“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
polarnova.xyz – This domain has quite a history.
Back in high school, when everyone in the informatics‑competition crowd was spinning up blogs for problem‑solving notes and assorted shenanigans, I followed suit. AI was still a distant dream, so I fumbled my way through Apache, MariaDB, and WordPress setup on my own. The blog lived at polarnova.site—the .com had already been squatted, and I’d heard “.site” sounded tech‑savvy enough. I eventually got bored with WordPress, tried GitHub Pages for a spell, flirted with serverless workers, and in the end crawled back to WordPress because its ecosystem is simply more fun to tinker with.
The original blog held not only write‑ups for contest problems but also chronicles of my experiments—wrangling Anaconda for a scientific‑computing stack, hacking around with ESP8266 modules, and the like.
Then came senior year of high school, when there was zero spare time. I let the server lapse and discovered, too late, that almost nothing had been backed up locally. (Ah, the karmic price of WordPress—suddenly GitHub Pages and serverless looked saintly.)
At university I resolved to resurrect the blog and registered a fresh domain: polarnova.xyz. I thought about letting polarnova.site expire, but a few friends still had my link in their blogrolls, so I kept renewing it out of sentiment. The rebooted site ran WordPress again, but my first two years of college were a blur of “real life,” and not a single post appeared.
By the third and fourth years, life changed. I suddenly had time for gloriously unproductive pursuits: reading poetry and novels unrelated to my major, wandering off to collect experiences just for the feel of it.
Somewhere along the line, the chatter died down. I realized the bustling life I’d once had was far behind me, replaced by a handful of long‑lasting but infrequent connections.
Academically, I felt one true growth spurt near the end of freshman year—concepts that had baffled me in high school finally clicked. After that came another plateau (still now) : everything looked incomprehensible again, and I still feel I know nothing. Probably the penalty for reading too little.
I keep heaps of course notes, both self‑taught and lecture‑based, mostly the former. But I dislike digital notes; I prefer scribbling formulas on blank paper and staring at them for ages. As a result, few notes ever made it into electrons, and the ones that did were lost to a Notability‑and‑iCloud sync fiasco. So there’s precious little left to post.
Eventually I realized I could at least publish book reviews for what I’ve read, dabble in a bit of performance art, or write the occasional inexplicable story.
And that, roughly, is where things stand.
Happy Birthday !
Goleta, California, 2025
Leave a Reply