Re: Bye, bye, Bear Blog!

01 Aug, 2026

View the original post here: Bye, bye, Bear Blog!. Or here Internet Archive.

You can find my favorite blog from 4s here: What the veil reveals. Or here Internet Archive when his blog goes offline.

Man, I just don't know what to say. Since it was ReplyJuly, I have been thinking about writing a reply post to 4s "What the veil reveals" for a long time. I was carried away with my traveling, and even some crazy events (that may have changed my life forever), I ended up hustling to reply to his blog today on the last hours of ReplyJuly. When I opened up his blog, I was stunt to see that he's leaving publishing on bearblog.

I was stalling on writing a lot lately, but my mind never stops thinking, I even published the blog asking people for what to publish. I got an email from Silvia about weeknotes and word vomiting. Though they were interesting ideas, I don't think I should disclose what I did in a week, every week, to the internet. I did fishy stuff that will make people upset, for real :). Publishing my weeknotes means I will redact so many stuff that it would appear so fake lol, so I will keep my weeknotes to myself.

And word vomiting is just a bit not my taste. Even though bearblog is really light, a person viewing my word vomit still consumes resources from the internet infrastructure. I had been browsing bearblog random section and some posts raised my eyebrow a bit. Sorry, I judged. I prefer my blog to be somewhat polished, and at least leave people with a thought or two worth pondering about. Steph Ango does this really well. His writings are short and concise, yet they are so clever and sometimes a bit witty. A principle he has is to never publish anything that his future-self would not read, anything that is too lengthy.

I used to do lots of research for my blogs. I first started blogging a long time ago on Wordpress. My first blog ever was about a Vietnamese folk song, whose lyrics told the story of a time of instability of Vietnam monarchy. I found a very detailed, museum quality recording of the song, made a video for it, did research about the original lyrics, and a painting describing when the French caught the king while he was sleeping because a trusted guard pointed him out. It was like shouting into the void, no one responded, the blog was deleted. The second time trying blogging, I posted about how Ferrero Rocher marketing was clever while their product is quite ass. I did some market research, their price throughout time, their TV commercial. Somehow 12 people liked my blog, I have no idea who they were or how they found it. The blog is still live, you can see it here.

So I wrote again, this time about a temple in my beloved town of Long Hai, Vietnam. I went there, took pictures, comparing structures and even come to the conclusion that the temple there now, is no where near the original temple. The blog is also still live here. On the journey there and lurking online to find old pictures of the temple, I stumbled upon a Flickr user called manhhai. I think we was an American GI during the war in Vietnam, and that name "Manh Hai" was given to him. His Flickr was an repository of valuable pictures from the era, that tells the story of the actual people during the war, not tactics and treaties of mainstream history. His entire Flickr was wiped from the internet in 2024, but I am so fortunate to have a picture of him saved on my old site.

Since then, I have not been blogging for a long time because I was so drained from all my work and study in high school. The last years of high school was brutal for me. I was balancing between the two high school systems of Vietnam and US. On one hand, I was preparing for the Vietnamese national high school exam, it is one of the most important standardized exam of the nation. On the other hand, I was taking the SAT, writing essays, and applying to schools in the US and Australia. Blogging became a tool of visibility aiming straight at admission officers at universities. I wrote about the clustering of the low earth orbit, the golden records onboard the Pioneers, and the Doppler effect. They were interesting, but I never find joy in what I write. Every sentence I wrote went through grammar checkers to make sure that I sound proper, to clarify what I want to convey, and eliminate ambiguity. Those checkers strip the personality out of my writing, and posting KPI exhausted me from making anymore posts. I just did not feel the joy of writing anymore.

Because I stop blogging, I stalled on writing all together and all my thoughts seems to be tangled up and became spiky. I usually caught myself being too harsh on other people and on myself. I hit my worst at around March 2026 when nothing seems to work anymore, and I became really critical to myself. That was when I started this blog and maintain it until now. Writing is combing out the tangled thoughts, and make them easily reference-able for future use.

I choose to maintain this blog and put my face to it because it is my creative output. I can tweak the design of the blog so it fits firmly into my content and my imagination of how my writings feel like. It is also feel nice to see how my blog resonates with other people. I got emails and guestbook entries that really brighten my days up.

Of course engineers, we look into ROI (return on investment), especially when your focus is simplicity and sustainability. I already have plans on how I can use my domain and site as a boost to my visibility to recruiters. I recently started ENGR4BBs and it is already live here. I don't know what else to come with this site, but I think I am good with the ambiguity.

I am not here to say that you should not leave, you definitely know what is best with your time and energy. Maybe this is my farewell to the author of the few writings that make me stop and ponder, and even laugh a little.

Ciao,

Let me know if you decided to do another experiment.

#ReplyJuly