Newsletter Entry

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Hi friends, it’s been a while!

On some foggy morning sitting on a BART train somewhere between Colma and Daly City two years ago, I reckoned I should probably figure out what I wanted to do with my life. “I should write this down somewhere”, I thought.

I was starting from a completely blank page, and was completely clueless about how personal writing worked, so this was quite an impossible task. I’m also easily distracted, and spent the next year-and-a-half writing about pretty much anything and everything I could to procrastinate on it. I started a blog. and then a substack. I wrote about Club Penguin, and keyboards, and trains. I started a digital garden and dumped a couple novels’ worth of words in there. It was all great fun! But even after all of that, the “who am I and what am I doing with my life” document remained tauntingly blank.

On an equally unremarkable day about six months ago, I felt some burst of inspiration to just try writing the thing. I bought my first journal, put a physical pen to physical paper, and wrote the first draft of what I christened ‘The Values Document’.

That draft, and the dozens that followed, frankly felt soulless and incoherent to me. Is this really it? Do I even want to show this to anyone, let alone myself? I rearranged the words until they became meaningless, then rearranged them three more times just to make sure.

The breakthrough finally came when I realized that I needed to put some fancy gift wrap around my values, rather than brute-force spewing them out. If I could come up with a form that represented who I am as a proxy, it’d be a whole lot more fun to read and write!

So here it is: my past, present, and future; my identity and all the things I find meaningful, in a single page five-thousand-word research syllabus.

Read it here!! https://bencuan.me/research

Going into this, I did not expect this document to end up becoming research-shaped whatsoever— it was a pleasant emergent surprise! It feels very much like myself in a way that no other single label could; I’d be happy to be considered a real legit researcher at some future point in my life.

I fully anticipate the shape of the “who am I and what am I doing with my life” artifact to radically change as I continue to grow. Maybe in five years it’ll end up being a podcast, or a short film, or an album on Spotify; but for this exact point in time, it’s exactly what it needs to be.

life updates!

Given my many months of attempts at writing the research syllabus, I’ve been pretty quiet on this newsletter for the past half-year. It feels great to be back! I have such an enormous backlog— much of which is already written but unpublished, because I wanted to get this out first— so expect a minor flood of entries to come out in the next couple months :)

physical space makeover!

I moved back to the South Bay! I’ve really enjoyed being closer to friends, family and work. In the process of moving, I found my third and final obsession of 2025: interior design. I hope to turn my scattered notes into a real blog post somewhat soon— it’s pretty on-topic in terms of my newfound research interests.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process of building up a physical space from the ground up with my goals and values in mind. As a result, it’s kitted out for frequent hosting and I’ve been having friends over almost every week since moving in! Let me know if you’re in town— we cook a big dinner and jam out with some live jazz a few times a month, among many other fun gatherings.

digital space makeover!

Big news: I finally bought a Figma subscription! Unrelatedly, I completely redesigned my website, again, for the seventh time.

Moreso than any of the previous iterations, I’ve tried to make my homepage as minimal and intentionally designed as possible this time around.

This year was the first time I made my own color scheme. I thought it’d be cool if my digital space also reflected some of the same themes from around my room (natural light tones, lots of green, with a big friendly dinosaur lurking in the corner).

The existence of the Garden, which I launched earlier in 2025, drove most of the high-level design decisions for my main website. Now that I have a space dedicated to chaos and playful experimentation, I could reserve bencuan.me to become my curated, organized, forward-facing side on the internet.

updates from around the garden

Tending to the Garden has provided me with a good, needed break from formal blog-post writing for the past six months. I now have over 65,000 words across 100 published pages:

started publishing a few of my recipes now that I’m cooking them for larger groups of people regularly. They’re pretty rough right now and are fairly limited in terms of instructions. Let me know if you ever try one and have suggestions on how to tweak them!
added a few more updates to the Things I want to do or organize list, which remains a popular entrypoint to the Garden. I’ve gotten a surprising amount of inbound from folks; turns out people want to do more fun things if the opportunity is made available!
learned how to lead climb! I compiled some lead climbing field notes in case anyone was curious about what goes into it. (Next stop: outdoor/trad climbing. Will have some more notes to share on that topic later this year.)
dumped out some ML systems notes I’d accumulated. These are all pretty WIP and will hopefully turn into something much more coherent as I gain more knowledge in the domain.
I wrote up some tips for major career decisions in August based on the thoughts I worked through around that same time last year when deciding where to go for a full-time position. It’s helped a few of my friends, maybe someone else out there will get something out of it too?
I moved the bookshelf to the Garden, since it no longer felt like it fit on my main site. I haven’t yet gotten around to updating it yet, though.