I actually don’t have the habit of writing blogs. I built the blog only because I brought the domain zijun.dev and didn’t want to waste it.
After leaving the blog empty for over a year, I decided to renovate it and maybe write a blog about it.
As a guy who is bad at and hate doing front-end stuff, there aren’t much things I can do.
So I selected a new theme PaperMod and made some small modifications to make it looks a bit different (mainly the background).
Particle animation background seems something really cool. I first saw this on the Zhihu’s login page (They stop using this a while ago), and there is an open source version. However, there are just too many people using it and I’d like my background to be more meaningful. Thus, I made my own one based on the simulation of a cellular automata: Conway’s Game of Life. I am terrible at (and also too lazy) explaining things, so if you are not sure what this is, you can read that Wikipedia. In general, there is a 2d grid, and each cell can be either live or dead. As time passed, the liveness of each cell depends on the eight cells which surround it. The real charm of it is that even though the rule is simple and naive, it is Turing complete. That means one can program it and make all kinds of computations by setting its initial state. Unfortunately, the initial state of my background is fully randomized and doesn’t support configuring (I know it is less fun, but I don’t think I’ll implement this. Too much effort for a background). If you really want to play with it, you can try this program.
Overall, hope you also find this background interesting.