Wed Aug 11 2021 5pm:
I’ve been thinking about the future direction of this blog for a while now. It seems that the number of viewers have stagnated. And I have a theory as to why that’s the case. There are too many topics covered in this blog, including military, aerospace, nutrition, travel, and anime. (This constitutes to the title of my blog, MANTA Piece.) And sometimes I add in a short story, a random post on current events, a new invention, my clownfish, or a post about my new favorite video game Scarlet Nexus to further confuse my reader as to the direction of this blog. I understand that the majority of my readers aren’t used to that.
For example, many of my viewers initially came to my site to read about my travel adventures in parts of Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe. But I’ve only been to 11 countries and my stock of travel stories have been depleted. (And given the current covid situation and delta variant, it doesn’t seem I’ll be traveling soon.) I’ve been consistently and haphazardly posting about different topics in a random pattern. My travel readers would’ve needed to wait 3 weeks to read a new post because of all the military, aerospace, anime, and video game posts in between that would’ve been of no interest to them.
So in order to keep this blog flowing at a reasonable pace, I’ve decided to narrow down the number of topics from 10 to 3. The frequency of new posts will be revised from every 3 days to every week. And each post will be written akin to a diary entry, that contains all 3 topics: Mars, my aging parents, and my journey to $5 million. As these 3 are the goals in my mind for the past 3 years, it makes sense to talk about my weekly progress towards them.
My main purpose for going to Mars is to meet like-minded people, people who share my interests of science, a healthy diet, and stock investing. You might be thinking I can meet these people on Earth too. But I’ve yet to find a single place where I can meet these people with this specific combination of interests. I could go to a local astronomy club and talk to the people there, but only be satisfied a third of the time. Likewise for a gym and investment club. But the people who go to Mars are of a different breed. They must be interested in science in order to want to go there. They must maintain a healthy diet in order to safely travel there over the course of 7 months. And they must have accumulated enough capital to purchase an expensive SpaceX BFR ticket in order to rocket there.
Meanwhile, my parents are in their early 70’s and I want to provide them with a respectable lifestyle. Since graduating from university, we’ve moved a lot, and not necessarily to better neighborhoods. I just want for them to feel comfortable to dine out every week, buy some nice shoes, not worry too much about the electricity bill, and perhaps move back to the nice neighborhood we once came from. Perhaps then, they’d finally think of traveling to visit their overseas siblings again.
In order to achieve the above 2 goals, it’s not necessary for me to become an astronaut. All I need to achieve is USD 5 million, my third goal, and then the first 2 will naturally be resolved. In mid-late 2018, I started my stock investing journey in pursuit of this third goal. After my contract ended 5 months later, I could only rely on my 5-month long-term investment experience and the capital I had at the time. To this day, despite the covid crash and Reddit pump, I’ve maintained a level head to make slow steady progress toward this monumental goal. One thing is for certain, the moment I do achieve USD5M, I’ll probably breakdown in tears like those Olympic athletes who won a gold medal, because that’s how difficult this goal can be. You’ll realize once you read my future diary-format blog posts. They can also be accessed in the above “Writing” tab.
I understand that this blog revamp doesn’t sit well with my travel readers, unless they’re also interested in future space travel to Mars. I might initially lose some of my early followers, but I hope you’ll understand that this is the only way for me to make reasonable progress. Since most people watch YouTube at home or Facebook on commute, my future WordPress readers will most likely be office employees who just need a break during a busy workday. They may probably also be investing their savings in pursuit of providing a better life for their parents and future family. Who knows, perhaps we’ll meet on Mars someday.
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For my previous older blog entries, please navigate through the sections below.
MANTA Piece 