About

1 About Me

My name is Huangxin, pronounced [xwɑŋ35 ɕɪn55] in IPA. I’m currently a MSc Computer Science student at UCL, with a background in Linguistics and Literature. I am interested in pattern matching in a broad sense: finding the structures underneath surface variation, whether in syntax, narrative, or the logic of a conversation, and not only in programming languages, but also in video games, natural languages, daily life, and in the way we perceive and understand the world.

In my spare time, I enjoy playing video games, photography, films, reading, and (of course) trying to develop some projects. I’m into all kinds of sports — bonus points if height isn’t a factor. And since moving to the UK, I’ve found myself genuinely keen on cooking: less as a way to recreate home, and more as a way to think about what home means in the first place.

2 About This Blog

“Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch. Die Denkenden und Dichtenden sind die Wächter dieser Behausung. Ihr Wachen ist das Vollbringen der Offenbarkeit des Seins, insofern sie diese durch ihr Sagen zur Sprache bringen und in der Sprache aufbewahren.”

— Martin Heidegger ¹

As Heidegger argued, language is not a tool we possess but a house we inhabit — we are called into being through it, not before it. Writing, then, is not the transcription of thought: it is how thought comes into presence at all.

I’ve spent a long time doing the opposite. Information arrives; fragments accumulate; ideas remain half-formed in notebooks, preserved but never really owned. This blog is an attempt to reverse that — to let the fragments become sentences, and sentences become something that has passed through me rather than merely passed by.

I also want to write more in English, which is not my native language. In Chinese, I enjoy the pleasure of choosing words carefully, whether to make the expression more accurate, more poetic, or more nuanced. In English, I am still learning to feel where a word lands. That difficulty seems like a good reason to keep going.

In that sense, this blog is less a record of conclusions than a place where thinking happens in language.