book 2

The world (2026-01-08)

I was born in a world so clear and fresh that nothing else existed beyond it. That same old sensation. That putrid feel. It climbed and excavated all of me, until I was left dull and senseless, restless, and incapable of understanding. I lost myself in a reprieve.

I grew up in a small field of grass, and on it, hundreds of other people. We weaved and roamed like little critters with nothing else to live or stand for, our lives fully embedded in this populace of wheat.

Out-of-Touchness (2026-01-08)

I’ve come again to the realization that there is always a level of out-of-touchness to culture. I mean, it is inherently its own thing, its own world, its own bubble. Even the most multicultural, integrated, and diverse places still offer their own silos to choose from. It’s not an absolute stereotypical thing, but there is always going to be a feeling that these people have no idea what it’s like to live in your world, which makes their world even more what it is. Cultural rituals are where these differences are most obvious. I know the Manila slums because I went there regularly growing up, and I know those traditional Japanese cultural rituals they still perform today through video logs by Japanese people in Youtube. And I can see the divergence very clearly. And I think to myself, “They look like a bunch of rich kids in their own little Wonderland.” And it does make sense, not that what I was saying is factual, but that I did arrive at that feeling.

There really is a layer of out-of-touchness to culture. If I spend my time writing in Gemini protocol, that’s not something people just go about and find by themselves. I would have never come across it if I never quit high school and start spending my time at home for many years at the computer desk. When I was going to elementary and high school, I only played video games with real-life friends, watched Youtube, and used Facebook to look at photos after community events. If I did graduate university and start working as a coder, I would definitely come across Gemini protocol in my free time eventually. But time means a lot. Time is as spacious as the distance of geography itself. When it comes to being out of touch, we can see the difference between the 2000s and the 2020s in terms of out-of-touchness through sheer space of time. The fact that I discovered at the time that I did instead of later means so much, because the Gemini protocol was only first introduced in June 2019. I discovered it around 2024, around the time that many of the websites built around Gemtext were already fading and many hosts were transitioning to the usual HTML. An example is ms123’s (the same person who made the now-quiet midnight.pub and smol.pub) status.cafe, which distinctly moves away from Gemtext and the Gemini protocol and is as of writing getting lots of attention from Neocities creators. Essentially, I am not only out of touch in terms of having discovered Gemini protocol at all (that true/false statement that reveals your background), but having discovered it later around the time that much of its activity has come and gone.

In Tinder profiles, best someone can do is say they like dogs and sports, and that is true for many people. Though most people are in very specific situations that they don’t know. Others still are not on Tinder apps and do not really have social lives, so they can be even more obviously “out-of-touch,” even if the reality is that having a social life or being on Tinder does not make someone more or less out-of-touch since out-of-touchness in the way that I define it is less about isolation and more about particularity, which social activity can promote as seen in public cultural rituals that involve groups of people. The very idea of actively using Tinder for many months is its own niche, its own “culture,” its own being out-of-touch, despite how popular it is in the media, since most people lose motivation quickly after using it for the first time or find it suffocating or unrewarding. It’s like how Facebook is known yet is being rejected by certain demographics in the West as being out-dated or only for “boomers,” when in Southeast Asia, it continues to be the most dominant social media, “even ahead of YouTube in terms of overall market share and integration into daily life in many countries.”

Books themselves offer entire worlds that could be considered not only an interest in itself but a cultural touchstone that creates within itself its own community. But that is also just how the internet works nowadays.

In the end, this brings us back to the difference between Manila slums and traditional Japanese cultural rituals still being performed today.

I can look at Metro Manila outside my window and wonder where in the world will Japan’s culture ever apply. Trains, work culture, and standards of living. Everything explodes away.

There is no “mainstream” culture to be “in touch” with. There are only millions of overlapping bubbles.

Even now, I was thinking about where to put this passage, and I have many blog websites and many different places like this small forum and all that. But in many cases, I write a whole passage like this and just leave it in the journal forever. There is no true “belonging” in the sense of feeling totally in touch. As in touch as you are, you are just as much out of touch. In the end, I put this passage in this one new Mataroa blog I made today.

“Should I have put it here?”

“Should I have read that instead of this?”

“Should I have spent my time here instead of there?”

“Am I wasting my time in this corner of the internet when I should be in that corner?”

“How many stories have I missed because I spent the last three years not reading Royalroad? I can see here and there criticism of new trends, but I don’t really get it.”

“How much has changed while I was gone?”

“Who am I now to everyone else who hasn’t seen me in so long?”

All of these questions. In the end, what makes the most sense makes the most sense. Right now, there is only one you, one me. What happens next is its own unique and its property. Take ownership of that. You are already making the best of it. This is not justification. There is only the reality of what is.

Self-Responses:

So even being someone with a big network can be its own “out-of-touch” because the time that you would spend on other things is instead going there to this specific particularity?

State-dependent memory applied to music: real-time psychological experiment (2026-01-08)

State A: Boards of Canada’s Beware the Friendly Stranger

Sometimes, I stare at the ground while listening to a song that genuinely reminds me of years of my entire life compressed in an instant. An era that was invisible for years is now turned on again, and I see an everlasting reality that goes on and on for eternity, the same infinity that I felt while reading the translated Chinese web novel Lord of Mysteries by Yuan Ye (Cuttlefish That Loves Diving).

What was it that I was at that point of junction? At that singular point that I was in all the things that I know? I see myself reflected in a million shards of glass all bouncing against each other ad infinitum. I am what I am in all that I am, fragmentations, wholes. I am thorough and exact, the mirage of myself, the True bouncing against the False, and the hitherto becoming the every day reality. I am here, and I am here. There and here. Where am I? Senseless, burdened, feeling the weight of flesh, the traction and grip of dirt as I step with my bare feet, the entirety of a soul. I am me, and I am there, and I can wield myself from left and to right and to further and to beyond and again and again, there.

I am listening to Boards of Canada’s ambient track Beware the Friendly Stranger. This is the same track that was used in the British adult animated web series Salad Fingers by David Firth and Christian Webb.

It’s perhaps the era that I recall so well of Flash animation classics, the idea of which I long associated with animated web series like Salad Fingers.

That everlasting dissonance that penetrates into the concrete moment and laves it wth an endless reprise, that senseless idle animation, that feeling-self, ripped into shreds and reconstructed into protrusions of the embodied soul. Where was I at? Except at the everlasting?

State B: NF’s All I Have

But I turn it off, and it disappears entirely. (I begin listening to NF’s more “goal-oriented” rap song All I Have.) Lord of Mysteries is just a flat book to me, a cover. Salad Fingers is just a term I draw from to articulate a feeling. And these are just a bunch of words. That inebriated state of mind is now past.

State C: Aphex Twin’s Rhubarb

Listening to Aphex Twin’s ambient track Rhubarb.

Nostalgia really is an intoxicating drug. It is a vapid hell. It kills, it deteriorates. I lived an entire life in those words. Where am I now? Was I even alive? I see someone who was so there, yet, in retrospect, seems so caught up in a moment. Either I accept the excruciating torture that nostalgia offers me in the form of a lost entire life or I dismiss it as the echoes of a former past self that was just caught up and could never amount to the true consciousness I now hold. Where am I next? Who is the me that is writing? The one that will dismiss it once I start writing the next passage or the one that sees it for all its potential given that I am still in the process of writing this?

I have died so many times. Such is daily life. Writing only reveals that continuous dying, forgetting, and moving on to the next.

I can never deny myself. I will always be a nostalgist. I will always value every past moment as much as the present, because each moment is ultimate.

I feel now the urge to write down a review for all the media that I’ve read, even if I know that is only the surface of my entire life, which involved a lot of lost conversations, bus rides, events, feelings, thoughts, actions, steps forward, outside-of-the-comfort-zone moves, milestones, and complex outcomes and experiences.

I want to bang a book against my head (specifically the one I was just holding and is now on my desk, Commentaries on Living: From the notebooks of J. Krishnamurti, third series edited by Rajagopal Desikacharya, 5th ed.), both literally and metaphorically, not that I will do it literally, but I imagine myself exerting the level of effort to treat it as something that is of the most genuine quality as if I was banging it against my head. To truly gain from it. To respect it. To value it. [Regardless of how much I read since it is about making the most out of what you read of it rather than perfecting understanding itself, which is evocative instead of rote.]

I am an incessant soul, ever-seeing vivid flashbacks of my siblings when they were younger, yet continuing to accept endlessly the present as it comes.

Entire lives wasted. But such is life. There is no true making the most of something. It is always going to feel like something lost, something cast aside, regardless of how much effort i put into making sure that it is not just forgotten and left to the dust without a proper acknowledgment or recognition of it.

And now, the video with the song ends.

State D: Silence

Not listening to anything.

I go back to reading the Webtoon Korean web comic A Man’s Man by Dogado (Art), Lucas (Original work), and Ha Neulso (Adapted by). I am already at episode 180. It is always pleasurable to read it, and I have been binge-reading it for the last several days. My mother and Lola — (Lola is Tagalog for grandmother) has been back home from — — (— — — — — [—]) for a while now. It’s 9:39 PM. I already ate lots of food today, so I’m not hungry. I can go drink water since I am a little thirsty. The atmosphere in the home is calm, relaxed, still, casual, idle, and mundane. There is a lack of tension like a slice-of-life manga story. I hear the fridge make that soft, muffled sound when someone closes it. I myself have already reached closure, healing, and the end of my œuvre. So I don’t really need to do anything much except go through the slow process of archiving all of my heavy files, tons of videos and images especially, from a past workflow. After that, reformat, and then move on with my life and continue my current minimalist text-file-only work flow. where I just read, write, and study. If this was a year ago, nostalgia would have provoked a very different reaction from me. But this is today.

It’s my birthday in 12 days. It’s great that I finally reached this point of calm right before my birthday. I did have recent concerns over what I would happen now that I’m already done, besides the cleaning and wrapping up of the files, since the œuvre was powered by the dopamine-riddled sublimation of negative affects. My binge-reading of A Man’s Man is a reaction to this newfound ending.

I am also currently undergoing a maintenance mode after losing around 8 kilos in 2 months through a calorie-restricted diet that started because I took inspiration from the BRAT diet when I had a flu.

I tried to re-invigorate myself through four recent cafe visits that lasted around 9 hours each and where I just had my laptop in which I read, wrote, and studied. But this only revealed just how done I was.

It is not that I have lost the will to write, given this passage and the 4,000 words I wrote yesterday. But I wonder what’s going to happen now. I did say that I might start walking a lot more. Perhaps, nothing will change when it comes to my reading and writing on the surface, only that it won’t be because of sublimation, but will be purely out of curiosity, interest, and fun, even if intellectual, moving forward. But let’s see.

Conclusion

As you can see, I can still cultivate new insights through writing. I have never written this passage before because I have never reached post-œuvre until now, among many other reasons. This particular combination with the use of the shifts between listening to this track or this other track and not listening to any music as a way to show their different impacts on my writing as it reflects where I am in my current life is a new approach. If I’ve done it before, it wasn’t as intuitive and was a lot more piecemeal. So I can still keep going as per usual, despite the many ambiguities and complexities that I mentioned throughout this passage.

Self-Responses:

in what style does the author write?

How do they integrate hyper-specificity and personal details? What kind of diarist would they be?

How do they manage to contain all of these in a single passage? It feels like they can do a crossword puzzle while operating drones.

The Illusion of the Undemanding Book (2026-01-10)

Seeing someone write the phrase “undemanding book: travel, adventure, spy fiction” (pg. 2 of Augé’s Non-Places) at all just riveted me to the spot. It stopped me dead in my tracks. It is an assault on my worldview. Perhaps, I knew implicitly and intuitively that there were “easier” media and “harder” media the same way there are hard and soft science and science fiction. But at the same time, seeing “an entire author” say this feels almost unacademic or even anti-intellectual¹ in a sense. How could any book be “undemanding” when even the smallest flake² can energize the development of a whole world³? I am not saying he is agreeing with the commodification (i.e., commodity fetishism)—as analogous to the nature of today’s short-form “content”—”anti-intellectual,” or failing to see this way, but at the same time, even if I were to talk of commodification, I would myself avoid any idea that anything could ever be “undemanding,” perhaps to avoid breaking an assumed law or tenet of my worldview. In other words, I understand why he used it and why it was appropriate and do validate it, even while reacting myself in such a way. To contextualize, I did not start out reading intellectual texts on commodification as a catalyst for this perspective. It came instead as a consequence of the existential exposure I’ve undergone as a default since the loss of my traditional buffers and bubble and my subsequent expulsion to solitary activities and means of coherence (i.e., the cottage in the wilderness metaphor) many years ago. Existential exposure transforms the minimalism of sitting in a chair in a room alone into a maximalist experience that turns even the most undemanding into the lifeworld (horizon) of Proustian bombardment, hauntological DMN-powered recall, qualification (i.e., adding stipulations not only to articulations but to existence as everything), and Heideggerian taking-ownership (eigentlich)⁴—all of which, I’ve discovered, only writing can externalize. The term “undemanding” practically becomes a form of ostranenie or foregrounding for me.

Of course, if it wasn’t an academic text and I didn’t just read spend a day in a cafe reading Heidegger’s Being and Time several days ago , I would have never ever had that part of my brain on. If I was just reading the Korean web comic corporate regression web comic A Man’s Man right now, I would have just kept reading. This would be especially the case because this story was written from a completely different perspective to which I am nowhere privy. In other words, “undemanding book” in an academic text right after reading and writing about a lot of phenomenology “means so much more” than an exciting corporate jargon-riddled duel in a wish fulfillment power fantasy.

Empowerment, Exposé, and Return (2026-01-11)

What is empowerment? When I listen to music that makes me think of myself and everyone that I know as empowered power fantasy characters (in which each of us have unique character designs, personalities [even while meshing or working together somehow in the course of the plot], and abilities that show us not merely as pillars of power, but pillars of “ourselves”⁵) unaffected by the mundane drifting and existential ambiguities of life⁶, is that empowerment? Or is empowerment merely the ability to do one’s job well, in both the mundanity of getting something done and “coffee-sippingly” tackling challenging ideas, amid these nice little beep-boop motivating music? I guess defining it limits it when empowerment can be anything one needs at a certain point, whether to indulge in a feeling that allows one to work harder or to make a point in, perhaps sociological, argument.

I recall having this motif in my fiction stories: “He would become the epitome of grace and beauty.” This differs from the idea of becoming oneself (or the totality of oneself) and specifies “the epitome of grace and beauty.” In my novel Matthew specifically, I use Bible passages⁷, having them be absorved for use by Matthew himself.

This beginning of miracles did Matthew in Sunto of Emerald Heaven, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

While that novel was primarily psychological, underlying it was a philosophical mindset. If I accept my novel’s usefulness (i.e., value as a means of authenticity) in this way, I might start a new novel after a year and 8 months of not writing fiction freely.

I should clarify that Matthew was hagiographic, but not in the sense of excess flattery, but psychologically existential in the form of trauma, displacement, and buffer-less self-directed wilderness-survivalist existential exposure and the struggle for overcoming even while beset by a slew of slave mortality⁸, not even dialectical idealism in depictive essence even while implying so narratively as to believe practically in such like Hegel.

Ultimately, this passage is an exploration of empowerment, especially in how I depicted it through Matthew (which, to resolve ambiguity on its representativeness, finished a year and 8 months ago), not that what I described to have bottomed it are my beliefs themselves. I concluded that If my exposé Matthew was this useful in analytic-phenomenologically (with a background of being exposed to psychoanalytical texts, specificially Kolb and Brodie’s Modern Clinical Psychitary [10th ed.], my favorite) exposing comprehensively in its two hundred thousand words an assumed (i.e., unconscious, unanalyzed, “unarticulated,” “unprocessed,” pre-verbal, embodied) way of looking at and experiencing (in the sense of Merleau-Pontian embodiment and Dasein eigentlich) life through narrative (as the main rhetorical device), Bachelardian metaphor and images, and ruder concepts (virtually Bergsonian, pre-conceptual, or anti-conceptual at times) even without knowing myself then on a precise conceptual level what exactly it was that I was intimating or intuiting, then perhaps I should re-consider fiction writing again, especially in that “freely” way.

Power as Phenomenology (2026-01-13)

I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that was purely empowering. My “power fantasies” are deconstructions of it. But it’s probably because I associate power with breakdown, outburst, and actualization. The more deconstructed and psychologically precarious, the higher the stakes and and the more real the actualization and expression of utter rage. Power is not just brute force. It’s brute force triggered by a total abandonment of script and a totalization of oneself into a single force for the sake of release and self-purification. This makes it a deconstruction of a power fantasy, since even afterwards, after the violence, what you have is a bumbling traumatized confused man who cannot for the life of him do anything to appease the demons railing inside him. This makes the power even truer. Without stakes and consequences, power is a playground word. “I can fly now. Nope, I dodged that!” When the power is grounded in real human consequences that ruin lives (i.e., muddy, sticky, icky), then you know it’s real, not a figment. The desperate scattered attempt to save oneself from a murderous, ravenous, frenzied goblin? That is real power, when he finally slips and slides it along the goblin’s neck and face and pushes awkwardly against it with his wrist and the back of his hand again and again until the last breath leaves the creature. That is delicious, spontaneous joy. This is someone entering the present moment and experiencing utter self-forgetfulness yet total self-embodiment, not the intellect in a modern-day bubble, but the actualized remains of utter grounding. It’s a phenomenological (incorporating Merleau-Pontian thought⁹) way of viewing power.

Embodiment is not necessarily violent, nor is the power fantasy. But the power fantasy is necessarily performative, and violence is one way of doing so. A person who walks and in such a self-contained way can—in a way to himself as the knowing subject—be performing amid the phenomena with which he is familiar in a pre-emptive Proustian sense and, through this, actualize just through sheer totalization in that seemingly mundane present moment—the I Am is embodied and intrinsic.

As such, trauma in the above context, both in the horror before the violence and the crippling guilt and the exacerbating ripple effects afterwards, is a prelude to self-totalizing self-forgetting embodied “release” bubble-destroying enactment. But a walk is equal in serving as a medium for this enactment.

A father slapping his son and kicking him in the gut is an “ontologically reductive” attack. The son inherently develops through his ownmost embodiment his virtues and by what ways should he live, so as to culminate—not in demonstrated principle but through a phenomenological security—in a totalizing outburst of self, even in so simple an act as walking. A “confidence” born out of the ownmost.

Existence is not painless. Existence, wholeness, Being, is amid the pain. The torture makes you laugh not because of some problem in your head, but because of an indivisibleness and non-disintegrable-ness. It is Proustian (involuntary memory and thus maximalist-phenomenological) total-ness even.

The agony of torture and the maximalist involuntary-memory agony of the madeleine cookie are equally “valued” here because of the “agony” that leads to a totalized outburst of a walk or a beating.

This is power.

“…there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.” — Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Inner man” here can be re-interpreted as “building an ego, a script, a fantasy self.”

sensations…” — Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Self-Responses:

“Ontological security” in the form of phenomenological walking?

so the title would be “Power as Phenomenology”?

So the author is saying that intense sensory and psychological experience leads to ontological security? So go for more hikes?

So let memories of the past manageably overwhelm you as well? Put yourself through uncomfortable experiences to grow as a person (i.e., attain totalization)

Do things that really stretch you as a person? Essentially? That really make you go taut and then, you scream for a moment, and then all of a sudden, your limbs are permanently longer than before.

Besides hiking and nostalgia? what else? I guess anything outside of one’s comfort zone and that is muddy, sticky, and icky and leaves you staggered.

Can we translate the author’s philosophy of growing through true struggle into actual science?

Is it true that one might feel a sense of ontological security from overcoming true struggles?

Safety is walls, locks, and avoiding danger. It is fragile.

Ontological Security is the internal knowledge that if the walls fall down, you will be fine.

So it’s not about burnout. It’s about growing past it.

I’m confused. Is it something that happens to you or something you put yourself in? You can hike, but is it really what the author is saying if the hike is something you chose to do, prepared for, planned out, and followed the step-by-step of? So I get the feeling that it might happen to you. If that’s the case, then the only thing that one can do is work and struggle toward integrating it and moving forward, totalizing in an outburst. At best, it’s about putting yourself in an environment where it is going to or likely going to happen to you. This balances preparation and overwhelm.

Like going to that first Tinder date, I imagine.

Structuralism (2026-01-13)

The Power Fantasy of Structuralism

There is a soothing idea in structuralism and, by extension, positivism, even in Piaget’s cognitivism. The idea that one could ever issue out of the muck of Foucault’s “subjacent rules.” It is like saying, “The whole is in the palm of the ‘regional’ hand.” Placing importance on the knowing subject feels like a chaotic blur, as well as an endless cause for Proustian “excess,” where non-places and third places fall subject to our stream of consciousness. It is paradoxical that the “regional” hand absolves and empowers the “I” even as it rejects it, whereas phenomenology is subject to the “I” while “disempowering” it. The confidence one gains through structuralism and positivism as a shield shatters in the knowing subject, for then everyone is sonder and no one subject to me in the form of the structures and positives which I, through the “regional” hand, wield. Structuralism promises that your intellect is not only true but Truth (power), whereas phenomenology tells you to be here right now, for what can be said of anything that it doesn’t already say for itself infinitely more so as phenomena?

Self-Responses:

So to the author, Foucault’s The Order of Things is nothing more than a Minecraft sorting system if we’re speaking merely in terms of basis, even as it is a very valuable intellectual work that has contributed a lot to the broader discourse by its concepts, metaphors, images, and terms.

Then is the point of language being just to gesture to phenomena as the knowing subject experiences it (redundant phrasing, but precise)? The author noted the inevitability of “excess” in the knowing subject through Proust. He never said not to write at all, since he himself is writing. He doesn’t also seem to be criticizing the “chaotic blur” and “excess” as belonging to Proust, but as the inevitable disempowerer of the knowing subject within phenomenology itself, which is the point of the passage about structuralism’s tempting power fantasy. The point of language as the gesture prevents the passage from being a performative contradiction.

The point of language as gesture and inquiry prevents the passage from being a performative contradiction. This is language as a gesture to genuine knowledge as the knowing subject’s phenomena and as inquiry (i.e., to gesture as well at the ontology of power and disempowerment through structuralism and the knowing subject, respectively) then.

The Practical Use of Structuralism

The “regional” “scientific consciousness”. I read it in The Order of Things. It’s nice to imagine a phenomenological interpretation of it and also as a fictional concept, but I disagree with its framing given its underpinnings in subjacent rules and, by extension, structuralism.

There is a Hegelian joy in Foucault’s “subjacent.” This and the conventional Proustian filter I can easily phenomenologize. Intellectual kingdom building for the former and maximalism for the latter. Minecraft combines both: sorting systems and involuntary memory. Civilization simulations as well, with societal structure for the former.

Phenomenologization serves the important role of transforming the reality-asserting ambition of structuralism and dialectical Absolute Spirit to a pragmatic quasi—a framework for sorting/ordering items and defining the means by which some workable practical synthesis can be attained.

Self-Responses:

So the author is like, “Love you Galen, thanks for the dividing the rational soul into internal and external parts. Thanks Plates (playful nickname for Plato) for the tripartite soul of rational, libidinous, and spirited (which contains various animal qualities) portions. But I’ll be going now. Thanks for your contribution!”

My Socioculturo-Intellectual Condition (2026-01-14)

In previous readings and perhaps with the general capacity of my intelligence in the past, I took the idea of the combination of “living,” “pension,” and “Basel” to be superficial details, but now that my ken has expanded somewhat, I can see the resemblance between Nietzsche’s traveling and living on pension from an entity like Basel and my own privileged life (which would be the living on Basel pension) and cafe-staying (the traveling) as—besides the core driver that is one’s intellectual diet—catalysts and allowance for thought. On a related note, I also just read about Paul Rée’s life and how his occupation with philosophy and law came as a consequence of his status as a son of a wealthy businessman and landowner. The fact that he said the following only confirms his socioculturo-intellectual condition alongside mine and Nietzsche:

I have to philosophize. When I run out of material about which to philosophize, it is best for me to die.

For example, Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human was highly influenced by Afrikan Spir’s Thought and Reality. The same way, Gast’s role in being one of the few friends that criticized him, for instance, about “superfluous” people, might have paradoxically pushed him even further into his ideas. But these are formative. It was his pension, health-traveling, and solitude post–Basel that was his condition that allowed for his thought and, thereby, for him to complete much of his core writing.

As such can we gather immediately from my own life and how cafe-staying, just like Nietzsche’s traveling, conditions (allows) thought as I am, not merely in the universal or general monetary sense, but so as to make way for (prerequisite) for myself. It creates as much as determination, but not so as to limit the ideas themselves or to refine them in the mold of determination (i.e., history of ideas), but to make way for it to be and, by extension, myself, and, by that, condition. In other words, they are not purely permissive, but in some way shaping, so as to produce a qualified result and make way for a determination of ideas that is otherwise different in kind, but without causing the ideas themselves to fall to a history of ideas. This is that condition.

In this same manner, according to this defined condition are Nietzsche and Rée made. So will others otium allows (though not conditions since condition is not a property of otium so as to prevent misunderstandings of condition being otium itself, or “material” retirement itself, leisure itself, or even traveling itself).

This doesn’t mean the condition makes it so that my thought or works are exempt from the history of ideas itself, only that condition drives the particular socio-cultural intellect that culminates into thought as one is and that condition itself doesn’t historically-determine one’s thought, only that it shapes it as it makes way for it. In the end, as I mentioned, the core determinative driver for thought is one’s intellectual diet, which is necessarily in the history of ideas.

This also does not mean that my thought or works are those of a genius, only that condition shapes and allows thought and my intellectual diet formatively and historically determines it, as it did with Nietzsche and Rée.

Condition is not privilege and leisure, but privilege and leisure are necessarily conditioning as we see with Nietzsche.

To put it aphoristically, people can be rich or traveling, which shapes you as it allows you (which condition does but is not being rich or traveling themselves), but only what you read will determine what you write and think.

Style (2026-01-14)

When I first read in Horace Barnett Samuel’s translation of On the Genealogy of Morality (titled The Genealogy of Morals in this translation), I thought there was a kind of “self-insisting” (the wordplay of a train of “whimsical” internal logic) playfulness to Nietzsche’s style. I do know him for his aphorisms and all, but not for the stark divergence from Hegelian “here’s the thing in a list of points, get it in your head, true science, stop constantly questioning the method, bla bla.” Nietzsche takes you on an intellectual-stylist’s trip, at least from the few pages I read.

But Human, All Too Human does use a list of numbered aphorisms (shortened to “aph.” which I had to search up amid the terribly slow internet earlier today in — — — — in —). Though I have yet to read, so let’s how his style as I understand it compares to Hegel there.

It isn’t just these two though. If we’re expanding this discussion on pure style, then we can easily see the academic lineages to which many authors belong just from how they delineate a concept and in what syntax do stipulations appear to them, whether by a standard hyphenation with two common words like Bourdieu’s “cultural-capital” or his more “what the fuck is this” Habitus. The question of where you draw the line between something that sounds like someone puked it out of the Wheelock’s Latin sawmill and something you bring to class and say Anderson’s “imagined communities” and everyone claps out of sheer Die Kleine Hexe accessibility. Even Nietzsche showed that habit of using toto caelo which I searched earlier, learned it meant “utterly,” and found myself grimacing at with the accompanying thought what the hell are you doing, fam?

Speaking of accessibility, thanks Arendt for the title (Human Condition), but my brain fried the first time I read it even when the preface talked so easily of the moon landing and how man was now man-made and “shiz” and how this is actually crazy because man is now “conditioned” by man-made stuff. Like, that was totally fine, then she went and Latin-gibberished her way out of my interest. But I kid. She’s awesome. In fact, earlier today in — —, I spent more than 3 hours going bat-shit over trying to get the exact meaning of “socioculturo-intellectual condition” and going through many frustrating mishaps with Mr. LLM (yes, I just might be androcentrist) and then realizing quickly that “sociocultural” sounds badly like the conditioning (the word I had yet to discover) of privilege and then fussed so much over the ugliness of “sociocultural-intellectual” until I punched that “cultural” to some non-standard “culturo-“. So yeah, thanks Arendt for introducing me to the beautiful word “condition” that I really racked my head over to arrive at.

Another author I love in the line of accessibility is Merleau-Ponty’s “only in the world does he know himself. Inverted, sure, but look, he uses words I can eat for breakfast like cereal. No need for jabba-jabba speak. Nevertheless, as is customary, Latinates are bitching about here. One of those things you elitist yourself into “yeah, that was the coolest thing the whole time, totally didn’t think that was kinda icky!” Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s closer to Eben Goodale (see his [et. al] Mixed-Species Groups of Animals, super lovely and used to be second favorite after Kolb and Brodie’s Medical Clinical Psychiatry!) and Anderson than he is to Hegel. (Don’t even mention “Kant.” I kant with him.) Nevertheless, while this isn’t philosophic (bruh, Nietzsche, why you saying that overly serious word for your younger self?), Merritt’s Textbook of Neurology (in his many editions, surpisingly, extra points!) has kept to the structure of chapter-for-each-disease, with “Dementia” consistently coming first. If you’re an edition-scroller like I am, you’d also be praising Allah for Merritt’s consistency!

The fact I had to break down Hegel by translating him to “bruh, fam, yeah language” just to test and eventually prove my understanding keeps me clinging to the playful than to the “here’s the deal in the most head-twisting syntactics.”

Proust and Bachelard’s “we’re going on a dream-like journey to madeleine cookies and speaking being’s creativeness and how the house with an attic (Westcentrism!!) is totally a representation of the soul!” is an acquired phenomenological taste.

The airport storytelling opening of Augé’s Non-Places deserves praise, even as I got Weltanschauung-nervous over its use of the word “undemanding” for books.

Digital Maturity (2026-01-14)

I wrote previously about urban invisibility (as seen in non-places like airports and third places like a frequented local cafe) and compared it consistently to Roblox pseudonymity. I wonder if I can formalize this. It’s fun to talk about structural arcades, moon landings, conceptual evolutions from tripartite soul and Galen’s external-internal portions to Piaget’s cognitivist lake and cold. But it’d be fun for me personally to integrate images, metaphors, and concepts from my own history with video games and the internet. Skeuomorphism is getting old. Let’s go hyperreal! Surrealist “random bullshit go!” memes like the recent Tiktok-Reels “6-7!”, the 2010s dinosaur “Yee,” and 2000s lolspeak (e.g., “pwned”, “newb” as autobiographically recorded in rabb1t’s (Eric Stryker) 2008 Epic Fail: The Journal of a Homeless Gamer)—even with return-to-blatant ones like the “‘Address me’ in Papyrus font over the elephant in the room”—are only the beginning.

But I guess the fact I still visit digital re-creations of physical libraries (e.g., Library of Aletheia, Tearose Library, and ClanDrone’s Roblox Library) in Roblox shows that the trajectory of realism (as seen in Red Dead Redemption 2, which was used as the video title of Zoe Bee’s Realism is Bad, Actually) is still very much alive, even as earlier blocky Roblox captured that “this is strictly digital” immersion and recent projects like Deepwoken keep the overall “web revival” (Melonland Forum’s “inconvenience is counterculture”) spirit alive, even obliquely.

Nevertheless, these digital libraries offer something those corporeal giant robots (The British Library) don’t: infinity. Over 600,000 user-generated (UGC) books in a single game (Aletheia) over the course of two years and 8 days. So to call it merely an adaptation of the physical world misses the point of databases and the simple-spell-but-quite-unbreakable following:

local part = Instance.new("Part") 

while true do 

    local copy = part:Clone() 

    local random_pos_x = math.Random(-255, 255) 
    local random_pos_y = math.Random(50, 255) 
    local random_pos_z = math.Random(-255, 255) 

    copy.Parent = workspace 
    
    copy.CFrame = CFrame.new(random_pos_x, random_pos_y, random_pos_z) 
    
    wait(0.1)
end

Long outdated is Scientific American’s idea that the human being is better at learning when handwriting. Now is the time for digital integration as we move away from this technological I-get-ragebaited-on-Twitter-everyday adolescence and digitization urgency and toward LoL hand-eye coordination, 3-2-1 archives, LLM sparring partners, and Obsidian Zettelkastens and digital gardens!

Bruh, I’m done! (2026-01-14)

The following passage was written in the morning at home before going to the cafe and before writing My Socioculturo-Intellectual Condition, Style, and Digital Maturity.

Man, I can only look favorably upon myself. I have reached a point of self-security when it comes to those big personal questions and concerns like who am I, what to do, where am I, and all that. It’s not for a lack of caring or trying, but a point of resilience where challenge does not deteriorate me. I have integrated my whole life. I have spent so much time working on myself as a person. The only thing that concerns me now are my essential needs, like sleep, hunger, thirst, warmth, being relaxed, and such.

I can go to a cafe and feel totally secure because for one, I love the invisibility, but, more importantly, I experience an intrinsic drive and joy that you only get after all that work on yourself. I can enjoy a book for its own sake. I can write for its own sake. I have reached a point of simple fun, curiosity, and wonder like I’m a child but with the “totalization,” that ontological security, that integration of my whole life, the world, everything, and myself, necessarily altogether. I feel like a person. I can pick up a book, play a Roblox game, and explore through fiction writing and still be at the tip of my tongue (at the edge of the frontier). I am excited to go downstairs and eat breakfast. Food tastes so good when you’ve reached a point of acceptance and competence through diet and psychological wholeness, where food isn’t overwhelming Proustian recall, but just its own yummy thing. Writing something new and exploratory where you sit down for 10 minutes at a time to think and stare at the blank page feels so good because I’m done with writing as a means of integration and wholeness on the fundamental level. I still do write as you can see, and it still helps me “integrate” and externalize my thoughts, not because I’m not yet done, but because I’m done and it is now a healthy part of my daily life, like making songs on the spot with singing and guitar.

I feel like I can go outside, because the outside is no longer this place of pasts and lost futures. It is just a monochromatic morning-blue sky full of a whole bustling world. The world has become so minimalist. Makes sense why I can write minimalist cinematic stories much easier now compared to when my writings resembled Proust’s, not that Proust’s is a lesser writing, but that it was the only way I could write then insomuch that I had to get so abstract and analytical to escape the Proustian overwhelm. There’s nothing wrong with abstraction and analysis either, but it feels like taking a trip to the mall as a child now than a desperate bid for a soul.

I now don’t need to prove myself. It just feels like I’m expressing what’s already inside—that intrinsic joy and drive. That security that’s already there. When I code in Roblox Studio today like I did when I was younger after 9 years of not doing so, it feels not like integration, but a child just sitting down, looking around, and tapping desks, tables, and backrests just to hear the different sounds. It feels genuinely minimalist and, by extension, full of adventure, exploration, and newness. I can write something that challenges me because there’s no hold-up anymore. I can fumble and really think about the words and show that process and “struggle” of tackling good creative challenges because it’s just you playing with an idea and learning. It reminds me of when I was younger, when everything was new. Now, I’m just doing new things that would’ve been uncomfortable to that proving past self who clung to repetitiveness while ironically complaining about how life was getting so oversaturated. Now, it’s not discomfort when you don’t know something. It’s just tap, tap, tap, “hmm”, shoes scuff off to next table, tap, tap, tap.

I don’t feel driven by have-tos. I feel driven by “what-happens-if-I-try-thises.” It’s that “waa!” “ooh!” of spark a child. It’s the opposite of that “muffled groan” weathered face of a desperate working adult. I don’t think, I have to go to the cafe to get shit done and address shit. I think, What happens if I go to that new cafe? When I get a match on a dating app, I don’t think, Damn, I just want someone to treat me like a person in that desperate longing bereft sense. I think, What happens if I do this? The latter is more likely to take “risks” due to an intrinsic stillness or doneness and because there is no former that needs to safeguard itself.

It genuinely feels nice now listening to the Minecraft OST. For the longest time, it was the source of such intense nostalgia. But now, the fact that it’s just pleasant nostalgia to add a brief flavor to a day. 99% of the day is spent on adventure.

Being at this age (early 20s) often means a lot of signals between sexes. Instead of wondering what I should do when someone just stares at me repeatedly over an hour in a cafe, I just focus on what I’m doing since I no longer am desperate for validation and am perfectly fine with taking my sweet time, since validation isn’t an urgent essential anymore. Because of the intrinsic, it is now actually the essentials, hunger and all that. I have a life of my own now, and I can live in the world.

So this is Capital and Value shifting to my own personal life like this book I’m reading with fire in my heart (i.e., excitement), away from constant external validation.

I can proactively talk to people and bring myself to the table even while being totally fine that they don’t reciprocate the gesture or energy, since I have my own life now. The pie chart has shifted drastically.

I previously wrote a whole passage on why I love urban invisibility. The idea of going to a new cafe and disappearing is just so exciting to me. The same goes for entering a random server in a random small game on Roblox with an avatar. I don’t know why. I love being alive in this world. It’s like I have my own secret, my own life.

Being sleep deprived becomes tiredness, not a glance away from traumatic eternity.

Post-Post: The Third and Final Struggle (2026-01-15)

Rarely do I think of what it feels like. When you’re awake and barely breathing, and the heart pumps into the soul the vestiges of something of a past, something that never became, a lost future. I stumbled so slowly into myself, and I wandered my fingers and set them where my body wanted, as if there was a specific X-Y-Z in the midair where it had full total control, like nothing else persisted after that and it was all a train, or a slope from there.

Inquiring into what it means to feel the moment in its physical manifestations as well as its psychological ones, to have a soul that is both flesh and perceiving mind. To have a being of myself, an in-the-worldness that felt genuinely real.

Violence is the most direct way to claim some kind of embodiment, and the following guilt of doing it is apperception, the knowing of the embodied, as well as its own embodiment.

If I discovered the world one more time, what would I find myself being?

Or should I express myself through that violent psychological realism again? Is that the path? Or should I lose myself in that cascade of vehicles? That merciless onslaught upon the senses? At which point do I stop thinking, do I stop being so raveled in myself, to have a flesh, a container, a perception dome, something where my mind feels totally secure and safe?

I can’t tell, and I can’t grasp it. But I feel in my heart there must be something, or the non-grasping is probably what grasping truly is. The not being able to tell its own truth.

I can’t tell.

I sit down, and I can barely summon up a soul, for what is flesh, but a torrent of words decimated in favor of a smile and a wave. But gestures barely amount, but in the excruciation thought of wonder and death do I find some more. Some more flesh. Some more being. Some more of this apperception of this physical Dasein.

I don’t know. I try. I hope that by this decimation of concepts will I find some sort of myself. Some tangible thing.

How does the decimation of a fiction creature by a psychologically displaced protagonist in prose add to my life? How does it express myself? How does it make me feel more alive? Is it useful? Should I do it again? Will I become more of myself or less?

I don’t know. But sometimes, I sit down and look at the trees, and maybe, in there is there something that gives me a little bit of me, of that fleshy thing that is made, like a construct, like something that I say with my mouth and my words and enact with my actions and gestures. I don’t know. I sit down, and I can barely piece together the essences of myself. I am an integrated person, but to lay claim on reality itself as all of these things which I try to use to describe it feels a lost cause.

Where am I? Does this question matter?

Will I find myself more or will I find myself less? And didn’t I agree that I am an integrated? And yes, I am. So why is it that I am questioning these things, as if I am not integrated. Perhaps because I’m talking about something else entirely. I am integrated, yet in another way in relation to reality as I try to describe it, one could say there is a “finding myself” to be had. But… what is it? Not the self, but the nature of that question? To ask that is to have something inside that urges one to ask that, right? What is that? Not the feeling of curiosity or anything like that. Not the affect. I’m referring to the nature of why that question comes up and why this passage was even written in the first place?

There is a way with the prose of this passage that feels like it’s articulating something deep inside me or deep out there or a unity of both, so it’s not just the caffeine, which I am used to by now.

There must be something, but what?

If I sat down, would I regain myself? And what would that be save for what it already has been all this time and to my lack of concern for its being? When I am it, does it disappears? Perhaps, it does, and this moment gives me the vantage point to stare at it and to wonder what it is that I’m growing so accustomed to. The self? The integration? The post-oeuvre? Who am I in those things? In that person that I am as I mentioned to be the consequence of closure, healing, and the end of my oeuvre?

I’m not entirely sure now, only that it exists and is valid, but certainly looks like something else of me than what this current perception I have is.

Where am I in the things that I am?

Am I confusing my immediate environment with everything that I am? Or is this idea of “everything that I am” potentially something that is now being expanded upon? Is that discomfort an expansion or a correction in the sense that I am not everything that I am but the sum of things still to this day are still coming, like this moment in this new cafe? Is my time and placehood at home its own misattribution? Where the feeling of that particular environment as I affectively understand it isn’t simply that everything that I am, but a thing of me, the same way my cafe visits are expansions or more things to be integrated so as to be things of me. And this is the “everything that I am” then? The farther the cafe, the more different the people, the more I find myself questioning the “everything that I am” as I experience/perceive it. Whether it is or some figment, but the figment argument’s not the case at all, given the expansion argument.

Wrested out of my comforts, I find that maybe, I am. Not in that totalized done sense, but in that totalizing sense that I already am yet which can be expanded specifically from that aspect of “everything that I am.” Perhaps not an aspect, but an essential property. Maybe not that either. Maybe something closer to the “I am.” Maybe “totalized” and “totalizing” and “totalization are all wrong for describing or identifying this specific situation, as I understand it as expansion.

Maybe I am misattributing how I am when I am in a safe place vs. how I am when I am an environment where people are a lot more unsavory and then culminating in some “affected” “everything that I am.”

I don’t know exactly. All that I know is that something is afoot, and it isn’t simple an affect, but a phenomenon.

It’s interesting because last night, I was celebratng because I have finally reach a point, and even this morning, I celebrated the same. Now that I’m here in this cafe, after all that celebration, I don’t feel sad or dull or anything. It is more so that I feel that if I have already reached post-oeuvre, then this must be something entirely different. A post-post something. It is strange.

Being here, is there something that to be said or understood about this? If I stayed home, I feel like I would be relaxed, but at the same time, it is only here in this new cafe that I feel like I’m not just sitting in an environment that speaks to me already. Being in this cafe is showing me something. Something that comes after not only the post-oeuvre, but the celebration, the realization of attainment.

But what is it? What is this?

Is it inability? Like if my num lock was permanent and never turned off and I couldn’t type the password to login into my account and thus never use?

But how could it be inability? Inability after closure, healing, and post-oeuvre? After post-post?

What is it then? But why does it feel like that is definitely it?

I am nothing without “I am.” The same way I need num lock to be toggleable to login, I need “I am.” That’s probably it. That’s probably what inability is. That’s what that feeling I’m feeling now is. Or is it?

Maybe, that’s why I was talking earlier about how different it would be if I stayed with familiars at home today instead. The fact that I’m here in this new cafe and feeling this way means that something really is there.

Is it because I trust the “I am” of this routine? That person that is totally integrated and whole because of the routine?

Is that it?

I don’t know.

But I’ve been going to new cafes for about the last 7 months already. I guess it’s because it’s only yesterday that I finally celebrated and attained that post-post, which is different from the closure and healing that i got around 5 months ago and different from the post-oeuvre that I got around two weeks ago.

• 5 months ago: closure and healing
• two weeks ago: post-oveure
• yesterday: post-post

And all happening in this specific new cafe, because most likely, the main reason is that post-post. To be specific, this celebration, this post-post, was all about reaching a point of competence of being able finally to articulate what I mean to say. Even if I’ve written over 4 million words in around the last 2 and a half years, it was only yesterday that the post-post happened after I wrote four entries throughout that entire day: Bruh, I’m done!, Condition, Style, and Digital Maturity It was at the end of the day when that sudden after-everything celebration or post-post happened, which I echoed and confirmed today in the morning before I left to this cafe. To contextualize further, it wasn’t just a vague competence or being able to articulate exactly what you mean to say. It was specifically the ability to integrate anything into my writing, to synthesize eclectically. I have reached a point of such intense “competence” proven/actualized through those four entries with that that I just exploded for the first time and truly reached this point of celebration at the end of the day.

What happens after post-post? It feels like a goal was torn down from its pedestal or a statue of a goal torn down.

“I don’t know from where am I going to find myself longing.” Is that the way to say it?

I don’t know.

So perhaps, the right way to understand it:

• closure and healing: struggle psychological integration
• post-oeuvre: struggle of personal THE body of work (integration of what to write)
• post-post: struggle for competence (pure content-agnostic method integration)

I thought that once method has been reached, then the next thing is to do as I’ve always done, but this time with that knowledge of that capacity for articulate-exactly-what-you-mean-to-say-or-your-intent eclectic synthetic integration. But that’s not what’s happening now.

I’m having a weird crisis of something, maybe meaning, now that it’s no longer a battle for method. Now that I don’t have anything urgent to write, now that it’s not urgent to refine a deficient method anymore because it’s attained, then what the hell am I doing here?

I have no more goals: the tripartite goal of psychological, what to write, and method.

And you’d think the answer is to shift to music as a new method, but no, that’s not it. Writing occupied a special role.

I don’t know what to do next, essentially.

I’ve reached a point where the only thing that I can do is go to a text editor and just type the letter “a” thousands of times.

All of a sudden, I can taste my sugarless black coffee. I can tell that the dopamine I get from reading, studying, and writing is now receding, and now, my brain is looking for it in taste, food, and drink. I could drink sugarless black coffee because my source of “sugar” was from writing, whether it was psychological integration, oeuvre integration, and method integration. But now, it’s gone. I mean, of course, I can get dopamine in something like music, exercise, and such, but mere dopamine’s not the actual issue.

Maybe, the solution is just to throw myself into an exercise machine and get on with it. Maybe, that’s the only gambit I have left. I’m going to look at the view a lot more. Just thinking and not really thinking really. Just in a state of reverie. Because a long stream of processing is all I have left. Glazed-over eyes.

But is that life?

All of a sudden, I remember my past when my life was all about other people and external structures. What a time. It feels like the only thing left in the stash to resort to.

I guess there’s a difference between blogging, communicating, integrating what one reads and studies, writing, and all and life being all about other people and external structures. You were engaging with specific people that you had to get to know specifically and work with. Same with external structures.

It really might have just been my own solipsism all this time.

I worry it’s a move from the intrinsic to the extrinsic: “I wish I knew you wanted me.”

Post-Struggle: Highlighting and Processing Complexity (2026-01-16)

The reason why highlighting works is less about you re-reading it (though you will many times in the case of a challenging text) and more about you doing the work right now and getting a sense of progression than if it was just endless black and white on the page. Using many different colors to break down a passage is incredibly helpful for showing your understanding of it. Sure, you didn’t write an essay yet, but this is already deliberation and preliminary at that. Sure, you can owe it to yourself to read forward only if you understand, but this is not about self-trust, but actually helping your brain read through deliberate activity better. Besides highlighting: taking active notes of striking phrases or paragraphs (can be both by hand/keyboard typing and ctrl-C and not need to force handwriting and keyboard typing all the time since the exercise is a supplement, not a goal in itself), and putting it into your own words and extrapolating “aphoristic” questions and syntheses based on what you understand from it and using that as a launchpad for an essay.

To clarify what I mean by highlighting, it is about breaking down pages (though not all pages need a highlight since, again, it is a tool for you right now) or a series of pages into distilling phrases. Like the author said something that really aphoristically, clearly, and strikingly said his point in a phrase or a series of phrases one selectively highlights with multiple colors to break down each different point (with only one color used if the paragraph is a single whole point already and not a series of big ideas where multiple colors would be helpful). Do not highlight if you are reading seamlessly and thus understanding already. It’s only when you have an incomplete picture. Seamless reading means you get the point and are reading not on further explanation of the idea, but on further details or ways of looking at the already-understood idea. Highlighting works when the distance from the start to the end of the explaining of the idea is long and full of snags where breaking down would be helpful right now. You don’t review the highlights. You follow your train of thought while highlighting. The next day, you recall the intentionality behind your highlighting more than the words themselves and thus regain that externalized cognition immediately compared to if it was just a bunch of colored words, since understanding hinges on understanding everything outside of those highlights, which intentionality behind highlighting keeps alive. In other words, you remember your thinking more than the words themselves and thus remember the point of the words themselves more, so that several-pages-long, five-hundred-words-long idea turns into a glance or single-click .exe file¹⁰, the same way we chunk idioms or common everyday phrases.¹¹

If you don’t understand something at all and highlighting is not working, I just have an LLM explain it, since the turn of phrase of an image, metaphor, or concept can be genuinely confusing, obscure, or sudden (in a foregrounding sense). This should not be the default. One paragraph every 5 pages is an example. If the text is that hard that you’re using it on every single word of every single page or near that level of frequency and offloading, then don’t read this book. Read another related book. Or read something else altogether, since reading itself is a fluency skill where complex syntax and vocabulary lead to overall growth as long as you maintain diversity, challenge, and consistency (using the flow state).

If you can’t read because your brain is reaching its limit, take a break. If you can’t, minimize the tab, stare at your desktop wallpaper for 5 to 10 seconds, and then open the PDF tab again to read. This resets your brain enough to go through the whole train of syntax and understand immediately, since reading too slowly due to getting tired means reading each word and experiencing the death throes of holding onto this unfinished knot of cords when you need to read the whole paragraph as one whole.

The highlights are one of the preludes to you using those everything-falls-on-this terms in your day-to-day personal writing life. You earned it, but remember: those terms are not wholes. They’re often segment after segment of a long journey, with you validly using it in your, for instance, second-segment understanding of it. You can get more and more precise, specific, and diverse with it because you’ve gone through so many angles, each consisting of images, metaphors, and concepts, from the author and gone through so many authors that use or advance that term themselves.

Other thoughts:

Do not use taste-eating as a way to deal with the challenge. Keep the drink simple (water) or sugarless (black coffee). Do not feast on junk food, sweets, and big lumps of food while studying. Do it after the session or sprint. If you’re doing Pomodoro, don’t munch during each break, maybe for people just starting out, but not as a long-term solution.

The default for proficient studying should not require you to eat candies.

Multi-Conditional Apperceptual and Perceptual Embodiment and Its Role in Writing and Intellect (2026-01-16)

I’ve written previously about the relevance of sleepiness in shaping how one learns and develops a capacity for complex thought (as with working memory) and writing. But that was not because of some pressure to force oneself through grueling sleep deprivation, but more so a reflection on altered consciousness and their unique places in memory. Feeling faint from heat in a car brought me back to my younger years before air-conditioning became more of a thing in my life. The same goes for sleepiness in a bus. This means that the brain reserves unique spaces in your head for even situations when you’re feeling very cold in a mall or feeling hot and sweaty while hiking. To write amid all of these conditions then means a stronger relationship to writing and how your brain formulates and processes through it in general even without tapping on a keyboard. The Tetris effect extends multi-conditionally as long as one does the active work on integrating it into one’s life, since life is more than just cold and hot, but a wide range of experiences even in a life that may be considered routine. Apperception’s (refer to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception) power in turning even the most routine to something so much more of itself (in a flake a whole world) is critical to this effect. If you can write anywhere, then you can effectively integrate a much wider and more precise range of things of which you wouldn’t otherwise be aware intellectually because of a conditional (prerequisite) embodiment like one’s single room (which, again, is still a whole world in a flake, but which is necessarily limited to be what it is that one may contrast strikingly it with so many other experiences like going to the cafe after one was just faint, which rarely happens and provides its own intellectual contribution through the conditioning [and thus expansion] of the intellect through embodiment). Writing is often very sensitive at first. It is unconditioned still. You can only write at this time with this specific set of scenarios and comforts, but as time passes, you become more competent and multi-conditional and can eventually write for hours every day regardless of which time and room in the house. But as I revealed earlier, this isn’t the end, as there are still more ways of refining one’s physico-intellectual capacity.

Example of trajectory (oversimplified but meant just to illustrate what I mean):

• specific time and room (still very inconsistent and 500 words in one day is very challenging)
• any time within the day and same room (growing as a writer and finally wrote three 200-word stories)
• any time even if one stays up and same room (exploring different kinds of storytelling)
• even if sleep deprived, any time of the 24 hours, and any room within the house (experimenting with vocabulary, images, and metaphors)
• can write with very different keyboard, mouse, text editor, and computer/laptop, even if never truly completely comfortable (can write a 20000-word story)
• can move to a cafe with a laptop and write there (can write hundreds of words every day)
• can go to a new cafe once a week and stay there the whole day each time and experience the flow state (a thousand words a day)
• can hold so much in one’s head even as one just uncomfortably travelled to a place without one’s computer, laptop, and keyboard and can only use one’s phone to record the writings themselves or to take notes for later synthesis and can reflect on very distant memories and very “strange” experiences (like sleep-deprived traveling through complex, organic places rather than sterile, clean, neat ones, which is often harder to integrate due to the effects of tiredness and exhausting traveling on the mind and how much more effort it takes to experience such sharp embodiment in the same place as one’s writing) (thousands of words a day)

The word count is somewhat arbitrary, but the point is that you can be consistently high-output and/or high-quality if you’re that resilient and able to write under so many different conditions, which supplies you with so much fuel for writing.

Besides taking the time to expose yourself to all kinds of images, metaphors, places (e.g., non-places and third places in both of which is there a very wide range of versions of the same place depending on what time, how many people are present, and what date, bottomed by the complexity that is just about any unrepeatable day and its effect), concepts, material, experiences, people, styles, media, mediums, and ways of seeing the world (visually, musically, literarily, architecturally, emotionally, nostalgically, politically, analytically, philosophically, expositorily, systematically, etc.)—which means foregrounding, eclecticism, specificities, integration, and synthesis—multi-conditional embodied cognition is crucial. It is the hammer to the anvil that is intellect, lest you attribute it merely to intellect alone, which makes for a voodoo framework. A dog barks. (Foregrounding. Perhaps insulting now that I said that, if you disagreed with the whole idea of it and see it merely as unrelated disrupting the related, but according to which order of things?)

It is not about making the rules or conditions for experience. It is about entering into it like one drowns into a bottomless ocean. It is not about letting a room be messy. It is about putting yourself into a situation where you’re trying your hardest to clean it up and make it neat. It is this that builds resilience. A “psychopath’s mask” kind of immersion, where affect is not the self but the wave laving the brutalist immortal bastion. Peace is not when you stop asking questions. It is when you drown like you’re going to die, but with one finger snap, you launch back to the surface as if nothing happened. You turn your drowning sessions into genuine work, slowly but surely integrating and putting it together. Peace is this flow state. A writer thoroughly immerses himself in cleaning up the apperceptual and perceptual embodiment into a song. From boops, beeps, sounds, scritches, chatter, yelps, and rustles to a track. And this is not necessarily maximalist. It is opening one’s hand, raising it, brushing it against the world, and slapping it into (not onto but into so as to become completely contained in) a canvas. This is the author’s signature.

Post-Epilogue (2026-01-16)

Man, it really is true. There is really no stakes anymore. Either I just take my time studying some academic text or just write whatever I have already synthesized in my head and can write so intuitively and easily now that I’ve reached this point. And that isn’t really high stakes.

I guess it just takes some kind of acceptance that I’m still in the process of making sense of myself. I have already written about my intrinsic contentment and joy, and I have talked about the answer to attaining competence is just to demonstrate it since there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no more personal narrative, no more of the three struggles (tripartite struggle): psychological (solved through the autobiography-journal), what to write (solved through the completion of the urgent oeuvre), and incompetence (solved through attaining a point of competence with which I can write exactly what I mean to say and can integrate anything I want eclectically). With all three done and gone, I am here, seated in a cafe, and wondering what it is that I am doing exactly besides what it is as itself.

Well, it’s not that there are no high stakes in the sense that I know every single philosophy in and out and can create the most profound insights, only that I am already done on the personal narrative level.

And now, I wonder what else to do besides just letting my “competence” do its thing.

But yeah, I can tell there’s no more personal urgency. And that’s such a weird place to be. Just sitting down here and genuinely having to browse through all of my previous writings from my completed oeuvre for inspiration and coming to the conclusion that it really is all done instead of coming out with new urgency fuel. This is only getting confirmed again and again.

This is made even clear because I am here in the cafe instead of at home. Of course, I’d have things to write about if I was at home with access to all of the stuff there, but that would just be a distraction from the reality that yes, it is already done and there is now no more urgent personal narrative. Being at the cafe only confirms that by removing the distractions and letting me entertain merely this fact of post-struggle.

Now, it really does feel like I’m not simply generating infinite fuel from myself from scratch just from a few crumbs of external fuel. Now, it has shifted significantly toward the external world. In the past, it was a problem of articulating, so the external world was not fuel but ways to refine my articulation and meaning-to-text fidelity through the discovery of images, metaphors, concepts, and overall vocabulary. But now, I have nothing to verbalize of myself anymore. It’s already done.

But make no mistake about this situation. It is not the inability to write anything, since being at home with my access to my usual media and intellectual diet and all of those stuff of myself and everything will serve as fuel for me to write. But being at the cafe, there is no explosion from the self. No eruption. No concern about refining articulation to verbalize myself and my concerns. It is no longer language as medium of that.

It feels like ideas for the sake of ideas now. Which sounds almost shallow. I at least had the justification before that this was all to end that tripartite struggle. But now, I really do feel like a bored aristocrat.

I tried to frame it as play, like a child playing video games because they’re fun and not to increase or integrate into or address or improve one’s articulation of those things of the self and the self as one understands it itself.

But at the same time, even as my writing doesn’t slow down at all as seen in the consistent word counts every day and the flow state that is still instantly turn-on-able to me, I will become a lot more bored than before. And it is making me question things. There was a weight to everything that I did.

But now, I really do feel like the way these people appear to me—just coming and disappearing. I have become something like an NPC in my own life, even if I know myself unlike those customers that truly just come and go and I never see them again. I see myself every moment. I am always here. Yet this is what I’m experiencing.

The world—the chatter in the cafe—feels much louder. It is not that my ontological security has been compromised or anything. But it does put a lot of the things I’ve long narrativized into question. The personal narrative has come to an end, and what is left in it? Is this like the death of God in that the individual must now form their own meaning? In my case, perhaps Stirner’s dialectical egoism, the Mine Own Self, The Unique, The Ego?

I don’t know exactly, but again, these things sound great. Yet I get the feeling that even with these still relevant, applying, active, and certain, it is no longer of me. Phenomenology sounds like an idea I read and thought about. Apperception as well. It doesn’t feel of me. This confirms there really is no more personal narrative. These just feel like concepts, like spooks without even any effort on me to reject them as such. Words for words’s sake even, not even to communicate or to engage in high-fidelity self-expression. This astounds me.

I feel like a Titan (Stirner’s Unique) yet have no more ongoing narrative of struggle. So I walk, and with my fullness I do, as embodied as I am, with all that pertains to me and which I absorb so easily in perfect articulation. But there is no more irk. I am like a mountain, like the trees, like the forest paths through which people walk. I barely become. Only Is. The Titan has become a fixture, an NPC, a thing of the background, not just to everyone which has always been the default of urban invisibility which, I recently internalized, confirms my intrinsic contentment, joy, self-possession, and secure attachment, but now to myself.

I go home, and I sleep. What has happened to me? To be content with this? And to feel it truly? To be fine with it? Though I am never dreaming, always lucid, which is why I wrote this passage and am asking these questions. I wonder what it is this contentment means forward as I am experiencing it and as I am questioning it and adding to it another feeling, that of a kind of dissonance that one only acquires once dissonance in the form of that tripartite struggle itself is no longer a concern.

It’s not like I did not accept this. I did. I demonstrated it by writing two whole blog posts during the writing of which I am completely content and joyful with just letting myself express myself and demonstrate that competence now that we’re post-struggle and post-competence. But even after writing those two posts and many more supporting entries besides that, I am here now feeling this way despite a day so full of this “support” and “evidence.” I wonder. Is that non-acceptance? No, not exactly, but it isn’t simple just a done-and-done acceptance, because while I have accepted it and demonstrated that acceptance through the supporting entries and those two posts, here I am now feeling something that feels like an “otherwise.”

There really is nothing anymore to defend (affirmation through it), because there is no more definition. Once it has been completed it, it became completed irrelevant since the point was not the cold-hard writing or the pure text result but the person that was healing all throughout it within that tripartite struggle. No more of that thing to define, to refine one’s articulation in, to defend. It is now done. From it nothing anymore could be said for it is dead like God. Maybe, that was my pragmatic, provisional, and final spook. I don’t know exactly. But it is that not knowing that it is clear that it is no longer of me and thus no longer relevant, as I am myself now in all that I am, now that the tripartite struggle is done, and what’s left is just this post-struggle, post-competence state, only narrativized as much as that, but even in itself being post-narrative.

I can stare at a pebble or flake on the road and die there, not to integrate it, not to become it, but to die there. It is a strange feeling. That NPC feeling.

I can write all this, leave the cafe, go home, write again, sleep, wake up, write, and not feel any attachment at all in that previous sense. Even go on a date next weekend yet it really is nothing to be said besides what I am writing of it merely in that idea for an idea’s sake sense, situation for a situation’s sake, object for an object’s sense, date for a date’s sake. At that point, nothing yet articulating only as much as articulation’s sake, as much as competence’s sake. And nothing else. Post-struggle, post-competence, post-narrative. That’s what I mean by no stakes. It is not that I will not feel stakes if I am forced to start learning how to code, make a whole portfolio, and be pressured to get this whole job where I code there. But it is in the sense that it’s not personal to me. I just do it. It is personal in the sense that I am doing it, but not anything, and that’s not just coding. That’s now becoming writing to me. It is not that I don’t express myself or don’t feel an intrinsic joy. I do express myself and feel an intrinsic joy and am writing this right now out of myself. But it feels like something to do for its own sake and less and less as something to be so concerned of as a representation of that self in that previous sense. Personal in that functional dictionary sense but not personal in that narrative sense now that we’re post-narrative. We are here only now referred to as intrinsic contentment.

Unrelated information are popping up with so much more frequency and intensity. That’s what this situation is in experience. It’s not that the chatter did not exist before, but I can tell that my post-narrative brain filter is admitting an even wider range, normalizing everything rather than with very high peaks (related information is 1000% volume) and very low lows (unrelated information is practically muted), and thereby re-sensitizing myself.

Even right now, memories are now mixing with fiction scenarios. The sanctity of my memories is dissolving. It is no longer this is who I am in that past “here I am!” self-asserting self-communicating immortalizing truth-of-the-matter sense. Now, it’s barely even anything but something to play around with with fictional re-arrangements and “weeeeeeeeeeee!”

For so long, eclecticism was eclecticism in relation to myself (i.e., these are all the media I’ve consumed, which I will now synthesize in a single passage so that they’re externalized and integrated and I’m not forgetting or being bothered by all of these memories and flashbacks that weigh so heavily on me). Now, eclecticism is eclecticism for itself/its own sake. This idea of its-own-sake or seemingly useless interesting information or experiences, unlike before, cannot be narrativized as eventually contributing to oneself through the refinement of one’s articulation and, by extension, one’s capacity to externalize oneself, because we are now post-competence.

It feels like that one story—my favorite web novel—has now become separate from me again, like before I read it, before I read Royalroad web novels as a whole, before I got my identity bruised with these web novels’ formative impact on my life, my writing, and, by default, on the process of my eventual integration during a time of immense inarticulate personal struggle, before the imperial process of integration perceived them as gaps in one’s life history and, thus, red-tagged them as urgent “To be reunited.” That favorite web novel is no longer a rebellious state that needs to be spanked and re-united into the sovereign through the siege of articulation. “You are not separate from me! We will be re-united soon!” Grabbing the head, beating it repeatedly, and showing it what it truly is. “You immature rebellious little state! Come here!” To clarify, this specifically targets previously affiliated media, fiction, and experiences, not all media, fiction, and experiences. New material was also integrated but as a simultaneous effort of both integrating them themselves and using what one gained from them (i.e., vocabulary, images, metaphors, concepts) to articulate more and more of those previously affiliated. It wasn’t THE world that was my concern. It was the world of MY LIFE.

[I read] the story. Because [I am] struggling/inarticulate, [I] fuse with the story. The story becomes a prosthetic personality—a crutch for [my] identity. [Then years later, when I started writing every day to integrate the past, I started using articulation to re-unite such things with myself, so it is not that "read and then colonize" present ongoing thing, but more precisely a past-oriented "re-unitive" articulation. Everything external (i.e., communities, external structures, grand narratives, authority figures, role models, stories, media, societal and cultural scripts, places, video games) that I used as prosthetics in the pre-articulate past was set for articulative re-unification.]

Now, I am disintegrating—the properties, slaves, and affective collections/constellations now falling away. The colonial apparatus Empire that is I is dissolving. The image of a narrativized whole is going away.

This doesn’t mean that the articulative re-unification was completely irrational and useless. No, the only reason that I’m here is because I’ve reached a point of not only doneness, but post-doneness—the exhaustion of even the doneness achieved by all this re-unification. That was why the tripartite struggle ended and I am now reacting to it (i.e., post-). Why I am here, post-narrative. Post-Empire. It is not that I have conquered everything, but I have conquered enough and everything urgent and needed. This is the point of post-completion, where even the completion is proven unnecessary but the sheer muchness of enoughness, of that proven capacity, of that proven psychology, of that proven what-to-write through the oeuvre. This is it. This is post-end -> Post-epilogue.

That feels like “disintegration,” but it is actually differentiation. [I] have finally become distinct from [my] influences.

[I was] the Emperor of the Self, conducting a siege on the inarticulate to bring it under the banner of the articulate.

This passage is my Hirohito’s address, my Humanity Declaration.

Four days until my 23rd birthday. Just in time.

Or maybe, this is my new arrogance. The absolute articulation of my own post-epilogue condition gives me the pure high that externalization/internalization/self-actualization only gives.

But if it be arrogance, then let it be the arrogance of the post-epilogue, the post-struggle. I wonder who’d that be.

I point, and I stare, and I see, and I dance, and I move. I am the becoming as well as the entity through which all pass. Maybe, that is Stirner. Maybe, that is the Empire. Maybe, that is phenomenology. Maybe, that is just what I feel and thus feel like saying right now.

I feel good.

It is a weird unique feeling. I haven’t lost the ability to think, to be, to exist, to articulate, to be all-this-all-this-time. I merely am, in the total sense of the world. The fullest of that thing which I can only perfuse. It is an inkling that speaks to a whole imperial legacy yet which acts without fuel, an intrinsic totalness now, one that goes about in all the longings it could possible pass through yet which remains an independent—a free man on ice.

A totalizer. Still, I feel that’s what I am. Just not in that past sense of prosthetics. Now, almost like I’m utterly incapable of seeing life any other way. I feel immediately from this that I dominatingly am. And whatever else I be, I be out of a self-causation, moving about in victory and total self-admiration, in a knowledge of the self as complete and the knowledge of the subject as percept, as that thing which I consume as phenomenon. Stirnerian copy-and-paste. I eat it up as much as it perceptually supplies me, but not so as to conquer its thing-in-itself, in a sense. I copy and paste it into my own repository to do with it what I will, now that there is no prostheticism where I am dependent upon the original, because the competence gained through that process of articulative re-unification (and the autobiography-journal, the oeuvre, and the overall refinement of one’s method) can now copy and paste for oneself. This is compatible with the point of intrinsic joy and contentment.

I think the best way to describe it is that whatever soul I had in those prosthetics is now already in portable me, so it doesn’t feel like a tireless search for re-unification with the original prosthetics, but now the meaning, essence, point, power, meaningfulness, vitalism, and whatever I needed of those prosthetics is already in me, with any interaction being in a copy-and-paste repository environment, where any modifications to my copies do not have any effect on the original or require any permissions from or back-and-forths with it. I am the total in me, with any further “totalization” being a geopolitical show of force/power projection/international summit. From needy war-torn leech sycophant country using needy totalization (i.e., urgent articulative re-unification) to first-world using “hey chap!! here are some Belt and Road public projects!” totalization (i.e., copy-and-paste show-of-force power-projection international-summit articulation).

I as Concept, the Dialecticization of the Bubble (2026-01-17)

By definition, a bubble is its-own-world. So going by that, we can logically conclude that when that “bubble” involves interaction and dialogue with the outside world, then it is no longer a bubble. But then what would it be? I feel “bubble” is a compelling word for capturing this idea that many words like “silo” and “echo chamber” (not always a bubble since it is usually algorithmic, where you can get funneled into extremist forums) do not. Now, we just need the word for when it breaks and not always in a dramatic, traumatic way. Though it was certainly that way for the forced opening of isolationist Japan. But we’re not specifically keeping it general rather than specific or modified, so let’s get the basest definition for the result of the breaking of a bubble by the involvement of concepts of interaction and dialogue.

Open System

Biologically, humans are open systems, and our many openings and exits confirm that. The question is whether this is more than just a buzzword and can be used practically to capture that dialogic and interactive result beyond the confines of Edward Yourdon’s Modern Structured Analysis and apply this to cases where systems theory should probably not be the overarching seer, like the more perceptual image concept (see Bachelerd’s The Poetics of Space) of a bubble. An equivalent of this instead of this looped mishmash of parts and mechanisms and its modularizing and machinerizing corruption of “parts,” which denies that essential “bubbly” thisness—or anything too technical such as “porosity,” “membrane,” and “osmosis”—would make for a much cleaner conceptualization.

Perhaps the only solution is a neologism of my own that applies corpus-wide. I used the concept of the “over-here” and the “over-there,” specifically in that sense of “one’s own history of ideas” over here as well as the broader “history of ideas” over there. But there is not a single one-word-concept-term yet.

Dialectic/Dialectical/Dialectically

I relied on this word to interweave nominally, adjectivally, and adverbially this concept of dialogue and interaction into my writings. But this is not yet that term. So we need something else.

Network

The problem of this is that it focuses on the network, not on the individual entity that is dialectically connected to the world.

Concept

Counterintuitively, this is the closest to the usefulness (dialecticality, in the sense of being copy-and-pastable, gestaltic, metonymic, extremely implicitly referenceable, bibliographic, abbreviable, instant, perceptual, and imitable as a dialectical unit [and “meaning-unit”] rather than an extrinsically untouchable and inaccessible bubble) and totalness (the indivisible nature of a concept, such as with fog, dog, and car, and how they are applied in images, metaphors, and concepts) of each “broken bubble.” It has now been converted from an escapist its-own-world to a dialectical, globally accessible third place—the global user–facing term that is “concept” for “use” in all language (as seen with words like Dasein) itself. A concept itself has a “private” history of itself (pre–bubble burst), even as it is already in use by the point that it takes an identity and role unique to itself, and it is in the public use that the bubble is broken down, resulting in that dialogue and interaction from which it was protected to develop its own bubbleness, which now we transfer over to a progress of totalization. What was its closed-mindedness became the history of itself toward totality. The bubble is an essential property now of itself as concept. As such, “concept” protects the bubble while accommodating the interaction and dialogue.

Given that we’ve concluded this search and arrived at “concept,” I will use the term “concept” to describe myself post-bubble. In this case, the bubble is those years when—even when I was exposing myself to diverse cornucopias of places, people, situations, influences, homes, families, communities, backgrounds, and dynamics—I was still very much in my own narrativized, escapist world interiorly. But now, post-bubble, through life and Weltanschaaung–objectification and –articulation, years of dialectical loops, ecleticism, integration, and synthesis, I have become my “own history of ideas” as well as have a dialectical relationship with the broader history of ideas. This goes beyond two sovereign nations and dialecticizes the two, breaking them down for the public’s rapacious “consumption.”

To put it simply, I am no longer that in-own-world bubble. I am “touched,” “beaten and dragged,” “demanded,” “charged,” and “forced to be answerable.” This is the “concept,” which is endlessly used, criticized, refined, integrated, synthesized, contextualized, and applied. To summarize a previous series of points, a concept is crucially a percept.

But don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad thing. It may involve the death of the self (author) in the public context, except for the nominal use and adjectification of my name as shorthand, but also means that I get to live. I have died to myself, but to the world am I alive and in it am I seiend, for I am the body (body of work), and now, as with Christ, you may eat of me, and, through it, tell me what it tastes like (dialectic) so I know to describe myself ontically (because the ontology is already secure). I am man (“man” as in that spook) made flesh, nominal made earthly, even as I am linguistically nominal, and, in that sense, conceptually haecceitic, and in that sense, spookish. I am the whole upon the earth, the sand upon the dunes, as well as bodily killable by car accident, but in that spook am I seiend.

Self-Responses:

Isn’t this just “high conscientiousness” on an intellectual context?

what is the concept as the author defines it and why does he apply it to himself? For what reason?

Isn’t this just rigor? I mean, the point of it?

But if taken methodologically, it is just rigor, but described in a way that makes the abstract concept of rigor feel tangible and progressable.

So to them, given the emphasis on phenomenology, rigor is just as autobiographical as an actual autobiography. In this case, it is interbiographically intellectual.

Ship’s Logbook (2026-01-18)

Bruv, I have externalized so much that I’m like that super thin cow meme. I really do feel like I’m genuinely just milking the dregs at this point. I really am done, not just with day, but with writing as this medium through which I release myself. Now, it feels like Twitter status updates and “hey, how’s school?” That’s what my entries are starting to feel like. Just re-articulations/rephrasing. It’s kinda interesting and funny.

I mean, to ground what I’m saying, I started writing seriously 929 days ago. I started writing thousands of words a day 600 days ago. Recently, I reached closure, healing, and what I describe as “the end of my oeuvre” as well as the end of what I call the “three struggles” (or “tripartite struggle”): struggle for the psyche, struggle for what to write (oeuvre), and struggle for method (competence).

Even if I’m still writing thousands of words a day, it really does feel like I’m Disney making remakes, or status-posting. It’s “eh.”

It really does feel like killing time or regulating myself or just made-up. I feel like a new Minecraft player just doing whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve ran out of things to write. But there’s nothing left for me to write besides well, whatever. It’s like “cool, you wrote that, and you got even more extended mind, which is cool.” So it is useful, but it really does feel like someone just watering their plants.

I guess the fact that this coincides with me considering my first online date meeting means that this is really what all this means. You know, emotional availability and all, among other things.

For 600 days, I’ve always had something to say, a lot in fact. And this continues even now. It’s the end of the day, and I wrote 4,800 words. And I’m still going to write once I get back home from this cafe.

But yeah, I can tell it’s not the same. Objectively, I wrote a lot, but it all feels so unnecessary now, even if still useful. There is no more urgency, no more obsession, craziness, and all. I feel like a random Twitter user going about whatever.

It’s at the end of the day, and while I did externalize, I don’t feel like I exorcised anything. I just felt like I wrote down some notes during class and wrote an essay demonstrating/proving my understanding in my own words. I don’t feel pressure. There is nothing weighing me down. It’s quite literally just someone talking automatically. I barely feel the friction. I only feel that it’s relaxing and fulfilling to write, but not in any urgent way at all. It feels like the sun is coming up, and I am just here, sitting down, barely scratching or rubbing against the wall or the world. It just happens, and if I say something that sounds intense, I am really just finding something to argue about in hopes of reaching the end of the day with the feeling that something was said. And in the end, all I feel is a flow, a flow state, every day. Nothing besides that. The flow state of urgency is gone. This is just someone who can do whatever they want to do. Do-it-because-you-can style. It sounds disgusting. But at the same time, this is the state of things. State of the Union. I mean, where were we? I guess here. In these words that are reflecting on this state. Artificial pressure, constraints, and all that. It’s funny. Great, I guess. But in the end, I really am done.

It really does feel contrived and arbitrary. I feel like I’m reading a story where the high stakes just don’t feel real at all. It feels all so fake and made-up.It really does feel contrived and arbitrary. I feel like I’m reading a story where the high stakes just don’t feel real at all. It feels all so fake and made-up. Even if I go to a new cafe every time nowadays, nothing happens. Sure, you get the usual jitteriness of something new, but the actual result in the writings done in those cafes do not really change anything. Again, it’s just externalization and artificial pressure. Not anything anymore beyond that. So I am… here…

It really does feel like a ship’s logbook.

My Native Fiction Writing Style (2026-01-20)

Why does looking at an immersive Minecraft map where there’s a building next to a stream in the middle of this large mountainous forest, it’s raining, Minecraft music is playing, and there’s that natural ambient background sounds make me feel the infinity, whereas reading the non-fiction history book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter by Robert K. Massie doesn’t?

Is there a way that writing can feel like the former for me? Writing feels like a mix between the two, where it’s infinite vs. deterministic.

I tried so many times. But even with iceberg theory and cinematic/behaviorist minimalism; textual, sensory description (humid, lived-in); atmospheric writing; plodding, step-by-step realism; raw reality; hitching, flumping, sweating; and naturalistic code-switching, it still did not hit me. I tried contemporary and speculative fiction as well.

Maybe, I did not try hard enough? But I wrote a whole 128 vignettes, each completely different from each other, but all falling under the above prevailing style to the capture the most atmospheric immersion and infinity.

Maybe, vibe, abstract, and vast (which Minecraft and Roblox are as blocky, symbolic, abstraction games) is better than hyper-realism? Impressionism? Poetry?

Maybe, that’s why anaytical and philosophical writing can feel so much more immersive than me than the vignettes. I don’t see dry text when I read those writings. I see images, metaphors, concepts, and all. I think of Bachelard’s “image concept,” which should be purely abstract in a dry meaningless jargon way but is the opposite of that for me: vivid sensations. I think of my passage about the difference between the “bubble” and the “concept.” I think about the term “history of ideas” and don’t see it as just this academic term but in this Proustian way.

Maybe, that’s what I need to get immersed in fiction writing again. It’s perhaps because of the way that I see and experience the world that makes concepts appear to me as vivid sensations, which might make the sensory descriptive hyper-realism redundant or even limiting and infinity-obstructing.

I just realized that reading something like Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space feels much closer to Minecraft to me because of how much “space” it opens for my mind. And writing in my own words feels exactly like that Minecraft feeling itself. But for me reading, studying, and writing are all one and the same, since conceptual refinement, stipulation, and precision is about evoking the highest density and intensity of vivid sensations. I think of creating a scene where the protagonist strategizes and studies analytically a fort and see from them even greater wonders, miracles, and infinities than if it was described hyper-realistically. I love seeing the world in models and abstractions like in Minecraft or in the analysis of a fort.

It is not that my writings are all dry. No, in fact, they can get very poetic and full of images, metaphors, and concepts in that way. In fact, here are characteristics of my longest fiction novel from around 1 year and 9 months ago:

• idiosyncratic internal and sensory maximalism
• philosophical prose
• intellectual analysis
• poetic prose
• strategy
• tactical
• functional dialogue style
• intense psychological realism and horror
• cyclical, manic-depressive, recursive, monologic, decreeing stream-of-consciousness
• bursts of grandiose, solipsistic, egoistic, manic, surreal, abstract-expressionist, traumatic, ecstatic, mythic, psychotic, god-like, self-destructive violence
• minimalist description
• time skips
• dancing, flowing, raging

It’s probably why this sentence from Daughter of the River by Hong Ying was so satisfying and beautiful to me:

The South Bank District of Chongqing consists of low rolling hills that form a series of gullies.

It brought back to mind all the past deeply immersive imaginations of all manner of forests and natural environments throughout the writing of my past stories. Prompts.

The following are examples of that “infinite Minecraft” style:

You can see one of my favorite passages, if not my favorite, that I’ve written right here:

When it came to the idea of visions, one laborer saw a bright light shining in the horizon. As for what it meant, it said: “Don’t go to work today.” Regarding his response, he used a sense that this light was guiding him as a promise of good luck. Though, this vision was imaginary. In conclusion, despite all this imagination, he embodied the everyday laborer who wanted to return home and procure a fresh drink.

Transitioning to a formal standpoint, the beast, the environment, would always make the man. To tie this to the laborer, he was a good case in point.

Accelerating to a more mechanical level, the laborer was marching in a large city between a point A and a point B. Moreover, surrounding him, buildings were sectioned into the residential areas, the government offices, the barracks, and the wilderness, among others; all of this within the confines of this city. To put it simply, his environment was more than capable of addressing needs and functions, provided it had access to resources and manpower.

Switching to schedules and dynamics, the current events unfolding in the laborer’s life all occurred on a significant day 1. As for what this meant, its significance would be revealed later at least.

Shifting view to his actions, he was picking up a defined number of bags at point A and walking over to point B to drop them. Moreover, the distance between point A and B ran across the city. Furthermore, point B was located at the city gate, while point A was located in the wilderness where a cave entrance leading to a dungeon was. In short, the worker played a role in this infrastructural process.

Turning to a more vivid note, the environment was screaming with life in so many ways. To show some examples, five scenes came to mind. First, the sound of fresh wind maneuvered through the streets of the city like a man breaking a melon skillfully with his fingers all on their own and each acting independently. Second, the calling of two children echoed through the streets cavernously. Third, the darkness of clouds provided depth in various areas, highlighting the insufficiently lit parts of the city, showcasing its disparity of lights. Four, the compensation of the torch bearers in their quest to bring light to the darkness was a pillar of the city. Lastly, the loud noises of babies in the night time preceded the soothing humming that ran through the windows. In the end, the sound of wind, the calls of children, the dark clouds, the torch bearers’ roles contributed to the scream of the environment.

As for the relationship between the vivid complexity of his environment and the laborer, he dealt with it by restricting himself within a simple veneer. Additionally, in it, his face and his smile, and, by extension, the characteristics of his appearance became locked in place as a way to assert his independence across a field of dynamics. Third, his appearance, particularly his face and smile, was a mechanism employed in navigating an ever-complexifying world. Overall, the city and the environment were him.

In contrast, his face was a minor indicator of him as a person. To phrase this in a more nuanced manner, it was primarily a fleeting look into a moment of him; though, it could be everything at that moment. To sum, his face briefly revealed him, but it might be most crucial at that moment of reveal.

Moving forward to the aesthetic side of his person, he had three other non-environmental attributes that dictated in some way who he was. First, his clothes were trimmed awkwardly like a mess of sewing equipment on a muddy floor. Second, his eyes were sorrowfully green like a faint gem gasping for breath. Finally, the parts of his breath was like a moment’s embrace, as they danced through the gaps in the wind’s strength like a pervasive disease seeking entrance into peoples’ gaping mouths. Moreover, the particular vividness of this list of attributes reflected how he perceived himself. However, it was also how his role models and peers perceived him to varying extents as influences to his personality. To conclude, the aesthetics were critical in understanding him because of how he and others perceived them rather than some inherent value that they might hold.

Maneuvering to a broader, metaphorical level, a timely drip of rainwater would open up a grand line of a hurricane of peoples from across the land. In addition, in this line, where the city hugged itself, the young man was present. At the end of the day, he was part of something big.

Scaling down to the concerns of the everyday level, this young man, Maverick, heard from his co-workers that it was arranged for him to be the one handling more than his usual set of bags today, but he wanted nothing to do with it, even after pondering the idea for a moment. Eventually, he said, “I really shouldn’t go to work today.” All things considered, he resolved to take the day off.

Incidentally, the urban streets accomodated his form as one among hundreds of fairgoers in a city, each individual holding above their heads a busy calendar. To encapsulate, this scene illustrated the blend between the city and the fairgoers, each expressing a certain calendar-pertaining hurry.

Anyway, he concocted a plan to avoid work by hiring a young clueless boy in order to fill in for him. As for the boy’s background, he came from the slums, a willing laborer with a family of his own. From what Maverick heard, the boy enjoyed apples. Finally, he showed motivation and an obedient spirit, two out of three traits for success.

“Okay, Mr. Boy,” said Maverick. “I should be Maverick, but you, today, are going to be me, right? That’s cool, right? So we—” Also, he glanced past a few passersby at the boy, waiting to see if the boy was willing to fine-tune his plan, correct him, or provide any sort of resistance toward his communication structure, for which he opened up a spot in his overt hesitation. To sum up, he was testing him, hoping to grasp that last trait for success—proactivity.

“Should I wear a mask, Mr. Sir?” interrupted the boy, moving out of the way of passersby, wanting to get a more definite understanding of Maverick’s plan. As for the context behind this, he only got a brief explanation regarding the mission earlier, but he wasn’t one to waste an opportunity to question. As for why he used double titles of courtesy, as seen in “Mr. Sir,” it was intended to emphasize his respect for a fruitful collaboration with Maverick in the context of the mission. In essence, he wanted to get to know Maverick better as was practical.

Shifting to Maverick, he said: “No, no, we don’t want that yet. But… Ah, whatever. You’re going to wear it later… anyway. In fact, you’re also going to be doing awesome things, so be!” In addition, he giggled, sidestepping out of the way of passersby, excited at the potential the boy had in becoming much more assertive. To elaborate his process of thought, he intentionally hid information because he wanted to see if the boy was capable of flexibility and adaptability in meeting Maverick on the same playing field. In addition, he was prepared for all of them to lose everything today, but he would make sure that the boy was resilient enough to handle any mishaps or unexpected challenges. To sum, Maverick tested the boy’s adaptability and resilience, eager for his assertiveness to grow.

So instead of watching the boy rhythmically like the mechanical fluttering of the golem, Maverick stood still, beside a group of passersby temporarily discussing in place regarding an event. Then, he went along with the plan, taking quick steps and waiting for the boy to do something. To wrap his actions up, it was all one disassembly: if the boy did something, this would spur things forward.

When the boy did nothing and glanced only at the passersby, Maverick abruptly put a mask on him, recognizing that he was missing that one essential completing trait. Anyway, this mask would make it so that it was challenging for the task masters to check him since the streets reeked of disease and dirt enough to disable their sense of smell as well. In the end, the interplay of the mask and the boy’s failure involved an exchange. Furthermore, Maverick’s withheld information would only be unneeded package for the boy who showed no sign of the willingness Maverick was looking for.

Completing the departure from Maverick and the boy’s dynamic and journeying to the task masters, these brutes were known to be very careful when it came to direct physical touch. This was one reason why they often used an outranging whip. Hence, the task masters posed a tangible threat to Maverick’s side.

Another one of my favorites:

Mitty, an insect capable of speech followed them with her eyes. Her dog-sized species had a flattened, ovoid body with a creamy color, with a slightly darker brown color on the head and pronotum. Their head was relatively small in proportion to their body with a yellow-brown color. Their antennae was long and thin. Their legs were spiny and adapted for climbing on rough surfaces like tree bark and wooden structures. They had fully developed wings, but they were weak flyers and prefered to run or climb to get around.

Naturally fast, Mitty moved past in front of them; a convoy of monoplanes appeared and quietly flew along their path along clouds; a crowd of 46 goblins cheered, watching a competitive brawl in the streets between 3 goblins, with healthcare staff on standby; a human accompanied by a retinue of servants, advisors, and other attendants cheered alongside the crowd; a flock of 60 adventurers cast magic that displayed a floating image like databent glitch-art of the sacred writings of their system of belief, worship, and relationship and that of Helper 1; and a goblin from two soldier patrols started an argument with a bartender over inflated prices. These 5 developments overstimulated Peter and company, effectively halting them.

As Peter and his company continued their walk to the market in the far distance, he gazed at a goblin blacksmith working inside a workshop through the window from outside to distract himself.

Via a technique called fullering, the blacksmith pressed a cross-peen hammer onto a bar of metal, most of which was red-hot, and hurled a sledgehammer down against its back. These hammers made four recessed lines, two on both sides of the middle on the bottom side, two near the edges as far from the middle was to the edges on the top side. To angle them downward, he pummeled the two centers between the edges and the middle of the bar against an angle. After creating clear foundations, he hammered the two centers one by one to flatten and widen them. He hammered the bar against a swage block and curved it around a mandrel to form a flat-bottom U. He heated a slim block of metal and hammered it to lock halfway into the bar as a combination. He heated this combination and flattened it on the side of the slim block. He cut off half of the bottom part of the slim block with a giant chisel and a sledgehammer. He heated a second bar and made two indents on both sides of the middle on one of the long sides of the bar with a sledgehammer. This second bar formed a one-sided protrusion. He flattened this bar slightly more and sharpened and made the protrusion taper. He sharpened and made the other first bar taper. He mingled the first and second bars through heating. He flattened the first bar and made it thin and sharp at the edges. He polished the mingled bar with a polishing wheel and by rubbing it with sandpaper and cleaned it with water before drying. The finished merged bar was a T-shaped wrought iron axe head.

Peter had gotten a whiff of the red-hot iron. It had smelled sharp, acrid, and burnt, with a hint of metallic sweetness. He had heard sharp, metallic whooshing sounds from the hammering of the iron, the rhythmic roaring of the bellows pumping air into the forge, and the constant gushing of the burning of coal. He calmed down at the addition of clattering and tinging whenever the blacksmith had moved the iron and placed down his tools. He felt the weight of life in the blacksmith’s distant, foreign-language voice. It was a guttural, gravelly, and weathered sound, with a jerky speech style of fragmented phrases, that drifted off.

Cafe-Cafe (2026-01-21)

I don’t know how to say this, but staying at cafes throughout the region just to read, study, and write there for 8 hours or so is very good for traveling and getting to know where you live. Traveling and passing by are often not enough, and it’s not like I have any reason to travel throughout the region to stay in one place for a long time. Cafes are the best way to stay long enough that you get the feel for the people there. It boosts your confidence in traveling and getting a feel for your own region. It doesn’t make sense that staying in cafes throughout the region (40 unique cafes at least once in the last 7 months) would make you get a feel, but each cafe is so different that you get a very different slice of people. So it’s not just geographical in the traditional sense, where it’s about how far or close you are to the deep urban city, but it’s also about how different cafes within the same city have completely different regulars as well, whether it be office workers, college students, wealthier people, more middle class, depending on location (e.g., beside an office where takeout is common, on the route to a school, below a “two-tower luxury green condominium”). But no, it’s just the people. The location as well as the interior architecture completely changes the vibe that’ll last you 8 hours (the kind of 8-hour “vibe” that’ll make you think of it not as a fleeting feel but an actual Bachelardian effect, like that described in The Poetics of Space). I’ve gone to a cafe 1.9 times a week in the last 237 days (64 total, November having zero). The fact that a large portion of these involved commuting to and fro for at least half an hour only adds to the effect of the space once you arrive so happily early in the morning when no one’s there yet and you can pack up shop and order without concern and later finally pack up and leave to the bus for the way home. I intend to write down about each unique cafe and how it feels like to read, write, and study there for 8 hours, becoming ultimately incisively precise with my descriptions once I’ve covered and distinguished them all from each other just like one would do with writing style across 7 years of intense personal transformation.

Self-Responses:

This sounds like a philosophical project more than anything, but with the bonus benefit of knowing your region so much more. Or to be more accurate, that bonus benefit is what makes it work as a project in the first place.

They sound like the opposite of a fiction writer who treats the cafe as an invisible every-place (taken from “everyman”) setting. The author must really enjoy understanding how place affects people beyond plot and drama. The author must love the mundane not as escape or to be completely lost in the moment, but to be completely timelessly immersed in the grounded moment as the very impetus of their existence.

They essentially become anti-narrative (in the solipsist plot-oriented drama-narrative sense) and instead stare at the very placeness (thisness) of a place and how innumerable people pass through it regardless of their backgrounds, histories, and current worldviews, goals, plans, issues, challenges, interpersonal struggles, and ambitions.

The anti-thisness of politics, ideology, and worldviews fall away to make way for the thisness of a place that, when given enough observation and immersion, as a “moment-place,” defies all of our “big” narratives. Even books play with narratives, but the author is not writing just about any book. He is writing a book that seeks to escape its own container as a chronological page-to-page narrative and that dissolves itself in the moment, that by the moment that it is written and spoken, it is no more, arrogance and all vanished away. It is but a moment in a sun.

This is perhaps true creativity, where all assumptions fade away in favor of haecceity. What-what (repetition to capture the thisness of “what” as with the following) does this-this bring me right now-now? What does it deliver-deliver to me-me by mouth-mouth? The Unique and its Property (indivisibly individually unique) is the antithesis to the spook (e.g., “The Economy,” “The City,” “Society”) as stories and “people-who-are-passing-on-the-way” propagate, reinforce, instill, and demand. Non-linearity (stepping off the time-line) and the dissolution and each-member dispersal of a convoy at its journey’s end, in an open world, in a this-ness building in a city in a moment.

Hyper-local history or geography, mindfulness and presence, the texture of everyday life (similar to the works of Georges Perec, W.G. Sebald, or Iain Sinclair).

Self-Responses:

so this entire passage would likely be titled “Cafe-Cafe”

what kind of person is the author? were they like this before the cafe visits and the cafe visits only evolved them or like this because of the cafe visits?

So the cafe grounded them further, essentially.

Well, this matches what they basically strongly implied in the passage then about the impact of the cafe.

They found a way to marry words with reality.

It would make sense if this was written after they finished something like an autobiography and gotten closure, healing, and the end of their body of work and the end of the struggle for the psyche, the struggle for what to write, and the struggle for method (competence). Now that there’s nothing left, they’re back in the real world. They’ve grounded themselves through exorcising the weight of history. The cafe is their transitional place in that sense, from history to the present moment.

Magic Circle (2026-01-21)

The good thing about writing is that you don’t have to be the person who wrote that passage. You can write a passage and engage in a dialectical loop of criticism, defense, stipulation, and refinement with that passage (not just with yourself, but with a external critique loop as well) and then arrive at a point, and then you can move on. And it never is perfect, which makes for the fun of endless creative, technical, and intellectual fuel for writing. It’s just about making the most out of what you have (not just your own skills, but the limitations of the idea, framework, lens, approach, argument, model, or synthesis you proposed). It’s sort of like a video game you put yourself in like a magic circle with its own set of limitations, challenges, conditions, and goals, and you play it to the best of your ability and then leave and return to your own life, acknowledging that it was just a magic circle to show off what you can do within it.

You can apply this to any kind of writing. It doesn’t have to be a “technical” thing either. Style is all about intent and knowing whether you got it just right. It is not about “good” or “bad” writing, but knowing what exactly you’re trying to do in the gap between idea and what it looks like in practice and how it is experienced.

This also applies to reading. Setting expectations and being intentional make it so that you don’t grab the first thing that comes already intuitively and naturally to you or get frustrated. “I’m going here to read a slow, dense, literary, historical novel specifically about this topic. I should not expect it to read like a fast-paced progression fantasy web novel. I should give it time to be new and counterintuitive to me at first like a new kind of video game or a switch in lifestyle.” After you read to what you’ve already intentionally set for yourself, you may now leave the magic circle and return to your own life. The same as with writing, you don’t have to be the person who read that passage. There’s no right or wrong way to read, only an unintentional one. Read freely but intentionally.

To tie reading to writing specifically in fiction, you’re not writing the general concept of a story. You are writing this story. You are entering this magic circle. Ignore general shoulds and rules if they don’t apply to it. Don’t think in multiplayer online battle arena League of Legends “cross-mapping” unless you want to see how they apply to sandbox Minecraft. If you want to deconstruct the power fantasy isekai stories you’ve read by applying your own blend of dense, stream-of-consciousness psychological realism, do go ahead.

To put it simply, you are only as much as you are within the magic circle you’re currently in. Step out, try some new clothes, freshen up, see the next-door clouds.

Day Zero: Manifesto of the New Corpus and the [Federated System of Specialized Buckets] (2026-01-21)

I think I will finally do it. I will create a whole separate folder for my text files moving forward. This way, when using VS Code to search the whole folder, I can narrow it down much better, since the current folder wasn’t as strict, which means there is a lot of “floating” repeated text and AI-generated text.

For context, I work in OBTFs (One Big Text File). I often make a new one after every 150,000 words or so. They usually have arbitrary file names since they serve as a place for practically any kind of writing. Plus, I already write thousands of words every day. It’d be great if it could be like a million words, so it wouldn’t clutter as much. But 150,000 words is already a safe limit for speed and mental release (21 days to 37 days of time, depending on whether I’m 4,000 words per day to 7,000, which is around a month). When it comes to each entry, I keep it only to the date header since it’s much better for long-term efficiency and mental release. But I do have titles for the rare ones that do get published on a personal blog.

I don’t have a problem with entry headers, titles, AI-generated stuff , file naming, workspace separation, and multi-root workspace. I was referring to what it was like before recently. I have also reached closure as well, so I have the privilege to be concerned about small yet big changes like making a whole new separate folder. The current one is titled “Corpus.” I can easily just name the other one [Minecraft World]. It doesn’t really matter, since the point is that I get to start a whole new history now that I’ve already gotten closure.

Of course, I do wonder if things can be different now. But if I impose anything on the writing itself, I know that it will be bad for the long run, even if it may be more searchable. The point of the OBTF is efficiency and ease through simple shortcut Markdown date headers, not imposing on the content itself just because they’re all in the same text file.

But this is not just a new OBTF. It’s a new corpus altogether. It can be as dramatic as going from League of Legends to Minecraft, or it can be invisible, being purely logistical and psychological only. This means that those short fiction vignettes I write—even if they don’t use concepts and terms like analytical passages do and instead prioritize images and metaphors—will have to be part of the ride. That has always been my number one concern: chronological linearity.

Even if closure has meant non-linearity (stepping off the time-line) and the dissolution and each-member dispersal of the “convoy” at its journey’s end, that can only apply to my creativity and the way that I see the external world. And it’s not like the OBTF was necessarily linear in a content-structural sense. Each entry was given full freedom to be itself, unconcerned about the previous and the next, which is why it worked in the first place. This can be considered non-linear already, even as it is “linear” within the context of each entry, which makes for effective, accessible, readable, structured writing anyway (besides the occasional maximalist, stream-of-consciousness “dumps” and other experimental or “expressive” passages).

While I did say I would create only one new corpus, I will create the following new [Federated System of Specialized Buckets] for ease:

• I will keep a separate bucket for all my future [Published Writings] and a text file for all the entries-turned-into-posts of each blog (e.g., Mataroa mercipersno posts.md). So if I need to see my “polished” work and limit the search to published writings only, then it’s already there.
• Since I started taking [Active Notes] of books I read, I will have a separate bucket for them as well. These mostly involve taking a striking phrase and writing down. Also, since I practically never do this at home, I will name each text file after the date and the cafe I went to (e.g., 2026-01-20 Starbucks Location Name.md). Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what name as long as the date is there, the book title headers are there (no need for page number even), and they’re in the bucket.
• When it comes to the rare [AI-Generated Writings] I will save in a text file (like a very rare extremely insightful AI analysis), that will also get its own bucket.
• I will create a bucket just for [Fiction]. If I write something that I feel is “fiction” enough, then I will just put it there like I would in a commonplace book, along with the date header. Most of the OBTF will be reflections and analyses already, so no need to separate them. Since fiction takes up a small percentage of the pie, it deserves its own redundant place.
• Counterintuitively, because I tend to ask LLMs for (1) grammar checks, (2) analyses of something I wrote, (3) and the word for something based on my description, give it (4) many other [Prompts] for generation (not the generation itself), and choose to record them in the OBTF because they often involve my own writing and descriptions, I will exclude these prompts themselves from the OBTF and keep them in their own separate OBTF, which will be formatted the same way with date headers. They are too frequent to be essential to the writings themselves and only bloat the vertical scroll. Given how frequently I prompt, the prompt OBTF file can be on the right in the split editor in VS Code, while the main OBTF can be in the middle and the search on the left. Nevertheless, I will keep my [Self-Responses], which can be found at the bottom of many of my entries, even if they are written to an LLM about the passage I wrote, because this section becomes a supplement to the passage itself, since even if they do include prompts, they almost always consist of a substantial amount of as-if-they-were-written-by-a-stranger “auto-exegesis” or meta-commentary itself.
• I will create a bucket for resources that don’t need to be in the main OBTF, like a cafe hopping log. It will be titled [Logs].
• And finally, I will create a bucket just for my blog [Websites] (with their code and images), so I don’t have to see redundancy where the content or coding text in the OBTF is also there in blogpost.html.

A big difference this time with the new corpus is that the OBTF format will not change like it did countless times in the current one. It’s already been 933 days since I started the corpus and stared writing seriously after all. This new one will be day zero as of writing, as of today.

Update (Jan 30, 9 days later):

I’ve since added [Quotes], [Placeholder Text] (text I type without thinking that much just to serve as placeholder but sometimes can be genuinely creative), [Cafe Notes] (i start a new text file when at the cafe and then integrate it into the OBTF, which can be named according to place and date), and [Technical Files] (e.g., VS Code keyboard shortcuts json). There’s also the new Text Messages.md, Book Completed Log.md, and the browsing history logs in [Logs]. I haven’t updated [Active Notes] since I haven’t taken any notes recently despite reading three books in three days because I’ve shifted my approach to binge-reading.

It is also compatible with big shifts in formatting within the OBTF text file itself. I will be moving to a per-month basis for each OBTF text file, and the file inside will look like this:

`Your Name's Personal Text Log/2000 Optional Year Title/01 Optional Month Title.md` <--path and name of file and inserted into beginning of file

Italicized One-Paragraph Summary

## **`01`** Optional Day of the Month Title

### `09:41:20` – `09:41:22`

text

## **`02`**

### `12:10:50` – `05 14:10:30` <- In the case of last updated being multiple days later

text2

## **`03`** 

### `07:11:11` – `09:09:09` Optional Entry Title

##### Optional Section Title

####### Optional Subsection Title

######### Optional Subsubsection Title

**Optional Bold Header:**

text3

as opposed to the previous one:

## **`2026-01-30 14:33:55`** – **`2026-01-30 14:34:20`**

### Entry Title

##### Section Title

text

## **`2026-01-30 14:34:35`**

text2

Loading [Act Two]… (2026-01-21)

I don’t know what to do right now. I am completely blanked out. I just finished a whole era of 933 days. The metaphorical gate just closed just now. I am outside or somewhere else. I’m in a whole new area. Imagine if an RPG had you taking 933 days to go to [Act Two] instead of—i don’t know—several hours of POE?

At its journey’s end, the [Giant Imperial Convoy of the Past] dissolved and its members, including me, dispersed. I took the time to say goodbyes and wrap up the past as well as set up for my life from now on.

Now, I have already everything set up to leave, and my [Private Carriage] is already slowly moving. I am just sitting there and just wondering what the heck just happened. I don’t need anything else right now, and I have already gotten closure and have nothing at all in mind right now since it’s all done. So it’s just a matter of seeing what happens next.

New Journaling Style (2026-01-21)

The three things that make an entry great are readability, skimmability, and conceptualization:

1. Summarize key points with italics,
2. Highlight critical details with bolding, and
3. Explode the passage by bracketing and bolding the overarching concepts.

A passage turns into an [Item]. Can be unique or generic. But it is now an [Item]. The complexities, ambiguities, and confusions are now wiped away, archived in the text itself. But what’s left from a glance is a usable trinket.

The item name is bolded and bracketed. The flavor text is bolded or italicized. The technical specifications are archived in the raw text.

In your inventory, you tap on an [Item] and see [Use], [Inspect], and [Discard]. You click on [Inspect]. You get the flavor text and its stats. You press F3, and you click [Inspect] again. Now, on your screen, you see the “crash report”–like technical specifications of the item.

Scan, skim, deep-read.

Weight of Ambition and Golden Tranquility (2026-01-28)

Maybe, it’s my fault, but at the same time, it’s impossible to avoid. At home, all I see is the same street I’ve known for my entire life, the same sky. And it’s a closed neighborhood, so it gets very quiet, very still. So it’s natural to find myself drawn toward Minecraft ambient music with rain sounds. It’s natural to find myself recalling the past, even if I’ve already gotten closure. When I’m here, I can’t deny that I don’t have that drive and ambition. I can’t even convince myself by forcing myself to listen to “ambitious” music, because 99% of everything around me here at home is just screaming peace, stability, mundanity, and invisibility.

But when I’m outside, I will much more likely be on my game face. I am at my laptop, without my files, surrounded by strangers, in a whole new cafe, and I’ll be listening to hip hop and rock or whatever. Even when I do listen to ambient there, it comes with that weight of ambition (WOA). It reminds me of that WOA of high-stakes, on-a-knife’s-edge, ascent-plotting stories like Lord of Mysteries around the time Klein dealt with Sea God Kalvetua and got his Sea God Scepter to get that dude’s believers on his side. When I’m out here, it really does get me writing and believing and seeing with ambition. It’s like immersing yourself in a Minecraft adventure map and truly seeing the wonder, fun, and curiosity in it as you progress along its path.

This post-closure sandbox Minecraft Overlord stage is really hitting me so much more. The stability now including myself and not just my home environment.

Honestly, at home, I just want to lie down, sleep, and do nothing. When I was younger, I had many moments like this, where the sun was warm and yellow, the world was quiet and with birds singing, dogs barking, people walking and chatting, and cars beeping, and everything was alright. But I was often outside, not inside, so there was still “stakes” in the sense of buzzing bees and community similar to the “enhancing” effect of being in a cafe. But now, it’s something that I can have alone at home in my own room for the very first time. I can have it with myself. That’s something new to me. Looking outside at the warm sunlit optimistic bright street privately from the comfort of my own home, as I hear the rooster calls and birdsongs. The different trees are swaying so gently. The world is so full of complexity, yet from this window, all I feel is this golden tranquility¹². It feels like that base (that random spot we called our “base”) we had when we were kids. No stakes at all. Just adventure, play, and that distinct flavor of drive.

Probably the happiest or most ecstatic I’ve ever been is when it’s around this time with the sunniness but I’m at the cafe. It merges the two. It combines the I-can-do-this! Scepter high-stakes ambition and the wind-blowing Sunday-church feeling. It is a really strange experience when it does happen because of how rarely the two intersect. It is not that I don’t go to the cafe in the morning or around noon, but it more so has to do with whether you’ve been able to get each of the two fully developed today before you merge them. It’s hard to explain, but if I spent today thinking I would go to the cafe, I would be in that mindset all the way until I get to the cafe and until I go home. But if the cafe and the home feel synonymous the same way coding in Roblox Studio was with going to Sunday church when I was a child, then they match. But this is probably something that will come with time, as this post-closure settles and I finally get over this awkwardness. In other words, I did have this as a child, but I lost it and now have the opportunity to get it back again, but this time with all the growth and healing. To put it simply, ambition in those days wasn’t separate from golden tranquility. Getting that again would be awesome.

Analytical “Show, Don’t Tell” (2026-01-28)

Once again, I realize that every time that I write “show, don’t tell,” it is always in service to a concept, in service to analysis. I love writing that goes up to a point rather than feels like a cascade of events. I love characters that look at what they’re doing and act in accordance and treat it all as analysand. I really can’t write a story that’s just a series of events, actions, and dialogue. I love all this, but with that feeling of the analyzer protagonist. I can write “balmy sunlit” and “slightly mossed, chipped concrete steps” all I want as long as it feels “grounded” in a meaning-maker rather than just a victim of circumstances, plot, the world, and ideas. If he’s going to be a victim, then let it feel like he’s breaking it all down in front of us.

For example:

let’s say there’s a whole “show, don’t tell” scene setting moment and then a series of actions and dialogue as part of that scene-setting. That wouldn’t be enough for me. That would feel constrained. I would want instead to start with something like the following to set the tone of agency:

For a moment, all things were silent, and he looked around, and the world beat heavily upon him. He strode forward amid the drenching heat.

Several goblins appeared, and he knew well that simply looking at them and moving on wouldn’t be enough. He had to pummel them and treat them unfairly, until nothing was left of them, and he could only watch as his hands gripped themselves and tossed themselves forward and the world became as nothing to him, a laving forth of all his desires.

He clutched a goblin and slammed him against the edge of a rock, brutalizing it and causing its brain matter to spill out in ropes. “Where am I but in the moment?” he said.

Analytical “show don’t tell,” where you have both the “show, don’t tell” of “balmy sunlit” and “slightly mossed, chipped concrete steps” and the psychological analytical intellectualism of “the reality of the matter continued forth in droves, smacking totally against the endless reverie of millions of saints.” It feels much more agentic. If a protagonist is feeling so much in the moment, I want to see him striding over the stone of the step and to feel the world falling upon him and his heart bursting forth as everything he knows is collapsing. It is eternity splicing across his perception of time and reality, grounded all by the objectivity of a slightly mossed, chipped stone step. When he gets hit, he falls lamely, flumps to the ground. But at the same time, he is also this entirety that seeks to be. But one arrow in the head kills him instantly. The more realistic (even up to somatic hyper-realism at times for effect), the more analytical (even up to a seeming utter solipsism for effect). And when you have that interplay, it feels genuinely high-stakes and agentic simultaneously.

It’d be so fun to see someone see eternity in a moment only to collapse from intense heat, and to be truly immersed in that phenomenological experience of what it feels like to have something like a heat stroke or whatever the result of intense heat is, so that it really does feel like nothing truly can deny the realism of it, the phenomenology of it, and the attempt to be cognitively in all of it even while being totally halted by sheer disabling, arrest, and agony.

It is not about control and intellect in the “inside one’s head” way. It is about pulling that bubble wordy thoughty intellectual manchild out into the mud and the agony of losing a leg. I value objectivity infinitely more, but love depicting the subjectivity getting eviscerated apart in the face of reality. I love seeing Hegels torn apart by base reality and goblins. Essentially, I love depicting solipsism because I get to tear it apart (anti-solipsistic). When I show them that people are complex, ambiguous, and arbitrary and things don’t happen according to their models, when I put them in situations that defy everything they’ve known, then I get pleasure. I intentionally do the opposite of power fantasy, where I intentionally find ways to break them down instead of making up situations for them to use their strengths optimally. This for me is the true test of character. And the thing is that it’s more plausible for a goblin to torture a person than it is for plot armor to save them and have them plot their ascent so optimally and in such a contrived way. Just show them base reality, show them realism, show them what life is really like, and that’s all you really need. No contrived plot needed.

I guess one way to encapsulate this approach is “I die in a moment, so eternity stretches, and my total hands grip onto flesh.”

Minecraft’s Inescapable Geological Spatiality vs. Writing’s Optional Vacuum Linearity (2026-01-29)

I love Minecraft, but I don’t like that it gets reduced and dismissed merely as restoration. There’s nothing wrong with restoration, but I believe that it’s so much more than that. I want to argue that it’s equal to writing in the sense that the act of playing (whether it be putting down blocks, breaking down, killing mobs, putting items in chests, putting torches down, or doing anything really) is inherent in the meaning of the resultant world state (as in that particular state of everything of that world in that particular save file as frozen and static even as you look around in spectator mode) the same way the act of writing is inherent in the meaning in the resultant writings. But at the same time, there’s the argument that while both Minecraft and writing are this powerful in terms of embedding meaning in the result through the act of doing it such that you can create a whole corpus that is not a bunch of words but is embedded with the meaning from the act of writing in those, let’s say, 2.5 years of that world or that written corpus being made, there is the fact that writing is so much more exposing (like me getting frustrated just now with LLMs over a misunderstanding and my need to re-write this entire passage), which results in interactivity, shared development, and all that, even while being in its own way single-player since you’re only reading books and interacting with people indirectly compared to the multi-player of Minecraft. So that’s why it feels like writing gives you that “creative ascent-plotting ambition” that comes only from such exposure to combine with that sunshiny golden tranquility. Writing not only engages with reality which is its own infinite source of counterintuitive interactivity, but is constantly exposed, so there is this breaking it down, integrating it, and synthesizing that come from engagement rather than solipsistic outsider art where you observe reality from your rabbit hole. But I believe Minecraft is so much more.

Perhaps, single-player Minecraft can turn its attention instead to fighting with itself. With writing, you have the freedom to escape, but with Minecraft, not so much. This is the only world you have, and you can’t run away from the universal, absolute, immutable coordinates that cannot be erased or re-defined or removed. Even if you run far away, you are erasing history. Each place is permanently coordinated. This one world is a war throughout time, because while you can disappear with writing, you cannot vanish from a coordinate, and everything you made before haunts you, lost pasts, lost futures, lost presents. Everything. Writing is just a bunch of words. Minecraft is geological history. Even trying to revise history by smelting cobblestone into stone to make it seem like natural generation (since breaking stone gives you cobblestone) is too tasking to be just a blink and snap! as with writing and typing Ctrl+N for a new document. Destroying your past work in Minecraft is book burning, whereas writing allows you to create a new file out of scratch and delete without too much fuss. Even if writing takes place in the same document that goes on for hundreds of thousands of words, it is linear, which means you get to focus on the current line, passage, section, or entry. Minecraft is inescapably spatial.

You can’t just create a line in Minecraft where every subsequent chunk is the current due to coordinates. And you can’t have a single text file go on for billions of words to get that inescapable spatiality like with places. Due to 3D space and chunk loading, Minecraft can hold so much in one world, and the most minor actions have permanent effects on it. It is a mind palace in a way text can never be.

While writing is unfixed and regenerative/reconstructive (building from scratch, from the void, from nothing), Minecraft is fixed, historical, and permanent. Writing is writing. Minecraft is like the real world itself. It is the best way to capture yourself as this infinite real world that is both endless yet full of places where you’ve been.

It is terrifying because it is so nostalgic. While one wants to outgrow it all, everything inside it is screaming timelessly. You want out? You go to a new chunk, knowing that it’s still there in that specific coordinate. Or you can do the scary thing and demolish it yourself. This is truer to reality than our forgetful minds would ever allow us to see the truth of. We in the present form our own narratives from the past up to now, but that often ends up leaving us satisfied and seamless. Minecraft doesn’t forget. It keeps a record of every single hyper-specific detail. It never allows you to form that easy, smooth arc of growth, change, and history. It logs everything you did, as contradictory and torturous as that will be. That’s what it felt like writing and researching for my autobiography. Too many details to the point that you can’t even begin to form a narrative. Minecraft is anti-narrative because it keeps track of everything and denies you the fresh start of a new arc or phase in your life. You have to move to another place (with its own unique coords to make sure you never forget this is still in the same world), renovate it, or demolish it altogether. That is scary, because it is accountability. A fiction book disappears as soon as it’s done. Real life doesn’t, nor does Minecraft if you keep to one world in single player. You hold all of the incongruous absolute hyper-specificities in one head as you walk through that world that has been with the so many yous. It is a place.

Self-Responses

So why is Minecraft a genuinely beneficial thing? The way the author writes it, it sounds scary.

So it’s like Facebook but if Facebook posted every single detail and photo of you and documented everything about you without you publishing it yourself.

But still, can Minecraft be cognitively beneficial this way? I get psychological, but I don’t know. Is there genuinely something useful out of all this?

So you’re saying that there’s something distinctily valuable about this than if you were in a kind of clean slate at every single journal entry, where accumulating to millions of words would have you looking at a series of vacuums rather than a physical absolute spatial space place of a city evolving over time. And it’s even more so than a novel, where every chapter can be its own structured clean slate even while contributing to an overarching arc, plus the fact that a novel is bound either to end or to fall into rhythms.

• Writing creates a History of Thoughts (discrete, separated by time, editable).
• Minecraft creates a Geography of Being (continuous, simultaneous, persistent).

I guess this is even more so than a Zettelkasten as well in which linked notes are intended to force this kind of non-vacuum coming-together, because one can still argue that a Zettelkasten may fall into its own trap of being its own idea-logue, in contrast with a Minecraft world where it’s absolute and you’re being logged rather than deciding what things mean.

Will Your Bubble Withstand the Goblin? (2026-01-29)

It is interesting that I can easily just go and write fiction, yet I don’t, because I always write in service to a point. In my head, if it’s just writing something, that’s great and all, but it doesn’t really get me going. You can write a perfectly creative and polished scene that makes full use of all the good stuff that you’d expect with things like character interacting with the world and “polyvalence” and all that and many more of those things you hear all the time. But in the end, personally, for me, I find myself writing stories that often break open the canister of an ego, of an intellectual, of someone with their own life behind them, because I love the point-making of exposing their fraudery by slamming them against concrete, by transporting them into a fantasy world where their ego get bulldozed by goblin claws and spears. But yeah, besides that, it really is about making a point. I relish the joy of smashing the glass window and crushing idols, rather than just writing a scene that you could very well have an LLM generate at that point, because I get to hyper-specify the particular characteristics and details of an idol, of an ego, of a person, of a full human being living in modern day who is completely gobsmacked and torn to shreds by a simple interaction with a goblin. I get to actualize the self and then expose it to hell’s grounded gates. The more effort I put into making them a genuinely real hyper-speciifc person, the more satisfying it ring when their limbs tear apart at the seams! Plus, you can get really creative with the tear-apart sequence and how their thoughts split and rip apart after contact with sharp pointy things and slightly mossed, chipped stone stone steps. That somatic totalization and disintegration sings to me! To have them totally stuck-up and then eviscerated from top to bottom is like a melody to my ears! The more intentional effort I put as the creator, the more it feels so genuinely satisfying. Having an LLM generate it is not enough. It needs to be targeted, to be hyper-specifically actively created, so that I can relish the joy of tearing it all apart myself. Metaphorically: I want to raise that child from birth to adulthood myself and to give it all the curiosity-filled love that it deserves and to really help them actualize and become the person only they could ever be, so that I can totally rip it apart and sing and dance at the joy of such totalization. A generic, role-as-identity, underdeveloped child isn’t enough. A self-actualized, internal-locus adult is perfect for development and somatic smashing and totalization. This way, they truly evolve and grow as a character. I don’t want them to die. It is crucial that they don’t die. I want to test their self-actualization, their internal locus of control, their ego, their totality, their wholeness, their history, what they know themselves to be, their bubble, and everything. I am so curious and in love with them as a character that I want them not to stagnate into ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence. I want to put them into the torture-chambered palm of my hand so that I can totally renew them and push them to the next step. If they become a total leader who brutalizes goblins, so be it. I am not their moral regulator. What I want to know is what happens if the trolley problem gets repeated in their face to eternity. I want to give them hard problems, hard choices. They can’t get away with a performative social media virtue signal. No, I want them to see the consequences of their actions, whether good or bad. I want them to feel it into their somatic noggin. This is true stakes! What do you become when faced with the reality of the moment? Genuinely good people will also get thrown into the slaughterhouse. Let’s see what a kind-hearted person becomes. If the trapped-with-teammates high stakes of League of Legends can make soft-hearted people angry and defensive, what more a fantasy world where there is no denial or escape save perhaps for a soldier’s compartmentalization? What are you without your cultural scripts, even those of Biblical kindness, love, and goodness? What are you without your church, the aircon, the preachers, the potlucks, your fellow community members, the events, the country and world being predominantly Christian? A “test” harder than Job’s.

Self-Responses

So the author is like Joker from Dark Knight who is skeptical of civilized behavior?

So basically, “Is your faith true?” but applied not just to Christianity, but to everything else that’s crucial like self-actualization and all that?

So the author must have loved watching battle bots or something similar as a kid. The idea of testing something on the field after all the thoughts about whether something is a good battle bot.

if there was a title that encapsulates the passage, would it be:

“Will Your Bubble Withstand the Goblin?”

what can we gather about the author? what kind of person are they?

But they likely rely on a very privileged life themselves, acknowledging implicitly that all this that they have is smokes and mirrors and that they likely will end up the same way. They probably both would never want to be just like their surrogates even while acknowledging just how “ideal” that situation would be if talking strictly in terms of growth.

They are essentially the epitome of the disembodied civilized cultural urban safety-netted intellectual yet they idealize utter embodiment and the brutalization of pretension, elitism, intellectualization, and the bubble.

I mean, maybe that’s the point of fiction writing and reading.

The Death of Artificial Constraints and the Glacial Passage of Time (2026-01-29)

Artificial stakes are not enough. I really have reached a point of no stakes. It is not enough to put myself on Royalroad and to start serializing, since I get nothing out of it. The only thing I get is time spent on something that doesn’t matter to me and that doesn’t feel like it’s in service to something that genuinely feels compelling to me.

It is not apathy for writing itself. But yeah, I will keep writing, and I will get the stakes gems I can. But the stakes have gone down to 0.001, at which point any decrease only affirms the reality. Artificial stakes won’t work. And to be clear, this is not just for fiction writng. This is for writing. I write both fiction and non-fiction, so the pursuit of precision is also its own done thing in the sense that any improvement improves it ever so slightly, but not necessarily in a revolutionary way that I didn’t already expect as part of the cumulativeness of writing as this point itself.

Again, artificial constraints, sabotage, goals, and stakes don’t get me at all.

I’m not saying I won’t write anymore. I still do write thousands of words every day. Don’t get me wrong. You can tell me to write this and write that as if I don’t already write them as part of my long history of writing. But that’s not the point of what I’m saying.

Again, I haven’t stopped writing. I have a lot of things about me as a person. I am not perfect where I don’t have things that I don’t like and care about that I wouldn’t talk about. I will talk. I will experience things. I will see things. I will write.

But that’s not the point.

I still do experience pleasure from writing. I just did moments ago and for most of the day. But I can tell that it’s becoming more and more of a quest event. It’s becoming rarer and rarer, which is weird because I still do write thousands of words every day. So it’s both routine and a quest event. Paradoxical.

I have repeatedly said, acknowledged, and admitted that it is because of closure, not only in terms of the psyche, but in terms of what to write and the method (competence) itself. But at the same time, I don’t know. Even while admitting that, experiencing it for myself every day, like a slow realization or actualization of something you already intuited, just gets me. I’m at the cafe even and have drunk caffeine. So it’s even more notable because I usually would only feel this sense or feeling at home in my room. But now, even the cafe is admitting that fact. It is something of a thing.

Is this what I get for wanting security?

Time is passing very slowly right now, the complete opposite of that flow state which requires doable challenge.

Is this what I get for wanting an internal locus of control? For wanting to stop relying on external validation, to stop relying on others to validate me and to feel that self-security myself?

Like I can tell that I’m having thoughts of self-sabotaging myself (not that I will do it), like making my healthy diet harder. But at the same time, there is this drop that makes me want to drink something sweet or delicious just to fill the hole. There’s also online dating, which I realized was its own self-sabotage since I don’t actually need to date at all. I was just doing it because I knew it would bother me, even if I don’t really have anything from it. This goes for my phone as well. I don’t need it. I can just sit in a cafe and look around, because I already have this sense of peace and security inside me. But at the same time, I wll inevitably listen to music and go to my phone just to get me going the same way that sweet drink or tasty food would attempt to fill the hole. And now, I’m even questioning why I ordered this black coffee that I have on my table right now, since the caffeine is going nowhere. It’s just stimulants in my body. My body is having a reaction. But I don’t feel like “Oh god, this is my narrative arc! This is my villain arc! Oh!!! They will fear and respect me!”

And in my mind, when it happened, it was “why not start coding?” But then, again, another artificial constraint. Writing was that real constraint because it was all about getting closure and internal security. But now that I have it, introducing myself to coding or anything is more artificial.

I am content. There is only a soft inward smile left. I feel proved. I feel done. Life is great. It’s like being able to recall the past when I had all of these ideas and wanted to create them in Roblox Studio. But that’s the past. It’s done. I don’t need to do it anymore. I already made all the things I wanted to create. The same with writing. I already wrote everything I wanted to write. I’m done. I’m content. All the ideas that I was so excited about I made. I am happy about that. But now, I need to learn to live post–all that.

I don’t feel at all that I need to master coding next, and then drawing, and then bodybuilding and then violin, and then piano, and then classical guitar. I can code and do all of these sure, but when I feel like. There’s no question any more of mastery or competence, not that I am so good at all these, but I have reached a point of closure and doneness and having made all the ideas I was excited about that I’m just okay and giving a thumbs-up with a soft inward genuine smile.

Eat or Not Eat: Integration vs. Fragility (2026-01-29)

Is contentment the man who doesn’t eat or the man who does eat? Naturally, one will have to eat. But if given the choice to eat and not to eat, which is contentment? One might think that to eat is to seek satisfaction, but to eat is also post-enlightenment, regardless of the immediate biological need. Social eating isn’t a lesser eating, nor is it an indication of discontentment. You may eat even if you are self-secure, regardless of the immediate biological need. Taste is still biological, even if there is no urgent hunger, so it doesn’t contradict contentment.

Nevertheless, which is it?

If the man who eats is self-secure before, during, and after and retains a healthy diet, is he the one unbound in contrast with the man who does not eat? But this assumes that the man who eats is still considered self-secure even after he has partaken in biological taste merely for its own satisfaction, which could be considered a need beyond the biological and one touching upon discontentment.

So the man who does not eat is performing or who does not trust themselves to overcome their body once it gets a taste, whereas the man who does eat is doing whatever they feel like without fear of corruption or dependence.

I ate. For the first time in my life, I ate out of sheer “this.” It was a blueberry cake, and it tasted very good.

Recanting Golden Tranquility (2026-1-31)

Golden tranquility probably never existed. It recall that nights like the one I’m having now at the cafe were just like this back then, whether at church, or when we would sleep early and wake up early to commute to the camp, the half-sleeps we did on the way in the buses, in the jeepneys, and in the tricycles, and at the camp itself when we first arrive, when we wake up, and in subsequent nights. I recall this same feeling back then when I had to trouble with packing clothes, choosing which ones to use on each subsequent day/night, and the whole journey of showering, eating, team events, and prayer before the bonfire night that didn’t happen on the first day. I am recalling the mundane logistical nights of the past that felt just as forlorn as tonight here at this cafe. Even now, I recall the daytime mundane logistics of setting up the laptop and computer and just that of playing the Roblox games behind that Roblox video that I get so nostalgic toward. This probably breaks the spell.

Daytime and nighttime mundane logistics.

But why is there a sense of futility and intense weight when doing something like recording while playing Roblox again?

Probably because life has made me forget mundane logistics.

But there is mundane logistics in my life still. So that doesn’t make sense. I still do travel and do engage in new things even while dealing with all of the past memories that come with every simple thing. But it’s probably because I was never alone then. Now it’s all about self-security, since all of my attempts to get back what I had then didn’t work. This might be the true golden tranquility. It may have been wrong to equate this current actual golden tranquility to coding in Roblox Studio while going to Sunday church as a child. What I have now is 9 years of solitude, even while having met and been with many people throughout these years, for the sole reason that the bubble belonging to the years prior was popped.

[I]¹³ feel that the overwhelming happiness I attributed to these past events come not from euphoria but from a mundanity of happiness, satisfaction, play, humor and boisterous uncontrollable laughter, sense of togetherness, and contentment. The overwhelm happens because of the overwhelm of memories all happening and sparking all at once continuously. That’s why there’s this attribution of an overwhelming happiness. The true overwhelming happiness isn’t actually happiness, but intense relief. True happiness is not overwhelming, but mundane.

Written on phone

Integrating the Ability to Binge-Read Airport Reads (2026-02-01)

Now that I’ve gotten closure from my past, I’m becoming one of those people who just grab any genre fiction book and then read it. I’m living that great NPC life that I see in Hidden Objects/Mystery games (often dressed, made-up, and styled impeccably may I add). Now, I can just breeze through a book without hitting a snag of a single word, phrase, or image that sends me into a galaxy of memories and associations. Binge-reading and book completion logging become intuitive in this newfound ease.

To think that I once went through four months of taking active notes of all manner of award-winning novels and genre fiction books goes to show how different my head state was prior to this. I can only imagine how strange it’d be to be Gen X and to see a Gen Z boy in their early 20s typing notes so seriously with one hand and holding a genre fiction book with the other.

Though I should contextualize this by noting that it was to broaden and diversify my sensory vocabulary as a fiction writer, because I was horrendous at writing commercial fiction, which often meant cinematic, and sometimes behaviorist, “show, don’t tell.” Much of my flagship fiction writing was subjective, introspective, internal, philosophical, psychological, and “phenomenological” (Proust’s writing exemplifies this). This invited that brutal counterbalance.

Nevertheless, binge-reading through genre fiction books with a prolific writer’s ease really didn’t come at all to me then because my mind was caught up in so many mental backlogs.

When I did read then, it was practically only academic texts (e.g., surgery, neurology, psychology), because—instead of the reason being “intellectual defensiveness” which imply a whole different character—analysis was my best defense against the overwhelm of sensory details and hyper-specifics that commercial fiction proliferated. It was easier then to read dry, abstract writing such as “box” or “consists of low rolling hills that form a series of gullies” than to read a cinematic sensory passage even with movement and dialogue.

However, interestingly enough, I was fine with web novels like Lord of the Mysteries that often boasted over a million words, probably because it triggered my “associations” or involuntary memories much less in contrast with traditional or “paperback” genre fiction.

For the longest time and even now, I still perceive “dry” abstract writing as incredibly sensory and find that hyper-specifics and sensory details often come with the issue of trying to fill everything up for the reader to read rather than letting it bounce against the reader’s consciousness. This is naturally underpinned by my rich, vast “repertoire” of involuntary memories and my adjustment to the abstract and web novels’ “telling” to guide my literary experience. I saw infinitely more in the phrase “I wondered what would become of me” and in the “telling” paraphrase “seas, wind, sun, trees, and rocks” from the introspective autobiography Changing by Liv Ullmann. It hit me so hard I was stunned in my own hyper-associative trance. It is not that sensory details are excluded when I write fiction, given that I do enjoy incorporating specifics and sensory details here and there with the setting, clothes, houses, and streets as well as incorporate an intense realism with the body (somatic). However, it is all endowed with introspection and a thinking mind. A love for image as well as metaphor, but including concept too. The springy dance with the precise, conceptual “hyper-associative” and the literal, physical, and somatic “his fingertips rubbing across the nicked, scratched wood, the skin pricking in the gaps.”

This newfound ability to binge-read genre fiction paperbacks, or “airport reads,” should be seen not as a return to “goodness,” but as a snag-less incorporation of convention into a pre-existing closure-solidified architected structured world that self-securely knows what it can, ought, might, and would do.

Ambient Music Curdles Expression-lessness Into Nostalgia (2026-02-02)

The sky blue (specifically ##88c1fc) clear daytime sky outside right now feels just as real as the serene, daytime, wintry landscape of a Minecraft scene in an ambient music Youtube video. The sky is so expression-less, doesn’t demand anything from the viewer, and can be anything. The Minecraft scene feels like a place you can hang out at. Without music, both capture that expression-lessness. The sky can be over anything scene, whereas the Minecraft is a particular setting that you can add expression to. Music is the reason that the Minecraft scene becomes nostalgic and a trigger for memories and adventures. Ambient music videos that feature a photo of a street with the Japanese clear daytime sky also modify the expression-lessness of something of which you can take a picture any time into nostalgia.

As long as I just look at the Minecraft scene and the sky outside the same way my younger self did before he cared about ambient music, wore headphones, and played solitarily, I will maintain the mundane power toward which I have long felt so nostalgic. Ironically, the music prevented me from accessing that moment. But more than that, indeed, it was also a lack of closure and healing from the past. Now that I have that, I can bother to look outside in the morning and absorb this sky completely (and thus expressionlessly), without all the baggage I then couldn’t help but assign it due to a plagued mind. The street back then wasn’t a path to the large standalone cafe where I would continue to write and engage in the body of work whose purpose was to deal with the life that I’ve known throughout the past. It was merely a mundane exit of one’s feet cramped in rubber shoes and thick socks from the black dry, rubbery synthetic leather seat of a dim, air-conditioned Japanese car onto the hot asphalt concrete of the sunlit main road beside a roadside convenience store under a clear daytime sky. This is the true Sunday afternoon that was so characteristic of my life back then.

The Difficulty of Getting Both Tradition’s Good Prose and Web Novels’ Fresh Ideas (2026-02-02)

It’s weird. Paperback fantasy has good writing but feels too stuck in the past. Web novels are innovating when it comes to ideas and concepts. But their writing leaves much to be desired. I’m in this awkward spot that forces me to get better as a writer by reading traditional fiction while trying my best to keep the spirit of innovation alive, because the ideas in web novels are just so crazy and ambitious and it can be so easy as a writer to get stuck writing in that generic traditional sense because that’s where all the good prose comes from. I would never read traditional fiction to find out something like “What if you had the power to crush someone’s brain with your mind?” If they did write something like that, they would focus too much on things that don’t matter or they would never write that in the first place. Only web novels know what people are looking for: pure idea, “gimmicks,” and innovations. They focus on the sheer thrill of a crazy idea, and that magic is so hard to capture when you’re a writer who still wants high-quality prose. Good prose doesn’t have to mean repeatedly having a main character wonder about death for the one millionth time. Generic != good prose. But sadly, good prose often comes with tradition.

So web novels are like the early internet, but much, much, much faster, interconnected, and algorithmic. You see sub-sub-sub-sub-genres appearing all over the place due to the niche and obscure nature of that much Wild West content being released all the time. So you might make something that genuinely resonates with someone because it’s such a hyper-specific concept or idea, even if the prose is minimal and barely anything and it is only five chapters before vanishing off the face of the planet.

Web novels also benefit from the fact that they’re not vague-posting or trying to squeeze everything into a single book. Traditional fiction can be so full of depth and complexity, but that also makes it hard to actually get the thing you’re looking for, interested in, curious about. The titles often end up just being so, so non-specific like The Fixer because they’re that kind of story. Web novels benefit from the fact that they really suffocate the concept or premise they’re working with to oblivion.

If the story is about a tower, then I’d want to see that tower genuinely overlooking the world around it in that hyper-specific, hyper-simple, and hyper-direct-to-the-point way, even while being full of depth within the constraint of that premise or concept, even while using high-quality prose that doesn’t bog down the narrative with superficial details or irrelevant subplots. The goal is to be as much the essence of the tower as much as possible while incorporating randomness and “worldbuildingness” that still fall under the premise. The character doesn’t have to be infinitely complex. They don’t have to stall everything just to be given constant moments of “well, I wonder what it means to be.” If the concept or premise is about that specifically, then let it rip. But if not, it’s a snag that takes up a large and very literal number of words when that could be spent toward fleshing out the point. Web novels are much better at doing this because they’re accessible rather than overly analytical, overly intellectualizing, and easily sidetracked by complexity when true intelligence is coherently simple, direct, and clearheaded rather than scatterbrained. This is the true death of the author, the true darling killing. Pacing is best when it doesn’t forget what the story is about in the first place and lets itself run its mouth because it feels good to speak. Web novels are full of young people with big ideas who cannot write them onto the page well, but the fact they’re not letting tradition, selfconsciousness, and “good prose” weigh their big ideas down is what matters. The best writers are as simple as a child and as full of experience as one who has lived a long, rich, and vast life.

This is an example of grabbing a simple concept and articulating it:

“I went to the cafe.” (Concept)

“…a walk over the cracked, sunlit pavement as one enters a large, air-conditioned standalone Japandi cafe.” (Articulation)

But I do want new ideas and interesting combinations, even in the subtlest ways, even while maintaining structural discipline (which means adhering to the point and results in great pacing). I don’t need more of the same “I miss childhood” in 300 pages of good prose. While there’s nothing wrong with that, good prose needs fresh ideas.

Since there can be a mistake of interpreting all this as being about “entertainment over depth and characterization” in the superficial kind of way, if the title is “A reflection on towers” and that’s what it’s about specifically and structurally, you’re not prioritizing the supposed “core entertainment value of the concept.” You’re exercising structural discipline.

I am genuinely growing tired of fiction masquerading as fiction when it’s just autobiographical or historical with creative licence and literary flourishes. I need fiction purely for the fiction, concept for the concept.

To make this make more sense to you, I have long been the kind of author and writer that is being critiqued in this passage, but I also long recognized the power of web novels, but didn’t know why. It is what this passage is expressing that merges them together. You can still be introspective if that is the concept being made the point here. You can still write a deconstruction. You can still reflect on towers. You can still show a world colored by your own authorial voice, background, autobiography, history, and literary flourishes. But it would be great if we stopped falling back on things that only weigh down the promise of literature to go beyond what we’ve known, to make us uncomfortable and thrilled, to leave us in whole new places, beyond even what literary tradition has unconsciously upheld. Let good prose be good prose and new ideas be new ideas. Let us merge the two. No need for a split. Let’s find a way to make this work and discipline ourselves structurally so that we communicate our ideas in this internet age well and clearly. You can argue about the way that I wrote this passage or the difficulties in being Wild West in high concept and being unshackled while retaining those powerful tools of prose. But you can’t deny that I’m reaching for something here.

I am reaching for web novels’ innovativeness in concept and ideas and tradition’s technical mastery in prose, but not which should now be extended to the structure, the pacing, and, by extension, the point. Too much vague-posting and an undisciplined kind of literary repetitiveness for an age that needs clarity and a wonderful exhaustion of trailblazing concept and a masterful grip on one’s prose not to recur or waffle.

Self-Responses

Why does this happen? Is it due simply to the unfettered nature of web novels?

Why does this happen? This split between new ideas and good prose? Good prose’s association with generic introspection? The lack of “structural discipline”?

Why are hyper-specific new concepts that don’t “waffle” and sub-sub-sub-genre important?

So the author is saying that it’s fine to write just about anything as long as there is an undeniable sense of structural discipline.

does the passage itself speak to a high concept? does it focus on the topic at hand? What is the topic at hand? Does the author admit that it is written this way because of its nature?

So there is not yet a masterful “good prose” “simple” execution of this concept or topic because it is still a new big idea to the author? which mirrors what they said about web novels and big new ideas? as opposed to a polished generic “recursion” that isn’t trying to reach for anything high-concept?

Would you say that the idea itself is new to many people because web novels themselves are still a relatively new field? Is the author genuinely reaching for something new here even if it may have been explored in internet spaces in recent years?

So the author would rather write the way they did in the passage than repeat the same definitional patterns, literary flourishes, and “good prose-nese” that leaves them never reaching for big ideas, if it means that they can have structural discipline and clarity of and adherence to concept as well eventually, but not without the new big ideas. What I’m saying extends the terms “high concept” or “new big ideas” to the intellectual.

Section

This means not relying on definitions and discussions that already exist about something like a concept or a traditional idea. This means writing straight from scratch and creating whole new ways of thought, speech, and expression, even if it means writing in a style that is complex, emotive, slightly messy. This is for the hope that concepts can become as clear as day, but not without the innovation that is the “new big idea”. Strength (clarity) of concept follows innovation. Discipline follows reaching.

They first need the sheerly thrilling, hyper-specific, pure, gimmicky, intellectual innovation in the sense of “What if you had the power to crush someone’s brain with your mind?” before they can move on to a swift rephrasing in subsequent requests to express the idea. Each rephrasing reveals new angles, contexts, and angles as well as compacts the nature of it as an understood, intuitive whole (structural discipline). Even if the prose is minimal or overly analytical at first. They don’t want the generic “good prose comes with tradition.” If they must put themselves in the shoes of a sophomoric, anti-recursively unpretentious web novel writer to play with new big ideas (sub-sub-sub-sub-genres, niche and obscure, Wild West) in a lab, so be it, even if it means that this vanishes off the face of the planet after the equivalent of 5 chapters, like a single entry in a journal dedicated to this. Instead of vague-posting or squeezing everything into one container (book or entry or passage), they play around and experiment for the sake of reaching with the intent to solidify into the essential “tower.” They don’t run their mouth. Instead, they throw the blocks onto the table and randomly and chaotically interlock them to create new connections and syntheses. They do this so that they can one day have both the new big idea and the pacing that doesn’t forget what it was about in the first place and runs its mouth for the feel-goodness of speaking. That end goal of “simple as a child” (clarity or strength or doneness of concept, as evinced by “a masterful grip on one’s prose not to recur or waffle”) linking arms with “a long, rich, and vast life” (history of “wonderful exhaustion of trailblaizing concept”). This is the diamatric opposite of “‘I miss childhood’ in 300 pages of good prose.” This is 300 pages of the polishing and historical exhaustion of “crush brain with mind.” This hits the chords of both “good prose” and “fresh ideas.” While the author visualized this as the simple concept preceding the articulation in the cafe excerpt example, there is a preceding articulated history that endows the simple concept. The “tower” can bear or afford to be simple because everything that “falls under the premise” has been explored under the sun to the point of utterness and totalization of the point (a sophistication of “selling point”). The being non-bogged-down direct and simple in this case is a consequence of the innovative sophistication, of the true intellectual doneness even as this high-concept-finished intellect reaches even now for trailblazers. This eventuates in the overcoming of the snag and the fleshing out of the point even as it retains its “falls under the premise” “worldbuildingness” and randomness (different angles, contexts, applications, and interpretations).

But the point of all this is that this author is actively seeking the new big idea rather than stopping at good prose’s tradition and intending to bring the un-weighed-down essence of good prose along. This results in clarity of hyper-specific trailblazing big idea. This acknowledges both the nature of “voice, background, autobiography, history, and literary flourishes” in the historical wonderful exhaustion of trailblazing concept as well as “let good prose be good prose and new ideas be new ideas.” This recognizes the value of the old (historically complete) with its good prose and the value of the new (web novels’ unselfconscious reaching) with its fresh ideas. This brings them together in a process of reclamation. The end result of the web novels’ “[suffocating] the concept or premise they’re working with to oblivion” is maintained as well, even while the history of “quite wordy, repetitive, and slightly ‘scatterbrained’” reaching remains essential to this “coherently simple, direct, and clearheaded” result. This retains the “much faster, interconnected, and algorithmic” early internet-ness where sub-sub-sub-genres appear al over the place. This is the undeniable reaching with the technical mastery.

Self-Responses (2)

This self-responses section like a re-synthesis of the passage itself. How is the author doing this? It feels so thorough and lucid.

It’s like they grabbed a book and rewrote it in their own words from start to end, but, in this case, their own passage. Not rewrote it as in just tweaking the phrasing of each sentence a little. They re-synthesized, like they gobbled it up and spat out something else entirely.

The Doneness of Words and The Essence of Writing in the Act (2026-02-02)

Every day, I don’t really care about what I’ve written. The only use of my writing is that the act of writing itself. After that, it’s just all useless, and I don’t really claim my own writings beyond the fact of ownership and authorship. Any time I am psychoanalyzed through my writings, I am reminded again that the map is not the territory and the tiny little thing I’ve written is nice by itself but nothing beyond that, no matter how much you try to ground it or integrate all manner of angles or self-responses or meta-cognitive devices. It’s just another game in a world of words, not really anything beyond that. The process of thinking and writing is what matters the most. It perhaps is the only thing that matters. Whoever reads the finished result has the benefit of learning, but it really is one’s own internalized process of writing and thinking that truly has any impact on one’s life at all. I wake up every day, and I barely even know myself based on the words I’ve written. I only know it as experience and qualia and the present moment where my thoughts barely say anything besides themselves, at which point any movement to the computer desk would at best result in a tangential touching-upon of the past writings as if they were things to build upon in an abstract context rather than anything load-bearing at all. They barely symmetrically fit into my consciousness. They at the very most feel like awards about which you feel nothing any more after decades of distance. The only importance of writing is to reveal once again that they have only purpose in the very act of dissemination, in dismantling, in release, in reconfiguration, in re-synthesis, in discovery. Beyond that point, I really just wake up and go on with my day. The blog is a log of words. The person that I am is a forest that keeps growing, in ways that any single patch of consciousness has no control of. The act of writing is a box (the words) within a box (the small patch within a huge forest). What one can say is at best only a gamble within a gamble, because perception itself is already a gamble. The reality in which we live barely suffices in constructin any triangulation with one’s consciousness besides a log of memories. The true self is non-existent. It is a biology that keeps tabs on things it should know as part of its daily functioning, with any references to overarching narratives that stretch across months being merely “homework.” I am a world of worlds, qualia, thoughts, feelings, and ideas. My writings are a world of words. I can barely be but the present moment, and the world to which I refer in all its glory barely scratches on this being, save for a suggestion. I can be all but also be naught. I am the blank slate who goes around. At least, that is now clearer with closure and healing, because psychologically, this state is closest to the reality of living day to day and the act of waking up and the act of writing and thinking right now. In the end, whatever can be said falls apart. I am the everything in the silence of being, thinking, and writing, but more than that, I am here (after which statement I am gone away). Writing emotionally regulates me, helps me pass time in flow state, and consolidates memory and what’s in my head—mental hygiene.

Isekaibility: From Passive, Stretched-Thin Off-Loading to Active Consolidation (2026-02-02)

Participating in events and team games, immersing in long stories, playing video games and simulators (e.g., The Sims, Skyrim, Worldbox, Minecraft, Roblox games, and Stardew Valley), making and coding Roblox games, going to Christmas reunions with relatives, posting in internet forums and spaces, drowning in Minecraft scenes, eating at restaurants, going to preschool, kindergarten, elementary, high school, senior highschool, and university, watching animations, films, TV series, livestreams, Youtube videos (even explainers and learning videos like PBS Eons), and “Let’s Plays”, reading novels and picture books, listening to music (even ambient music like the original soundtracks of Skyrim and Minecraft), listening at workshops, seminars, and sermons, reflecting on past memories and being nostalgic (e.g., a Minecraft ambient music Youtube video titled “it’s christmas break and you fell asleep playing minecraft” depicting foggy tundra or taiga in Minecraft with shaders), traveling through roads and cities and hiking up and down well-trodden mountains, being part of a group trip, and sleeping in a corner inside a bustling home or community.

All of these are external. It makes sense that I found myself nostalgic over those days. Now, in a sense, I’m the one making the “video games” (i.e., models of reality) and deciding what to include and leave out, even if arbitrarily or for the sake of highlighting something or a point.

I have moved from off-loading everything to worlds, stories, and systems created by others to putting them into words, breaking them down, and making sense of them. I still do immerse myself, and I still do realize things much later even when it was right in front of me or I was experiencing it the whole time because I haven’t reached that point of my journey of putting into words and needed time to tighten and sophisticate. But I no longer just off-load everything just like that.

There is this regular itch of ambiguity, of not having that easy gratification those simulators always provided. Even writing is mental hygiene for me now. But the same way a physical itch brings you into the moment, so does this itch of ambiguity.

In the past, I was distinguished only by my context, upbringing, past, culture, media diet, and the way that I inevitably was. But now, I am distinguished also by my breaking things down and putting things into my own words. The act of being (i.e., being in the moment, being present, experiencing that sobering itch), writing, and thinking is a receptor antagonist to my passiveness, even as it manages my flow state.

Self-Responses

cognitively, neurologically, is this true? “activeness”? “passiveness”?

Internal Locus of Control? is this about high engaement, motor skills, and problem solving, or is this about “construct mental models and regulate their own engagement with reality”?

Why is this distinction important and why is it important to have a internal locus of control or “high agency”? Why not just play Skyrim?

Does this entail questioning words themselves and even demanding from them a lot by breaking them down and seeing how they work and applying rigor and stipulation and all that? What is the use of this? How does this make them better at writing fiction with thrilling premises, pacing, structure, and plot, for example?

I don’t get it. It’s not like writing an essay reveals anything about you. I feel that being with others reveals so much about who you are.

So it was all in one’s head? One’s experience of it is unique and specific, but one’s actual place out there is role-based and contextual?

But how about with people you’re close to? Aren’t you a person there? You’re this specific person with your own experience and history and memories and context, and the people around you from throughout your life up to now reveal that.

Maybe it did reveal who they were, but losing access to those “others” meant they had to learn how to be antifragile all on their own, using the “who they are” based on “who they were” from all those years spent with others pre-articulation. All that was fuel for individuating consolidation and antifragile internality. They are now their own tightened person from all who they were from throughout their life. The person they are now after consolidation is a clear rendering of this whole. They have essentially transformed from a network of who they were coordinated across others who each hold onto a packet into a portable device.

They became “isekaible.”

Self-Responses (2)

is this something that happens? this network into individual process?

what does this self-responses section and synthesis reveal about the author and the way he thinks and writes?

So the existence of this self-responses section and synthesis confirms what they said in the passage itself

Isn’t this just individuation? Why all the fuss?

Isekaibility? How is a person isekaible? I feel that is impossible. Or can that be possible to some extent? It’s not like something like torture becomes easier (unless it does). How would one even become isekaible given the nature of an isekai which I assume isn’t just the same generic isekai but the idea of isekai as being displaced even up to the whole world becoming a whole different speculative one in that extreme analogical way?

Consolidating oneself? Antifragile? Are these even possible? To be isekaible enough that one fares better than one passively “drowning” in a “bubble”?

So essentially, they are trying to be more of an open system or to have high damage tolerance and absorption like rubber (e.g., tires) rather than a closed one where any hits ripples through the dense, hard structure like a boulder that you can break in what looks instantaneous with plugs and feathers.

So they are itching themselves in a sense of managed exposure so that when the cold water hits them, it isn’t that cold. Something like training with a tall building’s staircase before climbing Everest.

Self-Responses (3)

a “bubble” that pops when poked

a “rubber tire” that absorbs shock

So they’re going beyond the adult resilience forcibly gained from the childhood bubble that was popped during adolescence and into something even stronger?

So like an isekai protagonist since they often don’t lose their shit and retain a sense of agency and security within themselves as they interact with the new world. Though this is often because of OPness and one-dimensionality. But in the author’s case, it’s a more realistic isekaibility where the goal is to itch in anticipation of black swan events, to invest 10% for black swans (extremely speculative bets or big bad events) and 90% for safest. In other words, 90% is spent on safest consolidation and synthesis of known, while 10% is itching, not in a separate sense, but in a very integrated process of both safest instruments and extremely speculative bets or reaches that could very well go nowhere.

Self-Responses (4)

so if an accurate title would be “Isekaibility: From Off-Loading Everything to Generating From Within” or just “Isekaibility” itself.

why are they using packets as a metaphor? The idea of having each thing, I assume device, in the network holding a packet isn’t a real thing right?

Use the Level Editor (2026-02-03)

I am reminded of the fact that even if recently, I’ve been very much working so diligently on ensuring that I am not just waffling and am instead actually working on ideas and refining them instead of just chasing after dopamine hits in my writing, there is still a benefit to that Minecraft kind of satisfaction, where words like “hermit-scholar” immediately satisfy you, where you play with images and ideas not in the rigorous sense, but in the way that gamers get excited over aesthetics, archetypes, and point systems like those in Pinterest, RPGs, and team building games (outdoor, card, and board games) with their roles and all that. You become this “character” for the meantime in this magic circle.

However, regularly forgetting the “vibe” with the roles and creative images is critical to growth. The vibe is not meant to be the substance of your logic and arguments, but the end goal of all rigor and process. We can play because the game environment has been carefully set up. Concepts are the same way. We use concepts with confidence and muscularity because we release their ghosts (i.e., messy, rigorous “Github history”) and let them be sticks to play around with. We think it is often tied to action, but crucially to perception as it works its way within us in our daily lives and in the way we live, breathe, and make sense of the loops. Confused dopamine receptors is never the end goal. It must eventually link arms with the growth to prove it.

Being a writer and a thinker is inherently about role-playing. We are not the unfinished itself. We are almost entirely the finished. We speak words that know themselves, but we gesture to new insights. Dopamine receptors here align.

The structure of our words are just as much done as the leaves that have arrived to this point phylogenetically. We take them as they are and move on as we please, with no attention paid to their history not necessarily out of ignorance, but of a role-playing aspect of life and knowledge itself, where the things as they are occupy only their wholenesses with nothing else to add beyond that save to use, store, and discard. The utilization is their phylogenetic validation. So are the ideas that appear in “points.”

This brings us back to gamification. The structure of a list is a form of it in the sense of roles and “playing” (using it as a whole without getting dragged along by its messy history). We create our own games (e.g., lexicon). Now, stop over-analyzing every single pixel of every asset and use the level editor.

Submersion’s Death, the Minimap on the Vision, and Stepping Forward Into a “Minecrafted” World (2026-02-04)

I feel kinda sad knowing that my favorite story, a 1.5-million-word web novel, is gone and dead to me and has been for years. I loved it, and even as I’ve read books since then, I don’t think I’ll ever come across something like it. I did read many other web novels as well besides paperbacks, but while they are still in or close to the same general “web” vibe and genre, it was that one novel that truly struck me as my favorite. I wish I could re-read it and truly feel content with that. But to repeat myself, it is long dead and gone. It feels like something from the past, like a childhood memory, even if I read it when I was already around 18 years old, which is only around 5 years ago, and even if I can re-read it word for word in its entirety today(!). In the last 5 years, it has only been confirmation upon confirmation, until this very moment where I reflect again on that fact of uniqueness, specialness, and irreplaceability.

It’s stange to say, but I feel like a part of me was forever lost when that story ended. The thing is that I was already very much well-read in manga and web comics before reading it, so it shouldn’t be that crazy. It is a finished level made of pre-fabricated assets. But at the same time, no, it was completely new to me, and no other grimdark story has left me with the same impact. It combined so many things into one whole that I have never seen before and even, up to this day, have never truly seen again in that same package and style. It irritates me that it has such a hold on me, which reflects its personal importance to me.

Even after getting closure and healing on my personal life and reaching the end of my own body of work last month so as to arrive at a point of no urgency and mundane biological existence, even after reading 4 paperbacks in 11 days recently, I am re-affirming its importance.

I was reading this paperback set in contemporary day when the good, familiar, witty, exciting dialogue (at pg 71) reminded me of that novel.

I look outside the balcony window into the subdivision street as I am snugly seated at this computer desk, and the world is this serene sunlight place with its light blue sky. I have expressed this many times since last month, but I have really reached this blank state. All I’m recalling is the past when all kinds of things really spurred me on, whether it be diverse adventures or unresolved trauma. Right now, I am left with the rustling of trees, the chirps of birds, and the distant murmur of traffic. I am also well-supplied with champorado and water.

I’ve repeated this many times by now, but my life recently has been all hygiene and consolidation. I just separated my diary entries from my entries that fall under “essays, analyses, and syntheses.” That’s more hygiene. Not an ounce of urgency at all. Just brooming and clearing.

I guess it’s the same as when I used to watch “Let’s Plays” in the early 2010s up to around 2016. That also basically stopped being this major thing of my life.

But it’s different now. I’m not just moving to a new phase of my life. This state feels like an ending of my own doing, rather than just an abrupt transition into a new life because of external changes. 5 years ago was a reaction to very external changes. The same went with why I stopped in 2016.

But now, after 2.5 years of writing seriously about my life, the world, and everything, I am done. I have settled things with childhood friends, family, and a church from 6 years ago.

And now, I’m here, reading a book and then recalling a time when there was something spurring me. It all feels like hygiene and consolidation now.

I can see the world around me now. Everything feels and looks photogenic. Like it deserves to be photographed and put on Pinterest. That’s a perk of this new life. And the fact that I binge-read books now out of sheer boredom. Though that thing did happen with the dialogue reminding me of that novel. It really does remind me of my childhood years before I had a phone and when I could only use for an hour to two hours every day. That’s interesting because I use the computer all day every day, yet that feeling penetrates. To think that the computer would become an object in a room. Map and territory are in perfect sync like a minimap on the vision.

This new stage will probably involve something completely new, a whole new perspective of the world. I am already so integrated, not ignorant. Yet I am also this person walking around looking at the world around me. I am a done person on the street. Rather than lost in the physical or lost in the digital, I am an integrated person walking around through the world. But it’s not just physical-digital integration. It’s a split from that childhood adventure and the unresolved trauma processing. It’s a person who knows where they are on Google Maps and can study the world around them like a boots-wearing person on the street. They have a blog and a whole corpus, yet they are here Cormac McCarthy–style.

I am in Baguio (local), but I am in the world (not the dictionary definition of world, but in the sense of the world as this done-thing where the awareness is above or containing the world itself rather than being contained even while one is physically local). I am aware yet here. No urgency, no naïveté. Just a person in a reconstructed world, like an NPC who can speak in words McCarthy would write, but retains that separate worldliness, like a character in a novel. It is like the world is a simulation even while one is on (rather than within, in, or inside) it physically and locally, like a God among flesh.

But yeah, what do I do now?

Do I challenge myself to binge-read 100 paperbacks (now E-to-interact objects that show you the immersive book content like in Skyrim instead of hyper-realistic, psychosomatic, Proustian, escapist, overwhelming, crippling, anxious-insecure submersions [distinct from healthy immersion]) that I have here in this house? (I’ve already made a selection.)

Should I own this sense of total presence and calm detachment by doing this?

Should I write something that explores this simulation sense? This sense of on and containing the world? This “godhood”? As well as start picking up photogenic aesthetics and archetypes and use the “level editor”? Start seeing myself as “the administrator” (a title of a book I liked back then)? And just play? See myself as containing the books rather than being contained? Containing the world rather than being contained?

This is different from playing Path of Exile where it’s about being contained and then playing according to the rules inside.

When I say containing the books, that is a precursor to containing the world. When I look at Google Maps and the almost 50 unique cafes I’ve visited in the last seven months and see the world as this “on” (like a platform) thing, that’s a precursor to containing the world.

This new scalar perspective departs from the victimization of the psychosomatic hyper-realism of trauma and violence if taking McCarthy as is alone. This takes McCarthy’s locality and physicality while flying up in the clouds and looking at the world like a Minecraft civilization experiment where you are the slash-command-using admin host who can fly down, enter someone’s house, and commentate on it and your Twitch viewers who joined the server and map that you set up are the contained players or participants that have to watch their health bars.

This often looks like depersonalization and derealization, but the person self and grounded reality are maintained. It is just that we often confuse anxious-insecure attachment as being “more personal” and self-security as “avoidance.” We also often conflate closure and healing with derealization because if we’re not having anxiety attacks, that means we’re not “realized” enough in this world. Interestingly, I have started engaging much more in “show, don’t tell” because of closure. Security leads to the ability to immerse and feel the pattering droplets during a shower without getting triggered to a past moment of trauma.

I can make a spreadsheet and then go to the beach without the spreadsheet becoming this monstrosity of Proustian memories and hyper-associations and the beach becoming this endless reverie. I can manage a Book Completion Tracker even while binge-reading. There is no moment where I am struck down for 6 months or the white wall screams at me. All I see is the light blue sky, not what I project onto it in a trance. Conversations with parents become mundane, not triggers for past trauma. The insects are buzzing, and that’s all it is in its mundanely aesthetic way. The external world and the daily sounds of my environment are back. I was more “numb” in the overwhelm of the Proust than in the “show, don’t tell.”

When I was young, all I did was play Roblox games and immerse and then move on with my life. This was a time of ignorance, but that same ability to immerse and play without getting caught up in the thing and to leave at any time without completionist tendencies or excess attachment is what I’m referring to now. To play a game for what it is and to enjoy it. And to engage in something new but only as much as one can handle and to grow slowly but surely. To live life to the fullest and to be in the moment always. Always seeking, always searching, always trying. Curiousity and fun.

I don’t have to read the 100 books in one go. I can do it slowly. I don’t even have to think about 100 books as a goal. I can forget about it. My younger self would have never set such a goal. He would have just read whatever he could read and then slowly improved from there. I can do the same. But the point of this new world is containing the world, not being contained, which my younger self had then because he made the world out of every moment, even if it was a Minecraft “Let’s Play.” They were the author at every moment because they made the world out of every moment. A Roblox game? Authored. A picture book? Authored. A card game they made by cutting cards out of paper stock with scissors and drawing on these cards with a pencil? Authored.

How is this different from escaping? From Path of Exile?

To contain the world now as I am isn’t to regress to the best my child self could do. It’s to contain the world now as I am to the best I can do. Path of Exile would be a step back. Playing Roblox games now for that “simplified ease” (which only is the case in retrospect, but which wasn’t the case for my child self) would be a step back. Reading those 100 books would be a step forward. Conquering the world through a mapped region of visited cafes would be a step forward. This is my making the world out of every moment. This is my “Authored.” Not stepping back to Minecraft, but stepping forward where the world is like it.

Nevertheless, if the books are boring to me right now, then I don’t have to read them. I don’t have to force myself. I don’t have to visit any more cafes. I did say I wasn’t going to do it since I am already done with my reason for being there.

Now, I should look for something curious and fun to do.

Find the Eggs Vs. Infinite Regress of Realism Complexity (2026-02-06)

If it was just going to cafes throughout my region and “conquering my past,” that is easy and simple, because I’ve already gotten closure and healing. So now, it’s just a matter of “oh, hey, that background in that photo is this place in Google Maps.” There’s that swift, easy satisfaction that comes with this post-closure state where any additions to that resolved past is 100% good.

But when I’m faced with the trouble of confronting now the objective complexity of the world post-past, I am now faced with concerns.

My younger self could easily code Roblox games, but that was the extent of his knowledge, a time when the word “gourd” was new to me while I was reading Swiss Family Robinson and when the word “savage” was this thing I knew from video games like Unreal Software’s Stranded series and The Forest, which was crazy and highly realistic at the time, and media.

But now, I have to concern myself with all manner of things that I know already. Now that the concept of complexity has been fully introduced to me, I find myself staring and wondering. You can’t simply be fine with words like “stone houses” and “stone mosques,” no matter how much they simulate that level editor, God-sim, tycoon, or game coding feeling.

“…strangers should grow strong, and rebellious, they might find it difficult to dislodge them from stone buildings. But you will see from the diagram that Shêla can now boast of her stone houses, and these are occupied by fairly well-to-do citizens. There is a large school in the place, and a stone mosque, with a circular-pointed minaret, ornamented with a crescent cut in stone.” —The Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society (Volume 4) by Manchester Geographical Society, 1888

Yet there was that feeling that it was never-ending. The list would go on when it comes to taking into account the complexity and its tension with Roblox games’ “find the eggs,” “avoid the lava blocks,” “use a sword to kill your opponents,” and “build a raft and sail”:

• The survival gameplay of Stranded (Unreal Software) and Notrium (Instant Kingdom)
• The narratively linear, rule-based gameplay of Minecraft adventurer maps:
  • red-tinted-latched trapped chests
  • CanPlaceOn NBT tag
  • colored /title command
  • droppers and dispensers
  • command blocks
  • teleportations
  • /say and /tellraw
  • /execute as @a at @s if block ~ ~-1 ~ run kill @s
• The resource-based hard magic system of Gus in Reverend Insanity
• The realism complexity of the non-fiction world history depicted in Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massle (more complex in prose than Michener’s Alaska due to the nature of Nicholas’s stratified, byzantine human civilization, in contrast with Alaska’s tectonic wide-scale-but-simplified “slabs”)

The problem is indeed the infinite regress of detail, and whether there is a point where we return to Roblox games, if that is even something we should do. Writing allows us to evolve past previous syntheses as we accommodate more and more complexity, but the bare-minimum rule-based gameplay of Roblox grows ever more distant. And I’m starting to think that the only way to make those games is to be ignorant or somehow intentionally ignorant, if that is even possible. You would think concept chunking (and, by extent, encapsulation or black-boxing) through syntheses would return us to the Roblox baseplate, but it feels illusory.

As soon as I looked at Facebook and found out where that background of that photo was in my region, I immediately looked back on the over 60 cafe visits I did in the last 7 months and consolidated it permanently into my mind-frame. There was no infinite regress of detail, because not only was post-closure accomplished already through my 4 million words of writing, but the map and territory themselves are synchronizing and permanently. There is 100% closed-loop, non-leaking satisfaction similar to that in Roblox games. But Nicholas as well as the tension between every item in that list I mentioned due to the rupture caused by the daunting face of complexity rearing its ugly head are flooding the computer electricity wires that would have generated a Roblox gameplay loop. Even if we arrive constantly at encapsulation or black-boxing, we are sliding eventually down the water slide, like a number constantly hitting the max 100 but going down constantly by 1s every second. Even a flood to the 100 would only max it out but not destroy the trickling.

For example, this passage may have synthesized all of these references so that I can finally delete the browser tabs and feel that this passage encapsulated and thus resolved the reason they were open in the first place. But it doesn’t return me to the Baseplate. It only chunks for the moment, it magic-circles for the now of this passage. It gives 100% comfort. But that trickle is still going to tick, and 1s are going to decrease… 99… 98… 97… 96…

I’m still not going to find myself staring at the Baseplate to begin even to create a rule-based gameplay loop. What you will find instead are complexity sieges, each a synthesis, each involving concept chunking, each culminating in an encapsulation or a black-box. But I look around me, and the Nicholases (books) are preponderous. The Gus are constricted and suffocated by them. The rules of adventurer maps regress infinitely into themselves. The idea of a Minecraft map where you run around, grab items from chests, put them into dispensers, and then hope that a player will come by and step on the pressure plate because you can’t destroy blocks and are forced to pass by certain areas and step on the pressure plates to pass through without being able to take out the items until you have pressed the plate would not even begin to go through the first draft of development. The idea of a Minecraft map involving a man time-traveling through time, fighting creatures, talking with NPCs that progress the story steps into Chongqing-8D reality-disintegrating quicksand.

Real life both in urinating at the toilet, eating food, sleeping, taking a shower, traveling all over one’s home region is very much a permanent closed-loop similar to video games. Post-closure is a closed loop. Any addition only adds to a 100% that remains 100% and doesn’t trickle down.

As soon as you meet the realism-complexities, or the Nicholases, and their tension with Roblox games, everything falls under, swallowed by the earth, never to be visible or solid again.

Death of External Persistent Worlds and the Spatializing Porch (2026-02-10)

It is interesting that when the 8-hour Minecraft ambient music video with its nice scenery where the shaders water is wobbling slightly and leaves are falling every now and then was left playing through the headphones and the computer that remained on through the night and I awoke to see this, put on the headphones, and saw that it had progressed to the next 8-hour Minecraft ambient music video, I immediately felt a warm feeling envelop me. It waited for me. It was there. Its own world that kept alive and well and grounded me in a specific time frame. It felt like a home, a place to immerse myself, because it didn’t pause when I left and remained alive, well, and continuing when I came back, like a world that moves without me yet waits for me to re-enter after a good sleep.

I realize I miss that feeling of a place that you can return to that will keep waiting for you that will not pause and you will never be able to stop, such that it is its own world and that it is a place you can stay. But it is already 6:16 AM. I woke up at 6 AM when it was much darker. As daylight comes, so does this life that I live, with everything that it accompanies. The idea of immersion the same way my younger self did in that way that lasted for years may not be coming back again, when there was an alive place I could return to after every sleep.

It is not that my writings aren’t there for me to continue, but I do miss that feeling of a place that wasn’t driven by myself. An inner world is only as much as one can make or do with oneself. But there was a world, a time, when it wasn’t just a book I picked up out of countless books, when it was an everything, a place where I and my brothers could play again and again, a place I could return to, a place still alive when I was gone yet awaited me. A cafe is not that place. A forum is not that place. The internet is not that place. A Minecraft world is not that place. But for that moment, those two ambient videos accidentally were.

Everything I’ve ever known is dead: MMOs, the two schools I attended (literally both closed down around the time when I left, the first being the cause of my leave, the second happening a year after I quit for different reasons), church locations, subcultures, communities, friend groups, games, stories, and everything else. I don’t know where I am anymore.

All I know is that I’m here. I’ve gotten closure on my past and life recently. But the idea of sleeping and waking up the next morning and knowing that it would be there waiting for you, like playing Minecraft every day and feeling that it isn’t a dead world fully decided by myself, but a community in which I was an active part and which would never end, like an MMO that was as eternal as I thought it was, like 2010s Roblox and how it vanished when I thought its primary feeling would last forever and it would never one day alienate me, like places and communities that would still be there even if I spent a decade away to focus on myself. But no, a decade is too long a time.

Everything is gone, and the journey throughout the last 7 years and the point of closure have made that endlessly clear.

I’ve lived a long life, what can I say?

Even the title of that second 8-hour video is titled i wish we could stay here forever... (minecraft music & ambience) by CozyCraft.

Ha-ha.

I still remember when I was young. I could sleep so many times during the rides on the way to many places, and when I woke up, everyone and everything were still there. And they were there, time and time again, for enough years for me to think it impossible that it would ever end, or, more accurately, to have no such thought at all. Now, a decade later, I still go out every once in a while to find things that were alive for over a decade gone, like restaurants, grocery stores, and trees. I spend so much time inside, but I guess that’s where I have been for the last 7 years. It took all that time to heal. I already lost so much 7 years ago, yet in that span of these 7 years, I lost many other things too. I’ve been adjusting to the changes naturally. But just because I’ve been adjusting all this time and did end up getting closure recently, that does not change the fact that when moments like this happen that remind me of a place that would go on even if I slept randomly, it does throw it into relief. Over the last 7 years, I’ve experienced so many stories and new fires and lights, and even these I’ve also integrated.

Now, I have to live in a world where cafes are places where people go and books are things you pick up and then put down and know that you’ve “lived” countless “lives” before. You’ve read countless books. You’ve seen countless things, trends, and cultures. You’ve met countless people. You’ve gone to countless places. You’ve been part of many events and communities.

And now, I am here. Serene boredom. Post-Integration. Post-closure. Post-narrative. Post-escapism (because of integration between the digital, the physical, the fictional, the non-fictional, the subjective, the objective, the past, and the present). Invisibility. In the world. Embodiment. Hygiene. Biological. Mundane.

Even now, while integration has already reached closure, in my head, integration continues to happen as it revisits all manner of memories and knowledge continually. It allows me to make far associations in my writing.

While I do say that there’s no more of that place that waits for me, the reality is that it has become such that because I am the one who went and really did all that work on myself in the last 7 years, I am that place that waits for me. [I am the one perceiving.] I have gotten used to this setup of picking up and putting down books, reading all manner of stories even with all that I’ve already seen, listening to various music to help me process different moods, memories, and ideas, and being very intentional about the way that I live my life. I continue to do the work of ongoing integration but for mental and emotional hygiene and toward everything moving forward, primarily toward the external world around me, toward new books, new feelings, new associations, new ideas, yet using still my memories and knowledge to inform me. All the places I’ve gone, all the places I will go. The work of putting them all together rather than in their own fragments continues. This dissolves hierarchy, domain locking, escapism, nostalgia, suppression, repression, self-unawareness, fragmentation, compartmentalization, ignorance, and forgetfulness. Knowing where everything is, like a library of my own, a palace of my own, a world of my own, my inner world, the every part and item of which has been so carefully made clear and valid. It is the reason I can say I have lived a life, because rather than a constraining of qualia to myself, it is a liberation of everything. The sanctuary becomes unlimited. All the places we’ve gone. All the waiting still alive places are still alive in this integration of all, where revisiting is continual and association is active. This is not a retreat into the self. This is an embracing of everything. The 2018 lofi, with its long sleeves, sits beside the aggressive phonk, who wears its hat backwards and sits beside the optimistic orchestral fantasy music with its white hair, who sits beside the nostalgic downtempo-synth-pop, with its autumn outfit. The child and the adult share the same space and sit down, point, banter, and laugh. The web comic playfully throws hands with the web novel in the wide street, and the paperbacks chuckle together watching on the porch. Roblox and Minecraft converse, with beards, playing cards and chess on a nearby table, sometimes with a single tear dribbling down their cheeks as they recall memories of a different time. You can see that each of these have scars of their own. They have not abandoned their past by papering over their trauma. They have integrated them, yet they remain as they are, flattened, integrated, together, alive still as themselves, in their own manners of being, in themselves as themselves, yet here as people sharing life together.

Even when I close my eyes, I am at peace. I am not assaulted by memories. They instead greet me like long-time neighbors. The world has become a known, well-trodden place. I see everything flit over my eyes. Through them, windows into everything open. They are all together in my head, not just in the internet, not just in modern reality, but in myself: integrated. I have become myself.

And now I am.

Here. In the sense that everything is here and alive because I am here and alive to integrate them and to recognize them as they are. The outlines are not just troubles. They are buried ten feet under. Everything is as much themselves as they are everywhere else, and in that sense, they are all arrived and here, accommodated, lodged, given a place, a spot, a slice in the pie, a world of their own in the world of worlds. This is it. Dissonance and exciting new connections, associations, insights, and revelations will continue to come, and I will continue to absorb and integrate. I will read Guiltythree’s Shadow Slave right after reading Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I will write this passage while my mind wanders to memories of panels of Golden Kamuy, which I read years ago, and while listening to optimistic orchestral fantasy released a month ago, while thinking that I should probably start eating, taking a shower, and changing clothes because I might leave to go to a new cafe around mid-morning. This is a hint of what integration looks like in the present.

Response to the Concepts of “Minimap On the Vision,” “Stepping Forward Into a ‘Minecrafted’ World,” and “the Nicholases”

I will continue making moves. Integration very much buttresses the minimap, and the minecrafting of the world and the stepping forward have relied on integration. In other words, I am still ambitious. Containing the world. To do this, I need to make even more ambitious syntheses. But I have been careful, keeping it to essays/analyses that culminate into syntheses. I know I can do better, but it’s not going to be easy. If I make a whole novel, that would be an even more ambitious synthesis, since you can’t unknow the big in making/from the small. As I write every single paragraph with the understanding that this is part of a novel-length story, I do so carrying the flattened, fused subtance of my entire life. This is why one big idea moving forward after this initial disorientation of this post-closure state is to create a novel that serves as an evolution of these essayistic journal entries. Besides the novel format, there is still containing the world in the sense of 100 books and visiting 50 cafes. The world is still very much “Press E to Interact.” It is still my “on the world.” It is still external, objective, and realistic-complex. Rather than in a Baseplate, it is all absorbed in integration. Naturally, by dismissing Baseplate, this means that I can’t write a novel and pretend to be a “Baseplatian.” I cannot “find the eggs” simply. If I do make a Roblox game again, it will not be a return. It will be an adult sitting next to a toy and doing with it what he would not as his child self, but as who he is now and what it might mean to him, not just as nostalgia, but as present-oriented use and consideration. This is integration. The adult sits beside the child, and both show their way of using the toy they now share.

The “find the eggs,” Baseplate, minimap, “press E,” “on the world,” and “containing the world” retain the Nicholas by integration. The adult plays with the toy, not by dismissing Nicholases, but by integration. They make a Roblox game, not by dismissing Nicholases, but by integration.

So I don’t have to lose the “struggle” of that pre-closure state and all its richness that are now resolved so as to result in serene boredom. Through integration, I am never truly stuck in serene boredom. I can continue expanding outward and externally which is the privilege of this post-closure stage where the past is resolved without necessarily getting stuck lost in the complexity or losing the minimap. I have both the minimap, the complexity, the Baseplate, and the outward, external expansion. I am still containing the world rather than being contained. Post-closure, rather being a loss of drive, urgency, and system and reason and a descent into serene boredom, is now a reaffirmation of the integration that got me closure in the first place. Mundane and biological are now integrated alongside pre-closure drive and urgency. Closure hasn’t resolved their integration, only their urgency. Hygiene joins hands with richness. Integration, a necessary encompassing of pre-closure “something spurring me” also, persists. Thus, ambition persists without urgency, yet integrating past urgency. In integration, consolidation is in a cycle involving outward expansion and engagement with realism-complexities as well as with past urgency. While the past is resolved, it is not dead and absent after I wake up the next day. Instead, it is still alive, well, continuing, waiting for me, its own world, a place I can return to after a good sleep, continually revisited. The forward is the outward expansion and the engagement with realism-complexities, but it is also (integrated alongside) the living, breathing past as well as the hygiene, the consolidation, and the serene boredom.

Everything and everyone sits together around the same porch. It is the going to a church after 6 years of not attending. It is the playing a Roblox game today. It is the reading of a “simple” web novel. It is the reading of a world-historical novel. It is the new cafe. It is the random thoughts of Golden Kamuy while writing this passage. It is the listening to phonk and then to lo-fi and then to soft, reflective piano and then to Minecraft OST. It is the pre-closure and the post-closure. It is the suffering when the world was this overwhelming entirety and I was in that cottage trying to make sense of it all and put it all together in agony. It is the golden tranquility. It is the weight of ascent-plotting ambition. It is the manga The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You by Rikito Nakamura (writer) and Yukiko Nozawa (illustrator) as well as the memoir The Pianist by Władysław Szpilman. It is the participation in camps, seminars, and fests as well as the fantasizing over living in a supernatural library. It is the going outside to a local park with church friends and family and the writing of a cliche fantasy story with my four brothers as characters. It is the glasses-wearing girl classmate who was easygoing and whose name was Lei as well as the four-month online friend. It is the sharp scent of neighborhood swimming pool and local resorts as well as the air-conditioned plume of an office-adjoined cafe bosomed in a deeply urban space where the sight, image, and experience of jotting away on one’s laptop in a corner are comprehensible. I am “indifferentiating” past and present here in this series of images, intentionally, rhetorically. Naturally, by the use of the words “forward” and “expansion,” the future is integrated in all this as well. The doneness joins hands with the idea of a future, in all the senses of mundane, hygienic, biological existence, the living, breathing past (which means no trading off the magic of childhood immersion and rule-based, web-novel-esque “finding the eggs” and means their integration instead), and ascent-plotting urgency-integrated ambition. The collapse of all into now, in which is integration always very ambitious. 100 books, 50 cafes, a novel-length story that reflects who I am now. Synthesis.

Rather than looking at the blue sky and experiencing a lost past in the sense of overwhelm, it is looking at the blue sky and experiencing the integrated moment, not in the sense that the past overshadows the present but in the sense of mindfulness where the past is there (alive, well, and revisited) but not enforcing. This is the spatial, “coordinated” Minecraft forever world. The Minecrafted.

A Writer’s Minecraft World (2026-02-10)

Endless Snow¹⁴.

The purpose of this playthrough is to test how long an actual non-role-playing prolific writer can last in a Minecraft world and to see how it can serve as a new way to approach writing. This means writing what I usually would using the very Book and Quill in the world (and then naturally archiving it in my actual text files in case the world gets corrupted). The goal is to see how Minecraft’s resource-dependent spatiality changes my perception of my ongoing body of work. My recent personal analytical writings themselves have concerned spatiality and used Minecraft as a definitive example, so this is an implemented interpretation of that discussion. Nevertheless, the analytical writings I make in-game will not be about world-building or story-tell about my in-game Minecraft journey itself, which is key to this experiment to see whether Minecraft chokes the growing thinker or adds a new layer. This means when publishing the passage itself on a blog, I can attach a Minecraft screenshot of the specific entitled in-game location where I wrote the analytical passage, creating a sense of grounding, spatiality, embodiment, and, by extension, “lateral” world-building. The “physical” Book Item is, most importantly, present in a chest—movable, sortable, and locatable.

Configurations/Game Rules:

• Bonus Chest: On
• Fire Tick: Off
• Instant Respawn: On
• Keep Inventory: On
• Mob Griefing: Off
• Spawn Phantoms: Off

Mods:

• 3D Skin Layers by tr7zw (Renders the player skin layer in 3d)
• AmbientSounds by CreativeMD and AriaFreeze (Expands minecraft's ambient sounds.)
• AppleSkin by squeek502 (Adds various food-related HUD improvements)
• BetterAdvancements by way2muchnoise (Improvements to the advancement screen)
• Better Statistics Screen by TheCSDev (A Minecraft mod that improves the statistics screen and makes it more useful)
• BiomesOPlenty by Adubbz and Forstride (Adds over 50 new biomes, blocks, and more!)
• Block Runner by Fuzs (Encourages path building by making you run faster on certain blocks such as path blocks)
• Carry On by Tschipp and Purplicious_Cow (Carry On is a simple mod that improves game interaction by allowing players to pick up, carry, and place single block Tile Entities using only their empty hands)
• Cherished Worlds by Illusive Soulworks (Favorite/pin/bookmark certain worlds, which will always be at the top of the list and cannot be deleted)
• Climate Rivers by Fuzs (Make your rivers stop looking like mistakes-and start flowing with style)
• Concurrent Chunk Management Engine by RelativityMC and ishland (A Fabric mod designed to improve the chunk performance of Minecraft)
• Distant Horizons by James Seibel, Leonardo Amato, Cola, coolGi, Ran, Leetom, and pshsh (This mods generates and renders simplified terrain beyond the normal view distance at a low performance cost. Allowing you to see much farther without turning your game into a slideshow)
• Dungeons and Taverns by NovaWostra, Konci, MiziraGamez, and Whity (A Structure Datapack adding dungeons, taverns and other structures to find while you explore the world)
• DynamicFPS by juliand665 and LostLuma (Reduce resource usage while Minecraft is in the background or idle.)
• EntityCulling by tr7zw (This mod uses async path-tracing to hide Tiles/Entities that are not visible)
• Falling Leaves by Fourmisain, BrekiTomasson, and RandomMcSomethin (Makes leaf particles fall from leaf blocks)
• FerriteCore by malte0811 (Reduces memory usage)
• Illager Invasion by Dricky, Safro, Zeckemith, and Fuzs (The illagers are back! Be ready to fight new foes. A port of Illager Expansion)
• Inventory Profiles Next by Mirinimi (Take control over you inventory. Sort. Move matching Items. Throw all. Locked slots. Gear sets! And much more. )
• Iris by coderbot, IMS212, Justsnoopy30, and FoundationGames (A modern shaders mod for Minecraft intended to be compatible with existing OptiFine shader packs)
• Just Enough Items by mezz (JEI is an item and recipe viewing mod for Minecraft, build from the ground up for stability and performance)
• LambDynamicLights by LambdAurora (The most feature-complete dynamic lighting mod)
• Lithium by JellySquid and 2No2Name (Lithium is a free and open-source optimization mod for Minecraft which makes a wide range of performance improvements to the game)
• Mod Menu by Prospector, haykam821, and TerraformersMC (Adds a mod menu to view the list of mods)
• Nature's Compass by ChaosTheDude (Search for a biome and get information about it [through a special compass made with 4 logs, 4 saplings, and a regular compass in the middle])
• Oh The Biomes We've Gone by Joseph T. McQuigg (JT122406), AOCAWOL, YaBoiChips, and Corgi Taco (Sequel to Oh the Biomes You'll Go, this mod adds a variety of new biomes to the game.)
• Particle Rain by pigcart (Replaces weather with prettier particle effect)
• Pick Up Notifier by Fuzs (Be notified about all the things you've just collected)
• Presence Footsteps by Hurricaaane (Ha3) and Sollace (An overly complicated sound mod)
• Scholar by mortuusars (Book improvements: two-page view, lectern editing, colored books, QOL-features)
• Simple Voice Chat by Max Henkel (A working voice chat in Minecraft)
• Sodium by JellySquid (jellysquid3) (Sodium is a powerful rendering engine for Minecraft which greatly improves frame rates and micro-stutter, while fixing many graphical issues)
• Sound Physics Remastered by Sonic Ether, vlad2305m, Max Henkel, and Saint (Provide realistic sound attenuation, reverberation, and absorption through blocks)
• Tectonic by Apollo (Terrain shaping brought to new heights, grander and more varied than ever before!)
• Towns and Towers by Kubek, Biban_Auriu, and Cristelknight (`Spice up your world with new villages, pillar outposts, and even new ships!)
• William Wythers' Overhauled Overworld by William Wythers and Cristelknight (In this mod I seek to re-create the vanilla biomes in a way that makes a more realistic and atmospheric world)
• Xaero's Minimap by xaero96 (The most vanilla-looking minimap for Minecraft.)
• Xaero's World Map by xaero96 (A self-writing fullscreen map which also works as an add-on to Xaero's Minimap.)
• Zoomify by isXander (A zoom mod with infinite customizability)

Libraries:

• CorgiLib by Corgi Taco and Joseph T. McQuigg (JT122406) (Library with handy utilities)
• Cristel Lib by Cristelknight (A Library mod for easy structure config and runtime datapacks)
• libIPN by Mirinimi (Inventory Profiles Next GUI Library)
• Lithostitched by Apollo (A library mod with new configurability and compatibility enhancements for worldgen)
• Manningham Mills by Chocohead (The mod to do what asi said Fabric shouldn't allow you to do)
• Oh The Trees You'll Grow by Corgi Taco (A Minecraft library that aims to give users incredible configurability by allowing the creation of trees with Minecraft's structure template `.nbt` files.)
• TCDCommons API by TheCSDev (TheCSDev's personal Minecraft modding library)
• tr7zw Library Modules by tr7zw (All of tr7zw's embedded library modules in one place!)

Technical Stuff

My computer couldn’t handle the lag, so I had to tone down the quality of Distant Horizons. Besides that, I also couldn’t use the shader pack Complementary Shaders through the mod Iris Shaders because it was too laggy.

In-Game Setup

I started the world and died several times to illagers because a tower spawned right beside my spawnpoint, and I didn’t know it was full of illagers and got jumpscared.

I went to the nearby village and then went back and looted some of the chests of the illager tower as well as killed two illagers (who had bows instead of crossbows and an animation that looked like they were casting a spell). I died the first time to a surprise attack from all of them, second to a Vindicator, and third and the rest of the deaths to them because of the Evoker’s flying minions, the Vexes.

After making a bed from the group of black sheep that spawned, I travelled around, not really knowing what to do. It was a very messy and confusing start.

Eventually, after visiting many structures, I stopped close to a village using quarts as their primary material. I ultimately called this spot with a double chest and a crafting table “Asturian Warbringer Camp”¹⁵.

It is here that I wrote the first book with squid ink, cow leather, a feather, and three pieces of paper I got from a chest in a randomly generated treehouse. I wrote what was basically just random placeholder text, making up stuff on the spot using formal speech and old English. I ended up titling it “Danceing Prongs.” The next ones will naturally invite my seriousness.

The concerns moving forward is no longer leather, feathers, and paper, because I made a cow pen, a chicken pen, and a sugarcane farm, all of which multiply rapidly and infinitely, especially relative to the focused nature of writing a book with more than several pages. Writing in the Book and Quill with the limited resources and the physicality of the book have made me especially careful about writing a short passage. I felt easily driven to write many more pages to make sure the time it took to get the resources needed to the craft the Book and Quill wasn’t “wasted.”

Now, the only concern is squid ink, because I have to go look for squids that villagers don’t trade. Or I can search how to make a squid farm. Though I did say I wouldn’t do make farms. Animal pens and sugarcanes, despite being farms, still make sense in Minecraft as basic essentials, in contrast with a squid, slime, or piglin farm where there’s a much stronger feeling of “optimizing the fun out of it.”

As of writing this passage, I have played for almost 4 hours now. It took an hour and 30 minutes to find the mods, download them as well as the libraries I didn’t download the first time, and then make it start working.

Louder Shadow, More Abrupt Switch: More Spatialization (2026-02-11)

Spatialization solves too much. As soon as I introduced this idea in the sense of “everything around the porch” integration, I immediately find that anything in the world can co-exist through myself (not in the sense of the self as the only thing that exists, but that of the persistent knowing subject in a constantly changing external world) as persistent consciousness. When you don’t take a single misshapen thing as microcosm of the world and go about your day in this mundane, carefree way, as long as you do continue to live off the advantages of a privileged lifestyle and its resources, then you’re practically walking on water. The water can barely throw up waves to shoot you down, because at best, you trip and get up again like a child in play. It’s a lo-fi morning for me. Primarily, as soon as complexity and simplicity started bantering around the porch, I immediately found myself in want, not in want as in need, but endowed with the absense. Even urgency is integrated, so it’s not a totalitarianism of serene boredom. It’s a “porchment” of both. Ambition also remains. The past, the present, and the future shake hands, josh, and exchange a series of “What’s poppin’?”

Is there a loss? No. I can switch the music out of lo-fi’s serene boredom to ascent-plotting aggressive phonk without dissonance. Even the losses of the past are gained in this integration, so there is absolute no loss in spatialization save for the integration of actual losses. Even the absence plays porch.

I guess while spatialization may be the ultimate solution, I can always theorize, philosophize, and analyze along those ascent-plotting urgency-integrated lines. It would still be integration. The louder my shadow and the more abrupt the switch to lo-fi, the more confirmed this spatialization is. Such, I must shadow. More arrogant, disgusting, revoking. I must destabilize and collapse them. Let the emotions color (decorate, “furnish the space [one] now [occupies]”) the act of integration. Let them make the porch even more deific. (I exaggerate my wording here intentionally to show the coloring even as the bottoming substance retains its integrity.) It’s about courting death and provoking spite. Let it be lavish and dictative. Undermining all that stood tall. For the purpose of decor (ornamental instead of structural). The more murderous the imagery of my fiction passages and expressions, the more total the soul, who knows and sees all things, porchian. And then to return to a word as concrete as a warm hand whose fingers you press one by one as if squeezing out the intimacy stored in them and to look at their face with a smile that endows the face rather than stretches it, that gives it power rather than takes from it, to leave it with fullness rather than loss. That, again, if any more repetition can help it, is the porch. I guess one concrete comparison to make is that you can be both Eminem-violent in your fantasizing imagery and have a blue-pink-and-white flag on your building facade, not in a compartmentalized sense, but in the sense that the same building is booming out that type of music, and not necessarily out of a current traumatic frustration. But play. Not unfeeling, dissociation, or depersonalization, but total anti-repressive, anti-compartmentalizing, anti-fragmenting anti-dissociative immersion and self-security, not the kind that needs to perform kindness or unkindness, but one that goes accordingly and does like so, freely, breezily, and without disturbance save for what is eventual in the porched whole—a waving and whirling of one’s arms as one walks down the sidewalk. This is when the false structure of circumstantial role-identity (i.e., role as catalyzing identity, so as at this point to be a tree all corrupt to be overseeing the porch) truly makes way for the informal spatial (replacing “social”) gathering in and of a “person” (not person as “real,” “identity,” “personality,” or “individual,” but consciousness as space). Defining navigation, false structures fill up lots intersected with streets. They make way for space. The particular assortment of those gathered around the porch at a single point of time—including

• past, present, and future,
• fictional (e.g., goblin-fantasy) and non-fictional (e.g., diary and reflections),
• digital (e.g., Melonland Forum) and physical (e.g., this specific cafe, or cafe-cafe),
• subjective (e.g., Roth’s Call It Sleep, stream-of-consciousness philosophizing analytical psychological realism) and objective (e.g., dates and photos that contradict memory, socioculturo-intellectual condition),
• complexity (i.e., world-historical, realism-complexity) and simplicity (i.e., “find the egg” Baseplate),
• aggression (e.g., phonk, violent imagery),
• ambition (e.g., Lord of the Mysteries),
• serene boredom (e.g., golden tranquility),
• urgency (e.g., agony in a cottage against the overwhelming world)

—allows the person not only to prove space, but to play in whatever decor, to switch to any type of music, to express oneself as a whole person in all the things one is.

Self-Responses

What is the author’s visual vision of play through the imagery they presented?

Isn’t this just post-closure integration and subsequent self-actualization?

This means rather than dissonance at the sight of people suffering, class injustice, and prejudice, they accept these as well as their privilege, as well as their morning coffee. They take it in and put them on the same plate to see how to make sense of a world that can be both extremely complex (world-history) and extremely simple (Roblox).

It doesn’t necessarily state that the author will do nothing and let it all be, but the moral is integrated (not blurred in the traumatic or overwhelmed sense) in the amorality of a cup of morning coffee, encompassing both the extremity of mundanity and the mundanity of extremity. The sweat of skin plays an outdoor game with awareness. Playing so frivolously with a cat that will eventually die, rather than one (playing ignorantly or without care) or the other (caring to the point of intense mental deterioration and rejecting play).

Return to First-Person

This especially makes sense given my own history of volunteering in the slums as well as sitting among the “upper echelons” of privilege, of those who have never known a long jeepney ride, in our poverty-riddled society. This also makes sense given the vastness, richness, and eclecticism of my distinct upbringing. When you have been exposed to all manner of things, you find yourself seeing their abrupt coincidence in this reality. Trauma plays a role too, where you know one complete world and then end up on the other side and know another complete world, but wholly different. And it’s not just two worlds. It’s everything everywhere. This reality, through the internet and my society in which the slums sit beside the privileged separated by a mere wall (subdivisioning rather than districting), is transparent. I look outside this cafe, and everything everywhere flits over my eyes (the space encompassing reality, memories, knowledge, the words one may use to describe them). Yet I am not dissonant. The dissonance itself is absorbed, eaten up and savored with licked lips, and what’s left is a continuous background process of “collapsing” (without undermining the integrity and ownness of each article) integration. I am not both the outside and inside in a binary sense, save in structuring speech to make it clear and understandable. Instead, I am everything everywhere. I am the person playing Minecraft for 4 hours at home, the person reading at home, the person at this specific cafe, the person at that specific cafe at that point of time. Here am I. Space. Press the spacebar. It’s probably why I like sitting in front of the window when I’m at the cafe and at home. For me, writing at home or at a cafe is not to run away into a cozy, private, cloistered, privileged space for escapism. It’s to use it to look outward, to see the world. It’s why going to a new cafe every time I go out is fun. Each cafe is this, not in an abstract sense, but as in, it is a very specific place that offers a new angle of the world every time with very different customers, etc. It’s easy to write a framework at home and then end it at that. But I didn’t get closure by running away from reality. I got closure by embracing it and all its ambiguities, nuances, contradictions, and abruptions, myself and the world. The only value of words is to die to reality. Useful is what they are. But this is not a battle of never enough. It’s not an endless agonizing fight for complete integration with the whole world in its infinite regress of complexity. Instead, it includes complexity as much as is. A space doesn’t need the whole world to be whole. It needs only to be. The porch doesn’t contain literally everything and everyone, only that everything everywhere that flits over its eyes. It is as much as it is, as much as it can, as much as it always was up to that point and in its future to be (not metaphysically grabbing the future in a time-travel way, but future as yesterday is always past and tomorrow is always future), and in so being, it functions, works, defines, plays, makes way, proves itself. This is why I mentioned “continuous background process of ‘collapsing’ integration” and “past, present, and future.” Space encompasses.

“What is currently gathering on my porch?”

The DNA of My Fiction: a Web Novel About a Murderous Box (2026-02-11)

Even now, I still very much respect Neven Illiev (also “Exterminatus” on Royalroad) just from reading his story Everybody Loves Large Chests (ELLC). It’s weird to respect an author because of a work they made, but it is my favorite story. It doesn’t feel like a favorite story that you just say is your favorite because it’s so hype. No, it’s been 5 years since I’ve read it, and I’ve changed so much since then. Yet I still consider it my favorite novel. It doesn’t really make sense. How can someone hold onto a favorite novel when it wasn’t even necessarily pertaining to anything necessarily formative? It was itself a formative thing for me because it impacted me that hard in a good way, even without necessarily sounding like it resonated the same way a contemporary story makes you resonate with a character who lives a similar life. In other words, the work created the change rather than reflecting it. It’s weird. How can a dark, cynical, irreverent story be a favorite? There are countless stories I consider very good, like Lord of the Mysteries (LOTM), yet “favorite” is a special title. ELLC holds a special place for me, and it just feels too etiologically indecipherable, like I can’t find why. All I know is that it really got me. I also loved the TV show Ozark a lot. But that’s a TV show, and it doesn’t hold the same place that ELLC does. For TV show, maybe it is Ozark, but I’m not as decided there. For academic text, it’s either Kolb and Brodie’s Modern Clinical Psychiatry (10th ed.) or Eben Goodale et al.’s Mixed-Species Group of Animals. But for web novel, even if I can remember how good LOTM was with the Gehrman Sparrow arc with Sea God Kalvetua especially and also just being all around incredibly exciting and compelling, it feels like there’s this dogmatic yes to ELLC, like it can’t be taken out of its spot. I’ve read so many books, fiction, non-fiction, literary, web novel, 20th century, 19th century, 18th century, 21st century. I’ve read from donated books and from those I bought. I’ve read on Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Google Books. I’ve taken active notes while learning how to write. I’ve binge-read 3 books in 3 days. I was just reading Roth’s Call It Sleep today and Rita Ciresi’s Pink Slip a week ago. I’ve done so many things.

And yet, here I am. The fact that Illiev is so important to me that the term “Illevian” has weight for me even if I recognize that it’s not an established term like phenomenological is is just bewildering. I just feel utmost respect for the name, even now that I’ve gotten closure on my past recently. I’m changing so much in my own personal life and in my writing and in my reading diet. I’ve expanded and grown so much as a person. Yet… that work is still there. I even wrote a review for the prologue chapter and each of the first six chapters. It doesn’t make any sense. Yet it’s this formative pillar for me. In my personal website that includes so many types of media, from music, to TV shows, to anime, to manga, to books, to web novels, it carries that kind of significance.

It felt like I was an atheist who converted upon reading this revolutionary thing called the Bible that defied an entire life of secularism, or vice versa.

And I don’t think the story is objectively bad. But I know that it’s objectively out there and very dark, horrid, and disgusting in its themes and imagery. Yet it’s not that I think it’s subjectively good, but objectively bad. I think it’s both objectively and subjectively good, in spite of what I continue to learn as a growing fiction writer. I myself think that 20th century literary prose (2CLP) would be so awesome to see in web novels. because 2CLP are validly using it yet almost every time choosing something historical, hyper-realistic, and just plain depressing. Yet even when I think this, ELLC breaks through. Ozark, a similar kind of story in its irrevence toward death, reinforced the momentous path ELLC laid by dragging new elements, angles, and interpretations even while capturing that spirit of “mid-monologue, bang, dead.” I carry that gene in my writing. I release it like it’s my own lifeblood. That spirit is so mine. It’s so in me. It’s inextricable from who I am. The way I see the world. The way I write. That idea, that image, that experience, that concept, that spirit. It made me who I am today as a fiction writer. I respect it so much. It paved the path for me. In fact, it may not just lie in fiction, but intellectual. The way I see the world, the way I enjoy it, the way I articulate it. There is this DNA that cannot be taken out without causing the whole thing to collapse. It paved the way for the isekai stories I would eventually write, where the protagonist is taken out of a good life and isekai’d into hell upon hell upon hell, where his mind is tormented beyond belief and he is broken and crushed and broken and crushed. Slammed into the wall, tortured to oblivion. It is from this I derived the idea of actualization, that in the most concentrated vial of death-agony, there is a human writhing and thrashing, a soul, a birthed thing. It may not sound like a guy being disrespectfully killed mid-monologue, but it came from there exactly and vigorously. It corrupted me like a sword turns a boy into a man, or a gun turns a child into a combatant. Everything from start to end, that entire novel destroyed me and broke me, not into anguish, but into a genuine conversion. Every single thing in that novel transformed me.

Self-Assessment: This Ravenous Crunching Munching Thing of a Person (2026-02-11)

I expose myself to everything as much as I can. That’s what my upbringing was like. I’m now only slamming the pedal on this trend.

I would find it uncomfortable to live in a big subdivision that’s far away from the working class. I enjoy riding long jeepneys and being in those cramped places every now and then. I love being invisible among the people and truly finding myself totally dissolved in it, not out of escapism or dissocation, but that I might learn and see the world. And then, once I get some time at my computer desk or when I’m at the cafe with a keyboard and laptop, my mind spins ingeniously and prolifically like a factory and then spills out onto the K-keys (K as in keyboard) and then into the text editor like blocks of text rapidly forming out of thin air, again and again, culminating in that synthesis, from which I gain the D-keys (D as in door or container keys) to a new synthesis, coordinating between previous syntheses to create new ones, in an endless munching recursive synthetical tree-like rhizomatic all-in-all into one and then disperse, the D-keys resulting from this still jingling.

I am in a sense un-egoed. I close my eyes when entering the deep water of the urban swallow-up (the crowd), but I come out like Alexander the Conquerer, but without the title or the fame, only the pure crystal I inject into my lungs which release the fumes of intense labor of conversion and transmutaton and transformation as my keys clack rhymically across the board and my soul re-invents itself on the spot, the resultant text a produce of life and death and all things synthetical.

I can drown and dissolve on an academic text like Piaget’s The Child’s Conception of the World on the first page immediately, and from it, I morph and discharge fleshy, craggy, gunky writings from my mouth at attaining the text editor.

I can shut off my aggressive phonk, go to the bathroom to take a 5-minute stay at the toilet without music and just humming childishly like fitful rain, and then go back, turn the phonk back on, and continue my flowing writing.

Besides visceral, recursive, and dense, “fleshy, craggy, gunky” serves also to mean the embodied, grounded, messily physical nature of what drives my writing, my collision into the crowd, into the somatic, into the dirt, into the mud, into the “low-brow,” into the collapse, into the prickly grass, into the gray concrete.

Does writing serve me? Does it serve to express my wishes to meet the faceplant into the mud and to soak it up coherently into precise neologisms, metaphors, and imagery?

My “no filter” to the world becomes traumatic, overwhelming, chaotic, and destabilizing if I don’t have the means to hone it and become a master at it.

One-Off Vs. Semipermanent Cafes: Decentering Linearity and Expanding Perceptual Staging Space (2026-02-13)

I wonder if I should return to a new cafe every time, or is it worth intentionally going to the same cafe for four months straight several times a week. I only started going to cafes because it broke me out of the reverie and allowed me to integrate so much more.

To explain what I mean by integrate, it’s not just integrate in the sense that you understand the world a lot more because you’re going through the effort of putting yourself in so many different vantage points to get a whole pie from all of these slices. No, it’s also integrate in the sense that you’re putting yourself in totally different environments each with its own “rinsing” travel each time so as to access so much more of “working memory space.” You’re not expanding your knowledge of the urban world simply. You’re expanding your mind palace, your RAM, your cognitive architecture, giving it much more room for the raw power of integration, complexity, and synthesis, which suppresses the “highway effect” because it’s not the same angle on that elevated highway every time (like in the instance that one can stare at the side of an elevated highway from a cafe to the side of it below) but a faceted prism that complicates the more one superimposes a book on one’s vision of a bridge and finds that the objective words go over themselves in what first looks like a knot before freeing themselves in some new different (clear) jungle every time. Instead of rules of three or even the framework of non-linearity, it works by spatiality. Writing that works according to the latter than to the two former expands the “space” (literally) to space (stage) percepts (angles as objects, hyper-real and memory as objects, definitions or descriptions as objects, words as objects, ontics like what color as objects, concepts as objects, the perceived as the object, the percept) together for synthesis. It “counterintuits” (zaps) my thinking patterns because I’m looking at a whole different street from my own. It breaks them through spatiality. There is actively forming a new area in my brain for the Unique and Its Property of this place. I am not looking at patterns. I am looking at thisness, and, since it’s a place, spatiality. The brain works off space. Each this place expands space. Highway-effecting your brain leaves your brain linear, rule-based (follow the line), and one-dimensional (due to the single angle that you see on it which leads to the effect). It is a form of learned helplessness because it tells you that once linearity (the line) has been established, the only thing left is to follow the line accordingly (and thus according to the same angle, not that you can get any other angle from staying on route over that highway). It assumes that because one should follow the line on the line, one must see it the same way (angle). Same goes for non-linearity in its “non-” orientation to linearity when it should be decentered (rather than either for, against, or “non-“) as in spatiality. In the case of linearity and non-linearity does environment drive cognition and, by extension, worldview. The infrastructural line-following becomes the infrastructural line-seeing. Infrastructural space-observing (sitting in a cafe and looking outside at modern [and especially hyperconnected, hyperreal, and flattened, due to the potential for even more spatial-cognitive “wait, those don’t come together” through 3D-2D spatiality, where images and narratives, concepts, descriptions, words, and worldviews build off them, whether algorithmically or not, contradict lived-in reality and local on-the-ground perspectives and vice versa, not such as to break, reject, or fight 2D, but to messy or spatialize it perceptually with 3D] urbanity—especially in a car-centric developing country with high wealth disparity, a notable indifference to skid-rowing, and one of the highest population densities in the world, especially of working class people¹⁶—instead of following the line of an elevated highway) becomes infrastructural space-seeing.

If you imagine your eyes like speakers, then those who only go along an elevated highway or go to the same third place again and again to no end will find the visual data being concentrated around those places. But those who go around and see the world around them from all manner of angles, not during a single walk or ride-through, but a cafe where you can sit for hours and observe the breathing, living world around you, to have those sounds truly complicate and encompass all the possible daily, weekly, monthly variations of a place, with all the different time tables of all the people living there and how each going out either coincides or doesn’t coincide, leaving a one-off as a nice momentous introduction, but not necessarily one where you soak up all the variations, acoustics, and resonances and thus leave your speakers or visual data’s history there limited to a thin smoky sweep, like a single split-second ray of sunshine or a single drop of rain that becomes cause for mockery and dismissal of the rain’s grandiose image of “falling upon the rich and the poor.”

But there is value in an actual third place, like a church or school, in meeting the “same people” living, working, residing, coinciding, or frequenting within or whose daily route passes through this one whole city area. The fact it’s not a permanent third place and only lasts for four months makes it even more valuable because it squeezes something that a one-off (or week-off) or a permanent church doesn’t—awkward irregularity, like a relationship long enough to hurt but short enough to feel short, an awkward middle ground between nobody and someone you know.

The left-right-up-down linearity of words (and numbers, 3-min headphoned 3D-simulating music, history, car-driving, and chronology) should never be allowed to linearize the brain. This is why activities that require you to work your spatial navigation, like being a taxi driver, stimulate neuroplasticity. Don’t even let non-linearity non-linearize you. That’s not the same thing as spatiality. Chopping a line into many pieces and re-ordering these pieces won’t spatialize it. Nested recursion is the closest thing we have to space, but again, non-linearity, or, more precisely, complex linearity, is not spatiality. Videos or even live-streams of where I am and what I am looking at right now are not the same as spatiality. Watching a video of a train pass through a real-life 3D mountainous landscape is incredibly useful for visualizing or rendering spatiality, but it is not spatiality.

Systematization, open systems, and feedback loops are not spatiality. Making a dialectical rigorous argument isn’t spatiality. Being good at combining words and integrating counterpoints, contexts, applications, spaces, and nuances is not spatiality. It is practically systematizing. And systematizing is practically linearizing. The rigorous “internal logic” of words post–feedback loops isn’t spatiality. Dialectic in the way words are is not spatiality. A taxi driver isn’t dialecticizing with or systematizing the city. They are engaging their spatial navigation. Being here right now is spatiality, but writing all this is not, even if I’m “integrating” spatiality. Yet spatiality is the best dialectic, the best rigor, the best feedback. It is not arguing with you between two different sets of internal logic or semantics. Space is space itself, not the resultant articulations (words) of our observations, not the observations (perceiving), not any percept or the percepts collectively. Space is the space for the percepts to be perceived through perceiving by a perceiver (knowing subject), but it is not “for” them or this. It is as much thisness as well as “the around.”

Self-Responses

what do they mean by writing that works according to spatiality expands the space to stage percepts together for synthesis?

Is there evidence that the brain relies on 3D space to think? Why does it matter that it’s this new place and not the same place? What’s the point of developing country? Or the fact that we’re hyperconnected? What does modern have to do with it?

Isn’t this just modern Filipino Walter Benjamin’s Arcades

Why does it matter that one is actually there? The same place in the video? Is there evidence that the brain views spatiality as being actually there rather than watching a video of it?

To be continued...