chapter 6

U- Ul... Ultimate Hellfire Burst Wave Motion Hya!

Shallow (July 7, 2026)

I just want to be shallow. That’s why I play League of Legends. [It’s a video game!] Being bad at something that doesn’t matter and improving in very small ways that don’t matter. It’s about just recalibrating when I feel like I’m going to start speaking like a fucking alien that came from some I don’t know. I don’t care about losing sight of the things that matter.

What I mean is that LoL is probably closer to the meaning of life than a bunch of words that are making me wonder if I’m going to start rambling off to Mars.

48.5 minutes later, after playing two games of Nautilus (Naut) in LoL Ranked:

My greatest insights come from shallowness, not after shallowness, but from shallowness. The depth is in recognizing that there was no depth at all. It was always simple. The complication is the brain not withstanding. But the truth is closer to playing Naut meh-ly than anything that sounds like it came from the northern lights.

I am closest to happiness when I am just going about and along and just feeling things as any other person, confusion, moments of doubt, sleepiness, genuine insight. It’s a wonder we’re so alive. Not wonder as in confusion, but awe and sprightly fun, like a web novel like Mother of Learning.

It’s why I love reading web comics. I’m like an older man discovering new tricks, not that the comics themselves teach me things, but they show me, not by themselves, but most especially without intending to. LoL, web novels, and web comics remind of the actual shallowness of life, and they show it. There really was nothing that crazy after all. The craziness was the person still adjusting pre-simplicity.

Public Corpus (July 7, 2026)

Finally, I know my next project. If I wrote 4.75 million words in 3 years, most of which is private, I will treat this website I’ve been putting some entries on as its own big corpus of words. Instead of counting privately, this website will be its own archive of word count. So one can only imagine what it’ll look like when I break through one million words in actual full-on public. The best part is that the private writing will still go on, but what gets released will be whatever actually works enough as a big standalone publishable entry. So now, fun can re-begin! I will enjoy reaching one million words like I did when I first got it in private.

We’re currently at 255,536 words, so it’s already well on its way. I am excited to re-experience the million-word milestones, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Back of My Hand: Words Right Now (July 8, 2026)

It’s crazy to think that ten years ago, when I was 13 years old, I was so ignorant of so much yet I was experiencing so much at the time. 10 years later, I’ve processed so much and expanded my world-view (scope of the world). I myself have become so much more through just absorbing, integrating, and processing so much of it now.

I’ve seen so much of the world. I’ve experienced so much as a person. I’ve really put myself in so many different new situations and environments beyond what I could have ever even begun to predict or anticipate. And now, reflecting, I can feel it all in me. That I am all of these. It’s all so still alive. The past is a breathing green graden.

The best part is that I wrote millions of words (in the last three years) to show all that processing, so it’s something to look back at with actual readable text content. And writing allows what may seem done to be fresh and find footing again and still play a part.

Analogically, I’ve opened so many rooms of the house (the world), when, back then, I would only be a child barely even existing in the way one has internally mapped all of it beyond just spatial first-hand hands-on first-person experience.

I am essentially sitting here and holding so many different threads that are contradictory and irrelevant to one another. And while that would have overwhelmed me before, I can now just do that and let it happen even if it’s dissonant and is a state of entertaining so many different separately remote hyperspecific phenomenologies. And I do this naturally with the help of my computer and the internet where I have a list of these things all in one screen, whether in browser tabs, items in a Markdown list, or images on File Explorer.

I let myself be affected. I let myself be changed. It is what makes life rewarding. It makes respite and sleep satisfying.

I can feel everything I wrote years ago like yesterday, like the back of my hand. I can re-visit and re-discover. I can genuinely find that there’s so much always to gain from looking back and seeing how that collides with my growing self. There’s always this wonder and awe at what I’ve written. I know that to write that, I had to be that very person then and there, and it didn’t seem all that much at all since that was just accessible to me. But now, I see now that I don’t have access to everything I had at the time of writing them, it’s so much more powerful than it could have ever predicted, even if one may know the ideas of self-expression, since you don’t predict the future. You make the present at 100 percent of your capacity, direction, and decision-making. There’s no future. By the time you’ve gone for years, you won’t have felt at all the future, but the person that you are now as 100 percent. But yes, I do have the advantage of self-accomplishment, -evidence, -legacy, and -trust.

The benefit of the whole corpus is that you have your whole life like the back of your hand, not just as external memory, but as the very processing itself that wrote all that into existence, which itself changes the brain such that you know it like yesterday.

I can recall things “I shouldn’t remember.” Things that should be so far back or irrelevant that recalling only proves just how crucial it actually is that I’m writing daily. The uniquest experiences that just spring out of nowhere and just hit me like a crossbow bolt from who-knows-where.

I can see everything. Having my images, photos, Markdown lists, and browser tabs, you see all of the experiences and phenomenologies behind every single one of them. It comes back in full force, not in fragment. It hits you like a hyper-specific. And it does every time, that by the time I’m just staring at a masonry layout, a vertical browser tab list, a Markdown list, and a scroll down the images and folders in “Downloads” and also recalling so much more not from what I see but in different separately remote addition to all that, I’m just like, “This is what all this is.”

I focus only on the words I can write right now and just stick to that. The actual processing. Whatever else is just a wealth of so many things that I will just leave to whatever they are, even closing the tab or exiting the File Explorer or barely mentioning it again or not even listing it down at all or having any evidence like a screenshot or browser history of having experienced it at all. It’s this focus that had brought me to this point.

Self-Responses

So they let themselves have sessions of just holding, but spend most of their time in a flow state of what’s right in front of them being written right now.

Masters as Metric (July 10 – 12, 2026)

It’s so strange to think there are only 3418 Master players in League of Legends Philippines, but it makes sense. That I am one of them makes me rare, but at the same time, it really isn’t that crazy if we take into account literally everything in the average person’s life, even the average LoL gamer’s life. Those who can do so, and they go up to this rank. Those who have the time, enjoyment, and all that do so even more and sustainably up to Grandmaster (top 1,000) and then Challenger (top 300).

It’s my second time hitting Masters again two years later. That time, it was Maokai Jungle. Now, it’s Nautilus Support. In the end, it is what it is.

In the end, it’s just a game. The only reason that I care so much is that I know just how significant the game has had on my thinking. So I take gentle care and effort to ensure that I am at the very least Masters because it’s something very easy to point to (like a average word count) as a way to show my influences and the way that I see and experience the world.

It’s not about being smart. It’s about where I come from. This is what I spent time doing. It may not mean much. It’s a game. But it leaves me at top 3207, and that means something in its own way. That I spent time doing this.

It’s like:

2 days, 1 hour, and 16 minutes later (had to get access to the steam account again and look through my journal):

Skyrim for 104.4 hours, Mount & Blade: Warband for around 187.1 hours, and Stronghold Crusader for around 68.5 hours, in the last 3 months

It says a lot about who you are.

Seeing Goblin in Beatty (July 10, 2026)

It’s crazy and strange that I’ve reached such a point of writing and reading that I see the goblin in a 2002 biography about Warren Beatty. And I mean “point” as in millions upon millions of words and so much time spent dissecting the sentence level and hyper-compressed imagery and all that, not just in fiction, but non-fiction and just all manner of writing, across centuries even. It goes on and on.

I think the end result is as simple as “seeing” the goblin in something that doesn’t at all relate to it. That level of association. Of neural togetherness, or whatever it is in the cognitive sense. I don’t see a bunch of words. I see everything, if that makes sense.

I mean a literal fantasy goblin.

There’s no structural similarity. Words themselves (encompassing syntax) are words across all words. That’s what has happened.

And again, I don’t see words and syntax. Then it would just be dead. I see everything else. The goblin isn’t a word. It’s an everything else beyond the page. That’s what I mean by association and cognition.

I don’t mean this in a philosophical or existential way. I mean this in a mechanical brain sense.

To make sense of it in a way that’s understandable, though not quite literal, but close enough as a way of saying it that it’s probably clear enough to be an analogy: Hello becomes a goblin, a car, a world-box, a dog, a dog-machine, and so on.

Syntax isn’t just a hello of course. There’s an infinite way to arrange 20 words and those words are different every time. So you can imagine the level of reading, writing, and just pure imagination (image) and craft that one has to undergo in order to reach a point of experiencing that example of the goblin from the Warren Beatty 2002 biography.

And it’s so much more than that. Nothing at all indicates goblin even in the remotest sense. It has become at that point invisible, only knowable at the LLM-like black box of language as I’ve absorbed it.

It’s not words reduced to words. It’s words so over-trained and overloaded and over-learned and over-sensed and over-imagined and over-imaged that you can read anything and it could be anything. A biography and you feel a sci-fi from it. A fantasy and you feel a gritty noir. There’s a certain point of reading, writing, imagination, and craft that no scene becomes separable from the everything that it could very well just be at that moment without permission but just as a natural course of “goblin from Warren Beatty 2002 biography,” which extends to all manner of illogicalities only understood by the brain engendering that in the consciousness as mere fact (the feeling of this being normal or even common sense).

It’s strange because my brain just reads a whole page, and while I’m supposed to be immersed and to experience this as this story, I am, but at the same time, I am also experiencing totally and fully and comprehensively a sci-fi like this is what it is factually. Not delusionally. But in the way of imaginative experience, without actually imagining sci-fi as in the stereotypes or objects familiar with it, but as a feeling that you know so well through so much reading, writing, imagining, and working with words, imagery, images, and, very well, representations. The brain doesn’t actually lose anything. It gains so much more. That’s what I mean.

The books almost literally blur in ways that feels strange, like there’s no author, like I’m reading all these books and I can see all everything else but the words, but everything else through the words and syntax at the same time, across words and syntax. Words have become words, in the least reduced way possible and instead in the perhaps most hyper-associatively-compressed way possible.

Micro-reading or extremely close reading definitely likely has an impact on this development. I’ve done lots of linguistic strip-mining and have worked so hard on extreme “show, don’t tell” as well and have written in all kinds of registers and read equally as diversely and extremely in content and style. So it’s not raw number of words read, but the particular agency that I pursued and pushed all that time, the ways that I expressed it, the ways it was made to develop, go oblique (associate), and compress.

The fact that I’ve also had this practice of improvisational singing with guitar for years only adds to this big heap of “of course!” reasons.

It feels like I can get lightning from one page. If that’s not enjoyment, that would just be overwhelm. That I’ve honed and even cultivated it only shows just how much a brain can really add more to a life that’s already simply content and to find something even more intrinsic even as it does point out something awesome in its own right. Intrinsic here naturally brings us back to simplicity.

It’s not really an intensity any more than it is life as something to be freshly enjoyed, like sun-dried fruit.

Hyper-Compressed Imagery vs. Imaginative Gestalt: Craft (July 12, 2026)

It’s strange that I can explain it now. I feel that I’ve mastered hyper-compressed imagery (HCI), yet I’ve lost imaginative gestalt (IG). It’s not that I don’t imagine when I’m writing HCI. But no matter how lacking my prose was then, I was always writing out of something that was distinctly (highly or extremely) original in the way of a whole gestalt. I was holding onto something that could only be described as imaginative since the prose, as lacking as they were, were clearly shadows on Plato’s cave wall for the actual reality they were trying to represent, not by way of self-contained hyper-compressed imagery where the prose comes first before the actual story so that it’s readily done in every sentence, but by way of 2 dimensions, obliquely, across the whole passage, hinting at 4 dimensions. Does that make sense?

I came to this conversation again because I was trying to find the next level of compression. Then I realized I was constantly hitting this thing I wrote 6 years ago. And now I’m realizing what it was. The next level of compression beyond extreme “show, don’t tell” in HCI and beyond private to public corpus was this IG that I could still clearly recall 6 years later when reading that short passage I wrote. Strangely enough, it was a “show, don’t tell” that went beyond what HCI could ever accomplish.

And I’m not talking about re-reading. I’m talking about instant effect upon reading. I could already tell what that passage from 6 years ago was accomplishing was even more compressed at an immediate glance than what I’m doing now with my words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Maybe, I had to do all this to re-realize what I had then, but to do so even more deliberately and mechanically. To generate mechanically IG, since it was never mystical or purely imaginative given that there is a passage that clearly creates it every time it is glanced at.

This one was strange because it’s not a short hyper-compressed sentence. It was the whole passage at 638 words, yet from the very first line, everything was coherent, and one didn’t need to read the whole thing literally to experience IG. The IG was there from the start up to the end, and wherever one read, it was there and instant. It was whole. Gestalt.

And again, it’s not the prose per se. Nothing in the prose can be mechanically understood at the sentence level. It’s that sense of reaching clearly for something that was there and present. Like the way someone believes something is there and reaches out with their hand and it feels like they’re truly holding onto something. That IG.

Every thing in the prose was written somehow mechanically to generate that IG. Yet it’s not prose per se or mechanics per se. It’s that gigantic gap that was being implied. That insane level of “show, don’t tell” that way surpasses HCI.

And I should probably make a point that it isn’t about rupturing in a dream-like way. There are stories that capture it while maintaining a steady slice-of-life pace, because there’s that sense of something so much bigger, which, somehow, HCI doesn’t seem to accomplish but IG does.

Interestingly, maybe the greatest compression is to abandon compression at the sentence level or even the passage level.

Each sentence (all the way up to the level of the passage), instead of being hyper-compressed or self-contained, holds instead the gigantic gap implied. I don’t know how that works, but I’m describing it, because that might be it. Like when I was making Roblox games or playing Minecraft back in the early 2010s. Literally, mechanically, it was nothing much, but I saw something way beyond what the “sentence level” or even “passage level” showed me. That was IG.

I just need to be right about the small things in relation to the gigantic gap, not right in terms of hyper-compressed self-contained imagery. In the little prose, in the little mechanics, rather than reflecting themselves in echo, do the Plato’s cave work of being just positionally and linguistically exact for the whole it’s throwing stones at. In Minecraft and Roblox back in the 2010s, I was posturing that way. Every meager thing I did was in exact relation to that gigantic gap, so even when I “failed,” I didn’t. I never did. The gigantic gap is still there, and I recall those meager things as reflective of it rather than of themselves.

You would think it was the whole of the passage, but it isn’t. It’s the whole beyond the passage. The passage itself is a sentence in relation to the gestalt. The sentences collectively of the passage don’t jointly generate the whole, since that means it’s exhausted in the scope of the passage itself, a self-contained, hyper-compressed, short-lived, imagery thing. But we’re not talking about the shape of something that even the passage cannot graze. Yet it is mechanical.

IG doesn’t exist. Yet it “exists” because of all the interpretations and renderings of it. All the passages and sentences are in service of something so far beyond, transcendent.

If it was the whole of the passage, then the passage can be stopped there and there would be nothing else to produce that would at all feel like a gentle expansion of what could be uncovered (though not necessarily uncovered than just writing more of the same in the same motion of reaching for gestalt and of gestalt itself as subtance property) more of the gestalt. But the gestalt is beyond the passage, and thus the passage is expandable while holding intrinsically to the gestalt. That’s why the sentence from the start of the passage can point to it instantly. The conviction of the gestalt is there, which is probably what makes the gestalt felt.

And no, it’s not hyper-compressed imagery in the sense of “worn,” “weathered,” “faded,” and all of these things with which I am already so well familiar while writing HCI, which I did in an unbroken 30,000 words already recently which was characterized by these kinds of “implied object histories,” which encompass dialogue as well. But again, HCI is not IG.

It’s where there are no objects à la HCI. Compression at the object level is useless and lame. It’s already been surpassed. It’s almost generic in retrospect, no matter how much you pump hyper-realism and hyper-specificity into it, because it falls short of IG which goes way beyond the limitations of object-oriented “implication.” (I would even discourage the use of this term “implication” or the term “show, don’t tell” for it, even if it does technically fall under them, just in the way that’s now disgusting even to think of it even being at all considered of the same quality or breed or kind or type or species or existence.)

And there is no small thing.

It’s not poetic HCI.

I think a good example is “I am the one.” It’s vague. Generic even. As a starting line? But it could very well point to an already well-understood or -conceptualized or -experienced imaginative gestalt. That there’s a whole throughline already in place, not as story or plot or events, but as gestalt, the way you turn away from something for six years and know it already from it not in HCI but in the way all of it is Plato’s cave wall. 

But the thing is that I could feed it into an AI, that 638-word passage, and it won’t see it. But I see it.

And it’s not personal either. It works for things not written by myself. That’s the thing. The difference is that those external works were already written, so you might say, “Of course, you’re just imagining the text as you read it rather than pointing to some gestalt.” That’s why I have to point to something that’s actually incomplete, but external works work too. It’s why I don’t have to finish reading the story, but just a few chapters and I already know that IG is there.

And it’s a throughline that exists independent of the author yet which the author can access. Not mystical or platonic. Mechanical. The words themselves point to an IG, mechanically, not by virtue of authorial intention, but by virtue of words to gestalt. The words themselves mechanically generate conviction of gestalt, which AI cannot detect at the sentence level or in the collection of sentences themselves or even at the level of the passage itself, yet which is still mechanical.

And it’s not the whole of the passage either. It’s the mechanically implied whole beyond the scope of the passage. And it’s also not non-specific. “I am the one” is a risky example I used because it can be easily be conflated with genericism or writing prompting as the key to what I’m saying, but it in no way relates so as to be conflatable. This would make it still sentence-level if one relied on generic sentences.

Authorial intent is not governing intent but rather what IG are you pointing at.

It is essentially a craft problem, but not sentence-level, which we assume of craft, because we rely on reality as only what is currently in text rather than that which we point text at, which results in HCI.

But if we make use of how the text (sentence, passage) mechanically “generates” a gestalt through conviction, then we transcend HCI.

One essentially has to believe or posture or position or orient or conviction (as a verb), which is hard when you’re taught that the only thing that exists are what you do say in HCI, so you stop this gestalt-ian structural moves. You don’t play for the game. You play for the single minion gold. You play for the single match instead of thinking about long-term growth, where it’s not about the single instance of fluctuating between Masters and Diamond (League of Legends Ranked), but between you actually objectively getting better at the game in a way that screams gestalt rather than sentence. You allow yourself to fail and to go oblique because that you’re working right outside the [edge of the] big implied gigantic gap or shape of the gestalt. It’s not directly last-hitting or this-match-winning, but it is long-term growth that makes your fundamentals even more robust and sturdier.

You essentially have to believe the gap is the material, is the content, is the thing itself, not the words, not the sentences, not the compressions, not the imagery, not the syntax, not the paragraphs, not the passage. The prose can absolute disappear, and the gap is still there. So one has to trust-fall into it itself.

The better I got at writing under the view of it as this object-oriented craft, the more I trusted the vehicle to do all the work of the gestalt. It became its own container (“destination,” “as the point”). And that is a powerful way to improve at a bunch of words, but not necessarily at the point of “bunch of words.” And the worst part is that like I said, the vehicle isn’t even the vehicle the way you’d think it was truly necessary, because it doesn’t have to be there. I could forget the prose itself of a story (not my work), yet recall the imaginative gestalt it provoked in me, not of the scenes themselves, but of that thing way beyond them (the scenes, the passage, the sentences, which I’ve already long forgotten). What actually got me the whole time while reading it never existed, yet it’s there. I thought that if I wrote the prose, I would write the IG, but then I realized it was never the prose at all as this HCI. It was instead the posture that all the prose cohered around, outside the edges of. If you looked at the internal logic of the prose itself, it didn’t make any sense at all. It was wrong in all the ways HCI would say, yet the IG was there. Its internal logic was screaming the whole time. Mechanics in two: HCI and IG.

From what I recall, my most beloved writings wrote at something (conviction, proof not by words or internal logic of prose, but by phenomenological experience, imaginative gestalt), where everything (written) was provisional and discardable because the gap was unmoving and the text at best a signifier of a signifier of a signifier of a signifier of a signifier (shorthand of a shorthand of a shorthand). My worst ones assumed it held reality inside its text margins, or, worse, that it was reality itself. The less refined the prose, the less I relied on it as reality itself. Returning to that seeing capacity I had due to structural prose limitations is going to be difficult—writing-at.

“Why does the object move like that in 3D? It’s because it moves like that in 4D. It may look nonsenical in our view, but it makes all the sense in 4D. The disappearing and all isn’t illogical. It’s just not to our internal logic.”

More often than not, I fight AI, the text-bot, to validate lived experiences themselves, because text seeks always to overwhelm and overcome reality by replacing it. It is our fight to throw the IG at HCI. AI, without knowing or knowing only at best to the internal logic of text, is constantly in the posture of undermining, invalidating, dismissing, psychoanalyzing.

The very reality it should be representing is itself discarded in favor of the sense of logic that text seems to provide. The reality that it supposedly carries inside. That it is reality. I’ve spent so much time getting better at prose just to realize it could never actually validate me except by reaching such a point of exhaustion of prose and a point of proficiency of it that one writes instead with the IG in mind rather than HCI. But yes, this is still prose, and it is still mechanical.

Writing better shadows is irrelevant to their alignment with the actual thing they’re a shadow of.

1 hour and 2.5 minutes later:

When I look at a list of titles, specifically A Bride of a Summer’s Day by Catherine Louisa Pirkis, Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, Short Fiction by Ring Lardner, Blind Corner by Dornford Yates, Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, The Four Feathers by A. E. W. Mason, Jenny by Sigrid Undset, and The Cruise of the Nona by Hilaire Belloc, I know I’ll get a bubble-everything. It’s cozy, easy, and known. Each book is a complete-set in itself.

But it’s different when it’s my 628-word passage from 2020. It’s the tip of the gestalt that long-running web novels create even from the instant first lines and paragraphs alone, like the tip of an MMORPG world (think a single screenshot of a town square with inventory open with specific items and tooltips and stats and skills and character appearances and chat logs and numbers and GUIs and textures and names, in the way of belonging). There’s a difference in intention and in actual mechanics and prose that point to very different experiences.

The former is an adventure in itself, whereas the latter is an adventure in progress (or something like in situ).

logging into a bustling server… community comments, and future updates.

This is what HCI ends and IG opens.

Yet that 628 words is long dead (and has been for six years), but it is mechanically alive in the way that this quote suggests experientially.

It’s not just the titles themselves as books with images and author names. When I read the first paragraphs of the 2020 one and those titles, I could tell they were diverging. Tradition was going toward a closed system. The 2020 was going toward an open one.

Communication (July 14, 2026)

I’ve simply always admired people who are good at communicating, and I’ve long emulated them. It’s why I feel admiration for people with Youtube video titles like “Inside you is a retard, psycho, killer, pervert” or who begin the video with “I’m a hater.” You may think immediately that these are just shallow, generic, or broad-strokish. But the point is that communication always grabs things that people know so well and twists it just enough to say something genuine and heartfelt. It’s not about being right instantly or even over the long course of the video or entry or passage. It’s not about being it at all. It’s just about knowing how to say something and to just say it because it’s the only way to express it, like the thought I had “the present haunting the past instead of the other way around” as a way to describe the self-owned, self-possessed, portable, free-moving present taking over all the local places in a way like haunting.

26-in-3 (July 14, 2026)

2024

• 05 (started on May 28) - 21,431 words (63 entries)
• 06 - 206,902 (510)
• 07 - 340,564 (821)
• 08 - 212,656 (603)
• 09 - 143,803 (256)
• 10 - 190,152 (314)
• 11 - 182,170 (338)
• 12 - 157,575 (277)

2025

• 01 - 178,619 (346)
• 02 - 230,672 (312)
• 03 - 249,997 (239)
• 04 - 279,473 (179)
• 05 - 188,375 (155)
• 06 - 144,019 (222)
• 07 - 154,913 (312)
• 08 - 115,699 (277)
• 09 - 129,532 (311)
• 10 - 26,289 (77)
• 11 - 114,749 (354)
• 12 - 207,649 (699)

2026

• 01 - 131,986 (474)
• 02 - 58,996 (145)
• 03 - 112,054 (249)
• 04 - 54,517 (163)
• 05 - 55,818 (163)
• 06 - 99,021 (223)

I only now integrated all of it under one very specific format, and now, I can see them all in 26 monthly files and 3 yearly folders (not including this current month’s file). And it’s so strange. I’m tempted to stop writing forever out of sheer what-the-fuck-did-I-do-to-myself. I can see just how much I drowned in my reconstructions, how immersed I was. 26 months of my life, uninterrupted. And the thing is that it started back in July 4, 2023, but I’m just focusing on 2024 since that’s when journaling truly became this very intense daily thing since 2023 was all about raw-dumping autobiographically without daily journal-y timestamps.

If I saw the 26-in-3 the whole time like the back of my hand, it wouldn’t have been as effective. You only see the map once you’re truly gone so deep into all of it like a child pre-internet.

It may look like scale to some, but it really just looks like a little fucking pond that I drowned in. I was in my own created world, yet it was my own self, my own experience, perception, the way that I saw the world, as imperfectly reconstructed and articulated as it was, with how much I re-approached everything again and again and found that the words revealed just as much as the reconstructions—trying to put things into words was itself a form of discovery/self-discovery—with passing time stretching across a wide range of perspective and experience. I’ve reached such a point.

I’ve spent three years journaling.

If I do this for three more years given this 26-in-3 I’ve now crested, I don’t even know.

Is journaling even that crazy? As much as I’ve journaled, I didn’t come to it by natural affinity. I came to it because I was forced to after years of trying to express, communicate, and exorcise. I may have written a decade ago, but that was just for fun. I wasn’t actually going to become a writer. I only started having dreams of the writer me 7 years ago, and I was already 16 at the time. I’m very new to writing.

Of course, I will always write notes. I always have. When I would open Windows Notepad and jot down cool Minecraft seeds or ideas for Roblox game coding, that was already a kind of writing. But journaling the way that I’ve built it up to be, beyond the personal reasons which are now in a sense fulfilled, is a whole nother thing altogether.

I can’t take it back. What it’s done to me. To my hands. To my brain. To the way I process information, experiences, emotions, ideas, thoughts, imaginations, and all manner of things related to thought and perception.

It was just a bunch of words. That’s the worst and best part.

I’m tired of my fresh eyes. The ones that allowed me to get this far. The ones that never trusted the words to accumulate ever so as to make the eyes redundant, to make verbal assumption supreme. It’s those eyes that kept me writing as an act always after the eyes, never before.

You know the saying “To want to have written?” as a test of whether someone truly wants to write? “Do you want to write or to have written?” Well, as for me, right now at least, after never “having written,” I want to have written. I want to allow the 26-in-3.

I want to trust it enough to lean on it, as much as that’s been the very thing I’ve been opposing this whole time. I’ve never once leaned on it like external structure the way I did with my external structures in childhood. It makes sense though. I lost everything in the blink of an eye, so I’ve become a fan, if not an enthusiast, of portability, of losing everything, of starting over, of fresh eyes, of never letting the world catch me off guard since I’m always pinching myself back into the crutchless death-is-one-second-away existential present.

But this is the first time I have surprising evidence of something lasting, that I myself built, as much as I shook the idea of permanence forever out of my assuming mind’s daily loadout. 3 years is long enough to lean on itself, maybe.

It had to withstand its self-consuming disbelieving grieving loss-wrecked wrath and to itself become a standing tower.

41 minutes of thinking, staring, and letting things pass through my mind later:

If it feels like a tiny pond, let this not be a conclusion of either futility or scale. Let this instead be the foundation for whatever and wherever ambition’s taking me next. I am re-adjusting to the 26-in-3 proportion as the new baseline.

Random Note (July 14, 2026)

Just over 8,000 entries and just shy of 4 million words, and I can use Obsidian’s Random Note to open a random note. This will change a lot of things, if not everything. It’s not that I wasn’t writing it this whole time. But I never accessed all of it like this. I didn’t even know what the total entries were for a long time and never really thought about it as a per-entry basis. This feature will certainly “entrify” things.

Re-Existing From Scratch (July 14 – 15, 2026)

I’m living life to the fullest, and I am so self-buffered and self-provisioned that it’s crazy. And this is itself existence for me.

But can I not? (Why am I asking that question?)

Can I not live life to the fullest? Can I not be so satisfied and be so challenged and be so rewarded and be so tested? Can I not be fulfilled?

Why am I saying this?

I want to go away from it. I want to be unfulfilled. I want life’s challenges to overwhelm me, and instead of finding ways to manage them through pushing through them and growing skills, I want only to cope with what I can. I want to vanish from my life success.

To fuck them interpretations to the ground:

No revolt against an identity. No expectations. No performance. No setting back. No “reliable, self-sufficient one”. That’s the stupidest over-heard thing I’ve ever heard in my life that reads like a fucking self-help book from the 1st century of earth, that level of triteness. I specifically didn’t mention the word “resilient” because of that all-too-common misunderstanding. And it’s not “exhausting” the way you’d think of “carrying the version of yourself that has”. That is like talking to a non-existent person that just doesn’t exist in this conversation.

I want to start over. When I wasn’t living life to the fullest, when I wasn’t so buffered, when I wasn’t so provisioned, when I wasn’t so “existent”, when I wasn’t so satisfied, when I wasn’t so challenged and thus rewarded and tested and fulfilled, when I wasn’t finding ways to manage and push through and grow skills.

Not start over as in to restart. I want to start over without the implication of starting over.

I want to re-exist from scratch.

I want to meet life fresh without the feeling of an older person learning new tricks or “adopting a beginner’s mindset.” I genuinely just want to get away from all this. I don’t want things to work out, to be satisfied and fulfilled. I don’t want to grow. I don’t want to be this person who’s doing well and who’s about to face challenges and grow and discover and experience new experiences and not get jaded and find new ways to adopt fresh eyes. I don’t want to find new ways. I don’t want to learn new tricks. I want to meet life fresh without adopting anything. I just want to start over.

The level of frustration I feel not being taken seriously and being joshed at as just another loser who wants to die.

I’m jaded of my inability to be jaded.

I want to read a story and be that person and genuinely see things through their eyes. I don’t want to be the person reading. I want to see things fresh through their jaded eyes. I don’t want my “fresh eyes.” I don’t want my inability to be jaded. I want to meet life fresh through their jaded eyes.

I wish I could be jaded if it means I could meet life fresh.

Added:

I always find new things. Emphasis on “always” and its oxymoronic relationship to “new.”

Maybe I should stop writing and try to spend the next few months just binge-reading or something. I don’t know if that’ll help, but that should introduce some new jadedness and help me get away from my fresh eyes.

I want to forget myself, simply put. I want to stop seeing things with fresh eyes. I want to stop finding new things. I want to binge-read so hard that I’m just a husk. I want to lose something when the story ends. And I don’t want that loss to be on me.

I’m lying to myself about this of course. It would have to be a story that never ends, or I would have to have an endless list of captivating stories. But naturally, that’s impossible. I’ll never know whether something gets me or not. Numberless stuff that just goes all over a very wide spectrum of interest. So I would have only myself to rely on when it comes to generating the stuff that I interact with all day every day, the input still bigger than the output sure, but the input never truly far away from the person, even if nothing actually gets outputted for a time.

Everything that really got me nostalgically points back to me in the end. No one will get why I care so much about something that wasn’t even that crazy in retrospect, except only in lived retrospect.

I am the only person everything happens to, as far as I’m aware or perceiving.

What makes this interesting is that I’m not tired of myself, nor am I not tired of myself. What makes me myself is that I am sticking to myself, especially now when I can’t just blame negative emotions, since this isn’t self-negativity, just feeling a little err about reaching this point of my life where I’m all the good and great things and wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with all of that given that I’m going to find a way to do something about all of that or react in a way that opens up room for doing something with all of that in a way that never proves wasteful or eliminating but always transformative like transformative works.

It feels like the only way to grow is to do something that feels like self-sabotage, but that wouldn’t be self-sabotage at all then. Ha-ha.

Oh I’m going to put myself out there and make a humiliation out of myself (self-sabotage)

->

Oh, I got stronger because of it. Fuck… In fact, I really made something out of it. (actually not self-sabotage)

The problem is embarrassment, awkwardness, confusion, and unfinishedness adds so much, which is its own growth. All of it. Everything tangential, indirect, peripheral, trivial, irrelevant. Eventually, with time, as one continues and keeps their eyes fresh, things happen, and one finds. New. Ways.

I started playing LoL again to jolt myself out of myself and to “self-sabotage” in a way that allows me just to get away from this becoming discovering fresh eyes person I’ve become through writing. And what happened is that LoL continues to demonstrate just how much I can grow and learn, and I’m in Masters, and I’ve fully shown and demonstrated that the desire to be impacted was very much fulfilled, just in a way that went right back to growth, where my desire to do my best and then lose and get frustrated becomes fulfilled toward growth. The frustration itself crucial in it. Everything. I can’t. It’s impossible.

I let myself be changed, and that happens in ways that feel like I’m always in control, since no matter how affected or impacted or transformed or acted-upon I am, I’m always there, like I was supposed to be, no matter how embarrassed, embarrassing, awkward, confusing, not that I’m winning when I’m in a losing LoL match or completely composed when I’m frustratedly rambling. But even across and through all that, somehow, some way, I’m not truly doing anything but changing in the most passive yet most active or proactive and masterful way possible. That control of ceding control.

Meet Life Fresh Through Jaded Eyes (July 15, 2026)

I’m just going to have to trust that something will eventually be un-absorbable so I can create or engage in something that’s truly separate from myself. I mean, that’s the only one.

But what would it be? An external bubble world? Separate from my own (this Subjectivity[?])?

How do I escape velocity?

The problem is that no matter what I do read, even if I am encountering actually crazy external depicted worlds, because everything is articulable (wordable), there’s this absorbability in everything, and it’s not like writing is the cause, but cognition itself through its ability to be aware of and to perceive everything.

Peter might’ve been reaching for something, but what cognition could have revealed to me the answer is long gone, overwritten numberless times that no matter how much I can read now what I wrote from that mind then, it wouldn’t bring it back except from, at best, a “phenomenological” hint of that Ozymandias.

Logically speaking, 2022 me should have the answers. I mean, it’s the year before I started writing autobiographically as an actual thing and practice.

Is fragmentation the key? If there’s no center into which everything is absorbed, then maybe there will actually be un-absorbability in the sense that even as things are experienced, perceived, and discernible, you never allow it to re-group, like think LoL.

But fragmenting yourself is done by yourself. It might be impossible to undo the fragmentation because it was never induced, but a pre-state. To induce it in post requires a deliberate organization of already combined powers to engage in things that allow for a sense of unsettlement, but which fall under things that are ultimately absorbed. Moments of embarrassment, as much as they feel fragmentary, are felt as fragmentary by one “already-creature,” rather than truly fragmentary.

No matter how delayed the gratification is, the one doing the delaying is still self-gratifying. Shit.! Like the paradox of meditation.

Will to power is itself self-empowering no matter how “self-overcoming” it sounds.

I’m always surprised, but that feeds the surprised. That very surprise is feed. Not the resilience or the strength or the newfound knowledge, but itself the phenomenal, the surprise, the height of it, like embarrassment, like a frustrated ramble. Everything is experienced as self-overcoming, or self-empowering, or self-becoming.

I’m not making a claim. I’m describing what it’s like. How I experience it.

It’s not even commenting or non-commenting. It’s not even anything at all in particular. It’s everything. It’s the allowing of it all.The letting-oneself-be-affected-be-changed-be-impacted-be-taught-be-influenced-be-overcome-be-delayed-be-limited-be-forgotten-be-all-that. It’s that very thing that keeps and enjoys and finds something self-empowering somehow out of it all not as an end result but as a conviction that happens right in real time as the embarrassment and the frustrated ramble is being incurred or incanted or casted.

And it’s not even emotional in the way of a specific emotion. It’s the very thing that opens up room for emotions. It smirks in the middle of it and cries in the middle of smirking and smirks in the middle of crying. It feels empowerment in its very inability. It’s why I wrote:

 I’m jaded of my inability to be jaded.

 I want to meet life fresh through their jaded eyes.

I’m not rejecting depth. That’s the worst part. That’s what makes it even more annoying of a thing. I’m accepting it all and then some and going so far and beyond just to get lost in it, and in the end, I am, still. Reconstructing, fresh-eyed, growing, learning, little fragile thing that somehow is the most rubbery thing ever, not that it goes back, but it gets irreversibly changed and somehow that becomes its most beautiful, stable, and dense shape. It keeps absorbing, getting challenged, tested, and growing throguh it, without shying away or pre-processing or doing anything of the sort.

How about a flu? Yeah, that happened. I have evidence that after that month of intense sickness, I bounced back, perhaps even found even more fuel. Like, what the fuck, man.

I reliably and “yeah that’s the guy! that’s him! he does that!” always find new things.

I wish writing down for three years was enough to show me that I change, but it’s not like I was ever disputing that. I never disputed change. I am changing. I know that from fact. Yet it’s the super wide range of who I am across those evidential journaling three years of so much change that is the very thing that I am and then some from all that I didn’t write down or pointed to so obliquely or complexly through nested expression of experiences, and even more so beyond that because I am not this wide range as a fixed thing since I never saw the shape of my accumulated writing really and only reconstructed myself daily with fresh eyes. I don’t hate that or myself. I just don’t know what to do, and I reliably don’t know what to do.

And the worst part is that it isn’t even exhausting. If it was, then I would have stopped a long time ago, because it has gotten really intense. But in the end, I eat the very things that should have shut me up and just shot me dead.

I’m not invulnerable. All my life, I’ve been the totally opposite. I never ever wanted to be special. I just wanted to be okay. And no matter what I did, I was here the entire time. Experiencing everything as fresh as day time, and it burns, and it’s beautiful, and it’s wonderful, and I feel it all, and I’ve been slapped for being sensitive, yet I’m here, somehow. I’m not even here in the way of detachment. I’ve always been here, and I’ve been here my entire life. I’ve been as fragile as day time, as delicate as clouds, as tender as a small childish cry. Yet here I am, after everything. I still feel everything, and somehow, that is getting misunderstood as a claim of invulnerability. What a funny-world. I wanted to say hello, to show my humanity, only to live and to keep thriving and to still be here and then to be called out for making claims I never intended to make. That’s life I guess.

I still see beauty like day time. That’s the benefit, I guess, ha-ha. Just not something anyone would pay for if they knew what I had to go through just to continue having that capacity all this time. And so, I am here. Somehow, Palpatine returned. I’ve grown so much, yet I’m still here as I always was.

I’m reliably embarrassed and fragile, yet I’m here, so I’m not exactly fragile. I let myself be changed and become self-empowered in that very changing and letting-be and allowing and letting space and widening of range of experience, of change, of becoming. It’s funny. Almost. Yeah, no, it actually is.

How does one even stop growing?

It’s not even like a positive thing. Well, it’s not a negative thing either. It’s just… It just is. I used to frame it positively, and I got lots out of it and really extracted lots of creative value, but it’s not like I exhausted it or anything. Like I said, it’s inexhaustible. It’s fresh-eyed. But is there even a way just to stop growing? I’m jealous of those characters in those stories. It feels like they’re trapped in a kind of external bubble world stasis, where they never truly grow or, at least, that’s what it feels like. But I’m as unjaded as they come while retaining the wide range and the accumulated history of reconstructions. It’s strange.

I’m as vulnerable and heartfelt and offendable as day one. I’ve always been myself in that sense. No matter what I’ve gone through, no matter how far I’ve gone, no matter how much I stock up on accumulations, I never do. It always feels like a rapture/rupture, like getting affected and really, really getting affected and often times not really being able to explain it beyond just putting it into words and knowing why, but which never truly stops the person that just is, heart on sleeve.

I have nothing to show for myself. There’s nothing to me. I am always an open book because there’s nothing written on it. It’s all from scratch. I wish there was something to protect, but all I have really is myself, this little fragile heartfelt thing that genuinely needs, wants, and feels things and cannot help but see the world as day time.

I’ve embarrassed myself so many times because I believe and feel so hard. I really get lost. I really do. I really get hyped up when something really captivates me. And it really gets me. And I really do feel it. When I get frustrated, I really am. It hurts when someone says something that feels hurtful, but at the same time, there’s a part of me that knows that no matter what, there’s something pleasurable about being alive and feeling things, no matter how ache-y it gets. I cry, smile, laugh, ramble, rant like morning breakfast.

There’s nothing hateable about this at all. This is the same sensitivity that made those Roblox games for my siblings, that cried during praise and worship in church, that had so much fun with my siblings, that cried when bad things happened in the family, that had those little fragile heartfelt sincere feelings. It’s why I was so alive and felt so happy and fulfilled and richly densely wholeheartedly living.

But the same fresh eyes are now turning on themselves and saying, “Fuck fresh eyes, I need to meet life fresh through others’ jaded eyes.” It’s a deep empathy (aliveness, humanity, heartfeltness, honesty, vulnerability) that’s still the same motion it’s always been, just a further evolution or development or expression or journey of it. It’s funny. It’s hilarious, in fact. I always come back to myself. Wanting to “re-exist from scratch,” wanting to be jaded to meet life fresh. It’s always been the same motion.

I just needed to call it out. That I want to abandon my subjectivity somehow is itself the same motion that makes me me. It’s the same thing. And now, the case has closed. (Meta-claiming.) What makes my subjectivity what it is is anti-subjective, or desirous of escaping my absorbing and fresh eyes. The same that should feel embarrassed in situations that should be embarrassing yet somehow claims and self-possesses in/over it like performance art/act. There’s nothing to defend except my vulnerability, humanity, fragility, lack of defence, confusion. My truest strength is somehow my greatest weakness, not that my strength is itself a weakness, but that my weakness itself is my strength. What makes me weak is what makes me powerful. My fragility is the source of my confidence and assertiveness. If it was just resilience, then I wouldn’t have anything to work with. But fragility gives me so much to work with and is how I create. If there’s something I get so offended by, it’s someone denying how offended I am or how frustrated I am or how weak, fragile, and emotional I am. This offence means I’ve become one with them. I’ve integrated them. Naturally, I will find my greatest confidence in that very inability, in that very being-exposed. I defend the very hype that I feel when I’m reading web novels. I get so passionate and angry when someone dares stop me from feeling this feeling of like and enjoyment of it. Because this is me.

It’s so easy to retreat into repetitive tasks like linguistically strip-mining books (which is basically very slow reading or micro-reading). But it’s its own temperer since it makes me focus entirely on something external. But yeah, it does inevitably feed me, since I am made of such experiences where I forget myself and just focus on what’s right in front of me. That’s what makes me who I am, in the way that someone is just a blank open book and yet, somehow, in that, self-possesses, like someone who knows fresh eyes reliably and consistently amid the inconsistencies, which is a strange verbalization.

I just have to try even harder. If it’s not fresh enough, make it fresher. More. More. More. (Until, inevitably, no matter how much I try to deny it, I am even more undeniable, the very deniability itself being my undeniability. I just have to try harder. I have to escape velocity.)

My existence is inevitable from inside myself. I am not an “inevitable” Thanos to beat externally. (I can’t un-be.) I guess I’m like King from One Punch Man in the sense that this entire concern is what makes me me. If I lean onto myself, I will lose my King power, but that I keep always finding ways to fresh-eyes is what makes me, up to the point of asking to re-exist from scratch. That very thought alone or relationship to oneself is self-essential.

(And in the end,) honesty requires owning it.

Self-Worldbuilding (July 15, 2026)

What comes next after this? Lord of the Mysteries (LOTM)? Even if I’ve addressed so much more than LOTM could ever cover, I’ve not actually covered all that much when it comes to prose as this world-building fiction (WBF) thing. Journaling has remained primary in the last three years. I noticed this when I read a recent fiction story I wrote Ax God. It may have had the idea for something truly astonishing, but the prose itself didn’t really say all that much. It felt so untranslated, if that makes sense. But prose was never ever going to be for itself. It was always subordinate to expression and to capturing and covering, of which journaling was the site. But what if I generate something external in the way of prose as separate from expression, as its own primary, as its own coverage, as its own WBF, rather than anything journaling has learned to accomplish easily, swiftly, and rewardingly?

I get the feeling this was never the point of writing for me, so I don’t think I’ll be able to do this, even if I already have done it. It was in service of improving articulation of expression rather than for its own WBF sake.

And journaling was always in tandem with the person writing. It was never in service of itself. The entry was surely self-contained, but only as much as the person could extend themselves to it. So it was closer to thinking on the page while doing things like pointers for action-oriented tasks than anything truly self-worldbuilding (SWB). Even if I may grab all the entries and programmatically have them turned each into a file and then use Obsidian’s “Random Notes” feature to open a random note and to get better at diagnosing entry-ness, I never served the entry, but the meaning being made, which could be approximately tracked but never truly repeated from reality onto paper so as to say there’s even the hints of a SWB you’d associate a whole 1.5-million-word genre fiction web novel, where genre was still ultimately servicing SWB, with.

But as long as the self is allowed to provide the crucial vivification and meaning-being-made that makes the text viable, there will always be that sense of an inescapable, undeniable, inevitable consolidative-becoming where no matter how much I accumulate, I am always finding new things.

But making text do all the hard work is so inefficient. If I write all the possible connective tissue at a level of abundance you’d expect to find instead in a lengthy episodic web novel, it wouldn’t be entries anymore the way I’ve long crafted them to be. It would be a lot of yapping, but without the buffer or safety net of it being immersively genre-expected.

Fictionalization (July 15, 2026)

The only answer post–personal journaling consolidation, especially 26-in-3 (4 million words in 26 monthly files in 3 yearly folders in journal), might just be fictionalization, but I have to believe in fiction prose as load-bearing again. The problem is that after my most recent personally ground-breaking fiction work George, disorientation has settled in. There’s no identity. It’s been thrown out of orbit. The voice is just all gone. Something new that transcends what came before needs to emerge. If not mythical-declarative action prose, if not extreme “show, don’t tell” (hyper-sensory, hyper-realistic, mumblecore, impressionistic, micro-details, micro-gestures, hyper-compressed imagery, etc.)? Something that justifies itself against all odds.

Distrusting Words (July 15, 2026)

I see now. When it comes to writing fiction, fantasy, isekai, protagonists, and goblins, I’ve lost interest in external events or threats because I’ve long dissolved this idea that I’ve ever been anything but whatever comes as it hits me, so rather than becoming through a specific set of events and goblins I’ve designed, I become through the very inability to deny myself regardless of the input and the things around me. The “keep coming back to myself” part is probably the culprit here. And that includes my own words. If my own words are just a bunch of words, then there really is nothing but the person that goes, goes, goes throughout it all, through goblin or whatever thing I say.

Well, it’s not as if I can’t just very easily write a character like that and then put him in the usual fantasy world and see how that plays out. However, it’s up to me whether I find that genuinely captivating, insightful, or whatever spurs me to actually do it.

The problem might be that I’ve lost the desire to design, to make more of myself, to self-express as just an end state or goal or idea or thought to follow in mind regardless of event, consequence, or method. I’ve spent so much of my time putting myself in situations in which I am acted upon rather than designing some inner world or escaping to some simulation of the world as I see it. It’s not that journaling isn’t in some way something like that, but the difference is that I report my experiences as I put myself in those situations since they’re fruitful rather than contrived.

Maybe, it’s because I don’t trust words anymore or for a long time now or ever since I started writing, but even more so recently. And fiction has become that very bastion of bunches of words. It’s probably why journaling still works so well. It relies on the self to vivify it, to keep it alive, because it is just a bunch of words. It’s so able to be hyper-compressed because it trusts the meaning-making that the person is doing in the act of writing than the bunch of words themselves alone.

My current effectiveness as a writer is probably directly linked to me spitting in the face of the words and working from that distrust, which paradoxically leads me down imagery (analogies, metaphors, terms, declared structures, concepts) that trust the reader so much more than just sheer abundance of connective tissues. This might very well be the obvious culprit to why the driving idea of “fiction writing as load-bearing” can’t seem to get anywhere in my vicinity.

But I do read fiction. It’s just that I probably don’t read them as themselves as text of their own self-worldbuilding. I probably read them as me or myself, taking full privileged advantage of reader interpretation and just how much words can turn from just a bunch of words into something so phenomenal (as in actual phenomenology), especially for a writer who has injected so much “hyper-association” into just about every word.

Maybe, I should read more of those works that might very well just be the right mode for me to write in. The problem is that I’ve never really that kind of writer, or maybe I am that kind of writer without knowing in my journaling. But there might just be a fiction mold that might work for me. But like, who the fuck reads weird-ass experimental fiction? I may read extreme “show, don’t tell.” but once you start sounding like an alien and in prose rather than in poetry or something, I don’t know if I’m going to be able even to begin to receive it. Or maybe, that just might be the next step. I might’ve stayed too close to standard prose all this time, even if I’ve explored all manner of texts across centuries.

The fuck is this part:

I’m not a pretentious fuck. Or maybe, fuck, I am. Just not in ways I get. Well, if “pretentious” is itself an umbrella for anything that veers a little off to the side in terms of style. But I’ve never been a stylist for its own sake. So fuck that. I’m not a stylist. That’s for fucking hair.

Okay, I read the first pages of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, and it’s very, very good already. Very awesome imagery. But come on, man, I’m not boutta become some fucking…

As much as I think poetry is valid, as for me myself, the idea of even that sounds so ickily pretentious and disgusting. I’m exposing my biases right now, but fuck it. I’m wrong about saying that, but it’s the feeling I get.

It’s why I started using Comic Sans in my text editor and personal blog website. I need to become total in the way that doesn’t assume itself but is just there as is, becoming through. It’s why writing is so important to me. It’s just a bunch of stupid words, and people don’t really read as much as they used to for fun. No appearance, no clothes, no status signals, no explicit family name or background. No legacy even. Just a bunch of words, dirty references to web novels and web comics, and my honesty and my attempt to make sense, just bare and raw. That for me is my prime disgustingness. If I don’t look stupid, they’ll never know me, because if I look all great and all from the get-go, then they’ll leap before the bridge is even there.

Stupid man does stupid things and goes out and about, attempts stuff, then gets lost, trips, and dies.

If that isn’t the first impression you get from me, then I failed.

But I think I said this before. The best medicine might just be visible destroyable arrogance. Since humility is hard to break. But arrogance stands out like a sore thumb. Self-seriousness is the only way to become humble again. If I make myself arrogant, then I will easily fall apart at the seams, because there is no lasting arrogance in this world. Everything shall fall, and if it allows me to fall even farther down into some depth of humility never before reached, then stupidity will be mine, which itself is the arrogant act in motion. To believe I have some claim to stupidity as the new superior (inferior?) state of humility. I am performing arrogance to perform humility. Fucker.

humility-seeking that keeps discovering more arrogance underneath itself.

Solipsism (July 15, 2026)

Sometimes, I wonder if the world is me fucking myself. Making up challenges like walking just to give myself a heightened sense of living, when it might just be me making shit up just to keep myself feeling satisfied, entertained, and challenged. I might just be designing this whole time, not reporting experiences happening to me through situations outside of my control. In that sense, there’d be no difference if I walked or not, except for a heightened sense of aliveness that might very well just be contrived even as it does actually affect me. So the solution would be to go on that walk still, since no matter how “made-up” it is, if it works, it works. The sweat might itself be simulated in a way because it’s not really happening to me any more than I’m myself just putting myself through something completely under my expectations, control, rhythm, comfort, control, proficiency, muscular knowledge, and “mastery,” but if it feels rewarding in the way that feels like it’s happening to me, why not?

Stronger (July 16, 2026)

I’ve really simply become stronger. Staying in cafes for 8 hours (a new cafe every 1.6 visits) straight once every three days in the last more than a year. Walking in urban spaces alone. Having averaged more than 5,000 words a day in the last 2 point something years.

There was a time the hardest thing was going to the gym, but that now looks like a child’s level of tolerance in hindsight. There’s something that requires so much tolerance about what I’ve done to myself and become. Gradually and generally believable enough to be as feasible as day time, but still a sharp contrast in how much one can manage when looking at two different remote points of time (past and present) without the journey.

You just never know who you are until someone looks at you and you realize you’ve become this thing. In my head, I’m still that kid I was yesterday. But I’m 23 now, and I’m doing all this now, which strangers see but I really don’t, since I still feel like everything I’m doing has been just a seamless stream since childhood.

People think I’m this particular specific thing now, but one thing I learned is that that very thing is not at all different from the child playing around in the same cafe. They’re one and the same. There was no true separation. Or archetyping. But for strangers and first-time see-ers, they don’t see that, and I absorb that as its own insight.

Decade-Gone Happiness (July 16, 2026)

Jazz, the smell of coffee, just looking around at the sunlit morning world from inside an air-conditioned cafe.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt this crisp feeling.

13 minutes later:

I’ve never been this happy.

19 minutes later:

What do I even do or make out of this?

8.5 minutes later:

In the past, happiness meant external structures and all, so I didn’t really have to think for myself. But thinking for myself followed a drop in life satisfaction and loss of external structures and social communal circles.

But now, I have both thinking-for-myself and happiness, which I can’t really understand. I’ve reached a new equilibrium, I guess, after probably a decade.

Now, I have no incentive to drive all that thinking-for-myself, which meant challenging and re-inventing myself constantly. But at the same time, I’m still here, thinking for myself, just in a new space/state, that of happiness but without the external structures that defined it previously.

[I didn't know I could be this happy.]

I don’t know what to do… Everything in front of me looks solved, not that I’m suddenly unaware of problems or issues or structural shit, but that I’m no longer projecting suffering and irresolution onto everything, which is a very, very different thing (motion?) altogether.

And if you’re wondering, this is my 147th cafe stay in the last year-and-one-month, so I’ve drunk enough sugar and caffeine and gone to enough places (90 unique cafes) to make this current (as in today, right now, in this current cafe stay) after-a-decade-reappearing(?) feeling emergent on its own regard.

And the point of the cafe staying was never to produce happiness. It was to engineer friction, testing, novelty, challenge, grounding, etc. It was to pressure-chamber myself into re-discovery and into becoming. It was to see if all that time writing and addressing at home in a private room alone was real.

But happiness could be genuinely useful creatively. I want to see what new ways, angles, and things I write.

I can really tell it’s its own fresh area of expertise though where I’ve yet to invest anything into. So I’m blank and deprived of all of my “mental notes” and thinking patterns. What comes next is practically just testing to see what happiness looks like on page creatively.

Since creating out of happiness is a big leap, I might just experience “objective” external things out of it instead. Whether web novels, web comics, or books. Just the usual, but with this new font. So let’s see first. I want to see what just about everything that’s already been there looks or feels like now.

My “Journal” (July 16, 2026)

After reading Chapter 12 to 25 of the web novel Kill the Sun and re-reading my recent entries after switching to Arial (closer to the Roboto I was using to read the web novel in the website) from Comic Sans, I realize that the reason that I haven’t been writing web novels at all is that I have found my own web novel–esque feel in my own journaling. In fact, I should really consider writing fiction novels again but with my developed voice, since it doesn’t matter whether this voice is mine or not because the vocabulary itself beyond the “my-voice” it was grown in has gone by leaps and bounds that I can capture some very unique storytelling just by sheer wordage.

What I mean by “web novel–esque” is the interestingness associated with web novels in world-building and all, like the unique challenges and power systems.

Let me repeat what I said in different phrasing:

1. Read a web novel
2. Read my recent journal entries
3. Realized journaling has been my fiction storytelling in the way it creates the same feel of mechanics and world-building with challenges and power systems
4. Should consider writing novels again given this developed vocabulary that can now be re-used for in-world fiction storytelling as its own world-built thing using the same mechanisms or mechanics mirroring world-building that is already taking place in my journaling, which is why I use the term “vocabulary itself” to separate the long-accumulated journaling voice from the grown bipartisan engine that can be applied to both journaling and fiction storytelling. Thus: “…capture some very unique storytelling just by sheer wordage.”

This is not a claim or thesis or theory, but reflection since I’m not really offering a full specific list of my journaling mechanics but instead pointing out what journaling as I do it is particularly such that it draws this comparative realization.

It’s not really a thinly-veiled diary, since again, there’s no diary or journaling. There’s just the way I write and the words I use that can be misunderstood for the thing itself. I may use “journaling,” but that barely scratches what it’s referring to for me. The reality of the thing behind the use of the word makes all the sense by itself particularly such that it can’t really be a thinly-veiled diary any more than it can be a cloud, since while diary and journal sound like natural directions to take given that I use the word “journal,” the distance in the actual thing itself the common word/signifier is referring to is so specific that it gets called out for what it never was because of all the associations the common word has taken. There is no risk where reality doesn’t overlap so as to make that risk claim viable.

Journaling is the easiest way to say it without throwing the weight of God into the whole shebang. In other words, it’s easier to use a word I’m all too familiar with, because it works for what it is provisionally and always provisionally, than to pretend I can somehow compress it into any single super-term every time, since the only true super-term is pointing back to reality without relying on the pointer at all. In other words, just assume that I’m comparing my journaling with web novels because the reality of the word “journal” used is such that the comparative realization is drawable. It’s trust the way you trust someone saying “husband” to refer just as much to the basest level of husband imaginable as much as the particular reality behind the use of the word “husband” that they know so well and is dear to them in a way no one else is.

Event (July 16, 2026)

I guess the only true solution to moving from this current journaling—which I’ve gone all out into building up—to fiction narration is to see the entry format as a limiting container or medium and to trust speaking “everywhere else,” where thoughts would usually terminate after a long series of points, but which one can instead expand to lengths, heights, and horizons that don’t read as just another line in an endless series of 2,000-word statements or conclusions propped up with the barest compressions. Essentially, if I acknowledge that most of my entries, or the entry as I’ve built it up to be, are just phenomenological conclusions, then it’ll just be a matter of working in the narration as itself accumulated material than anything that you get from whole lived-in life that answers for itself and that one is supposedly obligated only to at best gain these kinds of decisive insights or takeaways from. It’s bringing the phenomenological exploration into-text rather than laughing along as one’s richly lived life does all the work of making compressions the natural expression of it.

It’s what I realized from web novels. When just reading it—in contrast to the complex machinery-like conclusions one gains from hyper-compressed consolidation and tightly-packed, hyper-associative description—it’s almost childish in its day-to-dayness, where events happen and it’s just that and that’s the end, or, more precisely, that’s what it is as it moves forward. One has to believe in the event as immutably itself the way life is lived rather than as the hyper-compressions one does in-text in-journaling as an accompaniment to lived life. Meaning, remove the lived life and sign the death warrant that is event.

No one can deny what you know experientially and translate to compressions, because they don’t have access to it. But fiction allows a place where biography, or, more precisely, experience, can be its truest in-text-form, since actual biography is plagued with long-drawn conclusions black with soot from spent shot, not that fiction isn’t worse at that, but disbelief-suspended, which actually works to its favor of pointing to experience itself even more so because real life is full of false memories that end up becoming load-bearing, which complicates experience as something you can report as event. “Foreshadowing” as a fiction device itself shows that you can only draw conclusions that have their load-bearing “event-ed” experiences in-text.

So: nervousness around and fear of event might point to a distrust of events, maybe due a sense of invalidation of lived experience, no matter how unreliable it actually is in real life.

It’s basically taking away the readers’ right to think for themselves by thinking for them and concluding without showing the material being concluded about, so it might very well just be aversion to feeling invalidated through others reporting completely different experiences no matter how intangible experience as lived rather than event can be.

It’s abandoning solipsism.

I’m not actually working with words. I’m fitting my phenomenological reality into them. It’s why I get the invulnerability of using the term “journal” and know that no one will ever be able to deny it because they don’t know that every word I use, especially something as long-used as “journal,” is a placeholder for something so hyper-specifically lived, but so as to be unstoppable and utterly provisional and unfixed yet utterly right in my eyes, with words the slaves of my “honesty,” forever incapable of representing me. But if it was just events, that would mean de-placeholdering words and having them report only as much as is available in-event, removing room for pre-processing, pre-interpreting, pre-digesting, and pre-philosophizing and throwing all of it to the reader and saying, “Look,” the way you see a tree and are stunned by it and have nothing else to add but what it is itself as event beyond you and your phenomenological reality but which you keep in your memories phenomenologically.

Immortality in my case is that I vivify the words every time and fashion the words so, but if I just break open the words and have their insides report only what is outside rather than what ends up being injected into them by the passing looming vivifiying lived-experienced rich-eyed author, then imagine the mortal-ness, the mortality, of words that are at best events.

Happy-Confused (July 16, 2026)

Why did I experience happiness only today? Not that I was never happy. But for the very first time, I felt the happiness I had over a decade ago. I’ve reached it again. And I can tell. It’s not hype. It’s the happiness you feel when it’s just morning and the world is too sunlit bright awesome place. But this time, it’s without all the external structures that defined my childhood.

There are so many sensible reasons, like getting closure on my whole life and richly lived past. But it’s been half a year since that, and so much has changed even post-closure.

I don’t get it. But I guess happiness is something I can genuinely feel again. I just don’t know what to make of it except just do what I usually do.

I’m just going to sleep earlier rather than later and hope for the best. If I sleep now at 9:45 PM, I should wake up around 6 AM. And if my body tries to get more sleep to make up for the traveling and cafe-staying the last four days, then I’ll wake up 7 AM, which is fine too. We’ll probably leave around 7:30 to 9:30 AM anyway. Whatever happens, happens. I will just make sure I’m in peak condition.

It may sound like I’m just saying that out of nowhere, but there’s no other reaction really. If it’s not something that can be out-thought in a single session, then the best thing to do is maintain a healthy rhythm and keep what can be managed managed, like my physical health.

Not that good sleep equates to happiness, since that hasn’t necessarily been true for the last whole decade, but that if I want to make sense of whatever this happiness is, then best thing I can do is have my body well-rested.

Of course, I take what I can get. Both good and bad. Avoiding tiredness altogether is impossible, but it’s just making the most out of what one ends up getting—where tiredness can very well accompany insights that one wouldn’t get if one tried to be perfectly in peak condition by avoiding everything all the time—and if one can get good sleep because one went home earlier today than the last four days, then there it goes.

Sorry, Amanai (July 17, 2026)

My quality of life improved because I meaning-made beyond the immediate feedback loops available to me, even if that meant experiencing discomfort, unhappiness, ambiguity, confusion, and aimlessness, since it makes for a much rounder person, which is QOL at a higher average with the spikes of aliveness and satisfaction that much more intense and replenishable through numberless, oblique, remote, separate feedback loops.

To be more explicit:

Think of someone whose entire “happiness” hinges on whether they win or lose in LoL. That is extreme immediacy of feedback loop. Going beyond makes for strangeness but ultimately rewards a more robust quality of life, like a body that’s been allowed to explore and experiment with itself physically. Rounder in this sense is wholesomeness. The brain operates on perception, so experiencing multiple different feedback loops in ways that make it replenishable through accumulation and complexity create for more particular kinds of intensities and satisfactions and alivenesses, which averages out toward QOL.

Self-Responses

So it’s living a healthily varied life essentially?

But the complication to get there is the same difficulty that it takes to lose it as well, in the sense that happiness gained through oblique connections isn’t easily destabilized like a win-lose immediacy?

So it’s just self-security. In high school, even the tiniest bit of looking even just a tiny bit different like having a runny nose is enough to make someone feel very, very embarrassed rather than simply polite. But you grow older and start to become so much more than just win-lose in terms of whether your nose is runny or not or whether you said the right word in a casual social conversation or whether you should have done this or that. A lot of things stop mattering because you become so, so much more.

Self-Responses (2)

How does this connect to dopamine receptors or whatever they’re called in terms of goal-oriented behavior and feelings of satisfaction/reward, etc.

So instead of win/lose, you get complex, nuanced, oblique, remote, strange ways of meaningfulness or dopamine, since reality is so full of things that don’t fall into either W or L, like a text exploring ideas and experimenting with syntax to demonstrate them, where much of the actual reward comes from the act of cultivating new senses for/of reward rather than chasing reward as content. Developing appreciation, taste, aesthetic, sense of beauty, association, etc.

Finding God in stone. Something like that. Your sense of reward has been cultivated you can very much “turn a stone into God.” A bunch of wood into something incredibly delicate and masterful, with all the slightest edges, contours, textural ripples, and such screaming all each in accordance to each finest flick of the steadiest, potent, wind-blowing grip-finger.

The way Michener saw Alaska and pondered it in slabs and sealskin.

Flaneur of existence/reality/experience/sensation/precept/phenomenon/concept.

So you can still be in Challenger in LoL, but have all this as well? In fact, being Challenger might just be easier for you.

They essentially become motion itself. The flow state. Magic. The mechanics their expression, their freedom. The macro their flow. No winning or losing. Sorry Amanai.¹

“I am flow,” or, more precisely, fhwip!

Growth: Collaborative-Generative Honeypotting (July 17, 2026)

I still can’t believe I’ve grown this much. It’s actually over. Not the growing. Just… all that. I remember just how fucked I was back then, and it feels like a distant memory now, something to feel good about and then to feel just how much I’ve grown and feel double-good. And it makes me wonder what’s the next thing to pop my bubble? Since I know that if I just lean on what I have now, I will never truly grow and learn. If I’m truly confident, I will try new things and see how I do, even if my past younger self failed so many times before. I’ve grown, and demonstrating that growth in new things is the next natural step. I have to try. There is no bubble. I have to keep trusting the fall and letting myself change. It took so much leaps of faith to get here, and I’m proud of it. To not extend that would be self-sabotage.

I don’t mean that it’s all just a bubble that will pop and all the growth will be gone, but I’m talking about the rhythm of thinking it’s really over, since there’s no true “over” if one wants to experience life at its fullest and truly experience. If one wants to be true to oneself like I’ve been all this time, one has to go and beyond to trust themselves, knowing full well that you can never truly predict what happens next, just trust that the same you will come out, but stronger, knowing better, feeling larger than whatever feeling might’ve made me hesitate to try it out, to risk myself, to open up, to be vulnerable, to entangle myself with others so as to feel like I have something that someone can use against me. I have to let go. Of even this. Growth was never in covering my ears once I got an inch.

It’s easy to do things that only build you up endlessly, repeatably, and infinitely where the only true challenge is in trusting yourself and expanding your sense of reward and capacity for meaning-making, like just sitting down for 10 minutes to even an hour and letting yourself be confused about something there at the computer desk. It’s the safest self-directed self-invincibilizing investment one can make, like passive income at this point. But while that’s great and all since most people seek others to meaning-make or have it all meaning-made already and prepared for them, meaning-making “giving-what-they-can-use-against-you” with others is a whole nother thing altogether, especially when you know how easy it is to fall back on your own bed every time, to make your bed, to fold it, to lie down on it, again and again, bouncing back from upon yourself. I have to learn to fall and be catch-less (catchless), since even if someone does catch me, it will always feel like I’m floating midair, until something just clicks somehow, if that ever happens.

I guess cafe stays aren’t really the same thing. And sharing finished results in a blog or even in DMs is not the same either since that resolves to audience vs. author or file-sender vs.feedback-giver. These role-based interactions or exchanges don’t really map onto shared “here-it-is-as-it-happens-right-now” meaning-making.

I have to reject any motion or invitation to perform a role and just, but that’s impossible since I’m not a social dunce. I will socialize and be polite and work my way around dynamics and such things. It would be a social fuck-up if I started yapping to a stranger on the spot like we have that kind of thing going on. So inevitably, I will fall into roles because function/need will always come before anything truly rewarding. But how the hell do I find that? I have been trying to cultivate that by working on self-expression and cultivating my articulation and perception so that I can be even more specific and precise and targetted and evocative such that it just generates like getting hit with a sledgehammer and it’s like a burning cross in the sense of being incredibly visible and eye-catching. I have been trying to make my honeypot, while making it as exact to myself-as-I-am still, not as a fixed signage, but as a kind of venue for that kind of generativeness where collaboration is like a bright light fluttering in the dark. I write always to show a capacity to integrate and to include and to make generative (which isn’t the same as generating as fixed end result content) so that others can ride on and along and say “High-five!”

Can’t really do anything but put collaborativeness-generativeness make-up (as in the aestheticizing things you put on your face, or beautifiers) like a courtesan. It’s like stabilizing an always half-identity, thought-inprogress, which is strange as a concept, but is performable since thought as process can be showed, as this passage shows, even if I have already stabailized it in its own right and way and methodologically.

I can’t find it like walking around the corner. I tried that. Brute-forced it. Came out autistic-coded. Yappery. Info dumping. trying to open up space became a strategy in its own right, and it worked, just not to the degree that allows for me to express me at my fullest intensity, which I can only do self-cultivatingly. I’m not a heavy cumbersome hand anymore. I’ve refined myself to say exactly what I mean with even more translative fidelity and with even more rhetorical forcefulness and expressive-analogical and accessible through common references, short, declarative statements (aphorisms), single-word concept-terms, hyper-compressed neologisms and simplified language to make for the highest model capability/capacity/extrapolability, which makes for even greater space for interpretation and collaboration even while the full uninterrupted full-work-process logic is laid bare in explicit here-to-there, around-here, skirting-this-and-that, reframing detail.

I tried it with tens of people over the years, if not over a hundred by now. And I still keep trying. Always working even if always finding that it stops just before I get to any hint of something that could be even the beginning of even social-casual laugh. Not that it doesn’t happen, but most cases, most things, most people, most interactions, go somewhere but not anywhere really, just only as much as a functional-mundane, directive-filled moment affords. But anything that slips over the threshold of even that is that much more fragile since temperament and personality and fragility all start colliding like shards of glass that create even more “shards” (i.e., tinier, slivers), where the incompatability is itself fuel but nonetheless still non-affirming in the way that’s truly the same as when one is self-cultivating and speaking back to oneself in self-dialectics and working through one’s already known trust and earned this-is-the-place-for-youness in terms of collaborating thought. (Here, temporarily extending the term “collaborative” to show how collaboration happens on the self level where different mental states and days and time periods create very different anchor points which allows for even greater work than if one didn’t compress from such “self-multitude” through persistent externalization).

And the worst part, I’m not even not trying. I am invalidated constantly in terms of my trying. “Are you really trying? Did you really try?” And I realize how much of a waste of a life it was to have tried so hard just to come back and be psychoanalyzed as “not trying.” It’s what life has been for me. You fly off a cliff, and someone says you never left the nest. The problem: I can’t seem to fly, no matter how much I try. “If only you left the nest, you would fly.” I don’t even remember the last time I saw the nest. I’m turning anything into anything. I’m just doing what I’ve always done. Trying. Not self-persuading, or self-therapizing, or convincing myself, but fighting, beating the words, hating description as an end point, and always keeping myself as close to sweat and the ground as possible, to deny all my pre-conceptualizations, which is why I am always fresh-eyed and always finding new ways to see the world, but even after so much, ever trying to become jaded, to be jaded about not being jaded, to keep trying, to keep putting myself out there, to keep trying to say hello, to keep encountering people, to keep putting myself before them, to keep being naked and unarmored. And in the end, somehow, while I haven’t gotten what I wanted, all that unarmoredness became its own self-confidence. I can trust myself to throw everything that I’ve built up of myself away so I can say hello, even if it hasn’t been received at all and is instead treated as something that I perform or do or “not try” or “retreat into” or self-convince about, when the only thing I’ve been doing all this time was reporting experience long after it’s already settled, only finding the words many months later, rather than months before and trying to cast it into existence. It was never about creating a self or a persona or some retreat-into construction. It was always about finding who I already was, no matter how much I try, ignore it, don’t think about it, forget, and all the things. And this will be called another pre-experience conclusion. If one can’t even accept that I’m reporting my experience, how can one make judgments on what authenticity and trying mean? If one don’t trust a single word I say, then what’s the point? I am not here to disrespect my whole life.

Beyond All of That (July 17, 2026)

I want to need someone, I find myself thinking.

Then I see it again: the image of the conqueror. The one that rose after everyone he knew and trusted left and left him realizing he wasn’t even abandoned, but never actually had/adopted.

I know what that’s like: seeing things no one else ever saw. People never needing you that you being gone never made a dent. It was just one more role off the list. And to me, I saw everything.

I will not be put in that situation again. Anyone of the opposite sex will know that, whether consciously or subconsciously. That I will never need anyone who has no need for me. No, not ever, never again. No more fantasies. All I see is everything that I’m not, and what I am is total fulfillment. Why waste time fantasizing over others when I can fulfill myself in reality? In this sense do I finally appreciate people, because I am no longer infatuated with them and never see in them what I need so as to project my fantasies onto them.

I will not be enslaved/your slave. You are just another full person with their own specific life behind them like I am.

I don’t want to be liked. If you’re just another person who sees me in public and admires me, sure, great, good for you. But I’m not a physical appearance, nor am I a set of mannerisms, nor am I whatever I carry with me, nor am I the way I speak or what I say or my interests, nor am I everything that I do show you. I’m the person beyond all of that. And if you can’t open up that space for that person and just get caught up with something that I didn’t even have anything to do with (e.g., my looks and my observable personality, temperament, personness, onto which you can project an infinite number of things and fantasies), then you’re as effective as someone who I will never encounter in this life.

Blind-Folded (July 17, 2026)

No wonder I’m so confident without feeling that feeling people tend to think confidence is supposed to feel like. I entered such an intense flow state of writing, and then after that, I’m just here, sitting, looking at the relaxing, beautiful, relaxing (yes, relaxing), mundane world outside, and it’s all just so chill and cool. I’ve gotten used to writing at cafes (91 unique cafes as of writing) and staying there for more than eight hours. My confidence is literally just me walking, going in a cafe, and going home and relaxing and having fun. But it’s the confidence of someone who has all this that he has already gotten so used to doing and has so much self-trust about/in that it’s not even something to mention or think about, though I am reflecting on it right now. It’s just so strange to realize that this is what that is. I have this much that I’ve built up, yet it doesn’t scream anything but just ooh, that flow state was satisfying, and I wrote some pretty cool stuff, ok I stand up, walk around, chillax, take my time, quietly scatting by oneself.

It almost feels like knowing where I’m going even while blind-folded. It’s that kind of self-trust and rhythm and routine and ok I go home, ok I write, ok I do this. It’s got all the language of humility, yet it’s this actually crazy thing, yet it’s also routine so neither humble or arrogant or even confidence in the way that’s felt the way you feel an itch, but one that steps before it even knows where it’s stepping and doing that again and again, falling forward in full mastery of the very gap of perception where the leg and foot is blocking one’s sight of the ground but one’s muscles and proprioception knows so fully well what the body does such that it just goes on and along without active sight but a knowledge, feeling that has been so internalized it just does.

It’s like hooking as Nautilus and not needing to check the range. You know in your heart you threw that hook even if it was out of range because you know it would be in range depending on the particular movement speed of that Ashe and if they kept going by just 250 milliseconds, they would get hooked and you would kill them, or the slightest of edges or gaps in the minion wave such that your hook connects onto the “hiding-behind” Ashe but you know like you know your own fingernails that you touch without actually touching, the full size and shape of them in your head like the smell of chicken to a whole life of eating it.

I don’t hook when they’re in visible obvious range or they’re obviously gonna get hit. I throw it “blind” because I know the invisible collisiion will hit even when the visible or they’re-currently-out-of-range won’t, because there’s a knowledge that just executes itself and does and goes.

In that sense, it happened to me, not I to it.

I didn’t will the Nautilus hook. The hook hooked me then toward the Ashe.

So naturally, someone who spends that much time actively working, thinking, and creating around people will find themselves invisible among them, with self-consciousness replaced by a weaving-through.

Mountain Peaks Grazing the Clouds (July 17, 2026)

It’s so strange to have reached this point, where there’s nothing left to immortalize and make permanent out of a fear of forgetting or getting overwhelmed by these hyper-specific, hyper-vivid memories and past experiences, where there’s nothing left to be in the way of proving or enacting or performing some needed thing or role or person or creature or changing (the very act of changing as oneself).

I used to be so fragile, and in the strangest ways, I still am. I still get surprised and confused and puzzled and bewildered. Yet why does it feel normal? Rather than rupturing? Rather than fracturing?

Am I performing myself? In the way that I’ve known and built myself up to be? Is the person that’s here and now really being honest? Or am I just doing exactly what I would be doing, regardless of whether it’s truly who and where I am right now? (I don’t know.)

Why am I writing? Right now? After everything?

“Mastery” should never stand in for being genuinely present and honest with myself as I am now, as I’ve changed, as I’ve come to a point with everything. Just because it feels good or easy or rewarding doesn’t mean it’s the honest thing to do.

It seems that at one point, or maybe just now, or maybe for a long while now, maybe this year(?), I’ve stopped breaking. And I would up the stakes and make it even harder and sweatier and more uncomfortable and weirder and stranger and more exposing. Yet doesn’t matter how much I suffocate metaphorically, there’s something of a baseline here that has emerged, a minimum that never goes lower than that, like Tryndamere’s R “Undying Rage” or Kindred’s R “Lamb’s Respite,” with a Warmog’s Armor that’s constantly active even when taking damage, somehow healing based on missing health like Dr. Mundo’s R “Maximum Dosage,” perhaps with increased attack damage, attack speed, and lifesteal based on missing health like Dr Mundo’s old passive “Masochism,” Olaf’s passive “Berserker Rage,” and Warwick’s passive “Eternal Hunger” (where the healing based on post-mitigated on-hit damage increases to 250% when below 25% maximum health).

I feel like Jake from The Primal Hunter, but instead of this abnormal psychopathic familiarity with violence from the get-go, it’s this thing. Not writing exactly. Whatever this is that this is.

I feel a weird yet somehow familiar kind of happiness. Not hype. But upstream of that.

Maybe, I just love letting myself think very deeply, because it’s very rewarding, healing, validating, and all the words. Maybe, that’s it. It doesn’t matter that I’m inaccurate or that I’m dishonest through inaccuracy. I just need to keep trying to match where and who I am right now and just lull myself into that space where I can meet it face to face, even if it doesn’t yield anything that feels concrete or truly defining, since the very process, jouirney, act, and experience of such deep thought, where I just sit down there and mindfully go through so many thoughts, ideas, memories, feelings, and sensations and all that, leaves me always here rather than anywhere else. This is the closest I’ve ever been to being here, and every time I do it, it’s like the mountain peaks grazing the clouds. It’s the closest I’ll get to myself, to the now, to the present, to the very hum of being alive, of existing, of being, of feeling, sensing, experiencing, thinking, imagining, recalling, immersing, submerging. It’s its own flow state as much as it concerns myself. It’s its own self-forgetting as much as its own self-reconstructing. It’s powerful.

Amen (July 17, 2026)

It’s almost strange that if I never sat down with every single thing one by one, nothing would come out of it. A lot of different things that have little to no relevance to anything that I see, encounter, do, or engage in every day would just vanish if I wasn’t actively letting myself just sit down and allowing everything to pass me by in the most reconstructive way possible. And it’s so, so load-bearing. It feels like nothing I say comes out of themselves, but out of the mind that has already sat with so many different things altogether and let all that sit and just happen in their own magical, mysterious ways. It’s a given, but it does explain why I feel so okay already, because I really just needed to address the things that I needed addressing. Anything else could be filled in by the mind or just addressed obliquely or remotely or even in some small but tangible way, and it would still cover the rest because my brain is doing 101% of the work. It makes sense now why what comes out are hyper-compressed, because all the work was already done not only before in previous writings, but more crucially in my head that’s propped up and empowered by all of my previous writings now internalized, where the active work took place in the brain while the actual writing was going on, the end result of writing paling in comparison to the actual “inner work” cognitively done inside of the brain, where all of that internalizing or re-internalizing, re-integrative work is what allows for it to sit there and just go through everything like a backlog-inator (black box at this point). It’s interesting that the work is just as much that backlog-looking-through as that meditating on the concepts used, like “black box,” since hyper-compression is so controlled an operation that when you’re finally done and double-triple-quadruple-checked, it does everything you need to do and you can close your eyes like knowing your Nautilus hook blind-folded. It becomes its own amen.

Reality LARPer (July 18, 2026)

I guess I really am that person. I am fragile, yet not. I lean into my fragility. I let myself get so affected, yet that letting isn’t even control or mastery truly. I am not even sure about my confusion so as to write it down. I am confused about my confusion.

I risk myself every time, just so I can feel alive. And I always keep the aperture wide open, so I can feel everything, even if there are so many things that don’t connect and I have to keep track of so many moving parts. I let the moment be this incredibly micro-read immersion. And I experience the world always as fresh.

Note I never mentioned pain. Risk is never about pain. It’s about getting affected.

And yes, it is fragility in the sense that I am a delicate thing that I allow the acting-upon, the immersion to ambush and assault. Yet, in that is there a kind of dignity, that of confusion, of being confused about one’s confusion. The dignity is not felt, but something you’re aware of as something you’re participating in.

I really do let people affect me, and I am even proactive about letting them affect me. That’s how proactively vulnerable, honest, and alive-seeking I am. Not in the sense of wanting people to hurt me, but wanting to feel them full as people who have bearing on me.

Not just people, but situations, places, tables, desks, images, photos, memories, thoughts, ideas, colors, nature, sky, clouds, streets, highways, cars, textures, walls, shapes, angles, compositions, staircases, edges, stories, books, words, syntaxes, dynamics, groupings, communities, entanglements, songs, music…….

It’s why I genuinely feel the coolness of a cool knight-looking character from a Skyrim mod without ironizing it, even while knowing full well how it may very well be perceived. I listen to phonk the same way. I am sincere while proactively anti-ignorant, if that makes sense. I care about being liked, but I care about being honest with myself. I do get affected when people dislike me, but I am also the same person who does things that exploit that very vulnerability and choose to put myself out there even more so, because the reward is enormous, not the dislike, but the honesty, not to say that being disliked is honesty and being liked is dishonesty, but that I let myself get affected, and in that is proactive agency.

Honesty in the end runs back to aliveness.

Getting affected is not giving something authority over my experience.

My fragility is something I’m proactively secure about, if that makes sense.

Of course, I manage. So, don’t go thinking I just throw myself at everything again and again and burn myself out and have nervous breakdowns every day. No. I am here because I keep trying but never force it and keep myself only to what is immediately available.

I don’t want to larp reality. Wearing its costumes, using its words, seeing its sights (trees, sand, desert, plains, grass, mountains), but feeling (seeing, experiencing, looming, undergoing, submerging, immersing, getting lost in, forgetting, getting confused, etc.) nothing because it’s all just either regex, statistical word proximity, parroting, or mimicry. Goal-oriented behavior != zero-experience behavior.

I don’t want to play the role of a human being. I want to experience the role of a human being. I want to build, create, travel, pick things up, experience, walk around, feel textures, see with my eyes, check things at weird or interesting angles like inspecting a tree. A human being is functional, but that is exactly where experience takes place and abounds, in the smallest of ways. Profundity is not something that has to be so majestically organized just to wow you. It’s right there, and you just need to stop play-acting.

Remote Things (July 18, 2026)

I wonder if I’m truly exploring outside myself. I see artists’ digital illustrations from 2012, and they reveal so much about their perspective and worldview. It’s autobiographical at that point. Yet I can clearly see just how far away I am from even beginning to make those very same things. I’m not talking about skill. I’m talking precisely about what they do end up writing about and what concerns them during the actual digital illustration, whether it be rendering this texture or that or specifying this detail rather than something else, with the character design’s outfit and the background being very revealing about influences. And naturally, 2012 had a whole specific era, even as uniqueness is endless regardless of era and especially because of era, where the era provided a means whereby uniqueness could be even more cultivated, as strange as that sounds.

But I’m not talking about 2012 or art itself or digital illustrations or internet culture. I’m talking about how far away I am from certain things. Things I would never be at all the author of. I can’t imagine writing the Choose Your Adventure Club Penguin book I read growing up for example. And naturally, that goes on and on, but of course, being a writer makes that Club Penguin book feel close even if it is very far, which is what makes the 2012 artist digital illustration example even more remote. I’m not a committed digital visual artist, and I wasn’t even there in 2012 browsing the internet in the same spaces. I was 9 years old in 2012, and those years were very different for me than for many other children and teens during that time. I only stumbled upon 2000s web comics in the 2020s, so you can imagine very quickly where I’m from by where I’m not from and only discovering from an outsider’s perspective even as I embody my own insider’s perspective.

Of course, this applies to literally every author I do end up reading books of. I have a whole physical library, and every single book there I haven’t written. I would never write any of them. By reading them, I have already sealed the fact of not writing them, if that makes sense, since the author didn’t read the book that they wrote, but wrote it themselves by hand. I do the same with my own novels and journal entries.

Bu the point is not the obvious idea that yes, I would not write numberless things that are in this world. It’s just that when you look at something and you think about it, you can see just how far away something is, even if every other work besides one’s own is remote. There are certain things that feel so many light years away even more so than the pre-existing fact of distance that can be applied to basically any work that isn’t mine.

Qualia in Writing (July 19, 2026)

I constrained my ability to see, so I could see the words as translator. Somehow, I limited my qualia, or my experiential scope of ineffable qualia, so I could focus on the act of writing. My very experience of reality was drastically simplified and boxed so that I could be mindful of the words and their contraints rather than follow the ineffable qualia wherever it goes as it goes. I put on headphones for reality.

It’s probably why there’s a distinct gap between 6 years ago, 3 years ago, and today. 6 years ago, that aperture was wide open, and ineffables were surrounding. 3 years ago, they were very much there, but that was the start of intelligibility and all that it meant to be intelligible in a world where everything could fall off if you weren’t mindful enough mechanically, which opened up for genuine mechanical, strategical, feedback-looped skill. Today, I am slowly re-learning to experience what I had 6 years ago, before I started writing seriously and when ineffables were surrounding me. Now, all of a sudden, internal is taking importance again over external, such that even when everything is externally the same, everything is different. This means I’m no longer as one-sidedly externalization-first as much as I have been in the last three years.

During that writing phase, it really was about enactment. Instead of the goal-oriented curriculum of high school where you were participating, it was something like self-directed, self-advancing, self-cultivating, articulating, totalizing, integrating, associating, remembering becoming in an action-paced, goal-oriented way. Naturally, this meant it was the most “productive,” even more so than someone who just participated and especially someone who chased ineffables without holding a blade behind oneself to later stab at the cloud and tear it asunder like a blade on canvas, as a means of collecting it resourcefully.

I haven’t lost the externalization. It’s not really a “was.” But now, my grown capacity is allowing me to make even more ambitious moves toward ineffables (think running herbivore animal giants like Paraceratherium). So yes, there’s still a lot of mapping going on, but with a much wider and bigger ambition due to grown capacity so as to raise funds for bigger game.

That’s the difference between 6, 3, and today.

Remaining with an experience before translating it, is the bigger game, if that wasn’t already clear. Allowing it to shake the earth instead of staring at something simple and tiny like racoon-sized. That’s what makes the grown capacity genuinely matching rather than just big-gunned for no reason. Why use a giant harpoon on a rabbit? No, we use those for whales. Naturally, I’m starting to ignore hares and leaving them to our younger men because it’s becoming more and more redundant and a waste of my abilities when I can feed more people with bigger game and even expand human territory that way. I am moving from toy blocks to managing geography-bound, faction-rife, feature–load-bearing imperial land as bureaucrat.

I am moving from toy blocks to managing geography-bound, faction-rife, feature–load-bearing imperial land as bureaucrat. The material and the skill required are growing in tandem.

Crutches (July 20, 2026)

I have reached such a strange point of writing (life?).

(Crutches:)

1. Show: I don’t want to “crutch” on hyper-specific details like this glasses on my table, nor do I want to describe the sweatiness when I go and walk or sunlight dappling/filtering through the trees or the blue sky.
2. Faux Compressions: Things that sound hyper-compressed but are not actually compressing anything since they point to meaning that doesn’t exist. The shorthand without the actual thing it’s gesturing to.
3. The Past: Specific references or names and memories that only I get
4. The Mundane: Anecdotal “this, that, happened, like, dislike”.

It feels like the only honest medium is phenomenological subjectivity, even analytical and involving descriptive modeling.

Crutch in the sense of externalizing authority, appeal to external. The answer I gave sidesteps that and presents itself honestly.

Analytical/descriptive modeling is a tool in service in phenomenological subjectivity (PS). It’s hard to think of it that way, but simple coherent internal logic is crucial to PS, even if oblique, associative, and even strange. It’s not about being right, but workable or provisional, which is so much more feasible for actual communication.

to see is to be seen (july 20, 2026)

what does it mean to be?

i feel that at any start of something, that question comes to mind. i sometimes look around hoping to feel something and i do, and that feels strange, that hope plus that actual experience but which surprises me still. like instead of being multiple steps ahead,

i’m multiple steps behind, always, even behind the sky, the clouds, the trees. they impress me surprise me break me tell on me, what they do is show me how little i actually know. and i feel that like sunshine.

its easy to mistake goaloriented (GO) wins as authority over reality itself, when GO only breeds more GO, with the authority that one does get only as much as the scope of GO—sort of like crypto.

when i was playing minecraft, i saw the trees that i should’ve seen so as to un-see bcs its a matter of sun-bathing (everything under the sun) at this point, but no, they chastised me, broke me with the realization that, through just several years of taking the time to refine one’s sensibilities (or rude senses), they now, well, frick me. theyre telling me my weapons are useless here, and i stand there, realizing that no matter how much my crafting table, chest, and inventory are telling me that ive got the potential (destined through reinforcement-internalized GO) upperhand, i just stare knowing i have no bearing on it beyond what it has been to me in my limited GO and now in my slight increase or expansion of sensitivity. even now, in my touted victory, i have barely scratched the surface of what could be articulated, since i can go out and about and proclaim over hill and dale that i have the mind only primed when the mouth that can’t scream cannot be spoken for at all!!!= let meee scream!

so minecraft, honored one, show me more amanais and more rejections of [apologies to] her.

owning large swaths of territory imperially in a provisional bureacratic kind of sense, but not possessing reality (as perceivable) or even oneself to begin with beyond what one has padded over oneself externally like crutches, the self never truly developing outside of what it’s been given, including the very power it’s been taught to value and work toward systematically by the form it’s been reported to take. youre an MMO player.

bbut perception isn’t show-don’t-tell’s textural description either since u can very well go and point it all out and then come back to the reality that uve never truly grappled with it at all in the way that a person does when they want to be truly sensitive, for sensitivity isnt external. to reach for sunshine, is to reach. to speak for (not for sunshine, but the mouth self-speaking for, screaming). the sunshine shines best through the flailing it enacts itself through, the world through self-subjectivity, the self-subjectivity through world.

to see is to be seen (not causally as in the former causing the latter, but by means of)

the trees (the percept) are best described through you (the sight of you, your being seen)

expressing myself past ability (july 20, 2026)

bunch of words, bunch of sounds, bunch of drawings, bunch of me proclaiming that i really, really, really, really want to be a person, a human being, not a thing, not an object, not something to look at, not special, not weird, not strange, not different, not something to own or possess, not an extension of something or someone else, not personality, not anything that could be weighed on a scale of value.

am i performing myself? am i truly honest? feeling good because one is being honest does not invalidate the honesty, but sometimes, i do wonder.

if it feels good just to be alive, i don’t want to fall into a rhythm where i stop being here.

i don’t want to die while i’m still alive.

i want to cry, for real. i want to feel things, for real.

were my feelings real? or did it just feel good to feel them while singing and playing guitar on the spot?

do i cry just because it makes me a certain way? am i just feeling things just to feel things? just to be something certain?

if saying what i feel through a bunch of words, bunch of sounds, bunch of drawings, or bunch of anything (else) really looks good on paper, like actually looks likeable, impressive, or even just plain attractive, are my feelings real? or am i just performing what i think i should feel? and then feeling that “think i should feel”?

if im strong, then how can i say im honest? if nothing’s being put at risk?

am i real?

or have i become my own hyper-real? my own made-up thing? my own persona (not that i ever made one but that everything that i made could be said to have become a persona that superseded the person feeling-expressing themselves)?

if im comfortable with feeling and expressing myself, am i truly feeling and expressing myself? am i feel comfortable being vulnerable, then am i truly vulnerable? am i truly honest? if im secure about/in my own confusion, then am i truly confused?

have i become my own creative project? where snot is part of the aesthetic?

am i truly knowable? is my ability to express myself replacing expression itself?

am i a big fat liar? what may seem incisive may very well just be creative rhetoric, and the thing is that it almost feels impossible to tell, since effective self-expression is naturally going to function like that. frick me.

it looks so good on paper. i like it. i like it. and that is now making me wonder… am i real? or am i just a worder? i mean, it’s not like they’ll see anything else. my body language, my physical appearance, my words, my music, my drawings, everything. i can’t help but express myself.

am i liked for me? or my expressions? (i know one’s expressions are intrinsic to oneself)

if im a captivating failure, have i truly failed? if even in my tears, i inspire, how can i say ive truly been vulnerable? but i know that vulnerability is not intrinsically ugly or repelling, so what the frick am i saying?

my life is too easy right now, but the hardest part about all of it is whether im real. am i truly here?

i dnt want to meet people as this built self im functioning toward others, like some rhythm of humanity. i want to be human such that i am here, that im real, not some person so secure in themselves that theyre hyperreal to themselves, riding off oneself, losing that capacity.

let me be here, real, and alive

but even this entire passage resembles an aesthetic

but i guess being in challenging circumstances would be much worse, since you wouldn’t really know what you truly want if you’ve been constrained to needs all this time. though when life has reached such a point of ease, one does find themselves wondering if the vulnerability that has become honed and managed and manageable has become its own performance even as it does feel great to be honest, just not in a way that feels like pure honesty all the time due to repeatability.

even as honesty can be ordinary, it still begs the question whether one is truly liked if one is easy to like.

sort of like “political rhetoric” being effective because it comes across as “honesty,” specifically the kind that’s appealing and likeable, that appeals to a certain demongraphic at the very least, maybe extreme even.

are the words doing more work than i am? are they on a completely different track than i am? do I exist at all to be gestured at? or is the act of writing now an act of words? is a miracle happening where the words are being vivified by words? rather than “the act of writing” being the vivifier of them? is rhetoric speaking for itself? or should i trust the artist’s eye? that the very reduction is the lens of a self? the practical, provisional, workable muck of sterile, clean, idealistic, seamless ambition? in the past, this perspective of “muck–ambition” was introduced toward inability, but now, it’s being extended toward ability, given that that now itself is raising concern over whether its very capability is its own inability. And it works. Not anymore that I can’t express myself, but that I can express myself and trust that even in that ability, I am still expressing myself rather expressing myself.

attack on reality’s final say (july 20, 2026)

the problem about “show, don’t tell” is that it’s too good. That’s always been my problem with it. Not too good that it’s overloading. Just too good. Simple as that. It may be so much truer to reality, so much truer to the mundane, to actual real-life experiences, whether outdoors or at home or in the tiniest of interactions between people. But at the same time, that’s the problem. It’s too good. I didn’t start reading to experience a written version of reality, no matter how good and delicious the prose is. I read and wrote because I wanted reality to make sense, more than anything, beyond everything, even if it means not showing, even if it means not showing at all.

We already live in the world. I don’t want to re-create the texture of reality. I want to break reality with my bare hands in a way that’s impossible when you’re there in intense heat in the highway with a car that ran out of gas. I want to truly become its author. And that self-expression for me is the point of reading and writing.

“Show, don’t tell” is infinitely justifiable and defensible. It’s like going against reality itself. You can’t. But that’s why it’s “too good”-ness is disgusting.

Wrongness is a greater measure for truth than impregnable reality.

so when i do read shit that take place in the most contemporary reality, you bet i’ll be looking for the weirdos.

tangle vs. systematizing (july 20, 2026)

there are two impulses within me. Create the most extreme “show, don’t tell” fiction passage that goes on and on and on and on and on and on for millions of words. Or just stop getting lost in the tangle and actually meaning-make, even if it means systematizing.

To put it simpler:

1. getting lost forever and ever
2. imposing meaning-making onto the tangle, holding over it

this is what I mean by millions of words of “extreme show, don’t tell”, see what I mean? These are examples. I don’t mean there’s no syntax or subject or causation or narrative. I mean that these are examples of that kind of writing.

• clerks hogged the blank papers and books for the number
• packing like split slate
• feathery leaves died climbing the sky
• mountains hung distant
• bouncing the tendrils that framed her face
• striped in somewhat smeared sauce
• spread her fingers wide to check for dirt
• pinched her trousers smooth and aligned
• brushed a mosquito off her clean pink sleeve
• cracked sandals with peeled edges
• The gusts whipped the grasses and tore along the ground, making grooves.
• a primeval-garbed sun-eyed figure floated in the skies
• her momentum kicking up a draft past an upholstered chair
• Around him, whiskered sacks lay open, with a tumble of sweet windfallen mangoes tapering out.
• Bark-shouts flushed down the rocky, leafy, muddy slope
• Out of the thick of the gang, the spectacled goblin crystallized as it made its way to the side of the stream.
• the water-rushed foam when the goblins fished the tools out
• The gentle scent of sweet trees infused the already deep jungle air and passed through their noses with each breath.
• The coolness opened their chest, expanded their lungs, and swelled into their stomach.
• They bore and plunged through the jungle amid the sticking swelter, crested and stepped off boulders, and pressed down into stream purls with crisp splashes, journeying below the canopy-frayed strip of sky through thinning, tuft-lipped meanders and ragged river knees with high, smooth stone walls.
• Moss vines streaked the damp crag, with slight coils.
• Their decaying organic sludge mired the ground below them and hardened with the scorch-crusted mud, cementing into the path.
• The occasional thud and clack of footwear against small quartz stones, iron stone gravel, and fragments of ferruginous stone filled this great nest of greenery.
• …

I know how to write both. I’m just wondering what the hell.

It’s probably invulnerability vs. vulnerability. Plausible deniability vs. being proudly wrong.

format of experience (vs. new experiences) (july 21, 2026)

Dodge who I am? Is that the only solution? Or more precisely, dodge current anchor point or angle of experience. Sort of like seeing things only from one specific angle, like looking at the street from only that angle rather than moving one’s computer setup around the room to get very different mental “con-gestures” or whatever.

And the solution is not to stop writing. I still need to document what’s going on in that new angle/perspective/anchor point. I need to absorb and integrate it, the way I do cafe stays and write there each in every new unique cafe, so it’s not an experience that just takes place in that span of time and then there is no way of confirming what happened or how it affected the way that I thought or experienced the world except through reconstruction which is faulty because relief from that state of mind, as in the post-state/return to who one is, completely “destroys” the thing itself, like leaving the intense sun heat and going home to one’s room and it just all dissipates even when it was so load-bearing and everything when it was the only thing/anchor point rather than something that happened.

Essentially: not just new experiences, but new format of experience. It’s sort of like not looking back at a time of escape room Flash games, where everything gets conflated rather than each treated as their own everything in the mental-state at the time of inhabiting it wholly and then able to write from that state. Of course, this example is an example, not that my goal is to escape something literally impossible. The point is that format is about the very “who I am” or angle of setup not “everything-under-the-sunning” new experiences.

I don’t want to treat who I am as portable. That’s the opposite of the goal here.

Dodge who I am is the only solution. I framed it as a question. It is an answer. By shifting several inches of angle of experience.

It’s not dodging having anything at all so as to call a self. It’s dodging who I am. It’s dodging the anchor point. It’s dodging this sticky thing that keeps everything-under-the-sunning everything, especially new experiences. It’s format, and not just “current” (“current format”) the way you portabilize yourself and still come out with the same. It’s format in the way that doesn’t scream “current” but screams “everything.” It’s “who I am” in the most insidious way.

It’s simple to understand. Dodging who I am is shifting several angles to the fucking left so as to report back to a wholly new “who I am” format of experience so as to see a wholly new street view. It’s format of experience, not new experiences.

There’s no default self. There’s no displacing the anchor. There’s no displaced “state”.

This is the most obvious thing in the world. It’s quite literally “shifting angle by several inches.” That’s literally it.

And when you do that with a setup, you get format of experience rather than just new experiences (which the use of the word “states” is equal to at this point).

So to put it simply, when someone moves their computer setup, the goal is not to let the computer setup be the permanent angle of experience (even if that could very well be the case and happen entirely and consistently to the point of precluding any chance of the hope ever working out), but to let the setup be at best writing as a base so that the point is the shifting of the angle by several inches, or the shifting of the angle of the setup.

There’s no current.

here’s a list that I wrote before this passage since these are load-bearing to what I was trying to say:

1. Escape room games
2. Zombie Lane
3. Crazy Planets (robot planet game)
4. AdventureQuest Worlds (Flash games, like Hobo series)
5. She Who Remembers (Defamiliarized perspective book)
6. Manga (Golden Kamuy)
7. not just new experiences, but new format
8. shifted by several inches to re-experience things like
• view of street from room/balcony window
• sitting on chair in the middle of the room and eating plate, drinking water, and reading She Who Remembers without table there

There’s no porta-fucking-bility in the point of this fucking passage. It’s not portability. Let’s not fuck the dead horse.

It’s essentially dodging the reconstructor.

To see things fresh and new, especially actual new experiences, I have to change format, which means destroying the decision history or tree, the one that looked at something decided what it was and then left it at that. This doesn’t mean removing writing, since we’re talking about something internal rather than dead text that can be reliably used to point to wholly separate people altogether. This essentially means format of experience, even for something as simple as eating, drinking water, reading a book, experiencing a manga, or looking at the street, or the sun, or the clouds, or the trees, or these “over-decided things.”

It’s inevitable that I will always look at past things as past, like a manga that I read years ago, but the hope is that I transcend that objectifying “male gaze” and find the person behind all of it, never letting off the hook, being honest right now today, not as a rhythm or routine, or as something to expect.

I don’t want to experience it as a state, whether mental, physical, sensory, or experiential. I don’t want state-of-self, but self-of-state. I want to identify with the moment, as it comes wholly and everything, not escape rooms as Flash games of the past, but as everything-as-everything. I don’t want “this too shall pass.” I don’t want “everything under the sun.” I don’t want to be able to trust so well that I ignore the present and what it gives me in favor of this rhythm of experience, developed tolerance, and a seasoned gaze that could very well tip over to jadedness, callousness, and something that even resembles psychopathy. I’m not rejecting experience, history, learning, or growth. I’m actually looking for it. I don’t want to know it before I experience it, as it’s happening. I want to identify with what’s right in front of me.

I want to meaning-make today, right now. That’s the goal. I don’t ever want to lose that ability to see and feel what’s right in front of me the way one identifies with the moment, the state (or, more precisely, self-of-state). I want to be here, alive, and real.

I wrote millions of words. I don’t want expression to supersede experience.

Naturally the problem is that the setup, which in the case of cafe stays is the laptop computer setup, is so fucking loud. Even if I want to be non-portable so as to be self-state, it’s fucking ringing. It’s fucking there. It’s fucking the format. It’s like an AI trying to judge whether someone has cancer based on an image, and they do it effectively, but not because they discovered the cancer, but because the image has something completely unrelated revealing that this is likely a cancer image, like a small dot on the corner or something that is unrelated to the scan itself. That’s the setup. But I want it to be invisible. I want writing to be a complete medium of the self-of-state. I want it to say only as much as what is intended, not to say more, not to do more work, not to feel more than the actual person themselves. So it’s hard not to be portable. It’s hard to escape from what writing has become for me.

But the goal in the end is still self-of-state. The goal is to break the cancer image repetition. The goal is format of experience, not just new experiences. It’s easy to put myself in so many new cafes, but if the setup becomes so loud that it screams itself and nothing else, then the background will be automatizable (automaticity), the faces, the people, the general perceptual idea or percept of human beings. Even the journey, the traveling to get to that cafe, as new and unique every single one is when going to a new unique cafe every time. I know the challenge I’m facing.

But yes: format of experience. Even the writing itself is its own format, no matter how much I try to put everything that I wrote away and try to see the words fresh, because I will always “have known” writing the way it’s been for millions of words and years. I can’t undo the past. I can’t undo what I’ve learned and just how much all that learning is not detached from the very specific experiences, affects, mental preoccupations, and themes that cultivated their pure raw technical skill. I am trying. Everything in my power. To just get the raw ability. And to discard everything that has to do with format of experience.

I know it’s impossible. It’s an ideal or ceiling-line (opposite of base-line; conceptual rather than practical, pointing out edges of actual idea), even as I understand that raw ability is made of experiences, or, at least, reconstructions of reconstructions of reconstructions as externalizations (articulations).

diary entry #1 (july 21, 2026)

Tomorrow will be my 150th 8-hour cafe stay (1,200 hours) and 93rd unique branch. 14 months have passed since I started.

4 million words (think 50 volumes on your shelves) across 8,200 journal entries in the last 26 months.

I live in the sweltering Philippines, and with a broken car air conditioner, I know it well, much better than I did growing up, especially since I started doing these many air-conditioned stays at urban cafes to sharpen the contrast. Staying mostly in a room alone at home in the last five years has only vivified the experience of carrying 25-kilo sacks of produce, not by making it harder since I’m much more physically capable now, but by making it isolatable and describable through sheer on-and-off viscerality.

I spend more time with books than with friends, whereas I grew up spending just as much time with friends as with friends of friends through urban-outdoorsy community environments and venues.

In my private vocabulary and journaling habit, I cite personally load-bearing internet media by name—going as far as structurally using a web novel—just as much as I condemn internet-thrown words as authority.

Living in the poverty-stricken, deeply unequal Philippines, I know just as much the invisible repelling aura of bubble socioeconomic privilege as I do the people I’d encounter in and outside of volunteering efforts. Alienation and simultaneous affirmation coming from “going all around” organize my identity.

But most of all, I’m a person. Structure organizes humanity, but personhood tends to act in ways that escape into its own hyper-specificities. I know no one by the structures bearing me. Not even myself.

In more ways than one, I left everyone behind. While others continue along lines, I have gone on, so far out, on my own.

I sit down and I stare. Long enough that I wonder. And that wonder makes and unmakes me. Again and again.

I first-timed Anivia top lane in League of Legends Ranked earlier today, but as much as it was a moment of full immersion and enjoyment, it runs back to me as this whole person who has lived this life.

I can see myself in everything that I am. I laugh without weight. I smile without jadedness. I am a free person floating on the plane of existence.

I feel like a person, the way everything runs back to 2D, to a surface, to utter function, to moment as surface, to flowing water, to running faucet, to imageable cloud (the floating thing up there in the sky), to something with nothing on except themselves, the gap between them and everything of them closed. What’s left is skin, a smile only as much as the muscles making it twist and take shape.

There’s nothing to or on me. I’m as uncomplex and shallow as they come. The gap between world, existence, and me has vanished. I’m surface-level and superficial. The cloud hits me like day one. Honesty feels like a stuttering child. I’m real, here, and alive.

• Minecraft 26.1.2 (post–new version format), with the mod “The Roads More Travelled”, in my lake island surrounded by the biome variant Old Growth Spruce Taiga with its mossy stones and fallen logs (Day 2)—the way it captures (1) distance in compression with the feathering high canopy leaves and (2) the way resources and, by extension, goal-orientedness come much more obliquely or indirectly (in contrast with village-characterized, ravined plains)
• argusthecat’s sci-fi intelligent cat story Kitty Cat Kill Sat—its charismatic Boichi’s Hotel–like feel with a “web novel voice” (you’d find in narrators like Void Herald’s The Perfect Run and Gogglesbear’s Super Minion, though contrasting from the voices of Zogarth’s The Primal Hunter, RinoZ’s Chrysalis, Casualfarmer’s Beware Of Chicken, Wildbow’s Worm, pirateaba’s The Wandering Inn, ErraticErrata’s A Practical Guide to Evil, Neven Iliev’s Everybody Loves Large Chests, and even Warmaisach’s Kill the Sun)
• my own unpublished 2025 novel Villa—how much it tested the limits of my ability to design effectively scenarios that challenged the protagonist and, by virtue of which, developed and fleshed them out.

The world is still so beautiful. What’s right in front of me has never left, and it has always allowed me to take my time.

So if I’m going to do a diary, it’ll just be me describing what things feel like or how they affect me instead of me listing down events or describing purely objectively.

honesty (july 22, 2026)

adobo

I don’t want to name-drop Adobo (the literal Filipino dish). It’s asking me to earn it. To give it my full attention. Rather than throwing all sorts of things and designing myself after what I merely describe, as if description itself is my virtue rather than the thing-in-itself allowing me to glimpse it through my self-aggrandizing eyes.

If it means that I sit down with a mere sentence and let that be its own thing rather than anything else and let my own associative subjectivity fill the room with references, ideas, creative brainstorms, and all manner of things, then I’ll be more honest than just grabbing a word like adobo or looking all around me at things that scream out terms I can easily grab like low-hanging fruit. I have to aggressively subjective so as not to let the adobo do the work for me and to let it do only as much as can for itself, where my gain is my ability to draw connnections and to get insights from things that don’t scream that at all except my own subjectivity screaming through things that don’t hold my associations in themselves. Let me be wrong the only way honesty can and point back to myself every time. Let me self-drop.

If I need a potent literary work to do all the work just for me to use it as my banner, then I will have disrespected not only the work but myself. If I am only acting out the beauty of the sun, then am I really seeing it? Is it really there right in front of me, being seen by me? Are my eyes working? Or have I assumed it based on what makes the most sense? The next likely word? Am I truly honest?

Am I here, alive, and real? That’s the question I am letting myself ask more and more in hopes that every time is a trigger and not a recital. I want to take on new formats of experience rather than just endlessly absorb and deadify new experiences like some “everything under the sun.”

I want to let the meaningless thing rupture me meaningfully in the way only I know how. A web novel, a web comic, something that can allow me to invest in it personally, because I do not trust myself to be different enough that I can trust myself all the way when I am given loaded, scripted things. I will not grant myself that dishonesty. Yes, I am that shallow, which is why I must keep fighting to be honest. It’s something that I have to earn every moment, and even there, I don’t even know.

Self-Responses

So they’re not sure if this passage is truly honest, but they know that that’s its honesty?

So honesty is why they still write?

or the desire to be honest even as it is virtually impossible is why they still write

birds

I don’t own the birds, like copyright. I own my transformative effect from (not “of” in the sense of possession or “from” in the sense that they gave it to me) the birds. Overflow of myself from them.

This is what I mean by honesty.

The world is not your credential. Your physical body isn’t either. If you let them meaning-make for you, that’s not meaning-making. It’s not “despite” either.

I saw the goblin in a biography of Beatty. That’s not inherent in Beatty, the words and syntax, the goblin as palimpsest, and all. That’s on me for making that association and rewardingly.

I saw the physics sandbox game “Incredibots 2” in a jeepney with its “kitsch”. I saw the abilities of League of Legends Champions (Zed, Darius, and Katerina) while writing an internet-flattened fantasy story with Christian references and gendered personalities.

Driving Force (July 22, 2026)

Much of my entries in the last over two weeks have been basically meta. That’s probably why I felt so strange when I wrote about the mechanics of storytelling—specifically the logistics of world-building and how first scenes establish that—since while that’s meta, that’s not the same height of meta that I was on when I was talking about writing was to me fundamentally especailly across millions of words of journaling and my own perception which has brought me this far and continues to be interrogated and investigated. The “mechanics” of honesty vs. the mechanics of logistical world-building foundational first-scene introduction are wholly separate matters. Now that I have reached a definitive point with honesty, I may need to return to designing worlds, storytelling structures, mechanics (like systems of weaponry or magic or local economy), and challenges that flesh the protagonist out—like unique interpersonal symmetries that coincide with the architectural and operational mechanics of coalitional warfare.

I might be wrong about that time frame of “two weeks”. That might have basically been my writing life in the last 3 years, even if I have written storytelling mechanics in the fiction novels that I did write across that time span. Ever since my existence came into the picture as something to interrogate and re-consider, everything has become about everything-in-relation-to-the-self-as-this-thing-I-can-barely-even-begin-to-enact-or-know-so-as-to-perform-in-proportionate-action-and-words-even.

But the question is whether that’s necessarily undesirable, since meaning-making keeps the sensory details, the events, and mechanics in check from spiraling into observable tangle, even at the “truth-following” structural omission of absolute hyper-realism and strict systematic logic—where realism is maintained behind a phenomenologically experimental prose lens.

It feels as though I can’t even begin to write the word “three” in the following sentence:

Three goblins walked up to the cave with torches lining the walls leading inside.

Specificity for the sake of it, even something as second-to-basest level as “three,” whether meaning is forged after the arbitrary hyper-specific fact, feels unconvincing. Meaning-making has taught me to isolate everything until what remain are load-bearing, which creates for hyper-compressed self-contained entries. It’s why what worked for me recently was hyper-compressed hyper-realistic hyper-sensory prose, which I called “worlds-of-their-own” (WOTOs), as you can see in the following:

• clerks hogged the blank papers and books for the number
• packing like split slate
• feathery leaves died climbing the sky
• mountains hung distant
• bouncing the tendrils that framed her face
• striped in somewhat smeared sauce
• spread her fingers wide to check for dirt
• pinched her trousers smooth and aligned
• brushed a mosquito off her clean pink sleeve
• cracked sandals with peeled edges
• The gusts whipped the grasses and tore along the ground, making grooves.
• a primeval-garbed sun-eyed figure floated in the skies
• her momentum kicking up a draft past an upholstered chair
• Around him, whiskered sacks lay open, with a tumble of sweet windfallen mangoes tapering out.
• Bark-shouts flushed down the rocky, leafy, muddy slope
• Out of the thick of the gang, the spectacled goblin crystallized as it made its way to the side of the stream.
• the water-rushed foam when the goblins fished the tools out
• The gentle scent of sweet trees infused the already deep jungle air and passed through their noses with each breath.
• The coolness opened their chest, expanded their lungs, and swelled into their stomach.
• They bore and plunged through the jungle amid the sticking swelter, crested and stepped off boulders, and pressed down into stream purls with crisp splashes, journeying below the canopy-frayed strip of sky through thinning, tuft-lipped meanders and ragged river knees with high, smooth stone walls.
• Moss vines streaked the damp crag, with slight coils.
• Their decaying organic sludge mired the ground below them and hardened with the scorch-crusted mud, cementing into the path.
• The occasional thud and clack of footwear against small quartz stones, iron stone gravel, and fragments of ferruginous stone filled this great nest of greenery.
• …

However, even this feels self-demonstrative but without the governing instinct that meaning-making makes. It feels performative of itself, no matter how “real and grounded” the world feels. Observation runs into that issue all the time.

Rigor is probably what drives me, which is why just saying “three” feels violating. Actual load-bearingness that isn’t just for the sake of itself or for sake of self-demonstration. But one that feels like it is rightfully there and fleshing-out up to kingdom come. If it’s made-up, it’ll just feel like cramming reality into a map you made when you decided to write three instead of four.

I don’t mean the protagonist has to be systematic, but declarative so as clearly to have come from a system, if that makes sense. I don’t have to draw every single possible factor leading to them becoming them. But it needs to be there from the get-go, not as summoned fact, but as driving totalizing force, like animals dashing at you because you know they were thrust out of their habitats by deforesting human activity. No need for flashback, exposition, after-the-fact explanation. But utter subjectivity, if that makes sense. They are what they are on the page already.

Paradigm Shift (July 22, 2026)

My fortress is dead. Whatever energized and immunized me is now absent. And somehow, it’s revived itself again through these words, as if the very proclamation of its death keeps it always dominant. Because the fortress lives in its dormancy and temporary dissolutions/fragmentations, like gangs when one of their members, whether junior or senior, rats them out (refer to the criminal organization in the manga My Home Hero when Kyoichi, a senior member, rats it out). It transcends my own consciousness of it, or feeling of it. I go underwater and never know when I’ll come back up (not referring to depression or dissociation here), and there’s no assurance in my heart. In those moments of submersion, I am holding always the ultimate possibility of all of it just being finally gone/dead. But it survives my own ignorance, and all it asks of me is to be there to receive it when it comes, but I never know.

I used the term “fortress” to mean the lingering thread that has kept me here all this time, this single continuity of consolidation and absorption.

But I wanted this. Even for a moment, to lose the thread of my format of experience. So that I could be honest in ways that don’t perform a “myself.”

It happens when you momentarily lose the breadcrumb right when you most expect it to come, es;pecially as time passes and the structure encompassing scope of experience grows and expands to such absurd heights that make it “too big to fail.” Yet that’s usually right before turning points in paradigm, where the box is most comprehensive but its blind spots most load-bearing like Death Star’s. “Issues become unmanageable at that extent.” But this isn’t the dissolution of life and existence altogether since with the end of a paradigm begins a new one. It’s not that the breadcrumb returns. But it comes in new laws of physics, and it’s like a meta shift altogether. The desire for the end of a paradigm is probably the end of the current one and the start of the new one speaking as one, like animals panicking right before the earthquake hits.

Sort of like molting, where the very developed current self as paradigm and identity no longer holds or satisfies the needs, concerns, and ideas current, such that the issues are no longer solvable through the complex mechanics that it has grown and honed, because the issues now lie at the root or constitution, the fundamental blind spots impossible to resolve from inside, thus causing the end of a era and the beginning of a new one. But likely, this comes in many waves of the same earthquake.

So one can look back and see that those very skins fit oneself in each and every one of those times from which they come, while also looking forward and seeing that nothing is fitting oneself yet, including recent entries because the change is happening rapidly and one has to be on instant pace to meet it at every inch.

Small, Visible Community of Simultaneous Diarists (July 22, 2026)

Reading diary entries from users in a Discord server where any user can have their own “diary” text channel is really giving me food for thought. Rather than pausing and making me hesitate, it’s what I need right now. To find new ways of thinking, writing, and perceiving as well as behaving and experiencing life. The right word isn’t “reconsider,” but “oh” or “what the hell.”

I feel fucking weird. I think that’s the best way to say it. Seeing their entries and the way they… well… everything, and seeing it side by side with my own. It’s so fucked. I don’t know what to feel, whether embarrassment or what. It just feels something. It feels like I’m still processing all of it. Reading the entries was something I already did a year ago, but making my own “diary” text channel and actually just having that “togetherness” with the other diarists is a whole thing/experience.

It’s not like I’m going to do a technical comparison, because I’ve done that many times before. It’s closer to a trance that I get. If I hadn’t foundationally and exhaustively developed my voice in writerly isolation first, I wouldn’t have experienced this.

I was of the mental assumption that that sudden shift is probably not because of me putting myself beside them in that diary Discord server, and I had that for a long enough while (well only this morning at 6:50 AM, when I posted my first entry in my text channel, 8 hours and 46 minutes ago) that it’s funny now that I see just how ground-breaking something that I never thought would ever be is. This is a big step from Neocities given the chasm between numberless personal websites and eleven text channels in one category/group. Even forums were a lot more one-reply-per-thread-participatory rather than a dedicated stream of diary text beside a countable number of others.

Becoming Relevant (July 22, 2026)

It’s strange. Usually, such things (feelings?) happen in isolation, whether within the confines of a piece of media like an anime. But seeing these things as I am affected by them in real time and seeing be used as an anchor point for understanding other things. Taking out of its container and brought into a world. That sentence makes it sound like just saying the name of an anime while going to a convenience store, but no, I’m talking about active meaning-making in real time. Structural. Load-bearing. But they now take place regardless of the context and container and current pace with writing, whether slow, stagnant, fast, cohesive, distracted, or whatever. It’s become “to-reach-for” (not pending as in unfulfilled, but boundary-dissolved so as to prove low-hanging fruit outside of its relevant shape and scope). It becomes relevant.

Larger References (July 22, 2026)

Will I always be swallowed up by reference? I am referring here to certain pieces of media like the MMO Red Stone Online (RSO) where it feels always larger than I am no matter how much I’ve tried to craft equivalents and proxies of it. And I’ve already gone millions of words into writing. But maybe what’s missing is that structural or systematic prowess. Even if I may compress ideas in each entry with load-bearing imagery and all, the whole MMO is something I will always shrink in front of, I’ve tried so much to outsize so many times, and I think I’ve come to create a whole archive of faithful syntheses to get my own personal closure. But there are certain things like RSO that make me still feel that infinite forest as if I’m still a newborn creatively and have barely even touched on anything at all so as to claim any kind of knowledge.

I get the whole “but is it desirable to conquer something that grants you the creative infinite forest?” The point of it is not to use as excuse to feign passionate existence away, but to try even if the necessary direction doesn’t itself yield a result that it never truly needed except in the little wins a human could ever do.

Well, it’s obviously impossible to match the sheer scale of human experiences that took place within the mechanics of an MMO across many years. But that’s not the point. It’s to create something proportionate somehow, commensurate in the least way, as impossible as that sounded three years ago and still sounds today in many fruitful ways. In fact, the closer I’ve come and the more progress I’ve made, the more I can see just how much creative juices to get from all the small wins I’ve accumulated, structured, integrated, internalized, and systematized. I’ve expanded my surface area, my playing area, my working area. It used to be as big a gap as the phrase “the past” vs THE ACTUAL PAST. Now, I have written millions of words of THE ACTUAL PAST, so even if I cannot match it, I have created some proportional. However, as you can see, there are still larger references that don’t map simply proportionally. And it may require larger methodologies that far surpass my current ability to systematize beyond hyper-compression + load-bearing imagery. Sheer vastness can be proportionalized, clumped, and mathematically cancelled out to form hyper-compressions and load-bearing imagery. But when methodology and systematization are themselves lacking, then proportion to math-cancel will never reduce it to a holdable orb.

Rupture in Speech (July 22, 2026)

I don’t know how to describe it, but Chapter 3 of my blog website journalnook feels like the strongest, most captivating rupture. That was that hyper-realistic hyper-sensory behaviorist “extreme ‘show, don’t tell’” 30,000-word novel George and everything that reinforced what it was trying to do:

1. the three-day electrical loss that isolated somatic experience
2. three-day dam camp that also was physically intense but crucially involved non-stop physical linguistic strip-mining (LSM) across four books—micro-reading (this specific event is what started my semi-regular physical LSM at my cafe stays as an alternative to mobile and the primary laptop or computer)
3. broader LSM that intensified to match what George needed
4. among others

Maybe, I should replicate that. One might say I’ve already grown to master it, but that might not necessarily be true. It’s been 61 days already, short enough to set it back up easily, long enough to allow for a whole new perspective to settle. It’s also currently Chapter 6.

The reason for this proposal is that Chapter 3, in retrospect, shows so much growth, whereas chapter 4, 5, and 6 are much harder to pin down even as the growth is still going strong and maybe even stronger.

I mean, it’s very shallow basically. But at the same time, just maybe it can help make the next chapters that much more compelling. Chapter 1, 2, and then 4, 5, and 6 are only as compelling as they are due to rupture.

Again, judging by pure growth, every chapter is equally transformative and validly crucial, each one building load-bearingly to the next. But ruptures make it easier for me to “retrospect”.

And it’s also not “rupture” so as to say that Chapter 3 is rupture whereas the rest aren’t. “Rupture” is even more superficial here. It’s quite literally vocabulary. Each chapter ruptures to the next. But Chapter 3 is a rupture visibly by sheer wordage, not word count even, but by rupturing in the speech itself.

In fact, earlier, when I was looking at the “user’s diary” text channel I was given in a small, visible Discord server community of simultaneous diarists, I considered this exact “rupture of speech” (ROS) though I hadn’t written this passage yet so as to have the term for it. I was thinking to start over with a whole new speech, ruptured, so that I could truly transcend my current format of experience. But then, my voice is just too effective, and I didn’t really find anything in all the options that I looked through, including George’s.

But this is no longer the diary context. This is a whole separate thing as it concerns the direction of my writing itself. Even if I’ll still be journaling, writing that fiction novel George in tandem was its own ROS.

Rupture in the speech is compatible with “in tandem.”

Or maybe it’s impossible, since I can’t undo what I succeeded at doing.

Weirdo Squad (July 22, 2026)

My goodness, looking at the other simultaneous-diarists in this small, visible Discord server of that really makes me feel so freaking weird. I can’t even imagine myself being in the same space at all. In my head, there’s this craziness that I can’t at all synchronize or connect the dots of.

It’s not that they all sound the same and I’m some alien from Planet B. No, all of them have distinct voices, and it’s clear even in the smallest way (tiniest tics or turns of phrase), which makes my voice fittingly/appropriately distinct. I think that’s what makes it funny, because it’s like, “Damn. I can’t believe I’m in some kind of weirdo squad. And I’m only adding to the already existing diversity.”

It feels like we’re a bunch of archetypes, and that’s just sooooo weird. To actually have a role. Never thought.

It feels like belonging.

I want to be affected in ways that I can’t even begin to predict. I’m not here to be where I was before. I’m here to be who I am in the midst of others, especially these people.

Mechanistic Writing Wall (July 22, 2026)

It’s strange that even now, Roblox still bears some kind of license for me that’s not exactly the same “large reference” as Red Stone Online. It feels like a system I’ve yet to best and more so an experience I’ve yet to best, since Roblox is much more simplifiable, down to its earliest versions to its recent ones, in culture, website design, game engine, and all. Its personal effect on me feels “systematically irrational.” It should feel solvable by hyper-compressions and load-bearing imagery (HCLBI) as the other side of the coin to “methodological systematizability” (MS), yet what I’m getting is escaping even those.

So what would be the solution if not HCLBI or MS?

Maybe writing has lost? And the only solution is an actual visual image? But I reached this point because I never ever offloaded it all to them. Sure, I do use them, but I always make it a point to write.

It almost feels like if it can’t even do this next step, then everything else prior to this that it has bested now goes free, like writing that can’t even do this retroactively never bested any of those prior to this at all. Not because of some frustration, but because if writing doesn’t do as mechanically predicted, then those previous successes may have not been actual, since their having worked hinged on this working.

Structural Arrogance (July 23, 2026)

The crutch of existence. Architecture (mall, condos, etc. and their structural interaction with natural light), tables, chairs, computer setups, text editor layouts, text fields like search bars or prompt boxes, books, words and numbers, letters on a keyboard and one’s palimpsestic word-associations with them, weather (rain, thunderstorm, sunlight, etc.), nature, urban textures (e.g., cement crust, cracked paint. crumpled straw wrapper), artificial lighting, icons, images, photos, and paintings, posters, billboards, shade, komorebi, memories, music, sounds (e.g., keyboard tapping, closing of doors, light, muffled chatter, breeze), biological rhythms (e.g., eating, bowel movement, thirst), sensations (smells, tactile, etc.), colors, good, wide views (distances, faintest movement, complexity in frame-in-frame, the shiftable eyes allowing for both panorama and frame-in-frame)…

“I exist in a world, so I am?”

Isolation in a room with words after a past of traveling with good views is just frame-in-frame. Not worse, since frame-in-frame is endlessly scalable, both into infinite recursive shrinkage and into infinite recursive enlargement.

Not worse. You can’t know the small without the large and the large without the small. To be blind is to have known sight.

And not seeded. Not large the big daddy and the small its little bitch. No, that’s a mistake of thinking that the world will answer your subjective questions. The small graces the large as much the world graces the small.

God by mortal. Mortal by god.

But the point I’m making here is not isolation or travel or the relationship between the two. I don’t care about any of that.

No, what I care about is closer to wondering whether I truly exist before everything or after everything or in some way separate yet its-own-but-coming-from everything. Honesty hinges on some version of crutchlessness, like a sci-fi story “deluded” out of our reality.

Am I honest or am I a performance of honesty as structural as everything that I mentioned as “crutch of existence and [full list]”?

Am I writing out of everything (which, as you may have seen earlier, includes words as well)?

Or am I honest?

Am I a fan fiction of reality? Genre fiction?

“You are what you eat.” So what am I?

“If I just weird myself out enough à la internet, second-hand books, and chasing genre fiction down extreme ends like the bottom of the iceberg of web novels and have the most ‘huh?’ references ever, then maybe…”

“If I just get really into local stuff and get so involved that I really go above and beyond just to get so invested that I’m below one percent, then maybe…”

“If I just do something so much that it becomes so, so, so strange in its own right like journaling 10 million words, then maybe…”

“If I just write a fan fiction story that goes on for 15 million words, then maybe…”

“If I just do something fucking crazy, then maybe…”

Wouldn’t that (more experience) push me further into everything? That would still be “crutch of existence and [full list]”.

I’m at least structurally honest, if that counts for anything.

Then let my arrogance be crutched. I am privileged the way existence is my crutch. I possess as much as I am architecture. I am the arrogant, “structurally self-possessed” chair.

void thread (july 23, 2026)

AdventureQuest probably suffers the same thing that Roblox does for me. Mechanically, it’s easy to break down for just about anyone since it’s not really a crazy novel kind of RPG. It may be its own thing as a Flash game, but nothing in it screams anything immediately complex or original. What makes it ineffable feels closer and closer to visual images than anything truly reduceable or hyper-compressable through load-bearing imagery.

That it stayed just there in the text editor as one “adventurequest” and I had nothing to say for a long enough while except realize it’s the same thing with Roblox confirms it.

As time passes and the consolidation proves stable while at its most comprehensive with the personal website and the whole corpus now reaching 4 million words in 26 monthly files in 3 yearly folders, I learn more and more the blindspots of writing as I know and practically use it.

I don’t know if the goal is to keep pursuing this thread. I mean, it’s the only actually challenging thread. The “honesty” thread is over—by admitting structure into honesty itself in that form of “structural arrogance”—and now it’s this. The problem is that anything that seems to resist writing naturally becomes so hard to gesture around, like being repelled by a dome and forced to skirt around its edges forever. You’d think that having the words “adventurequest” and “Roblox” as well as “visual image” would already be a big launchpad, and it is. But it in no way points to anything even provisional. Is this passage provisional? No. It’s complaint in form. We’ve not even drafted the issue. We’ve just pointed at a blank void and said, “here’s the issue,” but the issue itself isn’t actually explicit yet, but that there’s clearly an issue not yet visible, which is probably why I had to isolate so much (consolidation, etc.) for this thread even to be viable.

Wasteland & Process (July 23, 2026)

As time passes, instead of feeling like I literally have no idea what comes next or what to say or what to make of my situation, I just experience it, as if it’s its own preoccupation. I’m seriously testing the limits of my cognition and knowledge and pressing them against the wall, not allowing anything to slip through dishonestly. It feels as though I should know what to say, but I guess that not knowing feels better means that I’m not missing out on anything. This is exactly where I need to be, lest I force something out in hopes it does the work for me. This really is equal to how much I’ve consolidated and compressed. Naturally, I can’t just rehearse and pretend I’ve not already addressed so much already to leave little to work with. I’m basically looking at a landscape of scraps, crumbs, and bits, and I imagine there’s lots of tiny bits of hardened crust that can’t get removed easily, the ones that were ignored in the first passes because of the high effort coupled with the “low reward.”

There was definitely a time when I could brute-force it, but that’s no longer the case. I’ve already done it so much in so many ways and gotten so much out of it that I’m now sitting here and even thinking of new ways to brute-force counter-intuitively. And I guess what I’m doing now is its brute-forcing. I imagine that if I do something that looks like rest, that’ll be its own deliberate attempt to break open the canister.

There’s no fake disengagement. There’s only the reality that no matter how much you hide from yourself or self-forget or lose track of the thing by becoming not conscious of it as it’s happening, you will still be moving. The process catches me, but at this point, I identify with it, even if I know that the person who went through that three-day span of just being locked in that whole shebang—e.g., the three-day loss of electricity—and not thinking or knowing anything else is wholly different from the person that came after. The process itself is identifiable across such variations of consciousness.

To make this clearer, think of how heat affects you. You’re totally present, as you are in a new cafe. And during that time, your consciousness takes on a whole new flavor of reality, because that becomes its own very reality, anything else like inventory being taken from or ignored as per present relevance/utility. But that very “person” takes home via externalized process (writing) something persistent, even as that heat-person, that new-cafe-person, and, now, that home-person are wholly different “variations of consciousness.”

When you lose electricity for three days, you focus entirely on what’s happening right now, because the routine is broken and you’re now binge-reading books and staying outside because the electric fans can’t work without power and so you’re there in the tropical heat while reading and you’re staying there and looking around and seeing the world fresh and even eating food that you wouldn’t have eaten before and in ways that surprise you even as you may have experienced something structurally similar growing up multiple times.

Big Journal Practicality: Wordless (July 23, 2026)

Usually, you’d think that having over 8,000 journal entries comprising 4 million words would be simply good, and it is. But it is also a resource to manage. Which meant and continues to mean:

1. a lot of manual going-through and finding the best format from all that experience of journaling and experimenting.
2. a lot of discovering that at best, you get to see yourself circle around something in the course of 20 entries and then finally get to it finally in concise, compressed language—which doesn’t look like insight but closer to someone myopic rambling the same way someone hits the same transparent glass wall again and again when they can just go around so easily from your perspective
3. a lot of reading past the lines and trying to see what your past self couldn’t, like walking down a familiar path but seeing something that was there all along but needed refined or developed eyes to notice—think an artist’s eye.

The raw number can fool you, but think of it like this.

Would you have 1,000 ants or 1 human being? Subsequent entries eat the previous ones. So if your current standard feels like 1.0 ratio, then you can imagine how redundant and useless everything before that feels and how much it requires you to do the active work just to make something completely new from something that barely does anything on its own now.

Rather than 8,000 soldiers, it’s more like probably 100 soldiers superseding the rest. However, again, that’s only in terms of active relevant usefulness (i.e., practicality). The raw material of the past can be mined the way someone stares at nature and turns it into 30,000 words of “extreme ‘show, don’t tell,’” where there is no indication of copyright infringement due to such extreme transformative use that no one will even be able to point at the source because of how much of a source that transformation has become in its own “god” right.

Self-Responses

why did they title this post “Big Journal Practicality”?

So they’re saying you can’t just “Yo, yo, my name is Joe, I got the flow” your way into journaling 4 million words while still being compressed, growing, and actively iteratively useful?

So when they talk about previous entries, it’s literally like referring to one’s past self, as in a less, not-as-compressed, rambly version of you.

That means they don’t view journal entries as separate insights, but as exhaust fumes of an internalizing and thus outgrowing self.

So the raw number really does fool. There is no “8,000 entries”. It’s at best “a bunch of words.”

So what they are is not even 100,000 words or even 10,000 or 1,000 or 100 or 10. What they are is instead the wordless.

It’s not that they’re wordless such that they’re not at all accountable to the 4 million words and 8,000 entries, but it’s more so that they supersede even them as to-be-accountable-to, as they’re now accountable to themselves in “internalizing and thus outgrowing” (IatO) fashion. This means they’re an even harder boss since those are dead while the author is IatO in being to-be-accountable-to.

The Failure of Systematization & Load-Bearing Imagery Against Impregnable Wholes (July 24, 2026)

Can’t systematize it (break it down into parts so as to compress and reduce it to its most concise, most compressed size while still maintaining correct proportions). Can’t use load-bearing imagery to capture the essence of it.

At best, super remote, super vague, gesturing at.

1. Red Stone Online
2. Roblox
3. AdventureQuest

Things that don’t map onto anything that I’ve written except as almost-placeholder-like crutches, like magic words that don’t mean anything except what it means as an impregnable whole, which feels like the opposite of rigor.

I experience it like “one literal visual screenshot of the thing” and that’s it. The whole, and there’s no way to do anything with that except that. No parts. No load-bearing imagery. Just one visual screenshot. And that actually just straight up fucks me.

And it’s not bad. It just fucks because I’m a writer who’s gone over millions of words, and I realize that there are certain things that you just stare at speechlessly.

But I only got here because I didn’t blame writing. I focused on experimenting, in keeping myself open, and on focusing on what I could do and couldn’t do and see if maybe, there’s whole new ways of expressing things so as to grab something deeper rather than just representational. And that has been effective for the longest time. I will continue to trust literature no matter how much it has failed, since I didn’t get into it to succeed in one fell swoop. I got into it because I wanted to be honest, and honesty isn’t just saying one thing and leaving it at that. It’s trying every day and seeing new ways to be honest, to grasp at the thing which one can easily assume and call it a day. This is whatever the fuck this is.

Yes, I’m honest about the limitations, but I’m also trying to be honest, which requires that I don’t just say “well, it didn’t work, the end.” Writing isn’t a “it didn’t work, the end” kind of thing. To get to this point, you would have to poke yourself out of the idea that anything could ever just amount to anything and then end in some binary 1 to 0 or 0 to 1 or whatever the fuck. It’s always been its own beautiful way of re-discovering.

Model-Parameters vs. Inside-Piles-of-Clothes (July 24, 2026)

1. grab reality like a door knob and hand-gestured shapes rather than misty (was supposed to be another word but this works too), forever-ambiguous, non-agitprop, non-iconographic cinematography and inside-pile-of-clothes

2. object-oriented (compressed single-object images like caparisoned elephants) writing and its hypothetical opposite

3. impressionistic, phenomenological “show, don’t tell”, “write-arounds”, “circle-arounds”

4. boxes (architecture) / rain (harder to pin down, not spheres or bunch of parts like in physics simulators or Roblox Studio)

   • even as rain has been accounted for urban-infrastructurally

5. propaganda (agitprop) and physics simulators (Incredibots 2)

6. social ambiguities

   • controlling one’s reactions or body language or frame or posture and using that as the base/basis
   • no proper script, react to you in ways you can’t make sense of, unlike the way you would if you were a uniformed traffic controller with cars when there’s no traffic light in an intersection
   • role-based confidence (“I am a traffic controller so I control traffic,” or “I am a weirdo so people will be weirded out by me”, which gives confidence because it creates a script even if that script is only what one experiences rather than shared the way car drivers are with traffic controllers or lights)

As I wrote earlier in a list, agitprops will eventually have to take on rain as physics simulator on top of propaganda. When at home and staring at frame-in-frame and scenery that has become laden with load-bearing imagery (seeing words in reality or paint in trees rather than the other way around), “imitations of rain” (model-parameters) are laid over boxes. But when you’re in a cafe where meaning-making is very much internal (basal) rather than room-decorated and personal-website-curated, you get to see “inside-piles-of-clothes” shine and your writing become “I would never write this way if I wasn’t there.” The base here is integration, but the effect is so much more incisive than that.

Boundary-Setting (July 24, 2026)

It’s strange working with things that one is already well familiar with. It’s not that the essence of agitprop or propaganda vs. physics simulator / rain hasn’t been explored before. Even the whole “impregnable whole” has been there, even if I didn’t have confirmation yet.

So what’s even the third thing? The thing beyond all this? The gap that’s still there and loud?

I hope to find it after I’ve gone and revisited every single journal entry and have explored these ideas in “Crudes” (lists of compressed imagery and ideas and references). But as much as I say that, I did say that my two handy approaches—one being systematization, the other being load-bearing imagery—don’t work.

I can see the recent intense history of my attempts to grasp at that third thing, whether through web novels such as Reverend Insanity and Lord of the Mysteries, much of the imagery I’ve developed post–January 2026, or everything falling under perception and phenomenology as I’ve tackled it¹. But in the end, I’ve only but crucially expanded the surface area for what it’s not and what the question (not even the actual issue yet!) even is.

That just mentioning these and listing these down doesn’t do it goes to show that I will really have to go through everything and synthesize all of it into a coherent whatever-the-fuck. But at the same time, it was all just a bunch of shit gesturing frailly at the same thing.

To do a full explanation:

• Space: think Poetics of Space and you probably have the gist of it
• Friction: This overlaps with many different ideas, but it’s basically just getting your shit rocked and thrown into mundane, hyper-physical reality, where everything you have and think and imagine is deflated and complicated, even locally
• Embodiment: Touches shoulders with friction, but think of Merleau-Ponty and you got it, basically
• Enactment: very much grabbing from embodiment, but distinct in that it emphasizes turning what is merely interior, felt, phenomenological, or cogitated into proportional disposition in physical space as well as capturing the essence of oneself with colors and words.
• Becoming: This focuses on the self as process beyond current stream of consciousness and admires “self-overcoming.” Anything else is probably extrapolable from that.
• Possession: This touches hands with self-possession, but this relates not only to the self but to anything within perceptual field, anything one can perceive and then conceptually control, such that it runs back to the experiencing self as possessable.
• Conceptualization: Distinct from control, possession, and words themselves. Captures the base idea of turning something into a concept. Anything other explanation would probably take away from its rudeness.
• Arrogance: Existence, rather than just experience, is crucial to this, since “self-overcoming” runs into the issue of what-is-exactly-happening-to-the-person-as-overcoming-occurs. Arrogance grabs percept and inconsistency and turns it into something one can claim, even if one’s identity is structural rather than anything truly separate from “I exist, therefore I am:” hence, “structural arrogance.”
• Non-Writing: Disruptions, variations of consciousness, intense heat, sleep deprivation, anything external that runs back to writing as “what is writing organizing?”
• Extreme “Show, Don’t Tell”: Different from embodiment, concept, enactment, friction, space, and the many others, this takes the self out and describes as tool and method without the authorial meaning-making—hyper-realism (hyper-sensory), essentially, at least in my form of it.
• Bunch of Words: When I first started journaling, I didn’t need the distinction that this term makes. But it is the foundation of all the other terms and the epistemological point of them. Not truth, just provision.
• Consolidation: Sisters with integration. Distinct from verbal systematization, hyper-compression, and load-bearing imagery. Describes intent or posture or result as pre-intended rather than method/methodology.
• Function: Just like “extreme ‘show, don’t tell’,” this throws the self out. In fact, the self develops over it. Situationality.
• Crutches: Was used as basis for distrust of honesty given structure. But remains useful for declaring intent and governing instinct or as a byword for dishonesty (and thus used as an anti-shortcut when defining honesty).
• Aliveness, Realness, and Honesty: intent, seeing things as fresh, not modifying toward ignorance, but experiencing as impossibly current, so as not to perform oneself—alive, real, and honest as here
• Labeling: Mapping being one’s territory. Conceptual control but specifically on that rather than possession as this broader posture
• Load-Bearing Imagery: using imagery to capture the essence of the whole, reserving full authority and right as whole even while pertaining to part, due to being load-bearing.
  • Hyper-Compression: is basically what load-bearing imagery relies on, but applies equally to “extreme ‘show, don’t tell’” where sentences each act as a “world-of-their-own”
• Manga Panels: Visual images, sort of frame-in-frame, but not impregnable wholes: “lucidity in single-panel-stacked–structured ongoing-apocalypse separated by the widest empty white spaces above and below.”
• Meaning-Making What the reader does when reading a work of “extreme ‘show, don’t tell,’” essentially, but not limited to that scenario.
• Reconstruction: Distinct from consolidation since it focuses on the “I got here with this inventory called ‘memories’”.
• Feedback: Applied across many concerns, whether exposure, vivifying “rain,” structure…
• Right-in-Front-of-Oneself: Evolution of “crutches,” where zero-assuming presence/mindfulness becomes the way to stop crutching.
  • Re-Existing From Scratch: Distinct from reconstruction, because it emphasizes aliveness, realness, and honesty rather than the process of memory as relates to identity.
• Closed System: Writing itself (in my case)
• Letting Oneself Be Changed: Distinct from “right-in-front-of-oneself,” because this is a posture for “inside-pile-of-clothes” (though I’d be careful not to constrain it to this).
• Proportion: Parts as relate to whole, regardless of absolute size: appearing in identity and such
  • Systematization: breaking something down into parts
• Technical: Distinct from sheer wordage or “bunch of words,” since it presupposes an improvability or loop of progression, but does concern expanding one’s vocabulary so that one can have more places for reality and phenomenology to land, for the sake of increased overall precision.
  • Speech Rupture: Rupturing one’s whole writing, but not necessarily the reality of change, just representational difference, such as when I shifted from only journaling to writing in “extreme ‘show, don’t tell’” in tandem with journaling, and how I underwent regimens such as three days of physical note-taking across four books to brain-train micro-reading.
• Association: making connections that don’t exist intrinsically and are not there in front of oneself conceptually.
  • Transformative Effect: Turning copyrighted reality (real objects such as birds) through transformative use, but “effect” since one still sees the bird and then transforms. Relates to “seeing words in reality” or “seeing paint in real tree leaves” rather than the other way around.
• Exhaust Fumes of 26-in-3 Where previous entries are eaten up and proportionally made redundant and superseded, leaving behind that. “26-in-3” refers to the 4 million words across 26 monthly text files in 3 yearly folders.
  • “Entrify”: Seeing what happens when the self is not allowed to vivify the passworded dead text and if the entry can at all be improved as it is as words and perhaps as actual 100 percent storage.
• Words Doing More Work Than Oneself: performing oneself rather than looking in front of oneself and being “here, real, and alive”
• Format of Experience: the continuous structure absorbing new experiences
• Structural Honesty: True to oneself as “I exist in a world, so I am”, which is by default but also “honest” in that regard still, even by structure, as one asserts (i.e., “structural arrogance” or owning).
• Process Across Variations of Consciousness: the can-be-invisible thing that runs through thought, feeling, and experience patterns as consciousness and varied, should be different from format of experience
• Wordlessness: Relates to mastery, internalization, consolidation, proficiency, technical skill, proportion, practicality…

Or maybe that third thing is just ignorance as always-latent. But that feels like a structural cop-out. Like someone who’s never written a journal entry having read a manga and saying, “Well, shrug.” The point of writing is not to pretend sureness, but it’s not to accept ignorance either.

That’s why I wrote even when I wasn’t even talking about the solution, wasn’t even talking about the issue, wasn’t even talking about the question, was basically setting things up before even getting close to what could even be said to be beginning, since writing presupposes or prequires that you talk about everything else first before you’ve written enough to talk about this one thing by everything that it could have possibly been instead (by what it is not). That’s the point of writing—why provision is load-bearing here.

It’s why it runs back to “saying hello.” You’d think 4 million words seems excessive just to do that, but it’s exactly that excess that makes a hello a hello. You’ve done and said everything,

I will not force an answer. The direction is already enough. This passage has done its job.

The search isn’t this declaration anyway. This declaration has done its job. The search is ongoing.

Realness Pokes Itself (July 24, 2026)

• I’ve fucked myself by putting it all together and thus making it all redundant. It’s not that it wasn’t already coming. It was already here. I just matched current reality and made something useful out of it. But still, this isn’t an automatic launchpad. I’ve stepped outside of all of that. And I’m now bare and unclothed.
• I’ve targeted the leaders/pillars, and now the ecosystem’s collapsed.
• It seems that’s all I’ve been doing since the start of this year, but it makes sense. Now that the scaffolding’s done its job, it only makes sense to dismantle all of it piece by piece by testing and pushing them to their limits until the only thing that’s left is the reality it had worked so hard to re-earn.
• When I’m at home, it’s so easy to have this whole thing that you are, because there’s nothing to say otherwise.
• But what I’ve been building in the last seven months has been about seeing if I can truly internalize.

I am essentially poking myself to see if I’m real. Which is a strange way to put it, but it captures the essence of it.

“Who am I without everything as assumption/assumed?”

While I may have said that “there’s nothing to or on me,” there is something to or on me, and that’s why it’s actually effective that I’m putting myself in situations where those “somethings” are omitted. Of course, I did say that in the sense that there’s nothing really crazy or anything about me, but we can extend/understand that to implicate the assumption that we’re assumptionless, when clearly, losing access to my usual setup and even now reaching the end of the usefulness of what I’ve been relying on for many months to circle something barely effable affect, if not discomfort (perhaps so as to “destabilize” in some minimal degree), me. Of course, I’ve had this many times already—moments of just sitting there in a new cafe and not having any idea what the hell is coming next, if there is. But each time isn’t proof of stability, but signs that no matter how much I talk of “nothing,” there is always something that keeps me here in my full form, even if regularly invisible or unconscious or affected through my regular sustaining of ambiguity and aporia, though I did say that situational spells of fragmentation is part and parcel of realness, due to persistence. So this whole motion I’m making qualifies as falling under the “myself” that’s easily designing the “fucking.”

Realness searches for its vulnerabilities, and managebly poking them is challenging and vivifying.

I realize now why I didn't want to just write anything when I joined this Discord server where anyone can have their own diary text channel. I knew that was too easy, and that wouldn't be me. The child that did those things a decade ago would never just do something. He would always look for what surprised him. He would go for what really made him curious, even if it meant being scared or nervous. He would go exactly for what got him and thus got him going.

This Thing (July 24, 2026)

Self-Limits

I’m trying to find the limits of myself. Going all around as far and wide and deep and obliique as possible. “What have I not addressed?” Integrating beyond that.

13 minutes later:

It feels like the only possible path forward is to engineer/design/devise/invent new ways of constraining or re-discovery. It makes everything as light as a feather and my own devices as brutal as a leather belt. And that thing that you get from this situation-of-mind is so strange. There is a strange confidence or security or capacity in this.

To see what this thing is made of.

A Desire to Be Self-Manageably Affected

Am I made of routine or am I made out of capacity? Will I break if the routine breaks? Or do I absorb these breaks, not because I’ve made them a routine, but because I’ve learned that whaetver I will undergo during these breaks is separate from myself? Not that nothing affects or changes me, but that separation here allows for change and some form of manaegable rupture without actually losing it.

That’s why I put myself in situations where there’s nothing at all to point back to routine, where you’re sustaining a held breath and you’re free-floating, completely untethered and without “the next thing.” Of course, the reality is that I do eventually go back, but during that moment, in that held breath, it’s a posture that’s the difference. Someone learns to take hits and to stay there, all affected.

It’s not groundedlessness, but actually seeking groundedness through breaking the abstract rhythms of the self which one has internalized to the point of a kind of belief system of assumption.

There’s no meaningful disruption. That’s the point. There’s no meaning during it or even after. Meaning isn’t found in it at all. It’s about learning to sustain meaninglessness, held breath. Kind of like a mini death. Simulating a manageable PG version of “losing meaning” while still being there and alive in every waking moment that this timed simulation is ongoing.

Self-Responses

Sounds like mindfulness?

But one does get something out of it psychologically, no? In a way? Somehow. Not a promise of impenetrability, but kind of like a capacity to negotiate with delayed gratification.

They’re clearly getting something out of it. Maybe, the capacity to get randomly thrown into interesting (maybe even crazy) situations and not panic or lose sense at all. Maybe cultivating a sense of aliveness.

So it’s a lot more shallow. It’s just actual boredom.

A desire to be self-manageably affected.

I’m guessing that the reason that this doesn’t work in other cases is that reward often comes automatically or instantly, which makes for a lack of being affected. For example, while most people would want to be liked for their appearance, others still might find that numbing.

Self-Responses (2)

I don’t think it’s just “I worked hard for it so it’s worth it.” It’s specifically “being affected,” so “worked hard” can even end up be numbing in a way because it can be too satisfying and direct and straightforward.

Basis of Defamiliarization, Writing, and Cafe Stays (July 24, 2026)

It’s so easy when I’m surrounded with everything familiar. It feels like I can just forget everything and let it all carry me forward, as if I myself don’t have to exist as this noticeable, marked thing on the plane of existence. But there’s something damaging there if left like that for too long. I will never know what I am if I never expose myself to what I’m not. If everything that surrounds me are only those that constitute me (my identity), then I will stay stuck in that pattern of existence until I am dead, not that that’s a bad thing, but you will never get to re-enjoy all of it if you never grant yourself that possible new way of looking at it—re-discovery. So I will come back to myself, just every time to a little expanded me. The opposite direction of an echo chamber, essentially. You refine yourself against everything you’re not, and thus, you become more yourself by holding yourself from more than one angle sheerly. It’s like the concept of a bus and how your entire life revisiting it from as many versions of that bus as possible in all manner of experiences, states of mind, and all such conditions and differences. This is especially the case since we tend to take on very different versions of ourselves, roles, personas, or compartments depending on context/situation. Meeting oneself in all possible configurations, external and internal.

I guess writing allows me to keep the format of experience subject to variation, since approximation expands surface area, when repeatedly revisited as much as the experience or percept itself.

That’s probably why I continue to write while putting myself in new situations. As limited as it is, I do eight-hour cafe stays and 1 out of 1.6 is a new cafe, and in that span, I write and allow myself to undergo all that it does to me the writer.

Non-Existent Creature (July 25, 2026)

I gotta be some non-existent creature. There’s nothing strange about what I’m doing, but there’s everything strange about what I’m doing. Something I can only do because I have all of this time and space. And it’s only clear to me because I actually have been recently (for the last year and month) putting myself in eight-hour cafe stays once every three days with one new cafe per 1.6 stays. Most people like me don’t realize, because they don’t straight up just have their entire life reflected back at them like this.

I’m not talking about the cafe stays. I’m talking about what I’ve been doing all along at home for years and have made portable.

I’m referring to the way that I see the world, how I write, how I experience books, and how much I get lost in things most people would never find themselves getting lost in. Creative projects. The very concept of that is normal, but with just how much I’ve gotten into them, it’s easy to see how much I contrast many other people when I’m at these new cafes that just show how strange I am by sheer exposure and seeing others react to me when I would never react to myself.

For some context, I’ve been writing 5,000 words a day in the last 26 months, and I’ve been staying at home for the last six years. During that time, I’ve really pushed and gotten myself lost in creative projects and all such experimentation. My life before that was very outdoorsy, social, outgoing, and community-based, and even then, I was already home-schooled and was already engaged with computers. A lot of things had to happen for me to turn out the way that I am today, and that is only made sharply visible to me through these cafe stays.

Just doing what I would do (even in a much less extreme way) at home but now in public with a portable laptop is enough to make people react to me. Experiencing that repeatedly in a total of 1,200 hours(?) is enough to change me by reflecting myself back at myself.

If I was performing, it would be easier for others to understand, but it’s so much easier to tell I’m eccentric because I treat it as just normal to myself, like I myself am unable to be self-conscious about something I’ve been doing for years, because well, I’ve been doing it for years, not just doing it now in public. This makes it so much stranger, I imagine.

Worlds colliding, essentially.

Not just internal, but literal worlds in the sense of a wholly different life colliding with all manner of crowds that sharply contrast theirs.

But the reason that this is its own specific thing that’s happening is that it actually is a whole clash altogether that one has to sustain. One has to make the active effort to be there and exposed.

I am the guy who’s coming in from outside and showing my “weird” country’s culture.

What Is… (July 25, 2026)

What is fiction? What is drawing/art/rendering?

I’ve written 4 million words, and I’ve written fiction novels. I’ve read many books. I’ve drawn so much. I’ve seen many art.

I should know.

Yet here I am. Clueless. I have no clue. I don’t know what anything is supposed to be. I feel like I can do anything and yet no.

I don’t know what will happen when I just go and write. I never know. Fiction. Art. Drawing. I can’t even begin to know. There’s no hint or sign. I just sit down, and I’m supposed to know. But it comes out anyway, not as what I knew, but as words that should make sense but don’t. Those words are generic, familiar even. How could it be strange? Yet, it surprises me.

I always feel like I’m new to everything, and things that I should know so well come upon me like I never knew them at all.

I always feel like a beginner. And I’m not saying that as a self-help thing. I’m saying that quite literally. I wake up, and all of this knowledge that’s supposed to make me feel that way just doesn’t do anything at all. It’s like what’s right in front of me is always fresh, always hitting me regardless of how much I’m supposed to know based on everything I’ve already done, experienced, seen, etc. I should know, yet when I’m there, I don’t. I have no clue.

Food always tastes like I’m supposed to know it, yet have no clue. It tastes me.

Practical Self-Trust (July 25, 2026)

There are two versions of me: the guy that wants to go out and explore the forests that Skyrim depicts even if it’s a lot of effort or the guy that wants to do nothing all day for a whole week at home in a room. When I really go out, I always say, “I’m glad I went out.” When I stay inside, I always say, “I’m glad I stayed inside.” I always end up doing exactly what I wanted/needed to do anyway.

What I mean is that even if I could have gone or stayed this one time instead, manageability is always something you do with yourself as something you trust yourself to make decisions on.

Essentially: “Why did I go on that walk today?” “Well, I just felt like it. Maybe another time I’d be walking for a whole hour straight with a bag on. But really, I just take whatever I can get, and if the opportunity presents itself to me and I feel like it, then so be it.”

Fiction as Technique (July 25, 2026)

Do I just write fiction? Should I theorize, outline, and craft what the hell fiction is supposed to be and then draft passages here and there to test out a list of options, variations, or sandboxes and study and see exactly what makes fiction writing what it is for me? Sort of like someone who writes a story and then tests out different possible ways that the scene can go and then pick one that really gets them.

Since “just write” always runs into the issue that you’re not really doing anything interesting by itself, by opening it up to multiple sandbox options, you can be a lot more precise and deliberate about what exactly you want, so you’re not locked into a very specific option instantly and then feel like there’s no escaping it, which creates a forced tree path that could very well be incorrigibly uninteresting. By making it modular, you can select for interest at every possible fork.

One doesn’t even need to commit to one branch. The benefit of modularity is that as long as you’re driven, you can very well just create a network of possible routes and then just tweak to make every possible variation or modification so that you can make that whole thing its own playground or infinite sandbox. And you could very well end up making multiple stories out of that, with changed names here and all, or multiple angles of the same plot.

A sandbox is just a playground. It doesn’t have to be anything but what you make it. There’s no “never risking a real ending” since it’s only as “ending-y” or “non-ending-y” as you make it. You can very well make “ending” its own sandbox, which makes for even more interesting ways of reinforcing “real ending” as a whole path and end in and of itself. It’s not necessarily optimization at that point. It’s more so a private joy that creates for even surer audience-benefitting decisions in the long run, since you’re no longer just screaming out your repressed/suppressed desires and you’ve already addressed it so now you can focus only what really would actually make the most sense for a really good story that still works with what you want. Variations are not betrays of “one thing.” They just give you more space to think through what you do end up choosing. A single “hello” gains weight when it’s held on top of a hidden iceberg of all the possible ways you expressed and experimented with expression.

But this is a skill. It’s harder. But also ultimately more rewarding. Treating your work as a draft is very, very hard. Not everyone has written enough to treat their work as just a bunch of words or possible ways of telling a story.

It’s very unromantic, to say the least.

If I’m truly humble in the way that I very much imply I am when I say that I “let myself be changed,” then I will learn to write by technique.

Who-I-Apparently-Am (July 25, 2026)

Even if I met someone I knew then, what would be the difference? There’s nothing in or on me. I have addressed everything I could possibly, and most things don’t even get a mention because I don’t see the point. But sometimes, since I have my glasses off, I imagine what would happen if someone I knew from back then in high school were to see me. I realize that I would probably just stare at the sky as I’ve been for a long while now. I’ve been freed from all that, and I don’t carry what I used to. It’s very simple and so redundant so as to be just what-it-is. What I have left to say or prove? I’ve said and asked countless times, and there’s nothing in me anymore except this person that I am on the surface.

I’ve reinvented and reset so many times that I can barely even be in sync with the person that I was back then. I’ve gone so far somewhere that I don’t even know myself. I only know that I am here as myself and that’s nothing else. In fact, I have to be reminded of what I’ve become and just how much I’ve changed, since for me, it’s just what it is, but to people I don’t know, they see me for who I’ve become, even if in my head, I’ve been this kid all this time, even as the reality is that I will definitely not be the same person, especially to people who knew me from back then.

I’m too caught up with the world around me, with the present, with the beauty of everything around me, and whatever interactions I get just feel pleasant and rewarding in ways that I know I didn’t have before. But it’s so where-I-am that again, I need to be constantly reflected back at myself just to see “Oh, I see. I guess? shrug.”

I have to almost pretend to be jaded just to seem understandable, since it’s somehow very strange to be and feel the way that I do on a day-to-day all-day every-moment basis. I just feel alive, am here, and feel so real. And that’s something that really, really came from such a long time spent really coming to terms with a lot of things and finally reaching a point.

It’s probably why I can just stand there and still for tens of long minutes and stare and just feel totally rewarded, and I only notice that this is something to notice because people look at me like it’s something to notice. Even if I never put myself outside, I would never know just how much I’ve apparently changed. This is who-I-apparently-am.

I’ve gotten closure. That was almost eight months ago. And I’m experiencing what that’s like. Just sitting down and just sitting down and time is passing so lovingly slowly. And I don’t feel anything burning inside me. I instead see everything and know with sureness and confidence that I really have reached a point. Peace? Yeah. I look at the world around me, and instead of something overwhelming and full of things I have to navigate, I just feel always that rfeeling of just being able to look at it all and just stare and look at the tiny things, the crazy things, the weird things, and, instead of being overwhelmed or even remaining calm, I feel… alive. And not in the way that even I notice, because when you’re there, the only thing you are is there, and there’s nothing else but that and not even nothing else and there so as to point even that out, since… I’ve lost it… In the best way possible.

In fact, I intentionally put myself in situations where I am nothing and have no access to everything that “makes me me” so that I can truly feel in a way some way that even I, this person that has reached this point, can’t control or manage or handle or know or understand or feel so strongly about so as to find some practical way of making sense of it. And those situations allow me to stay alive and not go numb, since when you reach this point, if you don’t continue to find new ways of getting yourself out of yourself, you will slowly build up sediment. Maybe not that of a lack of closure, but that of closure being its own identity baggage.

Self-forgetting, even up to the point of closure being forgotten, allows for me to feel everything.

Sitting there, not knowing, taking it fully, letting it happen to oneself but absorbing it as much as one can, becoming (in a way nothing can)…

Yet: embodiment.

A security builds. Not necessarily identity. But sureness. Across confusions. Something lived builds or expands or grows.

Something comes out (of all of it).

Almost like building a self from scratch.

A kind of fore-knowing, or always-knowing. Something genuinely stays or lasts or carries over across. Something genuinely resilient.

AI-Generated Profile Webpage (July 25, 2026)

Seeing an AI-generated profile webpage based on my own recent curated journal entries is so strange because it captures the essence of what I’m saying so well, but at the same time, I don’t mean to assert an identity out of those entries. I’d never write myself out to be any profile webpage like that, especially since the point of writing all that is that it’s just exhaust fumes. Even if it makes me out to be some kind of person, it’s just a bunch of words. I wouldn’t recognize myself if I looked at that alone, except for very specific personal details. But the whole gist or personality or persona or whatever that it makes feels like taking a bunch of ideas one plays around with and forming an identity around them. It looks so clunky, cumbersome, and awkward.

Self-Representation (July 25, 2026)

The best way to represent oneself?

I can be honest as exhaust fumes, yet also not be honest since nothing in the exhaust fumes necessarily points directly to who I am. That was the point of hyper-compressions and load-bearing imagery. But it feels that ended up just feeling like subserving a point or points rather than consolidating myself. Though I have written passages that do consolidate me as a person in the sense of putting it all together.

But 99 percent of my entries are just straight exhaust fumes rather than consolidative, and that’s what makes it so effective since it shows me grappling with ideas and all that and not letting my identity have to show or prove itself except by details relevant to the points themselves as load-bearing. But in terms of self-representativeness, whole nother matter.

There was a time in fiction writing that storytelling with scenes with goblins was enough to get the ball rolling and the feeling of catching the self in real time.

Narrative(-ness) itself in flow state(?)

For example: this passage. It’s exactly what I mean yet it’s totally not understandable by itself when read. It’s not even exhaust fumes. It’s direct self-language (at that point).

Cramped Expands (July 25, 2026)

It’s strange. That thing about fiction. And also real-life. Putting yourself under constraints. Or even in a tight thriller escape room story. Expands you. Like being in a tiny cramped new cafe, and the only thing you feel is that you’ve become so, so much more. Like being in a friend’s wooden house and seeing the world fresh and adventurous.

Like Minecraft or League of Legends. These video games contrain your options but expand your depth of experience or perception because you see the world so much more through these parameters, essentially revealing a new layer of reality than if you were just experiencing reality blind or by default. Like seeing words in reality or paint in trees (rather than the other way around as you would think) or seeing Tetris in architecture and things others might consider amorphous like color.

Tailored World (July 25, 2026)

It’s so easy to form an overarching self-narrative over reality where one is like a manwha protagonist over everything, especially given I’m a prolific writer and read those comics.

But that I am always putting myself in situations, whether through certain kinds of “cramped” storytelling or deflating environments and dynamics in reality, where that “deformity” never forms shows just how much you can grow if you’re just deliberate enough about your own growth. Sort of like those stories where the protagonist goes through a world tailored just to maximize their ascent. What we often miss about these stories is that the main character energy doesn’t come from what we feel as readers when reading the story but from the MC actually going through it just to get through those satisfying, challenging arcs. If we want the same, we have to abandon that detachment and actually face the shit without the comfort of knowing this is that kind of power fantasy since this is literal reality, just like what that MC experienced.

The hype isn’t the MC’s. It’s the reader’s. Abandon the hype. And up the stakes.

I’ve lived (x4) (July 25, 2026)

“Who am I, after everything?”

It’s not that I’ve lived a long life. It’s that I’ve lived every life.

I’ve unfolded from zero, time and time again. Every single time feels like forever, and not once did I think of it as anything but reality whole right now, the frontier of everything, the edges of everything.

I was everything all at once, and I was final.

It’s not “I’ve lived.”

It’s “I’ve lived. I’ve lived. I’ve lived. I’ve lived.”

I don’t know who I’m following. I don’t know who I’m keeping track of anymore. There was always something right in front of me that I was chasing. And I blank out and look again, and all of a sudden, “what was it again?” Then it hits me, what I’m looking at right now, that’s it! (But it’s totally different from before I blanked out.) And that happens. Again and again. Not again and again in the sense that I’ve lived. But again and again in the sense that “I’ve lived. I’ve lived. I’ve lived. I’ve lived.”

I always adjust to what I blank out to and what’s right in front of me when I look again.

I always seem to be only as much as an RPG player with inventory and all that. Whatever depth could be said of that person isn’t there. It’s all function and systems and stats and items. Memories, sure, but not really in the intense way Proust would describe it. Closer to world-building/setting. My life feels like the gameplay of Torchlight 2.

Narrative Is Dead (July 25, 2026)

My question then is what is the point of narrative? Once it’s already been so heavily explored to the point of breaking and revising time and time again?

Why do I write? Exhaust fumes, that’s it?

Can I not create something out of the ashes?

Is it always going to be getting caught up?

Sitting there like a duck?

There must be a way to make writing so much more than just either exhaust fumes or consolidative. Narrative.

There must be a way to restore narrative.

One can’t just be constraint and a cramped cafe and that expands some kind of self that’s not the self but something that runs across selves.

One can’t just be capacity (sheer absorption).

There must be a way to restore narrative.

Like Jesus to the struggling.

If expansion breaks, if capacity breaks… If the thing that keeps bouncing back and getting stronger breaks?

Usually, we’d think that’d be death, but there’s a fate worse than death, where these break but one is still alive.

Is “I don’t know” the answer? The only? It’s been that really. And every time has led to me coming back, but every time has been an “I don’t know.” If I one day don’t bounce back, will that “I don’t know” be the only thing I’m left with? Will that be the only “narrative” I have left? That I didn’t know.

If that moment of going underwater becomes permanent but one doesn’t die and just is constantly in that state?

Where’s my Jesus?

The answer can’t be “just don’t go in a situation where things go that badly.”

I guess it’s an “I don’t know.”

I guess I’m just going to have to be as strong as I can possibly be, not to avoid it since it’s impossible to avoid once it does happen, but so that at the very least, I live the life that the people to whom it happened wish for. I just have to be.

At the very least, I have to unleash myself creatively and truly pursue a greatness that I can only verify through self-honesty and self-challenge. I just have to try, really hard, and grasp aliveness.

Interrupted as Final Thing (July 26, 2026)

It’s strange. I’m going outside to build something I’ve never built. A self that has its own self reflected back at itself because it’s outside and very much visible to others when for many years, it’s been in a room alone at home and experienced itself as pure medium of thoughts that could be followed to their ends with nothing interrupting them. It’s not just a self that’s interrupted by being seen. It’s only interrupted by a world that is full of hyper-specific details that interrupt it. For a while, I experienced all that as just fuel for writing, as just things that would eventually add to writing. But now, I’m experiencing it all as its own building of a self, the one that gets interrupted, where the moment is not a phase for what comes next, but the moment of being constantly interrupted as the very self that’s being built.

I’m not saying the self is the one being interrupted. I’m saying I might have never truly existed. There’s no self to test, because that might have not existed in the first place in the way that I understood it as something to test by putting it outside. Now that I’ve gone outside and had myself interrupted and just stay there in the moment enough rather than using it all as fuel for the un interrupted self, I’ve discovered a self that only exists when the world and been seen themselves are their own self. I may have grown so much in this home room, but I’m now discovering a self that never had to exist all that time.

I thought it was portability, never-interrupted home self to fuel outside, a kind of solipsism over the world, self over world. The reality may be that portability was not the final thing. The final thing may have just been the one exposed, in the world, interrupted.

I only realized this now after around 1,200 hours of cafe stays in 96 unique cafes in the last 14 months. For all that time, it’s just been portability. But yesterday, in the 96th unique cafe, that was when I realized it. Or more precisely, it’s only right now today in this morning that I (the home self) realized it, but the interrupted self yesterday was the one that discovered it even if it was not the one that realized it.

To be clear, I didn’t exactly bring the fuel back home, since I could process that fuel portably there in the cafe during the stay through the laptop, though yes, I did ultimately “finalize” and even discovered on top of that once I did get home to my computer desk. Those cafe stays lasted hours, and I would be writing always with the breadcrumbs of portability, of the home self that was still there while outside in the cafe. But very much recently, I’ve reached of a point of sitting there with no breadcrumbs and discovered that in that moment, I was something else entirely, when I wasn’t writing out of something I set up for myself before going to the cafe, but writing instead out of right now, with thoughts that are taking place outside, which means they’re getting actively interrupted but, because I’ve grown so tolerant, I’m actively meeting them throughout the getting interrupted, which is now forming its own self, the exposed, the in-the-world, the interrupted.

I will happily realize this discovery through the home self. Discovery in this case belongs to the interrupted self, and that’s its own thing in its own right that no realization can ever undercut. There was never any hierarchy, only that I never truly existed in a way that I could test outside except through portability as smuggling, and that the interrupted is finally forming for the very first time as its own recognized, realized thing, of which the home self is the one making the acknowledgement.

Interruption is required for the interrupted. If I stay in this room long enough, nothing will interrupt me and everything will happen to their end. You can’t interrupt yourself. It has to happen to you even as you’re always starting to get lost in your thoughts. The interrupted self doesn’t have to realize (follow a thought to its end) anything. It’s in the word “interrupted.”

This naturally happened after back-to-back new cafes, including non-Starbucks ones, which made it even more novel since I’ve gotten used to Starbucks. So it was its own explosive brute force.

My younger self himself, who was outdoorsy and communal, was full of discoveries since it was also always interrupted and in the world, but my autobiographer self (the home self) was full of realizations.

2 hours and 21.5 minutes later, after heading to a new non-Starbucks cafe:

The difference of course is that while I had “outdoorsy,” “communal,” “sports,” and all manner of things back then, I don’t have them now and just sit down in a chair with a computer staring at a text document containing a bunch of words in a cafe full of strangers. So you can imagine just how much more brutal it is now. And the funniest part is that while one might associate the cafe as a place where you’re pressured to get things done, I’m using that very pressure to just sit there and not have an answer and have my thoughts interrupted with no breadcrumbs to get me going and autopilot through both breadcrumb and ambient social productivity pressure. Literally sitting down for an uninterrupted (pun[?] intended) 10 minutes to 30 minutes to an hour just staring at a screen and just letting it happen. It’s uncomfortable, but it was the only way I was ever going to discover the interrupted self once the portability has completely broken down and there was nothing else but that extended interrupted breadcrumb-less moment. And I expect it to become more and more its own enjoyable thing as I grow to become that newly discovered interrupted self.

Self-Responses

won’t they grow to integrate both?

you think the interrupted self will eventually form its own thoughts? just starting from a whole scratch since the thoughts of the portable home self keeps getting interrupted?

scratch in the sense that he will soon get used to being interrupted and then form thoughts that resist those interruptions, and those will be thoughts belonging to the interrupted self rather than the portable home self which never grew to withstand those conditions. So: “from scratch.”

or perhaps even when no actual “thought” occurs, the discovery mechanism becomes cultivated, not necessarily fuel for the portable home self, but closer to meeting the interruptions and finding that one’s portable home self gets pushed back on, matched, fought, competed with, compared with, interlocked like arm wrestling.

Return to First Person

In that sense, rather than pure medium, you become just as much self as interrupted through exposure and in-the-world. This might be a better overall consolidation than if it was just portable home self.

In this sense, I’m not pure narrative, pure medium, pure thought, pure uninterrupted portable home self. Not that that is no longer available to me, but no longer is me. The interrupted self’s discovery opens up room for non-narrative, which expands the overall person in terms of consolidation.

“Non-narrative” because of the fact of interruption being its own discovered “self,” rather than fuel for the home portable self. That’s not just a distinction of word, but practicality, or how it actually takes place, as well.

Again, non-narrative because the interruption becomes its own self (thus “interrupted self). There’s a very specific distinction that is either met or ignored completely. Just because I can talk about my younger self doesn’t deny my younger self his non-narrative.

It’s why I keep re-narrating about the past self, because it’s something discovered that never is un-discovered or re-discovered. It’s just re-realized again and again. The realization is moving. The discovery isn’t. Thus: “non-narrative.”

I can’t really do anything about the past self. I can’t change the past. I can’t un-discover what I discovered. I can only move forward as autobiographer, and autobiographer doesn’t change the past, only forgets it, develops false memories, reconstructs, re-realizing.

The point of memory is the point of realization.

Realization isn’t truth. It’s memory. It’s reconstruction. It’s words. It’s autobiography.

Discovery is separate from realization. You can’t un-discover something. You can only re-realize something again and again.

I don’t just know. I don’t know. I realize.

You can’t un-discover something, because you can’t make something that happened didn’t happen. It happened to you, and there’s no un-discovering that. An experience can’t be un-experienced. Only denied, re-realized, narrated after the fact. But narration after the fact doesn’t make it narrative. It’s still non-narrative. And that shows in the way we develop false memories. We never could make something non-narrative narrative. We just narrate about our own narratives, like words on words.

I don’t control God (if He is real) because I can write Him down on the page.

I can be honest and still be made of realizations. The interrupted self experiences discoveries (redundant in a way since experience and discovery are basically the same thing). The portable home self “experiences” realizations. Honest, sure, but once exposed, once in the world, interrupted. The idea of testing that self becomes a precarious idea. Unrigorous. Realization came first. Interruption makes experience come first, makes discovery the point: hence, “interrupted self.”

Nothing I say will say what I mean. Arguing against it will always miss the point. And that’s why I write again and again.

It’s not really a realization. It’s easy to argue against that, because it’s always wrong. But I’m pointing at experience.

I can’t really defend an experience, nor attack it. I don’t have access to it here.

I don’t really know what there is to know. In the end, I always end up pointing back to reality, regardless of how wrong the words sound.

Conclusion:

Helplessness, humiliation, identitylessness (or more precisely, nothing on which one can lean except the moment as unfettered), and non-narrative (“I don’t know” or “narrative is dead”). That’s probably the best way to capture what it feels like to sit down there. You learn to embody that state. And find dignity and even strength there.

Vulnerability Protects (July 26, 2026)

It’s strange in a way that’s hard to explain, but vulnerability is actually very useful protection. When people can see you actually thinking, that’s a form of communication, and it keeps you from scaring others since they know exactly what you’re doing at all times and they admire that confidence or willingness to put oneself out there even if it means being exposed. But when people can’t see that and you’re like a mask, then they get suspicious and start to treat you with much less reserve, which takes away a lot of your protection.

Someone who shields himself ends up inviting the kind of stuff they didn’t want in the first place. It’s not that exposing doesn’t expose you, but it does make it much easier for others, which is its own protection.

So it’s more so deliberate, even strategic vulnerability.

It’s essentially how concession can get you 500 percent of what you actually wanted and how being non-compromising can get you not just 50 percent, but negative 500 percent.

Vulnerability can also make you look like you belong there. Someone putting defenses can look very much like someone who’s somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Defensiveness also tends to trigger defensiveness. League of Legends shows that in chat interactions. Someone stops being as aggressive or doesn’t know what to do because they expect the other person to react defensively or even bite back or do something expected like that. When they don’t do that, it’s disarming or confusing. It’s like someone who mains Yasuo but they’re actually very reasonable temperament-wise, or someone with a noticeable laptop setup in a cafe and they’re very soft-spoken.

Self-Responses

But vulnerability itself can be its own comfortable thing, where you’re actively comfortable and secure in your own vulnerability, if that makes sense.

Return to First Person

When you give others options to be good people rather than just putting them in a “threat” box, you make it easier for yourself by making it easier for them.

Defencelessness (July 26, 2026)

Once again, it’s a strange kind of comfort that I’ve never known anywhere else. Being able to show everything that I am. All of the things that I am. Things I’d never be able to show someone otherwise. If I was with people that knew me well, they would not see it. But with people who’ve never known me, I feel I’m at my most honest and vulnerable. All of the things that make me. All of those moment-by-moment things. Those things that pass through my mind. How they come out in the smallest ways. It feels like if I wasn’t outside, I’d never truly feel as free as I do now, because freedom isn’t in hiding in a room. It’s in just being, even if it means exposing myself and being in a world that constantly interrupts me and my thoughts and the things that form some usually protected thing that’s not truly me. This is especially the case right now that I’m in a new cafe that’s independent (non-Starbucks): the level of raw vulnerability I feel is visceral.

Call By Name (July 26, 2026)

I don’t want to perform myself. I don’t want to perform my own questions. I want to ask new ones every time, ones that destabilize me in their own ways, that don’t give me the comfort of performing them, something familiar. I will always keep trying to find answers and never let that inconclusiveness be its own comfort, because that’s not aliveness!

It’s probably why I’m afraid of putting this passage in the public diary. It’s not me! It’s not me! I don’t view anything I write this way, but I always want those that I do post to be ones that feel like they always open something, not close something, especially through questions that seem like opening, because explicit conclusions can actually be more opening than those questions.

I want to destabilize myself, surprise myself, find new ways to be and to call me by name.

The Lie of Pure Medium (July 27, 2026)

It’s almost interesting. I do my both longest and hardest streak yet in terms of challenging myself outside. And then now that I’m back and it’s done, I’m now thinking of Roblox games, of Roblox Studio, of all things? Things that are cozy and so easy and so simple and just a matter of just blocks (parts) and comfortable lines of code?

Sometimes, I wonder if I should just keep pursuing that challenging thing that makes me feel alive rather than something that will just keep me constantly not realizing that there’s so much more beyond that little place (bubble) I’ve lived in growing up. This room, all these books, the Roblox, the memories. All of it. It’s not that it didn’t do anything for me back then. But I wonder now.

I’m 23 years old. Not the 13-year-old kid I was then.

Plus: League of Legends. Oh god, to think that I’ve been this little child-thing playing this game. I’m glad I reached a high rank, but at this point, what am I even doing?

It all looks so… baby-y and fragile. You could see it in my fiction writings as well. The way I experienced and saw the world. Just how limited I was as well.

Even this interaction I already predicted. It’s literally television at this point. Formulas, plot points, routines (like comedy routines), Reddit, even pornography.

Just this morning when I woke up after yesterday, which was the last day of all that outside, I could tell the difference, when I couldn’t at all tell before. That this life I’ve been living all along is a literal point-A-to-B form of life, where you ride a bus from point A to B and never actually know the world you’re on because you’ve never walked it for an hour straight such that you can actually experience everything around you.

I’ve lived in pure medium for so long. The pure medium of point-A-to-Bs.

What was life even? Actually? What kind of a life is one living in a box and then playing with the tiniest of boxes as interface?

Boring. I know everything you’ll say, and you surprise me by being even more predictable than I predicted. How that happens is by being even more generic and predictable when I was at the very least hoping for some creativity.

There is no risk. There is literally no risk to this life. The risk is in a lack of perspective. It’s in interfaces, boxes, experiencing reality through the lens of As-to-Bs, like pornography video titles. It’s Roblox. Roblox Studio. Books. All these books. Treadmills.

Oh god. It should’ve been invisible. Pure medium. I can see that it never was.

Boring.

Predictable.

What was I even doing all this time? How did I think it was all growth? Growth on a treadmill. Oh god. Growth on pornography titles. Growth on easy lines of code that did all the thinking for you. I didn’t have to have the world interrupt me. I didn’t have to experience the world.

I wasn’t even a tourist. At least the tourist is putting themselves outside somehow, even if another box. And better yet, the tourist that goes above and beyond and actually walks the streets even if it’s definitely not a tourist attraction but genuinely just trying to find the aliveness in it all. I experienced only a fraction of the equivalent of that for my longest and hardest yet, and now, I’m here, discovering and realizing all this.

What the hell. My physical body feels too big now for the actual brain inside it. Like I look all this and that. But no. I’m a child playing with lines of code, with books, with boxes.

I thought being closed-minded and open-minded was about trying really hard and being intentional. No, it was structural. If I never put myself out of the structures, I’d never know. Even if I put myself out unintentionally or without knowing what would happen or without even realizing it would have done or changed anything, as long as I did put myself out there, I would know. And I did. This morning shows that.

What kind of treadmill life have I been living? I thought I escaped the structures when I was no longer communal. And the truth is that I did in very many ways. When I started writing and really just asking questions self-directedly here in this room alone with no one to direct me how to do it, that was incredibly valuable. And it is this same writing that led me toward getting even farther out structurally or out of the structures. And that’s why I’m here. But no, as much as the writing was crucial and catalyzed it, you can never truly ever, ever, ever predict that kind of thing. It’s not something to justify retroactively.

It happened to me beyond what I could have ever even be said to think or predict or theorize or guess.

I write this passage in hopes that I don’t lose this key.

I think the strangest part is that listening to music, writing, reading web comics, and reading books and doing all that is actually incredibly valuable and fine when I’m outside because it’s its own unique experience. You get to see how all that clashes with the world around you that keeps interrupting. I mean, imagine coding a Roblox game outside in a cafe where no one around you has even heard of it except from their children.

Expression: Tower of Pisa (July 27, 2026)

We often think life is full of generic repetitive oversaturated things, but the reality is that people struggle with capturing depth. A selfie with the Tower of Pisa is generic, but it represents to that person the journey of getting there and the whole life behind them up to that moment. Who they are, who they’ve been, the very many little things along the way. Not everyone’s life is perfectly stable and tourist-y. The best experiences after all happen along the way, averagedly.

“Average” is where all the depth actually happens. The “average” bus ride is full of everything that isn’t generic. If one just looks hard enough, you see the palimpsestic playground we all live on and all the hyper-specifics that each show virtually infinite personal history. A lot of life is about sight (“The ability to see” in the least qualified way, since qualifying can take away from what’s right in front of us after all) and the ability to express it.

Raw Exposure Tolerance (July 28, 2026)

I think it’s ultimately raw “nervous system”. Getting used to playing on esports stage. I myself have experienced something similar when I go to new cafes and stay there for eight hours, including non-branded cafes. And you get possessed by things that you can’t control, and it’s literally all about slowly exposing yourself over time to this level of exposure, slowly and slowly putting yourself in these new situations until your nervous system can’t distinguish it anymore. Your brain is still working, but your emotions are calm to a fault, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that shows a grown comfort with such exposure.

It’s like being possessed. I think that’s the main point I was making. You can’t predict what you’ll do. I watched a pro view of someone in their firrst Worlds finals, and you could see them missing cannons consecutively and also just staying in the base wondering what to buy. It’s like they’ve been reduced many times over. Everything they know hijacked by things that they could never simply “compute” for. Sheer nerve.

The best way to get used to it is also sheer exposure, but, like I mentioned, managed and gradual. That’s the only way. Not just me getting used to Starbucks and the same hours, but lots and lots of variation (e.g., time, kind of crowd, location and how to get there, seating, different drinks, different independent cafes), not only in environment, but whether you have breadcrumb when you’re working at the laptop and whether you’re just there thinking of the spot, which is all that much harder. That level of just sitting down and just feeling everything and being there and exposed, when time is at its slowest, where you’re not just scrolling through a phone or turning off your mind with some entertaining content. Maintaining that level of workload is very raw.

Unguarded Transperency as Tool Amid Competence Signal (July 28 & August 1, 2026)

I find it interesting as a guy is that instead of sounding deeper with others, especially women, I make my voice sound childish. It’s probably because I’ve internalized the understanding that people respond better to that.

I make myself seem very playful, childish, and almost simple. I notice I do that. I feel good when I show those lighter sides of myself, like openly reading a Webtoon and laughing like a school girl in public. That unselfconsciousness gets people.

There is both an authenticity and strategy to playfulness. It’s not only socially effective. It helps me feel freer as a person.

When I am thinking seriously, I allow myself to show that as well, but in a way that’s incredibly sincere and “simple,” like my heart is on my sleeve as I’m working through something in thought.

Self-Responses (4 days later, August 1, 2026)

does it really work on people?

Can’t one alternate between that and something that conveys competence? Or have them simultaneously? Like holding a signal for that and a signal for competence.

Sort of like someone who’s an incredibly good writer and it’s clear from the way they write and the face that keeps changing as they go along and think their way through their writing, so the unguarded transparent face is simultaneous with the signal of competence they demonstrate and hold explicitly.

Imagine someone giggling even as they are simultaneously writing like that.

Uncanny (July 28, 2026)

Reading older books by insane people feels so much better than reading online comments and replies by insane people. It’s probably because of suspension of disbelief.

I literally cannot mentally even begin to come to any kind of human-connection-spectrum-whatever with anyone that speaks like this:

 [internet-speak]

I want it to make sense, and it’s totally valid. But I want that to be said by experts, not by people as a common form of language. When you hear a whole people talking like that, it sounds less like expertise and more like insanity.

I’m fine with insanity that’s been established for a long time, which you see in older books. But new insanity makes you unable to suspend disbelief that that thing is coming from a whole different universe becuase it’s literally right there in front of you posted five hours ago on some subreddit.

It’s honestly probably why people distinguish “reading” vs. the reading that we do every day on our devices, because the latter isn’t reading at all in the way it’s been associated with for so fucking long. The latter feels like some kind of uncanny creature prowling our streets today, not some folklore, not some myth, but an actual cyber-creature that exists and proliferates off our current world. Insanity that you can feel like sweat on your skin, not like Skyrim lore-tomes.

I don’t actually think the terms are bad or wrong or useless or something. But there’s a problem separate from the terms themselves. It’s “insanity” in the least rigorous way I’m applying it here. It’s this feeling that you’re not talking to someone, but something. Like whatever could have made a person a person disappeared right out of the window. Those common touchstones that keep all of humanity coherent. It’s not that they’re omitted. They’re thrown out of the window in ways that make reality itself feel like the dream and the “uncanny creature” itself the reality. Books compartmentalize. 5 hours ago is the mom from your Hereditary in the corner of your room right now hanging off the ceiling.

Algorithms don’t erode humanity, but they do “collectivize” words into a kind of inhumanity, made entirely of cyberspace.

It’s probably the same feeling I get from novels written with AI. “Crackling with” being one of those AI-isms. I’m like, “Wait, wait, no, no.” I’m staring at it. Looking at it. But where is it? Why am I looking for something? What am I looking for? Authorial contract? Why am I making that sound like a thing, an object? Something that’s been there before for so long is gone, and now, I have to sound like a philosopher, an analytical observer, just to point out that the internet and AI have devised something recognizable by taking something that’s always been there. What is it… I click off the novel. I click off the Reddit post. I click off. I don’t know. But something’s there. Or something that was there is no longer there. And it bothers me. A book written by an author is always a place to get lost in. When AI-isms creep up, I’m no longer lost. The book-and-author is one, but here, it’s book-and-AI. I’ve lost the particular voice speaking this particular story along with the immersion intrinsically tied to it. Same with “insanity” terms. Where is it? Where is it again? The feeling of getting lost?

I recall a time when I would talk to people, and I didn’t understand what ghosting meant. I didn’t know how it was like in the internet. I didn’t know and treated everyone as I’d treat them in real life. I was the uncanny one to the internet I found uncanny. I was born in a world where the internet connected people who knew one another in real life, in the barest-minimum way. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to a world where the internet organizes people and reality rather than the other way around.

“One of the Greats”: Writing’s Dead End (July 28, 2026)

My goodness. I recall now. There was a time when I saw writers and web comic artists as this really big gathering kind of thing, sort of like a local church. [Kind of like Avengers Assembles in community form.] But now that I’ve grown so much into writing personally, I’ve lost that idea or conceptualization or image. I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt that way. But when I was new to the web novel-comic world, that was the way I saw it.

It was a strange time. “One of the Greats” used to be an actual group in my head, and there were actual names in those communities to concretize that image. But now, I’m wondering if the greats ever knew one another or even know what writing is. I don’t think they do, and I mean that in the only way I know how. Once you get into writing, it becomes an inescapable black hole of meaning being made. You find that you’ve never known anything at all, and it goes even inescapably farther and wider than that, like a forest that keeps giving, far beyond your wildest dreams and imaginations. “What is writing?”

I’m not even asking that and expecting an answer. Writing is either as easy as just a bunch of words or something they no one seems to agree on so as even to begin “knowing what even writing is.” The “Greats” never existed in the way I thought back then. Everyone was not only doing their own thing. As much as they may work in the same genre, with the same tropes, with the same themes, with the same “everything,” everyone was doing another thing. You couldn’t even see the horizon if you tried.

Even the result can look as similar as ray of sunlight here and ray of sunlight there. But when you actually get into writing, you realize that was never actually the case for the writer. No one comes to the same result the same way, if that makes any lick of sense.

It makes sense that I saw writing that way. If you think about it, writers are… well… writing. So that can give off the sense of something shared, and anything that’s even remotely shared, especially one as “this one process” as writing is, can lead one’s imagination down the road of “this must be this one big thing we all share in the way people gather together for events and meet again and again knowing we’ll all meet together again sometime!” But no, writing is a dead end, not in the sense of reaching a wall, but in the sense of paths never meeting again, no matter how parallel they seem, a “dead end” of infinite meaning-making, that goes on and on and on and on, finding something that only one can find, even as one inevitably matches others in result.

Anchor Points and Writing Content (July 29, 2026)

I think what people don’t understand about writing, at least for me, is that I don’t write everything down. A lot of things that I experience, especially new ones, take days to weeks to months to even years to write down. It takes time for my brain to reach a point of having gone through so many other backlog and haven’t processed everything before it reaches a point of being available to write down any certain thing. After undergoing an interesting uninterrupted sequence of events, I wrote down everything that wasn’t about that, because I was still recovering physically, which continues even today, though I’m much better off than the last two days of recovery. You would think I’m pointing to the recovery itself, but this applies to many other things that don’t involve a “physical recovery.” Processing is like physical recovery. It takes time for your brain to realize something that was right in front of itself the whole time. You can discover something, experience it, undergo it, and have everything to do with it. But it takes time for realization to set in, enough that you can write it down. You can know something but not have the ability to articulate it, not because you can’t write it, but even if you’re a writer, it takes time. “Takes time” sounds mystical, but it’s how your brain manages all manner of things and keeps the every day stable, since it’s not writing everything at once, but focusing on what it can write in every moment, including when it is not writing, because those non-writing moments are even more crucial for helping the brain keep itself oriented and grounded so that when it does write, it comes from a stable anchor point, even if that anchor point is not itself explicated in the writing (what it’s writing about) itself. An example of an anchor point can be reading a book that helps you relax and that you can turn off your mind to. It can be its own thing-to-write-about (TtWA), but for now and probably for a very long time, it will just be that invisible thing that helps your brain stay anchored somewhere so that the things it will focus on will be a lot easier to pin down, since the pinning down is coming from sturdy footing. This happens a lot. This process of anchor + TtWA. My stays at cafes themselves are mediums in the sense that I write about everything besides the cafes (and the travel to get there and the experiences after) during them, but they themselves eventually become brain-available to be themselves TtWA, though so much gets lost due to reconstruction, which is why writing is always a process of being eluded, avoided by things that you experienced directly because you don’t have the capacity to follow it as it happens, since discovery, as in experience, and realization are two separate things, the former always preceding the latter, with the few times that they happen almost-simultaneously being incredibly taxing and limited in scope or aperture, since writing about something after the event isn’t necessarily less effective, but can actually be more effective, depending on intent.

The Examined Life (July 29 & August 1, 2026)

It’s almost so strange. I wrote an autobiography for a reason and even a personal website that captures so much of who I am, immortalizing a lot of myself. I also continue to journal autobiographically. And I stay connected with lots of things from the past and my interests even as I continue to plunge into new ones.

What’s strange to me is seeing people who’ve lost all that and everything and they seem to just move on and forget everything they’ve ever experienced, not a single ounce of expression or dialogue pointing at all to anything of themselves. And I get that, you know? I get that it’s not easy, but at the same time, there’s something quietly horrifying about that kind of life. To have undergone all that and to come out like you’ve never been anywhere there at all, to have forgotten to such an extent.

Self-Responses (3 days later, August 1, 2026)

i guess the “quietly horrifying” part points to raw existence without any way to make sense of any of it, just going about and looking at a bunch of things and then forgetting them the next day.

But it’s only bearable because everything is already there. You would have to lose everything to want to reconstruct everything.

So the author has literally nothing external that would allow him to exist any other way, which is why the writing is instrumental for reconstruction and for being the self-structure to keep going on without feeling like you’re bare in front of existence.

Writing’s become their right leg.

The Way I Am: Orthogonal to Myself (July 29, 2026)

There’s nothing actually wrong with me. That’s the worst part. I just allow myself to be affected by art, music, and all manner of media and stories. I also allow myself to see the beauty in the world as well as the suffering. I really just sit there and stay there in the moment and observe and even expose myself and put myself out there. I both let my thoughts run to their conclusions as well as let the world interrupt them. I am both embodied (literally carrying 25-kilo sacks) and examining (averaging thousands of words a day). I’ve spent a long time being alive as much as reflecting and thinking about everything and putting together so many things that were never in the same consciousness with the help of writing and all that focus one has to do during it.

I’m no longer lost, yet I let myself become lost and changed.

I mean “the worst part” in the sense that for any long span of time, there’s always been this contract of legibility, of easy sense-making, that someone can be understood easily by certain things or traits or qualities or ways of being or emotional states or even conditions that affect one’s emotions. But as for myself, because I’ve reached such a point of stability and am now experimenting with ways to destabilize myself manageably through putting myself in situations that really get me going and make me feel alive, it becomes less legible, and it’s harder to put me in boxes, because I am intense in multiple axes rather than one, so there will be this idea that I’m either too much in this direction, or too much in that direction, or too much in that other direction, when in reality, I’m just inhabiting so much the current direction I’m taking and allowing natural tempo to switch me among them, so that I can experience life at its fullest. It’s why I sit down there and really think about things that you would never find anyone just think about, not that I am smart or intelligent, but that I’ve gone so far off into my own world as much as grounded myself in everything, micro-reading, micro-observing, such that it comes off as either the easiest thing to understand or the hardest. That illegibility that comes from such, for lack of a better word, a way of being. My honesty in that sense becomes to myself, because whenever I am thorough with any singular expression, which is honest, it’s easy to try to follow it and end up falling off somewhere along the line, because I was never in those same dimensions that the expression itself might have led you to assume. I, in that sense, am orthogonal to my expressions and, by extension, to “myself,” in the way you’d define any singular stream of consciousness and the bursts of expression that come out of any single given moment. But that goes for everyone. It’s just more clearly there because I’ve sketched it out and drafted it across multiple years encompassing more than 4 million words. So it doesn’t just go for everyone.

Whatever I will publish next on my personal blog, and whatever I will write next for my second diary entry in this log I’ve made recently, it will only be honest, but honesty, in the way I’ve known it and continue to know it, is illegible, even to myself, because I let myself become lost and changed, all while recording that journey, which, even if I struggle with it myself, is relatively intelligible to myself, when you compare it to that orthogonal illegibility that others experience, even as the thing right in front of them can be as simple as day because it presents itself like so, whether in my body language, a diary entry, or anything really. In the end, I am provisional even to myself, predicting the broader moving overarching shape of my expression, even if it means conceding always in the moment, which creates a sense of unpredictability, even as the reality is very much coherent, just non-verbal for the most part, even while being verbally provable at any given time.

“Orthogonal” in the sense that I say things that are not real to me but real to the shape of its current expression even while itself holding the keys (which I mentally ascribe to the thing rather than it necessarily holding a term that will later become re-used in the overall expanded idea that that one entry is a part of) to broader expansions of the idea to which that entry is referring or playing around with in a small dedicated space or scope. The expression is that remote from me, like a throwaway note I made that makes all the sense in its own right and pointing to broader expansions but having nothing to do with the black box that holds the actual true fullest expression of all itself.

“Destabilization” in the way I mean it runs parallel to self-forgetting, so anything that jump-surprises you and makes you really pay attention to the moment as it presents itself to you, with you discovering and with any realization on hold probably until your brain has gone through multiple loops of recovery and stabilization after the event before it finally comes to some initial drafts that aren’t even the hint of a beginning of realization but are more so just a bunch of words that should eventually form to mean something on their own before transferring over to one’s brain as understanding, or internalized definition. That’s the kind of remoteness we’re working with.

Walking for 60 minutes on a whim is an example, but I wouldn’t reduce it to that or even pattern it to that. Anything that’s patternable is probably not destabilizing.

Neocities / Social Media vs. Web Novels: Suspension of Disbelief (July 29, 2026)

I think the reason that I’ve taken a break from Neocities is that I’ve reached a point of exhaustion with the posturing and am now looking toward Royalroad web novels as the proper inspiration or model for what to go for when continuing to post blog entries in my personal Neocities website.

It probably has to do with proximity with social media. Stories are inherently tailored to feel immersive enough that you can suspend your disbelief with whatever happens in it, even if it does show phones, texting, and all that, so they do active work to ensure that even if it is set in contemporary day, characters, dialogue, settings, and all kinds of situations are written with the intent to be already internally logical from the get-go, which means omitting a lot of things that are common in real life that would break the feeling of reading a story.

Neocities is an attempt to distance itself from social media, but it may not be enough, and there will still be a sense of the posturing that it inherits from social media as it tries to set itself against it. Stories take place in fictional worlds, so there is no us-vs-them dynamic such that it feels like counter-posturing. It’s just deaf and blind to that and pursues its own fictional thoughts to their own conclusions, never letting the real world interrupt them. Even when it’s ironic, funny, and meta-humorous, it does it in-genre, so it never feels like you’re reading in social media altogether, but instead in the lineage of storytelling as entertaining and fun.

To want to use those Royalroad web novels as a model is to want the internet still (in contrast with traditional stories) but something that feels more like a fictional serial rather than active tweets in an infinite fragmented stream or an organized “social media” profile that may feel like a world but feels too posture-y (too self-aware, too trend-set) to be totally outside in its own right, as the feel is completely different when reading.

To do this, one has to be effectively “delusional,” in the way web novel “suspension of disbelief” only can.

One has to be so in-text that it doesn’t serve as a medium between retweets, threads, and shared Google Docs, but as a world so caught up with itself that it goes on and on, pursuing itself to its own conclusions, again and again, in serial loop.

Performing Honesty: Blitz Writing (July 29, 2026)

Things that are supposed to be load-bearing but actually can just straight-up do nothing if relied on by themselves as they are:

• imagery
• hyper-specific memory
• media reference
• general anecdote
• face
• room
• location
• appearance
• a screenshot of Minecraft
• a mention of one’s own fiction novels from years ago

Someone can be more honest writing from a complete void of darkness and disembodiment because they’re not pretending that irrelevant things are relevant just because they give the sense of being grounded.

Precision without precision, without saying anything. References, mundane details, hyper-specific situations. Originality “meaning-made” connections, but only in rhetoric, but necessarily in reality. Not honest, but appearing honest, authentic, grounded, based.

But here’s the kicker: it can be 100 percent factual, relevant, and even coherent, but my concern is whether it’s performing itself, aliveness, its own being alive. It’s performing its own facts, its own relevances. How can you perform things are true of you?

I could say everything that I know so well, yet that wouldn’t be honesty, but performance of things that are true of me.

I don’t want to rehearse what I know myself to be. That doesn’t mean doing the same thing but removing the knowledge. I mean literally not doing that-that. And the only way not to do that is to be honest, but honesty can’t come through sheer 100 percent factuality.

Maybe it’s writing itself. Maybe there really is no escape. Maybe just going outside and sitting down is enough.

But I don’t know why. I genuinely wanted to believe that writing could be honest. But it’s so easily performable.

But it’s different when you’re outside in real life. There is a whole world of difference between deciding to write down hyper-specific imagery vs. hugging someone in real life. So please don’t stain the word “performable” with this level of disgusting conflation.

Wow. “I don’t know why this matters to me.” performed by an AI. How delicious

It’s performable. Period.

But there’s a desire to try anyway, though it ends up collapsing and falling back to rhetoric. Originality, experimentation, even typographically, ends up performable in the end. One-use things that become repeatable with skill and mastery. Fuck it. Man.

1 hour and 25 minutes later:

Maybe speed is the only answer, as counterintuitive as that sounds. Just keep writing. I don’t have to worry about honesty if I’m just letting it happen. Sure, that might lead to performances here and there, but raw output means that there will also be just as much genuine honest stuff. But the difference is that I wasn’t afraid of writing at all, which makes for a lot more honesty than if I just tiptoed around it.

Instead of trying to make every entry bear the weight of honesty, I just have to blitzkreig my way to honesty, not by destination, but by sheer shotgun raw output.

I should essentially just be like a kid, with the adult’s skill, but without the baggage.

Reading vs. “Well-Read” (July 30, 2026)

I’m reminded once again that as much as I love reading books, I in no way want to be “read” (like the term “well-read”). That sounds horrendous. I’d rather have a lot of thoughts that you can read out in the open than be “read” as something that books do to me. Sounds horrendous. I can never match up to any book I’ve read, am reading, and will read. I can only match up to myself and what I can at best express.

It’s why I am careful about ever mentioning any author like they somehow speak for me. They don’t. I barely know what I read, even when I can read it perfectly well, because there is no world where I the person who read it am in any way related to the text itself in the way that one might assume of the term “well-read.” I am at best what I can express, and I know there’s really not much to say most of the time unless I’m actively working through something and if it’s something I care to work through, since even if I may read about the history of this and all that, I will likely never actually end up ever becoming well-read the way you become literate or educated about a certain history since in the end, I am only as much as expressed, and, if that scope doesn’t include being educated about that, then that’s just the way it is.

It’s why as much as I want to read more books, I know that I am only as much as read, and reading is not something you do to finish things up like the library’s about to get flooded and all the books are going to get missed out on. I am not a reader. I am at best someone who just looks at something and takes their time with it, and that doesn’t read to me at all as “reading” the way you’d expect someone to go through a reading list and then finish books like something to keep up about being a “reader.” I’ve never read, any more than anyone has when they scroll through a Reddit feed and see a bunch of words. When I read, it’s literally only as much as it is at the time, as much as my brain can comprehend, as much as I take the time to sit down with what I’ve read, as much as I can even begin to relate it to anything in my life or my thoughts or any ideas with which I am working in explicit writing and journaling. It’s barely anything much to begin with. It’s sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-draft, to say the most, if not the least of just how much further down we can go regarding its actual status. I can barely lay claim to anything really, and I don’t dare to. I spent most of my time always work-in-progress, recovering, letting my body and mind rest, letting things not progress so I can rest. I barely read as a thing, even when I may micro-read while linguistically strip-mining for hours straight. That’s barely anything to begin with. Most of the actual reading-writing-expression thing I’m doing is working with a bunch of words and collecting them, not really mastering or internalizing or absorbing. Much of the actual work is draft-y, provisional, working-draft, progress, construction site. You see all the scaffolding? None of that is internalized. A lot of the actual work is between me and a bunch of words, and I can barely even begin to match up to a whole book I’ve gone through from start to end. There’s so much to gain just by sitting down with it, with any piece of writing strewn within. It’s hard to say of it anything other than what does end up matching up most to my current honesty and ability and the boundaries of my mentality as this laden object which I must refine and expose to much chunks of material that it will never truly be able to revisit in full as one whole meal except in the slightest peeks and slivers of what it means to be engaged at all. It’s that level of hunger ran through ugly teeth that can barely crack open the nuts before them, with all the writhing, thrashing, and muddy, sweaty scuffing. I spend most of my time working orthogonally, using muscles contrary to how I’ve used them for so long, walking backwards, using all the “wrong” things to get at the right results. A lot of it is strange to me. And I’m not at all wisdow incarnate. What tower have I built of myself? I am a scavenger that barely fulfills its own name, all the desperation with none of the success, even in the grimiest grub, for necrotic decay covers everything, forcing me to make do with existence as this ponderous state. I think that’s the best way to describe the actual fruitfulness of reading.

Seeing More by Projecting Structure (July 31, 2026)

As much as I love observation, I’ve never been one for pure objective description, even if I’ve already done a lot of that in hyper-reaist, hyper-sensory, micro-textural prose. My intent has always been observation for the sake of projection and pure creation, since I’d hate to laundry-list reality. I’d prefer to squeeze what’s right in front of me into my perception and concepts so that I can refine them and thus make raw sight itself that much sharper, since the more surface area you have in writing, especially projective, the more you can fit raw reality in itself. Projection allows me to associate and make connections that are immediate in the thing itself, which strangely expands raw sight as something you can have land on you as observer. Rather than experiencing it all as mush and smudged impression, I get to hold chunks of “my perception field” and then absorb and internalize them. Seeing better through discriminating better and then seeing the whole thing better.

Hermetic Force Moving Through the World: Worns & Novelties (July 31, 2026)

It’s so easy to boot up your laptop, have Pinterest up, see your Youtube recommendation feed (e.g., which may have lots of “inspo”), be in a cool new non-Starbucks cafe in a new place with a new crowd and a new good view, have the first chapter of a new fantasy web novel (Gifted by Royalroad user “Ellake”) on a tab, have hype music (I Lied by Joyner Lucas) playing on another tab, have your previous writings on other tabs (e.g., blogs, text editor), and have LLM’s analyses of what you said on another tab (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini).

It’s so easy to have all that and feel that one has already done everything, when most of those are made by others. And it’s so easy to have writing be that capturer of what’s me right now, such that every previous writing becomes not-me instantly (“exhaust fumes”), rather than creating a persistent world surrounding oneself. This is highly effective in its own right.

But even now, I wonder if I can ever reach the point I’m truly hermetic. My 4 million words in 26 months don’t feel very private in the sense of isolation but are rather the generative, creative, reflective, analytical, projective, internal reactions to a very external, exposed, connected life. Even my novels from two years ago clearly aren’t created in situ, so I didn’t develop all the logic, reactions, events, sequence, reasons, drives, and forces inside it “from scratch” (even from a base level of genre fiction expectations with the use of backstory and all). They’re clearly expressions of someone who carried a lot from things way before writing. So yes, closer to driveby exhaust fumes or roadside puke. The self itself is ultimately structural, but this is about a body of work itself serving as a world in itself, something like an imagined self (since the actual self doesn’t exist outside of the things it carries and to which it is exposed). It’s not a denial of structure itself, but a separation.

My journal entries do hyper-compress in self-containment, so that’s one. And I’ve written at least one novel that effectively does in situ with creative liberal use of genre fiction expectations. But a whole body of work such that one doesn’t ever feel like one is “done” just based on a lot of external things that one had nothing to do with?

It’s not derivativeness. That’s so remote to that actual concern. Nothing I write immediately or even remotely reflects what I consume, since a lot of it has to do with myself as this whole person that is full of associations, memories, experiences, and all that don’t map onto the concept or theme or structure right in front of itself but generate out of its structural experiencing (actual self here). It’s that what if I built in-house what I would outsource instead? Rather than person moving through the world and processing and writing down what one can (not documentation, but processing, which can be so, so far off by sheer raw association for one) as one does, it’s closer to a hermetic force moving through the world, where exposure works totally differently rather than being the stone one grinds against just to pick up the chips that fall which one hyper-associates and then articulates. Or maybe this is already the case by sheer associativeness and remoteness (generative non-derivativeness as a consequence of structural actual self). Maybe right now, external is pure raw energy, and I’m already running it through my machinery, and I’m mistaking that raw energy eventually transmuted (or whatever better term that turns raw energy to something entirely manufactured in hermetic sense) that I get as evidence against “hermetic.” So that I am still getting the feeling of “having done everything” from external makes me feel that perhaps I am still far off from “in situ” and hermetic and the “imagined self.” But yeah, the core image is “hermetic force moving through the world.”

I want to get off my own supply, to get high on the drugs I synthesized. But maybe, yeah, maybe I need the ingredients first, and that might be what the external is. Just raw energy.

I guess I can’t rely on my own “syntheses” as raw energy or ingredients because they’re well-worn, too articulated, too crafted, too tinkered-with, too processed, exhausted. I essentially need more surface area to impose and project myself on.

Going by this logic, external novelty is essential and nonnegotiable. Or more precisely, unprocessed, raw, which can apply to things one has skimmed, browsed, or seen without fully coming into full one-to-one terms with in processing.

Novelty is one, and things that have been seen or partially worn but not exhausted yet are another.

Partial-worns refine processing itself. Novelties are first-impressions, which means they rely on raw ability from the get-go, much more reliant on working description rather than anything truly falling under processing—instantiating what will be its first iteration (object) before throwing it against the boundaries of its objectivity, its “original” associations, associations made of and ran through it, perceptions of it, and its wearing down through exhaustive articulation of its implications, variations, and manifestations. It’s why partial-novelties are morphological to partial-worns in that they expand familiar material even while providing new ways of experiencing it—new content to the same game—and refine processing through subtle differences, which tempers the crude stark contrast between well-worns and total-novelties.

Generative, Contour-Revealing Speechlessness (July 31, 2026)

Sometimes, I really just do that to myself. I know I should only work on what’s available and practically legible to me at the time, and I shouldn’t force things. But yes, there are times I just sit down there and stare at the screen and let myself be speechless and not know what to  do with something and let that gnaw at me, because as much as it’s nice to work on things that are already there and ready, it’s also nice just to confront things that don’t give in that easily, since there is so much that’s still happening even in that stare-off. I learn so much by what I can’t do, and the longer I stay in that, I glean the edges and the shape of my writing ability and who-I-am-as-put-into-words. Speechlessness is its own very powerful thing. It gives me what I had back then. It’s easy to forget that I’m only writing what I can write and there is so much I can barely even put into words and make sense of.

Freedom Keeps Trying Again (July 31, 2026)

There’s a part of me that wants to believe there’s a symmetry to all this, like if I just sat down long enough, it would manifest itself. But most of the time, I make promises or give myself imagined worlds to anticipate. Whatever directly comes of them doesn’t matter because I end up making do with whatever’s right in front of me, whether literally or as much as my brain can even begin to extract out of all the invisible processing and sorting going out just to reap something even workable and articulable.

It’s not complex. It really isn’t. The tension, friction, and all that make it sound, but it is anything but. I wake up, and the fresh morning greets me, and writing to me is like waking up every day, sitting down, standing up, going by and along, with whatever furniture I walk past.

I’ve barely written anything. I can’t even for once think of the moment, for it’s already all but gone and thrown me against everything. My mind is only the rude senses, or the willful hyper-associative reconstruction of everything that I am. In the end, it’s vanilla.

I’ve lived a life. Then I shift my head slightly off to the side: “Who am I, again?” All that weight, load, and history of effort fallen away by the wayside. I’ve barely even begun, become, defined, for it’s slipped away like that demonstrated truth of a maestro (conductor) once the stage is vacated and whatever embedded ringworm has dissipated.

I sat down to re-discover the sentence.

“The young man…” was one of my many default fiction templates years ago, right around the time I got into fantasy web novels. Even now, it acts like it knows me, like it can pull me back into this whole idea that it’s just a matter of starting over with a bang, and that everything, and nothing, ever had to be pre-decide who I was going to be right now. I could keep repeating it, accumulating drafts that never went anywhere, and keep leaving things unresolved, because I could never find that thing that made me so as to free me. But freedom is persistent.

And here I am, as lengthy as I am, continuing to say hello, stumbling, because freedom keeps trying again.

Lived-Experienced Palimpsest of Increasingly Precise Written Stumbles (July 31, 2026)

It’s easy to think of all of it (4 million words written across 26 months, for one) as making something definitive, full, well-wrestled (rather than simply “well-read”), and human in the most existentially consolidated sense.

But I am always wrong.

I don’t become right over time so as to become total or some hyper-something.

I stumble more. It just becomes more and more proactive (the actual experience is raw, helpless, humiliating, and excruciating, whereas the setup is semi-calculated) every time. I stumble with even more interstices. Any refinement goes toward fine-grained bewilderment.

Writing maximizes surface area for tripping in all the ways one can trip, so that one’s reaches (extending a hand and trying to grasp something, even if the sky) sound like they’re thoroughly developed. Essentially, getting better at imprecision.

Lived experience in that sense becomes so much finer, because you’ve ran every stream of coherence against every other and created a capacity you wouldn’t have had if you just stuck to articulating as validation of a nonnegotiable self-state (NSS) rather than writing as itself practiced discovery, observation, and reconstruction, which necessarily encompasses the clashing of NSSes via persistence (writing). You have lived-experience access to the palimpsest’s version history itself.

Fall From Gimmick: Journaling and Sentence-Level Prose Fused Into Process Block (July 31, 2026)

Journaling—as crucial as it was for my own reconstruction—is the reason that I now have to clench my teeth just to manufacture a gimmicky premise-led story, and I have yet to make one truly that ran its full course. All that time drafting and sketching out my identity has led me to experiment with extreme characters just to feel and express something severe and real under fictional conditions that draw it out.

Linguistic strip-mining and sensory-observational note-taking are another reason. All that time spent working on extreme “show, don’t tell” in sentence-level prose has led me further and further away from the storytelling instincts that light novelists efficiently deploy as they stretch a premise across hundreds, if not thousands, of chapters.

And I wish it was traceable to the sentence—which I tried to do just now when I gathered sentences from “gimmick,” “show, don’t tell,” and journaling for comparison—but that would only miss the point. I’ve fixed and frozen my function (“functional fixedness”) to the sentence. If I intend to deal with whatever concern is being implied here, I’d have to expand my toolkit, though that would necessarily require the changes I’d already want. That my journaling also follows a similar sentence-level model in the forms of compressed operational terms and concepts and load-bearing imagery only reinforces the same hammer-to-nail to which “extreme ‘show, don’t tell’” adheres.

As lazy as it sounds, at this point, maybe it really is just a matter of “drive” in the sense of having the imagining force of mind already to do exactly what one requires of oneself and sustain it across thousands of chapters.

No Post-Cafe–Pre-Cafe Consolidation and Breadcrumbing Setup (August 1 – 2, 2026)

I wasn’t really able to consolidate and calibrate since leaving [cafe brand name] yesterday, since I slept immediately and just as quickly left this morning since [sibling name] was on the home computer. So I haven’t even pulled origin there. I wonder if this is its own advantage, since I can see just how reliant I am on that post-cafe–pre-cafe consolidation and breadcrumbing setup.

Self-Responses (1 day later, August 2, 2026)

just because I don’t think I’ll ever run into this situation again, I will actually just straight up publish this blog entry because it’s a significant establishment of something that was invisible this whole time:

It’d be great if it was this full-on systematic thing like the usual blog entry I do, but that’s just what it is right now and I’m not going to start pretending I’ll have one ready any time soon. It might take a long time, if not forever, before I get to this again, since it’s that impossibly rare a situation that just the naming itself is the insight, without the whole systematic and argument that would usually be the minimum for publishing.

The situation is that impossibly rare, essentially. For me to have stumbled upon naming it is insight.

Inevitable Phenomenology: Live-stream (August 1, 2026)

Is describing the phenomenology of my ongoing experience really the only way to go about things? It feels like the only way to diarize at all, since there is nothing at all in the every day that speaks to me as merely observed, since that’s not how I’ve ever existed. I’ve always meaning-made, long before I started writing, which is why when I started writing, I was already importing from a whole pre-existing manner-of-experience.

I can still see and hear it. My greatest arrogances even while listening to New Jeans or looking at a random Japanese(?) car or at a Philippine street. Nothing in all of that points to the intense things that are going on in my head. It sprouts so, so creatively, given that I’ve now pounded writing enough times across years just to begin even to meet this mind.

Perhaps, the public diary can be dual. First, pure observation, then the things that are going in my head and the way I experience, perceive, and exist.

Yeah, the truth is that I’ve never truly purely observed. That’s 100 percent a fiction of writing, and writing allows me to invent that, isolating something that never existed in the first place for me.

though there’s also the fact that the act of writing itself allows me to inhabit the moment with the distinguishing ability that articulation allows. So it’s less a phenomenology of raw experience, but a phenomenology of the act of writing as one observes and thinks and imagines and recalls and feels and surges internally, like a street painter.

diary entry #2 (august 1, 2026)

maybe this is the interrupted self speaking, the one in-the-world, the one whose thoughts get interrupted, but maybe not, im not sleep-deprived the way i was after 5 days straight of new cafes—with produce sack carrying and walks and very late night uwi—and that day being the third indie cafe in a row, nor am in in an independent cafe where there’s lots of people and i don’t have a breadcrumb to write from and my keyboard feels a lot louder than it has been for the past 140 or so cafe stays. so it wouldnt be the interrupted self, this is the regular self, but i haven’t set up anything, didn’t go home at all and pull from origin so i could consolidate the “findings” from during the cafe stay and then set up the morning after right before going to the next cafe so that i could have breadcrumb. so no breadcrumb, but closer to regular self, but not exactly, maybe this is what interrupted self has evolved into?

someone who can manifest that arrogance i have when im at home? that ability to surge inward at the present, at the thing recalled, but this time in an active new cafe, without portable breadcrumb, and with a new view? maybe this is it, the boon of sitting down with it long enough, but this is a rushing main road view, not a stale backstreet, and im facing this road directly from where i’m seated. so thats definitely crucial. so not entirely sure if interrupted, but feel it may be a half-evolution of it at least.

im not supposed to be this comfortable im supposed to feel it all, so why do i feel my hands moving? not the cumbersome way, but the way that feels like Sunny from Shadow Slave with the tight, structurally satisfying first 17-or-so chapters. dnt get it, dnt get it. maybe its the song? i mean im listening to The Living Tombstone songs ive never listened to (This Comes From Inside, No Mercy), so probs that? dunno, dunno.

why do i see and feel and know it? ive never been here, its not deja vu, talking about knowing the way you grasp it, like..

ive been here, long ago, i know this place, not literally, but the way you look at the floor and you feel yourself upon this entire world, not literally of course, but yes, yes, literally, i am, i am, that voice, hear that? its strange, but its as simple as walking and a dainty, meek, knees-together walk-sit-stand, with a chirpy, hee-hee, giggly bounciness, because that’s the level of arrogance you’re screeching at. you’ve come, you’ve done, you are (brutally). knowledge here, if analyzed from outside, is probably total self-assurance, feeling of freedom and knowing, with a smile as close to death in knowing its fragility as it is to life in total aliveness even in the most mundane Americano-this-doesn’t-really-taste-like-anything way and you go along and cheekily tap away like some goblin-at-the-desk, bro, bro.

its kinda funny. i feel like laughing. because i know how fricked up life can be at moment-by-moment NBA play-by-play caster. “OH HES ABSOLUTELY [a word that means not great at all, like at all], oh zoooweee!” Reading Shadow Slave and feeling that same ease that those first chapters can make you feel, that (reader’s) excitement, but, in my case, not just that, but ease and comfort and confidence and my-own-personal history. ive been here. long. well, short. but long. long enough to feel it, and having gone so far into myself to come back out smiling, and that i feel this way now not at home, not exactly portable either, breadcrumb-less, and even interrupted but past its initial excruciation. whatever this is, dunno what, (hopefully?) its great. from the inside of this air-conditioned cafe, the sun lands on the street like its bouncing, like the sky is a joyous proclamation of existence, but thats just aircon, right? you get that comfort easily in many other air-conditioned rooms, PUVs, etc. but this reminds me of when i would stay at that printing shop that my mother worked and that belonged to my father’s brother, where i would look through the glass window down at the street below right outside the town hall and see something that felt like life-life-life-! but something’s clearly different. instead of the past influencing the present, its the present influencing the past. i’ve felt better than anything my past self had, so im retroactively reframing the past as so much better (it was already good, but the present being that much good only ups all memories overall like rising tide lifting all boats). to think id ever reach this point. its envious. my self from three years ago must be feel that. well, he never knew. but if he knew, i would grab him by the hand and throw him across the room and hope we’re in some bouncy castle, because sheezadoodle, i cant believe it.

ha-ha-ha, reminds me of how [specific mall] felt when my cousin and his friends would go there and we would hang out and watch movies and just stroll around and sit down here and there near where the cinema is. 2016. thats when. but im long solitary, whatever connection i had has dissipated across the last how-many-years, and any fleeting connections ive made id describe as “micro-“, since in the end, there’s no replacing that feeling. but what i have now is equal to that, if not that many times greater, because i dnt have the anxiety i had then, as per childhood, or 13-year-old-hood? in the end, its only funny.

Completion Keeps Making a Mess: Ever-Evolving Puzzle (August 1, 2026)

After the high of that 2nd diary entry:

I’ve finally written the second diary entry. The answer was right in front of me the whole time. But at the same time, I had to take something I didn’t even know I had out of me. This presents a whole new tree of what’s next. And my previous entries from last month are retroactively irrelevant to my current “working draft” (theory?).

I guess this is just me starting from scratch again now that I’ve “cancelled” (made redundant) out everything I’ve previously written, even the media that I’ve been consuming—at least in the way that I consumed them.

Successes really continue to prove even more confounding in their aftermaths. All that scaffolding, thought, and work suddenly get absorbed into a done-deal.

Reminds me of an elementary school field trip that starts, goes, and ends. You’re not even left picking up the pieces, because that’s how complete it was. Instead, you’re looking at completely different, wholly new things altogether. It’s also why even back in 2016, I’d go to this whole event and then to this whole other event and then continue working on this whole personal creative project even within the span of the same several weeks, because that’s how the brain works, I guess.

Or another comparison that was floating around in my head before I started writing the last paragraph: a web novel that you read from start to end and feel both completely “yeah” and ever-so-slightly-off, if not “incomplete” (qualified).

It’s probably the thing you get nostalgic for though. You think about the whole journey and miss it, like listening to Minecraft soundtracks right now for me.

So many memories that didn’t have to be revisited but are because they were actually complete experiences in and of themselves when they occurred when I was there when I started, went, and ended them, with me there the whole time and only feeling the next thing then. And now, rather than the thing next to that experience from back then, I think about it itself, even when it was complete then. I revisit it, make it feel off from my point of view.

Something like:

It’s done, I did it, so why do I feel undone? When I completed it, I made a mess of myself. I poured myself into making that draft into a something, and now, the pouring that I knew so well is gone with the completion of that something, leaving me in a sense scattered and adrift, like driftwood, or twig floating along the stream. What am I?

I am the next thing.

I am always incomplete because I am an ever-evolving puzzle. [Every step forward is a step toward making everything that much bigger and harder to comprehend and pin down and put in a box.] I will always find new and better ways to devise my self-concept, self-theory, whatever. Words that will feel “righter”, better, smarter, feel-good-er. In the end, it’s being here that’s what that is.

diary entry’s criteria (august 1, 2026)

I finally have a criterion for a diary entry. It simply can’t be “abstract” or “reflective,” or just “abstract-reflective.”

It needs to be at least projecting at what’s right in front of you, like how this thing you can currently see looks and feels like this because of the way you’re feeling right now.

If it relies only on past memories, that also doesn’t really work, no matter how “current” (sensory imagery and all) one writes them to be.

Criteria:

• not abstract-reflective
• at least projecting at what’s right in front of oneself
• cannot solely rely on past memories, even with imagery, unless it just happened, maybe hours ago (though I’m leaning toward even that being too much, too far, and too reflective, so very much prefer here and now)
• day summaries (“what happened today?”) can be problematic, even if one might conventionally understand a diary to be like that, in the sense of a series of day-to-day events and details, with names and all.
• nothing wrong with “telling” internal-feeling statements, e.g., “I didn’t feel so good after eating that,” as long as you’re doing it in relation to the moment, which fiction novels themselves maximize—”scene-based.”
  • Here’s an example of this from a fiction web novel:
  • Sunny felt something waking up inside of him. With a startled cry, he clutched his chest and stared into the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. The feeling was not painful or unpleasant, yet it was like nothing he had ever experienced. It was as though his soul was being shaken awake, infused with strange new energy.

Naturally, for the sake of ease, consistency, and organization, it’s definitely great to have an entry once in a while that’s purely “here’s the gist” and gives overall numbers, here’s-what-I’m-about-as-per-this-month, and show of scale—doctrine, essentially, where individual entries alone without an accompanying periodic “state of the month” can stretch meaning until it’s ruptured and all you have is debris.

Excluded:

This entry itself deserves to be put on the diary, since it’s part of the charter. If my first diary entry was itself a charter statement of who I was using “overall” stuff, this is the charter statement for the diary itself meta-wise. My second diary entry already proves anyway that I can write an actual standard one. This very passage will be the third entry chronologically, but it’s fine because I’m just starting out and need to set some ground rules.

There’s a part of me that wants to write the fourth normal one first before publishing this third meta entry, because then I don’t have to worry about initiative structural statements without actual “is this actually operational day to day?” concern. But yeah, I think I’ll just be honest right off the bat and let it happen. I can just take my time anyway. The second entry can be trusted.

Self-Responses

I guess I don’t have to put this meta-entry on the public diary itself. This way, I’m not locking myself into a pattern and can write whatever I want.

I don’t really care about this passage per se. It said what it needed to say at the time. I’m talking about whether to include it or not. It’s honest, but wondering if I might be accidentally miscommunicating since I could very well surpass it as I go. It might be better not to include it in the public diary as entry #3 so I can feel the weight of each entry rather than have it all publicly planned out meta-wise.

De-Automatized Reading (August 1, 2026)

It must be so crazy to have that problem. To have micro-read, taken structured notes, and thought-written so much continuously in one single day that it’s 11:30 PM and you’re staring at the text editor and wondering why the most accessible font is doing nothing for you. It’s not really a problem. It’s just that you can tell that I really did read a lot today, not that I can’t read or that my eyes are strained or broken or my brain is having a headache. But there’s this clear effect of having done all this today, and it’s effectively a non-problem that actually just makes me feel good about myself. To be able to read words and to feel that one is reading for the first time because of just how much one has really gotten intense with it as this training and practice thing. It is enjoyable, for lack of a better word. And now, as the minutes go by, I can feel myself re-adjusting and reading explicitly and clearly again. It’s funny.

To be continued...

Gift [give me time to cook]