book 2

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

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

Out-of-Touchness (January 8, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State-dependent memory applied to music: real-time psychological experiment (January 8, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

State B: NF’s All I Have

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

State C: Aphex Twin’s Rhubarb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State D: Silence

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

The Illusion of the Undemanding Book (January 10, 2026)

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

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

Empowerment, Exposé, and Return (January 11, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

Power as Phenomenology (January 13, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structuralism (January 13, 2026)

The Power Fantasy of Structuralism

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

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

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

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

The Practical Use of Structuralism

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

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

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

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

My Socioculturo-Intellectual Condition (January 14, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Style (January 14, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Maturity (January 14, 2026)

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

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

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

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

Bruh, I’m done! (January 14, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Epilogue (January 16, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ship’s Logbook (January 18, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Native Fiction Writing Style (January 20, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cafe-Cafe (January 21, 2026)

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

Self-Responses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic Circle (January 21, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loading [Act Two]… (January 21, 2026)

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

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

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

New Journaling Style (January 21, 2026)

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

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

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

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

Weight of Ambition and Golden Tranquility (January 28, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

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

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

Will Your Bubble Withstand the Goblin? (January 29, 2026)

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

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

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

The Death of Artificial Constraints and the Glacial Passage of Time (January 29, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eat or Not Eat: Integration vs. Fragility (January 29, 2026)

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

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

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

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

Recanting Golden Tranquility (January 31, 2026)

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

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

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

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

Integrating the Ability to Binge-Read Airport Reads (February 1, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambient Music Curdles Expression-lessness Into Nostalgia (February 2, 2026)

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

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

The Difficulty of Getting Both Tradition’s Good Prose and Web Novels’ Fresh Ideas (February 2, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Section

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

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

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

Self-Responses (2)

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

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

The Doneness of Words and The Essence of Writing in the Act (February 2, 2026)

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

Isekaibility: From Passive, Stretched-Thin Off-Loading to Active Consolidation (February 2, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses (2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses (3)

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

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

Self-Responses (4)

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

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

Use the Level Editor (February 3, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

Submersion’s Death, the Minimap on the Vision, and Stepping Forward Into a “Minecrafted” World (February 4, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find the Eggs Vs. Infinite Regress of Realism Complexity (February 6, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death of External Persistent Worlds and the Spatializing Porch (February 10, 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Writer’s Minecraft World (February 10, 2026)

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

Configurations/Game Rules:

Mods:

Technical Stuff

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

In-Game Setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

Return to First-Person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Responses

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

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

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

Writing’s Basis in Friction (February 20, 2026)

Does integration encompass the elimination of friction? No. So friction doesn’t deny integration. It only damage-reflects (counters, mitigates) the natural “fortress” of an integrated life, especially when it involves writings, personal websites, sterile, air-conditioned third places (even with the “body doubling” friction), and computers. In fact, the longer one goes through friction, between when one leaves the keyboard and when one returns, let’s say hours later, the more one can truly territorialize “the world around them” in that proving form of friction. To sweat is to endow one’s words with sprint and liveliness. It’s not that the words themselves will become rich with imagery or it will be more phenomenological necessarily. It is that when you write anything, you write with greater assumptions (which I say positively, since understanding hinges on lived-inness, one that “yeah, we get that”). Does this add, expand, clarify, extend, or re-imagine what one writes? Yes, because words hinge on actuality in that form of the assumed, because to write is to reach and grasp between two worlds, the fake and the real. Articulation is “touchtyping.” This is not the same as arbitrary or random. There is no “well, that’s what I wrote” in this “fricked” (verbalization of “friction”) articulation. In fact, the highest rigor is in getting fricked. You know what something is not by what that unceasing utmost fidelity requires of you in spite of your current skill (without care for suffering or flow state or anything but about something that’s closest to the objective because lived-inness is, in all the sense of the word, concrete) or “who you are” (who you think you are) right now. Friction brings you closer to reality. It fricks you closer and close to actualization. (It would help to conflate friction and actualizing here.) Territorializing is less imposing the framework or the ego and more so creating “friction consistencies” around you (expanding) to ensure you’re never without “feedback” to your, when left by itself, delusional thinking patterns.

This doesn’t mean sensory or friction overload. I don’t mean you should summer-burn in Japan. Friction should never be purposeless, but it should never be under your authority. It should be as “irrelevant” (abrupt, out of the blue, lateral, counterintuitive, self-denying, loop-denying, routine-denying) as a first-time unexplainable rash, but as purposeful as Hannibal’s Alps. There is a saying by Bachira from Blue Lock:

Purposefulness can be something you arm-wrestle into being in the duress of the sinking, rained-on bog rather than something you mentally prepare for through comprehensive safety nets. Interestingly, this arm-wrestling cultivates self-security; though it often looks like egoism, which one may associate with fragility. That kind of “headstrong” intensity is not about arrogance or stubbornness in the bad sense. It is about purposing self-admitting friction and, by extent, self-actualization. On this is writing founded. When you go through friction, you are in a rigorous battle with growth. Writing itself, when one takes the time to write something long and “exposing,” can be its own kind of self-admittance, where friction happens not outside of writing, but in it as a way to frick oneself into naked (bare), tactile (sensory) reality.

The more you (should) reach for Providence, the more the world should scale up to reveal more and more of itself to you, so that your Icarus-ing becomes your grounding. Your reaching develops your spatial navigation. Don’t stop reaching, but hand-hold friction when it scales (i.e., zooms out, layers, etches, sets against a now-revealing zoomed-out world hitherto invisible outside the zoomed-in frame) your reaching act. The same way a camera zooms out to make room for two players on opposite sides of the map, so does your reaching form a Point B to your Point A (your body as the anchor of that outstretching limb and longing hand) now in zoomed-out panorama. The same way a person thinks of their past (a stationary Point A) when going so far away from home (a far-thrown Point B) and discovering in the panoramic space between the two points the World, one must shoot out and find their reaching-out growing in dimensions in prismic beauty, burning and flame, casting and ironing, tossing and turning, raging and bulling, bursting and deflating, loosening and tightening, going utmost beyond and finding in all of it the ability to navigate space (compare to “arrogant” Icarusian traveling being how one learns to navigate the Big world around them).

Understanding syntax is understanding how words fit in a sentence. Understanding writing is understanding how words fit into reality. Understanding how words fit into reality is understanding how one fits (one’s place) into the world (the vastness) around oneself (the yet to be anchored, spatialized, put into space, put into the world, made in the world, understand in terms of one’s thrownness, appearance, apparence, being). Friction is to be. Purpose—the purpose or point of something, anything, done, purposefulness, the quality of being purposeful—is strong-wielded by those who see it as something you self-securely own and produce in-house. To be is to qualify (i.e., officially recognize or establish) in the act. In that sense, to write is to be bold¹⁷.

The lesson of Icarus isn’t to play it safe forever so you never have to be embarrassed and grounded. Icarus could see the whole wide world from that height even as he affixed his gaze on the sun. Icarus is not a “don’t do this.” It’s a “let’s fall together.”

In the end, there is a difference between knowing something exists and recalling it from throughout your life vs. integrating it. I may have integrated my past as I remember it and with representatives here and there. But there is a difference between integrating that along with that place fused into that fixed past and going to the actual place and territorializing it so that it is always a font of inspiration, creativity, imagination, and “sightseeing,” a place that isn’t imagined (recalled), but is where the reality of being there in that Place and one’s “imagination” (past memories, present imaginations and ideas on how to incorporate it into one’s writing) of it as one is there collide. Friction here is in acknowledging. Everything we do “takes place.”

The following passage I wrote “automatically” (without thinking so as to bring out what I have internalized personally) more than 8 months ago captures this passage:

While I did say that I wouldn’t be as “arrogant” as I was 2 years ago when I do fiction-write again, my biggest accomplishments are those when I dared and made claims and threw myself where there was no net. I shamed myself into my own eventual self-security. So let this integration not be an elimination of friction or egged-head embarrassment. Let me stain myself in my own pathetic posture, because inwardly is my fiery sense of self bursting past the delusions, the fragile egoisms, and the sense-o’-selves that never could. Let me total. Let me be arrogant again. Let friction scale my reaching act.

What the Fuck You Losers Doing in a Meetup? (February 20, 2026)

I have this bias or at least this sense that meetups (especially digital nomads, expats, or just people of that general background from which I also am and on which I look unfavorably) are magnets for the kinds of people who need them desperately in the sense that they’re not the kinds of people already predisposed to that kind of “X factor” that would make the idea of an external, especially digital tool like fantasy. Think networking, charisma, social butterfly, and all that and how growing up with your max level of experience being school and a bunch of flying text on cyberspace can put you in a strange place. The internet flattens as well as hyper-cultivates niche interests, and people who live off the internet the most are most vulnerable to the kind of awkwardness of IRL mundane talking-stage normalcy, implicating myself in this. Whether it be specific ideas, intellectual stuff, and a bunch of names and terms, the internet “mal-prepares” you even as much as it arms you with the ability to be incredibly hard to talk to and to yap confusedly and haphazardly like a child armed with a bazooka. I kinda demonstrated it when I was speaking to my mother just now in a family restaurant in a large mall and how the text that makes so much nested sense now comes across as the SOC ramblings of a godforsaken netizen. The fact that LLMs meet and greet me best in this jumbo jumble reflects the results of this critter sucking off internet machinery. It’s probably why I got so triggered by the name-dropping-framework-dropping my younger brother did when I was finally done with that nonsense. Philosophy’s only use is in improving one’s articulation. Beyond that point, hearing it in daily IRL life is a sin against humankind and must be discarded stat. Even as I am what I am with my background, I only feel animosity toward matters of the intellect, of things that separate the human being from the ground, from human speak, from the body. Writing was always a means to an end for me, and that was personal life closure. And now that I’m done with that, to hell with writing. To hell with names and terms. Don’t give me that shit! I spank it like a rebel child. Fuck u! But contradictorily, I still write, read, and study and enjoy it. The only thing that seems apt to happen is the integration of meetups, which is what I might consider doing. I will try to get out and smash this shit to the ground. In my writing will it manifest as well, this post-closure integration, this newfound serene boredom, this current embodiment, this social normalcy, even as I celebrate this freedom without throwing myself away inside external structures just like that now that the trauma ascent is over. The goal is friction. To man the words, to put a soul in them, one that can shake hands, feel flesh, and sweat on the way to a cafe, as sterilized as that still is in urban space. Nevertheless, let the meetup abrade my senses and cause me writer pangs as well as writer growths, for here be myself as a total including, out of fun, meetups, since the last 9 months already involved me going to a cafe over 80 times with over 40 unique cafes, where I’d stay the whole day in a given cafe to read, study, and write. Let’s scale it up. Industry move. Conveyor belt whir.

Occupying, Portability, and RPG Inventory: Isekaiability (February 21, 2026)

Was born there in that small place, and there, I thought of myself as something. I had the strength to think of myself as something beyond myself as well, but after some time, things changed. Environment, the world, things around me moving. I was a person moving through the world. But yeah, as things shifted and went through transformations, I changed too. My identity and sense-o’-self did, and what I could with my palms did too. The tactile sensation of slick sweat persisted across the different days, but the mind that worked under those mundanities went through geological twists and fissures. By the time I came out onto the urban plain, even as my appearance was merely that of a walking person, inside me flitted all the processed energies I’ve primed for resource-hungry creative output. So the cafes became my places, and where I sat, there I was (to my utmost benefit even with the digital-physical integrations and embodied [visualized through OTW sweat] and externalized [visualized by cloud-synced writings accessible through a portable laptop and keyboard] cognition), concocting, sucking off the energies of the place. I internalized the spaceness. The spaceness of all that time spent at home with all the memories, the physical objects that moved only when I moved them, and the accumulation of time, creative work, and experience as a writer only created the internalizing construct concept—a new cognitive-psychological skill—of occupying. When the world becomes your private quarters, there is no place you can’t go. This naturally extends to whatever you write. The ability to occupy fiction writing. Feeling at home there, in privacy, in quarters. That’s magical, immersion, and total abandon, the good kind.

Self-Responses

I’m guessing this is so much more than just being a comfort-wearing digital nomad or expat who are often the target for socket-having cafes.

So what is the author saying exactly? Who is this message for? Who needs to hear this? Who would benefit from realizing this?

So instead of the perfect place and desk, they focus on the optimal portable setup, which extends to how they view themselves and their creative work, perfection and optimality in the portability and portable wholeness.

So isekaiability in the sense that you can be isekai’d or displaced or “dropped off” and still be you. Of course, one still needs one’s laptop and money, but the point is portability. And both a laptop and money are portable. Their inventory essentially.

Space -> Line (February 21, 2026)

Add at least 15,000 words (around 5 to 7.5 chapters) of in-arc stuff per arc. The problem is ensuring development in both character and overarching plot even with in-arc stuff. To explain this problem, it cannot be a formulaic loop of events that just make world-building sense, but doesn’t really invest or extrapolate beyond just “i can get an AI to generate this based on a prompt.” It needs to be constructive (and, by extension, original), not interpretative (developmental simply in the sense of walking based on the feet in front of oneself) from a baseline.

The 2,500 to 5,000 words for arc introduction is separate from in-arc stuff. Don’t fully introduce an arc and then time-skip to next arc. Let the introduced arc-world breathe and be lived-in long enough. 5 chapters is enough to get the feeling of a lived-in world, and that’s enough to fit a self-contained story with start, build-up and conflict, and climax and epilogue.

Compare to cafe hopping. It took 30 minutes to an hour to get here, and it took a few minutes to set up. But I stay for 7 to 8 hours. There are 8 to 16 introductions in 8 hours, so 2,500–5,000 words multiplied by 8 to 16. That would be from 20,000 (8 to 10 chs.) to 80,000 (32 to 40 chs.) words. In web novel terms, which is what we’re working on anyway, that’s very normal. So while 15,000 can be the minimum, an average of post-introduction 40,000 words (16 to 20 chs.) is healthy.

You know how fun and rewarding it feels to stay in a cafe long enough that it reflects how much you were genuinely so immersed and got so much work, creative stuff, and backlog done? The same applies to when scaling the body of a message relative to “greeting/title” and “sign-off.” The most satisfying messages are those where the ratio of the body is titanic. Imagine how awkward it’d be if the summary was half the body’s length. Coherence in the form of intros, titles, and outros is only satisfying when there’s something to “cohere” about. If the content is the prepositions, what’s the point of structure? Infrastructure without population, cars, traffic, customers, commercial buildings, and residences.

We are not baselines (who we were before the cafe stay) and results (what we came out with). We are everything in between. We are the middle. We are the present. Same goes for arcs. The word “arc” can make you hyper-focus on distinguishing different parts of an overarching story by different starts and ends, these boundaries. But in this do we forget an arc is nothing without the world from which the point (result, both in how it affects our interpretation of following arcs and of preceding arcs) is taken. When we focus not on baselines and results, we get infinitely more from the middles that are infinite riches beyond the initial result we first get right after that “arc.” Think of this as someone going beyond just being a result of the directly previous moment, but someone who is the integration of everything that they are in all that they have been up to this moment again and again in recursive, constructive, original sense. What they understood right after high school is not the final word. What they understand now many years later from that time is part of the ever-evolving self that lives as a whole of themselves in all that they have been. This is the middle. This is how authors manage to get what feels like infinite value from previous arcs because they’re not fixed, forgotten pasts that are only as much as the first thing immediately resulting right afterwards.

Results are not them as themselves. They are instead triggers to involuntary memory and, in the sense, infinite value. The point of structure (boundaries) is to point to the middle, not to be as themselves in themselves of themselves.

We are not the philosophical conclusion. We are the perspiration. The wearing-away former points to the infinite latter, the font of life. The bunch of dead-end words gives way to lived-inness. We are not who we are at the end of the word, but who we are as constant life-givers to words that are otherwise meaningless and bunch-of-words.

We are afraid of the ambiguity and godlessness of sweat, where ego, agency, narrative, and systems vanish and defer endlessly into a bunch of words and proclamations.

But if we forget narrative in the sense of boundaries and starts and ends for a moment and cohere our consciousness and experience here right now in the sweat, then truly we are and the arcs almost needless and at this point relegated to a practical, logistical, polite formality from the view of the in-arc (“in the eye of the storm”). Words fall away to the moment.

Integration was never in narrative. It was always in the moment (all for one, all in the now, all in the spatial here, all recursive cohere, in lived-inness).

This brings us back to writing that “substantiates” its own “premises” and “conclusions” (also “climaxes”).

Self-Responses

So the author would hate “confirmation bias” and “plot points” like tracing handwriting dashed lines and erasing anything that doesn’t absolutely adhere to the capital letter A. But the author doesn’t strictly say discovery or organic writing or that outlines are bad, only that it must be substantiated or “allowed to breathe.”

So it can be the most genre fiction story ever as long as the structure doesn’t outweigh the substance.

So it’s basically math’s “show the work” or rigor’s “show the process”.

So the author is totally fine with discovery writing then. They may even encourage it, though not necessarily so as to say that outlines and plotting are bad and that pantsing is necessarily better.

But the author is not saying “justify your writing” since that implies justifying the body/content based on a result or a pre-conception or performing according to scripts. They’re saying “live in your writing.”

So the author would totally love the feeling of “It doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense once you read it and go through it,” as in “you just had to be there!”

“But why did you have to write this? Isn’t this excessive? It feels almost arbitrary wit how much it just runs down that slope and goes to some place where, when you think about it, no one’s gone” => “It’s what it was at that point. It justifies itself not by some premise or some ending, but by what it was at that moment, and in no way can make other sense except in the fact of its being in that moment of being there and being in that space and living there and to-ing be-ing.”

So the author wants you to get lost in the moment, to guffaw at the lamest, most random joke, to play board games all of a sudden after being invited by childhood friends (whom one met for the first time in years randomly just because one felt like it) to do so because the cafe just so happened to have board games available when one was just writing about philosophy an hour ago at home. And they view fiction writing as a stage where you can really show yourself getting lost in the moment, in words.

Back to First Person

A character can have ambitious goals and the will to take them on and ascend and do so one after the next. A story can be heavily plot-driven. But there are always ways to squeeze in the moment, those little things that drive that “commerce” of space. You’ll know if those “moment-giving” things are just interpretative/performative, or if they’re constructive/original.

Self-Responses (2)

So to put it simply, make the in-arc stuff at least 10 times as long as the intro, if not many more times longer. It’s less about numerical word count and a certain number of chapters and more so about ratio and heavy-lifting.

So the author loved that LOTM took all that time to really flesh out the world (which was volume 1 from what I recall) before they had Klein move away from his two new-world siblings.

But the author is fine with web novels that is centered around constant traveling and movement and “vignettes” as long as it doesn’t feel like a bunch of time-skipping from intros to outros and premises to results and arc boundaries to arc boundaries.

So the author must love Skyrim then. The idea of hanging out at an inn and then killing a dragon moments later. Taking one’s time. Even moments where the fight goes longer than it should and it turns into its own place, its own village.

So the author is fine with the traumatized cyclical protagonist as long as he looks around and it’s this space, this place, this present of the village, the humming, the clattering, the shuffling, the low murmur, the thudding door, the muffled steps outside, and his thoughts are interrupted for a moment or jagged between everything in his head and the spatiality and lived-inness of the world around him, friction. The tragedy is that despite the lived-inness and spaceness of the world around them as they move through it, they are stuck in a traumatic cycle, but not because of a foregone conclusion, but in the moment as all things go, one goes through a lot. They are here right now, but they get triggered the next and lose it all over again. So coheres the cycle. They are not living in the past. They are living in the present. It’s just that it’s traumatic. But this is their present. What is cyclical is not a repeat of a loop or a past. It is the now agonizing. [It’s the bird that sings regardless, the rain that rains, the bossa nova in the cafe right after getting a phone call of your parents getting into a car crash and now being at the hospital with your mother on her last legs while your father remains unconscious and your siblings shouting at you through a video call as you sit there staring at the screen with what feels like a halfway finished essay.]

Return to First Person (2)

Since it is easy to misunderstand this, I don’t believe in “even if it does nothing to advance the grand plot.” I think this is a big mistake. A board game that throws a wrench in the works substantiates one’s philosophizing. It’s not “does nothing to advance the great plot.” It is the plot. It’s not that things digress. It’s that things are.¹⁸¹ The narrative is first a space, then a line.

We form a linear narrative based on space. Prompting an LLM with “what can we gather about the author?” and feeding it the entries (space) of one of my blogs is not about finding the substance or value and instead about breaking a formal line at the end of a marathon. You don’t need it. But space is accessible via lines (titles, summaries, and all).

For example, I got this whole passage, which includes the two self-responses and the two “back to first persons,” out of my “diary and reflections” text file and moved it to my “essays” text file once I realized at the end of writing all the above that it belonged there.

Egoistic Spaceness (February 22, 2026)

Was I ever a writer? If all this time, I focused on line rather than on space, on telling my mental story rather than lived-inness, spaces, and places in the way that Auge and Bachelard would describe them? As much as analysis can involve rigor and stipulation, it was still in a sense untested because it didn’t take in space, even if one could argue that it is still a space when compared to the line that is the summary of the work and thought process involved in working through an idea without preconceptions but with discoveries. Nevertheless, analysis is very much like “telling” in “show, don’t tell.” As such, I feel that I was barely a writer because I am increasingly seeing the writer as being of space, of lived-inness, rather than of a man in his room deluding himself about with ego, pride, and trauma on the line. Was there a point at all at that point? Wasn’t it just a rant? Where was the space? A cafe is a space. It goes on, not caring about whatever ego you have concocted up. It is a place, a space, a lived-inness, a present of the village. The narrative of fighting the dragon? That of line doesn’t exist here.

If my web novel Matthew was written of space, it would have never gone so far into its own head when it comes to the plot being this mental description of events. It felt like a fantasy in the sense of capturing the agony in its deepest deluded concentration, so even if it was a anti–power fantasy, it was still a fantasy in the lack of spaceness, of placeness, of the tinkling of cups and the clattering of spaces that go on amid one’s delusions. Instead, Matthew was written of line, practically a rant.

If it was of space, it would have been 95 percent invisible, workman prose with rains, lived-in spaces, places, and “presents,” but because it wasn’t, it was 95 percent crazy breakdowns. Grief was not the man working through the invisible workman daily. It was the man screaming somehow in all of the non-invisible, non-workman, non-rain (the rain that rains, the bird that sings)—a rant.

I had an idea of a man in grief, but because I am here now with all I am after everything, it went from a very concentrated narrative of grief and reaction to a man with tears and then going through everyday functional life as per invisible, workman usual and clearly invisibly carrying the weight of that grief which will come out when spilling balmy sun becomes a vacuum moment to process outside of the rain. It became the 95 percent workman after its first visualization as 95 percent pure line.

I have to clarify this isn’t just about “show, don’t tell”. This is about a fundamental difference in fiction writing. The actual content changes, not in style or depiction where the same thing is said differently, but in the sense that something else entirely comes out in place. Spaceness replaces the line completely, not in prose as mere stylistic depiction, but as total, actual difference in what happened, in actuality. Matthew would not have turned out the way he did if spaceness had its way. He would have taken stock of the tinkling of cups, and he would have just lived very invisibly and workman even with the trauma he was bearing invisibly.

Psychological realism would sound very much Cormac McCarthy. The actions, movements, body language, dialogue. The rain that rains.

In contrast, here be Matthew. It was created, done. It was a fantasy in the sense that no one would be able to express their grief upon the world like that in that crazy, breakdown, dramatic way. Instead, it would be in a slight smile, in pressed lips, in a glance, in a slow descent down the steps, in a worn look, in a weathered laugh, in the slam of a main door carrying across the mansion.

Matthew could have been the most overpowered fantasy protagonist in the world, but if you just gave them a single moment in space, in place, in the present of the village, I assure you everything—all their delusions—would fall away in the face of space. Their delusions would be less the man lost in their head and ego and more so the man doing fucked-up shit. It’s the fantasy equivalent of domestic terrorism.

I’m not saying you should stop reading books like that or stop listening to music, which is all about personal narrative, memory, and cause-and-effect “this is what you get” reaction. But it would probably be beneficial if it was 95 percent spaceness. Standing outside at a busy intersection with lots of pedestrians and cars, in a cafe for hours, in a busy mall, or somewhere involving lots of people like beside a highway or long road is enough to get that spaceness, as long as you aren’t listening to music with headphones and writing distancing analytical structuralisms. The only use of self-narrative is self-pacing. It’s emotional regulation. It’s the formality. It’s the externalized cognition. It’s the externalization. It’s the healthy summarizing not to distance or reject space but to integrate it without overwhelm. But space precedes the line.

We are not ideas on a screen (the concept of a screen). There’s no “we.” It’s these words (not as pure ideas, but as words this person typed on this screen in this space in this room in this house in this neighborhood in this city in this time in this part of the world [there’s no “world” in the all-encompassing sense of it that we may refer to it so loosely]) on this screen. I am this person using this computer. This computer isn’t a concept. It’s this object. It goes through all manner of this dust. It’s this object with these memories. Once it dies, this computer does.

The point of all lines is to dissolve in space. The internet suddenly stops being overwhelming. The world suddenly stops being this thing where everything must overwhelmingly overcrowd into extreme cramping.

“Life” (specifically being and space, not the line-life) is a single continuous shot that never resolves. It also doesn’t have a start and an end. The word “continuous” is not supposed to mean linear, but constant. As it is, so it is. Those long shots in old films capture this. That lived-inness. In that sense, life is endless cinema.

What the child saw was space. Not magic, awe, wonder, adventure. It was spaceness. The lines of scripts, the scripts of “the world,” the rites of passage, the paths one must take, the things one must do, and the ways one must live all fall to nothing. Space dissolves it all. It sees the bed in the chair, the musical instrument in the couch, the sky in the texture of wood, the rushing wind in the soaring finger, the crashing world in drizzling rain, the monsters in the dark, the ghosts of the past, the explosions of footsteps, the endless fog, the council of gamers, the upper echelons of ascent-plotting adults, the dancing lights, the cosmic thunder of song, the Olympus in the theater, the mission of visual lines, the infinity of a road.

Is the road objectively infinite? No. But in effect, it is impossibly long, because you haven’t gone from start to end to break the effect of infinity. In that sense is infinity intact. In the here and now, it is effectively infinite. Reality is not as much as we don’t experience it and as we learn from words and books. Reality is as much as we experience it, beyond which are just a bunch of facts, ideas, and words and the unknown. People are not a bunch of facts and analytical frameworks. They are not ideas. They are not truths to make or break. They are not ideals. They are not universals. They are not “people.” The problem of objectivity is when it is used as an excuse to ignore what’s right in front of you, the thisness of things, the very what-they-are in favor of irrelevant fact tidbits being used to do the work that space already does infinite times over. The actual thisness of the road at this very point “of writing” is ignored in favor of a numerical length that tosses everything away for absolute confidence. See how un-objective that is? The child is watching. You’re counting and stuffing words in reality’s mouth. The child doesn’t ignore everything in favor of maintaining a mission, a narrative. It looks around. The adult dies in a jail cell full of everything but these-spaces, these-moments, and these-places. “Well, it’s irrelevant. Well, it’s gone. Well, it’s dead. Well, it’s past. Well, it’s useless.” By the point a whole life has come and gone, nothing has transpired. Only a ball in a box that perfectly fits it such that it never bounces, re-considers, re-attempts. The adult puts on shackles to prove themselves. The child knows their nature is to be free, to get out there, to look around, to see the world, to get to know, to open their eyes, to see what’s right in front of them, to play. “They are what they are.”

The only value in a Matthew is to expose the way that you are as a writer in writing. If an “arrogant,” “delusional,” “solipsistic,” “egoistic,” “traumatic” rant is the goal, let it. Expose those lines. Let it all go according to line. Let space dissolve in linearity. Let your reign never end. Your narrative forever intact. In reaction. In cause. In effect.

Self-Responses

This feels like a common realization of traveling, or is this more specific than that?

How would the author feel about spaces and places as in digital? Could one argue that digital spaces and places that don’t offer line but what you’d get from a cafe still apply?

What if I wrote a 1.5-million-word web novel with very big lived-in world-building?

This naturally encompasses rare moments of mundane severe awkwardness like having to make the person at the counter count 5-peso and 10-peso coins while combining the sum of those coins with the 25 pesos in one’s Starbucks card and also making the mistake it would be 210 in total but was actually only 205 so it was lucky that one chose the coffee that cost only 205 in venti even when one thought the money came with was going to be 210 and then having that mistake revealed when one stopped to say that it was 210 after the transaction has been made and the receipt has been gotten and they said the money I gave was actually 205 which matched the price, and, during the waiting, one was given a “please wait” so as perhaps to be thought to be tense or impatient even when one was just taking it as it went.

Return to First Person

What is the point of someone staring at it all and finding a way to turn it into self-fuel? Self-security from integration, portable wholeness. If writing is just emotional regulation, then what happened to writing as a way to help the brain put together everything? Does this self-fueling have to be solipsism? If there is no ego into which all is feasted. Embarrassment, nakedness, and learning moments need not be discouraged or lessened. One can have them as well as reaction. Does a reaction stemming from a need to fill the gap created by embarrassment with absorption as a step following initial integration and spatial look-around prove only egoistic in the negative sense?

If it is necessary to Matthew into the world, then I should keep writing Matthews. Can both be true? Space and Matthewing?

As in still living in space, in the present of the village, but you write Matthews still. What about workman prose then? Well, I did mention yesterday that the dichotomy between Matthew and workman prose need not exist, and whatever I write is what it is. That it will be perfect and seamless.

This means that the delusional, lost, egoistic, solipsistic Matthew will exist alongside the fantasy domestic terrorist, or the workman, or the privileged mundane severe embarrassment.

The room must still be privileged, and that is a very egoistic creative place. The place for Matthews.

Yet to go out and be exposed, embarrassed, and awkward and in space. There is an endless deliciousness to that that seems to satisfy one to full such that one forgets about Matthews.

I guess I can write this and slam it all to the ground under my weight, with all that I am, and feel thoroughly that I am here and the one writing this as is is is. Yet I live in a space.

And it doesn’t have to synthesize such that one might say that one will only be a victim with space and Matthewing solves that by adding agency to space. But perhaps, there is no synthesis, and there are two completes that need not each other and yet are not mutually exclusive and exist side to side. Yet even without synthesis, there is clearly the hammer-slamming agency as well as spaceness shaking hands, not in the sense of needing each other, but in the sense of an inevitable simultaneity, as if they are inextricably linked to each other, so as to make one wonder if they’re the same thing, which, again, is probably not the synthetic case.

It is interesting. To get closure and integration which lead to spaceness, one needs the fire and drive of pre-closure urgency, which is inherently insecure such that one may apply the word “ego” as intrinsic to this process of creation. So perhaps, based on this can we see the simultaneity of spaceness and Matthewing. I conceded previously by saying that urgency was integrated into post-closure serenity and boredom and, all in all, by extension, everything else—including past, present, and future, non-fiction and fiction, and all others—through spatialization. This should naturally include Matthew, yet my evolution into this idea of spaceness has made me reject which I now call Matthewing. But then I’m back here and acknowledging that it is not just emotional regulation, but a crucial self-fuel, not as mere urgency integration, like energy as flavorless energy, but hammer-slamming and conquering and reacting to gaps formed by mundane severe embarrassments.

Self-Responses (2)

So the author is saying that one needs egoistic reactions, like with the internet and embarrassments?

So they would never write if spaceness was all they needed. They need the ego to damn, to hammer, to slam, to punch the table with their words.

which is a more accurate title “Dissolution of Lines in Space & Matthewing” or “Self-Absorbed Spaceness”?

Isn’t this just go outside here and there but go back inside to write down your thoughts? Why say all that?

Is it the way they write fiction? Is it the way they engage in spaceness? Is it how they’ve changed? Is it because that change happened through this writing? Is that why it’s not just go outside, come back, write?

Ha-ha. (February 26, 2026)

It’s often (it’s often? how could it have been something of a regularity?) in times like this that I find myself wondering, because it’s been a long enough time that you can get real queasy, and not in the sense that you’re troubled or troubling yourself around (pushing yourself around), but in the sense that you know well that after all this time, there is only that small realization, where perception gives way to reality, and in my case, that reality is that single resonant note that keeps going, that of a long-time coming, that of finishing, that of simple welcomes and hellos. It’s nice to think this has been happening all this time, and it has. It’s just that the last 9 months have been tremendous change as well as—toward the end of that span—a slow repeated recognition of where I am and what I have become—this simple, single note.

It doesn’t matter where I go. I see the same old faces. Top, bottom, left, right, or whatever face of a cube that is this (circular) world (think small worlds) at this point. There is that slight stage nervousness that comes with every new place, as if this world would reveal to me that it would eat me alive with all the things it carries. But what it carries, I apparently carry now within me, such that it feels like sleeper agents within me awakening almost immediately to defuse that nervousness, not out of some defence mechanism, but because of the reality that, well, reality always takes over once perception is already in the way. Once I’ve gotten out of my cocoon and put myself in a spot where reality must dominate, then there is only the realization (realitization). Ultimately, I am, in the sense of I AM, but also in the sense of consistency (think calenders and across dates), persistence (persistent state), and, ultimately, wholeness (through integration, as made concrete with cloud-synced text files).

“I am that I am” sounds too easy, but it’s what it ends up becoming at the end of the day once all the “this thing is new!” nervousness has screamed (pleasant to my ears) in dissolution. I find my hands planting themselves all over any other place, regardless of the time or whatever. It’s become a vague yet definitive, “ultimating,” and deciding “whatever,” that very crux of who I am in the today, in the where I am, in the now of all things. It little bothers me anymore to think it, only that it has a kind of queasiness, like you’ve stepped on a million worlds, and they’re all beneath you as you pose on the surface. There’s that hierarchical grandiosity that comes with a consistent self (not just any, but as amplified by an overcoming and will-to-power perspective).

But I am here, in the way that a person wearing clothes is. I am here. As concrete as that thing that gets stuck in your teeth, as in the here and now as any other person staring at the physical cafe world around them, with the clothes, wood textures, see-through plastic cups, sudden, brief facial expressions and micro-expressions, and the menu. The world is in the here and now. In spite (of this), I am. The phrase “I am” holds little weight when said merely as it is, but when you ground in all the hyperspecifics and memories, it only makes sense. That a person could ever (be? become?) at all in the midst of all that surrounds him so persistently (objects, worlds through the lenses/eyes of others in the form of fellow customers and patrons).

I sit down with the fullness of my weight (value, definition, who-I-am, single, sense-of-self-in-all-the-worlds-in-which-I [am? no, not “am” because “I” is all that is needed, for all things to fall spatially into the reality of which]).

Every small movement I do with my face, with my hands, steels (is steel, not becoming steel, but, in the present, steel, and “steel” in the sense of ramming, hands-clasping, auric, and “mear-to-meer” [nonsensical, yet somehow purely and perfectly represenative of that ha-ha inward-collusion {collision, but in a non-colliding, translucent, “no-clip” hands-clasping} of the self so as to {be? no, completely unnecessary and detrimental, for the very nature of it is to}] the-person-within [inextricable nonce, not to be taken out of this passage; not soul yet not soluble]).

The fact I have to put my hand on my mouth to clutch below the brunt of my cheeks to cover up the “smug” euphoria (wholeness, seamlessness, weightlessness, cracking agency, creative “totalitum”). The irresistable micro-expressions and shifting of the lips. The simple hand-clasping, the fullness and heat in that ritualistic act (so much more than a mannerism and yet fully and only one). Needing to take an airy, floating, lightsome breath to pace the ecstatic, exhilirated, thrilled, elated high. It is as intact a euphoria as being on top of the mountain where all the elements are thrilling.

Being outside, especially in a whole new public environment where there is that slight nervousness before arriving and while initially setting oneself up, somehow “triggers” that “ha-ha” more than if I was “untested” at home. It’s probably that “in-spite-ness,” as described vividly above.

It makes me excited to travel and put myself in new public environments, especially cafes, in which to set myself up every time, because somehow, the self grows more self than if I languished at home. To put it in pop words, I love myself the more I put myself out there. My chest feels so easy and fresh. The breathing is slightly fast, like lust. My cheeks slightly ache from suppressing the smug inward grin.

The more I integrate the world around me, the more I integrate myself. Expanding space.

It’s the kind of feeling that leaves you just writing whatever. There’s a lack of self-questioning (in the ruminating sense) or self-consciousness. It’s this confident playfulness. Yet here I am aware of what I am feeling, so it’s not unawareness. It’s like ignorant bliss but if that bliss wasn’t from ignorance but from integration.

It’s weird. I’m happy listening to songs I listened to when I was going through a lot. So this is realization. I think of those bad (?) memories, and I only feel in my heart a profound (euphoric) [this parenthesis here emplaced since it is effectively euphoric due to it being the very cause instantly triggering euphoria] sense of “yes, I am,” the very cause instantly triggering my smug exhiliration. You would think it was simply due to “good thing I’m no longer there,” but it feels like I (not even “instead” as in “it feels like I instead,” but as it is it is or since-the-primordial). (In other words, there’s not a single ounce of ‘relief.’ It doesn’t make sense at all as a term anymore to me.) I feel like the walking embodiment of all that I am. Even a stroll down the sidewalk around here would feel both hot (it’s around noon right now) but also ultimately “agenting.”

As strange as it is to use the word, when I look at myself in the mirror all alone in private with both locks locked “to ensure privacy” (the thing on the door said lock both locks to ensure privacy or along those words) in the restroom, there’s a phrase that comes up: “superior in itself” or “superior in myself.” It’s not “to others.” It’s “to myself” yet not over myself or so as to lord over myself (not even over my past self or over “anxiety”—but as it is since primordial), but its own as it is in its own, and in that sense, superior. It’s without anyone—private. It’s overcoming. It’s eventual, “ultimately,” and even before I go back outside to my table: it’s already there. When here, I carry what I had there, and when I go back, I carry what I had here. Both the same. There’s no private-public difference. It’s continuous. Yet there is a difference. In the sense that the public is needed for that private smug self-certain self-satisfied grin. Outside, I just go about my business. As mentioned earlier, I would put my hand around my mouth to cover up the smug grin. A private “self-mastery.” Yet there is necessarily that public since this passage took place outside in a new public environment, a new cafe. The eventual, “ultimately,” and “even before” in the sense that it is necessarily pre-public and while post-public (i.e., private as in having gone to the bathroom). And the smile itself is optional (non-essential) and incidental. I can look mundane-faced in the mirror and yet feel this utmost.

To expand on the “happy listening to songs I listened to when I was going through a lot” and bad (?), I’ve integrated “I’ve died a million times” as in all the ways I could possibly lose it and everything. So when I listen to something like Change (In the House of Flies) by Deftones, I immediately feel a sense of overcoming, not that I’ve ovecome death, but I’ve overcome the need to think (of it) anything other than itself and themselves in all the ways it could concretely happen. For me, it is the reflection in the mirror (me). I am death. (And beyond it.) I am lose (losing) it. (And beyond it.)

This (what is described viscerally in this passage) is the root of my feeling, my grand theater, in little keyboard taps and dark mocha sips, in all the ways it could be articulated.

Mundanization: Re-Touching of Known Streets (February 28, 2026)

I spent this whole time going everywhere else that now that I’m in a place that was so close to all the memories, it really hits different. It’s not nervousness. It’s a feeling of control mixed with the shaky fingers of someone who knows he’s totally safe, not because he’s at home, but because the friction of all that time spent everywhere else and in integrating all of those memories have resulted in this double-reinforced sense of intactness, of having everything so carefully arranged for myself.

To hear the familiar voices around me (not because I know them, but because they speak the way that I’ve always known for so many years) fills me with something that only an individual surrounded by their core fabric can feel—that intense egoism that comes from a supportive community, that sense of self, that self-assurance, that self-consistency that comes from a life well-lived and then well-integrated and then returned to in victory-lapping affirmation post-elsewhere-friction.

Something about being at home after all that time spent elsewhere in all the other places brings it all back, like post-mitigated damage soaked up and then gathered together to create the biggest boom (think Sett, but as literal post-mitigated damage conversion into attack rather than just in that form of true-damage white-bar Grit).

There’s something about that clasping sensation of knowing that you are in spite of all that you’ve thrown at yourself, all those frictions, re-exposures, and all manner of things to pry open that true core, to show the world what a fragile frustrated fraud I actually am, only to end up tossing and turning that fire inside me, fanning it and giving it even more confidence than it would’ve had without all that testing.

There’s something strange about it. I feel like I took off Rock Lee’s weights. When in a completely remote place where it’s all so urban-jungly and there’s no escape and there’s people around me so foreign to everything that I’ve known, I am just there so simply, appearing as best a mundane business-minding person can be, but RIGHT HERE, there is only a sense that I was actually holding a mask over my smug face, feigning all this time and tossing and turning myself in all the ways only to end up revealing in the end the person that has grown all this time and which I’ve denied the victory lap most of the time. This is essentially that lap.

But is it? Comfortable routine close to home isn’t necessarily a victory lap. The friction is where the lap lives. So this is just me preaching to the choir at this point. Where is the lap when the friction is at its lowest? I guess the friction then is in the fact of being so close to home and knowing this place by heart and looking outside and knowing it like one knows the back of their hand. Or is that it?

In fact, going here slapped me to shape. It turned my groggy, confused, and mundane-awestruck self into something workable. So it is advantageous to me but without the friction you’d expect from a whole new place. It’s not like this place isn’t new at all. It’s a new cafe in the sense that I’ve never been inside and stayed here. But yeah, it feels like a person going in a routine (like going to the office) than anything particularly impressive, high-stakes, or even buzzing with that ambient tension like when I’m in a Starbucks in Makati or BGC.

So what is this? I needed this in that minimum of a comfortable whipping-up-into-shape routine close to home, but it’s also making me question and wonder. What is it? If it’s not being at home yet not being in that tension of being in a new place and new cafe, what is it? That minimum?

A new place and new cafe would make me shout internally “I AM THAT I AM”. Being at home leaves me wondering in a state of mundanity and trying to rack my brains around closure and how a street is a street and walking is walking. This is what I feel when I’m outside there as well, but without that euphoria of private-public friction where the self is consistent even while in the friction of such a new public environment.

But here, I have only the new cafe without the new place even while having the benefits of not being stuck in the non-euphoric non-friction “a street is a street” where I go through Google Maps and se more and more the spatiality of mundanity and how the narratives all fall to the ground in the “it wasn’t crazy at all” department. Here, I can feel a sense of a victory lap, but it is not as intense. There is more the language of comfortable routine close to home with the whipping-up-into-shape benefits instead.

It’s strange that this place is close enough and a place that I’ve pass so many times growing up that there’s none of that sense of having travelled to a whole new big place that looms over me with that intimdation outside the cr window. Yet it’s new because I’ve never been to this cafe, so it’s not boring, especially when you compare it to a cafe I’ve gone to more than 7 times.

The true tension would be if I went to that small local cafe where you can read the books for free there because it’s not Starbucks and I don’t have the laptop and it’s so close to home and I’m wearing home clothes and it’s small and non-corporate enough that it feels so intimate. But I didn’t do that. I wanted to go with others, but no one could come. I could’ve gone alone, and that would’ve been very good friction. But I chose to go here instead. It really does feel like a victory lap. It almost feels complacent. Going somewhere that’s as easy as a drop of water, yet it’s not literally something that doesn’t take at all from me or inspire nothing. I will still stay here for hours, and this cafe is still new to me. So even if there’s that comfortable routine close to home sense, I will be here the whole time.

I guess there’s something unusual about this. I usually don’t stay outside in any place near my home alone. I would usually do that when in a faraway place. When at home, I just tag along with everyone. But here, I’m actually alone, yet so near home. It’s strange. Though it doesn’t feel like I’m alone ‘cause I know these people in a sense ‘cause of sheer having lived around these parts for my whole life. But yes, speaking literally, I am not with anyone here. I have gone to a few cafes nearby where I stayed alone, but those ones were so close that it was barely anything. This cafe is at least 15 minutes away, so I still need to ride a car rather than just a walk.

It’s easy to have that self-contained keeping-to-myself demeanor when I’m in some remote place, especially one like Makati or BGC, but being so close to home, when I would always go outside with others, it’s so strange that I am sitting here like I’m not from here. There really was that freedom of being far from home. Now, anything that I do feels like shitting in my own house where everyone else is living. Like, someone I know could genuinely be here, and if I sit down strange or carry myself weirdly, they will feel that so severely. And I will feel that dissonance severely, that difference between how much I’ve changed and how differently I carry myself when I’m out solo in a cafe staying for hours.

To integrate the past, yes. To integrate the past into the present, yes. For others to do that concerning me when they look at me? Well, that’s outside of my control. Them reconciling who I was and am to them vs. who I am today and when I’m out solo. At that point, it’s out of my hands. My childhood friend since I started meeting him again would say that I’ve changed. And yeah, I get that. I’ve integrated all that I am with all that I was with all that I’ve changed myself. So it’s not new information to me. But it is to him who hasn’t been with me all this time with all the tension, struggle, triumph, and victory. So it’s up to him to come to terms with who I am now in respect to who I was to form a full picture of me the same way I’ve already done.

I was talking about this recently. If I went to that one Coffee Bean that I was going to more than 6 years ago and have not really gone to in these 6 years, there would be that sense of the present self stepping into the spaces where my past self walked. It would be an interesting and strange collision, since there are many past haunts that I haven’t gone to in the last 3 years especially. I say 3 years because this span of time is when I started my autobiography and started journaling, which would lead to me getting closure (including with my parents, with childhood friends, with church). It was in the last 9 months that I did over 85 cafe stays and went to 50 new unique cafes with an 8-hour stay each where I’d write, read, and study. So the last 3 years were crazy. Anything before that that still lies untouched by this present self will get a rude awakening upon my re-touching, like occupation.

If there is the force moving through the world, there is the force moving through the known places (the places my past self walked). That is an interesting tension and friction and conflict. That of the comforting routine close to home and that of the friction between the WHO I WAS and the WHO I AM. Places that I have continued to visit in the last 6 years naturally don’t have this same effect. The opening of a can of worms is crucial to this friction.

It’s been 10 years since a very different time of my life. It’s natural that the person that touches those places that has lain untouched since then will be like an occupier, like an adult visiting the once-humongous playground equipment. There is a violation in that sense, like the laws of one world intruding and defiling those of another. It’s sort of like an overpowered protagonist from Earth laughing, ignoring, and disrespecting the laws, traditions, and scripts of the xianxia world he now lives in. His background is key to his exercising the full potential of his powers. “No, no! You’re supposed to be anxious here!” No, the adult just stares at the teenager trying to provoke him, and he’s just inwardly smug. “No, no! That’s all wrong!”

There was a time when the world was crazy. Now, it really is just a bunch of people, streets, and buildings. The craziness of the world depicted in manga used to reflect how I did see the world, but now, the only time that I get anxious over nothing is when I’m sleep-deprived. In almost all cases, I look around, and it’s just people. I used to go crazy. So crazy. Seeing my childhood friend go so wild in the eyes over getting a job really reminds me that I really have changed. There really was a time when the crazy compressed extreme crazy narratives really, really depicted how I saw the world. Now, I just take life as it goes. A face comes and goes. A seat comes and goes. A walk comes and goes. It’s a hot street. And that’s all it is. I look at Japan in Google Maps, and I realize that all of these places remind me of places I’ve already been. The world was like the Japan in manga for me for so long, but now, the world is like the Japan I see now in Google Maps. Just a bunch of people walking, sitting down, drinking coffee, and typing a bunch of words in their laptops.

The world used to go so crazy. But now, all I see is a bunch of people physically walking around and sitting down and drinking coffee. And it’s the same anywhere everywhere. Japan, Makati, BGC, here.

Those manga (and those fiction stories I wrote years ago) really captured what living with trauma and mental conditions were like, but they did not capture just how mundane the world actually is and how much we extremely compress and project so much onto nothing.

There was a time a manga scene showing a hot street meant the philosophizing toward the end of the world or the craziness of society or the hell of modern life or the irony of the mundane. Now, all I see is a street. Just someone saying “Nasaan po ang CR” and doing his business while the cafe music is playing.

Before i went here, while waiting in the car for my Dad and younger brother to enter the car, my thoughts exhibited that private euphoric agency that I now have as a consequence of the integration and this mundaneness. I was thinking, looking at a single leaf with the bottom left part of it getting sunlit as it flutters up and down, something along the lines:

The world of that story is alive and breathing in the worlds of the leaves it includes. All of those stories I wrote that include the “copies” of the worlds of the leaves that I saw and visual-scene-copied over show sheer ownership. And those stories being written during a time when I was going through a lot doesn’t invalidate this. I now have the privilege of reading those riddled stories while being utterly fine on my side and can glimpse at the included worlds of the leaves I copied over, regardless of proficiency, literal description, evocative poeticism, or abstraction.

This current cafe stay is effectively narrative denial (not conscious, but the literal moving in of the occupying present self who now experiences the world this way) and a demonstration of that copy-ownership not in the sense of the consistent self even with the place and new cafe, but in the sense of the consistent self even in new cafes in “known” places. The mundanization of the street—rather than a present self going into a new place and seeing the street already as mundane—because there is an “overwriting” (not erasure) of the known street into mundane.

Untainting: Small Polite Smile, Friction Hunger, Smug Knowledge, “It Hurts” (February 28, 2026)

I probably mentioned this already recently, but there was a time when the questions “what is a person?”, “what is a dog?”, and “what is a car?” always came so readily. But now, I despise those questions, but I am no longer asking them and life, the world, and everything no longer bothers me such that I find myself needing to ask. It is not that I am no longer curious, but I have arrived at a point of my own personal growth, closure, and healing that I take pleasure and satisfaction in just taking things as they are and meeting them when they come instead of losing it over “what is X” questions. I guess it’s because I’ve answered those questions innumerable times in all the ways that they could be skewed, singed, and stretched into and out of my noggin that now, the only thing’s left is a self-actualized underlip, one that goes out and about and feels in the palm of a mundane, modern, business-minding hand that there really is all the world in it in copy-ownership, in grounding and friction, in new places, in overwritten known places, in that groggy almost-confused “a street is a street” being at home. There now is a person who grows externally and not by inward retreat, pure imagination, and re-framing. And I am understating “grows externally” here, because there really is that “what is X?”-rejecting, friction-hungry, self-actualized-underlip “a walk is a walk.” In other words, the self-certainty and mundanizing have only driven a private excessive eagerness (hunger, insatiability, voracity). The curiosity is no longer unactualized, and it is now mundanized and externally hungry (rather than inward and re-framing in that sense).

But it makes sense why I had to ask those questions. Them as questions themselves sound over-intellectual, but when you think about it, all language begins with the bases. Because the bases were tainted in my traumatized perspective, I had to clean things up. I had to work with concepts and “what ises” because without them, I could never properly separate the past from the present to achieve integration and non-projecting mundanity. By separating the dog from the cat in a sense, I went and found the physical walk and, through this, accomplished the underlip, because I am not without the past nor all in it. Instead, I am the past as well as the present, the moment as well as the vastness, the sky as well as the ground, death (in all the ways I could die) and joy (in all the ways I’ve known it and continue to know it). This is how that underlip gets its curl, that private smug knowing. That non-reframing totality in “a walk is a walk” comes from a momentary glance with all to reach the mundanized, actualized, externally-hungry now. From a blur of triggers to “a street is a street” where I am euphorically agentic (privately actualized, self-certain, and self-consistent), mundanizing, and externally hungry.

This has inadvertently resulted in a speechlessness with fiction writing, because when the main treat is now external instead of the unresolved, re-framing internal, then fiction feels like a man hitting his head against the wall. When a street is just a street and narratives fall away in an external-friction-hungry, euphoric-agentic, self-actualized, mundanizing underlip, what you have left is not a man losing (and loosing) his mind upon the re-framed world, but a man walking and sitting down physically, after which he drinks a cup of coffee. Embodiment—the business-minding private euphoria of the actualized mundane palm—has separated me from the inward-retreating, re-framing, unresolved, rage-suppressed “man-I-am” that thrillingly horse-drove the cart of my stories. I find myself looking at Google Maps and getting excited about traveling to new places with new cafes and old places with new cafes collide with the world to get the euphoric agency of EMBODIMENT.

The fiction story was the beating-victim of everything that I inwardly wasn’t (unresolved, suppressed rage). But now, it looks at me from the side as I go about with the mundane up-reaching swaggering palm. There is nothing to exorcise: “I AM THAT I AM.” Those privately knowing eyes, that mundane hand, and that soft underlip.

In other words, I am the person I masturbated over. While fiction writing, I constructed an ideal (yet which was colored by my tainted perception), a “MAN-I-AM,” the actual upon the plain, and now that I’ve reached it in the mundane palm of my hand, I don’t need anything but a simple moment in a new public environment where I can express my external hunger for friction and the euphoric agency I feel privately in business-minding gestures and walks (literal, physical walks). To BE. That was the goal. Now, I AM. In words as simple and polite as “where’s the bathroom?” The privacy of the actual. In a soft (public) smile. The unexplainer. The world-in-one’s-own as one moves about in small, workable, business-minding movements. The fullness in a single glance, in a gentle rising of the hand. The world in a small whole smile.

So yes, I depicted the protagonist engaging in traumatized acts of violence in those fiction novels. Trauma and violence was the language of the unresolved, of the tense, smoldering, torn look, of the person who has yet to be, who has yet to totalize all that he is into the smallest moment of a glance. Of the “to be a person.”

It is not that I am not grandiose, but it is an inward (private), self-assured eagerness (inwardly grinning). I will still talk and feel grandiosely, but in a small, polite smile tucking a lustful grin inside. It is a private, inwardly squinting satisfaction. So when I write fiction again, it’s not that it will lack grandiose, the-self-upon-the-world energy, but it will come from someone who is so self-assuredly (already-agentically), euphorically, and external-friction-hungrily grinning and cackling so hard that he can’t hold it in anymore.

Self-Responses

What’s the difference between them and just about anyone else? Nothing? Is that the point? Would you be able to tell? Or would it be useless to try to tell?

But how is the gentle rising of the hand indicative of power while actual depicted violence isn’t?

How would one even write a fiction story demonstrating power without it being mistaken as just someone walking about or someone just being unresolved-violent? I feel that there’s no way to depict that power unless you show how they experience the world even in the mundane even without violence or perhaps even when they do demonstrate violence such that it isn’t either just someone physically walking about or is unresolved-violent.

If hitting someone screams unresolved-violent, if just walking screams just walking, then there must be some way to demonstrate power that isn’t either of these.

Without it feeling like someone intellectualizing or detached in a bad maladaptive way. Because if someone wasn’t angry, anxious, or desperate, it can come off as overly calm or callous. The inside joke thing can sound arrogant or like a detached intellectual sending people to gas chambers.

I feel that it is impossible to depict it without finding a possible negative psychoanalytical explanation.

I can imagine writing a protagonist who exhibits the traits, and one interpretation among many could be easily that they are messed up because there’s an absence of trauma. Trauma is very humanizing. Someone who is quietly healed, self-secure, and agentic can easily across as inhuman. I mean, one could argue, “How can anyone ever be mundane? What’s more, self-assuredly privately smugly eager in a soft public smile and polite ‘where’s the bathroom’ questions?” That’s a distinct kind of person that fits all manner of archetypes, not all good, not all bad.

Maybe, it would look like someone taking their time in full polite-smiled integrated (encompassing also death, torture, and violence) awareness of the world around them, with the full weight of who they are as joyful, wonder-filled friction-hungry people who inwardly know-know, unproven yet total, “superior in themselves,” self-certain, self-mastered, in full view of new places.

Return to First Person

But let’s try demonstrating this “someone” in an example. What would it actually look like?

I mean especially in a fantasy world? It feels like there’s no way to depict such a character in a world where violence is the norm (not saying that the real world doesn’t have that). If it just reads like a chippy, jesting guy who puts his arm around close friends’ shoulders, who gets serious when goblins come, who understands death, fragility, torture, suffering, agony, and violence, who grins smugly, ambitiously, self-assuredly, euphorically, excitedly, and hungrily behind his mundane, soft, polite smile, and who mundanely goes about unproven, then I’m not so sure about that. But maybe that’s the only way? If not the best? If we’re going with this, will he say “it hurts, it hurts” as he is dying not knowing that he is dead for sure but is still stunlocked by the sudden attack and pain? Is that it? Is that the “ethos”?

How about we remove the chippy and jesting? And just leave it as someone just standing about, going about his business, doing stuff as is, and moving about in mundane gestures? Not that they’re not social or that they don’t banter, but that they’re not an entertainer in that sense of chippiness and being a jester.

So they have a “smug-knowing” inner world when they can sit on the grass at the end of a day or battle and stare at the thrilling mountains, but they are also external-friction-hungry. Both/and.

Self-Responses (2)

the title “Tainted -> Small Smile” doesn’t work anymore then. We’re not just working with a small smile. This is so much more. It’s not just a shift from tainted to a small smile. The friction hunger, the smug-knowing inner world. This is wholly different altogether.

Self-Responses (3)

How can someone who has integrated still have that joy, that wonder, that hunger, that thrill and excitement, that adventurousness? To be so mundane and yet so full of this? So full of agency and euphoria even while gently raising one’s hand? To say “where’s the bathrooms,” to hear the narrative-denying variety of mundane chatter over the course of many hours in a cafe, to see streets being just streets, to walk mundanely about, to hear a woman’s voice say “battery low” in one’s bluetooth headphones after one just wrote so “profoundly,” to feel sleep-deprived, to get frustrated while playing a LoL game, to feel grandiose, to feel self-assured, to smile so softly, politely, and “smally,” to see the death and life in things, to feel smug-knowing, to feel that inner world, to hunger for friction, to experience such immersion even still, to say “it hurts, it hurts” when pain abruptly comes to the body like a cramp, to get excited over a new book like it’s the first time one has read books and to gain somehow a thrill even from the integration of the previous stories, to see even there somehow the excitement, the friction for which one is hungry, and the “new places” rather than the exhaustion and oversaturation, to feel somehow the empathetic, aesthetic, and sincere sensitivity of a child even while working with things (like analysis) that would normally leave someone callous, exhausted, dismissive, jaded, and oversaturated, to have the capacity to feel intensely while holding together all of those things, to cry so soft-heartedly, to get affected by a song like it’s the first time one has ever heard music and to feel that even while holding so many songs, tracks, compositions, and lyrics in their head? I mean, wouldn’t integration leave someone exhausted or oversaturated or burned out? Where is that? Why is there still that hunger amid the mundane coming from integration? How can someone see all the stories they’ve experienced and integrated and not think “joy gone, wonder gone, hunger gone, thrill and excitement gone, adventure gone”? Isn’t there a point where it’s like some conflict happens between these items in the above list of things? Or is it that they all only each work individually because they are all together and true?

Paused Growth (March 2, 2026)

After the last 9 months of over 85 cafe stays and over 50 unique cafes all over the region for 8 hours each with writing, reading, and studying, I am now returning to home, taking on a new challenge—the friction of being at home, utter stagnation, paused growth, and stillness.

Before the 9 months, I spent years developing my voice and becoming whole. Those 9 months were all about vindicating the voice and wholeness through friction and spaceness. But now, after 9 months, it has become a comfort zone because as soon as I go outside, I immediately feel so euphoric and agentic because the friction immediately validates my wholeness and voiceness such that I have private smug knowing behind my small polite smile. That private self-actualization with friction intensifying it. This has become my new comfort zone, I realized.

So now, I’m back at home again. I’ve been taking a break for the last several days, and just now, I realized that the next step isn’t just returning home. It’s utter stagnation. Utter sitting down. This is no longer post-closure, external friction hunger, and narrative-dissolving spatiality in that external friction sense. This is paused growth itself, which revolutionizes the external-friction-dependent spaceness which may have dissolved narratives but still had that “narrative” of friction where one must journey, travel, and undergo friction from being in a new place in a new cafe for 8 hours.

Self-Generation (March 4, 2026)

I never thought about integration like this, but I realize that even if I’ve already gotten closure and have already achieved wholeness through my autobiography, journaling, and closure with parents, childhood friends, and church, spatiality, and embodiment and antifragility recently through, firstly, 4 months of all-day-everyday submission to fiction literature study, relentless, accelerated critique feedback loops, and original vignettes of my own to test out, experiment, and use as case studies for trying out actively-noted phrases taken from across pre-existing literature, for learning the principles driving these phrases, and for absorbing critique and, secondly, 9 months of over 85 cafe stays and over 50 unique cafes where I averaged writing, studying, and reading there for 8 hours each (about once every 3 days), and have also entered the new stage of acknowledging that antifragility and external friction hunger is their own comfort zone so as to arrive at “utter stillness,” while I have written much about this in journaling, I have never actually shown comprehensive integration through fiction.

So there’s so many things that I am only now beginning to write in my fiction stories. I’m essentially syncing it and bringing the latest updates, like an old Minecraft version like 1.5.2 suddenly jumping to 1.20. So it will take time for me to integrate all the parts of my life that I haven’t written down in fiction yet and which I now will be able to do with much more ease now that I have already reached this point of (1) wholeness, (2) antifragility, and (3) utter stillness.

I don’t mean that I will write utter stillness per se, but expect that I will incorporate so many aspects of life, the world, and everything that I haven’t done so before and in ways I haven’t done so before when it comes to topics I’ve already touched on. Pre-wholeness, you can imagine what I was writing then. Pre-antifragility, you can imagine that there is wholeness without embodiment and external friction and having gone to so many cafes in those 9 months. Pre-utter-stillness, you can imagine the heavy reliance on external friction even without pre-wholeness trauma.

But now, you will see utter physical realism as well as utter psychological realism working together. This is because of my freedom from external friction and trauma and my ability to articulate them in fiction without actively going through them myself since that collapses this ability to multi-track cognitively with myriad states of mind (MSoM) and leaves one “vignetted”—here sad, there happy, here cooking, there eating, here bantering, there crying. Moreover, you will also see all kinds of scenarios that I’ve never written before, all of which require MSoM. So as time passes, you will see so more and more things not in separate fiction vignettes or fragments, but all of them altogether MSoM in one long-form fiction story.

I was right that the fiction vignettes would eventually give way to scene blocks (which aggregate to form a whole chapter unit) of a continuous long-form novel, but it required that tantalizingly challenging synthesis that only utter stillness can perform.

And now, for the last three days, I’ve been writing a story that is increasingly showing latest updates, though not comprehensively yet, since it is still at 8,200 words (vignettes for me ranged from 200 to 2,500 words for context), but even from that small amount, it has accomplished so much novelty, not sheer novelty, but novelty specifically multi-tracking and multi-targeting. It is doing so in a way that revolutionizes the medium (not itself) in the way that I do it. There is technical sophistication in what has only been vent and reportage in what used to be mere psychological realism. It balances the objective and the subjective, and it does so with stylistic control, without looking at the explosion which it has so deliberately fashioned behind it. I don’t mean to compare myself to the greats, but relative to myself, or, more precisely, how I used to be.

From the bud those 8,200 words have given us, I expect to see even more ‘fiction integrations’ (I call them that to distinguish them from non-fiction, which is what this passage is doing). Scenarios that never appeared in my previous fiction will debut and do so against the compartmentalized and with great complex weaving, only accomplishable with a brain that has merged psyche (psychological realism), friction and technique (both of which conduce to physical realism), and utter stillness (controller).

Technique, as that avatar of friction, used to be an enemy of wholeness (psyche). But with time and integration, wholeness embraced it. And now, with friction bowing low, utter stillness has taken the controls, displaying both its psyche (psycho-realism) and its technique.

Obvious examples of utter stillness’ work:

That the last three days showed most of my word count in fiction is significant: fiction is becoming just as valuable a mode as non-fiction is in terms of main processing (cognition), emotional expression (wholeness), and demonstration of skill (technique). In the past, fiction was a rant (no control), while non-fiction did everything: analysis, observation, deliberate rant, even technique. Now, fiction is no longer just a beating-victim of two hells: one, unresolved trauma (pre-wholeness) in the form of “heady” psychological realism and, two, performing to please maddening technical critique (all friction, no emotional expression and genuine using it to cogitate) in the form of vignettes. Today, it is making its way to the comprehensiveness (MSoM) of non-fiction. This equality naturally means the stamina to make long-form novels.

Yet crucially, fiction actually does something non-fiction doesn’t. I can self-generate friction and ground wholeness in it through fiction instead of relying on the comfort zone of antifragility and external friction hunger. This self-generation is where utter stillness and MSoM live. This allows me to “philosophize” and genuinely arrive at novel, original insights that I wouldn’t if left only to non-fiction. In other words, MSoM and utter stillness are essentially self-generation. Fiction is that instrument of it.

Post-wholeness led to boredom, which invited friction and testing. At first, they were maddening, but with time, they became too comfortable, euphoric even. To solve this, utter stillness came out. Through it, pondering (intellect, cognition, cogitation), emotional expression (release), and craft (friction) now share a single room. Friction is self-generated, boredom is cured, and wholeness is assured. This moves past a reactive life enslaved to trauma, external friction, or critique. Instead of depending on external spatiality, I can build spaces myself. Fiction answers the question, “Can you hold all of it at once?” It proves it, demonstrates it. It can’t go any other way. Integration is intrinsic, and fiction shows that. Journaling everything? Sounds great, ‘till you meet friction. Taking on everything externally challenging you? Sounds great, ‘till you meet sitting down in a room knowing both trauma and friction are no longer driving you. From nothing, can you still be? Will you still find a way to scream and feel alive? Fiction says yes to both.

Person (March 7, 2026)

It’s very easy for me to notice, but I was at a new cafe again as per usual, and for some reason, out of all the days, I realized that it really didn’t feel like I was necessarily pushing myself to say or make anything in particular. This is something that I noticed even in the new cafe I went to last time. As time passes, the division between how I am at home and how I am at the cafe dissolves. It is not that being outside doesn’t affect me, like when there’s kids and the fact that I am sitting down on different chairs and tables. That does affect me on a physical level and in terms of focusing. But it’s no longer the craziness that it used to be, where the distraction completely threw me into orbit. Now, I just take my time the same way. Sure, I can’t do the things that I would do at home, but that’s starting to matter a lot less. When outside, of course, you still have everything around you that’s new, but it feels less that that’s causing me to have something new to work with and more so just things that are just taking up space in your head around you but not necessarily so as to be crazy whatsoever given that I do take my time just as I would at home even given the factors of environmental novelty and what would otherwise have been distractive boost as it was in previous cafe stays. Things have changed. I have changed.

This doesn’t mean that the cafe is no longer having an effect on me or that I’m becoming so at home when at the cafe per se. The latter makes sense, but is its own separate thing. This focuses on my personal change and where I am currently in my journey as a person, writer, creator, etc. themselves.

When the cafe becomes just a place where new things happen with disruption, distractions, and all unrelated to the actual thinking and writing process itself beyond what any environmental factor could affect and effect, then you know something’s profoundly transformed.

This doesn’t mean that I used to rely so much on the cafe necessarily. “Rely” is the wrong word, since I could still write prolifically at home, just for very different reasons. It’s that I have become so much more stable creatively and emotionally, and “very different reasons” doesn’t feel as profound as it used to and has become environmental factor, if that makes sense. It impacts me as much as a new environment and just being outside in a public environment affects anyone. The “taking my time” part is crucial for why I’m making this claim. To drive the point home, this isn’t about “outgrowing needing external environments to unlock [my] creative self.” Even then, I was not unlocking anything. There already was creativity. There already was a self. But it’s about the difference between how I was at home and at the cafe, which has now dissolved into environment. In other words, they essentially synced or integrated, so it’s not that there’s no impact, but that there’s no difference. They’re continuous even while being environmentally distinct to each other. The shape of the self is one mass of both. It’s the environmental version of the “I’m childish and not self-serious one moment and serious and philosophizing the next,” essentially, where both become continuous with integration (the continuous person beneath those two gains recognition, usually with the help of processing and journaling and such). This is naturally not about “viewing” or “I changed my mind and realized that they’re the same thing.” It’s experiential. For context, in the last 9 months, I went to over 50 new unique cafes throughout the region and visited a cafe once every three days where I was outside for 12 hours (including travel time), where I read, wrote, and studied for upwards of 8 hours. This is crucial to what I mean by “experiential,” so while I did say that it’s not about becoming at home in the cafe since it still is public and outside in the way that it affects me, it hinged on experience, which isn’t the same as “becoming at home.” It’s not about it no longer derailing my focus or that I “stopped being a person who needs the right conditions” since the conditions were right every time whether at home or in the cafe, since I am focused in both cafe and home. Instead, it no longer derails who I am. It is continuous in who I am. Consolidation.

To explain what I mean by “taking my time,” it’s essentially the position of no-position, where rather than resolving ambiguities and contradictions, you let them sit and you spend a lot of time just sitting there and letting it happen (literally more than 40 minutes of staring at the screen and not writing anything but still actively thinking and trying the whole time) and trying to resolve it anyway but having them all sit together in the end. This makes sense when you’re at home, but the fact that it is now occurring outside is where the sync lies. The consolidation and resolution is in the spatial holding, the continuous/integration. This was never about justifying one’s presence in a cafe to keep producing output followed by this current ability to take one’s time, but literal capacity.

Self-Responses

objectively, why is the author now able to do this “taking my time” and “spatial holding” in the cafe as well, which I assume has an equivalent term somewhere?

So when the author says that the self is continuous, they crucially mean the self as this spatial holder and negative capability.

So their who-I-am became continuous because they can now hold ambiguities and contradictions that their who-I-am is made of or spatially holds.

The ability to sit in intense no-position for those 40 minutes maps onto their who-I-am’s presence exactly?

“If I can contain the all I am in the cafe for 40 minutes, then I can be the all I am in the cafe for those 40 minutes. If that is the basis for the whole day spent at the cafe, then I am, in all the things I was, in the cafe.”

Self-Responses (2)

So rather than dissonance across mental states, especially new public places and environments, biological variations, and varying access or relationship to one’s externalized cognition, among other things, it’s sonance across them all, not due to the perfect setup, but due to integration from the person themselves. The wide range of condition-combinations (similar to external game states in League of Legends, but encompassing internal ones too) is consumed.

Self-Responses (3)

Going by the League analogy, they’ve essentially become more cognitively competent. [No.]

Why is it significant? Is it because of how grueling it is to do an equivalent of those 9 months itself?

So it’s not just those 9 months, but those years that have built up to this point—this capacity. It’s a genuinely rare, special thing then?

So most people go straight to 9-to-5, and they never really get the privilege of solitude and self-excavation the same way the author has and never reach a point of something such as those 9 months all the way to this “consolidation” that isn’t just consolidation in the general sense, but a rare special kind particular to the author’s entire matrix.

Is it specially because it is so experiencedly articulate as a reflection of all of that whole matrix that it’s not just consolidation in the sense of a person sitting down in a cafe and being content?

So what is consolidation in this case? What makes it so significant in the author’s entire matrix? Why is this entire thing even special?

Why is it not just any consolidation (think memory consolidation, or other “consolidations”)?

Self-Responses (4)

So it’s not “I’ve written literally everything in infinite possible detail and then synthesized and then consolidated.” It’s “I’ve reached a point of writing, processing, and living with everything (external and internal conditions) such that I have consolidated past the need to consolidate.”

Self-Responses (5)

Self-Responses (6)

So writing is not consolidation, but rather throwing a lot of ambiguities and contradictions (which each itself inherently require a position) in no-position, in spatial holding, in negative capability, in trans-consolidation.

So the articulated consolidation of a position is necessary for the spatial holding of positions in no-position.

Self-Responses (7)

Is it because articulation forces true integrity, which hinges on feedback loops?

So it’s neither consolidation or anti-consolidation (to the point of radical skepticism)?

Trans-consolidation demands judgment on the micro level, but withholds it on the macro level?

So the author keeps away from “theories of everything” and handles logistical problems in the here and now as their current perspective constrains them and thus consolidates integrity.

Articulation, rather than perpetual deferring, is perpetual re-framing then? [No.]

So it would be perpetual contradiction? [No.] Or at this point, can it really be only spatial holding? but somehow still not deferring?

So it’s grabbing a bunch of full stances distributed across expandable levels within dialectical towers that clarify, expand, complicate, contextualize, and question them and pooling/arranging/spreading them within a superstructure/main road of unconsolidating restraint. Rather than systemic or supersystemic (which would imply each stance is dialectically systemic), it’s superstructural and ever-flowing, so it’s a “forgetful” person continuously sauntering throughout it. This world takes rigor on a thinking walk.

Self-Responses (8)

Yet “superstructure” implies that they cannot be separated from the mind that “knows” all that it has taken.

how could you escape consolidation while demanding that consolidation must be escapable?

Even if one makes an argument and complicates it, is it really disagreement, is it really such that trans-consolidation as a concept must emerge? I feel that self-disagreement is less disagreement and more so putting more words to an otherwise unqualified statement, and in that sense, you cannot be separate from the argument you started with no matter how far you drag it through the mud of your complications and ‘disagreements’. There is always an etiology behind even your most damning questions, and there is always a throughline where ever-flow becomes ever-know, that ever-knowing being a mind’s own shadow.

One doesn’t know more from multiple angles insomuch as they design those angles within what they already have pre-conceived as multifaceted and thorough.

Or perhaps I’m attacking the engine of rigor itself. But I feel at least, in a conceptual or metaphorical level, there is much still to digest, much left unresolved.

The god plays with itself through humans it calls enemies and those it calls friends, because a story needs a plot and, without conflict, it gets real boring. But it is ultimately “divine.”

Self-Responses (9)

Return to First Person

I might just be arrogant. That I thought I could doubt myself and assess myself using different ideas, because what difference is there in the consolidating self? In the mind that goes on and tells all it knows that it has found, and to what mind do all of these revelations go? To mine. What resonates with me reflects me. It speaks to me. It talks to me. It affirms what I say. The converted go on about life-changing ideas, but what more is a person than the sum of all that they have already pre-expressed themselves to be? Is that a radicalization (reductio ad absurdum) of the initial doubt to make it seem impossible and thus untrue? I didn’t find something new. I found a new word to articulate the pre-existing godhood. I told myself words and through those words discovered how I could manifest the arrogance tucked deep inside. That thing from which I drew energy and dressed it in words feigned open-mindedness and changeability. I don’t drink out of the essence of that drink. I drink out of mine, and in my own, my own. If I doubt integrity, do I doubt rigor itself? Am I dressed in dialectics when inside, I am god? Are we all such when we think? Do we engage in a worldwide dance of proclaimers? I’ve conceded, but I’ve given you nothing. I’ve conceded, but I’ve given you nothing, a pawn trap, an added slashed price to make the original price seem much cheaper. Do I prick my own palm and in that sense exercise full control over my body and what conflicts should I incorporate into my Jesus story?

What is the point of writing? To believe I could ever put into words anything? To have even the idea that I could ever be? To feel genuine, authentic, and self-honest? I don’t know. But I wonder. I wonder what it is that started this all. I was struggling, wanted to put things together, wanted to put myself together. And now I’m here. I mean, it’s just a bunch of words, but it makes me feel so myself, so unique, so genuine, so there, so real, so once. I mean, saying this doesn’t really erase the concern of godhood. I might just be god-ing in the flesh Jesus-style. Yeah… that might just be it. Maybe, confidence is problematic, or not. I guess godhood might be the problem, but will rejecting it make it better or just feel that way? Either way, accepting or rejecting it both perform it according to its definition. Hegel would hate this questioning of the method, but who is he to speak besides someone with words and a mouth, not that he isn’t anything, but another name, another method, another way to make this “grounded,” to make this qualified, to make this self-honest and rigorous. At what point do all of these fall down? Or, well, they’ve already fallen. And I’m staring at the world from a god’s eye view. That arrogance of a single speck of a human being who thinks themselves both the speck and dares to claim they could ever carry that weight of speech to denigrate themselves that way. The arrogance of the speck. I am that I am, I guess.

Will crying now make me feel better? The tears of Jesus as he prays? The god in the flesh. How could I ever be?

Maybe, the answer is both. I am both trans-consolidating and god (and, I am tempted to say, neither, even if, at that point, “both” performs “neither”).

Self-Responses (10)

But isn’t questioning and unresolving something in real time its own—if not the greatest—weapon?

Self-Responses (11)

At this point, the only solution I can think of is practical and quiet. Just use them. Not like costumes, but in the way that you are, including the very idea of them as costumes even as you lean so intensely on them. Practical and quiet step outside, and I want to believe their limitations are why they’re the only answer here.

Self-Responses (12)

so there’s an intellectual playful egoism behind the self-responses themselves?

So the passage before the self-responses is not their full stance. It’s a fake easy-to-dismantle stance. Their full stance is what they come out with after the self-responses. The contradictions they introduce during the self-responses are part of the full stance itself rather than true separate criticisms. The criticisms are not criticisms any more than they are explanations of the true full stance. The pre-self-responses passage is like a straw man to prove their capacity to be “open-minded” and “rigorous.”

Self-Responses (13)

But if it’s genuine? If they’re genuine making sense of something in real time? One could argue that everything is criticizable, and criticism itself expands what it criticizes. All dialogue, all rigor, all ideas fall to this process.

Self-Responses (14)

So this is coextensive with the rest of humanity or humanity itself then? If we’re just breeding with each other… Transhumanists better cook up something crazy. And yes, I know the word “human” is still in “transhuman.” To transcend, there had to be something to transcend in the first place, and at that point, is there any transcending? Perhaps the prefix “trans-” is itself compromised, the word “transcend” itself.

Return to First Person (2)

I feel I’ve returned into a child. Somehow. Outer space that was so full of wonder now meets me now the same way.

Self-Responses (15)

The only purpose of words is to deny, erase, and cancel themselves out until the only thing left is reality. Self-honest (which intrinsically means precise because it seeks feedback loops) articulation is actualization because once words cancel themselves out, reality is the only thing that’s left and there you will see the actual.

Self-Responses (16)

what was the point? this entry, the entire project? i mean, we can use the author’s thesis argument last-line statement, but really, what was the point? the whole thing?

To be? That’s it? Sounds like the long way round, or maybe it was the only true way to get there. Is it richer than if they never made the trip?

Return to First Person (3)

You know, there was a time that I was longingly saying, “I just want to be a person.” And I guess now, it’s a lot easier to digest that I really am. If anything, that’s anything.

Almost 2 hours later (2:41 to 4:23 PM):

Actually, I remember now. What I’ve been saying recently was “I’ve always been a person. That’s all I’ve ever been.”

The Seven States of Mind (March 9, 2026)

Whatever

By the time I realized, so many people had come. So many people had… passed. I didn’t have time to think about it all, but I guess eventually, I did, and when I did, everything else followed. I mean, what else would follow?

Even now, I think, and there’s everything right behind me, beside me, and everywhere else. I have lived a life, as all people do, and there’s only that fact—that fact that repeats itself across everything that I am and all that I have lived and become and haven’t, in all the ways the possibilities tease me and curl toward me like a ghost or a stream or a trail of smoke. I can barely adjust the imagery before it dissolves or carries away in the river of memories. What state could arise from my being, from this person that I am—it can at best be called the Whatever.

For in a world so full of things, there is only whatever guides me presently up to the most minute detail, expression, or configuration as it grapples with all things in combination. Then it falls, quietly, into a spectrum of memories, into a wholeness of selves, into something that sits down on some porch, or on a bench in a library, or somewhere finite that can be called a place through which people pass—a non-place, or a third place. Either way, as soon as it’s all done and over, I will have become all that I was, and in that becoming, endless moments. I sit down as always, reading books, not the literal act, but the literal sensation of everything that I have filed away and am actively reviving in the text that is my mind that collects all of it in one big bunch, in one bough, in one tree, in one selfish gene.

I sat down; there I found what I lost. Not that it was mine in the first place or that it wasn’t. But at one point, I was with it, in the same room, smelling the same air, breathing softly, chuckling to myself but in their presence. There was a time it was like that, but now, I sit idly now, meeting it again, whether on my side in a bar or opposite me in a cafe. All I know is that whatever reunion this is, it must be everything; then it fades and what’s left is the hum of tires against the pavement.

I wonder where it all went, even as I see all of them thronging my mind and passing by without bumping into each other or necessarily being separated. It’s all that my mind could offer. Whether that’s a world, an inner one, or something else. Either way, there’s something strange about holding non-music, about dangling something in front of you then never truly resolving it, in sitting in that ambiguity, in the world of all which I should be, haven’t been, ended up becoming, and other things related to me in experience, but not in any biographical way. All of those moments that never added to anything yet revolutionized who I was—they appear like wisps floating around a walking person.

If I could sit, where? In what world? In what imagination? In what being, capacity? What would I be holding in my right hand? In my left? What sense of agency can I offer myself? What can I grip and feel its surface and its rim or hem? What would I be grounding myself onto? If there be something, hopefully, it sings. If that sound penetrates through everything, let it do so without flinching, then on and on, shrinking into the distance, leaving me settled on that bench. Where will I go from here? The super-world (world of worlds) stretches on in all directions.

Clouds litter the sky. Misshapen books clutter the floor. Whole lives burst, form, and expire in those books, and in those clouds, many reflections of who I was. In the familiar places, I project layers of meaning and memories of a time where I once was—as to what, I don’t know, save for what the sensations and images speak. At that point, what little am I in imagery? And in that little, the all I am? But that’s not how that feels like. The corridor shaping who I am doesn’t crowd or thunder in those images’ descent that one could say I hold onto a tethered magnum-opus ME, because at that point where the thoughts first arrive in droves and wisps and imbalanced coordinations but which nevertheless form an active, breathing landscape, there is only the person on the chair, neither exhausted or lively, only stateless, like a country without borders, without a name. The I AM dissolves into WHERE. And the WHERE dissolves into all places. And all places do not have in each other a shared name. They just are, never truly apart, but never truly touching save in their shared presence in my head. At that point, I litter the ground more than the books do. My pieces (not negative) cram the shelves. And I step far back enough to see them all together. Maybe that “I am” moment should come. But it never does. It drowns in a single piece like an outburst, but never in that everything this panorama is showing me.

Philosophical aside: My name is Whatever. If you know me, you know the little things. But I am not who I am in the Whatever. The person that speaks through this idea is not the idea itself. I am neither the sum of the little things in all the ways they appear, so it’s less a knowing of me and more so a knowing of yourself through the “me” that speaks in images, words, and ideas that only you can interpret. In such, you know the little things through me, in this idea I posit. If you understand this, you probably know more about what it means to try a word, then to splinter it and watch the shards sent flying.

I can never fully find myself, because the thinking mind rarely adjusts into a pinpoint unless an immediate environment compels it like a cafe. But you sit there in a familiar place looking at neighborly scenery, and there is nothing the mind can’t do. It shows you everything, and in that saturation, you are the covered entrance that opens into a huge city.

But arrogance is the fire that self-sabotages and burns before anything could be said to have been hilly and full of the worldliness of worn paths and legs and weathered books. Which is why we must argue for arrogance.

Arrogance

My hands grip onto the soft parts of the skinned body. And I enact the establishment of total control under the cloud that has empowered me, this cloud being the high horse of an angry heart. I move, and when I move, I move with the force of a herculean saint canonized under my own signature. So I must, so I must. That is the frustrating body which I seek to throw out of authority. I make way, and when I do, I do so with the wholeness of a construct, that posture of total administration. For I am, I am, singularly, I am.

So when I look, I take, and when I take, I move smoother still. The hierarchy is shaken, with me coming back on top, for even before time, I was, I was.

Restless hands give way to authority. An aching heart bursts outward in posturing. A merciless glare comes from invalidation. I scour the earth for my authority, and when I gain it, I bring myself back to all in all, for what came before was the body. What comes now is my realization.

I linger in the small things and in the large, and when the world moves, I turn it in anticipation, even if only to mimic the sensation of world domination.

I am is not the I am, but the I was in all the things I was summed up to form a bouquet, a wholeness which defies all shadow, which makes of it what they will, which turns it accordingly, which demands from all for the resolution of the self, for the entirety to be fully realized, for its claims to be made manifest. That is the self that seeks ravenously, and which must be made nothing, lest it devours the all.

So yes, while the hands shake in absoluteness supplied by arrogance, think for a moment what it means to dispel the ghosts, memories, and moments by containing, devouring, and claiming them. Even if you may have restored childhood’s unlayered experience in a sense, it is not ignorant, and because it is not ignored, it is projected on and de-layered, and that is something the child was never complicit in. The high of that oneness isn’t simulating childhood. It’s cutting your color cones.

But embodiment is where those flames dissipate and people are left to the sounds of the cafe chimes. Which is why we must argue for embodiment.

Embodiment

The soft parts of skinned bodies sing, and they do so idly, without cause, without reason. And when the worlds move, they move along with them, without hindering them, without complaint. They go along, and there they go, approaching steadily like steam-packets. What they do with what they have, they take it on journeys, and to what places, people do not know except the routines, the routes, which inform what people may gather from so assured states of places along the trips. There are no moments where the moments shatter or clatter away. They instead shift on their feet and go up and away like birds initially perched then excitedly swinging their wings through the winds. The lights never shy away nor deflate, only tuck away for a moment and shine again. By the time the skies light up again, there are paradises, and there are joys, not that there weren’t any the nights before, where cozy and snug sounds filled rooms and swept dusty roads. What occurred in moments occurred in all moments. The streets filled the boons of the worlds. What made their way streamed. What danced swung. What moved delivered themselves forward like clouds scudding dreamily which people see from the car windows on the highways. The skies never interrupt themselves, make exchanges instead, have summits, declarations, discussions, but never disturbance. They focus themselves where the yawns and yarns roll and follow the seams.

They like what they like, do what they do, move what they move, will what they will, and shine what they shine, like butter sticks when left on tables.

But heart is where you get out to steady yourself in someone’s presence without thinking anything but what they fill the room with, because what else could a person be? Which is why we must argue for heart.

Heart

Sometimes, you stare at someone, and you get real riled up, and there is nothing you can do, because in your heart, they are the everything, not that they dominate all people, but encompass all of their souls, not that they are the all in all, but that in some small way, they smile in a way that connects you to people as people, in small words, in taut expression sometimes, in the way hands touch and embraces warm you up and lights grace their faces. Because people are people.

So you go in groups and then outward into the world, for the world loves a fresh face. Try yourself, and try your friends. See what tests bewilder you and challenge your wits. Try again and again and again and again. Climb the hill, climb mountains even. See how you fare.

But yes, we go out yes. Together we do. But we’re more than just the feeling of going places together. The places themselves are new. And so we see where travel leads us, not as us, but as the novelties themselves, toward new worlds, new dynamics and communities, and new ways to feel the moment. Which is we must argue for travel.

Travel

The road and views stretch on endlessly, and I can barely see where I am. By the time I’m there, I’m gone. By the time I’m gone, I’m somewhere else, somewhere I cannot see but be, because there is no seeing from one moment to the next, but being here and nowhere else, in the way that the moment feels, but not in the sense of a sleepy town where routines cast repeating, cyclical shadows on walls, but in the sense of time passing through and through and then never splitting between the moments or into the moment, except in the sense that being is in the here and now, but without dissolving inside it, always a step forward and away, yet not from one moment to the next, but in the animated state of moving, of having been in the current in the going to be. Where 9.58 seconds last as long as the sea as the sea lasts in the 9.58 seconds. There is a folding of space and time into velocity, into mid-motion, where last is first is current, where nowhere is here and here is nowhere, where “from” and “to” dissolve and the now is a moving current, not in a moment in which sleep occurs, not the all in now, but abrupt, fading, whirling, saying, speaking, murmuring, dancing, curling, flying, riding, mending, silking, drumming, humming, furling, calling, crying, drying, swimming, banishing, welcoming, throwing, tossing, hiking, trekking, treading, climbing, making, nodding, seeing, circling, meeting, going, parking…

But hate anchors the traveler, prevents him from losing himself in the mirage of motion or in the sleepiness of a town or in the heights of totalizing oneness or in the peopling of heartful faces. It prevents him from losing sight of what is at stake, keeps him in a grudge, in a strong hold, in long-term ideation and planning, in strength that outlasts all without demanding the all into the self, but weaving from the anchored seat. Which is we must argue for hate.

Hate

It knows time won’t wait for anyone. But it doesn’t claim time, only works within it, and in the way that a person plans according to observation, not force. It doesn’t demand the world move according to him, only that he move in accordance with himself as he orchestrates through the world. He makes his way into the places and dances according to rhythms, swirling in a threading manner, clashing not with forces, but with routines and then rolling in anticipation and deliberate maneuvering. He is neither the ego nor the sleeper, neither the traveler nor the wanderer, nor the togetherness of people. He orchestrates from the inside out, from the outside in, not to travel, but to deliver, to make results, to create opportunities, to probe. Hate has given him all the fuel and direction he could ever need.

But hate spends too much time getting caught up in orchestrating the deeper web that they never think twice about what it means to dominate and not the fragile egoistic kind, but the kind that knows past a certain selfish, human point and goes straight to utter domination. There is neither totalization nor force in domination. It is hierarchical and true. Which is we must argue for dominance.

Dominance

So you were born. Well, under my authority, that is. And it was nice to meet you. Shake my hand. I know well in what kind of ways you think and by what things you are driven. There is only the sum of all things, and that in itself is sufficient. But that’s not me, nor myself. What is is. So think, or don’t. Either way, you will do. And I will do.

By this, we are total. See, I make the seeds, and they blossom. You trod the earth. I till the lands. You move the world. I create it.

Where (March 10, 2026)

Experience

I visit random hangout games and just stay there in the ambiences like a ghost where everything feels so hyper-connected, fast, alive, intimate, and observable. Like looking at numberless player-created books in a Roblox digital library. But also going to an old high school roleplay game and just hanging out there for hours and even going to the fishing spot and doing nothing there for hours or just walking around even if no one’s there and just feeling the silence. But also going to an active hangout game in a map set in Art Deco and seeing all manner of people talking in voice chat. But also going to some random green nature hangout game where there’s lots of small unique details and it feels like a place with lots of history. But also going to a random niche forum about web revival and seeing people yap and talk and suggest and express in ways that are much different from Discord. But also doing a long browsing session through random Discord servers with varying sizes, topics, rules, mods, chatters, and lurkers once every 6 months and just seeing all manner of conversation, activity, and all that. Sitting around in an endless sea even while inhabiting those small spots and just being there observing the small world around you that is all a part of this bigger everything that you can ghost through so seamlessly and yet so immersively in a sensory, observational way even if it’s digital. But also random personal Neocities websites that vary starkly in content, writing styles, interests, curiosities, weirdnesses, and such. Exploring 19th century texts as well 20th century as well as 21st century traditional and web novels. Taking the time to really know what kinds of people are everywhere, in random bus or train games, or in Youtube videos showing all manner of lives even if you find them weird, strange, and niche and showing all kinds of places, architecture, vibes, and mundanities and ways of editing that captures the energy, from vlogs, game shows, podcasts, video essays, and showcases of games and animations, seeing the sense of interconnected endlessness that encompasses even the most diverse and largest hubs as well up to the tiniest spots around corners or in alleyways in maps or the equivalent of them in all manner of places. Doing the same with traveling in real life and getting to know the geography of one’s region even if it’s a lot more finite and explorable, even while being infinitely deeper because it’s the reality in which all digital interactions are mediated with devices as one does 95 cafe stays for 8 hours of writing, studying, reading, observing, and feeling out the space, vibe, and people, each with commuting and traveling and with 55 unique cafes throughout the region over 9 months. Reading chat in Roblox in all manner of games the same way one listens to ambient sounds, background noises, and all sorts of conversations and talks within waiting lines or table groups that you are not a part of during all of those cafe visits even while being present in the same room, cafe, public transporation vehicle, terminal, street, or game yourself. A 4-month online friend that changes your life. A single afternoon feast with childhood friends that feels like eternity. A moment in a book that’s fixed itself on you. A web novel with 1.5 million words that lasts forever in your mind and never departs, always taking up space. A digital avatar’s face that feels distant and hazy yet affected you like the sky tore when the Toba supervolcano erupted. Digital moments that ripped something into you. Cafe tables, long table seat neighbors, and stares that you will carry with you forever. Roleplay medieval RPG interactions that span worlds. Quiet rain scenes in anime that continue to thrum in your head like the endless hum of tires against pavement. Scenes in web novels that repeat again and again as if in a time loop sitting beside every mild real-life decision you make. Usernames that resound in your ears. Memories of distant times erupt as smiles, twitches, and soft sighs. RPG levels that stack to eternity, that know you from the first moment you were born. Ancient game rules that no longer apply but stil hold fast in your consciousness: card games, Roblox games from more than a decade ago, board games, made-up outdoor games, made-up rules between siblings and family members, made-up currency for doing chores, in-game skins and chests that cost so cheap now in retrospect but meant the world and an afternoon journey to obtain from some random store through the busy market crowd. Small plastic monobloc seats on uneven concrete or dirt slopes, taking up not only your body, but your whole mind. Food that ate you more than you ate them. Faces that thronged continuously in a party. Adventures that never came to be, but you assumed you were a part of, whether in an implicit story in a Flash game, Roblox game, Minecraft maps, or in your strict imagination as you recall a past hyper-connected with all manner of stories, images, sceneries, games, ideas, rules, worlds, journeys, trips, moments, spots, faces, walls, corners, bathrooms, water surfaces and reflections, sensations (like right after you go for a swim and you feel sticky and worn), manga/comic panels, scenes, words, voices, tones, personalities, mannerisms, emotions, dirt surfaces, different vehicle shakings as they rolled, different bark textures (wet, dry, rough, smooth, thin, thick, rocky), paintings, depictions, concepts, tactile surfaces (like the cool green-painted wooden surfaces of scoring stations in air-conditioned classrooms), classic Minecraft imagery, moments (like rain in superflat worlds, sprinting at friends through the swamp, traveling across wide distances), maps, memories. Worlds that stay with you long after they’re gone. YET: without feeling overwhelmed, always in some moment yet always in some other moment as well. Small interactions that span whole distances, that go hazy on the horizon, but stretch up the sky before you. Constructed places, buildings, houses, structures, underground chambers, and paths that took only days yet dragged across years in the hyper-specificity of the blocking, arrangement, and manipulability in 3D space, imagery, textures, surfaces, and angles, the place as crisp as my fingerpad in front of my face. YET: I can turn off the monitor. I can pick up a new story and read it as if a child again. Recalling so much in a split-second and over any next ten seconds and without urgency, yet get into a flow state where I forget the everything of the self for the entire time I am awake on that day. I can sleep instantly. I can forget myself in pure motion. I can write aggressive “show, don’t tell” in a fiction story and have words like “clatter” be the only thing in my head. I can take full gentle simple self-contained total authority and revising immersion in the act of that sentence itself. The all in the moment, the infinite forest in the single patch of grass on which one is currently is standing.

Places

95 cafe visits and 55 unique cafes in last 9 months, where I read, wrote, and studied for 8 to 12 hours and averaged a total travel time of 2 hours, for one. I’ve gone to mountains, volcano, lakes, rivers, parks, malls, hotels, houses (traditional homes or modern ones), beaches, night markets, covered and open courts (basketball, volleyball, etc.), flower markets, warehouses, membership-only retail warehouse clubs, neighborhoods of the — (—) housing development programs, local mechanics and car washes, indigenous houses, local markets, gas stations and truck stops/highway stopovers, pedestrian footbridges, bazaars, hospitals (waiting rooms, cafeterias, clinic rooms, emergency rooms), statues, museums, palengkes, swimming pools (in big houses, condos, and resorts), tiangges (arcade-like and show butchery and phone repairs), convenience stores (whether deep in the city or in a park where people jog and bike around), 24-hour marts, 24-hour fast food joints, docks and passenger decks, resorts, cemeteries, junkshops, theological seminaries, pares and mami vendors, abandoned structures and lots, bus garages, retreats, campuses, bookstores, condos, trails, terminals, plazas, local eateries, bakeries, ferries, and street vendors, churches, cottages, country clubs, trains, internet cafes, jeepneys (traditional ones and e-jeeps, longer ones), buses, tricycles, pedicabs, taxis, Grab light cars, various rented vehicles, subdivisions, workshops, empty lots, venues (whether it be cafes, churches, theaters, stadiums, convention centers), viewing decks, restaurants, from branded to family-owned. It goes on and on. I’ve travelled this region so many times, and I mean region as in as far up as — and as far down as —. I’ve gone to so many different sides of my region, from the wealthy’s playgrounds to the slums. It goes on and on. There are naturally countless buildings I’ve never entered. But I’ve travelled already. I was thinking commuting just to commute, and there’s a part of me that wants to buy a new laptop so I can stay in parks for the whole day just to observe (which is much more feasible than commuting and trying to do intense observations through that beyond what one may eventually end up doing anyway when one commutes to places rather than just for the sake of observation). There are also still 270 cafes I haven’t visited yet, all of which have outlets and are within the region. So let’s see how things go.

This is naturally good for sheer intelligence. You will become a better thinker and writer overall, because you are forced to put into words actual things, the same way naturalists became very good writers since they were matching words up to the reality they were directly experiencing rather than spawning based on re-read tropes. Plants, places, buildings, community spaces, archiecture, kinds of crowds. All of these will develop, expand, grow. This is why as time passes, as my writing that was forged firstly in autobiography, journaling, introspective, analytical, essayistic writing, psychological expressionism and prose poetry, and then literary pure “show, don’t tell” takes on even more material, I will naturally become good at writing reality and extrapolating fiction based on that. This fiction extends to contemporary life as well as life in the 19th and 20th century as I synchronize my intense reading of 19th and 20th century literature (both fiction and non-fiction) with my actual lived-in experience of this level of exposure to my current world and its rhythms. This also extends to actual fantasy worlds and their lived-inness.

So is it fiction? Yes? Is it essays? Yes. Is it personal philosophy? Yes. Is it objective? Yes. Is it purely objective? Maybe not without qualifying and taking into account limitations, whether in direct exposure or in the researchable literature available.

Texture

More sweat dribbling down sweat-dried cheeks, thronged sidewalks, breezy, cool, and soft neighborhoods and cafe decks in the mornings, air-conditioned offices with typing, papers flapping, and electric fans whirring, turning, humming, and sometimes making clacks when it passes a certain rotation, the blaring horns of jeepneys down the elevated-highway-covered main road as people stand at the gloomy, orange-dim bus stop late at night, balmy-sweet bamboo doorways

Post-Synthesis Deadlock: Coexistence Through Playfulness and Egoism (March 15, 2026)

Each has gotten their fulfilling share of my energy, but their current intersection in today’s instance is forming a deadlock. Developed instincts are fighting each other.

I need a creative arrogance (even if arrogance itself is tamed), something that might not have to do with retired totalization. But it was supposed to go through these seven mediums, even one(!). But it ended that, even while all fulfilled, they formed a deadlock.

I need something new that transcends them, their fulfilled states, the deadlock they formed, and tamed arrogance and retired totalization themselves.

Maybe the answer is leaning into playfulness and egoism, the language of the totalized, when ego is no longer battered by incompetence and insecurity. This would essentially be “unselfconscious sincere self-honesty” but absorbing that displacement.

To clarify, this is not overthinking or creative paralysis. This is specifically different instincts fighting each other when in the past, when there were different instincts, the overarching instinct would be to totalize and “arrogant” it all in synthesis. But now “synthesis” itself in those forms of arrogance and totalization is implicated, so the overarching structure/system has been exposed, identified, and relegated into a member/part/citizen. With no way to resolve, what we’re left with is a deadlock.

But playfulness and especially egoism are different from arrogance and totalization. It absorbs that displacement and that third-person critique. You would think absorption here is euphemized totalization or synthesis, but it’s actually the opposite. It means writing out something defiant to the point of falling under playfulness and egoism rather than synthesis or totalization. Critique exists, and I wrote it myself. Yet I wrote something as if that didn’t exist. The two co-exist. I can’t stop my critique, but I also can’t stop what I feel like writing. So I critique but write what I feel like writing anyway. That’s playful egoism. Instead of bringing them all together, it’s being playfully egoistic when critiquing and when writing the fiction and still defying the idea that one has to force the two together. This naturally means synthesis itself is not load-bearing or structural, but its own playful egoism medium. So you have the critique, the creative writer, and the synthesis, and they all fulfill themselves totally yet coexistently past each other as they each playfully egoistically are.

But What Are “50 Goblins”? (March 19, 2026)

Is a philosophical opening for after the scene break? This is what I wrote days ago right after the last cafe stay (I am currently at Starbucks — — —) at Starbucks — — —.

At this point, I’m wondering if the next step is to satisfy that need for another Peter in the way of that novel’s focus, even if bizarre, on lived-in spaces and world-building, since world-building is always satisfying and plot needs to move. To have him dawdle in sensory and internal agony here is both satisfying in its own way but also inviting questions of whether I’m over-stating the point.

When I did the scene break, that was its own definitive end, and I didn’t really have a breadcrumb for afterward. I was working off what it was at that moment, which is totally fine, but now I feel there needs to be a big shout of direction, whatever form it may take. If our current sensory agony can be expanded from here on out, so be it.

I wonder if the analytical side of him can be explored, since I only introduced it in this chapter. It was an attempt to import that same analyticity from Matthew since that added so much characterful plot movement.

Right now, as of writing, the previous five chapters are already solid for me. Touching them would be only revisory at this point, like I did some time ago. Chapter 6 and moving forward are now their own new arc, so whatever I explore and start with should be effectively load-bearing. We introduced a level of psychological volatility that wasn’t present in previous chapters, as indicated by the use of glossolalia. He even started speaking in terms of how many goblins to kill before he exists, which was never mentioned in previous chapters, so that clarifies or goes explicit over something that could be just a violent tendency mixed with instability. Now, there’s an articulated frame of mind. Him killing the goblins in ch. 6 mirrors Matthew closest, where what’s happening blurs and the word choices turns poetic as exemplified by “A goblin made its way to him, and his hands flowed through it,” unlike previous chapters where it was more restrained to reality as seen in “By the time he staggered and wheezed to the side, the goblin’s face lay mangled”.

You would think that the same approach of “extrapolating directly from the previous five chapters” would be the solution here, which is basically what Peter and Matthew did as the former was already all about the world and the latter was about his analyticity. But Red’s philosophization faces challenges. It’s easy to “justify” murder through episodic violent analysis or through pure psychological instability episodically culminating in violence. But while Red may be volatile and he has philosophized even during his violent episodes, he has culminated into a deadlock where he cannot get himself to do anything but to agonize, which is distinct from both Peter’s and Matthew’s.

So if we were taking directly from what was already there, we would end up with a lot of external friction and goblins to force him to do something, only for him to react even more apathetically even while acting violently to whatever comes to him. The philosophizing only bleeds out the plot until he’s practically in the middle of hundreds of goblins and his only response is his own internal philosophy-tinged agony.

Perhaps, those five chapters are Red Grimes’ legacy, and I should accept that natural locked conclusion. The final scene even had him dancing manically. However, ch. 6 introduced interesting expansions to his personality that challenged the assumptions from previous chapters and clarified his motivations and what went on in his head throughout all that he did, since going too long without direct addressal would feel unfounded and ungrounded. Nevertheless, in a narrative sense, even if unresolved in a character sense, the first five chapters successfully narrativized why someone like him would never escape. Perhaps, what remains of chapter 6 up to the scene break can be an epilogue the way a prologue precedes chapter 1. Nevertheless, it is optional and can be my own authorial satisfaction in addressing the human being behind the protagonist behind the narrative conclusion.

I guess the next story, if I want it to last long—even what I consider to be the bare minimum of 100 chapters since I come a web novel background—needs to have someone with motives that match that kind of ambition, since philosophical paralysis isn’t helpful at all.

The fact that I wrote this whole passage for Red Grimes but never for Matthew or Peter might point to why Red didn’t work in the first place. I can’t rely on internal fuel anymore because I have reached a point where just mirroring what’s inside me won’t produce someone with endless ambition. I have reached the point where I am closer to the paralyzed because of my own personal life closure. Basically, I wrote Matthew and Peter more than two years ago when my life was very much different. Red was the product of a man in closure, and it’s almost been three months since I personally reached that definitive point. So whatever I write from now on has to find a way to harness an energy from inside me in a way that leads to the heights of my longest novel to date, the 200,000-word Matthew.

But what would that new protagonist look like? What am I? I think that’s the essential question here. Whatever I have, it’s not arrogance in the negative sense. It’s arrogance as a byword for self-security and self-starting self-contained self-consolidating resilient “I am.” It’s not unresolved. But it’s not undriven either. It’s not like I sit down doing nothing and lie down all day. No, I still do things and prolifically. But that’s only for me. Whatever energy or thing in me should be harnessed to create the likes of Matthew is still unknown to me. I have asked questions about and discussed many times now over the last three months.Red Grimes was supposed to be the answer, but as we can see today, it has finally ended. So whatever’s next needs something else, not that Red Grimes was a failure, but it’s not the kind of work I intend to work on overall. It is revealing in the way a step reveals the next and consolidating the same way. But it is not the Next Big Thing. Even the 70,000-word novel Villa, which I finished writing around 4 months ago, didn’t have that. Even if Villa wasn’t philosophizing the same way Red Grimes was, he was not a Matthew. He didn’t have it. The relatively high word count is deceptive in the way of Matthean ambition.

This is not about the next protagonist needing a justification, since that implies Matthew and Peter were working off our “justification,” which is a retroactive term. It’s about finding a character drive compatible with the narrative structure of a long-form novel.

But I must confess I am drawn to questions like “what does it mean to be a person?” It’s the same current philosophizing tendency that conceived Red Grimes. When I went to the blank page, the first thing I wrote was that question. As for why, I think it has to do with what I now view as unrewarding. Just the plain enactment of events falls meaningless on me. Just observation for the sake of it makes sense to a very real me who consolidates, but in a fiction context, I am making out of myself, so naturally, I am drawn to whatever contours I have yet to sketch, so complication is the natural course of my writing. It’s where motivation lies. It’s where instinct flows. I don’t care about systems that amount merely to systems and phenomenologies that amount merely to experience. I don’t care about stable identities that amount merely to empty plot-driven protagonists. I must actualize, “arrogantize,” and form out of a hole the source of a million constructed stars. I must determine and form out of nothing a whole. By such goes the inquiry and the way in which actions develop. That searing agonizing energy that burned through everything and then ended in an apathetic gaze that wrote Red from start to end is what propels me even now. If I try to write anything outside of it, it falls to what feels like stupidity. That was the point of phenomenology, of systems, to fuck over (as friction) the protagonist existentially through a bunch of sensory descriptions and social realisms. This is why I can’t simply continue Red nor can I write anything that you would think would make most sense for someone who has finally lost touch with what drove those violent episodes in Matthew and Peter. But I still want violence. It’s just that I need to filter it through something that’s compatible now.

As for how this proposed new protagonist will differ from Red Grimes’s paralyzed splat, the above excerpt from Red Grimes itself can be the launchpad, but modified in the overall characterization and, by extension, plotting to fit long-form. For example, instead of the philosophical question followed by sensory realistic violence extrapolating into paralysis, we can throw it into grandiose consolidation. It’s a “What if?” but with Red Grimes staring at the goblins and realizing that strategically killing goblins does reward him and fulfill his sense of existence.

But perhaps, I’m cobbling together a reason. I don’t actually know how this new protagonist will do it differently and work long-form. Theoretically, it’s just a matter of making him not spiral, but actually writing that over tens of thousands of words is its own rational puzzle-solving.

Revenge, protective violent rage, traumatic hole-forming grievances. These things easily drive a protagonist. When he sees the world and there is only the reality that he is handed with all the things that he cannot synchronize into a coherent self, he must render it all into a coherent blood-streaked palm—that way, he becomes, and in nature and reason, he naturalizes his own word-for-word identity. But again, those belong to my other novel Matthew.

The palm I now raise works off grounded frictions and barely rises up to the poetic and the abstract. It always works along those jeepney routes and A-to-Bs as well as those dense urban crowds and daily cafe traffic. This is what the last 10 months have done to me.

Whoever the next protagonist is, he has to break through the sensory-social realism that was the cause for the philosophical violence-apathy of our previous protagonist Red, somehow.

In other words, I need a Red that won’t let go of a philosophical will-to-power in the face of grounded realism. The fact that the last diary entry I wrote yesterday basically can be summed up to “all previous revelations emerge as fiction in the face of new out-of-the-blue hyper-specific data discovered mundanely and monotonously”—very humble, grounded, nuanced, stipulating, qualifying, rigorous even, exactly the kind of thing that won’t write will-to-power. The fact that it shut down the will-to-power energy from antifragility by pointing out that antifragility was becoming its own comfort zone and that non-friction was going to be the new friction only demonstrates just how hard it’ll be to circumnavigate where I am to create something “delusional” (after-the-fact phrasing) again.

He needs to decide 50 goblins are sufficient and that whatever else would be procured from their slaying would last for as long as a resource did, with nothing else to self-circumnavigate and enforce a crisis of meaning. The structure must choke this drifting tendency out and violate (verbalization of violence) its way the same way a person makes his way down south.

Lest it all becomes a series of events and whatever else can be said points to itself and nothing else, and in that sense, a word echoing in a vacuum, a tree dying in an infinite forest. At that point, anything goes, and when anything goes, nothing is compelling. Matthew at least had the basis. Red doesn’t. Whatever the next protagonist will have, it must answer that.

50 goblins is not 50 goblins. To Matthew, it wasn’t. To Red, it wasn’t either. It meant nothing to him, even if he tried to make it mean something. To me, currently, it means nothing.

It needs to carry meaning, not it by itself, since that would preclude the meaning needed to drive the protagonist’s engagement with it in the first place. Projection is crucial here. Without it, you have still life. For Villa and Red, the more violence came into contact with them, the less they cared and the more they drifted into what concluded them both narratively. We need someone who somehow gains from it, not necessarily from it itself, since events by themselves meant nothing to the person projecting the meaning onto them.

But I’m not content with this as the answer, even if this is critical context for why the question of who the next protagonist will be is so challenging.

I’m going to be honest. Any solution that amounts to “make it enact real life” will always come out short because we’re no longer working on the kind of real life that thirsts for depiction and enactment in form. The real life we’re working with just stares, and it’s the kind of staring that leaves you not really needing to write after all. It’s that “after all” that is the crux of the deadlock. System for system’s sake? Violence for violence’s sake? Or even for mundane, prosaic reasons. Phenomenology for phenomenology’s sake? At this point, just engage in real life, which is what I do, or in mundane data aggregation in the way of hyper-specifics or in consolidating data like clumping bananas. Fiction naturally requires its own special role that sets it apart from reality. It needs to be a fixation, a compulsion, an object of possessiveness. Workman creativity eventually answers its own question in the way that technical work answers a problem or mundane puzzle-solving reaches a defined endpoint, even if unresolved in the way that a settled person would go about it.

Though this was because I felt that everything had to do with everything else. I had to yet to decouple common objects and words from the overwhelming memories that intricately and convolutedly stained them.

Now, that concern is gone, but a similar question has arisen, but totally different.

brute-forcing fiction (March 19, 2026)

When all is said and done and there is little left to project save for what the manual hands can make do, how in the world will violence gain validity? One could argue that a list of 50 goblins is prosaic and whatever destruction of life will happen automatically in a sorting system, but at the same time, really? The nature of mundanity isn’t blindness to torture or agony. It is acceptance and a recognition of what little purpose dominance serves save to patch up holes in the integrity of the self, and when those holes are addressed and the fragments of the self are fused back into wholeness, how can someone burst into rage culminating in a violent episode? How can fiction writing ever find in any of that purpose? Sensory-social realism, in the many forms it takes in daily urban spaces, when given enough attention, takes over completely and reduces whatever poetic, abstract grandiosity wants to register the ineffable world into mental fragility, the making of a mind, the projections of a fractured, aggrieved human being from a history of disrupted development. How can one ever leap and say of the world anything than what can be observed and consolidated in, at best, the equivalent of clumps of banana? Writing becomes gestural and expressive, but not in any governing way besides banana-organizing. Analysis and violence become pasture for data aggregation, but not in any shape or form binding or coalescing or consolidating. It becomes at best a brushstroke, and when your world takes place in cafe chatter and jeepney drones, then what can be said but a moment in space, in a world so full of people and grounded sensations? Where will that arrogance appear? Where will Carthage’s Hannibal emerge?

I’m not talking about just any walk outside. I’m talking about ten months of staying for ten hours at a cafe, going to a new cafe half the times, once every three days.

It’s not really permission, more like sitting down and not really knowing what arrogance can do in the face of a world so complete in itself and a life so complete in itself as well post-closure.

I’m not talking about fiction itself. I’m talking specifically about long-form web novel fantasy where the structure intrinsically requires a constant doing away with 50 goblins, which begat that question of “But what are ’50 goblins’”? And it’s not bureacratic systematization. It’s not banana-organizing or just nature doing its thing.

But I’m not sure if that’s a solution. It feels more like an intense technical exercise where you push yourself to write violence when there’s also that undercurrent that yeah, everything that I am bleeds into everything that I write, so naturally, I can’t feign grandiosity nor can I take that delusion (after-the-fact phrasing) so sincerely.

It’s less the inability to write a Hannibal and more so the inability to stare at that character for too long. 5 chapters. Very fucking hard. 1000 chapters? I’ll let the silence answer.

And the motivation of play can only carry itself long enough for it just starts snickering, and when it doesn’t respect the story it’s telling and the character it’s writing, it will skew, and that skewing will immediately explode into termination.

I’ve said this before. But why the hell would I let a fiction protagonist enact my reality when the reality itself already closes its own cases and moves on its own pace? Fiction needs to have a special role that sets it apart from what reality is already doing so smoothly and seamlessly. This wasn’t the case before when reality pressured me into writing as a means of filtering overwhelm into something comprehensible. But now, naturally, it would be like slamming yourself into the wall to think that writing needs to enact anything at this point besides what I’m already doing so finely and dandily without any interaction with fiction. Who the hell gives a ma-fucking shit about a quiet, grounded sigh besides what that sigh in reality already carries all by itself without any gestural and expressive fictionalization beyond the confines of what data aggregation already does?

The fact that I’m allowing myself to get so worked up about this. I truly crave what I view as creative freedom. To be able to write such a long work and to have it spell everything for you in the way that only such a protagonist can do. Even brokenness will do. Like, just give me anything! I want to see it curl into resentment and to have that resentment transform into constraints that force him into even more desperate routes, that make the story more and more compelling for me. I need something that feels alive.

But yeah, when the very steps needed to build to culminate to that breakdown feel arbitrary in a “but what are ’50 goblins’” way, then it terminates before any meaningful climax can even begin to be presaged. But hot fucking damn do I love that energy that I used to know so well!

2 hours and 4 minutes later, after leaving Starbucks — — — where the above section was written and arriving home:

But I think I’m reaching my own conclusion about all this. I went home after a long ride. I lost a loose down arrow key that has been with me for 6 to 7 months or so. It has been there so long, and now, it’s gone. I don’t think there’s anything left to say but that. I went home and exposed myself to so many out-of-the-blue hyper-specifics. I love this. I love what this gives me. I love this life that is so embedded in the lives of others, of everyone else. It’s not arrogance, but it’s groundedness. It’s a lived-in place where the head is pure imagination. I know it’s not the same, and I know I can’t combine them both so easily. But anyway, I’m here now, with all of the frictions and the things of life that you can’t control but add so much to a realistic life. I’m going to a new cafe tomorrow like I did today. I do it because I love it. I do it because I am genuinely absorbing more and more of the world around me. I do it because every time I’m out there riding a jeepney and looking out into the world, all I see are more and more hyper-specifics, things that have been there since I was a child but which I am only beginning to integrate more and more through translation and articulation that I only developed in the last several years. I can make do with the banana clumps I’ve created in the form of consolidating passages that don’t seek to be overaching answers, but clumped data aggregations. I can keep working into reality the way a miner bores through rock. I am a very simple and straightforward person who is only as big as the world he has absorbed and in which he plays a part, even in the smallest yet most articulate ways.

In the end, I have no answer except for the little things that go so endlessly far into crisp detail that I can barely see even with my glasses on, and to slowly mine into them and to take it in and to look so closely, little by little, cafe stay after cafe stay, jeepney ride after jeepney ride. Every single time that I spend hours outside and take the time to map it onto the four walls of my room and onto the street and sky outside my room window, I grow into something of myself, and I say that in the discreetest way possible. I am a person, made of myself and muck of it.

If there is an arrogance, it is the arrogance of the man who sits idly and watches the world go by with the clarity that a maggot intimates itself with its wriggling. When it goes about, it does so titanically, in the way that a purposeful man moves, fresh, AOE2-unit-like. It’s like there’s an endless freshness attributed to a unit that never hungers or thirsts. It just keeps going, continuously supplied only by direction and unlimited breadcrumbs. This is what the entirety of my life has culminated into. At least for now.

The Force Behind the Waves (March 19, 2026)

Even now, I want to be wrong. I may have written a total of 7,000 words across multiple entries working off the idea that Red Grimes, that 5-chapter story, is over, but I don’t believe Red is actually done still, after all of that. Even now, I want to believe it’s still got something. Whatever it is. It can’t be the end. 7,000 words to me is nothing. What’s important is that I’m honest with myself and I keep fighting. I was both the person who wrote all those words and believed them the whole way and the person who doesn’t want to believe it’s over.

I want it to be wrong. I want to see. I want to see. I want to see. This self-rigor is why I have reached this point in the first place. So I go, in both ways, until I reach a point and then again, working off that point and then against it. I wrote recently that all previous revelations emerge as fiction as soon as new out-of-the-blue hyper-specific data comes up, and that’s working for me now, not that I half-ass everything I say, but that I go all the way just as much as I dialecticize and keep working. It is a kind of work, this process of breadcrumbing myself with all sorts of ways to look at something that otherwise gets lost in one hasty proclamation.

But That Feels Too Easy. (March 20, 2026)

why did I write this last night? It’s bugging me. I’m trying to find out what I was getting at. I feel like I was gesturing at a gap that I’m not addressing.

Damn, I really am going to make a longer list of things that are so obvious to me but I guess appear not to be so such that they appear as answers/suggestions. Years with LLMs, and I’m still forced to provide the very context so that I don’t have to see the same monotonous lists.

None of these apply and all of these have been previously addressed. This list will only grow longer.

Perhaps, it’s that breadcrumbing that never stops, even up to before I sleep, always giving myself something new to bite on and follow. Always a new puzzle, always that constant curiosity, that never stops asking and never stops holding both full commitment and the recognition that all conclusions and revelations are on hold until new out-of-the-blue hyperspecific data eventually calls them all out as fiction. I think that’s what it is. But that feels too easy. <- Why did I say that? That implies that I want something harder, which might just prove that point.

I realize it’s why yesterday, I called my insistence on making sense of fiction’s place in my current life “problematizing,” like I was making a problem out of nothing, rather than addressing a problem. And now I think I’m realizing that this is where I am. I’m now the problematizer, the breadcrumber. I am the person who wrote 7,000 words working off the idea that that fiction story Red Grimes is dead only to say, “While I have fully committed in the writing of those 7,000 words with all sorts of compelling evidence and points to back it up, I am now taking it back and insisting and holding still the belief that it’s not dead. This very fight is why I have reached this point. This relentless self-rigor.”

I’m the person who throws themselves in the mud just to write 7,000 words only to say “nah” and toss it away like it’s nothing, not that I wasn’t fully there in the writing of those words, but that I don’t let the past (in the sense of framing and how things like trauma distort your memories and cause you to project, as to apply to anything that you do end up investing yourself into even without trauma) control me and I don’t need to hold onto any superficial object or conclusion. This is how I’ve integrated, exposed myself to all manner of things, and self-actualized. It’s not that I’m abandoning them just becuase. It’s because new out-of-the-blue hyperspecific data throws everything out the window, and I am there meeting them, even collecting them, aggregating them, clumping them in passages I write. I am doing the work of dismantling whatever building I’ve now made myself into through rigor.

Michael (March 20, 2026)

In the last several months, more goblins had passed by Silver Route than he had ever seen, but perhaps, this was only how the world worked. Eventually, ecosystems would complicate and populations would explode.

In purple and yellow, Michael stood between two boulders, at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the road that stretched as far as his eyes could see, flanked by trees upon trees, forming an endless forest cut through with wagon trains, beasts of burden, and plodding sweaty travelers.

“So, how’s it?” said the young woman standing beside him with her hands clasped in front of herself. A shirt wrapped around her waist, and her trousers stretched to her ankles. Her hair formed a long, black braid, coiled flat. Her glimmering smile dotted with freckles, and her brows tapered off outward at the top edges.

“Fine for the next few days, but anything to do with goblins is going to have to wait.” Michael’s jaw shifted as he tongued his teeth for any remaining food from the sinigang he ate for breakfast earlier.

Behind him spread an encampment filling a wide circular glade. A multitude of tents fluttered in the morning breeze, and soldiers marched out with their hands swaying casually on the sides or interlaced behind their necks.

Three soldiers sauntered off the encampment, waving at Michael as they approached. “Sir, the ‘gemmies,’” said one of them, holding up a flashing purple gemstone.

They nodded. “Yes, Sir,” said the same soldier, who wore a ponytail. He paused, letting the breeze rattle a nearby wagon, before asking, “Want to see them, Sir?”

“If it works, it works.” Michael shrugged, raising his arms at the sides palm-up.

As the wagon trains trailed off and the road cleared, dusk came. Michael slumped at the desk in his tent, twirling his fingers in his clasped hands. He lifted a brow as the shirt-wrapped young woman in green marched into the tent.

The woman held her breath, glanced behind herself, and slammed the table. “The gobs [goblins] have shifted southeast,” she almost stuttered by the end but stiffened her voice enough to get the direction out.

“Husserl Tower.” Michael got up, palms on the desk, eyes wide. “Let’s go!” he repeated as he and the woman ran outside and began shouting for everyone to decamp.

Elsewhere, goblins trudged through the trees, entering another glade occupied by a tower. On top of it, hooded figures pointed staffs with balls of crackling energy.

The goblins raised shields, then charged the large door at the tower’s bottom.

The mages’ balls streaked down and slammed into the ground, blasting spherical bursts that mangled goblins and sent pieces of flesh flying.

“Damn it!” said one of the mages at the top. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!” Goblin blood splattered her face. She retched and coughed, getting some in her mouth, then wiped it off her face and spat it out as fast as she could.

She jumped. “Fuck!” She trod away behind the other mages, left arm raised over her head, the right clenching her staff to her body. “Damn it! Damn!”

“Lene, shoot!” said a nearby mage carefully aiming his staff at the field of goblins. “Fucking shoot!”

“Fuck! Wait!” Lene ran to the edge and planted her staff, the magic rapidly whirling and gurgling. Her ball went down so fast only the kicked-up remains of goblins hung in the air.

Hanging on the edge, it stabbed her multiple times, clutched her by the arms, and hurled her off.

The goblin leapt back down, breaking its knees, limping away, huffing hoarsely. It went back into the trees and gestured at a line of goblins holding crossbows. The one with the headband nodded and signaled for them to advance, then took the first step, beginning the march to the tower. Snarling under their breaths, they aimed through blood mist.

The goblins’ bolts struck into the mages’ hoods, splattering blood on the pillars.

The goblins’ squeals filled the air around the tower base as the hoods dropped and the balls came fewer and fewer.

The headband goblin smiled. “Okay, so where’s—” Purple flooded the glade from the trees.

It paused, staring at waves of steel-clad, purple-infused humans crashing into the scattered goblins.

The farther the goblins fled, the louder their wheezes, thuds, and blood squelches.

A man in armor layered under purple and yellow went forward and dragged his blade across a goblin’s face, scattering red. “Go to hell!” he growled.

Once the last goblins escaped and the humans cleaned up the few who caught their foot in a bog, Michael tasked his healers with checking any mages still alive, while everyone else piled the goblin corpses one by one.

“Okay,” he sighed as he sat on a dry spot in the muddy, bloody glade. His shirt-wrapped helper stood poised behind him, with a blank, dignified expression, watching the soldier with the dog-head insignia assisting the other soldiers with arranging the corpse piles.

By first light, inside a tent, Michael was snoring when his helper abruptly woke him. “Four hundred seventy three,” she said.

He nodded heavily, slowly removed his blanket, and stumbled to his feet, holding up a staggering thumbs-up as he slipped on his boots. Once the two went outside, he yawned loudly, letting his mouth show and rubbing his belly over his purple and yellow surcoat. She followed his gaze and gestured him forward. He dragged himself inside another tent, where a number of armored men stood over a map sprawled over a table. After they saluted him, one of them pointed him to the red flag. He nodded, waving him off.

He walked out, hands on his hips, head tilted up at clouds indicating later rain. “Rain.”

She nodded to herself and promptly left his side, returning inside the tent to reiterate the plan: take Senn Trail, northeast of Husserl Tower, to avoid the rain.

His mouth wriggled. “I just thought of something. The gobs have yet to regroup. If we catch them right before they get around Mount Telos…”

She slowly widened her eyes, then rushed back to the tent, then back out, shouting at everyone to decamp.

His continued chuckles drew everyone out of their tents before she could reach all of them.

Days later, at the ambush site, Michael stretched his arms and stifled a guttural shout.

Soon, the front part of a long file of lumbering goblins emerged from behind the slope on the path, steadily approaching.

Once the goblins paused to check their surroundings, the men ran out of the trees.

The men’s swords cleaved their skulls, sliced into their necks, and tore into their worn rags, sending them staggering to the ground.

Once the blood settled, the men’s gazes shifted over to Michael, who gave them a firm nod.

Soldiers with dog-head insignias began helping the rest clean up, pointing where bodies should be moved and giving directions to minimize the spread of filth. One soldier pried a blue gemstone off a dead goblin’s palm and handed it over to them.

His helper wriggled her toes to keep them from falling asleep while she stood by his side. With heavy eyes and a lopsided head, he folded his arms, wriggling his closed mouth, staring up in thought.

Her head still but slightly tilted in his direction, she routinely darted her eyes between Michael’s face and the clean-up.

She nodded absently, then hurried to a circle of armored men, the same ones standing over the map in the tent earlier. “Total?”

The men courteously eyed the blue gemstones in each other’s hands. “Five.”

Whatever the world did, it really wasn’t up to him. He managed his own, and by the end of it, it was just a matter of methods and results. Whatever complaint anyone had he refuted through action.

But if everything was taken from him, well… It wasn’t that he ever thought of it as anything but something he had to do, since by the time he was here, it was really what he had to do.

Perhaps, one day, he would be forced to participate in a way that required him to break more than just his legs. His spirit maybe. But what other spirit was there than that conflatable with morale? Just up the food variety. Or address a privation of land. Whatever else was brute-forceable.

A week later, he popped his neck as he, his helper, and his company tramped up Ellie Path, which ran west of Silver Route. Their shadows crept smoothly over the slope.

Unstructured Archive Section Manifesto: Investigating Integration in Light of Website’s Squeezing and First Draft’s Accumulation (March 21, 2026)

I was thinking earlier in the morning right before we left about integration and about the nature of squeezing something “to-be-integrated” into the main personal website and into the corpus beyond just the series of journal entries but in the way of a “portfolio” of who I am. I was thinking of:

What is integration? The accumulation (of my five million words in my last three years of journaling [the accumulative first draft])? That makes sense at a first draft level. But the main personal website goes beyond it. Is it the squeezing that I now attribute to the website? And what exactly am I in the context of all that I have yet to include in the website, or, I say this tentatively, squeeze in (or into what may be the context of a “portfolio”)? What am I in the context of the following three pairs (we use forward slash here to indicate “between” rather than “and” or “&” to show a difference in meaning between the two counterparts in each pair when previously, they were the same under unmodified integration):

I was writing previously about new out-of-the-blue hyperspecifics (NOHs)—which cause previous revelations to come out as fiction (not feel like, but genuinely made up and a bunch of words that become retroactively, fittingly data aggregations)—like those I data-gather mundanely and monotously at home and those I encounter when looking outside the car window at the hyperspecifics-riddled world outside especially in the context of my 100 ten-hour cafe stays over the last ten months, and that made sense in the general unmodified base context level of “integration” as a generalized thing, a tool term. But when we start investigating integration in relation to the above “modifications” or qualification, we may not be contradicting NOHs, but still, it may be making them structurally irrelevant, not necessarily methodologically absent or irrelevant.

Rather than existential or about “making sure I don’t lose my true self in the process of translation,” this is structural closer to the way of representation.

If squeezing (still undecided here whether it precedes “in,” or “into” in the framing of “[into] portfolio”) overrides first draft’s accumulation, then how does what is included in the website differ representationally from what has yet to be? “Yet to be” is distinct here from absent or excluded. There is a timeline in the mind in how the inevitable inclusion of things through structural accumulation clashes with the nature of the website as a structural squeeze. For example, imagine if I recall long-forgotten (in provoking the damning “yet to be”) dreams and feel immediately that I can and will just include it in the website and then also recall something else—let’s say, the rainy Victorian London art. Who am in the context of what I hesitate in squeezing into the website as with the latter and the naturality of the former, which I easily distinguish as its own sub-section (list of Dreams under broader Observations)? Is importance really the only factor? Or am I conflating importance with “sub-sectionability”? Is it irrelevant? Is the feeling that one is squeezing in something the only decider of whether anything should be included? How is the “yet to be” structurally considered in light of what gets accumulated and what gets squeezed?

While this investigation does not concern existence, it does bear upon how do I know myself, given the nature of writing, its accumulation of disparate memories, mental states, sides of myself, and long-forgotten “yet-to-bes,” and the website as externalized cognition. Rather than translation (or external format, etc.) itself (especially given as it is in “memory-to-prose-and-phrases-and-curated-photos,” even considering local structure [flow], precision, and context—or in the mistaken sense of “within the confined structure of a personal website,” but as it connects back to myself), which is strictly methodological in the way that website design guides the eyes and how one processes information locally, this is structural to what integration is intended to do and be, which this investigation casts into question.

This is not even about accuracy, since that falls back on translation and that problematic locality that does not at all carry structural weight regarding integration. Accumulation and squeezing do not concern themselves with translation. Essentially, these two qualifiers are cause for unmodified integration’s unsettlement.

Integration assumes accumulation, but with the introduction of website’s squeezing, first-draft’s accumulation’s reputation is damaged, and integration is becoming the opposite of what it’s supposed to do: it’s unintegrating. It’s a dam’s leaking. That’s not the same as returning to what it was before the dam. It will become something catastrophic (refer to what happens in real life when dams break). As long as the following three pairs remain unabsorbed into integration, it is a provisional structural unsettlement that we are investigating to avoid damnation:

You would think, “Well, just keep integrating (swimming)!” But when the very assumed function of integration in accumulation, or swimming, is put into question, it becomes “are we just making the leak bigger?”

So if it was just journaling and the website and whatever I felt like including just went into the website frictionlessly, then integration is not under question, but now that it’s complicated—not by this simple synonymity—but by the identified three pairs—(1) accumulation / squeezing in or into, (2) what I have included / what I have yet to include, and (3) what I have recalled / what I have yet to recall—then it all screams beeping red.

Previously, it was just a matter of refuting (causing to come out as fiction) all previous revelations through NOHs. But now, because integration itself is unsettled, the very structure that’s doing the absorbing is now leaking the more one “keeps integrating” instead. It is now threatening catastrophe. Integration (data aggregrations, or banana clumping) must halt, and this meta-investigation must pursue.

If I can’t just write everything into integration (unmodified) eventually through the sheer nature of what it is as “working” accumulation (previously assumed) and, in natural, inevitable evolution, it doesn’t immediately leap onto the website and then go on indefinitely and instead hits a kind of wall where private-and-public (not in the sense of on-and-off, but in the sense of a child naturally and inevitably maturing into an adult, like a medical student entering residency) integration tramples all over itself, then integration is failing and not doing what it’s intended to do, which is to integrate, regardless, even the unintegrable through acceptance, not because I’m no longer accepting, but because of squeezing, which was never at all in my head because of how frictionless the website was for almost a year now. If it’s not integrating, it’s unintegrating. It’s a dam leaking. It squeezes in, replacing whatever was already there, or goes through a moment of “dreams are allowed, but that rainy Victorian London art isn’t,” which is antithetical to integration’s point and purpose. It’s practically the same as if I forgot who I was every morning and started fresh. It was if I wasn’t even writing and even exacerbating and accelerating what writing is supposed to prevent and build reserves against—fragmentation.¹⁹ If it can’t answer the long-forgotten “yet-to-bes” (yet to be included, yet to be recalled), then it leaks, and the pressure builds.

Under this new light, even spatialization where one tries to have everything fit in the same space can be its own fragmentation because one wants to see them all together.

Or perhaps, I am conflating the limitations of a website with the actual working solution of journaling, which may just be the start and end of integration, rather than the unresidenced medical student. Maybe, the banana clumps of data aggregation within integration’s accumulation are all that I need. But the website really was an evolution and completion. It did infinitely times more than all my journaling couldn’t on its own in terms of representation (not to an audience, but to myself). It’s because of the website’s crucial place in my wholeness, life closure, and sense of doneness that is why I see the squeezing as it exposes accumulation as the writing on the wall because the form of the website is the enactment of the best of integration and especially spatiality. To regress to the journal is to regress to the limitations of the form of text and that form’s non-integratedness and non-spatiality. How do we absorb what “squeezing in light of yet-to-bes as it exposes accumulation” could be revealing, even if it is itself false?

The solution could just be an unstructured archive section. Okay, now I feel stupid. Though I wonder if it’s the same issue as accumulation. I mean, if it’s unstructured, you can put anything there. Isn’t accumulation in 3D space the point of spatiality though? It even addresses the yet-to-bes by providing an immediate landing site. In fact, I have something like this—the “Recent Activities” section. The problem is that it was tied to timeline and about what I consumed or neologisms I coined and used during a period in any given previous several months or so. An unstructured archive would get rid of the timeline and allow anything, whether recent, recalled, or only now desirable to include. It would look and function very different from Recent Activities. It would certainly address “squeezing in light of yet-to-bes as it exposes accumulation,” so it works. Ultimately, this might just be the best and only answer. I say “might” at this point because of how much effort I spent writing and thinking through this passage only to realize I missed something so obvious. At least, I have a whole manifesto for why that section was added.

Modern Identity (March 22, 2026)

I’ve had that Identity section ever since I saw it in incessantpain.neocities.org (which I encountered back in 2024 iirc) and imported it immediately once the main personal website was established. But that it only had that passage about class consciousness and alienation looks so near-sighted looking back, but I guess I was still working out what exactly identity looks like in words to me. Now that I’ve created the likes section, the subsection for Roblox, and the unstructured archive section that contains that random Roblox memory between me and that four-month online friend and I’ve recently changed the representative 221x250 image to a split image between that 2016 Christian camp that took place in — and a screenshot of me playing an old Roblox RPG, it’s just a matter of finding exactly where my identity lies between my home computer life and that outgoing social events-riddled life.

It’s easy to understand identity in relation to who I am, but in terms to how I am located in terms of socioeconomic background and culture gets more challenging, due to how complicated the influences intersect and sidestep each other (as in two distinct key experiences happening simultaneously in the same month yet somehow taking entirely different places in my consciousness and how that then relates to decision-making and self-representation).

It may seem as though the argument I’m making is that modern identity is so complex such that the physical location of the past is somehow simplistic, but in reality, even a memoir like The Pianist is enough to show that before digital realms formed, the world was already so hyper-specific and hyper-local you could barely drag your finger across a random wall and not feel the weight of just how much culturality in that carried, bled, and torn-up form of people and lives has passed and intersected here in such inscrutinable forms (and, in form, content itself enacting rather than the other way around, where cultural symbols themselves stand for otherwise nuances, complex, and individual hyper-specifics as with behaviors and rituals). So if anything, modern digitality only exposes those “irrationalities” (“inscrutinables”) and enacts as well as layers (through exposure as well as driving actual change).

This is not an argument justifying some inability to put together a workable scratch representing that label “identity.” Rather, it helps sand down a lot of the assumptions we make, so the final draft is at least precise, if not rigorous.

Even now, I stare at that screenshot of me and my online friend in that Roblox game. It’s meaningless. It’s trivial. It’s a stupid irrationality. But that’s also what makes it inscrutinable. Culture has always demanded the ability to be stonefaced in the face of things that might even be disturbing, where norm, right, and truth all fail to provide substantial evidence for where identity is located. It only smacks your face against some local dirt, and perhaps, that experience is valuable. This is why I have that section.

Labels are fucking dangerous. Even the subjective-objective-blurring sensory realistic description of mud flecking the cheek is as much a denier of reality as it prays religiously for some kind of miracle where hearts touch mudded flesh and the mind can be truly scrutinize in the way linear words tumble down, down toward hell.

Representation is not about the truth of reality. It is about gathering something that feels at the least workable and then hovering about it, never truly grounded, but also never truly distant, always in some sense “above” the words, but also the very person affected and relying on them when attempting with a stutter that the “I am” can be prismed through such words like “identity.”

Fuck. If a person could be in any shape or form visible through the attempts to cast him on the wall like the splatter they call cave paintings, then damn, hopefully, that’s as pleasant as fog rain. Moody, atmospheric, but distinct and clear in the way it soothes the soul.

If there’s anything that identity can only be made of, it’s integrity, and even that is arbitrary, but maybe… that’s the point? It’s as unstructured as a person and blabbering. Those highly justified things they call beliefs, they call meaningful anchors to who a person is? It’s nice to think of them as the definitive entirety of a person, the Ancient Rome to human history. But you look more locally, and immediately, you cry at the sight of something that shouldn’t hit you that hard, not because it represents something deeper, but in itself, it is its own world. A world you denied in favor of grosser truths, and perhaps, that is always our sin—then, we sin every day, and we try anyway to mend out chipping souls which seek to say of the moment “Allah.” But we are corrosive. Each step takes away the last.

If I could sit down and there in that moment be everything and frozen forever, then maybe this enduring question of identity would never be needed. But life is always resistant. It even resists itself, because a moment falls through as much as it solidly supports your weight, and I don’t mean that existentially or representationally. I mean that in the way dirt scatters and moves, in the way little things we come by every day slowly go away. A receipt on the table that has been there for months eventually betakes itself away.

Words don’t enact reality like form enacts content. They instead enact themselves, being their own worlds, their own phenomenologies. And the writer is themselves a writing process, a phenomenology unto itself. And that’s fun!

So if there was going to be a section of Identity, I would have to stifle a guffaw the whole time, the way someone privately snickers when they hear someone thinks they can actually hold the world in the palm of their hand. As if they hold philosophical control, when they work merely in symbols and in the way of goverance, not to say it bears no weight on human lives themselves, but that in every attempt to control and dominate, there is resistance. Resistance gains a name because of what it is against. People become. Themselves they become. In a world so full, people become. Become, otherwise, whenever, regardless, in regard, truly. It’s funny. I can’t stop snickering. A section on Identity!

In the end, I’m importing most of these from very basic realizations anyone will find out after searching a bit on Firefox. I’m just localizing it so we can laugh together in “last updated,” with recent references. Ha-ha.

Sneering at the Known Self: Head-Pavement-Slamming (March 22, 2026)

Now that I’ve reached a point of integration, of “knowing myself,” I want to escape it. I’m glad that I did reach this point after 3 years’ 5 million words and the main personal website and everything, but at the same time, once you’ve articulated it, it becomes almost detestable, as if knowing oneself is a disgusting rug. It’s not to say I don’t want to get stuck in words or that I don’t think it is useful or exhaustive at all. It is more so that I’m disliking more and more the sight of the mass of what I’ve articulated. When I go through any single day and I see the words through which my voice blossoms and bursts so precisely and faithfully, it almost bothers me. I feel the urge to scratch the skin off my body and to rid myself of myself, to become something more, better, “ultimating,” whatever to wipe it off me! To become free, to become total, in the way that a skin-and-flesh body could never arrive to. I demand to be free. To become something of myself in the way that a defined, known self could never accomplish. For me, I acknowledge I am the me in the known, but also, inside me, I am the me in the ever-becoming. I think there is an arrogance in that.

I almost want to write a character that isn’t tortured and is totally fine, healthy, well, and secure yet totally incapable of being totally okay with the state of a satisfied, purposeful life. There needs something more convincing, something more compelling than a life lived in such simple waste, to become something that isn’t simply of itself the way a ram grazes across the field, but to become utterly despicable to the self, and yet in that sense totally becoming. Of myself, yet of an utterness that defies any attempt at the deterioration threatened by knowledge, by a confidence, by a settledness. He shall hold that ambition.

It is true that I love the things that make all of this possible. Yet, in my head, there’s someone slamming his own head with his own fist, demanding to be known not as the known but as the “utterly,” the fullness only truly demonstrated in motion, in the endless beautiful becoming, in the irrationality of a someone burning through all their reserves to test the little fleshy skin patch which seeks so much to be disturbed, disgruntled, and put off.

I try not to be irrational, impulsive. It’s not wildness I seek. It’s utter becoming. I lean not on my own understanding. I lean on the utter becoming of the self that resists all that can be said of them, even by themselves, even by evidence, knowledge, and all manner that rigor brings. All establishments must fall for the utter rise of a sneer-mangled expression. Flesh is not the actualizer. It is the medium through which the spirit of utter becoming is expressed. When that spirit seeks flesh, he seeks to burn of which his spirit only is capable. The spirit is the one doing the utter becoming, and the flesh is the weapon they grab off the ground to burn into their skull the utter “beatdom.” The actualizer grabs anything off the ground, anything, anything at all, because the same way identity is projection itself, utter becoming is the same, turning a chair into a violent weapon, transforming a bunch of sticks into a megastructure, beating out something truly compelling out of a bunch of dead, cold words. Self-actualization then is the becoming, the constant mad-eyed state that glares at all that dares call it finished. The same way ideas are only truly self-actualized and at their constant highest fulfilled potential when they are constantly attacked, resisted, tested, challenged, and argued against, the self also calls for this. If you aren’t screaming “Die! Die! Die!” and feeling the satisfaction of a million suns as you are destroying yourself and making yourself anew in the constant erosion and friction of flesh which you instrumentalize to fulfill your purpose of utter becoming, then you are settled, and then complacent, and then outdated, and then lost, and then imprecise, and then murky, and then nothing and gone. Integrity—in self-honesty, earnestness, sincerity, and conscientiousness—is the holder of the self. If I’m not hearing the smacking sounds of someone slamming someone else’s head against the pavement repeatedly, then my eyes are closed and settled. Rigor is identity. Instead of sardonic snickering that accepts the “working-ness” of the final draft like someone going to work on time and working overtime every day even if the situation is dystopian and their best defense is a self-guffaw, it’s unfettered, straight, brutal battery. Not aggression in the way someone simply barkingly angry is, or violence in the abstract sense, but actual physical battery on the individual, moment-by-moment, close-quarters level where the head is seized and forcefully struck against the pavement.

Self-Philosophy and Identity: Utter Becoming (March 22, 2026)

Self-philosophy and identity. I notice that there are two kinds of personal writings I’ve been doing, especially in my main personal website.

Is self-philosophy just a one-time use thing, the kind you’d use only if you’re just going to point back to realty and its grounded anchors that truly pertain to identity?

Or is it identity itself? Is the “arrogance” implicit in self-philosophy just smokes and mirrors? Or does it serve as the very vessel of self-actualization as utter becoming. Because new out-of-the-blue hyperspecifics, which cause all previous revelations to come out as fiction, are genuinely essentialy to identity, because they work toward the rigor that is crucial to identity, refining in the direction of utter becoming. Even so, that doesn’t necessarily invalidate self-philosophy, or “arrogance.”

I mean, one could argue that they both constitute rigor and, by extension, identity, because the person who makes non-overarching data aggregations is also the person who passionately screams that identity is intrinsically rigorous and thus self-philosophy is self-eating. The person head-pavement-slamming oneself but also the person raises his palm and then watches as the entire world funnels into it before closing it shut in an explosive wave that solidifies actualization.

As such, integrity is itself integrous, yet it is also self-burningly rigorous and self-honest.

In fact, the passage I just wrote, Sneering at the Known Self: Head-Pavement-Slamming definitively captures the single essence of self-philosophy and identity:—utter becoming.

History of Defining the Long-Form Fiction Issue: Closed Eyes, Rain, and Re-Belief (March 28, 2026)

I feel that I’ve continued to work on articulating more and more exactly the long-form fiction issue, specifically my current disconnect from the ideal creativity of the long-form work I wrote two years ago. Even if it may look repetitive at an overarching glance, there is constant tension that indicates the genuine fruitfulness and creative-intellectual satisfaction I get from iteratively defining it. As long the issue persists and the solution is not yet invented, whatever I write advances a new area of what exactly is stopping me from just doing it as frictionless as the reading that past long-form work is today. Essentially, the better I get at defining exactly what the problem is, the closer I’ll get to the solution. This doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying for the last two years, but I don’t consider even that continuous 70,000-word novel as solving the issue, since even after that, the problem persisted, up to now. The reason that this isn’t just any fiction writing where the only thing you need to do is write. It’s that I’ve been writing fiction this whole time since two years ago, but the particular creativity that I’m looking for—not flow, which is instantly accessible for me regardless of what I write, but which isn’t the same as flow in that particular creativity, which isn’t quality, standards (which implies a matter of reaching a set of qualities through sheer training or imitation), the mechanics of prose itself, or a matter of r/WritingPrompts—is still inaccessible.

My latest version of my definition of the issue, in an excerpt from the journal entry preceding this current passage:

A concrete comparison can’t be made between old and new because the prose itself will distract from the actual issue—the overarching mode.

Any changes I’ve made in prose and the existence of my analyses themselves are causually irrelevant to the issue itself, which means they developed long after the issue already completely emerged and took over. In other words, talking about my sadness doesn’t cause the moon to come out at night. Even without the sadness, the moon would still come out every night, and talking about the sadness doesn’t cause the sadness itself. Additionally, awareness of an itch doesn’t cause the itch. An itch makes you aware of it just by sheer pain.

As for what happened two years ago circumstantially, I don’t know what could have caused it then. It’s easy to blame the serialization itself and the criticisms I got for the first time, but while the criticisms did affect me enough to lead to my burnout, the deletion of the account, and the termination of those long-form serials that now represent that ideal creativity, I don’t even recall what the criticisms are, only that I disagreed with them on the one hand and eventually understood why they said what they said on the other hand. A month after termination, my computer got water-damaged, and I couldn’t use it for months. So I switched to the laptop, and that’s when my pre-existing journaling practice exploded in prolificacy, going from around a daily word count of around 2,000 to 9,000, which gradually went down to 7,000 and stayed there until it finally started going down to 6,000 a year later and then to my current 3,500 to 4,000 another year later. Fiction took the biggest recession from 4,300 words in 74 days straight during that serialization period to random fragments here and there sparsely spread across the journal and separate text files. It recovered a year after the termination, but this time, it took a very different attitude, one of extreme technical training, which lasted six months straight—resulting in three longer fiction works, followed by 128 four-hundred-word vignettes. As for how it felt like, it destroyed me. What I made right after the end of that brutal period was that 70,000-word novel—a deliberate attempt to break free from what I did to myself and to bring back that old ideal creativity while integrating what I got from that brutality somehow—followed by the recent 16,000-word fiction that cements explicitly the death of that old hyper-fictional-immersive protagonist to “verifiable realism.”

Now, evidenced by a recent 1675-word work titularly titled Michael, I experience fiction writing like a stilted robot, but the result itself is “workman-competent.” Though I’m careful with using this term because it directly suggests craft killed the ideal creativity star—a big, deceptive claim, since the prose itself was never the issue, but what fiction writing feels like. It’s why initially in this passage, I offloaded the work to “verifiable realism.” I would probably extend the “prose itself was never the issue” point to structure itself, including interiority, world-building, and plot logic. It’s not even “an all of it” in a direct prose or storytelling sense, since I can close my eyes and the results wouldn’t matter because I know in my mind it’s just not the same, because analogically, talking to my childhood friend at the level of the face-to-face in-person flesh again won’t bring the life I had then. Though this analogy runs into the issue of suggesting that it’s a matter of past and present life itself, but no, that’s damning and too global.

When it comes to what it feels like to read back the old work, I find myself feeling ‘a warm, slightly impressed self-irony.’ I wrote things I can’t even imagine writing now, not because of the prose itself, but because of the nature of my creativity (notice I don’t use the word “mind” here since that implies it’s irrecoverable, even as I recognize how apt it is in almost every other context or use case even up to the point of creeping to the absolute edge of what I can bear to withhold here while still being self-honest).

I wish there was a way to solve this, but no matter what actionable thing I do, it doesn’t change the “is” that no “do” has fixed.

It’s almost funny to do bathos like this, but I feel like a stupid fucking loser not in the insult or the shame sense, but as a precise provisional term to express this inability that I’ve been grappling for two years. I wish it was an insecurity. I really do. I wish it was just a matter of “not feeling like a stupid fucking loser,” because I don’t feel like that. It’s just that it’s not coming, the way rain doesn’t come when you want it to.

I don’t know what to do with writing, but to continue to journal, to make sense of all this, and to write fiction here and there even if I feel like a stilted robot doing it, where I can arbitrarily do all kinds of different prose and it would have no true, lasting bearing. The prose, whatever form it takes, is just what it is in a local sense. I can close my eyes, waiting for a smack of rain on my face.

Ultimately, if there’s one thing I will try to do even more now, it’s to read those flagship fiction works and immerse myself as much as I can. It doesn’t matter if the prose stands out to me. The goal is to re-believe, if that makes sense. And it’s there. That energy, that essence. It’s as obvious as afternoon tropical heat, as a Philippine typhoon.

Writing at Home vs. in Completely New and Different Cafes and Mental States (March 29, 2026)

I really only find new thought patterns when I’m at a completely new and different (CND) cafe and when I let myself continue to write in CND mental states. I don’t know truly if what I wrote is new on their own, and I will never know since once you write it, it’s written, and the circumstances and manner of writing it belong entirely to the moment unique to the writing of that passage. But I do know that I was very intentional when I wrote all that I did when I was at that CND cafe and (series of?) mental state(s), and that is the most crucial part. If it feels like I’m just extrapolating in the way someone stares at the same wall they’ve seen countless times over two decades and knows there’s no way to get anything out of that wall than out of the new patterns they prescribe to their own brain through CND exposure, then, even if not in the vacuum, definitely over the long term, it will be much less intentional, and growth will stagnate against a distilled center like floating rocks bobbing against each other in a watery funnel.

I really might be at the mercy of geography and mental-state circumstance given how much the home swallows everything you give it and you give it so freely and easily until there’s nothing left to funnel into it except for whatever glitches outside, right before you can truly determine what it is, right before anything can come along with you, right outside your tethers’ reach, breaking away, in some unknown place, unanchored, undetermined, unquestioned but also uninitiated, demanding, tiresome, placehood, a sense of place, at-the-mercy, wonder, awe, stimulation beyond repetition, a new awakening of spirit, zest beyond emotion, flesh beyond routine, what-is becomes concrete rather than hidden in layers of built assumption due to seamless home wakes (e.g., assuming the chair hundreds of miles and hours before it’s even there in front of us). In other words, the idea of cultivating the CND state is essentially like cutting yourself and pretending you’re truly bleeding.

It is very much like entering the rabbit hole to Wonderland. There is intentionality up to the very point you’re out there and, once out there, intentionality is that of complete moment-to-moment awakening like debris from a car crash grazing your cheek when you’ve known domestic speed all your life.

Don’t get me wrong. Home is where the bulk of 5 million words was written, including this passage as I sit here at my desk, but home isn’t the author that wrote them. And the author isn’t stuck to his desk even as he writes at it. The words filter directly through everything else the desk isn’t. Autobiographies are not desk-bound, even if they were written at the desk. They source directly from the CNDs that comprehend one’s entire life. Once you’ve exhausted everything you could at this desk, it’s natural to seek new CNDs to layer the writing process itself even more, which is why I take it to CND cafes and mental states (CCMSes). To be clear, I am genuinely writing thousands of words at these CCMSes. They’re very much a home-sized bulk in itself as they are an injection of world-shattering knowledge. I can close my eyes to the actual writings themselves and know that I am dealing with a new worldview or evolution altogether. Home advances; CCMSes evolves.

Shoe-Fitting: “Exceptionality” (March 29, 2026)

What a person does. What a person lives for. What he acts by. It’s almost strange that it comes so suddenly. This mind of mine. I mean what mind is it? What else, to be more precise? I mean, it is what it is. By the time I’ve acted like it’s something special or whatever it is, it really is just a thing. I can talk, I can act, I can say a bunch of things that aren’t really that crazy or substantial—and, even if they were arguable, I would still say they’re just another thing. Okay, okay, self-honesty states that I have to admit that I’m good when I’m good, but still, come on, man, you can’t be expecting me to say that. That’s like the worst thing, the one thing I don’t like doing. If I make myself any more than I am—even if it is precise to who I actually am and it just sounds weird because I am weird—it will feel very, very weird, strange. All those words. I can’t imagine not being self-honest, but I can’t imagine just saying directly that I am different. I can only gesture from as far away a distance as possible, because at the very least, it’s just a bunch of remote facts and not anything even close to relating to myself. I don’t want to see myself any differently. I just want to see myself as just another guy on the road. That’s all I want to be.

If I am different, then I am different like everyone else is different. If I am special, like everyone else. If I am in any shape or form, competent the way a person is good at singing, and that’s not weird at all. That’s how I like to frame it, as much as possible. But when self-honesty forces me, I commit as hard as I can in the writing of a particular journal entry serving as the confinement and then move on to the next as mentally fast and far away as possible. It helps. I don’t want to be special, unique, different, in any way that is not just like everyone else. A compliment should go a long way, I suppose, but only in the sense that a person is complimented for being nice, which isn’t that crazy at all, but just a matter of things and whatever-whatever. f I have to dare admit that I am better, I would rather be better the way we are all specks and will die any time. I would rather that than anything else. I want to disappear into myself the way a person goes along the road and moves on like everyone else. I want just to be me and not have to deal with the weight of anything crazy that being special holds. I just want to be okay. Expectations and all that, be only as much as one sings along a road filled with everyone else. I don’t need the craziness of being actually crazy, just the silliness of a friend group, the moment of banter between them when they say unhinged shit that isn’t actually unhinged, just funny. But yeah, let me be normal, the way a special person is just like everyone else.

Come on, man. Don’t make me into anything I don’t want to be (even if I am it), no matter how self-honest I genuinely want to be (even if I must admit it). If I have to admit it, let me say it ironically like acting. Let me do it. I don’t want to bear with the actual reality of it—the thumping realization of exceptionality, of being something I don’t want to be even if I am it. “If,” “If,” “If,” let me keep it an “if”! I don’t want to bear it. I am lying when I say “if,” but I am telling the truth of what I don’t want to be even if I am it through lying. This is my self-honesty, distorted through the undesirable implications of “exceptionality,” in the vaguest sense of the term. Magical word it is. As much as I desire it to be, as it might just actually be—hopefully. I fear it so much I would rather die forgotten like everyone else, because to me, that is not a threat. That is peace, happiness. I don’t care to be special. I don’t care to be that person (myself, that’s me, that’s who I am, I must accept myself, I must accept my exceptionality, I can’t accept myself if I don’t accept my exceptionality, I must accept it, I must accept myself, I will only truly be integrated if I accept my exceptional and, by automatic extension, myself, I can only self-actualize, I can only be if I accept it full-heartedly, straight, without irony or deflection or laughter or any attempt to make it out to be anything different from what it actually is as reality, as me, me, me, that’s me!).

I… I… I’m trying to say it. I’m trying to say I’m exceptional. See how I avoided saying it by saying “I’m trying to say” preceding it? I’m special, so good at that. But to say it directly straight-faced, shit(!), shit(!), shit(!), shit! Let me be, let me be! But to be, I must accept it! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Accepting it, but also accepting my desire not to accept it! Both are me! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck (this “fuck” is me as well!)!

Self-Responses

The funny thing is that their inability to say it as exhaustively encompassed in this passage is kinda proving the point of what they don’t want to say.

Honestly, since I am the author, looking at it makes me uncomfortable, like I’m actually wincing in my face right now. It’s hard to move on and forward and pretend I didn’t just address and identify something that has been essential to say for a while now. It is a victory in itself as much as it is an introducer of things I can’t even begin to wrap my head around. A win for self-honesty and self-understanding and self-interrogation and integration and all that, but also… Fuck

What does a person do at the end of everything? I guess they sit down and close their eyes to meet, shake hands with, and welcome the next one, the next entry. This might just be that moving on that I mentioned in the past where the journal entry serves as the confinement, but still, Fuck, FUCK! What do you want me to do! I have to do it, if that’s what I’m doing.

I just… I just need to accept it. I mean, accept that I have to keep… keep… keep… shit, Fuck, shit, Fuck! Self-honesty and fuck are fighting each other here. I can’t just move on and pretend and confine and forget. Shit! But I want to, not that I have to, not that it will actually be what I do, but I think that I want to. Whether that’s actual want or not, I don’t know. I just don’t know! I… don’t know. But I do know. That’s the problem. I know, and I say I don’t know because it’s easier to say I don’t know than it is easy to say I’m in full awareness of something where full awareness of it is its own paining thing. It’s so much easier to hide in these tangles than it is to say anything truly straightforward, even as I am demonstrating the very self-honesty I genuinely believe in through it. I am both being self-honest and dishonest, because while it is demonstrating that self-honesty, hiding in the tangles of that demonstration is its own self-dishonesty. Shit, Fuck, shit, Fuck! As if cursing here’s going to save me. To give me an exit. Ha-ha. Laugh. I laughed. Another deflection, another attempt to exit. Period. (That’s new.)

Self-Responses (2)

I wish I didn’t know what to do, so I could ask and get an answer that’s totally new to me. But I know what to do. I know what will happen. That’s the point. That’s the problem. But that’s not a problem. I just want to problematize, but it is a problem. No, not that it is a problem, but that I want it to be a problem, because there’s something deeper I don’t want, that I’m afraid of. I was about to type “Ha-ha” just now, stopped myself. Okay, you know what: Ha-ha. There, fuck it.

Back to First-Person

I am—in some sense, to some degree, in some manner or way, not to my full understanding, perhaps both to humanize and normalize it as well as do the opposite—exceptional.

Okay, best I can do. See ya guys! We’ll meet again next time I feel like being self-honest.

I feel like I said goodbye and left right as the vulnerability started to feel like genuine vulnerability rather than just performative bid for connections and false concessions. Dang it. I did this to someone, a four-month online friend, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t remember, and it’s hard just to sit here and genuinely think if it matches here. I don’t know. I just… don’t want to know. And the knowledge (as much as these “bunches of words” I’ve so carefully curated and given you allow) of whatever we have here is the best thing I can afford right now without feeling like I’m just torturing myself. As if this isn’t its own tribulation. Fuck, ha-ha, yes.

You know, I wanted the cafe to be where I vanished and became a person. I wanted writing to be where I vanished and became a person. The latter came before the former, so the order here doesn’t make sense. But yeah, no matter. Both ended up doing the opposite, at least in the vanishing part. I did become a person. They are where I became a person. I didn’t vanish. The opposite happened. Being a person might just be its own standing out thing. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know! I fucking know! Shut up!

It’s interesting that the above is a million times more vulnerable than performing vulnerability itself. I’m suddenly so shy thinking that I’m grappling with this rather than performing grappling with vulnerability I don’t actually have. I feel more vulnerable admitting a lack of vulnerability and that I’ve been performing a kind of vulnerability. This self-honesty is its own weird place, because it might just be what self-honesty actually feels like. It’s easier to “own vulnerability” I don’t actually have. It makes you look and feel resilient and brave. It’s actually more terrifying saying that I’ve been playing poor this whole time, because then the world isn’t my playground where I can play and perform and pretend around. No, it’s a place where I have to admit that I am only as much as I am, in the way that exceptionality only allows. Performed vulnerability feels like freedom. I’m performing the vulnerability of authenticity, so I don’t have to bear with the vulnerability of the authenticity of exceptionality. Exceptionality—not the belief, but the reality that keeps screaming at you to admit itself—is horrific.

Self-Responses (3)

Back to First-Person (2)

The fact I’m having thoughts showing the desire for something bad to happen so that I can avoid being “that guy.” If something horrible happens to me, to the things I need to do the things I do, then I can be free, but I can’t do it myself. I can only hope, but I shouldn’t hope that. I’m just… afraid. I hope this was all just some random thought. Then I can disappear. I don’t care about all the things that come with whatever this is.

If someone could just mock me and tell me how stupid and disgusting and horrible and bad I am, that would be easier, better even. i keep looking for that kind of attention, relationship, treatment. It really is addicting. Being ignored, rejected, dismissed, alienated, and put down is both torturously isolating and helping me cope away from the idea that I am anything of that sort. Looking for places where I can be normal, lesser even. I don’t want to be special.

I guess that’s why I find myself thinking about car crashes all the time. There’s a part of me that genuinely wants things to go so horribly wrong that I can finally be free of the horrors of existence, especially the kind of existence that has to agonize over its own exceptionality. But yeah, that’s… something. The fact that I smile while thinking of that, enjoying the fear I feel of death. Ha-ha. It’s funny, if anything.

I like people who make me feel lesser. [I feel—somehow, in a way only I understand—loved that way.] That definitely says a lot about me.

It really is easier to be a loser. I’ve long admitted that. I love saying I’m a loser. I love the loser life. You can do anything. My genius feels genuine when it comes from a fucking loser. I can pretend, perform, play around with these social games of performing vulnerability and all. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

In the end, I know I will just move forward as I do. It’s funny. But yeah, hopefully, this self-honesty helps and progresses me. I don’t want to stay stuck in some stupid mindset, even as I admit these feelings about myself and difficulties with accepting something that amounts to a fundamental part of who I am. Yeah, yeah. Hand-wave dismissal. On you go. Off you go.

I guess that’s why I like being silly and playful. It staves off the pressure of ‘self-seriousness’ (or what feels like it but might actually be the E—that unnameable thing). But ironically, it leads immediately, especially now, to that realization that that kind of behavior might just belong to someone who is of the E, since if it coincides with genuine hyper-competent autotelic flow states, it becomes just that.

It is easier to play “funny-appearing earnest-unselfconsciousness,” but it’s strange because it’s both a performance and not a performance. There is a genuine unselfconsciousness, but the fact of funniness and silliness and playfulness is just as much genuine as much as it is me taking advantage of the pressure it actually staves off, not in it staving it off as an essential, needed self-conscious act, but as the way someone makes random funny or musical sounds when alone or outside or when there’s downtime as something that feels fun to do. This might just be the most balanced way to look at all this.

Self-Responses (4)

Essentially: “I’ll be the playful, snickering, joshing ‘exceptionaire,’ fully demonstrating exceptionality while disavowing self-seriousness even as this disavowing leads back to exceptionality itself through sheer hyper-competence coinciding with playfulness.”

So this is self-acceptance of both: (1) the reality of exceptionality through exceptionality’s playfulness’ normal, joshing, “just like everyone else” freedom and (2) the desire not to be “exceptional,” at least in the sense of exceptionality’s self-seriousness’ pressure.

Back to First-Person (3)

But is this the same as accepting it or am I formulating what that would look like? There’s a difference between speaking of it and admitting it directly.

It’s easy to title an entry “exceptionality” than to say “yo, this is a-me.” It’s not the same thing.

There is a tension, the one that’s biting its lip, that’s crawling toward resolving it with something ruder, baser, simpler, rawer. If I cut my finger by mistake, then whatever I say will go away, and the journal will hold in formula the effect of the truth without the actual integretaion and internalization of it.

I can only admit this. I don’t think any more formulating is going to change the fact that I’m just not convinced. I’m playing a word game, persuading more than agreeing, which reads more like devil’s advocate, because it definitely is. This whole passage is performing chaos, realization, and acceptance and agreement, just to say “yeah, good luck thinking I was faking with that. I went one step farther, one layer deeper, self-honestly sharper. You can’t out-maneuver the maneuverer.”

I play my own games, convincing myself that I finally said it only to take it farther next time because I know well I didn’t move shit.

I guess I will have to blame the E idea itself. It just doesn’t work with me at all. It’s probably why I allow AI to speak favorably of me, because it’s less wanting something to flatter me and more so me feeling a genuine sense of control listening to something I absolutely don’t believe in while still benefitting from that listening, like standing in the rain with an umbrella to prove you’re impenetrable, unconvinceable, not to show it, but out of self-actualization.

To put it simply, I don’t believe in the idea of me being E. But it was fun to act out the conversion into believing something I’ve never even once actually budged on during this whole almost 3 hours of text footage. Well, “act” isn’t precise. “Convincing myself” is definitive and exact.

If I truly believed I was exceptional, I would be able to say it to someone else’s face. But I can’t, and that’s not because I’m trying to look humble and because it’s shameful to say something so blatant. That’s because I don’t describe myself that way. It’s a million times easier to stand behind yourself than to stand behind something that sounds like something someone says and isn’t actually. I just don’t believe in the word. Maybe, in some way, somehow, I believe in something like an exceptionality about myself, but that’s not “I am exceptional.” “Exceptional” just doesn’t work for me. It’s a shoe that doesn’t fit even if in some parts, it feels genuinely convincing. The whole range of what it means, as a straight whole term, doesn’t hit me squarely, doesn’t capture the essence of myself. Well, I guess that was never its role, but the word itself doesn’t even capture anything for me exactly. It’s too vague a word to mean anything that isn’t just hand-waving. So if there’s an ending to all this, “exceptionality” or “exceptional” just do not work for me as words, even if I may believe in a kind of something about myself that very remotely resembles some parts of it, in a way.

Self-Responses (5)

Even as the word is ‘poorly designed,’ this entire thing demonstrates whatever that failed word was reaching even as it carried too much baggage to be useable beyond this passage.

Self-Responses (7)

If there’s a passage demonstrating “self-rigor,” it would probably be this.

Back to First-Person (4)

I noticed that I really can only accept and approve of the use of the word “exceptionality” when it’s being pointed at me rather than me saying it myself, since I know the word by those parts that work, whereas using the word myself means grappling with the whole of it where I can’t exactly just say “see it the way I do.” It’s not a good word, but I can trust it when it comes because I can trust myself to see it by its good parts and not the bad ones. It’s a useful word only as far as I am concerned in interpreting it myself rather than my liberal use of it given I write to communicate, and using a poorly designed word isn’t helping me. Precision is not the same as the interpretation I trust myself with.

Self-Responses (8)

Breaking Gospel (March 29, 2026)

Integration is such a weird thing. The definition of it is simple. The model of it is simple. But the experience of it is just so strange. When you really integrate far-lying, far-thrown parts together, it’s so strange. Memories and references that have never been even remotely in the same world now sit together long enough to turn into a unit in the form of a passage, even if only in a list without synthesis into some point or broader theme. It reminds me why I go to new cafes regularly. Even before I arrive, I forget, and that forgetting makes room for complely new connections, so when I re-encounter things, it’s things that you would never find together. The order, the pattern, the sequence, is reset and all jumbled up, in the best way possible. The longer I stay in that cafe only over that single original instance until around eight to ten hours, the more bizarre it gets, like Wonderland, and that’s so, so good for even more integration and out-of-the-blue connections that result in even more wholeness and sense of self-security in a “all roads lead to Rome” way. These bizarre unprecedented connections tear through sludged-up layers of assumption. All of a sudden, your entire worldview pre-teardown feels so arbitrary and “well, it works,” in the stupidest way possible, like a man shoring up the same old sand. Somehow, along the way, the configuration of things was mistaken for reality itself. Conflation, complacency, stupidity. When things work, they just work, and it feels like truth itself, but a coffee cup coming every time with that exact flavor isn’t truth. It’s just a configuration. The repetitiveness starts to sound like gospel, and now, here in the cafe, everything that made sense together now looks real arbitrary, like “when and why did I think those two only made sense when together and in that order? how random!”

Workshop Disappointment: Unsent Letter (March 30, 2026)

—, I attended this — three-hour creative writing workshop yesterday afternoon (by — under the title —). It ended up being a casual sharing circle. Twenty attendees rambled, and one microphone got passed around. The focus was on answering questions about what one wrote following each of the five cafe-themed (primarily centered on writing from the cafe’s perspective) prompt exercises. They left distinguishing between the writers and their current executions to chance. No one read their first drafts out loud, except incidentally. Oh, but they did yap.

Most used pen and paper. One-hundred words was the most they seemed to produce for an exercise, fifty being the average. While that alone should reveal whole worlds, whatever insight would have done just that screamed behind bars. Talking dominated. Even while encouraging craft, the speaker weaseled at the level of absolute introduction. AI-generated text did the presentation heavy lifting. They hashed out using the slides, tossing in foundational terms like “show, don’t tell” for good measure. A writer’s writer, even a passionate hobbyist, was nowhere to be seen. Personalized philosophy beyond “writing helps one express oneself”—the profoundest line ever said in that whole meeting—wafted elsewhere. While the humans behind the staff were nice—neither hospitable nor difficult—from their handling of someone needing an outlet in the middle of — — (electrical and expressional—which critically showed zero foresight for the writers of today), it was like the failed version of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from Catch Me If You Can, a drive-by cash funnel, a Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. I dredged up my creative and mental satisfaction and value out of it anyway.

I looked on starry-eyed as they orally explained (not expressed —which their writing would have done) themselves. I truly believed in them. But the facilitator drew none of that out. The workshop started, then ended. Whatever happened in between was plausibly deniable. You couldn’t even tell you walked out of there until you did, then you realized it was over. Something happened; I don’t know what. This message is one of only few pieces of evidence that it ever took place. There was no “Did I get better? Did I express myself better?” It was a hodgepodge of disconnected actions without self-actualizing feedback.

Is there anything that isn’t that? I don’t want the Reddit-presented phenomenon of “non-writing writers” and “non-reading writers.”

That was my second creative writing workshop. The first was yours back in — in —. I was definitely not a writer then.

The Blank Slate as Human Technology: The One-Time 10-Hour New Cafe Stay & Human-Vivified Writing (March 31, 2026)

It’s crazy how cheap it is to live with a desktop if it was just Meralco, Maynilad, and luckily cheap monthly rent (— PHP frozen, two floors, two bathrooms, 3 rooms, dining-kitchen area, sink-washing machine back area, living room, garage/parking lot taking up the front, gate, balcony, gated neighborhood, access to — — and its elevated highways leading all around, access to nearby supermarkets) you’ve had for two decades from a time when it was much cheaper and the landlord hasn’t increased the price since even after all the inflation. And how much disposable income you need just to stay for ten hours at Starbucks (— pesos, not including travel expenses) once every three days, a new branch once every two visits, 106 stays, 54 unique cafes, 10 months.

I wrote my reasoning for cafe stays to some degree here (heavily abstracted excerpt):

Each ten-hour new cafe stay offered “an alien planet” (which she used to describe “too green” Forks, Washington).

One might think the invisibility of Starbucks (‘by design supposed to feel the same everywhere’) would make it less ‘other-world normal,’ but it’s when everything tourist-y or eye-catchingly “local” in a conventional aesthetic “lived-in” Pinterest way falls away that people truly show themselves at their most residential. And I disagree: not all branches are the same. Each is so structurally different in both interior and location that you would barely be able to say any one is the same, especially when you stay for ten hours, which is enough time for the motion of life to settle into the hyper-local, into absolute thisness.

Each place is like every whole new Roblox game where people act totally differently. But here, it’s because people aren’t performing any role beyond the functional part of drinking coffee, chatting, and keeping to themselves as one would do in any public space but within the comforts of a cafe’s comfortable air-conditioned interior that you see them truly act differently in the way going to a local sports fest with basketball and volleyball matches could never.

I myself grew up traveling and being part of many communities and doing all manner of activities, whether performing on stage in a local concert, volunteering, acting as an assistant to a teacher, community cleaning, playing sports, or hiking (and many others). But ten hours in a new cafe has shown me that I somehow never knew anyone truly until they were strangers from a whole different area in their local cafe. It felt like I was truly seeing others for the first time, because we were no longer bound by our relationships to each other and all these came with throughout our lives. Community somehow lost that place for me as the way to know myself and to know others truly, strangely enough.

Ephemerality, residential, local, a whole nother area and world. These come to mind.

The ten-hour cafe stay (not the staff, a particular branch, or the customers and regulars) knows me better than even my parents and siblings do.

Similarly, a four-month-long faceless online friend knew me better than my family ever could in some ways.

Solitude at home for years, then solitude outside in ten-hour stays at new cafes I’ll never go to again, then solitude in the way someone who has reached such a point of personhood desires to be seen by another person, even a short-lived faceless online friendship. All of these have produced my greatest level of knowing both myself and others truly.

So while I did write that digital spaces in a journal entry could never replace the ten-hour new cafe stay because of the nature of text as curated, that’s only text as a public letter and messaging thing. When you’re dealing with a writer like myself who has lived in their writing for years, naturally, you will know them better by their personal writing, including their personalized fiction, even if that’s the only medium you have for connecting to them. And in that sense, ironically, family knows much less because they assume everything and then leave it at that. The blank-state of the one-time ten-hour new cafe stay knows me better than a community could ever. The curiosity I am shown—especially because I am not trying to hide, but unselfconsciously being myself as I am as I write personally rapidly over the course of that stay—by the security guard in a new cafe over the course of ten hours is the most I’ve ever been known by a person, which is why I invite it. I’ve learned I appreciated that kind of knowing. To be screams strongest in that sustained moment of true self-actualization.

You may wonder if I am pointing to the blank slate here, and you might wonder what would be the point of any accumulated writing then if the goal is the blank slate. The goal of personal writing, at least for me, is to engage in ruthless self-rigor right now. Accumulation shows how I’ve evolved (the way a bunch of people turns into a billion individuals and had no bearing in their emergence, minds, ideas, lives, and experiences save for ancestry), but it is never a reference table any more than a complete stranger in a new cafe is. All words are a bunch of words right after the fire behind the typing is done and the matter is text-file-saved, the truth being in the person-being-the-writing-moment—utter becoming. That the blank slate of the cafe helps that does not contradict the accumulation. It only proves that history as cold text is separable from the fire of what is present at the desk, the screaming man over a bunch of meaningless words given zest only by a passing cursory glance, whether by detached reader or the author themselves. I hold their purpose (like a shoulder bag). I hold the territory the map is reaching for. I am the god behind matter.

I am the engine, not of creation (which assumes the text carries what it is created with, bestowed, or given), but of the very thing that a bunch of matter turns into beautiful poetry. I glance away, and it goes back to matter. I glance at it, and it goes back to beautiful poetry. I actively project its beauty and poeticism onto it for the duration. The technology of writing is effectively mud relative to our ability to generate its purpose actively, to make it technological, ontological, philosophical, artistic, intellectual. You can realize this easily by looking at Internet Archive and seeing how much it means to the people that digitized him but nothing to almost everyone who would never stumble upon it. It requires delusion of the creative, but that is why we must keep raging against the dying of the light. It’s why some books are characterized as that of a writer’s writer. It’s smuggled-in value, shared community resources, insider info, local knowledge, algorithmically niche, personal. An AI would never understand why something is valued, only that it was told it was valuable based on its data, even if you gave it all the craft technologies, principles, and techniques, because human is the technology behind the writing. Writing is not an extrapolable technology, because the heart of it is technologically human, not in the subjective sense, but the most complex objective sense possible, which is hard to map even for an AI. For example, even if Moby Dick “should” be bad (if objectively relying solely on writing as the technology and not on the human as the technology), it is considered good, and without being told that it is valued, AI would never extrapolate that it is “good” by judging based on writing as the technology. And when you descend to the personal level, practically anything goes yet makes all the sense. It’s why I love my own experimental, surreal, poetic, abstract, psychological fiction stories and see so much in them. It’s why I see this one 1.5-million-word metafictional “deconstructor fleet” ground-breaking (literally novel and uncharted territory due to how recent all of this is) web novel as objectively powerful even after reading many literary fiction. The AI is relying on the map to judge the territory that the human is experiencing from the map (the writing). Imagine how hard that must be, poor thing. AI cannot access the “show, don’t tell” that humans experience every single waking moment. It has to be “told.” A human only experiences. Whether the patterns of accumulated recorded history accounts for that doesn’t matter. Thus, an AI would invalidate that person’s hyper-precisely described experience if it doesn’t map onto what “should” be, which is all it has as its reality, not because the person is interesting, but because unrecorded reality is.

seeya Mae (April 2, 2026)

I don’t hate myself. I don’t hate the way that I am. But I know that I can be a very miserable person when I am with people, and it makes those people feel miserable as well. I am specifically talking about online friendships here.

I noticed that I’ve changed because there was this very big and obvious opportunity to make a friend, so much easier objectively than the last one that led to a 4-month-long online friendship, and I didn’t take it.

I enjoyed watching those two friends talk, and I felt comfortable being there. But I knew that it was only up to that point. If I went and got into it, I know how fun it would be and how miserable it would be.

To explain, with online friendships, I become so anxious-attachment, when that’s not the case at all in real life. I don’t know why. I remember getting so angry when I was given the characterization that that’s how I’ve always been, but even after so long, despite being a prolific writer, despite using the internet all day every day, I would have never written and used the internet this much if it wasn’t for my circumstances.

To give a comparison, imagine if a Grace Field House child (my younger years, specifically the community, outdoor, event-y, social part, not the isolation) suddenly shifted to being isolated in a room with only a main computer and no contact with people except for those who have moved on with no one really responding to you or being available and you’re left to scour the internet to make sense of yourself. From that, it makes sense that you would start writing like I did and start becoming more and more of yourself and a person in yourself in the way writing lets you. I have integrated and consolidated so much into myself, since I really had no external structures to rely on, as the external narratives were proving insufficient and addressal and integration were the only way to move forward and get healing. And that’s where I am now. Integration on my whole life and closure. But that does not mean that I’ll just waltz up and pretend that I can handle an online friendship. I can’t. Maybe one day. It’s been 106 day since the end of that four-month-long online friendship.

Let me make sense and process. I was awestruck in the moment when that person talked to me in that Roblox game called “The Morning Roast” and proactively helped me find the mystery of the game so kindly, warmly, and nicely. When their friend suddenly arrived right as I was about to start asking them if this frequented this game and afk’d here regularly as a gateway to potential friendship, the way they spoke to their friend reminded me of that four-month online friend. I was already getting so into it and then as the conversation between them went on for 37 minutes as I just stood there as if afk with only the three of us there in that game, I slowly processed whatever was happening silently. It was only when their friend left and they said their goodbyes and they remained in the server that I started getting antsy. I felt awkward leaving when their friend arrived even if one could argue it was the perfect time to leave. I just stayed anyway. I was curious. It’s rare that you see someone who’s genuinely talking rather than acting like a child, so I listened to the two of them hang out and talk. I remained even awkward when their friend left, and I was battling within myself as to what to do. I went inside and stood by the window while they sat down at the table. It was a diner. After 20 minutes of us just afk-ing in the same game, they ended up leaving, addressing me by name in their farewell. I just said “seeya”. I ended up concluding midway through the shared afk between us that I would rather just wait until they were the one who left, since it was easier. In the end, I’m thankful that it ended that way. I was pretty conflicted, and in the end, I just afk’d the whole way since their friend arrived, having stayed there for a total of one hour in silence until their goodbye to me.

I am not saying I was restraining myself. I just realized that I wouldn’t be able to convince myself to go for it. So I didn’t. That four-month friend taught me a lot about myself because of the way that I behaved and how they dealt with it. So I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t afraid, but it was the fear of knowing just how much it reminded me of that four-month friend and how I reacted to all of it.

Smothered in Depth’s Signals and Implications: Inferiority’s Head Cracked Open by Elephantine Possession (April 3, 2026)

Why? I don’t get it. Is it because I wasted all these years in solitude? Why is my former crush from back in high school who came from a relatively wealthy family inarticulate? I don’t get it. Many assumptions I’ve had for so long are breaking. I’m so confused. I projected so much onto them back then. And now, when I look at them, all I see is a beautiful face. What did I even see then? I guess I saw smokes and mirrors. Reminds me of how my perception of my wealthier Chinese cousins deflated as I grew as a person and entered the spaces that I thought were holier-than-thou in a wealthy kind of sense. Like, now, all I see is someone with a background in the most prepositional sort of way. It’s not “someone-with-a-background.” It’s “someone, with a background.” What happened? They travelled to so many places. They have all of these things. They went to those kinds of schools. Why are they like this? It must be so hard, huh? Being all this and not being all that. It’s so strange. It’s so much easier for a loser like me because I can keep growing non-stop, but it is also torturous in its own way. But because I spent so much time in solitude self-directed, I went to such a point that I look at all of them that I saw so much in that way and now feel so strangely “huh?”

I wish I was compensating somehow. But I’m just confused. There is disappointment, but it’s mostly just unsettlement.

But why? They can’t be! They can’t be shallow! I was thinking, “Oh, if I just kept going and improved myself, I’ll be able finally to stand shoulder to shoulder with them!” Then I looked, and thought, “But… no… Wait, what if I can still talk to them? Then I realized, “Oh shit, they won’t be able to communicate at the same frequency.” But this is how I saw people from the working class/underclass, since money and food on the table are a constant problem. Why the fuck is it extending to the upper-middle/upper class? No, no, no, this doesn’t make any fucking sense! Don’t fucking tell me… All this fucking time!!!??? All this fucking time!??!? What the fuck am I supposed to do now!?!?!

They just surrounded themselves with symbols and signals. They cloaked themselves. Smothered themselves. Only to reveal at the end of all those Russian dolls nothing! Absolutely Nothing! What the fuck!!! No! No! No!

I believed. For so fucking long. All that self-honesty, all that agony, all that wonder, all that awe, all those years spent genuinely tinkering, questioning, and confronting myself. And to end up realizing that at the end of all of it that I was the only one who did this, and no one else could meet me where I was. I believed. I believed. I feel lied to.

That’s it. That’s my last source of humility. Nothing’s gonna stop me now. Ha-ha. Ha-ha… That was my last milestone. And now, it’s done. Sure, it may have been done this whole time, and I may feel fucked up about it. But hey, it’s, it’s… done! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

I’m going to be truly myself. That is the last wall fallen. And this actualization has a flavor. It has a way of doing itself. It has a way of walking. It is arrogance-tinged. The kind of arrogance that has defeated its final teacher because they were never there in the first place.

Now, I really am my only enemy. Self-honesty. Self-rigor. Truly myself. The arrogance of one who has total self-possession, no longer stipulated by that final teacher who was never there in the first place. I am.

Feeling insufficient, lesser, inferior, worse, weaker, less intelligent, less capable, less advantaged, less of myself, less, less, less, less, less. Now that the last teacher is gone, there is only true dominance and creative freedom. Utter self-possession.

Maybe, I will still look at people from 1st world countries who look particularly intelligent and still feel like they’re a goal to strive toward. But in terms of the wealthy people that I knew, those cousins, that former crush, the literary awards in my country (realizing that the writings that got first place every year were not at all what I would consider anywhere near that level at all), they are walls torn down. It’s less that I tore them down and more like I grew to such a point and started going outside, and everywhere I walked, the gates fell apart with just my unaware step. I leveled to 100 at the beginner zone and when I went out, everything collapsed just at the sight of me. And I am the one bearing the sense of crisis of disillusionment.

I feel like a crocodile who grew up thinking that its trainer was all-powerful, which is why trainers are careful never to let it ever realize how powerful it actually is as an adult in comparison.

Fortunately, books still offer a lot to strive toward because there are so many authors that I admire and can’t at all write and see the way they do. And the world is an endless teacher. This is where self-honesty and self-rigor come in, even with many teacher statues collapsing meanwhile in the background. I am my own endless ruthless teacher.

But damn, I can’t believe my former crush and many other people intimidated me so much that her rejection of me was like being rejected by the world. Just today, I was a little nervous about checking up on that former crush again. That’s what led to this passage’s realization. An elephant terrified of a mouse. But yes, even while it was the most horrible and traumatic experience ever, I am glad that my self-honesty triumphed over my inferiority-driven striving and self-doubt eventually.

Choking My Dreamer to Death (April 3, 2026)

It’s interesting that if I shift my mindset a little bit, I have so many documents that show me playing with ideas. Now that I have grown so much as a person and a writer and a thinker, it would be such a goldmine if I just looked at every single one of those Google Docs fiction experimental fiction whatevers and took them seriously.

I just need to separate the prose itself from the vision. That’s not going to be easy since I’ve been trained to look only at the prose, with the vision taking the farthest seat. It’s why you never see me playing with ideas anymore. I’ve very much become a technician.

It’s very much right now to stare at it and not feel the whole thing is trash because the prose is trash. A part of me knows there’s genuine ideas here since I was very much strong on ideas before but have settled to a more grounded realism that can be considered arguably uninspired and technically performative than actually innovative. But it’s not easy to see the way my younger self did. It’s hard to separate the execution from the vision itself.

I was the kind of idea-first guy who would think, “What if in some post-apocalypse setting, the jungle grew so much that they became so tall and vast that they towered over the cities themselves?” Of course, I couldn’t put that imagination into words as quickly as I did just now back then. But it was there in my head. I was fresh off all of those cool ideas, and I was creatively and vividly day-dreaming constantly. I could day-dream entire breathing, living (sometimes literally in the sense of a world that’s actually alive in a sci-fi, sci-fantasy, or surreal way), lived-in worlds. Now, I’m a sentence manager.

I think there was this study actually that the amateur writer’s visual parts of the brain light up so much more compared to the expert who thinks only in those linguistical brain parts.

But it is interesting. I don’t see anything anymore. I don’t day-dream. I can still see in my mind’s eye while I’m reading or when I’m thinking and imagining. But it’s not getting lost. Two years ago, I still had it. But the last two years have been depriving of all of it.

My mind was practically untouched and hyper-consuming all manner of visual media (manga, Webtoons, Youtube videos, animations, past real-life experiences that were very visual in my head, etc.) and web novels for 6 years straight, so you can imagine how hard that is to re-create. The last two years have been extreme linguistic and technical training, grounding, and exposure until the hyper-inventive mind that would generate something like The Promised Neverland or To Your Eternity was nowhere to be found. It’s not that I don’t consume visual media. I do. But I’ve become very much curbed in the day-dreaming department. And why? What did I gain out of it? I started pushing words so much to their full potential because I was no longer relying on anything else but them in a technically aware sense until they truly became a bunch of words. I trained myself until I detested them and wield them like a slave I find despicable. It is because of this evolved perception that I have become so ruthlessly rigorous and unassuming. This doesn’t mean that I try my best to squeeze everything into words, but I am very, very deliberate in only the way someone who has been deprived of everything else but words is.

The point of despising words is that I am very well aware of their limitations now that I have pushed them to their utter limits and still despise them for taking away so much from me. I’m not asking them to be magic. I’m asking them to get out of the way so I can get out what I want. They’ve become utter mediums of myself, like slaves I despise. “Shut the fuck up and sit still, slave!” Then I stand on top of it so I can enter the carriage. And it’s not a matter of reframing. Any kind of reframing uses words themselves, so I smile the way Ray from Mr Inbetween does when he knows he’s dealing with someone who underestimates him and he’s about to turn that little fucker to a fucking little pussy-piece-of-boy-shit. So you can see my rage in my articulacy, the very artiulacy born out of this very loathing.

The carriage is another slave delivering me to beat every single motherfucker out there for their fucking shittery. I abolish idols. I kill every single Russian-doll-nested thing inside which is absolute nothing! I am dominance itself. I no longer have day-dreaming, but I have utter becoming, utter rage, utter dominance, utter loathing, utter actualization. Everything is a despicable slave through I be. Where is the day-dreamer now?!

Everything is a bunch of motherfucking words, and, by extension, a bunch of motherfucking idols and falsehoods and by motherfucking extension, a bunch of fucking despicable slaves, utter medium, through which I actualize totally!

But I do miss the day-dreamer. I’ve been disappointed and disillusioned so many times. I do miss that feeling of drowning and immersing. Of hyper-day-dreaming. But look where I am. At least words are my despicable slaves through which I actualize myself. The world by extension as I face more and more disillusionment of statues and idols and benchmarks falling away, collapsing without me even doing a single motherfucking thing except just taking a step even a long way away from them. This is what I’ve become. This is the utter becoming, the utter disappointment, the utter mediumization, the utter despicable-enslavement, the utter self-actualization. Where are the motherfucking ideas? They’ve fallen to the ground. They’ve become utter mediums themselves in favor of total medium enslaved 100-percent-fidelity no-latency execution. The I am in the I am. I miss that day-dreamer who saw so much. He didn’t see beyond or past the words. He saw so much even in the smallest words in only the way he dreamily could. That utter day-dreamer.

Once you stop treating words like gospel, you master them the way a master masters a slave. And that extends to everything else, to the world itself. Self-honesty in the way of utter mastery destroys everything in favor of actualization rather than assumption (e.g., relying on words the way one relies on their infallible mother, inferiority-driven striving, self-doubt).

That utter day-dreamer was utter projection, the way a child blames themselves and internalizes shame when their parents fight. But now, I am the dominator, so naturally—the way I recently dealt with my inferiority-driven striving that relied heavily on the assumption that wealthier people naturally cultivated depth rather than just smothering themselves with signals and symbols that imply it (worldliness through much diverse travel, leisure enough to have a room of one’s own, free-range lifestyle enough to foster original thinking, and rigor through elite institutions)—I clasp (clutch) that vivid scene I day-dreamed and slam its head against the pavement, in favor of the feeling of the utter expression of the fullness of my being, of ruthless self-honesty and self-rigor, of actualization. Unintimidated, I learn disrespectfully (and, paradoxically, actually deeply respectfully) from everything and slam all their heads against the pavement in actualization and utterness.

Now, when something makes me uncomfortable, I don’t retreat into my daydreams or listen to music simply. I grab it by the motherfucking throat and slam it against the pavement again and again and a-fucking-again, using writing as a means of articulating reality with clear eyes. I confront it all ruthlessly self-honestly and self-rigorously and thus accomplish integration and, by extension, actualization and enactment. When before, I would sit down in a room and rot, not addressing it because I couldn’t and didn’t know how to and didn’t have anyone to talk to, now, I would write it down in precise words and slowly build it up even as brick walls—rejectors, emotionally unavailables, getting-away-with-its, insufficients, insecure self-righteous monsters, indifferents, uncommunicators, liars, and all manner of creature—surround me. I clutch those brick walls’ necks and suffocate them to death as I advance forward, contemptuously and utterly freely, because I am not a motherfucking slave. I am a person! I am! I am! I am!

Day-dreamer is the one who dareth close its eyes. I will choke that dreamer to death until it wakes up and sees what’s happening right in front of it with clear eyes. Face reality fucker!

Excess Craft That Ruins Ascent Expands Range Through a Story: Integrating Creative Conflict Into Me, Simply (April 4, 2026)

I realized that’s what I’m doing. I’m intentionally sensory-overloading my fiction writing because it’s a technical exercise burst first and foremost. I just do also it intentionally to capture a specific narrative that appeals to me.

I realized that’s what I’m doing. I’m intentionally sensory-overloading my fiction writing because it’s a technical exercise burst first and foremost. By overloading it with sensory details, I can expand my range and be even more precise so that I have even more control in the future. I just do also it intentionally to capture a specific narrative that appeals to me.

It’s like a song that is good as an exercise, but also its own kind of song that makes use of that technical training excess toward its own “song point.”

The person wanting to get better as a writer is the same person writing a specific kind of story. Both motions become one in the creation of the story.

It’s not indirect learning. It is direct learning as well as direct storytelling.

The story itself is an analogy of “craft ruining me,” funnily enough. Overenthusiastic gun-toting literary “show, don’t tell” ruins the beloved web novel strategist protagonist. The protagonist is analytical and philosophizing, but crumbles psychologically to the point of paralysis due to sensory and grounding overload. It is not just analogical. It is quite literal. Excessive “show, don’t tell” broke the ascent-plotting day-dreamer. The philosophizing that should have lifted off and become grandiose and coalitional loses to very, very squelchy mud.

I was learning craft by expressing through a story that excessive craft ruins the kind of storytelling that appeals to me.

Unintentionally, the name of the protagonist (and the story) is quite literally “Red Grimes.” “Red Grimes” as in there’s lots of blood and grime in the ickiest way possible. It’s anti-ambitious because it goes to such lengths to stun you with the abasing experience of having mud cake between your toes as you squash your way smothered by the forest. The idea of “Quest: Kill fifty goblins” gets clogged.

All of this happened unintentionally. It was just the natural result of two things conflicting and then colliding in the form of a single held-together story. My only focus while writing was just writing it, and what came out revealed my priorities: to write the story I want to write and to write it well the way I was technically taught. To reach a point of integration and total mastery and control that I can truly be free and write whatever I want. To go back to when I was an ascent-plotting strategical intellectual philosophical analytical grandiose dreamer. To let it all happen in front of me. It wasn’t enough just to do it. I needed to make something that was truly controlled. It’s not just about reaching a milestone or performing mastery. I really do love those descriptions I read in works like Sigrid Undset’s Jenny and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees. I can’t get enough. But I can’t be forced to write only in those descriptions. I need metafictional web novels. I need their protagonists. I need Marty Byrdes. I need people with genuine ambition and move-forwardness. I am both. I am all. That is what integration means. That is where the conflict is currently happening. That is where mastery is being sought. That is where the hopes of true control are looming.

But I can tell I’m still so far away from mastering Undset’s and MacDonald’s descriptive skills. It’s painful. And it’s not like I’m a master at writing LitRPG either. I’m still learning a lot. The problem and the point of all of this is that I did not start out writing LitRPG at all. The conflict was already embedded in me. I loved psychological realism, but I also loved LitRPG and metafictional works like Everybody Loves Large Chests, which feature a lot of systems and ascent. That I love those lush, sensory-heavy, sweeping, literary descriptions only complicates all this further. That I am also a very analytical person, the kind that loves reading academic texts raw, added as well. There’s just so much to who I am creatively that it just comes out. I was never one of any of these. I was all of them at once. And time has only complicated that further, made me more and more myself, more and more integrated, as well as more and more conflicted as the sides get closer and closer together and become more and more solid. Ultimately, I am the person that I am, in all the things that I am. I can only accept that and keep going forward, knowing that no matter how much I read, I will always find that I experience the world in the way that i do and enjoy different things and find it natural that these multiple things appear in the moment-by-moment self-expression, in fiction writing. It really is just a matter of course for me, even if it may seem very challenging to hold together. It’s why I’ve grown so much. It’s why I’ve struggled so much. It’s why I’m here. This is not my own complexity. This is me, simply. It’s why I was so confused when I was criticized. I didn’t know things had lanes. I just experienced the world as I was, and I still do, in spite and even more so because of my cognizance. Awareness breeds even more integration and actualization. It is a very personal thing. It is rooted in expression itself for me. I was always who I was. Knowing that only makes orchestrating self-actualization that much more feasible.

Sunken Dirt Patch and Book-Crammed Nook: A Small Birthday Gift for My Lola (April 4, 2026)

— slowly descended the tiled staircase, her body tilted aside, her right foot edging down in front. In the breeze-swept, concrete-floored nook at the bottom, book towers crammed both left and right walls. Her path led to a bed nested under a shining window opening into a sunken, walled dirt patch daylit below a cloudy sky. A peek outside stopped at a band of sky, the high fences, and her portico’s underside and balustrades. To the left towered the hulking wall. To the right stretched the fences and continued the portico extending to the unseen gate. The canal-lined, dust-brushed street ascended to the car-worn main road.

Graying, weathered men in t-shirts and shorts with steady expressions and chatty voices ambled down the slope. Her screen door opened, and her brother —’ measured shoes strode out, before the door swung itself shut with a bang. Sparrows flurried and chirped, and a rooster tethered to a slender rope by its leg crowed. Sunbeams threaded through the cloud banks, spilling over parts of her open stone-stepped yard on the right of her house.

Back in the room beneath her home, where the hem of her black polo shirt settled over the blankets, a blue book lay nestled inside. “Cussler” spanned the cover, under which yellowed pages sat frayed and cut in places. Raising it against her nose exposed the blend of scents it carried: scuffed fabric, sweet wood bedframes, cockled novels, and dunged, baked earth.

As a finger snapped behind her, a man materialized out of thin air, strode up, and shot her through the head. The 5’2”, spectacled woman bent, reeling to the side. Blood leaked out in sputters. Her body slumped backward onto the bed.

He removed the plastic bag wrapping his silenced 7.65-mm Beretta automatic and stored both in his backpack.

Three Pukes: Hyper-Experiencing Child Amid Healed Adulthood (April 4, 2026)

I puked three separate times this afternoon. It was the best experience ever. For some reason. It reminds me of hiking. Feels incredibly horrible but feels really great. It also reminds me of when I was a child. You were just sick physically but feel bouncy and great afterwards, where depression is absent and the only pain is physical. As an adult, I’m experiencing this child-like ease again where physical pain is just physical pain, but, because of the closure I got recently through the integration of my whole life, without the depression and unresolved weight and issues of an adult and without the extreme inexperience of a child. To clarify, vomiting is not a relief from this. How I experienced the vomiting is a reflection of healing. It was an enjoyable, genuinely valuable experience even while it felt horribly, and I was already thinking that after the first puke, even when I still had two more pukes to go and was still feeling horrible. Even when my thoughts were managing under the pukiness and horribleness, there was this experiential understanding that this was genuinely vivifying.

I was able to see a whole new side of myself. It’s like hiking or going to a new cafe. It’s like putting yourself in a whole new environment. Literally feeling very horrible and in pain for 30 minutes straight, which only lessened but did not stop afterwards, which resulted in my third puke.

I might even puke again later, but the fact I’m writing this might mean I’ll just lie down and sleep.

I’ve learned so much about myself today and how I am under that kind of duress.

It’s weird. There’s genuine excitement about just relaxing, drinking water, lying down, reading, sleeping, playing video games. It reminds of when I got sick last year. It was so fun in its own way because it made things genuinely fun and immersive in a new way that I wouldn’t really experience if I was totally fine and well. When I got sick last year, I immersed myself so much in Skyrim. It was its own cool thing. And now, life feels so much somehow higher quality of life. You’d think a day like this would go sour, but boredom somehow is much worse.

It’s why I found myself doing 106 ten-hour cafe stays in 54 unique cafes in the last ten months. It completely disrupts your thinking patterns the same way the horrible agony I felt earlier that led to the puking kept vivifying the way I experienced the world and thought about it.

Somehow, life feels so much more alive and greater and higher quality when you’re not just relaxed and sitting down and there’s genuinely a sense of getting shoved out.

This is not philosophy or a thesis. I mean this is how I am experiencing it. Somehow, life feels so much greater when you can feel it, really. Even if I may be reading and writing environmental spatial and bodily sensory description, somehow, words alone are just a bunch of words, but when you vivify them with the placeness of a new cafe below a condo, with hiking rain, mud, and sweat, with a long hot bath in a cottage rental in freezing Baguio at night, with formative memories from childhood, youth, and just general intense moments in one’s life, with puking that one rarely experiences (e.g., two years without puking even once).

Even if experiencing the words with the texture of this grounded, textured, vivified perception doesn’t automatically mean your writing reflects that, it does eventually get internalized and integrated before being actualized and enacted. Words are only as much as life.

To document my thought patterns during the peak of horribleness, I was thinking along the lines of the following:

If you’re wondering whether I’m recalling or actually narrating the real-time thoughts then, I was very, very present and conscious then. Even now, I am, given that I have all this to work with. This vivification naturally extends to the act of writing after the event, because your mind doesn’t truly differentiate between what happened then and right now. I was able to reach 4.5 million words in 1,000 days recently because of my life experiences. Sweat bleeds into word count.

Walking Without Legs (April 5, 2026)

When one has done everything in a day and also done so much already in a life in a good closure kind of way, how does one just sit down and sleep? Adventure still awaits me. But I’m like the ascent-plotting protagonist in the middle of the 1,500 chapters. I can stay here and settle and sleep and relax. It’s just a really strange situation: relaxed, adventure still upcoming, but also wondering in a big way. Once you reach a certain point in a long web novel, it really reaches a point where you have to answer that question. The moment it goes from establishing who the protagonist is, the world, and the way the story works. The moment it goes from absolute extrapolation to arbitrariness. At that point, you’re relying fully on the furthest internal logic, not from baseplate or pure extrapolation. Whatever’s coming now will be totally original and thus totally nonsensical except by absolute arbitrariness. There’s no shoulders to stand on anymore. You’re standing all by yourself in a complete world you made yourself. It’s full, but it’s come a long way, a long way out by itself, and now it must make its first true steps into total arbitrary-hood—its own self-reliant self-sustaining lived-in thing, in the way complete smothering darkness surrounding you can only reveal. In the blank void of space, how will you judge? You essentially cannot find anything to hold onto like a pillow or anything at all. You answer your own question in pure arbitrariness. This self-answering. Imagine sitting down and sleeping at the end of everything-in-a-day and done-so-much-already-in-a-life-in-closure. Nothing convinces you, because there really is nothing in the blank void of space. I’m essentially sleeping because I’m sleeping.

I suddenly don’t know what to do next. And the reason I’m only saying that now is that I know I’ll be given a host of reasons I’ve heard countless times before, and then they will say, “Ha, here’s a list that you haven’t heard.” I’ve heard that as well. “But ha! Here’s a list you totally haven’t heard.” Buddy, I’ve heard that as well. I’ve arrived at a point. Whatever happens from now on I will not be able to say anything at all about beyond what I do end up saying which is just part of the motion of things rather than anything truly revealing in the meta layer. The meta layer is silent, and the motion at best makes someone say the equivalent of “oh, the car is fast” while in a car, not in a literal sense, but in the sense of what is happening now experientially, not so as to say that the car isn’t fast or is a matter of just the car being just fast and that’s it or in any way, shape, or form so as to deny or acknowledge the car any more than what it is and even in what-it-is nothing more can be said and even in nothing-more-can-be-said, nothing at all worth saying I haven’t already considered so as to reach the point of leaving us with this point of nothing-convincing and absolute arbitrariness in the blank void of space. It’s not “I don’t know what to do next.” It’s “I don’t know what to do next” in the absolute sense of the phrase, not in the deconstructable “oh he used the word ‘do’ which I can then extrapolate to compel them to do what I consider to be my most revolutionary suggestion yet, which is to be, which again disregards the whole of the phrase and acts merely out of sophistry and bunch-of-wordenese just to perform depth” sense just to make a point that doesn’t even exist. See how much non-convincing extrapolation muck remains? How much more establishment is being waved at me when I’ve heard all of that gun-toting barkery before? Absolute arbitrariness is nothing-convincement. Take it or leave it.

Literally, I will sleep when exhaustion comes, but that’s not the point of this passage at all, neither is it not the point. It’s not the point in the sense that one could just say “well, stop asking questions, stop yapping, and just sleep,” but it is the point in that the literal sit-down-and-sleep is pitted against the “how does one just.”

I am walking like there’s no legs holding me up, where the ground and the legs should have been keeping me, well, grounded and emplaced, like I was working off something, like rain and land and soil and tilling and flesh and hands and rough-hewn timber from pre-existing logs and trees and ferns and mud and vegetation. And that’s not just literally legs, even if it is especially legs. It is legs in relation to everything else, in relation to a comprehensive collection of photos spanning my formative years, in relation to memories I hold in my head and can recall at any time or when I get triggered through a specific arrangement of inputs, in relation to my room where I sit with my legs stretched under the table, in relation to bantering with my friends as we ride jeepneys and eat at restaurants, in relation to family that I descend the staircase to greet and josh around with, in relation even to primal urges like libido and adult material, in relation to whatever’s on my screen and on the internet that is physically connected to a socket part of the wall part of the house part of the ground holding up the world. When there’s no legs, you get utter arbitrariness. It doesn’t loop back to somewhere.

Walking with legs answered everything for me. The very existence of legs linked me to everything else. I was never truly alone. Never in a blank void in space. To reach a point of pure invention. That point is not ignorant, it’s nothing-convinced. It has reached arbitrariness. The middle of the web novel where establishment and extropolation have been exhausted and met their ends. Walking without legs is impossible, but that’s why it’s so arbitrary. Once you reach a certain point, everything you do is impossibly arbitrary.

Walking with legs answered everything for me. The very existence of legs linked me to everything else. I was never truly alone. Never in a blank void in space. To reach a point of pure invention. That point is not ignorant, it’s nothing-convinced. It has reached arbitrariness. The middle of the web novel’s total length where establishment and extropolation have been exhausted and met their ends. Walking without legs is impossible, but that’s why it’s so arbitrary. Once you reach a certain point, everything you do is impossibly arbitrary.

I must sleep out of sheer leg-less will. It’s a kind of self-convinced arrogance that I can’t even imagine. How do you sleep in the blank void of space? Arbitrariness.

Absolute Arrogance (April 5, 2026)

I can tell I’ve healed because I’m experiencing my small neighborhood freshly again to the point that I thought that if I was going to move out, it’d just be to a lot here. What the hell happened?

Suddenly, my small neighborhood is so awesome. For the longest time, I never really went out all that much. I was staying mostly inside for 5 years straight. It’s crazy to think about.

And then to reach a point where it feels like a place I’m fine with living in like I haven’t been living in this small neighborhood since I was born.

I guess maybe my family won’t relate. I think they want to move on and get a house somewhere else. I mean, they went through things as well. It’s so strange.

I mean, it’s crazy. There’s a kind of utter domination in not living in some super fancy place. In fact, imagine living in some random apartment. Imagine just relaxing there. Maybe not even a lot. But can be owned. Imagine that. This small place that has a socket. This place where you live. Simple. Yet you don’t feel anything at all except this mind that can get so much from just about anything. Your mind is your palace. You have books and a computer where you write. You walk around, wearing a sando and shorts, but there’s this private smug grin. There’s this self-security and arrogance that comes only from freeing yourself from signals and implications and performances of depth. It’s so weird to live in such a sleepy little place that has no signals whatsoever, yet you have all this privately. It’s such a strange, pleasurable thing.

I can make genuinely good shit out of supposed “scraps”. Somehow, everything around me is just so fucking beautiful, wonderful, awesome, pleasurable, and so powerful. It doesn’t make any sense, but I guess it’s because my mind has been cultivated to be so utterly sensitive while also able to direct that utter exposure and sensitivity toward articulation. It’s a genuinely crazy thing. I feel like I’m genuinely going to live the fantasy that my younger self wanted. I wanted to be just a writer in his room and walking around simply. I wanted that kind of life. And now, I’ve done it, far beyond I could have ever dreamed. I feel genuinely free and adventurous because it’s expansion upon expansion even if I’m just here in this little place. My small room right now is also genuinely already good. Though I am thinking that maybe moving out to a lot or apartment in this same neighborhood will be its own powerful thing that I’m curious to see what will happen.

Though it would be more accurate to call the feeling “anti-phenomenological,” since I’ve seen too many “intellectuals” demonstrate a Cartesian concept-riddled metaphor-and-image-rejecting verbal-analytical “dissociation” that does not acknowledge the Proustian layer inherent in all knowledge. But I did use “anti-intellectual” because “intellect” as I insist on understanding it is Merleau-Pontian (i.e., embodied in a bodily sense). ↩
“Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.” — The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus ↩
Recall “speaking being’s creativeness” from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Though he does seem to select certain creators as Rouault and Pierre-Jean Jouve as capable of “pure sublimation,” perhaps as examples. Secondly, recall the idea of Minecraft civilization simulation event videos that combine entertainment with literal and hauntological potentiality and Hemingwayan “iceberg” evocation due to all that is inevitably left out in the final video from the host and that is given glimpses of in other videos by those who participated in the event. ↩
This is all followed by my recent achievement of closure, healing, and the end of my oeuvre, which has resulted in “self-actualization” and intrinsic joy (i.e., self-forgetfulness and doing something for its own sake). Writing need not externalize this, unless the “activity for its own sake” in question is writing itself, which inevitably leads us to the same result, but from a very different drive, that of fun, curiosity, interest, and play. This passage itself was written during this new period. It is the kind of thing I do for its own sake (a Stirnerite and Bachelardian kind of wordplay) and then toss away to do something else that’s fun and curious, maybe this one older Roblox RPG game called “The Legendary Swords RPG” by the user Omega_RX. Or I could eat and then go to sleep. I’m honestly only writing this (and all my other recent passages since the oeuvre’s end) because it is a nice way to stave off boredom. ↩
The idea of “oneself” is always subject to inquiry. It ranges: Heidegger’s Being and eigentlich (as opposed to Das Man), the basic ontological orientation of the Greeks, Maslow’s self-actualization (in the sense of “reality [being] the self-actualization of the idea” through individuation or the always incomplete consolidation of pre-individual left-overs), Merleau-Pontian embodied cognition, Stirner’s “dialectical egoism” (John F. Welsh’s coinage) and “creative nothing,” Nietzsche’s Übermensch (i.e., aristocratic egoism), Hegel’s rational historical development as seen through his “world-spirit on horseback” description of Napoleon, Marx’s historical materialism (in contrast with liberal individualism and as differentiated from Hegel’s historical development), and Joseph Brodsky’s moral unique-esthetics, moral extreme individualism, cogitative originality, whimsicality, and eccentricity (i.e., private self, in contrast with banal or boring evil), for example. ↩
This “visualized” “empowerment” is not in the sense of “rule is cool” commodification, nor is it in the sense of a historically materialized self, nor is it in the sense of utility, but in the sense of a philosophized authenticity and what empowers it [the most] (whether according to self-defined self-actualization, Dasein and historicity, an “epitome,” an aristocratic egoism, or anything else). ↩
I used the King James Version to capture that authoritativeness, tradition, idealism, and sacredness (i.e., holiness) that I recall, internalized, and preferred throughout my Christian upbringing, even while being completely fine with New International Version in general too. ↩
Matthew depicts the contradiction between the pursuit of Übermensch and its reason of wanting to help others in a slave-like way, in the sense of Psalm 1’s blessed-is-the-man-that-walketh-not “the way of the righteous” (interpreted to be accomplished as a Brodskian-individualist, materialist, and pragmatist goal) and the sense of “might makes right” or “intentions don’t matter if there are no results that one has to “overcome” (the “slave” self) to make happen, making full use of a materialist view (through the desire to shed one’s empathy and become a selfish, self-centered psychopath so that one might stop getting caught up in buffer-less unstable emotions, anxieties, and guilt and start making results that actually help others even if there is no empathy to “know” the fruits of one’s “kind” labor in hopes that the Spirit might work through me in the form of sheer material results despite my unknowing or lack of spiritual belief) and “epitome’s” finalism (particularly not a “self-“finalism as derived from “becoming the totality, which is close to the sense of full potential, of oneself”). ↩
“My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile ↩
For example, Obsidian is not a bunch of code to the user. It is a tool, a vehicle, invisible prose, a clear pane of glass facing the street. (Treat yourself as the future user that will integrate the tool [term] into your own works.) Another example is a vicarious power fantasy protagonist that serves to bottle everything—the world-building, the side characters, the 2000-chapter plot, the complex magic system—into a name. ↩
Read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception for more on this, particularly the idea of present perception as passive memory (“colouring of memory”) as opposed to the idea of the “projection of memories” which supposes memory comes after perception rather than as the constitution of perception itself. ↩
“Golden tranquility” serves to capture the image of “gentle, mundane, and stillness as in like a peaceful balmy sunlit noon with birdsong, not gentle in the sense of cold and cozy, but in the sense of warm, optimistic, springy, and sunny, that non-uncomfortable slight sweat, that fresh, blowing breeze, that ecstatic climb up the slightly mossed, chipped concrete steps, accompanied by those rustling, murmuring trees, with those swaying grasses, the billowing shirts, the wind-swept dark hair, that ringing sound of the natural outside, sometimes with a slight mountainous or ‘dimmer’ (due to the post-morning shade) atmosphere in the clouded afternoons, but mostly a carefree Sunday-church joyousness with no moodiness, cozyness, or atmosphere-ness, just a straightforward, grounded, happy-go-lucky moment of spring and sunshine, contrasting brutalism’s dutifulness, the romantic library’s ‘thoughtiness,’ and the ascent-plotter’s strictness and strategizing. It walks along the street, sings, has fun with friends, and goes home to family to play together, all within that context of sunshine, Sunday, and springy woohoo!-ness. It is a simple Sunday moment being a paradise or idyllic. A sunlit sanctuary.” ↩
Corrected from “It”. ↩
I will keep this placeholder name because relevant specific titles should be in-game to capture different phases of my journey, different places, and such. Ironically, the reason for the name is that the first out of five test worlds was set to Single Biome and to the biome Snowy Taiga, yet the sixth world ended up becoming the actual one, and I spawned in the green plains. ↩
I entitled it after a web novel that I recall in Rising Stars once and it left a mark on me even if I never really read it because at the time I was thinking seriously about what got readers going and because its name was catchy to me at that optimum time. I might name the next one “Blood Shaper” after another novel from around that same time. Back then, it had a drop of blood as a book cover, but as of writing, after checking it again, its current book cover looks very professional. Though I do feel a little nostalgic. Fortunately, Asturian has kept the book cover since it was first in Rising Stars, but that’s probably because it became inactive at Chapter 30. Things such as this really struck me as interesting about web novels as a whole. The idea of something in trending just dipping in what looks to be five seconds. Though the truth is that that is already 73,577 words according to the statistics on its page. ↩
Think long, cramped jeepney rides, walking along “unwalkable” main roads, and coming across all manner of individuals that live upon this world, ride through cramped jeepneys, sweaty walks home, tangy smells, noises, pollution, and throngs over a sidewalk even so, and carry themselves with as much dignity as they can hold onto (like the metal bar on a jeepney or bus). Half a minute was all it took for me to get from walking beside the working class to sitting beside the privileged. ↩
That is, to work with claims, assumptions, frictions. ↩
This is not an endorsement of digressions, random stuff, sudden detours, and tangents that are interpretative-performative or instantly irrelevant and serve as filler! ↩
Not just fragmentation before the “dam” gets built. It becomes practiced, deliberate, proficient, sophisticated, the way a broken dam causes a catastrophe. Not forgetting like the way one loses an object. It’s when you live in a simulation that starts glitching. Your sense of reality itself starts failing, even while you remain high-functioning. Identity is optional for sanity and personality. But this is not a lack of it. This is fracture, a kind of non-psychological, non-physical, non-emotional trauma. ↩

Table of Contents

The world (January 8, 2026)

Out-of-Touchness (January 8, 2026)

State-dependent memory applied to music: real-time psychological experiment (January 8, 2026)

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

State B: NF’s All I Have

State C: Aphex Twin’s Rhubarb

State D: Silence

Conclusion

The Illusion of the Undemanding Book (January 10, 2026)

Empowerment, Exposé, and Return (January 11, 2026)

Power as Phenomenology (January 13, 2026)

Structuralism (January 13, 2026)

The Power Fantasy of Structuralism

The Practical Use of Structuralism

My Socioculturo-Intellectual Condition (January 14, 2026)

Style (January 14, 2026)

Digital Maturity (January 14, 2026)

Bruh, I’m done! (January 14, 2026)

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

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

Other thoughts:

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

Post-Epilogue (January 16, 2026)

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

Ship’s Logbook (January 18, 2026)

My Native Fiction Writing Style (January 20, 2026)

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

Cafe-Cafe (January 21, 2026)

Self-Responses:

Magic Circle (January 21, 2026)

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

Loading [Act Two]… (January 21, 2026)

New Journaling Style (January 21, 2026)

Weight of Ambition and Golden Tranquility (January 28, 2026)

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

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

Self-Responses

Will Your Bubble Withstand the Goblin? (January 29, 2026)

Self-Responses

The Death of Artificial Constraints and the Glacial Passage of Time (January 29, 2026)

Eat or Not Eat: Integration vs. Fragility (January 29, 2026)

Recanting Golden Tranquility (January 31, 2026)

Integrating the Ability to Binge-Read Airport Reads (February 1, 2026)

Ambient Music Curdles Expression-lessness Into Nostalgia (February 2, 2026)

The Difficulty of Getting Both Tradition’s Good Prose and Web Novels’ Fresh Ideas (February 2, 2026)

Self-Responses

Section

Self-Responses (2)

The Doneness of Words and The Essence of Writing in the Act (February 2, 2026)

Isekaibility: From Passive, Stretched-Thin Off-Loading to Active Consolidation (February 2, 2026)

Self-Responses

Self-Responses (2)

Self-Responses (3)

Self-Responses (4)

Use the Level Editor (February 3, 2026)

Submersion’s Death, the Minimap on the Vision, and Stepping Forward Into a “Minecrafted” World (February 4, 2026)

Find the Eggs Vs. Infinite Regress of Realism Complexity (February 6, 2026)

Death of External Persistent Worlds and the Spatializing Porch (February 10, 2026)

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

A Writer’s Minecraft World (February 10, 2026)

Configurations/Game Rules:

Mods:

Technical Stuff

In-Game Setup

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

Self-Responses

Return to First-Person

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

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

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

Self-Responses

Writing’s Basis in Friction (February 20, 2026)

What the Fuck You Losers Doing in a Meetup? (February 20, 2026)

Occupying, Portability, and RPG Inventory: Isekaiability (February 21, 2026)

Self-Responses

Space -> Line (February 21, 2026)

Self-Responses

Back to First Person

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Self-Responses (3)`

`Self-Responses (4)`

`Self-Responses`

`Return to First-Person`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses`

`Back to First Person`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Return to First Person (2)`

`Self-Responses`

`Return to First Person`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Self-Responses`

`Return to First Person`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Self-Responses (3)`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Self-Responses (3)`

`Self-Responses (4)`

`Self-Responses (5)`

`Self-Responses (6)`

`Self-Responses (7)`

`Self-Responses (8)`

`Self-Responses (9)`

`Return to First Person`

`Self-Responses (10)`

`Self-Responses (11)`

`Self-Responses (12)`

`Self-Responses (13)`

`Self-Responses (14)`

`Return to First Person (2)`

`Self-Responses (15)`

`Self-Responses (16)`

`Return to First Person (3)`

`Self-Responses`

`Self-Responses (2)`

`Back to First-Person`

`Self-Responses (3)`

`Back to First-Person (2)`

`Self-Responses (4)`

`Back to First-Person (3)`

`Self-Responses (5)`