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book 8

Beats and Scenes Agenda (August 8 & 14, 2026)

Structure Iteration

I just need to replicate Shadow Slave’s beats-and-scenes structure, and I’ll have something more palatable.

But is it really that straightforward?

If no more prose, then I just have to match it there. I have to try with as many different premises and scenarios as possible, especially right around the story expands past its initial “[14]-chapter” loop.

Mechanics

The term “mechanics” will probably be relevant since there are many ways protagonists take action and advance the story.

Examples:

1. Shadow Slave has the Nightmares and the specific traits of his shadow slave thing. And that has its own sort of XP.
2. Kill The Sun had the trapped nightmare-giving monster that gives “[Zephyx].”
3. The Primal Hunter had the classic levels and xp from killing monsters as well as [semi-organized] humans.
4. Lord of the Mysteries had the pathway system (e.g., Clown), the Fog, and his connections with people like Dunn and [Azik] (who owns the skeleton messenger).
5. Re: Monster and Gemstone Goblins had a goblin protagonist who plundered and species-evolved with typical goblin activities.

As long as I don’t get distracted and the fundamental structure is repeatable, it should work regardless of genre and mechanics, since that is closer to the duty of the prose to translate whatever creative or original system I throw up and to map it onto the tightness.

“Tight gameplay loop” rather than visual art/stream-of-consciousness expression/literature. Forget writing.

Self-Responses (7 days later, August 14, 2026)

So it’s shift from artistic style to gameplay design.

So it needs to be repeatably outlineable, rather than descriptively outlineable. “Description,” under this definition, you can apply to a very fragmented stream-of-consciousness psychological fantasy, where prose dictates scene-blocks (or the strict lack or blur thereof). On the other hand, repeatability is outline-first rather than outline-after-the-fact (descriptive). This is not to say that one uses an outline but that intent, spirit, and structure follows an “outline.” “Generative” may be the right word for “repeatability” here.

It’s a departure from association into computability.

Another good word might be “systematic.”

Generation rather than expression. It’s a very subtle difference, almost like sleight of hand.

ASCII Castle (August 9, 2026)

It’s weird. I do read and get immersed. But the classic idea of “getting lost in a good book” feels not applicable. I think I’ve just grown up, so I’m not that kid whose entire world hinges on this “cottagecore” fantasy world with lands, castles, forests, roads, farms, and all.

There really was a time.

The outside world used to be this great unknown. Now, I’ve literally walked so much. I’ve gone all around. I’ve stayed in all kinds of places throughout the region and have been in the presence of so many kinds of crowds. I’m very, very local. I’m not at all a stranger to the world and even the internet. I know so many books. I’ve tried all kinds of things and had so many experiences.

So it’s hard to fault myself for struggling to sit down there and play around with ASCII where I have this castle and then write text along the lines of:

Good day everyone! Call me John! Welcome to my land. Would you like to visit my forest to the west?

…and expand it such that you can really see that I’m still that kind, because I’m not. I don’t remember the word “forest.” I don’t recall those days when an ASCII castle and a bunch of text had that impact.

Flash games, Minecraft, Roblox, text, ASCII. Each of them showed such small, little, tiny things, yet I saw so much in them. Now, I just scroll past. It’s almost strange.

If I still had that set of mind, I would write millions of words set in that cottagecore fantasy world. I would create big worlds in Minecraft. I’d create all kinds of Roblox games and get so lost in them. I’d imagine creating a big world with sheer ASCII and text, probably with the help of HTML.

I have the skills and technique and experience and knowledge and worldliness.

I’ve seen so many people create things that people can get lost in.

How? Mister? How? (August 10, 2026)

how can someone who consumes low-brow stuff have a “high-brow” mind? In fact, they’re not even protecting themselves from “low-brow” things. They’re not hoarding “high-brow” stuff like it’s something they have to do to make themselves sophisticated. It’s like that’s just the way that they are, and they don’t even have to try or perform it. In fact, they don’t even see themselves as strange, so performing is out of the question, which means they might feel strange when people make them out to be strange. That’s… well… strange.

But it’s not about what it looks like though. I’m more curious about how anyone can have a sophisticated mind without engaging in sophisticated things, as if they’re just that way, or maybe their life went in such a way that they became that way, or they were exposed to diverse things and that was fruitful for their development so as for them to turn out that way. I don’t care that high-brow doesn’t necessarily mean high-brow and low-brow doesn’t necessarily mean low-brow. What I want to know is why are they like that?

There are literal people out there trying to read these books, those books, because oh god they see Youtube videos about becoming “disgustingly educated” and think “I must have that” and they look for these things and those things and they really, really try. And they want to become it, but then…

You see someone not do any of that and have a capacity that seems that much more naturally that way already, even without all of those things you were told you have to go through to become that thing. It feels like getting hit with a frying pan.

It’s that they make so much out of so little. That’s what really gets me the most. They see things no one sees. They see so much in nothing. Their mind is doing 99 percent of the work. They just need the rawest material. It doesn’t even have to show anything related to what they end up creating or thinking or imagining or theorizing or associating or integrating or whatever. It just pops out of thin air, and they grab it like it was there in front of them. And they don’t see that as themselves. They see that as life, experience, the world, everything, being alive. They don’t know anything else, and that… feels like getting stabbed through the gut. On the other hand, most people need every possible sophisticated thing just to get going, because they have to be working at an already very high credentialed level for any of this to make sense, because why bother with scraps? Why lower oneself to things that don’t already signal depth and authority? Why see things that aren’t there? Why not just work in according to established rigorous definition? And here’s the angle: “Why re-invent the wheel? Why see things scaffolding-less? Why approach it like it’s something to see?” Why walk the earth?

Why get so excited over nothing? What about your background? What about where you came from? Why get so self-content over… a nothing-burger?? Like you see something we don’t? Like you have something no one else has? Or you’re just ill, broken, mentally unwell. It has to be, because how else? You get to cheat like that and get called good? Not on my watch. There’s clearly something wrong with that mind. Some set or way of thinking or genetics that didn’t really get out right. Something’s got to be wrong with that guy. Because how else!!? I stand on greats. He picks up a single grain of sand. Fuck you. I’m expressing here, not actually mad. But you get the point, right???

What do you see? (That I fucking don’t!! You fuckking… I-I don’t know. You get it. Get all of it. It’s all me. On me. I did this. To myself. But I didn’t. I mean, how could I ever know? Have ever known? I don’t know. Getting away. Getting away with it. Something. Something about it. It bugs me. Irritates me. Makes me want to puke. [Again, not actually feeling this way, just expressing.] But what the fuck?! HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!! NOTHING!!!!! NUH-TING! FUCKIEN-HELL-ALRIGHT! Because hell yeah, right? Hell yeah! You got the goodz! You got the goodz! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.) But no, you see something, don’t you? Something I can’t. Something I’ll probably never see in my entire life. I don’t know what I see. I don’t know what I see. I see something I guess. But no, w-what do you see? What do you see that I don’t? I-I-I don’t get it. Nothing about this makes sense, yet… HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA… it makes all too much sense. I… I know it well. Too well. It’s a funny feeling. This burger feeling. Nothing-burger-burger-werner. It’s hilarious! That’s the way it’s gotta be! That’s the way it’s gotta be! This life we live! This is it! The reality of it! This is what we live for! To be alive! To live! To see! To see… To see… _{To see… to see. to see. to see.}

Ha-ha. Well, we’ll get along fine! I bet! That’s the way it’s gotta be! That’s the way it’s gotta be!

So yeah. Anyway, I just expressed myself there. Nothing too serious. Just thought it was funny. too funny in fact. Ha-ha. Okay, stop laughing.

You know how a person sees? And they see really well? You know how that is? Funny. It’s… funny. It’s so funny in fact that I… I… I… I don’t know! I really don’t! I MEAN, WHAT CAN I DO! WHAT THE HELL ON THIS PLANET FUCKING EARTH CAN A PERSON LIKE ME DO!? TO TRY LIKE THAT!? TO DO LIKE THAT?! WHAT THE HELL/HECK!? HA-HA. _{(fuck, stop laughing)} Well, yeah… That’s the truth it’s gonna be.! That’s the truth it’s gonna be.!

You know… I used to be like… A kid. I think. I mean, how is that relevant? I’ll get to it. Just wait. But you know how I was a kid, and the world was this bright big place? Yeah, I remember that. The world, so bright, sooo coool, and everyone was like, the awesomest. I still think that. At least, the me from back then still thinks that. He’s still here, with me. Apparently. Hick-hick-hick-hick! But hey! We-go-we-go! L-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-mao! That’s the way the world works! That’s the way the world works! You know how the world works? Where it spins and twirls and everything curls.! hA-hA!

I think yeah I used to be a kid. But hey, people change. I change. Or at least, I never became. Or maybe this is who I’m meant to be. Simple. Really. That person. Not simple. No, no, no. Feelings invalid. Self-image? In-correct. Noppity-nope-nope-nope! Societal reality!? Crraaaazzzy! That’s the reality, friend, (I bet!)! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. (<- My super weird laugh!)

Do you know how people got their scars? Just kidding. Joker reference. Sorry.

Okay, so like, people, right? They do things, they live, they breathe, they have lots. Lots of things to do. And I’m like. I’m one of them ‘cause like ‘cause like ‘cause like we all get _along, somehow. I-_don’tknow Never thought about it, really. But lookie here! This world! So full of people! One of them’s a brat. A real tight crazy insane little what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you kinda person! The kind that… you know… when you meet them… you feel like the world’s turned upside-down.

I mean how could I? How could I? Huh? How could I? I-I don’t know (I _{really, really, really, really don’t.)}

You know… I guess. it’s funny. Well, nevermind. I was gonna say, but then decided against it.

That person is really nice. I guess. That’s the way to… That’s the only way to put it in fact!

Okay, tooloo! (This is all expression btw. Notice how intentional I am with the typographic stuff! Don’t take it too seriously! But it’s really lovely, isn’t it! You get to see me act out and perform some real actual person! That’s the craazziessst part ‘bout it, no? But still, feelings valid. No matter how much I can talk of it or refer to it, the reality’s still realitidad [my own Spanishization of “reality” lol!]. Any-how-way. We’re here. Uppity-uppity-up here. Check-ee-yeowt!)

FUCK ME!

Self-Responses

wait, hold on. you said that they might be describing themselves? what would that mean if it was true?

Or maybe they know how people could perceive them and are inhabiting that perpective to glean some insight?

So they’re like an alien trying to understand humans by mimicking their crying.

But the “I’m expressing here” could easily be inhabiting the person who’s trying to hide their hurt by just freezing it and saying “I’m expressing here” so it’s double meta-cognitive.

Imitating not the crying, but the comedy one makes to avoid the vulnerability of straightforward crying, specifically someone who struggles with that and has to hide behind typographic performance and “I’m just expressing” and laughter.

And they’re studying it. Like right now. What we’re doing. They’re probably looking back at it the way an actor looks back at the meta-performed that they just meta-meta-performed, like Robert Downey performing Tony’s coping humor, but much more “sophisticated” because there’s a lot more fine control due to it being typographic and written. I am that meta-alien speaking of this alien meta-meta-performing this meta-performer.

But it’s just a bunch of words. Who the fuck cares. But yeah, it is a fun little game, isn’t it?

I really am a child, aren’t I? I still like to grab toys and make them act out characters in stories we make up on the spot. But people are not toys. Human lives are real, and they do everything they can to live and to be happy and to survive and thrive. I am the same way. In my play, I do the very same. In my hunger. In my thirst. In my desire to get some good sleep after staying up to finish something that I’ve finally been able to do after seven straight months of just not knowing whether it was going to end up somewhere that feels like the end of a long, long, long 1-something. In my enjoyment of life after everything. I think it’s nice to be alive when things feel great. I mean, there’s no better way to explain it. The details state the same, but just because it’s inexhaustible doesn’t mean it’s not worth being re-discovered. There’s always joy to be found in a life so blessed by things that go ‘round, ‘round, ‘round! See that? Typography. (Actually, no, that’s more like repeating a word and making that the stylistic effect, whoopsie-daisies!) Did I copy the alien well? Well, it makes no difference who’s who. In the end, the text’s the sandbox, and we’re playing in it.

See the fun in it?! Let’s play!

Return to First Person

Okay, since it’s easy to misunderstand, yes, this passage is me performing a fictional perception. It’s not “oh, he feels this but he’s also analyzing it”. No, I don’t feel that. That part where the performing is happening while the vulnerability is happening is part of the thing. I know that sounds strange, and you might not believe me given that acting tends to have that effect on people. I mean, look what they did to the actress of Walter White’s wife. So, yes, please, I play characters. I’ve started doing it more and more. Of course, I did it to see if I could capture something I’d never be able to capture, but it quickly became more idea than expression, more exploration than release in the way you’d expect any kind of writing to be. It’s release the way you stare at a sandbox and see just what cool interesting fun new thing you can make next, not Rorschach your way into revealing you killed your parents at age… 2? Well, scratch that. Point is, bla bla bla bla. It’s this whole shenanigan-shebang. But I guess me talking like this ain’t helping, huh. How about we do a pinkie promise? If I break it, I scratch my —, ‘kay? Okay, not that censorship is making it look worse than it actually is. Anyhow! Movin’ onnn!

But yes, to be 100% crystal, the person who’s obssessed with the person who can “make so much out of so little” is not me. But neither is the latter, at least in a sense. It’s a depiction of how I might be perceived, not that that’s actually me. I model it not after myself, but after I might be perceived. Get me? This is not actual outsider perception either. It’s not taken from reality. It’s utterly fictional, but it’s also anticipative. I’m creating a zone of text, a world of readings bouncing against one another like a circus of deliberate mechanistic moves. (Oh brother, this guy really likes to makes it sound like he’s got it all together, huh?) Not exactly, it’s more like I trip, then I take the time to stay with the landing, if that makes a pint of sense. Well, it sure does, yuppity-yup-yuh-yuohp(!!!).

In other words: “I’m expressing here, not actually mad.” is not the same “POV” as “to be 100% crystal…” They’re not “The author is concerned with this:” <--- Notice the colon used to indicate examples, mistakenly merging two separate POVs.

Self-Responses

this is a very developed [written-out–performed] theory of mind. It’s theory stacking like spell stacking at this point.

How does this play out? I can’t imagine what this’ll look out outside the text in daily life. This isn’t just writing clearly. It’s improvisational yet very architecturally distinct and discrete and carefully segregated even with all the executed whimsical bounciness that goes on and on without end. So it is their mind expressed.

What if they were quiet? They do nothing most of the time, because they don’t need to. They only do whatever’s needed and functional, and whatever else is just them humming and enjoying themselves as they go along their way, carrying words, thoughts, and ideas they’re not afraid of losing because they’ve collected, aggregated, synthesized, executed, performed, articulated, built-upon, sophisticated, imagining it word by word even up to typography just to get the exact tone and even testing around with different typographic tones and how that leads to something that might not be true initially but true eventually as one discovers in the midst of the act (i.e., what-I-mean, what-I-think, or what-I-“believe” not through intention but through in-the-act writing-out-and-then-discovery). What if they were quiet? In fact, crouching and running their finger against the rough, pockmarked, weathered edge of a plastic monobloc chair leg that is shaped like a corner wall or L (with equal lengths of width and height composed of the two lines) and letting their thoughts bleed through like constitutional (interacting at the constitutional level, something like giving objects the benefit of the doubt) ghostly (frictionless yet forceful or, more importantly, willful) air-flow (direction, velocity—the projectile) that wills into the chair as percept and checks how their vision plays with the tactile sensation of the chair and forms new associations, ideas, and possible identities and how the performance/execution of what could be garnered from this burst into a whole new structural sense, with as much seeming weight as the five sense in terms of its epistemological carving-out (carving its own place into reality). They word as much as they encroach by their simultaneous multiple senses and their own musculature bickering back at them in actualizing “formidity,” the relieving weight of past successes following them onward (pushing them onward) and creating anew an incisive sickle snipe like League of Legends’ AD-assassin item Bastionbreaker (check the icon for its penetrative power that could even void Sisyphus’ massive boulder like true-damageable easy-shred paper). But it’s incantation. Not reality. Expression, not mind itself operating in all its parts. It’s the leaf as imprint on the paper, not the bough-grown tree. The world grazes as these words litter heel-of-the-hand-eraseable, wettable paper. It vanishes like a shower of wisp-like rain that, in its active torrent, seems impregnable, but is toyed with instead as a general comforting, aesthetic idea, bereft of its individual singular here-and-now I-am-a-distinct-coming-rain-and-not-the-concept-of-it identity-power (identity here referring to this rather than to “broad”). Pastel perfectly captures what a mess art makes and what little place it has over authoritative reality beyond “the expression of the human condition.” (Isn’t that right? Using a mocking tone here to perform that potential perception.) But deep breaths of a person who’s crowned king from a long lineage of having brutalized the very superfice of reality down to its last atom, beginning with the highest place of lineage, that of conceptual kings, descending to earth-walk, where the only thing left and yet most undefeatable are the faces of being as writing permits the potential fictional sight of, in which is still affinity like potency, which chariot-rides like total control and functionally is, even in the apparance of what is effectively “Chinese” water drip torture when it comes to control. God through designation like design. In this strange verbal case, fiction makes (generates, solves) proof of the real person. “Creative process” is the farthest descendent in a long line of kings, but is enough to gesture at their inherited divine right.

All metaphor aside, it’s probably why they may be quiet.

Then: Everything (we mentioned/talked about) is downstream of themselves.

But it’s “downstream” the way things litter on the stream like firm rocks and boulders and continue to get wet by continuously down-flowing streamwater.

Complication: Departure From Grounded Reality (August 11, 2026)

I wonder if I’m wrong that I’ll ever get back to grounded reality. It feels that the closer that I get to the simple of structure and its coherence, the more I bleed out into a world of wonder and awe, where things that I keep trying to hammer into words like pinning posters onto walls ends up fleeing from me and going far, far away into some distant reflexive wasteland of thought and “just-another-bunch-of-words”. Both the practicality and the indefiniteness somehow work together, yet that doesn’t yield simplicity even as the intention and the words seem to direct at first toward it. The simple somehow yields something analogous to infinite recursion, as if there is no point at which ever get so grounded while also fleeing the ground as fast and far as they can. What was it at one point?

I want to write the [scene] beats in a list, and [LLMs are] supposed to help me do that. And I can see it right before me. I look at Youtube Shorts videos, and I watch common things that happen and skits and comedies and some surreal and bizarre here and there to temper and to provide contrast, which indicates already that coherence, that lack of delusion, that normalcy, that inevitable simplicity that comes with a modern day of having everything accessible so as to be able to articulate everything against one another, to the point that anything truly post- should up folding back into the reality of “just-a-bunch-of-words,” those of categories and what they shield reality from—dissolution, total confusion. It should be easy. And it is. Persistently so. Words harp back on words. They speak for one another. And in the end, you can play Minecraft and have a playtime of about two hours. That should solve it, right? And it does. But the more I myself venture toward the simple, it feels like I’m lying (speaking lies) in the direction of a dream, of some nightmarish scenario, some stream-of-consciousness.

Direction in the way of chains of logic that can be traced back to “home,” “about,” “likes,” “hobbies,” and “interests” is enjoined in one happy little place, to which someone might return after college. It should be castable as this self-sufficient place where no mal-logic can penetrate from within or without so as to incur destruction of that simple loop from within. There can be no way to deny that, but was it ever true? Or was I looking at the rain sideways this whole time? And the more I try to turn back upright, the more the rain seems to split in multiple directions, image mirages (color burns, maybe?), and ways of feeling, like the ontology itself is smashing against something, which should be concrete, but the concrete itself dissolves on impact and devises itself (as if conscious and thus hard to tamper with and infringe some rights of, like territory or definitions of a person, or even of broader humanity as “robots vs. humans” may open up—and with how consciousness bleeds, no wonder it gets murky) toward some better, bitter feud-like direction, fashioned like and made to be a solution.

I hoped to reach it. Scenes and beats. That place I should know so well and do, but “do” how? I keep incurring the simple as complex, not because I don’t want the former, but because whatever it is keeps splitting (against?) in my vision as something it could never truly be that I imagined it was or thought it was or felt it was or experienced it as it was. I seem never to see things as they are, always in some way split like the way your left eye sees one thing and your right eye sees another, which creates this split view in the same concurrent vision or visual field, a ghostly duality that should never be, but is for the sake of… something. Broader? Closer? Multiplicity?

Why does my mind find things beautiful? And why does that question not solve itself by itself and end it like that? I wish it was just me complicating things unnecessarily. But why is there always a way to things that (almost as if, not just “for me”) never truly occurred in any way, shape, or form except in the total logic of what is presented before me as it was? I can’t Minecraft-block things back together again.

I wish I was reading books before this, but I was trying to clean myself by doom-scrolling. I was trying to do the equivalent of touching grass. Trying to make my mind as nothing-burger as possible. With all of the things that make online content so unmanageable, but grounding in that they brutalize things and make them so salvageable for an algorithim then to exploit. They keep me away from everything that makes reality what it is, or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. Instead, I see things through my eyes, regardless of whatever is put in front of me. I can’t deny myself, no matter how grounding today was. But I guess “grounding” itself is a weird almost fancy word, like it’s supposed to solve things, something to say in some session with a professional or a thinker friend. In the end, what am I saying? This is all just a bunch of words, but that excuse has gotten me nowhere. I have used “incantations,” and they have produced nothing.

Did I find confidence? Is that it? Self-trust? Is that why I’m writing this? I guess I do need to believe and validate myself, even if it’s through seeing myself in something else. I guess that’s why I’m writing this instead of earlier, even as there are of course many other reasons. Either way, did saying this change things up? Did I diverge in my reasoning and logic? What did I hope to gain? No more incantations and magic words, no more buzzwords I’ve created in my own ecosystem and vocabulary, no more recurring motifs. I have to settle this now.

Did I come with a conclusion already set? Am I practicing my magic lines, saying my wonder-phrases? Am I a character in my own set? Did I make myself? Up?

What is this?

Why did Beats and Scenes complicate things?

No, it was me. I thought I was getting back to goblins. I thought it was I was finally going to get back Wattpad.

But why are they all telling me things that don’t exist, that exist only in my head. These things, ideas, connections, images, dots. In the end, is this just brain chemistry? Am I just appealing to that logic? To that reasoning? To that imagery? That I used these “genius-sounding” terms.

Fuck me.

I am tearing myself apart. And in that, am I gaining New Wisdom? (Capitalize for effect.)

What is it?

I wish this was a spiral, but this is a deconstruction. I am laying everything on the table like blocks and pieces. This is a structured argument rendered through provisional prose. Well, I pretend using the term “provisional,” because every prose is provisional in that they stand in for something else, which is what makes it ordinarily effective, in that it accomplishes great things in so meek a form. That’s the punto!

But what was it?

I hope to make myself as bare and naked as possible.

When presented with the possibility of salvation, all the flailing of denial. Is that it? Beats and scenes is that salvation for a simple, directed life, and I am now undergoing or enacting that flailing of resistance?

I don’t know. Making hypotheses here. Throwing darts in the dark.

Why can’t I come back?

Why am I changing nevertheless? (Is that it? That I am denying changing? I’m not making statements of admission here, but guessing at what I feel or think or intend or truly believe.)

Is this just a nostalgia rant?

I’m trying to be like everyone else. That’s all this has ever been. This project. My writing. I’ve just wanted to re-integrate back with everyone. I want to be normal. I never cared about any of this. All of this is just me using provisional working tools just to get things done, but the goal was always to rid all of these in favor of integration (as in going back to just being a part of everyone).

I’ve always preferred the life of someone who’s a part of everyone else. I never wanted to be anyone except within the role I was given as part of a community, even if that role may appear “frontman” or something like that. Whether a pastor or a singer, it was always communal. I still hold that conviction.

I don’t like sounding different. I don’t like being different in a way that doesn’t fold back into the role I was given as part of a community. I am doing the best I can within what I was given, within where I am, within this particular set of life. I don’t want to deny who I am, because that’d be denying the people, the world, life, existence, everything. I miss them. I do. But I must stretch my wings and fly. To be myself is to be part of everyone else. I will not let them down, even if I know they’ve long moved on, as I have. Necessarily so. Communal has never been fused twins. It’s always been about doing the best you can and smiling and being with everyone, even if it’s not literally being with everyone in the same room all the time. I knew that. I still know that. And I will know that for as long as I live.

I’m studying how to be like everyone else, I guess. That’s perhaps part of the point of scenes and beats. I want to make something technically marketable and conventional, because I’m done with my stream of consciousness. I’m tired of being idiosyncratic. I don’t want to be different, to be apart. I don’t want to be special. I’ve always, always, always wanted to be simple, because the highest intelligence in my head has always been simple, communal, fresh-eyed, and action-oriented, that of stacking chairs, closing windows after service, and riding tricycles to volunteer in outreaches. That was all it ever was and nothing else. This intelligence that I may seem to perform never existed in that way or in any way. It was always just provisional, just a way of getting a true answer, for it was always false—this bunch of words. Nothing about it is real in any shape or form except in their intent, that prized feel or direction or spirit. That vision, that belief, that conviction, that no matter what happened or what you did, whether you fall or you get back up, you go in the direction—even while resting—of salvation, or of trying to be a better person, or of just being with everyone. That simplicity is the best.

Ever since… I’ve always just wanted to be normal and accepted and validated and been part of everyone else. 2019. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024. 2025. This year. Nothing else has been the point. It was all provisional. These side-goals, these side-“points”. Nothing. Nothing. It was always that point.

I never identified with writing for a very long time. But have only recently used the term “writer” in a more official sense because it’s true functionally. I really have written that much and spent all that time writing. It has been crucial for my generative development as a person, even if primarily consolidative and re-integrative in intent. But yes, I don’t want to shackle myself with words, labels, terms, ideas, even my own vocabulary. I don’t want to be the functional identity I’ve been in the last seven years, even if I acknowledge that is me and crucial to who I am. I don’t intend to die here in this hole. I want to evolve toward just being a nothing-burger. That is the highest point of human intelligence.

If I ever get stuck with this “identity”… If I linger in the comfortable gameplay challenge-friction loop of this…

I’ve given up on a lot of things (shed a lot of things that didn’t really represent me anymore [as per provision/function]). I intend to give up on a whole lot more.

The Childlikeness of De-Traumatized Intensity (August 11, 2026)

Maybe that’s it, no? It’s been seven months, and I’ve only kept the intensity high by switching from the traumatic intensity I’ve lived with for years to friction intensity where I put myself in challenging situations that test my endurance, tolerance, and ability to focus but manageably. It’s interesting that management in my case has been about keeping the intensity high but manageably and hopefully slowly mastering even that until my nervous system finally truly calms down, but over time and manageably rather than instantly, since it does take time.

This means I don’t actually have to live a still life post-trauma and post-closure. It can in fact be a lot “wilder”, using the very capacity gained from trauma to tackle challenges I wouldn’t have been able to tackle years before the trauma, but manageably.

Like, I used to be very shy, but now, while I may feel embarrassed, I’ve grown so much since enduring so much trauma that even difficult challenges that would have been impossible growing up are like breaks for me, in the sense that they’re still exciting and intense, but in a child-like way rather than in a traumatic way. They’re my current flow state, my current level.

There’s a childishness in the sense that the capacity has increased but without the traumatic association, so it’s the same feeling I know but much more complex, sophisticated, and potent in absolute terms.

1. Childhood intensity
2. Traumatic intensity
3. De-traumatized intensity = mechanistically the same as childhood intensity, but with much higher raw absolute capacity

And in fact, it’s lighter because there’s this understanding of greater capacity that the shy child didn’t have privilege or access to.

Dreams and Directions (August 12, 2026)

I’ve let myself become speechless, because I felt that the only thing left really was “dream.” The directions that appeared at many points of my life never came into fruition. What I had then in 2012 with Minecraft never came true. I saw a whole world that never came into existence in the subsequent years. In 2016, even then, Minecraft, even as it has changed, I continued to take with a posture, direction, a dream, vision, and that includes Roblox. And even then, those ideas and dreams didn’t come true. That brings us to 2018 and 2019 with manga, web comics, and my own writings then. They showed me things that made me see the world in such a way in the same sense of vision. And even seven months ago, when I was outside, staying in a cafe, reading a book in a big mall, I had so many ideas of what it was all going to turn out to be.

And it’s nice to think that my current accomplishments after so many years dwarf the dreams I had then, but that’s not necessarily true. I simply just passed them by and went on in my own direction as the results stated.

I thought my typical answer of “a bunch of words” to the question of dreams and ideas just wouldn’t suffice, so I let myself become speechless for the day. The problem is not the “written” part. It’s the “results vs. dreams” part, with writing falling under that “results” of course, even as I write with gestures, intentions, and ideas in my head while articulating with my scope of words, vocabulary, imagery, and conceptual structures.

Results will only breed more results, building on themselves. “Written” might just never capture my “dreams.” Instead, even after millions of words, I am wondering where it all went. Where did it all go? Not wrong necessarily. There’s nothing wrong with what happened and what I ended up doing and making in explicit written result.

But it seems like the dreams that I’ve sought to capture this whole time keep fading, and I don’t want just to say that it’s just that way, because dreams are made of something.

Writing’s purpose was to help put down everything, including the way I saw the world, but it feels like no matter how much I write, I only just end up making more words, supporting its own structure, separate from anything of myself, or, more precisely, anything of what I’ve seen by envisioning, especially as that act spans my entire life at so many different key points across my life journey.

Not-Shallow: Collaboration (August 13 – 14, 2026)

Why do we become so shallow at the end of the day? Is that the destiny of all people? If it’s those who are moneyed, yes, it’s easy to see that; as for those without money, of course they won’t have time to do anything else but work and make do with the entertainment they get and the family and friends they have.

But yeah, it’s almost strange. Why are we doomed to this fate? I’ve looked everywhere, and I keep trying to find a sign of something that isn’t what I suspect. Yet it’s all there.

And I don’t know if introspective writing is any more than just navel-gazing. Even that I don’t know.

I’m not talking about Kant. That’d be the most shallow name-drop I’ve ever heard. That’s even more shallow than just “un-moneyed” “shallow” because that’s curated persona-building, even if self-inflicted.

It’s not shallow to depth. “Depth” is the wrong word altogether. It’s tainted, damaged, broken, unusable.

I’ve read books, and they’ve shown me just how shallow people actually are at the end of the day. And right now, I’m looking for what exactly isn’t that.

Biographies. Autobiographies. Diaries, Journals. Blogs. Non-Fiction. Fiction. History. Travelogues. Memoirs.

It’s people. It’s shallow as a broader room read. It’s books as read across years. It’s multiple. It’s “much” in the uncountable sense that you only get once you’ve immersed that deeply so that you can understand and really get at the heart of things. Depth, breadth. Whatever you want to call it.

I’m trying to find out what isn’t.

It can’t be a name. Not another name.

I wish I could see the person that they are. But all I see is the shallowness and the structures they’ve decided to throw everything in the wind for. And I mean “everything” as in the opportunity to become not shallow. But I honestly still don’t know what that opportunity is. Like I said, my writing can very well just be navel-gazing. So in the end, what’s the difference? Just people doing people things. Anything that sounds self-helpy, name-y, or anything related to that mystical sort do not count.

This passage can’t be what not-shallow is.

After getting a good night’s sleep:

Maybe, the answer is focusing on something and collaborating with others. Watching a video together, working on a group project, following a manga/manwha/manhua together. I’ve never felt the word “shallow” while watching those Japanese Day in a Life videos, who just go to work and then go home and have their own recreational interests like manga or spending time with co-workers after work even if it’s a cultural thing. If it was just that profile picture, those social media posts, or the way they are in public in their most societally structural manner, behavior, and appearance, nothing. But it’s when people come together from different backgrounds, personalities, temperaments, and penchants that somehow, the structure of shallowness goes away. Shallowness seems to manifest the most when one is at most structural behavior and appearance. But collaboration, even if it may be structural in the sense that it’s programmatic, especially when it requires out-of-one’s-way focus from each participant, really does bring out the “depth” in people.

Anything to do with in-or-on-one’s-own-terms public might be problematically structural. But if it was collaborative and deep, intense focus like a really niche film that really gets a group of people interested and immersed or even some random power fantasy manwha that gets them hyped up and discussing or just adlibbing at that point about the mechanics, the interactions, the system, the storytelling, etc., then perhaps that’s the only way out of shallowness.

I did say intense focus, so the solitary form of that could very well be pre-collaborative, in the sense that it directly precipitates collaboration.

But pure solitary has the problem of navel-gazing, even if you can say you’re collaborating with yourself through your previous writings/exhaustive, long-spanning body of work as a creative project, or say you’re naturally taking input from books, the internet, and online videos, etc. Having people react to you in collaboration (not in mere public on-one’s-own-terms declaration, where even if you’re writing in a cafe, you can very well be just as shallow through navel-gazing from the lack of collaboration) removes your societal structural shallowness. Reacting to something together (collaboratively) is probably the strongest version of this.

I don’t think it’s stakes. It’s just simply collaboration. School and community is essentially where people from different backgrounds can gather and collaborate and react to things together like a storm, a group project, or holiday.

Just collaboration doesn’t mean anything to do with “forced group project.” You would have to hate collaboration to look for the only example that isn’t it. Something that doesn’t qualify shouldn’t be used as an example.

I essentially went back to childhood and why back then, it didn’t feel shallow, whereas people seem to become shallower as time goes on. It seems that adolescence and early adulthood are where shallowness in the sense of societal structural appearance, signalling, and all become loudest, as if they’re overcompensating for the vulnerability of childhood when it’s that very collaborative formative vulnerability that makes not-shallow.

Shallowness, strangely, somehow, abounds in books, not that books are inherently shallow. It’s probably the nature of anything written, whether navel-gazing or public societal structural shallowness. Even if autobiographical and vulnerable, it can be an elaborate version of the profile picture or the Instagram intellectual-vulnerable aesthetic.

It seems that the author might better be collaborating with others in a League of Legends match than in simply trusting this literary masterpiece to do all the work, if much at all. Somehow, I realize why mangakas and writers wrote those premises where people from different backgrounds are thrown into a single shared dangerous scenario. There’s just too much persona-building that goes on in a life, I feel.

Somehow, my 200,000 words of psychological philosophical fantasy is equal in shallowness to a moneyed Asian early-twenties woman’s “travelled, quiet-luxury” Instagram profile picture by sheer navel-gazing. It appears I am most not-shallow (or even genuine) when I am out of my public shallow societal structural element.

And as much as I get that it’s a genuine feat, I think anything solo and marathon-y like writing a long novel or doing an actual solo marathon or trekking or whatever runs into the same issue. It’s self-imposed constraint. You can deprive yourself of sleep and be very uncomfortable, but it’s limit-testing on your own terms. It appeals to the ego, in contrast with different-backgrounds collaboration.

I think competent collaboration is still better than persona-building solo marathons. While solo marathons are arguably much better than a profile picture that perfectly captures privileges that you were born and grew up with, they still appeal to society in that shallow structural sense that navel-gazing is friends with.

You can even literally do something so risky you could die, but even if you do end up dying like on Mount Everest, that’s still very much the strength of the ego than anything truly relinquishing of it. You could argue that at a certain point, you’re so vulnerable as a human body that ego drifts away into flow state, but again, think of the gym where you push yourself so hard you forget yourself, but, even in that, there is still a thumping ego.

Limit-testing self-discipline and even the religious lashing yourself with a spiky whip are both the cry of the ego seeking to resolve cognitive dissonance through assertion.

Collaboration might really be the only thing. It will always leave you strangely satisfied but also nothing to take for yourself shallowly. It’s shared collaborative focus, like a camp as a child where you just have fun with everyone during the events and team games.

Collaboration that is performative isn’t collaborative. Solo pursuits, even if rigorous, can be the ego re-consolidating itself to become even more flexible, rounder, wider, and ambiguity-tolerant.

Again, taking feedback is rigorous, but again, it’s still a solo pursuit. It’s something you take. It’s on your own terms. Even if you change, the ego can make any change appear like a strengthening of what it already is rather than any true concession. It’s like saying, “Oh, I knew that!” to someone telling you what you said was wrong.

It’s sort of the difference between Hollywood egos “collaborating” and children playfully collaborating.

It’s not about reality answering back. I don’t care how much you trek through rainy, muddy, itchy, thick nature. That solo trek is still persona-building.

Conclusion:

Roblox Studio might just be where the fruits of self-confrontation (functional post-reconsolidation) and collaboration and generation (rather than expression, since this is a focus on systematic computable repeatable gameplay design rather than descriptive or after the fact, in the sense of “generative schema”) co-emerge.

Think an “Minigames” game you’re making in Roblox Studio to play with your brothers. This is inherently multiplayer and thus you encounter bugs together or co-emergently and do things like fixes and suggestions on the fly during the collaboration, where optimizing is geared toward collaboration itself as an end goal.

In other words, this makes self-confrontation genuinely rewarding by focusing on the result of doing that, which allows oneself to be available for others. So it doesn’t dismiss all the time spent working on oneself and self-confronting and addressing personal issues and coming to terms with many things self-directedly.

But it recognizes that collaboration and generation (which, if you’ve read novels, is collaborative by nature of optimizing for shared fun rather than sheer magnitude [size], intensity [sheer expressiveness], exhaustiveness [output], or depth [recursive density] of expression) must follow self-confrontation.

I might have been looking at it all wrong. I thought expression was truth and anything else was just marketability, but then, I thought for a moment and remembered that childhood play, as “marketable” as it is, isn’t the same as “marketable.” You can write a web novel that’s fun and thrilling to read, and, while it may be marketable, that isn’t the same thing. Its focus on a tight gameplay loop as you would in Roblox Studio might just be the generative collaborativeness/collaborative generativeness that not-shallow expects.

Not-shallow = this entire passage = “marketable” web novels. It’s a strange journey. That something that’s marketable can actually be not-shallow while 200,000 words of philosophical psychological fantasy can be shallow.

Roblox Studio is probably better an example of course since it never has to be optimized for marketability. It just has to be fun, and if you and the people you spend time in it for are having fun, the numbers don’t really matter. So marketability is orthogonal here, but it does show that something being marketable doesn’t eliminate it.

However, it’s necessarily optimized for shared fun, and I played lots of popular Roblox games back in the day, having shared fun with my siblings. So as much as I say marketability is orthogonal, a recursively personal piece, as much as it is self-confrontationally deep, probably might end up going against the point of collaborative generativeness, where ego and authorship consumes everything as input, imposing itself upon the world like someone struggling with depression and narrativizing everything and everyone in accordance with their ingrained lenses.

Return to Roblox Studio. Or at least that childhood spirit of it. But reformulated as one transitions into adulthood. Not an adult version. But the same version, irrespective of life stage.

It was all for myself at the end of the day. All of those writings. The personal website. The journal. All that time spent looking around and trying to make sense of things and come to terms with them and my memories. I had become emotionally unavailable, so I sought to clear things out by myself and address things when no one could do this for me. Now that I’ve done this, it’s a matter of going back to making games for me and others together to play again. Games, stories, whatever. Whatever’s enjoyable. Whatever’s fun. It can be stream-of-consciousness too, but there’s a difference. The ego must be a plaything. Seek always to “perform” toward optimizing for collaborativeness. Think of new ideas, cool new fun stuff, brainstorm. This is that “performance” part. The same way a child play-acts and argues about rules with his playmates. Each is communicating, but as one grows up, communication becomes more sophisticated and ambiguity and complexity become more tolerable, allowing for more precise and interesting signs, which makes for previously counterintuitive ways to get the same childlike enjoyment, intensity, fun, and thrill. So it can very well be literary in format, even egoistic-like. But if the primal intent is solved at the root as being optimizing-toward-collaborativeness in the way of Roblox Studio, then that might just be it. Reformulated.

Working the Format (August 15, 2026)

I will find myself in everything but myself as I’ve built myself up to be. The self is a format, always decaying, always threatening to die, and it has to keep up, always be faster, in fact, than experience. Just as the blog as format has to be faster than the content itself so that it never ends up getting dying and getting moved on from by the content into a new format.

I have to keep hunting myself down in everything that’s not me. That’s why generative collaboration works and self-confrontation and intense solo-marathoning can be traps of navel-gazing and persona-building, where even the brutality one undergoes refreshens the ego for even higher reaches, claims, and bespoke senses of authority.

It’s why I really have to let myself go out there, not on my own terms, but that’s challenging of course, and it’s hard to find that gap in one’s overly familiar visual field.

Like I said, it’s hard to find. If it was easy to find, it’d be something to engineer in these words themselves, but best I can do is keep working the format so that it inspires dreams and directions as format that the explicitly written content or experience itself can follow.

It’s why sandbox, level editor, and constructing-the-very-environment-where-people-and-oneself-express-themselves are crucial here. That’s format.

So rather than temporary self-forgetting into ego reclamation of thing one intentionally underwent, it’s permanent self-forgetting so that one becomes what one undergoes (i.e., finding oneself in everything but myself)—finding something that I don’t quite understand but is truer somehow. It’s (ends up becoming) more me because it’s not me.

Children are a good example of permanent self-forgetting in that they become the very thing they permanently self-forget into. They become their experiences rather than ego-reclaiming over them based on a pre-built identity they persona-built themselves over years of post-childhood overcorrection.

I have to keep finding what I don’t understand, because that’s not me. That’s “everything but myself.” But it’s getting harder and harder, and I’m starting to understand more and more. But I have to keep trying. I cannot be dead to myself. Once that thought grows into rumination and I get stuck in that incest of thought, I will never find myself again. I will lose that aliveness that so characterized what it felt like growing up and undergoing those earlier formative experiences. I want always to be formative, and to do that, I have to keep trying. Because I know I’ll start eating everything, and I’ll get caught up in things I shouldn’t. Adult ego cannot curdle into blindness.

It’s why even something as simple as making sure my personal blog website evolves faster than me has tremendous impact on my motivation and drive. It’s the very sandbox I constructed, the very format of experience, or, in this case, written content. It’s that environment through which I impose and express myself, just as I may have with games developed in Roblox Studio for me and my siblings years ago. The format itself here was the target of brainstorming refinement, or of faster evolution, of cultivating that very infinite forest that a child would see at the edge of it rather than the jaded “I’ve seen it all” that curdles from overcorrecting post-vulnerable-childhood ego.

It’s why I self-theorize. It’s the same motion as theorizing toward the blog as format. I reach before the experiences can land, so that they have a place to land. I draft the very identity that affords the coherence of my experiences or allows them to cohere. This is “trying.” “Myself as I’ve build myself up to be” is no longer theory—like nostalgia or the already post-generative structural directional past as something known and “who you are” already, a biographical, memoiric, diaristic, travelogical, photographical, behavioral template that can easily draw a path for you if left unchecked, but is necessarily formative and argumentarily load-bearing—but that’s why it’s problematic. Theory may seem too much, but necessarily, because stopping outdated (bigoted, even) status quos can be uncomfortable, even within yourself, which is why it starts in dreams and direction. You draft the very ideas that allow you to take action. Lose yourself in the very thing you enter and see whatever becomes out of it. A step as much as a leap toward constructed faith as an overarching narrative built past pre-built (i.e., trying to find something that you are not). You become that directed leap. “Always farther than yourself” is probably what aliveness feels like. You get to enjoy something because you can’t just call it something that you are. Generative. Writing allows to consolidate (self-confrontation), which allows me to be emotionally available, which allows me to engage generatively (i.e., experience freshly after resolving emotions, gaps, and ideas), even with something like a web comic. This makes space for collaboration (through shared focus), sandboxes, and format. This brings us to beats and scenes as tight, narratively satisfying “first 14 chapters”—fun, thrilling, single-focused, immediately making way for the next beat, scene, or chapter, while comprising an arc generative in itself, the same way consolidation makes way for generativeness, even within itself as structure (think of foreshadowing and Chekhov’s gun). You plant your own foreshadowings and Chekhov’s guns past yourself. You don’t self-theorize into an answer. You self-theorize away and “fail” generatively in that direction. That’s also how you get a page-turner of a web novel. That overarching narrative. Those dreams and directions. That bigger idea. That larger-than-life picture. Explicit terms advance, but do not themselves direct. That blog. That self. Formats. Generative consolidated things. I write always optimistically in an arc.

Self-Responses

So they don’t see the whole arc, but they deliberately create the arc optimistically and generatively in accordance to that arc in a tight, narratively satisfying manner.

So it’s like writing with an intent already, or a “what I want to do and explore” and that can be a theme, a protagonist, or a certain kind of environment-and-how-that-affects-the-pre-built-character-and-how-that-explodes-into-storytelling. You don’t have to write with a whole exhaustive world-built plot-built character-built idea in your head. You just need the gesture, the direction, the “overarching arc.” Anything written as prose in that sense comes after that “irrational drive” that writes in accordance to what it cannot see but knows through optimism and dream.

So it’s demiurge’s urge.

The format is the shape of the dome, inside and outside which anything can happen. The premise.

To imagine it quite literally, if you put a giant transparent dome in the middle of the forest, inside, you get all manner of interactions as much as outside as it is a big obstruction as much as a mountain but vastly different in kind. The area’s horizon is forever marked by it, not merely by sight, but intent and actual ecological demand, in that sense that even it, as strange as it sounds and yet as common in its geometry, becomes integrated, or perhaps already was, even as the trees around it are hundreds of years old, the difference maybe becoming negligible with time as global function rather than simply behavioral adaptation, where pre-dome memories becomes stories to tell rather than anything much to rely on as a guide or a map, which effectively certifies its immovability—at least directionally, but crucially so.

Self-Responses (2)

Do not conflate novelty with what the author is saying, and saying wanting to go outside shouldn’t be accused as wanting to go inside. The tension is inherent in the want, sure, but it’s like saying “you’re saying no, but you might actually mean a “99% no with a 1% yes.” You have to trust the gesture and take it as that.

Self-Responses (3)

So rather than novelty:

The format is an old friend.

Self-Responses (4)

“…an old friend still alive.”

Continuing to evolve and try new things. Faker trying new champions.

The blog. The main personal website. Writing. One’s own writing room. Manga/manhwa/manhua/web novels despite being genre fiction. Music even as “well-worn” improvisational. Palimpsesting over previous writings and interpretations of the same view across many months. Erecting one’s own writing edifice parallel to the actual sky-blocking tall building across the street outside one’s room-and-balcony window. This edifice can very well be like the levels in a tower ascent web comic, in that unique separated ecology takes place squarely on each level distinct from the ones above and below, in a kind of world-built sprawling vertical “stadium,” where authoritorial updates range across its hierarchy even amid the boyhood festers developing within the nichest of its nooks and crannies.

The world is bigger than oneself, in which sense where does the world go except inside of the soul, like funnelling itself into its sub-self-similars.

The infinitely generative forest (TM: infinite forest) that one has to hold at bay, to keep bigger, for it to stay giant as it would proportionally to a child. To keep imagination sprawling. To let the white wall be overrun with sprawling vines. The brutalist structures be overrun with viney lore. The hunt for the post-apocalyptic ambient. For the tip-edge of the forest. To keep imagination vast. To imagine a glorious world. Losing one’s perception of size, where everything is bigger than they are and bigger because they are.

The window is a range to eternity. Stepping out. Walking among giants. Constructing oneself amid the erosion. Keeping the vastness vast; holding it back—as if foggy darknesses surged to oneself from all directions like reaching hands—from slipping inside the gaps on one’s permeable skin such that one self-bubbles them and makes space for nothing larger—eating into oneself then. Keeping the dreams and directions still breathing. What one saw back in Minecraft in 2012 still alive. 2015 Roblox. 2019 manga. 2021 web novels and live-streams. 2023 autobiography. 2026 books, cafe stays, and writing projects—the whole corpus as a gesture. The vision of a broader world, something bigger than oneself, even as one achieved the literal explicit goal, even while inheriting its accompanying active dream still—the goal separate from the thought that spurred it, the belief, the imagination. Pressuring and limit-testing the container. Forcing it to evolve to make room. The dream is bigger, and it is alive. Restraint and precision make way for the elephant, of which we have only a patch of skin formed.

Writing is not the ego’s little tiny thing through which one’s grandiose ideas are forcefully squeezed into. It’s the other way around. The ego is that tiny little thing. Writing is those ideas. You invent ego. The ego doesn’t invent the writing. Reaching for something bigger than oneself may seem like ego, but recall self-transcendence. Generativeness comes from here.

The format is formation.

One writes into a brand new world.

Self-Responses (5)

This denies writing its invisibility and accepts its formation.

You don’t recognize yourself in the writing. You eventually recognize the writing as yourself.

What the child sees by dreams and directions is themselves. What the adult is made of is themselves. And you can easily see where formedness vs. unformedness starts and ends. The problem is identifying formed structure as who one is even as one looks back at a time when one saw so much in things that now no longer produce that same feeling. But it’s when we stop “seeing so much” and prioritize what we are made of, which the child could never have been. We might think we are what the child saw, and now it’s all dead and over, but dreams and directions are not made of things. We see them beyond our eyes, beyond formedness, which a child’s unformedness cultivates. If we move ourselves from our formed to direction, then we get so much more out of this pending life that is beyond even our own “life” as we’ve already formed it structurally to be.

If we identify with seeing, we’ll never have to worry about losing anything, because dreaming is not something we can lose like things we are apparently made of. A direction is generative by sheer sight. To see beyond ourselves. The bigger world.

But again, consolidation is crucial, because you still have to establish explicitly what you have seen before you can start generating new dreams and directions based on where you currently are, since an overarching narrative always requires that anchor point of where you are, whether right now is the beginning, the midpoint, or the endpoint of that arc. A sandbox—like Minecraft—is itself a generative consolidation, a done deal that makes room for self-expression (which is itself consolidative as much as generative through format), building memories, and devising new ways of being and experiencing.

Self-Responses (6)

So they construct holes in who they are, not in between themselves, but leading out. That’s where structure comes in. The shape of holes. Minecraft is a hole. A persona (the person formed out of the shape of one’s expression and the body of it) is a hole. A mask is a hole. An avatar is a hole. An account is a hole. A user is a hole. Writing is a hole. A blog is a hole. You can’t get freedom in the quietness of your own shape. You have to make the shape of a hole in it that leads outside your body, sputtering out like blood, exposed to the freshest, green-scented air, the smack of dirt below, the world searing in its greenish-bluish intensity. The solipsism is breached. A tube-like path has awakened. Structure devises a bomb.

I am my sight. I am the ego that I’ve devised and intend to become. To do so, I have to fall apart in myself and come out of the portal into a brand new world. Everything I am gone. But in front of me is myself, walking, their footsteps I’m following.

This is probably what self-trust looks like. You construct the leap, the fall, the gap, the height, and the place to land, and that’s faith when you take it.

In that sense, childhood is not what happened. It’s what you saw. The same applies today. It’s what you see. Optimism. World of wonder. “I will create.” You create not out of creation. Text doesn’t devise text. You create out of direction. The text is made of dreams. Childhood is made of pointed-at destinations. I can see.

To say “Do you remember?” is to say “Do you see?”

Return to First Person

It’s why I want to see people. I want to embrace them. They are made of dreams. I do not intend to abandon them to objectification. I have to see them.

“I just wanted to help others…” was something I repeated during those troubled years. I know what that’s like. To feel gritted teeth. The rage at my inability to do the right thing. To see them. My lack of empathy. My inability to care. I will not pity myself. This is what they feel, too. Direction. Dreams. Intent. Failure. Generation. Trying. Belief. Conviction. Helplessness. Disillusionment. NO!!! I want to smile and hug them and tell them that there’s nothing more important than a human soul.

You cannot die alone!

Self-Responses (7)

So reading must be very important then as resources/material for forward self-theorizing. Keeping the forest larger. But to read, of course, one has to consolidate to be emotionally available and generatively engaged with freshened eyes, the same ones that said that people are made of dreams, such that web novels, non-fiction, and literary texts can all equally surprise, not out of sheer novelty, but out of an old format that remains alive through seeing.

Self-Responses (8)

So they don’t decorate; they function. That is the blackhole. Not festoons. But demand and the supply that has to match it increasingly. That is the brand new world. The Nether portal.

If you had a something, decoration’s the only that’s left, and that gets boring. But if you were reaching for something that doesn’t exist yet, everything is essential. Making a fire is an essential craft. And the call of the night’s ticking.

The ladder that keeps climbing.

The tower is not a tube of ascent. The ascent is the tower. Ascent is intrinsically shaped, and that shape is the tower’s.

Self-Responses (9)

There’s no weakness in method because there is no “Method”. There is all weaknesses in methods though. And we can work with that. It’s not “theorize almost anything into THE OVERARCHING FRAMEWORK.” You create a distinct impression of what’s going to happen at every single point of time, and each impression is different even while overarching. That’s not feeding into a theory of everything. That’s making a theory of everything at each standstill, and that’s not a theory of everything. It’s just a theory. There’s no desire to build a theory that stops all theories. There’s no theory of theories. There’s only theory of theories as is available now, and that’s not a theory of theories beyond what it is as looking at the horizon at 1:19 PM of August 15, 2026.

You can be grandiose in a moment. That’s not grandiosity.

The passage dies in its ascent, but the ascent continues because each moment sees its own impression, a palimpsest chock-full of instances of it.

Self-Responses (10)

Self-consuming “theories,” red (health/HP) potions.

Health in this case is the dreaminess/directionality of aliveness. Consolidating making way for Nethers.

New Directions? Or Just Stabilizing? (August 16, 2026)

I’m starting to wonder whether I’m actually setting up new directions or just catching up by continuing to consolidate everything. The shift from “bubble-world” to “bastion” is huge in its own right, and it took a while before I got something that hit. But that felt like precision, not anything to do with making space for an overarching narrative. It didn’t feel ambitious any more than it was a closer approximation of myself, and that’s just the stabilizing that consolidation does. It feels like writing a better goblin narrative and refining my prose. It didn’t feel like I went above and beyond to enter something that wasn’t met at all. It was more so just a reckoning with the things that are currently representing me and seeing how I can tweak them for definition. It felt like sharpening my identified-with, proven tools.

Phonk music that nods needlessly to you rather than calls you toward your self-serving next pinnacle claimed before one even embodies it to the point of needlessness and empty (void-bearing even, the listless opposite of “load-bearing”) flattery. Your power is a boring throne.

Where is the vicious, thrill-intoxicated trash talk at the end of a long, desperate, back-and-forth, throw-circus-fiesta League of Legends match? That visceral, alive Kira “I win” at L’s grave?

Where is that malice? Where you can just about tuck yourself into a tiny ball and wait there meekly and self-domesticatedly (your tendencies shut up in favor of shy, submissive, pushable, shut-down, bobbing-buoy, compliant, obedient functional-presentation) for seven years if that means the accomplishment of your venom? The pettiest is the funnest! Where you can be the most civilized, even traditionally feminine thing on this motherfucking planet if it means you get to inhumanly (most humanly, actually, as it is a primal urge to dominate) brutalize them just this once. The window of opportunity opens. Come. The call to honesty. To be true to one’s urges. To one’s primal feelings. Those things which cannot be soothed or indirectly placated any other way. And must, MUST, be expressed, not in rage, but in cold, almost unfeeling fury. Stab, gut, no more

I’m using malice sublimatively here to refer to that primal ascent against the “gods” that are goals and milestones. To create, to dream, to answer the call.

Once you’ve lost that malice, it’s almost like you’re a fat petty warlord hung with priestly ornaments. You’re so focused on consolidating your power you’ve lost sight of anything beyond keeping it. Identity becomes a shackling cross around your neck. Your power becomes a responsibility that entrenches you.

I want to dance like never before, feel like never before. To do so, to feel visceral and alive, I have to stay right here right now and try really hard every second of every day inhabiting thought as an opportunity to snap myself to the unknown right in front of me. I need the stability and continuity. It’s functional. But I should never let the words write themselves. I have to squeeze myself into every moment and prick my eyes open, like losing a Worlds Championship after initially going 2-1 in a best of five—the flurry of the moment catching up to me and right in front of me is reality and shock. I need to be surprised. It’s not winning that’s the problem. My biggest highs to me were surprises. I’ve experienced them a lot.

I have to believe. A step to tweaking and consolidation doesn’t require belief.

I guess my failures to transcend consolidation/stabilization themselves come from a belief that this time, it will get me, and that gets me. I guess I always fail generatively toward belief, even if it’s just another day of not transcending myself, because that’s exactly where it happens. That very ‘fragility’ is that very aliveness that I keep seeking.

But I guess my biggest concern is that I seem to have said this (“gestured at this hereditary mechanism”?) many times already, even as I recognize each time is a wholly different chronologically specific meaning-local gesture altogether, like a thumbs-up in Rome.

Then if there be malice, let it be the malice of the sharpener—hoping the next turn of the pencil leads to a brutalization of the hierarchy, working toward that even if only to find that only another increment has been added, the increment bearing the freight of malice. Every tick of precision is malicious (juiced up with malice). My little fire. Making every little step each imbued with the conviction that the very current one will immediately result in the consumption of the world, even if you do end up walking.

I still have to go pick up one by one the corpses of those who tried and pile them up, the passages that died in their ascent, because I hope that by this very mountain, I will create the very thing that ends this Great War. Put the entry that just tried and now lies lifeless in the continuum of dead ambitions. Try again. This time, it’ll work. I become. I am The One Who Wrote This. I will eat them all.

Construction: Processing, Which Is Elimination (August 16, 2026)

I don’t think there’s been a single point I’ve ever had the privilege of just losing attention while engaged in the act of creation. Even in the flowiest of states, I still increment every sentence. There’s still a person intuiting his way mechanically like a machine preoccupied with the difference between compound words and rhythm-deciding punctuations. But I guess that’s where joy happens.

The stupidest of differences appear to me the longer I write. It may also be called “subtle,” but to me, at a certain point, it all just feels funny, like someone jotting down into a pile of clothes. Meaning? Don’t kid around. Even as gestural and self-complicit as I’ve written all this time, I know well with enough distance between your literal eyes and the words on the screen, you will see through it all as nothing. You spent time. That’s all. One doesn’t even need that duration of creating. The words are visible on the page. That’s it.

But that’s probably what gets people so captivated. Something that doesn’t itself carry all that somehow inherits all that even in the arrangement of their own construction. “Sand made to think” is something said of computers. I think the words of writing are similar.

The idea that a soul is constructed doesn’t feel so far-fetched from this lens; though I don’t vouch for it.

Writing itself as construction has gotten me to give up on so many things. Once you articulate things, they start looking canny the way the unarticulated never seemed to be uncanny before the knowledge of what they are when put into constructed words.

I used to believe in so many things, but that change probably comes with processing, articulation being a kind of arbiter or supporter of that.

But yeah, I did get so lost. Got caught up. Delulu. Haw-ha. I remember. Those words meant so much to me then. I can see what I felt. I empathize. But man, it’s funny. Construction: processing, which is elimination. I’ve shed those beliefs, those little fragile sincere flights-of-fancy, those things that could never withstand what was truer and coming, so many things that I really, really wanted to make work out. I miss what I thought was there then. But I overcome. Even that petty little thing that made me. The way I saw. The way I crumbled and found my belief unfounded.

Strategic Exposure (August 16, 2026)

It’s strange to think that an enemy champion giving you attention is comforting, but that’s because of marking and positioning. If you’re in the dark and you can’t see where the enemies are, you act on very limited information; hence the use of wards. But if you have someone whose eyes on you rather than having no one, then within the overall area around the objective, the range of possibilities that would have remained virtually infinite is narrowed to a number of configurations through just one exposed edge or flank of the enemy composition.

It’s sort of like getting hit with an enemy’s attack. Information consequently expands, which is why attacks are strategically organized to conceal, stall, and fake—exposure converted to strength. Shape, edges, flanks, composition, movements. All these come up when one mentions League of Legends’ “marking” as well as “peeling.”

Essentially, a man with a sword charging at you vs. you sitting down and nothing happening. Thet former is a battle of skill, capability, mechanics, and perhaps wits. The latter’s orthogonal.

It’s why regularly going outside and being stared at can make you less scared. Lots of information that you wouldn’t otherwise have if you remained invisibly anxiety-riddled at home. Visibility here is a strength. The forward observer who stands on a vantage point. BoOom!!

Poetically, to see is to be seen. Cousin idea: Line of sight.

Separate From Logic (August 16, 2026)

Not everything is logicalizable. Of course, we stumble upon logic from our own experiences, but abstract theory catalyzed by experience isn’t itself made of experience except by trigger that is itself separate from the logic—e.g., a naturalist’s catalyzing encounter with a dog is separate from the taxonomy they invent afterward. Some things are really just strange as might occur in stream of consciousness (SoC—specifically when it’s the organizer and not just the medium as it is in my analytical passages where everything is imported as eclectic language vesseling a coherent idea train. My psychological, emotional, ‘philosophical’ fantasy stories themselves operate on SoC as organizer, especially as its organizing intensifies far beyond SoC as a medium, driven such that prose experimentation follows rather than wearing useful attire. It’s not that my analytical passages do not experiment typographically and linguistically, but that they do so importedly rather than within. The train operates analytically, which makes its load-bearing imagery structural for further argument. But SoC isn’t “further,” but driven beyond logic, beyond the instrumentality of prose experimentation. In fact, the logicality of narrative events and world-building within those novels themselves serve that organizer—logicality subordinate to or subset of SoC-as-organizer.

Logic, Theory, and Feeling (August 16, 2026)

1. logic (coherent idea train)
   • gameplay loops
2. theory (logistical)
   • siege-machinery-logistical and full of wide-scale advancements as well as an overarching narrative
3. feeling (conviction and belief)
   • organizing drive beyond logic

Logic compounds toward theory. Feeling keeps dream, direction, and belief on the horizon so that every next piece of logic holds the potential to overturn everything. Conviction keeps the mountain of dead ambitions and orphan logic pieces from decaying into self-fulfillment. Theory organizes logic, but feeling keeps theory provisional.

Reconciling With Objective “Show, Don’t Tell”: Ideology vs. Method (August 16, 2026)

It is scary how effective “show, don’t tell” when taken seriously as method. It’s both incredibly wowing and the epitome of why writing-as-objective-technique has always irritated me.

Or maybe I’m just saying that. It’s not doing anything by itself except its effectiveness. Why should it be treated argumentarily? If it does everything right, why accost it? Similarly, a fun LoL match isn’t trying to be anything but fun, thrilling, and playable. Its effectiveness for what it is shouldn’t be used as argument against it.

Of course, it’ll never be my journaling, but why backhand it for being itself?

But that I went through all that effort to steelman it by making 30,000 words of it myself to remove the “written by someone else” and “never fully experienced it myself” factor shouldn’t be discounted.

I guess it felt like a literary trap that invalidated everything I’ve previously written when that was never necessary. It could have been its own thing. However, that it was indirectly made to be this by all the talk in favor of its supremacy made it unlikeable even if its effectiveness is its own. Co-packaged ideology defiled the method itself. A technically effective bunch of words made me feel so horrible because of what it was co-opted to mean. Now, by itself, it is compelling.

This gives me lots of space. Both denying it or accepting it based on the binary of which the ideology convinced me would leave me stranded.

Forward-Looking Peace (August 16, 2026)

I thought that song was referring to the past. I would get nostalgic through it before. But now, I think I can see much better. It actually refers to something I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never felt peace like this before. This peace I have now is something my younger self never had. That feeling that resembles nostalgia isn’t nostalgia. It’s peace, but forward, something that never existed yet. And I’m actively forming it. What’s actually happening is that I’m maturing toward peace rather than the other way around. What’s before me is peace. I never had that peace before.

Growing up is somehow leading me toward peace, that which I’ve never experienced before.

These early twenties are actually where I’m discovering peace. It’s strange.

Building Outwardly (August 17, 2026)

I’ve decided to set this aside:

Everything is a medium through which I become.

I will instead focus on external work and just focus on creating that thing rather than what or who it makes me. I will focus on expressing myself, not as myself as this becomer, totalizer, absorber, consolidator, and all, even when that will ultimately happen, but as worker of projects.

In my case, this is the result of my current forward-facing, forward-looking inner peace. Once that happens, there’s nothing left, so I focus on ambitions as external projects.

I guess I went through all those eight-hour cafe stays, around 150 cafe stays in 100 unique cafes, so that I could become a stable observer/external builder. I would never be able to create outwardly if I was still unreliable and unsturdy. To be functional, you have to be trusty. I had to consolidate everything self-formative so that I could reach a working laborer’s baseline. To turn all of it into one. And that one can now walk, talk, and go about. I can use it, or myself, without noise or spurts. I needed to become highly effective scalably. Self-theory is finally triumphantly collapsing, closing its eyes with a teary smile on its face, knowing it has done its duty. I can be a computer. Expression can be come consolidation in the sense of a master script (think of that one script handling every single enemy entity in an older Roblox RPG), not self-consolidation (originating in the self). It’s why I directed my attention toward scenes and blocks, moving away from the compressiveness of sentence-level prose, where compression was in a sense co-opted in favor of self-becoming. It’s why I’ve moved toward format as given to scalability. The self-similar compressive density of the single passage-entry can now be freed from its self-constructive roots. Dreams and directions are back. They require self-transcendence, beyond even becoming which here is often so smuggled in.

To think I can represent myself most precisely and articulately the closer I get to technical control necessarily orthogonal to becoming, where building outwardly does the word work, while you can do whatever you want with your own life on your own. The external projects can be self-expression, but there’s a difference. I intend to work on multiple blogs and really make them rabbit holes, and that is external even as it concerns me as the cohering author. Now, it’s arranging words.

This means I will still engage in self-construction and -theory as themselves craft the way “show, don’t tell” and “stream-of-consciousness” are as techniques. But I write toward doing something external.

I can now separate expression from the self.

-> “How can I make better and more words?”

Attending (August 18, 2026)

I was watching the Finals of Worlds Championship Season 2, and that was around the time I was first playing. I realized that back then, before the map update in late 2014, even as I was playing the game regularly in internet cafes with friends, I very much didn’t play at all well. While I was looking at the old bushes/brushes the way I’d do today in low Masters, I did not at all regain a connection to a past familiarity with them. This means I hadn’t developed the discrimination then with the old bushes that I have now with the new bushes, but have it now and am applying it actively as I watch that older video, whose bushes I don’t have past training of but have current cognition attention already working into it in the way that reads “semi-familiar” (overlaying mechanical tips-of-bushes from which one can gank, de-ward, and dash between walls while out of sight).

This brings me to writing and how it makes reality that much more finite rather than purely impressionistic and experiential. You isolate, localize, and discriminate points of mechanical execution, and while that may seem unromantic and purely functional, it’s actually where and how you draw complex memories, not complex in the way of density, but in the way of definability, where instead of an ever-sand-rinsed palimpsest, you have the edge of bushes right before the lane, corners, ward positions, dashable parts of the walls (respective to champion), and all manner of connections that synergize seamlessly “under the hood.” “Attentional” may be more precise here than the manuality that the term “discrimination” implies. This is how writing organizes reality into words. What may have at one point been just scenery is now Tetris-organized, like an image-exposed machine trained and learning to attach labels to things that don’t have a pre-defined shape, with the help of except by humanity’s visual-linguistic history as expressed in internet text and images. But we’re not machines, so our “attentional” is that much more of an obviously experienced leap of maturation.

This means that over time, I can see so much more of what I’ve written before. In other words, something I wrote three years ago can very well produce more and more in my eyes through my maturing attention.

I see the Summoner’s Rift map in a multiple way. Layering numerous conditions that each change the perceptual layout even as the bushes remain the same because of champion abilities that interact with going in and out of sight through bushes, corners, walls, the specific length of each ability and which parts of wall qualifies for “dashability.” That layering may seem exhausting, but attention improvises it for what’s happening right now, like an erudite scientist continuing to watch and observe states and changes.

This means the forest is re-organizable.

So that includes unique people and staying at unique cafes across the world, where one, in a way, interfaces with them. With enough people and cafes, the unique isn’t impressionistic, but actively workable, scaffoldable, and provisionable the way a hand is distributed across a range of interactions, including new unique ones.

Difference becomes metricable.

X-Y-Z.

1 hour and 36 minutes later:

Right as I went downstairs and then headed inside the bathroom, my brain created a mental image of what I’d look like in the bathroom mirror that’s right beside the door even before I saw my reflection. But the mirror wasn’t there because the thing that held it up to the wall fell off and landed on the sink some days ago. Now, it, with its heavy frame, was sitting against the wall on the floor. And because of the metacognition I’ve developed over the course of imagining words and mapping them onto these things that happen in my consciousness, with the help of the gap between moment-before imagined reflection and the actual reflection that didn’t end up getting fulfilled, I realized that the brain’s prefiguring isn’t just limited to thinking of walking around the neighborhood out of years of experience and then deciding based on all that whether one intends to go for a walk right now or not or of imaginging the writing out of my thoughts and holding it until I get to the computer desk. It’s immediately before, not just in high-stakes sports with their muscle-tensing split-second-image pre-maneuvers, but in attention as everyday life. This reinforces the “interface” term. I notice the difference between two cognitive states, that of image-before-reflection and image-before-unfulfilled-reflection, because I saw analogs of them in words and syntax through my exhaustive writing. I am seeing everything before seeing everything. I am Nautilus-hooking immediately before the actual hook, and in fact, I hook without actual hooking numberless times. The walk is performed numberless times in the head before it’s even executed actually.

Scanning. Rehearsing. Attending.

Prefiguring in this case is implied in rehearsal. You repeat as though you’ve “hearsed” it. I say “repeat” because even if the imagined is the first, it is necessarily the after of the before, prophetic past tense.

I see in words I wrote to reflect sight, then back into sight. Sight -> words -> sight. I write to reflect sight, then, in some strange sense, I reflect sight to write, in a feedback loop where writing is where sight is more through importing the stipulations writing makes into one’s very sight by being where one can separate two things that would have remained intuitively fused, indifferentiable, or seamless previously. The writing itself becomes attention. Outward attention cognitively improving as a consequence of developing writing into it itself.

Color would not be a good comparison, because tips of bushes vs. impression isn’t the teal to navy blue. You literally see things you’ve not seen before because rehearsal itself is more sight, not just decisional or a blurry image in your head, but countless hooks and the hitbox length to justify them. Memory-into-countless-hooks is the reader actively see-imagining way more vastly, not just telling the difference between this color and that color. The word “bookstore” itself gains hitbox-length-proven countless hooks, not tealness or navy-blueness.

So it’s not pure brainstorming what-if sudden-cool-weird-premise-idea-out-of-nowhere fiction, but closer to sight or rehearsal.

It’s also not questions. You don’t ask a thoughtful question right before you hook. You don’t even realize you’ve generated that much once it’s already done and the actual hook actually lands or misses. But in between actual hooks, you have. You’re not at a writer’s table. You’re zoning.

It’s closer to having a literal zone or aura around you, nor range of hook because that’s just an indicator, but the manner in which someone walks because they don’t even have a hook to dish out yet they’re zoning. It’s how enemy players play the game against a Naut. They don’t dodge an actual hook. They see the zoning as much as they themselves zone, like Kai’Sa Flash-auto-ready to proc (trigger) that last stack on her passive zone-immediately depending on map state like whether objective is up and where and what’s the current stage, stakes, and win conditions of the game. No one plays simply toward whether they hook you, but toward what a Naut can do once they hook you or to your teammates or in a teamfight or their items. If it’s just based on in-range-or-not, then that wouldn’t be competitive whatsoever, irrational in perspective even.

And “possibilities” is problematic. No one thinks of possibilities. They rehearse. They see. We interface attentionally, with attention separate in its own right, not as object or as something to look at, but as sight. In other words, we countless-hooks attentionally, and that is sight. You created a world. They shot you in the head.

I don’t learn more words for tree. I don’t see the tree literally any more than anyone else. But I see the tree more because I countless-hooks (with proving hitbox lengths rather than mysticism). When you travel more, you see everything more, even if you literally are only here right now and seeing what you’re seeing right now, which a child besides you can see as well. You have more perspective, not morally, but back of one’s hand.

Creative Self-Recognition (August 19, 2026)

It’s so strange that my way of creating appeals to me so much. I looked everywhere again to scout others’ Neocities personal websites, and I feel like there’s really nothing. I forgot my own website during that scouting, but when I suddenly recalled my website again, I felt almost relieved, not because of the website per se, but because of the writing. There’s so much contained inside of the website itself because the writing is already so developed. It feels like I’m seeing so much visual but not really that much of anything when I scouting, but seeing my writings really brings me back that joy. I feel that writing can allow you to get really so explicitly deep, and there are already over 300,000 words in that website. It feels like others make writing so, so, so secondary or even tertiary that it feels like you can close your eyes and there would be no difference between them. But I really put my all into my writing. I guess me being the type to write a novel that is strictly “extreme” “show, don’t tell” the whole way for 30,000 words straight really shows that. I don’t mean to dismiss, but I necessarily dismiss when I do say that I come back to myself with relief and joy.

Still Not a Writer (August 19, 2026)

I thought I was a writer. I’ve never been. I’ve never cared about it any more than it is. I may enjoy books and do like the act of writing when I do find myself writing, but I’m not a writer. I don’t think of writing as something that identifies me. It’s a medium for me expressring myself, but the body of writings itself is at best something that isn’t at all anything beyond just a bunch of words. I’m the one who has all the memories and the reasons that they’re so meaningful to me. But I’m not a writer or a someone who has ever looked toward a whole big body of writings or any suggestion of it as something that at all makes me feel like this is where I must be. No, I have never felt beholden to words. I’ve always just disappeared as instantly as I appeared into writing. When the writing session ends, it ends, and that’s all it is.

Explicit Addressal Outlasts Happy Buffers (August 19, 2026)

Interesting that it wasn’t messages of happiness, safety, and escapism that helped me get closure. It was explicit, exhaustive, long-term addressal and review, along with all that sense-making and meaning-making that one inevtably does.

It means fulfillment doesn’t come from that peacefulness I got from lo-fi; though lo-fi as well as stuff like web comics definitely helped me not lose it for a time when I was still trying to find ways to make sense of things and adjust to everything. So it’s a buffer. But it won’t do anything at all when it comes to the actual issues. Those had to be worked through in precise, re-checkable, rigorous exam-like rhythms built over time.

Web Novel Reader’s Evolution (August 20, 2026)

It’s strange. I have to admit that I don’t get what I used to feel from web novels. I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s that I’ve already read all of the beloved top picks. It’s probably because I’ve read them that I myself have changed and can’t find whatever else as compelling.

I wonder if it’s like my blogs where once a blog fulfills a crucial gap, adding more blogs that just do the same but worse and in a less focused way just becomes redundant. It’s not novelty in this case. It’s “crucial gap,” since novelty is virtually endless but the place it serves in your mind is irreplaceable.

The following are some of what I’ve already read. And this doesn’t even include all the manga and web comics I’ve immersed myself in, which makes pinning down the full scope of my genre experience that more difficult.

1. Reverend Insanity
2. Lord of the Mysteries
3. Overgeared
4. Neven Iliev’s Everybody Loves Large Chests
5. Etzoli’s Epilogue
6. Overlord
7. Mother of Learning
8. Chrysalis
9. The Perfect Run
10. Worm
11. Beware of Chicken
12. The Legendary Mechanic
13. The Primal Hunter
14. Never Die Twice
15. Mark of the Fool
16. Gogglesbear’s Super Minion
17. HyperAlphaKing’s Gemstone Goblins
18. The Iron Teeth: A Goblin’s Tale
19. Azarinth Healer
20. Salvos
21. Speedrunning the Multiverse
22. Sunflower : [A sunflower based litRPG]
23. An Outcast In Another World (Subtitle: Is ‘Insanity’ A Racial Trait?)
24. Doom Guy Isekai
25. RE: Monarch
26. Jackal Among Snakes
27. Supreme Magus
28. Shadow Slave
29. Kill the Sun
30. Release That Witch
31. Sexy Space Babes
32. Florida Man’s General Store in Cultivation World
33. Sivios’s The Unwanted

It’s probably why I’ve moved to literary books even as I do find still interesting web comics that cover whole new niches I’ve never seen before, because they always each carve its own place in my head. Reality is a much bigger, tantalizing “genre.”

You don’t get the satisfaction of seeing something that’s familiarly funny, like misunderstandings that really get you chuckling (think the protagonists of Patron of Villains and Overlord and their comedic relationships with their “subordinates”), so there’s no sense of a puzzle piece locking into place, but there is that sense that this is not at all something you would read, no matter how much you read, because each seems to be ignorant or orthogonal to any idea of narration, like a Roblox game that decided not to give you XP or a level-up or any form of sign of progression and instead throws you into something that narratively structurally (or even almost structurelessly) reads like a 19th century autobiography, where you’re going not only offroad, but off how the brain has been taught to work, whether in the highest level of academic rigor or in children’s playground rules.

It’s like going to school, but there’s no school. You just go back home, and that’s life.

Digital Garden as Compounding Contradiction Stacks (August 20, 2026)

After setting up the “digital garden” “zettelkasten” with no overhead in the workflow finally, now this is when I get to see finally whether it works for me or not, given how much disgust I have for any Babel of words.

The idea I had while playing League of Legends (or was it watching the GenG-KT match?) was “compounding.” Even with all the contradictions, it could very well expand meaning by stacking layer rather than pretending that things are simply one-statement definitions and leaving it at that.

“Journaler” (August 20, 2026)

“Journaler”

But what the fuck is a journaler? If I already signed the papers declaring how much I don’t believe in words as something you stack up beyond just showing just how contradictory and unsalvageable they are beyond that experience of you as the writer writing in the moment, then what the hell am I doing sitting here thinking all of this amounts to something I can interlink together and hope for something, if anything? (B-buut that’s the point. fuck you)

Being forced to extract something out of words I’ve always used provisionally just feels awkward, cumbersome, and, as stupidly celebratory as it sounds, Sisyphean.

But maybe this is exactly what defining is/means. And optimistically, it doesn’t apply to every word, because “journaler” is so writerly that it triggers those sensibilities or whatever receptors in me that are so staunchly set against it and its ilk.

But still

What is it? Functionally. Ontologically. And in the territory of all of those identity-based labels. What the hell am I? Journaling is simply what I do, and I do it, and that’s all it is, and… nothing else. Writing happens, and I do it, and when it’s done, it’s nothing else. But what have I been doing all this time? Besides writing as the act? Into journaling as something maybe different, perhaps in kind, necessarily specific, and holding that possibility or potential of being so much more? Have I been conflating everything unilaterally? “Bunch of words,” bunch of words. Have I succeeded by marring my own eyes and dismissing it all? Or am I just denying words their power so I never have to be fear myself in them? What “journaling” could mean, could indicate, for me? Or “journaler” even more?

Maybe the problem of the digital garden—even if my private journaling is still chronological and the digital garden is only what gets published—is that it makes me known, and as much as I want to be understood, I have much preferred chronology because of how much things get said out of the sheer perspective of the year-month-day-hours-minutes-seconds moment. Known not by everything I’ve “currently” written, but by an endless staticity among all of my writings with no “across time”—eaten by a bunch of words.

What if I am all of it not across time continually refreshed by the present ongoing free unrestrained write-then-put-down self? What if I am not the consolidating? The becoming? What if I must accept those sides of myself not continually refreshed by virtue of “becoming” but treat myself as complicit in them, not in the sense of guilt or baggage, but in the sense that I must be (not “am” but must as an ongoing effort that restrains itself to it rather than always in that talk of “becoming” as “all just a bunch of words!”) who I am, not the tip of who I’m becoming, which in this sense instructs the actual ongoing “me” to orient itself around everything I was rather than whatever I get to get away with even after everything I’ve already said and committed to up to declaration. To own myself, I have to own myself irrespective of chronology and potentially abolish the tip-of-who-I-am-becoming-as-unrestrained-bunch-of-worded-continually-refreshed-freedom. I have to be stained. I don’t get to reset after every entry or creative project or anything or cafe stay or fiction novel I write or phase or person I was. I don’t get to hide behind the monthly text files and yearly folders and titles that conclude entries, days, months, and years. It’s not about carrying myself. It’s about being myself. I can’t be pure phenomenological experience and re-runnable simulated logic. Not anymore. I can’t externalize “identity” just to rid myself of it, to rid myself of myself. This is not about returning to psychological baggages, but not mistaking closure and healing as permission to externalize myself to escape its restraints. I have to re-associate. I don’t get to be a resettable run (like speed running) continually supplied by a chronologically-bound toolkit of memories, knowledge, and embodied intuitions, skills, and experience. I can’t be Roblox Studio. There is only one run. I must be prideful.

Self-Mastery as “Hi!”–”Hello!” as Trauma (Outside its Term) (August 20, 2026)

“Trauma”

As much as it has helped me to have this noun and its adjectival and adverbial forms, I’ve come to despise and bear a grudge against it. Not once after a certain point some one to two years ago have I felt that it could ever do anything but satisfy those bouts of heightened emotion. In the end, it’s a nice word to use when you’re fragmented, disoriented, lost, and overwhelmed, but once you’ve gotten over that horror, its practicality is gone and whatever’s left of it is horrendously unworkable. Its same usefulness is exactly the point where it goes off for far too long it really isn’t saying anything anymore besides affirming the person saying it. It’s monologic, like Ultron’s lines from Age of Ultron. It’s poetic and even angelically ethereal. It throws everything out the window so you can sit down and watch, and that in itself and that it never needed to be anything but that are compelling. But I have moved on from it, because that’s all it is. You will never get validation by repeating it and its forms, I discovered. You can only do this through a highly developed mastery and control, which necessitates a temper and emotionality proportional to them. Technique isn’t a puking mess. It’s a puking mess surgically implanted in an orchestration, so that a gun shot yields as much as ten thousand suns. Meaning must go beyond even you, until words say it even when you’re not looking and there to get offended when you’re not understood by them.

To express myself as normal, I had to become so abnormally normal. Years just to say “hello.” Just to have someone say it back. The word “trauma” will never work. I tried using it and the labels that often accompanies it, and I only worsened my affliction of loneliness. I couldn’t be blunt. I had to have exhausted everything so that what I do say comes with the precision of doneness: “Hello!”

Self-Responses

How does moving past the word “trauma” help one get validation that one wanted by using that word initially?

So precision is automatically validating because it contains it without needing the person to explain it for you, like a therapist explaining yourself to you. You explain yourself precisely enough it doesn’t come across as explanation but as apparance, even appearance, and that’s validating. Meaning-beyond-oneself can become appearance, such that it doesn’t need interpretation monitoring and correction. Such that the only thing others can do is deny belief in the person themselves because the person has already done all they can to make space (control up to the point of essential appearance such that there is two-way sociality) through their exhaustion and precision that a hello gets out and can be reciprocated just as easily. Like a compelling piece of fiction that becomes a medium through the title (sheer appearance) of which hellos are exchanged. In meeting, subsequent validation. You create symbols. You create new gestures. New Attack on Titans.

Analogical and Systematic (August 20, 2026)

As much as I mass-improvise analogies, let real-time thinking stack clauses to advance both description and qualification, and “shut things down” with aphorisms, I am a product of both analogical and systematic writing.

1. Surreal, associative, playful, dreamy, abstract, poetic, analogical, experimental, mythologizing stream-of-consciousness
2. explicit and frequently numbered structures, built of disambiguations, introductions, details, points, conclusions, and summaries—in journaling especially, often followed by, interspaced with, or intermixed with footnotes, parentheses (nested even), neologisms (many of which being compound words), elaborations, clarifications, preemptions, qualifications, and multiple layers of self-questions and -responses.

I developed them as one and am only now distinguishing them through an outsider’s perspective, even in practice, there’s nothing to distinguish since they ride all over each other. Metacognition only confirms this by being just as much the site of the two as one while it thinks about their (singular) thinking.

Proper Introduction (August 20, 2026)

“Myself”

Hiding behind abstract terms or even analogy in that characteristic way that very well applies only as a single-use framework won’t do me good here.

If I want to be honest, I can’t hide behind my own life, but I have to speak through it.

But what can I say here that I didn’t already say again and again?

It’s strange. I know who I am, but I don’t know how to say it in an introduction or bio besides just age and “writer” or something a little more phrasally specific than that but still doing the same thing. But no grand theories. I make one every day already, and while its point is to die as soon as the entry is done to draw more and more the map of what I’ve covered and experimented with both verbally and imaginatively, it can’t be used to introduce me, at least beyond a single-use entry restricted by a continually updated and refreshed chronological record, or semi-permanently. So we’re back to:

• age: 23 (as of 2026)
• sex: male
• country of birth and residence: Philippines
• general phrase-level descriptions of:
  • what I do: write thousands of words every day
  • how I write: idiosyncratically, associatively, systematically
  • what I cover: self theory
  • how it feels like: rabbit hole, tangle, metabolism
  • what my long-term progress, intention, and direction look like: in the vaguest sense, honesty, but, concretely, more and better words and bodies of work
  • my overarching techniques: self-dialogue, resetting, exposure, and ownership

Is that enough?

“Unusual” (August 20, 2026)

“Unusual”

Fear of Not Fitting In

I still remember when I’d cry out “I’m not weird!”, bawling, begging something, someone, or no one except myself in my room, while sitting down with the guitar to accompany my vocals. I’ve always wanted to be like everyone else, and I am. I just know there are certain things about me that don’t map onto what many others would consider normal, but I guess there really is no such thing as an “other” except what we ourselves designate in the very invocation of its plural form.

To Be Mediocre Is to Belong

My goal has always been to go back to being with everyone else. I would rather die as nobody than as somebody, not to deny myself, but to accept the very myself who was never anybody in the first place (and not in a self-deprecating way!) That sounds like gifted child’s burnout, and you know what, as fucking disgusting as those labels are, it probably qualifies. But hell nah, not again. I ain’t gonna sit down here and tell everyone I’m just another one of those. That is not the point of all this.

Complication

I hope writing that previous paragraph makes me feel more like someone you’d find in a Discord server’s vent text channel, and even the white people there are strange relative to the people I knew growing up in local Filipino churches, where most people weren’t even middle class (or at least something like lower-middle). But even then, I went to diverse churches, not really telling the difference between high and low, where even volunteering in the slums felt everyday and not at all a descent to something beneath my status or station, since I really didn’t have any formal conceptualization or ingraining of such ideas so as to decide how I’d present societally self-consciously in place, company, and input. The flattening (as well as introducing new forms of hierarchy) internet only accelerated this indifference.

To Live Is to Write Alone

That my writing has become controlled only makes all this tantalizing, but because this applies to everything I say, it’s a separate matter.

Nevertheless whatever I am, it’s fundamentally written, so anything unusual about me goes back to me being a writer, to constructive conflict between my pre-writing life and my current one. I wager that if I never lost my many dense social circles and learned to be by myself in lived life, I’d never become “unusual,” at least as I have come to understand it, even as I persist against its notion.

Differences Way Before Writing

Interestingly enough, even before writing, growing up as socially and communally as I did distinguished me from my siblings, who were never instilled with the same values and temperament as I personally did. However, I was already especially sensitive, obedient, and conscientious, which may have predisposed me to that upbringing. I can still feel the 6-year-old who was just happy to ascend to grade 1 and be with everyone else there the way I do now with my writing.

“Daily” (August 20, 2026)

It’s hard to argue for “daily” beyond me just saying “I write X words daily”, because of how cyclical and stop-and-go I am across days even as the day is the bread and butter of effort-followed-by-rest.

Even 8-hour cafe stays are inconsistently definitive even across unique storefronts, floor plans, and locations, not due to number of hours stayed, but due to how the boundaries of “somethingness” (definitiveness/definition) are located—the felt object-ness and concreteness of an event as pointable, re-usable symbol that can be used as a divider (think a chapter or a horizontal line). In other words, The cafe stay doesn’t make a day, so “daily” is left sinking murkily, not even as a markable fleck in a blurry car window being drenched in rain and continuously wiped with curious hands. I do use days-of-the-month, months, and years to organize my writings. But that’s as much as literal, functional chronology—in the same vein as multiples of ten and HH:MM:SS as well as 1787213378—and productivity averages.

Even across the day, such as during a cafe stay, I barely time (or timebox) myself and will just sit there until something pounces on me, even if that cogitative wait ends up being over 30 minutes. That ambiguity is delicious, because it’s not high stakes, but “not knowing.” It’s the difference between me playing in the finals of the Worlds Championship and me watching my favorite team in those same finals. Even if I’m the writer and thinker, I have to sit there and watch rather than farm minions and cross-map. It’s not that I don’t do similar tasks in between tough overarching problems, but most of the actual act of writing is that, in contrast with LoL. But yes, I do take small wins across days, weeks, and months, always making do with what I’ve settled with and feeling a raw satisfaction like ripping something off another even while simmering and smoldering with the acknowledgment that the greatest joy is in the challenge ahead and its vivifying sense which signets all small progress—that direction of breadcrumbing and of sitting there all the while. Here, there’s no “until,” but an endless wait and preoccupation with something like silence, even as things are being written. There’s no day-to-day beyond what sleepiness allows. Across days, nothing can happen, but at the very least, I’m resting or doing something permissive. By the time a day has passed, I’ve done everything I can, but that’s routine, functional, and a definition all on its own, but never as a transcendent “daily.”

Music in My Life (August 20, 2026)

Following and Singing Lyrics

It’s interesting there was a time that I would follow lyrics and their directions on stage. My head would pay attention to pre-choruses and bridges, and the lyrics would slide off my tongue. The only thing I had to do was perform as rehearsed, and it wasn’t even that challenging since I just played guitar, and when I sang, well, I wasn’t the lead singer. When I was the lead singer, in the end, it wasn’t really anything much by that point. It was different when I started making songs improvisationally, so then, two years ago, in 2024, when I played guitar and sang on the spot in public rather than on stage, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, because even as I’ve performed on stage many times growing up, this was way before I started doing my cafe stays, which would drastically train my solitary exposure tolerance, even if it’s been many years since I was that shy church kid.

First Worldly Music

Strangely enough, anime original soundtracks (One Piece, One Punch Man, Violet Evergarden), Kevin Macleod (early 2010s Roblox), Minecraft, Hollywood films, NF, Eminem, and Fall Out Boy were my first “worldly” music.

Horizons

Even now, now that I’m looking at the way things are going, it feels inevitable that I will try something like that—putting something like that first-time busking out there.

It’s strange that I’ve known myself by so many things that are now only part of who I am. Even writing in its current form is going beyond what I initially conceived it to be back in 2023. Whatever it ends up becoming and doing to me, especially with the hopeful onset of the digital garden, will probably be on the same level as that busking in terms of being so far from anything I’ve ever set out for myself.

But music is probably where my cynicism most settled in, even as it has been my primary medium—with how immediate it is even without original improvisation or interpretation—since childhood (besides coding) before writing and during my writing’s early forms. It’s why I myself can trace through memory the evolution of my sound. With every slight difference in use of vocal technique, tempo, rhythm, and melody comes something that to me feels like autobiography.

Speaking of autobiography, over the years, writing and music have grown to be creative buddies even through their distinct self-directed flow states (like two different historical records or mental streams). And this relationship has become more obvious and synchronous with greater control of writing which is the more recent medium (of identity and self-expression).

Presentation (August 20, 2026)

If I had to diagnose my own behavior and presentation, I’ve grown into people’s perceptions and have self-consciously veered away from convention toward something that is geared especially for what I feel is ease and accessibility. I let my hair grow to attenuate what I felt was a kind of masculine preppy “assholeness.” I have let my motions become more and more fragile-looking and delicate to simulate a non-threat. I have allowed myself to be more emotionally transparent—across thinking, confusion, tenderness, and flow state—because it pre-emptively defuses anything else I can’t eliminate or control but which could send undesirable messaging. This paragraph itself is just an attempt to make sense of why I have made myself like that over the course of a year and three months of staying at cafes for an average of eight hours each, which followed years of staying basically at home all the time. There’s both a pull toward making myself unoffensively and sterilely smooth and seamless in my appearance and a pull toward making myself as ignorable (not necessarily unlikeable, but certainly non-desirable and unnotable) as possible.

My internal goals have become trying not to offend and bother anyone, even while necessarily doing things that inevitably do so, which has pushed me toward controlling whatever else I can so that those necessary things do not pull me down too much.

A nice criteria I’m fine with is a weird stranger having a mental disorder, which gives me lots of permissive space, even as it’s also kinda against my beliefs and principles. It nevertheless works. This exposure to working socially, functionally, and provisionally rather than getting to impose myself with full honest fidelity has been its own source of personal growth.

It’s why while I’m in public, I prefer to play music that pulls away from “hypermasculine” sounds and aesthetics so that I can enact that service-smile mood. “Badass” anime original soundtracks are desirable though because it makes me seem nerdy and loser-y in an Eren fan way.

As for things I don’t want to do, one of these is showing that stern, self-serious, practically arrogant face. I try to keep the facial muscles at bay even if they can slip every now and then. This naturally creates its own kind of problem, because even people are staying and observing, they’ll notice this range, but I can’t do anything about that. I take a kind of pleasure in them seeing me, even while it all remains plausibly deniable.

I’ve also recently started yawning with an open mouth because I know it’s an ick. It’s actually great that my nose is the way it is. I imagine it’s both disarming and ick-y, even if I do it discreetly. This just scratches the surface of just how easy it is to make yourself uninteresting.

This is all running through my mind unconsciously/subconsciously. Incentive, emotion, feel, vibe, exposure. All of it. It’s why I’m fine with looking tender-faced. It’s both genuine and genuinely useful for making others set me aside so I can focus rather than draw unwanted attention. It’s better to be dismissed in this case.

Since my teenage years, I’ve just learned that intention and result are two different things, and it’s okay for result to be different from intention as long as it leads to what one intends.

I may be so obsessed about honesty as can be seen from my autobiography and journaling, but I’ve grown to control its manifestations and the word I’ve assigned purpose to represent it and do some work for it. Notice the self-mythologizing language here. It’s what I try to keep off the surface even as I recognize its cruciality in my identity and creative self-expression.

Being looked at is not the same as being known. So I don’t mistake them, and honesty doesn’t, too.