Thought Stream

When I was a child something new came to TV. Mind you this was the 90s somewhere in a 3rd world country, where we only had 3 channels (There was a mythical 4th channel that was only available near the capital, and those lucky enough to live near the border could get other channels from neighbouring countries but I digress). The shows were repetitive and stupid, they always featured Americans trying to sell you something that you didn't really need or some strange exercise machine. A local phone number was pasted over the American one for you to call to order the product. Often they had scantily clad models in brightly colored 90s exercise wear, smiling as they used an exercise machine that was so unconvincing that even a child like me was skeptical.

This was all very fresh and exciting and almost every house had something that they ordered out of curiosity. It would be a couple of years before there would be local faces in these infomercials, probably it was just cheaper to import the American footage instead of filming new localised footage, kind of like Power Rangers but magnitudes more lame. But despite that I watched a ton of them (We only had 3 channels). Often the infomercials would play at late night, when there weren't any TV programs and just before the channel would play the national anthem and go off air. We only had about 18 hours of TV, 24 hours of entertainment was a distant dream.

Fast forward to the information saturated 21st century, I was in bed, watching Youtube videos about tech stuff. I often get into a phase where I get into a new hobby and I start researching something, I compare different product reviews, understand the little differences between them, get a big picture view of the different companies and their strengths and weaknesses. Youtube is really convenient for all these things, I can waste hours just discovering new products. After all that time spent on research, I will then buy an entry level product and then lose interest in a couple of months. It's not healthy, but that's just the cycle that I am trapped in.

At least it's not exercise equipment.

I'd be nostalgic, but times really haven't changed much. I'm still watching videos of hyperactive Americans trying to sell me something late at night.

A friend dragged me to a Chinese tea franchise, it was a strange experience. It was a franchise from the People's Republic of China, not just another ethnically Chinese owned tea franchise (Which are quite common where I live, many Taiwanese ones as well that I don't bat an eyelid to). The design on the paper cup resembled some sort of fancy porcelain pattern and its logo was a lady dressed in the clothing of an ancient Chinese dynasty whose name I would probably mispronounce. It came with fancy polylactic acid straws that were purportedly more eco-friendly. The deco looked like a Starbucks where the bland corporate interiors were scrubed away and replaced by 5000 years of Chinese civilisation. They even had a fancy old calligraphy and a Chinese opera costume framed on the wall. I'm repeating the words 'Chinese' and 'fancy' an awful lot but I guess that's the best words to describe it.

Growing up in the 90s, China was always a sort of poor country, they were rough unrefined communists in the North, manufacturers of poor quality goods. But this was a different, it was the PRC seizing an American model of Starbucks-styled coffee chains and improving on it, doing it better. It was a sign of changing times. It was not just that they had grown beyond their communist phase, but they were now exporting their new culture abroad. Every sip that I took reminded me of clicking on the Chinese bulldozer in Command and Conquer: Generals*. It was like a statement that their Century of Humiliation was over and now they would be the overlords of poorly paid baristas serving overly sweetened beverages. In the tea house I realised that I am now trapped within the sphere of influence that produces over-romantisised rustic rural China Tiktoks, Mobile Legends Bang Bang and C-drama with names like " Rivals of the Heavens".

The tea itself was some Pu Er that I have trouble recalling aside from the fact that it tasted like a sweetened version of the cheapest stuff that I could get in a usual Chinese restaurant. Then again I barely sampled the menu, so I might not be doing it justice. Rating: 4/10, would try again.

*Which had a voice actor with a fake Chinese accent hamming up classic lines like "China will grow larger!", "We have big plans!", "We will live in prosperity!" and "Mines are dangerous to China!")

So since 2016 I've been in some form of desperate scramble or the other. Like I've been juggling more than I could possibly do and spending half my time being overwhelmed and the other half being exhausted. Constantly forcing myself forward and failing at almost everything I set myself out to do. Everything felt like some sort of super important life and death struggle. In hindsight that was the zeitgeist of the time and the energy of the last embers of my youth. I felt a need to constantly hustle and grow and try to achieve my true potential. By the end of it all I felt was hollow and burnt out.

But this year, I made enough money to be stable for a while. I had enough achievements to be able to cruise on it for a while. I was old enough to just get away with things on account of being a more senior member of the organisation. I don't care enough to be able to ignore minor problems and let others handle it. I've pulled away from enough people that I didn't need to care about their well being. And so I took a break. I didn't do anything important. Most things that I engaged with were meaningless and I just enjoyed it. I even took a break from updating this website.

There's no lesson here. I learned nothing. I was just resting. Not growing anymore. Just existing in a point in time. Enjoying my short time on Earth. I'm not sure when this break will end, but it is pretty nice.

Wow, an entire month has passed. To be frank, the main reason I haven't been working on the website is because I've been building and painting an army of Battlemechs for Battletech. This slow mobilisation of miniature giant robots has taken a lot of my time and focus. Aside from a 15 year old box set of mechs that really need putty and paint, I've been experimenting with 3D printing more minis to fill out the ranks. I now have a slightly over a company of mechs and the build up continues. I've only played a couple of games in this span of time though. Being able to align adult schedules is difficult and a far more challenging mix of logistics and strategy than the game itself.

It's been a thankfully slow month. I've come to the realisation that I've just been keeping myself busy and there has always been something going on since 2010. Maybe I can't work like that anymore. Maybe I need something silly and inconsequential.

That's all for now. I don't really have anything important to tell you aside from someone always dies horribly when you say "No guts, no galaxy."

Wow, I survived 2023. It wasn't an exciting ride, but rather a slog. I spent more than half the year in a haze of ennui and dissatisfaction, which is somehow quite well documented in this blog. (I thought I hadn't written much throughout this year, but I actual fact did write quite a lot, who am I to dispute written documents.) But here are some outtakes and reflections of the past year from the viewpoint at the end of it:

Perhaps my best achievement last year is I didn't catch a respiratory disease even once. In fact my strict Covid-never-ended-people-now-treat-me-like-a-paranoid-hypochondriac regime of masking and eating in places with good ventilation seems to have worked and I didn't get sick at all. I just have to keep it up until society solves this Covid problem.

Professionally I kind of stopped caring as much. Just going through the motions instead of obsessing over my reputation, ambitions or whether I'm doing the right thing. I'm at a level of seniority where I can get by. This attitude caused some problems this year with various co-workers, but whatever. No point dwelling on it.

I revived some old hobbies and tried out new ones. It helped a lot with the ennui. Having some solid short term goal to obsess over instead of the vastness of meaningless human life. All the small details that I needed to figure out and troubleshoot were far more preferable to being wrapped up in personal issues. Escapism through activity.

I've been dealing with some big changes with those close to me. It's taken up a lot of my time, but that's intentional and it's time well spent. I hope to spend even more time with them this year.

Creative outputs varied wildly in format, but they were constantly coming. I drew some some fun stuff, but all of it was only for myself because I never published any of it on the website. I'm still in the process of figuring out how I want to present my art online.

It's really hard to sum up a year in retrospect. Everything is still unresolved and hanging, so many things have been forgotten, so many raw wounds have scabbed over. All that is left is a lonely sentence or two that are echoes of tragedies and tumultuous times.

As usual, every morning I wake up at dawn and get into my Death Machine.

The Death Machine can kill me, but by moving two pedals, a wheel and a couple of levers I have to prevent it from doing so. Once I get into the Death Machine it accelerates to lethal speeds. If I don't make the correct combination of moves on the controls, the machine will kill me. If I'm lucky it might just injure me or force a hefty monetary penalty on me. There are many more Death Machines around me, each with its own hostage trapped inside. We are all playing this banal game of death against the machine and each other. The reward for surviving this game is that we get to arrive at a destination of our choice provided that there is a place for the Death Machine to rest. For such a lethal experience it's really boring.

To alleviate the boredom we get to use our Anxiety Rectangles while in our Death Machine. The Anxiety Rectangle has all sorts of distractions in it. It can show me images of war crimes, the words of people trying to be witty and snippets from children's cartoons. However it adds to the risk of the Death Machine killing you. For most people it is a worthwhile trade off.

My entire world is built around the Death Machine. My days are organised around the operating times of the Death Machines. We are trapped by debt to pay for Death Machines. The Death Machines even slowly destroy our environment and poison us. I'm not allowed to see my friends or distant family members until I get into it. I'm not allowed to work or have an education unless I play its game twice a day. I guess I could travel by sitting in a Giant Death Machine and put my life in the hands of other people, but the Death Machine saves some time. Sometimes when I get bored I voluntarily get into the Death Machine.

I wish this world would made more sense, but it is what it is.

I was on a short exchange where I had teach some Rohingia kids. They survived a genocide, now they are refugees with an uncertain future, domestic violence is common in their community. But I don't have any sob stories, they were your average bubbly children. All these apocalypses come and go, but on a larger scale humans just survive them and get caught up with worrying about your next meal or whatever trivial relationship problems you are having. We're good at that, we're a post-apocalyptic species, we've gone through it so many times, and we keep doing it to ourselves, but there's always survivors that keep going. Life goes on after all these disasters.

It's social media enabled genocide season again. With the backdrop of a climate crisis and a pandemic (not to mention that the forests are burning over here). It's horrific and to cope I tell myself that apocalypses come and go, but humans are so much tougher than even genocides.

I felt a short pang of impostor syndrome today, but I also began to ask the question: "What does a person that doesn't have impostors syndrome look like?" I started listing down the characteristics of this hypothetical human being: He (it's always a he isn't it) would be unfazed by any emotional problems, utterly infallible like a soul made out of stainless steel, he can start work on the dot and never have to do overtime, he knows what must be done and does it without any self doubt, he is confident and loved by everyone that meets him, he's always in control and never screws up, he never feels overwhelmed by all the problems he faces, he has encyclopedic knowledge and photographic memory, his body never betrays him, he never complains or whines or shows weakness, he is an undying soldier that knows no fear.

After a while I realised that I was describing some sort of demon. And then the impostor syndrome went away.

I visited a friend in hospital recently. It was an old public hospital, a sprawling complex of buildings overloaded with beds and human misery. My friend had an accident, nothing life threatening, but still enough to be concerned about. My mind was wrapped up as usual in all the anxieties of the fragility of life and having to live in a society of people. Having connections to others is hard, we have to make so much effort to fulfill our obligations to other people. We have to help them and comfort them when they are sick.

As I was trying to find my way through the maze of different departments I saw a small drain filled with guppies. They obviously had no idea about all the human suffering going on above them, they were just there living out their little fishy lives and having their little fishy drama, in a small body of rainwater. Their minds probably can't even conceive the concept of a hospital. I was a bit jealous.

I was watching some teen aged boys the other day. As an adult looking in, I can see all the posturing that is used to hide the deep insecurity that troubles them. I suspected it when I was a teenager but I could never really see it. It looks so obvious now. The act of confidence, trying to fit into a rough unforgiving hierarchy. The attempts at finding the approval of their peers. It's such a thin shroud. Barely covering soft, sensitive and kind children. I pity them.

Over time they practice the play acting until the point where play acting is all that they know. The shroud becomes thicker and thicker, until it starts suffocating whatever is inside. If they are lucky they hold onto their hidden doubts, if they are not it just gets lost in the folds of their performance. In the worst case they become alpha male influencers and tech bros, always looking for something outside because that's so much easier than acknowledging the fragile insides of human beings.

It is relieving to see them at a stage where it is just some experimental mostly fake personality instead of being a person that is mostly thick crusty bravado but hollow inside. Where that innocence and vulnerability hasn't been crushed out of them. I can only hope they grow up well enough to know how to grieve those things. I wish this phase of innocence lasts a bit longer, but then they start howling and jumping on each other and I remember that they are annoying teenagers.

*Not that teen aged girls are any better either. They are sociopathic in ways that teen aged boys can barely imagine.

This website is where I take a break from my identity. It's where I leave my identity at the coat rack and kick back and relax. The problems with identity is that it's just so damn tiring to have one in our modern society. You're constantly curating it and so much of it is under the scrutiny of others. Having and maintaining an identity feels so much like a chore these days, you have to be internally consistent and externally performative. You are your own brand, so you have to reduce yourself to a simple and digestible 3 point message. And if you don't do it in the right way, you face social sanction or ridicule. Once in a while I want to turn off this performance and just let all the ugly stuff hang out. I want to take a break and do whatever I want to do.

Or rather I want to leave the "I" behind, and just do.

What I'm getting at is not something like queerness or transness, where you trade one box for a different box. Where sometimes it becomes jargon, checklists, peers, flags and other identifiers. I prefer not bothering with any of the boxes or conventions. It's comfortable to put aside my identity and not have to play to any expectations. No race, no religion, no nationality, no gender, no age, no physical problems. Just a mind and words, like a glass cup, so transparent and hollow, that my audience can fill in as they please.

What would you do if you had the freedom to not be you? Without the limitations of the physical world, without any authority watching you, without the pressure of your community, without the financial pressure, without the social consequences. In many ways that was a lost promise of the internet, that you could use a pseudonym and for a moment, be free of the constraints of the physical world. Surf the web as an entity that had control over how it expresses itself.

So what I say is just let it go once in a while. Stop being yourself. Be like Zhuang Zhou and dream about being a butterfly. You'll eventually wake up and it's back to the real world and all your very real problems as usual. But for time it took you to dream, at least you managed to embrace the endless possibilities outside of the box that you call yourself.

I was taken to a high class Yakiniku restaurant, so for the first time I got to taste expensive beef cuts. The beef was tender, it arrived red and marbled with fat. I don't ever order this stuff unless someone else is treating me. I just don't think I can appreciate it.

I put the small beef cuts on the grill and watched them brown. On my first bite I could taste the animal. It reminded me of farm. This was a creature that was standing in a meadow, feeling a cool wind blow by, just a few weeks ago. It lived comfortably, not a hard life of constant strain that would have made the cuts of meat too tough. I wonder what it felt of its unremarkable unchallenging life. The slight aftertaste of the unachieved hopes and dreams of a living thing was a bit disgusting.

The remaining flesh on the platter was so red, so fragile and soft. I was made of the same stuff. Cut through my thigh and it would be the same marbled meat. We're all animals precariously attached to the world by this blood soaked matter. I'm not any less vulnerable than this herbivore that was subjected to the industrial horror of creating premium meat products.

I added a lot more spice and seasoning for the rest of my meat. It helped to hide the taste of the sin of violence against my fellow living beings.

This month I've had to confront a lot of problems that were just vague hypothetical futures. We're so fragile. We're tied to this existence by just a thin layer of beating muscles. It feels really precarious. Our cells could go crazy and kill us. Our lungs fail. Our brains trap us in a maze of confusion. Kidneys stop working. Pancreases malfunction. Our blood vessels get clogged. On top of that I'm living through a forever pandemic. It feels really scary and senseless. Bodies give me so much anxiety, but I sure wish that my loved ones bodies don't break down.

When I was in my 20s nobody really gave me a heads up that once I get older I have to confront aging, but not my own. They probably did tell me, but I didn't understand at the time. It was just vague hypothetical futures.

Maybe that's why we need God. At some point it's just out of our hands and we need to leave it to a higher power. That doesn't make it any less sad.

I have to lie a lot. I'm doing well. Yes, things are going to be fine. Everything is on track. I'm not worried at all, things are under control. I remembered that meeting and didn't double book myself. If you work hard you can achieve your dreams. I answered that email on time. I'm not just making this up as I go along. There is a future for you. I'm not bothered at all by the bad news. You can be an athlete. I'm not anxious at all. Things will work out in the end. I didn't lose all your test papers. I'm listening. You can be an astronaut. Of course I know what I'm doing. Shawarma is healthy diet food (I tell this one to myself a lot lately).

Was it something that I heard from another teacher or was it something I read somewhere, that for teachers, education is the act of continuous lying. It's make belief, we create the atmosphere of authority, the illusion of elders that know what they are doing. For less experienced ones it feels like a house of cards that could topple over at any time. For the jaded and worn out ones, it's a mask that is slipped into almost too carelessly. School is an elaborate fiction of how the world works. Maybe illusion doesn't always work, some kids always have the devilish sense to sniff out the vulnerability of teachers and are skeptical enough about the message. But we bet our future on this fiction.

Maybe all the problems that we have in the world today are caused by the fact that we are raised on lies. That there are invincible adults that can handle a class of 30 or so students without sustaining any mental damage. That there are simple explanations that can be found in authoritative texts. That hard work and effort are proportional to how well you do. That you can trust institutions to keep you safe. That this world is somehow fair in the end. That you can come up with a plan for your life at 16 years old and somehow stick to it. That you aren't just a pool of abstract labour to be exploited by a monstrous ruling class.

But what else can we do as adults? We have to try to make kids look forward to growing up. Even if we don't live in a fair world we have to at least impart in them the idea that fairness and justice are possible. Just shield them for a few more years and let them gaze at their bright dreams, distract them from the truth that they will most likely live unremarkable lives and then get sick and die. Let them experience carefree puppy love and not the kind of love that revolves around exhaustion, caring for a huge cast of family members and financial issues. If the alternative to lying is to give in to the despair of reality, is it even an option?

I can't help it. I guess I'll just keep on telling lies.

*Although, sometimes I can't sleep at night and I wonder how kids would turn out if part of their education was just adults being honest with them about how stupid and vulnerable we all are.

**While searching if I'd written about "lies" before, I realised that I use the world "Relief" and "Alien" a lot.

As I write for this blog of sorts, I notice that it stylistically diverges from my own journal entries. My journal has taken on more of a reporting style, less poetic, just direct accounts of my troubles and experiences that I'd like to remember. All my lame jokes go in the journal, where if unearthed will make the reader cringe and groan. The more mundane incidents seem to appear here on the blog now, while my more treasured memories end up in the journal. I also write longer form about my own complicated thoughts here. Longer than anything I've ever devoted pages of my journal to. The journal is far more alive, a mix of art and writing that captures a slice of my mind at that moment. But the constraint of mixing text and images makes the written word the dominant form on this website.

Here I'd write something like: The clouds were the color that reassured me that things were going to be ok. While in my journal I'd be more focused on the source of my worries, and then maybe a small reassuring sketch. I've written before about containers and mediums. The form of art really does seem to fit the medium. Whether an online blog or a private journal, the container for my thoughts becomes part of my thoughts themselves.

I wonder how the mediums available to me have affected my thinking. My growth as a human being is within the confines of the media around me. What if I didn't have the freedom to just write as many characters as I wanted, or if I was using a platform where it is just more efficient to use memes to communicate, or if it was in a different medium altogether like short video. Would I still be thinking this way? Just by the luck of birth I am more used to text than video, would I be able to broadcast my thoughts if the toll was having to put a filter on and talk to a camera in a slow performative voice?

I saw a banner in a stationary shop, "Writing is thinking on a page". If I didn't have a page, would I think as deeply or as thoughtfully?

I was chatting about how the I'd like the dramatised biographical motion picture of my life to be*. If possible, I'd want it to have a scene of me walking dramatically away from an explosion. For anything else, I'll leave it to the director to dramatise and fictionalise until it has absolutely no semblance to reality. Cut away all the boring parts and create a tight narrative of just one defining moment that I will be remembered for. A simple flimsy piece of cinematic celluloid that misrepresents a human life.

But the likelier case is that big budget Oscarbait Hollywood movie (or the Bollywood equivalent) won't get made and I won't be remembered in any way. Even if it was made, nobody remembers what won an Oscar 50 years ago unless they are a film buff or they check Wikipedia to prove me wrong**. Any legacy that I could strive to construct will just be eroded by the sands of time. Even my go to stories that I wear thin at parties and gatherings are probably a lot less entertaining than I find them to be. Or they will be butchered in the retelling. In the long run, like every other human that has ever lived, I will be just be forgotten.

I also got into a discussion about holy books recently. If someone tells you that a holy book, be it a Bible, Quran or Torah, is the complete guide to life; that's a sign that person hasn't actually read and understood the holy book. As much as all these books represent someone's legacy, we don't really understand them as well as we'd like. Theological discussion is made years after the facts have been lost to make sense of what has happened. Without these other people (many of which were not directly involved in the incidents that they were studying) supplying their interpretations of the context that we need to read the past, a Bible, Quran or Torah actually makes little sense. The world is never constructed by a single author, we need all these additional accounts to understand it. If holy books are truth, then the truth is somewhere in a deep pile of additional reading.

In order to understand an event, we usually can't depend on the messy reality. Humans lack omniscience, and everything is out of reach all the time. You often only have someone else's story or interpretation of events, or at the very least an exegesis explaining the context of what happened. There is so little to go on to make sense of this world, we need the incomplete accounts of others. Building a collective fiction that seems to be more important than reality itself is the reality of being human.

All that we ever see is the terrible dramatisation of someone's life, not even made by an award winning director. We live lives that are interpreted by the exegesis. Even the canon of truth doesn't matter as much as all the ancillary materials that attach to reality and become our lived reality itself. As we live, the fiction of other people sticks to our being, until at some point it totally replaces what we are and what we ever stood for. Perhaps that's why your own words, even the boringly mundane ones, are valuable. But then again are your words even yours after they have been read, interpreted and discussed by someone else?

*If anybody wants to buy the rights, they are going for really cheap right now. Although nothing much actually happens, you'll have to hire a good screenwriter.

**Holy crap, it was The Godfather? I sure picked the wrong year to prove my point.

I took public transport to work today. Haven't used it much since the pandemic started, but at least most people wear masks while stuffed into the same small metal tube on tracks, so it didn't seem that risky. It was a light rail train, so it was on an elevated track for most of the journey. Gliding above people that looked so small as they went about their everyday lives, above cars and houses and shopping malls and schools and office blocks. I was so detached but fascinated by the sight. Is this what god sees? Looking down on frail mundane humanity. Tiny busy creatures, none of it really mattering anything.

In between my power tripping I also did a lot of people watching. The frail people and the plump ones. Their skin and hair. Their make up framed eyes. Looking at the fashionable dresses of office workers. Peeking at the videos they were watching on their phones. Listening to conversations that made no sense nor context. Seeing children play and be carefree on the train. The small acts of kindness to the blind and the old. It sure beats being stuck alone in a car. I could even doze off while trying to avoid the heat of the setting sun coming through the window.

I like trains. There is some unspoken romance about riding them.

I just finished a book by an Asian American author, judging by how these books are marketed I am supposed to feel represented in some way in the media. But after I digested what I read in my mind, comparing notes with other examples of Asian American media that I've seen or read, I came to one conclusion: This stuff is unrelatable to me. I'm not saying that this it is bad or it has missed the mark, on the contrary I enjoyed most of it. But the experiences that they are about, this immigrant culture that has to navigate a hostile white world, are somewhat alien and so different than my lived reality as someone that lives in Asia. Their diasporic narratives are so very different. So much so that as I spontaneously wrote in the last sentence, I view Asian Americans as "Them", not "Us".

Honestly, BIPOC experiences are very different from the experiences of people that live in Asia. While colonised, most countries were not subjugated in the way that the American continent was colonised. When I talk with American minorities, I actually have trouble imagining their reality where they have to assimilate with an oppressive inescapable dominant culture. Even in the most harshly colonised countries, the locals were able to put up resistance and their identities were never fully erased. Even immigrants live very different realities compared to the West, in some countries they are incredibly wealthy and powerful. Some indigenous people hold power over their country, becoming oppressors themselves. Africans here have their own set of prejudices and problems, but as some of my friends from Africa like to remind me; they are Africans, not Blacks. It's all very complicated, and it can't be understood if you view it through the lens of whites versus oppressed minorities.

I can go an entire day without having to deal with white people. I see them as tourists on the street, just confused holidaying oddities that can be safely ignored. I don't view them as a threat in any way. I'm not discriminated by them, they're on my turf and I can insult them as I please in more than one language. I have my own racialised issues, but white supremacy is not one of them. In my daily life, it's just some far away thing that I've never actually experienced first hand. Distant whispers of second hand experiences and things that I see in newspapers, movies and books. Those Nazis are as real to me as the ones in Indiana Jones. This isn't a statement that white supremacy isn't real or it should be ignored, but it is not an unstoppable world spanning hegemony that everybody acknowledges. About half the world lives without it. Maybe one day the whole world will.

I watch videos on Youtube where Asian Americans say how important representation is to them. And I'm happy for them, but I don't feel it myself. I'm not writing this to bash anyone or exclude groups from 'Asianess', but I'm reflecting on how representation means different things to different people. Asian Americans are another group from Asia that adds to the undefinable variety that makes up the people of Asia, it's a diverse continent that can fit just about anyone, even those that aren't on the continent. But if I was asked to place myself in the confines of American boxes, I'm not white, I'm not BIPOC either. The world is so much more complicated than black and white.

I just showed some friends of mine, who were in their 30s or 40s, the types of websites made by teenagers that think they are emulating 90s or early 00s websites. There was some cursing and invoking the name of God. Sure, the tons of flashing gifs and horribly chosen colour palettes are not exactly what we experienced in the 90s, but I have to defend these kids. They are like archaeologists trying to piece together a time before they were born, and we didn't exactly leave much to guidelines explaining what websites looked like in the past. Heck all the Flash sites of the past are gone down a memory hole, they have no idea what Flash even is. We kind of just gave them a pile of Geocities websites and let them loose. It's not like they can google old websites to see how they looked, any surviving ones are buried under a steaming pile of SEO.

You can kind of divide Neocities users into two groups: Those that experienced the old internet firsthand, and those that didn't. I had thought to attribute it to different generations, but there are people that are about as old as me that never knew the Anglophone internet that we call "the old internet". So there are the people that are grasping at some sort of nostalgia, and others that desire anemoia, a nostalgia for a time that they have never known. None of them are wrong, but they want different things.

I sometimes see people writing about how some people make a website on Neocities that are nothing more than a three column index page, an about page, and a blog with a single entry complaining about school. The argument goes that these people have nothing interesting to say. And for that I have to agree, they don't have much interesting things to say, because most of them are children. They're like below 18, they're still finding themselves. Contrary to popular depictions, teenagers aren't particularly interesting or articulate enough to be able to express themselves well. Trust me I deal with them all the time. That's why we send them to school.

They saw some fun looking sites and unbridled ruleless creativity and want to copy it. Which is really great. Let them experience it. I learned parts of my aesthetic style from copying things that I really liked from the 80's and 90's. It wasn't exactly how the aesthetic looked in its own time, but it contributed to my growth. And it all blends in with my lived experience to create new styles. They're playing in the sandbox, don't be a grumpy adult telling them that how sandcastles should look like.

I like that they are making websites and at least trying to express themselves. Even the lowest effort pile of pronouns and links to social media is an effort. That's growth. Have a gold star. That's an accomplishment right there. Let them try it out, and once they realise that learning HTML is hard or that there isn't much that they actually have to say, let them abandon the site and move on, with a little wisdom gained. That terrible site that has a flashing "Welcome to my website" marquee and an under construction gif has served its purpose.

The spirit of Geocities is a collection of mostly abandoned web pages that don't say anything, created by teenagers that were just experimenting. It was disposable trash. They are supposed to come and go, but I hope that they leave having learned a bit more about themselves. Let the kids have their fun.

I know I just warned myself to not be nostalgic about the last decade. I'm so stubborn, I never listen. I can't help but be. All my bad memories get weathered by the waves of time, all that's left is the bittersweet longing for a time that wasn't so simple, wasn't so easy, but it feels like it from the viewpoint of hindsight.

I have all my journals with so much writing about the anxieties and defeats of youth. But my brain can't focus on them anymore. I sit down sometimes and just long for the past, because for all its problems, they are now just ghosts of problems. Long banished to graves to irrelevance. It isn't the overwhelmingness of now.

So I long for the vague past when I had the time to just while away, walking alone and thinking to myself. Preoccupied by that stupid young adult drama that never amounted to anything or meant anything in hindsight. The feeling of being the main character in some story, of having still some potential left. Not being burnt out and aimlessly continuing on the path of respectable adulthood. Not being busy with paychecks and taxes and trying my best to keep stable boring relationships.

I wonder if there are prescription glasses that I could wear to correct for bad hindsight?

This is a message to myself in the future. I was thinking about the last decade and I caught myself suddenly feeling nostalgic about the '10s and this has to stop. I should not feel nostalgic about any more terrible decades. Hopefully I will read this in 20 or 30 years to set myself straight.

No. The 20's were not a better more easier time. If you start getting nostalgic about it, your memory is failing and you are forgetting all the negative stuff that is going on right now. Goddammit you old fart this decade is tough. It's not just cute primitive social media and more innocent pre-AI times. Or the time before some horror beyond my current comprehension came into existence. This shit is already tough. We're already miserable and the dreading the future that you are inhabiting really isn't helping either.

Sure there's one or two nice things going on for you personally, but you realise that there's a whole lot more shit happening now right? Bloody hell we are in a pandemic that doesn't seem to end. Millions of people died this decade! Just because of horrible decision making. The lockdowns weren't a nice holiday where you got to sit at home and build websites and model kits. There was constant stress and anxiety! We have no climate mitigation and it's a historically bad heatwave. Floods! What the hell is going on with the weather? I'm so confused! The economy is shit and things are so expensive, it's cheaper than what you are experiencing, but the inflation is bad. Politicians are terrible and they constantly lie, don't let nostalgia forgive them for what they've done. They all suck, any illusion of how they used to be more gentlemanly is just an illusion. Social media is annoying, don't you dare get nostalgic about the social media or internet of this era.

Look, you may be looking forward to retirement, but I have to fund all that you ungrateful geezer. Good Lord the 20's are a horrible time to be in. The failing gray matter in your brain has likely scrubbed away all the bad stuff in order to remain sane, but I remember! And I'm keeping you accountable. This is a warning to the future. Do not feel nostalgic about this time!

It was one of those rainy days where at least half of you gets wet even if you have an umbrella. Drenched halfway, I wanted some warm comfort food so I walked into a 7eleven. On the counter was a a small steamed bun machine, keeping fluffy paus warm in the cold air conditioning of the shop. I looked through the selection and saw my favourite flavour: Chicken curry. I grabbed the tongs, opened the door, picked up the pau and placed it in a thin paper bag. I paid the man at the counter two notes and a coin, for such a warm comfort it was pretty cheap.

I sat in my car, pealed off the paper at the base of the pau and started eating. The soft fluffy bun was filled with chicken meat, potatoes and a savoury slightly spicy dry curry. It lifted my spirits and provided a small warm refuge from the gloomy weather. It was then that I realised that I had paid so little for this tiny piece of paradise. It was also when I realised that it was cheap because I was eating someone's dreams.

I've actually attempted to make paus before. It was tough work to fill and work the dough into a bun shape. Not to mention cooking the filling and steaming the buns. Someone lost their dreams to make the pau. Maybe it was the farmer that grew the wheat. Maybe it was the factory worker that operated the machines. Maybe it was the guy at 7eleven that I passed the two notes and a coin to. Maybe it was the dreams of the chicken that I was eating, dreams of spreading its wings and flying off into freedom. Maybe I was chewing up all their dreams.

A couple of days later a kid asked me if I'd rather be cow or a chicken. I told him that I'd rather be a chicken. A chicken has wings. And it has the small hope and dreams of flight.

So it's the season for visiting relatives and friends here. The food is delicious. There are rices seasoned to perfection, there are several different types of curries, there are a bunch of varieties of compacted rice, there are side dishes with the right amount of sweet sour saltiness, some houses have regional specialties too. It's spicy, savoury, salty, sour, sweet and deliciously oily. The product of hours spent in the kitchen preparing for the celebration. Our hosts insist that we eat, they seem to take joy in us enjoying their cooking.

In the background of my eating there are discussions of illness and aging. They reminisce about times that have long passed and of people that are no longer with us. I realise that they've lived long lives, full of moments of joy, heartache and challenges. Life is both too short and too long. It ends so fast, but there is just so much that happens in it. You will experience loss. You will find new friends and companions. You'll adore people, you'll hate people. Relationships are going to end up not how you expected. You'll meet a new generation. Children will disappoint you. People that you care about will get old and sick. You'll get old and sick. You'll hear the laughter of children as they run around without a care in the world.

That's what the beef rendang tastes like. Something slowly cooked over time, complexities inherent to its being. It's never just spicy or savoury or rich or sweet. Its all of it at once. Maybe that's why it tastes so good. It tastes like an acceptance of life, in all its ups and downs.

The air is poison. It is the third year of the pandemic. We have given up on any attempts to control it. Covid is just going to spread and kill people and we aren't going to care about a single one of them. A strange system of human sacrifice, without any ceremony or spectacle, to appease the Market God.

My Sister-in-law caught it a few weeks back, she still hasn't recovered from the effects. I had dinner with her before she started showing symptoms and narrowly avoided it. Now more people are getting it and we are on the brink of the festive season, which means another widespread wave, although this time I'm not sure if anybody is going to care.

The weather is getting hotter and more unpredictable. The air is smoke from burning forests. I don't understand how people can still deny that we are facing a climate crisis. It's now part of my daily life. It's too hot, I worry about what's going to happen in the next couple of months. But even if I wanted to I could hardly change anything, all the carbon emissions are coming from some mysterious economy across the ocean. Again nobody cares.

But still life goes on. We'll somehow have to adapt. Perhaps that is the last realm of grudging resistance that we can manage. Just somehow, try to live. The air is poison, we'll wear a mask. The air is smoke, we'll get an air filter. Water levels rise, we up and move. No matter how stupid and inefficient it may be, we will figure something out and keep on existing.

The air is poison. We must still try to live.

Wow, where has the time gone? I seem to be asking that question a lot these days. It's like I blink and suddenly a year has passed. A couple days ago was this website's 2nd anniversary. I was a bit busy, so I didn't have the time nor headspace to do a proper retrospective, so here is a belated one.

How has this website evolved over the last year? It hasn't changed much aside from the index page turning into a giant shitpost. It's still an amateurish mess of janky HTML and CSS. And I haven't had the time to sit down and polish my web design skills. There's just more fun things to do. But it is in a state of works-well-enough, so if it ain't broke why fix it?

My photography section is now looking more like a Pandemic lockdown memorial than an active photography section. It's not that I haven't been taking photos, but I've been taking actually GOOD photos. Which doesn't fit the terribly experimental street photography theme that I set out to document. Also there are too many people on the streets these days. I'm not fond of taking photos of people. Maybe one day I'll find the inspiration to start taking bad photos again.

Fortunately 2022 has been pretty productive in terms of art, and the first quarter of 2023 has some stuff as well, although it hasn't made its way to the website yet. But I put up a few galleries, worked on some pieces that I enjoyed making and completed another Inktober. My comics output has been relatively stagnant, although I did some stuff behind the scenes that haven't reached completion yet. I hope to be able to focus on that more for the rest of 2023.

My writing continued, occasionally turning into long rants or short essays. There are people that cringe at their own writing, but I actually had a blast reading my thoughts from the last year (Permit me this small amout of self praise). I think that my artblog had a lot more interesting writing than my main blog, which has been rather on the negative side. But then again it has been a side record of me going through a horrible time in my life, so it has some personal historical value as well. Writing has been a fun activity, I'm mostly writing for myself, just enjoying the process more than actually trying to communicate anything useful. As they say, anybody can write but but it's a lot harder to communicate. Not bothering with a coherent message and just stringing words together makes the process a lot easier in that sense.

I didn't think I would have lasted regularly updating a website for so long. I'm not one for doing one thing consistently over a long time. Then again I have a history of being overly pessimistic with the state of things.

I spent the day flitting around from distraction to distraction. A combination of anxiousness and just not being there even though I was physically in a space and productive. Something was missing. It might have just been a simple physiological effect of low blood sugar. Or the existential dread of wasting my time spinning plates while I could be using this time to do things that I actually want to do. My state of mind is somewhere in that continuum.

I'd like to work on my website, but I feel like there really isn't much to put up while simultaneously there is a bunch of stuff on the shelf that I haven't properly scanned in and cleaned up. I'd like to work on more bookbinding, but I have a pile of books that I can't fill. I'd like to draw more, but I can't find the time or energy. I'd like to get started on comics projects, but I can't seem to get into the right headspace to do the dreaded boring bits of a bigger project. I'd like to take some photos, I've been doing that but it's not the stuff that I put up here. I'd like to build model kits, I wasted some time on those a few days back, it was fun. I'd like to write, I'm doing that right now even though I should be sleeping. I'd like to sleep, but I want to write more than I want to sleep.

My brain feels like it's splintered into so many distraught desires to do things, when I'd just like to sit down and focus on some small goal. Part of me wishes that I would just reach that stage of maturity where I can just give up on my dead dreams and let go of them. But I guess I'm not enough of a grown up.

It's frustrating.

I'd like to be able to use every waking hour being productive and doing things that I like. But many hours spent working on gardening has taught me that there is a rhythm to the living world. It's not always a straightforward line going up, it waxes and wanes, there is a time for everything. Sometimes you sow, sometimes you wait, sometimes you rest, sometimes you reap.

Lately I've decided to pay more attention to rhythms. Instead of being constantly on, I rest, I spend time on leisure. Counterintuitively, the less I work the more I get done. The more sleep and rest I get, the faster work is finished. As it turns out, I'm not that different from a biological organism. I have to obey natural rhythms.

Rest is like soil, as long as you have enough of it and if it is of good quality, then anything you grow generally does fine. Resting is getting things done. So I decided to guard my rest more fiercely.

I've been keeping myself busy. Having to reconfigure my income streams in the last couple of months has been a handful. Fortunately that transition is complete, but the result is that I don't have as much time to myself as I would like. In between I've been playing RPGs and drawing and binding books and doing whatever I fancy, but that means that I hadn't had time to work on my website or any longer form art projects.

It's strange, everything that I worked on for the past couple of years seems so hollow and empty. Like it didn't really matter in the end. Maybe it did in ways that I don't understand yet, but all the things that kept me up at night just feel so inconsequential. What was it even for? It wasn't really worth setting aside my dreams and desires. In the end it was all meaningless. Maybe everybody feels like this, but they end up doing more meaningless busy work to fill up the time so they don't have to think about it. I know I'd rather engage in silly paperwork than think about it.

Anyway, I'll just finish up the stuff that has gone long past their deadline. Then I have to piece together my wants, needs and responsibilities into a coherent life.

I was chatting with a teenager about tokustasu, the genre of Japanese special effects that includes Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, Ultraman and Godzilla. Basically shows with Japanese people in latex and foam hitting each other while surrounded by fireworks and/or miniatures. He told me that he was fond of Heisei Kamen Rider series, which came out before he was born. I asked him how he found all this stuff and how he could even understand what he was watching. To which he explained that it involved downloading shady apps that stream pirated content, watching the episodes in Japanese and then cross referencing it with explainers in a language that he understood that he found on Youtube. It was an awfully complicated process to watch karate bugmen.

It made me a bit nostalgic about the hoops that I had to go through to find information on anime on the old web of the 90's. Often I wouldn't even have access to some anime that I wanted to watch (we got our anime on TV, there was like 1 badly dubbed show a week at most), so I like an archeologist I stitched together a narrative based on whatever I could find on shrines and fan sites. I would read episode summaries (I'm not sure if people still do this, do these things still exist?), reviews, look at character descriptions, stare at tiny screenshots, read up on settings and lore, and most of the time just imagine what the show was about. It too was an awfully complicated process.

Times change but somehow humans still find ways to create overcomplicated processes to find stories that they want to experience. I find that somewhat endearing.

For the last couple of days I've visited two used bookstores. I visited these types of bookstores all the time when I was a teenager, just going around through musty smelling racks of old paperbacks while hunting for old sci-fi books was something I did almost every week. Occasionally I'd find a Battletech novel to add to my collection. Or some random table top RPG book. It was always fun to have these little treasures that I could always find hidden on the shelves. It was always enjoyable to dig through the detritus of readers a decade ago and try to salvage whatever interested me.

Used book stores started disappearing when I started going to university. I was distracted by the piles of old books in the university library, so I didn't really have any problems with finding reading material. I would still hunt through them occasionally, but they became rarer and rarer. Disappearing almost completely by the end of the 2010s. Maybe I prefer the eclectic mixes of books, or maybe the bookstores just didn't smell right, but all this while, I would wander bookstores selling new books and just feel like I wasn't interested in reading anymore.

By chance I went to two of them, the first one a cozy room with a large billowy curtain at the entrance, it smelled lightly of incense, Chinese New Year music leaked in from the back door and it had a big cabinet of really old and rare books that were not for sale, but the owner put them there anyway for reference. The book choices bordered on academic, like it was a collection of books from particularly learned people, or at least book lovers. I spied a particularly well bound book on a shelf full of local comics, and judging the book by its cover (It had a really nice cover, and spine too) I picked it up. It was an indie RPG setting book, a really great find for that price.

The second one was one of those staffless book shops that are starting to spring up. You just go in and take whatever you want and pay for it through a cashless transfer (Our bank apps are like those in China, it's really easy to transfer money through QR codes and phones). It's based totally on trust, but I guess there just isn't a thrill in shoplifting old books. It didn't have as nice an atmosphere as the previous bookstore, but there was something old about the selection of books, they looked like the sort of books that I would always find as a teenager. To my surprise I even found Battletech novels in the wild in the year 2023. I finally completed my Micheal Stackpole Warrior Trilogy, it must have taken me 20 years to do so.

Searching through used bookstores is so much fun. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed thumbing through old paperbacks looking for a good book.

My back hurts. I have a terrible posture, and my bed is starting to sink so I'm always in a terrible sleeping position. On one hand I feel more comfortable with my body as I get older, but on the other it gets a whole lot less comfortable to be in this body and it's all downhill from here.

People always talk about how nice it is to have a young body, and that youth is wasted on the young. But young people are constantly uneasy with their constantly changing bodies. Growing pains are so hard and all the unfamiliar hormones just makes life a unpredictable storm of teenaged angst. Even the clumsy small bodies of children are a constant source of frustration and the desire to grow up. We all live a lifetime of never being totally comfortable with our bodies.

Our bodies are prisons of pain. To have one is to feel pain. To have one is to be able to feel pain. I guess the price is worth the tradeoff.

Looks like I'll be leaving another place that I put my a lot of effort and care into. I like to find these calm shelters for myself, the best ones are where I can just sit quietly and contemplate when everyone is not around. Places that I can observe for a long time and learn the nuances. Make friends, build small communities. But it never lasts. It's an unending retreat. From one safe space to another. It's starting to feel like my career is just a series of failed relationships with places. Everything I put any amount of love and care into eventually crumbles.

As usual there is the feeling of subtle anger and overarching loss. That swirl of negative feelings that keeps me up at night. But like regrets, clouds and birds in the sky they eventually pass. I can never seem to hold on to them.

That's life. Get up, move on, scatter to the winds. We say our goodbyes at the crossroads and go on our merry way to the unknown once again. I always describe myself as a pessimist, but that unacknowledged optimism guides my steps towards the horizon.

It's time to leave again.

P/S I know this is intentionally vague, but I'm not talking about twitter. Although I am disengaging from that too...

PP/S I just realised that this could look like an announcement that I'm leaving Neocities, it is not. This is a rant about IRL stuff and actual physical spaces.

I had chicken tenders for lunch. They were dry and rather tasteless. I had a hard time imagining that it was once a living thing. In the past chickens had sacred roles. Sacrificed to the primordial spirits, to pray for a good harvest or give thanks to the sea. Now they are just victims of industry. I don't think a chicken could ever comprehend the body warping horrors of slaughter, skinning, slicing, breading and frying that are inflicted on chicken tenders.

Animals are complicated, they are a maze of organs packed inside blood vessels, skin, bone, sinew and meat. You can look into their eyes and see part of yourself. They are a reflection of the tangled complexity of the natural world that they arise from. A chicken tender isn't that. It's life warped by industry, simplified and homogenised beyond recognition. Reduced to a linear slab of deep fried breaded meat. It no longer had eyes or a head for that matter, but I could see a different part of myself in there. I didn't like what I saw.

I took another bite out of my chicken tender. It was an affront to life itself.

I'd been obsessing over faces lately. For absolutely no rational reason, for the last 3 days I have just spent every moment that I could spare sculpting tiny 1/20 scale heads. The faces are the hardest part. But putty is a very forgiving medium. I've sculpted and reconsidered and erased and started over. There's a lot more to think about when dealing with 3-dimensional structures instead of a 2-dimensional picture plane. All sorts of surfaces that I could just leave as white space need to be carefully considered. And working at such a small scale means that missing a few hundred micrometers makes everything look off. It's a really tough problem to deal with. It's also a distraction from other problems that I'm, pun not intended, facing.

Sometimes things really suck. Or perhaps we're in a part of history where things unrelentingly suck. And we are expected to put on a brave face and carry on being productive. Somewhere, under this facade of a functional capable human being, I do wish that all of us could just openly admit our accumulated hurt and vulnerability . I'm so tired of carrying this heavy mask while having to go about my incresingly stressful daily tasks. As much as we try to shelter others from the pain of the world, maybe if we all admitted that the world is fucking painful we'd have some measure of relief. But even I realise that society can't function without people burying their true feelings deep inside.

So I work on the faces that I can control. Pushing around putty with a needle and knife. Considering ridiculous problems like how much should eye bags be exagerated to be seen at small scales. Or how I can accurately depict that curve from the cheekbone to the outer part of the eye. Or making sure the nose is both straight and properly curved. Trying to depict beauty and character on something smaller than my fingernail. It's all useless and silly, but at least it's not a brave face.

Photographers sometimes refer to their photography sessions as "photo therapy". The act of doing something is often beneficial to our mental health. For the past year or so, I've been indulging in "HTML therapy". Just prodding and poking some tags around and seeing how it makes a barely functional website. Even this blog section isn't generated by anything, I just copy and paste code in notepad and edit it accordingly.

It's kind of fun to see how manually coding everything slows down my thoughts. It's not a rapid response and I can't make knee jerk reactions in my communication. My mode of thinking shifts from reacting to introspection. Maybe that's a healthier mode of thought. Being in a constant state of reaction just wears me out.

Perhaps slowly building pages manually is just the modern equivalent of monks weaving sandals as a form of meditation. Or grandmothers knitting stuff. Deliberate action, a bit of rote ritual and introspection. It helps me to rest my mind.

My quarantine is over. I only had a sore throat that got better after a couple of days. But once I got back to work I felt like even a small amount of activity made me feel like my organs had been beaten with a stick. Hopefully that's just post-covid fatigue and not foreshadowing something worse.

Overall it wasn't a bad experience. I got a break and managed to finish a small model kit related project. I watched some anime and did some drawing. I had family around to help with getting food, medicine and supplies. My house was large and empty enough to self isolate for the whole period. Sure everything else was going to shit in my absence, but I'll deal with that when the time comes. My temporary hikikomori lifestyle was enabled by having loved ones around that could take care of me and support me.

Some of my dreams are unraveling, some of them feel like they have gotten so stuck in a quagmire that they don't even look recognisable anymore. Dreams are flimsy and fragile things, humans are tough. We can outlive the conditions that would shred dreams. For all their flaws, there are people around you that will stick with you through thick and thin. Even as your dreams die, you can still go back to them and it won't feel like the end of the world. You can live without dreams, but you can't survive without other people.

While in quarantine I binged on some "Cute girl doing cute things" anime. I'll admit that there was a point in my life when I didn't enjoy it. The plots were shallow, the characters were such simple tropes of schoolgirls, the jokes were predictable, everything was fluffy and sweet and there was hardly any conflict. It wasn't a work of art or a critique of the human condition.

But I find that as I get older, I get the appeal of such anime. It's such great escapism. Instead of the horny compulsive-liar sociopaths that real schoolgirls are, it offers a simple fantasy where girls are cute and innocent, color coded and each having a one note personality. When I get tired of real human beings and their real human being drama, I can watch the almost conflict free plots and predictable jokes and not be mentally challenged in any way. I can just enjoy the cute sounds and bright colors that are so divorced from the reality of humans that are made of bone, teeth, skin, hair and sinew.

I remember once having to deal with actual Japanese people and then withdrawing to watch some CGDCT anime because dealing with actual Japanese people is exhausting. There's a lot of reading between the lines that you have to do. It was then that I understood the true purpose of these anime. Sometimes we all just need a break from being all too human.

*I'd recommend a few titles, but it's all a colorful mush in my head right now. I can barely name any.

I've been reflecting on how everything that I had been dreading has happened to me all at the same time. Strangely, it isn't that bad. Or better worded, it isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

In the past month or so pretty much everything which I never wanted to happen has happened. I used to dread some of these things, it would make me anxious and keep me up at night. But looking at it now, as I am facing all of it down, I'm not as worried. The person I am that faces those anxieties isn't the same person that was dreading them. In between dreading the future and your nightmares coming to be, you grow as a person in ways you could never have imagined. Sure bad things happen unexpectedly and without warning, but the support and solutions to them also show up in unexpected places. You don't know the future, but it is pretty neutral, containing both good and bad.

So that's my experience so far. The time has come, I'm living out the worst future and I'm still coping. Deadlines are a lot more flexible than I expected and there are people that I can depend on. The world will still keep on turning no matter the outcome of my actions.

It's day 3 since I tested positive for Covid. I must have gotten careless and caught it from a friend. Probably it was just a matter of time since it's a super spreading pandemic right now. We've lost all control measures since everybody is just focused on politics and general elections here. While all this is going on my job just erupted in chaos and the internet seems to be running around to try to find new social media to take shelter in. And through this all I am isolated in my room, just waiting it out so I can get back to important work. I feel like a player put on the bench at a crucial moment.

Overall it hasn't been much of an event. I just need to quarantine and sleep. My only symptoms are a sore throat, a light fever and some stomach discomfort. Although some scientists now think that mild cases are much worse in the long term than more serious infections. I'm trying to not think about it. Doing some drawing. Working on some simple unfinished personal projects.

I have to rest. That's the only way I can recover. And I need to recover as fast as possible. I'm trying so hard to rest. It's such an oxymoronic situation.

I like to eat. As thanks for some aid in a crisis, I was recently fed by a family that can only afford to give their own home cooking. We asked them not to cook anything but they refused. Putting out an array of dishes and insisting that we eat. It was good, fried chicken, roasted fish, beef soup, sambal, bergedil. Obviously cooked by years of experience. I sat on an old carpet on hard cement and listened to how they had been poorly treated by authorities. The only treasure they had was each other and even that was almost snatched from them. I was relieved that their ordeal was over.

It's probably not a universal experience. But under the tropical sun and surrounded by lush gardens planted with gingers and chillies. Food was the refuge of the powerless. The act of eating together a sign of shared providence, hospitality and gratitude.

Food is the only only power they had. And they were gracious enough to share.

This probably is the longest gap of updating my website since I started it. A lot of things happened in life, mostly renovations at my house (organising and packing things up is so tiring) that unfortunately coincided with a ton of work related deadlines. That's as far as I will go for life updates. But here is a grab bag of musings:

Alone time

I was on a short staycation when I realised that I hadn't done this in a while. Just being completely alone, with nothing more than my thoughts. The internet is really convenient, but it is also an excuse to interrupt myself every 5 minutes with some sort of distraction. When you are all alone, you have to confront yourself. It's kind of scary, but also necessary once in a while.

Dumpling pulled noodles on a rainy day

I've been craving a good bowl of noodles recently with all the rainy weather. I finally found it at one of those shops where a sweaty Chinaman in a skull cap pulls the noodles behind a glass window. He throws the freshly pulled noodles into boiling water and it is served in a bowl of soup with generous dumplings and excessive chilly oil. Slurped it all up and drank the soup out of the bowl. The perfect remedy for cold weather.

Solitary inktober

This year I decided that I wanted to do inktober, but I didn't want to bother with the more social aspect of it. I don't think I have anything to prove anymore. So I've been enjoying it at my own pace, drawing without prompts and just having fun with it. The results are decent so far, and tomorrow's the last day of it.

This side of dreams

It occurred to me that I am close to the midway point of the average life expectancy of a human in my country. It's not a bad thing, I find it comforting that I'm closer to death than birth. But it is also the point in which I have completed a few of my modest dreams, and now I look at them not as desires but as something in the past. I still can't process being on this side of dreams.

Bookbinding

I tried my hand at bookbinding. I can do a pretty decent saddle stitch and can make sturdy perfect binded text blocks, but I'm still a beginner when it comes to things like Coptic stitches. I usually only binded books when I needed a new sketch book, which usually was once or twice a year. So I never got much practice. I decided to give some to my friends as an excuse to bind more books.

Optimism

In my head I'm a constant mess of waiting for the tragedy to strike. But everyone that knows me thinks that I'm a very optimistic person. Maybe because I always have the worst case scenario in the back of my mind, everything else looks not as bad as it could be.

It's a bit strange, on one hand our modern globalised society is obsessed with growth. There always has to be more consumption, more progress and more growth every quarter or society will just break down. But on the other hand, on the increasingly intolerant social networks that make up most of the internet, mob mentality and the need to dunk on others has led to an assumption that people never change or grow. Posts from years back are dug up as proof that someone has committed a taboo. People are becoming more stubborn to admit that they might be wrong and dig themselves further into prisons of identity politics. Any changes in opinion might lead to social exile.

As an internet user from the wild west era of the early 00s, we all said and posted some pretty offensive and dumb stuff when we were young. Thankfully so much of it has been lost to time, or not recorded at all since we didn't have cameras constantly filming us. We mercifully had the chance to change and grow as people. To retire the identities that we held as youth and move on. To tear down and rebuild ourselves over time. But it feels like a lot of us now are trapped in social media and mercilessly policed to have a correct identity and never deviate from it. Forever having to deal with receipts kept to incite outrage. I'm not sure if i could ever live with that pressure.

The way that society is organised keeps most growth out of sight. We separate age groups and keep them apart for the most part of our daily lives, unless you have children or young relatives you hardly see people grow. Perhaps children, growing up without a frame of reference of what adults are really like, develop a misconception of the permanence of personality. And adults, not used to interacting with children, don't really know how to interact with the younger generation.

But the collapse of context on the internet has made it so even minors are treated as really dumb adults.I've once been hostile to an idiot before realising that I was communicating with a 14 year old. And children, teens and immature people can create all sorts of havoc with social power disproportionate to their maturity. They have all sorts of harassment campaigns and tools that literally ruin lives. I remember in the past when I would sometimes meet a cool older person the internet (or I would be the older person) and there would be some guidance and patience (and forum moderation). Maybe I'm not in the right places, because mobs tend to be the order of the day.

It's pleasant to see people grow up. Yes, some may be bullies. Some may be problematic. Some may be sexist or racist. Some may be horrible people. But it takes patience and understanding to guide them to be better people. I think we need to believe in the potential of human beings again. We need to let people grow.

I am aware that my thoughts and emotions are just the result of hormone soaked neurons firing in my brain. If I would look at it objectively, everything that I feel and experience is nothing more than a biological response to stimuli. Just a mush of uncaring chemicals and atoms. And for the longest time I've strove to view the world as objectively as possible. Being objective and using it to search for truth makes science possible, it cuts away pesky biases and feelings and delivers the cold hard facts.

But unfortunately my entire interface with the world is subjective in nature. My feelings affect how I see and understand the world. While objective truths are seen as an ideal, very often the subjective is all we have. We cannot separate ourselves cleanly from the messiness of our bodies and world or fully reduce it to idealised parts. I can understand the biology of my small and large intestines, but it is always entangled with feelings of pain or disgust at the contents. And it's always in the context of the food that I eat and the messy microbiome within.

I've worked with data before, it's not always the cold math of an unliving algorithm. There's frustration, there's a tinge of excitement, there's that feeling of groping in the dark that has no single English word to describe it. There is that moment where your heart moves and you understand. Even math, which is as close to objective truth as we get, is learned and mastered by beings that cannot help but make it personal.

Perhaps, what I am clumsily trying to describe is that I cannot just "Think, therefore I am". I am always in a state of being, always in a context, and I can't escape messy tangle of the world around me. I will be subjective and sentimental because that's all we ever get in our one chance at living.

I sat through a talk where the terms "Metaverse", "Hackathons", "IR 5.0", "Smart city" and "IoT" were thrown about. I feel like if it was a decade earlier I would have been impressed. But now the Silicon-valleyisms that techbros like to throw around feel a bit icky. I remember when all this was so shiny and new, web2.0 was taking off, startups were just starting to disrupt the older established business models, new technology and software was coming out at breakneck rates. But in our current dystopia, it feels like the gilded surfaces of Silicon Valley have worn off.

Silicon Valley in the early 2010s was like a glowing example of how to do things right, at least that's how it looked to me as a person partially employed in the creaking bureaucracy of public service of a third world country. I remember complaining to a friend about how we need to adopt more design thinking, agile management, use more tech and startup thinking. We needed to learn from the Americans, adapt their best practices, disrupt. Then we could actually get work done. In hindsight I should have just enjoyed those lazy days of munching on fried bananas during work hours (The work day had 4 meals: Breakfast, Morning tea, Lunch, Afternoon tea, I wonder how we ever got anything done. I now think that we might have accidentally invented UBI).

Instead of the disruptive innovators that Silicon Valley used to claim to be, most of those approaches just led to billion dollar scams, dubious labour practices, tech that makes our quality of life worse, privacy nightmares, overstuffed monopolies and occasionally building the tools for genocide. The adherents of startup philosophy here got a bunch of money from investors and proceeded to burn through all of it with no results. I tend to avoid the startup bros now, they are a lot of talk but are rarely able to do much.

Times change, hindsight makes things clearer. Makes me wonder which of our current crop of unstoppable ideas won't stand the test of time.

I recently had a dream of a nice human scaled walkable city. The paths were narrow, vaguely middle eastern. Full of life but comfortable and peaceful. There were plenty of places to sit and rest. I passed by people that I had conversations with before. There were community gatherings and spaces for prayers and rituals. I wanted to spend some time there to document it, but then I realised that I was in a dream and the place was not real.

I woke up and desperately scribbled down notes on it before the dream faded. When I thought about it for a bit, I was reminded of the original Backrooms creepypasta:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you”

What if you could slip into spaces that are the opposite of Backrooms? Where you feel safe, comfortable and not lonely and alienated? Instead of nightmares of the endless despair of corporate hellscapes, we can have small dreams about places that would be pleasant to live in.

I have to deal with a lot of kids, so I unfortunately have a front row seat of what kids are looking at these days. I hear them singing Rick Astley's "Never going to give you up" and have to answer questions on whether SCPs and Backrooms are real. Which makes me realise that a lot of the pop culture that these kids are absorbing crawled out of 4chan before making it to Roblox, tiktok and Youtube. I remember it used to take a good 2-3 years before something turned from a 4chan in-joke into something mainstream. So mainstream that 10 year olds on the other side of the world talk about it. And this 4chan to mainstream pipeline seems to be getting shorter.

The kids that I know barely speak English, so how well versed they were on 4chan slang and memes was a mystery for a while. But I have realised that part of the pipeline is vernacular content creators, hungry for content, creating fan translations, reaction videos and summaries of lore in other languages. Like anything targeting children, these videos get hundreds of thousands of views. Once popular these start spreading predigested 4chan memes over to other platforms.

The result, literal children in Southeast Asia calling each other "Wibu" (derived from weaboo) and discussing SCP monsters like they are real entities. Although it used to be a secret club for edgy teenagers, and it still attempts to be so, there's really nothing more mainstream than 4chan these days.

"I was a young man, my head filled with frivolous dreams." an old Haji said to me once. I too was younger then. I'm not anymore. I remember in my politely rebellious youth I nodded along in agreement, but internally I clutched my pile of of dreams as tightly as I could. There was so much that I wanted to do. So much I wanted to be. So much potential that I wanted to grasp. So much energy that seemed to race recklessly in every direction.

I was talking with some younger colleagues recently and I realised that I was one of the oldest people in the room (One of the pitfalls of working in a young organisation). When I see them I see that conversation with my old friend the Haji. Except my position has shifted closer to the elderly counterpart. They live in such a frenzy of productive confusion. They are in such a hurry to do things. So ambitious. Desiring, discovering, chasing and growing. Each rushing forward holding on to more dreams that can carry. And because of that they are so exhausted and in so much pain.

Compared to them, all the potential that I had has fizzled out. Perhaps competence and capability have filled the void. I hope it occupies the empty space that used to be filled with the dreams that I discarded along the way. It would be less lonesome that way. In the past my dreams were the most precious things, but they devalued as suddenly as love turns to regret. I always repeat that the greatest tragedy of being human is that we are so much tougher than our fragile dreams.

Then again I have found new dreams that I never expected to have. So while I have had to prune down my dreams, hope is never lost. The journey is a lot more wider and longer than what I imagined in the ignorance of my youth.

What if we valued rest instead of labour? Why do we measure value in productivity? Why do we not view rest as the source of value, quality labour and productivity and strive to create more of it?

This is just a late night thought while going to sleep. I need rest to do stuff, but I prioritise doing things over rest. Why do I think like that? Is it the pervasive cultural emphasis on always doing things? Everybody asks what do you do, not how well you sleep at night. We constantly desire rest, but we don't prioritise rest.

What if we turned it around and prioritised rest as the fount of productivity? Instead of trying to get everyone jobs and keep up production, we just make sure that everyone is well rested and then let these calm, clear minded people do whatever they find to be productive?

I think the world would be a very nice place if we allowed people to dream full dreams at night.

I was once in an Arab library. There were walls filled with tomes of books in words that I couldn't read. Almost the entire library was out of my reach, except for a small squarish room filled with English books. I had once thought that my knowledge of English would open up the entire world. But there was so much inaccessible knowledge, hidden behind a language that I couldn't understand. There was a huge world that existed beyond my Anglophone reach.

I've been watching some stuff on philosophy Youtube, and after a while I start to realise that most of the videos are always quoting the same few Philosophy 101 names as they try to make sense of the world. It makes me wonder about why Western pop philosophy is dominated by so few people. The frameworks of a small number of European dudes from the mid to late 20th century is used to breakdown and interpret the complexities of modern life. Maybe it's because it's introductory stuff made for the masses written by 20 year olds on Youtube, so the more obscure people aren't brought up, but sometimes it feels a bit repetitive. An intellectual clique that doesn't see beyond its own blind spots.

Occasionally I do read a paper or two about postcolonial studies. I find them a chore to read. Many take interesting subjects and write about it in the dullest way. And I always get the nagging feeling that these exist in an academic framework that is built upon the work by that small number of European dudes. The approach, the format, the intended audience, the tone. It echoes a kind of European institutional philosophy that is taught in Philosophy 101 classes.

It's interesting to read other viewpoints, or to not read at all. It's interesting to talk to people and get insights into their thinking. It's interesting to go beyond European-centric thought. To look at a world where everything important is not written down, but it just permeates everywhere. A world of roadside shrines, calligraphy, street food, catfish, durians and banana leaf.

Lately tending to my garden and my relationships with other people gives me more to think about than reading books. Lived experience and working to solve problems really challenges my worldview, I realise that there's a lot more to life than just conceptualising problems. Conceptualising the problem is the easy part. Sometimes you actually have to address problems, and that is always a lot more messy than the view from an ivory tower. Perhaps the only way to understand life is to live with it. Or maybe it's arrogance to think that it's possibile to comprehend it. As I try to rethink my worldview of philosophy, I can't help but think that academic philosophy kind of looks like a collection of miserable 20th century loners that are weirdly fixated on power, resentment, suffering and logic. Surely there must be more to life than this.

Durians, everybody loves them, and by everybody I mean everyone that can stand their unique smell. I personally find them to be pleasantly fragrant. Their smell invokes childhood memories of sitting by the roadside with my family, breaking open thorny fruit and picking out the creamy yellow flesh. Despite its newfound value as a world famous export crop, it will always be a humble village fruit in my heart.

I really like palm oil. I like the golden crispy things that come out of it. So many things can be deep fried in the golden boiling liquid. One of my favorites is fish, coated in turmeric and salt and then deep fried. Even the bones get fried into a crispy treat and very little remains when I'm done with it. Many of my friends come from families that grow oil palms, they managed to escape poverty and get an education because of the crop. But all is not good, there's the deforestation, carbon emissions, haze and horrible human costs that are associated with it. Like everything, it is a very complicated love.

There was once an ad that featured a cute cartoon of a baby orang utan coming into a little girl's room and it explaining that it lost its home because of palm oil. Cue images of machines coming and destroying rainforests and cartoon animals fleeing. The little girl then urges the viewer to boycott palm oil to stop this destruction. Curiously missing from this ad were the people that actually plant the palm oil. They were reduced to grey evil machines instead of human beings. Every time I watch these types of ads, I wonder why they always value the cute orange orang utan over the dreams and aspirations of the brown people that also share the land.

I don't trust anything that has to do with history, politics, race or religion that I find on social media. These are all complex issues with a ton of nuances that need to be properly examined before making decisions. But put it in the format of an ad, a tweet or post, and a lot of the nuances are lost, creating the illusion of a simple black and white world. It turns into good guys and bad guys, where the good guys are the group that you identify with and the bad guys are whoever you don't like. If there's something we need to be careful about in the 21st century, it's the temptation of thinking that the world works on simple principles and one small thing that you have to do to change everything.

The boycott palm oil ad campaign was a great success. People in Europe began viewing palm oil as 'the cruel oil'. Legislation and consumer demand prevented export to Europe. It was a great plan, use market forces to stop deforestation. Well, it would have been a great plan if the world was simple and the people that plant oil palms were just slaves to a market and didn't have any autonomy or ingenuity of their own. The 'boycott palm oil' campaign succeeded in its objectives, but the world wasn't simple. Deforestation still happened, not slowing down one bit. On the ground, it was just too complex to solve with one simple trick that the palm oil industry hates.

Unable to sell palm oil to Europe, farmers found alternatives to plant on their land. The durian industry took off, spurred by demand from a newly affluent China that was demanding exotic fruit and R&D that allowed it to be frozen for export. Durian turned from a village fruit into a luxury commodity crop. Forests were cut down to chase the new craze. The locals had outmaneuvered the palm oil boycott and created a new market when the old market was unfavorable. Working on a simple model of supply and demand, the environmental lobby succeeded in their metrics but failed to address the real problem. They underestimated the complexity of the problem.

The point of this long story is not that this world is made up of a tangled web of interaction and unforeseen consequences. As complicated as it is, I still had to oversimplify it for readability. The oil palm lobby, the environmentalists, the Chinese middle class, the durian industry, they all created this complex web of interactions that create the real problem: I can't aford to eat durians as much as I would like to! I remember when people would give durians for free! Now they are charging outrageous prices for some stupid cloned durian! Why is it such a luxury item now? It used to be an impulse buy, now we have to think long and hard about getting some! I just want to enjoy eating durians dammit!

Most of the content on the internet is created by dumb teenagers* or people in their 20's. They just have plenty of free time to come up with stuff and put it out into the world. Heads full of dreams and lacking in restraint. Yes, there is plenty more polished content created by more established older people, but kids really do flood their own media of choice with a ton of terrible content. It's often really dumb and juvenile and I'm beyond that point where I can understand it. My sensibilities are aged, my skin is thicker and my emotions numb, I no longer experience the world as they do and I'm forgetting what I went through at the same age as well. But I appreciate their content for what it is; often raw emotions made into art.

I always keep that in mind when I see stuff online. It's either by kids or made for them. That's why it can look simplistic to me. That's why it doesn't match my tastes or sensibilities. That's why it's often bad takes. Children like to verbally abuse each other, just go to a playground and listen to how they talk when adults aren't around. They are growing up, they need to make mistakes and follow trends and do stupid things and have dumb opinions. I have to remind myself that most of the internet is still growing up. Even in your 20's there is still a lot of growing up that needs to be done.

Millennials like me found an internet which was a wild west with little adult supervision. And somehow the terrible internet forum drama on Something Awful of our youth has snowballed into a global inability to deal with the Covid Pandemic. We were the original internet assholes and we suffer because of it. But now we're finding ourselves as the older generation and watching a new one come of age. I wonder if our experience will be of any value, can we admonish and guide to the best of our ability? Or should we just be cautionary tales?

To be fair, there are always things made by ridiculously talented young people that elicit a guilty feeling of jealousy. But for most people, their masterpieces aren't going to be what they made early in their lifetime. There's going to be a ton of stinkers and flawed creations. There will be stuff so beyond my frame of reference that I won't able to get. But I can give them the time and be patient and be kind.

*My personal experience is that the smarter teenagers are riddled with self-doubt and tend to produce a lot less stuff than meme-machines with little self awareness. To be honest I'm not sure if this is the general case or just a personal anecdote.

So, things are not going too well with the world. I'm seeing anxious people posting tweets and photos of some great injustice from the other side of the world, but I understand that I don't understand the context that they are experiencing. They're really distressed about it, but I can only view it from a detached half-formed understanding of the issue, to think that I can truly understand them would be really conceited. The opposing faction is also posting all sorts of anxious stuff too, everybody seems to be very angry and self-rightous. The more I dig the more messy it seems. And the worst part of it is that everything is so contradictory that I barely know what is real anymore. It's like people shouting at each other within their own angry bubble. Truth gets lost in the confusion.

Being on the edge of an empire is strange, I understand that what happens in the center of power has an effect on my life and I don't have any say in it. So the best that I can do is try to decode what is going on within the superpower in an attempt to make sense of what is happening with the world. But lately it's like looking at some distorted reality, that's just so goddamn confusing that I can't make heads or tails out of it. I'm not sure if what I read and hear is even real anymore. I'm not sure if the people communicating these things know what is real anymore. For all I know, so many things could just be propaganda and bots and clueless people echoing misinformation.

Being on social media makes us really stressed because it distorts our sense of reality. I guess the same can be said for news as well. It delivers pre-digested ideas of right and wrong for you to consume, without giving you the time to think carefully about it. That's one thing that I like about blog posts and other old web holdouts, they can be absolutely mundane, but at least it feels like it is part of a human experience rather than the media agenda of corporations and polical movements. We live in really confusing times, I'm pretty sure that moral ground is going to shift rapidly from here on out. Part of me wants to abandon it all and live a simple life away from it all. Part of me knows that I have to at least keep tabs on it so it isn't used against me.

But what do I know? I'm only a third worlder playing a curious spectator to a crumbling empire.

I was watching the rainforest after the rain. It's quite magical to watch. Plumes of mist lift off from the trees and drift back into the clouds. It's hard to wrap my brain around the amount of water defying gravity and ascending into the sky. It looks like a giant living organism exhaling. An astounding sight. Enjoying the fresh air, just watching the timeless forest, forgetting about meetings and work. I feel like I remember how to breathe again.

These mist shrouded mountain peaks, I'm so small in comparison. Just another tiny piece of the huge puzzle that is life on Earth. It makes my own personal problems feel absolutely microscopic.

Here's a shot I managed to get. But I think the experience as a whole is impossible to capture in a photograph.

In the past two weeks I've been taking the chance to travel on day trips. Even if it was a short distance away, if I had the time I just went out. I've been to golden paddy fields, roaring waterfalls, splashing streams, rainforests, through highways and country roads. Ever since the pandemic I've been working, just stuck in one place for too long. I've been in a city, commuting and getting stuck in traffic jams. Slowly becoming numb. Haunted by the feeling that I've lost something indescribable. Some days I feel like I'm just a wandering ghost searching for some vague thing from the past.

Looking at the horizon, feeling cool water, climbing through muddy trails, catching a breeze, having lunch at a village eatery. As I've been to those places I noticed that I no longer had a sense of wonder that I used to have. Despite the scenery around me all I could feel was a sense of tired weariness. But with every place I go I feel like I pick up something familiar. With each place, my heart starts to beat a little more. I'm catching glimpses of the person that I actually know inside this hollowed out overworked shell.

Maybe I'm tied to a place. The green hills, blue skies and endless waters of this tropical land. To feel at home I need to leave my literal home in the city. Just go off and explore again.

I need to get out more.

We're almost at the end of the first week of Pride month, I know this because stuff from the Global North fills my social media feed. We don't celebrate it here. You'd probably end up in jail if you tried. Queers and bisexuals and gays and lesbians and transfolk do exist here, but they have find ways to live in a system that rejects them. I was just reading a thread where a gay American was trying to cancel a trans Southeast Asian. There's a strange lack of self awareness to it. It's like they don't realise that while they are a minority in their country, just being a citizen of a superpower and talking down to people who have to live in oppressive regimes makes you look like an oppressor at best.

It's a bit strange when people announce their sexual orientation and ethnicity online, and it kind of becomes their entire personality. It feels one dimensional. And they try to enforce this black and white system on the rest of the world. There are so many ways of being human, but they just want to conform to some pure ideal of a certain type of person that exists in the west. Even poor black people in the USA enjoy consumerism built on the backs of a global workforce that breaks their bodies to deliver cheap trinkets to big box shops. I get that you are oppressed in your own country and that sucks, but your experiences aren't universal and you still benefit from being a citizen of that country. Instead of trying to enforce your victimhood on others, building bridges and solidarity between oppressed groups would be wiser choice.

Some may consider this to be a conservative right wing view point, but it's not. American fascists are just as bad, they try to enforce their own black and white worldview on the rest of the world too. But the world is really complicated, it resists clean categories. Some people live in countries where minorities oppress the majority economically or politically. Some people live in countries where indigenous people oppress immigrants. Some people live in countries where religion is law. Some people live in countries that have been occupied and colonised by neighbouring powers. Some people live in countries but are not part of the country at all. You can't just take a template from the USA and apply it to every person in the world. It's not better or worse, it's different.

So enjoy your pride month. But remember that it is a cultural moment only accessible to a privileged few that just happen to live in the Global North. That doesn't mean that any oppression is invalid or lesser, but rather knowing that there are many forms of oppression in this world and working together to overcome it is far better than building a hierarchy of oppression and crowning yourself the winner at its lonely peak.

When trying to hit deadlines and keep up with work, I get into this near zombified state where I just need to keep myself, exhausted and numb, going until I reach the end of the project. I hardly feel anything, lose a lot of sleep and struggle to cross things off my to do list. Just scraping along and losing myself in frustration.

I was cleaning up the code of this blog a bit to make it more archivable. So I ended up reading what I had written down in the past year or so. It's good to read your own writing, it's an act of remembering who you are, even when life is tiring, foggy and uncertain. When life just carries you away on a torrent of constant troubles and anxious depression, just having something to remind yourself that you are human has a very grounding effect. Even if your writing is just some frivolous mash of daily topics without any purpose or order.

I often ask myself why I write. I write for work and then come home and write some more. Endless lines of typed out words. Strung out sentences.

Maybe I write because I want to remember and be remembered.

It seems like the rhythm of my day now revolves around avoiding traffic jams. The congestion really is unbearable, everyday being both alone and stuck in a crowd of people, just pushing levers with my feet for hours. It's a giant long assembly line that just produces waste. So I try to wait it out or avoid it whenever I can. It hasn't been easy. It's strange, the weather is becoming more extreme, either unbearable heat or rain and flash floods. But here I am, stuck in a machine that causes it to get worse. Unable to free myself, because that's just how society works.

Prices of food are rising, epidemics showing up everywhere, supply chains are disrupted, corrupt politicians are running the country into the ground, the currency is devaluing, countries are becoming more unstable, superpowers are becoming more imperialistic by the day, the climate is breaking down, it feels like tempers get frayed and mob violence is on the horizon. Every day I'm fed a steady stream of bad news on a glossy rectangle that serves me anxiety. But I'm so stressed that I can't put up any resistance and the only thing I can do is keep scrolling.

I feel like I'm stuck in a Zugzwang, I have to make a move, but any move that I make just makes things worse. I can see it, our global fossil fuel powered civilisation slowly falling apart. It's not an epic collapse, but it is so slow and mundane. Moving at a pace slower than a traffic jam, but still faster than I ever expected. And it's absolutely boring, it's watching a giant machine slowly wear itself out because it doesn't have the ability turn off. Inevitably the machine will stop working, without any drama or fireworks, just creaking to a halt. Perhaps then, trapped inside of it, we will only know despair.

Or rather we will just go on with our lives, because despair has become just another part of our daily routine.

I was alone at a stream that I haven't been to for years. I didn't have access since the pandemic started, and after all the lockdowns I was too busy with work to make the time to visit it. The water was clear, the paths were a little overgrown with plants, it was quiet aside from the splash of water and calls of a nearby raptor. A school of fish swam in the water. The day had been really hot and dry, but there was a lot more water than I imagined. I put my hands in to feel the cool water.

A small lone forest betta came towards me to investigate. It was about as long as a penny. Judging by it's size it wasn't more than a year old. Probably it had never encountered a human before. I slowly cupped my hand around it and caught it. I sat there for a while admiring the small cool pool of water and fish in between my palms. The water started to leak out between my fingers and the fish began to panic. I put it back in the water and it hopped away.

I felt a whole lot less stressed than I had been all week. I had been to other streams before. But maybe it was nice to be back in a familiar stream.

I had a chat with a random stranger today, he was on the older side and convinced that the world was going to end soon. He didn't think we need to worry about leaving anything to the next generation, since we have about 60 or so years left until the end of the world. I wasn't really surprised, these ideas are constantly around, so many people have predicted the end of the world and their personal apocalypses have come and gone without so much as a whisper. It's certainly a dangerous position, too many people thinking like this is going to ruin the world for the rest of us that actually want to live on it. But it is an understandable position, it's easier to imagine the world ending than to think about how hard the future will be.

When encountering despair, there are many ways people deal with it. Giving up is one obvious response. A different option, one that I choose too often for my own good, is to realise that my actions are futile and almost certainly going to fail, but do it anyway. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things. Maybe I'm a butterfly flapping it's wings and causing an unlikely chain reaction of events. In a world so soaked in despair and where your actions can feel meaningless, it certainly is the more interesting option to do rather than to wait.

For the first time I had Japanese curry. I once met an old Indian academic that described it as a "Crime against humanity", and I've been reluctant to try it since. But someone else was paying for it, so I decided to be adventurous. It's a bit hard to describe Japanese curry if your reference point for curry is Indian or Malay. The one I tried tasted enough like curry, like someone accurately described curry to a person that had never tasted it before and did not have the proper ingredients to make curry. Not a facsimile, but occupying the uncanny valley of curry. Close enough, but not quite reaching there. It tasted like a mild, store bought type of curry, lacking in most of the herbs and spices that make curry nice. It feels so much more synthetic compared to the more natural taste of proper curry, like it is missing a secret ingredient passed down for generations.

Live long enough and you'll achieve something. It might be a long held dream, it might be something you never expected, but just by being around long enough you will have an achievement, however mundane it may be. But if you have a really good look at it, compared to your original dream, what you manage to achieve looks a bit more compromised, stretched, twisted and gaunt. No matter the achievement, deep down it never looks like how you expected it to be. After all the passion and struggles, you are left with something stuck in an uncanny valley. Close enough, but not quite reaching there. I can accept it for what it is, but I know that it doesn't feel completely right. Missing some secret ingredient. A sticky paste on unabsorbent sushi rice. Like Japanese curry.

In Kafka's Metamorphosis, one day Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he has turned into some sort of monstrous vermin. What follows is a depressing story of how his relatively normal life crumbles as he becomes a burden to his family. I was always a bit jealous of Gregor as I read the story. One, because cockroaches are awesome beautiful creatures. And two, because turning into a giant vermin is such a concrete and tangible excuse to not be able to work.

I often have a ton of unfinished work that keeps piling up. Sometimes I just can't work on it. I'm either too tired or my brain is strained. On those times, I start to fantasise about having an excuse to not do it. Like a concrete excuse of what prevents me from finishing that report, not these vague feelings of being overwhelmed and uninspired. An undisputable problem that I can point to, that prevents me from doing these tasks. There are all sorts of mental diagnoses that can be done, but they are always inaccessibly locked in the mind of the sufferer. It's not the same as acknowledging that your horrifying exoskeleton and spindly arms makes customer service work hard. Sometimes people just need an excuse to get away from the harshness of life.

Eventually I'll be stricken by chronic disease and realise that I should be careful about what I wish for. But until then it remains a guilty fantasy. Although, I do realise that in the current techno-dystopia that we live in, even if you turn into a giant cockroach you probably still have to work remotely from home. Just turn your camera off during meetings or something.

*This is also the entire premise of the anime Paranoia Agent. Yes, getting hit by a bat is also a wonderful excuse.

Twice in the last week I've put my phone aside and depended entirely on my sense of direction to get home from the other side of town. I got lost both times. I like getting lost. The uncertainty, the sense of unknown, the spatial puzzle of filling in a mental map, going through places that you've never been. Being lost is a process, not a destination. It's all great fun. You can't really explore without getting a bit lost.

Getting lost is going to be a thing of the past. Everybody has a real time map in their pocket. Being physically lost is going to be very rare, something that only happens in the worst conditions. You can get directions almost anywhere. I wonder how people who don't have the experience of being physically lost will think when they become lost in other ways. Most of their world is a straight feed with few choices and branches. What other analogy can you map to the feeling of being lost? Will there be something else to replace it or will it just be an empty anxiety, a dreadful feeling with nothing else to compare it to?

In that sense I really do hope that there are more lost souls that can appreciate not knowing where they are every once in a while.

Society needs monks. Not religious establishments and their enforcers, but those weird guys that exist on the edge of society. They reject normal life and spend it collecting, documenting, praying and thinking. I think there is an important role played by these outcasts. They preserve knowledge and help to give context to the problems that everyone faces. Monks know the stories and have discussed and contemplated them. The role of a monk is to think deeply and to be around when someone that has not thought as deeply comes for help.

Consumerism vilifies the monk. Consumerism can only survive when driven by desire. Therefore people that don't give in to desire have to be silenced and ridiculed, replaced instead by amulets sellers, megachurches and prosperity gospels. The role of monks have been cut up and doled out to others, universities must now do the thinking without any spirituality, motivational speakers give context to life but without the deep contemplation, therapists give guidance as a service that must be paid for, philosophy becomes divorced from practice and society, thoughts are simplified and stripped of nuances to become short videos and social media posts, stories are discarded in favor of copyrighted properties held by giant corporations. Reduced, bureaucratised and compartmentalised; the monk has been removed from society.

"We should use tax money to pay people a living wage to do nothing but sit around and think about life, maybe pray a bit and do a few rituals" sounds like kind of ridiculous preposition from a modern western perspective, but isn't it a bit crazy that money is valued over deep thought and a link to the past?

But there is an urge in humans to be monks. Not everyone can spend their life chasing fleeting desires. Some people just need to seclude themselves and think things through. Some people need to collect information and keep it in good shape. Some people just need to spend a lot of time discussing obscure topics. Some people just need to exist on the edge of society. I think we should value these people. We should respect and cherish the outcast, and not let them fall into despair and disillusionment.

Maybe people looking back on our times will see the obvious. That there is a large spiritual emptiness because we don't have the social structures that help us to deal with our problems. Like a house with too few pillars, it can take only so much stress before it comes tumbling down.

I've been watching videos of concerned parents trying to make sense of that weird dissociative identity disorder trend that crawled out of tumblr and somehow exploded on tiktok. If you're not familiar with it, it seems that a once rare mental illness has exploded in popularity on tiktok with tweens and teenagers suddenly making a ton of videos demonstrating their newly discovered identities. So you have videos with kids switching back and forth between identities and talking to themselves. There are plenty of accusations that they are faking it for clout (Which to me sounds like something really crazy about modern society, why would you being mentally ill make you popular?). The sheer number of videos produced has been really worrying for Responsible Adults™, a group that I'm forced to participate in for no reason other than the year I was born.

I first encountered this subculture with some pluralist sites on Neocities, I found it to be an interesting read but didn't think much about it. Like all things that come from tumblr, it was a lot of jargon, categories and catalogues; which I find to be not a particularly useful way to articulate the complexities and contradictions of the human condition. At the same time I don't want to pass judgement on all those teens that self diagnose with DID. I'd done plenty of stupid things and believed all sorts of stuff as I was growing up (I was just lucky enough that I never had any capacity to broadcast it). Sometimes imaginative people find ways to cope with the changes in their life and identity, it might not be exactly DID but whatever they are going through is real to them. I don't think that there's actually a lot that an adult can do except let it play out and offer whatever support we can, as long as it doesn't become something harmful.

Which gets me to my other point, watching those videos of kids suddenly switching personalities and speaking differently reminded me of something that I had seen before and is pretty common in the Global South: possession by spirits. It just so happens that deities, djinn and various spirits enter the bodies of young people and cause them to hear things and behave in erratic ways, sometimes taking over the body entirely. If a teenager tried that stuff over here, they'd be referred to an exorcist, not a therapist. So my flight of fantasy explaination for this phenomenon is that somehow tiktok has created the right conditions that have awakened long dormant spirits and caused them invade the bodies of the younger generation en-mass. Call your local exorcist or witch doctor. Cast them out. This invasion has to be stopped.

*In case it is not entirely obvious, I'm being sarcastic about the last paragraph. I just saw the connection and needed to write it down.

Grief is not a linear process. There are stages, but you don't go through them like checkpoints in a marathon. Instead you wander through them, going in circles and doubling back, drunken and confused by your mind. Sometimes it does feel like there is too much grief around me, like I can't even recognise where I am anymore, there's just this vague cloud of something missing that can't be put to words. Am I at the beginning or the end? Is there even a way out?

Recently I had to deal with a massive disappointment, to which I kind of just shrugged and didn't feel anything. Maybe I was already prepared for the worse case scenario and as it happened I just did what I planned to do. Maybe I've become one of those cool and unfazed adults that I've always wanted to be. Maybe I'm just so emotionally exhausted by the pandemic that I really don't have anything left to mount any form of emotional response. Maybe I just accept that things won't always go my way and I can live with that. Maybe I don't realise that acceptance is indistiguishable from denial.

Or do all these possibilities even matter?

I'm just tired.

I sat down to play with a toddler today. We were playing with knockoff legos, the plastic was thinner, less glossy and more worn than the real deal (I suspect it was some sort of polystyrene instead of ABS). Some pieces could barely fit together, I could feel the cheap manufacturing as some were too loose and some were too tight. But it doesn't matter to a toddler, it's still a toy. He built a tower of blocks, demonstrating his advanced hand eye coordination. The tower grew taller until it reached the limits of the manufacturing, then the loose pieces just came tumbling down.

We only had 4x2 blocks, so we were limited to the most blocky and abstract shapes. I made a very abstract and rudimentary humanoid figure, just stubs for arms and some blocks where the head should be. To my surprise he managed to recognise the stubby limbs as a person, and we bashed the blocks together and smashed things up. I made a longer horizontal form, with a few blocks resembling a a dinosaur-like head, he recognised it as something different and gave it different sounds as the bashing and reconstruction continued. I wonder what was going on in his head, how did he see and understand the shapes?

Eventually he attached a gun/shoulder cannon(?) to one of the figures and made shooting noises. "Bu bu bu bu bu". That thing was rapid fire. I obliged with making whatever I was holding burst into pieces. There was much laughter. I guess toddlers understand what projectile weapons are, I wonder where he learned it from?

Having distracted him for long enough, I had to leave to do some work. But he kept calling me back to play, I must have been a fun playmate. It's been a while since I sat down to play in that way. To get down to the level of a child and look at the world from their viewpoint.

I realise that thinking about the last two years makes me upset. That's a bit of an understatement. In my country it was the largest mass death event that has ever happened, eclipsing WWII. I know people that died as a result of the lockdown and multiple waves of infection. I'm watching how families and people's lives have been ruined by the pandemic. At the same time it seems so foreign and distant. Like I didn't have any time to process or grief. The world feels so twisted. Like real life ended a couple of years ago and all that's left is a murky emptiness that has swallowed up whatever hopes and dreams we had.

But I'm not supposed to think about. Pandemic over, get back to work. More people will die, but we need to keep productive. We need to sweep the pandemic under the carpet. It feels so bullshit, pointless and stupid. A pathological need to work and pretend that things are back to 'normal'. I hate it but at the same time pretending just feels easier, even if we are going to pay for it eventually.

I'd like the space to process my thoughts. To not be so busy struggling so I can sort myself out. To figure out what I can do in this dangerous foreign land that I've found myself in.

On another note, the climate crisis strikes again and we had the third once-in-100-years amount of rainfall in the last 6 months. If I didn't have a work from home day, I would have been trapped in the floodwaters. It sure is an overwhelming time to be alive.

I used to hate school. I'd take every opportunity that I could to just skip going to school. I recently had to deal with tweens, and now I can remember why I hated school and took every opportunity to avoid it. Hell is other people, but other people that are going through puberty are a special pit in the depths of hell.

Just interacting with them makes me feel old and out of touch. What the hell is all this tiktok stuff? They are constantly doing little dances and hand signs that are alien to me. They talk like youtubers. They play stupid gatcha games. Why do they use so much 4chan slang, when did that become so mainstream that 11 year olds throw it around? They live with constant predatory content. All the comics they read come from a totally different era. They cut themselves and talk about how much their lives are pain. It makes me have flashbacks to how my teachers used to blame music videos and MTV, except now I'm inexplicably in the position of the clueless adult.

Why do some people consider their youth to be the best years of their lives? Are our memories so bad that we can scrub away all the crud that comes with growing up and only remember the lack of responsibilty and effortless strength and potential of our young bodies? Suddenly having to interact with this age group make me realise that being in the midst of it is absolutely horrible. All the changes and angst and confusion and not having any way to control it or even understand it for that matter. Where all your friends are just as idiotic and clueless as you are. It's so far removed from the springtime of youth that we depict in media.

I'm glad that I'm an adult with my feet firmly grounded by my experience. Maybe these tweens will be like that too. But in between then and now, I have to suffer them.

I've been reading folktales recently. They're delightful. There is an unrealness to them, thing happen just because. It often involves something outlandish or a flight of fancy. Pacing, characterisation and plot don't really matter. There isn't much structure to them. Sometimes there is conflict, sometimes things just happen without any. Some characters are animals, but they don't act like animals all the time, but they do act like animals some time. It really is a carefree form of storytelling.

At one point I was really obsessed with writing. I wanted to write well. I read a ton of books on writing. About storytelling, screenplays, drama and cinema. I'd watch movies and time the acts of the story. Pull apart the characters to their core motivations. I'd think a lot about the underlying structures that made some stories great, how did they build it in a way that it was satisfying to read or watch? I'd try to understand the hidden mechanisms at play. When I look back on it, I wonder if I was wasting my time.

When we constrain our tales to structures, tropes, genre and convention, perhaps we lose something. Literature becomes a novels of depressed people doing serious things instead a bunch of ungulates riding a giant flower and going fishing and getting into a fight with a giant that is stealing their smoked fish and then they outsmart the giant but get into a fight with each other and lose all the fish anyway. I wonder about all the stories that we have lost in our attempts to tell stories well.

Why do we have to earn joy? It makes sense if you come from an agricultural society to have to toil in the fields so you don't starve and have the energy to enjoy yourself. But an underlying assumption of modern society seems to be that you need to pay for pleasure. Joy has a price tag, even with family you need spend money on them (part of that is to keep them alive). And nobody questions why joy is so hard to obtain despite all our technological advancements. In the tropics where there is always an agreeable weather (with occasional strong monsoons and dry seasons), a lot of things just grew on trees. A lot of joy could just be picked as you walked along a path. Life just springs forth in abundance.

When colonisers came, they found the natives to be lazy because they didn't have to work as hard to survive. Spend a morning tending to your farm or going fishing, then you can enjoy most of your day, swimming or crafting or cooking or singing or dancing. Life was definitely harder without our modern luxuries, especially for women. But joy would literally grow on trees in the wild without any need for effort. Eventually the colonisers way of life was adopted, and we cut down the forests and orchards and built mines, factories and roads. Abundance was lost and replaced with scarcity. Now joy has a price. It has become governed by markets instead by the water and the soil.

I wonder what was the last time I felt joy from something I didn't have to spend money on? What did I enjoy that I didn't have to earn? Those long walks going nowhere in particular. Seeing a pied fantail peck at my window. Looking at the handful of blinking stars that can shine through the glare of the city. Watching a sunrise. Picking chilies off the chili tree. Watching the rain fall around me. Poking around the living world and finding fun bugs. Sour mangoes from the tree behind my house. A nice conversation with a friend. The herbs in my fried rice. Standing in a forest stream.

I don't deny that I enjoy buying stuff. It's fun. But I think about that other world that is out there, the one not blinded by the assumption that labour is the prerequisite to access joy. Would it be a better world if we just didn't assume that joy was scarce commodity to be sold and traded? What if it came down with the rain and grew out of the soil and we have so much of it we can just give it away to others?

Pre-pandemic I had this practice of reading all my journal entries for the year and thinking about how the year has been. Usually I sigh with relief and can't believe that I managed to survive it all. (Then the next year rolls over with increased difficulty.) I didn't journal much during the pandemic. Perhaps I didn't want to think too deeply about it. But I did have a years worth of blog posts about... I wouldn't call it random because there must be some insane pattern there. It was interesting reading nonetheless. A bit more of a fluffy omelette of writing instead of the darker more honest stuff that goes into my personal reflections.

I try to keep the more personal stuff out of this website, and not make it too much of a downer to read. But it has been a tough past 12 months when I think about it. Most of the time I was just trying to get by and keep my head above the water. Trying to keep my family safe and help my friends. Trying to figure out my grief while it seems like the world is just pushing for ruthless mindless productivity. Trying to literally avoid a killer virus and the attendant problems that come with it. I'm tired of trying, but I can't help but try.

I used to walk for hours on end. After the third hour I would start to feel a bit tired, but there was a simple trick to getting home. I just had to put one foot in front of the other. Don't think about how difficult it was and push ahead. If I had to rest for a while I would rest, but head down and foot forward. Eventually I got to wherever I wanted to go. Sometimes I would look back and realise that whereever I came from was far behind the horizon. The past 12 months have been tough, but head down and foot forward.

This website is officially one year old! Originally I had no idea what to put on it or what I wanted to do with it, but like any empty surface, I piled up a hoard of stuff on it. Makes me think back to the idea of websites as carrier bags, like cavemen and travellers we fill them with interesting trinkets that we find and other items from our long journeys. Like a grandmother's cabinet, it begs to be filled with nostalgia and narratives. If modern social media is a sewer that flushes things away as fast as possible, websites are places where things can settle and grow. A wetland full of peatmoss and attendant fauna.

So what have I learned after a year as a webmaster?

1. Writing is not that hard once you get into the habit of it. I think I must have wrote a novels worth of text in the past year. (Rather, coherent writing is not easy, but this stream of thought stuff is).
2. Overall HTML and CSS aren't that hard. Centering text in CSS is where all the difficulty is. It's also possible to build websites without Javascript.
3. I like building this intensely personal website, without advertising anything about my IRL identity or labels. It's very liberating. It's back to the wild west internet where people had to ask a/s/l.
4. I made quite a lot of art just because there was a place to put it. I was a lot more productive when I didn't feel like I was flushing my work down a content toiletbowl.
5. I'm starting to realise that my art is like home cooked meals, or at most a community barbecue. Meant to be enjoyed by a small group and shared because of hospitality. It's not fast food, it's not meant to be processed and served to mass consumers for profit.
6. Neocities is where all the weird outcasts of the internet hang out, reminds me a lot of when the internet used to be the place where the weird outcasts ran off to. But that's what makes the community fun to interact with.
7. Blinkie filled 00's nostalgia pages aren't for me. But I do like stumbling upon them.
8. After the pandemic and crisis, it feels a lot more better for my mental health to focus inwards rather than the constant chaos outside. Focus on the small steps that I can manage instead of the the out of control chaos of the world. Building a website has been a very meditative process.
9. There's no problems with putting stuff up for no reward. It's nice to create outside of modern online art hustle culture. I don't have anything to sell you or no brand to build and it's refreshing.
10. There's still plenty of interesting stuff to discover on the internet. The problem is that it's all hidden or hard to find. Links are important.
11. As long as your website is an honest attempt, it's interesting. I'll leave it to you to define what an honest attempt is.
12. For some inexplicable reason, people like whatever I create enough to follow me. A lot of them are lurkers. I don't actually know what they like about my shotgun spray of art, writing, photography and comics; but perhaps it is better that way.
13. I'm more comfortable with niche audiences. 200 people is just fine for my constant rambling. It's comforting that I won't create something that suddenly goes viral and puts the spotlight on me.
14. Perhaps I started making comics again because I knew that there would be some people reading them, but there wouldn't be a lot of people reading them. It's like I'm putting them up in a quaint small town instead of the public judgement/execution amphitheater of Megacity-1.
15. I started experimenting more with formats, not just on the web but offline as well with zines. Also exploring the text based world of Gemini was fun.

So in celebration of this anniversary, here's two zines that kind of capture the art and spirit of 2021 Occasionally, Content. (They're one page zines, so just look up a tutorial online, print them out and fold them accordingly).

I've been lucky enough to have gone on a fair share of adventures. It wasn't always fun and plenty of times it was dangerous as heck. There was always logistics and funding to think about, a lot more paperwork than I ever expected and so much heavy lifting. But there were always those quiet times in between all the work where I could look out towards the scenery and enjoy it for the moment. Take the sights and sounds in. In a post-pandemic world where travel is expensive and difficult, I'm glad that I managed to travel to a whole lot of exotic places and get it out of my system before it was too late.

I feel like I've settled into a bit fo a rut after all that adventuring. Maybe I've had my fill and no longer feel that wanderlust. Maybe it's just something that young people yearn for and I should move to other things in life. When I was a teenager I used to watch stuff and fantasise about what my great adventure would be, now not so much. I put off journeys for the banal and boring reasons. Whatever risks I took paid off in strange and unpredictable ways that help me in my career now. But I'm far more tied down, life feels a lot more routine than risk.

Fiction is filled with all those jumps into the unknown. But eventually you come back. No matter how dangerous it was the world didn't end, and you have to live with the consequences of your actions, good or bad. We can comprehend crises, they are exciting in their own way. But life just keeps marching on after those landmarks. There is a need to do the boring work of rebuilding and maintaining. It's an unfamiliar underworld in itself, in it I feel more lost than when I was in the unknown.

Lately I've been wondering about the tendency to put things into boxes. Not literal boxes, but conceptual boxes of categories. It's not really universal behaviour to classify things into convenient categories. Some cultures are fine with contradictory amorphous borders, you can live life just fine without always binning things into clearly defined categories like a scientist or marketing department. Things can be like a river, sometimes it swells, sometimes it shrinks, it meanders and changes, sometimes it roars and sometimes it's gentle. But modern internet culture just loves its boxes. There are just so many categories and so many are made up to describe identities. Maybe this is a result of advertising being the organising philosophy of web 2.0, you can't target ads at poorly defined demographics. So there are so many prompts to state which boxes you fit into, so much pressure to fit into certain boxes.

It's not a left or right wing thing, everyone seems to do it. Everybody is obsessed with categories. Even ill fitting categories or categories that are not even useful become points of contention. Genders are being split to the point where they are not useful categories (I agree that more than 2 is useful, but I do question the utility of a lot of xenogenders as meaningful categories), types of men now all have an associated Greek alphabet (With accompanying pseudoscience justifications on sociosexual hierarchies), we now have convenient categories to place anybody that questions our categories, just call them a liberal or conservative or hater and then dismiss all their concerns. Everything is so black and white, everybody is so insistent on creating and policing borders of where they belong to.

I don't mind if you want to live a unconventional life, all humans have a weird contradictory undefinable quality to them. But I really don't like that so much angst is emitted daily on the internet about what boxes we fit into. We now obsess about them, so much discourse centers them. About how we don't fit into them and how others aren't fitting properly. You can call it a culture war, but at the root of it is the mindset of packing things into boxes. The boxes have taken a life of their own. It's really unpleasant. It's like living in a filing system.

Time is really merciless. It drags so much on your daily routine, but then you blink and years have gone by. Kindergartners are no longer kindergartners, they are now making friends and learning how to be people. All the cute children are now confident teenagers. Young men and women that I once met are now married with their own babies. My classmates are now busy raising their children and preparing them for school. Mentors have retired, some aren't around anymore. Every year I see less relatives. Projects that I considered to be new and temporary have been running for the better half of a decade. Things which I liked are now having a retro revival, I hardly noticed them disappearing.

I'm here dumbfounded by how much things have changed without me noticing. I still think that I was just a teenager or a young adult, but that was decades ago. At the rate in which global life expectancy is reducing, I'm probably getting closer to my death than my birth. Inside I still feel really young, unsure and inexperienced. But when I have to do something my experience starts to show and I wonder how I managed to get so competent at life. Worries and regrets get dull, I don't care much for them anymore. Maybe all my senses and emotions are getting too dull. My body isn't as able as it used to be, I've racked up too much damage from a reckless youth. I feel weaker and more vulnerable than I've ever been, but I also learned to accept that part of myself and work around it.

All my precious time on this Earth just leaks away. I don't have the time to feel sad about it. I'm just bewildered at the pace. Where've the years gone?

On another note, this website is almost 1 year old. Where has that time gone?

I'm sitting in a large spacious food court, the sky is already dark. The traffic is terrible now, so I'd rather just do some work and have some tea than spend a couple of hours stuck in a traffic jam. I order cheap black tea, without sugar, to help settle my stomach which is still trying to digest a spicy banana leaf rice lunch. The space that I'm in is airy and a large fan rotates above it, I feel safe enough to take off my mask and drink my tea.

I'm the only customer there aside from a couple sitting some distance away. The workers of the hawker stalls sit around chatting to themselves. Business seems slow. A little girl plays with her older brother, they seem to be here to help out with the drink stall that I ordered my tea from. I always find myself in places like these, quiet melancholy spaces where there is a dignified emptiness. Makes me feel like a ghost trapped in hollow grounds.

My notes from last year are a mess and I have to get my head around them. After a while of data entry I give up, close the lid of my laptop and look outwards. There is a lit window, inside it young girl dances to the steps of an older ballet instructor. The motion is uncertain but graceful. Reminds me of the paintings of Monet. I'm on my second cup of tea. I watch the distant scene as I enjoy my drink. I don't have any internet to interrupt my thoughts.

On the way back to my car I saw I girl dressed in lolita dress of some sort, I'm not well versed in these things. A rare sighting. She wore it well. She was walking with a big hairy guy, perhaps it made her look more feminine in comparison.

I'm convinced that more than one person has written a piece of fiction that is so realistic that it captures the depth of the human condition. I also think that all of them were such terrible examples of fiction that they were rightfully ignored. Life is life, it's full of vague uncertainties, things are unearned, the protagonists don't get what they need or want, there's little foreshadowing, the characterisations are inconsistent and unreliable, things repeat and relapse and characters frustratingly make the same mistakes, there's no reward at the end, there are no proper ends for that matter, some things just end for no reason and leave dozens of plot threads hanging. Fiction is only good fiction once you properly cut, reassemble and sand down the unsightly edges of life.

That's the art of fiction, it's taking the ugly chaos of life and building a pleasing narrative. Dialogue should never be realistic, it should not have all the ahhs and umms, all the empty talk, all the unnecessary repetition. Plots should never be realistic, it should remove things that don't matter, it should show some clear progression, it should be interesting throughout and not have long boring periods of nothing happening. Characters should have clear motivations and arcs, something that can be summarised in a couple of sentences. All fiction is unreal. Even true stories have been edited down with the retelling. Some of our personal histories may even be more fiction that lived experience.

But a lot of people don't realise that life is not like fiction. Fiction is misused as the frame of reference of how life SHOULD work. Inevitably you become disappointed by how meandering and unpurposeful your life actually is. Life is boring, exciting, sad, funny, full of suffering but also relief, good and bad. It's a blob of stuff bigger than us that we struggle to understand. It doesn't fit in any genre. Neither comedy nor tragedy. Maybe you can never understand or make sense of life. But I guess that's fine.

Humans are a horrible judge of character. We can't even understand ourselves, much less others. That thing that we call a personality is oftentimes a murky pool of anxieties and desires, and most of the time how we see it is so different from how everyone else perceives it. We don't even notice it changing since we are constantly stuck inside our own heads, a blinded by the subjectivity of our experiences. Never free of the influence of the unseen biologies, hormones, infections, aches and pains of a mysterious mortal body. I wonder why we make personality so clear and direct in fiction, with lists of clear wants and needs, when everyone experiences such a muddied state of being.

I guess that's all part of the suffering of living. Not being able to see beyond yourself, but at the same time knowing yourself so well that all your flaws are apparent. Can such a being really find peace with itself?

I know myself, but at the same time I know that I'm a stranger.

I've had plenty of failures over my lifetime. I feel like I'm more used to failing than succeeding, although by now I've accumulated enough experience to probably do both equally. I've been really reckless with jumping into uncertain situations. It often resulted in me falling on my face and embarassing myself so many times that I'm pretty numb to the feeling. But I guess I'm willing to take those risks because after a while I realised that the cost of failure was much less than I expected it to be. Reputations can always be rebuilt, wounds can heal, losses can be earned back, it's not as hard to get back up as you imagine it to be.

Once I got used to the actual price of failure, I could adjust my expectations better. Success or failure or middling performance, often the differences in the result are small. What you gain from the outcome is usually a lot less from how you grow while working on it. So I don't dread the ending so much anymore, I just try to keep things moving along. If it implodes, it implodes. I still walk away with a bunch of experience points. Failure might hurt, but I can always recover.

Sometimes it worries me that the world is run by people like me. People that don't pay a high cost for failure, maybe through a combination of priviledge and luck, so they continually screw up but end up being promoted because they've just been in the system for so long. They outrun and outmaneuver the more thoughtful and cautious people, who are capable of making wiser decisions but hold back to think things through. I've bumbled my way through life, I can see more callous and cruel people doing the same thing. At least that's my personal explaination for all the horrible 'leaders' that I've met.

There are stories of kind people and hope all around us. But perhaps the problem with these stories is that they make us smile for a while and then we move on with our lives. Stories that bring us comfort probably have less traction than cat videos. Kindness, unfortunately is not engaging content. When someone puts some kind words on the internet, a whole bunch of strangers don't descend and try to dunk on the person. It is at best a couple of likes and maybe a feel good comment that doesn't lead to further discussion. It doesn't make people's blood boil and make them angry enough to leave a comment. There's no perverse excitement of attacking your enemies or feeling of superiority over perceived villains. This of course amplifies bad takes and creates an internet with an overwhelmingly negative bias.

Is it the fault of algorithms designed to optimise for engagement? Or is it the fault of positive content not being engaging enough to gain traction? Emotionally stable people without deep conflicts can be boring compared to the latest internet drama, why would anybody even consider that to be content? Should positive content try to game a system that amplifies negativity by design? Would kind words, manicured and coiffed with emotional attacks and calls to action, still be kind words? Are systems of interaction that are designed to prioritise kindness even possible or will that just become another incentive that will be perverted by those that game the system?

So many questions, no answers. At least not yet. I like nice and comforting content, but I read it and put it away and don't interact with it as much. I'm also guilty of getting a daily dose of internet outrage, and still coming back for more the next day. Are we all fundamentally flawed or do we have to escape from the systems that push these biases on us? I'm sorry, I really don't know.

When I think about the 4th Industrial Revolution, it looks the same as the last 3. Sure, AI and machine learning and IoT. But it's the same thinking but with fancier technology. It's making the same mistakes and making us just as miserable as the last Industrial Revolution, which makes it not all that revolutionary. Maybe we need to think less industrial. Move away from the factory thinking that has defined the last 262 years and towards ways of thinking that won't make us so miserable. To look towards post-industrial futures.

Sometimes I wonder why we treat our lives like we are a factory. Our value is linked to our productivity and how much capital we can produce. I think there is a danger in being so calculative with our lives, to quantify everything and struggle to maximise these quantities. What's wrong with being sub-optimal and inefficient? You're not a brick that needs to be mass produced as fast as possible within certain tolerences, you are a unique human being. One great analogy for optimisation is wandering around the space of possibility until you fall into a hole that you can't get out of. Why do we not value those suboptimal wanderers that explore the space of possibility? They might not be the best, but they can go on all sorts of unique journeys.

The way we relate to society is a toxic combination of Protestant work ethic, capitalism and industrial thinking. Where life is about trying so hard to be the best version of yourself. Maybe instead of constantly struggling to be the best that we can be, we should just accept the inherent inefficiencies of being human. Just be in harmony with our sub-optimal nature instead of constantly demonising it as laziness and irresponsibility. Just allow yourself to be yourself instead of pursuing an unobtainable ideal self.

I was reading through an old journal from 6 years ago and it was just so carefree. It had doodles and comics and all sorts of silly comments. When I think about it, I didn't have a smartphone, social media, any responsibilites or proper employment, and most of my time was spent with my head in the clouds. I spent time hanging out with friends and just doing what I wanted to do. I was technically in education, but I was as close to a freeter as I could manage. That was nice. I don't regret that time. Maybe I should try to do less with myself at the moment and just focus on doing things that I enjoy.

But then again maybe it's just because my memory is being selective and I'm only remembering the nice stuff instead of the constant dark undercurrents of dull anxiety from not being able to achieve anything. Considering that I can be nostalgic for the 2010's, I'm probably going to be nostalgic about 2022 some time in the future. Things are currently terrible, but they're not something that can't forget and look at with rose tinted glasses. I'll just gloss over wars and disease and economic collapse and just remember the fun times I had writing silly blog posts.

I always tell myself "It's not a loss if you don't think about it", perhaps I've been applying this selective view of reality to my perception of the past as well.

I once had a plan to study in Europe. Like all my plans it never fell through. I had all the qualifications that I needed to apply for a scholarship, but when the time came I was too busy with commitments to put everything down and leave. I don't regret my decisions, I was listening to my conscience and I don't think I would have forgiven myself if I did something selfish. And I think I came out of it with a unique perspective of being on the fringes instead of being trained in the centres of power. But on the other hand, that missed opportunity is probably why I'm overworked and severely underpaid at the moment, as well as why some of my dreams are now sorely out of reach. Nothing much I could have done about it, I just played the hand that I was given the best that I could.

We have to get used to mourning plans and dreams now. The world is just too unstable and opportunities are just too scarce. You will get lucky once or twice, but for the most part life will be about grabbing what you can and living with the consequences of your actions. No second chances or re-dos. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of being human is that we are so much tougher than our fragile dreams.

It's a scary world out there. Ironically I've been in quarantine for a week and not really out there in the real world, but I've been plugged in to a incessent stream of bad news from all over the world. In the virtual world I'm constantly reminded about tragedy, doom and collapse. About bad people and conspiracies and how we're all powerless against whatever cabals are running the world. All packaged in poorly thought out opinions that are indistinguishable from targeted misinformation.

But irl it's different. At the very least I can loosen earth and plant sweet potato or cassava. Pick chillies and herbs from my garden. I can help to organise charities or teach children. Go for a walk on my own two legs. Go stand alone in a forest. Talk to people I barely know, and they will make an effort to be nice to me. I can turn off the internet, ignore the news and the world isn't so bad anymore.

It's often said that the internet is just escapism, and people need to go out and touch grass. To give up cheap fantasy and go experience the real world with all its harsh realities. But the modern internet feels like a place that we should escape from. Being awake is better than a reoccuring nightmare. What does escapism even mean anymore?

If there's one thing that I've unlearned from this pandemic, it's how to be sick. I had a good run of avoiding any illness for the last 3 years. Suddenly I caught a flu and then it feels so unfamiliar. It was no longer something that used to be so commonplace with such a clear process (see a doctor, take some medicine, have a couple of days off and get back to work). Now I have to get swabbed (tested negative!) and quarantine (Just to be safe!) and all sorts of other uncomfortable SOPs are in place. I also have to keep working since things are online now.

At the very least I had time to sleep. I could dream strange fever dreams. I hadn't had much time for that lately. I hadn't much time to dream since we collectively decided that the pandemic wasn't important and began sacrificing dozens of people a day to the fires of capitalism. The late nights and sound of the smartphone alarm killed a lot of my dreams. There's so little space to dream anymore. It's so inefficient to sleep when your time on the Earth can be used for more productive stuff. As they say, you can sleep when you're dead*.

I always find dreaming synonymous with healing. There were times where I would get so emotionally knotted up on the inside and have no way of rationalising it, but after a good sleep and a somewhat unrelated dream, I'd wake up feeling like something had been resolved. Maybe people will look back on us and see an obvious link between all the mental disorders that we're having and the chronic lack of dreams in modern society. Then they will make fun of us, like how we make fun of scurvy ridden sailors that didn't know to eating fruit would have cured them. It's so obvious how could they miss it?

That's enough productivity for today. Time to go back to sleep.

*Why do we assume that death is anything like sleep? Sleeping is something that only the living can do.

Life is full of constraints. There are so many things that you can't control, so many things that you can't be, simply because of some random chance of your birth. I used to think that I could overcome it with guts and hard work, but nowadays that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Even getting older and accumulating love, money, power and experience leads to more responsibilities that end up becoming an inescapable tangle. The world that you are part of pulls you down, like a falling tree that can't escape gravity no matter how much it has grown upwards. It's one of those tragedies that we can't escape. Rugged individualism is powerless against the things that are out of our control.

I grew up with a lot of American media. It's very positive, kids are told that they can be ANYTHING that they want as long as they work hard ("You could be an astronaut or the president if you worked hard enough!"). If you live in a third world country where feudalism is still a thing, you soon learn that this isn't true. There's so much that you can't do, dreams that you wouldn't even consider because it just doesn't happen here. We were never free. We were always just some exploitable capital for some unseen master from beyond the seas. Sometimes I think a lot of western angst that I see on the internet is just the west realising that life is full of limitations that can never be overcome. The same experience everybody else in the world feels.

You look up and see that there was never a glass ceiling that can be shattered, only thick solid poured concrete. Life has unwinnable battles and unclimbable walls. You can try to change, rebel, run or escape; but that just leads to more thick heavy walls and locked doors. You're trapped in the periphery of an ugly machine that destroys lives out of uncontrollable systemic inertia. There really is no solution to it, some problems are too big and heavy and you can only wait for the whole thing to come collapsing down. Perhaps the only choice that you ever had is accept what really can't be changed and just live in whatever small cracks that you've managed to chip into your obstacles. It ain't much, but it's a living.

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” — Leo Tolstoy

Postscript: When I was younger I used to dream of epic struggles and such, and I'd resent my elders for telling me that there are things that I just couldn't do. I guess i am approaching that point where I'm one of those patient authority figures that tries to do what little I am capable of, instead of those fiery revolutionaries that rush towards their utopian visions. That realisation is a bit sad.

My main income involves writing, I sometimes spend the whole day pushing out words and reports from my strained brain. So it makes little sense when I get home and lie down sleepless on my bed, that I keep on writing. This time for no discernible goal or reward. I guess there is a difference. This is not clearly thought out prose that has a purpose, but more of an emotional release in the form of words. Like bubbles rising out of a wellspring. Or perhaps swamp gas bubbling out of mud while a colourful crab crawls along picking detritus up with its claws, mudskippers drag themselves forward on their fins and spear-like mangrove seeds fall and pierce into the substrate.

Like drawing, sometimes it's just nice to write. Abandon thesis statements and form. Just scribble something comfortable. Just get things out of my head. Humans have a need to release more than just carbon dioxide and water vapour in their breath, we need to let out thoughts. Perhaps the best thing about companionship is there is someone to confide in. To have long conversations where you can't remember the point of it all, but it feels good. The internet is basically a massive infrastructure so humans can put down their rants, an evolution of those lazy sessions at the coffee shop or pub where nonsense is exchanged and no one is wiser in the end. Just random noise, static emitted by the existence of consciousness.

So I write about nonsense. A stream of thought. I let it meander, curving and bending and eventually heading toward a point. It splashes against rocks and erodes banks until tree roots are exposed. But like a stream the best part isn't where it ends up at, it's where you kick off your shoes and enjoy sounds of splashing water and the cool water at your feet on a hot day. Take a deep breath and just exist. Abandon the goals, let everything out and for once feel relief.

I have exactly two memories of my paternal grandmother. I was about 4 years old. I remember her crooked and senile, and as my mother told me to go bathe she mistakenly heard that and started to strip. That's honestly all I remember about her being alive. My other memory was watching smoke come out of the funeral parlor. At a recent family gathering I realised that we never really talk about her. I kind of know what my grandfather's career was, but I hardly know anything about her. I might carry some genetically controlled behaviour that is strangely reminscent of her, but with so few people left that actually knew her, who would notice?

I stay in the same house as my maternal grandmother. We don't have much to talk about. As far as I know she had an eventful but not particularly accomplished life, although maybe she just doesn't want to talk about all the hardships that she went through. Maybe it's better for her to take those stories to her grave. At a few years shy of being a century old, all of us (including her) are pretty ready for her to pass away. I take photos of her sometimes, always candid shots. She always looks weak, withered and thin. Definitely not photos that would be used for the funeral.

I was reading this article about LinkedIn and how the algorithm used on the site makes people perform strange humble brag formats to game the system and 'win' the social media game. The systems that we use both limit and create how we behave. So it got me reflecting about Neocities and the indieweb in general, what are the UX designs (or lack of design) that shapes our behaviour?

Breaking down Neocities specifically, there are a few explicit incentives to keep making stuff: Followers, views, likes, comments. The usual social media stuff. There are also implicit incentives: Link backs (It feels strangely rewarding to see your button on someone else's site), accomplishment from problem solving (Figuring out how to do something feels good), the content on the site itself (I like making stuff and looking through my site), interactions with other users (You guys are nice people).

Personally, while I have the dubious achiement of having more followers on Neocities than I had on my old Twitter art account, the numbers aren't much of a motivation to create new things and build the website. The original intent of this site is a small squirrel hole to post things that I wouldn't attach my real name or reputation to, so the rising viewcount does make me a bit nervous actually. I write and draw mostly to create things, reactions to it are secondary. While the instant validation of a single digit of likes is pleasant, I think it's nicer to see some familiar names liking my stuff. Maybe it's the community spirit behind that. I'd like to think that most of my behaviour is driven by those implicit incentives rather than a need to push my ranking up.

Is there a way to 'win' at Neocities? Probably. Looking at sites that are 'popular', the kind of users that gets rewarded with explicit incentives are the ones with interesting content (photos, rants, blogs, art), interesting design choices, lots of flashy gifs or helpful bits of code. Clout here is linked to how cool you can make your website. But is there really a reason to do so? Unlike any other social media, there's no point to having a high score. Nobody is going to give you a job or sponsorships or whatever from being popular here. It's pretty pointless. Just enjoy building websites.

*I reread this so many times wondering if this is some sort of strange Neocities version of a LinkedIn humblebrag. Hopefully it isn't.

I finished rereading Satoshi Mizukami's "Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer", which is a good coming-of-age story. One message that it carried is that adults should smile so children can look forward to growing up. It made me think about how cynical adulthood can be depicted at times in the media. More often than not you have dull witted adults that have to be bailed out by snarky precocious children. We idealise the teenage and young adult years to the point that there are so few popular stories with adults as main characters (Aside from aging action movie stars). Some kids even think that life is over by 30.

So I'm going to list down a bunch of things that you can look forward to as an older adult, after you get through the turmoil of your teenaged years and early adulthood:

1. People respect you, it's undeserved respect at times, but they stop treating you like a child.
2. You have much more financial freedom. Not always do you have more money, but you gain some self control and spend on things that are important to you.
3. You can deal with your personal issues better, either you've worked through them or you just gotten used to living with them.
4. You are more patient with other people. Some of the people that you deal with were in diapers when you were in middle school, so you give these kids the benefit of the doubt.
5. You are less patient with other people. Life is short, no point in wasting it on a bullshit person.
6. You are less naive and know a bit more about how the world works. Experience tells you when to be cautious and when to be kind.
7. You learn to recognise bullshit and avoid it.
8. If you are willing to reduce your wants, you have more control over your time. If not, at least you have money to spend on your wants.
9. You kind of feel like you know what you are doing. Competence has a high price but it feels good.
10. You can spend money to reduce discomfort. I used to do all sorts of things to save money in my twenties that I won't tolerate now.
11. You have a lot fewer toxic people in your life, and the independence to cut off anyone that does you harm.
12. You get more comfortable in your own skin.
13. Sleeping is now fun.
14. You can enjoy vegetables.
15. You learn to appreciate your family, it's not always like that but if you got a good family you treasure them for what it's worth.
16. People around your age are more level headed and have so much less drama.
17. Simple things are enjoyable.
18. You no longer care about other people thinking that you are childish. You can be the embarassing older relative now.
19. You have fun stories to reminisce about.

I'm not going to generalise and say that you can look forward to all these things, but more or less there are fun things that come with growing up.

Old friendships are rare. There are so few people in your life that know you for decades. They are a link to a lost past. That makes the friends that you do keep in touch with so much more valuable. The days where you used to sit around and be bored together for hours are long gone. Now because of families and careers there are only a few precious moments where you can meet and laugh just like you used to.

As the time you get to spend together gets rarer, it becomes a dance over the same old topics. The future is not as certain, there are no carefree roadtrips because you can't seem to get your schedules in order. So you talk abut the past. A little more is added in, a sign of age and wisdom. Assessing the damage that we have taken has also become an important update. But at its core it is the same conversation that you had last time. It's comfortable and familiar. If possible you'd like to have it many more times.

Sour plum drops

Hard crumbly sweets, they taste of sour plum and suger. They are dry on the toungue. I'd been having a sore throat that had been coming and going for the past few days. It helps a bit. It came in a plastic bottle with a small hole under the flipable lid, just big enough for a single drop to come out. It gets my mind off the sore throat so I can continue writing.

Incandescent light

More of a purchase that I avoided. I was thinking about getting a LED bedside lamp, but then I decided that I didn't need another piece of junk that will break in a year or two and dug up an old lamp with an incandescent lightbulb instead. Maybe I'm being nostalgic, but there is something calming about the warm yellowish light of these bulbs. Makes me sleepy and comfortable compared to flourescent light. I used to turn on an incandescent light and draw at night until I felt sleepy when I was younger. It's a bit sad to see this lighting disappear under the harsh white lights of LED bulbs.

Thosai/Dosa

An Indian flatbread, crispy and thin. Dipped in a variety of curries and chutney. During my student years this was a staple food because of its value for money. I haven't had it in a long time since the pandemic had been keeping me out of Indian restaurants. When meeting up with a friend recently I ordered it. Some things comfortingly don't change. This is one of them.

A Phone clip for my car

Cheap. Flimsy. Plastic. It will probably be in a landfill in a couple of years. Bought at the usual budget shop where you never get what you wanted but come out with two or three other things. It comes in a plastic clamshell that needs a scissor to open. It sticks to the windshield with a rubber sucker. I always miss turns because I'm not looking at the map on my phone as I'm driving. This is meant to avoid those detours and save a few bucks on petrol. It's a shame though. I do enjoy getting lost.

Overall I'd had a nice experience with running this little website. But there is one downside. I find that while writing a blog helps to scratch that itch for reflection and playing with the written word, it has made me journal a lot less. And there is an important distinction between the two. On my website I'm semi-anonymous, far more aloof and only as vulnerable as I allow myself to be. Perhaps the voice you are reading is not even me but a character from my mind. Or I'm a fictitious writer playing to a gallery and creating things that I imagine the unseen audience wants to read, a fiction serving a fiction. Or it is the real me but curated, strained and filtered, as how all our interactions with people are. It is definitely not the contradictory spludge of the real human condition. Some people can wear their hearts on a website, but I definitely can't.

I allow people to read what I write on my website. But I would scream if someone found my journal, with its honest record of all my clumsy struggles and intimate vulnerability. A difference between being able to wear a mask and perform in public and just honestly assessing the mess that is my life. All the silly jokes that I write down only for myself, the weird sketches in the margins, the half abandoned artwork, the clumsy and failed studies, the one liners that I enjoy but will never show other people, the sometimes strange rambles of fiction, the bad comics with no plot nor quality. It's all masturbatory and terrible and cringey and not suitable for human eyes. But I think I should journal more. A log of all my bad jokes, struggles and difficulties is paradoxically comforting in the long run. Like a gentle voice reminding me that no matter how badly beaten down I feel at the moment, life will somehow just carry on.

Previously, I wanted to confuse the recommendations algorithm on my shopping app so that I would obfuscate my identity. This involved clicking and searching for a whole lot of random stuff so it couldn't find any patterns within the random noise. Somehow, the confused algorithm served up something strange (After a stretch of it sending me dick pics and viagra ads). A pathway to the occult. I had chanced upon the strange fantasy cowboy town that is occult Southeast Asian e-commerce.

It started relatively benignly. Services to scan your past life, Djinn repellent, mystical business boosters, all manner of love potions. But then I got to some pretty wild shops; magic amulets blessed by Thai monks, angel summons, sea goddess summons, Efreet summons, Archon God summons (For some reasons summons are a thing, apparently you have to equip these before a ritual sickle duel), wanted posters, tiger fang amulets (These were fibre glass fakes), psychic physical attacks (with 10% cashback, pay more for higher level attacks), Instant Mee Kolok? (From the same shop as the psychic attacks), lots of katana, all manner of assassination weapons like Krambit, a whole lot of mystical male performance enhancers. It was like I was in a shop in Final Fantasy. I'm glad that this stuff wasn't around when I was younger, I would have wasted so much money on this shit.

Society adapts fast to new technology, in really strange and magical ways. Instead of secular visions of progress and bland corporate design, we get these syncretic spaces filled with ancient beliefs hijacking modern information technology. Humans somehow find ways to be lawless on the fringes of the internet.

For the first time in a very long time, I went to the cinema. I don't mind going to watch a movie alone, in fact it's one of the things that I really enjoy, since I can watch a movie without the hassle of making arrangements with other people. Pre-pandemic I would take advantage of my flexible work hours and go watch movies at odd hours where the tickets would be cheap and cinema halls had plenty of seats. I'd go watch niche movies and there would be a few people with me, but enough space and privacy to stretch out and enjoy the film.

Entering the cinema again was like an affirmation of returning to normal. But things had changed, there was a machine and touchscreen instead of a cashier, all payments were made with my debit card instead of fishing for paper notes. There were no lines to the concessions. I scanned my ticket, now a flimsy receipt with a QR code instead of the tactile feeling of tearing off a stub. Good thing I kept my old ticket stubs, they're a piece of history now. I walked into the hall, found my seat and made a double take, the hall was completely empty. I was the only one in the cinema.

So the mindless popcorn movie played, I didn't like it that much, but for the whole duration there was the unnerving sense of dread all around me. This lonely post-Covid world. This enveloping sense of loss that has hung over us for the last two years. Things will never go back to the way they were. I didn't even stay to watch the after-credits scenes.

I snapped a photo of the empty cinema as a momento of the event and walked out through an empty mall (It was a late show). The cheap thrills of a superhero movie had morphed into a psychological horror experience.

A late night thought about a hypothetical situation:

What if we only have a fixed amount of happiness for our entire life that our actions can't affect? Like you can only be happy 10,000 times in your lifetime and have no control over when you feel it? It just comes and goes, without rhyme or reason. You can be in a miserable place and feel happy for no reason. You can be with people that care about you and feel absolutely horrible. It just randomly triggers, you have no responsibilty over how you feel. The amount of times you can feel happy slowly ticks away until there's nothing left. Perhaps that's when you die or perhaps you live on with something empty inside.

How would people live their lives if those were the explicit rules? That you would be happy regardless of your situation or actions. It doesn't matter if you chose Coke or Pepsi, or this boy or that girl, you'd still be happy and unhappy without any clear reason. Is the illusion of control important if it didn't make you happy in any way? Would we try the things that we try if there was absolutely no chance that it will spark a little more happiness? How many different life choices would you make if all your actions would deliver the same amount of fixed happiness that triggers randomly? I'd like to think that most of my choices in life have been somewhat caused by the avoidance of pain and the search of happiness, but in this scenario what would you do with life? If you can't control being happy or sad, what other things would you prioritise as meaningfu goals?

Taking the pursuit of happiness out of the equation, how would people live their lives?

I was chatting with a friend about how we were expecting the future to have killer robot skeletons controlled by a renegade AI Skynet, but what we got is android phones and Google advertising algorithms. Which brings me to my current conflict with the AI overlords of our day. I was shopping online on an app recently, and since I was looking at hobby electronics and batteries, it served up this odd thing that looked like some sort of portable USB charger that had a vague title and description. Out of curiousity I clicked on it. Turned out that it was one of those e-ciggarette vaping things. Which I absolutely loathe. I hate those jerks that spray strawberry flavoured steam out of their mouth without any regard for other people.

But since I looked at that one item, the algorithm decided to bin me with all the vapers and I kept getting recommendations for vape products. This pissed me off. I had to rebel against it. I'm guessing that this is some sort of unsupervised classification algorithm at play here, so to confuse it I have to add more uninformative noise so that my datapoint becomes an outlier and it has trouble predicting which group I belong to. I rebelled against the machine. I started regularly clicking on wildly different and unrelated products, basically throwing up as much digital chaff as I can to confuse the AI. It's no dark future where I have to fight laser armed robot terminators on battlefields full of skulls, but somehow it feels even worse.

The war is ongoing. Will I win an ounce of freedom from my Chinese controlled shopping app? The unknown future rolls towards us...

Blogs have a confessional aspect to them that you don't find elsewhere. Perhaps because the format tends to be more like a diary than a performance. Perhaps it's because it is now a commercially dead medium. It's nice to read the more honest words of a blog than to scroll past a feed. But one reoccuring theme I see in a lot of blogs is how distressed everyone is. Everyone seems to be hurting, one way or another. Especially the young adults and teens that are going through a lot.

If you feel something is wrong with the world. It's because there is something seriously wrong with this world. And it is making all of us really anxious, tired and scared. Thing that are poisoning our minds are everywhere, our environments are built for profit instead of people, our societies are really disfunctional. Perhaps those with enough care and empathy for others pick up on it and can't get up in the morning or sleep at night. I'm sure most of the population is past their breaking point but still trudging along to keep up appearances.

But honestly, even though I barely know any of the people that write the blogs that I read, I think that all of you can get through all the challenges that you are facing right now. It might be misplaced optimism, but for some reason I have faith in those people that can write a public journal documenting their hardships. From the bottom of my heart, I know that you guys have what it takes to get to a better place and make the world a better place while you are at it. Just take it one step at a time, and one day you'll look back and see how far you have gotten.

Asians are unable to show gratitude without involving food. Always visit on an empty stomach, or show up unannounced lest we prepare a feast for you. Have a meal with us at a restaurant and there is always an argument on who will get the right to take the tab for everyone else (The best choice is to not fight it, you will never win). At the core of it is the need to treat people well. Always be generous, even to strangers. It's the proper thing to do. Even if there is nothing in the pantry at least serve some water.

I'll be honest, one of the things that I hate the most about western culture is how transactional things are. Rational costs and benefits, supply and demand, Homo economicus, it's tiring. My finite mental energy cannot make infinite rational decisions. Giving stuff away is nice, it feels good. Sure you could try to fit it into a framework of me receiving a mental or social benefit from gifting, but I don't think that all of this can be fully explained by the cold calculus of profits and losses. Like shaving down a square peg to fit it into a round hole, something is lost when the act of gifting is quantified and rationalised.

The internet is changing and not for the better. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to web3. Where you belong has shifted from a home to a profile to a wallet. From hospitality to display to transactions. From limitless sharing to making things artificially scarce for clout and profit. The shift of the underlying philosophy of the web alone makes me uncomfortable.

This is my homepage, like any good host if you come I will feed you with whatever I can scrounge up (digitally). I don't expect you to hit that like button and subscribe, I don't need you to click on an affiliate ad, share and retweet or donate bitcoin. Just come and enjoy my hospitality. Look at a photo, read some of my words, enjoy a drawing. I hope it fills you up before you go back to your journey.

Surfing the internet in the modern era means encountering deserted and abandoned home pages. It's the same melancholic feeling that I get when I visit a vacant house, all the signs of someone's love and care in a now hollow shell. Where did they go? What happened to them? The links to their friends sites are mostly dead. Some of the old people on these websites probably aren't alive anymore. The young children in their photos are probably adults. I wonder what happened to all their collections and the things that they proudly displayed on their website? Away from the rage of the mainstream internet there is only this quiet sadness.

Humans are so complex, you can never piece together who they actually were based on the contents of a website. But these websites are like items in burial mounds, momentos that are lovingly placed in the memory of people that have passed (Ok, they might still be alive and posting antivax conspiracy theories on facebook, but let's enjoy the things that they've created).

I didn't have any resolutions for the new year, but one thing that I did want to do is to spend more time reading long form content. Properly thought out essays and articles rather than the 280 characters and a meme of a twitter post. I want to try to focus more and get less distracted. I want to enjoy reading rather than just reacting with rage and anxiety. That's why I started a linkroll to record any interesting things that I find and to help me keep track of my reading.

But as I started searching out for interesting things to read, I realised that the modern internet is a wasteland for text content. It's like a post-apocalyptic world of abandoned blogs, long dead links, surviving journalists feeding on the scraps of a once great civilisation, entire blogs written by bots pretending to be human, scientists entombed in paywall libraries, giant walled off corporate controlled social media megalopolis, hermit like personal websites and villages of small press publishers barely scraping by. It's a bit of an adventure to go out and search for precious pieces of writing in this hostile world.

I guess part of the fun is having to actually search and browse the web. With so much SEO, searches aren't very useful unless you know what to look for, even then they hardly direct to proper writing these days. Discovering new things actually requires more effort than I've had to make in a long while on the web, finally I have to explore without an algorithm.

A new year is here. I have no resolutions. Just a sense of dread inherited from last year. No point having goals if the situation shifts disasterously every couple of months. Perhaps my only goal at the moment is to survive to the end of the decade. Do small things that I can do and try to avoid as much damage as possible so the next generation has something to inherit. Lately I've been hyper aware that my luck can run out at any moment and there is a big chance that I'll be off this mortal coil sooner than I've previously anticipated. It's a dangerous world that will only get more dangerous.

So I'll trim down those dreams and focus on only the things that I want to finish up so I don't end up as a ghost wandering the Earth in regret.

Also I'll use less social media.

Part of a super typhoon broke off and hit the city that I'm in. I hate the fact that we have super typhoons now, it's a phrase that should be limited to cheesy 70's super robot anime. It's the first time I've seen a storm of such intensity here. Now the climate crisis isn't a hypothetical future, but a lived reality. After a botched response people have been trapped in flooded houses for days. Fortunately my home was spared, many were not as lucky. I probably won't be that active around here for a week or so as I get busy with flood relief efforts.

I had a bunch of art that I wanted to post before the end of 2021, but I guess that'll have to wait.

Recently I found the blog of a deceased Auntie. In it there were 4 posts: two essays (one in a language I can't read) and two posts showing off low resolution photos of artwork. A blog that will never be updated. A lonely memorial drifting on the internet.

We weren't close at all, and quite distantly related. She used to hang out a lot with my father in his teen years, but that's a half remembered story heard in passing. Sometimes we would visit their family when we went back to my parents hometown, I hardly ever talked to her. She is one of those shadowy memories of relatives that are only slightly removed from being a total stranger. She passed away without any spouse or children, only some nephews and nieces and friends to fondly remember her. Apparently she painted, I only found out about that on her blog.

We leave these tiny scraps and traces on the internet, likely slowly decaying into oblivion. How is it any different from oral traditions where things are slowly forgotten as memories and stories become worn out by time?

One of the great things about Neocities is how Pro-Cringe we are. There are plenty of things here that would normally be hidden on social networks where we have to attach our names and reputations to. But all your weird ships, badly drawn fanart, roleplaying, questionable design choices, geeky obsessions and teenaged (or millenial) ramblings just shamelessly hang out in the open here. And with it all being in the open, it creates a safe space and culture for people to indulge in whatever cringey stuff they want.

Yes, a lot of stuff here is cringey. But cringey is not bad. It's an honest cringe. One that comes from a place of deep love and passion. All the things that you do with your lovers and closest friends and family can seem cringey as fuck to a outside observer. Perhaps one of the worst things in culture is that it's cringey to care about things passionately, while it's cool to be aloof and detached. It takes a lot of passion and effort (and HTML, CSS and Javascript) to assemble a shrine on a webpage. No matter how cringey the content, the amount of love that goes into it deserves respect. And most importantly someone must have fulfilled a burning desire to see it through.

Cringe has a bad rap. People avoid it because it makes them feel judged. At worst it can be used as an excuse to alienate and isolate people from the in-group. Which is strange because it is an almost universal feeling. A lot of people have flashbacks of cringey things that they've done when they were younger. I say embrace it and accept it. We grow by being cringey, that's how we experiment and fall in love and try new things and be excited and be happy. Cringe drives culture, it's the cringe frontier before it becomes mainstream cool. Humans are a cringey mammal that does childish things way longer than it needs to.

Remember when love drove the internet? Not romantic love, but that weird geeky love for awfully specific subjects. These days it feels like hate and fear are the main drivers of what we see online. It's good to have a space where we can love on the internet again.

My Grandmother lived through the Japanese Occupation of my country. They came, routed the British and took over. Aside from all the warcrimes that they commited, they also completely tanked the economy by replacing the British issued currency with their own dollars and cents. They printed too much of it and that led to hyperinflation and famine. And when they lost the war and the British came back, all those notes were worthless because they weren't recognised by any government. To this day, we still refer to this cautionary tale of 'Banana money'.

Whenever the banks issue new bank note designs, my Grandmother goes into a panic. She assumes that whenever a new design comes out, anything before that can't be used anymore. We laugh and try to explain to her, but she doesn't really get it. Perhaps the trauma is too deep.

My mother was a teenager when race riots occured in my country. People were hacked to death just because they were unlucky enough to be around the wrong community at the wrong time. On the way back from school she saw dead bodies on the roadsides. To this day whenever there is any form of political instability, she always tells us to come home just in case chaos breaks out. I always reassure her that the politics of today aren't as bad as the past. But it doesn't get through, another deep trauma.

Recently I heard about the new Covid variant making its way around the world. It filled me with dread. I probably will feel this dread anytime I hear any news about an infectious disease in my lifetime. If I'm lucky, my grandchildren will see it as a weird quirk and laugh at me for it.

*This post was edited on 7/12/2021

I was talking with a friend from a non-english speaking country, and that made me realise how niche most of the early culture internet was. You had to be in a place of privilege to be able to access the internet in the 90's and understand the culture. For many people around the world, the internet began with smartphones and social media. For others that had access to PCs, they lived in the parallel world of their own vernacular internet, experiencing websites, forums, blogs and internet drama that anglophones never knew existed.

Where I lived, we got American music, videogames, TV and movies, we spoke English, so it wasn't a problem to interact with the 'mainstream' internet of english language websites and blogs. It wasn't hard to understand the jokes and nuances of the culture since western culture was so ubiquitous. But my friends that didn't speak English had a totally different experience, a lot of the internet was off limits to them. They had to get things translated manually because machine translation didn't exist yet. They instead spent a lot of time on mIRC, or Maple story or their own spaces. And later they moved into a variety of blogs, social media and forums in the mid to late 00s. There is a tendency to view the internet as something universal and borderless, but it really is divided up by language.

The early internet was a small sliver of time and space, if you were lucky you managed to experience it. If not then you have to play historian and listen to oral histories on Youtube or look at fragments of the past that were preserved in archives. But it really isn't the same as being there in the moment. Well, kids these days get to experience Minecraft and Roblox and whatever they like playing these days. So I guess each group has it's own little thing to look back fondly on.

November really is passing by in a rush, I barely felt it and it's already at the end.

I've been on Neocities since April, and 953 updates later I've racked up 124 followers and 23,575 views. I've written about 20,000 words worth of rants. These are all meaningless metrics. At the start I was happy to see my view count go up, but lately I've come to realise that it really doesn't mean anything at all. The conventional tech dogma is that putting a number under a username causes people to try to raise that number, but I've lost interest in them.

A popular saying by Lord Kelvin is “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind;”, I think a lot of the problems in modern society come from taking this mentality and generalising it to everything. Now your value can be expressed by how many followers you have, how many impressions or views you get and how much engagement you generate. We now have social credit systems, whether explicit (like in China) or implicit (Like in the western web). While numbers can be a good way of describing chemistry experiments, they are a meager and unsatisfactory way to understand human beings.

The only important thing here is that I enjoy myself. If there really is a metric of that, it's what I've made and put up on the website. This tangle of HTML and CSS is a labour of love of a lot of the things that I obssess about. If it is something that I haven't enjoyed enough to complete it, it isn't on the website. The satisfaction of creating this flawed mess of hypertext media is what keeps me going, not the need to push a number up.

Looking at web3 develop, with it's built in commodification of every human activity, I gotta say it really isn't appealing to me. Crypto, walled gardens, shitty VR and AR, NFTs and the need to implement artificial scarcity, barriers and property rights on medium that excels at distributing information. It's like web3 is going to be a worse version of everything that we have now. But it's really being pushed by techbros as the next big thing.

We really need to consider alternatives to it. I don't want a utopia, I just want to avoid living in the techbro dystopia of tomorrow. At the rate things are going and if there is a tech cold war in the future, I might even side with China instead of the United States of Meta. But before we have to choose between the lesser evil of tech dystopias, maybe we should start dreaming of a better future again.

Then again I resisted smartphones and social media for the longest time. I kind of missed most of web 2.0, pretty much only using it at the tail end where it had already turned into a toxic mess. I only got a smartphone 5 years ago, surviving on my reliable Nokia for a long time. I avoided Myspace, Friendster, Facebook, Instagram. Only learning how to use twitter 3 years ago. It is possible to opt out of the mainstream in some ways, but when Gmail and Whatsapp is needed for work it becomes difficult to keep on the fringe. I still only occasionally use Google maps, making me one of the few people that I know that can still get lost.

This has just been messy stream of thought writing. Just thinking out loud about my anxieties of where the internet is going. For now I just have disjointed thoughts and no real answers.

My internet went down because lightning struck the fibre optic cable and fried it. I never expected non conductive fibre optic cables to get hit and even the technicians were surprised. I remember a few 56k dialup modems fried by copper telephone wires getting struck by lightning, I thought it was a thing of the past. Looks like I cannot escape God smiting the devils in my telecommunications systems with lightning bolts.

Being able to communicate long distances almost instantaneously is something we take for granted. But it's built on a lot of fragile infrastructure. Sun, wind, lightning, waves or earthquakes could easily cut us off. No matter how much we try to remove ourselves, we aren't much different from the humans sheltering from the rain in a cave. Still at the mercy of nature.

Some people ask the annoying question of what my long term plans are. I have a fool proof answer prepared. In the long run I plan on dying. It is the best plan. Unlike almost everybody else's plans in life it cannot fail.

Macabre as it is, I like the idea that one day I'll be dead and people that I like will gather and say nice platitudes about me even if I treated them terribly. Nobody is going to care about my loose relationship with deadlines or my careless casual racism. The real me will be forgotten and replaced with some shadowy description from the past, then that too will disappear in time. The most serious crises that I face are just a silly insignificant nuisance in the face of eternity. I'm nothing more than a mote in the unfathomable finiteness of the universe spreading out in time and space. And yet I will be able to escape the material plane in a simple yet inevitable act.

If I had to choose a method? I always wanted to get eaten by a wild tiger. That would be nice, but that would mean that I have to save tigers from extinction so they are common enough to stumble upon one and get eaten. I'm not too sure about the viabilty of that as a plan.

If you look at my about page, it's deliberately very vague about my identity. No pronouns, no gender, no affliations, no race, no nationality. Even the profile name is kind of a throwaway word instead of a proper pseudonym. You could probably infer a few things about me from what I draw, photograph and write, this being a pretty personal website. But in general I'm mostly anonymous. I actually can't stand putting myself on the internet, it makes me anxious and weird. Call it a barrier or a veil, it's really comfortable to have a some personal space between me and an audience. I like that I can take a break from identity on the internet.

But with identity being so central to the modern internet, especially kids announcing everything from their sexual inclinations to their greatest psychological weaknesses to the public, there's not much space where I actually do feel comfortable. I hardly post anything personal on social media anymore since my peers and professional acquaintances follow me. There arent many active forums available these days. And the only places where you can be truly anonymous have pretty toxic cultures. So the indieweb is a bit of a refuge in a way.

This website is just me carving out a comfort zone where I can be just amorphous fragments of a human being instead of personhood forced into neat categories.

After a long struggle I wrapped up a long term project. It was a very long adventure where I must have used up the last of my youth. Now it's done. I've been raised on stories based on Hero's Journeys, the story ends with the return. It's all tied up neatly in a definitive ending. But life kind of just drags on continuously. Indefinite and uncertain. There aren't as many stories about that, because it's just not interesting. It kind of leaves me a bit lost when I think about what's next. Life never has a satisfying ending.

I guess I could work on some other projects that I've been putting off for a while. I'm not old yet by any means, so I still have some energy in me. And I hope that I'm a bit wiser.

Lately I've been pants out of my head tired (The fact that this is a relatively coherent sentence indicates that there are problems with the English language). Suddenly everyone is acting like the pandemic never happened. Everyone pushing to get back to business as usual is exhausting. I had barely been able to catch my breath during the pandemic, now everything is spiralling out of control and my list of tasks keeps getting longer. Some days I'm so tired I can't think or figure things out anymore. Being worn down by meaningless productivity. Maybe I need some rest.

For all the proposed solutions to climate change and the environment, probably the best thing to do is just for everyone to admit that they aren't doing too well and sit down and rest. Maybe we should do that, just let the whole world admit that we're exhausted and just stop. Take a break, get by with just a few things, cover for others and help each other. Like a war, but the opposite. Instead of suspending laws and morality and charging out to kill each other, we just put everything on hold, stay with family and maybe spend a year or two not doing anything important and recover. A great nap after which all of humanity will feel much better.

I'm still keeping up with Inktober, although I'm spending more time drawing than posting it on the internet. Which is why I could never really keep up with it on social media. It'll eventually go up.

We are just coming out of a long lockdown over here. Shops are starting to open up again, life is getting back to normal. At least as close as we can try to get it.

Against this backdrop I recently visited my local hobby shop. The selection of model kits is average, it doesn't have much of the older and more obscure stuff that primarily interests me. But just being surrounded by boxes of model kits was a huge relief. The colors, weight and texture of the boxes, the smell of lacquer paints in the background, completed models in glass cabinets. It was like I could breathe again after so many months of mostly being confined to a suffocating online space. I was suddenly back in reality instead of the unrealness that I had been occupying for the last few months.

I picked up a simple model kit for beginners. I'd rather ease myself back into the hobby than try some major project. As I get older I realise that it might be wiser to not be so ambitious with my builds.

My friends have recommended that I try reading newsletters, Substack and the like are apparently where a lot of writers are migrating to. I always refuse to do so. My reason is simple: I hate opening my email.

Email is this dark portal where requests and work come through. There is hardly any good news, just the prospect of more work. Or someone asking you for something. It's an unending vortex of stress and responsibility. I hate having to sort through the infernal thing. I hate sending emails. I hate replying emails. I've developed a Pavlovian response to greatly disliking anything that arrives in my inbox. It's come to the point where I hardly use my personal email anymore due to my aversion to it. Email rhymes with evil (if you stretch out the -vil and say it like a mad scientist). Email bad. No like email.

Mooncakes. Coming from Ancient China, mooncakes are served during the mid autumn festival. A baked confection with soft crumbly thin crust that envelopes a chewy sweet paste either made of red bean or lotus seeds. I'm not particularly fond of them, but I get them as gifts and will mindlessly eat them as snacks. I kind of like the softer crusts of the modern unbaked snow skin mooncakes than the more traditional ones. I once gave some to a friend from Beijing, he told me that mooncakes were very different in his home town.

Currypuffs. A hot currypuff fresh from the wok is one of the finest pleasures in the world. A dry potato and chicken curry is stuffed into a slightly flaky crust to form a dumpling, then deep fried to golden brown crispy perfection. I like the ones that Indians make, the curry has a bit more spice in it and taste quite close to samosa. They used to serve them a lot during events on campus. As a poor student I would be the first in line to grab as many as possible so I could stuff my face with them.

Apam Balik. A fluffy pancake that is covered in butter, nuts and sweet corn, then folded in half. Very nice warm straight from the shallow brass pans that they are cooked in. There is a variety that is thin and crispy. I always thought that it was derived from the the Indian Appam, but legend has it that it originates from South China. One of my friends used to always buy it for tea and I would end up finishing most of it. I kind of miss social eating from before the pandemic, where we could all just sit around and share a meal.

I feel like I spend too much time doomscrolling. Every day, only bad news gets amplified by angry voices. Makes the future look very bleak and hopeless. Before the pandemic I could still do charity and stuff to periodically restore my faith in humanity. But it's a lot more harder to be there in person now. Instead we're kind of isolated in our own spaces and fed a constant stream of bad news. Not healthy to say the least. My friends just ignore the news now, it's too depressing.

Suddenly we are in some weird live action reenactment of several science fiction dystopias and disaster movies at the same time. It's tempting to extrapolate the present into the future. It's tempting to read too many op eds and tweet threads on how the future is just as fucked as the present. It's tempting to read all the propaganda that floods our media. It's tempting to give in to the pervasive feeling of doom. It's really easy to look at the world through the twisted mirror of social media and just give up on people.

The future looks bleak, but if we could predict it wouldn't be a future. As much as we are heading into dystopia, the future is really something that we can never anticipate. On one hand I think that we will always see the worst case scenario. On the other I understand that the worst case scenario is also something that we never expected or planned for. For our allies and enemies, the future is FUBAR. Nobody will be a complete loser or winner, there is no definitive salvation or doom, there's no system or ideology that will save us, we will somehow figure out a way to survive and life will just go on.

How many moments do I give a certain bit of content? How many attention seconds does it get? How long do I look at it? How long do I explore it? How long do I think about it? On a social media platform, I don't really spend a lot of time on it. Within less than a second I decide on whether to ignore something and judge whether it is worthy of a like or retweet. The interface makes me incapable of actually thinking carefully about something or judge it fairly. Due to the speed of judgement, I have to fall back on other shorthands. Is this person someone I know? What type of person is it? I have to judge based on stereotypes, there's no time for nuance. If it's an opposing view, then it's simple to just reject everything they say. I don't have time to think, I have to keep scrolling.

Art suffers from this as well. How many seconds does a piece get on social media? It doesn't matter how many hours you've put into it, it's seen and judged in seconds. In this kind of environment shorthand becomes very important, fanart draws attention because it requires less time to judge if it is good. Something you already like, it's good. Same for attaching a social message to something. It's part of your team, it is good. Draw something original, without any points of reference and then it becomes harder to make an instant judgement. It's not part of your team, it's ambigious, ignore it, no time to think, need to scroll.

When I read a website, I'm often less hostile even in cases where I don't agree with what is being said. Maybe because I'm not being rushed by the interface to create maximum engagement. I have the time to think about what I'm reading and my stand on it. I have time to give the benefit of the doubt, to emphatise, to withhold instant judgement. Maybe our enjoyment of internet content would be more enjoyable if we just gave everyone a few more attention seconds. Read their writing without instantly falling back to shorthands, look at their art like it's in a gallery and worth your time and focus instead drowning it in an infinite scroll. Might be a good thing to consider with web design as well, how do you give your reader the space to be comfortable, hang around and explore?

I recently had to do some work with a small wordpress website. I'm not a web dev by any means, but after a few months I'd gotten used to editing the css and html directly on Neocities. And that's where the problems started. After the no holds barred chaos of Neocities, working on a free Wordpress template feels like a straightjacket. Options, themes and layouts are so limited, I can't just swap out css style sheets as I please, it's difficult to see how elements work and hack them together into some other function. I've had very little experience with a CMS before, and now that I'm working with one it feels really unfamiliar and strange. Makes me appreciate all these sites which are just bits of code hacked together which are somehow functional, aesthetically pleasing and unique.

In all fairness maybe I just have a lot to learn with the new interface. Maybe I'll get used to it and figure things out and this rant will look foolish in the future. But it is an uncomfortable experience to jump from eclectic variety that I'd gotten familiar with to the uniformity of the mainstream internet. It's like the spirit of encouraging experimentation is missing.

Sometimes pop-sci writers will marvel at how out of all the out the infinite possible outcomes, we managed to somehow experience intelligent life on this planet in this vast universe. Nothing short of a miracle. We have hydrogen and water and universal constants that are just right for us to be here. Miraculous. Some people extend this to love as well, out of the 7 Billion or so humans on this planet, you somehow meet the right person. Marvelous. Another string of improbable miracles. Keep on looking towards the future of untold potential and improbable miracles. It's a valid argument, but it carries the viewpoint of having multiple possible futures and us navigating through them at almost random.

The problem with possibility is that it collapses into a single event once it becomes the past. There are no multiple events, just the one that happened. It can't be changed. You can't undo or redo. It has passed. All there is to do is accept and move on. From the only possible outcome to the next only possible outcome to the next next only possible outcome. Looking back instead of looking forwards, it's a straight road of inevitability instead of branches of possibly.

I'm a fatalistic person. While I believe that there are possible courses of action, once something happens it was the inevitable outcome. There's nothing to regret or resent. Only resignation and reaction. No 'what if's or 'could be's. It's an immutable thing of the past. There were no other viable possibilities. I was meant to be.

My friends often tell me that I'm very calm in the face of bad events. One reason is that I'm so negative that I always assume that the outcome will be terrible. But the other is that I realise that nothing could have been done to stop it once it has happened. The past is the only outcome. One can only grieve and move on to the next thing that was meant to be.

I try to not be too negative on this website. Social media is already a stream of bad news and cat videos (and I don't even like cats). This is where I take a break and engage in creative endevours. But some days the paper tigers that control our politics and economies look so daunting and undefeatable. Some days there doesn't seem to be an end to our problems. It's just a series of defeats as things keep getting worse and you're just barely hanging on, pushed to the fringes. Life is exhausting.

I once talked to an old academic from India, and he reminisced about his experiences. "There were so many things we fought for, but in the end was it really worth it?" he asked. Those words just stayed with me. What regrets will I carry? What important things to me now will just not matter in the long run? Is any struggle really worth it in the end? Life just continues on, empires eventually fall, monuments will crumble, good and evil will both be defeated, people will forget, the hills and the seas will outlast human lives.

I'm not sure whether I should be comforted by my insignificance or if I should despair.

I tried googling something recently and all the hits on the first page were basically ads. I think we've reached the point where webpages pumped full of SEO outnumber pages with actual honest advice in search results. It's a worrying trend. The internet was a place to look for more information, and in many ways it was relatively reliable and honest. In some cases it very human and intimate. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. All we're left with is a tangled mess of ads, not bad if you want to buy something, but if you're looking for advice you're probably in the wrong place.

The internet was great while it lasted. But lately I see it disintegrating into a adtech ridden mess. Another loss to the numbing amount of losses that we feel right now. I'd like to google "How to deal with grief" , but the results just bombard me with offers for free e-books in return for my email address and souless copy written for the websites of large organisations.

Recently I've been clearing out my camera SD cards. Deleting all the blurry stuff and selecting what I want to keep. I went through thousands of photos, and I can say that I have about less than 2 handfuls of photos with humans in them. Aside from some work related stuff (Which is also devoid of humans) the rest are mostly deserted cityscapes and night photography. Partly it has been because of lockdowns and I've been avoiding crowded places. But also I'm not too fond of photographing people.

Taking photos of people is kind of awkward. I'd prefer if they were spontaneous and candid, but I can never stand far back enough to get a shot like that. And when I'm with a camera and people don't notice me, it feels like a creep shot. There's no winning in this. But most of the time they seem to react to the camera, and I'm not a fan of capturing really posed photos. I'm not fan of group photos or selfies either. I don't think I've taken a good human photo. People photos are just not my thing, I'm just too uncomfortable photographing them.

When I draw I tend to draw people quite a lot. But that's a solitary activity where I don't have to interact with people and I can be as detached from the real world as I like. Perhaps the people in photographs are too close to reality; creatures of fat and sinew, hair and teeth. It's very hard to capture the beauty in that.

I care about some things. I don't like that the climate is changing into some sort of persistent threat. I don't like that animals are going extinct before we can even discover them. I don't like that poor people have to suffer. I don't like that all of humanity is too short sighted to control a pandemic. This all means caring or empathising in some way with a group of people.

But there are limits to my empathy. I realise that I don't have the emotional energy to care about every injustice in the world. So I intentionally don't extend my empathy to things beyond my small area of interest. Perhaps it may be a bit cruel, but I really can't care about everything and everyone. It is difficult to really care about something, it's not as easy as liking posts and reposting viral messages. It takes real emotional labour to understand other people and be in their shoes. It's hard, exhausting, tiring, it grinds at your soul. Empathy requires investing your time and energy. It's not like pity, where you can shake your head for a while and then go back to laughing at cat videos.

So there are many issues in this world that I don't care about. We live in an age where it is expected that you have to have opinions or speak out about the flavour-of-the-day social issue. It should be acceptable to just not care and not have an opinion. If you can't really treat it with care it deserves, then leave it to people that are really invested in it instead of making empty noise. People have limited emotional energy, we really can't love everyone in the world equally. A bleeding heart eventually stops beating, a candle that lights the way eventually burns out.

I'm not saying that you should not care about anything. But pick a few problems and work hard at them instead of exhausting yourself by spreading yourself superficially thin across every single injustice that you encounter. We do after all live in a world of overwhelming injustice. You are not an unstoppable social justice warrior that knows no death or fear. You are, as all of us are, all too human. So take things slow and make one deliberate step at a time. Care for others, but care within your limits.

This website is one way communication. Like a book. Yes, you occasionally get a comment on your guestbook or someone sends you a message. But for the most part, unless your website is crawling with analytics, it's pretty much a black box. Put something out there, and someone reads it. And that's the extent of your interaction. No hearts or retweets or reblogs or emojis to give you crude real time information to feed your need for attention.

I sometimes get nervous if I put something on social media, since responses are so quick. Put art out there. People like it, judge it or just ignore it. Whatever you get it always leaves you feeling a bit empty. I remember helping a friend with his webcomic, and it was a slog of looking at charts and analytics and struggling to get tiny morsels of attention. But that is the modern artists dilemma in the attention economy. Making a living and getting attention is one and the same. I'm lucky that I have a stable job so I don't have desperately join that scrum at the internet.

Here on Neocities I'm blind. The only metric I have is the views going up, it's not really reliable. Maybe I will get a handfull of likes, which is comforting in its smallness. Maybe number of followers indicates that someone actually enjoys seeing my stuff. But overall I have no idea what is going on behind that veil, for all I know it could just be people hate-reading my stuff. I can't even pander to an audience because I have so little information about who is reading this.

I actually enjoy it. Having a barrier between the audience and creator. It's the same joy you get from putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. Sharing things over the distance of time and space. Carried over by the tides of fate. Not everything has to be conversation. Sometimes it's just nice to listen for while, then leave without saying a word.

It's easier to live in ignorance than to do something. Trying to fix real problems is really daunting. But if you remain uninformed (or misinformed) enough, it looks like there is an easy solution. You might not even have to lift a finger except wait for those people that promise you the easy solution to do something. Nobody wants to listen to experts talk about the challenges and nuances of actually accomplishing a goal. That's a boring struggle, not something that's short thrilling and exciting. We want the easy digested version. Cheap stories, simple fictions, something that can be done on a couch. Reality is hard and soul crushing. Give me entertainment.

I don't want to put down people that want to stay ignorant. I have my own expertise in my fields, but in the end I have my own list of things that I try to be ignorant about, lest the despair of it crushes me. Knowledge and action hurts. Caring about other people hurts. It's not a Hollywood movie with a feel good ending, it's a horrible boring slog. All it leaves you with is more vague uncertainty and unreachable horizons. It feels really good to think that one day a saviour will come and kick the bad guys out and everything will be ok again. It's so tempting to shrug our shoulders, have faith and wait. To do nothing. To be ignorant. It's a tragedy we all share.

It's frighteningly easy to just give up and ignore the harmful systems around us. To push the responsibility to someone else and just wait for a chosen one or some omnipotent God-fearing military to save us all. Learning is not as easy as googling answers or reading tweets. Knowledge needs action before you can truly understand it. The more you know the more shaky and unreliable you realise everything is. How scary the world actually is. Like walking in a dense fog or an unending dark corridor. But a good rule of thumb that you're on the right track is you never exactly know what you are doing and that you never find solutions, only more complex problems.

I like building model kits. But as with everything it's a complicated relationship. If you start with beginner kits they can be rewarding hobby, but as you get more advanced and try different techniques they become a sort of dedicated tedium. I'm not sure how many hours I've spent sanding small pieces of plastic, but it must be significant. So much sanding and more sanding. Humming a tune to yourself while you sand down another part. But I do enjoy it, all the cutting and sanding, all that mindless work that is strangely calming. Even the inevitable bleeding from stray X-acto knife blades has become part of the ritual. Despite it all I actually only enjoy the construction part of it. Possibly the only part that I do enjoy. Painting is required to get the look that I'm going for, but I'm not a fan of it and often I end up procrastinating at that point. Maybe I need an airbrush, because handpainting multiple coats of acrylic paint onto a large area is more tedious than all that sanding.

Maybe my sense of pride is pushing me to achieve a finish like what I see in glossy model kit magazines or twitter. Making the whole ordeal more difficult than it should be. I wouldn't call it masochism, at least masochism is eventful and exciting, but this is like acts of repetition dragged out over long periods of time. Either way, that's what a hobby is. "Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another."

I want to make model kit page for this website so I can show off some of my creations. But that means that I have to actually finish painting a few of them first.

I was thinking about drawing book covers as a creative exercise. Until I realised one thing: I can only recall finishing one novel in the last couple of years. Possibly it's the closure of book stores because of lockdowns, the lack of a disposable income or my preference for short stories and non-fiction, but I haven't actually sat down and read a novel in a long while. I haven't been in the mood for long reads as well, this pandemic seems to have shortened my attention span. Then again I've binged through volumes of terrible and mediocre manga, which I liked for its simple unchallenging content. Maybe that's the actual root of the problem. I've been picking up literary books that I 'should read' instead of trashy novels that would be fun to read with half a brain. Perhaps I should pick up a novel again, if only to just help me focus a bit more.

The last novel I finished was "The weight of our sky" by Hanna Alkaf, which I kind of had to read because someone gave it to me as a birthday present and I was trying to get to the ending. It was quite a scary book, especially since my parents lived through the events depicted in it and pre-pandemic I used to regularly walk the streets that the book was set in. With the themes of racial violence and OCD, I did wonder if it is age appropriate for young adults, then again they are exposed to much worse on the internet I suppose.

I like looking at websites dedicated to 00's nostalgia written by teenagers and early 20 year olds. I can relate to 90's nostalgia, since that was the decade that made up most of my childhood. It makes sense for me to think of that as a simpler, easier, better time. I was child. But 00's nostalgia, that's something else entirely. I was already a teenager/young adult by then. I witnessed how the events of the 00's set up the dystopia that we're living in right now. The terrorism, rise of surveillance states, boybands, wars in the Middle East and Afganistan, oppressive governments getting more oppressive, economic crises, the despair of the after effects Asian financial crisis and the global financial crisis that followed, the slow creep of tech giants, the change in how we communicated and did politics. Some people put 2007/8 with the launch of the iPhone and the Global financial crisis as a sort of event that changed everything, but really that was the result of a slow march through a decade worth of events. (I hardly remember the 10's, they were a complete blur that left me disoreinted and confused)

But 00's nostalgia doesn't bother with any of that. It remembers a simpler time, before all the social media. Geocities websites, Windows XP, Playstation 2, Xbox, flashing gifs, proto-memes, youtube videos, Newgrounds, flash games. Young people reinterpreting the decade based on childhood memories, second hand accounts and whatever media survived. It's like how I think of the 80's as action movies, cartoons and... ok I don't think about the 80's beyond those two things. I'm not complaining though. Let the worse parts of the past be put into history books and entrusted to wise men. Let it be forgotten by the masses. Let them have the comfort of a better time that they can look back to. We often task the younger generation to build a better future, but through their limited perspectives, they also build better, more pleasant pasts as well.

P.S. This unfortunately has two effects: 1) We will keep repeating the same mistakes 2) Kids today will look back at 10's and 20's as the 'simpler times'.

One day I'm going to stop updating this website. It likely won't be anytime soon. But eventually I will run out of things that I want to write about. Or maybe I might become too busy with real life. Or maybe this pandemic will get me. Everything will come to an end, it's just a matter of when.

I've been around long enough to realise that websites have about the lifespan of a dog. People change, society changes, the world changes. I'm not under the illusion that this will be long lasting monument of my greatness. Just a ephemeral gasp of life in the emptiness of universe. I take some comfort in that, something doesn't have to permanent to be meaningful.

I read really fast these days, probably at post-graduate level speeds if I can focus enough. Sometimes I just skim an entire article and get the whole gist of it without reading through the whole thing. Which is strange, because I'm dyslexic. Sometimes I think that it's just a self misdiagnosis, but I still mix up my 6's and 9's (which is a quite dangerous when working on my accounts) and I still sometimes mix up b's and d's, even when I'm using a keyboard. It hasn't been that troublesome lately, for the most part it's only caused minor mistakes that I can live with. An amusing fact about my brain rather than a real disability.

But then I tried to pick up Japanese. Suddenly the things that I stuggled with in early education came back to haunt me. I've been reading kana for 4 years, but I still can't tell さ apart from ち. I don't even dream about telling ツ and シ apart. I just look at the context and guess what letter it is. Which is probably what I've been doing with English all this while, but I've never thought about the actual mechanism before. For some reason, ideograms like kanji are easier for my brain to process. Maybe because there is more to grasp onto than a handful of small lines that are often mirrored. In primary school I remember many times I had to stay back in class because I had so much trouble copying off the board. I wonder how long it's going to take me to get past this hurdle.

The relative anonymity of the internet lets us build personas and experiment. But one thing that is rarely discussed is how it also lets us experience death, or at least the death of your own online persona. Everybody grows up, you change. And as you do so there are parts of you that get left behind. I'm sure most people have felt this before, you leave school and go to college or you stop going to a forum or you slowly stop regularly emailing a friend or the online community that you used imploded. All these small deaths, deaths by a thousand cuts. Cutting and pruning the bonsai that is your online life. I'm kind of glad that my cringey past lives have been swept away by time and the impermanence of the internet, that I got to snuff them out and move on. Death on my own terms.

Honestly that's one of the main draws of the internet for me. That it's not real life, I can put it down one day and walk away with little consequence. That I can just do a painless suicide if I ever get tired of things. If things get too tough there is a way out. You just disappear into the void that you came from. Compared to IRL (or modern surveillance capitalism), it's a nice fantasy isn't it?

Through this pandemic I realised that I'd rarely spent much time to myself, which is ironic since we've all been so isolated. But constant access to gadgets and internet have meant that I hardly had the time to just think through things without distractions. I usually go for very long walks without any internet connection to bother me, which I could hardly do. I didn't have any lectures to attend to where my hands would be idle to do other things. I hardly had the time to sit quietly and get lost in my thoughts without the temptation to check the internet. It really hasn't been healthy. The constant stimulation of content seems to have dulled my creativity. In order to access my own internal world, my daydreams or whatever you would call them, I needed to disconnect and be idle and bored.

When I look back at some of the creative stuff that I had made, I realise that most of it comes from a place of boredom and isolation. Like being alone in a forest or travelling in a different state. I've started walking in circles around my neighbourhood in the middle of the night to get the ideas flowing again. So far it feels a bit better, like I'm in my own brain again and not some augmented cyber hive mind.

I like reading people write about the mundanity of their lives. It reminds me that there are other people out there, half way across the planet,and we are all connected through this marvel called the internet. I don't need to read about your epic activism and struggles, politics or your philosophical insights, just reading about people going about their daily lives or their simple personal scale problems satisfies me. It's refreshing to read about people making small repairs at home, going to the store or doing their homework. The problems in the world are so huge and insurmountable, it's nice to be able to look away from them and remember that this world is filled with the small struggles of people going about their lives. For people shouting out into the void, just remember that there are people in the void listening and your company is quite welcome.

A hundred years from now, what knowledge would we be able to pass down to the people of the future? The closure of Geocities and Yahoo! answers, and now Google limiting access to drives just shows how easily information can just disappear from the internet. Links can be broken and disabled, file types become obsolete, platforms like Flash get discontinued. That's not even counting the uncertainties brought about by our insane political and economic systems. Large scale power disruptions, political instability or simply maintenance costs can take down servers. Makes me wonder how we're going to protect knowledge from coming disasters of the 21st century.

While knowledge is getting more accessible, it's also being cornered into walled gardens. Most science is paywalled by a few large academic publishing corporations, news publishers and magazines are setting up paywalled articles (and like many online publishers could go under and you'd lose all the articles), Disney controls a modern global mythology, Google controls almost all video content on the internet and photos, informative threads and articles have migrated to the almost unsearchable reaches of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There are still a few bastions of accessible free knowledge, but by and large knowledge controlled by corporations is a nightmare scenario that is our current reality. Not only can they shape our views, they can also block access or even censor knowledge. Or as with previous cases they could just delete it if it isn't profitable. And all of this is so dependent on our fossil fueled cheap energy economies that the underlying infrastructure probably can't be kept running without it. Perhaps the cloud is the best way to describe our collective digital information, ephemeral vapors that can disappear in the heat of the sun.

Would future generations be able to search through social media to discover clues to the past? Will they be open and declassified like old colonial records? Or will it be too big and noisy to process without the help of AI or maybe just full of holes because it isn't profitable to keep so much data around? What could we do to transfer knowledge between generations? A hundred years isn't that long a time frame, a human lifetime can fit into it. They could probably ask their elders about the glory days of the old internet. We don't need to carve HTML Rosseta stones and leave them in deserts so that generation can decode our websites. But it might be good to consider backups just in case this house of cards come toppling down.

Modern capitalist society has a cult like obsession with data, to the point where we hoard inordinate amounts of it because of the unproven promise that it's going to solve all our problems. But data is just raw information, knowledge is data with context and interpretation; and wisdom is knowledge being used well. We have so much information, but what are the important lessons that we want people to learn? What is worth learning and worth passing down?

Perhaps most of the wisdom that I have was passed down to me from older people that just took the time to talk to me. Their vast geological knowledge, academic achievements, technical skills or passion for the Beatles didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that they knew how to program mainframes, catch animals or make soap from charcoal. While those made for interesting stories it really wasn’t all that important. But what was important was that they took their experience and acted on it. Perhaps we don't need to worry too much on transferring knowledge in its current existing form to the next generation, but they can probably benefit from us being wise enough to be there for them.

I just finished 'The collapse of western civilisation' by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, it's a science fiction work on the premise of an academician from the Second People's Republic of China in 2393 writing about the how we failed to respond to the current climate crisis. It's a fantastic premise, how would people in the future think about current Western civilisation, which is so impotent in the face of dealing with the crises of our era. There are a lot of good points, though a bit overly academic in their presentation and perspectives. But it really falls flat as a work of science fiction.

The writers never follow up on the premise. I wanted to read about the perspectives of a Neocommunist Chinese woman from 2393, but the writing is just the very western present written in past tense. It is the usual modern complaints about academia, climate change and capitalism, but it barely discusses them from fictional hindsight. The book is way too obsessed with the things that modern academics obsess over, when these things would be as alien to future academics as 18th Century Islamic juriprudence is to western society. The fictional writer is barely a character in the work at all, when their writing should be shaped by the norms, values and zeitgeists of their time. There are hardly any hints of a post-climate crisis society in the writing, it's science fiction without any worldbuilding aside from some brief mentions of the rise of neo communism and some maps of flooded countries.

The end product is, like a lot of climate related literature, a thought provoking but dull read. This subgenre occupies the extremes of being either too simplistically alarmist or too technical and academic, which pushes people toward reading HAARP conspiracy theories or corporate fictions because while they're lacking in truth they have far better storytelling. You end up with some facts and trivia, but nothing that really grips the heart. It's something that will be cited in the future as an example of how Western civilisation collapsed because it couldn't tell the right stories at the right time.

I'm not a fan of philosophy. Or more accurately I'm not a fan of Western philosophy, or at least what it has turned into. I don't mind reading about ideas and theories about life, but the format in which it is delivered is absolutely horrendous. Philosophy texts are just so dense and hard to read. So many just read like miserable depressed men talking in circles and groping for answers. Which is fine if you are trying to figure something out by writing it down, but it makes for a horrible reading experience. Especially if I'm in a hurry and want to get to the point of things. When I was an undergraduate I'd think that maybe I couldn't understand the texts because I was missing out on something important, but now I realise that some of these philosophers are just really bad at writing. If you want to say something, say it in as few words and as clearly as you can. If the wikipedia summary does a better job at explaining your idea than your own text, then you have a writing problem.

I hate the fact that philosophy has become dominated by academia and they've developed such tangled structures of writing. Philosophers that I've met spout jargon and talk in circles, but that seems to be the only thing that they can do. It can impress the inexperienced, but in the end of the day it's just sophistry. Create the illusion of intelligence by being obtuse and impenetrable. It really makes me wonder why we let such joyless people lecture us about life and ethics. And what's worse is when this academic behaviour gets out and is aped by the general public. I see so many subcultures that just keep adding new terms and jargon to the point where outsiders find it impenetrable to understand and the categories have such minor differences that they are mostly redundant. I don't mind learning more about your point of view, but one must stop piling on jargon after a certain level. Like academic philosophers it makes your writing unreadable.

I'd rather read cryptic Buddhist koans, at least they're short.

I'm currently working on a redoing my gallery page (and maybe reorganising the writing page), but these things take time and effort. I need to sit down, read, design and code. It's not social media where you shoot an opinion off without thinking. A website is not instantaneous, it requires deliberation. Things happen slower and they stay up longer, it's the nature of the medium. And I wonder if having a barrier of entry actually makes for better content. Well, at least it creates a different form of content.

It's the same with art and photography. I'm not rushing to meet some crazy daily schedule so my feed always looks full. If I put something up, it's going to stay up in the gallery. People can look at it whenever they want, chronology is not important. So I'm taking my time, letting things which I've pencilled out sit for a while so I can look at it with a fresh set of eyes, enjoying the freedom that comes with having to stop at barriers.

A friend once described herself as a "Sad Millennial", to which I replied that it's redundant since I've never met a happy Millennial. Looking back, so many people have confided in me that they were suffering from some sort of depression or anxiety or a whole grab bag of mental disorders. It makes me wonder if most humans have a mental disorder of some sort, yet are able to perform very well in society and keep up appearances. If that was the case, then mental disorders may just be how a normal brain works. What if sanity is a collective fiction that we've all started to believe as truth? That would explain why people behave so wildly irrationally (and why some economists still believe in a consistantly rational man, despite evidence of the contrary). Maybe if we just accepted universal insanity, we wouldn't be so hard on ourselves and kinder to others.

These thoughts sometimes come into my wandering mind. I don't know whether I should believe it or not. But the scary part is that whenever I share this theory with my friends, they all quietly nod in agreement. Perhaps they are just humoring me, or perhaps they too realise how mentally screwed up we are as a species.

I'm trying to reorganise this website, so lately I've been thinking about web design. Even with rather basic css, there's a lot of designs that can be achieved. Two articles caught my attention recently: Human scale design and How blogs broke the web. A lot of this website is organised into a chronological ordered format. Makes it easy for me to just add another entry on top, but after a while it gets harder for readers to explore it. At its inception 4 or so pages served most of my needs, but as it grows it might be better to move away from a blog design paradigm to one where this website is a thing that should be explored. One where people can take their time to move through rather than "Newest post at the top".

I feel like we are a generation that is lacking in mentors, or at least an understanding of what a mentor should do. Media has programed us to be the hero of our own story, so we don't actually know what to do when it turns out that we are not. When you live your life being told that you are Luke Skywalker, the sudden realisation that you're at best a Yoda or at worst a bystander like Uncle Owen (I had to look his name up on a Wiki), can be devastating. I guess that's what drives people to activism or conspiracy theories in a desperate attempt at heroics.

But it's inevitable that we will soon be past our prime, saddled with so many personal mistakes that we too could be a valuable reference (or cautionary tale) to the younger generation. But what then? What frame of references do we have to do this? Maybe be the cool teacher figure like in Dead Poets Society? Or the mysterious and wise Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid? Are we supposed to die or go missing by the 2nd act like almost every mentor figure in any coming of age story? Or are we the powerful mentors that are always rendered useless when it counts in Shounen manga? While there were so many young heroes to model myself after, I struggle to think of any positive examples of how to be a mentor.

Once your youthful adventures are over, how do you get on with life? And where does the next generation fit into all of this?

I think this is why we are where we are right now. Probably some Gen-Xers and late Boomers are feeling just as lost as me. Giving in to the temptation of playing hero on the internet instead of admitting to their failures and sharing their experience for what it's worth. Makes me thankful for those that actually took the time to help me in the past.

I noticed that a lot of Neocities websites (including this one) are refered to by their webmasters as "my little corner of the internet". It's a bit ironic that in the limitless expanse of the internet, humans are still searching for corners. Like cavemen searching for small caves that they can press their backs against for security. Corners are comforting defensive positions, little private spaces where you don't have to worry about attacks from all sides. It makes sense that we try to invoke this cosy aesthetic when building our personal websites.

Or are we here because we feel cornered?

There's a charm to the dinosaurs of yesteryear. Yes, they are scientifically inaccurate and they very much reflect the predjudices and preconceptions of the era, but they look cool. Aesthetically they are closer to dragons and fantasy than the birds of modern reconstructions, but the kitsch, outlandish speculation and flights of fancy just make them look really interesting. They were like characters, they weren't just carnivores, they were villianous slow pondering Harryhausen or speedy Speilbergian slasher movie monsters. They were the tragically noble herbivores that were gleefully depicted being attacked and eaten. They were Victorian woodcuts of slothy dragons that were too stupid to survive. They were paintings from the 80's with shrink wrapped skin and bulging muscles with occasionally lasers strapped to them. They were Sunday strips in the 90's that sometimes flew F-14s. They were early webcomics that repeated the same panels over and over again.

My point is they looked cool. Modern reconstructions are getting more accurate and we're changing how we view dinosaurs, but as they get closer to the realm of science than fantasy they start to become a bit duller in comparison. This was kind of my thought process when I tried drawing a scientifically inaccurate T. rex . It's sometimes fun to celebrate the kitschy misconceptions of the past than to draw actual animals.

At it's current size this entire website is about 10MB. That's less than 3 pictures in my digital camera's sd card. I'm pretty amazed at what you can get for 10MB if you actually restrain yourself. Recently I've been experimenting with optimising my images and trying to get them as small as possible (1-bit indexed colors are a wonderful trick for black and white art). It makes me think about how wasteful we are with data, my phone can burn through 40MB a day and I hardly do anything on it except message people and occasionally open Twitter.

I'm beginning to wonder how much I can fit into a small space, like a 3.5" floppy disk's 1.44MB. When I was younger I remember being able to save low quality scans of comics on floppies. I'd get an entire chapter in if I was lucky. I wonder what I could do if I actually optimised art and text within those limits?

Like poetry it might be a good exercise to learn how to limit how much space you take up. Take the time to be brief and to the point. Cut out anything unnecessary. New forms of expression might come out of it. There are some examples on Neocities that serve as inspiration, like 10kB Gallery or some of the art by Automatic Llama.

As a society we focus so much on growth, that we take it as a measure of quality. If you're not growing you're not doing it right, more money, more posts, more numbers, more data. Like gigabytes of badly taken HD selfies. Like a cancer growing and filling up so much space. Instead of writing haikus we're like college students trying to fill out a 10 page assignment with whatever rubbish our energy drink addled minds can think of. Doing more with less seems to be out of fashion. Growth without elegance or restraint.

I don't use mobile internet. I don't like to be accessible at all times or bothered when I'm taking a walk or driving. Recently I had to use it for some work related thing, and it feels so weird to have so much information at your fingertips while you are moving about. The constant connection to other human beings, being able to see a persons face on demand, always knowing where you are going, being able to look things up instantaineously. I don't like it. I don't feel human, but like a psychic alien from 70's pulp science fiction magazine. When I'm on the move I like being able to be alone, get lost, let my idle mind wander.

At one point I was teaching English as a second language. Where I'm from, most people pick up English as a second or third language. And one of the hard parts is explaining English pronouns, specifically "he" and "she". You see a lot of East and Southeast Asian languages don't have gendered pronouns. Everybody just makes do with one gender neutral pronoun (In Chinese there is a difference in written pronouns but they all has the same sound). So you get students constantly mixing up he and she, his and her. And sometimes you get questions like "Why do they even bother with gendered pronouns?" To which I actually have no answer.

I sometimes watch with amusement when I see Americans arguing about pronouns and adding more to the list. I had enough trouble teaching two pronouns. It seems to me like they are complicating a system that a lot of people can live without. Why would you constantly add new pronouns when it would be easier to just subtract one and use a single pronoun for everything? Internet savvy Malay language speakers sometimes joke that their pronouns are dia/dia, which is means both he and she and whatever gender in between and beyond. Personally, it seems like a lot less work and a more elegant and inclusive system.

You would think that fixing pronouns and using a single one would lead to a more egalitarion culture. But honestly Asians tend to be sexist even without gendered pronouns. Makes me wonder if fighting over pronouns will lead anywhere. Some people say that words have power, usually the people that say that make a living by peddling their writing. Inflating the importance of words might be in their own interest. While I agree that words shape and constrict the way we think, maybe changing words alone isn't the solution that one might hope for.

This might be a controversial musing, but that's kind of how weird it is to watch foreign culture wars happen. It's strange and alien, and trying to make sense of it from your own personal context can be quite challenging and amusing at the same time.

I originally named this website "Occassionally, Content" as an excuse for a potentially spotty update schedule as well as a reference to my occasional feelings of satiation (I only have 3 settings: Content, exhausted and angry). But recently I've been wondering if I should be making content at all. The word content feels a bit artificial these days, like it is describing some sweetened combination of permitted coloring, high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated palm oil injected into a bun of cold soggy white bread. That's what pops into my mind when I hear someone describe themselves as a "Content creator" instead of something more concrete like a writer or artist. Content wants something from you, it's optimised, manipulative and commoditised. I don't want to make content. I hope this website lacks content, instead more fluff, filling or stuffing. The homely, soft and warm stuff that makes you feel content.

On another note I was rather suprised that people actually read what I write on this website. Usually my mindset when writing anything here is "Old man yells at clouds", so I guess thanks for watching me rant into the void.

I miss reading newspapers. They still exist, but the media landscape is so gutted that whatever is left is just a emancipated shadow of what it used to be. There was a ritual to reading newspapers, start at the lifestyle section, TV page first to see what's going to be on, then read the comics, then the columns. I liked the more frivolous ones where the columnists would just share small snippets of their life. Then the reviews of movies or games, then the ads for the movies that were showing in local cinemas, followed by feature articles if they were interesting. Then opinion columns, letters to the editor and world news. Local news was read only if I was bored.

In a newspaper there were all sorts of things that may or may not interest you. It was never tailor made for your target demographic or designed to bombard you with algorithmically guided ads. There was always that serendipitous chance of discovering things that you'd never expected to like. Old media never gave us what we wanted when we wanted it, but it did allow us to explore beyond the stereotypes of market demographics.

I run a dual boot Windows 10/Linux Mint on my laptop, mainly because Windows is an easier interface to use when dealing with media files (at the expense of it constantly tracking my every move) hence a bit more user friendly for work. Linux is for my leisure activities, which mostly revolve around watching video, surfing the net and a bit of light image editing. But having that software separation of mental spaces has really helped during the pandemic and work-from-home. During the worst parts of last years lockdown, everything melted together into a mess of constant work stress with unfinished work constantly reminding me that things needed to be done. Keeping my desktops apart in clear work and leisure spaces helps me to put everything away and shift into a different mental state, it also helps that I need to restart my computer to change states, that tiny hassle created a barrier that sometimes stopped me from crossing back into work mentality when I'm supposed to be resting. I think my productivity has suffered a bit though, I'm booting up Windows less and less these days.

I'm starting to feel like our right to private lives is slowly being eroded. Everything that we say or do is recorded, reported, stored in one way or another. The stress of living in a panopticon really gets to me. People used to be able to have a professional self and other private aspects of their lives, but lately it feels like it's all mushing up together. Your reputation is now attached to your social media, you have to constantly be on your best behaviour and keep your guard up even when communicating with friends. The eye of society is constantly on you. You have to watch yourself and try not to make any bad takes since these things live forever on the internet and everybody keeps receipts.

I guess that's why I want to keep parts of myself hidden from everybody else. Being able to get away and get to know other aspects of your being that you don't want to be associated with your place in society or your livelihood. Ironically I'm writing about this in a public space that everybody can see, but there is a level disassociation from my main identity that allows me to do so. Would I have been so honest if my name and face was attached to these opinions? Probably not. What is it about this world that robs us of our other lives?

One peculiarity that I've come across is that I write better when I'm on my feet and walking. The lack of distractions and being able to let my mind wander lets me think about things clearly and organise my thoughts. Once I'm done walking, I can sit down and type everything out smoothly. At one point I was doing 200words/km. For me writing really is 80% thinking and 20% actually the physical act of writing. This is opposed to sitting in front of my computer where the process of writing feels like trying to wring blood from a stone. I haven't been very productive during the pandemic since my movement has been limited by all the lockdowns. It'll be really nice to be able to go for long care free walks again.

I've known a girl since she was 5 years old, she's 9 now and one of the top students in her grade. Undoubtedly she will keep excelling in the rest of her life. But since she was a dumb kindergartener when I met her, I can only see her as that. Perhaps when she goes to college or establishes a career for herself, I might still not be able to overcome my first impression of her. I honestly do wonder how our parents ever take us seriously. In their minds we must all be drooling babies.

I've been reading a couple of autobiographical manga set in the Showa era (1926-1989) recently (Yoshihiro Tatsumi's "A drifting life" and Shigeru Mizuki's "Showa"), and one of the things that struck me was how massive events (Earthquakes, economic recessions, natural disasters, political upheaval) can just be compressed into a single offhand sentence. Undoubtedly these are life-changing moments for those involved, it may have even looked like the end of the world, but 50-60 years on it is a meaningless footnote to the younger generation. As time marches mercilessly on, all these crises that we live through lose all their context and meaning, only remembered in history books or academia but even then terribly abridged and missing the rawness that the people living through the hardship had felt.

I'm tempted to imagine how the current Coronavirus is going to be described 100 years in the future. It's probably going to be some obscure trivia like the Spanish Flu or the Manchurian Plague (Which I had barely heard of until the pandemic started). But in a way it's a relief to think about how all our pain and anguish can be forgotten and summarised into a dispassionate one liner, just another disaster in a long line of disasters.

Here's my attempt: In 2020 the Covid 19 worldwide pandemic strikes and incapacitates the global economy, triggering recessions all over the globe.

These days I think that "inteligence" is measured by the ability to find the optimal solution, or in other words the "best" solution based on the parameters given. Judging by the amount of resources that you save by being smart, choosing the non-optimal solution is kind of stupid. But I'd argue that it's good to occasionally be stupid and take the longer route, even when the shorter faster path is available. It's probably the even more human thing to do, any AI can find optimal solutions, but humans are always inclined to pick sub-optimal ones for reasons that can't even be explained by randomness.

The problem with optimisation is that it can lead to uniformity, there are only a few optimal solutions to a problem, while non-optimal solutions are almost infinite. What you generate through going through non-optimal "stupid" paths is novelty. Building up dumbness can eventually lead to new solutions (or problems) which you might never have found if you were always trying to follow the "best" options. In a world where everyone is racing to get to the top of a leaderboard, its nice to be able to be stupid and take your own time and go your own way.

Of course this doesn't mean that intelligence is always bad or stupidity is always good. Find a balance and use each when it is appropriate. Just drowning yourself in stupidity is perhaps worse than painting yourself into a corner by being intelligent. Sometimes you need to wander around and be dumb, other times you need to be smart and find your way out of your (perhaps self induced) problems. Do it enough times and you will live an interesting life.

I remember talking to an accountant about my plans for the future, he was surprised that I didn't have a 5 year plan. I explained to him that I don't plan because I think plans don't work, at least in the world where we currently live in. To plan something there has to be some predictability, you have to know the rules of the game to be able to consider your next few steps. The more unpredictable the changes to the game, the more planning gets thrown out the window and you just have to react without knowing what's going to happen next. Which is why I never bothered with a long term plan. If you live in a very predictable system, then great for you. You can anticipate and make plans for the future. But I haven't been able to find that kind of stability, and I'm not sure if I'm suited for it. I've just been doing things that people haven't done before, so nobody knows how it works exactly (or if it will even work out at all).

That talk with the accountant was 5 years ago and I pretty much just went with the flow, surviving multiple crises. It hasn't been easy, I'm reminded of Deng Xiaoping's metaphore of 摸着石头过河, to “cross the river by feeling the stones”. Like trying to cross a rushing river but only being able to feel the loose stones directly in front of you. To survive in a world where you can't anticipate what is going to happen next, I adopted a system of stashing instead of planning. You never know what will be useful in the future, so it helps to just do a wide variety things that might or might not be useful in the future. You don't know what will work, so having a wide net helps. Life is unpredictable. Playing tabletop RPGs and card games in my teens helped me gain the skills to run a business. Learning to draw comics somehow made me good at writing pitches and proposals. Being able to code has helped me on multiple occasions. Trying to learn how to paint led me to gain a large network of activists. Just making friends and talking to people led to opportunities and dead ends that I never saw coming.

Not sure why I'm writing this, just looking back at my choices in life and how I got to where I am.

I have been trained to write well. To carefully plan out thoughts, organise them, choose the right words to express them, edit, edit, edit, then get rejected and go through another round of editing. If you noticed the quality of this page, none of this stuff has any of that. I'm basically just writing stream of thought, with minimal editing. It feels liberating. It's probably why I can do this for fun after a day job that involves a lot of writing. Good writing is a delight to read. But honest writing is refreshing in its own way.

On the 22nd of November 2016 I watched "Death of a Salesman", I wasn't particularly impressed by it. I know this because I wrote it down in a sketchbook/journal. But otherwise I have absolutely no recollection of this event. On the other hand I know that it is a true event that happened because I'm not in the habit of lying to myself. It's a bit strange how we augment our memories with tools; photographs, writing, sketches, websites, social media, all these little things build up into a different self that exists outside us and keeps track of things that we would rather forget. Lately I have been having trouble with memory, but I always get like this when I am overwhelmed with too much to do. Perhaps these tools, while useful to an extent, become a means for pushing ourselves too much. I'm able to talk to people that are not in the room, but that means that they can also bother me about work in the middle of the night. That leads me to depend on more tools and I get swept away in a self reinforcing loop.

What was the point of this little tirade? Honestly I can't remember

Had a couple of hours free before a meeting, so I went for a short walk around the city to do some street photography. The photos weren't all that good. But it was fun to just do photography and not think too hard about the results. Just snapping and moving on, not even checking the LCD until I got back. Street photography is a very self indulgent middle class hobby. But it is a hobby because it is enjoyable to do.

It'll take a while to build the photography gallery. I want to try something new with the CSS so I have to properly gather the code instead of keeping with my current minimalist approach.

I recently visited a friend's art exhibition and he recommended this essay to me by Ursula le Guin. In it le Guin makes a comparison between the narrative of the hunter versus the narrative of a forager. I can't help but make paralels with carrier bags and websites. How we collect things shiny things like buttons, gifs and links and use it to decorate our spaces. The website is a container, much like the the bag or sling of a forager. Like planting gardens, it's a leisurely activity of searching, finding and collecting. Not something as thrilling as the conflict of hunters, who take risks and become the dominant narratives in many cultures.

I wonder if the internet started in a forager phase, where people explored and collected, and transitioned into a hunter phase, where conflict is the main driver of interaction. Will the future of internet culture be one of self appointed heroes in epic struggles against each other (egged on by social media) or will there be spaces for foragers to build their own spaces on the sidelines of the battlefields?

I should be working more on the site and getting more art uploaded, but I've been distracted by surfing Neocities. It's a different experience, actively clicking links and moving around instead of everything being served on a feed. I find myself reading more long form content, appreciating the web design and just clicking around a site to see what happens. Part of me wonders if this is just novelty of finding something new (or the fleeting nostalgia of finding something old), but I guess I'll enjoy it while I can and see how things turn out.