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book 1

fitful spring rain dashing against the window-pane
sun torrents dazzling over knolls and inlands

the forest unfurled up to the sedgy bank
a prospect of a world toured asunder,
a jungle made in casseroles of land,
below ran the river, murmuring through the glen,
ledges from the craggy sides of the valley jutted out;

Table of Contents

  1. READ ME.txt
  2. death
  3. story
  4. memory
  5. unraveling
  6. bodydoubling
  7. embodied
  8. forum
  9. dislodgment
  10. supplyline
  11. abstraction
  12. text

READ ME.txt

Hello everyone. Today. I will think about the way that I am, and I will do it here through this. So don't expect a polished rendering of detail, whether through efficient dispassioned reportage, Frederick Forsyth–esque non-fiction, Faulknerian, Crichtonian, McCarthyian, and Alcottian propulsive pacing, Harrison Salisbury–esque deep history, Batesian travelogue, Michenerian and Irving Stone–esque sensory descriptions, AM (Allied Mastercomputer, novel character) pure emotional breakdown (but used choosily in careful amounts), or some narrative arc (i.e., start-middle-end). But I do journal, and this place will reveal that. For the meantime [within the scope of this entry], I am holding myself back from certain habits:

But my holding back will not be the case later. In general, expect to see a mosaic of stunning curtness (e.g., stark Felina finalities and 22 July openers), long, flowing, and complex sentence structures (e.g., sometimes, a 500-word Woolfian or Warrenian "puke" paragraph), surprising associative and thematic connections (i.e., anti-Chigurh non-sequiturs), and the use of parentheses and digressions (as demonstrated earlier and here). This passage is a considered performative anticipation of it—a deliberate setup.

death

Everyday, I have to hold myself back from the idea of death, because when you come face to face with the reality of it, you get too caught up with it and the everyday that is at once full of agony and blissful. My writing is an engagement with impermanence, because I don't believe text is eternal, only that it is eternal insomuch as my life is "everything" to me as I experience and perceive it. Beyond that, or even within my own life in my daring attempts to communicate, the reality is very much that of a lonely harrowing death where love is fake and hope is futile and the idea of maintenance is a slow reclamation by nature where human life shuttles beteen dust and dust.

I am not saying that love and hope are Stirnerite spooks to the point that I am always moody-and-dark-Nate (from NF's Therapy Session lyrics), since I feel them enough to found core beliefs on them. It is just that death is tied to the capacity to take action and, in an associative sense, love as a non-conditional action-involving-but-not-action-and-result-requiring force. The harrowing death where love is fake and yadda yadda? That is more so a reflection on an illusion of immortality that, I feel, impoverishes love and kindness when they are expressed behaviorally. If the promise of truth, effectiveness, and objective, universal, truistic meaning is required to express altruism from a feeling of compassion and a drive for kindness, then I am truly not a sympathizer of non-agentic transactionalism. I instead privilege altruism-in-a-Husserlian-horizon-of-spooks, where for example, nationalism, against which love and hope have been etched, is composed only of Andersonian imagined communities and not the essential justificatory role it is accorded in good-will manifestations.

Ultimately, writing allows me to deal in death-as-a-beholder-of-life-love-and-hope, even as this death rages against these "virtues." This "rage" itself is what, I believe, allows acts of kindness to issue out of a serendipitous self-accountable (i.e., agentic) authenticity, instead of a thing of a thing.

To put it simply, if it doesn't make sense, that's a good thing, even as we try to make it make sense. I want to be kind, and I want to do the right thing. So I try to do it through what I know how. I fail, and I make mistakes. But sometimes, things just go easily or present to you in a way that feels morally straightforward. And that can be fun and great. But in the end, it's never supposed to make ultimate sense. We have to wrestle with the ambiguity, the feeling that we'll never be "enough," and the feeling that we cannot secure or guarantee anything and have to bear the unintended consequences of our actions. We do what we can, and if we fail the whole way, we try again, until we can't try anymore. Even after all that, it's not about the active doing so as to do, but the "being" part. That is the least and the most we can do.

story

I remember waking up one night, going outside, and thinking about all of it for 1 to 3 hours. I thought about the sky and the stars. I thought about the way that the world worked. It wasn't a train of thoughts in words or writing. It was one of evocation and intense emotion, like the way your mind races or clumps during some bout of nostalgia. I just stood there and strolled around a few paces. And nothing came out of it save for the memory of having done that.

July 13, 2025

memory

I deal with the weight of death everyday because of how richly I have lived my life even up to the ongoing present. You know that? All of my memories. I am writing it all down for a reason. That is why my writing incorporates references all the time. That is why I write media reviews. That is why I write down my experiences. That is why I read, study, and take active notes a lot as a way to get better at writing. That is why I have a personal website where I put together my writings, media I enjoyed, pictures of myself throughout my life, and such. That is why.

It helps me move on, and I can tell in my soul what I have written down, what I have yet to write down, and what I could expand on more. Even after 2 years of writing, I know well my own body of work. It helps me get it all out of my head, so I never have to feel like I experienced something and it disappeared forever, as if it never existed. I don't want to live among forgeters and forgetees. I want to be the whole person, throughout the entirety of my life, and that is why I have made all this and continue to put it all down.

July 14, 2025

unraveling

There was a time that the awe, wonder, and curiosity was in full force. In my eyes, tours de force were all around me, and I could barely match up. But I was never so overwhelmed so as to be discouraged, because I was much supported emotionally and cognitively by the people around me. Elementary school-work was the best that I could muster at the time, and even that had moments of pressure and difficulty. So I was very much far away from the person that I am presently, the person who now intends to tackle an "everything," a sum of reality that at the very least feels coherent, understandable, expectable, understandable, explainable, and intuitive enough that it doesn't sound like it came from the ether, while being still contextually, precisely, and case-by-case grounded, as personally and emotionally as is expectedly part of the process of refinement, recall, reflection, addressal, anticipation, mind-wandering, self-awareness, integration, and synthesis.

In the past, the idea of a Roblox digital library composed of 500,000 player-created books that I could navigate without lag was impossible, and if it existed then, I would be so charmed and attracted by it that I and my siblings and friends would probably find ourselves scouring its shelves and pages frequently, even if only for a time. But it did not exist back then and only exists today. Back then, I still had lots of interactions with the evocative iceberg tip, in places such as MonkeyQuest, Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, and many other MMOs and online games. It felt endless, like the edge of an infinite forest. I knew then that experiencing the tip was just the beginning, but I did not know how much it would take out of me once I started undergoing the complexities and complications of a vast and rich life, with its troubles and joys. And now, I already have in my list of things that I've done 3.4 million words, but even with that, all that I have repeatedly realized is that even if I could access the endless library and have no more lag, a fast computer (not a family "times up!" one, but a personal one that only I use all day everyday), fast internet, time, space, and resources, even beginning to make sense of all of it would overwhelm me. And it did. For years, it has, and even today, I have moments where I just need to release the stress as part of a regular rhythm, like through music, writing, and such. Writing is my primary mode of processing all of it.

And now, I'm basically just at the edge of the forest and slowly claiming the virgin infinity stand by stand. I've already "crafted" my lean-to and the lumber hut or cottage and am slowly integrating the forest around me into this little spot at the fringes of a civilization, given that I am engaging not in direct curations, but am dealing with raw materials themselves when I dissect and deconstruct (even with curated media because this "reverses" them into raw materials, similar to dealing with a mature patch of herbage that may at first appear incorrigibly united with the rest of the forest so as to loom like a gigantic breathing creature whose fragrant breezes perfume up to the distant mountains and placing them in an inventory with its accompanying record and engaging with it like one would do in a gamified context like in Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or FarmVille), integrate, cross-fertilize, and synthesize, and, by extension, create new constructions (integrative-synthetic re-construction, in the form of new buildings, roads, and other real-time strategy [RTS] structures, components, and infrastructure as part of the development of a settlement into a town, possibly a boomtown in the case of the analogical equivalent of oil, gold, or proximity to a major metro, large infrastructure, or a charming climate, essentially a newfound resource like a pile of insightful books [oil or gold], or a strong, capacious sponge that moves information around like one's developed body of work that serves now as an integrative-synthetic system [major metro, charming climate, infrastructure]). I'm not only inspecting. I'm cutting down trees. I'm bringing logs back to the cottage. I am starting to visualize the assemblage of a mill, perhaps from pre-hewn parts brought here from the city. Either way, the point was the establishment of this local base, where things would eventually occur, even if step by step, with each cut, each inspect, each jot of a phrase that attempts a summary of a day or the details of a specific species, and with each moment of rest as I contemplate the day ahead of me and the sequence of events eventuating in something culminative, a systemic plan of managing this forest, even if it means starting only with the patches immediately surrounding me and this glade on which I have built my cottage. Intimately connected to all this is the intent merely to make sense of it all, to go beyond that elementary and childish state of dealing with curated school-work and to find a way to manage newfound abundance—moving from the school-room and its curations to the loose but infinite forest and the input-output feedback-loop arrangements that I bring to the scratched table. But it starts with a simple to-do list, even if I know that part of effective "systemic disassembly" is often starting with a piecemeal approach and making oneself intimate with the process, the scope, and the "feel" of the forest and its variations before diving in headfirst.

So while my younger self did not know that the curiosity that lay beyond the "evocative edge of the forest" would be overwhelming for an extended period at first, especially without the systems that did the emotional, intellectual, and cognitive work for me (through curation and handling all the hard, complex, and complicated aspects that accompanied such ease [when viewed in isolation]), if I desired to go beyond that edge and to tackle the infinity (analogically, the 500,000 books), it would generally have to be patch by patch and piecemeal to manage sustainably given the natural variability and limitations of creativity, cognition, and the human body, so as eventually to produce a train of scaffolding and schemas that would streamline the daily work and prevent redundancy by trimming initial "elaborate" reflections on a subject to its more "concise," intuitive later drafts (through encapsulation, such as with "Stirnerite" and "ringing" phrases like "autobiography-journal," notably even as one continues to make bold attempts at opening up new lands, a simultaneous act where substance is not superficial but an ongoing dialectical process of feedback-loops, excursion, and refinement, even if it means taking the brunt of "initial drafts" or, from a forward perspective instead of an iterative one, owning the elaboration required to relate an otherwise underexplored subject or new angle of precision in one's corpus), creating a colonial apparatus that allows for excursion that considers one's arriving very early in the dry season and whether roads are sufficiently advanced to invite one into the western parts of the kingdom and, if not, leads to embarkation on board a coasting vessel, and in three days arrival elsewhere.

Instead of going to a field trip where the teachers and students pass through a museum, I am creating my own museum synthesized from the reflections that I "spout," which themselves source from the active interpretations and crystallized knowledge swirling in my cognitive soup. This means that others can pass by and admire the museum pieces that I construct, so as perhaps to find themselves inspired and elicited by them to act with reinforced purpose and decisiveness, greater creative and intellectual force, and with a kind of daring, provocative effrontery that contributes to a more nuanced world that subsists on the active minds of thinking, breathing people rather than on pre-digested frameworks, traditions, and legacies alone.

To summarize, I did not know that it would be this overwhelming to go beyond the edge into the recesses of the endless forest, but now that I'm taking on all of it independently through writing as a primary processor, the 500,000 books goes from an "evocative idea" implanted into the mind of a curious but ultimately substitutively supported child into something tangible, even if a colossal concrete trial that requires a lumbering down the lush, matted path, along the overgrowth herbage, over the sodden patches, and across the sun flecks.

This means going from a story that has the antagonists being narrated at the end of a tense scene with the imagined "happily ever after" of "it was a chance for new beginnings" to a chugging engine of life spent creating those new beginnings by concretizing and actualizing this "it was a chance for new beginnings"—beyond the fetishized (and, for adults, in retrospect, "nostalgic") "broad strokes" on which childhood often relies—in fine measured detail, carefully crafted descriptions, and deliberately erected structures that subserve the overall marathon for a kind of urban development and sprawl that seeks to tame an otherwise terrifying endlessness into something much more tangible than just aflame evocation. It is turning the curious yet agonizingly imagination-inviting tip of the forest to a path through one that is given much to being illustrated, processed, measured, systematized, worded, zoned, articulated, and circumscribed with drawn lines. Instead of reading several books (or engaging in whatever games or media) from the 500,000 books, calling it a day, and forgetting them like a balanced child might back in the early 2010s, I am instead sieging the forest itself rather than being staying in a constant state of thirst at the foot of it. I am daring to stare in hopes of overcoming the overwhelm and treading against the overgrowth. But this goes beyond what might just be colonization or deforestation used as an analogy. This is about the "show don't tell" moment, its most visceral textures, and being so there. That is what the curated life tends to miss because it presents to us a sequence (whether linear or non-linear) of images so as to produce a theme or idea or even an "anti-idea," when our moments of presence present to us the measurable 500,000 books that goes not from 500,000 books to 500,000 books even after one reads several books, but goes from 500,000 books to 499,998 books. This is the dent in the god of evocation. The iceberg tip is divested of its omnipotence, "the abstract 'endlessness' of its power, [turned from] an overwhelming concept into a series of manageable tasks." This allows us to go beyond stupid-faced starers and to read the right-in-front-of-us in-the-moment countable words rather than to engage in the fetishized evocation-idea of 500,000 books (i.e., "fetishizing the potential without ever acting on it... the 'happily ever after' summary without the hard work of building the new beginning").

The purpose is to move beyond passive admiration and nostalgia into a state of active, creative, and "visceral" presence in the world—to not just see the forest, but to build a life within it.

a profound personal project: to develop a method for living an active, creative, and meaningful life in an age of information overload.

creating a personal and coherent sense of meaning in an infinitely complex world

July 19, 2025

bodydoubling

I recall one of my earlier distinct experiences with body doubling was back in May 2021 where I and this woman around the same age would just be in a Discord audio call doing nothing. We could in a sense hear each other, because my microphone was on and hers was on as well. I could hear her keyboard tapping and possibly her muffled non-lexical vocalizations, and she could probably hear something similar. We did this for days from what I remember, but one day, I left. If it was only for several days, then it was significant enough to occupy a distinct space in my memories despite its short duration given how novel that situation and dynamic was. For context, I grew up spending time interacting with others face to face in person several times a week with real-life communities, events (e.g., camps, music fests, conferences, seminars, literary fests, sports fests, concerts), venues, and places throughout my region with at least a thousand people in my semi-regular circulation, and late 2020 was when I first started using Discord. It was not with baby steps, but with an explosion that transitioned into a part of my lifestyle given that I was initiated into it by my cousin and then guided through a server he was in. However, I have stopped using Discord since 2022, only checking every several months for a brief conversation or interaction.

The two of us never addressed it out loud, and when I left, I did so wordlessly and without warning. It was a magical experience. I don't recall why I left. I just knew that it was time to leave, even if I did have positive, albeit surface-level interactions with the members of that server to start, where I was even prompted to share a picture of myself with long hair because several of them initiated by sharing photos of themselves, including the woman with whom I had that body doubling. The server's members were mostly women, and they were active enough to include me, a new person, in their shared voice call channel, adjoined by a text channel in which we shared the pictures and some text messages (the voice-and-text two-channel format, which is customary for Discord).

I recall that at first, the body-double woman was distant (but not necessarily socially, just the least vocally expressive, even if expressive in their quietness and in their moments of engagement, as with the selfie photo that she joined along with) and felt like the quiet middle-child among the trio (the three women who engaged with me, with the "youngest" and the "oldest", quite directly behaving according to their ages relative to each other, though perhaps I am mistaken about their actual ages since I may have conflated their vibe with their age, even if basing this perception on the selfie photos). However, even if she was the most distant initially, she was the one that I ended up having that body doubling with. This probably means that we were closest in wavelength, even if only for a time.

Her name is Cali.

It happened randomly. Probably after the other members left, we two stayed, and it just so happened that we went past the normal duration of two non-friends staying in a call, and then it just kept going and going and going, like I was reading a children's story that did not stop when you expected it to (which is how horror or suspense stories get their kick). Then all of a sudden, boom, this strange provisional place that somehow solidity in silence and an almost "complicit" participation in some "social experiment," some novel way of engaging with another person, this thing that felt secret and wrong and morbid, like two people having an affair, yet it wasn't wrong. It was private, safe, intimate. It was the kind of secrets you kept with someone that you could trust. It felt like a place, not a social place, but a place where things happen, where things go wrong, where things go right, where things don't have a predicted order or a regimen. It felt like a balance had been hit, like the sun aligned just right for a moment to make that shape and then scuttled away once it was done, as if it never happened, that "wrong" unspoken thing. The way I'm telling this experience, I make it sound like two people slipped away from a party and went upstairs secretly. But that's what it felt like, in the most non-sexual and non-romantic way possible. It felt wrong, yet so needed.

And I'm finally writing about it here in this passage after more than 4 years. It was the kind of clandestine co-habitation (or "being-together").

embodied

One may think that on the basis of my abstract reflections that my experience of life has lain only on a disembodied way of life and, potentially, upbringing as well. But strangely enough, I spent a third, if not half, of my waking hours outside, traveling, and engaging in physical movement and exercise and not the kind that takes place in a schematic, sterile gym, but one embodied in the uneven and rough terrain of organic urban environments, more rural areas where the paved roads are not completely flat and do not form a grid of residential and commercial districts (though it never truly does, with London as a notable example where taxi drivers must master a hyper-complex system of roads that unfolded organically as much as it is descriptively systematized to form a study, so as to culminate in the Knowledge, which takes three to four years to complete) with unpaved roads here and there of dirt and those of gravel, and actual mountain trekking. One could even say that the level of abstraction is proportionate to the level of embodiment through which I grew up, as the traumatic severance of social circles and their accompanying face-to-face communal and physical third places and the following rippling effects of lockdown isolation and the new solitary forms of sublimation (e.g., writing, drawing, singing with accompanying guitar to make music on the spot as self-regulatory behavior instead of "praise and worship" communal currency) traumatically integrated as a result to ameliorate a fractured "de-socialized" psyche where even family connections and the unit as a whole proved intermittently dysfunctional and "compartmental," insufficient as a consistent safety net post-severance. Besides an "embodied" outgoing upbringing trauma and mental instability, I have had intermittent experiences with sickness, sensitive skin, itches, rashes, and hemophilia (i.e., various bleeding injuries, such as that one incident where I got hit on the head with a metal swing). While it is easy to assume that any human, regardless of their writings, lives in a world not only as Merleau-Pontian perceptual consciousness, but as corporeal self-regulators (as in physiology), there are occasions where one could distinguish between different embodiments (not different levels, but kinds altogether in a "Bourdieu cultural capital" context), such as that between someone who stays in a resort all day and Appalachian "mountain people" (see Charles Egbert Craddock). Ultimately, I am now here, having culminated from an in-person currency to an asynchronous where words have moved from supplement and directive to primary processor, as evinced by word pictures, deconstruction, emotional granularity, qualification, self-correction, and feedback loops. The overwhelm of massive embodied reality throughout my entire life as my mind crumbled under it (after social communal regulatory mechanisms were robbed and solitary ones needed to be formed à la deconstruction) needed to be broken down, first by abstract, then by grounded detail and word pictures, and then back to abstract again, making no hierarchy between them but contracting their powers into one. To put it simply, it's easy to talk about a car when you have decoupled it from all the cars that you've seen and all the "non-essential" "keloid" personal "embodied" associations that have proliferated to fuse to it (assuming a practical and pragmatic "essentialism"). Even a dog can trigger sweating and trembling hands for a reason. This is idiosyncrasy that must be excised (as with a tumor; Hank Green's pissing out cancer) or healthily integrated (e.g., "coming to terms with" permanent blindness in one eye)—or subsumed at least, as with few bullet fragments remnants that are allowed to remain on the brain due to proximity to the stem—or "scaffolded" (i.e., metal plates and screws in event of bone fracture) around to form a coherent and whole psyche, even if only workable for the time.

forum

I wonder what would be the optimal way to have a full force before going into a forum, when entering a niche but "open-topic" forum, when participating and active, and when egressing or taking a hiatus. In my head, a very full-fledged personal website(s), a gigantic corpus of writings, and such. This way, it's much easier to connect everything that I do say to everything that is already out there of me, since the medium is primarily text. Then, when going in, all one has to do is ensure that one is not just throwing stuff out there randomly but proleptically "designing" so that it is clear what one has to offer and what one will continue to do (not necessarily to redundancy and mere translation, but like a visible spark that one can make contact with to produce sharpened iron or a new chemical reaction; self-facilitating this process).

I believe that these three are key:

As for why it is not "engineering," this is not a prescriptive normative system. This is very much descriptive. And the goal is not arrogance, but facilitation of the "purity" of constructive discussion.

When one is only an ego, they post their ego everywhere. When one is a "disentangled" person, they can focus on the discussion as-is, the "purity."

This is not about objectivity either. This is very much antipositivist, interpretivist. This is why I mentioned "descriptive" to contrast with "normative" and "prescriptive." So treat it as a personal lived functional thing than anything disembodied. The "as-is" of discussion is about antifragile (not reliant on a single-fragile ego that uses "immature" or "neurotic" defence mechanisms) constructiveness, not "depersonalization."

You are essentially a country, not an impressionistic stranger on the street. But sometimes, you want to be ephemeral, to live between the cracks, to "die in the world," to make it so hard to find you and to collect all these little memories of you because you are an exploded star of endless far-reaching dust. In that sense are you a dot.

You are a dot when you want to seed a thousand worlds.

In a sense, the "country" essentially create models of all the people that you meet, and then pattern-matches as well as updates to account for all kinds of variations even as improvises certain non-essential aspects. A dot doesn't care. It doesn't exist, so whatever it says, as idiosyncratic and personal as it is, is elusive, so even if it does have its models, it isn't decipherable up to the root. We can only see a dot among dots, a flying seed in an expansive jungle that opens up into the splintered sky.

July 21, 2025

dislodgment

I think it wise to consider the dislodgment of pure logic (as in game theory) that occurs when one has lived too far into a particular embodiment so fused to the experiences through which it has thoroughly undergone. This is why it is critical to recognize one's strengths, given that the nuance that one's "embodied" experiences deliver may cause hesitation and bureaucracy to an otherwise decisive, optimal, and concise strategical logic.

While one may intuit that the greater "embodied" experiences, the better for more precise and nuanced decision-making. In many cases, that is a privilege of logicians rather than a practical working theory, one that can be integrated into a functional order and paradigm shared among decision-makers and those actualizers of the grammar (the "enforcers"). Ironically, there are cases when the person who spent too much time living throughout the country through hiking, walking, and traveling all around in person, in the streets, in everyday vehicles, and amongst prosaic fellows may find himself unable to act in a clear and pure sense when presented with troubles that concern a noiseless matter of logic, such as in government (or in olden times, being a king).

He cannot separate the "embodiment" from the logic and thus finds even the conceptualization of a horse overwhelming, biasing it too much against specific experiences, people, and details whereof he is all too ingrained. He is the veteran doctor.

"Embodied" intution becomes disintegrable from logic and becomes unconditional paradigm.

This is not to say that one must reject embodied experience, but that "embodied experience" is not a pure ideal so as to force one to have it as much as possible, so as to become biased against certain outcomes due to an excess of noisy fixation on certain things on which one has placed too much emphasis. To perceive this argument as a rejection of embodied experience is a tedious misunderstanding, as it implies that "embodied experience" is a pure concept, not a spectrum and bundle of specificities and details that belongs variably to each person. A synthesis of everything and every person's embodied experiences into one single person is a logician's ideal, but in the real world, you can only work with the hand you've been dealt, and if that hand is plagued by memories of fused experiences, overwhelmingly vivid detail, unaddressed insecurities, and trauma unrelated to the matter at hand that requires a space where only the matter and its relevant considerations exist rather than a "dissociated" detail about your memories of that one dog whose name is Peter who liked ice cream but couldn't eat and got sick and he had a bad day on July 14 but it wasn't that bad because he did get a few more biscuits, or the dog food, than usual.

To reinforce this point, let me take this from a therapeutic perspective. For those who have lived an overwhelmingly vast, rich, and diverse life and gone through trauma, we often start with disentangling everything from (in a self-regulatingly gradual, and sometimes brutal, severance) basic concepts such as "car" and "horse" so that we can use "car" without the associations and then slowly filter and break down one's "entirety" from there. This way, we don't see a monster when we look at a dog and see only a dog and can recall positive associations while maintaining the basic concept as a separate thing from the associations. This allows us the peace to think in iterative logic and emotional granularity.

It is thus a very personal, and interpersonal, experience of logic, prioritizing the now as it greets us and working from there, even if we never arrive at an ideal synthesis or true fulfillment of the "Gestalt entirety." We are pattern-finders as much as we are pattern-decouplers.

...to break apart fused concepts, to isolate variables, and to separate a core idea from its noisy personal associations... "noiseless logic."

(The 2019 film The King inspired me to write this, and I have yet to finish watching it, being currently in pause just to jot this passage down. My Netflix screen's paused on the foot massaging scene a little before the middle of the movie's length, lol.)

Added later: This, said by the deuteragonist Falstaff from The King, captures the now and the personal history with which we must contend so as to release the now:

"I cannot say what forces have conspired to bring you here, but these men need you, just as you need them. These men deserve your confidence. And if you cannot give them that, at least tell them a magnificent lie."

July 22, 2025

supplyline

I need a way to integrate my Youtube channel with my writings, blogging, and such. I've tried creating several different text-and-images personal websites, and while they have been successful each in their own right and have much content already for themselves, they don't really tie in well or feel like they can really be integrated with the channel.

Theoretically, all you have to do is start making it so that each video somehow connects to something that you say in a piece of writing; so if you make a video essay about a certain anime, then you can write an article about a related anime or a specific aspect of that anime that you were not able to explore in the video. But it is not that simple. I'm not a production line that thinks about a specific anime and then makes a video about it. That is not what I mean by integration.

Still, my Youtube channel has so many videos and has been made in such a way that it is very much a personality channel rather than a specific content channel; so I did not dig myself into a hole. It is just that as of writing, I have not made videos beyond several in the last 331 days. For context, I lost access to my account 331 days ago, and I got it back around 6 months ago. But in those 5 months that I did not have, I changed trajectory so much, particularly in my writing (not that writing itself repels video creation); so the last 6 months that I now have it have not really yielded much development in the channel. It has been centered around writing and the personal websites containing images and text. But don't get me wrong; they have been successful. I have grown much in these 11 months—that's for sure. It is just that now that I have reached these meaningful heights, I think that it is time to consider re-integrating the channel, synchronizing it, bringing it back to speed, and making sure that its development is not set aside or subordinated. This time, we can expect a phenomenal upgrade.

Even so, as I suggested earlier, the idea of integration is not that simple. As said earlier, making video essays may feel like a natural next step to writing; but the reality is that I don't really like having to spend too much time editing videos because of how slow they are and how little I actually capture and express in video compared to writing. The stock images barely inspire me, and I do not feel rewarded or fulfilled at all. It feels less like learning and more like dumbing down; in things like writing in "show don't tell," however, omission offers the opposite—the learning without the "dumbing." And yet, both approaches offer accessibility. To put it simply, the behind-the-scenes question of whether the creator is truly being rewarded is crucial.

Because an integration underpinned by a rewarding "non–dumbed-down" learning experience is critical, making videos will have to house their own operations and produce their own fresh goods; and I have already done that actually. I make songs through my channel; and I even have gameplay videos, and video essays, and many other kinds of videos. While this strongly indicates that the main thing is music, given the developments made during the 11 months, I am considering changing how I do things. But there is no simple prompt that does not prerequire a personal website or external ecosystem of sorts that can truly ground the videos in something tangible, not just for the audience, but chiefly for myself, because videos themselves can be cumbersome things. This audiovisual medium doesn't lend itself easily to modification or arrangement given how heavy they are—how long they take to create, edit, and render. Conversely, text is free-form and weightless—the Cossacks overlooking a winter-hit Napoleonic marching army. Or Henry V's longbowmen staring down the armored French cavalry in the muddy bog near Agincourt—you get the point.

To bring it all together: if I wanted to make videos, I would need something that "justifies"—not philosophically or motivationally, but logistically—the demanding assault. You can't move tanks if you can't even manage a basic supply line.

August 6, 2025

Previously Kept Unpublished

abstraction

I could list down all the specific things right now, but disparate information does not appeal to me. I don't see the point of mentioning the specific title of the specific video I'm watching, the specific medical text on my table and its specific size and cover design and its specific info, the specific cup of water and its specific size and color, the specific banana peels, the specific media I consume every day, and all that. But what would be the point? I journal because I intend to make sense of things. I would love to list down all of these, but as with my memories during the writing of my autobiography, my life is already so very textured and full of details and specificities. The problem is that it's so rich, dense, textured, lived-in, ephemeral, vivid, and all to the point that I'm just sitting here wondering what the point of all of this excess is? If it only overwhelms me, what the hell am I doing here? This passage has a point, because I need a point. I am not going to lie down and feel the endlessly specific, numerous, and specific textures of that street that the bus I'm riding on passes through on my way to the mountain I'm going to hike with these specific people, their histories and backgrounds, their temperaments and personalities, their way of speech and vocabulary, my relationship with them, and all those little tiny gesture and decision and what they mean immediately in themselves. That would be great, but at the same time, I would barely be able to do so without crumbling. I journal because I want to diarize every single little fucking tiny little hyperspecific detail, but first, let's coalesce things together. The fact that I haven't written a 200-word review for each of the one hundred listed specifically titled manga that I've consumed goes to show that I've barely even touched the surface of hyper-specificity. To truly enjoy hyper-specificity, the least that I can do is take the time to process and make sense of it. I cannot sit down here and generate the most coherent hyper-specific non-fiction diaristic narrative of all time just based on everything around me with all the context, background, and history of each person or thing. My mind can barely contain or even begin to recall all of it. This entire paragraph has a point and it does away with numberless specifities even while being precise to focus on actionability, workability, and sustainability. It'd be great if it was that simple to keep a hyper-specific diary such as that, but I've lived a hyper-specific diary all my life. What matters to me is not the specific measurements of that specific brand of glasses and its distinct history as an individual object for as long as I recall having known it, but the why of a couch, the why of journaling, the benefits of a healthy diet, the why of reading books. Not this specific entry, not this specific couch, not this specific book, not this specific healthy diet. I will get to these specificities as I go along and expand and build upon their initialized most general forms and become even more specific over time. However, I would hate to read my journal and only find somebody yapping about random shit without at the very least taking the time to step back into objectivity and rigor and into a place of coherent, synthesis, and doability. I cannot live in that tiny world, no matter how much I want to when I'm listening to relaxing, ambient music that gets me nostalgic. I have to exercise as much as possible the ability to generalize so that specifying doesn't sound like a specific brand of truck exploding on this specific highway with this specific history. I make models. I make actionable steps. I rely on the general idea of a thing to communicate more effectively instead of assuming that this general word means this highly specific thing due to a mistake of "anecdotalism" and a lack of basic communicability. I study and read academic texts, so that may have played a critical role in how I process the world. But again, there's the fact that the autobiography and journal started only because the richness, density, and specificities that I recalled too distinctly and individually (bottom-up) were getting too overwhelming. In sum, to manage one's ongoing experience in a world that is already by itself in itself made up of hyper-specifics, one must trace dots and color by number. It's why I often say the word "I am a person". It starts with that first and foremost. Everything else comes with the life that speaks for itself so fervently without aid so as to require aid and utilization.

I recognize that means losing the magic and even at times feeling a sense of repetition. It is unavoidable. But at the same time, at the very least, I get to experience the world without losing myself in the process. I grew up and was so immersed and experienced such ecstatic magic, but that also meant that I was passive to all of it and thus so much more fragile to changes because I did not really metabolize things, experiences, ideas, lessons, and models. Sermons are so full of such things. Anecdotes to explain broader concepts and virtues. Verses from the Bible are full of them. I grew up in that world as well. But at the very least, I am no longer sitting down and staring and watching the world go by simply. I am taking my time not only to put the blocks together, but to map real-life details onto blocks and blocks onto real-life details. I am crafting new blocks to capture precisely real-life details that need a better model, concept, or word for it. I am a master of blocks just as I am a master of experiencing life without defaulting simply to a senseless hyper-specificity. It is not that I cannot immerse myself and just take my time basking in the textures of daily life or a setting in a video game. I can, and during that slice-of-life moment, whether virtual or real, my memory gets tickled, and textures of the past are released like pheromones. But when I write it down that experience of sitting down in that digital bus moving along that endless road in that Roblox hangout game, I will make sense of it in a way that allows me to move on and take something with me from the experience rather than getting stuck in the infinite richness of a single moment in those three hours I spent in that server. This goes for any books I read as well. If I do write down about it and am not content with just having the cover image of the physical book stare back at me, then it will be to help turn it into closure for myself to absorb. I got really fucking frustrated when I lost thousands of rich, dense, and highly contextualizable family photos from when I was a child growing up, because the point of those hyper-specificities is that I get to process them one by one so that I can get closure. That was the point of the autobiography. So I don't hate the textures of life, but I need closure. Every single day. I can read a textured novel. In fact, I tend to write a textured novel over a goal-oriented one; though it is textured in terms of the protagonist and of psychological realism rather than textured in the highly descriptive setting sense. I am very much wary of hyper-specifics in my novels. This was also why I enjoyed web novels in the first place. Nevertheless, I love literary novels and non-fiction travelogues as well. I balance between such immense texture, density, richness, and depth and the need for clarity, actionability, and readability. Video games answer this need, which is why they can be very fun for multiplayer and bonding with siblings and friends. Same goes for those real-life team-building games and children's street games like patintero. Let's abruptly shift to the meta: Notice how I used the word "like" to introduce "patintero", registering it as an example of a broader "playable" (i.e., digestible) concept rather than by itself in a textured, lateral untitled collage of random things in a bookstore of everything and nothing and the distinct personality of what it does thematically contain even so so as to make it not truly random. When I go outside, such as to a cafe, I truly engage in the hyper-specifics as much as I can, just as much as I also ensure ("ensure" being a key practical, "effective", and utility word here) that everything that I do next has at the very least some foresight, preparedness, and ability. This is unavoidable since it's how the human brain works and makes decisions. We're not sponges of hyper-specifics. We're sponges of what we need to live like food, drink, and sleep. Anything else that comes after that is similarly a need, like social approval. The hyper-specifics are to us things that we experience, not that we are capable of containing them beyond that ongoing experience. Writing allows us to contain them, but that does not mean that our brains are wired to care about all of these things beyond what they suggest on the dictionary, anecdotal, and range-of-related-words-concepts-and-ideas level. To refine our definition of "losing the magic," it is not as simple as losing the ability to immerse, even if one might lose that specific strand of magic, or as simple as experiencing only repetition, since I still have the capacity for immersion and novelty, just that what I do after the fact, experience, or initial surprise allows me to process it beyond its hyper-specifics and to see it for what it means to me. "Losing myself" happens when the gap between what is experienced and what is processed gets so wide that I am in a sense "a husk of beatings," which is why children can be so vulnerable, sensitive, and also fragile despite their capacity for such uninitiated, untroubled, unqualified texture. They're in effect "traumatizing" themselves with all that texture. For an adult, all that texture is reserved for very intense moments, like deep creative experiences or trauma, but for a child, it's every moment of every day, with barely any abstraction (e.g., tracing dots, coloring by number). This is why it's so vivid, colorful, and so powerful in the memory. But that also means that they're not the best decision-makers. It's for the same reason that they are characteristically impressionable. To bring it all together, while it is fun to speak in hyper-specifics as a creative project, we are naturally drawn to seeing where the lines meet and where the corners are in every place we're talking with this childhood friend.

December 12, 2025

text

What I love about text is that it consumes everything. It's like a black hole that never becomes full. It just keeps eating endlessly. And there are trillions of fixed worlds within it. I have seen it in my OBTF (One Big Text File) and the way that such a profound sepulchre of thought gets completely consumed and eaten up, turned into a bunch of words contained within a single entry. It's beautiful and really shows how powerful cognitive offloading through textual externalizing is. But it is interesting and definitely evokes the power of the sublime, even while being a form of agentic "management."

That footnote contains a whole terrarium, a whole world in which one can live and breathe and cultivate farmland and build a home and travel and explore and create civilization again and again, a fixed world that sustains itself and continues to do so, but only if it is given observation. If not, it is a red stamp in time, using years that now feel so distant, that no longer carry the weight of its legacy, culture, and endless world.

A Youtube video may be something like that, but the "hard, dry coldness" of text makes this textual conversion sharper. To be accurate, it's less a conversion and more so just slamming an organic, slimy, exotic creature onto a photocopier, but let's say that even that carries none of the visual imagery, whether in color, black and white, or even image-to-ASCII. At that point, you have the subjective translation a describer gives to a picturesque scene. The words that speak "cold" to an endless myriad and "warm" to a sun that covers more than trillions of centimeters² on the Earth's surface. These are the words we are left with and which we must abide so that we find ourselves better present rather than stuck in words, mid-translation, or the sublime. Management brutalizes these echoes so it can make food on the table and breathe the succulent air of morning breakfast.

Even now, when I made 5 groups of my 50 tabs, give or take, I immediately noticed that the world I was just in that contains all of these different uncategorized tabs vanished as if they never existed. I felt like someone just robbed me of a personality, an identity. I was immediately left unsettled on that question, as if a piece of me was taken away. I wonder how many more things in my life you can take away until I am left staring without a self. Text, in a way, is meant to do that, not that you will lose your sense of self, but you make a contract with it that it will allow you to forget because you're not truly losing it. It's there, just not there to bug you all the time in your current head space. It is still a part of who you are, just externalized. So what's the difference between grouping the tabs and deleting it all together, it's the same as writing vs. not writing at all. Even if you might not visit those previous journal entries as often the same way you would just leave those grouped tabs as they are without getting too caught up with them since that is the point of grouping those tabs in the first place, the point is that in a way, you're both present and sure of this thing that you are that you cannot exactly describe until you actually open the grouped tabs and look at the previous journal entries. You know that you're more than this, yet you don't know exactly until you refresh your memory and access this external part of who you are (and your brain). But while closing browser tabs is totally fine—especially because they're still there in some very faint way in browser history—deleting journal entries isn't, because tabs barely contain who you are as much as those entries do.

Going back to text as this all-consuming black hole: an entire world of three months vanishes as instantly as a light switch turns off at night. The next day, maybe the next week, but one day, not so far in the future, while at one point, you lived in that entire world, now, you wonder what it was you were just saying.

"Who am I again?" says a voice.

It is the non-self that has lived through countless stories, deep dives, rabbit holes, worlds, journeys, adventures, experiences, dynamics, memories, people, faces, tangents, places, and realizations—a composition of all and nothing at the same time, reduced only to where it is and its presence which its current world distinguishes.

...ghosts haunting the archives of our own lives.

This is not the fault of text however. It immortalizes what we forget. It shows us how ephemeral this sense of "self" is and how blind it is except to the moment, where all appears integrated and full. Recording is the alternative to forgetting. Which is the better black hole?

December 26, 2025



Gift