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I’ve Never Read a BookHome — October 10, 2026

What’s the best way to determine whether I’ve read a book? I guess it’s personal. There are books that I feel totally fine with just binge-reading from start to end and don’t feel I’ve lost anything at all by just doing that. And there are books that feel they deserve to be strip-mined linguistically with me noting down all kinds of powerful phrases, which makes those books so much more than just a story with prose that just happened to be that way, unless it’s the former kind of book where the prose really isn’t anything at all which I used to believe was impossible till I diversified my reading and realized that there really was the kind of prose that “doesn’t do anything at all.” And there are books that don’t really feel like they’re prose or binge-y, but I take notes anyway because strip-mining very well encompasses ideas or interesting, striking, or insightful tidbits.

There are novels that have such a powerful overarching flow/momentum that vivifies a sprawling ensemble cast and world-building (think a plot-progressive bullet train ride where everything leads to development not as fleshing out or explanation but as actual plot work incurred upon the world like an encroaching threat that is the protagonist and his fellows—development through incursion, worldly reaction doubling as static world-building through A-to-B contrast, not defined by what is, but by what becomes or serves functionally like the world from the lens of an aggressively expanding empire since acted-upons show so much more in so much less, becoming as a concept here doubling [two birds in one stone] as exposition and progression, implying what was in what is actively becoming now in some kind of iceberg-theory backwards epilogue where everything that came before before in-text is strongly implied in what is happening now like now-flowing melted ice) that it deserves so much note just for that. And this is much harder to pin down with prose. Prose is a non-existent variable. Instead, we think in terms of breaking it down like an analyst so that both the small—big movements in relatively curt motions or in detail size or capacity—and the large—massive structural undercurrents (not visible in-text but visible across the farthest extent of momentum)—are coherent.

When I said that prose is a non-variable, I meant it can be cringy or even embarrassing, but because the overarching momentum is serious, it feels so much more genuine in that the world feels even more real because the consequentiality is unbothered amid all the messiness, clumsiness, and ickiness. I’ve seen too many novels with “serious” prose but cringy, embarrassing, or icky momentum or consequentiality, in the sense that it feels like an amataur trying to put toy blocks together. Web novels just so happen to be one of the best, if not the best, example of serious consequentiality amid that kind of prose and storytelling. They take the stupidest things so passionately yet it all gets elevated as a result.

It almost reminds me of Kung Fu Panda all over again. It never had to be serious to be serious.

Making DistinctionsHome — October 17, 2026

Volatility

As much as I sound like a marriage between stream of consciousness and something with big overarching structure, systematicness, and analyticalness (think distinguishing neologisms both descriptively in how they’ve been used across every instance and variation and in how they ought to be used such that two different calls of the same word-function are made separate so prescription can retain abstraction), the best of my coherence is predicated on the worst of it, or, more precisely, the other-way-round best of my capacity to release the abstraction I’ve painstakingly built across an in-and-out, back-and-forth, effectively-confounding meaning-making series taking place live in a blog.

I may have said “I’m only as much as I am,” and that echoes here. One moment (which can go on for three weeks straight), I’m not anything of the sort. The next, I’m full of it. Everything I am falls to biological recovery as much as the ideals that take flight in the form of mechanisms within my exoskeletal thinking. I am a writer. The words support me as they demonstrate the cognition that’s already been well on its way over the endless course of separating tit for tat self-dialogically. I am an angry worder: “angry” here can be translated to “forceful in going above and beyond to forget the above and beyond for the sake of re-establishing forcefulness itself,” not merely in the sense of growth, revision, or evolution, but in the bigger, more ambitious sense of recovery, forgetfulness, restart, and revisitation when identity should be at its most temptingly defining zenith.

I am barely a writer when I am; by that point, I’ve already written myself out of it, and the words go produce on their own. I don’t have any finite muscle control over the definitions themselves, only over the sense of having done something up to a point, reconstructing—like reforging—the particularity that makes something feel tangible and thus objectifiable to a productively systematic fault, so that stream of consciousness can not only come across as but function also as cognition the way one might use the term “cerebral” in forcing (think back to “forcefulness”) ideas into accountability, especially in reference to whenever they’ve been most invisible, if not altogether magical. The flow state of writing is simultaneously antecedent to, coincident with, and separate from writing itself as referable, recoverable, and reconsiderable. The writer isn’t a writer in the sense that words themselves are. I fashion words according to the sense of them, yet that sense happens on an axis distant from the cold winds one may understand themselves to experience during a free association in something like a guided communion with the words. The words write themselves before I even have the chance to be a writer, by which point who can say what/who has written what/whom? To say I’m merely externalizing might miss that the words themselves contain a password to who I dormantly am.

I exercise, but I don’t control the muscles’ recovery. I’ve just linked the sense I hold onto during exertion to desirable outcomes, even if I don’t consciously control all the functions of my body, since forms of exercise like walking are actions separate from something autonomic like your kidney’s blood cleaning.

As for why familiar ideas such as reconstruction and keeping the slate fresh are kept alongside abrupt expressions like “angry worder,” it’s to distinguish ideas from the realities that govern them. Ideas are more than just the sum or understanding of them and very much go in interplay with sense as something you can fall back on regardless of any full elaborable extent.

Expressive

I’ve gone on so many journeys, both fictional and real, that I forget where I started and I forget what real even is in the face of the flux of what makes something meaningful and by how much, across a virtual infinity of things that come seemingly out of nowhere. Words that drift outside of what they should mean populate the sea, or world, of stories, and there is not one moment I feel I’ve grasped it all, only that sense of forcefulness (think that uptick of testosterone after achievement with that feeling of fine power, control, and dominance) that feels alive and tangible in the now whenever one grasps it in one’s hand.

Isolatable World

A response of mine in a conversation:

I notice you’re staring at a philosophical gun and wanting it to fire and eliminate target goals with a sense of longform progression. Note that almost all these fiction passages end without consequence, as in as vignettes/snapshots.

A single extended image can very well take the form of a 1000-word narrative passage. It just doesn’t seem like an image the way a setting description would be, but it very well can make that distinction. In this case, narrative events within that image are equivalent to the pixels of an illustration.

It can be described as concept-building. Just done through narrative fiction with a stylistic/experimental narrator that thinks and qualifies and complicates what would otherwise be a series of events or thrillingly devised plot. It’s the same instinct as when they write their unusual essays, but just with different technique, that of fiction. Here, sensory description supplies new ways of interpreting concept cases or variations or flavors such as embodying, compression, or forcefulness, in both the mechanism of the prose and the content of the description as compactly worded and densely expressed to meet a particular effect that yields concept. Mud, for example, can be a conceptual analogical tool to rhetoricize ideas through somatic fiction (maybe speculative military fiction that focuses on boots, hurry-then-wait, and on-the-ground logistics with all the messiness and architectonics you’d expect in structuring “theater” sets where dialogue, slow movement, and coalitional action take place, leave, or return to). All of a sudden, you can see things that should have nothing to do with one another illustrate one another because they’re fashioned by a conceptually driven mind. This is discovery or reinforcement through explication, even if the details and mechanisms (of the prose expressing the events and descriptions and of the coalitional logistics within a war story) contradict the idea that ideas should come out of some pure logical essence.

Essentially, it is a distinctive thinking generator. Not knowledge, not arrangement, not formulation, but the fashioning that seems to arise out of nowhere yet out of everything in ways that feel so coherent once it’s been thoroughly exhausted of all its unrelatedness and formed into something essential and irreversible. The mind that births ideas, not the ideas themselves, but formation(-as-site)—activity—that agnostically transcends them. The distinctive thinking is the “idea,” yet isn’t an idea that you can dissect. It’s generativeness in distinctive thinking. It’s the factory for distinction during thought. Generativity. Distinctions discovered through tools that have nothing to do with thinking itself as an idea. This is what is meant by generativity. Thinking itself is made distinctive in the fashion of a generator.

This is not directed at philosophizing or perfuming ideas. It just has to create space. Anything that advances surface area reinforces the body of ideas.

If the world (our world itself, not a fictional one) feels uncanny, like it’s ever so slightly not worldly, then that might be a prime example of the kind of distinction that happens even after reading a webcomic as long as the mind continues to hunt and pin down distinctions during thought and not just as something for the eyes to notice but for the sense to undergo as the driver of thought. Nothing can be predicted to elicit or promisingly evoke any particular kind of response, but with tools for distinctive thinking generation, you may very well say you’ve gotten something out of what shouldn’t give you anything, even if you systematized it into existence as soon as you got a whiff of the sense of it, though almost entirely ignorantly except capably with the red pins that allow you to separate and isolate things to preserve distinctions and keep generativity live-streamed (which requires an established, robust vehicle of ideas and language that supports live transmission and translation because the livestream hinges on refined/taught/native fluency) rather than coughed out and wheezed away. These thought distinctions are separate from anything that has to do with the distinctions you see. Mud doesn’t reliably reproduce uncanniness, but tools can create the impression of this relationship because you will have very well gotten something.

The body of distinctions, or language itself as something like a dictionary with infinite unique slots, is the vehicle of distinctive thinking, of getting something out of what shouldn’t give you anything. This is not the same as vocabulary, but distinctions you yourself have established, challenged, complicated, experimented with, redefined, and reexpressed continuously until the history preserves them in your fundamental control of language as a stream of distinctive thinking and the “uncanny.”

This is not a fight for rigor or objectivity. This is a fight for distinction, which doesn’t have to end by itself, because the dictionary supplies subsets of what may first appear to be ends in themselves. Distinctions themselves can become umbrellas of subdistinctions, because distinction is in the end a unique dictionary slot, not a contained existence.

Self-Implication vs. Concept: Becoming ObjectHome — October 21, 2026

I’m thinking I’m moving from using my full name and face to concepts. It’ll help me get away from this subset of myself that is my full name and face and get closer to everything that actually constitutes me.

I’m referring to my personal website.

My separate blog already did this concept approach very well. It uses “the bastion” with a tower favicon, and it really goes all in in making it feel as this whole tied-together concept.

However, I feel that the main personal website has to remain ambitiously self-implicating, which it currently is given the conspicuity and irreducibility of a face and a full name. So maybe I shouldn’t. It’s just that concepts have the benefit that something like “a system” in the most Minecraft sandbox way possible have. They really inspire, generative, and create. They instill something in people’s heads. You turn otherwise crazily overly detailed things into neat packages for people to inhabit and consume and really feel fantastical about. It makes something that should be that crazy into something you can just immerse in and forget everything else. Turn a forest into a Minecraft forest with ambient music.

It’s so much easier to imagine the idea of a transitioning into a concept like “The System” so that the only thing you need to do is optimize toward concept-building as a purely abstract thing with any specifics just being cases that can be experimented with and optimized like a computer learns craft. When you become a concept, you are only as much as the concept is composed of. This creates a lot of room for interpretation to come directly out of everything it is composed of rather than on the whole of the full name and face which are just so much and carry so much baggage and history and memories and expectations and ideas and identities and all that.

But I must carry the baggage. I must exist. I must be. I must inherit myself and everything I am. I must achieve breakthroughs anyway. I must do so in respect to these things of who I already am. I must do in spite. I must live with the consequences of my actions and of my life and everything I’ve lived, seen, and known. I must take full ownership and accountability, responsibility and pride, weight and heaviness. I must bear myself and to feel myself exhaustively and thoroughly. That’s why I care so much about titling all my previous entries. Of course, it’d be great to relinquish myself and just forget everything and become almost robotic in the sense that I just look at the words and then form titles, but there’s something unmistakable about the footprint of immersing yourself in yourself rather than just appearing for the words and having them sort meaning out for you when you know that’s just impossible unless you bear yourself enough that you have to take breaks as a writer just to ensure that you’re writing honestly rather than merely out of the collection of words and reading out of the meaningfulness in your heart and enjoying life out of the intentionality that comes even with rest, recovery, and temporary escape.

I have so many books in this room. I’ve written so many entries in the last three years and almost four months. I’ve lived so richly, so much, so long. I’ve met so many people. I’ve gotten to know and see so many things. I’ve had countless experiences, and I can barely keep up with myself and everything that I am. I can barely capture myself. Yet it’s that inability that keeps me ever generative and ever so ambitious to put it all together. And I have made great efforts and made this life so much more easier to comprehend with all the organization, externalization, compression, and optimization I’ve done. All the formatting work I had to do. All the streamlining. All the cleaning-up. All the searching for everything. All the remembering. All the holding so many different things together with the help of my text editor and images and photos. All of it.

I don’t want to sleepwalk my way through all of it. I want to read all of these books. And while I have already spent so much effort to linguistically strip-mine them for sensory descriptions and phrases and striking ideas and articulations (which is to increase reading as a process by making it denser and that much more compressed rather than a breeze that flies by in a jiffy without you even having any traction or friction or any sign that your brain has inherited or been impressed upon in any shape, form, or even style or effect so as to be reliably externalizable except in the form of some distant impressionistic “huh”-toned recollection of some book about something), I am still here even now thinking of even more powerful, denser, compressed ways to make a book feel even more “read” even as I’ve binge-read 14 webcomics this month and feeling totally secure in that because of the nature of my current situation as being in rest and recovery after a year and four months of staying for eight hours at 127 unique cafes once every three days (188 cafe stays in total).

It’s why I’m trying my hardest to go through all my entries and give them titles because my writing system/format/workflow/thing has evolved so much over the last 3 years and I’ve done so much work just to tie in all together in the files and format. I’m working toward the frictionlessness of ideas even as I am in full acknowledgment of the process and journey of realizing those ideas.

I’ve taken so many notes. I’m systematizing everything (which is the nature of those retroactive titles since I can’t really see the full extent of my body of ideas if I have to go through the hell of reading through my millions of words) even while really putting my full brain to doing all I’ve personally written justice by being there as the long-existing person I’ve long been until now.

I’ve experimented so much and gathered so much data and experience and limit-tests and have in some cases have drastically accelerated my workflow and ideas on how best to capture something, especially with all the limitations that I’ve thoroughly investigated, interrogated, innovated (yes), broken down, explored, discovered, and expanded.

Readness QuestionHome — October 21, 2026

Physicality and attention bearing more meaningfulness for a book than the book itself. The brain’s conflation here clearly in effect.

Entries being containers of ideas rather than prose the way books are so that it’s easier to think of entries as just a list of titles that can be systematized into a full range of expressed ideas when that’s not the same with books where you’d do so much more than just assume it based on its content as just facts, details, and information (especially in the case of arguments when you’re reading something biographical since there’s nothing to dig up strictly ideational there since insight is in how something may be said or ideas as related to striking details rather than anything purely abstract so as to derive a full body of ideas from).

Naturally, this makes books even harder to pin down as in the experience of being “read.” And you’re left with having to deal with it being there on a stack of books beside your computer desk or recalling how intense you were with it during a writer’s three-day self-training camp. I will have glacially read and ensured a very clear syntactical and vocabular understanding of the book as in essential text-prose. There would be no mistaking the story as something impressionistic. So perhaps that more than enough counts as “read.” Then is it just intensity and difficulty? Is that really the only way to “read”? It feels like there must be something even more compressed and denser without necessarily making it more intense or difficult.

This extends to whether I can be trusted with the retroactive entry titling (and its following list-of-titles systematization) and any future projects like fiction stories where you’ll want more than just an icon, a title, and a subtitle and do some more formatting expertise—which will require the kind of embodied, internalized insight someone who has addressed the above “read” challenges will have.

What does it mean to…

• read?
• title?
• write a fiction book?

But aren’t words just the equivalent of a bunch of line art? Why get mad at a book for being words?

The Journey So Far and Future GoalsHome — October 21, 2026

I can clearly tell I’ll read web novels again and even play Minecraft like it’s something to advance and progress in once I’ve tackled the whole autobiography project, which has now expanded to encompass the website, the definition of what makes a book read, and the retroactive titles. I’ve already written so much and created the website and even compressed ideas so heavily through blogging which was mediated through the 1 year and 4 months of cafe stays which taught me so much about exposure, vulnerability, perception, portability, sensory details, worldliness, sensory and social tolerance and capacity, and polishing and finalizing. So now, it’s about cleaning up, optimizing, streamlining, and tackling an evolved version of the problem of meaningful “readness” as per what makes a titled entry so as to be systematizable, especially as concerns icons, book covers, concepts (concept-building like “the bastion” as per the “journal nook” blog), and all. This acknowledges the antagonism between data and representation as well as that between a WebP-AVIF, 10-KB-average thumbnail image gallery in the form of a cover for each authored book title and infinitely replicatory, redundant image files (and just files in general but most conspicuously with images) that amass into hundreds of gigabytes and threaten to overwhelm even terabytes of storage.

Destabilizing Completion: PrototypingHome — October 27, 2026

I genuinely wish this whole blog was like a story, but it isn’t. It’s not a whole immersive world like I may have implied it was many times. It is a website, but sort of in the way a lab is a labaratory rather than anything truly cohesive. It is a setting, a place, a stillness. A world feels like you could stay there forever sure, but a story is chronological the way its characters are. So there’s always a feeling of permanence in that the story could go on forever, but it’s not a place that you feel you can visit any time. It’s rather something like an endtime thing, the last save state but staggered across a timeline, whereas a blog isn’t exactly a staggered state as much as something more frozen and revisitable—a location where time-staggered footsteps overwrite one another such that it loses even any picture that it could have ever been historical because technology is implanted into it regardless. Ancient grounds lose ancientness by holding every story across history, up to futurism and potential and the now.

Naturally, because it’s not a story, it has all the advantages of a place where anything can just about happen, but that also means it lacks any true conclusiveness you would perceive of the events of a place rather than just the place (even as I do recognize that places change rapidly over decades).

There are no characters in a blog. This means you’re completely free, but that freedom that a story constrains into a narrative, plot, and progression system (in the case of a progression fantasy web novel that can’t go back but can stall by writing horizontally or diagonally and slowing the pace so that the fruits and effects of accomplishment are well felt and fully owned rather than lost as a formulaic goal-stricken workflow) is why you’re especially responsible for how you move forward, because no one’s waiting for you. People don’t exactly have their own stories. We live in a world, and we are people. We make meaning regardless of how things go, and the stories we do create don’t necessarily reflect our lives or even that of our mundane activities or how our moments unfold in the everyday. The arcs we frame ourselves under are so distant in their reflectiveness that it’s like scratching a tree’s bark and hoping the texture we’ve acquired would very well answer for everything else, when we very well know our consciousness can barely even rely on an external representation that simplifies and essentializes life to do the work that actual dynamics and systems play when we ourselves encounter them and unfold as a consequence, such that we lose sight of everything else and then regain full agency again and again—a string of events, structures, and our own inevitably irrational motivated decision-making. It’s a strange thing that we can find the thread at all given the nature of things as order so sophisticated it is mistaken for chaos and even still forced into our own human order of narration until the effect of all that is real, true, and of value is lost in some temporary stop where one chunks the world into a few colored blocks that feel nice to the touch with how rectangular they are up to their pinprick edges. Life is strange.

It’s why I marvel that I am holding the dissonance like a guard at the gates preventing the orc horde from rushing inside the city. I write as if I have not already made my case many months ago. I continue to own the present as if it owes me agency, as if my previous conclusions and actions have not already exhausted themselves into a senselessness, which my recovery reflected but which didn’t necessarily end in anything truly substantial beyond the next step of where my mind is taking me, how my ideas are landing, and what the entirety of my ideational development is ultimately beginning to show me. And I use the word “beginning” intentionally here, as if in disrespect to everything I’ve already ought to have done and said and completed and made peace with and come to terms with and removed all vagaries of. I have reached a point of points, yet the conclusion draws somehow a greater dissonance, because where there is availability post-synthesis, there is a senselessness that comes with getting overwhelmed with the expansion of a scope that had thoroughly made the most out of what it had then. I am making room for so much more and advancing to subjugate, but I am temporarily dazed and assaulted, hot and bothered, confused and wrangling off to the side. I have drawn myself out and have dragged my body stiff, until I’ve opened up new gaps in my sense and redistributed once again with newfound space which my previous completion brought about. I am now taking on new warlords and making new peacekeepers, ways to cope with an ever-increasing sense of life, in hopes that the map never stays distant for long and I will have ran myself through everything so as to be of a systematicness that I never had if I hinged everything on the external logic of the words. I intend to complete the mission, beyond what my eyes can see and what I am now resolved to take on. With greater diversely tested conclusiveness comes even more sophisticated frustrations to overcome, because you will have invited yourself to do more than just answer questions that already have been so expressed so as in effect to have their own technical documentation in both HTML and PDF to which people regularly refer for any problems that might occur within teams—though this isn’t a matter of technique that evolves enough to outgrow its documentation, but more so new ways to reformulate so as to account for even greater things that defy just another repetition or variation resulting from an abundance of new states to test and grind the idea against to produce, with time, something realized so as to lose its shackles and start sounding like there’s nothing to say except in the things now right in front of you which emerge now that you’ve drawn all the things out, which are now previous and now look like Floor 1 rather than Floor All. No amount of anticipation can ever account for the dumbfoundedness of having expressed and wound oneself around so many different ways of dealing with an inquiry. I am a fool even more now, the longer I hold myself up like Darth Vader using the force. I am suspended in midair. So many things I’ve not addressed that I thought my previous formulations accounted for. I didn’t realize how much I’ve allowed myself to forget to optimize toward a solved problem—the necessity of decreasing sample size to get an improved model, even if still insufficient but prototypally useful for future iteration where the head can formulate and then attack itself because it’s given itself room to make a realized sample-size-throttled prototype. This is what I’ve been doing, and that I’ve forgotten about it (the idea of it, not necessarily that I knew what I was going to learn after reaching a point of tackling all the angles so as to produce a full realization) shows just how inescapable cognition is even when one wants to get ahead of it, with which writing deals. This is not to say I was trying to understand much at once, because I would have not known what to try for when the scope of what I’ve just been reintroduced to through the new available space acquired by expansion post-synthesis has yet to be ascertained or even rehearsable as overwhelm enough to navigate even in the tiniest of coping mechanisms. As such, I am almost cyclically confronted with the dissonance of how much and seemingly fast my ideas collapse once they’ve been allowed to fructify in something that could be described as truthful, which, I now see, happens once you’ve treaded enough of systematicness’ structural requirements and drawn-out battle of daily quotas and experimentations on where to penetrate the excruciating next variation that the idea has yet to encompass even as it remains the same so as to reach a point that the overarching plot is thrown out because it’s done its job, even if only to make space and to “peel for your carries/damage-dealers,” in that it may be wrong but has made room to access deeper runs (think runs in a tournament) of the problem that would not been so simply available enough to have any initial overwhelming effect. The silence that follows having expressed “an everything” is loud enough that the questions that follow are simple and totally overwhelming because of the held breath that a truly spent personal subject effects. You are left staring at the screen, strewn among constructed landforms of pages—now all dead but the ingredients of something more perceptive, even if only to be greater at conditioning itself, the express idea always nearby once you’ve lived with an experience.

The End of a Project and the Changes That FollowHome — October 27, 2026

Maybe, this is the best time to say that it’s been a month since I stopped staying at cafes. In the end, it wasn’t really the cafes or the staying that was the driver of all that change and growth or whatever you might call that development, motion, movement, or shift, whether as:

1. a consequence of priority changes,
2. a creatively structural displacement that pushed me to establish and affirm what I would have left suspended in midair and initiated the discovery of whole new scopes that I would have never considered or even begun to be at the tip of theorizing—which made the power of words that much clearer even through the admonishment of it—
3. a thing that just happened and catalyzed the cleanup, standardization, and systematization of my project,
4. a combination of these, or
5. all of these at once without dilution.

Either way, it’s been one year and four months, 188 seven-to-eight-hour cafe stays, and 127 unique cafes. During those hours, I wrote with very different intentions, approaches, and goals compared to what I had at home, both prior to and during this period.

My life from July 4, 2023—the start of my self-formulation—to May 23, 2025, the beginning of the cafe stays, was complicated and full of noxious emotions, even it was in these 690 days that I set up for what would become the written data of who I am as a person, who I’ve been, and who I continue to formalize myself as in tandem with the systematicness of my body of writing in the form of a directory composed chiefly of (1) categorical folders, (2) yearly subfolders, (3) monthly subsubfolders, and (4) daily Markdown files.

The cafe period accompanied the securing of my website as a compact mass upon which I became, where the landfill that was my whole life was swept away and replaced by trackables, pointables, and declarables, isolatable moving parts rather than a heap of overwhelm, fragmentation, and instability, which the written data first addressed but did not complete, remove redundancies of, and operationalize. The body of writing itself has transformed from a bunch of horrific millions of words to a “practical application of principles and processes,” which even now continues to feed on its own sample size and coordinate across time and diverse states with methods such as precise personal titling to make feasible the scope of all subject matters covered and objectively reveal everything else outside of it—establishing the extents of one’s platform to step off the edge intentionally without running unknowningly back into one’s own tangle.

Before even July 4, 2023, I was already tackling myself indirectly through my own fiction writing, and way before that, I engaged in stories and found myself everywhere else. These continue even now, but I have evolved to hold the encompassment myself, declaratively.

Now, post-cafes, I am recovering as well as cleaning and systematizing everything up that much more, using everything I’ve discovered. Using what I’ve gotten from all that limit-testing across many states, I am endowed with a clarity that makes tangible and precarious the most delicate units of meaning-making. I am holding the thread, aiming at the needle. So many kingdoms of redundancy and obscuration have collapsed, and I make my way down south. The form of the journal entry is destabilizing. Standards have risen, thresholds have increased, and meaningfulness is taking confusing turns.

I said I’d eat everything—which means writing, integrating, and operationalizing as the persistent goal—but my jaw’s broken and torn and my body’s rejecting cud in the aftermath of a sustained period of systematic consolidation. I want to accomplish the dream I had when I was writing my 2024 fantasy novel Matthew and consumingly wrote the line “epitome of grace and beauty” because I wanted to become it. This “epitome” is not philosophical or in any way about perfection, but about a privileged experience of honesty even amid change, where self-actualization is a certainty in the face of things that still resist even the most basic level of unitization so as to repel your advances. It’s about eating everything as a direction that produces outcomes that push what would otherwise eat itself incestuously. This is about maintaining the lucidity to wonder and to be in awe, even frustratedly for spells that draw out.

I hesitate in front of the fruits that hang low and are already so grubby from all my touching, fiddling, squeezing, and throwing that they produce no marked effect and effectively rehearse and extend the string of words circularly with no hint that the logic is pouncing out of discovery. I know that the better I refine my conceptualizations, the higher quality the food will be when I eat because I will have eaten the best most “steelmanned” version of it, which makes for an even greater “identity” because it’s founded on discovery. Now that I’ve already operationalized what used to be ambitious goals, I am now confronting new directions to take not only the higher fruits but resultingly new destabilizations of what fruits are in themselves because I can only make work of what I can practically touch, where touch is only as much as stimuli.

In other words, now that I’ve already worked with so many ideas, things have both become completed and detabilized at the most foundational level of unit. What got me this far was “hello.” Writers, who write countless words, are not complicators of hello, but recognizers of it through discovery—”hello” being more accomplished through this. After systematic consolidation, which has returned me to a hello, I am left encountering my bases in the epilogue of their exhaustive discovery, interrogation, and systematization, and what I see is that I have said nothing. All the words I’ve written have become blank, which disturbs the lowest unit, the journal entry. The definition of a book itself as declarable—again, not philosophical but practical—is now also suspended in midair. This is not about the limits of systematicness itself or the undermining of practical conditions and discovery, but the practical accomplishment of it and the organic next step where you are left recounting and opening the discussion of what counts, or what is meaningful. The instability of the unit reflects a sophisticated shift in the aftermath of limit-testing, rigor, discovery, and completion.

This is not about everything, what makes anything meaningful in the first place, writing itself, identity itself, discovery itself, meaning itself, or anything fundamental, but the end of a project and the changes that follow.

The Death of the Entry, Book, Unit, Bounded Object, and Ideational Compression: Strange IdeasHome — October 27 – 28, 2026

I think I’ve lost it. Systematicness, maybe. It seems I will always be a victim of a book. I will always read a story and discover it as well as everything as well as myself as well as meaningfulness and meaning-making itself. It seems I cannot pre-establish the unit of a book and then stare at a bunch of books on a table and answer the question of what is a book. I think I am left to be passive, because everything I’ve tried to operationalize books themselves have not really scratched at the essence of a book itself. And that resistance may be inherent and productive. I may not be able to do anything about this question. Maybe, that is the only way to live in this world after a certain point of formulation and consolidation.

Essentially, I am forced to walk into the sea every time I am faced with a book. I thought my linguistic strip-mining of phrases was enough. But no amount of distance or operationalizing will ever achieve the book itself. I am left to be marked by the book itself. I am left to find my operational methods lacking. I am left to be disturbed.

Systematicness is losing ground. The definition of a book is left to discovery. Meaning-making is left to surrender.

I am left to do things without knowing what they would mean and how they would affect me. I cannot eat everything in the fashion of writing, integrating, and operationalizing. I am left to be thrown out of order and to stumble upon things. I am left to be passive and a victim.

I will be eaten by things that seem to elude me at every turn.

Or maybe, I’m still working out a way to approach books that feels sustainable, endurable, and workable, because as of now, it still feels like I’m a victim to them. With web comics, I’m not a victim. Even as I’m immersed and not writing about them, they are not such that they feel like they’re imposing upon me a whole new worldview and forcing me to surrender. Instead, it feels like I can discover without getting entangled in something that says so much of itself that I can’t do anything to make sense of it, probably because it’s not meant to do that, but I would not make that conclusion so readily, though books do have the special advantage of prose itself which is the medium of philosophy and why even fiction can really throw you off.

I wouldn’t mistake this as “what are some research questions.”

This doesn’t mean I don’t read, however. It just means I don’t really have anything to do with them so as for me to work operationally. It feels like they just happen to be there and I just happen to read them.

But it also has to do with the journal entry itself and writing and prose themselves respectively. That unit has crumbled or been put at risk. I’ve already established, investigated, interrogated, consolidated, integrated, qualified, conditioned, stipulated, limited, and systematized so much in the last year especially. I’m hitting an ideational wall itself.

I do write. I do read. That’s not the problem.

55.5 minutes later:

I’m not arrogant enough to claim something I don’t own or to pretend as if I’ve completed the book besides reading it, but even that I’m careful about because reading can be excused for the act of it itself without really processing/addressing what really captivates or compels me, since that’s always important when one wants to be honest instead of getting lost in the feeling of a moment, which one can end mistaking for honesty itself, for genuine engagement, for recognization, when I could very well just be going through the motions and letting the moment decide everything when something should be accounted for in its own terms, at least in terms that one can write down and see a shape that’s readily perceivable and workable. It’s why I care about the definition of a book.

It’d honestly be great if the text accounted for itself all by itself as written words the way LLMs perceive text. But text is not a Python string. Accounting for something. Defining it. These are problems that concern the book as more than just a list of striking phrases or a string that amounts to a “summarize this” prompt.

This will direct how I write fiction novels and journal entries themselves. The definition of a book encompasses both writing and reading.

When I defined a book as being composed of striking phrases such that I linguistically strip-mined various books for a year, I ended up writing a fiction book that was basically a collection of densely compressed objective descriptive sensory phrases, even as there was a coherent plot and story going on.

So it does matter in affecting technique/practice/practicality, even as it may seem purely abstract.

I’m not trying to account for the encounter before encountering it per se, or trying to experience something in theory before experiencing it actually. It’s easy to mistake systematicness and the whole point of it. The definition of a book is important because it does more than just give you something workable to frame every single story you read and write. It helps you work with books themselves as things that you can do something with and engage in. Experience is itself a way of encountering something, and if you can make that encounter not overwhelming or too detached or vague or nonsensical or irrelevant, then it will lead to better outcomes in making reading and writing something that would leave you feeling victimized.

[It's easy to theorize] how to solve this without accounting for what I'm trying to account for. It's easy to solve everything. Go outside, touch grass, develop a workable relationship to things like war, hunger, shit like that. It's easy to theorize, to make a list. But a book isn't a bunch of phrases or words. It's also not a story per se, because you would have to define what a story is. And the reason you have to define what a story is is that you're always going to be left frustrated and confused and annoyed that the most obvious things, like a dog, a car, and hello, seem to be non-transferrable, and you have to deal with yourself as something that has already exhausted many different states and definitions and angles and contexts and ways of working with something and creating a theoretical conceptualization of it. You would have to account for that, for all the frustrations that previous simpler less rigorous versions have encountered. The definition of a book is important because it's not just a self-help saying like "accept that things can be partial," "don't rush to conclusions," "become more flexible," and things such as "just eat breakfast" or "make your bed" or "drink water" or do "[something that's theoretically ideal but has no relation to the subject matter at hand because it doesn't seek to do anything but to entertain the idea of a general proverb or truth without really going into the actual concerns presented like a sage that doesn't know what the economy even looks like except by what he has spoken in poetic terms which do nothing to scratch the surface of what he is trying to impose on]".

11 minutes later:

Maybe entries don’t exist. And books, too. This actually gives me a lot more room not to justify the unit itself. I will be reading books and entries and working with them without getting caught up in their self-containment or in their boundaries such as date published or timestamps or titles, because even titles can be put on a list and you can get a summary of the full scope of the ideas treaded/covered, which can be infinitely rehearsible and scalable so as to make little point about structure in unitization. This would make for something more “ideational essence.” And you would think it would collapse everything into subjectivity, perception, and experience, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that as ideas are neither phrases nor states of mind. This doesn’t turn entries or books into an undifferentiated bunch of words or a state of mind you were in when you read it. In fact, it essentializes them ideationally.

In this sense, ideas transcend the boundaries of the unit of text, which displaces the unit itself ideationally. This gives a lot more room, space, and freedom for ideas to develop. Novels, journal entries, all of these are implicated. The article can vanish while the idea can retain itself losslessly.

This means experience, in the sense of reading various books over time, itself is a conduit of ideational essence. Because books and entries don’t exist, you can grab at an idea that none of these individual units themselves support.

This accounts for the book because it displaces ideational essence from its own medium.

This allows me essentially to binge-read books, because I will have accounted for it by engaging with it and its ideas even without taking notes, phrase-mining, or trying to account for it as a book-book. I can immerse myself in hundreds of books this way. This also means I don’t have to title every entry I’ve written necessarily, because ideas are not a body of ideas you objectively see the full extent of and then expand from there, but rather things that continue to surpass even themselves since they’re not units. I don’t have to write novels with the systematic qualification of having gone through everything I’ve written and creating something that’s truly striking in a way that I can account for in some kind of formulation arising from “truly” consolidated text. I just have to remain ideationally present enough to wonder and remain in awe and consolidate systematically while using that very opportunity to interrogate otherwise obvious things, links, and building blocks (think a dog, a car, and a hello). Rather than systematizing and isolating, it’s identifying and encountering, which doesn’t rely on units, but on trends and ideas and how one eventually comes to perceive something even while holding the glossaries one has well-trodden.

Rigor, after all, isn’t the same as a systematic document that has carved its distinctions well, because the cleanest complex formulation isn’t necessarily ideational even while it aims to organize and simplify. Ideas can be stranger, perhaps as strange as Camus’ The Stranger.

However, it does make sense why I went down the path of treating ideas as text units. Even before I was a writer, I was encountering ideas in all sorts of ways, but it was when I started writing that I could document my memories, externalize everything that plagues my mind, and put it all together in a way that makes growing sense. Writing is crucial to ideation. But “ideas as text units” is not the same thing as writing being crucial to ideation. When I first started writing, naturally, I never thought of life as words or text, but the more I wrote, the more I started putting words and text first before anything more “impressionistic,” which severely constrained my ideation while revealing even greater sophistications I would have never discovered if I didn’t go through all the limitations of this phrase-mining. I’ve conflated writing with ideas themselves (truth itself even) and writing with communication itself, even if writing is only crucial to ideation and communication without being the same thing. I think I will finally let go of my preoccupation with models and feedback loops and focus instead on what ideas could be outside of the framework of a body of units and its “largest extent.”

This is essentially a radicalization of compression, from the entry to the title to the body of ideas that was obtained from seeing the full extent just based on the list of hyper-precise titles as well as the operational (up to workflow) formulation obtained from seeing that body of ideas, which then goes back to a single entry that captures the essence of that formulation. Instead of text that has become systematically compressed self-similarly across all levels of scale, this liberates ideation from compressed text and puts even textual compression at the same level of the text that it compresses. A compact totalizing consolidating personal main website is the same in being ideationally “non-essential.” This doesn’t mean redundancies are somehow non-properties. Compression does work, but at the level of the text, not ideation itself. It is crucial to ideation, necessarily, but not effective at its level, if that makes sense. This separates apparent textual redundancy from the significance of what’s going on ideationally, where familiar language is instrumentalized by what is effectively a stranger’s ideational attitude. There is a clean textual formulation, and there are the ideas. This allows one to repurpose formulations for completely different ideas.

Naturally, this means things such as context and details of an argument are constitutively ideational. It would be a mistake to think I am making ideas out to be non-ideas somehow. Text is text outside of what they signify. An idea isn’t a summary losing details. It’s everything outside of the formulation that the formulation seeks to essentialize and to capture. In other words, details are not text. An argument is not text. Context is not text. An idea is not text.

So we’ve changed from the paralysis of “what is a book” to the immersive freedom of “there is no book,” where someone has a browser tab on ambient fantasy music and another tab on the League of Legends subreddit and another tab on a PDF of a 19th century autobiography, such that one doesn’t need to isolate the music, League of Legends, and the PDF for ideation to be effective.

This means novels can go on forever.

This means ideas don’t have to be themselves finished even as one makes definitive formulations of them or novels that capture the essence of an overarching concern, because the clean boundedness of a textual unit has nothing to do with the ideas themselves.

In fact, a novel can very well be the site where ideation is accelerated and sophisticated through imagined scenarios, sets, and constraints precisely because of this distinction/separation. The unboundedness and forever-ness of ideas makes text that much more useful when it’s not trying to restrict them but condition them generatively. Systematicness in that essence unleashes ideation, which we experience as imagination. Isolation moves indistinctions. Beneath objects shift disturbed blurs and obscurations. Ideation remains workable and screwable like a progression fantasy, which makes room for indistinctions to manifest generatively in the interspaces.

When I return systematicness and bounded objects their dignity, I’m not reverting to the question of what is a book. Instead, I am pointing out why writing is crucial to ideation even as ideation is strangely separate from it and unbounded. The novel itself becomes a textual conditioner without having anything constitutively to do with the ideations it conditions.

I can operationalize then from ideation itself, not from bounded objects. That’s the distinction. A book doesn’t get to have its what-am-I. What does get authority is ideation which relies generatively on isolation, set conditions, and systematicness which exposes indirectly the implicit gaps, blurs, and obscurations beneath focal objects. Rather than looking for bounded causes, I might better work from what I’ve obtained across (and often in ignorance of) many states, units, and experiences. Ideas as separate from the journal entry and the book and the state of mind and the phrase and the formulation and the unit and the experience and the instruments/tools to operationalize from ideation itself. “Bounded construction” might be a better way to define the unit. It’s a rehearsal, an arrangement, an expression. Ideation separate from everything that conditions it generatively, whether sweat, book, or song. But isn’t writing inherently bounded? The intention and worldview have changed. Ideation is everything outside of what I isolatedly encounter.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing this for the longest time unknowingly. I just haven’t declared the separation of condition and ideation. I can write as I always have, but not to privilege sweat or book or entry or compression, but to privilege ideation itself outside of all of that. Now, I have freedom and the intentionality from it.

In other words, I can be strange with it because ideation is strange. When I write, I don’t have to pretend to be systematic, but it does help to talk systematically about something ideationally strange.

Interestingly, I’d even say that the conflation was itself a conditioner.