[ ENTRY 001 ]

Wherever I find it

2024 —

On over-reading

红楼梦 is one of those rare books that rewards over-interpretation. Every re-reading surfaces another layer — the footnotes become more interesting than the main text. I think the books worth returning to are the ones you can never quite finish.

[ ENTRY 002 ]

Ottawa, Canada

2025

On building living machines

I got into robotics because of Neon Genesis Evangelion. My Rover club has four divisions and I can't stop mapping them onto a human body. Software is the spirit. Mechanics is the body. Electronics are the blood vessels and nervous system. And science — the theoretical layer — is consciousness. When you frame it that way, building a robot starts to feel less like engineering and more like something else entirely.

[ ENTRY 003 ]

Tokyo, Japan

2025

On becoming a 高級外人

A classmate called me 高級外人 after I said I liked Noh. I thought that was funny. Noh appeals to me because it's profoundly eerie — in a way that even Kabuki isn't. Compared to Peking Opera, which is spectacular and loud and expressive, Noh is the thing happening in the margins. I've always been more interested in the margins.

[ ENTRY 004 ]

Beijing, China

2025

On disappearing into a crowd

Whenever I'm in China, I feel my presence thin out. I become part of the collective — one face in a current of faces — and there's something both peaceful and unsettling about that. I think about how if something happened to me here, it would scroll past someone else's screen as a three-second news item. I don't think that's a tragedy. I think it's just the honest texture of existing inside something much larger than yourself.