[ 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 ]

Ottawa, Canada

2026

On playing God, selectively

I used to run everything through other people's heads first — every choice filtered through how everyone else might read it. At some point I realized I only need to be clear on my own thoughts. I'm not God. So with people, I've gone direct: say the thing, mean the thing. That dueling-minds mode — holding every perspective at once, judging the world from a god's-eye view — I save it for when I'm creating. Which raises a question I haven't decided how to feel about: does that mean I'd make a good PM?

[ ENTRY 005 ]

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.

[ ENTRY 006 ]

The pool

whenever I'm swimming

On what fills the pool

The thing that submerges me when I swim isn't water. It's thoughts, tons of them by weight. Every stroke stirs one loose, and every stir carries a small thrill — like excavating an idea I'd buried long ago and finding it still moves. I just keep swimming through all of it, and somewhere along the way I completely forget that what I'm doing is, mechanically speaking, exercise.

[ ENTRY 007 ]

Everywhere

∞

On friendship by telepathy

I've made plenty of friends by now, and the ones I keep are the ones with minds of their own. Some people, after we've hung out long enough, simply start becoming me — my phrasings, my takes — and I don't love having my thoughts stolen. Though honestly, what is being alive if not repeating sentences someone else said first? But people with genuinely strong opinions are different. Those friendships run on telepathy — years can pass, and neither of us forgets the other.

[ ENTRY 008 ]

Ottawa, Canada

2026

On language, thought, and action

Language, thought, and action are three entirely different forms of expression — each one reaches places the other two can't. Words never quite capture every idea I generate, and what I do never quite matches what I think. So getting AI to do exactly what's in my head down to the details is genuinely hard. But flip that around: AI is only a visualizer of my thoughts, and what I feel is layered, spatial, multi-dimensional. Which means it still has so many directions left to grow.

[ ENTRY 009 ]

Hyrule

Hyrule time

On Saria's Song

Saria's Song is a fast, bright little tune, and yet every time I listen to it I feel an inexplicable sadness. From a composer's angle, the Lydian mode and those rising phrase-endings leave everything hanging mid-air, like a thing you never know when or whether will resolve. From a mono no aware angle, that racing tempo is the good times slipping away at full speed: the harder you try to hold on, the faster they run.

[ ENTRY 010 ]

Earth

at arm's length

On the aesthetics of restraint

I think every relationship needs a certain amount of space. Distance produces a hazy, soft-focus kind of beauty, the kind you only get when you can't quite make out the details. Step too close, see too clearly, and the filter breaks. So I hold things a little apart on purpose. Not because I care less, because the blur is where the beauty lives. Being human myself, I know exactly which parts of us don't survive close inspection, and since the others are human too (probably), theirs can't be far off. So please let my fantasy linger a little longer.