blog

⊕so, i had to go out to oakland to bust my brother out of the nuthouse. how did he end up in oakland? how does anyone end up in oakland? insanity, maybe. it’s probably the least sexy city in the bay area, there are no tech darlings headquartered there, the best you get is crusty old ask.com and pandora (the only person i can recall using it in recent history is my dad). by far the largest company in oakland is the decidedly-unsexy healthcare provider kaiser permanente. there isn’t even a prestigious college around, like berkeley or stanford. all of oakland's major league sports teams suddenly decided to move out at once in the past couple of years. the dominant airline at oakland airport (which brags about its status as california’s fourth busiest airport) is southwest airlines, which those familiar with airline lore know is one of the least fashionable airlines.

i thought of it as kind of an escort mission: get in, secure the target, and then safely extract him. there wouldn’t be any enemies of course so the only challenge would be dealing with his poor pathfinding/AI and its potential for causing trouble. i would fly in during the early morning, then fly out with him in the evening, a kind of daytrip by air. it was a little bit surreal casually showing up at the airport with no major preparation or bags or anything, like i was getting on a local bus or train for a brief outing in the city. it brought to mind the insane story i read online a few weeks ago about a guy who commuted to school at UC berkeley in the bay area from los angeles three days a week by air, because he calculated that bay area rent was so expensive that living with his parents rent-free in LA and buying all those plane tickets would be marginally cheaper (he was, of course, an airplane nerd as well).

i had several hours to kill before the discharge so i decided to head into the city by following signs for the BART train. why the train? i like trains, and would rather deal with the inconvenience and grittiness of the train than the awkwardness and expense of an uber. i also don’t like using apps. they had a kind of shiny new disney-monorail type thing that connects the airport to the actual train lines, which you must pay a hefty premium to ride. the proper BART train arrived promptly once i got to the train station. most of the rolling stock i saw was clearly dated, but the shape and design of the cars managed to look sleek and seventies-futuristic rather than shabby and industrial like more recent trainsets i’ve seen in new york or chicago. an ad i saw in one of the stations celebrating the 50th anniversary of bart had a quote from nixon (“it’s like NASA”) who ceremonially rode it when it first opened, alongside a photo of him stepping off a train that looked suspiciously similar to the one that i saw pull in.

the inside of the car felt very wide and spacious, which i found out is actually because they are unusually wide. according to wikipedia the trains run on “...the widest gauge in regular passenger use anywhere in the world, used in India, Pakistan, western Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Chile, and on BART in the San Francisco Bay Area.” i sat down in a somewhat-scuffed seat, which was extremely comfortable thanks to its thick cushion, something you don’t really see much anymore in public transit. i tried not to think about the fact that they had probably absorbed at least 30 years of farts and that cutting one open might reveal that all the stuffing had long since rotted away and the only thing keeping the seats inflated was a steady supply of gas from passengers.

since i was in the bay area, i met for peace talks with my nemesis kit anderson at a restaurant he claimed still “had a lot of alpha” (i assume by this he meant it was still undiscovered). it was in oakland’s chinatown, which seems to be approximately halfway through gentrification. the restaurant was a dumpling place in a still-ungentrified building. in the ripe hours of the morning, the clientele was elderly chinese people and one caucasoid couple eagerly snapping pictures of each dish brought to their table.

i told kit i was sick of hearing about the damn submarine already, so instead he gushed about his plans for the new apple “vision pro” ar goggles. i already have a killer app idea, he told me, it’s an app that uses AI image interpolation in order to make anyone you want appear naked to you. ethically, he immediately defended himself, i think it is fine because you’re not actually seeing their naked body like you would with genuine x-ray specs, it’s just an imaginary, most probable nude appearance generated by a neural network, basically the same thing as fantasizing in your head, just easier and more high-tech.

i was too tired to object in any way but i guess kit must have been on some kind of strong stimulant stack because he kept ploughing ahead at lightning speed, practically thinking aloud: i’m in touch with a guy already, actually, who is building a machine learning classifier in order to objectively rate attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10 in order to finally settle hot or not debates once and for all, which i think it could have some fantastic synergies with my idea. you could set a filter to have only people above an 8 appear naked, or you know, now that i think about it, you could just make it so you can’t even see ugly people at all. even better, you could use AI filters to make ugly people look attractive to you and then easily go out with them as long as they agree the vision pro stays ON during sex.

kit was furiously typing into his phone most of the time and then announced he’d already arranged a meeting with some prospective cofounders (a former roommate and a barista friend from some place called the “rest ‘n vest” café) and had to dip right away to “get back to civilization”. before leaving, he pulled out a business card case and set a card on the table, which seemed to have a credit card printed on it. it’s on me, he said, new thing i've been working on, printable single-use disposable credit cards. with that, kit was gone. the waiter returned with the card several minutes later, saying i am sorry but this — he flexed the flimsy paper card between his fingers skeptically — card has been declined. i wasn’t too mad because kit had only ordered one thing, a pot of jasmine tea ($1) into which he’d surreptitiously slipped several pills.

after exiting the restaurant, i wandered the deserted morning streets of downtown oakland. everything at ground-level seemed abandoned, everyone having retreated up or out. a paper sign taped in the window of a chain restaurant read “WE DO NOT ACCEPT CASH ANYMORE, We have been burglarized 3 times in the past month!” it’s hard to believe that the ivory towers all around are actually hives of workers while you’re drifting about the desolate streets, accompanied only by the occasional beggar or madman. instead, the towers seem as if they are nothing but vast monolithic monuments to corporate hegemony, casting a shadow of profound insignificance upon the downtrodden wandering the solemn grid beneath their oppressive height. what does the “kaiser” of “kaiser permanente”, the name so many of those tall buildings are emblazoned with, mean again? honestly it is only slightly more dismal than the average american downtown.

i set a course for a cluster of bookshops i found on google maps, practically guaranteed to be in a better neighborhood. as you leave downtown and approach the hills, conditions gradually improve. sometimes you cross a particularly large road and it’s like crossing the border from mexico into texas. eventually i reached one of the bookshops, on a hip shopping street. small bookshops are always hit or miss, depending on the taste and curation of the owners/employees. i’ve been to hole-in-the-wall bookshops before that have far better selection than city-block bookstores, thanks entirely to the owner’s pickiness when it comes to which books he'll buy from nearby college students. in this case it was definitely a hit, i picked up two out of three books i was looking for, and seriously considered buying several more i discovered. i was so satisfied that i skipped visiting the other bookshops entirely and headed straight to retrieve my brother.

everything about the pickup went surprisingly without a hitch, although out of a desire to keep things simple and expedient i had to relent and install the uber app to get us to the airport. the uber guy got confused trying to get out of the parking lot and needed a little bit of direction before rushing down the highway at a wholly-unnecessary speed since there were still hours before the flight. my brother was surprisingly functional, and made it through airport security and even went off to buy some food alone without incident. you basically couldn’t tell anything was wrong with him (besides being perhaps a bit of a fashion victim) as long as you didn’t talk to him for more than a minute, or happen to notice that he’s wearing the standard-issue flipflops that are specially engineered to be impossible to kill yourself with. the flight itself was uneventful as well, although somehow we got stuck on the runway for almost half an hour after landing because “another plane was at our gate” and the pilot “couldn’t figure out what was going on”. i guess that’s budget airlines for you.

since he’s gotten back, my brother has been on his usual post-release binge – packs of cigs, weed, wine, whole cans of that costco canned cold brew coffee that i don’t drink anymore because it’s too strong, mexican valium, laxatives, pepto, occasionally the psych meds they actually prescribed him. nothing seems to have much effect besides making him sound way doped up when he speaks. he wanders the house restlessly changing his clothes constantly and moving stuff around, or bothering me with random delusional microrants. any pushback is immediately dismissed with some sort of rationalization. it is a little bit like being haunted by the living embodiment of a twitter feed, and it’s been scrambling my thoughts so thoroughly that i’ve been completely unable to write. the contents of this post only crystallized in my mind when i went on a little drive and got out of the house for a bit.

where's the beef

i was sitting around at a friend’s house idly browsing netflix while waiting for somebody to show up, and happened to catch the trailer for this new show called “beef”. it's about two LA asians who get into an escalating feud after a minor road rage incident in a home improvement store parking lot, or at least that’s what the trailer made it seem like. the premise reminded me a bit of a book i was writing while bored in class during middle school entitled “the couch wars”, about two neighbors who fight viciously for possession of an exceptionally comfortable couch. it remained unfinished only partially because i lost the manuscript while visiting grandparents in florida.

i don’t usually watch tv, but while i was away briefly my friends watched it and told me i should give it a go "to get caught up". with what exactly, i'm not sure. there’s also some hype behind the show because it’s produced by this shadowy organization called “a24”, which i had never heard of before they mentioned it (of course now i seem to see it referenced everywhere). apparently they’re the puppet masters behind recent critically-acclaimed hits like “everything everywhere all at once” (e2a2o). i looked at their works and it looks like the only thing i’ve seen by them is midsommar (i don’t watch many movies), a horror movie that finally takes advantage of that strange latent scandi creepiness. what i thought of it can be described like so: midsommar. but regardless, they seem to have competent filmmaking abilities, so i gave “beef” a go.

the show started strong, delivering on the revenge schemes and ruses the trailer promised. however, as the show went on, the feud kind of took a backseat as the focus shifted towards the character’s emotional struggles or whatever. ah yes, they’re trying to make it one of those “psychological” shows, a classic trick for making people think a show is deep or realistic. it's not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s well done.

as i watched, something started bothering me, which i noticed after watching one particular scene where one of the characters talks about his floundering art career making poo-shaped pots, in the shadow of his successful artist father. everything about the emotional reactions and actions of the characters felt too... explainable. it was too neat, too clean, characters always do what you would expect, they do what makes the most sense in their situation. there is little ambiguity in character’s actions or reactions, you can easily sum up their motivations for acting a particular way in a scene using just a short sentence. actions are so explicit that you can put together unambiguous cause -> effect sequences for almost everything characters do, like they’re robots simply responding to inputs. it’s all ruthlessly rational, nearly autistic, as if the writers were worried they would get called out by people if every action didn’t have a perfectly logical “canon” explanation.

what’s the issue with this? well, it wouldn’t be such a huge deal if they weren’t trying specifically to make their show so “psychological”. but what ended up happening is that they made it far too “logical” and not nearly “psycho” enough. by trying to stay so logically consistent, the characters become unrealistic; there’s no element of irrationality to their actions like people have in real life. consequently the show is deprived of ambiguity, of depth: there’s little to discuss, to argue about, to INTERPRET. contrast, for example, evangelion, which is made so compelling by the mystery, the ambiguity, the seeming-irrationality behind some of the characters’ actions. there are endless interpretations and arguments to be had about character motivations and psychology, most of which can never be definitely resolved based off of the source material. people still argue about and try to interpret evangelion to this very day. will people be discussing beef in 25 years?

with all of this still in my mind, i opened up my inbox the next day and found out that i’d been completely scooped by terminally-grumpy cultural critic and essayist sam kriss, who had almost the exact same gripes. he writes:

Our two heroes start trying to sabotage each other in more and more extreme ways. This is not a bad idea for a TV show; in fact, it’s a very good one. A bitter, episodic half-hour comedy, like Tom and Jerry, or Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner, or Popeye and Bluto, but live-action and for adults. Or like the Icelandic sagas with their vastening spirals of revenge. A kind of giddy, lurid exploration of all the ways you can fuck with someone’s life. Doing it right would take a degree of creativity, but the result would be very fun. Real fun always has a breath of sadism.

...

This is not the Beef we got. Instead, our enemies mostly just leave each other nasty voicemails and obsess over their feelings.

...

I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity. But these people are wind-up toys.

great minds think alike, i guess, although he’s clearly got me beat when it comes to writing those thoughts out. kriss goes on to roast most of a24’s body of work on similar charges, although he does end up dishing out some praise for beau is afraid. i haven’t seen it but i talked to a friend who’s seen most of the a24 movies and he said that that one was his least favorite.

in regret of lost time

i’m deeply ashamed to admit that i fell for a meme and read a book based off of a tweet. in my defense, occasionally there’s a viral tweet with legitimately good advice, like this one i saw recently about putting a pinch of salt into bad black coffee in order to make it less bitter. i tried it and it really works, although i cannot convince anyone else to. i might as well be asking them to eat a baby. anyways, recently the Algorithm shoved a laudatory tweet about this book called "this is how you lose the time war” onto my timeline, and it stuck around in my head. it’s probably because i’m an absolute SUCKER for anything involving time travel: back to the future, primer, looper, hot tub time machine, bill & ted’s excellent adventure, time bandits, source code, timeline (the original michael crichton book), the third harry potter book, the time travel episodes of every sci-fi tv show (stargate sg-1, fringe, LOST, among others), toki wo kakeru shoujo, time travel shoujo, every anime involving time loops (why is there such a fixation on this particular flavor in anime?), and so on.

so, when i had a flight coming up and was scrambling for something to read, it floated to the top of my head and i loaded it onto my phone. i didn’t really mind if it wasn’t super “literary” because i’ve been trying to read less weighty books on the plane. often i’m too tired to properly enjoy them, there are multiple books i’m probably going to have to revisit because i practically snoozed through them on the plane. usually i might do some sort of due diligence beforehand like reading the back cover blurb, but the tweet i saw also recommended going into it completely blind. i try to respect those kinds of suggestions because i know there’s many cases in which they pay off big time (e.g. madoka), however this was not one of those cases. in fact i might have dodged a huge bullet had i read the blurb because looking at it now, it screams “AVOID”. i can’t help but wonder if the “go in blind” thing is just a trick to lure in the naïve and unsuspecting.

i ended up on the flight with only this book loaded onto my phone. huge mistake. within five pages i could already tell it was going to be unbearably cringe, but i was cornered with no way out but through (i had already flipped through the latest issue of hemispheres before taking off). the writing was, for lack of a better term, extremely reddit. if you know, you know. the book is an epistolary lesbian romance between two time-traveling superhumans trying to alter the course of history towards their faction's desired timeline. don’t ask for more details because there are none. the world-building and explanation of the time travel mechanics was practically non-existent, and after reading the author bios in the back and finding out that they were big nerds, i wished that they had actually nerded out.

the main issue i had with the book is that it’s a romance masquerading as a sci-fi time travel book, that also manages to fail at being a romance. the romantic relationship between the characters seemed to go from 0 to 100 after they exchanged just three or four letters. during this time this was the only communication they had, they never met in person, and the first couple of letters began with them as rivals/enemies mocking each other. but i guess this was all papered over for most readers by the “flowery” love language used in the letters, the metaphor soup and college freshman-level vocabulary hypnotically convincing unsophisticated readers that they were reading some sort of beautiful blossoming romance. i came to this conclusion after reading a few nauseating rave reviews online (i never want to see the word "sapphic" again). to me it just looked like the authors were larping, i could see what they were trying to do but for someone who actually reads, the metaphors and fifty cent words only hit the ground with a dull thud.

i guess i could also complain about the sci-fi portions, but as i said it’s not really the focus of the book so i’ll keep it short. in time travel media there are some basic conventions you must follow: you start off by establishing the ground rules of your time travel mechanics, and then in the climax they must be cleverly exploited in an unexpected or subversive way to resolve the main conflict cathartically. it’s like how there are rules to writing a successful detective story, where the necessary clues must be subtly laid within the story such that the reader can potentially put it all together themselves before the detective solves it within the story. if you go against the rules you better have a damn good reason for doing so (e.g. the borges short story “death and the compass”), and i’m simply not seeing it in this case. the “schemes” the characters were involved in were barely described and basically all lame butterfly-effect type stuff. the vignettes in each time period before a character found the next letter were more or less nothing but window-dressing. kudos to the authors though for including some graham hancock “human civilization has been around a lot longer than you think” settings though.

fortunately the book (more of a novella) was mercifully short, and i finished it with time to spare on my flight. i think the length probably contributed significantly to its popularity. of course, soon after landing i load up twitter and what do i see? a picture of someone holding up a copy, captioned “this book is ass”. GREAT! i’m glad i pirated it. i probably should not follow this up by reading "solenoid", another book which i’ve seen people memeing pretty hard lately.

at the antique store

i “crashed” a concert or rave or something

there is an international brotherhood of event production workers who give each other free tickets to their shows, which is how my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis ended up scoring tickets to some sort of big concert/rave. i describe it like that because my friend repeatedly referred to it as a “rave”, although to me it seemed more like a concert. i’m not an expert but the image i have in my head of a rave is sort of an underground affair, hosted in an anonymous warehouse or under a highway bridge or in the middle of the forest. certainly not the sort of thing issuing tickets via ticketmaster at a respectable venue with a well-known performer on tour selling merch at a stand. i’d never heard of the performer, some kind of electronic dj guy, but he must be relatively popular because some of my more normie friends had heard of him. it’s been a while since i’ve been to any sort of concert or rave and i wasn’t feeling very tired that evening, so i tagged along on a lark.

when we showed up at the venue, an open-air amphitheater, i really expected we might get turned away at the ticket booth trying to collect our will call tickets, but sure enough they had them there, printed out with the price “$0.00” stamped in the corner. they even got us in through the “VIP” side-entrance, which led directly into a not-very-bustling bar. i guess there weren’t many vips. it gets even better, though, because the guy who got us the free tickets said we could have a round on him at the bar, something i greatly appreciated considering the prices there and the fact that you definitely should be on a little something to fully experience a concert. unfortunately they did not have any wine.

as concert noobs, we showed up way too early and had quite a bit of time to kill before the main act took the stage. we mostly hung around near the crowded bar/bathroom setup for the plebeians, leaning against a railing while taking advantage of the opportunity to do some particularly interesting peoplewatching. many girls were wearing extremely wild outfits, most of which seemed intended to expose the maximum amount of skin. guys, on the other hand, largely seemed like they had just come in off the street, wearing shorts and t-shirts, maybe some “supreme”-style streetwear or colorful hawaiian shirt with the top buttons unbuttoned if they felt especially saucy. the only exception was gay guys, who either had EXTREMELY short shorts or were dressed about as flamboyantly as the girls. you might think it would also be a bit of a social occasion to meet new people, but i observed that for the most part people struck pretty rigidly within the groups they came to the show in. i also noticed that there was a surprising diversity of ages represented, including some crusty old boomers and a crazy mom who brought her toddler in.

soon it was time for the actual concert, so we headed in to the “pit”, the vaguely-circular area right in front of the stage where people stand around and get funky. pit tickets are apparently the most expensive at this particular show, probably because it’s supposed to be rave-y. there was a lot of activity setting up the stage, and then the main act came on. the music was extremely loud and every song sounded pretty much the same to me: a bone-shaking volley of BWAMPPPP BWAMPPP BWAMPPPP and then maybe a girl would sing a bit or a guy would hit the drums or play a little guitar and then BWAMPP BWAMPP BWAMPP again. i was tipsy enough to get into it a little and move my body to the rhythm along with everyone else, but honestly not my favorite.

what really captivated me most of the show was the visuals, which went pretty hard. there were extensive pyrotechnics, like fireworks and huge bursts of flame on occasion. at the most hype moments, paper streamers would burst from the top of the stage and rain down on the crowd. during the finale, they let loose a cloud of white confetti that drifted in the wind in the same manner i imagine would happen if you hit a blossoming cherry tree with a strong gust. the light show was extremely impressive, coordinated and moving in all sorts of patterns in time with the music, bolstered by a fog machine continually spitting fog in front of the stage to make the beams seem almost solid at points. the least interesting aspect ended up being the background videos they played on a huge screen behind the stage the whole time, which seemed to either be 3D animated in the style of a sci-fi/fantasy video game like destiny, or animated in the animesque style of “avatar: the last airbender”. the gamer dj, i thought to myself. whatever happened to basshunter, i wondered.

easy goulash recipe

you will need:

• - a bunch of beef, cut into ~1in cubes. i am afraid of cutting meat wrong so i go to costco or wherever and buy the wrapped piles of cheap pre-cut beef labelled “stew beef”
• - yellow onions, of nearly equal weight as the beef
• - caraway seeds, around 1 tsp per pound of beef
• - lard (lard is the most authentic but i guess you could use any oil or oil-like substance)
• - paprika, preferably hungarian, although i have also had good luck mixing multiple types. the important thing is to have a LOT of it.
• - tomato paste (not strictly necessary), around 2 tbsp per pound of beef
• - chicken stock (water also works in a pinch)

melt lard (or heat up oil) over medium heat in a pan. season beef cubes with salt/pepper and brown them in the pan. leaving all the juices in the pan, transfer beef cubes to a pot. chop onions roughly and fry them in pan until almost brown, stirring frequently. this part always feels like it takes forever but don’t get impatient and turn up the heat or stop stirring for too long because the onions will start to burn. once the onions become limp and look like they have lost a significant amount of volume, add in tomato paste, caraway seeds, and paprika (some garlic too, if you like). when you think you have added enough paprika, add some more. you basically cannot add enough of it. cook very briefly while stirring, 1-2 min, be very careful because if things get overcooked here it’s OVER. then, add the whole contents of the pan to the pot with the beef from earlier, add just enough stock or water to barely cover the beef, bring to a boil and then simmer uncovered until beef is tender. add some salt/pepper to taste, maybe some marjoram. if it’s not thick enough, you can simmer uncovered for longer, or carefully dust it with flour from a fine-meshed sieve, stirring it in after each shake to thicken while avoiding chunks. serve over rice or some sort of noodles or with dumplings, with a dollop of sour cream as well if you want.

my brother's bookshelf

he recently went missing in California

bookstore

i recently went to the big bookstore. this should be an enjoyable experience for me, except that it never ceases to annoy me how they make all the good books extremely difficult to find by polluting the shelves with stacks upon stacks of the most wretched rubbish. there is almost always a “literature” or “modern classics” section, but every single time the level of curation is absolutely abysmal. i used to be one of those wishy-washy “oh every book is literature!” types but that was before i had read much actual Literature. now with a glance i can see that 90% of what’s shelved under literature is completely out of place. putting the likes of nicholas sparks in the literature section, REALLY? get a grip.

so browsing the bookstore, even in the literature section, ends up feeling a little bit like hunting for gold nuggets that have been mixed into an enormous pile of manure. there’s a lot of gold so it’s not too hard to find some, and sometimes it’s even near the top, but at the end of the day it’s still unpleasant because you're rooting around in manure and it's stinky and gross and getting all over your clothes. the most enraging part, however, is the people around you. what are they doing? they are frolicking about in the manure, rolling around in it, talking to their friends about how great it is. maybe they are even eating some of it. could they possibly... be here... for the manure? absolutely disgusting. as we walked out of the bookstore i was informed that big corm has passed on to the great ranch in the sky. now we only have pinecone left...

of course i simply let all of this silently stew within me, slowly approaching a boil. in fact i try not to tell anyone irl that i’m into literature, it makes it seem to them like you think you’re better than them (which you objectively are, but making it explicit is a bad look). so when i’m reading an ebook on my phone and people ask what i’m doing, i tell them i’m watching funny family guy clip compilations on tiktok.

the great ████ █████

last weekend’s █████████ unexpectedly turned into my last one ██ ████ ██ ███ ████████, so it was time to really let loose and ████ ███ ████ ████ farewell █████. i started off by driving to ███ ███████ instead of taking amtrak, █████████ ██ █████ an extra ███████ █████ for the mileage (and essentially getting a free visit to ████████ while i was at it). then i parked in not the cheapest, but the SECOND cheapest parking area at ███, in the back of the parking structure within walking distance to ███ ████████, because i was not about to bother with █ ██████. all of that is of course █████ ███████ ████████ and frankly i should have been doing that from the start, why was i bothering to inconvenience myself and my friends to ████ █████ ████ ████ █████? then, for ███ ████ ███████, filet mignon for dinner multiple nights? sure, why not, it’s ███ ████████ ████.

but the ████ █████████ began ██ ███ ██████ ████, where all of the ███████ opportunities that had tempted me before were now possible because [DATA EXPUNGED]. he said █████ and i could ████ ██ █ ███████ ███ with the ████ we wanted ██ ████, and he’d help us [REDACTED]. it was going to be a piece of cake since all we had to do was [REDACTED] and then we’d be golden. [DATA EXPUNGED] like kids in a candy store, we [DATA EXPUNGED], mostly from ███ ████ ████ botanical ██████████, and filled up ███ █████ ███ ████ ████ for ourselves and gifts [REDACTED]. i finally got my mom the ███████ i promised her as a late mother’s day gift, and a couple of ███ ██ ████ ██ my dad for father’s day.

then, right before clean-up, █████ [DATA EXPUNGED] exfiltrated ███ ███ ████ ███ █████, hiding it ██ ███ █████ ████. the next day, just the three of us headed downtown to a █████ ██████ store and [REDACTED] back home. [DATA EXPUNGED], the ████████ ████████ option was $120, which i paid in ████ using [DATA EXPUNGED] (another part of the █████████). then, using the [REDACTED] i got from selling █████ ██████ for $20 (which, for some reason, was really popular with older ladies), █████ and i went to this extremely good bbq place and split a massive platter that included basically everything on their menu. all in all, a fantastic ████████ ████, although it sounds like there are some even BIGGER plans for [DATA EXPUNGED] in august...

いざ！紀伊國屋きのくにやへ

もう直ぐ「魔入りました！入間くん」11巻を読み終わりそうだから、先日次巻を買うために紀伊國屋という日本専門書店に行った。いつか全巻集めるつもりだけど、一遍にたくさん金を使いたくないから、毎回三巻ぐらいしか買えない。でも、今回は書店で次巻だけがなっかた、少し悔しかった。イーベイかアマゾンで買わなくてはいけないかも。

それでも、やっと「坊っちゃん」を買った。坊っちゃんって良くて読みやすいと聞いたからずっと紀伊國屋で探していたけど、今まで全然見つからなかった。

it was recently brought to my attention (shoutout orphanim) that a lot of the links on the site are broken. huh, i thought, neoshitties being silly again perhaps? as i took a look under the hood to diagnose the issue. the problem was immediately obvious: the pages being linked to were completely gone! vanished! the entire "writings" folder where i indiscriminately parked half my pages was missing! there was something like 20 pages in there! some of them were even kind of good!

i thought back a little and realized what probably happened: on april 2nd when i was cleaning up all the rubbish kit dumped in my site's main directory, i must have accidentally deleted the "writings" folder as well. so really this is all kit's fault. but would it really be "suboptimalism" if this kind of thing didn't happen now and then?

"good thing you can just restore everything from the backups, right?" who the heck do you think i am? of course i do not have any backups! all my writings will have to be carefully transcribed from the ancient scrolls (word documents) and seasoned with the appropriate html tags again! i have to admit, this isn't the worst thing ever. frankly, i was already considering going back and editing a lot of the older writings now that i am several months wiser. the stuff i do post tends to be very lightly edited to begin with, because i'm very impatient and publish very soon after writing. the issue is that in order to edit well, you need some distance from the work, which is usually why writers get other people to edit their work. alternatively, you can just wait a while and come back to it.

so for the next little bit, expect to see some of the old stuff coming through again, and don't go accusing me of running out of ideas and showing reruns. i just have to hope that all of the best stuff is still in the word documents, because occasionally i'll add stuff during the transcription process. i guess a couple pages also made it to archive sites somehow. there might also be a few pages i wrote directly in the site editor which could be lost forever, although i tend to only do that for the blog posts.

then again there were some pages that are probably best forgotten, ones where i started strong and then petered out halfway through, eventually forgetting about it entirely and not even bothering to link it anywhere. if you think about it, in this age of reckless unchecked data creation and storage, one of the boldest actions you can take is deliberate deletion. the human mind forgets for a reason... now for this week's homework please read the borges short story "funes the memorious" (which i have found difficult to forget).

so one of the hottest netflix shows lately is this south korean reality competition show physical: 100, in some ways a spiritual successor to squid gamealthough while looking it up i just found out netflix currently has a reality competition show directly based on squid game in the works in addition to a second season of the original show. i was actually watching squid game for the first time (now that the dust has settled) concurrently with physical: 100, which was an... interesting juxtaposition. some elements were eerily similar in both shows, like the staff outfits and the maximalist set design. i wonder if physical: 100 took inspiration from squid game, or if squid game was purposely replicating established korean reality competition show aesthetics. i'm relatively assured of its popularity because even my mom was talking about it. for those unfamiliar, the premise of the show is that they gathered 100 korean athletes (plus a handful of foreigners living in korea) from disciplines across the board (olympic sports, powerlifting, mma, wrestling, crossfit, dancing, bodybuilding, climbing, arm wrestling, army drill sergeanting, etc.) and had them compete in various physical tasks to determine "who has the best physique". it's a pretty fresh take on the genre because you rarely see so many accomplished pros competing against each other outside their fields on these sorts of shows, usually in similar american shows (like wipeout, for example) they mostly cast "average joes" with wacky or manic personalities that will "look good on tv". the show is also notable for having some really creative designs for its challenges, which they are also able to make a lot harder than in other shows because the contestants are all professional athletes. probably the most memorable challenge from the show is one where they have to push a 2 ton wooden boat in teams of 10 across a couple dozen yards and then up a wooden ramp.

anyways, the other day i was working out with some friends in their big backyard shed, a former garage facing the back alley. incidentally this is the same "backyard shed" that served as the venue/stage for the concert that devoted readers will recall from "my budget bocchi the rock moment" of last month. i am starting to suspect there may be highly-hyperstitious mystic energies running through it. early into the workout (but pretty late into the evening), i started hearing a lot of engine revving noises coming from behind the back wall, evidently in the alley. it's pretty rare to hear any sort of cars coming through the alley because it's notoriously treacherous, especially after all the recent rainfall. currently you could safely say it's more puddle than dirt or gravel, and you never know how deep the huge potholes are gonna be because they are all filled with brown water. the revving noises kept going on and on, so eventually i stood up on some cinder blocks and took a peek over the fence into the alley.

⊕it was one of these big boys by the way, not the iconic grumman llv mail truckright there in the alley just behind the shed wall, there was a big white postal service van stuck in the mud like a beached whale, with a guy trying to push it from the back. it looked like the van had gone off the road a little bit into someone's backyard to dodge a particularly massive puddle (practically a lake, and ended up stuck in mud at an unfortunate angle trying to get back up the slight slope with absolutely no traction. a random guy from the neighborhood was hopelessly trying to push from the back as the mail guy tried to gun it from the front seat. it was basically the boat challenge from physical:100, which i had just finished watching with my friends. i immediately called out to the driver and offered our services.

the three of us joined random neighborhood guy pushing from the back while the mail guy up front kept flooring the gas. it was difficult because it was hard to get a good footing because of all the mud, but pushing in sync we managed to get the van rocking back-and-forth on its wheels and built up some momentum to get it going forward. we managed to push it maybe a foot forward, but we still somehow had to get it up the slight incline back to the road and that wasn't going well. neighborhood guy peaced out at this point, and the mail guy came out to confer with us. man, he said, i just had one more package left to deliver. he seemed a bit inexperienced and wasn't exactly sure what to do in this situation, so we tried to make some stuff up. we got some wood out and tried to put it under the wheels for traction, but it just kept sliding out. we tried to move the van backwards onto the wood and somehow it seemed to end up more stuck than before when we tried to push it again. finally, the mail guy decided that the situation was "totally fucked" and called in for reinforcements or a tow or something. we slunk back into the backyard shed with an acute feeling of failure, and one friend even went back in to the house. i had the feeling like i wouldn't be able to sleep at night from having left that postal van stuck back there. "our team has been eliminated from the competition."

about twenty minutes later, there was a bit of commotion in the alley again, so i peeked over the fence into the alley again. maybe a tow truck had appeared? no, now there was ANOTHER mail van parked in the alley. the reinforcements had arrived. a grizzled veteran mail guy had arrived who had evidently seen some shit in his time. "yeah these tires just ain't made for mud" he said as he laid down some chains in front of the tires. maybe with his gear and experience we could achieve redemption? i asked if he wanted any pushers and he replied in the affirmative, so i ran back into the house and got the friend who had left to come back, along with another one who had just been hanging out. the four of us plus the mail guy took positions at the back and started pushing. it wasn't budging at all, and then the veteran mailman called out from the driver's window, "ready for me to start driving forward?". oops. with the five us, we built up some back-and-forth momentum again, pushed the truck a little, and then suddenly the resistance was gone and we were slowly but surely getting it back up onto the road. mission accomplished. the mail guy thanked us profusely and issued a blessing: "may your mail always come safe and on time".

• ※taxes
• ※minecraft relapse
• ※while stopped for a while at a station on the train, the conductor came on and made an announcement that due to mechanical issues the train could not continue any further and that they would get ubers for all the passengers to their final destinations. thus i ended up riding in the dark for sixty miles in the passenger seat of a stuffed suv with christian rock radio playing softly in the background.
• ※my brother comes to my door and asks if i can buy him some bitcoin. what for, i immediately ask (of course). he said that for the past six months he has been sponsoring a nigerian guy by sending him fifty bucks in bitcoin every month. he tried to paint it as a charitable thing like when you donate to african orphans or something but also made sure to let me know that fifty bucks is a lot over there and so it's enabling this guy to really live it up, from what my brother has been told by him. i asked if the nigerian guy has a job, and with a completely straight face my brother tells me he is an online scammer. so you've met a nigerian prince, i retort. my brother informs me that the nigerian guy actually does romance scams now, because apparently those are a lot more effective. several minutes of argument ensue over this complicated moral gray area of knowingly sponsoring legitimate scammers and whether sending money to a scammer while knowing they are a scammer constitutes a scam or being scammed. it ends with my brother talking about how he's still chatting with this nigerian guy because the guy seems weirdly obsessed with him, and is also trying to acquire extra money to "travel to the us to study".
• ※pyramid
• ※i met this korean guy who told me he learned english by using discord. sometimes he would verbalize reaction emojis after things people said, including things he said himself. another one of the many fascinating effects of socializing primarily through social media, by now i could probably write a book-length anthropological study because for some mysterious reason i've managed to meet a lot of real specimens. it's almost as if they're drawn to me, like flies to feces.

⊕reading more than one book a month, apparently. i learned this and other interesting tidbits from a recent new yorker article that's been making the rounds lately, "the end of the english major", investigating declining enrollment in the humanities at american universities. the article is somewhat meandering and indecisive but contains a few juicy "behind the scenes" segments people have clipped and shared online, revealing briefly the Absolute Current State of english departments in some of the nation's (and arguably the world's) most prestigious educational institutions like the irreproachable Harvard University. for example, in the most memorable episode, a highly-decorated harvard humanities professor claims watching prestige television like "breaking bad" or "chernobyl" is comparable to literary study while sitting back and resting his feet on his desk. he fusses a bit with some silly putty and then, with perfect comedic timing, adds "better call saul" to his list.

it seems from the article that what's driving the decline in the humanities is that all the smart and motivated students are getting lured away to stem majors instead. the author interviews quite a few students who admit they like literature and writing, but instead opted to study something in stem. this is probably because they're smart enough to realize that getting into the humanities now is not a good play. these days college is so expensive that it's usually too risky to take chances pursuing degrees that aren't sought-for in the job market. it also doesn't help that rigor and standards in humanities departments have had to drop precipitously because to be a humanities student now you have to be thick-skulled or just naive enough to ignore the marching band waving red flags at the department entrance. according to the article, current harvard english students are having trouble reading something as basic as "the scarlet letter", and the extent of analysis/criticism from students is merely pointing out what parts of books are "problematic" which is about as difficult (and deep) as doing a word search.

a reason this article struck a bit of a chord with me is because it's one of the few times i've seen myself (somewhat) represented in media: you might think from my writings here that i'm studying literature or english or something, but in fact i'm one of those conniving book readers who betrayed the humanities by going for a stem major instead. i skip zoom lectures and phone in all my assignments so i can have more free time to read literature and i daresay i'm doing better at it than those in the ivy league who are actually majoring in it or even teaching it.

have i made the right choice? i can still remember the exact incident that confirmed i did and simultaneously cosmically blackpilled me on the current state of upper education in america as a whole because of how outrageous it was. i was required to take one upper-level class from the english department called "scientific and technical writing" which is still pretty much the only one i've ever taken. one of the assignments was to write a "process description" explaining how to do something (i did "setting up a minecraft server" and wasn't alone in that). then, when doing peer review, i got paired up with this guy who was straight-up functionally illiterate. his process description was on "how to roll a blunt" and it was one of the most horrifying things i've ever seen. words were twisted and tortured in such an excruciating manner that i could almost hear screams of suffering sentences from the screen. it was almost completely unsalvageable, there were more spelling and grammar mistakes than correct usage. most words looked like he just tried to spell them the way they sound, like someone just learning to write. almost the entire thing was underlined by the spelling/grammar checker and he didn't seem to have made use of the automatic spelling correction at all or even thought to himself "hmmm what is with all this underlining". then later, the instructor made him read a paragraph of something we were reading aloud and i nearly expired from cringe and secondhand embarrassment as he slowly stumbled his way along, actually sounding out words with more than two syllables the same way elementary school kids just learning to read do. but that's not even the worst part: after the peer review, i asked him what his major was, and do you know what he said? english. in his third year. after grades came out for that assignment, i looked at the grade distribution for it online, and the lowest score in the class was an 86. evidently something in universities is going SERIOUSLY wrong and i've been obsessed with figuring out what ever since.

do i lament the looming demise of the university humanities department? not particularly, in fact i may even go so far as to say good riddance. maybe they were worth saving back in the good old days like when old nabby was still kicking, but i think that the increasing institutional capture and bureaucratization of fields by universities is detrimental not just to the development of literature and arts, but even to science as well. once upon a time writers would come to their calling from diverse occupations and backgrounds, however now they're trying to funnel anyone with interest or talent into the same rigid disconnected academic System for upwards of seven years before discharging them into another closed cut-off community (new york city). a lot of modern writing is boring because writers are all hanging out with the same people and doing the same things. to save literature, you must do anything but studying literature in college. for a primer, read "the savage detectives".

i would like to preface all this by saying that i’ve never been “in” any sort of music scene and frankly i wouldn’t really consider myself “into” music. i don’t spend a lot of time searching for new music, most of the music i listen to is objectively pretty bad, and i am also one of those types who will listen to the same song or set of songs like a thousand times in a row. but then, i watched bocchi the rock, and everything changed: i went out and bought a guitar, played it until my fingers bled, found some bandmates who became my closest friends and then after working hard for weeks we finally took the stage for our first show... NO, here is what really happened: i finished the show, thought “huh i guess that sort of thing might be cool to be a part of”, and promptly forgot all about it. then, in one of those classic synchronicity moments (like when you check out the “ramon llull” wikipedia page and then suddenly it seems like everything you read afterwards namedrops him), a friend of a friend announces on extremely short notice that he will be hosting an “underground” concert in his backyard shed with four small hip local bands he’s friends with. this could be my bocchi moment, i think, except that i have not been shut-in for a couple of years autistically getting really good at some instrument, no i have just been playing dance games and reading and writing screeds on this Website. but there are other options: i recalled that part where they had bocchi working in the bar area, and i immediately asked if i could be the venue’s exclusive drinks vendor. sure, he said, as long as i didn’t try to sell any alcohol.

luckily, getting cheap bulk drinks isn’t hard / when you’ve got a Costco card. then i scavenged a bunch of stuff from around the house to make my stand look really legit (old minifridge, wagon, camp chair, folding table, my brother’s old safe to use as a cash box, gigantic "magnum" sharpie for making signage) and headed over to the venue a bit early to get set up. i scored a primo spot for my stand just inside the entrance of the open garage, beside a 1988 hatchback honda civic that i believe they had just finished pushing in there from the backyard, to make more room outside. what they didn’t know is that it was almost certainly going to rain, which is why i made sure to claim one of the only dry spots besides the big backyard shed where the bands would be playing. i drew up some signs, laid out the products with prices on the table, made a display for the single plush minecraft bee i was trying to sell for fifty bucks (HIGH ROLLERS ONLY, EXTREMELY LIMITED SUPPLIES said the sign i wrote for it), set up the safe/cash box, organized the stock in the back, gave up on trying to find someplace to plug in the minifridge and decided just to use it for show, and then finally sat back in my camping chair. soon, my assistant/friend (who had offered his services when i’d talked about the whole scheme on the way home from the arcade the day before) showed up and took a seat beside me. to finish things off, i opened up and poured some inaugural glasses of our private drink supply for the night: a $12.99 costco box of wine poorly hidden in the corner of the table behind the “cash box”. one of the benefits of working for yourself at an impromptu backyard concert is that you can drink on the job.

things immediately seemed like they were going wrong. it was already “doors open” time and barely anybody had shown up. the flustered friend-of-a-friend, who had boasted of hosting “400 people” in his modest backyard during the last show he’d done, was running back-and-forth between the shed and the entrance mumbling questions about the whereabouts of “all the people”. things started to look up as the first band began their set and people streamed in. many people passed the stand but they were mostly looking for the bathroom or calling the minecraft bee cute. thank you, i’m well aware. i sipped the boxed wine continuously hoping that maybe it would sharpen my sales skills. i just had to bide my time until people got thirsty from bobbing their heads to the music or whatever they were doing over there in that shed. a guy asked if we sold beer and i told him if he put some cash in the tip jar i could give him some boxed wine. he said he would think about it and wandered off. some tipsy girls came by and inquired about the “barter” part of my “cash venmo -or- barter ONLY” sign, and filled up my emptied wine glass with some kind of juicy vodka concoction in exchange for a dr. pepper. a good friend stopped by and chatted for a while, and perhaps feeling a bit of pity due to our lack of sales so far, bought a coke which he went upstairs and mixed with vodka right away. the guy from earlier came back, dropped a dollar in the tip jar, and i poured him a big swig of wine. i remained optimistic, as it was barely seven and the night was still young.

then, disaster: i noticed flashing lights reflected on the side of the neighboring house. i squeezed out of the comfy corner in the garage and headed out front to investigate. there was a cop car stopped in the street, and one concert host bravely taking one for the team talking with them through the rolled-down window. everyone else stood on the lawn watching closely with concerned expressions. i consulted with them and it seemed that things were Not Going Well. our expert negotiator had valiantly stalled them for nearly thirty minutes but the threats of arrest were becoming too frequent for his tastes. i slinked back to the garage and sullenly reported the news. the first band finished their set, somebody made an announcement, the music died down, and people slowly streamed out of the shed and past my stand. not a single one stopped to buy anything. i guess it hadn’t been long enough for any of them to get thirsty. i sat back in my chair and drank copious amounts of wine while shouting “fuck tha po-lice” at intervals and generally complaining about how i’m never going to financially recover from this. the expert negotiator, now off the clock, came by and started shouting about how he was going to kill the neighbors. eventually the last attendees trickled out, and we convened a meeting in the living room. they had found another venue a half-hour walk away, truly underground this time (in someone’s basement). i asked if i could still sell drinks and they said probably not because it was way cramped, so as they left i stuck around with my friend/assistant on the couch. i retrieved the boxed wine and we watched tv in a somewhat drunken stupor. at some point a girl in one of the bands came in, tossed me twenty bucks, and said she was taking the minecraft bee. i bought it for 19.99 so i guess i technically made a profit.

when i left, i discovered a parking ticket on my windshield. welcome to the Real World.

it's 2/2, twintails day. by far the cutest hairstyle, love the damn things. anyways i just remembered like i do every couple months that i have a bunch of loose, photocopied reference sheets from the cult classic anime oretwi (俺、ツインテールになります。) buried in the bottom of a drawer, which i bought for 2000 yen at mandarake a few years back. i'm not sure if these are available anywhere on the internet, i haven't seen them myself but i haven't looked either. anyways i scanned a couple sheets of aika today just to celebrate, maybe eventually i'll scan them all or at least put all these sheets into a binder or something. also this is a good test to see if the fixes i made to the blog page make pictures show up properly now, since i didn't have any to upload before.

an html element i'm very fond of is the dl description list element, which i use on quite a few pages "merely to create indentation" in exactly the manner you are warned not to do in the mdn web docs. by my reckoning there is only one place where i've used the dl element appropriately. finding that dl element would probably be good for a scavenger hunt on my site if i ever decide to do one. anyway, up until now, the blog page was also based off a dl element, but no longer. why the capitulation? well, first off, i noticed that the page was starting to get excessively long, and due for some trimming in one way or another.

the main reason, though, was that i noticed that for whatever reason, certain pictures i'd insert into blog posts would end up puny no matter how i put them in. this was concerning because i wanted to put some pictures of art i'd seen into a blog post, and obviously that wouldn't do. i suspected it had to do with everything being in a dl tag, and so i decided to finally ditch it.

in retrospect i am pretty sure the picture punification was not because of the dl tag at all, but either way it is fixed now. also i accidentally deleted the pictures i wanted to post in the first place. oops. in other news i messed around and made some margins bigger so hopefully writing on the site is a lot more readable now.

an exhausting day: a one hour flight that felt three times longer, a train ride the same length, and not a crumb to eat. this was all on top of having not slept nearly long enough to recover from how hard i had worked the day before. and so i ended up shambling the darkened streets looking for somewhere to dine.

i soon stumbled upon someplace still open, beaming soft beckoning light to the sidewalk. it looked brand new, it certainly hadn't been around last time i had been around these parts. it was KYURAMEN. idly i thought about how phantom places of respite waylaying wearly lost travelers is an extremely common theme in fairy tales and a few goosebumps books. the nature of the establishment recalled to me miyazawa kenji's tale the restaurant of many orders (注文の多い料理店) in particular. but i went in anyway.

the entire was very chic, heavily japanese-inspired. wood slats, red lanterns, paper screens, and one wall covered in those small wooden cards with stuff written on them that you see at shrines. the vaguely-asian but certainly not japanese host led me into a private booth sealed off with a curtain door and paper walls. they were already going quite hard with their interior design alone.

the real confusion began when i started to inspect the menu, a rather thick, spiral-bound affair. the first five or so pages were dedicated to a hagiography of the restaurant's food, as if i still needed more convincing to actually eat something in the restaurant after being seated and opening the menu. i didn't read the text very closely but i did notice it had a stilting quality, like it had been written by a foreigner. mostly this came through in the word choice and awkward commas placed like, this. curiously, they had very little to say about the restaurants origins, which is the one thing i really wanted to know. there was only a vague paragraph referencing "The Founder" as if he was a mythical figure or a cult leader. the only thing i gleaned was that he was not japanese, since he reportedly visited japan many times to "study ramen".

the next pages, as one might expect, exhibited the ramen offerings. they did so rather gratuitously, taking up a full two page spread just for three menu items. the ramen itself wasn't unusual, but then i noticed you could upgrade any of them to a "combo" including a pork bao bun and thai ice tea. excuse me? then, on the next page, i saw it: the KYUBURGER. to go between two disc-shaped buns made from rice, you could choose from a variety of exotic meats (teriyaki beef, pork belly, soft-shell crab, eel). to drink? thai ice tea, of course. and on the side? obviously salt and pepper crispy corn... wait WHAT???

i was absolutely flabbergasted. where had i stumbled into? in any case what i had to do was obvious: i had to get a kyuburger. i pressed the button to summon the waiter for my order. did i forget to mention that? they had a button on the wall for calling the waiters. i had seen it a few times in japan but i had yet to see anywhere courageous enough to deploy it stateside, even in aggressively japanese restaurants. a waiter appeared almost instantly and took my order of a pork belly rice burger, with crispy corn and thai ice tea.

ruthlessly efficient, the food appeared in barely five minutes. first one waiter dropped off the crispy corn, then right aftwerwards a different one came in with the thai ice thai flanked by another dropping off the rice burger itself. i noticed that all seemed to be wearing subtle earpieces.

so here it was, crispy corn thai ice tea and the rice burger. i tried to pick up the burger but it was still a bit too hot to handle. instead, i munched on the corn, the taste of which i can only describe as being "fried bits". it was inoffensive however not particularly compelling, i do not think i would get it again. where did they even pick up some an unusual dish? i don't think i've ever seen it anywhere else before, and i can't really think of any ethnic cuisine to which it might belong. there was no question, though, of where the thai ice tea originated, which was quite good although that might just be the sugar talking.

⊕then, the piece de resistance, the burger. i attacked it again with my bare hands but the fragile rice buns resisted the attack. you would think that they'd compact them somehow to make them more sturdy but no, they are just regular rice grains held together in that shape by pure stickiness. this is probably why they provided what appeared to be a plastic knife and fork behind the burger, which i picked up for my next assault. in fact they were quite solid and certainly not made of plastic. i also noticed that they were oddly elongated. the burger yielded to them easily and i have to admit it tasted pretty good. i guess you can't go all that wrong with pork belly and mayo, though there was an issue where the seaweed garnish would get stuck to the rice and swept up for the ride, spoiling the flavor and texture somewhat. overall i do not think the structure of the dish was ideal, the top rice patty especially felt like it kept getting in the way. if you have to eat it with a knife and a fork anyway then might as well ditch the whole burger pretense and make it more like an eggs benedict, with a single rice patty on the bottom topped with meat and sauce.

i said before that the interior vibe was immaculate, but it was severely lacking in one crucial aspect: the background music in the restaurant accompanying my meal was some of the most painfully generic pop music i have ever heard. i can't believe they dropped the ball this hard when the restaurant is desperately calling for its own idiosyncratic background soundtrack, like when muji had haruomi hosono compose "watering a flower" for their stores. the only relief was the sound of two employees just out of sight beyond the walls of the private booth cleaning the floor, rhythmically pouring some water from an old five gallon soy sauce bucket and then scratchily spreading it around the wooden floor with brooms.

when i was done eating, i summoned the waiter again with the button, and they promptly appeared with a tablet with which i settled the bill. i exited the restaurant, returned to the cold dark sidewalks. despite eating, i was still in a bit of a fatigued daze, if not even deeper in thanks to the surreal meal i had just experienced. was any of that real? kyuramen must be one of those places that only appears if you are completely out of it. i wouldn't be surprised if i couldn't find it again the next day. or, i do find it and there's nothing bizarre about it at all, it is a completely ordinary ramen joint.

when i boarded the plane and sat down at my seat, i spotted an endangered species: an inflight magazine. once upon a time there were thriving ecosystems in seatback pockets, but now on nearly every airline they have become barren wastelands containing only generic safety cards and maybe a credit card ad. covid was the last straw for many of the survivors, done in not only by the dramatic decrease in passengers but also the fact that they represented yet another potential transmission vector.

united's inflight magazine "hemispheres" seems to be the sole survivor. wondering how they could have possibly pulled it off, i opened it up and set my own (cerebral) hemispheres to work on the contents. my sample size expanded a bit on the next flight as well, which was still carrying the hopelessly-outdated december 2022 issue (yes, it's published monthly!). here are my ecological findings:

there is a small group of apparently fiercely loyal advertisers who have probably been running ads in hemispheres for well over a decade. i know this because i vividly recall seeing basically these same ads while horribly bored and thumbing through as a kid. one of them is this 4 page section entitled "THE BEST DOCTORS IN AMERICA", memorable because each page always featured a single stern, serious man posing confidently in a crisp suit astride a tasteful deep blue background. most of them have absurdly specific specialties or are plastic surgeons, and all are located in hip metropolitan areas. all of this i remember noticing as a kid, but what i didn't notice was the small text above "THE BEST DOCTORS IN AMERICA" which says "these doctors are among". maybe it actually wasn't always there and they had to add it after some lawsuit or complaint. then there was the text underneath that said they were "..selected by the nation's leading providers of information on top doctors". it is probably one of the most bizarre niche ads i've ever seen.

another interesting ad niche is "executive/professional matchmaking" services. there were ads for three separate ones and i don't think i've ever seen an ad for this kind of thing anywhere else. they were in close proximity to several ads for luxury condos "starting at $1.5 million", or an investment opportunity in a portfolio of "lucrative" real estate like the hotel that served as the model for the overlook hotel in the shining (minimum investment: $50,000). keep in mind this is the magazine that they put at every seat in the plane.

also advertised: an evening with dr. zahi hawass "the world's most famous archeologist" (archeology must be doing pretty poorly lately because i have not heard of him). for a price, he will reveal to attendees of his lecture tour the SECRETS of ancient egypt. finally, near the back of the magazine was a humble, poorly-designed ad for "PLASTIC INJECTION MOLDING" from a random company in michigan "seeking new projects".

i suppose then there's the actual "articles" to consider. maybe this is how they pulled it off, because most of them sound like ad copy or at the very least contain paid promotion. a short piece about a roadtrip goes suspiciously in-depth about the specific model of car used, for example. there is a whole section near the back that is just a grid of products that look like they belong on "shark tank". examples: "superfoods for dogs" and "portable blender". in the december issue it was called the holiday gift guide, in the january one, "new year, new you". i actually quite enjoyed that particular section because it reminded me of the dearly departed seatback skymall magazine, with its quirky selection of dubious (but amusing) domestic gadgetry served up by the likes of hammacher schlammer or however the heck it was spelled.

each issue seems to have two headline articles: "3 Perfect Days" done for some city, and then an interview with a B+ list celebrity. neither are blatantly advertisements. there's also always a "letter from the CEO of united" (which i'm sure he never actually writes) but those are pretty much ads for united. i was unable to read any significant portion of either of the "3 Perfect Days" articles because they were simply too nauseating. they were apparently written by different authors but never in a million years could you tell. the celebrity interview in the january issue was the guy who voiced the meerkat in the lion king. why would he possibly stoop so low as to appear in hemispheres? well, it appeared he was doing it to promote some new film project. advertising strikes again.

the only other takeaways from the articles: apparently "sober bars" are A Thing now, and there was also this incredible turn of phrase in one article: "...a forgotten but known genius." i suspect that the reason hemispheres is still around is that their ad sales team is the best in the business, and they have a willingness to turn pretty much the entire magazine into advertising. at least they still have the route map in the back with all the curvy lines connecting cities although even that part has been neutered. now you only curvy lines for the sparse international destinations, and they were very faint. i wonder what the atmosphere must be like working in the hemispheres office right now. they are nearly the last in their niche, waning industry. are they making enough money that they feel like they're off the chopping block, or does it feel like they have the sword of damocles looming over them?

the recent new year's er... festivities are still fresh in my head, which has got me thinking about one of my pet lit crit theories again. my proposition is that the most literary drug is alcohol, based off my observation that it is really hard to sift through the wikipedia articles of acclaimed writers without constantly tripping over the word "alcoholism"the second most literary drug, in my opinion, is opium. see, for example, de quincey or coleridge. it is really unfortunate that opium has been completely supplanted by its upstart, far too potent descendants. the dream of sitting back on a winter night in a big comfy easy chair beside the roaring fireplace and sipping some opium tea before bed is dead.. maybe this is just because of the sorts of books i read, after all i started my literary journey many years ago with infinite jest, basically half of which is about rehab/alchoholics anonymous and almost certainly based on personal experience.

i've shopped this theory around several times, unfortunately not really to anybody who's done as much reading as i have. one stoner of course countered with cannabis, a proposal i felt was laughable when i considered the creative outputs (or frankly any outputs) of the stoners i've known. mostly their knowledge and abilities begin and end with encylopedic knowledge of maurijuana strains and products, along with a series of increasingly byzantine procedures for consuming them in the highest dosages possible. anyways, as an example, this stoner offered up jack kerouac who apparently spoke fondly of smoking weed in his most well-known work on the road. i'd heard of kerouac but i wasn't really familiar with him or his work, so i moseyed down to wikipedia to see if this claim held up. and what should i find in the last paragraph of the introduction but this sentence: "In 1969, at the age of 47, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking." case closed: kerouac was not a stoner, he was an alcoholic who dabbled in ganja on the side. in fact i had just gained a new alcoholic writer to support my theory.

i also submitted my theory to one of my far-better-read friends, although to be fair he probably takes too many book recommendations from me to be an unbiased source. he is a big stephen king guy, so he floated cocaine as a possibility. king famously spent most of the eighties on an extended cocaine bender, during which he wrote many of his most popular books, some of which he doesn't even remember writing. i heard an apocryphal story one time about king reading a book one time and feeling the oddest sense of deja vu, then turning to look at the title page to see if he had already read it only to discover that he had written the book. at the time i refuted my friend's claim by declaring that stephen king writes genre fiction not literature (which escalated into a wonderful argument), but i did some more research just now and it would seem that king originally took up cocaine to try and quit drinking, then ended up doing both in copious amounts during his decade-long bender. another win for team alcohol? at the very least it's seeming like a common denominator.

anyways, last night i sat down with a glass of wine to watch some bocchi the rock!. i was thinking about getting another glass once i finished it off but then i watched episode 6, in which bocchi encounters an alcoholic bass guitarist on the street. she tries to explain it but bocchi only feels pity. then she says bocchi looks like the type who would get really into alcohol. it occured to me that they do make a drug for social anxiety, it's called alcohol. but the scene that follows in which bocchi imagines her potential "drowning in alcohol" future is just her alone in her room amidst hundreds of empty strong zero cans. i did not get another glass of wine afterwards.

⊕ the end of the year, a natural time for retrospection. fortunately it's easy these days to avoid any particularly deep retrospective introspection because every app that keeps data on you (which is all of them, more or less) now spits out a bunch of numbers to "sum up" your year (whether or not they all add up to one complete year is left as an exercise to the reader). you can compare with others and then move right along to racking them up for next year. this year i see that even steam has joined in, when i saw people posting these steam replay things and competing to see who had the biggest numbers. fools, i thought as i posted mine in response and utterly blew them out of the water, this is one of those games in which you win if you have the lowest number, like golf. everyone kneeled out of respect and deemed me the king of gamers.

it wasn't too long ago that my assured victory this year would have been completely unthinkable. i would like to ascribe it to my indomitable will, courage, etc. etc. but i can't help but wonder if i just got lucky, or if i simply grew up. maybe i shouldn't feel so smug and superior about my stats, the exact thing i just dunked on people for doing in the last paragraph. maybe i should aim to be like the guy who got the message "Sorry, this account does not have any playtime this year". then again, perfect abstinence wouldn't be very suboptimal, so i think i am doing just fine.

i also think it is funny that the steam replay stats are all in percentages. i feel like this was a deliberate design decision they made, for fear that if they put in some people's actual gameplay numbers they would be horrified and perhaps take it as some sort of wake-up call. i suppose they do not realize just how far gone some gamers are.

⊕i’ve been intending to document my considerable canned coffee can collection for a while now. it would be an excellent comfy indoor winter project, if it wasn’t for the fact that the dismal seasonal sunlight and sickly indoor lights make for poor photographs. then, i remembered some old guides i had seen about how to make a diy lightbox out of an old cardboard box.

i discussed the idea earlier with a friend who knows marginally more about photography and he said to just buy a cheap lightbox off amazon, where there are plenty available under those nauseating nonsense generic brand names used by the countless chinese sellers that seem to be rapidly taking over the platform. instead, i continued undeterred, and immediately ran into difficulties.

first off: the tissue issue. apparently you need some kind of thin transparent paper to diffuse the light into the box, like tissue paper. i really didn’t feel like going all the way out to some art store just for one thing, so i was ready to give up right then and there until it occurred to me, if it’s called TISSUE paper then maybe i can just use some regular tissues, like kleenexes. but first i had to test it with my light source, which i still had not found. every guide recommended lamps, bright white ones especially, however i went through the whole house and somehow found not one single usable lamp. i was ready to call it yet again, before remembering the extremely bright flashlight my mom had purchased to hunt for backyard burglars. i tested shining it through a kleenex and it seemed to work pretty well, so i pretty much had everything i needed to get to work.

⊕the lightbox guides i found were originally intended for taking pictures of figures and i happen to have a figure holding a canned coffee, so i also took this photowhen it was all done, it looked pretty good. shining the flashlight through the tissue at the top really did light up the inside of the box with a soft, smooth, even white light. then i realized it would be very difficult to hold the flashlight in place above the box while also working the camera in front of the box to take pictures. i also couldn’t rest the flashlight on anything, because the bulb had to be facing down unobstructed. the obvious solution was to hang it from something, namely the clothes-hanging rod in my closet. naturally i didn’t have any string or rope, but i was really getting into the swing of improvising by this point, so before long i had tied the flashlight up with an old ethernet cord i had on hand.

from the outside the whole setup looks outrageously janky, and i certainly had my doubts going in. then i got the camera out and started using it, and it was almost exactly what i had originally wanted: a nice little studio in which i could take clean crisp coffee can pictures. truly this is the essence of suboptimalism.

i saw blue skies and the sun again. turns out they were up there all along, all i had to do was take a plane. the clouds are just a barrier, bisecting the world. it's difficult to think of them as a true physical barrier since you can pass through them so effortlessly, so perhaps they're more of a mental or spiritual one. on our side is the ground, the gray, the gloom, constriction, the finite. on the other is the light, the heavens, the expanse, the infinite.

looking up from the ground, the clouds appear gray, but looking down from the window of the plane, they look like white. the clouds cover shrouds the surface uniformly like water, low enough though that some of the highest mountain peaks and ridges are still visible, poking out like islands. this is what the world would look like if the oceans suddenly rose a couple thousand feet, it occurs to me.

after the magnificent orange-blue gradient from the sunset finally fades to black, i look away from the window and have a peek at my neighbors. they are texting or using tiktok. once upon a time, being in flight was a kind of meditative interstitial space where you would be completely disconnected from the world for a time. you were quite literally above it all.

now, the barriers between the domains are rapidly eroding. it started with those telephone headsets you'd sometimes find in the back of middle seats, however the boundary was restored after they were removed due to being too expensive and unpopular. afterwards came the era of screens in the backs of seats, which sometimes offered live tv broadcasts if you swiped your credit card. then after that slow and expensive inflight wifi eventually arrived, mostly peddled by this company called "gogo" and targeted towards business travellers. i mistakenly believed things were still at that stage, but just recently i noticed that the price of wifi has dropped to just $8 on most airlines, a price reasonable enough that even i might go for it without work to do or an expense account. despite this, i do not partake, and keep the old ways alive by devoting my time inflight to reading books, distracted only by a guy sitting near me loudly discussing with his neighbor burning man and how he is using the money he made from getting in on bitcoin early to retire and focus on onewheels.

i am astonished when the artsy-looking girl next to me puts down her phone, reaches into her bag, and of all things pulls out a DS lite with a gameboy advance cartridge shoved in the front. it is pokemon firered. she is trying to catch moltres, soft-resetting when she fails. every time she tosses a pokeball, she angles the DS sideways so that she can spam the A button with all her might. i know a thing or two about this, i have been down this path before. i consider letting her know that smashing A while the pokeball shakes to improve catch rate is just an urban legend and doesn't actually work, but i refrain. after only a few tries, she gives up and goes back to her phone.

i decide to go to the flight attendants at the back of the plane and see if i can convince them to give me some alcohol for free, since earlier i moved to a middle seat to accommodate a lady with young twins who failed to book seats next to each other. they are always willing to go out on a limb for you if you save them from a potential incident. sure enough, the flight attendant reaches back into the cart and hands me not one but two little bottles of hazelnut coffee vodka. i stay behind and make a little bittle of conversation, accusing distant international rival air carrier lufthansa of some vague past seating-related impropriety. they haven't flown anywhere near here in at least a decade. sensible chuckles are had all around and i feel safe to return to my seat. the volume of vodka looks somewhat intimidating after i pour it all into a cup with ice, but the flavor is strong and the alcohol content is weak. what a great flight, i think after i finish it all.

it's very fitting that december started off with some light snow. it doesn't snow that often here so it's really something special, especially because after a snow is one of the only times you can see blue skies this time of year. when it snows it's as if the clouds throw themselves on the ground and leave holes in the otherwise perpetually overcast sky. because of the rarity everyone always gets caught unprepared, like me living out in the outrageously hilly outskirts of town with tires so bald they're off the norwood scale. but it was a light snow so by the late afternoon everything looked pretty much navigable again thanks to melting and other cars clearing the way with the tracks. i watched the progress anxiously as today was the appointed day of one of my biweekly arcade visits (i will let the reader choose if by this i mean "twice a week" or "once every two weeks") which i absolutely had to go through with. as i got on the road, i wondered what i was even worried about because by that point it was just a little bit damp.

everything was just as i had feared on the return trip several hours later though, when all the water on the road had time to freeze in the cold darkness. on even tiny inclines i watched cars in front of me slide around like butter in a hot pan, and then even felt myself lose control at several points. that was on the flat parts, too. then came the first big hill: as i crawled up, i saw a line of headlights coming down, spaced out like they were social distancing, creeping along at under half the speed limit. what a difference compared to how people normally drive down that hill. then i took the turn, and faced the steepest hill. the burly car in front of me gingerly ascended, sliding to and fro across the width of the road. i decided i was not about that life and parked the car at the bottom of the hill.

from there i walked the remaining mile home, which took a lot longer than usual because the route was both dark and extremely treacherous since there was also ice on the sidewalk. i was also wearing shorts but i didn't really mind. it felt eerily quiet without any cars out driving or people around. the whiteness of the snow covering everything contrasting with the dark somehow adds to the effect. things didn't feel dead, just subdued, hibernating. theoretically people were all still out there cocooned in the houses around me, but this was only evident to me from the gentle hum of heating units or the dim flickering glow of the television screen in a window. somehow i made it home without slipping or getting hypothermia.

things seemed lined up for a quiet thanksgiving this year since i am at my mom's. i thought it would be just me and her since my brother has been quite reclusive lately, never speaking, only coming out of his room in a massive hoodie to smoke. i suppose his bipolarity cycles with the seasons. but suddenly, starting earlier this week, it's like he's been rebooting. he was always really into food, cut his teeth on endless hours of the food network as a kid, and was especially into gourmet, michelin guide-type food. on tuesday, a big box marked "KEEP FROZEN" was delivered to the house, filled with all the gourmet essentials: foie gras, caviar, a truffle, fancy french butter with seals of authenticity all over it. i don't even want to know how much it all must've cost. he started appearing in the kitchen more often and holding normal conversations. then, on thursday he came down at noon and pretty much commandeered the entire kitchen for close to six straight hours. it was an absolute frenzy, almost like he was manic again. every surface and appliance seemed like it was being used for something.

around six or seven things started coming together on the dining room table, his special fancy seashell plates all laid out with small portions of carefully plated food. it really did look like part of the tasting menu at a gourmet restaurant. but it was also clear from the looks (and later, the taste) that it was all just a bit off, like the hotel room at the end of 2001: a space odyssey. there were a lot of really strange choices, like one dish that was half a mcdonald's-type oval hash brown (there were a ton in the freezer because i eat them for breakfast) with potato salad and then topped with... caviar of all things. some were a bit too rich in flavor because he overused some of the ingredients like foie gras: one dish was mashed potatoes made with foie gras, with foie gras gravy, and foie gras crumbles on top. however i must admit the main dish of duck breast with a cherry reduction sauce and mashed potatoes was actually quite good. really he might do quite well for himself if he practiced more, but even though it's one of his big interests he rarely actually cooks, just watches people do it on youtube and stuff.⊕
it tasted mostly like hash brown

how do i know so much about the flavor? well, that's because he didn't even end up eating most of it. i don't know what happened, maybe he was just too tired or had no appetite for some other reason, but after working hard for seven hours to get it onto the plate, i saw him take a few puffs of weed from a vape and then sit down at the table lethargically. he nibbled on all the dishes, commented on them, and then declared in a slow and somewhat fatigued manner that he was already full before going back to his room. i don't know if it was the weed or if he was just exhausted from putting in so much effort when he usually does nothing all day. but before he went, i asked if i could have some of the leftovers because i was really curious. i'm glad he said yes because it's not every day you get to have caviar on top of a hash brown, after all.

for many years i used to play team fortress 2 (tf2). my feelings regarding it are complicated. i definitely spent too much time playing it, but i cannot deny that it had incredible gameplay and a wicked sense of humor for what it was. however it's also the game that pioneered the lootbox/microtransaction monetization scheme that's eating much of the industry alive. this might not be so bad except for the fact that in terms of major updates, the game has basically been abandoned for years. when i quit about 3 years ago, updates had already nearly ground to a halt. a major update would come out about once a year, but they started feeling increasingly lazy and cashgrabby, mostly devolving into packaging up and selling a bunch of "community-created" content. there was also a whole thing where they basically just copied the cs:go "weapon skin" and "battle pass" mechanics into the game, because god knows people needed another paid grind event and more things with different rarity levels to roll and lust for.

despite their best efforts, i never put much money into the game. i guess i have my dad to thank/blame for this, as he was a legendary cheapskate who never ceased pointing out everything that he thought was overpriced or a a scam when i was a kid. i still never play crane games or order soda at restaurants. the one thing i did go in for was the battle passes because they seemed like an alright deal. they'd make the game more interesting with missions and you'd get a decent amount of item rewards. however, you'd also get exclusive crates (loot boxes) from them, which was just great since i always love it when you spend money to get the privilege of being able to spend money on something else. as a result, i'd always let all the crates from battle passes gather dust in the depths of my inventory, unopened.

the other day, i logged into my steam account for probably the first time in two years or so. i was curious, so i had a look at how tf2 is going along without actually playing it. i wasn't that surprised to find out there hadsn't been a single major update since i quit three years ago. it seems the extent of valve's involvement since then has been minor maintenance fixes and popping up every six months or so to crate some more community-created cosmetics for consumption.

what did shock me, though, is that somehow there are still tons of people playing tf2! when i checked steam's stats page, it was the fifth most played game, with over 80,000 players. i don't know if there's a livelier dead game out there. apparently earlier this year they even held a massive protest to try and convince valve to start caring about the game and make some new updates, or at the very least fix the major botting/hacking problem. imagine explaining that to gandhi or mlk.

i have to admit, though, now that i think about it i suppose i can't entirely blame valve for abandoning the game, it's not like they’re under any obligation to keep updating it with major content updates forever. it's free to play, there is more than enough content now to keep people playing for hundreds if not thousands of hours, and the game is now FIFTEEN years old with regular bug fixes and plenty of official servers still running. they've stepped away about as well as any developer has stepped away. even so, a game that's still running but that the developer seems to have given up acquires a kind of strange, dispirited "god is dead" atmosphere to playing it.

next, i peeped some historical player charts on steamcharts.com, and was even more dumbfounded to discover that there are actually more people playing tf2 now than when i quit. in 2019 average player counts hovered around 40-50k, and so far in 2022 they've been between 70-100k. absolutely baffling. how are new players even finding out about it? nobody streams tf2 and the esports scene has been dead in the water, floundering for years. are new players dusting off inscriptions of the tf2 logo in ancient tombs and finding the game after a quest to discover the symbol's origin? who knows. maybe the whole thing is still going off of pure inertia, an endless cycle of old players picking it back up for a bit before quitting again, introducing a few friends to it at the same time. or perhaps something exciting is going on in the community other than "notice us valve" protests that i'm unaware of? or maybe the player count is mostly bots, which were a huge problem when i quit.

then, i was also astonished to discover that all those useless crates from ancient battle passes i'd been hoarding are now worth a decent chunk of change. i kept them around initially because it seemed likely they'd go up in value. after all, their supply is limited and always going down as people open them, but i didn't expect them to go up this much. ⊕
a bunch of crates that had literally been dime a dozen when i got them 6-7 years ago as part of some campaign, that were still only worth a quarter each or so when i quit, were now like $5-$7 apiece. my total inventory value around when i quit was just shy of $100, and now it was well over $500. at one point earlier this year it had even been worth close to $700! according to my calculations, over three years my tf2 backpack value is up 485%. over the same period, the S&P 500 is up only 33%. that's one way to beat the stock market i guess.

the issue with my magnificent tf2 crate investment returns is that they're somewhat hard to turn into cold hard cash, unlike real stonks. it's easy to "sell" them on the steam community market, however the payouts are only in steam wallet funds. steam wallet funds are only marginally better than most fake video game money in that you can use them to buy video games themselves. overall i find the whole situation beautifully ironic. i have accidentally made a petty fortune through my past gaming efforts which can pretty much only be used to buy more video games, but i don't even really play video games anymore. such is life.

recently the thought fields have been relatively barren, even after i let them lie fallow for a week or so. usually that's long enough to restore their vitality, but apparently not so this time around. maybe it's because of the impending winter season, who knows. the only writing ideas i've had lately are short, scattered, often somewhat autobiographical or based off something i've encountered recently. in short, they feel a lot like what you might call "blog posts", which is how i chose to classify that thing i wrote last week about breaking my phone(s).

as a result, i've decided to restart the blog on this page as a place for that sort of writing. my last attempt here failed because it occupied a kind of awkward region somewhere in between "blog" and "journal", so this time i'm going to fully commit to the "blog" side. no need for daily posts, no need for keeping posts all really short, no need to keep posts strictly about something that happened that day.

really, in retrospect it was quite silly that i restricted myself like that. i wrote a bit about my motivations on the old page, but those were mostly post hoc justifications. the real reason was that i cooked up a neat webpage layout for a blog based on a calendar and wanted to fill it up properly, which required short daily posts. maybe i should have just made up a bunch of stuff to fill it up with instead of doing it for real. but sometimes, it's making stuff up that's the harder option...