l.

"We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!"
"We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."

"But often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple, but rather, against other learned men."

"The life of learning is difficult, and it is difficult to distinguish good from evil. And often the learned men of our time are only dwarves on the shoulders of dwarves."

"Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do."
-
"It would be atrocious," I said, "to kill a man in order to say bu-ba-baff!"
"It would be atrocious," William remarked, "to kill a man even to say 'Credo in unum Deum."
-
"A mirror that brings to life, for the imagination of the simple and sometimes even of the learned, the torments of hell. So that--it is said--no one shall sin. They hope to keep souls from sin through fear, and trust to replace rebellion with fear."
"But won't they truly sin then?" I asked anxiously.
"It depends on what you mean by sinning, Adso," my master said. "I would not like to be unjust toward the people of this country where I have been living for some years, but it seems to me typical of the scant virtue of the Italian peoples to abstain from sin out of their fear of some idol, though they may give it the name of a saint. They are more afraid of Saint Sebastian or Saint Anthony than of Christ. If you wish to keep a place clean here, to prevent anyone from pissing on it, which the Italians do as freely as dogs do, you paint on it an image of Saint Anthony with a wooden tip, and this will drive away those about to piss. So the Italians, thanks to their preachers, risk returning to the ancient superstitions; and they no longer believe in the resurrection of the flesh, but have only a great fear of bodily injuries and misfortunes, and therefore they are more afraid of Saint Anthony than of Christ."
"But Berengar isn't Italian," I pointed out.
"It makes no difference. I am speaking of the atmosphere that the church and the preaching orders have spread over this peninsula, and which from here spreads everywhere. And it reaches even a venerable abbey of learned monks, like these."
"But if only they didn't sin," I insisted, because I was prepared to be satisfied with this alone.
"If this abbey were a speculum mundi, you would already have the answer."
"But is it?" I asked.
"In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form," concluded William, who was too much of a philosopher for my adolescent mind.

I'm not old enough to remember what the early web was like, but I've been fascinated by old consumer tech since I was about nine years old; sitting in class looking up IBM PCs and Macintosh on the shitty Chromebooks they lent us & not even attempting to stay on task. It appears nothing's changed in all these years, now I've got this dilettantish interest in web architecture. In fact I'm currently sat at my desk looking at old websites instead of studying for the math test worth 80% of my grade, the 10 minute oral exam, or the chemistry lab I've got due on Monday. That doesn't matter, because I've found something interesting.

By The Opte Project - Originally from the English Wikipedia; description page is/was here., CC BY 2.5, Link

Check this thing out! It's a representation of data routes, internet exchange points and the like, from 2005. Doesn't it look like a neuron or a diffuse nebula?

I also found this directory of collected poems attached to the old server of the University of New Mexico's physics department. No information on what it was for: at first I assumed it was for a course on 20th century American poetry, but that doesn't explain why it's attached to the physics department, and it seems too personalized anyway--some of the links lead to messages celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Check it out for yourself here

I spent my weekend at one of those Model United Nations simulations for high schoolers, presenting hastily-written speeches and resolution papers and fighting to stay awake during our morning crisis. Between roughly 16 hours of in-session debate and partying with strangers until my legs started to ache I was entirely out of it by 4pm on Sunday. My brain felt like a freshly printed document with ink still wet on the pages, if the contents were written by a monkey on a typewriter. It went like this: session and session of raising placards and furtively writing notes and directives for failed and successful blocs alike. The first day a friend of mine (who had scored an assistant director position at the conference) started a conversation with a delegate from California, who was frantically pacing around practising his speech with a Bible in his hand (either he was in the 30 Years War committee, or just real devout). The guy from California told us the whole banging on tables and "shocked and appalled" call and response thing was exclusive to Canadian MUN. I still don't know if he was fucking with us. My friend the assistant director then up and vanished for the next day and a half for the noble mission of moderating caucuses and trying to get girls' numbers, only to reappear at the party for a game of UNO. Here's the thing: when you're hosting an event with over a thousand teenagers it's pretty much a given that about half of them are attending with the express purpose of bagging each other, no matter how "academic" it looks. It's like aiming for awards: many try, but few succeed.

On night two I went out for sushi with some fellow delegates from my committee and unwittingly sat right next to Leah Jeffries, the actress playing Annabeth in the Percy Jackson TV adaptation. Percy Jackson was my favourite book series in elementary school, but I've never seen the TV show. Luckily, the girls I was eating with recognized her and asked for a picture once she'd finished her meal. The morning after I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to attend the morning crisis, in which:

- A whistleblowing engineer was shot and killed by a Nerf blaster
- New Zealand got nuked twice. First by North Korea after an explicit threat that everyone assumed was a bluff. Then by the Russian Federation, who was aiming for China with a directive written so hastily that a miscalculation had their nukes jettisoning above Wellington.
- The whole damn committee got dissolved for its failures
- Our director breakdanced for us and was subsequently swarmed by anonymous notes asking for his hand in marriage

So whenever you're feeling disillusioned at the state of the world, remember things could always be worse. You could be living in a high school Model UN simulation.

Postscript: how crazy is it that container shipping only became widely adopted after WWII!? Yeah, it makes sense with the isolationist streak of the 1920s-30s but it's still weird to think about...

I was lucky enough to have my birthday on a Friday this year, so after school my friends and I decided to throw a proper celebration in which I completely exhausted my social battery. I'm writing down some details from that day because I want to remember it years down the line.

Went to the fire hazard of a bookstore I frequented and finally bought myself Kant's Critique of Pure Reason because I wanted to annotate it, which is really unwieldy on a PDF. Then I had to lug it around for the rest of the hangout because my backpack was stuffed to overcapacity with chemistry worksheets and the chicken plush toy my friend gifted me. One of the girls in the group wanted to go to Aritzia to try on some sweatpants and the rest of us had hours to kill before dinnertime so we obliged. She humoured us with the promise that there'd be a boyfriend couch, and so we made our pilgrimage to white woman Mecca; roaming the streets of suburbanite Vancouver, passing Body Energy Clubs and overpriced gelato places until we came face to face with Aritzia's answer to Christ the Redeemer: an ugly bulldog statue.

Whan that Aprille January with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March December hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

But alas! Inside the Aritzia there was no boyfriend couch to be found. My compatriots and I were forced to stand upright holding our newly acquired second-hand books with lost looks on our faces whilst women walked by in $40 plain t-shirts. It looked like such a setup we might as well have been holding matcha lattes too. I silently cursed myself for choosing to cradle Kant's massive forehead in my arms and not a philosopher that was sexier and more French (just kidding, I'd never betray my goat Immanuel) and we endured this public humiliation ritual until our friend finally emerged from the fitting room. Wow, this post is starting to sound like it was written by Greg Heffley. Enough about Aritzia.

Then I went to the ice cream parlour and got chocolate and salted caramel scoops :-DD and my friends began launching into some crazy gossip. I don't actually like ice cream that much, nor do I like gossip. To some people that's like me saying I don't like sunshine and clear blue skies or that I'm a D1 puppy kicker. Truth is, I used to pride myself on not engaging with that kind of thing until I found out that literally everyone does, and I was missing out on some pretty important information about the character of my associates. I was austere as all hell as a kid and it always seemed too underhanded to talk about anyone behind their back. Pre-middle school I'd actually chew out my parents for gossiping, until I gradually understood it as my relationships began to get that complicated too. Now I totally get the need for it. It's good to debrief once in a blue moon. You might just be the last one to find out that a good teammate and friend of yours is a menace to women. I'm not mad about that at all...

Finally we made the 20-minute trip to the Sichuanese restaurant, jaywalking all the way. At some point I was doing a (frankly offensive) impression of my chemistry teacher telling my friend to walk straight and not like a molecule with two bonds and one lone pair (side note, it's pretty great that Bent's rule applies to molecules that look bent). I stopped to point out how glad I was that peoples' Christmas lights were still up. For a second I felt like a kid again, breath visible in the air and lugging around a dollar store sled with boots stuffed full of slush, and snow up the pant leg too. Only there was no snow this time around... ah, climate change! Once we made it we were seated next to the rowdiest, drunkest Chinese uncles and we gorged ourselves on beef jerky and boiled fish. I'm so goddamn tired that I'm ending the post here but just know it was a pretty good meal and I had fun.

Now that we're only two weeks out from 2026, I'd like to reflect on my favourite memories of the year. Nostalgia, for me, is firmly bound to physical places; the locale is just as important as the time. My dad and I spent most of my childhood annually returning to the motherland like migratory birds, but we hadn't gone without reason since the pandemic. Spring break of tenth grade was no different: my eighty-something maternal grandmother had broken a bone, and the monsoon made our house's roof leak like crazy in the years we were gone. In short, we mainly returned for the sake of filial piety and household upkeep. Have you ever heard anything more Chinese? But as it turned out, my mother had some business in the south as well, so my dad and I enthusiastically tagged along like the bai chi* we are.

*a homophone that could mean "moron" or "eating for free" depending on the second character. I thought both meanings were fitting.

With that, I'd like to share some photos I took during the few late March nights I spent in Guangzhou, accompanied by a few comments I'd jotted down while I was there. That way you get the gist of the experience straight from the horse's mouth without all the tricks of time and whatnot. My notes from that time are greatly focused on the lives of ordinary people: petty vendors, mahjong players, the chubby kid whom I passed a birdie to in a dark alleyway. I hope you'll feel a semblance of the lust for life I was reeling from as I jotted these down. Either that or you'll be bored to death.



- Uncles getting their hair cut in the streets, smoking on platforms attached to bikes, lounging on leather chairs facing electric fans in their shops. In an alleyway shop a barefoot old man lounging on a plastic chair with his overweight cat sold me the best peanuts I'd ever eaten



- Electric bikes everywhere, young guys absentmindedly scrolling douyin or xiaohongshu on them (parked). I watched a delivery driver scroll, open mouthed, past girl after girl after girl without looking up once and ruminated on how cooked he was.

- Watching a pretty girl in a white slip speed off on her motorbike. Ruminating on how cooked I am.

- Street shops selling traditional medicine. You smell them before you see them.



- A particularly rotund cat in every other shop

- Entire street specialized in selling refrigeration appliances (shops located in garages, apartments up top)

- Kids playing badminton in dark alleyways

- Restaurants that have been open since 1958 where the most expensive menu item is $5




We walked to a square full of Buddhist temples, where I saw a woman pray by holding sticks of lit incense in her hands and bowing in four directions. "People in the south seem more religious than they are in the north" I said offhandedly to my dad, who reminded me that we weren't walking around Buddhist temples back in Beijing.



China obviously isn't really Communist these days. Now they just sell shot glasses and framed portraits featuring kitschy Chairman iconography. Mao is rolling in his crystal coffin. The streets were lit up from restaurants with open doors, advertising $3 beef noodles and $5 barbecue pork. I'd already had a meal of pork innards (it's an acquired taste but the texture's great) and beer that I'd bummed from my dad, but I sure was tempted.

We returned to the Buddhist square at night once the rituals started. Each temple had its own processions — in the centre one rang the men's voices; monks in orange habits chanted and sang. To the left, I heard noticeably higher voices, perhaps that of women and/or children, though there was a mix in attendance. I don’t remember if the right temple sounded any different — perhaps a true mix of the other two. Whenever you walked further from one temple you would hear the chanting from another mix in, and the scent of incense followed you everywhere in the square and into the street. I remember being entranced at the harmonious chanting and the coming and going of people, who prayed with shaking hands. I was sweating lots. There was a cat there as well with the most barn owllike face I’ve ever seen. That’s why they’re called 猫头鹰, I guess.

I'm on midterm break at the moment, after a hectic week where I had to write a physics test, a math test, and in-class essays for English and geography (the geo one's just a practice, thank god). To be honest I've been completely checked out since last Thursday, passing the hours on games even though I know I don't have the bandwidth for that cos I've got to take the SAT in less than a month's time and I haven't even studied yet. I don't want to subject you to my first year IB student woes, though. Desperately chasing nostalgia, is what I'm doing. The endless hours I've sunk into Pokemon, Roblox and old YouTube videos in the past few days genuinely make me feel like my brain is atrophying and causing me to mentally regress into my nine year old self, who thought Filthy Frank and ASDFmovie were the funniest shows on the internet, and that Pokemon Brick Bronze was the best game ever apart from Minecraft (if you know you know. high five me if you were there in 2017-18). If this post reads like shit just pretend a nine year old wrote it.

Anyway, this is my personal blog so I'm going to talk about Pokemon fan projects with impunity. Though I like watching challenge runs, my favourite kind of projects were always the story-driven ones, especially when there's some bits from the perspective of the Pokemon themselves (surprisingly, I've never finished any Mystery Dungeon game). I was only reminded of how much I loved this kind of thing while reading Qlockwork's LeafGreen nuzlocke comic "It's a Hard Life", which has pretty much everything I like about that kind of project: fun personalities & team dynamics, epic fights, and the visual medium is totally sweet - I love the watercolour. It got me thinking about some of the other fanmade Pokemon media I loved as a kid, since my parents never let me have a 3ds or anything no matter how much I wanted Omega Ruby and Sun & Moon. So I fed my obsession with the franchise by buying cards from corner stores, accumulating comics and stuffed animals, watching Indigo League on Blu-Ray in the basement before our TV got burgled one year, playing copyright-violating fangames and watching fanmade series online. I thought I'd write about some of these old favourites just to dig myself out of this compulsive gaming funk.

Shippidge's "Starter Squad" series on YouTube is what I thought of first while reading that comic. It's similar since it's mostly from the perspective of Pokemon, with plenty of straight-up deaths and character development. The abrasive, genocidal Charmander character was my favourite as a kid, which is why I never watched the newest episode of the series when it came out 4 years ago since I was upset that he wasn't in it. I dunno why I liked Charmander so much--probably cuz I was a simple-minded kid who thought gratuitous violence was cool. I still really love the series and hope to see it finished one day, though I'll probably be in college by then.

I also used to watch the hell out of Pokemon creepypastas. The Lavender Town legends about Japanese kids spontaneously combusting and hanging themselves with their intestines and whatnot after hearing some special frequency in the theme was creepy, sure, but Hypno's Lullaby was the one that scared the testes off me. I showed it to one of my best friends from back then, and whenever she and I hung around near the woods or at the very edge of the boundaries of our elementary school's grounds we'd joke around about how some yellow demon with a pendulum was gonna creep up and molest us or something. There are some other memorable ones, like Strangled Red, Lost Silver, and Absol (which was one of my favourite Pokemon as a kid).

I was way into Pokemon plushies and figurines as a kid, and used to roleplay with my friend with whatever we had in our collection -- battling, solving puzzles and doing "prison breaks" -- which is not anything I'd admit to my friends nowadays. T'was my version of playing dolls, I guess. The Pokemon TGC was probably one of the most popular things at school back then, after Roblox, manhunt, and mechanical pencils. My other best friend, a guy two years older than me, introduced me to Pokemon cards in elementary school (I say that like he dealt me cocaine or something. He may as well have). He owned a bunch of box sets and had a pile of cards that stacked almost halfway to the ceiling at his mom's apartment, and he and I used to sit on the carpet and play. Once, he got his hands on some special-edition Ash's Pikachu cards that were given out as part of the promo for the "I Choose You" movie, and he gifted one to me, only he was storing it in his underwear. I don't think I've ever experienced a declaration of friendship as genuine as "here, have a Pokemon card with my piss on it" since then, and anyway I'm pretty sure that specific card is worth like $70 nowadays. Despite never having played an official game until I learned to emulate GBA roms when I was like 11, this franchise is responsible for some of my fondest childhood memories. For better or worse, there'll always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.

I should've slept two hours ago. I've started to feel indifferent to everything, and I keep finding videos from 20 years ago on YouTube. It started with this one, "Goodbye 2005." Though I wasn't alive in 2005, everything about this video seems familiar. Oh! That crowded Chinese restaurant with the seafood tanks in the back and the incandescent yellow lighting. I remember being in the cameraman's position, only surrounded by different people.

Are there any Chinese families who haven't sat around a big round table like King Arthur's knights to gorge themselves on squirrel fish, cumin lamb and fried rice? I remember those nights well, though when we spent the New Year in Canada my father and I would typically dine with the families of childhood friends, because ours was across the Pacific.

I'm feeling quite lonely tonight. Though I spent an equal sum of my childhood years in Vancouver, these last two years I've realized how much I missed China. It's strange. There was a period where I didn't return for over two years, and I didn't feel so sentimental. Despite the fact that I went back to visit only a few months ago, I miss the damn place so much I could cry. I miss my grandparents! I miss the dinner table!

Something about my research project makes me very, very nervous. My paper is nearing 12k words, and all I have left to do is write the conclusion and finish my citations, but I get so preoccupied with a Need for Eloquence and Originality that my heart goes rabbiting in my chest when I think about opening the goddamn google doc. Have I written too much? Does my argument even make sense? Am I shifting too fast between technical descriptions of nuclear reactors and the geopolitics of 1960s Europe?

Today one of my friends saw me working on the paper frantically during a free block and started pulling my leg and calling me a massive nerd. Afterward I texted her something like "don't go on telling everyone about my nuclear power paper! I get shy when talking about my research interests the way other people get shy when talking about their crushes."

"YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON NUCLEAR POWER!?" she said.

"It's an analogy." I clarified, before attaching a diagram of a SMR with the caption "let me introduce you to my beautiful wife."

"Wait that lowkey looks cool. Your wife is pretty hot."

"SHE'S NOT INTERESTED!!!!! She only wants MY graphite rod in her core."

I'm not sure why I'm writing all this down. Maybe to remind myself to stop fretting uselessly and get on with the damn thing already.

Got Civ IV on sale and have been playing it obsessively for the past week -- went for a domination victory as Napoleon, and will likely be trying for a cultural victory as Frederick the Great next. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at all the ingame leaders I didn't meet in my first playthrough.



I'm genuinely losing my mind at the music choice in this video.

Merry Christmas. It's late at night and I'm listening to the (illegal) fireworks. I've been neglecting this blog quite a bit: my last real post was in September, and a lot has happened since. I spent the second week of November in France and Belgium with some school friends, crawling around in Nazi bunkers and Flanders trenches and getting assailed by the Normandy winds. Here are some details I can remember off the top of my head:




- nearly asphyxiated to death in a Sephora after being dragged along by the girls in the group
- pretended to be a pickpocket
- watched street vendors escape from the Paris police, possibly winning the world record in the 400m sprint
- was majorly constipated for days due to exclusive meat-and-cheese diet (my roommates made fun of me relentlessly for this and tried to force gut health medicine on me)
- had a Frenchman on a motorbike pretend to drive-by shoot my friends and I in Caen, yelling "BRAP BRAP BRAP MOTHERFUCKERRR" (we collapsed in laughter)
- found out "cavalry" meant "tank unit" in WWII -- though for a second I had a vision of Napoleonic hussars locked in a skirmish with Panzer
- lost my copy of War and Peace in a hotel room :,(
- had to convince my friends not to do a rendition of Erika in a restaurant in Dieppe (cut it out, Caleb, you'll give the poor woman a generational flashback).
- ran up the pebble beaches of Dieppe, yelling "artillery!" while having rocks thrown at me
- skillfully evaded horse drawn carriages in Bruges (and saw the Madonna too)
- ate five bowls of spaghetti sauce (and witnessed Caleb eat six, with noodles. We began praying we wouldn't get dessert)
- dropped an artillery shell in a museum and got chewed out by my favourite science teacher (I felt very sorry)
- saw a beer pipeline
- trudged through a necropolis in the fog, rows of tombstones stretching further than the eye could see
- visited churches and ate Flemish rabbit stew in a Mozart-themed brasserie, which made me feel like a pilgrim.

Apart from that, I've been working on a long paper about the French and West German nuclear power programs (I'm about 6k words in at the moment) and just taught myself HTML and CSS. I'm in the process of learning Javascript and JSON now, which I've got to get done before winter break's over. Started building a personal website today.

I also haven't been to the gym in months (yeah, I know). I've gotten soft in the gut and weak in the arms (not that I was ever very strong). That won't do.

I've barely done anything today, but I'm so tired that my arms are falling asleep as I type.
Thanks for reading. Happy holidays.