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I spent all day playing Civilization V today, completing my first cultural victory in any game with the Brave New World mechanic that actually makes it fun. I really enjoy the vertical investment of cultural victory and not having to micromanage a bunch of cities, which is especially awful in the mid-late game where you've got 50 infantry and 20 Panzer but no bombers yet and every war takes about sixty turns to resolve despite being fought over the same five tiles of land.

The actual chain of events that led to this victory was pretty comical. I was playing as Napoleon, on a map with three continents. In the early game I was allied with both the Songhai and the Japanese, before Japan asked me to assist them in destroying the Songhai in the late classical era. Japan took Gao and razed the second largest Songhai city, which I no longer remember the name of. In turn, I took Jenne with a bunch of free spearmen and swordsmen I had obtained from a strategic "Terracotta Warriors" wonder completion, which was positioned below Paris and Orleans in a sort of upside-down triangular formation, and was right next to Sydney, a city state which I was allied with. When Japan declared war on Riga soon after, I placed my soldiers around its borders and waited for it to be weakened, so that I could finish the job and turn it into a puppet state (which I would fully annex later). I was thinking that I'd seriously lucked out by landing on a continent with only Japan and Songhai as competitors, because while being militaristic, Japan isn't expansionist. This meant I'd have plenty of time to settle over all the luxury resources on our continent without worrying about rushing settlers.

One thing I wish they kept from Civ IV is tech trading. Around this time, I unlocked the "Defensive Pact" perk and wanted to use it on Japan, before realizing we needed open borders first, which in turn necessitated mutual embassies for both parties. While I already had an embassy in Japan, Oda Nobunaga had been so hyper focused on refining the pointiness of his sticks that he'd neglected the discovery of writing. My first Great Person was Alexandre Dumas, followed by Ki No Tsurayuki both born in Orleans. Though great people are randomized, I thought it was fitting considering the history of the continent in game. Japan began scheming around this time and declared war on my civ, so Japanese Belisarius and French Winfield Scott engaged in an extended standoff at the border between Riga, Osaka, and the city state of Monaco. After demoralizing Oda Nobunaga enough that he filed for a peace treaty, I used Winfield Scott to place a citadel, forming a critical chokepoint at the border that was so effective it allowed me to play at attrition and barely spend a thing on troops for every future war with Japan (there would be three rather one-sided conflicts, for the friendship between Napoleon and Oda never recovered).

Getting the win condition was easy enough against Japan and the Iroquois (who were also attempting a cultural victory AND ended up adopting the same ideology, which made them a valuable ally when it came to passing resolutions). I had basically established my supremacy by 100 AD, and the only real conflict was the occasional Japanese attack, which I could repel easily since my eastern border had the citadel and my western border had Sydney, the city-state with the highest defensive stat for most of the mid-game. Casimir III's Poland was the real pain in the ass: not only was his culture sky high, he was Catholicism when I was Shintoist, and he went for autocracy when I'd gone for freedom, which lowered our mutual tourism influence. Just when a swift cultural victory was in arms reach, he cancelled our open borders and international trade routes and kicked out my diplomat. He then sent a fleet of destroyers across the sea, which might have made a dent if not for the fact that I didn't have a single coastal city. Casimir and I played at Cold War: he had a naval fleet that couldn't reach my cities, and I had an infantry army that couldn't touch his ships. Neither of us wanted to bother with escalation. As a result, the Franco-Polish war achieved nothing on either side other than delay my inevitable cultural victory by around sixty turns.

Sometimes I'm riffing with my friends and I get struck with the need to record the conversation, and lately I've been meaning to record more mundane anecdotes from daily life. Since this blog is partially meant to serve as an archive, I thought I'd write some of it here.

Our regular teacher wasn't in for theory of knowledge (epistemology in IB-speak) today, but we were supposed to discuss whether the moral character of an author could be separated from the value of their work with a list that ranged from Ye to John von Neumann. The trouble was that almost none of the mathematicians on the list had any significant shortcomings. I mean, the only shortcoming they could think of were that Erdős used amphetamines, that Gödel suffered from paranoia in his seventies and starved himself to death, and that Galois was a political radical who got himself killed in a duel. I didn't really see any of those things as immoral, and my friend (whom I will refer to as the Maginot Line from this post onward) didn't either. I joked to him that if they really wanted to make an argument on a morally-controversial mathematician, they should've listed the Unabomber.

A good friend of mine (whom I referred to as the snowboarder in this post) was stuck writing a math competition for six hours today. Another friend graciously decided to order her a coffee so she'd have a lifeline for the last two blocks of the day. However, she apparently misclicked a few times and ordered a six-shot espresso instead of the regular three-shot one, and then the heart palpitation-inducing drink didn't even go to our friend in the end because it was given to a trivia teammate of ours who was also writing the competition. I don't even want to imagine how that tasted, or the aftereffects it produced.

Another topic of the day: optical computing & photonic logic, which is exactly what it sounds like--light as logic gates, replacing electrons with protons. Very, very cool technology being worked on right now, architecturally unique compared to other forms of quantum computing. Most of the details fly over my head.

Whenever I read poetry or philosophy in translation I can't stop myself from agonizing over some real or imagined nuance that might've been lost. Not to discredit translators in any way--they're typically quite successful in conveying the overall meaning & feeling of a piece--but sometimes the nuance is in the structure of the language itself, and that's the most difficult part to replicate.

There's this Kobayashi Issa haiku that's been making the rounds online. The English translation reads

Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time—

Which is still quite beautiful and succeeds in conveying longing for a late mother, but the point of the poem is really in the structure of the characters themselves. In the original Japanese, it reads

亡き母や 海見る度、見る度に

The kanji for "mother" is 母, and "ocean" is 海 (as they are in Mandarin, my native tongue). Along with the radical 氵, which represents water, 母 also appears within the character 海 as a radical. English also has plenty of portmanteaus, but there's no equivalent in this specific case, so there's always going to be that little piece missing from the translation.

Another language thing that's only tangentially related: there's a commune in France called Condom, which comes from the Gaulish Condatómagos, apparently meaning "field of the confluence." It was then recorded in Latin as Condomus, before the modern-day name. According to its Wikipedia page, Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie of Siouxsie and the Banshees fame lived there for a couple of years. They've got a Condom Cathedral, and there used to be a Roman Catholic Diocese of Condom up until 1801 (though no bishop of Condom has ever been elected Pope). The actual word for a condom is préservatif in French, but incidentally this little municipality is located by the river Baïse, which is very close to the verb baiser, meaning "to fuck".

In early January I read Consider the Lobster, an essay by David Foster Wallace, in which he examines the neurological anatomy of lobsters and explores a few arguments on whether it is morally defensible to inflict suffering on a living organism because we've got a taste for its protein, finally arriving at an inconclusive answer. You can find the essay online quite easily, but what really stuck out to me were the deliberations on whether lobsters could truly suffer due to their lack of a prefrontal cortex, or only feel neurological pain/"discomfort at not being at the optimal temperature". Below are some reflections I wrote in my personal server:

This was an interesting read because the arguments rested on the infliction of suffering, instead of any inherent wrong in consuming meat (which I have always been wholly unconvinced by), and so it was aligned with my preconceived belief system. I've known of the unethical practices of factory farming for many years, but I have consciously chosen to continue consuming products of this practice for nothing but pleasure (one could argue for physical health as well, but I could just as easily get my protein from alternative sources).

It's in my interest to believe that more primitive and inarticulate organisms (such as fish and crustaceans) do not have the capacity to suffer, because it allows me to consume without adding any weight to my conscience. But I know for a fact that there’s research pointing to the contrary, I've cycled and planted tanks and observed the entire life cycles of corydoras catfish over years, and I've gone jigging on the open sea and struggled against hefty cabezons, so I know damn well that fish are able to feel fear beyond the simple impulse to live and reproduce. I've not succeeded in working out any sort of place in my ethical system in which that belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

It's part of the reason why I'm fully in favour of lab-grown meat. If we could grow meat that is identical to organic meat (same taste, fibrous texture, protein content and all) without any of the animal suffering caused by factory farming at around the same cost, are there any real downsides to it? There's the argument that it "goes against nature" of course, but I personally see that as fear going against logic; after all, haven't we already gone against nature by modifying crops through tens of thousands of years of agriculture? Now that we have the technology to do so more efficiently, why shouldn't we take one of the oldest human activities to its logical conclusion? (I've a similar outlook on GMO crops, where my only gripe with implementation is that patenting screws farmers over).

On how distance allows us to permit suffering:
Perhaps it's because lobsters are so physiologically different to me that I feel a sort of cognitive dissonance when faced with the fact of their suffering, but I also consume other products that are well-known to be sourced unethically, such as chocolate and coffee. Which begs the question of whether I also feel less affected by the circumstances in which these products are made because of my geographical & cultural distance to the exploited West African farmers who produce them. Obviously I'm aware that individual consumers have almost no sway over global supply chains, but I'm making a conscious choice in purchasing any product, so the point still stands.

On hypocrisy:
I've often felt disdain for girls who squealed and hid at the presence of a spider and asked me to kill it for them and indignantly thought "why should an innocent organism die for your comfort?" But aren't I a hypocrite for producing demand for the confinement and butchering of cattle just because I like the taste of a sirloin steak?

I'm half-asleep and spitballing on a topic I think about semi-frequently but haven't read all that much about. So excuse my incoherence.

Modern warfare is fascinating to me because the objective to avoid escalation, and to keep boots off the ground for the most part. I think the possession of ICBMs sort of guarantees sovereignty (though nations can still be economically destabilized and all), and the invention of the atomic bomb made a lot of military strategy superfluous for the largest powers, at least where it comes to defending against land invasion. We've kind of perfected the obliteration of human life to the point where there's no need to innovate militarily because the solution is always to build more a-bomb variants (and to manage your supply chain in-between stockpiling bombs). But then the real end goal is to not have to use any of it at all... so in the pursuit of not using the bombs we make sure that the prospect of nuclear armageddon is as horrific as it can be and we build up this whole taboo around W70s and ant walkers and submarines armed to the teeth with cruise missiles. I still find it interesting how "winning" thermonuclear war was a serious point of debate before it became unthinkable, and theorists dreamt up strategies with figures of deaths in millions (got to actually read Herman Kahn one of these days).

There's this quote commonly attributed to Einstein that goes something like "I know not what WWIII will be fought with, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones." Makes me think about the China-India border dispute where both sides have agreed to prohibit the use of firearms close to the line of actual control, so now you've got actual modern troops training in phalanx formation. Looks like we're already fighting wars with sticks and stones.

This week the class of '27 had what will likely be our last field trip all together as a cohort. On the bus ride there and back we played trivia to prepare for the Quiz bowl type competition we have on Sunday and cozied up with (read: fell asleep haphazardly on) our seat mates.

Snowshoeing on the 23rd took us on a hike in which we pelted each other with snowballs and shook snow off tree branches on purpose, hoping to bury one of our own. Then in our cabin we dried ourselves by the fire, agonized over frozen beef, and exchanged childhood stories in which we terrorized polite society in the brief interval when we were hardy, half-savage twerps who couldn't really be faulted when we committed trespassing, indecent exposure, or acts of violence.



The next day we hit the slopes. On the ride there my friend George went apeshit on his roommate ("Why are you so fat? You didn't make dinner, you didn't make breakfast, you didn't do the dishes! I was your mom for the past 24 hours!") while the bus driver attempted to hide his amusement. The packed powder was fantastic once I got past the initial rustiness, but I had to drag myself across any stretch of the run without enough of a slope as I hadn't gotten my skis waxed since 2024. It felt like I was getting my fix of cross-country skiing early, but my snowboarder friend had it worse--hopping upwards of 250 meters of the piste because she'd lost momentum from the "slow ass snowboarders in front of [her]".



The final day we did cross-country skiing and I fell on my ass about three times, on my left side about five more. Least I mastered the art of standing back up on skis. The snowboarder snapped this one.

I have no idea why I never posted this photo anywhere. It's from the school trip to France & Belgium in November of 2024, which you can see more of if you click the "images" tag and scroll a few times.



This is Notre Dame de Lorette, the largest military cemetery in France. Over 43,000 individual soldiers are interred here. On that day the sky was overcast, the fog so heavy that you couldn't see more than 10 metres in front of you. When we walked among the graves the gradual reveal of each row of pale crosses made the necropolis feel endless. Those behind us melted back into the fog.

There's nothing like the sensory experience of getting lost in a city. Entirely invigorating. I'm mad for it. I've fallen in love with so many places that I've never lived in; in Boston I drove my folks mad visiting every art gallery and science museum, running up and down piers lined with sailboats and into churches despite being incapable of faith, even loitering around university bookstores for hours without buying anything. I don't know how they put up with me.

I'm sorely missing that feeling, so tell me about someplace, sometime and how it felt to be there. It doesn't have to be a city at all--tell me about soccer fields and national parks and public pools and the interstate highway. That sort of thing.

When I was 15 I wanted to approach perfection. I became obsessed with self-cultivation, wiped my social media presence, read lots of philosophy (some of which flew way over my head), drafted resolutions for myself and wrote maxims for living well where I outlined the importance of "lifting to exhaustion" and "steering clear of vices," and banned myself from lying, idling, gloating, gossiping and complaining. Nowadays it's a rite of passage for a lot of young guys, especially with the prominence of gym culture; my friends quoted David Goggins, did dips with the tables in homeroom and drove themselves mad eating 3000 calories of chicken and rice every day "for the bulk." We constantly fought ourselves, abstaining from sugar and pornography like we were diabetic monks (and we were absolutely right to do so for the latter; porn addiction is an epidemic nowadays). I'm not deriding this mindset in any way, though I'm aware it's obsessive and often a consequence of low self esteem. I look back on it fondly because it was one of the most supportive environments I've ever been in. After lifting to muscular failure we'd dap each other up so many times our calloused hands flushed red from the impact, and it all had a placating effect on us. If you were sore it meant you were doing something right: that you were in the process of becoming better, or someone else. Strangely enough, we found something life-affirming in torn muscle fibres.

Perhaps this kind of mindset is less common than I think, and I just happened to be around a lot of semi-athletic high school nerds that were in the math competition club and read (or pretended to read) Marcus Aurelius. I digress. If you're young and discontent, the best thing you can do for yourself is to take up something you can make progress in relatively quick (because that'll motivate you to come back) and stick to it. It doesn't have to be physical, though the social aspect of doing a sport has the added benefit of making you feel more human. It just has to be something that will show you that you still have the capacity to improve. Teach yourself an instrument. Start drawing again. Pick up that commonplace book from 2024 and write about what you're reading. I'm evidently talking to myself here because I seem to be slipping into old habits again, but I can only let myself be a mindless drone for so long until I start feeling insane and have to write myself a reminder that this is what I really enjoy, and not 4 hours of compulsive gaming. 2026 we're locking in babyyyyy

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

"When I have nothing to say / My lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?"