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I have had this book lying on my nightstand for months, occasionally turning it over in my hands. Its contents are exhilarating. Everything I love about places tightly bound into this little white book with cardstock covers.


When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.


You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell. but also because at night. by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says--such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers"--the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters. treasures. scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking. you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox


The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles. in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs. in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.


"And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations."

"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."

Essex Dogs is my favourite Blur song. I think it's the best thing they ever put out, and prefer it to anything they did prior to 1997. It's essentially slam poetry set to a trip hop beat, a theremin, some synths and a grimy, distorted guitar that sounds like it's imitating a chainsaw revving up, or maybe dogs barking. I've always been impressed with how it produces such atmosphere with fairly little. Heat trapped in asphalt, a drink-stained shirt that sticks to your chest and a misguided attempt to wash it off by running into sprinklers, disaffected youths trying to look busy, etc.

Watch on YouTube

I think my reading habits are too spontaneous and I should probably go back to making up "curriculums" for myself. I did this two years ago with the Napoleonic Wars, where I read a mix of nonfiction and fiction about that time period. I read David A. Bell's The First Total War and some sections of Napoleon: A Life and supplemented it with fiction like War and Peace and The Death of Napoleon. I really enjoyed this--I think it helped me get immersed in what I was reading and provided the structure that allowed me to connect everything. I think my main issue right now is that I've got some crazy ADHD when it comes to reading. I like to read multiple things at once, I'm completely inconsistent with how much I read, and every book on my roster is ridiculously disjointed from the rest. To illustrate my point:

In April I read 17776, Oedipus Rex & Antigone (skipped Oedipus at Colonus but I should really read that too), got about two chapters further into The Name of the Rose, read a few chapters of Eichmann in Jerusalem (a book that I've had since last year), chewed through half of Forbidden Colours in a day and a half and then didn't touch it for two weeks for some reason, then couldn't decide whether I wanted to try reading Lolita or Gravity and Grace out of the PDFs I have in my Calibre library.
Essentially, last month I was primarily dividing my attention between sentient space probes spectating evolved football, postwar Japanese homosexual trysts, and incestuous Greek tragedy (side note, it's real funny to me that Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex about the king of a city-state less than a two-hour drive from Athens. That's like if I wrote about the mayor of Seattle doing his mom and then gouging his eyes out). I'm driving myself crazy. I need to just sit my ass down, pick up a book and read it front to back.

More than anything I feel I'm really doing a disservice to myself when I'm neglecting so many topics I'm interested in but know little about. I'd love to get deeper into western philosophy but I think to glean the most knowledge from any philosophical work you've got to have background knowledge about the pervasive (typically religious) ideas and political conflicts of the time. I feel linear reading is more important in philosophy than it is in literature or even history (as strange as that may sound). It's like math in a way, you could try differentiating without knowing what a quadratic equation is but you'll likely arrive at the wrong conclusion and confuse yourself in the process. I read The Prince knowing jack shit about renaissance Florence and the Medicis and though I was able to "work backwards" (ie. draw parallels between Machiavelli's ideas and modern political thought and sorta see the influence) many of his contemporary references flew over my head. You get my point, I gotta quit getting distracted every time I see a shiny new title. Gotta hunker down and study.

I was a massive Rimbaud fan starting at age 14 (which is when I made the blog, hence why my icon has always been a cartoon depiction of him). I bought a bilingual edition of his collected works that year, and it became my prized possession. I was just beginning to develop a serious interest in literature then and no other poet had captured my heart so entirely.

Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées ; / I went off, my fists in my torn pockets;
Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal ; / My coat too was becoming ideal;
J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ; / I walked under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oh ! là ! là ! que d’amours splendides j’ai rêvées ! / Oh! oh! what brilliant loves I dreamed of!

Mon unique culotte avait un large trou. / My only pair of trousers had a big hole.
– Petit-Poucet rêveur, j’égrenais dans ma course / – Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes
Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse. / As I went along. My inn was at the Great Bear.
– Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou / – My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound

Et je les écoutais, assis au bord des routes, / And I listened to them, seated on the side of the road,
Ces bons soirs de septembre où je sentais des gouttes / In those good September evenings when I felt drops
De rosée à mon front, comme un vin de vigueur ; / Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine;

Où, rimant au milieu des ombres fantastiques, / Where, rhyming in the midst of fantastic shadows,
Comme des lyres, je tirais les élastiques / Like lyres I plucked the elastics
De mes souliers blessés, un pied près de mon coeur ! / Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart!


This was an early favourite of mine, "Ma Bohème (Fantaisie)." Rimbaud wrote this when he was 15, a romanticized account of his various attempts at running away from home. I was similarly restless then, thought not as much as he: I'd often go into the yard and jump the fence, an entirely clumsy motion in which I scaled the side of the house, placing one foot on a ledge and hoisting myself onto the thin iron frame of the gate before jumping down. Then I'd spend up to five or six hours wandering aimlessly outside, alone. Once, I walked for nearly two hours to a parliamentary office to join a protest. Another time, I overstayed my welcome at a Japanese restaurant by reading an entire collection of T. S. Elliot poems there and ordering only two glasses of barley tea. In 2024 I read the entirety of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on afternoons like this, where I'd lay on dewy suburban lawns and on some occasions holler at somebody's dog that was trying to give chase. My shoes were just as ragged as his: the paint-stained laces had been chewed by pigs and the inside retained traces of blood from when I decided to forgo socks and wore down the skin on my heel.

"Roman" was another one I particularly enjoyed that wasn't in A Season in Hell or Illuminations. I will not include it here for fear of artificially extending the size of this post, but it starts something like "No one's serious at seventeen" and details a drunk young man loitering at a promenade full of lime trees before instantly falling in love with a girl he spots walking beside her stiff-collared father. I reread it at 15 (coincidentally the age Rimbaud was when he wrote it) and felt the need to find a girl who'd think me "absurdly naïf." In my mind, she did not need to return the feeling at all, as long as my infatuation with her could give me a novel experience and inspire me to write something! Yet somehow, I was completely unable to find a girl to crush on, and it wasn’t due to lack of sexual interest or close female friends I could plausibly catch feelings for. I saw lots of beautiful women at the grocery store, in extracurricular clubs and in elevators, but none of them occupied my mind when they were out of sight. In hindsight it was for the better, as my motive was completely selfish! I was totally flippant when it came to human relationships; I'd forgo exchanging contacts with good friends on the basis that "we'd probably never see each other again." When I was alone I'd think about the contents of university lectures I watched online, Napoleon's invasion of Russia and experimental nuclear reactors instead of anybody I knew. I wasn't ready to have a girlfriend, or to be responsible for someone else at all. I only wanted an experience in the shape of a person. On n'est pas sérieux...

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.