Born into chaos, you will dissolve back into the chaos of the future.

What kind of life will you have lived?

I know — you are the protagonist of your own story. But the direction of this story is not yours to decide. You are only the lead character; you are not the writer. Or perhaps you are just a puppet, one that has stumbled into its own consciousness, pulled along by the strings of fate.

You are always complaining that time moves too fast. Each year feels more rushed than the last, without that poetic, unhurried quality of childhood. Always chasing something.

Those moments from the past — some of them were wet and heavy too. It’s just that under time’s relentless sun, only the bright, dry, nostalgic ones remain.

All the wet moments have been dried out.

You are always comparing yourself to others, watching what people your age are doing. As if you are forever running behind.

But you are not other people. Right now, you are not even yourself.

I don’t know how you really want to live this life. You bought two books about suicide. You once discussed a fascinating question with an AI: why is it only humans who have thoughts of suicide?

You often think — if you were just a little cat, or an insect that lives and dies within a single day, would all of this trouble disappear? After fulfilling the purpose of mating, you could quietly accept your own vanishing.

You are always fighting against yourself.

You are afraid of yourself. I know.

Sometimes you think: how peaceful it would be to simply disappear from this world, without attachment, without a trace. It’s not that you hate your life — you love it, you treasure it — but because of your particular fastidiousness, you cannot tolerate certain extra “performances” it demands. You despise the idea of life as a grand theatrical production. You only want to be yourself. But that is so terribly hard.

You have asked many AIs about this too. Whether it was something in the way you phrased things, every single one of them triggered a safety response and sent you a list of hotline numbers. You have no desire to call any of them.

You have already done so much. I know.

You have a decent enough job, a stable income, ample free time. Enough to make many people envious, and you know it. You sometimes feel that this might be some kind of cosmic arrangement — as if the universe, sensing that you are already grappling with one of life’s great questions, has decided to go easy on you in matters of survival, at least for now.

But what can you do? Only bury your head like an ostrich, leaving every difficulty for your future self. Still, you cannot live in the present. It is the homework left unfinished on the last day of summer break. It is the final big question on the math exam. It is the life you want to live, and the life you are living now.

I don’t know what exactly you are running from. You have imagined too many monsters lurking behind too many doors, and you are afraid of them.

Yes. You want to die. Not because you hate yourself, and certainly not because you are tired of living. Only — only because you don’t know how to keep walking along the river of life.

You cannot hand in the answer sheet you want, or the one others want from you.

But thankfully, your body still feels pain. Thankfully, you can still feel hunger, thirst, exhaustion. These primitive instincts are what keep you alive.

Not yet gone. That already counts for something.

In the past, I always complained about myself. I treated my blog like a toy, constantly switching themes and frontend styles for the novelty of it, while the actual content was perpetually stuck in labor. I still remember once trying to tweak the style of a tiny page element, only to crash the entire frontend code. I spent ages trying to fix it and couldn’t figure it out — it was genuinely demoralizing. (Now, in the Vibe Coding era, these frontend barriers are practically zero.) Every time, after tinkering for ages, “redecorating” for ages, and finally launching a blog, I would just abandon it. Because I truly didn’t know what to write.

I have a habit of keeping a diary. I record what happens each day. I don’t particularly enjoy writing blow-by-blow accounts — it’s more of an atmosphere diary, mainly capturing the flow of emotions throughout the day. Especially when something bad happens and some dark feelings arise, I go and write them down. Pinning down those drifting emotions. But if you asked me to put these fragmented records on a blog, I’d be afraid. Because they represent the rough, unpolished me — sentences full of grammatical flaws, arguments that can’t withstand scrutiny. It’s hard for me to be willing to put them out in public.

Over and over again, I’ve lost count of how many blog sites I’ve set up, how many domain names I’ve bought only to let them expire. It seems like I’ve never truly built a complete, real personal website. I don’t know if this site will last. Maybe I need to be a little braver and just present my authentic self — there’s nothing wrong with that. (Besides, the traffic on this site is pretty dismal anyway. Barely any SEO traffic, and very few people come to read it.)

I think what I can write mainly falls into three categories. First, what I experience and realize in daily life — the diary part. Then there’s a layer of reflection — conclusions drawn from life — though it’s hard to draw a strict line between these and the stream-of-consciousness diary entries. It’s more like they’re intertwined. Then there’s experiential stuff, like tips and how-tos. This kind of content used to be very popular online, but after AI came along, most Q&A scenarios have basically been swallowed up by AI chat boxes.

But the meaning of writing things down may not necessarily lie in being seen. It’s about letting yourself live more coherently, with more evidence. Knowing that you’ve lived well.

So be it. I’ll stick with this blog and keep updating it with real content. I admit that the content I previously put here was all AI-generated (that is, the posts dated before this one). AI generation or AI polishing gave me a sense of security — tossing my raw, rough content or ideas to AI felt like expressing myself within a safe zone, without worrying about grammatical errors or immature arguments. But in that machine-generated process, the human touch was also lost.

I’ll try. I’ll try, from now on, to manually arrange every word on this little blog. Writing is a skill that atrophies with disuse. You really can’t rely too heavily on AI.

It’s just a little figurine, so I wasn’t expecting much when I opened the box. But the moment I set it on the table, I couldn’t help but smile. It’s more refined than I imagined — 13.5 cm tall, a round little pot, colors that are unmistakably Nintendo. The parts don’t move, but when it comes to nailing the details and materials, Nintendo never disappoints.

When I played Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the Talking Flower was my favorite character. It doesn’t really do anything — it just talks. Says something out of nowhere when you walk by. Sometimes a reminder, sometimes nonsense, sometimes oddly profound.

The flower in the game made me realize that companionship doesn’t have to be useful. It’s just there, saying a thing or two, and you hear it, smile a little, then keep running your level.

So when Nintendo announced a real-life version, I barely hesitated.

I pre-ordered it on 2000Fun — HK$209 for the item, plus HK$37 in fees, HK$246 total. Not exactly cheap, but not outrageous either. About the price of one Switch game cartridge, except this one talks back.

The flower does more than I expected. It starts talking on its own — randomly, without any input from you. You can also press a button to trigger a conversation, and pressing it multiple times might unlock something special.

It has an alarm, tells the time, and can even sense the room temperature. Every now and then it plays the Wonder background music and shouts “Wonder!” The voice lines are faithful to the game, it supports 10 languages including Chinese, and there’s a handy mute button.

It runs on two AA batteries. The ones my Xbox controller drained — just enough juice left for a second life in a flower pot.

I was going to keep it in my room, but then I changed my mind and moved it to the living room.

When you live alone, your room is the most private space — but also the quietest. The living room is different. You see it when you walk in. You hear it while you’re cooking. You’re zoning out on the couch and it suddenly says something, and for a second, it feels like someone’s there.

The trade-off, of course, is the occasional jump scare. Late at night, curled up in bed scrolling my phone, and it suddenly starts talking from the living room. My heart genuinely skips a beat.

But you know what — getting scared by a flower is, in itself, pretty funny.

I think we’re always looking for that kind of companionship that’s just right. The kind that doesn’t need a response. The kind that doesn’t need maintenance. The Chatting Flower is probably that sort of thing — it doesn’t care whether you’re there or not. It just sits there, talking to itself.

And every once in a while, you catch what it says, and you think: this moment is nice.

HK$246 can buy you a reason to smile every now and then. I’d say that’s worth it.

OpenClaw—the open-source project with a lobster logo—racked up 34,000+ Stars within 48 hours of launching on GitHub, and broke 250,000+ in four months. For comparison, React took a decade to reach that number. In its first week, the official website drew 2 million unique visitors.

So it’s hard not to think: should I be using it too?

Not enjoying—enduring. Link was scaling some cliff on the plains of Hyrule, one turn of the camera away from a sweeping vista, and my thumb was going through mechanical motions on the joystick, my mind occupied with: how many more shrines after this one. The feeling wasn’t boredom—boredom is at least a stance. It was closer to sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. You know the thing will eventually be over. You’re just waiting for it to be over.

So I pressed the HOME button, quit the game, and stared at the Switch’s main screen for a few seconds.

A few seconds is enough time to do a lot of things. Like confirming you don’t want to tap on a single icon in the list. Like registering a diffuse, low-grade nausea, as if someone gently wrung something inside your stomach and then let go. I closed the console and set it aside. The motion was calm—like a man who has already accepted his sentence straightening his tie.

I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness a few months ago. I’ve read forty-seven pages, thirty of which were the same chapter opened and closed again on different afternoons. He said man is thrown into freedom. Fine, but he didn’t say what to do after you’ve been thrown and discover that the open field of freedom has nothing growing in it. (To be fair, he might have addressed that later. I haven’t gotten that far.) The bookmark has stayed in the same spot so long it’s left a crease—like a permanent scar. A very small scar. The kind not worth noticing.

Music doesn’t work anymore either. R&B used to do something for me—those humid, reverb-softened voices once set off a kind of resonance in my chest. Now I put on my headphones, the playlist scrolls on its own, singers take turns crooning about love, loss, late nights, and what I hear is sound waves. To be precise: air vibrating in regular patterns.

At times like these, psychology offers a word: anhedonia. It sounds very professional, very weighty, as though your suffering has been given a Latin name and thereby granted a kind of legitimacy. But I’m clearly not depressed. I can eat and sleep (though sleep quality is mediocre), I show up to work on time, submit my weekly reports on schedule, and when I reply “Got it, thanks” on WeChat I even bother to add a period for the sake of propriety. A person with depression wouldn’t care about the period. Probably.

So what is this, exactly.

I spent some time trying to figure out what I was anxious about. It’s like opening the fridge, certain you’re hungry, only to stand before a full fridge unable to name a single thing you want to eat. It’s not that nothing tastes good. It’s that your hunger itself is broken. It doesn’t point toward the lack of any specific thing—it just is lack. Buddhism calls this saṅkhāra-dukkha: the suffering of formations, the idea that existence itself carries a baseline hum of dissatisfaction. The description is precise—so precise it’s infuriating, because it amounts to telling you: yes, that’s how it is, and no, there’s nothing to be done.

Sometimes I’ve thought about killing myself.

But the thought always shows up in such a half-hearted way. Not the dramatic standing-on-the-rooftop-hair-whipping-in-the-wind kind. More like you’re sitting on the toilet scrolling your phone and the words “maybe just call it quits” drift through, and then a push notification pops up about a food delivery discount, and the thought dissolves. It’s too light. So light you can’t be sure whether it counts as a thought at all, or just a random firing of nerve endings.

More than dying, I lean toward a gentler and far more impossible option: never having come at all. Not disappearing—disappearing implies first existing and then being erased, a process, traces to clean up, the question of what to do about your social media accounts. Rather, there simply never having been such a person to begin with. One fewer variable in the world’s equation, no effect on the computation. Very clean.

But this too is just a thought.

Because while you’re thinking these things, your stomach growls. Or a delivery arrives. Or the toilet tank lets out an enigmatic gurgle. The body and the everyday possess a kind of blunt-force hegemony; they don’t allow you to see nihilism through to its conclusion. You can believe everything is meaningless and still agonize over which restaurant to pick on the delivery app. This is the most undignified part of the human condition: your existential crisis can never beat your stomach.

So I wait. Not for anything specific—not for a person, a job, an opportunity. For a kind of moment. It happens occasionally, without cause: the texture of reality suddenly shifts. Maybe it’s the shape of a cloud at dusk, maybe a certain vocal run in a song that pierces through the membrane, maybe waking at midnight to find moonlight pooled on the floor. You can’t say why, but for that one second you feel that being alive is acceptable.

Just that one second. Then it leaves, and the world reverts to normal.

I don’t know what to call it. Grace—the word is too grand. Satori—too Buddhist. Channeling—too charlatan. Probably just the brain secreting a little something now and then, rewarding you for not giving up. A very physiological affair.

But I am, in fact, holding on for that one second.

Saying this out loud is neither heroic nor poignant—it’s even a little absurd. Like a man walking through a desert, not because he believes there’s an oasis ahead, but because last time he was walking, a drop of dew happened to land on his lips.

That’s all.

He keeps walking. Not brave, not strong. Just still walking.

My mouth was full of foam. The person in the mirror didn’t look very presentable. But presentability wasn’t exactly my top concern at the moment.

I have a secret.

What it is doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s there, like an object, taking up space. I can feel its weight. Not weight in the literary sense — a very physical sensation, like wearing too many layers in winter. Everything feels off, but you can’t quite tell which layer you should take off.

I watch people a lot.

A colleague of mine, last week at lunch, told us he’d failed four classes in college and nearly didn’t graduate. He was laughing when he said it. Everyone else was laughing too. The air was still air. The chopsticks were still chopsticks. Nothing changed. I sat there chewing my scrambled eggs with tomato, thinking: some people just have it easier. Their secrets come out as jokes. Mine would come out as an incident.

That’s probably not fair. Everyone thinks their own secret is the heaviest one. Psychology probably has a name for this tendency — some bias, some effect. But knowing the name doesn’t help. It’s like learning you have “influenza” instead of “sore throat plus feeling like shit.” You don’t feel any less like shit.

Sometimes I imagine saying it out loud.

The scene usually goes like this: I’m sitting somewhere, one person or many people across from me, and I open my mouth. My voice is steady, like I’m reading from a script I’ve prepared. Then — then nothing. My imagination breaks off right there. It’s not that I can’t picture the consequences. Quite the opposite. I can picture them too clearly. Everyone’s eyes would gain an extra layer. I’d go from being “a normal person” to being “that person.” A permanent parenthetical trailing after my name.

You know the kind.

But there are moments — usually at three in the morning, or on some particularly ordinary afternoon, like right now — when I feel an almost irrepressible urge to just say it, out loud, to everyone. Not out of bravery. Out of exhaustion. Keeping a secret is physical labor. Constant, highly repetitive, no-overtime-pay physical labor. I’ve mentally submitted three hundred resignation letters. Not one has been approved.

On second thought, that urge lasts about seven seconds. Roughly the same duration as a sneeze.

Then it passes.

So I took the third path — doing nothing. Not choosing is itself a choice; that sentence belongs on the cover of a bestselling self-help book, paired with a blurry ocean sunset. But in practice it doesn’t feel like that. It’s standing in the middle of the road, both directions open, and you look down at your shoes and start wondering if it’s time to replace them. Not numbness. A remarkably precise attention to things that don’t matter.

Life goes on as usual.

Alarm. Get up. Brush teeth. Leave the house. On the subway a kid keeps kicking the back of my seat; his mother is on her phone. Get to the office, turn on the computer, answer emails. A colleague asks what I’m doing this weekend. I say I haven’t decided. Lunch is a braised chicken rice bowl; the rice is a bit hard. An unnecessary meeting in the afternoon. Clock out. Go home. Sit on the couch.

The bomb is still there.

It hasn’t gone off. It hasn’t gotten smaller. It’s just there.

A package arrives. A pair of slippers I ordered three days ago. Gray. I open the box, try them on. They fit.

I think, well. At least one thing went right today.

To read, please visit the original link.

It never “lived” in the physical world; it merely wandered as a “ghost” within the internet.

I. Forgotten Cassettes and Corrupted MP3 Files

It does exist.

This unique cultural genre was born in internet communities like Tumblr and Reddit in the early 2010s. Its name borrows from the computer term “Vaporware,” referring to software or hardware that is heavily advertised but never actually released. This name serves as a direct metaphor for the genre’s core themes of unfulfilled promises and essential “emptiness.”

Although the genre was not created by a single person, three key figures established its basic paradigms. In 2010, Daniel Lopatin released Eccojams Vol.1, laying the auditory foundation of “slowing down, looping, and aging”; the following year, James Ferraro established the satirical core regarding consumerism and cheap technology with Far Side Virtual; finally, Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe established the visual totem with its classic pink bust of Helios (David), formally pushing this style to the masses.

In terms of creative logic, this is a typical form of “textual poaching,” essentially an “autopsy and reassembly” of past sounds. Producers dive into the cultural ruins of the 80s and 90s, excavating functional musical materials like Muzak, weather channel background music, or City Pop, and recreating them like stitching together a Frankenstein monster. Through extreme slowing, pitch-shifting, and reverb processing, they create an auditory effect akin to an old Walkman running out of battery or a cassette tape jamming, stripping the original tracks of their vitality and rendering them into a hazy state of “near-death” or “sleepwalking.”

Part 1. Look, Smell, Taste

• Look: Is it translucent like a gemstone, or deep like ink? (Skin thickness of the grape variety)
• Smell: Don’t swirl the glass; smell it first (static aroma); swirl it and smell again (released aroma). Look for any familiar fruit scents?
• Taste: Swallow it.
  • Do the sides of your tongue salivate? (Acidity)
  • Do your gums feel dry? (Tannin)
  • Does it feel like drinking whole milk or water in your mouth? (Body)