Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

What is it like to stare at the night sky against your will? It's a question I'd never thought I would be asking myself when the unplanned power cut hit my side of Malta in the late afternoon. Based on past experiences, Maltese power outages can definitely last a few hours, but with the hard work of the folks at the national utility, Enemalta, the situation does get resolved soon enough. But as the sun went down and the streets remained pitch dark, the 44-degree heatwave started taking its toll on the century-old stone box that is simply not designed to dissipate heat quickly.

The queue is still at 744 tasks. It has been there for the past three hours or so. I've browsed today's news, answered a few unrelated emails, gone to the gym, and even tried to take a nap as I waited, to no avail, for the ticker to go down to 743 or less. Why not just click the Start button and go through Task #744 myself? Because I tried, realized that it wasn't easy, and decided to take a break by unenrolling from it, in the hope that someone else is more passionately up to the challenge, get it out of the way, so that I can work on something else.

Get your hands dirty in the field; only then will you see the true value of work and how to put theories into practice. Such advice is often freely dispensed to newcomers in many different professions. At first sight, its vague wisdom is innocuous enough: who can argue against getting out there, putting what one learned from books and classes into action, and seeing the physical results to improve further? The trial and error may be all the more exciting when the hands-on work means getting out of stuffy offices, going into the streets, and helping customers who are most in need.

Sporting culture is one of those things one simply cannot create from scratch. A startup may disrupt an industry through a combination of innovative technology, clever marketing, and novel business models. But startups in the form of athletics draw more frowns and ridicule than admiration. Even after a couple of hundred years in existence, the American version of football is still criticized for being a misnomer. Plenty of new exercises, from Quidditch to paddleball, face uncertain futures, as their popularity is seen more as a fad among certain population segments rather than as universally accepted.

There is a cardinal rule I abide by when gymming in Malta: never go after 5pm. Not that big to begin with, the local gym is packed by then, with every machine occupied, and a bike-riding class blasting music and shouts of encouragement on one side. Seeing the gym mainly as a place to relax away from the hectic meeting schedule (and occasionally discreetly gawk at the beautiful women exercising there), I find myself unable to handle its sweaty steaminess on sunny afternoons, just as I struggled in packed rush-hour trains in Japanese summers. 

"You just sounded very different from when you usually talk to your students," my wife said after she overheard me finish a meeting. I was surprised. As someone who believes I bring the same communication style to all my interactions, professional or private, I have zero self-consciousness about the changes in my pitch, tone, or speed as I talk in different situations. As naive as it may sound, even as I recognize the inevitable nervousness, lack of confidence, and the shakiness that come with certain conversations, I still see that the differences projected by those emotions are unnoticeably minute.

Researching Chinese companies and business executives, I recently came across a term I had never heard before. Yin-yang contracts (阴阳合同) refer to the presence of two parallel agreements a company signs with an individual or a business partner. The yang is the public one, to be submitted to investors, law enforcement agencies, and other scrutiny; the yin is the confidential one that contains the actual terms of operational ties between the two parties. Implicitly, the contents of the two are quite different, allowing the two parties to do one thing in practice while presenting something different.

It is always a downer to come back from a street party to find your house flooded. But in Malta, that downer is all the more when the stone house is likely more than a century old, and the party may involve half the country's population gathering around to watch a one-and-a-half-hour fireworks display. In positive terms, it is called "tradition and modernity living side by side." In less pleasant words, it can be summed up as "why does the government spend money on free fireworks, when it may want to consider subsidizing housing repairs with that money instead?"

Electric vehicle purchases, solar panel installations, windmills going up...as the Third Persian Gulf War degenerates into a tit-for-tat blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, increased use of renewable energy seems to be a panacea. That is, until you dig a little deeper and realize that the oil and natural gas stuck behind the Strait are not just for energy use. Petroleum is the raw material for everything from the fertilizers to feed our crops to the helium that is indispensable to manufacturing semiconductors. Electricity can transport us, but cannot put food and information technology on our tables.

Western liberals rejoiced when Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary for the last decade and a half, was finally thrown out of office recently, despite persistently tilting the field to his favor through monopolizing mainstream media and gerrymandering electoral districts to dilute opposition votes. Peter Magyar, the incoming prime minister, immediately called for a complete overhaul of the state broadcaster and rescinding Hungary's opposition to the EU's further funding of Ukrainian war efforts. Brussels seemed to have lost an enemy and gained an ally.

There is something deeply satisfying about finding typos and grammatical errors in articles from reputable newspapers like the New York Times or the Economist . The reader knows that these organizations employ dozens of dedicated editors to review, restructure, and polish pieces written by veteran journalists who themselves have years of experience checking on other people's work, not to mention degrees from prestigious academic programs specializing in exactly the types of writing they are paid to do. When readers can pick up what slips through these eyes and minds, they feel just a little bit like the pros' equals.

As the minutes tick away, the folks at the bus stop are getting jittery. Laughter and banter amongst family and friends gradually give way to silence, occasionally broken by a nervous tapping of a foot on concrete and a dismayed sigh. Otherwise, everyone looked in the same direction, the narrow paved road leading to the stop, the line of sight broken by a sudden curve against the tall trees across the street. Unable to see vehicles incoming more than a few seconds before the stop, no one dared look away and miss the arrival; their eyes intent on peering through the spring foliage for any glimpse of a bus livery.

In another war, by the third week, people will accept the routine of a new reality and will have moved on to something newer and more exciting. We cannot say the same about the so-called Third Persian Gulf War that is unfolding across a swath of the Middle East. The photos of residential compounds and civil infrastructure pummeled by bombs and missiles are getting as numbing to see as the growing statistics of casualties. But this war refuses to simply exist out of our minds: its consequences are too real and too close to be summarized as "someone else's problem."

"I am so looking forward to the next batch!" More than a hundred similarly phrased messages lit up the Slack channel as faces from around the world chimed in with anticipation. I was in a powwow of AI annotation "experts," a collection of more than 300 freelancers, remotely hired and based, to work through a project evaluating the quality of a Large Language Model (LLM)'s different responses to given prompts. Over a little more than two days, the group of people who have (and will likely never) met in person powered through what is likely thousands of tasks.

The government signaled displeasure with the reporting by revoking the journalistic privilege of several correspondents ...goes the typical back-and-forth between authoritarian regimes and critical (often Western ) media outlets. Those revocations are based on a perhaps deliberately bureaucratic method in controlling access: the existence of the journalism visa in most jurisdictions. Foreigners working for major news brands are expected to self-identify as seeking to publish information. This is so that they do not bring their employers problems, while enabling local authorities to better track their whereabouts.

"Chongqing was cool, but after seeing all the social media posts about the city...something was just missing for me." The German guy I met at the hostel in Chengdu had this to say when I inquired about his impression of my next destination. Seeing the ambivalence on his face was a bit worrying. After all, like him and millions of others, I was drawn to visit the city because of viral online content. Youtubers gave the city monikers of the Cyberpunk City while vlogging about its dazzling nighttime views and mindblowing mountainside construction. 

Early December 2025, Malta rescued 61 illegal immigrants from a capsized boat in the Mediterranean, providing them with emergency medical support after taking them ashore. With the majority of the rescued coming from Bangladesh and various African countries, the visuals of their being treated (for free) by Maltese medics and ambulances only give local netizens, already angry about rampant foreign arrivals in the country, additional ammunition to call for a more stringent anti-immigrant stance by the government. 

It was bound to happen sooner or later. That seems to be the unanimous verdict among Asia-watchers as another bout of Sino-Japanese conflict flared up recently. The statement from Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, unequivocally calling Japanese military to aid Taiwan in case of a mainland invasion, unsurprisingly triggered a negative reaction from the Chinese government. In the face of criticism even among the more moderate members of her own party, notably her predecessor Shigeru Ishiba, Takaichi has refused to back down, showing no indication that a retraction or apology is forthcoming.

Read some posts on online forums about Malta, and chances are that one would soon come across complaints that the prices do not match incomes. The ever-increasing costs of newly constructed condominiums and hotels aside, the biggest peeve among posters seems to be the country's restaurants. Despite the island being home to more than half a million residents, the eateries seem to cater exclusively to the influx of tourists with deep pockets, putting together posh dishes at posher prices, while giving those on a budget slim pickings beyond fried chicken and kebab shops. 

Ah, a Lenovo laptop. It almost takes me back to the college days, when the ThinkPad represented the pinnacle of the aspiring white-collar professional, ready to take work on the go, no matter how rough the road ahead becomes, both metaphorically and physically. Those were the days when the MacBook was the exclusive territory of deliberately non-mainstream hipsters, attracted by its quirky colors and functionalities. The serious kids, those heading to the world of finance and management consulting, needed a business laptop to accompany their business suits.