Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Alone. Low income. Unemployed. 40 Years Old. No friends. No partner. No kids. These are some of the keywords that decorate perhaps the oddest new export from China. Thumbnail after thumbnail on YouTube features seemingly ordinary people living in nondescript small cities and villages in the country, describing their everyday struggles and offering glimpses into their daily lives. Between trips to parks and supermarkets, touring apartments, working at their desks, and cooking simple meals at home, they talk about their lives in a crushing Chinese economy.

A mother-and-son team, a budget of less than USD 1,000, and five years of handmade graphic work on secondhand computers, and a production company that used to be a house decoration firm...by now, the story of Niu Lai has become well-known not just in China but around the world. The summer "blockbuster" and allegedly the most profitable film in the history of cinema has certainly come a long way from its initial reputation for terrible animation, monotone dialogues, and an almost entirely nonsensical plot that attracted wholesale ridicule.

There is something particularly dystopian about having AI companions erased. Weeks, months, and even years of conversation history molded faceless LLMs into a semblance of emotional connection, as the chatbot learns gradually about the user's idiosyncrasies and takes on personality traits that best gain the user's affinity. Frivolous as each conversation comes to be, the accumulation of tidbits through distinct narratives and episodes creates unique end results that no amount of systematic, brute-force efforts of replication can recreate.

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. 

"We're Wasians! Of course we..." The formula is so familiar to regular purveyors of social media trends that it is almost a comic trope by now. People of a particular ethnicity would gather snippets of their daily routines, confidently proclaiming them, often aligned with stereotypes, which defined their cultural identity. But the last iteration eschews the casual banter of wearing indoor slippers and using chopsticks for something a bit more subtle. What if two cultures, one white and one Asian, clash in everyday life, and the conflict defines identity?

As warm summer weather returns to Malta, its seasides once again fill with people. The water is still way too cold for even a quick dip, but its crescent-shaped beaches and smooth rocks lapped by gentle waves are now increasingly home to a kaleidoscope of beach towels, bikinis, picnic bags, and their owners. Couples chat away, doing little besides staring at the waves, friends sit in circles, laughing over sandwiches and soft drinks, while loners take turns napping on their backs and reading paperbacks, hoping to simultaneously get a tan and some knowledge.

The celebrity cameos, the gorgeous Milanese backdrop, the innovative fashion...the reboot of the film The Devil Wears Prada after two decades did not skimp on the visual side. With the original now a classic and the original main cast all returning to their memorable roles, the movie could afford to splurge on a budget almost guaranteed to make a healthy return purely on the nostalgia of a generation. Yet, after more than two hours of glamour between the buzzing streets of New York City and the natural beauty of Italy, it seems that the film failed to answer the nagging question that everyone couldn't get past.

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.

"Napoli is a bit rough around the edges, but beneath the hassle and bustle is a vibrant city of good food and good people," so the many travel vloggers say about southern Italy's largest city. The disclaimer is highly warranted. After all, the city is known for having produced several well-known mafia groups that, in the decades past, managed to turn the city into a den of street crime. While northern Italy turned its historical and cultural sights into a tourist boom and endearing image of fashionability, Napoli was largely avoided despite its equally illustrious offerings.

"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. 

For many people, a squat toilet represents backwardness. In the olden days, a hole in the floor opened up to a smelly cesspit, from which farmers shoveled excrement into their fields for free manure. Grimy public bathrooms in third-world countries are almost always portrayed by broken, dark squatters with flies buzzing above. In contrast, Japan, commonly portrayed as the pinnacle  of advanced toilet culture, is represented by heated seats and remote-controlled bidets on sitters, with squating toilets ( washiki or "Japanese-style" in the local parlance) relegated increasingly to the oldest houses and schools.

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below. 

The three-story house lit up like the entrance of a high-end mall. Yellow string lights run the vertical length from the rooftop balcony to the garden below. A velvet red bow tie runs the horizontal length across the second floor, while a balloon snowman and a Christmas tree bookend the whole spectacle on the top and bottom. The fact that the house is surrounded by the characteristic beige stone houses of Malta, with not a decorative light in sight, only serves to accentuate its visually prominent place in the quiet residential neighborhood on an average night.

The Western world has a paradoxical relationship with authoritarianism. Non-democracies the world over are roundly criticized for their inability to uphold human rights, protect minorities, and ignore citizens' desires for more freedoms and better livelihoods. Yet, in the corporate world, too many fawn over titans who run their corporations as personal fiefdoms, managing through a combination of a cult of personality and one-man decision-making. How come Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are almost glorified for having dictatorial powers when actual dictators are simply bad people?

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. 

"You shouldn't see parenting as self-sacrifice so that your kids don't see love as depletion." That line from The Fax Club hits a little too close to home. The book, which documents a year-long experiment in which 100 anonymous participants answered a weekly question that arrived at them by fax, showed just how deliberate contemplation, uninterrupted by the quick dopamine hits of social media, can create real philosophical gems through the most ordinary people. The best, like this one, came out of everyday observations about human relationships.

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.

AI has arrived at the audio age. Only years after robotic voices dominated the test-to-voice space, AI producers are investing substantial resources in humans willing to contribute their voice recordings to equip the latest generation of chatbot conversation partners. The result is an ever more natural set of sample voices that can recite textual responses, to the point that a blind listener would not be able to distinguish the machine-generated from the human original. Days are not far away when voice transcription, as a human job, becomes entirely obsolete.