Arts, Books & Writing
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Rediscovering the Act of Thought
Writing has always been at the center of my creative life. It is not only a means of expression but also a way of thinking. I have spent many mornings and late evenings writing essays, reflections, or free notes that help me understand the world around me. Typing has become second nature, a rhythm that…
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Why the Personal Blog Still Matters
For many, the personal blog now feels like an artifact from another era, something quaint that belongs to the slower internet of the early 2000s. People write on platforms now. They post on LinkedIn, share threads on X, and record their voices on short videos. The idea of sitting quietly to write in one’s own…
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The Terakoya Spirit in the Age of AI
Long before schools were standardized and education became a matter of national policy, Japan had the Terakoya. The word traces back to terako (children who once studied at temples) and ya, meaning a place or establishment. In other words, Terakoya were places where temple children learned. In their earliest form, many of these small, community-based…
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Writing That Forgets Itself
When people begin their writing with a confession about how long it has been since they last wrote, or how they finally found a free moment, something important is lost. The reader is asked to share in the behind the scenes chatter of the author rather than the substance of the work itself. These small…
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Writing Beyond the Noise
When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, audiences entered theaters expecting a science fiction adventure. They saw spacecraft moving with balletic grace, a red-eyed computer that seemed almost human, and a journey into cosmic mystery. Yet what lingers decades later is not the spectacle of rockets or the year printed in the…
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The Freedom of Plain Text and AI
There is no shortage of apps that promise to organize the human mind. Obsidian with its glowing graph view, Notion with its customizable dashboards, Roam with its block-level linking. Each has created communities of enthusiasts who spend hours tweaking their systems, sharing screenshots, and hunting for the perfect plugin. The rise of artificial intelligence has…
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Ghosts and Roots of Language
Languages are not simply tools of communication. They are also archives, keeping within their structures the echoes of past centuries. Every time we write or speak, we are inheriting choices made long before us, by scribes, poets, reformers, and governments. A word on the page may look ordinary, but its spelling, shape, and sound are…
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Revisiting A Thousand Plateaus
When A Thousand Plateaus appeared in 1980, the internet was not yet part of daily life. Computers existed but were mostly confined to research centers, military projects, and specialized offices. The idea of a vast, global network of minds and machines was still science fiction. Yet the book seemed to sense that something was shifting.…
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Markdown vs Plain Text
The relationship between plain text and markdown is often taken for granted. Many assume they belong to the same family, that a preference for one naturally includes the other. But is that really true? When I move between a pure plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit and a markdown editor like Typora or Obsidian,…
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The Open Door of Plain Prose
Open a book of mathematics and the page looks like a map to another planet. Strange letters and symbols occupy the space where you expect sentences. For those who speak its language, the page may hold elegance and order. For everyone else, it is a wall. The same thing happens with music. To a musician,…
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When Knowledge Performs
A library at rest is almost a contradiction. The shelves are filled with books, each holding the trace of someone’s thought, yet in the stillness there is no thinking taking place. The pages wait. The words rest in lines, perfectly preserved, but silent. We often imagine that a library is full of knowledge. In truth,…
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The Writer I Return To
There is a unique kind of joy that comes not from reading the works of great authors, but from reading what we ourselves have written. We often speak of favorite writers and beloved books, but when a person has written enough across the years, when journals pile up, essays stretch back into the past, and…