July arrived before the article did. I kept telling myself I would finish it, and I kept not finishing it. The month opened with that familiar low-grade panic, the kind that sits in your chest while you refresh the draft and pretend to work.
July 1. I watched episode 13 of the Spice and Wolf remake. Holo is still impossibly cute.
The end card previewed episode 14, which means it is a two-cour show. Excellent news.
July 4. A PhD student in the lab graduated and took everyone out for dinner. It was stingy in a way that became almost impressive. Thirteen or fourteen people, no private room, three long tables shoved into a corner of the main hall. We were packed in like suitcases. The guest of honor showed up half an hour late while everyone sat around looking at each other. He refused to order enough food, just six or seven dishes, and by the end we were staring into empty plates. There were more than ten people and only ten yogurt desserts. He did not drink baijiu or beer himself, but kept pushing other people to drink baijiu. If it had been good liquor that would have been one thing, but it was two bottles of Hengshui Laobaigan. Please. The baijiu was fine; the behavior was not. I mainly despise the way he would not drink but kept corralling others into it.
July 5–6. A critic called Sob wrote a very funny, very sharp take on Hibike! Euphonium season three. Akasaka pulled another wild twist: after all that, Ai Hoshino was the groupie, and Kamiki was the pure-love warrior. The ATRI clips made Atri look adorable, so now I have no choice but to go back to the original work. And the song Zatto, Boku no Machi is genuinely great. The chorus has these runs of thirty-second notes that hit exactly right. Now I have to watch the anime too.
July 9–10. My junior left and dumped a mess in my lap, complete with several pits waiting for me to fall in. I was furious. Maybe I had not done enough mentoring, so I was eating my own consequences. Then I went into overload mode: whole body uncomfortable, no energy, sore and aching.
One day I did thirteen or fourteen hours of manual work. Pure labor, not much thinking required, but exhausting all the same. Running on too little sleep made me error-prone, so I had to spend extra attention just to keep earlier work from going down the drain. That was worse than the physical fatigue. Luck was on my side, though. The night before, with equipment failing, I managed to rescue part of the product. That night I almost separated the wrong compounds. At the last moment something clicked: the mass was too small, the yield looked wrong, so I checked the system again, kept running the column, and finally pulled out the real target compound.
July 13. I pulled an all-nighter. My head hurt, with a stabbing pain on the right side that came in waves. I sometimes get a sudden sharp jab there, but it usually vanishes quickly. This time it lingered. I should get a scan when I have time. Also, the nearby McDonald's removed apple slices and all the related meals. What am I supposed to do about fiber? A later note: it was probably just a temporary stock issue, because the meals came back after three or four days.
July 16. In the evening I passed Xihai Art Museum and saw about ten middle-aged women squeezed into the tiny entrance area, less than five square meters, doing square dance. A wave of suffocation hit me. Beijing is just too short on space. A while ago I saw something similar near Fenglan International Center: a crowd packed under a building, treating a pitiful scrap of open ground like a plaza and looking perfectly happy about it. Beijing really can feel like a maggot nest.
July 18. I saw a restaurant called Xiong Ye Niu Dian. The owner seems to enjoy arguing with bad reviewers online. Apparently both the male and female owners are somewhat notable, and were active on Weibo years ago, but the accounts I found by following internet traces had all been deleted. I want to dig into the owner's story when I have time and visit the place to see what it is actually like.
July 20. A stretch of high-intensity all-nighters wrecked my body clock. By the time I could go to bed early, I could not sleep at all. Do not stay up like that.
I also fell down a hot pot rabbit hole. Ula Manchu hot pot from the Northeast is the origin of Beijing copper-pot mutton. Over time, Ula Manchu hot pot could add crab, oysters, dried shrimp, and other small seafood to the broth for flavor. Beijing copper-pot mutton, meanwhile, clings to plain water. The old story is that clear water shows the lamb's true flavor. That is a lame excuse. It was originally just a degraded version of something better, born from scarce resources, and now it calls itself authentic and traditional. Nonsense.
July 21. On the plane I caught up on the latest Spice and Wolf episodes. Lawrence still did not buy the honeyed peach slices in Ruvinheigen. What a bastard. The story has reached the trust crisis between Holo and Lawrence, which was also the most gut-wrenching part of the old version.
I also watched the first episode of ATRI on the plane. Atri is adorable. And the first episode of Oshi no Ko season two. Hat-senpai is still cute.
I had heard Fujian described as eight mountains, one water, one field, and seeing it from above made that literal. Leaving Beijing, the ground looked like neat rectangular plots. Entering Fujian, it turned into one bumpy hill after another. People say read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles. Ordinary people like me still need to go see things for ourselves; only after walking those miles do the books start to make sense. That said, travel is hard on the wallet and hard on the body.
The South feels rich. A village in Fujian is bigger than a town back home, and almost every house looks like a small villa.
July 22. At night an underage boy who presented in a femboy way kept hanging around and chatting. I hinted several times that he should leave the room, but he would not go. I slept late. Sometimes I wonder why people who seem normal in online chats present such messy lives on social media. After meeting them offline for even a short time, the answer becomes obvious.
July 24. Sharing a hotel room with kids made private time awkward, but it also forced me to fix my sleep schedule. I spent several days living around a group of children. I do not believe in physiognomy, but the kids who clearly had a bright, lively quality really did stand out. They were not necessarily handsome or pretty, but there was something refined about them, something mature and sincere in their eyes. It is hard to describe. By contrast, the kids whose strict parents had disciplined them into dullness, and the kids spoiled rotten by grandparents, were equally obvious. Upbringing matters. I am grateful my family did not interfere too much in my childhood. I did not grow into some towering tree, but at least I put down roots. Some branches grew crooked, but at least bad pruning did not kill me outright. Listening to the kids talk, I kept thinking how impossible it is to guess what the loudest online pundits are actually like on the other side of the screen.
July 25. I am completely weak now. The kids around me can run for ten-plus hours without looking tired. I lose focus after about a morning, and my body is far weaker than theirs. How did that happen?
It was my first time near a typhoon landfall, and it was spectacular. I also bought a bottle of Coke from a small shop that turned out to be six months expired. I opened it, took two sips, and noticed it was flat. Then I saw the production date. Mountain village residents must not drink much soda.
July 27–28. An eleven-year-old mocked my thinning hair. It was true, but I was still annoyed. The femboy came to my room again at night and still would not leave. Socks worn with sneakers smell absolutely vile.
July 30. I stayed in Fujian for a while. The faces in airports and stations definitely had a southern character, but within that there were distinct subgroups. Individually everyone looked southern; put them together and the differences became obvious. The world is interesting. Xiamen Airlines' plane food was actually pretty good.
August 1. So now I am officially twenty-four and still a student, and still accomplished nothing. Just back from vacation, I was immediately angered by my junior in the lab.
August 5. Depression hit hard. I thought about a lot of things and did almost nothing. At least I finally figured out one topic I had been circling in my head. The toilet and the shower really are the two best places for inspiration. I had heard from people in certain image-sharing groups that linguistics hobby circles have a high proportion of femboys. I was skeptical before. Today I believe it.
August 7. Autumn has already begun.
August 10. I went around Jiangsu and met a lot of very impressive young harmonica players. I have so much to learn. I also met a VTuber I often watch offline and dueted with her on a little anime song. Unfortunately, I messed up. Two days in a row I slept very little to catch early trains, and my back and waist ached. This may be my last summer vacation where I can move freely.
On the high-speed rail, the auntie next to me played short videos at full volume. I put on noise-cancelling headphones hoping to nap, but once the ambient noise was filtered out, the video sound effects became even more prominent in my ears. On nearby trips I also encountered a chain-smoking uncle who took off his shoes and squatted on the seat, a fiery kid who could not sit still, and the auntie already mentioned. People say southerners are generally more refined, but I am not convinced. My sample size is tiny, though. Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe those passengers with plastic Mandarin were not southern at all.
I caught up on new Oshi no Ko episodes. Abiko Samejima is adorable. I really like that fluffy short-haired little-girl look.
August 11. When a long task is coming, it is better to push hard whenever you can and finish as much as possible early. Do not spread it evenly across every day until the last one. Something unexpected will always appear and wreck the schedule.
At night I watched the last two quarters of the Olympic women's basketball final between France and the United States. The final two minutes swung wildly. France lost by one point. So close. Playing at home, France still got treated like the away team. The referees were shameless.
August 17. Blizzard and NetEase argued for more than a year and finally made up. I logged into Battle.net again and was asked for ID verification. Trouble. When I registered, I was underage and randomly grabbed an ID number online. Now I am paying for it. Fortunately I found a bug from a forum that let me into the account management page, and I quickly bound my phone number. I still cannot change the ID binding.
August 20. Black Myth: Wukong launched today. I get severe 3D motion sickness and rarely play single-player games, so I had not followed it much. Over the past two or three years I kept seeing marketing every few months. It was not annoying enough to hate, but I had no particular goodwill toward it either. Then this morning, my social feeds suddenly filled with posts from women writing long, solemn manifestos. They looked righteous at first glance, but reading them was the same old guilt-by-silence rhetoric. It felt less like an argument than a performance. I was disgusted enough that I immediately remote-controlled my dorm computer from my desk, downloaded Steam, bought Black Myth: Wukong, and planned to try it as soon as it installed. Out of spite, I hoped every yuan I spent would turn into something unpleasant for the people posting that stuff.
I played from six in the evening straight to one in the morning. A laptop with a 12800 CPU and a 3080 Ti could run the game smoothly on medium settings. I am definitely not suited to this kind of game. The maps are large and full of forks. Running and turning made me dizzy and nauseous. For the last few hours I had to play for a while, lie on the desk, then continue. I downloaded a cheat trainer ahead of time and locked my health the whole way, so I had no real sense of difficulty.
The three staff stances switch freely, and they look flashy. The full-charge heavy attack in smash stance is very satisfying; it made my head buzz. The spinning, thrusting move in thrust stance was great stress relief. Exploration, though, has almost no guidance, which was miserable for someone with no sense of direction and motion sickness. The controls are explained well, at least: the full keybind list is always available, shortcuts stay on screen, and the skill tree describes combos and effects in detail. I saw cloud players complaining that the game has bad guidance because it does not teach sprint at the start and expects you to figure out the staff spin yourself. But the tutorial level mentions both shortcuts. People will say anything. I wanted to sew that mouth shut. The game has plenty of flaws, including those inhuman invisible walls, but seeing people attack it with irrelevant, baseless arguments was disgusting.
I reached chapter four and got lost in Huanghua Temple. The first three chapters were excellent. Every major map looked and sounded completely different, and each chapter ended with a cutscene in a different style. The showing-off was maxed out. Chapter two's mountain sand slide was cool. Chapter three's snow mountain was carefully done; as someone from the Northeast, I thought the feeling of stepping in snow was very real. Kang-Jin Loong in chapter three was stunning, though only a minor boss. Yellowbrow's three-phase boss fight was also very creative.
So far, Black Myth: Wukong is easily worth the 268 yuan price. Unfortunately I am busy. Even though I was hooked, I will have to wait a while before playing properly. I hear the game has a huge amount of content, so it will probably take a long time to push through.
August 21. Ritsu and Kumiko share a birthday today.
August 22. Black Myth's story triggers have very loose preconditions. Most events fire as soon as you get near the area. I used a trainer to adjust jump height and speedran my way to the first ending. I hear the other ending is broadly similar to the first, and there are only two endings. The game is good overall, but the story feels a bit anticlimactic. From the main plot and the character codex, it is obvious that some invisible Hayekian hand is pushing things along, but by the end you still know almost nothing about it. It digs a lot of holes and fills in very few, leaving too much blank. My personal rating: 95 for art, 90 for combat, 70 for story. Promising for the future. Coca-Cola's new Oreo flavor is surprisingly good.
August 24. At night anxiety hit. At twenty-four I feel like I have made no progress since twenty. My abilities and horizons are stuck in place, and my hair is only getting thinner.
August 26. I watched the latest two Spice and Wolf episodes. Holo is still cute.
Genki Forest's new green plum flavor is not bad. And every autumn rain brings more cold. The rainy days earlier still felt muggy and hot. Today's heavy rain actually carried a chill. Summer was still there, but it had started to loosen its grip.