to paraphrase something I heard, every hole you touch you change / every hole you change changes you

between Cha, Liu, Hanayama - a 心 eternal, illumination of truth, the 無礙光 of unyielding peace. noticed after ordinary words, or ordinary beings, are collapsed by the weight of light, or the dead, returning to pervade all darkness. to show us a way home.

"[...] They take from you your tongue. They take from you the choral hymn. But you say not for long not for always. Not forever. You wait. You know how. You know how to wait. Inside MAH-UHM fire alight enflame." (from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, on her mother as exilee in Manchuria during the occupation)

+ also, in Cha's "Dictée": "But your MAH-UHM, spirit has not left. Never shall have and never shall will. Not now. Not even now. It is burned into your ever-present memory. Memory less. Because it is not in the past. It cannot be. Not in the least of all pasts. It burns. Fire alight enflame. [...]"

if people could feel embrace from something beyond the horizon of the "innocent/forgiven=reward, evil/sinful=punish" moral paradigm, might we better face history? Curley (in translating/reading Hanayama) & Liu consider idea of liberation through an aspiration to take responsibility for the past...

+ surprising resonances w/ Melissa Curley's "Prison and the Pure Land: A Buddhist Chaplain in Occupied Japan" (blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethi...), of how Hanayama Shinshō narrated war criminals' death row as a call for his readers to remember them & take similarly total responsibility for the war.

I think its presentation, as a science fiction story styled as a documentary (but based on real-life quotes+text!), deepens its reflections on how to represent/communicate such history. maybe this narrative device serves as a way to ease into facing the brutality & "open wound"ness?

Ken Liu's "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (kenliu.name/binary/liu_t..., cw for graphic descriptions of 731 atrocities), dedicated in part to Iris Chang, was really powerful and moving for me as my first exposure to this horrifying history beyond a passing mention in a bioethics class.

I turned to (and fell in love with) Go after burning out...it's kinda wild to hear that apparently this is not uncommon!

I started using chezmoi to manage my dotfiles via github a couple years ago, it really reduced my stress in getting back to a working system after my laptop's SSD failed!

“my other mug is a podcast with data-center-scale full-stack computing infrastructure offerings that are reshaping industry”

this reminds me of something 曇鸞 Tan-luan wrote in 無量壽經優婆提舍願生偈註:
如海性一味，眾流入者必為一味，海味不隨彼改也。
it is like the ocean’s nature having one taste; when various streams enter, they necessarily become the one taste, and the ocean’s taste does not alter accordingly.
(CWS translation by Dennis Hirota et al.)

when i want to keep the screen off i will listen to podcasts on 2.5-3x speed in order to saturate my bandwidth for information intake/processing (this may be missing the point)

The thing is, none of us know which Google doc will be our last. That's what makes each one special.

& with apologies to @chenchenwrites.bsky.social (misquoted from www.instagram.com/p/C-luVIJPQ5r in my 3am brain zoomies):