AAAAHH

Patrick 2, a gnome wizard, second in a line of Irishmen destined to conquer the Mazes of Menace, delved deeper than any before or after him. Through the blind caverns of the Gnomish Mines he stumbled until he came upon a stair descending to a lit space hallway.

Patrick 2 pushed ahead through the hall of stone, opening a door into an intersection with many unseen paths before and behind him. Immediately from two directions, monkeys began to wheel down the hall toward Patrick. Patrick hefted his staff and swung at the first monkey to reach him, but it didn’t attack. Instead, it dodged Patrick’s swing and, grasping nimbly, slipped a ring from Patty’s finger. It began to run away, and before Patrick could even realize what was taken from him, the other monkeys leapt on him and stole more– his cloak, his gold. One of them even tried to make off with the shoes on his feet! The monkeys flew in every direction down different hallways.

All hell broke loose. Patrick noticed that his precious ring of teleport control was taken, but he didn’t know which monkey took it. Without hesitating further, he dashed north after a pair of monkeys. Throwing caution to the wind, he chased the monkeys past monsters, rooms, and strange watchmen. Patrick left his cat behind, who began immediately killing and eating gnomes, rats, and the human watchmen that prowled this level of the dungeon.

Patrick chased and slew monkeys with abandon. He followed one into a lit open space and found his cat, busy devouring a watchman. Patrick continued his chase into a shopkeeper’s chamber and finally cornered what appeared to be the last monkey. He slew it with a dagger, and the dead monkey dropped Patrick’s precious teleportation control ring on the ground of the store. The shopkeeper smiled.

“For you, esteemed sir; only 400 zorkmids for this ring of teleport control.”

Izchak, the purveyor of Minetown’s lighting shop, took the ring and offered to sell it back to Patrick for a hefty price. Patrick was rich, of course, somehow amassing over 900 zorkmids during the early days of his quest, but the thought of buying his own ring made him uneasy. Noises outside indicated that the cat was still fighting and murdering outside. Patrick considered throwing some paralysis potions at Izchak. Then he considered trying to fight him outright, but he had a feeling the shopkeeper was used to rabble and wouldn’t go down easy. Suddenly, an imp appeared at the door of the shop.

“I would fart in thy direction, but it would improve thy smell!”

Patrick and the Imp did battle for a time, and Patrick was wounded deeply. Feeling desperate, he finally began to loose all of his magical power upon the imp. He fired volley after volley of wizard blast at the imp until it exploded and died. Patrick promptly paid the shopkeeper for his ring and stepped outside and reunited with his cat. With the ring of teleport control coupled with his ring of teleportation, Patrick could instantly travel to any location on the dungeon floor. He thought this was a pretty important ability and didn’t want to lose it. It could save his life in a pinch!

A strange yellow slime mold approached Patrick and his cat slew it. He decided to eat the mold to try and absorb its intrinsic characteristics and become more powerful.

Wow! Great stuff!

A demilich, a really terrifying indescribable demon, suddenly appeared before Patrick. He freaked out and blinked. A unicorn’s horn appeared, and the demon was replaced with a cave man. Weird stuff started happening all around Patrick, like the whole world was flickering around him.

A frog creature appeared and Patrick decided to battle it. It became a killer bee and bit him. Patrick swung at it with his staff and a dragon appeared before him. Patrick somehow missed it. The shifting form bit him and Patrick sickened and died on the spot.

Yeah, Patrick was hallucinating from eating a yellow slime mold. The demilich was actually his cat, and the ferocious killer bee dragon shaman was actually a rabid rat. The rat bit Patrick and he contracted rabies and died.

Darn! My best run yet, by far!

~ ~ ~

That, my friends, is NetHack. It was released in the 1980s, but the interactions of all the different elements of the game engine are so open ended that emergent gameplay narratives arise naturally throughout the game world. The monkeys made off with Patrick 2’s valuables, were chased through Minetown, and dropped their stolen goods inside a shop. The shopkeeper claimed the items for himself and would not let Patrick leave without paying the price. Meanwhile, chaos from Patrick’s cat outside and the constant flow of monsters through the town added to the confusion of the moment, giving me as the player less time to think all of my decisions through.

I was deeply riveted! And I was also really sad that I died. It was a funny death, but I would have liked to keep playing.

I have played many lives since, probably 20+, but none have made it back to Minetown. Many of my deaths are more mundane: starving to death while stumbling through barren caverns, or being attacked by water moccasins because I quaffed from a well, or dying from a cave in because I read an evil scroll.

Basically, taking risks in NetHack can result in instant death. But sometimes the risks are hilarious and need to be taken! Hopefully I will improve with time and be able to tell which risks are worth taking and when..?

PS:

hungers not I
darts I let fly
for sport I hunt thee
till sun end my spree

I went on a date with a pretty Mexican lass recently, and the experience pumped new life into my withering heart. We ate plantains and fried goat at a local Caribbean restaurant. We got some fancy drinks and talked long into the evening. It was really refreshing!

The next day at work, still smiling, I pulled out this classic:

El Paso is a ballad originally written by Marty Robins. It tells the story of a man smitten with a Mexican lass at the local bar. One day, he catches her sharing a drink with a dashing young cowboy. The narrator shoots the cowboy dead in a duel and flees the scene. His love for the maiden is so strong that he eventually returns to El Paso to see her and dies in the attempt.

I didn’t know that Grateful Dead covered the song live! The entire Red Rock set is so amazing, but their cover of El Paso is especially great because it takes Marty Robins’s slow, repetitive ballad and speeds the adventure along with plenty of flourishes and pretty guitar noises.

Of course, the original is an absolute classic:

We love a good storytelling western song. The climax of the story is such an upswell of drama as the singer comes under fire by mounted cowboys.

Something is dreadfully wrong, for I feel
A deep burning pain in my side
Though I am trying to stay in the saddle
I'm getting weary, unable to ride

But my love for Feleena is strong, and I rise where I've fallen
Though I am weary, I can't stop to rest
I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest

The Marty Robbins version does the climax better, I’d say, even if the Grateful Dead version is faster and more pleasing to the ear throughout.

O! To die for a woman! A few years ago I would have wanted nothing to do with any girl ever, but time revolves the heart and now I want some drama and romance in my life.

I haven’t played NetHack since college. For those unaware, NetHack is a dungeon crawling adventure game originally released in 1987. Can you tell?

These are the windows graphics. More hardcore players will play with text-based graphics that use letters and numbers to represent the dungeon and its contents on the screen. I prefer to play with the sprites… this game is esoteric enough in my opinion. Arcane, even. NetHack originates from text-based adventure games of old, where there is no graphical interface at all. In older text-based games, the player reads descriptions of scenes on a screen and “plays” the game by typing commands into the interface and seeing how the game responds. In this way, NetHack is actually a huge accessibility boost to the genre!

I died because my character fainted from hunger. While unconscious, a rat found my corpse and killed me. I didn’t know I was hungry, of course, because the game doesn’t really notify you of your status beyond some lines of text. A giant flashing warning on the screen would have been appreciated.

Alas, NetHack is not that kind of game! Death comes swiftly! In some cases, instantly!

The Supreme Court struck down this congressional map today:

What do these lines mean? What do the boundaries represent in the people that live there?

How do you describe this era? It is like post-modernism weaponized. It is like surrealism. Guerrnica but evil. Or maybe guernnica described exactly this sort of time

The town of Guerrnica was a real place. Before WWII, Hitler sent his bombers to the Spanish city of Guerrnica and burned it to the ground after hours of continuous bombing.

The city was carpet bombed. Some consider this the first carpet bombing in history via warplane.

This month, a number of robots made headlines competing in human sports.

In China, robots competed to complete half marathons alongside humans:

This event marks the first time robots have outpaced humans in a race. The race started at the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, with human runners and robots having their own tracks. Someday, maybe they will run side by side?

Robots are also competing against humans in tennis:

Ace, a tennis robot created by Sony, beat professional tennis players under competitive rules. Of course, the tennis robot requires a massive installation surrounding the table with cameras pointed every which way. As per the Guardian: “Ace sidesteps some tricky aspects of table tennis by having an eight-jointed arm on a movable base that does not have to stand on two legs. And instead of seeing the ball with two eyes, it draws on images from multiple cameras that view the entire court from different angles and track the position and spin of the ball.” I’ll be more impressed when a humanoid robot with a single perspective can beat a human competitor.

Still, I am floored by these developments. The robots are starting to look like the ones out of science fiction! Scifi is a form of prophecy, I am realizing.

Recently at a conference called FII in Miami held by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Investment, the Saudi state-owned chemical company Aramco, and the Saudi PIF investment company, President Donald Trump had this to say about China:

"I must say, I respect China greatly. Because it's amazing that with a system that in theory shouldn't work-- you know we go to school and we go to the best business schools, and we do well in those schools, and we read about free-entrepreneurship and we read about all these, uh, different things, but.. you look at China and how well they do, how well they manufacture-- I mean, they manufacture cars, so many that they actually have a contest for who can manufacture the least cars because they have so many cars. You have to have great respect for China for the job they do. Like them or not like them, you have to respect them."

For context, Trump said this as a non-sequitur to speaking about how “America is the hottest country anywhere in the world.” The question he was asked was “The world is entering a new economic era. Who do you think are the winners and who do you think would be the losers?” Let me respond by hearkening to the recent past.

In 2023, I wrote this short piece about the Chinese Spy Balloon and Attack on Titan:

https://www.aaaahh.net/a-frustrating-balloon/

This particular moment in time (January 2023) filled me with dread, because when this balloon started making headlines, all my previously liberal friends immediately turned into China hawks. Like, all of our discourse became anti-Chinese propaganda, feeding into the growing political current that Biden was an ineffectual commander-in-chief (probably true, as will be discussed below) that was not strong enough to fight the forces of this “axis of resistance” forming on the other side of the planet. Politically, America soured on Biden’s covid-recovery era progressivism and became war hungry. We needed to project power against China, apparently. You know, despite the fact that almost every single object you can observe and touch is made in China and shipped across the world for your convenience.

Well, that same year of our lord 2023 saw Oct. 7th happen in Israel. Biden abandoned his domestic messaging pretty much entirely to become a war president. He was fighting for Ukraine, he was fighting for Israel. He was building forces in the Pacific to counter China. Jingoism was IN! War was exciting again! Yahoo! We ended our occupation of Afghanistan under Biden, but we started two new proxy wars to make up for it. What are we as a nation if we are not constantly burning precious metals and fuel on foreign conflicts?

For obvious reasons, Biden would go on to lose catastrophically to Trump in the next election. Trump somehow simultaneously promised to both end “forever wars” and “finish the job” in Israel and Ukraine. He would talk about expanding the military to one crowd while pandering to anti-war hippies at the very next rally. The actual track record shows that Trump made war in the Middle East constantly throughout his first presidency, including working directly with Netanyahu to try and start an Iran war back in 2019 just before Covid erupted and shut down everything. How could Biden have ever hoped to top that pedigree? Republicans LOVE war. They make a new one in the Middle East every presidential cycle. Yes, that’s right, every single Republican president since the 90s has started a new war. Yes. Yes! Every single one! Look it up. So yeah, if WAR is the MESSAGE, then Republicans are going to beat you in the election. Biden couldn’t even stop Putin from invading Ukraine with a WWII level army. Biden was so weak that Putin could rattle his nuclear saber and just march right in to Ukraine ground-war style, starting a conflict that has continued well into 2026 and could endure “forever.” A forever war. Biden lost hugely to Trump, and the progressive policies he campaigned on all those years ago are now dreams on the wind.

So look where our hawkish tendencies got us this time. We went from expediently loathing China during the Biden era in order to usher in a president that would be “tough” on China. The new Republican administration went in and shuttered hundreds of thousands of government jobs, cut state funding for healthcare across the board, and now actively makes war in Iran. Gas prices have exceeded the very worst of the covid-recovery era. Inflation has not reversed and only increases in growth. And now, Trump is speaking at Saudi state-backed investment conferences where he is declaring that China “must be respected” because its socialism that shouldn’t work “in theory” actually works amazing in practice and has allowed China to become the industrial powerhouse of the world.

In all honesty, I knew almost nothing about China is 2023. I had one Chinese friend, that’s it. Since then, I have come to learn a lot more… and I must say this is one of those areas where I do agree with Donald Trump. Yes, we should respect China! What an amazing, massive place. What a history! What an incredible recovery! From being literally raped, pillaged, and murdered on Holocaust scales during WWII to a thriving country in 2026. The propaganda that China is some backwards evil 1984 dictatorship is falling away before our very eyes. It is being replaced by a new propaganda of optimism for Chinese success. And you know what? I’m all for it. I wish OUR country was producing propaganda about how great it is to live here. Unfortunately, Trump has recently stated that America is so busy making war that it cannot even afford to fund daycare for children:

"The United States can't take care of daycare. We're a big country, we have 50 states, we have all these other people, we are fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. We got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too. They should pay for it too-- they have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. [...] It's not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis, you can't do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing-- military protection."

And it makes me sick to my stomach because it was so obvious this is the direction we would go in 2023. As soon as Biden began to lose the thread of why he got elected, the slide back into war and austerity began. Biden campaigned on reinvesting in America. He didn’t spout “America-First,” but his message was essentially that we, as the wealthiest country on the planet, should be able to improve the lives of our own citizens. We were going to manufacture our own solar panels and semiconductors. And that was while we were dying en-masse to a pandemic. The world became real for a second, but the moment of clarity brought on by the pandemic has passed. Can we find that progressive optimism again? Or has American Fascism finally stamped the life out of hope? Are we doomed to wage war forever, always navigating some great power struggle between nations on the other side of this fragile little planet we all call home?

If Iran obtained nuclear capability, the Whole of the Middle East would be under threat and being blackmailed, and petrol and oil prices would soar!. You seem to forget that for 47 years this evil regime has murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people, maybe millions of people!. President Trump has done the World a great favour by being the only one to take on this evil regime!. Only other evil countries would support them!. Even Russia and China should see this!. They will benefit from this regime being removed!. We need stability in this World. A stable and just oil price will bring down the cost of living for everyone on our Planet!

This post is about the second book in Cixin Liu’s Three Body series, “The Dark Forest.” If you are familiar with the theoretical concept of a “Dark Forest” universe, then you already have a sense of what the book is about… but only a sense.

Caution: SPOILERS!

In this book, man finally makes first contact with a probe from another world. The object that reaches our own solar system is small, no larger than a truck, and it is shaped like a droplet of mercury. The following passage describes the moment in which a man-made probe touches the droplet for the first time.

“It was at this point that people noticed a strange contrast: The mechanical arm was obviously designed purely as a functional object, with a rugged steel frame and exposed hydraulics that that felt complicatedly technological and crudely industrial. But the droplet was perfect in shape, a smoothly gleaming, solid drop of liquid whose exquisite beauty erased all functional and technical meaning and expressed the lightness and detachment of philosophy and art. The steel claw of the robot arm clutched the droplet like the hairy hand of Australopithecus clutching a pearl. The droplet looked so fragile, like a glass thermos liner in space, that everyone was afraid it would shatter in the claw. But that did not occur, and the robot arm began to retract” (407, Liu).

This is man’s first physical contact with an extraterrestrial, and humanity is indeed transfixed like a cave man gazing for the first time into the heart of a gem. Up to this point, the alien fleet had seemed to be decelerating while humanity’s new space fleet could reach 15% the speed of light and was growing rapidly. Man was arrogant, riding high on his own progress.

I love the strangeness of the Trisolarin probe. I was absolutely transfixed reading the build up to first contact! As the human probe approaches the alien one, and docks, and latches on… it is so exciting and wonderful! The first humans to physically approach the probe with space suits were amazed to find that its surface gave almost no friction. Under a microscope, they see that its surface is like that of a mirror, with almost no space at all between the atoms that make it up. Doctor Ding Yi finally grabs a rock pick hits the droplet directly. Not a scratch.

“The fact that the droplet did not self-destruct was final proof of what people had guessed: If it was a military prove, it surely would have self destructed after falling into enemy hands. It was now certain that this was a gift from Trisolaris to humanity, a sign of peace sent in that civilization’s baffling mode of expression” (408, Liu).

Cixin Liu sets up a fall so dramatic and obvious. The ensuing fallout is almost hard to read. And yet, the literal melting of the Earth fleet in the open space beyond Neptune is beautiful in its own horrifying way. Humanity was transfixed like fry before an angler fish’s lure, and we paid the price of an entire space fleet for our wonder.

This outcome was foreshadowed, of course. The very beginning of the book starts with a depiction of an ant crawling through the impressions of a tombstone. Despite our hubris, we were only ants to Trisolaris, and our greatest show of force was crushed beneath the abstract boot of a strange space object from 4 light years away. Humanity was simply on another level. It is like a man with a bow-and-arrow trying to take down a tank. The bow user cannot even scratch the surface of the tank, let alone apply any force strong enough to slow its advance.

All told, “The Dark Forest” follows in Three Body’s footsteps in setting up a mysterious alien threat throughout the story and then dropping an awesome alien reveal right at the end. The first book did this too, slowly intimating the existence of the aliens without giving us concrete physical details about their life and culture until the last few chapters. The anticipation of discovery is sublime!

I have already started the third book, and the direction it seems to be going is already so bizarre. Humanity has shipped a frozen human brain into deep space…

No matter how many thousands of years we put between ourselves and our cave dwelling ancestors, some things do not change!

Here is a photograph posted by the news outlet Reuters back in 2023 about Israel’s war in Gaza:

The caption reads:

A Palestinian man reacts as he carries a casualty at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Rafah, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

The wording here doesn’t describe the picture very well. Instead of describing the man as crying, he simply “reacts.” Instead of carrying the body of a baby, the man only carries “a casualty.” This baby is not a casualty of a war, but a casualty of “the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.”

Here is another photograph:

The caption reads:

Women mourn holding the body of a Palestinian killed in Israeli strikes on houses, at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

Again, the women aren’t described as holding a baby. They are holding “the body of a Palestinian.” The woman holding the dead baby might very well be the child’s mother. And the strikes are “on houses.” We don’t know if it was these women’s homes that were targeted specifically, despite the fact that they are surrounded by the casualties of these strikes.

I suspect these captions were written intentionally to avoid emotional language. Since the images are indexed online by the text surrounding them, then it is easier to obscure Israel’s guilt in all of this by keeping sensitive images away from damning keywords like “dead baby” or “crying man holding a slain child” or “casualty of Israel’s WAR in Gaza!”

Two years have passed now since these images were taken. Here is Gaza now:

Desolation as far as the eye can see. Gaza is just gone. This was predicted as soon as Oct. 7th occurred, but very little public pressure was applied. These things can just happen, and America, the producer of the munitions that caused this as well as the ultimate defender of Israel against its enemies, will not stop it.

I ate pork, I am screwed.

You know what this means, right? People with Netflix will need to buy a different subscription to watch a lot of movies now. Big wigs with lots of money are carving up the world’s movies and shows, really valuable cultural media from across the decades, and charging a monthly fee for the right to access them.

It is a digital toll road between great movies.

In good faith, will Paramount share with Netflix the right to stream content that they own?

It is embarassing because Paramount’s IP is not even the best of the best. They just happen to be rich, so they can buy up truly great works of art and charge the price of a delicious meal to view them! In an age of infinite light and data moving through the air!

Mike Huckabee is the ambassador to Israel appointed by President Donald Trump. He recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show where he bumbled, shrugged, and IDK’d his way through tough questions about Israel and Jeffery Epstein.

MIKE HUCKABEE: How many boots on the ground do you think the US has supplied for Israel over the course of its life? How many times have we put soldiers on the ground for Israel?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we had the Iraq War, which was for Israel.
MIKE HUCKABEE: No — not for Israel.
TUCKER CARLSON: How was it for us?
MIKE HUCKABEE: Well, because it was retribution against 9/11. Now, was it the best idea?
TUCKER CARLSON: Was Iraq involved in 9/11?
MIKE HUCKABEE: Our government thought so.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why are 9/11 documents still classified?
MIKE HUCKABEE: I have no idea.

In the year of our lord 2026, members of the US government still use 9/11 to justify the Iraq war, even though former president George Bush has himself called the war a mistake. Ultimately, the government of Iraq had no direct connection to Al Qaeda. While 9/11 was used to justify the start of the war, no concrete evidence has ever surfaced to explain why Bush’s government so adamantly wanted to pursue war in Iraq. In truth, the Bush administration wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein’s government for its own purposes, and the anti-Islamic sentiments of the USA after 9/11 provided fertile ground to justify war.

Now, as the Trump administration builds military pressure around Iran and threatens to commit acts of war against it, we find there is no justification at all. It turns out, you don’t need a grand ideal to make war in the middle east. You can just sort of do it, and leave the fallout to future generations to sort out.

It is 3:37 am on a Sunday and my nose is congested so bad it is as if cement has filled every corner of my sinuses. My ears are pressurized like submarines and my eyes are bloodshot from being rubbed raw. I have just learned what yuri is at the bright young age of 28 years old.

Caution: SPOILERS!!

I just finished listening to Sarah Skaer’s reading of Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi. It is a wonderful travel narrative loaded with descriptions of sights, sounds, and delicious food. Really, every passage is loaded with food, food, food! The travel narrative quickly blossoms into a romance of sorts between the two main characters, a writer on a sponsored trip to Taiwan and a Taiwanese woman hired as her interpreter and guide. Here’s the catch: Aoyama Chizuko is a female Japanese writer and the story takes place in the 1930s, when Imperial Japan was actively colonizing the island of Taiwan and much of East Asia. So, while Chizuko and her Taiwanese friend Chizuru (or Chi-chan) clearly adore one another, an unspoken power dynamic between the two leads to a rift in their relationship that ultimately spoils the romance by the end of the novel. Or does it?

The novel was immediately endearing to me because Chizuko is basically a man that really loves food. Her entire character is about touring around, making stupid jokes, and eating as much delicious food that she can find. Chi-chan, endlessly knowledgeable about her home country and all its culinary delights, is more than happy to see to Chizuko’s every whim. Chi-chan plans trips for Chizuko that are so unbelievably detailed and thoughtful… she plans train rides through seas of clouds with hotel stops and night markets and snack stops… it all feels like a fever dream. And in a way, it is. Chizuko falls head over heals for Chi-chan, and she eventually tries to get closer to her. Chi-chan, however, is willing to flirt but unwilling to cross the line. For Chizuko, her trip to Taiwan is a wonderful writing tour from the “mainland” exploring an exotic place. On the other hand, Chi-chan is a second class citizen, an “islander,” forced to endure slurs, rough treatment, and eventually an arranged marriage in her own colonized land. It is a fever dream.

Again and again, Chi-chan asks Chizuko what their relationship really is. Is she Chizuko’s employed guide? Chizuko insists, sincerely, that Chi-chan is her friend. If this isn’t frustrating for Chi-chan, it was definitely fucking frustrating to me. After being edged along in this magical Taiwanese adventure, I wanted Chizuko to proclaim undying love to this absolute goddess Chi-chan, but in 1930s Taiwan, crossing that line (or even putting the line into words) must have felt impossible. At a critical moment a little later in the novel, Chi-chan again asks Chizuko to define their relationship. Chizuko says that Chi-chan is her “best friend.” Chizuko, literally drunk at one point, eventually falls to begging. She asks Chi-chan again and again to stay the night at her place. Chizuko is powerless to stop the rift that grows between herself and Chi-chan.

Indeed, the word “love” is never uttered in the novel to describe the relationship between Chizuko and Chi-chan. The word hangs in the imagination but is never uttered. This is in line with the definition of yuri as provided by (amazingly) The Ministry of Culture of Taiwan:

“In ACG (Anime, Comics, and Games) culture, the Japanese term “yuri” refers to affection between women that goes beyond friendship but falls short of romantic love.”

Indeed, the relationship between our protagonists is like a supercharged friend-zone. It is a complex relationship described through the subtle movement of dimples, flirty grins, and deep caring for food. Chi-chan is an angel from heaven to Chizuko, but ultimately she cannot give Chizuko what she really, really wants.

The novel ends in with the two reconciled but ultimately dissatisfied. The love they hold for one another is palpable, but it goes unfulfilled by the end. No amount of food can satisfy the sense of want hanging in the air. Indeed, Chi-chan literally takes Chizuko to a special banquet where the two chow down on 9 courses designed to be eaten by eight people, but physically stuffing Chizuko with her favorite stuff is not enough. Their relationship began with food but it transformed into something deeper, harder to satisfy.

In the end, Chizuko spends an entire year in Taiwan with Chi-chan. In the last pages of the novel, Chizuko remembers that she has to return to Japan in a few weeks but doesn’t mention this out loud. Chi-chan, presumably, is going to go ahead with her arranged marriage. The book does not explain what actually happens. We don’t know if love wins, or if they go their separate ways and never see each other again. This ending filled me with so much emotion that I had to write it all down.

So here I am. It is now 4:32 am on Sunday.

FUCK YURI!!!!!