2025-10-31 Journal Entry

My brain has been an absolute potato, I won’t lie. Jetlag is killing me, and for whatever reason my drive to write has just been gone. (I say “for whatever reason” as if I don’t know the reason!) I’ve turned into a truculent little shit without my sleep, mostly just absorbed in sleeping too much and watching youtube. I don’t think it’ll be entirely in vain though, since in a few hours it means I can get up early and go to a mornings-only bun cha restaurant that opens at 5:30am, hopefully that’ll let me beat the crowd.

I’ve been here for a few days and only really eaten convenience store food, which unfortunately in Vietnam is absolutely horrible. I bought two onigiri an hour or so before and they were inedible. The rice was hard, and when I pressed into the onigiri it didn’t budge. I spit it out into the trash can for fear of getting sick. Makes me miss Japan, honestly. The one positive side-effect of my drift down into short-form video is that my instagram feed is now almost entirely in Japanese, so I’m getting into all the strange Japanese memes and videos. But it’s still Instagram, so much of it is pretty shallow – cute girls, people doing dumb shit, and all the rest, not that I’m complaining (at least on the cute girls front). But one feels they should be doing better things with their time. So I’ll sit here and write instead.

Vietnam is fun and vibrant so far. I haven’t done as much as I would have liked on behalf of the aforementioned jetlag and quite a bit of rain – I was hoping I had dodged the typhoon season, but it’s lingering a bit longer. But I am now forcing myself out to get food. I don’t even really have a good reason to be nervous, but for whatever reason I’m often nervous about eating out in foreign countries. Normally that’s because I’m worried about the language barrier (or so I tell myself), but in Vietnam there’s quite a lot of English infrastructure, at least from what I’ve seen of Hanoi. There are quite a lot of foreigners, and most places have English signage or menus, and honestly a ton of folks have really excellent English. A few times I’ve almost suspected people of being American because of how natural their accent sounded.

What else is happening? Well I’m awake at 2am, for what that tells you. I have a fairly constant headache, and my nose is running. The flight over here was miserable – I had really nasty acid reflux after the wedding, and it gave me a really nasty sore throat. And that in turn got me full-on sick, so now I’m just sort of lightly recovering. The rain isn’t helping. But maybe some pho and bun cha will. Otherwise I’ll be stuck in a little barchan formation on the bed, curled up in the middle of the day at the mercy of my sleep cycles.

I don’t really have any specific things to be writing about, though I do actually. I think it may be worthwhile to write a review on Cloud Atlas, and I’ve got some inkling of a thing to write about the Death of the Author, which I’ve written about before I think in some other morning pages. But it has to do with the corollary of the Death of the Author being the Birth of the Reader, and the importance of agency and interpretation in the world of AI, where we have begun adding layers and layers to original texts themselves. I’ve seen some ideas that we should be writing more for the AI, which I think is perhaps fine for purely factual text, but then again there really isn’t such a thing as purely factual, especially for the current cohort of LLM-based AI models that don’t really have a physical “world model” and so purely relate to the text itself. If anything, that makes reading for oneself more important – it’s easier than ever to be spread incorrect information that would have been otherwise easily rectified by being-in-the-world or whatever.

But that will become some kind of cohesive argument, I’d say. I imagine there are other reasons for the decline of reading, but they are more related to the development of an oral culture, but I think that could be also argued against by arguing for one’s agency. You can listen to the Shaper, but you must consent to being Shaped.