Today's sentiment: Melancholy.

We only take out the recycling can beneath Xiaoxi’s desk once every week or two. All that every goes in there is paper and the occasional beverage bottle. The recycling can is hidden deep beneath the desk, so it’s very easy to forget it’s existence. You can only really see inside of it when you’re standing at one particular angle. This morning, I happened to be standing at that angle, and caught a glimpse of the green label of a bottle of tea I’d drank last week — my preferred brand, — different from the brand of bottled tea everyone else in this house drinks. I’ve given up caffeine (at least I’d like to believe I have). Taking that to the logical extreme, that means I’ll never buy that particular brand of tea again. Any sort of “Never again” produces a melancholy feeling deep in my heart. It seems like my life has gone from being defined by the things I’d never done but dreamt of doing to now being nothing but a list of things I’ll never do again. What will happen if I get too used to never trying anything new? I do try new things, I do go new places — it’s just, experiences don’t have the same impact on me that they used to. Maybe that’s scarier. It’s not a matter of being lazy or having bad habits. It’s as though my physiology has changed.

For some reason I can only process certain stimuli via imagining video games that simulate those stimuli. I experienced this quite acutely recently reading Mu-Chou Poo’s Ghosts and Religious Life in Early China. Ghosts, to me, are digital. Why? I have no idea. I didn’t play any Shin Megami Tensei games until I was already 18. Maybe my childhood subconscious interpreted whatever’s going on inside .Hack as ghosts? Likewise, humanity as it existed at the border between history and prehistory is digital to me. Maybe this is a result of seeing the Gyroids in Animal Crossing then learning that they’re Haniwa. Computers are where the mysterious relics of our ancestors — both physical and supernatural — take on some alternate life and continue performing whatever strange behaviors they were doing thousands of years ago, when they still inhabited this earth.

When I read 诗经, the Classic of Poetry, and see all these descriptions of plants I’ve never heard of, or paranoias about rats, I can only imagine these plants as existing in video games. There aren’t actually all that many games about interacting with plants at anything beyond a superficial level. Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley obviously are centered around growing plants — but all the plants are just sprites that you press a button in front of to interact with. There’s no considerations of the individual leaves of each plant. You don’t prune the plants. You don’t pick wild flowers from tufts of grass and put them in your hair. You don’t use the leaves of plants to add flavor to your tea. Even if you did do these things, they wouldn’t be implemented in such a way as to evoke the tactile sensation of touching the plants. Instead they’d just be systems, menus, sprites and text that tells you what you did. There are games that are much more detailed simulations of plants — but that’s all they are. You might have a terrarium where you get to slowly watch your plant grow. The plant simulations don’t interact with a wider game world.

Maybe there was some deep shock to my body when I played Shenmue for the first time and was allowed to carefully examine all the 3D models that made up the world, or to look up close at every single object sold in the convenience store. When I watch movies by certain directors, say Koreeda, the sets are so detailed and idiosyncratic that I wish movies worked the same way as Shenmue, and I could pause the action at any moment, pick up objects lying around, and rotate them around in 3D. What was shocking about Shenmue was that it was over 20 years old when I played it, and no later games that I know of ever expanded on the parts that I like. So much of that game felt like a proof of concept, yet just to make that proof of concept was hideously expensive. If one’s goal is to make every object in the world feel physical, to at least evoke a sensation of touch, then every single object has to essentially be designed as its own game. Each object needs an interface, a way to translate interactions with it to pressing buttons on a controller. So games like that don’t really exist. They’re too hard to make.

I’m not sure why I feel so sad, thinking about all the things I’ve put in the trash. Every bottle of tea is something I’ve touched, and is now gone from me forever. Where does my trash go? I have no idea. Once I’m dead, who knows what will happen to all the pieces of paper I’ve written on or all the Kirby socks Xiaoxi bought for me off of Taobao. I wish I could have a more permanent relationship with all the physical objects I’ve touched. I wish I could spend a life contemplating them. Instead I feel a similar mental pain to what I felt when I was doing my running logs: I’d pass through a place, catch glimpses of what can be seen from a single side of a single road, and then never have a reason to go there again. I plan to eventually write a eulogy for the running logs, going into more detail about this feeling. I’m not sure why it hurts me so much. I don’t really hear other people talk about this particular melancholy very much.

Xiaoxi and I are going to see Zhang Lü’s new movie The Shadowless Tower in an hour. What is it about? I have no idea. I saw Gyeongju a few years ago and thought it was fantastic. It was the tale of a Korean international relations professor who had lived in Beijing many years, and had returned to Korea for a few days to see his classmates. All of the characters in the movie were weirdo. Since I’m also a weirdo foreigner living in China, I related to the movie perhaps a little too much. The main character meets someone in Korea. He goes to her house. He translates the Chinese poem she's always been curious about, the enscription on some painting hanging on her wall. Then he leaves, to return to Beijing.

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