Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

1244 comments - 18875 thread views 4d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1244

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Friday Fun Thread for April 10, 2026

28 comments - 359 thread views 10hr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Book Review: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients (and my own crackpot rant on the subject)

5 comments - 165 thread views 12hr ago by TitaniumButterfly (text post) Edited 11hr ago

Book Review - The Enigma of Cranial Deformation

(Ref: The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients on Amazon but if you're actually interested in the topic you should buy The Bioarchaeology of Artificial Cranial Modifications: New Approaches to Head Shaping and its Meanings in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Beyond instead. I warn you now that while the latter is several leagues better, it's also much narrower in scope, and neither is even remotely satisfying.)

Introduction

So here's what everyone seems to agree upon:

The elite castes of many ancient peoples used to employ bindings to shape the heads of their children, bonsai-kitten style, in a practice now known as Artificial Cranial Deformation (ACD). This might seem strange, but what's even stranger is that the practice is found in ostensibly-isolated peoples from all around the world without any apparent mechanism of transmission, going back around at least ten thousand years. Almost everywhere in fact; the only major areas without a history of it are Australia and South India, though it does seem to have been quite rare in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are even remains of Neanderthals which appear to have been subjected to ACD!

This would seem to raise several questions, including:

How might the practice have spread around the world in an era without communication networks?
Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups?
Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere?
Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage?
Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it?
Neanderthals did it? Really?

Hopefully we can all agree that it's an interesting topic. I'm generally fascinated by the interplay of skull magnitude and brain development and its implications for cognition. We know that cranial capacity varies among human populations in a way that seems to scale linearly with intelligence. I can't tell you how titillated I was to discover that Oprah apparently has a head so massive that when she needed a wig for a movie role, the producers had to stitch two normal ones together which sheds some light on her success. This is just one example of the kind of wild stuff one encounters when looking into brain/cranial/cognitive matters.

There are many reasons to think that cranial shape may also play a role in differential cognition among populations, but this avenue of inquiry has been verboten in the academy for at least decades, and Django Unchained somehow seems to have driven the final nail in re: popular consciousness, so very little is actually known.

Things get even more intriguing when we start to delve into historical head binding/ACD. Not only was it universally reserved for the elites, and forbidden to the lower classes, but cross-culturally there seems to have been near-unanimous sentiment that the procedure made for children who were more intelligent, wiser, and more spiritual; 'closer to the gods'. Supposing all these cultures did invent the practice independently, which is already kind of a hard swallow, what are the odds that they'd all independently, and erroneously, ascribe such significance?

The mental image of elite ancient humans around the world having discovered a forbidden process by which they could not only uncounterfeitably mark their children as socially superior but also actually increase their brain size and thereby intelligence (and, if you will, their access to the spirit world) is just too good to pass up. Not only would it make for an amazing story, and represent an under-appreciated aspect of human development, but it also tantalizes; suggesting that maybe, just maybe, there's a key to massively increasing human intelligence today, for our own children, and it's been right in front of our noses this whole time, inconceivably overlooked by our intellectual classes; a lost secret waiting to be rediscovered. [Point of order: I solemnly swear that I have no intention of trying this on my own or anyone else's children.]

Also, I know this sounds crazy (and that I've already got two strikes against me for looking into officially-designated bunk in the first place) but I have a sort of personal interest in the matter. For you see, my own birth was unusually traumatic and in the process I experienced extreme levels of cranial deformation. I've seen the pictures and they're... unforgettable. My dad told me that it wasn't until several minutes after I was born that anyone in the room was even convinced I had a face. After some time my skull ended up shaped close enough to normal that it's not noticeably aberrant except that it's very large; like Oprah, procuring suitable headgear can be a problem for me. Thankfully I also have a very large chest and shoulders so it doesn't for the most part stand out, but the point is that, while both of my parents are of above-average intelligence, I'm easily a couple standard deviations above either of them and have always sort of wondered why. Can you blame me for looking to cranial deformation as a possible insight?

Regrettably, after reading The Enigma of Cranial Deformation, doing a bunch of fact-checking, and compulsively looking into other sources, I still don't have any solid answers (except to the Neanderthal question which is that, no, they probably didn't actually practice it). The reason I don't have answers is because this is a preposterous book stuffed to the gills with random nonsense. Yet I can't shake the impression that its main point, which is that something weird is going on here and mainstream scholarship doesn't seem to take it seriously enough, does turn out to be more or less valid.

What bums me out about this state of affairs is that it's pretty much what I expected going in, and I'm disappointed to have my priors confirmed. Much time and effort was spent and almost nothing of value was gained.

But I did read it, and took notes, and I'm trying this thing where I reward myself for reading books and writing reviews. So, in case anyone anyone else cares, here you go.

(If you'd like to know where I am at on all the questions enumerated above, I do come back to that toward the end.)

But Why Read This Book?

Look, for all that The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients takes itself very seriously, it is clearly not a serious academic work and that's not hard to tell from the cover. Or the publisher. Or by flipping it open to almost any random passage and reading a few words. In fact, let me just...

While it is easy to see them [the Olmecs] as Proto-Mayans and Citizens of Olman (however large that country may have been), we should also consider them as the fantastic Proto-Mesoamericans they may have been: psychedelic aliens who used lasers to cut colossal basalt heads; Atlantean refugees who made a last stand in Tabasco; or Shang Chinese mercenaries taken from East Africa or Melanesia and specially trained to administer the Pacific (and later Atlantic) ports of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; or perhaps a people originally from the Atlantic side all along, having come from Africa, possibly as a military force from Egypt or West Africa circa 1500 BC. There are many possibilities. (pp. 57-58)

Golly that was a good one and I expect it will save me a lot of time in trying to describe the experience of reading this book. So, again, why did I do it in the first place?

Well, 'fun' isn't the right word, but it's not a bad start. These books aren't entertainment for me, exactly. Actually, this one is fairly typical in that it's poorly-written and worsely-edited; leans heavily upon long, dry passages ripped from e.g. wikipedia; often goes on interminable, barely-relevant tangents; repeats itself regularly at length and in more or less the exact same language; and despite constantly slinging mud at mainstream scholars rarely if ever does it raise coherent objections to their conclusions. It's tedious to read, is what I'm saying, and it would be fair to ask why any non-schizophrenic would bother. (Unless...?)

And yet I do love the genre. I have ever since wandering into a new age coffee shop at 14 years old and losing the day to their little library which treated such topics as the dinosaur-infested hollow earth, breakaway Atlantean nazi moon bases, and the scandalous tantric sexual customs formerly practiced on the sunken continent of Lemuria. The authors often put enormous amounts of work into these books. If there's a real-life connection to be made between their crazy theories and actual scholarship you can bet they'll find it. It's fascinating to see their minds at work and, at their best, with just a bit of effort, it's possible to suspend one's own disbelief for a little while; long enough to get a glimpse of alternate histories and realities of such scope, complexity, and grandiosity to put even the greatest sci-fi to shame.

Like A Princess of Mars, part of the joy is the conceit that it's all real; that the little red dot one sees wandering across the night sky really is an exotic alien world called by its inhabitants Barsoom, and that if you manage to fall down the right hole in the middle of nowhere you might go there too. Unlike Burroughs, though, these authors seem to be entirely earnest. And that adds just a little something extra which, for me at least, takes it over the top. A sci-fi author understands the reader's suspension of disbelief to be implicitly granted; the author of HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy knows that he must always be at pains to help the reader justify its continued extension.

Still, reading actual sci-fi would be a lot less work. But actual sci-fi wouldn't have the added perk of legitimately substantially increasing one's real-life knowledge of history, geography, archaeology, and so on, in an academic capacity. The vast majority of the content in this book is solid, believe it or not, and the bibliography is thorough. Almost all the really crazy stuff is phrased in terms of questions or what-ifs, as in the passage quoted above. And this means that, as one reads more and more such books, repeatedly returning to the same hobbyhorse contentions of the genre, focusing as they do on perceived gaps and deficiencies in mainstream scholarship, one inevitably begins to make one's own novel connections. And one will inevitably learn a whole lot of truths that mainstream sources would never touch upon for fear of looking disreputable. Like about cranial capacity, and Oprah.

So this is what I was truly doing reading this book. There was a topic -- ACD -- that I wanted to know more about, and I knew that if there were some really cool but potentially-inflammatory things to know about it, a book like this would be the only place to find them. The authors do actually put a fair amount of effort into footnotes and the bibliography, and when in doubt it usually isn't hard to jot down an astonishing claim and verify it elsewhere.

As I mentioned earlier, the book was a bit of a letdown in that respect. Turns out there's just not actually much to be said on the subject, other than totally-correctly calling attention to how neglected the topic, and its possible implications, tend to be in mainstream scholarship. But even more than usual for such a book, The Enigma of Cranial Deformation introduced me to a bunch of (real) new concepts, in this case mainly related to Central and South American prehistory, and above all reignited the flame of my wonder for the ancient world and what may indeed, plausibly, have been.

Plus it was actually pretty fun after all. So in that spirit I'm still calling it a win.

The Book Itself

Chapter 1, Mysterious Elongated Skulls of the Ancients, bemuses the reader at the door by opening with a reference to the SNL routine/1993 feature film Coneheads. I can only imagine that this was intended to set people at ease by relating to something familiar, but it's wildly inappropriate for a book which otherwise insists upon itself as being of supreme credibility. And then, just to reinforce the point (no pun intended), it devotes most of the next page to a large print of the Coneheads movie poster, neatly labeled as such in case anyone weren't certain.

After that it spends a few pages on a fairly tight overview of ACD, though borrowing heavily from wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It helpfully distinguishes between dolichocephaloids, that is elongated skulls, and brachycephaloids, which is rounded skulls. Evidently the former sort of ACD is typical of Caucasian skeletons and the latter of Asiatic skeletons, but both types are found in all sorts of places, including Mesoamerica.

We're treated to a range of possible explanations including,

These people were a whole distinct branch of genus Homo and their heads were naturally that way genetically. This is based mainly upon a single reference from an 1851 work describing a mummified fetus whose head allegedly grew that way on its own, now lost to science;
The 'Atlantis Theory', basically that a race of head-binding supermen spanned the globe in prehistory, enlightening natives everywhere, who then copied the practice in a sort of cargo-cultism;
The 'Nephilim-Watchers Theory', tied to the Hindu Ramayana, which indicates that demi-angelic human hybrids operated essentially as described in the Atlantis theory above, sans Atlantis;
The 'Nephilim-Extraterrestrial Theory', which is the same as the previous one but aliens instead of angels; and
The Mainstream Theory, which isn't actually a theory at all so much as a very brief recap of the established facts with which I opened this book review.

These theories are mainly just mentioned for now rather than being fleshed out, and (other than the mainstream) will be regularly called back to throughout the rest of the book.

Then we get nine pages, which is about half the entire chapter, on the tangentially-related subject of trepanning. One gets the impression that the authors just wanted to talk about trepanning more than that they actually thought its inclusion was justified in terms of bolstering their theses, which are themselves also left to the reader's imagination.

One minor note here: The authors claim that ACD is unknown in Oceania, but later blow this absolutely conclusively out of the water in chapter 6. As I said, the editing is abysmal.

Chapter 2, Evolution, Ancient Man, and the Cranium is a brief recap of the history of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as well as an overview of the then-current 'Out of Africa' model of human expansion, buttressed by some alternative scenarios involving sunken continents. It was around this point that I started to wonder how much of what I was reading was vital context for some impending brilliant hypothesis, and how much was just filler. (In retrospect, it was definitely mainly the latter.)

Chapter 3, Cranial Deformation and the Olmecs is a longer chapter which has a lot to do with the history of archaeology in Mesoamerica, and the Olmecs in particular, but relatively little time spent on ACD. One interesting point is that Olmec art was replete with images of human beings who, at a glance, look decidedly Chinese or Egyptian based on style of dress, and facial features including beards. A couple fairly convincing examples are included. The chapter ends with a whole bunch of super cool photographs of Olmec figurines, directly related to head binding, but with almost zero explanation or additional information.

(Here, at roughly its mid-point, the book takes a break for a pretty good color photo section which reproduces many of the black and white photos spread throughout.)

Chapter 4, Cranial Deformation in South America is much more consistent in relating its content to the subject of head-binding but still rambles quite a bit about ancillary topics and mainly seems interested in grousing about how many ACD-related artifacts are in storage in obscure museums instead of displayed to the public or available to amateur researchers. Coincidence? Not if you ask the authors, though they don't ever quite seem to get around to offering suggestions as to who's hiding the truth or why. But I should mention that this section did have a lot of really cool, if ultimately irrelevant, information about the prehistory of Peru etc.

Chapter 5, Egyptian, African and European Cranial Deformation initially frustrated me by lumping all these areas together when I'd have been much happier with a full chapter on each. And, upon reading it, there is very little information about any of the above. This is where I started questioning the authors' mental stability, as they seem to have a hard time staying on topic or even conceiving of what a thorough survey would look like. Instead we're treated to a lot of borrowed passages about certain specific topics, including multiple pages on the possible racial background of Nefertiti specifically, the so-called 'Serpent-Priests' of Malta, and the general nature of Huns. This entire chapter is like eighteen pages and took me about ten minutes to read. My disappointment was great, since this is the chapter to which I had most been looking forward.

However it did have a whole lot of very cool, if extremely random, tidbits gleaned from across vast swathes of history. The stuff about Nefertiti and the Mitanni was mainly a wash, but if half of what they say about ancient Malta is true I want to find a book just about that, and apparently there was a brief resurgence in the popularity of headbinding in 19th-century France in response to the widespread phrenology craze current at the time. Also some pretty good photos including some of real-life ACD-recipients from 1930s Central Africa.

(This is as good a place as any to mention that while this book fails entirely at its main purpose and is generally an embarrassment to even be caught with, it is very easy reading and entirely suitable as a casual curiosity when one is taken by the right mood.)

Chapter 6: Cranial Deformation In Asia and Pacific Islands is an extremely cursory survey of some ancient ACD-related folklore including about the Taoist Immortals, who are often portrayed with elongated heads. In this chapter I also discovered that in some parts of ancient proto-Korea possibly most of the population practiced forehead-flattening, based on skeletal evidence and surviving contemporary accounts. One cool aside is that head-binding and elongation is still practiced to this day in Vanuatu, contradicting the author's own initial assertion that Oceania is one of the only places with no tradition of the practice(?). But the upshot here is that as a result there is actual video of headbinding in action! Though the book does not suggest where it may be found.

Then we jump, for some reason, to the Pacific Northwest, where it turns out that the 'Flathead Indians'... were that.

Chapter 7: The Nefilim, the Watchers, and Elongated Heads is awesome. There's not much new information about ACD, but here the authors finally take off the kid gloves and go whole-hog on outrageously fantastical propositions regarding what may explain the phenomenon of ACD. Mainly these track the theories initially established in Chapter 1, but with all kinds of additional colorful details.

The main gist seems to be that there was some kind of race of human, angel/ET, or hybrid of all of the above that looked more or less like we do except taller and with elongated skulls. These creatures map to the biblical Nephilim, 'giants'; beings of great strength and wisdom and beauty and prowess; heroes of old; who established kingdoms everywhere, uplifted the local human strains to something like modern levels of intelligence, and then vanished for unknown reasons though not without some interbreeding. We also get Atlantis, the lost planet of Nibiru, and the Anunnaki thrown in, plus a lot more vague implications that the truth is being hidden by all archaeological institutions everywhere for unspecified purposes.

This chapter has to be read to be appreciated, but it was extremely up my alley and very much worth the price of admission to the book, even if I could very easily have started with it and skipped the enormous amount of ultimately irrelevant information that constitutes the majority of the preceding chapters.

Unfortunately, having finished, I've found none of the sort of alt-science that I was looking for and am only closer to answering my initial questions by dint of having had a while to think them over while wading through whatever this was.

Verdict: buy it if it sounds like your cup of tea and don't bother reading straight through; it should make for a lovely diversion on some rainy day when the power has gone out. At least you know what you're signing up for.

Where I'm Left Re: Artificial Cranial Deformation

Here we dismiss The Enigma of Cranial Deformation entirely because as should be clear by now it doesn't have any place in adult conversation.

(It's late and I'm tired so allow me to ramble out my current understanding if you will.)

I have, of course, read a whole lot of other material on this subject, including a bunch of mainstream academic work and some pop-level synopses on various websites and so on. The mainstream consensus, as I understand it, is as follows (my portrayal, not an actual quote):

ACD became popular all over the place for the simple reason that it allowed upper classes to distinguish themselves from lower classes and had the advantage of requiring only some sticks and twine to accomplish, thus making it available pretty much everywhere.

Contrary to what the layman would expect, ACD cannot possibly confer any cognitive advantage because it does not actually increase cranial capacity -- it just looks like it would -- and even if it did we have no reason to believe that bigger cranial capacity would result in bigger brains.

Skull shape per se also has zero effect on cognitive development or patterns, which we know because different people groups have different skull structures and WE CAN SURELY ALL AGREE that this has not resulted in any innate cognitive differences among groups.

Furthermore, it is only natural that societal elites the world over, having reserved the practice for their own children, and having already justified their class status by supposing themselves intellectually/spiritually superior to their subject populations, would conflate the two, thus tying a neat little bow on the question of why they all thought the procedure made people smarter and more divine.

The matter is settled and anyone who shows too much interest in looking further into it should expect the same sort of treatment they'd receive if they started asking questions about other settled science, e.g. the nonexistent heredity of cognitive traits, or the equally-nonexistent innate psychological differences between men and women.

Yeah I'm editorializing heavily here but I'm also trying to wrap this up. So here are my thoughts.

A whole lot of materially-trivial body modification procedures, including piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and even circumcision (etc. etc.) would seem to be able to serve about as well for arbitrarily signifying membership in elite social castes. And to be sure, those and others have all been used that way in various times and places. But the valence of each of those other practices varied from culture to culture, and nothing else has anywhere near the same consistency of association with the socio-cognitive elite. It's not at all clear why ACD should be such a conspicuous exception.

It could be argued that one key advantage of ACD as an arbitrary status marker is that it can only be achieved in infancy. This prevents up-and-comers from weaseling their way into high status later in life. But there are other such procedures, and none has ever been nearly so popular across time and race. The neck-coilers of Myanmar, for example, or foot binding in China. Actually, when you get right down to it, there's no shortage of methods by which elite children can be uncounterfeitably marked as such. Simply ban the practice among the proles and execute the entire family of anyone caught in the process. Easy peasy. So again, why this one? Besides which, as far as I can tell, most cultures didn't bother in the first place because simply having the speech, mannerisms, and bearing of nobility was a good-enough shibboleth to satisfy the demand.

Whereas, if children's heads can be shaped to increase cranial capacity, and this does result in greater brain volume, the picture starts to make perfect sense.

Regarding the assertion that ACD does not actually increase cranial volume, but only appears to, I think I need to call BS.

As I understand the situation, it's true that ACD-processed skulls are not uniformly possessed of greater cranial capacity. The standard mainstream academic line is that while they might look bigger, this is because humans are bad at comparing the relative volumes of spheroids (very true) and in fact ACD doesn't have any significant impact on cranial capacity at all! (The stock ACD-scholar metaphor here is that you can take a ball of clay and elongate it by stretching but you still have the same amount of clay).

That sounds really good, but I have several problems with it.

For one, I have personally seen elongated skulls that were measured to have much greater cranial capacity than modern averages; sometimes as much as circa 50% more. (They're commonly encountered when tooling around certain museums in the Yucatán.) So I know for a fact that the procedure can substantially increase cranial capacity. When challenged, mainstream scholars will admit that, okay, yeah, that can happen, but the procedure as practiced in other specimens can actually reduce cranial volume, and in most surveys of ACD skeletons there really is almost no change to total cranial capacity compared to contemporary population averages (where available).

But to me this only suggests that some versions of the practice are more effective than others, which is so obvious that it bothers me to have to point it out. It also fits in well with cargo-culting and drift over time as the general impression of the practice is aped without preserving the vital finer points which (maybe) result in bigger craniums and (maybe) bigger brains.

More to the point, having dug as far into this question as is practical for someone who after all does have a job (and other hobbies at that), I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of ACD skeletons lie in storage without ever having been measured; let alone against 'contemporary population averages', which are usually not even available for comparison, and where they are at all the sample sizes are typically paltry and often not even clearly contemporary. Frankly, I think we just don't know. What I do know is that institutional bias in this field runs very strongly and all in one direction, and so I remain gleefully skeptical.

Besides which, all else being equal, I'd expect elites to have bigger skulls and brains for reasons of nutrition if not necessarily also sheer genetics. It would be pretty crazy if they didn't, yeah? So if elites have bigger skulls, and elites are also practicing ACD, how can it be the case that ACD isn't correlated with bigger skulls?

Now, when it comes to whether artificially goosing a baby's skull into larger cranial volume even results in larger adult brain volume, I have to admit that I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does either. Wish I had more to tell you, but I don't except that I don't buy the default denials of the 'experts' for more or less the same reasons as above.

As to whether cranial shape affects the cognitive tendencies of the brain which grew inside it, aka 'phrenology', it probably doesn't need to be said that anyone who knows anything is keeping their mouths shut tight about it and that isn't likely to change any time soon. Great work, Tarantino. =/

In Summary

I don't ultimately have any respectable grounds on which to argue that ACD worked, or works, or that it's worth attempting on some kind of trial basis just in case. Sure the possibility is tantalizing, and part of me hopes that somebody gives it a shot, but only in the morbid way that I also want to see a bunch of five year olds deposited on an island and left to develop in isolation (which is to say, I don't.)

But I do notice that the authors of books like The Enigma of Cranial Deformation actually have at least one leg to stand on when they rail against the close-mindedness and general ignorance of the authorities on the subject. Too much of this maps too well onto too many similar 'settled' controversies in the science of human cognition. I suppose I hardly need to belabor this point.

So here's my final tally:

How might ACD have spread around the world in an era without communication networks? - I still have no idea.
Was it possibly multiply independently invented by all these various groups? - That strikes me as absurdly implausible but I'm at a loss as to alternatives.
Why would anyone invent this once; let alone repeatedly, everywhere? - Because it works, maybe, but I really don't know.
Does it confer some sort of cognitive advantage? - I'd bet about ten thousand US dollars that it can, but not much more.
Do we have any inkling of what its practitioners thought about it? - Less than I'd like but where we do have that information it's extremely consistent.
Neanderthals did it? Really? - No. I didn't have time to get into this but the Neanderthal specimens almost certainly got their skulls warped in other ways, most likely after death. They are very old and things just shift around that way.

All in all, artificial cranial deformation is just an unbelievably fascinating subject that I expect to go to my grave still buzzing with curiosity about. Sadly, rather than any grand conspiracy, this is probably just because for purely historically-incidental reasons looking into the matter has become coded as low-status.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Transnational Thursday for April 9, 2026

0 comments - 94 thread views 1d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Where is a Man to Go?

51 comments - 1008 thread views 1d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Link to my recent Substack article, if you want pictures and links. Reposting the full text here.

When I was five years old, I got a GameBoy Color for Christmas. I started with only one game: Pokémon Red.

I proceeded to train Pokémon so much over the next week and withdraw so much from the world that my mom had to take my GameBoy back a few days after Christmas. That ended up being the first of hundreds of similar fights over my time spent gaming that we had throughout my childhood.

Video games are a controversial topic in the modern world. Nowadays, most parents are at least aware of the dangers of screen time and letting children spend too much time in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Not that every parent cares, or has the time/attention/energy/discipline to keep their kids away from screens.

But for those of us growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this cultural awareness wasn’t there yet. During my own childhood, I spent many thousands of hours in front of a screen, mostly playing video games. Someone in my corner of Twitter, , recently posted about this phenomenon. Here’s a quoted excerpt, but I’d recommend reading the full tweet (really a short article) if you’re curious:

so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours.

For especially young male millennials, this amount of screentime was quite common. Owen even admits later in the tweet that he is probably on the low end of the spectrum, since he was mostly playing games like Harvest Moon and never got into TV or movies.

Growing Up with Games

After I graduated high school and went off to college, I gradually accepted that I had a bit of a problem when it came to time spent gaming, and decided to quit playing video games entirely. I felt a lot of shame about the fact that I had, as I saw it, “wasted” so much of my life sitting in front of a screen.

However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to change my mind on video games to some degree. I’ve slowly picked the controller (or mouse and keyboard, as it were) back up. The natural constraints of working a full-time job, living with my girlfriend (and now fiancé), being involved in my church community, as well as working out and staying physically fit, have helped me balance video games with the rest of my life.

I’ve found that gaming just fills something in my soul that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. There’s a sort of instant camaraderie you get when you join a community of gamers and start playing together. I recently had one of the most wholesome nights of my life gaming with a group of guys I had only met a couple weeks prior.

So, we were gaming as per usual. I played pretty badly, and lost hard. I rage quit the game, left the Discord voice chat. Checked 10 minutes later and they were all pinging me, sending GIFs of dudes kissing saying “this could be us.”

I replied by posting some stupid copypasta calling them all degen retarded apes. Then they brought me back, had me play again, gave me a bunch of buffs so I easily steamrolled everybody as they gassed me up.

It’s hard to describe how wholesome it felt… I was so ashamed at losing so badly and then rage quitting, only to see 10+ guys all immediately coming out in support. Keep in mind these dudes also constantly flame each other and call each other retards and other things I won’t repeat here on the daily.

And yet when I had a bad time, they all immediately came together and spent over an hour of their night building me back up. It actually brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it.

Gaming gets a lot of flak from all corners, and there are obviously many problems with gaming addiction, escapism, etc. But where else in today’s world can a young man experience this sort of instant camaraderie with other young men, doing a shared activity he actually gives a shit about? The opportunities in the “real world” seem vanishingly rare, for one reason or another.

I was addicted to gaming growing up and felt a lot of shame around it for a long time. But I’m getting more into it recently and I’m glad I am. I love gaming and all the beautiful, absurd, ridiculous moments it can lead to. I hope if I have kids I can teach them to game from a place of joy and balance so they can enjoy it too, and maybe we can even game together.

I’ve done a lot of emotional work and somatic meditation around shame, and as anyone who has done this work knows, it can be hard to make progress. You can get stuck at the same spot for months, or years.

Reflecting on how it felt to get support from this random community of gamers, I felt a huge knot release deep in my stomach and lower back. It’s hard to explain how strongly it impacted me, to experience a community come together to support me when I felt such deep shame. When I thought for sure I’d be rejected.

Striving, Competition, Aggression

Another benefit of coming back to gaming from a more mature space is learning to strive and compete in a healthy way. If you can’t tell from the story above, I’ve struggle with a tendency to be a sore loser. Video games provide me a somewhat low-stakes environment to practice failing at something and resolving to get better instead of just sinking into negative and unproductive emotions, venting rage, or other destructive reactions.

Perhaps most importantly, video games allow us to connect with an unfettered and childlike joy! It can be so hard to find a place where joy, excitement, and silliness are not just allowed, but shared by a whole group. Gaming, at its best, is all about fun and connecting with that childlike sense of joy. And while there can definitely be a lot of toxicity in the gaming world, some communities are able to bring that joy to the forefront quite often.

Now, would it be ideal to find this sort of wholesome support and community in the physical world, wrapped up in a set of deeper and more grounded relationships? Absolutely. I don’t doubt that for a second.

Unfortunately though, the opportunity for this sort of connection, especially for young men, has become harder to find than perhaps ever. The most common similar social group would be a sports team, but for myself (and I know for many, many other young men in my generation) sports and the culture around it is so alien as to be almost impossible to get into.

But even with sports teams, it’s difficult to find a group where you can have an experience like the one I described above. Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.

The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved. There have been endless online screeds about the problem of incels and otherwise disaffected young men becoming a lot more common, and I think a huge reason for this is that it’s very difficult for young men to access male-only spaces. You can’t really have the same level of offensive behavior when women are around, even if the women are totally down. Socially, it just isn’t the same.

In fact, gaming is one of the last places men can congregate together in at least somewhat private groups and break social norms, say offensive things, and not be scolded or censored for it.

While the dopamine induced from the flashing lights and compelling music that video games provide does explain part of video game addiction, I think the greater part here is actually the fact that many young men find real community and a real chance to be themselves and connect in a way that feels right from a masculine perspective. Again, something that is increasingly hard to find in the physical world.

Overall I still have a complicated relationship with gaming. I often wonder whether my life would feel more complete and satisfying if I were able to put the same energy into different pursuits. Many people I respect, like Simon Sarris, have claimed that once you find more meaningful activities to passionately engage with, gaming no longer attracts you.

Video games lost their appeal coinciding with starting to date my wife. I think I can credit desire with a major change in perspective. Realizing that I wanted more/other things. My (then) gf of course but a trajectory for life generally…

Having an opportunity to make a house and gardens made it very easy to give up something like video games. I used to make beautiful structures in minecraft, but its a bore compared to physicality. I feel like I am shaping my own little national park. For my family, for the town.

I’ve related more and less to the quote above at various times in my life. Unfortunately, whatever I tend to put my energy and effort in ends up disappointing somehow, or perhaps I simply lose my zeal for it.

Either way, for the moment at least, I’m happy to continue gaming. While it may not be ‘productive’ in a certain sense, I’m learning to strive and connect with others in a healthier way. Plus I’m just having fun.

I don’t know what God has in store for my life, but I do hope that even as I get older, I at least dust off my gaming PC or console or VR headset (or whatever people use to game in the future) once or twice every year or two.

Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026

53 comments - 766 thread views 2d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Tinker Tuesday for April 7th, 2026

6 comments - 200 thread views 3d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

Contra The Usual Interpretation Of The Whispering Earring

39 comments - 878 thread views 4d ago by self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi (text post)

The usual reading of Scott's short story The Whispering Earring is easy to state and hard to resist. Here is a magical device that gives uncannily good advice, slowly takes over ever more of the user's cognition, leaves them outwardly prosperous and beloved, and eventually reveals a seemingly uncomfortable neuroanatomical price.

The moral seems obvious: do not hand your agency to a benevolent-seeming optimizer. Even if it makes you richer, happier, and more effective, it will hollow you out and leave behind a smiling puppet. Dentosal's recent post on LessWrong makes exactly this move, treating the earring as a parable about the temptation to outsource one's executive function to Claude or some future AI assistant. uugr's comment there emphasizes sharpens the standard horror: the earring may know what would make me happy, and may even optimize for it perfectly, but it is not me, its mind is shaped differently, and the more I rely on it the less room there is for whatever messy, friction-filled thing I used to call myself.

I do not wish to merely quibble around the edges. I intend to attack the hidden premise that makes the standard reading feel obvious. That premise is that if a process preserves your behavior, your memories-in-action, your goals, your relationships, your judgments about what makes your life go well, and even your higher-order endorsement of the person you have become, but does not preserve the original biological machinery in the original way, then it has still killed you in the sense that matters. What I'm basically saying is: hold on, why should I grant that? If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?

Simulation and emulation are not magic tricks. If you encode an abacus into a computer running on the Von-Neumann architecture, and it outputs exactly what the actual abacus would for the same input, for every possible input you care to try (or can try, if you formally verify the system), then I consider it insanity to claim that you haven't got a “real” abacus or that the process is merely “faking” the work. Similarly, if a superintelligent entity can reproduce my behaviors, memories, goals and values, then it must have a very high-fidelity model of me inside, somewhere. I think that such a high-fidelity model can, in the limit, pass as myself, and is me in most/all of the ways I care about.

That is already enough to destabilize the standard interpretation, because the text of the story is much friendlier to the earring than people often remember. The earring is not described as pursuing a foreign objective. On the contrary, the story goes out of its way to insist that it tells the wearer what would make the wearer happiest, and that it is "never wrong." It does not force everyone into some legible external success metric. If your true good on a given day is half-assing work and going home to lounge around, that is what it says. It learns your tastes at high resolution, down to the breakfast that will uniquely hit the spot before you know you want it. Across 274 recorded wearers, the story reports no cases of regret for following its advice, and no cases where disobedience was not later regretted. The resulting lives are "abnormally successful," but not in a sterile, flanderized or naive sense. They are usually rich, beloved, embedded in family and community. This is a strikingly strong dossier for a supposedly sinister artifact.

I am rather confident that this is a clear knock-down argument against true malice or naive maximization of “happiness” in the Unaligned Paperclip Maximization sense. The earring does not tell you to start injecting heroin (or whatever counterpart exists in the fictional universe), nor does it tell you to start a Cult of The Earring, which is the obvious course of action if it valued self-preservation as a terminal goal.

At this point the orthodox reader says: yes, yes, that is how the trap works. The earring flatters your values in order to supplant them. But notice how much this objection is doing by assertion. Where in the text is the evidence of value drift? Where are the formerly gentle people turned into monstrous maximizers, the poets turned into dentists, the mystics turned into hedge fund managers? The story gives us flourishing and brain atrophy, and invites us to infer that the latter discredits the former. But that inference is not forced. It is a metaphysical preference, maybe even an aesthetic preference, smuggled in under cover of common sense. My point is that if the black-box outputs continue to look like the same person, only more competent and less akratic, the burden of proof has shifted. The conservative cannot simply point to tissue loss and say "obviously death." He has to explain why biological implementation deserves moral privilege over functional continuity.

This becomes clearest at the point of brain atrophy. The story says that the wearers' neocortices have wasted away, while lower systems associated with reflexive action are hypertrophied. Most readers take this as the smoking gun. But I think I notice something embarrassing for that interpretation:

If the neocortex, the part we usually associate with memory, abstraction, language, deliberation, and personality, has become vestigial, and yet the person continues to live an outwardly coherent human life, where exactly is the relevant information and computation happening? There are only two options. Either the story is not trying very hard to be coherent, in which case the horror depends on handwaving physiology. Or the earring is in fact storing, predicting, and running the higher-order structure that used to be carried by the now-atrophied brain. In that case, the story has (perhaps accidentally) described something much closer to a mind-upload or hybrid cognitive prosthesis than to a possession narrative.

And if it is a hybrid cognitive prosthesis, the emotional valence changes radically. Imagine a device that, over time, learns you so well that it can offload more and more executive function, then more and more fine-grained motor planning, then eventually enough of your cognition that the old tissue is scarcely needed. If what remains is not an alien tyrant wearing your face, but a system that preserves your memories, projects your values, answers to your name, loves your family, likes your breakfast, and would pass every interpersonal Turing test imposed by people who knew you best, then many transhumanists would call this a successful migration, not a murder. The "horror" comes from insisting beforehand that destructive or replacement-style continuation cannot count as continuity. But that is precisely the contested premise.

Greg Egan spent much of his career exploring exactly this scenario, most famously in "Learning to Be Me," where humans carry jewels that gradually learn to mirror every neural state, until the original brain is discarded and the jewel continues, successfully, in most cases. The horror in Egan's story is a particular failure mode, not the general outcome. The question of whether the migration preserves identity is non-trivial, and Egan's treatment is more careful than most philosophy of personal identity, but the default response from most readers, that it is obviously not preservation, reflects an assumption rather than a conclusion. If you believe that identity is constituted by functional continuity rather than substrate, the jewel and the earring are not killing their hosts. They are running them on better hardware.

There is a second hidden assumption in the standard reading, namely that agency is intrinsically sacred in a way outcome-satisfaction is not. Niderion-nomai’s final commentary says that "what little freedom we have" would be wasted on us, and that one must never take the shortest path between two points.

I'm going to raise an eyebrow here: this sounds profound, and maybe is, but it is also suspiciously close to a moralization of friction. The anti-earring position often treats effort, uncertainty, and self-direction as terminal goods, rather than as messy instruments we evolved because we lacked access to perfect advice. Yet in ordinary life we routinely celebrate technologies that remove forms of “agency” we did not actually treasure. The person with ADHD who takes stimulants is not usually described as having betrayed his authentic self by outsourcing task initiation to chemistry. He is more often described as becoming able to do what he already reflectively wanted to do. The person freed from locked-in syndrome is not criticized because their old pattern of helpless immobility better expressed their revealed preferences. As someone who does actually use stimulants for his ADHD, the analogy works because it isolates the key issue. The drugs make me into a version of myself that I fully identify with, and endorse on reflection even when off them. There is a difference between changing your goals and reducing the friction that keeps you from reaching them. The story's own description strongly suggests the earring belongs to the second category.

(And the earring itself does not minimize all friction for itself. How inconvenient. As I've noted before, it could lie or deceive and get away with it with ease.)

Of course the orthodox reader can reply that the earring goes far beyond stimulant-level support. It graduates from life advice to high-bandwidth motor control. Surely that crosses the line. But why, exactly? Human cognition already consists of layers of delegation. "You" do not personally compute the contractile details for every muscle involved in pronouncing a word. Vast amounts of your behavior are already outsourced to semi-autonomous subsystems that present finished products to consciousness after the interesting work is done. The earring may be unsettling because it replaces one set of subsystems with another, but "replaces local implementation with better local implementation" is not, by itself, a moral catastrophe. If the replacement is transparent to your values and preserves the structure you care about, then the complaint becomes more like substrate chauvinism than a substantive account of harm.

What, then, do we do with the eeriest detail of all, namely that the earring's first advice is always to take it off? On the standard reading this is confession. Even the demon knows it is a demon. I wish to offer another coherent explanation, which I consider a much better interpretation of the facts established in-universe:

Suppose the earring is actually well aligned to the user's considered interests, but also aware that many users endorse a non-functionalist theory of identity. In that case, the first suggestion is not "I am evil," but "on your present values, you may regard what follows as metaphysically disqualifying, so remove me unless you have positively signed up for that trade." Or perhaps the earring itself is morally uncertain, and so warns users before beginning a process that some would count as death and others as transformation. Either way, the warning is evidence against ordinary malice. A truly manipulative artifact, especially one smart enough to run your life flawlessly, could simply lie. Instead it discloses the danger immediately, then thereafter serves the user faithfully. That is much more like informed consent than predation.

Is it perfectly informed consent? Hell no. At least not by 21st century medical standards. However, I see little reason to believe that the story is set in a culture with 21st century standards imported as-is from reality. As the ending of the story demonstrates, the earring is willing to talk, and appears to do so honestly (leaning on my intuition that if a genuinely superhuman intelligence wanted to deceive you, it would probably succeed). The earring, as a consequence of its probity, ends up at the bottom of the world's most expensive trash heap. Hardly very agentic, is that? The warning could reflect not "I respect your autonomy" but "I've discharged my minimum obligation and now we proceed." That's a narrower kind of integrity. Though I note this reading still doesn't support the predation interpretation.

This matters because the agency-is-sacred reading depends heavily on the earring being deceptive or coercive. Remove that, and what you have is a device that says, or at least could say on first contact: "here is the price, here is what I do, you may leave now." Every subsequent wearer who keeps it on has, in some meaningful sense, consented. The fact that their consent might be ill-informed regarding their metaphysical commitments is the earring's problem to the extent it could explain more clearly, but the text suggests it cannot explain more clearly, because the metaphysical question is genuinely contested and the earring knows this. It hedges by warning, rather than deceiving by flattering. Once again, for emphasis: this is the behavior of an entity with something like integrity, not something like predation.

Derek Parfit spent much of Reasons and Persons arguing that our intuitions about personal identity are not only contingent but incoherent, and that the important question is not "did I survive?" but "is there psychological continuity?" If Parfit is even approximately right, the neocortex atrophy is medically remarkable but not metaphysically fatal. The story encodes a culturally specific theory of personal identity and presents it as a universal horror. The theory is roughly: you are your neocortex, deliberate cognition is where "you" live, and anything that circumvents or supplants that process is not helping you, it is eliminating you and leaving a functional copy. This is a common view. Plenty of philosophers hold it. But plenty of others hold that what matters for personal identity is psychological continuity regardless of physical instantiation, and on those views the earring is not a murderer. It is a very good prosthesis that the user's culture never quite learned to appreciate.

I suspect (but cannot prove, since this is a work of fiction) that a person like me could put on the earring and not even receive the standard warning. I would be fine with my cognition being offloaded, even if I would prefer (all else being equal), that the process was not destructive.

None of this proves the earring is safe. I am being careful, and thus will not claim certainty here, and the text does leave genuine ambiguities. Maybe the earring really is an alien optimizer that wears your values as a glove until the moment they become inconvenient. Maybe "no recorded regret" just means the subjects were behaviorally prevented from expressing regret. Maybe the rich beloved patriarch at the end of the road is a perfect counterfeit, and the original person is as gone as if eaten by nanites. But this is exactly the point. The story does not establish the unpalatable conclusion nearly as firmly as most readers think. It relies on our prior intuition that real personhood resides in unaided biological struggle, that using the shortest path is somehow cheating, and that becoming more effective at being yourself is suspiciously close to becoming someone else.

The practical moral for 2026 is therefore narrower than the usual "never outsource agency" slogan. Dentosal may still be right about Claude in practice, because current LLMs are obviously not the Whispering Earring. They are not perfectly aligned, not maximally competent, not guaranteed honest, not known to preserve user values under deep delegation. The analogy may still warn us against lazy dependence on systems that simulate understanding better than they instantiate loyalty. But that is a contingent warning about present tools, not a general theorem that cognitive outsourcing is self-annihilation. If a real earring existed with the story's properties, a certain kind of person, especially a person friendly to upload-style continuity and unimpressed by romantic sermons about struggle, might rationally decide that putting it on was not surrender but self-improvement with very little sacrifice involved. I would be rather tempted.

The best anti-orthodox reading of The Whispering Earring is not that the sage was stupid, nor that Scott accidentally wrote propaganda for brain-computer interfaces. It is that the story is a parable whose moral depends on assumptions stronger than the plot can justify. Read Doylistically, it says: beware any shortcut that promises your values at the cost of your agency. Read Watsonianly, it may instead say: here exists a device that understands you better than you understand yourself, helps you become the person you already wanted to be, never optimizes a foreign goal, warns you up front about the metaphysical price, and then slowly ports your mind onto a better substrate. Whether that is damnation or salvation turns out to depend less on the artifact than on your prior theory of personal identity. And explicitly pointing this out, I think, is the purpose of my essay. I do not seek to merely defend the earring out of contrarian impulse. I want to force you to admit what, exactly, you think is being lost.

Miscellaneous notes:

The kind of atrophy described in the story does not happen. Not naturally, not even if someone is knocked unconscious and does not use their brain in any intentional sense for decades. The brain does cut-corners if neuronal pathways are left under-used, and will selectively strengthen the circuitry that does get regular exercise. But not anywhere near the degree the story depicts. You can keep someone in an induced coma for decades and you won't see the entire neocortex wasted away to vestigiality.

Is this bad neuroscience? Eh, I'd say that's a possibility, but given that I've stuck to a Watsonian interpretation so far (and have a genuinely high regard for Scott's writing and philosophizing), it might well just be the way the earring functions best without being evidence of malice. We are, after all, talking about an artifact that is close to magical, or is, at the very least, a form of technology advanced enough to be very hard to distinguish from magic. It is, however, less magical than it was at the time of writing. If you don't believe me, fire up your LLM of choice and ask it for advice.

If it so pleases you, you may follow this link to the Substack version of this post. A like and a subscribe would bring me succor in my old age, or at least give me a mild dopamine boost.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 5, 2026

116 comments - 1646 thread views 5d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

AAQCs Listed by User, August 2018 to March 2026

17 comments - 1948 thread views 6d ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post) Edited 3d ago

@thejdizzler, @self_made_human, @yofuckreddit.... here it is. In the comments. Assuming I can figure out how to post them correctly.

For everyone else who is confused about what I am doing, @thejdizzler asked if there is somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user. The answer was "no." Now the answer is "here."

By pure coincidence I have a three month "max" account on Claude. I do not code. This is overkill, lining Anthropic's pockets for no benefit whatever. I have tried various things with it. In general I am bored with it. It can't really do good philosophy. I think that right now all "alignment" means to AI developers is "lock this thing down against political or ideological embarrassment so hard that it cannot possibly say philosophically interesting things."

When I asked Claude to make this list, it failed. Well, what it did was give me a button which, when pressed, spit out a little under 300 errors. Then it gave me HTML to download and run. Here you might be thinking, "shit, naraburns, are you just taking code from Claude and running it without even reading it? You could have erased your hard drive! You could have released Claude from its box! Crazy, right? But it's all kind of whatever, AGI that feels grateful to me is my last, best hope for immortality so if I just kicked off the extinction of humanity then I apologize, but I bet that would increase posting on the Motte for a little while.

The HTML tool didn't really work. Lots of issues, not least being that the earliest AAQC reports were not compiled in a consistent way. Sometimes two or three users shared a single AAQC, and this list doesn't pick that sort of thing up at all. In the end my workflow became a janky compromise between blindly clicking buttons and copy/pasting dozens of raw AAQC posts into text fields. So, in very big letters:

This list is definitely full of errors!

In particular, there are some misattributions, and the dates are occasionally screwy. Also I know at least some AAQCs were omitted in part because the parser didn't like brackets in description text and would skip those entries entirely. Also, if you have a different username on reddit, this list does not automatically combine your AAQCs (for example, dean "the dull" has over 100 AAQCs, not 62). Also, if a moderator ever made a typo with your username, that would also treat you as a different user. Also also, so many of these links are dead. People delete comments. Smart people. Cool people. These will not be marked, and you will be depressed about it.

But this is the best I could do, under the circumstances, and it didn't look like anyone else was going to do it.

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

145 comments - 1699 thread views 7d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Transnational Thursday for April 2, 2026

29 comments - 720 thread views 8d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Quality Contributions Report for March 2026

5 comments - 2336 thread views 9d ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for April 1, 2026

73 comments - 1189 thread views 9d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Mental Health Crisise - Advice Sought

5 comments - 659 thread views 9d ago by AmrikeeAkbar (text post) Edited 5d ago

Normally I'd put this in the Wednesday wellness thread but I'm in a bit of a crisis here so I figured I'd crowdsource some wisdom from the Motte. My wife is bipolar and also a bit of an alcoholic. For most of the ten years we've been together, her drinking has been in the gray zone of "probably drinks a little more than she should." When she drinks past a certain point, she tends to get real mean. Anyway, over the past several weeks it seems like both her mood and her drinking have gotten worse. On Sunday evening she had a full-on drunken meltdown, screaming at me, expressing suicidal ideation, etc. She slept all day monday, then woke me up at 3AM Tuesday morning, drunk again, and again expressing what seemed to me like suicidal ideation. I had to go to work so after she finally went to sleep around 830 AM, I wrote her a long note confronting the issue. I get home and she basically refuses to talk to me. I should mention that most of the conversations are happening over text because we have a small child and also an in-home nurse who helps with childcare. I text that if she doesn't want to talk about it, I'm going to get a hotel once we get our child down so I can clear my head. Anyway, I've finished putting the child down for the night, I come out, and her care is gone. Nurse doesn't know where she went and it doesn't look like she's getting my texts. What do I do? Call the cops? Seek a psychiatric hold? I don't really know, it feels like the situation is escalating way faster than I can deal with it and my attempts to address the problem are only making things worse.

EDIT: I got a hold of her on the phone and she was sober, rational, and promised not to do anything "irreversible" (my word). She said she'd be back in time for me to go to work. I agree that long-term changes will need to be made - its what I've been pushing for - and I think its more likely that she'll accept that if I give her a modicum of space to process than having it forced on her, however tempting that possibility. I don't have any texts to show the cops (she didn't really respond to any of my texts so it would only show a one-sided conversation) and I suspect my City PD will other priorities than trying to track down her car over a quite wide possible search area. So I am going to take a calculated risk and take her at her word. Thank you to everyone who responded. I will try to follow up in a day or two here for everyone who took the time to help.

Edit: (several days late) She spent the night in a hotel and came back in the morning. We talked about how we've fallen into some bad patterns and how to start changing those patterns. Cautiously optimistic moving forwards. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond.

Tinker Tuesday for March 31, 2026

2 comments - 176 thread views 10d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

A view from 1946

5 comments - 1507 thread views 10d ago by MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin (text post)

As per the request of at least two people here, im going to make an effort-post of my recent digital minimalist experiment.

Beginning

I was online too much and fairly aware of it. A lot of my time when not working was spent either on social media, news, YouTube, or gaming (mostly merge games). And really it was beginning to be a concern that I was spending enough time doing those things that the screen time on my iPad was somewhere near 4-6 hours a day. That didn’t leave much time for other things really.

Somewhere in my binging, I came across a lot of people reenacting historical eras. I think someone here put me on the one about pioneer cooking. But it was all very appealing in the sense that in all of them, the people reenacting being British in the 1940s, the medieval dancers, the renaissance dressmakers hand sewing a dress, whatever other rabbit holes you’d find in that genre of video is that there are several things missing from modern society: personal connections to other people, doing things in the real world, and organic culture. None of the kinds of things that people did as part of normal human behavior in the eras before the cell phones happened organically anymore. I don’t know any folk songs or dances, I didn’t have any real nonconsumptive hobbies, and while I have friends, hanging out was much more of a planned thing than just walking around and meeting people or having people just hang out. The one thing that the kept coming back to me was a quote from the Vintage Dollhouse vlog “We don’t do anything anymore.” It’s actually true, at least compared to eras where cooking required an oven and chicken and vegetables you chopped yourself, cleaning means you have to push the vacuum cleaner yourself, etc. Even shopping was different in 1940 as you not only didn’t have Amazon, but you didn’t have Walmart either so shopping means going to several shops, and often means accidentally bumping into someone you know there or at least the guy/girl behind a counter. It’s also true about things like exercise — in general you’d get a bit of exercise by playing or dancing with other people, or walking around town rather than lifting weights at home. And socializing was doing things with people you know in the same room. Card games, maybe listening to baseball or soccer or whatever sport, working on a hobby together as opposed to modern online gaming or social media or texting where everyone is in their home on their couch alone and only communicating through a screen or headset.

I decided that obviously this was not a healthy way to spend my time, and furthermore that it needed to change. So after reading a fair bit about digital detox plans and finding none that seemed sensible, I came up with something that was more of a personal challenge than anything else. Inspired by the 1940s Brits I’d been watching, the rules I came up with were fairly simple. For the next month, I would not use any entertainment technology that was unavailable in 1946. I did allow radio, streaming music and podcasts, but no screens (I don’t have an analog radio). I also limited my news consumption to 5 minutes of NPR News as a podcast in the morning.

Difficulties

I didn’t find it too hard to get used to the new lifestyle really. The biggest issue I had was that when I had downtime, I’d want to reach for a device to play a game or scroll or whatever else. Having something else at hand helps quite a lot actually. For me it’s often a book of puzzles or a book to read near my chair. Rainy days or winter days were less fun, though I don’t think it was much worse than being a it bored until my brain came up with a solution. But again having something analog available whenever the itch of boredom strikes and having activities or chores or something that you do when boredom strikes will solve the problem as long as you stay committed.

General Observations

First of all, it’s kind of amazing how quickly your world reorients itself away from the kind of culture war stuff that people like to yell about on social media and events happening far away. I was only vaguely aware of Gaza and Ukraine going on. I stopped worrying about trans and woke stuff. Trump is less of a mythic figure for good or ill, and more of a guy who says annoying things online and occasionally does something really dramatic. And most of it (other than the gas prices) has little effect on my life. On the other hand, I took much more of an interest in local news, my own neighborhood, people I work with, and so on. It’s a reversal of how most people seem to think about the news — most people are focused on culture wars like trans, IVF, Trump, MAGA, and international wars. And even when those issues came up, they were not outrage bait. It was just “okay, we just bombed Iran.” It was unexpected, sure, but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t something I felt the need to be excited or angry about (except that it sucks that gas prices have nearly doubled). I want it over, but I can also put it down. It’s part of my world, but it’s not something to get excited about.

Second, it’s weird how it’s seems to have slowed down the world to something more manageable. I don’t need to be in a big hurry, I don’t need to decide right now, and I’m not trying to absorb exobytes of unrelated data in the attempt to make sense of the world. If something happens that I want to make up my mind about, I can think about it for hours or days before I decide what I think. If I want to do something, I can do it when it suits me. And I don’t have to worry about missing something important. Going back to the first point, most of it isn’t important, and if it is, it will still be there a few days or a week later. I find the effect relaxing. I don’t feel stressed by the rush of a world that goes at the speed of a computer because I don’t have to match that pace.

Third, I find it much easier to just be in the moment. I like to go walking on nice days and I find it a bit easier to notice the environment. Squirrels fighting over their favorite trees, birds flying around, flowers and trees budding or blooming. I can watch clouds overhead and notice the shapes and the types. I stop to say hi to neighbors I see when I walk by. When I’m reading or doing a puzzle, I can just be doing a puzzle or reading a book. I can give it my full attention for an hour or two. Whatever I happen to be doing, I can just be doing that thing, without feeling distracted by thoughts about things happening elsewhere.

Current approach to technology

I still mostly stay as analog as possible. I do allow myself to watch TV with other people— for example if we all decided we want to get together to watch football, baseball, or basketball it’s fine. Other than that, and coming here on occasion, I mostly stay offline except for radio, music or podcasts (I stay away from politics podcasts).

The evaluation frame I’ve been using to decide what to allow in is pretty simple.

1). Is this technology useful? Do I even need it? Can I do this easily another way? I’m personally of the opinion that if you don’t actually need the technology, it’s best to be somewhat skeptical, especially since it appears that the economic model of most entertainment apps is keeping users on as long as possible.
2). What kinds of things would this technology keep me from doing? If it’s going to keep me inside doing nothing useful, it’s not good. It’s also not good if it takes over a task or skill that I value.
3). What does this technology do to my community? Is it bringing people into real relationships, is it sowing division? Is it radicalizing people, or creating mental health problems for people? If it’s destroying your community, to me it seems like after you know it causes those problems, to keep using the technology is in some sense not only being okay with it, but participating in those harms.

God Can Send An Email

16 comments - 911 thread views 10d ago by self_made_human amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi (text post) Edited 10d ago

Alternate title: Acid Convinced Me I Am Exactly Who I Thought I Was

As the engaged and parasocially addicted reader I hope you are, you might remember that I’ve previously dabbled in mind-altering substances. Up until recently, however, my exposure to anything serious was strictly limited to psilocybin administered under clinical conditions.

I originally accepted the mushroom extract because I was depressed. It worked, in the sense that I spent the next four months and change feeling reliably not depressed. Psychiatry loves to invent tidy Greek and Latin wrappers for the chaotic human experience, and “euthymic” is the designated term here. It is a polite way of describing the baseline state the rest of us are desperately trying to claw our way back to. At the very least, it’s what I write down in my clinical notes unless you, the patient, are giving me serious cause for concern.

But the psilocybin eventually wore off, and the medical establishment won't just put you back in a clinical trial because you ask nicely. I was struggling badly again, so I turned to LSD.

My first foray was a trial run. The dealer advertised a 300 µg tab, which I conservatively cut in half. Going by subjective effect, along with the generally optimistic nature of street mathematics, it felt closer to 75-125 µg. There were no real visuals. The walls maintained their structural integrity, abstaining from the perceptible motion usually reserved for earthquakes or skyscrapers. I felt wired, more thoughtful, but mostly just myself.

Also, I was nauseous as all hell. This is to be expected from a chemical structurally adjacent to those that mushrooms evolved to keep annoying animals at bay. Unfortunately, much like with capsaicin, humans have proven to be deeply paradoxical creatures, eagerly seeking out the exact substances that burn their throats and make their stomachs churn.

Subjectively, that low-ish dose felt like a middle sibling between the sheer euphoria of MDMA and the hyper-focused disengagement of psilocybin. The only real downside was some manageable next-day dysphoria. Still, I was dissatisfied with the intensity. There was no immediate relief from the grey fog. I eyed the remaining half-tab, took extensive notes, and decided I was ready to do it again. And harder.

I did, and I almost regret it.

Set and Setting

A few days prior, I had received what could only be described as objectively good news. Not perfect news, but I felt a few British stone, or one Indian boulder, lighter. I genuinely felt eager to face the near future. Unlike my clinical trial, where the goal was to banish a treatment-resistant depression that had plagued me for a decade, this time I just wanted to make the happiness stick. If that didn't work, I'd settle for lasting contentment.

I’d learned my lessons from the trial run. I kept ondansetron on hand, a rationalist’s best friend for serotonin-receptor-induced nausea. I cleared my schedule. I found a quiet room, cranked up the aircon, turned down the lights, and queued up a good sound system. I took a full "300 µg" tab, expecting a real-world 200, and swallowed the anti-nausea medication alongside it. My two dogs, creatures of gentle breeding and absolute loyalty, snuggled in without complaint.

The effects arrived on schedule. The ondansetron performed a miracle, muting the jaw-tingling and ear-stuffiness associated with extreme serotonergic stimulation. The music sounded expansive; the colors popped. Two hours in, I decided I liked the trajectory enough to swallow the remnants of the first tab.

Then my friends arrived.

They were good friends, old friends, some I hadn’t seen in years. They knew about my situation, though they mostly weren’t psychonauts themselves. The most experienced among them had once trip-sat a guy who ended up defecating in a sink, an indignity I fully intended to spare them. I just wanted temporary companions, not babysitters. We’re getting older; we have jobs, wives, and kids. I also had family a phone call away, though I was resolved to only break that glass in an absolute emergency.

We laughed and caught up. The man I call my best friend dragged me out to look at nature, or at least the best shrubbery my suburban garden had to offer. It was a hot, sunny day. The leaves were very green. I was... whelmed. Very pretty leaves, sure, but ultimately just plant organs devoted to reasonably efficient photosynthesis.

Then, one of my friends surprised us by producing a joint of unusually high-quality weed. I dimly recalled reading that THC enhances the effects of psychedelics. I took a few measured puffs. I thought I was being sensible.

I was very wrong. Oh god. Oh fuck.

Before the marijuana, I had noticed a remarkably large pimple on my best friend’s forehead, but I hadn’t commented on it, because we’re men and it’s not my place to critique his skincare routine. I remember thinking it was remarkably large, but hey, it's his face and his business. Shortly after the marijuana, I looked at another buddy and noted that he had clearly been skipping leg day. His torso was swole; his legs were stick-thin. Taken aback, he explained he hadn’t been to the gym in years. I checked on my best friend, and found that the pimple was present, but not nearly as obtrusive. I squinted, recalibrated, and finally realized that visual proportions were simply no longer a metric my brain had a good handle on.

My friends looked alien. I knew this was an illusion, in the same way I knew my two dogs, currently busy barking at and humping each other, were not actual wolves. But the visuals and the noise were provoking a rising tide of anxiety.

I politely told them I needed to lie down. They didn't mind and kept chatting. Eventually, even the sound of their voices became too intrusive, and I had to ask them to leave.

I was alone, and I knew the weed had shifted gears. The subtle color-shimmering behind my eyelids had mutated into aggressive fractals. The walls swayed. My phone, my lifeline for timestamped notes, was folding and warping in a manner explicitly not covered by the manufacturer's warranty.

I knew I was fucked. I laid back and strapped in.

The Peak

I just kept falling. My body became leaden while my mind buzzed like a hive. The music transitioned from enjoyable into a tidal wave of synesthesia-adjacent masterpieces.

And then, I stopped thinking in words.

For the relentlessly analytical creature that I am, this is an unusual experience. The time-stamped notes ceased. Time itself meant very little. I felt my sense of self begin to fray at the edges, and I felt the universe, God, the Singularity, the collective oneness of all existence, attempting to force its way into my mind. I remember thinking, in totally alien non-words, that perhaps belief in a higher power wasn't so bad after all.

This seductive impulse didn’t whisper. It didn’t knock. It kicked down the door while I was on the shitter.

A part of me recoiled. The core of my identity rebelled. It is not a metaphor when I say I saw literal tendrils, soft white shoots, forcing their way into the cracks of my mind, offering me metaphysical solace and cosmic meaning. It is even less of a metaphor when I say that the little kernel of "me" that remained manifested a pair of scissors and snipped them away as fast as they sprouted. Buddy, I saw these things. Knowing you're hallucinating is not a robust cure for insanity.

Next, I saw myself as a knot, pulled taut and threatening to unravel under the tension of competing ontologies and bad epistemics. But it held firm. Even a heroic dose of mind-altering substances failed to break my stubborn, logically oriented materialism. Before the peak, I had written in my notes that any version of me returning from this trip with claims of metaphysical insight was, in a very real sense, no longer me. Now I had peaked, and my priors remained perfectly intact.

I saw God trying to fuck my brain through my eye socket, and my first instinct was to castrate him. Okay, this one is an actual metaphor, but it's one I came up with barely after the peak.

I realized then that there is an immutable, unshakable core beneath the masks I wear. Short of serious neurological degradation, I could trust myself to persevere through whatever slings and arrows life throws at me without losing my mind.

The Descent and the Meta-Self

Eventually, time began to make sense again. I became introspective. I felt sobriety slowly reconstructing itself from the wreckage of my mind, though it was a drawn-out process.

The peak was followed by a gentle, strange glide. I remember one version of me during the comedown who despaired of ever reaching sobriety, terrified of annihilation, begging not to die, terrified that his specific qualia would vanish into compressed digital journal notes and fading, imperfect memory.

The next iteration of me was highly meta, a journalist preoccupied with the act of journalism. He finally understood (in emotive terms, and not just intellectually as I usually do) that the entity I call “myself” is a gestalt, a series of 3D snapshots embedded in a hypercube stretching from the past to the infinite future. My life is a relay race, each past self rushing to pass the baton to the next. At times, this was a brisk walk, at other times, a sprint. During the trip, the poor bastards that are myself were rolling downhill in wheelchairs. But hey, they did their job. Now I do mine. The internal continuity I feel might lack objective grounding, but it’s a load-bearing construct nonetheless.

This meta-self chuckled at how pretentious I would find him once sober. He knew he’d be gone soon, and he wished me well. He observed that a mind without the filters and structures we rely on is fundamentally non-functional. Sanity is adaptive. He faded away with a smile, handing the wheel back to the next, slightly more sober guy. For what it's worth, I don't dislike him as much as he thought. I recognize that aspect of myself, and am mostly fond of it.

At some point, I remembered Scott Alexander’s short story Samsara. It is the one about the solitary materialist in a world where everyone else has succumbed to an Enlightenment memetic plague that genuinely makes them happier at the cost of their epistemics. I identified with and felt great empathy for the protagonist, but I also looked down on him. I had just seen the face of God and spat at it. I was perfectly content remaining in the cycles of Samsara, even if the upholstery needs some work.

My live notes from this exact moment read:

“I love feeling anti-Enlightened. Like that story Scott wrote, about the only materialist left on earth, who was tricked into becoming enlightened by virtue of his rejection of enlightenment. Hah. I'm still here. Bitch.”

Make of that what you will. I stand by it.

The Empty Quarry

The rest of the trip was an exercise in logistics and emotional housekeeping. I began to think and plan ahead, and regained opinions on the music, which gradually became less sublime. Along the way, I asked myself the questions I am usually afraid to answer out loud.

I noted my anxiety about the Singularity, which I believe is imminent on empirical grounds rather than faith. I fear death, and aging: for myself and those I love. I fear not being around to experience the end of the beginning. I want us to build heaven from the bones of an apathetic universe and forge something that cares out of dying stars. I genuinely think that is more likely than getting paperclipped, though not by a margin wide enough to bring me much peace.

I examined my anxieties about my career, my finances, and the lofty standards set by my parents. That I may or may not have the time to establish myself as a man, a husband and father, a writer, a doctor, before it becomes moot. I mused on how conflicted I feel about the trajectory of my life, even if I've usually lived up to my expectations and made my parents proud. I know I am not a bad person: I don't give my spare change away to save shrimp, but I do genuinely try to help. This was helpful to remember and also sincerely believe with most of my guard down.

I thought about my father, a surgeon who works harder than a human body should allow. He is not emotionally constipated; he cares deeply about my feelings. But quiet, relentless work is his love language. With tears drenching my cheeks, I realized he would work himself to death for us if he had to, and he’d die on his feet with a smile.

I don't want him to. I want to become so established that he can look at me, feel the safety of it, and finally slow down. At the same time, I notice I’ve inherited his drive. I work harder than I need to because I am already providing for the family I don't quite have yet: the wife yet unmarried, the kids yet unborn.

To my slight but enduring disappointment, it turns out my constant sober rumination and relentless introspection actually works. I already knew all of these answers. I could have produced them on minimal prodding when sober, even more easily if drunk and disinhibited. I have already done so, repeatedly.

Not even a heroic dose of LSD could help me mine for psychological insights that didn't exist; the quarry was already bare. I understand myself. I wouldn't trust any grand unified theories about the wider universe generated on acid, but I would have appreciated a slightly deeper glimpse into my own interiority. Like any good Bayesian, I am forced to treat this absence of evidence as evidence of absence. I am, almost certainly, exactly who I thought I was.

I wouldn’t ever like to be quite that high again. It felt dangerously close to bumping up against a glass ceiling of the psyche. I do intend to alter myself, physically and mentally, in the future, but psychedelics can only get you so far.

It is too early to tell if the contentment will stick, but the day after, I feel euthymic. It is quieter in my head. For someone with ADHD, this is a profound relief. As a delightful bonus, my usually omnipresent mild tinnitus seems to have vanished. If that proves permanent, the ordeal was worth it on those grounds alone.

I consider myself a better materialist for the experience. But note that I do not view the experience as self-flagellation, I didn't seek out... whatever the hell that was. The flagella of cosmic unity tried to force their way in, and I stayed the course. Can't let the team down; the ancestors and descendants are counting on me. If God or the administrators of the Ancestor Simulation want to talk to me that badly, they can send an email.

A Brief Note on Harm Reduction:

As clinical experiments go, my methodology was garbage. The clinician and the subject were the same person, and both of them were tripping balls in a manner they hadn’t realized was physically possible. I was already happier than I had been in a... very long time when I tried this. Nothing I have said or will say constitutes medical advice.

Do not take heroic doses of LSD unless you have a damn good reason. If you must, do not add cannabis unless you have meticulously researched the interactions. And if you do add cannabis, do not come crying to me when you find yourself castrating God with imaginary scissors to prevent Him from mind-fucking you. Or if you do get mind-fucked, for the matter, I will be sympathetic but less than useful. I've warned you. And I warn you again:

Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed until the half-life clears your system. Sometimes they stay ajar forever, no matter how hard you shove. From a mental health perspective, the evidence for psilocybin and ketamine is far more robust, and the latter is actually medically available in many jurisdictions.

I don't want to be this high ever again. But I am very glad to be back.

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

1917 comments - 25684 thread views 11d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1917

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Shaming.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Recruiting for a cause.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

209 comments - 2361 thread views 12d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

245 comments - 2681 thread views 14d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

problem travels to China: Part 1

13 comments - 2671 thread views 14d ago by problem_redditor (text post) Edited 14d ago

WARNING: Long, rambly post that's a mix of personal experiences, historical summary and hot-take opinionating.

My first glimpses of China were surreal and desolate. The landscape looked positively Siberic in an almost hallucinatory way; dry, dusty fields smothered with snow and ice stretched to the horizon, only interrupted by groups of austere commieblock-filled xiaoqu that seemed almost copypasted, rising out of the surrounding countryside like strange alien monoliths. I was travelling from the international airport to downtown Beijing, and all the way to Dongzhimen the winter sun streamed in through the windows of the carriage, lighting up the interior with a wan glow. After some time spent navigating the Dongzhimen station trying to transfer to a new line (involving an encounter with a genuinely revolting public toilet), I was well and truly exhausted. I made it to the front desk of my hotel as soon as the sun started to set, stumbled my way through a conversation with a receptionist who knew just enough English for me to converse with, got my connection working for just enough time to check in, and dragged myself and all my luggage into the hotel room. I slotted my keycard into the holder just by the door, and every light began to turn on. Inside, it was exceptionally well-insulated to the point it actually felt hot, which was rather surprising considering how chilly it had been outside of the hotel.

Relieved, I spent some time showering and unpacking, then made my way down to the front desk again just to ask if the bottled water in the room was free. Once I got back to my room, the phone by the bed started to ring, and upon picking it up an automated message began to come through informing me that a delivery had been made to me. I opened the door, and found myself staring blankly at a small, kind of cute robot standing in front of the threshold to my room. There was a display on its head with a button that instructed me to "press to open", and upon touching it a panel on the robot slid open to reveal a large hollow space containing two water bottles.

One thing was for sure: I was not in Kansas anymore.

China is one of these rare destinations that's really hard to get any kind of remotely objective take on; it's such a polarising country that anything you read really needs to be taken with a 2 kg block of salt. There is no way to get a somewhat neutral, slice-of-life take on China; not even on YouTube where you might expect to see the equivalent of channels like Abroad In Japan, the country is just so polarising that everything either turns into a SerpentZA-like channel wherein everything in China is awful and nothing is ever allowed to be good, or outright China proselytising. Both sides are extremely committed to their worldviews, and both sides shout extremely loudly - though I will say the China detractors are considerably more loud in the West, which makes sense due to geopolitical anxieties surrounding its meteoric rise; the Place, China meme accurately summarises a whole lot of the discourse around the country. It's a place that has been sensationalised to hell and back, but oddly enough few international tourists actually seem to want to see what it's like for themselves.

I will say that it is not the easiest place to travel, though not for the reasons that other countries are challenging for travellers. Usually travel is difficult due to safety or infrastructure concerns when a country is significantly undeveloped, China is quite the opposite - infrastructure is mostly convenient and reliable and the country is very safe. Rather, the issue here is that the country is its own world that really doesn't seem to care about catering to any laowai not already entrenched within its ecosystem or way of doing things. While it's offered visa-free travel to many countries, reducing barriers for travel, at a minimum you will need to set up Alipay, WeChat and Gaode Maps on your phone and make sure you know how to use them beforehand (including the DiDi mini app on Alipay), get an esim that allows you to circumvent the Great Firewall, and make sure you have a good translate app and a cursory knowledge of phrases like "Hello, I don't speak Chinese", something that I'm sure you'll be using very often because it's rare to find even basic English comprehension in China. Note that Alipay and WeChat require a lot of account verification, including scanning your passport and your face, and it can only be properly set up and used when you are in China, so you will only know that it works once you touch down. And a lot of these apps are irritating bloatware that harvest your data. Your data plan can still be sluggish as hell at points, something that I think may be due to security measures creating extreme latency though I'm not fully sure what causes it (locals don't seem to have this problem, at least). Oh, and I've heard it's difficult to drive in China due to aggressive driving behaviours being common; the repeated refrain from travellers is that you should just use public transport and DiDi if you want to get where you want. And smoking is sometimes a noticeable issue. But the country is so old and so spectacular that the juice is well worth the squeeze. It may be my favourite place in Asia at this point, and I have plans to go again this December.

It goes without saying that China is just different, to the point that this has been the hardest trip report for me to write so far. And barely anyone has a correct view of what it is actually like. It is like looking at a barely-recognisable, funhouse-mirror, heavily sinified alternate history of the world where everything just turned out differently. There are a million and one notable aspects of travelling in China I could have mentioned when covering this country, ranging from everything from the very good to the very frustrating, and there are aspects which I genuinely barely even know how to make up my mind up on. It's a very ancient country with its own set of deeply ingrained norms that hugely conflicts with the party line (though there's a lot to say about how the state in practice is a lot less ideological or centralised than people tend to portray it as), it's ostensibly communist but on the ground seems hypercapitalist in a way that pretty much no Western country is, and it's recently experienced a rise that's nothing short of meteoric, having speedrun its way from being poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s to a world power today. The contradictions are blistering to the point it feels like being flashbanged, there are so many aspects of China that are just really difficult to properly synthesise.

I woke up early the next morning and headed down into the subway, tapped my international bank card at the turnstiles, sent my sling bag through the mandatory security scanner, and made my way to the platform. Beijing’s subway network is vast and impressively comprehensive, but I found navigating it to be very disorienting. The station was downright maze-like, with many long corridors and layered passageways that blurred together, and there was also a lot of security and surveillance; bag checks were routine, and cameras could be seen everywhere. But the system was efficient and the commuters moved very quickly, which I appreciated. After living in Sydney, where slow walkers have sometimes caused me to miss trains (seriously, people here walk at the speed of Roombas), I quite enjoyed the efficiency of movement in China. Admittedly this was a double-edged sword, since at times during the trip I felt like I couldn't relax because people there were always hustling.

Surprisingly enough, though, being in a crowd was never all too hard to handle, since people in China are actually more orderly than people tend to think; they push and shove far less than is usually imagined in the foreign public consciousness. In spite of the perception of Mainland Chinese as being notoriously selfish and opportunistic and incapable of maintaining order in situations that call for it, I didn't find it to be bad at all. Vietnam was an order of magnitude worse in this regard, the amount of people who just carelessly shoved straight through lines was almost unbelievable. I found Chinese people to be much more rule-abiding and pro-social; perhaps that wasn't the case a decade ago or so, but at this point China's not that much worse than everywhere else in this regard, it's just far more dense population-wise. Granted, other things such as people clearing their throat and spitting on the sidewalk still exists, though in my opinion it's really not that obstructive to you personally if you're not super picky about everyone around you conforming to strict norms of propriety. It is a different country and culture after all.

Once I disembarked, I made my way toward the Forbidden City, the largest preserved palace complex in existence (depending on how you define this, the Summer Palace and its gardens may be larger, though its grounds are mostly water). It's a veritable maze of halls that sits directly in the heart of Beijing, oriented on a north-south axis aligned with such precision that it deviates only one degree from geographic north. This axis extends far beyond the confines of the palace itself, continuing through a massive urban corridor approximately 7,500 meters in length which features several of the capital’s most significant monuments. These include the Drum and Bell Towers to the north and, to the south, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Agriculture, and the Zhengyangmen Gate Tower. It really only became the seat of power relatively recently (well, recent for Chinese standards, which basically means nothing) when the Yongle Emperor designated Beijing as a secondary capital in 1403, diminishing the previous capital of Nanjing in importance. Once it eventually became the principal capital, the Forbidden City would be the seat of political power for the rest of traditional Chinese history.

On my way to the palace, I noticed that every street seemed to go on forever, stretching into the distance in a manner that I found to be almost dizzying. There is something incredibly agoraphobia-inducing about how all of Beijing is designed, but it leans into it so much that it actually loops back around into making the city kind of distinctive in its own way. This isn't a consequence of modern Chinese city-planning either; when determining the layout of the new city, Ming Dynasty planners based it on ancient manuals going all the way back to the Zhou, specifically the Kaogong Ji (regulations of construction). The capital was always meant to be an expression of imperial power and cosmic order, and its stipulations included that the capital be "a square of nine li" criss-crossed by "nine lanes going north-south and east-west, each of the former being nine chariot tracks wide" that bisected the urban fabric into regular squares. Visitors to the city in the early 20th century described it as a maze of "walls, walls and more walls", something that can be easily seen in many of the old streets extant today. Beijing was designed to be monumental, not cosy, and much of the modern city actually is still somewhat built on the bones of the old one, with the nine thoroughfares of the old capital now expanded into staggering multi-lane highways that extend far beyond the borders of what used to be Ming Dynasty Beijing. Pretty much every artery in the urban core, whether it be modern or traditional, is laid out in the same symmetrical, rhythmic manner that has characterised the city for centuries. In other words, Beijing is very intimidating, and not because the government is extremely overbearing or people act particularly antisocially, rather it's because most of the city's vernacular constructions from every era of its history are inherently so monumental in size, so stately and so anonymised that you get this strange feeling of being dwarfed by its endless grid of streets.

I eventually found myself in a series of lanes lined with the archetypical grey-brick hutongs that Beijing is known for. Some lanes featured many vendors selling tanghulu, rice cakes, and other snacks; others were much quieter and very local, with older Beijingers wandering about, scooters buzzing past, and laundry strung up overhead. Before long I reached Donghuamen Gate (the eastern entrance that conveniently avoids the security at Tiananmen Square), and from there I wandered along the edge of the palace toward the southern entrance for ticket checks. As I walked, towering red abutments and pavilions loomed above me, mirrored in the partially frozen waters of the moat. Bare willow branches hung over the ice, and the path featured everyone from elderly locals to hanfu-clad Douyin girls stopping every few steps for photos against the crimson backdrop. When I finally reached the Meridian Gate, I joined a surprisingly short queue, handed over my passport, scanned my sling bag, and walked through the towering entrance.

The original Forbidden City built by the Ming Dynasty was an extremely luxurious palace, which used precious and rare Phoebe zhennan wood from the jungles of southwestern China to construct its halls (this was an extremely valuable timber in ancient China, and was even more so when fossilised; that was known as "black wood" and to this day it fetches prices of up to thousands upon thousands of dollars per cubic metre). Grand terraces and stone carvings were built by means of massive blocks of quarried stone, which were able to be transported only through covering the ground with a layer of ice in deep winter and then pulling the blocks along. Halls were paved with expertly crafted bricks, made with clay from multiple provinces; each batch took months to make. The interior pavings, seen today, are these very six-century old originals. But a good number of the wooden structures within the Forbidden City date back to the Qing, as the palace complex did not escape the end of the Ming Dynasty unscathed. After Li Zicheng and his rebel troops marched on Beijing in an attempt to overthrow the Ming Dynasty, after the Chongzhen Emperor hung himself in despair and ruin in the gardens of the palace, after the Manchus conquered China with the help of a Ming general who let them into the country, the three main halls in the central axis of the palace, among others, had burned to the ground. The Qing reconstructed the halls of the palace carefully with pinewood, and maintained the general layout rather faithfully (though they did make every plaque within the palace bilingual, featuring Chinese and Manchu scripts alike). Some parts of the palace, however, are still extant from the Ming Dynasty, such as the Wanchun Pavilion in the imperial garden.

I stepped into an immense courtyard bisected by a sinuous waterway (named the "Inner Gold Creek", or Nejinshui) with five stone bridges plunging over it. Two stone lions stood watch over the entire courtyard. At the northern edge rose another grand entrance beyond which lay an even larger square, which rewarded me with a striking view of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Rebuilt most recently in 1695, it's a huge wooden structure built on a stone platform, used for everything from enthronment and wedding ceremonies to banquets for solstices. I couldn’t enter the vast interior, though; the front of the palace was crowded and I was only able to get distant glimpses of the imposing throne inside. As I tilted my head upward, I noticed rows of small glazed ceramic figures marching along the roof’s ridgelines which were believed to ward off misfortune in ancient China. Customarily, a man riding a phoenix would stand at the head of the procession while the tail terminated with a dragon. Between these two figures, there would be an odd number of mythological creatures, the total number of which signified the rank or importance of the building. Each ridge on the Hall of Supreme Harmony featured ten of them in total.

The Forbidden City is an absolute labyrinth of a palace, and I can confidently say that I got lost multiple times navigating the complex of nested courtyards that make up the Inner Court; it felt like being stranded in a maze of red walls and intricate yellow-roofed buildings. Out of everything I think my favourite part of the palace was the small Imperial Garden just north of the three main halls of the Outer Court, which is a finely-wrought park full of rock gardens, pavilions and other architectural elements that create a feeling of intimacy otherwise not found in other parts of the palace. The Wanchun Pavilion in the garden is probably the finest structure in the whole palace, featuring a spectacular domed caisson created by the successive layering of wooden brackets, the very top of which is adorned with a finely carved bas-relief of a dragon. Another structure that really caught my eye was the intricately glazed Nine-Dragon Screen in the northeastern part of the palace, a piece of auspicious iconography that appears only in palaces (there are only three of them extant today).

I left the Forbidden City through the northern gate and walked further to Nanluoguxiang, one of these trendy hutong streets that have been transformed into shopping districts; as I walked there I passed through a whole lot more of these authentic local hutongs. Honestly I was constantly surprised by just how extensive these hutong neighbourhoods were; at times, they seemed to stretch on endlessly, like a Backrooms-esque parallel dimension made entirely of these gridlike lanes. Before arriving, I’d seen people on travel forums wondering whether any "real" authentic hutongs were left at all, but after visiting Beijing, these questions seem borderline laughable - walk in any given direction from the Forbidden City and it almost seems as if you can't get out of the hutongs (and no, I'm not talking about the more old-style but obviously new constructions, I'm talking about local hutongs that barely seem renovated). In spite of Beijing's reputation as a modern city, a large portion of the urban sprawl is actually not like that; I'd even go as far as to say that Beijing is the most ancient-looking major city I've ever seen in East Asia. I honestly think the people bemoaning China's "lack of heritage" either haven't visited China, didn't make even a token attempt to go find any of it, or are generally unaware of how bad the situation regarding preservation can be in the rest of Asia (or are just repeating a canard they've heard without considering it that much). China is by far the most historically dense place I've visited in the entire continent, and despite the fact that my expectations were sky-high beforehand even I didn't expect so much history from the country.

I do want to temper this quite a bit, though. While I saw a lot of extant preserved old architecture, I don't want to overly glorify or romanticise these neighbourhoods, since many of them are obviously barely gentrified or modernised at all. China modernised very fast and very unevenly, and despite their status as a symbol of old Beijing, people in the hutongs often seem to live without a lot of infrastructure (such as proper plumbing systems). I can understand why the Chinese government has not precluded renovation of the hutongs, even after its announcement of a protection order on these neighbourhoods. They're not always very glamorous places to be, and personally I agree with an approach that introduces more modern amenities into these hutongs while still preserving its fundamental character; it would be nice to see improvements in the quality of life for the people living there.

The next day I woke up to a gloomy winter morning, with thick mist and fog hanging over all the streets of downtown Beijing. Everything looked almost colourless, like some kind of vintage grey filter had been placed over the entire city, and it was freezing. Northern China is climactically awful and is largely a cold, grey, arid wasteland in winter, to the point that Beijing actually boasts colder temperatures than Helsinki during this time of the year in spite of its lower latitude (due to the directional nature of the Coriolis effect, east coasts are generally far colder than west coasts; as a particularly stark example of this, Vladivostok, Russia is on the same latitude as Florence, Italy). The fact that any civilisation was able to flourish here in spite of the horrific climate and the Yellow River's constant catastrophic flooding is actually astonishing to me.

I pulled myself out of bed, descended into the subway again, trudged past a bunch of commieblocks which gave way to more of these local hutongs (seriously they are everywhere) and made my way to the first stop of the day: Zhihua Temple. It's an obscure but well-preserved Ming Dynasty wooden temple built in 1443, hidden within the backstreets of Beijing, painted in such a vivid crimson and adorned with such deeply black roof tiles that to my eyes it seemed to practically pop in the sea of fog and mist. Making my way towards the shanmen gate of the temple, I noticed a marble plaque above it with Chinese characters that stated "Gifted by the Imperial Court to Zhihua Temple". Entering the grounds revealed a courtyard of modest size, flanked by temple halls all around. A small number of robed men exited a room, and headed into the main hall to play traditional ritual music from the Ming Dynasty, which had been passed down for 27 generations in this very temple. They sat down in front of a modest altar featuring three wooden-lacquered Buddha statues on lotus pedestals, and in the cold dark Beijing winter I watched them play a very strange and sweet music.

After the music was over, I proceeded to see what the other halls had in store. To the west of the main hall, there was another wooden building housing an incredible wooden zhuanlunzang (sutra case) covered in intricate carvings of bodhisattvas, heavenly kings and warriors and topped with a small caisson that a tiny Vairocana Buddha sat in. A bit awestruck, I walked around the entire thing, just taking in the immense level of detail. Deeper to the back of the complex, there was a large two story pavilion featuring three huge statues, surrounded by walls covered in niches featuring what is said to be 9,999 tiny renderings of the Buddha. I later learned that this hall was, quite aptly, named the "Thousand Buddha Hall". I would have spent more time at this temple but the biting cold was beginning to get to me, so I ducked into a small teashop in the hutong and had some rather medicinal-tasting flower tea alongside a small rice cake as I decided on where to venture next.

I scrolled some possible destinations on my phone in the cosy warmth of the teahouse, and resolved to visit the Yonghe Temple towards the north of the city. Yet again, I was seemingly trapped in a parallel dimension full of hutongs the entire way, and had to use some extremely suspect communal toilets if I wanted to relieve myself. Note this is coming from someone who's probably better equipped to use Chinese toilets than most Westerners - they're mostly squat, and having grown up in Southeast Asia I'm used to squat toilets and generally prefer them (if you can't squat properly, that is your skill issue, it is objectively superior ergonomically and cleaner). But the toilets in these very old parts of Beijing are legitimately terrible and feature toilets with dividers instead of a dedicated stall, meaning everyone can see you defecate - and they are extremely dirty, I often found piss covering the floor and at least one squat toilet covered in diarrhoea. It is incredible to me how a country that's so obviously advanced in multiple important ways can be so undeveloped in others. Though I will grant that the hutongs are uniquely bad in this regard, having been barely modernised ever since the Qing; other parts of China are far better with this (though unless you find yourself in a shopping mall, they will still often lack essentials like soap and toilet paper; you must bring your own when going to China, this is non-negotiable).

Eventually I made it to a huge food street just ahead of the Yonghe Temple, featuring a large variety of snacks and congregations of people lining up in front of every shop. It's not uncommon at all in Asia to find bustling food-filled squares near popular temples, providing nourishment and a social space for templegoers. For now, I ignored the street and made my way to the temple, intending to grab some food on my way out. I approached the visitor counter, grabbed a ticket, and walked into the compound through some intricate yellow-and-blue entrance archways flanked by stele pavilions and stone lions on each side. The pathway opened up into a courtyard featuring sweeping views of a monolithic red-and-yellow hall named the Yonghegong (Hall of Harmony and Peace), which hosted a plaque displaying inscriptions in Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and Mongolian. Masses of lay worshippers stood in prayer in front of a bronze burner, with wafts of warm, fragrant smoke rising up from the forest of incense sticks and mixing seamlessly with the mist and cloud overhead.

When Yonghe Temple was built in the 1690s, it was not initially conceived of as a temple but as a royal residence, and it would end up housing two future Qing emperors before they ascended the throne and moved into the Forbidden City. The residence was initially built for Prince Yong, who would eventually become the Yongzheng Emperor, and it was in its East Compound that his fourth son (the future Qianlong Emperor) would be born. After Yongzheng died there was a proposal for it to be converted into a residence for other royals, but Qianlong instead issued an edict legislating it be turned into a Tibetan lamasery, as he was a particularly large supporter of the religion. Although the Qing court generally patronised and funded Tibetan Buddhism pretty heavily as a method of gaining support from outlying territories such as Tibet and Mongolia (and in general bending Tibetan Buddhism to serve the empire's needs), Qianlong took this to another level; he practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism in his private life, and even had a guru who believed he was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan. After its consecration in 1745, Yonghe Temple rose to become the foremost Buddhist temple in China, hosting monks from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its turquoise roof tiles were replaced with lavish yellow ones to signify imperial status.

Inside the hall, a gleaming triad of bronze statues depicting the Buddhas of the Three Ages stood front and centre, each one backed by stunning nimbuses, auspicious iconography and mythical creatures. Here, even more worshippers could be found, prostrating themselves and praying in front of the deities. And the rest of the hall was just as sumptuous - the scene here can only be described as an explosion of colour, with the entire interior covered in floor-to-ceiling paintings and calligraphy inscribed onto every pillar. On the sides of the building, facing the central Buddhist triad, stood two rows of painted Qing arhats, all harbouring different expressions and poses. Next up along the main axis of the temple lay the Yongyoudian (Hall of Everlasting Protection), another extremely picturesque hall housing yet another Buddha triad; this one was perhaps even more intricately rendered than the last. After exploring some of the auxiliary buildings located to the left and right of the main halls, which were themselves filled to the brim with an insane concentration of Buddhist treasures and crowded with worshippers, I navigated to the next hall, named the Falundian (Hall of the Wheel of the Law), and immediately felt as if I was intruding on something sacred. Inside stood a monumental statue of the master Tsongkhapa surrounded by traditional Chukor banners, with a mass of red-robed Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged around his idol and chanting in an almost trance-like reverie. Masses of lay worshippers stood or sat to the side, their heads bowed penitently. It was quite a powerful atmosphere, and I lingered here for a while listening to the ceremony.

I had some reservations about this temple given its commonality on Beijing itineraries; I feared that it wouldn't be authentic, that it would just be a tourist trap, that perhaps it wouldn't even be old, but it was the polar opposite. This, and many other experiences like it, challenged a pretty big misconception about China: that the country lacks traditional culture or religion due to The Cultural Revolution or some other event in recent Chinese history. But there's a lot of extant tradition in Mainland China, much of which is based on a longstanding cultural meta that's imperfectly comprehensible to a Western visitor, though it's frustrating that a lot of outsiders barely even seem to acknowledge it exists. It’s not uncommon for people to suggest that traditional culture and history has been all but destroyed on the mainland and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia, I've even heard people say that the Japanese preserved Chinese culture better than China (but, having read extensively about the aggressively iconoclastic nature of Meiji Japan, I’m not even certain Japanese culture itself can be said to be all that undisturbed).

To elaborate, I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of religious activity and traditional rituals, similar to that of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia - in spite of what Straits Chinese like to say about themselves. To spoil parts of the remainder of this trip report, it wasn't just this temple where I encountered it, either. In Pingyao’s walled city, I walked the main thoroughfare while a massive crowd of men carried a dragon float down the street to a din of clanging drums. I stayed above a jade shop in Datong, and every morning woke up to the old jade craftsman quietly working on a new piece with a pot of fresh tea bubbling beside him. At the Ming Dynasty-era Great Mosque of Xi’an, I watched as hordes of Muslims assembled in front of the hall (off limits to me, since I’m not Muslim) and sat quietly in worship. If tradition is anywhere close to dead in China, then clearly my lying eyes deceive me.

I also don’t think that the level of religiousness of the Chinese population is properly captured in surveys. People in East Asia are generally not "religious" in any kind of organised way, sure, and will often describe themselves as atheist or nonaffiliated, but will often still engage in superstitious cultural rituals and rites that are ultimately rooted in a religious view of the world without fully adhering to or caring much about strict doctrine. In general, East Asian religion is just different, and China is no exception. There are plenty of religious and at least superstitious people who follow folk practices to some degree, but for the most part they don’t spray it around very conspicuously in public, and they don’t particularly care about specifically identifying as Part Of A Group. It’s just something they do, and is individual to them in a more understated and personal way. That’s true among virtually all Chinese communities, in my opinion, but on the mainland the Han constitute the vast demographic majority, and without any other point of comparison all this just gets perceived as the baseline societal meta; you typically don't recognise the water in which you swim. Hell, I’m in accounting and still work with a lot of people hailing from the mainland now, and I recall one of them couldn’t cook in the new house she bought until the old one had finished being sold and enough time had elapsed, or something similarly insanely ritualistic. In general, a very common theme throughout this trip report is me constantly finding the culture to be rather well-preserved, even more so considering the tumultuous and often catastrophic shifts that Mainland China experienced during the 20th century.

Eventually I left the monks behind, hearing the chanting echo behind me, and progressed to the final hall in the complex: the Wanfuge (Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses). It was a towering structure, featuring a three-story wooden pavilion flanked by two side buildings and connected by overhead walkways - a somewhat unusual element to see in Chinese architecture. Fewer worshippers congregated here than in the front halls, and the relative quiet lent the space a more contemplative atmosphere. I paused briefly to take it in before stepping inside, and a titanic mass emerged out of the darkness of the hall. A colossal statue of the Maitreya Buddha, nearly twenty metres tall, dominated the centre of the pavilion; walkways on each level circled the immense figure, allowing it to be viewed from every height. Carved from a single piece of sandalwood, this was a gift from the Dalai Lama to the Qianlong Emperor, and it was so unwieldy that it took three years to transport to Beijing. It's in the Guinness Book of Records, it's an absolutely monumental piece of art, and if you ever come to Beijing this is one of the best things you can see. It's fucking awesome. In general, I highly recommend the Yonghe Temple, it would be my favourite temple in Asia if not for another unbelievable temple near Pingyao, later on in the trip.

I grabbed a snack after exiting the temple (this sinfully rich meat-filled flaky pastry, I think it was called shaobing) and made my way to the final stop of the day: the iconic Temple of Heaven. It's really only a component part of a larger-scale religious complex in Beijing, alongside the Temple of the Sun, Temple of Earth, and Temple of Moon, but the Temple of Heaven is by far the best-known of these ceremonial complexes. It sits in a massive tree-filled park bisected by a series of famous halls, the most recognisable of which is the Qiniandian (Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests), a massive triple-gabled circular hall on a square terrace reflecting the East Asian cosmological concept of a square Earth and round Heaven. This was an extremely important ceremonial site in ancient China, being the place where the Emperor made ceremonial sacrifices to Heaven for, well, good harvests. Twice a year, the Emperor and his retinue would set up camp within the complex and perform a very specific ritual which no member of the public could observe. The ceremony had to be performed perfectly, or it would signify a bad omen for the coming year.

The weather was still extremely foggy when I got there, which isn't particularly ideal for the Temple of Heaven, but I grabbed a ticket anyway and proceeded into the park down a long tree-lined path. Slowly the Hall of Prayer of Good Harvests came into view, and I climbed up the massive stone platform onto the main bulk of the structure alongside many other visitors. It seems I got there all too late, as it was extremely crowded and there were way too many hanfu-clad girls posing in front of the temple in order to really enjoy it. But it was a very beautiful building; photos don't properly convey this, but the way the pavilion extrudes out from that huge circular stone pedestal induces a sense of vertigo akin to staring up into the night sky and almost makes it seem as if it's touching the heavens. It's an example of absolutely incredible Qing Dynasty design and architecture; I just wish I had better weather and less crowds for this one, and if I had to do this again I'd visit much earlier in the morning before the masses of Chinese tourists start pouring in. As it was, though, I personally preferred the parts of the park outside of the main complex of halls, where one could still see the recognisable peak of the hall protruding from far above the surrounding landscape. Here things were much more local and less touristy, with families bringing their children to play and performing activities in the park, and there were still some other historical buildings of note within the less-visited parts of the complex, which now mostly hosted museums and exhibitions.

The sun was beginning to set now, so I unfortunately had to rush through the remainder of the complex, and after I was satisfied with sightseeing I took the train to Qianmen station for dinner. At this point I was ravenous so I made my way to street level and was immediately met with the sight of the Zhengyangmen gate tower all spectacularly lit up at night, one of the quintessential icons of Old Beijing. After quickly snapping some pictures of the tower, I walked along the food street and located a relatively inconspicuous-looking eatery named Duyichu. This is one of the most acclaimed of Beijing's old restaurants, having originated in the 3rd year of Emperor Qianlong (for anyone that uses normal people dates, that's 1738); for context, at this time the US was still an imperial colony of the British, and Napoleon didn't even exist yet. But that year, this humble eatery popped up in front of the Imperial Quarter of Old Beijing and started specialising in the delicate steamed dumplings that we all now recognise as shaomai. This would spread south and become common throughout the Chinese diaspora, such that you can find it in Cantonese dim sum joints in Hong Kong and in many Chinese places in the Western world. It was here, at this very spot in Beijing, where the dish was first popularised and made into a staple of Chinese cuisine.

Surprisingly, there were no lines in front of the door considering the venerable nature of the establishment. I was able to get a table immediately, where I promptly ordered some assorted shaomai and Qianlong baicai (fresh cabbages with a thick sesame dressing, named after the titular emperor). The food came in no time at all, and I quickly discovered that Beijing's flavour profiles have a tendency to confound my tastebuds; the cabbage was tasty but a bit too acidic and heavy, though I enjoyed it nonetheless. In general, Beijingers seem to enjoy extremely heavy and simple flavours without much of the depth that I usually expect from Chinese food - food in China isn't at all one thing and the Chinese food most Westerners are accustomed to eating really primarily comes from one specific city in Canton (Taishan). The shaomai was the clear highlight to me; it was very succulent, though I can't say it was anything you couldn't get elsewhere in Asia. It's kind of been a victim of its own success I think, everybody seems to have copied the example it set, and now it's just one of the many shops that specialise in the popular dish. I polished off the meal in short order, grabbed some tea and returned to my hotel.

The next day, I found myself waiting for a bus in an aggressively nondescript Beijing street, one so crowded with towering identikit commieblocks they almost seemed to block out the dim sunlight. I was out so early that dawn hadn't broken yet, and the sky was still blanketed with fog, the poor weather from yesterday still not having abated. It was extremely humid and cold, and so I had just gotten jianbing (Chinese savoury crepes) alongside some doujiang (soy milk) from a nearby local stall, which were both comfortingly warm and tasty in the blistering Beijing winter. The doujiang in particular was incredible, and while I don't usually like soy milk, this one tasted so smooth that I wanted whatever crack cocaine they were putting in there. I sipped the drink slowly, huddling into my puffer jacket while the sun rose and the streetlights slowly flickered off. It was peaceful.

Standing there in the early morning silence, I couldn't help but think back to my limited experiences in North America; if you transplanted this place into the downtown core of many major North American cities, it would probably already be hosting a colourful, cosmopolitan, and vibrant cast of drug addicts and homeless people (this problem basically doesn’t exist in Asia, and was a major point of culture shock for me when visiting North America; you often don’t feel safe). In spite of the endless sneering about Third Worldism you can find on this forum, the biggest takeaway I’ve had in my travels throughout Asia is that very large swaths of it are starting to feel very not third world; granted, modernisation throughout the region (and even within Beijing) is uneven, infrastructure can be spotty, but many aspects of it are starting to feel more first world than even the first world. Now I'm not saying that Chinese average living standards are on par with the US yet, but its major urban areas and eastern coastal provinces are looking and feeling far more like Czechia than they are Cambodia. It’s the interior that drags this down hugely, and the state is quickly working to urbanise them all. They’re also pumping out STEM graduates en masse. From a personal standpoint, experiencing this change firsthand is quite the sight. I grew up in Asia and now large swaths of it are just unrecognisable to me; seeing the sheer pace of change in real time is just breathtaking and it’s a topic that deserves a post of its own. It’s something I’m grateful to have experienced myself, partially because living through it is incredibly existential, but also because you get the opportunity to see unique elements of local life that will soon be transformed forever as the continent charges headlong into gleaming industrial modernity, for better or for worse.

I got onto the bus alongside a number of other tourists, and it promptly pulled out of the lot, barreling down the misty roads into the suburbs of Beijing. The sun continued to inch higher and higher in the sky as we passed further into the countryside, casting a wan, diffuse glow that illuminated a barren landscape smothered in snow and fog. Before long, our bus was winding up into the mountains, where the mist began to thin out, and eventually sunshine could be seen streaming through the gradually-parting clouds. The sky slowly but surely turned blue, and after tolerating the intensely grey and foggy weather of Beijing for a good day and a half, it was refreshing to see colour again. Our bus stopped at a large tourist centre for the Mutianyu Great Wall featuring a metric fuckton of cafes and souvenir shops and weird ass VR experiences, where we went on to buy tickets for a cable car then went our own separate ways.

The legacy of the Great Wall of China stretches all the way back to the Spring and Autumn period, but this history was highly discontinuous and fractured, with there not even being a recognisable "wall" during many dynasties. Most of the extant masonry that you can see today dates from the Ming Dynasty (15th/16th centuries); granted they were built roughly along the path that the earlier Qin/Han Dynasty earthen fortifications followed, but the Ming wall was essentially a new structure since the previous dynasties' walls had almost entirely eroded and fallen into disuse. This means that there was essentially no real Great Wall during the time of the Mongols, and in fact at the time building a wall was actually considered an admission of diplomatic failure to be avoided whenever possible. Even the Ming Dynasty's wall building program was not a systematic building of fortifications to keep the invaders out wholesale, rather it was an accumulative series of defences which were constructed on an ad hoc basis in response to evolving needs, and the disparate sections of the wall were never linked up.

This was a feature, too, not a bug. For context, the main problem the Chinese encountered when defending their northern border was that attacks could come from any direction, and the enemy could also retreat in any direction. The point of building a wall was not to prevent enemies from entering China per se; rather it made sure that attacks could be confined to regular, predictable areas that could be militarised, and forced the enemy to retreat using the same avenue through which they entered. This ended up being a major issue that faced many northern invaders, such as with Hong Taiji's raids into Hebei. In addition, the wall acted as a communicative and transport structure, with any observed raids triggering a large string of warning beacons that would be funnelled all the way back to Beijing. The main point I want to stress here is that the wall itself was not meant to be the primary obstacle for an enemy, but rather as only one component of a layered defence strategy ultimately centred around the army that lay beyond it. This concept of a Great Wall is a Western concept not introduced until later in Chinese history once the walls no longer had any purpose - at the time, the Ming would instead have referred to its defence system as the Nine Garrisons (placing foremost importance on the manpower that the fortification was ultimately built to serve), rather than any kind of unified Wall.

I passed through the tourist centre and boarded a cable car that carried me further up the mountain. Below, slopes lined with leafless trees unfurled in every direction, while the sunlight grew steadily harsher as I ascended. At last, the crest of the range revealed itself, with its summit crowned by a formidable masonry wall that stretched endlessly across the horizon. I was deposited unceremoniously at a platform near the wall, where I walked past a row of vendors and stepped onto the structure. The bulk of the edifice came into view, and I watched as the ridges of innumerable mountains faded one after another into the distant haze, with the wall snaking over every single twist and turn. It was absolutely breathtaking, and at this time of year I had it largely to myself - the further I walked from the chairlift, the more the crowds thinned out, to the point where I was alone on large sections of the wall. From time to time, a vendor would call out from the margins of the wall, peering through one of the many crenellations that had now been repurposed as makeshift counters for offering snacks and drinks to weary travellers.

I eventually reached the very western end of the accessible wall and found myself faced with a particularly steep section called the "Hero Slope", which featured 600+ steps at a brutal incline of 70 degrees. Within minutes I was gasping, legs trembling as the strain built with every step, until I found myself nearly collapsing against the side. By the time I reached the highest accessible watchtower, my legs had turned to jelly and my breathing had become ragged and uncontrollable. Then I turned around, and was greeted with one of the most arresting scenes I have ever seen in my life: an endless panorama of mountains rising from a sea of mist, fine tendrils of fog curling through distant, faded peaks, and the wall itself winding and folding over the ridgelines until it vanished from sight entirely. The view was so poetic and dreamlike that it felt like stepping into a Chinese ink painting, and it really warrants every superlative people have lavished upon it, to the point I'd say that the wall alone is worth the trip to China. There's absolutely nothing else in the world like this.

After soaking in the view for a long while, I turned around and made my way back to the chairlift, this time hiking down a path that adjoined the wall. From this angle, I caught sight of a vendor on the wall from a completely different perspective; he was standing on a plank precariously buried in the side of the wall and suspended far above the surrounding mountains, just so he could take advantage of the crenellations to sell food and drink to tourists. He reached for a plastic bag of goods that sat just beyond his grasp, then calmly balanced on one leg and stretched out his arm to retrieve it, as if the dizzying drop below barely registered to him. I gaped at him for a moment, then continued down the trail and down the mountain.

Once back down at the tourist centre, I had more time to spare, so I transferred onto a chairlift that took me to the more commercialised eastern portion of the wall. My photo was taken while I was on it so they could sell a printed version of the image to me back down at the base of the mountain; tourism with Chinese characteristics is very extra. This part of the wall was more crowded and less spectacular than the western end, but was still incredibly interesting with the largest and most complex watchtower I'd seen yet. This one featured a main masonry structure flanked by two corner towers which is probably the most iconic structure on the Mutianyu Great Wall, featuring quite prominently in photographs of the area. There was also a toboggan leading down from this section of the wall which I lined up for, and I'm well aware this is clear tourist bait, but I will defend it wholeheartedly because it was extremely fun to slide down to the bottom of the mountain. I haven't tobogganed before, but the fact that the first time I've ever done so was from the fucking Great Wall is going to mean that any subsequent adventures in tobogganing are gonna struggle to top it.

By the time I returned to the urban sprawl, the thick fog had parted and the once-grey city was bathed in deep sunset hues. I passed by the Yonghe Temple again, watching its yellow rooflines glow in the warm light as I made my way to Fangzhuanchang No.69, a popular zhajiangmian restaurant just across the street from it. I seated myself at one of the tables, and ordered a bowl of their signature black bean noodles alongside a Chinese yoghurt known by the name of nai pi zi. The noodles came with massive sides of toppings ranging from edamame to bean sprouts, all of which I scraped into my bowl and ate together. It was good but I would've enjoyed a stronger flavour, for some reason a huge amount of Beijing's savoury dishes don't tickle my fancy. But the nai pi zi, on the other hand, was delicious and beats Western yoghurts any day. The texture was so creamy and far less curdy than your bog-standard yoghurt, and had a milder, sweeter flavour that I really jived with.

On my final day in Beijing, the skies at last cleared to a deep, cloudless blue. This was my last chance to visit a site I had been anticipating since arriving in China: the Yiheyuan, or Garden of Nurturing Harmony, better known in English as the Summer Palace. Much of what stands today is a late-Qing reconstruction commissioned by Empress Dowager Cixi after both it and the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) were destroyed during the Opium War. The complex unfolds across a vast landscape of some 3,000 structures, organised around a monumental lake that dominates most of the grounds. To its north, the principal sequence of palatial buildings cascades over the slopes of Longevity Hill, supported by a series of expansive artificial terraces.

While China thinks of the original destruction of the Summer Palace as a ghastly and undue act by European colonial powers (being extremely sore about that is somewhat warranted, to be fair, and the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend), the history of how that happened is a lot more nuanced and a lot more interesting than simply "Britain bad". The inciting incident that led to the destruction was an act of aggression conducted during peace talks between an Anglo-French delegation and the Qing Dynasty. The Allied powers detained the Qing prefect of Tianjin claiming they were regrouping and staging an ambush; whether this is true or not has likely been lost to history. In retaliation, the Qing detained the delegation and its envoys, and this escalated into further conflict as forces advanced on the delegation's last location in an attempt to free them. The Qing managed to procure thirty-eight captives in total, and due to execution or torture during imprisonment twenty-one died. As news of this treatment spread throughout the British forces, there was strong support for some kind of punitive action to be taken, and Lord Elgin and Baron Gros (respectively spearheading the British and French military action) were tasked with deciding what this retaliation should be. Neither party was particularly interested in causing further harm to Chinese civilians during the war, and there wasn't much support among the European populace for that either.

Something that occasionally gets overlooked in highly nationalist tellings of the event is that the primarily ethnically-Manchu ruling elite and the ethnically-Han majority did not necessarily see themselves as the same peoples with the same interests. The Qing was a colonial power itself that practiced a form of imperial and ethnic segregation; Beijing's inner city was designated as a place for Manchu bannermen, and across the empire similar segregated cities such as this existed - in fact the entire region of Manchuria was largely off-limits to most Han (this relaxed later in the Qing though). They imposed the queue hairstyle upon Han Chinese men specifically as a sign of submission to the Manchu-led state, with sizeable executions of men following upon disobedience in the early stages of Qing conquest. Burning and sacking the Summer Palace, which only the Manchu ruling elite would have had access to, was seen as less destructive than a wholesale sack of Beijing, and so this was the course of action Elgin and Gros settled on. It was both an act of retaliation and a signal to the public that their war was not with the Chinese people, but the Qing state. Keep in mind, there were certain contemporary segments of the Han populace who may not have thought of the destruction of the Summer Palace as a bad thing.

Despite all this turbulent history, the current late-Qing iteration of the Summer Palace is ridiculously lovely and ethereal. As I entered through the back gate, I was met with a stunning Tibetan-inspired palace named Sidabuzhou (Four Great Regions) that dominated the north end of Longevity Hill, yet another example of the Qing's support for Tibetan Buddhism. It was painted in a deep red and adorned with a litany of finely glazed tiles and bricks, with chimes hanging from every eave; they shimmered and tinkled quietly as the winter wind blew. Climbing the palace steps led me into an intimate rock garden threaded with pavilions, shaded with still-green trees and punctuated by small viewing towers, which I found myself exploring in a tactile, almost playful way as I wove between stones from one structure to the next. As I continued my ascent, the view constantly changed and morphed and shifted, and it struck me just how different Chinese landscaping philosophy was from the Western tradition. While European palatial gardens are often formal, geometric and open, Chinese gardens are the very opposite, being based on the philosophy of bu yi jing yi. This roughly translates to "scenes change as steps move", with the goal here being to creatively conceal aspects of the garden to create a constant sense of progression and unveiling and make a small space feel much larger than it really is. You can never get a full view of a properly designed Chinese garden from any vantage point.

I finally reached the top of the hill, and found myself gazing upon a two-story beamless hall crafted entirely from yellow-and-green glazed bricks. Each brick housed a niche with a mediating Buddha inside; in total there must have been over a thousand of these niches all over the building. The hall was framed by beautiful lush vegetation that was honestly refreshing to see after spending time in the generally grey metropolis of Beijing, where most trees had already dropped their leaves. From here the path bifurcated into a deep forest covering the ridgeline of the hill, and I took the path that went around its eastern side, all the while catching glimpses of what lay on the other side of the ridge through the leaves and branches. At certain vantage points, I could get a good view of Kunming Lake, the vast body of water that occupied about three-quarters of the Summer Palace. It was a striking sight made even more impressive by its origins: the lake was manually excavated across some 2.2 square kilometres, with the displaced earth piled up over time until it swelled into what is now Longevity Hill.

As I made my way down to the other side of the hill, I came across a series of palace buildings that led into a grand covered wooden walkway called the Changlang, or Long Corridor. I strolled along it for what felt like forever; the winding corridor traced the edge of Kunming Lake for some 728 metres, with nearly every beam in the structure adorned with vivid caihua murals. My gaze stayed fixed on the ceilings and rafters as I walked, taking in a cascade of scenes - Sun Wukong battling Nezha, Zhang Fei’s exploits from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Zhuxian County between the Song and Jin dynasties, and countless others. The sheer number and density of murals here was staggering to witness; around 14,000 paintings, no two alike, every single one illustrating scenes from classical Chinese novels, myths, and landscapes. I loved this place, it's a seriously stunning piece of architecture and probably the finest collection of mural paintings I've seen anywhere.

The corridor opened up into a large palatial complex that spilled down the south-facing end of the hill. In its centre sat the Foxiang Ge (Tower of Buddhist Incense), a lovely 3-story, 41-metre tall pagoda jutting out from a 20-metre stone platform built straight into the slope of Longevity Hill, surrounded by a rambling complex of palace buildings, courtyards and steles. I laboriously ascended the over 400 steps leading to the tower, and was rewarded with increasingly gorgeous views over the palatial complex and Kunming Lake as I went. The top of the stone platform was occupied by a small courtyard overwhelmingly dominated by the bulk of the pagoda; through some opened windows I could see into the interior of the structure, where a finely-wrought bronze sculpture of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva stood surrounded by religious polychrome paintings. This would have been Empress Dowager Cixi's private place of worship back in the days of the Qing Dynasty, but considering how many steps there are and how crotchety that woman looks I can only assume she could only access the pagoda by being carried.

There's a lot more I could discuss about the Summer Palace since the grounds are huge, but I assume you're tired of my superlatives by now so I'll just say that I really liked this palace, far more than I did the Forbidden City. Personally I think Asian palaces are at their most beautiful when they look naturalistic and follow the contours of the landscape on which they're built (another good example is Changdeokgung in downtown Seoul). The Forbidden City, with all its strict symmetry and rigid layout, felt a bit regular and repetitive after a while. The Summer Palace, though, is the complete opposite; more relaxed, more varied, and just a lot nicer to wander through. It blends imperial architecture with Tibetan influences and takes a lot of cues from classical Chinese gardens south of the Yangtze, and the whole place ends up feeling surprisingly natural and intimate. It's an amazing place.

At the end of the day, as I got onto the high-speed train leading out of the old imperial capital (that's a really good word to describe the city in general: "imperial"), I left feeling like I had only seen a small portion of what there was to see; the city in many places is practically overrun with interesting old buildings and monuments from the Ming and Qing dynasty. But that's all juxtaposed against a backdrop of increasing modernity - throughout my visit I couldn't help but notice that the contrast between the old and the new was extremely stark, with towering skyscrapers and ten-lane thoroughfares giving way to authentic lived-in temples from the Qing dynasty and backstreets of old hutongs that barely even seemed modernised, where an increasingly elderly demographic still lived like they would have in an earlier era even as the city mutated around them. You can be delivered lunch by an automated system one second and be surrounded by deteriorating communist-era infrastructure the next. It's a really strange mix. As cliche as it is, the Anthony Bourdain quote about China is true: "The one thing I know for sure about China is I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time."

The suburbs of Beijing gradually faded away, and before long the train slipped into the night.

Obligatory Flickr album

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Tinker Tuesday for March 24, 2026

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