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Collected quotes, 6 of n: Language, translation, identity, empire (1)
This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Quotes and Excerpts
A confluence of things, lately:

A refreshingly candid and clear-eyed talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a screening of the documentary 5 Broken Cameras, and finishing the book (Why Palestine? Reflections from Singapore) around which that talk revolved. Quite a lot of it was dedicated to questions like the utility (if any, now) of international institutions like the ICJ in stopping, ultimately, the ongoing genocide; and to stressing that part of the reason the conflict continues is because people keep being told that the only way to end it is to keep trying to find recourse in precisely the institutions and supposedly “proper” channels for protest and resistance that have already failed or proven themselves inadequate and/or too easily dismissible.

Sinners and its deft use of horror genre storytelling tools to delve into racial politics and art (music) as conduit for both resistance and domination.

This excerpt from a Viola Davis interview that led me to seek out the full thing, which turned out to be a thoughtful meditation on her career thus far.

Getting around to re-reading Babel — which is not the most subtle book about language, colonialism, and imperialism — now that I can read it alongside Vicente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues. I tend to forget that the book’s full title is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence; and now that I remember, it reminds me of a simple discussion question from that book talk that hit harder after having watched a civilian go through five different cameras that were shot out of his hands, damaged by shrapnel, etc.: “What would you have Palestinians do now?”
And as a result, then, a lot of simmering thoughts these days on the many ways to set the protocols and criteria and languages (in the broadest sense of the word) for sustaining or challenging various systems.
Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging—in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily—to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence.
From Orientalism by Edward Said

Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.
from Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio de nebrija, as quoted in babel by r.f. kuang

“[T]he power of the [silver] bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing — the stuff that gets lots when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.
[…]
You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.”
– Professor jerome Playfair, introducing the concept of silver-working and the british empire’s royal institute of translation, from babel by R.F. Kuang

[T]ranslation turns not just on the transfer of meaning but also on the struggle to control the processes of transferring meaning. It relates to all sorts of tensions around procedures, around the limits of what can be translated, as well as prescriptions for what must remain untranslated.
[…]
It is not so much really to avoid difference or to avoid plurality. It is to be able to exercise total control over linguistic pluralism and to make this control as automatic as possible.
vicente rafael, in conversation with siri nergaard for translation: a transdisciplinary journal, as reproduced in motherless tongues

“It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics. […] But what it denies is the human being behind all of that.

I feel that, as a Black actress, I’m always being tasked to show that I have range by doing white work. […] But we don’t put those same parameters on white actors. You know, you can have a white actress who’s fifty-four, fifty-five years old, which is a great age to play Mama in Raisin in the Sun. Is she gonna be able to pull off Mama in Raisin in the Sun? […] They don’t have to do that. So for those four years at Juilliard, all the white actor has to do is play all white characters.
[…] Juilliard was an out-of-body experience because, once again, I did not think that I could use me. Me needed to be left at the front door, even though me was what got me in there.
Viola Davis on her Juilliard education and its focus on shaping her into “a perfect white actress.”

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.
from Orientalism by edward said

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.

And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.”
– Karis Nemik, from the Star Wars series Andor
2025-05-18
This space should be a notebook // Cats

I think, having made certain declarations about what this blog should be or should try to be, I’ve gotten too weighed down by the thought of living up to those aspirations, haha. But this space is, first of all, meant to be a digital notebook for me, so I’ve decided to throw out the kid gloves and just post what and when I can.

Today: a collection of cat posts / photos that felt like they deserve a permanent place in my pocket, batch 1 of n

nap-hime:
toodotnil:
please enjoy Poki as he found the meat I’m defrosting
Oh defrosting meat, we’re really in it now

https://www.tumblr.com/nap-hime/715114760961703936/oh-defrosting-meat-were-really-in-it-now

There’s something about the expressiveness of cats.

everythingfox:
“Oliver is unsure of what to do with his first time under the tree”
(via)

tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/everythingfox/671043538291736576/oliver-is-unsure-of-what-to-do-with-his-first

Case in point. Add to that any reminder of how small they are, and how big, strange, and bewildering all the constructs of human life are to them, and my heart just twists every time.

miiilowo:
miiilowo:
where is my favorite painting i need to find my favorite painting
a break in their day by david hettinger. i loveyou

https://www.tumblr.com/miiilowo/774681590336012288/a-break-in-their-day-by-david-hettinger-i-loveyou

Another precious intersection of interests: cats and art. This is one of my favourite paintings now, too.

As an aside, I’ve started using Quotebacks code here. Yes, after years of deliberately trying to avoid anything that would make this space feel “too much like Tumblr.”

Why?

One, because it looks cool.

Two, because I wholeheartedly believe in what they’re trying to achieve here, which is to build an easy, universally applicable standard for engaging with other content on the web without losing context or attribution.

Link rot / information decay has always been one of the main weaknesses of tech, or at least, the internet. It’s a big factor in making so much of tech feel ahistorical, I think. In a way, the movement of information on the web is a massive game of telephone. It’s so easy for pieces of information to get chopped off and framed or understood differently, or even for something to just get passed around so much that someone further down the chain inevitably loses sight of the source. ¹
So: attribution, and referencing, as Quoteblocks is trying to do. Bonus points for doing it elegantly, and for being able to handle the myriad forms that information on the web tends to take.

2025-02-13
Modular living

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Annual Soundtracks

While packing for my trip back home for the holidays, I caught myself doing something curious: I was sorting my things into packing cubes corresponding to certain days, certain legs of my trip as they’d been sketched out roughly in my head.

Over the next few days, the same thing would happen: This cube with that bag of knickknacks, both stuffed into this duffel bag, specifically for this couple of days with this group of people. That bag for this trip, somewhere colder. And again, and again — a different set for a different stop, prepped and swapped in, quick as nothing.

It used to bother me when life didn’t feel cohesive. Everything was supposed to have its place; all those spaces were supposed to fit together; all of it was supposed to be essential, interwoven and inextricable, moving along as a predictable, if not harmonious, whole.

But I’m coming to learn that there’s a difference between what is absolutely essential and what is nice, or even necessary, to have in a given moment — and that the former can be a very small category indeed. Does the world end if I forget to pack my laptop charger and only realise once I’m already on the plane? No. Does time stop if everybody’s calendars are full and we can’t find shared dates for a trip? No. Life keeps going, and I’ve realised that it can move along at quite a clip even when so much has been — temporarily or not, for better or worse — shucked away.

There’s a concept from my management strategy classes that has somehow stayed with me: modularization, or the disaggregation of systems into more self-contained units. One of the main benefits is to reduce complex dependencies and their attendant risks, i.e., chaos in one unit is less likely to set fire to the whole. (Modules can still slot together to form a greater, functional unit, if necessary or expedient. But not doing so doesn’t render each unit useless.)

I suppose this tendency to map organizational theory onto the workings of my life is something I should probably sit down and reflect upon someday. But for now, it’s been a useful mental model for helping me expand my window of tolerance, as it were, and roll with whatever punches the world throws my way. A modular framework allows me to stay whole, funnily enough, by reminding me of the many different units that comprise life as I know it. Yes, setbacks and disappointments do happen; expectations can and will be recalibrated; and none of that has to shut the whole operation down each time.

Where does this sit, in the grander scheme of things? This useful little framework helps me ask. Do you see, then, how much exists beyond and outside of this, and how it can’t possibly colour everything else?

Or, phrased differently on more melodramatic days: Why put all the pieces of your heart in one basket?

2025-01-26
Today in science, 12.02.24

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Today in Science

1.

Researchers built a smartwatch heartbeat monitor that relied on slime mold to operate, and over the course of caring for their living devices, the participants developed an emotional attachment to these.

This study’s main hypothesis was that requiring some degree of physical care in an interactive device would lead to users being more invested in its use. And would you look at that — the study found that, after having to take care of the slime mold to keep their heartbeat monitors ticking, users felt a sense of responsibility over the device, saw its use as a reciprocal relationship, and found the slime mold’s growth as a source of positive feelings. I love how humans care so easily.

Here’s an excerpt from the Twitter thread where I got the article link from, and the quotes from the participants are adorable:

Their little pet mold friends! “You’re my little slime” because look, they’re just both soft little entities who were being fed and watered! They felt happy enough about the slime’s growth to mention them in their diary entries several times!

This reminds me of that anecdote that’s made the rounds of the internet a few times, about how a broken bone was a sign of humanity — because our ability to care for others is essential to building the communities that have helped humanity thrive.

(Of course, there’s a lot that’s iffy about that anecdote, which this fact-checking article delves into. A post for another day, though I do appreciate that some of the points made there highlight (1) the insidious anthropocentrism of the anecdote; and (2) how it frames the concept of civilisation as inherently altruistic, when (cough) colonies the world over, for one thing, would say that hasn’t always been what the concept has been wielded as.)

But anyway. People have such a remarkable capacity to care; I wish the worlds we build for ourselves day to day reflected that better.

2.

Researchers examined the phenomenon of “friends to partners” to see how common it actually is as a starting point for relationships, versus the literature’s apparently skewed focus on dating as the main way such relationships start.

I didn’t know there was such an overriding lens in social science research, though it certainly feels like the case for pop culture and day-to-day conversations, so — not all that surprising. Dating culture (and, by extension, hookup culture) is a thing now, especially with dating apps popping up everywhere.

But, as the researchers and the Tumblr user they quoted in their paper¹ point out, dating — i.e., “strangers striking up a conversation at a social function and then falling in love during a series of romantic excursions”, as the paper puts it — is not the only pathway for initiating relationships:

In fact, the paper argues that dating might not even be the most prevalent nor preferred way to start a relationship. Their analyses showed a startling disparity: despite only 18% of studies looking at friend-first initiation, two-thirds of participants in the studies they meta-analysed reported that this was how their relationships started, and 47% of respondents in another survey they conducted said that they saw friend-first initiation as the best way to start a relationship.

As someone who’s most likely somewhere on the aroace spectrum,² I appreciate how this study tries to decouple (heh) the concepts of dating and relationships, when so much of the world seems to insist that one is an essential prerequisite to the other. I’ve gone on my fair share of dates³ and relationships⁴ (lol) and what I’m realising in retrospect is that I cannot stand casual dating. Being attracted to a total stranger is unfathomable to me, and the concept of going on — again, as the paper puts it — “romantic excursions” that are, on some level, explicitly constructed as such, with somebody whom I don’t know enough to even definitively have an opinion about, is often tedious at best.

Or, as one friend put it about another friend of ours, “They need to be friends with somebody first before the thought of even considering them as a romantic prospect occurs to them.” The literature says this is something like being demiromantic. I’ve not delved into the topic enough to have come to any sort of conclusion, personally, but the general sentiment feels deeply relatable to me, haha.

So, all this to say: it’s nice to know that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that there’s nothing clinically abnormal (heh) about my inability to put myself through the whole rigmarole of talking up strangers to find someone I’d like to jump into a long-term relationship with.

3.

I thought I would just be linking to these papers and this would be a short post.

We are all still learning about ourselves every day, I guess. Haha.

2024-02-12
Netrunner Never Died
Netrunner is one of the best games of all time.

It has also been — at least, by official tally — “dead” for six years now.

What is Netrunner anyway?

Netrunner is an asymmetric card game for two players, with each playing vastly different games that somehow still mesh together beautifully. Since its inception, Netrunner has had a cyberpunk theme; true to form, this means players take on one of two roles:
- Corporation: As a megacorporation from one of four powerful factions, the player must defend and advance agendas to score enough points to win the game.
- Runner: As an intrepid hacker from one of three factions, the player must break through the Corporation’s defences and steal enough agendas to win the game.
What sets the game apart is the degree and elegance with which this theme gets baked into the actual mechanics. Corporations play their cards face-down, creating a board of imperfect information to reflect the difference between what the Corp and the Runner knows. Runners can try breaking into everything — not just what the Corp might place on the board, but the Corp’s hand of cards, their deck, and their discard pile too.

The objectives and tools available to each side are vastly different — and yet, the nature of the game forces these into a constant give-and-take (tempo, in the game parlance) as each side tries to force the other into tough choices and eke out a window to win.

The life and death of Netrunner

The game was designed by Richard Garfield, the same guy who created that card-game juggernaut, Magic: The Gathering. Originally conceived in the 80s, at the dawn of the collectible card game (CCGs) craze, Netrunner was one of those titles that catered to the stragglers outside of the fantasy-themed games that took most of the spotlight. In terms of game design, it was very much a product of its time — layered on top of its elegant core mechanics were the usual trappings of CCGs at the time, from randomised booster packs to draft formats and card speculation.

In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) licenced the game from Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and re-engineered it as a Living Card Game (LCG). This format ditched the “collectible” aspect of the original game in favour of a standardised starter (“core”) set that could be played on its own, as well as monthly expansion packs with fixed contents to build up the card pool. This meant that players all had access to essentially the same pool of cards for deckbuilding (especially for competitive play), shifting much of the emphasis away from players’ ability to buy up rare and powerful cards.

Fantasy Flight Games also wrapped the whole Netrunner game in its own Android setting, basically skinning it in its own IP.

This is important to note, because this split between who owns the setting IP (FFG) and the mechanics IP (WotC) is probably (1) a key aspect of the licencing troubles that resulted in the abrupt discontinuation of the game in 2018; and (2) a major roadblock to any games company officially reviving the game in its modern format following said discontinuation.

Enter the fan community

When FFG pulled the plug on Netrunner in 2018, I thought that was it for the game.

After some time, rumours started surfacing in the old forums — the game wasn’t completely buried. When I first heard about it, I thought it just meant a small corner of the old community was stubbornly holding on — organising a few tournaments online, checking in on each other occasionally, stuff like that. I was surprised and delighted to find that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It turns out, in the spirit of scrappy runners everywhere, a few passionate fans banded together to set up a whole registered nonprofit organisation and continue the game in an unofficial capacity.

Null Signal Games is a full-on game publishing company, operating as a nonprofit, that has produced new sets of Netrunner cards and hammered out an organised play system that encompasses everything from game night kits to World Championships. The new cards are published and distributed across North America and Europe; they are also fully interoperable with the old Android: Netrunner kits. More importantly, though, the Null Signal team has put in a lot of work to build a card pool that goes beyond supplementing the old game, working as a thoughtfully designed ecosystem all its own.

Beyond the game itself, there are whole departments covering all the roles necessary to sustain a vibrant, growing community: from game design to distribution to marketing to diversity and inclusion. This has been a revival not just of the product, but of the rich and rewarding community experience that had sprung up around it.

That shines through in what might be the most staggering fact about the whole endeavour, which is that it’s entirely volunteer-run. Every person involved is ostensibly an unpaid volunteer, putting in quite a lot of thought and effort out of sheer love for the game. Look, every single card that has been produced in the Null Signal era is available as a tournament-legal print-and-play, meaning people can get into the game without spending a single cent, and still have access to even the highest levels of tournament play.

The main goal here, clearly, is to keep a well-designed game alive in every sense of the word and bring it to as many people as possible.

Again: Netrunner is one of the best games of all time, and the brilliant mechanics aren’t even the biggest reason why. I feel compelled to talk about this here if only to have a record of what fan communities can create, even when “official” parties like established game publishers abandon a game.
2024-01-28
Grief (1)

1.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

I first started reading it after I’d transferred out of biology, funnily enough. It helped pass the time while I camped out with my parents or my uncle in my grandfather’s hospital room.

By then, we already possessed an unwilling familiarity with the basic vocabulary of cancer: the different stages and what it meant for my grandfather’s illness to be at Stage 3; the different grades and what it meant for my grandfather’s tumors to be classified “high-grade”; the different treatments available and what they meant for my grandfather’s chances and quality of life.

The book helped add context. I suspected, at the time, that reading was a desperate attempt to sustain an illusion of control: understanding more of the mechanisms and history of the disease would be my small part in helping my grandfather confront it.

In retrospect, it feels more like an oblique approach towards acceptance. None of us actually wanted to articulate the enormity of the disease, because that was tantamount to admitting how paltry our options were.

So, for the longest time, I let the book do that for me, under the guise of expanding my ability to navigate the situation. It was a clear, cogent map of cancer: the slow evolution of science’s understanding of it; the lulls and wrong turns and significant leaps forward in terms of treatment; and how, ultimately, all of this still fell short of any definitive cure.

There’s a quote that’s become attached to my memories of this book:

“The best thing for being sad … is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.”
T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”

2.

One of my aunts — my godmother — died last year.

She was my mother’s cousin, one of the daughters of my grandmother’s favourite sister. She was at my grandmother’s house at least once a week, sneaking us Maltesers and See’s Candies, spiriting us off to their house in Batangas to go swimming on the weekends. She had the same travel bug as the rest of that side of the family, jetting off to a new country every year and bringing back suitcases of pasalubong each time. Every Christmas, there would be a pile of gifts by the tree, all tagged with cards written in her firm script.

The week before my mom’s birthday, I got a message from her saying that my godmother had been hospitalised. Metastases in her intestines; none of us even knew she was sick. She was scheduled for surgery the next day.

After the surgery, her doctors said, once she had recovered her strength, she would need to undergo chemotherapy.

After the surgery, she had a stroke. After the stroke, she caught pneumonia. After that, the week of my mom’s birthday, the family gathered for her funeral. They sent me updates on WhatsApp.

This Christmas, there was more space around the tree because we no longer had half of the gifts that would usually be there. Everyone still tiptoed around it anyway.

What did I learn between one loss to cancer and the next? Nothing that helps make anything easier, to be honest.

There have been more in the years between, of course. Different diagnoses, different stages and grades. I can’t recount them all.

I started re-reading the book again last year, and finished it again just last week, during the first weekend of the new year.

In the book’s last chapter, when Mukherjee charts the latest efforts to advance targeted cancer therapies by sequencing the disease’s genome, he emphasises the gulf between understanding and treatment: Identifying particular biological mechanisms and pathways that drive the disease is one thing, but translating that knowledge into therapeutic strategies is another challenge altogether.

More so because each cancer genome, as genetic research has now validated, is unique. Or, as Mukherjee put it, in what probably wasn’t a jab for me in particular but felt like one anyway, “Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.”

This heterogeneity is part of what makes the disease so intractable. Funny how, emotionally speaking, it’s the apparent homogeneity of outcomes that makes cancer so daunting.

3.

One of our friends had been uncharacteristically silent online for weeks. We were all in different countries. The fastest way anyone had to physically check up on him was to book a 1.5 hour flight and cab over to his apartment.

We had, instead, tried various messaging and social media platforms, but received no response. For a while we thought he was just on some kind of digital “detox,” as some people in our friend group have done from time to time.

When we eventually got hold of one of his friends who lived in the same country, we found out that he had been in the ICU, in a coma, for over a month. There had been some kind of issue with his brain; he was awake now, but had some speech and vision problems — the details remained hazy.

He is awake, but slow to recovery, came one of the first few updates. The family will move him to another hospital once he is doing better.

He’ll get discharged tomorrow, was the next update. He can see better now, but still has some speech delay.

Do they finally know what the diagnosis is? one of my friends, based in the Netherlands and evidently staying up for news, replied.

There’s inflammation on his brain, but his mother didn’t get what kind of virus. The doctor isn’t here so I can’t ask the details.

No problem, our friend replied. As long as it’s not tumour/terminal stuff, I’m a lot relieved. Guess we all are.

Then, towards the end of November:

He seems to be healthy enough to use social media again!

Yes, I can call and talk to him last Saturday.

Good!

He reacted to one of my IG stories earlier this week. A heart emoji on a story of me and another mutual friend having ice cream — his favourite food.

He always has a freezer full of ice cream at home. Famously exercise-averse, he will walk countless city blocks for a good ice cream shop recommendation. One of our mutual friends’ favourite stories is how they spent evenings eating ice cream at various convenience stores in Taipei, in the middle of winter, with him dressed only in shorts and one of his signature hoodies. They were together on a work trip then, visiting other colleagues who had also become friends. When this mutual friend and I visited other such colleagues-turned-friends during one cold spring, we sent him a postcard bought from the ice cream shop in Edinburgh, an Instax from the gelato shop in Amsterdam. We had gelato together when he visited Singapore, a few months before he went radio silent.

The last time he had reacted to one of my stories was a month before everyone stopped hearing from him, on a photo of me and our mutual friend going pottery painting.

A heart emoji and: That’s a cute cat!!!

Thank youuu, I’d replied. Come over again soon so we can make more cat plates together haha

And now, to his latest heart emoji: HOW ARE YOUUUUU

I hadn’t expected him to reply. Our mutual friend and I kept talking about our holidays, catching up on how our year had started. When I got the notification that he’d sent a message, we excitedly went to check.

I just got better, he’d typed back. Ever the optimist.

I had 5 tumors the past months

In the brain

Doctor said it’s Stage 4

To our question about whether it would be okay to visit, he answered, Maybe once I’m back in Jakarta. Ever the optimist.

Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a cliche question, but when you’re in shock, I suppose, nobody has the energy or inclination to be original.

Another one, this time from our friend in the Netherlands, on a call past midnight our time, as we figured out what to do: Why is growing up so hard?

I had turned off my Kindle that was still on the last page of the book I’d just finished, the tail end of the index:

X-rays, 23, 24

– as carcinogen, 77-78, 347, 349, 389

– as diagnostic tool, 291; see also mammography

We were trying to write an index of our own this time, halting, uncertain. What we could do; what we knew and didn’t know for sure about our friend’s condition; what we knew and didn’t know about what he would want, in a situation like this.

The key conclusion, of course, was that we couldn’t just try to take action for the sake of feeling better about doing something. We had to support in whatever ways (a) were feasible and (b) would actually be helpful and welcome, and wouldn’t stress him out further.

The reality, of course, was that this made for a dismal Venn diagram.

“There’s not much we can do right now,” our friend in the Netherlands summed up. “And we are running out of time.”

There’s a quote from the book itself that has stuck with me on every reading. It encapsulates that gulf between understanding and practice, at least for me:

“What is certain, however, is that even the knowledge of cancer’s biology is unlikely to eradicate cancer fully from our lives … [W]e might as well focus on prolonging life rather than eliminating death. This War on Cancer may best be “won” by redefining victory.”

I understand this. The past twelve years have been an education, protracted and difficult, on this.

But, in practice: How do you wait for the clock to run out on someone you love and call that victory?

2024-01-14