zushi's place

I remember that when I was house-hunting a few years ago, there were two particular houses that I really liked. For one reason or another, I didn't end up purchasing those houses, but over just a few visits, I got to know those houses surprisingly well.

I think one reason for this unexpected familiarity is that those were houses that grew as the families living in them grew. Each picture was carefully chosen and placed to preserve some specific memory, each piece of furniture had an air of belonging that could only come with time. The extensions in these houses were quirky, but lovingly so. As if the houses saw that the people inside outgrew it, and tried it's hardest to expand itself, however awkwardly, so that it could still shelter the people inside. There was a sense when you step inside that unmistakably felt like “home”.

By coincidence, both of these houses were sold to flippers and was completely revamped to a modern look. The replacement constructions were amazing in their sterility. It was as if someone replaced organic soil with concrete, disinfected the whole house, and hired a few exorcists to expel the place of any spirits, just in case.

Where's interesting is that instead of fading from my memory, the knowledge that these places are no longer there has made them ever the more vivid for me. I felt like I was the passive witness of some sort of memorial that no one else had attended, and had an obligation to at least keep a bit of space in my memory for them. Memory is weird like that – you can conceptualize the presence of something so strongly that even when they were irrevocably lost, the idea of the place can still exist, sometimes stronger than ever, and almost always at least a bit adorned.

What causes these places to feel special? I had certainly grew up in places that felt like “home” that I have since moved from, and don't feel a sense of melancholy about these places. It might be because these places were never demolished – so that I have the feeling that I would be able to revisit them if I really wanted to. Or it might be that I've seen those houses so few times that my subconscious is continually pulling them back from the brink of being forgotten, and so in the repetitive motion it had assigned the memories some importance?

It occurs to me that at some point that these places had become like ghosts – imaginary traces of vivid things that no longer exist. In our imagination, we assign personality to places just as we do for people; so that when vivid places disappear, it's natural that they would appear to us like ghosts of places. And so that nowadays, when I notice something vivid that has been lost, I'm again reminded of those empty, peaceful, ghostly homes floating in my memory, those places that are no longer there.

Last year, I watched a little-known anime released in 2016 called Flip Flappers. The show is obscure for good reasons. There's an unusual amount of fanservice, the plot falls apart near the end, and most of the side characters come across as being very two-dimensional.

However, there was one aspect of the show that made a deep impression on me when I first saw it, and over the past few months, I have only come to appreciate that aspect of the show more and more. In this post, I want to capture this particular part of Flip Flappers that made it a special show for me.

(This post will by necessity include some mild spoilers, but I will keep it as light as possible.)
Flip Flappers centers around the story of Cocona, a middle school student who is unable to decide the high school that she wants to attend. To her, this decision seem to have the potential to decide the rest of her life. However, all around her, other students seem unconcerned about their decisions – they seem to have decided quickly play and chat during as usual, and appear not to have given much thought to the issue.

Among these students, the upperclassman Iroha Irodori is an exception. She spends her lunch break on painting, and after class can be found in the art prep room (of which she is the sole maintainer of) drinking tea and working on more art pieces. Unlike the rest of the students at the school, Iroha is thoughtful, calm, and caring. Moreover, she possesses a distinct individuality that few in the school seems to have, and Cocona finds herself drawn to her in order understand where that individuality come from.

Over the course of the show, Cocona eventually comes to understand Iroha deeply, but it is not through the way that the she would have initially envisioned.

In Flip Flappers, Cocona has the ability to travel into fantasy worlds called Pure Illusions. These fantasy worlds are whimsical and abstract, much like the world of Alice in Wonderland. And unbeknownst to Cocona initially, these worlds are deeply connected to the people around her.

In the world where she eventually realizes this connection, Cocona comes to experience the life of a child named Iro through Iro's eyes. In that world, she discovers a gaping wound forming in the child's unhappy life. Unable to bear seeing that scar, Cocona works up the courage to exert her will on that world, and in doing so resolves the trauma that opened up. Though Iro still has a relatively sad childhood, at least Cocona made sure that it wouldn't be a scarring one.

Of course, the child that Cocona helped turned out to be the past Iroha, and Cocona's excitement of helping the child became a rude awakening later on. When Cocona goes back to the art room after school, Iroha is no longer there. Looking around the school, Cocona finds the artist tossing out the old canvases that seem no longer need now. In their interactions, Iroha [no longer ]seem as thoughtful and reflective, but tends to projects her emotions spontaneously instead. Furthermore, she no longer spends her breaks painting, and has instead joined friends' conversations in the courtyard instead.

After Iroha's childhood trauma has been resolved, she has become a part of school's usual scenery of carefree students. It's scenery decidedly absent of that directedness and individuality that had once defined her and drawn Cocona to her.

And in what is unusual for a story like this, Iroha's character arc ends here. Flip Flappers does not comment on her character before or after the change, it does not attempt to have Cocona find and reclaim the old senpai. The Pure Illusion world is closed and gone, and there's no going back to the old Iroha. Cocona is left to consider the impact of her decisions on the world.

I feel that in this handling of Iroha's arc, the show demonstrates an understanding of art, trauma, and people that I have seldom seen in other media. It understands that art is sometimes born from a desire to cope with a traumatic past, rather than from the strokes of brilliance that media usually portrays it as.

It also understands that trauma can be solely responsible for a person's positive identity, yet the person could still develop other positive identities otherwise.

It understands that sometimes, as a consequence of personal growth, valuable personality traits could be lost.

It understands that the dichotomy of individuality and conformity is much, much more nuanced than most popular media would give it credit for.

Lastly, it understands that the value judgement between an artist and a student is outside the scope of the show itself to comment on, and that the audience must reach their own conclusions on this one.

Despite being written and directed by artists in various mediums, Iroha's arc understands and portrays so many bitter truths about artists that I can't help but admire the grace and conviction with which it does so. It is a rare example of a show being incredibly honest and incredibly insightful, complimented by a combination of elegant and beautifully-illustrated storytelling. Flip Flappers is a diamond in the rough, but what diamond is there shines truly brightly.

Looking back, although I have mixed feelings about Flip Flappers, the recentness and the depth of the show gives me a lot of hope that the show will be surpassed on day. Both the screenwriter Yuniko Ayana and the director Kiyotaka Oshiyama are still in some ways up-and-coming names in animation, and I look forward to what valuable things they will say about art, trauma, and life in the future.

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Categorized under: #animations, #psychology, #art, #essay

Tragedies are really interesting to me in how their effects are extremely surprising. Why would anyone enjoy feeling sad? Why would anyone enjoy hearing about others becoming powerless victims of their circumstances? Why do tragedies evoke some significant feeling, rather than just fear and negativity?

Given that some of my favorite stories tend to be tragedies, I find myself thinking about these questions a lot.

There hasn't been a nice common-sense explanation to this that I could find [1]. So I'm going to take a shot in the dark to come up with an approximated working theory on it. My confidence in it is not strong at all, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'm ok with it as a working theory.

I think most people have had some meaningful experiences that made them feel completely tranquil. This might from appreciation of nature, encounter with beauty, deep connection with others, dance, religious ceremonies, or many other sources. One common feature of these experiences is that they make you temporarily forget yourself and your concerns, and focus either beauty or connection to others. My hypothesis is that the complete forgetting of concern is one of the reasons that these experiences feel so pleasurable.

One nearly-universal feature of good tragedy is that tragic heroes gets harshly punished through little or no fault of their own. If I have to take a guess on it, tragedy is appealing precisely because the outsized nature of the punishment tells us that it is futile to worry. At the conclusion of a tragedy there's a message conveyed that “no matter how hard you try or how much you worry, you could still be brought to ruin”, and the dramatic presentation convinces us for a moment that “there's no point of being worried about anything, whatever is bound to happen will just happen”.

Usually, near the end of a tragedy, we also feel empathy for the tragic hero, and feel that we share a moment of meaningful reflection with the author of the tragedy [2]. These serve as further ways to for us to forget about ourselves for a time.

And so for a moment we simultaneously let go of all of our concerns and establish meaningful connections with others, creating a pleasurable experience that's often associated with tragedies.

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[1] Nietzsche and Hegel's explanation on Tragedy doesn't really feel common sense to me, mainly in that I think the topic can be approached in a much more layman way.

[2] In antiquity there may have also been group songs and dance. And in stage productions, there are also fellow audiences to share a moment of connection with.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation

One thing that consistently surprised me in America is how much negativity Americans associate with “normies” – people who are perceived to lack distinct individual traits. This is something that didn't really exist where I grew up. Certainly, I was surprised when at one point I described someone as normal, and that person reacted as if it was a slight.

America exports so much cultural values to the rest of the world that it can be kind of easy to forget that American values are a bit of an extreme case. In Hoftsteader's Cultural Framework, America ranks the highest in terms of individualism. This means that being different is likely considered more of a value in America than any other country in the world, and popular American media pretty often reflect this – Queen's Gambit, Spiderman – Into the Spiderverse, and Ready Player One being quick examples that come to mind.

It's hard to say whether things like this are good or bad – after all, America does do well in the world. It is also true that to a certain extent, I feel like I'm starting to internalize the vague notion that “normies” are “bad” as well. But still, whenever I hear or say the word normie, a sort of cognitive dissonance flashes through my mind, and I'm reminded of how much culture really shapes how people see themselves and others.

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Categorized under: #psychology #sociology

For different cravings, biology seem to operate on different models.

In the replenishment model, a craving that's satisfied won't come up again unless it's been a while since it's last fulfilled. An example here would be drinking water.

In the dependence model, a craving that's satisfied will cause the next craving to come up sooner or stronger. Addictive illicit drugs are the most obvious example here.

What mechanisms determine whether a craving fall into one or the other? This is something I'm kind of curious about. When mistaking these models, it's easy to think video game causes addiction to violence, or that social media doesn't cause dependence.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation

A friend reminded me of Overjustification Effect (Wiki Article) recently. Despite having heard of this effect a long time ago, I'm only recently realizing that Overjustification is an elegant solution to why creatives often burn out and find it hard to find inspiration.

Namely, when the external motivation of money/fame/recognition starts playing a role in creative projects, the Overjustification Effect states that intrinsic motivation will decrease over time. If the positive feedback of money/fame/recognition is not manifested for a while, then the creative endeavor will lose both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation altogether, and the creator will find themselves running on fumes (or face the common “I've lost my passion” phenomenon).

If a creator wants to avoid this, is seems that by necessity they will need to have a sense for their currently ratio of intrinsic-to extrinsic motivation, and intentionally try to sustain the intrinsic part. Maybe some people can do it naturally, but to be host this sounds challenging, unless one has an overwhelming amount of intrinsic motivation, and that seems a bit rare in adults.

In children, however, intrinsic motivation doesn't seem like a scarce resource. I recall having almost effortless concentration, curiosity, and motivation to play with things when I was little – legos, board games, mazes, brain teasers. Those motivations had no connection to external rewards.

So even though extrinsic motivation is effective on kids, it seems that there are less sources or concerns for extrinsic motivation when one is young, so it's pretty easy to sustain a passion for something.

At some point around adolescence, extrinsic motivation seems to take over. Hobbies not only need to be interesting, but also have a “point”, and so toys and games, among with other unique hobbies, lose their luster.

This got me thinking. Perhaps our intrinsic tendency to play with things still exist as adults, but are just suppressed by an overwhelming amount of extrinsic motivation that inevitably need to come out of our hobbies. So we gradually lose the ability to indulge in things that have no “point” – unless like the artist, we also find some way to cultivate intrinsic motivation against the usual social pressures.

The challenges that the learning adult faces is not so different than that of the burned-out creative. When extrinsic motivation takes over, it becomes pretty much impossible to sustain something unless one is frequently very successful.

What causes the overjustifaction effect? I'm a bit surprised that there doesn't seem to be a good evolutionary explanation for it yet. It would be cool to hear what science has to say on the cause one day, since I think the influence of this effect on how we behave is really underrated.

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Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity

My roommate recently got a kitten called Kiko, and I've been playing with him a lot recently.

When talking about Kiko with a friend over chat recently, I kind of realized something that playing with the cat made obvious.

Play and learning are really extremely similar, with the only difference being play benefits survival (historically speaking) while learning (in most cases) benefits community or social standing.

How to apply this to life? I'm actually not sure yet. But it's fun to realize that two distinct – even often-considered-opposite things, are really in fact really similar.

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Categorized under: #psychology #speculation

For my Twitter account, I follow a decent amount of economists. I remember that in January 2020 (before most Americans knew what Covid is), one economist was predicting that as many as 450,000 Americans might die from Covid.

I didn't really form an opinion on this when I read it, but I remember talking to a roommate about this later on. He mentioned “that seems high” and I was like “yeah, maybe it was”.

Anyways, there's a pretty strong voice out there that says that macro-economics are too complex for anyone to understand, and that all macro-economists are BS-ters. I guess there is a small N=1 sample of an economist being really, unfortunately, right.

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Categorized under: #irl

This is the perennial question.

Although I never grew up with cats, I always kind of liked how quiet and graceful cats are, and figured that this means that I really preferred cats.

This is why I was surprised to learn yesterday that my grandparents (where I grew up) actually had both cats and dogs when I was little! And what's more, that I actually preferred hanging out with the dogs back then (which might be why I didn't remember the cats!).

I've gotten a few remarks that my personality changed a lot ~10-12, and that I was actually much more extroverted before then. Here's another weird data point of how different I was when I was little.

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Categorized under: #irl

Given the conditions, 2020 didn't feel like the worst year. I'm really thankful to work a job that felt safe and buffered from the impact of covid, and nobody I knew really got threated by Covid.

Switching to fully remote work meant that my lifestyle got a revamp in terms of useful habits, and it feels like I will be bringing most of it into the new year, and perhaps to the post-covid world.

Here's hoping that 2021 will be a good year, for as many people as possible.

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Categorized under: #irl