Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 16 Sep
Written Language

Recently, I’ve started learning Mandarin Chinese. Like most people, I came in thinking the complex writing system would be the hardest part, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn how intuitive it actually is. Unlike most writing systems, Chinese hanzi do not provide any direct information about how to pronounce them and only represent meaning. At first, this seems very difficult and unintuitive as you would have to either look up the character in a dictionary of some kind or ask a native speaker (or even use a TTS) to know how it sounds and even after that, you still need to remember how it’s pronounced and even how to say the tones (which is hard for people unfamiliar with tonal languages) to be able to read it aloud again. However, as I started to use the language more (which, as of me starting this article, has only been a week), I found a beauty in the separation of the written language from the spoken language.

See, one of the first things I learned about hanzi is that they can mostly be read in any language that uses them whether it be Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, etc. since they just contain meanings, not phonetic information (obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but I won’t get into that here). This means that the same characters can be pronounced differently by different languages or dialects but still have mostly the same meaning. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I started to actually use hanzi to text my Chinese friends (btw, typing in Chinese is wonderful and I’ll talk more about that later) and found that even if I had forgotten how to pronounce a character, I could still remember what it means and sometimes just read it in English in my head. Of course, I still look up the pinyin to remember how to pronounce it so I can actually speak it, but I really appreciated how I could just look at a character and know what it’s supposed to mean before knowing how to say it. With alphabet-based languages like English, reading works the same way as over time, you eventually become familiar with the shape of the word, not the individual letters and they have the advantage of still having phonetic information to pronounce them, but as I learned more about Chinese, I started to appreciate just how much meaning can be put into each character.

Now, I am going to butcher this explanation as I am not yet an expert on Chinese characters, but I hope I can still make you appreciate how it works. Basically, hanzi are typically made up of multiple smaller characters squished together into one character. For example, 好, meaning “good” is made up of 女(woman) and 子(child). 我(meaning I or me) is made up of 手(hand) and 戈(meaning spear, halberd, etc.). Even then, those simpler characters can sometimes be broken down further, or you can even go the other way around and form more complex characters with new meanings. Most of the time, there is no logical coherence to how these characters are formed, mainly due to the language itself evolving naturally over several thousands of years of people using it, but it does mean that new characters can be created. I think the best way to show this is with the Chinese periodic table of elements. The video I embedded below best explains it, but I will try my best to give a brief summary. Basically, each hanzi has a specific smaller character within in called its “radical” which helps to identify it (think of it like the first letter in a word so you can look it up in a dictionary). With the periodic table, each element’s hanzi is given a radical to represent its state of matter at room temperature, so gasses like oxygen (氧) would have the radical 气 to indicate that they are normally gasses, while Mercury (汞) has the radical 水(water) to indicate that it’s a liquid at room temperature. The video explains much better the brilliance of how the rest of the character is formed, but my point is that every single one of the elements in the periodic table gets its own unique character that tells you a basic property of that element and also makes it so that they can be pronounced with a single syllable!

Before I continue to my next point, I’d like to talk a bit about typing in Chinese because it is perhaps my favourite thing about the language. There are obviously many different ways to input Chinese characters into a computer due to the complexity of the writing system, but the way that I and many other people type is using the pinyin keyboard. For those unaware, pinyin is the official and most common system for romanizing Chinese characters (i.e. turning them into Latin alphabet letters). This means that you get to use the same keyboard you’d use for typing in English to type in the pinyin for the words you want and then you get a text prediction like on your phone keyboard that shows a list of hanzi that are pronounced that way. Now, at first it just seems like the same as typing any other language since you’re just typing in the letters as you’d pronounced them, but I found that the text prediction is smart enough that most of the time, you can type a whole sentence with a few key presses! For example, say I wanted to type 我是快乐 (I am happy). I could just type the pinyin “Wo shi kuaile” (idk how to type the tones); however, I could also hit the keys “W S 1 K L 1” and get the same result (btw, the “1” means that I chose the first prediction that showed up). That’s 6 total key presses compared to the 13 I would have done if I typed the whole pinyin. Unfortunately, I still have to use a handwriting input to type less common characters like some people’s names, but in every day use, the pinyin keyboard is extremely fast at inputting information. I’m normally not that fast at typing in English (even with text prediction) and I’m not fluent enough in Chinese yet to know how much faster I am typing in it, but I’ve found that when I switch back to texting in English, it feels so much more clunky than when I type in Chinese, and it made me really appreciate the language so much more.

I’ve been hyping up written Chinese for this whole article so far. Does that mean I think it’s the greatest system in the world and that everyone should switch to it so we can all experience its greatness and 中国永远? No, not all all. But learning all this about the language made me really appreciate the diversity of languages around the world and why we should make an effort to study and preserve languages as much as we can. It’s especially important to preserve both the written and spoken forms of languages because it’s the relationship between both parts that make up the whole language. With Chinese, there is a massively interdependent relationship between the spoken form and written form as there are some things that can be conveyed in the written language but not the spoken language and the same thing in the opposite direction. One cannot be fully understood without the other and if suddenly all Chinese speakers (and computer TTS programs) disappeared and we only had the written texts or conversely if we lost all records of written Chinese and all Chinese speakers had to only speak the language or write with a different system, then there would be so much of the language lost. It would basically be dead. And this interdependent relationship between the spoken and written language made me think about how other languages have a similar thing going on. Maybe not as much, but let me explain.

I think the first thing that made me think about all this is capital letters. Grammatically, capital letters signify the beginning of a sentence or a proper noun, and other languages that don’t have an uppercase set of letters usually have their own way of signifying these or don’t even need to at all. However, from a cultural perspective, capital letters provide some things that can’t be truly represented in other languages. For example, TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE THIS CAN SIGNIFY YELLING WHICH NORMALLY CAN ONLY BE CONVEYED THROUGH SPOKEN LANGUAGE BUT WITH ALPHABETS LIKE LATIN OR CYRILLIC WHICH HAVE UPPERCASE LETTERS, YOU CAN CONVEY YELLING THROUGH TEXT ALONE. Also, sarcasm and mockery often are difficult to convey outside of spoken language, but iF yOu aLtErNaTe BeTwEeN cApiTaL aNd LoWeRcAsE LeTtErS LiKe tHiS, yOu cAn MaKe iT oBviOuS tHaT yOu DoN’t iNtEnD tO bE tAkEn sEriOuSLy. Some people online have started to use what they call tone indicators to indicate things like sarcasm, mainly to help neurodivergent people who normally can’t pick up on that, but for the most part, I think my point still stands that capital letters are an example of a feature of written language that adds a whole new layer of self-expression to a language.

As I thought on this further, I started to see a lot more examples of things even in English that show the interdependence of written and spoken language. The most obvious thing I could think of are jokes and puns. Some puns and jokes only make sense when spoken aloud, some only when written down, and some require the cultural context of both the spoken and written language. I can’t name any specific ones in English off the top of my head, but there is a joke I will mention later that only makes sense spoken aloud, but that has more to do with my later point about interdependence between completely different languages. Anyway, I digress. With written English, you can also see examples of how the written form of a word doesn’t always represent the spoken form, almost like with what I mentioned earlier about written Chinese being separate from the spoken form. With English, it’s mainly due to the inconsistent spelling rules, but the concept is still there. For example, “there”, “their”, and “they’re” are pronounced exactly the same in spoken English and cannot be differentiated on their own without context, but their written forms can be instantly distinguished at a glance. On the other end, you have words like “live” which are always written the same way but have a different meaning or even pronunciation and are only differentiated by context or from spoken word. For the most part, there’s not as much of a disparity between the spoken and written language in English as with Chinese, but you can start to see my point that basically every language only really makes sense with both parts.

A lot of my points really just boil down to cultural context because every natural language arises from groups of people communicating each other. That’s why spoken Mandarin can still be understood even though almost all the words sound like another word. The words themselves don’t necessarily convey the meaning, it’s their interaction and placement with other words that do. And of course, no natural language exists within a vacuum as they are spoken by people who speak with other groups of people who may speak other language. This means that every language is influenced by other languages as well. And sometimes, the interaction between two or more different languages can provide new cultural context that can’t be conveyed by either language alone.

If you’re reading this, unless you’ve translated it to your own language, it means you know English and therefore would know that almost all English words are either borrowed or evolved from other languages (to be fair, that’s most languages, but modern English is a relatively young language and unlike most languages, doesn’t really have direct roots to an older language like how Spanish and French stem from Latin). But yeah, like the text in parentheses says, most languages also borrow from other languages. Usually, this happens between neighboring groups of people, like how the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system into Kanji while also adopting some of their words and at the same time some words in Chinese are borrowed from Japanese. Other times, it happens from huge migrations of people to other lands, like how most Filipino languages have a lot of words from the Spanish language due to the conquistadors settling there or the English word “boondock” coming from the Tagalog word for mountain due to the Philippine-American war. You can even find some huge examples of a bunch of languages mixing together into a unique one like Hawaiian Pidgin which is a mix of a ton of different languages from different groups of immigrants working together. I’m running out of examples that I can name off the top of my head, but hopefully you get my point. Anyway, I mentioned earlier about a joke that can only be spoken aloud to make sense. It’s a joke my dad used to tell when I was a kid, but it only makes sense if you speak both English and Tagalog. It’s a knock-knock joke that goes something like this: “Knock-knock” “Who’s there?” “Ako maba” “Ako maba who?” and it ends there because the recipient of the joke is supposed to realise they just said “I smell bad” in Tagalog and it doesn’t work for someone who doesn’t speak the language because for one, they likely wouldn’t be able to repeat the “Ako maba” line and also, it doesn’t follow the usual “knock-knock” joke structure where the person telling the joke says the punch line. There must be more examples out there to further drive my point, but I think it’s enough to illustrate that these cultural differences are what make the interactions between different groups so beautiful.

I don’t know how to continue without rambling and repeating most of my points, so I’ll end it with this thought I had about forcing everyone in the world to have the same language. There are some people out there who genuinely think that we should all speak the same language or that we should switch to a universal writing system like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I mean, I think what I’ve mentioned throughout this are enough to illustrate why that’s a terrible idea, but even then, I don’t think these people realise just how much you limit humanity as a whole by having only one language. Even with computer programming languages, we embrace a huge variety of them because even though they are all Turing complete and can mostly do the same things, there are things in some languages that you just can’t do in others. And since language is our way of communicating with other humans, it affects our way of thinking and therefore allows people of different backgrounds have different systems of thought. Sure, English is pretty much a universal language at this point since it’s the language of the internet which spans the whole globe, but having it be the only one severely limits the human experience. And before I end this post, I’d like to rant about the concept of universal translators in science fiction. Most of the time, they’re just used as a plot device so the writers don’t have to come up with new languages or even explain why everyone speaks the same language as humans, but I think what bothers me about them is that they often imply that every thought can be directly translated to another language which simply isn’t true. I get not wanting to come up with new languages, but when they don’t show any cultural differences between alien races, it breaks a lot of the immersion for me. I think an example of where this is done brilliantly is in Star Trek, specifically in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where they’re having dinner with an alien race (I don’t remember which one lol it’s been a long time) and the aliens storm off as they are offended by something, but the crew’s translator can’t figure out what because what they’re saying can’t be directly translated to English. To be fair, this isn’t really an example of the universal translator trope as they did have the aliens speaking a different language, but my point is that they put in a little extra effort to show that some things cannot be translated perfectly to other languages and I get that a lot of writers want to keep things simple, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a few small details to show cultural differences between us and the alien races. Also, another fun example I just remembered was in Godzilla: Final Wars where one of the Xiliens is asked for his name and he simply tells them to call him X since his name cannot be pronounced by humans. It’s such a small detail, but it just adds so much intrigue to this alien race because it tells us that the way they normally communicate with each other is something that humans can’t do. It’s like how bees communicate with dance moves but probably won’t be able to understand us if we do the same moves since we don’t have the same body parts (unless it’s just the motion of their entire body, but you get my point). My point is that we need to be more aware of our cultural and linguistic differences to really appreciate the human experience. Yeah, I think that’s good enough for now. Okay, back to work.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 2 May
Simulation

I recently was thinking about the idea that we live in one huge simulation. I’ve heard a bunch of theories on how to prove it, but I realised most, if not all of them depend on having some understanding of the world outside of the simulation; otherwise, we have no way of proving it.

In Futurama season 11, episode 10, they explore this idea of living in a simulation by having the professor create a precise simulation of the universe that even simulates the show’s characters themselves. (Note that I will likely be calling back to this episode throughout this post as this is what inspired this thought in the first place.) Anyway, as the episode goes on, the simulated universe reaches a point to where the simulated characters have caught up to the present and created their own simulation like the beginning of the episode. The simulated Planet Express crew then start to wonder if they themselves are in a simulation so they set out to try and prove it by observing a massive cosmic event that would stress the computer running the simulation causing errors and therefore prove that they live in a simulation.

I won’t spoil the ending of the episode, partly because I’m going off pure memory and haven’t seen it since it released but also because there is a sweet and heartwarming part to it that I wouldn’t want to ruin for you, dearest reader. Also, this discussion is not on the ending but rather the approach the simulated characters made to proving that the universe is a simulation.

See, the thing is that simulations do exact what you’ve programmed them to do. Anything that seems wrong only appears that way in comparison to what we expect in the real world, but in the simulation, everything is working exactly as programmed. Things may not obey our laws of physics in the simulation, but they are following the laws of physics as programmed in the computer.

I think you may see where I’m going with this. The laws of physics in the simulated universe would work exactly how the real professor programmed them to be, so the simulated professor would have studied the simulation’s laws of physics and anything inaccurate to real world physics within the simulation would not matter since the simulation has its own laws of physics. The only way the simulated professor could prove that an event was the result of a simulation malfunction would be if he knew how the “real world” physics was meant to work. Otherwise, theory would have to be adjusted to fit the observed phenomenon.

Okay, maybe that whole paragraph was very rambly and made no sense, so let me raise a thought experiment. Suppose you created a simulation of the universe using a video game physics engine, let’s say Valve’s Source engine. (For those of you unfamiliar with the games using this engine, I will try my best to give context because I will be talking about specific engine mechanics, but it may still be confusing.) In the Source engine, there is a feature known as “air-strafing” in which the player can move the character in a certain way that allows them to gain extra momentum midair simply by turning and moving left or right. Some consider this an exploit since this obviously could never happen in real life, but when you look at the code, this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. The engine may be trying to simulate real world physics for us to see, but small details in how it works make it have a completely different but still valid set of laws of physics.

So now imagine a scientist who was born and raised in this simulated universe. Let’s say that something similar to Newton’s laws of physics have already been established in this world. The people living here have grown to understand these laws and formulas as they are, unaware that they are different from our laws of physics since they don’t know they are in a simulation. Now, let’s say our scientist made a huge breakthrough and discovered the “air-strafing” mechanic mentioned earlier, or maybe even some other Source engine exploit. Does this discovery prove to them that they live in a simulation? Not exactly. This would force the physics community within the universe to adjust their understanding of how their world works, but eventually, they would find some way to make it fit with other discoveries and now they have a working theory and model of the universe, adjusted to fit new observations.

Now imagine you’re a scientist in the late 19th century trying to solve the blackbody radiation problem. Experimental results show that the universe does not work exactly how theory describes it. Then, the 20th century comes and some guy named Max Planck figures out a solution that fits the observed behavior almost too perfectly just by assuming that the electromagnetic radiation is released in discrete packets or quanta of energy rather than the continuous range of energy values you were taught to believe. It seems ridiculous but then even some guy named Einstein figures out these energy packets of light can be modeled as tiny particles called photons and then more discoveries are made and before long, the whole 20th century revolves around these new quantum laws of physics and making them fit with previous theories.

If we are indeed living in a simulation and the computer running it exists in a world where only classical Newtonian mechanics work, then to the outside observers, everything to do with quantum theory must seem like a glitch or exploit like with the aforementioned exploits with the source engine. But to us, since we live in this universe and only know of this one, everything is working as expected, even if it seems unusual. In fact, in the Futurama episode mentioned at the beginning of this post, Amy points out that a lot of the optimizations the professor made to the simulation resemble a lot of the oddities with real world quantum mechanics which opens the professor’s mind to the idea that they too could probably be living in a simulation.

Actually, as I was writing out that last part, I remembered another interesting example to bring up. In Minecraft: Java Edition, there is a quirk with redstone pistons in which they interact with redstone wiring the same way doors do in the game due to an oversight by the developers. However, this odd behavior turned out to be so useful that it was left in the game and became known in the community as “quasi-connectivity” due to the unintuitive yet useful behavior. This mechanic (along with other redstone mechanics) was not carried over to the Bedrock Edition of the game leading to both games having vastly different rules to circuit-building at larger scales.

This made me imagine a sapient being living in the Java Edition and somehow being transported to the Bedrock Edition. Having existed in Java his whole life, he would first not notice much difference, but then seeing things work differently in his new universe would likely lead him to conclude that he is in a simulation. However, back in the Java universe, he would not be aware that he exists in a video game because he has no idea that the real world exists and would have no point of comparison. The things that seem weird to us in Minecraft like floating blocks and inconsistent gravity would be completely normal to our Minecraft character and in fact, our world would seem more like the simulation to him. Even if we take things further and imagine him pushing the game engine to its limits by building a massive railgun like the YouTube user docm77 built, that railgun would have been built based on previously observed phenomena in the Minecraft world and would still follow the laws of physics. In fact, this is basically the equivalent of us in the real world building a particle accelerator or even the nuclear bomb to exploit scientific discoveries we’ve made that seem to break previous laws of physics but in actuality reinforce them.

I’ll end it here before I ramble on for much longer. Hopefully this all made sense because it is really hard to fully explain my thought process here. I consider this good practice for my writing, so hopefully one day I could explain all this in a way that actually makes sense.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 24 Apr
Warp Technology

Before I begin this discussion, I would like to note that I am not a physicist and any of the science I explain here comes from my own understanding of these topics. This entire blog is meant to be a creative output for myself, so there is little need for properly cited research.

Anyone who grew up with Star Trek would be undoubtedly familiar with the concept of a warp engine. For those unaware, a warp engine bends space around it to allow a spaceship to travel across the universe faster than light. When I was pondering on this concept on a drive home, I thought about how a lot of other miraculous technologies ended up becoming widely available to the general public. The very computer I am using to type this and the one you are using to read this was built upon many decades of research around a technology that was originally used for massive operations like sending a rocket to the moon. Now obviously warp engines would be far more complex than any computer, but it is inevitable that a society that develops them would eventually be able to compact the technology down to something that an average person could use, not just for space travel.

This got me thinking about possible concepts for commercially available warp technology. The obvious ones would involve transport, and not just the intergalactic kind. With advanced enough warp technology, you could build a whole city in which people can get to where they need in an instant by warping the space between them and their destination. Train lines that travel across the country could get to their destinations in seconds with warp technology.

Then I thought about how it could be used to simply compact things. Entire apartment complexes that take up city blocks could be compressed into a pocket dimension that people could simply walk into. Your closet full of junk could become as spacious as the TARDIS from Doctor Who. Space becomes essentially irrelevant when you have a technology that can change it very easily.

Of course, anyone familiar with the concept of relativity would know that bending space inadvertently affects time as the universe’s way of making sure the speed of light stays constant in any frame of reference. Warp technology could take advantage of this effect by creating spaces where time is slowed down or sped up to meet certain needs. For example, one could use this technology in a server room to speed up the calculations of the computers. It could also be used recreationally by having time move in a certain way at home such that people can spend a lot more time resting while time moves normally in the outside world. There are obviously a lot of negative effects that would result in messing with time like this, but I can imagine that a society that reached this point would have figure out ways around those problems.

One really interesting use that I thought about only recently is the use of warp technology to create extremely accurate color displays. I’ll try not to get too deep into quantum mechanics here, but basically, when electrons emit light, they only do so at very specific frequencies due to energy levels being at fixed quantities. Because of this, color displays, no matter the technology, cannot produce the exact wavelengths of every color in the visible spectrum and only get around that with an illusion on our eyes by mixing specific amounts of red, green, and blue light, the colors our eyes are sensitive to. Because of this, most of the colors we see on a display, such as the color yellow, are not the actual wavelengths of light. The effect is still more than convincing enough, of course, but with warp technology, it may be possible to accurately produce light of any frequency in the visible spectrum.

Essentially, you make use of the Doppler effect which is often associated with the sound of something approaching you, but it is also seen with the further edges of the universe where light gets shifted to longer wavelengths due to space expanding between galaxies. With warp technology, you could take advantage of this effect and have something that produces a fixed wavelength of light and bend the space around it such that the color we end up seeing is different. You could then use this to make a beam of light that aims at different pixels on a screen, somewhat like an old CRT television, but instead of electrons hitting phosphors on a screen, they’re the actual photons of the exact colors we want. With how advanced displays are now, I can’t imagine how much of a difference this would make, but you can imagine a company would market the hell out of this and make people think this is the future of color displays.

Continuing on the concept of bending light, there is a concept in physics known as gravitational lensing where objects in space have such strong gravitational fields that light bends around them, much like a lens. With warp technology, it may be possible to build powerful telescopes that simply bend space to create lenses. Since the light is not passing through a physical medium like glass, we end up reducing a lot of the light data lost with physical telescopes. For more everyday uses, this could also be used for cameras. Instead of having to buy a bunch of different lenses for different purposes, maybe there could be a product that uses small warp engines to create any lens you want with gravitational lensing.

Those are the everyday uses I can think of right now, but now I want to shift the focus to perhaps the more obvious alternative use of warp technology: weaponry. A lot of technologies started out as tools of war, so it should be no surprise that warp technology would first be used as a weapon. Surprisingly, I can only name two sci-fi franchises that cover the concept of weaponized warp technology, that being Star Wars and Titanfall (there likely was a Star Trek episode that covered it too, but I can’t remember at the moment). Star Wars technically uses hyperspace technology which is a bit different from warp technology, but since they serve similar purposes, I’ll consider them basically the same here. In The Last Jedi, there is an infamous scene where a character uses a ship’s hyperdrive to destroy an entire fleet of ships in an instant. In Titanfall 2, the enemies use a weapon called the Fold weapon to bend space-time to destroy an entire planet from a distance. Both of these cases make use of space travel technology to create weapons of mass destruction, but I want to cover a bit of the small-scale weapon applications because there’s only so much you can say about planet-destroying weapons.

The first thought I could think of was something similar to the AR-2 from Half-Life 2 which fires pulses of dark energy instead of bullets. Dark energy, in the context of theoretical physics, is basically what causes the space between galaxies to expand rapidly, essentially bending space-time like our warp engines. One could use this to create untraceable weapons as they would not be firing physical bullets but instead small ruptures in space-time to kill enemies.

Another possible application would be some kind of gravity grenade as seen in some futuristic shooter games where instead of a normal explosion, the grenade changes gravity to either pull enemies into it or launch them upwards. With warp technology, this would not only be possible but also could have various other applications like maybe have it push enemies outward like a normal explosion or even freeze the enemies in time like with the time-manipulation I mentioned in the earlier section. This could even be applied to a missile for more destructive purposes and if used as a nuke, it could avoid a lot of the radioactive side effects from nuclear weapons.

A really interesting application would be to use warp technology to curve bullets. If you ever played Angry Birds: Space, you may remember that a lot of the levels made use of gravity zones or whatever they were called to change the trajectory of the birds mid-flight. This could be used to fire bullets at enemies behind cover by bending space to curve the bullet’s trajectory around the cover. If any game developers are reading this, please make a game mechanic in a shooter where you can curve bullets with gravity.

I might expand on this topic a bit more sometime, but for now, these are my thoughts.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 24 Apr
Halo 2 and Yakuza 0: Converging Paths of Two Protagonists (plus a lot of extra thoughts)

This whole thing was originally a thought dump I texted to my friend at 1am one day, but I decided to share it here for anyone interested. This is just about some similarities I noticed between the games Halo 2 and Yakuza 0, specifically in the way that they both handled having two playable protagonists who almost never interact directly yet influence each other’s stories unknowingly. Also, I’ll add an extra bit of my final thoughts after the second separator to discuss my current thoughts now that I’ve finished Yakuza 0 (yes, I wrote all this before even finishing the game). Also, spoilers for Yakuza 0 and Halo 2, obviously.

The Original Message

Click to expand

So this is a kinda random thought I had lol but I was thinking about the parallels between Halo 2 and Yakuza 0. Obviously these are two vastly different games lol but the main comparison to be made is with how they handled having two playable protagonists. Both games have the player switching to the other protagonist every few chapters with their paths never crossing until after the events of the game (I know Yakuza 0 has that iconic “Yo, Kiryu-chan!” scene, but like that’s at the very end so I don’t count it lol). Also, I love that in both games, the playable protagonists unknowingly affect each other’s lives throughout the story which makes it so much more satisfying when they eventually do meet.

But I think what’s most interesting to talk about is how each game handled this formula because I think it’s brilliant how they both executed this. Yakuza 0 made the protagonists feel vastly different to play, to the point that switching between Kiryu and Majima almost feels like playing a different game. The obvious thing to point out is the fighting styles lol, but I think it goes a bit deeper than that. Majima, especially at the beginning of the game, is slightly older and more experienced than Kiryu, so when you switch to him, there are a bunch of subtle changes in gameplay like how much easier it is to get a huge health bar before unlocking the full skill tree compared to Kiryu, or how Majima shows more mastery of his fighting styles in the training missions compared to Kiryu. And not just in fighting, Majima is clearly much more experienced than Kiryu in running a business so you get to see how Majima already knows all the formalities in business interactions while Kiryu initially struggles to properly hand out a business card at the beginning of the game.

I’m only halfway through Yakuza 0’s story at this point (why are the mini games so much fucking fun 😭) but I feel like I’ll have more to say later on lol. Anyway, I have finished Halo 2, so I’ll talk on that here. Halo 2 has a much different approach to making the protagonists feel distinct. Since it’s a linear first-person shooter unlike Yakuza 0 which is an open-world beat-em-up game, Halo 2 kinda has to make the two protagonists feel almost identical at their core. There’s the obvious part that it also has multiplayer so they need to make the characters feel the same, and while I do kinda wish they had a tf2 approach to make the characters different, I think it’s fitting given the story. Arbiter and Master Chief are supposed to be each other’s counterparts, almost equal in skill and significant leaders on their respective side of the conflict. What really sets them apart is how they’re treated by those around them, and it’s really made clear in the opening cutscene. Master Chief is celebrated by humanity for his success against the Covenant at the battle of Installation 04. At the same time this is happening, Thel ‘Vadam is being publicly humiliated by the Covenant and is stripped bare and burned for his failure against humanity leading him to becoming the Arbiter.

This is where the English teacher analysis comes in lol because the parallels between the characters are really subtle in the gameplay but tie into the story poetically. In the game, Master Chief has a flashlight. It barely has any use in gameplay, especially compared to the first game lol, but the way I see it, the flashlight symbolizes how he is the beacon of hope for all humanity against this unstoppable foe. That may seem like an asspull at first lol but it makes more sense when you look at Arbiter. Pressing the exact same button as Arbiter instead activates his cloaking device making him invisible to all enemies. This symbolizes his shame for his loss, wanting to hide himself from the world that rejected him, but also the fact that he now hides in the shadows, having left his old identity behind to fight the war in places no one will see.

Halo 2’s level design also plays a role here and I think this is where the brilliance shines. Without getting too specific, Master Chief’s levels feel like good old shooter gameplay where you shoot aliens and protect humans. However, Arbiter’s levels can get confusing because you’re fighting against your own race and now you have to keep track of which aliens are with the Covenant and which are the heretics. While they do have subtle design differences, you’ll find yourself asking “Who is the enemy and who am I fighting for?”, the same question that the character himself is asking. It’s such a subtle detail in the gameplay that gets you thinking the same way as the characters you’re playing. Master Chief has his mind set on saving humanity and has no uncertainty on who he’s trying to protect, so his gameplay feels very traditional. Arbiter is lost and confused on what he’s been fighting for and whether or not the faith he was raised to believe in is even true, so his levels often feel confusing.

I could yap a lot more lol but these are just my current thoughts. I might even write a full video essay discussing my full thoughts after I’ve replayed Halo 2 and finished Yakuza 0 🙂

Addendum (Am I using that word right?)

Click to expand

As of writing this part, I finished Yakuza 0 a few weeks ago and am now on the final chapter of Yakuza Kiwami, only putting it off because I want to finish the Jo Amon fight before the final chapter. With my new context, I want to add a bit more to my previous thoughts.

First, I want to cover something I said in the second paragraph (third paragraph of the overall post): “Kiryu initially struggles to properly hand out a business card at the beginning of the game.” As it turns out, if you make the right choices and quicktime events in that part of the game, Kiryu executes all the business tasks perfectly and he only messed up because I messed up all the choices. I personally think my outcome was canon since Kiryu had no formal business experience at this point since he was just a debt collector for the Yakuza before that, but it could honestly go both ways. What really surprised me after beating the game was how much more money Kiryu makes from his real estate business over Majima’s Cabaret Club. Previously, I thought Majima’s business minigame was more profitable to reflect that he is the more experienced businessman, and that was the case at the beginning, but once I had completed both minigames, Kiryu was easily earning over a billion yen per collection while I could only get barely over 100 million from Majima’s business. I guess it makes sense considering the game takes place when the real estate market was booming, but it still kinda ruins my original point about the gameplay reflecting their business skills.

Now I want to talk about the combat. This is where things get a bit more interesting. I said before that the game’s combat reflects the difference in experience between Kiryu and Majima with Majima having access to a lot more health and damage upgrades near the start of the game since he’s an older and more experienced fighter. Even the story shows how much stronger Majima is than Kiryu in 1988 with Majima taking down Awano and Lao Gui, the deadliest assassin in all of Asia, back-to-back. However, when both characters have all upgrades unlocked, including their respective Legend styles, I think Kiryu ends up being stronger than Majima, especially with how ridiculously overpowered the drunk upgrades for Brawler style are (you can easily cheese some of the coliseum tournaments by choosing the sturdy knife and instantly winning with a single heat action while drunk and at full health). Majima still ends up being a lot better for multiple enemies, but for one-on-one battles, Kiryu ends up being stronger. This makes sense after having played Kiwami because it’s clear that in later years, Kiryu rivals Majima in fighting ability which is why Majima sees Kiryu as such a worthy opponent.

The thing is, I beat the main story after having unlocked both Legend styles, so the difference in strength was not reflected in the gameplay for me. However, I’ve heard people say that the business minigames canonically happen after the ending of the main story which makes a lot more sense, especially considering how the game does not indicate how much time has passed between Sera becoming chairman and Kiryu and Majima meeting, so I can see how they could have done all that in that span of time. With all that in mind now, I think the final chapter still does reflect their strength differences if played before getting the Legend styles. If memory serves me right, most of the overpowered upgrades for Kiryu are locked behind the real estate minigame while Majima has a lot of the damage and health upgrades from the start so if you max out both characters with the limited skill trees, Majima still ends up the stronger fighter which makes sense for this point in the timeline.

Now I want to talk about the training missions since I only briefly mentioned them in the original text. I think this is where Majima and Kiryu’s different personalities really stand out, so I’ll go even more in depth for them.

Kiryu’s training missions are about him learning techniques under his masters, but never using it against them. A lot of times, he’s either sent to fight someone else to use a technique for the lesson or he unlocks it after finishing a task. I believe this is to reflect how at this point in time Kiryu has not surpassed the level of his teachers since he never gets to fight them. I guess you can argue that he surpassed Miss Tatsu since he beat that one guy she lost against or that he couldn’t fight Bacchus since he’s old, but I still think he’s supposed to be a beginner fighter at this point. He is only 20 years old in this game, so he is nowhere near the legend status he achieves in later games, and I think that’s reflected well with his training missions. He is just a young man with a mind open to all these new techniques.

Majima, on the other hand, approaches his training missions differently. He is already an experienced fighter being 4 years older than Kiryu and already achieved a bit of a legend status being Sotenbori’s Lord of the Night and known throughout the Yakuza as the guy who survived a year of imprisonment and torture for refusing to carry out an assassination. Because of this, all his lessons have him beating his teachers in combat. With Fei Hu, he learns the different weapon styles by beating him with his own baseball bat style. With Komeki/Komaki, he ends up inventing new techniques to counter the moves that Komeki tries to teach him. With Areshi and his crew, he learns their techniques similarly to how Kiryu does with his training missions, but unlike Kiryu, he ends up far surpassing his teachers (most likely because Areshi and the others dance for entertainment but Majima is actually using the moves for combat).

Now I also want to mention the Komaki training in Yakuza Kiwami (spoilers for that game obviously lol). In this game, Komaki uses his real name (apparently Komaki and Komeki have vastly different kanji when written out so it makes more sense in Japanese why he chose such a similar sounding name for his fake name lol) and is training Kiryu this time. This Kiryu is a much older and stronger fighter than before, so his training actually involves fighting the master. However, he still ends up learning the intended techniques like before, unlike Majima who developed his own techniques from the lessons. On top of the Komaki training, the game also features the Majima Everywhere system for Kiryu to relearn some of the Dragon style techniques he forgot during his 10 year sentence. What’s really interesting is that some of the moves you unlock are actually Majima’s techniques that Kiryu adopted into his own fighting style. This further emphasizes Kiryu’s learning style of adopting other people’s techniques into his own.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote the last paragraph and I completely lost track of what I was saying. Feel free to expand the text, but just note that these are mostly insane ramblings of a man who couldn’t find sleep that night.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 20 Feb
Mahjong, Chess, and the Certainty of Choices and Consequences

Those of you who know me well might know that I have recently developed a fixation on the game Mahjong, specifically Riichi Mahjong, the Japanese style of the game. The more I learned about the game, the more I started to see how much the choices in Mahjong reflect the choices we make in our own lives. It also got me thinking about Chess again and how both games provide different perspectives on life choices. Before I continue, I would like to say that you do not need to know much about Mahjong or Chess to keep up with this discussion; however, I may make some references to certain actions that can be done in both games. I will try my best to explain them, but ultimately, I don’t think knowledge of these games is necessary to get my message.

In most versions of Mahjong (at least the ones I researched), you begin with a hand of 13 tiles and your goal is to draw and discard tiles until you reach a point where the next tile you draw completes a 14 tile hand of a certain pattern. That is perhaps the simplest way to summarize it as there is obviously a lot more to it than that and it varies between versions, but it describes pretty much every game of Mahjong. Much like in real life, you have no control over your starting hand. You may start with a very lucky hand allowing you to achieve a lot more earlier on, but at the same time, you may also start with a very unlucky hand that forces you to work much harder just to catch up to everyone else. Even then, unexpected things can occur throughout the game and a person with a lucky start may end up at the very bottom while a person with a terrible starting hand may end up on top. Still, that does not take away from the effect that skill has on the outcome. As I played more Mahjong matches and learned more patterns, I started to see that what may seem like a bad starting hand is actually really good and I just needed to learn new patterns that I could not recognize before. This is reflective of real life where learning new things can open up a lot more opportunities for you that were always there but you just couldn’t see them until you learned about them. For example, let’s say you were learning a musical instrument. At first, you may see very limited options of what you can play as you might only know a few notes or chords. However, as you study the instrument more, and maybe even a bit of music theory, you start to notice certain patterns that allow you to find notes that sound good together. Suddenly, a world of possibilities starts to open up and before long, you can play any song you want and even other instruments are a lot easier to learn now that you can notice the same patterns appearing. Much like with a starting hand in Mahjong, you have all the same tools and choices available to you, but now you are able to do a lot more with what you have.

Let’s take a step back and talk again about the luck aspect of the game. I mentioned before that sometimes, unexpected things may happen that are outside of your control. Does this mean that your choices don’t matter and it’s all just a coin flip or a roll of the dice? Not exactly. Much like in real life, in Mahjong you have to prepare for things to suddenly go wrong or right. From the games I played, I found that the best moves are the ones that open up the most opportunities for you. I’ll elaborate a bit more to paint a better picture. In each turn, you draw a tile and then choose whether to discard this tile or to discard a tile already in your hand. Usually, you’d want to choose to get rid of a tile that doesn’t contribute to the winning hand, but other times that decision is not so simple and you may have to even take a risk and choose a move that might give you more choices down the line or play it safe and choose moves that won’t necessarily win you the game but will guarantee that you won’t be completely screwed over by random chance later. That’s just life. Sometimes we have to make choices that keep us on a stable path, but other times, we may get opportunities to take a huge risk that pays off even more. Things can and will go wrong, but as long as you are able to make choices that leave more choices open, you will most likely find a way out.

Eventually, you reach a point where choices become limited but much simpler. In Riichi Mahjong, there is a state called tenpai or ready hand in which you only need a certain tile to complete your 14-tile hand so your only choice is to keep discarding the tile you drew until you draw a tile that completes your hand. If the game ends in a draw, you still end up winning some points afterwards. Still, much like the rest of the game, there remains a huge risk of everything going wrong like if an opponent manages to complete their hand before you. This is like in real life where things may seem like smooth sailing until something happens out of nowhere and ruins everything. However, we still keep going. Life isn’t about keeping things perfect; it’s about being ready for when things inevitably go wrong, even when it seems that everything will be alright in the end. The best choices aren’t guaranteed to be the perfect choices, but we always need to be ready to make the right ones.

Now let’s talk a bit about Chess. Unlike Mahjong, a Chess game always begins the same way, and even if it’s Fischer random, the opponent still has the same starting position as you, so the outcome of the game depends entirely on the skill of the players. What’s more is that there is absolutely no randomness in Chess, so with every move, a good choice will always be a good choice and a bad choice will always be bad. It’s a system that rewards good decisions and punishes bad ones. In some moments, you will encounter some unexpected consequences, but those will always be due to player oversight like if you successfully capture the opponent’s queen but completely miss the checkmate you granted to them. Chess is a very complicated game, but it is still predictable and every move has complete certainty in which position it will result in.

To me, Chess represents what we expect life to be like. It’s complicated and difficult to learn, but we expect things to always turn out in our favor when we do everything right. They say a game of Chess in which both players make all the perfect moves will always end in a draw, and a lot of times we expect life to be like that, to be played so perfectly as we expect. But most of the time, life is not like that. A lot of times, you’ll do things right, but then something happens that you didn’t prepare for, like if you spent months studying an opening but then your opponent plays a variation you never looked at and it doesn’t matter if that move was good or not because it throws you off balance. Or even worse, you might play a move that seems brilliant but it either turns out to be a huge blunder or it forces you into a position where none of your available moves seem right, not even the one that wins the whole game. However, with Chess, you can always learn from all these. When things play out the same way as before, you learn from your mistakes and know exactly what moves are right and wrong. Most of the time, life is like that. We make mistakes and keep learning from them until we learn to play effectively.

Unfortunately, there are times in life where it goes from a game of Chess to a game of Mahjong. You play all the right moves, you make all the right choices, you do everything completely right, but all of a sudden, because of random chance, something completely out of your control, it all falls apart. You can try all you want to prepare for these things, analyze every move, every position, every possibility, but nothing within your power could have prevented tragedy from striking. You can only move on and hope to recover. To me, that’s what Mahjong represents. If Chess represents our illusion of complete control, Mahjong represents the harsh reality of the universe: that we have no control. Even a lot of professional Mahjong players admit that even with all the skill involved in the game, you will always be at the mercy of random chance. Does that mean our choices don’t matter and that we have no free will in the universe? Not exactly. To me, it just means that we should not expect the right choices to always have ideal consequences. We can make the best choices to make sure the outcome will more likely fall in our favor, but ultimately, we can never really set the chances of failure to zero. We just have to keep trying and keep getting better.

I have quite a few friends who started university relatively recently. When I hear about their plans, it sounds to me that they are approaching this stage of life like a game of Chess, expecting the right decisions to have positive outcomes. It’s always good to have a plan and even a backup plan, but that isn’t always enough, so I always tell them not to worry too much about things falling apart and that it’s best to be prepared for a change of planning rather than planning ten steps ahead. Always have a goal, but don’t be too focused on your path to that goal. Going back to Mahjong, I play in a similar way in that if I see a possible hand I can go for, I try to go for it, but I always make sure my hand is ready to do something else in case things don’t go my way. For a more specific example, sometimes I’ll have a white dragon in my starting hand and keep it there in case I get the chance at yakuhai, but I make sure that if I see two white dragons on the discard area (meaning I can’t get yakuhai), the rest of my hand is still good enough that I can get rid of the first dragon and still have a chance of winning. We can’t always prepare for when things go unexpectedly wrong, but we can always keep ourselves open to change directions.

At the same time we need to prepare for when things go wrong, we also need to be ready for when things go right and make the most of that positive opportunity. (Side note, at the exact moment I was typing this paragraph, I received an email about getting an interview for the internship I applied to which is such perfect timing for the point I’m making) Going back to the Mahjong example, I once spectated a game from another beginner, and I got frustrated when I saw him blunder a winning opportunity. He drew a second East wind tile, and since he was sitting on the East seat and on an East game, he could have gotten 2 Han for simply picking up a third one, but he instead discarded the piece. With the way the rest of the game played out, he wouldn’t have won either way since most of the opponents won essentially by random chance, but it frustrated me every time he made a move that took away any chance of winning.

Obviously this was just a simple Mahjong game so it’s not that serious that he blundered the chance of winning since he could do better in another game, but I think it’s a good representation of a lot of life opportunities. I had the chance to get certified as a life insurance agent, but I completely blundered it because I could not schedule my days properly to make time for it. I had the chance to graduate with my bachelor’s one year early due to my high school AP credits making up my first year of uni, but now I’m graduating much later just because I got a bit greedy and tried to force a larger workload on myself to graduate even earlier. Experiences like these are why I’ve been trying to make myself recognize opportunities and make the most of them. I’m obviously still learning and still stumbling, but I think I am getting better. I’m playing this game of life a little more carefully now, but I’m back in uni studying again and applying to multiple jobs while also giving a bit more focus on my physical and mental health. Maybe I lost a few rounds, but just like in Mahjong, in life you can always make it back to the top. You just need to make the right choices and be patient and prepared for when the opportunity comes back.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 7 Feb
Kiryu’s Bizarre Adventure

WARNING: Spoilers for Yakuza 0 and possibly other Yakuza games as well as most of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

Okay, this may be my most unhinged post yet, but hear me out: the Yakuza games take place in the same universe as Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. There isn’t really much connecting the two franchises, but it is fun to find the connections between them. This all started with a conversation with a friend of mine when I pointed out that Yakuza 0 and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part 3: Stardust Crusaders both take place in 1988.

As I thought deeper into this connection, I noticed that Kazuma Kiryu, the main protagonist of Yakuza 0 (and most of the other Yakuza games) is only three years older than Jotaro, the main protagonist of Stardust Crusaders. They both live in the Tokyo area, which to be fair is quite big, but it isn’t reasonable to assume that they might have interacted at some point in their lives. My theory is that they either went to the same elementary school or just hung out with similar groups as kids. We know from a certain episode of Jojo that Jotaro was already a strong fighter at around 7 years old, so I’m thinking that a 10 year old Kiryu became friends with Jotaro and taught him how to fight after seeing him get picked on by other kids. This would explain why Jotaro yells “ora” when he punches since Kiryu sometimes does the same thing when punching, so Jotaro likely picked up on this and integrated it into his own fighting style.

There’s also the bit with Kiryu’s charged attack in Rush style in Yakuza 0 looking like Star Platinum’s punch barrage. This led me to think that Kiryu might be a stand user like Jotaro, but overall, I’ve decided that doesn’t really work into this whole theory. I thought at first that Kiryu’s cartoonishly superhuman strength might mean that he’s a stand user, but then that would mean a lot of other characters in the games have the same type of stand as Kiryu’s which just doesn’t make much sense, especially when you consider that in Jojo, stand user’s will always eventually be drawn to other stand users by fate, yet Kiryu has never encountered another one. Besides, it’s not exactly unusual in the Jojo universe for regular humans to achieve the kind of superhuman strength we see in Yakuza, like when Jonathan in part 1 fought vampire Dio in a burning mansion before he even learned Hamon, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that Kiryu is just a regular human, at least in the context of the Jojo-Yakuza universe. Ichiban is a whole other story, but I won’t get too deep into that here, mainly because I haven’t played Yakuza 7 or 8.

Now, another small connection I noticed is that in Yakuza 0, there is a substory where you meet the boss of an Italian mafia group and JJBA part 5: Golden Wind centers around a large Italian mafia group. There are no other connections to be made here lol but I like to think that the mafia boss you meet is probably a predecessor to Diavolo since he chooses to leave the mafia about a decade before the events of Golden Wind.

It’s hard to make more connections past Yakuza 0 since the next game in the timeline takes place in 1995 and 2005 so JJBA parts 4 and 5 take place during the time Kiryu is in prison and have no connection to events covered in that 10 year gap. Part 6: Stone Ocean takes place in 2011 which is close to the events of Yakuza 4 and 5, but I’ve decided that Yakuza takes place in the Irene universe since the whole world was affected by the events of the original universe and would have to been acknowledged in Yakuza (also, Yakuza 5 would straight up not have happened at all in the Jolyne universe since the universe was literally reset 💀).

I have noticed that JJBA part 9, Yakuza 8, and the upcoming Pirate Yakuza all take place in Hawaii and around the same time, but I am not caught up on any of these to really say anything conclusive. Firstly, part 9 takes place in a completely different universe to parts 1-6 so it would not connect to the headcanon I’ve come up with. Also, Hawaii is kinda big, so it’s reasonable that even if they did coincide somehow, they wouldn’t cross over. I mean, even the Judgement games take place in both the same universe and the same areas as the Yakuza games yet they’ve never directly crossed over. Who knows, maybe I will eventually find a funny way to connect them and I’ll do a follow-up to this post.

Finally, I’d like to point out that Kei Ibuchi from Yakuza Kiwami 2 is voiced by the same actor who voiced Dio Brando in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. There is no in-universe connection here; I just thought that was funny to point out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my unhinged rant about how the Yakuza games take place in the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure universe. If you didn’t, that’s fair. This was all just the insane ramblings of a madman.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 3 Feb
Equilibrium

Balance. It’s a common lesson I’ve been taught throughout my life, yet only recently I’ve been starting to fit into my life. Some of you know I have been conditioning my body to get back into doing martial arts, and a huge part of my new training involves balance, both figuratively and literally. In the literal sense, I have been training balance by just doing some basic exercises and stretches, mainly hoping to eventually achieve the kind of Taekwondo high kicks I was doing as a kid, but also to understand my body better and bridge that connection between my mind and physical form. Since the last time I did any athletic activity (which was an eternity ago), my body has gone through quite a lot of change, from my weight gain during the pandemic to my strength gain in the previous year of weight lifting. With such physical change, I understood that I needed to change mentally and spiritually as well to make sure all aspects of myself are aligned and balanced. I don’t want to push my body too hard, but at the same time, I want to find consistency again. It’s this balance that I’ve been struggling to maintain, this balance of life. I am in perhaps the busiest year of my life and I need to be able to keep everything in check or else I’ll stumble and fall again like a few years ago.

Let’s talk a bit about that mental and spiritual balance I mentioned. Those of you who have known me a long time might know I have a bit of a past. If you didn’t, that’s good. I wasn’t a criminal or anything like that, but there are parts of me that I wish I could leave behind. The thing about the past is that no matter what you do to erase it, it will always follow you. You can choose to let go, try to burn it, kill it, make it go away, but the past will find some way back to you. It always does. It doesn’t define who you are now, but it does tell everything you did to get there. This is something I have struggled with for many years and still do. Luckily, most people I know see me in a mostly positive light, so most of this struggle is internal, but then how do I extinguish a fire that persistently burns within me? What I’ve learned recently is that I don’t. I should make peace with it. Making peace does not mean it goes away, but rather I find a way to make it not hold me back anymore. It’s like that scene from Mulan (1998) where she uses the weights to wrap around the pole so that instead of weighing her down, they help her go up. That’s how I’m trying to approach all that pain, all that rage, all those negative feelings I tried to hide away for years. I keep it in and let it out when I need it most. I turned it into a weapon, but not in the same way I did before, instead using it to push me through life but at the same time balancing it out with my more positive and peaceful thoughts.

The hardest part about balance is that the scales will tip back and forth a lot before they truly settle. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m at that point where I’m trying to find my center of gravity and I won’t be sure until everything stops tipping back and forth. See, I’m not even sure if my approach to life is that balanced at all. Sometimes you’ll think you found the balance point only for everything to tip one way. That’s okay. We keep trying. This is not a battle I can win through persistence and sheer force of will but with patience. When you block an attack, you don’t just try and push through; you reposition and find a new opening. That’s life. It’s not about pushing myself till I break like I once thought. It’s about knowing when to push and when to hold back. I’ve been trying to incorporate this into my own kinda fighting style using calmness and peaceful thoughts in my defense and the painful thoughts mentioned before to power my strikes. It’s become more of a meditational practice for me than a martial art because I use it to explore my inner turmoil and try to find balance rather than as a self-defense or fighting tool (though that is still part of it lol). Still then, it’s all about trying to tip the scales carefully. Too much rage in a punch may leave me blind to a counterattack, but too little and all that energy would be wasted on a weak attack. Too much tension in a parry can leave me too stiff to reposition, but too little and the opponent’s strike will take me down. It’s all about those choices, and I want to apply them to my everyday life.

This whole thing has mostly been me rambling with no clear direction or thesis, so I’ll try and share how I’m trying to apply these lessons in my own life. More directly, I’ve been both voluntarily and involuntarily using Wing Chun moves to do stuff like opening doors. I don’t have a wooden dummy to practice on, so sometimes I’ll just find myself doing some of the moves I learned years ago (I forgot all the names lol) on random things. More indirectly, I’ve been trying to find balance in the way I approach things in life. I don’t want to be so locked in and hyper-focused to the point that I become blind to everything around me, but at the same time, I don’t want to be so relaxed that I lose track of where I’m going. I’ve learned to take a step back every once in a while to regain my perspective, but I try to make sure I can always return to where I’m meant to be. I’d go on with more examples, but I honestly forgot 💀.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about balance is that being balanced does not always mean being still. A spinning gyroscope or even a Beyblade can stay upright and balanced by spinning consistently. A juggler on a unicycle can’t stay balanced by staying still at the equilibrium; they have to constantly adjust their position to stay upright. Two people slow-dancing must keep moving with one another to stay balanced and on the beat of the music. See, it’s not always about finding that equilibrium; it’s also about maintaining it. Like with my workout routine I mentioned, I need to keep it consistent even after I’ve achieved the results I want, otherwise I’ll start to regress.

I have honestly lost track of what my main point in all of this was, but I hope for you, my dearest reader, this all meant something to you. Perhaps you may find your own lesson that I missed in all of this.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 25 Jan
Unconventional Weapons

This may be one of my more unhinged posts, but I just needed to get this thought into words somehow. I was thinking about how most martial arts styles teach the use of conventional weapons (insert My Chemical Romance joke here) like swords and knives, but I want to see a style that’s based around using random everyday objects you find lying around. In a way, it would be similar to Miss Tatsu’s Beast style from Yakuza 0. For those who haven’t played that game, Beast style is a hyper aggressive fighting style you can play where you pick up the nearest object and use it to beat up your enemies. The Yakuza game series isn’t known for its realism, but I think the concept can be applied to real life martial arts. Obviously you can apply the same skills from using conventional weapons to most items you’d find lying around, but I feel like there would be a lot of situations where you’d have to get really creative and use something like a frying pan which doesn’t have the same balance as something like a dagger. Going back to the Yakuza 0 example, there’s a bunch of techniques in that game centered around using unconventional weapons in unique ways, like using a bicycle to knock down opponents or using a portable stove to burn an enemy that gets too close. Obviously these moves don’t require martial arts skills and are just general improvisation, but I think they can be taken further with martial arts principles.

I’m thinking, if I ever decide to start a martial arts school, I’d teach a style based around the use of unconventional weapons like this. It would obviously have to be based on a solid foundational martial art based around weapons like Kali, but the school would have more focus on understanding the physics of the weapon to better understand how to apply the knowledge to objects that are not meant to be weapons. So back to the frying pan example, you can hold a frying pan like you would a dagger or baton, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to use it in the same way, at least not effectively. We’d probably teach how to adjust for unbalanced weapons like that so that students can understand how to improvise when forced into a situation where they need to use one against a trained opponent. And then for something really unconventional, we’d teach how to use a flat, rigid object as a weapon, like a door or a book or a laptop or even a baking pan (actually, this whole train of thought started when I was in the kitchen earlier and wondered how I’d use a baking pan as a weapon haha). Now I’m no martial arts expert, just a guy who’s really into it, but I’d imagine for this style of weapon, it would be like that scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once where Evelyn used a riot shield like a spinning arrow sign but probably adjusted for different sized objects. See what I mean? There’s no conventional weapon I can think of that’s used in the same way so most martial artists probably wouldn’t really know what to do if they need to use something like that so I think it would be useful to have a fighting style that encompasses all sorts of unconventional weapons so you’re never in a situation where you don’t have a useable weapon.

All that probably sounded either absolutely insane or complete genius and I’ll have no idea until I wake up tomorrow. Maybe both. Who knows? Most of my ideas with a lot of things sound insane at first until they somehow work. But yeah, that’s it. Any martial artists who read this, please reach out to me and tell me I’m crazy.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 24 Jan
The Essence of Self and the Pain of Loss

I don’t remember too much from my Philosophy class in university, but I remember a huge discussion about what defines the self. What makes you you and what makes me me, etc.? Are we defined by our physical form or is there something more to the self? There is obviously a lot to talk about here, but for now, I just want to talk about my current thoughts on it and how it relates to the pain of loss.

Firstly, let me show you this video here:

You don’t need to watch it, but I think it will give a lot of context on my thoughts. For now, I’ll begin from the Philosophy class I mentioned.

So a bit of background first: I took Philosophy in the spring of 2021 during the Covid pandemic, so attending class in-person was optional, and only a few weeks into the semester, it was just me and one girl in the class. Why is this important? Just to explain why there was only one other student in the discussion. That’s it.

Anyway, we discussed the thing about the essence of self and we shared our own beliefs. The other student, I’ll call her Flower since she’ll come up later, said she believed that it’s the consciousness that defines the self. I stated that we are defined by our actions and the consequences we have on the world and that the self lives on even after the body and the consciousness fade. Four years later, I look back on this discussion and I both agree and disagree on these statements. A lot has happened in my life since then and I think that shaped my thoughts and feelings on this topic.

Let’s start with Flower’s statement about the consciousness. Firstly, is the consciousness/mind bound to the physical brain that contains and processes it, or is it much like software that can be replicated and copied to another form? What then happens if you transfer it to another body, via a brain transplant, telepathy, whatever? More importantly, what if it is a completely different body? From the video linked above, it’s clear that even just losing a limb is a drastic and terrifying change of self, so being placed in a completely different body would be an existential nightmare. That’s why I don’t fully believe that the mind alone defines the self because the body plays too big of a role in a person’s sense of identity. I guess it’s kind of like a ship of Theseus situation because at what point is a change too big of a change to still be considered the same as before? Okay, maybe I’m getting too carried away, so let’s move on.

My statement from that class discussion is one I still kinda agree with but I still ponder on it. Some time ago, I formed a bit of a thought experiment on this. Imagine I wanted to live forever. Let’s say in this hypothetical, I had no records of my DNA, fingerprints, anything to confirm my body as my original. So now imagine I found a perfect body double. He’s ten years younger than me but still looks identical to me that people in my life can’t tell the difference. Now, I have him fake his death so then I can train him to eventually take my place. I teach him all of my mannerisms, all of my thought processes, philosophies, everything that people in my life would know about me and he perfects all of them to the point that no one can tell the difference. Now, I disappear from everyone’s live and have my double completely taking over my life, living exactly the same way such that no one can tell the difference. I, the original, can simply pass away with no one knowing, and this younger replacement can continue living as me without anyone having a clue. Ten years pass, and he then does the exact same thing with another body double that’s ten years younger than him and this goes on for several iterations. Of course, slight changes will occur over time, but if the changes between the two physical persons remain smooth and continuous as possible (I wanna make a calculus/differential equations joke here but nah), no one will ever know that I’ve died many times and they’ll think I’m immortal and only the people in on it, the people who are “me” will know about it. So then, are they still me, or is it something more?

Those with similar movie tastes to mine may draw comparisons to Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride and yes, that was the inspiration. But let’s step back and think about this. What does this say about the self? Because in this thought experiment, the person that’s me is just the concept that lives in everyone’s minds, the impact I had on their lives and not my physical form. But does that mean that we are all just defined by what other people think of us? Honestly, I don’t think so. This version of the self, I like to call it the other because I’m bad at naming things. Okay but seriously, I think it’s important to make this distinction because I think the self includes the other and a lot lot more.

So what is it that I think defines the self now? There’s obviously a lot to discuss, but let’s go back to the bit about the body. Now, like I said before, the physical body still makes up the self as much as the mind and soul. When a person loses a limb or organ or whatever, they lose a part of themselves and depending on the situation and stuff, this can lead to not just physical pain, but emotional pain of loss. And there we go, we’ve reached the second part of the title.

The pain of loss is usually associated with losing someone in your life, most often death. We feel that pain almost like losing a part of our body and even if we heal over time, the grief remains present and we only learn to live with it. We can never get them back, but they remain as phantom pain (insert MGS joke here). This is why I think that people in our lives make us who we are and should count in the essence of the self. When we lose someone, it feels like we lose a part of ourselves because we do. In fact, I think we’re all basically a part of each other, forming a huge network of connections like a massive organism. Those closest to you will feel the most painful to lose, much like losing a whole organ, but those who drifted away from you over time to the point that you forget each other, may feel like less of a loss, much like a hair falling off because you know deep in your heart that at some point someone may take their place or maybe you don’t need them anymore, kinda like baby teeth.

It’s at this point that I’ll be sharing a bit of my own personal experiences, so you can stop reading here if you don’t wanna hear me yap about my pain and what I consider to be my own self, but I might add a bit more worth mentioning. But anyway, I want to start from March of 2023 when I heard the news about my old friend passing away. I hadn’t spoken to him in 5 years so he was not a part of my life for a long time, but even then, losing him felt like losing a part of myself. It made me away of how much time had passed since the last time I saw him and losing him made me more aware of what else I lost. It’s painful to talk about this time in my life, but I should mention that all this happened when I was perhaps at my lowest point (second only to another moment in my life that I won’t get into here unless I wanna torture myself with more traumatic memories). This was the time when I had completely burned myself out with academics having failed enough classes to hold me back a year so I took a gap year to reassess my life. I felt done with everything I used to care about: programming, poetry, music, etc. so I made the decision to spend that year working as a tutor so I could take time figuring out who I am. Losing my friend made me notice just how much of myself I had given up. I was not me anymore; I was someone else. However, unlike a limb or a friend, I could always get those parts of me back and regain my passions, my ambitions, my loves. In honor of my friend, in fact I’ll say his name: Brandon Po, I decided to get my shit together and find myself again. Unfortunately, this part also involved cutting out another person in my life.

Remember earlier I said Flower was gonna come up again later? This is later. To sum it up, I kept in touch with Flower long after that class ended and we became incredibly close. I won’t go too deep into the details and nature of our relationship, but the important thing to note is that by the end of 2023, the same year that Brandon passed away, I decided to cut Flower out of my life. To this day, I’m still unsure of that decision, and I won’t get into the reasons behind it since it’s extremely personal, but basically, this loss was almost as painful as losing Brandon. Not quite the same, but it still felt like I lost a part of who I am. However, this time felt more like removing wisdom teeth or some other vestigial organ. It may have been painful at first, but in the end, I found I never needed Flower in my life to begin with. Sure, I’m still happy with all the good times we had, but in the end, I could live without her.

That following year, 2024, was honestly probably the best year I’ve had in a long time. Without getting too specific, I got back into university, back on track to getting my degree, I got a new job that earned me a lot more than my old one, and I reconnected with a lot of people I haven’t connected with in a long time, including myself. Those who are close to me know that I don’t look fondly at my old self. I look back on how I used to be and openly despise that person. However, that’s not who I’m talking about when I say I reconnected with myself. What I mean is the glowing brightness hidden in all the darkness from before. I see now that the negativity that I thought defined me back then was actually a shell hiding my true form, the person I’m meant to be. Now I’m writing poetry again, not out of pain and frustration, but out of love and hope for the future. Now I’m practicing martial arts again, not to express my physical anger and frustrations but to find balance in myself and to reconnect my mind and body which have so long lost touch with each other. I’m doing all the things I used to do but now I have a new positive perspective on life and I don’t want to waste it. I want to make Brandon proud by making myself proud and if there is a life after this one, I hope to see him there and tell him all about it.

So now we’re here, what then defines the self? Is everything that we feel as loss a part of the self? See, the beauty in the question is that no answer will fit it perfectly. What defines the self depends entirely on how you approach life. I no longer consider my negative thoughts and actions from the past as a part of myself, but I still acknowledge that they once were. And I know that one day, what I consider an essential part of me will no longer be and I will live on. Damn idk how to end this, but yeah, go on and find yourselves!

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 14 Jan
Vectors

I got thinking about how people often refer to their significant other as their other half, or sometimes their better half. It is kinda cute, I’ll admit, but for me, I just don’t like how it implies that we are all incomplete halves until we find the other half to complete us. I do believe that the right people can complete a part of you, but just something doesn’t sit right with me about the idea of being incomplete without another person. I like the way it’s phrased in the song “By Chance (You and I)” by J.R. Aquino with the lyric below:

“Could you be the other one so we’d equal two?”

Here, it implies that both parties are complete on their own, but together they become something more. I personally find that approach more meaningful, that we’re all whole, but we can add another person and become more than what we began with. That brings me to vectors.

To any readers who have not learned about vectors in a maths class or have forgotten about them, I’ll try my best to explain. Vectors are quantities that have both direction and magnitude. Basically, they can be visualized as arrows in space. When you add two vectors together, it’s like putting the start of the second arrow onto the end of the first arrow and then drawing a new arrow from the start of the first arrow to the end of the second arrow. When both vectors are facing the same direction, the magnitudes add up like scalar values in normal maths (1+1=2), but in most cases, the magnitudes won’t add up that neatly. In fact, if say both vectors have a magnitude of 1 but point in opposite directions, they add up to 0.

I like to imagine relationships between people, whether romantic or otherwise, as vector addition. With the right people, you’ll both or all face the same direction and add up to something bigger. Each person is a complete and whole value, but together, they add up to something greater, maybe not always 1+1, but they still add up. However, sometimes you’ll meet someone who will subtract from you, a vector pointed in the opposite direction. Maybe they won’t be pointing in the exact opposite direction and make you zero, but you still subtract together. What then? I think that’s where we symbolize the relationships that don’t work out, like an old friend from high school pursuing their dream in an opposing direction to yours or your significant other becoming more of a negative impact on your life or a family member going down a path you can’t follow, etc. In life, we’ll find people who will point us in the right or the wrong direction, and it’s up to us to choose whom to add or subtract from our lives.

So then, as some math nerds reading this might thing, what of the vectors that don’t necessarily add or subtract but instead come out with a magnitude still close to 1? This is where I think the analogy starts to get interesting beyond love and romance. The way I see it, I find these vectors to have the most significant effect on our lives because they can turn you towards a different direction without taking away from your magnitude or adding to it much. These are the people in life you may encounter with whom you have little interaction but these interactions can lead you to where you need to go. Still following? Because the analogy is starting to break down and become more abstract, but I’ll try to keep it together.

In my own life, I can likely name a few people who pointed me in a different direction without knowing it. Some of you reading this, especially the ones who were sent the link to this blog early on, might even be those people. In time, I would find my arrow aligning more towards those people, though turning away from those I haven’t seen in a while. These are the people that made me think more positively, opposite to how I was years ago when I was just a total bummer to everyone around me. I am infinitely thankful for the people who set me on the right path, and perhaps someday, I may find the other one who will add me up to two 🙂

There’s a lot more to this analogy I could add, but at that point, I’ll be talking about higher dimensional geometry and a bunch of other nerdy stuff that I don’t wanna bore you to death with, so I’ll end it here. Stay safe and happy, and I hope you too can find completeness!