No not the shakuhachi, the other Japanese bamboo flute. The shinobue. The easy one they give to children. It's already plenty hard for me =)

One flute I use every day, and two others I never use. Mistakes were made.

1. Each note is blown in a different way

I knew that you need to blow “sharper” to reach higher registers, but not that this isn't a binary thing—even in the same register, the further down the pipe you go, the “wider” you need to blow to make the notes sound. This is done with minute adjustments of lips or head position that are very hard to convey in words, and must be found experimentally then drilled to muscle memory. It takes time.

The visualisation that helped me the most is imagining puffing on your hands to warm your fingers, vs. blowing to cool down a burn. You have to control the spectrum of blowing “warm” vs. “cold”. A good exercise is to actually blow onto your palm—do your flute-playing embouchure and, taking care to stay relaxed and fully without tension or compression in your lips: how far can you blow onto your palm and still feel air? Can you direct the air jet up and down to your wrists? Can you make it “warmer” and still reach far?

2. Quality of tone

It feels really nice when you finally become able to make the damn thing make a sound, and again when you finally figure out the trick to kan-on. So you hold onto whatever you did for dear life, terrified that the note is going to disappear. Sadly, you probably sound like ass doing that. We found a lip position that kinda more or less works but is poorly focused so we compensate by blowing too much air, which makes it breathy and full of those little whistles, so we get tense with frustration, which furthers degrades the jet quality, etc.

One reason is going off-tune. Small details of lip and head and flute position change the pitch a bit; it's common to unintentionally go a semitone too flat all over, or else to go flatter on low notes and sharper on high notes. A very helpful exercise is to play the scale to a pitch tracker (I use VocalPitchMonitor on Android, but anything with a line visualisation of the pitch will work).

But it's not just the pitch, it's also the timbre. How clean the note sounds; how full, how pleasant to the ear. There's a distance between making the notes sound, and making the notes sound good . You have to listen to yourself, including by recording yourself, and set it as a goal to make it sound as good as the skilled shinobue players you see on videos.

Learning to play flute made me incredibly jealous of keyboard instrument players who can just press a button and get any note at any time.¹

3. Minimal effort, subjective feeling, and note quality

The good news is that all these things are consonant. For example, chasing the correct pitch with a pitch tracker will automatically improve the timbre too, and make it less breathy, and help you use less air, which lets you relax, which feels good. It's not just a matter of being in tune, but being in tune helps everything else.

I think most beginners will be like me and generally blow way too hard, to make sure to make a sound at all. A very good exercise is: how little air can you use while still keeping the note?

The trick to that is to use the air efficiently. As a test, try making an /s/ sound for as long as you can, and time it: like, sssssss… now try an /h/ sound, as in “h”: hhhhh. Compare how long you can keep both sounds without going out of breath: pretty massive difference, isn't it? The /s/ has a way more focused jet, too, it will hit your hand much more sharply.

Think of a balloon blowing air; if the aperture is small the air will last much longer, and also blow much faster. But also, you don't want such a small aperture that you have to tense your lips to do it. There's a balance.

You don't want the air jet for flute playing to be too fast, but also you don't want to waste air to reach the desired speed. Not only this will make you go dizzy and out of breath, but also will damage the note quality. I've often had this experience where I notice I'm blowing too hard in ryo, so I make an effort to relax and do a puff as soft and relaxed as possible, “pu~“, and unintentionally I kick into kan—I was pushing all that air to keep the lowest register, when a tiny little fraction of effort would be enough to hit even kan, if used efficiently.

If you ever tried to learn to sing, or speak for the theatre, or do kiai in kendō, it's the same principle. Less air, less muscle tension, more sound.

And the nice thing is, when you hit that sweet spot just right, it feels good. Subjectively, in the sensations you have internally. Kinda like when you manage to make a glass cup ring; or, more accurately, the simple pleasure of blowing into a bottle and managing to make it sound just right, full and resonant. And when it feels good like that, the note also sounds good.

So the process of training is like, chasing that high. Drilling to muscle memory the small adjustments you have to do to get that minimum-effort resonance across all notes and registers. It actually gets kind of addictive, in a random-reinforcement, lootbox kinda way—blow a note, that was a bit breathy; change a bit, it disappeared; try again, not yet; try again—aw yiss that's the stuff that hits the spot 😌✨

4. Bad flutes make it harder

As a beginner and with such a fiddly instrument as the flute, there's always a tension like, “is it just me or the flute to blame?” You don't want to spend thousands in a professional instrument you can't make good use of, but how cheap is too cheap?

I originally got a 20€ shinobue online and it was super breathy and just very hard to sound. So I thought, I need something a bit better than that, but out of prejudice I didn't want to have a plastic one like the Suzuki (if I'm playing the shinobue I wanted one made of bamboo dammit, it's called shinobue, not resinbue or purasuchikkubue). So I got something sold from Japan as “Yamamoto” for 50€. This sounded much better, until I realise every note was one semitone too flat.

Common beginner issue, right? Thinking it was surely my poor technique I set to study my blowing and make it more kari. But the weird thing is, when I hit the nominal note, I could only do it really whispery. The meri notes sounded full and resonant, at exactly 1 semitone below what they should be.

So I got the bug and started looking it up online. There wasn't much information about this flute online but finally I saw on Amazon Japan reviwers going like, “what the hell, this shinobue is one semitone too low”.

Finally, I saved up more money, took the plunge, and got something out of a reputable manufacturer—a Rakusui sudake, which came at some 150€ including shipping and import fees. And yup, in this one I wasn't too flat at all. (In fact I now tend to play a little too sharp all the time, due to developing bad habits trying to compensate for the “Yamamoto”). If you compare them in the photo at the top, the Yamamoto actually has the holes physically farther away than the Rakusui; I'm not physicist but I know that a longer piper is lower-pitched… The Rakusui is also generally much easier to get a good sound out of it. The little black generic just sounds like a ghost of a whispered note.

I'm sure a skilled player could make the low-quality shinobue work, but I'm not a skilled player. In the end I wasted 70€ in flutes that sound bad and I never use, in addition to the salty 150€ of my Rakusui.

So if you want to try it out with minimal investment and don't want to be forever in doubt whether it's you or the shinobue, I think it's better to just buy a plastic Suzuki (or other known, reputable brand) and be done with it. You can have a shinobue under 50€ made of synthetic materials, or a bamboo one in the 100€ range, but I don't know if there are good bamboo ones cheaper than that. (Price estimates for Europe residents in 2025.)

5. Tension and ego

This is the opposite of the talk about minimum effort from before. The biggest advantage of edge-blown woodwinds, as opposed to something like a recorder, is that all the emotion and expressivity of the performer appears in the tone. The biggest disadvantage is that all the emotion and expressivity appears in the tone. If you're tense, even if you can hit loud, ringing notes, they will sound strained and bad.

Sounding bad makes you even tenser, so it sounds even worse…

You have to kinda work on the psychology of this, it's a bit paradoxical but it's the paradox of performance for all arts. Stop trying too hard to sound good, so that you can reach your goal of sounding good. It helps to have some good ol' humility; if you're like me you want to be good at this thing already, to impress your friends, to at least be able to say: “yeah I play the shinobue” without feeling like a fraud. That desire makes the notes sound bad. Why do we want to impress our friends anyway? Our friends already like us, they don't have to be impressed by anything. You don't make friends by being good at things in the first place; we're cherished for being good company, not for being impressive.

It helps me to think of taking myself out of the way somehow, like instead of trying to look like a badass shinobue player who appears in the horizon with shrill whistles looking all sexy and yuugen (like Vampire Princess Miyu from the hit anime series Vampire Princess Miyu), I'm just sitting down here to “let” the music reach the flute. The music is up somewhere in the Platonic world, I'm just allowing it to manifest, like being possessed; it's not me doing it. Or else I think of it in spirit of “offering”, like I'm not playing to look cool, I'm offering a gift—to my plants; to little insects; to the moon and the sun rays in spring, anything that won't make judgements.

Of course I still want to look cool, I'm only human. But actively striving to look cool gets in the way of playing music (and of looking cool, for that matter). So I have to kinda like, identify that desire and carefully set it aside for a while.

6. All that diaphragm stuff is real

Teachers will talk a lot about the strength of notes coming from the belly, the core, the diaphragm, the legs and feet, the posture, the dāntián, etc. etc. At first this all sounded abstract and wishy-washy to me, but no, it's actually a thing. I'll be playing the shino and everything sounds hollow, then I realise I'm hunching on my chair and my belly is being compressed like an accordion, so I prim up and brace my core and boom, suddenly it sounds good.

It's not a subtle effect at all. If you did all the diaphragm and posture stuff and saw no improvement, the issue was probably with the lips or flute position. When you fix the core breathing, you can tell. And it really has to do with bracing, as you would for lifting weights or taking a punch to the gut. In fact Miki Saito has described a performer who says when they have trouble hitting dai-kan on stage, they will ground their feet and imagine ripping the ground apart—a technique I recall from Stronger by Science's advice on proper bracing for back squats, of all things.

There's this video series by Kano Yasukazu that I find highly underrated, and he spends kinda the entire first part just describing elaborate, almost ritualistic protocol to take posture, step into position, slide your hands under and over the instrument, etc. This isn't unusual for Japanese culture stuff, it's the same kind of formalised body movement used in tea ceremony, etiquette and so on. But I realised this is actually quite useful for taming something as fiddly and temperamental as the quality of your breath; if you do this little body ritual every time before playing, it becomes a trigger, you get into the performing space just by anticipation.

7. Dynamics

When you finally manage to make a passably good tone, it rings clear and in tune and—loud. So now that you can make it loud with little air, you get so happy that you keep that maximum loudness at all times. Then anything you play sounds harsh and grating.

You know that saying “don't just play the notes, play the music”? That has to do with rhythm, of course, but also with variations in loudness. Inoue Mami has a Youtube channel where she puts up a lot of shinobue tutorials including a notation for loudness. One approach to learning this is to try to find the lowest possible volume you can maintain each note, and improve that (it's harder on higher notes and higher registers; from my understanding, that's normal and to be expected from the instrument, the higher notes are just louder; but also try to play with your range and see how quiet you can still reliably sound them). Then pick a piece you like and work on making sure you can play notes going loud and quiet at appropriate times (record yourself and listen!). Kōjō-no-Tsuki is a good first one. Kagome Kagome is a great challenge because the melody is so minimal that if you don't get the rhythm and dynamics both right, it sounds like crap, there's no melodic line to save you.

One technique done with dynamics is “waving”, that is, tremolo—but it can also be really slow, like, going up and down the volume on a long note. After knowing about it I spot players doing that for effect here and there.

8. The zero note

This will sound obvious to many but many fingering charts and tutorials I used at the beginning simply failed to mention the fingering 0: cover every single hole, including the tuning hole, and lift only 6 (middle finger of top hand). That gives you the equivalent of a 7 meri (a Bb on a 8-hon), like half-holing the 7. On most flutes it's actually a bit off-key (on mine it's more of a flat A# than a nominal Bb) and you can compensate for that by blowing kari, though I find that dash of microtonality to be charming actually, adding to the eeriness of the shino (compare the equivalent “u” note on the shaku). Kōjō-no-Tsuki is again a good piece to practice this (on an 8-hon).

9. Transposing

Being new to music in general, I didn't realise if a song ends up with too many half-fingerings on your size of shino, you can move the notes up and down a bit and usually reduce to one or zero half-notes. This is a bit tricky because a do-re-mi shinobue is tuned to the Western “chromatic scale” which has 7 notes, but also modern music is written in the “diatonic scale” which has 12, and since 7 is not a multiple of 12 the extra 5 create an irregular pattern. You can figure out how many of the notes to move by looking at a piano or learning the “circle of fifths”, but I'm lazy and just use an online transposition tool.

10. Korogashi/magaru

If you play the shinobue at all you know yubi-uchi (tapping the higher note briefly to repeat a note). If you listen to shinobue music you probably noted some sort of more elaborate grace notes that players do when changing to different notes, too. That's variously called korogasu (rolling), magaru (bending), and probably other names. The technique for this wasn't obvious to me, they do it so fast that even on video slow motion it's not too clear:

• When rolling down, you first go higher. For example, to do 6-5, you do 6-7-6-5.
• When rolling up, you overshoot. You go even higher. For example, to do 5-6, you do 5-6-7-6.

Mami has a tutorial on this. It's not a hard technique, just takes training to get it quick enough.

11. Tapping under

To do yubi-uchi, you always tap the higher note (except on fingerings like 7 where you're forced to tap down). Korogaru, too, favours the higher note. Both of those add higher-pitched grace notes, and to my mind that's part of what gives shinobue music its “shinobue” feel (along with doing everything legato).

However, every so often I spot players tapping below instead, and it sounds better in some contexts. I can't explain why, but when trying to play Asa Branca do Sertão with yubi-uchi, for example, it sounds better if I tap down when the melody is descending, and up with ascending. Otonoha's excellent arrangement of Cosmo Canyon from FF7 taps down at the first note, even though it goes up afterwards, and it does sound better that way. Maybe it has to do with melodic harmony or something? 🤷‍♀️

I don't know if tapping down is a conventional shinobue technique or if it has a name.

---

Footnotes

1: I was so envious of keyboard instrument players that I got a melodica. Then I realised that in a melodica—that's a harmonica with piano keys, basically—the higher notes are farther away from the lips than the lower, which means you have to adjust your blowing dynamics according to the note…

Seriously though, it's a cheap instrument and I find it an excellent tool to study music in general, like trying out harmonies or figuring out scales. It's just much easier to visualise the notes on a thing with keys. Also it looks and sounds inherently funny, which helps dispel the seriousness and tension of my practice sessions.

Min'yō: Folksongs, often working songs, shanties etc.

Koten-uta: A generic word for “old songs”. Often used for “city songs” (miyako-bushi) like Sakura Sakura, Edo-period koto compositions and the like.

Jiuta: Edo-period, urban ensembles of koto + shamisen + shakuhachi.

Warabe-uta: Children's folksongs.

Komori-uta: Lullabies, a surprisingly productive genre.

Tsugaru-jamisen: A distinctively fast shamisen genre from the Tsugaru peninsula, kinda power metal shredding on the shami.

Gagaku: Classical/courtly music, based on Chinese classical music.

Ohayashi: Festival songs. Drums, whistles, flute loops, yells.

Hayashi/noh theatre music: Not to be confused with the above. Ghostly and eerie. Dissonant melody on purpose, no harmony, no conductor.

Kabuki theatre music/nagauta: A “mainstream” counterpart to the opaque noh music.

Biwa-uta: Epic poetry played with a lute (biwa).

Shōmyō: Buddhist chanting. Excellent if you like droning.

Honkyoku: Shakuhachi pieces, solo or (rarely) in two or more. No set rhythm; follows the breath and intuition of the performer. Lots of note-bending, breathiness, rough sounds for effect. Sounds like what bamboo would play if bamboo could play music without humans involved. Originally Buddhist music, was forcibly secularised.

Kagura: There's two distinct styles for holy shintō music; mi-kagura, peformed at the imperial palace, is close to gagaku, while sato-kagura, performed for dances and folk rituals, is closer to ohayashi, with fast flutes and accelerandos.

Jojōka: “Lyric songs”, a sort of Meiji-period folk revival, blending a reevaluation of Japanese musicality with Western concepts of music. Set to authoral poetry. In particular, school songs (shōka) acquired a bit of the status of folk songs due to their use in education (Kōjō no Tsuki is in this category). Also includes kayō—at this point we're at pop songs from the 1910s/20s.

Enka: “Ballads”. Something akin to country or blues, characterised by pentatonic scales, very heavy vibrato, and sad lyrics about lost love and drinking. Stereotypical “karaoke music”. Stereotypical “old person thing”.

Taiko: Big chonky satisfying traditional drums, but played with jazz drum technique in large ensembles. See it live if you have the chance, it loses a lot on recording. Newer genre than people think.

Ryūkyū: The archipelago is a distinct culture colonised by Japan and has its own entire musical tradition, that I haven't looked into yet so I won't try to list.

The thing hidden in the sword.

Is it, like, samurai zen meditation or something?

---

Last kendō class was newbie day and I got to be the sempai for a while (we split in little groups) which was very rewarding for me as I'm like, a frustrated IT drone who wanted to be a teacher. I just love teaching in general.

Then after class one of the newbies was asking the actual teacher about the spiritual meaning of kendō and such. Which is a bit of a faux pas, see, we don't talk about stuff like that. It sounds incredibly corny to even try to say it but all that stuff about “the dao that can be spoken of” yadda yadda is actually too real, like, when you start talking about “the state of no mind” and “sen-sen-no-sen” and whatnot, you quickly find yourself larping a fantasy of a zen monk. And while I am a big proponent of larping in general, there's a point to distinguishing when roleplay is roleplay. So kendō people only ever talk about like, the angle of the knees and how to push momentum into a thrust. They say at the outset that “the purpose of kendō is to train the mind” and leave it at that; the rest becomes self-evident by doing, if you do it enough.

But this was clearly like, a spirituality-minded guy and he's a beginner, it's the privilege of beginners to break the taboos and ask uncomfortable questions. It's a reasonable question if you're considering whether to get into the discipline or not, and your interests are primarily spiritual. So the teacher was being like, “people usually can't explain why they do kendō. It's not fun.¹ It's no good for self-defence.² 'I do it because it's a thing I do.' But when you keep at it, there's… a secret.” Which is his way of saying what I described as, there's some hidden thing inside the sword; it calls to us.

1: [citation needed] 2: [citation needed]

But then the newbie asked point blank: And what's it? what's the secret?

Pressed to put in words the unwordable, the teacher struggled for a long while, then said: “The… thing that you think is 'you' is not really in charge.”

Which put me to thinking, even now. I guess it's as good a way to say it as it can be, though I still feel like, talking about it is a bit of a red herring. You can be intrigued by this idea and discuss the idea and kinda bat for the idea, make it a part of the “you”, like pinning political badges to one's jacket. But to be in the space without “ideas” and “yous” is a different kind of thing altogether, and talking about the idea too much stops you from getting that. Still, the questions have to be answered.

---

Teacher often compares kendō to tennis. It's a good way to demistify it. It's a sport. It's played 1-on-1. You hold a whacking tool. You try to score more points than the other person. You spend years shaping and optimising your minute body movements and fastest reflexes to perfectly fit the needs of the scoring, with split-second reactions.

The only difference is that instead of trying to whack a ball you whack one another's heads. You're the ball. It's full-contact tennis.

(And yes there is all this spiritual stuff and so on but I'm pretty sure that a high-level tennis player will reach similar states of flow and whatnot.)

I think that's a good metaphor, but to elaborate on that evaluation of kendō as “not fun”, I would like to compare it with ballet. I mean I never did ballet, but I know people who did. I'm told the training is absolutely thankless and gruelling; months upon months, years of doing repetitive exercises and painful foot blisters and potential joint injury, before you can do much of anything. Kendō is like that, very steep learning curve. The way of handling the body is not natural, and nothing like most martial arts either.³ You joined it trying to be a badass swordslinger, and then you have to spend entire classes inching around the floor like an awkward penguin, then you forget not to put strength in your right hand, which everyone can tell right away and call you out on it, so you fix your grip, but now you lost unity with the back foot. Repeat for seemingly forever.

But if you put up with it up to the point where you can actually wear the armour and do matches? If you stay with it up to the point where there's this strange telepathy happening, where you can tell what the other person is feeling and doing despite not seeing their face or anything, from their sword alone? Oh yes, now we can dance.

I have a lot of fun at the matches! Kinda like the best 3D fighting game I ever played. You still have to keep doing a lot of unfun exercises and stuff—way more repetitive exercises than duels—but I think that's true for any sport. The gravitas, the high-impact, the like, stillness stillness BAM “doooo!“—it's definitely a thrill, incomparably more interesting to me than the way Olympic fencing chose to gamify swords.

Still, I don't think anybody does it for the fun, not alone. If you want to have fun, there's much better ways to do that. A night out at the lesbian bar, for example. If you want to learn self-defence, too, you can spend the same amount of effort learning guns and muay thai and trauma aid, and you'd be much better off. Or even if you just want to feel like a swordswoman, I mean you can go to a ren faire and hold a real metal sword and wear actual armour at HEMA, and all of those things are great I'm not dissing them. But kendō lives in this awkward space: a sport that seems to resent being competitive and refuses to be part of Olympics or similar events, a fencing where you only ever hold bamboo and wooden sticks, a martial art that's so abstracted as to forgo any claims of applicability, a “method of disciplining the heart” that never discusses spirituality. It is, I think, a thing of compromises.

At the core of kendō is the idea that sparring is important, that whatever compromises it requires, we can't just do kata; martial arts are dead if you don't have opponents actively trying to win against you, coming at you at full speed. (Even a boxer's hand moves significantly faster than the brain can react; a sword multiples this speed several times due to the lever principle; if you never experience that, you don't understand how fighting works, you cannot rely on “if they do this I do that”.) Sparring is important, but the winning is not. Or, well, the winning is important, but also it's not. it's hard to explain. If you make the sport be about winning, then it becomes a “mere sport” in the depreciative sense; it gets sidetracked by money and ego and sponsorships. You have to try to win, to want that, whole-heartedly, and at the same time you have to not try to win, and in fact not to try anything at all.

---

3) Body movement in kendō has something more in common with roller skating or, even more closely, skiing, I think. I expect people with that background will have an advantage in learning the footwork. People from karate or boxing struggle to unlearn drawing strength from hip torque, and how to keep their dang feet pointing forwards (but they have an advantage in the sense of spacing and timing).

The notes in the Japanese folksong Sakura, Sakura, namely E F A B C, form a rather sombre scale (1-4-2-1-4) that's about as iconic as the song itself; to the point where both the song and the scale are downright stereotypes. Play anything in these notes and it sounds “Japanese”. But what is the scale called?

It's not this one either.

All over the Anglophone Internet, you'll see references to the “In” scale—”shadow scale”, as in one half of yin/yang (Japanese In/Yō)—as being the name of the Sakura scale. You will also see it variously refereed to as “Sakura scale”, “Miyako-bushi”, “Hirajōshi”, “Iwato”, “Kumoi”, or just “Japanese”. And you will spot mentions of something called “Insen” or “In sen” scale, which also shows as “Japanese scale”, and is alternately claimed to be the same thing as the Sakura scale—makes sense, since “In sen(pō)” is just “In mode”—or else something else entirely: 1-4-2-3-2. For example, scales-chords.com gives “Japanese scale (In sen)” in C as C Db F G Bb. Sakura transposed to C would use C Db F G Ab. This matters a lot; the Sakura scale has two intervals of a single semitone, which harmonically are dissonant, and give the scale its moody, melancholic atmosphere. The song Sakura adapted to the supposed “Insen” scale would be played with E F A B D; that just sounds off.

English Wikipedia also distinguishes “In scale” from “Insen” (Japanese for “In mode”), and claims the latter is a koto tuning by Yatsuhashi Kengyō that differs from Hirajōshi (=Sakura scale) by one note. It gives no sources for that except a vague link to a generic Japanese online dictionary (kotobank), which says the exact opposite: In-senpō (“shadow mode”) = In-onkai (“shadow scale”) = Hirajōshi (“plain tuning”). Also I'm pretty sure Kengyō predates the terminology “In”; and I could find no such tuning for koto either.

What gives?

Well here's a table I translated/adapted from the Japanese wikipedia:

Yō/Inaka-bushi ("light/country")	Ascending	C D F G Bb	2-3-2-3-2
	Descending	A G F D C	2-2-3-2-3
In/Miyako-bushi ("shadow/capital")	Ascending	C Db F G Bb	1-4-2-3-2
	Descending	Ab G F Db C	1-2-4-1-4

Mystery solved. The original classification of scales in yin/yang, “In” and Yō”, actually had two variants for each class. What is often called “In” in English, aka the Sakura scale proper, is the “In descending” (in reverse order; just read it descendingly in the table). And what is often called “In sen” is the “In ascending”.

Blessedly, that table was given with a citation: This analysis was from Meiji-period Uehara Rokushirō, Zokugaku Senritsu-kō. What he did was to classify the scales found in folk music as “yin/city” and “yang/country” styles, then correlate standard instrument tunings to Western music theory, and also proposing that the scales change a note when ascending.

---

Personally I think Koizumi Fumio's tetrachord analysis (which focuses not on scales and octaves but the two nucleus tones and the colour-giving note between them) makes more sense as something that reflects the character of Japanese music, rather than trying to fit it into Western ways of thinking about music. I'm no musician or theorist but it just immediately struck me as accurate and useful; the tetrachords for ryūkyū or min'yō totally do sound like ryūkyūan or min'yō music, the tetrachord for miyakobushi captures the essence of songs like Sakura, and Koizumi's two nuclei feel much more natural to me than the notion of a “scale in the key of”—fooling around with the notes when playing Sakura on shinobue, I always felt like they dance around the gravitation of both E and A, rather than resolving into a “going home” to either of them. This is typical of J. folksongs in general.

I'm way out of my depth here but I don't immediately see the motivation for the “ascending” versions of the scales, and also I'm not sure where are these used. Are there folksongs using the “ascending” scales, or is this an artefact of Uehara's theory? Is it based on some sort of variant koto tuning or small deviations of canonical “scales” in practical contexts? (Koizumi's theory is more direct, like, “ok there are two nuclei separated by a perfect fourth, plus a third note between them that gives the melody its character, that's about it, all the other notes? oh they're just extras lol”)

In any case I think it's clear that the “In descending” is the one with most relevance. Japanese sources tend to prefer “Miyako-bushi” to refer to it. I also like “Sakura scale” in an English context because unlike all the “Insen” stuff it's unambiguous (it's the scale defined by the song) and evocative (everyone knows the song).

---

What about the “Hirajōshi scale”? That's properly a koto tuning, as suggested by -jōshi (“tuning”). The modern version is, if you tune string 1 to D4, the others would go:

D4 - G3 - A3 - A3# - D4 - D4# - G4 - A4 - A4# - D5 - D5# - G5 - A5

D D# G A A# ; 1-4-2-1-4. Hirajōshi is the name of the koto tuning equivalent of the Miyakobushi scale. The same goes for “Iwato” and “Kumoi”, which are modes:

The names and exact intonation of each tuning will vary slightly depending on the ryūha (school style), but I've included here three well-known tunings. The most basic is Hira-jōshi [plain tuning], which uses the Miyako-bushi scale with strings 1 and 5 as they main note [key/tonic/prime]; then there's 雲居調子 Kumoi-jōshi ['in the clouds' tuning, 'distant' tuning; reference to a scene of longing in Genji?], which uses the Miyako-bushi scales with the main note on string 2, a fifth lower than Hira tuning; and finally Iwato-jōshi [“Iwato tuning”; a place name, the meaning of the reference is lost on me], with string 4 as the main, a fourth higher than Hira tuning. Changing the tuning merely transposes the melody; all of them are in the same Miyako-bushi scale.

This is credited to Hirano Kenji 1989, which I found in this exceptionally informative article by Mizusaki Masato. I still haven't fully sank my teeth into it, but the one silver lining about the confusion of “In” and “Insen scale” is that I found this text when trying to make sense of it. It's great.

So in a nutshell, “Hirajōshi”, “Iwato” and “Kumoi” all come from the same context, i.e. koto tunings based on the Miyakobushi/Sakura scale; and it's a random accident that the Anglosphere carried -jōshi (=“tuning”) for one of them but not the others. It should be noted that the koto originally didn't use the Miyakobushi or other folk scales, but rather the classical Ritsu scale from gagaku (court) music. Yatsuhashi Kengyō (1624-1645) is credited in bringing the miyakobushi scale as a koto tuning, seminally in the composition Rokudan-no-Shirabe. I do not know, however, that he is credited with inventing the “In mode scale (Japanese).”

Preamble: Words have meaning. Grammar signals meaning. Pay very close attention to the title. I worded it the way it is for a reason. Make sure you understand what I actually wrote in the title, instead of what you wanted it to read, before moving on. Note also that much of the discussion here is based on Chinese sources because—get this!—only Chinese sources have anything meaningful to say about what a term “really means”. Westerners trying to claim what it “really means” are just making idiots of themselves and revealing more about their thought processes than they reveal about Chinese ones.

A capsule history of 白左's proper meaning

In 2010, the pseudonymous “Li Shuo” coined the term 白左 (lit. “white left”) on the social platform Renren in an article titled “The Pseudo-Morality of the Western 'White Left' and China's 'Patriotic Scientists'”. At birth the term referred very narrowly to young western leftists who sympathized with the communist revolution pre-1949 and came to China to assist it. It was very much a pejorative term but it was very specifically applied to a very small number of people.

It was also a term that came from a self-identified right libertarian. Put a pin on that. We're going to circle back around to this.

As is usual in language, and doubly so in the modern Internet era, there was a rapid shift in meaning, starting in about 2013. It no longer referred to this one, specific group from history, but rather became a generalized label. The implied criticism morphed into the subtext of people out of touch with reality; people who spout lofty ideals while being blind to the real-world problems around them.

The big explosion in usage started in 2015 as bewildered Chinese netizens watched the social fallout from the refugee crisis in Europe. It is unfortunate that, from my perspective, they derived the wrong conclusion from this, criticizing, for example, Germany's “open door” policy as a case of bleeding-heart saviours ignoring reality to everyone's detriment. (Note: I don't think that Germany handled the crisis well, but I don't reach the conclusion that some Chinese netizens reached that Germany shouldn't have accepted the refugees at all.)

This big explosion continued in 2016 as bemused Chinese observers divided on which was worse: Hilary Clinton's so-called “political correctness” or Trump's populism. (Note: both were considered bad. They weren't deciding on which they supported, they were deciding on which of the two was the worst.) In that period, 白左 finally settled in a relatively stable meaning as a criticism of western identity politics.

Now let's add the wrong meaning

Here's where we circle back to the origin. In 2017 the term was added to the Urban Dictionary with an already divergent meaning. It was largely correct, but it already contained the seeds of how the term would be read in the west: right wing. UD rapidly had definitions added that included equivalents to “libtard”, “woke”, and other very American views on life. This is the unfortunate product of people not understanding several key things and instead focusing on the first use of it by a self-proclaimed libertarian right-wing guy.

However it wasn't until 2021 that Tucker Carlson's use of the term to attack Democrats that 白左 became part of mainstream western political discourse. Ironically on the right wing. (I find it personally hilarious that a 电视脱口秀演员 like Carlson, a veritable 流量奸商 or 右壬, didn't introduce other terms from Chinese that were as harshly critical of the right like 川建国 or 懂王 being used to describe Donald Trump. It's almost as if he was cherry-picking Chinese criticisms of the west to only attack one side. Almost.)

This is why most westerners believe that Chinese people are right-supportive. Because one Chinese political epithet that was poorly-understood and badly-translated was weaponized by the Anglophone right and used as an unsubtle bludgeon against their opposition. All while ignoring the far less subtle open critiques of the American right.

For purposes of this essay we will be sticking with the correct usage. And if you don't think the Chinese usage of a Chinese term used in Chinese net haunts is the correct one, get out of here. This blog isn't for you. I'm sure there's some white supremacy sites you'll like better. Like Faux News or the New York Times. Or maybe Storm Front.

Note: I'm not saying that study of the term's evolution and abuse in Anglophone circles is not a valid field of study; that's sociolinguistics in a nutshell, in fact. I'm saying I'm focusing on the Chinese usage of a Chinese term because the abuse of language by barbarians is out of scope. (Yes, the use of “barbarians” is a joke.)

The interesting spin-off

While the American left was reacting badly to the American right weaponizing a foreign term that neither side fully understood, the Chinese use of the term, with the rise of 网左 (Internet left) as a concept, started to be applied domestically as a criticism of overly dogmatic Chinese leftists. Observers tracking trends in Chinese cyberspace consistently document 白左 and 网左 appearing across political discussions, with trend reports confirming this usage as recently as late 2025. Being branded 白左 was in effect saying “you're so dogmatically left that you're like a white person”.

So a term that started life as a criticism of a historical group of people by a right-libertarian, that then mutated as a criticism of perceived impractical leftists in the west (getting internalized at that stage by the west), and then mutated further is now a domestic criticism of Chinese people by Chinese people.

But ... why? Why is this term so long-lived and so adaptive?

Here's where I get personal

The reason is ... white people don't really have a great reputation in non-white circles. It's a shock, I know, but you don't. And yes, right now, I'm addressing white folk. Even the white folk that have “good intentions”.

See the problem is that a whole lot of white people have good intentions. But they also have a degree of arrogance that is staggering. It was white people, for example, who set back queer culture in China, losing three decades of careful diplomacy that was paying dividends in recognition and acceptance ... until an arrogant LGBTQ+ group in the USA convinced a group in Shanghai that a pride parade, one that didn't have permission from authorities, was how you get results.

And they weren't wrong. There were definitely results. And the queer community in China has suffered for it nationally. About 40-70 million queer people (according to UN-aligned estimates), who were finally making positive steps toward recognition and acceptance, are back being suppressed, closeted, and and viewed with intense suspicion and revulsion. The only thing that hasn't been reversed as a result of that disastrous American intervention is the medical position on homosexuality, et al. We're thankfully not reverting back to the stage where being queer is a mental disorder that can be “cured”...

Did they mean to do this? OF COURSE NOT! Hell, I'll go a step farther. They weren't the whole reason. Rather like how there's a whole host of machinery inside a gun that has to work in concert to expel the bullet from it, there was a whole host of public security frameworks and public opinion shifts that were part of the sudden reversals in LGBTQ+ rights in China.

The thing is, that machinery in guns needs a trigger to be pulled to put it into action and send that bullet on its way. And the same was needed for the sudden shift in LGBTQ+ rights in China. The Shanghai affair was the trigger. The Chinese state, in its modern form and in much of its imperial past, has operated on a simple premise: unsanctioned public confrontation is not a tactic of persuasion, but a challenge to authority. The methods of response have shifted; the underlying logic has not. The pattern is consistent across history: method matters as much as or more than the message. Even when the state was leaning toward acceptance of queer culture, despite the already dubious status it had as “foreign ideological infiltration”, the open defiance of holding a public protest without permission was a uniquely potent trigger that led to the sudden, drastic, tragic reversals.

The sad fact of the matter is that good intentions and five bucks gets you a small coffee at Starbucks. What matters is outcomes, and the outcomes of the 白左 set are largely negative. The “white left” believes that just being “in the right” is enough; they're generally living in safe environs (by world standards) and think they know things better from their cruising altitude of 30,000ft than boots on the ground.

They're very much a model of people out of touch with reality, who think that having their heart bleed is enough for them to be a force for good, who ignore reality in favour of ideals and slogans. They're the Red Guard, in short. They spout slogans and ideals, without regard to physical reality, and leave misery and death in their wake.

On the title

The title of this rant is On the toxicity of “白左” or “white left”. Note that it's not the white left. It is the quoted term.

That, in the end, is what this essay is really about. Yes, it contains vituperative criticism of white “liberals” and “progressives”. (And, naturally, of the white right.) But I want to focus back on the term. I am, quite self-awarely and ironically, using the term to diagnose a pattern even as, starting now, I warn against its reification.

I've explained why the term has proven so long-lived and adaptive. But the more important question is: should it be? It gained traction because it described a real phenomenon. It was short, pithy, and largely accurate from the perspective of its original users. And it could be deployed across a wide variety of contexts.

That, however, is precisely where the problem lies. Its adaptability allows it to serve legitimate criticism of a genuine political tendency, but it's just as easily wielded as a bludgeon by the Western right (but who cares about barbarian duckspeak?)¹ to attack ideological opponents: “See, even Chinese netizens think libtards are bad, LOL!” And it's used, too, to beat down sincere leftists who need guidance in praxis, not dismissive labels and silencing. Its very pithiness makes it, in my view, a textbook example of Orwellian “duckspeak”: catchy, universally deployable, but ultimately a substitute for thought.

It becomes an excuse to shirk our duty to educate, to guide, and to build toward a more coherent, humane future. Just like the sloganeering of the 白左 themselves.

---

¹ I will personally send 500g of my favourite tea to the first person who figures out this deep cut of a joke!

Trafik Kazası Kusur Oranınan İtiraz

Sistemlerin her zaman kusursuz çalıştığına dair o tuhaf inancımız, ufak bir trafik kazası geçirip de Tramer sisteminde “Yüzde 100 Kusurlu” ilan edildiğimiz gün paramparça olur. Bir makine, yoldaki o görünmez çukuru, karşı tarafın sinyal vermeden şerit değiştirmesini veya o anki fren refleksini göremez; sadece kağıttaki iki boyutlu krokiye bakar ve faturayı size keser.

Hukuk ise makinelerin bu kör noktalarını düzeltmek için vardır.

Hatalı bir kaza tutanağının faturasını ödemek zorunda değilsiniz. O %100'lük ağır kusur oranını, bağımsız bilirkişiler ve Sigorta Tahkim Komisyonu aracılığıyla değiştirmek mümkün. Olayın sadece metal bir çarpışma değil, bir hak arama mücadelesi olduğunu unutmayın. Sürecin nasıl işlediğine dair harika bir yasal döküm arayanlar için şu kaynak çok ufuk açıcı: https://www.tuvahukuk.com/trafik-kazasinda-kusur-oranina-itiraz/

#hukuk #trafikkazası #hakaramak #tazminat #tramer #adalet

Did I fall for the elaborate scam, even when I had a inkling that it likely is? – Update – I did.

Coming back from office yesterday (9th April) evening around 8.30 pm, as usual, I had my earphones plugged in listening to a podcast. I was just 10-15 minutes away from home walking on the footpath. A man approached with a usual pitiable expressions and said something in frail voice, which I couldn't understand as I had earphones in, and being apathetic that I am, I just passed by ignoring. After going few steps ahead I thought let's just check if he needs monies or information or something else. If he asks for money, I am out. I can try to help with information.

Once upon time, when I was waiting at a bus-stand, I had dodged a scam by offering to get a man a meal when he claimed to have stuck in Bengluru who refused the meal after walking with me for few minutes towards a restaurant. Point being, I was kind of ready and confident that I can dodge these kinds.

So I went back, he was around the same place only, but I noticed a woman and a girl child with him. I asked him “What? What do you need?” He said, “Hindi, hum marathi, hindi samazega kya?” (Here onward we spoke in Marathi only, following is English translation.) Me: “ohh, then let's talk in Marathi only. I can understand.” He: “wow, you have met like a god, no one here is understanding the language or helping. We had came a couple of weeks back here from Hyderabad and we worked at the construction site for last two weeks but contractor betrayed and is not paying a dime. It is now not possible to feed ourselves here, we are going back home but do not have means to carry out the long journey.” The accent seemed little familiar. Me: “Where do you want to go?” He: “Washim, Akola.” Now, to give a little context, Washim is just an hour drive from my hometown and thus I know area a little too well. I am at least familiar with major town names, have directional sense. I immediately thought to myself, how coincidental? Maybe I can probe more and make sure about the details. But being from nearby area there was already the development of a soft corner. He was winning, without even trying. Moreover, having traveled multiple times by train I know the how hectic and long the journey can be. It is a more than 24 hrs and there is no daily direct train to Washim. Me: “Where in Washim?” He: “Aasegaon Pen” I had in recent past visited Lonar crater and coincidentally a family friends in-laws are from a village named Maslaa Pen. That village was basically in-route from the Lonar to hometown. So I remembered the name well. Me: “Is it near Maslaa Pen?” (Because of same suffix, that was an obvious guess) He: “Yes, there is Karkhana (factory) there”. There was puzzled look on his face, probably saying, how do you know so better. Me: “I am from Pusad” They all got relieved hearing that. He reiterated that I have met him like a god ( now I think that could have worked too well). He: “I am embarrassed to even beg like this with (in front) of wife and a child. Never thought I will have to see this day.” And few more lines on the same line. The woman also pitched in now. She: “My sister was given to (married to a guy from) Kali Tembhi, but after her passing away we are estranged now. There is not much connection. (My guess, Kali Tembhi is supposed to be nearby Pusad, I am not particularly aware, there are multiple Kali nearby.) I think, by this time, I had already decided subconsciously to help, but still wanted to do more checks. Me: “So how are you going to go now?” He: “There is a train to Nanded at 11.” Me: “Hmm, it will take 24 hrs to reach” He: “Yes. Then from there another train to Washim and then bus to Aasegaon Pen” Me: “We have family friends from Maslaa pen, surname is Deshmukh” I got my phone out and searched for Aasegaon Pen on google maps. It showed around where I had hoped it would, and I also searched for Maslaa Pen and it was nearby, the details were checking out. I asked for the phone number, he gave a number, I called that number, that rang but it wasn't his handset. No one answered. That was a red-flag. He said, he might have made a mistake. Then he asked for my number and rang my number. I asked if he has UPI, he said he does not. I still copied the number and checked on the Gpay, and at least it was not registered there. I asked for name – he said – “Sunil Pawar”. Now I have saved this as 'Sunil Pawar Scammer? Aasegaon Pen', and the number is 9075998790. He: “See help as you can.” He did not specifically ask for money or food or anything. Seeing that it is already around 9pm and train scheduled around 11.30pm, it was not prudent to offer dinner at some nearby restaurant, cause in here, it takes at least 1.5 hrs to reach railway station by city bus. I was still not so sure, and I remembered I only have a couple of hundred rupees notes in my pocket. He repeated the same sentence again a couple of times. The woman chiked in that it is already late and they need to reach station also. This was a case of 'an appeal to urgency' I did spot that and it did raise a red flag in my mind but I guess the my emotional self had already took over, I took out the pocket got 2 notes out. Told them I have only this much right now. I was kind of glad also and guilty at the same time, I wasn't so sure of my decision. Gave him the notes, told him I will call you to check if you reached. I immediately took the leave, thinking about the encounter. I thought, even if fraudster ₹200 is not going to kill me and make him millionaire, anyday better than indirectly giving away to some Vantara island. Make-believe to feel better about oneself. ₹200 in (अक्कल खातं) learning account.

I did call that number a day later and later 2 times also, it rings but no answer. I was earlier not inclined to put out the number in the post, but I guess I don't care about the privacy of the individual.

Mercedes-Benz Aracınızı Neden Sıradan Bir Tamirciye Teslim Etmemelisiniz?

Otomotiv dünyasında teknoloji o kadar hızlı ilerliyor ki, geleneksel tamir mantığı artık iflas etmiş durumda. Özellikle bir Mercedes W205 (C Serisi) veya W213 (E Serisi) kullanıcısıysanız, aracınızın aslında tekerlekleri olan devasa bir bilgisayar ağı (CAN-bus sistemi) olduğunu bilmelisiniz.

Mekanikten Elektroniğe Geçiş

Eskiden bir arıza olduğunda usta motoru dinler ve sorunu bulurdu. Bugün ise durum çok farklı. Örneğin, dizel bir Mercedes'te AdBlue sistemi veya NOx sensörü en ufak bir hata verdiğinde, motor kendini korumaya alır ve aracı çalıştıramazsınız. 9G-Tronic şanzımanınız vites atarken hafif bir vuruntu yapıyorsa, sorun dişlilerde değil, şanzıman kontrol ünitesindeki (TCM) bir yazılım adaptasyon kaybında olabilir.

Bu tür sorunları çözmek için elinizde İngiliz anahtarından çok, gelişmiş yazılımlara ve lisanslı donanımlara ihtiyaç vardır. “Arıza lambasını söndür, yola devam et” mantığı, lüks segment araçlarda geri dönülmez ve on binlerce liralık beyin hasarlarına yol açar.

Nokta Atışı Teşhis ve Doğru Müdahale

İşte bu yüzden, Ankara'da Mercedes'iniz için bir servis ararken dikkat etmeniz gereken en önemli kriter, servisin teknolojik altyapısıdır. Küresel otomotiv parçalarının en büyük üreticilerinden biri olan Bosch'un standartlarını taşıyan bir servis, aracınızın dilinden en iyi anlayan yerdir.

Orijinal Bosch KTS arıza teşhis cihazları kullanarak, tahmine yer bırakmayan, nokta atışı çözümler sunan ve gereksiz parça değişimlerinin önüne geçen Mercedes Bosch Servis Ankara hizmetleri, aracınızın yazılımını ve donanımını korumanın en akılcı yoludur. Yüksek mühendislik ürünü olan aracınızı, o mühendisliğin gerektirdiği donanımla buluşturun.

Mercedes-Benz Aracınızı Neden Sıradan Bir Tamirciye Teslim Etmemelisiniz?

संदिप खरेंची माफी मागून सादर करीतो

#विडंबन प्रत्येकाच्या घरामध्ये एक तरी (भोंदू)बाबा प्रत्येकाच्या डोक्यावरती घेतला त्याने ताबा प्रत्येकाच्या जीवनामध्ये कुठली तरी चिंता प्रत्येकाच्या डोक्यामध्ये कसला तरी गुंंता प्रत्येकाच्या पत्रामध्ये दोषारोप नशीबा

प्रत्येकाच्या डोक्यामध्ये ओसंडून भक्ती प्रत्येकाच्या प्रश्नावर लगेच यांची उक्ती प्रत्येकाच्या व्याधींकरता यांच्याकडे थांबा

प्रत्येकाच्या आश्रमी उत्पादनांची जंत्री प्रत्येकाच्या खिशाला स्वतःहून कात्री प्रत्येकाच्या तर्कावर यांच्या उलट्या बोंबा

फिटावेत जर तरी शब्दांचे देणे एक तरी विडंबन असे लिहावे बहाणे प्रत्येकाच्या पानी कशी विशुद्ध प्रतिभा?

Securing the Future of Real Estate Investments in Türkiye 🇹🇷

Managing a global real estate portfolio requires more than just acquisition; it demands a sophisticated understanding of local judicial review and market dynamics.

At Pi Legal Consultancy (PiLC), we have published a comprehensive deep dive on Medium regarding Rent Determination Lawsuits (Kira Tespit Davası). This is an essential tool for landlords to align their income with current market values after the 5-year legal cap is lifted.

Key Takeaways for Investors:

Mandatory Mediation: Understanding the procedural requirements effective since September 2023.

Court Valuations: How judges calculate fair market value while applying “equity discounts” for long-term tenants.

Strategic Representation: Why working with a specialized real estate dispute lawyer is critical for international owners.

Authored by our award-winning team, currently serving as a consultant for the European Commission and a partner for the World Bank Group.

Explore the full roadmap on Medium: 🔗 https://medium.com/@pilclawturkey/protecting-your-investment-a-comprehensive-guide-to-rent-determination-lawsuits-in-t%C3%BCrkiye-322d046abd70?postPublishedType=initial

#PiLC #InternationalLaw #RealEstateDispute #InvestmentStrategy #TurkeyLaw #Wordsmith #LegalWriting

Flower Diary: The lost diary of a young lady. Advanced magical theory mixes seamlessly with youthful ponderings.

Been thinking a lot about luddism lately, in part because the social media addiction synergises so competently with the mental fatigue I was left with after my last bout of covid. and I have been thinking about things like:

• Social media as a coping mechanism for loneliness, and ultimately for the existential question, for the impermanence of every human action (screaming into the void et cetera).
• The fragility of supply chains and electronica generally (cf. RAM/SSD shortage due to spambots, Israel war oil supply issues).
• March of technofascism (ID checks, chat control, deanonymisation, “AI” everywhere, spyware is now normal, every smartphone is a 1984 spy TV, Anduril/Palantir merely smokescreens for an entire complicit sector etc.)
• The defanging of anarchism as a movement, the unbelievable erasure of Rojava and Chiapas from international discourse paralleling only the erasure of anarchist Spain in thoroughness.
• We living in interesting times, History II: A New Beginning, todo dia um novo 7×1, the surreality of fascism increasingly normalised without anybody taking on weapons, each week a new headline that would have been unthinkable two years ago.
• Reality fragmentation and narrative control through increasingly sophisticated technological means.

And what that all adds up to me is: We should keep diaries. As in, on paper.

---

Yes, becoming a political prisoner for your diary is a very real possibility, but IDGAF. I would much rather get arrested for doing something with a chance to help the world, than spend my time on the stage performing this rehashed trope of “complacent masses who refused to pick up guns as the nazis took power”, which is a role that's not only 20th-century-derivative but also boring, depressing, and doesn't go well with my outfits.

I've toyed with the idea of journaling in a conscript (perhaps my own Vinescript) or even a full conlang, but in the end that's a deterrent to the important thing, viz. to write. Journaling is intimidating. I type at 100wpm, if you're used to computers, moving into longhand feels painful. But one thing that I learned from #bujo, and later longhand creative writing, and then working on my thesis on paper, is that the slowness is a feature. It changes how your mind works, your relationship to language and the text; compared to typing, handwriting increases focus, attention and retention. It does, however, takes time. When I wrote my Holocaust poem in a frenzy while travelling through Berlin, I basically spent my entire time hopping from café to station bench to café writing nonstop, revision after revision, trying to capture what I experienced at Platform 17.

Then again, typing also takes all day if you account for drifting into the Internet because you have a device in your pocket. And even if you don't, if you had a e-ink typewriter or some other toy—again, your relationship with the text is just different by virtue of the slowness. A bit like you're editing and writing at the same time. I don't think I would have been able to write “Two is for Joy” if I had composed it on a keyboard.

This will be a very niche analogy but maybe some of you have had the experience of playing NES/Famicom Castlevania after getting used to SotN or other titles of the Igavania era. Suddenly everything is so sluggish. Your Belmont marches forward without the slightest haste, steps slow and imperturbable like the march of inevitability. Your whip flickers back for a beat before going forward. The Belmont commits to every jump, you can't change direction in midair, whatever you decided to do you have to face the consequences. Hordes of the undead knock you back undignifiedly, not terrible bosses but random bats flying you off-platform with the slightest brush of their wings. Used to the backdashes and fluid double jumps of an Alucard, a Soma, you feel like, wow, this game sucks. But it cannot suck. There's no way that fucking Castlevania has bad controls, Castlevania III has such high ratings, Rondo of Blood, Chronicles have such a stellar reputation. You must be not getting it. So you persevere, and then, eventually, it clicks; you realise how intentional these old games are, every screen carefully laid out like a puzzle; here's your set set of verbs, here are the enemies, how do you get through? You jump and whip a bat, and you keep the action button down; the Belmont walks backwards, with slow dignity, calmly dodging by a few pixels the hitbox of a bone thrown by the skeleton on the platform above; you move forward, then back, following the skeleton's movements, waltzing your own 8-bit danse macabre to chiptune Bach; it all fits together perfectly, like the elaborate gears of a clock tower. The Belmont is exactly as fast as they need to be.

That is how writing longhand feels like when you're used to typing.

---

Some time ago I was at a political conference travelling with a comrade, and a local comrade (a stranger to us) was kind enough to host us on her sofa. On the last day of the conference she wasn't at home so I decided to leave her a thank-you note, and I engaged my entire gender in it, writing a cute little one-page note with round letters and doodles and colourful pens and highlighter, the works. I wrote about how the trip went for us, because then she would know that her hospitality allowed all these experiences to be part of our personal history. This was the trip during which I had that misadventure where I forgot my bokutō at the top of a mountain at night and ended up climbing up and down twice, with just a tactical flashlight, futilely retracing my steps and failing to find the telltale iris-pattern sword bag anywhere, until I gave up and headed home and realised I had forgot Álmdrósar not at the top of the mountain as I had assumed, but rather on the sidewalk by a lamplight, after hiking down. It was down there all along.

So I wrote a summary of the entire misadventure in few sentences, a bit shorter than the one above, and my comrade read my note and said like: kinda incredible how you managed to condense the entire thing in such a small space. Because to her I had told the entire little drama, much of it by dumbphone calls as it happened, with great granularity of detail; and looking at the note I wrote, yeah, I accepted the compliment; there is an artistry to it, to sketching just the life lines that convey the energy, the feel of the subject you're portraying, with minimal hand movements. But I didn't even think of it, it just comes naturally when you're doing longhand. We had a conference to go, i couldn't sit there writing all morning. One thinks about which words to set down when it's impossible to change your jump mid-air.

That is what I think I should be doing with a paper journal. Think about what happened in the day, to me and to the world at large, and sketch the lifelines. Leave a record of what it was like to be a lesbian immigrant when the nazis came back in the 2020s and nobody took the threat seriously; and maybe my record will perform to someone in the 2120s, when nazis return again like fucking Castlevania Dracula, the same role that Weimar-era lesbian magazines did for me, viz. show that I'm not crazy, or that I'm crazy but I'm not wrong; how surreal it is, that everybody keeps going to work like nothing is happening; and this hypothetical future queer would learn, like I learned, that this entire thing is so very precedented, that we are here and have always been here, and that it's up to us, the living, to risk our necks this time. To commit to the jump.

Or maybe my diary will be destroyed by fascists, or more likely just be quietly forgotten and buried in a dumpster to rot with me. But the act of having written a diary will surely do me good in some way. At least it's not social fucking media.

Long time no write! This is a blog to publish updates on my projects, so that's exactly what I'll do here.

Regex engine

Right now I'm writing a fast regular expression search engine in Rust. In case the reader doesn't know what a regular expression is, they allow specifying some rules about what some text should look like (e.g., think “starts with H”, “has 5 letters”), and then you can reason whether a text follows them (like the words “Hello” or “Hopes” do), or search for strings fulfilling the rules within a larger text. In our case, the regular expression to specify these rules would be H[A-Za-z]{4} (“H” followed by 4 letters).

There are quite a few software libraries that implement regular expressions in Rust. To name a few:

• regex: the most widely used, pretty fast.
• fancy-regex: supports more features.
• regexr: tries to get the best of both worlds, fastest implementation.
• resharp: quite custom-built, fast implementation.

I ran a benchmark consisting on generating various lengths of random sequences of A, C, G and T and then searching for all (possibly overlapping) matches of the regex ATG([^T]..|T([CT].|G[^A]|A[CT]))*T(A[AG]|GA) (which recognizes possible forward open reading frames). The results are these:

• regex: 8.8 MB/s, slowest.
• resharp: 65 MB/s.
• My crate in progress: 99 MB/s.
• regexr: 222 MB/s, fastest.

If we replace that regex with ATG(...)*?T(A[AG]|GA) (which matches the same regions but uses the lazy *? metacharacter for a more concise representation), then we get:

• regex: 8.8 MB/s.
• resharp: doesn't support that metacharacter.
• My crate in progress: 109 MB/s, fastest.
• regexr: 5.5 MB/s, slowest (why?).

regex and resharp had also the highest overhead, in the hundreds of microseconds, while both regexr and my crate could compile the regex in about 20 microseconds.

I would like to work a bit more on this crate. Specifically:

• Support capture groups, which the other crates do and I think is pretty much an expected feature of any regex library.
• Stabilize it some further. I'm using cargo llvm-cov and cargo mutants, but I may resort to cargo afl to weed out bugs even more aggressively.
• Make it faster. I have some tricks up my sleeve that could manage gains.

Career

I'm working as a Resident Physician in Psychiatry. Also trying to get a Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering. Pretty exciting stuff going on in that front.

Vera, a stats and probability professor gets caught up in what is literally a series of unfortunate events (A Low Probability Event) which changes the world. In what is essentially a post-apocalyptic story, she joins Agent Layne, of the Low Probability Event Commission (LPEC) to investigate the casino they suspect is behind it.

This story works on a scale both cosmic and personal. Like an anti-superhero story, LPEC is a nod at gross government overreach in the name of national security, saving the world, etc.

The first part of the book has some quite graphic depictions of bizarre deaths as a first person account of the Low Probability Event, which nearly put me off reading on. I'm glad I persevered to the end though.

#books #horror #body-horror

Haklarınızı Şansa Değil, Profesyonellere Bırakın

Hukuk, “hallederiz” denilerek geçiştirilemeyecek kadar ciddi bir alandır. Bir davanın kaderi, yazılacak tek bir dilekçenin detaylarında veya kaçırılan küçük bir yasal sürede gizlidir.

Zeki Şimşek Hukuk Bürosu; Aile, Ceza ve Gayrimenkul hukuku alanlarındaki uzmanlığıyla İstanbul'da müvekkillerine şeffaf ve sonuç odaklı avukatlık hizmeti sunuyor. Davanızın büyüklüğü ne olursa olsun, doğru strateji ve etkin savunma ile her zaman bir adım önde olun.

Hukuki sürecinizi güvence altına almak için üsküdar hukuk bürosu sayfamızı ziyaret edin ve profesyonel ekibimizle hemen iletişime geçin.