Chiaki’s dead, comes a quiet voice from the other side of the table. Ichika’s eyes search for sympathy, but Kana doesn’t understand a word. Chiaki… which Chiaki?Chiaki Sano? Ichika replies. We were in the same class.The curly-haired one? Ichika nods. What happened?I don’t know. She didn’t leave a note.She killed herself?Yes. With a door handle, at her parents’ house. She used her Mac charger.Was the cable long enough?No idea.
I walked past the poster for Desert of Namibia in Shimokitazawa and something about it stopped me. Kana’s face—that profoundly empty gaze—pulled at something. I wasn’t sure if it reminded me more of myself or of people I used to know, people from a time in my life when everyone seemed to lack something essential, some basic capacity to feel. A lack of empathy was everywhere back then, in my hometown and definitely in my own heart. And I catch myself doing it still sometimes, wearing that same empty look even when I’m with people I actually care about, and I hate it when I notice it happening.
Yumi Kawai is extraordinary as Kana. She’s 21, works at a laser hair removal salon in Tokyo, and she’s always on the edge of something you can’t quite name. She drifts between two men—one who steadies her with careful, almost desperate affection, another whose charm masks a cruelty that matches her own. She doesn’t really choose between them. She just moves between worlds, carrying her restlessness like weather, and Kawai makes you feel the weight of it.
Yoko Yamanaka made her debut film on basically nothing when she was a teenager, and now she’s made something that doesn’t hurry, doesn’t explain itself. The film holds in tight, boxy 4:3 frames—hair removal cubicles, cramped kitchens, narrow hallways—and it feels claustrophobic in a way that perfectly mirrors what’s happening inside Kana. She’s surrounded by men who can’t quite hear her even when she’s screaming.
There’s this scene where Honda comes home from a work trip where he went to a hostess bar, and what follows is honest in a way that feels almost painful to watch. The apologies that mean nothing, the moment Kana’s quiet fury becomes something physical and irrational, and the film refuses to tell you who’s right. They’re both somehow both.
And then there’s the salon, which is actually kind of funny—Kana and her coworker speculating about an elderly woman’s bikini wax, Kana getting fired for telling a customer she’s been wasting money on cosmetic procedures. The film does this thing where it cuts between absurdist comedy and something genuinely unsettling without warning, and that tonal whiplash is exactly what it feels like to be around someone like Kana. You don’t know what’s coming.
Midway through, Kana sees a therapist, and it’s one of the most real psychiatric scenes I’ve seen in a movie. The doctor’s careful questions, Kana suddenly ranting about pedophilia as a philosophical point, her asking the therapist to dinner. They float the idea of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, but nothing sticks. Kana’s trying to understand who she is, and she says it so quietly you almost miss it, and that feels important.
By the end the film gets strange—panda ants, campfire songs, parallel universes bleeding into what was a fairly grounded story—and some people will feel like that’s liberating while others will feel the ground disappear. Maybe it’s the least controlled part of the film, but there’s something right about that incoherence too. Kana can’t be resolved. She can’t be diagnosed or taught a lesson or fit into an arc. She just continues, and that’s the whole point.
Yumi Kawai’s performance has this electricity to it, this quality where suffering looks like something alive and vital. She deserves every award she got for this. She never condescends to Kana, never asks you to feel sorry for her, never explains her away.
Desert of Namibia isn’t comfortable and it doesn’t want to be. But watching it made me feel like I was seeing something necessary, a film that holds contradiction the way we actually have to hold it in our lives—uneasy and unflinching, refusing easy answers, refusing to turn its impossible heroine into something safe or understood.
Video games are the only thing that can pull my brain out of its own self-destructive patterns completely. I’ve known this about myself for a while now—how they distract me from the spiral, from reaching for my phone to let some pseudo-social feed numb everything. My best memories, the ones that actually matter, they’re tangled up with games somehow. Winning a Super Nintendo on Austrian children’s television as a kid. That feeling of wandering through flea markets hunting for treasures with the PlayStation logo on them. Fighting impossible odds with a party held together by hope and the last scraps of health bars.
I went to GG Bavaria last weekend, this small gaming convention in Munich that somehow feels like the comfortable little sister to Gamescom. I wasn’t expecting much, honestly. But the moment I walked into that hall, something just clicked. There was this density of actual developers there—people whose games you’d just watched someone playing at a booth, and you could just walk over and talk to them. That doesn’t happen at the huge conventions. You usually get a faceless industry. Here you got creators and community actually meeting.
What really got me, what I wasn’t prepared for, was seeing friends there. Michi had brought Incredibug—this adorable little physics platformer where you play as a pill bug uniting crustaceans against some menacing smart home system. And then there was Bardcore, this game by Flo and Tomas and Svea and Ludwig that I’d playtested with them, the one with the bards and the quirky skeletons and the black bat dragon. There’s something about watching people you know show the things they’ve built to strangers. Watching those strangers’ faces light up. It’s a small, perfect kind of moment.
The evenings are where the convention really came alive. They’d shuffle everyone out of the main hall and then the DJ would start—all anime openings and Nintendo soundtracks, which sounds so niche until you’re standing there with a couple hundred people singing along to One Piece, Case Closed, and Neon Genesis Evangelion theme songs. I remember standing there with a free drink and a cookie, watching other people create little characters on screens, and just feeling this strange, genuine warmth. This is where your people are, you know? Everyone speaking the same language.
I drove home in Ludwig’s packed car with four other people crammed in, all of us talking about nothing in particular—university, water damage, the specific problems of village life. And I realized I was happy. Just completely, simply happy.
I’m thinking about going to Gamescom again. It’s been years, back when I had a press badge and could slip away from the chaos into the quiet rooms. But I’m also wondering if I have the energy for that right now. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what I want from it. What I do know is that GG Bavaria 2026 felt like an event that caught exactly the right moment. Like it understood what it was supposed to be. And if you’re even slightly into any of this—games, art, the weird beautiful intersection of all these people who speak the same language—I’d say get a ticket next year. Good game, Bavaria.
Philipp sits alone in his small Tokyo apartment with a bento box and a cold beer, staring out the window at all these people whose lives went somewhere else. And I think we’ve all been that person, watching through glass at a world that kept moving without us. He wonders if they’re happier, or if they’re just as lonely as he is—which is maybe the loneliest question you can ask yourself.
His life changes when he stumbles into the rental family industry. I know, it sounds strange. But it’s real—there are actual companies in Japan where you can hire someone to be your family member for a few hours. To fill the spaces where people should be. And Philipp, this washed-up American actor who came to Tokyo chasing something and got stuck instead, somehow ends up working there.
The first job he takes is absolutely surreal. He’s paid to be a mourner at a funeral for a man who’s still alive—literally lying in the casket—because the guy wanted to hear people say nice things about him. And I think that image broke something open in me because it’s so brutally honest about what we all want. We want to know that we matter. We want someone to show up.
What got me, though, was how real it became. The deeper Philipp goes into these artificial worlds, the more genuine everything feels. The boundaries just blur. And then he meets Mia, and suddenly he’s not just performing anymore—he’s building an actual relationship with a kid who thinks he’s her father. A kid who was rejected from a fancy school because she doesn’t have one. And now she does, except he’s not real, and that’s the thing that keeps you awake at night about this whole situation.
Following Philipp in Rental Family reminded me of my loneliest moments in a foreign city. When everyone else was busy becoming part of something and I was still on the outside, pressing my face against the window. When I was scared I’d made a huge mistake. When I started to wonder if I was just going to end up completely alone in a place I’d dreamed about living in. There was something in his character that felt like a possible future version of myself—like a warning and a question all at once. What happens when you chase something so hard and it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined? Do you keep pushing, or do you admit defeat?
Brendan Fraser carries this whole thing on his shoulders and honestly, he’s never been better. He’s got this weight to him—this sense of a person who’s always between identities, stumbling from one role to the next like he’s never quite sure who he is underneath all of it. He made me cry multiple times, which I wasn’t expecting. By the end, you still don’t really know who Phillip is, and I think that’s kind of the point.
The film is deeply, specifically Japanese—Tokyo as this stage-like backdrop where people are hunting for connection in the concrete and glass and neon. It’s a mirror held up to loneliness as a structural problem, not just a personal one. But it also feels universal because we all know this hunger. We all know what it’s like to want someone to choose us, to show up for us, to make us feel like we exist.
Philipp probably doesn’t remember why those lonely evenings used to define him, because now he’s one of the people who took the weird path. The one who dared to try something that doesn’t fit into the normal shape of things. And maybe that’s what this whole thing is really about—the courage it takes to step off the window ledge and actually become part of the world, even if it’s messy and uncertain and you don’t know where it’s going to take you.
The questions that occupy me most when designing this website are: Who am I? What do I want? And what’s the point of any of this? The answers to these self-centered existential crises are not easy to find, because they shift depending on my mood and emotional state, and reveal themselves as traps whenever I finally manage to corner them and practically beg for mercy—and the enlightenment that should follow.
Then I try to remember why I started blogging in the first place. Did I want to feel important? To connect with others? To prove to the world out there that I existed? Did I simply lack alternatives, given that shortly after the turn of the millennium there was no YouTube, no podcasts, and the written word was one of the few means of carrying my thoughts, feelings, and opinions outward?
My love of blogging probably stems from the fact that I enjoyed reading books as a child, and through that developed a fairly extensive vocabulary that I wanted to express, garnished with my own stories. This ambition was barely noticed or appreciated by my teachers, but it was by people in my closer circle, who wanted to know whether—and what—I was writing about them.
My love of publishing texts on the internet is probably rooted in the knowledge, or at least the desperate hope, that people I knew were reading them. Friends I had hurt. Acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while. Girls I was in love with. Through my blog, I could transform my longing for them into frequently very embarrassing texts, without having to address those feelings to them directly.
Perhaps this approach was somewhat cowardly, and maybe my words—saturated with heartache and world-weariness—never reached the eyes they were actually intended for. But at the very least, I had created a creative island for myself where I could do as I pleased. And that was not only incredibly liberating, but gradually became an important part of my life.
At many points along my path, I could only begin to pursue happiness again after pulling various spiraling thoughts from my head and hurling them onto digital paper, only to then blast them out into the great wide world. The nameless feeling that came with clicking Publish was somewhere between catharsis and orgasm. The more personal, honest, and emotionally naked my confessions were, the greater the relief. I’m only happy when my words change the world—at least the one I call home.
Over the decades, my blog has evolved into a diary whose intimate entries lie buried under a mountain of attention-hungry, now entirely worthless drivel. Sometimes I come across one of them and feel a little sad that it’s no longer part of this great wide world, but seems to have been erased. Perhaps I can undo that.
The questions that occupy me most when designing this website are: Who am I? What do I want? And what’s the point of any of this? I still haven’t found the answers to these self-centered existential crises, but at least I’ve begun to track them down through countless psychologically questionable acts of self-reflection—or so I hope.
It’s difficult for me to find the line between introverted solitude and extroverted self-expression. One extreme would be a diary locked in a vault, into which I write all my thoughts in secret symbols; the other, an OnlyFans account in which I expose not only myself but also my sensitive data—passwords and all. Middle grounds are hard for me to walk.
In order to design something and actually finish it to the point where I can fill it with content, I first have to strip a project’s purpose down to its essentials. And at this task—which sounds so simple yet is incredibly complicated—I have obsessively worn myself to the bone. After all, this publication is meant to represent me and my thoughts. And to achieve that, I first had to figure out who I actually was—or at least, who I no longer was.
I now want to treat this dispatch as a personal notebook, into which I can enter texts about art, music, books, technology, film, fashion, travel, games, food, and my life in general. What matters to me is that everything I write must relate to me—my thoughts, my experiences, my feelings, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, and my opinions—because otherwise it’s worthless.
Going forward, I will focus primarily on the written word. I have removed the images that used to decorate every single post, because I realized that I sometimes never published certain texts for the simple reason that, even after hours or sometimes days of searching, I couldn’t find a suitable illustration. If I want to add a photo or video to a post from now on, I will simply link to it directly within the text—life can be that simple.
As a fitting typeface, I have chosen TeX Gyre Heros Condensed by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki, because it works well even on small mobile screens. In the past I always found a serif counterpart for headings, timestamps, and supplementary information—but even that felt like too much in this design. Instead, I’m largely limiting myself to the limits of my new favorite typeface. Japanese characters are the one exception, represented by Ryoko Nishizuka’s Source Han Sans JP.
I hope that this website—and everything I have cut, burned, and destroyed for it—will help me figure out who I am, what I want, and what any of this is for. Perhaps I need to become (again) conscious of the fact that this journal is not only the center and pivot point, but also the only constant in my otherwise chaotic life. But this can only work if it becomes a part of that life once more.
