This article was originally written in Chinese. Also available in 日本語.

Issue 2 · Background music: KITSCHKRIEG feat. BLUMENGARTEN & SHIRIN DAVID – GUT GENUG

On June 27th, after beating sunielreddy, a player from the United States, my rapid rating on Chess.com hit 1000. Nine months in, I can finally call myself a beginner.

Around the same time, I realized I hadn’t touched competitive games like Street Fighter or Dota in ages. I think the appeal of chess is the absence of everything that makes online games frustrating — no teammates, no patch-driven power shifts, no lag. Just a pure 64-square board and its pieces. And somehow, that’s already enough to keep me hooked on the sheer variety of it.

Chess tests knowledge across many dimensions, but the core of what got me to 1000 was simple: make fewer mistakes, and capitalize on your opponent’s. Add one more thing — reading your opponent’s next move (just one move ahead) — and that’s genuinely enough to reach 1000. Everything after that is where the real learning begins, and most of it comes down to pattern recognition. Every opening is a pattern; every tactic is a pattern. Strong players read the position early and steer the game toward patterns that favor them. That ability draws on several things at once: memory, imagination under pressure, and confidence.

Once I hit 1500 online, I want to try some over-the-board tournaments. Looking at a physical board in real life has to offer something that a screen can’t.

Steam Next Fest

I’ve had plenty of game ideas I thought were brilliant — “a top-down turn-based fighter where every action is determined by cards,” or “building assembly lines with your own hands in VR.” Then, a while later, I’d find them on the Steam store: Fight in Tight Spaces, Loop One, both released within the last few years.

Maybe the sociological concept of multiple discovery explains it. Everyone draws from the same pool of games, so similar ideas naturally surface in different people’s heads at the same time. Good ideas are never rare. What’s rare is the follow-through to actually finish one. Next Fest, though, never runs short of people who have both. Here are some I played:

1. Deer and Boy: Similar in feel to INSIDE — great at guiding the player and building atmosphere, but nothing that really stands out. It released this month without making much of a splash. I think it represents a lot of games: well-made, no obvious flaws, but still missing whatever it takes to break through.
2. Memory Brew: Tales of Underworld: A genuinely funny visual novel. The jokes land hard and feel grounded. My strong suspicion is that the dev team escaped from the grind of some major studio. That said, games built on memes risk fading with them. The ceiling of this genre — VA-11 Hall-A — works because it generates its own timeless ones.
3. Order of the Sinking Star: Jonathan Blow’s new project. The quality on display is enough for me to buy it day one without a second thought.
4. Void Diver Demo: Plays like Escape from Tarkov, but with official co-op and a Korean-style anime art direction. Should sell well. Personally, I struggle with games where numerical progression is the main thing pulling you forward — grinding the same maps over and over just doesn’t do it for me.
5. Trees Hates You: A troll platformer in the vein of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Hilarious to watch someone else suffer through; infuriating the moment you pick it up yourself.
6. Loop One: Demo: Building assembly lines in VR. Watching your own lines actually run in front of you must feel great. But a game that asks you to think, iterate, and think again isn’t something you want to do with 200 grams strapped to your face. The controls in the current demo feel bad enough that I couldn’t push through it.
7. Hyperstacks Demo: Excellent controls — which in VR is the difference between life and death. A UGC game in the vein of Roblox and Fortnite, with a built-in level editor. Given how small the VR player base is, I do wonder whether it can accumulate enough user-created content to sustain itself.
8. Aliya2: Dawn Demo: A hidden gem. I genuinely can’t articulate what this game made me feel, so I’ll hold off until I finish it.
9. FantasyJourney Demo: The store page bluntly states “combat core is similar to Sekiro.” Curious, I searched on Bilibili and found the developer’s own channel — 10 followers, a promotional video titled “An Art School Graduate’s Indie Game: FantasyJourney,” 300 views. The game itself isn’t bad. I just hope the developer puts more thought into how they present it.
10. Demon Bluff Demo: A single-player game built on the logic of Werewolf. You play as an observer trying to identify all the wolves; the wolves lie and each has a unique ability. It demands bold hypotheses and repeated deduction — genuinely taxing. Since it’s a roguelite, though, some runs hit dead ends or just come down to luck.
11. Kitchen Cleaning Master: Simple inputs, maximum satisfaction. An incredibly stress-relieving little game. Proof, once again, that people genuinely enjoy doing routine tasks.
12. Sovereign Tower Demo: Essential for anyone who likes knights. Art, gameplay, and music are in complete harmony. The current demo already feels polished and whole — I wanted more the moment it ended.
13. Strange Zoo Demo: An animal management game where every animal’s sound is recorded by the player. Your cat can say “Manbo” or bark like Bob. What Does the Fox Say? The concept — a zoo full of animals making completely wrong noises — is genuinely funny. As a game, though, the underlying systems aren’t there yet, and the novelty wears off fast. This might actually spread better as a TikTok filter or a browser toy than a full game.

Эта странная жизнь

Lyubishchev left behind no grand achievements. But what he did leave behind matters more than any achievement could — a life well lived.

(Almost no information about this book exists in the Western world. It was first published in the Soviet Union in 1979 as a work of narrative nonfiction.)

“Time is more precious than gold, for gold cannot buy back lost time” — so wrote a Tang dynasty poet. Benjamin Franklin put it more plainly: “Time is money.” The conversation around time has never stopped, and time is routinely treated as worth more than money. And yet, paradoxically, modern society has invented countless time-saving tools — and time has never felt scarcer. People’s inner lives have followed: a strange kind of impoverishment, hard to name. Efficiency keeps climbing. So does the anxiety.

We might find something useful in the life of Alexander Lyubishchev, a Soviet biologist who, starting at age 26, tracked every day of his life down to the minute — for 56 years straight, without a single break, through war and illness alike.

July 21, 1941. German aircraft attacked the steamship Kotovsky — bombing, machine-gun fire. The captain and an unidentified captain were killed; four wounded. The paddle wheel was damaged; no stop at Bograche, proceeding directly to Kremenchug.

That’s his wartime diary. No fear, no reflection — just date, event, and time. His method never changed: a monthly review, looking back at the month and planning the next. An annual summary at the end of each year. A five-year plan looking further ahead.

Isn’t that absurd? People aren’t machines. Why live like one?

Two reasons. First, he had a fixed life goal: to establish a natural classification system for biology — to find the underlying patterns of living forms in mathematical language, to do for biology what Mendeleev did for the elements and write a “periodic table” of life. A goal that ambitious required him to know exactly where his time was going.

Second, his life was anything but rigid. His annual summary had a dedicated column: “Entertainment — 65 times,” followed by a list of plays and films. In 1969 alone, he received 419 letters and replied to 283, building friendships across wildly different fields — teachers, prisoners, members of the Academy of Sciences, art theorists, journalists, agronomists. His replies were thorough and lively; reading them, you’d think you were reading a literary scholar.

A doctor who is only a good doctor cannot truly be a good doctor. The same goes for scientists. A scientist who is only a scientist cannot truly be a great scientist. When imagination and inspiration disappear, the source of creativity dries up. That source requires detours — without them, a scientist is left chasing facts and nothing more.

Lyubishchev wrote extensively on the history of Athens — entirely unrelated to his work as an entomologist. The answer only became clear when the author sorted through his manuscripts: he had been preparing a major work on the rise and fall of civilizations, and Athens was just one part of it. The reason he needed to write about civilization at all was that he had to argue against the British geneticist Ronald Fisher, who tried to reduce sociology to biology and explain the fate of civilizations through genetics. Lyubishchev thought this was wrong and felt compelled to say so. It was consistent with his longstanding opposition to the idea that natural selection explains everything.

A question naturally follows: hadn’t he committed all his time to his life’s work? Understanding a person means understanding their contradictions. Lyubishchev spent large portions of his time critiquing evolutionary theory, studying ancient Greek history, and writing back to strangers — not single-mindedly building his biological classification system. But those apparent detours were exactly what made him who he was.

What he wrote was how he lived.

Lyubishchev’s main work was in biology — specifically entomology, in its purest form. He spent three years traveling across southern Russia conducting field surveys, and found that the pest problem in the Soviet Union had been drastically overstated — the damage was nowhere near as severe as the government claimed. That sounds like a good thing. But in the Stalin era, it effectively invalidated the entire pest control apparatus and threatened the livelihoods of countless people. He paid for it: stripped of his doctorate by an academic committee. He refused to recant. Eventually he was rehabilitated, and the institute director was arrested in a political purge.

There’s a common saying: keep your head down and live to fight another day. Lyubishchev didn’t operate that way. He had his own standards of judgment, and time tracking was his ruler. He didn’t measure himself by credentials, titles, or books published — only by his own time reports. That kind of purity leaves no room for excuses or self-interest; there’s nowhere to hide in front of the record.

This book was written by Lyubishchev’s friend after his death, while going through his belongings. What can we take from his life? The author puts it this way: if a person’s actions make themselves happy, then it isn’t a heroic achievement, and there’s no need to call on others to follow suit.

A life well lived is already its own answer.