"When the fireworks finally faded, I noticed a few stray sparks lingering forever in the sky—they were simply the stars we never bothered to look up at on ordinary nights."

👋 Editor's Note

Scrolling through the endless stream of images and text online, it often feels as though the magazine format has shed its physical form while its spirit endures (a veritable ghost in the machine, so to speak). Yet, in squeezing out the name Zhiwen (meaning "close at hand") for this publication, you might gather that I am, at best, an agnostic toward this prevailing "spirit."

When I was a child, during a ritual drawing of lots, I grasped a magazine, despite my aversion to its glossy, almost greasy pages. Fashion magazines felt like dense, impenetrable bricks of advertisements. The faces within were so alien, so utterly disconnected from my reality. Sometimes I wonder: How different were they from the beautiful, melancholic faces that AI dreams up today?

Beneath the exaggerated exoskeleton of fashion spreads, many magazines were built on a bedrock of text—often dedicated to telling jokes. During long train rides, suspended in that liminal space, a younger me would binge-read three or four magazines back-to-back, consuming them as one might watch television. Only later, after venturing onto the internet, did I realize that terms like "E-Zone" scattered throughout those pages were merely aggregations of online humor.

I eventually took to Weibo—acting very much the elementary schooler I was—and morphed into a human web crawler. I mined countless jokes, meticulously compiling them into PowerPoint presentations on a regular basis. I was far more diligent with this than I ever was creating slides for group meetings later in life. Why? Simply because, in my childhood mind, PowerPoint was the closest medium to a magazine.

This habit of curation is no different from what I am doing here today. It is driven by the same hope: that the fragmented pieces of the web I’ve encountered might reveal some underlying pattern, forming the corner of a much larger mosaic. Even if it merely yields the illusion of "acquiring" something, it is enough.

The format is fluid, the publishing schedule entirely erratic, and appending "Weekly" is merely for aesthetic flair. Consider it an experimental endeavor—best to just start writing while the year is still fresh.

🐎 The Paddock

A collection of fragments taken out of context. Many entries are not direct quotes but rather paraphrased reflections. Please read with discretion.

📹 The Art Within the Fragments

The Chinese Jueju (quatrain) demands the creation of a complete, miniature universe within an extremely confined space. The poem must feature shifts from near to far, or far to near, achieving a sense of all-encompassing totality. Conversely, the inner spirit of Japanese haiku is profoundly fragmentary. The emphasis lies in how one elegantly and meaningfully isolates a single corner, a lone fragment. This slice is imbued with suggestion, inviting us to seize its threads and let our imagination unspool outward.

...Yasunari Kawabata introduced, and masterfully demonstrated, a different lens through which to view humanity. With a literary stroke, he documented a more authentic way people come to know one another: interacting fragment by fragment across different times and spaces, leaving behind a fragmented cognition. Moreover, each piece inextricably enfolds the specific elements of its time and place. He does not deliberately stitch these fragments together; rather, he intentionally amplifies their fragmentary nature, making it a defining characteristic of his literary style. His narrative tense rarely advances in a linear, continuous fashion; instead, it loops and meanders, weaving back and forth with effortless agility.

— Yang Zhao, The Galaxy Falls into the Body

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless. A photograph is a message about the event it records: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.

Setting aside the "freakish" (John Berger's word) works of studio photography, photography, unlike painting, has no language of its own; it possesses only the language of the events themselves. Nor is it like cinema, capable of manipulating time; it can only make the decision of which isolated instant to capture. Yet this limitation grants the photograph its unique power: What is shown invokes what is not shown. Thus, one might decode the aforementioned "message" as follows: Why I believe this is worth looking at is to be judged by all that I have chosen not to show, because they are contained within it.

— John Berger, Understanding a Photograph

📛 Manufacturing Repression

Repression doesn't just grow on trees, you know—it requires patience, focus, deeply devoted and self-sacrificing parents, and a hardworking, intensely focused child. Only then, in the span of just a few short years, can you forge a truly inhibited, repressed human being.

— Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

Years of schooling leave some intellectuals appearing less agile than animals, hardly looking as though they are the product of millions of years of evolution. Modern schooling turns individuals pale under its discipline, significantly sapping their vitality and gradually stripping them of the ability to use their bodies intuitively. Iris Young once analyzed the differences in how boys and girls move: a boy throws with his entire body, while a girl relies only on her arm. Culture prohibits the latter from using her body naturally and wholeheartedly. Modern institutions treat both genders equally—which means every movement of an arm or leg must be deeply calculated. Every precious instinct of physical expression is remolded into a heavily scrutinized exercise in etiquette, where everything revolves around propriety.

Socrates once proclaimed, "The unexamined life is not worth living." My reaction to this statement is somewhat pessimistic: a life subjected to constant examination seems profoundly miserable.

— Wang Xiaowei, The Depths of the Everyday

🧘‍♂️ "The Greatest Discovery of My Generation"

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
— William James

Both positive and negative emotions can elevate or diminish creativity. The key lies not in the type of emotion, but in its intensity. The primary role of positive emotions is to enhance cognitive openness and flexibility, whereas negative emotions primarily fuel our focus and drive for deep inquiry.

Ideally, the most effective catalyst for creativity isn't the presence of a single emotion, but rather allowing diverse emotions to coexist within our bodies, all while maintaining the ability to harness them so they do not monopolize our cognitive bandwidth. This is the true test of human autonomy.

— Fangyuan Li's Interpretation of Emotion Is Your Creativity

📰 The Newsstand

A selection of contemporary articles. Ephemerality is not an issue.

1️⃣ Do Not Step Lightly into AI-Native

In practice, AI technology should not be treated as an isolated, standalone product, but rather as a feature or supplement to existing, mature products. Just as WPS achieved success by ensuring its interface, features, and file protocols perfectly mirrored Microsoft Office, seamlessly integrating AI into established tools to boost efficiency and user experience is the far more sensible approach.

2️⃣ The Resonance Method

The "Resonance" prompting technique works by constructing vivid imagery, atmosphere, and sensory details within the author's mind, providing the LLM with a rich creative context. This allows the model to roam freely within the established thematic space, generating unique and wildly diverse creative outputs. It is, essentially, the AI equivalent of creative writing.

3️⃣ Your 2024

As the year draws to a close, it is worth finding the time to leaf through the photo album.