It's Morio!

It’s like my brain staged a coup while I was just trying to be a responsible adult writer.

I’m here, minding my own goddamn business, polishing my anthology pieces, wrestling my main novel into something that resembles a coherent book, and suddenly my imagination kicks the door open like the world’s worst roommate yelling, “Surprise. Two new novels. They’re your problem now.”

Bro. I did not order this. I don’t even have shelf space.

I’m just trying to revise a draft without crying into my keyboard, but no, apparently productivity comes bundled with chaos. I thought I was being efficient. Turns out I was just summoning more children. Literary children. Multiplying like rabbits that have never heard of contraception.

The anthology wants love. The main novel wants therapy. And now two newborn plot-creatures are clawing at my ankles like, “Hi. We’re shiny. Pay attention to us or we will haunt you at 3 a.m.”

Honestly it feels like being in a polycule with stories. Except none of them communicate, all of them are needy, and I am the only adult in the room pretending I know what I’m doing.

Anyway. Guess I’m writing four books at once now.

They’ve always been a little too sharp for the room. Brilliant, restless, impossible to pin down. The kind of person who feels everything and pretends not to.

One night, the performance slips. Neon, sound, and someone who doesn’t quite look away. What follows is physical, strange, and harder to forget than it should be.

It ends before dawn, but the air still hums. The kind of silence that sounds like something unfinished.

Signal and Noise (ACFR #4) A story about connection and disconnection, about what happens when someone stops performing long enough to be seen.

Free to read now. For mature readers, contains explicit content.

Modern love has gone off-grid. It lives in cropped corners, reflections, and that one blurry wrist holding the wine glass. The face? Classified.

BBC News notes that women are deliberately keeping their partners offline. Influencer Tawana Musvaburi told the BBC she doesn’t post her boyfriend’s face because, “As a woman, you want to come across strong, like, ‘I’ve got my stuff together.’” Even a ring, she said, wouldn’t change her mind. The relationship is real; the reveal is not.

British Vogue writer Chanté Joseph called it a cultural pivot - posting your man too often is “cringe,” “culturally loser-ish,” and just a little embarrassing. Meanwhile Stephanie Yeboah told the BBC she lost around a thousand followers after going public with her boyfriend. The moral? Nothing wrecks engagement like genuine happiness.

Others say it’s about privacy, protection from envy, even superstition. Dr Gwendolyn Seidman of Michigan State University told the BBC that people are posting less because “this stuff is eternal.” Once it’s out there, it’s fossilized.

It’s funny, though. This self-imposed secrecy has the same energy as K-pop idols banned from dating: the fear that affection, once visible, devalues the product. The difference is that this time, the leash is self-tied. The audience doesn’t demand the illusion; we’ve internalized it.

So we soft-launch. A shadow. A silhouette. A whisper of someone just out of frame. It’s love, but behind glass: curated, plausible, protected.

the bears have entered their villain origin arc

Japan is living through its bear arc. Fatal attacks are at record highs, and somewhere in Tokushima, a small pharmaceutical company decided the answer was chili.

The result is, um, what translates into English as “Bears Running Off,” a domestically made bear repellent that took three years of research. The goal isn’t eradication but coexistence between humans and bears, which feels both deeply Japanese and quietly brave.

Field tests showed brown bears bolting, wiping their faces, and sniffling like they’d just lost an argument with a pepper grinder. The formula works, and it’s cheaper than imported sprays. You can even buy a practice version, for the truly cautious.

It’s easy to laugh, but the intent is honest. People are dying, and someone thought, maybe we can make this a little less awful. Maybe we can protect both sides.

The Rope and the Robe continues the Arakawa Confidential world, where silence carries secrets and intimacy hides behind ritual.

This story steps away from Bar Venus to a shrine at the edge of the city, where stillness has weight and devotion takes a form she was never meant to see. A single act, witnessed by accident, turns order into revelation. It’s about service. About surrender. About the quiet tremor that moves through body and spirit when boundaries start to dissolve.

You don’t need to read the first two reports to understand this one. But if it feels a little too intense, maybe start with Slippery When Wet or Under Control. They’ll ease you in before the rope, um, tightens.

For mature readers. Reader discretion advised.

And yes, like the others, it’s completely free to read. No paywall. No subscription. Just another story from a world that keeps finding the sacred in the dark.

me and my last two brain cells trying to survive episode 6

A part of me thinks that there’s no sane reason Zooble should be hot. They’re a pile of polygons glued together by divine mistake, a fever dream in motion, and somehow my brain went, yes, that one.

Maybe it’s the swagger. Maybe it’s how they exist like a visual glitch that learned confidence. Everyone else in that cursed circus is melting down while Zooble just lounges there, limbs all wrong, vibe immaculate. It’s not supposed to work, but it does.

They look like gender and chaos had a lovechild, and I’m the fool clapping for it. It’s gone past liking. I’ve been claimed. You stare too long, and something in you just gives up the fight, quietly accepting that this is who you are now, for better or for polygon.

Photo by Sumit Kant on Unsplash

Once upon a time, before girls could kiss each other in daylight and still trend on Pixiv, there was Class S.

Sounds like a wholesome tea club that occasionally got emotional, right? That was the point. In early 20th-century Japan, emotional intensity between girls was fine so long as it ended before marriage. You could adore your best friend, write her poems, swear eternal devotion under the wisteria... just don’t stay too devoted once a man shows up.

Enter Yoshiya Nobuko, the mother of refined yearning. Her 1910s–1920s collection Hana Monogatari (Flower Tales, and no, not the sixth installment of Nishio Ishin's insanely popular series) basically invented the template: two schoolgirls, a secret friendship bordering on love, a farewell at graduation, and the tragic promise to never forget each other. Society applauded, safe in the knowledge that the girls would grow up, marry, and forget anyway. Nobuko, however, didn’t forget. She spent her life with her partner, Monma Chiyo, in what newspapers politely called a “friendship.” The closet had curtains back then.

The term Class S (for sisterhood or shoujo) was the euphemism that made all this possible: intense, spiritual, pure, temporary. The whole thing was a cultural hall pass for queer longing, valid only until graduation. The girls were allowed to feel, but not to last.

By the 1960s and 70s, the mood shifted. The postwar Year 24 Group looked at that fragile framework and decided it needed more melodrama and fewer rules. The Heart of Thomas and The Rose of Versailles turned repression into European tragedy: boys who looked like girls, girls who dressed as princes, love so aesthetic it almost passed for religion. Desire left the dormitory for the cathedral.

And somewhere in all this, the word yuri sprouted. Literally “lily,” it started as code in Japanese magazines, used to tag stories of women’s love and to contrast with bara (rose), the label for gay men’s content. The flowers were metaphors: lilies for feminine purity, roses for masculine passion. Both bloomed where they weren’t supposed to.

Then the 1990s arrived and subtlety died a fabulous death. Revolutionary Girl Utena exploded the genre with swords, roses, duels, and queerness that looked you dead in the eye. Utena wanted to be a prince but also wanted to burn the whole fairy-tale system down. It was the moment yuri stopped being about “innocent friendship” and started interrogating who gets to define innocence in the first place.

The 2000s and 2010s kept the revolution spinning. Maria-sama ga Miteru revived the Catholic school aesthetic with delicate guilt and hidden vows. Strawberry Panic! made melodrama a spectator sport. Citrus dragged yuri into soap-opera scandal, and Bloom Into You (personal favourite? yes please, thank you) stepped quietly into realism, asking what happens when someone simply doesn’t fit any label at all.

Then came Yuri is My Job! where the fantasy finally ate itself. It’s a story about girls pretending to love girls for customers who want to believe in purity, while real feelings creep in through the cracks. It’s performance art about the performance of affection, a mirror held up to a century of Japanese audiences who loved the aesthetic of yuri but got squeamish about its reality.

This is, at best, a surface-level walk through a field that scholars spend entire careers cultivating. There’s so much more: doujin culture, publishing politics, Western import cycles, fan lexicons, the slow evolution of censorship itself. But the broad arc remains the same. From Class S purity to café roleplay irony, yuri has always been Japan’s favorite controlled burn, how far can desire go before someone calls it a phase again?

And, since this is my blog, I’ll end with a shameless plug. While Slippery When Wet isn’t tehnically yuri, it is the dropout cousin who lights a cigarette at the reunion and laughs at the word “pure.” But it carries the same heartbeat that started in Yoshiya’s pages a hundred years ago: what if the feeling does not fade when it is supposed to?

i didn’t watch a show. i got spiritually mugged.

tadc wasn’t supposed to hit like this. i went in for memes and neon clowns and came out emotionally waterboarded. six episodes, gone in two days. just like that.

curse the living stars and the wretched minds who made this. how dare they make me care about that deranged, soul-mangled freak of a character. i wasn’t asking for catharsis, i was asking for nonsense. now i’m here, raw and unwell, clutching my screen like it owes me therapy.

Photo by ayumi kubo on Unsplash

Tokyo hums at night. You start to forget how quiet silence can be anywhere else. The vending machines sigh, the trains grind through Kita Senju, and in Yurakucho, smoke from the yakitori stalls drifts under the tracks, carrying small talk that sounds a lot like flirting. The city doesn’t speak. It overhears.

Lust isn’t chaos. It’s communication. Every touch says something. Every pause asks for translation. You can hear it in a laugh that lands too softly, or in the way someone doesn’t pull away when the crowd gets close. It’s a conversation made of breath and timing. In Japanese, hoshii means I want but also I lack. Every confession starts from that gap.

In Golden Gai, the alleys are too narrow to pretend you’re not listening. The bars smell like grilled salt and someone else’s perfume. A hand passes a lighter, a shoulder brushes another, and suddenly everyone’s speaking the same language without realizing it. Lust doesn’t shout here. It lingers. It waits its turn.

Kita Senju has a slower pulse. The trains echo over rooftops, and the station lights turn the air a kind of tender gray. You catch people walking almost in step, just close enough to feel each other’s warmth but not enough to reach. That’s what longing sounds like when it behaves.

And Yurakucho... God, that place never decides what it wants to be. Half salaryman sorrow, half soft confession. Under those arches, you see it all. People pretending to wait for friends, checking their phones, not leaving. Desire hides in small talk that goes on too long, in the moment before someone finally says, anyway, I should go.

People think lust is sudden, like a switch. But it’s slow. It builds through repetition. Through eye contact that lasts a second too long. Through restraint that starts to ache. It’s not the act, it’s the air before it. The almost. The not yet.

When I write about it, I’m not writing about sex. I’m trying to catch the space between what we mean and what we actually say. That’s where it lives, the pulse under the conversation, the part of you that wants to be understood but not caught. Two people guessing at each other’s grammar until something clicks.

Lust isn’t a confession. It’s practice. You learn it by mistake, by guessing, by listening. There are no fluent speakers, only people trying to get it right for once.

New story from the Arakawa Confidential Field Reports - Slippery When Wet.

If Under Control was the quiet before the storm, this is the thunder that follows.

Bar Venus hums like temptation dressed in velvet. Momo’s the new girl, all sugar and bite. Rina’s the bartender who’s been pretending control is the same thing as peace.

They both learn it isn’t.

It starts with mischief. It ends with a choice. Mostly F/F with some M/F to set the scene, and a lot of emotional humidity.

For mature readers, so read responsibly, pretty please.

(or: why half the internet had a meltdown and I couldn’t open Canva)

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

It started with Canva freezing. Which, under normal circumstances, I’d call divine intervention, a reminder to stop fiddling with font kerning for the cover of my next short story. But then Spotify glitched. Reddit hung. Even my translation app refused to cooperate.

And because I am a stable and rational human being, I immediately assumed the universe was punishing me for trying to be productive.

Turns out, the real villain was Amazon Web Services (AWS), the corporate deity that secretly holds half the internet hostage, having what can only be described as a public nervous breakdown. According to Ars Technica, a single point of failure in their DNS system sent millions of services into chaos.

Let that sink in. One broken link in the world’s biggest digital supply chain, and suddenly I can’t design a cover to save my life.

The tech gods trip over their own cables

For the non-tech people, DNS is basically the internet’s phonebook. You type “Netflix.com,” it finds the right number and calls the right server. Except this time AWS dropped the phonebook in a puddle, set it on fire, and blamed humidity.

The Guardian said even banks and smart beds went offline. Newsweek reported Amazon’s slow crawl back to “normal operations.” Which is corporate speak for “we duct-taped it and are pretending it’s fine.”

And yes, I’m still bitter. Because my Canva tab, the one with three versions of the title font for my story, kept looping the same cheery error message like an insult.

The chain reaction from hell

AWS’s own regions are supposed to be redundant, meaning one goes down, others pick up the slack. Except when they don’t. Turns out “redundancy” is just marketing for “we hope nothing explodes.”

Meanwhile, Business Insider quoted the Ring founder calling it a “tough day.” Buddy, my Canva refused to load for six hours, we all had a tough day.

Wired pointed out that the outage showed just how fragile our internet actually is. When one company sneezes, the whole digital economy catches the flu. Or in my case, the whole creative process collapses mid-cover draft.

Existential crisis, but make it corporate

The irony is painful. We’ve built this whole sleek, cloud-powered world so I can design a book cover from a café, but one tiny DNS glitch and we’re back to drawing on napkins. Somewhere, an ancient librarian spirit is laughing.

And here’s the funniest bit. Every startup immediately tweeted “we’re aware of the issue and working with AWS.” Translation, “Daddy Amazon broke it, and we don’t know how to fix it without crying.”

AWS themselves released a neat little post-mortem saying they’d “identified the root cause.” That’s cute. So did I, it’s called overreliance on a single tech monopoly that can ruin my art day.

So what did we learn?

The internet is held together by prayer, caffeine, and DNS records.

Canva is not immune to the apocalypse.

AWS is that one friend who insists they’ve “got it under control” as the smoke alarm goes off.

Maybe this is a sign to slow down. Or maybe it’s just proof that the cloud has commitment issues and needs therapy.

Either way, I got my Canva back eventually. The new cover looks decent. The outage left me mildly traumatised but inspired.

Because nothing says writer resilience like rage-refreshing your way through an infrastructure failure.

And now that the bitching and moaning is over, I’d like to take this sacred moment to thank Amazon for their generous contribution to modern civilization, their tireless innovation, and the continued opportunity they give humble writers like myself to publish fine literary works on KDP.

We spend half our lives pretending not to look. Which is funny, because the human body was made to be looked at. The curve of a shoulder, the tilt of a hip, the way gravity edits the same geometry in a thousand ways.

Take breasts, for instance. Mmm. Breasts. No, stop it. Focus. You’re supposed to be talking about aesthetics, not having a spiritual crisis in 4K. Okay. Everyone swears they do not notice the details, but come on. Entire art movements were just people trying to make their admiration look respectable. You think Rubens mixed all that gold light for theology? Please. That man worshipped softness. The Venus of Willendorf didn’t become an icon because she gave great lectures. She’s famous because someone looked at her roundness and thought, this is what comfort looks like before the world learned shame.

Right, focus. This is professional commentary. Breathe. Where was I? Oh, yes. Somewhere between marble goddesses and lingerie billboards, we forgot how to talk about the body without guilt. Like beauty needs a reason. Like we can only appreciate it if we promise not to enjoy it too much.

And yet, I think that’s where the honesty lives. That one stupid second before your brain wakes up and starts filing reports. You look, and it just hits you. No theory, no art history footnotes, just a body being a body and something in you going, oh.

Then the panic sets in. Because that’s not professional, right? You start explaining it away. Symbolism, technique, contrast, whatever keeps you from sounding like you just got emotional over skin. Meanwhile, your insides are staging a small coup.

It’s embarrassing. You want to thank the painting, apologize to it, and then crawl under a desk. Every time you think you’ve matured, something soft and human punches through and ruins the bit.

We keep acting like admiration is a crime when it’s probably just gratitude with poor impulse control. God, that sounded awful. Delete that.

Pull yourself together, man. You’re writing an essay, not unraveling in public.

Let us try again. (clears throat)

There are the round ones, full and buoyant, like they have never heard of gravity or grief. Painters adore them because they catch light like fruit in late summer. They feel like laughter turned into shape.

Then come the teardrops, full at the base and narrowing upward. The physics of grace. They carry a quiet wisdom that knows beauty will shift but never vanish.

Bell-shaped ones belong to the architecture of comfort. They feel like safety, like the kind of warmth you can rest in without needing to explain yourself.

The athletic form looks like it could run a marathon or debate your thesis. Compact, efficient, perfectly balanced between strength and restraint.

Side-set or east-west have a certain freedom to them. They seem to face the world at a relaxed angle, a little bohemian, a little untamed.

And then there is asymmetry, the universal truth. No body matches perfectly. That tiny difference is often where the story begins.

We keep giving these shapes personalities even though they are simply variations of being alive. The round ones become cheerful, the pendulous become kind, the small and high-set become precise. It is not science, only projection. The body turns into a mood ring for whatever feeling we cannot name.

Artists have always understood this. Sculpture bends under the weight of its own tenderness. Paintings stretch what is real until it feels truer than a photograph. A body is never still; it is always in conversation with time.

Shape is not destiny. It is dialogue. Between gravity and defiance. Between self and gaze. Between what we hide and what refuses to stay hidden.

So if you catch yourself admiring form, do not flinch. Look again. Then look kinder.

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Three Graces” (1635). Museo del Prado, Madrid. View the painting on Museo del Prado’s site.