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While packing today, I found a little notebook I had written in as a child. My name appears in an immature hand. On the cover, “403” sits over a fluorescent-highlighter background, “503” is shaded in pencil, and “603” was finally carved in ballpoint pen. Most of the pages contain drafts and bits of writing made for fun. There is also no shortage of Minecraft group rosters, house designs—yes, I drew them one block at a time—and even a comic abandoned halfway through. Some passages distinctly foreshadow the later Boring Notes, making this notebook a true veteran. ...

After finishing the website, I went an entire month without writing a diary entry. Why? Partly because having one more place to update felt troublesome, and partly because everyday life gave me plenty to do. But if you kept pressing me, you would probably receive only stammering and evasive glances. It is true that the past few weeks of school have been rather intense, but with a mere thirteen credit hours this semester, I can handle the assignments comfortably enough. At least I do not stay up until the middle of the night. (Ah, a deadline warrior.) ...

After some thought, I decided I should at least reach two to the seventh power. Today, let us discuss a subject that has been brewing in my head for quite a while: the emotional aftershock a story leaves behind. The immediate cause was the 3.1 story update for Wuthering Waves, which genuinely stunned me. Its excellent script carries traces of predecessors such as Interstellar and Steins;Gate, yet still tells a good story rooted in the world of Solaris. Although, for now, it ends badly. It takes the literature of regret tentatively explored in 2.5 and brings it to full maturity, successfully stabbing another large crowd of players, myself included. ...

This is Tianyao, who spent nearly three weeks after publishing Diary 126 writing an essay titled “Why People Should Start Keeping a Diary.” Ironically, he did not write a single diary entry during that period. ( Now, faced with a new proposal for Composition class, he has finally remembered the starving little essay series abandoned in a corner, with only 127 entries to its name. Ah! (Seamless transition.) At this point, attentive readers may ask: no matter how hard we search, why can we not find the nearly sixty entries between 34 and 91? Was some mysterious power at work? An exotic numeral system, perhaps? ...

Unable to think of a topic for my first English Composition II essay, due tomorrow, I began digging through old papers on my computer. Omnibus has a special sort of “reputation”: it makes you consider questions no one else your age would ever think about, yet which an American citizen apparently needs to consider. It is an American textbook, after all. At the same time, if you replace “Country A” with “Country C” in each essay’s cultural analysis, the difficulty of publishing that essay immediately rises by an entire level. Unfortunately, that is what we did for most prompts involving Country A. Consequently, most people who can see this post on WeChat cannot see those pieces of my “dark history.” On reflection, perhaps that is not so unfortunate after all. ...

It is that time of year again, and naturally the annual retrospective cannot be omitted. Let us see how much I can finish before 11:59 p.m. ( One thing worth mentioning: I gave my experiences in the Puzzle Hunt community this year their own article. On one hand, I feared I would hit WeChat’s character limit and leave no room for anything else. On the other, judging from the feedback I have received all year, not many people around me are particularly obsessed with this subject. The video made its earth-shattering debut during the puzzle team’s TPAPWRAPA livestream on the 29th, then appeared on Bilibili together with the companion article. If you are interested, please follow Zhuge Tianyao on Bilibili. Thank you! ...

Congratulations to the WeChat account Mysterious Mr. Owl Q on reaching one thousand followers! Confetti 🎉 I saw the news first thing in the morning and became so excited that, amid the deadline panic of finishing a paper, I found time to doodle some limited-edition merchandise. Only one exists, so you tell me whether that counts as limited. If the opportunity arises, I will put it into ruthless mass production. ( Come to think of it, I have been in the puzzle community for roughly as long as that account has existed. I have recently been organizing the various puzzle-related things I wrote over the past year, so here is a tiny preview—and a lazy way to pad today’s word count. ...

Thank goodness for Thanksgiving break! American geocaches are beginning to seem suspiciously homogeneous. So far, I have found at least six hidden in similar places, including the only two physical caches on campus. Damn it, I have not seen a single one resembling the ingenious camouflaged caches Teacher Nano once showed me. Must Chinese Taobao teach these Americans a small lesson in the manufacturing might of Yiwu? Then again, this pattern gives me more time to read the story behind each location, because that is honestly the only interesting part left. Perhaps this is simply geocaching adapting to America’s great road-trip culture. At least I can confidently write “found” in my log instead of behaving like certain newcomers who search for my cache in Hangzhou, fail without ceremony, immediately post “Needs Maintenance” to pressure me into sending a friend out, and then demand a revised hint and lower difficulty in one seamless chain until the answer is practically placed in their mouths. You only realize how demanding players can be after becoming a cache owner. I wonder whether any of my own “did not find” logs at the beginning of the year caused someone else the same trouble. ...

We meet again after n days. I missed you all so much! I recently made a website introducing my university and sharing some of my experiences here. Teacher Zhang once asked me to give a talk for some younger students at the end of September, but who knows how long I will keep procrastinating on that? I may as well publish this instead: My Life at LETU You will need a VPN to access it from China. The site is entirely in English for now, because it was actually an assignment for my English Composition class. (Gets punched.) In the future, I will gradually archive the Sojourner’s Diary series there, making all my dark history entries easier to find. (In the end, I still put them here.) Questions are also welcome; the answers may be added to the site! ...

The updates have returned! I have been quietly working on something big, which should be ready soon. After agonizing for ages over whether to make it an article or a video, I decided I want both. My QQ status has already hinted at the subject. It was also one of my possible titles, haha. Halloween culture has always been strong in America. For someone whose only systematic introduction to the holiday and its history came from an Omnibus textbook, this was my first time truly celebrating Halloween. I had received candy before, admittedly… but that was at a birthday party. ...