Lately, I’ve been caught up with an anime called "The Summer Hikaru Died." The title alone pulls no punches—something’s off, something’s missing. The show is strange, even by late-night standards. Humorous, but unsettling. The kind of story that makes you squint at the edges, listening for something just out of view.

It’s about Yoshiki and his best friend, Hikaru. Or, it’s about someone who looks like Hikaru. The real Hikaru died in some shadowed accident in the mountains, and what Yoshiki got back isn’t exactly his friend, but a shape that wears his name, speaks in that easy Kansai dialect, and carries around laughter and habits that feel almost—almost—familiar. Sometimes the world flickers between hand-drawn strangeness and sudden real film footage, blurring fiction and reality until you can’t trust your eyes, much less your heart.

Every episode, things shift sideways. The plot loses its way on purpose. As a viewer, you’re left wandering with Yoshiki—trying to map out the new boundaries of grief, loyalty, and dread. What struck me most was the ache of it. The slow, spiraling sense of something precious lost and replaced by something close, but never whole.

It reminded me, in a way, of "Tanabata" (2024), another haunted thing set in the countryside. Both series feel rural and empty around the edges, filling in their silences with longing and the kind of loneliness that asks you to whisper, just to be heard. In “Hikaru,” the horror isn’t only in the supernatural. It’s in those human moments—trying to find comfort in what should be familiar, and discovering the warmth is gone.

The show circles the idea of identity like a moth at dusk. If someone holds your memories, your voice, even your affection, does it make them who you remember? If grief refuses to let a person go, do you really want the ghost to leave? There’s love here, but it’s knotted up with loss—a refusal to say goodbye, even when saying goodbye is the only honest thing left.
Cosmic horror blooms, too. Realities thin, time slips, and the truth turns cold and bottomless. What we fear isn’t just monsters, but not knowing—about ourselves, our friends, or what’s clawing at the walls when we’re left alone.
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"The Summer Hikaru Died" is a mess of genres—part coming-of-age, part slow-burning terror, part small-town portrait. But somewhere inside that confusion, it gets at something true: The pain of losing someone and the quiet wish that, just maybe, they might come back, even changed, even uncanny. What wouldn’t we give to hold on, even when letting go is what’s asked of us?

Lately there’s been a steady march of progress in the world of artificial intelligence. Names I’d never heard before now echo everywhere, and the latest to land in my Instagram feed is the Nano Banana by Google Gemini AI. It’s a strange little revolution. Suddenly, almost overnight, I watch as everyone I know becomes a figurine; action figures of themselves, smiling, glassy-eyed, with shoulders set just right. My feed hums with these toy-likenesses, each more polished, more perfect, more unreal than before.

I can’t deny it’s cool. There’s a sense of novelty when you see your own face, or the face of a friend, rendered with that toy-like precision. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t leave me unsettled too. The power of these new machines is growing with every passing week….. images, photographs, likenesses generated out of the ether. It makes me wonder how much longer we’ll be able to tell what’s real and what’s manufactured.

That old, instinctive ability to trust what you see: to say “yes, that’s really her, that’s really him” - it’s starting to slip away. And as the world bends further toward illusion, I find it harder and harder to hang onto what’s genuine, to draw some line around who I am, or who anyone else is for that matter.

Social media doesn’t help. Maybe it never did. Everybody wants to show their best side: the hand-picked photos, the fantastic physique and whitest teeth, that trip to Greece where the sky and sea are the bluest you’ve ever seen. Scroll and you’ll find it, again and again, the curated lives of others, and your own curation staring right back at you. I’m guilty of it too: the travels, the wins, the hints of fitness or the occasional sunbeam arranged just so.

But every now and then I get this longing. To see something different. Not just the shine, but the scrape. The less-than-perfect light. Someone’s honest talk about anxiety or insecurity, some reflection on their place in the world: which is, more often than not, a place of uncertainty. These are the moments that actually make me feel part of something, that let me believe all of us out there….. friends, strangers, silent watchers — really are human, moving through each day, carrying burdens only partly seen.

I don’t know how this will evolve. Photos and videos, no matter how clever, only skim the surface. They show the mask, or the avatar, or now, the action figure with the perfect little fists. Maybe that’s why I still remember LiveJournal with a kind of longing. It was a slower world, a quieter one. People written in their own voices, not just images and angles, but full sentences and unfinished feelings. When you read those journals, you felt the person behind the screen: their doubts, their late-night hopes, the messiness that made them real.

You can’t fake that with an algorithm. You can’t automate honesty. That extra dimension: past the manicured photo, past the clever AI, into real reflection - is what makes us who we are. So yes, wonder at the new gadgets. Marvel at the action figures, post the photos if you must. But don’t let them erase the part of you that can’t be trimmed to fit a frame. Write, if you can; about what scares you, what excites you, what gets you out of bed. That, to me, is the only technology we need for staying human.
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And so…