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An exhibition of classic Chinese animation brought back memories of my childhood and reminded me how much beauty there is still to discover in our own cultural heritage. Today, I took my son to an exhibition featuring classic animations created by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. As I walked through the exhibition and saw those familiar animated characters again, memories of my childhood began to return. Where Is Mama?, Havoc in Heaven, Calabash Brothers, and, of course, Black Cat Detective, the brave black cat who would raise his pistol whenever the words “To Be Continued” appeared at the end of an episode. ...

Lately, I’ve been seeing more discussions about a possible AI bubble. From rising tech valuations and massive investments in computing infrastructure to questions about whether AI companies can eventually deliver the profits investors expect, concerns about the industry’s future seem to be growing. Some commentators have even started suggesting that 2027 could be a turning point for the current AI investment boom. Whenever I come across these discussions, I find myself wondering what people actually mean by an AI bubble. Are we overestimating the technology itself, or are investors simply too optimistic about how much money it will generate? And beyond the stock market and the technology companies attracting billions of dollars in investment, could there be another kind of bubble forming in the everyday lives of people who believe AI will help them become wealthy? ...

Two days before TOKEN2049 Singapore began, I wrote down a few questions I wanted the conference to answer. I was less interested in what Bitcoin might do after a keynote, or which project might become the next short-lived narrative, and more interested in whether stablecoins were becoming part of financial infrastructure, whether AI agents would actually need crypto, and whether traditional finance was entering crypto — or finance itself was beginning to move onchain. ...

Over the past year, I have followed several major crypto conferences, from Miami to Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, and now TOKEN2049 Singapore. What interests me most has gradually changed. At first, crypto conferences were easy to understand. We watched Bitcoin, regulation, exchanges, new chains, market cycles and, inevitably, price. But the conversations around these events have started to feel broader. AI keeps appearing. Stablecoins are moving deeper into payments. Traditional financial institutions are no longer simply asking whether they should participate in crypto. Increasingly, they are discussing what parts of finance might eventually move onchain. ...

Today I saw a Reuters report saying that the RMB had strengthened to a more than three-and-a-half-year high against the U.S. dollar, just days after the Fed raised rates . My first reaction was a small sense of disappointment. For people who work in international trade and often receive payments in U.S. dollars, a slightly stronger dollar against the RMB is usually welcome news. When the Fed announced another rate increase, I had expected the exchange rate to move up at least a little. Instead, the market went almost the other way. ...

Recently, I redefined LaceMoods and updated the website. I wouldn’t really call it a redesign. It feels more like I finally started bringing together all the scattered ideas I’ve had over the past few years and giving them a place to belong. LaceMoods started in a very simple way. It began with women’s lingerie. I’ve always liked lace, soft fabrics, and the feeling that comes with wearing something beautiful, even when nobody else sees it. Lingerie is still one of those things people can feel slightly awkward talking about, and it often gets linked to sexiness almost immediately. But if you strip away all those assumptions, underwear is simply one of the most intimate pieces of clothing in a woman’s life. From the time a girl starts growing up, it becomes something she wears almost every day and something that stays physically close to her body. ...

Every year on September 18, when I hear the air-raid sirens outside — three times, three minutes each — I feel a heaviness settle in me. It may look like just another date on the calendar, and life still goes on as usual: we get up, take our children to school, go to work, and deal with all the ordinary things that fill a normal day. But in 2026, it has been 95 years since that night in 1931, and I still believe this is a day we should stop and remember. ...

Ahead of the September 15 vote, Senator Cynthia Lummis posted a blunt message on X. After months of negotiations, she argued that the latest version of the CLARITY Act had already incorporated many Democratic requests and that it was time to stop negotiating and vote. The revised text did include 126 substantive changes sought by Democrats, including tighter restrictions related to public officials and crypto conflicts of interest, according to Reuters’ reporting on the final draft of the bill . Even so, disputes over ethics, banking and financial stability remained unresolved going into the vote. ...

I used to think I would be the kind of mother who rarely lost her temper. I imagined myself as calm, patient, and good at communicating with my child. I would listen carefully, explain things gently when he was upset, and manage my own emotions before they ever reached the point of anger. I had read so much about parenting that I genuinely believed that, if nothing else, I would at least be good at talking things through. ...

It has been almost a month since I last updated Flowanriver. I did not stop because I wanted to give it up; I simply did not find anything during this period that I genuinely wanted to write about. There were topics I could have followed, trends I could have commented on, and certainly things I could have written because they were easier to rank or more likely to be indexed by Google. But every time I tried to approach writing from that direction, I felt something was off. I did not want to publish something just to keep the site active, or choose a topic simply because an algorithm might prefer it. ...