thoughts on diet coke
i just paid HK$9 for a diet coke, or about US$1.15.
2 notes
All Notes
the death of the personal blog
nobody writes personal blogs anymore.
No notes found.
2 notes
i just paid HK$9 for a diet coke, or about US$1.15.
nobody writes personal blogs anymore.
No notes found.
September 21, 2026 at 14:46
i just paid HK$9 for a diet coke, or about US$1.15. i actually think it was a “coca cola light”, which is how diet coke is branded in parts of asia. to those of us on western incomes, in developed countries, that price is pretty close to zero; buying one daily comes to less than a percent of your income. there aren’t many things you can buy that are much cheaper.
diet coke has zero calories. it contains no sugar, no fat, no protein, and has all but zero nutritional value. it contains caffeine in small enough doses that you typically don’t have to think about what time of day you drink it. the only downside to drinking it that i can think of is that the phosphoric acid is bad for your teeth.
what is the upside? there’s the caffeine, but as previously mentioned it’s a small dose, and there are more effective media for caffeine intake.
diet coke reminds me of vaping (of which i am 2 months clean, as of writing). it’s roughly free in the biological sense: none of the cancer risk associated with tobacco. there is also very little upside to vaping; after a short period of using nicotine, tolerance vastly blunts any of the actual effects. diet coke at least does not have the withdrawals nicotine does.
as a child, i remember only rarely drinking full sugar coke, and as an adult i do not like it. full sugar sodas have a somewhat astringent texture. coke zero, which attempts to replicate standard coke more closely than diet coke, avoids this, but is still too sweet.
when at a restaurant fancy enough to ask me “still or sparkling”, i will often choose sparkling purely for the novelty. but sparkling water on its own can taste slightly sour, because there is nothing to balance the carbonic acid.
since moving to hong kong, i’ve found a drink here called “coke plus”. i’ve tried it a few times, because diet coke is less common here and coke plus tastes pretty similar. i looked into it and coke plus is a similar formulation, but has 5 grams of dietary fibre. isn’t that wild? it’s not just “not bad for you” but now actively good for you.
i just paid HK$9 for a diet coke, or about US$1.15. i actually think it was a “coca cola light”, which is how diet coke is branded in parts of asia. to those of us on western incomes, in developed countries, that price is pretty close to zero; buying one daily comes to less than a percent of your income. there aren’t many things you can buy that are much cheaper.
diet coke has zero calories. it contains no sugar, no fat, no protein, and has all but zero nutritional value. it contains caffeine in small enough doses that you typically don’t have to think about what time of day you drink it. the only downside to drinking it that i can think of is that the phosphoric acid is bad for your teeth.
what is the upside? there’s the caffeine, but as previously mentioned it’s a small dose, and there are more effective media for caffeine intake.
diet coke reminds me of vaping (of which i am 2 months clean, as of writing). it’s roughly free in the biological sense: none of the cancer risk associated with tobacco. there is also very little upside to vaping; after a short period of using nicotine, tolerance vastly blunts any of the actual effects. diet coke at least does not have the withdrawals nicotine does.
as a child, i remember only rarely drinking full sugar coke, and as an adult i do not like it. full sugar sodas have a somewhat astringent texture. coke zero, which attempts to replicate standard coke more closely than diet coke, avoids this, but is still too sweet.
when at a restaurant fancy enough to ask me “still or sparkling”, i will often choose sparkling purely for the novelty. but sparkling water on its own can taste slightly sour, because there is nothing to balance the carbonic acid.
since moving to hong kong, i’ve found a drink here called “coke plus”. i’ve tried it a few times, because diet coke is less common here and coke plus tastes pretty similar. i looked into it and coke plus is a similar formulation, but has 5 grams of dietary fibre. isn’t that wild? it’s not just “not bad for you” but now actively good for you.
nobody writes personal blogs anymore.
the friction associated with setting up a personal blog is far lower than it would have been in 2006 - commercial offerings, free platforms, or AI to build it for us. but it feels greater than ever because frictionless alternatives now exist; setting up a twitter takes seconds and the twitter algorithm is a free, built-in way to get your first readers.
in 2006 you paid with effort to set up a blog. in 2026 you pay in aesthetic.
to me, this is gradient descent towards a local minimum, and i think we are stuck here. the world we have built is convenient, not aesthetic. LEDs are more convenient than neon signs, but the loss of Hong Kong’s neon should upset the world. personal blogs are the neon signs of Hong Kong.
the feeling of stumbling across an old personal blog is incredible. reading articles written in 2006 on a website abandoned since 2014, pages of content with the small “0 comments” tag. seeing an abandoned twitter with no replies is just the norm. the effort of setting up a blog is what makes its abandonment sad.
so here we are. it’s not the same to start a personal blog in 2026; the writers of 2006 did not know what the internet would become. but i hope by enduring the friction ($12/year for a domain and the effort of maintaining a jekyll site on github pages) somebody might stumble across this in many years and get the same feeling i get. consider it me putting up my own neon sign, even if it’s more work than a cheap LED.