An artery is the scarlet highway guaranteed to deliver survival. It pulses endlessly without rest, and its cessation means immediate oblivion. Everyone forgets its existence when it works flawlessly and vilifies it as a traitor at the first sign of trouble. Yet this sovereign of circulation reigns with ruthless efficiency through our veins. To live, we must coax its favor while avoiding its wrath.

Artificial intelligence is hailed as tomorrow’s omniscient oracle, yet today it labors through battles of data and bugs as a so-called universal problem-solver. It carries the lofty dreams of its creators and the messy realities of the workplace, occasionally performing inexplicable antics that startle its users. Promising brilliance, it delivers cold responses and cryptic errors, ultimately embodying the paradox of outsourcing intelligence only to burden human hands.

Assemblage is the mischievous art form that summons fine art from a pile of junk. An old toy once relegated to the corner becomes a gallery star sold at a princely sum. It's the absurd ritual in which chaos achieves recognition as art, flipping the spectator's sense of value on its head.

Assembly language is the unvarnished attempt to commune so closely with metal that the machine feels every beat of your heart. It spurns the silky comforts of high-level languages, instead granting adventurers passage through the wastelands of bits and registers. Scribes of assembly taste the sweet fruit of blazing speed, only to have their souls chipped away in debugging hell. A backstage champion of digital progress or a siren luring programmers to madness, its nature depends on the wielder.

An assessment center is a field of trials under the guise of evaluating talent. Participants exhaust themselves with group exercises and presentations, only to be judged by vague interviewers’ whims. It touts fairness and efficiency, yet becomes a device to test stress tolerance and corporate servility. Successful candidates emerge not as proven talents, but as warriors who endured needless ordeals.

Assimilation is the ritual of stripping away the pardon called individuality and intoxicatedly drinking from the chalice called the collective. Different voices are gradually erased by the cacophony renamed harmony, until everyone ends up as a uniform chorus. The colors of freedom are immediately repainted into monochrome sketches, and difference is shunned as dissonance. Resistance is not a virtue but stamped with the mark of discord, and participation becomes an obligation.

Astrophotography is said to trap countless stars behind a lens, but in reality it is a hobby that romanticizes endless duels with long exposures and a tripod. Facing the darkness may be a pursuit of romance or a nightly ordeal frightened by light pollution. The wait for the final image is a thorny path where anticipation and equipment failures take turns stirring frustration. In the end, the captured photos become mere decorations for SNS exhibitions, and the mystery of the galaxy is reduced to a prop for hashtag #stargazer bragging.

Astroturfing is the glamorous stagecraft of propaganda dressed as grassroots activism, conjured by PR firms. It pretends to be the authentic voices of citizens while secretly manipulating public opinion with money and algorithms. No banner screaming 'citizen movement' is more suspicious, no slogan more of a cheap fairy tale. It masquerades as an autonomous uprising only to become the puppet of corporate interests.

Asylum is the diplomatic drama in which one voluntarily chooses an unstable status, savoring both the pity and indifference of others simultaneously. Once hailed as the prologue to epic heroism, it now entails navigating a labyrinth of paperwork and interviews. Border officials pretend to welcome, while scheming the next bureaucratic obstacle in private. The asylum seeker is forced to transform from fugitive to refugee to reluctant political activist, yet the title brings few privileges. By the time they reach new lands, they are often drawn into an identity crisis wedged between homeland and adopted nation.

Asynchronous I/O is the art of programs abandoning tasks without waiting for replies, creating an illusion of idle CPU time and gifting developers with mysterious bugs. It proclaims in its specs that there is no need to wait, yet in production it's met with cries of "When will it ever return?". The term "non-blocking" feels like the system perfected the excuse to keep humanity waiting. Beneath its elegance lies a theater of idle timeouts and chaos. Welcome to a realm where patience is optional and confusion mandatory.

Atheism is the philosophy of holding every ultimate answer in abeyance, staring at a throne of gods that never occupied. Knowing there is no afterlife guarantee, it burdens you with the resolve to grin nervously between life and death. It means choosing a narrative that goes on even when the main character never arrives. A simple yet endless DIY project in which you furnish your own ethics and anxieties. For example, someone may skip saving for heaven but diligently budget tomorrow's coffee.

An atomic operation is the forbidden trick of computing that refuses division and uses indivisibility to deny everything else. It freezes execution between error and success under the guise of a binary shield, soothing or tormenting human ambition. It performs a lone-show, mocking multiple actions with solitary dignity. Proclaiming to guard system consistency with faux nobility while incinerating implementers' neurons. Ultimately, it dazzles with the promise that "do it all at once and it's perfect," a festival of technical vanity.