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The Firehose Feed

This is a chronological feed of everything I’ve published.

AI asia Being a Writer Being Chinese Birds blog blogging books cat CDrama ChatGPT China Chinese culture Chinese Drama COVID COVID19 culture digitalgardens Fediverse Fiction geopolitics indieweb Internet Language Learning life Malaysia Mandarin mental health movie review Obsidian Penang PKM Politics productivity reading science fiction seedling socialmedia StayAtHome Substack tech Technology television Travel writing

  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – quick thoughts

    The movie is a reminder that people are now desperate for something different and fun again. They don’t want to be preached to about diversity, inclusion or other agendas. They want to see a bunch of people doing crazy, impossible things, and Mission Impossible 7 delivers.

  • Why I Left Apple’s Ecosystem

    I acknowledge that Apple products are sleeker, high in quality and they “just work”. But I still left the Apple Ecosystem anyway and have absolutely no regrets.

  • Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny was great! But if you had listened to movie pundits, you probably would have expected it to be terrible. I think we’ve forgotten how to enjoy movies.

  • A good post by SelfAwarePatterns about Threads and why social media is mostly crummy these days.

  • Threads is out. And the natives are restless. 🍿 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

  • The way I blog has drastically changed since I discovered the IndieWeb. For one, I’m less precious with my blog posts. I allow mistakes, errors, and no longer think chronologically. Every post is an evolving document.

  • In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, Google has changed its privacy policy to declare that they will scrape up anything you post online to train their AI tools. How should writers and artists protect their content from now on?

  • Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Substack … if you’re building your content home on any of these, it’s time to wake up to the cold hard reality that they could all disappear on you one day. As a writer, embracing Indieweb principles could save your life’s work from disappearing along with these platforms. Here’s how I…

  • When I wrote this today, #TwitterDown was trending on Mastodon. Here’s another lesson why using platforms like Twitter and Substack as your content home is a bad idea. Publish your content the POSSE/PESOS way and you avoid much of the dangers of a social media site melting down.

  • That Man

    That Man

    The Outerworlds formed the Federation because they had to. At least, that’s the “official” story. A Distant Stars tale. This story is exclusive for blog subscribers, so do subscribe to the blog to read the story 🙂 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

  • A Dream of Splendor – review

    Finally, a Chinese drama that is not just beautiful to look at, but is well acted, authentic, and celebrates womanly ideals and the female gaze.

  • Distant Stars is a composite novel set in the distant future where humanity has fled to another part of the galaxy. But old habits die hard. Humanity is still at each other’s throats and have long forgotten why they need to work together. A roadmap for readers.

  • The slow awakening that I no longer have to create around an algorithm’s demands. 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

  • People are dying. The world is in chaos. Do our words matter? 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

  • I recently made a video about daily notes, but since then, I’ve already made improvements to my template. I’ve incorporated bullet journal principles into it, which has made the process more enjoyable and has encouraged me to journal more frequently.

  • In 2022 I searched high and low for a software that I could use to generate my own “wiki”. I later found out that most call this a “second brain” or “personal knowledge management system”. Fortunately, I came across Obsidian and fell in love. As I tinker around with Obsidian, I realise that it’s powerful…