Elizabeth Tai

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The Firehose Feed

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

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  • Walks in the morning

    If I don’t start my day early in the morning walking while the sun rises, I know that it will be a less than ideal day. A few days ago, I grabbed my Nordic poles and went out walking despite it being a drizzly day. I let the rain fall as I walked/poled around the…

  • Being Chinese in an anti-China world

    Being Chinese in an anti-China world

    I speak and think in English. But I’m genetically Chinese and that is problematic in an anti-China Western world. 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

  • Weekend Tales #2

    Dealing with digital burnout and a bumper issue with 12 recommended reads! 📧 To read, subscribe to the blog.

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

    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

    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 and the Temple of Political Correctness

    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.

  • The sorry state of social media

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

  • The puritanical pursuit of platform purity

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

  • Being an imperfect gardener of my digital garden

    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.

  • Google: All your content are belong to us

    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?

  • How I am blogging the IndieWeb way

    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…

  • POSSE and PESOS: Better ways to publish content

    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

    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 — story index

    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.

  • How I’m healing from algorithms

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