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The Firehose Feed

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

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

  • An interesting debate about imperialism, capitalism and why there’s a move towards a multipolar world. Justin Podur and Sam Gindin discussed this with such civility. We need more grounded debates like this.

  • It’s probably impossible to be neutral about China

    I’m often obsessed about random topics, but none of my pet topics would paint me in a bad light like my current interest in the US-China tensions. It’s pretty disturbing to realise that I will be automatically disliked because I hold a different view of China.

  • I was vacationing with a friend on Scotland island, off Sydney, #Australia in this amazing B&B. We were having breakfast at the verandah when the host approached us hesitantly. “I hope I am not offending you if I ask this, but we were curious why you were speaking English after we have left.” My friend…

  • Why do some Americans have such bad geography skills? Why do they knows so little of the world outside America. The book, “A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization” by Sam Lebovic, attempts to explain the phenomenon.

  • 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

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

  • Weekend Tales #2

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

  • 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. 🍿 πŸ“§ 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.