amw

the legend of the millionaire market vendor

amw — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 06:57:01 GMT

Taiwan is a country of many superstitions.

I won't forget the time at work when i mentioned one of those superstitions as a piece of harmless smalltalk with a new migrant, and then one of my university-educated, highly-paid, well-traveled Taiwanese colleagues looked at me like i'd just said the moon was made of cheese, shocked that i would challenge such a well-known fact. The fact? That if your child plays basketball, they will grow tall. Kids who grow up short, it's because their parents didn't make them play basketball. Everyone knows that! I was suitably embarrassed that i had been such an insensitive clod, and quietly slunk back to my desk with a red face, having proven myself to be exactly the kind of arrogant, judgmental outsider that i generally try my best to avoid being.

It's still a ridiculous belief, but that's beside the point i suppose. Every culture comes up with their own irrational superstitions. I know i've copped flak from people who grew up in the US or Asia from one belief i was brought up with - that air conditioning is bad for your health and will make you sick. I think most people who grew up in Europe still believe that, and will stubbornly open the windows year-round to get some "fresh" air, even - or especially - in office blocks where there is no option to turn off the built-in HVAC.

Anyway, there are superstitions, and there are urban legends, and there are open secrets, and it can be hard to disentangle them when you are a migrant to a new culture. One of the most persistent myths (or truths?) of Taiwan is that street market vendors are secretly extremely wealthy.

Yes, you heard me right. The aunties who unroll their blankets first thing in the morning and squat on the ground till noon peddling assorted greens, they're actually millionaires who own multiple apartments and make all their real income from rent. They probably have a Mercedes at home, they just ride that battered old scooter to the market as part of their gimmick.

The story goes that all the foreigners and tourists who buy from market vendors are suckers - they've been taken in by the old timey mom'n'pop schtick, they've been bamboozled into giving away their money to swindlers who don't pay any taxes (because market vendors only take cash and don't issue receipts) while civilized members of society prefer to shop in clean, safe shopping malls and get their food from internationally-trusted supermarket chains.

Of course if you challenge it, they will point to a guy they know, a friend of theirs on the inside, or some article on the news about the notorious grifter who spends all day cosplaying as a peasant, hawking steamed buns to the gullible masses.

The thing is, it might very well be true. If you try to calculate out the income that most of these street vendors could plausibly be making from their wares, the profit margin is so slim that it'd be virtually impossible to live off. Unless, perhaps, you outright owned your home and did not have to pay rent. Or unless you had a passive income on the side, wealthy children sending you a stipend, connections to organized crime... and then the market vending is just a hobby, that thing you do to pass the time while your real money is being made elsewhere.

But the thing is... even if it is true that every market vendor is a sham, an undercover aristocrat just faking a connection to the common people... THAT'S STILL BETTER THAN THE FUCKING MEGACORP.

It's like when people say "you can't be a real leftist because you buy nice things" or "you can't be anti-capitalist and use a smartphone" or whatever gotcha claim they think will win an argument that nobody was even having.

Like, what would you rather have? A well-to-do neighbor who opens up a market stall and sits there every day, engaging in banter with and selling vegetables to the local people... or a well-to-do neighbor who doesn't give a fuck about the community and spends all day playing golf and sharing racist memes on social media? Which city would you rather live in, the one with hundreds of hyper-local mom'n'pop outfits where the shopkeepers know their customers and sell the human connection as much as the products on their shelves, or the one with hundreds of identical chain stores selling ultra-processed foods and imported tat?

One of the things i like best about Taiwan is that there is still a cash culture. Tap-to-pay and mobile payments are not ubiquitous, which means you can actually exist in society without tech companies and banks spying on literally everything you purchase, everywhere, all the time. Despite rivaling Japan in density of convenience stores, it's still perfectly viable to choose not to pick up a microwaved dinner from 7-Eleven every night. There's enough little food stalls and holes in the wall that you don't need to. Of course, the majority of Taiwanese people do mostly eat at convenience stores, they do mostly shop at supermarkets, they do mostly buy brand name products... but the point is that the option is there. The same cannot be said for a lot of other places i lived.

And the thing that is so insidious about this narrative of the millionaire market vendor, is that it's basically teaching Taiwanese people to turn their country into a giant shopping mall, owned and run either by foreign billionaires, or by local billionaires who would gladly sell out to China because money is more important to them than culture. I mean, obviously it is, because otherwise they wouldn't be running massive conglomerates that push out all the local mom'n'pop stores.

I'm sure some well-heeled, middle-class Taiwanese person would tut-tut and tell me that i am just falling for the trick. By depriving the Taiwanese government of the taxes they were due from these dastardly street vendors, i am actually undermining civil society, and if only i had the great historical knowledge of how corrupt Taiwanese society used to be before the KMT military dictatorship straightened it all out, i wouldn't be so easily duped. Because, you see, many years ago they introduced a system where every receipt issued by a business doubled as a free ticket to the Uniform Invoice Lottery, a scheme to motivate consumers to put pressure on vendors to issue receipts and thus accurately report their income for taxation and bla bla bla. You know what? Maybe that did make sense in 1951, but in 2026 let's be real. The bulk of the taxes are not coming from ama and aba selling bok choy and kim chi to the handful of people who still cook their own meals, they're coming from TSMC and MediaTek and Foxconn and fucking Uni-President (Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Carrefour etc).

No, wait, but you're still being misled! By giving money to street vendors you're supporting organized crime, and if you believe in Taiwan independence then you're shooting yourself in the foot, because everybody knows most of the organized crime syndicates in Taiwan are directly linked to CCP influence campaigns via the United Front Work Department. (This, by the way, is why you can never trust a temple in Taiwan - they're all money-laundering fronts for local gangsters who in turn are owned by the CCP. The Communists are not just under the bed, they're in your ancestral shrines! Clearly converting to Christianity is the only truly patriotic choice...)

So you are cheating the government out of money and not doing your civic duty, or you are tearing at the very fabric of decent, law-abiding society, or you are contributing to a takeover by the CCP... Anything but connecting with another human being, handing over some coins in exchange for some greens, having them smile and give you a bunch of scallions on the house, or knock off a few bucks for being a regular. If these are the bad guys, then why is it so hard for the good guys - those upstanding members of society with vastly more billions of capital behind them - to offer an equivalent service, eh?

When i started thinking about writing this entry i wanted to call it "the mythical millionaire market vendor" because of the alliteration, but i chose not to, because i do actually believe that it's not a myth. It's an urban legend, insofar as it's a story people tell to promote certain lifestyle choices, but i suspect it's grounded in some degree of truth. I don't doubt that market vendors have more access to "old money" than the kids clerking at FamilyMart, and clearly they are doing better than the folks who unfold their sheets of cardboard to sleep on. And yet, when the moral of the story is "why you should distrust your neighbor in favor of a megacorp", bro, i don't like that story. That's not the society i want to live in. I think if most people were honest with themselves, they might agree.

Anyway, i wanted to get it off my chest. This post was brought to you by my local tycoons and triads, making money hand-over-fist, one head of lettuce at a time.

Friday Five for 29 May 2026

amw — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:43:26 GMT

Yes, it's thefridayfive on Sunday, because i wanted to give my last post a day to sit, but i also couldn't skip a meme about one of my favorite things - food!

1. In an average week, how many nights do you eat home-cooked dinners?

Every night. I usually only eat out when i am traveling.

2. Do you plan your meals out in advance, or just wing it?

I'm not sure what this is asking... If the question is do i just randomly buy food and then figure out what to make later, no - that seems like a recipe for creating food waste. I buy exactly the right amount of food that i need to get the calories i want for the number of meals between this shop and the next. I shop at least twice a week so i just get enough fruits and veges and carbs to last exactly until the next one, but i do buy whatever looks good, i don't go to the shops specifically looking for anything other than my preferred brands of tofu, peanut butter, coffee and oats.

3. How many nights per week do you eat out or order food delivered?

This question seems like a repeat of question 1, but aha! It's not! Because one thing i do do about once a week is try to pick up a meat snack. I call it "cheat day", but basically it's just a vague attempt to get some B12 and whatever other nutrients i might miss from eating vegan. (I did start taking a D+Ca supplement after the docs said my bones were decrepit, but that's more due to not having any male or female hormones any more.) Usually i will get a 刮包 pork belly bao on Friday night as a pre-dinner snack, and then i balance the Friday night dinner to have less tofu in it, or one less pancake or something.

4. Do you keep a stock of nonperishable foods from which you could whip up a meal or two if you needed to?

Definitely not. I keep only exactly much as i need and nothing more. I hate wasting food and i hate feeling like my house is full of junk so i always try to keep my shelves bare. In an emergency it would be much more important to get access to clean water than food, imo. I worry about that a lot more, because usually i only have about 2L of water in my bottles plus whatever is in the jug which is enough to survive a day in a pinch, but it'd be cutting it fine if i needed to be active as well. But if i needed to be active then presumably there would be other survivors/refugees/etc too so we could figure out the food and drink situation together. There is a bomb shelter in the next building over, though i'm not sure how much water the local authorities store in there.

5. Have you ever tried preparing meals for the week all at once, say, on the weekend?

No. I know some people do that, but it seems really weird to me, because seems like it'd take longer to cook something from frozen than it would from fresh, and then the freezing process destroy the texture. I suppose it'd make sense for curry or stew or something, but i don't have a pan to cook that kind of stuff in, i only have a single frypan and a single burner so it's not going to happen anyway.

religion, atheism and visceral reactions to the world around us

amw — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:17:15 GMT

Okay, let's try to get started. I expect we might get a couple of little, bite-sized entries given these thoughts i was having that seemed i wouldn't be able to exorcise without writing down have already started to dissipate. Maybe i should dot-point all my thoughts? But surely that would not be as fun to write or read.

So, how we feel things in our body. The topic came up because i was having an exchange online with someone about religion and how it's experienced differently by different people. It was in response to a recent Religion For Breakfast video about atheists vs agnostics and how, when prompted by researchers with a weird question about the emotions they expected to feel if a divine power turned out to exist after all, atheists tended more toward anger or fear whereas agnostics felt comforted or reassured.

Agnostics Spiritually Struggle More Than Atheists—But Feel Better About God

The research that was cited annoyed me, because how is this even a sensible question to ask an atheist? It's like asking how someone might feel if matter or energy didn't exist. The whole universe would work differently! Belief in a divine power is inherently a belief in impossibility, that's the whole point. If divinity were measurable or observable, then there would be no need to have faith, because it would be just as unremarkable as seeing an apple fall from a tree. In a fantasy world where the laws of physics operated differently and miraculous stuff happened all the time, gods wouldn't be gods, they'd just be the guys who did the magic, so, like, whatever. Maybe better give them a sacrifice to stay on their good side. In that world, people looking for the kind of thing we call a religious experience today would invent a different kind of belief system, and atheists would remain unbothered.

But, it seems, there is some cohort of self-proclaimed atheists who perhaps do retain some kind of belief in the supernatural, since they can imagine this kind of divine being that breaks the laws of physics existing in our universe after all, and that its presence would upset them. Which makes me think about the fact that perhaps some atheists are the way they are more as a reaction to organized religion than as a result of looking at the world around them and concluding that there is no God because of course there isn't.

Fortunately, the video was followed by a second one comparing "nones" to "dones" - that is, people who have no particular religion or belief system ("nones") versus people who were raised with some kind of religion or belief system but don't practice any more ("dones").

Religious Residue: What Sticks After You Leave Religion

It seems that some who start out as "dones" may eventually end up as "nones", but others just persist in varying degrees of "doneness", where the belief system they were brought up in continues to influence aspects of their thinking, and - i presume - their emotional reaction to an absurd question like "but what if God was real tho?"

The video probably also builds on context introduced in previous videos about religiosity where the concept of "CREDs" - Credibility-Enhancing Displays - was discussed. This is an academic theory used to examine how religion gets passed on from generation to generation, or how it spreads in a community. The idea is that witnessing people who demonstrate some kind of sacrifice or ritualistic performance in pursuit of divine blessings or grace is a powerful and influential force. When you grow up seeing your elders or others in your community give something up for a belief, it makes that belief seem rational.

And, of course, it is rational! Not the part where people believe in the supernatural, but the part where people intuitively understand the benefit of being part of a community, of have a system of values that can provide a life direction, a psychological comfort when times are tough, all that stuff. Religion makes sense as a form of social organization - it might not be the most efficient in theory, or the most just in practice, but it's a key part of human history and still a major influence in many people's lives.

So, this is all the preamble to the point of how perhaps the deepest connection to religion is not intellectual - a rational decision made on the merits - it's something that's simply felt deep inside. Some religious people say that they can "feel" God inside them, or in nature, or at some holy site. They experience it viscerally! I try to think back to my own experiences being brought up in a Christian context but with no particular religion, before spending several years more seriously engaged with New Age belief and ritual, to eventually becoming an unapologetic atheist and... yeah i don't remember feeling much of anything outside of manic episodes, psychosis and assorted drug-fueled delusions.

Which means i need to get my understanding of religion from somewhere else, and the one place i really saw it was my mother. Which is funny, because my mother was stridently anti-religion. On reflection, she was perhaps exactly the kind of non-believer who would have been particularly miffed if Jesus popped up one morning saying "lol, here i am, i do exist after all". She was raised Catholic, but had lapsed at least by the time she started dating my father. (There is a whole side quest about her parents offering my father money to not marry her, which i am not sure how much was due to him being ostensibly Protestant and how much was him just being some kind of long-haired layabout who didn't meet their standards.) My earliest religious memories are of my father telling us we ought to say the Lord's Prayer each night before bed, and my mother saying that she wanted to protect us from ever getting screwed up by that nonsense. (She once recounted a story of having to share her favorite band in school - all the other children came up with Elvis or The Beatles or whoever, but her upbringing had been so sheltered she didn't even know any popular music, she only knew Mozart.)

Well, the divorce screwed my mom up, and she went spinning into a search for meaning, which did eventually lead her to one church or another, but she rapidly noped back out of all that and adopted 1980s/1990s New Age - creative visualization, crystal healing, essential oils, tarot cards, Enya, the whole bit. And that's how i grew up, and it overlapped with my budding identity as a raver, so that whole woo/hippie thing is my culture. But my mom never forgot the church, apparently. I didn't realize until one day when i was playing some ambient electronic music that i thought she might not hate, and it had some bells in it and she physically recoiled "ugh! it sounds like church!"

This is weird, because we lived in the Netherlands at the time, and in Europe it's not uncommon to hear church bells on Sunday morning same way you might hear the adhan if you live near a mosque. But i guess the Sunday morning church bells are something that can be psychologically prepared for - you know you're about to be faced with some traumatic trigger, so you steel yourself by making fruit salad and a café au lait and chatting with the kids. A Christian jump-scare in a techno track one of your kids is playing for you, though? The horror!

I wish i could share the song, but it has vanished off the internet - it's Bionaut - Astral Unraveler, from the 1996 album Au Naturel. It's completely inoffensive ambient synth music, not much different to Enya, except for those ding dong bells that for me not even once evoked the slightest religious movement.

And that's the fascinating thing, right? I don't FEEL it. I don't feel the power of the call to prayer, i don't feel the weight of the shame or the guilt or whatever it is that left my mom so deeply connected to her Catholic upbringing, even decades after leaving it all behind, becoming a New Age crunchy/granola mom, a university professor, a strong and independent woman - all that stuff. She still FELT it.

So i was talking to a religious studies expert and they said that's how it works, that's the power of belief. For people who are devout, it's not just something they think about, it's something they experience viscerally, in their bodies. What's important to scholars is not whether their belief is in something "real", because obviously the emotions it creates are real, the impact it has is measurable. That's super interesting!

This led me to thinking about my own visceral reactions. It's not religion for me. I like Maria chapels, i always go in and light a candle - if they have real ones. I'll give a little bow and a prayer to Maria in Christian parts of the world and i'll do the same to Mazu over here. I like the peacefulness and the ritualistic aspects of it, but i don't really care very much, i don't think anything is going to come of it. Church bells are just bells, gospel house is just house, 北管 temple music is just gongs and trumpets.

But then i do find some things just get the hackles standing up on the back of my neck, i feel so uncomfortable, sick to the stomach, i start panicking and feeling like i need to escape... and it's kinda class-based spaces. Or not even class-based, exactly, but just certain monuments to consumerist lifestyles that terrify me. You know what it is, right? Upscale department stores, shopping malls, suburban cul-de-sacs... it's a physical reaction for me. I feel like an impostor, like a stranger, like i am surrounded by aliens... which is absurd because it's exactly people in my own income layer, it's my colleagues, my family, my friends, it's where they shop, where they eat, where they live, but somehow a part of me associates it with trauma that i can't find a root for. Was there something that happened to me as a child? Was it just a symbol of a sort of "normal" life that i never felt i was allowed access to as a migrant? Did it develop later, along with my transness?

I mean, that's another interesting thing, right? Why do trans people want to get surgery? It's a deeply physical emotion, like right inside your core, you feel something is wrong with the bits you were assigned at birth. Something about how the hormones affect your brain or the plumbing affects your movements, it's just uncomfortable and awkward and nothing seems to make it better... until you get the treatment and then there's new or different problems for sure, but at least that crushing pressure of bodily discomfort is lifted.

Of course these are negative emotions, but there are positive emotions too, like how certain music doesn't cause you to recoil, but to spread and bloom and twirl with the joy you can feel from the tips of your fingers to your toes. And when someone asks "what just happened, where did you just go?" The answer is into the music. Into that blissful space where the best words we have to describe the emotion come from religious terminology - it set my spirit free, it was a glimpse of the divine, like being touched by an angel... Because you felt it, right? Like people feel God! It doesn't matter that the emotion is just a trick of your own mind, it only matters that you felt it.

What i think is cool is that we can change it. We can change our bodies to be how we like. We can train ourselves to get over our triggers, or at least manage them better. People who are "dones" can become "nones", but people who are "nones" can discover religion too, sometimes. So even for these experiences that are wired so deep into our bodies, they're not immutable. That's what gives me some kind of faith (ha!) in humanity, that even people who have worked themselves up into the deepest spite and most violent hatred might some day come to understand their very real emotions stem from reactions to stimuli that can be changed - the reactions, that is, not necessarily the stimuli.

I dunno, this kind of turned off in a more psychological/self-help direction than i started out as. I don't have a conclusion. I think this entry is something i want to build on when i go back to the topic of utopic post-humanism and these science fictional ideas about transcending the limitations of the body... but how there is a way to think about that which doesn't have to introduce superstitious notions of dualism or go down some colonialist imagination of erasing people's connection to aspects of their physical identity.

Hmm. Anyway. I wonder what kind of visceral reactions to things the other folks on LJ have seen in their own lives or in people around them? I wonder how many of our bodily reactions encode intuitions that can't always easily be recalled or explained, and how that influences the way we exist in the world...

some things i need a bit more time to flesh out

amw — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:55:31 GMT

I have some posts i want to write but i am so exhausted from work i haven't had the time to do it.

- America continuing to waive sanctions on Russian oil so they don't have to face the global economic consequences for their stupid war in Iran makes it even more infuriating that ordinary people like you and me still aren't allowed to pay for our fucking LiveJournal accounts. Which in itself is because of Russia's stupid war in Ukraine. Meanwhile geopolitics nerds are practically chomping at the bit for something to kick off in Cuba, or Taiwan, like our whole-ass countries are just levels to clear in a computer game. Something something war is stupid.

- I recently had an email exchange getting into the visceral nature of religion and how it imprints on people, with the example of my mother's reaction to bells in ambient music. I want to navel-gaze about what might have constructed my own visceral reactions to things like suburban life, and ponder about the way other people respond to elements of society deep in their bodies, e.g. revulsion toward homosexuality. Also bonus China/Taiwan content: why do i feel so cozy among the run-down tenements that cause some local folk such embarrassment or shame?

- An important book for me as a teenager was John Varley's Steel Beach. It comes from the low-brow school of corny, optimistic, male gaze-y, oorah science fiction for boys, but i sense it shaped a lot of how i think about gender. I went back to read the first book in that series which i never read before - The Ophiuchi Hotline - and it's kinda what i wanted the Culture series to be. I want to write something about these ultra-futurist utopias where culture and ethnicity and gender and beauty standards all disappeared because they didn't matter any more, and why perhaps that specifically appeals to me as a third culture kid, but why it can perhaps seem dystopic to people whose identities are more deeply rooted in a specific place or physical condition. This is a big topic. I feel it also relates to the question of whether we are "souls" driving around a bit of meat or whether this biological organism tapping on the keyboard is the thing itself, and how that can shape our place in society and resulting worldview.

- Oh yeah, fucking the UK now making it official that trans people are no longer supposed to be allowed into toilets of the gender they live and present as, despite most of us having done so without incident for decades. But also at the same time acknowledging that it's impractical to ask for proof of "biological sex" at every toilet door. It is one of the most bafflingly heinous things that has happened in the west recently. Engineering the system in such a way that it's not technically illegal for an individual to simply live their life, but service providers can be punished for not enforcing segregation of trans people is a weird, indirect form of lawfare that systematizes discrimination against a group that was already marginalized. The fact politicians and the media continue to waffle around it being a complicated issue is astonishing.

a bridge, a banquet and a bit of an improvement

amw — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:52:18 GMT

Thank you, LJ friends, for commenting on my sadpost and making me feel a bit less despairing.

The last week at work wasn't much better than the one before, still so much pointless battling with a colleague who just will not step back and let other people do the work they have been tasked to do, but i vented at a couple other colleagues and they had my back too, which made me feel like i wasn't crazy for feeling the way i was about the whole nontroversy. It's so fucking exhausting to have to walk on eggshells around some fragile male ego every time we want to do something that touches "his" precious corner of the system. Of course he's the same guy who will cheerfully use AI to shit all over every other part of the system without a care in the world. Sigh.

I'm just spent, i don't want to have to do any more fighting. Next week we are getting a new starter, but she's in Europe so it's going to mean trying to mentor someone across a timezone gap, which sucks. I really do not buy cross-timezone teams any more than i buy work-from-home as a productive concept. The only way it succeeds is if everyone is a highly-motivated and independent learner who is responsible for discrete, well-specced tasks with no overlap or interplay with other people's shit. In most tech companies that describes very little of the work, especially for new starters.

I've spent most of my career dealing with these problems and it's never gotten any easier. When i started my career we had IRC and conference calls, now we have Slack and Zoom - the only difference is that now the whole process is redirected through servers controlled by American tech companies. It's absurd how pretty much the whole world collectively shrugged their shoulders and let American rentiers slide in as middle-men for every process we previously were quite capable of doing ourselves. And they're doing it again with all this AI nonsense too. Ugh! I fucking hate everything about this industry.

But i'm going to try not to think about it. Today i took a bike ride up to the Danjiang (aka Tamkang) Bridge which opened earlier this week. I was a bit unsure about it because most of the YouTubers who crossed only showed the inland side, which like... why would you cross a bridge over a river mouth and not want to go on the sea side? I was worried that perhaps they had only built the bike and pedestrian way along the inland side and i'd never get to enjoy looking out across the sea, but i was very happy to get up there and find that there are broad cycle and walkways on both sides.

It was really cool to look back over my secret "behind the overpass" beach in Bali, which is now absolutely not a secret any more. The day was perfect - bright sun, not a cloud in the sky, 30 degrees, and a very stiff wind that had everyone gripping extra tight to their hats and selfie sticks. There was a whole army of sightseers up there getting their snaps of the new pride of Taiwan. It's the longest single-pylon cable stay in the world, although no doubt China will build a longer one just as a fuck you at some point. It's only about a kilometer across, but the pylon is something like 200m high and the deck is quite low so it looks pretty dramatic. Probably be cool to cycle over at night time, but who all going to be up in Bali or Tamsui at night other than the people who live there?

Well, probably everyone. I think cycle touring kinda turned me off night-time cycling - the routine was to be up as soon as the tent dried off and then book it to the next campsite before sunset. Now the idea of cycling at night seems odd to me, which is funny because in Europe people cycle at "night" all the time due to winter days being so short you practically don't get any light at all. Although, come to think of it, i cycle home in the dark every day over here thanks to the early sunsets, and it is quite peaceful, but that's only 20 minutes through the well-lit urban core - not a multi-hour 60km circuit to the seaside like i do on the weekends.

Eh, i dunno. I think i just like to be home in the evenings because then i can cook dinner and settle into bed to do my evening ritual of watching shows to avoid thinking about work. In reality, if i added up all those hours of staring blankly at my computer screen at night, i could probably have a more productive hobby, but every time i imagine going out to do something after dinner i fear becoming even more tired than i already am.

Last week i did go out for a banquet, because our CEO was in town and so we had an "AMA" (from Reddit slang meaning "Ask Me Anything" - this is how it is when your executive team are millennials) and a dinner. Normally they hold these dinners at some godawful western restaurant but this time it was a "Cantonese" restaurant, so i jumped at the opportunity to actually have the chance of eating something that wasn't a weak, insipid, Taiwanified version of the actual thing. But, as you can probably tell from the scare quotes, this Cantonese food was indeed a weak, insipid, Taiwanified version of the actual thing. We got a bit of dim sum and it was alright, but mostly it was the usual Chinese banquet dishes, and not really the best version of them imo.

One of my colleagues was sad we didn't get 腸粉 chángfěn, which is one of the most classic breakfasts of Guangdong province... God i miss those steaming boxes on the side of the road where you knew you could always get a juicy, saucy, slippery noodle roll with some lettuce and chili and maybe an egg cracked inside if you really wanted to spoil yourself. She ordered a couple for our table, and of course the Taiwanese banquet version of chángfěn isn't a plain noodle, it's so stuffed full of tempura shrimp you might as well have just served shrimp in the first place. It was like 炸兩 zháliǎng with meat inside instead of 油條 yóutiáo (donut), and did nothing to feed the part of my soul i left behind in Guangdong.

This is the worst part about banquet style dining in Asia - it's all meat-first. Not because the dishes themselves necessarily need to be meat-first, but because the whole culture of banquet dining is showing off the opulence, and meat means you are rich, rice means you are poor. So you don't get any rice unless you ask for it, like a peasant. After a zillion plates of pork and beef and chicken and fish and squid and prawns, they finally brought out some greens, but by that point everyone was stuffed.

The best thing was something they called 宮保雞球 kung pao chicken balls, but - although the chicken was boneless - it felt more like 辣子雞 spicy chicken to me because it didn't have any nuts. It wasn't mainland spicy, but it was a bit more than Taiwan spicy, which made it feel more like something i would cook at home.

Inexplicably we did not get any char siu, but there was one thing where as soon as i tasted it i was right back in every Chinatown dim sum restaurant the world over - 珍珠丸子 "pearl meatball" dumplings, which is i think a steamed pork rib inside a sticky rice ball. That very blank and empty flavor of steamed pork is one of those nostalgic flavors for me that you only get in Chinese restaurants because who the fuck else is going to steam their meat?

It was so weird that the stuff i loved was the stuff nobody else on the table liked, including the pleasantly sweet deep-fried 鹹水角 "salt water horn" dumpling, those 珍珠丸子 "pearl meatball" dumplings... Meanwhile the 燒賣 shumai and 蝦餃 har gow vanished instantly, despite to me being the boringest dim sum that exists - you can find them in the freezer section in every supermarket around the world! Might as well just get a potsticker from 八方 (local chain restaurant) at that point...

Anyway, it was a perfectly cromulent meal, and notable because it kept me out late one night and i didn't spontaneously self-destruct from exhaustion. Also, bro, my table polished off a whole fucking bottle of whiskey. In middle-class Taiwan there is basically only one alcohol that exists and it's whiskey. Beer is for plebs (unless it's craft beer) and kaoliang (the local baijiu) is for toothless, betel-munching hicks. Have you ever been to a Chinese banquet where everyone is necking whiskey like it's coke? Come to Taipei, i guess. Not my vibe, but here we are. (If i didn't have to work here i'd be choking back kaoliang with the hicks, completely failing to understand their 臺語 Taiwanese Hokkien but kan-pue anyway.)

Oh, and speaking of Chinese languages, please, God, can someone teach the fucking Americans how to say Xi Jinping? Every news presenter and podcaster and China-watcher-who-can't-speak-Chinese is failing the pronunciation SO FUCKING BADLY. The worst part is that it's so simple.

You guys. In pinyin romanization, "x" is essentially pronounced like "s". If you want to add a bit of panache you can put a slight lisp onto it, but just pronouncing it like "s" is going to get you SO MUCH CLOSER than the utter cringe fest of all these guys trying to do a Queer Eye zhoosh sound or going full "sh". Chinese already has "sh" and it's spelled "sh"! It's in Shanghai, for fuck's sake! So how to pronounce Xi? Like this: see? Yes, with the question mark. The tone goes up at the end. See? That's how you pronounce Xi.

And how do you pronounce Jinping? Dear Lord. It's just gin ping, guys. Gin like the booze, ping like pong. See? Gin ping? That's it. I cannot for the life of me understand why everyone is doing so much. I almost feel like there is some kind of running joke going on where all the Chinese pretend like the name is much more complicated to pronounce than it actually is so they can laugh at the ignorant barbarians doing it wrong.

While we're at it, what's with the faux-French pronunciation of Beijing? The "j" isn't pronounced like bonjour, it's pronounced like jack. Was there some passive-aggressive CIA psy-op to get everyone in the Anglosphere to pronounce it wrong after switching from the 17th century pronunciation of Peking? Beijing is just bay jing. See gin ping in bay jing. Last week he met with tuh lung poo (also known as chwan poo in Taiwan). Yes, pronouncing Trump's name with "poo" on the end will never not make me giggle.

Anyhoo, here is a video about the history of Israel invading Lebanon, because the war is still on, a million people are still displaced, and hundreds have been killed since the so-called ceasefire.

Israel's Long War on Lebanon

You can watch it as a companion piece to the Guardian's recent man-on-the-ground video showing an assortment of Lebanese people annoyed at either Israel or Hezbollah but somehow not too bothered by their own feckless government. This helps to explain why. Hearing a Lebanese person talk seriously - and with frustration - about being pushed around like a pawn, bullied by their neighbor and stuck with a weird colonial-era political system seems to rhyme somewhat with the Taiwanese experience. Us colonizers sure did leave a mess. You'd think that'd make us less inclined to support contemporary colonial projects, but alas.

I guess i should cook me some dinner. Work tomorrow. Fuck my life.

too depressed to come up with a title

amw — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:59:37 GMT

I am depressed.

Last week fucking sucked and i don't want to write about it or i will just get mad again.

Topic one, i hate Amazon, and online shopping in general, and the fact that it's now impossible to NOT shop online for certain items.

Topic two, i hate my job, i hate the tech industry, i hate that every single fucking thing i do has to be an argument. I hate working with dudes who constantly think they're the smartest guy in the room, people who always have to have the last word, who give their opinion on everything, who "and just one more thing" at the end of a meeting and then proceed to keep everyone around for another 45 minutes. I hate working with people in different timezones - every decision is always delayed, or it's taken by the wrong people, and every morning there is an endless stream of shit to fix. It's so inefficient. I hate working with work-from-home folks who are completely out-of-touch with the struggles shared by those of us who have to show up to the site every day. I fucking hate LLMs, i hate so-called "AI", i hate vibe coding, i hate that every fucking website on the internet is trash now. I hate that you can't trust anything you read any more, i hate everyone who says "look at this thing i made" and then it turns out they didn't actually make anything - they just asked a bot to do it - but they still expect everyone to praise them and take time to review the work that they didn't even do. I hate that i am always, always tired.

I don't have time for anything because i am so fucking tired.

My Canadian passport is expiring and i can't get a new one because i don't even have two friends on the entire planet who can vouch for me. Apparently spending 4 years working side-by-side with people in Taiwan still doesn't net you enough of a relationship that they will say "sure, just put my name and address on the form", you just get these weird, evasive non-answers or they politely ignore the question. Like, my entire life is work, that's the only thing i have any energy for, but i can't even get anyone at work to vouch for me, what the fuck? I give these people everything, all of my spoons, and for what? A paycheck i don't have the energy to enjoy and a bit more paperwork to prove my worth to the immigration department.

You might ask why i don't have any other friends. Because... like... i just like to be alone. Why do people need friends to count in society? I have internet friends, including - i hope - the regulars here on LiveJournal. But i don't know anybody's real names, much less phone numbers or addresses or birthdays, because none of that stuff matters. Until it does. I feel like when i was younger you just had to get a doctor or a judge to attest to your identity, which was a slightly better system because at least it was part of their job to be a pillar of the community - make an appointment, they sign a thing, the end. I mean, because apparently showing up in person to the actual fucking government office to apply isn't enough to prove you are who you say you are!? It's so weird that citizens are made to rope in other random people to vouch for them, basically volunteering to have the government build up a social network like it's an investigation into a criminal network or terror cell. (Ironically exactly the kind of work i do at my job.)

Oh no, now i'm back to thinking about how fucking awful the tech industry is. It's disgusting that a bunch of barely-regulated American ad companies know more about me - and everyone else on the planet - than the government supposed to be looking out for my health and wellbeing. It makes me sick that a bunch of greedy, reckless shitheads have spent the last couple decades hoovering up everything there is to know about everybody just in order to maximally bilk them for cash. I know we all like to imagine that it's sinister spy agencies tracking everything we do and trying to manipulate us into caping for warmongers and ideological extremists, but it's actually even worse than that because in reality it's just unaccountable grifters who will do anything to make a buck. At least the government has to answer to the people.

I mentioned on the last post that i have been reading the Culture series by Iain M Banks because it's set in a futuristic communist utopia. After reading the first three novels, i have come to realize that i'm probably never going to get the book i wanted to read - the escapist one about the actual utopia - because each book thus far is about the worst fucking person in paradise. Vague spoilers ahead - basically all of the stories are not set in the utopia, they're set in worlds outside the utopia, and the main characters are all arrogant, self-absorbed, abusive psychopaths who never really get any comeuppance other than the knowledge that the universe is much bigger than they are and so all the chaos they unleash will not count for anything over the long arc of time. There is something reassuring about that, but also it's not very fun to read. But i realized when i looked up reviews of these books that i am reading them wrong. Because apparently other people spend 500 pages thinking they are reading about a swashbuckling hero, and then when the twist happens on the last page that exposes the main character to be an asshole, it's a big kick in the nuts for all the obviously-male readers who didn't cotton on to the fact that THIS GUY WAS ALREADY A SUPREME ASSHOLE ON PAGE ONE. A real twist would be if these thoroughly 80s edgelord characters turned out to be nice, actually.

I mean, it's fine. I grew up in peak cyberpunk era, i read and watched and listened to all sorts of gruesome, gratuitous, outrageous stuff as a teenager, but it's kind of a bummer that i was hoping for Kim Stanley Robinson and i basically got William Gibson meets Irvine Welsh.

Is it too much to ask to read a book about nice, competent people who live in a kind, caring society and dedicate their lives to making things better for everyone? The funny thing is that there is a whole ass category of "cozy" literature that is supposed to be about such pleasantry - and there is even a sci-fi offshoot of it now - yet it still invariably revolves around murder, like. What the fuck? I enjoy formulaic mysteries as much as the next chick - i mean, who doesn't love a bit of Death in Paradise? - but can't we just have a cozy thing without a bodycount for once? Where are the books about awe and wonder and discovery and learning? I feel like there used to be at least some sci-fi about that.

I keep thinking about this TV show that came out last year called Pluribus. It was made by the same guy who did Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, so it was already going to be highly-acclaimed straight out of the gate. But - just like the Culture novels - it's a story about the worst person in paradise. Utopia comes knocking and the "hero" is the incurious, violent, self-absorbed drunk who wants nothing to do with it. Halfway through the season a second "hero" comes along who is somehow even more unhinged than the first one. As viewers we are supposed to empathize with these two flawed protagonists because lol everyone is secretly an asshole on the inside, am i right? Apparently i'm watching it wrong, because God forbid i wanted a show about a real alien intelligence, a wildly different form of life, a culture that organizes in a way that produces a wholly unfamiliar social contract, an exploration of a way of being that could have all kinds of interesting consequences... But, no, the story is about a grumpy woman and a grumpy man being grumpy about their predicament. Apparently it's a character study. Oh yay, like we didn't have a zillion other shows about awful people dealing poorly with their trauma. For fuck's sake!

And it's not that i don't care about the human condition. It's that I DEAL WITH THE HUMAN CONDITION EVERY DAY. I have enough fucking human condition to deal with in my own mental health. I have to put up with more than enough second-hand manpain and utter douchebaggery at work. Why the fuck would i want to see more of that in my downtime? Why do i want to read about it? People are awful. I FUCKING KNOW. Let me read about people being better. Let me dream about a place that's better, because WE BUILT IT THAT WAY. Because we can, if we just fucking tried, if we didn't resign ourselves to lol oh well, humans are doomed, we all suck, let me immerse myself in this literary deep dive into the psyche of the worst fucking person in the universe.

Fuck everything i want to cry.

I want to be free.

the war at sea

amw — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:39:43 GMT

I love the sea. I don't much love swimming in it, but i do love the vastness of it. It's like an opposite desert. Instead of being largely dead it's teeming with life, but it's still violent and dangerous and a cold reminder that humans are delicate bags of mostly water that remain stable for barely the blink of an eye and can collapse at the slightest perturbance.

I love feeling tiny and insignificant, thus i love the sea.

Space is also like the sea, or the desert, except with even more nothing.

I have been reading Iain M Banks' Culture series recently, and one of the gimmicks he has in his space opera is giant space stations called orbitals, which are ring-shaped structures similar to Halos in the eponymous video game. I was trying to figure out how big an orbital was, and was surprised to see that the size of the ring was larger than the diameter of the sun, which felt unintuitive, because orbitals are set up to orbit stars just like planets do. But then i looked at how far the moon is from Earth and it's like one sun-radius away. So the sun seems really big, but there's actually a shit-ton of nothing in between it and us. You could string a hundred more suns end-to-end and it still wouldn't close the gap. So of course you could fit a bigger-than-the-sun orbital into an Earth-like orbit, and the far side of it would show up as a shining band across the sky, just like the moon hangs silver above us every night.

I think that's so fucking cool.

Going to space is a dream of mine, mainly because i imagine it to be like being stuck in the middle of a desert with nothing and nobody around - or like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Lots of writers have imagined it the same way, which is why we have space "ships" and sci-fi military organizations that look a whole lot like terrestrial navies. Space marines are a thing because you can't get humans onto the alien base without first moving them through lots and lots and lots of nothing.

I've been thinking more about the navy recently because the US has switched its war in Iran away from a bombing campaign to a naval blockade. Make no mistake - it's still a war even if high explosives aren't raining from the sky, demolishing buildings and killing civilians. Instead, civilians are being prevented from doing their jobs, either under direct threat of "kinetic action", or indirectly due to supplies not arriving and their companies going under.

The blockade already started on day one, of course, as thousands of civilian ships got stuck inside the Persian Gulf, unable to leave through the Strait of Hormuz for fear of copping a stray or even getting targeted directly - by the Iranians, to be clear. Most of those ships are still stuck there today, over two months later. This is like COVID all over again, when merchant sailors were left stranded at sea, unable to dock anywhere. There is a fantastic American YouTuber called What's Going On With Shipping who has been grumbling for weeks about how the US Navy evacuated all their own ships from the Gulf but left American civilians stranded, which is a double slap in the face because at least a few of those ships were Navy-contracted tankers supplying fuel to the same damn destroyers and carrier groups that are now fanned out across the Indian Ocean trying to chase down vessels moving freight in and out of Iran.

From a narrow geopolitical point of view, the Americans blockading Iran is probably a more effective strategy than bombing a bunch of factories while the IRGC hide all their missile launchers in hardened underground bases. Blocking the ships will shut down all the factories anyway, and as a bonus it will also shut down pretty much any other business connected to or dependent on the import/export economy, which is pretty much all that's left, given the Iranian government already shut down their own internet leaving white collar workers cut off too. Sooner or later something will crack.

From a broader geopolitical point of view, fuck America for forcing the entire world to suffer economically because their leader is a fragile-egoed nitwit who tore up the already-existing agreement negotiated by his predecessor and the international community. Maybe Americans don't care that oil prices are going up a bit, but other countries are far more dependent on trade with the Middle East, and other countries have far more people living on the poverty line where business costs going up even just a little can crash their entire livelihood. Hundreds of millions of people around the world - billions - are being affected by Trump's hubris.

But the war will play out as it will. There isn't much people in small nations can do to resist the will of the hegemon, and while the effects of the war are out of sight out of mind, there doesn't appear to be much domestic pressure to stop it in the US either.

So let's talk about pirates instead.

In history there is somewhat of a fuzzy demarcation between merchant mariners, pirates and navy personnel. Some of the world's most famous figures engaged in all manner of questionable interactions with other folks on the seven seas, and the sea in and of itself has been known for its lawlessness since antiquity. When sci-fi brings us tales of smugglers and bounty hunters and privateers in space, it's all based on millennia of humans doing the exact same shit on the ocean. It's only pretty recently that we stopped looting and pillaging and plundering as a matter of course.

You remember about 20 years ago when "Somalian pirates" were kind of a light distraction from the Global War on Terror? They were a punchline compared to Al Qaeda, but they still successfully hijacked dozens of ships each year, terrorizing (and occasionally killing) the crews and extorting millions from the owners. The fact that it's trivial for shipping companies to pay off pirates who manage to stop just a fraction of a percent of marine traffic in the region seems to say something about how imbalanced the global economy is. To be fair, Somalia's economy has grown 2x since the world's navies cracked down on illegal actions in the Gulf of Aden, so maybe all those former pirates are now doing honest work as content taggers for American AI companies?

No, of course they aren't, because now that the US Navy is busy trying to chase down traffic in and out of Iran, Somalian pirates have been at it again, just yesterday nabbing their fourth ship in two weeks.

An interesting thing about the US blockade of Iran is that it's a global blockade. After blowing up a bunch of random boats floating around the Caribbean and chasing suspiciously-flagged vessels out of Venezuela all the way up to fucking Iceland, the US Navy are now stopping vessels around India. The Americans are careful to only board tankers that appear to have discrepancies in their registration, i.e. there is some kind of legal framework for pulling them over to check their papers, detain the crew and confiscate the cargo. This is also why the US Coast Guard is sailing around the Strait of Malacca and a bunch of other places very fucking far away from US coastal waters - so the administration can claim these obvious wartime operations as "police actions". The US now has barely a peg leg left to stand on if the China Coast Guard ramps up harassment of civilian ships in my neck of the woods.

So are the shadow fleet the pirates, or is it the US Navy? Only one of the two is sailing around with guns pointed at the other one. It all comes down to who has filed the right paperwork, which to me sounds a whole hell of a lot like the good/bad old days when law-abiding sea captains could get a letter of marque and just take whatever foreign ship they pleased.

Again, putting the geopolitics aside, if you think about the human aspect of all of these sailors being stuck at sea for months - either on the run or on the hunt - with dwindling food stocks and inclement conditions, it's hard not to feel for them. They're all just out there trying to make a living, a million miles from home.

Do you remember this song?

Dune - Million Miles From Home (Official Video)

i was sent to outer space
to find another happy place
now i'm left here all alone
million miles away from home
floating through the galaxy
all the stars in front of me
now i'm left here all alone
million miles away from home

Yes, it's corny, what did you expect? Rave music makes no pretensions of poetry, it just gets right to the point. I guess someone older than me would post Space Oddity or Rocket Man.

Actually, let's do that - this video features the animation of Iranian artist and former Calais Jungle refugee Majid Adin.

Elton John - Rocket Man (Official Music Video)

I started out wanting to write about spaceships and pirates and now i am back to migration and refugees.

You know, i did have some kind of high concept angle going on where i was going to somehow talk about space-based megastructures and awesome factories and oil tankers, and why the Culture is a communist utopia but also how it's not perfect, but maybe it's as good as it gets, and also GIANT RINGS IN SPACE AND TALKING SPACESHIPS, but that will have to wait for another day.

Friday Five for 24 April 2026

amw — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:11:17 GMT

I liked this week's thefridayfive and i am too tired to do a proper update so let's go.

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?

The right answer here is probably the 90s. I started university in the late 90s and finished in 2006 i think, but i was never on-campus and only did it part-time remote after work, so highschool is my last real organized education experience.

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?

The main fashion i remember from the mid 90s was colorful oversize shirts for men and skimpy tops for women, paired with baggy low-slung pants and sneakers for all.

To be honest i still love that look.

I hate tight pants and i really hate pants that go up any higher than the hip - pants covering the belly button are just weird. I'd rather see butt crack and/or pubic hair peeking out the top than a person's midriff all bound up like they're stuck inside a toilet roll. High waist pants suck.

I wore large, multi-colored tees as a teen because i presented masc and that was the style, but now i am trans and supposed to pass as femme so i almost exclusively wear ribbed tank tops to try emphasize my meager curves, which is not dissimilar to the skater girl look of the 90s. I'm too old and fat to get away with crop tops nowadays, but i still would rather have something that gives a bit of a hint that people are supposed to read me as a woman. When i wear oversize tops or even a hoodie these days i just get read as male.

On other people i am attracted to the same thing. Big pants, sneakers, sleeveless top or oversize shirt - that's what i consider to be sexy. Backward cap, bucket hat, sunnies, candy bracelets, tracksuit pants, sports bra, flip-flops, all that cheerful, practical, comfy stuff, that's my jam, and that's what we wore.

There was much worse fashion in the 90s that i didn't pay any attention to. There are so many better things to do with life than fuss over other people's clothing choices.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?

Yes and no. I hardly ever listen to specific tracks that i listened to as a teenager, not because i don't like them any more but because they carry a certain baggage that takes away from me being able to enjoy them on their own merits, it just becomes an exercise in navel-gazing nostalgia. However almost all the new music i buy is very much in the style of 90s-era electronica. I just love the way the instruments were used back then, the kind of unabashed joyous synthiness that never felt too concerned about making sure there was a poppy hook, nor were they trying to be undergrounder-than-thou. It was just a really solid time for house/techno/trance/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?

In high school i was mostly au naturel or varying degrees of bleach blonde. I had a mullet in the early 90s and was forced to cut it off when i moved to Europe because according to my Dutch family i looked like a football hooligan, so then i had a very typical and 90s middle-part/curtains boy's haircut. My hair is flat and straight so there isn't really much i can do with it anyway.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?

The cool thing in highschool was smoking and drinking, which i did less of in the early years and more of in the later years, but i still never really made it into the cool crowd. In the Netherlands i feel like the coolest kids had scooters and did hard drugs and zoomed around the polders to go to the big gabber parties. I went out clubbing with my friends pretty regularly but it was to alternative/rock clubs because that's what they liked and we rode old bicycles around like losers. Occasionally i took a train out to some other city to go to raves where i met up with weirdos i knew from early internet or BBS communities, which in retrospect was pretty cool actually, but i didn't feel like it at the time because i also read comics and played computer games and listened to less popular techno.

I dunno, "coolness" is a strange thing to think about because it didn't manifest in the Dutch highschool system the way it definitely did when i still lived in New Zealand or the way it's portrayed in American high school dramas. Thinking back to New Zealand, the coolest kids were the biggest rebels who had their own cars or access to an elder sibling's, and they listened to hip-hop music or heavy metal with lots of swears and sexy lyrics... which - again - in retrospect seems juvenile and in reality much less cool than me hanging out with my friend who lived on a farm and shot bow-and-arrow and painted fantasy art, or my other friend who lived in a trailer and made epic mash-ups by meticulously dubbing snippets of tracks off the radio onto cassette tape.

I wonder if all the cool kids i remember from school secretly thought everyone else was cooler than they were, and maybe that's just the rite-of-passage, everyone in highschool thinks they're less cool than they actually turn out to be?

what it means to be an illegal human

amw — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:38:21 GMT

Yesterday i got a new tattoo. Actually i got half of it - i'd like it to start "creeping" from my inner left bicep up onto my shoulder, so i am booked in to continue that cyberpunkish transformation in a few weeks.

The cyberpunk aesthetic is due to a stylized circuit board trace pattern acting as a backdrop for the main part of the tattoo. My starting point was Faith from the computer game Mirror's Edge, who has a stylized circuit tattooed on her upper arm, but rather than the straight lines of that game, i gave the artist reference photos of the back side of two classic synthesizers used in electronic music - the Roland TB-303 and SH-101, both released in the early 1980s. That was just before synthesizers switched from consisting of mostly discrete components to mostly integrated components, so the circuit traces curved and swooped around the physical size restrictions of resistors and capacitors and knobs and sliders - they weren't just connecting a bunch of silicon chips to push buttons arranged in neat little rows. So it's giving a sort of whimsical retrofuturistic vibe, which continues my theme of badass/serious-looking black ink that's also a bit cute and fun.

I would post a photo but i can't pay LiveJournal due to sanctions so i don't have any space to upload anything. Sigh.

Anyway, the circuit trace concept is just the backdrop for the main message i wanted to get tattooed on me: "kein mensch ist illegal". If you google that phrase you will find the logo, which is fairly well-known in Germany and occasionally pops up on signs and banners around the rest of the world. It means "no human is illegal" and it came out of advocacy for the rights of refugees and undocumented migrants. My most anarchist inner self feels like "NO BORDERS" better captures my personal view on the absurdity and inherent violence of political borders, but it also carries a bit of libertarian baggage that i don't really need after getting "不自由毋寧死" ("give me liberty or give me death") on my other arm. "kein mensch ist illegal" is a way of saying a similar thing that's unashamedly inclusive. Nobody should ever be a non-person. The whole point of universal human rights is that everyone has them, no exceptions.

The concept of citizenship is another topic that fascinates me, given it's one of those privileges i theoretically enjoy but in practice am rarely able to exercise. I am especially interested in how affording citizens special rights creates a hierarchical system that is implicitly biased, but it's a topic that few people - including liberals and leftists - seem to want to grapple with.

People who don't think about citizenship very deeply might assume that everyone is a citizen of somewhere, but that's not actually true. There are millions of people around the world who have no citizenship at all, mostly due to strange political maneuverings that left them with no country of their own, but also no right to gain citizenship of the country now governing the land on which they live.

One well-known example of statelessness is Palestinians - not all Palestinians, but a specific subset of Palestinians who were born of refugees in countries that did not afford them citizenship, plus many still living in the Israel-occupied West Bank or Gaza, who might be able to obtain travel documents but not citizenship in any meaningful sense. But there are other groups too, for instance the Rohingya, Bedoon, Sahrawi and so on.

In some instances, citizenship is wielded as tool of power over occupied peoples. Israel famously did this after annexing the Golan Heights, which is still internationally recognized as a part of Syria. They graciously offered Israeli citizenship to the few original inhabitants who remained after decades of violence, but it's citizenship with a gun to the head. By accepting broader rights for yourself in your invader's country, you are tacitly giving up the right to your own sovereignty. The people of East Jerusalem got a similar deal where the choice was capitulation/citizenship or "permanent" residence that Israel could revoke at will. It's the same shady shit Morocco did in Western Sahara, Russia is doing in the occupied regions of Ukraine and what China hopes to pull off in Taiwan - imperialism, pure and simple.

I think most would agree that it would fucking suck for a foreign military to roll into the town where you live, claim ownership over the region, tell you that you're actually better off with them in charge, and oh by the way just sign this contract to make it official. Even if materially you are better off, it's at the cost of your dignity. Of course, if people are particularly desperate - which they often are, thanks to a preceding campaign of economic strangulation and/or full-blown violence - it's understandable that they would acquiesce.

So if this Faustian bargain is how citizenship is weaponized after annexation, what makes inherited citizenship or birthright citizenship any less problematic? In a state that truly believed in universal human rights, all humans would be afforded the same rights, so citizenship would be irrelevant. But a state that recognizes citizens as having more rights than non-citizens has encoded systematic inequality at its core, so it should be no surprise when it implements a carceral system that disproportionately affects people of certain ethnicities, or withholds medical care from certain categories of people, or disenfranchises segments of the population, or unleashes campaigns of violence resulting in the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of civilians.

My favorite underrated political commentator is a guy called Mark Charles. He is a former pastor and current Native activist who lives in DC and mostly does speaking engagements and consulting, as far as i can tell. He has a podcast/stream that gets just a couple hundred views each month, which is a real shame because he's a captivating speaker and always comes to current events with something thoughtful to say.

My Second Cup of Coffee: A Native perspective on the Birthright Citizenship debate

His most recent topic was the birthright citizenship hearing that went through SCOTUS a couple weeks back, against the context of Israel's re-invasion of Lebanon and the US/Israeli bombing of Iran. He briefly reflects on America's legacy of bombing civilians, including the unbridled barbarism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he did a powerful piece on last year for the 80th anniversary. But mostly he talks about the strange position the indigenous nations of Turtle Island find themselves in, where on one hand they are theoretically sovereign peoples, but on the other hand they exist entirely subordinate to their occupiers.

He points out that the US was never a nation open to all. The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to deal with the problem of stateless children of former slaves while ensuring that children born on the rez would not be eligible. Maybe that would make sense if tribal nations had actually been allowed to exist as equal states on the Americas, but obviously that never happened as evidenced by the trail of broken treaties. Native peoples were eventually offered US citizenship through an act of congress 56 years later (4 years after women were first allowed the vote), but the constitution still stands and is now being used by the Trump administation to argue for the denial of citizenship to American-born children of undocumented migrants and temporary residents alike. Charles rightfully critiques the popular imagination that the constitution is some kind of sacred text written by great and wise scholars - reminding us that in fact it is a political document constructed by and for a ruling class of rich, patriarchal white men who even after the emancipation proclamation still understood native peoples as nothing more than savages.

Of course the complexity is that multiple things can be true at the same time. This is why it's interesting to me to consider autonomous resistance movements among occupied peoples like American Natives, or Palestinians, or Kurds, or Uyghurs, or Hong Kongers. It's intuitive as an outsider to want to take the side of the oppressed, because obviously it would suck to have a foreign force come in and claim ownership over your land, place you under an authority that isn't representative of your culture and apply unto you a "citizenship" or other caste that you never asked for... But as the occupation continues, the way people experience it changes.

Indigenous peoples of the US show that it is possible to survive a genocide, albeit at great cost. Even the hardest core Land Back activist today is hardly expecting the Europeans to pack up and go home. Perhaps this speaks to the urgency of resistance? But even conceiving of resistance as a zero-sum game is its own sort of imperialist mindset. The counter to colonialism doesn't have to be ethnonationalism, but it might take some work to find one that isn't.

I guess this is why it's much easier to be an elitist than an egalitarian, because the elite can just sit back and go "oh well, it's survival of the fittest". It's easy to become an apologist for genocide when you figure that it's just a natural sorting. If you do want to stand up for equality, then you hit these messy discussions around who gets to own what? Why should one person have more right to a resource than another person? How do we distribute aid fairly? How do we respect everyone's cultural practices? What do we do when climate change makes certain areas less viable? There is no simple answer, not like with fascism where every conversation gets reduced to "lol, our guys are top of the heap, fuck you, sucks to be a loser".

And this is why it's important to me to unequivocally state that no human is illegal. For me, that should be at the root of everything we try to build in human society, because otherwise we're no better than animals.

i love a long weekend

amw — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:11:15 GMT

This weekend was a surprise 4-day weekend. Normally we get Tomb Sweeping Day off work, but this time around it coincided with Children's Day, so i am enjoying a lazy Monday in bed.

I really think that 3-day or even 4-day weekends should be the norm. It is so much better for my mental health to have more than just a couple days to unwind before having to head back to the coal face. It makes me feel less guilty when i "waste" time watching YouTube or some other dumb, unproductive relaxation thing. And - in the rainy season - it increases the chance of getting at least one day when it's pleasant to go out.

This is the rainy season and Sunday it was humid, overcast and not pissing down. So i went on a bike ride. I was thinking of going up to Bali or Tamsui to look at the progress of the bridge (apparently it's opening next month) but instead i headed opposite direction toward the Zhuwei fishing harbor out back of Taoyuan airport. That's a pretty long ride at the best of times (about 100km round trip) and because i got a late start i decided to permit myself an early turnaround in Taoyuan City.

I was kinda hoping to at least make it to the oil refinery, just to get a first-hand feeling for the kinds of places currently getting bombed in the Middle East and Ukraine/Russia, but my body wasn't feeling it. I should probably mention that the last couple weeks i got hit with a UTI, which the first round of antibiotics didn't clear up, so i went to the doctor and got some industrial strength antibiotics that have left me feeling wiped out and nauseous. Work has been exhausting too. I can't sleep because of the war and my peculiar anxiety to check on its latest developments. It's just been a shit few weeks. Anyway, i didn't make it to the fishing harbor, or the oil refinery. I did make it to the market, though.

There is a flower market in Taoyuan that's located near the start of a rail trail/greenway heading out to the coast, under a highway overpass and over a bridge crossing a creek. They also have fruit, veg and snack food stalls there, and several times on my trips up to Taoyuan i've popped in to buy fresh-cut pineapple, some red guavas or those stubby 芭蕉 bananas that are my favorite. This time i felt a bit bad that i couldn't make it out to the fish harbor where i normally pick up a 蘿蔔糕 turnip cake and 地瓜籤 sweet potato fritter as my vegan fish'n'chip replacement, but i saw a guy in the market frying up the shredded sweet potato treat so immediately stopped and got a serve to give me that seaside vibe. It was delicious.

Before heading back i did a little roll through the market (it's one of those ungentrified markets where motorcycles and pedestrians filter through the same stalls) and found a lady selling jars of 豆腐乳 fermented tofu. I probably mentioned it here before, but fermented tofu is something like blue cheese - they let the tofu ferment, then steep it in some kind of pickling brine with alcohol and spices. Eventually it turns into a cream cheese consistency with a Roquefort pungency. It's incredibly salty, somewhat stinky, but it tastes really great spread on a hunk of bread (if you can find it) or spooned into a stir-fry for richness. The store-bought ones are usually kinda bland compared to the DIY versions i've found about the place, so it was cool to pick up a jar. I cooked up a cube of it last night with some fried potatoes, green beans, silky tofu and basil/chili/garlic/ginger. Om nom nom.

Just because i didn't make it to the oil refinery (or the massive LNG power plant along the coast) doesn't mean i didn't pass any factories. I cycled past a couple of chip factories and chemical plants, then took a detour past some medical device manufacturers, some more electronics places... Some of those factories are right next door to tenements that undoubtedly house the workers. And in Taiwan those workers are often the blue collar migrant class - Filipino, Vietnamese or Indonesian. You can tell by how many nearby canteens are serving sisig, bánh mì or ayam bakar. Annoyingly i never get there around the right time to find an excuse to sit down, but it's on my bucket list to at least check out some of these places for lunch and see if i can find a gado-gado or my beloved ketoprak. They're usually very "rice and meat"-heavy, though, echoing the meals you'll find at blue collar canteens all over the world.

Anyway, yeah, it's interesting to look at the kinds of people who live close to factories. Obviously there's the factory workers themselves, who often happen to be migrants, but there are also poor people. The old folks who perhaps lived in the area before the factories arrived and couldn't afford to retire in a fancier district, plus all the pink collar support people who run the local canteens, the folks selling SIM cards and phone cases, people who fix motorcycles, people who cut hair... young families with small children who don't have the money to live in the next suburb over where middle class condos start to sprout.

So who do the bombs hit when war breaks out? Well if it's a precision munition delivered overnight, hopefully only the night watchman on-site. In the early morning you might start to hit other workers too. Drivers. The lady with the food cart prepping snacks for first shift. The migrant kids training pencak silat under the bridge. Collateral damage. Or deliberate - for instance during the recent combat search-and-rescue operation when all "military-aged males" within the operational area became potential targets. And with less accurate and/or larger munitions, the chance of hitting non-combatants only goes up.

I guess this is how it happens that white collar people can live relatively unscathed in cities under fire for years. They still have to face the trauma of bombs falling each night, rolling powercuts etc, but odds are the primary targets aren't going to be in their neighborhood. Unless they live near a police station or local government building, like i do. Or, you know, there's a high-value target hiding upstairs.

Le sigh.

Anyway, i like to bike around these places because it keeps me grounded. I think a lot of white collar people invisibilize the working class because they never really have to see them other than as clerks in the convenience store or delivery riders bringing dinner.

About a year ago our office switched around the cleaning times so now the janitorial staff comes through during work hours. It's mildly inconvenient to step away from your desk as someone vacuums underneath it, but it also serves to remind that while we sit on our asses all day, some people are out there pushing brooms and lifting bags and unclogging toilets. It also made me think of how many other offices i worked at where i never saw them - they must have come through overnight. Who gets hit by the bombs? Night shift workers.

So this wasn't supposed to be a "war and..." post, but here we are. I don't really know why i am consumed by it. I am an army brat and international relations hobbyist so i kept up with the Ukraine war probably a lot more than the average person, but to be honest i never felt particularly invested because Eastern Europe is not a place i have any connection to or interest in visiting. But i've always wanted to visit the Middle East. It hurts me to see it in flames because there is so much history there, plus all those arid landscapes i adore. Since transitioning i mostly gave up on the idea, because being a solo femme-presenting traveler in that part of the world is not ideal, even aside from any problems or misunderstandings around being trans. I experience it all vicariously, through wiki and maps and books and games, hoping that one day at least one place won't be torn apart by war or oppressed by dictators and zealots. In reality it'll probably always be a never-never land for me, but one that continues to capture my attention. At least i wish for people there to have peace, even if freedom in the way i understand it remains out of reach.

Although i think freedom matters too.

Malcolm X said no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom, and i tend to agree. But he also pointed out that the prerequisite for that struggle is people becoming able to define freedom for themselves. I haven't been to the Middle East so i can't speak for the people who live there, but after living in China i do tend to feel that it's hard for someone to conceptualize of what freedom could mean without first becoming able to question the structure of their society, and surely they can't do that if their home or workplace is being bombed? So, at the risk of stating the obvious, if we really care about liberating oppressed peoples, it seems not bombing them should be step one. Then at least it makes space for them to develop a critical consciousness, and only then can they define their freedom and pursue it to find peace.

I am blessed to have quite some freedom, although perhaps not quite enough to find peace. Four days off is not nothing, though. Everyone should get to have a holiday and time to think.

war and bridges

amw — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:09:53 GMT

I am a civil engineering nerd. Or, perhaps it's better to say i am a civil engineering tourist. I don't watch any of the urban infrastructure influencers, i don't sit around reloading the SkyscraperCity forums to get in-progress updates of every tower, i don't even pay much attention to the latest supertalls or other megaprojects because i lived in Shenzhen City and those are just another Tuesday to me now. But. I really do love all the ugly stuff that humans build. I love Big Dumb Objects, i love gigantic machines, i love factories and power stations and sawmills and silos. I know it's weird, given i am also an aspirationally vegan, bike-riding, AC-eschewing greenie, but touring these epic monuments to human civilization is often a highlight of my travels.

So, i also love bridges, and it makes me sad to see a newly-constructed, paint-still-wet bridge going up in smoke in Iran. You know what i don't love? Fucking mainstream media uncritically repeating Trump's made-up nonsense about the size and purpose of the bridge. In case you only saw the video on TV and didn't stop to open Wikipedia, there's at least a half dozen bridges in Iran that are much longer, including a stone arch bridge built 1700 years ago that remains in use today.

You don't need to have a PhD in civil engineering to see the value of an urban bypass. The city in question is Karaj, which has a population of about 2 million people. It's probably a half hour's drive from Tehran (pop. 9 million) and there is a metro line that joins the two cities. There's also a couple of freeways that snake together in the pass, before opening out to form a ring road around the suburbs. Or not quite a ring because - even though Google Maps is probably out-of-date - you can see that there are a few gaps along the northern stretch, with satellite imagery showing the spaces cleared out to continue building the road.

So, it's on this probably-still-incomplete northern ring road where they built a bridge to help move traffic along to the next big city Qazvin (pop. 500,000) a couple hours' drive away, or to Tabriz (pop. 1.7 million), a couple hours beyond that.

But, you know, sure, blow it up because apparently this bridge is a critical piece of military infrastructure designed exclusively for the purpose of driving missile trucks across, and there's like totally no other way to get a missile truck from Tehran to Tabriz. Except, go back and check out Google Maps and really take a look at Karaj. It's a whole-ass fucking city, bigger than most cities in the US, with expressways and arterial roads and residential streets alike. There's shopping malls and movie theaters and schools and hospitals and all of the normal things that exist in every city. No doubt tens of thousands of trucks - big and small - drive through there every day.

This is just what an amateur person with a bit of critical thinking can find out. Obviously the USAF has folks smart enough to know that hitting a bridge in this particular part of the country is no great disruptor of military logistics. It's not like this is the fucking Crimean Bridge over here. It's not even comparable to the multiple bridges across the Litani that Israel destroyed so they could isolate the southern governates of Lebanon and invade it yet again. Which means the only reason i can see why the Americans targeted this bridge in particular was for propaganda. A big "fuck you" to a government that's actually investing money into urban infrastructure projects. A chance to get some war porn with picturesque mountains as the backdrop.

It feels like theater, similar to the 2003 shock-and-awe campaign in Baghdad that "coincidentally" resulted in hitting a string of targets directly in line of sight from the hotel where all the journalists were staying. That was back in the day before everyone had a camera in their pocket, so the military had to make sure mainstream media could get the shot.

Ironically now that everyone does have a camera in their pocket, governments with a reputation to uphold are doing their damnedest to make sure nobody gets to see those photos. Bellingcat put out a report today on information suppression in the UAE, and how actual missile and drone hits are being misrepresented as debris. Anyone posting evidence to the contrary is arrested: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/02/war-uae-iran-infuencer-dubai-conflict-drone-successful-strike-intercept-fire/

So there is a propaganda war going on, but at the same time hardly any reporting is getting out, which is weird. None of the governments involved are trustworthy actors. During previous wars you could at least depend on the western media to report on what parts of it they could witness - even if that was only a small and biased corner of the action - but now we have western media parroting straight-up lies from Trump's social media accounts, lies that can trivially be disproven, but instead run as the headline.

Do they think people are stupid?

Anyway, back to the bridge. Seeing a new bridge get hit reminded me of the bridge they are building from Bali to Tamsui that i've been watching go up over the past few years. (Incidentally hundreds of meters longer than the one the Americans just hit in the Karaj suburbs, although in this case the main deck is ~20m above sea level instead of ~100m above a canyon.) The Danjiang bridge will definitely reduce traffic on the upriver Guandu bridge, which i usually cross at least once on my weekend cycle trips up to Bali. I've been really looking forward to taking my first ride across it, hopefully before it becomes a well-known hotspot.

I have a sad feeling that by linking Bali to Tamsui with a road and tram connection it will make Bali less appealing to me. Tamsui is the most famous "seaside" suburb of Taipei, with a bustling food/market street and various new build condos catering - i think - mostly to retirees and foreigners who are willing to put up with an hour-long commute to live by the sea. Bali, on the other hand, is a gritty, grungy suburb of nothing. There is a large container terminal, a temple dedicated to Liao Tianding (Taiwanese Robin Hood figure), some ramshackle fishing ports, rusted warehouse buildings and beaches of sludge and quicksand. I love it, because it's quiet. But when the bridge opens, it's liable to gentrify the place, since it will now be on a direct route from the Taoyuan airport to the picturesque north coast. Maybe the half-vacant highrises will start to fill in, maybe they'll build some new ones on all the empty lots. Maybe my little old lady who cooks sausages on a BBQ out back of her shed will get cleared out by the authorities as the formal riverside bikeway gets extended all the way around the currently-closed off area where construction is taking place.

Or a Chinese missile will take out the center of the span before i even get the chance to cross it.

Except, it kinda probably wouldn't, you know? Because even if China started a shooting war, would they really blow up fresh-built civilian infrastructure just to send a message? I expect they'd sooner connect Xiamen to Kinmen, rubbing it in the nose of Taiwan that the billion-strong mainland can build bridges further and faster so don't even bother putting up a fight.

But it's still one of those things that flashes across my mind's eye, because the bridges look superficially similar - the bridge in the news is a dual-pylon cable-stay, the bridge i see each weekend is a single-pylon cable-stay - and they both make up part of a broader transit plan that will make the lives of people who live in the area more convenient. They're both bold declarations of human prowess, of our ability to grow and develop and spread out and bend awkward terrain to our will.

Even leaving the human cost of war aside, bombing infrastructure should be seen as a direct affront to our shared humanity. Think of all the planning, all the labor, all the individuals making up every part of the supply chain. Consider how much time and energy was put into the construction to date, gone to waste thanks to a gang of idiots on the other side of the world with enough air power to blow up pretty much any structure on the planet at the push of a button. Oh, they're such big boys with their B-2s and JDAMs.

It's not just bridges. Bridges are an easy talking point because everyone's crossed one. Humans like bridges, they help connect different communities and stand alone to be admired - there are dozens of "list of bridges" pages in Wikipedia. But factories are getting blown up too - steel factories, chemical plants, any kind of industrial site that could plausibly maybe possibly be repurposed to build those famous missile trucks that can no longer cross the definitely very critical and only bridge across the Karaj River.

And then i think about all the times i've been out in the suburbs, the tens of kilometers of twisted metal i've cycled past, the massive smoke stacks and pipelines and conveyer belts and elevators... I love going out there, i love seeing those brutally utilitarian structures that exist to support humanity. I know for the workers it's just the place they go to earn a paycheck, and for drivers it's just the liminal space they zoom past on the way to their actual destination, but as a walker or cyclist you can appreciate the grandness, the majesty of it all. Or i can, at least. And to imagine day after day of bombing, one building after another getting flattened, the wanton destruction of our collective works... The news likes to show when heritage sites are destroyed, but factories are our heritage too. We're ruining our own civilization and that's such a shame.

Anyway, i like bridges, i think that's all i wanted to say.

war and plastic bags

amw — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:55:53 GMT

I forgot to mention in my previous post my funniest war-related story.

Thanks to the war, Taiwan is experiencing a plastic bag shortage. This is a Big Deal because everything comes in plastic bags here.

Literally just this morning i was at the market, and there was an auntie talking to the vendor about the shortage - actually giving her shit for not giving me a plastic bag, but in reality that's one of the few vendors who respects my request to let me load the produce into my own canvas tote. Anyway, two other vendors i visit regularly profusely apologized for not being able to place their wares into one of the iconic red-and-white striped bags that seem as deep-rooted in Taiwan low culture as 藍白拖 (blue white slippers) and HeySong sarsaparilla. If only they knew the strategic stockpile of bags i still have balled up in my kitchen!

Worst thing is you can't even repurpose the vendor-supplied plastic bags for trash here, because each local government sells their own special-branded and hologram-embossed trash bags which you are expected to use, since those bags are tax revenue that goes back into the daily trash collection.

I have noticed, though, that you can "recycle" (probably not...) the red-and-white striped bags in one of the barrels in the compost truck, so perhaps i'll stack that full tonight.

I'm doing my part! 🫡

war and the economy

amw — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:18:26 GMT

I haven't really talked (or even thought much) about how war impacts the economy because it seems kind of callous when thousands of people are dying and over a million are still displaced. But it kind of ties into my post last week where civilians - and particularly the segment that is the "low end population" - seem to be taking the brunt of the trauma from this war, while the actual aggressors seem far less impacted. Well the same seems true for the economic impact.

Because here's the thing that maybe doesn't get headlines in the US or Europe. Philippines, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka - all experiencing oil shortages. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan - all our governments are dipping into the stockpiles. In Taiwan, like many other countries in the region, the government is sacrificing revenue to try keep the price at the pump stable. Billions of people are having to eat the cost of a war that Israel and the US started.

Of course all of this was entirely predictable because we saw the same damn thing play out when Russia started its war in Ukraine. The headline news was that it impacted gas delivery to Europe, but it also impacted grain deliveries - both out of Ukraine, which was being invaded, and out of Russia, which was being sanctioned. Less food means more famine which means more conflict which means MORE FUCKING WAR.

Side note, The Guardian just released a harrowing timeline of the massacre that happened last year in El Fasher, and it's worth reading: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/25/heroism-horror-and-the-pits-of-hell-inside-the-last-days-of-el-fasher The tens of thousands of civilians who died at the hands of the UAE-backed paramilitary in Sudan is something to keep in mind when you hear these GCC dictators acting like innocent babes, unfairly targeted by their definitely-much-worse neighboring dictator for packing their countries with US military bases.

Second side note, there hasn't been a huge amount of reporting on US military bases getting hit, but this week it did come out that personnel have since been withdrawn from the bases along the Gulf. Meanwhile today strikes landed at an airbase in the middle of Saudi, injuring more US service members. So, like, definitely a sign that the war is already won, am i right? What a fucking clown of a president y'all have right now, truly an embarrassment. https://www.nokings.org/ - find an event near you today!

Anyway, back on the topic of the rest of world being fucked. Something i don't like to admit but is probably to some degree a result of having moved to an island nation is that Taiwan is very heavily dependent on fossil fuels. I bike or walk everywhere, always try to buy local food, i go out of my way to live a "green" lifestyle... But end of the day 80% of Taiwan's electricity grid is fossil fuels - natural gas from the Middle East and coal from Australia.

The Taiwan energy independence story is a joke. There is an ongoing battle between the two political factions around nuclear power, where the ruling party has to be against it because nobody wants a Fukushima in their back yard, while the opposition claps back by saying shutting down the plants has made us dependent on foreign powers. (The parties shamelessly switch positions to avoid ever having to commit to building new plants.) Meanwhile the scant renewable projects face the same kind of insane smear campaigns that you see around the rest of the world - onshore windmills so loud they keep me up at night, offshore windmills scaring the fish away, poisonous chemicals from solar leak into soil and give us cancer, bla bla bla. Like burning fucking coal is the key to clean air and healthy, traditional lifestyles. But, to be fair, renewables are also all tied up in backroom deals with shady property developers, so they come with a poor reputation either way. The bigger debate is who gets the sweet contract to build more LNG terminals, projects that afford us just a couple more weeks runway in case we need to survive exactly the kind of crisis Israel and the US have now pulled us all into.

So, i live here all high and mighty, mostly eating vegan and riding bikes, minimizing my travel, never turning on the AC... While in reality just keeping the fridge on and cooking up a plate of greens is destroying the planet anyway. This is why even though i enjoy a bit of hyperbole in my writing, you gotta know i'm no absolutist. I think most lefties/social justice warriors/whatever you want to call us are the same way. Like, we know we live in an imperfect society, that's just the way it is. But even though the world sucks, it's about staying clear-eyed that things can be better and taking action to bring about positive change. I wish our politicians would at least try! Of course, in Taiwan i have no ability to impact the situation by voting. All i really have is my voice, so i talk about these things with colleagues, and they look at me all bemused-like, but maybe someday something will get through.

I think about that sometimes. Why live in a country where i am a visible minority, where i am a second-class citizen (or - to be more precise - not a citizen at all), where even my speech is considered but a curiosity ("listen to the naive foreigner opine on our politics, aren't they cute?") Why would i do this to myself?

I've talked before about how i think growing up as a military brat has created a kind of identity in myself where i somehow feel more comfortable as an outsider. Because i'm a third culture kid, there isn't really anywhere that i fit in. I don't even fit in with the culture of third culture kids because my dad left the forces when i was still young, so all the moving that happened after that no longer had me rubbing shoulders with other military brats, foreign service kids or the babes of business execs. I've become the eternal vagrant, not really having a country of origin or cultural identity of my own. To quote one of my favorite 90s pop songs, "i'm just a girl in the world"...

No Doubt - Just A Girl

I unironically still love the synth riff. That last chorus when all the melodies finally come together is an epic climax of the kind you rarely hear in rock music.

It's funny that that song is about the patriarchy and how women are expected to behave a certain way. The rhymes are a bit silly but it's low key a feminist anthem that also hits as a song for anyone who feels like society has pushed them into a role. I wasn't a woke enough kid to completely get that at the time, but i still loved pogoing around the dancefloor singing it at the top of my lungs. It's seared into my memories, the day one of my friends pulled me aside after this song and asked me why i was smiling. That's probably the day the alternative/rock scene died for me, because nobody would ever ask that question at rave. I suspect they wouldn't ask it of someone presenting as femme either. On the contrary - since transitioning i get asked why i'm NOT smiling.

Fuck the patriarchy.

Anywho, i grew up as an outsider everywhere i went. Even when i did blend in visually it'd always come out at some point that i was a fraud because my accent wasn't quite right or i didn't have the same childhood memories or i smiled when i shouldn't. Now i am at home on the outside looking in, which is probably why i have ended up settling as a visible migrant. All the cards are on the table, there's no illusions i'll ever be part of the in-group. I'm a nobody, i count for nothing. "That's all that you'll let me be..."

And yet. I do have the money to insulate myself from it all. Which brings us back to the economy. Well-to-do folks like me, which is to say anyone who has enough saved that movements in the stock market directly affect their on-paper wealth, may be annoyed at this war for crashing the stock market. But the truth is that most of us can just wait it out, because capitalism always bounces back. Meanwhile the most well-connected perhaps already moved their money out of index funds and into futures, and now that the market is low they can buy back in and make a profit in both directions. Those bastards are the real movers and shakers, and that's who is on social media every day saying don't worry, it's just a blip, it'll all be over soon, and then we'll be richer than ever before! How out of touch do you have to be to talk about how much money you're making while huge swathes of the population live paycheck to paycheck and have never known the privilege of shrugging off a month of stagnant gains? Truly these are the most self-centered, heartless shitbags in the world.

So, you know, there is a certain level of schadenfreude when one of them gets thrown in prison, which just happened to the leader of a "third way" political party that saw a lot of success in the last couple elections here in Taiwan, only to turn around and ally itself with the KMT anyway. Done for corruption, 17 years. Of course his supporters are up in arms accusing the two "old guard" parties of being far more corrupt, but that's the point, isn't it? You can't pretend to be an alternative and then get caught doing the same shit. If the problems are systemic you have to fight the system. You have to push back, don't take the easy route. Welcome to the resistance, etc etc.

Something in this post is dancing around a conversation i've been having at work about colleagues who seem unfazed by shipping low quality hacks and generating technical debt, but i spent so many spoons this week fighting those battles it's somehow easier to just rant about society instead. So that gives a hint as to my current workplace vibe. Fucking hell.

Anyway, how are you all doing? I might have something else to talk about at some point some day. Next weekend it's Tomb Sweeping! Of all the populist handouts our government did, i think i appreciate the extra holidays the most. No doubt i will sit in a bundle and lament the state of the world, but at least i'll be lamenting over a long weekend.

war and the poor

amw — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:31:23 GMT

One of the annoying things about being a full-time worker is that sometimes i would like to spend time doing more research into a thing i want to write about, but i don't have the time because i have to go to work.

Case in point: i want to write about the sense i have that the people dying in this war are not representative. Yes, friends, i am still fixated on war, but i promise this hot take will be from a totally novel and exciting angle.

So something i remember about living in Shenzhen was going through a few typhoons. And i was always fascinated about living through natural disasters in China because the reporting was done in this weird, opaque way where there were plenty of stories about the heroism of brave patriots who put their lives on the line to save a dog, or a child, or a granny, but you'd have to dig a lot deeper to hear about the tragedy of the people who lost their homes, or who actually died. It's a kind of censorship that happens in authoritarian countries where the facts aren't suppressed per se, but the media (both traditional media and social media) is deliberately curated in such a way that it emphasizes stories that make the administration look good over stories that make it look bad.

Quick refresher: The Party is at the core of society and Xi Jinping is at the core of the Party, so when people in society do good deeds they are embodying the Chinese spirit, the Party spirit and the spirit of Great Helmsman Xi. Similarly, when something bad happens, it's a result of having gone against the Party, it's corruption, an anomalous tumor, something to be quickly excised and then forgotten so as not to let the sickness spread. Unless, of course, the bad thing happening can somehow be pinned on foreigners, in which case it's part of the ongoing Century of Humiliation, the ceaseless Black Hand of western forces undermining China's rightful place at the center of the world. (With the Party at the core.)

Anyway, during one typhoon a few people died, which was rare. China is like the US in that when a storm makes landfall it's usually already killed a bunch of people in poorer island nations, and it's a matter of national pride that the great and powerful mainland take a less devastating blow - maybe even no direct fatalities recorded at all. In this way the regional hegemon gets to show its might, giving the people who lost all their belongings the small comfort that at least they're not as pitiful as those hapless islanders who should be thankful actually for the pittance in aid they receive.

But i digress. The people who died turned out to be maintenance workers, which in China invariably means internal migrants - people who have traveled from poorer provinces to find work, and who often work without the formal local residence permission (hukou) that would allow them to access local healthcare services, have their children attend local schools, etc. These folks are both the engine of Chinese society - the delivery workers, the factory workers, the cooks and cleaners and laborers - and the downtrodden, the class whose homes are targeted for removal when the next big urban development project breaks ground. They died because they were literally in a drain pipe doing their jobs when the flash floods hit. I can't remember where i was, but it was probably high and dry in my apartment, working from home.

Anyway, this is the point where i need more time, because i remember these folks as migrant workers, but maybe they were "just" local poors. Although i suppose it doesn't matter because in the hierarchical system of value applied to different folks in China, local poors are higher than migrant poors, but they're still "low-end population" that the middle class and educated set need not concern themselves with.

Why am i talking about China in my latest war post? Well, it's because the Gulf states, which have been some of the primary targets of Iranian missile and drone strikes, have exercised a media control policy - ostensibly for OPSEC reasons - that remind me of how it felt to live in China. Civilians are being arrested for sharing information about the strikes on social media. Mainstream media reporting is vague and reported in the passive tense - "explosions have been heard", "reports of smoke rising from..." Eventually, maybe some hours or days later, you get the report... Pakistani killed. Bangladeshi killed. Nepalese killed. Wait are we talking about Afghanistan/Pakistan or Iran? (PS you guys, there is also another military conflict happening right now on that border.) Nope, these are all people dead in the UAE. Did any Arab civilians die? Nope. Well, yes, but he was a Palestinian so oh well, we all know how little their lives are worth.

And again, i wish i had more time to research the actual numbers so that i could give concrete evidence, to plot the demographics of each country against the civilian deaths, to check the amount of column inches devoted to reporting on each death by demographic grouping, to do the analysis that would prove my intuition that the people who die are disproportionately not the elites who started the war nor part of the privileged populations whose silence helps to legitimize it. I don't have the time, so bear with me, or don't.

"But amw," cries the Enlightened Centrist, "it's only natural that people identify more with victims with whom they share more in common. Obviously Americans will care more when one of their own dies!" Yes and that's not my point. What i find interesting is why it is that if you drop a bomb on a city in the Middle East, you're apparently more likely to kill a South Asian than an Arab. I suppose it makes sense in a country where 90% of the population is foreigners, but why is that? The vast majority will never gain citizenship - you have to live there 30 years just to qualify. I don't have the background knowledge to comment on how many of the migrants are being exploited versus how many feel the sacrifice is worth it, but either way it means that there is intrinsically a class of replaceable bodies that only exist to do labor for the local elites. So when they die, oh well, switch out for a new one. Would the Gulf states be so reluctant to respond if it was their own people dying? Would Iran even target them if the odds were higher they'd hit people of consequence? (I should probably mention in case it's not obvious that soldiers are implicitly a disposable class too.)

And this kind of disconnect is something that really strikes me about this war in particular. I feel it in Lebanon too, where Israel is repeating the same gimmick they did in Gaza of demanding millions of people leave their homes so that those same homes can be flattened by bombs, just to send a message. "Destroying terrorist infrastructure" or some such bullshit. Guess all you need is one neighbor with a drone and an AK for the IDF to decide to target the entire city block. But it's all legal, you see, due to the principle of proportionality. It's worth it to disrupt the lives of millions of people to take out a handful of high value targets because those millions of people aren't really people actually, they're more like cattle, they're just inconvenient bodies getting in the way of military goals. Don't worry if a few get hit, they breed like rabbits, new ones will sprout up all over the place, so it doesn't matter - we're doing them a favor, actually!

But this is all just vibes. It's emotions. Take it with a grain of salt. What do i know? Not much, considering the media reporting is so locked down. It's not just Iran - the authoritarian regime famous for shutting down their internet whenever things get a little of hand - it's Israel, Saudi, the Gulf states - all of them are aggressively trying to control what information gets out. Meanwhile indie media has also not been doing the greatest job (e.g. https://skepchick.org/2026/03/is-the-us-military-trying-to-bring-back-jesus/). I am pretty serious about seeking out credible reporting, but that's slim pickings. Even self-styled OSINT guys, Bellingcat, the credible defense gang, they're more interested in exposing the big stories than reporting on the nobodies whose lives got fucked over. Much less diving deeper to see how many of those nobodies are even nobody-er - women, children, elderly, people with disabilities, LGBTQ folks, migrants... Because we matter the least of the least.

Or, so says my intuition. Take me with a giant grain of salt. One day, maybe, i will have the time to do proper reporting on this. That would be a job i feel like might actually matter.

parties during the war

amw — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:40:02 GMT

Abort mission! Well, it's not that dramatic. But the party this weekend, i walked out around noon, hiking an hour odd down the mountain with all my stuff, then jumping on a local bus and now the slow train home. I will arrive back at my house before the shuttle bus leaves the party, so at least i'll be able to buy some food, cook some dinner, watch some TV and relax before another day of work. [Around the point of linking the videos below i got off the train, bought food and walked home. Yes, it's a teaser - read on for some classic documentaries!]

I'm not sure why i wasn't feeling it this year. This is definitely the biggest party i've been going to here in Taiwan, it's hard to know exactly but i'd guess a thousand people or definitely the high hundreds. I've never been a fan of big parties or clubs, i think the perfect size is about 200 people, just large enough that you don't know everyone but just small enough that it feels like you could. It makes gigs feel more personal. This is one of those big parties that still has small-time production values. Everyone working is a volunteer, the foreign headliners tend to be people who are just in the region on holiday (or already touring anyway) and not explicitly brought in for this one gig, local talent sleeps in tents like everyone else, they either don't get paid or if they do it's unlikely to be enough to cover their travel, but it's okay because they're doing it for the love etc.

I was part of a crew that stepped up from the 200-300 person parties to the 1000+ festivals back in the 90s and there was definitely growing pains. In the end the promoter stepped back from parties and now just does the occasional oldskool reunion once every few years. (This is perhaps the one thing that could get me to go back to Australia someday.) But i liked this party because the promoter reminds me somewhat of that promoter i worked with back in Aus. Well, and also not, because that Aussie promoter was an ex-punk of the loud and political stripe, aggressively queer, indie and anti-fascist. Here in Taiwan, well she has a bunch of indigenous folks on her crew, the party is way gayer than any other psytrance gig i've ever been to, but let's just say the local DJ with the Free Palestine shirt never got reinvited.

Psytrance has an Israel problem. It's always had an Israel problem. The story goes like this: when young Israelis finish their military service, the tradition is to take a backpacking tour to celebrate their freedom. Many ended up in Goa, a place in India where a bunch of western hippies had been living since the 70s. In the early 90s those hippies started looping EBM/industrial riffs and somehow that birthed a whole separate genre tree of electronic music, something that took influence from what was happening with house, techno and the nascent rave scene, while also somehow being straighter and whiter in its expat-oriented exoticness. The Israelis went home and took the music with them. Psytrance went on to become a mainstream form of electronic music in Israel, while around the rest of the world it remains a fringe subculture centering around a string of LSD-drenched festivals along the hippie trail.

As a result, the biggest names in the scene are from Israel, some of the biggest labels are Israeli, and whether you are partying in India or Thailand, Portugal or Australia, there will inevitably be a few Israeli headliners and their globe-trotting entourage who just want to get high and have fun.

Occasionally, very occasionally, they will comment on the political situation, by which they mean how unfortunate it is that their country is run by right-wing extremists. Oh well, nothing can be done, we all just want the same thing after all, i pray for peace, bla bla, the kind of political conversation which leads predictably nowhere because they don't want to think or talk about the fact that their country has been occupying two other countries since before they were born, and they've lived their entire lives as beneficiaries of the apartheid system.

But, like, how can you grapple with that? I imagine it's a bit like when black people point out that us white folks benefit from white supremacy. Even if you try to be a good ally, even you listen and learn and help affect change where you can, end of the day you're still benefiting from a system of oppression that remains far from dismantled. It's a generational struggle. Meanwhile you can't put your life entirely on hold to fight the power, so you go to a party and someone challenges you and what then? Its not the time or place for a deep discussion, so you mumble out something vaguely uncontroversial and try to change the subject.

Speaking of whiteness, another country known for its psytrance scene is South Africa, and (unlike Israelis) they don't act coy about their racism. But, again, you got this country with a weird caste system in its recent history, where the relatively progressive traveler types invariably happen to be members of or descendants from that upper caste, and they've faced the same anger and resentment as their more shamelessly bigoted peers. Unless they're particularly woke, they've seen the violence and criminality in their own country and associate it with the identity of the perpetrators rather than the system itself, so racism just becomes a part of how they understand the world. It's not even worth trying to call them on it. They'll deny it, then rightfully point out that what do we know, we never lived there, bla bla, but we're all the same actually, come to the braai, you'll see, we just want peace. Let's drop another tab and find it within, maaan.

So, anyway, it's jarring to turn up at yet another party with Israeli flags on the poster while the IDF are unleashing yet another iteration of civilian murder and terror, yet another million people displaced because LOL oh well you got in the way of my bombs. The arrogance is beyond the pale. Don't worry! Listen to psytrance! Dance for peace!

I think i shared this excellent Spanish article last year: https://www.elsaltodiario.com/musica/own-spirit-psywashing-cuando-cultura-trance-sirve-blanquear-israel-genocidio-gaza Here is an English one on the same topic: https://jacobin.com/2025/03/australia-doofs-zionism-idf-palestine

Three years ago a different bunch of terrorists out of Gaza stormed a psytrance party, abducting and murdering hundreds of people just like me. Or maybe not like me, because would i be so brazen as to party less than 10km from a walled enclave where my own government's military acts like prison guards, controlling every person and item that crosses the border?

I mean, sure. I guess i would. People did. People do. One classic crossover of weird rave scene activism happened when an idealistic freetekno party crew traveled from the UK to Sarajevo shortly after the ceasefire in 1995. (They had previously made it to Tuzla in 1994.) It's one of the rare early rave adventures that was fully filmed in documentary format, so you can see a snapshot of the era when i was first getting into this music, plus a glimpse of what life was like for the civilians who lived through a bloody war and bombing campaign.

Storming Sarajevo Desert Storm, Sarajevo 1995

Of course they were partying on their own too. The radio station kept playing tunes. The clubs stayed open. The bands kept performing. This is another great documentary of the times.

Rave AGAINST MACHINE BY James Harvey, Stevan Riley, Richard Rudy

And that's the thing i keep thinking about, that the people are all still there. Even genocide isn't a complete obliteration. People survive and keep going, just with extra added trauma.

Anyway, so this shit is going through my mind while i am bopping around at a psytrance party, and then there's the Japanese guy who keeps offering his LSD spray bottle, there's the American who is describing in great detail his plans about when to do the ketamine, when to do the acid, when to drop the E, there's the Israeli awkwardly trying to avoid talking about the war, there's some other guy of unknown heritage (American number two?) discussing his ego death and how it opened his third eye and in Hindu teaching do you have a lighter, plus a bevy of Taiwanese babbling equivalent nonsense in Chinese and wearing outlandish costumes and i can't fucking let it go, i make my way to the one weird corner of the mountain where there is half a bar of signal and scroll refresh on the war.

It's not even my war, for fuck's sake. The last therapist i had was Iranian, and she would have told me i am ruminating. I always thought it was funny when she said "ruminating" even though i know it's just a bog-standard therapy word, because Rumi. Anyway, she's right, i shouldn't be letting myself get so wound up. It's not healthy.

But two weeks ago i was at a party and the airstrikes kicked off right in the early afternoon, just as one of the DJs was about to change over. In the before time i wouldn't have known, but with smartphones all the wars are in my pocket. This week there's hints Israel is about to invade Lebanon (again) and who knows what the fuck America is going to do but i'm sure whatever it is it'll be stupid. And yep, Iran ain't no saints either. But since i have friends in America and i have second-degree connections to folks in Israel thanks to this party scene, forgive me for focusing more on the motherfuckers who needlessly started the damn thing.

The party was good, i think. But i just did not have the appetite to get fucked up and forget about it all. When one guy offered me a hit i was like, no, man, the sun is shining and the DJ is playing some beautiful melodic techno, this moment is perfect, why would i ruin it by adding drugs on top? Because that's the funny thing with drugs... when you are in a perfect moment, they can only make it worse. But when you are feeling like shit, when the world around you sucks... getting high can get you to that perfect moment, drugs can give you the peace you can't find on your own. So i get it, in a way. Maybe they're drowning their sorrows, maybe they're drowning their guilt, but for me when the sun is on my face and the right track drops... i am going to take that moment for all i can, because who knows when it will end?

So there was 3-4 hours of really great music, i got to say hello to a bunch of familiar faces and hug those who only show up once a year at this big gathering, i also took a Saturday morning walk down to the local town and picked up a bunch of nibbles from the market, then headed back through the flooded rice paddies and the strawberry fields. The strawberries were in harvest and the smell was incredible. The birds sang, the sun shone, the music pumped and nobody got bombed. I guess, on balance, it was a good party?

I dunno. I'm happy to be home with time to spare to finish up this entry and cook up a proper meal. I wish there was a scene with music closer to my tastes in Taiwan. I wish there were ravers here who had a bit more critical consciousness. Perhaps there are, perhaps not. In the mean time, i still have a scene of one, in my shoebox apartment, listening to tunes on my tinny tablet speakers, not scrolling the war.

war on tv

amw — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:56:47 GMT

I watch all of the sci-fi. Well, a lot of it. I love sci-fi, i love the way it gives writers the opportunity to project current society into the future, it gives us a framework to imagine a different way of being. But one thing that irks me about sci-fi - or perhaps just TV more broadly - is that we rarely get a civilian face on war.

And by that i don't mean that i'm looking for a harrowing story of loss, but just some kind of acknowledgement that wars - and bombing campaigns in particular - go beyond "let's have my boys and your boys duke it out". These actions ripple out to affect the lives of people who did not sign up for this shit, but now it's right there, all around them, part of the pattern of their days.

If you read the civilian bloggers in Iraq during that war, or you had to read Anne Frank at school, or you had civilian grandparents who lived under occupation in WW2, or you watched a few updates from people in Gaza on Tiktok, or you know some guys living in Ukraine... you probably know what i'm getting at. It's this sense that living in a place that's getting bombed or being raided by an occupying force is not an all-out apocalypse, but it's not nothing either. It's just normal people, living normal lives, with ever-increasing tension due to the knowledge that fucked up shit is liable to pop off at any moment. But it's out of their control, so they just keep on living.

I remember when Prigozhin made his march on Moscow a couple years back there were a bunch of videos that went viral of completely blasé Russians just standing around going LOL is this a coup? Who fucking knows, let me take a selfie and then get on with my day. And it seemed so astonishing how little of a shit they gave, but at the same time i can see how society can get to that point.

Imagine you have a regular degular job, you go to work every day, your kids go to school, you hang out at a café on Fridays, on the weekend you go to the park or catch a show. You chat with your friends about how useless your government is, about how out-of-touch they are, then you take another drag of your cigarette and shrug your shoulders and say but hey, what can you do? Maybe you go to a protest, and you're there in a massive crowd and off in the distance you see some smoke going off and the riot police kettling the loudest and angriest of the bunch, but you're at the back somewhere with your kids and figure maybe you should get them home. Next day on social media the buzz is that some of the punx in the black bloc got disappeared, but what can you do? It's Monday, you gotta go back to work.

Two weeks later you're at the office, suddenly an explosion rattles the windows. What's happening? Terrorists? You check online but the internet is down, people are calling and texting trying to figure it out. Rumor has it some foreigners who hate the government even more than you do tried to assassinate the president. No way! Did they do it? I think so, the whole leadership compound is burning! But wait, that's over the other side of town, so what's on fire down the street? Hold on, wait a second, is that the school?

...

But you don't need to have your kids blown to bits by a "foreign intelligence couldn't figure out where the military base was" oopsy-daisy to be affected by the bombs. I think about all the hospitals that were destroyed in Gaza - and they're being hit across Iran now too - or about the government buildings, the police stations, the TV broadcasters. Living next door to agents of the regime shouldn't make you a target, but apparently the IDF - and Hegseth's DoD - think otherwise.

There are two police stations within about a 300m radius of my house. There is a regional administration center for the local government even closer. Directly underneath that is a subway station, a supermarket, a food court. My nearest hospital is about 400m away, there's a few more within a couple clicks. These might not be the first night's targets when there is still the presidential compound nearby, or a bunch of military bases and sports stadiums dotted around the suburbs, but clearly by some folks' reckoning they would be the second night's targets, or the third's.

And you might think to yourself, well, it's a war, obviously any sane person would leave, right? Like, that's where all those refugees are coming from, right? Except for every one person who is able to leave, there's 10 more who stay. Could you leave your house tomorrow? These cities don't turn into ghost towns where the only people left standing are military personnel, they're still filled with butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, with nurses and teachers and laborers and drivers and fucking children.

Or you might think, well as long as you didn't let the paramilitary build a secret base under your apartment you're safe... but then you go to your local convenience store, and you're waiting in line, and the guy standing in front of you suddenly fucking explodes. With your ears ringing you wipe the blood and gore off your face and think, how am i still alive? Was he a suicide bomber? No, he's on the ground screaming, what the fuck? And then later you find out that LOL it was a super elite clinical strike where foreign spies decided it was time to remotely detonate pagers that they distributed to their enemies.

Like, can you imagine, this guy in front of you just exploding? Is the first thought on your mind "wow, i sure am glad these foreign spies decided to make my country safer by blowing up a gangster right in front of my face". Can you imagine thinking "gee, thank you foreign military, thank you so much for murdering my daughter while she was at school as part of your grand plan to liberate our people from tyranny". The crazy thing is that some people probably can imagine this, especially if they live in a country where their own police regularly commit brutality, where people who suffer rape and abuse in prison are seen as getting their just desserts, where children can literally be gunned down every single day and oh well that's just the price you pay for freedom. Isn't violence glorious?

But, exactly because people already live in a cruel society, exactly because they have learned to just shrug and accept the injustices that go on in their own backyard... you'd think that's all the more reason why they should be able to empathize with the ordinary people who live under authoritarian regimes, people who have learned to make the best of the hand they were dealt. (And it's why they should also be able to empathize with the plucky self-starters who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to build a better life elsewhere, but xenophobia is a whole nother rant.)

So surely these things live in the minds of people everywhere, right? Somewhere deep down, people in the west have to know that the other billion-odd middle class people on the planet have kinda sorta pretty similar lives to them. It's not such a grand leap to put yourself in their shoes.

And so, i keep wondering, why is there so little media depicting this kind of war? We have plenty of media focusing on the guys in the trenches, dramatic scenes of gunfights and noble sacrifice for the cause. We can always watch along as politicians maneuver and the elites ruminate over whether it was all worthwhile. For sure there's stories of civilian tragedy and despair. Or - America's number one favorite - the post-apocalyptic "well the war already happened and destroyed everyone, but don't worry there's still a tiny smattering of humans left in the world who are all armed to the teeth and constantly trying to murder one another because society was always hopeless" libertarian fap-fest. But where's the "i'm not a soldier or a freedom fighter, i just fix toilets, and the police station across the road was hit while i was on a job the other day, now my windows are smashed, kinda sucks because there's rolling blackouts every night too, but i still gotta go to work, still gotta pay the bills, people's drains are still getting clogged, maybe tomorrow my window guy will show"... Like, just stories of ordinary people with ordinary lives whose shit is randomly being fucked up by all the chaos.

Perhaps Americans aren't the right people to look for to make those shows, because Americans haven't had that kind of war on their own soil in recent history? But that's why you'd think sci-fi would be a good vehicle for it, a chance to think about what this kind of conflict really means.

I guess it's just on my mind because i caught up with season 2 of Paradise, which is another post-apocalypse show where the world outside the bunker is populated by gun-toting maniacs, except they subverted it last episode by having the local crazies turn out to be nice, actually. And now we get the stoic man roaming the wilds with a gun and a newborn, which has been done so many times in sci-fi it really deserves its own TV Tropes page. And then i walked down to the market, and i thought about where the bombs would land if we were a city under siege, if we would all turn into rag-tag bands of killers, or if we'd just keep on keeping on.

Is it weird that i think about these things? I remember when COVID broke out in Wuhan and i lived in Shenzhen and almost immediately the rumors started that it must be some kind of breach out of a CDC building because sci-fi teaches people that any virus outbreak surely has to be the result of evil scientists in a lab (scientists never get to be the good guys in sci-fi, unless it's Star Trek, and even then...) And i was like "what are the odds", and then i thought about how my previous apartment was just a couple hundred meters from the CDC building in Shenzhen, and i realized the odds were pretty good, actually, because cities are dense and all kinds of buildings are built up all over each other so you can throw a dart at a map in any major city and you're bound to find some nearby lab to conjure a conspiracy from.

Similarly, drop a bomb on a government radio station, you're gonna blow up some guys who have nothing to do with the propaganda apparatus. Fly a drone through the window of a "high-value target", the shrapnel still gonna slice through the little old lady next door. Urban warfare is some bullshit.

Sometimes i wonder if the people dreaming up these campaigns - or these stories - ever lived in a city, if they ever had to share a bus with a hundred other people they never met before but peacefully interact with because that's what it means to be part of a society.

Sometimes i wonder if people think about anyone other than themselves at all.

on war

amw — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:31:35 GMT

I am not going to pretend that i have some kind of deep, educated take on geopolitics in the Middle East. I did all this shit 20 years ago, listening to streaming radio 24/7 during Iraq. Did we have to listen using RealAudio plugin back in those days? Something like that. I read all the blogs, the warbloggers, the milbloggers, the civilian bloggers from inside Iraq, the embedded journalists, the journalists in exile, i started learning how to fucking read Arabic so i could follow that damn war... And it didn't matter, because the American leadership kept on going - sending their military personnel to die, ignoring the murder of civilians, justifying torture, carrying out extrajudicial assassinations - for exactly as long as they wanted to keep going, which was much longer than the majority of American people wanted, not to mention the whole ass rest of the world who had to suffer the consequences.

And so, here we are again. America bombing another country, again, leaning on deals with dictators in the Arabian peninsula, propping up Israeli hegemony in the region, doubling down on imperialism and "might makes right", just as long as the sword is in the steady hand of Team America: World Police. Bush almost kinda sorta was able to sell that illusion, but under Trump there are no illusions any more. Trump is and always has been a shamelessly corrupt, racist, sexist grifter. He does not try to hide it - that's his entire brand. He scams people, he abuses people, he engages in frivolous lawsuits against his enemies while ignoring the law when it inconveniences him, safe in the knowledge that the system will never hold a rich, white man truly accountable. In government he has surrounded himself with a combination of dim-witted television personalities, fellow con artists, hapless yes-men and outright fascists. This is not Team America: World Police, it's Kleptocrats vs Nazis: Can They Coexist? (Yes, yes they can.)

Anyway, it's an embarrassment. And almost all of America knows it's an embarrassment. Trump approval levels are in the toilet. Popularity of this war was underwater before it even started. But these clownshoes in government don't even give a fuck. Even the hardest ass neocons to whom the lives of brown people mean nothing at all can't deny that Netanyahu and Trump started a war that killed their own servicemen on day one, soldiers who would not have died had these power-hungry shitbags not decided it'd be fun to drop some missiles on their nemesis for the lulz.

And yet... here we are, with the media starting to churn out thinkpieces like "well, if you think about it, we've been at war with Iran for 50 years" like. Bro. Don't even start with this fucking gaslighting. "They would've attacked us anyway so we just attacked them first." Give it a rest, this is weak fucking sauce. Even the slightly more liberal-coded corners of the media are like, "well just listen to this Iranian artist talk about how bad the dictatorship was so killing these guys is a good thing, actually". No. Sorry. Been there, done fucking that. I was on the "let's take out Hussein because he is an asshat" train 20 years ago. I neither believed nor cared about the lies Bush told over WMDs, it was enough for me to believe that Team America: World Police was going to take out an objectively Bad Guy. But that's the fucking point. Team America: World Police is no more. America under Trump has burned every bridge it had with the liberal democracies of the west. Trump cozies up to dictators and authoritarians, while denigrating people with even the flimsiest of principles for not fluffing his fragile ego. So sorry not fucking sorry if i am not buying the "well, war is bad and everything, but on the bright side at least we took out this one scumbag" schtick. No. I refuse. And everyone else should too.

Because that's the thing i find most sinister. That eventually all of this "well actually" commentary is going to normalize the idea that a cabal of rich, corrupt, pedophile-befriending shitbags can just unilaterally decide to send people to die on their behalf, to have their enemies murdered, to watch civilian deaths climb and cities crumble and shrug it off like it ain't no thing. That people will come to believe that it's totally okay to let these actual terrorists go on terrorizing us and destabilizing the world for their own petty power games. I want people to remember that this is not okay. That this is not what liberal democracy is supposed to be about. We can accept we live in a flawed society, with flawed political systems and flawed leadership, and still not accept this fucking trashfire.

Eventually Trump will get cold feet and pull out, claiming victory no matter the outcome, because he never set out any real goals to begin with (classic grifter move). Israel will keep on bombing and invading every other country in the region, never having to face consequences for its own nuclear program or genocidal actions. Saudi will keep on murdering journalists, UAE will keep on funding war in Sudan, and on and on. All of the western influencers will go back to Dubai and gush about how safe and beautiful it is, all the cucked comedians and sportspeople gonna perform like caged monkeys for the Saudi royal family... and Americans gonna vote in a new president and just kinda shrug and think "oh well, that sure was a weird few years under Trump, huh?" God, i hope there's a deeper reflection, an actual reckoning.

Is this what it means to get old, when you watch shit happen and you saw it happen before and thought "well that won't happen again" and then it does and you're just like for fuck's sake.

Sigh.

taking the 303 / returning on the slow train

amw — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:01:13 GMT

I know i could take a taxi from here and arrive in 20 minutes. But instead i am taking the local bus, route 303, because how could i not?

Squiggling through the suburbs of Hualien, passing each school, market, hospital and prison, it reminds me why i love public transport, the way it loops and snakes around the place to try serve everyone, it gives me hope for humanity.

(I know, i know, one of Taiwan's recurring scandals is corrupt politicians planning transit routes to go past their own properties. Let me have my moment.)

Hearing locals yell up at the bus driver in Taiwanese Hokkien, i understand little to none of what they're saying, but catch a few words, the uncle, drinking water or drinking till drunk, something's happening at 4 o'clock? In any case it's the kind of boisterous, extroverted banter that is vanishingly rare in the public space of Taiwan and i am living. Quiet nerds looking at their phones is not it.

-o-

One of the things i love about walking through small towns is it really drive home what the essentials of life actually are. The small town outside of Hualien from where i got on this slow train home is case in point. It's not scenic or touristic enough to have any souvenir stores, although there is a nearby resort and it is surrounded by cloud-capped mountains and has a lush river basin where cattle still roam free. But it has everything people need. Aside from the two convenience stores and supermarket on the highway, the main road has a butcher, a greengrocer, a phone store, a whitegoods store and a place selling dollar store knick-knacks and hardware. Plus, of course, the Taiwan necessity - 17 fucking breakfast joints all with presumably the same menu of 蛋餅 danbing (egg pancake), toasted sandwich or burger. (Burgers are a breakfast item in Taiwan.)

Around 2pm Sunday everything is closing its doors, but i did find one classic restaurant with TV in the corner blasting trashy news, lazy susans on the table, little chopstick rack in the corner, self-serve sauces, all that. I got a 魯肉飯 stew pork rice which is basically just rice and gravy, with bamboo shoots on the side. There is something so comforting about just ordering some local yokel food, no pretensions about being cosmopolitan or exotic, nothing imported, just the same rice and gravy they been eating in Taiwan and probably Fujian before it for hundreds of years.

This morning some guy from the next tent over - one of those chaps with an SUV and a tarp bigger than my entire apartment keeping his crew's tent dry while i got soaked - kindly offered me some mushroom soup, and i said yes without thinking. Of course it was something similar to cream of mushroom soup, basically a massive bowl of warm milk with the lightest dusting of mushroom flavor. I choked down a few mouthfuls and it was all i could do not to retch. Although i am only "aspirationally vegan" aka reducetarian, my only real "cheat" is pork once every couple weeks. Dairy squicks me out and milk in particular is something i've never drank straight, not even as a kid. Just, disgusting. But over here i feel like it's a middle class signifier.

To be honest, i'm not sure exactly what milk means culturally in Taiwan, but in China i know it was somewhat of a treat until more recent generations. There was (and kinda still is) a myth in China that the reason westerners are bigger and taller is because they drink milk, so if Chinese parents want their kids to grow up big and strong they must serve them milk from a cow. You can go to any working class Chinese (or Taiwanese) diner for breakfast and none of them serve cow milk, hot soy milk is and always was the beverage of choice, but if you walk through the supermarket there is an entire aisle of powdered milks and various "healthy" breakfast things where just add milk to make your child into fucking Yao Ming or whatever. It's a strange class gap. At the same time milk tea somehow became Hong Kong's national drink, and bubble milk tea became Taiwan's, and for me just the idea of putting milk in tea is repulsive. (Yes, i am a bad Brit.) Anyway, the reason i know the culture of milk in mainland China is because Chinese people love telling stories, and i heard it a bunch of times when i lived there. One told me when they were kids it was the biggest treat in the world to get the white rabbit milk candy, because milk was rare, so the candy was seen as not only delicious but nutritious too. I laughed at that, until i remembered in the west we had "the Milkybar kid" doing the same big dairy schtick. I swear to god, sif it wasn't enough for these motherfuckers to chain up mama cows by their teats, rape them every year to keep them lactating, then sell the babies for veal, they gotta brainwash people into drinking their product too because it's so gross no sane person could like it.

Anyway i hate milk.

So i had this milk thing and it was one of those awkward moments where i have to try to enjoy a gift to save the face of the giver but also i wanted to throw up. Eventually there was a moment where i had some time to rinse out the bowl, and i hastily made my exit to the dancefloor, where my favorite juice guy made me some coffees and a dragonfruit banana smoothie to wash the taste away. The usual gang of fancy schmancy Japanese style donburi and yakitori joints were there, but there was also a very 佛 (Buddha-y) vege spot that made an epic 素雞卷 "vege chicken roll" which the closest thing i can think of is the Vietnamese bò lá lốt sausage wrapped in betel leaf. They also had a vege version of 豬血糕 pig blood cake, which despite the name even non-vegan version is basically just a flame-grilled patty of glutinous rice. One dude also had a really nice 蘿蔔糕 "carrot" (turnip/radish) cake, which was pleasant because the bigger breakfast places in Taiwan usually prefer a version with bacon bits.

Anyway, the food was good. The music was, eh, it was psytrance. It was fine. I also finally met a Canadian migrant who came here 10+ years ago and we have been chatting back and forth on social media all that time but never managed to meet up in person, so that was cool. He just got his permanent residence and quit his job straight afterwards. 12 months to go for me... He also works in tech and is well and truly done with the whole new trend where management thinks "AI" means we can all do 10x work than before because they drank the Kool-Aid, when in reality our work is 10x slower because of all the fucking idiots throwing slop at the wall that serious developers now have to clean up. It's even worse than the first time around when outsourcing was all the rage. It's exhausting, i don't want to think about it.

Instead i will settle into this train ride. 4 hours to go, we're just sitting here in a siding like it's fucking Amtrak or something, the kind of useless train ride you almost feel like you could walk faster. But it gives time to look out the window and nibble some of my 麻粩 malao (sesame sugar rice puff thingy) i still have from my supply run to the local nut and dried fruit vendor by my house. End of my long weekend on the Pacific coast. I refuse to think about work, or geopolitics, because fuck all of this shit. I still have a sci-fi novel on my e-reader too, let's do this thing.

staring blankly out the window on a characteristically grey day

amw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:11:10 GMT

This weekend the forecast is rain and more rain. I already had my ticket booked for a party out near Hualien, but the promoter didn't organize buses and it's a holiday weekend so i knew finding transport was going to be a nightmare. The rain almost put me off wanting to bother.

But i found a ticket down to one stop before the place closest to the venue, and (after an hour of wrangling with the site) i even found a ticket back home on Sunday that didn't leave at an ungodly hour, albeit on the slow train that stops at every podunk village along the way. At least i'll have a seat so i won't need to spend 5 hours jostling for standing room on local connections.

And yet i still left this morning with some trepidation. It sucks to go camping in the rain, it sucks to go to outdoor parties in the rain, it sucks to do anything in the rain. I am not super thrilled about having my entire weekend taken up with travel and party stuff, which means i won't get to really relax from work, which after 4 days back has already destroyed me again. I am so fucking exhausted with work, i am so ready to never think about commercial software ever again. All the fucking Silicon Valley hype cycle, ultra libertarian, tech bro accelerationist bullshit just wears down my soul. I don't want to think or talk about it or i'll just start crying, i hate my job so much.

But. Now i'm on the train, and it's overcast but not yet raining, and because it's not a bullet train you can actually see out the window, the mountains are the deepest green, the grubby, moss-clad buildings pop out creating a delightful contrast of shapes and color, some bamboo stalks here, a rice paddy there, a small bed of cabbages, a factory, and i remember that life is more than just the fucking incessant scream of trash takes and scandal and propaganda.

Which of course the people who live out here have access to and consume all the same media, it's not about the culture, it's just about seeing something different for a moment, letting my eyes drink in something that isn't a computer screen (yes i'm aware the irony of typing this into my phone), just to imagine another world, another way of being... Even though it's the same world, it's the world just a short train ride away. And it could be a train ride anywhere, because it's not the place per se either, it's just the travel through the place, the change in perspective, the chance to fucking get out of my own head.

I needed this. Even if the party sucks and i spend 2 nights in a puddle of mud and misery, i needed this. God, i need a break so badly.

I remember talking to one of my colleagues who cycled the full circuit of Taiwan, he said that when he got back to Taipei, he just wanted to start again. He said he thought he could be happy just cycling around the island forever. And even though i haven't traveled that full route myself (although i've done plenty of legs), i get it. Because just being on the move, having a different view each day, just going and going and never having to feel stuck... That's the most beautiful thing in the world, that's what makes it feel like all the struggle is worth it. I just want to be free. I want so much to be free.

Okay now i am about to start crying on the train. I will post this and try enjoy a bit more.

horse on get rich

amw — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:42:57 GMT

Oh hai LJ. I have been off all week, and i have done absolutely nothing. I read a book. I played some computer games. I watched some videos. And that is all. I feel like i am only just becoming human again, but alas tomorrow i have to go straight back to work. There are a couple of long weekends coming up, but i will be going to parties those weekends so not really the kind of relax that i think my soul still craves.

The weather was dismal until today, and since it was my last chance, i took a bike ride up to Bali, grabbed a sausage from the lady with a BBQ out back of her house, an icecream from the lady with a cart by the temple, and a coffee from the little container shack thing on the boardwalk. They are my highlight spots and outside of work colleagues and the local wet market vendors, the only people i interact with at all in Taiwan. So we wished one another a happy new year and the sausage lady gave me a handful of sweets and i sat alone on the beach just soaking it in.

It's so funny that this country has become my home and somewhere i am on track to stay for the longish term, even though it's the place i've lived where i have the least connection to anything happening in my community. I don't have any friends. I don't watch TV. I don't know anything about local pop culture. My Chinese language skills have regressed since living here simply because outside of the wet market i never speak to anyone. People don't socialize outside their cliques in the public sphere. Everything online happens exclusively on Meta platforms - Facebook, Instagram and Threads. I feel more like an expat than ever before... but also because of the politeness and shyness and introverted vibes of the whole culture, it kinda doesn't feel unusual to be a hermit? Maybe i am more in tune with Taiwan than i think...

So yeah, Chinese New Year came and went, i spent it in bed. Didn't even get any treats because the local markets were overrun with people doing their last minute "traditional wares" shopping so i went to the supermarket instead. I did go to see my 生煎包 (steamed and fried bun) person yesterday and picked up a rare order of 鍋貼 (potstickers) because in northern China they eat dumplings on New Year because dumplings look like sycees (those boat-shaped gold ingots) and supposedly make you rich. They gave me a double serving for being a regular customer so hopefully i will get double rich this year! I don't know if it will work because it's a northern Chinese tradition and most people in Taiwan have Hoklo (Fujian) or Hakka backgound which are both closer to Cantonese traditions. But i think one pan-Chinese tradition is that they will gladly take their luck from anywhere, doesn't matter who invented the superstition, any chance to get rich is worth a shot.

Sitting in the sun today sipping my coffee, i felt like i was already pretty rich. I don't need much. I think i would be content to spend the rest of my days just biking around, reading books, playing games, watching shows, listening to tunes. An idle lifestyle of consumption, to be sure, but nothing outrageous. Coffee is my only luxury these days and i don't take it for granted. It truly is a delight.

I am going to cook my dinner, same basic dinner i always cook, with variations based on what looks best in the market each week. Dry tofu, bok choy, garlic, ginger, chili, black bean... i have a leftover king oyster mushroom i'll throw in, and maybe i'll nibble a carrot on the side. Starch today will be green onion pancakes with peanut butter because delicious food beats tradition every time. Sweet jasmine tea for dessert. Let's go.

i don't listen to lyrics but that's not really true

amw — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 06:04:47 GMT

I almost exclusively buy and listen to music without lyrics. I guess it's something about what my brain latches onto, because even when i go back and listen to popular music that i was into before i was old enough to really develop my own tastes, i find it's often the riffs or beats and loops that i most remember. Words are distracting, they can take away from the vocals hitting as instruments in their own right, or - when the lyrics are especially stupid - they can ruin the whole damn song.

A lot of music with vocals does not age well. Some of it becomes more problematic over time because apparently in the 70s and 80s it was fine to listen to rock stars sing about banging teenage groupies but dear lord no it was never fine and how was this ever even a thing we all accepted? Other stuff just sounds increasingly juvenile as you get older till it's like no, Trent, i don't need to hear you whining about your fucking girlfriend for the zillionth time. But a 303? A 303 still sounds as good as it ever did. What it means will never change, because it means whatever you wanted it to mean. Music without lyrics is the best music, period, there is nothing to debate.

And yet... There are still poets. Like actual poets who the whole point of their song is the lyric and if it hits, it'd probably still hit even if it was a cappella. And it keeps on hitting because it's a timeless meditation on the human condition, or a time capsule of an important social moment. Sometimes a pop artist accidentally does a poetry, but for me the top tier genres for finding this kind of stuff is folk music and hip-hop. I don't go out looking for it, though, i usually just hear it in the background of a TV show and think "wow, this song is perfect for the scene" and then check it online and there's some indie darling staring back at me with a half dozen mixtapes and 27 views on YouTube, world-famous in the tiniest niche.

But sometimes, every now and then, i get a music rec and it's like oh jeez here we go, some megastar with a guitar singing about their rough life as a celeb, and i feel like i should listen to it to be polite because it was meaningful to one of my friends, and 99 times out of 100 it sucks, and then i have to be gracious while my ears are bleeding and thank fucking God i don't have a partner so i don't ever have to do this in my own home any more.

Minor sidenote: talking about sitting through music i don't like reminded me that this week was our office's Chinese New Year party. It was at a classy KTV joint and i didn't go. Not because i hate both karaoke and office parties - i really was intending to go this year as an effort to try connect with people outside of work work - but because there was an epic production issue going on and i was at work till almost 9pm trying (and failing) to fix it. This week has been fucking crazy, you guys, i put in several late nights, then got pulled over by a fucking cop for jaywalking across the alley next to my house. No cars around. Hungry. Exhausted. Fuck tha police!

Anyway, somehow that tangent led to N.W.A., which at least brings me somewhat back to the song that i was recommended this morning and wanted to share with you all today. I am an old, but i do keep a bit of exposure to the youf through watching a handful of Gen Z and Millennial YouTubers talk about politics and culture. The youf tend to like hip-hop, so i get a fair bit of exposure to that stuff through osmosis, and one of the biggest stars in hip-hop is this guy called J. Cole. I think he's known for doing kinda safe, middle-class rap, similar sort of lane to Kanye back in the day, but don't quote me on that. I am not the person to comment on the genre because i don't follow any of the gossip or beefs or online discourse, i just hear a song i like every now and then. And this one was a goodie, y'all!

J. Cole - Quik Stop

It starts with some gospel/R&B fluff which honestly it's fine to totally ignore the intro and skip to the rap, which is chef's kiss perfect. He's telling a story about dressing down to try blend in, then one day he forgets himself because he's so into the tunes he's playing, and he pulls into a gas station and a kid selling weed on the corner recognizes him, and there's this exchange where the kid starts to tell him how much the music meant to him, and our hero reflects on his fame and his self-doubt and then realizes that what really mattered was being able to reach people, maybe even just this one kid.

And the first time i played it i cried, like full-ass Tracy Chapman Fast Car ugly crying because it felt so real. Like, it gets at this idea of standing out in society, which is relatable to me not because i am famous but because i am a visible minority. Sometimes we yearn to just be invisible, just be a "normal" person. But it also gets at entering middle age and questioning what it was all for, now that our lives are mostly on track. The money, the girls? None of that really matters, sometimes you still feel worthless. But then when someone says you helped them through a tough time, that your words provided some kind of comfort, that's so validating. So at the same time, it's a story about how much music can mean to us, how these little things can help us through the dark.

I'm not religious. (Star Trek interlude: i hated the latest episode of Academy for bringing back a certain kind of "we just gotta have faith" theme from DS9 so that's all i'm gonna say about that.) But i do find meaning in life from the knowledge that simply by existing in society, by putting parts of myself out there - at work, in the market, on LiveJournal, whatever - i am contributing to the universe, making tiny impacts on the people around me, on culture, on the future of humanity.

There was a trendy slang that came out when i lived in China, a 小確幸 - a "small sure joy" - referring to a little treat you could gift yourself that you knew would make you happy in tough times. I think originally it came from a Japanese poem but as usual in China it rapidly became a Party-approved hype term, it got commercialized and co-opted by every vendor under the sun, and now it's probably not cool any more, but i still like it because it reminds me of the 90s hippie/new age concept of the random act of kindness. (Y'all remember the closest thing i had to religion growing up was new age.) I guess that's a bit different because doing something small for someone else isn't a surefire ticket to joy because you don't know where their head is at or what they need in that moment. But the general philosophy that small things matter is the theme i'm going with, so bear with me...

It also makes me think about the favorite saint of one of my exes - St. Thérèse de Lisieux. My ex was also new age and Catholic saints fit perfectly into that belief system because you can just pick and choose the best ones. Plus, in the US, there are tons of awesome saint-related bits of religious iconography you can pick up to decorate your shrine, thanks to the Mexican influence. St. Thérèse become a nun as a child and wrote a bunch of letters and poems about how much she loved Jesus and then died of tuberculosis in her early 20s. Her gimmick was that you don't need to be rich to get close to God, you can just be the tiniest little nobody, who does only the smallest acts of charity, but He will still see it and lift you up, like a space elevator! As usual with Catholic lore, there's something vaguely creepy about it all, but years and years ago my ex gifted me a St. Thérèse medallion and it has traveled the world with me, rusty and battered, this young French girl clutching a cross and some flowers to her breast, reminding me to be a good person wherever i go. I'd say she succeeded in bringing small joys to the world.

Anyway, it's my birthday, and it's cold and miserable outside, so i am staying cozy and trying to unwind. Yesterday i bought myself a 紅龜粿 - a red turtle cake - which is usually something just for celebrating birthdays but now the market vendors have a bunch more of them in stock because Chinese New Year is coming up. (It's funny living one block from a big temple and traditional market - you can see the crowds swell as people suddenly get pious or nostalgic during very specific festival seasons, even though the shops are there year-round.) Anyway, i ate my red turtle cake because it is both a small sure joy and because they say it will grant long life and prosperity. Live long. And prosper. Argh! Star Trek is following me around like a tribble.

I'm not sure where i was going with all this, other than to share a bit of where my mind has been at this week and how i am keeping myself together. I am really tired, y'all. I had a surprise WhatsApp phone call with L - my landlord from the year i spent in Canada during COVID - and she said i shouldn't be wasting my youth toiling away at my desk in a country where i don't know anyone and have no real connections, i should be in Berlin or Bali or Tulum getting laid. Cue my agonized response about the carbon footprint of air travel, the exploitative nature of using the Global South as an idle holiday destination, i didn't even get into how uncomfortable i feel with the concept of sex these days... Maybe i have something in common with St. Thérèse - she suffered from "scrupulosity" - a pathological sense of grading your own life on an unachievable moral standard. But she got through it by becoming a nun and writing letters about small things so maybe this entry is that.

Okay, poets, nuns and turtles. Fucking 46, my life sucks.

getting old and grappling with small-c conservatism

amw — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:12:25 GMT

I am probably writing this entry a week early because it's not yet my birthday, but apparently aging is on my mind.

It's cold outside. Yes, 15C (60F) is cold for me now. It's raining. I am wiped out from work. What few friends and family i have all live on the literal other side of the world but even if they were here i would not have the energy to socialize with them. I am a hermit. I want to keep talking about Star Trek.

Actually, this isn't about Trek, exactly, but how the small-c conservative response to the new series has made me reflect on aging. I think perhaps i have temporarily mind-melded with a Youtuber called Jessie Gender who does a lot of Star Trek reviews, because she literally just put out a piece discussing the same topic. But us high-falootin' LiveJournal folks are far too erudite to abase ourselves by watching a video, so allow me to bash out a couple thousand bytes of plain text to tickle similar synapses.

There is a lot of low-effort media criticism that can safely be ignored because it's just vapid ragebait. The whole "dude with a microphone is angry about something on the internet" genre of entertainment is boring and stupid and transparently opportunistic, even when it's not actively bigoted. The drivel those guys produce makes everyone dumber and it's not worth the time to respond to.

But there are also sincere critics who expend a lot of energy virulently hating on anything that doesn't exactly replicate the thing they loved from before. You know how it goes. Kids today don't understand what good music is. The new Star Wars movies aren't as good as the old ones. The new Life is Strange doesn't feature the same romantic coupling as the old one. Tomatoes don't taste like they used to. All the people who moved here after me ruined the place.

It's all coming from a small-c conservative point of view. It should be self-evident, but just to be clear: this is not a partisan characteristic. There are plenty of people on the so-called left who hold conservative views, in particular in relation to environmental protection, resistance to gentrification and so on. This isn't going to be some fake-centrist "well, the anti-fascists are just as bad as the fascists, if you think about it" hot take, but i do want to think critically about the conservative impulse in my own backyard.

One criticism of Starfleet Academy - and the new Treks more broadly - is that the dialog is too low-brow. In the past, Star Trek had more of a theatrical presentation. The characters spoke with a refined diction, they stood up straight and addressed one another by rank, they listened to opera and played chess and drank tea. Modern Trek allows its characters to slump, slouch, swear and use contemporary slang. That does give the show a different tone, so i understand why it can rub people the wrong way - it is harder to imagine these characters as elite space-explorers when they call one another "bro". But i also feel like it's pretentious to hold up the TNG-era presentation as timeless, as if that didn't exist very much in the context of its own time too.

Star Trek isn't just aesthetics, after all. Yes, the spaceships all have those funny nacelles, and everyone wears skin-tight uniforms in primary colors, and the aliens all look like humans with different foreheads, but that's not really the point of the show, is it? Really the show is about a team of professionals in a futuristic setting negotiating the social issues and moral quandaries that arise from discovering new peoples, new places and new ideas.

So the show is essentially about change and how we deal with it. And the way it presents that is a through the lens of an idealized, US-coded government institution and its rules-based intragalactic order. Each iteration of the show updates its aesthetics and the general structure of the in-universe institution to match the era in which it was made, precisely because the point of the show is to provide contemporary social commentary.

Except to some people that's not what Star Trek is about. They want it to provide 1960s social commentary, or 1990s social commentary, in perpetuity. Maybe they just loved the 1960s aesthetics, or the 1990s aesthetics. They want Trek to be the way they remember it being. To wit, they want the rose-tinted nostalgia more than the actual thing. This is why remakes and reboots never quite recapture the magic, because nothing can bring back the exact emotion of the first time you experienced a thing. Time marches on. We all get old. The stuff that mattered to us stops mattering to others.

But i think a core aspect of the conservative worldview is that what mattered to us should still matter to others. Conservatives want to preserve what came before because they believe in its intrinsic value. They fear change because they see it as a loss, something that is taken from them as their own memory of it fades. This is admittedly a bit silly now that media that can easily be digitized and preserved for as long as people care to make copies, but the impulse remains. It's why we have tradition.

And this, to me, is the root of the tension between progressivism and conservatism. Personally i don't have much time for fundamentalists because it's patently ridiculous to expect nothing to ever change in a universe where time only moves in one direction, but i can empathize with the sense that things these days are just moving too fast.

Because i am an old.

I caught myself at work the other day sighing and saying "everything is worse than it used to be". I made a joke out of it by following up with "just wait till you're my age, you'll see!" And i can sit here and talk about enshittification and try to justify why the current band of right-wing thugs and grifters are actively fucking up society in a way that's totally unprecedented... But that's not true. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. I liked how things were before Brexit because i had more freedoms, but now i don't and that's life. Even if i got my citizenship back tomorrow, it wouldn't undo how the past 10 years have shaped me. I can never get my youth back either.

So, for me, this is why shows like Starfleet Academy provide me with comfort. Not because they recreate a nostalgic emotion from my youth, but because they show heroes that are facing challenges reminiscent of those in our contemporary society. The inspiring part is watching people address change in a way that doesn't involve suppressing or ignoring it - that's progressive politics, that's Star Trek. Of course it's simplified, but it's a parable, its purpose is to nourish the soul, not to provide some actionable roadmap. And what nourishes my aging soul is the hope that humans will continue to grow and adapt and figure out new ways to be, because if we can't then what's the point?

Meanwhile, i still shamelessly jump on Bandcamp and buy all kinds of music made in the style of 1990s electronica, because that was inarguably the best era and no foolish child will ever convince me otherwise.

We all have conservative streaks - probably more and more of them as we get older - so the trick is finding a way to satisfy those corners of ourselves that crave nostalgia while also not impeding progress for society more broadly.

For me, i love my 90s-style techno, but i'd rather give my money to folks doing a cleaned-up and slick-sounding revival of it than dig through crusty old record bins to find "new" old tunes. I also love walk-up tenements made of prefab concrete and shabby tile, unkempt parks and bike paths with crumpled tarmac, grubby mom'n'pops with plastic stools and stainless steel bowls... but i know this stuff is all aging like me. I can try to rationalize my opposition to gated communities and shopping malls and chain restaurants as anti-capitalist, but i'm under no illusion that the youf are with me on this. They don't have the emotional connection. They'll build their resistance in a McDonalds and that's okay, i guess.

The main point is that they still can build their resistance, and that's why i'd never want to take away art that even just in the most superficial way tries to depict progressive heroes. We all need heroes.

I think i have now managed to convince myself - after starting out thinking that i might be conservative, actually - that i'm still pretty progressive. Okay, mid-life crisis averted. For another week, at least.

star trek academy, face and tiredness

amw — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:41:35 GMT

It's Friday night and i am ded. I have no idea how i used to go out drinking, then clubbing, then keep the party going all weekend when i was younger. Not to mention work full-time and complete my degree after hours during the week. Wisdom and self-confidence and a supreme sense of chill are some positive aspects of aging, but losing your vim and vigor vucking sucks.

But i want to write about the latest episode of Starfleet Academy because i can't wait for the ONTD post and this one hit at a few points in a way that felt personal for me.

In this episode of Academy, we are dealing with a student who comes from a Klingon background and a simultaneous diplomatic event that involves the Klingon people. Now, for folks who know a bit about Star Trek, you might remember the Klingons as a warlike people who were the big enemy during The Original Series, but by the The Next Generation era had become allies of the Federation. They're a fan favorite species but actually the ones whose storylines always make me groan because i'm so uninterested in the ritualistic preening of a bunch of short-tempered, superstitious lunkheads.

Which is why this Klingon episode was so good, because it subverts a lot of the classic tropes while also deepening the lore and expanding the viewers' understanding of what it means to be Klingon.

The setup is once again helped by the time skip. In the era of Academy, the Klingon Empire has crumbled and their homeworld has been destroyed by the environmental catastrophe that upended the galactic order. This leaves the once-proud and dominant species as refugees without a planet of their own. Now a person like me might think "well just move to a new planet, like..." but actually that dismissive take is exactly what this episode is about.

I suppose from this point on there will be some plot spoilers, so scroll on if you really don't want to know anything.

The B story of the episode is that the Federation has found an uninhabited world with a similar climate to Qo'noS - the former Klingon home planet - but they have failed to get the Klingons to accept it as a new home. The problem, of course, is that even though the Klingon peoples have scattered and are no longer a significant power in the galaxy, they still retain their pride and identity as a species of warriors who must earn everything they possess through glorious battle. Accepting charity is not an option for them.

Which brings us to the A story, which centers around our Klingon cadet who since the first episode has subverted the stereotype by being an introvert and a pacifist - he wants to become a doctor! Due to college shenanigans, he finds himself having to justify his own identity to his fellow students while also trying to make an academic case for why it's not (!) right for the Federation to grant the Klingon refugees asylum.

There are so many layers of nuance to the way this story plays out. It speaks to real-world issues around indigenous relations, around imperialism and colonization, around what it means to have autonomy and self-determination... all this fantastic stuff that is exactly the stuff that Star Trek is famous for talking about.

The situation is resolved in a way that is fairly predictable if you have watched classic Treks like TOS, TNG or Voyager, but the journey we take to get there has some character exchanges that really got me.

One of the buddies of our Klingon cadet is a rogueish orphan who in the first episodes is portrayed as a superhero-like main character who is a badass fighter and athlete and rough'n'tumble antihero in the Han Solo tradition. But in this episode we realize that secretly he's a giant nerd, just like James T. Kirk. Having spent time in prison, he memorized all the rules and regulations of the Federation, so he makes a compelling case for asylum, leaning on legal precedent and moral principles. And then all his philosophizing falls flat on its face when a member of the community he's claiming to advocate for is like "no, shut up, you don't understand".

And it's this moment that comes like a slap in the face to people like me - bookish third culture kids who have lived in a dozen different places and know all the theories of all the cultures. All of our worldly experiences count for nought when confronted by someone with an actual lived experience growing up in a singular culture, with parents and a family and a community who all existed in a certain way, who all held certain values... Even when this guy is an outsider in his own community, the weirdo pacifist, the one who ran off to join Starfleet instead of hunting and fighting with his fam, even the least Klingon-like Klingon of all time understands Klingon culture better than the teacher's pet, because he lived it, because it's a part of him.

It hits on so many levels. On one hand, i identify with our well-traveled hero, who is honestly trying to do the right thing, and who logically has all the right answers. On the other hand, i identify with our ethnic minority character who is sick and tired of having other people speak for him, speak about the very real future of his people as if it's just some abstract topic of debate. It's so fucking well done, and it's disarming to see in a show that's ostensibly about college kids in space.

I think living in China and now in Taiwan has also led me to a better understanding of the honor system that is central to the portrayal of Klingons in Star Trek. Klingon "honor" isn't honor, it's 面子 - face. It's about prestige and standing in society. Klingon episodes in Star Trek all feature objectively stupid rituals that must be performed in order to give a superior face, to avoid potentially embarrassing them, to allow them to gracefully cede ground on something that they can't publicly be seen to "lose", and so on.

I find the concept of face to be incredibly dumb, but i also understand that i live in a society where it really matters to people - at least people of a certain age or a certain background - so i can't just pretend that it doesn't matter. And this is the lesson that my fellow smartypants third culture kid learns when his super-progressive buddy turns out to still hold on to an absurd but nonetheless deeply-held tradition and sense of propriety important to his people. You don't just get to assimilate everyone into the secular utopia, you gotta give them space to be who they're gonna be, otherwise you're betraying your ideals.

It's so cool to see this stuff in Star Trek again! The way it's done here is so slick, it doesn't feel as clumsy as it did in Discovery, and it isn't immediately undercut by biological essentialist jokes or war crime apologia à la Strange New Worlds. No, here we are back to the kind of earnest, sincere storytelling that - The Orville aside - we haven't really seen in live action Trek since Voyager. I can't get over how thrilled i am and i really hope that somebody outside of the niche core of Star Trek nerds is going to watch this show, because the world fucking needs it.

Anyway, i like my hopeful television shows that depict people who are fundamentally good, and who believe in a building a better world, but who also make mistakes and learn lessons. I also like when it's not "oops i did a genocide" level mistakes, it's just "oh jeez, did i fuck up our friendship?" That's some real shit.

I'm so tired.

somewhere along the way people stopped caring about privacy

amw — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:53:26 GMT

This week is the first time at work where someone straight up shoved a bunch of incoherent LLM output in my face and held it up as some kind of authoritative response to an issue in which i had specialized knowledge.

For the past year or two i have been having to review garbage change requests that solve problems in ways that are non-standard for our company and feature reams of redundant commentary and useless circular test cases that only test themselves and not the reality... but it's my job to review other developers' bad code, so if they are using LLMs to generate it then oh well, job's a job.

It is frustrating when the hours i spend reviewing will not result in any learning, but i have been in this industry long enough to know that this is nothing new. There has always been incompetent grifters in tech. That is: developers who do not have any interest in becoming better engineers and who take zero pride in their work. It's not even that they're all lazy, some of them are just ignorant. They know just enough about computers to bamboozle their less-technical friends and upper management, but otherwise are happy to throw shit against the wall until eventually something sticks. Those guys love LLMs because now they have a shit machine gun.

This week some rando made a post on social media complaining about our service. Their problem was quickly resolved by the community, but the post got lots of upvotes and the attention of our CEO. The issue is a very obscure corner case with a known workaround that CS has to deal with once or twice a month, but because this went viral on socials our team got hit with the "reduce all social media complaints to zero" quarterly objective.

I explained that we have spent a bunch of time over the past year trying to reproduce the issue, and we have confirmed that there really does have to be an extremely unusual sequence of events and/or bizarre interactions for it to trigger. Because so many things have to fall into place for the behavior to occur, a fix would involve multiple teams and likely take several months to deliver. Since it happens so rarely, and because there is a trivial workaround, it has never been prioritized to resolve, but that wasn't good enough for our upper management who asked to take a look at the line of code that served up the suboptimal response. 5 minutes later they returned with a pages-long "analysis" generated by Claude (a tech-oriented AI chatbot) featuring an executive summary and recommendations of how to solve a totally different and entirely imaginary bug.

Yes, boss, you sure showed me, the actual expert on the thing you just outsourced to an overpriced autocomplete. There was so many layers of wrong in the report that it shocked me, because i thought these tools were at least capable of crafting vaguely believable bullshit. But management has become so enamored with the idea that AI is going to save us so much time and money that anything coming out of it must be intrinsically valuable - or at least worth the time to consider. The time of a professional who had literally just taken twenty minutes to give you their expert opinion prior to you consulting the chatbot.

Like. Tableflip.

Anyway, the stereotype that executives are impressed by gaudy trinkets and always desperate to jump on the latest hype train is based on more than a kernel of truth. But what i actually wanted to write about (as usual, my intro went way off-course) was how it is that normal, everyday people have become so attached to these chatbots too.

In honesty, i do see the appeal. It's nice to get a human-like response to a human-like question. Not everybody wants to dive deep into wiki holes on every topic, sometimes they just want a quick summary. Plenty of people have trouble reading and writing, so having a language assistant that can translate complicated texts into simple texts and vice versa can help them to communicate. And it's an absolute delight to have a magic box that has encoded "all" of human knowledge and can mash up and remix and pop out all kinds of Frankenstein prose, and poetry, and pictures, and music. It's a boon for creative inspiration and a true celebration of human culture. AI is fun!

Except i don't use it. At all. Why is that?

I've been thinking about the reason, and i am pretty sure it comes down to privacy. I hate the idea that every conversation i have, every topic i look up, every whimsical tangent i follow and article i delve into... all of that personal data would now be captured by some unscrupulous tech bros in the US. Yet so few people seem the slightest bit bothered by this!

So i started thinking... why does it bother me so much? I write public entries on LiveJournal, exposing my deepest emotions and most personal thoughts to the world. Anyone wanting to profile me could easily do it using information i have freely shared.

Except, that's the point. I freely shared this. When i put something on the public internet, it's public domain. It's for everyone. It's contributing to the collective consciousness. Everything we release to the public in our lives is an investment in the future of humanity. Even people who never have kids, who never achieve anything of note, the interactions they had with the world around them will live on forever, and that's why we all matter. That's why we should all try to be good people!

But there is private life too - the internal thoughts i have, the half-formed ideas that i didn't share yet because i didn't quite work them out. The food i ate for dinner last night, the TV show i watched, there's nothing intrinsically secret about those things, but also i don't have anything to say about them that i feel will add to the world. I don't share them, which makes them private. You know who is sharing them, though? Every other motherfucker on the internet.

Because most people aren't getting on VPN and torrenting shows to watch locally - they are watching on a streaming platform where they have to log in to a blessed app that constantly sends telemetry back to the company about which shows they watched, how long they watched, where they paused, how long they paused, if they rewound and so on.

Because most people aren't going to three different vendors at their local market to buy ingredients and cooking something up from scratch - they are ordering in from the same delivery platform they use every day, or maybe they had their groceries delivered, or they visited a supermarket where they have a customer loyalty card. Every product they purchase is recorded - the company knows exactly what they buy, when they buy it, how often they buy the same thing, when they switch brands...

Or maybe people still visit mom'n'pop stores because they're trying their best to support the local economy, but it's too annoying to use cash for everything, so they use a credit card or a phone payment app instead. And so every transaction they make - where they were, what time it was, how much money they spent, with which vendor - all of it is sent back to the bank, where the data is linked directly to their real-world identity and can be cross-referenced with income, address/postcode, loans, taxes and everything else.

This is the world we are living in, the one where people have already given up all of their privacy.

It always blows my mind that people voluntarily leave their Google account logged in when they do a web search because they think it's nice that Google remembered their previous searches and tries to give them more relevant results. It's so helpful that when they go to YouTube they get recommendations based on everything else they watched. Super convenient that when they go to fill in some random company's Form it already knows their address. How totally-not-creepy it is for Gemini to read their emails and offer life tips because it knows them better than they know themselves. Fun! AI is fun!

The thing is, the AI in real life is not the AI from the movies. In the movies, everybody had their own little robot companion who was their buddy and just knew about their own stuff. I would love that AI! I can't wait for the AI where i can conjure up some cute cuddly toy or sexy hologram woman who i can bounce ideas off and chat to about my day and ask to remember the name of my friend's kid or remind me which year it was that i moved to Germany. But those AIs don't exist. Instead we have "AI as a service" - owned and run by a third party, requiring a paid subscription linked to your personal ID.

For years now we have been sold this idea that "AI laptops" are just around the corner, that Apple's new chip or Microsoft's new Surface will unlock the dream of personal AI that runs on your home computer. It's a lie. While it's totally possible to run small models on home computers - plenty of hobbyists and professionals do it every day - the kind of smart, snappy generalist AI we know and love from sci-fi still needs to delegate its real work to supercomputers in the cloud.

But people don't care. They don't fucking care. They buy televisions where the television itself has built-in ads, before you even started watching anything. They buy cars where the car is constantly connected to a service that's tracking them everywhere they go. They use social media networks with "for you" pages.

It feels like nobody cares about privacy. Or they have some warped view of privacy, where they don't want certain topics to exist in the public sphere, but they are totally okay with the idea that companies have access to the most intimate details of their lives. It's as if people trust companies more than they trust individuals, and certainly more than they trust the government. It's like some bizarre opposite-land, where the least-accountable entities in society are being granted the most amount of trust. It's bananas!

Of course, if you think everyone else is crazy except for you, then maybe you are the crazy one.

Well, on this, i'm happy to be the crazy one.

foolishly applying D&D alignments to random shit, aka why i'm lawful good now

amw — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:51:15 GMT

The recent abduction of Venezuela's head of state by US special forces sent me off on a thought tangent about how i perceive the rule of law and how my feelings about it have developed over time. The topic is a really deep one, and it's one where i find my personal knowledge to be lacking - i regrettably didn't study law in university and don't have a strong grounding in the history of different legal systems.

Despite my ignorance, i do still have strong emotions about the law and how it is enforced, since my everyday existence is very much dictated by regulations that i have no power to change. In particular, i am thinking about my status as a non-citizen migrant, which is how i have spent the overwhelming majority of my life. As a voting-age adult, i have spent less than a single year living in a country where i held citizenship. I suppose it's 4 years if you include living in Germany as an EU citizen prior to my so-called countrymen stripping those rights from me in a referendum i was not even eligible to take part in.

And, of course, as a trans person not only is my existence often medicalized, in some countries it's now being legally challenged too, to the point that if i ever go back to the country of my birth - the place where i still ostensibly hold the right of citizenship - i am now banned from entering toilets of the gender i have been living as for over 25 years. It's absurd, but that's life as a minority - the people in power will gladly trample your rights, bargaining them away in exchange for votes from bigots and those the bigots bamboozled.

So you would think that i - of all people - would be critical of this system of social organization that so frequently tends to be weaponized against me. And i kind of am. As an edgelord teen and twentysomething i flirted with libertarian ideas, and as a lifelong raver i have maintained an association with and affinity for political anarchism and DIY counter-culture. Why do we need the law anyway? We can always make sure people are excellent to each other in our temporary autonomous zone. Fuck the police! Freedom! Drugs! Techno! Yeah!

And yet at the same time i have always been a Star Trek fan, a show whose utopian stories are structured around Starfleet, a military-like institution that represents the best of us all and flies around both exploring and defending the galaxy. I am a strong supporter of the UN and the EU and all transnational organizations that set up a baseline for human rights and frameworks to ensure they are not violated. And - the real wake-up call - i have at times been criticized by exes for having a too-rigid view of the world, a hard edge to my moral code that can result in me coming across as brusque or uncaring.

Which is to say that as much as i see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and while i can understand the romantic appeal of a self-organized solarpunk utopia, i also don't see a viable path to a better future for humankind without guiding structures that people collectively buy into.

And that brings me to the D&D alignment system. (Yes, all that up there was just the intro to the actual topic.)

For any readers who don't know what this is, it's something that was dreamed up in the 1970s by the creators of a game called Dungeons & Dragons, where nerds like my dad would sit around a table and tell collaborative stories where they assumed the roles of elves and dwarves and other characters from a Tolkien-like fantasy universe. In order to help stimulate the roleplay, each character got an alignment - a categorization into one of nine ethical quadrants along two axes: Good to Evil and Lawful to Chaotic. So a Lawful Good character would be consistently honorable, a Chaotic Evil character would be arbitrarily cruel, and a True Neutral character would exist in a Zen-like bubble of never passing judgement, favoring neither action nor inaction.

Of course, as a second-generation nerd, i grew up with D&D as part of my childhood. I always liked the idea of playing a Chaotic Neutral character, because i felt that that would allow me the maximum freedom to do whatever i wanted. Chaotic Neutral characters are rogues, rascals, tricksters and nymphs - folks who routinely subvert the social order, although not in a way that would directly result in a harmful outcome, since cruelty would be Evil. At the same time, they never feel compelled to lift a finger to help, since altruism would be Good. Perfect alignment for a kid with a power fantasy.

As an adult in the real world, i see the Chaotic Neutral alignment manifested in the Dadaists and nihilists and unserious douchenozzles who say "lol society is fucked, let's make jokes", and i fucking hate those guys. Well, no, i don't care enough to hate them, i just find their output to be tedious and a waste of time to engage with. Because i want to spend what little time i have on this planet engaging with something more constructive. Which means that i have turned out to be Good, actually - no doubt to the disappointment of my tween self.

But the thing is, not only am i Good, i think i am Lawful too. And i'm coming to this based on casting contemporary political events into these D&D alignments.

Something that has been annoying me about the mainstream Democratic/centrist discourse on the latest round of police brutality in America is this narrative that "oh noez, ICE is even apprehending ordinary citizens!" Where the emphasis is weirdly being placed on the fact that law-abiding Americans are "suddenly" having to face police brutality rather than on the fact that police brutality per se is wrong, and would be just as wrong if it were being deployed against hardened criminals. That's the whole fucking argument for why it's wrong to snatch Venezuela's dictator, and why it was wrong for Russia to "de-Nazify" Ukraine, and why it's wrong for Israel to regularly bomb their neighbors because something something terrorism. It's always wrong to treat other people like shit, even when those people are reprehensible. That behavior is Evil, period, no argument.

But the question is, is it at least Lawful? And my instinctive answer is... no, it's actually fucking not. It might be Lawful in a legal system structured around a caste-based hierarchy, maybe one in which certain demographics are explicitly disenfranchised, or one in which some humans can exist purely as property of others... But in a constitutional system affording every human equal rights, you can't pretend that it's Lawful to selectively apply the law.

Or can you? There is a common phrase often used in relation to China to describe the philosophy that the law exists merely as a tool allowing the elite to control the masses. That is: rule by law, not rule of law. The law is deliberately written to be vague and inconsistently enforceable, precisely so that it can be selectively applied. In this way, the government can claim to always be acting in a lawful way, and they can make a case that their selectiveness and secrecy is carefully applied in order to maximally protect the social order, i.e. the public good. Does that mean the CCP is Lawful Good, despite disappearing its own citizens and regularly engaging in international intimidation tactics and lawfare to silence the people of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet and so on?

This gets at one of the limitations of the D&D alignment system, in that you can't really apply it outside of individuals, because the Good to Evil axis is defined around empathy and abstract groups can't have empathy. But also it suggests that not only are most people are Good, actually, they're also Lawful, actually. Because in practice society would not function if people did not have enough empathy to mostly be kind to others, nor would it function if people did not have enough consistency to mostly follow the norms. It appears the concept of "Lawful Good" is intrinsic to the existence of human society.

I think that's why it's so frustrating to witness the actions of politicians that transparently do not align with the populace. Leaders who show a distinct lack of empathy and a disregard for human suffering. Leaders who make erratic decisions and do not maintain a coherent pattern of behavior. It's not Lawful and it's not Good. It's Chaotic and it's Evil. Or - since those are loaded terms - you might say capricious and spiteful, traits that if broadly held would undermine the foundation of society. The ones cheerleading for this nonsense are antisocial nutsacks who still deserve our empathy as fellow humans but one can only hope will someday learn the folly of their malice.

-o-

To add a bit of behind-the-scenes insight: i typed up and then deleted a half dozen more paragraphs that attempted to reimagine the D&D alignment matrix with a different axis for Good to Evil - stuff like Collective to Individual or Universal to Hierarchical. But no matter how i tried to structure it to avoid classifying certain behaviors as "good" or "evil", it always came back to the same conclusion, which made me realize that the debate over the meaning of those words is just philosophical wank. I think in reality everybody understands that being compassionate is good and being an asshole is not.

On an unrelated (?) side-note, the new Star Trek series - Starfleet Academy - launched this week, and it is BY FAR the best live action Trek of the "Nu Trek" era. It's set in the far-flung future of the past few seasons of Discovery, which means we actually get to have new stories instead of endless rehashes and reboots of the Star Treks of yore, plus because the Federation crumbled during the time skip, we get a front seat ticket to the rebuilding of the galactic order. It's the first unabashedly aspirational Trek since Prodigy, and though it will probably get ruined by the execs sooner or later, what's been released so far is still a balm for fans who've been missing a show that centers optimism and hope.

Ad astra per aspera!