01.03 | all the best in 2024 from your eldest daughter

If you can't handle me at my worst then we already have something in common.
– Some internet meme

✉️ letter #49

I'll keep the personal message in this one short since the last three weeks have been dedicated to an almost overwhelming amount of family interactions. I had vaguely considered writing a post-Christmas letter to you all but between executive chef-ing the Christmas meal and helping young parents navigate the China digital ecosystem and mediating volatile grandparent feelings and weaving together an as cohesive experience as possible for three very different age groups at Shanghai Disneyland... well. December 27 was not a good time to finish up anything.

The week since hasn't been particularly less busy, but what can you do.

I've used the term "it's a lot," to describe how I've been feeling about this trip back to China. I am simultaneously consistently grateful that I can have such an oasis of joy and togetherness amidst such a swirl of global (and some extended family) tragedies... and very, very tired. I envision needing a week of disassociating, staring at my ceiling while my nervous system decompresses. Why do I work to the point of burn out to help my family have a happy holiday? If I don't, who will?

The term "eldest daughter syndrome" has been trending all year, and as with all pop psychology memes, it's very obviously a massive oversimplified stereotype dictated by people who are sore about something very specific from their own experience and still so "haha, hey it's me" relatable.

According to this random site called Modern Intimacy:

Eldest Daughter Syndrome (EDS), while not an official psychiatric diagnosis, is an often-unconscious family role that many young girls inherit as the oldest child, in which they find themselves doing more domestic labour, emotional caretaking, and face higher expectations than their younger siblings.

This random site called Family Education has a whole Mayo Clinic-style checklist. This writer on Katie Couric Media (I had no idea she had a media company) goes even so far as to call us "victims." That feels like a really strong word to attach to some birth order expectations that everyone seems to go through, but okay.

Anyways, I said I'd keep this short (mostly because I'm sneaking the few hours of alone time I have during my very early morning to write this) so I won't go deeper down this rabbit hole for now.

Instead, happy new year everyone. I'll think up some general 2023 recollections and potential 2024 resolutions when I actually have time to think.

🎼 the soundtrack | Gifted - N.A.S.A., Kanye West, Santigold, Lykke Li

Sometime during this season, a remix for this song from 14 years ago popped up in my Spotify Discover Weekly and triggered a pretty intense sense memory of the year 2009, when I was straddling my old life and friend group in indie sleaze Brooklyn and my new life and expanding friend group in... I guess it'd be indie sleaze Shanghai, considering how many nights I was barhopping between the dives of C's, LOGO, Dada & Anar (which I could've sworn at some point had some kind of name like Pomegranate Lounge).

These last two years in New York have been me basically doing a reverse of that experience, and damn does it feel like it's taking a lot longer this time around.

🌱 green lights | eco-news to know

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon singing the Endangered Species Act into Law. Mother Jones has put together a brilliant series of stories highlighting the many ways it is now under threat from all sides - "corporate greed, political weaponization, the climate crisis, garden-variety government bureaucracy, and even weak spots in the law that have undermined it from within."

• Here are the allegedly 10 most sustainable countries in the world. I'm not sure I'd agree with these choices (if single use trash in Japan is wild, and Canada's dependent on driving & oil sands, and Norway is basically rich because of its oil exports... why are they on here?), but having choices to debate is fun. [Sustainable Jungle]
• Colombia’s left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, has put environmental justice at the center of his agenda, pairing it with the fight against poverty and inequality. [Jacobin]
• In also somewhat good news, the demand for fossil fuels is likely to peak this decade as we transition to using more wind, solar and EVs... but not enough workers in the energy sector are pursuing the training needed to fill the growing number of skilled jobs. Career transition idea? [Yale e360]
• One of the most interesting changes in my lifetime has been to watch Ireland become such a bastion of progressiveness. It is now set to become the next nation to recognize the "rights of nature" and a human right to a clean environment. [Inside Climate News]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

Steamboat Willie just entered the public domain and there's already an AI generator trained on it to take advantage. Personally, rather than see what cursed images AI can generate, I'd rather see someone creative actually use Steamboat Willie to tell a real story. Are we instead now just going to be drowned in wacky auto-generated imagery every time a big cultural touchstone becomes available to us? [Ars Technica]

• Is there a "major opportunity" on the horizon for middle America to revive their manufacturing industries to apply new technologies? Bloomberg seems to think so. [Bloomberg CityLab]
• Japan was struck by one of the worst earthquakes in recent history just after New Years, killing dozens and reducing several buildings to rubble. Here's what caused it. [Nature]
• How did a lobbying group promoting Israel-American relations become one of the "most fearsome entities in American politics" and probably one of the biggest reasons why the United States is a sole veto on ceasefire? [Slate]

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I unfortunately got nowhere close to reading as much as I wanted to in 2023. The last book (number 21 of my reading goal of 36), which I started sometime in late summer and only finished in the last few days of December was Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

And so that's going to be my recommendation. I'm still sitting with whether I liked it's last third - and I won't say why here because I would love to actually discuss it with somebody so I don't want to preemptively turn you off the book - but the first parts detailing a 30-year-long trauma-bonded friendship that also goes into the history of video game making felt real and fascinating.

As someone who's been playing PC games since the 6th grade, the entire journey of Sadie and Sam (and Marx) creating their own gaming company was a fond walk down memory lane. Devouring issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly as a kid, reading about whatever drama was going on behind whatever studio and enjoying that thrill of anticipation for what was coming up in the year. That one time I hung out with the Kotaku crew in Brooklyn and beat them all at Nintendo DS Mariokart. Guitar Hero-ing at a bar for my birthday party. The countless hours where I was sucked into the worlds of Final Fantasy, Fallout, Skyrim, Yakuza, Assassin's Creed.

I ended the book not particularly caring about the lives of the characters, but it did make me want to make video games a part of my life again.

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