newsletter
12.13 | talking china in new york
If you know anyone in New York that might want to get involved with China-focused events, please let me know about them!
elaine
i own this place!
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12.6 | a belated roast of the british museum
“How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’ ‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.” – R.F. Kuang, 'Babel or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the
newsletter
11.29 | the season for cognitive dissonance
This year especially, it felt so hard to do the mental gymnastics that wouldn’t link the celebration and colonization together, especially with you know what happening in you know where.
newsletter
11.22 | the sudden end to this chapter in my life
I've had about two weeks now for the news of the very unexpected demise of my job to really soak into my consciousness and, while I still think the whole situation really sucks, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much mental space it's freed up.
video
explaining: so this is what it's like to be laid off
Hi, I'm Elaine. This is elaine is XYZ, a vlog that's about me suddenly and surprisingly and sadly... losing my job
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10.8 | how does the world work anyway?
Smils' How the World Really Works reminds me of how a lot of smart dudes somehow always end up overestimating their ability to weigh into things they are not so immediately knowledgeable on.
newsletter
09.29 | pirates of the climate collapse
Last month, I briefly mentioned a factoid that’d I’d come across about how the “golden age of piracy” largely happened because a drop in sunspot activity lowered the amount of radiation getting to the earth, which then led to a lull in hurricanes.
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09.20 | i guess i don't need to regress anymore
A very popular theme in manhwa storylines is the "regression"-style plot, where you "regress" to a point in time just before the trajectory of your life went wrong. Only, what if your life hasn't gone that wrong?
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08.24 | re-approaching normal?
This summer was the first summer that actually felt back to normal for me, and part of it was that I finally booked a travel itinerary that reflected how I like to travel: a lot.
exploring
exploring: travel woes in summer 2023
There’s just something about living out of a suitcase for a month. I can’t tell you how excited I was to work remotely from a variety of places in Europe for the whole month of July… only to run into well, the absolute craziness of air travel this summer.
newsletter
03.31 | hey, hey look over here
Last week I finally finished another attempt at a vlog, pushed it out to Youtube, and then immediately felt embarrassed that I'd made it at all and chose not to tell anyone about it.
explaining
explaining: where all my vlogging mojo went in 2022
2022 was hard. And if I'm to get into making vlogs, even just for myself, in the future, I needed to unpack that and figure out a way forward.