Creeping in the Alleyway

https://grahammoliver.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/creeping-in-the-alleyway/

My friends,

Behind our apartment building is a shortcut behind another apartment building which saves us about three minutes on our trips to the grocery store, the library, or the hospital. I love this little alley during the day or when it’s not raining–it used to be gravel but has been blacktopped in the past couple of years, and there’s a handful of one-story housing in the shadow of the apartment buildings that wouldn’t surprise me if they were originally an illegal construction. The other side of the alley is the side of a hill, where there’s a (again, probably technically illegal) community garden, and a house that until this summer was so hidden by a fence and overgrowth that I didn’t even realize it was there (I thought it was a tiny shed until they cleared around it and revealed a full structure). Two men leave out bowls of food and water for feral cats in the area, which drives me a little nuts due to the birds/critters that’s displacing, and sometimes in the evenings you’ll come across those two men smoking and talking to the cats. When it rains, the alley fills up with giant puddles, so I try to remember to avoid it then. The shoulders are completely full of scooters and cars that rarely, if ever, move, but every now and then you’ll get startled by someone sitting inside of one. One enterprising neighbor has turned a tiny concrete platform into three parking spots you have to use an app to rent. For the five years (it gives me a little shiver every time I write those two words lately) we’ve lived here, the above-pictured scooter has been there. In my memory, it was originally standing up right, but I don’t know if that’s the case. For at least the past few years it has been lying on its side, slowly being taken over by nature and accumulating other debris. Recently, the government sticker has appeared on it, which I think means it’ll be disposed of soon, but we’ll see if it happens or not.

I don’t have a photo of what it looked like before, but you can get an approximation from Google Maps.

There’s so much litter down this alley. There’s a hollow underneath a tree that appears to be occasionally used to burn trash. I’m very, very amazed I don’t see rats, but in the whole time we’ve lived here I’ve only seen a single one running into a nearby storm drain (rats are in Taipei, but in the five years we’ve lived here, I’ve still seen fewer than in the one week we spent in NYC). I went out and bought tongs to pick up the litter, but this is one of those goals I haven’t realized yet. Should I get a five-gallon bucket or can I make do with bags? If I get one bucket, do I have to get two to separate recycling? Of course these questions don’t matter, they’re just things that rattle around in my skull instead of actually getting out there and doing the sweaty work.

Speaking of doing the work, I have a little call to action I would like to share with you that is off-topic for this newsletter, but it’s occupied a lot of my thoughtspace lately.

Technology sucks especially bad lately. Cory Doctorow explains the phenomenon as enshittification — “first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” In a more recent talk on the subject, he laid it out in familiar, specific terms: “But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.”

For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a new laptop that came with Windows 11 preinstalled. Windows 11 is awful. It’s constantly pushing Microsoft’s AI Copilot on you. It keeps trying to get you to use OneDrive. It’s removed a lot of customization options previously available. And even if you go through the many hoops to remove those things, they’re still in the background, using resources and ready to spring back to life.

This was the catalyst I needed to give Linux a shot again. I haven’t tried using Linux since undergrad, when it was very frustrating and hard to get games or anything else I was familiar with to run. This time, though, I installed Linux Mint and it’s been incredibly smooth. It’s very familiar for a Windows user, almost everything works like I expect, and it’s so comforting to use a system aimed at being useful versus aimed at clawing value out of me. Linux is free, and while it’s more difficult to setup than Windows, once it’s setup it’s more difficult to get malware/virii etc., so not only should you think about switching, you should also think about helping your parents switch.

I was already using some open source products. I’ve been using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office (though I do most of my document work in-browser) and SumatraPDF instead of Acrobat Reader for a while. I mostly use Firefox as a browser instead of Chrome/Edge. And beyond open source, I’ve gotten off of Google Search (currently using DuckDuckGo and considering paying for Kagi) and most big social media (I can’t part with Instagram yet but I’m working on it) — instead I’m on BlueSky.

But I’m trying to do more, and now is an effective time to do so. As Ed Zitron notes, the LLM/Generative AI bubble is showing signs of popping. It’s been oversold and forced upon consumers, and there’s serious pushback which we can join by refusing the associated products. I want to do my tiny, tiny part in taking away some power from these organizations who are actively harming our society and environment.

The transition is inconvenient! I can’t get my Pinyin Mandarin keyboard to work as well in Linux and sometimes my laptop doesn’t go to sleep right. Google search is BAD, but DuckDuckGo’s is actually a little worse. I have no idea how to transition off Google Documents in a way that’s not going to be a huge pain for myself and my students. These problems stand out more than they should because they’re new problems, and not the problems I’m used to from the other programs. But the inconvenience is worth it. It’s impossible for us to do no harm in a modern world, but it is possible for us to do a little less, to encourage a little less. And even if our effort is minuscule, it feels so good to try. If you want any suggestions, get in touch.

Further reading:

• Warms my heart to see Tressie McMillan Cottom writing about good things happening with community organization in Louisville, Kentucky. I just recently read Obama’s first memoir, and it has a neat glimpse into that world (though the perspective felt incomplete).
• The NYTimes also has a really incredible portrait of the commitment of the hibakusha–the atomic bomb survivors–in Japan. In our visit to Hiroshima, the complete focus on nuclear weapons as a nondebatable moral wrong was intense and inspiring.
• September marked the ten year anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson police. Inquest has a collection of pieces about the aftermath, the people, the art, and more that I strongly recommend.
• The wonderful Linda Holmes shared this delightful article about Vienna’s museums welcoming Taylor Swift fans after the concert was cancelled due to a security threat. I loved her comment on the article, which was (paraphrasing, can’t find the exact comment) all it would have taken to stop this good thing from happening is someone thinking Taylor Swift fans are not a museum’s audience.
• Besides vtubers, young people fan/stan culture is one of the few things that makes me feel old and out of touch. I cannot comprehend the mindset that liking your band means you must also actively dislike other bands, and that their success is a personal insult to you. I know this is a Thing That Has Happened Before, but the internet has intensified it in a scary way, and it goes hand in hand with the weird parasocial relationships between audience and artist. If you haven’t read any of the conversation around Chappell Roan’s privacy, I recommend Kelsey McKinney.
• I’ve written before how frustrating Taiwan’s public media is — it produces incredibly good stuff, but is fractured and inefficient and constantly trying to reinvent itself unnecessarily. Case in point: I’m one of its biggest fans, but I had no idea that most PTS shows now have full episodes (but not full seasons!?) on TaiwanPlus’s site (which I guess is why they were abruptly removed from YouTube). Anyways, there’s a lot of good stuff on their page (click the 3 bars in top left then Shows), but I’m especially fond of See You at the Market.

Gentle reader, next weekend is Mid-Autumn Festival here in Taiwan, the Thanksgiving-ish holiday that involves good company and eating too much, and like we have for several years we will be visiting a friend’s family house out on the edge of a tea and fruit farm. The sight makes me a little guilty, as I have not embraced Taiwan tea culture. I prefer to get my caffeine in the morning from coffee, can’t responsibly have caffeine after lunch, and I still don’t really care for the chewing involved in drinking bubble/boba tea.

But I am growing my “tea” appreciation in other directions than tea leaves! Our house now has barley, dried ginger, dried fruit+flower blends, chrysanthemum flowers, and more. My favorite, when I want to use fresh ingredients, is to cook a couple of inches’ worth of ginger slices plus a cinnamon stick for about 30 mins at a bare simmer, then add in a squeeze of lime juice and honey. It’s really great, doubly so if you’re feeling under the weather.

But that takes work! My preferred fast drink lately is buckwheat tea. I buy a big bag of dried buckwheat kernels, then I toast a cup or two in a pan myself and put them in a jar. Half a tablespoon and five minutes with hot water makes a mug of tea. What’s great about buckwheat is the same toasted kernels make excellent toppings for oatmeal, soups, or an addition to bread dough, giving a crunch and a nuttiness that makes most dishes better. If you want to be super efficient, you can save the spent grains from tea and put them in your oatmeal or congee as well. The only real downside is that unlike barley, you can’t leave buckwheat in hot water for tea too long or else it starts to ooze some unpleasant starchiness.

So! Go fill your pantry with not-tea tea choices for every day of the week. Cheap delicious and healthy. Take the victories you can.

Until next time,

-g