Friends,

For the first time, I’ve translated my previous newsletter into Chinese. It took too much time for me to commit to doing it each month yet, but that’s a medium-term goal. Unfortunately it’s not currently feasible for me to send the two versions out separately to two different lists of subscribers, so any future Mandarin versions will be a link within the English version. 你想要閱讀的話，在這裡有2月中文版的文章。

We finished making space for the New Year’s horse-sized good luck, so now further big changes are happening in our house. First, after six-and-a-half years of using our camera translators and struggling with the doing basic operations, I discovered that our TV has had the ability to switch to English-language menus this entire time. Please clap for my accomplishment.

Second, we’ve spent the past few years waffling about furniture. I’ve written about it here at least once, probably multiple times, but we’ve been stuck in this gray area of uncertainty. We’ve been in the same apartment since we moved to Taiwan. We like the apartment: it’s well located, not too loud, with solid neighbors. It could be a little bigger, of course (actually, if you replaced the bath tub with a closet it’d be really close to perfect). However, the furniture in the apartment mostly belongs to the landlord, as it came furnished. And this furniture… is not the best. We’ve supplemented it over time, but the mattress and sofa in particular are just not at the level we want. But we’ve held off on doing anything about it, because a) we don’t have any idea how long we’re going to be here, so we’re scared of spending money then having to get rid of stuff soon after, and b) we don’t really want to disturb the landlord any as he hasn’t raised our rent since we moved in. Our apartment definitely feels like “home”, but it also is hard to feel like a place we should be investing any money in beyond what could be taken away from here as luggage on an airplane. And then there’s the slight mood swings, where one week I’m contemplating asking our landlord if he’s considering selling anytime soon but then the next week I’m looking at house prices in three different countries, just to see.

Grass is always greener, right? It’s so hard to hold it all in my head. The smaller apartment is directly connected to so many benefits: walkable neighborhood, 10 minute grocery trips, ability to travel for extended periods of time without worry, and more. But it’s also hard not to daydream about a slightly larger kitchen, about going back to a king-size bed, about a recliner. All of those things have costs beyond the pricetag, but it’s so indirect, and easy to forget.

But we’re going to make improvements on what we’ve got! This past month we finally built up enough courage to discuss it with the landlord and it went… fine. I’ve already returned to him a dehumidifier we replaced five years ago and a bug zapper we literally have never plugged up, and now we begin shopping to replace some truly awful little cabinets. If we have to suddenly move, it’s going to be a little more financially painful than it would have been before, but it doesn’t sound like there’s going to be a rent increase or a problem from the landlord. Wish we had done it a while ago. Second best time to plant a tree is today and all that. Now we have to do the even harder work of actually figuring out where people in Taipei shop for furniture that’s a step or two above Ikea (PLEASE LET ME KNOW!) and what we want to look for in a mattress (there’s a brand here called Sleepy Tofu and I have no idea how good it is but I kind of want it just for the name) and how hard it is to get someone to come take away our old stuff.

Besides the intense drama of apartment furnishing, the last month also included the Taipei International Book Exhibition. I wrote last year about how wonderful the experience was, how energizing it is to be in a crowd of people excited about books (and manga and board games), how special it was to see the international collaboration. This year I had the same feeling for about five minutes upon entering, but it quickly faded, because no matter which direction I turned I found myself staring at AI. AI AI AI. Publishers advertising AI as part of their publishing process. Bookstores advertising guides for how to use AI. Faces of AI-related CEOs. Clearly AI-generated images across the children’s section.

Most depressing was a booth representing Italy, which was sparsely filled with a few tables, chairs, and a handful of books. Their booth’s walls were covered with wallpaper depicting bookshelves, and as I passed I realized that the bookshelf image was very clearly AI generated. The kind of AI image that you could throw in a kid’s activity book with “Can you spot the problems in this picture?” captioning.

Last year, Italy was the expo’s guest of honor.

(I will say that this year’s guest of honor, Thailand, had a fantastic booth that was simultaneously aesthetically pleasing, informative, and chock full of books. Michelle and Albert at A Broad and Ample Road have a much more positive portrayal of the fair, so check them out.)

A few days after the expo I found myself walking around NTU’s campus, when I came across a flyer for an event from a visiting scholar entitled “Why trust in science is important”. The flyers to either side were both advertising AI-related workshops. And sometimes I’m angry about this but mostly I’m just so sad, so so sad, like this year suddenly many of my student emails have started randomly bolding key phrases and apparently this is probably because they’re using LLMs more and more just to send me simple emails. Or because they’ve read so much LLM-generated work that they’re mirroring that style. Which is worse? I guess I’m transitioning early into my old man yelling at clouds phase of life but if nothing changes it’s going to be really close to sucking out all the fun from large swaths of the internet, teaching, and literature. And that’s my life, man. The more it invades all of these spaces the more it sucks the soul out of them, and it looks like it’s going to be a bit before the pendulum swings back the other way. Shit.

Further reading:

• We are all lucky to have lived in the era of Sir Ian McKellen. If you missed his performance of a monologue from Sir Thomas More on The Late Show, you owe it to yourself to see it now. He did the same monologue on Marc Maron’s podcast, though I haven’t listened to that full episode yet.

• It’s been long known that university teaching evaluations are full of bias, especially against women. In this post, Ben Schmidt uses ratemyprofessor reviews to do a very technical linguistic analysis on gendered language in the reviews. A conclusion: “Students have a far more elaborate vocabulary to criticize women for being ‘unprofessorial’ than to criticize men.” I’ll admit I don’t understand the framework at all, but the results are easy enough to get.

• Lynn Cherny used similar tools to analyze what would happen if you take Pride & Prejudice and replace the nouns with the algorithmically closest noun. This sounds kind of silly, right? But what it actually does is show you how poorly an algorithm’s writing can sound. “I do not cough for my own amusement” becomes “I do not pardon for my own profit”, for example.

• One more on language. There’s a been a spate of posts recently showing how language has evolved over time by telling a story that goes back in time with its writing style and vocabulary. I don’t know who kicked it off, but Colin Gorie’s post was the first one I encountered. As someone who hasn’t studied any old English, I lost a little meaning at 1400 and a lot of meaning at 1300, then 1200 was unintelligible.

• The recently translated Taiwanese novel Spent Bullets is, unfortunately, getting pretty bad reviews so I’m not going to rush out to read it. However, I found the context for the novel to be really interesting. It’s set against the Taiwan → Silicon Valley pipeline and features the university I teach at, although this is a side of the university I’m very unfamiliar with.

• Absolutely loved Gabriele Galimberti’s photo series “Toy Stories”, which has children posing amidst their toy collections. Click captions in the bottom right to see the country of each.

• I’m making plans for a Taichung trip later this spring and was recently reminded of the giant statue of Warcraft villain Arthas, the Lich King, that features prominently in a Taichung public park. Blizzard made a cool (and a little annoyingly melodramatic) video about the making of the statue, but it doesn’t feature my favorite part: that the foreboding Lich King is in a sunny open space, near stores featuring giant Snoopy and Charlie Brown figures, or that he gets decorated for Christmas.

After eleven years of teaching, I still get little bouts of imposter’s syndrome, that people are being entirely misguided when looking to me as an authority on literally anything at all (except a small range of books and video games, maybe). Tutoring helps clear this up, because I can compare myself directly with what’s going on in my students’ other classes and see, hey, I’m not actually doing a bad job at all.

That doesn’t work in some situations though. For example, I was recently invited to give a lecture at another university and I’m alternately spasming between “man it’s nice to get recognized for my work” and “there is no way I have anything more important to say than the tons of other instructors at their and my institutions”. These opportunities pop up every now and then, and each time it’s both really cool and really scary that people look at what I’ve taught and written and think, “yeah, this guy has something useful to say”.

I know a little of both sides is healthy, but I’m working on correcting the balance towards the confident one a bit more. Watch out.

Hope your balance is either correct or in the process of being corrected, too.

-g