mxawng

i wrote a website!

writing

i am a ✨ prolific ✨ writer and wordsmith. however, most of those smithèd words live in chat logs. you probably can’t have them. unless you have unreads from me, in which case please check your messages.

i regularly write screeds in various forms, and also long ago this site was some sort of blog. some of these words can be found below. i also irregularly write poetry.

the disgraceful art of the poet

elizabeth bishop's “cirque d'hiver”

… how do we write honestly? how can we be faithful to the subject of our writing? these questions trace their way through many of bishop’s early poems. they infest my own writing here, today.

consistency considered harmful

a leaked internal video essay to my former fb colleagues

… “[the danger is in] exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the straightjacket of logic, with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.” —hannah arendt

sense and sentiment

a manifesto on language from someone who loves to speak

… my goal almost every time i open my mouth on the internet is to coax other people into reflexively altering not their opinions, but rather the rhetorical manner in which they discuss whatever subject they’re discussing.

how to maybe be an adult human

… half a year ago, i started working on maintaining a website so i could create and publish content instead of just consuming it. this was a real goal!—one which i managed to fail not because i was too lazy to write things, but because i was somehow too lazy to experience or think anything worth writing about.

air quality and health in china

… the city of beijing is now much like my grandfather’s apartment was: i have family living in it and breathing there is hard.

shall i hear more, or shall i speak at this?

the long version of the story of my short time at Stripe

… what does it mean to be a startup? to some extent, that’s the question this story comes down to. or, more precisely— what does the label of “startup” entail for me?

some practice with javascript

… my friend carl suggested that i duplicate a js1k submission, so here’s my simplified clone of this pong game from the first js1k—simplified in the sense that it is less flashy. it is, of course, many more bytes.