Michael Cannings

How many competing writing systems can one language have? Five? Ten? A hundred? I've been working all hours recently, so to switch modes I thought I'd do a long, very nerdy thread on Hokkien and how history has led to a proliferation of ways to write it. 🧵👇 1/34

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The deluge of “low content” titles and AI-generated shit, combined with SEO-spamming by the creators of the aforementioned shit, has rendered Amazon’s search unusable (at least for books).

This is not because only two genuine books were released in that period – subsequent pages of the results show many more. It’s also not part of a disinformation effort, as the same problem appears with uncontroversial topics.

Amazon’s problems with book quality are getting much worse in the age of ChatGPT. This is the first page of search results for books published in the last 30 days with the keyword “Taiwan”. As far as I can tell only two of the sixteen results belong there.

@samatlounge Or diversifying your organisation beyond the sort of people who can afford to work for that salary in London.

@samatlounge OK, that's probably a more realistic assessment of how this happened!

@samatlounge As someone who completely over-analyses choosing names for new projects, I have to respect the level of "ah fuck it, that'll do" on display here.

@Yolo_Tengo @brianhioe Ooh so nice. Niche tweet of the week.

Oh my God, lol. Will they light up Taipei 101 for her?

@brianhioe Mmm, mid-2000s Computex meets Huang Fu-hsing faction, with a generous helping of narcissism.

What the hell is happening in this image. Photo from Terry Gou's FB

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I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten or overlooked – please do add your suggestions!

Though it’s not out until September, MADE IN TAIWAN is an instant pre-order for me: Clarissa Wei @dearclarissa and Ivy Chen combine recipes with stories and essays on food culture and its relation to wider society in Taiwan.

What are you looking forward to in new Taiwan-related books? Here’s a quick thread of some titles that are either just out or coming soon – most of these I have yet to read, but am excited to.

‘Donald Shek, a British second-generation immigrant from Hong Kong, plays with recognisable London landscapes, superimposing fantasy, colourful cityscapes over top of black and white images…’ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@saltertonarts) State-less 無國界 till April 9th kakilang.org.uk/stateless …