Notes from China

Hi. It's Richard. I am currently on a Teaching Fellowship in Xiamen, China, and will be for the next two months. I've got two classes a week, and otherwise nothing but time, a bed, food, and the work in front of me.

This pop-up mailing list is an experiment on whether sending a daily update – on what I am doing and how I am doing it – helps that work. At the end of my time, I'll archive this list, and remove everyone from the subscribers list. If it works, I may set up another newsletter - but this experiment will be over.

Boulders and mailing lists

Day 13 of 75
08 November 2026

This is the first entry in a new pop-up journal that I’ll be posting daily for the duration of my trip in China. My goal is to talk about what I did, when I have something to say – or how I did it, when I want to focus only on the methods. I’m stealing this concept wholesale from Craig Mod, a writer I admire, who sets up small newsletters when he goes on walks or on writing retreats.

If you’re interested in getting a daily email about my process, my outputs, and occasional short notes about how my time here in Xiamen is going, do subscribe.

You won’t be subscribed to anything after January 9th without your consent, and you can always unsubscribe whenever. I’ll delete the subscribers to the mailing list on the day of the last post, January 9th, but I’ll keep this page alive for those who want to refer back to it.

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Today was Sunday, which means I didn’t want or need to do a ton of work. I have more prep to do for tomorrow’s class – I am teaching C at Xiamen University of Technology in China, at the moment – but the slides are mostly written, I’ve also written some example code, made some questions for the students, and I think that I’ll mainly be putting the finishing touches on the slide deck tomorrow morning. I am not worried about it.

I set up this mailing list this afternoon. This is somethig I’ve wanted to do for a while - a small mailing list that I can build up or tear down at will, without using Mailchimp. I haven’t found a great newsletter system since TinyLetter was destroyed by Mailchimp, but my hope is that this system will work. Currently I’m using some new scripts on this website, Netlify’s automatic form settings for dealing with subscriptions, and Mailgun for hosting the actual list itself. We use Mailgun at SustainOSS, but we don’t utilize all of its capabilities, and we also pay for Mailchimp, which I think might be unnecessary. By setting up this list, I am testing whether we can get rid of Mailchimp permanently, and save more money for the podcast and other functions. I suspect this may be the case.

Besides setting up this page, I also went for a long walk this morning in a natural park area here, where there are large boulders and a temple complex. Six kilometers along a mostly stone-paved trail with granite steps. I disliked the grooming of the boulderfield into a sanitized playground, but I enjoyed seeing it be more accessible for the old and the young, so I understand.

I saw a few new species of birds (lifers, in birding parlance): Red-billed Blue-Magpie Urocissa erythroryncha, Rufous-capped Babbler Cyanoderma ruficeps, and Fire-breasted Flowerpecker Dicaeum ignipectus. I swear none of these names were made up. I took a few pictures and dozens of recordings, which have been added to the illimitable backlog.

I wrestled, as always this year, with grief and despair. But I made something new, and I’m proud of it, and that is one of the better ways to respond to those emotions. Today was a good day.