Xander ✺

@spectralcodex.com

Front-end developer (React/TypeScript/Astro), biogeography grad, history and map enthusiast, leftoid/anti-fascist, Wikipedia supporter. Non-American resident of Taichung, Taiwan 🐙 🕸 https://spectralcodex.com

This site commemorates Eguchi Ryōzaburō for his contributions to developing the Port of Hualien, ignoring his brutal subjugation of Taiwanese Indigenous peoples. The county restored the discarded stele in 2008 and added a torii that might have never been there. spectralcodex.com/hualien-eguc...

Eguchi Ryōzaburō Monument (江口氏紀念碑) - Spectral Codex

A newly-manufactured (and already weatherworn) torii stands in front of the reinstalled monument. Along the waterfront in the Port of Hualien stands a monument dedicated to the memory of Eguchi Ryōzab...

spectralcodex.com

Great news. It was a great honour and pleasure to be there in February of 2024, to photograph some of the process and the craftspeople involved in the restoration. See some of my shots from that assignment, here: blog.alfiegoodrich.com/portfolio/co... www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/06...

Ceremony set for November will mark Shuri Castle’s main hall being restored

Restoration work for the main hall began in November 2022 following a fire in October 2019.

japantimes.co.jp

Boys Day with “koinobori” (traditional carp windsocks). Early 20th century, Japan. The carp is a central symbol in this celebration, representing strength, courage, and the determination to overcome obstacles—qualities inspired by the legend of the carp swimming upstream to become a dragon.

This early 20th-century photograph captures the vibrant tradition of koinobori (carp windsocks) flown in Japan to celebrate Boys' Day (Tango no Sekku), now known as Children's Day. The image shows several large windsocks attached to a tall bamboo pole, billowing in the breeze above a village landscape.

The carp is a central symbol in this celebration, representing strength, courage, and the determination to overcome obstacles—qualities inspired by the legend of the carp swimming upstream to become a dragon. Traditionally, the black carp (magoi) represented the father, the red carp (higoi) the eldest son, and additional smaller carp for younger brothers. In the background, children and adults walk along a path near thatched-roof houses, providing a glimpse into the communal and festive atmosphere of rural Japan during the Meiji or Taishō eras.

Taiwan relies heavily on imported energy. In 2024, about 95% of its fossil fuels were imported. Around 70.3% of Taiwan’s crude oil comes from Middle Eastern countries. Developments in and around the Strait of Hormuz are therefore closely monitored, as disruption affect global supply chains.

Bild

"The transformation of a dark remnant of Taiwan's authoritarian past into a venue for human rights education began in 2009, with the discovery of dozens of formalin jars containing human body parts inside an abandoned building in New Taipei's Xindian district." (CNA) focustaiwan.tw/culture/2026... 🧋

How a site of White Terror persecution became a human rights venue - Focus Taiwan

The transformation of a dark remnant of Taiwan's authoritarian past into a venue for human rights education began in 2009, with the discovery of dozens of formalin jars containing human body parts ins...

focustaiwan.tw

Cyberpunk's not "dead," but it's old-fashioned, even tenderly nostalgic, like being a poetic '50s beatnik rebel in 1985 Countercultures get assimilated. The very fact that ChatGPT can slop-out a cyberpunk with such chatbotty confident-wrongness... it's not "electronic frontier" here in 2026

The handbook you hope never to use: What Taiwan’s civil defense manual reveals about democratic resilience Jozef Huljak unpacks 🇹🇼’s national civil defense 📙 & contrasts it with 🇪🇺 preparedness handbooks, showing how threat perception shapes preparedness & public messaging. ceias.eu/the-handbook...

The handbook you hope never to use: What Taiwan's civil defense manual reveals about democratic resilience - CEIAS

On the opening pages of Taiwan’s national civil defense manual, citizens are confronted with a stark question: “In the event of aggression, are you aware that adversaries will flood the internet with ...

ceias.eu

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

Built around 1962 in central Taichung, Nanye Dance Hall (南夜大舞廳) first opened as Coffee Honolulu and was later renamed Honolulu Club. It was designed by local multidisciplinary artist Wang Shui-ho (王水河) and features an unusually expressive façade. spectralcodex.com/taichung-nan...

Taichung Nanye Dance Hall (台中南夜大舞廳) - Spectral Codex

Established in the early post-war era as Coffee Honolulu (南夜咖啡), it was converted into a bar, nightclub, restaurant, and concert hall in the early 1960s. It was abandoned for much of the 2000s and 201...

spectralcodex.com

This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. As you can see, AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed the site. It is only a matter of time before the site shuts down completely. The golden age of independent web is over.

This result shows s the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. THE SQL query is https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph:
```
SELECT
DATEFROMPARTS(YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate), 1) AS [Month],
COUNT(*) AS [Questions]
FROM Posts
WHERE
PostTypeId = 1
GROUP BY
DATEFROMPARTS(YEAR(CreationDate), MONTH(CreationDate), 1)
ORDER BY
[Month] ASC
```