Welcome!
This is the personal website of Jun-E Tan.
I'm an independent researcher who has many interests on the side. This is where I document my explorations both professional and incidental. More about me here.
The website is perpetually in the making, so do check back for updates.
Latest blog posts
MCO 2.0 - Garden Talk
Friday. I've been going around my garden stalking the wildlife and taking videos. So far I've captured two different types of spiders (both equally majestic in their minute stature), an aggressive bright green praying mantis that charged at the camera,... Read more
MCO 2.0 - The Life of Ali
Sunday. Maybe writing once a week is not a bad idea. I'm glad to report that this week has gone well, some small anxieties notwithstanding. I talked to my friend S yesterday and through the conversation realised that I may have become too attached to my... Read more
MCO 2.0 - Life rhythms and soil systems
Sunday. Dropping the day counting thing because I can't be bothered. MCO throughout Malaysia has been extended to February 4th, but our daily cases have gotten up to more than 4,000 and I don't think we'll be going anywhere anytime soon. Last year we were... Read more
MCO 2.0 Days 4, 5 and 6 - A breakthrough
Saturday. I've been guerrilla writing. I pretend not to be writing, walking up and down the house "chilling", and when I least expect it I sit down and hammer out two paragraphs. It's a battle of wits between myself and myself. Sometimes I win,... Read more
MCO 2.0 Day 2 - Day:1, Me:0
Thursday. Today is one of those days that you end it feeling, ok, day. You won this time but tomorrow I'll get you back. I've been suffering from some sort of writing block in my work, which is not a good affliction in the best of times but worse when... Read more
MCO 2.0 Day 1 - Here we go again
2021 is wasting no time and getting down to business immediately. Second week of the new year and we've been handed another MCO (Movement Control Order - strict lockdown), as we hit a record daily cases of 3,300+. Malaysia declared a state of emergency,... Read more
Death by thousand pin pricks
It's been two days after the US Elections. Votes are still being counted. This morning in the hospital I saw the news blurb go, and I translate from Malay, "Biden is confident to win, Trump has already declared victory". The surreality of the... Read more
Hello Lockdown My Old Friend
Day Three of Lockdown, Version 2. KL is now a red zone and a conditional movement control order (CMCO) has been issued. Over the last two weeks the situation had worsened rapidly and we went up to more than five hundred new cases per day, from a... Read more
Deleting my CouchSurfing Profile
I've just written to the Support and Privacy teams of CouchSurfing.com to give me a copy of my data, and to delete my profile. This was a difficult but easy decision. Difficult, because CS was a very important part of my life. I studied CouchSurfing as a... Read more
Second half of the year
We are now officially one day into the second half of the year. I thought that I would commemorate this momentous occasion with a blog post and do the usual bitching about how time flies. It's funny that a lot of conversations with friends on times of... Read more