Ernie Hsiung

I’m Gen X. I’ve been writing on the web since 1999. Let me tell you what changed. Here's a quick trip down memory lane about how online writing has changed since I started doing this in 1999, approximately 3.5 billion years ago.

I started blogging in 1999 when my dad found my website via Google Translate and confronted me about it at Christmas.
25 years later I'm still writing in public, just with better boundaries and a Stripe account.
What changed (and what didn't):

open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

The Least Popular Character in Street Fighter Taught Me Nothing About Life, Which Is Probably the Point Dhalsim isn’t escapism. He’s a mirror.

This essay about Dhalsim from the Street Fighter series isn't really about Dhalsim from the Street Fighter series! But shh, don't tell anyone that.

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What Playing the Least Popular Street Fighter Character Taught Me About Being Mid
open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

The 4AM Doorbell Olympics: How to Lose Sleep and Alienate Neighbors Adulthood is mostly about ignoring things that make noise.

🛋️ Read here:
The 4AM Doorbell Olympics: How to Lose Sleep and Alienate Neighbors
open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

#writing #substack #essays #humor #boundaries

Adulthood is mostly about ignoring things that make noise.

New LYD essay: “The 4AM Doorbell Olympics.”

A story about insomnia, stolen Nintendo Switches, and learning that sometimes “doing nothing” is the healthiest response imaginable.

The Sandwich that Broke Me What happens when the universe tests you with fried chicken

You know that thing where you handle the big crisis fine, then fall apart over something tiny?
Just wrote about the day a delayed sandwich almost broke me - and what it taught me about how we actually process stress.
(Spoiler: we're carrying more than we let on)

open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

The Milk Story (Remastered 2025) From THE VAULT! (insert ominous whooshing sound here)

4/4 "The Milk Story (Remastered 2025)" - for anyone who grew up in the DMZ of their parents' ideologies.
littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-milk-s...

3/4 It's not really about the milk. It's about being caught between two contradictory love languages and not knowing how to disappoint neither parent.

2/4 Mom (post-war Taiwan, one of 13 kids): "Feed him! Love = food!"
Dad (ex-military health obsessive): "He's getting fat!"
Me: 😰🥛

🧵 1/4 Republishing one of my favorite old pieces: being 8 years old, Asian American, holding a glass of milk while my parents fought over whether I should drink it.

Warning: contains cache invalidation, Claude hallucinations, and a four-tier privacy system for your diary.

How I Turned a Weekend Project into an Existential Crisis How a two‑week plugin turned into a 46,081‑line chaos spiral—and what I learned.

I just wanted to build a simple Obsidian plugin.
What I ended up with:
– An AI orchestration platform
– 46,081 lines of “vibe-coded” complexity
– A low-grade identity crisis

New post:
How I Turned a Weekend Project into an Existential Crisis open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

If you’ve ever juggled aging parents, medical jargon, and a sense of humor held together with duct tape and sarcasm… this one’s for you.

It’s about caregiving, cultural translation, and the surreal moment when your immigrant parents become your responsibility—and somehow you’re the one explaining health insurance and pill organizers that may or may not end up storing jewelry.

Thirty Percent Chance of Being an Earring Holder Notes from the Front Lines of Caregiving, Mistranslations, and Mice

New on the blog: Thirty Percent Chance of Being an Earring Holder.

littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/thirty-per...

The Happy Path No One Mapped The Startup Hired Me. Then They Fired Me. Here’s What I Wish I’d Known.

It’s not a rage-post.
It’s a post-mortem.
On misalignment, fake “happy paths,” and what it’s like to realize you cared more than the system had room for.

“This wasn’t a failure. It was a flashlight.”
littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-happy-...

The Happy Path No One Mapped The Startup Hired Me. Then They Fired Me. Here’s What I Wish I’d Known.

Got hired at a startup after 435 days of searching. Got fired 11 workdays later.

Turns out they didn’t want thoughtful UX—they wanted a hardcoded demo.
I missed the memo.
They missed the onboarding.

I wrote about it: littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-happy-...

The Ghosts of Memory Recognizing the Patterns We Inherit

When is forgetting your keys normal aging versus the start of something worse?

littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-ghosts...

#BrainHealth #Memory #AgingParents #CognitiveHealth #GenX

Note-Taking for the Chronically Distracted: An ADHD Guide to Obsidian When I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, everything clicked.

Feeling like your notes are a chaotic graveyard of half-finished thoughts? Same. I wrote about how I wrangle my distractible brain into something resembling an effective note-taking system. ADHD-friendly, low-effort, and chaos-resistant.

Read here:
littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/note-takin...

it was supposed to be a play on "elephant in the room" but then i typed on pink elephants and oh nvm

4 Brutal Lessons From 356 Days of Unemployment (From Someone Who Should Know Better) Time is a flat circle and, apparently, so is my job search.

5/ full story here if you want to read about how time becomes more relative than einstein thought when you're on unemployment: littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/4-brutal-l...

4/ wrote about the messy parts nobody talks about - especially when your tech career path looks more like a jackson pollock painting than a straight line. also there's an ai-generated photo of me in a pink elephant costume because why not at this point

3/ the real kicker? watching my former students get hired faster than me. if you need me, i'll be updating my linkedin status to "professional resume distributor and part-time existential crisis manager"

2/ some highlights: my 1,990 linkedin connections transformed into the mariah carey "i don't know her" gif, i spent 6 hours writing a federal resume that became useless overnight, and my mom keeps asking about a broken dryer. time is weird when you're jobless

1/ wrote about being unemployed for 356 days (yes i'm counting). turns out teaching people how to get jobs doesn't make you immune to not having one yourself. the universe really said "plot twist" huh

The Seagull Story From the archives. Original blog post date: December 9, 2003.

Now available for paid subscribers on Substack:

The Seagull Story, by @ErnieAtLYD open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

The infamous Seagull Story is back - now with 2024 footnotes! It is a tale of high school awkwardness, unrequited crushes, and why you should never eat lunch under seagull flight paths.

Hey, ChatGPT: Roast Me. The following prompt was inserted into ChatGPT. With the exception of editing out one left-field reference, the entire dialog is pasted as is.

Me: "Roast me, ChatGPT."
ChatGPT: Pulls up a PowerPoint of all my flaws and career zigzags.
This week’s blog post is part therapy, part comedy roast. Check it out!
➡️ open.substack.com/pub/littleye...

"Hey ChatGPT, make an image based on what you know about me."

Awesome, but damn, I didn't realize I like air fryers so much.

The New Job Hunt: Tools and Processes That Have Changed A Field Guide to Job Hunting in the AI Age (Spoiler: You Still Need Friends)

The more I dive into AI tools, the more I realize how much real human connections matter. I wrote a little something about navigating job hunting in this AI age—spoiler: it involves teaching robots to sound like me so I can talk to actual people. 😂

littleyellowdifferent.substack.com/p/the-new-jo...

303 Days Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Claude Write My Resume

4/4 The full piece breaks down my actual workflow for using Claude AI in the job search process. It's surprisingly effective when it's not trying to convince potential employers that I invented the internet

Read the full story here: open.substack.com/pub/littleye...