This is a story about mental pressure. In this story,the kids are constantly forced to bury themselves into their endless homework by those giant monsters behind them. The children’s brains are filled with water that can be heated by tension.If a kid is overstressed,the water in their brain would boil and produce steam,which becomes the food of the greedy monsters and the energy of the whole city. Thus,those poor children repeat their lives day after day, serving as the power plant of their world,spending their childhood in tragic misery……
Though I find the plot a bit tried (though very, very Chinese), the lush set and character design is what sets it apart, for example:
View the full video below:
The animation was created by students at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and one person called them “China’s future hope for animation.”
My friend Charles who flits between Beijing and Thailand had a recent mishap with a taxi driver and a group of plainclothes police in Hong Kong. Keep in mind that Charles doesn’t speak Cantonese, and that the communication channels throughout this story are therefore pretty faulty.
Here’s my summary of the story:
He was having problems talking to the taxi driver, who ended up taking him to the police station.
He quickly leaped out to speak to the police to sort out the mess.
They were still going through the bureaucratic hurdles of form filling when the taxi decided not to wait and drove off.
His suitcase (wallet & passport included) were still in the taxi.
Even though he knew the last four digits of the taxi’s license plate, the police have not been able to do anything in the past few days.
(Updated from here down.)
It strikes me as unsurprising that the taxi driver drove off with his stuff and that the police deem it outside their boundary of duties to recover goods left in a taxi. But that does not make it right — I would have hoped for more especially from the police, particularly when the victim in question has lost his passport. (For fucks sake, it can’t be that hard to recover the non-cashable items!)
Stranded in Hong Kong, Charles has reached out to his friends abroad via the internet and they have responded like a human flesh search engine:
Charles was having issues getting enough money to even get a new passport from the British Consulate, so a ChipIn fund was set up, and flocking to it (myself included), we have contributed over 1800$US in the past four days.
In the four days Charles posted an account of his troubles on his blog, he’s received 127 comments: Shouts of support, offers for help and serious call-my-friend-the-ambassador missives.
See the original account here and keep up on the latest from Charles Stuck In Hong Kong here. (A giant shoutout to Sam Ismail for setting up the Punk Kiva fund.)
Highlights from Frank Yu’s presentation entitled, “The Coming Chinese Wave: History, Overview and Trends of Online Games in China.”
There are 3 waves of adoption, all of which still exist:
2000-2003: licensing / portals / korean-taiwanese games: subscription to local vendor
2003-2007: China MMORPGs / communities: free initially, monetization from avatars and virtual goods
2007-present: Web games / social networking sites: pre-paid cards, online/offline events and marketing, elements of gambling
And two final details I love:
Because consoles are banned, most of these games are PC-style games that can be played with one hand, freeing up the other one to smoke.
In second or third-tier cities, a fast connection is valued over hygiene: Toilets are dirty but they’re used to it. They can’t stand a slow connection though, because that would cut them out of their fun/leisure and communication channels.
Catch the slides for the presentation here, or watch a (noisy) recording of the talk here.
Jennifer 8. Lee talks about the spread of bastardized Chinese food around the world, and the origins of faux-Chinese items like the fortune cookie and General Tso’s chicken.
My favorite bit: Her theory how the non-centralized “spontaneous self-organization” of Chinese restaurants across the US has led to more basically-the-same Chinese restaurants as there are McDonalds, Burger Kings, Wendys and KFCs combined.
I wish she said more about why this phenomenon took place, and how Chinese restaurants in each country have localized in more or less the same way. Obviously, the sheer quantity of people and the strong self-identification of the Chinese played a help hand. But what else?
The clip is entitled “President Attacked by Shoe, Leads to War” (总统被扔鞋引发血战) in reference to the event last year when a journalist attacked US President Bush by throwing a shoe at him.
It was produced by 胡戈 (Hu Ge), the man behind the original egao film, the “Bloody Case That Started from a Steam Bun” (see ESWN’s coverage of it here).
Spoiler alert (read this only after you have watched it):
The ending, in case it’s not clear, reveals that the clip is an ad for Alibaba, “the world largest online B2B marketplace” — brilliant ad: It’s entertaining, directly related to the product and they contracted an internet-famous artist Hu Ge to create it.
Footnotes:
My friend Paul Saffo predicted the president-shoe meme would be a hit back in December 2008 here.
China is building what is billed as its first sex theme park, aimed at improving both the sex education and the sex life of its visitors.
Due to open in Chongqing in October, Love Land will include displays of giant genitalia, naked bodies and an exhibition on the history of sex.
He was inspired to build the park after a visit to South Korea’s popular sex theme park in Jeju.
By May 18 BBC was reporting that it had been demolished, and according to an Eastday report (thanks awflasher), it had been taken down by city officials on the 16th already.
There is something about this story that, I believe, represents some of the development happening in China: It’s driven by sheer entrepreneurial bravery, backed by non sequitar logic, and involves imitation.
IEEE has an article about the digital TV standard that China rolled out in time for the Olympics.
Here are some highlights:
Being late in this particular game is not necessarily a bad thing. It allowed China to take advantage of advances in information-coding technologies that make digital television in China—unlike that in the rest of the world—work well even in bad weather. These technologies mean that China’s digital television can be viewed on the go; it won’t break up even at 200 kilometers per hour—you can watch a broadcast on a cellphone while sitting on a high-speed train. (The United States is only now trying to retrofit its digital-television standard for mobile reception.)
Development of what is formally called GB20600-2006 (GB stands for guo biao, “national standard” in Chinese) began in 2000 at China’s DTV Technology Research Center, in Beijing, established by my company, Legend Silicon Corp., of Fremont, Calif., and Tsinghua University, also in Beijing.
China plans to turn off the analog terrestrial television broadcast in 2015.
88 Bar is about finding bits and pieces in virtual China and examining them from the various lenses of our authors:
Lens 1: Designer
Jason Li is an associate at Node. Originally from Hong Kong, he has also lived in Canada, the US and Spain. He's writing a graphic novel in his spare time.
Lens 2: Cultural anthropologist
Lyn Jeffery is a research director at the Institute for the Future. She has spent more than 20 years living, working, and doing research in China.
Contact us if you're interesting in becoming one of our lenses.
