An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
I came across a BBS on Sina tonight, images from an exhibition of photos of Chinese inmates in asylums, period unknown, location unknown. They looked uncannily like someone taking photos through a security camera…but then Jason figured out they were photos of photos hanging on a wall.
For non-Chinese readers, go to the bottom of the page and click on the image that looks like this, in order to scroll through the 4 pages of photos:
From 传说狼的联盟的BLOG
In the past decade, the pollution in Hong Kong has been getting more and more serious, and most of it is attributable to the winds that bring the haze from factories in the Mainland.
But sometimes, it’s our own fault, or, if you prefer, the fault of the big corporations in Hong Kong, as was the case a few days ago:
The caption accompanying the photo above (taken by my father): "Smoke and steam from the 3 chimneys of the HK Electric power plant [see left side of enlarged photo] at Lamma Island clearly clouded the sky!!"
See original photo here.
gorgeous, isn’t it? Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years. SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.
I was clicking through news portal Daqi and noticed this obviously fake yet incredibly evocative photograph:
The author is 麦田精灵 (wheat field fairy), and the picture seems to have been hand-picked from a non-Daqi forum: the 云南信息港 (Yunnan Information Port)’s photo sharing forum. The user profile doesn’t yield much information about the picture’s creator, except that she has contributed to over 20,000 posts on the Yunnan forum and that she can be reached at km@sina.com.
A Daqi editor picked up these photographs off of the Yunnan forum and created a feature out of it on Daqi’s new photo sharing section (大棋图海). In this section you can check out the original source of the picture (a feature which is actually often missing on other sites), comment on the picture (actually links to the original Yunnan forum), and vote on the picture in two ways:
So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.
How is all this relevant?
Jason posted on Citybar/City8.com last summer, and I thought I’d give a little update because I love it. City8 gives you a beautiful high res full-screen photo of the place you choose, which you can navigate for a 360 degree view, move closer and farther, annotate, and see others’ annotations as well. (Tip: click on the middle of the green nav tool. It will take you to full screen. Wait for it to resolve). The short video (in Chinese) on their homepage with "Little C" shows you what the site can do. You can follow it even if you don’t speak Chinese (there’s a City8 English tab at the very bottom of the page but it only allows you to search in Shanghai and Beijing, and it has much less functionality than the Chinese version).
At the home page you can click on the images of 8 different cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Jinan and Wenzhou of all places) and just play with the locations they give you (places to eat, tourist spots, places to shop). The site is also searchable by street or keyword. You can also enter your own spot to see what’s there.
You can drop into, say, the Five Horses Mall in Wenzhou and get a pretty good feel for what street life looks like in Wenzhou on a nice day. Great stuff!
An email arrived this morning from IFTF’s Jason Tester with the subject header: "What if France is making a backup copy of itself in China?"
The email contained a link to a post on Super Colossal titled: "China: USB External HD to the French."
The scenario, laid out by Super Colossal, is this:
Thanks to Reuters/Aly Song for the great photograph.
Jared Braiterman, a principal at Giant Ant, recently showed me some of their work from their on-going research on youths and technology (dubbed "Mobile China China Mobile").
Here’s an excerpt from one of their visual reports, entitled "Chinese Students Rarely Use Their Own Photos As Avatars" (download):
The research result is that, of the profile pictures analyzed, only 4 of 200 Chinese students abroad used their own picture as their icon versus 58 of 200 Americans.
Yet the sample contains some bias: the data for the Chinese users came from a BBS called 未名空间 while the American sample was UC Berkeley students’ blogs on Livejournal. Additionally, UC Berkeley students are far from homogeneous: I would say that the Chinese-Americans occupy a middle space between the two and therefore dilute the results.
Regardless, the original statistic, 4 of 200, stands. Yet, it’s the remaining 196 that is interesting. For example: why do people like to use baby pictures, and is that actually them as a baby?
Here’s a Flickr stream of more Giant Ant research artifacts, or you can read my 15-minute analysis on MySpace CN vs US profile pictures (blogged back in April).
From Chinese IT guru Keso’s Flickr stream, a t-shirt with the latest rallying cry against Chinese Internet censoring, most recently of Flickr itself: Fuck GFW (Great Firewall). Above, in Chinese, followed by "Please use Tor". Tor is an anonymity network — a free service that, according to Tor’s website, works like this:
The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you—and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to
destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.
Tor is also where you get taken when you click on a "Fuck GFW!" button on IT blog Herock:
Herock has apparently been hosting either a FuckGFW proxy or a link to a proxy for awhile now, as you can read here. No doubt the term has a long and glorious history. But according to a Jeremy Goldkorn June 8 post on Danwei, this latest round was started by Keso’s June 8 response to the blocking of Flickr, Fuck GFW post, which Danwei translates as:
In the global Internet, the better the website, the more likely it
will get GFWed. This is the sorrow of all Internet users in this
country. In the past it has been Google, Blogger, Wikipedia,
Wordpress.com, Vix.com… Now it’s Flick’s turn …
… I just have one character to tell those bastards: Fuck!
From citizen journalism site Moobol.com, this glimpse of parents and caretakers sleeping outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital. Translated text and selected comments below:
Late night, June 12 2007, over 100 parents of sick children, and some children themselves, sleep on the ground in the underground parking garage and on the disabled ramp outside the doors of Beijing Children’s Hospital. In order to save the 20 RMB nightly cost of staying at the hospital, the underground parking garage has become a residence for the poor families and children who have come from around the country. The temperature in the underground parking garage reaches 35℃.
Selected comments:
Who would put up with this if they had enough money? Medical costs are expensive enough that taking a child to the doctor basically empties the family coffers, so the adults have to save when they can.
The Chinese medical system seems strong, but if you look closely it only addresses a certain group of people. It’s only the rich who can see the doctor, and those without money just have to take it. Exorbitant medical costs make the common people shrink and the high cost of medicines drives the common people crazy. Could it be that in the future the common people will just die on the street? The medical industry has so many dark sides.
Better not to have kids at all.
The long travel to Beijing to see to the child’s illness means that savings are long gone. The hospital only has beds for patients, why would they have beds for caretakers?
Why do people have to go to Beijing to cure sickness? It can’t be that there are no local hospitals? Of course they won’t be able to handle the high costs of Beijing. Even if people follow others blindly, they still have to consider their own economic strengths. Outsiders coming to Beijing is like Chinese going to the United States, it’s definitely difficult.
China’s healthcare system reform is being reformed daily, but there seems to be no affect; at any rate medicines cost more and more! It’s harder and harder to see the doctor!
Every big hospital in Beijing is the same situation. Last year I saw a couple who came to Beijing to seek medical treatment for their child. The mother stayed in the room with the child but the father couldn’t spend the 20 RMB for the bed and slept in a chair in the hospital hallway every night. For his own meals it was just two steamed buns, but he didn’t forget to buy his daughter some grapes or an apple each day. Pity the parents’ heart.
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