all-in-one post, because i can. well, to be honest…there’s only three bullet points in this post.
the first point…i hadn’t mentioned this earlier, but i’d actually quit world of warcraft, didja know? i’d quit four months ago, but my subscription didn’t actually end til august 20th. now that august 20th is past, my quitting of is official! which was a long-time coming. nothing against world of warcraft, but i’d played it for 6 years. and the game mechanics grew old a long time ago. i didn’t notice…or didn’t care to notice, until one night in a raid i came to the cathartic and sad realization that i spent more time staring at the action bars than i did at the actual action happening on screen. from then on i just decided to quit. to be honest, my life didn’t change drastically. i think i’d always been pretty good about not letting my mmo gaming life adversely affect my social life. so no longer having the mmo time sink bore little influence on my day to day (except now having even more free time). i played other games during my free time now…including torchlight, dragon age 2, mass effect 2, and the current flavor…deus ex human revolution. the game is seriously boss (the second point). damn the game is gorgeous. i’m already in my second go-thru…already finding numerous things i missed completely the first time around.
if you haven’t played the game, the above image is of heng sha, one of the cities featured in the game. it’s essentially shanghai on steroids.
speaking of august 20th, the third point is that i actually did something for my birthday this year. and when i say something, i mean the same as i did for my 30th and 31st (but not last year…i was feeling anti-social). sake and food at en…word.
midsummer already…yikes. but yes…midsummer. hmm, things to recollect so far. fourth of july weekend found a number of us in seattle for our friend miltons wedding. it was my second time in seattle…the first time was for a wedding too. hmm, what is it about seattle and getting married? anyhoo, that was fun. for our little table of ex-cornellians (the wedding was predominantly of the brides side) it was a nice bit of reunion, since i hadn’t really seen a number of them in years. the days leading up to the wedding were also packed with nonstop eating, and more eating, and then regretting eating as much as we did. coming back to nyc afterwards, i sort of wish there was somewhere in nyc that sold the little cups of fresh crab/lobster/etc like they did at pike place. god that was yum…and not terribly expensive.
other things strewn about the summer but had yet been ‘journaled’ include the big apple bbq festival (i ate a regrettable amount of bbq), gina back in town briefly and an accompanying dinner at jewel bako, hiking with sally in the palisades interstate park (ouch), an iphone upgrade (my stupid 3g couldn’t even hold a charge for more than a day), the last harry potter movie ever (sniff), and some tacos with ivor at tacombi just this past sunday. those were some good tacos. a number of other eating excursions were strewn about as well…menchanko tei with sally, minca with kj, pepe giallo with carol and margie, moustache with liz and betty, and kasadela with jess. hmm, i think (hope) that’s it. right then…
rant time! i don’t rant enough. or maybe i do, but they’re dispersed amongst any number of websites through my pithy commentary. oh look…a new social network has emerged. and from google no less. and while i am all for early adoption of new media, it’s not because i’m forward thinking or anything…its really because i like to reserve my names and handles early on. though in the case of google+, it’s tied to my gmail name anyway. *shrug* oh well.
so now i’m on google+, and some friends find it less than exciting, others already pointing at the death of facebook. which got me wondering…huh? let’s backtrack a bit. before google+, there was a discernible chorus of people complaining about facebooks privacy issues, etc…and that they would like to bail on it for really…anything like facebook, but not facebook. which had me wondering a bit to myself. what the fuck were people posting on facebook that was soooo important as to be deemed ‘top secret…don’t steal my info brah‘. the fact that you were drunk last night? your shit stain looked like jesus? you like nyancats? oh fuck…they’re on to you! if you added your email, phone number, etc…then that’s on you. but really…what then? nobody cried when phone books were delivered in the past. the point is, nobody gives a fuck about you. there is no secret department within facebook noting every minutiae of your life via your profile and news feed. and even if there were, their weekly reports would be something along the lines of “watches shitty movies, likes reality tv, gets drunk alot.” but let’s get this straight…if you had issues with fb’s privacy issues, oh yes, google would be a much better place. the company that knows everything about you already. yea the perfect alternative.
i continued wondering some more…about modern society’s need to clearly define the new and the obsolete. that if they’re not rebuilding the shrine every 20 years, that they become irrelevant. this topic of course extends beyond just social networks (for instance dumbasses buying a new iphone every year), but with social networks, it worked a bit differently. do people really love rebuilding their profile and friends list every few years? because i sure as fuck don’t. it was first friendster, then myspace, then facebook, and now google+. while i’m all for keeping up with the progression of technology and bemoan those that refuse to adopt, in this particular case it wasn’t about a technological progression. friendster was a first step, myspace was eyeball herpes…but facebook had everything most need and expect from a social network. the facebook newsfeed is their crowning achievement and gift to social networks everywhere. google+ brings circles. yea, taking bets how long before facebook brings out a similar update. what else? not much.
the point of this rant isn’t to say i wont be on google+, since i am. it’s to question the necessity of another social network, and as a corollary, people’s oddly misguided malignment of facebook when they clearly want what they offer. from google’s perspective, of course another network…their network…is necessary. but from a user standpoint, it seems kind of pointless.
i checked out bye bye kitty this past weekend at the japan society…for once not on the last weekend it was open, which seems to be de rigeur for any exhibit i want to see. the artwork ranged from gorgeous to banal to downright disturbing (i’m looking at you, blood circulation video thingy). one artist though plain and simply blew my mind…manabu ikeda. his giant pieces of work are highly detailed compositions of surreal landscapes and environments, recognizable for their distinct melding of traditional japanese qualities with modern details. he draws the way i probably think i draw in my mind.
the piece i loved the most was the history of rise and fall (up top), which is obscenely detailed. i need to learn some oceans eleven style skills and acquire that thing somehow.
i didn’t actually know what to expect from my trip to beijing. for one, china’s been on the ascendant for the last decade, and this was also my first solo trip (though i did have friends there). but i’ll be honest, there weren’t terribly high expectations. my opinion and the opinions offered by my family were, to say the least, colored by our nationality (taiwanese) and the fact that china was (and still is) looked down upon as, well…hicks. yea.
first, the family history lesson. unlike a number of modern taiwanese who came in the 50’s to flee the civil war, my family has resided on the island since by my estimation, the early 1900’s (at the latest). we are fifth generation taiwanese, possibly older since my parents readily admit that anything before that is unknown since their ancestors then were pretty much illiterate. both sides of my family are thoroughly taiwanese, and have no familial ties to china whatsoever. it’s easy to see and feel the vast difference, socially and culturally, between someone from taiwan and someone from china. but nevermind all that…it sounds way too serious for the purposes of this post. the point was to establish that china was just like any other country i wanted to visit, and that i wanted to visit and see for myself what all the fuss was about.
BEIJING THURSDAY | i landed at beijing airport mid-afternoon. i’m still deaf in one ear for half the day as they still hadn’t popped from the flight…ow. beijing airport is massive. like…stupidly huge. there isn’t nearly as many people as where i came from (newark liberty), but the terminal is twice the size…wow.
i drop my things off at my hotel in dongzhimen and head out to wander around. people can’t seem to drive for dick…i spent the day dodging traffic. not just cars…pedicabs, bikers, even other pedestrians. seriously, fuck you. when cars have the right of way, it sucks donkey dick being a pedestrian.
what’s up with all the hairballs floating in the air?
i met my friends dora and erick later in the day at their architecture studio (dora’s a college friend and erick’s her bf who together run their own studio), but headed back out to let them finish up their work. i roamed the central business district, scoping out the cctv building and the burned out shell of the adjacent hotel (which a friend’s roommate had worked on…then cried about when it went up in flames).
the skies are perpetually gray…weird.
we hit up yunnan food for dinner (yum yum) with their friend, then went to a live concert at the austrian culture thingy (?).
FRIDAY | you know how to spot foreigners in the city? when it’s mid 70’s and they’re wearing shorts. seriously…beijingers dont seem to fancy wearing shorts the minute it hits the 70’s. i wait anxiously all year to break out my shorts. i first headed to the train station to grab tickets to shanghai. beijing main station…what the fuck is that place? it took me 15 minutes after wandering aimlessly to figure out that the ticket hall was a separate building. the main station itself feels like a halfway house.
i walked towards the forbidden city down the fancy-pants avenue leading towards tianamen. now i know where all their civic improvement money goes. i head into the forbidden city, and it’s immediately apparent that they don’t take care of it as well as i wish they did. it’s a fucking shame. i get the impression they’re not much for cultural preservation yet…everything just seems like a potential commodity. seriously…the forbidden city! hundreds of years of heritage? hello?
i headed out the north entrance of the forbidden city towards the hill to the north to get some pretty landscape photos of beijing and the forbidden city. after coming back down the hill, i walked thru some of the local hutongs, then up wangfujie (a main shopping avenue), then along whatever that road is called adjacent to it. my feet are destroyed…oochies. i meet up with my friends again at their studio and we headed to dinner at 1488? 1467? some year-sounding number. whatever…beef noodle soup place near sanlitun in a modern renovated hutong-ish area…that was yum. we then hit up sanlitun for drinkies at miga, then kokomo til god knows when. both were rooftop bars, and if you ignore the buildings beyond, the english being spoken and the nyc drink prices could’ve led you to believe you were back in manhattan. kek.
SATURDAY | i slept in late, because i don’t even know what time i got back to my hotel. we met for brunch at vineyard in…some new-ish hutong area. i wandered around afterwards on my own, then met up with alice who’d just gotten in from tianjin…woot! den mother’s here to lead the way! we drove to the 798 art district and roamed for a good while, checking out the art galleries and still-derelict factory spaces. even if they say it’s undergoing gentrification, i still think it’s a cool area to wander about.
we headed back into beijing proper to the area just south of tianamen (as you’re noticing, i don’t have the slightest clue what any of the areas are called). alice dragged me through the alleyways to a small shop that serves the best donkey sandwich. donkey! yea i was a bit apprehensive about eating a donkey…but it tasted pretty good! we didn’t nosh too much as alice had another place in mind…beijing pot stickers! (all counted as ‘appetizers’ before dinner proper). yea those were yum also. we headed out of the hutong back to the newly demo’d and rebuilt area that looked like a chinkified disney main street. there was even a ‘taiwanland’ nearby that i’m told is not associated with taiwan at all (in a cultural-exchange thingy way that is). so weird. we took in some fancy drinkies at the capital m with sweet views northward toward the qian men gates. swanky.
we met up with dora and erick later for dinner…chuan’r? i think that’s what they’re called. lotsa yum skewers and a big spicy fish that wasn’t meant to be big and spicy, so they had to take it back, scrape off all the hot shit, and reapply with normal non-spicy shit. still delicious though.
SUNDAY | dora, erick, and the third partner effi had meetings on sunday, so i strolled thru sanlitun a bit on my own before having to duck out of the pouring rain. i headed back to the hotel when the rain didn’t let up and just spent the rest of the afternoon vegging in front of the television.
worth mentioning…hearing english names ‘translated’ into mandarin…funny. hearing danny devito ‘translated’ to beijing mandarin…disturbing.
i headed to the southern train station in the evening to catch my night train to shanghai. shanghai…woot!
SHANGHAI MONDAY | so it’s not just beijing people…it seems like a significant portion of the population are seriously deficient when it comes to social etiquette. cripes. i walked from the french concession to the bund looking for some place to cool off, because my ability to determine scale on a map seems to be deficient. that was a long fucking walk. i hit up everything i could inbetween though…the parks, taikang lu, and whatever else my little guide book could offer up. pretty.
hmm, this place is humid as balls.
i gave terence a call once i hit the bund, who actually offered up lunch…woot! i taxi’d over to meet terence for lunch at jing tai fung. shao long bao…yum yum, that place rocks. afterwards i dropped my things off at his apartment and took a bit of a nap as terence headed back to work.
after composing myself, i headed back out to check out xintiandi. when that place lost my interest, i subwayed over to pudong, since i didn’t really care for the alternative…the super duper sightseeing tunnel pink floyd laser light show. pudong…wow, what is this place? it’s just full of lights, gleaming new skyscrapers, and wide avenues. having a plethora of towers to scale, i chose the jin mao tower since it had the clearest view out towards shanghai proper, with the oriental pearl dildo tower in view also. the newer bottle opener tower was right behind the jin mao. up on the observation deck, you could look out to the humidity hovering over the city like a yellow blanket…frightening. you could also peer down to the lobby of the grand hyatt 25 floors below. fucking scary…
i spent the rest of the evening strolling about the waterside, watching the lit boats make their way up and down the huangpu river like a parade. later at night, terence took me out for yunnan food at lost heaven, then drinks at a bar where you had to find the secret switch to open the door. cheeky fucks.
ps: chatting briefly with our waitress at dinner, i learned the following: if you look chinese, but you tell them (in chinese) that your chinese isn’t so super, they probably think you’re mildly retarded.
TUESDAY | i spend the majority of my train ride back to beijing reading the engrish on the broadcast screen. i’m having a “delighted voyage“, making sure to “watch my belongs“. lulz. the station announcements are also all preceded by kung-fu music.
of note too…those annoying people you usually encounter on trains talking obnoxiously loud on their cells? that’s everybody on this train. fuck you all.
i got back to beijing in time for dinner, and proceeded to get a call from dora asking if i could swing by their studio to help a bit on their competition (due the next day). suffice to say…i spent the rest of the night cranking out a rendering. i can’t seem to escape renders…lulz! i didn’t mind though. it’s the least i could do for them showing me around beijing.
WEDNESDAY | we met up for lunch near chaowei soho, then i wandered south past the second ring towards fancy-pants department stores. a dust storm kicked up that day though…i hate eating sand. not cool. hmm, my journal entries ended here. ah right…we had peking duck later for dinner, then headed out for drinks at…some hidden pub at the workers stadium. dora and erick retired early since they were pooped, so effi, mitsu (effi’s friend) and i continued on to go clubbing til some ungodly hour. it sounded like a good idea until i found myself crawling home at 4am. it’s worth mentioning i had to catch my flight home thursday. derp!
CONCLUSION beijing is a weird city. it took me a week to process all of this, and i came to the conclusion that it’s not a fun city if you’re on your own and if you like to wander around aimlessly. because a car will hit you. all my fun derived from my friends taking me around (this is expected of course). but various cities are wandering aimless-friendly. london, tokyo, barcelona, etc are all fun to stroll thru and take in the sights. beijing…not so much. shanghai was though, if not for the face-melting heat and humidity.
would i go back to beijing? meh, maybe in another 10 years. shanghai though may need it’s own proper vacation.
since i haven’t found the time to sit down and doodle more pictures, i’ve taken to enhancing older illustrations that i was still fond of. take for instance uriel, which i’d done a while ago (we’re talking years), but my photoshop skills at the time lacked that bit of flourish. fast forward to now, my ps skills are where i’d like them to be, and i felt the urge to go back and give it the proper photoshop doodading it deserved. i think it’s now quite pretty actually…woot.
below are the original sketch, the first coloring pass from way back when (ugh), the initial v2 photoshop revision to spruce it up, and the spiffier v2.1 revision that i’m definitely happy with.
ps, i’ll get to the china post once june finally rolls around. otherwise i doubt i’d post anything else really for the month of june…
i found myself up this morning at an ungodly hour…not necessarily because i had something to look forward to doing (in fact, i just holed up in my apartment all day as not to assault my nose with outdoor pollen), but because i wanted to quickly jot down the exceedingly vivid dream i just had.
i’m in a cab going somewhere…the events prior to this are fuzzy (as if the dream really did just start with me in the cab). so i woke up in a cab where the driver, a girl, had taken a pitstop at their home(?). the taxi driver was actually accompanied by her cute friend who was riding shotgun. i suppose they needed to grab something? so we hung out for a bit at their apartment. it looked like brooklyn sort of…i assume anything not looking like manhattan is brooklyn. they lived on the 2nd floor of a building with a backyard and everything. it was raining out, and their apartment was cluttered with random things.
the girl (navigator) was cute, shoulder length hair, extremely fidgety, and liked to roll around in her underwear. she was becoming progressively undressed as we chatted, eventually just rolling around the couch naked (i’ll chalk that aspect up to my libido), but eventually settled into jammies. i even recall spotting her license? old yearbook? and caught her bday as 1985(?). odd detail…tho it’s good to know the dream-me is concerned with these things. as we’re about to head back out to the cab, the taxi driver heads down to the cab, but the friend is staying put. i forget something and run back in to grab it, chatting briefly with the cute girl. i’m about to head back out when she says that the back door leads to the taxi faster. so as she’s fiddling with the patio door out to the backyard, it crosses my mind to ask her for her number. and of course at that very moment i wake up.
beijing countdown…two days. word. and even now, i’m still trying to get decent directions to the goddamn hotel i booked. the homepage put a vague dot on its map, google has it in an adjacent city to the northeast, and now i’m relying on baidu to guesstimate where the hell the hotel is. currently the best guess is that plot of land under construction in the above image. i’ll find out soon enough i suppose. thankfully i’ll be traveling with my hiking bag…
its readily apparent that i don’t bother with current events often in my blog. it just doesnt have a place here. especially not terribly sad ones like the earthquakes and tsunamis in japan. heck, one of my friends was caught up in it (literally…she was in ishinomaki), and she in turn had friends who didnt make it out alive. but thats neither here nor there. what i would bother posting here are videos like this, that while a bit sad, are still gorgeous to watch.
in a semi-unrelated aside, we actually got to use the full-sized gundam in odaiba (now shizuoka) in a few of our renderings recently. ha!
