Saying Nothin’ but Thanks: Getting Back to Roots in the East Bay
Posted from: San Francisco, California
One Valentine’s Day in the nascent months of World War II, and not long after the opening of his flagship furniture store, young Sol Wiseman’s marriage to Bay Area debutante Elizabeth Wolfe was announced in the society pages of the Berkeley Gazette. Just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as the rest of the world was going to shit, he celebrated yet another blessing: the birth of his first-born son. His second son, my uncle Richard, followed two years later. (more…)
Chasing Specters: Ghost Hunting in Beijing and a Long, Slow Ascent
Wang Wei took me ghost-hunting last week, some famous haunt off of 3rd Ring Road, built and neglected by a Hong Kong developer. We weren’t supposed to be there. I know that anything’s a nightmare if you listen to it at the right pitch, but there was an honest-to-God dark stairwell with unmarked floors, and scrabbling hand prints, and flawless red spatters where I guess someone got really excited about their gaifan and made exit wounds on the wall in tomato sauce. And at the very top, a single light and a locked engine room door, behind which there are definitely Outer Gods holding court at the center of the universe. (more…)
Spring Comes Early: New Directions and Netflix Man Candy
A few months after the divorce was final, in the early days of January, I spent a couple nights watching back-to-back auto industry unveilings on Youtube. Maserati’s Alfieri at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show. The Lexus RC F in Detroit. Not because I know anything about cars. Rather, the existence of life on alien worlds trivializes our ant colony intrigues here on earth. (more…)
Typhoons in Taiwan: from the Da’An Tea Gardens to the Yongchun Hills
Posted from: Taipei, Taiwan
The national weather service tells me that Typhoon Chan-Hom is unlikely to make critical landfall near northern Taiwan, and will slam instead into the Shanghai coast. I stocked up at 7-11 anyway – water, salad, douganr, weird Haagen-Daas flavors – and now I wait for the storm warning to pass. (more…)
VOX 10th Anniversary: A Jaunt Down to Wuhan
Wuhan, China
I realized as I sat next to it with a bowl of reganmian that I’d never actually seen the Yangzi. It’s muddy. We were down in Wuhan for the 10th Anniversary of punk scene mainstay VOX Livehouse, co-founded by a close friend of mine who’s since moved on to greater things. We spent a day confirming that East Lake is, in fact, very large, and two nights holed up on VOX’s second floor balcony with a crew of Beijing music diehards and ne’er-do-wells. (more…)
Comparative Color Saturation in Chinese vs. Western App Interfaces
Sometimes you have one of those conversations that’s so full of new ideas, it pinballs around your head for days. I enjoyed one of those recently while interviewing a source at a Beijing-based mobile game localization company, a man responsible for reviewing non-Chinese mobile games and assessing whether or not they’re a good fit for China. We were talking entry-level stuff for him, I’m sure, but it was a new to me: the challenges of porting games to the Chinese market, the actuary tables for app vetting and what the criteria is for refusal, that kind of thing. I asked him about the common visual adjustments – color, animation style – that his company recommends developers make to their mobile games in order to better please the Chinese eye before a launch on the mainland. You know what he said?
“Bright colors are a must here and our localization team often increases the saturation on games where there’s too much visual neutrality. Games with darker palettes, too many grays, blacks or browns tend to do worse in the market.”
Jesus, really? A noticeable difference in market share based on app color values? I mean, I got the impression that the guy wasn’t using the word “saturation” in the Biblical design sense, rather as an expression of general vividness, but I wondered if that was a measurable fact. And if it was, how to measure it. Which is weird for me, because I don’t usually bother with measurements, I just eyeball a cup of flour and throw that shit in the oven.
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(I moved this post. Read the rest over at The Pixellary.)
In Cometh the Wood Goat: A Chinese New Year at Guanshuyuan
Posted from: Beijing
I’ve never really been able to capture Chinese New Year on camera. I’ve tried. But silly little SLRs don’t do continuity well, and it really is the continuity that’s so beautifully overwhelming. Imagine putting a hundred bags of popcorn in microwave, and imagine that some of the popcorn was actually thunder, and then imagine the explosions lasting for a week, until the noise became almost comforting, a low-level thread in the static that makes up your earspace. (more…)
Suddenly I’m Really Into Print: Concrete Flux Launches Issue 3 – Escapism
It’s been all digital with me for 18 years. Since I was 13, digital digital digital HTML internet, and then one day I’ve got InDesign open and I have this from-the-gut need to make things I can touch. I want someone to show me paper samples. I want to understand bindings. I want data sets to call the cops and complain, breathlessly, that I visualized them in ways they never dreamed. (more…)
The Devil’s Sweet Seat: Pamukkale & Antalya
In Turkey, there’s a mountain made of bone. It rises right out of the valley, a few dozen miles of grapes and dirt and then this out-of-place colossus. The guidebook said its color was due to a mineral spring heavy on the calcium deposits, but sweetie, please: those are the powered bones of the damned, and Pemukkale is the view from Lucifer’s living room. (more…)
Bosphorus Gluttony and Cannibal Penguins: First Tastes of Istanbul
Istanbul, Turkey
Everyone warned me this would happen. They told me over and over, and yeah, I was kind of excited, but I just didn’t understand. Pete, Lauren, My Khanh, Nancy: you were right. I don’t care about culture. I don’t care about hamams, or buying carpets, or hand-painted mosque tiling, or the stupid billowy Mediterranean breeze. Siege of Constantinople? Whatthefuckever. I just want to eat. (more…)