This is my fourth lunar new years in China, and I really did try not to get so swept up in the revelry that photos fall by the wayside. I did manage a few pictures and some video, but along the way what I’ve found is that our camera is woefully inadequate to capture the Bladerunner dystopia that Beijing becomes during New Years week. Some choice selections:

Saturday

Appetizers at HuaJia YiYuan

What’s odd about this deer penis wine is not really that it exists at all, but rather that some of it’s missing from the bottle.

Charlie and Bekka at GuiJie (Ghost street)

The bowling alley at GongTi

The rabble

Picking songs at Coolth KTV (karaoke)

What happened after that last picture has been stricken from the record, but suffice to say it involved a very loud group chorus of House of the Rising Sun, and at least one song by the Spice Girls.

Sunday – New Years’ Eve

Off the subway – headed for the temple fair at Ditan park

Sign on the public bathroom at Ditan park. Glad we’re all finally getting honest with ourselves about the dangers of entering a public pisser here.

Bekka and I at Ditan park gate

The long slog into the park

Kyle pretended to pose for this so I could snap a shot of the true face of socialism: giddy officers carrying a giant teddy bear.

Crispety, crunchety and blessed by actual priests

Chinese temple fairs: exactly like the American fair in that the food looks scrumptious until four seconds after you eat it, at which point it becomes a solid ball of indigestible remorse

Look, culture.

I almost photoshopped in a bunch of cherry blossoms.

The cracking fireworks, going off intermittently for days now, start in earnest after nightfall. The air fills with the smell of cordite.

From the window at a house party:

Beijing becomes an industrial mass of surreal explosions

We run outside and join the fray

From ground level:

Every street is ankle-deep in red firework paper

During the last three days of 2011, my sole purpose in life was to wait for my furniture to arrive, while intermittently darting downstairs to buy basketfuls of vegetables and jian bing (chewy flatbread).

Yes, I was wildly excited about defeating the TaoBao ordering process by actually buying something, but it turns out that checkout is only half the fun. Now that I’ve got the hang of it, ordering is easy. Delivery, on the other hand, can apparently only happen when you’re at least two blocks away, slathered in massage oil, with two young spa attendants waving aromatic orange peels in your face, and it involves twelve successive phone calls from the freight driver, four calls from the property management office, two red stamps, three signatures, six lords a’leaping, and the personal heavenly blessing of the Jade Emperor himself.

After that exciting debacle, I figured that until my work desk was resting peacefully in the home office, the only safe excursion was to the local grocery, where I could sprint back home, carrots flying, in time to meet the delivery guy.

Chinese refrigerators are quite small, and kitchen cabinet space is at a premium. I recently learned this is because, up until a few decades ago, the traditional Chinese kitchen consisted of only a wok, a curved spoon, a giant cleaver and, depending on how traditional your kitchen was exactly, an old lady who thoroughly disapproves of your nutritional choices and wishes you’d eat more rhinoceros horn. Practically speaking, this makes the American dream of lurching through a grocery store once a week and returning home with a Mount Everest of noms (I call it Nom Everest) impractical, so Chinese tend to buy a bunch of spices and snacks, and then go to the store once daily for fresh vegetables, noodles and tofu.

Yes, the thought of buying your daily food supply in basket-sized batches sounds quaint, provincial and vaguely organic, but in practice, it’s an ever-present reminder that the human body is a disgusting sac of ravenous biomatter requiring constant sacrificial fuel.

The tedium of the endless trips is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I’ve always loved grocery stores. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because as long as I’m still shopping, there still exists the possibility that I might end up with ice cream. Or maybe because, during any trip to a Chinese grocer’s, I can actually hear David Attenborough’s voice when I stand next to the deli case. In any event, I find the whole process vaguely comforting. Or rather, I did. The happy complacency was shattered shortly after I saw this:

LOL, I thought, Spicy Duck Tablets. I whipped out my phone to take a picture. Click.

Within less than 10 seconds of the shutter snap, a bald man in his mid 30′s with a huge, dripping splatter of what appeared to be blue hair dye drying on his scalp materialized next to me, and an audible hush settled over the aisle. “You can’t take pictures in here,” he said. I froze, my synapses firing hysterically while my brain Googled “it’s cool, you’ve seen this before”. No search results returned. Why would a bald man dye his non-hair? I thought, paralyzed by weirdness. And once he started dying it, why would he not distribute said dye evenly across his scalp? Did he come to work like that, or did he do that here? Is he a grocery store enforcer?  Had he been watching me from some kind of surveillance room? Why can’t I take pictures of food packaging? Somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, autopilot engaged.  “Oh, okay,” I mumbled, and wandered off towards the frozen dumplings in a daze.

I spent the rest of the day trying to construct a plausible sequence of events that led up to that moment.  The best I could do was that maybe he was cleaning up an exploded package of dye in the storeroom when his apprentice enforcer burst in and breathlessly reported, “there’s a foreigner taking pictures of the duck tablets – gogogo!”, at which time he used his standard issue teleporter to deconstruct himself at the cellular level and reassemble in the snack aisle next to me. Guess I’ll never know. What I do know is that, after the incident, I was too paranoid to take a picture of the large snack bag reading simply “PASTE”.

Aaaanyway, everyone here is gearing up for Chinese New Years (Jan 23rd), and my friends and I have made plans to shoot off fireworks on the ice at HouHai between bouts of Magic: the Gathering. I’ve tried on several occasions to explain the pandemonium that is Chinese New Years, but I think the best I’ve ever managed is, “Dude, you don’t even know”. Gregg comes to my rescue here by reminding me that fireworks stands sell child-sized backpacks full of sparklers and rockets so that, come New Year eve, every toddler turns into a sugared-up kamikaze armed with explosives.

Here’s hoping for a fire-breathing Year of the Dragon.

My political platform typically consists of the word “Meh”. I like to pat myself on the back for being too pessimistic to believe in anything except individual human responsibility. Governments shall rise and fall, shit shall happen, life shall go on. But the more I hear about SOPA and the Protect IP act, the more I sense my withered inner activist shaking off the coils of eternal slumber.

If you’ve never heard of SOPA or Protect IP, here’s the skinny:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Sad thing is, I think it’s only a matter of time before a bill like SOPA or Protect IP is passed. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll happen when some unfortunate event occurs that opportunistic legislators can use to make everyone who opposes the bill look bad. The comments section of a website will spark a celebrity suicide, or some kid will download a pirated slasher movie and kill his parents or whatever. Name your tragedy. “We have to do something,” legislators will bluster, and they’ll set about happily paving the road to hell. What’s really kind of amazing is that it hasn’t happened sooner.

So yeah, I think it’s inevitable. But I’m not willing to see it pass without at a hefty dose of public ire.

What is happening in the U.S. right now is vastly egregious. A body of people who can’t answer the question “what is DNS?” are toying with the idea of making fundamental changes to the core operating basis of the net, changes that would effect everyone, every day, in ways that, if you’re a nerd, should certainly scare the crap out of you. If you’re not a nerd, try this on for size: the people responsible for building and approving the IRS website want the power to decide what should and shouldn’t be available online.

And now a quick break for this message by your congresspeople:

Look, legislators, nobody is blaming you guys for not reading the whole bill or doing your research. A) the internet is complicated, b) the Appalachian Trail is really lovely this time of year and c) most bills are thicker than the Wheel of Time series, and God knows when I got to page 5000 of that, it was like, “Call me when Rand picks a girlfriend and let me know how the final battle goes, mmkay?” But here’s the summary: This one is over your head, let it go.

Truth is, Washington, I’m tempted not to give two fucks what you do. Beijing has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into a similar scheme, they have a rumored staff of 50,000 working round-the-clock to stamp out and track down any offenders, and yet it took me 45 minutes to set up a permanent path around the blockade. Most people know how to, as it’s called here, “climb the wall”.

So good luck with that. It will take your 10-year-olds approximately seven seconds to figure out how to create or log onto a distributed darknet and download or share whatever pirated media they want. You will still be paying $1000 a ticket to attend conferences about the exciting new world of social networking. By the time you hear about said darknets – or whatever alternative work-around everyone’s using – and whip the tut-tutting mothers of America into a tizzy of terror about them, everyone I care about will be communicating through telepathic bio implants. In the meantime, you’ll continue to flail around in increasing frustration as you throw untold amounts of money at turning site administrators into criminals, and making technology that much more of a pain in the asshole to use for only those Americans who don’t understand it – including yourselves.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

So, on one hand, your little regulatory commissions are kind of sad. But this isn’t about my ability to figure out how to ignore you. This is about my clients, who want to build their businesses by using their own websites as platforms for open communication, without being afraid of some lawsuit-hungry psycho with an internet connection. And this is about you taking all those good intentions and sinking them into a solution that doesn’t do more harm than good, instead of kissing special interest RIAA butt.

The internet, in its current lightly regulated state, is preciousssss to me. It’s the only wonder of the world that anyone can take a chisel to, participate in, and make their own. Yes, it comes with risks, copyright infringement, and really gross porn. But if you take the one, you take the other. Sorry – that’s how the First Amendment works.

Scarily, the right course of action here is the one thing that makes legislators feel powerless and grumpy, which is to do nothing. The solution is to do nothing. Quietly and without ruckus check the “veto” box, and then refuse to entertain even the suggestion of altering the fundamental ways we share information. Tell the RIAA to stop whining for government intervention and change their business model to fit the modern world like everyone else. Do not create a consolation-prize type bill that says basically the same thing as SOPA, but is called something else. Do not become politically skittish in the face of some horrible accident. Just do what a good government is supposed to do, which is facilitate smooth trade, increase the quality of life for your citizens, and foster innovation and peace.

But if you must legislate about something tech-related, why don’t you talk about allocating some funds for state governments to conduct and implement usability studies on their DMV websites. That’s something Americans could get behind.

Everyone else, if you’d care to tell your representatives to back off, you can do it here: http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

I spent the better part of Christmas Eve morning sitting in an empty concession stand outside of Solana shopping center waiting for the two very confused young ladies behind the counter to figure out how to bake a pizza slice.

“Why does this oven have so many knobs?” whispered one to the other, loudly.

“How should I know? No, turn it that way. The OTHER way. Why do foreigners use these things? Hey, maybe the customer knows.”

“Ask her.”

“YOU ask her.”

At long last, my garden slice was shoved across the counter, topped with – oh joy – crunchy cucumber and partially-frozen corn.

The pizza stand shared the space with what I can only infer is a coffee shop called “Yikes! The Spot.”, not to be confused with more famous establishments “Crap! A blemish.” and “Uh oh! My period.” I considered ordering a coffee or a “Mike tea with yam currant cereal” but taking into account the speed at which the pizza was produced, I figured the next twelve years of my young life would be better spent elsewhere.

Had I been in any kind of a hurry, I might have been frustrated at the wait, but after yesterday’s mega death match with TaoBao, China’s hottest online shopping portal, and its standing army of Chinese online payment interfaces, staring off into space is about all the heavy mental lifting I can handle today.

Yesterday started out rather pleasantly. I stuck my head into a local bookstore. Bought a set of speakers for some Christmas movie magic. And I girded my girly loins for a long sit-in at Industrial Commercial Bank of China.

Despite the invariable multi-hour wait to speak to a teller, I like ICBC. You can pay your water, electrical and gas bill in one go (just bring in the receipt that the billing people tape to your door), their checking accounts are totally free, and you can’t toss a crab apple without hitting a branch office. So, daydreaming about never having to haul a single piece of furniture home from IKEA ever again, I figured I’d do the rest of my apartment shopping on TaoBao.com. For that, I needed a Chinese bank account.

The tellers were patient. I filled out forms. I filled out the same forms again. I nodded a lot and said “yup” a lot and a lot of people fussed over my foreign ID.  It all seemed rather straightforward, really. And just as things were wrapping up smoothly, the bank teller handed me this:

“Don’t let anyone else use it,” she said. If she had been wearing glasses, she would have looked at me balefully over the top of them.

“What is it?”

“You plug it into the computer. Com-PU-ter.”

“Yeah, the USB gave that away, but…”

“NEXT!”

So home I went to give the Mysterious Device a whirl. I plugged it in, and a big “ICBC” logo flashed on my monitor. And then nothing happened. I pushed some buttons. Poked it. Still nothing. “Meh,” I thought, pitching it off the side of the couch, and promptly forgot it existed. To the TaoBao mobile!

Okay, so I’d never navigated Chinese ecommerce.  But how hard could it be, really? Find something rad, add to cart, enter bank card information, rejoice. A few hours of poking around, and I found a pretty awesome coffee table. Added to cart, confirmed order, and prepared to pay online.

Pay online. Such small words for such a far-flung circle of hell.

What happened over the next seven hours can only be described as “doing battle”, and at this moment I’m not 100% certain whether I ordered a coffee table or authorized the Chinese mafia to launder money through my bank account. At hour two, I began to hallucinate new browser windows.  At hour four, I started to wonder if the Chinese had actualized an alternative system of economics under which people exchange pure liquid rage for goods and services. At hour four point three, I cried. And at hour seven, emotionally depleted and twitching a little, I gave up.

I had registered for online banking. I had set up some kind of IE-only browser-based-but-you-have-to-download-and-install-it application called “Banking @ Home”. I installed “security drivers”, whatever those are. I made passwords for AliPay, China’s Paypal equivalent. I made passwords for TaoBao. I tried direct bank transfer, but couldn’t figure out what info they wanted from me. I tried putting in my card number, but the form validator wouldn’t accept my foreign passport as a valid ID.  I gave half the Chinese internet my bank card number. I stared at, and gave up on, a screen called “Pay by pre-paid voucher”. I made up secret security questions and secret answers. At one point I had five programs open, and they all seemed to be telling each other juicy secrets, but none of them seemed to be helping me pay for my coffee table. I pushed next. Next. Next. Next. But nothing worked. The big red X is truly universal.

And suddenly, just as a disembodied fatherly voice told me to fall into the white light, I sat bolt upright, scrounged around under the couch, and dug out the Mysterious Device. I stared at it. It stared back at me. I plugged it in again. I tried to check out one more time. “Enter password for your USB key.” I tried one. It worked. “Click OK twice on your USB key to finalize your order.” I pushed “OK” twice on the Mysterious Device. And magically, miraculously: “Payment succeeded! Congratulations.”

Immediately, I received a private message from the coffee table manufacturer. “Thank you for your perseverance.”

“How do you know I was ‘persevering‘?” I wanted to scream. “I could have been taking a very relaxing bath.”

Despite the traumatic checkout process, the TaoBao “finding and buying stuff” experience is actually totally amazing, and uniquely Chinese. Like eBay, anything and everything you could ever want you can buy cheaply. But like any good Chinese shop, no price you see online is the final sale price. You put your desired item in your cart, you confirm your commitment to buying it, and then the seller usually contacts you right away (or you can contact them) and you can haggle over chat, after which they modify the price in your basket before you finalize your purchase. Thanks to this “promise to buy it and then hash out the details” method, you can also get all kinds of crazy custom items factory-direct. I just bought a ginormous custom-cut living room rug from a carpet manufacturer in TianJin for about $150.00 – shipping included.

Successful transactions in capitalism: the true meaning of Christmas. Angels are singing.

Happy Holidays to all.

In my final days in South Carolina, faced with an empty house and no internet, I actually bought a jigsaw puzzle. The analog kind, with actual pieces you can actually lose. And on our very last night, myself and a nameless collective of miscreants wrote a note about the origins of Blue Stalin on a paper plate  – the last plant-based writing surface we hadn’t packed yet – stuffed it inside his hollow, hollow head, and left him in a bed of leaves in an undisclosed location.

I had forgotten how much of travel is waiting. The good traveler knows how to make waiting bearable. Waiting for the dryer to finish the last load of laundry so you can finish packing. For the shuttle to come. For the plane to take off, and immediately thereafter, for the plane to land. For the jetlag to wear off, for it to be early enough to fall asleep or late enough to get out of bed. But the waiting’s over. We’re in Beijing, finally, finally.

On our second morning here, Kyle and I stumbled out of our hotel into the dry, crackling cold and found a sticky-bun restaurant that smelled like pee, chestnuts and bland corn porridge, 50 cents for three buns. I ordered the ones with vegetarian filling. “WE. DON’T. HAVE. ANY. OF. THOSE.” the shop owner bellowed at the dumb foreigner, waving her hands dramatically. Four waitresses clustered behind the counter, staring inscrutably. I almost cried with joy: I’m home.

This has no bearing whatsoever on my move, but when I see someone who knows and loves their craft well, it’s like they’ve reached some kind of nirvana and they become mesmerizing to watch. The dumpling baker was only about twenty with a smooth impish face, and he probably makes a few dollars a day. But he sang village songs with twinkling eyes, a huge smile and a ready voice, and his singing filled the whole kitchen as his flying hands transferred baozi from rack to oven three at a time in perfect rows. He stopped just long enough to fix me with a blazing grin and shake my hand below the serving window. What’s his secret, I wonder?

My secret is a smartphone. Considering that nothing in this country – nothing at all – can happen without a mobile device, that was my first order of business. Even website registration for services like WeiBo (China’s answer to Twitter) or TaoBao (China’s answer to eBay) is often verified by text messasge. The iPhone sales lady in Apple’s SanLiTun location smiled at me pleasantly. “Sure, you can buy one. You have to go online after 10:00p.m., go to a special url, and try to make a reservation. If you manage to do so successfully [erm...?], you might be able to come back tomorrow and pick it up.” Not sure if that “path of most resistance” sales procedure is a response to in-store theft or some kind of inventory management technique, but I went next door and bought a Droid. Just outside the glass doors of the Apple store, a dozen or so men brazenly stand around offering boxes of pirated iPhone 4s to passersby. Mall security loiters a few meters away, disinterested.

The last few frantic days have mostly consisted of procedural t-crossing and i-dotting. Apartment hunting was a blur of staring at real estate agents’ backs as we walked over and over and over the same two square miles. “Hah,” they all said, “You might have found a place for that price a few years ago, but now? No way.” We ended up with a nice, but slightly smaller and vastly more expensive than we wanted, two-bedroom near SiHui subway, on the eastern edge of the city. The bathrooms are lovely. The floors are heated from beneath. Our neighborhood is pretty great. That’s all I wanted, really.

Even in such a short time, it’s clear that things have changed here. The Beijing I remember – where gaggles of pudgy, shirtless old men playing mahjong dominated the residential districts and women walked their dogs in pajamas – is being crowded out by frenetic modernization. No one seems to be hawking and spitting as often or as loudly as they used to. Housing prices have doubled. Traffic is twice as bad, if such a thing is conceivable, and taxis are twice as hard to come by. By government decree, there are now ‘no smoking’ signs in every restaurant, which seems to mean that people are free to go on gleefully smoking inside as usual, but now chuck their cigarette butts on the floor for lack of an ashtray. The dive bar where I met Kyle has been gutted, just one more empty husk of industrial rubble in a soon-to-be decimated alley squeezed between the flagship Adidas store and a new luxury mall.

But still, I keep stumbling on bright flashes of that more familiar Beijing in the little corners that development passed over. The beverage aisle in the local grocery carries a mysterious brand of soft drink, which they courteously translated into English as “XJPT SPMQG DPFFF.” Fruit sellers and steamed dumpling vendors gather around the subway entrances. From our sixteenth floor window, we can see the coal trains passing by on the tracks beside our building.

And then there are the things that have always been and will always be part of China. The winters here are so dry your lips harden and start to crack within hours of arrival, and no amount of water or chapstick will save you. Taxi drivers are as ornery as they’ve always been. And cultivating good guanxi in your apartment complex is a matter of necessity.

Apartment life here is like accepting a new family.  If you insist on privacy, if you expect professionalism or perfection rather than warmth and good spirit, if you demand that the kid who installs the cable makes an appointment before showing up, or if you make a stink about punctuality, customer service, or plumbing problems, you will quickly become irrevocably and universally hated. Workplaces here are like brotherhoods, and gossip travels with otherworldly speed: when you make an enemy of one cleaning lady, you can be certain that the electricians four complexes over have heard all about the rude foreigner in building #3. And when your Chinese property management team doesn’t like you, all the tiny, invisible moving parts that propel your life smoothly forward immediately begin to break down. It’s like instant and observable karma. Mysterious fees appear on your bills.  The guards won’t let your friends into the building without you coming down to fetch them (they tell you it’s “policy”). You can’t get blown fuses fixed. You’re always last on every waiting list. Your questions are answered in monosyllables. I’ve been down that road, it’s exhausting and unrewarding and littered with my undelivered mail.

All it really takes to get anything done here is to skip the getting-to-know you part of human relationships and treat everyone on staff like a long-lost brother. Bring cookies and American cigarettes. Accept happily that no one will do what they said they would when they said they would (it’s not personal), understand that whatever can go wrong will, and welcome any visitor from the building staff warmly at any hour, and suddenly there are a hundred people who will bend heaven and earth to make your life a little easier. This is the Chinese concept of guanxi in action, the almost formulaic creation of personal connections and favor-trading that, much more so than money, make the Chinese world go ’round.

I used to hate guanxi. To an American, it feels like vastly unfair favoritism and blatant bribery. In our culture, we expect to be treated like valued customers in every dealing with service and industry, regardless of our behavior or personality. An American sees and feels a distinct line between personal and professional relationships, personal and professional behavior. In China, these lines are indistinct. But I’m coming to understand guanxi as a form of community building. It makes vast sense that a newcomer should quickly show their colors and the community should quickly fold them in, particularly in a place like China, where the collective supports and protects the individual, especially when bureaucracy and government can and do so often fail in that regard.

And similarly deep-rooted Chinese attitudes seem to remain intact.

On our way to the mandated health examination (where we saw a contraption mysteriously labeled ‘reverse vending machine’. I can only assume that you give it soda and it gives you money.), our taxi driver informed me with strong undertones of disapproval that Obama has yet to issue formal condolences to North Korea on the death of Kim Jong Il. He also seemed to consider it a shame China hadn’t been involved in a major war in a while. “We’re out of practice,” he said, shaking is head, and then, “Oh well, leave government things to the government. We ‘old hundred names’ can only mind our own problems.”

This old-hundred-name can agree with that last bit, at least.

I thought about that comment far longer than I’m sure Rusty intended. I examined everything I own with a new eye, wondering “Being a minimalist and all, do I really need this?”.  But when, during the early stages of packing up the house for my upcoming move, I found my plastic silver cat amputee ashtray with inbuilt fan (more on that exciting development below), I decided that, no, minimalism is probably not an ism I have any claim to.

I do, however, structure my existence around moving a lot, making regular clutter enemas a necessity. My moving-to-a-new-country methodology tends to involve throwing everything I own on the side of the road and then ignoring that anything unusual is happening until a mean lady with immaculate hair makes me turn off my electronic devices. Conversely, Kyle lovingly removes each item from its place,  pets it, tell stories about it, showers with it, writes it a sonnet, and then refuses to leave without it – an approach that brings me face to face with, well… Behold, artifacts of my minimalist lifestyle:

Exhibit A: Silver mechanical plastic ashtray lucky amputee cat

I never really sorted out if the red knobby thing was supposed to be a bloody arm stump, or if he is holding a strip of his own living skin in his other paw, but yes, it came like that. The best part is that when you open the stomach to stub out your cig, an internal “air-clearing” fan is activated, emitting a whirring sound from deep within the cat’s bowels. Whrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Exhibit B: Shaolin Dodecahedron Banhammer

To gaze upon the banhammer with mortal eyes is to know Mjölnir for the flimsy puff of sissypants weakness it is. Eat it, Thor. And also forum trolls. Actually, this is an old Shaolin training hammer that got incorporated into a Dungeon Master costume last Halloween (no, really). Mystery solved.

Exhibit C: Astrolabe

I know sextants are the new thing, but I really can’t sext my way out of a paper bag.

Exhibit D: Chinese Teacher’s Day ‘Thank You’ card

No, little Suzie. Thank you.

Exhibit E: Chinese Fighter Pilot Helmet

I don’t know what kind of girl chooses diamonds over a dual-panel faceguard, but whoever she is, she’s not sexually active.

Exhibit F: Zombie Survival Kit + Holy Oil and a vial of hallowed ground from Jerusalem

Insurance shimsurance. All the major eventualities are covered: zombie outbreak, vampire attack, and finding out I’m an immortal and need a portable place to hide from a sword fight with the Kurgan (there can be only 0ne).

Exhibit G: Blue Stalin

Because fact is stranger than fiction: One spring day about four years ago, Kyle and I ended up on the nearly-abandoned campus of a small Beijing art college. Thirsty and cranky, we poked around for, and finally found, a snack shop. Just next door, behind a slatted plastic curtain, we found the student supply store. And because we were feeling whimsical, we bought a white plaster bust of Stalin – which we were told was not actually Stalin, but whatever – and some paint. Blue Stalin was the best tie rack ever, and when it came time to leave Beijing, we couldn’t bear to part with him. He spent 8 months in the cargo hold of a transatlantic ship, and was finally delivered here, to my door, in South Carolina. And here he will stay. Look for Blue Stalin in a public park near you.

I was just recently asked to design an ecommerce icon set for Smashing Magazine and after a several week long row with Photoshop during which I threatened to set its ruler states to “picas” and leave them that way forever, it’s finally done.

Doing design work for Smashing is terrifying in the way that asking Stephen Hawking to review your long division would be terrifying. You’d hand in your sad little equation, worn thin from your eraser, and pray only for the intelligence to understand all the myriad, cryptic ways in which he’s going to pity you.

Similarly, there are so many killer designers in the Smashing community that every time I go check out the work they’re showcasing I have to get out my drool vacuum just to keep the keyboard dry.

So I sat down to do the best icon set that has ever been created in the history of the entire universe and I ended up with a retro-bubblegum-Swiss-popart set with curled corners that I’m (obviously) rather hard-pressed to describe, and which couldn’t match my personality any less if it was wearing clown shoes and a Flat Earth Society t-shirt. “This set,” I think, “will represent my work to all the people I admire.” And I lay awake and imagine the comments section filling up with “Pfff, these don’t even have kerned laser-aligned ratio layers!”

When you have to Google the basis of someone’s derision before you can form a retort, you’ve already lost.

Anyway, while I’d love to show you the complete set, I don’t wanna steal Smashing’s thunder, so a small teaser will have to do:

No idea when it’s supposed to publish. You’ll probably know before I do.

The most amazing thing about creating an icon set is the carpal-inducing amount of zooming-in required to fiddle with the details. The smaller design gets, the more important the details become. Just in the last year or so, I learned about the dramatic difference in sharpness you get when snapping edges to a pixel grid. And creating an icon at, say, 24×24, every single miniscule pixel has to sit in perfect alignment, or it rebels in the way that chameleons rebel – by partially disappearing. You can see a mis-aligned right edge and top edge on this icon close-up:

And when the edge is correctly aligned:

For a dog’s age, I’d been under the impression that the minimum distance you can expand or contract any Photoshop shape is 1 pixel. Technically, this is so – but you can still free-transform the edge of a shape so that it stops between 1 pixel and another on the pixel grid. In order to deal with this, Photoshop doesn’t hard-cut the edges of the shape (by default, anyway) – it makes the offending edge semi-transparent, and therefore, a little blurry. This has something to do with Aliasing and Anti-Aliasing, I understand, and I also understand you can turn various knobs in Photoshop to make your edges edge and your aliases ali, but suffice to say I ended up manually edging all my work, in all five sizes.

The truth is that, to me, aligning to pixel grid is like shaving my legs every day, which is to say, if someone’s already zoomed so far up in my bidness that they’re stroking my calf stubble, chances are good that events will manage to move themselves forward, dull edges or no. And since many of my layout elements will be rendered as CSS, it usually doesn’t make much of a difference. With icons, though, it matters. It really does. Behold at actual size:

Other lessons learned: If you’re using wording on your icons, test your font at the smallest icon size before you begin design. Because certain fonts – and I’m not naming any names here – but certain fonts make “RSS” look like “ASS” at 32×32.

I remember the first time I landed in China. Almost 10 years ago now, I stepped off the plane in Changchun airport to the sounds of construction and the mewling of oxcarts. “Dude,” I thought, “oxcarts”. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

The outskirts of Changchun were brown and arid, and like every Chinese city of a certain size and  proximity to the Gobi, the city had a little traffic roundabout with a small CCP plinth in the middle. The guy who came to meet me was not so much excited at the prospect of picking me up as he was about the fact that the excursion put him right next to one of the province’s only KFC’s. We had to climb over a small mountain of rubble to get to the door. He ate a lot of wings.

“This place is in pieces,” I thought. And I didn’t get what was so great about KFC for another 4 months.

My first year, after the harvest, I sat on the wall at YeHe castle and watched the farmers burn the chaff on the fields, hundreds of tiny fires like holes in the universe. To be fair, YeHe was really only half a castle – a re-built model of a real fortress that used to sit there. The new wall didn’t encircle the whole compound – it seemed to get depressive after hugging a couple of doors and just petered out – and the lake below was filled with toxic fish, goat shit and abandoned children’s shoes. It was a gathering spot for the rural Chinese tourists on day trips up from SiPing city. But myself and the other students from the academy lived right next to it for a good 10 or so months, and it was our playground. Weekend BB gun wars, and firefly swarms in summer. Sometime around then, I realized that if I could spend my life surrounded by surreal experiences, it’d be a life well lived.

I had some wild times in Jilin Province, but the the real home of my heart is Beijing. I went and read some of my old travel posts from 2004, during my second stint in China, and it seems that though I was a young lass of 21, I realized then through a fog of roasting sweet potato smoke that Beijing is where my soul belongs. Somehow, in the intervening years, I forgot that. I’ve now remembered. So, I’m going to make a life there, and I’m taking The Pixellary with me. Before the end of the year, I’ll be moving back to Beijing. I really ought to think about packing.

At dawn on the fifth day, look to the East.

Dear Nabisco / whichever multi-tentacled overlord conglomerate company owns your delicious Ritz cracker brand at the moment:

It’s rare that I get so excited about cracker packaging, but your new Ritz Fresh Stacks (tee em) have given me a new lease on consumption.

Everyone has their little quirks when it comes to food.  Some people hate pecans. Some people are sexually attracted to breaded chicken wings. And I have a tumultuous relationship with snack boxes.

See also: buying ice cream at the grocery store makes me hysterical. The thing is (and bear with me, because this really does come back around to crackers), I despise re-frozen ice-cream and freezer burn. If I met freezer burn in 18th-century France, I’d challenge it to a duel immediately. It’s just that I’m uncomfortably aware that as soon as my popsicle packages leave the chilly embrace of their temperature-controlled storage shelves, the deathmatch with physics begins, and until I get home and put them away, I can’t concentrate on anything except the fact that my popsicles are melting. I try to act calm about it in the store, but my maternal popsicle-nurturing instincts consume me completely.

I shake my tiny fist at thee, biology. I shake my tiny, tiny fist.

I have similar anxiety issues when I open a new box of crackers. See, when I want some crackers, I only want a handful of crackers, and I only want a handful of crackers about twice a week. But with the exception of Hitler, freezer burn and failing a perception check during a dungeon crawl, nothing in the multiverse is worse than a stale cracker. So every time I eyeball a fresh new box of crackers in my snack cabinet, I have to weigh the strength of my desire for crackers against my reluctance to waste whatever I won’t eat. Maybe this time, I think to myself, I’ll feel like eating them all.

Eventually, my willpower collapses, or I convince myself that I’m hungry enough to eat like a real American, and I take the sodium-laced plunge. And sure enough, as soon as I eat a handful, I feel like I might as well just throw the rest away, because I know the next time I come back to the snack cabinet, I’ll be coming back to a tangled holocaust of less-than-crispy food. And that gets me thinking about starving kids in third-world countries, and the fact that the remaining caloric energy in the cracker box would feed like, two hungry children for two days, and I wonder why no one has started an international aid organization that makes daily rounds collecting snacks that suburban America knows it isn’t going to finish and airlifts them overnight to Africa. And then I wonder if African children would hate me more for throwing away a barely-touched box of perfectly good nosh, or for forcing myself to eat the rest even though I’m not really hungry anymore.

Eating crackers has since become such a downward spiral of guilt and recklessness that I’d given up on the whole thing.

So imagine my joy at seeing, way down there on the bottom shelf at Publix, Ritz Fresh Stacks, a scrumptious bundle of single-serving hatchling cracker packages.  I just finished eating one, and I don’t even feel a little bit weird about it, because the rest of the crackers are still in individual air-sealed papooses.

Thank you Nabisco / tentacled conglomerate. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

If you asked my friends to describe my temperament, you’d be unlikely to hear, “cleaves to the heavenly bosom of the divine” or “spends hours in quiet contemplation of the spiritual”, and more likely to hear, “is really too stuck on the ‘that’s what she said’ thing” and “should stop eating after the second helping but doesn’t”.

And okay, so I get up at noon on Sunday. But hey, my MUD character goes on holy quests for arcane artifacts and mana potions several times a month, thankyouverymuch. And I have been known to positively crusade for cookies. So imagine my surprise at learning that, according to Google’s Secondary Connections list, it turns out I’m connected by a distance of only ONE PERSON to a smorgasbord of ACTUAL PRIESTS. Picture proof of my consummate holitude after the jump.

Want to see your own secondary connections?

1. Log into your Google account, if you have one.
2. Click here: http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social?hl=en
3. Scroll past the “Direct Connections” until you hit “Secondary Connections”.
4. Freak the hell out.

Secondary connections, for those of you who weren’t aware that the internet is cataloging your every misstep and embarrassing drinkasode, is a running list of almost everyone that your friends chat with, follow on Twitter, and email, all handily alphabetized in your Google account. While everyone loves a taking a little stalky peek into everyone else’s social circles, we also must remember that when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. And occasionally, the abyss tries to friend us on facebook.

And the abyss also ruins years of carefully not telling my husband my ex-boyfriend’s last name. Fuck you, abyss.

I don’t really mind the idea of secondary connections. I’m a member of the connected generation, and I accept the idea of “Privacy Invasion by Default” as an inevitability, as long as I can opt out. But I can’t. Neither, Google account holder, can you.

In my heart of hearts, I know that Google’s baby steps towards total, boundary-less interconnection are utterly unavoidable. I know that the world is hurtling headlong into an era of uncomfortable openness. I know that in 50 years, the kiddies are going to laugh so hard at my antiquated notions of “privacy”, they’ll pee themselves and drop their ice cream sandwiches. I know I can’t stop any of this, and secretly, the thought of living with intertubes hardwired into my brain gives me the good shivers. But I’m just not ready yet.

So, knowing full well that this statement has been thrown back in Google’s face enough times to make it lackluster and impotent, I say it again: “What happened to ‘do no evil’?” Please, Google, give me an opt-out.

So what else is up this week?

Reveled in the exciting launch of Visual.ly – I love infographics – they’re the romance language of the universe. If you were conducting Spice trade negotiations with the Harkonnens, you’d use math. But if you were, say, making passes at a Klendathu female warrior bug, you’d have a better chance of getting some with a textured minimalist chart on the evolution of carapace attractiveness. This week saw the launch of hot infographic gallery and inspiration site Visual.ly. Inter-species Don Juans rejoice.

Axureland.com gains some traction – Also filed under “cool new gallery sites” is Axureland, a well-presented collection of widget libraries for Information Architecture and prototyping tool Axure. Axureland is the adorable brainchild of Vim Interactive.

Saw a good show - Two hats off to Dylan Thomas & The Over Easy Breakfast Machines, one for ensuring they’ll have the number one search engine result for their band name for ever and ever for the rest of eternity, and two for an awesome live show.