State of Things

It has been weeks, since something big happened inside China. President Xi has finally gotten hold of what he always wants, indisputable, unstoppable power upon China. This move has essentially wiped clean 100 years of struggle of my people. Yet all I can hear is silence. It is as if all Chinese has become blind and deaf. Life, goes on.
This silence in fact happens much earlier.
Right after Xi took power, he effectively destroyed objective media, newspapers, TV stations, internet outlets, even independent writers and intellectuals. Then he built a stronger internet censorship machine, upon human censors, AIs, willingly cooperative domestic internet ISPs and companies. After that, he used corruption as an excuse to punish those within the party who might be trouble to whatever he was planning. People love to see lawless display of state power against those who profit from political connections. It was all planned out and executed like a precise battle plan. And most of us has waken up into a nightmare and realized this has been his plan all along.
Now it is quite hopeless to be honest. There is no one politically strong enough to challenge Xi, both within and outside the party. Critics have been warned, jailed or lost his or her voice or platform. Advances in AI and data mining have silenced the rest of my people, there is nothing the state does not know. Your private chat massages, your location histories, your online presents, even your shopping history. Xi must love reading 1984. It is worse than soviet union. Under both psychological and realistic pressures, my people just shut up. Let's be honest most people just don't care anymore. As long as things go as usual. Do things go as usual?
Mostly yes.
As long as economy goes well, as long as housing market keeps going, as long as people can still live and breath under reasonable conditions, yes, things will go as usual. But will it last?
Not necessarily.
Concentrated power does not always yield reasonable decisions. In fact, it mostly yields bad decisions. Because no one can criticize, no bad news, no bad data. The system can not fix itself without right data. It may be alright at the moment, but what about under stress, what about another recession?
It has never been so easy to inter change information in the history of human race. Yet it has never been so hard and dangerous to criticize in China in like 50 years. Without some healthy amount of negative feedback, the system would inevitably fail. After all from what we can see, Xi has never been as smart as Putin. Putin knows his people, Xi just silence them.
So what does it mean for us, people who still live in China and have a life here. I have little hope. Under current toxic environment, I can see little hope. It is after all against party's agenda to politically educate people. People has no desire to learn how to govern themselves. I can see generations of suffering before people can have a voice, before a healthy political system can rise from ashes.
After all, what other communist countries ends up like? Do we, the Chinese are so different from North Korea, or soviet union? Not likely.
But hey, it's golden times, to get rich on politically connections, on corruptions and other disgusting means. There is no doubt about that. As long as you can bear the look of yourself in the mirror, or think long and hard in history perspective. But I guess they are of no problems, we are always nihilistic anyways.

America As A Concept

Just watched Obama farewell speech. After the election I have paid little interest in drama of American politics. Partly because I am living in China where democracy is not of the top priority. Partly because of the disappointment i felt towards the result. Watching the speech hardly helps at all. But that's not the point for tonight.

It's the concept of America as a country. Countries are defined by lines drawn on the map, by people. Countries are held together by various means. Most of them by race, color of the skin, by religion, by tribal traditions. Look at China for example, most Chinese are of Han, and those who are not are rapidly converted into Han's way of life. In time of need, China can always use race as a way to incite patriotism, in order to hold the country together. Most countries on earth behave similar way.

While America, ideally, is a different story. Ideally America is held together by a concept, a notion, that no matter where people come from, what God they worship, people will work together to build a new and a better system to help themselves. Patriotism for Americans should really be to protect such concept from harm. That's why America could be so diverse and still works. That's why different people would live and work together under a single banner of America. This never has happened before in history. To build something better on a grand scale or just for one self, is the ultimate concept of America, of success and now challenges ahead.

This is the political experiment that really matters.

posted from Bloggeroid

Rocky Week

This has been some week!

Have to fight my way out through some shit that, honestly I don't want to have anything to do with anyways.

But in the end the week ends with a nice overtune and hopefully things would get better with time.



Chinese new year is about to happen and it's getting festive everywhere. I have got my ticket back home and my brother in law is back from Australia. Talked with him once and he sounded serious. I don't know what happened up there making him all serious but hey, we will see.

I want to write about battery issues this year and batteries in general. I just can't find the right time to sit down for a solid hour to finish it. Hope this weekend I can manage some time!

posted from Bloggeroid

Cashless Living In China

Recently I have tried to go cashless for some time, for no particular reasons at all. Well maybe it was because I was on a business trip and carrying a bulging wallet from place to place wasn't exactly a safe practice. I can only keep my eye on certain amount of things, like my plane ticket, my phone, and my bag and that's about all. I can't just go around still thinking about that wallet in some pocket of mine. So I buried my wallet somewhere in my bag. From that day on for about a month I never actually had more than 50 Yuan in my pocket. And I can say I have had no problem at all living, both on the road and at home.

This shouldn't be a surprise to most of the people around me through. Most people living in the city like I do, have at least an IM app called Wechat installed on their phone. Some shops or supermarkets or KFC also support an app called Alipay.

In Wechat, people can bind one or several bank cards to their account. When paying someone or some shop all people have to do is to open Wechat and scan a QR code the receipt is showing, you just have to type several digits and the transaction is complete. The money would go from the bank card to the recipient's Wechat account. And the transaction goes instantly.  Because almost everyone nowadays has a Wechat account, and has Wechat app installed on their phone, paying with Wechat is really the most common way to live cashlessly. I have used Wechat to pay taxi, food, supermarkets and so on. I think I can do just about anything with Wechat.

Alipay is similar but not all the same. Alipay is not a IM app, it is solely used as a payment app for Taobao, which is the largest online shopping platform in China, maybe in the world. Users of this shopping platform don't need to go anywhere. Anything that a human would need I dare say he or she can buy from Taobao. At first Alipay was just a payment service for Taobao, after a while, Alipay started to grow in functions, like buying plane tickets, paying mobile phone bills, utility bills and so on. Most major supermarkets and shops support paying with Alipay. Personally I have used Alipay for my phone bills utility bills and even steam games.

Now I have about 10 Yuan in my wallet and it has been like this for over 10 days. I don't really feel the need to withdraw any cash from my bank.

There are concerns as well. I know these private companies would very much love to know where and when I pay for what. These kinds of information are priceless and they would love to pay a little bit just to gather that info. And the state is looking into using these info for other purposes that I am not so comfortable with. Cash as a payment method is anonymous. And there is no other way more anonymous than using cash. I understand them all. But, living like this is really fantastic and futuristic as well. I can't just live under a stone. Can I?

Google DNS Unstable For My ISP And I Think Something Is Going On

For some time I have been using Goolge’s DNS servers, i.e. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and they are working fine. The reason behind this is the DNS advertisements going on in China, and the other reason is, I really don’t feel that good, knowing my ISP actively pushing its own DNS to all my devices connected to its network. When I say actively I really mean it, like every 5-10 minutes. On PC it’s really simple just set a specific DNS and that’s all, the same is for my router. But on Android devices, DNS can be set for WIFI but not for 4G or any mobile connections, unless you have root access.
I don’t know know the exact reason behind pushing so hard for those DNS servers, but as a rule of thumb I really don’t trust any of them. Let’s say the worst case could be, by pushing those DNS servers to all my devices, almost all my internet connections would have to go through those ISP DNS servers first. Those ISPs have all my personal information and can link my IP address to me personally without any problems. If they keep a record of all my DNS requests, they would have a almost complete metadata of my daily internet usage.
If metadata collection in those so called democracy countries is scary, and within China is downright dangerous for people like me.
But from what I can see, Google DNS is no longer a stable option for my concern. For several times a day maybe more, all 2 Google DNS services would be down for 5 minutes more or less. It’s not my internet is down, no. Pinging those 2 DNS servers shows the servers are still up and running. It’s just the DNS packets are somehow not making it.

This makes me nervous. I have seen how the GFW over the years blocking Google’s search results while Google search was still not completely blocked. The GFW would disconnect users’ connection to Google once in a while, creating a user experience that Google search was not stable, not usable, so that users of Google would have to turn to other domestic search engines. After a while when almost nobody was still using Google, the GFW blocked it completely and almost nobody noticed. When news came out saying Google was “blocked” the state media would say its services were never stable and other BS, internet users would agree because they knew no better. This tactics was so successful that I am afraid they are using it again, but this time aiming at DNS services.
What they want is in fact data. Over the past several years I think Chinese gov has been trying to gather as much data as possible and trying really hard to figure out a way to use all these data. I don’t believe they have made much progress in how to use the data but having them and keeping them are certainly disturbing enough.
Anyways, I would have to figure out a way to deal with it. Like many times before.

A Bad Year For Me Too

2016 was a bad year for me too.

I wasn't planning to write anything down for the year of 2016 because, I thought this form of thinking useless at best. Who would read this after, like, a month? And who would remember anything after 2 weeks? So what's the point?

But I just don't want to be wasting my experiences, disappointments of the whole year just because my point of view. Well, let's face it, it's the holidays and I got too much time to kill. Damn these holidays, if only I got to work over time.

Anyways, for 2016, it was hard for me as well.

For a whole year I have been working on one major project or, one major product, with my colleague, under some stressing conditions, and was able to pull something out in the end. The process, the whole thing was not that easy. Everything has to be done from the ground up, from literally zero. Although I enjoyed the process of actually had made something useful out of something plain, and the results were nice enough for me to sit back and relax for a bit, it was still hard. I don't know if I still have what it takes to do it again, if chance rises.

After October most of my time I spent on trips to various places and some of the situations were just not for me. Before that I never actually took planes to anywhere. I was a train guy before all that. But flied like 20 thousand kilometers before the end of the year. I really missed the days and nights of my own place, while staying at some unnamed hotel.

All those work coming to the end of the year I found myself stuck in a situation that, couldn't be solved with my chemistry skills. I spent days and nights thinking about ways to get better, sometimes thinking about how to fuck someone I know up so that I won't be dragged down with. It's really uncomfortable and just not within my abilities. And the stuff is still going on.

After this year of hard work, I think to me, proves that I have the ability it takes to do what I want to do. And this year also helps me realize what I really want in life, what kind of work that suits me, and what kind of balance of work and life I have in mind. But also this year and maybe the year after, shows that sometimes even if you know what you want, you are not going to get it. Even if you do, it won't be long.

posted from Bloggeroid

Lost In Translation

There is a mobile music game I have been playing for years. Honestly I have never thought myself to a mobile music game player, but after watching my girlfriend playing it for half an hour years ago I thought to myself: hey it looked fun! And it is. And over the years I have tried a lot of similar games on different platforms and this one is still the best for me. Oh BTW it's called Rythem Master and in case you never heard of it outside China don't blame yourself, I will do some explaining why later. But a recently past ridiculous ruling in China completely ruins the game for me.

It's a simple rule indeed, imposed by some part of the government I never knew exist or care to know, forces all mobile games operated within China to use Chinese and English and other languages should not appear. The logic behind this is puzzling and its effectiveness doubtable but, for the game I care, BS happens.

As you may or may not know, music games involve music. Great number of them. And most pieces of the best music in this Rythem Master game are foreign. After the ruling came out there is an update to the app. All the music titles and names of the artists are *machine translated into Chinese.*

( To be fair I don't know for a fact they are machine translated but from the quality of the translations it certainly seems plausible. And, one step further, I can hardly blame the devs behind the scenes, they are coders, not English/Korean/Japanese to Chinese translators! Poor quality is within expectations for some small time game like this)

With this update because of the need of "Chinesification" some of the best features for pro gamers are broken. Boy I was pissed.

To be fair the devs know this, and they are in no position to fight a ridiculous ruling past by a mono party famous for suppression of oppositions. As for the ruling itself I think there is something more to it. For years the Chinese gov has been pushing for so called "soft power". It probably finally noticed the fact that Chinese people are more fond of cultural products of foreign origin. It's not like that we as a nation dislikes our culture. It's simply that our similar products are laughable at best. That's where those old man sitting up there decides to do something about it. Forcing Chinese into mobile games is not the best of ideas. But forcing music titles and artists names translated into Chinese is just plain stupid.

I remember some remarks by an American friend, he said China is boring, wherevet you go it's the same. The same people, same language same dressing same way of life. Yeah. He is right. And it is the ultimate goal of the ruling party. By imposing a rule like this would certainly help. And ruining a game, and looking dumb in the process, it's acceptable loses.

And for the fact that this game, Rythem Master is hardly heard of else where? Well there is never an English version of the game. Login needs a working QQ/Wechat account which most foreigners cares nothing about, and payment system relies on services that are China only. But I think the most likely reason is, most of the music within the game has no copyright, the game pays nothing to the artists or music labels. That's why once in a while a music within the game would change its name, or its cover art or replaced by a live version. But still, best mobile music game out there😅

posted from Bloggeroid