Peaceful Rise

"Save Energy, Protect the Environment"

As expected, I didn't last too long in my job at the state-owned enterprise, and now I'm back to watching episodes of DS9 on youku . As per Jackie's suggestion, I feel I should share some insights into the inner workings of the propaganda machine here, having now worked as a part of it, but really there's not much to say.  The long and the short of it that these people are all idiots.  I didn't find it much different from working in New Oriental.  There, our team of people, each person uniquely unsuited for their job, worked blindly to make a crappy product that would never sell.  And even though it was a private enterprise, my coworkers were concerned with censoring the content to make sure nothing remotely bad was said about anything, either in China or elsewhere. The SOE was just the same, except that it didn't matter if their products didn't sell, since they were government funded whether their products sold or not.  The only motivating factor for an...

I'm sorry I haven't been writing.  I think there's something wrong with my brain. Perhaps it's all the Chinese. The last time I was going to write was just after Christmas, when me and my friends all got detained overnight in a police station.  I got about halfway through a very detailed and winding narrative of the night when I became distracted and then forgot what happened. I think it's mostly that writing frustrates me.  My life could be portrayed so much more vividly and entertainingly in documentary format.  Particularly because so much of anything I want to write is inspired out of discontent, which comes off as whining self-pity.  If I had a videocamera on me at all times, then the tragicomedy of my existence in China could be fully appreciated. But since I don't, I'll try to keep this brief again. Let me begin by proudly introducing MomaDVD.com , Beijing's first online DVD rental service.  This was an idea that my friends Guy and Jeff ca...

Well it's been more than a month since I left my old company to its inevitable prolonged withering demise, and have since promptly lost all motivation to continue posting here. Despite my lack of creative impulse, things have been good.  I've been keeping afloat with a little bit of translating work for Greenpeace  (see the PDFs), which fills me with a warm glow of self-righteousness and makes pandas shed tears of joy.  I've also been doing a little research into the possibility of realizing my long held dream of opening a bagel shop (and investors, I think this is a great opportunity for you.  A low risk alternative to the U.S. financial system, I think).  I should be moving into a nice new apartment with the French guys where I'll finally have my own private bedroom at the end of this week, assuming the agent we're using is only acting like an infuriating cheating lowlife scumbag and is, in fact, not.  And I just bought a roundtrip train ...

Don't let the title fool you, I don't actually love my job. Nor have I seen Dr. Strangelove. Nevertheless, it's been such a long time and I wanted to write something about my job.  The reasons I haven't written about it for so long are a mixture of respect for whatever nondisclosure terms might have been lurking in my contract, a fear of seeming disrespectful or disloyal to any potential future employers who might grace the pages of this blog, and mostly, the fact that my company's website is so ridiculously awful and the content is so immensely stupid that it's not even worth the space on this page to point it out.  I was also somewhat concerned that a coworker would stumble upon my site and I would be in trouble, except that a) my coworkers can't really read English, and b) I kind of half want to get fired at this point.  So what merits this special occasion today?  Well, I just happen to be so numbed by the Olympics, the insipid circle-jerk of the ...

As I began work this morning, and dove into my daily task of figuring out how to procrastinate for eight and a half hours, I started, as usual, by reading through the China articles on the New York Times website.  The first article to fall across my screen was yet another monthly reminder by Jim Yardley of why, exactly, the Chinese Communist Party is still in power, because apparently we keep forgetting.  Either that, or we're just downright impatient.  The headline was: China's Communists, Resilient in Face of Change A few hours later I found that the page had refreshed itself, inexplicably bearing a new title: China's Leaders Are Resilient in Face of Change The second title is actually more fitting for the article itself, which is more informative and less colored than the first title would lead you to believe.  But I wonder what the explanation is for the title change.  Did it all of a sudden occur to some editor that "Oh yes, those pesky Communist...