The most boring job in the world

On my trip to Shanghai in January this year, I found that China government blocked Wretch--the biggest web community in Taiwan. It's like censoring the whole Blogger.com! The same fate has happened on almost all the pictures on the Internet with titles like "bikini," "underwear," "thigh," or "swimsuit." The government not only trample the freedom of speech, they also deprive the pleasure of of every healthy man.

My friend from China tells me that China government hires thousands of people as Internet police task force. Their everyday job is to search keywords relating to contents that might "destablilize China's society and immoralize its citizens." I think they have the most boring job in the world.

Internet police force is a new form of security forces. These people are the reflection of their narcissistic boss. "The security forces ensure that the leader retains his celebrity, and in return the leader empowers the security forces (who often consist of young men from the countryside) to do whatever they want to the population at large," as James M. Curtis writes in "Why World History Needs McLuhan." But China's Internet police forces are no country bumpkins; they are a band of techno-savvy geeks who show Chinese people that everything is still under their control, even on the Internet.

I might work in China in the future, so writing this topic might jeopardize my future career. However, I believe that blogs will bring more accurate pictures of truth than the mainstream media, especially in China, where the mass media are manipulated by the government. Blocking blogs is unbearable.

The feeling of the unpredictable future

Something has happened. Is it just my pessimism? Or maybe its the malfunction of my sensorium. Surfing the Internet seems like a form of escapism. What's waiting for us is our unrecognizable face. We lie to ourselves that everything will be the same. But the future is just another word for end.

Enjoy your life.

Why monsters all love New York City?

I see Cloverfield today. To be honest, I am quit disappointed. The main reason is that the movement of characters and the cuts of each shot are too gratuitous. It is like the characters (including the monster) act for the camera so that it can catch their every action. Not to mention about the cuts. Their timing is too perfact. For more peculiar details in Cloverfield, please see the film review in The New Yorker.

This movie brings me to a question: Why the setting of disastrous movies is always in New York City? I found the answer on my trip to Shanghai when I looked down from an airplane and saw the glamorous New York City. You only have to imagine you are a monster, and you desperately want to find some place to destroy. You wouldn't like prairies or forests, for they have nothing to crush. This place must be the representation of modern civilization with millions of toys--buildings, cars, people, etc. Then the answer of my question is clear. Only when you imagine yourself as a monster will you know why monsters all love New York City.

girl, F train, memory

Subway is a wonderful place for me to observe human faces. This is a girl I saw on F train today. I didn't want to take out a camera and take her pictures, so I kept her image in my head. On the paper, I can recreate the image. My memory, therefore, is preserved on the paper, and because of this painting, my memory exists.

Image, girl, and ink

This is a practice of ink painting. She is not any particular girl I know, although I do use someone's image in my brain (not picture) to draw her.

I seldom put water colors and black ink together. The result is not bad. The problem is the shape of human face. It's....strange. I used to draw asian girl. Maybe that's the reason why I feel the face is a little weird. Or, I should start practising sketch.

A lesson from drawing a script

I shot my video project on last Friday. Spending almost two hours in embellishment of script is really unnecessary. In the night before the filming day, I redrew half of my story. Then the problems emerged. There is no space for me to put more shots on the script! This gives me a lesson. Script doesn't have to be well-drawn or immaculate; the most important thing in writing a script is to leave more space, so one can change it when he or she has a better idea. That's also a lesson about life.

We shouldn't worry too much about not having rich parents or a degree from Ivy school. What we should worry about is that we don't devote ourselves to our jobs, and never willing to become a better person. Too often, we just fill our lives with worthless stuff, and forget to leave more "space" for change.

Clinton's ad versus Obama's ad

Monica Langley and Amy Chozick, reporters of The Wall Street Journal, wrote that after Clinton had lost eight straight primaries in a week, her campaign strategies Mark Penn yelled at ad-maker Mandy Grunwald: "Your ad doesn't work…the execution is all wrong." Ms. Grunwald fired back by saying, "Oh, it's always the ad, never the message."

Let's compare the TV advertisements of Clinton and Obama. Remember the first feeling when you see these ads. Is there any huge difference between them?





Well, if somebody said the TV ads make Clinton lose and Obama win, I suggest they type "Clinton ad" and "Obama ad" on YouTube to see what they can find. One can find a lot of cool Obama girl's ads, and also a lot of cool anti-Hillary ads. It is not about the message of the TV ads produced by the candidates. It is about how people can make their own ads for their candidates.

What is sex appeal in advertising strategy? This is it!

I was majored in advertising in my undergraduate school. Even though I have changed my major to media studies in grad school, I still love to see every kind of ads.

This is the most wackiest ads I've ever seen for a soft drink. Strong sex appeal.While there might be thousands of audiences using this ads for masturbation, I wonder a few would bother to remember the product's name.

Delegates

"What is delegate? Who are these people? What roles do they play in the primary elections?" My Asian friends often asked me these questions. I also ask the same questions to myself. For a foreign student, the existence of delegates seems so bizarre. In most Asian countries, the winner is the one who has the highest votes—just that simple. But in America, the winner is the one who has the most delegates, even thought he or she might have fewer votes than other candidates.

Everyone can check Wikipedia about the job of delegates. Here, I want to emphasize their role in the primary elections. As I just said, the winner who has the most delegates in the primary elections becomes the party's nominee for the presidential election. How to count the number of delegates for each candidate? It is extremely complex, especially for the Democratic Party. For the Republican Party, winner gets all the delegates. But for the Democrats' delegate-allocation system (my professor said this is the "democratic way," not "Democrats' way"), which awards votes based on how well each candidate did statewide and in each congressional district, the delegate count might need several days.



According to Time magazine, Clinton and Obama each needs at least 2,025 delegates to win nomination. And now everyone is talking about superdelegates. Who are these people? Well, these guys are the "unpledged delegates" who can ignore the preferences of Democratic voters and decide the nominee by themselves. Because Obama and Clinton now each has 600 to 800 delegates, the final winner might be decided by that 796 superdelegates, not by voters.


It is not just Democrats' nightmare, but democracy's nightmare.

The greatest fear of foreign students

This is the scrip for a two-minutes video project--about what we foreign students fear most. I will change it when I have a better idea. The video will be posted on this blog soon.

The duel

For people around the world, the competition between Democrat's two superstar candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—is beyond the issues of global politics. It's not just that Americans can have the first African-American and the first women president; it shows the world that now it is really the 21st century—when people's leadership will no longer be restrained by their races and genders (you can check out more interesting articles about the 2008 campaign on my professor Paul Levinson's blog).

Either of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would make history if nominated. But the idea of having them both as running mate might be a dream, for their styles are too different—one with inspiration to inspire the masses and one with delicate technique to fix the problems.

Well, it's far too early to know whether Obama and Clinton could work together. For now, the fight between Obama and Clinton is just like reading the duel of Miyamoto Musashi (宮本武藏) and Yoshioka Seijuro (吉岡清十郎) in Inoue Takehiko's comics. Musashi is a young, energetic swordman with unique style of swordsmanship that makes his moves unpredictable. Seijiruo is an experienced, well-trained martial artist with outstanding tactics and strategies in fighting. They locked in a tight fight, and a little inadvertence can cost both of their lives.

Everyone, hold your breath and don't blink your eyes in watching this duel.

Words as Pictures

The word "man" in Chinese ideogram is "人," which is also part of my Chinese name 朱澤人. While most people think "人" comes from the image of a man standing with two legs spreading apart (this word is quite neutral, as you can see there is no additional "leg"), I think the image should be a man sitting astride (who would stand like that?).

Chinese writing has gone through thousand years of abstraction, and it is now much closer to the alphabet than it is to oral communication. But in some of its characters, one can still see the words are the pictures, as in 人.

As Leonard Shlain wrote in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, "Content supersedes form in the West; form is an in dispensable adjunct to content in the East. One must be artistic to write Chinese well." For a person who used to think in pictures, Chinese ideogram might be more easy to read than alphabet. For example, some of my friends call me "two-legs man," for that image can be easily formed when looking at my name.

I've got a lot of awful nicknames because of "人". But one can see himself in his name. That's not bad!