China

I lived in China for a little over 2 years until February 2019. I left when my job was put on hold because of the “Wuhan Virus.” I decided to take a trip to Africa to see how many countries I could see until the whole thing blew over. It turns out that you can see 3 countries and then you go into lock down for half a year, it never blows over, and the virus becomes a pandemic. But that’s another story; maybe I’ll blog it as S for South Africa I posted a little about it here.

China is a big country, just 2% shy of the size of the United States (where I’m from), but with almost 11/2 billion people living in it compared to the the 1/3 billion1 population of my country. And there is some disagreement about what “China” actually is. Without getting too political, The People’s Republic of China as it is currently known, has some disagreement with the rest of the world as to what is and isn’t part of it. The word China itself is a word given to it by the West. Some say it’s not a country, it’s a people.

All this is to say that any generalization about China will be wrong. But I am going to do it anyway. What follows is my very opinionated view of China.

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my Brother’s BBS

#AtoZChallenge 2022 letter

This is a story I like to tell because it gives me a little hacker cred.

When I was a kid, my older brother set up a BBS called The Arena. My “handle” was Thy Gladiator. Why was it “thy” instead of “the?” Because I thought it made me seem cool and smart for some reason. My brother was The Metallic Hawk. A much cooler name.

This is the Atari 1200XL, the model that we used to host our BBS
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What should you eat?

This is the first in a series of post that I plan on putting up on a my new site Shut The Fuck Up And… self help for people who are sick of bullshit.

What should you eat? I got a simple one-word answer for you:

Yup! That’s it. Eat plants. Study after study shows that a plant-based diet helps you live longer and helps with a lot of the common shit we all have to deal with as humans. Diabetes, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stress – the list is long. Surprisingly, it can even un-fuck some of the damage you’ve already done to yourself. Bonus: It’s good for the environment.

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The Mask Aid Project

I have been working on a new project called the Mask Reborn Box. It was my friend Kalimov’s idea because he wanted to do something to help with the pandemic. He asked me for some English translation (he’s Chinese) and I have become the CEO of the company. I’ve helped with marketing and we’ve done a few hackathons.

We’ve already built a prototype and we’re looking for 100 first followers to buy one for $100 each so we can have our first run. We attempted a Kickstarter, but they denied us, so we went to Indigogo. We couldn’t get traction on Indigogo because it was my first time trying to do a crowdsourcing campaign, but we learned a lot.

The working prototype of the Mask Reborn Box

The box is awesome and works really well. We just have to figure out marketing. I’m the marketing guy for the project, so I’m kind of taking a crash course in it. Wish me luck!

Story of my book – rough draft

I am taking a class called the Storytelling Workshop from Seth Godin. This is the story I came up with for the class assignment. It’s my first time telling it, so it’s a little rough. The assignment specified not to read from a script, so I deviated from it pretty hard. I may rewrite it based on what I recorded. Below the video is the original story I wrote.

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A year in China

A map of the USA superimposed over a map of China
China is bigger than USA, but not by as much as you might think

Reflections on 2018

I met someone on this year’s Hacker Trip to China and I’ve been sharing with her over chat messages what I’ve been up to. She suggested I document what I’m doing because I do a lot of strange things. It reminded me that ‘oh yeah, I have a blog.’ Looks like the last time I posted was over 2 years ago.

I really don’t know where to post stuff these days. For a while, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have sort of been my public face, but they get shittier and shittier each year and so full advertising that they have become practically unusable. Also, they are a pain in the ass to get to from China because the government blocks them. So maybe, here is where I need to post this stuff. On my own site, in WordPress.

So here goes. After a year in China, I have a lot of experiences to tell. Keep your eyes on this space.

My interesting life

My company asked me to write a bio to send out and share to everyone’s email. Thought I’d share this with you guys.

I like to say that I am an artist, rock star, and geek by passion, a teacher, coder, and writer by trade. Not the perfect elevator pitch, but I’m working on it. Over the years, I have accrued a large variety of technical and creative experience.

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