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ESWN has a story about “the Second WoW War,” where the First WoW War would be based about The Most Famous Pervert In China. It is, in short, a tale about a virgin maiden and her seduction at the hands of a powerful WoW guildmaster. The tale is told by the maiden’s elder brother on…

Continue readingSex Scandals & WoW (redux)

One of our first posts on Virtual China, and still one of the most popular, was on the homemade inventions of various farmers across China: boats, cars, subs, and so on.  There are also homemade airplanes out there.  Now it’s an amphibious vehicle, being reported via “China’s BoingBoing,” Postshow.

On…

Continue readingthe inventiveness of Chinese farmers Part Two

Talking about bridging language barriers, there is a really quick solution that I like to use for translating e.g. Chinese websites into English (of course I am still studying hard to learn the Chinese characters… but until then, I can cheat a little using this software 🙂

This solution is the translation application called Foxlingo; it is…

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K.M. Lawson at the multi-author China history blog Frog in a Well, provides a detailed tutorial on how to use Google Books to find open source historical material about China, and how to download texts in pdf format. Google Books allows you to do full-text searches of the books that are indexed already by Google, and apparently, to…

Continue readingGoogle Books + Chinese materials

I sometimes come across a Chinese character, often part of someone’s name or a place name, that I don’t know how to pronounce.  Here’s a handy character-to-Pinyin translation application, which is generously offered for free on a website called Ping Asian Imports.  They say that they get over 500 visitors a day using the service.

As many of us experience on a daily basis, the language barrier is an important part of the reason why the Internet appears divided up into different Internets – e.g. an English and a Chinese Internet.

A number of good translation software applications exist today. In the future translation software will definitely develop into levels that provide more accurate translations, easier to use…

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“Have you ever seen such a fancy government building?  Seeing the broad, stylish square in front of the Tai’An Municipal Government [in Shandong province], who would still dare to say that we Chinese are poor?!”

An example of what’s driving the Chinese economy: massive real estate projects intended to project power, respect, and wealth.  Apparently also a topic…

Continue readingon the BBS today: luxurious government buildings

Because I find myself in the business of tracking memes, I found this picture on the last page of a newly released American graphic novel called “American Born Chinese,” by Gene Luen Yang.

The rest of the page is blank, but the Backdorm Boys reference is clear.

ESWN translated a story that illustrates, for me, the speed at which digital content can go from private to full-on mainstream public in China.  It’s a significantly different understanding of the unspoken rules of Internet privacy, than in say, the U.S..  (Not that these rules aren’t constantly being rewritten: think of the recent Jason Fortuny “sexbaiting” story, in which he…

Continue readingalternative “rules of privacy” in Virtual China

Ge Jin, a Ph.D candidate in communications at UC San Diego, whose video clips on Chinese gold farmers and farm owners you might have seen on Youtube, has a full length documentary on the topic, called Gold Farmers.  Check out the film’s website.  It sounds amazing.  Gold farmers, for those readers who…

Continue readingGold Farmers documentary film