The Journey is the Goal

Today I went around Beijing to do a number of things, among them:

• buy pillow slips
• buy table runners
• heal a nation
• check out micro SD cards

I managed to complete only two of the above, thus rendering my excursion relatively futile. For those interested, I managed to buy the pillow slips and discover that I couldn’t find the micro SD card I was interested in; but as I shuffled around the city, I got to complaining about how everything around me was wrong (which I suspect is a symptom of living in a crowded society).

It’s easier to point the finger at other people here, whether rightly or otherwise, and lament their lack of social consciousness. In a less crowded environment, we’re more likely to point our fingers at institutions or structures that we believe aren’t functioning properly and thus make our lives harder. Anyhow, thinking about this, usually with rhetoric like ‘people who board the train before letting others on should be shot’, ‘people who smoke in crowded areas should be shot’ and so on and so forth, it inevitably makes me wonder about what a world would be like if such criteria were met.

Ahem, that isn’t to say that I actually think all these various miscreants should be executed; I don’t think a society in which such people are produced should utilise such barbaric means to enforce its ‘developing’ criteria; but were such a society to exist, what would it be like? How could it come about?

Ideally, the only way it can come about humanely is for the city to determine the population, rather than the reverse as has been the story of human civilization. For the city to come before the population, it’s ‘beacon’, that is, the things that draws people to the city, must be capitalized and monopolized on. I’d like to think that everyone would want to go to the city because ‘everything just works’ there, but that seems like a fairly unrealistic and unsustainable expectation, so there must be some other resource that attracts people there initially. Later on, the everything-works idea can be relied upon to draw people, but in its early stages, it wouldn’t be sensible.

Now, in the early stages of this new city, if a resource has been identified and dominated, the next stage is for the company in charge of this initiative to engineer the rules that will govern the workforce that will seed this city. This is where the necessary ideals for this new city can be established and, not only that, be followed all thanks to operation of the company. Instead of a loose idea of a social contract, the citizens of the budding society would have the rigid guidelines of their actual contract; the breaching of which can thus see that person removed (exiled) from the company city.

This is all well and good in the beginning. I keep referring to this company as a city, but in truth, it would be more like a town (if that) than anything else, but it’s the only humane way I can see that a society can be built on certain ideas without infringing on the rights of those who don’t agree with those ideas. At first, the market would be the motivating force that would draw people to this place in exchange for their ‘rights’ to rampant individualism to the detriment of their peers and society as a whole. So long as that strain of consensus remains throughout the development of the city, it would add a dynamic that isn’t regarded as fair in cities today.

Well, all of this is merely a castle in the sky; but it’s good food for thought.

I have just interrupted my game of Ultimate Ghosts ‘N Goblins, after having played Diablo on my PSP, to write on my blog. I think my experience with UGNG played a large role in prompting me to write here. I remember playing Ghouls and Ghosts on my Sega Master System, or was it my Mega Drive, back in the day. As I recall, it was the most frustrating game I’d ever played, but it had this wonderfully cheesy aspect to it that made it sadistically satisfying. Well, thankfully the youth of today can have the same experience I got when I was young by playing UGNG on their PSPs.

To give you some idea how frustrating UGNG is:

For those of us who grew up with the consoles of yesteryear, we all remember starting our platformer games with nothing but 3 lives. We would then travel through a hotizontal 2D environment collecting points, resources, rings, coins or children who say ‘thank you Michael’ before being forced to confront a boss at the end of the level. Often, if we were attacked or were hurt in some way, we would lose a power up, health or something else. When our health reached zero, we would lose a life and be forced to restart at the start of the level or at the last ’save point’ we passed.

In UGNG, when you start the game on ‘Novice’ your character runs onto the screen wielding javelins. A glance to the bottom left hand corner will reveal that your champion does not, in fact, have three lives, but somewhere between half and one dozen lives. You die after you are hit twice unless you survive long enough to pick up suits of armour or, I suspect, a shield. Thankfully, you respawn where you died.
Anyhow, needless to say, by the time I reached the first boss, I’d already died 3-4 times and had accepted that the only way I was going to be number one at this game was if I played it endlessly for hours at a time. The sort of activity only a 5-year-old would have the patience and time for.

Prior to playing UGNG, I was, like I said, playing Diablo on PSP. Now, I remember Diablo from back in the day. For those who are unenlightened, Diablo was the game that preceded Diablo 2, that tedious game that consisted of mouse-clicking, item acquisition and Mephistocide. Now, I found Diablo 2 a boring game, so boring in fact that it wasn’t until about 6 years after it was released that I actually got around to finishing it, and even then, only with the help of a dearth of games on the computer I was playing it on. This is distinguished from Diablo on PC, which I picked up about a year after it was released for about $5 from a garage sale, and finished soon after. If I recall correctly, it was a terrible game. Playing it on the PSP, though, it seems a lot better. Firstly, there’s autoaim, so you don’t need to worry about accuracy when firing bows or spells. Secondly, there double-speed which means that time in the game passes two times faster than it did on PC. With these in place, I find playing Diablo on PSP not all that bad. Hopefully it’ll get better as I play more.

Actually, I’m not sure where I am going with this post. I guess I just want to talk about the games I’ve been playing.

I recently finished Civilization 2, by which I mean I owned Civilization 2. If I can defeat the game on the highest difficulty against the most opponents in the largest world and triumph, the game is done and done. From this, I then moved onto Alpha Centauri which is very similar while being different at the same time. It almost feels like after having made Civilization 2, the designers thought ‘look, we can do this and this and this now, if only it made any sense in the context of civilization. I know! In the future on another world, anything goes, so lets set it there!’ And so Clinical Immortality was born.

Well, I’m going to leave it there. Bored of writing now. Need to find new games to play. Only 4 more days until Fallout 3 comes out, possibly 14 more months until I have a computer that can run it.

At present I don’t have an MP3 player. I have been using my DS as an MP3 player and, while it performs admirably, it is not the best device for this function. Two days ago I was paid and so now I’m looking for ways to spend my newfound wealth. High on the list of things I want to buy is an MP3 player, however while I have been looking around online at what my options are, it’s very easy to get distracted. I’m not too fussed about how much this MP3 player costs as, so long as the device meets all my criteria, it will just be a one-off purchase (although I certainly hope it will be covered by a warranty).

While looking at MP3 players, my biggest problem has been… well… the numerous distractions that seem to be bundled with them. There has been a big push in recent years for ‘integration’, that is, having all the functions you want bundled into one device; however I have found that this movement tends to ignore two big problems. The first has to do with battery-life, that is, if your device can perform a lot of functions - and you use it for all these functions - when the battery of the device runs out you will lose all of those functions. The second has to do with irreconcilable differences between what you want from each function. For example, if you want a portable MP3 player, you probably want it to be small so you can hang it around your neck or clip it onto something. If you want a portable video player, you probably want it to have a big screen and to have a fairly large capacity so you can store a fair number of movies on it. No matter which way you look at it, if these are the things you are looking for in each of the functions you want to take advantage of, they just can’t be combined into one device.

Turning to my present MP3 player escapade, I have looked at a few sites and almost all of them advertise a wide range of MP3 players, but they all do the same things. All of them can play music and video and display text and photos. Some of them support playlists, have external card support (usually SD, miniSD or microSD), support video input/output or can run a wide range of video and codecs. After looking at all these MP3 players for a few hours, it dawned on me that I really ought to compose a list of the things that are most important to me in choosing an MP3 player. Here is what I arrived at.

Essential:

• Can play MP3 and OGG
• Small (can hang around neck or can be worn conveniently)
• At least 4GB
• Playlist support
• Shuffle support
• Can be locked/unlocked
• Drag-and-drop support
• Single-hand operation
• Blind operation

Other attractive features:

• SD card expansion
• Microphone
• Text-display

If the MP3 player I buy has all of the above features, I would be happy, but I am increasingly concerned that this might be harder to find than it seems. A few of these features are not even mentioned in many of the reviews I have looked at. I imagine playlist support and drag-and-drop support are difficult features to reconcile, but in all the reviews I have looked at, these issues are not looked at in any great detail. Similarly blind/single-hand operation is very important to me as, living in China, I frequently find myself on very crowded trains or buses; one hand is usually holding onto the handrail and I’m lucky if I can even bring my other hand to my face much less while it is holding my MP3 player.

For the remainder of today I will likely continue my search for a suitable MP3 player and maybe tomorrow I will go out to one of the electronics shops to see what they have on offer. I’m particularly interested in finding out what MP3 players other people have and whether or not they meet my criteria.

Last night as I was lying in bed thinking all the dota I’d played during the day - I’ve been playing DOTA AI for lack of a suitable online environment in which to play in - and was thinking about, firstly, what makes it fun and, secondly, why it isn’t on the DS. For the sake of logic, I will look at the second of these points first as that weighs upon my mind more and the first point inevitably flows into the second.

For those who are unaware, DOTA DS does exist. DOTA DS is, as the name implies, DOTA which you can play on your DS. I don’t know if it has multiplayer support or not, to be honest, I didn’t get that far. For those who haven’t played it, rest assured it is an affliction you needn’t subject yourself to. I enjoy playing DOTA and so when I heard about DOTA DS, I thought it would be awesome; but the experience of playing DOTA DS I imagine was similar to that of those who saw Star Wars Episode I after the long break following the previous Star Wars film. That said, this inevitably led me to ask the question, why is DOTA DS so awful? There are a few reasons for this not limited to:

• There are only about 5 heroes to choose from
• The sprites used in game mostly came from Warcraft 2
• The controls were clunky
• The game freezes after a few minutes
• The controls were not intuitive

In brief, it was ugly, hard to play and very unstable; however, were these issues dealt with, would the game still be enjoyable? There is one thing I will say about DOTA DS to its benefit and that is that it is a fairly decent port of the Warcraft 1, 2, 3 interface, by which I mean, I think it would have been hard to make that interface any better given the restraints of the console. It is herein that I would like to try and resolve the gap between what makes a game like DOTA good and the strengths and limitations of the DS as a console. To do this we must ask ourselves what makes DOTA DOTA and what makes it fun?

For those that are unaware - if you’ve read this far, you’re most likely not unaware - DOTA is a Warcraft 3 map in which up to 10 players are split onto two teams of 5 players each. Each player controls a unique hero and the goal is to destroy your opponents’ base which is situated at the other end of the map. In addition to this, each team has one computer controlled player (not included in the 5) which controls all the various buildings as well as its own units (referred to as creeps) that endlessly spawn at the base every minute or so and march towards the enemy base in an effort to destroy it. Inevitably these creeps come into contact with the enemy team’s creeps and they fight. It is usually in this environment in which your hero tries to push back the enemy’s creeps to allow yours to triumph or, as is more often the case, you focus on eliminating the enemy’s heroes to make it harder for them to defend themselves. As the game progresses, your heroes gain experience which is used to allow them to gain levels hence making your heroes stronger and more able. In addition to experience, for killing units, whether they be enemy heroes or creeps, players gain money which can then be used to purchase equipment for your hero. The game is over when your team destroy’s the enemy’s base (although there are different modes in the game which allow you to change the victory conditions). This is, essentially, what DOTA is. The experience itself can be somewhat different and, most certainly, it’s rare that any two games are the same (the wide difference between the heroes makes this so). So, the question is, why can’t this simple concept work on the DS? Maybe we will see such a game on the DS in the future, but what would it look like? How would it play? And above all, how would it be received?

DOTA is a fairly old map and is based on a earlier map (from either Starcraft or Warcraft 3, I’m not sure) known as Aeon of Strife. What I have described above, I believe, is the same description of any Aeon of Strife map. Everyone controls a unique unit and you all try to wipe out the enemy base. Given the clunkiness of the DOTA DS I described above, perhaps simply porting DOTA to the DS isn’t such a good idea, instead it would be better if an Aeon of Strife map was specifically designed for the DS.

Now, I’ve just said that DOTA is a kind of Aeon of Strife (AoS) map, so for anyone who has played Warcraft, you are no doubt aware exactly how many dozens of AoS maps are available to play. The truth is there are heaps, yet more people play DOTA than any of the others, why is that? Perhaps it is because DOTA has the right balance between length of game (roughly an hour a match), difference between each game (rare is it that two rounds of DOTA are alike) and it offers a rewarding experience to both veterans of DOTA or AoS maps in general and beginners to the genre. DOTA is not a map that leads beginners by the hand, it assumes you are familiar with the interface of Warcraft prior to playing and, more often than not, the best and most effective way of finding out how certain skills or items work is by purchasing them and finding out first hand rather than by reading large slabs of text (almost certain to turn people off a game). There was one other AoS map which I and a few others were familiar with called Tides of Blood. I remember that being a perfectly enjoyable map, but the rounds took too long and there wasn’t much variety between each game. That said, as an AoS map, it was very enjoyable, so so long as the lessons of DOTA are learned and capitalised upon, a non-DOTA AoS game on the DS has the potential to be thoroughly enjoyable.

How would an AoS game on DS work? For this section, I will assume the reader is fairly aware of the DOTA interface and the DS hardware. DOTA is played in Warcraft 3 using a two-buttoned mouse in conjuction with a keyboard, granted you may say the keyboard isn’t entirely necessary, but even if you only use it for communicating with your teammates, it’s still used none-the-less. The DS consists of a D-pad on the left, 4 buttons on the right and two shoulder buttons in addition to a touchscreen. The number one frustration I faced when playing DOTA DS was moving and attacking with my hero. On computer it’s easy, you select your hero and right-click where you want him or her to go. On DOTA DS, you tap your hero to select it and then… well… I can’t remember. If you tap on another unit, you either select that unit or, perhaps your hero walks to that unit, but what if you want to attack it? Maybe you can push a D-pad direction to set you next tap to be ‘attack’ or ‘move’, but heaven help you should you need to control multiple units (eg. summoners, Geomancer in DOTA); that just isn’t effective. What about scrolling around to look around the map? Maybe the d-pad should be used for that, but then you still have the movement/selection issues from before.

It was at this time that I realised I was looking at it the wrong way. What I have said above is simply porting DOTA/AoS to the DS, but such a system just isn’t suited to the console. How would you normally control a unit/hero in a real-time game on a console. Well, normally, the D-pad moves your unit around, so it makes sense that the same holds true in any DS AoS game. Wouldn’t that create problems if you have to control multiple units? Well, yes and no. How do you control multiple units in console games? In a few of the games I’ve played you use things called ‘orders’. The other units would probably be a lot more independent than they are in a game like Warcraft, but remember even in Warcraft they are not fully independent. Unless you hold-position whatever unit you have, that unit is still going to attack any enemy that comes nearby and do a whole host of what we would regard as ’stupid’ things.

Another frustrating thing I remember about DOTA DS is what I would call the minimap/hero-config screen. There would be a button you would push to switch the screens around enabling you to access the minimap (to move around) as well as to level up and use your hero’s abilities and purchase items. What that meant was, when you’re in the heat of a battle, you would constantly need to switch screens to access your hero’s skills. Woe betide you should you need to urgently run away while you presently have a select-unit skill awaiting a target highlighted. Again, this is an example of a fairly decent port of a Warcraft function, but it simply doesn’t work given the constraints of the DS. Ultimately AoS DS will perhaps initially look to have more in common with Battalion Wars (GC) or Freedom Fighters (All) than it would with DOTA as we know it on PC.

Perhaps what I have said above seems somewhat boring or obvious, but it was the later thoughts I had that made me really excited at the prospect of such a game. At present, DOTA or AoS maps are a feature of Warcraft/Starcraft/RTS games. They are not games in themselves; but what if they were? What options would be on the table? As a standalone DS game, what would AoS DS look like? I can see a menu screen already:

• Campaign
• Skirmish
• Multiplayer
• WFC
• Options

Looks like the exact same list you’d see in any RTS game and the possibilities seem equally endless. The excitement in my mind dwells on what the Skirmish and Multiplayer sections would look like. For those who have played DOTA, you’d be aware of some of its faults. The need to input modes at the start, leavers, unbalanced teams. AoS DS could ammeliorate some of these faults as, given it would be a stand alone game, it would be made with these in mind, not something tacked on at the end.

Can you imagine you and 4 of your friends together with your DSs about to play AoS DS. First you talk about what map you want to play, of course map in this case would mean terrain. This isn’t really an option playing AoS maps in Warcraft 3 as the terrains is invariably tied to the game. For there to be different terrain, the entire map has to be remade. What might other maps look like? Will it always be two teams on one map? Will one map always consist of one map? Is there a possibility of having two completely seperate terrains exisiting on the same map through which travel between them can only be achieved using special portals.

What heroes will be available to use? Presumably those from the ‘campaign’, but what about custom heroes? Perhaps a system could be set up allowing players to create their own heroes using the skill-set provided in the game.

What will the starting and victory conditions be? The default or something more exotic?

There are 5 of your altogether, so does that mean you will all be on the same team against X number of computer opponents or will you split up? If AoS DS is built on its own, unlike in Warcraft 3 AoS maps, the AI needn’t simply be tacked on after the fact. The game can be built with the AI in mind and, in that way, it stands a better chance of having a more sophisticated AI than present AoS maps found in War3 have. What’s more, if one of the players drop, that player can simply be controlled by the computer without damaging the team too much (provided the AI is sophisticated enough to adapt to the circumstances of the player that left).

All of this might sound interesting, but it is important to note that these should be extras in addition to a ‘default’. The default mode should be something that definitely works and is definitely enjoyable. These extras should be saved for those players that are looking for a bit more excitement.

That just about wraps up all my thoughts on DOTA/AoS for DS. I think it could work if it is made specifically for the DS and not just ported over. I believe the aspects that make DOTA fun can be realised on the DS in a game similar in experience but not necessarily in interface. I think it would be fascinating if such a game existed on the DS (provided the work goes into it), but I don’t see it happening in the short term at all.

Today I made a fascinating discovery, that being that I am presently living in the greatest country in the world. I know this because it falls into one of the three catagories which I’ve determined deduce which country is indeed the greatest. These are:

1. The country you’re from.
2. The country you’re living in.
3. The United States of America.

It appears to me that everyone on earth holds one or all of these three countries as being the greatest country on earth. It strikes me as being a bit unusual when you think how arbitrary a country can be. There are many ‘objective’ indexes that countries themselves use to determine which among them is the greatest: GDP per capita, military strength, population, proximity to Chuck Norris but formost among them which I remember hearing about is the Human Development Index (HDI). To me this is just another one of these methods of objectively determining which country is the greatest only, as I recall, the results are often more interesting because the number one country isn’t always the US.

Yesterday morning on my way to get my computer repaired I found myself thinking about the integrity of life. In particular about consciousness and, after death, what happens to this consciousness? Such questions seem to be the domain of faith; indeed, there don’t seem to be any solid facts regarding what happens to consciousness after death.

Firstly, by consciousness I mean that which allows us to think, feel and make decisions, our free will if you will. Everyone is not only in possession of consciousness but this consciousness is independent of other consciousnesses. The decisions you make and feelings you have might be affected by outside forces (biological chemistry), but you always have some control when it comes to adhering to forces administered by people other than yourself regardless of how strong the compulsions might be. The point of this is not so much that our consciousness is free of persuasion, far from it; rather what I mean is it is entirely independent of other consciousnesses. It is possible for two people, friends, to be talking to one another and be thinking about completely different things, each person’s mind is independent of each other person’s.

Next, given this fact, what is our consciousness and how did it come into being? I’ve often heard that who we are is mostly determined by how we were brought up. Does this apply to our consciousness though? If I were fed jam on toast instead of nutella on toast when I was younger would the very fibre of my being be something other than what it is today? This doesn’t sit well with me, for, from what I can see, during my earliest years, I would have to have been either someone else, or no one. From birth, aside from any chemical issues, from a consciousness perspective I would have been completely identical to every other baby of my age on the planet or at least significant portion of the population of babies would all consciously identical, meaning were they switched they could theoretically become completely different people in the place of those they would have been. This might seem a little confusing to follow, but it should become clearer later.

Related to this last point is another aspect which, while not an issue for us today I think is particularly interesting to reflect on. What if human cloning existed and you had a clone or two made of yourself. These clones, copies of you, would be, in short, you. That which makes you what you are would also make them what they are. Would this mean that when you make a decision, they too would make the identical decision? Should you all complete a test, would you all get the same result? Should you die, would you still feel in some way alive in one of your living clones? I think consciousness is something truly complex and appears completely illusive to our conventional experimental methodology we use to broaden our knowledge.

Lastly, as for consciousness after death, what happens to our consciousness after we die? Could it be that we will inhabit the body of another? It’s unlikely we would have any of the knowledge or experiences we gained in our last life though that said, would we really be who we are then? Imagine if we did ‘come back’, how would our next ‘host’ be selected? Would we as conscious beings actually be aware that we are again conscious beings? Could the consciousness that makes me who I am be the same as the consciousness that makes everyone else everyone else? Perhaps I as a conscious being am existing multiple times at the same time, but if that were the case, wouldn’t I feel something from these other consciousnesses? Wouldn’t I not care about dying because, would I, my consciousness wouldn’t actually die?

As a side note, looking at things in perspective, if you take the universe as a natural ‘order’ as it were and you see the development of life and humanity within this natural order, should human consciousness be little more than the sum of events which have created us, doesn’t it strike you as being odd? The natural order of the universe creating what could only be called historical machines, machines whose very existence is the product of natural development even though they are not identical to each other. Perhaps this is the result of that law of entropy, because chaos is spreading so too will there always be more independent consciousnesses than there will ever be (if ever be) identical ones and as time continues, won’t these consciousnesses diverge rather than converge.

For the past three days I have been performing a ritual of ever increasing mindlessness as the days wear on. It’s a ritual that has served me well in my past vocations but during this recent spate of intense indolence I’m inflicted with, it boggles the mind why I continue to bother.

Every morning I wake up at sometime between 7:30AM and 9AM, I stagger out of my bedroom to the fridge where I take a swig out of a bottle of orange juice. I then take my bottle with me, sit on the lounge, turn my computer on and check out a handful of websites including blogs, newspapers and a game website. Once satisfied with all the news I have read, I then return to my bedroom to retrieve the day’s attire and proceed to have my shower, the length of my shower determined in large part by my fatigue or the reliability of the hot water on any given day. After my shower, I get dressed, throw the dirty clothes on the dirty washing pile and return to my computer. Then, by any register of meaningful activity it could be said that my day ends. For the entirity of the past few days I have been doing one of four things, I will either be looking for and applying to jobs I find on the internet, playing on my DS, playing on my computer or reading my book all the while waiting for a response from the four different employers I presently have (and the rapidly declining half-dozen or so I might soon have) to contact me as they said that they would and, I quote, “make me busy”.

Now it is quarter past one and again I am waiting for my silent benefactors all the while writing on my blog, in itself a gross departure from my daily routine. With all the talk I get from so many employers, they seem to me to simply not understand that I require more minerals, not gas. I think I have accumulated a great deal of social credit in the month I have been looking for work, doubling the length of my Chinese MSN list with affluent, well-to-do people, but for all that, social credit just doesn’t pay the rent.

I will now as before continue to answer the questions plaguing my mind. Where will next month’s rent come from? Who will pay for my next meal? When will I be productive again? Not these questions, instead I must ask will I ever find a place to get rid of these acorns? What do I do with this pommel stone? and will Drew Latham be able to expose the neo-Nazi conspiracy affecting Russia and the US?

When one is feeling as blue as I have been as of late, one becomes accutely aware of the imperfections present in one’s environment. Had I a better mood, I would shrug off these small imperfections with a smile and get on with whatever it was I was doing, but at the moment this is not the case. My latest bout of dissatisfaction, in large part born out of the extensive free time I now have has given rise to feelings of culture shock. I don’t think culture shock is quite the right term though because as frustrated as I am, I do think I would prefer to be somewhere in China than in Sydney although as time passes I suspect this sentiment might rapidly change. Rather I think cultural frustration would be a better description of what I am presently experiencing, and even that I suspect isn’t right because a lot of the things I am having issues with have little to do with culture.

So, how could things be better? Well, in the perfect world:

• The buttons in wordpress would impart meaningful information instead of del, ins, img, ul, ol, li, code, more etc.
• After going shopping my receipt would be put in one of the bags and my change handed to me.
• “Here this is a good dish, you will like it” would always be followed by a good dish.
• A menu would be located either at the door or outside the door of every restaurant.
• Waiting staff would be hired on their ability to notice and respond to requests made by diners.
• The word ‘penis’ would never appear in a menu.
• Subway stations would be surrounded by places worth going to or have transport links to such places.
• Subway stations would not be surrounded by (a) construction site(s).
• There would be no smokers.
• I would be paid to study Chinese.
• I would have time to finish my quests in Baldur’s Gate 2.
• I wouldn’t require more minerals.
• The Personals>Friends section of www.thatsbj.com would be filled with friend-material instead of meaningless diatribe such as this and this.
• The Settlers would be released on DS.
• All three elevators in my building would be running all the time.
• There would be an affordable supermarket near where I live.
• A haircut would take no more than fifteen minutes.
• People would always sit in the outermost chairs of the bus.
• The bread would not be sweetened.

Since my parents left roughly two weeks ago, I have become acutely aware that I am almost completely alone and as such have been feeling very depressed. Not only this, but I have become aware of a cycle which could well see that this situation goes unresolved. The strategy I have followed to date has been successful in only one instance and for that I am grateful, alas all other contacts I have made through this method have turned up fruitless. I have been using this website to find and hopefully make new friends and by in large it has been unsuccessful, but I will get to that later.

The cycle I have become aware of has been born of my present isolation which I began feeling after moving into this new city without actually knowing anyone who lives here. In my first few months I met a fair few people although most of them I wouldn’t really call friends, rather they are better described as if-you-ever-have-a-problem-you-can-call-me acquaintances, I suppose you could call it the exact opposite of the friend in need. The overwhelming majority of these people have no time for me, but have all the time in the world for my problems which, as nice as the sentiment is, does little to placate my sense of devastation. The result is I am rapidly losing my faith in the people around me, in particular any new people I meet and hence feel a strong desire to coup myself up in my flat. In turn this generates more despair and creates a worsening situation with no really conceivable method of release save moving to where my actual friends are.

One of the factors contributing to my dissatisfaction with many of the people I have met since arriving in Beijing is that many seem to have very little idea of what a friend is. Over the course of the last two months I have added about six people to my MSN list, all people of whom live in Beijing and who claim to be looking for friends. All of them have expressed a desire in one way or another to be my friend. Of them, I have met four of them in person and for each of them we have only met once. The troubling thing is that, altogether, I have been ’stood up’ more times than I have actually had meetings with any of these people. Not stood up as in I go to the meeting location and they don’t turn up, rather an arrangement is made a day, two days, a week in advance and then cancelled at the last minute. It angers me to no end having this situation repeat itself over and over again and leaves me with little more than a feeling of despair. So, the end result is I have six more people on my MSN list who may as well be messaging from Afghanistan as it doesn’t look like I will actually meet them and I’m sure people in Afghanistan have far more interesting lives than those I seem to have encountered in Beijing.

On a brighter note, maintaining a connection to my Sydney friends has been much more rewarding. I seem to spend more time doing things with them than I do with anyone I know in Beijing and they actually do live miles away. I think the hard part of making friends here is that it is impossible for me to find people who are interested in any one of the niche activities I do and interests I have. I’d even go as far to say that the people who hold the same interests I do by nature tend to seclude themselves. Still, one can always hope if nothing else.

Having worked in China for over a year now I would say that during this time I have become significantly desensitised to practices which, back in Sydney, we could classify as being ‘wrong’. Now you could say, ‘it’s a different culture and things work differently here’, but I’m not one of those people who think right and wrong are relative terms. That said, even given the context I don’t think it is acceptable in either Australia or in China for people to say one thing and do the opposite and I think, perhaps to a smaller extent, I don’t think either culture praises people for maintaining habits like spitting or not lining up. However, unlike these examples, there is one aspect about living in China that goes directly contrary to what I have been brought up to believe growing up in Sydney which, given recent revelations, sickens me somewhat.

To a degree, since I started working in China I’ve come to accept that while I do have a degree majoring in Chinese Studies as well as hold an ESL teaching certificate and am a native English speaker, from an employer’s perspective I am as much being employed to the position on the basis of my qualifications as I am because I am a caucasian. In my last job this wasn’t much of an issue because I didn’t think this really was the case, my colleagues were from all over the world and of a whole range of ethnicities, although prior to arriving in China I was warned that I should expect that sort of mentality both from the average person on the street and from employers. Certainly when it comes to classes, ethnicity can have a significant impact both to one’s teaching and social experiences here, but in my mind there has always been a difference between an institution distinguishing people on the basis of skin colour and the prejudices of the average person on the street.

What has spurned me to write about this has been a recent discovery at my present place of work in which I overheard a conversation among management regarding the eligibility of new employees. The details of the conversation were that the school is presently looking for new staff and as such is posting many job ads as well as collecting as many resumes as it can. On each resume they receive they require a photo to be attached. One such resume they received was from a person in Beijing, but he didn’t attach a photo claiming he was concerned about the security of his internet, as such he wanted to come in in person for an interview. As one of my managers said to the other, the name of the person in question was Spanish in origin and he was concerned that he might be of Filipino descent, as such he didn’t meet the ‘ethnicity requirements’ of the job.

At first when I overheard this I felt indifferent, I guess I accepted that being in China and having encountered this mentality before, there wasn’t really anything to be surprised about. It was only after I reflected upon it for a few days that I realised that this was the first time I had actually witnessed what could only be described as blatant institutionalised racism. Now granted of the ten foreign staff working at my school, eight of them are caucasian, one is partly Asian and the last is Hispanic. I couldn’t help but notice this when I first started working there (after living in China a year, seeing lots of pale faces together in the same place in China is truly a spectacle to behold), but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Now, however, I have confirmation that even if a prospective employee did get to a point where they were speaking to one of my managers and it was discovered that they were not ‘of the correct ethnic background’, they would be flatly denied the job.

Thankfully I handed in my notice over a month ago and so, in a couple of weeks, I will no longer be working for them, though I do feel quite dirty about it all the same. Partly because my reasons for leaving are not those that I have mentioned here and partly because my reasons for leaving are due to this mentality prevalent in China. My exact reasons for leaving are because I am unhappy with the number of hours I work, the distribution of these hours throughout the week, the rate of pay I receive for these hours and the rate of overtime pay (which incidently is at a rate lower than regular hours). The thing is that, hmm, well, by Chinese standards, my work conditions are excellent and I get the impression that my employers are perplexed as to why I would want to leave because they perceive that these conditions as being well above average.

I however know that I can earn substantially more money for significantly fewer hours each week, I tell myself it is because I have a degree from a reputable establishment, I have a teaching certificate, I am a native English speaker and I have over a year’s teaching experience, but after going through what I have above, I suspect that even if I didn’t have these things I would still be able to get a better paying job solely because of my skin colour. It makes me feel quite shameful in some respects, but I can’t really see a way out of it, save going into business for myself. I was considering that, given all jobs here require you to submit a resume with a photo I could just not submit the photo and take what comes afterwards. The thing is that I can understand why they want people to attach photos and it does make things much more convenient. No respectable school in China wants an employee with nose piercings, chains, tattoos or dreadlocks and would probably frown on double-platted beards.