Recently in kungfuology.com Category

Happy everything everybody. Just putting an update here. Although the blog has been inactive for a while now, I still get mails. I'm happy to help out with some stuff, unable with some other stuff ...

... but if I reply it's going to be from my personal mail. It's a Hotmail account and due to the nature of the blog mails I receive, the replies will usually have links or attachments. 

First time mail from a free webmail account, including attachments or links = junk mail folder. That's what I have been learning.

So mail away ... but check your junk folder later.

Oh it's that time again.

Oh shit time flies I don't wanna die Not so long ago, I took a break from the blog and other stuff in order to push through and get a first draft done of a novel. It was across the first half of 2011 and the book made it out at the end of the year.

My Shanghai-set novel on Amazon (cheap)

After a long period of fucking about on three new ideas, I've picked one and have to get on with it. The last one needed six months off the blog and most other net stuff, it was about 210 pages. This one is more than double that length and way more involved. 

I dunno, it/me is not important and we've got a bunch of other blogs and sites doing stuff now. But according to the stats we got up over 15 000 individual IPs a month ago, so if you are one of the people who has been reading: thanks very much. 

As many of you noticed, the blog has been down for a week. To quote the service provider, some malicious code was injected into my files, three of them in fact. Not the blog but other bits in the same space. Well, we're back now.

What have I been up to? Well there's a pic of me on a break while cycling around what's left of the Meilong area, by the river opposite where the swimming centre is. Also, I'm almost forty. 

I did go to a show and there's a bunch of videos and releases to be posted. So watch this space. Huge backlog of Crash posts too. 

I'm sure this seems more than a little self-important to casual readers. It is in response to inquires though, and we did used to have quite a bit of fun on the comments. 

It may seem a bit off, putting up discursive and provocative posts like this one:

... and then having the comments turned off on the blog. Actually, I love to get comments, love to talk about stuff and used to always put longer comments and rebuttals into new posts for further discussion.

Here's the sad truth. I am just one guy doing this blog with limited resources. Once me and Jake's writing got over a certain amount of traffic, the spam-o-pocalypse began. And at one time, it completely crashed the blog. I don't have the resources or the willpower to go up a level to what needs to be done to deal with it. So they stay off.

But.

The blog has a mail that I check often: andy(at)kungfuology(dot)com 

If you really think something here warrants response, agreeing or disagreeing, or adding - then either send me an e-mail or write your own blog post and send me the link. If it's substantial enough I'll get it up as a new post.

Hint: "You're wrong," or "No, it isn't," are not substantial. Also, I don't tend to take anonymous stuff seriously at all. If you want to protect your privacy and stay out of public life - then stay out of public life and accept what that means. 

Righty.

I'm blogging again. That's the news.

But there will be a big change in the blog content. Things are changing and slowly moving for me, behind the scenes, and my needs for this space have changed.

More selfish needs, sorry.

Previously: this blog was a space to write about the Shanghai music scene. It had the following rough rules:

Try to post three times a week

95% of content about the shanghai music scene

Show diverse cross section regardless of tastes

Now the purpose has changed. Here is the new rough guidline to this blog:

That will include the music scene, my own music, film, table top games, writing, my novels and screenplays, thoughts on DIY culture and Shanghai. So, if you want to only see vids and links about China music, just click the shanghai music scene category to filter all the other stuff out. If you don't know about the categories and the tags in blogs by now, there's not much else I can tell you. 

This also implies that I'm free from my perceived need to be uncritical about bands here. Well, I actually have a general belief that it's fairly pointless anyway, and that if you can link over and hear the music, I needn't describe or critique it much. So all that's probably going to stay the same. 

And follow me on Twitter if you do that (at)andybest72

So, yeah, the blog has problems. It's up again. But, for me, it's either blocked or so slow that anything I do gets timed out using the regular Chinese net service.

I can do stuff with a VPN service, but as we all know, some of those are having problems too lately. 

This and many things about life are so annoying that, see picture, even at 38 years old, being juvenile feels great. It's my light painting ode to Perez Hilton.

Well, while I'm trying to catch up I should mention, in case the post doesn't get done, that this Friday is the Pairs CD release, Death to Giants have a bunch of new tracks on their Douban page and the Friend or Foe CD is also imminent. Full posts and links shortly.

- sigh -

As many people noticed, the blog went down completely. It generated a kind of fatal error and my host shut me down as a precaution (the error affected their MySQL database). I have contacted them and they have opened the blog again ... but I haven't had word back on the error so it's not really resolved yet.

So, for now, comments are off (error originated in comments DB) and posts won't be forthcoming until I get the exact info and fix. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone.

In the mean time, here's a photo from our many night rides in Shanghai. This one is much clearer and well thought out than the usual ones as I had help. Thanks, Micah!

Well, I'm a bit hesitant to announce this officially, but for now my free shit proxy thing seems to work pretty well all the time.

So, I'm on Twitter.

@andybest72

So follow me if you're there. I've had a play and I now guarantee you that as well as announcing new posts on our sites, there'll be other links, retweets and Q&A. If enough people follow it that I have more followers than followees, I'll keep it 99% China music related.

See you there.

OK, I turned off the comments while on hiatus.

So now they are back on. 

Anyone can comment, and anonymously too. But why would you ever comment anonymously? I've only had that once recently, from someone being rude on purpose. You can do that and use your real name, I don't mind. If you feel the need to hide the fact you're a douche the chances are everyone already knows.

If spam becomes a problem, they may have to go off again though. My filter has a tough time with it.

Hello everyone. Sorry. Last weekend, on very short notice, I buggered off to the place you can see in the photo for a week on the beach. 

You should be able to click on the pic for a massive version. I took that one on the trip.

It was great.

That's one of the two beaches with swimming and chair/beach-umbrella rentals on China's famous Putuoshan: an island national park by the Hangzhou Bay. Back to gigging next weekend. See ya all there.