[2016] hangzhou, suzhou, nanjing, shanghai

i wanted to have a blog without writing anything, so this is what happened. maybe this can be good alt text writing practice for me. this post is about the first half of my trip to china in 2016. i went with my family and antonia's family.

here's a photo of a boy running in a garden. it was taken on march 6, 2016.

i like this concept because technically you can still read what i'm writing if you want to, but the focus is on the pictures. these days a lot of people don't really read things either, they just skim the articles. and i don't have to think too hard about if this sounds good or not. win win!

this photo is from the same day. it's blurry because i wasn't walking on the road, i was on some kind of vehicle.

also, i was gonna say this kind of reminds me of when you're on a foreign website or page with a language you don't understand, but you're there for the vibes. this is kind of like that.

later in the day, it's nighttime. you'll see i like taking pictures with flash. tanghulu! i didn't eat any though. just the camera :)

another thing is, this kind of layer lets me write more freely and intimately, like i would in a diary or something when i'm the only person that will read it, and without the feeling that many eyes will be reading and judging. it's more… stream of consciousness.

march 7 – i have a million photos of flowers and so does the internet.

the nice thing about a website too is that it's not super final, which can be good sometimes but not really in this case. like take this trip for example, i have a lot of photos from my digital camera, other people took photos on their devices, maybe they sent it to me, maybe they didn't, maybe i had a journal and wrote about this trip somewhere… but i don't always have all those things in one place. so i'm slowly gathering and i can update this whenever.

i wanted to touch on this as well. people visiting a website experience it differently. so maybe people with screen readers will be able to hear everything i'm writing, but they may not be able to see the images. which oftentimes is the opposite of their experience, not everyone adds alt text to their photos and stuff (me included…i'm sorry)

life is kinda like that too, we see everything coloured through the lens of our own experiences. this photo is from march 8.

i had two pictures that i took out of the window, they both had buildings and a similar kind of tree in them. i was thinking about whether to put them side by side or if i should even have both of them in this post, but i decided to remove one.

lalalala this is the 8th photo on this page. i wonder if i should set a soft limit to have some constraints? like how for some spotify playlists i try to keep them under 100 songs. i just counted and there are 19 photos here. i think i'll try to keep each post under 20, because the page loads kind of slow when there are a lot. if there are more maybe i'll break it up into parts.

i had this lotus soup for the first time on a mountain. i can't really describe what it was like but it lowkey changed my life and was unlike anything i've ever had. also it was hot and the weather on the mountain was cold. when i came home from this trip i pestered my mom to find out how to recreate it. we found some powder but it wasn't the same. the funny thing is that antonia didn't like it when she tried it. i think this is one of my honorary favourite foods.

WHAT HAPPENS IF I TYPE IN CAPS? doesn't look like much

this font does not support chinese characters, should i create a custom one? (discovered this while i was trying to write someone's name in chinese)

at first i didn't think too much of this image but it kind of grew on me

this is antonia's phone case. i like the colour.

i really have so many flower photos. thank you God for creating flowers. i'm listening to dreamcatcher right now. i didn't realize but this whole song is in english! (can't get you out of my mind)

this is a redacted style font. i wonder how it works, like if letters are mapped to different lengths? i debated if i should do more for this, like putting similar pictures next to each other in a horizontal scroll thing or carousel? but right now it's a single page scroll and maybe i'll leave it like this for simplicity or laziness, who knows

btw i just checked and the font is called flow block. there's other versions where the corner is more rounded but i like this one. yihui told me about how on mac, you can press spacebar to preview images. what a quality of life improvement. it's really helpful when i'm trying to decide what photos to add here.

yesterday i was telling yihui i think a driving force behind a lot of my work is the desire to create things that consolidate other things. like making things that reduce the number of things i have rather than creating just to create? and kinda putting garbage out there… there is a lot of stuff in the world already and i don't wanna add to that without reason

antonia is covering her face because something smells bad, probably someone was smoking nearby

the hello kitty-fication of everything

did you know i had over 800 photos from this trip? narrowing it down to a few was really hard.

there's another font called redacted, it's on google fonts. there are 2 versions, one that's kind of like handwriting scribbles and another one that's more similar to this one, except i don't like it as much because there are no spaces between the words and everything is one big block. i tried the scribble one but i liked flow block more.

it's march 11, at the airport going to another part of china. we left on march 5, so it's been about 6 days of being here so far.

why is no one here lol… maybe passing by this section and no one has landed yet. i think i remember seeing a snoopy in the airport. i'll try to find the photo!