PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Alright. I heard about this interesting form of “microblogging” on twit.tv, and they spoke so highly of it I thought I’d check it out.

In a nutshell, tumblr.com gives you a platform to make a website/blog, normally hosted on tumblr.com. As for content, it allows you to add things that you find in your day-to-day internet surfing (i.e. favorite links, cool youtube videos, quotable quotes, whatever), and place it on your blog. When you find stuff you like, you just click a few clicks – and voila, it’s on your site!

For anyone who’d like to start a blog, but couldn’t be arsed with the pain-in-the-ass of updating it, or coding — this is likely a good option for you. And I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna take to this one.

I’ve already started one, just to test it out. I’m gonna use this to keep track of online movies that I find during those “bored-out-of-my-f*cking-mind” moments.

Be sure to pay a visit:

China’s Pirated Media

…and here’s the RSS feed if you want movies fed to your news reader automatically, or have them fed to your Email whenever I post the links.

See also: My award winning post How to find Stolen media on the Chinese internet.

Well, Spiderman and Spiderman 2 have already fallen victim to Chinese Piracy. And it was only a matter of time until Spiderman 3 (which is presently whoopin’ ass in box offices worldwide) became available on the internet — due in large part to a little help from some Chinese Video websites.

I mentioned it in passing in my last post on Chinese youtube clones, but in case you missed it, here’s are links to the whole lot:

Now I’m not going to link to them directly, but here is some text that when copied and pasted into a search engine might yield an interesting result:
?????1?3?????? site:youku.com

Here is my list of top 5 Chinese youtube clones, but make sure you stay tuned till the end, because the +1 is a real gem! The neato thing about most of these sites is that they can host shared/stolen content for everyone to enjoy/report.
Note: I’m not endorsing these sites, I’m just trying to make the barrier between the eastern and western internet a little bit more transparent.

So here are the top 5, according to the gospel of panda:

5. mofile.com

A lot of web-cammery, a decent tags section, these guys break my top 5 — even though I haven’t used them too much. Looks good though, as you can see from this White Stripes Video?Seven Nation Army:

4. 6rooms.com

You can find some stuff on here, but it’s more difficult than some of the other sites. I’m usually not too impressed with them, but I am today. They earn my 4-spot, mostly because they have Spiderman 3 online! (Click here to see) Poor quality, but what do ya expect?
Note: Sony claims that they “have so far found no pirated copies of Spider-Man 3 on the Internet” (thx Imagethief), but I guess that “so far” is done with as of now.
Here’s a sample:

Read the rest of this entry »

Wentworth Miller, better known as Michael Schofield on the hugely popular TV series Prison Break, has been invited to China, and is expected to be here in June:

The Shanghai-based News Times reported Wentworth Miller as having been invited by Zhongbo Media Group, who have bought the rights from Fox to shoot an online video adaptation of the American hit TV drama.

In an interview with the paper, an official of Zhongbo said that Miller is coming to promote the Chinese version of Prison Break, and will take part in some commercial activities. Miller is also invited to act as a final judge to select actors for the Chinese Prison Break. Source: Xinhua

Prison Break has gained an enormous following here in China. What Xinhua neglected to mention is that Prison Break’s amazing popularity has spread almost exclusively through piracy. Fake DVDs and VCDs of Prison Break widely available, and even after the recent so-called DVD crackdown.

But nevermind the DVDs, Prison Break’s main means of escaping copyright into the Middle Kingdom is the Chinese internet:

[LINKS REMOVED]

And that’s just for starters… There are tons of other video sites out there also hosting Prison Break full seasons. Not lousy 2 minute youtube clips. Full seasons.

I wonder what Fox Broadcasting has to say about that? Would they take a similar posture as they have with youtube and other American (so-called) copyright outlaws?

In any case, they seem to be willing to overlook it long enough to bring star Wentworth Miller into China, to help promote a 200 minute online Chinese adaptation of Prison Break, which Zhongbo Media licensed from Fox for $1.2 Million US.

You mean, the Government is behind all this?

Another interesting question is raised by all this hoopla. Prison Break’s plot is focused around conspiracies and corrupt/evil government officials. Could a Chinese version possibly be bold enough to include such a plotline?

Apparently no such luck:

Zhongbo Media Chief Chen Weiming says the Chinese language remake will have more plotlines on top of the original storyline and characters. The movie will encompass a well-known computer virus case from last year. A large IT company will be one of the bad guys in the adaptation, instead of the Vice President and the FBI in the American version.

Maybe they wanted to be original…

As for me, I’m mostly just curious as to how they translate T-Bag into Chinese!

Read more about Prison Break:
Watching Prison Break
Prison Break Blog (Spanish)
Prison Break News
Prison Break Blog: BTW

Here are some neato China Links for this week:

Michael Mouris is f*cking brilliant

He makes these really cool videos all by his lonesome. Two of which have a kinda-sorta-almost China theme:

• Stop Motion Kung Fu!
• Car + Karaoke = Caraoke

The Crew at Chinesepod dish out 500 Lessons

For those of you who may have missed it, here is the 500 lesson torrent, available for download.

Where are my f*cking mushrooms?

Ok, so it’s not China related, but this is damn cool. Real-life Super Mario in Brooklyn. I wish I could go on an invincable blinky star rampage…

So I just got in yesterday from my short jaunt across the water to Japan. The final results of my intensive Japanese study were, ummm, less than stellar shall we say. I have a multitude of acceptable excuses:

1. I’m just pure flat out lazy.
2. Jack Bauer fighting terrorists is way too addictive.
3. I got two little side projects in the works. I’ll explain both of ‘em later.

Random Tokyo Thoughts:

• They got the best toilets ever. Ass wiping taken to a whole new (dare I say, enjoyable?) level.
• It’s really hard to sit on tatami wearing a yukata without showing your gear.
• I once hated fish. All fish. And when I go back to Newfoundland I’ll hate fish again. I’m probably the only Newfoundlander that hates fish. But having eaten some sashimi, and some wasibi mackarel — well, maybe it was just Newfoundland cooking I hated.
  (Sorry Newfies! But you gotta admit, putting meat and potatos in a boiler and cooking the shit out of it for three hours is not exactly cooking!)
• Mount Fuji would be funnier if there were two.
• Conversation is much easier in Japan than China, despite the language barrier. In China, I’ve never chatted about Johnny Damon’s (old) beard, Charlton Heston, I Love Lucy, or Charles Bronson. Free media kicks ass!
• Sake tastes like banana, but nobody in Japan seems to agree with me.
• My girlfriends dad is the best ever! And I got a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon and a bottle of Courvoisier to prove it… What was I ever so worried about?