Comment ’RADII‘ below to join our newsletter and never miss content like this again.

Move over, Perler beads. The craft catching on with China’s urban youth now is 拼布 (pīnbù, ”assembled cloth“), or patchwork.

For most of the past year, young China sat in shops placing tiny plastic beads with tweezers. 拼豆 (pīndòu, ”perler beads“) — as a “childhood hobby”, a way to slow down and make something real with your hands, with a big emotional payoff.

Now some of those same people are putting the tweezers down and picking up scrap fabric.

Grandma‘s quilting circle had this figured out first.

#radii #radiimedia #pinbu #chineseyouth #diyculture craftcore ...

Comment "RADII" below to join our newsletter and never miss content like this again.

Remember the fox-and-tiger board game? The tabletop 志怪 (zhìguài, "records of the strange") revival has a second act, and this one puts you on payroll.

《阴阳差事录》(yīnyáng chāishì lù, "The Yin-Yang Errands") builds its whole board around two figures lifted out of folk belief. The first is 走无常 (zǒu wúcháng, "walking as the wuchang") — an ordinary living person conscripted after dark to work as a constable for the underworld, then sent home by morning to get on with their day. The second is 掠剩使 (lüè shèng shǐ, "commissioner of seized surplus"), a supernatural official whose entire job is confiscating whatever wealth you earned beyond what fate allotted you. An auditor. In hell.

Play it and you get warrants, quotas, a salary for passing the starting square, and the option to burn money for a ghost to make a problem go away. Players on Xiaohongshu keep landing on the same reaction: how is there still a job down there.

Seems like Chinese hell was always modelled on the imperial civil service.

#radii #radiimedia #chinesefolklore #boardgames #chineseinternet ...

Comment `RADII` below to join our newsletter and never miss content like this again.

Once in a while a meme shows up that`s pure nonsense, and it just washes over the whole feed on Xiaohongshu.

Since May it`s been this trapped opossum, everywhere. What makes it different from the usual brainrot is that there`s a little frustration in it. Somehow it captures the mood of young people right now better than anything else has.

#radii #radiimedia #chineseinternet #memeculture #genzchina ...

Comment ”RADII“ below to join our newsletter and never miss content like this again.

This is what it looks like when China‘s biggest shopping platform runs a photography contest.

Taobao’s brief was simple: post the most abstract, inexplicable photo you‘ve got.

What showed up was not nonsense. Everyone quietly brought their best work anyway, cross-tagging #alexwebb under a contest that called them unhinged.

A lot of contests in China seem to run this way: show the real skill, but file it under a joke title so nobody can accuse you of being performative — the same naming logic behind 发疯文学 (fāfēng wénxué, ”unhinged literature“) and 废话文学 (fèihuà wénxué, ”nonsense literature“).

Swipe to see the ”unhinged“ photos >>>

#radii #radiimedia #streetphotography #xiaohongshu chineseinternet taobao ...

Comment ”RADII“ below to join our newsletter and never miss content like this again.

Somehow the ghosts in these Chinese horror games are the least scary part.

Long before jump scares, Chinese horror lived in objects: paper effigies, joss money, a red bridal dress that reads as funeral white. But sometime around 2019, a handful of indie developers stopped drawing haunted mansions and started drawing the ‘90s instead.

The developer behind 烟火 and 三伏 gave the look a name: 电子包浆 (diànzǐ bāojiāng), ”digital patina.“ 包浆 is the soft sheen an antique picks up from decades of being handled.

Five games. All five bet on the same thing: you’re more unsettled by something you‘ve actually seen before.

#radii #radiimedia #chinesehorror #indiegames #gameart ...