rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Lu and I made a quick stop to Guangzhou pre-xmas where we met up with some of Lu’s old classmates Wang Ge (Gary), Lu Jun and Lu Jun’s girlfriend. Lu Jun and his girlfriend were rocking the new nerd glasses style that couples are wearing in Guangzhou now, so Lu and I took our best stab at wearing them well:

After Guangzhou, Lu and I flew from Hong Kong to SFO and then onto Missouri where we have been spending some time with my parents. Unfortunately, my Mom’s parents haven’t been doing so hot, so we wanted to spend some good time with them and our other family members like Brad, Tracy, Andy, Joe and my cousin Brittany’s new baby, who has my name!

Throughout this trip, we have been making many notes about post-economic-disaster living in America, noting all the highway adverts that are blank, how much midwest folks are consuming, and the huge amount of food served by restaurants.

Lu has documented this on her blog in Chinese and English. Here is an enticing one we took in a Walmart near where my grandparents live I will call “Lu Big Pants and I’m not talking about Koolhaus’ CCTV building”:

We are having fun here and its been a nice change of pace from the freezing dry weather in Beijing. Also, I don’t want to sound negative about American culture in the midwest. I’m trying to understand this place from a different vantage point now after living in China in order to offer comments, criticism and hopefully contributions to make it better — most of my family still lives here!

Today, I’m with my mom in the basement of my parents house going through old things, applying the kinkade principle to my parent’s old stored goods, and revisiting past memories. From nathan:

less is more. Do you want to uncomplicate your life? Start divesting yourself of material possessions, stem consumerism, live as consciously as possible. Live free

I’m still thinking about this last year. It has been an interesting year which I will post more about tomorrow and talk more about 2009 plans. Be safe tonite and see you in 2009 my friends. Also, watch out and not get to into some party like this (via Ian:

Studio photographs on this page CC-by Min+ (敏佳)

With great people like Christopher Adams and Joi Ito releasing this fabulous free culture powered project under CC Attribution license, one can go and download most of the content and have some form of experience for free (as long as they give attribution back). I can go and download the images and essays right now and make my own images or my own book called FREE LOLS. I just started it. Check out the first image!

Original Photo by Joi Ito of Lessig

I received this nice email today from the editors of the book:

Dear Jon ,

It pleases us very much to announce that an exceptional new book, <FREESOULS captured and released by JOI ITO> has just come out. We would like to inform you that a limited quantity of books are being made available directly from the publisher.

We wanted to send you this important message right away, because your portrait is featured in Joi’s new book.

First of all we invite you to browse the FREESOULS book:

http://freesouls.cc/thebooks/

Then please consider ordering a copy or two:

http://freesouls.cc/order/

We also have a way for you to spread the word to your friends, family and admirers! Below is a link to your portrait, with more information about the book:

http://freesouls.cc/pic/463728390/

Thanks for being a part of our community, and for making this project possible.

Kind regards,
The FREESOULS Editors

There still is nothing like having a high quality limited edition book in your hands made by your friends that supports shared ideals. Thus, not only is it good to have one of these books, buying products that support the FREE CULTURE ethos further underlines that giving gives you more.

Go buy the book, and I challenge anyone out there to take the content from the book and make a remix, a new book, or even help on the FREE LOLS book We could use the tag, freelols

These things just keep growing and changing. I’ve been having some epiphanies as of late about how all these digital technologies, social networking sites and bite sized information status update micro-blogging blasts are actually hurting my memory and cohesive large scale output. I’m not a neo-luddite nor anti-tech, but I think its good timing for thinking about these things now that I’ll be at my parents in BoCoMo for ~ 2 weeks with that Deer on 1.5 second latent satellite internet. We have some good projects queued up for the midwest which will be fun to do and if you will be in the bocomo, most definitely ping me.

I had to read back through my bio and cv and see if my output and quality of output is down. The jury of peers in my mind is still out. I took the time to update my biography to be extensive and add in some new notes about Laoban, Cantocore, PDwiki and some other things. I’ve focused a bit more on overall direction. I must admit that sounds quite cheesy, but after devoting myself to other causes so heavily for 3-5 years, I knew that these last three months I needed to wander around and get lost a bit to connect up the way past, recent past, and present to get to the future.

I’m often asked why do I contribute to *Open* projects and I have to say I didn’t get into these mostly free projects for altruistic large scale society issues. It is fun and I really wanted to learn about software culture and how to build a successful global project (even beyond software). The “helping the world” view for my participation in FLOSS really is bolt on to what I’ve done previously in consideration of high level contribute-to-society goals. So, when assessing future goals and direction, I took into consideration the big picture of society and what these types of skills and projects can do.

Also, in considering things about my sister’s life, living in Beijing, re-connecting with old friends like Matt Hope, and concluding so many past projects, I asked myself, “Hey, why can’t I have fun? Why do I always have to limit myself to doing bigger projects and keeping so many old projects alive? Why do I have to take on the world’s problems directly?”

Whether the projects are a new soundsystem, an art exhibition pulling concepts from Cantonese culture or consolidating desertification in CaoChangDi, as an artist, I have to keep making projects or die. Oh, and I do have the large scale goals behind these projects, I’m just not going to take what I have done or myself so seriously anymore. I am who I am.