Well, originally we wanted to do the same thing. But now Julian is an animal photographer, and I photograph animals! Soon on all the commercial photo sites in the world: iStockphoto, Shutterstock, Fotolia, you name it. Because we used to be good, but then we became commercial!

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Sichuan – in all of China, even internationally, this province is lauded for its tasty and, most of all, spicy cuisine. But who could be able to decide on even a handful of dishes when presented with this spectrum of varied delicacies. How about a grilled chicken foot? A light green glibbery weirdness or rather a brown lard rind repulsiveness? Whatever it shall be, don’t forget to round it off with a lot of chili! Yes, life can be a bitch, especially when you have to choose. But fear not: For the indecisive among you wanting to relinquish undefinable animal parts once in a while, sagesex has composed an exclusive seasonal menu.

Before we start you should be sure to have a bowl of rice at your disposal. Admitted, this will dampen the intensity of enjoyment, yet you will soon realize the necessity of this precautionary measure. In order to prevent the rice from being to boring, we recommend mixing it with an equal amount of beans with pork and, of course, fresh red chili. So much for the side dishes. But what’s for dinner?

Proteins are in order – so take some of the funny brown-crusty tofu brick. But Sichuan means spicy – so don’t forget the mountain of dried red chili piled upon it! Next we need some vegetables for the vitamins … How about a plate full of whole, fried, hot-as-hell green chilis? – delicious! Because the whole thing is a little one-sided like this, we recommend adding a plate of Chilis of mixed skin color with a touch of brown weirdnesses. Well done, now that’s a well-rounded meal. Sichuan experts know: Chili goes especially well with chili and chili. Enjoy your meal!

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Signs from Lijiang old Town, Yunnan, China.

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It’s very simple: Go to Flattr, register, pre-pay an arbitrary amount via Paypal or credit card, and adjust how much of this money you want to give for the good in the world every month. From then on and everywhere in the Web, you can simply press one of these cute little buttons that you can now see below all our posts, and your monthly contribution will be fairly distributed among all the projects that you have flattrd in this month. Plus, from this moment on you also have the opportunity to have your own contributions to the world’s information culture rewarded by the world. And, as with Digg, you can always see how popular something is by how much it gets flattrd.

You can see, I find this idea beyond brilliant and of course I have begun to flattr my favourites myself (by the way, it would be great to have a wordpress plugin that shows you my favorite things). Flattr is a concrete and well-made utopia that might even make redundant the often talked-about “culture flat rate”. There are still some concessions to grey reality, like the 10% that Flattr keeps (though they are supposed to have promised decreasing this percentage in the future – plus, I like to support the pirates in their lawsuits), the idiotic fees that Paypal/Moneybookers take, or the minimum contribution of 2€/month (which is OK for me, but it could keep a few Indians from taking part in this new world economy). Still I’m hoping and believing that Flattr will be outrageously successful, that it will blur even more the boundaries between producers and consumers, and that it helps bringing free culture to free people without making the producers starve. In this spirit we naturally rejoice deeply if you flattr us.

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Without a doubt China is among the countries with the most amusing half-assed English T-shirt prints in the world. In this great genre of fine arts, vocabulary, grammar, and meaning are being bent to achieve cool sound and design. The creator of this piece is setting new standards and leading T-shirt art into a new age. Watch out designers and avantgarde artists – the Chinese are coming!

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Dali is a small town in Yunnan, China. Actually, it is three towns: When we arrived at the Dali bus station in the evening we consulted the Lonely Planet and found out that we were supposed to be right next to the city walls of this enchanting little old town. So we ignored the waiting taxis and started to walk. Unfortunately, nothing here looked similar to our map, and after half an hour of wandering about we had to admit to ourselves that we had no clue where we were. Everything here looked to typically newly Chinese and modern, not a hint of old town.

Expecting the city walls somewhere just around the corner – only we didn’t know where – we started looking for a taxi. The first few drivers couldn’t make heads or tails of our destination of choice (Which is perfectly normal in China). The next few asked fantastical prices and refused to use the taximeter. Enraged, and almost using force, we finally got a driver to do his job. Behold – just around the corner quickly turned into 15 km! We hadn’t known that there is Dali old town and Dali new town, and these towns are not direct neighbors. On the other hand it turned out to be so much prettier than we had become used to in China – old houses, small streets, no stress, few people – that we were reconciled with the world when on top of all that we also found a charming guesthouse. Even more so when on the next morning our room afforded the view depicted above.

The greater was our surprise when we started out to discover the town – we hadn’t even been within the city walls! Which, however, turned out to be situated a few hundred meters from our dwelling, and there we found the third Dali, the one that we had heard about: A huge, and a little too picturesque, old town, which has mostly been newly rebuilt for (mainly Chinese) tourists.

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Mr. Money goes to Town from sagesex on Vimeo.

sagesex.com presents: Part 6 of the Money Series. In which we finally take to Town (Hanoi, Vietnam) our famous money business cards and the beautiful money suit we acquired in the earlier parts of the series.

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Dear ungrateful readers/viewers!

Some of you have expressed their understandable desire to enjoy more of our mega smrtness (S.M.R.T.) cast into articles again. We are deeply honored. Now Julian is actually writing some of these articles and I, too, will (just like here) address some words to you. However, the more perceptive among our readers should have noticed that my latest passion and favorite means of expression has become photography, and especially photo editing.

But why? Firstly: A picture is worth a 1000 words, and writing 1000 words takes me much longer than shooting and editing a picture. Secondly: Words are nothing but smoke and mirrors, while images don’t lie. But most of all: I believe I have more to show than to say at this moment.

At this point I would like to recommend two free programs: Naturally there is the established yet still unique image manipulation tool GIMP. But my newest discovery is the slightly younger but very promising digiKam, a kind of Aperture for free people. This great and ambitious thing helps managing and editing photos like professionals do. It does still have a few quirks (e.g., it takes a few minutes to start up), but also some wonderful features: Examples include the different before/after views and lots of brilliant effects that have also enabled me to show Julian’s 60-year-old, black freak soul here.

I hereby express my hope that you can dig my new form of expression. Writing is so 2009, photos are the hot shit!

Love,
Stefan

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