Double Twelve

Normally I couldn’t care less about made-up shopping holidays like Double Twelve or Double Eleven. Most of what I follow is electronics, and electronics prices are already transparent as hell, so these so-called shopping festivals rarely throw out anything tempting. Nothing worth buying, in other words.

This year was a bit different. Zhengzhou’s smog is this bad, so I figured I should get an air purifier and some masks.

For masks I went straight to JD and bought 3M’s 9502V. Wearing it is whatever — maybe I just adapt easily, but I didn’t find it hard to breathe at all.

For the purifier I originally wanted a Xiaomi. Honestly I don’t care much about the powder-leak complaints or the forum talk about how it purifies fine without the sleeve. The thing is a fan plus a filter, not exactly high tech. But the Monkey King is just too good at this game, and my memory is shit, so I always forget to sit in front of the screen like an idiot watching a countdown to snipe one. By the time I remember, it’s usually half an hour past the sale and long gone. I never even got to play the monkey being toyed with by the Monkey King. Kind of sad.

So in the end I bought a Sharp entry-level model, 999 yuan on Taobao’s Double Twelve special. It arrived by SF Express, not bad — even with Zhengzhou hosting that damn SCO summit, they still delivered.

After using it a bit, the purifier itself works fine. Two days at home and the indicator is basically green. I don’t open the windows much anyway, so there shouldn’t be much of a problem. Noise isn’t loud either. The built-in humidifier function I rarely use.

The other purchase was a USB lamp — the kind you plug into a power bank and use as a light. My bedside lamp used to be a pressable Shift key, but that thing broke recently…

This USB lamp was only 8 yuan and the brightness is decent. Paired with a power bank it’s actually pretty great. Only I got a bit carried away — an 8-yuan order on JD felt like a waste of my free-shipping coupon, so I threw in two packs of latiao: one regular gluten latiao, one Qinzuishao.

Tried both and they’re good. Or rather, I just like latiao. Thinking about buying a whole box next time. I also bought beef jerky and fragrant rice during Double Twelve, but those got held up by the damn SCO summit and still haven’t arrived.

During the SCO summit in Zhengzhou a lot of couriers shut down. The only ones still running were SF Express and the post office. Even the post office just sends you a text telling you to come pick it up yourself — no delivery, supposedly because traffic is restricted. Fuck me.

So I had to sneak out of work to go pick up the music I’d bought.

The other courier that didn’t shut down was Amazon, though I don’t know if that’s because it was an overseas order and didn’t get intercepted.

I chopped off a few hands during Double Twelve, but luckily selling secondhand stuff on Xianyu brought back a fair amount of blood — and cost me plenty too. I’ve seen things now. Way too many weird buyers. Maybe I’ll rant about them in a separate post when I have time.