A day without posting any new content combined with a merciless approach at blacklisting any account (follower or not) that said anything crass in my comments and which has under 100 followers of their own seems to have rid me of the keyboard warriors.

Tencent and ByteDance generally don't talk each other outside the courtroom so, although you can give Douyin permission to access your phone book to suggest people, you can't give it access to your QQ or WeChat friends list (i.e., the way most people in China communicate). Being as the majority of people follow back any Real Person that gets recommended to them¹, such a low number either indicates "this person has no friends" or "this person is intentionally using an alt" both of which are prime indicators for "this person feels safe being an asshole to strangers".

I really need to work on this getting out the door before noon thing but I don't see it happening.

No matter how much I think I'd actually appreciate the Chinese Concrete Museum², I'm not in a museums by myself mood so I leave town by a more or less direct route with stops to find and photograph a gas station where I took a shit in 2008.

After about 30km of nothing particularly fascinating or special³ and briefly getting lost (which shouldn't even be possible with the GPS but I've set my day after tomorrow destination wrong and am skewing too far west), I find myself heading south from Daye on the G106.

Seen with fresh eyes that know what they're looking at, it's a lot more interesting than it was when I was heading north from the tollbooth where I spent the night in 2008⁴. This does not, however, make it interesting.

The best bit is probably the probably Great Leap Forward era aqueduct covered with Cultural Revolution era slogans on the verge of sunset as I'm passing out of the town where I'd intended to spend the night on to the town where I'll actually sleep.

The first town is much larger and has something like 20 hotels shown on Maps. However, when I get to town, these are basically divided between "things on the other side of the road" (which has a barrier down the middle) or "things that obviously have a second floor lobby". I have to make it all the way to the very end of town before I get to a place I can cross the street and, at that point, I may as well just call ahead to the two hotels in the town 8 kilometers down the road instead of backtracking three.

First one tells me they aren't open. Could be true, could be my out of province phone number. Don't know, don't care as the second one is absolutely fine and dandy. Surprised that I'm a foreigner when I show up but still fine and dandy.

His local police will be the first time in Hubei I encounter Authority being less fine and dandy with me but they crumple under the not very intense pressure of him responding to them saying "tell her to leave" with "she says no", show up, take all the same photos of my documents that he already sent them over WeChat, and wish me a good trip.

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¹ I'm following 187 and being followed by 43,000. Two of those 187 are detectives from the Incident. The one who mostly likes videos of people doing interesting construction things with plaster followed me back. The one that was posting sad videos about being nearly 30 and not yet married set her account to private after I clicked like on a food video.

² Industrial museums on the site of former factories are a new enough thing that, unlike a county museum featuring local history, there's a very good likelihood of this having professional curators and exhibit designers.

³ A mix of buildings of different eras telling the development story of a region is interesting. A whole lot of 90s stuff that wasn't interesting when it was built and which isn't run down enough to be replaced is just the outskirts of an industrial city.

⁴ One of my more interesting lodging stories