Twenty Years Of Flag About
My name is Luit. Full name Luitpold-Alexander Zollorsch – yes, that’s a real name, no, I didn’t choose it, yes, it’s exactly as German as it sounds. Vietnamese name Khôi Nguyên. Born in Munich in 1988, matured in Frankfurt. I was born in Germany by chance, but I’m European and an Earthling by conviction. I’ve lived in Sài Gòn since 2018, currently together with my partner Jayden. By day I’m a Frontend Engineer and AI Orchestrator. By night, I’m still the same, just with worse posture and three monitors: one for playing games, one for running AI agents, and one for watching YouTube videos about concrete, science, philosophy and geopolitics.
This here… is my blog. It has been my blog since 2006. It covers games (mostly retro, mostly city builders, occasionally something where you shoot things), music, life in Việt Nam, architecture and infrastructure, recipes from a German kitchen that now operates at 38 degrees Celsius, software engineering, personal essays that occasionally get uncomfortably honest, and whatever else I feel like writing about. The topic taxonomy currently includes categories like Concrete & Steel, Love, Sex & Identity, Nerdom & Games, and Politics & Ideology – which gives you a decent sense of the range and the energy. Everyone’s welcome here. Every identity, every orientation, every background. The blog is queer, the author is queer, and the comment section is que…disabled (unrelated, but also related). Speaking of queer: at one point I registered 🏳️🌈.ws as a domain because no German registrar could handle emoji URLs and a New Zealand one could. It redirected here. It was useless, but fancy.
I am not a tech blogger. Not a lifestyle influencer. Not a content creator. I’m a guy who has had a website since 2006 and never stopped.
Why It Started
The year is 2006. Facebook doesn’t exist yet. YouTube is one year old and still independent. People communicate through MySpace, ICQ, chat rooms, and SMS. ISDN is still around. DSL is a premium. There are no smartphones. Movies come on VHS, CD, or DVD. Having a personal website is genuinely rare – and, in the social circles of a teenager in Munich, genuinely impressive.
A teenage me, going by the nickname xXKronosXx (yeah, this cringy xXblobXx format was lit late-MySpace-era shit back then), builds one as an extension of his MySpace and ICQ profiles. The idea: provide more information and personality than social networks allow. Stand out among friends. Plant a flag in the Wild West of the early internet.
The nickname, for what it’s worth, was just a nickname at first. Over the following years it became something more – a constructed persona, an identity that lived online while the real one was still figuring itself out. That’s a longer story, and it’s told elsewhere on this blog. The short version: the persona eventually collapsed, the person behind it grew up (debatable), and the website survived both.
Twenty years later (damn, I’m old!), the flag is still up.
The History
2006-2008 – kronos-net.de
Pure profile website. Hosted by the marketing agency where I worked at the time, running their custom PHP CMS called Netzcraftwerk (a name that has not aged well, but neither have most things from 2006). The site had a personal profile, dedicated pages for close friends, hobbies, a download section for free games, and a guestbook – the latter being a very big deal in 2006. If someone signed your guestbook, that was basically a LinkedIn endorsement with soul.
2008-2010 – First Blog
Migration to WordPress + Hetzner. Open-topic posts about whatever fascinated me – games, music, movies, the occasional existential crisis typed at 2 AM in a font I’d rather not remember. Quality was questionable by any standard, including the ones I had at the time. Friends contributed posts – several of them as regular co-authors with their own nicknames and topics. Two of those co-authors have since passed away. Their posts are still up, filed under names that nobody logs into anymore. That’s part of what “they stay up anyway” means, later on this page.
During this era, the site accidentally became a major German resource for Pennergame, a browser game about being homeless that was inexplicably popular (the 2000s internet was a different place.) Keyword SEO tricks and shady optimization that I’m retroactively embarrassed about drove thousands of daily visitors, leading to AdSense revenue in the triple digits per month, a live chat widget (unencrypted, unmoderated – different times), and a Pennergame forum. An accidental early internet success story. Also, objectively, kind of gross. But it happened, it’s part of the history, and I’m leaving it in.
Then, in March 2010, I deleted the entire thing overnight. Redirected every incoming request to google.de, locked the door, and walked away. The reasons are personal and documented elsewhere on this blog. The blog came back weeks later – stripped down, private, reborn as a digital diary under the same domain but with a completely different purpose. The old content survived in what I called the Rotes Archiv (Red Archive), a mausoleum for posts that deserved preservation but no longer fit the person writing them.
2010-2013 – Expansion
Stable traffic, frequent theme changes (almost every six months, because apparently I treated my blog like a wardrobe), and expansion to Facebook and Twitter. The blog became increasingly personal as life, personality, and surroundings went through significant changes. The writing got more honest – sometimes uncomfortably so. The nickname started crossing from online into real life. Friends called me Krony. The blog was catching up to who I actually was.
August 2013 – krony.de
The MySpace-era username was done. A domain and identity shift to Krony – the name people already used. The rebrand made it official. The redesign leaned into Minecraft aesthetics, because Minecraft was basically my second operating system at the time. I built cities in that game – full highway interchanges, metro systems, skyscrapers above the clouds. The blog’s visual identity reflected the same obsession.
2013-2017 – Frankfurt
Frankfurt was the first city I chose for myself – open-minded, international, five years that mattered. The blog reflected that: mixed topics with a growing share of personal posts driven by major life changes. Global coming out, first deep love, first collapse, first psychiatric ward, first real recovery. The writing got heavier because life got heavier. Some of those posts are still the most honest things I’ve ever published.
Hosting moved from Hetzner to Host Europe, and later to World4You in Linz, Austria – on the recommendation of a friend, because that’s how hosting decisions worked in 2016. Overall traffic declined, but certain posts kept pulling absurd numbers for years: a transcription of Lord of the Weed, answers to questions about German age of consent law (don’t ask), and guides for running Pharaoh and The Settlers 3 on modern Windows. The internet is a strange place, and my analytics were stranger.
2017-2020 – Stagnation
Interest faded. Posts became sporadic and unfocused. Zero posts in 2020. The blog kept running on inertia, like a server that nobody remembered to turn off. I was busy living – I’d moved to Sài Gòn in 2018, was rebuilding everything from scratch in a new country, and writing about it was the last thing on my mind. The blog survived, barely, the way a houseplant survives when you forget it exists for three months and then find it stubbornly alive behind a curtain.
2020 – lui.vn
New domain. lui.vn – matching my real name and my new life in Việt Nam. VinaHost handling the domain registration and NetCup handling the hosting. A symbolic reset, even if the posting frequency didn’t immediately change. The domain was the statement: this is who I am now, and this is where I am.
2021-2025 – Sporadic but Alive
The blog switched languages. Everything before 2021 was written in German. Everything after is in English – a shift that happened naturally as my daily life, my thinking, and my audience became increasingly international. The German past stays up, untranslated. It’s part of the archive.
2021 was a hard year in ways that echo through the blog if you know where to look. The posts from that era are a mix of lockdown diaries, gaming marathons as coping mechanism, and the kind of writing you do when the world has gone quiet and you need to hear your own voice. Posting remained sporadic through 2025 – occasional pieces, some search rankings that held, residual traffic. Low motivation, but the blog never went dark.
March 2026 – Refurbishment
Full rebuild. Hosting moved to Hostinger in Singapore. Theme recreated from scratch – the 26th major redesign, self-designed and self-developed, like all the ones before it. Backend (WordPress plugins) rewritten. All 687 historical posts restructured and enriched with metadata. Comments section disabled. Motivation found in a drawer where I apparently left it six years ago, slightly dusty but functional.
By the Numbers
687+ posts. 7,987 moderated comments across the years (currently hidden, but who knows). 26 major theme redesigns – eight of them in the first three years alone, because apparently restraint wasn’t in the skill tree yet. All self-designed and self-developed, often chasing whatever web design trend was fashionable at the time. Glitter phases. Unicorn phases. A nudity phase (the 2000s internet was wild). Rainbows – both the decorative kind and, later, the identity kind. Responsive since 2010 – before most people knew what that word meant in a web context. Zero major technical incidents across 20 years. Consistently scoring 95-100 on all Google Lighthouse metrics, because I’m the kind of person who optimizes microinteractions that almost nobody will ever notice and then feels deeply satisfied about it anyway.
I’ve always been proud of what I built. At least technically. The actual blog post contents – especially the older ones – are another matter. Many are cringey. Some are creepy by today’s standards. A few make me want to reach back through time and gently close my younger self’s laptop. They stay up anyway. All of them. They’re part of the history, and deleting your past because it’s embarrassing is a form of dishonesty I’m not interested in.
Why It Still Exists
Independent personal blogs have largely disappeared. Most content today is created on major social media platforms, where usage rights belong to corporations, content is mined for data and ad targeting, and infrastructure is controlled by a small number of – mostly – American tech companies. That infrastructure is increasingly not neutral – not politically, not ideologically, not commercially.
The broader political shift of recent years – particularly the alignment of major tech companies with directions that are, let’s say, not great for anyone who values democratic norms, diversity, or basic human decency – has made owning your own space feel more important, not less. I moved my hosting out of Germany to Singapore. I’ve made deliberate choices to reduce dependency on big tech wherever possible. Not out of paranoia. Out of principle. And out of a stubborn conviction that the internet was better when it was weirder, smaller, and owned by the people who built it.
lui.vn exists as a counter-position. A privately owned, not-really-independently-but-at-least-less-dependant hosted, handcrafted corner of the web that belongs entirely to its author. No algorithm decides what gets seen. No engagement optimization shapes what gets written. No data mining pays the bills. No AI-generated slop fills the gaps (the AI here helps with editing and is credited where used – it doesn’t replace the voice, and it doesn’t write the opinions).
Success and visibility are secondary. What matters is having my very own, beautifully handcrafted and with Easter eggs filled niche out there.
Twenty years in, the flag is still up. The internet changed. I changed. The blog changed twenty-six times, visually, and at least three times, existentially. But the impulse that started it – a teenager in Munich who wanted a corner of the internet that was his – is the same impulse that keeps it running from a server in Singapore, written from a desk in Sài Gòn, by a person who still thinks having your own website is genuinely rare, and genuinely impressive.
Hero image: taken by me on Jan 16, 2026. It was visually extended on March 30 2026, at 12:27 PM with the help of google/nano-banana-pro.