Twenty Years Of Flag About
I’m Luit. Luitpold-Alexander Zollorsch on paper – yes, that’s a real name, no, I didn’t pick it, yes, it’s exactly as German as it sounds. Khôi Nguyên in Vietnamese. Born 1988, living in Sài Gòn since 2018, currently with my fiancé Jayden.
By day I’m a frontend engineer and AI orchestrator. By night I’m the same guy with worse posture and three monitors: one for playing games, one for running AI agents, one for watching YouTube videos about concrete, science, philosophy and geopolitics. The posture is not improving.
Munich first, for the earliest years. Then the greater Munich area for the rest of childhood and all of my teens – a place I have somehow never once defended in a conversation, not even by accident. Frankfurt came after that, and Frankfurt was the first city I actually chose. Five years that mattered. Then Sài Gòn, chosen harder.
It took me roughly three decades to notice the pattern: I have only ever felt at home in places I picked myself. Where you’re born is an accident with paperwork attached. I was born in Germany by chance, I’m European by conviction, and an Earthling by everything that’s left over.
What this is
This is my blog. It has been my blog since 2006, which means it is older than the iPhone, most of my friendships, and every strong opinion I currently hold.
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, and personal essays that occasionally get uncomfortably honest. The category list runs from Concrete & Steel through 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. Also not unrelated.
Speaking of which: I once registered 🏳️🌈.ws as a domain, because no German registrar could handle an emoji URL and a New Zealand one could. It redirected here. It was completely useless and I loved it.
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 having one.
Yes, there’s AI on this blog
Every recent hero image you see is AI-generated, and the credit line sits right under it in the caption, on every single post. An AI also runs the editing pass on my drafts – structure, rhythm, the sentence I’ve rewritten four times and still hate.
What it doesn’t do: think for me. The opinions are mine, the memories are mine, the voice is mine, and when a post is wrong about something it’s wrong in my specific way. That’s the whole line, and it isn’t a fuzzy one.
And there’s a part I’d rather say out loud than have someone discover: AI is the reason this blog is alive again. Between 2017 and 2025 it barely moved. Zero posts in 2020. What came back with the tooling wasn’t the writing – it was the time, and then the appetite. Turns out the thing standing between me and a finished post was never the ideas. It was the six hours.
An anti-slop blog run by an AI orchestrator only sounds like a contradiction if you think the tool is the author.
Why it still exists
Independent personal blogs have mostly died. Not dramatically, just quietly, the way things die when something more convenient shows up. Almost everything gets published inside major platforms now, where the usage rights belong to a corporation, the content feeds ad targeting, and the infrastructure sits with a small handful of – mostly American – tech companies.
That infrastructure was never neutral, and over the past few years it stopped pretending. Watching those companies line up behind directions that are, let’s put it gently, not great for anyone who values democratic norms or basic human decency has made owning your own square meter of the web feel more urgent, not less.
So: no algorithm decided what you’re reading right now. You got here yourself, or someone sent you, and the RSS feed is right there if you want everything else on your own terms, in your own reader, with nothing in between. Advertising doesn’t pay for this, which is why there isn’t any. Nobody is being measured for engagement, least of all me.
The hosting has already left Germany. It sits in Singapore at the moment and moves to Malaysia as soon as I find a free weekend to shovel domains and data across, which is its own small comedy – I optimize microinteractions nobody will ever consciously notice, and the migration has been on my list since March.
Not paranoia. Principle. Plus a stubborn conviction that the internet was better when it was weirder, smaller, and owned by the people who built it.
Twenty years, compressed
2006 – 2008. kronos-net.de. A teenage me, going by xXKronosXx, because that cringy xXblobXx format was genuinely lit in the late MySpace era. Hosted by the marketing agency I worked at, on a custom PHP CMS called Netzcraftwerk. Personal profile, pages for close friends, a download section, and a guestbook – and in 2006, a signed guestbook was basically a LinkedIn endorsement with a soul.
2008 – 2010. WordPress and Hetzner, and the first thing that was actually a blog. Games, music, movies, the occasional existential crisis typed at 2 AM in a font I’d rather not remember. Friends wrote for it too, several of them as regular co-authors with their own nicknames and their own topics.
Two of those co-authors have since died. Their posts are still up, filed under names nobody logs into anymore.
The same era, the site accidentally became a major German resource for Pennergame, a browser game about being homeless that was inexplicably popular. Keyword tricks and shady SEO drove thousands of visitors a day, AdSense revenue in the triple digits per month, an unencrypted live chat widget, a whole forum. An accidental internet success story and, objectively, kind of gross. It happened, it’s in the history, I’m leaving it in.
Then in March 2010 I deleted all of it overnight, redirected every incoming request to google.de, and walked away. The reasons are personal and documented elsewhere on this blog. It came back weeks later, stripped down and private, a digital diary under the same domain with a completely different purpose. The old posts survived in what I called the Rotes Archiv – a mausoleum for writing that deserved keeping but no longer fit the person doing the writing.
2010 – 2013. Stable traffic, a theme change roughly every six months because apparently I treated my blog like a wardrobe, and the writing turning steadily more personal as everything around it changed. Friends had started calling me Krony offline. The nickname was crossing over.
2013. krony.de. The MySpace-era username was done, the rebrand made the new one official, and the redesign leaned hard into Minecraft, because Minecraft was my second operating system at the time. I built cities in that game. Full highway interchanges, metro systems, towers above the cloud layer.
2013 – 2017. Frankfurt. Global coming out, first deep love, first collapse, first psychiatric ward, first real recovery. The writing got heavier because life did. Some of those posts are still the most honest things I’ve ever published. Hosting wandered from Hetzner to Host Europe to World4You in Linz, on a friend’s recommendation, because that’s how hosting decisions worked in 2016. Traffic declined overall, while a few posts kept pulling absurd numbers for years: a transcription of Lord of the Weed, some answers about German age of consent law (don’t ask), and guides for running Pharaoh and The Settlers 3 on modern Windows. My analytics have always been stranger than my life.
2017 – 2020. Stagnation. Sporadic, unfocused, then nothing at all in 2020. I’d moved to Sài Gòn in 2018 and was rebuilding an entire life from scratch, and writing about it was the last thing on my mind. The blog survived the way a houseplant survives being forgotten behind a curtain for three months.
2020. lui.vn. New domain matching my real name and my new country. A symbolic reset, even though the posting frequency took its sweet time catching up.
2021 – 2025. The language switched. Everything before 2021 is German, everything after is English, and the shift happened on its own as my daily life and my thinking went international. The German past stays up, untranslated. 2021 itself was a hard year in ways that echo through the archive if you know where to look: lockdown diaries, gaming marathons as a coping mechanism, the kind of writing you do when the world has gone quiet and you need to hear your own voice.
March 2026. Full rebuild. Theme recreated from scratch – the 26th major redesign, self-designed and self-developed like every one before it. Plugins rewritten, all 687 historical posts restructured and enriched with metadata, comments disabled. Motivation found in a drawer where I’d apparently left it six years earlier, dusty but functional.
The numbers, and one confession
717+ posts. 7,987 moderated comments, currently hidden, possibly not forever. 26 major redesigns, eight of them in the first three years alone, because restraint wasn’t in the skill tree yet. There was a glitter phase. A unicorn phase. A nudity phase – the 2000s were a wilder place and I was very committed. Responsive since 2010, before most people knew what that word meant on the web. Zero major technical incidents in twenty years. Lighthouse scores between 95 and 100 across the board, because I’m the kind of person who optimizes an animation curve nobody will ever consciously register and then feels quietly magnificent about it.
The confession: I’ve always been proud of what I built, technically. The contents are another matter. Plenty of the old posts are cringey, a few are creepy by today’s standards, and at least one makes me want to reach back through time and gently close my younger self’s laptop.
They stay up. All of them. Deleting your past because it embarrasses you is a form of dishonesty I’m not interested in.
Doors out
If you want to know me rather than the site, start with Personal Lore – that’s where the honest ones live. The feed is at /feed/, no account needed and no middleman taking a cut. Instagram is the only social platform I still actually use. And if you want to reach me directly – mail, Telegram, Zalo, WhatsApp, or a link to my OnlyFans that I promise is worth clicking – everything lives on luitpold.me.
Twenty years in, the flag is still up. The internet changed, I changed, the blog changed twenty-six times visually and about three times existentially. The impulse hasn’t moved an inch. A teenager in Munich wanted a corner of the internet that was his, and a man at a desk in Sài Gòn still thinks having your own website is genuinely rare, and genuinely impressive.