Ghost In The Sound Card The Age of Empires soundtrack was built to be forgotten
The Age of Empires soundtrack was engineered to vanish under a strategy game - so how did it end up permanently stuck in my head?
One language, all years Everything I wrote in English
116 posts. The rest of the archive is mostly German, which is what happens when you start a blog at nineteen and move countries later.
Desire, Memory, Belonging The shabby door
Attraction is biography, not biology - on desire with a map, orientalism, a war that isn't mine, and the shabby door into a life in Sài Gòn.
@luitpold.me
The frontier-vs-everyone-else gap is real – but “8-30b level” sells the floor short. Most people’s AI is Gemini 3.5 Flash, the default behind Google’s AI answers (2.5B+ users a month), or a free-tier GPT mini. Distilled last-gen flagships, a year behind and fast, not toy models.
And the wall’s lower than it was: GPT-5.6 went broadly public yesterday, Fable 5‘s back on paid plans. Except “public” skips free ChatGPT entirely – the elite part is who pays 50 USD a million tokens, not who’s let in.
Push back on myself: nobody’s baffled. 2.5 billion people use this daily – they just see something useful-but-mid, priced like a frontier they’ll never open. And the spend is real. Google alone: ~180 billion USD this year, up from 31 billion in 2022. Hundreds of billions isn’t hyperbole, it’s the floor.
Five Nights In Đà Nẵng The one who sang into the ocean
A Tinder match in Đà Nẵng became five unplanned nights - a hot, melancholic story about desire, connection, and wanting different lives.
A Sailor's Yarn Fourteen years of almost
A fourteen-year crush across Frankfurt, Munich and Bangkok that never quite landed - a queer love story told as a sailor's yarn, true where it counts.
@luitpold.me
Bobby Prince died June 16, at 81. Real name Robert Caskin Prince III – Vietnam vet, lawyer, and for one glorious accidental decade, the guy who invented what a PC game was supposed to sound like.
I didn’t grow up with him exactly – I grew up with Duke Nukem 3D’s strip-club synth-rock, Doom’s MIDI metal grinding through a Sound Blaster, and Duke Nukem 2’s weirdly chill loops nobody else seems to remember. That music didn’t just soundtrack my teenage years. It’s still in rotation on my machine right now, three decades later.
Library of Congress inducted the Doom score into the National Recording Registry in May. A month later, he was gone. Rest easy, Bobby – the frequencies you split so the effects could cut through the music still cut through.
Desire, Legally Speaking Sex is everywhere in Sài Gòn, and officially nowhere
Sex toys sit legal but invisible in Vietnam and loud but dying in Germany - how two countries regulate the same desire in opposite directions.
The Language Of Neither The neutral pronoun Vietnamese never had (so the community grew one)
Vietnamese forces a gender into every sentence - so how do non-binary and trans people get addressed? A look at the grammar, the slang, and the gaps.
Thirty Years Late I finally raided the first tomb – and I did it ugly on purpose
Tomb Raider 1 turns 30 - a personal review of finally finishing the original in its rough classic mode, where mechanics and atmosphere beat graphics.
Mom's Reisauflauf, Remixed The rice casserole my sister kept stealing from the fridge
Reisauflauf, remixed lighter and fluffier - a baked rice casserole with apples that even the pickiest eaters keep sneaking cold from the fridge.