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Further down the pile Page 2 of the backlog

Older dispatches, same weather. Nothing back here has been tidied up for the occasion.
A young Vietnamese man in a white t-shirt and jeans, seen from behind at the foot of a steep pale blue staircase, taking an impossibly long stride that clears four blank steps at once, while a young woman in a yellow dress waits at the top beside a lit doorway, drawn in flat ligne claire style.

A Loanword Rebuilt The trapboy takes the stairs four at a time

Trapboy and trapgirl mean something in Việt Nam they never meant in English - a courtship protocol, a fishing metaphor, and a stamped government form
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
A walled city cemetery on a still morning, worn blank gravestones in the foreground and a lone figure standing on a wide empty patch of lawn where no stones are, with Berlin apartment blocks hazing out behind the wall

Ten Years Of Being Right Knowing is not preventing

Germany knows exactly what the AfD is - and it is rising anyway. On memory culture, a blog post from 2016, and a calendar.
EN· ·Politics & Ideology
A young man stands in the doorway of a quiet apartment living room in early morning light, seen from behind with a backpack on one shoulder, looking back at a couch with a blanket folded into a square on the armrest

The Trärchen Year Two boyfriends and a contract on the kitchen wall

Throuple life in Frankfurt - a three-page relationship contract on the kitchen wall, one very good year, and the slow way it came apart.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
A lone hooded figure stands on a desert plateau facing a large glowing rectangular slab of light that hovers perfectly still in front of a vast layered sandstone canyon

Two Rules, No JavaScript The four lines of CSS that killed my scroll-lock JavaScript

overscroll-behavior: contain now locks the page behind an open dialog in Chrome, Edge and Firefox - plus the :modal refinement and where Safari stands.
EN· ·Code
A teenage bedroom at night, a beige tower PC with its CD tray open holding a blank disc, a spindle of blank discs and a marker pen on the desk, a figure seen from behind lit by the glow of a CRT monitor

Notes From The Burner Tray The disc was the network

Game piracy in early-2000s Germany ran on borrowed CDs, blood patches and a school IT room - a look back at a world that dissolved around 2010.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
A lone figure sleeps on a rise of sand while a vivid full-colour dreamed landscape of dunes, ruined towers and drifting lights unfurls from their head and fades to bare line drawing at the frame edges.

The Render Runs At Night My mind runs on MIDI

A mind with no mental images, a render engine that only wakes at night - and a creativity that never actually left.
EN· ·Personal Lore
A Sable-style illustration of a besieged fortress at dusk, mixing a Tolkienesque stone keep with a Crusader desert castle, a tiny granary and wheat field at the wall's foot, a huge simplified army with siege engines approaching, and a lone defender watching from the near tower.

You're Under Attack, Sire Helm’s Deep with Stronghold sound effects

Helm's Deep re-dubbed with Stronghold sound effects - the most cursed, most perfect gaming-nerd crossover since Troy met Age of Empires.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
A lone figure at a drafting desk on a desert rise, a single server tower on the far horizon and a faint looping line curving back on itself in the pale sky, drawn in flat Sable-style linework

The Tool Eats Its Tail The pipeline that published this post

A custom MCP server drafts, scores, illustrates and publishes lui.vn posts in one chat - and this post came out the far end of it.
EN· ·AI
A young boy hunched at a glowing CRT monitor in a dark attic bedroom at four in the morning, playing an isometric strategy game, drawn in a flat-colour Sable art style with warm screen-light against teal and lavender shadow

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?
EN· ·Music
A lone figure stands from behind at a battered doorway set into a broad ochre wall, and through the open door lies not a room but a vast tropical city stretching to the horizon

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.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity