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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 man seen from behind at a desk with three glowing monitors in a dark high-rise bedroom at night, beds behind him and a window wall with a city skyline framing the scene

Make It So, Number One I haven’t written a line of code this year

AI agents write all my code now: no IDE, pull requests no human can read, agents that gossip - and friends and colleagues losing their jobs.
EN· ·AI
Illustration of a small Saigon apartment kitchen at dusk: one man stirs a pot at a gas stove next to a propped-up phone, another slices ginger at a cutting board, a potted ginger plant on the balcony behind them

Jayden's Kitchen, Batch One Too salty? Add sugar

Four Vietnamese home-cooking recipes from Jayden's kitchen - ginger chicken, bitter melon with egg, pumpkin coconut soup, and fish in tomato sauce.
EN· ·Life & Leisure
Two children seen from behind sit on a cracked concrete sea wall above a flooded river delta with half-submerged stilt-house roofs and palm tops, one holding a snow globe up to the sun, while bare glacier-less mountains with dead spruce forests and mine terraces shimmer in the heat

Seven of Nine, Unfortunately Is our home ready?

Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached, 65 conflicts, record arms budgets - and a would-be dad asking whether our home is ready for his kids.
EN· ·Personal Lore
A hooded figure crouches in the shadow of a half-open wooden door in a stone manor corridor, while torchlight spills from a hall where an armored guard stands and a stained-glass window casts teal and rose light on the wall

Twenty-Eight Years in the Dark Garrett finally casts a shadow

NewDark 1.29 brings hardware lighting, dynamic shadows and guards who spot your silhouette to Thief 1 and 2 - ahead of Nightdive's official remaster.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
A man lies on his back on the tiled floor of a dim apartment at dawn, arms and legs outstretched, a phone face-down beside his hand, an air conditioner on the wall and a hazy city skyline in the window behind him

Four Days of Almost My son-but-not-son

A paternity test, four days of waiting, a night on the floor - a Sài Gòn story about the child that wasn't mine, and the ones I still want.
EN· ·Personal Lore
A small boy in striped pajamas sits with his back to the viewer at a desk in a dark room at night, lit only by a bulky beige CRT monitor showing a colorful isometric pixel city with a river and a red bridge

Reticulating Splines Again SimCity 2000: Airports were my biggest fear

SimCity 2000 in 2K on Linux, thanks to the human-made sc2kfix mod - plus secret DOS nights and the runway chain reactions that crashed them.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
An elevated view over a bend of the Sài Gòn River in thick brownish smog, the downtown towers and a cable-stayed bridge dissolving into haze under a dim orange sun, a lone masked figure at the river railing

Thirty Years of Smoke One pfennig per breath

Indonesian wildfire haze has reached Sài Gòn - and a eight-year-old's fear about one day paying for air turns out to have been half right.
EN· ·Curiosity & Science
My neighborhood shipped a version number

Living In The Patch Notes My neighborhood shipped a version number

Phú Mỹ Hưng 2.0 is rebuilding a Taiwanese-planned, Korean-populated district into an ultra-luxury enclave - a resident report from inside the fence.
EN· ·Concrete & Steel
A lone figure with a rucksack and coiled rope stands on a stone ledge looking across a wide valley holding three landscapes at once: fog-covered slate rooftops and a clock tower on the left, a forest basin with one enormous ancient tree in the center, and a sun-bleached desert plateau with a half-buried stepped pyramid on the right

Doomed Backlog Season Garrett, Link and Lara are all coming back at once

Thief, Ocarina of Time and Tomb Raider are all being rebuilt - dates, engines, what is actually new, and one very inconvenient release calendar.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
View from the back seat of a taxi stuck in morning traffic in District 4, Sài Gòn, motorbike riders packed shoulder to shoulder ahead, one balancing a stack of egg trays

One Letter Apart We made boredom boring

Boredom didn't vanish - it got optimized, monetized and stripped of the one thing it was good for. The media flood, counted in human lifetimes.
EN· ·Digital Life