To main content To menu

Further down the pile Page 3 of the backlog

Older dispatches, same weather. Nothing back here has been tidied up for the occasion.
A dense delta city at dusk drawn in fixed isometric projection, with tin-roofed shophouses and a canal in the foreground, a river crossed by a cable-stayed bridge and an elevated highway, and a cluster of lit office towers and construction cranes fading into haze

Press Play, Mayor SimCity 4 shipped with two soundtracks – and a Grammy winner on oboe

SimCity 4's soundtrack is two albums in one - god mode and mayor mode - made by a jazz department, a Czech orchestra and a Monkey Island composer.
EN· ·Music
A narrow Sài Gòn residential alley at night, seen down its length, with a lone figure walking away between pools of orange lamplight, tangled power cables overhead and roller gates closed on both sides

Six Years Of Alleys Somebody always opened the gate

Safety in Sài Gòn is not ambient - it is made of people. Six years of hẻm life across four districts, and what Phú Mỹ Hưng costs.
EN· ·Life & Leisure
A wooden serving board held out toward the viewer with a round golden carrot cake on it, one wedge cut out showing the orange-flecked crumb, an open-plan office with concrete ceiling and ducts behind

Public Alpha, Edible The carrot cake I shipped to production untested

Carrot cake with no butter and no oil, baked at 11pm from memory alone and served to an entire office before anyone had tasted it.
EN· ·Life & Leisure
A small tethered hot air balloon drifting in layers of mist above a hilly jungle canopy, with the outlines of an overgrown stepped pyramid and broken ruins visible through the gaps below

On Repeat, Regrettably A stranger in Hamburg rebuilt the Tomb Raider theme, twice

Tomb Raider theme, covered twice by German producer Ambyion - a 2021 remix, a 2025 rework, and one loop I cannot get out of.
EN· ·Music
Illustration of a teenage protest march passing along a city boulevard in cold spring light, one marcher holding up a piece of brown cardboard painted with three eggs

Eggs, Beats And Paragraph 188 Merz leck Eier, or how a confiscated sign became a banger

Merz leck Eier went from a confiscated demo sign to a viral rap single, a Google Maps prank and an open prosecutor file - here is the story.
EN· ·Music
A long candlelit banquet table in a high hall, seventeenth-century figures leaning over an open ledger, a potted palm behind them, and one lone cloaked figure waiting outside in the doorway

Words Nobody Asked For A kennel for maidens

German was argued into existence by people who mostly lost - four centuries of poets, pedants and purists building a language out loud.
EN· ·Curiosity & Science
Low-poly illustration of impossible glowing green rock shards floating in a black void, with an ochre island carrying a red pagoda temple, a stone lantern and a blossom tree, and a small figure with a braid leaping between them under a pale moon

Thirteen Years Later The better tomb, and the man who wouldn’t build it

Tomb Raider 2 is the better, rounder Tomb Raider - and the game its own creator refused to make. On levels, gunplay and the Lara hype machine.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
Ligne-claire illustration of a bearded island hermit in a rainbow robe with a red headband, standing on a grassy headland above a turquoise lagoon among tall seven-leafed plants, a wrecked rowboat on the beach behind him

Twenty-Five Megabytes Of Island Stranded 2 still eats weekends

Stranded 2 runs on Linux in 2026 - a 2007 freeware survival island, a lost weekend, and one German guy still building the sequel.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games
A lone figure seen from behind, crouched on a vast cracked plain, arranging four dark pebbles in a row on a stone slab while hundreds more scatter toward a hazy horizon under an enormous sky

Grammar All The Way Down Then I found four pebbles

Ultrafinitism wants infinity banished from math - but every fix for infinity is just another grammar, and quantizing an 80B model shows why.
EN· ·Curiosity & Science
A sunlit, empty teenage bedroom in a rural Bavarian house, drawn in flat ligne claire style: an unmade single bed with late afternoon sun falling across it, an open window with a lifting curtain, a desk with an old CRT monitor, and a black t-shirt crumpled on the floorboards

Class of 2005 F*CK YOU – two words, no argument

The bug in the system - Heartstopper landed 20 years too late for a queer kid at a Bavarian village school. Six years, two carved words, what came after.
EN· ·Personal Lore