Empty Corners Singapore – empty corners of a crowded island
Singapore for a week without a single photo of the Merlion - wetlands, hornbills, empty rain-soaked parks, and the small human encounters most tourists miss.
Timeline
Baking Through the Heatwave Bitter orange cake – a recipe in three attempts
A Seville orange loaf cake that took three versions, one feral oven, and an entire office of Monday-morning guinea pigs to get right. (148 chars)
A Pearl Resurfaces The $137 million game I couldn’t play
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within bankrupted a studio, changed cinema forever, and looked like a game I desperately wanted to play. Twenty-five years later, I found it on Netflix.
Two Flags Apart Thirty years of wuseln – The Settlers 2 and the fan project that refuses to die
The Settlers 2 turns 30 - a personal history from DOS to Sài Gòn, and the fan-made overhaul that keeps the Wusler bustling on modern machines.
Sister, Citrus, Continents Lemon meringue tart: A French recipe that traveled through Australia to land in Sài Gòn
Lemon meringue tart with a supply chain spanning three continents - a French recipe, an Australian sister, and a Vietnamese kitchen.
Living Inside the Game $100 billion and an excavator for an alarm clock
Ho Chi Minh City is building $100B+ in infrastructure simultaneously - metro lines, airports, highways, an entire new CBD, and a city reclaimed from the sea. A deep dive from someone whose bedroom window overlooks the chaos.
What The AI Found I fed 15 years of my private conversations to an AI and asked it who I am – part 2
One friendship went from 11,629 messages to 125 in a quarter. What an AI found in 425,491 private messages and twenty years of blogging.
The Folder I Never Opened I fed 15 years of my private conversations to an AI and asked it who I am – part 1
Chat logs from four years, 425,491 messages after deduplication, and the pipeline that fed them to an AI - the engineering half of a self-analysis.
DOS Gets It Right MURI: A DOS platformer that actually gets it
MURI nails the early DOS platformer feel - EGA palette, PC speaker, chunky pixels. Thirty years late to its own era, still worth it.
Tropical Christmas Bread The pumpkin bread that makes thirty degrees feel like Christmas
Pumpkin bread in Ho Chi Minh City's December - when 25 degrees feels like Christmas and the rainy season finally packs its bags.