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Further down the pile Page 3 of the backlog

Older dispatches, same weather. Nothing back here has been tidied up for the occasion.
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
A lone androgynous figure sits from behind on dark coastal rocks at dusk, facing an empty sea as if singing out over the water

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.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
Two simplified figures lie close on a bed in a dark hotel room at night, each holding a softly glowing phone, with a small gap of duvet between them, in a flat ligne-claire style

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.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
A three-storey red-painted adult shop in Sài Gòn at dusk, its facade covered in neon signage and a rainbow banner, seen from across a busy street with tangled power lines overhead

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.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
The neutral pronoun Vietnamese never had (so the community grew one)

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.
EN· ·Love, Sex & Identity
A rendering of Lara Croft running away from a T-Rex toward the camera, pistols in hand.

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.
EN· ·Nerdom & Games