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city of a million shards
Tooth swings his legs in the city lights. A pixellated ad flutters across the windows. Beneath him, the roads roar by: one city, two cities—every city in the world is here, mirrored in a hundred skyscrapers. From up here, one can see the strait that splits the downtown from the peninsula. This is Berlian—all of…
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On dislocation
I see the river from above before I know who she is—a strand of yarn tangling the city and trees. 80.2.2, I locate myself in this new coordinate system. I wear it on my sleeve: I am not from here. There are so many white people in this room. Is this the right place? Am…
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Famous harbours, nameless streets
(Post 3 in my 2024 Travelogue) Oh, Hong Kong, how do I write about you? I’m brimming with gratitude that I had the chance to visit after wanting to for years. But can’t help a sort of grief too, at the signs I saw at every turn that the city was changing for good. I…
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Not all who wander are lost, but some who wander want to be
(Post 2 of my 2024 Travelogue) What they say really is true; your body remembers where it was born. I moved away from Singapore to Australia in 2018, but no matter how long I’ve been gone, my sleep schedule still keeps Singapore time. For several years until I completed my Master’s, I would fly back…
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The metropolis with a village heart: an ode to Singapore’s wild chickens
(Post 1 of my 2024 Travelogue) So, there are a lot of wild chickens in Singapore. More chickens than the last time I visited. Way more chickens than when I was a regular resident. That was my chief takeaway during my 5-day visit. Not how the city has gone 100% cashless, not the fact that…
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Compass
Originally published on FanFiction.net, and then here on my website. It has now been adapted into an interactive comic. As I fall through the fog between sleeping and waking, I begin to forget. Flashes of red. A shower of water and glass. Rainbows and dying lamp wicks. Where was I? Where am I now? Something’s…
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x marks the spot
This was written as part of an ARG I made for my partner, for our first Valentine’s Day. It took the form of a virtual treasure hunt; this was the prize. It was presented as several separate chapters, each gated by a password field (the passwords are denoted by square brackets). “Why upon your first…
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Societies of control and the failure of the taxonomic project. Or, how pride flags are related to pelicans.
The categorisation of things stems from but a single aim: to organise very large numbers of things, or collections of data, so as to harness and manipulate them. This is particularly useful–and profitable–as global systems of commerce and administration are handed to the purview of information technology, as big data looms increasingly large on our…
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Coming of age
When I was thirteen years old, I began to feel the bird inside me. Crammed inside a pelvis too small for its wings, it was trying to unfold. It burbled something, hoarsely, a parody of birdsong, as I stared and pretended not to hear. I was inside a tepid factory of scratching pens and clattering clocks,…
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“What’s on your mind?”
It is strange that cold after heat registers as a pleasant tingling across the skin. Why is it pleasant? Why do we call it pleasantness? It is stranger to think that the cold, wonderful and skin-tingling, will persist long beyond the end of all terrestrial life, or that the same sights capable of producing a similar frisson will continue to glow to the blindness of lifeless space in which the planets and stars would…
