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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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River City, Storm City, Flood City: A prospective on Tropical Cyclone Alfred
Meanjin, Brisbane, BNE. The River City lives upon the floodplain of the Maiwar, which for many millennia was a prodigious wetland. The Turrbal name of the locale, Meanjin (“spike”), refers to the pointed riverbend in which the central business district is nestled. The ghost of the swampland is still felt to this day, in the…
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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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千里香
A locative story written in 2018. In its original form, the story would be read on a portable device, each section unlocked when the reader arrives at a given location in person. To emulate that experience, I have included with each section a photograph of its corresponding unlock location. Qianlixiang: the thousand-mile fragrance. A white…
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A letter to a soon-defunct address
Originally published on Facebook Notes, and then on Medium. I think I’ve finally composed my thoughts on RGS. “Home is where the heart is” — that’s a line that I’ve believed ever since five-year-old me heard it in a song from a long-forgotten cartoon. When we pack up and leave a familiar place for good,…
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Drift
We once thought we could fathom the vastness of the seafrom the lap of an island shore. Watching shipstip over the horizon, we laughed, knowing nothingcould survive the fall past the edge. We did not see how, deep beyond the continental margins, submarinecanyons channeled secret rivers onto underwater plains, or howthe abyssal fish slowly went blind, their…
