Writing
Personal
Life, tech culture, and stories from Bacolod and beyond.
2025 3 posts
- My 2025 Stack Audit: What Earned Its Place The annual December reckoning, expanded to the whole stack: every tool, service, and habit judged by one question — did it earn its place this year? personal
- The Subscription Fatigue Essay: Why I Self-Host The monthly tally finally radicalized me into writing it down — on rented software, vanishing catalogs, price hikes with shrinking service, and the quiet dignity of owning your stack. personal
- Eleksyon 2025: Tech, Misinformation, and Fact-Checking The midterms are done — new counting machines, AI-era disinformation, and the fact-checkers' impossible math. A PH developer's notes on the election as an information system. personal
2024 3 posts
- Year of AI Coding Assistants: A Working Dev's Audit Copilot, Cursor, Claude, o1 — after a full year of AI-saturated development, the honest audit: what actually changed in my work, what didn't, and what I'd tell a dev starting today. personal
- Vision Pro Ships + Sora Stuns Video February's split screen — Apple's $3,499 bet arrives to reviews calling it a marvel nobody needs yet, and OpenAI's Sora makes minute-long video from a sentence. personal
- Bitcoin ETFs Approved: Crypto Grows Up? The SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs — after its own Twitter account got hacked to announce it a day early. Closing thoughts from someone who covered the whole strange cycle. personal
2023 2 posts
- Apple Vision Pro: Spatial Computing, Announced Apple revealed a $3,499 headset and refused to say "metaverse" even once. What the Vision Pro announcement signals — and what it pointedly avoids. personal
- AI Doomers vs Builders: The Open Letter Era Hinton left Google to warn about the thing he built. Thousands signed a letter asking for a pause nobody paused. A working developer's attempt to hold the debate honestly. personal
2022 3 posts
- FTX Collapses and ChatGPT Launches in the Same Month November 2022 ended one era and started another within three weeks — an $8B hole where a crypto exchange used to be, and an AI you can talk to. Notes from the hinge of the decade. personal
- Axie Post-Mortem: What PH Learned from Play-to-Earn The Ronin bridge lost $625M to state-sponsored hackers, SLP fell more than 99% from peak, and the scholars went back to job hunting. An honest accounting of the Philippines' play-to-earn experiment. personal
- DALL·E 2: The First "AI Art" Shock OpenAI showed a model that turns sentences into photorealistic images. The demos feel like a magic trick the explanation doesn't dispel. Some first reactions, filed for the record. personal
2021 4 posts
- Squid Game, El Salvador, and Crypto as Legal Tender The same month a survival drama about debt became Netflix's biggest launch ever, a country made Bitcoin legal tender. The two stories rhyme more than they should. personal
- Scholarships, Breeders, and Axie's Micro-Economy At peak hype, Axie Infinity isn't just a game in the Philippines — it's a labor market, a breeding industry, and a tax question. Field notes from the inside of the boom. personal
- Bitcoin's Run and Crypto FOMO in the Barkada BTC touched an all-time high near $64K, Coinbase went public, and suddenly every group chat has a crypto evangelist. Notes on staying sane during a mania. personal
- Clubhouse and the Audio-Social Moment An invite-only, audio-only, iPhone-only app became the most coveted room on the internet. On scarcity as a growth hack and whether drop-in audio survives the hype. personal
2020 4 posts
- Cyberpunk 2077: A Launch-Day Post-Mortem Eight years of hype, three delays, and a launch so broken Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store. What Cyberpunk 2077 teaches anyone who ships software. personal
- Among Us and Impostor-Game Psychology A two-year-old indie game became 2020's social phenomenon. A gamer's take on why lying to your friends in space is the most honest fun of the year. personal
- TikTok and the Rise of Short-Form Everything Lockdown made TikTok the defining app of 2020. Some thoughts on the recommendation engine behind it, and what short-form does to the rest of the internet. personal
- Animal Crossing and Why Cozy Games Won the Lockdown New Horizons sold over 13 million copies in six weeks. A gamer's theory on why, in the worst months of 2020, the world chose to pay off a loan to a raccoon. personal
2019 4 posts
- SEA Games, Manila Servers, and a Decade Signing Off The Philippines hosted the SEA Games, esports won real medals, and the 2010s ran out of calendar. A year-end note on the decade that built the modern web — and us. personal
- Fortnite's Black Hole: The Game That Turned Itself Off The biggest game on Earth sucked itself into a black hole and went dark for two days while millions watched nothing happen. The boldest live-ops move ever made. personal
- Apex Legends: Shipping with Zero Marketing Respawn dropped a battle royale with no trailers, no hype cycle, no pre-orders — and hit 25 million players in a week. A gamer's notes on the anti-launch. personal
- The 10 Year Challenge and What We Feed the Feed Everyone is posting 2009-vs-2019 photos, and one writer asked an uncomfortable question: did we just label a facial-recognition training set for free? personal