Ready Player One Review

My formative teenage years coincided mostly in the 2000s, and feverishly playing World of Warcraft, Fable and Diablo — so even though I didn’t get most of the references to the Eighties, I totally understood and felt what they stand for. Ready Player One is a fantastic mixture of nostalgia and sci-fi, aptly labelled by USA Today as ‘Willy Wonka meets the Matrix’. The fast-paced writing and its quality made the book an OASIS-like simulation for me: instead of VR goggles and haptic gloves, I turned page after page and was fully-immersed inside the mind of Wade Owen Watts, who’s Parzival inside the OASIS world. Even though some plots are obvious, the book is thrilling and a one big glorious celebration of geekiness. Take me back.

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Clothes Making Clouds

Clothes Making Clouds

There are so many ways to define Shanghai, yet a few popular icons do a lot of the talking. As the international metropolis and a symbol of China’s rising economic power, there’s the Lujiazui (陆家嘴) skyline — with the Oriental Pearl Tower (东方明珠) and high offices of Chinese and multinational corporations. There’s the Maglev train […]
May 5, 2026
Passing on the Baton

Passing on the Baton

Day 2876 in Shanghai and I’m walking with Hasse on Dongdaming Road (东大名路) in the Hongkou district. In 2018, I lived next to this road; here I registered my first Chinese bank account, bought my first baozi in a FamilyMart, and it’s here that I photographed so many random things because Shanghai was all new […]
April 13, 2026
Arriving at an emotion

Arriving at an emotion

Before moving to China, I wondered what it’d be like to live in an entirely different environment — and it was the same for holidays like Cambodia or Vietnam, or when Hasse was born. You try to imagine these things and how they’d make you feel, how you’d react, or what they’re like. But everytime […]
April 10, 2026
People of Nantong

People of Nantong

I’m carrying Hasse around in Nantong (南通), in the historical block surrounded by the Haohe River (濠河) — while Eva in the hospital visits a sick relative. Hasse, being a seven month old baby, is a true 显眼包 (eye-catcher), so dozens of bypassers turn their head or want to touch her (which I quickly have […]
April 4, 2026