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On the final day of 2024, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning comedian Amy Poehler spoke to me from the picture-perfect bookcase backdrop of her MasterClass ad. "I am a big proponent of doing things before you're ready," she says, and it somehow inspires me enough to pull up my keyboard and begin typing.


It felt wrong to greet the new year without writing something, but the holidays felt strange to me this time. As the new years resolutions and TikTok video recaps flooded my algorithm, I felt an unmistakable sense of alienation settle in my ribcage.


I don't think I'm alone in feeling the insurmountable weight of the new years. Heavy is the weight of the world that you impose upon yourself, and I've never been known as a light-hearted person. (I wish I could say it was simpler when I was a child, but my thoughts have always been too big to shove into my body.)


But while I wrestle my inner voice into the new year, I still wanted to footnote the old year somehow, even if I'm not quite ready. So here is my attempt.


Here's some cool things I did last year:

  • I organised the second edition of Indie Jam and moderated two panels! (here & here)

  • I helped coordinate 20+ collaborations for The Cham Drinkers

  • I attended gamescom asia 2024 as an Official Media Partner

  • I interviewed Derren Lam from Neopets at gamescom asia 2024 (article & video)

  • I interviewed Andrew Wincott from Baldur's Gate 3 at gamescom asia 2024 (article & video)

  • I met Larian Studios Malaysia (who are all sweethearts!) and attended the BG3 anniversary party

  • I was a guest on The NexGen Show, a marketing podcast by Prof. Harmandar Singh (video)

  • I was a guest on Weekly Midnight Radio, a talk show hosted by content creator Adli_HM (video)

  • I was in the jury for Kakuchopurei’s Southeast Asia Game Awards & Appreciation (article)

  • I was in the jury for Taipei Game Show's Indie Game Award 2025

  • I hit three years of streaming on Twitch, and pivoted to coworking streams

  • I watched Hozier live in concert (!!!)


Here's the best media I consumed last year:

  • My Hero Academia

  • Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

  • Delicious In Dungeon

  • Dandadan

  • Look Back

  • Arcane Season 2

  • The Carls series by Hank Green

  • The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

  • Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical

  • Tavern Talk

  • Pacific Drive


Here's some lessons I learned last year:

  • I learned that done is better than perfect

  • I learned that leaving your comfort zone is almost always a good choice

  • I learned that there's inherent and unique value in human creativity

  • I learned that every choice has an opportunity cost, even people

  • I learned that even rest requires discipline

  • I learned that drinking water is really important in your late-twenties actually (???)


Here's what I hope to achieve this year:

  • Focus on mentorship

  • Travel overseas, hopefully twice!

  • Get back into streaming games more frequently

  • Dedicate more time to personal creative projects


Happy new year, and see you next post!

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I'm a sucker for a retrospective, so let's take this from the top.


On 2nd November, I took a six-hour flight to Perth to watch Hozier in concert. On 8th November, I saw a quokka in person for the first time. On the first hours of my 28th birthday, I find myself huddled next to a packed suitcase as I contemplate my place in the world.


I'm prone to romantics, it's true. That must be why the soft light of my bedside lamp seems to warm my soul, and the steady hum of the mini fridge in the background reminds me of the quiet thrum of my heart. I feel, as always, my mind threaten to untether itself at any moment, but I am grounded by my sister's sleeping presence a few feet away. I want so badly to carve this moment into my bones, underneath my fragile skin so that I can remember what silence feels like when I no longer have it.


I will spend most of my birthday in the airspace between Australia and Malaysia, after which I will land back into a world stuck on fast-forward. I have three meetings lined up this week, followed by an entire event to organise, and at least five more meetings waiting for me after I'm done with steps one and two. I know I will feel tired, but I take comfort in the fact that the exhaustion will exist in my body, not in my soul.


I feel like a vastly different person from who I was last year, although I don't know if I look all that different from the outside. I am still a flesh vessel fueled by sugar-infused caffeine, and I still play an egregious amount of Overwatch 2. But I am also less obsessed with who I want to be, and more obsessed with who I am today.


Last year for my birthday, I wrote about the idea of greatness as a concept larger than myself. I still think about it often; that pervasive, self-important longing to achieve a greatness that outlasts you. It is not the type of thought you can stop having once you start having it. But this year, as I roamed the windy streets of Perth, I thought about the tiny pockets of the universe we each control within ourselves.


There’s this moment in the middle of the Hozier concert when he disappears from the stage for a few minutes. Hushed whispers ripple through the crowd as people turn to one another, fingers pointing to the time on their phones in confusion, an awkward spattering of applause attempting to fill the sudden void. When he re-emerges on a tiny platform in the centre of the stadium, the subsequent cheers can be heard from a mile away.


He tenderly plucks out the starting riff to Cherry Wine, one of the first songs he ever released, then something absolutely magical happens. It is a moment that feels like a moment as you’re experiencing it. Tiny dots of light form a field of stars among the audience, swaying gently along to the song we all know by heart. For three minutes, it feels like the entire world slows to a graceful halt.


What’s magical about this isn’t the fact that it happens, because I can tell you that every concert tries to recreate this moment and succeeds most of the time. What’s magical is that each person that turns on their flashlight has decided to be a part of something bigger. Without even knowing each other, dozens of people have come together to create a piece of collective art without expecting anything in return. It is the beauty of humankind in its most distilled state.


As our bodies continue to make the slow circle around the galaxy, I find myself surrendering more of my personhood to the vast unpredictability of our universe. That way, I get to enjoy the improbability of the rain pouring outside my window even though we’re on the cusp of summer. I get to laugh at the improbability of my running shoes falling apart on the final day of my trip. And I get to marvel at the improbability of turning 28 years old and sitting at row 28 on my plane ride home.


See you back in Malaysia.



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Today I rediscovered the website of the first person I ever envied as a writer. But in order to tell you this story, I have to bring you back in time.


Back when everyone learned to code HTML so they could add their favourite Taylor Swift song to their Friendster profile. Back when nobody knew enough about internet safety to stop oversharing about their lives online. Back before Facebook and Twitter and before we let billionaires decide how we spend our time. Back when therapy wasn't a thing, so emotionally repressed teenagers turned to their blogs to let their hearts breathe.


She was my senior in high school, from one of those legacy families. Which is just a fancy way of saying all of her siblings attended the same school as we did. It was a pretty big deal by government school standards, because it meant that the upperclassmen gave you better treatment, which meant that the lowerclassmen thought that you deserved better treatment too. It was a lot of perks for doing nothing but being born second.


She was (is) beautiful. Not that it had anything to do with her writing. She was (is) beautiful in a way that seemed irrepressible by the flesh and blood that held her bones together. She was a walking spring breeze and a warm ray of sunlight rolled into one, with a sense of quick-witted humour and easy charm that seemed to surpass her years. It seemed unfair to me that she was (is) also the most talented person I have ever met.


This is where you need to understand blogging culture, although there isn't much to understand. For how much the internet has grown quicker and shorter over the years, admiration is a human trait that doesn't get lost to time. It was just a little harder back in the era of Blogspot.


Before it was called Blogger, and before Wordpress and Wix and Squarespace entered the picture, everyone had a little Blogspot of their own. You could key in your email to subscribe to their blog, and if my memory serves me, there was a little feed of blog updates that you could read in your dashboard. What matters the most to this story is that blogging was already a dying culture when I entered high school, but I still did it. And so did she.


It is a rare thing to be part of the final few people clinging onto a social phenomenon. I suspect it is something I will only experience once in my life. It is a melancholy that only comes when you are alone but not truly alone, and that’s what makes the shock of being noticed all the more earth-shattering.


It also means my memory of this moment is inherently self-centered, and I apologise in advance.


It was close to graduation season when she quoted me in her blog. I remember nothing else except that I had compared high school to a spiderweb that forcibly linked us all together, until we inevitably escaped and the webs ceased to connect us to each other. A real attempt at a highbrow metaphor in a really shitty piece of writing. I didn't truly believe it was any good until she acknowledged it.


The thing about receiving praise is that it always feels good, but it always feels better when it's coming from someone who does the same thing you do. But while my writing felt like a clumsy fumble to make sense of those awkward, hormonal years, her writing saw something in our shared existence that I couldn't. Her words plucked out the simmering, violent emotions of teenhood and painted beauty over the pain. While I spent my teenage years seeking to understand the world through other people's words, she bore her soul open and simply lived.


I’m sure there was (is) a real girl hidden beneath all those words, beneath the perfect outer shell of good grades and artistic talent and general popularity. A girl who felt as shapeless and awkward as I did in high school, more form than substance in those younger years, quietly offering the world words in exchange for understanding. Or maybe there wasn’t (isn’t), and some people are just born with a talent so vast that it swallows their entire world whole with the need to create. Not for the fame or the numbers, but for the simple pleasure of living life through artistic expression.


Even now, my admiration and envy sit hand in hand. Her writing pierces through my thinly veiled adult facade and I have to force my eyes to swallow the words even if they hurt. Our existence is no longer shared but I enjoy the way her experience has shaped hers. I still find myself thinking of her from time to time when I sit down to write. I don't think she ever thinks of me.


I think about how I bumped into her mother at the dry cleaners a few months ago. I have never envied (admired) a person so close to me, yet so far.


—


I'm going to share the link to her writing with the hope that it inspires you the way it has inspired me. If she happens to see my work some day, I hope she knows how much I enjoy hers.

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