Due to the visual nature of this episode, we would recommend that you watch the accompanying video on our YouTube channel.

Greg's work

Before the Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993, Greg Girard was doing something very few, nigh on zero, local Hong Kongers were doing. Greg, camera in hand, was documenting a place which to many immediate residents and neighbours was utterly ordinary. It was a jangly juxtaposition of overbuilt and underbuilt, a seedy, sensationalised tourist myth, also simply "home" for hundreds of everyday hardworking families. For all those reasons it was a fixture, and furthermore like most fixtures was taken for granted-- even after the announcement of its pending demolishment. Somehow, Greg, an award-winning Canadian photographer whose work spans five decades across Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, and beyond, decided this place was in fact remarkable. He was both plucky and persistent enough to essential bet his imaging career on it.

His books include City of Darkness, which compiles a defining visual record of the Kowloon Walled City, and Hong Kong PM 1974–1989. His work has appeared in Time, National Geographic, and major galleries including the ICP in New York, and is held in the collection of Hong Kong's M+ Museum.

In this episode, we walk through some of the most striking images from Hong Kong PM with Greg, discussing what it felt like to arrive in 1974 as an 18-year-old on a cargo ship, and why many of the most extraordinary photographs come from the tension of ordinary x extraordinary.

We also dig deep on the headlining Walled City project, and why Greg felt a sense of responsibility to document it. Greg explains how he won people's trust after years of sensationalist press, and why every single former resident he's spoken to is grateful the record exists, even as some outsiders still misread the work today.

We hope you enjoy.

What does it take to build a work of art by yourself, on a macbook, in a Brooklyn rare oatmilks only coffee shop, with zero team, no water cooler, no corporate handbook, and no guarantee whatsoever it'll work?

That's the question at the heart of this conversation with Sam Eng, the rad indie game developer behind Skate Story - one of the most visually and emotionally striking games to come out in recent years. With an 85 on Metacritic and a perfect ten on Steam, Skate Story puts you in the shoes of a glass demon skating down into the underworld. It's part Dante's Inferno, part vapourwave fever dream, part meditation on fear and fragility. And I love it. Needed some sharp elbows to make sure I can get Skate Story gametime over Mario Kart or Animal Crossing on the Switch 2!

In this episode, Sam walks us through the building blocks of solo indie game development: how everything from 3D modelling and animation to code, sound design, and world-building comes together inside the Unreal engine on a 16-inch MacBook Pro. He talks about how he cold-emailed the band Blood Cultures via Bandcamp, met them at a coffee shop on the Lower East Side, and built one of gaming's most hyper-simpatico audiovisual collaborations.

We also get into the culture underneath the game. Sam is a skater, traversing Manhattan as his primary mode of transport. He unpacks the no-pads ethos of street skating, the elemental simplicity of a skateboard as material culture, and how the metaphor of a glass demon who must skate despite being made of breakable material connects directly to the vulnerability of stepping onto a board.

The conversation opens up into a debate about gaming as a medium. Is it taken seriously enough? What separates meaningful play from fast food gaming? And what can it teach kids about agency?

We hope you enjoy.

Expat Prep on Substack

In this episode, we are joined by our first repeat guest (we dig him that much) on Vanilla Club Podcast, Expat Prep, where we explore what it means to reorient your life when bedrock assumptions fail. Expat Prep is an anonymous Substack writer from unnamed Midwestern City (I think he stole this from the Simpsons by the way), who writes with a wide-ranging knowledge of financial and tax matters (disclaimers of course apply!), wry humour full of pop-cultural references, and an abiding, if subtle, patriotism. He is one of our favourite follows.

With Uruguay as the case study, buckle-up gauchos, as we venture between Montevideo and Punta del Este, where scale changes everything. Hat tip: Susan Sontag, as we get environmentally deterministic in this joint. Expat Prep dodges bullets at night (yes really!), surf bums, tax advisors, and overzealous tenedor libres by day.

What is driving people, expats specifically: is it safety and opportunity? Or is it something more subtle, like the ability to simply feel at ease? Adventurism? Uruguay is hot right now, low-key becoming a top flight option for prospective-expats American and otherwise.

One of the central themes is that planning, even in uncertain times, is not purely defensive. It can be hopeful, value creating in finance-speak. Building optionality is one of Expat Prep's underpinning, most resonating themes. And whether it is in blunt pragmatics or in the abstract we have a brilliant guide here indeed. Let's go!

We hope you enjoy.