These are my first pair of Jordans. Mine is a common story: kid grows up in the 90s, watches via satellite as the greatest player to ever play the game of basketball decimate all foes. Dad and mom only buy each kid one pair of sneakers a year, and Jordan sneakers were pricey for kids. On top of that, there was no basketball in my school. I would eventually save up my allowance and console myself with a black and red Wilson outdoor basketball purchased in Takishimaya Square's "Stadium" sports store. The ball had MJ's signature debossed into it, one of the goat's many endorsements at the Read More

If you follow my IG stories, you'll see that my weekend baking project involved making fudge brownies with the kids. With just a little salt and a deeper glass dish instead of a pan, we managed to create a fudgier brownie that maintained moisture without beinig soggy. We also extended the mixing time, which was tough because my three baking assistants are between 5 and 8 years old. We were doing all the mixing by hand. We made over two dozen brownies which were quickly gobbled up by the household over the next 30 hours. I feel bad for Emma, who only had two. I later found out from Summer that Read More

While cleaning some boxes in the bedroom, we found a kit that we got from the homies over at Tie Dye Manila. We never quite got  to playing with the kit, so this was our shot! Here's some photos of the work in progress. The kit made this the simplest tie-dye project I've ever done. It's simple to use and the kids loved the process too. I had never used the squeeze bottles (included in the kit), opting to dip-dye my tie-dye projects in the past. The bottles were very helpful and economical. You don't waste dye that you don't need. A good idea for any tie-dye project is to line up several Read More

One of the nice things about quarantine is the opportunity to exercise old skills. For example, I think you'll notice from my feed moving forward that I've been fucking around with layout again. This is a result of my digital spring cleaning and an inventory of my hard drive folders, I came across some of my design work from 15 years back. Most is stuff I can't show much of due to various Non-Disclosure Agreements, for which I have simply forgotten the statutes of limitations of. But when I saw them, I realized that I still fuck with the ideas I had back then. That they are still in my head Read More

In the words of Virgil Abloh when he originally said that street wear was going to die in 2020,"Hey I’m gonna go into my archive." My test to use bleach to"unpaint" my old Converse Weapon Mid seems to have been a great success. I've worked with bleach on a number of times, but this is my first time using it full strength on a pair of shoes. I had originally tried to bleach my Nike Air Vapormax Flyknit, but those turned out to be way too color fast. I suspect that this is due to the high amount of recycled materials in the Flyknit material. There's about 4 PET bottles recycled into every Read More

As I am reminded by my Google Photos app of Hong Kong -- it being the place where I was a year ago today -- it becomes immensely real to me how much our little corner of the world has changed in only twelve months. I have spent my life primarily in three cities: Manila, Singapore, and Hong Kong. These, plus San Juan, La Union are my home. Now, while they are different countries and vastly different culturally, it does not escape me how small a part of the globe they actually cover. And yet just in this little bit of earth, over only about three hundred days, we as humanity have been Read More

Summer tells me that it's the first time she ever saw me cry. 2019 has been such a mixed bag. Losing Kendo, but also having a killer ending party. Building my favourite art installations of all time, seeing people engage with them, but also not being able to complete some concepts I've been planning for ages -- specifically, the return to print media. Building the coworking space I've been planning for 2 years, but having a contractor that's had us in a limbo of back work for half a year now. Honestly, I feel somewhat bled dry. It is what it is? Perhaps. Time is a very interesting dimension. Read More

Its been a pretty wild year. Two months to go, and these 2 photos kind of show how far we've come already. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see what the place looked like in January. Since then, we've built up the space, grown the company with an awesome community team, launched 2.5 online magazines, managed to host both the Philippine Aeropress Championship and NAPCON board game convention, and -- of course -- design and build a line of our own workplace furniture too, together with collaborator, Artesania. I just came from a meeting with our partner, Injap and we finally have set a Read More

It's a major problem with "being yourself." Happens all the time, happens every day. And it's really nobody's fault. Nothing about it is controllable on any large level that might matter. Or is it? The problem with being yourself is that it takes so long to figure out who you actually are. There's this myth that you're supposed to have it figured out by the time you're around 30 -- a totally arbitrary number. For most people, this will be a lifelong search. You'll find yourself looping back into things you thought that you had graduated from already or cresting hills you simply cannot see Read More

I wonder if they'll remember this? So much importance is loaded on the cliché watershed moments of our family lives. Graduations, birthdays, weddings. And while all those things are indeed special, and while I do have very complete memories about my father's 40th birthday barbeque or new year's eve, I equally remember the times we were simple hitting the Burger King or Circle K after dark with my folks. In our little family, our lives are changing again, and this has made me think a lot about the places that I spent my childhood and how they influenced me and my thoughts. They let me know Read More