Hello there! I’m Kai, from 🇸🇬 and currently living in 🇨🇦, aspiring renaissance man. Former student of microbiology, and barely not a naval officer, though I spent over a year in officer school. At one point, I was a data scientist, then I was a software engineer, and now idk how to describe what I do now. Data guy at a Singapore startup, but also miscellaneous technical doer of things?

I’m a massive nerd, and can’t seem to shut the hell up. Instead of going to therapy or getting a romantic partner, I just tweet about it instead. You can blame my parents hehe :3

Also you should throw money at me so I can keep doing dumb stuff maybe.

My broad interests include:

• half-baked armchair philosophy
• writing
• self-improvement
• coding, data science/analytics, AI/ML whatever
• games of all kinds, whether they be strategy or role-playing games, etc.
• science, economics, history, current affairs
• and a whole lot more…

If you wanna say hi, I’m @kaisoapbox on Twitter! My DMs are open, I’d love to hear from you 🥰 You can also drop me an email at kaisoapbox@gmail.com or something. AND I’M NOT LOCKED ANYMORE WEW.

Currently I’m working on:

• My offline speech recognition Android keyboard powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model
• Hosting Atelier on Sundays at noon in UBC, a community of cool, friendly, and encouraging people who gather weekly to work on cool stuff together. You should come by if you’re in Vancouver, it’s a lot of fun and the community is absolutely wonderful. Also follow Atelier on twitter or instagram pls.
• A video game with some friends from Atelier and the UBC Game Dev Club called Mt. Stringmore, a 2D autorunner featuring two lovable characters, Marshmallow and Knitby, as they journey to climb the eponymous Mt. Stringmore.
• The occasional writing piece for my blog.
• Porting over my previous Substack writings to this website.

Current future projects/plans:

• So many other stories told through the medium of interactive fiction (aka short mediocre video games).
• The Bachelor(ette)‘s Cooking Guide, a guide to cooking which assumes zero skill, equipment, time, and money. Perfect for students, beginners, and stingy idiots like me.
• Writing my own English-language Jubensha game. Here’s a good primer on Jubensha if you’ve never heard of it before.

Potential future project ideas:

• I downloaded all my Spotify listening data since the start of the pandemic. Gonna put up an interactive data visualization of it, which is gonna be fun. Or horrifyingly embarassing to let other people look at. At least it probably doesn’t have too much One Direction.
• A personal finance board game. I like to describe my design goal as a game which is “accidentally educational”.

Past projects:

• Mostly under the projects tab
• The original Kai’s Soapbox was a Substack newsletter, providing commentary of Singapore politics and current affairs.
• A bunch of old WordPress blogs, first writing under the pseudonym Clair Audrey Taylor, then a brief stint of Singapore-focused satire as the SG Tribune.
• I used Tinder over packet radio at DEF CON 2023 for the Scavenger Hunt. I’ll write a blog post about it at some point.
• Considering the ongoing entangling of my pseudonymous online life and my professional life, I should probably talk more about my professional endavours at some point, because some are kinda cool. But not yet.

PS: Why the emoji 👑🧼📦? Well, it’s me in emoji form! 凯, the Chinese character for my name (kai), represents victory, and thus 👑. The 🧼 and 📦 for ‘soapbox’ is pretty self-explanatory. An alternate emoji depiction of my full Chinese name: 🔵👑🥰