One letter turned Germany into Iranian skewered meat on my map. I was building Flavor Lines from 2.35 million restaurant signs. The culprit: kebap. In Germany it usually means döner. In Turkey, meat on a skewer. Same sign, opposite category.

A Threads joke claimed there’s an invisible line in Asia where fried rice becomes plov. I wanted to see whether the line appeared in data, so I downloaded 87 GB of OpenStreetMap.

Hello, my name is Vova. I’ve spent almost 25 years building interactive things. In recent years, I got buried in startup work and weekly KPI reviews. Potentially profitable, terribly boring.