About This Site
The Windy City Dispatch is not a real newspaper. It’s a fake news site created by Quangdao Nguyen as the backdrop for an April Fools’ 2026 prank. The site was built to look just credible enough to house a single fake article implying that Quangdao is under investigation after flooding the nvisia Chicago office with live penguins — an April Fools’ stunt that allegedly “went too far.” The rest of the articles exist to sell the bit.
How it was made
Every article on this site was written by a mixture of Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s AI models. Each fictional reporter has a distinct voice and style, and the articles range from absurdist takes on real Chicago news to completely invented stories reported with straight-faced seriousness. None of it is real. Please do not cite The Windy City Dispatch in a research paper.
Most images were generated using Nano Banana, a Gemini-powered AI image tool. Some images fall back to Lorem Picsum placeholders when Nano Banana was unavailable.
The site itself is built with Astro, a modern static site framework, and is deployed as a set of plain HTML files — no server, no database, no JavaScript frameworks fighting each other in your browser. It was coded with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool.
Easter Eggs
- Jordan Pryce exists as the designated author for article concepts that came from Quangdao himself — her bio and backstory were crafted to fit the tone of those ideas. Naturally, she’s also the one with the byline on the penguin article.
- Dennis Culpepper has his own ongoing saga across multiple articles — an overeager new hire whose first day keeps going wrong, culminating in getting fired. His pieces are written in-character as both reporter and subject.