Marcel Winatschek I’m an artist, writer, designer, photographer, hacker, typographer, illustrator, director, traveler, and popular culture enthusiast who has lived, worked, and studied in Germany, Japan, China, Spain, France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Portugal, and the United States, among other inspiring places. My passions include apocalyptic cinema, millennial tunes, and deliberate sustenance. This notebook serves as a diary of a curious mind and is a collection of my stories, thoughts, and experiences, including philosophical essays on life, art, music, books, technology, movies, fashion, travel, games, and food, as well as photos, videos, and interesting discoveries I stumbled upon on the internet. I’ve worked with Nike, Sony, Adidas, Nintendo, Spotify, Canon, Lufthansa, Nissan, Microsoft, Casio, Huawei, Adobe, Red Bull, Heineken, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Mercedes-Benz, Converse, Onitsuka Tiger, Dell, Swatch, BMW, Levi’s, Hewlett-Packard, Asics, Intel, Lacoste, Ubisoft, Absolut, Mazda, H&M, Puma, Burger King, Volkswagen, eBay, Diesel, Ford, Electronic Arts, and Paramount. The Depressed Girl: “Chiaki’s dead,” a quiet voice comes from the other side of the table. Ichika’s eyes search for sympathy, but Kana doesn’t understand a word. “Chiaki… which Chiaki?” “Chiaki Sano?” Ichika replies. “We were in the same class.” “The curly-haired one?” Ichika nods. “What happened?” “I don’t know. She didn’t leave a note.” “She killed herself?” “Yes. With a door handle, at her parents’ house. She used her Mac charger.” “Was the cable long enough?” “No idea.” I walked past a poster for Desert of Namibia in Shimokitazawa, and something about it caught me off guard. Kana’s face—its profound emptiness—pulled at me. I wasn’t sure if it reminded me more of myself or of people I used to know, people from a time in my life when everyone seemed to lack something essential, some basic capacity to feel. A lack of empathy was everywhere back then, in my hometown and definitely in my own heart. And I catch myself doing it still sometimes, wearing that same empty look even when I’m with people I actually care about, and I hate it when I notice it happening. Yumi Kawai is extraordinary as Kana. She’s 21, works at a laser hair removal salon in Tokyo, and she’s always on the edge of something you can’t quite name. She drifts between two men—one who steadies her with careful, almost desperate affection, another whose charm masks a cruelty that matches her own. She doesn’t really choose between them. She just moves between worlds, carrying her restlessness like weather, and Kawai makes you feel the weight of it. Yoko Yamanaka made her debut film on basically nothing when she was a teenager, and now she’s made something that doesn’t hurry, doesn’t explain itself. The film holds in tight, boxy 4:3 frames—hair removal cubicles, cramped kitchens, narrow hallways—and it feels claustrophobic in a way that perfectly mirrors what’s happening inside Kana. She’s surrounded by men who can’t quite hear her even when she’s screaming. There’s this scene where Honda comes home from a work trip where he went to a hostess bar, and what follows is honest in a way that feels almost painful to watch. The apologies that mean nothing, the moment Kana’s quiet fury becomes something physical and irrational, and the film refuses to tell you who’s right. They’re both somehow both. And then there’s the salon, which is actually kind of funny—Kana and her coworker speculating about an elderly woman’s bikini wax, Kana getting fired for telling a customer she’s been wasting money on cosmetic procedures. The film does this thing where it cuts between absurdist comedy and something genuinely unsettling without warning, and that tonal whiplash is exactly what it feels like to be around someone like Kana. You don’t know what’s coming. Midway through, Kana sees a therapist, and it’s one of the most real psychiatric scenes I’ve seen in a movie. The doctor’s careful questions, Kana suddenly ranting about pedophilia as a philosophical point, her asking the therapist to dinner. They float the idea of bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, but nothing sticks. Kana’s trying to understand who she is, and she says it so quietly you almost miss it, and that feels important. By the end the film gets strange—panda ants, campfire songs, parallel universes bleeding into what was a fairly grounded story—and some people will feel like that’s liberating while others will feel the ground disappear. Maybe it’s the least controlled part of the film, but there’s something right about that incoherence too. Kana can’t be resolved. She can’t be diagnosed or taught a lesson or fit into an arc. She just continues, and that’s the whole point. Yumi Kawai’s performance has this electricity to it, this quality where suffering looks like something alive and vital. She deserves every award she got for this. She never condescends to Kana, never asks you to feel sorry for her, never explains her away. Desert of Namibia isn’t comfortable and it doesn’t want to be. But watching it made me feel like I was seeing something necessary, a film that holds contradiction the way we actually have to hold it in our lives—uneasy and unflinching, refusing easy answers, refusing to turn its impossible heroine into something safe or understood. Wednesday, 11 March 2026. A Weekend Among Dreamers: Video games are the only thing that can pull my brain out of its own self-destructive patterns completely. I’ve known this about myself for a while now—how they distract me from the spiral, from reaching for my phone to let some pseudo-social feed numb everything. My best memories, the ones that actually matter, they’re tangled up with games somehow. Winning a Super Nintendo on Austrian children’s television as a kid. That feeling of wandering through flea markets hunting for treasures with the PlayStation logo on them. Fighting impossible odds with a party held together by hope and the last scraps of health bars. I went to GG Bavaria last weekend, this small gaming convention in Munich that somehow feels like the comfortable little sister to Gamescom. I wasn’t expecting much, honestly. But the moment I walked into that hall, something just clicked. There was this density of actual developers there—people whose games you’d just watched someone playing at a booth, and you could just walk over and talk to them. That doesn’t happen at the huge conventions. You usually get a faceless industry. Here you got creators and community actually meeting. What really got me, what I wasn’t prepared for, was seeing friends there. Michi had brought Incredibug—this adorable little physics platformer where you play as a pill bug uniting crustaceans against some menacing smart home system. And then there was Bardcore, this game by Flo and Tomas and Svea and Ludwig that I’d playtested with them, the one with the bards and the quirky skeletons and the black bat dragon. There’s something about watching people you know show the things they’ve built to strangers. Watching those strangers’ faces light up. It’s a small, perfect kind of moment. The evenings are where the convention really came alive. They’d shuffle everyone out of the main hall and then the DJ would start—all anime openings and Nintendo soundtracks, which sounds so niche until you’re standing there with a couple hundred people singing along to One Piece, Case Closed, and Neon Genesis Evangelion theme songs. I remember standing there with a free drink and a cookie, watching other people create little characters on screens, and just feeling this strange, genuine warmth. This is where your people are, you know? Everyone speaking the same language. I drove home in Ludwig’s packed car with four other people crammed in, all of us talking about nothing in particular—university, water damage, the specific problems of village life. And I realized I was happy. Just completely, simply happy. I’m thinking about going to Gamescom again. It’s been years, back when I had a press badge and could slip away from the chaos into the quiet rooms. But I’m also wondering if I have the energy for that right now. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what I want from it. What I do know is that GG Bavaria 2026 felt like an event that caught exactly the right moment. Like it understood what it was supposed to be. And if you’re even slightly into any of this—games, art, the weird beautiful intersection of all these people who speak the same language—I’d say get a ticket next year. Good game, Bavaria. Tuesday, 10 March 2026. The Man Between Masks: Philipp sits alone in his small Tokyo apartment with a bento box and a cold beer, staring out the window at all these people whose lives went somewhere else. And I think we’ve all been that person, watching through glass at a world that kept moving without us. He wonders if they’re happier, or if they’re just as lonely as he is—which is maybe the loneliest question you can ask yourself. His life changes when he stumbles into the rental family industry. I know, it sounds strange. But it’s real—there are actual companies in Japan where you can hire someone to be your family member for a few hours. To fill the spaces where people should be. And Philipp, this washed-up American actor who came to Tokyo chasing something and got stuck instead, somehow ends up working there. The first job he takes is absolutely surreal. He’s paid to be a mourner at a funeral for a man who’s still alive—literally lying in the casket—because the guy wanted to hear people say nice things about him. And I think that image broke something open in me because it’s so brutally honest about what we all want. We want to know that we matter. We want someone to show up. What got me, though, was how real it became. The deeper Philipp goes into these artificial worlds, the more genuine everything feels. The boundaries just blur. And then he meets Mia, and suddenly he’s not just performing anymore—he’s building an actual relationship with a kid who thinks he’s her father. A kid who was rejected from a fancy school because she doesn’t have one. And now she does, except he’s not real, and that’s the thing that keeps you awake at night about this whole situation. Following Philipp in Rental Family reminded me of my loneliest moments in a foreign city. When everyone else was busy becoming part of something and I was still on the outside, pressing my face against the window. When I was scared I’d made a huge mistake. When I started to wonder if I was just going to end up completely alone in a place I’d dreamed about living in. There was something in his character that felt like a possible future version of myself—like a warning and a question all at once. What happens when you chase something so hard and it doesn’t turn out the way you imagined? Do you keep pushing, or do you admit defeat? Brendan Fraser carries this whole thing on his shoulders and honestly, he’s never been better. He’s got this weight to him—this sense of a person who’s always between identities, stumbling from one role to the next like he’s never quite sure who he is underneath all of it. He made me cry multiple times, which I wasn’t expecting. By the end, you still don’t really know who Phillip is, and I think that’s kind of the point. The film is deeply, specifically Japanese—Tokyo as this stage-like backdrop where people are hunting for connection in the concrete and glass and neon. It’s a mirror held up to loneliness as a structural problem, not just a personal one. But it also feels universal because we all know this hunger. We all know what it’s like to want someone to choose us, to show up for us, to make us feel like we exist. Philipp probably doesn’t remember why those lonely evenings used to define him, because now he’s one of the people who took the weird path. The one who dared to try something that doesn’t fit into the normal shape of things. And maybe that’s what this whole thing is really about—the courage it takes to step off the window ledge and actually become part of the world, even if it’s messy and uncertain and you don’t know where it’s going to take you. Sunday, 8 March 2026. My Only Constant: The questions that occupy me most when designing this website are: Who am I? What do I want? And what’s the point of any of this? The answers to these self-centered existential crises are not easy to find, because they shift depending on my mood and emotional state, and reveal themselves as traps whenever I finally manage to corner them and practically beg for mercy—and the enlightenment that should follow. Then I try to remember why I started blogging in the first place. Did I want to feel important? To connect with others? To prove to the world out there that I existed? Did I simply lack alternatives, given that shortly after the turn of the millennium there was no YouTube, no podcasts, and the written word was one of the few means of carrying my thoughts, feelings, and opinions outward? My love of blogging probably stems from the fact that I enjoyed reading books as a child, and through that developed a fairly extensive vocabulary that I wanted to express, garnished with my own stories. This ambition was barely noticed or appreciated by my teachers, but it was by people in my closer circle, who wanted to know whether—and what—I was writing about them. My love of publishing texts on the internet is probably rooted in the knowledge, or at least the desperate hope, that people I knew were reading them. Friends I had hurt. Acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while. Girls I was in love with. Through my blog, I could transform my longing for them into frequently very embarrassing texts, without having to address those feelings to them directly. Perhaps this approach was somewhat cowardly, and maybe my words—saturated with heartache and world-weariness—never reached the eyes they were actually intended for. But at the very least, I had created a creative island for myself where I could do as I pleased. And that was not only incredibly liberating, but gradually became an important part of my life. At many points along my path, I could only begin to pursue happiness again after pulling various spiraling thoughts from my head and hurling them onto digital paper, only to then blast them out into the great wide world. The nameless feeling that came with clicking Publish was somewhere between catharsis and orgasm. The more personal, honest, and emotionally naked my confessions were, the greater the relief. I’m only happy when my words change the world—at least the one I call home. Over the decades, my blog has evolved into a diary whose intimate entries lie buried under a mountain of attention-hungry, now entirely worthless drivel. Sometimes I come across one of them and feel a little sad that it’s no longer part of this great wide world, but seems to have been erased. Perhaps I can undo that. The questions that occupy me most when designing this website are: Who am I? What do I want? And what’s the point of any of this? I still haven’t found the answers to these self-centered existential crises, but at least I’ve begun to track them down through countless psychologically questionable acts of self-reflection—or so I hope. It’s difficult for me to find the line between introverted solitude and extroverted self-expression. One extreme would be a diary locked in a vault, into which I write all my thoughts in secret symbols; the other, an OnlyFans account in which I expose not only myself but also my sensitive data—passwords and all. Middle grounds are hard for me to walk. In order to design something and actually finish it to the point where I can fill it with content, I first have to strip a project’s purpose down to its essentials. And at this task—which sounds so simple yet is incredibly complicated—I have obsessively worn myself to the bone. After all, this publication is meant to represent me and my thoughts. And to achieve that, I first had to figure out who I actually was—or at least, who I no longer was. I now want to treat this dispatch as a personal notebook, into which I can enter texts about art, music, books, technology, film, fashion, travel, games, food, and my life in general. What matters to me is that everything I write must relate to me—my thoughts, my experiences, my feelings, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, and my opinions—because otherwise it’s worthless. Going forward, I will focus primarily on the written word. I have removed the images that used to decorate every single post, because I realized that I sometimes never published certain texts for the simple reason that, even after hours or sometimes days of searching, I couldn’t find a suitable illustration. If I want to add a photo or video to a post from now on, I will simply link to it directly within the text—life can be that simple. As a fitting typeface, I have chosen TeX Gyre Heros Condensed by Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz M. Nowacki, because it works well even on small mobile screens. In the past I always found a serif counterpart for headings, timestamps, and supplementary information—but even that felt like too much in this design. Instead, I’m largely limiting myself to the limits of my new favorite typeface. Japanese characters are the one exception, represented by Ryoko Nishizuka’s Source Han Sans JP. I hope that this website—and everything I have cut, burned, and destroyed for it—will help me figure out who I am, what I want, and what any of this is for. Perhaps I need to become (again) conscious of the fact that this journal is not only the center and pivot point, but also the only constant in my otherwise chaotic life. But this can only work if it becomes a part of that life once more. Sunday, 8 March 2026. 20 Nights in Tokyo: I’ve decided to use Japan as the thematic foundation for my upcoming bachelor’s thesis in design. How exactly I want to approach this is still somewhat uncertain. At first, I intended to shoot a documentary about the colorful underground cultures in the Land of the Rising Sun. Cultures permeated by depression, anxiety about the future, and a kind of resentment toward society by their followers. I wanted to cover everything from eccentric horror manga and underage idol groups to rape porn that only narrowly falls under artistic freedom, and speak with pop-culture experts about whether Japan’s aging population might eventually cause these scenes to die out. However, this plan ultimately struck me as somewhat too overambitious. I should probably be a little more modest. Then I remembered that my professors at the Japanese university where I studied had always encouraged me to use my projects to explore stories drawn from my own life, my own feelings, and my own experiences. Because it gives an intention much more soul. At the very least, I know that I want to address Japan and my time here in my bachelor’s thesis. And I want to take this chance to connect the project with my love for Tokyo. For when I close my eyes and think of Japan, I see not only the brightly lit streets of Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Akihabara, plastered with neon signs, but also the countless secrets hidden within them—secrets waiting to be uncovered and told. Since I now at least understand that I want to portray Tokyo at night in film for my thesis, I will spend the next three weeks in Japan’s capital, preferably venturing out after sunset to wander through temples, parks, and towering buildings in search of my own story that I want to bring to life by film. For this purpose, I have booked a bed at a quite cheap capsule hotel in the Sumida district and will dive into the always loudly pulsing metropolis from there. What exactly will come out of all this, I still don’t know. But sometimes I simply have to throw all my previous plans overboard and take a courageous leap of faith in order to transform adventures into stories. Monday, 22 September 2025. Goodbye Kumamoto: My time here in Kumamoto is now coming to an end. For a full year I have been an exchange student at the Faculty of Design of Japan’s Sojo University, exploring new ideas in both artistic and technical fields. Day after day, I wandered the two campuses that rise above the city, learning about typography, painting, and graphic design in lecture halls, tinkering with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis in the computer club, and studying Japanese in the library with friends. I’ve met so many wonderful people, traveled across half the country with them, and through them gained deep insights into a different kind of society—glimpses that remain forever closed to most travelers. It’s hard to express how grateful I am to have lived through these colorful adventures. I came to see my year in Kumamoto as my own little Persona game, determined to experience every side of this city. That’s why I dragged my friends to every restaurant, café, izakaya, karaoke bar, shop, park, cinema, and exhibition Kumamoto had to offer. I wanted to taste every dish, see every movie, and join every festival. I even felt a quiet pride as I rushed past tourists to complete my own personal missions at city hall, the post office, or the housing agency—tasks usually reserved for locals. I walked the narrow path along the river through all four seasons, from the first cherry blossom to the final snowflake. And on every single day, there was something new waiting to be discovered. Of course, I’m sad to leave, to part from so many people with whom I shared my days, my worries, my hopes, and dreams. Yet I’m deeply grateful for every moment I was allowed to spend here. Kumamoto and its people will always hold a quiet place in my heart. This year at the far end of the world has shown me that I can find my way anywhere, make friends everywhere, and keep gathering new goals, ideas, and insights. I’ve grown in Kumamoto, and that growth has prepared me for whatever adventures may come next. Wherever life takes me, I’ll carry this place within me. Farewell, Kumamoto—and perhaps, one day, our paths will cross again. At least, I hope so. Friday, 19 September 2025. One Year in Japan: For exactly one year now I have been living in Japan. I have a Japanese phone number, a Japanese bank account, a Japanese social security number. As a student at the art faculty of a Japanese university, I have met many local creatives as well as wonderful people from all over the world who, like me, are trying to find their place in this demanding society. When I’m not sitting in lecture halls, studios, and cafeterias having my broken Japanese put to the test, my life plays out by day between cinemas, galleries, and museums, and by night between izakaya, karaoke bars, and supermarkets that stay open twenty-four hours a day, on nearly every corner of the city, bright and humming. When I look back on this year, I see myself walking with friends along the river lined with freshly blossoming cherry trees, heading to the next spring festival. It’s the same river that led us in summer to the fireworks, in autumn to the castle, and in winter to the Christmas market, and where on quiet days white egrets basked beside turtles looking bored. In the park the frogs croaked, in the brook, patterned koi raced each other, between the laundromat and the fast-food place I told the girl with the roguish smile and the short, thick, jet-black hair that I liked her. “好きだよ!” still echoes through the cold night, before the brightly lit temple on the hill called us. “付き合ってください!” Even after this year, Japanese society remains a book with seven seals to me. Somewhere between well-meant politeness and militant rule-conformity, people operate day in, day out with the same mixture of a desire for individuality and a fear of otherness. The Japanese are a close-knit and perfectly synchronized collective that, up to a certain point, tolerates outside influences with interested curiosity and at the same time rejects everything that isn’t through and through Japanese. This cultural instinct for self-preservation hasn’t diminished my love for Japan in the least, for at every moment here I have felt welcome. And I can hardly wait to see what adventures still await me in this fascinating country in the months and years ahead. Wednesday, 10 September 2025. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: On a warm summer evening, when the cicadas were diligently chirping away and the moon was slowly pushing itself onto the stage of the sky, a friend and I were on our way home from an exhibition when, not far off, we first heard music and shortly after cheerful laughter. Because we were curious and still had a bit of energy left, we decided to see what was going on there. So we picked our way through the neighborhood’s ever-narrowing streets and walked past streams, houses, and playgrounds until, a short time later, we stood at the edge of a small park where a neighborhood festival was underway. And it took less than a minute before friendly, perhaps slightly tipsy, people invited us to join the little festivity. So we made ourselves comfortable on the blue tarp spread out in the middle of the park and looked around. In front of us a thrown-together band was playing familiar Japanese songs, and all around small stalls had been set up selling cool drinks and fried delicacies. Around us sat talkative families, and children chased dogs, cats, and each other, or danced acrobatically and interestingly to the guitar tones of the cheerful musical artists. We watched the summer spectacle unfolding before us with interest, and my companion confessed to me that she hadn’t known about this festival at all—despite the fact that she had already lived in this neighborhood for several years. I personally was glad to be allowed to be part of this small gathering. After all, I don’t stumble into a little Japanese summer festival every day. And as much as I love darting over the crossing in Shibuya, admiring Sensoji in Asakusa, and indulging in the latest nerd trends in Akihabara, my heart truly opens only when I discover Japan from intimate sides that remain hidden to most outsiders. Because they aren’t made for them, because they aren’t advertised, because they happen off all the beaten paths. And so we stayed until the end, until the band had given its last turn onstage. And as people said their farewells, we too set off home, warmed by the sense of having experienced something small we will draw on for a long time. Saturday, 6 September 2025. The Samurai’s Grave: We arrived at the foot of Mount Tatsuda, the site of the Hosokawa family temple, Taishoji. Today the grounds belong to Tatsuda Nature Park, green, wide, and quiet. Among bamboo and cedars stand four mausoleums: for Hosokawa Fujitaka, first lord of the Kumamoto domain, his wife, his son Hosokawa Tadaoki, the second lord, and Tadaoki’s wife, Hosokawa Gracia. History you can touch. The teahouse Ko-sho-ken moved me most. Restored from Tadaoki’s drawings, it recalls a man who was a warrior and a tea master. At the entrance sits a hand-washing stone he loved. In Kyoto, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and tea master Sen no Rikyu drew water from it. Later the Hosokawa lords carried a basin on sankin-kotai journeys to Edo to hold tea ceremonies—a traveling vessel. And then there is the shadow of Miyamoto Musashi. One of his supposed graves is said to be here. In all, five places in Japan claim to be Musashi’s final resting place—three of them in Kumamoto, where he spent his last years and died in 1645. Another grave lies in Musashizuka Park on the old Ozu road, the former National Route 57, among cedars. Legend says Musashi was buried there in armor with his sword, following his wish to “protect the Hosokawa from behind” as they passed. The park holds a stone inscribed Stone Pagoda of the Sword Master Musashi and a bronze statue. The third grave, Nishi-Musashizuka, is in the Shimasaki district. Which is the real one? No one knows to this day. Since 1955 the area has belonged to the city of Kumamoto as a loan from the Hosokawa family and has been called Tatsuda Nature Park. For people here it is simply a lovely place to breathe: walking paths, shade, birds, benches, a hush in the trees. Officially, together with the Myogeji temple precinct in Kitaoka Nature Park, the site is designated a National Historic Site, because the Hosokawa family graveyard lies here. If you like history but not glass cases, the Taishoji temple grounds offer a quiet, dignified spot. Tea, samurai, and stories—and yet it is only a park where children laugh, strollers roll by, and the air smells of resin after sun, and crows wheel overhead. That, to me, is the Kumamoto I love. Wednesday, 3 September 2025. Embracing the Escapism: Sometimes I wished I could muster the courage to leave everything behind, lock myself away forever in an apartment, and devote the rest of my life to a single online role-playing game. In the midst of an enchanted fantasy world full of wonders, dreams and secrets I would transform from a peasant boy into a heroic warrior, find unimaginable treasures and fight monsters, and band together with other outcasts bored with real life to form a sworn adventuring party. My days would be governed by quests, rituals, and leveling, by the pulse of raids, and the slow comfort of companionship the real world denied me. My existence would turn into a digital meaningfulness whose end would arrive only when the servers were switched off. Moriko Morioka, thirty years old, single, and unemployed, put my dream into practice: An escape from reality. After losing her job she became a NEET, neither working nor studying, and seeking refuge she drifted into the World Wide Web. There she immersed herself in online games and reinvented her life as a young man named Hayashi. As a newcomer she nearly dies in the game but is rescued just in time by a girl called Lily. Through Lily she finds allies she can trust and begins a life online that finally feels fulfilling. Meanwhile, in the real world, she meets a handsome businessman who reminds her of someone she recently encountered. Will that encounter influence the life she has built in the game, and what will become of Moriko’s fulfilled MMORPG life? Recovery of an MMO Junkie by Rin Kokuyo is one of my comfort anime, even though I am not much for romances and the director involved later turned out to be a disgrace. I still love anime about people living inside online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, or Final Fantasy XIV. Whether it is Sword Art Online, Shangri-La Frontier, or Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense, I enjoy watching others enact my secret dream: finding not only the time of their lives but a kind of meaning in an otherwise hollow existence. And perhaps one day I, too, will summon the nerve, like Moriko, to renounce the drab, gray, utterly magic-less reality and finally surrender forever, without regret, to the warm, connected wonder of a digital world. Saturday, 30 August 2025. Happiness Between Two Buns: Japan is a country full of treats. Those who want to fill a hungry stomach efficiently and cheaply can find sushi, tempura, and ramen on every corner, in different price ranges, in hidden restaurants or crowded supermarkets. But Japan would not be Japan if it hadn’t absorbed other culinary cultures and made them its own. Cities brim not only with steaming noodle shops and futuristic chains where raw fish on rice travels past on conveyor belts, but also offer delights from Spanish and Italian kitchens or, for those who prefer hearty, fatty, generous portions, the American culinary world. You encounter these options everywhere, from tiny stalls and family-run izakayas to high-end restaurants and bustling food halls in the most unexpected neighborhoods. Although I love Japanese food in all its health-promoting variety, I sometimes have to descend into Western-influenced fast-food depths to keep from losing my mind. After all, nothing soothes a stressed head like calorie-drenched soul food. Japan tempts hearts that long for an early death by cheeseburgers, French fries and sugary cold drinks not only with imported names such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and TGI Friday’s, but also with homegrown chains founded in the Land of the Rising Sun. From MOS Burger to Dom Dom and on to Zetteria, the choices range wide: sandwiches piled thick with meat, cheese, and vegetables, fried platters, and combos that seem to dare you to resist. They are available at train stations, convenience locations and late-night outlets across the country. My personal go-to franchise, frequented with friends, is Freshness Burger, known for its delicious fat bombs. Its first branch opened in Shibuya in the early 1980s. The official slogan, “Burger cafe where adults can relax that proposes a high-quality eating habit”, is as curiously phrased as the similarly English-sounding slogans of other competitors. But in my experience Freshness Burger not only serves the most generously topped and juiciest sandwiches, it also often offers surprising specials that I am only too happy to devour. And, what is almost more important: The fries taste, unlike those from the better-known rivals, as if they were more than a sadly looking side dish. Gigi Hadid once famously said: “Eat clean to stay fit, have a burger to stay sane.” And she was right. Friday, 29 August 2025. For the Alliance: My journey begins in the Northshire Valley, enclosed by high mountains, somewhere in the thickly wooded Elwynn Forest. Before me stands not only the abbey of the local brotherhood but also an adventure that will take me into frozen deserts, bubbling volcanoes, and creepy ghost towns. When I meet my friends, masquerading as knights, thieves, and wizards, behind the towering gates of the royal fortress Stormwind, and outfit myself there with keen blades, shining shields, and magical potions, I can hardly rein in my anticipation. The scent of pine and old stone, the flutter of banners, and the clanking of armor all heighten the thrill. One thing is certain: Whatever challenges await in this digital wonderland, we will endure and overcome them together. World of Warcraft is probably the largest and thus best-known online role-playing game, where paying participants slip into the roles of elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, trolls, and even talking pandabears on the fantastic planet of Azeroth. They explore mysterious continents, live through adventures and complete quests, forge friendships, build alliances, and clash with enemies for power and glory. Players create characters, shape their skills, take on professions, tackle dungeons, trade, and socialize. When the heroes are not busy fishing, collecting pets, or idly bouncing around auction houses, they immerse themselves in an epic saga of love, hatred, and broken dreams in which Alliance and Horde face each other bloodily and vie for the favor of gods and devils—by any means imaginable. When I installed World of Warcraft on my newly bought Mac Mini in the mid-2000s, I played straight through until exhaustion set in at dawn. The months that followed were an experience that can never be repeated. Everything felt new, thrilling, and magical. People around the globe logged into World of Warcraft to swap dreary everyday life for a generic but interactive Lord of the Rings copy. Some players became completely lost in it, even to this day, although twenty years on the initial fascination has largely faded. I would give anything to wake once more in the Northshire Valley, ringed by high mountains, and set off with my friends to rediscover Azeroth and its fantastic tales, as if seeing it anew. But times change. Thursday, 28 August 2025. My Summer in Japan: Summer here in Japan is slowly drawing to a close, though no one has informed the sun. It remains so hot and muggy that every step outdoors becomes a sweaty ordeal, at least when I dare to leave the house in broad daylight. Even so, over these past months I’ve tried to see, experience, and take in as much as I can. After all, every minute in this country, in this adventure, is precious. Sooner or later I’ll be back on a plane, heading home, and any moment I haven’t used to the fullest will feel wasted. I want to keep that potential regret small, so I push myself to go, to look, to listen, to be present, and to savor what this place offers. I grabbed dear friends and headed with them into every shop and restaurant that looked even vaguely inviting. We drove into the mountains and out to the water. We wandered through cities, museums, and temples. I met locals and people from every corner of the globe whose stories, dreams, or simply their way of not taking life too seriously touched and inspired me. Japan is a riotously colorful grab-bag, a lucky packet worth opening and exploring. Whether in nerdy manga shops, smoky izakaya, or mist-shrouded samurai graveyards, I’m grateful for each memory I’m allowed to carry along on the rest of my journey, a pocketful of moments that clink like coins and remind me why I came so far in the first place. And while the sun spent the days of this summer beating down on us without mercy, as if to taunt us and prove itself the ruler of the sky, Kumamoto at night turned into an idyllic dreamscape, a black-blue paradise full of chirring cicadas, croaking frogs, and purring cats. Fireworks stitched light across the dark vault, and in meadows ringed by small houses people sat and grilled, drank, and sang. Neighbors waved, wind bells tinkled, and smoke drifted upward like a prayer. Now summer here in Japan is coming to an end—and with it my year in this city at the far edge of the world, a place that welcomed me, challenged me, and, in ways I never expected, changed who I am. Monday, 25 August 2025. My Favorite Cinema: The other night over dinner, a friend asked why I love lesser-known films so much. Her favorites are American action blockbusters like Die Hard, The Transporter, and the high-octane The Fast and the Furious series with Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez, while my patchy watchlist includes titles like Nightcrawler, Melancholia, and My Small Land. My quick, perhaps rash, answer was that I enjoy movies that lodge in my memory, that I might still recall years later because they moved me, fascinated me, or taught me something. Maybe it’s simply that I was in love with someone in the cast. I chase the afterglow: A scene that lingers, a line that won’t fade, a feeling that taps me on the shoulder after the credits roll. In the shadow of the multiplexes in Kumamoto, somewhere between Toho, Aeon, and SMT, which lure crowds with hits like Jurassic World, Under Ninja, and the latest Demon Slayer, plus popcorn, tortilla chips, and syrupy cola in huge cups, stands my favorite cinema: The Denkikan. Its dark walls, hung with obscure posters, host local gems and far-flung wonders, whose popularity sits somewhere between celery salad, cloudy sunsets, and computers running Linux as a daily driver. How many people can say they saw Oasis, The Jazz Loft, or All We Imagine as Light in a theater? A haven where the projector hums, the aisles creak, and I catch whispers of other lives. A schedule like a treasure map inviting me to trust the curators and go somewhere unexpected. With a freshly brewed coffee on one side and a companion on the other, I let the Denkikan carry me into unfamiliar worlds. On these long screenings, there are often no more than five fellow travelers, scattered among the seats. Of course, I value the blockbuster experience too. Surrendering to wild action with sweet-and-salty snacks is as valid as falling for small secrets. Yet there is special magic when, in my little favorite theater, I watch Japanese indie films like Rainy Blue, At the Bench, and Linda Linda Linda. Those are the films that make my heart beat faster, the ones that hum behind ordinary days, turn the walk home into an epilogue, and remind me that quiet stories can claim space in a life. Thursday, 21 August 2025. Arrow in the Knee: Staggering from the cave on my last reserves, I let my eyes adjust to the harsh sunlight as a vast, mountain-studded snowscape unfurls before me. In towns clasped by timber and stone, merchants, thieves, and kings ply their trades. Dragons, werewolves, and vampires wake. Bright hoards and darker magics hide from the gaze of a budding civil war. I wipe fresh bear blood from my skin and set out for the next village. It is not the first time I have roamed these forests, nor will it be the last. Once more I have returned. To the valleys of Skyrim, where the wind bites like iron and distant watchtowers blink with fire as paths fork, promising danger, coin, and stories for the stubborn and brave. Two hundred years after the Oblivion Crisis, the Empire of Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls V stands at the brink. The High King of Skyrim has been assassinated. New alliances form and stake their claim to the throne. Yet amid this conflict, a far more perilous, ancient threat stirs to life. The dragons, whose existence is whispered in long-forgotten passages of the Elder Scrolls and deemed extinct, have returned to Tamriel. Skyrim’s future, and that of the entire Empire, hangs in the balance as the land waits for the prophecy to unfold: the coming of the Dragonborn, a hero wielding the Power of the Voice, the Thu’um, and the only one capable of standing against the dragons—foretold in runes and shouts carved into cold stone walls. Nothing sets my little nerd heart racing like diving into The Elder Scrolls V. Again and again. Sometimes as a kindhearted knight who rescues fair maidens, builds homes, and adopts children. Sometimes as a ruthless mage who slaughters monsters and farmers alike. And sometimes as a naked madman who, thanks to supernatural powers, can vault over castle walls, marry deities, and fight Spider-Man, with essentially one overriding goal: to hoard every cheese wheel in the realm. The Elder Scrolls V is a vast playground full of marvelous characters and intriguing stories. Returning to the world of Skyrim is, each time, a blend of adventure and coming home, a feeling only a handful of computer games ever manage to create with enduring comfort for me. Wednesday, 20 August 2025. Magazine for City Boys: Although my chest houses the heart of a digital minimalist and light-footed traveler who thinks in bits and bytes and has gradually moved the baggage of his not-so-young life into the cloud, I have nonetheless kept a soft spot for printed media. Whether books, magazines, or newspapers, something happens to me when I hold these riotously colorful works of art in my hands and can not only look at them but also feel them, smell them and, to a certain extent, even hear them. I buy them sometimes fresh off the press at the kiosk or happily second-hand, always knowing that I will take their secrets into myself and then release them back into the world before someone else can fall in love with them. One of my favorite magazines is the Japanese Popeye. It’s a monthly fashion and men’s magazine based in Tokyo, addressing clothes, sports, and everyday culture from a young male perspective. Popeye was founded in 1976 by Yoshihisa Kinameri, who saw Japan at the time in a state of drift and wanted to encourage the country’s youth toward a healthier lifestyle. In the meantime it has grown into one of the nation’s most influential cultural publications. The magazine is widely known for introducing American youth culture to Japanese readers. In his book Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, W. David Marx described Popeye’s debut issue as “a sunny take on life in California, where youth were carving out the future for the rest of civilization.” Each issue tackles a specific theme that it introduces to its readers. Sometimes it is about trips to the small and big metropolises of the world, New York, Seoul, London, Taipei, Paris, about the freshest films, books, and fashion trends, about cool restaurants with which city boys can impress their girlfriend—if they even have one. But most interesting to me is the Japanese gaze on the world and the selection of stories Popeye correspondents bring back to readers in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, and also from the farthest corners of Okinawa, Hokkaido, or Kyushu. I dig the style, the interviews, the photo features, especially the Girls in the City series. Popeye is a beautifully designed declaration of love to mindful consumption and one reason print must never die. Tuesday, 19 August 2025. After the Rain: The weather over the past few months here in Kumamoto seems to recognize only two possible settings. Either it strives to mimic the lava-laced dungeons of hell and cook us alive, or it bombards us so mercilessly with rain, gales, and typhoons that building an ark seems the logical step for ferrying ourselves, and a few stray animals, to safety. Thanks to climate change, or rather to those who deny it, the weather has digivolved into my personal arch-enemy, and I, in turn, into one of those people who cannot help, at every opportunity these days, lamenting how awful things already are and how much worse they are likely to become—assuming, of course, there is any future left for us at all, for anyone paying attention. The other day I came home seared through, surely nurturing one or two splendidly developing cases of skin cancer, only to realize that, precisely as I pulled the front door shut behind me and took a brief cold shower to stop the sweating, the rain began outside. The joy at this long-overdue cool-down, and the prudent fact that I had just finished the groceries and therefore did not need to venture back out, did not last long. What started as an exciting thunderstorm, complete with flash after flash and rolling thunder, quickly morphed into a rainstorm so merciless that one chirpy, softly whirring disaster notification after another began lighting up my phone, stacking themselves into a cheerful little tower of alarms on the glowing lock screen. In front of my house the street turned into a long paddling pool, while I was first instructed to evacuate and later, because the bridges were overflowing, told to wait it out. Since I live on the second floor, I watched the drama through the window and on special reports on TV. My only fear was that the power might fail or the water supply be hit, but that did not happen. Sleep was impossible that night, because my phone chimed every few hours, sending grim alerts one after another. While I, as I learned next morning, got off lightly, others coped with flooded homes, cars, and supermarkets. Let us hope this was the worst we will have to endure in the near future. Saturday, 16 August 2025. King of the Monsters: There are certain Japanese subcultures to which, to date, I’ve never really found an entry point. Among them are animated VTubers, masked superheroes à la Kamen Rider, and kaiju—giant monsters that, at regular intervals, stomp Tokyo flat. Well-known examples include Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Gamera, and of course the universally beloved Godzilla, brought to life by Ishiro Honda. I did see Roland Emmerich’s American version in theaters in the late ’90s, yet the destructive spectacle didn’t leave much of an impression on me whatsoever. And that’s strange, because I generally adore it when the world is reduced to rubble in the media I consume. Somehow, though, this particular behemoth and his city-crushing antics never quite worked their way under my skin. The basic idea for Godzilla came from producer Tomoyuki Tanaka. The inspiration is said to have been the incident of a Japanese fishing boat that strayed into the fallout zone of an American nuclear weapons test. The first film, from 1954, in its original Japanese version is not only technically impressive in its effects, it is also a thoughtfully constructed work in terms of plot and drama, one that can be read as an allegory for Japan’s trauma after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or as a direct reaction to the nuclear mishap that struck the small fishing boat. Since then, and with a nod to King Kong, Godzilla has run amok and spread fear and terror—most often in Japan’s major cities. To develop feelings for the skyscraper-tall and perhaps even misunderstood reptile, I recently watched the newest, critic-lauded installment in the film saga, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One. There, a kamikaze pilot tormented by survivor’s guilt seeks redemption when a giant monster he failed to kill is transformed by radiation from atomic bomb tests and lays siege to postwar Japan. It’s about honor, guilt, love, grief, friendship, responsibility—and, naturally, many demolished properties. Unfortunately, I was as whelmed by this Godzilla outing as I once was by Roland Emmerich’s attempt to bring the creature to New York. Maybe I simply don’t fear irradiated monsters, no matter how loudly they roar. Godzilla and I, despite its cultural relevance, will probably never be friends. What a pity. Friday, 15 August 2025. A Smoky Smell: Summer in Japan is barbecue season. Partly that’s because it is, let’s say, bold to leave raw fish outdoors for longer than three seconds in these godless, blistering temperatures, let alone try to serve it to anyone. And partly it’s because there is nothing more flavorful than sinking your teeth, with an ice-cold beer, or in my case tea loaded with rattling ice cubes, in freshly grilled scraps of meat, blazing-hot sausages, and the occasional almost-scorched piece of vegetable. Ideally it happens while good conversations flow and cheerful company gathers around. In that setting even the sweatiest evenings can be endured with a little style, a lot of taste, and decent entertainment, and somehow they pass pleasantly instead of painfully. That, in short, is summer survival, Japanese-style. A few friends and I therefore met above the rooftops of Kumamoto, at the American-leaning burger, hot-dog, and barbecue spot Jiro 26, to celebrate that day’s sunset once again for the brief coolness it brought along. We were entrusted with cute little gas grills and got to ornament each of them with bite-sized steaks, strips of bacon, and wiener sausages. Between the meats we set down carrots, cabbage, and bell peppers. When everything was cooked through and tantalizing, we dipped the treats in punchy sauces and let them melt away on our damp tongues. From the terrace we watched the city settle as the sky dimmed. Tongs clicked and grills hissed softly while we hovered, trading pieces, comparing doneness, raising toasts to the breeze and fading light. Because we are, all of us, small gluttonous creatures, we raided the steaming pot of curry after the barbecue, as well as the rice cooker standing beside it with an almost innocent air. To wrap things up we went bowling at the nearby sports center, where we taught the pins a lesson in fear. Evenings like these are my regular reminder of why I love Japan—apart from the candy-colored entertainment industry and the tropes that are so quick to see through. After all, here I get to have a wonderful time with even more wonderful people I would never have met otherwise. They anchor me to ordinary joy and make the city feel friendly, close, and warmly lived-in—and delicious barbecue comes on top. Thursday, 14 August 2025. Want to Come Down With Me? Sometimes I refuse to consume media that has become too popular. Whether films, shows, or video games, once the hype train really gathers speed and it feels as if the entire planet is trying to convince me that I have to watch, listen to, or simply experience this thing because it’s the finest achievement humanity has produced in its more than 300,000-year history, I react almost reflexively with a defense mechanism that looks suspiciously like an allergy. I tense up, dig in my heels, and avoid it on principle. Familiar examples are Squid Game, The Weeknd, and Balatro, whose emotional impact on my life falls somewhere between militant indifference and a burning, slightly irrational hatred that I can’t quite justify even to myself. Yet I have decided to change this attitude. Exercising healthy agency by refusing to chase every, mostly artificially stoked, trend is admirable, and I still value that instinct. But when I renounce every recommendation, even those from close friends, and retreat into obscure niches, I insulate myself bit by bit from the mainstream and thus from the shared experiences of an entire generation, depriving myself of any chance to feel genuine empathy for others. I stop speaking the same cultural language. Following this new logic, I recently watched Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, approaching it with open curiosity, and trying to meet the work on its own terms rather than through resentment. That was my small but deliberate experiment in loosening my stubborn grip. In the film, the Kim family has hit rock bottom. Father, mother, son, and daughter live in a dim semi-basement and will take any odd job. Only when the youngest gets hired as a tutor in the ultra-chic villa of the Park family do the Kims board the carousel of class conflict. With clever schemes, talent, and teamwork, they push out the Parks’ employees one by one. Before long, the Kims are indispensable to their new employers. Then an unforeseen incident sets off a chain of events as unpredictable as it is unbelievable. I found Parasite as brilliant, surprising, and surreal as everyone said. I’m glad this positive experience is my first step back toward a renewed love of pop culture. Tuesday, 12 August 2025. My Odyssey: The Japanese language is a mountain that can be climbed only through perseverance, diligence, and the support of people who have already mastered it. Step by step, piece by piece, and word by word, I haul myself from one ledge to the next. What began as a picturesque hike through the gentle woods of romaji, hiragana, and katakana, sweetened by simple vocabulary and understandable grammar, with one little success after another, turned, with each waystation I managed to reach, into a personal odyssey among ambiguous kanji, hazy shades of politeness, and pitch accents I can hardly distinguish. As I climb, the air thins and I lean on the ropes offered by guides. Yet even as the path narrows and the rocks bite, the summit still glints somewhere ahead, inviting. On my Japanese-learning journey so far I have ridden out every high and low. There is euphoria when I not only understand something but can reshape it and use it in my own words. And there is frustration when the cashier at the nearby supermarket asks me a question and all I can manage is “大丈夫”, because from her stream of speech I could not catch any of the usual anchors like 伏る, カード, or 箸. At those times I either feel a surge of drive and reconfigure my whole life into Japanese, listening to podcasts, buying stacks of manga, and watching YouTube, only to crash, burned out, a few days later. Or I simply want to quit, once and for all, and walk away from the mountain altogether. After riding those emotional waves, I realized that everyone has to find a personal way of learning Japanese. For some people it works to ban every other language from daily life and, for a time, almost become Japanese. Others keep studying Spanish, Korean, and Icelandic alongside it and somehow rack up more progress than I do. For still others the best path is to keep things loose, curious, and fun, following interest rather than duty, and letting momentum build slowly. I very clearly belong to that last group. And I count myself fortunate that there are kind people who actively encourage me, answer questions, correct my stumbles, and cheer from the trail as I keep moving forward, sometimes crawling, sometimes striding, but always, stubbornly, continuing the climb. Saturday, 9 August 2025. The Maddest Obsession: From early youth, my life was divided into chapters named for the women I happened to love at the time. Whether in Berlin, in Tokyo, or wherever I drifted, and whether anything became a relationship, whether intimacy happened or not, it was always too easy for me to become so intent on one woman that she defined an entire era. From this came obsessions that at times stretched across years, fed by depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and a self-diagnosed borderline condition, and they often ended in an emotional detonation. After a few quiet weeks or months, another woman would appear. Hopes, dreams, and fantasies were projected onto her, and the cycle began again. There is a name for this hyperfocused state: Limerence. The term was introduced in 1979 by Dorothy Tennov, an American professor of behavioral psychology, in her book Love and Limerence. It denotes an extreme form of being in love, already more than just having a simple crush on someone, and the patterns that accompany it: Relentless, nearly compulsive thinking about the beloved. Longing for reciprocation. Constant fear of rejection. A blind spot for her negative traits. A narrowing of perception to objects and incidents that relate to her. And shyness and uncertainty in her presence. According to Tennov, limerence may pass into love if a relationship takes hold. If it remains one-sided, it fades of its own accord, and the state can last from a few months to several years. My limerences resulted in me organizing entire days around the woman I’m currently fixated on. There is no stalking on my part, yet jealousy and possessiveness appear, of course at odds with reality. When energy runs high, an open, charismatic version of me steps forward. When my body and mind are tired, withdrawal follows. Over time it became clear that my fixation is not on the woman as she is, but on the separate fragments of an ideal assembled for her. The fall begins when my feelings go unreturned and expectations collapse, and the only useful act is an unconditional retreat and a renewed willingness to meet other people, with the hope that this vicious circle will finally break - no matter how, and by whom. Wednesday, August 6, 2025. Hobo Horror: Good stories put a quiet spell on me. Whether they arrive as books, films, or video games, what lingers afterward, often for far longer than I expect, isn’t the glossy, polished shell so many media try to sell these days, but the people inside and the moments that temper them into something tougher and wiser. That is why adventures pull me in. Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry, and The Secret of Monkey Island don’t just tell varied, engaging tales—they let me stand close enough to feel them. And sometimes the mood can tilt darker, which suits me fine. So it does in the pulp thriller The Drifter, where the light thins and the edges grow hard. In The Drifter we follow Mick Carter as he is hauled headfirst into a tangled web of shady corporations, murder, and a madman’s thousand-year obsession. The hobo has been adrift for a while, trading one job for another, never staying long anywhere. He jumps a freight car toward the town he once called home, witnesses a brutal killing, is chased by high-tech soldiers, thrown into a reservoir, and drowned. That, however, is only the beginning of his trouble. His consciousness comes loose and is forced back into his body mere seconds before death. He ends up wanted for the murder he saw, tormented by his own past, and stalked by the conviction that something from the far side is on his trail. What begins as supposed fantasies in a middle-aged loser’s head swiftly becomes a layered adventure suspended between a tragic past and a future that looks spent. The story moves Mick along at a sure pace, one situation to the next, with barely a breath in between. One moment he’s assembling a Molotov cocktail from a bottle of high-proof rum. The next he’s interrogating a corrupt neurosurgeon. Before long he has to swing out of a high-rise window on a frayed extension cord. The Drifter is a gripping rollercoaster of feeling, its lineages easy to sense: Steven King, Michael Crichton, and John Carpenter, with a trace of 1970s Australian grindhouse. In the end, good stories never die out. Monday, 4 August 2025. Wurstcutters: I never thought of myself as particularly attached to home, yet staying away too long causes a small ache that points, stubbornly, toward Germany. Sometimes it’s nothing more than the sound of the language, its clipped edges and sudden softnesses, absent from the air around me. At other moments a single habit or custom goes missing, and the day stumbles. An unspoken social rule fails to hold where I am, and the floor feels a little slanted. There are days when none of that speaks loud enough, and the craving reduces itself to something simpler and more insistent: Food. The kind that anchors a life even when one pretends not to notice. After almost a year in Japan, the local fare has become familiar and, I admit it, beloved. Sushi and sashimi. Ramen and soba. Karaage and tempura. Bowls of rice, miso soup drifting its warm salt, plates of pickled vegetables that square the meal. When a different appetite insists, the shelves and coolers answer with Japanese versions of spaghetti, pizza, and richly filled sandwiches from convenience stores and neighborhood supermarkets, each with its own taste and charm that refuses easy comparison. Still, there are hours when German hausmannskost presses forward. The Sunday dishes my grandmother conjured onto the table at noon, the steam rising as if from her sleeves. Beef roulades, käsespätzle, fried potatoes. Or, if nothing else, a good, moist loaf of black bread. To quiet that longing, Erika and I went to the German beer restaurant Oden in downtown and set out to fill our bellies with Central European comforts. The menu staged its pretzels, bratwurst, and potato salads between Japanese side dishes in a way that didn’t look especially German, and the food came with chopsticks that we used with wide smiles on our faces. The room didn’t shift into Bavaria, nor did time turn obliging. The city outside kept its pace, and we ate the meal it offered. Yet the distance shortened by a finger’s width, and the missing eased for the span of an afternoon, enough to carry me back into the week with a quieter hunger for home. Friday, 1 August 2025. Fellowship of the Fat Dragon: It’s no secret that, deep in my heart, I’m a nerd. I love wacky video games, quietly vibe to anime soundtracks, and enjoy stories in which foolish villagers become true heroes. Pen-and-paper adventures draw me in, and I gladly take part. Among mixed groups of barbarians, mages, and warlocks, I fight monsters, find great treasure, and rescue fair maidens. Although my media consume often leads me down the psychological abysses of human beings to understand them, and perhaps myself, better, from time to time I simply need a hefty pinch of fantastic, humorous tales somewhere between fantasy and science fiction. The kind that let my soul hang loose. One such refuge was the film Honor Among Thieves from the Dungeons & Dragons universe, which I finally managed to watch recently. Is there honor among thieves? Our unusual hero in this exciting fantasy flick certainly doesn’t ask. Former bard and thief Edgin breaks out of prison with his partner, the barbarian Holga. In a world full of long-lost legends, opaque magic, and overweight Wyrmsmiths, the two join the wizard Simon, the druid Doric, and the paladin Xenk to form a thieving crew. Their special mission is clear: Recover a lost relic and stop the cunning rogue Forge and his dark plans. Yet he knows how to make the lives of our heroes as difficult as possible. The magical venture is full of dangers, and plenty goes wrong, but the thieves are not easily discouraged. Where there is no honor, there are no rules. Whatever awaits them, they will be ready. Perhaps. Honor Among Thieves is a colorful, witty, and adventurous fantasy film in the best sense. The world around Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter, and the Sword Coast invites a mental dive and resurfacing. It reminded me of those absurd pen-and-paper evenings with friends, when we pulled every kind of nonsense and regularly drove our game master to madness. The film pleased me so much that I urgently long for a sequel. As a series, the story would also have worked. Some narrative strands could then have been told more fully. It was like a smaller The Lord of the Rings, one that doesn’t take itself quite as seriously as the original sometimes does. Through Honor Among Thieves, I rediscovered my affection for classic fantasy and would gladly see more of Edgin and his cheerful crew. Thursday, 31 July 2025. Weightless Wanderer: Everyone seems to hold a different idea of minimalism. For me it means freedom. Freedom from objects that weigh on me, distract me, or hold me back. Consciously and unconsciously I try to remove, or at least shrink, anything that blocks spontaneity or agency. Over the years I have learned to let go. I have noticed that many things that seem essential are nothing more than cargo—both material and mental. When they are gone, I breathe more steadily and act more directly. Most of the time the rule is simple: Once something leaves my field of vision, it leaves my mind as well. The room created by subtraction becomes quiet, and in that quiet I can decide what I truly want. I have become a nomad without fixed roots, moving from place to place and observing each location with childlike curiosity. Whether my journey stretches across Europe, America, and now Asia, or consists of a short walk to the nearest café, I want to rise, step out, and move without schedules, packing lists, or negotiation. Even the laptop that once promised mobility began to interfere. Whenever I left the room I needed a backpack, and the weight on my shoulders sharpened my awareness of limitation. That awareness felt heavy, not only on my body but on my thoughts. I learned that mobility is not only distance but also ease. When ease disappears, travel becomes a task rather than a movement. To carry as little as possible and still be ready for anything, I placed my whole digital existence inside one object: my phone. It holds my books, movies, games, music, and personal pictures. I can write, photograph, and record anywhere, whether I sit by the sea, climb a hill, or lie in a hospital bed. The screen guides me through unfamiliar streets, links me with other people, and manages my knowledge, plans, and finances. Even if the city unravels around me, the small rectangle in my pocket holds its quiet order and points me toward the next turn. I no longer measure freedom by the number of things I own but by the lightness with which I can leave them behind. To me, pure minimalism is carrying my entire life in the single device that never leaves my side. Wednesday, 30 July 2025. French Fantasy: Since my earliest days I have loved Japanese role‑playing games. No other genre draws me so deep into hidden worlds, deliberate stories, and mentally unstable characters. Dragon Quest, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger—whenever little boys rise to become god-slayers, I remain before the glowing screen for hundreds of hours, tracing each dialogue box while the world outside steadily burns to the ground. Over the years I learned that these Far Eastern legends reach far beyond my room. They travel across languages and teach strangers to dream in the same fantasy worlds. Today their imprint is visible in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a surprise hit from a studio in France. The developers do not hide their admiration. It breathes through every single visible polygon. The game unfolds on the small island of Lumière, housed inside the Belle Époque filtered through stone, steel, and smoke. For sixty‑seven years the inhabitants have faced an annual event called Gommage. Each summer a goddess known as the Paintress writes a number on the sky, always one smaller than the previous. Everyone whose age is the same or greater dies, quietly, without marks. To break this cycle, the city council selects a squad after each ceremony and sends it across the channel to stop the Paintress before the next inscription. None have returned. Expedition 33 boards its vessel with hopes, dreams, and fears of what lies beyond the sea. We follow the march of these brave souls through a world that almost seems to be too beautiful to be true. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not a Japanese role‑playing game, even when the palette, the soundtrack, and the battle rolls insist on that lineage. During my journey I recognised fragments of NieR Automata, echoes of Final Fantasy, and the depths of Xenoblade Chronicles. Yet the imitation stops short of substance. The protagonists are nothing but tristful replicas of stratified, flesh-and-blood individuals. The world changes little and blends together, its flora and fauna repeating in blurred loops, and the final revelation comes short in epicness. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the Avatar: The Last Airbender of video games—a botched attempt to mimic the emotional range of its idols without grasping the force that makes the originals so devastating and compelling. What remains is a rebuilt framework in vaguely French attire. I’d rather stay inside my Japanese wonderlands. Monday, 28 July 2025. Fishers of Men: I have lived in Japan for almost a year now. The steady scrutiny that accompanies the life of a so‑called gaijin outside the big cities no longer unsettles me. Children greet me as they coast past on bicycles, pensioners bow if I avoid blocking the aisles, and girls in navy uniforms let their eyes linger for a moment when they think no one notices. Instead of discomfort, I feel quiet ease. People treat me with kindness or at least with courtesy that seems honest. Many are happy to speak a few words, test their English, or ask why I picked their town over the neon capitals they know from television. Each morning I rehearse simple Japanese, relieved when the sounds land cleanly. I come from a country known for old wounds and a renewed appetite for exclusion. It’s hard for me to ignore or even forget that. Japan is conservative, and I understood that before stepping off the plane, yet I was still shaken when an extremist party drew strong support in the recent election, most of it from voters my age or younger, some of them friends who share coffee with me on Saturdays. Their approval surprised me more than the numbers on the screen. It showed me that the rejection I thought I had left behind can surface anywhere. The campaign’s orange flyers appeared suddenly, on walls and in hands. Some teachers at my university shrugged, saying protest votes were unavoidable, then changed the topic. My frustration grew when I could not show those friendly, curious people how they were being guided. This nation’s fishers of men use the same routine every radical group prefers. Short slogans, invented statistics, and a steady supply of unease. With those tools they collect not only votes but also the public attention needed for patient work on real, often tangled problems. Some asked why I remain liberal. The reason is simple and selfish. I want to live in a world that does not restrict movement, a place where eyes follow me only out of curiosity and never out of hate. Nothing else seems worth defending. I remind myself that freedom rests on ordinary choices made every ordinary day. I count each conversation as practice for that defense, even when it ends in silence. Thursday, 24 July 2025. Konbinis Are Churches: I was living on FamilyMart rice balls and low blood sugar dreams. Tokyo nights too hot to sleep and too cold to stay awake—it’s always 3:47 a.m. when you walk into a konbini. The neon light like a kiss from a dying god. The buzz of the fridges like the sigh of someone who’s given up. Konbinis are churches. Sacred spaces where nobody prays but everyone kneels. Bent before microwave ramen, counting coins. The salaryman with his suit crumpled like a used cigarette box. The girl with smeared lipstick, eyeliner like bruises. The boy in a school uniform who’s not going home tonight. We’re all there for the same reason—because the world outside is too much, and this fluorescent purgatory asks nothing of us. I’d stand in front of the refrigerated drinks like it was an altar. Pocari Sweat, lemon chu-hi, cold coffee in PET bottles. I’d buy a rice ball with salmon, melon bread, a lighter I didn’t need. My hands were shaking. I liked the way they shook. Made me feel alive, or close to it. Outside, the rain tasted like metal and regret. I’d suck it off my lips and watch people slide through the streets like ghosts, all of us moving toward some convenience store or away from something worse. There’s a konbini every few blocks, like veins pumping sugar and trash into the city’s bloodstream. Every one of them the same. Open 24/7, eyes never blinking. You can lose yourself in them—not in a romantic way, but in the way people vanish into cracks, forgotten until they rot. The konbini is where you go when you have nowhere else. When your apartment’s too small, too quiet, too full of memory. When your body wants something it can’t name. Salt, sugar, heat, nicotine. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. Because the lights are always on. Because the shelves are always full. Because the world ends softly, one plastic bag at a time. Friday, 31 January 2025. Food and the City: I’m collecting places like bruises, and Kumamoto is teaching me how to hold them. I want to swallow this city whole—its bars, its noodle shops, the grease-stained counters where old men nurse their drinks like they’re the last thing keeping them tethered. I want every corner that smells like soy and sweat, the kind of sweat that comes from standing over boiling broth all day. The thing is, I don’t want to experience this place like a tourist. I want it messy and cheap and at two in the morning when only ghosts and drunk boys are awake. Karaoke rooms where someone’s always crying into a microphone. Dark izakayas where salarymen tell the same story over and over, and nobody stops them because that’s the whole point. Host clubs where the smiles are plastic but the laughter feels real, even when it isn’t. Coffee shops with maids serving you silence that’s thick like syrup. I’ll sit anywhere, eat anything. The city center thrumming like a neon heart or out near the edges where streets don’t even make it onto maps. And the only currency that matters is having someone with you. Someone local. Someone who knows the places that don’t exist online, who walks you there like they’re showing you their own bones. I remember this one night with her. We found a hot pot place downtown where the broth was boiling like we were. You fish things out with chopsticks—meat, mushrooms, vegetables—and they come up steaming and half-drowned in soy. Robot waiters rolled past with their fake smiles and real pudding. The sauce stained everything, our fingers, the table, maybe our memories of what we were before we sat down. There’s no better way to know a city than to eat it. No better way to belong than to chew on its streets. And somewhere between the steam rising off the broth and the neon bleeding through the windows, we made quiet plans for places we hadn’t touched yet, nights we still wanted to break open. I felt it then—this buzzing just under my ribs. The feeling that maybe we’re not just consuming, surviving here. Maybe we’re actually building something real. Wednesday, 22 January 2025. A Serene Fairytale: Who gives a shit what Hollywood’s golden boys are sweating over in their hot rooms with their endless rewrites and plastic champagne. Because at the beginning of this millennium something happened. Something too soft to scream and too sharp to forget. The best movie of all time slipped through like smoke. Lost in Translation. And all the computer effects and starlet tits in the world can’t erase it. Coked-up executives can pump a movie full of crap and call it love, but it won’t bleed like this one. It won’t ache like this one. This one didn’t even need Los Angeles, New York, or whatever American tax haven dump bent over the lowest—it had Tokyo like a slow pulse under pale skin. Bob Harris is falling apart. A middle-aged ghost in a five-star coffin. With some whisky in one hand and endless exhaustion in the other. Charlotte is drowning quietly in a fresh white dress, married but lonely like a window in winter. They find each other in silence, in elevator glances, in night-blue bars and half-empty hotel pools. No grand confession. No clichéd strings. Just that quiet panic of two souls brushing against each other in a foreign city that doesn’t care whether you live or die. They don’t fall in love. They dissolve together. Time fucks them over like it always does. But for a few moments, they forget the script. They make up something better. Something real. Bill Murray doesn’t act. He exists. Scarlett Johansson doesn’t fake. She glows like she’s lit from inside by something bruised and holy. Sofia Coppola doesn’t direct. She whispers through the lens. And somewhere in the distance I can hear Happy End’s Gather the Wind, like an echo that holds this serene fairytale together. Lost in Translation isn’t for people looking for endings. It’s for the ones who stare at strangers in the subway and want to cry. For those who fall in love with cities. With moments. With people they were never supposed to meet. It’s for the broken, the dreamers, the ones who can’t stop remembering things that never quite happened. And yeah. It’s fucking beautiful. Monday, 13 January 2025. My Plum Ghost: I participated in an art contest. Nothing serious, but it swallowed me whole. The theme was Yokai. Japanese spirits, monsters, the beautiful weirdness that lives between shadows and dreams. For this, I built a canvas with my bare hands in my Japanese Arts class. Cut the wood, stretched the cloth. I wanted it to feel like something real. Not digital. Not fake. Something that bleeds when touched. I used traditional materials. Glue, brushes, powdered pigments that smelled like the inside of a shrine. Nothing fancy. Just old magic. I spent days sitting in our classroom, hunched over it like a secret I couldn’t share. The canvas stared back at me. It whispered things. Or maybe I was just tired. My yokai was mine. No one else’s. A hybrid born from salt and fear—a cross between umeboshi, that sour, shriveled plum that tastes like a punch in the mouth, and umibozu, the sea ghost with a black, formless body that capsizes ships when no one’s looking. I called it Umebozu. A pun. A joke only the sea would understand. It looks like a plum, but it drowns you. The painting was a colorful homage. An amateurish love letter. I shaped my small world to mirror Katsushika Hokusai’s wooden masterpiece The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but in a more cheerful way. The yokai stared from the center of the storm. Big eyes. Wrinkled skin. A hidden smile that made me happy. People asked what it meant, and I explained. They smiled. They liked it. Sometimes I imagined the Umebozu slipping off the page, crawling into the real world, hiding in rain puddles or tea cups or behind vending machines late at night. I started seeing it everywhere. The curve of a wave in the river. The color of a bruise on my arm. It followed me home in the folds of my clothes, in the ink under my fingernails. I dreamed of salt and storms and laughing things that lived in the sea. And when I woke up, I missed it. I missed him. My little yokai. My plum ghost. Maybe he was never just a joke. Maybe he was the part of me that never fit, never spoke. But always smiled. Friday, 10 January 2025. Call Me Ishmael: I was drifting, low blood sugar, the air like soup. I hadn’t eaten all day, or maybe I had—I don’t remember anymore. Walking through this supermarket in Japan, one of those blindingly clean ones with neon light and weird elevator music playing overhead, and it was so cold. So cold. Fish eyes staring at me from slabs of ice. And then there it was. Whale. Raw flesh like wet velvet, whispering at me from behind cellophane. I stared at it the way you stare at someone you’ve seen in a dream before. Wrong and perfect at the same time. I bought it like buying a secret, fed some yen into the machine, heard it beep, and just like that, the small pieces of a slaughtered giant were mine. Back at home the silence was loud. I didn’t cook it. Just opened the package, dropped the slices onto shredded carrots and radish, squeezed a lemon wedge like a little prayer, and ate them with metal chopsticks. They tasted like horse. Like blood and memory. Like something I wasn’t supposed to taste. I thought about the whales, sure. Thought about the documentaries and the guilt people wear like expensive jackets. But mostly I thought: when else? When else would I ever get to know this feeling, this very specific wrongness melting on my tongue? I ate the whole thing slowly, like a ritual, like a dare, and when it was done I just sat there with the low hum of the fridge and my own breath rising and falling like I was learning how to breathe for the first time. There’s something in my gut now, not quite guilt, not quite satisfaction. Something older. Animal. Like I remembered something I shouldn’t have. Next time I want to eat dolphin. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe to feel worse, maybe to feel better, maybe just to feel anything at all. It’s not about taste anymore. It’s about going somewhere I can’t come back from. Monday, 6 January 2025. A Neon Disease: I watched Akira and it never left. That’s the thing nobody tells you about movies like this—they don’t just exist in those two hours in the dark. They become part of how you see everything after. Neo-Tokyo is a wound. It breathes smoke and vomits neon. The streets are soaked in broken dreams and syringes and that specific kind of beautiful hopelessness that only exists in cities that have already died once. Skyscrapers scream in color, pink and blue and acid green. And somewhere in there is Tetsuo, just a kid like any other, until something inside him wakes up. Not love. Power. The kind that destroys things. I loved him and Kaneda together—two orphans on that red bike, moving fast enough to forget they had nothing. No grand plans, no meaning-making, just the engine humming and the need to burn. They were the kind of kids who exist in the margins of stories, usually invisible. But they mattered. Then the city turned on him. Split him open. Filled him with electricity and madness. And Kaneda couldn’t reach him anymore because that’s what happens when power becomes too big for a person to hold. It eats them from the inside. What got me about Akira was how it moved—those cells melting into each other, worlds collapsing. Otomo didn’t predict the future, he showed us we were already living in it. The movie felt less like fiction and more like prophecy, like something that had already happened and we were just catching up to the impact of it. It infected everything after. The image of it, the feeling of it, lived in my chest for years. There’s something pure about how badly a movie like this wants to show you something true about the world, even if that truth is uncomfortable and dark and beautiful in a way that breaks you a little. I wish more things were made with that kind of commitment, that kind of refusal to look away. Friday, 3 January 2025. The Wandering Mind: Sometimes I’m not sure whether the world I currently find myself in is real. Then I strain to search for glitches that the simulation around me may have overlooked—only to eventually give up in frustration and realize, disappointed, that I’m not permitted to catch even the slightest glimpse behind the curtain. And this despite the fact that I could swear there have been enough moments in my life when I should have slipped into eternal oblivion. Yet I’m still here—if only in the fading aftereffects of my own thoughts. Perhaps I’m forbidden from being forgotten—by myself as well as by others. I was born in the year of dystopia, on an unremarkable winter morning somewhere in southern Germany. My mother raised me on her own, supported by her family, who soon became mine as well. I was never particularly diligent, let alone ambitious. Instead of doing homework, I preferred to daydream and lose myself in the colorful worlds of television series, video games, and fantasy novels. After catching enough Pokémon, watching enough anime, and kissing enough girls in my small hometown, I eventually felt drawn out into the big wide world. I found myself in Berlin, Tokyo, and New York. In London, Paris, and Rome. In China, Canada, and Turkey. Whether I was ever truly in those places, or whether all my small and great adventures took place only in my imagination, may perhaps reveal itself at the end of my journey. At the moment, I’m roaming the streets of a mid-sized city in southwestern Japan while studying the analog and digital arts of depressed people and even more depressed robots. After searching far too long for the truth of everything within myself, I recently decided to throw myself into the unknown with open arms and allow myself to be swallowed by the countless possibilities of this planet. Wednesday, 1 January 2025. Culture Isn’t a Museum: I was determined to squeeze every last ounce of experience out of Kumamoto before time did what it always does—slip away like it owned the place. When my friend mentioned a classical concert, I said yes before my brain caught up to my mouth. Something about that city made me say yes to everything, like I was collecting moments like they were currency I’d need later. The day had that golden quality where sunlight does something almost obscene to everything it touches. We’d just come from eating the kind of food that ruins you for everything else—rice that felt like eating a cloud, soup with the kind of depth that makes you think about generations of grandmothers passing down secrets through flavor. We walked through the city slowly, taking our time like we weren’t running away from anything. The usual chaos was there—vending machines humming out their own frequency, kids chasing pigeons, the whole beautiful mess of a place that’s alive. The concert hall appeared like something that had landed there on purpose, all glass and stone and intention. Inside it was packed with families, kids bouncing in their seats, parents looking exhausted and content the way only parents can. A young guy came out with a flute and played like it was his voice, like the instrument was just the medium. When the Totoro theme started bleeding through the speakers, something shifted in the room. Ghibli soundtracks do something weird to people—they’re not just music, they’re every childhood memory you forgot you had, wrapped up in something bittersweet and aching. Then this woman walked out and sang like she was trying to tell you something important. Her voice had weight. And then a kid, maybe twelve, took the mic with that specific terror only kids get before they do something brave, and just opened their mouth and let it out. The whole room held its breath. And then everyone lost it. People started singing, dancing, laughing like they’d been given permission to remember they were alive. Strangers became something softer than friends. It wasn’t reverent or quiet or the kind of culture you experience behind ropes in a museum. It was loud and messy and genuine, the kind of thing that reminds you why humans keep making art in the first place. For the first time in days, I didn’t feel like I was running out of time. I just felt like I was there. Monday, 30 December 2024. Bubbling Like a Fever: Kumamoto wasn’t mine when I got here. It was just gray concrete and train stations and the specific kind of noise that makes you feel invisible. But then something shifted—maybe it was just time, or maybe the city decided I was worth knowing. Suddenly there were colors everywhere. Temple eaves catching the last light. Vending machines glowing at three in the morning. The kind of small details that make you feel like the place is actually alive. What got me most was how the blank spaces in my head started filling in. You know that feeling when you first arrive somewhere and it’s all static, no shape to it? One day it’s just streets you walked through, and the next day it’s *places*—specific corners that mean something now. A convenience store you pass at exactly the right time. A playground with swings that sound a certain way. Little alleys where cats watch you like they’re judging whether you deserve to be there. I found people too, which honestly surprised me. Not through trying or anything intentional. Just accidental conversations that turned into inside jokes that turned into actual friendships. We started walking through the city like we were trying to figure it out with our bodies, if that makes sense. They showed me places I would have been too cautious to find alone. There’s something about moving through a city with someone else—it changes what you’re capable of noticing. One day we went to this massive mall floating above the train station like some kind of steel spaceship. It was exactly the kind of place I’d normally avoid—too bright, too much, all neon fever dreams and aggressive modernity. But then we ended up at this shabu-shabu place on the top floor, sitting above all that noise, and the whole city was just spread out below us like it was showing us what we’d been walking through. The hot pot was bubbling, meat curling, mushrooms opening up like they were surrendering. We kept dipping and burning our tongues and talking about nothing in particular, but it felt like maybe something was actually happening. Like the city was finally recognizing us as something other than ghosts passing through. I know this sounds dramatic. It probably is. But there’s something about being in a place long enough for it to stop being scenery and start being home, even if it’s not supposed to be. Even if you’re just passing through. Wednesday, 25 December 2024. Love Machines: Being in Japan feels like existing inside a dream that keeps restarting. There’s neon bleeding into everything, this dazed quality to how people move through the world, and I’m just wandering through it all not quite sure if I’m understanding anything correctly. Tokyo’s electric streets, Osaka’s weird late-night energy, Kyoto’s temples that feel less like buildings and more like something breathing slowly—I think I’m free here. I think I’m just passing through. And then it hits me. There’s this feeling that appears without warning, a subtle thing, like someone’s breath on the back of my neck. Not quite fear, not paranoia exactly, but something sharper underneath. The feeling of being perceived. Watched. Cared for, maybe, in a way that feels algorithmic and strange. They’re everywhere I go. Shibuya crossing, rain-soaked mountain villages where even the air feels sacred, the back alleys where I’m definitely crying for reasons I can’t name. Early morning or middle of the night or some time that doesn’t have a name. They find me regardless. The machines. The vending machines. Jidouhanbaiki. They glow like they’re praying, humming softly, full of something I didn’t ask for but somehow need. They’re not just selling drinks—that would be simple and boring. They’re offering icy lemon sodas that taste like summer, black coffee hot enough to burn, milk tea with pearls floating in it like little secrets. Exotic fruits wrapped in plastic that catches the light. Ties, umbrellas, the weird specificity of it all. Sometimes underwear if you know where to look. They understand something about longing. There’s something about them that feels like watching a person who’s been through something and come out the other side. They’re steadier than the convenience stores, quieter, more faithful. The blood moving through the city while everything else sleeps or screams or just exists in that strange middle space. They never close. They never judge. They give you something warm when you’re cold and something cold when you’re burning up from the inside. Some of them are genuinely beautiful. I’ve seen ones that feel less like retail and more like whatever lives in the space between art and necessity. They’re just sitting there on corners like they know something about who you were before all this. I still don’t know if they’re watching me or if I’ve become them somehow, but I keep feeding my money in and they keep giving me exactly what I didn’t know I was missing. There’s something honest about that exchange that feels rare. Sunday, 22 December 2024. Memoirs of a Samurai: I wasn’t expecting Kumamoto Castle to hit me the way it did. I mean, I knew it would be impressive—it’s famous for a reason—but standing at its base, looking up at these walls that had literally been destroyed and rebuilt, something shifted. The earthquake happened. The ground actually split open. The walls crumbled. And then people just... put it back together. Stone by stone. It’s wild to think about that kind of persistence. Walking along the perimeter, I kept noticing how you can actually see the history embedded in the stone itself. Some pieces are dark and weathered, scarred by fire and time and violence. Others are newer, cleaner, set into place with this obvious precision and care. It’s like the castle is literally made of its own story, and you’re just walking through it. Inside was the heavy stuff. Swords and armor behind glass, and this iron mask that just stared at nothing with this empty grin. It hit differently knowing there was once an actual face behind it, someone breathing, sweating, about to go do something terrible or defend something they loved. It’s one thing to read about history. It’s another to stand in front of the objects and feel how real it was. Then I came back out into the chaos of the food market and honestly, that contrast was everything. From all that weight and silence to this alive, loud, steaming mess of fried food and voices. I grabbed some fried croquettes filled with horse meat because why not, and the first bite was this rich, unfamiliar thing. By the third bite it started to make sense, started to feel less strange. There’s something about eating something unexpected in a place this layered—it all kind of feeds into each other. The castle looked different at night, lit up against the dark sky. Less like a monument and more like it was still standing guard or something. I don’t know. There’s probably some pretentious thing to say about how the past and present exist in the same space here, but mostly I just felt lucky to be standing there thinking about it. Friday, 20 December 2024. Last Night I Dreamt of Flowers: Tokyo swallows me in its heat. The asphalt quivers, glass panes tremble. Neon lights flicker in my eyes like broken memories. I drift with the crowd, let myself be pushed, my body feverish, my head full of everything and nothing. Then I’m inside—inside the world of teamLab. Borderless—no walls, no doors, no boundaries. Only light. Waves of color ripple across the floor, over my shoes, over my hands. The warmth of the room caresses my skin, as if the light itself had fingers. I walk on. A dark hall. Then—explosions of flowers, meadows rising from shadows, pollen drifting in slow motion. I raise my hand, and the room shifts with me. My body is a line in a poem writing itself. I run through the rain of the artificial night, lights bursting on my tongue like candy. My reflection fractures into glassy surfaces—thousands of versions of me staring back. Girls made of light, boys made of shadows, ghosts in a city that never stands still. Someone laughs, a sound like an echo from a dream. I lie down on the floor, looking up into the nothingness, flooded with color. No beginning, no end—only this moment. My heart beats to the rhythm of the light. I close my eyes. Tokyo whispers. And I’m weightless. I dive deeper into the colors, as if I could drown in an ocean of light. But it doesn’t feel like drowning. It feels like being lost, like time has stopped chasing me. The walls breathe, the floor pulses, and I forget myself in the movement, in the silence, in this odd dance of pixels and dust. Everything is near and distant at once, like the sound of a song I’ve never heard but somehow remember. Every step reshapes the world around me, painting a new image onto the canvas of space. A flower blooms beneath my feet, and in its petals, I see myself—fractured yet whole, shifting through all my contradictions. I turn in circles. Colors weave and unwind, vanish only to return. The light makes my thoughts flicker, my heart jumps to the beat of a melody only space knows. It’s a dream that never ends. Or maybe it’s the moment I finally wake up. Tuesday, 17 December 2024. One Night in Ikebukuro: I’ve spent a lot of time in Ikebukuro after dark, and honestly, I think you have to go there at night to really get what Tokyo is doing. It’s intense in a way that feels almost necessary—like the whole city needs somewhere to let loose and just breathe differently. Everyone’s there after work with their colleagues or alone or with people they probably shouldn’t be with, and there’s this palpable sense that anything could happen, or nothing will, and either way nobody’s really checking. The bars are stuffed in everywhere. You’ll find yourself in some tiny restaurant or standing at a counter in a place that barely fits three people, and it’s perfect because you’re close enough to actual life to feel something. The drinks are cheap and strong, the food smells incredible, and there’s this electricity in the air that I haven’t really found anywhere else. It’s not glamorous—it’s kind of grimy actually, neon reflecting off wet pavement, the smell of ramen and cigarettes mixing with something else I can’t quite name. What gets me about Ikebukuro is how alive it feels. There’s pachinko sounds bleeding into conversations, people leaning against walls waiting for who knows what, these moments of real connection happening in the shadows between the flashing signs. I remember standing in Sunshine City looking down at everything spread out below, and thinking about how many lives were happening simultaneously in that chaos. How many people were there for completely different reasons—some running toward something, some running away. When I walk through those streets, especially late when it gets quieter but never quiet, I feel like I could disappear completely and nobody would notice. There’s something comforting about that. You can just exist there without explanation. The city doesn’t ask who you are or what you want. It just lets you be whatever you need to be in that moment. Saturday, 14 December 2024. Life’s a Bowl of Ramen: One of the favorite pastimes of people here in Kyushu is asking me about my favorite Japanese food. My answer depends on the day, but I usually say ramen. And no, I don’t mean the cheap instant kind you find in supermarkets. I mean real ramen—made with real ingredients. The kind you find in a tiny restaurant tucked away in some unknown back alley. Nothing revives me more at night than a hot, steaming bowl of soup filled with noodles, meat, vegetables, mushrooms, and a soft-boiled egg. And because I spent years addicted to Sriracha and thoroughly destroyed my taste buds, I pile on as much chili powder and fresh garlic as the Japanese immigration authorities will allow. Getting into ramen is like diving into a rabbit hole of broths, noodle varieties, and regional specialties. Originally, wheat noodle soup came from China, but in the early 20th century, Japan adopted it and made it their own. After World War II, when wheat imports from the U.S. increased, ramen became a staple. Today, every region has its own version. Some shops simmer their broth for over 24 hours to achieve the perfect flavor. Others focus on experimental fusion creations—something that fascinates me as much as the food itself. I’ve tried quite a few bowls of ramen, and despite all the variations, one truth remains: A good bowl of ramen always feels like coming home. On my trip to Fukuoka, I couldn’t miss the chance to try the city’s most famous dish—one that’s beloved far beyond Japan’s borders: Tonkotsu ramen. This broth is the opposite of subtle—thick, smooth, and packed with umami. The secret? Pork bones simmered for hours until they break down, infusing the soup with that unmistakable milky richness. The noodles are thinner than in other types of ramen, allowing them to absorb the heavy broth. It’s served with tender pork belly, fresh spring onions, and a creamy egg. If you know what you’re doing, you order a noodle refill. My sensei and I certainly did enjoy it at 大砲ラーメン. Tonkotsu ramen isn’t just a dish—it’s an addiction. Wednesday, 11 December 2024. Fonts Turn Words Into Stories: I adore good typography. The bigger, bolder, and more brutal it is, the more I fall in love with it. Whether classically placed on a snow-white background or chaotically scattered across colorful illustrations, typography is truly effective only when it snaps people out of their wandering thoughts the moment they see it. As British artist Mark Boulton aptly observed: “Most people think typography is about fonts. Most designers think typography is about fonts. Typography is more than that, it’s expressing language through type. Placement, composition, typechoice.” And as part of our ongoing design studies, we took a trip to Fukuoka to visit an annual typography exhibition. Nestled on the northern shore of Japan’s beautiful Kyushu Island, Fukuoka is a vibrant city where tradition and modernity blend seamlessly. Known for its welcoming atmosphere, it’s a haven for food lovers, with steaming bowls of Hakata ramen served at bustling yatai street stalls. Beyond its culinary delights, Fukuoka boasts serene temples like the iconic Kushida Shrine, sandy beaches, and a quite thriving art scene. With walkable streets, sleek shopping districts, and a reputation for being one of Japan’s most livable cities, Fukuoka offers curious visitors like us a chance to experience Japanese renowned warmth and innovation, all wrapped in an irresistible coastal charm. The exhibition itself was a vibrant exploration of Asian and Western typography created by students and masters alike. Whether featured in books, on posters, or even online, the famous Japanese dedication to perfection was evident in every single project. Personally, I was especially drawn to works that made bold use of hiragana, katakana, and kanji, creating a modern form of calligraphy that made my Japanophile heart beat faster. After viewing the exhibition, we had the freedom to explore Fukuoka on our own. We first hopped on a bus to the city center, treated ourselves to a bowl of hot ramen, and then wandered through the streets to soak in more of this enchanting city. Sunday, 8 December 2024. Me at the Zoo: They said it was for our Japanese Arts Class. Something about sketching wild animals to improve our line sensitivity. But in reality, it was about sunshine, good company, and getting to know some new place—at least for me. I walked to the local zoo on the other side of the city. It took hours, but I didn’t mind. I had my AirPods with some cheesy J-pop on and the sky above me was this deep electric blue, full of possibility. I passed babbling creeks that glittered like broken mirrors and old parks where tiny dogs pulled at their leashes like they had somewhere better to be. Streets were quiet, except for the soft whir of bicycle wheels and wind brushing tree leaves like secrets. At the zoo, I met my friends. Paint-stained fingers, backpacks full of snacks and sketchbooks. We were a mess, but in a beautiful way. The kind that makes old ladies smile at you like they remember being wild once too. We wandered through the zoo like it was a playground for our eyes. Yeah, the cages were small. But even depressed animals are at least something. Tigers with lazy elegance. Bears scratching their backs against stones like it was their full-time job. Flamingos standing like proud poets in pink. Then came the petting area. Round guinea pigs, soft like clouds, twitchy noses, black and soulless eyes, the kind of small joy that gets under my skin in the best way possible. We rode the creaky Ferris wheel and watched over the lake, surrounded by red oaks. Then we found these old mechanical animals. We dropped in a coin and zoomed across the pavement like we were five again. It was ridiculous. It was perfect. Lunch under the trees. Bentos from the nearest konbini, crispy chicken, egg rolls, rice sprinkled with furikake. Someone had these chocolate cubes wrapped in gold foil. We shared, laughing with our mouths full. We didn’t talk about work. Or stress. Or anything heavy. Just strolling, eating, laughing. Making something out of the moment. We were together, the sun was shining, and it felt like one of those days I tuck into my memory forever. Saturday, 7 December 2024. To the Lighthouse: The lanterns outside 老之倉庫 glowed with a soft, amber light, cutting through the early evening haze like scattered fireflies. It was the kind of place you’d pass a hundred times without noticing until someone told you it was worth stepping inside. That someone, in my case, was a group of classmates from Sojo University. After the school festival, they had decided we should celebrate here. Inside, the air was warm, alive with the hum of conversation and the low, melodic clinking of glasses. The aroma of hops blended with the scent of food. I found myself at a long table, surrounded by faces that were both familiar and foreign, a constellation of new friendships still forming. “You don’t drink?” someone asked, their tone more curious than judgmental. “No, but I’m here for the company.” This answer seemed to satisfy them, and soon the table’s attention turned back to ordering. Golden drafts arrived, frothy and luminous, like small suns. I watched as my friends lifted their glasses in a toast, their voices rising together in a symphony of celebration. “Kanpai!” It wasn’t the beer that mattered. It was the act of sharing, of weaving ourselves into the rhythm of the evening. My oolong tea’s earthy bitterness grounded me, a counterpoint to the effervescence of the room. As I sipped, I thought about how people often seek connection through what they consume. The conversation ebbed and flowed. Stories about the festival, plans for the weekend, fragments of dreams shared in halting English and Japanese. Outside, the city exhaled softly, the sounds of distant cars and bicycles slipping through the cracks of the night. By the time we left, the lanterns had grown brighter, their glow pooling on the cobblestones like liquid amber. I felt lighter somehow, not because of what I had drunk but because of the time spent together, the threads of connection woven tighter. As we slowly walked to one of Kumamoto’s karaoke clubs, I realized that Ichinosoko wasn’t just a place to drink, it was a place to belong, even if only for an evening. Thursday, 5 December 2024. The School Festival: Over the weekend, my Japanese university transformed into a vibrant school festival. Students from all faculties buzzed around the campus like busy bees, setting up tents, stages, and stalls, and filling them with life, color, and energy. There was an abundance of food, drinks, games, performances, raffles, and competitions—including a show by a somewhat famous idol from Tokyo, whose appearance drew an enthusiastic crowd. The spectacle concluded with a dazzling fireworks display that lit up the night sky. Afterward, we gathered at an izakaya downtown for the final celebration, where we laughed, reminisced, and spent our hard-earned money on very delicious food and drinks. Our group ran a stall at the festival, selling Sri Lankan delicacies like fried noodles with meat. My first day began at the archery clubhouse on the outskirts of campus, where we worked together to prepare the ingredients—carefully cutting meat and vegetables into bite-sized and pan-ready portions. Once everything was ready, we transported it to our stall, where the ingredients were fried to perfection, packed into transparent boxes, and enthusiastically advertised to passing festival-goers. Meanwhile, students from other courses were equally busy, offering sweet waffles, hot yakitori, fresh coffee, and an assortment of games like goldfish catching, ring tossing, and a lively lottery. Gamers showcased their skills in intense Super Smash Bros. matches, flexed their strength in arm wrestling contests, and danced with boundless energy to popular K-pop hits. As the festival neared its end, the main stage transformed into the site of an exciting raffle. Visitors who had diligently collected stamp marks at various food and game stalls over the two days eagerly awaited their chance to win fantastic prizes like AirPods, smartwatches, and even a Nintendo Switch. Our reward was simpler yet equally satisfying: Feasting on leftover food, savoring the beauty of the fireworks display, and, to top it all off, visiting an izakaya and singing our hearts out at karaoke in the city center. Monday, 2 December 2024. At the Soy Sauce Brewery: So we went to visit this soy sauce brewery in this small town called Ashikita, down in Kumamoto, and honestly what struck me most wasn’t the production methods or even the whole complicated history of how they’ve been making soy sauce since 1909. It was the story behind why we were even there in the first place. The Iwanaga family nearly lost everything in 2020 when these torrential rains flooded Kyushu. Sodai Iwanaga was telling us about how the water reached two meters high in their town, and I’m standing there trying to imagine that, trying to picture your entire life’s work—five generations of it—just underwater. Instead of giving up, which honestly would have made sense, they decided to crowdfund their rebuilding. Almost a thousand people helped them raise nearly ninety thousand dollars. And the messages people sent back were just devastating in the best way. Someone wrote that their dining table had never been without a bottle of Iwanaga soy sauce. Like, this product was that woven into someone’s life. What got me was thinking about how many people’s entire existence is tied up in these small businesses, these things they’ve inherited and cared for and built their identity around. The Iwanagas could have walked away. Instead they asked their community for help, and their community showed up. And now they’re making soy sauce and vinegar and miso paste again in this little factory that feels like it hasn’t really changed much in decades, which is kind of the point. Visiting the brewery, I kept thinking about how the visual design of their products—the labels, the bottles, the whole presentation—was actually telling a story. Every detail mattered. It wasn’t just about what was inside the bottle. It was about this family choosing to rebuild, choosing to keep doing what they’ve always done, in a place that’s still visibly recovering. You can see the recovery happening around Ashikita if you look. And somehow their soy sauce is part of that healing process. One bottle at a time. Thursday, 28 November 2024. Day at the Museum: Few places in the world exude a more peaceful aura than museums and galleries—though perhaps supermarkets at 4 o’clock in the morning come close. These sanctuaries of natural wonders, historical milestones, and cultural achievements stand apart from the chaotic events of the outside world. Those who step inside join an exclusive clientele, people who have deliberately chosen to immerse themselves in what they hope is an inspiring parallel universe. Within these walls, time seems to pause, encouraging visitors to leave with the aspiration of making the world a little better—or at least not worse. A friend and I recently visited the Contemporary Art Museum here in Kumamoto. Situated in the heart of the city, this museum is far more than a repository of art—it is a symbol of Kumamoto’s commitment to inclusivity, creativity, and forward-thinking ideals. Its mission is clear: To foster a tolerant city that embraces diversity and to inspire a future where every citizen can live a fulfilling, art-enriched life. The museum’s vision is built upon three core principles: offering a welcoming space for cultural exploration, stirring deep emotional connections through art, and collaborating with the community to envision a brighter future for the city. This is a place of reflection, imagination, and shared inspiration—a space where the lively spirit of Kumamoto is celebrated. The exhibitions we explored at the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto ranged from thought-provoking Japanese paintings to intimate photography and interactive installations, each one a visually stunning testament to the museum’s dedication to showcasing a rich tapestry of creative expression. By the end of our visit, we even had the chance to become part of a colorful, participatory work of art. Kumamoto deeply values culture, and the Contemporary Art Museum is just the beginning of my journey. There are countless museums, galleries, and exhibitions waiting for me to discover, each promising its own unique contribution to the city’s vibrant artistic landscape. Sunday, 24 November 2024. Gotta Catch ‘Em All: There’s always something interesting happening in the center of Kumamoto. On my way to the city’s downtown museum with a friend to check out a few free public exhibitions on a special open day, we stumbled upon a toy swap meet in front of a popular shopping center—and the runtish crowd that came with it. This colorful event didn’t catch us entirely off guard, as our art teachers had not only warned us in advance but also handed us a few action figures to trade. So, before immersing ourselves in the world of paintings, photography, and installations, we took a deep breath and dove into the exciting universe of bright plastic toys, cute plush animals, and shiny trading cards. As with most things here in Japan, the swap meet also had some kind of system. At one stand, we could exchange our action figures for points, which we then used to buy toys displayed on the other tables. The more valuable the product, the more points it cost—simple enough. Wandering through mountains of Far Eastern playthings, we picked out a few favorites. I chose a small book about Japanese ghost figures, which fit perfectly with my participation in the yokai drawing competition. I was quite thrilled with my find, though we didn’t have enough points for much else. What we weren’t prepared for was the grand finale waiting for us at the very end of the amusing event. The climatic highlight of the swap meet was an auction, where children, parents, and some random nerds like me could bid their leftover points on especially valuable toys. The selection included everything from Pokémon plushies to musical instruments and brightly wrapped plastic sculptures, the purpose of which I still can’t fathom. While I spent just two small points on my cute book, the little monsters around us were screaming bids in the triple digits just to take home a goofy-looking sheep. Some kids cried. After witnessing this lively social and cultural spectacle, we finally made our way to the museum. Admission was eventually free on that very day, after all. Hurray! Wednesday, 20 November 2024. Draw Me Like One of Your Yokai: I recently joined a drawing class here at my university in Kumamoto. After learning the fundamentals of Japanese painting over the past few weeks, it’s now time to put that knowledge into practice. Most of the works my diligent fellow students create, sometimes after months of effort, are entered into various competitions, primarily national ones, offering not only fame and honor but sometimes even monetary rewards or other prizes. Following the well-known saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” I’ve decided to participate in a competition as well. And I’ve really found a good one: The sunny island of Shodoshima is hosting a drawing competition with a focus on yokai. Yokai are supernatural creatures, spirits, or beings from Japanese folklore, embodying a wide range of traits from mischievous and playful to malevolent and terrifying. They often reflect cultural beliefs, natural phenomena, or moral lessons. Famous examples include Kappa, water-dwelling creatures known for their fondness for cucumbers and cunning tricks, Kitsune, fox spirits associated with intelligence and shapeshifting, and Tengu, bird-like beings often depicted as mountain protectors and skilled martial artists. Yokai are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, often appearing in famous myths, art, and even way more modern media like anime, manga, and video games. The required canvas size is manageable enough to give beginners like me a fair chance. My teachers kindly provided books on yokai and encouraged me to gather inspiration, develop ideas, and start sketching. I now have just under a month to complete the painting, which includes preparing the canvas and producing the necessary paints, colors, and glue. I’m very glad that my fellow students are also there to help me. If I win, I’ll not only receive money and a special artifact but also be part of a ceremony on the beautiful island of Shodoshima. Wish me luck as I compete against master’s students, amateur artists, and professional painters. How hard could it be, am I right you guys? Monday, 18 November 2024. Ghosts in the City: A few years ago, I snuck out of the house on Halloween night and wandered through my dark, foggy, and eerily deserted hometown. With a scary story by ghost hunter John Sinclair playing in my ear, this one about a brothel haunted by vampires, it felt like the perfect entertainment for such a spooky night. The atmosphere was electrifying, the kind of mystery that sends shivers down your spine in the best possible way. The only person I encountered that evening was a long-haired bottle collector making his rounds through the dense fog, his silhouette occasionally flickering into view before vanishing again. Every second of that enigmatic Halloween was unforgettable. Since that night, I’ve developed a deep fondness for exploring the streets of whichever city I find myself in during Halloween. This year, as I’m living in Japan, I made it a priority to continue my quiet tradition here. My daily route often winds around the castle park, past residential buildings, shops, and Kumamoto’s always-vibrant downtown. Around Halloween, this area transforms into a lively spectacle, with the market square near the popular bus station bursting with food stalls, shops, and a small but lively stage. In the heart of the square, a mix of cute witches, playful ghosts, and furries scurried about, juggling pizza slices, Coca-Cola bottles, and shopping bags. On stage, children were applauded for their creative costumes. One memorable highlight was a little girl dressed as Sailor Moon, confidently shouting into the microphone with such enthusiasm that it took a gentle intervention to end her impromptu performance. Halloween has always held a special place in my heart, but celebrating it in a city where others embrace it with equal fervor elevates the experience to another level. There’s a unique magic in blending my reflective tradition of wandering with the vibrant communal energy of a place like Kumamoto. The streets, the costumes, the laughter, and the shared love for all things spooky—this is Halloween at its finest. Wednesday, 13 November 2024. Trick or Treat: My Japanese exchange university regularly organizes events on special occasions to bring Japanese and international students together. These include excursions to fascinating places around Kumamoto, like bridges, breweries, and golden One Piece statues, several competitions to improve participants’ English language skills, and farraginous festivities celebrating special cultural holidays. Halloween, with its colorful disguises, mysterious customs, and sweet treats, sometimes scary, sometimes not, is no exception. The Japanese people here on the island of Kyushu embrace this day enthusiastically, and Sojo University has made its own contribution to this modern tradition. On the spookiest day of the year, I was invited to a cozy Halloween party hosted by my university at its International Learning Center. The event featured an abundance of Japanese snacks and drinks—many of which were still completely unfamiliar to me. Students and lecturers dressed up as dinosaurs, witches, and bloody knife-wielding murderers, creating a festive atmosphere. I had interesting conversations with new people, which made the evening even more enjoyable. My costume? Gru from Despicable Me, of course. Despite my immeasurable efforts, I couldn’t secure first prize in the costume competition. Too bad! But I’m not a sore loser—most of the time, at least. Halloween has become one of my favorite days of the year. Growing up in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, I only experienced it as it slowly began to gain popularity in Europe. Unfortunately, by the time German kids started trick-or-treating, I was already a little too old for it. My childhood Halloween tradition was limited to watching The Simpsons Halloween specials on TV while snacking on skull-shaped chocolates. This year, I’m thrilled to celebrate Halloween in Japan, a country where the fascination with ghosts, spirits, and yokai is deeply ingrained in the culture. It’s been an unforgettable experience to embrace the spooky season in such a unique and meaningful way. Sunday, 10 November 2024. Street by Street: So, honestly, my days here in Kumamoto kind of rotate around the same few places—my apartment where I sleep and work and do laundry, campus where I run between lectures, and downtown, which is where I actually live, if that makes sense. That’s where everything happens. That’s where the city feels real. Downtown is right under the castle, which is beautiful, and there are these three covered shopping streets—Kamitori, Shimotori, Shinshigai—that are always buzzing with something. Restaurants, tiny bars, bakeries, weird little shops selling things I didn’t know I needed, cafés where I’ve probably spent more money than I’d like to admit. It’s the kind of place that feels different depending on what time you walk through it, what you’re looking for, who you’re with. And I’ve kind of decided, maybe a little desperately, that I’m going to actually explore all of it while I’m here. Like, I don’t want to leave Kumamoto in a few years and realize I spent the whole time going to the same three places out of comfort or habit. There’s something about being somewhere temporary that makes you acutely aware of how finite it is, you know? So I keep trying new restaurants, new shops, wandering into places that look interesting. The annoying part is that some restaurants only have ticket machines with Japanese characters, and I genuinely cannot figure out what I’m ordering half the time. It’s humbling. But that’s when having friends around actually saves me—they’ll explain what button does what, and then next time I might actually know. My Japanese is getting there, slowly, but honestly some days I wonder if I’m just moving backwards. But walking around downtown, talking to people, eating something new, getting a little lost—it feels like the actual point of being here. Kumamoto’s not flashy. It’s not what people think of when they think Japan tourism. But there’s something real about it. Something that makes you want to stay for one more coffee, walk one more block, try one more thing before heading home. Friday, 8 November 2024. Barbecue and Fireworks: The Land of the Rising Sun is not only renowned for its, let’s call it, alternative entertainment industry but also its breathtaking fireworks festivals. And one of the most stunning takes place every October in southern Kyushu, in the town of Yatsushiro in beautiful Kumamoto Prefecture. This vibrant spectacle showcases Japan’s finest light and sound artistry, with unparalleled effects created by the country’s leading pyrotechnicians—or at least, that’s how it was advertised to potential visitors. Intrigued, I took a crowded local train to Yatsushiro with a couple of friends, where we not only admired the dazzling night sky displays but also savored a delightful evening barbecue. At the cozy barbecue in a local parking lot on the outskirts of Yatsushiro, nestled in a quiet neighborhood, we indulged in an array of delicious Japanese fried delicacies, sweet and salty snacks, and, for those so inclined, an abundance of cold and fruity beer-mix drinks. During the evening, we struck up a conversation with a possibly tipsy gentleman who claimed to be a famous voice actor from Tokyo. He enthusiastically told us he had starred in iconic robot anime like Gundam. I found this really fascinating and had a pleasant chat with him, but eventually, my friends politely yet firmly ushered him on his way. “Bye-bye, Ojisan,” I said with a mix of amusement and relief. The fireworks competition began at nightfall and had a Disney theme. Whether it was The Lion King, Frozen, or Aladdin, each display featured classic animation-inspired scenes, paired with matching music and spectacular explosions in every color imaginable. Standing there, on the outskirts of a, at least to me, unknown Japanese city, surrounded by wonderful people, delicious food, and a stunning hanabi show, filled me with joy. I couldn’t stop smiling—even while waiting in the long queue at the overcrowded small train station or enduring the, let’s say, cozy ride home a couple of hours later. And I simply can’t wait to experience all the amazing more things Japan has to offer. Wednesday, 6 November 2024. The Otaku Dungeon: I realized very early on that Japanese entertainment is far superior to its Western counterpart. As a small child, German television introduced me to series like Maya the Bee, Vicky the Viking, and Heidi, which were far more heartfelt, emotional, and exciting than anything Disney and its contemporaries offered. Of course, I loved normal cartoons too, but when East Asian classics such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and One Piece finally arrived in Central Europe a few years later, I found myself craving everything from the Land of the Rising Sun. I devoured anime magazines, bought shonen manga anthologies, and spent my pocket money on Japanese music CDs. An otaku was born. When you think of otaku paradise, Akihabara, Tokyo’s Electric Town, naturally comes to mind. It’s a haven for every nerdy heart, offering everything from anime and manga to provocative figurines. However, my personal favorite store is on the other side of the city, nestled in the heart of Shibuya. The Mandarake there is somewhat hidden between a ramen restaurant and a guitar shop. Descending the stairs into this underground otaku dungeon, I suddenly find myself surrounded by everything I truly love. The aisles overflow with movies, comics, trading cards, figurines, CDs, video games, consoles, magazines, drawing supplies, hentai, and all sorts of quirky odds and ends. Whether it’s iconic series like Pokémon, Astro Boy, and Neon Genesis Evangelion or hidden gems like Excel Saga, Genshiken, and Eden of the East, Mandarake offers such a vast and wonderfully obscure selection that I could easily spend my life savings here—and still only scratch the surface. The real obstacle, however, is that I’m broke. Sometimes, I wish I were obsessed enough with one series to want every piece of merchandise available. But because I have an eclectic taste and like a bit of everything, I usually find satisfaction in simply wandering through the labyrinthine aisles, soaking in the vibrant atmosphere, and drawing inspiration from the colorful characters around me. Monday, 4 November 2024. Let’s Make Curry: At Sojo University in Kumamoto, where I am, as you all know by know, spending a semester abroad, a two-day festival with all the trimmings is set to take place in just a few weeks. All the faculties will participate, putting on a vibrant showcase of activities. At least, that’s the plan. The festival will feature numerous food and game stalls, a large stage with various performances, and a spectacular fireworks display. There’s even a special guest—a pop idol from Tokyo. I imagine the whole thing will feel like one of those heartwarming anime episodes where the entire school plans a festival, only for the city to be attacked by ugly alien monsters—or something along those lines. Recently, I joined a fun and vibrant group called Sojo Buddies—a lively mix of Japanese and international students from various faculties at Sojo University. The witty group organizes exciting events in Kumamoto and beyond, plans excursions to interesting places, and occasionally meets for meals at delicious restaurants. Since good food brings people together, we’ve decided to run a food stall at the festival, serving spicy curry and other delicacies inspired by Sri Lankan cuisine. To ensure we know what we’re doing, and to avoid making fools of ourselves at the festival, we held a group cooking session, followed by a very essential taste test—and it was a complete success. Cooking with such an amusing group was a nice experience, even though my main contribution was aggressively breaking pasta into small pieces—just as the recipe we received instructed. In the end, we were all quite pleased with the result. I got to meet many new people, and we capped off the evening by watching a live broadcast of a local basketball team’s match. We’re more or less confident our food stall will be a gigantic hit at the upcoming festival, and the more money we raise, the grander our after-show party at some izakaya will be. Now, we eagerly await the festival at Sojo University. Hopefully, no ugly alien monsters will decide to attack our city in the meantime. Friday, 1 November 2024. Shake It Off: Japan is not only known for its eye-catching fashion, delicious food, and captivating animation art but also for its frequent earthquakes of varying severity, a consequence of its geographical location. Ever since the Great Kanto Earthquake in the year 1923 and, more recently, the Tohoku Earthquake in the year 2011, both the inhabitants of this East Asian island and visitors alike have been acutely aware of the ever-present danger simmering beneath their feet. Even the city of Kumamoto, where I am currently staying, experienced devastating earthquakes in the year 2016, which not only destroyed a bunch of city districts but also its famous landmark: The Kumamoto Castle. As a recent resident of Kumamoto City, I felt compelled to, and also had to, attend a disaster preparedness seminar. Together with a few friends, I fulfilled this obligation at the first available opportunity. We visited a local fire station, where we learned how to act in the event of an impending disaster. The seminar included an engaging video, hands-on simulations involving the four elements, fire, water, wind, and earth, and a Q&A session with the quite dedicated course instructor. After this experience, I feel confident in my ability to pull through should the worst occur. That said, perhaps I should also attend a seminar on surviving a zombie apocalypse—just to be fully prepared. One key takeaway from the seminar was the importance of having a emergency bag. What should it include? A flashlight, a portable radio, a helmet, a protective hood, work gloves, a blanket, batteries, a lighter, candles, water, food, instant noodles, a can opener, a knife, clothing, cash, and a first-aid kit. Having gained some expertise in disaster preparedness, I even found myself featured on Japanese television, sharing my thoughts on this crucial topic. Although I’ve grown accustomed to the frequent, minor tremors here, the specter of the legendary Nankai megathrust earthquake looms large in everyone’s mind. But I wouldn’t mind if it held off for a while longer… Wednesday, 30 October 2024. Autumn Flower: Autumn showed up in Kumamoto, and honestly, it’s been doing something to me. There’s this moment every year where the heat finally breaks and the whole city just exhales, and I’m finding myself walking around way more than I used to, taking streets I’ve never seen before, just watching how everything shifts. Sometimes there’s a cat lying in the sun somewhere stupid. Sometimes I find a tiny shrine wedged between two buildings or a café that feels like it’s been waiting for someone specific to walk through its door. It’s the kind of place that makes you feel like you’re constantly discovering something that was always there, which is maybe the best feeling. This is when those red spider lilies show up—these impossibly bright flowers that everyone here seems to love, and for good reason. They’re the kind of thing that makes you want to stop and actually look at something, you know? So when the Japanese Arts Club organized this walk out to some field with a river running through it, surrounded by mountains and all these green trees that still don’t quite feel real to me, I went. And we just stood there picking out the prettiest ones we could find, carefully digging them up with their roots still attached, bringing them back to the studio like we’d found treasure. I sat down with my sharpened pencils and watercolors and tried to put one of these flowers onto paper. And it actually worked. Like, it surprised me. Something about having the flower right there in front of you, about taking the time to really look at it and move your hand slowly enough to actually capture something true about it—I don’t know. It gave me this quiet confidence that maybe I could actually try painting one in the traditional style eventually. I’ve been thinking about what the first one should be. Got a small canvas sitting around waiting for me to get brave enough. But there’s no rush. That’s the thing I’m learning here. Good things take time, and that’s not a cliché when you’re actually living it. Everything moves at its own pace, and somehow that feels revolutionary. Sunday, 27 October 2024. The Art of Cheap Eating: You know how you go to Japan thinking you’re gonna eat healthy, all that sushi and fish and perfectly portioned everything, and then you immediately get knocked over by the sheer abundance of delicious things waiting to be eaten? Yeah, that happened to me. Somewhere between my first bowl of ramen and discovering okonomiyaki, I just kind of surrendered to the fact that I was gonna try literally everything. So that’s what I did. I went on this beautiful, reckless food tour through the country, eating my way through cheap fast food joints and upscale restaurants and tiny bars that smelled like grilled meat and soy sauce. Tempura, yakitori, karaage—all of it. The kind of eating where you’re not thinking anymore, you’re just experiencing, just tasting, just existing in that moment where something really good is in your mouth. The problem—and this is where the dream crashes into reality—is that Japan, despite being absolutely incredible, is also aggressively expensive. Like, stepping into a random supermarket and seeing prices on fruit that make you audibly gasp kind of expensive. I’m a broke student, which means my wallet has actual limits, and those limits were being tested daily. But here’s where it gets good. Every single night, this guy shows up. The supermarket savior, basically. He walks through the aisles with his little stickers, slashing prices in half on all the bentos and sushi and prepared food that’s about to hit its expiration window. And then it’s like watching nature’s most primal instinct kick in—everyone descends at once, this beautiful chaos of people grabbing the deals. If you’re fast enough, patient enough, you get to eat incredible food for basically nothing. That’s how you survive eating well in Japan on nothing. You just have to believe in the sticker man. Thursday, 24 October 2024. Painting Is Poetry: When I showed the last art teacher who had to put up with me my sketches of naked bodies, which I had more or less painstakingly created in the months prior, he said to me, and I am not exaggerating here, that they were the worst works he had ever seen. In. His. Entire. Life. This man certainly knew no mercy. But not only was he right, his words also confirmed something I had long suspected: I was better suited for digital art than analog art. I even resigned myself to the likelihood of failing his course due to my lack of talent, a fate only avoided when a tipsy fellow student intervened. She sent him a borderline humorous email, miraculously persuading him to let me pass. Thanks to this pivotal experience, I would have given up the marvelous craft of pen and paper forever if I hadn’t met two inspiring girls in Japan who invited me to drop by their art club. I tried to explain my complete lack of drawing skills, but before I knew it, I was standing in a room filled with paints, brushes, and canvases. The teachers, bustling around the space, promptly handed me pens, sketch pads, and art books, urging me to create my first painting. I met other nice students, drank some black coffee, and, almost by accident, became part of the Japanese Arts Masters Club. It all happened so quickly and I’m not quite sure if I’ll fit in here. But it can’t hurt to try it out, right? My first tasks are to study the basics of Japanese drawing and to learn how to create my own art utensils. Once I’ve accomplished that, I’ll start sketching plants and eventually choose a motif to bring to life on paper. With this, nothing stands in the way of my new career as a painter. Soon, my masterpieces will adorn the walls of the world’s greatest galleries, hanging proudly alongside Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. Visitors will marvel at my creations, shed tears of awe, and collapse with joy. And to think, all of this began with joining the art club. Or, as the modern Japanese mangaka Imigimuru aptly put it: “This art club has a problem!” And that problem… is me. Monday, 21 October 2024. Design Is Everything: The other day, I asked myself whether I had ever consciously decided to become a designer. The answer was a perplexed shake of the head from one of the little men that haunt my mind. Like much of my life, it was more by chance than sheer will to succeed that I found myself on the path of those who make a living from creative work—or at least try to. Did I have the potential to choose alternative career paths? Perhaps. Did I make use of it? No. Why not? Maybe because I’ve always been more comfortable with subjectivity than objectivity. Does that mean I’m swimming in money, with my art hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York? Yes, no, maybe? Hello? Hello?! If it weren’t for my almost success-allergic life decisions, I wouldn’t be where I am today: The Department of Design at Japan’s Sojo University in Kumamoto. Not far from the main campus, creative minds, and also me, work under one roof with art students on illustrations, advertising campaigns, products, typography, sculptures, 3D and app design, interfaces, and paintings in every shape and color. This is where I’ll spend most of my time in Japan, trying to channel as much visionary power as possible into my work so that I don’t feel too out of place when it comes time to present my results alongside my fellow students in the University’s very own art gallery in downtown. We learn to see the world through fresh eyes, engaging all five senses to explore and create. By paying attention to the everyday, we uncover new perspectives and develop unique ways of expressing ideas. Through trial and error, we shape our creativity, finding inspiration in the ordinary and transforming it into the extraordinary. This is a place to grow at our own pace, driven by curiosity and a love for discovery. I’m excited to see how much I can learn from this environment and how well I can complement my skills with impressions from a different world. Perhaps this journey will shape me into a designer whose work might one day hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Saturday, 19 October 2024. Reborn as a Student at a Japanese University: Guess who is now officially enrolled at Sojo University in the beautiful city of Kumamoto? That’s right—this guy. Founded shortly after the Second World War, the academy evolved from a technical high school and now offers courses in art, architecture, and various sciences. I ended up at the famous Faculty of Design, where they teach graphic, illustration, typography, photography, video, and 3D, among other subjects. Since I need to earn a minimum number of credits to complete my semester abroad and have no idea what to expect from the lectures, I’ve enrolled in nearly all the courses offered to me. I’ll narrow them down in a couple of weeks based on what I enjoy most. Sojo University boasts a konbini, several canteens, and even its own hairdresser. There’s also an international learning center where students from around the world can interact with each other and with Japanese classmates. My first day here felt like stepping into one of those generic school animes. Curious people bustled everywhere, J-pop played in the cafeteria, and inspiring posters covered in kanji adorned the walls. Interestingly, I am the only exchange student in my faculty. All my lectures are in Japanese, but the professors and students go out of their way to communicate with me through ambitious English, animated hand gestures, and a variety of translation apps. Initially, I was quite worried about fitting in here. I’m twice the age of most other students, don’t speak their language at all, and only know the Japanese school system from fantastic tales where usually something supernatural happens in the first chapter. However, my fears have not materialized. The initial shyness of my classmates quickly faded. They either find me personally, or at least the country I come from, fascinating. They’re eager to show me everything they think I’ll find new and exciting and help me navigate the social, organizational, and, especially, communication challenges of my exotic life in Japan. I believe I’ll have a great time at Sojo University—or at least I hope so. Sunday, 13 October 2024. A New Language, a New Life: As I prepare to spend the foreseeable future in Japan and am passionate about the culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, it feels only natural to learn the language. And where better to embark on this journey, one I hope will ultimately broaden my intellectual horizons, than in the heart of Japan? Exactly. With that in mind, I visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library in the vibrant international district of Roppongi. Armed with textbooks, a notepad, and a pen, I began learning my third language after German and English, immersing myself in a world I had chosen for myself. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Amen, brother. To make this process both efficient and enjoyable, I decided to invest in the みんなの日本語 textbooks, purchased from the 書泉ブックタワー in Akihabara. This set of books has been an invaluable resource, guiding me through the intricacies of Japanese: learning the hiragana, katakana, and kanji scripts, expanding my vocabulary, mastering grammar, and picking up useful phrases for everyday life. Like any ambitious student of Japanese, my journey begins with the first alphabet: Hiragana. The word literally means “flowing” or “simple kana,” making it the counterpart to the more complex kanji, which no human in the world truly masters because they’re so difficult to learn. Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, and with a few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by a character or digraph in these sets. Translating words from the Latin alphabet into hiragana is relatively straightforward—I just have to follow the character table consistently. However, two challenges arise: Navigating tricky rules and knowing when certain words are transliterated not into hiragana but into the more Western-oriented katakana. Mastering hiragana is the easiest hurdle on this linguistic adventure. Once I tackle my first kanji, I’ll look back at the simplicity of hiragana with nostalgia. But let’s not dwell on that future just yet. Friday, 11 October 2024. City of Bears: Welcome to Kumamoto, a city nestled in the westernmost part of Japan on the beautiful island of Kyushu. Known as the “City of Bears,” this charming locale will be my cozy home for the next six months as I embark on my exciting semester abroad at the Faculty of Design at the private and prestigious Sojo University. Here, I hope to refine my skills in typography, illustration, and computer graphics—though, of course, I sometimes wonder if there’s much left to improve. Waiting for laughs. I’m staying in a dormitory with other exchange students from around the world, about twenty minutes from the university’s main campus and another ten minutes from the creative art campus. From my apartment, located in the higher part of the city, I can see the iconic Kumamoto Castle. Renowned far beyond Japan’s borders, the building sits majestically atop a hill, surrounded by a lush green park and beautifully illuminated with colorful lights in the evenings. At the heart of Kumamoto lies the lively downtown area, anchored by the Kamitori and Shimotori shopping streets. These bustling arcades are lined with cafés, konbini, book stores, museums, karaoke spots, bars, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, boutiques, izakaya, barbers, teahouses, galleries, and countless other shops. Whether it’s day or night, there’s always something thrilling happening in the city center. I can’t wait to spend the next months exploring its many offerings and getting to know its vibrant culture. Upon arriving in Kumamoto, I couldn’t help but feel like I had stepped into my own Persona adventure. Much like the game’s protagonists, I find myself in a foreign Japanese city, at a new school, and with a few months to navigate unfamiliar surroundings, forge friendships, and soak up as much as I can—though saving the world might be a stretch. I’m determined to make the most of this incredible opportunity, collecting unforgettable memories and experiences along the way. After all, I know how rare and special this chance is, and I plan to savor every moment of it. Wednesday, 9 October 2024. Their Eyes Were Watching Girls: When I’m not enjoying the crème de la crème of the musical entertainment world, characterized by Italian operas, French chansons, and South American jazz, I immerse myself in the underground bunkers of Japanese idols. From internationally renowned classics like AKB48 to the nostalgic sounds of Morning Musume and short-lived Eurodance groups such as SweetS, D&D, and Folder 5, I know, listen to, and love them all. These groups, a wild mix of personalities, sing about love, friendship, and emotions, accompanied by cheerfully poppy melodies that barely conceal the melancholic undertones—cries for help aimed at suicidal schoolgirls and kinky hikikomori. My current favorite idol band is Sakurazaka46, which emerged from Keyakizaka46 with its center, Yurina Hirate. They are some kind of sister group to Nogizaka46 and Hinatazaka46 and a rival to AKB48, NMB48, and SKE48. Sakurazaka46 briefly attracted international media attention a few years ago when their predecessor group wore outfits resembling the Schutzstaffel military uniforms of Nazi Germany during a concert. This sparked controversy, and the record company had to issue a formal apology. Despite, or perhaps because of, this incident, fans remained loyal to the group. Today, they call themselves Buddies—and I am really proud to count myself among them. Because I’m a huge admirer of Sakurazaka46, I couldn’t resist visiting an exhibition in Shibuya as part of their latest single release. The exhibit featured personal messages from members like Karin Fujiyoshi, Rina Matsuda, and Hikaru Morita, along with behind-the-scenes photos, stage outfits, music documentaries, and other smelly fans to mingle with. On a personal note, I had to process the bittersweet news that Rina Uemura and Fuyuka Saito were using the exhibition as a platform to announce their graduation. But as a connoisseur of Japanese idol culture, farewells are part of the experience. Speaking of farewells, does anyone know what Atsuko Maeda is up to these days? Monday, 7 October 2024. Some People Walk in the Rain, Others Just Get Wet: Nothing makes me happier than walking through the rainy streets of Tokyo. After the hot days behind us, with concrete and bones alike melting, I wanted to cheer naked and weep with joy at the sight of the first gray cloud creeping over our heads. The sidewalks are lined with dancing umbrellas, some black, some white, most without any colors, but I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to cower. I don’t want to protect myself from the drops that timidly, then stormily, splash down on us. For the first time since arriving in this city, I don’t wither away when I bravely step under the open sky. I can finally breathe again. Finally live again. Finally savor my existence—if only for a very brief moment. The rain lures me into the back alleys of Ueno. I stand on a bridge, the clattering carriages of the Ginza Line rattling below, making their way to the next stations. The parks are empty, people hop around under the awnings of storefronts. I feel closer to Tokyo than I have in a long time. Away from the must-see places, I find myself at an unfamiliar corner—between a pharmacy, a shoemaker, and a bus stop. It smells of ramen, cars, and opportunities. A group of yellow-capped children waddles past me in their sailor uniforms. They stare at me. One of them begins to wave and greet me, the others join in, a chorus of “Hello!” sounds. I say “Hello!” back. We are all a little happier now. I wish for the rain to dissolve my body, for me to become one with this city, right here, right now. I don’t care if I perish forever. I want this place at the end of the world to absorb me and never let me go. Tokyo is my religion, my destiny, my God. If my soul will only find peace when I can proudly proclaim that I am Tokyo and Tokyo is me, then so be it. The sky shifts, trembling blue, red, and black before me, as if watching anxiously to see if the man-made spot of land beyond it will accept my humble sacrifice. But on this day, the love of my life forgoes my gift, leaving me out in the rain. Perhaps Tokyo graciously wants to grant me a few more days within it before calling me to it forever. Friday, 4 October 2024. The Emperor’s Shrine: Tokyo is a grab bag of emotions and experiences. Every turn in a new direction brings a fresh adventure and another story to tell. I love wandering through the bustling streets, shops, and cafés of the Japanese capital. Yet, I am also grateful for moments spent in more or less sacred places scattered across the spacious city. Surrounded by green trees and towering gates, these temples and shrines serve different gods and spirits. The smaller and more hidden they are, the happier I am to find them, feeling as if I’m the first person in ages to rediscover them. I conveniently ignore the burning candles and fresh offerings that suggest others have been there before me. Sometimes, though, I seek the enlightenment and support of truly powerful energies. Because I need all the assistance I can get to bring my messy life at least somewhat back on track. This is what led me to the famous Meiji Shrine in Shibuya, nestled between the fashion district of Harajuku and the serene Yoyogi Park. The shrine, built in the early nineteen-twenties and dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, is divided into two sections: Naien and Gaien. Although the original structure was destroyed in the air raids of World War II, it was rebuilt in the nineteen-fifties through public donations. And it’s absolutely stunning. Though I’m an atheist and think about gods the way I think about unseasoned food and watery coffee, I still tossed a few yen into the donation box, clapped my hands, bowed a few times, and even bought a wooden plaque, or Ema, to write down a few wishes and leave a small part of myself there. As I strolled slowly through the shrine, watching traditionally dressed miko and fashion-forward trendsetters pass by, I was reminded once again of how much I love Japan’s fluent blend of tradition and modernity. In special places like these, I temporarily let go of my atheism, enjoying the thought of a hidden world intertwined with our own—if only just a little. Monday, 30 September 2024. Tower of My Heart: Though the Skytree has been a colorful rival towering over Tokyo’s skyline for years now, when it comes to captivating the eyes of residents, tourists, and the occasional bird, the Tokyo Tower remains the landmark of this East Asian metropolis for me. In how many films, documentaries, and anime series have I marveled at this red-and-orange wonder of architectural significance, serving as the backdrop to tales of great love and even greater destruction? Seeing this colorful tribute to the Eiffel Tower always makes my heart beat faster. No journey to the Land of the Rising Sun would be complete without cozying up to the magical metal of this man-made giant. The communications boom of the fifties prompted the Japanese government to construct a large broadcasting tower to relay information throughout the Kanto region. Additionally, amid the post-war economic recovery, Japan sought a monument to symbolize its resurgence from World War II—one of the most devastated nations rising again. The resulting Tokyo Tower gained international fame through mentions in anime and manga like Magic Knight Rayearth, Doraemon, Tenchi Muyo!, Revue Starlight, Please Save My Earth, Cardcaptor Sakura, Digimon, Detective Conan, and Death Note, becoming a symbol of Japan and its eclectic capital for weebs around the world. Stepping out of the elevator and onto the observation deck, I see the lights of Minato, Shibuya, and Meguro below. The Rainbow Bridge glows with vibrant colors. Around me, tourists fight for the best selfies, capturing themselves with the sprawling metropolis as their backdrop. Here I am, in the heart of the one and only Tokyo Tower, which graces the pastel backgrounds of Naoko Takeuchi’s popular masterpiece Sailor Moon—the source of my lifelong love for it since childhood. If it were legally, physically, and biologically possible, I would outright marry Tokyo Tower and have lots of cute, little mini towers with it—but I’d probably be deported just for trying. Saturday, 28 September 2024. It’s Hot in Tokyo: If there’s one unsettling truth I hadn’t anticipated, it’s that Tokyo will become a blazing inferno this fall with a single goal in mind: To kill me. The moment I step out of my air-conditioned hotel, I’m transformed into a soaked creature, my sweaty silhouette a testament to a body in agony. All for wanting a little sightseeing in Shibuya, Akihabara, and Shimokitazawa, only to be punished by some evil god, spirit, or yokai wielding the concentrated power of a thousand suns. I was completely unprepared for this unfair battle with climate change, which ambushed me along the way and turned my joyful journey into an odyssey in the blink of an eye. I have to plan my daily trips through this burning concrete jungle down to the very minute—though, of course, that’s hardly possible. If I spend even a second too long away from the air-conditioned havens of subway stations, department stores, and art museums almost sealed off from the outside world, I liquefy into a dark, sweaty, and miserable mess that not even the iciest drinks from the omnipresent vending machines can save. Japan wants me, and anyone else brave, or stupid, enough to face the open air on these diabolical days, to know who’s in charge—and no portable fan, mobile sunshade, or colorful popsicle can spare us from that harsh reality. The longer I endure this endless game of hide-and-seek with the sun, the clearer it becomes: There’s no point trying to strategize against nature’s brutal counterattack on humanity. My time here in Tokyo is finite, and I’m not going to let a giant fireball in the sky ruin my trip. Stepping out of a Family Mart onto the midday streets of Asakusa, I begin to melt at the first step, as the beloved konbini jingle morphs into the tune from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my boiling head. Fuck you, sun, I think as a puddle of sweat forms beneath my feet, and I slowly drag myself toward the next temple, shrine, or cute maid café for a few photos. I will survive—hopefully. Thursday, 26 September 2024. Wind’s Howling: As I leave the grimy swamps of Velen behind and stride through Novigrad’s gates, a city brimming with possibilities opens up before me. Cheeky rascals dart through the winding alleys of this bustling harbor metropolis, under the watchful gaze of the Eternal Fire that looms over its inhabitants. Banks, brothels, and shops of craftsmen line the streets, and I catch the sounds of singing and laughter from countless pubs. I head toward the Rosemary and Thyme tavern to meet my old friends Dandelion and Zoltan, hoping to moisten my dry throat before I continue my journey to the freezing Isles of Skellige to find the most important person in my sad life: Ciri. There are few video games that linger in my mind even years later. Games that left an enormous impression, that made me love and appreciate their characters, whose music still echoes in my ears, and whose vivid scenes play out in my mind’s eye. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of those epic titles. As Geralt of Rivia, I crept through dark, goblin-infested caves reeking of decay, fought off monsters, specters, and whoresons, and wandered through lost worlds that hinted at the end of our own. And when I didn’t feel like doing my duty as a student of the Wolf, I played cards, got piss-drunk, and chased after fair maidens across Redania’s seedy beds. Sometimes, I crave the chance to dive into a gritty fantasy world and live beyond the bounds of good and evil. Games like Skyrim, Dragon’s Dogma, and Divinity: Original Sin serve as a unique form of escapism. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is my personal favorite—a vivid universe where I can fully immerse myself. Based on the books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the adventure is a rollercoaster of bloody encounters, humorous moments, and tender scenes. I’d give anything to erase my fond memories of that wondrous journey and walk through Novigrad’s gates for the first time once more, in search of peace, happiness, and the occasional fair maid. Wednesday, 25 September 2024. Where the Trendy Things Are: Of course, Tokyo has its ordinary side, its normal, even boring aspects. Men in dark suits, towering walls of skyscrapers, and loud, crowded subways. But then, I step through a door and suddenly I find myself in a sugary Tokyo, where everything around me is glossy, fluffy, and overwhelmingly gaudy. When it comes to fashion in all its glorious shapes, colors, and magnificence, the Far Eastern metropolis of Tokyo is a vast and vibrant universe, full of small and massive clothing stores, hidden vintage shops, and independent galleries. Old stores close, and new ones sprout like mushrooms in an endless cycle. It’s nearly impossible to stay fully up-to-date. What’s even more intriguing than just keeping pace with fashion is the experience of wandering through Tokyo’s diverse stores myself. Especially in Harajuku, Tokyo’s iconic district where styles are created, mixed, and discarded faster than I can say “kawaii,” the sheer variety of colors adds warmth to the bustling crowds of this megacity. Strikingly printed sweaters, pants, and bags adorned with all kinds of cute accessories fill the alleyways. Style-conscious schoolgirls cast off their dull sailor uniforms after the bell rings and slip into the latest trends they’ve picked up from stores like Nadia, Honey Salon, and Love Drug, ready to showcase them in the lit streets. Labels such as Milklim, Kirby, and Jóuetie are all the rage among trendsetters in the metropolis. These can be effortlessly paired with established brands like A Bathing Ape, Comme des Garçons, and Billionaire Boys Club. Harajuku is a true Land of Cockaigne. Every step through this magical neighborhood feels like another adventure waiting to unfold. One moment, Sailor Moon gazes at me from the shelves, the next, I’m standing in a soft toy wonderland, and suddenly, there’s a candy paradise around me. Tokyo is a vibrant wonderland, and nowhere is this more evident than in its peculiar stores, none more dazzling than those found in Harajuku. Tuesday, 24 September 2024. The Cozy Neighborhood: There is no place in Tokyo that feels homier than Shimokitazawa. The alleyways are lined with cafés, second-hand shops, and record stores. A few years ago, the neighborhood in Setagaya was considered a hipster haven, but it has since become a meeting point for those who find Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara too crowded, too loud, and frankly, too mainstream. Visitors who make their way here are seeking slow moments in contrast to the otherwise hectic pace of life. Shimokitazawa smells of pastries, jazz plays softly in the background, and the staff are dressed as if they’ve stepped straight out of fashion magazines like Popeye, Brutus, and Fudge. At the start of the millennium, the Setagaya City Council released plans to redevelop a large portion of Shimokitazawa, located in the southwestern corner of the Kitazawa district, which included the construction of several high-rise buildings and the extension of a highway through the area. The narrow, winding streets and small alleyways, cherished by residents and visitors alike as part of Shimokitazawa’s appeal, have made this plan controversial, with some viewing it as degrading and overly commercialized. A decade ago, Shimokitazawa Station was restructured, sparking major changes deep in the heart of this charming neighborhood. As I sit in a bookstore, watching passersby come and go, I sip my coffee and nibble on the mini chocolate pretzels that came with it. To improve my Japanese, I’ve picked up some textbooks and flip through pages filled with hiragana, katakana, and kanji. If I could move to Tokyo, I’d probably settle in Shimokitazawa. Then I’d sit in this bookstore every day, drinking coffee, snacking on mini chocolate pretzels, and learning Japanese for the rest of my life. Banana Yoshimoto wrote in her book Moshi Moshi: “When I considered the destruction of the earth, I felt I’d deal with it when I saw it happening, but when I thought of losing Shimokitazawa, I felt real fear.” Sunday, 22 September 2024. The Electric Town: There’s probably no place in the world that makes weebs’ hearts beat faster than Akihabara. Enthusiasts of Japanese pop culture will find everything they could dream of in this district, known far beyond the borders of Tokyo. From anime, manga, video games, and J-pop CDs to books, trading cards, figures, model kits, cosplay costumes, and even hentai, it’s a paradise for otaku. But Akihabara isn’t called the Electronic City for nothing. For those less into nerdy pop culture, it’s a haven for tech lovers, offering everything from cell phones and computers to spare parts and gadgets. Akihabara is a phenomenon that completely consumes everyone who enters it. Historically, Akihabara was located near one of Edo’s city gates, serving as a gateway between the city and northwestern Japan. This made it home to many craftsmen, merchants, and samurai. Since its opening in 1890, Akihabara Station became a hub for freight traffic, fostering the growth of a vegetable and fruit market. By the 1920s, the station saw heavy passenger traffic as it opened to public transport. After World War II, the district’s black market thrived in the absence of strong government control, transforming Akihabara into a bustling market town. By the 1930s, it evolved into a center for household electronics, solidifying its reputation in this niche. Walking through Akihabara’s bustling streets, I’m greeted by big-eyed cartoon characters with even bigger breasts. Girls in brightly colored maid outfits shout cheerfully, offering flyers for themed cafés. The air is filled with the scent of plastic, tea, and sweat. In the stores, young women and middle-aged men alike browse the latest issues of Weekly Shonen Jump, Ribon, and Ciao. Each floor is a universe unto itself—some filled with slot machines, others with art supplies, and hidden ones with cute sex toys. Once I’ve immersed myself in Akihabara’s fantastic anime, manga, and video game world, I may never find my way out again. Friday, 20 September 2024. Open Your Eyes: As with every nineties nerd, The Legend of Zelda is one of the game series that has accompanied me since childhood. My real entry into the series was the third installment, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the Super Nintendo. I played this adventure so many times that I knew every area by heart. Thanks to a questionably legal cheat module I picked up at a flea market, I squeezed every last bit of life out of the game. It allowed me to have all the items from the start and sneak past the otherwise stubborn guards on that rainy, fateful day without even beginning the obligatory castle tour. I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t have appreciated that kind of rebellion. The stories in The Legend of Zelda games are typically the same: A silent knight tries to save a kingdom overrun by dark forces and, ideally, wins the heart of a beautiful princess in the process. Since this premise alone wouldn’t draw anyone away from the comfort of their couch, the series thrives on tricky puzzles, quirky characters, and an enchanting world full of exploration. Of course, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 was the game that truly immortalized the series for me. A vast 3D world to freely explore, paired with assets that literally blew my mind. And following that one, Majora’s Mask became my all-time favorite. For me, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch is the logical progression from the first Nintendo 64 installment. The world is even bigger, the puzzles even trickier, and Zelda even prettier. There’s probably no other game where I enjoy aimlessly wandering, just to see what I’ll discover next. And I always find something—a deserted beach, a quaint village, a mysterious labyrinth. I only wish there had been a few real dungeons and larger cities with more inhabitants. Running into the same old shrines and stables got a bit tiresome after a while. Nevertheless, Breath of the Wild is an experience that will forever hold a special place in my heart. Wednesday, 18 September 2024. The Nostalgic Paradise: Tokyo is much more than just Shibuya, Akihabara, and Harajuku. If I want to experience different places than the usual tourists, I have to go to places that are less well-known but no less exciting. For example, Odaiba, the artificial island in Tokyo Bay, which is a popular entertainment and shopping area for locals. Before 1996, Odaiba was purely a business district. The Japanese economy was at one of its peaks and the island was to become the model of futuristic living. In total, the construction of the island cost over 10 billion US dollars. But the bubble burst in 1991, an event the Japanese called Kakaku Hakai. Half a decade later, the area was mostly abandoned. After the renovation, Odaiba became a thriving entertainment and shopping center with all kinds of restaurants, stores, and amusement arcades. A giant Gundam statue looms over visitors, who usually arrive in the evening, and there is no end of comics, collectible figures, and knick-knacks. Odaiba is a nostalgic paradise that visitors to the Japanese capital shouldn’t miss. The Daiba Itchome Shotengai, which is located in the middle of a shopping center and seems to be from a bygone era, is particularly worth a visit. Coming here is like traveling back in time. Many families, as well as some nerds, take the opportunity to experience exactly that, right there. When I enter the shopping street, I feel as if I’ve been teleported to a fantasy memory. There are old slot machines, pinball machines, and pachinko machines. Posters of idols from the eighties, nineties, and early two-thousands hang on the walls. I recognize the faces of Yumi Matsutoya, Ayumi Hamasaki, and Perfume. The shelves are crammed with food and bric-a-brac. There are sweets, ice cream, and chewing gum. But also plushies, toy cars, and colorful printed socks. Anime and manga everywhere. I can catch goldfish at one stand, play Mario Kart at the next, and a ghost house awaits me a few meters away. If I died here and now, I wouldn’t even be angry. Tuesday, 17 September 2024. A Journey Into the Past: Tokyo, once known as Edo, began as a small, insignificant dump. It only grew into the most important city in Japan when Tokugawa Ieyasu, the third feudal ruler after Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, built a castle there in 1590. If I’m looking to explore beyond the hottest fashion trends, tastiest food varieties, and cutest schoolgirls in Tokyo, beyond Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara, then Asakusa is the place for me. Not only is it home to the hotel where I’m staying, but it also hosts Sensoji, the oldest Buddhist temple in the city. For a long time, Asakusa was known as an entertainment district, home to kabuki and rakugo theaters. Asakusa has a past I could still sense here and there. After the Meiji Restoration, the modern entertainment industry began to take root, with Western theaters and cinemas emerging. However, after World War II, Asakusa’s popularity as an entertainment hub waned, with districts like Shinjuku rising to prominence. Today, in addition to Sensoji, Asakusa is primarily known for the Nakamise shopping promenade and the annual Shinto festival, Sanja Matsuri. I also found many delicious traditional restaurants around the temple, where I could grill and season my own food, as well as numerous pachinko halls where I could test my luck. This enormous metropolis on the other side of the world has a deeply traditional side. And every walk through Asakusa is also a journey into the past. Just a step out of one of the bustling shopping streets, and I’ll find myself in the middle of a small forest, an old temple complex, or surrounded by lovingly crafted shrines. I can only imagine the small and grand spectacles that have taken place at Sensoji over the past thousand years. Despite all the colorful anime, manga, and video games that I typically associate with Japan, I feel surprisingly grounded and calm here. Perhaps I should visit such holy and magical places more often. Saturday, 14 September 2024. That Could Have Been Us, But You Don’t Care: For many years now, I wanted nothing to do with German culture. I switched all my consumption habits to English and looked down contemptuously on anyone still crawling through the oozy cesspool of German-language entertainment because they didn’t know any better. For me, German-dubbed TV shows were proof of bottomless stupidity. German novels fell into one of two categories: Cheesy crime junk set on the Baltic coast, or coming-of-age ‘my-mother-is-an-alcoholic-and-I-just-want-to-fuck‘ bullshit. As for German music, I wanted to hear, haha, nothing about it—just the thought of the whole Schlager-pop-Deutschrap crap made me want to vomit. Now that I’m older, wiser, and totally at peace with myself (#IWish), I’ve come to finally realize that I can’t tear myself away from my German roots, no matter how much, for whatever reason, I wished I could. I need the German language. I love the German language. I don’t want to reject it. Its systematic harshness is simply divine. And the German language is not just another random dialect on this earth, it’s a shared identity between me and those who use it. I’ve learned that the German language and its accompanying culture can inspire me in ways, especially on a deep, intrinsic level, that no other vernacular can. So now, I actively seek out people who express their feelings, thoughts, and hopes as authentically as possible in my mother tongue, using it in creative ways, especially in music. Artists like Paula Hartmann, Berq, and Lotte give me a cozy sense of home with their lyrics, even when I’m standing on the other side of the world. My latest discovery is Liska. Her songs are genuinely emotional without descending into cheesiness, and they resonate with me through various feelings and experiences. German-language music hasn’t been this interesting since Juli, Wir sind Helden, and the very, very, very early days of Silbermond. Friday, 13 September 2024. Center of My World: When I think of Japan, I picture the bustling intersection at the heart of Shibuya. As the traffic lights at each corner finally turn green, crowds of uniformed salarymen, laughing schoolgirls, and amazed tourists stream toward one another, briefly merging into a homogeneous mass before dispersing back into their daily routines. On my first visit to the Land of the Rising Sun, halfway across the globe, the very first place I consciously visited was this iconic landmark in the middle of Tokyo. I took the train straight from the airport to Shibuya, met a few friendly people there, and found myself not only in the center of Japan, but in the center of my world. Due to the anticipation of the 2020 Olympic Games and their underwhelming presentation a year later, the popular district at the heart of Japan’s capital has undergone significant transformation in the recent decade to appeal to both locals and visitors. I became most aware of this with the redesign of the city’s famous Shibuya 109 logo, which sits prominently atop a fashion-savvy shopping center. The more such signposts change, the more I realize that time is moving on helplessly and doesn’t care about my nostalgic feelings. But maybe that’s a good thing. After all, change is life and the more Shibuya develops, the less I have to worry about its future. As I stand at the edge of the intersection, I see the red traffic lights ahead, rising above the crowd on the opposite side, and the models advertising clothes, food, and phone contracts on massive screens. I hear the voices of those around me, the eager motorcade, and the man on a platform shouting into the crowd with a megaphone. I smell a mix of expensive perfume and cheap deodorant, taste the green tea I’m carrying in a plastic bottle, and brace myself to feel the bodies of hundreds of people. Then, the moment comes. Red turns to green. I step forward, becoming one with Shibuya, Tokyo, and Japan—neither for the first time nor the last. Thursday, 12 September 2024. All the World’s a Stage: When Hikari is thrust onto the recently set up stage of a seemingly innocent chamber play, fate strikes a desperate blow against the most stubborn and dangerous form of conservatism—the one powered by pure fear of being alone. The audience demands change before it is suffocated by the dreariness of the powerful. Fresh blood must pave the way for a new future. Few of the actors suspect that the light of hope conceals a story of self-sacrifice that transcends any level of human friendship. The bright star in the sky seems within reach, but whoever touches it in the end must live on with the possible burden of drifting apart from the ones they love. Both strangers and friends sometimes ask about my favorite anime. Then I proudly list widely known classics like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell. After all, these titles suggest what kind of anime I prefer and where my roots lie in this sometimes condemned Japanese art form. I also secretly hope this keeps me from being labeled a complete weeb if I omit that I also enjoyed series like Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, and Eromanga Sensei—for various reasons. However, one of my all-time favorite anime is, and remains, Revue Starlight by Tomohiro Furukawa—because it is simply perfect from start to finish. Revue Starlight follows a motley group of friendly schoolgirls from a renowned theater academy who secretly battle each other underground to become the star of their personal stage in life. When the lazy Karen’s lost childhood friend suddenly appears in class, it triggers the healing of a world whose progress has come to a standstill. Everything about Revue Starlight is exceptional. The characters are fantastic, the animation style is striking, and the music is so good that I could listen to the soundtrack on repeat for days. It’s a shame that Revue Starlight is only known to a few hardcore fans. I sincerely hope you watch it one day and celebrate it as passionately as I do. Wednesday, 11 September 2024. Journey to the East: The plane I’m on is taking me to a place that couldn’t be further from home. Am I running away from myself, or am I simply longing for another world that will make me love my own again? Those who share my destination feel understood only from afar. I stifle my fear of the unknown with the certainty that I’ve chosen it over the comforting arms of monotony on purpose. After all, standing still is death, and death will come soon enough. It seems only logical to sacrifice time with people I like for the possibility of uncovering white spots on my personal map. So, I close my eyes and wait for the moment when the doors to a strange universe open for me. Before I finally begin my semester abroad in the Japanese coastal city of Kumamoto on Kyushu as a student of the renowned Sojo University in October, I plan to spend a few days in Tokyo. It’s been over ten years since I last visited this enchanted metropolis at the edge of the world, and I can’t wait to aimlessly wander through the wonderous temples of Shibuya, the cheerful bars of Shinjuku, and the farraginous manga stores of Akihabara to see what has changed in the last decade. I’ve booked a room in a modest hotel in Asakusa and will set out from there, day and night, to explore both the bustling streets and the narrow alleyways nearby and beyond. Having already lived in Tokyo and visited cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Yokohama, I feel prepared for the biggest culture shocks and can focus on seeking new experiences and adventures—hopefully beyond the typical tourist attractions. The plane I’m on is taking me to a place that couldn’t be further from home. That place is Tokyo, a man-made melting pot of diverse cultures where all my escapist dreams, hopes, and fantasies converge. May I find even a fraction of my expectations between the lives of millions of people. I hope to return home with new ideas, goals, and visions. Perhaps I’ll even meet myself over there, on the other side of the world. Tuesday, 10 September 2024. Goodbye Augsburg: Exactly one year ago, I moved to Augsburg. I wanted not only to be closer to my university but also to the people I had spent most of my time with since starting my studies. The city in the far south of Germany welcomed me with open arms, gradually drawing me into its most remote corners thanks to the warmth of various friendly faces. I wandered through vivid house parties, colorful music festivals, and boozy riverside gatherings, made myself comfortable in cozy bars, and spent my nights with like-minded souls. No matter where I ended up at the end of the day, I was always surrounded by people whose true love for the present moment seemed boundless. Now, my self-imposed fate is once again pulling me away from a life I’ve slowly come to love. With my semester abroad in Japan approaching, I’ve sublet my apartment to a fellow student, meaning I’ll have to say goodbye to Augsburg—at least for a while. I know the city will keep breathing, loving, and crying without me, continuing to be a euphoric playground for all kinds of human escapades. To Augsburg, I am just a fleeting visitor on my eternal quest for happiness. But that’s okay. I realized long ago that staying in one place too long does me no good. Maybe I’m nothing more than a restless nomad who’s secretly afraid of any kind of commitment. As I gaze over the seemingly endless rooftops of Augsburg, watching the sky slowly darken while the laughter and lights behind me grow brighter, I realize that I will miss this city and the people I’m leaving behind in it. The stories they write from now on will no longer include my name. I’ll become their past. But sometimes, I have to make grown-up decisions, even if I’d rather avoid obligations. It’s not so bad. After all, I’m not saying goodbye forever. And with that certainty, I can dive into my next adventure without any worry. Because, deep down, I might already know that Augsburg is a place I’ll want to return to and stay a little longer. At least maybe. Friday, 6 September 2024. An Evening With Friends: Before we part ways for a while due to our upcoming semester abroad, I spent a few memorable evenings with my friends. Investing quality time with people I care about is incredibly important for maintaining mental stability and avoiding the depressive phases that tend to creep in when I’m left alone with my thoughts for too long. I’m someone who only understands how much I care about certain people once they’re gone. That’s why I’m a little afraid that I might only realize too late how important the network of friends I’ve built over the past few years is to me—as soon as I step off the plane without anyone else on the other side of the world. We annoyed neighbors during gaming competitions, sweated up stairs during movings, devoured Asian delicacies on movie nights, flirted in beer gardens and ice cream parlors, emptied cold drinks by rivers and lakes, and fought monsters, priests, and potential murderers during game nights, pen-and-paper sessions, and mystery dinners. There were also afternoon coffee parties and bar visits at the city’s trendiest spots, with deep conversations about life, love, and death. I spent as much time as possible with other human beings, draining my social battery to the max. But it was worth it, because I knew our window of opportunity would very soon close. I know myself. It can be dangerous for me to cram too many appointments into a short period of time. That usually ends in temporary burnout, leaving me unable to exit my apartment for days, weeks, or even months—and during those tough times, not even my antidepressants help. But just before my semester abroad and the impending flight to Japan, I didn’t have the luxury of pacing myself. Sometimes life gets in the way, and you either seize the moments that come with it—or simply miss them for good. I’m glad I had the strength to take advantage of every opportunity that came my way. In the end, I have no regrets when it’s finally time to say goodbye. Saturday, 31 August 2024. One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure: I pride myself on having excellent taste when it comes to cultural offerings. The more East Asian indie films from the late nineties I watch, the more superior I feel to the world out there. Although I often have no idea what exactly I’ve just gotten myself into, I like to compare it to jazz: the more I think of tortured cats when I listen to it, the more profound, creative and adult it must be. As long as I’m consuming something that at least gives me the feeling that I’m witnessing something higher, I’m happy. Maybe if I’m able to fully understand Hideaki Anno’s psychological drama film Ritual someday, I’ll become some kind of holy cinephile god—who knows. However, there are also evenings when I suddenly find myself in front of one or two reality TV shows on Netflix because my friends wanted me to watch with them how the singer from the band Tokio Hotel, you may still know them from songs like Monsoon, Don’t Jump, and… surely another one, getting fucked up at the Oktoberfest, eats curd balls at his mom’s, and drives through the desert with his twin brother in a camper van. The fun went on for eight episodes. At the end I wasn’t much wiser than before, quite the opposite in fact, but at least there was delicious Hwachae with watermelon, mango, and some undefinable goo to eat in the meantime. I more or less secretly hope that there will be a second season of the series, after all, I’ve invested time in it now, which should have paid off. Will Bill and Marc ever become a couple? How much alcohol can the average Kaulitz brother take in a day without collapsing? And do I have to listen to a certain podcast to keep up to date and because I may have promised someone without really thinking about the consequences? I’ll probably never know. Trash television is a welcome change for my constantly stressed brain. Because sometimes it’s quite a good idea to dive into completely irrelevant parallel worlds with even more irrelevant protagonists in them. Wednesday, 21 August 2024. Do You Wanna Play a Game? As someone who typically enjoys gaming with a controller in hand or a keyboard under his fingers, sitting in front of a screen, and snacking while exploring old ruins, bustling towns, or enchanted forests with my illustrious group of virtual adventurers, I’ve found myself more frequently gathered around a table with others in recent years, passing balls, cards, and dice. Whether playing for drinks, stakes, or simply for pride, with the right group, a fun evening was always guaranteed. Together, we played through Poker, Tac, and Dungeons & Dragons, held competitions, and sometimes even invented our own rules to make the games more interesting. It’s amazing how distinct traits of individual players emerge when they’re placed in a group, seated around a table, and given the chance to win a round or two. They love psychology, fantasy, or social justice and show this more or less consciously in their actions. Some analyze every strategy in great detail, while others dive into the chaos with a naive Leeroy Jenkins mindset. Some try to assist their rivals when they sense unfairness, while others show no mercy. Some lose interest the moment they sense they won’t win, while others persevere until the bitter end. The more distinct my opponents’ characteristics, the more interesting the game becomes. The game nights I’ve spent with friends have also taught me a lot about myself. For one, my ambition is heavily tied to my mood. When I’m in a good mood, it’s easier to accept losses and celebrate wins. I’ve also realized that the conversations during the games mean more to me than the games themselves. The dialogues that arise are things that might otherwise go unspoken. And finally, I’ve learned that I really hate Tac. It’s just a complicated version of Ludo with cards, for whatever reason. But despite that, I’m grateful to the wonderful people who have introduced me to a world of tabletop gaming that’s so different from my usual digital realm. Friday, 16 August 2024. How to Cook for Forty Humans: I enjoy cooking with others because I love combining good food with even better company. Of course, I don’t do this with just anyone, but with people who are either close to my heart or just kinda hot. We go to the nearest store together, decide what to prepare while browsing the colorfully stacked shelves, pick out fresh, delicious ingredients, and then head home with our jam-packed bags. There, we chop vegetables, fry fish, meat, or tofu, and toss some noodles into a pot. Meanwhile, we listen to the latest playlists on Spotify, chat about the ups and downs of life, and eagerly anticipate the upcoming feast, enjoying some fizzy drinks along the way. The real fun begins once the cooking is done. Whether there are two, three, or ten of us around the table, we take a moment to look at each other before diving in, filling our plates with salmon, salad, and summer rolls. Conversation flows freely as we talk about the world and its wonders, big and small, or relax with a Netflix show or two. And if we’re not in the mood for the inevitable clean-up afterward, we simply open a delivery app and save ourselves the hassle, scrolling through pictures of pizzas, sushi, or stir-fried noodles. An hour later we sit on someone’s bed, enjoying some delicious Pad Thai, a cute anime, and some human connection. Sure, I don’t always need company when I’m eating-whether it’s a carefully crafted meal or a quick snack. Sometimes, I sneak into the supermarket next door in the evening, grab some nearly expired nigiri at half-price, and hope the salmonella gods spare me again, as I wash it down with a bottle of Diet Coke. Dessert might be a handful of cornflakes that I nearly choke on because a Zelda Let’s Play distracted me from chewing. It can be quite relaxing to spend an evening like that now and then, but I shouldn’t rely on this so-called lifestyle all the time, because, as the saying goes, “Food tastes better when shared with friends.” Monday, 12 August 2024. Cute Girls Doing Cute Things: Kaos doesn’t have it easy. Not only does the teenage manga tryhard look like a primary school student and have no friends besides some curious animals she meets on her way home, but she’s just learned that her four panel artworks came last in a survey among national comic book fans. Before Kaos considers hitting up with Truck-kun to finally end her misery, her editor suggests she move into a dormitory for manga artists to improve her creative skills and perhaps participate a bit more in social life. Before Kaos knows it, she becomes part of a quirky crew of fanatical artists who all share one weeby goal: to achieve their big dream of a career in manga. In the anime genre Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, the name says it all. There are no epic adventures, devious villains, or hard-to-guess plot twists. These comfy slice of life stories revolve around cute girls doing cute things—nothing more, nothing less. They go out for ice cream, chat at school, hang out in parks, visit bathhouses, and encourage each other in tough moments so they don’t give up. Shows like Comic Girls are pure balm for the soul when the world feels too chaotic, stressful, and overwhelming. Life can be a real jerk sometimes, but in these colorful fantasy universes, every challenge can be solved with a little courage, fun, and good friends. In the style of K-On!, New Game!, and Non Non Biyori, the different characters in Comic Girls complement each other, growing stronger together. Little Kaos meets the energetic Koyume, the tomboyish Tsubasa, the shy Ruki, and the somewhat sinister Suzu in the dorm. Each of them has their own fears, but together they can overcome them and make progress in life. And there’s always something to laugh about, often through awkward or embarrassing situations. When I’m not in the mood for earth-shattering blockbusters, I cozy up with a hot cup of tea and watch anime like Comic Girls, enjoying cute girls doing cute things—nothing more, nothing less. Wednesday, 7 August 2024. Is Beer Art? Every semester, the Werkschau is the grand finale at the Faculty of Design. At this vernissage, students from Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg present their final projects from all areas of analog and digital art. From photography, books, and drawings to computer games and interactive installations, everything that’s new, cool, or just fun is included. There’s also live music, delicious food, and plenty of refreshing drinks, along with many familiar and unfamiliar faces who don’t want to miss out on the hustle and bustle. And if that’s not enough, you can dance into the morning at the after-show party in a nearby club. I personally had my hands more than full at this year’s Werkschau. Not only was I a member of the generally stressed team that organized this illustrious event, but I also presented my short film Into the Woods, which had previously premiered in a museum. Additionally, I spoke to fellow students about their entrepreneurial plans after graduation for my work at the start-up incubator Funkenwerk, the central contact point for innovative ideas at Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg. I even stood behind the bar as a member of the student council to ensure that everyone stayed hydrated in the sunny weather—mostly with beer. The end of the vivid exhibition also marked the end of my fourth semester at Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg and heralded my temporary farewell. It’s amazing how much mental stress built up over the past few weeks and has now disappeared in one fell swoop. I will spend the next month and a half organizing all the necessary preparations for my upcoming semester abroad in Japan. I need to sublet my apartment, finalize the last necessary documents, and attend a farewell party or two before most of my friends disperse into the big wide world. So long, my beloved university. We will see each other again next year. Tuesday, 23 July 2024. The Illegal Girl: My collection of Japanese indie movies has grown considerably in recent years. What I appreciate most are the quieter slice-of-life titles that provide intimate insights into the small and large everyday problems of East Asian inhabitants. It doesn’t matter whether the stories take place in the colorful, vibrant streets of Japan’s big cities or among the mountains, lakes, and valleys of rural areas. Of course, the more I feel connected to the protagonists and their experiences, the more the films resonate with me. As Philip Pullman said, “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Last night, I watched Emma Kawawada’s My Small Land. It’s about a girl named Sarya, whose parents are Kurdish refugees from Turkey living in Japan. She pretends to be German to her friends because she has had better experiences with this than with the truth. While her father works, Sarya looks after her younger siblings and contemplates her future, as she will soon be going to college. An intimate relationship develops with her colleague Sota, and her feelings become increasingly clear. Sarya wants a completely normal life. When her father’s application for asylum is rejected, the world she has worked so hard to build begins to crumble. My Small Land is a haunting movie about the balancing act of a young refugee caught between two worlds, searching for her own. As the story progresses, I felt more intensely the inner turmoil pushing Sarya to her emotional limits as she tries to save her siblings from the fate that lies before them. Sarya’s life becomes a gauntlet of cultural constraints, social circumstances, and her own dreams. My Small Land depicts the sacrifices people make to avoid being broken by reality. After watching it, I realized once again how much my privileges protect me from these challenges and the hard decisions that I’ve been able to avoid—at least so far. Monday, 15 July 2024. Pen and Paper: I embrace my nerdy side not only through my limitless Japanophilia, which manifests in an arguably unhealthy consumption of anime, manga, dramas, books, and pop music I can’t even understand, but also through my love of geeky tabletop role-playing games. In this exciting fantasy realm, I navigate enchanted kingdoms as a magical dragon warrior, explore small towns overtaken by Cthulhu’s monsters as a clumsy policeman, and venture through enemy spaceships as a trigger-happy hophead. Tabletop role-playing games are like a carefree vacation for my brain, offering a chance to let loose and try things I (probably) wouldn’t dare to do in real life. A couple of friends and I have been members of a role-playing club for some time now, where we more or less regularly experiment with different scenarios, characters, and rulebooks. From fantasy to science fiction to cyberpunk, there’s nothing we wouldn’t dare to try. Personally, I prefer the bloody horror one shot adventures, where we slip into the roles of unsuspecting citizens who roam through abandoned settlements, haunted mansions, and cursed cathedrals, only to face crazy cultists, hungry vampires, and, in the last dungeon, an overpowering deity and, in the best-case scenario, be torn to shreds by it. After all, survival is only for cowards. I’ve wanted to try tabletop role-playing games for a long time after hearing about them in various podcasts, YouTube videos, and not least in Stranger Things. So, I’m thrilled to have found other people who are just as eager to dive into other worlds and let their imaginations run wild. Where else can you try to ride angry unicorns, shoot the newly born Antichrist, or drown a doomed metropolis in smelly feces to perhaps save it from its fate, only to realize in the end that all these ideas were rather semi-smart? Exactly. When I’m on my semester abroad, we’ll try to hold the sessions online. And maybe I’ll find a group in Japan that’s keen to play, too. Who knows. Sunday, 14 July 2024. Public Viewing: Anyone who knows me even a little bit understands that soccer doesn’t interest me in the slightest. During some World Cups, I am a vague fan of the Japanese national team, but only to the extent that I follow their wins and losses from the sidelines. I generally have little interest in spending several hours watching others compete in sports unless they are characters in an anime or manga to whom I have formed an emotional attachment. In the end, my favorite soccer team remains the Kickers around Kakeru Daichi, even though they only know about winning tournaments from hearsay. But at least they scored a goal against the Falcons once. Yeah. Despite my general disinterest in any ball sports, I went to a public viewing event in the city center on Friday night with some friends because Germany was playing Spain in the last sixteen round of the European Football Championship. As we all know, our national team lost, but I doubt anyone there cared less about that than I did. So why was I there anyway? Because I realized that it’s essential to socialize regularly, especially when you’re hanging out with people you know, like, and can have fun with. The reason for getting together becomes secondary. It’s much more important to feel connected to others—and eat some snacks while you’re at it. The time I can spend with these people is finite. And that’s not just because of my own mortality, but because we’ll soon have to say goodbye to each other as the semester abroad is just around the corner. Mine in Japan doesn’t start until the fall, but others will be leaving in a few weeks to explore the world. From Spain to Canada to South Korea, everything is included. We won’t see each other again until next spring. That’s why I’m trying to spend as much time as possible with my friends before our schedules scatter us in all directions. And that, in turn, means that I even watch soccer with them, despite my interest in it being around freezing point. Sunday, 7 July 2024. My Heart Is a Ghost Town: Although I’ve always considered myself a global cosmopolitan who has long since cut ties with German pop culture, Paula Hartmann’s Kleine Feuer has been my most-listened-to album over the past few months. There were days when nothing else played in my AirPods all day but these 15 songs, from beginning to end, over and over again, morning, noon, and night. “Others see ghosts, I only see you,” Paula whispers to herself without any empathy. “So long shadows with so little light. You send a smiley face, trap doors open. My heart is a ghost town and you are the ghost. The wine at two makes me cry again at three, then I fall asleep.” Paula’s apathetic voice and the bleakly pulsating beats are the anthem of my default emotional state, which I can only escape when I’m with other people, and which I fall back into as soon as I’m alone. The Berlin singer comments on the world I’m trapped in on solitary evenings. “Wish we could talk to each other, wish us one last summer. Hear my friends say: ‘Everything will be fine one day.’ As long as you swim through the rain and thunder. Where’s our happy home? I’ve forgotten where I live. Listen to our last notes, otherwise silence on my phone. Share no more songs, share no more smoke. Share the stars and the moon.” I like tracks that I can listen to in the background, but also immerse myself in. Paula’s music covers me like a blanket and reminds me that other people feel the same way as I do. “The cord of my hoodie tastes like fall and the first birds are screaming in pain. The colorful ravens put on their black coats. A grandma behind every windowsill. The first bus wipes me up and then breathes me out. A brake light beacon in the exhaust, rusty leaves on cobblestones. A quick thought about you and suddenly gravity has me again. Kicks my legs, fall down and break. Your roof turns gray walls into a house. In it, we exchange disappointments for a lifetime.” Friday, 5 July 2024. Hollywood’s Calling: My favorite project of the semester, which is slowly coming to an end, was a short film I created for the compulsory elective course Motion assets. The topic was Young People and Old Trees. While my fellow students focused on animations to complete the task, I insisted on making a real film and was allowed to do so. After all, I had always wanted to do something like this. So, I grabbed a good friend of mine and we went to the nearest forest together to shoot Into the Woods. I can confidently say that the movie is an absolute masterpiece, and I’m expecting a call from Hollywood any second now to become the next world’s most famous director. The short film is about a young woman who embarks on a journey into the depths of the forest to meet her destiny. I aimed to combine the flair of The Blair Witch Project with the aesthetics of David Hamilton. The piano music, which I composed while tapping away on my keyboard, is intended to give the story an ominous touch. The countless retro filters I applied to the videos provide the whole piece with a dreamy feel. Incidentally, the ending features a computer-generated imagery firework that makes even Michael Bay look outdated. I really enjoyed the shooting, even though the model caught eight ticks in the process. Suffering for the sake of art. Into the Woods premiered in a museum last weekend, and interested viewers asked me afterward whether the young woman survived, what the fire meant, and if the movie was an allusion to the climate crisis we’re currently in. I replied that I would answer all their questions in the upcoming second part, Into the Woods 2: Revenge of the Trees. Finally, I’ve acquired a taste for chasing nude girls through nature in front of my camera. Fortunately, I’ve received a bunch of requests from potential models who would like to participate. So, you can look forward to my next magnum opus, which will be shown in an artistic, or adult oriented, movie theater near you. Wednesday, 3 July 2024. Chaos Nation: I love dystopian movies. Children of Men, The Road, Snowpiercer—the more hopelessly the future is depicted, the happier I grin. Classical psychoanalytic theory would attribute my passion for the end of the world to the death drive, the urge for doom and destruction. This concept was first proposed by the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein in her essay Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being and later expanded upon by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Personally, however, I believe I am simply fascinated by chaos because my life is a minefield of self-imposed rules, and I need confirmation that abandoning them would lead to anarchy. Last night, I watched Alex Garland’s Civil War starring Kirsten Dunst, Nick Offerman, and Cailee Spaeny. In the dystopian thriller, the President of the United States illegally secures a third term in office, plunging the country into another civil war. A ragtag group of journalists embarks on a dangerous road trip to conduct one last interview with the fascist Donald Trump lookalike before the rebel army reaches the White House to end the man-made horror and restore democracy to the deeply divided nation. But between them and the most powerful man in the world lies a mayhem universe full of racist lunatics, mindless soldiers, and creepy murderers. The mental appeal of Civil War lies in the increased probability that the world it depicts could become reality with just a few wrong decisions. Many inhabitants of the land of opportunity already yearn for anarchic freedom and want to turn the United States of America into a lawless theme park where anything deemed unpatriotic, or just Mexican, can be shot at. Perhaps Civil War is not just a glimpse into the future but into our present. And because this idea is only exciting until it comes true, next time I’ll prefer watching another unrealistic disaster movie. Preferably something with zombies, asteroids, or ravenous sharks that live in tornadoes. Tuesday, 2 July 2024. Too Many People: A few friends and I were out and about at the Augsburg Summer Nights over the weekend. For a few days, the city center transforms into one big party with all kinds of music stages, food stalls, and even a silent disco. But before we threw ourselves into the thundering crowds of the Bavarian town, we chilled out in a pal’s garden right next to the hustle and bustle, treated ourselves to a few cool drinks, and shared some funny life stories. There, I met an amusing sports student whose chaotic love life sweetened my evening, and my psychologically quite committed playmate, with whose help I became the undisputed king of a certain board game. Unfortunately, I have to say that I didn’t really enjoy the Augsburg Summer Nights—unlike my friends. There were just far too many people crammed into one place. I couldn’t enjoy the various music performances or have a bite to eat in peace. Everyone transformed into a huge ocean of bodies and I felt like I was drowning right in it. I was glad when I finally stepped out of the barrier into the airy freedom again and took a few breaths without being pushed around by a crowd. The first thing I did with my newfound freedom was grab an ice-cold Coke Zero from a nearby convenience store and watch the colorful and very loud turmoil from afar. This experience made me realize once again that although I don’t mind lots of people coming together in one place, I only enjoy it if they move in one direction as quickly as I do. That way, I can simply glide through them like some kind of slippery fish, as I do it in big cities like New York, Tokyo, or even Berlin. For the fun part, however, such events are not really for me. I prefer quieter house parties where I can talk, drink, and dance with the guests without getting run over by a horde of drunken revelers. But after all, everyone has a different idea of fun. And I don’t judge if others had a nice evening or two at the Augsburg Summer Nights. You do you. Monday, 1 July 2024. No Part of My Life: It’s an afflicting feeling to know people with whom I once felt very close, but who are no longer part of my life. It’s not as if they’ve moved away, disappeared, or even died, but our relationship has changed so much from one day to the next that we no longer communicate. Not even when we are literally standing next to each other. Then we ignore one another because that’s what you have to do under these circumstances. And if we would usually have talked, laughed, and shared a few worries, we are now like strangers who happen to be finding themselves in the same place and will soon go our separate ways again without even looking at each other’s faces. I find this situation particularly difficult at times when I experience something interesting or get exciting news that I would otherwise have liked to share with this person immediately. Until recently, these topics eventually mattered to both of us, or at least we knew that the human being on the other side of the city always had an open ear. But just before I mindlessly reach for my phone to write her an update on my world or record a voice message asking for her honest opinion or valuable expertise, I remember that I’m no longer allowed to communicate with my former friend and have to deal with this current challenge piling up in front of me on my own. The hole that this person leaves in my heart will close. Her profile photo will slide further down in the messages and, at some point, disappear. Other faces will take her place and talk, laugh, and share some worries with me. I will soon have forgotten this once important character and the melancholy feeling of emptiness that she’s causing. It will be as if she had never existed at all. And then I will no longer reach for my phone to share a part of my life with her, because for a brief moment I forgot that this person is no longer a part of it. But before that happens, I wonder if this gloomy emotion I’m carrying around could have been avoided, or if it was inevitable. Thursday, 27 June 2024. Studying in Japan: The idyllic town of Kumamoto is located on the island of Kyushu in the southwest of Japan and has not only a beautiful castle, an old samurai house, and a colorful landscape garden to offer but also a university that happens to be the partner institution of my college. This means that every semester there is a lively exchange of academics-to-be between these two learning establishments. Some students are sent from Japan to Germany, and some students are sent from Germany to Japan in return. And guess who has two thumbs and is one of the ambitious people sent from Europe’s politically split heart to the Land of the Rising Sun? This guy! I will be spending the upcoming semester as an exchange student at the private Sojo University in Kumamoto, where I’m going to study creative subjects such as Graphic Design, Photography, and Manga Media in the Department of Design at the Faculty of Art. I will be living in a free dormitory that is only a few minutes’ walk from the university’s campus and available to students from all around the world. The winter semester doesn’t start until October, but I’ll be spending a few weeks in my favorite city of Tokyo beforehand, exploring my old hoods Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara and hopefully seeing some old friends from back then. The flights to and within Japan and the hotel in Tokyo are already booked. Now I just have to sublet my apartment in Germany and make the remaining travel arrangements so that I’m ready to go to the Land of the Rising Sun for the third time in my life this fall. I should probably use the next few months to improve my Japanese language skills. Otherwise, it could be a bit difficult to communicate with my fellow students and the rest of the locals during my semester abroad in Kumamoto, because I probably won’t get very far with just basics like “Hello,” “Goodbye,” and “Sorry, but where’s the nearest toilet?” See you soon, Japan. I hope you’ve missed me. Wednesday, 26 June 2024. Just Fun: I’m not sure if it’s my diet, the sun, or my antidepressants, but lately, I’ve generally been worrying less about my life. Whereas I used to spend weeks, months, maybe even years, doing nothing but creating as many sorrows as humanly possible in my mind, I’ve recently been blessed with a stoic calmness that is almost uncanny. There’s so much free space in my head now, and I can fill it however I want. It’s not as if I don’t care about what happens to and around me, but I take note of it, accept it, grow a little from it, and then continue on my way. Maybe that’s just what you do as some kind of functioning adult—or somebody who pretends to be one. In the past, even the smallest unforeseeable obstacle would have sent me into acute self-doubt and bottomless panic. But today, I know that difficulties are not only part of life but are essential for me to be a better person tomorrow. And that it is an art to use them to my own advantage. With this knowledge, I don’t waste a second too much on problems that aren’t really problems at all. Not only that: with this newly acquired form of acceptable equanimity, I automatically allow myself to have fun without any, or at least many, regrets. Because when I invest less time in irrelevant conflicts that should be ignored, I have more time for the good things in life. So I prefer to spend my time with people who also choose to have fun. I don’t care what exactly they understand by this term or why they have decided to do so. Maybe they don’t want to be alone. Maybe they need a distraction from their everyday worries. Or maybe they have simply learned that celebrating the time we spend together has no negative impact on our future. Quite the opposite. Life is too short to spend it only in my own head. It’s always the happiest moments that I like to remember the most. So I try to collect a bunch of them before it’s too late. Because as Frank Ocean once said: “Have as much fun as possible!” Amen, brother. Wednesday, 19 June 2024. Cheers to the House Party: Last night I found myself at a house party in a part of town I haven’t been before, where half the girls in attendance seemed to be called Julia. I like house parties. They’re much more cozy than clubs. And you can have intense conversations there, often with people you’ve just met. The birthday girl had gone to great lengths to make her party pleasant. In addition to champagne, snacks, and suitable music, there was a bowl full of little challenges at the entrance that each guest could complete if they wanted to. My task was to transform myself into a so-called woo girl and to cheer loudly even at the most inappropriate moments. Between the colorful fog machine, soap bubbles everywhere, and a drying rack turned into a beer pong table, I met new people who sweetened my evening with their stories. A photographer struggling with herself, a psychologist from Vienna, and an artist whose individual skills made a packed balcony roar with laughter. I think it’s important to surround myself with new people and be inspired, guided, and encouraged by their dreams, hopes, and perhaps even worries at times when I seem to be at a standstill, at a loss, or generally thinking too much about the purpose of it all. And house parties are the perfect opportunity to meet just such folks. As I step outside and board the over-punctual night bus with two of the many Julias, I am glad to have been here today among all the cheerful faces, whose laughter from the bottom of their hearts makes me forget my own sorrows. The evening has shown me once again that this city is full of unique and interesting characters. And it is unfortunately far too easy to overlook them repeatedly in my stressful everyday life as I rush through the big and small streets. But it’s worth stopping, listening, and both hearing their stories and enriching them with my thoughts. I’m already looking forward to the next house party—wherever it may take place. Saturday, 15 June 2024. I Am Europe: I voted in the European elections this morning. After I bought a coffee at the nearby coffee shop and went for a walk to the next elementary school, where the voting took place, I chose the Green Party because they most closely represent my political views on environmental protection, digitalization, and human rights. I don’t want to leave Europe to the radical left or the radical right. People who trample on our fundamental democratic values out of greed, ideology, or sheer stupidity must not be the ones who end up destroying our chances of a future worth living. Because tomorrow belongs to those who are committed not to fear, but to hope. I don’t believe in heritage, tradition, and nationalism. Although I was born in Germany, I do not feel German at all, but as a citizen of the world who is dedicated to the wonders and possibilities of all the different cultures this planet provides. For me, the idea of a unified Europe is the logical step away from restrictive borders and towards an open society characterized by a wide variety of people, cultures, and views. Thanks to the benefits, safeguards, and support of the European Union, I have met countless amazing people from different corners of the Earth that I would never have been able to meet without the opportunities of a united continent. We should be happy to be part of Europe because it strengthens us financially, socially, and culturally. The European Union must be led by people who have only one goal in mind: to improve our community and the lives of us all. By casting my vote, I have helped to ensure that we are hopefully spared a dystopian future in which radicals, fascists, and populists, under the guise of democracy, aim to undermine and destroy it and our very own existences following thereafter. Committing ourselves to the European idea is the best chance we have of a realistic utopia in this period of human history. We are united in diversity, we are the future, we are Europe. Sunday, 9 June 2024. War in My Head: When I was younger, I used to attribute my emotional shortcomings to being a spoiled only child. I had to be the center of attention in every group I was part of. If that didn’t happen, I would go to great lengths to convince everyone around me that I was the focal point of their otherwise unbearable lives. I was an obnoxious drama queen with a distinct main character complex—or maybe I was just bored as hell. I began to realize that my own thoughts would become my greatest enemy. The constant overthinking about everything and everyone led to a melancholy toward the world and its people. Painful memories gave way to a selfish lack of empathy. The guilt from poor decisions triggered emotional swings that not only affected me but also those I cared about. I grew afraid of moving forward, knowing that even the smallest steps could end in disaster. My mind became a prison of doubts, loneliness, and self-destruction. Escaping myself seemed impossible. Even the smallest hint of stress, anxiety, or unpredictability would send me spiraling back into old patterns and harmful habits I thought I had left behind. Most of my mental energy went toward resisting the madness that loomed just one wrong thought away. I knew that if I gave in, I would be lost forever—and that wasn’t worth it. At least, not yet. I’ve come to terms with a bitter defeat in my ongoing battle with my mind and realized that I can’t go on without professional help. Without support, I keep slipping into the same mental loops and faulty conclusions. Then I grow more frustrated, lonelier, and weaker. My doctor has diagnosed me with moderate depression. Starting today, I’ll be taking prescription medication to prevent mental crashes, balance my emotions, and hopefully feel happier. I’ve also been referred to a psychiatric ward for therapy. It’s an option worth trying. I hope these steps will help me lead a somewhat normal life, or at least call a ceasefire in the war raging in my head. Tuesday, 30 April 2024. Going Places: Although life feels like it will drag on forever, and I’m convinced of my own immortality anyway, a bitter truth hangs over my head like the proverbial sword of Damocles: I will die. I’m not sick, at least I hope not, but the day I die will come, without a doubt. How am I supposed to deal with this bitter realization without slipping into paralyzing apathy or pure panic, weighed down by my weltschmerz? Exactly: I try to make the best of the time I have left on this planet. This resolution doesn’t always work. Sometimes I lie in bed for days, letting life’s opportunities pass me by, like some fool who doesn’t even understand the fear of missing out. On days when I have enough energy, curiosity, and hope, I step outside my front door and actively face the universe. I want to experience something new: an adventure, fresh faces, or something I’ve never seen before with my own eyes. It doesn’t always have to be a grand event or life-changing moment. Sometimes, giving the small things a chance is enough. I visit an unfamiliar place—a café, a store, or a nearby lake—or strike up conversations with people I’ve just met or haven’t interacted with much before. Sometimes they’re hilarious. Or, I confront problems and fears with new approaches, solving and eliminating them for good. I’m often so blinded by routine, that I don’t even consider exploring alternatives. Coffee? Black. Sneakers? White. Girls? Blonde. Sometimes, though, I avoid the unfamiliar because I’m afraid that even a harmless choice will plunge me into mental chaos, forcing me to expend significant effort to regain my balance—only to return to the tried and tested. This has happened far too often, and I can’t ignore the risk. But maybe, the one new thing I embrace on a seemingly inconsequential yet fateful day could be the key to a whole new life. Because no matter how small or unimportant it may seem, every possibility carries the potential for something great. Friday, 19 April 2024. My Britney Moment: This event has been planned for weeks in my mind. I storm through the front door, undress, and throw my clothes on the white sheets and pillows-covered bed. I enter the now brightly lit bathroom with a fully loaded electric razor and stand in front of the mirror. A little push in the right direction and the machine starts to buzz. “Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment in evening entertainment but tonight there’ll be some love,” Alex Turner yells into my ear. “Tonight there’ll be a ruckus, yeah, regardless of what’s gone before.” It’s about time. I’m not allowed to think anymore. Now is the time for action. I place the vibrating device on my head and it starts to shred through my hair. Dark tufts rain down around me. In a few minutes, I will be a new person. I’m the artist of my own self. I try to optimize my body, my appearance, and my clothes so that they no longer cause me any problems. In my mind and the outside world. Because I’m in a constant battle between minimalism, depression, and mulling over irrelevancies. And, let’s be honest, a big chunk of laziness too. Usually, it’s the same story all over again. I think about reducing my lifestyle in terms of food, habits, or stuff I own. The longer the decision to do so runs through my thoughts, the result is always something like: sure, why not? So I delete it. Sometimes it returns somehow but usually I don’t give a fuck about it and it just disappears from my mind, my future, and my life. If I don’t regret doing it immediately, I know that I’ve made the right decision. Like shaving my head and thinking: This action brings me one step closer to my ultimate self. There must be no more options, just my own unique and individual standard. It’s time to emancipate myself from my doubts. That’s why I choose one path in every single respect. And I try to stick to it, with some adjustments of course. The universe is chaotic enough. So I’m happy about any lack of alternatives—even if it’s only brought about by myself. This is my Britney moment. The big difference between her situation and mine is that she did it out of mental desperation and I did it out of an unavoidable step in my perfectionist master plan. The liberating feeling you get when you run an electric razor through your hair and realize that there’s no going back now is probably somewhere between orgasm and murder. And it’s only that good the first time. That’s for sure. Because from now on it’ll be just another routine that I have to implement into my life. It’ll soon become completely normal for me. I look at my work of art in the mirror. No racing heart, no regrets. Just absolute satisfaction that I no longer have to worry about this part of my life. And, who knows, maybe Britney felt the same. Monday, 15 April 2024. Unrequited Expectations: I firmly believe that expectations are the root of all disappointment in interpersonal relationships. Expectations will always let me down, no matter who or what they’re directed at. If I assume that someone I care about will act in a way I expect, I’ve already set myself up for failure. There is no exception to this harsh law of life. Even when expectations seem to be met, it’s often an illusion. Why do people I place expectations on end up disappointing me? It’s not that they do it on purpose, they have their own expectations of situations, goals, hopes, and people. They’re playing the same doomed game, just with different players. They don’t know what’s going on inside me. And they don’t have to, nor do they need or want to. They have their own thoughts and worries, and they’re busy enough with those. So, should I never place any expectations on anyone or anything again? Perhaps. But maybe it’s enough to avoid basing my entire emotional world on those expectations and falling apart when things don’t go as I imagined. I should aim to be strong enough, so grounded in myself, that the actions of others don’t throw me off course. The more satisfied I am with myself, the more I can tolerate not being the focus of others’ attention. And that’s a good thing. I must be careful not to fall into the same traps as many others who overthink their lives, relationships, and dreams. Unmet expectations can lead not only to disappointment but also to the destruction of important friendships. Unmet expectations offer valuable lessons. They help me reflect on myself and the people around me. Approaching people without expectations allows me to enrich my life with the experiences they trustingly share, without expecting anything in return. I shouldn’t close myself off to this opportunity but approach it with an open heart—even if I may never truly become part of the world of the one I hold those expectations for. Sunday, 14 April 2024. Self-Destructive Tendencies: Hello. My name’s Marcel, and my various hobbies include reading, cooking, and sabotaging my own life. Then I chase away friends, place obstacles in the path of my success, and sacrifice myself for irrelevant beliefs. While normal people know when to stop and avoid repeating the same mistakes, I crave unnecessary drama and go the extra mile. All I reap from these self-destructive tendencies are disappointment, anger, and loneliness. The worst part is, I know when it’s better to stay quiet, when a situation doesn’t need to escalate—but something inside me wants to watch my world burn, over and over again. With this attitude, I’m putting people through pointless tests they can’t pass, just to prove to myself that these friendships were doomed from the start. That I’m better off alone, because relying on others only leads to disappointment. Thanks to my “superior” mindset, I save myself the time, which I can now spend alone—trapped in my head with no chance of escape. It’s hard for me to tell who’s truly a friend and who just happens to share the same space. Who’s forced to spend time with me but looks for the next chance to get away. And just when I’m surrounded by people to whom I’ve devoted thoughts, dreams, and hopes, I feel alone again. Why bother making connections if they’re only going to be shallow, collapsing like a house of cards with just a few wrong words? I could save myself the trouble. I shouldn’t set up false expectations, and if I did get disappointed, I’d only have myself to blame. Should I stop people from entering my life and wave them away before they even get close? Since there’s nothing left but to spend some time together and then say goodbye? It’s unrealistic to form friendships with everyone. It’s enough to share a moment, to enjoy each other’s company before moving on. And it’s okay to dedicate thoughts, dreams, and hopes to those fleeting connections. Tuesday, 9 April 2024. Welcome to the Club: Each faculty at our university has its very own student council. There is one for computer science, one for humanities and natural sciences, one for architecture and civil engineering, one for electrical engineering, one for mechanical and process engineering and one for economics. And then there’s the motley crew that I’ve been a member of: The Design Student Council. This is where illustrious people from the three degree courses Communication Design, Interactive Media, and Creative Engineering come together to chat about art, events, and life in general over pizza, beer, and music, as well as to have a bit of a rant about the other student councils. Through the student council, I got to know all sorts of great people from different areas of the university who would otherwise have remained unknown to me and would have continued to pass me by without a greeting in the canteen. Together we organize flea markets, karaoke evenings, and exhibitions, act as contacts for new students, and try to improve university life with our ideas. Sometimes we spend hours discussing grievances at our faculty, sometimes we try to answer the eternal question of how many primary school children we could defeat in a fight to the death. The correct answer, of course, is seven—everyone knows that. I am very glad that in my first semester I dared to sit down week after week in a room full of people who were becoming fewer and fewer strangers to me, and through this, from my perspective, quite courageous step, I became part of a community that enriched my time at university in many ways. Gradually, more and more of my friends have found their way into the Design Student Council, and thus to free cold drinks, and rumor has it that I have already spent a night or two in our designated room after the evening got a little out of hand. Every faculty at our university has its own student council—and ours is undoubtedly the best. Sunday, 7 April 2024. The Wandering Mouth: We’re at a party. Strange and familiar faces hover around us, drinking and shouting. Cheerful music fills the air. The garden where we celebrate is lit up in bright colors. You’re having fun, drifting from one bottle to the next, from one taste to another, from one mouth to the next. People are waiting for you to push beyond the limit. Things are spinning out of control. The mood shifts. It’s no longer fun. The night grows darker. You fall, lying on your back on the grass, laughing with the others around you. Your top has slipped up, exposing more than you realize. I walk over, cover you, and pull you to your feet. It’s hard to tell if you’re laughing or crying. You try to kiss me. I turn away, pressing your head to my shoulder. “I love you very much,” I whisper in your ear. Silence. “I love you too,” you answer quietly. Björk’s voice whispers, “Your mouth floats above my bed at night, my own private moon.” You nestle your head against mine, the faint smell of beer, salt, and cigarettes mingling in your breath. Hair to hair. Skin to skin. Pulse to pulse. “Just because the mind can make up whatever it wants, doesn’t mean that it’ll never come true, won’t ever happen. Please, could I change that?” I can feel your body against mine. “Just because she can.” This moment feels like the most important thing in the world. “Is that the right thing to do? Oh, I just don’t know.” You turn toward me, your face close. “Let me introduce one to the other. The dream and the real, get them acquainted. Introduce. A mouth to a mouth.” Your face becomes mine. I taste your lips, your tongue. Your breath enters me, warm, filled with beer, salt, cigarettes, and a hint of loneliness. “The dream and the real, get them acquainted.” Maybe hope can win. “Can I just sneak up from behind?” I plead. “Now please, can I kiss her?” I shout. “Is that the right thing to do?” The void answers softly, “Oh, I just don’t know. There’s a line there, I can’t cross it.” I wake up, am lost, can no longer deny it. Tuesday, 2 April 2024. Meeting a Master: This semester, we took part in a workshop with the popular Hungarian artist István Horkay as part of our Werkwoche at Technical University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg. His collage posters are famous and have been exhibited in galleries all over the world. István Horkay embarked on his journey by graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Budapest. Following this, he was offered an opportunity to enrich his skills at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. And he taught us exactly that: The fine arts. István Horkay’s art is epitomic in the double meaning of the word. A fragment, an incised part of something that already exists, and, because of this incision, a violation of the finished surface, the tangle of writing or a finished picture. This is based on the experience that people, by transmitting themselves through signs, feign a kind of meaningfulness. In István Horkay’s work, this textual meaningfulness always appears differently, as contrasting colors appear on the surface in separate places. His posters are not only experimental but life itself. It was a great experience to work with István Horkay and his lovely wife and design some works under his personal guidance. I was allowed to design a total of three posters, which I called The Book of Love, The Bachelor of Arts and Jazz. The workshop was complemented by an exhibition that took place together with a display of the most beautiful German books. The Werkwoche was a great opportunity to creatively break out of the daily routine of studying and try something completely new. I’m looking forward to taking part again in the near future. My second semester was rewarding—I had a great time, made new connections, and deepened existing ones. That’s what college is all about. At least for me. In the semester after next I have the chance to spend it abroad and was asked to choose a university in a country that interests me. After some thoughtful consideration, I’ve narrowed down my options to Japan, Taiwan, and Lithuania. In a few weeks, I will know where my journey will take me. I would agree with all the choices. Simply because each of them offers opportunities that I will never have again. Let’s see where destiny will take me to. Until then I’m looking forward to my fourth semester with new courses, new people, and new adventures. Yeah. Sunday, 4 February 2024. Time to Grow Up: Since the beginning of my college attendance and the subsequent move to a new city, my entire circle of friends consists of my fellow students. That wouldn’t really be a problem. After all, they are all great people with their very own dreams, hopes, and goals. And I’ve grown very fond of some of them over time. We’ve partied the night away together, sunbathed by the lake, cooked delicious food, danced, played tabletop role-playing games, watched anime, and had profound conversations about the meaning of it all. The time I spend with these people means a lot to me. But I’m realizing that the age difference between me and them is leading to interpersonal difficulties. After all, I am now 40 years old and most of them are around 20. And that’s not a very healthy relationship. When we celebrated my birthday in a trendy bar in the city center a few days ago, we had a lot of fun. Expensive drinks, loud music, and a few colorful drugs. Everything I need to have a good time. But of course, I noticed that I was the oldest person there. I couldn’t flirt with anyone because otherwise, I would have felt like a creep. And that’s not all: I’m generally not allowed to develop feelings for my fellow students that go beyond friendship. No matter how much I would like to sometimes. Because otherwise, I feel like I’m abusing their trust in me as a friend. But since I would like to be in a romantic relationship again because I honestly miss that in my life, I now feel a little trapped in this adolescent world. I have therefore resolved to finally grow up. At least partially. I need to expand my circle of friends. Get to know people who will help me grow. Mentally. And with whom I have the chance to develop intimate relationships that are not possible in my current environment for various reasons. However, I don’t yet know how I’m going to do this. Maybe I should find a new hobby. Or go to places that are frequented by people of the same age. Or maybe it’s enough to walk through the world a little more consciously and be more open to new folks. The important thing is not to get too comfortable in my present surroundings. Otherwise, I will deny myself opportunities that are currently hidden from me. Monday, 8 January 2024. Midlife Crisis Outfit: As of today, I am 40 years old. So it’s about time to talk about my midlife crisis. Strictly speaking, I’ve been in it for four decades now, but in order to have a good starting point for today’s topic, let’s just assume that it’s reached its peak today. My midlife crisis manifests itself internally through constant reflection, depression, and self-destructive tendencies and externally through continuous optimization of my, at least in my eyes, perfect outfit. I am a great advocate of a single appearance. While normal people wear a different wardrobe every day, consisting of all kinds of colors, shapes, and brands, I have made it my mission to find the ideal piece of clothing for every part of my body. And, yes, I know that this behavior is the result of some error in my head. But let’s call it minimalism. I quickly realized that the majority of my individual uniform had to be black. That way I don’t have to worry about any color combinations. Black always fits, looks good, and is also slimming. No other color has so many wins. What’s more, my outfit has to be cheap, basic, and available everywhere. Even if, for whatever reason, I end up in Guatemala, I need to be able to go into town and replace a used item of clothing there. That’s why I’ve chosen a few international companies whose products I use to present myself to the world. Of course, I always adapt this decision. After all, my outfit is alive. Like me. I’m not dead. Yet. Most of my clothes are from H&M. Because the quality is good, the price is reasonable, and availability is guaranteed. One plus point is that the basics are not printed with logos. They are simple, modern, and have a good shape. I can also dye them if they are washed out. So I’ve bought the same black pants, T-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, jackets, underpants, scarves, and gloves several times so that I can change them every day. Of course, I can’t wear too many nameless basics, otherwise I have no character. That’s why my cap printed with the New York Yankees logo is from New Era. Because I wanted something American. And since black only looks good with white accents, because otherwise you seem like a mortician, I’m wearing a pair of white Nike Air Force 1 with white Nike Everyday Cushioned Training Crew socks. Because it’s the default right now. My outfit is rounded off with black Jisco glasses, a vintage Casio watch, and Apple AirPod Pros. Done. This is how stylish a midlife crisis can be. At least in my head. Friday, 5 January 2024. The Death of Social Media: When websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter emerged in the early 2000s, I was fascinated by the possibilities they brought. Whether I was chatting with buddies, flirting with girls, or discussing the latest One Piece episode with other fans, social media turned the internet into a place where strangers could become acquaintances, and acquaintances could become friends. Social media shaped who I am today. Facebook took me to Berlin, Twitter to Japan, and Instagram to America. I reveled in the benefits of this universe, but I watched with regret as these platforms gradually became breeding grounds for hate, ignorance, and depression. Suddenly, social media was no longer fun. Still, I didn’t want to abandon the dream of a connected world, because there were people on these platforms who meant something to me. For far too long, I ignored my inner voice telling me it was time to say goodbye to the hollow shell that social media had become. Maybe I was just afraid, or perhaps I was hoping I’d find a reason to keep denying the inevitable. But the longer I stayed, the more out of place I felt amid the angry voices, blunt propaganda, and false promises. So, I had only one choice to finally shed this mental burden that had weighed on me for years: delete social media. And now, I’ve done it. Besides my retreat from social media, I’ve also stopped using emojis in emails, chats, and text messages. I’ve disabled the buttons that let me decorate my thoughts with colorful little pictures on my phone and computer. My words have to stand on their own. And if they can’t, then I’ve failed as a writer—and as a decent human being. Of course, emojis serve a purpose. They’re meant to fill the gaps where words fall short. Without them, there will be misunderstandings, arguments, and, ultimately, conflicts. But I don’t care about that. As usual, the world should revolve around me and my decisions, no matter how arbitrary or illogical they may seem. Monday, 25 December 2023. Men of Culture: When a brave adventurer has spent the entire day climbing mountains, recovering treasures, and battling giants, while trying to keep every single one of his limbs attached to his body, there are three things that drive him to look forward to the next day: Beer. Meat. And sex. After all, he’s got tough memories in his head, hard-earned coin in his pocket, and an even harder erection in his pants. And he needs to deal with these potential problem-makers as quickly as possible, so they don’t lead to his downfall in the long run. The only question is: Which establishment will help him the most in this delicate matter for the least amount of money? Stunk and Zel are two prime examples of these now not-so-theoretical fortune hunters. For the jaded human and the high-spirited elf, real life begins when they step onto the streets, now aglow with the city’s colorful neon signs, after a tingling brew at the Ale & Eats inn, run by the ever-bubbly bird lady Meidri. From there, they can slip into the well-oiled, frequently used orifices of willing prostitutes. After all, there are plenty available here, in every conceivable shape, color, and function imaginable. One day, they rescue the angel Crimvael from the clutches of a wild monster and introduce the innocent soul to the pleasures of jolly light girls. I enjoyed Interspecies Reviewers more than I expected. Stunk and Zel are two lovable, horny guys who want to mount anything that breaths. Their boundary-pushing sexcapades are so colorful, amusing, and over the top that I’d love to see a second season. But for various reasons, it will likely never happen. So I have no choice but to close my eyes, have a few warm thoughts, and imagine myself joining Stunk and Zel’s illustrious troupe, about to get down and dirty in the nearest fantasy brothel. I’m even thinking about getting the manga, just because I want to know which brightly lit establishments my testosterone-fueled friends will end up in next. Wednesday, 13 December 2023. Blessed Blow: God had the best cocaine. My friends assured me of that. Nothing was as clear, pure, and effective as the contents of the transparent bags she carefully placed on the table at weekends. God was not even twenty years old. She had long black hair and a round face. We called her God because she went to a notorious Catholic boarding school for girls. We should have named her Devil, at least if her stories from there were to be believed. Since God liked me, I was always allowed to snort for free. But that privilege made me feel like a mooch, so I paid for her food at McDonald’s and her drinks at Bar 25 in return. Sometimes at least. While I randomly consumed everything I could get my hands on, God only used cocaine to function. Her minimalist usage made a great impression on me. After a trip to her parents in the south, God never returned to Berlin. Rumor has it there was trouble with a classmate. God had smashed her head so hard against a sink in the restroom during an argument that it broke. We never heard from God again. That was also the end of my cocaine phase. Monday, 11 December 2023. Jump, Jump, Jump! When I think of Japan, my mind drifts to sushi, manga, and suicide. It’s a country of pure contrasts, where neon lights pulse with life, yet shadows loom just as brightly. Recently, I watched Sion Sono’s cult masterpiece Suicide Club, a delirious descent into the bizarre phenomenon of mass suicides sweeping the East Asian nation. The film from 2001, featuring appearances by Ryo Ishibashi, Akaji Maro, and Masatoshi Nagase, unfolds like a sinister puzzle, with Detective Kuroda and his team fumbling through a trail of cryptic clues: Rancid sports bags, clunky early-internet websites, and a deeply unnerving pop idol group that’s equal parts saccharine and sinister. And I love it. The opening scene is burned into my head: Dozens of uniformed schoolgirls, hands clasped and faces alight with giddy laughter, throwing themselves in front of a speeding subway train. Blood sprays across the station like something out of a grotesque art installation. It’s horrifying, absurd, and iconic—a tone-setter for the ride that follows. From there, the movie spirals into a dizzying blend of splatter gore, J-pop surrealism, and psychological labyrinths. What’s it all about? The search for identity? Love? Friendship? Or is it just a meditation on flesh? Sion Sono doesn’t hand out answers. Instead, he dares me to sit with the madness and draw my own conclusions. There’s something inconceivably irresistible about shows and movies set in Tokyo right around the turn of the millennium. Foldable phones snapping shut with satisfying clicks, Eurobeat tracks pumping through crowded arcades, schoolgirls in sailor suits dashing to catch the last train—it was the very last time when Japan felt like the epicenter of cool, a fever-dream era that unfortunately will never quite return. Suicide Club captures that strange moment perfectly, preserving it in all its chaotic, messy glory. And if there’s one message I take away from this twisted gem, it’s that you have to treat life like a write-once hard drive. Although, it would be nice to forget the bad things. Saturday, 9 December 2023. Beer, Beer, and More Beer: The second semester of my studies in Interactive Media has just said goodbye to me. Officially it doesn’t end until the end of September but with the semester break starting in the next few days, I can justifiably say that my first year at college is now over. It has been a year full of new people, experiences, and joy of life. I have learned, designed, and programmed. We made our own movies, build machines, and create animations, tried our hand at programming languages, and almost single-handedly destroyed the university’s beverage budget in the form of beer, beer, and more beer. I joined the design student council and a Dungeons & Dragons club, helped out at events in front of and behind the scenes, and spent some nights at the campus because I missed the last train home more than once. While a few months ago, I was still convinced that I wanted to devote myself entirely to visual wonders and thus pursue a Bachelor of Arts, in recent weeks I have come to the decision that I would like to try my hand at the Bachelor of Science after all and thus prove myself in the world of bits and bytes. The good thing about this plan is that if it fails, I can still crawl back into the art world the following semester. Possibly because the physics-soaked math has taken the fun out of it for me. I would then only have to make up a few missing modules. In the next semester, we will have to try out various elective modules in the areas of design, computer science, and gaming and decide in which country we would like to spend our semester abroad. I’m currently leaning towards Japan, Finland, or Estonia, but I still have little a bit of time to think about it in peace. Besides, I have to be accepted there first, and this decision is, sadly, not mine alone. But let’s see in which part of the world I’ll end up in the coming winter. My versatile studies have given me, and I’m not exaggerating, a sense of life again. A reason to get up early in the morning. To come to campus with joy, smile at familiar faces, and experience new adventures with people I already know or just met for the first time. And for that, I want to thank everyone who has shared this journey with me so far. I’m really glad I decided to apply at Technical University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg last year for being able to have this opportunity and excited to see what challenges await me next semester. Tuesday, 25 July 2023. I Lost My Heart in Tokyo: Japan is not only a land of cultural traditions, technological achievements, and historical, social, and geographical challenges, but for many enthusiasts it is a nation of great and small wonders waiting to be discovered and explored. Over the past decades, Tokyo has developed into an international hotspot for pop culture, from fashion and music to art. In Kyoto, you’ll find the most beautiful temples; in Osaka, the most delicious delicacies; in Yokohama, the most exhilarating nightlife. Those who make it as far as Okinawa, Hokkaido, or Tottori experience Japan in its most multifaceted form. They see that anything is possible here. They realize they are standing in the midst of a cultural treasure trove and need only choose a direction. In anime and manga, wide-eyed space pirates, power-hungry swordsmen, and brave magical girls come to life. In J-pop and J-rock, both the bright and shadowed sides of life are sung about. And in countless novels—from Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami to Mieko Kawakami—quiet and outspoken heroes alike search for happiness. Japanese pop culture is full of love, desire, and passion. It seems to burst outward in every conceivable direction, and with every loud bang a new discovery, a new story, a new potential passion comes to life. My observations of the Land of the Rising Sun, poured into words, are declarations of love to this seemingly endless universe of creative daydreams—one into which you can immerse yourself at will, whose brightly illuminated gates stand open to all who wander the world with open eyes in search of an inspiring home. I want to celebrate Japanese pop culture in Germany and beyond. Whether fashion, art, music, films, books, games, travel, technology, food, or life in general—whether anime, manga, or J-pop—whether widely known far beyond the borders of the Far East or long since faded into eternal insider status in its homeland. For you, I set out on a journey into the distance, in search of an alternative world whose energy can be felt from here, whose courage can be sensed from here, whose love can be felt even from afar. I want to grasp it and understand it—and hold it close to us. In my texts on Japanese pop culture, which I regularly publish on this blog, I sit beside Spike Spiegel in the cockpit in Cowboy Bebop, save the world with Asuka Langley Soryu and her friends in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and wander with Ginko through the spirit-filled forests of a long-forgotten world in Mushishi. I dive into the bustling chaos of Takeshita Street in the heart of Harajuku, let myself be swept away by the gaming kids in front of the flickering screens in Akihabara, and settle into a well-hidden jazz café in Shimokitazawa to listen, over a cup of matcha tea, to the lively sounds of Ryo Fukui, Casiopea, and Soil & “Pimp” Sessions. And now and then, I travel back in time to a Japan that no longer exists: to the exciting 1970s of creative revolution, the brightly glowing 1980s of economic dominance, and the sobering 1990s of financial decline. Each era is as beautiful as it is different, waiting to be discovered and brought back to life. Every single one of my articles about Japan is a digital homage to the creative spirits of a nation that so often seems far away. If you enjoy looking beyond the cultural horizon, if you are always searching for something new, exciting, and surprising, and if you are not afraid of perhaps losing yourself forever in a labyrinth of otherness, then you are in exactly the right place here. Discover Japan’s most imaginative side with me, again and again. I look forward to embarking with you, in my upcoming articles about the Land of the Rising Sun, on an unforgettable expedition into the depths of Far Eastern ingenuity—and to uncovering together one or another lost treasure hidden somewhere in the depths of Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka. Tuesday, 25 July 2023. If I Can’t Be a Part of Your World: Of course I can’t always have what I want. That would be far too easy anyway. My own happiness sometimes collides with the dreams and wishes of others. And I have no right to hurt them just because I hold the questionable belief that I absolutely must be the main character in every single story that is told. Every now and then I have to admit to myself that, in a play, I only occupy a supporting role and that the spotlight is directed at someone else. No matter how hard that may be on my own ego. Sometimes I am neither Romeo nor Juliet, but simply some random fruit vendor who suffers dutifully in the background. If the slim, black-clad girl I like—with her white sneakers marked by life, who grins shamelessly at just the right moments—the girl I want to spend time with, experience adventures with, forge memories with, and face the perils of the world alongside, already has someone like that by her side, who—surprise—is not me, then the only correct path I should be capable of taking is the one that leads away. Away from this captivating girl, away from her supposedly radiant happiness, away from the creeping pain I have grown accustomed to in recent times out of sheer ignorance toward myself and perhaps a touch of masochism. Above all, away from the inner urge to perhaps still obtain—through some random, completely logic-defying miracle of this universe—the chance to become part of this slowly dissolving hope. Before I cause irreparable damage. To myself and to the girl I actually wanted to win over. Because all I could achieve with this desperate plan is hatred, anger, and an almost unimaginable loneliness. And I certainly don’t want that. Unless I am already lost. But then everything is too late anyway. So while she’s lying in bed with her boyfriend late at night, having watched a show, he was allowed to dive into her, and now, without sparing a single thought for me, has fallen asleep tightly cuddled up to him, I stand after a mediocre party in the rain, with two cold, rancid McDonald’s cheeseburgers in a bag, at the main station, waiting for the last train home—only to indulge in the one pastime I desperately wanted to prevent: thinking about her. These embarrassing and pitiful emotional scars could be avoided if I followed the advice that emerged from a boozy round of others. That I should distract myself. That I should talk to the nice but uninteresting faces about more than just a few irrelevant sentences. That I might thereby find someone who could burn themselves into my emotional world just as deeply as the person whose attention I am trying to draw to myself by every conceivable means. But of course I don’t want that. Because everyone else is just empty shells compared to this one girl. And even though I know perfectly well that this isn’t true, it’s far easier to regard this both subjective and objective lie as an established truth and thus dissolve undisturbed in my own self-pity. After all, heartbreak is much more fun when I abandon all hope. Perhaps because this way of dealing with sorrow is also much easier than having to face the uncomfortable reality that I may not actually be infatuated with the girl herself, but with the false expectations I pumped into her from the very beginning. Because what do I really know about this girl, beyond the scattered stories she so graciously shared with me, and the connections I had to piece together myself—otherwise I would have been staring at a patchwork of other people’s memories? Exactly: nothing. I know absolutely nothing. And realizing this fact is the first step out of my own broken head and into the real world. On top of that, as could hardly be otherwise, I’m a good person. Of course I am. At least that’s what I tell myself so I don’t go completely insane. I don’t want to barge into someone else’s romance, no matter how broken and certainly miserable I might imagine it to be. Such a devious attack would not be my place and would also be deeply misanthropic. And probably very stupid. Besides—and this is the most important point—it would get me nothing. I wouldn’t be the brave hero rescuing the helpless princess from the clutches of a painful relationship. No, I would simply be some random asshole who got too caught up in his own movie and, from whatever psychopathic abyss, decided that his only chance at happiness was to destroy that of others. And no one wants anything to do with someone like that. Ever. Least of all the girl far removed from my own crumbling world, whose grin I see before me when I close my eyes. Her happiness should be untouchable. Even if she has decided that I myself may not be a part of it. So I am left with nothing else but to scrape together the last remnants of my own sanity, my own reason, and perhaps a bit of my own pride, and arrive at the only right decision that is worth pursuing. Namely, that I must tear down, burn, and blow up these bridges built in the wrong direction as quickly as possible, turn around, and finally walk once more along the ridge of mental health. Before it is possibly too late. Maybe the other nice faces aren’t just empty shells after all. Maybe one of them can evoke the same feelings in me as the slim, black-clad girl with the white sneakers marked by life. Maybe one of them is just as pretty, smart, and cheeky—if only I allow for that potential instead of dismissing it with irritation from the outset. And if everything goes well, I might even forget why I was so fascinated by that one shamelessly grinning person in the first place. Sunday, 26 March 2023. Round Two, Fight! Well then, are you all already as excited as I am? Of course you are. Because this week my second semester in the Interactive Media degree program at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences is beginning. And ahead of me—and my daring fellow companions—lie a few months full of fun, excitement, and… very… nice… other… things. The main thing is that there’s something with alliteration. Because that always sounds good. And since you’re surely absolutely dying to know what awaits little Marcel this semester, why don’t we all take a look at exactly that together. Because let’s be honest: you don’t have anything better to do right now anyway. Exactly. So… let the wild ride begin! In the Introduction to Interactive Design, we’ll get an overview of systems of order, the principles of interaction and interface design, the basics of creative prototyping, cross-media design and creativity techniques, basic analog and digital design tools, and the fundamentals of usability as well as design theory. Presumably it’s also about the fundamental fundamentals of the fundamentals—but that’s obviously just speculative wishful thinking. In any case, we’ll definitely learn information design, data visualization, mapping, screen design—so typography, grids, and design systems—the basics of usability and human-centered design, as well as generative design. That all sounds very fascinating indeed. After successfully completing the module, we’ll be able to apply basic design principles and typography appropriately across different digital output media, independently prototype design tasks using analog and digital design tools, apply fundamental design and creativity techniques, solve tasks experimentally and process-oriented through prototypes and design variants, and analyze and visualize processes. The course Introduction to Audiovisual Design, in turn, spans a wide arc from the elementary forms of expression in animation to methodological design concepts for time-based media. Both conceptual design and artistic experimentation are encouraged. The lectures challenge us to actively participate and to develop our own positions. The working groups and workshops provide hands-on experience, fostering personal experience and self-organization within teams. Group work is, after all, the very best thing in the world. Everyone loves it. And the teaching methods are oriented toward critical discourse and practical experience. A major focus here is animation. In lectures, the most important animation cultures are presented exemplarily, and in workshops, simple animation techniques are practiced. In addition, cinematic means of expression are also covered—again introduced in lectures and then applied in workshops. This is where we build the bridge to storyboarding, an essential design technique for audiovisual media. Discussions of current and classic media art, as well as excursions to relevant festivals and exhibitions, round out the program. In the Introduction to Web Technologies, we learn all about the internet and how it works. We study the functionality of key browser protocols, the technical foundations of websites, and the basics of frontend programming. We acquire knowledge about the practical and correct use of relevant internet protocols and browser interfaces, the implementation of designed websites, navigation and manipulation of the DOM using JavaScript and jQuery, and the creation of interactive websites. We also learn how to analyze connection problems and browser traffic performance in relation to web applications, as well as how to plan and implement our own websites using various developer tools. In the end, we’ll understand what HTTP, TCP, APIs, WebSockets, WebRTC, XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery are. Hopefully. Wasn’t CSS a band once? In the Introduction to Software Development, we learn how to design, implement, document, and test our own applications. These applications also include graphics and user interaction via graphical interfaces. By the end of the module, we’ll be able to transfer the acquired knowledge and skills to a small, self-developed software project and put it into operation. We learn all about development phases, requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of programs, as well as methods of agile software development and advanced concepts of object-oriented programming such as class hierarchies, inheritance, and polymorphism, along with programming graphical user interfaces. The content is made practically tangible through an individually planned and implemented software project carried out during the lab. On a very personal note, the next part of the Japanese language course is also coming up for me, in which we’ll learn the second Japanese script, Katakana. It’s basically the alternative—and mostly Western-term-used—little brother of Hiragana. During the course, we’ll even all go out for Japanese food together and order our dishes in the East Asian national language. How exciting. “Ichi sushi kudasai!” And since I postponed the programming exam from the first to the second semester—because my private fortune teller decided it should be so—I also get to look forward to another round of Processing. Hooray. At least I’m not alone in this, because some of my fellow students were just as incapable and are therefore in the same boat as me. That immediately makes me feel less lonely. In any case, I’m excited to see what adventurous projects we’ll tackle in the new courses, and after the one-and-a-half-month-long semester break—which seemed to go on forever—I’m actually looking forward to returning to a somewhat structured daily routine that is not self-determined by me. On the other hand, the semester break could of course have lasted another three to eighty-seven months longer. I would certainly have been the last to complain. By the end of this semester, we’ll also have to decide whether we want to pursue the artistic or the technical track. My choice is already clear. And that’s not only because of the traumatic computer science exam that I still sometimes dream about—only to wake up late at night drenched in sweat, shouting, “A, A, B, B, A, A, B, A, B, A, B, B, B, A… C?!” My heart simply beats more for the colorful world of subjectively evaluated art. Objective technology, with all its rules, regulations, and laws invented by some mathematicians that are nearly impossible to argue away, is for me more of a means to an end—and therefore secondary. Yes, dear computer scientists, I know this sentence hurts a lot. But you’ll just have to get over it. Really. As in the previous semester, I’ll then once again present you with a conclusion of the months behind me, in which I’ll proudly proclaim why I am the best, smartest, and probably also most handsome student Augsburg University of Applied Sciences has ever had. And while you’re still laughing, I’ll already be sailing off into the sunset on my yacht—paid for solely by my high IQ—with a very lightly clothed Selena Gomez in my arms. Or something like that. Monday, 13 March 2023. Hope Dies Last: From up here you can see the lush green meadows, the azure-blue sea, and the clear, sunny sky. Gentle piano melodies echo through the overgrown high-rises. The decaying buildings are the last memorials to a civilization that was not prepared for its sudden departure. In the distant future, invaders from another world attack Earth without warning and unleash machine lifeforms to take over the planet. Faced with this insurmountable threat, humanity is driven from its home and flees to the Moon. The Council of the Exiled organizes a technologically seemingly superior resistance force of android soldiers who attempt to reclaim Earth. To finally break the stalemate, the organization deploys a new unit of infantry: YoRHa. Meanwhile, in the abandoned wasteland that was once a place filled with bustle and laughter, the battle between machines and androids continues to rage. A war that may soon bring to light the long-forgotten truth about this world and the fate of humanity… Released in 2017, the role-playing game NieR:Automata by the Japanese artist Yoko Taro could easily have disappeared into the depths alongside countless similar titles because of its premise. Alien monsters attack Earth while humanity desperately struggles for survival. As if one had not already seen, heard, and played through something like that thousands of times before… Yet while all those other works are forgotten shortly after their more or less tedious completion, even years later one keeps thinking back to what was experienced in the visually stunning successor to NieR Replicant. Because the end of the world has rarely been portrayed as so radically depressing, hopeless, and philosophically heavy. NieR:Automata is an unforgettable experience on many different levels. The characters burn themselves into one’s emotional world. The epic music by Keiichi Okabe continuously shatters even the most cheerful-seeming thoughts. And the fact that you must successfully finish the game multiple times to fully understand the story—only to end up empty-handed again at the very end, after giving it your all—puts the finishing touch on the whole experience. Anyone who wants to find happiness in a world of merciless hopelessness and ultimately drown in absolute depression cannot avoid NieR:Automata. Before long, they will be fighting side by side with 2B, 9S, and A2 against a seemingly insurmountable fate. And they will become part of a story whose true ending seems to flee with every step taken toward it—only to struggle desperately against its own resolution at the very last moment, by every conceivable means. Wednesday, 8 March 2023. What I Talk About When I Talk About Walking: I love walking. Drop me anywhere on this round ball of Earth, point me in any direction, and I’ll set off. From A to B, crisscrossing, straight ahead or in circles. The main thing is to keep going, always further. And when I talk about running, I don’t mean jogging, racing, or sprinting—good God, no—but the most relaxed form of human locomotion: walking. Over the past few years I’ve gradually increased my walking volume. Not long ago my daily step count was still in the single- or double-digit range, but I kept pushing my limit higher and higher. Three digits soon became four. Four digits eventually became five. And five digits might one day even become six. If that’s humanly possible at all. The number of ten thousand steps a day—randomly pulled out of thin air by a Japanese company for advertising purposes and scientifically completely irrelevant—I can now easily manage. At the moment I’m hovering around an average of twenty thousand steps, like some kind of elite athlete. My success—so inspiring to every single human on this planet—rests on three significant pillars of individual achievement: boredom, routine, and distraction. I simply have nothing better to do. I only do things if I’m used to doing them. And I only stick with something if my thoughts are occupied with something else while I’m doing it. With alternative sporting activities, like jogging for example, I spend every second of the agonizing and seemingly never-ending process hoping that some confused hunter will mistake me for a graceful deer—or at least a somewhat stocky wild boar—and shoot me in the forest so it will finally be over. When I’m walking, on the other hand, I’m often surprised to realize I’ve already been doing it for two, three, sometimes four hours without actively noticing. During the time when I’m more or less abusing my two still-functioning legs, I prefer listening to some kind of alternative-culture podcasts. For example 8-4 Play. Or Retrograde Amnesia. Or Axe of the Blood God. Anything where a few hardcore nerds passionately talk for hours about a topic that has narrowly missed mainstream mass consumption. The geekier, more multi-voiced, and more lively it is, the better. Then, armed with my noise-canceling headphones, I stride rapidly through cities, across fields, along the lake. Past cars, people, and nice-smelling cafés, boutiques, and döner stands. Always with just one goal in mind: keep walking, always keep going, until I’m so exhausted I almost have to puke. In Augsburg, where I’m currently studying as you may know, I have a regular route that has been carefully optimized but still leaves room for experimentation. I like the city a lot because it’s neither too big nor too small, and because you can disappear either into deserted alleyways or into the bustling chaos of the crowds—depending on what you feel like at the moment. On a day completely at my disposal, I get off two stops before the main station, walk to the university library, treat myself to a coffee and a bit of laptop time, and then take a big loop through the Textile District, one or two parks, and the old town before buying something to eat at Rewe and heading home again. And I do exactly that every day, over and over again, like a broken robot with no life. But it works. Because it’s routine. Because I like the varied route. Because I know exactly where, along my seemingly random path, I can rest, where I can get online, and where I can go to the bathroom. And that kind of certainty is exactly what mentally disadvantaged autists like me need. This calculated knowledge drastically reduces the chances of unpleasant surprises while still leaving enough room for new ideas, secrets, and discoveries. And occasionally you even meet people you already know—or haven’t met yet—and can chat with them for a bit. At least that way you don’t feel quite so lonely while stubbornly walking in circles. “But Marcel, if you walk twelve-bazillion kilometers every day, why are you still such a fat pig?” To that cheeky and completely unexpected question I have three perfectly thought-out and formulated answers. First: shut up. Second: no idea—how should I know? Third: I’m working on it, okay?! More information will be available in my upcoming self-help book, soon to appear at your trusted bookstore: Boss Transformation: From Battle Colossus to a Line in the Landscape. While I’m preaching to you here about walking, what I actually want to make clear is that if you, for whatever reason, need more movement in your life, all you have to do is find something that doesn’t completely piss you off while you’re doing it. That can be literally anything. Except maybe sitting on the couch eating chips—unless you’re losing weight while doing it. If you are, then you’ve basically won at life. The only rule you need to follow is that you must keep trying the different activities available to you until you finally find something where, while doing it, you don’t secretly wish for sudden cardiac arrest as an excuse to stop. Some people get lucky and find it on the first try, others only on the hundredth. That risk is something you just have to accept—but it’s worth it. And if for me that means walking along paths in spring, summer, autumn, and winter—whether in sunshine, rain, or snow—and hopefully not getting run over by a bus, then for you it might be… who knows… football. Or tennis. Or climbing skyscrapers without safety gear or clothing. If the standard-issue stuff isn’t for you, then you should look beyond the obvious. Life is full of possibilities—you just have to use them. Alright, enough guru talk for today. I’m going to put on my smelly sports shoes that are already almost crying out loudly for mercy, pick a five-hour podcast about the best Super Nintendo games of the early nineties, and head out into the wide world like little Hans. And if I do end up getting run over by a bus, at least I’ll have died doing something I truly love with all my heart. And not everyone can say that. Monday, 6 March 2023. Dystopian Decadence: A misaligned photograph of the future, born in the fever of Japan’s growth in the sixties and seventies. Traditions, quiet and fine, threaded through with wabi-sabi as an inner pulse, keep time beneath the noise. Buildings that refuse to shed their rust, that keep a film of dull gray on the fingers, stand as patient witnesses. A floating consolation, and a smell of open country, move down the lanes and linger in the alleys. The story of Millennium Parade unfolds in a forked-off Tokyo, grown out of this zone – our shared room of side-by-side living. The city has laid aside its earlier addiction to polish and noiseless urbanity. Instead, it sets out toward a strange, beautiful, absurdly ideal future metropolis, nourished by disorder and yet leaning toward transcendence. The self-titled debut album by the Japanese music group Millennium Parade has been on constant rotation for me since release. After all, the record is packed only with absolute bangers from start to finish. Bon Dance? Slammer. Fly With Me? Slammer. Familia? Slammer. The only tricky part is explaining the genre, because Millennium Parade simply hurl everything they have, pop, hip-hop, electronic, dance, rock, funk, jazz, and rap, into a single pot, give it a hard stir, and then fling the multicolored mash against the wall to see what dazzles. It splatters, clings, and somehow composes a picture that feels both chaotic and deliberate, a collage that swings from sugar rush to steel-edged groove, music that keeps its playfulness even while sounding engineered with obsessive care. Unskippable. Millennium Parade persuade not only with modern songs for modern people, but also with a visual presentation rarely seen. The videos and live appearances by the collective surrounding Daiki Tsuneta of King Gnu overflow with off-the-wall ideas and meticulous craft, mixing animation, stage design, and camera play into a kind of kinetic theater. Every frame feels engineered, yet the work breathes. Spectacle never strangles the spark. Their aesthetic extends the music’s argument. The future can be unruly and tender at once, a city of images that invites touch. And I can hardly wait to finally hold the new record from this Japanese collective in my own hands, whenever it may choose to appear. Because nothing would make my heart happier than waking in a neon-soaked, alternate-timeline cyberpunk Tokyo. Sunday, 5 March 2023. Cool Guys in Their Hot Rods: Vroom, vroom, vroom—off they go, those daredevil devils in their souped-up death machines. At the Redline, after all, anything goes. The greatest racing competition in the universe only takes place every five years, and that’s exactly why absolutely everyone wants to claim the glory for themselves. All while organized crime and militaristic governments try to exploit the spectacle for their own purposes. Joshua Punkhead, a reckless hotshot who has clearly never heard of speed limits and who crashes through everything with his ultra-tuned ride that isn’t up a tree by the count of three, has only one goal: to become the winner of the Redline. And that’s despite the fact that his crush, Sonoshee, is also competing—and has absolutely no intention of letting him win. The murmur among the intergalactic spectators grows loud when it becomes clear that the current race will take place on Roboworld. Its militant inhabitants have absolutely no desire for a bunch of insane sports junkies to tear across their planet and possibly stumble upon one or two secret weapons of mass destruction. A deadly game begins. Because it’s not just the other racers chasing Joshua—whom everyone simply calls JP—but also the president of Roboworld and his lackeys, who have set their sights on him and his fellow competitors. Can this loudmouthed guy with gasoline in his veins conquer both the Redline and Sonoshee’s heart? From the first second to the last, Redline is fast-paced and wildly colorful action, occasionally broken up by quieter moments to catch your breath. JP is a likable jerk with his heart in the right place. And both the different drivers and the surrounding characters offer enough depth, soul, or simply fun to keep the audience entertained. If Redline is anything, it’s stylish. You could pause the film at almost any random moment—every single frame would be a vibrant work of art. Whether it’s the tech-packed racing machines, the densely detailed locations, or the sensual women, Redline bursts with illustrative highlights, all underscored by slick music, bombastic sound effects, and one cool line after another. By the end, it’s hard to believe what an overwhelming visual spectacle has just unfolded before your eyes, and you almost doubt whether you even caught everything that happened at breakneck speed. After all, the screen practically explodes toward the finale in a firework display of glaring colors. But perhaps that very doubt is what makes you want to watch the film all over again. You can call Redline many things—but boring is definitely not one of them. Anyone who enjoys cool guys in hot rides and even hotter girls who constantly raise the stakes in every scene will appreciate this anime. Everyone else can keep puttering along in their Fiat Punto through a 30-km/h zone and avoid taking any risks in life. Friday, 3 March 2023. Something Beautiful Is Going to Happen: The vacation spot outside Vaasa devoured the four Lund girls. With their tiny bones and their tanned skin, an entire era disappeared. Six kilometers of winding coastline, a popular bathing resort in the fifties. Rows of changing cabins, tall reeds rustling in the wind. Here one finds the era the conservatives long for: when parents could send their children to the beach unsupervised, two dollars for ice cream and a bus ticket in the pockets of their summer trousers. Mom and Dad shook their heads in concern and concealed the news about the children in Messina, Graad, Gottwald, where, it seemed to them, every week the tiny skeleton of a child was found cast into a replacement wall. Regularly, someone’s daughter who had been kept captive in a basement there for thirty years would flee into the street and scream for help. But not here. Here there is social democracy. And the delicate peach blossoms of social democracy, its gentle aid programs, these progressive things make the broken soul of a person flare up with a kind of hope. This fantasy land will remain forever untouched by that strange technical urge to build a secret underground room, one with a ventilation system whose vents are disguised in the lawn as miniature clay windmills. These dark fever clouds of the mind cool in the clear mists of open air; the breath of the distant blue glaciers freezes the sick thoughts of a person. Vaasa. One would much rather live here. And then, on a Tuesday morning, clouds beneath a blue sky, the four sisters went swimming. The computer role-playing game Disco Elysium, released in 2019 by the Estonian studio ZA/UM, takes place in a world that is raw, merciless, and devoid of any sign of empathy. In an era of political upheaval, in which the survivors of a ruthless war still have to wipe the blood from their faces, everyone searches for the remnants of happiness—whether in one of the great metropolises or far away from the depressive bustle. Harrier Du Bois, a detective of the 41st precinct of the Revachol Citizens Militia, called simply Harry by his few friends and many enemies, wakes one morning in a run-down seaside hotel with no memory of his past or of the world around him. He and his temporary partner from the 57th precinct, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, have been called to the once idyllic coastal town of Martinaise to investigate the brutal murder of a loudmouthed soldier. The decaying world of Disco Elysium is full of interesting stories, viewpoints, and characters. From the first minute, the game is like a talkative book that wants to devour you and take your breath away with its never-ending chronicles. Wherever you lead Harry—through the enchanted church, the small supermarket, or the desolate swamp—with every step the history of a place collapses over you, a place that shouldn’t even exist like this… or perhaps it should? Disco Elysium thrives on its enormous freedom of choice and the not-to-be-underestimated weight of chance. This begins even before Harry opens his eyes for the first time and continues all the way to the bitter end—when you only then realize the path you have taken, without having had any sense of what you may have missed. But by then it is already too late. Harry’s limited time in Martinaise is essentially a search for himself disguised as a detective adventure. Do you want to confront the town’s inhabitants as a permanently drunk Nazi? As an all-knowing philosopher? As an unabashed muscleman? As an authoritarian logician? Or rather as a likable charmer? The possibilities in Disco Elysium seem almost limitless. Anyone who immerses themselves in the world of Disco Elysium must renounce every distraction; they must become one with every single polygon that transforms into a living painting on the screen; they must become Harrier Du Bois. Or rather: Harrier Du Bois must become you. Disco Elysium is an experience that likely does not exist a second time in this form or with this intensity. Martinaise may cover only a fraction of what the rest of the world—lingering in a fog that continuously approaches you—has to offer, but one can sense the immense drama hidden all around. And with every conversation, every question, every new idea, you come a little closer to this epic—without ever being able to grasp it fully. For the greater whole, one simply is not ready yet—and probably never will be. Wednesday, 1 March 2023. The Empty Heart: If I want to, I can become friends with a great many people in a very short time. No matter where I am, no matter the situation, no matter who I’m dealing with. Then I’m funny, captivating, and so incredibly openhearted that it feels as if we’ve known each other for a lifetime. I share intimate stories and secrets, confess my greatest sins and fears, and give them the feeling that I understand them and would move even the most unreachable levers just so that, simply by having met me, they might become happier. And that’s despite the fact that we only met for the first time five minutes ago. In the past, I was almost proud of this ability—to actively switch off my shyness, lethargy, and social phobia and suddenly flip them into their complete opposite. Thanks to a trick I taught myself, which I call spontaneous mental distraction, and which works by thinking about something completely different just before doing something stupid or illogical, I do the boldest, craziest, and most charming things without having the chance to reflect on them beforehand. There simply isn’t enough time. Those actions then feel completely natural and not wrong at all. And afterward I’m always glad I dared to do them, because it allows you to reach people who would otherwise have remained closed off to you. It’s fun to bend the world to my advantage this way. And I once thought that this absolute accessibility made me a better, more complete—and yes, also more popular—person. Because of this unconventional character trait, I quickly became a central part of many different circles of friends, some of which only formed because of me. I enjoyed it when people desperately wanted to do things with me, competed for my favor at parties, or fell in love with me simply because they believed I was the first and only person on this planet who truly understood them and their problems. The feeling of emotional superiority eventually became normal to me. But an oppressive truth that I initially dismissed as nonsense slowly became a sad certainty over time: I am a ghost. An empty heart wrapped in flesh without the slightest trace of empathy. A bus full of loudly wailing orphaned children could explode in front of me and it wouldn’t just be that I didn’t care—I would actually be annoyed that the little brats chose this exact moment to burn in front of me and block my way. The only reason I can make friends with other people so quickly and easily is that they mean nothing to me. And if I do happen to take a particular liking to someone, I analyze them for so long and so intensely until I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the fascination that drives me crazy—only to drop them afterward like a hot potato. Because I’ve drained everything from them. And then they become, at best, boring or, at worst, unbearable. When I look back today, thanks to social media, at the various groups of friends that I once thought I was a fundamental part of, many of them still exist—just without me. The photos that once showed their faces pressed closely together beside mine now have to make do, years later, with one less forced smile. Friends with whom I spent drunken summer nights and spun countless legends became, as if I had never existed, strangers from one day to the next. I essentially sucked them dry and moved on. Like a ruthless wanderer of emotions who, just a moment ago, was still in the middle of his loved ones—feeling, celebrating, and fucking—and the next moment, when no one was paying attention, had suddenly disappeared. Never seen again, on the way to the next adventure, only to pull the same stunt as before—just with different faces. At least I brought a few strangers together, so maybe my hunger for feelings had some good side to it, I lie to myself. If I want to, I can become friends with a great many people in a very short time. No matter where I am, no matter the situation, no matter who I’m dealing with. Then I’m funny, captivating, and so incredibly openhearted that it feels as if we’ve known each other for a lifetime. Sometimes I wonder whether I even possess any kind of character at all or whether I’m simply a soulless shapeshifter who only ever reflects whatever brings him closest to his current goal. Ideally into the favor, thoughts, or genitals of the person in front of me. Always the right answer ready, always a cheeky remark at hand, always the correct balancing act between compassion, seriousness, and humor. And if I do give the wrong response once in a while and feel the inner pain of the resulting mental setback, then I learn from it, adjust a few inner screws, and correct them on the next attempt. But is that really me? The question of who one actually is is as old and clichéd as life itself. Perhaps I’m simply a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from book quotes, television wisdom, and sayings I once picked up from someone I happened to admire—pretending to be a human being, when in truth I am nothing more than a parasite somehow kept alive, feeding on the fears, dreams, and problems of others. Then I pounce like a starving predator on the first depressed-looking victim who crosses my path, tear them apart skin and hair and bone, and indulge myself in their remains so that something—anything—finally fills me again. A new body, a new thought, a new warmth. Anything other than the tasteless nothingness to which I’ve grown accustomed for so long. But the hint of satisfaction lasts only a short while and disappears as quickly as it came. Because nothing can fill the seemingly endless emptiness inside me—especially not another person who only wanted to be loved, held, and saved, and who is now nothing more than a vague memory in my continuous bloodlust. So I move on again, disgusted with myself, toward the next pretty face. Hoping that this time everything will be different. Surely it will be. Monday, 27 February 2023. Adventures on the Sand Planet: In the future, our planet will transform into a strange new world in which humanity must endure on an Earth without rain or oceans—only vast, desiccated deserts where two teenagers struggle to survive and search for hope. The sea, the sky, and the land have been completely polluted by humankind when mysterious objects fall from the heavens. These gigantic structures crash onto the planet and absorb the air, the water, and most living beings into their core, stripping the Earth of the very essence of its nature. The few remaining inhabitants of Earth fight to survive in a hostile environment and against an oppressive ruling race known as the Rodo. A hot-tempered boy named Ran struggles against the Rodo and against a world in which rain has become nothing more than a legend. Green Legend Ran by Yu Yamamoto and Satoshi Saga, released in 1992 and 1993, is one of those anime titles that rarely appears on cult lists. Sure, Akira, Spirited Away, or Perfect Blue are always represented, but Green Legend Ran has long existed in the shadows—and entirely without justification. In fact, it was one of the few titles I once ordered from a catalog on VHS. Alongside *El Hazard* and a *Bubblegum Crisis* music video tape. For whatever reason. I had always intended to get the otaku documentary instead—but at the time I was too young, since it was restricted to viewers 18 and older. As mentioned earlier, Green Legend Ran is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth with a distinct science-fiction aesthetic. After an extraterrestrial invasion in which six of the so-called Rodo—an apparent race of gigantic monoliths—crash down from space, a massive climate shift is triggered that completely eradicates the oceans and rainfall, transforming the planet largely into an immense desert. By that time, humanity had already devastated the environment, making a kind of apocalypse inevitable—similar to other environmentally themed anime such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, or Future Boy Conan. In this brutal new world, two polarized factions have emerged. The first, the Rodoists, is a fanatical religious sect that worships the Rodo while practicing a form of hydraulic despotism. All communities are clustered around one of the monoliths, as they are the only remaining sources of water and food—most of which is gathered near the monoliths in what is known as the Sacred Green. Travel between communities is rare, since beyond a certain distance from the monoliths the environment becomes so depleted that even the air is no longer breathable, requiring pressurized, spaceship-like vehicles. The second faction, the Hazard, is a secret revolutionary movement that opposes the Rodoists. The protagonist, Ran, is a young orphan determined to join the Hazard and seek revenge on the scar-chested man who killed his mother. He becomes caught in the middle of a battle between the Hazard and the Rodoists, during which he meets a mysterious silver-haired girl named Aira. Ran helps several Hazard scouts escape from his city and joins them. Soon afterward, the Rodoist army attacks the Hazard base. Aira is forcibly evacuated by the Hazard against her will. Ran attempts to board the sandship but fails, and begins pursuing it across the desert in a stolen pressure suit. He is rescued by traveling water and food merchants just before his air supply runs out. The leader of the traders, a thoughtful man named Jeke, offers to help Ran rescue Aira. The rescue attempt goes awry when the Rodoists attack the Hazard sandship and recapture Aira while Ran and the merchants attempt to infiltrate the same vessel. Divided into three chapters, Green Legend Ran is a rousing adventure film featuring carefully crafted characters who seek happiness after the apocalypse. What begins in a dusty shantytown quickly evolves into an epic journey across deserts, forests, and sacred cities to uncover the secret behind the Rodo. Co-developed by the well-known illustrators Kenji Teraoka and Yoshiharu Shimizu, the work brims with action, humor, and occasional touches of romance. At times it is quite brutal and, toward the end, features more exposed breasts than many a hentai manga. Naturally, Green Legend Ran can be interpreted as a metaphor for the environmental catastrophe toward which our species is undeniably heading. Perhaps the Rodo were summoned by the Earth itself to prevent humanity from causing further harm—who knows. Anyone who enjoys a densely packed adventure anime filled with rugged characters, gigantic sandships, religious fanatics, and a bit of bloodshed will have just as much fun with Green Legend Ran as I did. Not least because of the outstanding soundtrack by Yoichiro Yoshikawa. And who knows—perhaps the film ultimately presents a not-so-implausible vision of the real world’s future. Thursday, 23 February 2023. The Modern Diet: Honestly, I don’t even know why I’ve been eating less meat in the past few weeks. And when I say less, I actually mean a lot less. It just happened that way. At lunchtime, the cafeteria always served a portion of French fries with ketchup and mayo for a buck—and that was enough for me. Out of curiosity, I picked up a pack of vegan salami at the supermarket, which was actually quite good. And a little avocado, hummus, or pickles with the cheese sandwich: Best. I’m not concerned about health, climate, taste, culture, or even the animals in my newly discovered meat reduction. Let the critters be chopped up. Preferably quickly and efficiently. Why does everyone want to eat only happy animals? The unhappy ones would be much more worthwhile to be torn out of life. Then, at least, it would be over for them. I can think of at most three reasons why I don’t have to think like a psychopathic Patrick all day long of roasted pigs, fried chicken, and freshly butchered cows just because I’ve stuffed myself with nothing but fruit, vegetables and cereals for a day. First, I don’t give a shit about what I eat. I’ve long since reached a redemptive point in terms of nutrition, where the focus is on coffee. And everything else is second to seventh priority. Whether I’m shoving a veal cutlet in my mouth or some soy wheat bean mash-based alternative pudding, I don’t give a fuck. It’s all good—as long as it doesn’t make me throw up. Second, it makes me feel better than everyone else. At least secretly. When I put the vegan cold cuts on the conveyor belt at the checkout and the guy behind me has his half a kilo of mixed mince for 2.99 dollars, I think to myself that I’m the more modern person of the two of us. Of course, I don’t tell him that. But I let him know it by placing the sliced, rancid sunflower seed porridge with shredded vegetables in it in such an optimal position that he can read what’s written there in big letters under the supermarket logo: “I’m better than you!” Third, I am a follower. And that’s probably the most important reason of all. You just have to tell me certain things often enough, and eventually, I’ll believe them. When I watch more or less secret recordings of some redneck slaughterhouses, where chickens are trampled, piglets are castrated, and cows are mistreated, then it has at most a short-term effect on me. But the more often I witness such things, the more I think to myself: Okay, okay, from now on more cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes should suffer. I get it. A few years ago, I wrote an insanely important literary text with the brilliant title Vegetarians, fuck you! Meat is for eating, in which I vehemently defended my desire for dead animals. And when I read through this, you can’t call it anything else, philosophical masterpiece, I actually continue to stand by everything I wrote back then. Especially the first three words of the headline are still very close to my heart. But I have learned in recent months that it is extremely important to try something new and only then decide whether you want to continue on this path—or not. After all, we live in a time that often seems overwhelming and thus equally depressing due to its countless possibilities, but on the other hand, it has never been made easier for us to simply dare to do something different and thereby develop an eclectic view of the world, society and, hopefully, ourselves. By the way, before any militant vegetarians or even, God forbid, vegans celebrate me now for being the first person on this planet who has at least somewhat reduced his meat consumption, I would like to clarify something. Because I have three more than important rules with this newly discovered life feeling, which I use myself to keep almost rigorously. First, although I actively do not buy meat and sausage produced from cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys or, what do I know, monkeys. But I do eat these products when they are offered to me somewhere. For example, when people invite me to eat. The reason is that a little meat can’t hurt. Possibly to prevent some ominous nutritional deficiency. Besides, I assume that this meat, in restaurants or at people’s homes, is of higher quality than when I get a bag of frozen Chicken McNuggets at Aldi. Secondly, I am not a vegan. It doesn’t matter if it’s milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, eggs, honey, or whatever else you can squeeze out of the critter: It ends up in my mouth. I don’t feel like giving up eighty percent of all food just because, for whatever reason, it contains milk proteins, has been filtered through some fish bladders, or once a chicken egg flew past it. Give it a bone! That amount of boomer mentality is necessary. Third, I eat fish. Ha! I can already see the surprised look on your face. I love fish. Salmon, pike perch, dorado, trout, halibut, herring, scampi, tuna, clams, crabs, eel, squid, cod, mackerel, plaice, oysters, shrimp, and sardines. Whatever is crawling around in the sea, I will find it, catch it, and inhale it on the spot. And you can send me as many links as you want to some pseudo-scandalous documentaries in which seventy thousand fish have to spend the rest of their lives squeezed into a rain barrel, just so I can slap them on my sushi: I don’t care. As I write this, I’m stuffing myself with a cheese sandwich with the last vegan salami slice that was still lying around somewhere at home, and I just can’t find a reason why I should have bought the ones with cows, pigs, or horses in them instead. But maybe this is just the beginning of my journey. Possibly I will eventually evolve into a higher being who can live on nothing but sun, air, and coffee. And probably only then would I be truly satisfied with myself and the world. Wednesday, 22 February 2023. Terror of the Underworld: When Arano steps out of the station in Shibuya, his fate is already sealed. The young man came to Tokyo to make his dreams come true: he wants knives to rain down—preferably into the hearts of the Yakuza, toward whom he harbors an inexplicable and ruthless hatred. “There are too many superfluous elements in this world,” is the credo he keeps murmuring to himself. Before long, the otherwise rather taciturn Arano, played by Chihara Junia, finds himself caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs and, amid the chaos, befriends the club owner Kamijo, portrayed by Onimaru, as well as the outspoken skater Alice, brought to life by Rin Ozawa. Yet the fragile bonds he forms are quickly torn apart again by greed, revenge, and arrogance. The film Pornostar, released in 1998, is the debut work of Japanese director Toshiaki Toyoda and can at least not claim one thing: to be normal. Somewhere between drama, thriller, and gangster film—and with a bucket of stage blood thrown in—a hint of a love story even begins to grow, all within the restless backdrop of a Tokyo on the brink of the new millennium. Pornostar is full of blood, violence, and death. And yet all of this unfolds almost matter-of-factly, incidentally, and with such raw craftsmanship that one almost feels as if sitting in the same room, witnessing one human life after another being extinguished—only to end up back out on the street afterward with a cigarette in one’s mouth, blowing one’s hard-earned yen in the nearest arcade. The film lacks sympathetic characters with whom one might identify. Arano’s motive for wanting to cleanse the world of the Yakuza can be sensed, but for the most part it remains hidden from the viewer. Kamijo’s fateful step into the clutches of the underworld happens just as casually as the final meeting with Alice, who, of all the characters, might have represented a possible way out for Arano and his dream of raining knives. But perhaps it is precisely this narrative flaw that makes Pornostar so special. Perhaps one does not even want these people to find happiness. Why should they? They chose of their own free will to take part in this cruel game of the underworld. Perhaps they practically deserve Arano as an avenging angel. And perhaps he too, with the first murder, plunges himself into an abyss from which there can be no escape. In fact, Pornostar reminded me of the film Love & Pop by Hideaki Anno, which was released the same year—without sharing any other similarity beyond the fact that both are set in the same city. Yet the raw, almost documentary-style filmmaking of both directors could be seen as two sides of the same coin. Only that one side is filled with misbehaving schoolgirls, and the other is… well… filled with blood. Anyone who watches Pornostar expecting to feel satisfied, inspired, or even happy by the end is mistaken. The film takes no prisoners—quite the opposite. One might wish for one or another character to experience the Grand Summer of Love on Fiji and blissfully slide into the year 2000, but as the Bible already says: “For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” And in this heartless world, defying that sacred prophecy seems almost impossible. Tuesday, 21 February 2023. I Only Dreamed of You: Mima Kirigoe is ready to leave her career as a celebrated pop idol behind and pursue a dazzling future as an actress. However, shedding her former image proves far more difficult than she ever imagined, and the dark world of show business threatens to drag her into the depths of despair. Is Mima able to keep a firm grasp on the things that define her while the strains of her new career path take their toll and a menacing presence from her pop-star past lurks in the background? And as delusions, fiction, and reality begin to blur in her mind, what is it that truly defines her in the first place? Without a doubt, the 1997 film Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon, based on the novel of the same name by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, is one of those anime you must see before you die. And just last night, I was finally able to cross that very point off my bucket list. What begins as a story about a starlet and her stalker becomes increasingly entangled with each successive scene in a web of shattered dreams and dubious memories. As an enthralled viewer, you break through one meta-layer after another with each of Mima’s thoughts—only to be utterly drained in the end by the torrent of psychotic impressions that has just washed over you. Who is Mima? Where is Mima? And above all: why is Mima? Step by step, you witness how the initially sweet, cheerful, and naïve Mima is cast into a hell of depression, murder, and rape. Who can be trusted—and who cannot? When do you stop being yourself? And in the end, which decision was right—and which was wrong? Perfect Blue is a visually striking and, thanks to Masahiro Ikumi’s fantastic soundtrack, sonically powerful journey into the deepest abysses of the human soul. The film shows that hope and despair are often separated by nothing more than a single unintended step, and that truth is frequently nothing more than a long-forgotten thought that may once have existed but was quietly replaced by fear, panic, and the longing for a redeeming answer. Sunday, 19 February 2023. The Pop Terrorists: While the whole world celebrates South Korea’s cultural boom and it seems like half my classmates are studying abroad in the country’s colorful capital because of it, we must remember a unique collective alongside veterans like Blackpink, Red Velvet, and BTS, and newcomers like Ive, Le Sserafim, and NewJeans: Balming Tiger, the quirky pioneers of Seoul’s idiosyncratic rap scene. This special group is a blend of multimedia outsiders who throw K-pop from its glittery, polished world into the underground. Imagine Girls’ Generation meets Brockhampton, or Keith Ape meets Abra. I’m hoping to see them live soon, because that would be more than amazing. Balming Tiger, the self-proclaimed multinational alternative K-pop band, aims to conquer our boring world with their unorthodox style. The collective consists of performers Omega Sapien, Sogumm, BJ Wnjn, and Mudd the Student, producers San Yawn and Unsinkable, video directors Jan’ Qui and Leesuho, visual artist Chanhee Hong, DJ Abyss, and writer Henson Hwang. Each artist in this ensemble brings a distinct artistic identity and energy, showcasing a broad range of versatility. They approach music with a focus on diversity rather than adhering to a single genre. I especially love Sogumm’s soulful additions to the group’s artistic repertory. Named after the infamous Asian Tiger Balm ointment, the band’s core creative vision is to reflect and represent the current young generation. Their music is a call to trust in our collective selves, move forward, and embrace love. Their debut album January Never Dies, along with their first extended play and other works, are vibrant expressions of today’s hyper-expressive Asian youth, drawing from a wide array of Western influences in hip-hop, electronic, and alternative genres. Songs like Sexy Nukem, Just Fun, and Loop? are as original as they are diverse, appealing even to those listeners who might be skeptical about the aggressive South Korean pop wave. Saturday, 18 February 2023. Don’t Stop Shooting! I finally watched Shinichiro Ueda’s 2017 film One Cut of the Dead the other day. And what can I say? It is, as anyone who has seen it can attest, absolutely fantastic. The big problem is that I really shouldn’t reveal anything about it, not even the genre, because otherwise I strip away all the fun. Only this much: One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a small film crew is in the middle of shooting a zombie picture… But of course it’s not an ordinary warehouse. Rumor has it that military experiments were carried out here… on human beings! Then, as if from nowhere, real zombies suddenly appear and terrorize the crew. A bloody struggle for survival begins… What sounds like off-the-shelf junk from the recycling bin turns into one of the most entertaining indie films in recent years, half an hour in. Born in 1984, the same year as me, Shinichiro Ueda succeeds in playing with the audience’s expectations and, in one fell swoop, swings the mood of the entire film around so abruptly that I no longer know what’s up, what’s down, or where front and back even are. The shift isn’t just clever, it’s brazen, gleeful, and meticulously prepared. Choices that first read as mistakes reassemble into punch lines and reveals. From that point on, the movie’s confidence is unmistakable, and I watch, grinning, as it keeps tightening screws I didn’t realize were there. One Cut of the Dead lives on the goofs, mishaps, and blunders during the shoot, and on the fact that, while watching those legendary thirty minutes for the first time, I was thinking exactly the things that later suddenly make sense. That some scenes run far too long, that the actors often stare off in arbitrary directions, that the action sometimes unfolds entirely outside the frame. I’d say that, deep down, One Cut of the Dead is a film about family—for reasons that, of course, only reveal themselves at the end. At the very least, Ueda’s work is full of surprises and grows not only funnier by the minute but also more coherent. If you want to escape the same old mush for nearly two hours, this zombie splatterfest has you covered. Don’t stop shooting! Friday, 17 February 2023. Rebellious Girls: The Japanese music label Wack, itself belonging to the J-pop giant Avex, is famous for its eccentric groups, among them BiSH, EMPiRE, and Gang Parade. Founded in 2014 by Junnosuke Watanabe, the company declared a clear mission: To offer a proper stage to artists who are a little more experimental, a little stranger, and not immediately comfortable inside conventional idol frameworks. Crucially, that support doesn’t mean indifference to results. Even while foregrounding otherness and odd textures, Wack aims its performers toward success and plans their activities with that outcome in mind. The label’s identity sits between provocation and pragmatism, pairing freedom to try unusual ideas with careful presentation and smart promotion so that unorthodox performers can still reach large audiences across Japan. ASP is one of Wack’s newer workhorses, arriving at a moment when the label has to reorient after the breakup of the exceptional unit BiSH. To keep up in Japan’s fiercely competitive music market, the group now opens itself even more to alternative directions, trying approaches that are off to the side of mainstream idol pop while still jostling for attention. Their first album bore a telling, tone-setting title Anal Sex Penis, which makes plain how seriously they take themselves: not at all. The provocation operates like a wink and a shrug, announcing a willingness to poke at taboos and to laugh at expectations, even as the underlying aim, to succeed within that crowded field, remains in view. From the outset, the band signaled that irreverence was part of their method. The lineup, Yumeka Nowkana, Nameless, Mog Ryan, Matilder Twins, Wonker Twins, CCCCCC, and Riontown, cheerfully kicks at the fixed rules laid down by their predecessors, especially in live performances, where expectations are treated with irreverence. Yet they never completely hide what they are at heart: a cast pop-punk band full of shy girls who from time to time prefer to strike quieter, more reflective notes, like in I Won’t Let You Go, my personal favorite. That mix of brashness and modesty, of noise and pause, shapes ASP’s character. Precisely this seemingly paradoxical spectrum sets them apart from the competition and gives them an unusual opportunity to extend their otherwise rather short half-life, in contrast to the countless peers whose momentum fades quickly in the same crowded, fast-moving idol environment. It keeps curiosity alive while allowing growth without abandoning their origin. Wednesday, 15 February 2023. Four Sisters and a Funeral: The three sisters Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika live together in a large old house in the Japanese coastal city of Kamakura. When they learn of the death of their estranged father, they decide to travel to the countryside for his funeral. There, they meet their shy half-sister Suzu for the first time. They quickly grow fond of her and invite her to live with them. Suzu happily agrees and begins a new life with her older sisters. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s movie Our Little Sister, set against the vivid backdrop of Kamakura’s changing seasons, the four sisters navigate the full spectrum of human emotion and sustain one another through life’s trials, forging a profoundly intimate bond. Against the backdrop of the summer ocean sparkling in the sunlight, the glowing autumn leaves, an avenue of magnificent yet fleeting cherry blossom trees, hydrangeas dampened by the rainy season, and a brilliant fireworks display announcing the arrival of a new summer, their moving and deeply relatable story portrays the irreplaceable moments that make up a true family. Accompanied by the wonderful music of the legendary composer Yoko Kanno—who previously created soundtracks for works such as Tokyo Sora, Petal Dance, and Kamikaze Girls—the audience shares in the sisters’ emotions and challenges in every scene. Every touch of the piano keys carries meaning; every stroke of the violin tells a story. Our Little Sister is an airy, gentle yet sorrow-tinged drama about people in different stages of life who, though marked by the past, refuse to let it dictate their fate. Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika do not hesitate for a second to take in their young half-sister Suzu and offer her the family she never had. And when the four young women stand on the beach after yet another trial, laughing as they gaze into the distance, one feels grateful to have met them and the other residents of the small town—to have shared in both the joyful and sorrowful changes. I hope that the future of the four sisters will shine as brightly as the small fireworks display that had only moments before illuminated the overgrown garden of the large old house. Monday, 13 February 2023. The Pointless Love: As she sets off for home, I call after her with the first stupid remark that happens to come to mind. The slender girl dressed in black, wearing white sneakers marked by life, turns around one more time, grins, calls back, and raises her hand. I wave too, and then she steadily becomes a little smaller—smaller still than she already is. The smoke from her cigarette dances in the otherwise so clear air. I only watch her go for a brief moment; I can’t bear the sight—and the cold that gradually embraces me—any longer. I open the heavy glass door and step once more into the building bursting with other people’s dreams, which over the past months has turned into our refuge from the usually loud, chaotic world outside, seemingly abandoned by all good spirits. I deliberately want to miss the moment when she disappears completely behind the walls. Maybe because deep down I really am a coward, and this way it takes longer to sink in that without her, here in these light-flooded halls, it’s quite lonely. There is no worse feeling than being in love with a girl I shouldn’t be in love with—for various reasons. Perhaps because there are simply too many differences between myself and the one on the other side. Because the girl of my affection already has someone who occupies the position I’d like to hold myself. Or because the girl I keep thinking about, at the most impossible times—maybe even constantly—simply doesn’t share the same emotions I so vulnerably hold out to her. And if things go really badly, then all of these points apply at once and hit me all the harder. One almost insurmountable truth seems certain: this love makes no sense, has no future, and therefore no value. And there’s nothing I can do to change that, no matter how much I turn it over in my mind or wish it were otherwise. With all my might, I try to find objective arguments for why it would be far more logical if I didn’t feel any affection for the shamelessly grinning person opposite me. But no matter how meticulously I search for them, they simply don’t exist—anywhere. The lists, tables, and diagrams of negative reasons remain empty again today—as always. Because there’s absolutely nothing that argues against wanting to immerse myself in this body that seems almost ready to burst with different talents. How could one possibly resist the sober, disarming, and sharp-witted charm of this girl? She’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s cheeky. She always has a stupid quip at the ready, either glows with energy or sinks apathetically into her thoughts, and every time I talk to her she opens up like a human incarnation of a lucky bag full of interesting stories. Her manner flows seamlessly from brazen brat to motivating muse, without entirely dispensing with rules, guidelines, and socially relevant conventions. At heart, she’s one of the good ones—no matter how much she sometimes tries to conceal that with her abrasive ways and loose tongue. I collect every new detail of her life like puzzle pieces scattered all over the globe, which, piece by piece, assemble into a lovingly decorated and partially scarred treasure map I can use to orient myself as I discover still more adventures, memories, and inspirations. Then I sit there, listen, marvel, and travel back with her once more to those fateful moments that made her the—quite literally—wonderful personality she is today. And no matter how great, meaningful, or varied I may consider my own existence, it’s nothing compared to the plays unfolding before my mind’s eye. I watch, transfixed, and can only gape in astonishment. This pointless love is not a shock, not a jolt, not an earthquake. It gnaws at me, always a little—sometimes more, sometimes less. Usually in situations when I least expect it, or when I catch sight again of a certain smile shaped by the experiences of a young but exciting life. For a brief moment I am happy, only to remember shortly afterward that there was a reason my heart would soon feel a little heavier again. Yet contrary to appearances, this pointless love is not an ominous feeling—quite the opposite. Far more bleak would be to deny myself this emotion from the outset. For the fact that I can feel this pointless love anywhere at all in my stunted, empathy-stripped soul is proof that I haven’t completely closed myself off from the world, that I’m not yet dead inside, that there’s still hope I won’t someday drown irretrievably in my minimalist melancholy. As she sets off for home, I call after her with the first stupid remark that comes to mind. There are no lies hidden in my words, no mockery, and no false expectations. I am fully aware of the position from which I’m almost shouting after her, and that her small world is already fully occupied by figures I can neither replace nor wish to. The slender girl dressed in black, wearing white sneakers marked by life, turns around one more time, grins, calls back, and raises her hand. I wave too, and then she steadily becomes a little smaller—smaller still than she already is. The only hope rests on a future in which I may continue to follow that pretty face and listen to its stories. After all, our time together is limited. But the psychologically perhaps not entirely sound fact that other people bore me or even get on my nerves after the shortest time, while this girl does not, is sometimes so new, so rare, so unusual that I simply can’t help staying close to her and waiting with curiosity to see what might still come. Of course, I have to be careful not to fall into the same traps so many others have fallen into before me. Because unrequited affection can tip over in the blink of an eye, leaving me not only with the sad certainty of an unfulfilled romance but also standing amid the ruins of a friendship turned to dust and ash. And I should obviously avoid that at all costs; otherwise this depressing journey will end not only empty-handed, but with a wounded soul as well. There’s no worse feeling than being in love with a girl I shouldn’t be in love with—for various reasons. And yet, secretly, I’m a little glad about it. Because it also says a great deal about me and the path I have taken so far. After all, this emotion, classified as negative from the very beginning, can—with a different perspective—transform in no time into a veritable treasure trove of consciousness-expanding ideas. I just have to draw the right conclusions from it and must not act according to outdated patterns of thought. This pointless love is a bittersweet gift from which I can draw insights, gather inspiration, and gain a lesson or two about myself and others. It gives me the opportunity to enrich my own life with the experiences of the girl, which she shares so trustingly. I should by no means close myself off to this chance—on the contrary, I should face it as open-heartedly as possible. Even if, or perhaps precisely because, I will probably never reach the actual goal: becoming a part of the world of the one to whom this pointless love is directed. But hope—no matter how small, feeble, or unrealistic it may be—is known to die last. And sometimes that’s all I need to keep going in this usually so loud, chaotic world abandoned by all good spirits that waits for me out there, beyond these light-flooded halls. Sunday, 12 February 2023. God Is Chill: To live up to my rediscovered campaign of unconditional openness, I of course don’t want to withhold how my first semester in the Interactive Media program at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences went. After all, we’ve just received the grades for our exams. And let’s put it this way: it went better than expected. Really. It borders on an organizational miracle that I survived the scientific area so unscathed. Maybe the evening group prayers with my fellow students via one or two text messages actually did help after all. And that despite having learned that you should never demand anything from God, only ask politely. And also: if you only turn to God in a crisis but don’t think of him when things are going well, then he’s first busy forgiving you before he helps you. But apparently God is more laid-back than one might think. So, in that sense: thx. And: lots of love. Of course, I didn’t miss out on a clichéd bit of fun: trying to crash the university’s online administration server with one reload after another until the grades finally became visible. But it didn’t work. Probably I should have reloaded not every five minutes, but every five seconds. Oh well—now I know for next time. My lawyer, by the way, advises me to make it clear at this point that I will not attempt to crash the university’s server—or any other server, or anything else in this world—in any way whatsoever. Neither intentionally nor accidentally. These days, you can never be too careful. Many thanks to Mr. Goldberg of the law firm Goldberg and Partners. Props where props are due. I’m quite satisfied with the results of my first semester, but I’m also aware that I’ll only manage the coming years if I cram the material into my head more consistently, more regularly, and with far more commitment. With the right mix of Anki, repetition, and the Pomodoro technique. At least those are the three strategies I plan to focus on. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. What do I know about proper studying anyway. I’ve also realized something else—something I hadn’t definitively decided at the beginning of my studies: which degree I want to pursue. Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science. We have to know by the third semester. But if the computer science exam offers even a small glimpse of what’s still to come, then I will cling to the Bachelor of Arts with all my might. Because otherwise I might end up standing there empty-handed. After all, good and bad art can always somehow be argued for—but computer science is like a killer robot gone out of control. It knows no mercy, only zeros and ones. Pass or fail. Life or death. And I know which side I’d be on. Apart from that, I can say that the Interactive Media program at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences is a lot of fun, very varied, and should be interesting for anyone who feels reasonably at home in both the artistic and the technical worlds. A large part of the entertainment value also comes, of course, from the fellow students with whom you battle through lectures, practicals, and exams—but that’s probably the case in any degree program. And in that respect, I’ve been really lucky. Shout-outs to Group C, which a perhaps slightly too clever person rightly described as those who always sat in the back row at school. Unfortunately, I can no longer claim to be a freshman. This very time-limited term, in combination with my not-quite-so-dewy person, had always caused wide eyes and the occasional stammer in people standing opposite me. In any case, I’m curious to see what new adventures await us in the second semester, and I’ll be spending the next few weeks reviewing the fundamentals of programming so that I can also pass the postponed exam successfully. Hopefully. But at least I’m not the only one who hasn’t yet managed to get this topic behind them—for whatever reasons. And with that, we close another chapter of my rediscovered campaign of unconditional openness. I hope you’ll join me again next time as the more or less exciting journey of Marcel Winatschek as a student continues. Will he crash a certain server? Will he be the first person to be awarded a master’s degree in the second semester because he is finally recognized as the global genius he always claimed to be? So handsome, so smart, and yet so modest. Or will he be exmatriculated because the glass buildings of the university simply aren’t fireproof enough for him and his—let’s call them—accidents? Stay tuned; we’ll know more soon. Hooray. Friday, 10 February 2023. A Single Moment: Sometimes all it takes is a single instant, a moment, even the tiniest thought—and suddenly I’m falling again. Just a second ago I was laughing, content with my life because, for once, something had finally worked out the way I had always wished it would, or at least I had no reason, for a change, to hate the world and every single person in it. And then, a second later, I plunge back into the same old, worn-out abyss from which it becomes a little harder to climb out every time. Then there seems to be no gray, no gradations. Only black and white. I am either saturated with the pure joy of eternal existence, or nothing has any meaning and it would be better if I disappeared from the face of the earth right here and now, because then I wouldn’t have to think anymore about why, for God’s sake, everything was shit again—even though just a few minutes ago it had been going so well. There is nothing in between. No rope, no safety net. I either soar or I crash. What I had just considered secure, good, and immune to negative thoughts is suddenly put back on trial. I start to brood. To doubt. To question everything I had already regarded as settled. Mistrust then envelops me like a leaden cloak that wraps itself smoothly around my body and slowly presses me down to the ground—where, apparently, I belong. Was that comment this morning really meant kindly? The emphasis was a bit too ironic, the accompanying look just a little too mocking. Is it possible that everything this person has ever said to me and about me wasn’t meant seriously at all? Is there any proof that we actually get along well? He’s probably just making a fool of me. Because in the end he’s just like everyone else. And I have no choice but to see through him before it’s too late—for whatever that might mean. Often it’s enough if the other person doesn’t immediately reply to a supposedly totally casual, funny WhatsApp message that is definitely not dripping with self-doubt. No one could have guessed that the spontaneous-sounding remark had been painstakingly crafted over hours in a specially opened word-processing document and adorned with the perfect mix of emojis, punctuation, and colloquial touches to come across as humanly normal as possible when I finally send it at the optimally calculated time. After all, not everyone is such a complete psychopath as I am. Then I suddenly find myself back on the same roller coaster as thousands of times before, with the familiar loops of thought that I keep trying to break—of course without success. Because in every mental decision I stubbornly take the same directions I have always chosen. As if I had learned absolutely nothing since the last collapse. And that, even though I had sworn to myself that next time everything would be better—or at least different. So once again I rattle through all the stations of inner turmoil in my little, rusty cart of questionable metaphors and at the end of the ride arrive at the one single true realization I have always arrived at: that I am not worth it—whatever it is that happens to matter to me at that moment. I am not worth having friends. I am not worth experiencing love. I am not worth being attractive. I am not worth being taken seriously. I am not worth being successful. I am not worth being an equal. I am not worth being allowed to be happy. Everyone else is worthy—just not me. But I should have known that from the start. Why had I even bothered to build up hopes in the form of this fragile house of cards when it was obvious that the slightest gust of wind would make everything collapse again? I could really have spared myself the effort. How foolish. If you won’t listen, you have to feel. Your own fault. These extreme mood swings always come when I need them least. When I had finally made peace with myself, when I had found myself again, when the world wasn’t actually so bad. But no such luck. The world was bad. Really bad. It had conspired against the one person who simply wanted to find happiness. And that person was me. Of course, it went without saying that I myself was responsible for the misery I had just thought myself into. As always, it was the others who were to blame. After all, I only wanted the best for myself, for them, for everyone. Didn’t they sense that? Didn’t they know that? Maybe I should have tried a little harder to convince them of my deeply good intentions… Once I’ve hit the ground, I’m left with only two options: to remain there and come to terms with the bitter truth that I’m simply a bad person, or to reach upward again in the hope of somehow finding a way to change my fate carved in stone—however that might be possible. Sometimes all it takes is a single instant, a moment, the tiniest thought—and suddenly I’m falling again. Perhaps it’s impossible to defend myself against these external and internal influences. Perhaps they always hit me, and with such force that I no longer know which way is up or down. Like an enemy who knows me inside and out and always aims precisely at the most exposed weak spot. Which makes sense. Because that enemy is me—and no one else. And yet perhaps I can set up mental safety nets in advance that will catch me when these mood swings take aim at me again. A bag full of good, safe thoughts that protect me from falling back into the familiar abyss. Comforting truths that remain valid even when everything else has fallen victim to despair. And a solid basic trust in myself—that despite my psychological shortcomings, I have worth. As a person. As a friend. And as someone whose love for themselves will, hopefully, overcome even the greatest fears. Thursday, 9 February 2023. Literature for Sheep: Japanese music is a collection of anthems for my own little messed-up world. Whether it reminds me of sad anime episodes, the churning background music in video games, heartbreak, or my first few moments at Narita airport, stepping through the “Welcome to Japan” banner into an universe of cultural, technological, and human wonder, J-pop and J-rock are always there for me. They plug a little of the constant melancholy in my small, perpetually annoyed and bored heart. The energetic music of bands like Indigo la End, King Gnu, and Asian Kung-Fu Generation is a frequent soundtrack to my thoughts, worries, and desires. And so are Hitsujibungaku. For decades, rock music from the Land of the Rising Sun was in a creative crisis. There was little sign of anarchy, change, or revolution. Artists in the genre seemed content to strum away as a copy of a copy of a copy, delivering a run-of-the-mill sound that, for good reasons, didn’t resonate outside Japan. They were simply too tame, too dull, and too boring, like rebels without hate—or even drugs. Hitsujibungaku, however, also don’t aim for destruction, decline, or chaos—but that doesn’t really matter. Celebrated by the Japanese press as a “smooth whirlwind,” Hitsujibungaku, roughly translating to “literature for sheep”, quickly made their musical breakthrough. Hitsujibungaku’s songs speak of the search for happiness, dancing in the moonlight, and dreams of an endless summer. When I hear Moeka Shiotsuka’s voice, accompanied by Yurika Kasai and Hiroa Fukuda, I know they mean what they play. “In a world full of unknowns, even if you pretend to be smart, you’ll still get hurt,” she sings. “At some point, you became focused on avoiding failure, giving up what you really want, without even knowing what that is. Not seeing it, overlooking it, becoming skilled only in despair. It’s a bit too early to decide it’s already too late.” If anything is worth preserving in our superficial world, it’s this kind of emotional sincerity. Wednesday, 8 February 2023. I Can Have Alone Time When I’m Dead: When I started my studies, my biggest concern wasn’t the course material, the professors, or fears about what the hell I would do with my degree once I had it in my pocket, but rather how the other students would react to me. After all, at the end of my 30s, I was twice their age. Most of them could have been my children. Maybe they were. One or two faces did look familiar… During the introductory week, my suspicion that I was the oldest person there was confirmed. By a long shot. Not just in my degree program, but generally within a 500-meter radius. Even the janitor was probably younger than me. And he was about to retire. Should that have given me pause? Yes, perhaps. But now that I was here, I had to make the best of it. In any case, I was mentally preparing myself to spend the next few years in isolation at the senior citizens’ table, slurping porridge and philosophizing with myself about the good old days. When MySpace was still the measure of all things. When I still had to rewind VHS tapes before returning them to the video store. When the song of the year was a techno remix of the Smurfs. “Every Smurf loves to listen to the radio, full blast anyway. The rhythm crashes into every leg—that’s how dance music for Smurfs should be!” While the university president gave his third welcome speech of the day, and seemed just as enthusiastic as he had been during his first, the campus was packed with young people who were equally confused and nervous, scurrying back and forth. Their T-shirts were decorated with more-or-less creative graduation slogans: 12 Years of Walk of Fame – The Stars Leave, the Fans Stay. And: Graduate Today, Captain Tomorrow. Or even: With Their High School Diplomas in Hand, Heroes Become Legends. With so much concentrated youthfulness, I felt like throwing up. However, I had of course expected this sight beforehand. Because I’m extremely clever. What else could I have expected? Exactly. After all, these people were the norm here—not me. They were the crowd; I was the outsider. Between the tours of the building, the city, and the room where the beer fridge was located, I got into conversation with my fellow students. Little by little, the uniform mass of more or less fashionably dressed bodies transformed into interesting characters with names, pasts, and humor. I quickly realized that they were just normal people, each with their own fears, hopes, and dreams. And they were all as excited as I was—if not more so—just for different reasons. A week full of get-to-know-you tours, various house parties, and a boozy study trip to the Bavarian Forest later, I no longer felt any fear of not being able to fit in because of my advanced age. When I entered the cafeteria the following Monday, the first familiar faces were already beaming at me. “Hey, Marcel!” I heard someone call cheerfully from one of the tables. I grinned back, followed the lively crowd, and sat down in a free seat among my new companions. Of course, I’m still “the old fart.” Just like Jenny is “the pothead”, Tim is “the farting guy”, and Fiona is “the one who got plowed in a fire truck.” I’m not the only one who gets stupid looks from strange students—no, everyone has their own baggage to carry, in one way or another. The key to happiness in this case is unconditional openness and a positive attitude—no matter how difficult that may be at times. Being part of a group means being aware of my possibly not-so-glorious shortcomings and taking it with humor when they are in the spotlight. The important thing is to have a good line ready to keep the wheel turning and shift the focus to the next person. It’s a game I only lose if I don’t participate. Since that fateful first week, hundreds of encounters have blossomed into friendships that have taken me all over the city—to various apartments, clubs, and bars. No matter where I go, I see familiar faces everywhere. Not only from my degree program, the student council, and the courses I took, but also from friends, roommates, and acquaintances who didn’t shy away from me because of my differences but, on the contrary, invited me into their lives. Of course, I still have to listen to the occasional stupid comment. But that’s part of it. Today, it’s completely normal for me to walk the streets with them, exchange stories, create memories, and delay the morning a little longer. I’m happy to learn more about those who confide in me, to support them with advice, action, and some jokes, and to help them solve one problem or another conscientiously—provided they want that at all. If you think you hate people, that you don’t need anyone but yourself, that you’re better off closing yourself off from everything and everyone, then you need to pack your bags, set your old life on fire, and go somewhere else. With new people, new opportunities, and new adventures. And as quickly as possible. Of course, these relationships are not permanent either. I will soon forget many names, faces, and encounters. And they will forget me. Because they have moved on. Or because I have taken a different path. And that’s perfectly fine. Because new people will come into my life again, over and over, as long as I make it possible, in whatever way I can. Some of them will stay—for longer, maybe even forever. But these opportunities only arise if you don’t nip every conceivable contact in the bud just because you’ve convinced yourself at some point that you’re happier alone. Out of fear, out of pain, out of feeling overwhelmed. Because no matter how strong you think you are in this matter, at some point you will break down. And then it will be too late. As we stumble out of Iveta’s apartment door, shouting loudly and smelling of tequila, wine, and popcorn schnapps, to grab a few more beers to go, I glance briefly down the brightly lit street. New people are streaming through it, and in the buildings people are laughing, singing, and dancing. Right now, at this moment, I am part of this backdrop, this ensemble, these stories. Because I took a chance and didn’t close myself off to the unknown, even though that would have been so much easier. Because one thing is certain: I can have alone time when I’m dead. Tuesday, 7 February 2023. The Boy and the Murderer: Mr. Long is not a man of many words. In fact, he hardly speaks at all. His talents lie more in… let’s say… practical work. Mr. Long is a Taiwanese contract killer. One of the good kind—someone who doesn’t ask questions when you give him a place, a time, and a target. Mr. Long simply does what needs to be done. And he’s pretty good at it. Usually. After his assignment to kill a Yakuza boss goes terribly wrong, Mr. Long, played by Chen Chang, finds himself stranded in a remote Japanese town. With only five days to scrape together the money for his journey home, he receives unexpected help from a little boy named Jun, portrayed by Junyin Bai, and from the unsuspecting townspeople who have fallen in love with his culinary talents. With a makeshift food stand set up by his new friends, he begins cooking and selling Taiwanese noodle soup in front of the local Buddhist temple. Trouble catches up with this unusual group when a drug dealer tracks down Jun’s mother Lily, brought to life by Yiti Yao, and through her eventually finds Mr. Long as well. Yet despite the inevitable confrontation with his violent past, Mr. Long will find it difficult to give up his new life. A cold-hearted hitman is showered with altruistic love and forced to surrender to it. The Japanese director Sabu masters the art of blending the ordinary with the unexpected. With a sly touch, he sends his protagonists into unfamiliar territory that expands both their minds and their hearts. Mr. Long shows me that happiness can be found in the most unlikely places. Mr. Long is difficult to assign to a single genre. With this film, Sabu created a drama whose unexpected moments are amusing, tragic, and shocking all at once—often at times when I least expect it. Just when I think I’ve figured the film out, around the next corner there’s either a clown, a chopped onion, or a knife that can hardly wait to strike again. I wish for a happy ending for Mr. Long, Jun, and Lily—a place where the three of them can be happy and left alone by the merciless world. But the past of this small patchwork family catches up with them just when I’ve finally stopped resisting the tears welling up in my eyes. In the end, I myself turn into one of those dreadful cliché viewers who laugh and cry at the same time—and I don’t even care. When Mr. Long looks out the café window to the other side of the street and his life suddenly gains a new meaning, I’m simply glad to have accompanied him on his turbulent journey of few words. Monday, 6 February 2023. Feelings Without a Name: In the most unexpected situations, I encounter girls whose sheer existence fascinates me so much that I can hardly comprehend it. It’s not as if I’m overwhelmed by love, hate, or pity, because the tentative affection I feel for the girl on the other side doesn’t fit into the emotional templates into which I’ve almost instinctively pressed all my previous encounters. It’s not love, because I’m not consumed by jealousy, desire, or grief. It’s not hate, because I finally feel a touch of empathy again. I’m happy when the girl is happy, and sad when the girl is sad. And it’s not pity, because any supposed fragility I see in the girl is merely a reflection of my own inadequacies. The more interesting I find a girl, the more I naturally want to learn about her. Even the smallest banalities that no one else is aware of—perhaps not even the girl in the spotlight—become significant, important, even overrated. What kind of music does she listen to? What clothes does she wear? How exactly did she become the collection of ideas, ideals, and identities that she is today? And what would I even do with the answers to these questions? The incomprehensibility of otherness can drive me mad if I’m not careful. Not only can I find no definition for my own feelings, I can’t even manage to pigeonhole the girl into neat categories. Every encounter brings new insights, and I feel compelled to shatter the theories I carved in stone the day before. Then the floor, littered with dust and debris, bears witness to the fact that the irrefutable knowledge of human nature—which I had been convinced of all these years—was worth about as much as the time I wasted trying to find answers to questions that may not even exist. After all, not even the girl in whom I suspect this enlightenment knows of its existence. Perhaps I project too much onto the girl. Perhaps there’s nothing there. Perhaps she’s just a normal girl who simply wants to come to terms with herself and the world around her and already has enough to deal with. Maybe I’m just imagining that I’m a little infatuated with her and her supposed secrets because it allows me to ignore the complexity of my own life for a short time. After all, I can only receive my own happiness once I’ve figured out how the girl defines happiness. Reality can wait for me until then. I rack my brains trying to figure out exactly what feeling I’m experiencing. Because if I could come up with a name for it—a definition—it would be easier to find a way to deal with it, to put it behind me, to come to terms with it. I’m not even sure if what’s buzzing around in my head is a real feeling at all, or if it’s just my imagination because I have too much time to think again. The feeling without a name is too strong to ignore but too weak to fully engage with. So I carry it around with me out of slowly creeping habit and wait almost anxiously for the moment when it knocks on the door of my chaotic world of thoughts again—usually when the mischievously smiling face that first led me down this strange path, in the truest sense of the word, enters the room. But perhaps this gap in my own emotional spectrum is also sad proof that I’ve lived my life so far in a predetermined manner, in which even my feelings were copies of copies of copies—from television, from books, from the lies of society. Their names are rules—no, almost laws—for how I should behave when I stumble into one of these feelings. Do I feel love? Then I despise the relationship the girl is in, burst with jealousy when she even looks at someone else, and cry alone at night, masturbating into my pillow, because I will never be part of her colorful world. Do I feel hatred? Then I turn the girl’s life into a hell on earth, set fire to her pet, her family, and her entire apartment building, spin the threads of manipulation so skillfully that she ends up collapsing in the street, screaming, because life no longer has any meaning. Do I feel pity? Then I turn myself into a more or less invisible guardian angel who will do anything to ensure that the victim of my favor never, ever suffers harm again—and I make sure to feel really good and great and important about myself while I’m doing it, because otherwise it all makes no sense. In the end, it’s all about me and no one else. Just like always. What’s the point of helping someone else if I can’t reap the rewards? Exactly. The worst thing about this nameless feeling is that I may not even have a right to it. After all, there are far more important people in the life of the girl I want to impose my worn-out template on. I’m nothing more than a fleeting minor character whose stage appearance is so brief that I’m not even explicitly mentioned in the script—at most, perhaps, as a passerby, spectator, or guy no. 5. But perhaps this insight is enough to make peace with the nameless feeling. Maybe it makes no sense to find meaning in it, because it’s not permanent and can disappear as quickly as it came—at the latest when the girl whose accessible gaze triggered it in the first place has moved on. On to new scenes, people, stories. While I myself linger in the backdrop that has just been abandoned by the spotlight and is about to dissolve, watching the silhouette that once smiled so disarmingly, only to forget shortly afterwards that the nameless feeling ever existed. Sunday, 5 February 2023. A Student for Life: After the more or less sudden end of AMY&PINK, I felt lost. For fifteen years, I had put all my energy into a project that was full of fun, passion, and hope at the beginning, but by the end had become nothing more than a slowly fading burden. When the bright lettering finally disappeared, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I sank into idleness, the days just passing me by. Was today Tuesday or already Friday? February or September? What year was it anyway? I couldn’t bring myself to do anything productive anymore and spent days, weeks, and months going for walks, watching TV shows, and going through depressive phases where I just lay there, switching between scrolling through Reddit, YouTube, and Pornhub. From sunrise to sunset. And vice versa. In my late 30s, my life seemed to be over. What else was there to look forward to? Except maybe a heart attack caused by too many frozen pizzas and too little exercise. The only things that kept me alive were the voice messages from my good friend Hannah, who probably knew me better than I knew myself at that point; the programming course I was forced to take by the employment office so that I would at least be busy with something; and the fact that I was far too lazy to commit suicide. On a much too hot summer day in June, I took the cheap ticket to nearby Munich to run around in circles and listen to a few podcasts. After all, I knew the streets of my hometown so well that they were getting on my nerves. At least there was life in Munich, even if there was none left inside me. After buying a picture book about Japanese pop culture in a bookstore—because that was the only topic that still interested me even remotely—I sat down on a free bench on my way back to the city center to leaf through it a little and, at the same time, press the ice-cold can of Diet Coke I had bought at the nearby supermarket to my mouth. Its contents had been my main source of nutrition for several weeks—after all, I didn’t want to get any fatter. When I looked up, I noticed that the bench I was sitting on was in front of the city university. Young people were buzzing all over the grounds, chatting and laughing. Some were in a hurry; others were sitting on the grass. There was a lively atmosphere. The large buildings watched over the small, mostly hectic figures whose futures would be shaped within them. The setting reminded me of TV shows such as Gilmore Girls, Community, and Greek, and I found it a little sad that I had never had the opportunity to lead what was surely a pretty exciting student life. My secondary school diploma wasn’t good enough for that, and after completing my training as a media designer, I had simply ignored the option of being allowed to study. After all, I wanted to earn money. With AMY&PINK. And that would undoubtedly live forever and soon become an international media empire. Like Vice. Or the New York Times. Or Russia Today, for that matter. Who needed a degree? So there I was, in my late 30s, sitting on this bench with nothing but a book and a can of Diet Coke to my name, feeling sorry for myself. Two young women had taken a seat next to me. The blonde proudly told me that her little sister had just registered in time for the entrance exam for the coming winter semester. The brunette was a little overly surprised. “I hope she gets accepted!” “She definitely will!” When I got home, I became interested in what I could have studied with the qualifications I had gained through my vocational training. Communication Design was listed. Graphic Design. Interactive Media. I was a little annoyed that I hadn’t taken advantage of this opportunity, but had instead been so stubborn as to consistently ignore any path that led me away from my very own trip. At the time, I was even proud of that stubbornness. While lethargically clicking around on the internet, I came across the website of the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, which had been offering a combination of design and computer science in its Interactive Media program for several years and advertised it with flowery words. The program sounded like a colorful grab bag of everything I enjoyed. Designing. Programming. I would even learn how to create video games. It was pure madness. Before I could sink back into self-pity over never having taken advantage of this opportunity, a date caught my eye. There was still one week left to apply for the program. The admission requirements stated that not only a high school diploma but also a vocational qualification would be sufficient—provided that I passed the necessary entrance exam. I took a sip from my seventh can of Diet Coke that day, thought for a moment, and filled out the linked application form. “I can give it a try,” became my motto from that day on. After that, everything happened very quickly. I was invited to take the entrance exam, which I passed. I was invited to an interview, which I passed. I was sent the application for enrollment, which I submitted on time. At the beginning of October, I entered the campus of Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, sat down in a lecture hall for the first time, and suddenly I was a student. Just a few weeks earlier, I had thought that my life would be over by the time I reached my late 30s—that there was nothing more to come, that all my dreams had been dreamed and all my hopes buried. Suddenly, I found myself in a completely new story, with new goals, new tasks, and new people. An unexpected adventure had begun—after all, I’m a student for life. Wednesday, 1 February 2023. Men Who Stare at Streets: Yusuke looks out of the window. Accompanied by the voice of his deceased wife, houses, trees, and the sea fly past him. He doesn’t notice that there is another person sitting in the red Saab 900 Turbo in front of him as he fills in the gaps in the sentences with his own words. Misaki will soon drive him to a place where he can finally find himself. Last night, I saw Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car for the second time. The Oscar-winning Best International Feature Film is based on the short story of the same name from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 book Men Without Women and tells the story of two people whose fateful encounter no one could have foreseen—least of all themselves. Yusuke is a successful stage actor and director who is married to the mysterious Oto, a beautiful playwright with whom he shares a peaceful life despite a painful past. When Oto suddenly dies, Yusuke is left with unanswered questions and the regret that he could not really understand her—nor did he want to. Two years later, still struggling with Oto’s death, Yusuke accepts an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. He drives his beloved fire-red Saab 900 Turbo to the big city in the west, where, upon arrival, he learns to his surprise and disappointment that, for legal reasons, he is forced to let Misaki, a young chauffeur who hides her own traumatic past, drive his car. Rehearsals progress, and eventually Yusuke and Misaki develop a routine, with the Saab increasingly becoming an unexpected confessional for both driver and passenger. Less pleasant for Yusuke, however, is the decision to cast Koji, a handsome young television actor with an unwanted connection to his late wife, in the lead role. As the premiere approaches, tensions between the cast and crew grow, and Yusuke’s increasingly intimate conversations with Misaki force him to face uncomfortable truths and uncover haunting secrets left behind by his wife. I’m glad I’ve now seen Drive My Car for the second time, because with each new encounter I have different expectations of the characters, whose thoughts and actions seem to reflect my understanding of human interaction. The character of Misaki, for example, now vaguely reminds me of someone I met recently. Her sober, disarming, and astute manner invites me to want to learn more about her. What does she think? Why does she think that way? And who—or what—made her who she is today? The flowing conversations in Drive My Car are like intimate dances whose intention is to build bridges to the other person—brick by brick, meter by meter. With each new day that dawns in Hiroshima, there is a chance that two people will open up a little more to each other, only to be rewarded with new insights, no matter how painful they may be. And these insights apply not only to the other person, but often to myself as well. Only those who have not even attempted to understand Drive My Car would describe it as calm. Every scene is seething with tension: Yusuke, who cannot forgive himself for his wife’s death and searches for answers that may not even exist; Misaki, whose observations only become words of trust when she assesses the chances of further hurt as low; and Koji, whose search for meaning can only save others, but not himself. Eiko Ishibashi’s selectively used music dispels the absolute silence at just the right moments, which is otherwise interrupted only by glances, touches, and conversations. Extensive tracking shots across the autumnal Japanese backdrop make the characters appear as if in a diorama, their desires, hopes, and dreams seeming small and lonely. A meta-level runs through the entire film: the story of Uncle Vanya, who is confronted with his life and his missteps in Anton Chekhov’s world-famous play. The character of Vanya represents someone who has spent his life working toward something that never came to fruition. It is a reflection on time and emotions wasted—a theme that both Yusuke and Misaki grapple with throughout the film, as both deeply regret their past relationships. Drive My Car is mature in the truest sense of the word. Its characters have shed all childishness, all banality—indeed, all traces of joie de vivre—and try, with their last ounce of strength, to maneuver safely through the thicket of painful memories, only to have to admit in the end that they cannot drive away from the past, not even in a red Saab 900 Turbo. Tuesday, 31 January 2023. Songs of Rebellion and Loneliness: I recently watched the documentary Our Lies and Truths about the rise and downfall of the Japanese girl group Keyakizaka46. After all, in recent years Techi and her comrades have been the idols I listened to most. Songs like Silent Majority, Ambivalent, and especially 黒い羊 still play on endless loop for me today, and the accompanying music videos are performative masterworks. Yasushi Akimoto, who has been responsible for acts such as AKB48, Onyanko Club, and Iz*One and also created Keyakizaka46, is not for nothing Japan’s most gifted and at the same time most hated producer. “Some people say Yasushi Akimoto destroyed the Japanese music industry, and I agree,” noted Agency for Cultural Affairs Commissioner Shunichi Tokura in cutting words. The most striking thing about Keyakizaka46, first sister group to Nogizaka46, once slated to debut as Toriizaka46, and already missing two members before its first show, is neither the music nor the choreography, and certainly not the powerful man behind them. It is the force with which their center, Yurina Hirate, seized the group’s inner climate and public face in no time, then year by year slipped toward madness, until, after much back-and-forth, she finally announced her departure in 2020. Soon after, the band renamed itself Sakurazaka46, unable to cope with the hole left by Yurina “Techi” Hirate, who had joined at fourteen. The 2020 label-made film Lies and Truths depicts sustained decay—depression, burnout, and total overextension from Techi, and a strange mix of envy, fury, and admiration among her colleagues. Techi was a prodigy, and no one could handle it—least of all herself. In interviews, former members recall Yurina Hirate’s impact and search for when everything went wrong. No one knows what turned her, hailed as a reborn Momoe Yamaguchi and, at fifteen, among the year’s most attractive idols, from a cheerful girl into someone alone and apathetic in dark corners. Only she does, and she won’t say. Maybe someday, she hinted in a 2020 radio interview. Even in the film she appears in fragments: She dances, sometimes falls, draws gazes, then implodes, sobbing “I can’t!” before backstage staff force on a new costume. Keyakizaka46 sang of youth, rebellion, and being different—messages that pierced schoolgirls and traumatized outsiders. What remains is brief brilliance, lingering remnants, and a restless soul seeking happiness elsewhere. Friday, 27 January 2023. When the Voice of an Entire Generation Fell Silent: Even today, people I don’t really know still ask me—by email, letter, and by shouting through open windows—what actually happened to AMY&PINK. The portal of good cheer. The party ship of Berlin’s newcomers. The voice of a generation that never wanted to grow up, partied for three days straight at Berghain, and woke up one morning in the ruins of their own denial of reality. The reflexive answer to the highly individual question of why AMY&PINK no longer exists is: “No idea.” And that wouldn’t even be a lie. Because I really don’t know. Maybe it just happened that way at some point. Maybe there was no longer any place for it in today’s media world. Maybe things just have to end at some point before they are kept alive artificially (even longer) for reasons that are incomprehensible. AMY&PINK saw the light of day in 2007 as the successor to my private blog, Tokyopunk, just as I was on my way to Berlin to begin my training as a designer in the field of conception and visualization at a digital new media agency. Everything was new, everything was exciting, everything in my life suddenly revolved around the German capital and the colorful people who bustled around in it. I filled my new project with personal stories, finds from the internet, and the occasional fresh music video, and found passionate writers such as Hannah, Caro, Ines, Misha, Wenke, Sara, Meltem, Jana, Daniela, and Leni to take the site to the next level. AMY&PINK transformed from a small blog into one of the nation’s most widely read online magazines. In the early years of the new decade, AMY&PINK was the digital go-to for young rebels, hipsters, and avant-gardists—and those who wanted to be just that, or at least know what these chaotic guys were up to and spouting nonsense about. We were invited by brands such as Mercedes, Microsoft, and Deutsche Telekom to events throughout Germany and around the world: New York, Toronto, London. Rome, Shenzhen, Los Angeles. Lisbon, Monaco, Las Vegas. To get drunk there with Kendrick Lamar, Tokio Hotel, and Frank Ocean. And all because we wrote strange things on the internet, constantly used swear words, and there were people who wanted to read exactly that. And every now and then there were bare breasts to be seen. Or girls throwing up. Or swastikas made of cocaine. The more provocative, the better. The press loved and hated us at the same time—much like our readers. Unfortunately, the problem was that I continuously maneuvered AMY&PINK into a spiral of “what the fucks” from which I soon couldn’t get the site out. At first, everything was funny, ironic, and over the top, but at some point a completely far-fetched professionalization of the content took hold. On the one hand, we had to be even more outrageous than everyone else to keep readers interested; on the other hand, advertisers demanded fewer exposed genitals on the homepage. On top of that, the Wild West days of the internet were over by the mid-2010s. Any visual content that wasn’t contractually approved by the copyright holder, rights manager, and preferably three to twelve additional lawyers couldn’t be published. The site lost its visual punch because everything consisted of official press photos, the texts became increasingly absurd and unrealistic, and AMY&PINK transformed from a radiant rock star into a washed-up madman who drunkenly assured strangers on the street that he was still cool—“really now, you, burp, stupid cunts!” With the departure of important AMY&PINK authors, the diversity of voices that had long ensured balance in the site’s content also disappeared. Before the decline, every photo series about fucking teenagers was accompanied by an intimate text about heartbreak, every LSD-soaked music video by an amusing travelogue, every bizarre triviality by a story about the small and big experiences of those who had chosen AMY&PINK as the medium to realize themselves digitally. After all, they could have published their texts in Vice, Huck, or the local newspaper. But at some point, there were only empty shock articles left—attracting attention at any cost, when no one had been interested for a long time. I tried to save AMY&PINK. Really. God is not my witness, but my friend Hannah is—without whom I might have drowned in my own madness long ago. The poor thing had to listen to the drama every day, for years on end. “You have to be able to make something out of this!” “That can’t be all there is!” “Maybe try again in another language?” I was caught in an endless cycle of brooding, doubting, and trying things out. If I were even a fraction as cool as I always pretended to be in my countless articles, I would have poured gasoline on AMY&PINK years ago, lit it on fire, and let it explode behind me in cinematic slow motion while I walked toward the camera with a crazy smile on my face. But I’m not cool. And I can’t just let go that easily. After all, visitor numbers were still quite good, the content we had built up over the years was being clicked on diligently, and any SEO expert would have been happy with such metrics. But in the end, I spent far too much time trying to save AMY&PINK—time that I should have invested in more important things. Finding a real job, for example. Having children, planting trees, building houses, whatever. Only to admit to myself at some point that AMY&PINK wasn’t going to work out. Not because the website itself wasn’t working anymore, but because I had outgrown the whole thing and it was finally time to say goodbye. AMY&PINK had been fun at one point, but now it wasn’t anymore. And no number of clicks in the world could change that feeling. So one fine morning, I sat down in front of my laptop with a hot coffee, made a backup of the site, and then deleted it from the server. And I felt nothing. Nothing at all. I was simply done with the whole thing. AMY&PINK was dead. And I didn’t care. I finished my coffee, got up, and went for a walk. Even today, people I don’t really know still ask me—by email, letter, and shouting through open windows—what actually happened to AMY&PINK. The portal of good cheer. The party ship of Berlin’s newcomers. The voice of a generation that never wanted to grow up, partied for three days at Berghain, and woke up one morning in the ruins of their own denial of reality. The reflexive answer to the highly individual question of why AMY&PINK no longer exists is: “Because I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.” And it took me a long time to admit to myself that this reason alone was enough to end it, even though logic said otherwise. Instead, I now have my own little blog again, which I can fill with content that really interests me, and where it doesn’t matter if I’m the only one who reads it or likes it. Here, it doesn’t matter if I write about my current favorite Japanese band or publish a short story about a city at the end of the world. I can even rescue some articles from AMY&PINK and post them here if I think they would fit in well. Why not? I can now (once again) do what I want. Hurray. I learned a lot from AMY&PINK and the people who had anything to do with it. But now it’s time to let the subject rest and start something new. The world out there is huge, and the possibilities for finding happiness are limitless. You just have to have the courage to let go, reach out to the unknown, and let it lead you to new adventures—before it’s too late. Monday, 16 January 2023. The Transience of Written Words: This website has undergone many changes over the years. From a small blog by a Bavarian media designer to a collection of stories by creative minds from all over Germany. From the Bible of Berlin nightlife to a gonzo magazine for hipsters. From a digital news site to a never-sleeping ticker of viral events. Until, at some point, I was faced with a sheer monster of false expectations and hopeless prospects. This blog wanted to be everything, but collapsed as a result, unable to do anything right anymore. For various reasons. I had forgotten what this was really about and wanted to remain relevant at all costs in this fast-paced media world. With my eyes fixed on the future, there was only one choice: keep up. Keep up with the news. Keep up with the trends. Keep up with the loud, shiny, and flashy. I had to be even more extreme than everyone else. At some point, I just blindly churned out news, lookbooks, gossip, YouTube videos, shitstorms, and tits in a completely irrelevant mix. The main thing was that something was happening. Whether I liked it or not didn’t matter. Stand out at any cost. Fake it till you make it. The future could only get better. But it didn’t. I broke down in a battle I could neither win nor wanted to win. This website had filled itself to bursting with nonsense and bullshit. Of course, I didn’t want to admit it, while everyone else was already shaking their heads. It had to be wilder and wilder, bigger and bigger—stand out at any cost. A relaunch every year. Every year the same promise, packed into a pseudo-epic article, that now everything would be like it used to be. That I understood what readers really wanted. That this blog finally wanted to be good again. But I broke that promise again and again. Because the world around me was getting louder and brighter and flashier, and I couldn’t stop the carousel I was on until my bad metaphors blew up in my face and this website literally broke under the weight of verbal and illustrated shit. In the end, I just wanted it to be over. I was about to delete the site, the archives, all the files. This blog had failed. I wanted world domination. But what I got was a glimpse into the absolute emptiness of a possibly bright future that I had ruined for myself. None of the fun, the expectations, the hope remained. On a final night drenched in wine, I rummaged through the old texts—the ones that were published on this website when blogs were just becoming popular. When life was still a game. When the world still seemed to be in order. They had long since been lost in digital nirvana and crushed under a cement block of meaninglessness. I read them. And they were good. These ten-year-old texts about love, about dreams, about the expectations of an entire generation—they were good. Just good. These texts were better than most of what had been published on this website in recent years. All the fast-paced dramas and rumors and deeds of some walking, breathing attention deficit disorder. All the digital constructs of a money-hungry industry whose little cogs had long since been ravaged by burnout and depression. All the never-ending news of a world that seemed to spin a little faster with each passing day. They were obsolete the moment they were written. Wasted words without meaning. Without resonance. Without weight. I realized that there was only one way to save this blog. And that was to do the exact opposite of what I had considered my task in recent years. To get off this metaphorically still incredibly stupid carousel—which today seems to almost take off due to its speed—to look at it from a safe distance and to go my own way, with my own definition of time. What does that mean now? I want the texts that appear on this website to be relevant not only in the next ten minutes, but also in the next ten years. Someone in the distant future, when hoverboards can really hover and we fly to Space Spring Break on Mars for the weekend, should read them and think: That speaks to my soul. That inspires me to try something new. I should show this to the people I like and love. You shouldn’t be able to tell how old the content is. Because it’s completely irrelevant. Of course, no sentence is written for eternity. Texts written from the heart are always a snapshot of a moment in time—a portrait of the era in which they were written. But We’re Too Young for True Love has a different half-life than Miley Cyrus Pissed on the Floor Again. Although the latter does have its appeal, in a way. For some people, at least. What does that mean for this blog? I want it to become a colorful grab bag full of surprises again, with something wonderful for everyone. Whether you want to read a fascinating review of an apocalyptic film or the emotional thoughts of me traveling through Japan. Whether it’s about the enamored introduction of a new band or the painful experiences of growing up. Whether you just want to look at a few digital treasures or witness an epic story in the depths of Berlin. It’s important to me that the articles that appear on this website from now on are so great, so beautiful, so worth reading that they will still be relevant in one, two, five—maybe even ten—years, without losing the rough edges that move me when I write. Cowboy Bebop will still be a cult classic in a decade. Haruki Murakami’s books will still be important in a decade. Texts about heartbreak will still inspire people, a decade from now, to take control of their lives again—or at least to wallow in self-pity a little more beautifully. To make a fresh start, I have completely archived this blog, wiped the server, and started again from scratch with a just do it mentality. Little by little, I will now select old articles, revise them, correct them, improve them, and polish them up so that I can publish them again. But of course, I will also regularly add new content and mix it in so that there is always something exciting to discover. With each new day, my digital diary will grow a little more—slowly, steadily, and with joy. For this purpose, I’ve created a design that is as minimalistic, spartan, and brutal as possible, because nothing should distract from the content. The irony of this text lies in two points, of course. Firstly, it is basically just another one of those repetitive pseudo-epic texts that praise the resurrection of this website and swear solemnly that everything will now be as it used to be. After all, that has always worked very well so far. And secondly, it denounces the transience of words and is itself one of those texts that, for reasons of content, will lose its relevance in no time at all. I simply want my blog to become a peaceful garden in the middle of an unmanageable digital jungle full of nonsense—where everyone can have fun, whether they want to indulge in the profoundly formulated transience of being or just a few short notes from my chaotic mind. Everyone is welcome here, free to look around and take away the thoughts and opinions they consider important and right. Or not. I would be delighted to continue accompanying, entertaining, and inspiring you, my readers, on your turbulent journey through life. In my own way. Sunday, 1 January 2023. Fantasy for Pedophiles: Have you ever sat in front of the TV or your laptop and wondered what the dumbest thing to watch might be, after binging every single episode of The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and How I Met Your Mother? The answer is: In Another World with My Smartphone. That’s the dumbest thing. Not the dumbest anime—no—but simply the dumbest thing that has ever been created and then broadcast anywhere, at any time, in any way. By a mile. By a mile the dumbest. What’s it about? The fifteen-year-old Touya Mochizuki is accidentally killed by God with a lightning bolt. As an apology, God lets him live again—but since he can’t send him back to his old world, he reincarnates him in a fantasy world instead, granting him one free wish. Touya uses that wish to take his smartphone with him into the new world, which God kindly upgrades as well. He can’t contact his old world with it, but the phone can easily be recharged with magic and otherwise works just like it did before. He can read news websites from his world and even use Google Maps for his new fantasy world. Since God happens to be having a pretty good day, he also boosts Touya’s physical, magical, and cognitive abilities on top of that—basically as compensation for accidentally murdering him. Touya makes full use of his second chance at life and befriends lots of different people, mainly women and high-ranking figures in the new world. He begins traveling from country to country, resolving political disputes, completing small quests, and casually enjoying himself with his newly found allies. What at first sounds like a nice little anime adventure you could watch in between other things soon turns out, after the opening episodes, to be a pointless parade of boobs. After Touya meets about ten different run-of-the-mill girls in the first few episodes—ranging from toddlers to sex bombs to a 600-year-old vampire queen in a teenage body—the story quickly devolves into nothing but the question of which of the under-served minors Touya will eventually marry. In Another World with My Smartphone feels like it was written by a pubescent twelve-year-old who has absolutely no idea how social interactions are supposed to work in order to make even the slightest bit of sense. For example, one episode revolves solely around the extremely important question of which of the ten walking fantasy pin-ups for perverts gets to show Touya her more-or-less existent underwear first. Every now and then a few ninjas, monsters, or dragons show up, but they’re dealt with within five minutes so the show can quickly return to what it considers the important stuff. I watched In Another World with My Smartphone all the way to the end. Not because I hoped the series might somehow turn things around and tell an adventurous story in what initially looks like a cliché fantasy world—no. After the first three episodes it was already clear to me that this was all garbage. And In Another World with My Smartphone isn’t stupid in a funny way or dumb in an entertaining way. No—it’s simply awful. Plain and simple. Honestly, I was just too lazy to turn it off and find something else to play in the background while I jotted down stock market prices or something. Everyone responsible for In Another World with My Smartphone, or involved in its creation, should be sued into the ground. You know me: I like breasts. Small ones, big ones, young ones, old ones, light ones, dark ones. And I don’t care if feminism gets trampled underfoot, as long as it makes sense within the world being presented to me. That’s the great thing about movies and TV shows: they can show whatever they want. They don’t have to be role models. They can go over the top. Just because some poor idiot gets shot every week in CSI: Miami doesn’t automatically mean every viewer thinks murder is a good thing. But In Another World with My Smartphone simply makes no sense—for anyone. Neither for the audience nor for the characters. And just when you’ve finally settled a bit into the characters and the world and think, Well, it’s not that bad, the creators throw a few more half-naked lunatics into the animated harem for idiots. What haven’t we had yet? Robots with boobs? Here you go! A scientist in stockings? Here you go! A twelve-year-old with a marriage fetish? Here you go! Now everyone fight over Touya—the uptight loser in the white pimp coat whose only defining trait is a magical phone. Even the most pedophilic Harald would probably feel like he’s being thoroughly messed with while watching In Another World with My Smartphone. If you’re thinking about giving In Another World with My Smartphone a try just to form your own opinion, then I can only say: No. I forbid it. Every raccoon run over multiple times on the Route 66 can give you a better story than whatever was cobbled together here into an anime while the creators sat at their drawing boards with their pants open and eventually threw any semblance of plot overboard so that irrelevant fantasy girls could outdo each other minute by minute in their desperate horniness. In Another World with My Smartphone is the dumbest thing. By a mile. By a mile the dumbest. Thursday, 29 July 2021. Of Beasts and Breasts: Let’s get this out of the way right away: Monster Girls is not exactly the deepest, smartest, or even remotely the most beautiful anime under the sun. Quite the opposite. The utterly idiotic story fits on a cum-stained biscuit, the dialogue mostly consists of swearing, screaming, and moaning, and the illustrations look like they came straight out of one of those seventh-rate hentai dating simulations made by some Russian backwoods developers that you regularly get thrown at you on Steam in ten-packs for about two bucks. So what’s it about? For years the Japanese government had kept a secret: mythical creatures such as centaurs, mermaids, harpies, and lamias are real. Three years before the events of Monster Girls begin, the government revealed the existence of these beings and introduced a kind of cultural exchange program. Since then, these creatures have become part of human society and live with ordinary families like exchange students or au-pair participants, though with different duties and restrictions. For example, humans are not allowed to mate with the strange beings. For whatever reason. Enter Kimihito Kurusu, a typical run-of-the-mill Japanese fuckboy. When Kuroko Smith, a coordinator for the Japanese cultural exchange program and a female copy of a certain agent from the film Matrix, accidentally delivers the very frightened and embarrassed lamia Mia to his door, he doesn’t have the nerve to send her away and lets her move in. Naturally. As the story progresses, Kimihito meets other female monsters, each belonging to a different species, and gives them shelter as well. Some arrive more or less by chance, others are forced on him by Kuroko or push themselves into his life, and it doesn’t take long before he finds himself in a chaotic situation in which he tries to live in harmony with his new housemates while dealing with their constant wishes, fears, and the drama that results from helping them adjust to life in the human world. However, the situation takes a new turn after Kimihito is more or less charmingly informed that, due to an expected change in the law concerning relationships between species, he is expected—essentially as a test subject—to marry one of the girls, which greatly intensifies the competition for his attention. Over time, episode by episode, other liminal beings also become attracted to him and start trying to win him over, much to Kimihito’s embarrassment and to the utter annoyance of his already outrageously horny housemates. Monster Girls is one of those typical harem anime that has been told a thousand times before, in which a nose-bleeding protagonist is pursued by around ten extremely horny female characters. The only difference is that this time they happen to be monsters with more or less large breasts who absolutely want to be mounted right here and now. We have Mia, the snake with the big breasts; Papi, the harpy with the small breasts; Zentrea, the centaur with the gigantic breasts; Sue, the slime creature with flexible breasts; Melu, the mermaid with big breasts; Rachnera, the spider with enormous breasts; Lala, the dullahan with big breasts; Zombina, the zombie with thick breasts; Tionisha, the ogre with huge breasts; Manako, the cyclops with small breasts; Doppel, the shapeshifter with average-sized breasts; Polt, the kobold with big breasts; Ki, the dryad with massive breasts; Lilith, the devil with small breasts; Cattle, the minotaur with enormous breasts; Luz, the fox with small breasts; Merino, the sheep with big breasts; and of course agent Kuroko, who is likewise blessed with a generous chest. By whoever. In Monster Girls, the viewer is constantly bombarded from all sides by exposed secondary sexual characteristics—usually straight into Kimihito’s face, which causes him to cry, complain, or bleed. Often all three at once. The series doesn’t offer much more narrative depth than that. But that’s fine. Monster Girls doesn’t convince through an emotional story, clever twists, or even its drawing style. Just watch the first five minutes of Monster Girls and you’ll know exactly what to expect from the following episodes. The series really only aims to do one thing: be fun. Anyone who has ever wanted to see an angry horse with big, wet boobs take down a motorcycle pickpocket will be in exactly the right place with Monster Girls. It doesn’t get any smarter than that—but not much dumber either. And in today’s otherwise unpredictable world, that’s worth something too. For some, Monster Girls is a contemporary critique of the ongoing racism and sexism in 21st-century Japanese society. For others, it’s a colorful masturbation aid for perverts who have always wondered what sex with a moist, big-breasted snake might feel like. Or, as the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel supposedly always used to say: “Why not both?” Tuesday, 25 May 2021. Fuck the Teacher: As Rui lies sweaty on her stomach in bed in front of Natsuo, her bottom clad in skimpy underwear thrust toward him, his heart begins to beat faster with every passing second. Rui coughs. The cold seems to be bothering her. The only thing that will help now is the freshly unwrapped suppository that Natsuo is holding in his hand. He gently pulls down his little stepsister’s damp panties. Natsuo’s youthful modesty prevents him from looking directly at Rui’s most intimate parts, so he carefully feels his way between her legs with the white suppository. The girl whimpers. The first opening Natsuo reaches with his fingertips doesn’t seem to be the right one. “Higher…” Rui gasps quietly, her face pressed into a pillow as her older stepbrother tries to gently push the suppository into her moist entrance. “I’m sorry…” is all Natsuo can say before feeling his way a few inches higher and then lovingly pushing the medicine into her tight, conception-longing exit. Only Rui’s gurgling moans break the silence in her dimly lit bedroom. Soon she will feel better again. Welcome to the scandalous world of Domestic Girlfriend, the anime for people who somehow find incest and sexual intercourse with wards quite acceptable, but would rather not promote blood libel and horny teachers. Here, there is kissing, fondling, and fooling around until the break bell rings, but somehow everything is quite nice, cute, and funny. At least until the first feelings develop. Natsuo Fuji has a crush on one of his teachers, Hina Tachibana, but since he knows he has no chance of ever getting into a relationship with her, he lets his friends talk him into going to a party where he meets the quiet Rui. One thing leads to another and then, well, neither of them is a virgin anymore. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what they expected, but that’s okay. They’re just ships passing in the night and will never have to see each other again, right? But when Natsuo’s father announces that he is getting remarried, Natsuo learns that he will also have two new stepsisters. Now there’s a problem, because, what a coincidence, one of them is his teacher Hina and the other is Rui. Yes, the family dinners at Natsuo’s house are about to become more or less really awkward in Domestic Girlfriend. What sounds like a nice love story with a little physical contact quickly develops into a drama harem with hentai elements. Rarely have I wished so much for a protagonist to fail in all his endeavors and for karma to really kick him in his constantly swollen soft parts as I do for Natsuo in Domestic Girlfriend. Natsuo cheats, lies, and fibs his way through every interpersonal relationship, hurting everyone who crosses his path within a ten-kilometer radius. Of course, Natsuo is unaware of any guilt. He’s just looking for true love. And if people who develop feelings for him get hurt in the process, that’s not his problem. After all, it’s their own fault for falling for his innocent ways. But instead of punishing him for breaking his little stepsister’s heart and hymen, massaging his suicidal classmate’s breasts, and then fucking his teacher, he ends up winning an award for best young writer, because after all, it’s his big dream to become an author. And Rui, whom he has been messing with from the very beginning, spreads her legs for him again to celebrate the occasion. If the credits hadn’t come before, Natsuo would probably have won the lottery too. Because Domestic Girlfriend teaches us that karma can’t hurt you if you simply praise improvement after every misstep and smile away all signs of remorse in a sympathetic manner. After all, Natsuo is the main character in his own life story and, hehe, hoho, if you have tits and, for whatever reason, ended up near him, then you’re just out of luck. Instead of having to listen to Natsuo’s annoying whining all the time, I would have preferred to learn more about his boss Masaki, the gay and adorable flamboyant restaurant owner with a yakuza past. But there probably wouldn’t have been much room for underage breasts in his colorful annals. The best thing for Domestic Girlfriend would have been if Natsuo, after his well-deserved fall down the stairs caused by his literature club friend Miu, simply hadn’t woken up. Because then we would have been spared the schmaltzy and completely far-fetched rest of the so-called story, and Rui would have found her well-deserved happiness. With me, for example. Right, I’m going to stick a suppository up my rear end now—Domestic Girlfriend has made me sick. Monday, 5 April 2021. In Love With a Goddess: Back in the day, as everyone knows, everything was better. The music. The weather. The food. The love. And of course television, too. These days it’s nothing but crap. But were anime better back then as well? You might think so. Sailor Moon. Cowboy Bebop. Neon Genesis Evangelion. All classics from that era that still convince today through their likable characters, their great stories, or simply their sheer epic scale. Oh! My Goddess is without a doubt a classic. The anime released in 2005, based on a manga, is still celebrated decades later as one of the most popular animated series from the Land of the Rising Sun. Likable characters? Definitely! A great story? Uh, well… if you want to call it that. Sheer epicness? Eh. So what’s it about? Keiichi Morisato is a second-year college student who accidentally calls the Technical Goddess Hotline. The goddess Belldandy appears and informs him that her agency has received a system request from him and that she is supposed to grant him a single wish. Believing someone is playing a prank on him, he wishes that she would stay with him forever. And his wish is granted. Since he cannot live with Belldandy in his all-male dormitory, they are forced to look for alternative accommodation and eventually find shelter in an old Buddhist temple. They are allowed to stay there indefinitely because the monk who lives there has gone on a pilgrimage to India after being impressed by Belldandy’s innate kindness. Keiichi’s life with Belldandy becomes even more hectic when her older sister Urd and her younger sister Skuld also move in. A series of adventures follows as his relationship with Belldandy develops. There’s a reason anime series today are no longer made the way they were back then. And that reason is: lack of ideas. Keiichi is the typical shy, run-of-the-mill Japanese loser who gets nosebleeds just from seeing two cloud formations shaped like breasts. Belldandy is perfect. Period. And all the other characters are… there. In Oh! My Goddess, 26 episodes attempt to connect the creative beginning with the emotional ending. What happens in between is completely irrelevant. While the creators initially tried to portray the unusual situation Keiichi finds himself in after his wish—sometimes humorously, sometimes sadly—the stories become increasingly absurd over time. And not in a good way. By the midpoint of the series at the latest, it’s basically just random goddesses and demonesses insulting each other. Then suddenly they’re racing cars, unleashing robots on one another, and eventually something explodes while a pseudo-homosexual motorcycle club cheers. The end. Next episode. The same thing again. And if they only had about three yen of budget left for an episode, then it takes place entirely inside a house. Occasionally you see the garden. Wow. Some episodes aren’t worth the celluloid they were recorded on. The intro plays, then shortly afterward the credits roll, and you’re left wondering: what actually happened there? Did anything happen at all? The little goddess and her older sister had an argument and Keiichi fell down. That’s it. The theme song was the best part of the episode. Oh! My Goddess is the perfect background-watch adventure. It has the charm of an Kids’ WB anime series, the kind where you just drift from episode to episode and it didn’t matter if you missed one because you actually got up and went to play soccer with your friends. Basically, you can watch the first five and the last five episodes of Oh! My Goddess and you won’t have missed anything. And if you find yourself wondering what relevance some previously unseen character has? The answer is always: none. They just suddenly appeared. And cause trouble. That’s all. Oh! My Goddess would have been a better series if it had simply focused on the relationship between Keiichi and Belldandy. And whoever suggested that it would be funny if Belldandy’s entire family gradually showed up should have been fired on the spot before they even finished the sentence. Back then everything was better. Except Oh! My Goddess. Saturday, 13 March 2021. Maybe Not Today, but a Huge Sun May Rise Tomorrow: Tatsuya Egawa’s Golden Boy was the first anime that made me realize that Japanese cartoons weren’t just for little boys and girls but could also go in a more adult direction. This was despite the fact that the series aired on MTV in a heavily edited version—if you still remember MTV. What’s Golden Boy about? Kintaro Oe was top of his class at Tokyo University’s Faculty of Law, one of the most prestigious in the whole world. Having mastered the entire curriculum without any problems, he disappears shortly before graduating. Now, he rides his bicycle through Japan searching for the most important things in life: the lessons you can’t learn in a classroom. That’s one way to put it. In essence, each story revolves around Kintaro encountering a more or less big city somewhere along the road where he spots an attractive girl and immediately decides to pursue her. Literally and figuratively, as while the girl has no interest in him, he does everything possible to impress her. And when I say everything, I mean absolutely everything. Kintaro tutors a wealthy daughter in math, cooks ramen at some restaurant and even cleans dirty toilets at a software company—all just to disappear again before actually getting what he wants. Golden Boy may only have six episodes in total, all fairly similar, but this anime still holds a very special place in my heart even today. Tatsuya Egawa introduced me to the concept of adult themes in anime and inspired an entire generation of horny teenagers to give it a chance as an adult medium. If you’ve only ever associated anime with Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Spirited Away, Golden Boy will open both your eyes and the door to a sticky world that long-lost souls call hentai. It will even take your mental virginity. Before you know it, you will find yourself standing in a forest of pulsating tentacle penises, with one hand down your pants, watching Japanese schoolgirls being fucked across some parallel dimension until they ultimately explode. But that, my dear and innocent children, is a story for another time… Sunday, 7 March 2021. The Queen of J-Pop: What Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or Mariah Carey might be in Western realms, that is what women named Hikaru Utada, Namie Amuro, and Seiko Matsuda are in Japan. Grand shows, powerful voices, and an abundance of feminine energy—this is how the Far Eastern audience knows and loves its female superstars. They dazzle with charisma, glamour, and emotional performances that blend strength with elegance. These artists are more than singers, they are icons who have shaped the image of Japanese pop culture for decades, inspiring countless fans across generations. Their concerts fill arenas, their songs dominate the charts, and their influence stretches far beyond Japan’s borders, defining what it means to be a pop legend in Asia’s ever-evolving music scene. Whoever ventures into this alternative glittering world will not escape it easily. Suddenly they find themselves clicking through one fascinating J-Pop playlist after another, trying to sing along with Arashi, Morning Musume, and Akina Nakamori using fragments of learned words like 世界, こころ, and 愛してる. Yet no one reaches the heights of one particular artist—the uncrowned, immortal, and one true queen of Japanese pop music: Ayumi Hamasaki. With more than twenty studio albums and numerous best-of compilations, Ayumi Hamasaki stands among the greatest stars the Land of the Rising Sun has ever produced. After a brief detour into hip-hop, her name alone now evokes admiration and nostalgia, symbolizing an entire era of musical brilliance and emotional expression. Albums such as A Song for ×, LOVEppears, and Duty have sold millions of copies and, thanks to file sharing and passionate CD importers, have found many fans abroad. International audiences discovered her partly through the popularity of Japanese animated series like Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Ranma ½, which brought attention to Asian singers and pop culture. Born in Fukuoka, Ayumi Hamasaki sang and wrote her way into the radios and hearts of listeners with self-written and often self-composed songs like Voyage, Boys & Girls, and Dearest. She is the Queen of J-Pop. Her songs will outlast time itself, and her passion for music has inspired a new generation of Japanese artists such as Aimyon, Yoasobi, and Kenshi Yonezu. Thursday, 4 March 2021. D Is for Dragon: It is well known that when you’re drunk, you do the stupidest things. Sending your ex a WhatsApp message with a shirtless selfie attached, for example. Convincing yourself that one more vodka Red Bull will go down just fine and that an hour later you definitely won’t be vomiting into your own pillow at home. Or getting into a fight with a bouncer. All three very stupid things. But you do what you have to do. Kobayashi also enjoys getting drunk. The Japanese programmer is alone. And she has time. Enough time to head into the city with a bottle of sake and then back out again. That she doesn’t stay sober for long goes without saying. And because Kobayashi is in such a good mood, she drives into the forest. As one does. As a drunk programmer. Among all the dark trees and the nighttime grass, she encounters a dragon. Tohru. As one does. As a drunk programmer. And she invites her to come live with her. As one does. As a drunk programmer. That’s how the story of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid begins—and it doesn’t get any less absurd from there. Anyone looking for normality in this anime series will be quickly disappointed, again and again. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is a cliché bomb like no other. But it’s fun. Unlike other cliché-filled anime. Here, madness is still written with a capital M. When Tohru enters Kobayashi’s small apartment, she transforms into a pretty maid—and stays that way. There’s not much to say about the remaining characters. Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid knows it’s an anime. And because it knows it’s an anime, all its characters are pure anime archetypes. We have the cute loli. The unhinged otaku. The busty sex bomb. The shy student. The gluttonous office worker. The perpetually annoyed grouch. And my personal favorite: the kindergarten friend who’s in love with the cute loli—initially a bit of a brat, but soon bursting with joy at the slightest touch from her beloved. So in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, we follow the daily life of Kobayashi and her housekeeper from another world. We go shopping with them. We visit a bathhouse. We attend a comic convention. Of course, together with all sorts of other colorful characters who gradually appear out of nowhere and create even more chaos. The series Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is, above all, one thing: fun, fun, fun. From the first to the last second, one anime bomb explodes after another. Sometimes small, sometimes big. Sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. Sometimes intimate, sometimes hilarious. But always with a great deal of love for the characters and the audience. As a first anime experience, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. Films by Studio Ghibli are more suitable for that. Or Your Name. Or perhaps Cowboy Bebop. But if you’ve watched enough anime to playfully engage with its stereotypes, then Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is a guaranteed firework display of good vibes. Monday, 1 March 2021. A Balm for Depression: Sure, sex is pretty great. But have you ever watched all the episodes of K-On! in one sitting, only to feel such a massive void in your heart afterward that you immediately started all over again just to even begin to fill it? Exactly. K-On! is pure joie de vivre, a love letter to cheerfulness, to carefree days, to the plans and hopes we all once had at some point. When the daydreamer Yui starts high school, she firmly resolves to finally get off her lazy butt and join a school club so she won’t end up being a loser. The only question is: which one? Luckily, the newly formed school band is desperately looking for a guitarist. This could be the beginning of a wonderful friendship and an amazing musical career for Yui. Unfortunately, she hasn’t the faintest clue how to play the guitar and has zero stage experience. On top of that, she’s easily distracted, and whenever she learns something new, she forgets something else. This is going to be a tough challenge for the other band members… K-On! isn’t about an epic legend, grand heroic deeds, or saving the world. K-On! is about Yui—so warm-hearted, lazy, gluttonous, clumsy, naive, and adorable that it’s an absolute joy to watch her little everyday school adventures. And it’s about her four best friends—Mio, Ritsu, Mugi, and Azusa (whom Yui affectionately calls Azumiau)—their shared, unstoppable ambition to become the best rock band in the world with After School Tea Time, and the sweet Papua softshell turtle Ton-chan, who diligently swims back and forth in the background. And about Yui’s little sister Ui, without whom nothing would probably function at all, and whose self-sacrificing devotion will undoubtedly one day become a case for the nearest psychiatrist. If you ever feel lonely, depressed, and abandoned by the entire world, just watch an episode of K-On! before reaching for the bottle, the pillbox, or even the rope. And then another episode. And another. Until you eventually start all over again. Again and again. Forever. K-On! makes you realize what life is really about: overcoming fears, gathering new experiences, and perhaps even finding friends for life who will stick with you through thick and thin. And maybe you’ll even rediscover your love for breezy, lighthearted pop music—the kind you once traded in for hip hop and electronic beats. Anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable, welcomed, and at home here from the very first minute is truly beyond help. K-On! proves that sometimes it’s the small stories that truly melt your heart. And no matter how much your soul has already been eaten away by cynicism and the general suffering of the world, after a personally prescribed K-On! cure, you’ll automatically feel more content, happier, and more positively inclined toward the entire universe. Because Yui’s carefree nature—quite literally—rubs off even on the most sarcastic grump. Guaranteed. K-On! is sugary sweet, melodic, and absolutely iconic. And on top of that, there’s a generous dollop of whipped cream—because life is hard enough as it is. Sunday, 28 February 2021. Songs From Another World: When I finally got my driver’s license in my early 20s and raced through the streets of my uptight hometown in my mother’s bright red Seat Ibiza, criss-crossing back and forth, there was no hip hop, no techno, and no Britney Spears shouting from my speakers. No. It was the then-new single by a Japanese pop musician. Her name was Kumi Koda. The song was Butterfly. My girlfriend at the time, who was sitting huddled in the passenger seat, was mortified as we sped past the local ice cream parlor, the school, and the outdoor pool. With Butterfly blaring at full volume. The fact that she let me back in her life after that is probably one of the most mysterious wonders of the world in human history. Of course, it makes absolutely no sense for me to listen to Japanese music. I’m not Japanese and I don’t speak Japanese. No matter how much I sometimes wish I did and no matter how many Japanese courses I’ve endured. And believe me, there have been quite a few. My teachers are utterly desperate with me. Greetings go out to Mr. Hasegawa, Ms. Takeda, and Mr. Sugimoto. To Ms. Ikeda, Ms. Takahashi, and Ms. Watanabe. To Mr. Fujiwara, Mr. Noguchi, and Ms. Yokoyama. To Ms. Ota, Ms. Sato, and Mr. Suzuki. And to Ms. Weatherby-Harrington. After about 20 years and countless Japanese lessons, on a good day I can count to seven, distinguish between こころ for heart and こども for children, and shout “はじめまして、わたしはマセルです！” for “Hello, my name is Marcel!” That’s it. Really. You’d think that after all the Japanese anime, comics, series, films, concerts, books, dramas, video games, and what feels like hundreds of thousands of songs, I’d be able to do a little more. But no. Even for my great love, Japanese pop culture, I’m still too lazy to seriously learn Japanese. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’ve met enough Japanese students in my life who wanted to turn their hobby into a career, and with every new word they learned, they became less and less interested in consuming anything Japanese. Perhaps because that’s when you really realize that Japan is just a normal country with problems, boredom, and a relatively average entertainment industry. Like Germany. Or America. Or Romania. Hundreds of Japanese people wouldn’t throw themselves off strategically well-placed bridges, skyscrapers, and train stations every year if the nation in the far, far East were as great as it is portrayed in K-On!. And that’s despite the fact that the show is virtually an all-around credible documentary about the everyday school life of young adolescents in the Land of the Rising Sun. But due to my complete mental block, I can’t even begin to comprehend any further meaning of a Japanese word. To me, everything Japanese sounds great. Everything is wonderful. Everything has something magical about it. If you get wet when Jacques from some Parisian suburb asks you for directions to the nearest public toilet in the worst French accent, then Japanese has the same effect on me. “What are you saying, little Japanese girl? Your dog has warts on its balls? Kawaii!” I’m that typical, fat, run-of-the-mill nerd who’s always one step away from his first heart attack, who considers Japan to be the Mecca of evolutionary creativity and celebrates everything with even a single Japanese character on it, even though he couldn’t tell it apart from Chinese, with a completely unnatural level of obsession. Soon I’ll be buying cuddly pillows with childlike, half-clothed waifus on them, who are of course actually thousand-year-old vampire queens. I’ll only eat rice drizzled with sake. And I’ll officially change my name to Marcel-san. When musical gods like Hikaru Utada, Scandal, or Asian Kung-Fu Generation pound on the keys, strings, and microphones, roaring, screaming, and strumming, I don’t hear hackneyed lyrics about love, pain, and freedom. I hear the pulse of Tokyo. The vibration of Osaka. The voice of Kyoto. And sometimes even the fart of Los Angeles. With songs like First Love, Secret Base, or Rewrite, I can piece together my own stories in my head. Imagine my own personal credits. Fantasize about my life on the other side of the world. J-pop exudes the same kind of magic you had as a child when you heard English-language songs on the radio and didn’t yet have to understand what nonsense was being sung about. “Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby?” Uh, no thanks, I’d rather not. Of course, I could look up the translations of these songs on the internet. But that would be very stupid. Then I would know that my creative heroes, whom I’ve been listening to ever since there was a Japanese song on some Sailor Moon soundtrack CD that forever changed my taste to, let’s say, alternative, so that now I have no friends left, spout the same pop-rock-backed brain shit as Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Adele. Only in Japanese. And then I might as well hang myself. Nevertheless, I would argue at this point that J-pop is the best music genre humanity has ever produced. Jazz is dead. Hip hop is murky. Even the otherwise universally celebrated K-pop is nothing more than colorful. Japanese pop music, on the other hand, is melodic, emotional, and captivating with an incredible power that you otherwise only experience when you accidentally find yourself at an anime convention surrounded by sweaty weebs armed with two to seven Canon SLR cameras and a sixteen-year-old dressed as Rem from Re:Zero. Because when you don’t have to pay attention to the lyrics, but only to the musical performance as a whole, you realize the sophistication, skill, and sonic perfection that many Japanese artists put into their completely authentic work. And I can rightly claim, notice, and evaluate this. After all, I studied music history for 63 years. At the Moon University. Maybe J-pop just broke me. Because in their four-minute songs, they like to mix eight different music genres, three orchestras, and a singer screaming at the top of her lungs, stir it all up, and turn the epic switch up to 11. So that you might think the universe is about to explode while God dies and the Keio Girls Senior High School choir cries in the background. J-pop is the anthem of my own little messed-up world. The Japanese music industry doesn’t care whether I listen to the songs or not. Whether I worship the stars or not. Whether I watch the music videos or not. They’re not marketed to me through TV commercials, radio slots, and newsletters. I don’t exist for them. I can figure out their meaning for myself. I know nothing about their scandals or problems or rumors. J-pop is a huge, personal playlist. Just for me. Because everyone else thinks the songs are crap. Its emotional range has something for every situation in my life. For dancing. For laughing. For crying. Whether they remind me of sad anime episodes or the stirring background music in video games or heartbreak or my first minutes at Narita Airport, when I stepped through the Welcome to Japan banner into a world full of cultural, technological, and human wonders. J-pop is always there for me and fills the void of wanderlust in my small, constantly annoyed and bored heart. Of course, J-pop isn’t cool. Even Japanese people don’t think J-pop is cool. When I once mentioned at a picnic in Yoyogi Park that I like AKB48, I was allowed to spend the rest of my trip to Japan alone. Apparently, a report about me was repeated every hour on state television, warning the population about me and saying that it was better to stay away from me. A gaijin who likes AKB48 and admits it publicly? If you see this walking hentai, drop everything! Including your children and pets. And run for your bare life! Cool Japanese people like Swedish indie bands, American rappers, and British DJs. But definitely not a bunch of plastered Yukis from next door who have been thrown together into a so-called band by sleazy pimp managers and now have to jump up and down and back and forth to pop dance music until something inside them breaks. They realize that only overweight, middle-aged office workers want to celebrate them and have sex with them at the same time. And then, after their identity crisis, often accompanied by shaving their heads and crying in front of TV cameras, they are replaced by younger models. On the other hand, this is probably the case throughout the entertainment industry. Everywhere. All over the world. And when you watch interviews with Japanese bands and musicians, there is no pride in what they have created. No arrogance. Not even a hint of self-confidence. Rather, the exact opposite. A collective apology for being responsible for such noise, which is falsely labeled and sold as music by record companies. As if they should be ashamed of following their dreams. Instead of taking over their fathers’ cement factories, as befits true Japanese descendants. After all, they have brought shame upon Otosan. Shame! Not even they themselves seem to like J-pop. For whatever reason. But maybe that’s just Japanese reserve and politeness, which is clichédly admired and celebrated in every travelogue, no matter how lacking in individuality. They are very shy, you see. The Japanese. All Japanese people. There are no exceptions. Every child knows that. But maybe I’m just weird. Not in a cool way. Oh God, definitely not in a cool way. More in a Should we commit him now or wait two weeks? kind of way. When I hear even a single beat of any Ed Sheeran memorial song on the radio, I want to turn into a mass murderer on the spot. But put me in front of a ten-hour YouTube video of The Best Anime Theme Songs from 1980 to Today at full volume and I’ll starve and die of thirst at the same time. Because I just can’t turn it off. A Cruel Angel’s Thesis is just such a banger. I’m fully aware that with this revelation, I have forever ruined any chance of future sexual intercourse. But I just can’t pretend to like people like Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, or Sabrina Carpenter anymore. I just can’t. Their songs. Their stories. Their thoughts. They just mean nothing to me. Pure. Utter. Nothing. Instead, I sit here, close my eyes with pleasure, and listen to Perfume, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and Babymetal. How they sing about “せかい”, “ドキドキ”, and “はなび.” And I’m happy. Even though, or maybe even because, I don’t understand a single word. Wednesday, 5 February 2020. Pixel Penance: I’ve spent more cumulative hours dying in Dark Souls than finishing some entire games. There’s something specific about that kind of consistent destruction - you either come out of it fundamentally changed, or you quit. The saying goes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, which is obviously bullshit most of the time, but Dark Souls actually proved it could be true. The Game Kitchen, a studio in Seville, took that feeling and compressed it into a pixel game. Blasphemous shouldn’t work - pixel art and that kind of relentless punishment feel like they belong in completely different genres - but Cvstodia, the world you move through, carries all the dread. Dark, religious, soaked in ritual and blood. You’re the Penitent One, basically the only survivor of something unspeakable, moving through this nightmare looking for something that might not exist. The game is brutal. The controls feel wrong, like the game is actively resisting your attempts to play it. And the writing is dense - medieval Catholic horror dumped on you in long text blocks while you’re trying not to die. It’s almost like the whole thing is designed to frustrate you into quitting. If that hasn’t turned you away, you might be the right person for this. If it has, go play Mario instead. Blasphemous is the kind of game that stopped existing for a while - the kind where punishment is the point, where it doesn’t apologize or hold your hand. It’s on PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox. This is what I’ve been missing from games. Friday, 27 September 2019. Tokyo, Clear Light: Novelty gets in the way when you’re traveling with a camera. Especially in Tokyo, where there’s so much visual noise that you think the place will do the work for you. It doesn’t. What matters is whether you can get quiet enough to actually see. Michael Ivnitsky went to Tokyo and shot work that doesn’t pretend. Fashion photography with a model named Lisa M, the kind of images that read as genuine—the subject isn’t performing herself, the composition isn’t trying to prove anything. It’s just seeing and recording what you see. I’ve done similar work in other cities and it’s always the same problem at the beginning—I’m distracted by the place, trying to make the location do the heavy lifting. Then something clicks. Usually it’s a clear light, or a moment where the person you’re shooting actually relaxes, or just the specific angle of a face that says something true. When that happens, the city becomes almost irrelevant. Tokyo is dense enough that it takes more work than most places to get to that point, but the work pays off. What Ivnitsky captured reads like that moment. Not “Tokyo is beautiful and magic”—that’s tourist thinking. Just: I was there with a camera, I found someone worth looking at, the light held, and I didn’t fuck it up. That’s harder than it sounds. Friday, 27 September 2019. Vanishing Point: You make a lot of money in China and suddenly you’re not just rich, you’re exposed. Somewhere on the party’s ledger, your name gets flagged as a problem—too much power, wrong kind of influence—and then you’re gone. Overnight, no explanation. I learned about this from a German-French documentary. They profiled an entrepreneur named Hu Kexin who’d made a fortune in household and agricultural products, then pivoted to something almost whimsical: importing French baking culture. He bought thousands of hectares of French farmland, hired French bakers, wanted to create this whole ecosystem around bringing fresh bread back to China through his company. It’s the kind of ambition that sounds charming until it gets you erased. Estimates put it at around 400 billionaires and millionaires who’ve simply vanished over the past decade. The Chinese government doesn’t acknowledge it. The Western press reports on it in fits and starts, but it never quite registers as the horror it deserves to be. The documentary also interviewed Guo Wangui, a Chinese billionaire who fled to New York to stay alive. He was straightforward about the mechanism: the Party let entrepreneurs flourish while building the economy. Once that wealth accumulated into real power, it became a liability. They started making people vanish. His own family members were killed. He tries to warn others on social media, probably knowing it won’t help. What stuck with me wasn’t the fear in what he described—though that was there—it was how casually he explained it. Like commenting on traffic. The system doesn’t need drama or theater. It just marks you as a problem and then you’re gone, and everyone left behind understands the logic perfectly. There’s something beneath the surface of that country, beneath the cultural richness and economic power, that doesn’t see human beings at all—just assets and liabilities. Once you fall into the latter category, that’s it. Friday, 27 September 2019. Seventies Japanese Jazz: I found Japanese jazz from the seventies by accident—Sadao Watanabe, session players backing singers I’d never heard of—and it rewired what I thought the music could do. There’s a formal precision underneath something loose and exploratory, Western sophistication filtered through Japanese restraint and taste. The production is warm and muffled by today’s standards, and it sounds like it doesn’t care if anyone’s listening. I can’t stop reaching for those records. Thursday, 26 September 2019. Summer Walker Takes Her Time: Summer Walker popped up from Atlanta with this slow, thick R&B that just hangs on you like humidity. Her song “Girls Need Love” was the thing that changed everything—Drake heard it, sent her a message, and suddenly everyone knew her name. But what actually stuck was the way her voice just sits in a track, patient and unhurried, like she’s got nowhere else to be. Her debut album came out in late 2018 and racked up billions of streams. The new album dropped in October, and before that she’d put out “Playing Games” and a track with A Boogie where what really mattered was that she could pole dance in the video in a way that made you believe she actually loved doing it. Because she does. She talks about it like it’s meditation—coming home, lighting a candle, putting on good music, getting on the pole. There’s something genuinely sensual about that without it needing to be calculated. Just someone who likes their body and what it can do. Her influences make sense if you listen: Amy Winehouse, Erykah Badu, Jimi Hendrix, Leon Bridges. That span from jazz-soul confessionalism to psychedelic guitar to the patient R&B of Bridges. She’s not trying to be any of them. She’s just pulling from the same well of people who knew how to make space in a track and fill it with something real. Drake paid attention. 6lack brought her on tour. The numbers were good. But what sticks is smaller—the way she moves through this moment like she’s got nowhere to be, like the music and the attention are nice but not the main thing. The main thing is doing what you actually like. Coming home. Lighting a candle. Getting on the pole. No performance, no strategy. Just that. Wednesday, 25 September 2019. The Game Boy Never Left: I’ve probably played “The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening” more times than I care to count. Game Boy first, then Game Boy Color, then the 3DS. There’s something about it that sticks—the island setting, the dreamlike tone, the way it tilts the Zelda formula. The crocodile that needs dog food. Marin. The whole strange vibe of it. Here it is again on the Switch Lite, rendered in soft pastel colors. Link waddles around Koholint Island like a claymation character, and after twenty-five years it still holds up. The puzzles are clever, the tone is still specific and weird, the logic is its own thing. What interests me is how much the Switch Lite feels like a straight continuation of the Game Boy. Small, portable, no TV connection. It came out alongside this remake, which had to be intentional—Nintendo returning to something they’d mostly abandoned. The Game Boy was always about gaming in the margins of your day. Spare moments. You’d pull it out and disappear. The Switch Lite does the exact same thing. I keep thinking about how games get locked to certain hardware in your memory. I didn’t decide to play Link’s Awakening—I had the Game Boy, I had time to kill, so I played it. Over and over. The Switch Lite works the same way now. Same game, same portable logic, same sense of escape. The machine changed, but you’re still doing what you always did. Tuesday, 24 September 2019. She Knows What She’s Doing: I put on “Supersize” and immediately understood why this was inevitable. Shirin David spent years on YouTube building an audience around her image—Hamburg, early twenties, Lithuanian and Persian, knowing exactly what works. The album is just the obvious next step. The songs don’t pretend. “Der Körper ist gewaxt, alles bei mir glatt”—”Gib ihm,” “Brillis,” “Gift.” She sings “Ich wollt’ in Unterwäsche kommen, fick’ deinen Dresscode” with the kind of confidence that only comes from understanding your audience completely. Crude, sexual, unapologetic about what it’s for. What strikes me is the honesty of it. No artistic mystique, no performance of being more than she is. Just a clear reading of her own appeal and a decision to use it the way that works. That’s harder to find than you’d think. The album won’t change anything. It wasn’t supposed to. It’s what happens when someone who understands the internet finally stops hinting and just does the thing. Monday, 23 September 2019. Coming Home: I burned through entire summers in those early SNES RPGs. Secret of Mana, Terranigma, Chrono Trigger—games where you could lose yourself in a pixel world with a band of companions, where magic mattered and the story felt inevitable. I’d disappear into a single game for weeks, not because I was chasing the ending but because I didn’t want to leave. Children of Morta tries to capture that feeling. It’s a rogue-lite from 11 Bit Studios where you play as the Bergson family, magic users living quietly in an enchanted forest until darkness arrives and tears everything apart. Suddenly it’s about saving the world, protecting Mount Morta, uncovering the rot spreading through the land. Each family member fights differently—weapons, magic, fists—and as you move through the dungeons you unlock new abilities and watch the story unfold. Love, loss, hope, all rendered in pixel art that feels like someone painted it from the memory of how those old games felt. What works about it is that it operates on two levels. The nostalgia is obvious, the way it captures what made those SNES games actually matter. But there’s also the design itself—the pacing, the way you learn each character by how they move, the sense that you’re watching something unfold rather than just grinding through dungeons. Out on PC, heading to PS4 and Switch eventually. The family is real. The pixel art is beautiful. The story lands. If you’d rather play Fortnite, that’s your call. Monday, 23 September 2019. The Waiting: For two years before it came out, Cyberpunk 2077 was better than any game could be, because it didn’t exist yet. You had trailers, screenshots, developer interviews promising a revolution in open-world design, and what you really had was a projection based on The Witcher 3, which was probably the best open-world RPG ever made—vast, written like actual fiction, worth exploring because the world felt inhabited instead of designed. Cyberpunk as a genre had been mostly visual wallpaper for decades. Neon and corporations and neural implants, looked great, meant nothing. What made this compelling was that CD Projekt Red would bring their writing sensibility to something with actual narrative weight, actual stakes. That a world of MegaCorps and street gangs and impossible choices might actually feel urgent instead of just pretty. Keanu Reeves showed up as a digital ghost in the marketing, which should’ve been terrible but felt exactly right for a game about authenticity and fakeness being the same thing. It all lined up. The studio, the source material, the cultural moment, the casting. It felt possible that someone had finally understood how to make cyberpunk matter. December 2020 arrived and the game was broken. Famously, legendarily broken in ways that took years to fix. But before that, before the launch exposed the gap between what we expected and what was actually there, it was just potential. For a moment it felt like someone got it. That feeling, that anticipation, was worth something even though it didn’t pan out. Tuesday, 11 June 2019. Clairo’s Small Sound: Claire Cottrill from Boston makes bedroom pop in the literal sense—just her in a room with voice and careful arrangement, everything minimal enough that there’s nowhere to hide. “Pretty Girl” was the breakthrough, this quiet song that didn’t try to impress you, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. What worked was the realness of it. Not performing authenticity the way so much online music does, just someone with an idea and a camera. Somehow that reached hundreds of millions of people, which makes sense when you think about it—when everything else feels like a performance, actual honesty becomes rare. She’s putting out her first full album, “Immunity,” in August, with “Bags” as the opening single. The interesting part is what happens at that scale. Whether the smallness that made the early stuff matter survives becoming a real album, becoming a real thing. That’s always the test with someone this young and this genuine—does she stay true to what got people listening, or does something shift. Tuesday, 28 May 2019. The Forever Warning: There’s that thing that happens when you fall down an internet rabbit hole—one link leads to another, then another, and suddenly you’ve lost three hours and become a frothing expert on something completely obscure. For me, it’s been atomic semiotics: the science of how to warn people ten thousand years from now about nuclear waste dumps they won’t understand using symbols they won’t recognize. Atomic semiotics might sound like science fiction, but it’s real enough to raise the hair on your neck. For decades, scientists around the world have been wrestling with the same problem: how to scare future humans away from something like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico—a nuclear waste storage facility—assuming those future people won’t speak our languages, won’t recognize our danger symbols, and might not even understand what radiation is. The proposals get progressively more sci-fi: giant monoliths scattered across the landscape, genetically modified cats that glow under radiation, an “atom pope” preaching nuclear gospel to devoted followers. In 1991, a group of scientists, writers, and philosophers hammered out concrete proposals. The first layer of warning would be massive earthworks—either shaped like the radiation hazard symbol or a skull, or else jagged ridges pointing outward. These are just the introduction. They announce: something important happened here, we thought we were important, and this place is dangerous. Monoliths would sit inside or on top of these earthworks, with messages carved at different levels. Level two pairs short written warnings with two faces expressing extreme negativity—one modeled on Munch’s The Scream, the other a disgust face designed by psychologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. The next levels escalate: longer passages about the danger, paired with increasingly complex symbols and diagrams meant to communicate what it is, where it is, and how long it stays dangerous—all without any shared language. What really struck me is the design philosophy behind the empty center. “For human beings, creating a center—we are here—is the first act of ordering chaos,” the designers wrote. “A center has always been a place of privilege and honor. Here, we want to invert that. This center is not a place of privilege or value. It’s the opposite: uninhabited, despised, empty, a void, a non-place.” Turning the symbol inside out. That’s clever. But would it actually work? That’s where things get philosophically dark. The 1991 group modeled out various scenarios where their warnings would fail entirely. In a “feminist world,” twentieth-century science itself might be written off as arrogant male aggression, so all the warnings get dismissed as examples of that very same thinking. In a world of radical relativism, future people would see the messages as just one incompatible perspective among countless others—meaningless to their worldview. And symbols drift. The skull meant death and danger once; now it means pirates and treasure hunts. For the slim chance that someone ten thousand years from now can read English, they’ve carved an inscription. “This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!” It describes the danger: what it is, where it is, how it intensifies toward the center. “The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.” And at the end: “This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.” That last line might be the most honest thing science has ever written. They’re still collecting proposals, decades later. Warning songs about radioactive flowers. A massive black monolith. Weird confusing structures inside the facility meant to spook intruders. A couple years ago, some designers won a competition with an idea to reshape the entire site using carbon dioxide, creating unnatural forms and garish colors that would make anyone think twice about going near it. There’s something melancholic about it all—this enormous effort to communicate across thousands of years to people whose minds might work in ways we can’t predict. We’re throwing messages into the future like bottles into the ocean, hoping. But I also think we’re probably deluding ourselves. People don’t listen to warnings. We never have. We see a skull and we want to dig. Monday, 27 May 2019. Finally: It’s been a quarter-century and DiCaprio and Pitt finally end up in the same movie. Tarantino puts them together in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, set in 1969 Los Angeles—the exact moment when the old studio system starts its final collapse. Everything beautiful is dying. TV is eating cinema. The old guard is fading. DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a television star watching his relevance evaporate. Pitt is his stunt double, Cliff Booth. There’s an enormous ensemble supporting them—Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Margaret Qualley—all moving through this specific, doomed landscape with absolute precision. It’s Tarantino’s ninth film, and something’s shifted in him. The last few weren’t what Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown were, but this one feels different—less interested in plot mechanics, more interested in period texture, in dialogue that sits with you, in the way a specific moment in time can contain the feeling of an entire era ending. The cinematography is immaculate. Every detail means something. What gets me is that Tarantino’s not really interested in spectacle here. He’s interested in obsolescence. Rick Dalton is a man realizing that he’s becoming irrelevant, which is a fear every artist carries but almost never admits. You can be skilled, talented, necessary, and still feel the moment when the world decides it’s done with you. When the temperature shifts and you’re no longer setting it. That’s the story. DiCaprio and Pitt carry something of that weight themselves now. They’re not young anymore. These are guys who spent decades as the most desired actors in the world, and now they’re playing men in a world that’s moving past them. The irony isn’t accidental. Tarantino understands what it means to make art about the moment you start to feel your own obsolescence. The film comes out in August. I’ll watch it. The real question isn’t whether it works—the real question is what Tarantino is actually trying to confess here, hidden inside a period piece about 1969. That’s where the meat is. Wednesday, 22 May 2019. When Grumpy Cat Died: I found out she died in one of those mixed news feeds—Grumpy Cat dead at seven from a urinary tract infection, sandwiched between tech announcements and memes that had already moved on. Tardar Sauce. The cat with the permanent scowl. The thing about Grumpy Cat was that she wasn’t famous for being cute or clever. A genetic disorder—feline dwarfism—had given her an underbite that made her face look perpetually furious. Not performing anger. Not in on a joke. Just a biological accident that somehow became the exact mascot everyone needed for their own bad mood. Posted to Reddit in September 2012. YouTube video three days later. By the time people figured out how to monetize Facebook, she had millions of followers. What gets me is the speed of it. Not a trained dog doing tricks, not a kid saying something inexplicably funny. Just a cat with a certain expression, and suddenly there’s a hundred-million-dollar empire. Merchandise. TV appearances. Magazine covers. German political parties used her in election posters. When a coffee company tried selling Grumpuccino without paying, her owners sued for 710 thousand and won. A cat that went to court over trademark infringement. That’s what I can’t stop thinking about now. She wasn’t a celebrity. She was a phenomenon—something that crystallized right when meme culture was learning to be its own economy. She proved people would turn anything into a brand if it gave them something to project onto. A permanent scowl meant whatever you needed it to mean. Your job. Your life. Your mood. She was a mirror that happened to be a cat. I don’t know if it’s weird to feel something about an animal I never met. But there’s something perfect about her existing by accident, being furious without trying, and somehow becoming immortal in the dumbest way possible. No performance. No apology. Just a face that everyone agreed meant something, and then she was gone. Saturday, 18 May 2019. Hold Your Breath: Die Partei, Germany’s satirical protest party, gave their European election campaign slot to Sea-Watch. Not as a guest appearance or cause du jour—the full thing, uncut. They called it “Hold Your Breath,” and it wasn’t a plea or appeal. It was just facts: one in ten people drown crossing the Mediterranean. The EU doesn’t rescue them. The EU criminalizes rescue workers. The EU pays Libyan militias to drag people back. This is what you’re voting on in a few weeks. The ZDF wouldn’t air it like that. Too pointed, apparently. So they cut it down, softened the angles, made it fit the usual broadcast texture. The message survived intact, technically, but castrated. Most of what bothers me about the thing isn’t even the censorship—media outlets always find reasons to soften anything with teeth. It’s that Die Partei even tried it. Campaign ads are almost always performance: image, personality, careful messaging, hours of polling and focus groups. They stripped all that and just put the fact on the screen. One in ten. EU policy. Vote on it. No emotional music, no slow build, no asking you to feel the right way about it. Just visibility. That’s apparently where the line is. Not at lies—those run constantly. Not at exploitation. At actual clarity about something the state has chosen. The broadcaster’s instinct to edit it down tells you everything you need to know about what makes institutions nervous. Whether anything changed, whether anyone even noticed, I couldn’t say. Probably not. But the move was clean: you identify the moment where the rules break, and you force the system to explain itself. Thursday, 9 May 2019. Detective Pikachu on YouTube: At some point, Ryan Reynolds just uploaded the entire Detective Pikachu film to his YouTube channel in full. No rental fee, no subscription—just a Hollywood film sitting in your feed like any other video. Free. I watched mostly to hear whether Reynolds could carry a performance on voice alone. His Pikachu is relentless, just constant quips and riffing, jokes that skew more adult than you’d expect in a kids’ film. It works because he commits completely. The actual plot is skeletal: a kid whose father vanishes teams up with his dad’s old Pokémon partner, who he can somehow understand. Dumb premise, but dumb enough that you stop thinking and let it happen. What stuck was the strangeness of the thing’s existence. A major studio release, just available on YouTube for nothing. No visible strategy, no expiration. Maybe promotional, maybe a favor, maybe nobody at the studio bothered to take it down. It had the quality of stumbling onto a glitch in the distribution system. I couldn’t tell you much about the movie now. Reynolds’ voice, mostly, and the weird feeling of watching something that slick on YouTube. Which was probably exactly what they wanted. Wednesday, 8 May 2019. Vermissen: Henning May’s voice has always been this heavy, honest thing—the kind that doesn’t ask permission to break. Paired with Juju on “Vermissen,” it works in a way I wasn’t prepared for. She comes from SXTN, years of making crude Berlin hip-hop with Nura, reflecting their actual lives back without any apology. When they split up, I wondered what she’d do alone. Then this. The song’s just the two of them talking about missing someone. May’s voice pulls it up from somewhere deep, and Juju meets him there—no posturing, no reach, no performance. That directness is exactly why it works. She’s never played the part of what a female rapper is supposed to be; she just exists fully in the space. Hearing her alongside May, who does the same thing, feels like the obvious choice once you hear it, even though there’s no reason it should exist. I keep listening to it. There’s something about the way neither of them tries that makes you believe in it. Wednesday, 8 May 2019. The Drinking Stopped: You see the studies every couple years now. Young people aren’t drinking. The numbers just keep dropping—eight percent of twelve-to-seventeen year olds drinking weekly, down from over twenty percent in the early 2000s. Which means this whole thing we grew up thinking was inevitable—sneaking alcohol, first beers, getting fucked up as a rite of passage—just isn’t the default story anymore for kids coming up now. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s just strange to watch something you assumed was universal about youth culture stop being universal. We grew up thinking certain things were just how it happened. You drank. Everyone drank. It was part of the whole script. The statistics break it down: thirteen percent of teenagers binge drink monthly now, versus twenty-five percent back in 2007. The trend’s been moving one direction for a while. For people in their twenties it’s different though—about a third drink regularly, and binge drinking in that age group has ticked back up over the last seven years. So it’s not that young adults quit entirely. It’s specifically teenagers who’ve backed off. Which leaves me thinking about everything that hangs on that ritual. The stories people tell about becoming themselves. The nights that feel dangerous or necessary. Basements, cars, whatever else is supposed to happen. The scripts we all got handed about what adolescence is. Maybe it all just gets rewritten. Maybe there’s a different kind of risk now, or maybe refusing the old templates is the rebellion. What’s strange is how fast the generational edge moves. A few years back I was writing like the way I drank was universal—how people drank, period. Now I’m reading statistics about teenagers doing something completely different, and it lands like observing some alien future. That’s just how it happens. Every generation shows up convinced the next one will follow the same playbook. Then they don’t. You’re at that point where you’re too old to get pulled in but old enough to notice it shifting. Wednesday, 8 May 2019. Watchmen Again: I watched the Snyder film back in 2009 and understood almost nothing. Walked out confused, didn’t bother looking up what I’d missed, moved on. Alan Moore’s universe isn’t built for people coming in fresh. It’s built for people who already care, who want to see the source material translated, who have opinions going in. I had none of those things. HBO is doing a series version now with Regina King, Don Johnson, Jeremy Irons. The pitch is that ten hours gives you room to breathe with something this complex, that you can make it work for people who’ve never read the comic. HBO’s shown they can do that before—Game of Thrones, Westworld, The Sopranos. They know how to unpack dense material. The actual plot is simple enough: someone kills The Comedian in an alternate New York. Rorschach investigates and finds a pattern. His old partner comes back in. Dr. Manhattan leaves the planet. It’s a murder mystery built on questions about power and morality, about whether anything matters when you can stop a nuclear war. I followed that much in the film. Everything else was noise. I’m skeptical the HBO version will fix that for me, but I’m curious whether it’ll try. There’s something decent about an adaptation that respects your intelligence enough to demand patience. Or maybe that’s just how I’m justifying my fundamental confusion. Either way, I’ll probably end up watching it. Wednesday, 8 May 2019. Not Gone Yet: I woke up in a cold sweat at three in the morning thinking about Miley Cyrus without a shirt. The dream had somehow convinced me I hadn’t seen a decent topless photo of her in years—and I was right. Ever since she started doing the whole responsible adult thing, which frankly hasn’t been working. So I grabbed my phone and spent half an hour scrolling through the Miley folder, the collection of better years, just trying to calm down enough to sleep again. The next morning she dropped a new topless shot on Twitter. Hands covering the important parts, but enough that I could tell she hasn’t forgotten about us—the ones who’ve actually been around since before she decided to perform maturity. Not the full sun-soaked nude I’d secretly be waiting for, but topless is topless. It reads like she’s thinking about it. About being whoever she actually is underneath all the reinvention. I’ve been watching her negotiate with herself for years. The free spirit or the dignified adult. She keeps landing in this dead zone between them, and it’s painful because you know she doesn’t belong there. I save the new photo, add it to the bloated folder on my phone, and scroll back through the times she seemed closer to just saying fuck it. I’m not expecting a revolution. But every now and then she gives us something like this, and I take it as proof that the Miley I actually liked isn’t completely gone. Just dormant. Maybe waiting for the day she finally stops caring what anyone thinks. Tuesday, 7 May 2019. Deutschland: Rammstein have sold over sixteen million records in their twenty-some-year existence. They’ve won Echo Awards, gotten Grammy nominations, sold out Madison Square Garden in under twenty minutes—all while singing exclusively in German. Every album since 1997 has topped the German charts. David Lynch and Lars von Trier have used their songs. They’re arguably the biggest rock band in the world right now, and definitely the most successful German rockers ever. And yet: nobody’s tried to copy them. Not really. A few bands have tested whether they could roll their Rs as majestically as Till Lindemann, but that’s surface level. The real reason Rammstein are untouchable is that they can’t be copied—because their whole existence is rooted in a specific moment in history that won’t repeat. They came out of the East German underground. Feeling B, First Arsch—bands nobody outside that world knew existed. Then the wall came down and the doors opened and suddenly this particular collision of Black Romanticism, Industrial aesthetics, Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Goethe, Houellebecq, Machine horror, and a thousand other things that somehow cohered into one of the strangest, darkest, most compelling visions in rock music. It wasn’t designed. It wasn’t a formula someone figured out and executed. It evolved out of a place and a time and a set of artists who understood the power of provocation and image and sound in a way that felt genuinely dangerous. You can’t manufacture that in a laboratory. They’ve just dropped a new song called “Deutschland.” It’s controversial—their work usually is. There’s an album coming in mid-May, and this is the first taste. I haven’t heard what they’ve done with it yet, but the title alone is interesting. It’s the most direct statement they could make: not a cryptic metaphor, not an artistic gesture. Just the name of their country, straight up, on a song during an era where that became loaded in ways it wasn’t before. I’m curious what they’re saying about it. Friday, 29 March 2019. Just Rihanna: New Rihanna photos for Fenty and I can’t stop looking at them. There’s something about how she just presents herself—wearing her clothes, facing straight into the lens like she’s not trying to convince you of anything. Not performing mystery or aspiration or accessibility. Just showing you what she looks like and what she made. I’ve seen her do this in music videos, on red carpets, existing around paparazzi over the years, and it’s always the same thing: she’s genuinely comfortable being observed. Not calculating, not performing authenticity. Just actually unbothered. And yeah, she’s beautiful—strikingly beautiful—but that’s not the hook. It’s the confidence. She doesn’t need permission to be that attractive. The Fenty campaigns work because she owns both the product and model, so there’s no gap between fantasy and reality. No seduction angle, no pretending cosmetics will change your life. Just: here’s what this looks like, here’s what I look like using it, that’s the offer. She shows you straightforwardly and somehow that’s more effective than all the soft-focus promise-making. There’s something confrontational about using your image that plainly. No hedging about relatability or accessibility. Just someone who knows what she’s got and doesn’t apologize. I think that’s what makes people actually want to buy what she’s selling. Thursday, 28 March 2019. Scratching the Itch: I’ve lost count of the hours spent in Skyrim—hundreds, across different playthroughs. I finished it again recently on PS4 with all the DLCs because I needed to be back in that frozen world before Elder Scrolls 6 finally shows up. Whenever that is. Years from now, probably. But waiting sucks when you’re hooked, and there are ways to ease the addiction: the MMO, the card game, and a mobile spin-off called The Elder Scrolls: Blades, coming in spring. You’re a Blade—that ancient order. Exiled. When you return home, your city’s destroyed, and rebuilding it is the whole point. Bethesda’s promising the stuff that makes these games impossible to stop: console-quality visuals, real magic, endless loot to collect and upgrade, real-time combat where your fingers swing swords and throw lightning. City customization is there too—shape your home however you want. Arena for just fighting. Then the Abyss: an endless dungeon getting harder the deeper you go, enemies meaner each level. Like those punishment dungeons in old JRPGs, that Lufia cave on Super Nintendo that felt like it went on forever. Except it actually doesn’t stop. Whether it’ll actually feel like Elder Scrolls or just feel like a mobile game dressed in Elder Scrolls clothes is the thing. Skyrim was massive—hundreds of hours massive. A phone game can’t be that. But I’ll probably play it anyway. The addiction doesn’t really care about reasonable expectations. Thursday, 28 March 2019. Honest Futurism: These three met in LA and spent four years casually making music together before deciding to actually commit. Nora was dishwashing and driving Uber, trying to hold a songwriting career together with what little energy was left. Then at some point it shifted from maybe to definitely. They wrote “Sugar” in ten minutes. It took a year to get the single out. After that they moved to a small village in the mountains of rural Spain. All three of them in one house, away from everything, betting that isolation might give them what proximity never could. The video for “Sugar” shows the specific kind of desperation that arrives when you have everything except meaning. There’s this hand that feeds her, and then it hands her a bomb. It’s that hollow panic that hits every morning regardless of what you own, that reaching for something that will never arrive through a screen or a notification. Nora described it like this: you have everything, but the only real connection you have is 4G, and it’s not enough. Nora grew up moving between Spain, Italy, and Norway. She studied journalism once, briefly, before she figured out music was the thing that mattered. Jan works in synthesis, drawing from Jean Michel Jarre’s approach to sound. Sju plays drums and has been shaped by Warpaint’s sense of texture and space. Together they’ve created something that sounds like it arrived from somewhere else—Suzanne Vega filtered through Kraftwerk, Fleetwood Mac reimagined with cold electronics, pop music that assumes you can think while your body wants to dance. The band name is clever. Ora The Molecule. A molecule is simultaneously itself and part of something larger. Ora means “now” in Italian, and it’s also the name Nora used in an all-girl band in Oslo years ago. Every melody she brings to the band is the molecule Ora emerging again—the same impulse, the same person, reconstituted. They were asked about missing the cities they left. Nora said they appreciate both worlds, but right now they need the quiet. Friends from LA visit and bring new input. It’s not escape. It’s about knowing what you actually need to make something honest without all the easier paths closing in. They want to work with Amadou & Mariam, Warpaint, and Stromae. Not a list of commercial targets. Just artists they actually respect. Their answer about the future was: “Birds, beats, and ancient futuristic sound waves cutting through the present. Forever, until we die.” That’s what you say when you’ve stopped worrying about the right answer and you’re just speaking the truth. Thursday, 28 March 2019. The Knuckle Heads: Found this Moose Knuckles campaign in Montreal and couldn’t stop thinking about it—a fictional gang called the Knuckle Heads shot by photographer Luis Morales, basically a crew of outsiders on a mission to make the brand known. It’s the kind of ridiculous concept that only works because the clothes are actually good. The pieces are functional stuff—Wellon jackets, athletic suits—designed for how people actually dress in Montreal. The graphics are rooted in the city itself: Biosphère, Expo references, the maple leaf. That specificity matters because it’s the difference between something that feels like it belongs somewhere and just another product wearing a place like a costume. Canadian fashion’s never been loud about itself, which is something I’ve always found more interesting than the screaming aesthetic of other scenes. No need to convince anyone it matters. Make something good, root it in where you’re from, let people decide if it speaks to them. The quietness is the point. What the gang concept really does is make streetwear honest about itself. You wear something not because marketing sold you on it but because it signals something about who you understand yourself to be. That’s subculture. A fictional crew of misfits doing it is just the self-aware version of what was always happening anyway. Wednesday, 27 March 2019. Four Princesses: I’ve loved Disgaea since the fifth game, Alliance of Vengeance. The humor’s stupid and earnest at once. The anime art is charming in a way modern games have mostly forgotten. The characters feel like people, not design documents. And underneath all that is a turn-based strategy layer that actually demands something from you. I spent way too many hours with that game, and I’m not sorry. The Princess Guide takes that Disgaea DNA—character-driven story, anime style, tactical depth—and blows it up. No more turn-based. Instead you get real-time action. Think Ys-style combat, but you’re not the one swinging the sword. You’re the knight teaching a princess how to lead her army through a war. The premise is simple enough. A kingdom is falling apart. Four princesses from four regions each need to command their people, and they’ve hired you to teach them how to fight and lead. Here’s where it gets interesting: everything you do shapes who they become. You give real-time commands on the battlefield. Between fights, you praise or criticize their choices, and that feedback literally changes what they learn. Four princesses means four separate stories, four different paths through the same war. What caught my attention was the inversion of the usual power fantasy. You’re not the hero. You’re the person trying to make someone else into a hero, and your decisions matter in ways that go beyond just winning battles. That’s harder than it sounds. There’s pressure in it—did I push her too hard, or not hard enough? Can I actually trust my own judgment about what she needs? Whether the game pulls it off, I have no idea. But the concept alone makes me want to play it. Wednesday, 27 March 2019. Uboot: Found Yung Kafa and Kücük Efendi through one of those algorithmic moments and came back to it. They’re German, their mixtape is called Uboot, and there’s something about what they’ve made that keeps pulling you back. The music has this melodic quality to it, a kind of longing running through everything, but also a distance that keeps it from feeling too familiar. They let you in but not all the way. Most artists go either all the way or they lock you out entirely—these two hold you at arm’s length, and it’s more interesting that way. What gets me is how intentional it all feels. Every sound is placed. They know how to write a song that lands, that moves through you with shape and purpose. But they’re not playing it safe. There’s risk in the choices, a refusal to smooth anything out or simplify for mass appeal. The aesthetic is consistent—you can feel the vision—but it never gets precious or overthought. I’m curious where they’re going next. That’s the mark of something that actually matters: it changes how you listen to everything else for a while. Wednesday, 27 March 2019. Tokita Ohma: Tokita Ohma doesn’t have a backstory worth mentioning. He fights because that’s what he does, someone pays him for it, and that’s the deal. No tragic origin, no hidden motivation. Yabako Sandrovich never bothers explaining how he got this way in Kengan Ashura—a manga running since 2012—he just is. What Sandrovich cares about is the fighting itself. Not the yelling or the impossible powers. Just the geometry of it: how your weight shifts, where balance breaks, the moment you realize you’re already losing. That’s the manga. That’s enough. I haven’t read the whole series, but I’ve seen enough to understand it. Ohma fights on behalf of Nogi Hideki, a businessman who bets heavily on the outcomes. The plot, if you call it that, is just the fights and the weird respect between two guys trying to physically break each other. Netflix adapted it to anime, which makes sense. They’ve been buying up anime licenses like they personally broke something. Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, everything they can grab. Most of it doesn’t work, but Kengan Ashura should be fine. The action is clean, the protagonist just needs to understand his body better than anyone else, and the rest handles itself. I’ll watch it when it comes out. There’s something satisfying about a man with real skill calmly dismantling someone who thought they were much stronger. That moment when you realize you’ve already lost, three moves back. That’s the whole appeal. Wednesday, 27 March 2019. White Earbuds: Two years ago you’d spot someone with AirPods and it felt like a thing. Now they’re just everywhere. Apple made them respectable—made them normal, which made them universal. The design is almost stupid in its simplicity. Two white sticks, barely there. That minimalism is what did it. They disappeared into necessity. Commute, work call, pretending you’re not listening to anyone around you. The new ones are faster, better battery, wireless charging. The specs don’t really matter though. They already won. They’re infrastructure now. I see them on teenagers, suits, joggers, the coffee shop person ignoring everyone. This is what design objects do when they work—become invisible. There’s something absurd about the anxiety they create. Two hundred dollars for something you can lose in the couch in thirty seconds. The form factor is so minimal it barely feels like you own it. Someone I know keeps hers in a specific pouch like they’re small animals that might escape. The wireless charging case is neat. Just drop them and they’re ready. Apple’s good at taking something that worked and making it work slightly better, then making everyone want the new version. Doesn’t matter. They already got us. Tuesday, 26 March 2019. Real Games: Most games on my phone are designed to evaporate from memory the moment you close them. Swipe left, match three, watch the progress bar climb. The notifications never stop. They’re apps built on the assumption that you’re not actually looking for anything substantial—just something to keep your hands busy while you’re waiting for the train or standing in line. Games that depend on reminding you constantly that they exist, that you haven’t played them in six hours, that you could be unlocking something right now. The problem’s always been that actual game designers can’t charge money for phone games anymore. Not five dollars. Not even two. The moment you ask for anything upfront, your audience evaporates. So the good stuff gets buried under an avalanche of free clones—puzzle games with slightly different art assets, all the same mechanics, all the same timers and currencies and progression bars designed to keep you checking back. Most people never find the real games because they don’t know to look past the free section. Apple’s trying to do something about it. Apple Arcade. A subscription service—ten euros a month—that gives you access to a hundred exclusive games across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. They brought in some actual game designers: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Ken Wong, Will Wright. People who’ve made things that mattered. No ads. No tracking. No in-app purchases forcing you to decide between progress and money. The basic logic is sound: if publishers aren’t competing for free downloads, they can afford to make something actually worth your time. They can build games that respect you instead of games that exist to extract money through frustration and addiction mechanics. The App Store poisoned phone gaming years ago by deciding that free-plus-IAP was the only viable model, and maybe subscriptions could actually unfuck that. Or maybe subscriptions just become another middleman taking a percentage while the actual problem never gets solved. History suggests that’s more likely. I’ve wanted a real game on my phone for years, but I’m skeptical this is the answer. Still, at least someone’s finally saying out loud that mobile gaming became a wasteland. That’s something. Tuesday, 26 March 2019. Panty Party: The game opens with anime girls in what looks like a destroyed schoolyard, and you realize pretty quick that they’re not the characters—the underwear is. The actual combatants are panties. Cute girls’ panties fighting it out in a 3D arena styled after Tekken. I’m not making this up. The game is real, it’s on Steam, it’s on the Switch in Japan, and it exists because someone genuinely made it. I’m not sure how to categorize this thing. There are the obvious AAA titles burning millions of dollars. The clever indie games that do a lot with almost nothing. And then there’s that weird pocket where something exists and you can’t tell if someone was joking or if they actually believed in the vision. Panty Party lives in that third space, except the strange part is that it kind of works. The premise is stupid on purpose: cute girls’ underwear fights each other to save humanity from evil. But the game is committed to that stupidity. The 3D world is deliberately sparse and a little depressing. The music is synth and bouncy, the colors all candy bright. Up to four players can beat each other senseless with their panties while anime girls cheer from the sidelines. And the longer you play, the more you find yourself emotionally invested in a pair of pink underwear with little red bows. What gets me is that someone made this instead of something else. They had the time, the talent maybe, probably some money, and they chose to make a fighting game where the fighters are panties. That’s either the most pointless decision ever or the most honest. I haven’t figured out which. The game is exactly what it promises to be—no irony, no winking at the camera, just committed to its own weirdness. If that appeals to you, you’re probably going to have fun. If it doesn’t, you’ll hate it in five minutes. I’m still not sure which one I am. Tuesday, 26 March 2019. Yo! Returns: Yo! MTV Raps is back, and it’s on German television. I never thought I’d write that sentence, but here we are. The original show ran from 1988 onward and was the thing that was Hip Hop for people my age. Not the music—the music was always there—but the presentation of it, the gateway, the cultural authority telling you what mattered. Fab 5 Freddy on the couch, then everyone who’d come to define an era: Wu-Tang Clan, Tupac, Biggie. MTV didn’t invent Hip Hop, but MTV Raps introduced it to millions of people who wouldn’t have found it otherwise. The format was stupid simple: talk, perform, talk again. But it worked. Germany never really got that moment. We had MTV, we had VIVA, but not the cultural nexus where German Hip Hop and mainstream television could meet like that. Berlin had its underground scene, serious and brilliant—MC Bogy’s been there since the early ’80s, one of the few people from that era still actually respected—but it stayed underground in a way American Hip Hop never had to. Palina Rojinski hosting is a particular choice. She was everywhere on German television in the 2000s, MTV and VIVA especially, and she always had that quality where she seemed genuinely interested in whatever she was doing, which in television is rarer than you’d think. Not a rapper, not a critic, just someone with taste who asks good questions. MTV’s dusting off this 30-year-old format and pointing it at Germany now, bringing in MC Bogy, giving German rappers a stage that looks like it matters. It probably doesn’t change anything—nothing ever does. But there’s something worth noting about when people want to talk about music seriously, they still reach for this: conversation, live performance, television. Not algorithm, not TikTok, just the basic idea that good talking and good playing is enough. Episodes air on YouTube on Saturdays. I don’t know if I’ll watch, but the point is it exists. Monday, 25 March 2019. Kerli From Elva: Kerli is from Elva, Estonia—five thousand people surrounded by forest, in a place that had recently escaped the Soviet Union but hadn’t quite shaken it. She was the weird kid who sang, and she had to get out. Not romantically. Just gone, anywhere, it didn’t matter where. Where she grew up, there were rules about feeling. Don’t be too happy or sad, because something bad would happen. Not might—would. You learned to bury it. Except Kerli couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was always the one who felt everything, who wanted more, who couldn’t survive that kind of suffocation. By fourteen she’d won the Estonian Eurovision pre-selection. That year she decided music was all that mattered. By fifteen she’d auditioned for Island Def Jam and was signed. She escaped. Made it. Her music is genuinely strange. Minor key, off-kilter, the whole production cold and wrong and right. Someone who grew up somewhere passion was dangerous carries it in the sound. Someone who could never be casual about anything, who had to mean every word. Monday, 25 March 2019. Thawed Into Apocalypse: A meteor’s coming. That’s the entire premise - massive enough to end everything. So governments worldwide make this one bet: they’re going to freeze people. Young, healthy people. Insurance for the species. Japan’s plan is five groups, seven people each - Winter, Spring, Summer A, Summer B, Fall. They get cryochambers scattered across different regions. When the meteor hits and the world ends, these groups wake up. Hopefully at least one of them lands somewhere that’s still survivable. But what actually happens is worse than anyone thought. The meteor impact remakes Japan entirely. Cities drown. Mountains flatten. The ground itself becomes something unrecognizable. When Takahiro, Natsu, Arashi and the others wake up, they’re stepping into a world that’s actively hostile, and they have no idea what’s edible, what’s safe, or how anything works anymore. I’ve always loved apocalypse fiction. There’s something about stripping away all the systems, all the infrastructure - it shows what humans actually are when nothing is guaranteed. These kids wake up with no choice but to figure it out. They’re alive in a dead world, and that’s it. The anime started showing on Netflix recently. Yumi Tamura’s manga gets adapted here with an unusual visual style - took me a minute to adjust, but it works. I’ll take any competent version of this story. I’m the type who’ll watch every episode because something in apocalypse narratives just gets me. It’s not about waiting for some clever payoff. It’s just watching people exist in a world that demands everything. Monday, 25 March 2019. Not a Compromise: Most rock-hip-hop hybrids are a compromise—guitars trying to sound hard, rappers over grooves that want to break into something else. Tiavo, Lucy and Deon from Saarbrücken, sidestepped all that and just made what they wanted. Their debut ’Oh Lucy’ had range—anger and sadness and the specific exhaustion of chasing something up a hill every day. ’Wah Wah Wah’ and ’Take Me Back to Woodstock’ didn’t romanticize the grind; they just showed what it felt like. Other songs looked at what happens to you inside the industry, how it uses you. They started touring internationally—Mike Shinoda, XXXTentacion, Machine Gun Kelly—which meant the thing was landing somewhere. Not just a regional project anymore. The follow-up ’Bitte Lächeln’ pushed the sound further, letting Post Malone and XXXTentacion influences bleed through more openly. ’Shit On Your Grave’ had a confidence to it, like they’d figured something out. It’s one of those moments where a German hip-hop project actually felt like it was moving toward something new, not just remixing what had already been mixed to death. Monday, 25 March 2019. Sally Walker: Iggy Azalea is Australian, which shouldn’t have worked for hip-hop. She moved to the US at sixteen anyway and built something real. ’Fancy’ went to number one in 2014. Then came ’Problem’ with Ariana Grande—the two of them hit #1 and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously, something that hadn’t happened since the Beatles. That’s not viral noise; that’s genuine, sustained success in a genre that doesn’t typically hand it to outsiders. What made her interesting was the confidence. Didn’t hide the accent or try to be someone else. Just technically sharp and committed to the risk. She’s got a new song out called ’Sally Walker.’ Interested to hear where she’s at with it. Sunday, 24 March 2019. Joy Crookes: I still think about Amy Winehouse. It’s been years now, but I remember that particular kind of grief—when someone who’s been making exactly the right songs for you just disappears. That voice, soft but rough somehow, made sadness feel understood. “Love Is a Losing Game,” “You Know I’m No Good”—those songs burrowed into me when I was younger. They were necessary in a way only certain music is. The loss never really left the British music world. But something came out of it: a generation of singers trying that same thing. Joy Crookes is one of them. South London, early twenties, soft pop that you could miss if you weren’t listening carefully. The songs have titles like “Don’t Let Me Down”—the kind of music that whispers instead of announces. What gets me about her work is the backbone underneath the softness. There’s steel there. She talked about living alone since seventeen, learning to take care of herself, figuring out how to say no. That came from her family, especially the women in it. You hear that in the songs—not fragility, but resilience that doesn’t need to prove itself. I can’t tell you if Joy Crookes will matter the way Amy did. That’s not really the point. But there’s something in her music—that quality of turning difficulty into something that doesn’t scream for attention. Maybe that’s its own kind of inheritance from what came before. Sunday, 24 March 2019. Looking Out: I reach for my phone the second boredom sets in. It’s automatic—pocket, Instagram, scroll, scroll, repeat. The justification is airtight: why sit with nothing when you could be liking photos, retweeting, swiping? You only live once. Might as well pack every moment with something. But it turns out boredom does something. The constant distraction—phone, streaming, the feed—never gives your brain any space. You can’t sit with a thought long enough to understand it, to connect it to something else, to actually process it. You’re moving from one thing to the next so fast that you’re living without really experiencing anything. Your mind is always on the next hit. There’s a BBC video about this that stays with me. The example is simple: look out the window on a train instead of your phone. Let the landscape blur past. Let your mind go somewhere. And suddenly you’re thinking thoughts you wouldn’t have thought otherwise. Ideas come from that space. The things you actually remember and care about come from those moments when nothing is being fed to you and your mind is free to just wander. I get the utility. The phone is incredible for connecting, learning, escaping. But I think we’ve given up something quiet for that. The ability to actually be bored, to sit with your own thoughts without an audience or a feed or a next thing waiting. And in that space, strange things happen. You remember what you actually care about. An idea forms that wouldn’t have otherwise. You think something that’s actually yours. Sunday, 24 March 2019. Tomasz Mro: Tomasz Mro draws women. That’s the essence of it. British artist, mostly working in illustration—his subjects sit alone, often in thought, rendered with a precision that makes every line count. No excess, no showing off. Just clean drawing and a presence you can’t look away from. What catches you is what keeps you there. You look once and notice the skill. You look again and find details—the way light catches a fold of fabric, some small shift in the expression that you missed. Each time there’s something new, something the drawing has been holding back. That’s not accident. It’s intentional economy. The worlds around them are sparse. Sometimes just a color field, or a pattern suggesting depth. He trusts that the figure is enough, trusts his audience to fill the space around her with whatever they bring to it. That’s where the work does its real work—in what’s suggested, not what’s shown. I think what pulls me is the confidence of the approach. One figure, beautifully rendered, everything else quiet. The women have this quality of stillness and intelligence, a weight underneath the surface that comes through without needing to be stated. That’s harder than spectacle. That’s what makes you want to look again. Sunday, 24 March 2019. Evangelion Sticks: Shinji Ikari just wanted to see his father. That’s the whole hook, and it’s perfect because it’s so ordinary. He gets the summons, he shows up, and instead of a reunion, the world’s ending and he’s being handed the controls to a giant robot. I first watched Evangelion when I was way too young to understand it, and even then something about it stuck—not the plot exactly, but the feeling of it. The atmosphere Shiro Sagisu’s music creates, this sound design that makes a broken future feel intimate and real. The characters are impossible to look away from: Shinji scared and trying, Asuka furious and drowning, Rei unknowable and alone. Misato caught between them, trying to hold everything together with wine and charm and a broken moral compass. Even Pen Pen, the penguin just there in the apartment, existing quietly while the world disintegrates. The show isn’t afraid of being ugly about it. There’s theology and symbolism and all that, but underneath is just the raw fact of three teenagers piloting giant robots because no one else can, and it’s destroying them. Slowly at first, then faster. The last few episodes don’t even try to maintain narrative anymore—it just dives into Shinji’s head and stays there, watching him come apart. What gets me is how honest it is about failure and suffering without ever offering comfort. There’s no redemption arc waiting. The ending just stops, or spirals, or resets—depends which version you watch, but none of them feel like victory. They feel like waking up in a room you don’t recognize and deciding what comes next anyway. I can’t really explain why it matters to me so much. It’s not beautiful in a way that makes sense. It’s jagged and painful and sometimes ridiculous, and there’s something in that refusal to smooth itself out that feels true about being alive. It’s available on Netflix now, and I guess that’s how the world works—these brutal, strange, generations-defining things eventually make it to the streaming menu. But watching it again, I still feel that same thing breaking inside me. Some part of the show doesn’t let go. Saturday, 23 March 2019. No Para: You’re scrolling through something and you hit play on a video that looks like standard German rap fare—all the signifiers are there, tinny beats, mumbled delivery, the whole playbook. Then it hits you: this isn’t serious. It’s a parody. And not some lazy SNL-style sketch. This is “Kein Para,” Yung Larry’s surgical dismantling of Bausa’s “#1 song ’Was du Liebe nennst,’” executed with such technical precision that you can’t quite take the original seriously anymore. Yung Larry is Philipp Laude, a German-Austrian comedian and actor who spent years in the early-YouTube comedy group Y-Titty before basically inventing what German YouTube looked like. He’s done film work, real music projects, the full range. Started his own channel a few years back and built a substantial audience. But the smartest thing about “Kein Para” is how it deconstructs contemporary German rap with such ease. All these rappers are grinding, projecting this studied casualness while chasing streams and chart positions. Yung Larry does the same thing as a punchline, and somehow it lands cleaner. That’s what gets to you. It’s not mean-spirited mockery. It’s just casual. The fact that someone clearly capable of doing this as a joke makes you wonder how sincere any of it actually is. When the formula is this rigid, how much of rap is just performance anyway? How thin the line between real and ironic when all the moves are prescribed? The parody works because it respects the original while exposing how formulaic it is. Philipp isn’t attacking Bausa—he’s just showing that you can follow this blueprint exactly and it works fine. The only real difference is commitment, not talent. Which is strange to realize about a genre supposedly built on being authentic and effortless. Saturday, 23 March 2019. Orange Trees: Marina was one of those pop singers I paid real attention to in the early 2010s. “I Am Not a Robot,” “How to Be a Heartbreaker,” “Hollywood”—songs that had both the melodic generosity and the production intelligence, music that looked as sharp as it sounded. Three albums in five years, each one assured, each one working. Then she was gone, completely, for so long that people’s first google suggestion about her was whether she was alive. Now she’s back with “Orange Trees,” and it’s almost a joke how simple it is. A song about Lefkada, the Greek island her family’s from, no concept, no arc, no persona. Just singing about wanting to come back to a place that matters. “I’m trying to get back to what we need. Living like we should. Flowers in my hair, I belong by the sea.” Straight and uncomplicated, guitars and castanets underneath, the kind of song that doesn’t ask you to think about anything except maybe your own need to be somewhere else. She’s Marina now, dropped the “and the Diamonds,” which feels right. She shot a video for this in Mexico with Sophie Muller, and it looks like what the song sounds like: oversaturated, golden, the kind of visual heat that makes you want the beach. An album called “Love + Fear” is coming in August, but this doesn’t feel like a statement. It feels like a postcard from someone who figured out what matters. The thing about returning after an absence that long is it usually doesn’t work—you’ve lost momentum, people have moved on, it’s hard to sound current. But this feels effortless. The voice is still there. The instinct is still there. You remember what you liked about her in the first place, and it’s immediate, and maybe that’s what she wanted: not a clever comeback, just a reminder that some things don’t need to change to matter. Saturday, 23 March 2019. Hiro Mashima Doesn’t Change Much: Hiro Mashima has a type. Kids who are fundamentally alone in some way, usually angry about it, usually desperate for connection. Crews of people who shouldn’t belong together but do. Wars that weren’t supposed to be their problem. And somehow, every single time, you believe these people would die for each other. Fairy Tail proved this pattern. Lucy runs away from her comfortable life. She finds Natsu, a dragon slayer raised by the dragon he’s been searching for. Happy, a blue cat, is just there being weird and helpful. And the Fairy Tail guild becomes the thing they didn’t know they needed—a family of choice, which is the only kind that really matters. You watch them get pulled apart and smashed back together across seasons. The series ran long enough to test your patience more than once, but at least it ended on its own terms. When it was actually over, I felt like I’d been part of something, even if I’d spent half the time rolling my eyes at the plot. Now there’s Edens Zero. Shiki grows up alone on a robot-filled planet with no human connection. Rebecca arrives with a spaceship and a cat. He leaves with them. The template is identical—lonely kid, makeshift crew, journey into the unknown. Fairy Tail in orbit. One Piece but with stars instead of water. He’s not even trying to disguise it anymore. I’m not sure if that’s the mark of someone who’s mastered their craft or someone who’s stopped trying to surprise himself. Maybe it’s both. Saturday, 23 March 2019. LSD: Sia, Diplo, and Labrinth formed a supergroup called LSD and released a new song. Three artists with no obvious reason to work together, but each one knows what they’re doing, and it shows. Sia’s voice is unmistakable. Diplo’s production is tight. Labrinth keeps things from getting too polished. It’s the kind of collaboration that feels inevitable in retrospect, even though nobody saw it coming. Friday, 22 March 2019. Vertical Thinking: Vertical video format was considered bad taste—everyone knew you were supposed to turn your phone sideways to film anything. But TikTok and Instagram changed the math. The interface demands vertical now. It’s all vertical, and nobody questions it anymore. Lena Meyer-Landrut’s new video for ’Don’t Lie to Me’ embraces that completely. Shot in portrait format and directed by Paul Ripke, it mimics a smartphone display itself—all the interface elements, the visual chaos, notifications stacking up. It’s modern in the way that only something made right now can be, and yeah, sometimes it’s sexy. That matters less than the fact that she actually understands this moment. She lives this stuff. She’s on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube constantly, and it’s not some calculated strategy—it’s where she actually exists. She knows how to provoke attention. There’s the Instagram story in some thin top where her nipples were clearly visible through the fabric, and it got exactly the press response you’d expect. No coyness about it. She understood the mechanics. This video confirms it. She’s not imitating this culture—she’s actually living inside it. Friday, 22 March 2019. I Can’t Get Enough: Selena Gomez is wearing pajamas in the new music video. Not styled or ironic—just soft, regular pajamas. She looks comfortable, which is not a word you’d use for most of her career. After fifteen years in public, dealing with lupus and depression and the raw weight of being that famous that young, she comes back sounding different. Quieter. Like she finally learned what honest sounds like when you sing it. The song is “I Can’t Get Enough,” with Benny Blanco, Tainy, and J Balvin—an odd combination that somehow works. What’s interesting is how she talks about the making of it. Not as some triumph, but as learning where her actual strengths are. The lower register, the control, that came from months of figuring out what she could actually do instead of trying to be what she thought she was supposed to be. It’s simpler than her earlier work. More true. Her career is strange when you lay it out. Disney kid at fifteen, which could have been the whole thing. Spring Breakers in 2012 actually held, still does—something real underneath all the provocation. Then albums that improved even as she was falling apart in private. Nobody warns you about that part: sometimes the only place you know how to survive is in your work, so you get very good, very fast. She’s been at this long enough that the desperation has burned away. There’s no need to prove anything anymore. Which is maybe why what she’s making finally feels like it matters. The pajamas in the video aren’t a gesture. They’re just what she’s wearing. The vulnerability reads as real because it’s not being performed as vulnerability—it’s just the truth of her voice now, quieter and more honest than before. All those years of building toward this. Everything else was just clearing the way. Friday, 22 March 2019. Settled: Lena Meyer-Landrut used to be the Eurovision girl. Hyperactive, over-the-top, the kind of thing German pop spits up every few years and forgets about. Except she didn’t disappear. She got better. By now she’s learned what most people never figure out: how to exist in public without being destroyed. She posts without the desperate need for validation. She sings like she means it. She knows when to show up and when to disappear. At twenty-seven, that’s not nothing. The Tush Magazine photoshoot with Armin Morbach captures her at that point—comfortable enough to pose nearly naked, sure enough not to perform hunger. Morbach doesn’t try to seduce or flatter in that empty airbrushed way. He just photographs her as she is: lit in gold, looking back at the camera with something between curiosity and self-knowledge. No vulnerability being staged. Just her, there. What gets me is the distance from Eurovision. That was pure exhaustion—all that need to prove something, all that hunger. This is settled. This is an adult artist comfortable in her own body, not trying to convince anyone of anything. The sensuality in those photos isn’t seduction; it’s presence. She knows it. Morbach knows it. No pretense. Friday, 22 March 2019. Fero47: Fero47 posted videos of himself rapping on his phone and now he’s on Epic Records. German kid, half a million Instagram followers, debut single at number 8 on the charts—the whole trajectory from bedroom recordings to a major label deal compressed into a few years. His first single ’Jaja’ sampled Justin Timberlake’s ’Cry Me a River,’ which shouldn’t have worked but it did. Number 8. That’s when Sony stepped in and signed him. Produced by SiNCH and Typhoon. I haven’t listened enough to say if his music is actually good, but what’s interesting is the mechanism of it all. People on the internet decided he was worth sharing, other people believed them, and suddenly the industry had no choice but to catch up. Half a million followers just from word of mouth. No marketing campaign, no gatekeepers deciding whether you’re allowed to listen to this guy. His second single ’Puerto Rico’ came out and immediately did the same thing. That speed gets to me—the whole path that used to take years of grinding is now measured in months. Bedroom to major label. Phone video to chart success. The timeline is just completely different now. Friday, 22 March 2019. Miley’s Honesty: Miley Cyrus reinvents herself every couple of years with military precision. New sound, new look, new narrative—this time she’s all grown up, or reformed, or whatever the story is. Everyone buys it for a while, and then she posts a topless photo on Instagram and the whole thing falls apart. I saved it when she posted it. She clearly knew what she was doing. I clearly knew what I was doing. No one’s confused here. What gets me is the contradiction at the heart of it. There’s all this machinery around her—managers, publicists, brand consultants, all of them working to control her image, to make sure she’s presenting the right version of herself at the right time. And then she’ll just take her shirt off on the internet like it’s nothing. Like fuck the narrative. I don’t know if that means anything about where she’s going next. Maybe she’s heading back to that looser version of herself. Maybe it’s just a calculated reminder that she’s human, that the wild stuff isn’t entirely dead. Probably both. Probably neither. I’ll keep watching either way. Not just for the topless photos, obviously. But because there’s something honest in those moments that you don’t see anywhere else. Just her, not performing. Thursday, 21 March 2019. Bonnie Strange, Topless: Bonnie Strange posted a topless photo on Instagram. Just a casual picture, nothing graphic—something about daydreaming through Ibiza without a bra. The comments came fast: “What kind of mother are you?” People were disgusted, certain this was wrong. This is what happens when a woman with children has the nerve to have visible skin. What strikes me is the specific texture of the judgment. It’s not just prudishness—there’s something deeper. Once you reproduce, society decides, you give up the right to a body that isn’t clothed and apologetic. Your breasts become shameful by definition. You’re supposed to become unsexy, covered, respectable. The threat has nothing to do with the children. No kid is harmed by knowing their mom has a body. The real threat is the refusal itself—when a mother doesn’t ask permission to be visible, when she just posts a photo and moves on. That casual indifference, that’s what disturbs people. Bonnie Strange posted her breasts on Instagram and didn’t apologize. Didn’t perform the modesty that mothers are supposed to perform. The comments were people noticing that someone had simply refused—had just stopped caring what the rules said. She posted the photo and kept living. Thursday, 21 March 2019. When Wikipedia Went Dark: I opened Wikipedia one morning and the whole site was just black. Complete blackout. A message from the editors explaining why—something about an EU copyright vote happening that day, Article 13, upload filters. They were taking the site down to get people’s attention. The thing about copyright filters is they don’t work. You can’t build an automated system that reliably tells the difference between someone uploading a video they’re allowed to share and someone uploading something they’re not. The systems catch too much. They’re blunt instruments. So what you end up with is a version of the internet where hosting anything risky becomes basically impossible. Remixes die. Fan projects die. Anything unlicensed gets harder. The weird, unlicensed, half-legal creative ecology that’s always been part of how the internet actually works starts suffocating. But the vote was happening anyway. Five million people signed petitions. Tim Berners-Lee said it was a mistake. Every organization that actually builds things on the internet said it was backwards. None of it mattered much to the machinery. Policy tends to move at its own speed. What stuck with me was that one day—that black screen. It was one moment where something that usually stays abstract and invisible became concrete. You went to Wikipedia looking for information and hit this wall instead. For a few hours, one of the internet’s most essential utilities shut itself down just to say: pay attention to what’s about to happen. Whether it changed any votes I have no idea. The directive probably passed in some form anyway. But that black screen did something. It made the thing real. Thursday, 21 March 2019. Podkinski: Palina Rojinski has a podcast now on Spotify called Podkinski. New episode every two weeks. She used Plato as cover for it—you learn more in an hour of play than a year of conversation, or something like that. Fair enough. She’s been around the German media circuit long enough that you probably know the name from something or other. DJ, TV host, actress, Berlin fixture. One of those people who moves between stages and dancefloors and cameras like it’s all the same thing, because to her it probably is. She’s got that kind of ease about it. Podcasts are everywhere now. Everyone with any platform launches one. Most of them are just people talking, which works or doesn’t depending entirely on whether the person talking is actually interesting. This one’s straightforward—Rojinski in a room with people she likes, no script, no theme, just whatever comes up. Music, work, life, Berlin. You could say it has no format, but that is the format. I haven’t actually listened yet. It’s on Spotify if you want to find it. Thursday, 21 March 2019. All Those Places: When “Not A Love Song” went viral in 2017, Megan Bülow was still in high school. I don’t remember the moment particularly, but it makes sense looking back—a teenager writing an actual song about actual feelings instead of chasing the algorithm. She grew up all over the place. Eight years in Germany with most of that in Berlin and Hamburg, six in England, two in Texas, two in the Netherlands, now Toronto. Started busking on London streets when she was eleven. That kind of childhood either destroys you or it teaches you that everything is temporary except whatever you can hold onto. For her, it’s the music. Her lyrics are specific because they’re personal. “You & Jennifer” is her doing exactly what the title suggests. “Sad and Bored” is supposedly ironic, though I don’t think she actually believes that. The newer track “Sweet Little Lies” gets at something true about how imagination works. She described it as bright but dark underneath, about how fantasy can give you the most incredible feeling or become your worst enemy. That’s true. An hour spent in your head can make you feel invincible or completely destroyed, depending on which direction your head goes. I’m not going to do the comparison thing—if you like Sigrid or Dua Lipa then you’ll like her, that’s what the industry says. But it’s mostly marketing. What matters is that she sounds like someone with a life writing songs about it. Not performing the role of a pop star. Not executing a strategy. Just playing music she wrote about things that happened to her. That’s rare. Wednesday, 20 March 2019. Still Waiting: That part of the year where it’s supposed to be better outside but isn’t. Gray, cool, all wrong. I’m inside with the lights down and something playing, waiting for spring to actually commit. Netflix is dropping a new batch of shows this week—Sabrina, Spirit, some anime, comedy specials, whatever else. Most I won’t watch. I’ll find one thing, watch it in a couple nights, and then I’m back to scrolling. The seasons move in their own time. So does my attention. I’m not really watching for some release schedule or keeping up with what everyone’s supposed to be talking about. I’m just filling the hours between now and when it’s actually warm enough to be outside without pretending it doesn’t bother me. The waiting’s the point. The shows are just what I do while I’m waiting. Wednesday, 20 March 2019. Stadia: Google announced Stadia, which sounds like a painkiller but was actually their answer to cloud gaming. Stream games over the internet like Netflix—no console, no expensive graphics card, no waiting for hardware to age out. Just a controller and whatever power Google’s data centers could deliver. The pitch was appealing. Games in 4K, 60fps, developers working with essentially unlimited server resources. Watch someone stream on YouTube and click a button to start playing. No friction. Games as a service, available to everyone everywhere. It felt like watching the obvious future arrive. Google had the infrastructure. Twenty years of data centers scattered globally. Money. Reach. Hard to imagine what could stop them. The answer was the internet. Your internet, not Google’s. The last mile—the cables to your house, the wireless you pay for, the latency that matters infinitely more than bandwidth when you need real-time control. Cloud gaming requires a rock-solid, low-latency connection to feel like local play. Even in a decent city, even in Germany with decent infrastructure, that’s still rare. Stadia promised to remove barriers, but the entire thing depended on connectivity that doesn’t actually exist in most places yet. Cloud gaming has been the promised future for twenty years. Every company that tries it hits the same wall. It’s not technology—the data centers work fine. It’s infrastructure. The internet in most places just isn’t built for this. Building it out is slow and expensive, and nobody in entertainment is going to fund it. They want to build on what exists, not wait for the world to catch up. The dream was appealing. Gaming without gatekeeping, without expensive hardware, without waiting for generational cycles. But technology dreams collapse when they meet actual infrastructure, actual geography, actual world. Stadia promised to democratize gaming and just exposed how unequally internet access is distributed. Wednesday, 20 March 2019. Cartwheel: That’s how they met. Hailey Bieber climbed onto a diving board at a lake in New York, did a cartwheel, and belly-flopped into the water. Kelia Moniz watched and they became best friends. You can’t script that. They grew up in different places. Kelia surfed in Hawaii. Hailey became famous and married a pop star. They found each other at a lake on a hot day and something worked. Now they make things together. They designed a swimwear collection for Roxy called Sister. What I notice about collaborations is that it shows up in the work. You can feel when two people actually want to be in the room together. The colors, the cuts, the way they compromise on details—all of it’s visible. I don’t know if it’s real friendship or a very good performance of one, and honestly I don’t think it matters. The finished product is either a conversation between two people who trust each other’s taste, or it’s a corporate product. This one feels like a conversation. Tuesday, 19 March 2019. Making Work: Ama Lou’s a singer and filmmaker in North London. Paria Farzaneh and Feng Chen Wang both design menswear. Lava La Rue skateboards and makes art. Raye sings. They’re all working across different parts of London, doing their own thing. Converse made a campaign around them—called “Spark Progress,” all about supporting creative young women. Which is fine. But the actual interesting part is just: these five people are making work. Ama’s mixing music and film. The menswear designers are working in a space that doesn’t automatically default to women. Lava’s practice is grounded in skating, not just aesthetics. I’m probably more interested in what they’re actually doing than in the campaign around them. But I get why the campaign exists—it got my attention, after all. And the work is the thing that stays interesting. Tuesday, 19 March 2019. All At Once: Every few months North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon and the earth shakes and everyone refreshes the news for a few minutes before moving on. The thought sits there anyway. What would happen if every warhead on the planet went off at the same moment instead of one at a time over decades of hypothetical conflict. The mathematics don’t mean anything at that scale. Dust in the atmosphere. Years without sun. The slow suffocation of everything. I’ve rehearsed this scenario a dozen times already, mostly in video games. Fallout. Metro 2033. The Division. All of them built on the corpse of nuclear war, letting you pick through the ruins and fight things that shouldn’t exist. There’s something restful about those games. The worst already happened. You’re not waiting for it anymore. The actual bombs fell in 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial blasts killed around 135,000 people. Then the burns, the radiation, the long slow dying that went on for years after. Two warheads. Two cities. The weapons now are exponentially more powerful and there are thousands of them. The idea’s gotten almost casual. Every science channel has made the video, every corner of the internet has imagined what it would look like. Maybe thinking about it thoroughly enough makes it stop being terrifying and become just another historical scenario waiting to happen. Or maybe I’m just fascinated by thinking about the end because it’s easier than thinking about now. And you keep thinking about it, even though thinking about it doesn’t change anything. Sunday, 10 March 2019. One Arm, No Mercy: I’d spent hundreds of hours in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, learning the grammar of FromSoftware games—the patience, the reads, the carefully timed counterattacks. Sekiro uses that language but speaks a completely different dialect. You play as an unnamed swordsman, though the game calls you Sekiro, which means “one-armed wolf.” You’ve already lost an arm and nearly died when the story picks you up. You’re bound by oath to a young nobleman—some aristocrat with a cursed bloodline or secret power—and when he gets kidnapped, you chase everyone responsible through Sengoku-era Japan. That’s the premise. There’s no mystery about your goal, no blank-slate character building, no second-guessing the story’s direction. You know who you are and what you need to do. The Sengoku period is the late 1500s, Japan tearing itself apart. Miyazaki, the director, specifically chose this era over the Edo period because it was rougher, bloodier, more brutal. It matters. The world you move through is collapsing, and you move through it as a one-armed man with a prosthetic that can ignite or transform into a saw blade or chain whip. The historical setting grounds the fantasy in something real—you’re not fighting shadow demons, you’re fighting warriors who were actual soldiers in an actual war. The combat philosophy is where Sekiro completely breaks from its predecessors. Dark Souls rewards patience. You wait, you observe, you punish mistakes. That gets you killed in Sekiro. Miyazaki explained his thinking plainly: a ninja doesn’t fight like a knight. A knight has armor, reach, options. A ninja is constantly on the edge of death, exposed, taking enormous risks because that’s the only way to survive. So Sekiro is built on aggression and vulnerability at once. You’re forced to attack relentlessly, which sounds like it should be reckless, but the game’s designed so that recklessness, when executed precisely, is your only winning strategy. Then there’s the resurrection system. You die, but you can resurrect in place, mid-fight, and keep going. This isn’t a kindness. It’s the opposite. It lets the game be harder because you’re not losing progress every death. It lets Miyazaki create encounters where you genuinely might die at any moment, where one mistake cascades into a second and third. And it matters to the story too—the resurrections are tied to who your character is, part of the mystery surrounding him and the boy he’s sworn to protect. Compared to Dark Souls, Sekiro strips away the RPG stuff. No character building, no leveling, no new weapons to find and experiment with. You learn one character’s entire moveset and you fight enemies designed to destroy anyone who doesn’t understand them completely. It’s more direct, more focused, meaner. And because your character has a name and a story and a specific goal, the opening is clearer—you’re not confused about where you are or why. You know. Dark Souls players will probably be drawn to this. But not for the same reasons. It’s faster and crueler and it asks for something different—not caution but ferocity, not patience but controlled aggression. And that historical setting changes something too. The violence feels more grounded. The stakes feel heavier. You’ll die constantly. Everyone does. Most people will quit at some point. But if you can sit with it, if you can accept that the game is designed for you to fail repeatedly and that failure is the path to success, there’s something here that no other game offers. Sekiro doesn’t want your friendship. It wants your absolute concentration. Sunday, 10 March 2019. Still Weezer: You fall for someone, you end up falling for their music. A girl in Munich loved Weezer and I spent nights listening to Pinkerton, Raditude, Hurley, all of it. Songs like “Beverly Hills” and “Perfect Situation” got under my skin because they got under hers first. That’s how it works when you’re young. You’re trying to live inside someone else’s head. Weezer’s been fractured for years, making albums that felt like they didn’t know what they wanted to be. Then the Africa cover happened and somehow that became a thing, changed how people thought of them. It was ridiculous and right at the same time. Now Rivers and the band are putting out the Black Album and they’re confident about it, like they finally have something worth being confident about. The producer talks about them like they’re rubber—elastic, flexible, you can stretch them and they snap back. Rivers is pulling from social media, the Bible, Catch-22, throwing everything in. It’s scattered but it coheres. I want to know if it’s what they think it is. I want to know if she would still love it. I want to be the kind of person who remembers a girl in Munich and the songs that came with her, who still gives a shit what Weezer sounds like. Sunday, 10 March 2019. Dutch Type: The Dutch just hit different. Everyone knows this. I was twenty, stoned behind a student bar in Amsterdam, when three tall blonde women appeared out of nowhere like they’d been waiting onstage. Emma, Sophie, Madelief. Their long hair moved in the wind while they smoked the joint like it was nothing, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I was too much in my head, too aware of how far out of my depth I was. I never talked to them, but I stayed half in love with them anyway—with something about the ease, the straightforwardness, the way they existed without narrating themselves. Years later I saw Tiffany van Roest in the new Playboy and something caught. Twenty-three, from Soest, and she could’ve been a cousin of those three women. The shoot was nude, which is the whole function of Playboy, and reading her talk about it afterward she was just as direct. She’s comfortable naked because she actually lives that way, goes to saunas without thinking about it much. The photographer was good company. They had fun, the photos came out fine, and she talked about the whole thing the same way she talks about anything else—no shame, no performance. That’s the Dutch thing. But the real subject isn’t the photographs. It’s that when you read what she actually does, who she actually is, she’s more interesting than any shot could capture. She works in a care facility for aging horses, has two of her own, and would rather live on land with them than anywhere else. She barely wears makeup because she doesn’t think about it. She’s looking for a dark-haired guy with brown eyes and a few days of stubble, but more importantly she wants someone who makes her laugh, because humor is a currency to her. She was single and wasn’t performing being desperate about it—just clear. That’s the type I remember. The kind of person who knows what she wants and says it without flinching, who’d be exactly the same in a barn as in a photograph, who cares more about horses than about being looked at. The Playboy thing is incidental to that. It’s just what happened. The real substance is the steadiness underneath, the person who doesn’t perform, who just exists as herself. That’s what got me in Amsterdam. That’s what reads here. Sunday, 10 March 2019. The Gateway: I scroll through playlists more than I actually play them, which sounds stupid but there’s something about a good cover that makes you want to listen. Most of them are generic—Apple’s been cycling through the same patterns and emoji combinations for years—but when someone actually designed something specific, you feel it. The cover tells you something about what’s coming before the first song even starts. It’s the threshold. You look at it and you know whether you’re walking into a dark room or a bright one, whether this is careful or reckless, made for you alone or made for a party. A cover that someone actually thought about does something that a generated one doesn’t. It makes you believe in the playlist. Apple figured this out eventually and started having artists design them. Real illustrators, designers from all over—Stole Stojmenov, Carlos Perez, Gerard Huerta. The difference is obvious. These covers look like decisions, not defaults. They look like someone cared about what the transition from silence into music was going to feel like. I care about this stuff because design is what I do, but I think anyone who listens to music feels it too, even if they don’t think about it in those words. A playlist with a nothing cover can still have good songs, but a good cover makes you trust the songs before you hear them. You’re already convinced it’s worth your time. The image sold you before the sound did. There’s something about the fusion of sound and image that sticks in memory. You don’t remember them separately—you remember the whole experience, the cover and the listening as one thing. A playlist with a real cover just acknowledges that. It puts thought into the threshold. Saturday, 9 March 2019. Lightness and Edge: I grew up listening to the music Sigrid’s parents raised her on—Neil Young, Joni Mitchell. You can hear that foundation everywhere in her work: the conviction that a song needs to be built on something real. She started piano at seven in Bergen, just naturally good at it. By her teens she was covering Coldplay and Adele, but then something clicked—she realized she’d rather take songs apart, steal the pieces she liked, rearrange them into something hers. That’s always the right move. Her brother Tellef’s a musician. When she was sixteen he asked her to open for him, two weeks’ notice, and she had to write original material to do it. That kind of deadline works sometimes. She wrote, and then she kept writing. A couple years of real work and she had a deal. Now she splits time between Bergen and London, shaped by the music that raised her but doing something entirely her own. Her first single, ’Don’t Kill My Vibe,’ was immediate—over a million streams in days because the song itself is just good. It has lightness and edge in the same breath, which is rare. That’s what all her music is. Pop that doesn’t feel like it was designed by committee. She told someone once that what’s always inspired her are just really well-written pop songs, and playing piano and singing whatever comes to mind—that’s the best. That’s her whole thing. Now her debut album, Sucker Punch, is out. I’ve been waiting for this, and it’s the thing I hoped it would be. Saturday, 9 March 2019. Chameleon: You learn early that you need to adjust yourself for everyone around you. The real stuff—the bright, unfiltered you—gets dimmed down so you don’t stick out, so you survive. That’s what Jenniffer Kae’s new song ’Chamäleonmädchen’ is about. She grew up in a musical family, surrounded by Soul, R&B, Gospel, Country. But for years she was singing other people’s stories, other people’s feelings. Now, after putting out an album in 2008 and various projects since, she’s decided to sing in German and finally tell her own things. There’s something real about doing it in your own language—it feels like a commitment, a way of saying I’m going to be heard the way I actually sound. Her music balances two poles. There’s the quiet side—guitar, vulnerability, intimate. And then there’s the other thing, the energetic and powerful underneath. Hand-made. Alive. She describes it as two different spaces that both exist in her at the same time, and I think that’s the whole point. Not swapping between them, but containing both. In ’Chamäleonmädchen’ she’s singing about that split existence. About adapting to what everyone expects you to be, hiding your own head and heart and truth because the world doesn’t really reward you for being too much of anything. But underneath all that performance, something’s still glowing. Still bright. You just keep it quiet so you don’t burn anyone by being yourself. Saturday, 9 March 2019. DC in the Collapse: Washington DC in the summer, everything broken. The Division 2 puts you there as a sleeper agent activated when the government completely fails. You move through the ruins, shoot people, try to keep the country from collapsing entirely. The first game did this in Manhattan, which was fine until you finished it—and then there was nothing. Just an empty endgame, loot that didn’t matter, playing until you got bored enough to quit. They’re supposedly fixing it this time. Bigger map, better endgame, raids that mean something. Maybe they learned something. The appeal hasn’t really changed though, and it doesn’t need to. These games work because they tap into a specific fantasy—you’re not struggling to survive, you’re the competent ones, the ones in charge. Everything you do matters because the system has already broken down and you’re what’s left. You’re necessary. That’s the appeal. What’s different is the city. Manhattan winter, narrow streets, tight spaces. DC summer, wide open. The National Mall is flat and open, Georgetown has long sight lines. Different city, different geometry, different feel—but it’s the same game underneath. Move through a broken place, complete objectives, get stronger. Same structure, new setting. I don’t know if this is better without playing it, but I get the appeal. You’re competent and necessary when everything else has failed. That’s the fantasy, and it’s effective. Saturday, 9 March 2019. Still One: In the UK, one female artist made the top 10 albums last year. Dua Lipa. You see it everywhere: Ariana Grande as the sole woman in the most-streamed artists, Helene Fischer as the only female voice in Germany’s charts. The pattern’s so consistent it’s almost funny. I remember believing things would change around five or six years ago. The Me Too moment felt genuinely different, like something structural might actually shift. Women started saying no. Conversations spread everywhere. The industry was supposed to reckon with itself. But then you see a year’s numbers and realize the machinery kept running exactly as before. The conversation got louder. The lists stayed the same. Universal Music did a whole campaign around International Women’s Day, #Feminize, bringing in Dua Lipa, Lena, Anne-Sophie Mutter to talk about representation. I respect that they’re saying it. I just also know that a campaign about equality in music and actual equality in music are two very different things. Women make incredible records. The numbers have nothing to do with that. I’ve been following music long enough to know better than to expect sudden change, but I still get this small disappointment seeing one name on a list that should have five or ten. That feeling of watching a system protect itself while everyone agrees it needs fixing. It doesn’t make me angry. Just tired. Friday, 8 March 2019. 1A: I’m always here for music videos shot in Tokyo. Something about that city—the density, the saturation, the way neon cuts through crowds—it becomes a visual argument on its own. The Killers and Shawn Mendes figured that out. So has Alexa Feser, moving through Shibuya and Harajuku with purpose. “1A” is a pushback against the constant feed. She’s right: if you stay plugged in, it’s all dysfunction. Broken people, broken world, no way out. But there’s still good in the margins. Not the big gestures—the small, untouchable stuff. The ordinary things that still hold weight. I didn’t know her work before this video. But I’m sold. There’s no false hope here, no trying to inspire. She’s just saying something true and moving on. That kind of clarity without performance—that’s what I’m always looking for. Friday, 8 March 2019. Seoul at Ground Level: I went to Seoul because everyone else was going. K-pop, the dramas, the whole cultural machinery had made South Korea impossible to ignore. But the version of the city I found on the ground was quieter than the export suggested. The place is genuinely colorful—not designed that way, just accumulated. Flags strung across plazas, storefronts stacked with cheap beautiful things, parents crouched by the river pointing out buildings to their kids. I sat in alleys watching ordinary life unfold. Cute shops, pop songs from speakers you can’t locate, the specific mess of a real city. The history is still there even when you’re not looking for it. Seoul’s been important for centuries, and that weight doesn’t vanish because you’ve built skyscrapers. What you notice is how it all occupies the same space—traditional houses and glass towers on the same block, centuries of political capital and viral moments from five minutes ago happening simultaneously. That collision is what makes the place feel alive. The K-pop, the dramas, the cultural attention that brought me there—they were reaching for something that was already real. Seoul doesn’t package itself for outsiders. It just is: old and new crushed together, crowded and deliberate, specific in ways you can’t plan. I came to find out what all the attention was about. What I found was a city that doesn’t care if you’re watching. Friday, 8 March 2019. The Exhaustion of Okayness: Be Charlotte is 21 and Scottish and has figured something out that most people spend decades chasing. Her song “Do Not Disturb” lives in this weird pocket where it’s utterly danceable but also deeply about something else—the need to disappear into yourself for a minute, to stop performing okayness and just exist. The opening is this almost-delicate piano line until the beat drops and it’s groovy in a way that feels inevitable. Hip-hop touches wrapped in pop production, which is exactly where she’s been pointed all along. She started writing by pulling from Tracy Chapman and Alanis Morissette, Bob Dylan, but feeding it through her own obsession with modern pop and hip-hop. The result is music that doesn’t split the difference or apologize—it’s smart and danceable at once, emotional and grooved out at once. She describes the song as trying to articulate something she’d been carrying for a long time, this need for space that had no name. And it’s about that specific thing: living in a world that wants everything instant, everything responsive, everything available, but knowing you sometimes just need to shut the door. There’s no asking for permission in the song, just this matter-of-fact exhaustion about it. I recognize that exhaustion. The pressure to be available, to be present, to respond. There’s something both defiant and tired in how she sings it, like she’s already past the point of justification. It’s not a song about vulnerability the way music usually means it. It’s about the exact weariness of performing okayness when you’re not. The thing she keeps coming back to in interviews is how long it took to trust her own voice, to stop sounding like everyone else and just sound like herself. That’s the arc of the song too—not arriving already confident, but getting there anyway. Friday, 8 March 2019. Rothbart’s Girls: I’ve always appreciated artists who draw girls with actual agency and strength—not the decorative fantasy version, but characters with their own thing going on. Kirsten Rothbart does that. There’s no apology in her work, no softening of the edges to make feminism easier to swallow. These aren’t drawn for the male gaze or for empowerment™ marketing. Just drawn straight, with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you’re making. Thursday, 7 March 2019. The Most Honest Relationship: Love and Producer is a dating sim that took off in China. The setup: you’re hired to rescue a failing TV show, and suddenly you’ve got four superhero boyfriends competing for your attention. They have superpowers—one can fly, one can rewind time—and they love you if you pay them enough money. Purple diamonds. Real dollars. More cash, more affection. The app exists because of a specific kind of social cruelty. In China, if you’re a woman over 30 and unmarried, you’re Sheng Nu—leftover women. It’s not entirely serious as a concept, but the pressure behind it is. Real enough that some women marry whoever’s available to escape the label, and enough others found a different escape route: an app where you’re always desirable, never rejected, where loneliness costs money but at least it’s a transaction you understand. The mechanics are grimly honest. Your boyfriend will text you, call you, let you unlock his secrets—if you keep paying. There’s no ambiguity in the relationship. He doesn’t have bad days or get tired of you. He wants what you’re willing to spend. It’s the most transparent relationship anyone could ask for. I get why it works. Not as a substitute for real love—that’s not what people are looking for. They’re looking for attention that doesn’t come with conditions. A voice on the phone that’s always glad to hear from you. The feeling of being wanted. And that feeling does exist inside the app. It just costs something, which is maybe the most honest part of the whole thing. Thursday, 7 March 2019. The Eighties Never Left: I don’t know why Fulale’s album covers work, but they do. This Melbourne artist took Drake, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, all the contemporary names, and dressed them in 80s packaging—the specific kind of neon and chrome and leather that only that decade managed. The covers don’t look ridiculous. They look like they should have existed. That’s the weird part. You’d expect these artists to look out of place, anachronistic, a joke. But they don’t. Rihanna in 80s production design still reads as Rihanna. Drake still seems untouchable. The visual language changes—neon replaces LED, film grain replaces digital clarity—but the artists themselves don’t diminish. It’s like some core thing about what makes them matter transcends the era. The 80s have become this cultural default we all return to. Not because we’re actually nostalgic for them—most people weren’t alive then, or don’t remember them—but because the aesthetic is available. Fashion cycles through it constantly. Music producers sample it. Stranger Things made it feel like a lost world worth missing. But what Fulale’s work suggests is simpler: these artists would have been just as dominant in any era. The 80s filter isn’t making them better or worse. It’s just showing that Drake would have been Drake, whether the decade was the 2010s or the 1980s. Maybe that’s all nostalgia is anyway—trying to imagine that something timeless was always timeless, even in moments we never lived through. Thursday, 7 March 2019. Gold Peanut Butter: Cashmere toilet paper. Golden peanut butter. A seven-meter inflatable slide. Snoop Dogg decided these needed to exist and decided he’d be the one to make them. I respect that. The collection came through some payment partnership with Klarna, but the actual story is just the products. They’re not trying to be practical or traditionally aspirational—just aggressively, unapologetically extra. You don’t buy cashmere toilet paper because it improves anything. You buy it to have bought cashmere toilet paper. Same with the gold peanut butter, the silk robe, the inflatable slide for your yard. Snoop’s always had the kind of confidence where he doesn’t need to convince anyone he’s cool. He already is, and it’s been understood long enough that it’s automatic. So when he decides to sell you absurd luxury goods, there’s no desperation, no reaching. It’s just “I made some stupid shit, buy it or don’t.” The audacity of 115 euros for toilet paper. 2,500 for the slide. He knows what he’s doing. There’s something I like about luxury items that don’t pretend to be anything but conspicuous consumption. They’re not elegant or refined—just expensive and absurd. The gold peanut butter doesn’t taste better. The cashmere won’t make your bathroom transcendent. You’re paying for the sheer ridiculousness, the fact it exists, the right to own it. That’s honest in a weird way. I wouldn’t buy any of it. Probably not. But I’m not mad at Snoop for making it or at whoever does buy it. In a world constantly asking you to perform taste and restraint, there’s something liberating about just saying fuck it and buying gold peanut butter. Thursday, 7 March 2019. The Labo Gamble: I don’t remember much about the Virtual Boy. Red plastic, black screen, you held it up to your face like binoculars. 1995. It gave people headaches and lasted about as long as you’d expect something that stupid to last. Nintendo’s trying VR again now, decades later, but this time with cardboard. The Labo: VR-Set comes out April 12 for the Switch. It’s not a polished consumer device—it’s a kit where you build the headset from cardboard, fold together toys called Toy-Cons, and clip them to your Switch. Cut, fold, snap, shove the screen into the headset, and you’ve got 3D. It’s crude. Simple. Weirdly elegant. There’s something either genuinely clever or completely insane about this approach. It’s cheap. It’s tactile. It doesn’t try to compete with Oculus or PlayStation VR. It’s doing something different. You assemble six Toy-Cons: the VR headset itself, a blaster, an underwater camera, and a few others. Each works its own way. The whole thing treats assembly as part of the experience, not a barrier. The appeal is obvious. Anyone with a Switch already has the screen. Instead of selling expensive new hardware, Nintendo puts the work in your hands—cardboard, scissors, time. No tracking lights, no proprietary sensors, no ecosystem lock. Just design that actually functions and the kind of stubborn ingenuity Nintendo’s become known for. They’re being honest about what this is: a toy, not a promise. I don’t know whether it’ll work. I don’t know whether anyone still cares about VR now that the hype has cooled. But I like that Nintendo’s refusing to compete on specs. They’re not building the best VR. They’re making VR something you build yourself. That’s either the future or a brilliant niche. Probably both. Thursday, 7 March 2019. Finding Edo: You step out of Shibuya into the chaos—neon, glass towers, advertisements blinking through colors that shouldn’t exist, the future arriving in real time. Two blocks in the right direction and you’re somewhere else. Forest. Temple. Something quiet that’s been there for centuries. That’s the thing about Tokyo that most people miss. They see the half that photographs, the half that fits the narrative. The city used to be called Edo, a minor place until Tokugawa Ieyasu built a castle there in 1590 (he was the third of Japan’s great unifiers, after Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi), and it exploded into the country’s largest, most important city. The traditions that took root never left. They got buried under glass and concrete and neon, but they’re still everywhere if you know how to look—in the temples, in the restaurants, in the way buildings hold themselves, in details most people walk straight past. I spent time trying to photograph that ghost-city underneath the modern one. The temples that survived. The houses that remember what they are. Restaurants that have been feeding the same neighborhood for a century. It’s less dramatic than the neon version. It doesn’t give you the story tourists want. But it’s truer to what the place actually is: a city that kept building on top of itself, adding layer after layer, never quite letting go of what was underneath. Wednesday, 6 March 2019. Still Keeping Time: I’ve seen those Casio digital watches on so many wrists over the years. Silver, minimal, the kind that turns up on bartenders and night-shift people and anyone who doesn’t think much about accessories. My friend Clara’s had the same one for probably a decade. The Japanese company made their first digital watches in 1974, and by the 90s they were everywhere—the kind of thing that becomes invisible and then, inevitably, cool again. Now Casio’s bringing them back as a “Vintage Collection,” reissuing the models from that era. The 90s have been creeping back into fashion for a while—velvet, all-denim, tartan, the whole cycle returning. These watches came from that time originally, so re-releasing them as vintage feels inevitable. The watches are stainless steel, built simple, the kind of thing that works with whatever you’re wearing because they were never designed to make a statement. Six models, none of them expensive. They look clean on the wrist because they’re not trying to be anything other than functional. What strikes me is that these watches never actually went away. They’ve been in continuous production the entire time. The “vintage” label is just permission to care about something that was always there. Clara didn’t need the trend—she’d been wearing hers for years anyway. Now that they’re fashionable again, the watch is exactly the same as it ever was. That’s more honest than most style. Wednesday, 6 March 2019. The Model That Never Leaves: So I saw this campaign from Ellesse that uses a completely fake model. Not like, heavily edited fake—completely digital. Her name is Shudu. She was created by this photographer named Cameron-James Wilson who apparently decided at some point that working with actual human beings wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. The first thing you notice is that she’s perfect. Not photoshopped perfect—computer-generated perfect. The skin doesn’t have pores, doesn’t have the tiny imperfections that actual skin has. It’s beautiful in this almost unsettling way. You can’t quite place what’s wrong with her until you realize what’s missing: she’s never tired. She’ll never need a break. She’ll never get older or sick or decide she doesn’t want to model anymore. The clothes themselves are fine. 90s rave stuff, 80s sportswear, the usual nostalgia cycle. Neon, velour, boxy cuts. The design work is solid. But of course it is—how could anyone mess this up when they’re working with a model that doesn’t have opinions or bad angles? I keep thinking about what this actually means. Fashion has always wanted models to be objects, right? Perfectly still, perfectly lit, perfectly compliant. The industry spent decades training women to stand a certain way, look a certain way, accept a certain amount of degradation as the price of the work. And now we’ve gotten to the point where why bother with the woman at all? Just generate her. Problem solved. There’s something almost honest about how bleak that is. But also something that misses what actually matters about fashion photography—which is that a real person is choosing to be looked at. They’re making something happen between themselves and the camera. Shudu just receives the gaze forever without ever feeling it. I don’t know. I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m just noting that we’ve reached the point where the fantasy finally matches the technology. We wanted models to be impossibly perfect and permanent. Now we have them. Whether that’s progress or just the logical endpoint of something that was always rotten is probably up to you. Wednesday, 6 March 2019. Rape Day: Some developer released a visual novel called Rape Day. The game is exactly what the title suggests: you click through images as a psychopath in a zombie apocalypse, making decisions about which women to assault and kill. It lasted about five minutes on Steam before getting removed. Before that happened, the developer did some interviews. He’d grown up on horror novels, then psychological thrillers, then he got into stories told from the villain’s perspective—Mr. Brooks, Nightcrawler. He also liked porn. So he wanted to make something that smashed all of that together. Hence Rape Day. The shitstorm was immediate and predictable. Should this even exist? Is it art or is it just an assault simulator? The developer pushed back on the moral panic angle—we’re fine with depictions of murder in fiction, he argued, but assault is still taboo. Why? If art gets to show terrible things, shouldn’t the medium not matter? Give it a hundred years and this’ll look like the outcry over Grand Theft Auto or the first nude scene on television. He had a point about the inconsistency, sort of. But he was missing the obvious thing, which is that there’s actual distance between art that depicts something transgressive and a product whose entire appeal is transgression itself. A film or book or game can show rape and be saying something true about power, psychology, violence. Rape Day wasn’t interested in saying anything. It was just the thing itself. Shock value is not a thesis. Steam deleted it. The developer went silent. Now Rape Day exists as this idea everyone’s heard of but almost nobody’s played. The controversy made it more famous as a concept—as a symbol of where we draw lines and what those lines actually mean—than it could ever have been as an actual game. Wednesday, 6 March 2019. The Last Season: Game of Thrones spent eight years breaking things you thought were fixed. Kings you thought were safe. Children. Entire plotlines that seemed central to the story. The Red Wedding was the moment I understood the show wasn’t going to bargain with me about what I wanted to feel. Stannis burning his daughter. Cersei’s walk of shame. These weren’t plot points the show apologized for. They were claims it was making about power, about desperation, about what people will accept when they think they have no choice. Most television doesn’t have the nerve for that. The show worked as a mirror because it made you complicit. You watched people compromise themselves, and you understood why they were doing it, and that was the worst part. It wasn’t condemning anyone. It was just showing you how it happens. The final season was starting in April and I had no idea how it would resolve. Too many pieces still moving. The forces from beyond the Wall. The chaos of the Iron Throne. The question of who deserved power, if anyone. But I wasn’t waiting to find out who won or lost. I was waiting to see what the show would make of itself at the end. What last thing it had to say. I’d sit down and watch it the same way I’d watched everything else—unsettled, unable to look away, not sure I actually wanted to know. Tuesday, 5 March 2019. The Machinery: YouTube’s automated filters were already pulling videos of documented war crimes because IS flags appeared in the footage. Not the propaganda itself—just footage showing what was happening. The machine saw the symbol and said no. This was already happening in 2019 with filters companies installed voluntarily. Article 13 would make it mandatory for basically every platform that hosted user content. The EU’s new copyright law sounded reasonable on the surface—ensure creators get paid, stop unlicensed content. But the upload filter part, Article 13, was something else entirely. Any platform hosting user uploads would have to scan everything against copyright databases before it went live. Billions of files, most of them legal. The filter couldn’t distinguish between a copyright violation and a creative remix, between terrorism and journalism about terrorism. It would just see the match and kill the post. The people pushing this claimed it would help creators. It wouldn’t. The payment stuff went to publishers and platforms, not the artists actually making things. Meanwhile, the filter requirement was technically impossible for most small platforms to handle. They’d have to outsource it to Google or whoever could afford the infrastructure. Which meant more power to the big companies, not less. But that wasn’t even the worst part. Once you build the machinery for automated content filtering at scale, you’ve built a tool. And tools get repurposed. Today it’s copyright enforcement. Tomorrow it’s “protecting children” or “preventing extremism” or “combating misinformation.” You’ve created the infrastructure for censorship and handed it to whoever controls the algorithm. And nobody gets to look at how it works—the code stays proprietary, the errors go unchallenged. The internet people loved—the memes, the remixes, the fan content, the weird recombinations of culture—all of that would choke under this. It’s not designed for that. It’s not designed for nuance. It’s designed to block things, and when your only tool is a ban, everything looks like a violation. I wasn’t going to fix anything by shouting about it online. But there was a protest in Berlin, and the thing was large enough and strange enough to warrant actually showing up in person. Standing in the street with people who understood why this mattered, holding signs about Article 13 while the machinery of European bureaucracy kept grinding. Maybe it would change nothing. Probably it would change nothing. But the alternative was letting it happen unopposed, and there was something about that I couldn’t accept. Friday, 1 March 2019. What Stays: Masha Sedgwick talks about finding out she was pregnant at twenty. It’s 2010, she’s a student, working whatever job pays, and her relationship is already falling apart. She describes looking at the test, watching the second line appear, and feeling something like dread move through her. All of it screaming no. She decides not to have the kid. That night she tells her boyfriend. He’s disappointed and relieved at the same time—a mix she can feel in the room. They’re not ready. They never will be ready together. Here’s the thing: she tells this story on her podcast with Lisa Banholzer, just laying it out without protective framing or apology. What it felt like. What she decided. What came after—relief mixed with pain, a strange grief, and hope for a different future where she could choose consciously. Almost 100,000 abortions happen in Germany every year. The statistics don’t say anything about the weight of the decision, or what it means to carry that choice without having to defend it. Most people don’t talk about it. Masha did. What stays with me is how rare that is. Not the abortion—that’s common enough. But the honesty. The willingness to be that vulnerable about something so loaded with judgment. It matters because it gives permission, quietly, to everyone else who’s lived it alone. Thursday, 28 February 2019. Girl Gang: You see it everywhere—friends in basically the same outfit. Same cut, same vibe, never actually coordinated, just two or three people who spend enough time together that they’ve somehow started looking like the same person in different bodies. It’s genuinely cool. No fashion magazine choreography, just taste converging because you actually like each other. Spring brings it out more. Everyone’s outside more, visible more, and looking for reasons to spend time with people they like. That’s when the matching becomes automatic. You show up to meet someone and you’re both wearing the same thing, or close enough that it doesn’t matter. Nobody planned it. What’s interesting about spring clothes is the mixing. Flowy stuff next to structured, something bold against something quiet, feminine details paired with hard edges. The kind of thing that only works if you’re not overthinking it, which usually means you’re someone who’s stopped thinking about yourself and started thinking about the group. Maybe that’s the whole thing. The matching clothes aren’t about the clothes. They’re just the visual proof that you’re not alone in how you see the world. Thursday, 28 February 2019. What You Actually Like: Most people dress like they’re trying not to be noticed. Too much of anything—color, sparkle, personality—and someone might comment. So the clothes become safe. Neutral. Survivable. Zalando sent something about a campaign called “Stand By Your Style,” which basically said: wear what you love. They mixed high-end labels with streetwear to make the point—elegant dresses next to jeans, whatever. Supposedly proving that style isn’t about price point or category, just what you actually like. And of course they want you buying more clothes while you’re thinking about it. That’s how this works. But something’s true underneath the marketing. In design work I’ve noticed that the moment someone stops performing for an imagined audience—stops worrying about whether it’s too much—something shifts. The outfit becomes language instead of camouflage. You see the person in it. So Zalando was selling aspirational confidence, which is its own kind of commerce. But what’s being sold happens to be worth having. Wear what fits who you are. Don’t soften it. The irony of getting that message in a fashion ad is fine—we’re all in these systems anyway. Might as well take the good bits. Wednesday, 27 February 2019. A Machine That Worked: There’s something funny about Dr. George Taylor’s “Manipulator” from 1869—a steam-powered device so enormous the motor had to stay in another room while just the vibrating part poked through the wall like a plumbing accident. Imagine walking into a special medical chamber just to get vibrated by a machine in the next room. But he’d actually figured something out. Switch to electricity, shrink it down, make it portable, and doctors started prescribing the thing for constipation and arthritis. The marketing was brilliant: magazine ads showing women using it on their faces and necks, all technically honest, all completely hiding what the device was actually good for. The technology matured fast once the marketing stopped mattering. Cordless by 1966. Better motors. Multiple speeds. Actual design thinking. The device just kept improving because people finally wanted it to improve and stopped pretending it was something else. A century from steam-powered industrial monstrosity to something refined and practical—which is wild when you think about how much else happened in that same span. There’s no redemption arc here, no moment where society finally accepted something taboo. It’s just a machine that solved a real problem, marketed as a medical device until that fiction became too much trouble, then engineered better because it was worth engineering better. Technology is usually a lot less complicated than we make it out to be. This one just came with an extra century of awkward history attached. Wednesday, 27 February 2019. Supreme and the Art of the Overhyped Brand: A friend of mine is basically a Supreme completist. Not just the obvious stuff—hoodies, decks, tees—but everything: bags, pens, belts, the random collaborations that don’t make much sense. Basketballs with a box logo. Coffee cups. Key chains. At a certain point it stops being fandom and becomes documentation. I get it in the abstract. The brand has this weird gravity in streetwear that makes people buy things they don’t need just to own the thing. Photographer Ahmad Smith did a shoot with Supreme and a model named Erika Larson, and the photos landed somewhere between fashion and provocation. Stripped down, minimal styling, the brand’s aesthetic stripped to its essentials. It’s the kind of shoot that does what all good fashion photography does—it makes you feel something about the brand even if you don’t want to. The Supreme box logo becomes almost abstract when you’re looking at the actual execution, the way it sits against skin or fabric or whatever the angle is trying to say. The thing about Supreme is that it’s been so effective at the hype cycle that it’s hard to talk about it anymore without sounding like you’re either selling something or critiquing the sale. The photoshoot doesn’t escape that. It can’t. It’s promotional work. But there’s still craft in it—in the framing, the restraint, the way Smith uses negativity and body as compositional tools. Whether that makes it interesting or just expensive depends entirely on what you bring to it. I can see why the fandom works. Supreme gave streetwear a focal point, a thing you could collect and debate and prove your taste through. For some people that’s enough. For me it’s always been a little hollow, but I understand the pull. There’s something about owning the perfect branded object that feels like you’ve solved something. You haven’t. But the object doesn’t know that. Wednesday, 27 February 2019. Good Photographs: There’s this black-and-white photo of a raccoon by Blake Marvin that’s stuck with me. It’s from Apple’s global iPhone photography competition, and the thing is—it’s genuinely good. Not “good for a phone camera” good. Just good. The raccoon’s caught in the middle of what looks like a heist, eye contact with the photographer, and there’s this perfect composition of the hollow log interior that frames the whole moment. It was shot on an iPhone XS Max, which matters less than the fact that someone saw this and knew how to capture it. Apple runs this “Shot on iPhone” thing where photographers from around the world submit their best work, and they pick the winners to put on billboards and in stores. The 2019 round was genuinely diverse—people from Germany, Israel, Singapore, the US, Belarus. The photos showed colorful city landscapes, curious animals, reflections, the kind of stuff that matters to you when you’re actually paying attention to the world around you. What gets me about contests like this is how little it matters anymore that you started with a phone instead of a Canon or whatever. A good photograph is a good photograph. The technical quality across different iPhone models—from the older 7 to the newest Max—is solid enough that the camera stops being the barrier. It’s all about what you see and when you press the button. The jury was full of photographers I’d actually heard of, people whose work matters, and they were taking this seriously. The raccoon moment they highlighted was funny and sharp, but so were the other images—there’s real craft here, real eye. These aren’t Instagram snapshots; they’re people doing something with the constraints they have. I think what matters is that nowhere in that process does it say “best iPhone photo.” It’s just best photo. The phone happened to be the camera. That shift—where the tool becomes invisible because it works—that’s when everything changes. Wednesday, 27 February 2019. Have Fun in Pyongyang: The only images of North Korea I’ve ever seen are the ones the government filmed itself: parades where tanks roll endlessly, nuclear tests, synchronized gymnastics where thousands of people form the leader’s face. It’s so relentless and so surreal that the country stops feeling like a place where people actually live. It becomes a permanent broadcast, a loop of propaganda with no frame around it, no life outside the cameras. That’s what makes “Have Fun in Pyongyang” almost jarring to watch. Pierre-Olivier François and Patrick Maurus made this documentary over eight years, forty trips just to film ordinary things: harvest festivals, factory floors, singing competitions, weddings. Not monuments or ceremonies. Just life—people bored at work, proud of small things, being silly when they think no one’s watching. What sits with me is that it doesn’t make North Korea seem more understandable in some grand political sense. It just reminds you that twenty-five million people live there, and living means eating and working and finding small moments of joy within whatever walls are built around you. The country survived the end of the Cold War, a famine that killed hundreds of thousands, decades of isolation. Not because the system works, but because people keep going. You keep going. You find what you can. Maybe that’s what they discovered: people are still just people, even under the worst circumstances, even when the world has decided their country is nothing but a headline. That’s harder to turn into propaganda than any parade ever could be. Tuesday, 26 February 2019. Unguarded: There’s something refreshing about finding an Instagram account where someone’s actually just living instead of performing. Lily Mo Sheen—Kate Beckinsale’s daughter—gets it. She posts from beaches, stupid selfies, whatever moment seems worth documenting. No strategy. No carefully managed image. Just someone with enough privilege that she doesn’t have to. She’s twenty, born in London, works as an actress in that vague way children of famous people sometimes do—small roles in forgettable movies, nothing that took much effort. But on Instagram that doesn’t matter. She just posts. From beaches, bikini shots in that impossible blue water, stupid faces at the camera. Looks like she’s actually having fun. Most people on Instagram are trying to sell themselves because they feel they have to—followers, validation, visibility as currency. She’s already got money, got looks, got connections through her parents. So she can skip that. Just be loose. Post something because it amused her, not because it supports some narrative about who she should be. Which makes her actually interesting to look at, compared to most people. Not because she’s prettier or richer, but because she’s not trying to convince you of anything. I follow her account because it’s rare to find something on Instagram that’s genuinely just for the person doing it. Stupid and present and unperforming. Tuesday, 26 February 2019. Article Thirteen: The EU’s been working for years on updating copyright law for the digital age, and they’ve landed on something called Article 13. It’s part of a larger directive updating copyright for the digital marketplace, and at its center is a requirement for online platforms with user-generated content to prevent the spread of unlicensed material through “appropriate and proportionate measures.” In practice, that translates to upload filters—automated systems that scan everything before you post it and kill anything the algorithm suspects might be copyrighted. Clean in theory. Messier in practice. The voting history shows how contested this is. The EU ministerial council drafted something in May 2018. By June, parliament’s justice committee approved it, with Axel Voss from the CDU as the main negotiator. Then in July the full parliament voted it down after public backlash. They voted again in September and passed it with some language revisions. Now it’s in trilog—the three-way negotiation between parliament, council, and commission—and they’ve reportedly agreed on a version that’s actually stricter than the original. Final vote is March or April 2019. The real problem: filters can’t understand context. Fair use, parody, sampling, critique, fan work, transformative stuff—all of this lives in legal grey zones, and an algorithm doesn’t navigate grey zones. It matches patterns. You post something completely legal and an automated system flags it because it found a surface similarity. Once that becomes normal, it spreads everywhere. The internet contracts. And there’s the burden thing: creators eat the cost. Your legitimate work gets flagged and you fight an unappealable algorithmic decision. Maybe you request manual review, but the system is built to be conservative. Platforms aren’t liable if they block your stuff by mistake. They’re liable if they don’t block copyrighted material. So they err toward caution, which means your thing dies. Alexander Lehmann made a video explaining what Article 13 actually does, the real consequences, and what might stop it. If you care how the internet gets shaped—not by technology, but by policy—it’s worth watching. This is the kind of change that feels distant and bureaucratic until you’re the person whose thing got deleted, and by then it’s just normal. Tuesday, 26 February 2019. Gorillaz in Print: Gorillaz have always been a visual project first. Jamie Hewlett’s art defines them as much as Damon Albarn’s music does—the four characters (Noodle, Murdoc, Russel, 2D) are so fully realized, so specific in their weirdness, that you can’t imagine the band without them. It makes sense that Levi’s wanted to do something with that. The collaboration is at their Print Bars in Berlin, Cologne, and Munich. You choose one of Hewlett’s designs, customize the colors and patterns, and get it printed on a t-shirt, jacket, or bag. It’s a smart move because it lets you build something unique rather than just buying the same graphic as everyone else. You’re mixing Hewlett’s vision with your own taste, which feels right for a band that’s always been about the look as much as the sound. Gorillaz have been doing this for two decades. Their debut came out in 2001 and everything after—Demon Days, Plastic Beach, Humanz, The Now Now—maintained the same principle: the image matters. The characters have evolved, the music has evolved, the projects have gotten weirder, but that foundation never shifted. This is a band built on aesthetics first. There’s something almost relaxing about a virtual band having merchandise that actually works. No awkward celebrity sponsorship, no strange compromises. Just Hewlett’s drawings on your back, looking like they’re supposed to. Tuesday, 26 February 2019. Small Dick Problems: I stumbled onto the Small Dick Problems subreddit late one night and couldn’t look away. It’s exactly what it sounds like—guys with small penises talking openly about the entire weight of it. How to sleep with someone without the conversation becoming a logistics problem. Whether to warn them first or just let them figure it out. What you can actually do when there isn’t much to work with. One guy asked if expensive pumps really worked. Another said his girlfriend texted jokes about his size to her friends. A third got ghosted after sending a photo and wanted to know what he’d done wrong. The forum’s motto is basically: we didn’t choose this life, it chose us. And there’s something genuinely honest about that—men comparing notes on a thing most guys won’t even admit bothers them, let alone talk about openly. A friend of mine in college was convinced it defined him, and it kind of did, but only because he let it. He’d make jokes first, always beat everyone else to the punch. It didn’t make him feel better; it just made him the guy who talked about his own dick all the time. The threads go deep into it. How much does grooming actually help visually. Whether certain positions are off-limits. Whether you should just own it from the start or let it be a surprise. The desperation is real—guys asking if surgery is the answer, if they should just give up on sex entirely. And then other guys talking them off the ledge. Sharing what actually worked. Sometimes just admitting they felt the same way. What gets me is that some of them have actually found their way through it. There are posts about relationships that held, about women who preferred it or didn’t care, about life happening normally despite this thing they were convinced was a dealbreaker. Proof that it works, physically speaking, even if the guy spent months convinced it never would. There’s this weird amount of hope on a forum that’s nominally about disappointment. You can joke about insecurity all you want, but there’s something clarifying about a place where men just admit it: this affects me. No one’s performing. No one’s pretending it doesn’t matter. They’re asking each other how to live with it. And sometimes the answer is you find someone it works with, and sometimes it’s just that you learn to be okay with yourself anyway. Either way, at least you’re not alone in thinking about it constantly. Monday, 25 February 2019. Roma’s Year: The Oscars without a host that year, which somehow felt right. The ceremony had more room to breathe. What stuck with me was Roma. Cuarón’s film in black and white, streaming on Netflix, in Spanish—it just kept winning. Every technical award, the directing prize. The German entry that had looked promising didn’t have a chance. The anime didn’t either. Roma moved through the night like it was inevitable. Green Book got the acting categories and the screenwriting stuff. Mahershala Ali again, which felt earned. Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody was a win I wasn’t expecting to care about, but the film was huge in its way, and he was all of it—that’s what you want from that performance. Olivia Colman took best actress, which I felt good seeing. Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” won for the song. Mark Ronson behind her, her voice doing all the work. It was already everywhere; the Oscar just made it official. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won animated. Black Panther took everything else visual—sets, costumes, music, sound work. The sweep was complete. But Roma, mostly. A film that’s formally restrained, in black and white, in Spanish, moving at its own pace, not trying to be comfortable—and it wins the directing award at the Oscars. I kept thinking about what that means. Not about the film itself, but about what the Academy values when everything else falls away. Whether that says something true about cinema, or whether I’m reading too much into an awards show, I honestly don’t know. But it felt significant in the moment. Monday, 25 February 2019. Faster Than Youth: I don’t follow sneaker releases that closely anymore, but something about the Ader Error x Puma collaboration pulled me in. They call their design philosophy “Futro”—the space between retro and future—and it could be marketing nonsense, but in their hands it becomes something real. A collection called “Faster Than Youth.” I still have no idea what that means, which I respect. Ader Error is Seoul-based, emerged maybe a decade ago, and somehow became essential to how people think about streetwear. They approach collaboration differently. Where Puma’s usual partners would treat the archive reverently, Ader Error treats it like raw material. They took the Cell Venom, a 90s running shoe, and didn’t honor it—they interrogated it. Rebuilt the whole thing. The overlays, the proportions, the structure. Nothing was left untouched. It’s not nostalgia. It’s rethinking. The collection has the expected padding: jackets, parkas, the apparel that exists because collabs need to fill out a lineup. But the sneakers have thinking behind them. The RS-X with its color-blocking registers as a choice, not just decoration. It might be handpainted. Looks intentional. I’m not sure I’d wear any of it. But I notice the refusal to be obvious. No retrofuturism as an aesthetic, no “youth culture” marketing angle, just: here’s an old shoe, and here’s what becomes of it when someone takes it seriously. That’s harder to pull off than a clean silhouette. Monday, 25 February 2019. Sole Fury: The hard part of a good sneaker isn’t the hype—it’s designing something that doesn’t fight with how you dress. Reebok’s Sole Fury gets there without pretending. The silhouette sits quiet, the colors are steady, and it works whether you’re in jeans or something with real structure. No lifestyle story, no creative-pioneer framing. The shoe doesn’t need it. That’s rare enough to notice. Monday, 25 February 2019. Shanghai Underground: Shanghai’s club scene operates below the official narrative. Neon-lined streets, bass pressure from beneath street level, the kind of night-time infrastructure that doesn’t match the daytime. In the clubs you find down there, there’s a different circuit running—attention distributed away from the usual oversight, rules that apply selectively, the machinery of control loosening just enough to let something breathe. This is where Nüsuù Workshop does its work. Three women—Lhaga Koondhor from Zurich, Daliah Spiegel, and Amber Akilla—built this collective in that space. They’re operating against a music scene that was locked down, male-dominated, going through the motions. What they created is a kind of knowledge infrastructure for the underground—taste, method, information, permission. They’re part of Shanghai’s fundamental contradiction: a city steeped in tradition, choked by the present, torn apart by modernity. Lhaga came to this through necessity. She’d managed a bar in Zurich called Longstreet from 2010 to 2016, and there she met an Asian girl crew named Wifey. Something in that intersection stuck with her—a reminder that the music and community she wanted didn’t exist in Zurich anymore, maybe never would. The city had become too safe, too mapped, too settled. She moved to Shanghai and became like a chameleon, picking up everything—music, food, the texture of what people were creating. A VPN keeps you networked even inside the wall. She wanted to be inside the production, not outside observing it. Wanted to be part of what Shanghai’s underground was actually making. The collective started funneling that knowledge back into the scene. Building scaffolding where nothing existed before, making room for people who didn’t fit the template. It’s not flashy, not a revolution, just methodical infrastructure in the margins. You move through Shanghai’s underground music world and you can feel the shift—not everything changing, but enough changing that different things can exist. There’s a discipline to it that appeals to me. Not breaking the system, just knowing it well enough to slip through it, to carve out space where you can make something that matters. Shanghai’s full of people doing this same calculation—finding where you can move, where nobody’s quite looking, what’s possible in the gaps. Nüsuù’s just doing it with more intention, more clarity about what they’re building and why. Saturday, 23 February 2019. Zendaya: I’m a little smitten with Zendaya, if I’m being honest. It probably started with that Taylor Swift “Bad Blood” video—just her presence in that crowd, the way she moved. Something about her felt different from the standard Disney-to-fame kid. She’d done the usual modeling gigs, then Disney put her on “Shake It Up” and later “K.C. Undercover.” But somewhere along the way she became something else. Spider-Man: Homecoming was when I really noticed it. She has this quality that makes every scene feel larger than it should. Not trying, just present. I saw her in a Tommy Hilfiger campaign recently, styled all seventies and soft. She talked about fashion as self-expression, individuality, power. The standard thing to say, but she means it. You can tell. What I’m watching for now is whether she stays interesting. It’s easy to have presence in a franchise. It’s harder to pick roles that don’t bore you, to have the judgment to turn things down. She has the skill. She has the look. But there’s something else—that thing that makes you pay attention. Most people her age don’t have it. I think she’s going to use it. Saturday, 23 February 2019. Plateau: Converse and JW Anderson have been putting out some smart sneakers, and this Run Star Hike collaboration is worth paying attention to. The white version comes with a wildly colorful platform sole—like a wedge from some ridiculous 80s shoe, except it actually works. There’s also a glitter version. The whole thing is basically Anderson playing with proportion, taking an icon and breaking it down, stretching some parts and compressing others until it’s something new. This kind of proportion play is core to how Anderson designs. With the Chuck Taylor he could’ve just slapped his name on a gimmick, but instead he actually thought through what happens when you put a chunky running shoe sole under a classic canvas high-top. The upper stays thin and familiar. The sole gets thick and architectural. Put them together and something clicks. The shoe showed up in his Spring/Summer 19 runway in London and you could see why—it’s the thing that makes you do a double-take when you pass someone on the street. Not just the white and color contrast, though that’s loud. It’s the proportion shift. That platform isn’t hiding. The sole has a sawtooth pattern that adds height and structure, making this three-part thing where each layer does its own work. Details matter here. The white version uses linen instead of canvas. There are handwritten marks inside tying the two brands together, small gestures that feel like conversation rather than a corporate handshake. There’s “1917” next to a patch—nod to when the All Stars launched, Anderson crediting the shoe’s actual history instead of pretending he invented something. It’s the kind of collab that doesn’t need to scream. You either get what he’s doing with the silhouette or you don’t, but either way the shoe is there asking a quiet question about what a sneaker becomes when you’re willing to mess with what everyone assumes is locked in stone. Friday, 22 February 2019. Bowser Gets The Keys: Nintendo’s new president is named Doug Bowser. Not a codename, not a nickname—that’s his actual name. Doug. Bowser. His predecessor, Reggie Fils-Aimé, had just stepped down after fifteen years. Reggie was one of those rare corporate figures people actually liked—he showed up on YouTube, worked the conference circuit, had genuine goodwill in the gaming community. When he announced he was moving on to travel and spend time with family, nobody minded. It made sense. So he recorded a video saying goodbye and introduced his replacement. Doug Bowser. And the internet understood the joke immediately, because Bowser is Super Mario’s main villain—the antagonist, the obstacle, the thing keeping the plumber from the princess. Except now there’s a real person named Bowser in charge of the company that created the character. The coincidence was so perfect it felt written. Reggie didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening either. He made the joke in his own announcement, something about “with a name like Bowser, who should hold the keys to the Nintendo castle?” The right move—acknowledge the absurdity, move on, let the internet have its moment. The memes came instantly. For days, people treated it like Nintendo had hired an actual supervillain, which in a weird way, they kind of did. There’s something genuinely beautiful about pure cosmic coincidence. A guy named Bowser taking over the job that basically amounts to being Mario’s antagonist. Only real life gets away with writing that obvious. Friday, 22 February 2019. After Andromeda: I lived in Mass Effect. All three games, every side quest, every corner of the Citadel and the planets beyond it. The ending was something everyone wanted to rewrite and sure, there were moments that felt like compromise, but I never cared about the arguments. Those games felt real to me in a way most don’t. Then Andromeda happened and it became clear that lightning doesn’t strike the same bottle twice, that whatever alchemy BioWare had found wasn’t going to happen again with that particular formula. They went quiet after Andromeda. For a while it seemed like maybe that was it, maybe Mass Effect was just done. But they were building something else the whole time. Anthem launched today—four players in these mechanized suits called Javelins, flying through a colorful world, fighting together against some threat that’s probably meant to be cosmic and important. It’s about as far from Mass Effect as you can get while still keeping the same studio’s DNA underneath everything. I don’t know what I think about it yet. It feels like the move you make after you’ve stumbled. Not a retreat, exactly, but a pivot. Just trying to prove something still works. Whether that’s true will take weeks to find out. Live service games reveal themselves slowly. You don’t know what they really are on the first day. What stays with me is what it means that this is what BioWare wanted to make next. That story-driven single-player worlds gave way to this multiplayer live thing. Maybe that’s just the market pressing in from all sides, every studio following the same path. Maybe BioWare looked at what made them famous and decided they were tired of making that game. Maybe both things are true. It’s out now. Xbox, PlayStation, PC. I’ll try it eventually. Not because I think it’ll be Mass Effect again—of course it won’t be. But because I’m genuinely curious what happens when a studio decides to stop making what it’s known for and do something else entirely. Whether they learned anything from what they built before. Whether they still know how to make something that sticks. Friday, 22 February 2019. The Fold: In 2019, Samsung announced a solution to a problem nobody was having. The Galaxy Fold was a foldable phone that cost two thousand euros and was supposed to replace both your phone and your tablet, or solve some internal conflict about which one to carry. The logic was that if you were the kind of person who couldn’t decide between the two, here was the answer: just get both at once, but make it fold. The thing was impressive technically. The first Dynamic AMOLED display that could actually bend without shattering. Enough processing power to run three apps at once. Premium materials, premium price. Samsung had thought of everything except whether anyone actually wanted this. The hinge was a weak point. The gap in the middle when folded was constant. When it was a phone, it was awkwardly big. When it was a tablet, it was weirdly narrow. Every form factor was a compromise. What struck me at the time, and still strikes me now, was the sheer confidence of it. Samsung had built enough successful phones and tablets that it apparently felt empowered to invent new categories of desire, new problems that didn’t exist until Samsung decided they did. The Fold wasn’t solving a real problem expensively—it was creating an imaginary problem at an impossible price. It was pure tech-industry faith: if we build it, they will come. If we fold it, they will understand why they needed it folded. I never got one. Didn’t know anyone who did. Years later, foldables exist because Samsung insisted on them existing, and they’re better now, but that first one was basically a very expensive prototype being sold to early adopters who wanted to own the future before it made sense. Thursday, 21 February 2019. Kitbull: I could watch Pixar movies all day. Up, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, Inside Out, Ratatouille, Coco, Cars—doesn’t matter. I’d cry and laugh through every single one. Wall-E falls apart after the first thirty minutes, Up gets worse as it goes, and Cars is basically for kids whose drunk dads force them to watch Formula 1. But Pixar is Pixar. They’ve earned it. Every couple of months they put out these shorts—either before the films or straight online. Piper, Lou, Bao. Little perfect things that pack a whole emotional life into a few minutes. You laugh, then you cry, then you feel better, and that’s all there is. That’s how everything should work. Kitbull is the newest one. Rosana Sullivan directed a short about a pit bull and a stray cat in San Francisco’s Mission District. The pit bull’s had a rough time. The cat is shy. They become friends. Sullivan said she started with a cat video she liked, just wanted to draw something cute, and then it turned into something more personal, something real. You can feel that turn in the film itself. There’s something about how these shorts work that I can’t quite pin down. They take the smallest, simplest idea and make it matter completely. Two animals becoming friends. A boy growing up. A rat cooking. And the animation is so precise that you stop noticing it’s animation—the cat moves like an actual cat, the pit bull has actual weight to him. Before you realize it you’re sitting there attached to these figures in a way that should take an hour to earn but somehow happens in five minutes. I watched it after a long day and it got to me. Not because it was trying to, but just because it was true. That’s the whole thing, really. Pixar figures out how to be true without ever trying hard. They just show you something and let you feel it. Thursday, 21 February 2019. YouTube’s Problem: Matt Watson posted a 20-minute video in 2019 showing how YouTube’s algorithm and comment sections had become a staging ground for child predators. Five clicks could take you from the homepage to a rabbit hole of videos featuring young girls in gymnastics or dance videos, and from there into comment threads where men posted timestamps of moments children were exposed or in positions they found arousing. These moments got compiled into videos, downloaded, and traded on private sites. No one told the kids this was happening. The advertisers noticed. Disney, Nestlé, Epic Games pulled out. It wasn’t a shock to them because YouTube had done this before—in 2017, the same thing happened, and Adidas, Amazon, Deutsche Bank left too. YouTube’s response hasn’t changed. They told reporters they had policies, they’d closed accounts, they’d disabled comments on millions of videos, they were committed to doing better. The video went viral because you could still see it happening. The weird part is how little seems to have actually changed. Alphabet owns YouTube. They can predict what you’ll watch next, optimize ad delivery, measure engagement in real time. Apparently they can’t or won’t prevent organized predators from coordinating in comment sections. After being caught twice, losing major advertisers both times, the question stops being whether they can fix it and becomes whether they want to. Thursday, 21 February 2019. Ferropolis Again: Ferropolis announces its lineup every spring, and it’s one of those things I always check because it tells you something about what’s happening in electronic music and performance art. 2019’s list landed recently—Bon Iver, A$AP Rocky, Bilderbuch as the names everyone recognizes, but the rest of it is what actually tells the story. The deep cut starts with Solomun, Four Tet, Modeselektor, Charlotte de Witte, Ellen Allien, Helena Hauff—people building something real with sound, not just booking names to fill days. That’s different. You can feel the curatorial thinking there, choices that make sense together rather than just aggregation. A$AP Rocky showing up is interesting too, hip-hop in a space that’s mostly electronic. It shouldn’t work but it does because the festival has enough confidence in what it is to let other things exist inside it. The Melt Forest with Pornceptual and Pansy running the performance programming is where you see the actual stakes. That’s not a side stage; that’s the festival saying this is countercultural by design. It’s deliberately experimental, which is rare enough now that people genuinely plan their summers around it. What keeps pulling people back to that industrial site—an abandoned power plant near Gräfenhainichen—is consistency. Over 120 artists, three days in July, no attempt to be everything to everyone. The scale is there, but so is the taste, and that combination is rare enough to feel worth the trip. Thursday, 21 February 2019. No Apologies: The video is moody, intimate—Ariana moving through a space, telling someone they should just break up with their girlfriend already because she’s bored and wants them. That’s the whole song. No metaphor, no apology, no dressing it up in feelings. What I like about it is that straightforwardness. Most seduction songs dress themselves in romantic language or at least pretend to care about the damage. This one doesn’t bother. It’s not vulnerable or apologetic—it’s just want, stated plain. That lands completely different when it’s someone with Ariana’s momentum, someone people actually listen to when she decides something. The song was part of that moment with “Thank U, Next,” the album that just moved through everything when it dropped. One of those releases where the day you hear it, the conversation pivots. Number one everywhere. I don’t really care about streaming numbers, but they were big enough to be the proof, which is maybe why we talk about them. I keep coming back to the confidence thing. Most artists are trained to make themselves sympathetic, to earn empathy. Ariana just takes what she wants. No apology, no performance of caring. The song’s basically a shrug—if you want it, fine. If you don’t, that’s your loss. That kind of unguarded certainty isn’t usually how things work, but when it does, it’s all you can think about. Wednesday, 20 February 2019. How They Fall Apart: Red Chucks, canvas already soft and separating from the rubber sole. That’s the first time I remember actually noticing what shoes someone was wearing. They belonged to a girl I knew—not anyone important, just someone whose taste in things made sense to me even then. I wanted a pair after that. Mine were bright and new and wrong at first, but they broke in fast. Every basement party, every rooftop situation, every messy hookup and terrible decision and conversation at 3 AM where you think something’s going to change—those shoes were there. They got destroyed. Canvas stained with spilled drinks and dirt and all the other damage, the rubber sole starting to split. They looked like they’d actually been through something. Eventually they fell apart completely. The sole separated from the canvas and wouldn’t go back. I remember being surprised how much it bothered me—getting genuinely upset about a pair of shoes dying is stupid, but they’d been on my feet for three years and losing them felt like losing proof that any of it had happened. I’ve bought Chucks since then. They all follow the same pattern: pristine and bright for about a month, then you stop seeing them and everyone else does too. They become just how you move through the world. By the time they’re finished, they’re invisible. Converse puts out new colors every season. This year they’re doing a faded vintage palette, like someone old was trying to remember what their destroyed Chucks looked like. Which is funny—selling you the worn-in aesthetic before you’ve worn them in. But the shoes still find whoever needs them. That’s how it goes. Wednesday, 20 February 2019. The Internet Keeps Dying: Every few years some tired coalition of lobbyists and career politicians figures out a new way to break the internet. This time it’s Article 13—a copyright filter that the EU is about to ram through because tech regulation is too hard and industry lawyers speak louder than anyone else. The filter would scan everything you upload—video, image, music, meme, remix, whatever—for copyright violations before it ever sees the light. Sounds reasonable if you’re a Sony lawyer. It’s apocalyptic if you’ve ever made anything. The thing about automated filters is they don’t understand context. A reaction video gets flagged. A song playing in the background of your story gets killed. Fair use doesn’t exist. Parody doesn’t exist. The whole weird anarchic culture that made the internet worth a damn in the first place—fan edits, mashups, commentary, jokes, the constant remix and riff and response—all of it gets smoothed into silence. I’ve watched people say this won’t happen. That it’ll be fine. That the algorithms are smart enough. They’re not. They’ve never been. And even if they were, we’d just be trading one kind of failure for another—one where the people who built this thing no longer get to decide what they do with it. The irony is almost perfect. Axel Voss, the CDU politician pushing this, has been sued for copyright violations on his own Facebook page. He’d be the first one flagged by his own filter. But he won’t be. That’s how these things work. German YouTubers like Gronkh and LeFloid are putting up a fight, and honestly, at least someone is. The petition hit five million signatures. But signatures don’t matter to people who’ve already decided. It takes bodies in the street. Demos. Noise. That’s what killed ACTA. That’s what might kill this, if anyone still gives enough of a shit. In a few weeks the European Parliament votes. After that, the internet looks different. Not overnight. Just slowly worse. Less strange, less surprising, less made by people who just wanted to make something. More managed. More safe. More dead. Wednesday, 20 February 2019. One Foot Out: Maisie Peters was eighteen when she decided to make music her actual life and moved to London. Summer 2018: she was in studios every day while her friends were home doing normal eighteen-year-old things. “Stay Young” is what she made from that distance—a song about the moment you realize you’re already changing, becoming someone new, even as you’re promising your old friends nothing will. The specificity of it interested me. Not a generic song about growing up, but about that particular age, that particular move. She wrote it partly as a promise to her friends—that distance wouldn’t matter, that she’d stay the same—but the emotional point is that you can’t keep that promise. You’re already someone else by the time you understand what happened. The people you love are still who they were. You’re not. There’s something honest about writing a song from that moment. Whether it actually works as music is another question—that depends on the voice, the production, all the technical things that have to go right. But the impulse is real: eighteen in a new city, trying to hold onto something you’re already losing. Tuesday, 19 February 2019. Making Mario: I spent weekends as a kid sitting in front of my Super Nintendo, daydreaming about designing my own Super Mario World levels. A ghost house full of red Yoshis. An underwater level with Koopas everywhere. A forest of doors, each hiding some impossible puzzle. I’d grin to myself, knowing that someday I’d actually build all this. That someday came in 2015 with Super Mario Maker on the Wii U. Not quite what I’d imagined, but close enough. You could design levels across different Mario styles, upload them, see what thousands of other people were making. The internet filled with brilliant designs and absolutely sadistic kaizo levels that required inhuman skill. I made some mediocre ones. Didn’t matter. I was finally doing it. Super Mario Maker 2 landed on Switch with better tools. I lost months to it, building levels I’d never finish, entire worlds that only exist on my console. There’s something about building these little spaces, even if nobody plays them, even if they’re not good. Finally got what I wanted as a kid. Finally got to make my own Mario games. Tuesday, 19 February 2019. Karl Lagerfeld Is Dead: Karl Lagerfeld is dead. That shouldn’t require explanation. But it does. Everyone knows what it means—a man people called arrogant and brilliant and ruthless and visionary, hated and loved simultaneously. He didn’t apologize or explain himself. I think he was exactly what he claimed to be: an icon, a thinker, someone who reshaped how the world looked through pure force of will. He was born sometime between 1935 and 1938, grew up wealthy in Hamburg, moved to Paris with his mother in the fifties. That’s when everything shifted—not just for him, for fashion entirely. He became the architect of Chanel, took a house that had already reshaped how people saw themselves, and pushed it further into something harder and more beautiful. Then he went his own way, worked under his own name, made the present and future look like he’d designed them. “If you wear sweatpants, you’ve lost control of your life.” He said things like that and meant every word. He was the last real authority in fashion. The last person who could reshape an entire industry through taste and will alone. After him there’s just noise—everyone doing their own thing, no one at the center anymore. Without the white ponytail, the dark glasses, without his instinct for finding the right woman—Claudia, Lara, Toni—to embody what he saw, fashion becomes smaller. Quieter. Less itself. I’m not sure what comes next. A world without Karl Lagerfeld is hard to imagine. Tuesday, 19 February 2019. The Sleek in Five: The Sleek is the kind of shoe that works because it doesn’t ask permission. Clean leather. Perforated three stripes. A window for the logo. Colored sole. Adidas kept the silhouette and changed the color—five times. Pink and red, white and yellow, white and pink, pale blue, black leather. There’s a design lesson in this. Not every good idea needs to be complicated. Sometimes you find something that sits right and you let variations of it breathe. The shoe doesn’t change much between versions—structure, details, proportions all the same. But which one you reach for on a given morning is different every time. Context, mood, what else is in the rotation. The pale blue one feels different from the black one, not because one is better, just because they live in different parts of your mind. I could want all five, or just one. The shoe itself doesn’t demand anything of you. It just works. That’s rare enough to notice. Tuesday, 19 February 2019. Nothing in Common: Nothing connects Avril Lavigne and Nicki Minaj except they’re both massive in pop music, which barely counts as a connection. Avril came through rejecting the idea that female pop stars had to be perfect. Nicki came through and said perfect was boring—she’d be weird and in total control. Different eras, different everything. I think about them together anyway because they both refused the script. Monday, 18 February 2019. Still Thinking: Robyn spent eight years away and I didn’t realize how much I’d been waiting for her until she came back. “Honey” last October didn’t feel like a comeback—it felt like someone picking up mid-conversation. “Missing U,” “Because It’s in the Music,” the new video for “Send to Robin Immediately”—all of it confident in a way that reboots usually aren’t. She’s Swedish, which shapes how she makes pop. There’s no softening, no apology. “Dancing on My Own,” “With Every Heartbeat,” “Hang with Me”—those songs got under my skin because they sounded like thinking, not performing. “Body Talk” in 2010 felt complete, like she’d said everything she needed to and was done. Then eight years of silence. The return comes with a streetwear collection called RBN, made with the stylist Naomi Itkes and the label Björn Borg. It’s sportswear and workwear informed by Robyn’s own style and the Björn Borg archives from the 80s—which seems random until you realize it’s exactly how she thinks: looking backward for raw materials, not for something to resurrect. What strikes me is that she didn’t come back needing to prove anything. The music, the fashion, it all moves forward like the silence was just a pause. I don’t know what’s next, but I know she does. Monday, 18 February 2019. Radio Energy Naked: I knew they were doing Playboy before I saw it. Radio Energy—those voices everywhere across Germany, same women in different markets. Julia, Natali, Daniela, Elisa, Janine. Suddenly nude in the magazine, March 2019. The nudity’s the obvious story. What actually comes through is reading what they want. Janine needs humor and an impression that lands immediately. Julia rejects handsome men entirely—she wants something strange, something that stands out. Natali goes for artists, people genuinely obsessed with making things. They’re specific about desire. That specificity matters. Radio is pure voice. You invent someone’s face from their voice, and it’s probably nothing like who they actually are. Then they appear naked in a magazine and the thing you imagined collides with the thing that’s real. It’s an odd moment. More honest than Playboy probably intended. Everyone would sleep with Justin Timberlake. Unanimous. Monday, 18 February 2019. Selena Posted That: She posted photos from the beach with her friends, and she was just there—in a white bikini, nothing retouched, no sucking in. Her stomach showed. No big deal, except it kind of was. I’d gotten used to the version of Instagram where everyone looked airbrushed into a different species. You stop noticing it after a while, the little adjustments, the filters, the angles that hide what you’ve learned to be ashamed of. Showing up as a fictional version of yourself becomes the baseline. Seeing her photos felt like watching someone break a rule I didn’t know existed. Just posted them. The kind of casual documentation that Instagram used to be, before it became a performance, before looking like an actual person felt like a risk. Not revolutionary, just human in a way that’s embarrassing to call brave. There’s that thing where you remember being paranoid about your own photos. The internal calculation—what’s acceptable to show, which version of yourself is the right balance between visible and palatable. It’s work you don’t recognize as work until you stop doing it, or until you see someone else stop and realize how much energy it takes. I don’t know if it changes anything about how Instagram functions. The algorithm doesn’t reward being human. The whole culture keeps grinding toward more polish, more distance from anything real. But there was something in that choice that stuck—the choice not to perform, not to edit yourself into acceptability. Monday, 18 February 2019. Marshmello in Pleasant Park: Marshmello performed a concert in Fortnite, ten minutes in Pleasant Park with cartoon characters bouncing around him. It was what you’d expect—bright, chaotic, a thing to witness once and forget. This happened before. Second Life had digital concerts too, years ago, with the same sense that entertainment was about to completely dematerialize. Celebrities showing up in the metaverse, brands opening storefronts, everyone convinced this was how people would experience culture from now on. But it didn’t stick because you can already hear any song you want whenever you want. The experience isn’t the music. It’s being somewhere at the same time as everyone else, and a game doesn’t really deliver that. Marshmello’s a natural fit anyway. He’s one of those SoundCloud producers who somehow built a career bigger than anyone expected—”WaVeZ” dropped in 2015, and people latched on. The oversized white helmet, the anonymity, the brand of staying opaque while remaining omnipresent. He’s everywhere: collabs, social media, YouTube cooking tutorials where he’s still in costume. For people who grew up with Twitch and Discord, he feels native to a game in a way most musicians don’t. The concert itself was forgettable mechanics—dancing emotes, a big stage, music playing. But the question that surfaced with Second Life and never really went away keeps coming back: are we looking at the future of entertainment, or just a platform trying to monetize its audience through novelty? I think the appeal is simpler than people admit. No one’s there for the music—the music exists everywhere. They’re there to be part of something, to say they were there when it happened. A game makes that easy. There’s no real experience, no difference from watching a video, but it feels exclusive, it feels like a moment. That feeling is enough. And it works, so it’ll keep happening. As long as there’s a platform with millions of players, someone will figure out how to turn it into an event. Marshmello will do another one, and someone else will follow, and in a few years this won’t feel novel anymore. It’ll just be another distribution channel, the same as a YouTube stream, a Spotify drop, a TikTok trend. The medium changes, the hunger to be part of the moment stays the same. Sunday, 3 February 2019. Kill the Wall: Shangguan Zhe runs Sankuanz under a concept he calls “Kill the Wall”—which shows up in everything: fragments of contemporary art mixed into vintage sportswear, uniform aesthetics made strange, visual language that doesn’t respect clean boundaries. He treats streetwear like actual art rather than product, pulling from subcultures and following a real grammar: oversized midsoles that look almost deliberately clumsy, earth tones interrupted by neon, 90s shoe shapes rebuilt at new scale. The Chinese streetwear scene has been making noise for years, but there’s something different about Zhe’s work. There’s honesty in it. He’s not trying to teach you about design history or fill a market gap. He’s just following an idea—this idea of breaking down walls—wherever it leads. You see that less than you’d think in collaborative work, where most of the time it feels like nobody had an actual opinion about anything except the business terms. Puma brought him in for a capsule that reads like a Shangguan Zhe primer: Cell Endura, Cali, RS-X, Thunder, all rebuilt with characteristic thick soles and reflective details, neon against muted tones. The pairing makes sense on paper—Puma gets cultural credibility without risking much, Zhe gets distribution to places he wouldn’t reach on his own. But the real test is whether something this specific survives being flattened into a scroll feed. Specific visions don’t usually make it through that intact. Still, the perspective is visible from the photos. You can see what he was thinking. Most collaborative announcements don’t give you that much. Saturday, 2 February 2019. Sushi God: Raw salmon, sashimi, the whole thing—I could eat nothing but sushi for the rest of my life. The texture of it on my tongue, perfectly steamed rice, a soy sauce thick enough to actually taste. I’d do it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, every meal, until food poisoning or some ocean parasite took me out. And I wouldn’t even care. Nozomu Abe runs a restaurant in New York called Sushi Noz, and in certain circles he’s stopped being human and become a god. The precision with which he works the day’s fish, the refusal to make anything optional—it’s almost religious. He’s built this place that doesn’t compromise, that could sit in the middle of Tokyo and nobody would know the difference. What gets me about people like that is the understanding that one perfect piece, handled exactly right, means more than a thousand careless meals. It’s the kind of thinking I recognize from my own work—the moment you stop asking “is this good enough” and start asking “is this exactly right.” They’re questions that lead somewhere different. I’ll probably never eat at Sushi Noz. It would destroy me. But I like that it exists. That there’s still a corner of New York, or any city, where someone’s committed enough to something that specific, that small. Where obsession still looks like the right choice. Friday, 1 February 2019. Rings: She sings about buying herself expensive things. No tragedy narrative, no redemption arc, just a woman who’s been through hell saying I’m going to buy myself rings and not explain why. That’s the whole song—Ariana on “7 Rings,” the 2 Chainz remix. It’s deliberately light, bubblegum pop. The line that catches me is the one about having been through bad shit (“I should be a sad bitch”), but instead of that being what the song is about, it’s just context for the real subject: spending money on yourself without guilt. She has this line about how whoever said money doesn’t solve problems never had enough money. It’s cynical but also completely true. After Manchester. After Mac Miller died. After Pete Davidson. Watching her make a song that doesn’t turn any of that into a lesson or a redemption story—that doesn’t try to perform healing—feels like something. She’s not singing about resilience. She’s just saying: I earned the right to buy myself nice things and I don’t owe anyone an apology for it. 2 Chainz is there mostly to co-sign the whole thing, which is all it needs. The song doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. There’s something honest about refusing to inflate the moment. Sometimes a song about buying yourself rings is just a song about buying yourself rings, and that’s enough. Friday, 1 February 2019. The Hundred: Game Two hit 100 episodes. The show’s been going since MTV killed Game One a couple years back, which means Budi, Simon, Etienne, Nils, and whoever else shows up has somehow managed to keep talking about video games on German public television without anyone pulling the plug. They’re good at it—they know how to actually engage with games instead of just reporting on them. For the 100th, they didn’t do a clip show or a retrospective. They made a dystopian action film. Plot about saving the world from a YouTube monopoly, which is funny because it means they were thinking about the actual stakes of internet culture and not just the mechanics of the show itself. Nearly 90 minutes, actual production, insider jokes throughout. The kind of thing you come up with after you’ve been working together long enough to trust each other with something that stupid and ambitious. I like that instinct—the moment when a crew decides it’s earned the right to try something outside the format. Most shows never get there. Most shows either run out of ideas before they find the confidence, or they hit an audience size and a network just grinds the format into dust until nobody cares anymore. Game Two made 100 episodes and then made a film. That’s the thing worth noting. Thursday, 31 January 2019. At Ease: Simon Bolz, the photographer, said something pretty straightforward in his caption about Marie: she’s “such a positive and open young woman” and “extremely photogenic.” Looking at the photos, you can see it immediately. She looks comfortable. Not like someone performing comfort or playing a part – just actually there. Marie is 22, from Giessen, used to be on Germany’s Next Top Model show. She did this shoot in Spain for Playboy’s February 2019 issue. She’s a rock and metal fan, started playing guitar at thirteen, was in a band for a while. Just naturally uninhibited. What stuck with me from the interview was how she talked about sex and relationships. “If there’s no desire, no passion – just routine and a head that’s not really there – I’d rather not.” And then: “You have to have fun and let yourself fall.” That kind of honesty doesn’t usually make it into print. Most people soften it. She didn’t. Looking back at these photos now, years later, what’s actually interesting is how genuinely at-ease she is. Not performing that ease – actually at ease. It’s harder to capture in professional photography than you’d think. Usually there’s some kind of tension underneath, some awareness of the camera. Not here. Thursday, 31 January 2019. Kingdom Hearts 3: There’s something almost defiant about Kingdom Hearts as a series—the idea that you can smash Disney and Final Fantasy together, throw in a teenager with a giant key for a sword, add mythology about light and darkness and hearts, and somehow make it all land. It shouldn’t work. It keeps working. KH3 finally came out and after the wait, the experience is exactly what you’d expect if you’ve played the others. You’re in Frozen, then Pirates of the Caribbean, then Tangled, moving between worlds with Sora and Donald and Goofy, collecting allies and keychains and fighting an ongoing battle with darkness. The Keyblade transforms into different shapes mid-combo, you summon Disney rides as weapons, you ride ice slides created by magic. It’s visually absurd and almost aggressively flashy. The game is really three things in rotation: talking, running, and fighting. Exposition, movement, combat. Each one takes its time. If you’re impatient with any of them, you’ll feel the other two dragging. And the story—god, the story. If you haven’t played the six or seven prior games (depending on how you count them), you’ll need YouTube just to understand who’s talking about what. I had to relearn entire character arcs I’d forgotten. But there’s something endearing about how earnest KH3 is about its own absurdity. The plot about light and darkness and friendship takes itself completely seriously while happening inside Arendelle and the world of Ratatouille. Somehow, by the end, you’ve gotten attached to these people and you care what happens to them, even though it’s ridiculous. The combat is dumb and fun—thirty combos stacked into a single fight, your numbers rising while explosions bloom behind the characters. The soundtrack is reliably orchestral and dramatic. Hikaru Utada came back for the main theme, Skrillex got involved somehow, and it all works in that way Japanese games make orchestral music work. It’s a game for people who got attached to Kingdom Hearts when they were young and never let go, who think mixing Disney and anime action is the most interesting idea in gaming, who don’t mind that the story requires a flowchart. If you want coherent narrative structure, you’re in the wrong place. If you want to spend thirty hours in a mashup of everything, comfortable and familiar and deeply, unapologetically strange, this is exactly what it’s always been. Wednesday, 30 January 2019. Toxins and Toys: Five out of eighteen sex toys tested by Stiftung Warentest failed because they’re loaded with actual poison. DEHP, which damages fertility. Phenol, which might cause genetic defects. Nickel, which triggers allergies. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are possibly carcinogenic. The other thirteen mostly passed, which is something. What struck me is that there are no regulations for this stuff. No standards at all. You can put almost anything in something made of silicone and sell it, and there’s nothing stopping you. Dr. Wagner-Leifhelm from the test said it plainly: these things have direct mucous membrane contact. Your body absorbs things through those tissues. It matters what’s touching you there. I’ve bought cheap toys without thinking about it. You see one online with decent reviews, you order it. Nobody’s thinking “I wonder if this is toxic.” That’s not how you shop for these things. You don’t read the materials list. You don’t check a safety database. You just assume it’s probably fine, the way you assume everything else sold legally is probably fine. Until something like this test comes out and you realize nobody’s actually checking. The advice at the end—wrap it in a condom if you’re paranoid—just underscores how broken the situation is. But what else are you going to do? You can’t tell which ones are safe. There’s no label. There’s no database. The only way to know is if someone happens to test it, and they test maybe five a year. So you’re either gambling, or you’re just not using anything at all. Wednesday, 30 January 2019. Another Eden: I’ve loaded Chrono Trigger maybe five times since the ’90s, never finished it the same way twice. The branching endings meant you could always convince yourself there was more to see, another route through Zeal or another conversation at the End of Time. Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda made something that felt inexhaustible. They released a mobile RPG called Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space—time travel, ensemble cast, the standard JRPG machinery but assembled with thought. Free-to-play on iOS and Android, available in Japan, the US, Canada, South Korea, and a few other places. Not Europe yet. The game updates constantly and apparently has enough content to justify the name. Chrono Trigger was their masterpiece. They could have stopped there, let the game sit untouched in everyone’s memory as the perfect thing. Instead they’re designing worlds, thinking about how to make time travel matter thematically instead of just mechanically. It’s not another Chrono Trigger. It’s them doing what they did before. I haven’t played it. Mobile games always feel like they’re asking for something—money, attention, time—and what you get back doesn’t balance. The free-to-play model is a contract in small print. But knowing they’re out there building, that they didn’t stop, matters somehow. You don’t get to see that very often with the artists whose work actually stuck with you. Wednesday, 30 January 2019. Skeleton Music: I found them through Spotify, one of those recommendation rabbit holes where you’re clicking around in playlists from people you actually trust for taste. Dahlia Sleeps—Luke Hester producing, Lucy Hill singing, a London band that’s been building quietly for a while now. The sound is skeletal: minimal electronics, reverb-heavy, but never woozy. Lucy’s voice is surprisingly warm against it, soulful in a way that catches you off guard. You get the obvious comparisons floating around: London Grammar, The XX, Daughter. That general territory. But there’s something more direct here, less atmospheric in the way those bands sometimes are. Luke’s production feels confident in what it’s leaving out. A guitar appears when you’re not expecting it. The vocals sit right in the empty space like they belong there. They’ve been at it since 2015, picked up a few EPs, millions of streams, the usual underground-to-semi-discovered arc. Then they dropped “Love, Lost” and did one of those music-video sessions with a fashion brand—Ellesse, I think. I watched for the actual performance, and it landed. Two songs: “Love, Lost” and “Storm,” both from the new EP. It’s clear they understand how their songs live in a room, in the real air, not just through speakers. The production doesn’t hide the performance; it frames it. There was also this thing where Facebook pulled down their EP cover, which shows nude bodies, because the algorithm flagged it as obscene. The band pushed back on Instagram. It’s the kind of small stupid moment that follows music that isn’t trying to be safe, and honestly it says more about what we’re allowed to look at than about the band. Either way, it doesn’t touch what matters: the actual sound, the actual emotions in the songs. The thing that sticks with me is how much air is in everything. Nothing feels cramped or over-produced. There’s real confidence in making something this sparse work, in trusting that empty space is doing something. I keep coming back to it at odd hours—not analyzing it, just listening. It feels like being in the room with someone thinking out loud. Tuesday, 29 January 2019. Add Yourself: Someone found a bug in FaceTime group calls. You’d start a call and swipe up to add another person, but instead of entering their number you’d add your own. Now you’re listening in on the other person’s call without them knowing. Video works too. Just like that. The timing is what makes it stupid. Apple spends most of their time telling you they’re different from the other tech companies, that they actually care about privacy, that your data is encrypted and safe and they don’t listen. That’s their whole pitch. And meanwhile anyone could tap into your calls if they knew this one trick. The feature had been around since late 2018, so the bug could’ve been sitting there almost from the beginning. Someone could’ve been listening to you for months. Not as part of an investigation or anything official. Just because they wanted to. An ex, a parent, whoever had it out for you. Apple killed group FaceTime when the bug came out, just turned it off. But then it came out that they’d apparently known about it for a week before doing anything. A week of leaving an eavesdropping exploit alive while people were using the feature. The thing that got me is how fast all those promises about privacy just evaporate. One bug. One little interaction between features that goes wrong, and suddenly “your data is safe” means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t take a sophisticated attack. Doesn’t take hacking anything. You just add yourself to a call. That’s the depth of the protection they’re selling you. Tuesday, 29 January 2019. Dancing on Ice: Sat.1 had this show where celebrities learn to skate with professionals. I don’t know why I started watching—it’s a stupid premise—but something about watching someone fall and get back up over weeks of practice is weirdly compelling. On ice, you can’t fake progress. Annette Dytrt was one of the coaches. Five-time German champion, moves like someone who doesn’t have to think about movement. That kind of ease reads as power. It’s what makes ice skating so visually strange—the bodies look both effortless and impossible. Ice skating has this cultural pull I’ve never quite understood. Sport and performance so tangled together you can’t separate them. The costumes are tight. The tradition goes back to Katarina Witt and before. Being beautiful is kind of the job. Athleticism and desire married in obvious ways. Annette recently did Playboy, which feels almost inevitable. But what keeps me coming back is just the movement. Watching someone actually good at something. That’s its own thing. Tuesday, 29 January 2019. Cool for Rent: That new Puma Cali in purple is sitting in my head. The shoe itself is fine—tennis court design from the 80s, perforations and a chunky sole, nothing that’s going to change your life. But it works. There’s no apology in it, no self-consciousness about being retro. I’ve been a Stan Smith guy for years. They’re the kind of shoe you don’t think about, which is the whole point. The Cali is the opposite—you notice it, but it doesn’t feel like it’s asking for permission. Selena Gomez wearing them is the strategy. Puma looked at the market and realized they don’t have enough cultural weight to be cool on their own. So they signed people who do: Rihanna, The Weeknd, Selena. The CEO actually said this in an interview—get Gen-Z girls interested, and the boys automatically follow. It’s blunt and true. It’s also the entire system of how taste spreads. But it only works if there’s something there to begin with. The shoe has to be fine. The design has to make sense. Then the right person shows up wearing it, and suddenly it matters. That’s when taste becomes contagious. Maybe that’s all taste ever is. I still don’t know if I’d actually buy another sneaker. But I get why people would. Tuesday, 29 January 2019. Skeleton Key: There’s a skeleton on Instagram living a better life than me. @OMGLiterallyDead. Just bones in streetwear, going to clubs, taking selfies. No apology, no self-consciousness, just a complete absence of flesh participating fully in the Instagram ecosystem. It works as satire almost by accident—Instagram’s been chasing extreme thinness for years, and posting a literal skeleton registers as less of a joke and more of a logical conclusion. Just another person on the feed. I don’t know if the person behind it meant it that way, but there’s something genuinely cool about refusing to perform anxiety about your own appearance. Even as a skeleton. Monday, 28 January 2019. Where She Belongs: I discovered Asian Doll through one of those algorithmic turns that actually landed something worthwhile. Misharron Allen—that’s her real name—was born in Dallas in 1996, which means she grew up watching southern hip-hop crystallize into its most potent form. When she started rapping, trap music wasn’t experimental anymore; it was the language everyone was speaking. The fact that she got signed to Gucci Mane’s 1017 Records label is significant because Gucci doesn’t collect people. He recognizes them. Gucci Mane himself is instructive here. He came up in Birmingham, Alabama, started writing as a kid, moved to Atlanta as a teenager with his mother, and didn’t really break through until 2005 when “Black Tee” got picked up and he released “Trap House.” That album didn’t chart, which people always leave out when they talk about Gucci’s rise. What they focus on is that he kept working, kept refining, kept collaborating with people who understood the same frequencies he did. By the time Asian Doll arrived at 1017, Gucci had already built something real—not just a label, but an ecosystem. Zaytoven, Hoodrich Pablo Juan, Ralo. These are people with substance. What hits me about Asian Doll’s actual music is the clarity. “Rock Out,” “First Off,” “Main”—they’re not elaborate. They’re just complete. She sounds like she knows exactly where she belongs in a track, and she occupies that space without apology. There’s a directness to it that I respect. A lot of people in rap sound like they’re auditioning for something. She sounds like she’s already in it. The collaborations came naturally after that: Soulja Boy, A$AP Ferg, and she just kept moving. It’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as career progression, the standard rapper arc, but listen to the actual music and you hear someone who understood the blueprint and decided not to fight it but own it instead. That’s a different kind of strength. Monday, 28 January 2019. Experience Overrated: Dana messages me occasionally with a show she swears will change my life. Her taste is genuinely scary—ignore one of her recommendations and you fall out of touch with what’s actually happening in culture. So when she texted about Sex Education, I didn’t protest. Otis Milburn, awkward and inexperienced, lives with his mom, who’s a sex therapist. Years of absorbing her books, videos, and relentlessly direct conversations have made him an accidental expert. When his private life leaks at school, Otis sees an opportunity—he could turn this weird knowledge into actual social capital. He and Maeve, sharp and deliberately strange, start an underground advice practice for the sexual problems plaguing their classmates. Analyzing everyone else’s dysfunction, Otis starts to realize he might actually need help too. It’s the kind of Netflix show that lands on the sympathetic side—likable characters, reasonable stories, gentle mirrors held up to the world. First love, coming out, masturbation, a whisper of Oedipal texture. It won’t reshape culture the way American Pie supposedly did. Nothing quite reaches the “flute in the pussy” level of alchemy, the kind of reference that lasts twenty years. But for anyone fumbling through inexperience or trying to get past it, there’s something solid about watching other people navigate the same confused mess. You don’t always need something that promises to change your life. Sometimes you just want to be entertained, to think about sex and desire and what wanting feels like, without it demanding profundity. Sex Education is that. You pick things up. Maybe a technique, maybe just permission to wonder what you actually want. Dana was right. Usually is. Monday, 28 January 2019. Swastikas and Flowers: BNK48, the Thai sister group of the Japanese idol factory AKB48, showed up to rehearsal in swastika T-shirts. Arms raised. Someone filmed it. It went everywhere. The strange part isn’t that they wore them. It’s that they didn’t understand what they’d done. Pichayapa Natha, the group’s lead, posted an apology in halting English: “Everything that happened is completely my fault. I should know much more about the world.” There’s something genuinely sad about that sentence. She’s asking the internet how to become a better girl because someone in the system made a choice without thinking it through. Her manager took her to the Israeli embassy in Bangkok the next day. They brought flowers. An apology was accepted. The story ended. This keeps happening in Asia. A Thai restaurant got caught last year with a Hitler portrait hanging in a guest room. The swastika in the East is ancient—Buddhist, Hindu—it exists in a completely different context. But the internet has made context irrelevant. You can’t have symbols local to your culture anymore. Everything gets swallowed into one global meaning the moment someone films it. What stays with me is how young Pichayapa looked in the apology, and how confused. Like she’d been told she’d done something terrible but not why, and she was doing her best to apologize for it anyway. Monday, 28 January 2019. Wargroove: Wargroove is what Chucklefish made when they decided to do a tactics game. If you’ve played anything else from them—Starbound, Stardew Valley, Risk of Rain—you know they have solid instincts about what makes a game work. This one’s no different. It plays like Game Boy Advance-era Advance Wars—that’s the whole appeal. You move little armies around a grid, position units, manage resources, try to outthink what’s opposite you. If tactics are your thing, you already know you want to play this. Four factions, different unit types and commanders, fifty-plus hours of campaign. But the map editor is where the real life happens. Build your own scenarios, share them, watch what the community does with the tools. That’s how things like this stay alive for years. I’ve always liked games with pixel art that understands constraints instead of fighting them. Everything reads at a glance. The art serves the function. There’s something about the color palette and the animations that just works, even though it’s squares all the way down. It’s restraint. Most things aren’t doing that right now. I went back and played Advance Wars again before this came out, the way you do. It still felt solid. Strategy doesn’t date the way action does. But it was good knowing someone had made something new in that space, actually cared about getting it right. Saturday, 26 January 2019. Underpowered: The Resident Evil 2 remake opens with Leon and Claire arriving in Raccoon City just as the Umbrella Corporation’s experiments escape containment. Mutated creatures, zombies, the full catastrophe. I watched someone play through it, which turned out to be the best way to experience it—you’re helpless, you see what they’re about to run into, you can’t do anything but react, which is exactly what the game is designed for. Resident Evil 2 in ’98 basically invented survival horror. You’re not a commando, you’re someone underpowered and trying to stay alive. The remake keeps that tension. It splits the campaign—you play Leon or Claire, and their paths overlap, so you’re moving through the same spaces at different times, which creates this strange sense of being in the same catastrophe from different angles. Level design gets convoluted sometimes. You’ll backtrack through hallways looking for a keycard, never quite sure if you’ve missed something or if the game is just making you work. Inventory management is maddening—limited capacity, everything matters. But that’s not a flaw, it’s pressure. The puzzles make you think. Zombie animations are unsettling in ways that matter. Characters feel like people instead of plot devices. What strikes me is how much trust it puts in you. No hand-holding, no endless exposition, no cutscenes dumping lore. You move through the city and piece things together on your own. There’s DLC called The Ghost Survivors that takes side characters and gives them alternate-timeline scenarios. It shouldn’t work—feels like the kind of padding that ruins lesser games—but the mechanics are solid enough it works. And somewhere in Raccoon City you can play as a life-size tofu, which is exactly the kind of absurdist detail that proves someone in that development studio had actual taste. Saturday, 26 January 2019. Back to Denim: Denim sits in this strange cultural middle ground. It’s the most basic thing—workwear, no pretense, something you wear because it works. But it’s also been handled so much by fashion that just wearing it straight feels deliberate now, almost like a statement. Either you’re someone who doesn’t think about clothes, or you’re someone who’s decided to commit to what denim means. Monki’s approach is interesting because they’re not treating jeans as a neutral base. The new collection leans into construction details that feel intentional: hammer loops, contrast stitching on the seams, wider cuts through the leg that don’t try to hide themselves. The colors move past the usual spectrum—pale vintage blues, mustard yellow, natural ecru, a purple that actually reads as a choice rather than an accident. It’s a way of saying this isn’t just denim, it’s this specific version of denim. There’s a workwear lineage here that connects to all the nineties stuff floating around. Utilitarian details that feel at home on the street, not just on the job site. The construction suggests someone’s thinking about longevity—how the fabric wears, where it creases, how the color shifts. That relationship between the material and the body moving inside it. I’ve been working in design long enough to recognize when someone’s actually thinking about materials rather than just using them. It’s the difference between denim as a default and denim as a decision. When you understand that fabric will absorb the shape of whoever wears it, that it’ll tell a story just through sitting and moving and living. The real question is what these look like six months in, worn hard and daily. That’s when you find out if someone truly understood denim or just borrowed the shape of the idea. I’m hoping it’s the former. Friday, 25 January 2019. Brightness All The Way Down: There’s something about Kero Kero Bonito that makes you remember why you ever liked pop music in the first place. They’re three people from London—Sarah Bonito, Gus Lobban, Jamie Bulled—and they sound like they imported their entire musical education from Japanese pop and synthpop instead of the usual places. Their songs are impossibly bright. ’Fish Bowl,’ ’Let’s Go To The Forest,’ titles that don’t pretend to be deep. The production is clean and synthetic, the melodies immediate, and Sarah’s voice sits in the middle of it all, high and clear and completely sincere. When she sings ’even if you fall, there’s a trampoline waiting, you just have to believe,’ there’s no distance between the words and the feeling. No irony to hide behind. There’s this assumption in pop that you’re supposed to be cool about it, or at least aware, a little ashamed. Kero Kero Bonito rejected that entirely. They just made music about feeling good and believing in something and having hope, and in a landscape where every artist performs detachment, that reads as almost radical. It shouldn’t be radical to make something genuine, but there it is. The thing that strikes me is how complete their commitment is. No hedging, no distance, no cool pose masking the real feeling underneath. Just brightness all the way down. I don’t know how they sustain it, honestly. The industry doesn’t reward that kind of sincerity. But people find them anyway, the ones who need music like this, who still believe pop can be joyful without being cynical. Friday, 25 January 2019. The Broken Academy: A billionaire industrialist ends up with seven children born mysteriously on the same day to unconnected mothers around the world. He builds them into a superhero team called The Umbrella Academy. By their teens, it all falls apart. Decades later, the surviving six have to reunite as adults in their thirties—Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Vanya, Number Five—when their adoptive father dies. But the investigation gets immediately derailed because they can’t stand each other and also the world is ending. This is the premise of The Umbrella Academy, created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá—and yeah, that’s the Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. On the surface it’s absurd: mysterious simultaneous births, a billionaire training kids to save the world, a family with superpowers who can’t even talk to each other. But what makes it work is that the premise serves the actual story, which is about trauma, estrangement, and the impossible weight of family expectations. These kids were designed to save the world, and instead they destroyed each other. The Netflix adaptation takes that core dynamic seriously. The apocalypse is real and immediate, but it’s almost incidental to the actual plot, which is watching this broken family try to function for long enough to prevent extinction. They’re fighting each other more than they’re fighting the threat. There’s something darkly funny about that tension—a show where the external stakes are massive but the internal disaster is what actually matters. Comic-to-screen adaptations are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes you get something that captures the weirdness and energy of the source material. Other times you get a competent but soulless adaptation that just hits the plot points. The Umbrella Academy has enough conceptual strangeness and enough emotional weight beneath the premise that it seems like it could actually work. Whether it sustains that for a full season is another question, but the foundation is there. I’m curious how much of the melodrama and genuine darkness carries over, and whether the show understands that the family drama IS the main event. That’s where most comic adaptations lose the thread—they treat the personal stuff as a subplot when it’s actually everything. If they get that right, this could be something. Friday, 25 January 2019. Vaping Makes You Unfuckable: There’s this fake government PSA floating around about vaping that just kills me. It’s got this serious deadpan warning that e-cigarettes reduce your attractiveness by sixty percent. Not your lung function. Not your wallet. Your sex appeal. The consequences are loneliness, isolation, and sexual frustration. It’s obviously a comedy bit from some German sketch group, but the execution is perfect. The genius of it is that it doesn’t mess with health facts or aesthetics. It goes straight to the one thing that actually matters. You’re going to be alone. You’re going to be horny. That’s it. That’s the pitch. And yeah, there’s something true in there. Nobody’s ever looked at someone with a massive cloud machine in their mouth and thought “okay, I’m definitely fucking that guy.” But you already know that. Everyone knows it. The PSA just says it out loud in the most official-sounding voice possible. I showed this to a friend who vapes once. He laughed and took another hit. You can’t really convince someone to stop once they’ve decided to own it. The awkwardness is baked in by that point, and paradoxically, that’s kind of the whole appeal. There’s a defiance to it. A commitment to the bit. This is how internet trends work. Something dumb shows up, people make fun of it relentlessly, the jokes get weirder and weirder, but nobody stops doing the thing. Then a new dumb thing comes along and everyone forgets the old one existed. Vaping will disappear the same way eventually. We’ll just stop caring and move on to the next thing. Thursday, 24 January 2019. The Whole World: The show was in a karaoke bar. Not a gallery, not a ballroom—an actual karaoke bar near Alexanderplatz with the TV tower in view. You can’t signal venue choice more clearly than that. William Fan had been talking for years about wanting to create a whole world, and at Berlin Fashion Week it felt like he was making that claim. The collection was called “It’s Your Time to Shine,” and the pieces believed in it. Sequined coats with actual structure. Tiger-print trenches. Kitten heels in lavender. Mohair cardigans, animal prints, cocktail dresses cut to the body. Even the sneakers—90s Puma Cell Enduras reworked with tassels and Swarovski crystals—refused to apologize for being too much. Street fashion and luxury have always pretended to be enemies, which is strange because they’re the same impulse with different budgets. Fan seems to understand this without needing to state it. He takes nightlife pieces and tailors them without killing what makes them alive. The excess doesn’t become tasteful. It just sits better. Berlin allows this kind of thing. The entire city is built on that principle—spaces remade into whatever you want them to be. Clubs in warehouses, parks on parking lots, runways in karaoke bars. There’s an understanding that you can take something and make it into what it should have been. Excess doesn’t apologize. I don’t know if he’s trying to change fashion or just wants to stay inside the world he’s making. The collection suggests the latter, which is fine. There’s a kind of confidence in showing sequins and tiger print and saying, Yeah, exactly this—without hedging, without trying to make it smaller. That matters. Wednesday, 23 January 2019. The Long Game: Yuni Ahn took the creative director job at Maison Kitsuné and showed up to Paris Fashion Week with a collection in beige, saffron, and dark blue. Not exactly a provocation. The clothes sat somewhere between conservative streetwear and sixties office wear—sharp, minimal, built to last. She wasn’t interested in excitement, which made her interesting. The brand itself started as a record label before becoming fashion. Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki built it around a playful fox mascot (the Japanese translation of the name) and a philosophy about craftsmanship that actually meant something. When Ahn came over from Céline, the founders said she understood what the house could be. That’s the kind of thing people say in press releases, but in her case it seemed true. What grabbed me was the restraint. Paris Fashion Week runs on performance—established tradition, calculated scandal, brand mythology. Most designers in that environment either genuflect or burn it all down. Ahn did something quieter: she made clothes that didn’t need to explain themselves, that didn’t apologize for being simple, that looked like they were built for someone who actually wanted to wear them. The colors wouldn’t age overnight. The cuts wouldn’t feel dated in a season. There’s something almost confrontational about that kind of refusal to perform. I think that’s what the founders saw in her. Not a vision for something new, but a vision for something that lasts. Wednesday, 23 January 2019. Password Panic: Got another email about 22 million passwords leaked. The panic instructions, the ritual password changes, the temporary feeling of being on top of things—it’s theater that stopped meaning anything a few years ago. These breaches happen constantly now, and I’ve made peace with the fact that my data is probably compromised somewhere on some server I’ll never know about. You can’t live in constant digital panic, so you don’t. You change the passwords that matter, ignore the rest, and get on with your day. The whole system is designed to make you feel simultaneously helpless and guilty, and at a certain point you just stop letting it work on you. Thursday, 17 January 2019. Four Octaves: I heard Ilira as background noise—Instagram, TikTok, one of those feeds where songs just materialize between other content. The voice stopped me, did something that obviously triggered whoever designed the algorithm. Four octaves, the captions said. I don’t know what that technically means beyond “unusual,” beyond notes going where voices don’t typically go. She’s from a small Swiss town, Kosovo-Albanian, and decided as a kid that pop music was her life. Not as a possibility—as fact. Listened to Rihanna and Nirvana growing up, pulled from both, eventually started posting self-written songs using cheap online beats. An Instagram video caught the attention of Prinz Pi, some German rap guy with connections, and he brought her to Berlin. The rest is the expected trajectory: Berlin to collabs, collabs to streaming numbers, streaming numbers to LA and London for the album sessions. The machine doing what the machine does. By the time I started hearing her everywhere, the momentum was already complete—she was inevitable. What stays with me is the actual mechanism of it though. She’s clearly studied how pop hooks work at the cellular level, the exact pressure points, and she builds everything with that precision. It’s not raw or accidental—it’s understood. Constructed. And it works every time. I don’t know if I like this because it’s clever or because it’s the sound everyone’s been trained to like or because those things are the same now. I just keep playing the tracks. Thursday, 17 January 2019. Lindsay Lohan’s Good Years: I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t completely into Lindsay Lohan back in the early 2000s. Red hair, freckles, a voice that had actual character to it—I was hooked. I know what the narrative became. The tabloids, the drugs, the collapse into every bad thing you could imagine. But before that, for a couple of years, she was genuinely talented. Not as a performer especially, but as a songwriter with something to say. “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)” got to me in a way I didn’t expect. Not because it was complicated—it was actually pretty straightforward, a ballad about family stuff—but because it felt like she meant it. She had other songs with titles like “Rumors,” “Over,” “First,” “Speak.” Introspective pop songs that felt personal in a way most pop songs don’t. MTV, VIVA, the circuit, and somehow it worked. People connected to it. Then it all went sideways. The clubs, the photographers, the legal stuff. Fast and predictable and sad. Whether she ever pieces it together now, I don’t know and I don’t think it matters much. What sticks with me is the music from before that window closed, when she was actually a singer and not just a story about a star falling apart. Wednesday, 16 January 2019. Late Night Cherry Glazerr: There’s this guitarist I sleep with on and off. Her apartment is a constant war of sound—she’s always got some rock music going that I can’t even parse, and I prefer darker stuff anyway, music that actually says something. She mocks my taste, I mock hers, we both know neither is changing. But she’s talented and her body makes it impossible to leave, so we make it work with wine and sex and just not talking about music. Then I heard Cherry Glazerr. Clementine Creepy on vocals, Los Angeles. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—better than playing Juicy Socks, Daddi, and Wasted Nun on constant loop at three in the morning when you’re already worked up, the apartment shaking loud enough to wake the block, all of it getting under your skin before your brain even catches up. Your body reacts before you understand why. The new album Stuffed & Ready comes out early February, and the album is genuinely great—the kind of great that makes you feel stupid for dismissing an entire genre. My girlfriend caught me listening yesterday with my eyes closed and just smiled. I couldn’t even defend myself. Clementine Creepy’s voice is doing something to me that I don’t fully understand, but I’m not going to pretend anymore that I’m above it. I’m already counting down to turning it up to full volume. Wednesday, 16 January 2019. The Restless Kind: “I love being the best at everything I do, always.” Anne-Marie said this without irony, her Essex accent hard and flat. Not a boast—just saying what’s true about herself. She’d been like this since childhood. By two, she’d already decided excellence was non-negotiable. So she studied acting, landed West End roles, picked up karate, and by seventeen had won two international championship titles. Music was the real thing though. That’s where she poured everything. She never stopped needing to test herself. Toured the world with Rudimental. Then started a capsule collection with Ellesse—bold cuts, unexpected shapes, colors that actually look good together. Nothing revolutionary, but you feel her personality in the choices. The same drive that made her a serious karate competitor and a serious musician applied to fabric and silhouette. The thing about people like Anne-Marie is they don’t know how to hold back. Most of us accept being mediocre at most things, and that’s enough. She won’t. Everything she does gets the full intensity. You wonder if she ever just sits with something ordinary and calls it enough. The collection’s out now. With someone wired like this, there’s no middle ground. It either becomes exactly what she wanted or it doesn’t. No in-between. Tuesday, 15 January 2019. The Weeknd Gets Away With It: I should hate The Weeknd—he got to sleep with Selena Gomez, and I didn’t, which I’ve never figured out. But you can’t hate someone who makes music this good, the kind that actually cuts through all the forgettable recycled noise. Since Abel Tesfaye showed up at the start of the decade with House of Balloons, he’s been operating on a different frequency. Right now, he’s the pop star. His new song “Lost in the Fire” with Gesaffelstein is him laying out exactly what he wants to do. Fuck you slowly with the lights on. You’re the only one he sees. The sex is so good it’s priceless. Then he goes further: you mentioned you might be into women, maybe you’re going through something, and if you want to bring someone over, she can ride your face while he fucks you hard. It reads like a 2 a.m. text from someone who’s genuinely horny and has nothing to lose. When The Weeknd sings it though, something shifts. The crude honesty of it stops being embarrassing and starts being magnetic. His voice is so assured, the production so polished, that you stop thinking about Tinder and start thinking about whether he actually means it. Maybe I should have sent Selena Gomez those lyrics instead of secretly liking her photos at 3 a.m. Maybe that would’ve changed everything. Or maybe The Weeknd just has the rare skill of making anything sound necessary, even the most naked want. Tuesday, 15 January 2019. The Nineties Won’t Quit: I keep running into the nineties everywhere—not in some arch, retro-collection way, but like something that just won’t die. The Spice Girls, Friends, the absolute chaos of color and style, the feeling that you could wake up and something genuinely unexpected would be normal by evening. It was dumb and real at the same time, and now when I catch a glimpse of it, my gut reaction is just yes. Urban Outfitters has a new collection tapping into the same instinct. They’re mixing athletic pieces with softer ones—sweatshirts over slip dresses, shearling over silk—and it all feels like something you’d actually throw together without thinking about being fashionable. Just what was in the closet. The colors are sharp and bright without being precious about it. There’s a skate vibe running through, which is right—the nineties were when that kind of thing started bleeding into everyday wear, when it wasn’t a statement, it was just what people looked like. I’m not going to tell you to buy it or that it’ll matter. But there’s something in these pieces that feels honest. They don’t look like someone trying to capture the nineties from a mood board; they look like someone who actually remembers what that felt like, what it looked like. That recognition is the whole thing. Monday, 14 January 2019. The Leak: A Twitter account spent the summer of 2017 doing something simple and horrible: publishing the personal information of celebrities, politicians, and internet personalities. Phone numbers. Home addresses. Scanned ID cards. Family messages. Credit card details from people’s relatives. All of it dumped online, sorted into what looked like an Advent calendar leading up to Christmas. The targets ranged from YouTubers like Gronkh and LeFloid to rappers like Sido and Marteria, to comedians and other public figures, alongside politicians from nearly every party in the German Bundestag—everyone except the AfD. The weird thing was how scattered it felt. There didn’t seem to be any pattern beyond whatever this person had managed to steal or scrape. Some victims got a few documents leaked. Others had their entire lives opened up. The account had sixteen thousand followers before anyone really paid attention. It wasn’t until Thursday evening, just before the holidays, that it blew up in the faces of the people who’d been compromised. The political motivation seemed obvious enough—someone targeting enemies of right-wing conspiracy culture, or maybe just raging at a system that felt untouchable. But the why didn’t matter once everything was already out there. That’s the hard part about leaks: you can’t un-publish something. I’ve never understood people acting shocked by this. We’ve been handing our lives to Facebook and Google for years. Location history, purchase patterns, search queries, photos, every network we build—it’s all sitting in some server farm waiting for the next breach or the next person with a script and a grudge. This leak just made it visible in a way that’s easy to ignore when it’s your bank or an app you forgot you signed up for a decade ago. Nothing changes after something like this. I still put too much online. I still sign up for things I don’t understand. I still assume I’ll deal with the privacy settings later. Everyone does. We complain about Google and Facebook knowing everything, but we trade it away because it’s easier than thinking carefully about what we’re giving up. These musicians and comedians and politicians had their lives exposed, and the rest of us just kept scrolling. Friday, 4 January 2019. The Warehouse Option: Brandenburger Tor on New Year’s is a specific kind of torture. Thousands of people, overpriced beer, a DJ playing whatever gets the safest response, someone doing a Helene Fischer tribute while the crowd screams along. It’s not a party, it’s a tourist attraction pretending to be a party. Everyone there filming it, nobody actually experiencing it. But there’s always an alternative if you know to look. This year it was an old supermarket by Jannowitzbrücke—just a warehouse space someone had rented for the night. The DJs mattered: Bjarki riding Nina Kraviz’s orbit, Keith Carnal, Emmanuel, Francesco De Luca. Not people playing hits, just people playing music that’s actually good, for other people who care about music. What always struck me about parties like this was the confidence. Not arrogance, just the straightforward assumption that the music mattered more than the crowd, that you were either there for Bjarki or you weren’t. No compromise, no hits to keep people happy. Just the belief that if you showed up, you showed up for the right reasons. That’s always been the division in this city. The version you can see on a map, promoted to death, and the version that actually exists in the spaces in between. The difference isn’t just the music. It’s the whole approach—one designed to be documented and shared, the other designed to be lived. Both happening on the same night, kilometers apart, to different groups of people with completely different ideas about what matters. Friday, 21 December 2018. O Human Being: I’ve been wondering since I was a kid why Christmas means killing thousands of trees just to throw them out in January. Every year, the same routine. They’re farmed for it, sure, but there’s something off about a tradition where nobody thinks to keep one alive, to let it survive and come back. There’s a short film by Anomaly London called “O Human Being” that flips the whole thing. A man named Peter gets chosen by a Christmas tree family, and it goes bad immediately. They cut off his legs, dress him in red baubles, stick a gold star on his head. He’s the decoration. It’s a simple reversal: humans become trees, trees become people. What happens to a tree now happens to a person. The cutting, the dressing, the discard—it all becomes visceral when you’re watching a body. Peter’s fear is the kind you recognize. His blood is the sap, his body is the trunk, and you can’t unsee it. And the worst part is, nothing changes. Your tree is in the corner right now, dropping needles, dying slowly. You can touch its branches, whisper something kind, but the ending’s already decided. In a week it’ll be gone. Thursday, 20 December 2018. Wireless in Frankfurt: Frankfurt got Wireless in the summer of 2019, the London festival importing itself wholesale to the Alten Rebstockpark for a couple of July days. I remember the strangeness of it—Travis Scott and The Weeknd and Casper all on a Frankfurt lineup, a city that had no particular reputation for this scene suddenly hosting forty thousand people in streetwear moving between open-air shisha bars and foodtrucks. It felt less like Frankfurt had built toward something and more like hip-hop had gotten big enough that it didn’t ask permission anymore. It just showed up and expected the city to make room. The artist roster was genuinely strange in that context. Marteria, Bonez MC, Bausa—huge in German hip-hop—sharing stages with international acts that usually played stadium cities. Migos. Rita Ora. Electronic and hip-hop mostly, everything the festival called ’urban music,’ which by then was just music. Street art performances and breakdance crews completing the aesthetic, like the whole culture was being transported intact. I didn’t go. By the time I’d thought about it seriously the festival was already over, already fading into the kind of memory that feels less like something you experienced and more like something you heard about. But I remember thinking about what it meant—not whether it was good, just that it happened. That a city with no stake in this scene had suddenly become the venue. Like proof that the music had genuinely won, that it could plant itself anywhere now. Wednesday, 19 December 2018. Facebook Gave Your Messages to Netflix: Your private messages on Facebook weren’t private. The New York Times got hold of documents showing that Facebook had handed other companies the keys—Netflix, Spotify, banks, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, Apple, Pandora. Official partnerships, open APIs, workarounds. The door was open. Whether or not these companies actually read what you wrote probably depends who you ask. The mechanism was simple. You’d connect Netflix to your Facebook account and approve the permissions. Grant access to Spotify. Link your bank. And every time you did, you were opening a window. The apps could see your messages, your friends’ contact information, sometimes your financial situation. Netflix had a line to what you watched. Spotify could track your listening habits. Banks could check your account balance. All the data that Facebook had, and had no particular reason to protect from third parties. Everyone involved denies the really bad part—that they actually read your private messages. They say the access was more technical than that, that they didn’t exploit it, that it was all legitimate partnerships. Maybe that’s true. Maybe they just had the ability and chose not to use it. The distinction feels thin. The New York Times broke the story by publishing the secret documents. Which would have been a good clean journalism moment if the Times’ own app hadn’t been doing the exact same thing. Their older version had been harvesting Facebook user data the whole time. So while they were reporting on Facebook’s data practices, they were also part of the problem. They’ve removed the feature. Facebook says they’ve wound down most of these deals. Everyone apologizes and promises to do better. It’s the same cycle every time. A lot of people left Facebook years ago over this kind of thing. A lot of people are still there. You’re either the type who deletes it or the type who stays because that’s where everyone else is, and there’s no real middle ground. If you use Instagram or WhatsApp, you’re on Facebook’s system anyway. The company’s had plenty of chances to prove it cares about your data. It hasn’t. Wednesday, 19 December 2018. New Era Did It Again: New Era keeps taking designs that already work and tweaking them just slightly, which shouldn’t work but somehow always does. Three new snapback configurations landed, and I spent more time than I should thinking about what actually changed between them. The 9FIFTY is the modern one with elastic fabric and a clip closure, so it fits different head sizes without the strap looking awkward. Higher, boxier crown. It feels like they were saying: let people skip the back strap entirely. The Retro Crown is the opposite approach. Unstructured, lighter buckram, flat crown. It’s the version for people who just want something on their head that doesn’t have opinions. Just there. The 9FORTY is the strangest one. They took the classic back strap, which is basically the perfect closure mechanism, and replaced it with a clip. You get the traditional shape and proportions but with modern adjustment. Like they were testing what you’d actually miss if you changed one thing. I think about caps more than most people because I spend time thinking about how clothes sit on the body, how a closure mechanism or the crown height changes how something wears. There’s something satisfying about a brand that understands you don’t need radical redesign. Just relevance without breaking what already works. These three look good together. The difference matters because there’s a real distinction in how each would feel wearing it. Some people want structure, some want softness, some want whatever this in-between thing is. Probably overthinking it, but that’s what caps do to you. Wednesday, 19 December 2018. She Came Back: Selena Gomez came back to Instagram. Just posted some photos. Nothing huge. But I found myself genuinely relieved, which surprised me. I didn’t realize I was that invested in whether she was holding up. By that point, her life had become this public spectacle of the worst kind—the relationships, the mental health stuff, the constant commentary from strangers. She’d stepped away from social media for a while, which felt like the right move. When you’re falling apart, the last thing you need is the internet watching and offering opinions. What struck me about her return was that she seemed to have actually worked through something. Not everything. You don’t fix everything in a few months. But something had shifted. She talked about how much of her life had been public, how she’d needed to learn to say what mattered to her regardless of how people reacted, how the whole process had been emotionally intense. It wasn’t a comeback narrative or an explanation. It was just her saying: I’ve been struggling, I’m still working on it, but I’m doing it my way now. The photos were just her with friends in the snow, skiing or whatever. Nothing remarkable. But there’s something about seeing someone you’ve been quietly worried about actually present, not in crisis, that hits different. You can’t help it. I don’t expect her to owe me her wellness. That’s not what this is. You just follow someone’s life long enough and they become part of your world, even if you don’t know them. Maybe that’s weird to admit. But it’s true. Wednesday, 19 December 2018. War Is Over: Mark Ronson, Miley Cyrus, and Sean Ono Lennon did “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” on SNL, and the thing that struck me was how unafraid they were of the material. It would have been easy to make it contemporary, sand it down, update it into something safer. They didn’t. The song comes from John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971, built out of a campaign they’d run two years earlier. They rented billboard space in major cities—New York, LA, Toronto, Tokyo, Rome, Berlin—with a single line: “War is over! If you want it! Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” This was December 1969. Vietnam was still happening. America was divided, increasingly reluctant but still committed. The song distills their message down to something almost philosophical: that peace depends on wanting it, that we’re complicit in the systems we claim we can’t control. John said it best later—as long as people believe they’re powerless, they are. The song isn’t a cheerful holiday wish. It’s an assertion against fatalism. The Fray covered it in 2006 and got it onto the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time. Other artists have tried since. But covering Lennon carries risk, especially something this direct. You either understand why it works or you don’t. This version understands. The arrangement stays intact, the restraint stays intact. Cyrus doesn’t oversell it, doesn’t try to make it hers. And Sean Ono Lennon—he’s the literal connection between then and now, between John and whatever this song becomes. It’s not sentimental. It’s just factually true. He gets to carry forward something his parents made, and he does it right. The strange part is how the song cuts both ways now. Fifty years on, we know that “War is over if you want it” oversimplifies how power actually works—we’ve watched the public reject wars that happened anyway. But the song was never pretending to be prediction. It was always assertion. A refusal to accept fatalism as fact. Maybe that’s all it ever needed to be. Tuesday, 18 December 2018. Searching for Kanye: Kanye West is impossible to hold still in your mind. You find one stable thing about him—the production, the ear for samples, the way he rebuilt hip-hop from soul records and classical music—and then you remember the rest of it, the endless performing, the ego that swallows everything, and the verdict collapses. Everyone just picks a side. Either he’s a genius or he’s a charlatan. Nothing in between. He came up producing for other people. The Blueprint with Jay-Z was the big one, early work with Common and John Legend. That’s where his sound came from, the thing that became recognizable—electronic and acoustic mixed together, soulful. It was distinctive and it worked. Hip-hop shifted toward it. Time magazine in 2005 put him down as one of the hundred most influential people alive. British journalist Ben Zand made a documentary called Searching for Kanye, basically a half-hour of interviews tracing his life through music and fashion and celebrity, hitting the achievements and the disasters both. It leaves you nowhere. The question—who actually is he, genius or fraud—doesn’t resolve. You finish watching and you’re still stuck, which feels right. Some people are too big for neat biography. The contradiction is all they are. Tuesday, 18 December 2018. Unpolished: Cardi B hit number one with “Bodak Yellow” and something shifted. Not because the song was perfect, but because it happened instantly, completely, out of nowhere. She was on reality TV a month before. Then this one song and she owned everything. What made it strange was watching her refuse to get smoothed down. She said crude things, talked about money and sex without the usual euphemisms. She was funny in this direct, unpolished way that’s usually not how pop music works at her scale. Pop music is built on turning raw material into brand. She just wasn’t playing that game. When she did Carpool Karaoke, I wondered how it would land. That format is designed to be so safe and friendly—everybody in a car, everybody singing, the whole machine of niceness. Cardi B doesn’t perform niceness. She just shows up as herself, unfiltered, and that’s what people reacted to. What made that moment real was the speed of it. She didn’t have time to learn how to be famous the normal way, to be trained and packaged and smoothed at the edges. By the time the industry figured out what to do with her, she was already at the top, exactly because she’d refused to let them do anything to her in the first place. Tuesday, 18 December 2018. Dead Cells: Every few months I cycle back through Dead Cells the way I used to with Super Metroid—convinced the next run will unlock something, find the weapon combo that feels perfect, open a door I’ve been circling. It’s a metroidvania wearing a roguelike’s skin, which sounds like a design document but actually lands. Each run is short enough to feel disposable; the progression—abilities that unlock new paths through the same interconnected world—makes me want another one immediately. Something about it hits the way Castlevania did when I was learning that hard games didn’t have to be cruel. Dead Cells understands that difference. The world isn’t holding my hand, but it’s not arbitrary either. Multiple paths exist; I pick based on my mood or the weapons I’ve found. That feels like choice instead of luck. The game borrowed Dark Souls’s skeleton like every game does now—die, lose stuff, memorize patterns—but it did the thing Dark Souls never quite managed: made me want to go again right now instead of three hours from now. The runs are tight. The combat has weight behind it. Secret rooms hide in corners. Passages appear only after I’ve earned the right ability. I’m rewarded for snooping without the game demanding it. What holds with Dead Cells is that it doesn’t seem to be reaching for anything. It knows what it is: a game about movement and upgrades and finding a passage I didn’t know existed. It’s on every platform by now, which is fine—good games feel the same on any screen. Putting it alongside the actual classics feels wrong. Those games sit differently. But Dead Cells is the closest anything recent has come to understanding why those games still matter. Tuesday, 18 December 2018. Hidden Cameras: South Korea has a hidden-camera problem that’s become almost mundane. Men buy spy cameras for about $20 at electronics shops, install them in bathroom stalls, film women naked, sell the footage online or to strangers for kicks. It’s happened enough that women check toilets before sitting down, looking for infrared signatures of hidden lenses. Some just stop going out. What’s strange is how it coexists with everything else. South Korea built a tech infrastructure that’s decades ahead of most places. But that same precision engineering gets repurposed. A camera small enough to hide in a light fixture is easy to build once you know how, and apparently that’s what happens. The legal system doesn’t take it seriously—fines are nothing, prison time is rare. There are women pushing back. Activists patrol public restrooms with infrared flashlights, expose the cameras, demand real consequences. Soo-yuen Park is one of them. The BBC documented her story because it matters, because women there are finally fighting back. I think about the contradiction sometimes. How a culture builds something so precise and permits something so violating. The camera isn’t the weapon—the man is. The real failure is a place that lets this happen, where women have to inspect a bathroom before they can use it. That’s what bothers me. Monday, 17 December 2018. That Ariana Grande Moment: Victorious was the usual Nickelodeon pablum, but her voice was obvious immediately. The kind of control that only comes from actually studying someone—Mariah Carey probably, maybe Imogen Heap. She understood what a run was for, which is different from just being able to do one. By the time Sweetener happened, she was everywhere online in a way that didn’t feel managed. That matters more than people think. Most pop stars treat Twitter like a broadcast platform, but she was actually there, which is disarming and probably more effective than any strategy could be. A million followers who felt like they knew her because she was actually talking, not performing talking. The Manchester bombing in 2017 happened at her concert. She came back and did the benefit show and just kept going. That’s what you do, or you don’t. She did. Sweetener era was nonstop touring—Köln, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, everywhere. Live pop music is the only place where a voice still matters in a real way. Thousands of people in a room, her voice against all that distance. That’s where the work actually lives. I don’t follow what happened to her after that. Maybe she’s still the artist who got it right, or maybe she cashed in like everyone does eventually. But for a moment there—late 2010s, when she was making full records instead of just singles—she was doing something that felt inevitable. Like someone had finally figured out how to think inside the pop machine instead of just surviving it. Monday, 17 December 2018. After Spex: Spex closed in 2018. It was a German music magazine—the kind of publication that shaped what people in this country thought mattered in music and film, even if nobody actually subscribed. Prestigious in that niche, influential way. By the end of the year it was done anyway: circulation tanked, advertisers moved to digital, the whole print infrastructure collapsed the way everyone said it would. But music magazines had a weirder problem than just being printed on paper. For years, if you wanted to know what albums or films were worth your time, you read critics. Or you didn’t read them yourself, but you knew they existed—people thinking seriously about music, making arguments for what was good and strange. Then streaming happened. Spotify, Apple Music, the algorithm ecosystem. Instead of trusting someone who understood the medium, people started letting the machine decide. You like this? Here’s ten more. It learns your taste and feeds it back to you, the perfect closed loop. Why read a music magazine when a recommendation engine can just show you more of what you already love? Max Dax, who edited Spex, sat down with a couple of other people—an academic named Thomas Hecken and a journalist named Daniel Koch, who edited Intro—to talk about whether pop criticism had basically died. The easy answer is yes. The machines won. But somewhere in that conversation it gets messier. Maybe the problem isn’t that algorithms are bad at recommending music; they’re actually good at it. Maybe the real loss is something else: discovering something you wouldn’t have found on your own, an editor making an argument for something strange and new. The closed loop of personalization kills that. Or maybe not. Maybe Bandcamp still has it, where weird music gets made and people actually search for the unexpected. Maybe we’re not less curious, just getting our curiosity fed differently now. Maybe the magazine era never survives the economics anyway, and I’m romanticizing something already doomed for other reasons entirely. Monday, 17 December 2018. Three Voices, One Love Song: Marteria, Casper, and Kat Frankie recorded a love song together. It’s the kind of collaboration that doesn’t announce itself—three rappers trading verses like they were sorting something out in the studio and we just happened to be listening. There’s an intimacy in three people thinking about the same person at the same time, especially when they usually deal in armor and distance. No performance, no conviction, just three voices saying it plainly. Sunday, 16 December 2018. KeKe: YouTube rabbit-holed me into KeKe’s “Validé” at maybe three in the morning. Wasn’t looking for anything, just following whatever the algorithm served next. She’s Austrian, early twenties, voice that stops you like she’s not even trying. Trained jazz singer doing rap, or maybe just doing whatever she feels like and rap is what came out. There’s something about the way she moves through a song that doesn’t feel like she’s filling a role. Just sounds like her, which is rare enough to notice. Got two videos officially—”Validé” and “Donna Selvaggia”—and that’s enough. The voice, the production, the way she doesn’t overcomplicate anything. You can hear the jazz training in how she handles phrasing, how she knows where to leave space. It’s precise even when it sounds like she’s just talking. Most German rap I encounter is guys pretending to be tougher than they are, talking about lives they haven’t lived, ready to call their moms the second anything gets real. KeKe doesn’t play that game. She just operates on her own frequency and doesn’t seem bothered whether anyone’s listening. Probably there are bootlegs of unreleased stuff floating around if you know where to look, the way these things work. But what’s out there is enough. Something’s happening here. Sunday, 16 December 2018. Slim and Old: Japan’s the weird case where everyone’s thin and lives forever despite the smoking and drinking and KFC. Walk through Tokyo and what strikes you is the absence: nobody’s overweight. And people are routinely living past 100, still sharp, still involved. It’s the one place where the correlation between longevity and staying lean actually holds. The answer is probably what everyone suspects: portions and what’s actually on the plate. Fish instead of beef. Rice, miso, vegetables instead of bread and cheese and cream. Small meals, multiple times, balanced, not the idea that dinner is one massive plate you finish. The friction is built into the culture—it’s just the normal way to eat. A typical breakfast is rice, grilled fish, miso soup, pickles. Lunch is something similar, modest portions. Dinner follows the same rhythm, same scale. Sugar exists but it’s not everywhere; a chocolate bar is occasional, not daily. Convenience stores are packed with junk, but it’s not the default, and there’s actual cultural shame around being overweight in a way that doesn’t exist as much here. I’m not saying I could live like that. The appeal of bread and cheese and heavy food is real to me, and I don’t have the ambient social pressure that makes you feel weird eating more than everyone else. But the evidence is hard to argue with. They’re not doing anything complicated or special—just eating less, eating better, and somehow that extends everything. The longevity, the sharpness, the fitness. All from something as basic as portion control and not eating garbage every day. Sunday, 16 December 2018. Loud Shoes, Italian Light: Italy occupies more space in my head the further I get from it. The light does something there that doesn’t happen anywhere else. The food tastes like it was designed on purpose. People move through their days without the constant feeling that they’re already late. I’ve thought more than once about the retirement fantasy—small place on the coast, mornings like that, nothing else. It’s good to think about when you’re somewhere that doesn’t quite have that energy. Fila and Naked released the Italy Pack. The V94M Low, Vista Blue and Gray Violet—these big chunky dad sneakers that just exist loudly and visibly without much apology. The tie-in is simple: Fila’s Italian, so here’s Italy in a shoe. But I can’t figure out what actually makes them Italian beyond that. The colors could be from anywhere. The shape’s generic retro. It’s the kind of marketing move where you shrug and accept that the story is thinner than the product. But there’s something good about a shoe that just doesn’t retreat into subtlety. Takes up space. Doesn’t try to fit into somebody else’s idea of what a sneaker should be. That’s a kind of honesty. The Italy fantasy is still better than any shoe could be—that light, that pace, that feeling that someone thought about how things should work. But these sneakers point in that direction somehow. Not the thing itself, but something in the way of it. That confidence that it’s okay to just be what you are. That counts for something. Sunday, 16 December 2018. Good Fat: I know exactly what’s going to kill me eventually: bacon. Good, fatty bacon. I could put it on everything or in everything or with everything—sandwich, pizza, pasta, doesn’t matter as long as it smells and tastes like bacon. Crispy strips, fried or grilled with eggs, yeah that’s an American or English breakfast thing, but I’d eat it any time of day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, between meals. Speck’s been part of German cooking forever. In old farmhouses they’d have salt barrels for curing meat. Back when meat wasn’t something you ate every day, the day they slaughtered a pig was a celebration. They had to process the blood and organs fast before they went bad. The pieces for speck got salted, smoked briefly, then hung up dry and airy. After slaughter they’d throw a feast—neighbors, family, everyone came over. And of course there was really good speck. But how do you actually know the difference between good bacon and garbage? The fat is the first thing. It should taste like smoke and salt, not like a chemical factory. Good bacon smells rich when you cook it, fills the kitchen with something real. Cheap stuff is mostly air and water—it shrinks to nothing in the pan and tastes like nothing. The color matters too. Even thickness. The meat-to-fat ratio. These aren’t mysteries once you’ve tasted both. I’ve ended up at places that take it seriously, cure their own, smoke it properly, and it’s a different food entirely. Worth the money, worth the ritual of a proper breakfast with coffee and time. That’s probably the thing—good bacon asks you to slow down, even if it’s just for twenty minutes while you sit with eggs and toast. Cheap bacon asks you to get in and get out. I’m not saying I always make the right choice. Half the time I’d probably eat whatever’s in the fridge. But when I do get the good stuff, it’s the kind of thing that makes the day better, and I don’t feel like I’m poisoning myself in the process. Sunday, 16 December 2018. K-Pop’s Normal Now: K-Pop’s not some separate world anymore. You hear it everywhere, mixed into everything else. Dua Lipa and Blackpink on the same song sounds absurd until you actually listen to it, and then it’s just… there. It works. That’s become the pattern—western artists showing up on K-Pop tracks like it’s the natural thing to do now. The weird part is that none of it matters linguistically. Most people listening to a Nicki Minaj and BTS collaboration don’t understand what BTS is actually singing, but that’s never been the point. K-Pop’s power has never been about the words. It’s the production, the choreography, the visual intensity. The way the energy hits before anything else registers. So when a western artist jumps on a track, they’re not carrying it or saving it. They’re just one more voice in something that was already overwhelming. John Legend with Wendy from Red Velvet should be awkward, but the song is built well enough that it just absorbs him. It happened fast. Like, weirdly fast. Five years ago K-Pop was this foreign thing you either got or you didn’t. Now it’s aspirational. Western artists actively want the collaboration because they see what K-Pop has—reach, obsessive audiences, cultural momentum. The genre stopped being regional and just became another lane in pop. There’s no border anymore, or if there is, it’s irrelevant. The collaborations aren’t even notable now. They don’t feel like crossovers. They feel like regular songs that happened to be made by people from different places. And I think that’s the real shift. When collaboration stops being weird, that’s when you know something fundamental has changed. K-Pop didn’t just arrive. It arrived and stayed, and now everything else has to figure out how to move around it. Saturday, 15 December 2018. What I Actually Want: Smartwatches have always felt like a con to me. You’re strapping a phone to your wrist, basically—one more screen to check, one more device demanding your attention. But analog watches, the kind that just sit there and tell the time? There’s something satisfying about those. These new adidas Originals designs are worth noticing. They’re reviving three classics: Archive, Process, District. The original DNA comes from the seventies—clean, minimal, the kind of timeless work Dieter Rams championed—and they’ve updated each one without losing that clarity. Better movements inside, fresh colors, and most land under 200 euros. The holiday releases come with copper accents and a matte black finish. I keep staring at the District M1. There’s something about the proportions, the case line, the way the dial sits. It’s one of those designs where nothing looks extraneous. I’d wear it every single day without thinking twice. Here’s the honest part: I wrote this because I’m hoping my friends read it. The ones who haven’t figured out what to get me yet. I actually want this watch. Been wanting it for a while. And I’ll be more honest still—I’m tired of getting gifts that don’t land. Socks. Combs. Random tech gadgets that end up in a drawer. Stuff nobody thought about. A watch like this isn’t a guessing game. It’s something I’d actually want to wear every day. If you’re stuck trying to figure out what to buy someone, this is the answer. Looks like you paid attention without trying too hard. And if you’re one of my friends somehow reading this: you know what I want. Saturday, 15 December 2018. Playing Alone: I’m bad at competitive games. Not occasionally—genuinely, objectively bad. StarCraft, League of Legends, Overwatch, Minecraft, Final Fantasy XIV. I’d jump into any of them and get destroyed immediately. In dungeons I’d be running in circles, completely lost, and the group would be right to lose their minds. There’s no excuse for it. So I quit. Now I stick to single-player games where I’m the only one I’m letting down. Skyrim. Far Cry 5. Yakuza Zero. Games where failure is private. Minecraft used to be what every kid was addicted to. Now it’s Fortnite, and Fortnite isn’t a game anymore—it’s a compulsion. I won’t go near it. Partly because I know I’d be terrible at it, but mostly because I know exactly what would happen. I’d be in a match for five minutes before some eight-year-old starts screaming that he fucked my mother, and he wouldn’t be wrong. I’d be moving wrong, shooting wrong, dying constantly. That kid would have more wins before his next energy drink than I’d get in a year. That Jimmy Kimmel challenge proved it all. He got parents to turn off the TV right in the middle of their kid’s Fortnite match. Not at a stopping point. Middle of the game. The reaction videos are pure chaos—kids screaming, crying, throwing controllers at the wall. That’s the state of things now. That’s what this game has done to an entire generation. I’ve officially given up on the next generation. They’re wired for constant stimulation and rage, and there’s nothing that fixes it. Might as well just speed up global warming and call it mercy. Saturday, 15 December 2018. Hairy, Fluffy, Wet: My third real friend was Jörg, sophomore year. He wore lip gloss and shaved his armpits completely smooth, which didn’t seem that weird at the time because a few guys at school had gotten metrosexual after David Beckham made it a thing. We dated for two months. Then he told me he was gay. We never slept together, but a few times he fingered me, and he was really bad at it. I thought it was because he was inexperienced. But no—he just couldn’t do anything with a pussy. Until then I’d never really thought about gay guys and vaginas in the same sentence. I assumed the only connection was birth and then nothing. I had no way of knowing that YouTube would eventually create a genre around putting the two together. But here we are, watching gay guys squirm and shriek while looking at a woman’s vagina without throwing up. Some lesbian couple posts these joke videos where they film gay men touching a vagina for the first time. What unfolds is predictable enough: warm guys completely lost in front of someone else’s warm, wet opening. It’s hairy, fluffy, totally different from what they’re used to. The whole thing is awkward as hell, which makes it funny. And now I finally understand why Jörg was such a shit fingerer. Friday, 14 December 2018. Still Drawing: I wanted to be a manga artist. Spent years drawing in my room—Dragon Ball, Akira, whatever manga I could get. I had this real belief it was going to be my thing. Then school got harder, other stuff took over, and at some point I just stopped. The sketchbooks went into storage. The dream kind of evaporated. Kelsey Smith is 18, from Georgia, and she didn’t stop. She’s at Savannah College of Art and Design making modern work rooted in manga and anime. You can see the influences—Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop—but she’s transformed it into something entirely hers, something that exists in its own world. Her paintings are quiet scenes. Lonely women alone in bedrooms, thinking. Cats. Cute guys in the margins. Everything’s dark but never scary, just still and moonlit. She clearly loves the night, the solitude of it. Sailor Moon shows up in her work sometimes—on posters, in memories—like she’s painting the feeling of being awake at 3 AM while everyone else sleeps. I imagine her drawing night after night, some music playing, chasing that dream of being an artist the way I used to imagine it. What gets you is that she actually did it. At 18 she’s still at it, still pushing forward something that would be easy to abandon. There’s something about watching someone pursue what you quit. Not bitter, really. I made different choices, and they were fine. But it makes you think about what you let go, whether you made the right call. Makes you wonder what it would feel like to just sit down and draw again. Friday, 14 December 2018. Australian Summer: I hate winter. Some people settle into it fine—hot chocolate, blankets, that whole thing—but I’ve never managed it. I’m at the window thinking where did the sun go, because I actually need it. Heat on my skin. Real light. The ability to exist outside without planning seventeen layers. Every year it’s the same: the temperature drops and I vanish into my apartment for three months. Australia’s in the middle of summer on the opposite side of the world. Brutal heat, full blue sky, oceans. The fantasy fills itself in: surfers who look transcendent, beaches where people actually look alive, the kind of light that rewires you. I’d be there if I could. But I’m here, stuck, watching the days get shorter and the world turn gray. So I’m grateful when photographers like James Geers send images back from places like Australia. Emily Lacometti’s in a lot of his work. She’s the kind of person who looks like pure summer—completely at ease in light, bleached blonde, golden, the way you’d move if you’d never been cold. Looking at her photographs in January is maybe obscene. It doesn’t fix anything, but I do it anyway. Every day until the sun comes back. Friday, 14 December 2018. City Pop on Wax: I’ve always been envious of people who collect vinyl. Not the aesthetic of it—though there’s that—but the actual commitment involved. You go to a record store or hunt online, you pay real money for a specific pressing you’ve been tracking for months, and then you play it. Just that one record, all the way through. Streaming promises infinite choice and then delivers infinite mediocrity. Every song matters equally, which means nothing matters at all. Zag Erlat collects Japanese city pop from the 70s and 80s. He’s based between London and Istanbul, and his collection is almost unnaturally complete—Taeko Onuki, Marlene, Ruriko Ohgami, records that are basically out of circulation now. I’ve spent enough time in city pop forums to know that some of these pressings just don’t come up anymore. They’re gone. But he has them. He posts videos sometimes of himself playing tracks from his collection, and there’s something disarming about it. He’s not making content or building a brand. He just has this music, it means something to him, and he’s playing it. The generosity of sharing something rare—something most people can never own—hits different when you understand what he’s actually showing you. Friday, 14 December 2018. What Pink Can Do: Arvida Byström makes work in screaming pink and it stops you. Bodies, hair, blood, technology—all of it unapologetic, all of it broadcast. You notice the shock value first, but that’s not really the point. What she’s actually done is build a visual language out of things women are supposed to hide, and rendered it all undeniable. I’ve been online long enough to watch artist-brand collaborations, and most of them feel like someone else’s idea of what the artist should do. With Arvida, there’s no translation needed. When Urbanears asked her to design headphones, it made sense—someone with her sensibility, someone who knew how to take an object and make it unmissable. The collaboration didn’t require her to compromise. The collection came out in pink. When Arvida talks about the color, she’s entirely herself. She wanted it to feel surreal, unreal, outside normal reality. Pink amplifies feeling, she says. It’s written off as weak, but it has soft edges and it can bite back. Maybe pink just contains everything. There’s a philosophy in there, not the kind that gets written down, but the kind that shapes what you actually make. I probably didn’t need new headphones. But I understood the logic—the appeal of having something that brought her entire world forward without apology. That’s rarer than it should be. Thursday, 13 December 2018. Winter Blur: Winter shrinks everything. The light disappears, the weather turns miserable, and the world outside your window becomes something you stop looking at. The couch becomes serious furniture. The heat stays on. You find yourself scrolling through new releases, looking for something that might fill the hours until spring. Some of those shows actually landed. Kingdom had real tension to it, the kind of series that made you want to keep watching. Grimm was solid enough—not brilliant, but it worked. Most of it was filler anyway, and that was fine. The point was never finding the perfect show. It was just having something on, a reason to stay inside, a duration that got you closer to warmer months. This was how January worked back then: new titles would arrive, you’d pick through them, queue up whatever looked least painful, and settle into the dead season. The specific films and shows blur together now. What stays is the rhythm of it—the need to disappear into other people’s stories while you wait for the cold to break. Thursday, 13 December 2018. Matcha: I spent years as a coffee addict. Serious about it. Started at a design agency during my media training, and it never really stopped. Regular lattes at first, then whatever fancy drinks Starbucks had, then black americanos with nothing—just the necessary bitter hit. Eventually it was only about the effect. The jolt. Two pots a day until my stomach was screaming, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and sleep was impossible. My first time in Japan, a friend named Sari took me to a ramen place in Harajuku and poured me matcha with the meal. That was it. The color, the smell, the taste—something about it felt different. And the caffeine works different too. Enough to carry you through anything without that jittery, nauseous feeling coffee had started giving me. After that cup, matcha became my thing. Wherever I go now, I’m looking for good green tea, ideally matcha. There’s a documentary on Arte right now about where matcha actually comes from. How it’s grown and processed, the people doing it for generations, their stories. Most people hear “documentary about tea” and think how dull that must be. But it’s not dull at all. It’s actually calming to watch. Meditative. The kind of thing that reminds you not everything needs to be loud or flashy to matter. Thursday, 13 December 2018. The Girl Who Won’t Play Along: Maggie Lindemann left San Antonio for Los Angeles when she was sixteen, in 2015, to make music. She had all the ingredients for the story everyone knows: talent, ambition, the right person noticing. But then she wouldn’t stop saying fuck, and it became clear this wasn’t going to go the way these things usually go. “I always have something to say,” she said in an interview. “Even when it gets me in trouble, I don’t hold back if I think something needs to be said. I don’t work from a script. I don’t censor myself. I’ve been through some shit. I like that I get to be completely myself.” The kind of thing every artist says in magazines, usually meaning about thirty percent of it. She sounded like she meant all of it. She grew up in Dallas, sang in a church choir starting at four, which is how these stories usually begin. In middle school she recorded videos of herself and posted them on KEEK, this defunct social platform that existed for a moment. People watched. One of her clips ended up on YouTube, where Gerald Tennison found it—a former Sony strategist who recognized something real when he saw it. He called. A week later she was driving to meet him in Los Angeles. Then everything compressed into fast. But even as it all moved, she stayed herself. “I’ve been singing my whole life,” she said. “It was just something I had to do.” She talked about refusing to become what people expected—the teen girl singer who makes pop songs, who fits into a mold. “I do what I want, say what I want, and be who I want to be.” You hear that a lot too, and it usually sounds like something someone was told to say. From her it sounded like a threat, or a promise, depending on your perspective. Her single “Would I” came out of the darkest period of her life, about things she’d been carrying around for years. That kind of honesty in a song doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s the thing that makes you listen twice. Thursday, 13 December 2018. Milena Huhta’s Surreal Worlds: There’s something about an illustration where every time you look at it again, you find something new. A detail you didn’t see before, a figure half-hidden in the corner, a joke that suddenly lands. You get lost in the image, and your mind fills in the rest. You don’t need permission to project your own meaning into it—the blank spaces invite you to. Milena Huhta, a Finnish illustrator, builds entire worlds like this. Her work feels like stepping through a door into somewhere that’s almost real but not quite. The logic is her own. Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, vague futurist machinery—she mixes pop culture with the old mythologies we’ve been using forever to talk about death, desire, the monster inside. The result doesn’t feel like a mashup; it feels like she’s showing you how they were always the same story. Her titles are deliberately cryptic: “Lost Love,” “Alice in Flux,” “Mire Grime.” The figures in her work have this casual, half-smirking quality even when they’re demons or ghosts or something without a name. She paints herself in there too, buried in the background—always as something magical and dark, something with teeth. There’s a kind of self-awareness to it that feels honest rather than precious. What gets me is how much there is to see without the images becoming cluttered. The color doesn’t overwhelm; it clarifies. You can stare at one of her pieces for five minutes and still find new angles. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in one of those shadowy faces. Maybe you’ll just see her looking back. Wednesday, 12 December 2018. The Cleanest High: Saturation levels beyond what seems possible on a handheld screen. The music is precise and demanding. You’re moving your hands in patterns that feel instinctive until the moment you think about them, then you miss the next beat. The game doesn’t pause. It doesn’t wait for you. It just keeps going, color into color into color, each transition timed to the drums. Sayonara Wild Hearts is a rhythm action game, mostly. You’re following beats through neon worlds, racing on skateboards and motorcycles, dancing in battles. The Fool guides you through encounters with the Dancing Devils, the Howling Moons, the Stereo Lovers—anthropomorphic concepts with no backstory and no explanation of why they matter. Each level is tied to an electronic song written for the game. The tracks are good. The colors are overwhelming. The pacing is perfect. People who played it kept using the same vocabulary: transcendent, psychedelic, consciousness-altering. They weren’t being hyperbolic. The game isn’t subtle about what it’s doing. It’s designed to strip away everything except the immediate sensory moment. Your brain gets no room to think about work or money or what you’re doing with your life. The rhythm is too loud, the movement too fast, the colors too much. You either keep up or you don’t, and while you’re keeping up, you don’t think. I think a lot of games claim to be about flow states or immersion. This one actually achieves it. It’s not trying to tell you something or make you feel something complicated. It’s just asking you to move with the music for an hour. The Switch exclusive nature meant something at the time—portability added to the intimacy of it, the small screen somehow making the intensity feel more personal. Now it feels like an artifact of a specific moment in gaming. There’s something satisfying about a piece of media that’s entirely what it intends to be, with nothing wasted. No story that doesn’t serve the aesthetic. No padding. No attempt at being something else. Just color and rhythm and the absolute focus required to keep moving. You finish the game and you come back to the normal world with your attention frayed in that specific way. You forget about it until the next time you see it, and then you want to feel that again. Wednesday, 12 December 2018. The Kiezmarke: You walk past someone on the street asking for money and there’s always that moment. Cash disappears. You don’t know where it goes, and that’s the thing that lets you keep walking. Berlin has something called the Kiezmarke—a token system run by One Warm Winter, a campaign trying to get people to think about homelessness instead of stepping over it. You buy the tokens from shops like Mustafa’s Kebap or Schillerburger. Each one’s good for a meal, sandwich, clothes, a haircut. You hand it to someone on the street, they trade it in. It just removes the whole anxiety. No wondering about intentions or outcomes. The choice is already made for you. The person gets fed. The shop makes a sale. One Warm Winter gets a donation. No second-guessing. I’m not sure it fixes homelessness or anything grand like that. But it’s more honest than most of what we do—it admits that most of the time you’re just responding to something in front of you, not solving anything. You give the token and walk on. That might be enough. Wednesday, 12 December 2018. She Comes Back: “Let Go” and “Under My Skin” were two of the best albums ever made. “Sk8er Boi,” “My Happy Ending,” “Complicated”—I danced to those songs, cried to them, fucked to them. She had something the radio was missing: a voice that made sense of being seventeen and furious and horny and lost all at once. Then 2007 happened. “The Best Damn Thing” was supposed to be another chapter and instead it felt like she’d decided to become a parody of herself. Louder, broader, less human. A few years later she married Chad Kroeger from Nickelback, which was less a shock and more a confirmation that something had broken. I didn’t hold it against her. People change. But something in how she moved through the world after that felt smaller, performed, like she was living someone else’s version of her life. I’m the guy who never got over Avril Lavigne. Fifteen years of that specific pathology. The new album “Head Above Water” has a song called “Tell Me It’s Over” about knowing when to stop letting someone manipulate you, when the pattern finally breaks and you walk. Her voice on it is different. There’s a restraint in it now, something pulled from the women who came before—Holiday, Fitzgerald, Franklin, James—women who didn’t ask permission for their strength. It’s the first time in years I’ve heard her sound like something other than a recovery narrative. I don’t think you get over the artists who reach you at the exact right moment. They become part of the architecture. When she disappeared, I felt the gap. Now she’s back and the old thing is still there, changed but present. Not a crush anymore. Something more complicated. Recognition, maybe. Like seeing someone whose face you know better than almost anyone’s, and realizing they still see you too. Wednesday, 12 December 2018. Sick Cute: Pink bandages on fresh cuts. Hello Kitty in the margins of a suicide note. That’s the core of Yami Kawaii, which translates roughly to “sick cute”—a Japanese subculture that takes depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation and dresses them up in the visual language of anime girls and pastel aesthetics. Japan has a long, documented history with suicide, from ritual seppuku through Aokigahara to everyday headlines about salary workers and students who can’t find a place in the system. The cultural weight of that is heavy. Yami Kawaii takes that weight and says, okay, but what if we made it cute? What if depression was something you could wear? The community coalesced online—Tumblr, YouTube, Line—in the cities where kids felt most trapped: Tokyo, Osaka, the usual suspects. They swap aesthetics, share illustrations of self-harm as transformation, create a visual grammar where bleeding becomes beautiful. Lolita dresses with scars. Anime girls with cutters instead of weapons. It’s the inverse of the cutesy-for-cutesy-sake stuff everywhere else in Japanese pop culture. Same language, opposite energy. I watched a documentary about it once and kept waiting for insight that never came. The kids talking about it just seemed sad. Genuinely, plainly sad, and looking for a way to make that sadness legible to other people who understood it. The aesthetics were just the translation. Whether it actually helped or just made things prettier while staying broken, I couldn’t tell. Tuesday, 11 December 2018. Back for More: I made it a hundred hours into Far Cry 5 before it locked me in a bunker and the world wouldn’t stop burning. The whole reason I’d been there was supposed to stop that. Nothing worse than investing that much time and something like actual feeling into a game only to have it close on you sideways, nowhere near where you wanted to land. So I swore the series off. But then Ubisoft dropped a trailer for New Dawn and that feeling came back—that itch. Here’s what Far Cry actually is: it’s not about the story. Story is a generous word. It’s about driving around with increasingly ridiculous weapons and trying to detonate as much as possible. Yeah, you can play it stealthy, careful, methodical. Most people probably do. But I’m out here firing rockets at deer. Flamethrowers at bears. Compressed air cannons at people because the game lets me and I’ve stopped pretending to care about narrative justification. You hit some NPCs and they rattle off maybe three sentences and then suddenly they’re your companions for the next sequence of explosions. It’s a weird kind of bonding. In five, you were breaking up a cult. This time around, you’re cleaning up the mess you made in five. Or that’s the idea. The trailer stays vague about it. What it does show is that John Seed survived somehow, and his twin sisters Mickey and Lou are running around Hope County now with bodies in their wake. The world went apocalyptic, all pastels and desperation. Coming in February. I know what happens next. I play it. Seventy hours dissolve into this game’s particular brand of absurd action and half-baked plot trying to hold it together. And I try—genuinely try—not to get attached to someone the game is going to shaft me with like happened last time. That almost became something. This time I said I wouldn’t repeat it. I’m going to repeat it. But I haven’t started playing yet so I can still pretend I won’t. Tuesday, 11 December 2018. Hamburg Late: Hamburg at night is full of people you’d never expect to find anywhere else—the ones who wouldn’t bend to the template everyone was using. Walk into a bar late enough and you meet someone whose life is so specifically theirs that you can’t look away. I found out about Chrissi through photographer Maria Kotylevskaya, who caught something real instead of a moment. Seventies men’s magazines (now artifact), cats, Vietnamese food, serious reading, sex that was actually good with people who could deliver it. On nice guys: “I don’t even register them.” That’s the kind of honesty Hamburg seems to breed. Her night was organized around what mattered: Hafenklang for a show, 439 for drinks, Komet to dance the weight off, Hirschgarten for a walk if you found someone worth the time. Not a checklist. What happens when you know what you’re doing. Hamburg stays alive through people like that—completely clear about what moves them, done with anything else, indifferent to whether it looks right. Chrissi was the type the city was made for, or that it makes of anyone who stays long enough watching what actually matters. Tuesday, 11 December 2018. Starcourt: That Stranger Things trailer was basically just a mall. Not some abstract monster dimension or a cursed house, but Starcourt—a shopping center in the 1980s with arcades and food courts and the specific gravity that malls have when you’re the right age to care about them. It was a weird choice for scale-up, but it worked immediately. By that point I’d mostly made peace with the show. The first season had legitimately unsettling moments, but watching it try to maintain that dread while also becoming a massive Netflix property was like watching someone run in two directions at once. Bigger monsters, bigger conspiracies, everyone important getting plot armor. A mall just sitting there as a location felt like honesty. The Duffer brothers did press somewhere and joked that they’d been too deep in Red Dead Redemption 2 to finish on time. You could never tell if they meant it or if it was just the kind of thing people say. They released episode titles that didn’t tell you much—“The Sauna Test,” “The Bite,” “The Battle of Starcourt”—enough fragments to know something was going to happen but not what. None of that mattered much. The trailer had already done the work just by showing you a place. That was it. Monday, 10 December 2018. Losing It: I’ve lost my phone seven times. Taxi, ex’s apartment, a party, a café in New York, my aunt’s house, the bus—and once it fell off a church tower while a few friends and I were being idiots trying to film something. I probably got it back three times, if I’m being generous. The rest meant a trip to the phone store and the depressing knowledge that I’d just spent money that could’ve gone toward ice cream on replacing the same device I apparently can’t hold onto. The typical solution is to just not lose it, which is clearly advice I don’t respond to. But there’s this case from Berlin, Phonie, that approaches it differently: put a chain on the thing. Which sounds absolutely stupid at first—the kind of attachment that gets you laughed at in middle school, turns you into the kid with the weird phone lanyard. But somehow they made it not look terrible. The chains are decent, the transparent case lets your phone show through, and you can wear it around your neck or sling it crossbody if you want. It looks like something someone might actually choose to wear, not something you’d be forced into by sheer practicality. What gets me is how the whole concept is both completely ridiculous and immediately obvious. Yeah, attach it to your body. Don’t let it leave. It’s simple enough that you wonder why everyone doesn’t do this, and embarrassing enough that almost nobody does. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel foolish for not thinking of it, and even more foolish for considering using it. What are you, twelve years old? But I still think about that church tower, the café in New York where my phone disappeared into the void, the money I’ll never get back—money that could’ve been ice cream. And I wonder if next time I lose my phone, which I will, I’ll finally just buy the chain and be done with it. Monday, 10 December 2018. Tumblr Deleted Itself: Tumblr killed itself this week. Not on purpose, but they might as well have. December 17th and no more nude photos, no more porn, no adult content at all. The thing about Tumblr—the actual thing that made it work—was that it let all of that exist. That was the whole platform. It started in 2007 as something simple: a feed of whatever people wanted to post. Artists. Photographers. Weird kids. Lonely people. People who made things that didn’t fit anywhere else online. You’d scroll and see a painting, then someone’s nudes, then bad poetry, then someone’s erotica, then fan art, then philosophy. That just kept going. No algorithm. No engagement metrics. Just whatever you followed, and all of it was allowed to exist. That was the appeal. That was the entire point. It was messy and weird and sexual and creative all at once, and somehow that worked. Then the app got pulled from the store because it was hosting child pornography. That’s a real problem. A serious one. So Tumblr’s answer was to panic. They decided to ban everything sexual, just to be safe, like you could write a policy that knows the difference between a Renaissance nude and exploitation. You can’t. There’s no rule smart enough to distinguish art from porn from abuse. But they tried anyway, and now everyone who made art there is just checking out. The artist blogs started posting goodbyes pretty quick. Not angry, just tired. Either their work gets shadowbanned or deleted, or they stay and pretend it doesn’t exist. Most of them left instead. Patreon. Other sites. Some just stopped posting. The thing about Tumblr was that it was weird and open and let you be weird too. Take that away and there’s nothing left to stay for. I’ve been online for two decades and I’ve watched the internet get smaller and more afraid, more apologetic about itself. Tumblr was one of the last places that didn’t pretend to be something safer than it was. Now it’s just another platform that got too scared. The weird stuff will exist somewhere else. It always does. But Tumblr won’t be the place anymore, and that’s something to sit with. Tuesday, 4 December 2018. Rihanna’s Naughty: Rihanna just announced another lingerie drop called Naughty, and at this point there’s not much pretense left about what Fenty is actually for. She’s not selling confidence or transformation or any of the coded language fashion brands hide behind. She’s selling lingerie designed to be looked at and wanted, and she’s built her brand on being direct about it. The appeal is straightforward if you look at the images. The pieces are constructed to expose skin, to draw attention to bodies. No mystery. Rihanna designed them that way, modeled them that way, and she’s marketing them that way. It works because it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. What interests me is the confidence that takes. Most fashion—especially at that price point—wraps sexuality in euphemism. Empowerment. Self-expression. All the language that lets everyone pretend it’s about something beyond what it actually is. Rihanna just sells lingerie. And somehow that directness makes her campaigns more interesting to look at than brands spending millions trying to convince you it means something else. It’s refreshing in a way that probably shouldn’t be refreshing, but here we are. Tuesday, 4 December 2018. The Fake Poster: Some smart person made a fake Coca-Cola billboard in Berlin—perfectly rendered, Christmas aesthetic, one added line: Say no to the AfD. It was December and it was part of the AfD Advent Calendar, which was a campaign of daily actions against racism and the far-right, twenty-four of them, one for each day. Corporations want it both ways. All the marketing about diversity and inclusion, but no actual positions when things get messy. So activists filled the gap with a fake. The genius part is how little the poster needed: Coca-Cola had already done the emotional Christmas work. Someone just borrowed that template and added one sentence. It made its point just by existing—here’s what it would look like if they actually cared. Here’s how easy it would be. Coca-Cola’s response was something like: “not every fake has to be false.” Which I respected. It’s not the same as taking a position, but it’s acknowledgment. It’s a company saying yes to something instead of running legal through it first. The billboard stayed fake. The campaign ran its course. But for a month that year, the gap between what corporations claim to stand for and what they’re willing to do got filled with clever activism and borrowed logos. You can do a lot in that space between performance and conviction. Tuesday, 4 December 2018. Nudes for Access: In China, young people are apparently sending nude photos to companies in order to use their apps. The first time I read about it I thought it was an exaggeration, one of those viral misreads that gets worse each time someone shares it. But it’s real. And what gets to me isn’t that it happens, but that it doesn’t shock anyone. You know where this was going. Photos instead of personal data. Flesh instead of a password. Maybe the companies don’t even look at them. Maybe that’s not the point. The point is you’ll do it. Monday, 3 December 2018. What Kitsunés Does: Eastpak’s been making bags since the seventies—functional, military-rooted stuff you throw in a van. Maison Kitsunés whole thing is Paris and Tokyo not quite deciding between themselves, and not trying too hard. When you put those two sensibilities on the same duffel, the same backpack, you might expect some friction. There isn’t any. The black-and-white version of their camo-fox pattern actually looks better constrained like this—less costume-y, more like something you’d carry without thinking about it. They didn’t skimp on the hardware or the compartments either. Padded laptop section, organized pockets, metal hardware that feels substantial. The kind of functional detail you notice when you’re actually moving through the world with these things. I’ve never been sure what to make of designer collaborations with utilitarian brands. Usually it reads as a box to tick—put two reputations together and declare it an event. But the ones that work do so because they’re not performing anything. They just do what they were going to do anyway. This is just a smarter version of bags that already existed. A duffel with a pattern. A backpack with organization. A tote. A crossbody. Not reinventing, not forcing anything. There’s something I like about seeing Kitsunés sensibility applied to objects you haul around every day. It’s elegant without being precious. Taste without the performance. Monday, 3 December 2018. Night of Life: Cro customized a Levi’s trucker jacket for World AIDS Day, and that’s what caught my attention. When someone actually goes in and designs something specific instead of just lending their name, it feels different. World AIDS Day cycles around every year and mostly gets forgotten. Prevention work, access to treatment in places where it’s still not standard, the endless push against stigma—it’s all still happening, still necessary. Jugend gegen AIDS does the education. They partnered with Levi’s for Night of Life, the kind of corporate cause collaboration that could be completely cynical or could actually matter. This happened in Berlin at Kühlhaus, third city after Hamburg and Munich. There was a market component during a Christmas market where shopping supported the cause directly. Chefket performed. Riccardo Simonetti and Ishtar Isik came through as ambassadors for a new campaign. Design matters. When an artist puts real thought into something, when they care how it looks and feels, when they don’t just phone it in—that’s a different gesture. That’s a collaboration instead of a transaction. So I don’t know if the jacket sells or becomes a collectible someone never opens. The cause is real either way. But Cro actually designed something, and that’s what makes me think this whole thing might actually work. Monday, 3 December 2018. Tavi Killed Rookie: Tavi Gevinson shut down Rookie Magazine last year. After seven years, the site just stopped. No warning, no slow fade—she killed it because she couldn’t keep it alive and keep herself alive at the same time. Rookie started in September 2011 as something almost absurd in its ambition: a digital magazine for teenage girls that actually treated them like humans. It had essays about desire and menstruation in the same breath as fashion photography. Columns on racism and feminism. Weird fiction. Advice that didn’t talk down. The whole thing rendered in pastel colors and fractured layouts, deliberately pretty and deliberately weird. It was made by teenagers and young artists, which meant it felt like actual conversation instead of brand voice. There was sex in it, and anger, and genuine writing. The problem was that it couldn’t make money, or rather, the money wasn’t there for what it actually was. Advertising wanted clickbait girls and algorithm-friendly content. Investors wanted scale. Tavi could’ve sold it, monetized it harder, built the influencer angle. She didn’t want to. So instead she watched the finances drain and watched herself get sicker. She was on the subway when she read a headline about Anna Delvey, the con artist who faked her way into New York money. Tavi saw it and felt her stomach drop—not because she’d faked anything, but because the internet will turn on you the second the narrative flips. She was running a cultural project that meant something, but success online is temporary and subject to reinterpretation. One bad news cycle and suddenly you’re the girl who conned everyone. The girl whose ambition was really just narcissism. It wasn’t rational, but imposter syndrome isn’t rational. So she chose to close it before it could be taken from her. Before the story could become that. Before the internet’s tone shift could rewrite what it had all been. I didn’t always agree with everything Rookie published, but I understood why it mattered. It proved you could make something entertaining and explicitly feminist without the project becoming preachy or hollow. You could build community around intelligence and sexuality at the same time. You could let teenage girls see themselves as subjects of their own lives, not just audiences. That’s gone now. I don’t think that’s the end of Tavi—people with her instincts don’t disappear. But it says something dark about how this platform economy works, how thin the margin is between doing something real and getting crushed by it. Saturday, 1 December 2018. Velvet Stars: Miley’s doing Converse again—third collaboration—and I was ready to ignore it. Most celebrity shoes are just a name on standard inventory. But there’s this vinyl Chuck Taylor with star tape on the sole, that kind of small ridiculous detail that either lands or it doesn’t. These land. The platform versions in brushed velvet with scattered glitter are the real move. Velvet on a sneaker could be a total disaster, but they kept it restrained—glitter threaded through instead of plastered everywhere, colors like burgundy and electric blue that don’t pretend to be wearable. It takes real confidence to put a texture like that on something people are supposed to walk in, and it shows someone actually thought about what they were making instead of just licensing a name. The whole thing coheres around her existing taste, which is at least honest. Matching clothes, same palette, same maximalist energy she already does. It feels like one idea instead of a cash-grab with someone’s face on it. I’m skeptical of these things by instinct—celebrity collaborations are there to sell a person, not shoes. But sometimes the design is competent enough that you stop thinking about that. The velvet pieces here actually are. The vinyl stuff is just fun noise, which is fine too. Friday, 30 November 2018. Boulevard: Gina-Lisa Lohfink released a song called “Boulevard.” I’m not sure why this surprised me, but somehow it did. She was on Germany’s Next Top Model, which is where you go if you’re tall and pretty enough to endure Heidi Klum’s laughter. Then she did reality TV. Then her sex tape circulated. Then more reality TV. And now music, because that’s the next format when everything else stops working. She’d tried songs before—”Alles Klar,” “Barbie Girl,” “Tarzan & Jane.” They went nowhere. But that doesn’t matter. Once you’re famous for anything, someone’s always willing to fund the next attempt. You throw songs into the void until one sticks. “Boulevard” didn’t stick. It’s the sound of 2 a.m. in a club you got dragged to, the beat was manufactured somewhere, her voice is buried under effects that can’t save it. Not terrible. Just completely predictable. The exact song that had to exist. The label says she’s being “self-ironic” about her image, which is kind. Really what’s happening is she ran out of other formats and this is the next format. Maybe she’s laughing. Maybe she’s just exhausted. Maybe the difference doesn’t matter anymore. So now there’s a song. People will stream it. Some out of curiosity, some out of hate, most by accident. The numbers will tick. And the Boulevard just keeps existing, because why the hell wouldn’t it. Friday, 30 November 2018. 90’s Kid: The 90s catch heat they don’t deserve. Everyone talks about the bad parts now—the fashion disasters, the haircuts, daytime TV hell, that dread around Y2K, SMS charges eating your entire paycheck at 19 cents a message. On the surface it looks like a genuinely bad decade, a cultural low point we should all be embarrassed about. But if you actually let yourself sit with the nostalgia instead of dismissing it, something else comes back. Star Wars. Sailor Moon. The Game Boy—that gray brick that never died. The Turtles. Tomb Raider. Tamagotchi. Space Jam. Pokémon. Friends. Bruce Lee movies. The Simpsons. Everything with Schwarzenegger. Jurassic Park. Silent Hill. Michael Jackson. The actual stuff that shaped me, that got into my bones, that I still think about. The 90s weren’t a wasteland at all. They were full of things that mattered. Rachid Lotf, an artist, packed all of it—or his version of it—into a single image he called “90’s Kid.” Not the polished curated version. Not ironic distance. Just: here’s everything I loved. Here’s what made me. That’s it. The detail hits you in waves. First you spot the obvious things—the Final Fantasy VII poster, whatever. Then you get curious and start looking closer. Hello Kitty? Monopoly on the floor. A Furby wedged on a shelf. The more you dig, the more specific details emerge, and you realize how personal it is—his specific taste, his specific arrangement of what matters. It could be your image too, different in the details but probably not that different in spirit. There’s no irony in the image, no performance. Just a person saying, “These things made me,” and meaning it. I look at it and find myself everywhere—not because his specific taste is mine, but because we grew up in the same glossy landscape of references and objects. The 90s created enough monoculture that the details can be personal while the feeling is shared. You see your own nostalgia in his nostalgia. I could buy it as a poster. Probably will. But the real moment is the looking itself—spending time with what actually mattered, what actually shaped you, stripped of the jokes and the dismissal. The image does that. It doesn’t apologize for loving the things it loves. Thursday, 29 November 2018. After Monet: Monet wasn’t sure if he was painting Japan or the idea of Japan. He built a garden from prints since he couldn’t visit—worked from images, tried to live inside them instead. That obsession with Japanese composition, with space and color as pure structure, seeped into everything he touched. The Western art world called it Japonisme and treated it like a revelation, but it was just one man’s very long infatuation. Here’s what gets interesting: Japan had been closed to the West for two centuries. The moment it opens, Western painters go berserk for Japanese aesthetics. Woodblock prints, compositional logic, the visual vocabulary of an entire tradition. But Japan was having its own conversation the whole time. Japanese artists watched the West watch them, then kept evolving that same visual language in their own direction. Manga isn’t borrowing from Impressionism—it’s the direct descendant of woodblock prints, same DNA, just moving through the 20th century on its own tracks. The exhibition at Arp Museum traces this arc. Historical prints flow into Monet’s era, then forward into contemporary manga. Not like manga learned from Monet, but like they were both solving the same visual problem across different times. There’s a reading lounge where anime sits alongside art history. A tunnel wall painted by Christina S. Zhu—all motion and color, a magical girl chase sequence. Cosplay treated as seriously as any other art. It shouldn’t add up, mixing high and pop, but it does, because they’re actually continuous. What stays with me is how long this conversation has gone on without stopping. A French painter who never visited Japan but couldn’t stop thinking about it. Japanese artists watching the West watch Japan. Now we consume Japanese visual culture directly, through forms the West barely understands yet. It’s the same obsession, just in different languages, across 150 years, and somehow nobody’s finished saying what they need to say about it. Thursday, 29 November 2018. Just Soft: Kylie Jenner and Adidas made COEZE, which is just fleece—oversized, soft, in red or purple. The pitch is simple: warm and casual enough to wear anywhere. At home, getting coffee, pretending you didn’t think about your outfit. Winter needs things like this. There’s something right about not overcomplicating it. Fashion usually needs a story attached. The inspiration. The cultural moment. Some deeper thing underneath. This is just “it’s cold, wear this.” I respect that. The shoe collabs are the interesting part. Two Falcon versions: one in gold and hot pink (very 90s, unapologetic), the other in red, white, and blue (intentional but more restrained). It’s a small difference, but it matters. One says “I’m making a statement,” the other says “I’m warm and it looks okay.” Both versions work. I wouldn’t wear any of it. But I get why someone would. Making something people actually want to wear—not just own, but actually wear—is harder than it sounds. She landed it. Wednesday, 28 November 2018. Summer in December: I hate winter. There’s snowboarding—you get a whole day on white slopes, then collapse in a warm cabin and drink yourself stupid. That part’s fine. But the rest of it, the mud and dark and cold that just sits there, it hollows you out. I spend months wanting time to move faster. So these photos by Kristijonas Duttke make a kind of sense. He shot them with his model Katharina in a tiny garden shed outside Dresden over the summer, surrounded by plants and flowers jammed into the middle of a garden allotment community. The whole idea was to capture that feeling and bring it back when everything outside turns grey. He called it “a small patch of paradise,” which is what you hear in promotional material, but looking at them, it’s true. There’s something Swedish about them, even though it’s Germany. The light feels different. The air looks different. You look at these and your brain actually believes for a second that it’s warm right now. Katharina models on the side but has some other job—Kristijonas wouldn’t say what. It doesn’t matter. She’s just a person in summer light, which is all this really is. They do what they were supposed to do. In December, sitting under fluorescent lights with the heat blowing, I look and remember what warmth felt like. Not actual warmth. Not going to change anything. But you look anyway. Tuesday, 27 November 2018. The Character: Lady Gaga’s essentially out of the pop business now. After A Star is Born with Bradley Cooper, she made it clear she wanted to be a real person—complicated, sad, working through actual things—rather than a character, and that’s a fair choice. But pop music needs people willing to be characters, willing to be loud and strange and excessive without caring if they look ridiculous. Ava Max filled that void with “Sweet But Psycho.” The song hit number one almost immediately. It’s catchy, made for dancing, built on the hook of a girl who’s beautiful and slightly unhinged—which is just a way of talking about female power without being apologetic about it. What strikes me is that she doesn’t seem defensive about the whole thing. She wants to be a pop construction, a character, not an authentic artist with a real inner life. There’s something refreshing about that refusal to pretend there’s depth underneath. You commit to the character, you sell it, you move on. For years that’s how pop worked, before everyone decided authenticity was the only honest thing left to be, and the whole genre got thin and careful. Whether Ava Max lasts is still open. Whether this is the start of something or just one good moment. But the song works. It’s catchy, it’s stuck in your head, and you can’t argue with that. Tuesday, 27 November 2018. Why Anime Feels True: You’re sitting in front of a show about a kid with powers they don’t understand, and a moment comes where the character just stares at something—and the feeling in that frame is the exact feeling you’ve been carrying around for three days without being able to explain it to anyone. That happens a lot in anime. I think it’s because anime doesn’t apologize for sincerity. A character can spend five minutes thinking about loneliness in the rain and the show treats it like something that matters. You can be desperate and weird and sexual and hopeful at the same time, and the form just holds it all without flinching. Real life makes you file those things away, pretend they’re not there. On Reddit there’s a subreddit called Anime IRL where people pair screenshots from anime with photos of real life. A character staring at a wall gets matched with someone’s photo of themselves staring at a wall. A lonely dinner scene matched with someone’s actual lonely dinner. It’s comforting in a strange way—proof that your specific strange feeling was worth animating, that someone else has thought it too. Maybe that’s what any art is supposed to do. But anime does it without irony. It’s urgent and earnest without feeling like you’re supposed to laugh at it. It’s a place where you stop performing normalcy even for an hour and realize how many other people are tired of performing too. I’m not going to say it changed my life or healed me. But it’s the thing I go to when I need to remember that being weird isn’t something to apologize for. Tuesday, 27 November 2018. The Original’s Untouchable: Disney’s been on a spree lately—dig up an old cartoon, render it in 3D, cast some stars, release it. Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Dumbo. Just working through the vault. But The Lion King shouldn’t be on that assembly line. That one’s sacred. The Lion King was my favorite Disney film. Still is. When I was young, I had everything—the soundtracks, the games, the books, the action figures, the VHS tapes. All of it. The film arrived at exactly the right moment. It stuck in a way very few things do. I can still quote huge sections of it. I’ve probably watched it a hundred times. In school, this girl named Katrin and I would do scenes from it on the bus ride home. Simba and Scar mostly—that uncle-nephew dynamic. We had those lines down. It was a small thing, but it mattered. They’re remaking it in 2019. 3D, Donald Glover, Beyoncé, the works. I’ll watch it, probably. I watch all the remakes, though I couldn’t tell you why. But here’s the thing: the 1994 film has my whole heart. Not because I’m stuck in nostalgia or whatever. Just because that film is finished. Complete. And nothing—not a new animation style, not any voice actor—is going to change what it already is. Friday, 23 November 2018. New Rules: Saw Dua Lipa at a small venue in London—maybe 200 people, tight space. She opened with “New Rules,” that song that’s basically a masterclass in not being a pushover. “Don’t answer the phone when he’s drunk and lonely.” It’s become one of the biggest songs in the world, which tells you something about what people actually need to hear. She’s gone from indie favorite to something genuinely global in just a few years. The hits stack up: “One Kiss,” “I Don’t Give a Fuck,” “Be The One”—they’re everywhere, and they’re everywhere for a reason. They’re catchy, but there’s more to it than that. She sings with this complete confidence, like she’s not trying to convince you of anything, just stating facts. The concert itself was efficient. No production excess, no trying to overwhelm you. She moved through the songs the way someone who actually owns them would, not like she was performing them. Played “Blow Your Mind,” “Electricity,” “Scared to be Lonely.” Clean, direct, no filler. She mentioned something about touring and workouts—how every city is different, so she tries different things. Yoga here, boxing there, whatever’s available. It seemed genuine, not a canned answer. Just someone figuring out how to keep her body working while she’s constantly moving. What I kept noticing was the straightforwardness of it all. The songs don’t ask permission, don’t apologize. “New Rules” could be preachy or victim-narrative, but it’s neither. It’s just practical: know your value, don’t let people use you, move on. There’s no romance in it, no hope that maybe things will be different. Just clarity. She’s got this quality where being a global superstar doesn’t seem to touch her. No performing for the machinery of fame. Just someone with real material and the confidence to stand behind it. Friday, 23 November 2018. Selena Knows What She’s Doing: Selena Gomez has the system figured out. The contradictions are too perfect to be accidental—interviews where she talks about Jesus, then Instagram stories in lingerie, a clean image constantly undercut by sexualized content, carefully aimed moments where the boundary almost gives. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s a strategy, and it’s working. The wardrobe malfunction (or near-malfunction, if you’re reading signal into pixelated video) is just the machine doing its job. Fans waiting for the accident that isn’t an accident. The platform built to serve these moments. The low resolution that makes everything mysterious. Everyone knows what’s happening. Nobody says it. That’s the whole point. What interests me is how well it works. Not what Selena’s thinking, not whether she’s brilliant or playing both sides. Just that the thing turns, everyone’s in it, and nobody has to admit what they’re actually doing. Wednesday, 21 November 2018. Behind The Fence: Oxford Street, somewhere behind barbed wire and a heavy metal door, there’s a warehouse where Adidas threw a party for another celebrity collaboration. Kendall Jenner and Olivia Oblonc on the streetwear collection—months of work, apparently, resulting in a puffed jacket and assorted other pieces that land somewhere between premium and accessible, or maybe just expensive enough to feel like it matters. I remember the venue more than the clothes. The fence and the door suggested something secret, but inside it was the standard formula: drinks, DJs, famous people being photographed. The usual crowd at every launch, every city. Kendall’s main pitch was the puffed jacket. “I can’t wait to wear it snowboarding,” which is fine. That’s the thing about celebrity collaborations now—they’re not supposed to be special in some artistic way. They’re supposed to be functional luxury. Something Kendall would actually wear. Something you could wear. The same thing. The party felt like every other fashion party I’ve been to. Different city, same setup. Cîroc, Budweiser, a couple of decent DJs. It’s not bad. It works. It gets people excited about a collection they might have ignored otherwise. It’s just… predictable. The same machine spinning in London, Berlin, New York, wherever. What stuck with me was the entrance. That theatrical fence. The metal door. Someone decided that a warehouse needed to feel like a secret, even though everyone knows where it is and why they’re there. It’s a small thing, but it’s the only moment that felt like someone was actually trying. Tuesday, 20 November 2018. Everything Else Stops: Standing in front of Super Potato at eleven PM with maybe fifty yen left in my pockets, staring at cartridges I’ll never actually play because my Japanese isn’t good enough to finish the story, everything else just stops mattering. The neon’s too bright, the arcades are too loud, there’s some idol group performing somewhere and you can hear the screams even though you can’t see them. When I’m in Tokyo, I skip the cafés in Shibuya and Harajuku and head straight east. Akihabara first. That’s the rule. Before I’m jet-lagged, before I remember I have a life somewhere else, I’m already walking through those narrow streets with no plan beyond Super Potato, the Sega arcade where I’ll lose at Ridge Racer to someone who’s been there since the nineties, and then just looking. Plastic toys from forgotten anime. Modded controllers. Cables for devices that stopped existing years ago. Someone’s built a shrine to anime girls in the corner of a five-story building’s back alley. Always something. The thing about Akihabara is that it hasn’t changed, or I’ve never noticed if it has. It’s exactly what it was when I first went there—this jumbled, unselfconscious mess of people hunting for something very specific and being completely fine with the fact that nobody else on earth cares. The otaku hunting for a specific bootleg Gundam figure or a rare cartridge don’t perform their obsession for an audience. They’re not performing it at all. They just want the thing. That’s what actually gets me about the place. Not the shops or the collectibles or even the arcades, though those are great. It’s the permission structure. Everyone’s weird here and that’s the entire point. In most of the world, being this deeply into something niche means you’re doing it in private or apologizing for it. In Akihabara, wanting something that nobody else wants is just what you do. You walk into a shop, ask for the most obscure thing you can think of, and the person behind the counter either nods or points you to another shop. No judgment. No eyebrow raise. Last time I was there, I spent maybe an hour just in one building because I kept finding new sections. Manga I’d never heard of in the basement. Someone’s collection of broken arcade parts on the third floor. A wall of figurines that seemed to only exist in parallel universes. I didn’t buy anything because I didn’t want anything, really. I just wanted to be in a place where that was fine too. Saturday, 17 November 2018. Bambi Season: Bambi’s been getting criticism for decades, and it’s deserved—it’s basically an industry reminding itself it exists. You can sit home and trash the whole thing if you didn’t get invited, which is easy and makes sense. But then someone asks if you’re coming, and suddenly all that judgment dissolves and you’re digging through your closet past the t-shirts and old jeans, looking for something that might pass for formal. The show itself never changes. Red carpet. Models and directors and money people. Someone gets a lifetime achievement award just for being around long enough. The after-party is the real thing—everyone’s drunk, complaining about how TV is dead, Netflix already won, and which dress showed the most cleavage. You could set your watch by it. What’s new this year is the generation trying to refresh it. YouTubers and Instagram twins—Lisa and Lena, Dagi Bee, Dua Lipa. They’re supposed to be injecting some youth. But they all look like the same person, like someone cloned a Ukrainian Justin Bieber and just kept copying it. They’re grinning at their phones while teenagers watching are visibly turned on, throwing up hand signals that mean nothing. It’s this weird collision between manufactured celebrity and actual human need. So you drink champagne, eat snacks, get cornered by a suit who promises he can make you big. You believe it for a second. Then it’s morning and you’re out the door early, relieved you lied about your number. Saturday, 17 November 2018. Pokémon Tamagotchi: I was carrying around a Tamagotchi in the 90s, and my whole sense of competence hinged on keeping the pixels inside alive. Mine died in its own shit. Not metaphorically. Literally. You’d forget to feed it for a day and come back to a dead screen, that immediate gut-punch of knowing you’d failed at something genuinely simple. The worst part was that it felt true to life. Tamagotchi and Pokémon. Tamagotchi and Pokémon. Tamagotchi and Pokémon. Say it a few times and you realize it’s the most obvious idea that somehow nobody thought of until now. Two things that were always supposed to be one thing. According to some leak from a Japanese magazine, it’s actually happening. Bandai and Pokémon are working on a Tamagotchi crossover where you raise Pikachu, or Charmander, or Squirtle, or Bulbasaur in that little egg. Feed it, keep it alive, watch what it becomes. The leak doesn’t say when it’s coming out or what happens after you inevitably let it die. I’m already preparing my excuses. Why I’m carrying a plastic egg on my keychain at work. Why I’m going to love it more than I should. Why this, somehow, feels like the thing I’ve been waiting for. Friday, 16 November 2018. Dumbo’s Back: I watched the original Dumbo once as a kid and it terrified me in a way that made me never want to watch it again. The mother, the abuse, those characters in the hallucinatory beer-drunk sequence. A helpless little elephant with these oversized ears getting put through everything. I was maybe seven or eight. One viewing was enough to make me lock that film away. Now Disney’s making a live-action version with Tim Burton directing, which could go either way—disaster or something genuinely interesting. The cast is strong: Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Alan Arkin, Eva Green glowing like she always does. But Burton’s in that place where his films all seem like variations on the same idea. Twisted enough to register as Burton, but there’s nothing underneath anymore. Beetlejuice had something. Edward Scissorhands had something. Nightmare Before Christmas actually landed somewhere real. Anything since Alice in Wonderland just feels like the same gesture repeated. Looking at this trailer—and it is very sad, which makes sense—I can’t tell if the sadness is intentional or if he’s just forgotten how to make something that breathes. Maybe melancholy is what he has left now. Maybe that’s fine. Part of me thinks I should finally go back and watch the original, face down whatever grabbed hold of me thirty years ago. The rational move. The other part is happy leaving that memory exactly where it is, a door I don’t need to open. So I’ll probably wait for this new one and see if Burton’s found any reason to care about something again. Friday, 16 November 2018. The End of Lindenstraße: The ARD announced they’re cancelling Lindenstraße. Thirty-four years on air, and they’re done. Final episode in 2020. My mother watched it every week. So I grew up watching it too. Nothing fancy about the show—just stories happening in a stairwell or someone’s apartment, people living their lives, dealing with things. Hans W. Geißendörfer made something that didn’t need to be important to be important. It was just there, reliable, every Sunday, unspectacular. But it was the show that made me understand that homosexuality was normal. That you didn’t need to fear people who looked different. That the absurdity of the world outside finds its way into your living room and your relationships, whether you’re paying attention or not. The ARD says viewership is down. Production costs don’t match the audience size anymore. They’re being respectful about it—a proper finale is promised—but the truth is simple: the show isn’t profitable enough. So it goes. What leaves with it is hard to articulate without getting melodramatic. It’s not that Lindenstraße was high art. It was a soap opera that actually cared about the stories it told. It took social and political issues seriously without turning them into spectacle. They lived in the show the way they live in actual life, as part of the texture of being alive, not as drama to be solved in forty-five minutes. Most German television now is just screaming—talk-show hysteria, reality competition formats, endless recycled games. Lindenstraße never shouted. It just was there. I know this sounds like I’m making something small into something huge. A TV show ending isn’t a tragedy. But something real is gone, and what German television is replacing it with is noise. Lindenstraße was never cool enough, weird enough, or cruel enough for what television wants to be now. It was too steady. Too willing to believe its audience had a brain and a conscience. My mother will watch the final episodes. I’ll watch them too. I’m not sure what else you do with something that’s been in your life that long. You show up for the ending. You don’t abandon it when it’s almost over. Friday, 16 November 2018. VICE’s Long Fade: I used to actually read VICE. Not because it was cool—I mean, yes, but that wasn’t the point. I read it because every issue had something you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Real reporting from places that didn’t matter to bigger outlets. The photography was sick. The writing had swagger that felt earned, not performed. The whole thing carried this implicit message that the world was weirder and more interesting than anyone wanted to admit. Then it got absorbed into the machine. The corporation built out all these vertical brands—Noisey, Motherboard, Munchies. Shane Smith stepped back after the sexual harassment allegations came out. Nancy Dubuc took over with Disney and Fox and HBO all quietly holding equity, and for about five minutes it seemed like maybe you could keep the edge under institutional protection. You couldn’t. This month VICE fired 15 percent of its staff, which is about 1,350 people. They’re collapsing most of the subsidiary brands into a handful of survivors. Waypoint, Amuse, Tonic—they’re all gone. The math is simple: the company lost over 100 million dollars in 2017, probably another 50 million this year. They went from 36 million readers two years ago to 27 million now. The ad money dried up. The mystique wore off. I stopped reading it somewhere in the last few years without really noticing. The investigations were still competent. The photos were still good. But the thing that made you want to read it—that sense that these people genuinely didn’t care what the establishment thought—had gone completely hollow. It became a glossy magazine that wanted to look rebellious to sell ads. The performance of edge without any actual edge underneath. This is what happens when you let something grow too fast and forget what you built it for. MTV did this. Probably others I’m not even thinking of. You create something real, something vital, and then the minute it gains traction the money people show up and ask why you’re not maximizing return. So you add more verticals. You hire more people. You optimize the algorithm. You make the thing bigger and bigger until what you originally created has been completely buried under infrastructure. I don’t know if VICE survives this. Maybe cutting down to size actually lets them find something real again. Or maybe this is just the slow motion death of another publication that mattered and then didn’t. Thursday, 15 November 2018. The Hand-Off: The appeal of Kynseed is letting you build something—a farm, a business, a family, whatever—and then watch it outlast you. Your character gets old, eventually dies, and you just slide into the next generation and keep going. The whole thing’s designed around that timer. Made by some people from Lionhead, which makes sense; that whole company was obsessed with generational consequences and the idea that your choices ripple forward through time. Kynseed does that same thing but as a chill pixel-art sandbox. Stardew Valley mixed with Albion. You’re not optimizing anything or grinding toward an endgame; you’re just settling somewhere and seeing what a whole life looks like across thirty or forty years and three or four characters. It’s a good idea and the 16-bit art style doesn’t hurt. The world’s pretty and lived-in looking. Ten euros on Steam and GOG, Windows only for now, though they’re planning Mac and console versions. I like that the generational timer forces you to stop thinking about this as a forever-thing—you can’t just endlessly optimize and perfect. You settle, you build, you age out, you hand it off and see what your kid does with it. That’s the whole game. I haven’t had serious time with it yet, but there’s something about that structure that appeals to me—the generational thing, the idea that you’re not the endpoint of anything, you’re just one link in a chain. Nothing’s really finished; you just pass it on. Wednesday, 14 November 2018. Tsuruki’s Tokyo: I had this version of Japan in my head—the one everyone has. Neon, order, precision, a country where everything works and nothing is messy. You know the fantasy. You’ve absorbed it through a thousand images that all blur into the same impossible place. Then I found Tetsushi Tsuruki’s photographs. Tsuruki is a Japanese photographer who shoots his own country like he’s looking for evidence. No romance, no filter. The Japan in his pictures is tired, broken, human in ways the fantasy isn’t allowed to be. There’s blood on hotel sheets. There’s a nakedness—literal and spiritual—that you don’t see in the postcards. Tokyo at night from his perspective isn’t the gleaming tower-dream; it’s neon reflecting off wet pavement, windows going dark in buildings that never actually sleep, the grime of a city too busy to stay beautiful. What gets me is how thoroughly he kills the illusion. He’s not making some grand critique. He’s just looking—at the corners nobody cares about, the moments when people aren’t performing. The truth that only shows up after dark, when the carefully maintained surfaces crack. I’m still drawn to that fantasy, if I’m honest. But I can’t unsee what Tsuruki saw. It hasn’t disappeared; it’s just become a choice now. You know what it costs. You go in knowing you’re trading one reality for another, and that’s fine. Maybe better than not knowing the difference. Wednesday, 14 November 2018. Wilfred Warrior: Wilfred Warrior is a Persian cat from London who looks like someone stuffed Steve Buscemi into a white fur coat and ran him over a few times. I know that sounds mean, but it’s the first read you get when you see him—something went catastrophically wrong in a lab somewhere, or the universe played a prank that landed in exactly the right way. The face you’d normally avoid looking at, except it works. He’s got this grin, these huge eyes, this stare that somehow has personality underneath it. There’s a whole lineage of these cats now. Maru, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, all the others who became mascots before anyone thought to give them contracts. Wilfred is the latest, and he might be the oddest. Not the cutest—the oddest. That’s a different currency on the internet these days. He got pushed into view by Michael Rapaport, the comedian, who took one of Wilfred’s videos and re-dubbed it. That’s the whole story. Someone took this genuinely weird thing and gave it a frame, and now it’s everywhere. The algorithm picked it up. People started showing it to each other. Now Wilfred’s growing by the day, and I understand why. Once you see his face you think about it at odd moments. You want other people to know what it’s like to encounter him. There’s something about being this unresolved, this genuinely peculiar, and just not caring. Most internet cats are cute or funny. Wilfred is just unsettling in a way that’s funny to me. The blankness of it. The confidence. Like he doesn’t know he’s supposed to be endearing and that’s exactly what makes him work. Wednesday, 14 November 2018. Stan Lee: I was never really a Marvel person—always preferred manga—but you couldn’t ignore Stan Lee. He created or co-created nearly every major superhero of the last seventy years. Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, Iron Man, Black Panther. The catalog is almost absurd. He died at 95, and American pop culture doesn’t make sense without his fingerprints on it. Stanley Martin Lieber was born in 1922, son of Romanian Jewish immigrants in New York. Timely Comics brought him on in 1939 to do the grunt work—reading proofs, filling ink bottles, the apprentice stuff. His first published work appeared in 1941. Twenty years later he was running the place. When the company became Marvel, he became inseparable from it. In the 1960s he was everywhere in Marvel’s machinery. Writing, editing, answering fan mail, publishing his monthly “Stan’s Soapbox” column, building this whole infrastructure of fandom that made comics feel like a conversation. He became the public face at conventions and panels. In 1981 he moved to California to push Marvel’s expansion into film and television. For years after that he’d appear in movies in those tiny cameos, an autograph on everything. What endures isn’t whether he actually drew the pages or wrote the dialogue—there’s a whole argument about that. It’s that he made superheroes human enough to survive him. The National Medal of Arts in 2008 was almost ceremonial. He’d already made himself permanent. Tuesday, 13 November 2018. Color in November: I saw someone in Harajuku wearing neon pink, some experimental top, sneakers that didn’t match. Just walking, unbothered, like it was normal. And I guess in Tokyo it is. That baseline of visual confidence—wearing bright color in wet November like it’s fine—that’s what separates Tokyo from everywhere else. In Germany, autumn kills the whole visual world. Everything’s gray, everyone dresses gray, and standing out feels like you’re making a statement instead of just getting dressed. In Tokyo, same gray sky, and they just decide to paint over it. Harajuku, Shibuya, Shimokitazawa—there’s this understood agreement that you can wear whatever you feel like, and nobody makes it weird. The clothes usually aren’t expensive. A vintage shirt layered with something experimental you found in a resale shop. The point isn’t the price or the brands. It’s that what you wear is allowed to matter, and that you get to decide what a season feels like instead of letting the season decide for you. A nineteen-year-old in bright colors walks past a tired salaryman in dark blue and they’re both just people. Nobody’s defending anything. That’s what I wanted from autumn my whole life. Permission to dress in the color you feel instead of in the color that’s acceptable. In Tokyo, you just get that permission without asking. Tuesday, 13 November 2018. Hard Girls: There are days I’m fine with Ed Sheeran or whoever making me feel something deep, but most days what I actually want is hip-hop that doesn’t care about your feelings—something crude and mechanical, especially from women who’ve got more edge and style than I ever will. City Girls are exactly that. They don’t bother with the fake gangster routine. At least one of them has done actual time, which is the only credibility that matters when so many other rappers are just dressed up in a story. Their songs are straight autobiography. “Where The Bag At,” “Sweet Tooth,” “Tighten Up”—these aren’t invented narratives, they’re just how their life sounds. Yung Miami and JT—Jatavia Johnson and Caresha Brownlee—met through friends, decided to make music together, and pretty quickly it was clear it would be hip-hop. Drake wanted to work with them, then everyone did. But what matters is they’re not interested in anything else. No experiments. No emotional bullshit. No songs they’ll regret in a few years. They just exist as themselves, completely, and if that’s too much for you, that’s the whole point. There’s something about that kind of certainty that changes everything. You listen to a few tracks and you get why they land the way they do. They’re not clever or vulnerable or trying to be relatable. They’re just there—crude, unmovable, unapologetic—and if you can’t handle that, you’re missing the actual point. Tuesday, 13 November 2018. London Gets Further: I haven’t made it back to London in longer than planned. There was a time I’d go at least once a year, just for that specific international atmosphere—nothing you get in Berlin or Hamburg or anywhere else in Germany. London had something different. Still does, probably. But cities don’t wait, and somewhere along the way the annual trip became something I kept postponing. Now it’s been years. Tuesday, 13 November 2018. If These Were Gadgets: Instagram as a camera. WhatsApp as a walkie talkie. Netflix as a slide projector. That’s what Thomas Olivier designed—what modern apps would actually look like if someone had invented them in the 1980s, not as software but as physical objects you could hold. The appeal isn’t just the retro look. It’s that these would kind of just work. A messaging app is basically a walkie talkie in digital form. A photo-sharing app is a camera with a network built in. Strip away the software layer and you’re left with something simple and functional, exactly what 80s design would have produced. There’s something satisfying about that. We usually think of progress as moving away from physical objects, toward abstraction and immateriality—everything in the cloud, everything on screens. Olivier’s work flips that. It asks: what if the task was so fundamental that it needed its own dedicated machine? What if we never abstracted it away at all? I’d want to own these things if they actually existed. Not as ironic retro pieces, but as tools. They’d be limited compared to modern apps, sure. But there’s something honest about that limitation. A camera that shares photos, full stop. No metrics, no engagement mechanics, no algorithmic manipulation. Just the one thing it was designed to do. Looking at these designs makes me wonder what we traded and what we got in return. Convenience, maybe. A lot of convenience. But also a lot of friction in places there never used to be any. Olivier’s designs make that friction visible. Monday, 12 November 2018. A Party Moment: Jeremy Scott pitched the Moschino x H&M collection as a party. Fun, pop, energy, friends showing up—that’s the pitch. No pretense of importance. Just meant to be fun and then it’s over. They threw the expected party in Berlin. Champagne, photographers, everyone in the new pieces. And the actual product here wasn’t the garments. It was the mythology around them. The temporary nature of it. The knowledge that these exist for a moment and then they don’t. What you’re actually buying is the proof that you were there. There’s something honest about a designer collab that doesn’t try to be profound. It’s temporary, it’s fun, it’s a moment. That’s the whole thing. The pieces are just evidence. And that’s fine. Monday, 12 November 2018. The Thing That Works: The BVG made a song. Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” reinterpreted by transit employees in a glossy video that commits fully to the concept—cool and confident and aware of its own absurdity. The premise is simple: a public utility loves you. They’ve decided to sing about it. And they’re not entirely wrong. The BVG gets you to work at 6am with a coffee you managed to grab, then to a stranger’s apartment at 2am after too many drinks, then home the next morning when that situation resolved poorly. For years it was just invisible—the system that works. You didn’t think about it until it broke, and then you suddenly understood how much you depended on it. For a long time they didn’t try to be anything but reliable and unglamorous. Then came an adidas collaboration, which worked fine, and now this: a full song, BVG employees as performers, a serious commitment to the idea that yes, we love the people we move around the city every day. The audacity is kind of charming. A public utility deciding it can participate in culture. The video itself is what you’d expect—glossy, competent, forgettable. What matters is the commitment. Whether this is genuine affection or marketing is hard to parse, and maybe it doesn’t matter. They’ve done the obvious thing well enough that they’ve earned the right to try for something else. It’s the kind of move that works in Berlin. A city that doesn’t perform seriousness, where a utility can decide to be cultural and it reads as natural rather than desperate. Everyone else is working overtime to seem cool. BVG was just content to move people, and that turned out to be the coolest thing anyway. Friday, 9 November 2018. Back to the Board: I haven’t played Monopoly in years. Maybe not since my cousin—the scratchy type who’d get bored after thirty minutes and start throwing houses and hotels at me in frustration. Or with my dad, who refused to lose. He had this uncanny way of maneuvering me into financial ruin so smoothly that I stopped believing in capitalism altogether. I’ve been quietly rooting for the collapse of international banking ever since. But here’s the thing: despite those disasters, Monopoly means something to me. It was about sitting down with people I actually liked, giving them three hours of my time, and doing nothing but slowly bankrupting each other. Yeah, it usually ended in chaos or days of awkward silence. But when someone eventually asked if we wanted to play again, we’d all say yes. Because it was fun. Because the sitting together was what mattered. I found out there’s a Sailor Moon Monopoly. Not the redesigned characters from the new anime, but the originals—Usagi and the girls we actually wanted to play as. It’s not a thing I needed, but it’s making me want to sit down and play again. With people who watched the same show. Who get why playing as a sailor guardian matters even if it’s just pretend real estate. There’s something about having the exact right version of something that makes me want to come back to it. The characters I actually cared about. The thing that reminds me why I liked it in the first place. I’ll get it for that reason—not because Monopoly is a good game or because Sailor Moon deserves a board. Just because I want to sit with the right people for three hours and do something pointless together. That’s the whole thing. Monday, 29 October 2018. Taki Taki: Caught the “Taki Taki” video during a work break. It’s got that generic reggaeton-trap groove that gets everywhere for a summer and then disappears completely. Ozuna’s in it, Cardi B’s in it, DJ Snake produced it—none of it means anything to me, and I suspect it won’t mean anything in six weeks. The video’s exactly what you’d expect: beach bars, dancing, bodies, the whole designed-for-summer-playlists thing. I watched it because Selena Gomez is in it. That’s the only real reason. She doesn’t get much screen time, doesn’t get much to sing—it’s mostly just her in the frame for a bit—but that’s enough. I know how this works. I’m fine with it. The song’s already halfway forgotten and I only heard it today. That’s not a criticism, that’s just what it’s for. Something to play while you’re on vacation, something to move some units, something that’ll be off the radar by fall. It serves its purpose. Selena serves hers. We all move on. Wednesday, 10 October 2018. Mitsuboshi Colors: Put this on one night out of boredom, just a cute anime about three elementary school girls and their clubhouse in Ueno. Yui, Sat-chan, Kotoha, a thieving cat, neighborhood stuff. That’s the cover. What I didn’t expect was how unsettling it actually gets. By episode two or three it was clear these three had something genuinely off. Not anime-quirky—actually broken. The kind of broken where you can already see the psychiatric evaluation in their future like some fixed point. They want to clean the lake, so they’ll do something objectively dangerous. They hear the zoo elephants are starving and plan a heist. Zombies in the park? They’re going in. I kept telling myself one more episode and then I’d watch three more, increasingly disturbed by what these kids were casually committing to. Their parents are never around, which doesn’t help. But what got me was rooting for them anyway. There’s something compelling about watching someone follow their own logic that far, especially when it’s completely unhinged. They move through the world like it runs on their rules, not anyone else’s. Everyone else figures it out or gets out of the way. And you start to see the freedom in that, even if it’s the kind of freedom that ends badly. By the end I wasn’t watching cute kids doing cute things. I was watching someone live entirely in a reality that only existed in their head, doing it so confidently that part of you starts to believe it too. Thursday, 4 October 2018. Getting It Right: There’s a twenty-year-old from Berlin named Nessie who posts outfit pictures, and the thing about them is they don’t look like she’s performing anything. Just careful decisions, letting them be what they are. You see a lot of young creative people where the effort is all visible—they’re desperate to prove they’re interesting. She was just working. Someone sent her around Berlin with a new phone, one of those brand partnerships. The camera wasn’t the story. She was just documenting what she’d already decided to wear, and you could see she understood why it all made sense. Most people never look long enough to actually understand how things work. They just grab what feels like it might work. Nessie had somehow figured out what colors could do together, how a weird choice could make sense if the rest aligned, why something hangs together or falls apart. That takes time. Thursday, 4 October 2018. Test: Friday, 21 September 2018. Manga: I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately. There’s something about how they’re paced that gets me—a page does what it needs and then you move. No overcooking it. Maybe it’s just different enough from everything else I read. Saturday, 4 August 2018. Mid90s: Summer in 90s Los Angeles if you were skateboarding: the park, the streets, the crew you fell in with at the shop, the family problems you couldn’t do anything about. Jonah Hill spent his teenage years in that world, and for his directorial debut he made a film about it—or a version of it, anyway. The protagonist is a thirteen-year-old named Stevie; the film is called Mid90s. Hill isn’t reaching for transgression or shock. You could make a skateboard film about sex and violence and the darker edges of youth—Ken Park exists exactly in that territory. But Mid90s is quieter, more autobiographical in the way actual childhood feels: small moments, boredom, the sudden intensity of new friendships, family weight you don’t fully understand. The film’s shot on 4:3 DV, that washed-out video aesthetic that actually was the 90s if you lived it, not a stylization of it. There’s something about returning to a decade through someone who lived it as a kid. The 90s get flattened now into a mood or aesthetic, but Hill is precise about his—LA, that particular skate culture, the loneliness and excitement of being thirteen in that world. That specificity is what matters. This isn’t nostalgia for a decade as a concept; it’s a memory of what it felt like to be there, in that specific place and moment. Thursday, 26 July 2018. The Whitest K-Pop Group: Ran across EXP Edition through some pop culture rabbit hole - four guys from New York named Šime, Koki, Frankie, and Hunter who moved to South Korea to be K-pop idols. No background in the industry, no cultural connection to any of it, just American ambition and a management company willing to bet on something completely absurd. The songs are exactly as hollow as they sound. “Feel Like This,” “Stress,” “Ready To Go” - everything so aggressively produced and empty that it becomes this weird unintentional statement about what K-pop actually is. Strip everything away but the formula and you’re left with machinery. K-pop usually works because it sells transformation, sells fantasy. EXP Edition is just the mechanism with no one inside. VICE made a documentary called “Minority Reports” following them around, capturing exactly what you’d expect - four American guys completely out of place, trying to appeal to Korean teenagers who have no reason to care about them. No irony, no self-awareness, just sincere and unearned dedication. What strikes me is that it might actually work someday. Not for them probably, but if K-pop is big enough to greenlight EXP Edition, it’s big enough to turn literally anyone into a product. American artists as just another assembly line in the factory. They’ll probably burn out in a couple years - dissolve, rebrand, fade. But right now they exist in this weird space where total commitment to something fabricated is almost sincere. Thursday, 26 July 2018. No Flinching: Found a game called “Fuck ISIS - Super Patriotic Dating Simulator.” You’re a CIA agent named Elodie seducing ISIS members in Syria. It’s got crude jokes, dating-sim mechanics, and it’s half-finished on Kickstarter. The commitment to the premise is what gets me. No irony, no distance, no pretense. You’re seducing terrorists and the game doesn’t apologize for it. Just states that flatly and moves on. Most transgressive media spends half its energy making sure you understand it’s being transgressive. This one skips that. Just commits to the stupid premise and lets it breathe. I keep thinking about this unfinished thing that exists because someone had the idea and someone funded it. No gatekeepers, no filter between impulse and world. That’s either the most honest thing or the dumbest thing, and I genuinely can’t tell. Wednesday, 25 July 2018. I Am Shin Chan: There’s a kid in Shin Chan who doesn’t understand shame. He grabs asses. He lifts skirts. He says whatever crude thing is in his mouth without filtering it through any social decency. He’s five years old and he’s the most honest thing on screen. And somehow he’s the character I’ve most wanted to be, which says something I’m not sure I want to examine too closely. Shin Chan is in good company with the anime I actually loved—Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, the ones that stuck. But this one’s different. It’s not pretending to be anything. The kid’s a little asshole and he knows it. The whole family is kind of a mess. There’s no arc to iron everything out, no lesson that fixes the dysfunction. They’re just these people, crude and sexual and embarrassing and present. The German dub is the right version, which I know sounds weird. I tried the original Japanese with English subtitles once and it felt flat, neutered somehow. The dub has this aggressive cartoon logic that matches the show’s rhythm. It’s not trying to be faithful to some sacred source—it’s committed to being funny in its own language, and that’s better. People get weird about the sexual content, but Shin Chan isn’t interested in making anyone comfortable with it. The early episodes are thick with it, and there’s no winking about it, no “oops, isn’t Shin Chan naughty” framing. It’s just there, casual, part of how this small pile of chaos moves through the world. Shin Chan isn’t softening the edges for anyone. I keep coming back to these episodes, and I think it’s because the character has something I don’t—this absolute freedom from caring what anyone thinks. He’s five. He’s a cartoon. But he’s more himself than most people manage in a lifetime. That’s probably the whole thing right there. Monday, 23 July 2018. Sneaker into Smoke: I watched someone turn a Balenciaga Triple S into a bong, and it was more satisfying than any sneaker content I’ve seen in years. The shoe costs over a thousand dollars. It’s one of those pieces that exists as much as a status symbol as it does as actual footwear—something you look at more than you wear, something that’s partly an investment in cultural capital. Some designers decided to disassemble one on film and repurpose it into smoking equipment using materials from a hardware store. No explanation, no irony winking. Just: here’s what we’re doing and here’s how we’re doing it. What works is how completely it strips away the mythology. The moment you treat a luxury good as just material, all the cultural weight that made it special evaporates. The limited drops, the resale market, the whole idea that wearing it means something—none of that survives being deconstructed. What’s left is just a shoe’s material, now serving a different purpose. I notice this partly because I work with design myself. You spend enough time thinking about objects and what we project onto them and you start to see how arbitrary it all is. A Balenciaga is special because we’ve decided it’s special. The price, the scarcity, the mythology—all of it is ceremony. Strip that away and you’ve just got material. Repurpose that material and you’ve made a point without having to say anything. The project’s best part is its refusal to explain the joke. It doesn’t need to. It just does the thing and that’s enough. Wednesday, 18 July 2018. Starcourt Mall: Someone on Reddit spotted a renovated mall being dressed up for Stranger Things and Netflix confirmed it. Starcourt Mall, opening summer 1985 in Hawkins—the show’s using the mall as the backdrop for season 3. The trailer’s just a promo tour. Nothing happens. Neon, storefronts, every haircut that should’ve stayed buried. Steve and Robin are at Scoops Ahoy, which is the best use the show’s found for those two. There’s something about malls in nostalgia. The enclosed space, the fluorescent hum of it, the generic shops that felt important when I was young. Stranger Things nailed the visual language from the start—it feels like memory, like watching a home video of somewhere I spent years. Adding a full mall is just leaning harder into that. It’s the obvious place for a show that makes the mundane feel vital. Summer’s a long wait. That’s the show’s rhythm now—long stretches thinking about Hawkins, wondering what’s moving in the dark, whether anything ever works out in a place like that. Nothing good happens in a mall when the lights start cutting out. Tuesday, 17 July 2018. The Forever List: There’s a YouTuber named Gregor Kartsius who’s spent the better part of twenty years playing every RPG he could find, and he finally did what everyone does eventually—he made a list. Not just any list: 101 best RPGs, plus some extras squeezed in, stretched across videos that’ll take longer to watch than some of these games take to beat. I respect the impulse. You play enough RPGs and you start mentally ranking them whether you want to or not. Every new one gets measured against the ones that mattered, against Chrono Trigger, Dark Souls, whatever captured some specific moment in your life. You remember them like people. The thing about RPGs is they’re time. They’re the only medium where you can sink months and lose all of it to amnesia—start playing at six and look up and it’s three in the morning and you’re still one boss away from closure. They ask you to care about characters with barely any dialogue and somehow you do. You get attached to the music, the way a town looks, the pointless side quest. And then it ends and you move to the next one and the first one starts fading like a real memory does. So a ranking matters and also doesn’t matter at all. Someone will definitely argue that the list is wrong, that it’s missing the obvious choice, that it’s wrong from the foundation. And they’ll be right. But whoever made it is right too, because they played all of them and genuinely loved them. That takes something. If you need months of your life dedicated to deciding whether one SNES RPG deserves the 47th spot instead of 49th, the list exists. But the list is just proof that someone cared this much, and if you care this much too, you get it. Tuesday, 17 July 2018. Kill the Head: Bill Murray does this thing where he just exists in the world and it works. Selena Gomez was making a zombie film with him then, which made sense. I’d thought of her as basically the new Scarlett Johansson anyway. Jim Jarmusch was directing. The movie’s called Kill the Head, and besides Gomez and Murray there were Chloë Sevigny, Adam Driver, and Austin Butler. In an interview from March, Murray said the script was hilarious. It was in early production. Jarmusch had made Broken Flowers, Coffee and Cigarettes, Only Lovers Left Alive. Films that take their time, that know what they are. A zombie film from him probably wouldn’t look like anything else. I wanted to see Selena as a blood-soaked corpse. I wanted that image. Tuesday, 17 July 2018. Mechanical Dread: The thing about Akira is that it doesn’t try to make the future look good. Katsuhiro Otomo’s film is probably the closest we’ve gotten to showing apocalypse without irony or nostalgia—just Tokyo coming apart, the architecture failing, the people smaller and smaller until they disappear. It commits to the ugliness completely. That’s what makes it a masterpiece. But the masterpiece was always half-made by its soundtrack. Geino Yamashirugumi and Shoji Yamashiro didn’t write music that tried to redeem anything. No hopes for recovery, no moments of unexpected beauty. The score is mechanical, electronic, relentless—the sound of systems grinding down to nothing. Listen to it in isolation and it’s almost unbearable. In the film, it’s perfect. The music and the image together create something that stays with you like an injury. Thirty years on, a group of producers took those original themes and remixed them into synthwave. Wolf Arm, Acidulé, Speed Machine, Carbon Killer, AWITW, Gregorio Franco—running the old Yamashiro melodies through a different filter. Synthwave is usually seductive, aspirational, the future imagined as stylish and dead. But the original Akira score was already synthwave before synthwave existed. Already the future reduced to pure architecture, mechanical and without mercy. The remixes don’t change what the themes are saying. They just let you hear it from a different angle—the same bleakness, but more alive in its own way. It’s that same ruthless architecture, just heard from inside the machine instead of outside of it. Tuesday, 17 July 2018. Lil Dicky: I have a lot of time for Lil Dicky because he’s managed something most rappers don’t: he’s funny without being a joke, skilled without being a flex. Most comedians who rap are just bad at rapping. Most rappers who try to be funny end up diminishing the technical stuff. He does both, fully, at the same time. He’ll build these absurd premises for songs—interviewing for a job with Snoop Dogg, whatever stupid scenario he’s thought up—and then he raps the hell out of them. Not ironically, not as a side-gig. Genuinely. You get these sections with intricate flows and technical precision, the kind of thing that shows he’s actually good at rap, buried in the middle of something ridiculous. He’s not using the skill to undercut the comedy or vice versa. They just coexist. Hip-hop is obsessed with seriousness—the persona, the credibility, the stakes. Lil Dicky just doesn’t seem interested in any of that. He’s fine being skilled and silly. It’s rare enough that it stands out, and it’s weird that more people don’t just do it. The whole energy is lighter because of it. Tuesday, 10 July 2018. Six in the Morning: Six in the morning. Heidi Kubieziel opens the door to find six armed police in tactical vests and two city observers in her stairwell. They’re looking for her husband Jens, who isn’t home. They want documents from Zwiebelfreunde, the digital rights organization where Jens sits on the board. “I was half asleep and alone with the children,” she said later. “Six in the morning and the doorbell was ringing. They said they needed to speak to Jens and come inside. By the time I asked questions, they already had the warrant out. The search was already underway.” The legal connection was thin. Someone had used a Riseup email address—a privacy provider—to organize protest against an AfD rally. Zwiebelfreunde recommends Riseup. The suspect disappeared. So they raided the Kubiziels instead. That was the reasoning. They took computers, hard drives, USB sticks, everything. Jens wasn’t there. Nothing came back. Before the officers left, Heidi was offered a suggestion: if Jens resigned from the board, the raids would probably stop. Not framed as a threat, exactly. More like something she might want to consider. This is Germany. Zwiebelfreunde isn’t some extremist group. They run Tor nodes, teach encryption, work with Reporters Without Borders and the Dresden Institute for Data Protection. Teaching people how digital privacy works is what they do. Frank Rieger from the Chaos Computer Club pointed out the obvious: innocent families shouldn’t have their constitutional rights violated on such flimsy evidence with such excessive force. He’s right. It also reveals the texture of how states solve problems they don’t like. Not new laws. Not open debate. Just dawn raids and seized equipment and casual suggestions about stepping down from your organization. Wednesday, 4 July 2018. Funko Made Cereal: Funko made cereal. Of course they did. When a company realizes collectors will buy a $15 toy even if they hate it, branching into breakfast is inevitable. The boxes come with Cuphead in red, Mega Man in blue, Gollum in green—the same characters you’d already have on a shelf, now printed on cardboard. What gets me is how naturally this works. Pop culture isn’t something you search out anymore. It’s not a hobby corner or a niche interest. It’s the default environment. My breakfast now has a licensed character on it. I’m eating video game properties. There’s nothing strange about that anymore. I’ve been collecting since I was a kid—toys, records, art books—always at the edges of normal life. Now the edges have collapsed entirely. There’s probably a kid somewhere right now who doesn’t know that liking these characters used to be considered weird. They’re just pouring them into a bowl. In five years there might be more Funko properties on cereal boxes than actual cereals. Part of me thinks it’s funny. Part of me thinks it’s sad. Mostly I’m aware that I’ll probably buy whatever they release next, pour it into a bowl, and feel nothing about how strange that would’ve been ten years ago. Tuesday, 3 July 2018. Another Rapper, Another Beer: Every rapper eventually launches a beverage. It’s as inevitable as the first NFT project or the signature sneaker that nobody asked for. Bausa got his turn—slapped his face on a can of Gude and called it an “Artist Edition.” The brilliance is how little effort it requires. Show up for a photoshoot, drink something while cameras roll, let marketing people explain why your brand and beer somehow complement each other. Whether he’s actually tasted more than a courtesy sip is irrelevant. The transaction is complete once his face appears on the label. I almost respect the straightforwardness of it. No invented origin story about passion for brewing or some mystical discovery process. He just showed up and let his reputation do the work. That’s cleaner than most celebrity ventures, which tie themselves in knots justifying why the founder supposedly cares about this specific thing. At least there’s no pretense. When I was younger, musicians seemed like they were actually trying to make art. Now they’re all just managing their brands, which is probably more honest than I’m giving it credit for. The art and the business have always been the same thing, but used to be the musicians pretended otherwise. Bausa’s at least not bothering with that particular fiction. Still, there’s something bleak about watching this cycle repeat. Every artist with any cultural relevance suddenly has a beer, an energy drink, a fragrance. The brand replaces the person. Now when I think of Bausa, I see that can before I hear any of his actual songs. Tuesday, 3 July 2018. How to Tell Good Coffee: I need coffee in the morning or I’m genuinely unbearable—not just tired, but actually broken, moving through the day half-dead until that first cup hits. It’s pathetic, I know. I’ve bought the expensive brands, the ones with reputations, roasters that sell on origin and care. I tell myself I can taste a difference between what I’m buying and supermarket coffee. Probably I can’t. The real problem is I have no idea if the expensive stuff is actually good or if I’m just getting ripped off by better marketing. Someone made a video explaining how to actually tell the difference. Cheap coffee—the supermarket brands, the mass-market stuff—just tastes flat and burnt. Real coffee tastes like something. It has flavor, character, a sense of where it came from. You can feel the difference once someone points out what to look for. The danger is that knowing ruins things. Once you taste what good coffee is supposed to be, you can’t enjoy mediocre coffee the same way. Every bad cup becomes obvious. The coffee you were fine with suddenly feels like a waste. I’m not sure I want that knowledge. I like my morning ritual as it is, even if I’m just drinking expensive mediocrity. Some ignorances are worth keeping. Tuesday, 3 July 2018. Before She Showed Up: Hi Score Girl nails something I’ve been thinking about since the nineties. Back then it was just the arcade—quarters, sweat, someone’s little brother crying because he lost Street Fighter again. Or home on the console, same crew on rotation, playing until some parent showed up with threats. The whole social geometry of gaming before it became something you did alone on a screen in your room. The anime’s based on this manga about Haruo, arcade kid living for high scores, knows every cab and every game. He’s running everything until Akira shows up—rich, quiet, barely acknowledges anyone, and absolutely destroys him at Street Fighter II. That moment when someone better walks in and breaks your whole identity. The series follows what happens next between them, throws in Koharu and this whole thing with a Neo Geo that apparently matters. The stills are enough on their own—the way they render the arcades, the cabinets, the specific texture of that era. It’s one of those properties that could’ve been novelty, banking on nostalgia, but instead it feels like someone actually remembering what it was like to be a kid with fifty cents and the belief that you were the best at something. What gets me is how specific it is. Arcade nostalgia’s easy—slap some pixels on a screen and people eat it up. But this understands the actual texture. The specific games, the way competition felt, the random arrivals that broke your world. Street Fighter II as your entire culture. That sting of being the best at something nobody important cares about. The series gets it, and that’s rare. Monday, 2 July 2018. I Wanna Dance With Somebody: I’m not as hung up on breasts as people seem to think. Sure, I appreciate them—the same way I appreciate a pizza loaded with double cheese or cheap corner-store wine that tastes like someone mixed in antifreeze. They’re pleasant. I notice. But I’m not obsessed. So I can’t entirely explain what happened when I watched Palina Rojinski dancing through a Russian hotel room to Whitney Houston. Fifteen minutes straight, watching her move through space like something had taken her over. The way she jumped, twisted, held her arms. Completely mechanical and completely alive. Hypnotic. Palina—hair model, World Cup reporter—wasn’t doing anything complex. Just moving to the song. But something about it locked in. I downloaded the video, probably violated some Instagram terms I didn’t bother reading, and now it plays on repeat on my laptop. Twenty minutes at a stretch sometimes. Watching for… what? A shift? A threshold? Some new level of consciousness? Whatever it is, it’s there. I’m sure of it. Monday, 2 July 2018. Concrete Cuckoos: A wooden chalet, hand-painted, someone’s grandmother’s mantelpiece for fifty years. Every hour on the hour, a tiny door pops open and a stylized bird emerges, calls out, disappears. That’s the cuckoo clock formula, refined to kitsch—quaint, unthreatening, the kind of thing you’d encounter in a Black Forest gift shop or your parents’ cabin. Guido Zimmermann looked at this formula and asked: what if the house was concrete? What if instead of alpine fantasy, you got the architectural language of East German prefab apartment blocks—those Plattenbauten that line the edges of Berlin, brutalist and exhausted, everything the chalet isn’t. So he built cuckoo clocks that look like Marzahn towers, miniature Hartz-IV apartments with little doors that open at the hour. There’s something genuinely funny about it. You’ve taken something designed to be charming and replaced its entire visual language with something almost aggressive in its refusal to be pleasant. The cuckoo emerges from concrete brutalism, announces the time, retreats back into the prefab. You know it won’t fix anything, but you look anyway. I’m not sure if these clocks are meant to be ironic or sincere, and maybe that distinction doesn’t matter. The buildings themselves aren’t being mocked so much as recontextualized—treated as architectural material worth rendering in miniature, worth building something around. There’s respect in that, or at least a refusal to dismiss. A claim that even the ugly stuff has its own logic, its own shape. The artist isn’t prettifying the Plattenbauten. He’s just insisting we look at them differently. Monday, 2 July 2018. Gleaming Continuity: You see Rina Sawayama’s list of interests—anime, Nintendo, strange music—and you immediately know her. That was my childhood too, basically. Spent it glued to screens watching whatever weird stuff I could find, learning about culture through games and cartoons and whatever was on TV. She grew up the same way, moved from Japan to London by her parents and surrounded by that same sensory chaos. When you meet someone with that background, you trust them. She’s been making music for a few years now. Some of it electronic, some of it pop, but there’s always something distinctly hers in it. Her debut didn’t blow up the mainstream but it found the right people in the underground, which is the only place it mattered anyway. “Ordinary Superstar” is basically her saying out loud: I love the 80s. Specifically the version of the 80s that exists in our heads—all glitter and darkness and shine. The video’s her with friends, dancing through that aesthetic, all styled for maximum camp. Karaoke moment included, completely over-the-top, which only works if you’re willing to look stupid. It makes sense when you know Rina. There’s no separation between what she loves and what she makes. The 80s aren’t a costume or a bit—they’re part of the same visual and sonic language that drew her to anime, to Nintendo, to all of it. It’s all one continuity. The song is good. It’s the kind of thing you listen to more than once. There’s genuine fun in it without any of the defensive irony that a lot of music has now. Just: here’s something that looks and sounds great. If you get it, you get it. Sunday, 1 July 2018. Into the Hollow: You’re descending into Dirtmouth. The ruined city fades above as you push deeper into caverns filled with insects and corrupted creatures that move in ways that feel off. It’s Metroidvania structure—all that backtracking, finding new abilities, discovering passages you were too weak to access before. The world feels genuinely wrong in the way that makes your chest tighten. I had fun with it, mostly, though some sections brought me close to quitting entirely. Part of it was difficulty, but honestly, a lot came from my own impatience and sloppiness—getting caught in some desperate “just keep swinging” loop that only bred more mistakes. There’s a moment you hit when you realize that careless determination is the enemy, not the boss. I hit it more than once. For someone with actual patience, someone who can sit with frustration without turning bitter, Hollow Knight is a dark little world that feels complete and real. That’s enough. Sunday, 1 July 2018. Same Outfit: Peter Baumann traveled across Japan with Maria Kn for three weeks shooting fashion photos, wearing the same outfit the entire time. Not a statement, just practical—one dress packed, everything light, easy to move. That’s the whole idea. It’s the kind of constraint that seems dumb at first and turns clever in the work. When nothing changes but the place and the light, you stop looking at the outfit and start seeing the background. Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima—each city’s got its own look, and Maria’s the only constant. That strips away the usual travel photography thing where you’re trying to capture yourself in beautiful places. Instead it’s just: here’s a person, same person every time, now look at where she is. Peter was straightforward about it. Lighter luggage, less thinking, one item you can rely on. But the work’s cleaner for the limitation. The places don’t have to prove themselves against some complicated outfit. The light doesn’t have to compete with styling choices. You’re just looking at a woman in different cities in the same dress, and somehow that’s more revealing than if she’d worn something different each time. I respect that. The constraint could’ve been a gimmick but it’s not—it’s just how the project works. No flourish, no concept, just the plainness of traveling light and paying attention. Sunday, 1 July 2018. The Underground Still Moves: I was in my twenties when we started driving to illegal raves in the kind of buildings that shouldn’t have been standing anymore. Warehouses outside the city, abandoned industrial spaces, places that existed off the map. My friends and I didn’t really think about whether we were allowed to be there—you don’t when you’re that age. You go for the music, for the way six hours of dancing in a dark basement changes how you experience being alive. By then the classic techno era was already ending. Hip-hop was bleeding everywhere, and drum and bass came in harder and faster, less patient than what came before. The scene thinned gradually. Friends who only existed in these spaces stopped appearing. Venues closed. And then there was just silence. In Britain right now, the underground rave scene is barely hanging on. Clubs are dying, the city keeps getting more expensive, the margins where youth culture actually happens keep shrinking. But there are still people making music in basements, still showing up to illegal events, still dancing until sunrise knowing they might get arrested. Not out of some romantic defiance—just because the alternative is accepting that things you love actually die. What strikes me about it is how little it takes to keep something alive. Not that it survives—maybe it doesn’t, not like it was. But that some people refuse to let it just fade away. They show up anyway. Keep the music playing. Keep the night going. That feels like enough. Sunday, 1 July 2018. Speaking Terms: Lindsey Jordan’s debut “Lush” gets to the point—no setup, no waiting. “Speaking Terms,” “Golden Dream,” “Let’s Find an Out” don’t circle what they’re about. They’re direct about the texture of young romantic pain, the kind that feels permanent even though you know it won’t be. Jordan’s from Maryland. The production stays clean and minimal, which is the whole thing—the songs don’t rely on atmosphere or arrangement to make you feel something. You hear her voice, a guitar, drums when she bothers. That restraint means everything sounds barely there, which somehow makes it land harder. What works is how light it feels even when the content is heartbreak or confusion or being eighteen and certain you’ll never want anyone else. The arrangements leave space. There are moments of near-silence, then a guitar comes in and it lands different because you weren’t ready. That’s craft that doesn’t announce itself. I’ve played it enough now that I can’t separate whether I like the songs or what they’re saying. Some confessions just work. The whole album has no distance between song and subject—no performance, no making pain sound prettier. It reads like someone’s diary set to perfect melodies, which shouldn’t work but does. The album’s short and doesn’t overstay itself. Forty minutes and you’re done. You either get it or you don’t. I got it. Saturday, 30 June 2018. No Sorting: Most photographers learn the rules early—what goes in a portfolio, what gets buried in a private folder, what never appears in the same image as what. Kristofferson San Pablo, a photographer from Manila now based in LA, seems to have never learned them, or learned and ignored them. He shoots roadtrips and Simpson riffs and nudes and whatever else interests him, all filed together with no hierarchy. A picture diary without apology. The work doesn’t defend itself. No thesis, no concept, no career strategy visible. Just someone with a camera documenting things he wanted to look at—color, light, skin, cartoon references, the absurd next to the considered next to the explicit. You see a lot of contemporary photography straining so hard to say something important. His stuff just says: I saw this, I wanted to photograph it, here. There’s a confidence in that indifference that comes from actually not thinking about it, not performing the indifference. The moment you become aware you’re being transgressive, the performance shows. He seems genuinely unaware there’s supposed to be a filter. That takes either stupidity or a kind of intelligence I don’t have. Either way it reads true in the work—an absence of self-consciousness that ruins most contemporary photography. You can feel in the pictures that he’s not fighting the place or trying to make statements about California. Just using it. Shooting what’s there and what shows up. Girls who say yes, light that works, roads that lead somewhere strange. The pictures feel like documentation more than art, which might be all the difference. Saturday, 30 June 2018. Superstar Flowers: If I had a million dollars, I’d buy coke and video games and some impossible Kate Upton-Selena Gomez hybrid to sleep with. But honestly, most of it would go to Superstars. Every single adidas Originals Superstar that exists or will ever exist. Every version, every color, every material. Before they were trendy, after they stopped being trendy, forever. The Superstar is the only shoe. There is no other discussion. The latest one has dark floral print running down the side—deep flowers against white leather with those three iconic stripes. They built it for women, sold it as a women’s shoe, engineered the whole thing because girls supposedly love flowers. I don’t care. That distinction means nothing to me. There’s something pure about wanting something without needing the reason to make sense. You see it, you know it’s right, and the need is just there. That’s how the Superstar works every single time. I want to own it, lick it, wear it. In that order or reversed or all at once. Doesn’t matter. It’s a Superstar. An adidas Original. No debate. No compromise. No world where I don’t need this. Saturday, 30 June 2018. Scorpion: Drake grew up in Toronto playing Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi—138 episodes of high school drama before he was old enough to legally drink. Then he walked away from acting to rap, which is one of the strangest career pivots in entertainment, and it worked completely. The thing about Drake is he doesn’t fit what people think a rapper should be. He’s too smooth, too melodic, too willing to talk about feelings. For years people said he was soft, that he wasn’t real hip-hop. The gatekeepers hated him for it. He sold millions anyway. At some point the argument got tired because he’d already won—not by proving the critics wrong but by not caring what they thought. Scorpion is his new album. It’s him at his core: opening up about past mistakes, present situations, future moves. No apologies for any of it. And that’s the whole thing with Drake—he doesn’t perform being cool, he doesn’t need to earn credibility through the usual channels. He’s just there, available, honest in his own weird way. I’ve always liked him because of that. Not everyone does. The people who hate Drake usually wanted hip-hop to stay the way it was, and they’re disappointed that it has room for someone who cares more about a good song than about performing authenticity. But hip-hop always had room for it. They just wanted it to look like struggle and toughness on the surface. So Scorpion is out there now. If Drake interests you, you already know where to find it. Friday, 29 June 2018. Juno Birch’s Worlds: Juno Birch paints breasts and women and sex and power like nobody else. Her work splits people—some try to decode it, understand what she’s saying. Others want it off the wall, burned, gone. But that split, that recoil, that’s where the art lives. She’s a British artist, and her paintings and sculptures are windows into skewed feminist worlds. She interprets the universe from a female perspective. Breasts, pussies, lecherous men. In her work, logic doesn’t apply. Women are rulers and objects. Individual and cliché. Repulsive and sexy. You look at them and don’t know if you’re identifying or being put off by the pure strangeness. The weirdness is deliberate. She’s showing you something true about how women see themselves and how the world sees them, and she’s not softening it. No apologies. Just the thing itself. I think what I like about it is that she doesn’t treat feminist art like something noble or clean. She treats it like the complicated, contradictory, sexual, ugly thing that it actually is. Most art about women tries to make it palatable. Hers doesn’t. Her work still splits people the same way. She seems fine with that. Friday, 29 June 2018. Back in Orsterra: I spent the objectively best years of my life sitting in front of an old tube TV, deep in some SNES RPG. The games blur together when I try to list them—Lufia, Terranigma, Secret of Mana, A Link to the Past, Illusion of Time, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, Star Ocean, EarthBound, Final Fantasy III, Harvest Moon, Breath of Fire, Mystic Quest, Soul Blazer—but the feeling stays sharp. Each one mattered in a way nothing really matters to me anymore. I’d do just about anything to get back there. The people who made Octopath Traveler understand something about that pull. They built it specifically to recreate what those SNES RPGs felt like, transplanted onto Switch. HD-2D graphics, a world called Orsterra, eight playable characters all tangled up in overlapping stories. Ophilia Clement, Cyrus Albright, Tressa Colozone, and the others move through a landscape that looks and feels and sounds like something from 1994, except it’s beautiful and technically sophisticated. The narrative is uncomplicated—light against darkness, good against evil, the familiar shape of an RPG you’ve already played a hundred times. But that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Not novelty. Just the right feeling. I picked it up when it came out. Did it give me back what I was looking for? No, not really. You can’t actually climb back into who you were at ten years old. But sitting in Orsterra for those hours felt like remembering something real, and sometimes that’s the best you’re going to get. Friday, 29 June 2018. When Love Becomes Lethal: Back in 2002, the internet was slow and billed by the minute. Battle Royale was worth stealing—I queued it up overnight and waited two days for the download to finish. Some bootleg trailer had convinced me it mattered, all blood and darkness. A Japanese school class wakes up on an island. Weapons scattered everywhere. The teacher explains they’ve been selected for a program: kill your classmates or don’t go home. The whole film is just showing what happens when survival becomes the only rule, when the people you’ve known your whole life become problems to solve. There’s an essay somewhere that explains why this works. The argument is that Battle Royale finds the real fracture point in adolescence—where instinct overrides everything you’ve been taught to care about, where logic defeats emotion, where you discover whether the bonds you thought were strong actually hold under pressure. And all of it circles back to love, the kind that shatters under weight. What stays with me is how unsentimental it is. The deaths aren’t tragic in a way that comforts you. The violence isn’t made beautiful. People you were supposed to care about just become obstacles. The film shows you that transformation, how quick it is, and moves on. No lesson. No revelation. Just blood and the proof that some relationships exist only because conditions allowed them to. I downloaded it to watch people get hurt. Instead I watched people stop being friends. That’s what stuck. Thursday, 28 June 2018. What Hamburg Actually Looks Like: The Hauptbahnhof in Hamburg has a smell. You hear about it before you get there—legendary, they say. That’s your introduction to the gap: what gets marketed versus what’s actually there. Tourism boards know the work. They take the harbor, the architecture, the history, and they frame it into something appealing. Hamburg exists in two versions now: the one for sale and the one that’s just there, grimy and industrial and genuinely ugly in places. An Instagram account called We Hate HH documents the second version. People send in photos of the worst corners, the unflattering angles, the spots that won’t make the postcards. The name’s aggressive and the premise nearly hostile. But there’s something honest about it—a refusal to add filters and shadows and all the small lies we use to make things palatable. You can adjust contrast, add vintage tone, frame it carefully, but you can’t really Photoshop a city into something it isn’t. Not for long. Someone always documents what it actually looks like. Every city has this gap between marketed and actual. Hamburg’s not uniquely ugly. But there’s something clarifying about a project that ignores the frame and just shows what’s there. No selling. No compromise. Just the place itself—grimy, honest, indifferent to how it appears. Maybe people are tired of curation. Maybe they want to see something real for a change, or at least real enough that someone bothered to photograph it. We Hate HH isn’t a love letter. It’s not interested in persuasion. It’s just: here’s what it looks like. That’s enough. Thursday, 28 June 2018. Bright, Quick, Done: I can’t do the long-term game thing anymore. Three weeks with Fortnite or World of Warcraft and I’m ready for literally anything else. I need something I can finish in an evening, feel like I got something out of it, and then move on. No battle passes, no seasons, no twelve-year-olds in voice chat. Iconoclasts is that game. It’s a platformer with Metroidvania elements—you play as Robin, a mechanic on a dying planet, piecing together what’s happening. The world is bright and colorful, full of strange characters and actual puzzles. Nothing overstays its welcome. Joakim Sandberg made the whole thing alone. You can feel that care in how the game knows when to end. It runs on everything. What I like is how clean it is. No cosmetics, no seasons, no guilt for taking a break. You finish it and move on. The game doesn’t follow you. Thursday, 28 June 2018. Dressing Loud: Tokyo summers are brutal. Rainy season first—everything damp and heavy—then heat that’s relentless. You sweat through everything by noon. One summer I was buying replacement t-shirts at the H&M in Shibuya almost every day. The register guy started saying my name before I got to the counter. But if you walked through Harajuku or Shimokitazawa, you’d see kids in clothes that made no sense for that weather. Bright colors, clashing patterns, layered fabrics that guaranteed you’d be soaked. They weren’t trying to be comfortable. They were just refusing to disappear. Everyone else was trying to minimize—dark clothes, thin fabrics, anything to avoid being noticed and sweating through it in silence. These kids were the opposite. Taking up space. Being obvious about it. There’s something I like about that stubborn refusal to shrink, the insistence on color even when sensible people would just wear something plain and suffer quietly. Not because it matters. Just because. Thursday, 28 June 2018. Normal Perverts: I stumbled into FetLife one night and found a whole world I didn’t know was that organized. Not hidden—just there. People in leather and horse masks, uniforms, expensive gear, all discussing it seriously. College kids, office workers, people who wanted something different. What got to me was the infrastructure. These weren’t shameful secrets in someone’s browser history; they were actual communities. Events, consent discussions, boundaries. People fucking in basements and hotel rooms and living out what they actually wanted. The question underneath: where does normal stop and perverted start? It’s stupid because the line moves depending on who’s asking. But there’s something real there. If you can actually have what you want instead of just fantasizing about it, if you find people who want the same thing, if there’s community instead of isolation—does that change something? Does it make you happier? I don’t know. These people seem less bothered by shame and the performance of normalcy. They’re not pretending. Whether that makes them happier or just different, I can’t tell. Wednesday, 27 June 2018. LaChicaM’s Fantasies: Andy Warhol’s been the biggest influence on how I think about sex and art. His work taught me that color and repetition can make anything beautiful, that you can flatten something onto a canvas and suddenly it’s worthy of serious attention. Which is probably why I’m so drawn to LaChicaM, a Polish artist who took that idea seriously and ran straight into explicit pornography. Her paintings combine Warhol’s color palette—bright, clean, almost violent neons—with completely unashamed sexual imagery. Dicks, pussies, breasts, everything rendered precisely and stylized and utterly confident. There’s nothing crude about it. It’s all too clean, too pop, too aestheticized for that. But it’s also completely unafraid. I’ve always respected artists who don’t treat sexuality like something dangerous that needs protecting. Like it’s some kind of taboo that requires irony or political framing to justify. LaChicaM just paints what she wants to paint. The fact that it’s explicit just means it’s more honest. She has a webshop where you can buy prints of her work, and I’ve been seriously considering ordering one. I keep coming back to this image—a completely hairless, meticulously rendered cunt in these impossible pinks and purples. Part of the appeal is the thought of hanging it above my kitchen table. Just there, where anyone walking in would see it immediately. Not as a provocation or a test, just as proof that I’m okay with owning what I find beautiful. My roommate would walk in and see it. There’d be a moment. We’d move on. And it would just be hanging there. That simplicity—that refusal to hide—is what keeps pulling me back to her work. Wednesday, 27 June 2018. Nobody Knows the Anthem: So there’s this Bad Lip Reading video of the German national team singing their anthem, right, and it’s just pure nonsense when you watch their actual mouths moving. The real words are all solemn and dignified, but Bad Lip Reading just transcribes what it looks like they’re actually saying, and it’s complete gibberish. The thing is, it’s funny because it’s obviously true. You watch any big sporting event and you can see half these guys don’t actually know the words. They’re just kind of… faking it. Mumbling their way through with their hands over their hearts, trying to look appropriately patriotic while clearly having no idea what they’re saying. I get it—you’re a professional athlete, not a choir. Nobody expects you to have the anthem perfectly memorized. But you also have to stand there and pretend you do, because that’s what the job is. There’s something weirdly honest about it, though. These guys are representing their country at the highest level, and even they’re just going through the motions. They’re stuck between what they’re supposed to feel and what they actually feel, and that gap shows right up on their faces. They look uncomfortable. Because they are uncomfortable. They’re being required to perform a kind of patriotic earnestness that probably doesn’t come naturally to anyone, especially not to a group of athletes who just want to play the game. Nobody’s ever going to call them out on it. That’s the unspoken deal. We all just agree to pretend the lip-reading is wrong, that they definitely know every word, that they feel it. But we all know they don’t. And somehow that’s more real than if they’d actually memorized the whole thing. Wednesday, 27 June 2018. 5 In The Morning: I heard “5 In The Morning” and realized how completely she’d settled into herself. Not the version still trying to figure it out—the version who already knows. I’ve been listening since True Romance. That album got ignored at first, then became the kind of thing people claimed they’d always loved. She followed it by writing pop for other people—”I Love It” for Icona Pop, “Fancy” with Iggy Azalea that went number one. She became the person whose taste was shaping what pop sounded like, even if most people never noticed her name in the credits. She said something about her approach that I didn’t forget: “I’ve never written a song to sound cool or whatever. I write everything the way it comes out of my head. I’d call it raw pop. That’s pretty close to what I am on stage—nowhere near polished. Soft, bland music bores me.” It’s a refusal, basically. A refusal to make what everyone expects. “5 In The Morning” is what that conviction sounds like when it’s complete. No doubt, no performance. Just creating what she actually wants. There’s always the fear that people like this get ground down—that eventually the business wears them into compliance, and they start making what they’re supposed to instead of what they want. But some people are too stubborn to let that happen. She’s always been too strange. I don’t think she’s ever going to be the kind of famous that needs her to be normal. Wednesday, 27 June 2018. Jaden’s Tokyo: Jaden Smith’s been obsessed with Tokyo ever since he made Neo Yokio, and it hasn’t gotten any less strange. The anime was pretty bad, but he doesn’t seem bothered. He was too busy loving Tokyo to notice it didn’t work. In an interview he basically declared Tokyo the best place on Earth. ’Please, really, go to Tokyo and have fun because it’s just incredibly great,’ he said. No irony, no hedging. He meant it. And because he’s Jaden, he flew out to Harajuku with his crew and filmed himself throwing Monopoly money around—just fake cash floating everywhere like he was documenting some vision only he could see. There’s something unhinged about it, the way he loves the city without any self-consciousness. No performative cool, no brand strategy, just pure devotion. He’s built his own Tokyo in his head and he keeps going back to it. Whether that’s beautiful or ridiculous mostly depends on how you feel about people who care that much about anything, real or imagined. Tuesday, 26 June 2018. Summer Loop: I keep coming back to Chillhop’s seasonal stuff. They put out four a year and Summer Essentials 2018 just dropped—the usual crew of producers, the usual formula, nothing surprising. Matt Quentin, Stan Forebee, Sofasound. Names I’ve heard plenty but couldn’t place in a crowd. Doesn’t matter. The work lands. There’s something almost anti-music about the whole concept. Dusty samples, simple loops, melodies engineered specifically not to demand anything from you. Perfect for an afternoon doing nothing, or sitting on a roof with a cold drink, or those nights where the window’s open and you’re thinking about something you shouldn’t be thinking about. I’ve cycled through these playlists for years and they work. The appeal is exactly in what it won’t do. It won’t surprise you. It won’t ask for your full attention. It won’t make you feel like you’re missing something else. There’s something generous about that restraint. A conversation lands better when there’s no bright noise pulling at you. A memory comes back clearer. You can exist for a while without needing permission. Chillhop probably doesn’t need defending at this point—these playlists are everywhere now, the aesthetic is mainstream, lo-fi hip-hop as coffee-shop wallpaper. But there’s a reason it became ubiquitous. It actually understands what summer needs. Tuesday, 26 June 2018. Straight Girls Playing: Nothing gets me harder than straight girls with other girls. That first time especially, when I know for certain she’s actually straight—that’s when I feel like the turning point in her life, like I’m giving her something nobody else ever will, pulling her into a world she never knew existed. That moment when the confusion on her face shifts into something else. When she realizes she actually wants this. It’s one of my fetishes, and not even close to my only one, but this one runs deep. The kissing, her shirt coming undone, hands on skin that nobody’s touched before. The look on her face when she understands she enjoys it. That moment that changes everything. Nothing beats that. But it has to be authentic. Not actresses faking it, not performance. I need the real shock, the genuine pleasure, the actual moment when someone understands themselves differently. Real feelings, true emotions, the complete presence of that single instant. There’s a forum called Straight Girls Playing built entirely around this. It celebrates straight women with women, everything focused on the authentic ones—the ones who actually just figured it out, not women hired to pretend. Professional actresses show up sometimes, but nobody’s there for them. We’re all hunting the same thing: that moment when something clicks, when someone’s understanding of who they are shifts in the span of an evening. Tuesday, 26 June 2018. Poolside: Three German athletes got photographed naked in a pool during the 2018 World Cup. The national soccer team had declined, so Playboy booked Kristina Levina, Patrizia Dinkel, and Tanja Brockmann instead. Mallorca, topless in a pool, and Dinkel was named Playmate of the Year. She’d wanted the title since childhood, crediting beer and a philosophy of living well to her figure rather than gym work. What’s almost nice about the whole thing is how obvious it all was. Nobody was pretending—the publication needed content, the athletes wanted exposure, and people wanted something to look at. It’s the kind of transparent transaction that doesn’t come around often in celebrity culture, where usually everyone’s lying about their motives. Here it was just plain. Kind of honest in its own way. I couldn’t tell you which of the three is which if I saw the photos, and that seems exactly right. They’re not personalities in this scenario—they’re just the visible part of a summer moment that worked because an entire world was paying attention to sports. By August, nobody remembered. Monday, 25 June 2018. Speedrunning That Matters: Someone finishes a three-hour game in fifteen minutes because they’ve played it three hundred times and know every glitch, every spot where the engine breaks. A week of this—different runners, different games, all of them pushing what they love as fast as physics allows. GamesDoneQuick raises money for charity. Doctors Without Borders this time. The games themselves don’t matter—Zelda, Tetris, whatever. The point is watching someone’s entire focus on one thing distilled into speed and precision. Watching them prove they’ve earned it. I’ve never been disciplined enough for that. Never wanted something precise enough to practice it three hundred times. But there’s something I respect in how speedrunners just commit, no irony, no performance. They love this weird thing and they made it useful for one week a year. I’ll watch some of it, probably. Not for deep reasons—not because I care about the charity or speedrunning culture or any of that. Just because it’s weirdly compelling to see people be that good at something so pointless. No meta. No agenda. Just drive. Monday, 25 June 2018. Alone With Everyone: Pizza and wine in the apartment, door locked, scrolling through people’s lives on screens. The internet was supposed to end loneliness and instead it just made it louder. Everyone’s performing now—their best selves, their curated moments—and the more you watch the more alone you feel. Not because you’re excluded. Because the connection’s fake. You can have hundreds of followers and still wake up at three in the morning knowing there’s nobody you can actually call. Social media did something weird to how we relate to each other. It turned connection into a broadcast and loneliness into something you’re supposed to hide. Everyone’s got friends online but nobody’s actually talking. We’re all in the same room but facing away from each other. There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being constantly visible but never seen. From being able to reach everyone and actually reaching no one. From spending hours scrolling through other people’s happiness while sitting alone in your apartment, knowing they’re sitting alone in theirs doing the same thing. It’s the loneliness of proximity without contact, connection without meaning. I’ve wondered if it kills you, that kind of thing. If it compounds or if you just get used to it. If there’s a breaking point or if you just keep getting smaller until you disappear. Monday, 25 June 2018. Once Bernd, Always Bernd: Krautchan was Germany’s answer to 4chan—the place where guys called themselves Bernds and spent way too much time convincing themselves they were smarter, edgier, and just generally better than everyone else. The mix was always the same: some right-wing stuff, a lot of anime girls, a few actual nerds teaching each other how to install Linux. It was theirs, and it felt alive in that specific way imageboards do when they’re small enough to have a real culture but big enough that you’re not watching the same five people every day. Then it just died. One April morning, no warning, no goodbye thread, just gone. The Bernds scattered after that. Some tried Ernstchan, others went to pr0gramm, a few ended up on subreddits that never quite felt right. None of it had the right feeling. It was like showing up to your bar after new owners took over—technically the same space, but whatever made it work was gone. But Bernds don’t stay scattered. I watched them rebuild Kohlchan basically from scratch, mimicking the old site so closely it was almost absurd. Same logo, same layout, same structure. It was less a new site than a resurrection of something that probably should have stayed buried, except it worked. People came back. The strange community that fed on crude jokes and taboos started happening again. There’s something weirdly stubborn about it—the way these internet communities keep regenerating no matter what kills them. You scatter the users and they’ll find each other again and build the exact same thing in a new place. It’s like they’re almost biological, a culture that needs a body to exist in but doesn’t care which body. The only thing that actually made me laugh was watching people joke about whether Kohlchan was already being run from BKA servers—the German federal police. With that much unfiltered content on one site, someone was probably paying attention. Maybe that’s what these spaces are now—less secret clubhouses and more performance art for whoever’s trying to shut them down. Monday, 25 June 2018. Night Vision: You show up when it’s dark out. Reading in bed with the phone hidden so nobody catches you awake past bedtime, or in a club because everyone’s dancing except you, or on the last train home drunk and having missed your stop twice because you weren’t paying attention. This place is what you’re looking at when the night gets too quiet or too slow or you need something besides what’s in front of you. The problem is screens at two in the morning. They burn. The brightness drags you back awake when you were actually getting somewhere close to tired, pushes away whatever you were reaching for. So I made the whole thing darker—just an inverted version of everything, nothing fancy. It switches on at ten PM and off at six AM, like it knows something about your schedule that you don’t. Curious if it actually works or if it’s just the thing you do when you can’t sleep, tinkering with settings because your brain won’t shut up anyway. Friday, 22 June 2018. Herbertstraße: Nisse’s new album is called “Ciao.” The first single is “Unmöglich”—Impossible. Once you know his story, that word makes sense. He was born in a storm in August, somewhere in south Hamburg, in the dead zone between farm country and the industrial Phoenix district. Growing up there was bleak: drunk teenagers, fistfights, tuned cars, the kind of boredom that calcifies into cruelty. The only real thing was the music. He found the 80s German voices—Drafi, Ideal, Falco, Reim, Kunze, Lindenberg, Nena, Reiser—and they became the shape of how he heard the world. Michael Jackson showed up on cassettes. In the 90s he went to school in England, which is where the absurdity kicks in: surrounded by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he fell in love with German hip-hop through CDs mailed from home. At seventeen he moved to St. Pauli and got a window overlooking Herbertstraße. That street is a famous institution in Hamburg—where the sex workers have always been legal, where you can see how the city’s underbelly actually functions. Sirens all night. He was living in the center of a contradiction, watching how people survive when survival is the only option. That does something to you. Two albums now, and “Impossible” is what he called his new statement. There’s a logic to it. Tuesday, 29 May 2018. The Shark Hunt: Fishermen off Okinawa were losing their catch to sharks. Day after day the sharks would come, tear through the nets, and disappear with the fish. At some point you stop calling it nature and start calling it a problem. So they hunted them back. Hooks, knives, spears—whatever worked. The sharks kept coming, the fishermen kept killing them, and it became part of the routine. Brutal. Direct. There’s no ambiguity about what’s happening: you kill the thing destroying your livelihood, or you don’t eat. What strikes me is how cleanly this sits outside the modern conversation about nature. There’s no tragic tone, no hand-wringing about the ecosystem. The fishermen are doing work that needs doing. The violence isn’t something to feel bad about—it’s incidental to the purpose. And they celebrate it with a yearly festival, not to mock the sharks but because the work deserves marking. I watched a documentary about this and what got me was how unapologetic it all felt. Not performed toughness, just the work itself. The masculinity in it isn’t flexed—it’s the unavoidable result of meeting a problem head-on, with steel and skill. No ideology, no performance. Need and response. There’s something clean about that. Something I can’t quite let go of. Tuesday, 29 May 2018. Just Skin: My back looks like it’s been through a full nuclear weapons program. I could spend money on Clearasil or wait for acne to become beautiful. Everything’s beautiful these days, anyway. British photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor was thinking something similar—or at least taking it seriously. Her series “Epidermis” is photographs of girls and their skin, exactly as it shows up: Louise, Indiana, Joice, and whatever acne or marks or irritations they’re carrying. It’s pushing back on the whole only-perfection-matters thing we do—the way photographs only show flawless skin and perfect bodies, like the rest of us are failing for having actual human bodies. Sophie came at this from somewhere real. She spent years hating her own acne, went through the puberty thing and way beyond it, wanted normal skin—the kind that appears in magazines. Eventually she figured out that normal is just whatever’s in the pictures around you. We learn what’s acceptable from images. Change the images and normal shifts. That’s almost too basic to say out loud. Everyone knows beauty standards are invented, that we’re shaped by media, all of that. But there’s a difference between knowing something and actually seeing it. These photographs of skin that’s just skin, marked by time and luck and biology, hit different. Not a problem waiting for a solution, not proof you’re failing. Just the surface of a body being itself. Tuesday, 29 May 2018. Yuber’s Room: Yuber wanted to become a Twitch streamer and it ruined him completely. He quit his job, his girlfriend left, his friends stopped showing up—everything that held his life together came apart. The bet was that streaming would eventually pay off, that viewers would materialize, that donations would cover rent. They didn’t. Years passed and he kept going, broadcasting to almost nobody from a room that accumulated trash like evidence. What gets me is how avoidable this seems and how invisible it actually is. The success stories—Ninja, Shroud, the handful of people who actually made it—make it look like it’s all about talent or personality or grinding hard enough. But those are the ones who broke through. For every streamer who makes it, there are millions who don’t. The odds aren’t just bad—they’re basically a lottery with better marketing. You could stream perfectly, consistently, with everything going right, and still fail because virality isn’t a product of effort. It’s random. I knew someone who literally moved countries because he thought it would improve his streaming prospects. Pure magical thinking. A year later, two hundred followers, money gone, and back to reality. The failure isn’t personal—it’s structural. The platform needs you to fail so that everyone else thinks they’re just one stream away from making it. Yuber’s probably still streaming, or he’s quit and I just never heard about it. Either way, that room is the logical endpoint for almost everyone who tries. The system doesn’t care how hard you work or how good you actually are. It just needs enough people desperate enough to make the attempt. Monday, 28 May 2018. Brusch: There’s this German musician, Tristan Brusch, who makes music that shouldn’t work but does. His father was a violinist—serious classical training. Brusch learned composition as a kid, absorbed all that structure, and then went sideways with it. German music right now is predictable. Pop, hip-hop, schlager—all of it safe. Brusch operates in his own lane, making these weird genre-bent songs somewhere between chanson and pop and something else. Not trying to be experimental, just genuinely strange. The kind of artist who doesn’t care if you understand what he’s doing. What interests me is that he’s trained well enough to actually break the rules, not just bend them slightly for a label. He makes what interests him and if you’re there for it, fine. If not, he’s not going to explain it or dial it down for accessibility. That confidence—the refusal to compromise—is rare. Most artists are performing for approval by the time they’re professional. Brusch sounds like he just makes what he wants. Monday, 28 May 2018. Hard Rain: I’ve stopped pretending I don’t obsess over Lykke Li. Every video she makes, I end up posting it. It’s not deliberate anymore—it’s just what happens. Where most artists ration their visuals, drop promotional videos every few months and make the rounds, Lykke just keeps releasing. Video after video, no apparent strategy, just constant output. After “Deep End” and “Utopia,” Anton Tammi directed “Hard Rain,” and it does what she does best: take physical affection and make it look like the only currency that matters. The song’s about wanting someone close, about offering everything—the weight of heavy rain, an entire ocean of it. It’s vulnerability. Fear of distance. The desperation of trying to hold someone you thought you’d never lose. There’s something about how she moves in it, how the closeness is filmed—not polished or romantic but honest. Like it’s the only thing that communicates what actually matters. I felt it watching. Not the clean feeling of well-made video work, but something that caught me off guard. The kind of specificity that makes you understand, in a dumb and honest way, why you keep coming back to someone’s work. I almost cried. Still might. Monday, 28 May 2018. Deep End: I watched Lykke Li’s “Deep End” video like watching those vertical iPhone recordings from parties—the frame, the movement, the way the camera just catches what’s there. Except this was shot with actual intention, lit beautifully, and it matters more. The thing about it is that the sexuality doesn’t feel performed. She’s not dancing for the camera or for whoever’s watching. She’s just there, moving in the frame, and somehow that’s more interesting than any calculated seduction would be. It’s the difference between someone being seductive and someone just being themselves. The song itself is what makes it work. “Deep End” is one of those tracks that unfolds over repeated listening—you catch something new in how it’s layered every twentieth time through. There’s a richness in the production that doesn’t wear thin. Lykke Li’s been at this level long enough that I shouldn’t expect to be surprised anymore, but the way she puts these things together—image, sound, intention all at once—still gets to me. This one definitely does. Thursday, 24 May 2018. Wizard of Legend: Fast. That’s the whole thing. Wizard of Legend is about throwing spells at enemies so quickly that you stop thinking and start reacting. Contingent99, a Los Angeles studio, made it as their first game. You pick spells from a pool of over a hundred and run into a dungeon. Die, start over, try a different combination. The pixel art is clean and readable, which matters because your eyes need to track everything at once. Speed and precision are what count. There’s no padding, no tutorials, no hand-holding. You figure it out or you fail, and failing isn’t a big deal. I loaded it expecting an evening’s distraction. Instead, the loop pulls you in. You see a spell synergy you didn’t think about before and want to run it back, want to nail it. Every attempt teaches you something small. You chase that feeling of a run coming together, even after the tenth failure trying to make it work. It’s on everything now—Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch. If you’re the type who learns a system by throwing yourself at it repeatedly until something clicks, it’s worth grabbing. That moment when you finally execute what you’ve been picturing is real. Thursday, 24 May 2018. The Richardson Pivot: Richardson released a new collection shot in Tokyo during bloom season, which is the part of the playbook where you’ve officially made it as a fashion brand. The pieces look good—hoodies, shirts, towels. But I kept thinking about what Richardson used to be, which was actually provocative, actually scandalous in a way that meant something. Now they’re another lifestyle label selling carefully composed taste, which is fine, it’s just the arc of everything. Every major brand does this eventually. You get to a certain size and you book a photographer and go shoot in spring because that’s when everything looks best. The aesthetic has become so standard that ’inspired-by-Japanese-culture’ basically just means ’we think carefully about design.’ It’s not really about the place anymore—it’s about what the place has come to signify in fashion, which is refinement and restraint and the possibility that your hoodie actually means something. It works. The photographs are genuinely beautiful. But there’s something almost funny about watching something with actual edge get polished into soft pastoral scenes and called grown-up. Richardson probably makes better clothes than it ever did. That’s not the point though. The point is just noticing what happens when everything—even things that were once deliberately challenging—eventually gets wrapped up in something beautiful and sold back as sophistication. Wednesday, 16 May 2018. New York, Imported: The dream of New York is durable. Even as the city changes, what it represents stays in people’s heads. You see it in fashion, music, the way people from other places move. There’s gravity to it that doesn’t seem to break. Staple and Ellesse built a collection around it. The product names gesture toward cultural weight—Rockafella Popper Pants, Jefferson Shorts—and the color palette pulls from the city’s streets and skyline. It’s a straightforward move: tie your brand to the mythology and people feel something, even buying it from across the world. Both companies have the credentials. Ellesse’s Italian sportswear DNA goes back decades, clean and precise. Staple’s reputation is built into New York street culture. Together they’re a real dialogue, not just a partnership of convenience. What makes it work is that both understand the same thing: the image of New York is more powerful than the place. The mythology travels further than the reality. People buy into what they imagine, not what’s actually there. Wednesday, 16 May 2018. Failed Parody: The choreography in Childish Gambino’s “This is America” is tight and controlled, precise movements against images of violence and consumption and distraction. It’s a carefully constructed argument: spectacle versus brutality, performance versus what’s actually happening. Every element supports that tension. Nicole Arbour’s feminist parody has her doing the dancing, and it’s supposedly making a statement about gender. But she’s not using the video to make a point—she’s using it to center herself. She’s borrowed the form without understanding what made it work, and the whole thing falls apart because of that. The original is about a system. This is about her noticing the system exists and wanting recognition for it. Those are not the same thing, and you can feel that difference when you watch. I didn’t finish it. Tuesday, 15 May 2018. I Fall in Love with You Through a Robot: After “Your Name” worked in 2016, a particular kind of silence fell over the industry. Everyone started waiting to see if someone could do it again—if that film was lightning in a bottle or if there was a repeatable formula. That Shinkai film reached people who’d never sit through anime, got them invested. That’s rare enough that everything released since gets measured against it. Yusuke Yamada’s robot-romance novel seemed promising enough that a studio thought it had the same potential. The setup is there: Tokyo in 2060, Olympic games on the horizon, a scientist and his coworker falling for each other while she’s become a target of something or someone. A humanoid robot is somehow in the equation—part of the plot, or part of the problem, or both. The premise is solid. I’m interested in it, though maybe not in the way the studio wants. It’s not anticipation so much as genuine curiosity about whether the machinery that worked once can work again, or whether “Your Name” was just unrepeatable. The robot angle is actually interesting—it’s not just a barrier to romance, it’s a real complication built into the world itself. Not the time-displacement trick, but something in that register where the obstacle is baked into everything. We’ll see if it lands the same way. That kind of moment doesn’t come around often, and you never know until after it’s happened. Tuesday, 15 May 2018. In the Code: I used to hack into Super Nintendo and Game Boy cartridges with these weird devices, poking around inside to find what the developers left buried. Unreachable chests, broken enemies, passages through solid walls. The thrill wasn’t breaking the game—it was seeing what existed in the code that nobody was supposed to find. The Cutting Room Floor is what that impulse becomes. It’s thousands of people doing exactly what I did as a kid, except methodically, with games spanning decades. Someone found a secret quiz in Terranigma. In Super Mario 64, there’s an unreachable mine. Secret of Evermore charges different boatmen prices based on your character’s name, a detail buried so deep almost nobody ever discovers it. What gets me is that none of it needed to exist. The developers knew players would never find those things. They coded them anyway—jokes for themselves, experiments, mistakes too small to matter. It’s the opposite of designed experience. The games we actually play are the finished product. Everything else is the workshop, the thinking left behind. That’s what I was really chasing as a kid. Not a way to break the game, but a way to see what was underneath the performance. The seams where the actual work lives. The Cutting Room Floor is just that impulse scaled up—proof that I wasn’t the only one hungry for what was hidden. Tuesday, 15 May 2018. Competent: Missandei was the only sane person in Game of Thrones. Everyone else was poisoning each other and scheming for power, and she was just competent and calm and smart. Nathalie Emmanuel played her that way - not theatrical, just present. There’s a scene where she’s naked on a beach and it doesn’t feel exploitative like so much of GoT’s nudity did; it feels like her character exists outside all that pageantry. You realize watching it that you’re seeing real acting. I’d seen Emmanuel before in Misfits, the British show where she played Charlie, sharp and funny before getting killed off halfway through. Even in something that campy, she brought groundedness to the character. So there was always something there beyond the surface - a real actor underneath, not just a pretty face filling a slot. What’s stuck with me since then is that she doesn’t let one role consume her whole existence. She acts, she’s got other projects going, she’s just a person with multiple things happening. She doesn’t seem interested in becoming a brand or squeezing every last drop from one performance. In that sense, she’s got more sense than most of the characters she’s played, characters desperately trying to be one thing and hold onto it forever. You’ll probably always think “that’s the Missandei actress” when you hear her name, and that’s fine. That role is remarkable enough. But there’s clearly more than that, and the fact that she seems to know it about herself is worth noting. Monday, 14 May 2018. One Big Move: A 39-year-old Dutch guy named Didi Taihuttu sold his house, sold his cars, and moved his family to Thailand to chase Bitcoin in 2017. An Arte documentary followed him through it, watching what happens when someone decides the only way out is through something totally untested. Within six months his money had quintupled. He became a millionaire. He became the guy who made the call that worked. The thing about these stories is they’re always told from the moment of victory. The documentary exists because Didi won, not because the reasoning was particularly sound. Everyone in the film wants what he has—the escape, the freedom, the feeling of having figured out the game before everyone else. There’s this hunger radiating off the screen, this FOMO dream of one big move that resets your entire life. I get the appeal. Regular life is a grind. Work pays for rent and not much else. Every savings goal feels like it’s fighting a losing battle against inflation and housing prices. At a certain point the appeal of betting everything on something that might be revolutionary or might be bullshit feels almost rational, if only because slow safety starts to look like slow death. The documentary doesn’t really care about Bitcoin though. It’s interested in the human part—what drives people to risk everything, what they imagine life will look like after they win, how hope works in a system that doesn’t seem designed for regular people to ever actually get ahead. Didi’s story is just the visible one, the one that worked out in the moment that mattered for the film. Monday, 14 May 2018. This is America: Childish Gambino dances through the frame with meticulous choreography, and all around him are bodies and guns and blood, shot and lit with obsessive care. You’re supposed to be watching him. You’re supposed to not see what’s in the margins. That’s how it works. I’ve been into Donald Glover’s music for years because he doesn’t fall for the typical rapper moves—no bragging, no posture, just someone trying to say something true. The work has real depth to it. “This is America” is what all of that was building toward: a song about a place where the spectacle is so loud and beautiful that people watch that instead of what’s actually happening. The music pulls you in. You move to it, you feel good, and that’s the mechanism itself—that’s exactly how it functions. The song shows you what you’re part of. I don’t know if anything changes because of it. Probably doesn’t. But he made something beautiful and true about a broken place, and did it in a way that makes you feel the contradiction instead of just understanding it intellectually. That’s the part that sticks with you. Monday, 14 May 2018. Akira’s Standard: Opening with Kaneda’s bike skidding across that neon highway—that moment when you understand everything in anime is about to change. That’s 1988’s Akira. A film that didn’t just transform Japanese animation. It transformed what animation could be at all. I came to anime when it was scarce in English, hunting for fansubs and strange VHS copies. And if you trace what came after—Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, the material that pushed structure and image into uncomfortable places—it all leads back to Katsuhiro Otomo’s film. He built something that didn’t need animation to justify itself as cinema. It was cinema. Dense. Violent. Visually bewildering. Set in a Tokyo that was simultaneously future and ruin. The plot—Shotaro Kaneda, his friend Tetsuo, motorcycle gangs, psychic collapse—is almost secondary. What matters is the discipline of the image. Every frame composed like it might be the last one Otomo gets to make. That kind of care, that refusal to shortcut the visuals, it became the standard. After Akira, you couldn’t phone it in. Everything that came after knew that. Just as important is the permission the film granted. Permission to be structurally strange. Permission to let a narrative fracture. Permission to make something not primarily for children, even if it was drawn. Every ambitious anime in the decades that followed walked through a door Akira opened. What’s strange is how little Akira has aged, even now. The visuals, yes—technically immaculate. But it’s the thinking behind every frame. The refusal to make anime feel cheap or secondary. That became the standard for everything after, and most of it is still trying to match it. There’s a documentary about this—Super Eyepatch Wolf made “The Impact of Akira”—but you don’t need it. Just look at what came next. The influence is everywhere, written into the DNA of nearly every ambitious anime since. That’s how you know something mattered. Monday, 14 May 2018. Submission: When dogs feel outmatched, they collapse on their backs, expose everything, and just surrender. That’s submission. When I feel like that, I do the same thing, except I also get this overwhelming urge to rub myself against whatever just beat me. It’s not always sexual, but ritual—pure acknowledgment. Right now, if someone asked me to pick one person to fuck, kill, and marry without thinking twice, it’d be Princess Nokia. Destiny Nicole Frasqueri was born in ’92, lost her mother to AIDS at ten, spent the years after in and out of foster care until sixteen. She’s my spirit animal right now, and if I weren’t so lazy I’d probably spend all my time trying to make her mine. The music video for “For the Night” is what did it. Princess Nokia’s performing clips from old shows, but mostly she’s just shaking her ass so hard in this blue-lit villa with a pool that I immediately hit the floor, flipped onto my back, and spread myself out because I had to. The submission. The rubbing. All of it, forever. Friday, 4 May 2018. Our Homemade Video: I’d been awake for three days straight. Every time I’d jolt up at 2 AM, 4 AM, 6 AM, the first thing I’d do was reload the page. The video would still be there, thumbnail and all, sitting among thousands of others like it, completely unmoved by my desperation. I’d click the little flag in the corner again, fill out another form, send another email to an address that almost certainly didn’t have a real person behind it. Then I’d lie back down and stare at the ceiling, drinking cold coffee. Fabienne had texted me on a Friday night while I was at a bar arguing about Zombieland. She wanted to know if I was fucking with her. Why was there a porn video of her on the internet. I didn’t know what she was talking about until she explained: some guy had uploaded a clip we’d made years ago, just for ourselves, something we’d done for fun one afternoon. Turns out he’d uploaded it to YouPorn over a year ago. Millions of views. I read the comment section like I was reading reviews of my own character. “I want to come on her tits!” “Hottest pussy I’ve seen in forever!” That kind of thing. The problem wasn’t that I minded. I’ve never had an issue with the idea of someone seeing me naked, watching me fuck. The problem was that Fabienne minded, and she minded a lot, and now she thought I’d done it. That I’d uploaded our video to make a quick buck while she was asleep. Which is insane, obviously—who would be that stupid?—but I understood why she’d think it. The video was there. It had to come from somewhere. And I was the more obvious suspect. When you’re on the wrong side of an accusation like that, the only thing you can do is protest your innocence and hope the person you care about believes you. She didn’t seem to. I spent three days trying to get it taken down. Saturday morning through Tuesday night, I was sending emails to every contact address the site had listed, filling out removal request forms, messaging people in Twitter DMs, begging for help. Nothing. The video stayed. I couldn’t sleep properly. Couldn’t concentrate. Every notification made my stomach flip. Somewhere in the back of my head was the specific terror that the police would show up, that there was something illegal about this that I didn’t understand, that I’d end up in a cell for something I didn’t even do. The only real help came from someone named Katie—maybe an employee, maybe just a social media person—who messaged me back when I reached out on Twitter. She was sympathetic. Said she was on vacation but would delete it manually when she got back. So I waited. I reloaded the page constantly. I texted Fabienne updates like I was trying to prove something, though she barely responded. When Katie finally wrote back on Tuesday evening saying it was gone, I should have felt relieved. I didn’t. The video was off the site, sure, but I’d learned something I couldn’t unlearn: nothing disappears from the internet. Someone out there still has it. Someone will always have it. It just takes one person copying it down, one person sharing it, and it lives forever. There’s this weird thing we do where we act shocked when someone’s intimate life becomes public. We judge women harshly for the same things we laugh at men for. We pretend sexuality is shameful while simultaneously being completely obsessed with it. We act like once something gets out, the person involved should feel destroyed, like they’re damaged goods. But Fabienne and I had been stupid and horny and curious. We made something that felt good at the time. We looked good doing it. The fact that some asshole found a way to steal it and monetize it says something about him, not us. But try telling society that. I never heard from Fabienne again after I told her it was deleted. Maybe her lawyer told her not to respond. Maybe she just couldn’t stand talking to me anymore. Either way, I got it. The video was gone but the wreckage remained. She wouldn’t speak to me. There was this hanging dread that it might show up somewhere else. And there was something else too—this small, sad awareness that I’d lost her friendship over something neither of us did. The guy who uploaded it faced no consequences. No one knew who he was. He got away with it perfectly. Everything ends up on the internet eventually. You try to stop it and it doesn’t matter. You think you’re being careful and you’re not. You trust the wrong person or you lose control of a device and suddenly your private life is public. The only thing you can actually control is how you feel about it after. And that’s the part I’m still working through. Wednesday, 2 May 2018. Back at Hogwarts: Hogwarts Mystery hit number one on the app store and suddenly everyone I knew was a Ravenclaw again. I got it because I was bored one night and thought it would be funny for ten minutes. That was two weeks ago. The setup is simple: you make a character, pick your house, work through seven years at Hogwarts. Classes, quests, the whole curriculum. It looks good, feels right, and if you spent any real time with Harry Potter, there’s something about being in that world on your own terms that the books and films can’t touch. The monetization is vicious. Everything costs energy. A lesson, a quest, moving between scenes—energy, energy, energy. You can wait for it to refill slowly, or you can pay. The game asks constantly, for the smallest things, in ways that feel designed to anger you. There’s no pretense about it. I’m still playing. I’ve spent money I shouldn’t have spent. People I respect are sinking hours into this despite knowing exactly what’s happening. There’s something about having your own story at Hogwarts that the books and films can’t give, and I keep paying for it. I could just rewatch the films instead. They’re all at home. But you know it won’t fix anything. You play it anyway. Friday, 27 April 2018. Lösch Dich: When you watch “Lösch Dich,” a documentary about online hate networks, you expect to learn about anger. What you get is the production schedule. Reconquista Germanica, a right-wing troll network that ramped up before the 2017 German elections, built a machine. They recruited people—not ideologues, mostly just people sitting with loose resentments about immigrants, Islam, whoever—and fed them into structured groups. Every day, new orders: flood this hashtag, tag these accounts, push this narrative. Variations on a theme, coordinated relentlessly. The goal wasn’t to convince anyone of anything. It was to make their perspective look inevitable, inescapable, already won. A guy called Nikolai Alexander ran it. He knew which questions worked: “What does it mean to be a patriot? What’s Germany to you in your dream?” And it worked. The machinery was efficient. Sort by leaning, feed into units, assign tasks, repeat. The documentary pulls back the curtain. You see the funnels, the command structure, the mechanics laid bare. And something crystallizes, something sick: this is how some of what passes for genuine public opinion actually forms. It’s not organic. It’s someone else’s construction project. What lingers isn’t the ideology or the targets. It’s the realization that resentment—the thing that feels most intimate and real—can be engineered. That loneliness and anger can be turned into a process, a schedule, a thing that runs itself. That the system is simple enough to work, and that most people inside it don’t even know they’re parts in it. Friday, 27 April 2018. Verde: Verde is green in Spanish, and Marsimoto’s given us an entire album that proves he’s still operating on the strangest frequency in German rap. Most alien energy, most removed from whatever’s happening on actual earth while the planet falls apart in the background. The beats are what grab you first. Nobodys Face, Robot Koch, Dead Rabbit, The Krauts—they’re building something that lives and moves under you, that keeps shifting, always something else emerging from the mix. It’s production that doesn’t sit still for a second, but it holds together. Bubbling, restless, like something breathing. Marsimoto rides it perfectly. Not performing, not trying to convince you. Just thinking alongside you, half-singing through verses that come at you sideways. The hooks fold back on themselves. Nothing here pretends to mean something grand. “Immer wenn ich high bin,” “Solang’ die Vögel zwitschern, gibt’s Musik”—summer songs, escape songs. The kind of music that makes you want to lie in the grass and let the day go. I’ve always respected music that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t apologize. Verde’s that kind of album. It’s not trying to be anything else. Friday, 27 April 2018. Weekend Stupidity: Saturday always hits the same—brain checked out by afternoon, nothing on the calendar, friends doing their own thing. Used to just kill time scrolling until dinner. Then I dredged up this stupid list from somewhere in my memory, one of those old joke posts about ridiculous missions you’d assign yourself for the weekend. Most of it was genuinely dumb in the best way. Paint yourself completely green and go to a club, and if anyone calls you Hulk they have to buy you a drink. Ask the DJ if he can play the whole album by a band that doesn’t actually exist. Tell everyone their name wrong on purpose for the entire weekend and watch the social math completely fall apart. The really stupid ones were the best ones. Go ask random strangers on the street if they’ll adopt you, and apparently if they say yes you’re officially part of their family now. Sell all your stuff and fly to Antarctica to become a professional penguin cuddler because they’re always cold. Play Tetris but the buildings are actual apartment blocks. Suck on a frozen french fry and tell people it’s the new American food trend and watch them actually consider it. You’d never do most of these. They’re funny as ideas, not as things to actually carry out. The gap between the thought and the execution is where the fun actually is. But some versions of this stupidity do work. Show up somewhere completely committed to the bit, don’t break, let other people figure out what’s happening—that’s its own thing. What made the list work was that it didn’t take itself seriously enough to be annoying. Just here are some absurd things, do as many or as few as you want, whatever. No hype, no pressure. Just nonsense in its purest form. Friday, 27 April 2018. One Border Over: There are three ways to get weed in Germany and none of them are good. You hang around Görli, hoping to find someone who isn’t selling you dyed weeds. You rely on the paranoid guy on the seventh floor—the one terrified of aluminum foil, airplanes, sunlight. Or you order from the darknet and leave the door unlocked because you know what’s coming. Switzerland took a different route. You just walk into Lidl and buy legal hemp cigarettes. The Botanicals company grows them—cannabis in automated greenhouses, proper equipment, quality standards. The product is pure: dried buds of Cannabis sativa L., cut and portioned into 1.5 gram packets. Around 17 euros. You pick it up like coffee or bread. The gap between those two states is genuinely strange to think about. Same language family, same economic zone, separated by a border and suddenly the illegal becomes mundane, the contraband becomes grocery. I have no idea when Germany catches up. Bavaria? Never, probably. But standing in a Lidl buying weed feels like a preview of some stupidly distant future that’s already happening somewhere else. Thursday, 26 April 2018. Gumshoe: Gumdrop scraped chewed gum off Amsterdam streets, ground it into granules, and pressed it into shoe soles. Gumshoe—a pink sneaker where the sole is 20 percent of the stuff, about a kilogram per pair. The sole even has a map of Amsterdam on it. This is part of the whole trend now. Plastic bags into shirts, ocean garbage into pants, old socks into new socks. The closed loop where consumption just eats itself—buy, throw out, buy again, feel fine because it’s recycled. Gumshoe doesn’t hide the joke though. You’re wearing street refuse. There’s something weirdly honest about that. I don’t know if the shoe actually works. The gum probably gets sticky in heat, smells weird, falls apart. But whether it functions is almost beside the point. Someone looked at pavement gum and thought ’sneaker material.’ That audacity is the interesting part. Around 190 euros a pair. The product itself is secondary. You’re paying for the idea—proof that someone can look at garbage and see a shoe. That’s worth something. Thursday, 26 April 2018. When Platforms Get Scared: YouTube deleted Simon’s channel after five years. Every weekly upload, gone, because he posted about hemp products. Not a major violation, probably not even one by their actual rules—just an overcorrection in a panic. Poof. A few days later, Kilian at Tanzverbot got hit with a strike for a video from two years ago. No recent violation. No warning. Just sudden, arbitrary, and calculated: locked out of the features that let him build an audience. “I woke up in a good mood and now I’m completely fucked,” he said. YouTube had been taking heat. Wall Street Journal reporting on ads running next to extremist content, advertiser boycotts, the whole thing where everyone decided PewDiePie was the real problem. Behind the scenes, shareholders were scared. And YouTube, which loves the persona of a cool, community-first platform, started acting like a frightened corporation trying to protect ad revenue. The pattern was always there. YouTube’s always preferred safe content—cosmetics, travel, music videos, nothing that might upset an advertiser. But the algorithm kept surfacing the edgy, controversial, actually-interesting stuff. That contradiction finally gave. So they tightened the screws. Not carefully. Just hitting channels large enough to have real followings, channels whose creators had made themselves dependent on YouTube income. Both Simon and Kilian had thought they were safe. Five years or an established streaming presence meant something, they figured. It didn’t. The message was clear: YouTube chose its own revenue over creator security. The time when the platform needed you was over. Now it could afford to cull anyone who didn’t fit the sanitized image that kept advertisers calm. I’ve spent twenty years online watching platforms come and go. None of it’s permanent. But there’s something particular about watching a company openly choose money over everything else and then act surprised when creators start looking elsewhere. Thursday, 26 April 2018. They Want Your Real Name: Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security, wants to know who you really are. Not your username—your actual name, verified and on file somewhere. It would solve everything, he thinks. Misinformation would vanish. Trolls would behave. The whole internet would finally grow up. The sales pitch is gentle enough: “verified pseudonymity.” Your real identity stays registered and checked, but you can still use a username if you want. It’s a compromise, see? The structure without the total erasure of privacy. Neat. Reasonable. Probably fine. Except every place that’s actually built this system has ended up with a surveillance state. China has it. North Korea has it. Iran has it. Once you’ve got a registry of who said what and when, a government knows exactly who to target. Dissidents disappear. Minorities get tracked. The same infrastructure that catches assholes also catches anyone the government decides is inconvenient. It’s not a glitch in the system—it’s the point. And for what? Real-name policies didn’t even fix the problems they claimed to. South Korea tried it, gave it up. You still get misinformation. You still get cruelty. You just get it with a complete ledger of who’s responsible, which sounds nice until you realize who gets to hold that ledger. The internet was supposed to be a place where you could think dangerous thoughts without your government knowing, say unpopular things without your boss finding out, be someone other than who you were supposed to be. Not always good—anonymity made people cruel. But it also made people free, in a way that being fully legible and registered doesn’t. King’s probably sincere. He’s not trying to build a police state. He just thinks good policies and careful procedures will keep a surveillance tool from becoming a weapon. Which is what everyone thinks, always, right before it does. Thursday, 26 April 2018. Supposedly Sixteen: WhatsApp’s age requirement just jumped from 13 to 16 because of GDPR. Starting in May, you’ll see a prompt asking if you’re old enough. Answer no, and you’re supposedly out. Except there’s no verification. It’s exactly like those “I’m 18” gates on adult sites—you click yes, you’re in, nobody’s actually checking. The EU didn’t require real age verification, so this is just the appearance of something happening. There’s something honest about it, in a way. A regulation that everyone involved already knows won’t work, being implemented anyway. The wall exists so regulators can point to it. Kids under 16 will keep using WhatsApp; they’ll just click an extra button first. Wednesday, 25 April 2018. American Apparel, Redux: American Apparel’s whole thing was being aggressively boring in the best way. Plain t-shirts. Hoodies. The kind of basics that somehow become iconic because someone got the fit and the color right. Dov Charney built the brand on that—minimal design, manufactured in LA, priced so you could actually buy it. During the hipster peak, if you wanted to look good without overthinking, American Apparel was basically the answer. Then in 2014 Charney got fired from his own company. It came out that he’d been sending dick pics to employees, jerking off in front of them, asking for nudes. The whole thing unraveled from there. He was the creative driving force, and he was also a sexual predator, and somehow those two facts got tangled up in what the brand even was. By 2015 the company was bankrupt. Gildan, a massive Canadian manufacturer, bought what was left for around ninety million euros. The new owners shut down every store. American Apparel didn’t die so much as evaporate. It went from being everywhere to nowhere. Now they’re back with something called “Back to Basics”—old ads restaged but cleaned up. Less sex, more purity. Soft versions of those stripped-down images that used to feel like they were breaking rules. You can shop basics again if you want. It’s hard to see how this works. The brand was built on a specific moment and a specific person—that collision of minimalism and sex, restraint and transgression. You can’t separate that from Charney, and his name is toxic now. The comeback feels like someone trying to wear the same outfit years later and expecting nobody to remember what happened in it. Wednesday, 25 April 2018. Into the Ghibli Park: You know that moment in Spirited Away when Chihiro steps through the tunnel and everything opens up—the food stalls, the bathhouse, the flooded landscape—and you realize she’s crossed into somewhere she can’t come back from? That’s what they’ve built in Nagakute, about 350 kilometers west of Tokyo. A place where the animation actually becomes a place you can walk through. Studio Ghibli Park opened with different themed areas tied to the films that made the studio what it is. You move between the world of Howl’s Moving Castle, then Spirited Away, then My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service. It sounds like a gimmick until you’re actually there, and then it becomes something harder to name. The uncanny experience of stepping into the inside of your own memory. They didn’t go for the obvious theme-park plasticity. The structures are actual architecture, the environments recreated with reverent accuracy. The food tastes right. The light comes from the right angles. You can feel that someone spent real time thinking about what these worlds owe to the people who dreamed them. What hits you walking through is how much animation lives in suggestion. The drawings move and you fill in the rest—textures, temperatures, smells. Standing in the actual bathhouse courtyard, or the forest path, you confront what you were filling in all along. It’s the strange precision of having your imagination treated seriously. I never thought I’d actually walk into Totoro’s forest, or stand where Howl stands at the window. And now I can. That boundary between the world in your head and the world you move through collapses. You’re not sure if that’s a good thing or just inevitable. Wednesday, 25 April 2018. The Last Video Store: Videodrom is in crisis. The video rental store in Berlin’s Kreuzberg has 35,000 films in its catalog—the biggest in Germany—and €20,000 in debt that grows every month. Rental numbers have collapsed. The owner, Karsten Rodemann (who calls himself Graf Haufen), watches the math turn impossible. Summer’s coming, traditionally dead season for places like this, and he’s out of reserves. But the debt is just a number. The actual problem is bigger. When Netflix or Criterion or whoever decides a film isn’t worth the licensing cost, isn’t trendy enough, doesn’t serve the algorithm’s current preference—it disappears. One day it’s there. The next, nothing. Deleted. Unless you kept the DVD, unless you knew someone with a copy, unless there’s still a physical archive somewhere, that film becomes effectively inaccessible. Not lost. Just gone from the world as anyone could reasonably get to it. What made Videodrom different was exactly what made it unsustainable. Rodemann ran the place on the logic that culture was worth preserving even when there wasn’t money in it. You could find films there that streaming services had already written off, forgotten about, determined weren’t profitable to keep circulating. 35,000 reasons to think differently about what got to survive. The thing that kills me is how inevitable the collapse feels. Streaming was always going to be cheaper and easier than renting DVDs. The margins were always going to get worse. Once enough people stop renting, the economics just don’t work—rent goes up, demand goes down, and every independent video store hits the same wall eventually. Berlin’s full of that story right now. Shops closing. Chains replacing whatever was independent. The city becoming something more efficient and less interesting. Videodrom is probably done. Maybe some nostalgia moment buys it time. Maybe the owner keeps scrapping it out. But the math underneath doesn’t change. What gets to me is thinking about what doesn’t get preserved when places like this close down. There are films only available there now. Not because they’re rare or obscure—some are pretty standard—but because the streaming services delisted them, or the licensing is tangled, or they’re just not profitable to keep in circulation anymore. Those films exist in one physical location in Berlin, and when that location closes, they become a lot harder to see. There’s something about walking into a store and talking to someone who’s been watching films for decades that doesn’t have an algorithm equivalent. Asking what to watch and actually getting taste, context, a reason to take a risk on something you wouldn’t have clicked on alone. That’s gone when the store closes. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s just nostalgia for a way of living that wasn’t that great in the first place. But I’m not sure. Wednesday, 25 April 2018. Black Screen Records: Chrono Trigger still lives in my head. The way Yasunori Mitsuda’s music shaped that whole world—there’s something about game soundtracks that no film score does quite the same way. They’re built to loop, to anchor you in a space you’re moving through, to make you feel the weight of a moment without ever trying. The Witcher 3, Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium—I come back to these albums the way other people come back to records they loved in high school. I’ve always been weird about vinyl. There’s something tactile about it that digital never quite matched, even if the sound quality argument is probably half nostalgia and half real. You put on a record and you’re committing to sitting with it for a while. You flip it. You read the credits. It’s a ritual. So when game soundtracks started getting pressed to vinyl—when you could actually own Earthworm Jim’s theme on wax, actually hold VA-11 Hall-A as a physical object—something clicked. Black Screen Records out of Cologne figured this out early. They’ve been pressing game soundtracks since the beginning, everything from tiny indie games to bigger stuff. Oddworld, Hyper Light Drifter, Furi—the catalog has range. The albums look clean. The sound is clean. If you care about both games and records, you end up there eventually. I’m not sure what I’m buying anymore—the music or the idea. Probably both. There’s something about owning a physical copy of a game’s soundtrack that makes it matter more, makes it feel less like background noise. It stops being disposable the moment it’s on wax. Tuesday, 24 April 2018. The S5: Sunday around noon on the S5, packed car between Jannowitzbrücke and Ostbahnhof. A 36-year-old woman is giving her 38-year-old friend a blowjob. Kids are somewhere on the train, tourists are around, and she’s just going for it—no hesitation, mouth working, dick out in public. Commitment to the act. I’ll give her that. An 18-year-old passenger says something. Tells them to stop. This is where the woman decides to become a problem. Instead of pulling up his pants and shuffling away embarrassed, she goes feral. Curses the girl out, then hits her square in the face. The boyfriend jumps in, starts punching the girl’s 19-year-old friend. The woman’s partner joins the fight. Three on two in a moving train car, and nobody’s backing down. Someone pulls the emergency brake when they hit Ostbahnhof. A witness actually grabbed one of the guys—held him by the shirt while his dick was still hanging out of his pants, keeping him from lunging back. The kids got bruised, scratched up, nothing serious. The couple ran. Cops found the woman from the footage, her boyfriend turned himself in. The usual charges: public indecency, assault, insult. What strikes me is how fast it turned. Not the sex itself—fine, people are animals, people are horny, I get it. But the violence. The absolute refusal to feel caught or embarrassed or wrong. Just go straight to throwing punches at teenagers. The entitlement is staggering. Like being interrupted was the transgression, not them fucking six inches from someone’s child. Berlin’s got this reputation for not giving a shit what you do. Maybe that’s real. Or maybe it means you can do whatever you want until someone has the nerve to call you on it, and then it’s a free-for-all. I’ve been in cities where everybody minds their own business, and I’ve been in places where the response to any chaos is immediate and brutal. Berlin splits the difference—anything goes until it doesn’t, then suddenly you’re on the floor bleeding and the cops are asking questions. The couple probably got fined or community service. They’re still together, probably. Maybe they found a better spot—a parked car, somewhere dark, somewhere they won’t get interrupted. Maybe they stopped doing it entirely. I have no idea. What I know is the S5 was packed again the next day with fresh passengers in the same seats, nobody thinking about what happened there, and whatever they left behind got wiped clean by someone who doesn’t ask questions. Tuesday, 24 April 2018. Mario in Hyrule: I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to play one of these games as someone else. What if Mega Man was here instead, or Samus. You imagine it for a second and move on. A YouTuber named Kaze Emanuar actually did it. He merged Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—both N64 games from the late 90s, both locked in my head as separate monuments—so Mario wanders through Hyrule trying to find Peach. The weird part is how well it works. I watched clips expecting it to fall apart, Mario too big for the spaces or the controls fighting the landscape or the puzzles wrong for his body. None of that happened. He feels native to Hyrule. The design philosophy is close enough that you’re not fighting the swap, you’re just living in someone else’s memory. I think that’s because of how N64 games were made. Same hardware moment, same ideas about weight and space and momentum in 3D. When you open them up and let them talk to each other, they don’t clash. There’s a language they both speak. I haven’t actually played it, just watched clips, but I keep coming back to it. There’s this weird pull that isn’t quite nostalgia. It’s more like someone rearranging furniture in a room you lived in and you realizing the room was bigger than you thought. You know these games inside out. Seeing them braided together makes you want to go back and look for the gaps, the seams you could have fallen through. Tuesday, 24 April 2018. Still Hearing Tico: There’s still that feeling when you hear them. Any of the themes. Tico, Lady Oscar, Sailor Moon—one chord of the opening and I’m eight years old again, sitting on the floor in front of an old television set. That was the thing about German TV in the nineties. They just played anime straight through the afternoons. No apologies, no self-consciousness. They treated these shows like they were the most important thing on the schedule, and I believed them. RTL2, VIVA, whichever channel had whatever time slot—the afternoons all bled together. Tico one day, Mila Superstar the next, Lady Oscar, Monster Rancher. The openings weren’t filler. They had real melodies. Emotional precision. The kind of songs that made you feel like you needed to be brave about something, to fight for what mattered, to become someone worth becoming. I’m sitting around now, decades later, and a certain synth line will surface in a sample or a memory will conjure it, and there’s this immediate ache. Not the soft kind of nostalgia. More like a tuning fork—something about those melodies was calibrated to exactly the frequency of what I needed to hear at that specific age. The resonance never quite faded. The openings weren’t trying to charm you. They were trying to make you feel something real. They did. They still do. Monday, 23 April 2018. Nemes × Galfy: Harajuku, Shibuya, Shimokitazawa. Spend enough time in Tokyo’s shopping districts and you understand something about how young Japanese people see clothes. They don’t try harder or have more money; they just see something different on the street. A style emerges overseas, and within months Tokyo has already torn it apart and reassembled it into something that looks nothing like the original but feels inevitable. The Nemes and Galfy collaboration is exactly that move. Blues, blacks, reds—t-shirts, caps, jackets with white text and hard-edged logos. The kind of drop that matters to people who actually care. Zen-La-Rock, a rapper with real credibility in those circles, got behind it, which tells you something about the intent. What holds my attention is the mechanism. Overseas style arrives, gets filtered through Japanese street culture, and comes back out as something that feels both foreign and absolutely rooted. The pieces are stark and simple. The intention is clear—this is for a specific audience. The familiar story: you discover it, you wear it in the right neighborhood, suddenly you’re part of something else. Or you just have better clothes than everyone around you. There’s something satisfying about watching it work in real time. The underground doesn’t stay underground long, but that’s never really the point. Tokyo keeps remixing. It keeps landing. Monday, 23 April 2018. Ethan Klein Gets It: I catch myself rewatching H3H3’s back catalog instead of starting something new on Netflix that could theoretically change my life. If YouTube disappeared tomorrow I honestly wouldn’t care—or I would care so little I wouldn’t have words for it. Only one channel would actually hurt to lose. Ethan Klein does this thing where he takes the genuinely insane present moment and punctures it with real precision. He and Hila run the show like they’re watching the world come apart and just trying to set it down a little straighter, without taking themselves seriously about any of it. What makes it work is the mix. Mutated memes rubbing against actual analysis. Viral videos getting contextualized against what’s actually broken in media and culture. They’re not afraid to be crude or mean when the moment calls for it, and they don’t apologize for finding something funny that maybe you’re supposed to find distasteful. That’s the whole point. I don’t know who I’d be without H3H3. Someone more credulous, probably. More likely to believe whatever stupid idea gets packaged nicely and handed to me. They do something that feels rare now—they’re demonstrably smart without performing intelligence, sharp without being bitter about it. That matters. Monday, 23 April 2018. Just Filler: I got a free Netflix subscription a few years ago and genuinely thought my entertainment problems were solved. Unlimited everything, instant access. That lasted until I’d watched Stranger Things and Breaking Bad and the handful of other shows that didn’t feel like a waste of time. After that it was just scrolling through hundreds of options looking for anything that didn’t seem designed for someone else. Last night I was watching this French film where a divorced woman brings home a new boyfriend and her adult son has a fit about it. Somewhere in the middle of the thing—a sex scene, a conversation about menopause, I stopped paying attention—I just checked out and thought: why am I here? The movie was basically made for middle-aged women who think crude jokes about fucking are hilarious. I’m not that person. The actor means nothing to me. So why was I watching this? Because there’s nothing else. That’s the actual answer. After you’ve burned through the good stuff—which takes maybe two months of regular watching—Netflix is just filler. Expensive, professionally made filler, sure, but filler nonetheless. I scrolled through my watch history the other day and felt physically ill. Ghost Wars. Game Over, Man. Extinction. None of it was worth the minutes. None of it warranted existing. But they keep making more. Love. The End of the F***ing World. These hollow shows that all melt together by the time you’ve watched three. And the revival shows are somehow worse—Gilmore Girls coming back for a season nobody asked for. It’s pasta thrown at the wall. Enough of it sticks to keep the whole thing afloat, but most of it’s just waste. The other streaming services have the same problem dressed up differently. Prime Video makes shows nobody wants to finish. Maxdome is where people who’ve never heard of Netflix go to waste time. The whole model demands volume, which means quality dies and you end up with an infinite amount of something that makes you feel less satisfied than boredom would have. I could fix this a dozen different ways. Different regions, better VPN, actually leave the house. Those all miss the point. The real issue is that I’m subscribed to a service designed to fill my downtime, and it’s working. I sit there scrolling until I give up and click something just to have noise in the room, some proof that I’m not completely alone with my thoughts. That’s the actual trap. The solution isn’t a better streaming service. It’s just not doing this. Unsubscribe. Spend the money on literally anything else. Read something. Call someone. Sit with your thoughts without mediation. There’s a whole internet that doesn’t charge a subscription, and a lot of it is worth your time. You just have to want it badly enough to look. Monday, 23 April 2018. Done For Me: Charlie Puth’s “Done For Me” is fine—it’s a clean production, the kind of song that exists because it’s easy to make and people like to listen to it. But the video is different because Kehlani’s in it, dancing through the whole thing. She moves with this kind of control that isn’t flashy or tryhard, just efficient and confident, the movement of someone who’s figured out how to fill a frame. You watch her instead of watching the song, which is probably not what Puth intended but it’s what happens. She’s had kind of a rough ride the last few years with all the public stuff, so there’s something about watching her just move through a video with that kind of ease that feels earned. Not defiant, not performative—just present. Sunday, 22 April 2018. By the Kamo: I spent time in Kyoto and understood why it gets under your skin. Tokyo was relentless—too loud, too much, too fast. Kyoto is different. Everything moves slower there, the air feels older, and you stop trying to keep up with the city and just let it happen around you. The city was the imperial seat for over a thousand years, which means something—not in a romantic way, just as fact. There’s weight in the old streets. Modern shops blur into ancient temples. A manga store sits next to a narrow bar that’s probably been there since before manga existed. Geishas in full dress walk past blinking arcades. It shouldn’t work but it does. The thing about Kyoto is that the old stuff doesn’t feel like it’s being preserved for tourists. It feels like it’s just how the city decides to be. The traditions are still alive because people still live them, not because someone decided to keep them alive. You notice it when you walk—the city isn’t frozen. It’s considered. Like someone’s paying attention to whether it stays in balance. Everything they tell you to see is worth seeing. But what actually stays with you is walking by the Kamo River at dusk, the light turning, and the sudden understanding that you don’t need to be anywhere. That’s when Kyoto gets you. Sunday, 22 April 2018. Gundam Narrative: I grew up knowing about Gundam the way you know about something woven into a culture—enormous robots standing in Japanese plazas, merchandise everywhere, a universe someone created in 1979 and kept building on without stopping. Nearly fifty years of it, so embedded in the country’s identity that it sits alongside things that took centuries to form. The scale is honestly ridiculous. TV series, films, manga, restaurants, theme parks, action figures with more detail than some sculptures. It stopped being just a franchise at some point and became part of how people actually think about themselves. The stories work on the surface—kids pilot giant robots, wars happen, deaths follow. But the better entries find something heavier underneath: what happens when you’re told you have to pilot something capable of destroying everything around you? What do you become? Unicorn found it. Iron-Blooded Orphans found it. Even the older work has moments where the weight is real. Gundam Narrative arrives in November as part of whatever their timeline project is called now. More kids, more space, more impossible choices in the cockpit. I’m curious what angle they’ll find, what fresh way to ask the same question about breaking points and what you carry after the fighting stops. Saturday, 21 April 2018. Keep Up: Kourtney Kardashian took her clothes off for V Magazine. This is apparently still news. The theory seems to be that you need to either die or get naked to stay in the conversation anymore, and she went with the second option. I know who the Kardashians are because I was forced to watch their show at some point. You sit down thinking maybe it’ll be entertainingly bad, and you just feel stupider afterwards. But it sticks. The Kardashians become this permanent part of the landscape, like a billboard you drive past without thinking about it. Kourtney’s always been the sensible one, the oldest, the one who seemed like she didn’t want to be there. I had this whole theory that she was just tolerating the family business. Maybe she still is. But here she is anyway, naked in a magazine, doing what everyone else does now. There’s an interview attached about her kids and makeup. That’s not why they took the pictures. I stopped caring about it a while ago. It’s just the mechanics now—you trade your privacy for attention, your body for relevance, and nobody flinches anymore. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe I’m just tired of watching it happen. Saturday, 21 April 2018. ATM: “I fell in love with big wheels and fast kicks, made no thoughts about it, it might kill me, I just count a lot of money.” That’s J. Cole on “ATM,” over a trap beat that’s almost austere—controlled, nothing wasted. He’s not lecturing about materialism; he’s confessing to it. Naming the specific trap of wanting things you already know won’t save you. The production choice is everything. Cole could’ve surrounded this with all the excess the lyrics describe. Instead the beat stays minimal, the mix has air. You can hear him breathing between lines. It’s the counterpoint to what he’s rapping, which is the entire point. The video reinforces it. Just Cole in an empty room, rapping. No jewelry, no cars, no luxury aesthetic. Nothing to distract from the confession. This kind of clarity only works when you have something worth saying, and he does. What sticks is how the form and content aren’t fighting each other. When they’re in alignment. That’s harder to pull off than complicated ideas. It’s discipline, and discipline is design. Saturday, 21 April 2018. No Tears Left To Cry: “No Tears Left To Cry” came out in summer 2018, about a year after the bombing at her Manchester concert. Twenty-three people dead. Over five hundred hurt. She’d dropped out of sight after that, which made sense—you don’t come back from something like that on a normal timeline. When the song finally showed up, it wasn’t trying to mean anything. Just a song, relatively stripped back for her, with space around her voice. “I’ve got no tears left to cry”—she’s singing it like she’s stating fact, not making some grand declaration about resilience or overcoming. There’s exhaustion in it. The exhaustion of having felt everything and having nothing left. Her voice has always done this thing where melody feels conversational, like she’s just thinking through the lyric as she sings it. I’ve liked that about her for years. But this landed differently because of what came before it, the weight of the year she’d had. You hear that tiredness and it matters. Everyone wanted to talk about healing, about her return being this triumph over tragedy. Fair enough. But what actually stuck was simpler: she made a song because that’s what she does. Not as therapy. As work. As the only thing that probably made sense anymore. That was enough for me. Friday, 20 April 2018. Domino: I fell asleep during the first Deadpool. Combination of weed, pizza, and the kind of exhaustion that hits without warning. I remember the opening being solid, then I woke up at the credits. Not the kind of experience that makes you clamor for more. Wasn’t planning to see the sequel. I’ve got a backlog of actual important things to watch before I run out of time. But then the Deadpool 2 trailer hit and something shifted. One character. One person. Domino. Zazie Beetz as Domino absolutely captured me in a way that was almost stupid. I could feel myself getting into it and not really caring who knew. Ryan Reynolds is doing his whole hot-guy-with-jokes thing and fine, sure, I see it, whatever—he’s doing his job. But Domino. That’s the character that made me think, yeah, I’m going to sit in a theater for two hours and watch this. So I went because of her. That was the entire motivation. That was the whole reason I bought a ticket. And I’m completely fine with that being the story. No apologies, no pretense. I wanted to watch Domino and so I did. Friday, 20 April 2018. Supreme and Lacoste Made a Polo: I stopped paying attention to Supreme years ago. Nothing against them—I just got tired of tracking what was going to cost three hundred dollars on Grailed next week. But I saw something about a Lacoste collab, and it made me wonder what that even means anymore. Lacoste is your grandfather’s polo brand. Heritage. Real credentials. Supreme started as a skate shop in New York in 1994, the kind of place where kids would roll up just to see what was dropping that week. James Jebbia somehow turned it into a billion-dollar empire. The red box logo became the thing everyone wanted. Hoodies from ten years ago go for four times retail now. What’s strange is that Supreme stayed cool the whole time. Brands don’t usually survive their own success that clean. They get quiet, they get desperate, they stop mattering. But Supreme kept being exclusive. Kept being scarce. Kept making you feel like you were in on something. And somehow that never got old. Now Lacoste wants in. They did a collection together—reimagined polos, probably some other stuff. Heritage brands don’t usually need to team up with newer companies. They’re the foundation. They have pedigree. But Supreme’s cultural capital is worth more than a century of tennis authenticity now, and Lacoste knows it. They brought what credibility they have hoping some of the weird hype would stick. There’s something honest about it. Lacoste’s basically saying that what Supreme figured out—scarcity, exclusivity, the feeling that you’re inside something—that’s the real currency now. Not because the polos are better. Just because they’re rare and they’re cool and having them still means something. But how much longer? That’s the thing I wonder. Supreme’s been getting older for twenty years now. Hype doesn’t age well. Eventually people get tired of paying for emptiness. Eventually the red box logo is just a box again. Lacoste’s betting against that happening. I guess we’ll see. Friday, 20 April 2018. Tim Bergling: Avicii’s dead. Tim Bergling, the Swedish producer, found in Muscat at twenty-eight. No detail about how, no explanation, just gone. I caught “Wake Me Up” in a Berlin club in 2014, not the kind of place I usually end up in, but the track pulled the whole room into the same moment. Avicii had this quality where euphoria sounded like grief, or maybe the other way around—everything tilted at an angle. His production was raw sometimes, almost acoustic, like he was trying to make dance music out of fingerpicking and heartbreak. He collaborated with the obvious names—Daft Punk, Eric Prydz, Steve Angello—but never sounded like anyone else. He started young, making beats as a teenager. The stage name came from the Buddhist concept of hell, which either works as dark humor or complete prophecy depending on how you look at it. Won a music competition in 2008, signed deals, and ten years later he was producing some of the most heard tracks in the world. “Levels,” “Wake Me Up,” “Lonely Together.” Songs that moved through every club and festival, designed to make a crowd feel the same thing at the same time. What strikes me is the trajectory. Kid starts with a C64 remix, somehow ends up making music with Daft Punk, then burns out trying to find a life that doesn’t revolve around being Tim Bergling in front of crowds. He’d been sick, stepped back from touring, and then he just wasn’t here anymore. All the clubs are still playing his tracks. People are still dancing to it, still feeling that moment of suspension he built. I think about that a lot. Friday, 20 April 2018. Back to Tape: I watched this documentary called Back to Tape the other day—Niko Hüls driving around Germany talking to the people who made Hip Hop actually exist there. I was braced for the usual history-lesson thing, but what I got was something quieter. Just a road trip through the places where the music lives: Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Rödelheim, the towns and backyards where it all got built. German Hip Hop wasn’t supposed to work. Cro, Casper, Alligatoah came later and made it undeniable, but before that it was Toni-L and Advanced Chemistry, Moses Pelham, Samy Deluxe—people in basements and backyards making something that had no reason to exist in Germany except that they decided it would. The documentary doesn’t march through this like a history book. It just visits. Rödelheim in 1993, the moment everything seems to crystallize, Niko listening to Moses Pelham explain how it actually happened. That click-into-place feeling. What struck me was how real the interviews are. Namika talking about how Hip Hop absorbs the world, how multicultural influence isn’t something you add on, it’s what the music actually is. Curse, Roger, Scotty76, Duan Wasi, Beat Boy Delles, David P—none of them performing history, just living it, talking about the years when the streets changed. That stuff has always interested me, the way music shapes and reshapes a place, the way urban culture actually moves. The documentary does this thing where it trusts the road. Doesn’t oversell the story or try to make it bigger than it needs to be. Just drives, listens, watches. There’s something honest about that approach. The pulse of German Hip Hop doesn’t need framing—it needs visiting. Thursday, 19 April 2018. What She Figured Out: For what Michael Jackson or the Beatles are to some people, Lykke Li is to me—not a comparison that lands on anyone else, just the truth about what I listen for. Everything she makes is exactly right on every level. We waited too long for something new. Not that the old records go anywhere. “Youth Novels,” “Wounded Rhymes,” “I Never Learn” just get better with time. But life moves on, and so does she. Two new songs now: “Deep End” and “Hard Rain,” from an album called “so sad so sexy” out June 8th. Her music doesn’t reveal itself on the first listen. You’re hearing sound but not really landing on anything yet. Come back a few times and it shifts. A melody you missed before, a line that suddenly matters. That’s by design. She doesn’t explain anything. You have to meet her there. I’ve been waiting to know what she figured out in the quiet. The answer is still Lykke Li—still the only voice worth listening to, still the one that makes the world feel coherent. Always worth the wait. Thursday, 19 April 2018. All of Them: I’ve watched this show so many times that I can recite the dialogue, but there’s still this moment in season two where something happens between Mamoru and Bunny that I can’t get over. It makes me genuinely upset, and I think about it at three in the morning sometimes, sitting up in bed wondering why he couldn’t just explain himself. Thirty years later and it still bothers me. The thing is, I love every single character in this show. Not in a diplomatic way where I’m forcing myself to appreciate them—genuinely, absolutely love them all, even the villains. So the idea of ranking them feels impossible to me. Bunny’s my favorite, obviously, but there’s no second place. Everyone’s a first-place character. I could tell you about specific episodes or scenes that matter most to me, but I’d end up listing all of them. There’s no filler in my head when it comes to Sailor Moon. Every episode is the best episode because they all have something that gets to me. Part of it’s pure design and craft. The character work in this show—how each person looks, moves, speaks—is so precise that you can’t dismiss anyone. They’re all perfectly realized. But it goes beyond that. Sailor Moon understands something about how people actually are that a lot of other things miss. Everything in it works. I want to talk about this show constantly. All the rankings and top tens I’ve read—none of them match what I actually think, but I read them anyway because I’ll take any excuse to think about these characters more. It’s not about proving anything. It’s just permanent. You can’t rank what you love this much, but you can’t stop either, which means every list is just another way of admitting you’re obsessed. Some of them get it right anyway. Wednesday, 18 April 2018. When Facebook Stopped Mattering: Woke up one morning and half my audience was gone. Facebook had changed their algorithm again—pushed friends and family higher, buried anything with a link. So anyone who followed me there was suddenly not seeing my posts. I panicked. Everyone else publishing online was panicking too. We’d built our readership partly on that platform, and they’d just shut the door. Then I checked the traffic numbers. They were up. Way up. The homepage alone had grown by 5000 percent. Five thousand. People had apparently decided they didn’t need Facebook to find me. They just went directly to the website. Used a browser. Did the thing that was always possible but felt impossible after years of relying on social algorithms to deliver your audience. It’s obvious in retrospect. People could always find me without Facebook. But algorithms make you forget you have other options. They promise to deliver your readers to you, and you believe it until the moment they don’t. And then you feel ghosted by a platform. Which you were. But that’s not actually the relationship you need. What surprised me more than the traffic increase was the quality. People coming from direct visits clicked through more articles, spent more time on the site. Better engagement across the board. Someone typing in a URL is already committed, already choosing to be here. Not just doomscrolling and accidentally landing on a link. I could have deleted the Facebook page then. Everyone was saying delete Facebook anyway. But here’s the problem: advertisers still look at social numbers. They still use follower counts as a viability metric, even though none of that actually translates to revenue. Kill the page and you become harder to sell to sponsors. And I need sponsorships more than I need to make a moral point. So the page still runs. An algorithm pushes my posts to maybe thirty people a week. A handful. Real people though, who found me without being prompted, without an algorithm deciding it was a good time to show them. And that matters more than I expected. The whole thing is backwards—I’m more successful after losing the platform that was supposed to distribute my work—but it’s cleaner somehow. No waiting for permission. No performing for an algorithm’s amusement. Just here, and the people who want to be here know where to find me. Wednesday, 18 April 2018. When NEON Died: I read NEON completely—front to back, then back to front, hunting for details I’d missed. The reporting on dreams, the talk about sex that didn’t flinch, the strange honesty about what it felt like to be alive online. Every month it found the exact nerve to touch. Then somewhere I stopped being the person it was written for. I’d outgrown it, and that was fine. NEON started in 2003 with a question disguised as a statement: “Actually, we should be growing up.” The magazine lived in that contradiction—the space between youth and forced adulthood, between wanting to stay reckless and knowing you can’t forever. For fifteen years it was the only place that seemed to understand that feeling completely. Not gossip or trends. Real thinking about dreams, about what living actually felt like, about the strangeness of becoming someone when you’re not ready. The closure came down to numbers. Fewer readers. The subscription base drying up. The generation that should have replaced the old one had found other places. Editor Ruth Fend announced it with a kind of brutal honesty that felt right. She spoke directly to readers: you’ve moved on, you’ve grown up, and not enough young people came after you. That’s the truth. That’s when you let something go. When I reread her words, I thought about the old issues on my shelf. The ones I still pick up sometimes. They’re from a version of me I’m not anymore, but when I’m inside them I recognize the thinking. Ideas from writers I didn’t know became part of how I thought. This blog—everything I do here—comes partly from seeing what NEON did. Not in any direct way. Just knowing it was possible to write about life in a way that felt true. They showed me that. I owe them something for it. The final issue comes out in June. Ruth promised a last look back, a celebration and goodbye both. The kind of thing you do when you’re leaving something you made and you want to hold it one more time before you let it go. NEON goes digital, which is what nearly everything does now. The chances exist there, but so does the noise. What dies is the physical magazine. The thing on a rack, the weight in your hands, the front cover you see before you’ve decided whether to buy it. That’s not replaceable. A website can do similar work but it’s not the same. When something like that ends, it takes a piece of time with it. That specific feeling of being a particular age, reading a particular magazine that knew exactly who you were. That’s gone now. The world keeps moving. The magazine doesn’t. That’s all. Wednesday, 18 April 2018. The Lights Come On: The AfD—Germany’s far-right nationalist party—decided they need to shut down the Berghain’s darkroom because people are having sex in it. Which is, you know, exactly what the darkroom is for. Not corrupt housing policy, not a broken healthcare system, not anything that actually matters. Just sex in a dark room that needs their immediate legislative attention. An AfD city council member named Sibylle Schmidt submitted an actual official proposal with actual demands, delivered in absolute deadpan sincerity. Revoke the club’s license entirely, or at minimum install lights in the darkroom to prevent sexual activity. Cap operating hours at 10 PM to 6 AM—as if that means anything to a place that’s been running around the clock forever. Ban drugs. Make sure staff are carefully managing customer wellbeing. The whole thing reads like someone’s fever dream of authoritarian nightclub management, complete with rhetoric about drug abuse and young women in hospital beds. She actually connected the dots from “people fuck in the dark” to “public health crisis.” For anyone not tracking German nightlife: Berghain is this legendary industrial techno club in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The whole mythology is built on anonymity, freedom, darkness. You go in and you’re untethered—sexually, chemically, however. The door policy is famously brutal and opaque. They don’t want your Instagram. They don’t want you performing. That’s the entire thing. You can’t replicate that in a space that’s been neutered with bright lights and restricted hours and staff monitoring your state of mind. What gets me is the actual sincerity underneath the absurdity. Schmidt isn’t joking around. She wrote this all down, submitted it through official channels, genuinely believes this is how you solve problems. The moral panic is so clean, so transparent. Somewhere, adults are having sex without permission, and the state must intervene. Full stop. Nothing’s going to happen. The Berghain isn’t going anywhere. But that’s not the point for the AfD. The point is the gesture itself—we’re the party of order, of traditional values, the ones who’ll protect you from darkrooms full of horny anarchists. Even when defending those values means arguing that consenting adults should be denied a space to be free. Even when it requires state-mandated brightness and bathroom monitoring in the name of public safety. There’s this thing that exhausts me about it, which is just having to keep asserting that people get to fuck in the dark, with whoever they want, however they want. That this is still worth fighting for. That it’s still remarkable to have a space where that freedom exists without apology or justification. Wednesday, 18 April 2018. Just There: There’s a photoshoot by John Joseph Estevez I can’t stop looking at. He photographed Guadi Galano, an Argentine model, for something called “Dip.” Three simple settings: a pool, a lake, an apartment flooded with light. She’s topless in all of them. Cigarette burning, glass in hand, that’s the whole concept. What gets me is how unbothered it all is. She’s not performing ease or trying to make a statement about freedom or the body. She’s just sitting there with a cigarette and whatever’s in her glass, letting the light do its thing. No agenda. No performance. No reason for any of it beyond the moment itself. I think people respond to photographs like this because they’re the opposite of everything else we look at. Most imagery of bodies is working toward something—a story, an emotion, an idea you’re supposed to take away. These images just watch and don’t add anything to what they’re watching. The cigarette is just a cigarette. The light is just light. She’s just there. There’s something about that restraint that feels true. Estevez could have narrated these images a dozen different ways, but he didn’t. He just looked and shot. That’s the whole thing. Tuesday, 17 April 2018. The Highlight Reel: I stopped watching the Echo Awards years ago. The reasons should be obvious by now. Not the Holocaust jokes or the self-satisfied rappers or the musicians who suddenly develop a conscience and return their awards—that’s all surface noise. What actually killed it for me is that the whole thing is just an incestuous machine celebrating mediocrity, with zero interest in who these people are or what they’ve made. It’s not a music award. It’s an industry congratulating itself once a year. The Oscars do the same. Just a yearly farce with better lighting and more history to hide behind. The Echo just repeats itself into irrelevance. Then Klaas Heufer-Umlauf’s “Late Night Berlin” did something perfect. They took the actual highlights from the ceremony and cut them together. If you’ve ever seen those videos where someone mutes a music video and you suddenly hear the ambient silence and crowd noise, you understand what happened next. Yawning. One person clapping. Everyone staring at nothing, killing time. The Echo Awards, completely bare. It was the best critique possible because it wasn’t a critique at all. Just footage. Just what actually happened. Tuesday, 17 April 2018. Art of a Champion: I went to an exhibition in Berlin—Nike, Jordan, and Converse had commissioned sixteen artists to interpret sixteen legendary basketball moments. The Kickz store hosted it. There was a party with decent drinks and people who knew what they were looking at. Sneakers are the right object for this kind of thing. They’re where design and athletic achievement actually touch—literally where someone stood when they did something impossible. You can see a painting of a famous moment and understand it, but then you see the actual shoe worn in it, and something changes. That’s material history. What’s interesting about sneaker culture, at least the parts of it that matter, is how it refuses to separate the object from the fandom. A sneaker has to work. It has to be built right. And it has to look good. When all three align, you get something that carries weight beyond just being a shoe. The gallery context was useful. You’re not shopping, you’re not aspiring to own anything in particular. You’re just standing there with the shoes and the artwork, forced to think about why these moments got translated into visual form in the first place. Why sixteen artists felt the need to say something about them. The answer is obvious—because they were worth saying something about—but it’s easy to forget that. Berlin and Kickz do this better than most places. There’s a version of sneaker culture everywhere that’s lifestyle branding, aspirational, trying to turn taste into a product. This isn’t that. It’s the object itself, treated as the object, with no distance between the people running it and what they’re displaying. That’s rarer than it should be. Tuesday, 17 April 2018. Gucci Gang: “Gucci Gang” is a stupid song. It’s fourteen seconds of Lil Pump saying “Gucci Gang” over and over, and somehow in 2017 that was the entire joke and also the entire point. You either got it or you were the person at the party complaining about music while everyone else was laughing at how dumb it was. Lil Pump was this kid from Florida who showed up on SoundCloud with zero training and maximum delusion. “D Rose,” “Boss,” and then “Gucci Gang”—each one dumber and more confident than the last. The confidence is what got you. He’d go on interviews talking about how he’s going to be the biggest thing ever, how he’s already made it, how he’s not even in his final form yet. You could tell he actually believed it. There was no irony shield, no winking at the camera. Just pure, uncut belief in Lil Pump. That was the appeal and also why it wouldn’t last. The whole thing was built on youth and luck and the internet being weird for a moment. He’d associated himself with Smokepurpp, Lil Yachty, Chief Keef—people with actual staying power or actual weirdness that went deeper than production quality. But Pump was just a kid who’d figured out how to make a meme into a song. What I remember about that moment isn’t the music. It’s the confidence of someone with zero reason to be confident. No chops, no years behind him, no real skillset—just a YouTube view count and an absolute certainty that the world owed him something. In another context that would be pathetic. But in 2017, on SoundCloud, when everything was absurd anyway, it was kind of perfect. He made being a complete amateur into the whole point. Nothing lasts. “Gucci Gang” is already this thing that happened, this moment you either were there for or you weren’t. I don’t even know if Lil Pump is doing anything now and I don’t particularly care. But for like six months there was this absolute commitment to dumbness that felt honest in a way most things don’t. He meant every word of the delusion. That’s rarer than you’d think. Monday, 16 April 2018. She Still Can’t Help It: She’s been trying to seem respectable and serious lately. Gone are the days when she’d piss on streets naked, flash her body in magazines, move her genitals around MTV shows just to watch everyone lose their minds. That was the interesting Miley Cyrus. Except you can’t actually leave that behind. Or you don’t want to. This past weekend at Coachella she was posting Instagram stories, and in one she’s standing in front of a big Hollyweed sign, sipping a smoothie with her underboob just hanging out. And there she is. The girl who doesn’t care what she’s supposed to be. Still in there. Still refusing to perform the respectability thing. I don’t know if she’ll ever actually stick with being a serious adult or if this is just how she works—a few years of acting respectable before the old Miley breaks through again. But I’m always more interested in the moments when she drops the act. Monday, 16 April 2018. Never Gets Old: P-Thugg hides Dave 1 under the bed when his girlfriend shows up. It’s a dumb move, the kind of thing you do at seventeen because you panic. They’re doing it in 2018 in the “Must’ve Been” video, both in their thirties, and it still works because some people never really grow out of that instinct. Chromeo’s been this way since 2004. Montreal and New York, Dave 1 and P-Thugg, funk music at a time when that wasn’t what people wanted to hear. They found an audience anyway—the kind of people who understand that a good groove is a way of saying you’re not alone. Their stuff doesn’t try to be important. It just wants to make a room feel less empty for a while. The video tracks them backward through time: 1988 as kids, 1998 as teenagers, then the present. Each decade has the same joke, the same vibe. It’s not trying to say anything profound about friendship or growing up. It’s just saying that some people don’t change, and sometimes that’s okay. DRAM handles vocals, Jesse Johnson’s on guitar with the kind of funky lines that actually matter. The song works the way Chromeo songs work—it lands where it’s supposed to, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and leaves you feeling a little better than you did before. The groove doesn’t age. Neither do they. Monday, 16 April 2018. April in Palm Springs: April in Palm Springs always smells like sunscreen and desperation. The Levi’s pool party at the Colony Palms landed right on the Coachella weekend, which meant everyone had already filled the desert into their plans and was just waiting for an excuse to show up. Snoop Dogg and Heron Preston handled the music—the kind of celebrity DJ energy that doesn’t require your attention, everyone too busy with phones and drinks to really listen anyway. The guest list was what you’d expect: the LA rotation, the beautiful people who show up at every poolside event between April and September. Artists and athletes and models and everyone in between, faces you recognize and faces you don’t. Eventually it all blurs. Brunch happened, drinks were free, the Levi’s branding sat somewhere in the middle, but mostly it was a pool and tan skin and that particular California light that makes everything feel temporary. It’s the moment when the year actually starts here, not January. The festival circuit opens up, and for a couple months everyone moves into the desert doing the same party over and over—same beats, different sponsors. You know by September you’ll be tired of it. You know it’s not sustainable. But that’s the deal, the one you make when you live somewhere this absurd. Monday, 16 April 2018. Billie Doesn’t Care: I’m probably too old to think a sixteen-year-old is this cool, but Billie Eilish has something most people never develop: she genuinely doesn’t care. Not the performative kind of not-caring where you care very much about seeming like you don’t care. The actual thing. She was born into a creative family in Los Angeles—actor father, musician mother—and started making music almost by accident with her older brother Finneas. By the time she was old enough to deal with the machinery of the music industry, she was already fully formed. A full name that reads like a joke (Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell) and a personality to match. What strikes people, what bothers them, is that she refuses the script. Don’t dress like a pop star. Don’t smile for the cameras. Don’t apologize for your words or soften your opinions for your audience. There are always people telling you what you should be—especially if you’re young and in the public eye. They tell you how to dress, who to be nice to, what kind of woman you should become. Billie just… doesn’t listen. I can’t tell if it’s confidence or if she’s genuinely too indifferent to pretend. Either way, it works. It makes her interesting in a way that manufactured perfection never could. Everyone else is trying so hard to say the right thing, wear the right thing, hit the right note. She’s just living, making music with her brother, wearing what she wants, saying fuck off to the rest of it. The haters exist, sure. They always do. But they’re noise. She talks about it the way you’d talk about background traffic—acknowledged, filtered out, no energy spent. That’s the rarest thing in the world right now. Everyone’s desperate to be liked, to be understood, to explain themselves. Billie got old early in that particular way. I don’t know if it’ll last. Probably won’t—the machinery usually wins. But right now, at sixteen, she’s figured out something that takes most people decades, if they figure it out at all. And that’s actually worth paying attention to. Sunday, 15 April 2018. Only Spring: Spring’s the only season that makes sense in Tokyo. Winter flattens everything to gray, summer’s unbearable—either the heat wraps around you like a wet towel or it’s raining sideways for a week. Autumn’s fine if you like melancholy. But spring is the only window where you can exist outside without losing your mind to temperature or water. The cherry blossoms are half of it. Everyone knows about them, but walking through Harajuku when they’re falling is something else. For a couple of weeks the city’s just carpeted in them. Petals in everything. Then there’s what people wear. That’s when you see it clearest—the moment Tokyo remembers it has permission to use color. The kids in Harajuku aren’t celebrating, they’re done waiting. Neon, clashing patterns, things that would look absurd any other month feel like the only reasonable response. Dog, Sagi Dolls, Sankuanz—brands change but the principle stays the same: brightness as refusal. I think about this when I’m designing. There’s something about a seasonal reset that lets people be louder. Makes me wonder what we’re all sitting on the rest of the year. Sunday, 15 April 2018. Every Controller Ever: I’ve held so many different controllers in my hands over the years that I couldn’t tell you the exact count anymore. Atari 2600, Master System, NES, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, PlayStation, Virtual Boy, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Xbox, Wii, Switch, and everything after that. It never stops. But somewhere along the way these stopped being just input devices and became the subject of actual honest arguments. Which one fits your hand best. Which is actually comfortable. Which one looks good. How many buttons is too many. Which one survives your messy teenage bedroom and a drunken birthday party without snapping. These things are design objects. Real design. Someone sat down and thought about the curve of your palm against plastic, the weight, where your thumb naturally falls. All of it intentional. I watched this history of controllers once and realized how much you can tell about an era from the shape of its controller—what mattered to designers, what they thought players wanted, what they got wrong. The Super Nintendo one is obviously mine. Perfect proportions. Nothing wasted. It knows what it’s doing. If you’ve been following this blog at all, you probably already knew that. Sunday, 15 April 2018. Eyes Bleeding: Right now there’s an insane amount of genuinely good new music, and I’m barely keeping up, but I fell for Princess Nokia pretty much immediately. Destiny Nicole Frasqueri’s the full name—born in ’92, performing as Princess Nokia—and she makes this laid-back feminist hip-hop that works everywhere. Put on “Metallic Butterfly” or “Honeysuckle” or “1992” and suddenly you’re in a completely different headspace, whether you’re smoking or fucking or just doing dishes. What I respect most is that she doesn’t tolerate any sexism bullshit. During a Cambridge tour stop, she actually got off stage and beat down a heckler who’d been talking shit. That’s not manufactured drama—that’s someone who means every word she’s singing. “Tomboy” is her queer rap anthem and the response is enormous, the kind of thing that tells you something cultural is actually shifting. She just dropped a new mixtape and “Your Eyes Are Bleeding” is the lead single. It’s so hypnotic and chill I’ve had it on repeat for days. The kind of track that makes you want to do anything while it plays—smoke, dance, kiss someone. Eventually I’ll end up smoking with her while this is on, most likely, but right now it’s just one of those listens where the vibe is everything. Sunday, 15 April 2018. The Ones Who Wouldn’t Wait: Instagram used to be a place to post vacation photos. Then it became a tool for anyone with something to say and the nerve to be visible. The feminists got there early. I started noticing it without meaning to. An account that felt different—politics braided into images, arguments made through the body, conversations under selfies that were smarter than most essays. The usual internet noise, but cut through with actual thought. Girls (women, activists, artists—the categories got blurry) who decided not to wait for permission, not to soften themselves, not to perform accessibility. Just: here I am, believe what I believe, look at what I look like, figure it out. The gatekeepers used to control the story. Magazines, institutions, anyone with a printing press or a broadcast license. The internet flattened that. A creator in Berlin could reach someone in São Paulo, and they’d recognize something true in each other’s work. Scale and directness at the same time. No filter, no editorial softening, no committee deciding what was palatable. The ones who got visible this way—publishing themselves, using their bodies and openness as argument—did something that felt impossible before. Not a manifesto, not a structured organization. Just a lot of individual people deciding to exist loudly, and it turned into a thing. Proof that you could be exactly what you were and have thousands of people say, yeah, me too. I think about what that means. Especially as someone watching from outside it. Not part of the movement but aware it’s happening, aware it matters, aware something broke open. The internet didn’t invent feminism or rebellion. But it removed every excuse for hiding it, for performing moderateness, for waiting. Now they’re everywhere. That’s the thing. And you can’t unsee it. Saturday, 14 April 2018. Mega Drive, Small: I was a Sega kid before I switched to Nintendo. The games were something—Sonic, Ecco, Golden Axe, and then the RPGs: Phantasy Star, Landstalker, Shining Force. Games that still make sense when I think about them. So Sega just announced a Mega Drive Mini. Exactly what it sounds like: the whole console shrunk down, pre-loaded with the classics, Sega’s counter to Nintendo’s SNES Classic. I don’t know when it comes out, probably late in the year, but the announcement hit harder than I expected. Here’s the weird thing about these mini consoles. They work perfectly, which makes them feel like something that’s done. You get the game exactly as you remember it—no emulation approximation, no changes—and that exactness turns it into a museum piece. This is what you loved, perfectly preserved. There’s comfort in that. There’s also something kind of sad about it. I’ll grab one when it comes out. Not because I need to replay these games. I’m carrying them around already, in whatever the memory equivalent of muscle memory is. But something about holding that console again, even if it’s a fancy version for adults, feels necessary. Like proof. Saturday, 14 April 2018. After Years Anonymous: He built an entire world of sound and then stayed invisible inside it. Just the voice, the music, no face attached—which in an age of celebrity visibility seems almost impossible now. But The Weeknd had the discipline for it. Mixtapes, production, atmosphere, everything except the person. You had to follow the sound to find him. He’d grown up on R. Kelly, Ginuwine, Prince—artists who understood how to make R&B feel both intimate and dangerous at the same time. That sound was in his ear when he started making music as a teenager. The stage name came from one specific weekend: he dropped out of high school, moved into his first apartment with a friend, and that moment of transition became his name. Everything after that was music. The Selena Gomez moment gave him visibility, whether he needed it or not. But the real work was already there—the mixtapes, the production knowledge, the melodic instinct. When he released “My Dear Melancholy,” the songs came out meticulous and spare. Nothing wasted. “Call Out My Name” is the kind of song that only works if it’s aimed at one specific person, one specific moment. It’s not trying to be universal, just exact. What’s strange is how good the music still sounds now that everyone knows what he looks like. All those years making it from the shadows, and then he steps out and makes something this direct, this exposed. The visibility doesn’t ruin it. He doesn’t seem to need the mystery anymore. The song is just the song. Saturday, 14 April 2018. Naked Again: Playboy was going to stop publishing nudes, which would have been cowardly, so they pivoted back to #NakedIsNormal. This is how we get Nina Daniele, 29, from the Bronx, as the 2018 International Playmate of the Year. Some people I know think the magazine is over—something grotesque and outdated. Fair criticism, maybe. But they’re misreading what Playboy ever was. It was about choice. A woman looks at the magazine, thinks “I could do that,” and a few months later she’s on a global stage with her body celebrated and a substantial paycheck. That’s not oppression. That’s pretty radical, actually. There’s something almost defiant about it. Desire without apology. A body displayed, admired, compensated. The whole transaction probably only feels clean if you don’t interrogate it too thoroughly. But there’s something healthy in that too—in not making everything about complicated feelings and power dynamics. Sometimes it’s just a woman and her body and a magazine and a lot of people looking. That’s not nothing. Saturday, 14 April 2018. A Profound Waste of Time: The glossy magazines with the game covers consumed more of my money than the games themselves. I remember the weight of them, waiting in line at the shop. The smell. The overwrought fonts that made half the text a chore to read. A profound waste of time and money, obviously. Probably why I remember it so clearly. The internet killed all that. Screenshots on demand, reviews updated instantly, wiki guides for everything, and strategy videos. By 2005, physical game magazines were already dead—bleeding out in newsstands, obsolete before the last issue shipped. Except people never quite stopped wanting them. There’s something about paper that a screen can’t touch. You can’t flip through a website the same way. You can’t leave it on the coffee table for someone else to find. You can’t skim while your coffee gets cold in that particular rhythm. “A Profound Waste of Time” launched in May 2018 at around 20 euros—a new print magazine betting that people still cared. Not a buyer’s guide or a catalog of upcoming releases. Real writing about games that actually mattered. Life is Strange. Yoshi’s Story. Final Fantasy. Longer pieces from people with something genuine to say about why games were worth thinking about. The title gets it exactly right. Hours spent on video games are a waste. Money spent on a printed magazine about video games, when everything’s free online, is an even bigger waste. But knowing it’s pointless and doing it anyway—that might be the whole thing. Friday, 13 April 2018. Shaved or Not: There are basically two camps now—women who shave everything smooth, women who’ve decided that’s exactly what they won’t do. Both absolutely convinced they’ve found the right answer. The natural-hair argument has some feminist weight behind it: smooth means hairless, hairless reads as childlike, childlike is basically some male fantasy. Real women, free women, have hair. Everywhere. Full stop. You’re not supposed to carve your body into somebody else’s idea of sexy. But demanding women must have hair, insisting that shaving is complicity—that’s just swapping one set of rules for another. Your body should look like this because of what I believe. That’s control dressed up as freedom. Different politics, exact same energy. The thing I’ve noticed is how little of this is actually about ideology and how much is just sex. People like what they like. Some guys like smooth, some like hair, some don’t actually care as much as they pretend to. Women are the same way about their own bodies—some want to feel smooth, some want to feel natural, some just want to do the least amount of work and get on with their life. None of that is a moral position. It’s just preference. My own tastes have shifted over the years—what seemed essential to attraction at twenty isn’t the same thing at thirty-five. But that’s just my taste changing. It’s not a verdict on anyone else’s body, and it definitely shouldn’t be. The person whose body it actually is should be the only voice that matters. So do what you want. Not what some partner expects, not what feminist theory demands, not what whoever’s loudest online says. What you actually want. Everything else is just noise from people with opinions about your body. Friday, 13 April 2018. Dancing Anyway: In 2014, Kyiv’s nightlife just stopped. When the Revolution came and the shooting started, the clubs closed, the energy died. Not peace—just absence. The kind of dead a city goes when nothing normal is happening. Slava Lepsheev lost his job when the financial collapse hit after the war. Waiting for solutions wasn’t an option. So he started Cxema—not a registered club, nothing legal. He’d break into empty warehouses, basements, apartments, set up his equipment, and throw parties. Raw, hypnotic, relentless techno. The point was to dance. Tom Ivin made a documentary tracking Slava and the crew. He doesn’t ask grand questions about the nation’s future or what resistance means. He just films young people in the dark, moving until sunrise, trying to feel something other than the weight pressing down. What runs through your head at 4 a.m. when the bassline is in your chest? Nothing. That’s the goal. There’s something defiant about it that has nothing to do with politics or messaging. It’s people in an impossible situation doing the one thing left: moving, making noise, being together. Not celebrating. Not protesting. Just refusing to stop. The film wonders what becomes of a generation like this, whether the country can even survive. But the real question is simpler: what do you do when the normal answers don’t work? You find a building. You break in. You dance illegally. You keep being alive anyway. I never learned if Cxema continued or what happened to Slava after. But the scene stays vivid—dark room, bodies moving, the bass cutting through everything, the country falling apart above, and down there they’re still dancing anyway. Friday, 13 April 2018. Young M.A Made a Porn: I watch a lot of porn, and there’s this constant frustration—you’re trying to actually get off, but the editing is terrible, the dialogue is unbearable, someone’s moaning wrong, the guy’s just going through the motions, the cumshot gets botched, or the whole thing cuts out before it ends. You’re lying there thinking, “I should have directed this.” Young M.A apparently had the same thought. The rapper just made her directorial debut with a porn film called “The Gift.” It features Ana Foxxx, Gina Valentina, Honey Gold, Jenna Sativa, Shyla Jennings, Anya Ivy, Elena Koshka, Yara Skye, and Zoey Reyes fucking their way through a mansion somewhere in California. There’s technically a plot about a virgin who gets corrupted, but that’s mostly just structure. You can watch it free on Pornhub. I watched it. It’s actually well-made—attentive to framing, pacing, intention in a way most porn isn’t. If you only get off to extreme stuff, the real degradation kind of thing, this won’t do it for you. It’s too professional, too composed, clearly the work of someone who cares about filmmaking. But if you care about that too, “The Gift” delivers. Thursday, 12 April 2018. The Carnival: Joseph Seed doesn’t hide. When I showed up in Eden’s Gate as a freshly minted deputy, him and his cultists didn’t scatter or panic—they just watched. Joseph stayed still and quiet, knowing something I didn’t: I wasn’t leaving Hope County. Not today. A minute of dialogue later, our helicopter went down. I woke up in a cabin bleeding, and Richard “Dutch” Roosevelt had already decided what came next. The phones were dead, the borders sealed, and three of Joseph’s most devoted—Jacob, John, and Faith—controlled everything outside. Someone had to go out there and take them apart. Armed with a pistol and whatever faith I could scrape together, I started recruiting, clearing settlements, destroying compounds. Those first ten hours were tense. Every vehicle that passed felt like a threat. I’d dive into grass, heart pounding, because everyone wanted me dead. By hour fifteen, I was sprinting into settlements just firing at anything that moved. The fear had burned away completely. Two companions jogging beside me, a sonic cannon in my hands, and suddenly I wasn’t hunting cultists anymore—I was just running laps through a shooting gallery. The problem is what Far Cry 5 is trying to do with tone. The dialogue is all Bible verses and threats. You find torture chambers, collapsed bodies, the weight of violence. Joseph and his friends are supposed to radiate menace. But the world has this carnival quality that completely undercuts it. There’s a deranged film director next to a bunker where families are being tortured. You can fish fifty feet from a firefight. I got teleported to Mars at one point. The game knows exactly what it is—a playground wearing a horror mask—and it doesn’t really care that the two don’t match. If you try to make sense of any of it logically, it falls apart. One guy locks down an entire county and nobody from outside does anything. The story missions where you get kidnapped and tortured by Jacob or John or Faith happen on loop, structurally identical, and by the third time it made me want to quit the game entirely. The map is so densely packed with collectibles and side missions that you’re perpetually distracted from the actual plot, which might be the smartest design choice in the whole thing. What really gets to me is how much the people of Hope County don’t matter. In Witcher 3, I cared about random NPCs. I still think about some of those side stories years later. Here, someone would tell me they’d lost everything and I’d feel nothing. Give me my reward points so I can move forward—that’s all I wanted. The characters feel less like people and more like attribute clusters: sad farmer, grieving widow, angry mechanic. None of it stuck. Joseph himself doesn’t reappear until you’ve taken down his three lieutenants. And that grind is real. The first region is engaging. The second starts to wear thin. By the third, I just wanted it finished. How many cassette tapes and baseball cards and lighters until the final confrontation? Too many. The game buries the climax under mountains of completionist work. There are bugs too. Entire settlements become unplayable when enemies spawn wrong or not at all. Missions break in ways that make you restart. It’s not catastrophic—you lose maybe an hour—but it’s enough to snap you out of whatever immersion exists. Despite all this, I kept coming back to Hope County. There’s something about the sheer absurdity of it, the refusal to reconcile brutal narrative with playground atmosphere. The carnival never stops. The stories you accumulate are genuinely strange and memorable, even if the people in them feel hollow. Joseph Seed is at least a problem you can solve. Pump enough bullets into him and he’s gone. That’s more than real cults allow. Thursday, 12 April 2018. The Freedom Part: Pip Hicken in a photoseries by Rachel Mia Fogarty called “The Celestial Women”—blue wig, pink glasses, completely topless, no hesitation about any of it. She’s a musician in Melbourne, makes art, makes work with other people on projects that don’t need anyone’s approval to exist. That’s what I’m looking at when I see the photo. Not the colors or the nudity, but what it shows about how to actually work. She and Rachel decided to shoot this. No brief, no consensus, no one checking whether it was risky or wrong. Two people making something that only needs to justify itself by existing. That’s the thing about Australia that keeps pulling at me. I know it’s probably a fantasy, the idea of a place where people work that way. But this photoshoot doesn’t feel like a fantasy. It feels like a working method that actually functions somewhere. Melbourne, maybe. Or just Pip. I don’t know. But I’ve been staring at this image for weeks and I can’t stop thinking about the freedom in it—not as a concept, but as a practical way to spend your time with another person, making something neither of you will apologize for. Thursday, 12 April 2018. Dicke Lippen: Twenty-Four Hours: Katja Krasavice is Germany’s biggest YouTuber, and like all of them at a certain level, she makes music now. “Dicke Lippen” is the expected product of all that—you probably know exactly what you’re getting. This YouTuber Mibu apparently decided the appropriate response was to listen to it for twenty-four hours straight. Just put it on and let it run without stopping, streamed the whole thing live. And he actually finished it. I don’t know what that sounds like by hour fifteen or twenty, but at some point it stops being music and just becomes noise—something that’s burned itself into your brain through pure repetition. That’s basically internet culture in a nutshell. Nobody asked him to do it. Nobody needed it. He just decided to subject himself to this and filmed it for people to watch, and somehow that seems like the most honest thing anyone’s doing online right now. Wednesday, 11 April 2018. Moonlighter: I grew up on Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana—played them until they wore out. Those Super Nintendo RPGs were enormous and detailed despite the pixels, and they kept me occupied for years. I still have the muscle memory, still hear the music when I think about them. A whole generation grew up on those games and is now old enough to make their own stuff. Moonlighter is part of that wave. You can feel it in how it’s designed. You play Will, a shopkeeper in some village called Rynoka. During the day, adventurers come through buying weapons and potions and whatever else they need for their heroic quests. Will runs a good shop. But he doesn’t want his whole life behind the counter. At night, he slips through magical doors into strange worlds, hunting for treasure and artifacts to bring back and resell in the morning. The concept isn’t revolutionary—day job, night adventure, the loop of gathering and selling. What matters is the craft. The pixel art is clean and detailed, the world design looks thoughtful. This is clearly made by someone who understood what made those old RPGs worth replaying, what kept you coming back. I’ll probably spend a lot of time with it. Wednesday, 11 April 2018. Switter: Backpage got killed last week. The FBI shut it down using new federal laws designed to fight sex trafficking—FOSTA, SESTA, the acronyms that scare the shit out of platforms that host user content. And now sex workers are panicking, which is what happens when you build your livelihood on someone else’s servers. Twitter’s been the workaround for years. You post, you advertise, you connect with clients, whatever you need to do. It’s decentralized enough to feel safe, popular enough to actually reach people. But the moment Congress decided platforms are responsible for what users do on them, every social network started sweating. Twitter could be next. So sex workers did what sex workers always do when the system fails them. They built their own thing. Switter, it’s called. Built on Mastodon, which is open-source software, no corporate structure, no single company to sue or shut down. No ads, no data harvesting, no shareholders wondering if bad publicity is worth the user base. You post what you want. People see it. That’s it. It’s funny how the people with the least institutional power end up showing everyone else how platforms should work. They didn’t wait for regulation to catch up or for some venture-backed startup to solve it. They took existing technology and made it theirs. Decentralized, distributed, owned by no one. The thing everyone keeps talking about that actually exists, just not where you’d expect it. Wednesday, 11 April 2018. What He Wouldn’t Say: Zuckerberg sat there for five hours trying to convince Congress that Facebook wasn’t evil. Most of it was him repeating the same rehearsed answers. You could watch all of it or skip it entirely—I don’t think either way mattered much. Then there was this one moment. Senator Dick Durbin asked which hotel he’d stayed in. Zuckerberg paused. “No,” he said. Not hedging, not deflecting. Just no. Durbin pushed. What about the private messages? Who had he been talking to that week? Again—no. Durbin let it sit. Then he made the point: “That’s it. Privacy. The boundaries of privacy. How much of yourself you’re willing to show in modern America.” He was saying this to a man who built his entire company on extracting exactly that from everyone. The whole thing was performance. Everyone knew it. But that moment cut through the noise—a guy who won’t tell you what hotel he slept in, running a company that knows where you go and what you do when you get there. Someone cut the highlights into ten minutes. That’s the version worth your time. Wednesday, 11 April 2018. Hotel Smokers Lounge: HUF dropped a 420 collection called Hotel Smokers Lounge. Colorful, straightforward, leaf prints on hoodies and tees, the usual. I scrolled through the lookbook and didn’t feel much—which is kind of the point now. Five years ago this would’ve seemed transgressive. Now it’s just streetwear. There’s a weird feeling to watching culture get absorbed so fast. Weed goes from underground to legal in some places, and suddenly every brand wants a piece. HUF did it well, I’ll give them that. No forced humor, no trying too hard. It’s confident in what it is: merch for people who like weed and like the brand. The design’s clean. That’s really all that matters. When you’re doing a 420 drop, you can phone it in or you can actually think about the execution. HUF thought about it. Good colors, good placement, pieces that work. Nothing earth-shattering, but solid. Part of me misses when a leaf meant something. Now it just means you had thirty bucks and liked the hoodie. That’s not bad—it’s just different. Mainstreaming always means dilution, but sometimes dilution is what allows something to finally breathe. Tuesday, 10 April 2018. Pop-Kultur: Berlin’s got enough festivals. Most blur into the same calendar, the same names rotating through bigger venues each year. Pop-Kultur was different by 2018—still committed to booking people nobody else quite knew what to do with yet. That August had Noga Erez moving between politics and something like desire without flinching. John Maus collapsing under his own synths. Henrik Schwarz and Alma Quartet taking string arrangements from other centuries and remixing them into something new. Pan Daijing, Haiyti making rap that couldn’t be categorized. Hope thinking about darkness as something generative instead of just absence. Kat Frankie with protest music that didn’t ask politely. The curators kept saying things about inclusivity and celebrating pop culture seriously, which is what curators always say. What actually mattered was that they were booking people who gave a shit about what they were making. None of these artists were there because someone decided they fit a brand. They were there because they were actually doing something. New venues that year too. Kulturbrauerei, Theater RambaZamba for the first time. You could feel the energy without anyone having to announce it. That’s the kind of festival where people show up because they want to hear something they couldn’t get anywhere else. Seventy euros. Not cheap, not desperate. The right price to filter out anyone just looking for something to do and leave an actual audience in the room. Tuesday, 10 April 2018. The Kit Kat Club: The Kit Kat Club is on Köpenicker Straße in Berlin. You know the reputation if you know it exists—the dress code that actually works, the Saturday nights, CarneBall Bizarre. People show up in latex or less and do exactly what they came for, and the place has been around long enough that it’s just itself now. Not performing, not trying to be something for an audience. Just a nightclub that’s also openly a sex venue. I’ve never been. I don’t know if I would even if I could, but there’s something to respect about a place that knows what it is and doesn’t apologize to anyone. Most venues like that either get cleaned up or fade out. The Kit Kat’s been there for decades because it actually serves the people it’s meant to serve. Someone made a YouTube tour of the place that’s floating around. Watching it was strange—someone fully clothed walking through with a camera, narrating casually. I guess that’s the view from outside. Maybe that’s enough. The place doesn’t need validation or curiosity. It just needs the people who actually want to be there, and they keep showing up on Saturdays. Tuesday, 10 April 2018. So Sad So Sexy: Lykke Li’s music got me through the last ten years. Not in some metaphorical, poetic sense—literally. Youth Novels, Wounded Rhymes, I Never Learn. The Twilight song everyone clowns on but which is genuinely good. There was something about the architecture of those albums that made sense when nothing else did. She disappeared for a while. Years. You get used to it. You assume it’s over, that era is done, you move on to the next thing. That’s how it works with artists—they give you what they’re giving you, and then they disappear, and eventually you stop waiting for them to come back. A video appeared called ’So Sad So Sexy.’ No announcement. Just a thing. And I was right back there. Not nostalgic exactly—something weirder than that. Like remembering that you loved something, and the memory having actual physical weight. What I love about her music is the restraint. It’s sad, genuinely sad, but it never pleads with you to feel sad too. The production is intricate without being fussy. You never feel the effort—it sounds like someone thinking clearly about something complicated. That matters, especially in a genre full of people just sounding pretty while saying nothing. I don’t know if this is the beginning of something or a one-off. The video doesn’t tell you much. But that’s fine. Sometimes it’s enough to know the person is still thinking about making things. Monday, 9 April 2018. Converse and Sneakersnstuff Do Camo Two Ways: There’s something interesting happening when you take a military pattern that’s spent decades washing into fashion and paint it lavender. The new One Star collaboration between Converse and Sneakersnstuff comes in two colorways—a pretty standard tan and brown, and then this pale purple thing that should look ridiculous but somehow doesn’t. Camo stopped being about hiding a long time ago. Now it’s just a texture, a visual language, something that reads as intentional rather than evasive. The pattern itself got designed in the sixties, expensive and elaborate, by people who actually needed to disappear into jungles. That specificity—all those organic curves calibrated for a particular landscape—is why it still works decades later. It’s not abstract enough to be decorative and not literal enough to feel dated. Just a system of shapes that registers as both order and chaos depending on how your eye lands on it. On the One Star it works because the shoe is already so minimal. There’s no competing visual language here, no branding that fights it. Just the pattern and the shape. The brown version is what you’d expect—understated, practical looking, the path of least resistance. The lavender pulls a small trick, just enough color shift to make you look twice at what should be a familiar thing. It’s the kind of choice that feels like someone actually thinking about the shoe rather than just printing the same pattern everyone else already did. I don’t have a deep investment in sneaker collabs one way or another. Most of them feel obligatory, another pattern on another silhouette. But this one has the feeling of restraint, which is rarer than it should be. Not trying to save the shoe or change it, just offering it a different texture and letting that be enough. Saturday, 7 April 2018. Bartier Cardi: Cardi B’s ’Bartier Cardi’ is everything the song title promises. The video has her wrapped in red fur and diamonds, surrounded by rapturous attention that’s orchestrated to the frame. She owns every second of it—the confidence isn’t performed, it’s just there. That’s the kind of ease most people have to work into; she started with it. The ascent was fast. A year ago, maybe less, she was the Instagram girl with the voice and the mouth and the willingness to say whatever. Then ’Bodak Yellow’ happened and the whole thing shifted. First woman since Lauryn Hill to own the number one solo, and after that it was momentum—covers, spreads, the whole thing coming at once. Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Fader. She came up as a stripper and never apologized for it. That might be the thing—no shame in where you came from means no hesitation anywhere else. It changes how you hold yourself in a room, what you’ll wear, what you’ll ask for. Her debut album is coming out soon. At this point the arrival is complete. ’Bartier Cardi’ is just the announcement of something that already happened. Wednesday, 4 April 2018. Aliens in Sneakers: Some artists spend their whole practice pinning reality down—make it look exactly as it is, every detail locked. Jay Bisual went the opposite direction. His work out of Barcelona is pure color and invention. Aliens in fresh sneakers. Space girls floating through planets thick with stardust and magic, robots skating through impossible clouds. The kind of work that makes you want to frame every single piece on your wall. I keep going back to his paintings like I’m stuck on a particular song, tabbing between pieces without finishing any of them. The colors are exaggerated and bold—not realistic, not trying to be. The kind of energy that makes you realize how careful the actual world is, how timid. What gets me is that they feel detailed and real enough that you forget they’re paintings. That moment where you think maybe the place actually exists somewhere, on some planet you could theoretically reach if you knew how. Wednesday, 4 April 2018. Four Years of Not Screaming: Das Filter turned four the other day. It’s a publication about culture, media, technology, design—the standard beat of cultural writing—except it’s run by people who don’t seem interested in any of the usual noise. No “stunning,” no “breaking,” no desperation. They just want to understand what’s happening. Ji-Hun Kim and whoever’s working there approach it quietly, seriously, focused on actual substance. That’s almost disqualifyingly old-fashioned now. What grabbed me was the contrast. Most cultural writing online is exhausting—it’s either advertising disguised as criticism or criticism designed to make you click, and those two things have basically merged. Das Filter doesn’t do that. They describe themselves as a platform for contemporary culture and society, which sounds stiff on paper, but they mean it. They want to explain things, create context, filter noise, understand complexity. There’s no performance. No angle. No trying to own some discourse. Just looking at what’s there. I think about how rare that is. How desperation has leaked into almost everything. Most publications need you to visit, need you to stay, need you to have a strong opinion so you’ll come back tomorrow with an even stronger one. Das Filter just wants to do the work of thinking clearly about things. They write for themselves, in a way. And I keep reading because that’s the only cultural writing I’ve found that still feels honest. That’s worth marking somehow, even if it’s just paying attention. Four years of showing up and not screaming. Wednesday, 4 April 2018. BiSH Gets It: BiSH shouldn’t work the way they do, but they’re smarter about it than anyone else doing this. They’re an idol group from Japan that owns being an idol group—owns the construction, the artifice, the whole manufactured thing—and that honesty makes them feel more genuine than the groups pretending to be natural. Aina The End, Cent Chihiro Chittiii, Momoko Gumi Company, Lingling, Hashiyasume Atsuko, Ayuni D—seven members, sharp energy, songs like “PAiNT it BLACK” and “SMACK baby SMACK” that stick with you. Japanese idol culture is massive. AKB48, Nogizaka46, Passpo—inescapable. Billboards in every city, the radio, TV, local knockoffs in smaller towns. Perfect smiles, manufactured everything, the same formula repeating infinitely. BiSH is an idol group too, and they’re not against the formula. They sit somewhere between Scandal and Stereopony and Morning Musume, but weirder, harder. They took that sweet, artificial thing and made it aggressive. Being fake becomes the honest choice. You’ve got this sound that’s tender and mean at once—it shouldn’t work, and yet. They’re huge in Japan right now, songs everywhere, people talking about them on the street. It deserves to be that way. They figured out what no one else will: how to be completely constructed and actually mean something. Wednesday, 4 April 2018. Moose Knuckles: Moose Knuckles started in 2007, but the family’s been making cold-weather gear for nearly a hundred years—which is to say it’s fundamentally a practical brand. It exists because Canada is brutal in winter. Then they launch a campaign called ’Three Wheel Motion’ inspired by 80s skateboarding, specifically Tony Alva, who was the first real skate star, the guy who made it about freedom and motion rather than technical tricks. It’s an interesting collision—a brand rooted in necessity suddenly reaching into this cultural moment that was all about not caring about necessity. The new collection features the Canadian maple leaf, which could feel lazy on most brands but feels direct here. It’s not winking at you. It’s just where they’re from. I like that they’re not trying to sound global. They’re making something specific to their place and its hundred-year history. They have a funny name and functional heritage, and they’re not apologizing for it or trying to translate it for a wider audience. The 80s reference works because it actually matches the design language—bold, unapologetic, stuff that just works. Most regional brands feel like they’re compensating for something, but Moose Knuckles doesn’t seem insecure about competing with bigger names. They’re just making what makes sense from where they are. Thursday, 29 March 2018. The Arkyn: Adidas dropped a new sneaker called the Arkyn. Mesh upper, three stripes, sock-like construction with perforated tongue, Boost sole in four colorways—nude, dark blue, black, white. One-thirty euros. What interests me about it is the design philosophy. The sock construction, the minimal seaming, the perforated details are all solving specific problems of fit and feel, but the shoe doesn’t need to explain any of that to you. You just wear it. That’s the sweet spot in design right now—real engineering hidden under a visual calm. Boost is everywhere now, which is fine, it’s good foam. But I’ve been watching how the uppers are evolving. Designers are peeling away visual noise while the construction gets more sophisticated. The Arkyn does both—looks simple, is built to handle your foot in a very specific way. Whether people actually buy it depends on hype, celebrity machinery, and all the stuff that has nothing to do with actual design. But the shoe itself is well-made. Clean. The kind of thing that doesn’t date itself because it’s not chasing a moment. It’s just solving a problem well. Wednesday, 28 March 2018. The Air Max Thing: The Air Max doesn’t need defending. You see them everywhere, especially in Asia, where sneaker culture carries a different weight—different mythology, different relationship to what Western design means. The visible air bubble, that silhouette. It’s become one of those things that’s just there, part of the visual language. Hypebeast and Nike brought together sixteen Asian artists to make short films about the shoe. Not advertising in the traditional sense. Just artists—illustrators, animators, video people—responding to an object that somehow mattered. The work is strange and textured and often beautiful. Some of it plays with the shoe directly, some barely acknowledges it at all. Styles shift. Obsessions emerge and disappear. It’s good work. What makes it work is that the artists aren’t sacred about it. They’re not trying to prove the Air Max is more than it is. They’re just using it as a starting point, and in that response something interesting happens. That’s the difference between advertising and something worth watching—when you give good artists room to think instead of a script to follow. There’s something about the shoe that allows this. Maybe it’s because the Air Max already did what most design objects never manage—it became a language. It’s available, it’s visible, it means something to people in a hundred different ways. Artists can use it as a reference point for something else entirely without needing to explain themselves. That’s when a commercial actually becomes interesting. That’s when you’re not watching advertising anymore, you’re watching people think through design. Tuesday, 27 March 2018. Fashion’s First Family: I watched “Fashion’s First Family,” i-D’s documentary about London fashion newcomers, and what struck me was how little romance there was to any of it. You go in thinking about Vivienne Westwood and Karl Lagerfeld and the mythology of how you actually break in, and instead you get people grinding through season after season—getting a tiny bit famous maybe, then disappearing when the cycle turns over. The machinery is real and it’s cold. What got to me was how much genuine talent gets burned through. You’re watching folks who actually understand color and form, who know how to make something that didn’t exist before, and you know from the first episode that most won’t survive it. Not because they lack ability. They can’t afford London rent. They do a collection and nobody shows up. They spend six months building something and three months later it doesn’t matter anymore because the aesthetic has already moved on. The industry sells itself as this open thing that wants new voices, fresh perspectives, young talent. What it actually runs is a tournament designed to eliminate everyone except those with the right mix of obsession, money, and timing. The documentary doesn’t judge this. It just shows it. You watch them try and you see some survive the first cut and you have no idea what happens next, and that’s the whole thing. What stayed with me wasn’t inspiration. Just the facts of it. Tuesday, 27 March 2018. Small Club, Big Names: Migos came to Berlin with Culture II fresh out and played Huxley’s, which is strange because they’re a stadium act. Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff sold out a club the size of a shoebox in hours, the kind of show they probably hadn’t done in years. There’s something worth noticing in that choice. Hip-hop moves through the world in a specific way—not down from the biggest stages, but through the places where people are genuinely listening. Berlin was still one of those places then. They showed up because it mattered. They met some of the German national team players in town for a match against Spain. Boateng, Rüdiger, Sané, Draxler—athletes and rappers recognizing each other across scenes. They came to the concert. It’s the kind of collision that happens naturally in Berlin now, different worlds just running into each other. I never saw the video. Don’t think I’m missing anything. It’s the fact of it that mattered—a major act in a small room, willing to play places where the moment still counts for something. That’s one way culture moves. Tuesday, 27 March 2018. The Pencil Moment: Apple released an iPad at 350 euros with stylus support. That’s the announcement. The specs don’t matter—Retina display, A10 chip, whatever—they’re fine, they’re all fine. What matters is the price. I remember when stylus tablets cost what cars cost. When the barrier to digital drawing wasn’t talent or desire, it was money. You had to commit. You had to save. The tools were precious, and you earned the right to use them by paying for that right. That world’s gone now. This iPad exists at a point where someone can try it without ruining themselves. A student can sketch. A bored person can doodle. A curious person can find out if they actually want to draw before they commit to more expensive gear. The risk is gone. The preciousness is gone. That’s the real shift. Not processors or displays or gold finishes. The moment when tools stopped being sacred objects you earned the right to touch, and became just things you could use. That’s worth noticing, even if you’re not going to buy one. Tuesday, 27 March 2018. Things That Work: There’s this Vietnamese student making videos about how she can’t believe how good Germany is. Traffic actually flows. Cosmetics aren’t complete garbage. There are parks. The infrastructure doesn’t actively fight you. She’s right, obviously, but hearing someone articulate what you’ve completely stopped noticing is disarming. You grow up surrounded by something functional and it becomes invisible. You spend years taking the absence of chaos for granted, always comparing yourself to everywhere else—America seems bigger, Japan seems more advanced, Scandinavia seems cooler—while the actual privilege of living somewhere that simply works goes completely unremarked. It’s like someone visiting your house and commenting on your light, and suddenly you realize you haven’t noticed that light in years. What gets me is how specific her observations are. Of course the trains are reliable. Of course cosmetics companies actually test their products. Of course parks exist. But the fact that these things are boring enough that we’ve all stopped looking at them—that’s the real thing. I’m busy reaching for somewhere else while what’s already functioning is right here. I don’t know. There’s something weird about having an outsider hold up a mirror to the ordinary stuff that works. Not in some flag-waving way—it’s not that I suddenly love this country more. It’s more like noticing the light. The systems that don’t collapse. The parks that exist. The absence of the grinding chaos that exists everywhere else. It’s almost embarrassing how long you can live somewhere without actually seeing it. Tuesday, 27 March 2018. No Performance: There’s an image that stuck—photographer named Daniel Dittus shot a girl called Julia Eh at a vintage shop in Hamburg, Vintage Gallery. Julia with a pineapple in spring light. The kind of thing that just works. Daniel had renovated an apartment, found 70s wallpaper, met Julia through a friend. She caught his eye. The way she dressed, the way she moved. Style without the work. He asked if she’d let him photograph her. She’d never been in front of a camera before. Said yes anyway. Sunny day, good light, she just did her own thing. That’s all there is. Hamburg’s full of people like that if you’re paying attention. People who don’t perform—they just live there. Working vintage clothes probably helps. You’re around things with history, other people’s old lives. Makes you think about what you wear. By the time you’re selling that stuff, you’ve figured out your own look. The pineapple was probably a joke. Doesn’t matter. Girl in vintage clothes, weird fruit, spring light—it lands. Style that doesn’t need to sell itself. Just there. Monday, 26 March 2018. Druck: The Norwegian series “Skam” came out of nowhere and somehow became this global thing. Creator Julie Andem followed four teenagers through real teenage life—crushes, coming out, family pressure, all the stuff that actually matters when you’re sixteen—without the usual television gloss. Part of what made it work was how raw it felt, how much it trusted the audience to recognize actual human conversation when they heard it. It was a show that looked and sounded like you were eavesdropping on someone’s real life. Germany has made its own version now, called “Druck,” and it centers on a sixteen-year-old named Hanna who kind of destroyed her social position by sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. She ends up in a group with Mia, Kiki, Amira Thalia, and Sam—girls from different parts of the social landscape who gradually become something like a real friend group. The obvious plot point is that Hanna’s relationship with her current boyfriend Jonas hits a wall when she finds out he’s still in secret contact with Leonie. Normal teen drama, but the show doesn’t shy away from how messy and painful that actually is. What interests me about any adaptation is whether it’s just copying a formula or if something genuine actually moves across languages and borders. Skam worked because it felt true. You believed these were real people having real conversations, even though obviously they weren’t. If Druck is just using the same structure with German accents, it’s just a slicker version of every other teen show. But the first episode has something. The dialogue feels like thinking out loud, the kind of overlong rambling conversation that’s too messy to be scripted, even though it is. The characters register as actual people, not types. I’m mostly watching to see whether authenticity is portable—whether something that felt essential in Norway can feel just as true in Germany, with a completely different language and set of cultural pressures. Skam had a very specific moment and place. Can that realness survive translation, or does it get smoothed out and polished into something safe? That’s what I’m actually paying attention to. Monday, 26 March 2018. The Genie’s Back: I saw Christina Aguilera on the cover of Paper Magazine the other day. Thirty-seven, two kids, blonde hair, freckles. She looked like herself—not curated, not performing, just present. It’s rarer than it should be. There’s a formula for how these things go with pop stars. Sweet girl, girl next door—then you spend a few years half-naked and provocative, proving you’re not a child anymore. Then somewhere in your thirties you cycle back around, talking about therapy and finding yourself and what actually matters. Every one of them does it. Britney, Miley, Ariana—they all walk the same path. I loved Christina’s first album. “Genie in a Bottle” is genuinely a perfect pop song, and “What a Girl Wants” and “Come On Over” I listened to constantly. Later came “Fighter” and “Beautiful,” which had real weight to it. Then “Dirrty” hit and she went full leather-and-provocative, and I just… wasn’t interested anymore. Lost her after that. In the interview she’s talking about knowing yourself, about where your actual beauty comes from. Normally that’s just celebrity PR, but it didn’t feel like it this time. Felt genuine. I don’t think I’ll go back to her music. That’s okay. But there’s something right about watching someone navigate all of that and actually come out looking better. Actually look like they’ve figured something out. Monday, 26 March 2018. Pink Season: Parks get packed in spring, everyone out with beer in the middle of the day, these achingly earnest pop songs about the blossoms playing from somewhere. Cherry season hits Tokyo and the whole city organizes around it. Hanami. People wait all year for those pink trees, and when they come the streets fill up with exactly the kind of euphoria you’d expect from that much collective focus. What’s wild is the commercial machinery that moves with it. The blossoms hit and suddenly everything is a sakura product. Starbucks, Twix, the convenience store—sakura beer, sakura sushi, sakura frappucino. Someone decided toilet paper needed a pink cherry blossom on the package. Video games got sakura editions. Toothbrushes. Once you see how it works, there’s no hiding it: take any product, make it pink, call it sakura, and people will buy it because the season is happening and the season demands participation. It’s marketing without apology. But the real action is in fashion. When spring actually arrives in Harajuku and Shibuya, people stop dressing for winter and the streets crack open into color and experiment. It’s not the sakura merchandise—it’s the opposite. It’s people actually thinking about clothes, actually building something out of what the warm season means. That voltage in the street when everything thaws. So you’ve got these two things happening at once: the corporate machinery running one track, real people in real clothes running another, and the blossoms as the excuse for both to exist simultaneously without acknowledging each other. Sunday, 25 March 2018. Taught Himself Everything: Reezy is twenty-two and everything he knows, he learned from YouTube. The production, the mixing, the video editing, the visual sense—all of it came from tutorials. He’s from Frankfurt and he released two mixtapes in a row, “Feueremoji” and “Tropfenemoji,” with song titles that feel like they’re indexing someone’s private mythology: “Testament 1995,” “Lovestory 2002,” “Wolken 0000.” The thing that actually matters is that he doesn’t hire people to do parts of it. He makes the songs, he shoots the videos, he edits them, he even designs his own clothes and makes pieces for people in his crew. It’s not a statement about being multidisciplinary—it’s just how he works. No managers, no waiting for anyone’s approval. The internet handed him everything he needed to be a fully realized artist the moment he decided to start. Growing up with that kind of access changes something fundamental about what you think is possible. You don’t hit invisible walls telling you that you need permission or credentials or the right mentor. You start making things and see what they become. A lot of the Frankfurt rap scene feels like that right now—not trying to sound like anything else, not following a template, doing the work with real taste and no apologies. I think about how different this would have been fifteen years ago. What you’d need and who you’d need to know. Now the barrier is mostly will, and something about that produces a different kind of culture. More work gets made. It’s not gatekept into blandness. Friday, 23 March 2018. The Girls Bijou Draws: Bijou Karman draws girls from Los Angeles—young, strong, undeniably pretty—and apparently everyone worth knowing has already noticed. Rihanna’s looked. So have Converse and Harper’s Bazaar and Elle. The work is sharp: clean line, color, this kind of confident clarity that doesn’t apologize. Most illustrations of women get it fundamentally wrong. Either they’re decorative, or they’re trying to perform toughness in a way that reads as defensive, compensatory. Bijou’s girls are just strong the way some people naturally are. Pretty and powerful at the same time, but not in some rhetorical way—it’s not a statement, it’s just fact. They take up space like it belongs to them. She’s talked about what it actually costs to grow up as a girl in a system that’s working against you. You learn to work twice as hard for half the respect. You figure out that crying isn’t weakness, that anger isn’t ugly. And somewhere under all that pressure, something crystallizes. Either you break or you become someone who can hold softness and force at once, someone unafraid to be both. Bijou’s drawn that person over and over again. She understands what strength looks like better than most. Thursday, 22 March 2018. Lost in April: The trap of opening Netflix in April is the same trap every month, except April feels worse somehow. Winter won’t let go. You’re tired of the cold, tired of rewatching the same shows you finished months ago, and then Netflix drops everything at once—new seasons of dramas you’d forgotten about, anime with fresh subtitles, limited series promising dark complexity, sci-fi that cost actual money to make, classics that somehow still work. It’s both generous and completely paralyzing. Lost in Space was the new one worth your time, one of those remakes that actually had something to say. House of Money continued if you’d already swallowed that hook. Arrow was still doing its thing for the people tracking interconnected comic book plots. Aggretsuko was there for anime comedy that didn’t hurt from trying too hard. Wakfu showed up, strange and French-influenced, the kind of thing that appeals to people with specific taste. Fullmetal Alchemist for anyone meaning to catch up. Angry Birds if you wanted your evening to feel a little hollow. Powerpuff Girls returned in whatever form. The films were a scatter—classics alongside new, prestige, and random. The Truman Show, which works every time. Life of Brian for Monty Python transgression. The Hateful Eight if you wanted brutal. The Bourne Identity for pure forward momentum. Watchmen if you hadn’t gotten there. Stranger stuff like 6 Balloons and Paul sitting alongside them, existing in the catalog now because they existed everywhere at once. The real luxury wasn’t the quality of any single show. It was the abundance itself—having so much piled up that you could surrender to the couch entirely for an evening or a week. You’d skip most of it. Start things you wouldn’t finish. But April felt different when Netflix had dropped something you might want to watch. Winter was still happening outside, still refusing to leave. But inside, you had enough options that staying in felt like a choice. That was enough. Thursday, 22 March 2018. Getting High: Being at an Alison Wonderland show when you’re already high does something to you. Her beats are relentless, the synths pull you somewhere darker, and everyone around you has basically shut off their brain—just there for the feeling, everything else irrelevant. She came out with a new one called “High” featuring Trippie Redd. The video isn’t trying to be anything—not trying to be cinema, not trying to be art, honestly incoherent if you’re halfway through the comedown—but it gets the job done. Alison and Trippie want to get high. They want you there with them. That’s the complete message and it works because it’s exactly that simple. Sometimes a song doesn’t need depth. No story, no meaning beyond what’s already sitting right there on the surface. You just want some people, wine, pizza, and something good playing while you exist together for a while. That’s what this is for. When you’re in that moment—sitting around with people you actually like, nothing to prove, nothing to do—that’s where “High” belongs. Thursday, 22 March 2018. Deadpool Returns: The Deadpool 2 trailer just dropped and I already know I’m seeing it in a theater. This is one of those rare superhero movies that understands what it is: funny, violent, nothing to apologize for. Ryan Reynolds is the reason it works. Most actors in these roles seem like they’re apologizing for the material. Reynolds commits to the bit without ceremony, and you can tell he’s having fun with it. That ease—the confidence to let something be stupid without announcing it—carries the whole thing. The trailer shows what you’d expect: ninjas, Yakuza, sexually aggressive dogs, all of it stupid in exactly the right way. The commitment to absurdity without self-consciousness—that’s where the comedy lives. If you somehow missed the first Deadpool, catch up before the internet spoils everything to death. This isn’t a movie trying to matter. It’s competent and funny and violent enough to remind you why you bothered going to a theater in the first place. Thursday, 22 March 2018. EarthGang and J.I.D.: I kept running into EarthGang and J.I.D. in different contexts and never realized they were connected until I found out they’d gone to Hampton University together. That kind of detail changes how you listen. Two guys from Atlanta’s Southside—Olu and Eian—started EarthGang in high school and just kept making music together. Their first EP came out in 2010 when they were basically kids, and then they kept going. Mixtapes, albums, the kind of slow careful trajectory that doesn’t have big moments but also doesn’t need them. Nobody was throwing parties about it, but that’s not why you make music. J.I.D. was there too in the early 2010s, at Hampton. He figured out pretty quickly that school wasn’t his lane, so he dropped out after two years and committed to rapping full-time. That was the right instinct. By the time his debut dropped in 2017—“The Never Story”—he’d already been touring around with EarthGang and other people from Atlanta doing serious work. The album was worth the wait. There’s something about Atlanta’s rap scene that doesn’t need permission. The production gives things room to breathe, the rhyming is precise, and they’re making records for people actually listening instead of chasing attention. EarthGang and J.I.D. are part of that lineage. There’s something I still can’t quite pin down about their music that keeps pulling me back in. Not the production, not the rhyming—something about how secure they seem in the work itself. Like they made it for themselves first and everything else was secondary. That’s the kind of artist I keep thinking about. Wednesday, 21 March 2018. Over My Head: Echosmith were everywhere with ’Cool Kids’ in 2013—one of those songs that plants itself in your brain whether you want it there or not. Then they basically disappeared, and I figured that was it. Peak and decline, like half the acts from that era. Turns out they just went quiet. Spent time in the studio trying to figure out who they actually wanted to be. ’Over My Head’ is their first real statement back, and it’s a harder sound than ’Cool Kids’—heavy on synths, this weird sleek new-wave thing that shouldn’t work but does. The drums cut through. It feels deliberate. This is a preview of a summer album. I’m curious what’s on there. The band sounds less like they’re trying to prove something and more like they’ve just made what they wanted to make. I’ve had it on repeat. Still not sure if that’s because the song is genuinely good or because it’s nice to see them return without falling apart—but the distinction feels minor. Wednesday, 21 March 2018. Klaas Can’t Rap: Alexa raps: “I connect my fist to your face via Bluetooth.” Siri jumps in: “Send your dick pic to your mom’s picnic.” This is Klaas Heufer-Umlauf’s late-night show on ProSieben. Klaas wanted to rap. He can’t. So instead of pretending, he let Siri and Alexa take over. The machines do the rapping while he stands there getting roasted by his own devices. The whole bit lands on the fact that they outrap him. There’s a comparison going around to Jan Böhermann, another German late-night host who does similar shock-comedy bits. The comparison holds—German late-night seems to orbit around this kind of absurdity. But Klaas’s version is meaner. The machines aren’t just better rappers; they’re contemptuous about it. That’s the actual punchline. What I find strangest is how much intention is baked into this. Someone wrote these lines. Someone approved them. A network greenlit the idea of Alexa insulting their own talent. It’s the kind of bit that only works because nobody’s pretending it’s clever—everyone just committed to the dumb absurdity of it all. Tuesday, 20 March 2018. Following Nastya: Nastya Kovaleva is a Russian model who actually travels instead of just posing in locations for Instagram. France, China, Thailand—she moves between them and documents it all without the usual performance. No manufactured narrative, no lifestyle branding. Just someone going places and paying attention. Photographer Sergio del Amo caught her in Bangkok recently, shot her in a hotel room with light everywhere. The photos have something—both of them clearly present instead of just going through what a photoshoot is supposed to be. I keep going back to her Instagram for this exact thing. Not because the photos are technically impressive, but because there’s no concern with building a persona out of travel. Just documenting the places, not performing the experience. Monday, 19 March 2018. Timeless: I’ve been deep in the vaporwave thing for a while now. City-pop, future funk, whatever you want to call that aesthetic—Japanese music from the eighties remixed and rearranged by producers in bedrooms all over the world. Chilled beats, emotional synths, all of it arranged to make you feel like you’re inside some imaginary Tokyo from an imaginary future. A gray spring day disappears when you’re listening. You’re somewhere else entirely. Desired works in this space seriously. Russian artist based in Yekaterinburg, and for years he’s been remixing J-pop records in a way that doesn’t feel like remixing at all—it feels like discovery. His work appeals to people obsessed with Japanese culture and music, yeah, but also to anyone looking for something that isn’t algorithm-approved. He clearly loves it. You can hear it in the earnestness of every track, in the way there’s no irony, no winking at the listener, just genuine affection for the source material. The new album is called “Timeless.” Songs like “Sunshine City” and “Video Girl Yukiko” and “Into the Unknown” do what they’re supposed to do. They get in your head. They place you in that neon hypothetical disco from a future that never existed but should have. Available on vinyl, cassette, digital—everything you could want. The cassette thing still makes sense, even in 2018. People care about cassettes. What stays with me is the lack of irony. Desired isn’t leaning on retro novelty or performing nostalgia. He’s just making music he believes in, for people who want it. That’s rarer than it should be. Sunday, 18 March 2018. The Corpse Walks On: The Simpsons used to mean something. Everyone had the same episodes memorized, the same jokes that worked in any conversation, the same memories of when television could actually shape culture. There was a moment when knowing a Simpsons reference meant you belonged to a specific group of people who got it. I think the movie was where it all changed. Not because it was terrible—just because it was hollow. A decent episode stretched out to feature length, competent but empty. After that something died in the series. The creativity just… stopped. What had been sharp and strange became safe and profitable. It’s still on the air because there’s money in it, not because anyone cares. Philipp Walulis, a television critic, made a video essay about this exact thing—why the Simpsons declined season by season, decade by decade. It’s the question anyone who actually watched the series ends up asking. The old episodes are still perfect, which is almost depressing. They’re untouched by any of this. You go back and they’re exactly as good as you remembered, which somehow just emphasizes how badly everything after them missed the point. Sunday, 18 March 2018. Reezy’s Feueremoji: Reezy’s Feueremoji with Bausa has been running in the background for a while. The whole thing sits in this chillhop-and-trap zone—production that’s deliberate about not trying too hard. The songs are about expensive clothes and food, success and future anxiety, all delivered with the same flat confidence. “Zombies,” “John Schnee,” “High Class Street Fashion”—they follow the same blueprint, and it works because nothing is reaching. I used to dismiss German rap without really listening to it. Something about the accent or the cultural context made it easy to check out. But that’s lazy. Reezy and Bausa clearly stopped caring about proving anything to anyone a long time ago. The mixtape doesn’t announce itself or try to convince you—it just sits there and stays in your head, which is harder than it sounds. There’s nothing flashy about it. It’s just solid. Saturday, 17 March 2018. Oh Mama: Some music video where Rick and Morty do a Pulp Fiction bit while Run The Jewels’ “Oh Mama” plays underneath. Rick belching through the chaos, Morty terrified, both of them moving through what amounts to a job gone sideways. You’re always waiting for new episodes that may or may not come, rewatching old ones because there’s nothing else to do. At least when something like this surfaces, you remember why you’re stuck with the show. The video works because it’s exactly what you’d want. Granddad checked out and belching his way through the violence, nephew in full panic mode, everything moving like choreography while the track keeps it urgent. The show’s been buried under a thousand essays about how self-aware it is, how it winks at its own cleverness, the whole recursive bit. Maybe it’s all true. Mostly I just like watching it, and it’s clear I’m exactly the type to fall for it. I could sit down and watch the whole thing tonight. I’ve seen every episode. Doesn’t matter. I’ll do it anyway. Saturday, 17 March 2018. More Clarissa: Clarissa taught me more than anyone else who actually set out to teach me anything. My parents, my teachers, friends—none of them got through the way that show did. It was scripture for me on all the stuff that mattered. Still is. I find myself rewatching those old episodes late at night and I’m still pulling something from them. Reboots are everywhere right now, so Nickelodeon decided to make new Clarissa episodes. Melissa Joan Hart is coming back, this time as Clarissa’s mother. The logic is straightforward—the show resonated with people, people are nostalgic, so make more. Same reason Roseanne came back, Dynasty came back, MacGyver came back. It’s what the studios are doing now. Most reboots are genuinely terrible though. The Gilmore Girls revival was painful. Fuller House was bloated and pointless. Someone greenlit the Jersey Shore revival and for that alone deserves to be ashamed forever. So I’m not walking in with hope. But maybe this one could work. Hart actually understands Clarissa. There’s something potentially interesting in the idea of her as a parent now, watching her own kid navigate the same anxieties she spent years working through. Maybe they won’t fuck it up. Probably they will, but maybe not. At least the old episodes are still there. Still hold up. Still teach you things. Saturday, 17 March 2018. Something Worth Doing: Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is one of those castings that just works. There’s something in the way she carries herself—part warrior, part completely unbothered—that makes you believe the things she does on screen are actually possible. So when Reebok signed her for a fitness campaign alongside Ariana Grande, Gigi Hadid, and Victoria Beckham, I didn’t immediately dismiss it. The promotional language is all there—becoming your strongest self, mental and physical transformation, all of that—but at least the person saying it seems like she actually believes it. Celebrity fitness campaigns work a specific way. They show you beautiful, fit people and tell you that if you buy their shoes and adopt their mindset, you’ll look like them too. What they don’t mention is genetics, the personal trainers who cost six figures, the fact that these people were already gorgeous before any contract existed. But you know that. You also know intellectually it won’t fix anything, but something in you wants to try anyway. I keep thinking about Wonder Woman before Gal Gadot played her. The character worked because she wasn’t trying to inspire anyone. She was just doing the job. No philosophy, no arc about discovering herself, no language about unlocking potential. She fought because that’s what she did. There was something clean about that. Gadot brings some of that to everything—even a sportswear partnership. She’s not desperate to convince you of anything. She’s just there. That’s probably why this reaches people who wouldn’t normally pay attention to this stuff. The actual point is simpler. Gadot’s got an ease in her own skin that you can’t teach or manufacture. The Reebok campaign is just the frame. If you’re looking for a reason to get back in shape, you could do worse than having her face attached to the idea. Not because she’ll transform your life or unlock some hidden strength. Just because she makes it look like something worth doing. Saturday, 17 March 2018. Ramen Heads: I found my way to Afuri in Sendagaya a while back and basically never left. The menu is small and I know it backwards. There’s a particular yuzu ramen they make that I still think about when I’m not sitting at the counter—the broth is bright and clean, and the noodles have this texture that most places fuck up. Which is why people spend their lives making it. Ramen spent a long time in the West as student food. The cheap instant stuff you bought in bulk when you were broke. In Japan it’s always been something different: a craft, a point of pride, a tradition people guard carefully. The gap between how it’s perceived in different parts of the world is kind of interesting. Same dish, completely different weight. There’s a documentary called “Ramen Heads” now. Koki Shigeno, Arata Oshima, and Yusuke Kamata made it. They interviewed Osamu Tomita, a ramen chef who clearly gives a shit about what he does. The film is about why ramen matters—why those small choices in technique and ingredient change the entire bowl. It’s shot with the kind of care the subject actually deserves. It’s at food festivals right now. Probably coming to streaming at some point. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m curious what someone like Tomita thinks about after spending most of his life making the same bowl over and over. That kind of focus usually means he’s figured out something worth knowing. The documentary probably won’t teach me anything I haven’t already figured out at the counter. But it might explain why I keep going back. Friday, 16 March 2018. Five Articles: A couple’s been together five years and they barely have sex anymore. Both of them want to—neither’s holding back intentionally—but the gap between comfort and desire is wider than you’d think, and they can’t seem to cross it. It’s the kind of problem that exists in a lot of relationships but doesn’t get talked about much. A therapist named Angelika Eck wrote about it for Zeit Magazine, about how eroticism survives in long-term relationships, and reading it felt like someone finally naming something you already knew was wrong. Drag queens got mainstream. TV, parades, bars in every city. But drag kings—women performing the exaggeration of men—are still on the margins somehow, which makes no sense. Hazel Cills wrote about them for Jezebel, looking at why the inverse of drag never got the same cultural moment. There’s something weirder and probably more interesting happening in that space that nobody’s paying attention to. Mark Zuckerberg is absurdly short. Like, actually tiny. Facebook controls his image carefully because power and height are tangled in our collective mind—you need to seem big to seem powerful—and if he’s going to run for president, as the rumors suggest, he needs to look like a man who could lead. Maria Bustillos wrote about this on Medium, and the whole thing is funny in a way that you can’t unsee. Counterfeit sneakers are a full economy now because the real ones cost $200-300 and will be out of style in a week. Hypebeasts in their Supreme and Yeezys exist in this weird space—are they actually stylish or just wearing logos like identity? Kevin Lozano looked at the fake sneaker market for GQ, and yeah, the knockoffs might be the truest thing about the whole scene. Brad Kim created Know Your Meme ten years ago. Ten years of documenting every weird corner of internet culture. In an interview with Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Verge, he talked about what it’s done to him: he can’t believe in anything anymore. His mother’s faith, his childhood faith—the internet took that. He’s seen too much. You see enough of how people actually behave online, and something in you dies. Monday, 12 March 2018. Supreme Believers: I’ve got a friend who’s obsessed with Supreme. Like, genuinely obsessed—not just the obvious pieces, but the pens, the keychains, the skateboards, the sneakers, everything. For years I thought he was completely insane. Lately I’m starting to understand it. Then I learn about Georgie Riot. She’s this alternative model and skater from Manchester, and when a photographer came over to shoot portraits at her place, he just stopped. The sneaker collection, the skateboards, this massive Supreme towel—the whole apartment was basically a shrine to the brand. She didn’t just own these things, she lived inside them. That’s what made it click for me. There’s something about watching someone commit that completely to something, especially when it’s something as ridiculous as a streetwear label. Supreme started in New York as just another brand, but for people like Georgie it’s become something closer to faith. A very expensive, very cool religion. My friend would probably just move to Manchester to study her collection. That apartment is basically his temple, and now he knows there are other believers out there. Monday, 12 March 2018. Heal Cancer: Flipped through an old list the other day—ten missions that were supposed to be accomplished over a weekend, the kind of crowdsourced absurdism that made the internet feel participatory for a moment. Go back and superlike an ex on Tinder. Dress as Batman and help solve crimes. Get drunk and play beer pong with old people at a nursing home. Give out free condoms to strangers. Watch Harry Potter backwards. The final one, with no setup: heal cancer. What gets me is how sincere it all was. This wasn’t ironic. The poster genuinely believed that people would go out and do these ridiculous things and come back with stories. There’s something almost beautiful in that faith—the belief that chaos written down and shared was enough to make something happen. Most of the humor is locked in its specific moment. Some of it’s just harmless dumb stuff. Some of it hits the semi-transgressive notes that appeal to anyone young enough to believe consequences are theoretical. And then there’s that final item—heal cancer—which feels less like a punchline and more like the list just surrendered to pure absurdity. I spent enough years on the internet to know when it felt genuinely different. When a dumb list could feel innovative. When a dare written online seemed revolutionary. Now I’m mostly bored by the same impulses resurfacing. But I can see why this list seemed genius: it was permission. It said everyone’s doing this weird thing together, and maybe the doing wasn’t really the point at all. Friday, 9 March 2018. Anime Went Mainstream: Wearing anime shirts to school was social suicide back in the day. Or at least it felt that way—you’d get mocked by kids with even less social standing than you, which somehow made it worse. Now it’s everywhere. Sailor Moon stickers on MacBooks. Adults with Pikachu tattoos. The whole forbidden thing became a style choice. Uniqlo’s released a new anime collection through Weekly Shonen Jump. Dragon Ball, Bleach, Naruto, Hunter x Hunter, Yu-Gi-Oh!—the obvious ones. But also High School Kimengumi! and Rokudenashi Blues, the stuff that barely made it out of Japan. Kids and adult sizes. There’s something that happens when the thing that marked you as an outsider becomes merchandise becomes normal. The freak becomes the default. You put on the shirt now and nobody thinks anything of it. Not even you. It’s just fabric with a design on it. Somewhere in that transformation from forbidden to mainstream to invisible, something shifts. Whether that’s good or bad is the kind of question that has no answer. Wednesday, 7 March 2018. Okay Kaya: I don’t know how long Okay Kaya has been making music, but I just found her. A Norwegian artist living in New York, and the first time I heard her songs I understood I’d been waiting for this without knowing it. “Clenched Teeth,” “I’m Stupid,” “Damn, Gravity”—they sit differently than most things. There’s no reaching in them, no performance. She sounds like someone thinking, and I guess that’s rarer than it should be. Norway keeps producing people who somehow understand something about silence and clarity that the rest of us have to learn. She’s been in New York long enough that you can hear the city in her too—that particular exhaustion, that restlessness—but there’s still something cold and Scandinavian underneath. The kind of thing that doesn’t need to explain itself. She hasn’t toured in Germany. I don’t know if it’s logistics or indifference or just hasn’t happened yet. I’ll keep listening, which I guess sounds obsessive, but that’s what music does sometimes—finds you late and makes you feel like you wasted time not knowing about it. There’s no fixing that feeling, but you listen anyway. Tuesday, 6 March 2018. The Warmth Bus: Hans Staudenmayer’s flashlight beam sweeps across the steps of the Alte Nazarethkirche in Wedding. Minus twelve degrees. Two feet sticking out from under a blanket. “Can you hear me?” he asks. The blanket moves. “We’re from the Wärmebus. Do you need help?” Andreas Gandzior, Uta Keseling, and Martin Nejezchleba from the Berlin Morgenpost spent a night documenting the Wärmebus—a mobile warmth service that works through winter, finding people freezing on the streets and getting them to shelters or warming centers. The work sounds simple. In practice, it’s urgent. When it’s below zero, the difference between someone finding a doorway and not finding one is the difference between living and dying. You don’t notice these people in the daytime. At night, during the coldest parts of winter, they become a kind of invisible infrastructure—the ones under the stairs, in the U-Bahn, wedged into alcoves. The documentary doesn’t sensationalize it. There’s no music, no emotional manipulation. Just the cold, the flashlight, the question: “Do you need help?” And the person under the blanket answering. I’ve been in Berlin in winter. Everyone has a warm place to go. It’s hard to hold in your head that other people don’t, that the choice isn’t between your apartment and someone else’s. The choice is between having a place and not having one. Between life and hypothermia. What stayed with me was how ordinary the work looked. Two people in a van. A routine. Night after night, finding people you’d walk past without seeing in daylight. The documentary doesn’t ask you to feel guilty or do anything about it. It just shows you the work, the cold, the people. That’s almost harder to sit with. Tuesday, 6 March 2018. No Apologies: Three years old, Joanie Del Santo stole her parents’ friends’ shoes at a dinner party and organized a runway show in the living room. Everything else followed naturally—modeling at seventeen, styling when people asked for help, then Saint Liberate, the vintage shop she opened because she needed something entirely her own. Her grandfather even models on the site, which says something about how she thinks. She’s from Pasadena, has that California thing where clothes just work without trying. Photographers like James Drew shoot her. It’s straightforward on the surface: good eye, good taste, clear sense of what works. What got me was the anime side. She’s a serious nerd about it, loves Japanese culture, dresses as anime characters whenever she wants. Her friends apparently hate it. That’s the whole point—she’s not editing herself into something acceptable or marketable. Fashion and anime are equally real to her, both equally important, both part of how she exists. You meet people who actually know what they like and don’t apologize for it, and something about that is just attractive. Not in a calculated way. Just in the way real things are attractive. Monday, 5 March 2018. Five Things: The internet is basically an endless stream of garbage and occasionally something genuinely interesting. This week I read five pieces that made me think. Ulrich Clement wrote about affairs at work for ZEIT Magazin. Not the romance part—the power part. How hierarchy changes what’s actually happening, especially when one person has authority over another. Desire doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Lisa Simpson has always been the idealist, the one who thinks for herself and won’t compromise. Darryn King wrote for Vanity Fair about how she became a feminist icon without really trying, just by being smart and stubborn. That kind of quiet integrity matters. Sam Kim reported for Bloomberg on North Korea’s hacker army—talented programmers scattered across the globe, stealing money and funneling it back to a regime that would destroy their families if they refused. It’s a genuinely dystopian look at how surveillance states weaponize talent. Farhad Manjoo wrote in the New York Times about YouTube replacing text. I watch way more video than I used to, that’s true. But the premise that one medium kills another feels too clean. We’re just adding layers, not replacing them. The digital nomad lifestyle sounds perfect—quit your job, buy a MacBook, work from a beach. Alice Gregory wrote for Outside about why most people get tired of it. The logistics alone wear you down. Plus there’s the loneliness of never building anything that lasts in one place. It’s the fantasy that sounds better than the reality. Sunday, 4 March 2018. She Finally Gave In: I can already hear it. Six months from now, same commute, same radio station, the same song between news breaks. Iggy Azalea and Quavo, “Savior,” looping until it’s just part of the static. When Iggy broke through, I thought she might be different. She didn’t soften herself. Didn’t perform weakness or vulnerability. She wasn’t asking for permission or sympathy. Just showed up and said what she wanted. That counted for something in hip hop. But somewhere she made the calculation that this mattered less than a hit, so she’s been sanding down every sharp edge until there’s nothing left to hold onto. “Savior” is built from the formula they pull out whenever they need to guarantee a radio hit. Latin-ish beat, breathy padding underneath, a melody designed to stick without requiring anything from you. Quavo shows up and says his name and leaves. The whole thing is so competently engineered that you feel nothing. By summer I’ll have heard it a hundred times. And I still won’t have felt anything. Friday, 2 March 2018. Heavy Rules: Alma put out this mixtape called Heavy Rules with Mø, Kiiara, and Tove Styrke. I played it once and came back to it, which is the only metric that matters for whether something sticks around. The kind of thing you’d play on a drive with the windows down, not because it’s going to change your life but because the songs don’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. The Finnish singer with the neon hair isn’t trying to be anything other than what she is. That sounds obvious, but it’s not as common as it should be in pop music, where there’s usually this distance between the person and the persona. She’s got a voice that does something with the production instead of just sitting on top of it. The mixing lets you hear that she’s actually there, which sounds like a small thing until you realize most pop music doesn’t bother. “Dance for Me,” “Chit Chat,” “Good Vibes”—the songs have this bounce that doesn’t feel engineered. Electronic pop that trusts you to find your own way in, which is rarer than you’d think. She came up on “Chasing Highs” and “Phases,” singles that already made it clear she wasn’t headed for the assembly line. This mixtape feels like her digging into her own thing further, which is always more interesting than whatever comes next in the algorithm. I like that this happened because four artists just decided to make something together without turning it into a moment. No brand coordination, no major label strategy. Just music. The things worth listening to usually come from that kind of impulse. Friday, 2 March 2018. Everything You Say: The piano was old, and nobody ever taught her to play it. She just touched the keys until they made sounds she liked, then started singing. That’s how Beatrich—Lithuanian, 19, self-taught—started making music. I found her through “Everything You Say,” which is a clean pop song that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Not trying to be anything but what it is. Friday-ready in three minutes. The background is what caught me. Growing up in a house at the edge of a forest, spending childhood in nature and invented worlds, then finding music as the next form of the same thing. No lessons, no structure, just instinct. And you hear it in her work—even in a straightforward pop song, there’s something unguarded. No brand machinery running underneath, just someone making what she wants to hear. “Superstar” was the obvious hit a few years back, millions of plays, the whole trajectory. But I keep coming back to this one because it’s quiet about what it does. Doesn’t ask much of me, doesn’t demand investment in her story. Just a song that does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t overstay. Friday, 2 March 2018. Already There: Unearthed demos from dead artists hit different. It’s listening to a version of someone who doesn’t exist anymore—which is technically always true, but demos make it sharp. This is Amy Winehouse at seventeen, before Back to Black, before Rehab, before everything solidified into myth and tragedy. James McMillan co-wrote “My Own Way” with her then, and he kept the recording all these years. It’s sparse—just her voice, some arrangement underneath, nothing polished. What strikes me is how formed it is: that lazy phrasing, the way she worries a syllable, the confidence of someone who knows what she’s doing even at an age when knowing is rare. The song itself is dark, resigned, touched with something brittle that could snap either way. Not hopeful exactly, but not drowning in it either. Some people arrive fully themselves. I hear it on this demo—a seventeen-year-old who’s somehow complete. Most of us spend decades becoming whoever we are, and some never quite make it. She was already there in a way that feels almost cruel. The culture absorbed her into the category of early death—Janis, Jimi, Kurt, all the ones who burned and left perfect legend behind. We nod and agree she was doomed and talented in equal measure. Both things true. Both somehow missing the point. The unreleased songs that surface feel like evidence, like proof we remember her correctly. Which we do. But it’s also a small sadness: the difference between listening to a voice at seventeen and imagining what comes next, and knowing what actually came next was five more years and then nothing. I listened to “My Own Way” a few times. It’s exactly what it is—a demo from someone who had her voice figured out, dark and matter-of-fact, not asking for pity. Just there. That’s enough. Thursday, 1 March 2018. The Paid Interrupt: Asian Andy became an Uber driver and livestreamed the rides. People watching online could pay to send messages that a text-to-speech voice would read inside the car, right there in front of his passengers who had no idea any of this was happening. I don’t know how long he thought about this before doing it—it feels like one of those ideas that arrives fully formed, obvious in retrospect, impossible before the fact. The setup was straightforward. Camera in the car. Livestream running. A donation link. Every few minutes, some guy’s two-dollar message would interrupt as a robot voice: “Your mother is a horse,” or “Eat my ass,” or whatever else was being crowdsourced in real time. His passengers would jump. He’d look in the mirror and keep driving like it was part of the job. What made it work was that he’d removed the most exhausting part of internet performance—the pressure to be interesting. He didn’t have to do anything. He just had to exist in his car while strangers paid to interrupt him. The passengers were the content. He was the straight man. The internet was just sitting in the backseat. Thursday, 1 March 2018. Television Gave Up: ProSieben and Sat.1 are just running the same three shows in heavy rotation now. “The Big Bang Theory,” “2 Broke Girls,” “Two and a Half Men”—the same episodes endlessly recycled like they’re the only programs on earth. I remember when this wasn’t true. “Stromberg” was on, “Bullyparade,” “TV Total”—German shows with something behind them, made for an actual audience. Now it’s just American syndication and reruns, the lowest-effort content possible filling every slot. The obvious answer is money. It costs almost nothing to license an old American sitcom compared to producing anything original. Journalist Philipp Walulis looked into the economics once and it was exactly as grim as you’d expect: corporate ownership structures, licensing deals, the calculated decision to treat content as a commodity. Every repeat airing of “The Big Bang Theory” generates revenue. No risk. No cost. No thought. What gets me is that the networks aren’t even pretending anymore. This is just the model now. Air cheap syndicated content, hit your quotas, keep the shareholders happy. You’re not really the audience—you’re just a metric they measure success by. The money changes hands long before anyone ever tunes in. Thursday, 1 March 2018. Less to Prove: Ellen von Unwerth shot Miley for Wonderland and the first thing I noticed was that she looks like herself. Not the shocked version everyone had been trained to expect, not the scandal-Miley that was everywhere. Just someone in front of a camera without needing to prove anything. The arc was almost too obvious to watch. Hannah Montana to the girl who had to be the opposite of that, shock as a full-time identity. Every leaked photo, every MTV appearance was another middle finger to whatever she’d been before. It made sense—the only way out was through the opposite direction. But somewhere along the way, probably around “Younger Now,” the desperation seemed to lift. The Wonderland interview has her talking about Elton John, her house pets, the usual stuff. Nothing that’s going to change anyone’s mind. But the fact that she can just exist in a magazine shoot without it feeling like image warfare or performance art—that’s different. She’s not fighting anything. I keep thinking about the people who grew up watching her become unrecognizable. That specific experience of seeing a girl you knew as a brand transform into something shocking and aggressive. Whether she’s actually changed or just found a way to be herself without scandal as the fuel—that’s the question. Could be either one. Whatever comes next, it won’t be the same as before. She’s burned through the shock cycle and now she’s just here. That uncertainty about what that means—that’s probably the truest thing about where she is now. Wednesday, 28 February 2018. Play Chrono Trigger: The game opens with a carnival and a girl with a time pendant, and from there Chrono Trigger barely puts a foot wrong. Thirty years later and no one’s made a better JRPG. Sakaguchi directing, Horii writing, Toriyama designing—they hit something that just works. Multiple endings, a time plot that holds together, characters that stick with you. Getting it ’right’ used to mean original hardware—the cartridge, the console, the whole ritual. The ports to PlayStation, DS, iPhone were all slightly off somehow. Each version felt like a compromise, like you were missing something essential. But now it’s on Steam for fifteen euros. You don’t have to hunt or negotiate with the format anymore. You just buy it and play it. That feels important. Not because the original hardware is worthless, but because the game is the thing, and everything else is just the container. Tuesday, 27 February 2018. Antifuchs: German female rappers kept getting scattered. You’d get a moment—SXTN with “Fotzen im Club” and “Bongzimmer,” those uncompromising tracks that proved what women could do—but the moment wouldn’t hold. The space would close back up. After them it was just fragments, no presence. Antifuchs understood she couldn’t wait for it to stay open on its own. Hip-hop had been her life since childhood—shaped by Foxy Brown, 2Pac, Capone-n-Noreaga, the Neptunes, Eminem, Kool Savas, Olli Banjo. But she’d been listening closely to her own country and noticed the gap: German female rappers who met her standard didn’t really exist. She’d heard decent tracks, but nothing she’d want to keep returning to. Nothing with real weight. So she came masked and completely clear. Not to prove women belonged in hip-hop—that was settled. But to actually deliver something with taste and no compromise, uninterested in softening any of it or apologizing for what she was doing. That’s the moment that shifts a scene. That’s what matters. Monday, 26 February 2018. Another One: Another app just landed to kill Instagram and Facebook and everything in between. Vero. The pitch: you share what matters to you—music, films, restaurants, photos, whatever—and you choose exactly who sees it. No algorithm, no ads, no surveillance. Just people you actually know seeing things you actually want them to see. It’s the same pitch Snapchat made, then Peach, then Vine, then about fifty others. The format changes but the dream stays the same: social without the extraction, without the madness. And technically, yeah, that should be better. Sending a song or a photo to a few people shouldn’t require a platform that’s turned into a surveillance shop designed to keep you staring until your attention is worth money. What’s different right now is that some real people are already on it—Charli XCX, Max Joseph, Zack Snyder. Not massive names but actual artists with fanbases. They’re doing the thing where they post exclusive stuff and make it feel like being there early means something. It’s basically a timer. Once you see that pattern start, you’re watching an app in its window. Six months, maybe a year if it’s lucky. Then it dies and people pretend they never heard of it. I understand the appeal of trying. Every time something like this lands you think maybe this is the one that sticks, that finally lets you just share something with your friends without a machine deciding it’s not profitable enough to show them. That thinking is sound. The app that delivers on it probably isn’t coming from somewhere. It’s not going to have venture capital and celebrity seed users. And if it does, it’s already poisoned. So another one lands, another one dies, and we’ll do this again next year. You know it won’t fix anything, but you download anyway. Monday, 26 February 2018. Bushido’s Backyard: The internet’s relentless. Most of it vanishes, but sometimes something catches and stays with you. Five things rattled around in my head recently, and they share nothing except that they all caught me mid-scroll. Bushido being a suburban neighbor is genuinely funny. The German rapper built his whole career on street credibility and toughness, and now he’s in Kleinmachnow dealing with actual neighbors. Imagine that disconnect—the persona versus the guy who probably gets noise complaints about his backyard. It’s absurdity that only works when you’re famous for the opposite of fitting in. Kids learn about sex from Pornhub now, not health class or magazines or any actual conversation. They learn from platforms designed for adults watching other adults get destroyed on camera. The education question everyone circles around is simple and unanswerable: what happens when that’s your sex ed? How does it shape you? I don’t have an answer, just a bad feeling we’re failing something basic. Silicon Valley keeps proving that exploitation works better when it’s wrapped in good design and marketed as progress. Facebook, Google, Amazon—empires built on extracting value from people and burning out their own employees. The machine gets more efficient, and we keep using the apps anyway because stopping feels harder than staying. The speedrunning community keeps grinding away at Super Mario Bros., people spending decades shaving milliseconds off their times. Entire obsessive subcultures built around frame-by-frame analysis and muscle memory practiced until it’s automatic. There’s something genuinely beautiful about that focus—the absolute purity of trying to be perfect at something that doesn’t matter in any material way. Poppy decided the internet deserved performance art that’s intentionally artificial and resistant to explanation. She built an audience by leaning into mystery instead of solving it, doing things that defy categorization. In a space where everyone performs authenticity, she just performs artificiality straight-faced and somehow that’s more honest. These five things don’t connect except they’re all proof that culture is stranger and more fractured than anyone admits. We’re thinking about gangster rappers and porn education and corporate evil and 30-year-old game records and internet performance art simultaneously, often in the same hour. That’s our actual landscape right now. Sunday, 25 February 2018. Waiting It Out: March on Netflix was its usual deluge. New seasons of Jessica Jones, Love, Santa Clarita Diet, Designated Survivor, Suits, Gotham, The Blacklist—the reliable stuff you were already watching. Some of it held up. But the month also surfaced the more obscure arrivals. Collateral. Requiem. The Defiant Ones. Mädchen hinter Gittern, a German prison drama that somehow lands every time. B: The Beginning. A.I.C.O. Incarnation. Children of the Whales. Stretch Armstrong. Shows that take a few hours and vanish. That was the deal. The films were stronger. Annihilation actually understood the source material. Game Over, Man! was pure dumb fun. Ricky Gervais on stage doing his thing. Das Wunder von Bern, another German film, this one about football and fathers, hitting deeper than expected. Then the Marvel movies showed up again like clockwork—Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor, Captain America. Alice Through the Looking Glass for surfaces without substance. Bolt for something harmless. Black Swan for that dark, beautiful feeling. That whole month had a rhythm to it. Cold, gray outside. Staying in. Hot drink. Reaching for whatever was scrolling past. Not everything stuck. Some of it was bad. But there’s a kind of peace in knowing nothing’s going to change you, just fill the time until spring comes back. Friday, 23 February 2018. Breasts Save the World: Comet’s coming in the movies, so you blow it up or hide in a bunker or hold hands and wait. Nobody ever figured out the solution until Erina Kamiya made it obvious. Get in a hot tub with friends, let your chest turn into a Saiyajin, boom, world saved. The video’s stupid and I mean that as a compliment. Kamen Joshi’s the idol group, the YouTube channel is where she actually has some control, and she apparently has the guts to just make the crude joke explicit. She knows what role she’s in, what people show up for, so instead of the usual coy distance, she just leans into it. Yes, look at this. Here’s the stupid funny bit about it, and nobody has to pretend it means something deeper. It’s not subversive exactly. It’s just honest in a weird way. You know what this is. At least she’s not pretending it’s anything else. Thursday, 22 February 2018. Alcohol Wins: I’ve heard the argument too many times to count: alcohol’s worse for your brain than weed. It’s not like anyone’s disputing it. But there’s always this gap between what we know and what actually gets legalized, and that’s where Germany’s been stuck—where most places have been stuck, really. The cops know it. The researchers know it. The law still doesn’t care. A study from University of Colorado Boulder finally put the data in front of everyone. 853 adult brain scans, 439 from teenagers. They compared what alcohol does to your brain against cannabis. The difference isn’t subtle. Alcohol shrinks your gray matter and your white matter. Gray matter’s where you actually think. White matter’s how your neurons talk to each other. Cannabis doesn’t do that. It doesn’t sit there reducing the volume of your brain the way alcohol does. Kent Hutchison was one of the researchers. He said something that stuck: “We’ve known for decades that alcohol is bad for the brain.” The weird part is how the cannabis research keeps contradicting itself—one study says it shrinks the hippocampus, the next one finds changes in the cerebellum, the one after that finds nothing. But alcohol? It’s consistent. Measurable. The studies don’t have to fight with each other because every piece of evidence points the same direction. The obvious conclusion is sitting right there: if you’re choosing between getting high and getting drunk, you’re choosing the option that doesn’t physically shrink your brain. But there’s always that careful German qualification in the research—long-term cannabis effects still need more study, so don’t think you should smoke all day. Fair point. Moderation’s still the thing nobody wants to hear. What gets to me is how far the policy lags behind the science. André Schulz, who runs the German criminal police, has said out loud that cannabis prohibition is arbitrary and hasn’t worked. The people whose job it is to deal with the actual fallout think it’s a failed experiment. Alcohol—legal everywhere, normalized completely—does more damage. And somehow the argument keeps going. That’s the absurdity. Thursday, 22 February 2018. Computiful: I’m alone so often and I just wish you were here. That’s how CRO opens “Computiful,” stating it plainly without desperation. In a world of unlimited options, he wants to turn it all off and just want one person. The song is his response to what the internet has done to connection—we swipe past people like they’re products, and if they don’t fit the algorithm we move on. Everyone’s interchangeable. CRO’s tired of it. He builds the track from soul, rap, and funk with a Daft Punk edge, sleek surfaces covering genuine loneliness. When he’s rapping about opting out completely—forget the hype, the likes, the numbers, just give me one real person—the melancholy underneath feels honest. Not a complaint about the youth or a lecture, just someone naming what we all know: that moment when you’re scrolling through faces and realize you just swiped past someone you might have actually cared about if you’d stopped long enough to notice. I don’t know if a song changes anything. Probably it doesn’t. But there’s something direct about naming what we’ve built a system to hide from ourselves—that we’ve made connection effortless and somehow made it meaningless. Thursday, 22 February 2018. Lollapalooza’s Coming Home: Last year’s Lollapalooza was ruined by logistics. They’d booked Trabrennbahn Hoppegarten—an old racetrack basically off the map—and public transport there was theoretical at best. People spent hours trying to arrive, got stranded trying to leave. It was a masterclass in how not to run an event. This year they’ve learned. Back in Berlin, at the Olympiastadion in the Westend. Actually connected to the city. Actually reachable. No three-hour journey on the U-Bahn just to get there. The venue knows what it’s doing. The artist bill is solid. The Weeknd and Dua Lipa carry the weight—the draw—but they’ve stacked it with real talent. The National, Liam Gallagher, Armin van Buuren, Kraftwerk 3D. Casper and RAF Camora on the German side. Years & Years, Wolf Alice, Lewis Capaldi. It’s a thoughtful lineup, not just names from a spreadsheet. There’s actual variety here, real texture. I’ll probably skip it. Festivals in Berlin demand everything and you spend half the time commuting. But at least the infrastructure is sound now. At least they learned something from last year. That counts for something. Wednesday, 21 February 2018. I Don’t Give A Fuck: Five of them together on BBC Radio 1 in LA, tearing through ’I Don’t Give A Fuck’—Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, MØ, Alma—and it was one of those moments where the lineup just works. Everyone brings something. Dua Lipa’s been everywhere lately. Two years of constant touring: LA, London, Europe, New York, opening for Troye Sivan across the States. That kind of movement feeds what you make. Travel changes the way you write. Her debut album hits different. It’s pop at the core but it breathes hip-hop and soul like they’re all one thing. These aren’t songs announcing themselves as important—they just arrive knowing what they’re doing. She knows how to make you move but she’s also thinking about something deeper. There’s this restlessness in it, this need to keep reaching for what comes next. You don’t hear that much, especially from someone this young with this much control. Wednesday, 21 February 2018. Web 2.0 Died: Vox—not the TV network, the media company that owns The Verge, Polygon, Eater—just fired fifty social media workers. The official reason: the industry changed. What they meant was that the whole Web 2.0 thing nobody was supposed to question turned out to be a cult, and the cult was collapsing. For years the social media experts had a gospel. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat were the future. Your own website was dead. If you weren’t optimizing for the algorithm, you’d be unemployed within a year. Writers bought it. Editors bought it. Designers fed themselves to the machine and told others to do the same. Now Zuckerberg’s killing organic reach and pivoting back to people messaging each other directly. Trump basically owns Twitter now. Snapchat had a redesign everyone hated and apparently you don’t recover from that. The feeds are cratering or already dead, and the people whose entire job was predicting these companies would save media are getting their severance packages. This wasn’t a one-time layoff. Every major media company that over-committed to social is going to pay for it over the next few months. The social media staff that was supposed to be the future are probably updating LinkedIn now, which is its own kind of irony. YouTube’s shedding advertiser money and getting more chaotic with every content rule change. Twitch streamers are drowning in moderation drama. Medium burned through cash and closed offices because blogs, which Medium was created to save, turned out to be dead yet again—dead before, alive briefly, dead again. The actual young people aren’t even using these services anymore. They’re in Discord fragments, scattered group chats, Instagram Stories that vanish in 24 hours. Or they just quit and stream Netflix and call it digital detox. The grand unified social network was always a mistake. I have no idea what replaces all this and I think that’s the healthiest thing that could happen. Instead of everyone chasing one future that turns out to be a dead end, maybe people just make what interests them. Stream games, write about mushroom poisons, post pictures of yourself, build something that doesn’t fit a template. Fail alone or succeed quietly instead of all failing together. For the first time since social media exploded, the air feels different. There’s potential again. Fifty people lost their jobs to teach everyone a lesson about hype and the danger of betting everything on one platform, one future, one story. That’s a brutal price. But maybe it had to cost something to learn. Wednesday, 21 February 2018. Dinosaur Costumes: My uncle stopped buying American peanuts. My aunt swore off McDonald’s. A friend gave up a certain genre of entertainment—the specifics don’t matter. These were small acts of spite, which felt like the only honest response to 2016. Trump happened, and America became optional, something you could simply boycott like a bad coffee brand. The thing that made it sting is that America obviously had other modes. Liberals, feminists, YouTube, all the creative chaos sitting next to the cruelty. But knowing something in theory is different from actually living with it. When a place keeps choosing its worst version, I started wondering if that’s not just what it is, and everything else is the exception. John Oliver, whose job is spending forty minutes every week explaining what’s broken about America, decided to make a different argument. He said people should appreciate America for what it does right. And his examples were beautiful in their absurdity: YouTube. Dinosaur costumes. A bed that looks like the Batmobile. The fact that somewhere in the American brain, someone imagined a Batmobile bed, made it real, and sold it to strangers. And it works. You can’t hate a country that invented that. You can try—it feels noble—but then the dinosaur costume shows up and you’re standing there holding your principles and grinning anyway. Maybe Oliver’s actual point is that you can’t judge a whole place by its worst politicians. America makes both monsters and art, builds Batmobile beds and concentration camps. You can hate the second without being able to quite hate the first. The absurdity is part of the real thing, as real as the cruelty. I can’t hate America either. I tried during those years, and it felt right. But it was always going to be an act. Too much of what I care about came from there—culture, design, the permission to be strange. Maybe that’s America’s real superpower: it does something unforgivable, and then it invents something so utterly weird that you have to forgive it anyway. My uncle can keep his peanut boycott. I think we’re all stuck with some version of love for the place, whether we admit it or not. Tuesday, 20 February 2018. Still Pixels: I’ve always said pixel art is the best way to make a video game. Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking—I grew up on Super Nintendo, after all—but I’ve played through Witcher 3, Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV, games that probably cost more to make than my car is worth, and I still get that specific thrill from a well-crafted pixel platformer that the big 3D stuff doesn’t quite touch. There’s something about constraints that makes you sharper. Celeste hit me exactly right. It’s about this woman Madeline who decides to climb a mountain that’s essentially a series of escalating horrors, meeting the kind of weird people who show up in those places—an old woman who’s sweeter than she should be, a hotel owner running some kind of scheme, people who seem to think danger is a drug. The game just came out on everything. The gameplay is familiar territory: Super Meat Boy spliced with those old SNES platformers that seemed designed to destroy you but somehow made you come back for more. Celeste has that same quality. It throws different challenges at you, the people you meet feel real, and the difficulty climbs in a way that feels honest rather than cheap. It’s not for people with short tempers or shaky patience, but if that’s not you, it respects that. When I finally cleared some of those later levels, I felt like I’d actually learned something, beaten something fair, rather than just gotten lucky. That’s always what I come back for. Tuesday, 20 February 2018. Digital Cocaine: There’s this modder named Filip who makes about six grand a month selling cocaine in The Sims 4. Not real cocaine, obviously—digital cocaine in a mod called Basemental Drugs. But the money is real. What started as Filip just fucking around with his Sims kitchen, adding some recreational pharmaceuticals to the game for fun, turned into this fully realized drug economy mod. You can cook cocaine, grow weed, throw parties, deal to AI junkies, hire sex workers, wake up with hangovers. The whole pharmaceutical pipeline. It’s absurdly detailed. The mod itself is free to download. Filip doesn’t charge for the work. But enough people who use it throw him donations that he’s apparently found the one legal way to run a drug operation: simulate it so perfectly that people want to fund it. There’s something almost accidental about it—he wasn’t trying to build a business. He was just goofing around, created something weird and specific and good enough that it stuck. Now he’s making more money from donations than a lot of actual jobs pay. The punchline people make is always the same: “if you want to deal drugs, just learn to code first.” Which is funny, but also kind of true in a depressing way. The barrier to making actual money isn’t legality, it’s just… having a skill worth monetizing. Filip did. Monday, 19 February 2018. Borrowed Chairs: The benches disappeared from Kottbusser Tor one afternoon—the deep U-Bahn station where you’re standing alone on the platform at off-hours and the sound carries wrong. Berlin’s transit authority had unscrewed them, supposedly to discourage homeless people and dealers from lingering. What actually happened was it became brutal for anyone who couldn’t stand for hours: old people, anyone with chronic pain, anyone whose body was already losing the day. Toy Crew showed up with chairs. Just walked into BVG storage, took what they needed, and put the furniture back where the benches used to be. Not hidden. Not subtle. Right there at the platform level like it was always supposed to be that way. The wit of it kills me. Not angry, not political in the lecture sense—just solving the problem with absolute clarity. You make it unbearable to sit, they make it clear you’re being stupid about it. This group’s been trolling the transit system for a while now. Flower boxes hanging off S-Bahn windows. An entire car filled with leaves. They treat the trains like collaborative sculpture, which is funny because that’s actually what they’ve become. You notice them. You can’t not notice them. I keep waiting to see what’s next. Monday, 19 February 2018. I’m Definitely Squidward: SpongeBob’s one of those childhood characters you’d actually want to murder as an adult. I used to admire the guy—his genuine joy in everything, the way he found meaning in jellyfish and burgers, his absolute inability to be cynical. I wanted to be him. Now I’m pretty sure I’d be Squidward, the only one in that show with any sense. I’d want to bury him and Patrick both somewhere quiet and forget they existed. Vans did a SpongeBob thing with Nickelodeon—sneakers, shirts, skatedecks, all of it. I looked through the collection the way you look at old photos from high school, which is mostly affection mixed with something harder to name. These are things made for kids who still believe what SpongeBob believes. There I was, scrolling through, remembering when yellow and pure happiness seemed like enough. You can’t get that back. He doesn’t change. You do. And the gap’s permanent. Monday, 19 February 2018. Still the Best Theme Song: The transformation sequence music from Sailor Moon is the best theme song ever written for a TV show. Twenty-five years later, I’m still convinced this is true. Those opening notes catch you the same way they caught you at nine years old, like they’re rewiring something in your brain that got set years ago. Tokyo threw a concert for the anniversary, and they had these musicians—Mariko Terashita, Makoto Yoshida, and Kotono Mitsuishi among them—rework the songs with orchestral arrangements. Full strings, the kind of production you’d expect in a concert hall. Not remakes so much as resurrections. Hearing those melodies stripped down and rebuilt at that scale made me understand what I’d always felt without being able to articulate: these weren’t just anime songs. They were pop songs that happened to be soundtracking a show about girls saving the world. The deeper cuts hit hardest. “Heart Moving,” “Eternal Eternity”—these are romance songs underneath the production, and placing them in that lush arrangement made something click. You realized the show was always doing more than it seemed to be doing. It was always about desire and choice and being wanted. There’s a new film coming out in Japan this year, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal: Dream, and the fact that something this old keeps generating new content means either we’ve all collectively refused to grow up, or there’s something legitimately substantial buried in the bones of this show. Probably both. The transformation concept alone—the idea that you put on the suit and you become something—that’s a metaphor that doesn’t expire. It works for being a girl, being an artist, being anything that requires you to decide you’re going to do this thing. The concert felt like watching something you loved as a kid get taken seriously without becoming self-important about it. The strings didn’t condescend. The arrangements didn’t wink at the audience. They just said: this music is good, and these feelings are real, and we’re going to play them in a concert hall because that’s what good music deserves. I don’t know if I’ll ever shake the feeling that Sailor Moon is mine in some particular way. Probably not. And probably that’s fine. Sunday, 18 February 2018. Stripes Again: Stripes don’t really leave fashion, they just fade for a season or two while everyone chases something else—florals, pastels, whatever’s on the mood board. Then somebody remembers that a simple repeating line is almost impossible to get wrong, and suddenly they’re everywhere again. There’s a reason for that. Stripes work. The appeal is almost boring in its logic. A repeating line creates visual rhythm without any effort. Oversized jumpsuits in horizontal stripes, tunics in color blocks, denim with a stripe texture somewhere in the weave—they all land the same way. It’s geometry that doesn’t announce itself. Which is probably why stripes show up in kids’ clothing, in nautical tradition, in every few years of fashion when the industry needs something it can trust. What’s interesting right now is how the colored stripes are getting actual color in them. Not just navy and white or black and cream, but real combinations—combinations that feel almost retro, like seventies or eighties, but not in a trying-too-hard way. Just stripes that happen to use colors. That feels earned. After years of minimalism, a little visual joy doesn’t read as a mistake anymore. The oversized cut matters too. A stripe in a well-fitted oversized piece behaves differently than in something tight—it sits there looking inevitable instead of clinging and distorting. Horizontal stripes catch a lot of criticism for their proportions, but that’s only true if you’re fighting the pattern. Build it into the garment properly and it almost always works. I caught myself looking for stripe pieces when this started circulating, which probably says something about the direction things are moving. You feel these patterns shift before you think them through. Some visual element hits and you just want to own something in it, wear it until the season turns and something else becomes inevitable. Stripes might stick around longer this time. They usually do. Friday, 16 February 2018. Just Friends: Anne-Marie and Marshmello made a song called “Friends” about being stuck outside someone’s desire. The friendzone isn’t real, except it completely is—just not as a place. It’s a feeling, and the feeling is real enough to build a song around. Everyone knows the script. You’re interested in someone. You’re around them, you’re nice, and somewhere in your brain it adds up to something. Except it doesn’t work that way. People either want you or they don’t, and being first doesn’t entitle you to reciprocation. It’s not a waiting game. It’s just done. What gets me is how much time we spend on this idea, like there’s some secret move that changes the answer. There isn’t one. The person already knows. And if you tell them, it doesn’t fix anything—it just makes things awkward. I’ve been on both sides. The wanting, obviously. But also the other end, where someone wanted me and I was just trying to be their friend. There’s a different kind of guilt in that, like you owe them attraction because they were kind. You don’t. The song just sits with the feeling instead of pretending there’s a way out. Which is probably why it needed to exist at all. Friday, 16 February 2018. What They Did to Secret of Mana: If someone had asked me what I wanted from a Secret of Mana remake, I would’ve had a straightforward answer: keep the pixel art but upres it, get an orchestra to play the music, polish it up without losing the charm, maybe add some dungeons if you want to get creative. That’s what I would’ve said. Nobody asked. Instead we got this odd 3D polygon remake—the kind of thing that’s been haunting every classic game port since the Nintendo DS era, and I’ve never quite liked it on sight. It looks hollow. The music is worse: it sounds like someone ran the original soundtrack through an electronic blender and this dull techno remix came out the other side, everything musical about it drained away. The text got the same treatment. Whatever weirdness and personality lived in those character moments—gone. It makes you wonder who this was even for. The people who loved the original aren’t going to feel right about it. New players won’t know what they’re missing. So it’s just floating in this weird middle ground where nothing quite lands. I think about it sometimes—why we keep remaking things that didn’t need remaking—but I guess that’s just how it works now. The original’s still there if you want it. Thursday, 15 February 2018. Neo Tokyo Radio: The snow falls past Momo’s window. Orange lamp flickering. Neo Tokyo Radio plays—same as every day—and the Master sets down a bowl of ramen still steaming from the pot. A glass of vodka comes with it. “Heater’s dead,” he says. “This works better.” Thirty years back, a comet fell into the Gulf of Mexico. Fire first, then ice that never quite lifted. Most people didn’t survive it. The rest of us packed into the few cities that still had power and light, and we’ve been living under the neon ever since. Neo Tokyo became a city of people who learned to exist in the dark. Momo’s not the kind of place you read about. It’s narrow, chaotic, stuffed with people who don’t fit anywhere else. The smell is old cigarettes and ramen broth and coffee and something else I can never quite place. But it’s where people like me end up—where we belong if we belong anywhere. I’m reading a magazine from before the strike, pages yellowed and soft. The radio keeps going—Neo Tokyo Radio, some station broadcasting from nowhere to nobody in particular. I’ve never found out who runs it, and I don’t want to. If I knew it was just a person with equipment, the whole thing would collapse. This way it’s something else. There’s a memory I have from before, when I was younger and the world was different. I was listening to something on headphones, some song I’ve completely forgotten, and I felt like I was the only person alive who understood what the artist was doing. That feeling’s mostly gone now. But sitting here with the ramen and vodka and the radio humming, I get a flicker of it. That sense that someone out there is making something just for themselves, and if you’re lucky, you get to listen. The Master stands behind the counter. Red and purple and ice-blue neon bleeds through the window. Neo Tokyo Radio keeps playing somewhere in the dark. Wednesday, 14 February 2018. Still Offline: I lived online—phone, laptop, gaming, everything that mattered. That’s where my actual life happened. But Germany, the country I physically inhabited, was stuck somewhere else entirely. Slow internet everywhere. Laws written for people who didn’t know what the internet was. Schools that didn’t teach digital literacy. Politicians who clearly didn’t understand, or didn’t care. It was uncomfortable when friends from other countries would ask why our internet was so slow, or why you still had to go to an office to handle government business. Austria, Poland, Scandinavia—they’d all created digital ministries years before, treated it like real infrastructure. Germany hadn’t. The gap was obvious. There was this conversation happening in startup circles about the obvious questions: Why can’t we do what other countries do? Why is our infrastructure so far behind? Why don’t schools teach this? Why doesn’t government treat it like it matters? Most Germans wanted this fixed. Most business people wanted it. The government wasn’t interested. Years went on and nothing really caught up. Internet stayed slow. Schools still taught like the internet didn’t fundamentally exist. Government still moved at a 1990s pace. And you realized it wasn’t a technical problem at all—it was that the people making decisions didn’t live where the rest of us lived. They weren’t online. They couldn’t understand why any of it would matter. Wednesday, 14 February 2018. Just Bonnie: I’ve started telling people I’m addicted to Instagram Stories, which is both true and a convenient lie. The reality is I spend my evenings on the couch watching trash TV with my thumb ready to skip through everyone else’s content. McFit girl again? Skip. YouTuber and her boyfriend? Skip. That one who’s always making out even though her own boyfriend watches these stories? Skip, skip, and skip again. But Bonnie Strange. That’s the only person I actually watch. I can’t explain it. How she carries herself. Her humor. Something about her. There’s just no one else. I want to be her best friend, her secret lover, her proud wife all at once. Her Stories are sweet and funny and genuinely hot, hitting in a way nothing else does. I’ve been collecting screenshots, some of which definitely shouldn’t exist, and I’m aware that I’m basically the person who needs stalker rehab. But first, let me share all this incriminating evidence anyway. Bonnie, I love you. Wednesday, 14 February 2018. Crossing Souls: The pixel art in Crossing Souls is the first thing that hits you. It looks deceptively simple at first, almost cheap, but the detail is meticulous. Someone in a small studio in Spain spent real time on this. The animations are sharp, the environments have weight, light falls through windows with purpose. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t announce itself, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. The game itself is about kids in California in 1986 who find a pink magic stone that lets them travel between dimensions. It’s built entirely from 80s references—Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, E.T., all the obvious touchstones—but it doesn’t feel like a checklist. It feels like someone genuinely loved that era and wanted to capture what it was like to actually exist in it, when magic and danger seemed possible. The story is straightforward. Kids find magic object, world faces threat, you solve the puzzle. Nothing surprising there. But the game’s real strength is in the feel of it—the rhythm of dialogue, the pacing of discovery, the way characters miss what’s right in front of them or suddenly understand something together. That’s where it lives. I played it a few years ago and haven’t thought about it much since. But something brought it back recently—probably another wave of 80s nostalgia online, or someone mentioning it in passing. I remembered why it held up: the game doesn’t perform its own importance. It just exists, completely and without apology. That’s rarer than it should be. It’s on PlayStation and PC. Tuesday, 13 February 2018. The Last Blockbuster: I remember the smell of a video rental store—plastic cases, dust, that same recirculated air from the 90s. You could scan the whole store in five minutes, but you’d stand there for twenty anyway, waiting for something to grab you. Or you’d wander into the wrong section by accident and see things you weren’t supposed to. There was an element of discovery in that, of randomness. You didn’t get what you wanted; you got what the store happened to have, and you convinced yourself it was what you wanted. Streaming killed it. And streaming was supposed to be amazing—no more drives, no late fees, infinite selection. It was. You get exactly what the algorithm thinks you want, which is usually nothing you actually want. You pay your subscription and spend three hours scrolling, bored and paralyzed. Everyone agrees it’s better than the old way. Everyone’s right. Everyone’s miserable. But there’s still one Blockbuster. It’s in Anchorage, Alaska, and it survives because Alaska’s internet is basically held together with string and prayer. In a place where streaming doesn’t work reliably, a video store didn’t have to die. It just had to wait. There’s something bleak about that, actually. The only remaining Blockbuster exists not because people prefer it, but because the infrastructure failed around it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s what happens when progress doesn’t reach everywhere equally, and the things that should have disappeared just sit there, waiting for you to notice. Monday, 12 February 2018. Frame Perfect: I borrowed my best friend’s older brother’s Super Nintendo for two weeks when I was ten. The goal was basic: finish Super Mario World before he asked for it back. When the credits rolled on the second-to-last day—Mario grinning at me, Peach safe, that little victory ditty playing—I felt like I’d done something worth doing. Genuinely proud. Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Yoshi’s Island each ate up months of my life. They demanded patience and focus, the kind of sustained attention that’s easier when you’re a kid. They completely occupied my brain until the end. Then I learned that people finish those games in five minutes. Blindfolded. With their feet. On purpose, in front of an audience. Speedrunning is its own religion. The people serious about it operate in a completely different universe than someone like me who needed weeks just to see the ending. They’ve memorized every sequence down to the individual frame. They’ve optimized movement to the point of finding glitches that shouldn’t exist, understood code better than the people who wrote it. It’s not just skill—it’s obsession so specific and narrow I can’t honestly say I understand it. There’s something hilarious and humbling about how far the gap stretches. I felt fast finishing Mario World before the rental ran out. Meanwhile, these people are racing against physics, against the game’s code, against each other. The speed is almost beside the point. What they’re actually doing is proving these things have no secrets once you’re willing to spend enough time pulling them apart. I’ll never speedrun. Games taught me patience. Speedrunners learned that patience is just another obstacle to optimize away. In their elite circles, my two weeks with Mario World probably makes me a slow-rolling, clueless Sunday driver. And honestly, they’re not wrong. Monday, 12 February 2018. What YouTubers Actually Made: Every kid wants to be a YouTuber now. Not a doctor, not an astronaut—those were for a different era. Now the dream is just: sit in front of a camera, mess around, upload the footage, and let the money arrive. It’s supposed to be that simple. Except nobody actually talks about the money. The successful creators will tell you everything—their feuds, their relationships, their stupid pranks—everything except the numbers. Ask how much they’re making and suddenly everyone goes quiet. It makes sense, really. Mystery is worth more than transparency. It lets people imagine whatever number sounds best. Back in 2017, someone did the actual accounting on German YouTube. Bibi, probably the biggest creator at the time, was pulling in around 513,000 euros per year from ad revenue alone. Paluten was nearly there at 493,000. Even the gaming guy Gronkh, who mostly just streams himself playing, was hitting 360,000 annually. These are the numbers Google actually paid out. Merchandise, sponsorships, brand deals—none of that’s in here. The top tier of creators, maybe fifty channels across Germany, were making somewhere between 350,000 and 900,000 euros a year from ads. Which sounds incredible until you realize how few people that actually is. Millions of people upload to YouTube every single day. The vast majority of them make absolutely nothing. There’s this massive gap between the mythology and the data. Kids see that Bibi’s rich and think that’s how it works for most creators. The reality is that perhaps a hundred creators worldwide have ever made real money from platform revenue. Everyone else is in their room, uploading into the void, hoping the algorithm eventually notices. The ones who made it to the top probably aren’t wrong to stay quiet about their earnings. Why mess with the dream everyone else is still chasing? Monday, 12 February 2018. Owning Ghosts: There was this cryptocurrency called CryptoCelebrities where you could buy digital contracts tied to famous people. You didn’t own their likeness or their time or anything concrete—you just owned a token that said you owned a token of Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber or Eminem. The celebrities themselves had no idea this was happening and weren’t getting paid. They just existed, and people were turning them into tradeable assets. The whole thing was deranged in a way that only early cryptocurrency schemes could be. It wasn’t even a scam in the traditional sense—more like a kind of mass hallucination where thousands of people agreed to spend real money on ghosts. I watched people in forums fighting to acquire tokens tied to Jennifer Lawrence or Wiz Khalifa, like Pokémon cards but with actual human beings who would never consent to this and would probably find it deeply unsettling if they knew. Part of the appeal was exactly that transgression—buying something you weren’t supposed to be able to buy. You were taking something sacred and turning it into a tradeable commodity. That’s speculation in its purest form, with nothing else to hide behind. Selena Gomez was listed as belonging to someone with the initials W. Hilton. The weirdest part wasn’t that someone thought they could own her, but that there was a record of it on the blockchain that anyone could check. The fantasy and the transaction were the same thing. Wednesday, 24 January 2018. The Copyright Panic: Back when Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive came up for a vote in January 2018, I kept thinking about all the dumb videos and screenshots and remixes I’d thrown up online over the years. Nothing I made would have survived those upload filters. Most of what made the internet fun wouldn’t have. The idea was straightforward: copyright holders needed protection, so the EU would require platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Reddit—to scan every upload before it went live and automatically delete anything flagged by copyright databases. Memes with licensed music. Clips from movies. Fan art. Samples. Everything. The filter wouldn’t understand context or fair use or public domain. It would just match and delete. If some corporation claimed ownership over your work—whether they actually owned it or not—that was it. Gone. No appeal. No explanation. Open source developers were completely exposed. Sites like GitHub and Stack Overflow would have needed these filters too. Firefox, VLC, entire libraries that industries depend on—they exist because people could share code openly. An algorithm would have destroyed that. They justified it with terrorism and child exploitation. Real problems, sure, but the tool didn’t distinguish. It would have crushed remix culture, fan communities, most of what actually moves online. Anything built on anything that already existed. The vote happened in late January 2018. It passed. For a few weeks it looked like the internet was about to get smaller and quieter and way more paranoid. The backlash was big enough to force compromises, water down the worst parts. Not good, but survivable. Most of internet culture lives in this gray zone—not quite legal, not quite theft, just… shared and remixed and passed along. That vote tried to close that gap. It almost worked. We got lucky, but I think about how close it was, how easily all of this could have gone a different direction. Thursday, 18 January 2018. Positions: Nadine Kroll wrote a book called “Stellungswechsel”—roughly, a change of position—about moving to Berlin as a young woman and figuring out what you want sexually, what feels good, what you’re allowed to admit wanting. She wrote it plainly, without the usual performance. The book covers desire in its different forms—sex, relationships, the things you think late at night and don’t mention to anyone. She was crude when it warranted, always direct, sometimes funny. There was something genuinely rare about that kind of honesty, especially as a woman writing it. Reading it years later, what got me was how real the voice sounded. Not polished or artistic, just actually hers. No stylistic flourish, no performance. She was describing her own life and described it straight. Most of it isn’t even about sex, really. It’s about the moment you realize you don’t have to be the person people trained you to be. That you can want what you want and say it. That the good girl they constructed doesn’t have to be who you are. Writing like that—without apology, without flinching—doesn’t happen very often. The book got published and she became a real writer, which is its own kind of uncommon. Most people don’t manage it. Monday, 15 January 2018. Gatekeeping Never Stopped: Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime—you log in and it’s all there. Every movie, every song, every book, completely legal, absurdly cheap. Who buys DVDs anymore? Who bothers with piracy? It’s so much easier to just pay eight bucks a month. The convenience is real. That’s not a lie. But convenience isn’t the problem. The problem is control. You don’t actually own anything. A title vanishes because the license expired. Amazon can pull books from your Kindle whenever it wants. You think you own your library until the corporation renting it to you changes the rules. Peter Sunde started The Pirate Bay to fight exactly this—the idea that a few gatekeepers get to decide what culture reaches people. In an interview a while back, he said something that stuck with me: he was shocked how shortsighted everyone was. We spent years fighting to break the gates, and the moment a company came along with an easy button, we lined up to hand them the keys. Different gatekeepers, same prison. An artist can’t even opt out anymore. Want your music heard? Spotify is the only game in town. Want to reach readers? Amazon owns the bookstore. They control the distribution, they control the audience, they control your worth. You’re dependent on them in ways that feel impossible to undo. I use these services. I’m part of the problem. But what gets me is how inevitable it all feels. We’ve collapsed everything into five companies that can make any piece of culture disappear on a whim. We did it to ourselves because we valued convenience over freedom, and now the convenience is locked in and the freedom is gone. Maybe there’s a way back. Some decentralized thing where no single company owns your library or decides what exists. But I don’t think we want it badly enough anymore. The convenience has us. Saturday, 13 January 2018. In Love With A Ghost: I got exhausted with mainstream music fast. You know the rotation—Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Kendrick Lamar, whoever else controls the algorithm that week. It all blurs together after a while, and you realize you’re not actually listening to anything. So one day I just stopped and went looking for something else. Found Maël Madec—he goes by In Love With A Ghost, which tells you something about the vibe. French producer working in chillwave, building this quiet community on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube. No hype machine, no chart obsession, just someone making songs because they mean something to him. His albums have names like “Healing” and “Ordinary Magic” and “Let’s Go,” which already tips you off that this isn’t ironic detachment or cynical production. There’s genuine warmth in what he makes, genuine care. The electronic stuff wraps around you instead of screaming at you. It’s designed for dreaming, or at least for not hating where you are. The song titles alone tell you he’s thinking differently than everyone else. “I Was Feeling Down, Then I Found a Nice Witch and Now We’re Best Friends.” “Chilling at Nemu’s Place.” “Sorry for Not Answering the Phone, I’m Too Busy Trying to Fly Away.” These aren’t clever joke-titles; they’re exactly how the music feels. Sweet and slightly unreal and completely sincere. What matters is that it works. When you’re tired of being yelled at by the industry, when you need something that assumes you want to feel something, this is what you reach for. It’s not a cure for anything, but it reminds you that the margins still have better stuff than the center. Friday, 12 January 2018. Festival Sluts: I was at a Die Ärzte show years back, deep in the crowd and sufficiently drunk, when a girl up on someone’s shoulders just decided to pull her shirt off. No hesitation. She had that look—permission she didn’t know she was looking for, handed to her by three chords and the roar of a thousand people. I don’t think Farin saw. I doubt anyone who mattered saw. But everyone around her saw, and that seemed to be the whole point. Concerts give you that. Some weird license to stop being careful. I’ve watched people climb barriers, run into pits, just abandon the part of themselves that worries about Monday morning. For this girl it was taking her shirt off. The crowd held her for those three minutes and then moved on to the next song. I found out there’s a subreddit called Festival Sluts. An entire forum dedicated to girls doing exactly this—getting topless at shows, capturing the moment, celebrating it. Which is oddly fitting. The thing is real enough and widespread enough that it has a gallery and an audience and people who keep coming back. I don’t know what that moment meant for her. Nothing, maybe. Everything, maybe. The music was loud enough that she wasn’t really a person anymore—just movement, exposure, the visible edge of something unplanned. For those three minutes the crowd couldn’t think about anything but the beat. I remember her face more than anything else. That’s what stuck around. Friday, 12 January 2018. Three Steps Ahead: The song’s called “I Don’t Give A Fuck,” and it’s either the most honest thing Dua Lipa could say right now or the most calculated provocation you can imagine. Probably both. She’s from London, started singing professionally at fourteen. That kind of early commitment doesn’t happen by accident. You don’t just stumble into a career like that. The hits came in order: “New Rules,” “Hotter than Hell,” “Homesick,” “Blow Your Mind (Mwah).” Each one sticky, each one engineered for radio and charts. Each one another step up. By now she’s everywhere—in stores, on playlists, in your head without you deciding to put her there. She went from a girl with ambition to a brand, a logo, a face you see without looking for it. It happened fast, and it happened with a kind of efficiency that’s actually impressive. No false modesty, no pretending the music is about anything other than what it is. She knows what she wants and doesn’t waste time getting there. The new song is exactly what you’d expect: catchy, radio-ready, playing the edge without taking any actual risk. It’s a pop song. Good. That’s all it needs to be. In a few months you won’t be able to avoid it. You’ll hear it somewhere without choosing to. And she’ll be on to the next thing, three steps ahead already. That’s how she operates. Friday, 12 January 2018. The Same Three: Every few years without fail, I go back to three shows: Friends, Scrubs, The O.C., maybe Skins. These grabbed me somehow and never let go. Probably shaped me more than any person I’ve known or band I’ve obsessed over. They were there from early childhood through every bad love affair, every stupid phase. They’ll be here at the end. The flu knocked me flat last week—the real kind, the kind that empties you out. While I was on the couch, half-conscious, I scrolled through streaming apps clicking past new content. New seasons of Dirk Gently, new Disjointed, new Family Guy scattered across different services. All these options carefully designed to feel essential, and none of it meant anything to me. Nothing landed. So I started Friends again. German dub this time, just for a different texture. From the beginning all the way through, the whole thing, until I’m thoroughly wrecked by the end. Three episodes in and I’m already settled into Monica’s apartment like I never left. There’s something about these three that the new stuff can’t touch. It’s not nostalgia, exactly. It’s more like showing up to a place where nothing changes, where the people tell the same jokes, make the same mistakes, end up in the same coffee shop. You know what’s coming. You know every beat. And that’s the point—that knowledge doesn’t touch what you feel. Rachel’s waiting, like she always is. Friday, 12 January 2018. Tokyo in the Small Hours: I’ve watched enough Tokyo documentaries to recognize when one actually gets it. Stephan Düfel’s documentary doesn’t try to explain the city; it just moves through it and watches how people live there. That’s the only approach that works. The thing about Tokyo is that everyone’s grappling with the same contradiction from different angles: millions of people moving in this beautiful, precise choreography, and underneath it this hunger for contact, for recognition, for actually being known by someone. Düfel finds it everywhere. Families in these anonymous apartment towers reaching out to neighbors, trying to break through the isolation. Office workers at bars at night, not really socializing, just drinking their way through the weight of the day, the thing that never actually lifts. And then the small bar regulars—people who found a room the size of a closet and made it theirs. Colorful people. People who figured out that surviving Tokyo means finding a place small enough to know, a group small enough to be known in. What keeps me watching these documentaries is that they don’t pretend the loneliness is a problem needing a solution. Tokyo works exactly because of this contradiction. The isolation and the belonging exist at the same time. I keep coming back because I need to understand why that matters to me. Thursday, 11 January 2018. Cassie’s Almost Too Much: I could talk about Cassie’s musical accomplishments, her creative vision, the genius of how she navigates the music industry. That would be the smart thing, the right thing, the non-sexist thing. And it would also be completely honest in some abstract sense. But honestly? I just want to cover her in maple syrup and spend a few weeks licking her clean. Everywhere. I mean everywhere. I’d probably do that until we ended up married in Hawaii or a tactical team had to pull me out of a basement while I’m screaming “Wait for me, Cassie!” at full volume. Since that’s sexist and gross and almost certainly illegal, I’m resigned to just watching her “Don’t Play It Safe” music video over and over, which is what I’m going to do anyway. Though maybe I should keep a bottle of maple syrup around. Just in case the rules change. Thursday, 11 January 2018. Germany Gets Off: There’s an unfiltered honesty to Pornhub’s annual statistics. What a country gets off to is basically the truth about what that country wants, stripped of all the usual lies and pretense. The Japanese are into hentai and schoolgirls. Brazilians want video games. Swedes obsess over step-sisters. Canadians love lesbians. Each country’s basically a personality type reduced to search terms and fantasies. Germany’s into stepmothers, teenagers, anal. Lucy Cat, Katja Krasavice, Aische Pervers. Those are the names. Top categories: anal, big tits, mature women, mothers, lesbians. And if the woman gets pissed on or covered in cum, that’s the real turn-on. That’s what hits. It’s the kind of honesty that makes you uncomfortable when it’s your own country staring back at you. The weird part: that year’s top searches included “Porn for women,” “Rick & Morty,” and “Fidget Spinner.” Someone was genuinely searching for fidget spinner porn. The internet makes no sense. Most countries want the same stuff. Porn’s porn, desire’s universal. But reading the data about Germany, there’s something deflating. The land of philosophers and poets, and what you’re actually seeing is a preference for degradation, humiliation, family taboos. No mystery to it. Pornhub just removes the pretense. Thursday, 11 January 2018. Grey Market Nostalgia in São Paulo: Brazil’s game market is completely backwards. Import tariffs push console prices so high that most people will never own current hardware, which means you get these entire generation of kids still grinding through ancient Sega cartridges while the rest of the world moved on decades ago. There’s something almost beautiful about it—not intentionally, but by accident of economics. Necessity creating its own weird culture. The black market there is insane. Walk into one of those cramped tech shops scattered through São Paulo and you’ll find cracked games, bootlegs, fan translations, ROM collections burned onto whatever media they could get their hands on. Piracy isn’t a moral question in that context; it’s just how people access the medium at all. The shops themselves are chaotic and overstuffed, the kind of place where you stumble onto games that barely exist anywhere else, regional variants and garage-made compilations that would never survive legitimate distribution. I learned about this from Drew Scanlon, the YouTuber, who went down there to document the whole thing. He was wandering these grey market shops, talking to people, seeing what a gaming culture looks like when pricing locks out the official supply chain entirely. It’s one of those pockets of the world where capitalism accidentally creates something interesting—not by design, but by failing so obviously that people had to build around it. There’s something I keep coming back to: those kids on old Sega games aren’t playing them because they’re nostalgic or retro-cool. They’re playing them because that’s what’s available and affordable. But that constraints-driven ecosystem produces its own passion. You get people who know every frame of a twenty-year-old game because it’s the one they have. That kind of deep familiarity with limited options breeds a different relationship to the work than someone with infinite access. I’m not sure which is better. Probably neither. But it’s real in a way that feels increasingly rare. Thursday, 11 January 2018. Denim Works: There was a long period when denim was genuinely uncool. The sleazy guys in Mantas wore it. Worn-out guys with herpes halfway down their thighs. Your supposedly cool physics teacher with the mustache. Those were denim’s associations. Then something shifted and now it’s fashionable again. What’s funny is how complete the turnaround is. A fabric doesn’t change. The context around it does. One year denim is dead weight carrying decades of bad associations. The next year it’s back in new cuts, new finishes, high-waisted silhouettes in stone blue. Jean jackets returned as spring essentials. I don’t know why I care about this. It’s fabric. But there’s something almost generous about how completely something can be forgotten and then rehabilitated. The guys in their Mantas are long gone. The denim stayed and got another life with people who didn’t know it was ever uncool. Wednesday, 10 January 2018. Streaming Hate: Spotify destroyed something in my life that wasn’t broken. For years I’d built a practice around owning my media—torrenting indie playlists, downloading anime series through RSS feeds, collecting MP3s on external drives. This was inefficient, and probably illegal, and I didn’t care. I had access to everything. More than that: I had the freedom to keep it, to revisit it, to build something that was actually mine. That’s the kind of person I was. I wasn’t cool about any of this. I wasn’t cool in school, I wasn’t cool at work, and I’m not cool now. While everyone else listened to hip hop and wore Nike, I was listening to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and wearing the same Adidas Superstars for fifteen years. But I was ahead of things technologically. When people were burning CDs, I was downloading MP3s. When they were using iPods, I was already there. It was a small consolation, but it mattered to me. When Spotify showed up, I ignored it completely. Why would I pay to rent music I’d never own? It seemed like the kind of thing everyone would eventually use, but like most trends I didn’t understand, I’d wait for it to pass. My friends in Berlin started getting that dark green logo on their phones. They could stream Kanye West without buying anything. I watched it like I watched every other thing everyone else was doing: from the outside, unimpressed, already there before they arrived. The resistance lasted until Apple announced Apple Music. Once one of the companies I actually respected started pushing streaming, it stopped feeling like a choice I could refuse. The alternative to owning media had become mainstream. My old way wasn’t just outdated—it was becoming unavailable. Suddenly I was the holdout. Not in a cool way. I was becoming the person who doesn’t have email, who won’t use a smartphone, who insists on keeping his own files like some kind of digital hoarder. That scared me. So I gave in. I signed up for Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox. I was going to finally be a normal person in a streaming world. “How hard can this be?” I thought. Everyone else manages it fine. It took a week to fall apart. Spotify’s algorithm is just guessing at who I am. It knows I listen to weird indie stuff, so it serves me Post Malone and lo-fi hip hop beats for studying. Artists I loved were missing entirely. Songs vanished from playlists I’d made without explanation. Entire albums had only three tracks available. I’d find something interesting, listen to it twice, then go back to watching some obscure radio station on YouTube instead. The service works great if you want to discover what everyone else is discovering. If your taste is narrower or stranger, you’re just scrolling through their menu looking for the one thing that won’t disappoint you. Netflix was worse. I’d spend thirty minutes clicking through recommendations unable to make a decision, caught between rewatching something I’d already seen and trying something new. The anime I actually wanted to watch wasn’t there. I knew it existed somewhere on the internet—I knew exactly where to get it—but I’d made a commitment. I was supposed to be a streaming person now. The whole experience felt like punching your own face. What bothers me isn’t really the money. The ten euros a month is fine. It’s that these services are designed for a specific kind of taste: mainstream enough to license, popular enough to justify the bandwidth, safe enough to localize without changing much. If you want something outside that narrow range, you either wait for it to show up (hoping someone pays to make it available in your region) or you feel like you’re doing something wrong by wanting it. I keep thinking about what streaming actually is. It’s not liberation from ownership. It’s the transfer of choice from you to a company. You’re renting not just media but the algorithm that decides what’s worth showing you. That’s the part that bothers me. Not that I can’t own music anymore, but that the alternative is accepting someone else’s curated version of culture. Some company’s version of what’s good, what’s worth discovering, what you should want to watch next. Maybe this is fine for most people. If your taste is Post Malone and your taste in TV is whatever Netflix suggests, the system works beautifully. You get unlimited choice within a controlled set. Everyone’s happy. But I spent twenty years building a practice around finding the weird stuff, the thing nobody’s promoting, the artist who’s so specific you’d never find them in an algorithm. Streaming didn’t make that impossible. It just made it feel like something you’re not supposed to do. Some part of me knows I’ll have to adapt eventually. Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and eventually the old infrastructure—torrents, file hoarding, RSS feeds—will genuinely become unavailable. But I’m not there yet. I’m still the kind of person who owns a hard drive full of anime episodes, who buys music on Bandcamp, who occasionally breaks his own rules because what he wants isn’t available through legal channels. It makes me feel a little less relevant. A lot less normal. But I’m oddly okay with that, as long as I can choose when it happens. Tuesday, 2 January 2018. The Game Boy That Wouldn’t Start: You know that feeling. Someone gives you something electronic and it arrives without batteries. Of course it does. And of course it’s Christmas, or Christmas Eve, or some other day when every store is closed and you can’t go buy them yourself. The gift sits there. Waiting. Useless. I had this happen with my first Game Boy. Pokémon, original edition. I opened it on Christmas morning and there were no batteries. We looked everywhere—asked neighbors, checked with family, found nothing. For almost a week I had this thing I wanted more than anything, and I couldn’t turn it on. I could hold it. Look at it. Read the manual over and over. But I couldn’t play. That’s the particular cruelty of Christmas timing. It’s not just that you can’t use something. It’s that you can’t use it right now, on this specific day, when you’ve been anticipating it. The gift feels incomplete, and you spend the holiday wanting it instead of enjoying it. I wonder if this still happens. Maybe batteries are less of a problem now, or parents think ahead better. Maybe everything comes charged. But I’d guess there are still kids somewhere sitting in front of something they can’t use, waiting for stores to open, learning this specific lesson about wanting something and not being able to have it yet. It’s a small frustration. But it’s the kind that sticks with you. Wednesday, 27 December 2017. Identity Requires Memory: I found out what Rocco und seine Brüder pulled off in Berlin and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. They laid ten fake Wehrmacht stumbling stones—Stolpersteine—into the pavement right in front of the AfD headquarters. Called the whole thing “Identität braucht Erinnerung.” Identity requires memory. The phrase hits different when it’s planted in concrete instead of printed somewhere you can look past. Gunter Demnig’s real Stolpersteine are these small brass plaques set flush with the sidewalk outside the last chosen homes of Nazi victims. They’re meant to interrupt you. To stop you mid-walk. To mark a place where a person existed before they were deported, murdered, driven to suicide. By 2017 there were around 61,000 of them across Germany and twenty-one other European countries. They’re a language, a way of speaking truth into the pavement. What the collective did was repurpose that language and point it at power. They left the stones outside the office of people who have spent years soft-pedaling Nazi crimes, miniaturizing genocide into manageable talking points, folding the Holocaust into history like it’s something we’ve already learned from and moved past. No artist signature. No manifesto. Just the stones, saying their thing. I love the simplicity of it. The AfD builds its power on distance and rhetorical abstraction. They work in ideas, in framing, in the careful selection of what you’re allowed to remember. The action works the other way—it uses presence and weight, the brute fact of an object sitting there that nobody can talk around or contextualize away. You can’t move past a stone in your doorway. I don’t know how long they lasted or if anyone got caught. Probably cleared out by morning. But for a while there was something true on that pavement, something that couldn’t be unsaid or walked around, and the people in that building had to look at it. That’s not nothing. It’s the kind of move I file away—not as a template, nothing so calculated, but as a reminder that honesty can take the form of concrete and brass. Wednesday, 6 December 2017. What Heintje Was Into: Modern German rap is relentless—every track is fighting to be the crudest. The lyrics are about fucking women, humiliating them, degrading anyone who isn’t hard enough. After an hour you feel marinated in it. Compared to what was on the radio thirty years ago, it’s a total collapse. Except the old guys were exactly the same. Heintje had “Dicke Eier, Weihnachtsfeier”—completely unhinged. Michael Holm came through with “Dein Spitt ist zu weak,” pure venom. Nicole had “Total geflasht von deinem Swag,” no filter. These weren’t innocent singalongs. These were rough records by people who didn’t care what anyone thought. I don’t know why people pretend the past was cleaner. There’s this idea that music used to be innocent, that things have somehow gotten worse. But they haven’t. The impulse has always been there—make something aggressive, make it crude, make it dangerous. Make it something your parents would hate. The form changes, the delivery changes, but the actual drive to say something harsh and vile and offensive and just leave it there without apology—that’s constant. It’s not modern. It’s not a rap problem. It’s just how people are. Wednesday, 6 December 2017. Something Real: Clairo uploaded videos of herself singing from her bedroom in Boston. Lo-fi, intimate recordings that sound like she’s singing just for you. The songs are small and pop-shaped, the kind of thing that could vanish under everything else online. But they didn’t. Her audience found them because something about the approach read as honest. What got people—mostly women—was that she didn’t seem to be performing a version of herself. There’s no carefully constructed image, no brand strategy. Just someone with a guitar and something to say. That’s rare enough online that it becomes its own magnetism. “Pretty Girl” was the song that broke through wider. She’d written it after a relationship ended. The story was simple: she’d been pretending to be someone else in the relationship, reshaping herself to match what her ex wanted, and eventually she couldn’t keep doing it. She couldn’t stay small and accommodating for him. So they split. But the song she wrote about it resonated with people who’d done the same thing—who’d bent themselves into shapes that didn’t fit. The thing that strikes me is how uncalculated the whole thing feels. No label found her first. No algorithm decided she was marketable and pushed her. She just made something true and put it out there. People found her. That doesn’t happen much anymore, or maybe it never did. Wednesday, 6 December 2017. Polarstern: There’s something particular about design competitions for consumer products. A corporation picks a theme—”Mystic Ice World”—and two hundred designers throw ideas at it, knowing maybe one will stick and they’ll get acknowledged in some limited way. Gorbachev vodka ran one of these a few years back. The winner was Gabriela Berdecio from Barcelona, and her design was called “Polarstern”: a starry night sky on midnight blue, cold and clear and not trying too hard. But what gets to me is all the design that doesn’t make it. Someone spent time on a dozen directions for this bottle, sketches and half-thoughts, and now they don’t exist anywhere except maybe in a notebook. The thinking that happens and just ends. That’s the actual work of design most of the time—the invisible part. The winning bottle is genuinely good though. You see it and you know exactly what it is. Tuesday, 14 November 2017. What Petra Eriksson Sees: You can make gray feel honest enough, call it the real world unadorned and serious. But spend too long there and honest starts feeling like defeat. Petra Eriksson is an illustrator from Barcelona who works for magazines like Refinery29, The Sunday Telegraph, and Lucky Peach. Her weapon of choice is color—not subtly, not in a balanced palette, just a lot of it. She paints portraits of public figures and ordinary subjects in explosions of magenta and lime and cobalt, color combinations that shouldn’t work but do. Michelle Obama rendered in neon, Martin Luther King Jr. in electric hues, musicians and food and random people glowing like they were lit from inside. The colors don’t feel real, but they feel true. There’s something about seeing a face rendered this way that makes you actually look at it instead of sliding past the way you’ve learned to do. You can’t ignore color like that. I work in design, so I notice the technical choices—how she uses flat shapes, how she builds compositions that hold together even when the palette has no business working. It’s confident work. But what gets to me is something less technical. Her work feels like an argument against the gray. Not an argument for cheerfulness or optimism or any of that easy stuff. An argument that how we represent things matters. That color isn’t decoration—it’s how you make people pay attention. There’s something almost stubborn about it. A refusal to accept that the world has to look the way we’ve been trained to see it. Or maybe she’s just better at seeing than the rest of us. Tuesday, 7 November 2017. December Clothes: Christmas merchandise starts showing up before summer ends, which is wild until you remember most people have no idea what to wear for the holidays. You see them at parties in whatever they wore last week, or they tried something and it feels wrong, or they just wore black and didn’t think about it. There’s a middle ground where it works—something that reads as intentional without looking like you’re dressing up—but not everyone lands there. The seasonal collections understand this. Silver dresses, gold shirts, blacks that have some shape to them. Lookbooks photograph all of it beautifully, and for a second you think you’ll find your version in there. Then you shop, and nothing translates, or it does but you don’t want to spend that much, or you try it on and it’s just not you. You end up in black jeans and a decent shirt like you were going to anyway. I’ve never figured out the middle ground myself. I either overthink it and feel stiff, or I don’t think about it and just wear something comfortable. Both work fine. Most people at Christmas are thinking about the food or trying not to argue with someone’s uncle anyway. No one’s watching what you wore. Monday, 6 November 2017. Pascale: I keep meeting women in clubs, cafés, at parties—always the same type, always the same result. We click immediately and spend the next few days together, sleeping in her apartment, ordering pizza, talking until the sun comes up. Then I disappear. What draws me in is being close to someone when they’re entirely unselfconscious. I want to be in their space, understand how they live, how they move around alone. But I don’t want anything beyond those days. The moment it could become real, I’m already thinking about the exit. Pascale Hunt, a model from Hong Kong photographed by David Collier in Marrickville, has that quality that pulls at something in me. Collier caught her in unguarded moments—sleeping, showering, smoking. That’s what I’m always looking for when I meet someone: that openness, that absence of performance. A few days of it, then I’m gone. Now I’m thinking about finding another one. Someone interesting, someone I can be close to without pretense, at some club or café where the connection is immediate. It always starts the same way, and I always know exactly when I’ll leave. Monday, 6 November 2017. Katsura Hashino: You’re a teenager in a small Japanese town, investigating murders that pull you into alternate realities where you fight shadow versions of people’s psyches. You’re also attending school, buying groceries, spending afternoons with friends. Persona 4 shouldn’t work—tone-wise, aesthetically, practically it should fall apart under its own contradictions. Instead it feels true, like that’s actually how life works: the routine and the profound hitting you at the same time without resolution. That’s Katsura Hashino’s whole thing. He directed Persona 4, then went bigger with Persona 5, set in Tokyo with more style and confidence. Catherine is a puzzle game about a man caught between his girlfriend and a literal incubus—sounds absurd, but it works because Hashino understands something about desire and fear that most games don’t touch. Digital Devil Saga is weirder still, harder to explain, just bleakly beautiful. Most games pretend characters have one emotional drive, one motivation, one goal. Hashino’s characters are all contradictions—wanting things that cancel each other out, committed to a person while terrified of commitment, trying to save the world while barely holding it together. They feel alive because they’re messy. You’re stealing from your own mind in Persona 5, or solving a tower of blocks that represents anxiety and temptation in Catherine, and it makes sense not as game mechanics but as genuine metaphors for how consciousness actually works. I haven’t gotten to Persona 5 yet. It’s the kind of game you need to be ready for—it demands time, attention, space in your head. But I know I will eventually, and it’ll feel the same way Persona 4 does. That’s what his games do: they make sense, even when they should be falling apart. Monday, 6 November 2017. Lime and Mint: ASICS dropped a pair of Halloween sneakers and I’m thinking about why limited colorways still matter to designers. The GEL-KAYANO TRAINER in mint and black, the GEL-MAI KNIT in lime and grey. You know ASICS as a running brand—they’ve been doing their thing since the seventies—but these aren’t about performance. They’re about what happens when a heritage technical shoe gets a color palette that makes you look twice. There’s something satisfying about the constraint. Halloween isn’t really a fashion event, but it gives brands an excuse to do something weird with their tooling. Lime and grey. Mint and black. These aren’t the palettes that sell volume. They’re the palettes that make the two people who get them feel like they found something. The GEL-KAYANO TRAINER has been around since the nineties. It’s got DNA—the distinctive Gel pods, the split tongue, that whole language of performance running that’s become just aesthetic shorthand now. Most people buying it are buying the silhouette, the memory of what it meant to care about the engineering. The knit construction on the new version softens it somehow, makes it less obviously functional, which is exactly the right move when the shoe isn’t going anywhere near a track. I think about all the designers at ASICS Tiger sitting in meetings deciding which models to run in special editions. They could phone it in. Instead they’re pulling from the archive, treating these old shoes like they matter. That’s the whole thing, really—not the Halloween peg, not the limited quantities, just the decision that certain shapes deserve a second life in colors nobody would buy year-round. That’s taste. That’s a brand that remembers why it has a design language in the first place. Friday, 27 October 2017. The Newest Thing: The event in Munich was secondary to the actual draw—spending time with colleagues like Gilly, Ümit, Thang, Christine, Frank, Fuchs, Micha, Rita, Marco, and Rainer, people who think seriously about design and technology. We looked at the Huawei Mate 10 Pro in some sterile event space, but the real substance was after: dinner at Hoiz Neobrasserie, drinks at Ruby Lilly, sleeping in a comfortable hotel. This is what tech journalism actually is—an excuse to be in a room with people you like, looking at the latest expensive thing. The Mate 10 Pro itself is the kind of phone that makes you believe technology is still going somewhere. The screen is nearly frameless and the display is sharp. The dual Leica cameras are genuinely capable—you can shoot in darkness and get images that look like actual photography, not the overprocessed garbage most phones produce. It’s waterproof. It’s fast. None of this is surprising anymore, but it’s all done well. I watched people see it and feel something I’d stopped feeling: that excitement about a new device, the sense that you’re not falling behind. My phone worked fine. There was no reason to want the Mate 10. But I could feel the pull anyway—that gravity of wanting the newest thing, the belief that it’s somehow a way of staying young. Thursday, 26 October 2017. The Shallowness Trap: There’s this thing happening with young journalists right now where everyone’s desperately trying to seem cool and irreverent and in touch with what matters. They finish school, they get a byline somewhere online, and suddenly they’re convinced they’re revolutionizing media. They drink artisanal coffee, share ironic memes in group chats, and write listicles about whether you’re smart enough to know basic facts. The whole thing is exhausting to watch. Bento was the perfect symbol of this. It was what you got when you blended SPIEGEL’s institutional confidence with BuzzFeed’s clickbait energy and threw in the lowest-common-denominator stupidity of a reality TV show. The outlet was ostensibly about speaking to young Germans, but what it actually did was treat its audience like they were dumber than they were. Quiz after quiz, ranking after ranking, each piece designed to be shareable and meaningless in equal measure. It wasn’t journalism that happened to be young. It was youth as a brand applied to journalism. Jan Böhmermann, who’s been doing satirical takedowns longer than most of these writers have been alive, spent about twenty minutes dismantling Bento on air. Not with anger, which would’ve been too easy, but with the kind of patient contempt you reserve for something that’s so fundamentally confused about what it’s trying to do that you almost feel bad. Almost. The questions Bento asked its readers were genuinely depressing—not because they were too hard, but because they were insulting in their simplicity. Do you know what seasons are? Can you spell basic words? It was patronizing dressed up as relatability. What stuck with me wasn’t the takedown itself. It was the reminder that trying this hard to seem effortless always shows. You can feel the effort underneath. Real cool doesn’t announce itself or chase metrics or calculate how many shares something will get. It just exists. Bento cared too much about being liked by the right people at the right moment, and that’s the death of anything that might have been genuinely interesting. Thursday, 26 October 2017. That Night: Nike van Dinther brought it up on her podcast years later, talking about #MeToo and what happened to her during a press trip to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2011. She and Sarah Gottschalk were discussing the silence women carry after assault, the shame that makes you feel complicit, and she told the story about the magazine editor on that trip—about getting drunk with the whole group, about him offering to walk her back to her room, about waking up with his fingers inside her while she slept. She remembered thinking about all the other women who must have faced the same thing, and she was so embarrassed that she pretended to still be asleep. She just turned away until he stopped. She dressed quickly while he was in the shower and went back to her own room. The next morning everything was strange. She told Sarah and they talked about it, but she convinced herself it might not have happened, might have been the alcohol playing tricks. Then she tried to get him to admit it over Skype months later and his response—the defensiveness, the way he immediately shut it down—convinced her it was real. So she told this story on a podcast, naming him, because she’d finally gotten to a place where she could. I could leave it there. I could call her a liar. I could admit it. The problem is that I actually don’t know. What I remember is that it was a Jägermeister-sponsored trip and everyone was absolutely wrecked. I remember running into Nike in the hallway late that night and we ended up in her room—not mine, because I was sharing with a friend. We sat on the bed and watched TV. That’s everything I have. And that the next day felt off. I’m not a good person when I drink. I’m not aggressive, mostly just clingy or else I disappear. I try not to drink much anymore because I don’t like who I become. And I’ve done enough shit in my past that I can’t be certain whether what she’s describing actually happened or not. When someone accuses you of something and you genuinely can’t remember, saying “I don’t know” sounds like the oldest excuse in the world. But it’s also the truth. The next morning I acted strange because I picked up that she was acting strange. I thought maybe it was awkward because we’d woken up together, or because we’d done something drunk that neither of us wanted to acknowledge, or maybe she was worried someone else would find out we’d been in the same room. I was probably naive about it. I got defensive when she tried to get the truth out of me. That defensiveness—the way I shut her down without explanation—that probably convinced her I was guilty. Which, I guess, is exactly what someone would do if they had something to hide. Rape and sexual assault aren’t jokes and they’re not acceptable. I can’t tell you I’ve never pushed someone in that direction, even if I didn’t go all the way. I’m not proud of it. I have nothing to say in my defense. But I did try to talk to her about it afterward. I told her I was sorry if something bad had happened that night. You can’t blame everything on alcohol and have that excuse you from responsibility. Can you apologize for something you don’t actually know you did? I don’t know. And doesn’t an apology automatically mean you’re admitting guilt? Maybe. What I know is that we got along really well before that night. We traveled together to Prague and Hamburg and Cologne, had nice lunches in Berlin, drinks in good bars. I liked Nike and Sarah and what they were building with their project. I’m still sad about how much this destroyed our friendship. Can I blame her for speaking out? I don’t think so. I just think it’s a shame. Of course it’s her right to tell that story however she needs to. And I celebrate everyone using #MeToo to make the world better. But I wish I knew what happened that night. So maybe we could both move past it. Or maybe that’s a lie I’m telling myself. Maybe I don’t actually want to know. Maybe the truth would hold up a mirror to some dark part of me that I’m not ready to see. My hope is that someday we can talk normally again. But that hope is probably the only thing left. Wednesday, 25 October 2017. Matador’s Back: Matador came back. It was a men’s magazine from Germany, ran in the mid-2000s. The idea’s simple: find people who’ve actually lived something and let them write. No self-improvement narratives, no enlightenment guides, no essays about reinvention. First issue has a war photographer and nuns growing marijuana. That mix works because the magazine isn’t in the self-help business. Nadine Kroll writes here and now writes for them too. First piece was about blowjobs—straightforward, no bullshit, just how it works. That’s the magazine’s whole energy: serious journalism next to beautiful nude women next to tech reviews next to sex advice. Print-magazine thinking: nothing needs to justify itself to anything else. It’s just there because it’s interesting. Bimonthly, five eighty euros at newsstands. I’ll grab it if I see it. Wednesday, 25 October 2017. What a Jacket Absorbs: The denim jacket is the most democratic garment in Western culture. It looks the same on a billionaire and a broke musician, on someone who works outside and someone who just wants people to think they do. You can’t dress it up enough to make it formal, and you can’t fuck it up enough to make it wrong. It just absorbs whoever wears it. The Type III Trucker Jacket from Levi’s, that 1953 design that’s been essentially unchanged for seventy years, is the purest version of this principle. It doesn’t care about your story. It becomes your story. You beat it up or baby it, you bleach the cuffs or let the arms fade naturally, and it reflects every choice back at you. It’s cheap enough to buy thoughtlessly and solid enough to keep for decades. There’s no version of yourself you’re trying to project when you wear one—you just are. I saw photographs recently from an exhibition in Berlin, curated by European photographers and creatives showing what they’d made with the jacket. I didn’t go, but the images stayed with me. What mattered wasn’t the styling or the technical skill. It was that everyone in those photos looked like themselves more clearly because of the jacket, not less. A trucker jacket doesn’t make you interesting. It gets out of the way and lets whatever you’re already doing come through. I’ve owned maybe five of them. The one I have now has the cuff cut short because I got tired of how it sat. That’s the kind of edit that costs nothing and says everything. You don’t modify a Type III to improve it. You modify it because you’re the kind of person who cuts the cuffs off, and the jacket just accommodates who you are. That’s probably why it’s lasted this long. Tuesday, 24 October 2017. Gucci Gang: Lil Pump insists he’s the coolest, most perpetually high rapper around. It doesn’t convince me. But something about the pink dreadlocks and the sheer lack of self-consciousness makes me look twice. Almost. He’s from Miami, making bratty trap music with lyrics so dumb they loop back to something. His album hit number 3 on the charts. Smokepurpp’s there, Lil Yachty, Gucci Mane, the whole crew. A few years ago this was underground or a joke. Now it’s just the cultural moment. The Gucci Gang video is what you’d expect: his crew getting high, girls everywhere, a tiger in there somewhere. The whole thing’s such a self-parody that you can’t tell if Lil Pump’s in on it or deadly serious. Maybe he is. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it. He’s got nearly 4 million Instagram followers. The music’s dumb, the aesthetic’s even dumber, but it lands. Not because he’s talented, but because he doesn’t care whether you think he is. Tuesday, 24 October 2017. The Faé: “The Faé are children living at the end of the world,” Grimes said when she launched her new music genre. “They know humanity won’t last much longer on this earth and make art that reflects this knowledge.” It’s a strange framework, but it works. The Canadian singer—known for “Genesis,” “Oblivion,” “Flesh Without Blood”—has been moving from pure experimentation toward something more deliberately constructed: an aesthetic built around female strength and apocalyptic sensibility. The Faé playlist brings together artists like Kirara, SZA, and Abra. Work that doesn’t try to sound hopeful, that treats darkness and strangeness as material worth exploring. What’s interesting is that she’s naming something that already exists—that strain of contemporary art and music running on apocalyptic fuel, the work that finds beauty in collapse rather than resisting it. But naming it as Faé, building a mythology around it, treating it as a real movement: that matters. It validates the sensibility. It tells artists they’re not working in isolation; they’re part of something real. Whether Faé is an actual genre or a brilliant reframing of existing sounds probably doesn’t matter. What matters is the space she’s creating for this particular way of making and thinking. And there’s something to be said for that, especially now, when most culture is still pretending things are basically okay. Saturday, 21 October 2017. Before Sunrise: Every autumn, half the music world suddenly reaches for the introspective record. Strip away the production, confess something, prove you have depth. Most of it is thin—sounds intimate because it’s quiet, sounds profound because the reverb is heavy. Anna Leone, though, she actually pulls it off. I found her new video for “My Soul I” recently and it’s one of those rare cases where the restraint is real. She and her directors, Victoria Lafaurie and Hector Albouker, shot it on a ferry in Vaxholm, Sweden, at four in the morning. They wanted that light you only get before sunrise—that specific half-dark when everything feels both exposed and hidden at once. It’s the kind of choice that shows someone thinking about what a song actually needs instead of what makes good content. Leone was clear about what she didn’t want: no flourish masquerading as sincerity. The video does what the song does—it starts slow and spare, then builds into something with real weight, but never loses that close feeling. That’s harder than it sounds. Easy to make something feel big. Hard to make it feel big and still intimate. I don’t know much about her yet, but I’m listening. Monday, 2 October 2017. Public Access: Miley’s hosting this poolside interview thing for Converse, guests scattered around talking about fashion or music or whatever, and there’s a yellow cow in the background. The whole setup is so transparently a brand operation that it almost becomes endearing. She’s not pretending it’s organic or sincere—she’s just committed to having a good time with it. Her dad shows up, which carries its own weight given their history. For years their relationship was this public mess, but now they’re old enough to just be in the same frame together doing something absurd. Maybe that’s what growing up means—not fixing everything, just getting past it enough to sit by a pool with your kid and some random celebrities for a video. The yellow cow I can’t explain. It’s stupid and for some reason it stays with me. Wednesday, 27 September 2017. October Streaming: October meant admitting defeat to the couch. Netflix was dropping new seasons and shows and everything in between, and I already knew I’d spend the next month with some combination of pizza, wine, and whatever was bright and moving on the screen. Stranger Things was back, which was enough on its own—the kind of show that makes time disappear without you noticing. Mindhunter was finally arriving, something about FBI profilers in the ’70s that looked like it actually had something to say. The Meyerowitz Stories was there, Baumbach’s comedy-drama thing that works because it doesn’t try too hard. Riverdale if you wanted beautiful people and absolute ridiculousness. Some documentaries, specials, the usual stuff that shouldn’t exist but does. The list could go on forever. The point wasn’t to watch everything—that was impossible—it was to have the option. October was permission to disappear, to have something new waiting every time you finished something else. The comfort was in the abundance, in not having to decide too far in advance what you’d be doing at midnight three weeks from now. Wednesday, 27 September 2017. Puff Puff: Found a couple early Dragon Ball volumes at a flea market when I was young and read them until the spines cracked. This tiny monkey kid named Goku hunting for magic balls with his girl and an old man—something about it worked. Everything felt possible because you genuinely didn’t know what came next. The discovery was happening on the page at the same time I was discovering it. Then the series became something else. Increasingly muscular men yelling at each other. Power levels climbing into meaningless numbers. The same fight stretched across thirty episodes. That’s anime’s original disease, and Dragon Ball caught it hard. The early chapters had actual mystery. Weird creatures that didn’t make sense. The characters fumbling through the world. There was strangeness before there was fighting. There was magic—not the supernatural kind, but that feeling of not knowing what’s waiting around the next corner. These Japanese t-shirts exist now with “Puff puff!” on them, referencing those early episodes. You can only really want one if you remember what it felt like then, before the series settled into being a formula. Before the mystery became routine. I still think about Goku as he was at the start. Small. Not knowing what he was walking into. That version of him stayed with me way more than anything after. More than all the screaming that came later. Wednesday, 27 September 2017. Nowhere Else to Go: I saw pictures of girls in Harajuku with their whole bodies painted in these bright blocks—yellow, turquoise, pink, colors that don’t match anything because they’re not supposed to. The trend is called Ishoku Hada, which is just Japanese for unique skin, and it’s centered around this girl Sonoramas and her friends Miyako and Lilly and Cherry and Lmskii and Miku, all of them covered in color, walking through Harajuku and Shibuya like they’re trying to prove something about what happens when you refuse to stop pushing. Harajuku’s been the test kitchen for Tokyo fashion trends forever. Everything gets invented there first—styles from everywhere mixing with styles from nowhere until something emerges that nobody’s seen before. Anime influencing street fashion influencing high fashion, cultures colliding and recombining. It’s the place where you go to see what everyone else will be wearing in six months. But here’s the thing about a place like that: you eventually run out of things to do to the surface of your body. You can dye your hair every color that exists. You can mix fashions from every era and every continent. You can stack on accessories until you can barely move. You can wear makeup in ways that make you look like a different species. And then one day you realize you’ve exhausted the wardrobe. The only frontier left is the skin itself. So that’s where you go. I get the logic of it, even if I don’t know if I’d do it myself. There’s something about refusing to accept the plateau of fashion, the idea that there’s some point where you’re done and you just maintain what you’ve got. In Harajuku, standing still is death. You escalate. You find the next untouched thing. If that’s your skin, then that’s your skin. Monday, 18 September 2017. The Air Force, Again: The Air Force 1 just won’t quit. Adidas keeps throwing Superstars and Stan Smiths at anyone who’ll listen, pumping out new colorways and collaborations like hype is a finite resource they’re trying to corner. But the AF1 stays. It’s been the same essential shape since the ’80s—high or low, leather or canvas, clean or wrecked—and it still moves the way everything else is trying to move. Someone decided it needed a floral moment. A higher sole, sequins, embroidered roses—a variant that lands somewhere between design exercise and boutique exclusive. The kind of thing you see in a Berlin streetwear shop and think, okay, they’re trying something. Josephine Fischer over at ELLE wrote about it in the way fashion writers do: the shoe threads together simplicity and excess, plain looks and complex ones, somehow stays cool both ways. And she’s not wrong. There’s something about the AF1 that lets you layer it however you want. The platform sole actually changes how it sits on your foot, which matters more than people think. The florals and sequins are the flex—trying to push it into “special” territory, like it needs permission to be interesting. It’s instructive how much mileage Nike’s gotten from that single shape. The Air Force 1 is basically blank canvas at this point. Oversized. Minimal. Patent. Shearling. Leather that costs eighty dollars and leather that costs four hundred. Every version works because the silhouette does the thinking for you. The base is that good. The floral sequin thing though—that’s a real bet. You’re trying to take something that’s already cool and make it spectacular, which almost never works. Usually you just get busy. You lose the cool under the decoration. But if anything can carry that weight, it’s probably the Air Force 1. The shape’s strong enough that even when you dress it up, it doesn’t disappear. Monday, 18 September 2017. Free: 6LACK spent years trapped in the wrong contract. Ricardo Valdez Valentine—Baltimore born, Atlanta raised—got signed to a label that had no idea what to do with him, and he was stuck there for years while he had actual songs waiting to exist. When he finally got out and released “Free 6LACK,” it wasn’t really a debut. It was a release. The sound is somewhere between hip-hop and alt-R&B, but that doesn’t quite capture it. There’s the battle-rap precision from his early days in the delivery, sharp and clipped, but he’s learned to let the production breathe. It’s hazy and distant, like you’re hearing it through glass. The songs are minimal. Nothing extra. Songwriting-wise he’s operating at a level most people aren’t. The melodies sit in odd places, the lyrics don’t overexplain, every choice feels intentional. I’d heard enough comparisons to The Weeknd or Raury to assume he was just another name in that orbit, but “Free 6LACK” sounds like he stopped caring about fitting anywhere and just made what was actually in his head. Maybe that’s what “Free” meant. Not the album title, but the fact of it. Monday, 18 September 2017. Ultraviolet Dystopia: I’m drawn to dystopias in a way I can’t fully explain. There’s something about the image of total collapse, systems of control refined to their logical extreme, that just holds my attention in a way utopias never will. Peace and freedom and perfect structures bore me. What I want is the opposite—concentrated power, governments and corporations intertwined until they’re indistinguishable, extraction and surveillance so complete they become the baseline of existence. Somewhere in that darkness, small rebellious movements emerge, moving like ghosts through spaces too vast to fully understand, let alone fight. Marcus Wendt figured out how to visualize this. He traveled to Asian cities—Hong Kong, Seoul, Shenzhen—and photographed them, then pushed the colors into ultraviolet territory, deepened the shadows, made the neon feel less like light and more like something structural, something inseparable from the architecture. Looking at the work, you don’t have to imagine the figures moving through those streets. The runners, the hidden people, the system’s failures moving through the gaps—they’re already there if you know where to look. The cities were always like this. Wendt just gave you permission to see them clearly. Saturday, 16 September 2017. Ten Terrible Ideas: Someone online once listed ten things you absolutely must do this weekend, each one progressively more hostile than the last. It starts almost kind—go to a sake festival, drink cheap—and then immediately betrays you by getting absurdist. Sing the Pokémon theme at the start of every conversation, deadpan, no laughing. Marry the first M-named person you meet. Get yourself on the evening news by any means necessary. By the time you reach the Berghain bit—stand in the queue and ask the bouncer the same stupid question three times—you’re watching performance art disguised as a weekend checklist. Sleep with your old math teacher, because apparently that’s something you both wanted anyway. Invent a time machine to go back and fix all of 2017 before it ruins you. The last one is just cruel: bow to anyone who buys you a drink, but don’t let them get you pregnant. The specificity is what kills me. The M-names, the particular cultural nightmare of actually standing in that queue, the math teacher thing because almost everyone had that person. It’s the kind of writing that only happens at three in the morning in a group chat, where the best jokes are the ones that make no sense and sting a little bit. I never did any of them. I don’t think anyone was ever meant to. Friday, 15 September 2017. Dr. Sommer: The first thing you’d flip to in BRAVO was Dr. Sommer’s advice column. She answered everything—sex questions, heartbreak, family trouble, the regrettable people you’d spent time with. What made her different was that she actually took it seriously. No performance, no brand voice. Just genuine engagement with what was going wrong. That’s rarer than it should be. Most advice now comes filtered through algorithm, corporate tone, or you’re just supposed to figure it out alone. I’ve thought about trying to create something like that. A space where the actual problem gets actual thought back. I’m not sure I’m wise enough for it, but I know how much it mattered when someone actually listened. Thursday, 14 September 2017. Sophia’s Monobrow: Sophia Hadjipanteli, a Greek model, had a monobrow. One continuous strip of hair across her forehead. Agents wanted it gone. Men online wanted it gone. Everyone in the machinery of making people look a certain way wanted it plucked, waxed, lasered away. She refused. She said she looked better with it. The internet had feelings about this. Some people framed it as brave, as some kind of statement against beauty standards. Others just thought she was weird. But what actually interested me was how uninterested she seemed in the whole argument. She didn’t need to convince anyone. She just kept her eyebrow. There’s something about that kind of indifference I find more compelling than actual defiance. Defiance means you’re still fighting. You’re still thinking about them. Indifference means you’ve already stepped out of the ring. I’ve spent years cataloging the ways I don’t fit whatever ideal was floating around that season. And most of that catalog is just voices I’ve been carrying around that aren’t even mine anymore. Background noise from a lifetime of measuring myself against other people’s opinions. Sophia’s monobrow isn’t really about beauty standards or acceptance or any of that. It’s just someone who decided the conversation itself wasn’t worth her time. Thursday, 14 September 2017. Bathtub Civics: Palina Rojinski got naked for a German Vogue voting campaign. Not to sell magazines—to sell voting itself. The campaign was called #Germanwoman, one of those celebrity-driven initiatives where famous people explain why politics matters. Except they didn’t do interviews or PSAs. They put her in a bathtub with champagne, walking through how the electoral system actually works. The timing, the mechanics, the whole structure of it. The unspoken hook was the hope that she’d shift and reveal something accidental, which is both the campaign’s entire premise and its entire confession. Caro Daur, Lena Meyer-Landrut, and a few other Instagram celebrities were in it too, each there to say why voting matters. It’s a completely unsubtle collision of celebrity, sexuality, and civic duty. Make voting sexy and people will pay attention, is the theory. What’s interesting about it is how accidentally honest it is. Elections aren’t won through logic or argument. They’re won through desire, identification, attraction. She’s famous and naked, therefore voting matters. It’s stupid and it probably works, and that’s genuinely depressing—not the campaign itself, but how effective it is. People don’t evaluate abstract systems rationally. They respond to patterns, to signals that seem trustworthy. A famous person’s body is the clearest signal there is. Wednesday, 13 September 2017. Pink Carousel: The runway was circular. There was an actual pink landscape painted on the floor, or maybe it was projected, I can’t remember now—but the point is Rihanna wasn’t interested in the standard fashion week formula. No long cold stages, no clinical precision. This was the Fenty x Puma show in New York, and it looked like something between a carnival and a nightclub. Models moved through this space in clothes that ranged from genuinely odd to genuinely wearable, which is exactly where good fashion usually lives. Oversized sneakers that actually looked considered. Pieces with color and attitude that didn’t need to explain themselves. The front row was doing what front rows do—phones out, trying to capture something they could actually imagine themselves wearing. Puma’s been irrelevant for a while now, honestly. Squeezed out by Nike and Adidas, stuck in that space where nobody thinks about you when they’re thinking about sneakers. Then Rihanna gets involved and suddenly there’s air in the room again. It’s almost unfair how much weight she carries—everything becomes possible the moment her name’s attached. I don’t know if this sticks. Fashion week moments are temporary by design. There’s always another collaboration waiting, another moment happening somewhere else. But there was something about this one that felt less like a one-off and more like something starting. Or I’m just susceptible to good execution and confident styling, which is probably more honest. Tuesday, 12 September 2017. Foreignrap: I stumbled on this site called Foreignrap and it’s basically a repository for hip-hop from everywhere—you sort by country, get surprised, whatever. No algorithm trying to convince you that one region owns the genre. Just videos from Korea, Japan, Iceland, Congo, everywhere. The tracks are genuinely all over the place. “Good Enough” with 唾奇 and Sweet William, “Amica Pusher” from PRIESTESS, something called “WINALOTO” from TOMMY CASH that looks absolutely unhinged, “ELSKAN AF ÞVÍ BARA” from GKR, “Carnival Gang” with what looks like half the Korean underground rap scene on it. Aziz Firat, Thomas Vimare, and Ariel Dorol run it. You can submit your own tracks, dig through mixtapes, build something. It’s the kind of thing that makes you realize how much music gets buried because it doesn’t fit the geography you happen to live in or the scene you already know. If you’re still listening to Bushido, that’s on you. Saturday, 9 September 2017. Voting Unboxed: Sophie Passmann unboxed her absentee ballot like it was some limited-edition skincare collaboration. Every Instagram personality with three hundred followers was desperately waiting for L’Oréal or ALDI or whoever to send them something to film. Sophie got the one thing nobody would ever sponsor: her voting materials. She treated the envelope with complete reverence, pulled out the forms like they were a luxury product. #unboxing #sponsored #ad. If you want to be a successful influencer, she’s saying, just grab your ballot from the pile in your apartment and start filming. Or, you know, actually go vote. It’s a direct hit on influencer culture at its most absurd. These people wait around for brands to send them things so they can make a video of themselves opening a box. Desperation packaged as content. She showed how laughably empty the whole genre is by applying its machinery to the least glamorous thing possible: civic participation. What gets me is the confidence. She knew exactly what she was doing, knew it would land. There’s something almost generous about that kind of mockery—spending real effort on a joke at the expense of people who think this is their actual job. In September 2017, when she posted it, the unboxing thing still felt aspirational to a certain type of person online. She destroyed it with one video. The tweet went out and people got it. Not everyone, maybe. Some people probably watched it confused, thinking she was serious. But that’s the risk of deadpan. You let people be stupid for a moment, and then you don’t explain the punchline. Friday, 8 September 2017. Notes of Berlin: Notes of Berlin documents something I’ve always found absurd and funny—the notes, signs, and messages people plaster onto walls, doors, and bus stops throughout a city. Every person who sees them does something different: some laugh, some get angry, some just keep walking. The blog captures that moment when a stranger’s dumb joke or desperate plea or weird observation stops you in your tracks. It’s a document of how cities talk to themselves, one sticky note at a time. Friday, 8 September 2017. Arigatou, Ikura, Sumimasen: I got lost in Shibuya trying to find a restaurant that wasn’t on Google Maps. The small street I turned down had no English signs—not that I expected them, but standing there the reality hits different. I said sumimasen to someone outside a shop, and they understood. They pointed, I went, and something shifted in how I felt about being there. Japan is advanced until you need to communicate. The major cities have English on signs and menus. Most Japanese people speak English, but it’s wasei-eigo—Japanese English—which is its own dialect entirely. The pronunciation is Japanese-shaped, the grammar is Japanese-shaped. If you’re not used to it, you can’t always understand. It’s faster to just know a few words that always work. Arigatou is the obvious one—thank you. Everyone learns that. Ikura is how much, which matters if you’re buying anything. Sumimasen does everything else. You say it when you bump into someone. You say it when you need directions. You say it to get someone’s attention. It’s an apology, a thank-you, a question all at once. It got me through most of a week. There’s something about trying a language that isn’t yours, even just a handful of phrases. It changes how you move through a place. You’re not a tourist pointing at things. You’re someone who showed up and made the effort, however clumsy. Japanese people noticed. They were patient with me. The accuracy didn’t matter as much as the fact that I tried. I learned maybe ten words before I went. Enough to order food, ask directions, apologize. Enough to not feel completely helpless in Akihabara or wandering Harajuku. I don’t remember most of them now. But I remember the feeling when a phrase landed, when someone understood what I was trying to say. That mattered more than I expected. Thursday, 7 September 2017. Pattaya: You go to Pattaya looking for a beach and you get one - warm water, decent sand, the kind of seafood restaurants that actually know what they’re doing. On the surface it’s a functional tropical destination, the stuff you see in travel photos. The thing about Pattaya though is that it wasn’t designed for tourists looking for that. It was designed for a very specific appetite, and the infrastructure for that business is just woven into the regular town like it’s normal. Bars and massage places and restaurants line the same streets, all operating under the same implicit understanding. No one pretends otherwise. Most beach destinations hide what they’re built on. Pattaya just leaves everything visible. I spent an afternoon there trying to figure out if that directness was honest or just depressing. Thursday, 7 September 2017. Calling It In: The German election software had a problem. When the Chaos Computer Club started investigating, they found the user manual sitting publicly online, complete with credentials for the manufacturer’s internal systems. The update server passwords were exposed. The connection for election night results was pre-configured in the software, with a password—at least in Hesse—that said “test.” And the software generated sample result files that revealed exactly what real files needed to look like. Together, these weren’t theoretical vulnerabilities. Someone with basic technical skill could forge election results across the entire country. The government’s federal elections director had insisted just months earlier that elections in Germany couldn’t be hacked, that the system was secured against all manipulation. Now it turned out it was held together with “test” as a password and credentials scattered across the internet. Municipalities were running software they didn’t really understand, deploying systems they hadn’t vetted, trusting black boxes out of necessity. The election was three weeks away when this came out. The official response was honest and a little absurd: if the software didn’t work, they’d fall back to phones. Election officials would call in results the way it was done before the internet existed. No encryption, no networks, just voices on a telephone line. So that’s what happened. Germany, the technological center of Europe, counted its federal election by telephone. People calling in numbers, reaching back decades for something more trustworthy than the systems they’d built. It wasn’t efficient and it wasn’t elegant. But it worked. There’s something darkly funny about that—a nation so technologically advanced that it had to choose the analog solution. And something unsettling too. You don’t really think about how much faith you’ve placed in systems until you’re forced to stop trusting them and go backward instead. Thursday, 7 September 2017. When They Finally Come South: Looking at electronic music lineups, the geography is always the same: Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne. The circuit has a gravity that pulls north. Not intentionally—it’s just how cities calcify once they establish themselves as the place. Big cities attract big promoters attract the artists who shape culture, and everywhere else inherits scraps. The south has audiences and decent venues but might as well be a province. Not Munich, which has enough weight to pull things its way. I mean Stuttgart, places like that—actual culture, actual crowds, but the serious artists skip right through. So it meant something when a real festival landed there in December. Sven Väth, Nina Kraviz, Chris Liebing, Solomun—not just names but people who shape the form. The kind of lineup you usually drive north to catch. I don’t have sentimental investment in supporting local culture or whatever, but there’s a difference between living somewhere good things happen and living somewhere you have to plan a trip for it. For one night, the south had access. Maybe it shifts something. Maybe the circuit loosens and artists stop treating half the country like a peripheral market. Or maybe this was one festival and everything snaps back. Either way it happened once, which is more than before. Thursday, 7 September 2017. She Walked: Alice Weidel took off her microphone during a ZDF talk show and left. Someone asked her about two party colleagues, she got uncomfortable, and she walked out of the studio. The moment you watch that happen on live television, you know you’re looking at someone who isn’t ready for any real power. Here’s what the AfD actually is underneath the suits and the policy papers: a bar full of angry people who’ve learned to talk about their grievance in political terms. The party positions itself as serious governance, but it’s really just organized resentment. Weidel was supposed to be the credential-stacked counterweight, the reason to think maybe it could be different. Lived in China, speaks Mandarin, worked at Goldman Sachs, partner to a filmmaker from Sri Lanka, raising kids in Switzerland. On paper she looked like someone who could maybe push back against the party’s worst instincts. But that’s not how it works. You don’t stay neutral when you’re inside a movement defined by its drift toward extremism. The pressure pulls you right. Weidel came in trying to be reasonable and slowly became something else. By the time she was asked on live TV to condemn part of her own party, she didn’t have the composure for it. She folded. And there’s your answer about whether she’s ready to govern. If you can’t sit through a difficult interview without walking away, you can’t make decisions for a country. You can’t be a chancellor and lose your composure when things get uncomfortable. That’s the baseline. Weidel isn’t meeting it. The AfD is what happens when you organize anger and give it institutional form, and she’s gradually become part of that machinery instead of being a check on it. That’s what the walk-off revealed. Wednesday, 6 September 2017. Mana in 3D: I spent enough time with Secret of Mana on the SNES that the soundtrack never really left my head. The sprite work, the colors, the magic animations—it’s all weirdly concrete in a way that three-dimensional games often aren’t. That’s probably why I’m skeptical that a 3D remake can capture what made the original feel the way it did, no matter how much visual polish you throw at it. Square Enix is doing a full 3D remake for the PS4, and unsurprisingly, it’s adopting the same vaguely clean, aggressively mid-tier 3D aesthetic they’ve been using for a while now—the Final Fantasy remakes, I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear, all that. There’s a comparison video of the opening scenes side by side with the original, and I watched it expecting to feel disappointed. The new look is bright and competent and totally soulless in the way these things usually are. But here’s the weird part: it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would. The character designs carry over okay. The world reads visually even if it lacks the personality of those pixel graphics. It’s not a betrayal, exactly. It’s more like watching someone cover a song you love—it’s never going to be the same, but sometimes you realize the melody is strong enough to survive the translation. I don’t know yet if it’ll actually hold up to a full playthrough or if I’m just being charmed by the novelty of seeing those familiar locations in three dimensions. That’s the gamble with remakes—the original was perfect for a reason, but sometimes the reasons aren’t as load-bearing as you think. It might surprise me. Or it might just make me want to dig out my old cartridge and remember why the original mattered in the first place. Wednesday, 6 September 2017. Netflix Origins: You’re deep in some show when you start thinking about Netflix itself. Where’d it come from? Why’d they try to sell themselves in 2000? There’s a video with 101 facts about it. You’ll watch them, keep maybe three, and have one thing to mention at dinner. It doesn’t matter, but you’ll do it anyway. Wednesday, 6 September 2017. Fuji at 2 AM: Mount Fuji is one of those Japan bucket-list things. It’s been sacred for over a thousand years, apparently first climbed by some monk nobody remembers back in 663. These days hundreds of people go up every year, and they all do basically the same thing: they time it so they can watch the sunrise from near the top. That means catching a hut halfway up around midnight and then starting again in the dark, probably 2 AM. There’s a fast bus from Shinjuku in Tokyo that gets to the fifth station in maybe two and a half hours. From there different routes branch depending on how much time or difficulty you want. The Yoshida Route from Kawaguchiko is the one most people take. The basic requirements never change: decent shoes, layers for the cold, water, some money. I watched a video about it once, one of those how-to things, and it stuck with me. Not because I’m desperate to climb it, but because of something mentioned in passing. Nearby is Aokigahara, that forest everyone talks about—you know the one. The dark reputation. So there’s this mountain that’s been sacred for over a thousand years, almost holy, and then right there close by is this place with completely different energy. That contrast is strange. Haven’t been there. Probably will at some point. I’m just curious what it’s actually like standing in the dark with a few hundred other people, all shuffling up a volcano, waiting for the sun. Tuesday, 5 September 2017. M.I.L.K. Gets Summer: I’ve been on this tropical music kick—lofi hip-hop mostly, nothing too dance-oriented, just these soft beats and minimal melodies hanging in the background. The kind of stuff that makes you feel like you’re somewhere warmer, which is the whole point. M.I.L.K., this Danish musician, just released his first EP called “A Memory of a Memory Of A Postcard.” He builds backwards, starts with a visual, maybe sketches out a mood board, and then writes the music to match. It’s the harder route, but when it works, it works. His yacht rock is this soul-soaked thing that actually captures summer without leaning on the obvious moves—no manufactured beach culture, no Ibiza beats and a voice repeating the same line endlessly. Just summer that feels earned. Light, easy, honest in a way that matters. That’s rarer than you’d think. Tuesday, 5 September 2017. Someone Was Listening: I open my inbox expecting garbage—junk, spam, someone’s ambitious dick pics. Instead there’s this letter from Anna. She’s been reading for years and decided to actually make something. Took one of my stickers, did a photoshoot with it, sent me the pictures. It’s weird how much that matters. You write into the void for so long, put out what you think is worth saying, and you don’t know if anyone’s reading or if they give a shit. Then someone like Anna shows up and something shifts. Oh, someone was listening. Someone cared enough to actually do something about it. The photos are nice. She put real thought into them. No angle, no ask, just “I liked this, so I made you something.” That doesn’t happen often anymore. Not online, not anywhere. After twenty years of doing this, you’d think I’d be used to it by now. But every time something genuine makes it through the noise, it’s a small shock. Like proof that someone’s actually out there paying attention. Tuesday, 5 September 2017. Die Partei’s Master Plan: Nilo Destino and Zwieboe showed up at a press conference in Kreuzberg and basically wrecked it to make a simple announcement: Serdar Somuncu should be Germany’s next chancellor. They weren’t joking. They were completely serious about not being serious, which is the only sane position anyone can take about politics at this point. Die Partei—The Party—exists in that space between satire and documentary. Their campaign platform is a work of genius: universal total justice, or failing that, at least twice as much as the SPD provides. Complaints about injustice? Suppress them forcefully. The Hamburger SV will be relegated every single year, solving that particular football crisis permanently. They want MILF-Geld (support for young mothers) instead of Cougar-Rente. End animal testing—animals are here to be cute and eaten, not experimented on. Instead, test new drugs and cosmetics on professional athletes. They’ve already got bodies adjusted to chemical assault. Or better yet, have YouTube beauty influencers like Bibi test everything first. Let them pioneer the lipstick and ass-makeup innovations. They’re used to performing on camera anyway. The whole thing works because Die Partei isn’t trying to seem smart. They’re just pointing at the system and saying: this is already ridiculous, we’re just being honest about it. Which, after watching German politics stumble around for years, feels like the only real option left. Monday, 4 September 2017. Slipped Through: I’ve been playing London Grammar’s “Truth Is a Beautiful Thing” constantly late into the night—the kind of album that sinks in while you’re working, wine in hand, thinking about whatever’s left of the day. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s just there, the way you want music to be. They put out a video for “Non Believer” and it lands exactly how their stuff usually does. Hannah Reid’s voice has this quality that matters—powerful and fragile at the same time, but not performing at being either. Just genuinely both. Dominic Major and Dan Rothman know how to sit in that space with her. There’s something almost invisible about music this good. The industry is so loud and fast and hungry for the next thing that when you hear something that’s actually, plainly beautiful, it feels like they slipped through somehow. London Grammar doesn’t fit the moment we’re in, and that’s precisely why it works. Monday, 4 September 2017. Before They Copied It: Tresor. Matrix. Kellerdiscos. East Berlin, 1997—and everyone who was there will tell you the parties were harder, the drugs better, the clubs more real. The standard mythology. What mattered was the specific moment: when the city’s nightlife was shifting east and the scene was still inventing instead of copying. The Tresor had become the epicenter. The Matrix in Friedrichshain opened that year and got famous fast for all the technical excess—computer-controlled beer taps, sophisticated sound systems, the kind of equipment that meant someone was thinking about this as design rather than just noise. For 1997 Berlin, that was a statement. It said: this is deliberate. An Arte documentary caught the scene in March of that year. Footage of the moment before standardization, before the tourists and money figured out how to replicate it. You can watch how it actually happened then, when the scene was still making itself up. The computer beer taps are the tell. Someone cared enough to over-engineer the details because the whole thing still felt like it mattered, like it could go wrong, like it was worth getting right. That’s always the moment before everything gets standardized and turned into a style. It doesn’t last. Monday, 4 September 2017. Grounded: Rowan Hamilton found Effy and Iona on Instagram and reached out about a shoot in Portland. They said yes, no complicated back-and-forth. That’s what it looks like when people recognize something real in each other’s work. The photographs are good because they’re at ease. They styled themselves, made the choices, which means intention lives in every detail. Rowan described it as one of the chillest shoots he’s done. You can feel that in the images—the comfort between them, the absence of self-consciousness. No strain. Most people freeze when you ask them to take their clothes off in front of a camera. But if you actually understand image and light and your own body, if you’ve paid attention, it becomes work instead of exposure. That’s what I’m looking at here. Monday, 4 September 2017. The Propaganda Ministry: Die Partei took over thirty Facebook groups run by AfD supporters. About 180,000 people across them. They changed the pages and didn’t hide it—their Propaganda Minister, Shahak Shapira, had a statement ready. The logic was straightforward enough: the platforms were full of lies, nobody official was stopping it, so they did. There was something tired about it, like they’d asked politely and decided to stop asking. What got to me was the gap. The space between when they went in and when Facebook caught on. Did the people actually running these communities see them change first, or did the platform’s systems flag it? How long does that take? Die Partei clearly knew—which tells you something about how these spaces are actually defended. I never found out what happened after. The groups probably got restored. Die Partei probably didn’t try to hold them. The communities scattered and reformed elsewhere. The platform patched something or released a statement or both. But the fact that they could do it, that they could take over real communities with real members just to make a point about vulnerability—that’s what stayed with me. Sunday, 3 September 2017. Hair That Changes Its Mind: A few YouTubers started coloring their hair, and suddenly everyone in the city wanted to try it. Blue, green, silver. Some pulled it off. Most of them, though—there’s something about a neon head that doesn’t translate unless the rest of you is already there to meet it. The real barrier is commitment. You pick a color and you’re living with it for months, and most people aren’t confident enough to bet their whole aesthetic on one choice. They want the option to change their mind. That’s probably why Pranava’s Vivid Moods Color exists. It’s a hair dye that changes color with temperature—yellow becomes green when you’re in the sun, pink shifts to purple, silver goes blue. You’re not picking a color. You’re hedging your bets with all of them at once. It’s kind of funny, actually. A whole product built for people who want colored hair but can’t decide which color to want. That’s not nothing—that’s probably most people. You want the thing until the thing requires commitment. I have no idea if it actually looks good or if the color shifts are dramatic or if anyone’s going to bother with it. Seems like the kind of product that solves a problem by making the problem someone else’s. But I respect that. Pick the dye, let the temperature decide. Saturday, 2 September 2017. Cro’s Mask: Cro wore a panda mask on stage, which should have been absurd but wasn’t. Instead it became the most honest thing about the work—a commitment to image over identity, to the constructed self as the real self. Every song happened in the frame of that mask. He made an album called “Tru.” that felt like it mattered. Not overconfident, just present. The kind of record that needed to happen in a room full of people, not just uploaded somewhere. German hip-hop has always had more visual literacy than most hip-hop, and Cro was deep in that—everything mattered, the way it looked, the way it sat in space. Painting came next, or alongside it. Canvas instead of stage, but the same thinking about what image means, what it carries. An artist who understood that the work and the presentation of the work weren’t separate things. The mask wasn’t hiding who he was—it was clarifying what he was. Saturday, 2 September 2017. Ten Dollars: Instagram got hacked in 2015 and six million people’s contact information got stolen and immediately packaged for sale on the dark web. Someone looked at it and thought, here’s a business. Not even to sell the whole thing - just to let people query it. Ten dollars and you could find anyone by their email or phone number. They found out because Selena Gomez’s account went down and that was newsworthy enough to trigger investigation. Of course it took a celebrity getting hit for Instagram to admit something was wrong. They spent days insisting it was only high-profile accounts, only the famous people with special protection, before conceding that yeah, it was everyone. The lie outlasted the initial panic. The passwords stayed encrypted, at least - that part worked. But everything else got extracted and sold. Names, emails, phone numbers, all the scaffolding that connects you to the rest of the internet. Someone built a database and charged ten dollars a search. Ten dollars to find anyone. Saturday, 2 September 2017. Just Like That: Berlin’s been drowning in posters for weeks—movies, events, services, and now election season on top of it. The candidates have claimed every vertical surface, and public space becomes just another billboard. You walk past thousands of messages nobody asked for. Someone did something simple about it. An artist group called Einfach so flipped about a hundred election posters over. CDU, SPD, the usual suspects—turned them around. Now the city’s got empty rectangles everywhere, surfaces waiting for something. The move is clever because it’s legal. You’re not destroying the posters or taking them down—you’re just flipping them. It’s a loophole that makes you smile because it works. A little lightness in the day, a little space that doesn’t belong to someone else’s message. What interests me is that it doesn’t try too hard. It’s not preachy about reclaiming public space or critiquing electoral politics. It’s just: these are white now, do what you want. A small act of refusal that opens the door instead of closing it. Berlin needs more of that kind of thinking—not the righteous intervention, just the useful one. Friday, 1 September 2017. Deck 10: Red Bull Radio launched Deck 10, a monthly program on the third Tuesday hosted by Naima Limdighr and Keno Mescher. The idea is simple: cover rap and electronic scenes away from the major cities, the sounds and people nobody else is really paying attention to. The first episode heads to Frankenland, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where Naima meets LACA, an underground rap legend with decades behind him, and Kuchemann, a newcomer working in that same space. They’re sitting in someone’s living room talking about what it means to make music in places with thin infrastructure, how the dialect shapes your sound, how you build a scene when you’re not in a metropolis. It’s the kind of conversation that doesn’t happen in magazine profiles. I have a photo somewhere of me and Tereza from years back, both of us stuffed with burgers, Leni in the frame too. Tereza became someone I’d forget about until stumbling across her name again. Now she’s the one picking the best club track of each month for the program. It’s a small thing but it’s the kind of discovery that makes a show work—someone you half-remembered turns out to be exactly the person who should be there. Modselektors Gernot talks about the turning point in his career, and Nick Höppner’s involved too. It’s a solid lineup, the kind that makes sense if you know anything about electronic music in Europe and who’s been doing it the longest. The whole thing feels necessary. Germany has underground music culture that sprawls across small towns and regional scenes that never make it into international coverage. A show that actually documents that, that treats provincial scenes as serious, sounds like something that should have existed ages ago. Friday, 1 September 2017. The Real Obscenity: There was an election coming in Germany, and I’d already decided: Die Partei. Not for any serious reason—just because they were the only ones being honest about how completely obscene things had gotten. They’d put out a campaign ad featuring Serdar Somuncu, the comedian everyone either loved or hated, basically naked and doing explicit sexual things with pornography and breasts. Which is crude, obviously. But that was the whole point. Die Partei understood what everyone else was too polite to say: actual German politics was far obscener than anything they could film. They basically admitted it themselves. Released some statement saying they’d tried to match the obscenity level of German politicians and the auto industry and failed completely. You can’t compete with reality. The cold hard facts—the corruption, the hypocrisy, the casual brutality of actual power—are always more scandalous than any amount of naked flesh and bodily fluids. So I was voting for tits over Merkel. It made sense. Friday, 1 September 2017. They Have Your File: Stood at the wrong protest. Lived next to someone smoking. Your face in the wrong camera at the wrong time. The German police file you away—quietly, without asking, without telling you afterward. Most people have no idea. The scale is quietly staggering. Seven hundred thousand people in the “drug offenses” category. Half for cannabis, just once, years ago. The charges got dropped, the case closed, your entry stays forever. They’re not purging anything. You don’t have to do anything obviously wrong. Florian Boillot is a photographer. A cop shoved him during a shoot, he complained to her superior, and now he’s flagged in two databases: “left-wing violent offenders” and “politically motivated crime.” Björn Kietzmann has an immaculate record—clean as they come. Still flagged eighteen times. Once because he was standing near a firecracker that went off; police accused him of throwing it, the case dissolved, and he’s in the database. Still there. Journalists have been denied press passes to cover protests because they photographed one a decade ago. You can do the math on how many innocent people are quietly archived. Tens of thousands, easily. The system doesn’t announce it. No notification. You’re just filed. You can actually find out if you’re in there. It’s called a self-disclosure request—you write to the BKA and your regional police and ask what records exist. Might need a certified copy of your ID. There are templates online, sites that explain the process, tools to navigate it. I haven’t checked. Probably should at some point. Thursday, 31 August 2017. The Satirists Had a Point: So Die Partei - you can believe whatever you want about them. They blame the Russians for everything, think Germany shouldn’t take in more refugees than the Mediterranean can handle, and want to bring back emergency exams where students get five questions nailed to the chalkboard in early June and the answers are just posted online beforehand. Then you chill. Ridiculous stuff. But I took the Wahl-O-Mat quiz honestly, let every answer be exactly what I thought, and it matched me 71.1 percent with Die Partei. Greens at 69.7 percent, the Left at 68.4 percent, some other party at 68.3. Maybe they’re not as incompetent as I figured. Look, whether you want Die Partei running Germany or not, you have to respect what Martin Sonneborn’s satirist crew does with campaign ads. They’re the only ones making anything that doesn’t sound like it was written by a dead thing in a suit. Nico Semsroth’s got this ad aimed at non-voters, trying to sell them on Die Partei. His pitch is perfect: don’t care if they win? Vote for them anyway. At least it keeps the AfD out. Maybe the FDP. Possibly the SPD. Stupid. Funny. And they weren’t lying. Thursday, 31 August 2017. The Asexual Thing: I walk through the city and there’s always someone. The cute stranger, the bartender, someone entirely unremarkable who just hits. It’s this constant pull underneath, part of how I move. I figure everyone’s like this - same default wiring. Then there’s Michelle, who isn’t. Michelle has a boyfriend. They’re together, it works. But she looks at the world and doesn’t feel what I feel - that ambient wanting that shapes how you see people and what you pay attention to. Never has. While everyone else was pairing off and figuring out how to fool around, Michelle was already different, already not interested. She’s asexual. She doesn’t talk about it like it’s tragic or broken. It’s just how she’s built. No engine running underneath. So instead of that constant wanting, there’s room for other things - coffee, cake, talking about Star Wars until 3 AM. The things she actually cares about get her full attention. Nothing competing for the same space. There’s a whole community of people like Michelle. Bigger than anyone acknowledges. It’s not a disorder. It’s just one way to be human, and in a world where sex is the default plot point - where everything’s trying to sell you on it, where desire gets treated like the base motivator - asexuality is the quiet refusal. I can’t really imagine it. Not that pull, not that constant checking. Walking through the world and just seeing people instead of wanting them. Michelle does it every day. Everyone around her assumes something’s wrong or it’s a phase, but she’s just operating from a completely different set of wiring. Thursday, 31 August 2017. Worst of Chefkoch: I’ve lost hours on Chefkoch, this German recipe site where people submit their food with zero self-awareness. Sliced tomatoes. Salt. Powdered flavor enhancer. Liquid flavor enhancer. Call it “Tomato Plate à la Andi” with a wrong accent mark, and somehow that’s cuisine. There’s always an Andi. This one works at a nursery but calls himself a Branch Manager, and his cooking reflects that same delusional confidence. Tomatoes plus seasoning plus more seasoning, with that accent aigu placed on the wrong vowel entirely. In his world, conviction and chaos are the same thing. His recipes are the ones that make perfect sense at parties where enough coke is flying around that no one notices the extra MSG. Then there’s Döner Kebab Casserole. Big Mac Salad. These aren’t jokes or experiments. These are real submissions from people absolutely convinced they’re doing something. The whole site is basically the internet in one place: everyone has a platform, everyone’s an expert, and most people have no idea what they’re doing. Wednesday, 30 August 2017. The Oktoberfest Shoe: The heel is embroidered with lederhosen patterns. There’s a pretzel worked in. Gold lettering spells “Prost” alongside the three stripes. Someone at 43einhalb and adidas designed a sneaker specifically for Oktoberfest, and they spent real time on the details. Which is kind of absurd in the best way. It’s not a lifestyle shoe trying to be relevant all year, not a retro reissue coasting on heritage—it’s a shoe that knows exactly when it matters. For one festival. For one weekend in late September. For one very specific feeling. I don’t know if I’d actually wear it. But there’s something honest about that kind of specificity. Most limited editions feel like manufactured scarcity, like someone in a board meeting decided to restrict supply to drive demand. This is different. This is a designer saying: here is what I made for this exact moment. For this crowd. For this thing that happens here. That kind of limitation, that kind of purpose, it gives the shoe weight. You’re not buying a pair of sneakers that might work for multiple things. You’re buying something that’s done one job really well and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Wednesday, 30 August 2017. He Wants Sex: “You want to fuck me but you can’t because I forbid it.” That line from Henning May—from AnnenMayKantereit—is the whole song right there. It’s the hook on this WDR Unplugged remix they did with SXTN’s Juju and Nura for the track “Er will Sex,” and the delivery is perfect. He sounds wounded by the injustice of it, genuinely offended that desire isn’t a complete argument in itself. The song is exactly what it promises: a conversation between people who want each other and the small negotiations that follow. Juju catalogs the performance of modern seduction—moped, unsolicited pictures, Netflix plea—and Henning counters with the paradox of actual attraction. He’s attentive, he buys her beer, he listens, he opens doors. He checks every box. And none of it matters because she decides. The song knows this is both hilarious and true. Stripping it down to acoustic for the radio session makes it meaner. You can hear them barely holding back a smirk in their voices. The lyrics sting a little more without the production glossing them over—the give-and-take between what he thinks he’s earned and what she’s willing to trade. It’s sharp and sexual and weirdly honest about how desire gets tangled with ego and power. German pop doesn’t bother with euphemism. There’s no shame in these lyrics, no metaphor—just people singing openly about wanting and not getting, about the rules you set and the ways you enforce them. It’s crude and direct in a way that feels rarer than it should be. That moment where May’s voice cracks—I think about it more than I should. It’s the only note that could land there. Wounded and arrogant and completely sincere. Tuesday, 29 August 2017. Living With It: In 2013, visiting Japan for the second time, there was constant talk about Kim Jong-un potentially lobbing a nuclear missile at Tokyo. Nobody seemed actually frightened—it was just part of the landscape, like the humidity—but when anti-missile defense stations started appearing across the city, something real shifted. You’d walk past these structures and feel the weight of the threat materialize. Last night, it happened. A missile went up from somewhere near Pyongyang and traveled about 2,700 kilometers before falling into the Pacific, way past Hokkaido. It didn’t hit anything. It wasn’t meant to. But people in Japan woke up to their phones screaming. Emergency alerts. Get to a shelter now. Someone on Reddit described being in a game, chatting with friends, when the notification hit. Their first thought: this is it, I’m about to die in a nuclear explosion. That gap—three seconds maybe—where abstraction turns into something you can feel. What’s strange isn’t the missile itself. It’s how quickly you adjust to knowing that death can arrive with a notification. How people install the apps, get the alerts, and then scroll through their feeds. The threat becomes infrastructure. I keep thinking about that moment for the person at their desk. Not the missile, which is abstract, part of geopolitics or posturing or whatever. Just the specific human experience of getting yanked into mortality for three seconds. Phone lights up. Instructions arrive. Everything shifts in the time it takes to read them. Then nothing happens, and you go back to your game. Living somewhere that’s possible is its own kind of dissonance. Not the threat of annihilation, which feels almost normal by now, but the knowledge that you could be ordinary and fine and then a notification arrives, and for three seconds you genuinely believe it’s ending. Tuesday, 29 August 2017. What Paris Lost: She was eighteen when Rick Salomon filmed them together. He was thirty-three. She never consented to him making the tape, and she definitely never consented to him leaking it. But in 2004, “1 Night in Paris” hit the internet, and the whole thing became inextricable from her brand. The public story was simple: the tape made Paris Hilton famous. It was the thing that launched her into the stratosphere. Except that’s not what happened. She never made a cent from it. Never wanted it out there. When she finally talked about it publicly, she was still furious about this part—the myth that she’d somehow benefited. “I never made a dollar off that video,” she said. “That’s one of the things that really pisses me off when I hear it.” What gets me is how completely we missed the actual damage. We saw the tape and saw Paris Hilton, and we connected them as cause and effect. Made her famous. Gave her a brand. But that’s not what it did. It took away the possibility of being anyone else. She’d spent her whole life admiring certain women—Princess Diana especially, that version of elegance and control. She thought she could be like that. One video from Rick Salomon changed the equation forever. Now she was the girl in that video. That was the only story. Afterward, she was trapped. Depression flattened her. She couldn’t go outside for months, couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing her, knowing what they’d seen, thinking what they were probably thinking. The violation doesn’t look like much once enough time passes—just a leak, just a scandal, just a thing that happened. But in the immediate aftermath, it was total. She felt annihilated. When asked about Rick Salomon, she said she regretted ever meeting him. I believe her. Tuesday, 29 August 2017. What Jim Will Draw: I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to have someone who’d actually draw anything you could think of. Any fantasy, any crude impulse, any bit of obscene nonsense rattling around in your head—rendered in Microsoft Paint and sent back to you. No judgment. No limit. Well, Jim exists. You go to his website, describe what you want, and he draws it. Paint, colors, whatever style feels right. Donald Trump passed out on a White House toilet, coked up and covered in his own mess? Done. Sonic the Hedgehog spending his final moments in a dingy biker bar? Done. Margaret Thatcher dressed as a Valkyrie, flying through a storm on an enormous cock? Done. Jim doesn’t turn anything down. He really does draw everything. What strikes me about it is the complete absence of a filter. No moment where he decides something’s too vulgar or stupid. He just works. And he does good work—the Paint aesthetic is genuine, the compositions have real weight to them, the color choices make sense. He’s not being ironic or above it. He takes the request seriously. There’s something almost punk rock about that. The internet spends half its time pretending to be civilized and the other half proving it has no actual shame. Jim’s just the honest witness to all of it, rendering the requests as they come, with full respect and zero judgment. Tuesday, 29 August 2017. Look What You Made Me Do: Taylor had fights with basically everyone—Katy, Kanye, Kim, every guy she dated, apparently even Selena. Those feuds used to fuel her music. Anger and betrayal made her records better. “Look What You Made Me Do” was supposed to be the ultimate response to all of it. But it’s just anger with no craft underneath. All words, no melody, no song. She’s sitting there recounting every grievance and it sounds exactly like what it is—hollow, listless, more interested in settling the score than in actually making something worth hearing. The shift is weird to watch. At some point revenge became more important than the music itself. The feuds were real and painful and she had every right to be furious, but deciding that getting back at people was the whole point of the record—that’s when she lost me. 1989 was probably her last actual record. Monday, 28 August 2017. Lang Lebe Die Gang: So years ago I basically made this blog into a Lena Meyer-Landrut thing after her Eurovision win. Might as well admit that now since if you’re still curious why anyone cares about her, that’s my fault. She’s just dropped a track with Genetikk, these masked German rappers, called “Lang Lebe Die Gang.” It’s for some Netflix show, which I’m not going to sit here pitching because unlike a lot of people, nobody’s paying me to. The actual thing though—it’s really good. The beat works, the rappers are solid, and Lena sounds like she’s actually into it. Which matters because she’s capable of so much more than the harmless nothing-pop they usually give her. You’ve got Helene Fischer and Sarah Connor and Andrea Berg out there absolutely destroying German music on a regular basis, and here’s Lena actually doing something real. Maybe this is it. Maybe she breaks through all that noise. Wouldn’t that be something. Monday, 28 August 2017. Validation Machine: Veronika Dräxler shut down her art blog after ten years. The thing is, it was actually working when she closed it. The blog, Selbstdarstellungssucht—roughly “self-presentation addiction”—had readers, won awards, had people asking to be featured. So shutting it down wasn’t the usual kind of blog death. The thing was that once it started working, it stopped being what she’d wanted it to be. The writing was curious at first, strange in the right way. She and her writers interviewed lesser-known artists, took odd photos, didn’t perform expertise. It felt like genuine looking instead of explained looking. But then metrics mattered, and click-counts mattered, and suddenly those were driving what got published instead of instinct. Success poisoned it by making it successful. Veronika wrote about this when she shut it down. The core of what she said is that chasing external validation is just another word for exhaustion—there’s always another number, always someone else’s approval to earn, and the thing that started as personal exploration becomes a platform you’re running for an audience that doesn’t really care either way. I think about that moment she hit, where you realize you’re optimizing instead of creating. It happens to everyone who makes things that people notice. You’ve got traction, momentum, proof that people want what you’re doing. The logical move is to keep doing it better, smarter, more efficiently. But the cost is that you stop being the person doing it for reasons that matter to you. Most people take that trade. The sensible choice. But she just didn’t. Walked away from something that could have gone on forever. The art world didn’t lose anything. There’s always another blog, another platform, another space for art to be discussed. But there’s something about choosing to stop when you’re winning that stays with me anyway, even if it changes nothing. Sunday, 27 August 2017. No Apology: Yulia Nefedova’s drawings hit different because she refuses to choose. Sexually explicit, playful—usually featuring herself or people close to her—but also sharp and critical about consumption and capitalism. Most artists trying to do both end up with work that feels split down the middle, apologetic. Hers doesn’t. The eroticism doesn’t undercut the thinking. The critique doesn’t kill the horniness. They exist in the same space without either one giving ground. That takes something most people don’t have. A refusal to perform the separation between the thinking self and the desiring self. Between intellect and appetite. I found her work in Amsterdam years ago and it stuck. Recently, Sander Dekker photographed her, and the new images caught that same charged tension—the eroticism and the edge running parallel through every frame. The pictures feel intimate and sexual and critical all at once, the way her actual personality bleeds into the work without apology. What draws me to artists like that is simple. They don’t split themselves. They don’t perform the split their audience expects. That refusal has weight. Friday, 25 August 2017. Mana Reborn: Your character falls off a bridge into a river. You wake up on shore with no memory. There’s a sword in the water. You pull it out, and that’s the game—a kid finds something and everything changes. I played Secret of Mana for hundreds of hours on my Super Nintendo, which is absurd considering the game’s length, but something in it wouldn’t release me. The world looked like pixel art but felt like a vivid dream. Artificial colors more vivid than reality. Music you could almost feel against your skin. I memorized everything—every path, every secret, every line of dialogue. I spent hours flying with Flammie, fighting through the Mana Fortress, living for that moment when the spell would land and the whole world would click. I stopped playing regularly sometime in high school, moving on to other things. But the game wouldn’t release me. The kind of thing that lives in your fingers and your memory, that you can imagine perfectly in the dark. You can hum the theme without thinking. You remember the exact color of that fortress. When they announced a 3D remake, something in me tensed. A game you’ve mastered doesn’t need a second life. You already have the version that mattered. But the news didn’t feel like theft. It felt like permission to see Mana become something else. Square Enix released it in early 2018 on PS4, PS Vita, and PC. They rebuilt it from scratch in 3D, which wasn’t what I’d hoped for—I wanted them to polish the pixels, add new secrets, leave the essential thing alone. I knew how Mana would end. I knew where every secret was. I knew what every character would say. But I played it anyway, to see if the magic survives the translation. Friday, 25 August 2017. How Things Vanish: De Maizière shut down Linksunten after the Hamburg riots. The whole Indymedia platform just vanished—not just certain posts, the entire thing. One day it existed, the next day it was gone. It had been the gathering place for Germany’s radical left for years. Testimonies of burned police cars, anonymous manifestos about attacks and arson, the vocabulary of protest turning into something heavier. The government called it a lawless zone and decided the solution was to delete it completely. Right-wing extremists ran their forums openly, and nobody shut those down. The inconsistency was impossible to miss, but easy enough to ignore if you weren’t really thinking about it. What was strange was that the cops didn’t want this to happen. Linksunten had become useful to them—they could watch the networks, see what was being planned. Intelligence gathering. Once it was gone, that ended. They lost a window into what people were actually doing, and it made their jobs harder. But the part that stuck with me was simpler. Something just ceased to exist. A whole platform, years of conversation and archive, deleted because someone in power decided it was inconvenient. Not through courts, not through changing the law, not through any process you could point to or argue against. Just the ability to make things disappear. Which makes you wonder what else can vanish the same way when nobody’s watching. What other platforms, what other archives. How much of what seems permanent is actually just operating at the pleasure of people who have that power. Friday, 25 August 2017. Worst Of: Jennifer Weis doesn’t perform excitement. The frontwoman of Jennifer Rostock sounds like she’s just telling you something she noticed, and the fact that it’s scathing usually doesn’t sink in until later. The band’s been around for a decade, mixing pop-rock with social critique sharp enough that you can easily miss it on first listen. The new song “Alles Cool” is exactly that move. It arrives as a breezy summer number, built for long drives and the feeling that everything’s fine. But Weis and the band have tucked their usual criticism into the choruses—politics wrapped in melody, the kind of thing that gets under your skin because you weren’t braced for it to even try. They’ve also released a “Worst Of” album, the songs too weird or specific for mainstream release. Most bands bury material like that. Jennifer Rostock made an album out of it. There’s confidence in that—taking the stuff that didn’t fit, that wasn’t commercial enough, and saying it’s worth hearing anyway. Says something about how they actually think about songwriting. German pop is often so calculated, like someone’s focus-grouped every emotional beat. Jennifer Rostock work differently. They write in German about German things without ever sounding locked into some narrow territory. You could be anywhere and understand what they’re doing. That’s rarer than it sounds. Friday, 25 August 2017. Ten Euros Per Nazi: In Fulda, someone figured out how to turn Nazi marches into fundraisers for refugee aid. It’s elegant enough that I’m still not sure if I’m looking at genius or just devastating strategy. Here’s how it works: pledge ten euros per Nazi who shows up to a demonstration. Every body on the street, every moment they spend making noise—it all becomes donations for refugee organizations. The thing’s called Hetzen für Flüchtlinge, a pun so dark I won’t even try unpacking it fully. “Hateful for Refugees.” “Inciting for Refugees.” Something like that. The wordplay carries the whole concept anyway. This is in areas where the far-right has built a real apparatus—rallies, flyers, constant noise about deportations and border closures. So someone looked at that and thought: what if we let them keep doing exactly what they’re doing, but flip the scoreboard? It’s not about bans or legal silencing. It’s about letting them march and just watching their participation become profitable for the exact opposite of what they believe. There’s a clarity to it that matters. The Nazis are marching. Refugees are being helped. That’s the complete thought. Will it change minds? No. Probably nothing does. But there’s something almost cool about a strategy that doesn’t even pretend otherwise—that doesn’t imagine the right counter-protest or the right argument will convert anyone. It just says: you want to speak? It costs you. That money goes to them. Thursday, 24 August 2017. Bootleg Logic: The thing about streetwear is that everyone agrees the logos are what matter. The actual quality of the hoodie, the actual comfort of the shoe—nobody’s checking. You’re buying the cultural capital, the three stripes or the swoosh or whatever Supreme put on a brick and made scarce. Companies spent billions making kids understand that wearing the right symbol is what makes you real. And then they acted shocked when kids found a way to get it without the four-hundred-dollar price tag. In Seoul, plenty of teenagers just bypass the whole system. They buy counterfeits from hidden shops and markets—good ones—and wear them without apology. Highsnobiety made a documentary about it and seemed scandalized, but I don’t know why. If the only thing that matters is the visual identity, and the counterfeit has it, then the system is working exactly as designed. They taught kids that identity is purchasable and that symbols mean everything. Why would they be surprised when a teenager looks at that logic and decides to buy the same thing for fifty bucks instead of five hundred? There’s something clarifying about it. The counterfeits cut through all the bullshit—the scarcity games, the hype drops, the influencer machinery—and just made the product. The real irony is that the fake version understands the original logic better than anyone. They want to sell you status and belonging. The counterfeits sell you the same thing cheaper, which means the original is the one getting outplayed. You can be bothered about that if you want. Talk about intellectual property, craftsmanship, the dignity of original work. All valid. But you can also see it as an efficient response to a fucked system. Not rebellion, exactly. Just pragmatism. The kids aren’t idealists. They know what they want—the symbol, the cultural signal—and they’re not going to pay a luxury tax for it. There’s a design principle buried in there somewhere. The counterfeits aren’t better made, but they’re smarter. They saw the actual problem—people need the symbol, not the premium price—and solved it directly. Meanwhile the real brands are stuck defending scarcity and hype because that’s how they maintain margins. The counterfeits are free to just be useful. No wonder they’re winning. Thursday, 24 August 2017. Still Being Discovered: There’s a moment in the middle of “Hallucinogen” where everything goes quiet except for Kelela’s voice layered with itself, and I realized someone had finally figured out how to make R&B feel like it’s still being discovered. It was 2013, and she was doing something that felt completely alive in the now—no nostalgia, no heavy-handed reference, just presence. The precision of her production choices. The way she knew when to leave silence. The confidence to let a song breathe. It was clear she understood the form deeply enough to move sideways through it. Her debut album, “Take Me Apart,” carries that same intelligence further. She talks about it like building a tapestry—everything interwoven, each thread pushing listeners in different directions, sometimes multiple directions within a single song. That’s the seduction and challenge at once, which most people don’t pull off. Usually one or the other, occasionally both but never without some compromise. She was after both at full strength. Kelela grew up in Washington, D.C., and you can hear that sensibility all through her work—patient, unselfconscious, not performing for approval. The voice precise but never cold. Production that breathes. Her approach to R&B wasn’t about claiming territory but exploring it, pushing into unfamiliar corners while keeping the emotional core taut. Not experimental for difficulty’s sake, just genuinely curious about what else the form could contain. What I keep coming back to is the generosity of it—making work that could reach different people in different ways without compromising the strangeness or the craft. There’s a particular craft to knowing what to leave undone, how much you can express through absence and texture. That’s harder than loudness or technical mastery. That’s the work that doesn’t announce itself. Thursday, 24 August 2017. What Do You Champion: Laurel Golio photographed three people in Champion’s new sweatwear for a collaboration with Urban Outfitters, and each one answered the same question: “what do you champion?” Princess Nokia, the New York rapper, said Community. Golio herself said Youth. Camille Jansen said Following Your Heart. It’s simple—ask people what matters to them and give them room to answer. No irony, no angle, no claim that a sweatshirt will fix anything. Just three people being straightforward about what they care about, and somehow that feels almost refreshing now. Wednesday, 23 August 2017. Still Got It: The club was loud and stupid, but something worked anyway. By the time we got back to my place the whole thing was still going. Then she was naked and suddenly gone—worried about how she looked. Like that was the thing I was thinking about. Like my brain was anywhere but right there. I think about that moment sometimes. How anxiety just follows you, even into bed. Even when you’re with someone who decided they wanted to see you. The self-consciousness is real, and somewhere, someone’s selling the answer: a highlighter for down there. Just dab it on your vulva and everything’s perfect. It’s absurd, but it exists because the worry exists. Someone designed it. Someone’s using it. It’s one of those things that makes me sad in a way I can’t quite pin down. The distance between what bodies actually are and what we think they should be. The fact that intimacy somehow became another place to perform. Wednesday, 23 August 2017. Reputation: I remember not wanting to put my phone down when the Reputation announcement dropped. Not because I needed to read news—I just felt something shift and I wanted to stay in that moment. Taylor had been quiet for over a year. The Kanye incident, the Katy thing, the internet deciding she was a snake and a villain. Everyone was waiting to see how she’d respond: apologize, explain, rehabilitate. Instead she came back like someone who’d already made peace with being exactly what people claimed she was. She didn’t fight it. No explanation, no redemption arc. Just darker visuals, different music, a snake as her symbol. It was like watching someone you’ve known your whole life stop performing and actually become who they’d always been underneath. Not tragically, but in that satisfying way when someone stops playing for the audience and starts making something just for themselves. The shift from 1989 was brutal. That album was controlled pop, smart and clean. Reputation was paranoid, sexual, mean in ways she’d never allowed herself to be before. It felt like watching someone finally tell the truth after years of managing her image, and the only way she knew how to express that was to go to the opposite extreme. Just to feel anything real. The album hadn’t even come out and I already knew it mattered—not because it would sound good, but because it meant something. It meant she’d chosen to be dangerous instead of likeable. There’s something about a pop star who stops trying to be loved and decides to be dangerous instead. Most never get there. Taylor did, and that’s when she actually became interesting to me. Wednesday, 23 August 2017. Fake Fifties: I read about these two students in Munich who figured out they could buy counterfeit €50 notes on the darknet. Twenty-three euros per note through Bitcoin, which was absurdly cheap if you stopped to think about it. They ordered a batch, one bill arrived, and when they used it to pay for a taxi with zero resistance, they decided they’d found a loophole in reality. Next order: twenty fake fifties. For two months in spring 2016, they worked the clubs—Neuraum, Bullit, Circle 5, Hashtag, and even P1, which was supposedly where the real money went. Hand over a fake fifty, get real change back, split the difference. It’s almost elegant, the kind of scheme you read about and think: why hasn’t anyone done this before? And then: because eventually someone notices. A bartender at a place called Willenlos got suspicious. Turned in a fake bill. One hour later it was over. They claimed they’d gotten the counterfeit note from someone else, but the regional crime unit found the printing workshop in Landshut with meticulous customer records. Even counterfeiters keep better books than most restaurants. The court gave them a week in jail and community service. They tried to pay back the clubs, but some had already closed. You can’t extract money from a business that doesn’t exist anymore. What gets me is how minor it all is. Two students, one spring, enough fake cash for a few dozen nights out. A local news story that no one outside Munich remembers. The kind of thing where you see the whole arc—they were clever enough to pull it off, dumb enough to keep doing it, unlucky enough to get caught. Classic small-time crime. You order counterfeit money from the internet and eventually someone catches you. That’s the whole game. Wednesday, 23 August 2017. September Reprieve: Summer in Berlin that year was barely a summer—wind and rain kept killing the festivals. I stopped planning and just checked the weather like it was stock data. By September I just needed something else to happen. The East Side Music Days came up over the 2nd and 3rd, free shows scattered across Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, London MCs and newer names and the usual circuit. Nothing that was going to rewire me, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was still having something to walk toward. The Warschauer Straße, the East Side Gallery, time before the real cold moved in. I’d figured out by then that Berlin festivals were just about showing up and seeing what held together. The weather, the crowds, maybe one good set—it all blended into one long season, one continuous salvage operation that would be the only summer I’d remember. Tuesday, 22 August 2017. The Leak: The hack dropped and suddenly everyone’s private photos are on Reddit. Miley was in it. She’d been trying to clean up her image, trying to be less controversial, and then that photograph—her pissing in the street—destroys the whole thing in one go. You can perform sexuality, you can perform transgression, but you can’t perform a bathroom break. That’s where the image breaks. Everyone else says the nudes with Stella Maxwell are the story, but they miss the point. Those shots are just her body. The other one is her being human in public, which is apparently worse. I think about what it costs to manage how people see you. You spend years controlling the narrative and then someone hacks your phone and it’s over. Everything private is suddenly what everyone’s looking at, and you can’t take it back. The worst part is how quickly it becomes normal. Another leak, another set of celebrities, another news cycle. By the time it’s big news, it’s already everywhere. The invasiveness is just ambient now. Monday, 21 August 2017. Fake Followers, Real Money: I watched a friend refresh her Instagram analytics at dinner once, checking engagement rates like they meant something. She’d been posting for months, photographs of her breakfast and whatever body parts she could get away with, grinding toward ten thousand followers. That’s the magic number where brands supposedly start throwing money at you. Mediakix ran an experiment to see how fast you could actually get there without any of that effort. They bought stock photos of a generic blonde model, mixed in some random travel shots, created a couple of Instagram accounts—nothing original, just the lifestyle-beauty-travel template everyone copies. For about three hundred dollars they started buying followers in bulk. Instagram didn’t flag anything. They’d add fifteen thousand followers in a day and the platform just let it happen. Fake likes, fake comments, all sourced from follower farms in China, Russia, India. Pennies per engagement. Within two months the accounts looked legitimate. Thirty to fifty thousand followers each. And that’s when the brands showed up. Swimwear, liquor, food—four sponsorship deals total. They made back their investment several times over plus free product. No one checked. The agencies didn’t verify the followers. The brands didn’t verify anything. Instagram didn’t care. It was just numbers on a screen and a payment clearing. I think about my friend posting honestly for months, building slowly, assuming there’s some logical path from effort to money on this platform. And I think about how someone with literally nothing—no followers, no actual life—can manufacture a profitable account in a fraction of the time. The difference is that she’s trying. The other person isn’t. The platform rewards them exactly the same. When she checks her analytics now, I think about those fake accounts and what they prove. Not that Instagram is broken—that’s obvious. But that the whole thing, from the platform’s perspective, is just a numbers game. Real or fake doesn’t matter. Profitable or not matters. That’s it. Thursday, 10 August 2017. Liberal Country: Germany’s always been good at the official story. Progressive laws, cosmopolitan culture, a country that believes in itself. And yet the violence against gay and lesbian people climbed steadily, year over year. More assaults, more hate crimes, more of everything. In the first six months of 2017 alone, there were 130 reported cases—beatings, harassment, extortion, property damage. A third more than the previous year. The actual trajectory is what gets you. Sixty documented crimes in 2006. Over 300 by 2016. And that’s only what made it to the police, what victims reported, what got recorded. The full picture is worse. Someone asked the obvious question: did marriage equality finally end discrimination? The numbers already answered that. Germany had legalized same-sex marriage while assaults on queer people kept rising. Two separate truths living in the same country. What’s exhausting is how predictable it all is. You pass a law and feel progressive for five minutes. Meanwhile people are still getting hurt in the streets. The official position and the lived reality stay miles apart, and everyone knows it, and nothing really changes. Germany just keeps being both things at once—liberal in theory, hostile in practice. Thursday, 10 August 2017. The Caffeine Hack: Every morning I’m pouring coffee before I’m fully conscious, operating on pure habit. I have no idea why it works, just that without it nothing starts. The coffee hits and something switches on. I become available. I have thoughts. For two decades I’ve never bothered to understand the mechanism. Turns out it’s simple. When your brain works, neurons burn energy and adenosine builds up as waste. The more they fire, the more it accumulates. That’s your brain’s natural brake signal—telling you to rest. Adenosine activates receptors on your nerve cells that say slow down, you’re tired. Caffeine blocks those receptors. It wedges itself between the adenosine and the receptors, so the message never gets through. You’re not actually less tired. The adenosine is still piling up. But your brain stops receiving the signal. So you just keep going. Knowing this doesn’t make me want coffee less. If anything it makes the whole thing feel darker, more necessary. I’m addicted to a molecule that’s basically a chemical lie—it doesn’t fix the exhaustion, it just keeps me from noticing it. Every morning is a small negotiation with my own biology. Tuesday, 8 August 2017. Strobelite: If Gorillaz aren’t sitting in your regular rotation, you’re doing something wrong. I’ve cycled through every track from 2D, Noodle, Murdoc, and Russell enough times that they blur into the background—work, driving, three in the morning, doesn’t matter. Only a handful of acts pull that off. They just released the video for “Strobelite,” this euphoric dance track off Humanz. Peven Everett’s featured. Raoul Skinbeck directed it—he’s been around Murdoc for years. The funny part is Raoul’s actual résumé before this: commercials for a local glazing company in Stoke-on-Trent. Somehow that prepared him perfectly for making pop videos that actually work. The video is basically the band throwing a reckless, destructive night at some notorious London club, Peven Everett in the middle of it all. Pure motion, pure chaos. The kind of evening that feels incredible in the moment and slightly questionable the next day. That’s why Gorillaz matter: they never forgot that music is supposed to feel good first. No pretense, no overthinking. Just something that grabs you. Tuesday, 8 August 2017. Alles Gut: I’ve always been skeptical of German rap’s obsession with hierarchy and proof. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt—they’re all trying to win something. Vienna doesn’t. The scene there operates at a different frequency, less concerned with dominance, more interested in just thinking out loud. Jugo Ürdens is one of the producers driving it, and EINFACHSO, nineteen, Polish-Austrian, feels like he could be leading whatever comes next. What gets me about this moment is the specific contradiction in how these people live. Between street and university. Between smoking weed and playing chess. Searching for answers online and in the real world. The rap sounds like thinking out loud, not performance. It doesn’t announce itself—it just exists in that space between things. Vienna’s history filters into everything made there. There’s a weight to the city that affects how people think and make. The culture’s always been its own thing, separate from what Germany’s usually obsessed with. That separation creates space to experiment, to fail without gatekeepers watching. I’m still discovering what’s happening there, but the scene itself doesn’t seem to care whether Berlin notices. Maybe that’s the whole point. Monday, 7 August 2017. Die WASD: I used to love gaming magazines. Total!, MANIAC!, GEE—the physical ones you’d find in shops. Something about the weight of them, the care in the design, the knowledge that someone had decided what belonged in this issue and then it was finished. Most of that’s gone now. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter discourse took its place. Fine for speed, but not the same. Die WASD is a German magazine that still exists. 200 pages, carefully made, serious about gaming without irony or exhaustion. Three people run it: Christian Schiffer, Ina Seidl, Markus Weißenhorn. Someone told me it’s the best gaming magazine in Germany, and I believe them because you can tell from the outside that it was made with actual thought, not just optimized for engagement. There’s something valuable about a magazine as a complete object. It’s bounded, finished, designed as a whole instead of an infinite feed. You buy it and it doesn’t change or disappear. It doesn’t recommend you anything. It just sits there. I haven’t read it, but the fact of it—a 200-page magazine about games, made with care, designed to last—that’s worth noticing. Friday, 4 August 2017. What Zipcys Gets Right: Zipcys—Yang Se Eun, a South Korean illustrator who goes by that name online—draws romance in a way that hits different. Sensitive moments between beautiful people, the kind that don’t need anything else. No irony, no cruelty, just two people and whatever’s happening between them. Looking at her work makes something ache a little. As a teenager I was certain I’d be a manga artist. That was going to be it—years of development, mastering the form, becoming one of the greats. The reality was uglier. Somewhere around page three of everything I started, my brain would derail into explicit scenarios with insect aliens, blood spray, crude anatomy, the works. Every attempt at a narrative would collapse into something filthy and absurd. I’d give up, start something new, and three pages later: same spiral. So I stopped trying to be that person. What I actually make is different. Cruder, more explicit, more willing to wallow in the fucked-up corners of sex and violence and stupidity. There’s a pleasure in it—in the refusal to keep things romantic or tasteful. But watching Zipcys’ portfolio, I’m struck by what I gave up. Not the career, but the capacity to draw something genuinely tender without it feeling like I’m mocking myself. Her illustrations are mostly about desire and attraction—girls and boys, mostly young, in states of closeness. But there’s nothing exploitative about it. It’s romantic without being saccharine, sexy without being crude. The kind of thing that makes you believe in something you’re not sure you believe in anymore. I’m not going back. The work I make now suits me. But there’s a specific loneliness in appreciating beauty you’re not equipped to create yourself, in clicking through someone else’s vision and feeling that sharp little envy. She found a way to be sincere about romance. I turned sincerity into a joke about beetle aliens and called it a day. That distance—between what I can appreciate and what I can make—that’s just the gap I live in. Thursday, 3 August 2017. Juliette Dominique Brown: Saw Juliette Dominique Brown through Insuh Yoon’s work—a Colombian photographer and painter who shoots people, whoever catches her eye. I liked the directness of it, no manifesto or overthinking, just the confidence to make work about what interests you. That clarity is harder than it sounds. Thursday, 3 August 2017. Death Wish Coffee: That state where you’ve had three cups of coffee and nothing’s changed—your eyes are still half-closed, your throat tastes like burnt beans, and you’re still thinking about going back to bed. That’s when you hear about Death Wish Coffee. World’s strongest. Nitrogen-infused. The kind of product that exists because someone looked at regular strong coffee and thought the actual problem was that it wasn’t strong enough yet. There’s a dark humor in how far people will go with this. You drink normal coffee, then you need better coffee, then you need the strongest coffee ever made, and then that’s not enough so they add nitrogen to it. At some point you have to laugh at the escalation. You know it’s not really about the coffee. But you’re still thinking about trying it anyway. I never actually bought a can. It feels like the kind of thing that’s better as a concept—a joke at three in the morning that’s also somehow a real product you could order. You know it won’t change anything, the nitrogen won’t fix the real problem, and yet there’s something appealing about it. The commitment to the bit. The refusal to accept that maybe more caffeine just isn’t the answer. Tuesday, 1 August 2017. The Chairman’s Intent: Most current rappers blur together for me—Lil this, Lil that, endless variations on nothing. But Action Bronson cuts through. He’s one of the few acts working right now who actually matters to me. He’s back with “The Chairman’s Intent,” and the video is ridiculous in the best way—he’s a blonde-wigged kung-fu fighter seducing women while he fights. Director Rik Cordero shot it properly. Harry Fraud handled production and is executive producing the album too, which means real intention. “Blue Chips 7000” drops August 25. You can get it however—digital, CD, vinyl. I don’t have strong opinions about format futures, but I know when something I actually want exists, I want to own it. Monday, 31 July 2017. Another Tokyo: Tokyo gets shot to death, which is why it’s interesting to see it through Lauren Engel. She showed up with friends, hit the expected spots—Skytree, Yoyogi Park, Takeshita Dori—and came back with photos that make even the millionth picture of Shibuya feel like it might be worth looking at. She’s worked for Adidas, Beats by Dre, Folklore, shot for Vogue, Highsnobiety, C-Heads. That’s the kind of experience that teaches you to see differently. Engel grew up in Hong Kong, lived in New York, then Sydney, then Boston. You don’t stack cities like that without it changing how you move through space, how you read people, what you know to look at. When she lands in Tokyo, she’s not chasing some pure authentic version of Japan or trying to prove how interesting she finds it. She’s just moving through Shibuya, Harajuku, Akihabara the way she’d move through anywhere else, seeing what’s actually in front of her. Most travel photography is working so hard to tell you something. Look how vibrant. Look how beautiful. Look how different. The best pictures just show you where someone stood and what they looked at. Engel’s Tokyo work lives there—not trying to convince you of anything, just clear about what she saw. I keep going back to the same thing: photographers who’ve lived in that many places don’t get starstruck anymore. They just see a city as a city. Which somehow makes the pictures feel true. Tokyo’s been shot ten thousand times. But there’s something about watching it through someone who’s been around the world, who isn’t performing wonder, that makes you want to stand exactly where she stood. Monday, 31 July 2017. It Was Always Going to Happen: You know Lisa and Lena if you’re twelve or if YouTube has decided to recommend something. The Stuttgart twins got famous on Musical.ly, the app where kids lip-synced pop songs in their bedrooms and sometimes made it look easy. Lisa and Lena were the ones who made it look easy. And then, inevitably, a fashion line. JIMO. They say it means twins in Haitian. Maybe it does. The whole thing is separate from them but connected to them, which is the whole move—you build an audience on one platform, you sell them something on another. No one even questions it anymore. It’s just what happens. I never actually looked at the clothes. Doesn’t matter. They’re probably fine. Probably exactly what their audience wants to wear. The transformation from person to product happens so smoothly now that the specific product almost doesn’t matter—what matters is that two girls turned being famous into something you can buy. That’s the system. Friday, 28 July 2017. Rocko Still Works: Everything was better, or that’s what we tell ourselves. The cartoons especially. Sailor Moon, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy, Doug, CatDog—those shows admitted the world was weird and didn’t apologize. But Rocko’s Modern Life was different. It wasn’t just another cartoon. It was a refuge for the genuinely broken kids, the ones whose heads were already wired wrong. And it didn’t try to fix you. The show understood something most entertainment still misses: that some people are built different, and the best you can do is make space for that strangeness. Not explain it away, not sand down the edges. A wallaby dealing in comics. A cow raised by wolves. A turtle in an RV. Pure absurdism, but the show had its own logic that made it feel more true than anything normal. If you didn’t get it, didn’t love it with the same specific intensity, then you didn’t need to be there. Go back to whatever else you were watching. Become one of the normal people. The show didn’t care if you understood. It refused to explain itself or apologize for being what it was. So when Nickelodeon announced they were bringing it back, when that first trailer dropped, something landed. Not nostalgia for what was, but recognition that what made Rocko matter still matters. The world is still chaotic and absurd. The best response is still to let your brain get twisted by the strangeness instead of fighting it. Tuesday, 25 July 2017. ARMS: The Joy-Con motion controls are the entire design. Swing to punch, tilt to move. You get maybe an evening out of the novelty before your arm gets tired. ARMS knows exactly what it is: a fighting game built around a gimmick, not despite one. The characters are visually clean, the art style reads well on the Switch’s screen, and matches move fast enough that the control limitations don’t feel like problems. It commits completely to its one idea. I played it for a while after launch. There’s something honest about a game that doesn’t pretend to be deeper than it actually is. But honesty and depth are different things. Strip away the novelty of the controls and you’re left with a fighting game that’s too simple for its own ambitions, controlled by a method too imprecise for what it’s asking you to do, held up only by the charm of the core concept. That’s enough for a party game. It’s not enough for anything else, and maybe ARMS made peace with that a long time ago. Monday, 24 July 2017. Costa Cordalis, Hostage: Some marketing executive in Germany decided the best way to sell creamy Greek yogurt was to imagine a Greek grandmother kidnapping a schlager singer as ransom for her stolen recipe. Costa Cordalis, legend of German pop-folk, held hostage by a sweet old woman over OIKOS. The logic is insane but somehow it works. The whole thing was built on this premise: Danone stole the recipe. The grandmother retaliated by stealing Costa Cordalis. It’s absurdist hostage negotiation through dairy products. And the punchline is that this is supposed to be a fair trade-off—losing one of Germany’s most beloved singers in exchange for thick, creamy yogurt. Not the worst deal, actually. Costa Cordalis deserves a moment here. This is a man who sang with genuine, unironic sincerity—the kind that makes TV schedules revolve around your appearance. No winking, no self-aware humor, just pure commitment to the bit. So there’s something perfect about him being collateral in a yogurt hostage dispute. His honest earnestness made him ideal prey for marketing like this. The yogurt itself is fine. Greek-style, thick, creamy, comes in flavors like strawberry and blueberry. But that’s not the point. Someone pitched this concept—a grandmother kidnaps Costa Cordalis over yogurt—to their team, it got approved, and they actually shot it. And it worked. Stupid enough to be brilliant, ridiculous enough to stick. There’s something very German about this—the willingness to commit fully to a completely absurd premise, to treat it with complete earnestness, no winking. Just: here is our yogurt, and this is why the grandmother took your favorite singer. Facts presented as facts. I don’t know if I’d buy the yogurt based on this ad, but I’d definitely remember it. Twenty years of blogging teaches you that memorable is half the battle. Even if what you’re remembering is basically a marketing department’s hostage crisis. Monday, 24 July 2017. Game Over: I heard too late. Superlevel, the German indie game blog, was shutting down. Eight and a half years, finished. It made me sad. For more reasons than one. There are only a handful of blogs from those early days still around. Nerdcore, maybe. UARR. Sara’s stuff, whatever shape it takes. And then Superlevel, where Fabu just kept swinging that refusal—committed, strange, somehow still relevant. But relentless rebellion and financial stability don’t mix. They never do. For the devoted readers, Superlevel was this constellation of subjective writing, experimental podcasts, weird mixtapes. For me, it was proof that you could run a blog on pure disdain—this arrogant, rooted, almost vicious “fuck all of you” philosophy—and actually matter. At least for a while. In the end it was always going to be money. The American indie media thing sort of works—ignore ads, convince a handful of people to back you on Patreon, hope it adds up. Europe doesn’t seem to work that way. Or maybe it does and you just have to prostitute yourself, the way this blog does. Money instead of dignity. Not a great motto, but it works. I want to thank Fabu for trying. For standing against the endless compromise, against everyone selling out, against the idea that you have to become the thing you hated just to survive. He didn’t win. But he tried. Superlevel tried more ideas in less time than almost anything I’ve seen. A new podcast every few weeks. The Diablo 3 key generator thing—joke or not—made entire classrooms of German teenagers lose their minds. The forum was home to people who hated the mainstream consensus, who thought differently, who wanted something weirder. That mattered. Now I feel like an asshole at a funeral, suddenly teary about someone I never made time for when they were alive. Too busy. Taking it for granted. Too caught up in my own shit to even say thank you. Now it’s gone and I’m the kind of person who shows up late. Fabu has a real job now at a real company with real money behind it. I still hope that in a few years he gets bored and tries again, brings everything he learned into something new, something that might actually work. If that’s even possible anymore. So long, Superlevel. May you find peace next to all the other internet things we killed through indifference. If you’re just discovering there was something wild and colorful in the German gaming world, the archive is probably still there. Go read it before it’s gone for good. This was the thing worth your time. It’s over now. That’s on us. Monday, 24 July 2017. When SoundCloud Almost Died: I found out SoundCloud was running out of money the way you find out about most things these days—through a news article you didn’t know you needed. Fifty days of cash left, maybe less. The company had just fired 173 people, about 40 percent of the staff. Alex Ljung, the founder, was apparently trying to sell the whole thing to whoever would take it, maybe Deezer, before the whole place collapsed. London and San Francisco offices were closed. Nothing felt inevitable anymore. It was surreal because SoundCloud was one of those platforms that seemed permanent in the way things you use often do. Not like Spotify, which had the money and structure. Just… there. I had music saved there. You’d click around at weird hours and find remixes nobody was paying attention to, demos from people uploading without much hope of an audience. There was something open about it, something that didn’t feel like a machine. The problem was how many artists actually depended on it. A woman I know who works in music said the reach you could get on SoundCloud didn’t exist on any comparable platform—the algorithm would surface your stuff to people who actually wanted to hear it. For a lot of musicians, it was the first place you put something to see if it meant anything. If it worked there, you had something to build from. I had to think about all the music I’d saved, the tracks that only lived there, the remixes that would just disappear if the platform died. The smart move was to back everything up to Bandcamp or somewhere else. Practical stuff. But there was something bleak about it—you were doing triage on your own archive because the company you’d trusted was rotting from the inside. It survived. Someone found a way to keep it going. But the fear already killed it for most people, and they stopped uploading. The platform didn’t die, but it never quite recovered what it had been. Thursday, 13 July 2017. Still Better Than The Walking Dead: The later seasons of Game of Thrones weren’t as good as the first ones. The writing got worse, the surprises stopped landing the way they used to, the whole thing became about spectacle instead of actual stakes. I made peace with it eventually. Shows fall apart all the time—most of them do if you give them long enough. At least it never became The Walking Dead. AMC took a genuinely unsettling show and just let it calcify into this shambling corpse that nobody wanted to watch but everyone kept watching anyway. Game of Thrones at least had the decency to stumble and fall instead of just groaning forward forever. When the new trailer dropped, I watched it more out of habit than expectation. The characters are scattered now, all doing their separate things. Sansa’s finally becoming something other than a pawn, which is the only plot thread that’s actually made sense in years. Cersei’s still consumed with revenge, which at least stays true to character. Arya’s gone so deep into her assassin fantasy that she doesn’t feel like a real person anymore. I’ll watch the new season when it airs. Too much time invested to quit now, and there’s always the slim chance they actually pull off an ending that works. Probably won’t happen, but you watch anyway. Thursday, 22 June 2017. Hirari’s Gospel: You see them everywhere in Harajuku if you’re looking—people who’ve just decided that fitting in is somebody else’s problem. They wear whatever they want: big boots, fluffy jackets in the summer heat, makeup that looks like it took actual tactical planning. It’s the most aggressively apathetic fashion you can pull off in a culture that’s literally built on conformity. Hirari Ikeda became the patron saint of all that refusal. She’s not just another street-style person—there’s something about the way she moves through Harajuku in those ridiculous boots, those fluffy layers, all that color, that makes photographers lose their minds. She was posting her tits on Instagram when everyone else was quietly documenting their lunch. By the time she shows up to a party, it’s guaranteed to turn legendary. I came to Tokyo wanting to understand what the actual pull was—why Japanese kids in school uniforms, drowning in social expectation, looked at Hirari and saw a way out. There are plenty of weirdly dressed people in Tokyo. But there’s something almost religious about how the youth have latched onto her. She’s the one thing their culture keeps telling them they can’t be: actually free. The thing about freedom in Japan is that it has to be a fashion statement. You can’t really challenge the social order with ideas or behavior the way you might elsewhere. But you can refuse to dress right. You can dye your hair, wear stupid boots, post your tits on the internet. It’s a narrow door, but it exists. Standing on those Harajuku streets watching her, I got it. What she’s actually offering isn’t style—it’s permission. Thursday, 22 June 2017. Gold and Gray: Everyone was there for the same reason—the perfect photograph, the one with sunlight, reflection, and the structure gleaming at its most photogenic. Gray afternoon didn’t cooperate. You could see the disappointment move through the crowds in waves. They’d come for the postcard and got a dull building in muted light instead. I didn’t have my phone ready, which freed me to actually look at how the thing was constructed. Three tiers getting progressively smaller, the gold plating angled to catch light from every possible direction. It’s not subtle design. It’s manipulative, in the best way. This is a Buddhist temple—built to represent impermanence and emptiness—and they covered it in enough gold to guarantee you’ll never feel peaceful looking at it. The contradiction sits right at the surface. Maybe that’s what interested me more than any reflection. Seeing how deliberately the discomfort was built in. As a designer, you recognize the intelligence of it. Everything here is calculated to hold your attention beyond the point where you want to look away. The gold coating isn’t decoration. It’s the whole structure saying, directly: you will keep looking. You will want the perfect version of this. You won’t get it. You’ll come back anyway. When the sun finally broke through the clouds, the gold became almost aggressive—too much reflection, too bright to look at directly. Everyone felt it. Even the tourists who hadn’t looked up from their phones glanced upward. Then the light moved on, the clouds came back, and it faded to something closer to dull again. That moment of impermanence—when the perfect light finally arrived and lasted barely long enough to matter—felt more genuinely Buddhist than anything else about the place. I left without ever getting the shot I was supposedly supposed to get, which felt right. Wednesday, 21 June 2017. What’s Real on Instagram: I found Dain Yoon’s Instagram and didn’t scroll past. The first image that caught me was her face splitting—not digitally, not in a filter, but in actual makeup. Three versions of her stacked vertically on her own cheekbones and forehead, rendered in such precise shadow work that you could feel the geometry of it. Everyone’s retouching themselves now. It’s not new, hasn’t been new for a while. Instagram is a catalog of half-truths—airbrushed skin, pulled-in waists, brightened eyes, all the invisible work that happens before the image exists. It’s easy to do it wrong too, easy to end up looking like someone else entirely. Young people especially, they’re living inside that machine, treating their own image like a design problem to solve with software. Dain Yoon, a South Korean makeup artist, works backwards. Instead of erasing what’s there, she adds to it. She takes her actual face and transforms it with pigment and shadow and precision technique. The illusions she creates—her face melting into the background, multiplying across her own features, disappearing into abstraction—are real things. No Photoshop. No digital intervention. You could theoretically stand next to her and see it. She got picked up by TV. The skill was obvious enough that it registered even in the noise. There’s something satisfying about watching someone do something real well. We’re drowning in fake-well-done; actually-good is harder to find than it should be. I don’t know if she started this as a statement against filters or if that’s just the thing people see in it now. Either way, there’s a kind of freedom in that approach. You’re not competing in a space where everyone has unlimited editing tools. You’re just showing up with your actual face and asking: what can I do with this? What can I make? It’s a strange choice, but it’s the interesting one. Wednesday, 21 June 2017. Your Real City: You’re building your mythology around döner at Kottbusser Tor, around the blur of Warschauer Straße, around the mythical pull of slipping into Berghain. Feed it to Instagram and the story feels true. There’s the shitty apartment you’re escaping soon, the unpaid internship you’ll outgrow, the whole narrative that you’re in the right place just enduring the wrong conditions—for now. Just give it time. You’ll make it. You’ll become the person who actually belongs here. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you hate döner. Maybe the nightlife exhausts you, maybe the whole self-invention machinery—proving yourself constantly, performing all the time—just doesn’t fit. Maybe you’d be happier in Hamburg or somewhere quiet that doesn’t demand proof of your worthiness. But you’d never know, because you’ve probably never asked yourself honestly. What city actually suits you versus what city you think you’re supposed to want—those are different questions. Most people never really ask themselves. They move, plant themselves, and tell themselves they belong because leaving feels like admitting they were wrong. Berlin’s full of them. So is every city. Wednesday, 21 June 2017. Bad Liar: She plays her dad in the video. Her mom. This hot blonde PE teacher she’s secretly into. The way Selena Gomez moves between all these characters—each one lying about something, hiding something—the video doesn’t make sense in any conventional music-video way. But that’s the point. I know the story you know about Selena. Disney princess, Bieber thing, manufactured pop star. And you’re not wrong about the system—it’s built to turn people into empty products. But something different happened to her. The weight of all that visibility at a planetary scale didn’t hollow her out. It did the opposite. So all these characters in the video are wanting or hiding, unable to say what they actually want. Her parents. Herself. The teacher. The title says it: you’re a bad liar. Everyone in the video is. She’s not interested in learning to hide better or pretending everything makes sense. She’s just showing you the mess—the wanting, the gap between who you’re supposed to be and who you actually are. It’s sweet and confusing and somehow queer, in a way that mainstream pop music usually isn’t brave enough to admit. That’s proof that Selena is deeper than the system that made her. Deeper than it wants her to be. Tuesday, 20 June 2017. Polly Norr’s Demons: Polly Norr paints women in the middle of their own wreckage—wanting and despairing and caught in whatever dark thing is happening inside their head that day. She doesn’t flinch from the sex. It’s crude and unguarded. But right next to it are the demons, the self-doubt, the feeling that you’re drowning. What’s striking about her work is that she doesn’t separate these things. The lust and the darkness are in the same painting, same colors. Most art chooses a side. Hers just shows both: the wanting and the damage at the same time, sometimes darkly funny, sometimes just bleak. And it never pretends anything gets solved. I keep looking at her paintings because they don’t try to make me feel anything in particular. Not aroused, not devastated, not inspired. They just show me what it looks like in there—the contradiction, the hunger, the demons that don’t leave. The person’s still living anyway. That’s it. No resolution, no moral, just the truth of how it is. There’s a confidence in work like that. An artist who trusts the truth enough to not explain it. Polly’s paintings have that. You look at them and you just see it—the mess, the wanting, the fact that you keep going anyway. That’s enough. Tuesday, 20 June 2017. Dead Music: Music died, and DJ Khaled’s “Wild Thoughts” is just what we’re pretending is alive instead. It’s not even a song, really—he grabbed a beat, looped it, threw a couple of notes on top, and then got some famous people to mumble at it. That’s the whole formula now. No songwriting, no craft, just assembly. But the video is where you see what’s actually happening. Rihanna basically stands there and lets her breasts do all the work while she barely bothers to move her lips. The less she actually sings, the more the frame pulls back to show her body. There’s something almost honest about how shameless it is. Somewhere along the way, the industry figured out that talent was optional. You just need someone attractive enough to point a camera at and not try too hard. Rihanna understood this before anyone else—she figured out you can show up, barely move, barely sing, and still get a hit as long as the frame is wide enough. There’s no gap anymore between the product and the marketing. They’re exactly the same thing. What kills me is how clear it all is now. The industry used to hide what it was doing. Now it’s all naked economics. Just bodies and noise. But I don’t think that honesty makes it better, just sadder somehow. This is what we’ve decided music is. Monday, 19 June 2017. The Letter: The internet used to feel lawless. You could pull whatever you wanted through Napster, LimeWire, eMule—entire seasons, full discographies, things that didn’t exist anywhere else. That’s gone. Torrent sites collapse. People drift to private trackers, Usenet, wherever. Even getting US Netflix from outside the country is getting harder. Which is why Movie4k and KinoX blow up. You type in what you want, click through garbage pop-ups, find a player that works, and you’re in. It feels safe. You’re not downloading, just streaming. That’s fine, right? No. The law doesn’t see it that way. The sites claim they’re legal, and for years there was real ambiguity in copyright law around temporary copies in your RAM versus actual downloads. That gray area was their shield. But the European Court of Justice shut it down. They ruled that distributing media players designed to stream obviously illegal content violates copyright. Doesn’t matter if the stream is temporary. What matters is whether a reasonable person would know they’re doing something wrong. And they would. The real problem isn’t the watching. It’s the tracking. These sites run ad networks and social trackers that identify you in ways an IP address never could. The operators work with lawyers. They have everything—what you watched, when, for how long. A letter arrives months later. Hundreds or thousands of euros to settle quietly, or they sue. And now you’re in court explaining why you streamed a TV show. I know people who’ve gotten these letters. The moment they open one, they understand how exposed they were. It would’ve been cheaper to buy it. Some people layer it all—VPN, Tor, Bitcoin, virtual machines, every paranoid measure. And you watch them do this and think: the money stopped mattering a long time ago. This is about something else now. Principle, maybe, or the thrill of getting what you’re not supposed to have. But principle doesn’t protect you when the letter comes. Neither does paranoia. All that effort to stay invisible, and none of it ever mattered. Monday, 19 June 2017. Everything Looks Like Sex: You start noticing it and you can’t stop. A banana in someone’s mouth becomes a joke. A pair of smooth stones catches your eye the wrong way. A gap between two columns at the station is suddenly an optical illusion of something else. The world becomes this constant parade of shapes that shouldn’t mean anything but somehow do. Once you start seeing it, it’s everywhere. I think it started young, the way these things do—the kind of humor kids make when they first discover that words and objects have more than one reading. A sentence can be phrased innocently but sounded filthy if you put the right pause in. A banana isn’t just a banana once someone’s eaten it a certain way. It becomes a mirror held up to what you’re thinking about. The joke works because it’s obvious and stupid and everyone knows exactly what you’re implying, but pretending not to is half the fun. The funny part is how automatic it becomes. You’re in a café, someone’s sucking on a lollipop, and instead of just seeing a lollipop you’re seeing… the joke. Your brain does this thing where it looks for the crude reading without asking permission. It’s like visual pareidolia but horny—the same way you see faces in clouds, except you’re seeing something else in everything else. A carrot. Champagne. Two fingers arranged a certain way. The geometry of it matters. The angle. The motion. There’s something almost innocent about it in a backward way. You’re not being weird or perverse—you’re just playing with shapes and language the same way you did when you were a kid making your parents uncomfortable at the dinner table. It’s a kind of visual literacy, knowing that there’s always a second reading available if you want it. Most people walk around not seeing it. You see it everywhere—strawberries, the neck of a guitar, the architecture of a building’s entrance, the way someone stretches. The world becomes one long double entendre. What it actually reveals is attention. You’re noticing what’s already there—the geometry of objects, the way bodies move, what happens when you look at ordinary things slightly sideways. Once you’ve learned to see the joke, you can’t unsee it. Someone points out a constellation in the stars and then you can’t stop seeing it, but at least you had a choice. This one just happens automatically. You walk through a grocery store and the produce section becomes a comedy nobody else is in on. I’m not sure what it says about you, the fact that you read it all this way. Maybe just that you’re paying attention, that you haven’t become numb to the world’s shapes. Or maybe it’s something else—a way of keeping things playful, of refusing to let surfaces be just surfaces. Either way, there’s a laugh in it, and that’s usually enough. Sunday, 18 June 2017. Instant Film: The last thing I want on a beach trip is to babysit my phone and worry about sand in the charging port. But I also don’t want to leave my good camera at home. So I’ve always been drawn to instant cameras—the kind where you press the shutter, the mechanism whirs, and thirty seconds later you’re holding an actual photograph. No screen, no editing, no culling through four hundred photos of the same sunset. Lomography’s Lomo’Instant Panama is built for exactly that. Wide-angle lens, multiple shooting modes, a set of lens attachments (fisheye, close-up, portrait), color gels to play with. The design is clean, portable, clearly thought through. It’s the kind of camera you actually want to carry instead of resent. There’s something about the ritual that matters more than the specs. You frame a shot and commit to it. You wait for the print. It forces intention instead of documentation—the opposite of how we photograph everything else now. The prints themselves are small, they age visibly, they exist as objects you can touch. No cloud backup, no infinite copies. What you shoot is what you have. I used to do film photography before digital made everyone a photographer. You’d come home from a trip with thirty or forty frames because film cost money, and somehow that constraint made each image feel weightier. Now people get back from vacation with thousands of pictures they’ll never look at. The Lomo splits the difference—instant film’s finality with the ease of modern design. You leave knowing you have prints, not just files. I probably won’t buy one. I’m old enough to have collected a dozen cameras that didn’t stick, and I know how this ends. But I respect that it exists, that someone still thinks instant film matters, that there’s design built around the premise that maybe documenting a vacation should feel different from the way we document everything else. Sunday, 18 June 2017. Collision: Aston Martin and Hogan made a sneaker for Fashion Week in London. Three thousand pairs, $545 each. The press release didn’t bother describing the actual shoe—just the brands and the numbers. That’s the entire product. Two names that have no reason to touch, colliding at five hundred dollars. Tuesday, 13 June 2017. I Do: Beatsteaks from Berlin are the kind of band where if you’ve seen them live, you know exactly what you’re getting. Arnim and the guitars and the bass, all that focused energy, hitting you right. It’s consistent. It’s why people keep showing up. The new album “Yours” is early next month and something’s shifted. “I Do” is the song that hit me first—it’s written as love or lust or guitars, or honestly all three at once. But what’s actually different is they’ve decided not to make every song sound the same thing. Each one gets to be its own. Arnim explained it like how mixtapes used to work—every song different, different volumes, different approaches, all these different moods living next to each other. You weren’t worried about continuity, just about whether it worked in that moment. That’s what they wanted the album to be. Not seamless. Not polished into matching sets. Just different things existing together. That’s a choice. A band this established could easily stay exactly as they are. But when they decide to let songs fracture away from each other, to risk the music not matching, something’s changed in what they want to sound like. I haven’t heard the full record yet. “I Do” is doing enough for me. Tuesday, 30 May 2017. Stüssy and Harumi Yamaguchi: Stüssy collaborated with Harumi Yamaguchi for their 2017 summer collection, and it was the kind of pairing that makes sense immediately. She’s a Tokyo-trained fine artist—Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku—whose work had been gaining attention well beyond typical design circles. Putting her illustrations on t-shirts felt natural rather than opportunistic. What interested me was how straightforward it all was. No irony, no winking about high art descending to fashion. Just good drawing on a quality shirt. The kind of work that signals someone spent actual time developing their craft, developing a visual point of view that reads instantly but doesn’t need to announce itself. That’s maybe what made it work. Both sides had their own credibility intact. Stüssy exists securely in streetwear culture; Yamaguchi exists securely as a visual artist with exhibitions and a body of work that gets taken seriously. When a collaboration happens between two things that each have their own weight, without either side needing to borrow cool from the other, something genuine emerges. No performance. Just the work itself. Tuesday, 30 May 2017. Moscow Mule: Every bartender in Berlin is ready to make you a Moscow Mule. Half of them actually know what they’re doing. The other half give you something watered down and flat with a cucumber slice, like that fixes it. The Moscow Mule showed up in America sometime in the 1940s and became the default drink for anyone wanting something that looks impressive without being complicated. It’s vodka, ginger beer, lime—that’s the whole thing. The cucumber is optional but everyone does it anyway. In Berlin you can’t avoid them. Some bars nail it. Some treat it like a chore. The frustrating part is how simple it is. Three ingredients. If you fuck that up, you weren’t paying attention. It’s not like you’re asking for anything ambitious or rare. You’re asking for the least demanding cocktail in the history of cocktails. Salt Point started selling Moscow Mules in cans. American vodka, fresh ginger, natural flavors—same formula every time. No bartender involved. No mood swings affecting whether your drink is any good. No flat ginger beer, no ice that tastes like freezer. There’s something appealing about that to me. Not because I hate bartenders—I don’t. But because sometimes you just want the thing to be right, without needing someone to care enough to get it there. Sometimes consistency matters more than showmanship. Tuesday, 30 May 2017. Why Games Ship Broken: I think back to playing Super Mario World or Zelda as a kid, and there was something about the basic fact that nothing broke. The game arrived on a cartridge, fully done. If a door didn’t open, that was the world telling you something. If a wall stopped you, that was design. There was no Day-1 patch. There was no version 1.1. What you had was what you got, forever. Now you buy Skyrim and there’s a patch waiting at startup. Invisible heads floating where faces should be. NPCs walking through walls like they’re ghosts. A quest objective just vanishes if you complete it in the wrong order. The game doesn’t know what to do, so it just stops. Sometimes you laugh at how absurd it is. Sometimes you just sit there wondering if you paid money for an unfinished product. The obvious answer is scope. Games got too big. Too many systems layered on top of each other. Fix one thing and break three others. Plus the business side: publishers want release dates. Ship it now, patch it later became the actual plan. It’s cheaper than delay. But I think there’s a stranger thing happening too. Modern games don’t seem to assume they’ll ever be truly finished. They’re designed around being fixed later. The developers know players will find things. The players know the game will improve. It’s almost collaborative, except the collaboration is you debugging someone else’s product for free. Some bugs are genuinely great—the physics engine deciding gravity works sideways, or a character sliding across the floor with their legs fused together. You remember those. You tell people about them. But the ones that lock you out of a questline or corrupt your save are just dread. They’re the opposite of charming. I don’t think it’s laziness. I think the systems got too complicated. Too many variables. Impossible deadlines meeting impossible scope. The bug stopped being an oversight and became a cost of production. Which isn’t the same as not caring, but it’s not too far off either. Monday, 29 May 2017. Still President: It still sounds wrong when I say it. Trump’s president. After everything—the scandals, the chaos, things that should’ve ended it—he’s still there. The people holding on live somewhere else. Everything reaches them as confirmation. You point at something and they see it differently, and inside their bubble both feel equally real. You can’t reach through that. I thought this would break eventually. That a lie this big, this exposed, eventually cracks under its own weight. But I don’t know anymore. Maybe this is how things are now—everyone in separate realities, none interested in the others. Maybe he wins again. Maybe it just goes on like this forever. And it still sounds wrong. Monday, 29 May 2017. Bench’s 90s: I saw the pictures from Bench’s 90s capsule collection and something about it stuck with me. Shot in a Berlin skatepark, all these track suits and color blocks, the whole streetstyle aesthetic that was supposed to be gone by now. The thing is, I didn’t grow up thinking the 90s were cool. I just lived through them, wearing what my parents bought me or what I could scrape together. But looking at these now, I get it. There’s a confidence in that era’s ugliness that I can’t stop thinking about. The logos didn’t hide. The colors didn’t compromise. Proportions weren’t worried about looking good—they were just there, occupying space, not asking permission. Everything these days is so carefully balanced, minimal and refined. The 90s just threw shit together and somehow it worked. The collection gets the details right, which surprised me. You could make a throwback like this into a joke or a costume, all exaggeration and winking. Instead, the track suits are almost restrained. The proportions are there—that 90s silhouette—but they’re cut in a way that you could actually wear them and not feel like you’re at a theme party. There’s shimmer in the fabric, color accents throughout. It could be a costume. It’s not. I think that’s what gets me. It’s not a caricature. Someone understood what actually made that style work, not just what it looked like. There’s a difference between copying the aesthetic and understanding the attitude. The 90s didn’t ask if it was good. It just was. Monday, 29 May 2017. Gorillaz Still Weird: Gorillaz came back in 2017 with Humanz, and I was probably too old to be this invested in a band that technically doesn’t exist. But the album had teeth—restless, overstuffed, guest spot after guest spot, like they were proving something to someone. They were touring again, and Cologne got the June gig at the Palladium. Deutsche Telekom streamed the whole thing in 360 degrees, which sounds like exactly the kind of marketing nonsense that would tank a band, but something about it worked. Gorillaz had always lived in that space between animation and reality, where cartoon logic and actual live performance blurred into the same thing. A 360-degree stream wasn’t gimmicky for them—it was just another honest expression of the fundamental strangeness that made them interesting in the first place. I don’t remember if I watched it live or if someone told me about it later. The memory is fuzzy in the way that unimportant things are, even when they matter to you. What stayed was simpler: they were still here, still making it weird, still refusing to be a normal band. That was enough. Monday, 29 May 2017. Dysnomia: I’d say I have no friends, but that’s not quite right—I have Eddy, Nils, Simon, and Budi. They work for Rocket Beans TV and they don’t know me, but I watch enough of their content that I’ve basically decided we’re friends. It’s a relationship that works fine as long as I don’t examine it too closely. The Pen & Paper sessions are the thing I always come back for. Hauke runs these tabletop games where the four of them get thrown into different scenarios—zombie apocalypses, Viking settlements, murder mysteries in an old house. There’s genuine improvisation happening in real time, genuine reactions, and the kind of chemistry that doesn’t come from a script. Watching people try not to get their characters killed while making everyone else laugh for hours has its own pull. Their new campaign is called Dysnomia and they’re in space. An old scientist, a pilot with a death wish, some Justin Bieber-looking asshole somehow on the crew, and an AI keeping score. Puzzles, enemies, the usual collision of incompetence and luck that makes these things work. It’s not trying to be anything important. Just four people playing a game together. Which is exactly why I can’t stop watching. Sunday, 28 May 2017. Game of Thrones Again: Game of Thrones hasn’t been good in years, but I watch the new season anyway. The early run had teeth—actual stakes, real surprise, writing that mattered. By season five or six you could feel it shift, the show becoming less a story and more a spectacle machine. It still beats The Walking Dead, which is a low bar. HBO put out a trailer. Daenerys in Westeros finally, Jon Snow braced for White Walkers, Arya doing her revenge thing. The same pieces on the same board, moved around for whatever endgame they’ve planned. I know how this ends. Not well. But I’ll watch anyway. There’s something about returning to a show you’ve stopped believing in. The rhythms are predictable by now—I know when they’ll kill someone off for emotion, know which dialogue will get quoted to death, know exactly how disappointed I’ll be by the time the final credits roll. I watch anyway because I’ve already invested years, because there’s some stubborn part of me that wants to see them pull it off, because there’s still nothing else quite like this on television. Thursday, 25 May 2017. Vinyl Factory, Soho: London parties are hit or miss. This Hunter thing at Vinyl Factory in Soho was better than most. Festival kickoff supposedly, but really just an excuse to get beautiful people in a room with cocktails and music. Everyone was in good spirits without being obnoxious—a real accomplishment for that crowd. The usual suspects showed up: designers, musicians, actors, models, the rotation you see at these things. Kit Harington looking content. Courtney Love being herself. Stella McCartney somewhere networking. Tom Daley. The kind of room where you recognize most faces and everyone’s aware of it, but polite enough not to perform the awareness too obviously. The Rabbit Hole DJ crew kept it loose with surprise guests coming through. Hunter apparently wanted it to feel like a festival. It didn’t, not really—festivals have a rawness you can’t fake in a Soho club—but I got the instinct. People talked, held their cocktails, gradually migrated to the dance floor. Nothing revolutionary, but it worked. What stayed with me was how it managed not to feel entirely hollow. Everyone knows they’re there because some brand decided to throw a party, that this is advertising, and yet it still worked. London’s nightlife still has the ability to make that feel almost inevitable, or at least acceptable. Maybe after enough cycles of this, soullessness and genuine fun start to look the same. Thursday, 25 May 2017. Office Hits: You sit at your desk for eight hours pretending to look busy, hitting refresh on your email, telling yourself the day will end eventually even though it absolutely won’t. The printer’s jammed again. Your boss asked for something due yesterday at 4:47 PM today. Someone left their lunch in the fridge and it’s been there for three weeks. Circus HalliGalli—a German comedy show—did a whole thing called Office Hits, which is basically sketches about every specific nightmare of office work. The hosts are these guys named Joko and Klaas who throw absurd music and comedy bits at you for an hour, and one of the main sketches has Palina Rojinski doing a full Rihanna impersonation while she’s mentally destroying her incompetent boss. The sketch is simple: she’s just running through every idiotic thing a manager does while channeling pure Rihanna attitude. There’s other stuff too. “Problems at the Office Printer.” “Meeting Baby One More Time”—which is exactly what it sounds like. “Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb” for those days where your brain is just completely offline. It’s all obvious material, but that’s kind of the point. It’s not trying to be clever. It’s just naming the specific hell of your actual job. The weird thing about office comedy is that it only works if you’ve lived through it. You need the printer trauma. You need the meetings where nothing happens but everyone acts like something might. You need the boss who doesn’t understand their own industry but definitely understands micromanaging. Once you’ve got all that, the sketches just feel like proof you’re not insane. I don’t know if it actually helps you get through your day, listening to comedy about how much your day sucks while you’re still at your day. Maybe it just makes you more aware of the time passing. Maybe it’s just permission to hate it for a few minutes. But there’s something satisfying about someone else saying it out loud, saying all the things you’re not allowed to say to your actual boss. Wednesday, 24 May 2017. Ahoj-Brause Went Legitimate: Ahoj-Brause was the German fizzy concentrate you made yourself—tablets or powder you’d dump in water, watch it fizz and dissolve into something sticky and sweet. Orange, raspberry, lemon, or woodruff, though what woodruff was supposed to taste like nobody ever figured out. The flavor wasn’t the point. The point was that you made it. You controlled the ratios, made it cloying or barely flavored, whatever you wanted. The real magic was mixing it with vodka. A splash of Ahoj in a lot of vodka, and you had something that didn’t taste like alcohol at all, which was perfect for teenagers trying not to feel what they were drinking. Everyone knew the trick. Every kid probably did it at least once. Now Columbus Drinks has decided Ahoj-Brause needs to exist as a finished product. Cans. Orange, raspberry, lemon, woodruff. Ready to drink, already done. There’s logic to it: reduce friction, increase convenience, monetize nostalgia. But something about it feels off. The appeal of Ahoj-Brause was that you made it. It was a small act of control in your teenage chaos. Buying it premixed is just consuming. It’s the difference between cooking with your grandmother and reheating something she made. I haven’t spotted one yet, but they’re out there—probably discount bins at Rewe next to the flavored water nobody asked for. There’s a specific irony in watching something from your childhood get absorbed into the machine, packaged and legitimized and sold back to you as a product. Everything ends up here eventually. Everything gets its corporate version. Still, if someone handed me a can, I’d drink it. I’m curious if it tastes like actual memory or nothing at all. Wednesday, 24 May 2017. Mockery Doesn’t Touch It: There’s this German YouTuber—Bibi, I think—who made a song called “How It Is” that was apparently terrible enough that everyone from the internet to German TV comedians took shots at it. Carolin Kebekus did a parody on public television. The whole thing became this whole thing. But here’s what gets me: none of it matters to her. Every parody, every cruel joke, every person dunking on the song—it all just keeps her relevant and keeps the money coming. That’s the thing about internet fame that took me twenty years of watching this stuff to really feel in my bones. Criticism doesn’t touch it. Mockery doesn’t touch it. You can be the worst, and you’re still getting paid for being watched. I kept reading these sarcastic takes wondering if she goes home and cries about it, if she regrets uploading the song, if she questions her whole existence on YouTube. And maybe she does. But probably not when she’s counting the engagement metrics and the sponsorship money. The cruel irony is that the crummier you are, the more people pay attention, and attention is literally the currency. It’s a weird thing to resent—that critics and comedians and people trying to be clever about why something is bad are basically just giving it more life. Every parody is free publicity. Every cruel joke is a signal boost. So Kebekus mocking it on German TV was just another advertisement, really. I don’t know this person or her work beyond the reference. Maybe the song was actually good and everyone was just being mean. Maybe it was as bad as they say. Doesn’t change the equation. The system is rigged in a way that failing publicly is still succeeding financially, and that’s something I’ve watched happen over and over and still don’t quite know how to feel about it. Wednesday, 24 May 2017. Rina Hashimoto: People always ask me: if you love Japan so much, shouldn’t your type be Japanese women? I’d always have to think about it. Selena Gomez? No. Scarlett Johansson, who’s been there? No. Kate Upton? No. None of them. So I lived with this contradiction—loving Japan like it was my favorite place on earth while not actually being attracted to Japanese women. Maybe I’m just a hentai otaku. Someone who likes the idea of an East Asian woman way more than actual people. It made sense. It explained everything. Then I saw her on one of those girls’ Tumblrs: Rina Hashimoto. Sweet face, dark skin, black eyes, that summer-bleached hair. I was completely fucked. Couldn’t stop saying her name. Rina Hashimoto. Rina Hashimoto. Rina Hashimoto. And it was like flipping a switch—I was in love with Japan again, but this time it felt real. Wednesday, 24 May 2017. The City Rebuilt: In 1923, Tokyo stopped being Tokyo. The Great Kanto earthquake came through in September and destroyed the city so completely that most of it was just rubble. Two million people, most of them living in wooden buildings, and suddenly the buildings were gone. A hundred thousand dead. A million and a half homeless. That’s not a tragedy that happened to the city—that’s the city ceasing to exist. But then it came back. A few decades later, Tokyo was Tokyo again, rebuilt from scratch into something different. Not the same city, because you can’t rebuild a city exactly the way it was. You build the next version of it. The people who lived in the wooden buildings are gone, and their Tokyo is gone, and we call the new thing by the same name. This kept happening. Tokyo rebuilt after the earthquake, and then it rebuilt again during the war, and kept rebuilding each time something knocked it down. The city sits on fault lines, so the ground keeps reminding it that nothing is permanent. You can look at modern Tokyo—all the neon and glass and hypermodernity—and underneath it is the memory of complete erasure. Not old memory. Recent memory. The grandparents of people alive now experienced that destruction. There’s something about cities that makes them keep going even when they’ve had every reason to stop. Tokyo became Tokyo again after being erased, and it stayed Tokyo, and it grew into something bigger, and it sits there waiting for the next earthquake that will probably happen in a few decades. That’s just what cities do. They disappear and come back as themselves. I think about this when I think about making things—about design, about building something you know will probably be destroyed or changed or have to be rebuilt. You build anyway. That’s what people do. That’s what cities do. They collapse and get rebuilt because staying fallen isn’t an option. Tuesday, 23 May 2017. Die Urbane: Berlin started a hip-hop political party in 2017. Die Urbane. The founders took the values from seventies hip-hop culture—representation, participation, identity, power critique—and thought these should be political values. Not as irony. They were serious. It makes a kind of sense. Hip-hop came out of communities that the mainstream political system had written off entirely. Those communities figured something out about power and voice that parliament never did. So why not? Because the moment you bureaucratize a radical culture, you kill it. Party applications. Parliamentary rules. Bureaucratic machinery. The thing that gave those values their actual power—the fact that they came from outside, pushing against the system—dies the moment you’re inside. I don’t know if they understood this. Maybe they did. Maybe the whole gesture was just to make the existing parties realize what they’d been missing: that a street culture had thought harder about representation and participation than anyone in government. Tuesday, 23 May 2017. What’s Left Over: Beige and burgundy keep appearing in what I’m seeing lately. Not because anyone decided they’re trendy, but because they’re the colors that actually work—the colors people reach for when they stop caring about impressing anyone. Beige is honest. Burgundy is dark enough to hide the world, but not so dark you look like you’re mourning something. I’ve gotten more interested in minimalism as I get older, not as a lifestyle philosophy but as a way of thinking about what design actually is. When you strip everything away—all the gesture, all the narrative, all the stuff meant to distract—what’s left has to be good. The cuts have to be right. The fabric has to feel right. You can’t hide behind colors or decoration anymore. The stuff I’ve been looking at lately—basic crews, hoodies, sweats, the kind of pieces that are almost boring—feels like it gets this. No narrative, just the work. Good material, clean lines, and colors that will wear well for years. It’s not exciting. It’s not supposed to be. It just works. There’s a confidence in that kind of restraint. You pick these colors, you pick these shapes, and you trust that anyone paying attention will understand what you’re doing. Most people won’t. That’s fine. It’s not for them. Tuesday, 23 May 2017. Kamehameha: A festival named after a Dragon Ball attack—that’s the kind of branding decision that works if you commit completely, and whoever booked Kamehameha committed. Offenburg, on an old runway, every summer. By 2017 it was their fourth year, which means it had crossed over from novelty to tradition without ever losing the absurdity. The lineup that year mixed electronic and hip-hop without apologizing for it—Chris Liebing and Ellen Alien running alongside Cro and Maeckes, with everything else filling the gaps between. Felix Jaehn, the KMN Gang, Pan-Pot, Bausa, the Adana Twins. The kind of diverse booking that feels intentional, like someone understood that the same people move between genres at festivals, that electronic and hip-hop crowds aren’t actually that different. You’re high in a field on a Saturday night and the music is just music. I remember the name more than most of the artists, which says something about how branding works. The festival could have been called a hundred generic things—“Summer Sound” or “Offenburg Music” or any of the neutral names that festivals hide behind. Instead they went with a cartoon attack, and that single decision made the whole thing feel like it was made by people who actually cared, who weren’t just booking acts and selling tickets. The name carried confidence. Festivals work like that—the image you get from a lineup in May is different from the experience in June, which is different again from the memory a year later. I never made it to that Kamehameha, but I remember thinking it sounded like something worth experiencing. That anticipation is sometimes better than the actual event anyway. Monday, 22 May 2017. Crying in the Club: The title said everything: ’Crying In The Club.’ Camila Cabello was out of Fifth Harmony, officially solo, and Sia and Benny Blanco had handed her a song that sounded like every confident-woman-in-pop-music moment of the last five years. She’d been leaving the group for months before it was official—features with Shawn Mendes and others, solo appearances, the slow drift away. When the split finally happened at the end of 2016, it kicked up drama online the way these things do. But I was mostly curious about what she’d actually sound like on her own. The song isn’t anything special, just competent pop with a strong voice over it. But that was always the point. Camila was the voice that stopped you when Fifth Harmony came on. The real question was whether she was enough on her own. Monday, 22 May 2017. How She Disappears: Zara Larsson’s a strange figure because she doesn’t perform like one—no announcement, just shows up with an opinion and a voice that knows how to use itself. Confident without the gesture. Credible without the attitude. Both at once, which most artists can’t manage. “Don’t Let Me Be Yours” is a summer song in the easiest way possible, which means it’s actually hard. Nothing wasted. She doesn’t oversell a moment, doesn’t make you watch her work. Just slides in, does the thing, leaves it alone. What’s weird is how much technique that requires. A voice that knows how to disappear into a song. Most singers want you watching them sing. She wants you listening to the song. By the time “So Good” came out, that was already her whole thing: sounds effortless, actually precise. I don’t know what the long game is for her. Doesn’t matter much. Right now she makes songs that work without trying to make you know they’re working, and that’s harder than it looks. Monday, 22 May 2017. Traumfrau: I was obsessed with Nina Bott when I was younger. Completely, unambiguously obsessed. She was on this German soap called “Alles was zählt,” and I watched it for years, not because the show was good, but because she was in it. When she moved to other projects, I followed. Terrible TV movies, low-budget productions that aired at weird times on channels I’d never normally watch—”Ein unverbesserlicher Dickkopf,” “Die Sturmflut,” some forgettable thing where she seduced a guy with a serious problem. None of it mattered. If she was in it, I watched it. I was that person for a while. The kind of guy with a completely unreasonable type, absolutely shameless about the pursuit. Pure horniness. Pure devotion to a face on a screen you’ll never touch. She’s done Playboy a few times now. Got work done on her chest at some point—it felt like a betrayal when that happened, the way these things do, because the fantasy is always about a specific person, not perfect anatomy. But she’s Nina Bott. She can do whatever she wants. She always could. That was never really the point anyway. Thursday, 11 May 2017. Why Snapchat Died: Every app has an expiration date, and it usually hits when your parents figure it out. Snapchat had maybe three good years before the generation that actually mattered moved on. Nothing technical killed it. Just the slow realization that everyone’s mom knew how to use it. I watched influencers jump to Instagram Stories around that tipping point. A study from Mediakix tracked twelve of them over thirty days and found eight posting more to Stories than Snapchat. It wasn’t even a conscious choice—they just drifted toward wherever the young people had already moved, and the rest of us followed. Nothing changed about Snapchat itself. The disappearing messages, the filters, all the mechanics still worked. But exclusivity was always the only real feature it had. The moment you lose that to mainstream adoption, the entire appeal evaporates. Zuckerberg understood this better than anyone who actually built something new. Copy the feature, drop it into a platform where everybody already is, and wait for the exodus. The weird part is how predictable it all is. You build something exclusive. It gets discovered. Your parents join. It’s dead. Someone else copies the mechanic and wins by doing less. The technology barely matters. It’s all about who else is there and whether they understand it yet. Thursday, 11 May 2017. Osaka in Squares: You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. Phone out, framing the shot before you even look at what’s actually in front of you. I did a whole trip to Osaka this way—Shinsaibashi district, the neon signs, the crowded shopping streets, whatever looked good through the screen first. Osaka’s the third-largest city in Japan, a trading hub, expensive as hell to live in, and completely indifferent to whether you’re there to experience it or just to prove you were. The thing about Instagram travel is that you end up seeing the place through a very specific lens, literally and figuratively. You’re hunting for angles, waiting for the light to hit right, positioning yourself in front of things that photograph well. The vintage signs photograph well. The crowds photograph well. A temple gate photographs well. You move through the city like you’re curating a museum of yourself. But somewhere between the fifteenth selfie and the thirtieth shot of the same street from slightly different positions, something shifts. You stop performing and actually look. You notice the way people move around you without caring that you’re there. You taste something you bought because it looked interesting, not because it would look good. You find yourself somewhere that isn’t photogenic at all—just a narrow alley, some old shopfronts, actual life happening—and you don’t take a picture. Osaka isn’t interested in your documentation of it. The city’s been a commercial center for centuries, moving money and goods and people through its streets long before Instagram existed. It doesn’t need your validation. And maybe that’s what I actually needed to learn from going there: that the experience and the proof of the experience are two different things, and sometimes they’re in direct conflict with each other. Thursday, 11 May 2017. Melon Soda: “Melon Soda” hits you with this propulsive, gear-shifting architecture that shouldn’t work as a pop song but does. Tricot, the math-rock trio from Kyoto, has always built their tracks with this relentless intelligence—sudden time shifts, rhythms that feel locked into place until they splinter into something else. But “Melon Soda” is different. It’s the most immediate thing they’ve done, all guitar shimmer and rhythm that feels simple until you’re three listens in and still discovering new angles. I found them circling the edges of various playlists when I was hunting for something between the obvious stuff—not prog, not quite pop, but intelligent without feeling bloated. J-rock bands don’t apologize for being complicated, and Tricot doesn’t either. They’re just three people making sharp, strange music that feels like it could fall apart any second but never does. The rhythm section has this telepathic quality, the guitar work constant invention, lines crossing over themselves like someone thinking out loud in real time. They’ve been working since 2009, releasing on labels that people actually respect. By the time “Melon Soda” showed up, they weren’t new to anyone paying attention, but they might as well have been to me. I put them on when I need something that won’t let me stop thinking—not background music, not something you half-listen to. Either you follow the structures and the tempo changes and the moments where everything locks into something beautiful and discordant, or you switch away. I don’t blame people for switching. The ones who stick with it aren’t listening to anything simple. Wednesday, 10 May 2017. Ferropolis: You pack your backpack, buy your rations of canned food, and tell your friends you’re taking a break from the world for three days. The Melt Festival in Ferropolis does something to you—night becomes day, beats become religion, and you end up friends with people you met soaked in dust at 4 AM. The lineups they pull together feel almost unfair. This year it’s M.I.A., Bilderbuch, Die Antwoord, Glass Animals, Bonobo, Modeselektor, Dixon, Phoenix, The Kills, Ellen Allien, Kate Tempest, Warpaint, and dozens more. It’s the kind of bill where you genuinely can’t see everything you want to see, where conflicts actually hurt when you have to choose. Three days of that specific tension. There’s something about Ferropolis that stays with you. Maybe it’s the setting, maybe it’s the people who came for the right reasons, maybe it’s just the permission to care completely about what you care about without the usual static. You show up as one person and leave as something slightly different. Tuesday, 2 May 2017. Cherry Blossoms: Spring gets everyone reaching for a camera. The light improves, everything blooms at once, and you’ve got maybe three weeks to document it before the blossoms scatter. It’s ancient at this point—couples in cherry trees, families standing still while someone figures out the exposure, strangers asking each other to take their picture. Grant Spanier photographed his girlfriend Iona Catherine Small in those blossoms. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d see a thousand times online, which is fine—most are perfectly nice. But his work catches something real. She’s looking at him, he’s clearly present, and there’s no performance in it. He talked about how he doesn’t photograph her just because she’s beautiful, but because they’re intimate, and that shift shows immediately. The camera reads it like something true moving through the frame. That’s what separates a documented moment from an actual photograph. Real presence. You can’t fake it. The photographs that stick with you are made by people who were actually there, paying attention to the person in front of them rather than composing for some imagined viewer. Spring makes you aware of this more acutely somehow. Everything’s transient, everything visible. The light forgives nothing. Tuesday, 2 May 2017. Selfie Soaps: RTL II decided it needed to own the youth market. The thinking was simple: kids live on YouTube and Instagram, so let’s make TV shows out of selfies. “Berlyn.” “Mjunik.” “dailyCGN.” Just people filming themselves on their phones for a couple minutes, which is somehow supposed to be different from actual YouTube people doing exactly that except these had corporate backing and the unmistakable stench of desperation. The weird part was how quickly nobody wanted this. Even fans of “Berlin – Tag & Nacht”—a show so relentlessly stupid it should carry a warning label—couldn’t stomach it. Two of the three are already cancelled. The digital chief who championed it is gone. The third one’s probably dead too, just hasn’t admitted it yet. There’s something sad about watching a TV network miss the entire point this completely. They saw the format and thought the format was the thing. Looked at YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and didn’t understand what was actually happening. Thought a phone camera was the secret, that you could replicate youth culture by just appending aesthetics to a corporate product. The gap between what they thought and what was true is the whole story. You can’t copy the internet by mimicking its surface. The format was never what made it work. It was always about people who had something to say, who did it because they wanted to, not because a focus group said teenagers like phones. The energy has to be real, and a corporation can’t fake that no matter how many selfies they film. Tuesday, 2 May 2017. Konichiwa: I keep coming back to “Konichiwa.” It’s a ridiculous title for a single—Gerard just straight up went with it—and the track is wound so tight you almost can’t tell what’s happening until the third or fourth listen. By which point you’re already committed. He’s from Vienna, part of a scene you don’t know about unless you’re digging. Over the last decade he’s released increasingly strange, increasingly precise hip-hop, mostly through Futuresfuture, which is now his own label. Before this single there was “Blausicht” and “Neue Welt”—both actually charted, which is impressive given how experimental they are. The tours that followed sold out across Germany and Austria. He became one of those artists who’s quietly foundational to an entire underground scene. The production is the signature: beats assembled from pieces that shouldn’t cohere but do, vocals placed in ways that feel accidental even when they’re precise. The writing is all adolescence and observation—the weight of living in something moving too fast to think about. Just the texture of being aware of how little any of it matters while still showing up anyway. What I appreciate is the refusal to perform. He doesn’t sound like anything else and doesn’t apologize for it. He just calls his own sound “Gerard Musik” like it’s obvious. That confidence is rare. Most people spend years trying to sound like something else before they realize they don’t have to. The album “AAA” is coming soon on his own label. I’m curious what happens next—not because I expect anything revolutionary, he’s never chased that. Just interested in what he does when nobody’s watching, when the only pressure is whatever he puts on himself. Saturday, 22 April 2017. DaddyOFive: When DaddyOFive was happening, it was just one of those YouTube things you’d stumble into. This channel where a guy and his wife filmed themselves screwing with their kids—destroying their toys, making them fight, hitting them. Called it pranks. The algorithm was pushing it, people were watching, nobody was stopping it. The oldest kid Cody was in most of the videos. You could watch him break a little more in each one. He didn’t understand why his parents were doing this, and I don’t think the parents understood either, not really. They just knew it was working. It took Philip DeFranco and a few others pointing out that it was actually abuse before anyone cared. Once they said something, everyone piled on. Of course it was disgusting. Of course it was wrong. But it had been sitting there the whole time, getting views and ad revenue, and nobody’s algorithm had flagged it as a problem. The casual math is what stuck with me. Pain equals engagement equals money. YouTube doesn’t care what the formula is, just that it works. The platform created a space where exploiting your own kids made economic sense. And for a while, that was enough. I don’t know where the channel ended up. Probably deleted or demonetized or moved to wherever creators go when things get too hot. But those videos exist somewhere. Those kids are living with that. At some point Cody’s going to google his own childhood and find it all quantified and ranked. Wednesday, 19 April 2017. A Year Without Razors: Morgan Mikenas stopped shaving for a year and posted about it. The backlash came fast—vicious comments, vomit emojis, sexual threats dressed as criticism. What bothered me most was watching other women pile on, women so locked into the hairless standard they couldn’t tolerate someone refusing it. They’d swallowed the whole thing so completely they became the enforcers themselves. It’s strange how much effort society puts into making body hair on women seem disgusting—not unattractive or a cultural preference, but genuinely, viscerally disgusting. The message starts young and it’s everywhere: your legs, your underarms, everything below your neck has to disappear. It’s an enormous infrastructure of shame built around something completely natural, something that grows on half the population without any of this baggage in most contexts. You notice the power of the rule when someone breaks it. Morgan’s year of unshaven legs genuinely rattled people. The revulsion was real, not performed. I don’t know what she was trying to prove or if she proved anything. But it’s worth noticing that a woman choosing not to shave is still radical enough to trigger that kind of response. Still forbidden enough to matter. That tells you something about how completely this thing has been internalized, what everyone’s supposed to believe about her body. Wednesday, 19 April 2017. Pool Party Gravity: Virgil Abloh was DJing, which tells you everything about the event’s target audience. A pool somewhere in the desert, drinks at festival prices, everyone’s carefully constructed version of looking like they hadn’t tried. The Levi’s party—another branded gathering where the actual clothes are almost secondary to the real product: the image of beautiful people in the right place at the right time. These scenes follow a formula now. I’ve watched them accumulate long enough that the details blur together—different models, different celebrities, the same scene playing out. What strikes me isn’t the glamour but the visible labor underneath it. Everyone at these parties carries a low-level awareness that they’re inside a frame, that they’re being consumed. Casual requires enormous effort when everyone’s watching. A pool felt cold. The drinks tasted like nothing. The music was fine. But the image mattered, and everyone understood that while it was happening. There’s something almost honest about it—this unspoken agreement we’ve made with the aesthetic world: be beautiful and aware, and in exchange, you get this moment. It’s ritual dressed as spontaneity. Most of the time I don’t know what to think about it. Sometimes it seems sad. Sometimes, weirdly, noble. But I keep looking, same as everyone else. Wednesday, 19 April 2017. Disappearing Into New York: There’s something about New York that makes you think you can disappear into it and become someone else. Leave everyone who knows you, step off a bus, and suddenly you’re nobody. You get to decide who you are. Brooklyn especially sells this. You walk around and see people doing it—working, dancing, kissing someone, drinking on a roof. They look like they’re actually living the lives they planned. Maybe they are. The hard part is that you’ll probably never meet those people. You’ll live five minutes from them and never cross paths. Your story and theirs exist in the same neighborhood and never touch. But that’s part of the dream too, somehow. Everyone around you is living vividly, and you’ll never know them. It’s lonely and thrilling. I don’t know if it actually works the way people think it does. The leaving is easy. The becoming is harder. But people keep trying anyway, and there’s something honest about that. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re just going. Tuesday, 18 April 2017. Sxtn’s Back: There’s this moment in SXTN’s new track where Juju says “Du bist Haustier, ich bin Raubier”—you’re a pet, I’m a predator—while smoking and drinking champagne like she’s just stating facts. That’s the whole vibe of the song, and the whole vibe of them. They’re a Berlin hip-hop duo. Juju came up around Freundeskreis, and Nura had already been through other crews. What matters is that they don’t sound like they’re trying to prove anything. They rap about their lives, the moment-to-moment chaos of it, the parts that don’t quite make sense but feel absolutely true. Their videos are actually well-made, which shouldn’t need saying but apparently does. You can feel the production budget and they know how to spend it. But it never feels like the videos are doing the work—they’re just the frame while Juju and Nura do the actual thing. What gets me about SXTN is how much of rap is still performance. Building a persona, hitting the expected notes, earning credibility through moves that look right, feel right, sound right. They skip all of it. They just exist, and it makes everything else sound thin by comparison. Tuesday, 18 April 2017. Ronin: Superstudio Hamburg, Friday night, a hundred people in black looking at the NMD_CS2. Adidas was calling it the Ronin Pack—the latest in the City Sock line, a shoe with no excess. Minimal geometry, all black or near-black, restraint that only works when you know what you’re doing. The exhibition was called “Sowohl als auch”—both/and. Not a runway. Installations, a Swedish singer, a design duo in the background. The boundary between commerce and culture deliberately removed, which is just how you launch something serious now. The NMD’s DNA is modular, functional. It looks engineered rather than seduced. The Ronin Pack embraces that. Nothing decorative. Just proportion and material and the decision to refuse ornament. It reads clean. They said it’s for everyone—men and women both. The shoe doesn’t know the difference. Leather is leather. Design solves the same problems across the board. Walking home I kept thinking about what it takes to move a sneaker now. You can’t just make something beautiful. You have to compose the whole apparatus around it—the gallery, the lineage, the philosophy, the democratic gesture. It works about half the time. This time it landed. Tuesday, 18 April 2017. Rihanna the Designer: Rihanna was in Berlin last week for her PUMA collection launch. She was actually there for it—not just showing up, but there because she designed the thing. Music made her famous, but design is her real work now. She shifted everything over to it, and the collection shows. Clean, purposeful, no wasted effort. Just clothes that function, made by someone who understands what actually matters—proportion, material, how things sit on a body. That’s her job now. That’s why she flew to Berlin. Tuesday, 18 April 2017. Wearing Gibberish: I spent a lot of time looking at t-shirts in Tokyo. Not because I was looking for t-shirts, but because once you start noticing the English printed on them, you can’t stop. And almost none of it means anything. Not in a broken English way—fully incoherent. Power. Beagle. Wonderdrug. Just words arranged like they were supposed to make sense. The kids wearing them had no idea what they said. They didn’t care. English had this imported shimmer to it, something that read as cool and international whether or not it translated to anything real. The meaning wasn’t the point. The point was the sound of it, the visual weight of foreign words. A Japanese TV show tested this exact thing, intercepting teenagers in Harajuku and asking them to explain their own clothes. Blank looks. Bad guesses. A lot of “I dunno, it just looked cool.” And genuinely, no one seemed bothered by this. You don’t wear English for definition in Tokyo. You wear it because it looks right. Wednesday, 12 April 2017. The Baseline: For a while I thought YouTube would figure itself out. Everyone kept saying I didn’t understand the appeal, that I was being unfair to creators like ApeCrime, Bibi, Sami Slimani. They’d explain about authenticity, connection, how this is where the culture actually is now. And I thought: okay, maybe I’m just skeptical and out of touch. I can wait a couple of years. Let the kids get bored. Let the algorithm shift. Something will break the cycle. But nothing broke. The same channels stayed on top. The pranks stayed obviously fake, the product placements stayed shameless, and the young audience just kept watching, thinking it was real, thinking it was authentic. Not because they’re dumb. Because they’ve literally never known anything else. This is what entertainment looks like to them. This is the standard. I figured that out a while back, and it actually scared me. There’s no fixing that. You can’t teach someone they want better when better is just an abstract concept to them. An entire generation is going to grow up thinking that a certain kind of low-effort grift disguised as spontaneous real-ness is just… what art is. What connection is. What you aspire to. My friends still find it funny—the ones my age, anyway, the ones who still wear Air Max and think this stuff is the future. And now they’re raising kids who are going to be even deeper in it, who won’t even have a memory of something different. Who won’t know what they’re missing. So I stopped waiting for YouTube to correct itself. There’s nothing to correct anymore. It’s just the baseline now. And that genuinely unsettles me. Wednesday, 12 April 2017. Cam Girlz: I watched Cam Girlz, which follows Lily Madison, Amelia Twist, Lana Rose—young women streaming naked on MyGirlFund and sites like it. Some are broke, some just sick of worse work. They’re comfortable with their bodies. Society imagines it should be scandalous. Nobody actually cares. The filmmakers follow them through their nights. You watch them work, manage clients, decide what to show and what to keep back. There’s no moral dimension here—no exploitation narrative, no rescue fantasy, just labor. Labor that happens to involve being naked, which is clarifying in a strange way. What gets me is how utterly normalized this has become. Ten years ago people would have gasped. Now it’s just one option on the menu for turning attention into money. Easier than waiting tables. Less humiliating than calling your parents. Some of the girls frame it as feminist reclamation, ownership of their bodies and their work. I understand that framing. What I watched, though, was people doing a job they’re good at and getting paid for it. The documentary seems uncertain what to say about it. It keeps gesturing toward statements about feminism or economic desperation but never quite lands anywhere. Which might be the only honest approach—don’t mythologize it, don’t save these women, don’t turn their lives into your argument. Just show the work. Wednesday, 12 April 2017. Battle Royale: I first heard about Battle Royale in the early 2000s—Tarantino’s favorite film, which was reason enough to care. The premise: a class of high school students wakes on an island with explosive collars, told that one of them survives. That’s the whole setup. I downloaded it on dial-up, waiting through the modem all day for the file to come through. Watching it hit like something necessary. The characters—Noriko, Mitsuko, Kazuo—became obsessions. For years I kept going back to it, that particular way where you can’t explain what you’re chasing but you can’t stop. Kinji Fukasaku made it look like chaos and precision at once. It should be exploitation; instead it’s almost tender. The violence lands because you’re watching actual people, not players in a game but teenagers being themselves before the horror starts. The film spent forever stuck in distribution—censored, delayed, unavailable depending on where you were. Seeing it finally hit uncut feels strange now. I’m not the person who downloaded that bootleg; the obsession has settled into something quieter, the kind of thing that doesn’t need defending anymore. It just sticks. Monday, 3 April 2017. Personal Shopper: After Twilight, most actors just vanish or keep making the same movie. Kristen Stewart picked a different route—Olivier Assayas, Personal Shopper, Paris. French indie about grief and displacement, with nudity that no one’s asking for but which Stewart owns completely. I watched it like everyone else who’d spent years in Twilight fandom, which means I was partly there because of the nudity and partly because I was genuinely curious if she could act. The answer turned out to be yes, completely, in a way that Twilight never let you see. What got to me wasn’t her body but her presence—small, lost, genuinely unmoored in Paris even though that’s supposed to be her home. She’s watching all the time. Never fully present. It’s the opposite of the Bella thing, which was kind of the whole point of the exercise. Assayas doesn’t make a spectacle of the nudity. It’s just there, matter-of-fact, part of being alive. The film is cold and European and doesn’t give you easy feelings. You finish it and you don’t feel better, you just feel like you’ve spent time with someone who’s grieving. It worked, though. Not because of the nudity but because Stewart wanted something and she went after it, consequences be damned. That matters more than Twilight ever did. Monday, 3 April 2017. Seventy-Three Questions: Selena Gomez answered seventy-three Vogue questions in eight minutes, which works out to roughly one every seven seconds. She talks about being grateful—her favorite word, apparently—and names Natalie Portman as the most fashionable person she knows. Nothing unexpected, nothing that wasn’t already calculated. Just the performance of access, smooth and practiced. I watch these Vogue videos sometimes. They’re built on a formula that works: fast enough that nobody gets uncomfortable, personal enough that it feels like you’re learning something. The celebrity is always charming and in control, available but untouchable. It’s designed that way on purpose. Gomez seems comfortable with it. She’s spent enough time in front of cameras that she doesn’t have to think anymore, just exists in the exact way the format wants. The camera is happy, Vogue is happy, everyone moves to the next one. There’s something almost peaceful about watching someone work that well at a game they know perfectly. Tuesday, 28 March 2017. In the Viewfinder: You show up in Tokyo with a camera and immediately you’re seeing the city through a viewfinder. Shibuya, Harajuku, Yoyogi—they’re all exactly what you expected. The neon signs, the costume shops, the weird little storefronts (a sex shop here, a bookstore there) tucked between larger buildings. You photograph it because that’s what you came for. The proof that you were here, that you saw the thing everyone else sees. The days blur between ramen counters where the owner doesn’t acknowledge you and karaoke bars where you’re pressed against salarymen singing off-key. You drink something strong and cheap, eat something you can’t quite identify, and it all feels important in the moment and unremarkable when you look at the photos later. There’s a point where you stop trying to get the shot and just exist. Maybe it’s the third bar, maybe it’s watching a group of kids in costume move through the street like they’ve choreographed it. You realize the photographs aren’t capturing anything—they’re just proof that you were tired and hungry and standing in a place that felt exotic until you actually got there. Tokyo isn’t a dream. It’s just a city where the ordinary looks strange to outsiders. Tuesday, 28 March 2017. Casey Neistat’s Back: Casey Neistat’s back to daily vlogging. He quit a year ago after selling Beme to CNN for something like $25 million. Made this whole announcement about being done, moving on, whatever you do after you’ve cashed out. Now he’s filming again. He built himself on YouTube the hard way—daily videos, years of them. Skateboarding through New York, documenting his own life, moving through the world with a camera attached to his face. That was his entire identity by the time Beme happened. Then CNN paid him and he disappeared, and everyone figured he’d finally gotten what he wanted. But here’s what nobody really understands about quitting: when you’ve spent a decade turning something into your whole life, the money can’t actually make you stop. It just sits there. The habit doesn’t go away. The audience doesn’t go away. So you wake up rich and bored and realize the thing you hated was never the work—it was the need for it to mean something. Remove the need and you’re left with just missing it. The funny part is who says money doesn’t buy happiness. It’s always either the people who are broke or the ones who just got rich enough to know better. Because money can buy you the freedom to quit, but it can’t buy you something to replace the obsession. Neistat got his $25 million and discovered that was never the point. Tuesday, 28 March 2017. Selena in Vogue: Selena showed up in the latest Vogue looking exactly like what you’d expect—shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, lit to make her look like something between a person and a perfect photograph. The usual machinery of celebrity beauty in action. I’ve had a mild crush on her since the Disney years, one of those background fixations you pick up when you’ve been online long enough. Her face stuck with me. Age has been kind to her in the way it’s kind to some people—she went from performing a role to actually looking like someone. The photos are genuinely good. Bright, uncomplicated, summer mood. She looks comfortable in them, even happy, which is rare in fashion spreads. Most of the time you can see the machinery working. Here it feels less like that. If you want to see them, go to Vogue. I’m just marking that they exist and that I’m the kind of person who notices. Monday, 27 March 2017. Just Movement: You’re jumping right along platforms, a spike pit opens beneath you, and you have maybe one frame to react. The screen scrolls forward regardless. No dialogue, no context, no apologies—just the question: are you good enough? Either you are or you aren’t. That was the whole language of 8 and 16-bit platformers. Mario, Sonic, Alex Kidd, Mega Man, Donkey Kong Country—they all spoke the same dialect. A character moving through space, gravity pulling down, the level design pushing forward relentlessly. The best ones didn’t add anything extra. Super Mario World and Ghouls ’n Ghosts trusted you completely. They assumed you’d figure it out or fail, and they didn’t soften that bargain. I think what I miss isn’t really the games—there are plenty of modern platformers around. It’s the relationship between game and player. Those old ones had zero interest in whether you liked them. No difficulty sliders, no infinite lives, no algorithm trying to adjust to your skill. You either had the reflexes or you didn’t, and that was the entire conversation. There’s something almost cruel about that simplicity. But also something clarifying. You know exactly where you stand. No designer trying to make sure you feel like a hero, no artificial scaffolding to keep you from failing. Just you and the question of whether you can move accurately enough to survive. Monday, 27 March 2017. 1 Night: Charli XCX’s been getting brighter. True Romance was underwater—lo-fi and violet, everything muffled. SuperLove tightened it up, added shine. Now she’s somewhere else: more immediate, more color, something almost aggressive in how it moves. “1 Night” with Mura Masa is where that new energy lands. The video’s just people—walking, sitting, being alive in whatever space this is. No narrative, no subtext, no meaning layered underneath. Just the texture of existing. It’s harder to do than it sounds. Most people can’t point a camera at their own life without trying to mean something with it, without turning the ordinary into a statement about themselves or their taste or their awareness. But this video doesn’t do that. It just watches. The track does the same thing—restless and unadorned, moving without asking for approval. It exists, and that’s the whole point. Monday, 27 March 2017. Superstar Boost: Every few years I buy another pair of Superstars. Black leather, white stripes, shell toe. Nothing else fits into your life the way these do. Everything else is a costume; these are just shoes. They made a new version with Boost in the sole. That’s the foam adidas uses now—it’s softer, more responsive, makes walking feel less like a negotiation with gravity. The midsole is visible on the bottom and wraps the arch. Still clean, still minimal. Gold details on the tongue, which I didn’t ask for but works. The shape didn’t change. They’re still completely themselves. Boost is meant to be invisible—you don’t see it or think about it, you just walk a little easier. Whether the softness matters at my age, I’m not sure. My feet don’t hurt in Superstars anyway, they never have. This is how you do it right, though. You take something that works and you make it slightly better without destroying what made it work. You add comfort without adding identity. That’s respect for a design. That’s knowing when to stop. Tuesday, 7 February 2017. The Sound of Being That Age: Skins came out of Bristol, not Hollywood, which meant it got the texture right from the start. British television around 2007 didn’t coddle teenagers the way American TV did—no manufactured drama, no easy resolutions, just the actual mess of being nineteen and thinking your life meant something because your friends did. The show followed three generations of kids through the same school, same city, and it never flinched away from what that looked like: sex without romance, drugs without mystique, love that broke things. I was hooked for years. There’s a specific kind of watching—where you can’t wait for the next episode not because you need to know what happens, but because you need to spend more time with these people. Tony made terrible decisions with absolute confidence. Effy didn’t talk much and that made what she did matter more. Sid kept failing at everything in the most human way possible. Mini’s cruelty looked like self-protection until it wasn’t. That’s the show in a sentence: it knew the difference between who you thought you were and who you actually were, and it didn’t judge you for the gap between them. The weird thing about loving something that specific is you can’t really evangelize it. People either get it or they don’t, and if they get it they’ll find it anyway. But there’s a real problem that comes up when you try to watch it again: the streaming versions have had their original soundtrack replaced. Not because of censorship or something noble like that, just licensing—TV executives decided a generic replacement score would cost less than clearing rights. It’s absolutely wrong. The music was woven into the show so completely that losing it hollows out whole scenes. It’s like watching a memory with the color turned down. The actual experience of the show still hits. But if you’re going to revisit it, hunt down the original DVDs or find a copy with the real soundtrack intact. Because Skins without that specific sonic texture is just well-acted drama about teenagers, and the thing that made it matter was that it felt like the actual rhythm of that life—the specific songs that stuck in your head during the worst moments, the particular sound of being that age in that place in that exact moment. Tuesday, 7 February 2017. Rereading 1984: I reread 1984 every few years, which seems excessive until you realize that Orwell’s sentences actually improve on memory and the world keeps changing in ways that make the book feel urgent again. The world of the novel is split between three perpetually warring superstates. Winston Smith lives in Oceania—England—under a government that isn’t bothering to hide the fact that it exists to crush any thought that diverges from the party line. The surveillance is total and constant. The telescreens never stop watching. The historical record gets rewritten whenever it’s inconvenient. The propaganda about the enemy is relentless and absurd. The whole system is built to make you doubt your own mind. What’s unsettling about 1984 is that Orwell isn’t warning about something that might happen—he’s describing how power actually operates. The goal of a totalitarian system isn’t just obedience. It’s eliminating your ability to trust yourself. If you can be made to believe something that contradicts what you saw with your own eyes, then you’re completely theirs. The prose is deliberately flat and clinical—Orwell describes nightmarish things with the tone of someone filing a report. The language is stripped down and controlled, a weapon in itself. Reading it is like watching someone’s mind break, which is literally what happens to Winston. People read 1984 and become paranoid conspiracy theorists, seeing totalitarian structures everywhere, which misses the book’s point a little. Except they’re also not entirely wrong. The mechanisms Orwell described—the information control, the historical revisionism, the manufactured enemies—those are real. You can watch them working right now. So yes, read it. Not as political prophecy but as a description of how institutions actually function at scale. Once you understand the mechanics, you see them everywhere. Which is unsettling, which is why I keep rereading it. Friday, 3 February 2017. So Good: You notice when someone’s actually got it. Zara Larsson had it the moment “Lush Life” landed—this Swedish teenager with a song that just worked, that got into your head and wouldn’t leave. The thing went everywhere, and she was suddenly the breakthrough everyone cared about. By 2016 she had gold certifications and awards, the whole trajectory compressed into months. “So Good” is the follow-up, featuring Ty Dolla $ign, and it’s the obvious next move when you’re riding something real. There’s a moment after a genuine hit where you have to decide whether to run it back or pivot, and the smart play is not to overthink it. Just deliver something that fits, that feels like a natural extension of the thing that worked. It’s pop music as a precise calculation, but the good ones don’t feel calculated. There’s something satisfying about watching an artist actually break through instead of vanishing after one song. Most pop moments are isolated incidents. Zara’s got the thing that suggests she might actually stick around, and “So Good” is proof the first single wasn’t luck. Her debut album is coming, and at this point you’re just watching to see how far this takes her. Friday, 3 February 2017. The Nine-Figure Graveyard: All that money sloshing through the video game industry, and studios still release bombs constantly. You’d think budgets in the hundreds of millions would guarantee success. Somehow they don’t. The winners are obvious. Zelda, Call of Duty, Pokémon generate revenue streams that make traditional entertainment look quaint. The Sims worked because it let people build and destroy endlessly. Grand Theft Auto figured out the open-world crime fantasy better than anyone else. Super Mario Bros. is just right in a way that doesn’t need explaining. Then there’s Duke Nukem Forever, which spent fifteen years in development hell and arrived looking like a 2003 game. Brütal Legend was stylish and strange—Tim Schafer’s metal-world fever dream—except nobody actually wanted to play it once they were inside. Shenmue was this impossibly detailed thing that rewarded obsessive attention right when the industry was learning to reward shortcuts instead. The stupid part is watching studios spend nine figures and still miss the fundamentals. Money doesn’t teach you taste. It doesn’t tell you what people want to do. The hits stumbled onto something that felt right, felt necessary. The flops usually felt like someone was trying really hard to make you care about something elaborate that you didn’t. Every year there’s a new nine-figure production that’ll be forgotten in twelve months. That’s just the math. Thursday, 2 February 2017. Trump Regrets: I came across a Twitter account called Trump_Regrets the other day and fell into it for a while. It’s just people who voted for Trump in 2016 posting about regretting it. No snark from whoever runs the account, just raw confessions. People saying things didn’t work out the way they’d hoped, jobs didn’t materialize, family got separated at the border, whatever the specific damage was to their own life. The speed of the regret is what struck me. Not months later or years, but like three or four months in and they’re already on Twitter eating their vote. Each regret is so particular and sincere it’s almost sad—you can feel the specific moment someone realized their choice didn’t work the way they’d imagined. It becomes this accidental document of what happens when you bet on someone and lose. I don’t really have a take on it. Watching people publicly admit they were wrong about something that mattered to them is honest in a way that most political discourse isn’t. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Thursday, 2 February 2017. Beyoncé’s Pregnancy Announcement: Beyoncé announced her pregnancy with twins by posting nude photos to Instagram. Not a press release, not a magazine exclusive—just her body and her news, sent out to the whole world at once. The internet took notice, which I’m sure was exactly the point. What got me was the pure confidence of it. Here’s a woman who knows the one thing that will make everyone stop and listen. Here’s her. Here’s what’s happening. Done. No permission needed, no gatekeepers, no careful choreography. Just Beyoncé on her own terms telling you what you’re about to hear about. The photos themselves are well done—composed carefully, lit perfectly, with the kind of ease that only comes from having complete control and zero self-doubt. She’s not performing vulnerability or fishing for compliments. She’s just stating a fact about her body and her life, and the rest of us are apparently meant to deal with it. I respect the move. There’s something to be said for just refusing to let anyone else tell your story. Thursday, 2 February 2017. Pretty Fake: Late night. You’re home alone and something has gone completely wrong. The job is shit. Someone left. You got news that stops you cold. And in those moments there’s something almost beautiful about the idea that none of this is real. That you’re not actually here. That it’s all just code running somewhere, in some machine that doesn’t know your name. The Matrix didn’t help. It spawned an entire generation of people absolutely convinced they could prove that everything—trees, cats, the three empty chip bags on your coffee table—is just bits and bytes. They were insufferable about it. But here’s the weird part: actual scientists have looked at this seriously. They’ve run the numbers. And it turns out the odds that we’re living in some kind of simulation aren’t as small as you’d think. There’s something mathematically plausible about it. So who built it? That’s the part that gets funny. Maybe some kid messing around with code in a basement. Maybe people from the future who are bored or cruel or both, just want to see what happens when they give consciousness to a machine. Maybe your smart neighbor. Maybe your dog one day got so bored that it decided to create an entire universe just to watch it spiral. There’s a relief in thinking about it that way. At three in the morning when you can’t see how any of this gets better, when it all feels impossibly heavy, it’s actually kind of comforting to imagine that you’re not real. That none of it is. That it’s all just someone’s experiment, someone’s mistake, someone’s game. Wednesday, 1 February 2017. Finally: There’s always been something about a bigger man that just gets to me. A bearded guy at the bar, demolishing a double cheeseburger and a beer without once pretending to be anything other than exactly what he is. All the appeal. ASOS expanded to XXXXL across the board—their own labels plus Burton, Noose and Monkey, Wrangler, and everything else in the range. Actual clothes made for actual bodies. I spent years standing outside those store windows, watching other people walk out with bags. You stop checking after a while because you know there’s nothing in there for you. So this matters. It’s not some grand gesture or moral victory, just a store finally deciding to stock bigger sizes. But now I can actually shop there instead of standing on the outside, and that’s something. Wednesday, 1 February 2017. Borrowed Accounts: Some German celebrities—Joko Winterscheid, Palina Rojinski, Marteria, Prinz Pi, MC Fitti, and Laryin—gave their social media accounts to homeless Berliners in February. One day each, during what they called One Warm Winter. The idea was straightforward: let people see what a day actually looks like when you’re sleeping outside in winter, unfiltered, through a verified account instead of a news story. What got me was that this had to happen. We’re constantly moving past homelessness—in feeds, on streets, in the news—without looking. The people living it might as well not exist. But post it through a celebrity account and suddenly it’s real to us. That’s its own kind of depressing truth. The accounts showed what you’d expect: food distribution lines, hours searching for clean clothes, the endless logistics of keeping yourself alive and warm. A shower, a warm place to sleep, clean clothes—things I think nothing of—are whole projects when you’re homeless. Time moves differently. Everything is harder. And cold in Berlin in winter isn’t romantic. It’s survival. Nobody wakes up and chooses this. The people who talk about homelessness like it’s freedom or simplicity are the people who’ve never actually been broke, actually cold, actually desperate. They’ve never had to choose between eating and staying warm or between an hour inside and twelve hours on the street to keep moving. They’re imagining something they’ve never lived. I don’t know what changed after the campaign ended. People probably felt something, scrolled past, forgot. The homeless people kept walking. Life went on. Maybe it planted something in someone. Maybe I just wanted to believe it mattered. Wednesday, 1 February 2017. I Did This: There’s a Twitter account that started drawing Trump as a five-year-old kid showing off his finger paintings. A cat. A dinosaur. A house. Just scrawls, barely recognizable, each one captioned “I did this.” That was the entire joke. No hidden layer, no punchline underneath. It was just true. Early 2017 had this particular flavor of absurdity where each day outdid the last. New scandals, new executive orders, moments where you’d think it couldn’t get more incompetent and then it did. People were protesting, making art, trying to make sense of it. But the Trump Draws account sidestepped the anger and the analysis and did something weirder—it showed you what was happening without needing to yell about it or explain it. What made it work was how completely it matched reality. You didn’t need outrage when you had accuracy. A man who thought he was doing great things but couldn’t articulate why. A child proud of his drawings. Someone with the confidence of a toddler and the power of a nation, and nothing about that made sense, so why bother pretending it did. I don’t know if that’s what the account intended, but it didn’t matter. The simplicity of it—the refusal to dress it up as anything more complicated than it was—made the absurdity more visible than any serious analysis could. It just reduced everything to its actual scale: a guy with a child’s ego, wielding power he didn’t comprehend. Wednesday, 1 February 2017. Berlin, Red: Danny Reinke’s “Secret Desire” collection showed at Berlin Fashion Week inside a garden installation—apple tree, roses, topiaries, the whole Garden of Eden staging. He’s 24, from a fishing village on the Baltic, and he sent ten looks through this space that mixed sportswear and couture in a way that felt purposeful instead of confused. The material work is what actually landed. A lot of velvet, a long red tulle dress that sits at the emotional center, pearl embroideries shaped like birds of paradise—that ornamental dream language. The red runs through everything in different shades, the color of secret wanting, the desire inside yourself that doesn’t map onto anything public. It’s direct, which could be corny, but he’s earned it. There’s a gender blur happening that’s worth noticing—sharp-tailored suits, oversized bows sewn on deliberately, a refusal to perform gender difference rather than make a statement about it. The installation itself could have collapsed into something greeting-card soft, but Reinke’s got enough structural confidence in the work that you believe he’s thinking, not posturing. It works because the clothes are solid and he doesn’t seem to care if you understand the concept. That’s enough. Tuesday, 24 January 2017. Weight and Movement: Seeing loden on a modern runway hits differently when the designer knows what they’re doing with it. Marcel Ostertag wasn’t trying to make traditional Tyrolean wool feel contemporary through cutting or irony—he was pairing it with silk that moves, with draping that flows, letting the heavy stuff sit next to the gentle. The whole collection was a statement about texture and time wrapped inside fashion choices. The materials have presence. Loden embroidered, loden cut into small skirts, loden as parkas with sport elements. It stays recognizable throughout, which gives the work a coherence a lot of contemporary collections don’t bother with anymore. There’s no disguising what things are made of, no trying to make traditional fabrics look new by deconstructing them. Just a commitment to letting materials mean something. What struck me was the underlying philosophy about pace. In a moment when everything is immediate—make it, post it, move on—there’s something quietly radical about saying that clothes are meant to be lived with, to be owned rather than performed. The loden does that work through sheer weight and presence. This is fabric meant to last, to mean something. It’s not a priority fashion often bothers with anymore. The pressure and the speed are too strong. But watching it play out through material choice and silhouette, seeing heaviness allowed to exist alongside what’s delicate—that stays with you. It was the kind of sustained thinking about material and time that fashion usually doesn’t have patience for. Monday, 23 January 2017. No Filter: The billboards have changed. Five years ago fashion advertising was all hairless bodies, skeletal things airbrushed until they barely looked human. Now it’s completely flipped—cellulite, stretch marks, hair, actual fucking skin. Monki, the Swedish brand, made it explicit with #NoFilter: we’re selling underwear to girls who don’t look like Ariana Grande, who look like people with bodies. It’s a real correction. The old standard was insane. But the mechanism is identical, just with opposite aesthetics. They’re still selling you an ideal. The old ads made you feel wrong because you didn’t match them. The new ones make you feel like you’re supposed to embrace being imperfect—which is nice until you realize it’s a strategy to sell you underwear you probably already own. I’m not saying that’s cynical exactly. It’s just how advertising works—there’s always a calculation underneath. And if that calculation corrects something broken in the industry, fine. There’s real value in showing diverse bodies instead of one impossible standard. But once destigmatization becomes a product feature, it’s still a feature. The brand moves inventory and looks good doing it. That’s the deal. The old version said be thin and hairless. This one says be yourself. Except yourself, as packaged back to you in a billboard, is just another standard wearing different clothes. Whether that actually helps people or just trades one set of anxiety for another—that’s not really a question a fashion brand can answer. Monday, 23 January 2017. Anyone Can Be a DJ: Celebrity DJs proved it first: you don’t actually have to know anything to be a DJ. Paris Hilton figured it out. Giulia Siegel and Nadja Abd El Farrag got there too. They all walked through with zero apologies. Open Spotify, click a playlist someone else made, put on oversized headphones, nod like you’re studying the frequencies. That’s the whole job. No mixing, no music knowledge, no actual skill. Just the appearance of doing something while a premade playlist plays itself. What gets me is how low the barrier actually is. A laptop. Spotify. Headphones. Enough confidence that nobody watching cares enough to notice you’re not doing anything. And if you’re the kind of person who dropped out, blew up an apprenticeship, ended up on a friend’s couch because your own parents gave up—why not just become a DJ? You’ve already got the equipment. There’s no gatekeeping. There’s nothing to gate. The culture absorbed this without blinking. Fake DJing is a real profession now. Surface became the whole substance. And the people doing it don’t even seem bothered by their complete incompetence—they’re genuinely unbothered. Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe the real skill is just not caring whether you’re actually good at anything. Wednesday, 18 January 2017. YO Sperm Test: Life is basically unfair. While Johnny from upstairs keeps accidentally knocking up different women, me and Mareike have been trying for years and nothing takes. We’ve tried everything. Different positions. Toys. Whatever works. Could be her. Could be me. Probably my sperm though—they get damaged from hot baths, your phone in your pocket, too much milk, maybe a curse, who knows. Sperm are fragile. So there’s this phone attachment that tests them. The YO Sperm Test. You jerk off onto a slide, clip it onto your phone, it tells you if your swimmers still work or if you’re shooting blanks. And if it’s bad? Mareike should try Uwe from the office. A baby’s more important to her than I am. Wednesday, 18 January 2017. Tokyo’s Walls: The walls in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Akihabara had Drake and Beyoncé next to cute manga girls in modified school uniforms, weird aliens and turtles with flowers on their heads. I walked through these districts one afternoon the way tourists do, hunting for street art in all the obvious places, certain there was something authentic underneath if I just looked hard enough. Street art’s supposed to be about breaking rules and marking territory without permission, but in Tokyo it all felt pre-approved somehow. Tokyo doesn’t make it easy to find anything unstaged. The whole city’s so carefully designed that even the graffiti feels intentional, even the chaos has aesthetic. The businesspeople in dark suits walked past without seeing any of it, thousands of them every day, moving through the city at the speed Tokyo demands. What got to me was the permanence of the invisibility. All these painted walls marking a city that moved too fast to notice them, marking margins nobody was looking at. In a place this hyper-curated, where literally everything gets recycled back into the brand, street art was maybe the only thing nobody was trying to sell you. Someone painted a wall because they wanted to, and then Tokyo moved on. Sunday, 15 January 2017. Better Than Me: There’s a panda at Dujiangyan Panda Base in China who takes better selfies than I do. Not because he’s trying—he’s just there being a panda—but his photos have this effortless quality that makes every selfie I’ve ever taken look desperate. Most people doing selfies put real effort into it. Makeup, lighting, a hundred takes, the perfect angle. Someone’s bought a ring light, propped up their phone, deleted a hundred shots before getting one worth posting. Then this panda shows up and just looks better in a frame. Dujiangyan is where they keep pandas and work on conservation. These animals were almost extinct, which is the serious part. But there’s something funny about a panda accidentally becoming internet famous just for being photogenic. He’s not trying to be a personality. He just is one, effortlessly. I’m not sure if there’s a moral here. But I can’t really argue with the evidence. Saturday, 14 January 2017. What Facebook Keeps: In late December 2016, a twelve-year-old girl named Katelyn Nicole Davis livestreamed her suicide for forty minutes on Live.me, a platform connected to Facebook. She’d been abused by a family member. Her parents took down the stream immediately, but it was already spreading. YouTube removed it when asked. Facebook refused. For weeks the video circulated—shared, reposted, quantified with likes and emoji reactions. Her parents kept asking Facebook to take it down. Other users reported it. Facebook said it didn’t violate their community standards. Technically not illegal, they said, as if that mattered. What stays with me is the contradiction. Facebook bans topless pictures. They’ll remove a woman’s breasts in the name of community values. But a video of a girl killing herself? That’s content Facebook is comfortable with. That can spread. That gets engagement metrics. I keep thinking about the people who made that decision. They weren’t being cruel. The system just organized itself so that nudity is a bigger problem than suicide footage. The policy logic was sound. That’s what’s unsettling about it. The police posted on Facebook asking people to stop uploading it, appealing to respect for Katelyn. But the platform that’s actively hosting it doesn’t have to listen. Friday, 13 January 2017. Ferngespräch: TEA&TWIGS is one of the few fashion blogs I still follow, but not for the fashion part. Jasmin and Isabella are just interesting people. I’ve been on those press trips to coastal towns, we’ve drunk too much champagne on hotel rooftops in Portugal, hung around at one of those Lisbon parties where everything somehow makes perfect sense at the time. The kind of people who make you feel smarter for knowing them. They live far enough apart now that regular in-person hangouts aren’t automatic anymore. So they started a podcast called Ferngespräch—a pun on long-distance phone calls and the internet, which is funny because that’s basically what the internet is anyway. They just talk. Love, work, modern feminism, relationships, boundaries, food, whatever comes up. Jasmin mentioned something about moving from the telephone into the network, and it clicked. What strikes me is how un-built it is. No brand voice, no target audience calculation, no content calendar. Just two people who think clearly talking about things that matter to them. You can feel immediately that they’re talking to each other, not performing at some invisible crowd. I don’t know if I’ll listen to every episode, but there’s something right about it. The confidence to just make the thing without all the scaffolding around it. Friday, 13 January 2017. Insta-Fame Pills: Daniel Allen Cohen made these pills called Insta-Fame. Eight of them in a box, designed to make you go viral instantly. No work, no talent, no soul-selling required—just swallow and watch the followers arrive. Obviously they don’t work. That’s entirely the point. What gets me is that the idea isn’t even that absurd anymore. You see someone with a million followers and wonder what they know that you don’t, what system they cracked, what algorithm exploit they discovered. There’s this quiet belief that virality is a code you can break if you’re smart enough or persistent enough or willing to spend enough money on the right tool. Cohen just made that literal—he turned desperation into a product and packaged it like actual medicine. The pills look clinical and official, which is the best part. They sit there with the plausibility of something that might actually work, of something you might actually want to buy. And the joke is that we’re already buying into variations of this fantasy. We’re already paying for courses on becoming Instagram-famous, trying apps that promise to decode the algorithm, spending money to engineer something that’s supposed to feel authentic and organic. We’re shopping for shortcuts. Cohen just removed the pretense and left the pure, stupid honesty of wanting to buy our way in. The other thing is how the joke hasn’t aged well, or maybe it’s aged perfectly. This commentary on social media obsession should feel quaint by now, but it feels sharper than ever. The desperation is real. People genuinely believe there’s a trick to virality, some magic combination of timing and content and performance that will tip them into relevance. And they’re not entirely wrong—virality does work like a system, it does have patterns and rewards. But the system is also indifferent and often cruel. Cohen’s pills are the perfect mirror because they can’t work, so you never have to face them failing you. You just have to sit with the fact that most people aren’t built for internet fame—don’t have the instinct or the comfort with performance it requires. And maybe that’s good. Maybe avoiding relevance is its own kind of victory. Friday, 13 January 2017. Somewhere Out There: I’ve always liked the idea that somewhere out there is someone who looks exactly like me. Not a twin—I don’t have a twin—but some random person in another city who has my face, my hair, my particular way of standing. Maybe they’re a better version. Maybe they’re worse. Doesn’t matter. There’s comfort in it. The versions I’ve heard usually go the same way. You’re at a party, someone taps your shoulder, says they know your twin. Or you’re walking through a crowd and someone stops you—they swear they know you from somewhere, but you know you’ve never met. The photos come out. The laughs. Maybe you exchange numbers. Maybe it ends there. But you’ve still met yourself, in a way. I haven’t encountered mine yet. But I keep half-expecting it—some moment in a crowd where I’ll catch eyes with someone and just know. We’ll both freeze. We’ll both be thinking the same thing. What happens then? Do you become friends? Do you feel like you’re betraying yourself somehow? Or is it just a weird story to tell at parties forever? I think I’d want to stay in touch. Not out of some weird obsession, but because that person would understand something about me that almost no one else could. What it’s like to move through the world in this particular body, with this particular face. That’s worth knowing someone for. Friday, 13 January 2017. Mealworm Burgers: The Swiss government approved insect meat in May, and Coop started selling mealworm burgers and grasshopper skewers. What got me is how normal it looks—the packaging, the shelf placement, the fact that nobody seemed to think it was particularly newsworthy. Which is fair, because two billion people already eat them regularly. It’s only in Europe that this counts as a future-food experiment. The nutrition checks out: good fats, iron, zinc, the whole list. Over 2000 edible species exist. In most places where they’re eaten, there’s no pitch. They’re just food, available and tasty. But here, the conversation stays locked on sustainability metrics and protein efficiency. All true things. Doesn’t change the fact that most Europeans find it pretty gross. I’m curious what actually happens to these burgers. They’ll probably sit in the cooler case for a while, get picked up by a handful of curious people. Maybe the taste is good and they catch on. More likely they get past expiration and the experiment gets quietly discontinued. Either way, someone put these on the shelf. That’s the interesting part. Friday, 13 January 2017. The Audition: Trump’s press conference the day after Obama’s farewell was like watching someone who’d already decided the whole game was beneath him. The wall thing. Ignoring CNN, taking Breitbart instead. There’s something genuinely magnetic about that kind of contempt for the process—this refusal to play along, just say what you think and let it burn. I get why people loved it. Years of politicians carefully weighing every word, and here’s someone who wouldn’t. But the wall never happened. Neither did any of it. And what’s actually stuck with me isn’t Trump but the people who’ll defend it all forever, who still believe in a wall that doesn’t exist, who’d rather hold the lie than admit the mistake. That’s the weird part—not the con, but everyone who knew better and loved him anyway. Thursday, 12 January 2017. On the Street: Trump was inaugurated and Françoise Mouly, editor at The New Yorker, decided the right response was to make a newspaper and hand it out directly. She and her daughter Nadja, a cartoonist, assembled “Resist!”—comics and essays from various artists, all circling the same question: what do you actually do in this moment? The paper was aimed specifically at young women, immigrants, queer people. The ones for whom this isn’t abstract political theater but the texture of their actual lives. There’s work about abortion, racism, sexism, the specific gravity of fear that becomes your baseline. You wake with it. You sleep with it. You make plans around it. There’s always been something clarifying about dark moments for artists. Institutions feel less important. The idea of reaching someone directly, concretely, matters more. Comics work best for that—there’s almost nothing between the image and what it makes you feel. It travels faster than argument, faster than think pieces. Just picture and understanding. I don’t know if a newspaper actually changes anything at the level of policy or law. But I understand the impulse to try. To decide that what you had—your platform, your daughter’s talent—mattered most when handed directly to someone, actual paper and ink in their hands, when everything else feels controlled from above. That matters. Even if it doesn’t shift votes, there’s something defiant about insisting on directness like that. Thursday, 12 January 2017. The Validation Economy: I watched that Nick Smith video about social media, the one that breaks down what we’re all actually doing when we’re scrolling and posting, and it landed harder than it should have. The internet used to feel like a place where people found each other and actually talked. Now it’s just this massive crowd, and the only way to matter is to be louder, prettier, or more scandalous than everyone else. Everything is a metrics game. Likes, shares, comments, followers—the numbers are the whole point. We’re holding our stupid grins up to the camera, but not because we’re having fun or because we want to remember something. We’re doing it because we’ve organized our entire existence around whether strangers think we’re worth their attention. The moment doesn’t matter. The feeling doesn’t matter. What matters is the proof that we mattered, right now, to whoever’s scrolling past. It’s all validation. Just endlessly chasing these little digital tokens and telling ourselves that’s what being alive means. The weird part is knowing this and still doing it anyway. I know the game is hollow. I see exactly how it works. And I’m still posting shit I think will land, still checking to see who liked it, still feeling that small hit when the number goes up. It’s not mysterious—it’s just how the platforms are designed, and we’re all caught in it. Maybe the video helps if you haven’t thought about it yet. For the rest of us, it’s just confirmation of something we already know but can’t quite stop doing. Thursday, 12 January 2017. The Brown Network: This documentary traces the money and people behind far-right movements in Germany—the networks that operate unseen while the actual followers do the visible, audible raging. It’s less conspiracy-theory wild than you’d expect and more just… competent. They know what they’re doing. The manipulation is precise. These networks understand exactly which fears will move which people. Economic collapse, cultural change, the sense of being lied to. They don’t recruit by saying “join the fascists.” They recruit by being sympathetic, by asking dangerous questions, by offering community to people who feel unheard. And because it’s all coordinated—the messaging, the platforms, the timing—it reads as organic grassroots when it’s actually engineered. Once you’re inside, you’re not a believer. You’re a node in the network. You repeat their talking points, share their content, convince your friends without knowing that you’re following a blueprint written by someone else. That’s where the real power is. Not the visible leaders but the ordinary people who’ve become distribution channels. I know people like that. Not from any sinister recruitment, just from clicking links and finding a community that seemed to get them. Maybe it did, in its way. But they were still saying things other people had written. The documentary makes all this visible. It shows you the connections, the money, how the whole thing works together across countries. You watch and you understand the mechanism. And then you realize that understanding it doesn’t stop it. Which is somehow worse than not knowing. Thursday, 12 January 2017. When Pop Met Synth: Another 80s party looming, and I’m already dreading the playlist. Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Europe—the same five songs on repeat until someone cranks “Final Countdown” and you consider faking your own death. I needed something else. Found this YouTube channel called TRONICBOX that takes modern pop and remixes it as 80s synth-rock. Ariana, Katy, Justin Bieber—all of it runs through that glitzy synthesizer filter, and suddenly you’re in a music video from 1987. The whole thing shouldn’t work, but it does. They don’t have a massive library yet (presumably it takes time to send songs through a time machine and back), but what’s there is solid. “Somebody I Used to Know” as a synth anthem. “Firework” pumping through those drums and keyboards. The usual suspects sound weirdly… better? More fun, at least. It won’t solve the actual problem of having to make small talk at parties, but at least the background music won’t drive you insane. That’s something. Thursday, 12 January 2017. Seventeen: At seventeen I was tearing myself up on some guy’s dick that was way too big, convinced I was dying. That’s what I remember about that age. I certainly never thought I’d get pregnant. Not a fucking chance. Even though obviously I could have. You hear stories about teenage pregnancy and something in you shuts down. You tell yourself you were different—too busy with other shit, Barbies, cartoons, whatever. Pure bullshit. The truth is I was horny and reckless and lucky, all at the same time. And the way I needed that distance, that humor, between me and the girls who actually got pregnant—that’s just how I dealt with the fact that it could’ve been me. Some people get pregnant at seventeen. Most don’t. The difference isn’t wisdom or values or anything you want to believe about yourself. It’s luck. Timing. Whether a condom broke. Pauline got pregnant at seventeen. She’s twenty-two now and studying. I found that out and something shifted. Not the inspiring story thing—more that she just kept going. Didn’t become a cautionary tale or a triumph narrative or whatever. Just kept being a person. You can laugh at that or respect it. Depends what you’re like. I think I respect it. Could’ve been me. Could’ve been anyone. Wasn’t. Wednesday, 11 January 2017. She Was Already Shaving: Mehmet doesn’t like pubic hair. He’s fourteen. That’s enough for my thirteen-year-old cousin to spend an afternoon with a razor, scraping smooth everything—legs, armpits, asshole, the tiny hair between her eyebrows. They’d barely kissed, barely touched anywhere that would matter for the next decade. But she already knew the score: if he was going to want her, she had to stop being the way she naturally came. Her friend walked her through it like a tutorial, the kind of thing older girls teach younger girls like it’s just… how bodies work. Shave here. Shave here. Shave everywhere. Let nothing survive. When I asked why she cared what a fourteen-year-old boy thought about her body, she didn’t have a real answer. Just shrugged. That’s what you do when you like someone. Make yourself smaller. Less. Into something that won’t disgust him. What gets me isn’t that Mehmet has dumb ideas—of course he does. It’s that she didn’t think it was strange to believe him. Didn’t think it was strange that her body was the problem and she was the one who had to fix it. It was already just… there. The way things work. Wednesday, 11 January 2017. Armed With Condoms: Sailor Moon’s already saved the world a couple times. Turns out that wasn’t the last battle. Right now in Japan, she’s enlisting again, except this time the enemy is syphilis and the weapon is condoms. Young people across Japan have been getting infected at rising rates, so somebody figured—if kids won’t listen to health officials, maybe they’ll listen to someone they’ve been listening to for decades. Sixty thousand condoms—pink, heart-shaped, with Usagi’s face on them—got shipped out to about a hundred and fifty municipalities. It’s absurd and pragmatic at the same time. I get why it works, though. Pop culture doesn’t just entertain people; it moves them. An animated girl with ridiculous hair has more credibility in someone’s mind than a government notice. Maybe that’s bleak, but it’s how persuasion actually works. I don’t know if it’ll change anything. Probably not on its own. But there’s something about the image of it—Sailor Moon ending up here, anime getting conscripted for public health—that stays with me. Everything finds its use eventually. Wednesday, 11 January 2017. Goodbye, Mr. President: Obama had his farewell speech. If you’re young enough, he’s the only president you really knew. He was cool—composed, thoughtful, the kind of articulate that felt like a relief when he spoke. Yeah, there’s all the stuff that fell short: NSA, Guantanamo, the compromises. I’m not pretending he was some perfect thing. But there was something there, a dignity and intelligence you could just see. And then Trump. I can’t really picture what’s about to happen. He won’t do anything right—not by any measure I care about. It’s all so naked: money, power, using the office to make himself richer. Probably been jerking off to the idea of it for months. There’s something surreal about watching someone leave after eight years knowing the next guy is just going to torch it all for tax breaks and real estate. It’s absurd and completely real at once. You want to laugh and throw up. I’ll miss him. Not in some sentimental way, but actually. His farewell is the kind of thing you hold onto, even if you’re cynical about how much it mattered. Wednesday, 11 January 2017. Still Quiet: I don’t know why I expected Murakami to want the Nobel Prize. The moment anyone said he could have turned it down, I thought of course he would—all that machinery, all those expectations hanging over the next book. He doesn’t work for audiences. He works for something quieter. I got into Murakami by accident, the way you get into anyone good. Maybe it was 1Q84, maybe Norwegian Wood, maybe Kafka on the Shore—it doesn’t matter which one. What mattered was that first moment I felt how he writes: not rushing, not performing, just moving his characters through their days the way it actually happens. Slow. Confused. Bumping into old memories without understanding why they still hurt. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the one I keep coming back to. It’s about a guy who spends years trying to figure out why his friends abandoned him, and the book doesn’t pretend that’s a mystery you solve. It’s just his life, and he’s working through it the way we all do—not fully understanding himself, moving in circles, sitting with the pain of it. The book trusts you to sit there too. You’re not going anywhere. There’s no resolution waiting. Just a person thinking about his own past. That’s the whole thing, actually. He writes like he trusts time and silence. His people are never loud or rushed or figured out. They’re living through something that doesn’t make sense, and he’s patient with them. He doesn’t need you to feel a certain way about it. He just describes it and lets you stand there in it. So he’s got a new novel coming. Killing Commendatore, two parts, releasing in Japan in February. I know almost nothing about it. I don’t need to. By now that’s how I read Murakami—you show up, and you trust he knows what he’s doing. He has, every time. Wednesday, 11 January 2017. The SNES Shoe: The Super Nintendo is the best console ever made. “A Link to the Past,” “Secret of Mana,” “Super Mario World.” These aren’t just games I loved growing up. They’re design touchstones. The weight of that controller, the color palette, the menus. Sixteen bits, every decision intentional. Being an adult who cares about these games and wants to actually wear that fact is its own thing. You can go obvious: t-shirt with a sprite, a hat with the logo, the standard nerd-merch route. Nothing wrong with it. But there’s always this gap between what you love and how it looks on your body. Freaker Sneaks made an Air Jordan 4 that pulls the actual SNES controller palette—that specific shade of purple, the red, the green, the yellow—into the shoe itself. They even added the four buttons and made them actually press. It’s the kind of restraint that separates real design from costume. Someone who knows will see it immediately. To everyone else, it’s just a nice purple sneaker. That’s what matters about it. Not the limited-edition framing or the hype machine. Just the confidence to make something that works as a shoe first and a reference second. Wearable without announcing itself. I haven’t had them on, so I can’t say what they’re like in the world—whether the buttons feel right, if the proportions work when you’re actually standing in them. But the idea behind them, that restraint, that’s real. That’s design. Thursday, 5 January 2017. Noah: I first heard about Noah Cyrus because she voiced Ponyo, which made her interesting immediately—not because of the last name she can’t escape, but because she’d been given a real role in something that mattered. You don’t get that kind of work handed to you unless your parents are famous, which automatically makes you suspicious. But she treated it seriously, talked about the environmental message in Miyazaki’s film the way someone who actually paid attention would. That was her entry point into all this. Before that, she’d grown up with her father teaching her about music—the actual thing, not the industry. You can tell the difference when someone talks about their work. There’s no manufactured enthusiasm, no media training visible yet. And then there’s Miley, which everyone wants to know about. They want to know if Noah’s bothered by the nude photos, the wrecking ball, the gleeful fuck-you to the Disney machine that made her sister famous. Her answer is the one that actually matters: she’s proud of her. Not defensive, not pretending she didn’t see anything. She’s proud because Miley did it with conviction, with real self-assurance. You can tell she means it. They’re different people, so they’ll make different choices, but there’s no distance between them. Just clarity. By sixteen she was already everywhere—Instagram, Snapchat, another kid growing up with a phone instead of a childhood. But she’s deliberate about it. She talks about having complete control over what she shows, what she keeps. She even turned off comments on Instagram to shut out the people who just want to tear things down. That’s not naivety; that’s a boundary. She understands the stakes. The music was real work. “Make Me (Cry)” with Labrinth was charting. She wanted to keep making it, touring, having an actual career. Her role models were Lady Gaga and Rihanna—artists who’d actually done something meaningful. When I asked what she’d do if she became president of the world, she answered without hesitation: animal rights. Ban zoos. Ban circuses. That kind of clarity about what matters is rare at any age. What stayed with me was how unselfconscious she was about everything. No rehearsed answers, no performance. When I asked if she was addicted to her phone like every kid her age is, she just said yeah, I’m addicted. So what. She’d give up pizza before her phone. Television didn’t matter to her—no cable in the house. But love or her phone for a hundred years? Her phone, she laughed. The hypothetical spiraled out of control. She wasn’t trying to be cool. She just was. There’s a difference. Wednesday, 4 January 2017. In Between: I’ve been cycling Gorillaz through my headphones for probably twenty years now, so waiting for new material has become its own permanent state. While 2D and the crew are working on whatever’s next, Noodle—the animated guitarist and keyboardist—dropped a mixtape on SoundCloud called 私 Noodle❗️ and it’s legitimately good. It’s got Grimes, Lully, and Anna Meredith on it, and there’s no dead weight. Every song feels like it was chosen because she actually wanted to hear it, not because it fit some idea of what a mixtape should be. That’s always been the Gorillaz way—taste first, everything else follows. Sometimes that taste points you toward weird places, but it never feels accidental. I don’t know if this means the band’s working on something new or if Noodle just needed to get these sounds out of her system. Doesn’t really matter. It’s one of those things that makes you remember why you got hooked on their music in the first place. Wednesday, 4 January 2017. Proving Nothing: BuzzFeed had three women spend a week deliberately manspreading on the subway—taking up seats, being thoughtlessly inconsiderate—to demonstrate that men do this all the time. You watch waiting for the actual investigation, the thinking, and it never comes. It’s just three women being assholes on transit while someone films it. The thing worth considering—how entitlement shapes movement through shared space, who takes up room without asking—gets buried under the performance. But you can’t investigate that by staging the behavior. That’s theater. That’s three people being deliberately rude to strangers to generate clicks. What got to me was how the conclusion jumped from specific to universal. Three people being thoughtless, and suddenly that’s men. Prefix “man-” to any behavior you dislike and you’ve implicated a whole gender. But inconsiderate people are just inconsiderate. Gender doesn’t determine whether someone spreads across two seats. I’m not saying crowding isn’t real—I’m saying this video doesn’t actually address it. It just documents rudeness and calls it activism. There’s real friction on transit. Real moments where someone else’s comfort costs you space. But that’s human behavior. And turning it into a week of filmed inconsideration doesn’t illuminate anything. We get outrage. We don’t get understanding. Sunday, 18 December 2016. Alles Liebe, Annette: People film themselves endlessly and post it online. Got a free perfume in the mail. Went to see a movie. Had drama with some friend. Nobody cares. But they keep filming anyway. That’s why scripted television is better. Netflix knows it. HBO knows it. German public TV figured it out too. They grabbed actress Barbara Prakopenka and some colleagues and made ’Alles Liebe, Annette’—a soap opera about vlogging. No clue why. The story: Annette is eighteen, wanted to be a writer, applied to her dream university and got rejected. So she started a vlog out of spite. It’s not the most gripping premise on paper. But maybe that’s the point. A scripted show about the reality of vlogging is probably more honest than the actual thing. At least there’s intention behind it. Thursday, 15 December 2016. The Last Office: I actually love Twitter. I know that’s an unpopular thing to say now. The people who care about it are journalists, ADHD YouTubers, and actual Nazis in egg costumes, which is not exactly a compelling advertisement. Most people look at the whole thing and can’t fathom the appeal. They’re content if Facebook still loads. So Twitter’s closing its Berlin office by year-end. Consolidating in Hamburg. No profit, no stability, just the standard playbook for a dying company—cut costs, trim the fat, make yourself look salable to whoever’s willing to take you off your hands. Some tech billionaire. A Saudi fund. I don’t know anymore. I’ve seen this film before. You watch something slowly disintegrate, each cost-cutting measure another confirmation that it’s already over. Then it either collapses, which is sad, or someone buys it and it becomes a mausoleum—like what happened to Tumblr, MySpace, StudiVZ. Still technically breathing, still technically a website, but the life drained out. The zombie phase might be worse than death. At least death is honest. I keep using Twitter anyway. Knowing better. There’s something stubborn or stupid about it, I can’t decide which. Thursday, 15 December 2016. Why Gigi’s on Repeat: Gigi Hadid lounging on a Tahitian beach, tan and glossy in actual sunlight, becomes essential viewing the moment winter arrives where you live. She’s lying there with nowhere to be, and you’ve got her on repeat because the real world is gray and cold and making everyone stupid. That particular kind of winter is the worst. Not dramatic snow-laden cold, but damp, lightless, the kind of gray that makes depression feel like common sense. It gets dark at four. Everything hurts. The news is bad. You’re starting to think in German Romantic poetry about death. You try the solutions they tell you to try. Vitamin D pills. Tanning bed sessions, even though you’ll turn into a rotisserie chicken by thirty. Tropical cocktails with umbrellas, Hawaiian music in the background, a beach poster you bought five years ago. Effort. Money. Embarrassment. And you’re still inside. What actually works is just watching the video. Gigi in the sun, the water behind her, looking like she never heard of winter. No reason to leave the house, no money spent, no fake rituals. Her there, you here, and something in your head goes somewhere warmer for a few minutes. The real world hasn’t changed—it’s still gray, still cold—but you’ve got her on repeat and it’s enough. Thursday, 15 December 2016. Red Lace: There’s something satisfying about lingerie that actually understands bodies. Most of it is just marketing and terrible engineering, but a label like Conturelle pays attention to how it sits, how it moves, what actually matters to the person wearing it. This set they’ve done in red—Italian lace, fitted enough to be deliberate but not so tight it becomes a weapon. Good lace breathes. Good construction means you stop thinking about the thing and start thinking about yourself, which is the whole point. You look better because you feel better, and someone who knows how bodies work designed this to make that happen. There’s a particular pleasure in noticing craft in something intimate. The kind of detail that only matters if you’re paying attention: the weight of the lace, where the seams lie, how the cut respects movement. It’s the same satisfaction I get looking at a well-designed anything—a shirt, a chair, a logo. But on skin, it hits different. It matters more. Thursday, 15 December 2016. Cowboy, Avocado, Fox: I don’t know when emoji stopped feeling like an addition to language and became the language itself. There was probably a specific moment—some conversation where a single picture said what three sentences couldn’t—but I can’t pinpoint it. Now it’s automatic. Apple just released a new batch for iOS 10.2. Cowboy, avocado, fox, champagne, owl, butterfly, kiwi, peanut—the selection seems almost random. No clear logic for what made it in versus what got left behind. Maybe there’s a committee. Maybe it’s arbitrary. Either way, they’re there, and in a few weeks they’ll feel like they always have. Getting them requires an update, which takes about five minutes. iPhones will have them soon enough. That’s how it works. What gets me is how completely these tiny graphics have taken over how I actually talk. A single emoji in the right place does more work than most of what I write. That’s not a statement I’m proud of, but it’s honest. We’ve all shifted into a hybrid language that didn’t exist ten years ago, and it works. That wasn’t the plan, if there was a plan. The new ones will show up on my phone soon, and at some point the cowboy will be exactly what I need to say. I won’t think about how much work a tiny image does in a conversation, or how strange it is that we all speak this way now. I just use it. That’s where we are. Wednesday, 14 December 2016. This Is Fine: A dog in a burning room, holding a coffee cup steady between its paws, and it says “This is fine.” That image became the emoji of 2016—the only thing anyone could point to that actually described what was happening. Everything was on fire and we were all just sitting there, pretending to be okay. KC Green drew the comic years earlier, but it didn’t go viral until the year needed it. Trump, Brexit, the general sense that everything was simultaneously breaking and speeding up toward something worse. The meme caught that particular flavor of exhaustion—not panic, but resigned acceptance. The dog isn’t screaming. It’s sipping coffee. Somewhere in the chaos, someone turned the image into merchandise. Plush toys, t-shirts, hoodies, mugs. You could buy the feeling, basically, or at least a physical reminder that everyone else felt it too. There’s an almost beautiful absurdity to it—the commodification of dread, turning the symbol of helplessness into a thing you could hold and own. I’m not sure if I would’ve bought one or if it would’ve just made the whole thing sadder. The meme worked because it was free and everywhere and disposable, shared in group chats and reposted without context. Once it was a plush toy in your hand, it became something else—a souvenir of a year nobody asked for, proof that this was real and worth remembering. Tuesday, 13 December 2016. The Last Livestream: December 2016, and Aleppo was ending on social media. People trapped in the eastern part of the city were posting goodbye messages on Twitter and Facebook as the siege closed in. Saying hello and goodbye to the world simultaneously, from their phones, while the bombing was still happening in the background. Zouhir al-Shimale, a journalist there, wrote about his birthday that week. No cake, no celebration, no family. Just hunger and the siege and the knowledge that this was probably it. He was writing it all down like someone still believed the internet cared. Monther Etaky, an artist, wanted to livestream the genocide—actually broadcast his own death, he said. Wanted people to see it. Bana Alabed, a kid, whose mother was posting updates and pictures that thousands of people followed, a child documenting the end of her city in tweets. What stayed with me was just how wrong the medium felt for it. Twitter wasn’t built for goodbyes. Neither was Facebook. You’re reading someone’s last message in the same feed as jokes and celebrity gossip, formatted the same way, scrolling past it at the same speed as everything else. When the livestream stopped coming, that was it. People moved on. The world didn’t end. Everyone just kept scrolling. Tuesday, 13 December 2016. Cheap Monday: I was never really a fashion person, or at least I didn’t think I was until I found myself caring more about the details of a good knit than about being the guy with the expensive jacket. Cheap Monday gets this in a way most brands don’t. Their founder, Örjan Andersson, said something that stuck with me: he doesn’t sit front row at the shows. His inspiration comes from the street, from Stockholm, from watching how people actually dress when they’re just living their lives. There’s something freeing about brands that refuse to take themselves seriously. The Wired Up scarf and beanie aren’t trying to be anything other than what they are—warm, decent-looking pieces that work with everything. They’re the kind of thing you grab without thinking about it, the kind that becomes invisible because it just works. That’s the whole philosophy, really. Not high fashion, not trying to be seen, just clothes that make sense. Street style, Copenhagen and Stockholm and Berlin, where nobody’s performing for anyone. You wear what works and what feels right, and that’s it. It’s the opposite of the fashion industry’s usual noise, and maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it. Tuesday, 13 December 2016. In Character: Brock Lesnar on the cover is the obvious choice—intensity and damage, what a cover needs. But it works because WWE 2K17 understands what it’s actually selling: theater. The creation suite is the draw. Build a wrestler from nothing, design their moveset and arena and entrance, write their promos. You’re basically inventing a character into existence. This year they added a promo engine where your words actually matter—you choose what to say, form alliances or burn bridges with other wrestlers based on your dialogue. It reframes the whole experience from executing predetermined moves into building someone with personality and stakes. Career mode takes your created wrestler from NXT through the WWE hierarchy, and the path your character takes depends on your choices and your promos. When they reach the Hall of Fame, it feels earned because you shaped it. That’s where these games truly work. The roster is massive—thousands of moves and animations, decades of wrestlers to play as or rebuild. The soundtrack is huge and anthemic, made to feel like you’re walking to a real entrance. These games have always understood something about wrestling: it’s performance and story first. The physicality is just the stage. That’s why they work at all. Sunday, 11 December 2016. Making Bleeding Easy: There’s a persistent genre of self-help content that keeps insisting your period is actually your month’s best days. You just need the right mindset, the right products, the right something. It’s always framed as a perspective problem—if you could just see it correctly, if you could just reframe the pain as opportunity, everything would change. I heard someone describe getting her period at eleven. Genuinely thought she was dying. Not the exaggeration kids do, but real panic—the moment you realize your body doesn’t follow orders anymore. That’s the thing that actually matters. Everything else is just managing to exist with this new reality. So it’s strange how the response to that actual problem is never to fix the problem. It’s to tell you to think about it differently. The industry around this—and there’s a whole industry—exists to convince you that your suffering is an opportunity if you’re just creative enough, positive enough, resourceful enough. That the difficulty isn’t your biology, it’s your attitude. I’ve never heard anyone describe their period as an opportunity who wasn’t trying to sell something. I might be cynical about it, but that observation feels more honest than anything in the self-help aisle. Friday, 9 December 2016. Postfaktisch: German linguists basically admitted defeat in 2016. They picked “postfaktisch”—post-factual, post-truth—as their Word of the Year. Oxford had done the same in English. When the language establishment starts coining words for how broken things have become, you know something’s really shifted. The Society for German Language explained it pretty baldly in their official statement: in political discourse, emotions had started to matter more than facts. People were willing to ignore evidence, to accept lies, because those lies felt right. Felt true. That feeling was enough. The other top contenders—”Brexit,” “Trump-Effekt,” references to fake news—they all pointed at the same thing. The conversation had stopped being about what happened and started being about what you wanted to believe happened instead. I remember when lies at least had to try. They needed argument, evidence, internal consistency. Being dishonest took effort. Now a lie just had to feel right. It had to tell you what you already wanted to hear. That was all that mattered. What struck me was the openness of it. Not that people had been dishonest before—they always are—but that we got comfortable with it happening right there on the surface, no pretense. The bullshit was visible and we just lived with it. Somehow that feels worse than the lie. Once you name the thing, you can’t pretend it isn’t happening. Not that naming it changes anything, but at least you’re not pretending anymore. That’s what “postfaktisch” does. It marks the moment we admitted what had already happened. Friday, 9 December 2016. Patent: There’s something about opening a new shoebox. The smell, the tissue paper crinkle, pulling out an object that’s yours and just sitting with that for a moment. Stupidly good feeling. Right up there with eating a full bucket of fries at the end of the day. The Puma Basket Heart is a 1960s basketball shoe nobody’s played serious ball in for fifty years, but it keeps getting pulled back into production. Good design doesn’t really retire—it just waits. This version comes in patent leather, all glossy and lacquered, with oversized laces that make it feel more formal than a regular sneaker. The kind of update that works because it doesn’t try too hard. Just different enough to feel current without erasing what made the original work. I think about what makes certain designs actually persist and I keep landing on the same stuff: proportions that don’t age badly. Materials that don’t look cheap after a month. You can wear it without feeling like you’re performing some brand fantasy about yourself. Most shoes want you to know you paid for them. This one just sits on your foot looking clean. Whether I actually wear these or they live in the box is almost beside the point. The object itself, the design, the ritual of acquiring it—that’s the whole thing. That’s what good design does. It exists. It’s nice to have. Everything else is secondary. Friday, 9 December 2016. Nothing Happened: A man with a beer and a cigarette pushed a woman down a staircase at Hermannstraße station, just after midnight. She was heading down to the platform when he and his friends came up behind her. He was faster. At the middle of the stairs he lifted his leg and shoved her in the back. She fell forward onto the landing. He watched her go down, took a drag, and walked away with his friends toward another exit like it was the most natural thing in the world. I watched the video because someone sent it to me. I don’t know the woman, don’t know the man, have never even been to that station. But watching violence on camera—cold, casual, documented but not stopped—is different than hearing about it secondhand. This wasn’t rage or a fight. It was one person deciding a stranger deserved pain, and being absolutely certain nothing would come of it. Berlin’s a fine city, mostly. But there are parts where some people move like the normal rules don’t apply—where you can push a stranger down the stairs and know nothing will happen. Thursday, 8 December 2016. Superstar Politics: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stopped being a politician and became a celebrity somewhere along the way. I don’t know exactly when—maybe when YouTube made everyone famous, regardless of what they actually do. Turkish diaspora communities started defending and attacking him the way people do about movies or musicians. Passionate advocates. Passionate critics. Videos from both sides making the case about whether he’s a visionary or a tyrant, which is exactly how people talk about cultural figures, not political leaders. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish anymore. A pop singer and a controversial politician get the same treatment: charisma, controversy, devoted fans, detractors, engagement. Both become symbols. Both create tribes. Both emerge as entertainment. It all gets poured into the same mold. Politics enters entertainment and comes out as celebrity culture. Arguments about policy become arguments about character. Good or bad. Visionary or tyrant. The language of fandom applied to governance. I can’t tell you if he’s good or bad for Turkey. But I know he’s famous—genuinely famous, the way pop stars are famous, which isn’t how politicians should become famous, but it’s the only kind the internet makes anymore. Thursday, 8 December 2016. SoundCloud Comes Back: Everyone’s adding “Go” to their names now. Spotify figured it out first, and now the whole industry’s just stuck with it—Apple Music, SoundCloud, whoever’s next. It’s lazy but it works. SoundCloud’s finally launching their paid version in Germany, which is funny timing since the whole thing started there. 135 million tracks, ad-free, works offline. Nine ninety-nine a month, or thirteen if you go through Apple and they take their cut. Standard stuff. The thing that actually matters about SoundCloud isn’t what they advertise. It’s full of bedroom producers, bootlegs, lost B-sides, remixes that technically shouldn’t exist—music that Spotify and Apple would never go near. Those platforms sound like corporate radio if you listen close enough. SoundCloud sounds like someone actually left the internet unsupervised. That comes with a cost. The recommendations are messier. Tags are sometimes wrong. But if you know what you’re looking for and you know it’s definitely not what the algorithm wants you to want, there’s something honest about that. You find things on SoundCloud you literally can’t find anywhere else. I’m not going to tell you it’s better. Depends what you want. If you care about hearing music the way it was made and not filtered through a Netflix approach to playlists, it might be. If you just want music, Spotify’s fine. But if you’ve been using SoundCloud anyway—just through the shuffle and the ads—there’s finally an easy way to stop doing that. Wednesday, 7 December 2016. The English Lesson: An old man in a Polish commercial orders an English for Beginners textbook. Allegro, that massive Polish auction site that’s basically Eastern Europe’s eBay, made it their Christmas ad. You can feel what it’s reaching for before it even starts—sentiment about time, family, connection, the familiar beat that plays every December. But it doesn’t actually reach for it. There’s no dramatic payoff, no scene where you learn who he’s learning for or how it changes his life. He just orders the book and that’s the whole ad. Everything rests on that one image: an old man at page one, deciding to start over. Watching it, I felt this stupid pull to learn something. Not anything practical, nothing that would matter to anyone else. Just to pick a skill and begin. There’s something in that image—the textbook, the time it’ll take, the quiet stubbornness of someone deciding to go through with it—that cuts through all the talk about becoming a better version of yourself. He’s just learning English. Christmas commercials work by manufacturing emotions you’ve probably never felt. But every few years one lands different. This one did. I think it’s because of what’s missing—no transformation, no payoff, no evidence that it mattered. Just someone starting. That’s enough. Wednesday, 7 December 2016. Person of the Year: Trump got Time’s Person of the Year in 2016. He’d been fixated on it for a while—came in third the year before and complained loudly about it, tweeted that Time would never name him, said they’d picked “the woman who ruined Germany” instead. Then they went ahead and gave it to him. I remember thinking about how the magazine had also put Hitler on their cover in 1938 under the same heading. That’s the kind of historical fact you wish you hadn’t noticed. He told NBC it was “a very, very great honor.” What struck me watching it happen was how little it changed anything. He got what he’d wanted and he was still just as angry, still obsessed with status and rankings and whatever validation he was chasing. The whole dynamic was there in one moment—desire finally satisfied and somehow that didn’t satisfy anything at all. That winter I’d think about what would happen next. Best case: four years of embarrassing tweets and then it ends. Worst case: something worse. Most likely: something nobody could have predicted anyway. I’m not even sure my speculation mattered. The real answer was that you couldn’t know what would happen until you actually lived through it, and that was maybe the only honest thing about the whole situation. Wednesday, 7 December 2016. In and Out: You walk into the store and grab whatever you need. No line, no cashier, no waiting. Amazon Go handles it with cameras and sensors that track what you’re taking and charge you automatically as you leave. Obviously better than standing in a supermarket line. There’s something satisfying about the frictionless part—moving through a space without that dead moment at the register, without any human exchange needed. You’re basically stealing, except the payment already happened. Clean. But this eliminates cashiers. Whole job category gone because machines do it faster and cheaper. I know the standard line—technology creates new jobs, the economy adapts, progress moves forward. Might be true. Doesn’t change that someone working a register right now has to figure out what comes next. What gets me is I can hold both ideas at once without a problem. This is a genuinely better way to shop. And it’s also weird and a little unsettling. The future probably looks like this. Can’t really tell anymore if that’s a good thing or just inevitable. Tuesday, 6 December 2016. The Stack: The moment you realize you want more than one of these is the moment the design clicks. Swarovski’s Crystaldust bracelets are minimal in a way that feels careful. An open bangle. Stainless steel end caps. Crystal details catching light. That’s the whole thing, and that’s deliberate. They come in a range of colors—pink, green, blue, others. Each one has that particular crystal shimmer. But the real move is what happens when you stack them. One bracelet is fine. Two together start to shift how you see color. Three or four layering against each other, the light catching differently at different angles, becomes something you want on your wrist. That’s the design logic I appreciate. The constraint that forces multiplication rather than complication. You don’t add more features or details. You make something simple enough that you want to repeat it, and the repetition becomes the design. Pink with green. All of them together. The combinations change depending on what you’re wearing. The whole thing works because it doesn’t try too hard. A bangle that’s content to be a bangle, available in colors, stackable if you want. The restraint is what makes it worth wearing. Tuesday, 6 December 2016. Boost on the Tubular: The adidas Tubular Instinct is getting the Boost treatment. Two new colorways—beige and black—both in that high-cut silhouette that was always somewhere between tech and elegance. The appeal is obvious: Boost cushioning on a shoe that already had some presence to it. Thick soles, that wrapped-around collar, the three stripes appliquéd at the heel instead of sewn along the side—it’s not a minimalist sneaker, which is probably why I like it. The design brief was Paris. That Paris-as-fashion-capital stuff that justifies almost anything. But with the Tubular it actually kind of works—the beige and black colorways have that quiet European thing going, the kind of shoes you’d see someone wearing in a gallery or a café without anyone thinking much about it. The Boost sole doesn’t hurt that. It’s soft underfoot in a way the original probably wasn’t, which means less of that thin-soled discomfort after a few hours of wearing something you bought for how it looks. I’ve always been suspicious of shoe upgrades, especially when the marketing leans on “revolutionary” and “game-changing.” Usually it means they’re charging more for the same thing. But Boost is legitimately different—it’s airier, springier, more responsive than traditional foam. Whether it matters on a high-fashion sneaker is debatable. Does the average person care that much? Probably not. But I do. The difference between a shoe that looks good and a shoe that looks good and doesn’t destroy your feet by evening is worth noticing. The Tubular Instinct was never meant to be a workhorse. It’s a design object that happens to be something you can wear. Putting Boost on it doesn’t change that, but it makes the whole thing feel less like a compromise—like you don’t have to choose between looking like you have taste and feeling okay when you walk around. Which, fair enough, is not a high bar. But it’s something. Tuesday, 6 December 2016. The Unfairness: Chrissy Teigen is the kind of person who makes Twitter actually interesting. The way she operates online is different from anyone else. She can destroy someone in a reply and it’s so precise, so measured, that you’re almost impressed at being roasted. It’s not the polite put-down kind of wit. It’s not even the cruel kind that makes you feel bad. It’s the kind that lands so perfectly you have to respect it. She’s also smart in a way that matters. I don’t mean she knows a lot of facts or can quote things. I mean she actually thinks about stuff and has opinions that feel earned, not performed. You watch her get into a conversation and she’s not trying to be clever—she’s just saying what she thinks, and it happens to be both funny and right. The obvious thing is that she’s beautiful. That’s just a fact. But Sports Illustrated doesn’t hire you for the Maldives shoot unless you’re serious. And so there she is, in a bikini, on a beach somewhere most people will never go, having the time of her life. While the rest of us are outside in January scraping ice off windshields. It’s genuinely unfair. The whole setup is unfair. She’s witty and smart and attractive and living a life that feels like it exists in a different universe from everyone else’s. Anyone who claims the world is fair is either delusional or has never been paying attention. Tuesday, 6 December 2016. Flower Logic: At Clark University, someone wrote survival tips about sexual assault that included this: giving flowers to someone you’re interested in is emotional manipulation, which makes it rape. That was the actual text. The logic was straightforward: if you’re giving the flowers because you want something sexual in return, then you’re using them to make her do something she wouldn’t otherwise do. That’s coercion. That’s rape. I understand that consent matters. But somewhere the definitions got so broad that everything meant everything and nothing meant anything. Desire itself became the crime. Every gift, every compliment, every attempt to appeal to someone—all manipulation, all assault. You can’t separate what you want from how you act. That’s not possible. Some blogger made the obvious point: it made women sound defenseless, incapable of saying no to flowers, unable to judge a gesture for themselves. She was right. The guide was supposed to protect people and ended up describing them as passive, without judgment, unable to resist. I remember thinking I’d never buy my girlfriend flowers after reading that. Not because I believed the logic, but because I didn’t want to have to explain it. Better to not try. Better to keep your head down. Maybe that’s the point. Monday, 5 December 2016. Back to Helga: Rock am Ring is going back to the Nürburgring. Two years at Mendig airfield and now it’s coming home, which is the right call. Mendig never felt permanent. It was the holding pattern, the emergency solution, the let’s-just-make-this-work situation. The environmental regulations kept accumulating too—more restrictions every season, more requirements from the nature protection people. Eventually you’re spending millions just to stay legal. At that point the whole thing falls apart. The Nürburgring’s already set up for it. The infrastructure’s there, the approvals are in place. The festival can actually focus on being the festival instead of fighting endless bureaucracy about bird habitats and protected wetlands. I don’t know how much people think about any of this when they’re actually standing there. You’re in the crowd, something’s happening, you’re caught up in it. But there’s that moment where thousands of people all scream the same word at once—that chant that is the whole festival. That only works at the Ring. That’s when you know you’re in the right place. Monday, 5 December 2016. Game Two: Sometime in the early 2000s I realized that four German guys on television understood gaming better than most of the gaming press. Simon Krätschmer, Daniel Budiman, Nils Bomhoff, Étienne Gardé—they hosted Giga Games and then Game One, a show that mixed sketches, reviews, and stupid jokes into something that actually felt alive. If you were anywhere in Europe with a PC or console back then, you knew them. They mattered in a way that’s hard to explain now. Game One got canceled in 2014. The hosts scattered into Rocket Beans TV, a 24-hour internet stream that felt like exactly what they’d do after television kicked them out. It was good, but it wasn’t the same. The specific magic of four people on TV at a specific moment doesn’t translate perfectly to always-on internet. Nobody said they missed Game One, but you could feel it. And then somehow—through Funk, this youth platform ARD and ZDF set up—they got to do it again. Not Game One. Lawyers made sure of that. So it’s called Game Two. Same hosts. Same format. Slightly different container. I’ve got no idea if it’s actually good or if I just want it to be good because it shouldn’t exist. Probably both. But there’s something stubborn about it, something almost defiant. They get to make the thing they wanted to make, even if they had to rename it. That’s not nothing. Sunday, 4 December 2016. Measured: You clip it to your wrist and you can’t stop knowing anymore. Steps, distance, calories, active minutes—all day, all broken down by the hour. The watch nudges you every time you pause. Move 250 steps an hour, it insists. The Fitbit Blaze was designed to not look like what it is. Not medical, not aggressively technological. Just a watch, smooth and small, the kind of thing you’d actually wear instead of leaving on a desk. It tracked the obvious things—running, cycling, cardio—and figured out the rest automatically. Real-time stats on a screen small enough to disappear. Notifications too, if you cared. The real feature is the impossible knowledge. You feel it on your wrist. You always know whether you’re on target or falling short. It’s supposed to motivate you. Maybe it does, if motivation is just an upgraded form of anxiety. I spent enough time in design to see what happened here. They made it beautiful specifically so you’d never take it off. That was the entire point. A thing so appealing you’re forced to wear your failures constantly. That’s clever design. That’s also kind of insidious. Sunday, 4 December 2016. Smart Tampons: my.Flow designed a Bluetooth-enabled tampon. The logic is there: knowing when to change without checking is a real micro-problem. A sensor detects saturation, pings your phone, everyone moves on. Competent engineering, sensible product idea. The strangeness isn’t the tech itself—smart textiles, IoT health devices, all that exists. It’s adding network connectivity to something so purely biological and private. Outsourcing awareness of your own body to notifications. It solves one problem (not knowing when to change) by introducing another (app dependency, the weirdness of your period becoming data). From outside, it looks like solving a minor inconvenience by making things more complicated. I’m curious whether it took off, but that’s not really my question to answer. What sticks is the impulse: the reflex to digitize everything, to add sensors and notifications to bodily experience because the infrastructure exists. Not malicious, just the default assumption that making something measurable makes it better. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes you’re just adding distance between yourself and your own body. Sunday, 4 December 2016. Titanfall 2: Titanfall 2 is about pilots and Titans—you’re inside a giant robot. The campaign follows someone who dreams of becoming a pilot, learning what it means to trust a machine and be trusted back. The multiplayer lets you actually live in that. Respawn built this thinking about movement. Not just running and shooting, but how you traverse space, how you engage enemies. They nailed that with the first Titanfall, and the second one goes further. Adds story. Adds weight. What gets me is the design philosophy. Most shooters are pure reflex games. This is about understanding mass. How a heavy thing moves. How your strategy changes when you’re piloting something massive versus running solo. There’s real theater in that. Games that understand bigness appeal to me. The way scale transforms strategy. A Titan is slow but devastating. A pilot is fast but fragile. The whole thing shifts. Most games miss it. Haven’t played it yet, but I’m curious. That’s what pulls me. Not the shooting, but the piloting. The mechanics of being something heavy. Saturday, 3 December 2016. Body Without Apology: So there’s a model named Melina DiMarco from New York who shoots nude, and she treats it like it’s not a big deal. Not provocatively, not as transgression—just as fact. Her body, documented, no apology attached. The photographer is Atisha Paulson, and the work ran in Yume, an Australian fashion magazine. What’s interesting is that this should be unremarkable by now. Photography has had a century to work through nakedness as a formal subject. But it still reads as a statement, which probably says more about the rest of us than it does about her. She talks about the body as art, which is the obvious language for it. And I think that’s genuine on her part—not a defensive reframing, but an actual observation. The human form has proportions and lines. Light falls across it in specific ways. There’s material there to work with. The fact that we’ve wrapped so much shame around it doesn’t change what’s actually there. I was looking at some Helmut Newton once, and someone asked if it was exploitation. Which is a real question with photography and the body. But Newton’s answer was basically: I’m documenting what’s there. The woman is there, she agreed to be there, I’m making a record. What you feel about that is your problem. I’m not sure that’s totally fair, but there’s something honest in refusing to apologize for the subject itself. Melina seems to come from a similar place. Just clear about what she’s doing. The photographs probably aren’t for everyone. But they’re probably not meant to be. They’re for people who can look at a body and see a body, without the cultural noise on top. Saturday, 3 December 2016. Suing for Information: Germany has a Freedom of Information Act that in theory gives you the right to ask the government for anything. No reason required, no explanation needed. The catch is that agencies deny requests constantly, and the only way to push back is to sue them. Actually sue. Your government. Over a document you’re asking for. The numbers are bleak. In 2015, there were about 10,000 requests to federal agencies. Eleven ended in successful lawsuits. There’s an organization called Transparenzklagen backed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. They fund these cases if they matter strategically—weight beyond just one person wanting access to their document. Journalists, activists, whoever. If it’s worth fighting. I find it genuinely funny that you need a special org to exercise a right the law already grants you. Not in an absurdist way that’s clever. Just—the design is broken. The system theoretically gives you something, then makes it practically impossible to get without outside help. Which is the same as not giving it to you, just with a better cover story. Saturday, 3 December 2016. Unfinished Business: Joel shoots a surgeon in a hospital and lies to Ellie about what he’s done. Maybe he saves her. Maybe he condemns humanity. The Last of Us never tells you which—it ends before you have to decide. That uncertainty felt earned and final. When the sequel was announced, I had mixed feelings. The first game had said what it needed to say. It had explored morality and survival and what you’ll sacrifice for the people you love. Another chapter seemed redundant, or worse—the franchise mode where a perfect story gets inflated into product. But Neil Druckmann’s explanation changed my mind. He said this wasn’t going to be about extending something already finished. It was about finding a story that mattered, one that actually served the characters rather than just trading on them. He wasn’t promising spectacle. Just that it felt necessary. That shifted something for me. There’s something about returning to a world that changed how you think. You know the landscape. You know the weight. It’s not curiosity about plot—it’s knowing there’s still something in those people you didn’t fully understand. Saturday, 3 December 2016. The Classics: Unboxing a new pair of sneakers hits different. That smell, the tissue paper, the weight of them in your hands—you open the box and there they are, perfectly laced, ready to go. Reebok’s Classic Leather in this new pearlescent finish comes in five colors: black, rose gold, turquoise, white, and champagne. The shimmer is the whole point—it catches the light without being obnoxious about it. The leather’s soft, genuine, and the shoe sits right on your foot in that way that makes you understand why some designs stick around for decades. Reebok became a legend in the mid-80s when they got into fitness and aerobics and suddenly there was this whole culture around the shoes. They were built for movement but they looked good enough to wear anywhere, which was probably the real revelation. A shoe that didn’t have to apologize for being a workout shoe, that worked just as well on a city street. That’s rare. I’ve worn a lot of different Reeboks over the years. There’s something about the simplicity of the Classic that keeps it from getting tired. The pearlescent version feels a little fancier than the standard leather, which is funny because all it is is a subtle finish. But that’s enough. That’s everything. Friday, 2 December 2016. The Cooling: You remember the moment it felt possible. Germany would handle this. The whole country rallied around the idea, and then it just didn’t hold. The optimism curdled into something else—resentment, resistance, the kind of political backlash that made everyone involved feel stupid for believing in the first place. I notice it walking around Berlin. The tension’s there if you’re paying attention. People from Syria, Afghanistan, elsewhere, trying to work and study and figure out how to live. But somewhere along the way the country decided they were the problem. Some of the refugees themselves have started saying maybe the borders should be shut. Hard to blame them for being bitter about it. The real story about integration is the one everyone avoids telling. It’s not tragic or inspiring. It’s just people coexisting badly, slowly, with no clear ending. Friction. Indifference on both sides now. That’s the actual texture of it. Friday, 2 December 2016. Potato Salad: There’s a German movie called Kartoffelsalat—potato salad—made by YouTubers and now free on YouTube. IMDb ranked it 25th worst film ever made, which is somehow both impressive and completely unsurprising. The plot: a virus turns schoolkids into flesh-eating things, and a handful of YouTubers are the only ones who can stop it. These are people who built careers on unboxing videos and prank streams. Now they’re trying to be action heroes in a feature film. You can imagine how well that works. What strikes me is that this actually got made. Actual money was raised. Studios said yes. People paid to sit in theaters for this. The cynicism is almost admirable—understand the algorithm, understand viral moments, make something, sell it. Don’t understand anything else. Just execute. Now it’s free, which removes the final barrier. You don’t have to pay anything. The only thing stopping you is knowing that sitting through it might hurt. Whether that’s worth it depends on how much you enjoy watching complete failure in real time. Friday, 2 December 2016. The Alola Games: I remember when Pokémon was playground business. Your Charizard against my Blastoise, and nothing else mattered. These new games arrive in a weird place—they matter to the same people who played Red and Blue twenty years ago, and there’s this quiet acceptance now that Pokémon is just part of who those people became. The Alola region shapes how these titles work. Instead of the standard gym circuit, you’re moving between islands completing trials for regional guardians called Kahunas. Same progression loop, different costume. More importantly, Pokémon themselves changed. The islands’ isolation created regional variants—a Vulpix that became ice-type, a Ninetales that picked up fairy. When you encounter these, there’s a beat of not quite recognizing them. Creatures you know, warped by environment into something only familiar if you already know what to look for. Everything else persists: collection, battles, the grinding to get strong enough for whatever final challenge awaits. But these games seem to understand their audience better than most sequels manage. They’re not trying to convince skeptics. They’re making new entries for people who loved the originals and never really stopped. That’s a better instinct than chasing reinvention. The whole thing gets to just be itself—a reason to keep playing when everything else shifted but somehow this didn’t. Thursday, 1 December 2016. The Quieter Kind of Gone: Şirin Manolya Sak left Turkey after two and a half years. She was a journalist, which in Erdoğan’s Turkey meant living with a specific kind of dread. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. You just carry it. After the coup attempt in July, the carrying got heavier. The regime didn’t bother with subtlety. Journalists got arrested. Activists vanished. The point wasn’t justice or even logic—it was teaching a lesson fast enough that people got the message before they had to experience it themselves. Once you know what happens to people who speak, you think before you post. You delete things. You keep your thoughts small. In Istanbul and Ankara, young people were running the calculation. They’d been raised thinking they could say what they wanted, and now they were learning that calculation had changed. Stay and be silent, or leave and be free. Not a lot of middle ground. So they started looking at exit routes. Germany became the natural choice. Not because it was exciting or because they were heroes, but because you can’t write anything real if you’re afraid of your own government. The strange part is how it stopped being dramatic. Exile used to be romantic, something from novels. Now it was just logistics. You finish school, check the visa requirements, book a flight. The saddest part isn’t even the leaving—it’s thinking about everyone who stayed and learned to keep their mouth shut. That’s a different kind of gone. Wednesday, 30 November 2016. Stussy Does the One Star: I’ve always liked that Converse and Stussy seem to understand something the same way. Both are rooted in California skate and surf culture, where how something looks is what it is. So when they put three Stussy graphics on the One Star ’74, it doesn’t feel like a collaboration so much as an obvious move. The One Star itself is quietly good—basketball shoe from the ’70s that skaters adopted because it was cheap and simple and looked right. No mythology, no brand story, just a shoe that worked. Stussy came up the same way. Shawn Stussy screaming that S onto everything, and it stuck because the eye was good. There’s a honesty in how both of them started. You end up with three Stussy graphics on the tongue, colored suede, black midsole keeping it lean. Stussy logo on the sole, nice laces, details that matter to people who care. The colors—Mauve Mist, Black, Hunter Green—aren’t trying to shout. They’re just right. The whole thing reads like two designers who understand the same world deciding to make something together without overcomplicating it. Which is pretty much what both brands have always been about—good design, quiet credibility. This shoe feels like the inevitable result of that philosophy meeting itself. Wednesday, 30 November 2016. Another Name: The internet’s best gift is letting you become someone else. You pick a name that isn’t your name, load some photos, and suddenly you’re a new person. No one’s waiting for you to be consistent. No one knows your real life. You just show what you want to show, and people respond or they don’t. Anonymity is permission. Post the version of yourself your real name would never post. Be the person who has fewer neighbors and relatives watching, fewer expectations, fewer reasons not to. Ten thousand strangers like your pictures and none of them know where you live or what your parents think. Just you, a fake identity, and the version of yourself that only breathes online. I’ve been around the internet long enough to know this isn’t new, but it’s never boring either. Everyone who does it is working out the same equation: who are you when nobody has to know who you are? The answer’s almost always: more yourself. Wednesday, 30 November 2016. On Hold: The xx’s video for “On Hold” is just people being young. Shirtless on couches, jumping in pools, dancing through the night. Moments that feel infinite while you’re in them, then years later you’re looking back. The song captures exactly what it feels like to miss that time while you’re still in it. There’s something about the way the track builds—minimal, insistent—that makes you feel the weight of it. Not sad, just aware. This kind of freedom, this lightness, doesn’t stick around and nobody bothers announcing when it’s gone. I watched this and kept thinking about what it actually felt like to be that young. Not just the obvious stuff—the drinking, the dancing, the kissing without thinking about it. But the texture of it. The specific way your body felt, how time moved, how much space everything seemed to have. Most people spend the rest of their lives trying to describe that moment and they’re always slightly wrong. The xx got it right. Tuesday, 29 November 2016. What Yoshi Knows: I found Yoshi one afternoon in the crush of Shibuya’s shopping streets, impossible to miss. Red coat, chains catching the light, a poncho that probably had a story behind it. Embroidered pants in bright colors, high heels, rings stacked on his fingers, red-dyed hair, a colorful sweater, a patched hood. Every piece competing for space in the crowd, no apologies. Tokyo people don’t apologize for color. You can dress like that, show up like that, and it’s just normal. Nobody treats you like you’ve made a mistake. Come October in Berlin, the city converts to black. The second the temperature drops, everyone retreats into the same uniform. Black coats, black pants, black shoes. The streets look like a funeral procession. Munich, Hamburg, same story. Autumn arrives and everybody agrees to disappear. I keep thinking about Yoshi and all those details. The more you look, the more you find—a ring you missed at first glance, an embroidery that only shows from certain angles. The casual confidence to layer all of that together and walk out the door. That’s the real difference. In Tokyo, color in autumn is normal. In Berlin, it’s a statement, which means someone will judge it, which means most people don’t bother. They just dress for the cold like everyone else. Practical. Safe. I understand the logic. But Yoshi had figured out something: you can be alive in October, or you can be invisible. He chose alive. Tuesday, 29 November 2016. Fairknallt: Marie Nasemann threw a launch party for her new blog in Hamburg, two hundred people at Goldmarie in St. Pauli. She’s been a model and actress, which means there was already an audience, but that kind of turnout suggests the actual subject hit something real. The blog, Fairknallt, is about fair trade fashion, sustainable design, organic beauty—easy enough to fake for followers, but the reason she started it sounded genuine. She got tired of shopping. The discomfort of walking through regular stores, knowing exactly where the cheap clothes come from and what that means for people making them, became intolerable. That’s what interested me. Not the moral position itself, but that moment when you realize you’ve seen something and can’t unsee it. Once the system becomes visible, continuing to participate in it exactly the same way becomes impossible. So you change. Or you start documenting how to do it differently. Or both. Anyone who works in design knows this friction. You can’t build things without understanding how they’re made and at what cost. You either accept the compromise or you figure out a different approach. There’s no comfortable middle ground once you look too closely. Tuesday, 29 November 2016. Scott Park’s Star Wars Ships: Scott Park draws spaceships. The Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, the V-Wing—all those vessels from Star Wars rendered clean and precise in black space. He’s a Creative Director and Illustrator from Toronto, and he’s spent years pulling from the pop culture he loves: Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future. Star Wars is his current focus. There’s something about spacecraft on the page that works better than on screen. You can actually look at them. The design holds still. You see the proportions, the detailing, the way light sits on the hull. Park draws them cleanly—technical but never stiff, confident without trying. It’s the kind of work that makes you aware of how you were looking at these ships before without really seeing them. Star Wars design is good design. The proportions are satisfying, the silhouettes are instant, the details matter without cluttering everything. It makes sense that someone would want to illustrate them properly. What’s interesting is actually doing it well, which Park does. Not reinventing anything. Just showing you what the thing is, clearly rendered. I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at the Death Star. The technical approach somehow makes it more impressive, more solid—like you could actually understand how it holds together. Tuesday, 29 November 2016. Back to Stars Hollow: The thing about Gilmore Girls is the talking. Lorelai and Rory and Sookie firing off dialogue so fast you can barely catch it, references stacked inside references, people who actually want to be around each other. It’s network TV from the early 2000s, but it lives somewhere else—in those kitchen conversations that run until two in the morning. The show ran from 2000 to 2007, then Netflix brought back A Year in the Life and suddenly people were acting like they’d never left Stars Hollow. The setup is straightforward enough: a small Connecticut town, three women at the center, the pull between staying and leaving, ambition and loyalty tangled up together. Rory chasing journalism, Lorelai running the inn and making a mess of her personal life, Sookie being the kind of friend who never wavers. The dialogue demands your attention. The cultural references echo off each other. What it’s really about is that American ache—wanting something bigger, knowing it’ll hurt the people who hold you, leaving anyway and then coming back because they’re the only place that makes sense. The show doesn’t make it pretty or simple. It just watches it happen. The characters are smart and they mess up. The town is strange in specific ways. It adds up to something that feels like actual life. People are buying Funko figures of the characters, and I get it now. It’s just a small way of saying something that mattered to you is still there. Monday, 28 November 2016. How Super Mario World Really Works: I spent hours in front of the television playing Super Mario World. Dinosaur Land, Donut Plains, the Forest of Illusion—I moved through those worlds without thinking about how they actually worked. Jump, run, find the exit. Simple as that. Except it wasn’t simple. Underneath that colorful surface was an intricate system. Every enemy had rules for when and how it moved. Items were spawned by hidden random number generators. Lemmy’s castle had its own logic for which pipes spawned which enemies. None of it was visible, but you felt it happening. Retro Game Mechanics Explained released a video breaking all of this down. He gets into the RNG mechanics, probability tables, the algorithmic decisions firing every frame. It’s the kind of breakdown that rewires how you think about a game you’ve known forever. I realized watching it that I’d been playing with this intricate machine my whole life without noticing. All those hours in front of that TV, and I was only seeing the surface. The jump felt good. The enemies behaved in ways that seemed fair and unpredictable. The pacing worked. None of that was accidental. That’s what good design actually does—it hides itself. You don’t see the architecture because it works. You just know that something is right. The video reveals the engineering underneath, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You look at the game completely differently. Not with cynicism, but with real appreciation for the craftsmanship. Monday, 28 November 2016. Something With Media: A decade ago, “something with media” was what people said when they had no idea what they actually wanted. Your guidance counselor would nod. You’d nod. Nobody knew what the hell it meant. Now the industry is concrete enough that you can be specific. Game programmer. Motion graphics. VR development. UX research. Name the thing and there’s probably someone hiring for it. What’s interesting about magazines that document who’s building what and who’s hiring—Code+Design being one of them—is what they prove. The digital industry has an infrastructure now. You can read interviews with people who actually made it, companies explaining themselves, job listings with specific skills. Where there used to be a void, there’s a map. The magazine is free, which means it’s half ads. That’s usually annoying, but here the ads are the point. They show you where money actually flows, what companies need, what skills are in demand. If you’re trying to figure out whether this path is real, the ads answer it faster than any interview. They’re honest in a way interviews usually aren’t—companies are spending money to reach you, which means they’re actually hiring. What strikes me is how new this all is. Not so long ago, “media careers” existed in the abstract, something you aspired toward without knowing what you were aspiring to. Now you can hold a magazine in your hands and understand the actual landscape. Read how someone did it. Read what they learned. The specificity is the thing—not the magazine, but the fact that specificity exists at all. Monday, 28 November 2016. Plant Your Mac: There’s always an old Mac somewhere in someone’s apartment. Maybe an iMac from the 2000s, still taking up space on a shelf. Maybe a PowerBook you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away. You can’t use it anymore—the OS is stone-age by now, and nobody makes software for it—but it’s too real to just dump. Christophe Guinet figured out what to do with all those dead computers. He turns them into planters. Not ironically. Actually makes them nice. Plant Your Mac is the name of the project, and it works on anything: iMacs, Mac Pros, PowerBooks, whatever shell you’ve got. Gut the insides, add soil, grow something through the screen. A plant pushes out where the monitor used to be. The thing is, Guinet doesn’t just do this. His whole practice is about nature and design colliding in weird ways. He builds installations where cars become trees. Designs logos out of grass. Works with living things as a medium the way a painter works with paint. It shouldn’t be cute enough to actually work, but it is. I think what I like about it is how backward it is compared to what designers usually do. Most design is about acceleration—making things faster, sleeker, more efficient, better at doing what they’re supposed to do. Guinet’s looking at dead technology and asking a dumb question: what if we just let nature have it? What if decay is the point, not the enemy? A dead Mac covered in moss and vines and wildflowers isn’t e-waste anymore. It’s something you want to look at. Something that’s actually more interesting than the computer ever was. Which is strange because the computer was designed to be beautiful—that was the whole thing with Apple, right? But the plant is more beautiful. The plant just doesn’t care about design. Monday, 28 November 2016. Reverse Engineering Yourself: Marimar Hollenbach studied environmental science, hated it, so she taught herself design, then web development, then coding. It’s like she was reverse-engineering her own competence, stacking skills until something stuck. She found a mentor who believed in her work. Now she builds things as a creative developer in Berlin. That’s not an unusual path in the city’s media world. Anne Gradler and Timo Josten have their own versions—people who backed into their careers sideways, figuring it out in pieces instead of following a map. Berlin’s media industry is crowded and it doesn’t tolerate naiveté. What strikes me about these stories is that the people who survive it are usually the ones who stay in the game long enough to get good. Marimar’s actual advice—stay active in the community, learn the tools, talk to people doing real work—sounds obvious until you realize that’s just how she got here. Not because it’s in some manual. Because that’s what worked for her. There’s something grounding about watching someone describe their actual path instead of coaching you on the mythical idea of “breaking into creative industries.” It’s just Marimar teaching herself code late at night, or Anne learning whatever she needed to run a campaign. People becoming capable of things they didn’t expect to learn. The community part matters—finding someone who believes in you definitely changes things. But mostly it’s momentum. Stay visible, stay learning, stay around long enough that luck recognizes you when it shows up. Friday, 25 November 2016. Last Night in Hollywood: David Collier had one night left in Los Angeles when he matched with Andrea Villarroel Lua on Instagram. They met and shot that evening—Hollywood Boulevard first, then his apartment after dark. Andrea works as a fashion journalist and stylist, builds everything around vintage clothes and analog film. She actually cares, which you can feel in the work. Meeting a stranger and deciding to shoot the same night puts you in a particular headspace. Whatever taste you have in clothes, whatever taste you have in light—it all shows. Hollywood Boulevard gives you what you expect, all that reliable neon, but the apartment afterward is different. That’s where something actually happens. A two-week tour ending in a stranger’s apartment with a camera is exactly how it should go. Friday, 25 November 2016. Shelter: FYE and FENNEK met on one of those nights where everything’s too loose and suddenly you’re making a commitment. She surfs, photographs, sings—part of Velvet, this loose artist collective. He’s been producing for twelve years, the quiet type who makes things better. Together they don’t sound like anyone particular, though The Knife and Air are probably in there somewhere. The song came from a road trip through California. FYE was shooting and surfing with Velvet, living that untethered life the coast makes possible. The landscape is in the lyrics. “Through the wild wood and the windy dust.” You hear where it came from immediately. They made the video themselves. FYE shot it. Beach scenes, waves, all that golden light but filtered through melancholy—not the California of travel guides. More like memory. Beautiful and strange and slightly wrong, the way it can be when you actually live somewhere instead of just passing through. What strikes me is how uncommercial this feels. No machinery behind it. Two people who met right and made something without letting anyone else touch it. That’s becoming a rarer thing. Friday, 25 November 2016. Berlin’s Creative Machine: Every year, young people from all over the world land in Berlin to do “something with media.” They start as unpaid or barely-paid interns at whatever agency takes them—PR firms, ad shops, design places. If they’re lucky, they eventually get promoted to junior something. That’s when things get serious. The pattern never changes. You start at an agency, work through nights and weekends and whatever depression comes with them. By your mid-thirties you’ve run into something that doesn’t bounce back. Everyone talks about the same exit: going freelance. The people who made it out will tell you it saved them. So you try it too. Deutsche Welle made a documentary about Berlin’s creative workers—following the sound agency Kling Klang and others—tracking how people actually navigate this oversaturated, collapsing market. It’s called “Passion & Profit,” part of their Made in Germany series. The title says what no one wants to admit: you can’t have both. Berlin’s creative scene promises everything. What it actually delivers is fatigue. The city is cheap. It feels alive. Everyone’s working on something interesting. So you stay. You stay through unpaid gigs, impossible deadlines, the months when there’s no work and you’re eating bread. You stay because leaving feels like failure, because part of you still thinks the next thing will be different. Thursday, 24 November 2016. Real Ting: “Real Ting” hits and you know something’s shifted. Stefflon Don came out of London with this sharp, confident energy that made everything else in hip-hop at the time feel slightly wrong. She looked like she’d absorbed Nicki, Lil’ Kim, Rihanna, and Missy Elliott into something of her own, but the visual shorthand didn’t prepare you for what she could actually do on a track. Her debut mixtape, also called “Real Ting,” moved fast. People who knew what they were listening to dropped her name—Section Boys, Angel, Lethal Bizzle, Dutch MC Cho. She’d moved through Birmingham and Rotterdam, impressed people like Jeremih and Tremz. This wasn’t manufactured hype. The lyrics came tight and immediate. Gold teeth catching light. The physical presence was hypnotic too—the way she moved through a track, the obvious intelligence underneath it all. The kind of artist who makes you want to follow where she’s heading. By the time she was running things at Jazz Café in London, it was obvious this wasn’t a moment. This was the beginning of something that was going to matter. Thursday, 24 November 2016. Made for Love: “I get paid so he’s not alone.” That’s Juju, opening SXTN’s new track, and it cuts straight to the core. Two rappers from Berlin, Nura and Juju, and Made 4 Love is probably the only anthem Germany’s underground has actually made for sex workers. The FAZ interviewed them once and something stuck: “They don’t rap about being women who rap. They just rap.” Juju said when asked if the comments about her looks bothered her—it annoyed her more when people reduced her to her personality. They’re past the point of needing permission, and it shows in the music. The song itself is explicit about the transaction in a way you rarely hear. Juju describes the whole mechanics—the closeness he feels is his, from her side it’s just work. His moans in her ear while they’re fucking, salt from his sweat on her lips. He goes down on her, on her chest, keeps going until he comes inside her. Clinical and horny at the same time, which is exactly the point. What makes it work is that they’re not making a political statement. Not trying to make you sympathize or uncomfortable or enlightened. Just describing the reality of it, in language as crude as the situation actually is. No softening, no metaphor, no apology. I don’t know what comes next for SXTN. They appeared in the Berlin scene like they didn’t ask permission, and this song feels like the moment it became impossible to ignore. Hard, unambiguous, and not caring if you’re listening. Thursday, 24 November 2016. Taking Up Space: Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt make you pay attention. Not because they’re performing—they’re doing the opposite. They take up space without apologizing for it, and that’s the kind of confidence that stops you in your tracks. Icona Pop embody something rare: female power without any of the theater. No soft edges, no trying to make it palatable. Just two Swedish women who know exactly what they want and couldn’t care less whether you’re listening. They made “I Love It” years ago, which got beaten to death in advertisements until hearing it again feels like remembering a trauma. But they’re too good for that to stick. The song survives because they mean it. “Brightside” is their new track. It’s light and direct about girl friendship—not trying to make a statement, just acknowledging that this matters: having someone you don’t have to explain yourself to. The kind of clarity and simplicity that most artists would overcomplicate, and Icona Pop just… don’t. What hooks me is the refusal to perform. They make what they want without asking permission. You hear it everywhere—the ease, the certainty. That’s the whole thing. They don’t perform being women. They just are. And somehow that’s become the most riveting thing about them. Wednesday, 23 November 2016. Miley Without the Mouse: Miley Cyrus decided the best way to leave Hannah Montana behind was to show up completely naked in a magazine shoot. Terry Richardson photographed her for Candy, no softening, no art direction to hide behind—she’s just there without her clothes on, in scenarios that make it clear she doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. A cop uniform, leather, on her knees. Completely unbothered. What I find myself thinking about is how earnest it all is, weirdly. There’s no winking at the camera, no ’look at me being dangerous’ performance. It reads like someone who’s decided her body is hers to use however she wants and doesn’t need anyone’s permission or approval. The people who watched her grow up on Disney will have whatever reaction they’re going to have. I get why she’s done it—she’s erasing that image completely, replacing it with something that can’t be softened or made family-friendly. The pictures are crude and direct. Maybe that’s all there is to it. She’s stated her position: she’s not the girl you thought she was. You can look if you want, or don’t. The magazine exists, the images exist, and she’s moved on to the next thing. But there’s something I respect in the absolute lack of apology or performance around it all. Wednesday, 23 November 2016. The Future Looks Like Ads: Keiichi Matsuda made a short film called “Hyper Reality” that works on you in an uncomfortable way. He’s showing you a near-future where physical and virtual reality have completely merged into a single augmented landscape. The world without all the tech layered on is just an ordinary gray street—quiet, unremarkable, almost peaceful. Then the AR kicks in. Ads everywhere. Notifications stacking on surfaces. Gamified tasks demanding your attention at every angle. Your reality is hijacked. Every moment becomes a sales opportunity. Matsuda’s vision is about how VR, AR, wearables, the Internet of Things will let systems control every aspect of our lives. He’s not being dramatic about it. He’s just showing you the trajectory—where the incentives and the technology are actually pointing us. And the brutal part isn’t that the technology is evil or out of control. It’s that we’re walking toward this with our eyes open, choosing augmentation one notification at a time. What gets me about it is how plausible it all feels. Not a dystopian fever dream. Not some exaggerated warning. It just looks like an extrapolation of what’s already happening. The tech does what Matsuda shows, and I’m trained to accept the interruptions. And maybe that’s the real thing that scares me—not that the future is coming, but that we can see it coming and we’re reaching for it anyway. Wednesday, 23 November 2016. Dragon Radar: I spent hours on early Dragon Ball when I was young—just watching kids hunt for these magic orbs, with no real stakes, no world-ending threats. The show was small and strange and genuinely funny. Then it became something else. Z stretched everything out, tournaments went on for seasons, then you had the aliens, the time travel, and by GT it was just watching increasingly powerful versions of the same guy break things. I get why that worked for people. It didn’t work for me anymore. So when Dragon Ball hits 30 years and Japan starts pulling old merchandise out of the archives, one of the things they remake is Bulma’s radar. The tracking device. This handheld gadget that was just a plot device in the original show, but it’s real now, solid plastic, costs about a hundred euros, and actually exists in the world. The Pokémon GO craze wore off years ago—now it’s just people staring at their phones on street corners while nothing happens. But there’s something different about an actual object you can hold. The Dragon Radar doesn’t do anything real. You point it at the sky and it finds nothing because there are no magic balls to find. But that’s honest, somehow. It knows exactly what it is, and what you’re actually chasing when you buy it. Tuesday, 22 November 2016. The Last Party: Blumentopf played their final show on November 22 at the Zenith in Munich, a sold-out room for a band that spent three decades throwing parties better than most people’s careers. PULS documented the whole thing, which feels right for an ending like this. They started in 1992 as four rappers and a DJ: Cajus Heinzmann, Bernhard Wunderlich, Florian Schuster, Roger Manglus, and Sebastian Weiss. The first EP hit in 1996, the album in ’97, and after that it was just the work of staying alive. The music videos cycled through MTV and VIVA like clockwork, but the singles never climbed the way labels wanted them to. Roger explained it plainly once: “We’re an album band. We never sold singles well.” Not a complaint. Just the reality of being made for rooms full of people who actually wanted to hear the whole thing. German hip-hop in the nineties had its own gravity—weirder and less concerned with American approval than what was happening elsewhere. Blumentopf felt like guys who just wanted to make music for their friends, and for twenty-four years the friends never stopped showing up. Now it’s archived, documented, closed. There’s always something that ends and doesn’t come back, and the good ones always leave a particular kind of hole. Tuesday, 22 November 2016. The Pill Problem: The first time you have sex without a condom after using one for years, the difference is obvious. Better sensation, less friction, just better. So when someone you’re with decides to go on the pill, there’s this immediate relief. You don’t have to negotiate it. Everyone gets what they want—or everyone thinks they do. But the pill isn’t nothing. It’s a hormone you take daily, and depending on your body, it does real damage. Weight gain, mood crashes, depression, the fog where you can’t quite feel like yourself. Rare cases: blood clots, strokes. Doctors say it’s safe because the odds are low, which is true, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I’ve watched it happen. Not tragedy, just this slow transformation. A friend who went on it and felt off—not quite depressed but not quite herself either. Weight she couldn’t lose. A flatness to everything. And there’s this weird acceptance around it, like yeah, the pill does this, but at least the sex is good, so it’s worth it. Which, when you think about it plainly, is fucked up. There are alternatives. IUDs, condoms, pullout method, combinations. None of them feel as good or are as reliable, which is probably why nobody really uses them. We’ve just accepted the pill as this convenient standard, and nobody wants to think about what that convenience costs the person taking it. The benefit is obvious. The cost is slow and invisible. Tuesday, 22 November 2016. Osaka After Dark: I went to Osaka thinking it would be the warm-up before Tokyo, the appetizer. It turned out to be the meal. Everyone wants Tokyo—the lit-up sprawl, the Skytree, the weight of being at the center of things. But Osaka at night is different. The neon hits different when the streets are narrower, when you can actually see the light reflected in puddles and faces. I remember walking through Shinsaibashi late, the shopping streets still packed, pachinko parlors spilling sound into the alleys. The energy was less “look at me” and more “we’re all just here,” which somehow felt more human. The city’s known for comedy—Manzai, the fast-paced standup style where two comedians riff on each other. It’s a useful thing to remember when you’re wandering around and everything feels slightly absurd: the vending machines, the tiny restaurants squeezed between taller buildings, the way people move through space with this practiced efficiency that looks like dance if you’re tired enough. Osaka’s always been Japan’s trading heart, the practical center, and you feel that. It’s not trying to impress you. It’s just doing its thing. The food is why people mention Osaka, and they’re right. The eating culture is different—rougher, more direct, less ceremony. But what got me was the small stuff: stumbling into a hole-in-the-wall at 11 PM, the owner barely acknowledging me, just setting down a bowl. The kind of place that exists for locals, not tourists. When you’re out at night in a city like that, wandering without a plan, you start to understand why people stay. It’s not the sights. It’s the feeling of being inside something that doesn’t care whether you understand it. Tokyo’s a capital. Osaka’s a city that happens to be beautiful when the sun goes down. Tuesday, 22 November 2016. Still Hot: Takoyaki hits different when it’s still hot. The outside’s fried to a blistering crisp, nearly burnt in spots, and inside it’s soft—almost molten. You bite in and it’s too hot but you don’t care; you burn the roof of your mouth because waiting feels impossible. Bonito flakes curl in the steam. Mayo and that thick, almost sweet sauce pooling on top. You eat these standing up, usually with a toothpick, moving fast. I watched a video once of some food site visiting Otafuku in New York, the famous takoyaki place. One of those kitchen-porn shoots where they show you exactly how it’s made—the batter, the timing, the flip. It looked exactly right, like someone who’d thought about this thing for years and found the answer. I’ve never been, but it’s the kind of place that makes you crave takoyaki right now, which isn’t hard to do anyway. In Japan these are everywhere on festival grounds. Six balls in a cup, pulled from the pan while they’re still sizzling. That’s the only real way to eat them—at a street stall, probably drunk or heading somewhere, just grabbing something fast. Cold takoyaki is pointless. Even lukewarm misses the whole thing. You need that heat and that texture contrast while it still counts. All it takes is octopus and batter and timing. But there’s something about that combination, the specificity of it—it has to be exactly hot and exactly crispy or you’ve ruined the experience. That kind of simplicity actually demands a lot of attention. Otafuku probably understands that. Monday, 21 November 2016. All White: There’s something about all-white fits in Harajuku. I spotted Kim at one of the side crossings—not the famous intersection from the photo essays, but far enough in that the crowd spread out enough to actually see faces. White fluffy boots, white pullover, white pearl necklace, then a Nike shirt with yellow accents that cut right through. Black hair making it work. I’ve never understood why Harajuku, packed with underground designers and actual Japanese brands, fills with kids in Nike and Adidas. The bigger the logo the better. There’s something honest about it—a way to signal you’re plugged into something global without thinking. The opposite of the boutique hunt. What struck me about Kim’s outfit was how unconstructed it felt. Not assembled, just grabbed that morning. The white made the yellow Nike land harder than it should. That’s the difference I see in street style—people thinking about being seen versus people living in their clothes. Monday, 21 November 2016. Killing Tegel: Tegel was closing. After decades as Berlin’s main airport, it was scheduled to shut down once BER opened. The only thing that actually made it good was that it existed within the city. You could get there in twenty minutes on a single transit ticket—A and B sections, no surcharge, no long journey to the edge of civilization. That’s rarer than it should be. Most major cities have multiple airports because one location isn’t enough, and because redundancy matters when things go wrong. Berlin was doing the opposite—consolidating everything into BER, a massive project south of the city that had already become famous for catastrophic mismanagement. The plan was to kill Tegel and make everyone dependent on one airport. People wanted to keep both airports running, which made obvious sense. Tegel made money every year. The arguments were solid: redundancy matters, proximity matters, a city shouldn’t strangle itself for the sake of modernization. But it was always going to close. These are decisions governments make after long meetings about progress and efficiency—decisions that look brilliant on paper until you’re actually trying to get somewhere and it takes twice as long. I didn’t fly from Tegel much, but I understood why people fought for it. It was a small thing—the ability to leave your apartment and be at the gate before your coffee got cold. The efficiency wasn’t romantic, but it mattered. It was infrastructure that worked so well you barely noticed it. Then it was gone, and suddenly everything was harder, and you realized what you’d been taking for granted. Tegel closed. BER eventually became functional, sort of. The city moved on. Most people forgot there was ever another option. The practical gets invisible until it disappears, and the new becomes inevitable, even when the new is clearly worse. That’s how infrastructure works in cities. Monday, 21 November 2016. Dreamin’: Adi Ulmansky. That name already sounds cool. She keeps it short to just Adi anyway, which is the right call. Guarantee some German athletic brand is already trying to figure out how to collab with her, inevitable really, but that’s beside the point. Her new song is “Dreamin’.” It’s about the stuff people usually won’t talk about—depression, the meds that come with it, all those fragile and raw and honest things. She does it without losing the bite, keeps the sarcasm and humor woven through it, lets it all sit together without contradiction. What gets me is that she’s visibly perpetually high, and it just doesn’t read as a problem or a contradiction. If anything, the drugs are clearly helping her make better music. Which isn’t news—we’ve known that forever—but apparently it’s still worth saying. Monday, 21 November 2016. Will.i.am’s Buttons: Went to a will.i.am headphone launch at the Voo Store in Berlin. Influencers and models, Kendall Jenner didn’t make it. Will.i.am’s actually into technology—he’s been interested in it for years—so the whole product launch felt less hollow than it usually does. Sunday, 20 November 2016. Bored Stiff: Sarah Nicole Harvey makes self-portraits in Toronto. She’s been working as a model for a few years—bridal campaigns, beauty shoots, magazine placements, the professional circuit—but the work that actually matters is what she does alone, with her own camera and no one else’s direction. She made a series called “Bored Stiff.” The concept is simple and direct: coffee, cigarette, undressed, tired. She points the camera at herself when she’s feeling restless and bored, documenting that actual feeling instead of performing something better. That’s the whole project. There’s something honest in it. Most self-portraits you see are people trying to look good—either aspirational or consciously artistic or both. Sarah’s just tired and unwilling to fake anything. The cigarette and coffee aren’t styled props; they’re what you actually do when you’re alone and restless. It’s the only way to photograph yourself that doesn’t look like a performance. I recognize that energy. Everyone on Instagram looks like they’re having a good time. Everyone in the professional photos is lit perfectly and smiling. The only way to make an image of yourself that feels true is to stop caring if it looks flattering. Document the boredom instead of selling the happiness. That’s the move. Sunday, 20 November 2016. Lollyphile: When Chupa Chups came out with the tongue-staining gimmick, I was totally into them. The colors—bright industrial blues and greens—would stain your mouth black, which felt dangerous in a ridiculous kid way. But the flavors were just standard candy. Apple. Strawberry. Nothing unexpected. I found out about Lollyphile a while back, this company in San Francisco making lollipops that taste like pizza and beer and breastmilk. The breastmilk one is genuinely strange, but I respect what they’re doing. They decided candy didn’t have to stay cute and innocent. The full lineup is wild. Chocolate bacon. Cornflakes. Green tea. Sriracha. Mojito. Wasabi. Eight bucks each. You only buy them if you actually want to know what pizza lollipop tastes like. Not for the joke of it. Just to know. Using candy as an excuse to taste combinations that shouldn’t go together. Wasabi and sugar. Bacon and chocolate. It shouldn’t work but it does. Sunday, 20 November 2016. One Song Each: They gathered at Gretchen one night with a simple constraint: each DJ plays one song. Just one. It sounds small, almost pointless, until you realize what it actually forces. Most of the time DJing is about building something—layering tracks, creating momentum, pulling people through a journey. You have all night. But take that away and suddenly everyone’s in the same position. A legend gets sixty seconds, same as someone nobody’s heard of. One track to say something. No elaborate setup, no second chance at getting it right. Just: here’s what I love. The lineup was a mix: Nina Hagen, Palina Rojinski, Markus Kavka, DJ Hell, Oliver Koletzki, and dozens of others from every corner of the Berlin scene. Techno lifers next to mainstream personalities, people you’d never expect on the same bill. That’s Berlin—no hierarchy, just a lot of different voices wanting to say something at the same moment. The whole thing was either going to be transcendent or a total slog. A hundred songs, a hundred visions, no connective tissue between them. Could work. Could fall apart. But it’s a thought worth having—that maybe you learn something true about what someone loves when you strip away the scaffolding and they have to choose just one track. When they can’t hide. When it’s real. Friday, 18 November 2016. Borrowed Openly: Nike took five existing shoes and synthesized them into the LunarCharge. The neopren upper borrowed from the Air Flow, the bootie shape from the Presto, the lacing from the Air Max 90, the silhouette from the Air Current. Plus their latest Lunar running tech. On paper it sounds like a corporate spreadsheet, but the shoe actually comes together when you look at it. The thing sits in this strange in-between space—part running shoe, part lifestyle sneaker, fully neither and somehow both. The proportions are clean. That neopren material has a specific weight to it, a drape that keeps the whole thing from feeling oversized. When a shoe pulls this hard from five different references it usually reads as confused, like a committee couldn’t decide. This one has some kind of coherence to it. What I actually like is that it doesn’t hide what it’s pulling from. The Presto bootie is legible, the Air Max 90 lacing is right there, the Current profile is visible in the shape. It’s not trying to synthesize these things into some new unified language. It’s just being honest about what it’s borrowing and how it’s assembled. Most contemporary Nikes feel like they’re hiding something. This one doesn’t pretend. I don’t know if I’d actually wear it, but there’s something refreshing about the design thinking being this clear. It feels like someone made an actual choice. Friday, 18 November 2016. The 350 V2: The Yeezy Boost 350 V2 dropped in three black colorways that November—copper stripe, green stripe, red stripe—and everyone wanted them. By then the original 350 had already become something real, something Kanye designed rather than just slapped his name on. The V2 refined it: Primeknit upper, Boost sole, a ribbed rubber outsole that looked like contour lines on a map, the SPLY-350 lettering running down as a code that started as an inside reference and became an outside symbol. I’m not sure it was beautiful. Severe, maybe. The kind of minimal that reads as luxury even when it’s mass-manufactured and available everywhere, which destroyed the mystique before it could really settle. The original 350 felt like something you hunted for. The V2 just existed, inevitable as a style. This was the moment Kanye finished moving into pure design. He wasn’t a musician making sneakers anymore—he was a designer who made music as a side thing. The energy translated: ambitious, dense, sometimes at odds with itself, but completely there. I never owned a pair. They looked right but fit wrong—the Boost sole stiff, the upper narrow where it needed to breathe. By the time I tried them on, whatever cultural gravity had surrounded them had already shifted. I was looking from outside, which probably felt right. Looking back, the 350 V2 sits at a strange peak. Not his peak of influence, but a peak of a certain kind of inevitability. The shoes are everywhere. Nobody thinks about them anymore. Friday, 18 November 2016. Eva Doesn’t Change: The box arrived Monday afternoon in December. June Korea opened it with shaking hands. Eva was inside—still in parts—and he assembled her carefully, gave her a name, started taking her everywhere. Restaurants, parks, bed. Ten thousand dollars for a woman who would never age, never leave, never surprise him. A salesman had told him the pitch: “She won’t leave. She won’t die. She’ll always look exactly like this.” That’s all the promise. Not love. Not even companionship, really. Just permanence. Most people get lonely and do something about it quietly. June did this instead, and then photographed it, which somehow made it more serious—not an art-school thing but something rawer. Eva will outlive him. He bought that. He keeps buying it, every time he comes home. There’s something almost unbearably honest about it. Not the transaction itself, but his willingness to be public about being this lonely. Everyone feels this sometimes. Everyone. But we usually hide it until we forget we’re hiding it. He didn’t. He brought Eva to dinner. In the end Eva wins. She’s built for it. He isn’t. She’ll still be beautiful and unchanging when he’s gone, still be there, still be impossible to explain. But for a while they were together, and he made it mean something by refusing to pretend it was anything other than what it was. That’s all any of us really do anyway—try to prove that we existed, try to turn loneliness into something that looks like a life. Thursday, 17 November 2016. The 505 Never Left: The 505’s been around since 1967. That’s long enough to watch the Summer of Love unfold and then outlast most of the people who were actually there. By the seventies, it had already moved from counterculture artifact into punk uniform—Debbie Harry wore them, the Ramones wore them, and suddenly a pair of Levi’s became the thing you wore if you mattered. They still look the same now, which might be why they still work. There was some big launch party for the new 505C at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan a while back. The usual suspects showed up—Debbie Harry, Zoë Kravitz, and others who don’t need to prove anything by wearing the right jeans because they’re the ones who define what the right jeans are. The whole thing probably looked exactly like you’d expect: a room full of cool people making official what’s already obvious. Debbie Harry said something at the party that stuck with me. “Blue jeans have always stood for America,” she said. “When the wall came down and the Eastern Bloc fell apart, all those kids wanted was blue jeans.” There’s the whole Cold War wrapped up in that observation—the 505 as American export, as freedom, as something so simple and so loaded at the same time. A pair of jeans that people risked everything to get. I still don’t know what makes a garment stay relevant for nearly fifty years. Trends cycle out. Styles get corrupted and abandoned. But the 505 just stayed what it was meant to be—not a reference, not a statement, just the blue jeans that work and that mean something because the right people have always worn them. Maybe that’s the whole thing right there. Thursday, 17 November 2016. Drum: MØ’s hot. That’s not news and it’s not the whole picture, but it’s the first thing you notice. She’s got the kind of presence that fills whatever space she’s in—not because she’s trying, but because she just doesn’t fit anywhere else. When she started performing, the temperature changed in every room she walked into. “Drum” is her new track, and the video is a road trip. Just her, a couple of guys, the open road, that feeling of pure motion with nowhere specific to go. Windows down, freedom, all of it. It’s the fantasy that every road trip song tries to sell, but most of them get wrong. She doesn’t. The song itself is hypnotic in a way that sneaks up on you. First listen, it doesn’t announce anything. Second listen, you’re starting to hear it. Third listen, it’s the only thing in your head. Most pop songs are designed to grab you immediately, but “Drum” doesn’t play that game. It moves at its own pace and assumes you’re smart enough to catch up. There’s something smart about the way MØ exists between pop and something weirder, something that doesn’t care about lanes or categories. “Drum” is entirely that. It’s a song about motion and leaving, about that specific hollow feeling of wanting to escape that’s half-real and half-pure fantasy. You know it won’t fix anything, but you listen anyway because the feeling is good. The video captures it perfectly. Just people driving, and that’s enough. MØ in the center of it all, calm and certain, like she’s already figured out something the rest of us are still working on. That’s the real thing here. Thursday, 17 November 2016. Cats in Space: I found these t-shirts on Kai-You, a Japanese site that traffics in exactly the kind of novelty design that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Cats in space. Cats on pizza. Cats exploding in front of impossible fireballs. Not clever. Not trying to be clever. Just pure, unfiltered absurdism on a t-shirt. There’s something I appreciate about design that commits fully to its own stupidity. Most shirts are trying to communicate something, hit a demographic, establish taste or identity. These just wanted a cat and some chaos. A burning unicorn vomiting rainbows with a cat riding it. Not a metaphor, not a joke you have to understand—just the image, fully rendered, fully sincere. Your life is probably boring in that specific gray way where nothing’s catastrophically wrong but nothing’s right either. I’m not going to sell you on the idea that a novelty t-shirt fixes that. But there’s something almost respectful about merchandise that exists purely to be absurd, no apologies, no winking. Just a designer, a printer, and a commitment to cats in the worst possible circumstances. The internet has broken the economics of production. You can now manufacture literally anything for almost nothing, and somewhere, someone will want it. Someone designed every one of these shirts. Spent time on it. Thought about a cat on a rocket. Thought about fire. Put them together. And now it exists. The sheer pointless dedication to novelty feels like its own kind of authenticity in a world of calculated appeals. Wednesday, 16 November 2016. Old Clothes: Most of what people wear now comes from three sources—the same creators, the same algorithm, the same warehouses. After a certain age you want something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s attempt at looking everyone else. Reclaimed Vintage does the simple thing: it reaches backward. 60s prints, 70s cuts, 90s slouch. The collection spans about sixty years of actual style—pieces that meant something to someone, not trends manufactured to fill shelf space. What works is that it doesn’t feel like costume. These pieces breathe like things someone wore, not a designer’s simulation of age. Real oversized prints on the shirts, wide-leg pants cut to proper proportions instead of some modern reference to them. It reads as retro now only because actual design stopped somewhere around 2008. I’ve collected vintage pieces for years—not as a declared aesthetic, just because older pieces are cut differently, built differently, fit different bodies. They were made when there was still room for variation in how a man could dress without it being a statement. Now everything’s locked down so tight that wearing a 70s shirt reads as a choice, which defeats the whole point. The thing is, it just exists and you like it. But if you want to dress like something other than the person next to you, this is an actual shortcut. No algorithm, no influencer mythology. Just old ideas about what works. Sometimes that’s enough. Wednesday, 16 November 2016. Christmas, Consumed: Something that happens every December: the department stores get crowded around 3 PM, people looking panicked, kids crying, someone’s mother-in-law trying on the same sweater in three colors. I used to go to one of these places on December 23rd, thinking I could pick up whatever was left, and it was always chaos—people shouting at their kids, the checkout lines snaking through the toy section, everyone moving like they’re the only one in the store. You’d think by now we’d know better. Christmas is supposed to be a moment to step back from all of it. A week where you’re not supposed to be going anywhere, where time is supposed to slow down, where you can actually sit with the people who matter and not be thinking about your email. That’s the idea anyway. In practice it’s the opposite: more running around, more buying, more decorating, more cooking, more wrapping, more noise. The whole machine just accelerates. I think somewhere along the way we decided that the size of the gift pile proves that you care. That a Christmas dinner has to be elaborate and stressful to mean something. That if your house isn’t covered in lights and tinsel, you’re doing it wrong. None of that is true, but we act like it is. There’s something about the season that makes people lose their minds. You end up in these moments where your mother is stressed about chopping vegetables, your sister is stressed about finding the right present, your grandmother has already told the same story three times, and everyone’s wound so tight that nobody’s actually present for any of it. You’re all in the same room, but you’re all mentally somewhere else—at the next store, at the next task, at the next thing that has to be perfect. What if you just didn’t. What if you sat down with your sister instead of running to the mall. What if you told your mother she doesn’t need to cook like it’s a restaurant opening. What if you actually looked at your grandmother when she’s talking, instead of planning your escape. It sounds simple because it is. But somewhere we decided that presence wasn’t enough, that we had to prove our love through consumption and exhaustion. I’m not saying don’t give gifts or don’t cook or don’t decorate. I’m saying the point of all of it should be the time together, not the thing. And if the thing is getting in the way of the time, then you’ve already lost. That’s the part I always come back to. Wednesday, 16 November 2016. What a Shirt Said: The Orlando shooting happened in June 2016, and it was one of those moments where doing nothing felt obscene. Some designers—Fabian Hart and a few others—decided to make something instead. A T-shirt. It sounds small, maybe it was, but they put real thought into it. The shirt was tied to UNESCO’s International Day for Tolerance, which I’ll be honest, I’d never really given it much thought before. But the idea was simple: the German constitution says all people are equal, regardless of gender, origin, belief, sexuality. Print that principle on a shirt. Let people wear it if they wanted to. What surprised me was how direct the execution was. No charity angle, no donation model, no performance. Just a piece of clothing that meant something to the people who wore it. Fair-trade production, limited edition—the kind of details that suggest someone actually cared whether this should exist at all. I remember seeing photos of it on people with some platform—photographers, YouTubers, the usual names. They weren’t being told to wear it, exactly, but they did. You put something on your body, you’re saying something without having to speak. I never bought one, and I don’t know how many actually sold or what real impact any of it had. The specifics don’t matter much anymore. What I remember is someone trying to make something tangible in response to an atrocity. Not talking, not performing sadness—just designing a shirt and putting it out there. That kind of gesture stays with you. Wednesday, 16 November 2016. Still Showing Up: Masaharu Morimoto started cooking when he was eighteen and just never stopped. That was forty years ago. Born in Hiroshima, he could have been a baseball player—that was the dream—but an injury changed the trajectory and now he’s spent more time with a knife than most people spend at their jobs. What strikes me about Morimoto is his directness. No technique obscured in mystique, no cultural authenticity for the camera. He brought Japanese food to a western audience by refusing to soften it, which is backward from how most chefs operate. You don’t translate sushi. You just get very good at it and let people figure out why it matters. I think what catches people about someone who’s been doing the same thing for that long is that they stop trying. The ambition burns off after a few years and you’re left with craft, which is quieter. Morimoto doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone—not to his customers, not to critics, not to himself. He solved the problem decades ago. There’s a version of success where achieving what you wanted makes you hollow, where winning the game makes the game itself feel pointless. Morimoto isn’t that. He seems genuinely indifferent to the fame, which is probably why the fame never made him worse. He still shows up and does the work the same way he did when nobody cared. That’s rare enough that it’s worth noticing. The funny thing about pursuing mastery is that it doesn’t feel like climbing toward something anymore. It feels like standing still while everything else gets louder around you. Morimoto’s been there the whole time—same place, same hands, same knife angles. Everyone else just caught up. Tuesday, 15 November 2016. Sailor Moon Hit Different: Sailor Moon wasn’t the kind of show you watched and forgot about. It was the kind of thing that stuck in your head different, that rewired something. Usagi’s not noble. She’s lazy. She’d rather sleep than save the world. But she shows up anyway, which is what makes her strong—not because of any special power, but because she keeps doing it even when it’s hard. And then there’s Ami with her intelligence, Rei with her rage at injustice, Makoto with her strength, Minako with her confidence. Four completely different women who are all powerful, all complete. Not types. Not symbols. Just people. What mattered was that the show never once suggested being beautiful and being competent were in competition. Never made you choose between wanting to be desired and wanting to matter. Haruka and Michiru just existed as women who loved each other—no explanation, no big deal, just part of the world. That’s how you knew the show understood something true. For a lot of kids watching, that was the moment the box came apart. You could be more than one thing. You could want things that didn’t fit anyone’s narrative. Your sexuality didn’t have to be written the way people expected. The plot is there—monster, fight, romance—but that’s just mechanics. What you’re actually watching is people becoming themselves. It mattered more than I understood at the time. Still does, in ways I don’t fully have language for. Tuesday, 15 November 2016. Hipster Cartoons: Matt Lassen, an illustrator for MAD Magazine, decided to reimagine cartoon characters as hipsters. Bart Simpson with a man-bun and vintage frames. SpongeBob in thrift-store chic. The Smurfs as the kind of guys who’d spend three hours discussing single-origin coffee. By late 2016, hipster jokes were already stale—everyone had been making them for years, and the whole thing had aged into irrelevance. But Lassen went ahead anyway, probably because the premise was too good to waste. “I wanted to make a tribute to the cartoons I grew up with,” he explained. “I thought it would be funny to mix things I love with something I can’t stand: hipsters. They try so hard to be above everything that they basically become cartoon characters themselves.” He’s right. The hipster movement collapsed under its own self-consciousness. They were so committed to not being clichés that they became the most obvious clichés imaginable. There’s something genuinely funny about watching that energy applied to cartoons—taking characters that were simple and earnest and dressing them in irony until they’re unrecognizable. The cartoons I grew up with had a kind of stupid purity. SpongeBob didn’t wonder if his job was cool enough; he just loved it. Bart wasn’t performing punk rock; he was just being annoying. No self-consciousness, no careful curation of taste. But Lassen’s versions are wrong in a way that makes them funny. They’re trying to be something the originals never were, and failing in exactly the way a hipster would. It’s a simple joke, but it lands. Tuesday, 15 November 2016. Bad Nerd: Nerds used to be the worst thing you could be. Kids with allergies running the chess club and computer labs—they’re CEOs now. Someone’s probably a billionaire. They won, and everything shifted around them. What surprised me was the detail: you could actually be into that stuff and not look like you’d given up on yourself. You don’t need the vintage anime shirt with references only five people understand. You can care about games or code and still wear jeans that fit. For years, that wasn’t possible. You picked one or the other. I think what actually changed wasn’t that nerd stuff became cool, but that you could like it without the uniform. Back then, your appearance was how you proved your loyalty—dressed as evidence. If you were serious about computers or comics, you had to look like you didn’t care about looking like anything. It was insane, but that was the contract. Now you don’t. You can be into whatever you’re actually into and move through the world without broadcasting it in your clothes. Your interests don’t have to be visible in how you dress. That’s the freedom I notice. Small thing, maybe, but it changes something about how you exist. Tuesday, 15 November 2016. Fuck 2016: It’s November and 2016 still isn’t fucking over. You’d think by now it would be finished with us, but instead there’s something new every day. Another shock, another betrayal, another thing to learn to live with. Trump won. I keep thinking about that—not that he ran, but that enough people actually voted for him. And I watched women in my life realize in real time that none of it mattered. Nothing they’d believed in, nothing they’d been told, nothing they’d done. He won anyway. Then Prince died. Then Bowie. Then Rickman. The year didn’t just destroy the present; it was erasing the past too. John Oliver did this segment where he got people to just look at the camera and tell 2016 to fuck off. Celebrities, random people off the street, everyone just letting it out. There was this moment of collective relief, like we all needed permission to say it together. But it didn’t fix anything. It just proved we were all aware we were fucked and desperate for some kind of ritual to make it feel like we had control. By late November I wasn’t thinking about what comes next. I was just hoping nothing else would break before January, which was obviously a stupid thing to hope for. Monday, 14 November 2016. Quiet Design: A Bathing Ape, the Tokyo streetwear label that somehow managed to stay cool for thirty years, did what high-end designers occasionally do when they discover that video games exist: they made t-shirts. The collaboration was with Capcom, so we’re talking about actual franchises—Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Mega Man, Phoenix Wright, Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts. Not some random licensed grab. What struck me wasn’t the novelty of it. It’s that Bathing Ape treated these games with the same design attention they’d give to anything else. The shirts aren’t trying to be ironic or nostalgic or winking at some audience. They’re just nice. Clean graphics, good color choices, the kind of restraint that separates actual design from merch. You know the difference when you see it. I’ve been looking at video game apparel my whole life—the garbage t-shirt stands at conventions, the ironic ’80s references, the stuff that screams “I LIKE THIS THING” in the loudest way possible. This is different. It’s the work of people who understand that you can mention a game without spelling it out, without shouting it. Resident Evil, in particular, carries weight as a franchise. The iconography of those games is so strong that it doesn’t need help. Bathing Ape knew that. Same with Monster Hunter—that’s a game that understood character and visual design from the jump. Mega Man’s design legacy is basically untouchable. These aren’t properties that need saving or explaining. The collaboration felt less like “let’s make money off game fans” and more like “these games have design worth wearing.” There’s something about pairing high-end streetwear with these specific Capcom franchises. It’s a quiet statement that games, at least the ones worth playing, are culture now. Not emerging culture or “surprising” culture. Just culture. And if a brand like Bathing Ape is willing to stake their reputation on it, then maybe we stopped needing to justify why we care about these things. The thing about Tokyo brands is that they genuinely respect what they’re touching. That respect makes space for the subject to breathe. A game is still a game. A t-shirt is still a t-shirt. But when they meet at the right angle, something quiet happens. Monday, 14 November 2016. Kawaii Monster Café: You walk through a door in Harajuku and normal Tokyo evaporates. The salary men, the towers, the strangled subway cars—gone. Sebastian Masuda designed the Kawaii Monster Café, so the sweetness that replaces everything is completely intentional, which is somehow worse and better at the same time. Unicorns you can actually sit on. Pink cakes the size of actual furniture. Milk bottles the size of your head dangling from the ceiling. The place divides into zones—Sweets Go Round is the center, then Mushroom Disco, Milk Stand, Bar Experiment, Mel-Tea Room spinning off around it. Each one somehow more relentlessly cute than the last. The Monster Girls who work there fit the aesthetic perfectly, like they were built for the space rather than hired into it. Everything’s bright and crowded and aggressive about how much decoration it can sustain. There’s something honest about committing this completely to sweetness. No irony, no wink, no “isn’t this funny how cutesy it is.” Just maximum sugar in every direction. You can pretend it’s ridiculous—and it kind of is—but that misses what’s actually happening when someone decides to make their vision of beautiful without compromise. I stayed longer than planned. Shot photos I’ll never look at again. Ate something pink. The kind of place that feels like a mistake while you’re there and makes sense afterward. Monday, 14 November 2016. The BluèzZz…rn: POORGRRRL has this song called The BluèzZz…rn. It doesn’t look away. It’s about the heavy times—pills, grief, the kind of darkness that stops feeling temporary and becomes the actual shape of things. Nothing redemptive about it. Depression’s the baseline now anyway. Not just personal, but cultural. The fantasy of running through fields singing is dead. Everything’s medication, isolation, cats, crying yourself to sleep. That’s the default. Tara Long—POORGRRRL—isn’t here to save you from that. Her music exists in the exact space you’re in, looking at the exact same bleak landscape, not turning away but not drowning either. That weird space where despair and defiance are almost the same gesture. There’s no rescue narrative, no therapy angle, no inspiration. Just recognition. Someone else sees what you see from the same dark place. That shouldn’t matter much—it doesn’t change anything—but it does anyway. Sunday, 13 November 2016. And July: Most people in the West still think K-pop is something that started three years ago, or maybe they caught one song on the radio and thought that was the whole thing. But South Korea’s been running this entire parallel music industry for decades, and every year it gets bigger. The factories are insane—they take teenagers, train them for years, manufacture these perfect idols. You’d think it’d be soulless, but a lot of the music is actually good. Heize is one of the newer names in all this. She came up through a show called Unpretty Rapstar, which is exactly what it sounds like—a competition for rappers and singers, and the whole thing is unfiltered compared to what you’d see on American TV. She’s got this calm, knowing way of moving through a track, which matters more than people think when the production is this slick. The song that made me pay attention was called “And July,” which she did with DEAN and DJ Friz. It’s not hyperactive like a lot of K-pop is. There’s space in it. The beat’s got this chill, drifting feeling, and Heize’s voice sits right in the pocket without trying to impress you. One detail stuck with me from some interview—she named herself after a German word. I never found out which one, and maybe that’s fine. There’s something I like about that detail just floating there, untranslated. Pop culture travels in weird ways, picking up pieces from everywhere. A Korean artist named after German, making music with a producer who could be from anywhere, and somehow it gets to you because the songs are good. I don’t follow K-pop closely enough to have opinions about chart positions or industry drama. But when something’s well-made and doesn’t apologize for itself, it finds you eventually. That’s what happened here. Saturday, 12 November 2016. The Unwritten Rules: Everyone past 21 is basically dead on social media. You cross some invisible line and suddenly you’re not getting the memos anymore, doing everything wrong without realizing it. It’s all unwritten rules that everyone else just knows. I needed to understand the actual code, so I got it from some teenagers. Instagram food photos are finished—completely cringe now, which is wild because that’s literally what Instagram was for like five years ago. Snapchat Stories apparently need to hit this exact frequency where you’re visible enough to matter but not so much that you’re just screaming. Each platform has its own set of invisible rules, and I have no idea how anyone under 20 just absorbs this. It’s pure instinct, cultural knowledge you’re supposed to have if you didn’t graduate before these apps existed. There was one honest moment where a girl said she’d never send nudes, which is the right answer, but everyone knows that’s not what’s actually happening. The gap between the stated rule and what people do is maybe the only truthful part of any of this. I stopped trying to keep up a while ago. By the time you understand the rules, they’re different. You stay ahead of it or you become what people your age use as a cautionary tale. There’s no middle ground. Saturday, 12 November 2016. Plastic Orgastic: Pink everywhere—balloons, candles, this glibbering substance that shouldn’t work in photographs but somehow does. I found myself staring at Bruna Reis’s “Plastic Orgastic” for longer than I meant to. Reis is a Brazilian photographer, still young, already showing in Italian Vogue and Nakid. There’s discipline in her work even when the concept is excess. This shoot brought her together with Bruna Leal, an Instagram model with clear taste in objects—balloons, champagne, candles—and art director Juliana Rodrigues. What came out is aggressively feminine and sexual, pink and glossy and alive. I’ve seen plenty of pink-excess work online. Most of it feels like Instagram trying to seem deeper, which doesn’t land. This works because it commits. No irony, no self-awareness. Reis shoots it straight, and that’s why the sensuality actually hits. The body becomes sculptural against these objects—the balloons, the mess, the light. It refuses to apologize for being beautiful. There’s something in the Brazilian sensibility here, I think—a comfort with the body and desire that feels rarer in northern work. No shame layered on top. Just: here’s a beautiful body, here are objects that feel good, here’s what that looks like. I bookmarked it. I’ll probably look again. Saturday, 12 November 2016. Tiki Tabu: Theophilus London was performing at a party for Amuse, a Vice subsidiary, at Tiki Tabu on the Lower East Side. That was reason enough to pay attention. He was at that point where everything he made felt necessary, where you could feel him becoming something the moment couldn’t contain. The party had that mix of people you only saw together in New York at that exact time: Virgil Abloh, Paloma Elsesser, people making things and not worried about categories. Mia Moretti was DJing. A film was screening somewhere. I’m not sure I was actually there—might have just read about it somewhere and filled in the rest with assumption. What I know is the texture of those Lower East Side nights. A room with personality enough to feel like it mattered. People gathered around other people doing actual work, no strategy, just attention. That was the real luxury, before every moment became something to document and monetize. Theophilus London kept going. Some of his music found people who needed it. Some was him thinking out loud, working through ideas in public. But there was always something alive in it—the same electricity you’d feel when the right people had gathered in a room. Saturday, 12 November 2016. Something in the Water: Tom Grennan’s from Bedford. His voice has this weight to it that makes you listen without trying. Around the third song I realized I’d stopped thinking about anything else. “Something in the Water” doesn’t try to dazzle you. “Old Songs” doesn’t either. They just sit with you. Same with the Chase & Status collaboration on “All Goes Wrong”—confident without needing to announce it. He sounds older than he probably is, like he’s already lived what he’s singing. I’ve been listening to these for a couple weeks now. His voice settles into you. You can close your eyes and there’s nothing but him and the songs. No strain, nothing competing for space. That’s the rare thing. Friday, 11 November 2016. Out of the Van: Møme records from a van. Not metaphorically - an actual converted van he’s been driving around, mostly in Australia, making music between surf sessions. Jérémy Souillart is the name, but the van’s the fact that matters. This isn’t a lifestyle brand or a content angle. He genuinely lives this way. What gets me is that it’s working. Twenty million streams, charted in 30 countries. He’s making legitimate music from outside the normal system, not because he’s making a statement about it, but because he’s just not in it. He caught on to something: you don’t need permission to make art, and sometimes the best art comes from people who didn’t ask for one. His sound is sparse, patient - electronic music that doesn’t rush or try too hard to impress. You can hear the time in it, the breaks between sessions, the discipline required for both surfing and production. There’s no wasted motion. New track’s called “Alive.” The video is sun and water and endless driving - the language of someone who decided to live exactly the way they want. It’s not subtle about the freedom thing, and I respect that. Most people make art about the life they wish they had. Møme’s just living his. Friday, 11 November 2016. Mari: Harajuku’s thing is that everyone’s got style, or at least everyone’s trying. You see it everywhere—kids mixing the wildest colors and shapes, throwing stickers of anime and Disney characters all over themselves like they’re creating some kind of beautiful mess. There’s no restraint, just intensity. But then you see the other side. The ones who actually edit themselves. Who take all that same freedom and compress it into something tighter, more controlled. Not timid—just clear about what they want. Mari was like that. White jacket, green cap, a skirt with red roses across it. She had this sweet face but something determined in it too, like two separate moods working together. I shot her and immediately wanted to know more. Just something about the way she’d pulled herself together—the clarity, the confidence in the restraint. We didn’t get anywhere. Language got in the way. So what I have is the photograph. What she chose to wear that day, how she was standing. That’s the whole thing. Sometimes that’s all you catch, and it has to be enough. Friday, 11 November 2016. The Most Expensive Joint: 420 Science Club just made the world’s most expensive joint. I saw something about it in passing—a German YouTube channel that’s basically dedicated to documenting the experience of smoking increasingly elaborate weed products. I haven’t watched the video. Honestly I probably won’t. But the basic concept stuck with me in a way I can’t quite shake. There’s something about making something expensive and well-engineered specifically so you can film yourself consuming it. Like the real product isn’t the joint but the footage, the documentation. The joint is just an excuse. Getting high is what happens while you’re filming. I mean, cannabis culture has always been partly about showing off a little. What you have, what you know about it, the ritual of smoking. YouTube just made it shareable and repeatable and gave it an audience. 420 Science Club isn’t inventing anything new—they’re just being very literal about what was always implicit. But I keep coming back to this weird feeling that something fundamental shifts when you start documenting the experience instead of just living it. The high becomes content. Your own consciousness becomes a product to be packaged and shipped out to subscribers. I don’t know if that’s exhausting or just obvious, or if I’m overthinking it because it feels like something I should have an opinion about. Maybe I’m just getting old. Thursday, 10 November 2016. That Miley Video: The morning after Trump won, my feed filled with the usual grief—friends posting apocalypse memes, sharing dread in group chats, people trying to joke their way through genuine panic. Everyone was processing the same thing in the same way, which meant nobody was really processing it at all. Then Miley Cyrus posted a video. She was crying. Not performative tears for a camera—the kind of crying where your face gets red and your voice cracks and you stop trying to look okay. She was talking about walls and bridges and how we’d failed, how this was what it looked like when people gave up on each other. It was messy and earnest and completely unpackaged, which made it weird to watch. You don’t expect that kind of rawness from someone whose job is calculated image. I kept thinking about the gap between who she’s supposed to be—the Disney kid, the provocateur, the one who sticks her tongue out at cameras—and who was actually in that video. Just someone scared. Someone who’d built a whole identity around being larger than life, and now she couldn’t contain her face anymore. People were already making fun of her for it. The celebrity crying about politics, seeking relevance through emotion. But I kept coming back to the honesty of it. Not whether her politics were right or smart, but that she didn’t perform the moment. She let it break her. That’s harder than it looks. I don’t know if it changed anything. Politicians ignored it, people who needed to hear it already knew it, the internet moved on. But for maybe thirty seconds, a person who’d spent her entire life in public tried not to be a performance. That has to count for something. Thursday, 10 November 2016. What Freedom Costs: The internet got way less free, way faster than anyone expected. Governments started regulating it, corporations started controlling it, intelligence agencies started collecting everything moving through it. The NSA, GCHQ, BND—they’re all drowning in data now, grabbing more than they could ever parse, just because they can and nobody’s stopping them. Netzpolitik.org pays attention to this stuff. They’re one of the few places doing actual independent journalism about digital rights, internet policy, surveillance. No ads, no paywall, no corporate money—just coverage of decisions that affect how the internet works. It’s the kind of thing that should obviously exist. It barely does. The problem is the economics don’t work. Independent journalism costs money. Writers need to eat. Servers need power. All of it requires funding from somewhere. The only source that actually works is reader donations, which are shrinking, which means the work keeps getting smaller. I’ve watched the internet change from something that felt open to something that feels owned. The people still fighting for digital freedom, still paying attention, still writing about it? They’re running on empty, sustained by donations from a smaller group every year. It’s not sustainable, and it’s also the only model that could possibly work, because the moment you take money from anyone with a stake in how the internet works, the journalism stops being trustworthy. The internet’s getting shaped by people we don’t know, making decisions we don’t see. Somebody has to keep watching. Right now that somebody is exhausted and underfunded. Thursday, 10 November 2016. All In: The black eyeliner, the black hair, the whole committed aesthetic—Masha Sedgwick looked like she meant it when she was going through that emo phase. You could tell she wasn’t just trying it on. Everyone else was performing a little, testing the waters, but she had gone all in. I noticed her because of that seriousness. She’s a fashion blogger now, one of the ones people actually read because she thinks about what she’s writing. Not just pictures and product links. She talks about clothes and coffee and hair like these things matter, and in her hands they actually do. She’s 26 and she’s made something real from it, which is harder than it sounds. When she told her parents she wanted to do this full-time, the conversation wasn’t easy. All those questions hanging in the air about what a real job is, about tradition and security and doing things the way they’ve always been done. But she had her answer ready, and it was the only answer that mattered: you can’t live inside somebody else’s choices. You do what you’re actually good at, what you actually care about. And maybe that’s how you make money now—by being serious about something instead of pretending to be serious about what everyone else cares about. There’s something satisfying about that arc, watching someone from the emo era actually follow through. A lot of people grew out of it and became normal. She just grew up inside of it, took what it meant and made it into something that works. Thursday, 10 November 2016. A Parallel World: PLAY16 was Hamburg’s games festival in November. Not the polished convention thing - just indie developers, artists, students, people showing work they made for its own sake. Workshops, exhibitions, talks about design and creation. Everything centered on bodies and presence, physicality in games. Three games won awards at the town hall. The developers mentioned something that stuck with me: winning the award felt like stepping into a completely different world from their actual life. Which is exactly how it works when you make anything. You’re living in two places. Your real job, your responsibilities, your normal self. Then there’s this other world you’re building in the hours nobody’s watching, in the margins. Most of what you make stays there. When someone notices, it’s disorienting. The games themselves don’t matter as much as the fact that they exist - FAR: Lone Sails, FRU, a tank simulator, whatever. Someone cared enough to finish them when they could have done anything else. That’s the whole story. People wandered through exploring. Some wanted to learn how to make games, how the code and music and design worked. Others just wanted to experience what someone else had made. Both are valid, both are the point. Wednesday, 9 November 2016. Tilt: Maeckes keeps coming up in rotation. His new album “Tilt” holds its own against “Zwei”—maybe better, still deciding. If I had to listen to one song until I die, it’d be “Tisch,” the track with Balbina where they’re basically saying that needing someone while being too much of a mess to actually commit is at once pretty hot and completely selfish. There’s a real confession in there. The album sits right. “Loser,” “Wie alle Kippenstummel zwischen den Bahngleisen zusammen,” “Urlaubsfotograf”—weird titles that work. He pulled in Tristan Brusch and Josef Hader. Nothing feels out of place. The video for “Tilt” is this whole identity trick. A guy who looks like Maeckes but isn’t dances with his moves—or Maeckes’ moves, the distinction gets blurry—while basically saying he’s not Maeckes. The world’s already confusing enough without videos that mess with who’s who and what’s real. But that’s kind of the joke. You get caught up trying to figure it out, and the simplest move is just to dance and let it go. Wednesday, 9 November 2016. Magazine for People Who Hate Teens: A few years ago, every major publisher suddenly panicked that they were losing the youth market, so they started throwing money at digital magazines designed for teenagers—shiny, mobile-first operations with sunglasses-on energy and headlines about YouTubers. Most of them died quietly. Celepedia was one of them, and it’s worth thinking about why, because it’s the clearest possible example of adults trying to buy cultural relevance and fucking it up entirely. Celepedia was a German online magazine ostensibly for 12- to 24-year-olds, though really it seemed designed for adults who’d never met a teenager and had formed their entire understanding of youth culture from a single Snapchat notification they didn’t understand. The headlines tell you everything: “What Bibi’s Beauty Palace Said About Lisa and Lena!” “Does This Girl Only Have Four Fingers?” “Did This YouTuber Get Her Boyfriend Pregnant?” “Color Blocking Nails Are So Mega Nice!” Content pitched so far down that it made gossip magazines look like academic journals. The magazine ran for two years before the publisher realized there was no money in it. Millions of visitors, zero sustainable business model. The editor-in-chief went on record saying they’d learned through research that teenagers were actually more conservative than expected—which is the kind of thing someone says when they’ve been inside the wrong room the entire time, talking only to people like themselves, certain that understanding youth means understanding which YouTube star had which fingernail color. I get the impulse. Publishers see teenagers hooked on their phones and assume the money’s there. It’s not wrong about the phones. It’s wrong about everything else. The assumption that you can just hire people to write down what YouTubers do, slap it on a website, cover it in emoji, and suddenly you’re speaking their language. That’s not culture. That’s not even accurate journalism. It’s an adult’s crude approximation of what they think young people care about, which is almost always wrong. The real failure wasn’t the magazine, though. It was the confidence that you could monetize teenage attention by insulting their intelligence. That you could build something sustainable by treating your audience like they were dumber than they are. Every headline in Celepedia assumed the reader had the critical capacity of a houseplant. That might get clicks. It doesn’t build anything worth keeping around. When Celepedia shut down, the publisher called it a learning experience about recognizing when to move on—which is corporate language for “we spent money on something stupid and now we’re pretending it was part of the plan.” What they actually learned, or should have learned, is that you can’t fake understanding a culture. You can’t buy your way into relevance by hiring people to consume content on your behalf and then repackage it. The gap between the adults running the thing and the people they were trying to reach was never going to close. It was always going to be visible in every headline, every post, every pixel. Tuesday, 8 November 2016. The Hate Mail: Once the blog hit a certain size, the hate mail changed. Not “I disagree” hate. Actual threats. “Kill yourself, hang yourself, die of AIDS.” You read some at first because you’re curious what people will say. Then you stop reading them. Then you start again. Then you stop again. Eventually you just scroll past them, except some days one lands different and you pause on it. The worst part isn’t getting them—it’s noticing who gets them worse. I get angry comments, sure. Women who write online and aren’t apologetic about being feminist get a completely different operation. It’s meaner, more sexual, more targeted. It doesn’t stop at comments. It escalates. It gets personal in ways that show exactly what people are terrified of. Not women in general. Women who are confident about existing. I notice it most when I see it happen to people I know. There’s something about the volume and texture of it that’s different from what I get. An energy underneath the anger that’s just pure fear. And here’s the thing—it works. Most people fold. They stop posting, delete the account, realize visibility costs more than it’s worth. So when two women actually manage to have a real conversation in public, it means something. The noise level that had to be generated to prevent it shows you what was worth protecting. Some guy terrified of women spending hours typing variations on the same threat. That’s the infrastructure underneath the whole thing. Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Super Tamade: Walking into Super Tamade for the first time in Osaka felt like stepping into a neon fever dream. The place is impossibly bright, aggressively bright, with these garish illustrated signs everywhere—stars and carrots and spaceships rendered in the most unhinged color combinations. Yellow price tags mark deals that seem almost insulting in how cheap they are, like the store is daring you to buy whatever’s underneath. I’d heard the rumors beforehand. The yakuza uses it for money laundering. The quality suffers because of the prices. The raw meat and fish are sketchy at best. But standing there, watching salarymen and families and tourists all converge on the pre-made food section, I couldn’t help wondering if the legends were half the appeal. The chain opened in 1992 and somehow became a destination. That’s the real mystery. You’ve got ramen, peanut butter, drinks in flavors you’ve never heard of, whole sections of meat and fish at prices that don’t compute. The prepared food is so varied and so abundant that it almost breaks your brain trying to decide. Every choice feels both completely safe and vaguely dangerous. There’s something about that uncertainty that gets to you. Maybe the yakuza thing is true, maybe it’s just a story travelers tell each other. Maybe the cheap meat is fine and everyone’s paranoid, or maybe it’s exactly as questionable as it seems. Either way, you buy something you’re not quite sure about, pay almost nothing, and leave with this small illicit thrill. It’s not beautiful, it’s not comfortable, but it’s real in a way the clean parts of the city aren’t. Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vanishing: Tajikistan’s government picks people up and they vanish. A journalist. An activist. Someone who posted something on Facebook that contradicted the official line. The police arrive, they’re gone, and then—nothing. Sometimes their families find out they’ve been tortured. Sometimes they just never hear from them again. Thousands have fled because staying is essentially asking to be made to disappear. The international community makes the right noises—condemnations, calls for reform, threats of sanctions. Tajikistan ignores it. They keep hunting for the ones who got out, trying to drag them back. There’s no real pressure that works here. The government’s already decided the cost is worth it. I think about what that feels like—to live in a place where your government is your enemy, where speaking is dangerous, where disappearing is what happens to people like you. Not hypothetically. Structurally. Regularly. And I don’t know what changes that from here, honestly. The mechanisms that might work—sanctions, international pressure, whatever—they’re slow and probably useless. The people who could actually change things are the ones most at risk of disappearing. Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Pull Up: Music loses me fast. I’ll obsess over something on Apple Music for a couple of days, loop it until I’ve dissected every background layer, and then the spell breaks. That’s just how I listen. “Pull Up” by Abra hasn’t broken yet. She shot the video herself in Bushwick and Harlem, New York. Produced the track. Wrote it. The work shows it—no committees, no compromises, just a clear vision from someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. There’s something about finding someone early. Not the rush of discovery, but the quiet certainty of watching someone operate at a different level than everyone else trying the same thing. It’s rare enough that you know it when you see it. I don’t know how long this window stays open. In three years, “Pull Up” will be everywhere. My friends will act like they discovered her. But right now, it’s still just her doing the thing, and the rest of us catching up to what she’s already figured out. Monday, 7 November 2016. What He Wants: The guy’s spent his entire career doing exactly what I scribbled in the margins of my school notebooks and then threw away. Jonny Negron just never stopped. His work is unapologetically fetish art. Big-breasted women in bikini tops, underwear visible, positioned in jungle scenarios and office situations where they’re either in charge or pretending to be. The fantasy is explicit: these are female power fantasies, or male fantasies filtered through female bodies. Amazon women, submissive assistants, women with proportions that don’t quite track but somehow work in the context of his line weight and color palette. What strikes me isn’t the straightforward horniness of it—that’s honest at least—but the consistency of the vision. There’s a world here. In Negron’s world, feminine power is absolute. Men are beside the point or actively subordinate. It’s a fantasy of surrender, of losing control to something stronger. I respect that he just made it. Didn’t apologize for the subject matter, didn’t dress it up as something it isn’t. A lot of artists would hedge, add layers of irony or commentary. Negron just draws what he actually wants to draw and sells it. There’s something clarifying about that. Whether you care about the work or not, you know exactly what you’re getting. It makes me think about what we actually want versus what we’re willing to admit we want. How much energy we spend disguising desire. Negron skipped that step entirely. Whether that’s freedom or just indifference, I’m not sure. Probably both. Monday, 7 November 2016. Five Cans a Day: Brown urine. Yellow skin. A construction worker somewhere in Florida showed up at the doctor’s office wondering what was happening to his body, and when they ran the blood work, the numbers came back almost unreadable. His liver enzymes were shot. Bilirubin—the bile pigment that makes your skin that sickly yellow—was way too high. But the really strange thing was the vitamin levels. B12, folate—they were so far above normal that the lab couldn’t actually measure them. The numbers just stopped making sense. He drank maybe some beer here and there, kept himself reasonably healthy otherwise. But for the past few weeks, he’d been knocking back around five energy drinks every single day. Construction work is exhausting. The sun beats down, your body aches, and eventually you reach for whatever’s going to keep you upright. That was his solution. The doctors eliminated everything else. Hepatitis, autoimmune disease, genetic stuff—nothing fit. What kept pointing back at him was the energy drinks. Manufacturers dump B vitamins and folate into these things by the megadose, marketing them as health boosters, brain fuel, endurance accelerators. Sounds good on the label. The problem is that too many vitamins is just as bad as too few, and when you’re drinking five cans a day, you’re not supplementing—you’re overdosing. Most people get enough B vitamins and folate from regular food. You don’t need an energy drink to fix that. But the labeling creates this impression that you do, that you’re doing something smart by consuming these fortified concoctions. It’s a sales pitch disguised as health. After he quit the drinks, his numbers came back down. His liver recovered. He got lucky in that way—his body had enough reserves to bounce back. Nothing dramatic happened, no dramatic moment of reckoning. Just a guy who got sick from something he thought was helping him, and who felt better once he stopped. Monday, 7 November 2016. Breaking the Dead: The Walking Dead never bothered explaining what started the apocalypse. That blank space is where fan theories live. Someone had the thought: what if Breaking Bad’s Walter White caused it? What if that blue meth, cooked in a desert RV, got into someone’s system and rewired them into something hungry and undead? It seems stupid for about thirty seconds, then it clicks. Both shows treat their catastrophes like natural disasters—inevitable, almost impersonal. Breaking Bad never explains why Walter becomes what he becomes. The Walking Dead never explains why the dead walk. So the theory fills both blanks with one answer: same universe, Walter’s chemistry the match that lights it all. Fan theories like this are why I watch television. They’re the conversation that happens after the show ends, in the spaces the show leaves open. You’re not supposed to believe them. You’re supposed to turn them over in your head, find the moment they almost make sense, then laugh at how much you wanted them true. The meth-to-zombie pipeline is ridiculous and also kind of perfect. Walter White as the accidental architect of the undead—explaining nothing and everything at once. Monday, 7 November 2016. What They Refused: There’s something about following activism in other countries—you see the problem through a different lens, hear it in a different accent. In Brazil, the women making noise about harassment and beauty standards weren’t being gentle about it. Models were refusing the jobs that came with a side of groping. Rappers like Lay from São Paulo were making it part of the record. Activists just kept pushing. I don’t remember what made me pay attention to it at that moment. Some film or article probably. But there was a point in 2016 when it felt like the conversation was finally getting louder, or like people were finally allowed to hear it. Grace was doing something called “Beyond Beauty” where she’d talk to young people in Brazil about what was actually happening to them. Not the glamorous version. The real one. The thing about modeling and entertainment is they’re built on control—your body, your image, your labor. All owned by someone else. So when women in those industries started refusing it, pushing back, it meant something. It meant risking money, opportunity, reputation. They did it anyway. Sunday, 6 November 2016. Tsukiji: Early morning at Tsukiji and the whole place operates in this practiced chaos. Tuna auctions in the corner, bidders shouting, fish getting wheeled away to be broken down. The restaurants are stalls really—you sit at a counter with maybe seven other people and watch someone who’s been making sushi the exact same way for decades work through the morning. I ordered at random and got something that tasted like nothing I’d eaten before. The fish was so fresh it felt aggressive. The rice was warm. The temperature difference when you bit down mattered. Each piece was about the size of my thumb, and the whole thing was done in minutes. I kept thinking about how sushi everywhere else is the same concept but under completely different rules—like someone learned what sushi looked like but not what it should feel like to eat. This wasn’t pretension, just the gap between making something well and making it work functionally. I can’t tell you which restaurant to go to because I didn’t pay attention to the name, and honestly it probably doesn’t matter. What mattered was understanding that something you thought you already knew was actually something else, and now you couldn’t unsee that difference. Sunday, 6 November 2016. Everyone’s Circling: I read a handful of pieces that week that kept bumping into the same wall—everything that’s supposed to be authentic keeps getting sold back to you. Lina Mallon writing about Instagram and bodies. What happens if you show yourself, if you’re visible. The strange judgment that follows, mostly from other women, hiding behind this idea of feminism that says if you’re exposed, you’re either desperate or you deserved it. She nailed something I’d never quite articulated. Then VICE with something stupid and brilliant about eco-sexuality—people fucking for the planet, basically. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also just the endpoint of something we’re all doing now. Everything has to mean something. Even sex has to be in service of a cause. Julia Korbik on feminist consumerism. Bearded women in fashion ads. Hair-removal shampoo marketed to people who don’t want to remove their hair. Dildos for lesbians like they’re a product category now. Feminism as a brand. You could get angry about it, but it’s easier to just watch the machinery work—capitalism figured out how to sell you your own resistance. Masha Sedgwick on what it’s like to be a woman in her late twenties. All the invisible pressure. The sense that time’s running out, that you’re supposed to want things, that the world has an expiration date built in. I don’t experience that exact panic, but the underlying thing—that you’re aging out, declining in value—that’s pretty universal these days. And Stoya talking about dating “good male feminists,” which is funny because even straight sex has gotten politically complicated. Even desire has to come with the right consciousness now. Whether that’s progress or just exhaustion, I honestly don’t know. They all seem to be about the same thing: trying to live authentically in a system that’s monetizing authenticity. Trying to resist a machine that’s very good at selling resistance. Reading them back to back like that, it felt less like a bunch of independent thoughts and more like everyone circling the same problem from different angles. Sunday, 6 November 2016. I Can’t Help Myself: You spend enough effort becoming an adult and leave certain things behind, and then the decade you thought you’d escaped comes crawling back. First the old Nintendo games, then the plastic pocket gadgets, and now the Kelly Family reunion tour. I can’t help myself. Look, I liked the Kelly Family back then. Not ironically—I genuinely listened to their albums. There was something that worked, even if you’d get laughed at for saying so in the wrong company. When they announced they were reuniting, it was obvious they meant it. Patricia Kelly talked about how it felt like a dream coming true, finally getting back on stage with her siblings after all those years of ups and downs. Angelo explained it differently: twenty years had passed since their last major show in Dortmund, and it hit them that they wanted to celebrate what they’d built together as a family. It made sense. Family acts don’t really stop being families just because they stop touring. The Kelly Family was massive across Europe in the ’90s in that inexplicable way of things that don’t hold up to scrutiny but never really fade. The kind of thing you only admit to liking once enough time has passed. Hearing about the reunion, I realized I’m not embarrassed anymore. Not because they’re suddenly cool—they’re not—but because I’m far enough from being a teenager that I can just like what I like. The earnestness, the family dynamic, the songs that stuck. It still works. Maybe that says something about me. But I’ve made peace with worse. Saturday, 5 November 2016. What Adblockers Sell: I installed my first adblocker sometime in the mid-2000s, because I was tired of banner ads and autoplay videos and the whole exhausting ecosystem of online advertising. Seemed obvious. Smart, even. Free software that protected your privacy. Win-win. Except it’s not. The reason these extensions are free is that they record every single website you visit. Everything. Your whole browsing history gets logged, packaged up, and sold to data brokers. That’s the whole point. You’re not the customer—your data is the product. It sounds theoretical until you actually think about it. Anyone with a credit card can buy access to your complete browsing history. Not just what you searched for—everything. The weird stuff. The late-night spirals. The thing you looked up once and regretted. The medical searches. The thing you told nobody about. All of it is for sale to anyone who wants to spend a few bucks. And there are definitely people in your life who would do that if they could. Exes. Jealous people. Curious strangers. People with grudges. It’s not hard to imagine. It’s not expensive. It’s just data—and you’re handing it over every time you click something while that little extension is running. Saturday, 5 November 2016. Shibuya Calling: Shibuya churns through hype cycles—a new shop opens, you either catch it or you don’t, everyone’s looking for what comes next. I went to Banny’s opening near Meiji-jingumae mostly just because I was around. It’s the kind of place you’d expect—mix of vintage and new clothes, magazines, sneakers, bags, and for some reason toothpaste. Beer and pizza from the family mart next door. Just people hanging out. No attempt to be cooler than it actually is. No idea if it lasts. That night, it worked. Saturday, 5 November 2016. Alexandra Rubinstein: Alexandra Rubinstein’s a painter from Brooklyn who decided to paint male celebrities giving head, with thought-bubble captions about what they’re thinking while they do it. Leonardo DiCaprio: “What’s Gilbert Grape Eating?” Drake: “Best I Ever Had!” Beckham: “Eat It Like Beckham.” Justin Bieber: “Is It Too Late Now?”—which is perfect because you can feel the desperation in that one, some pathetic maybe-this-fixes-it energy. She started doing this because there’s basically no pornography made for women. The entire industry assumes its audience and doesn’t bother—billions of dollars built on the idea that nobody wants to watch men work. Rubinstein painted it instead. What strikes me is how funny the titles are and how true they are at the same time. Drake thinking his own lyrics while going down on someone. Bieber with that damaged-goods energy. The stupid things that would actually be running through male celebrities’ heads in that moment. Regular porn would never touch this because it’s not built to think about female pleasure as even a visible thing—it’s built for someone else entirely. She didn’t write an essay about the gap or ask permission. She just made the thing that should exist. Saturday, 5 November 2016. Maeckes Won’t Sell: You know exactly how it would work. Spend thirty years making music nobody pays attention to, or let the industry remake you into something marketable and digestible, and you’re famous. The choice is stupidly clear. The manufacturing process is brutal but effective—every rough edge smoothed, every weird impulse calibrated, every trace of actual personhood veneered over with something that photographs well and plays well with algorithms. It’s a real transaction: your self for their distribution. Markus Winter, who raps as Maeckes, is one of the ones who didn’t take the deal. He’s been the patient poet of German rap for years, the guy who worked with the Orsons to make music that felt like something substantial, something that mattered. When Tilt dropped in October with the track “WOW” on it, it was him charging at the entire mainstream apparatus—the critics, the machinery, every manufactured star they prop up and sell to you as authentic. It’s a critique disguised as a song, which is exactly what good music does. There’s something almost stubborn about it, the way some people just keep making the work they believe in regardless of whether anyone’s listening. He’s been doing it long enough now that it’s not even a choice anymore, it’s just who he is. The song is his answer to everyone who took the other route, everyone who let themselves get processed into a product. It’s not an indictment, really—he doesn’t sound angry about it. He just sounds like someone who decided a long time ago that he’d rather be broke and strange than comfortable and fake. That’s what the song is really about, I think. Not condemning the compromise, but making it clear that some people are constitutionally incapable of it, even when it would be easier. Even when they could have everything if they just bent a little. Maeckes won’t bend. That’s the whole thing. Friday, 7 October 2016. Older People Like Video: Somewhere around 2016, every editor in the world decided text was dead. Video was the future. Adobe Premiere was the new literacy. If you couldn’t cut in Final Cut you might as well start looking for another job, because everyone said the kids were done with reading—YouTube was the only language they understood anymore. Except a Pew study from Washington showed the opposite. People over 50 wanted video. Everyone else still preferred text. Still preferred scrolling through a story instead of sitting through some YouTuber’s intro. The reason’s obvious enough. Video takes time, attention, real mental weight. Text you can skim. You can read it at 3 AM when you’re half-asleep. It’s faster, which matters when you’re drowning in information trying not to fall behind. Meanwhile older people got to sit back and let the news wash over them—whatever was trending, whatever was urgent—while young people were grinding through feeds, trying to stay current on enough topics to not sound completely lost in conversation. Maybe it was never about what people actually wanted. Maybe the industry had already sunk money into video infrastructure and needed to convince itself the future was coming. Turns out people don’t need the future to decide what they prefer. Friday, 7 October 2016. Done: Germany keeps telling itself it’s liberal, progressive, welcoming. A model for Europe. But that welcome’s got fine print. Cross certain lines and you feel it. Black people in Germany know this already. So does anyone else who doesn’t fit the picture. You get the message early: this place is open to you, as long as you don’t make it obvious that you’re different. Sometimes it’s the police. Sometimes it’s the way someone’s face changes when you speak. Sometimes it’s just the question—”But where are you really from?”—that follows you everywhere. What’s different now is there’s a generation done with the apology. Nura, Jermain Raffington, Kokutekeleza Musebeni represent something you can feel building: young Black Germans who are simply saying what shouldn’t be radical to say. “I’m Black. That’s good. That’s who I am.” And if that makes you uncomfortable, that’s your issue. The power isn’t in the statement itself—it’s in the refusal. They’re not asking permission. Not performing gratitude for being tolerated. Just existing, loudly, as themselves. That’s the shift. You see it everywhere these days, young people rejecting the deal their parents accepted: stay small, don’t make waves, maybe things improve. But in Germany, a place where identity and nation have been weaponized in specific, historical ways, this particular refusal carries weight. It’s not angry exactly, just done. I don’t know these people, but I know what they’re describing—that moment when you stop waiting for the world to decide you’re acceptable. It doesn’t solve anything. But it changes something. Friday, 7 October 2016. Iza’s Pikachu: You see someone walking through Tokyo with a Pikachu on their head and you have two choices: assume they’re in costume, or accept that this person has simply decided to live this way. Iza chose the latter. That’s actually her head. That’s how she moves through the world. Pokémon GO happened a few years back—everyone was walking around hunting invisible creatures. Most people got bored and moved on. But some didn’t. For Iza, the craze didn’t end; it deepened. What started as a casual interest became this: a Pikachu permanently affixed to her skull, the natural result of not pretending to outgrow something you love. There’s something about Tokyo that makes this work. The city’s full of people expressing their particular obsessions openly—you see it everywhere if you look. Fashion, street art, the way people dress for what actually interests them rather than what’s acceptable. Iza fits right in, just pushing it further than most. It’s not irony. It’s commitment. What gets me is that this isn’t performative. She’s not doing it for attention or the camera. She’s just this devoted to something, and she let it show. Most of us hide what we actually care about, curate ourselves into something more palatable. Iza didn’t. I don’t know if that’s admirable or insane. Probably both. Thursday, 6 October 2016. Where She Fits: Crystal Moselle made a short about a girl named Rachelle who lives outside New York and feels completely locked out of the skate scene. She’s intimidated by the people in it, sure it’s not for her, small in the face of people who make it look effortless. Then she meets a group of girls who skate without needing to prove anything, and something in her shifts. The film doesn’t make a big thing out of it. There’s no pep talk, no moment where someone explains that Rachelle belongs here. Moselle just watches her move through the space, watches her see the other girls, watches her decide she can do what they do. It’s simple and complete. Moselle’s thinking about that specific age, the hinge between being a kid and whatever comes after. Everything still feels possible. Everything still feels fragile. For Rachelle it’s skateboarding, but the film gets at something bigger: seeing yourself reflected in someone else, and then having the nerve to become that person too. The skate world is male-dominated and hostile to women. The film knows that. It doesn’t need to explain it to you—the way Rachelle moves through it says everything. Thursday, 6 October 2016. Nicola’s Tokyo: Nicola Formichetti did the art direction for Diesel’s 30-year anniversary show in Tokyo, and that’s the kind of gig that makes sense for him. His mother was a Japanese flight attendant, his father an Italian pilot - the kind of background that gives you claim to two places at once. He got discovered by Katy England, who gave him a column at Dazed & Confused when he was just starting out, which is basically the story of him existing at the intersection of underground and mainstream fashion without ever seeing those as separate things. The show was this blend of intimate and elaborate - an exhibition, a party afterward, models, Tokyo’s nightlife scene, the whole apparatus but lighter somehow, less forced. Nicola talks about Japan as central to his creative process the way some people talk about their home, because it kind of is. The models were actually compelling. Sara Cummings is one of those people who moves through fashion on her own terms without needing to announce it - you just watch her and understand the entire underground model conversation. Kiko Mizuhara is one of those faces that works in film and fashion simultaneously, which doesn’t happen often. Even Rola, who doesn’t exist in Western consciousness but has this kind of presence in Japan that doesn’t translate because it doesn’t need to. It was just people making something beautiful in a city that actually cares about that work. The whole thing happened and then everyone went home. Nothing else. Just the thing itself, no message attached. Thursday, 6 October 2016. The Dental Camera: Huge photographs of vaginas at STUDIOLO Berlin, shot with a dental camera. Peter Kaaden was testing equipment on things he actually wanted to look at, which has a certain logic—why waste the magnification on dental applications? The results are extreme. At that scale, the familiar becomes almost unrecognizable. Texture and shadow, the specific topography of skin, folds, pigmentation. You lose any sense of proportion or context. All the compositional framing that usually makes explicit photography function as art or erotica—the pose, the body as a whole, the human presence—just collapses. You’re confronted with pure biological detail. Kaaden talked about it simply: “Suddenly I could see details I’d never seen before. I was closer to the bodies than I’d ever been.” That closeness is everything. Most of the time, looking at bodies is mediated—through distance, through framing, through all the conventions we’ve built around how bodies can be seen. This camera eliminates that. There’s no aesthetic distance to hide behind. It’s just magnified skin, the fact of its presence, the choice to enlarge it and print it and hang it. There’s something clarifying about that, weirdly. Not in any moral register. Just: here’s what bodies actually contain and display. Not mysterious or poetic. Real. The work doesn’t hedge—doesn’t dress the subject up in concept or distance, doesn’t apologize for interest. Just magnifies and frames. The show ended a while back, but the premise stays with you. Thursday, 6 October 2016. Berlin, Slowly: Berlin in the afternoon feels different than Berlin at night or in the morning. There’s this particular exhaustion to the daylight hours, a sense that the city has already shown you most of its hand and now you’re just picking through what’s left. We went to Dandy Diner first—vegan food that doesn’t feel like penance, which is harder to find than you’d think. Then Made in Berlin, a vintage shop that has the kind of inventory that comes from someone with actual vision instead of someone who just opened a store in a gentrified neighborhood. By the time we got to Yoli Frozen Yogurt I was thinking about how cities like this work. They’re supposed to be overwhelming, this constant assault of choice and people and spectacle, but if you move through them slowly enough they become almost intimate. You notice the things that other people miss. The care someone took with a window display. The way a bartender knows how to talk to strangers. A frozen yogurt shop that just is what it is. These are the moments that stay with you, not the famous landmarks. Wednesday, 5 October 2016. Not Performing: Cara Delevingne doesn’t seem to do things that don’t feel like her. That’s the thing about her. You watch her and there’s no performance, no sense that she’s acting out a role in her own career—she just does what feels right and doesn’t apologize. It’s rarer than you’d think in that world. Most people in fashion and entertainment are constantly adjusting themselves, figuring out what photographs well, what the market wants, what a brand needs from them. Cara just seems to be herself. No hedging. No strategic reinvention every couple of years. When she attaches her name to something, it’s not because she’s mathematically perfect for it. It’s because the thing actually matters to her, because the message aligns with how she moves through the world. You can feel the difference between someone who believes in what they’re doing and someone who’s just collecting a paycheck. Maybe I’m reading too much into a celebrity’s public image. But in an industry built entirely on careful image management and positioning, there’s something almost defiant about just being yourself and letting that be enough. No reinvention cycle, no course corrections based on algorithm feedback. It makes you think about your own compromises—the small adjustments you make for different people and situations, how you shape yourself to fit different contexts. How much of that is necessary and how much is just habit. What would stick around if you stopped performing. Wednesday, 5 October 2016. When Anime Was Simple: Curtis Newton’s adventures on the Comet were just another Tuesday afternoon on German TV. The ship, the crew, the general sense that someone had cobbled together a space opera from spare parts and optimism. I didn’t know then that this stuff had been edited and remixed, re-dubbed into something barely recognizable from the original Japanese. It was just space opera, simple as that. The odd thing is watching people now act like anime is some niche obsession they have to apologize for. Back then it wasn’t shameful—it just existed on ZDF like anything else. I watched Mila Superstar, Sailor Moon, Captain Future between homework and dinner. Nobody called it immature. Nobody had to frame it as ironic appreciation. What’s stayed with me about space adventure anime, especially the older stuff, is that it didn’t try to be cute or clever. No overexplained systems, no seventeen layers of character archetype and fanservice calculation. Just a crew, a ship, whatever problem was waiting out in space. The newer shows can’t help themselves—they’re designed by committee, every moment justified to death. This stuff was simpler. Probably worse in some technical sense, but more honest. They’re re-releasing it on Blu-Ray now—the German dub alongside the original uncut Japanese episodes. The ones that never made it past German TV censor scissors. I’m curious what we were missing, what ZDF cut away. But I’m not nostalgic for the original in some purist way. The dubbed version is what I watched. That’s the real memory. I wonder if any kid now actually picks up Captain Future and watches it, or if it’s purely a product for people like me. Space adventures without irony are a hard sell these days. Everything’s overstuffed with references and in-jokes and carefully calibrated appeal. These old shows don’t know how to do that. They just move forward, ship and crew and problem, episode after episode. That directness is either going to feel refreshing or completely boring. Wednesday, 5 October 2016. How It Falls Apart: Nazis function better in groups. Surround them with their friends and the performance is complete—beer, slogans, the whole theatrical monologue. But isolate one, put him across from someone asking genuine questions, and the facade cracks. Suddenly he’s stammering, backpedaling, finding reasons why that foreigner isn’t so bad after all. The conviction was never real. It was just the crowd noise. Naomi Nemi El-Hassan decided to test this with Nazi rappers—actual German musicians selling white supremacist garbage in song form. She was reporting for a YouTube series and she sat down with one of them to ask why. The claim he made was almost funny in how transparent it was: hip-hop didn’t originate in Black America. A Swedish guy invented it in the 1920s. So hip-hop is basically European. It’s basically white. It’s the kind of lie that collapses under any scrutiny, but it doesn’t need to survive logic—it just needs to let him feel less like a thief, less like someone selling stolen property back to his audience under a new flag. What gets me is the shamelessness. These guys are taking something genuinely powerful—rooted in Black American experience and resistance—and they’re just inverting the story so they can claim ownership. The lie is flimsy as hell, obviously constructed, but it doesn’t matter. The facts were never the point. It’s about being part of something, about having a target. Put him alone and the whole ideology falls apart. Tuesday, 4 October 2016. Weekend Rotation: It’s dark and cold outside, the kind of weekend you just surrender to. Dump yourself on the couch, grab whatever snacks are around, and don’t plan on leaving. Here’s what I’ve had on rotation for exactly this situation. The pure escapism stuff—Uncharted pulls you straight into an action movie and doesn’t let go. Same with Witcher 3, except you actually care about the people involved and the world feels like it has weight to it. Those are the ones where you look up and realize it’s been six hours. For something less demanding, there’s Minecraft and Mario Maker in creative mode. Building something, watching it take shape, no timer, no failure state. It’s the difference between gaming and meditating. Hours disappear but you’re not stressed, just in your own head. Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a different kind of pull—the timer mechanic, the repeating days, there’s actual anxiety to it, but in a good way. Like you’re in a puzzle you need to solve. Never gets old. Metal Gear Solid V is pure adrenaline and paranoia. GTA is mayhem. Destiny is that multiplayer grind that’ll ruin your sleep schedule. These aren’t cozy in the traditional sense, but they’re good at hijacking your weekend completely—you stop thinking about anything else. FIFA and Pokémon are the ones you can play half-asleep. You’re just running through the motions, but the game’s rhythm carries you. Good background-noise games when your brain’s already fried. The real trick is just having something on hand that matches whatever you’re in the mood for. Some weekends you want to disappear into a story. Some you want to build something. Some you just need the distraction. Saturday, 10 October 2015. Sneaker Season: The weather shifts in a way that’s hard to name until it’s obvious—the light changes, the air gets thinner—and suddenly you’re thinking about shoes again. New ones, always, even though you know exactly which ones you’ll end up buying. That’s the thing about sneakers. You develop a relationship with specific models the way some people do with hoodies or jeans. You own three pairs of them. You’ve owned three pairs of them for the past decade. The Stan Smith is still there. adidas’s 1972 leather thing, barely evolved, which is exactly the point. It’s perfect because it doesn’t try. Black and white, minimal, works with everything, doesn’t embarrass you anywhere. The Superstar is the one with the aggressive stripes and the gum sole—that’s another model that’s been around so long it’s become invisible, which is the highest compliment a shoe can receive. Both are shoes that look better beat up. Both have probably been sitting in a clearance bin somewhere since you last bought them, because the people buying sneakers for fashion reasons buy different things every season. Then there’s the Chuck Taylor, which is less a shoe and more a cultural artifact. You wore Chucks when they cost thirty dollars and everyone did, before they became a heritage brand that costs more. They still feel the same though. Thin, cheap-looking, completely impractical in actual rain, but they’re the easiest shoe to wear because they require no decisions. No technology, no branding visibility, no stories. Just a shoe. The New Balance 580 is the one you probably don’t see people wearing much. It sits between the obvious choices—the basketball shoes, the running shoes, the status symbols—in that weird space where something is genuinely classic but not fashionable enough to be trendy. That’s where the good shoes live. Reebok’s stuff from the nineties has that same feeling: robust, a little dated, probably better engineered than anything designed in the last five years. Vans, Puma, Lacoste, Superga—they all make versions of the same shoe, really. The high-top canvas, the leather court model, the minimalist low-top. You could draw these designs on a napkin. You probably have, at some point. The fact that they all still exist, still sell, still feel right after fifty years says something about how much fashion can change without actually changing anything fundamental. Autumn is just the excuse to buy them again. New sole, fresh canvas, another few months before the canvas wears through the right way. The shoes don’t change. You don’t change. The weather reminds you that your closet has seasonal requirements, so you buy the same thing you always buy, and it works like it always works. That reliability, the fact that you can hand someone the same shoe model from 1972 and it still makes sense—that’s the whole thing, really. Friday, 9 October 2015. Revival: I never cared much about Selena Gomez. She seemed perpetually trapped by whatever happened to her - the Disney past she couldn’t shake, the relationships that didn’t work, the illness, the relentless attention. Other people created the story; she just had to live in it. Revival is what happens when someone stops performing recovery and just tells the truth about being inside that machine. The songs aren’t trying to be clever or transcendent. They’re just damage reports - here’s what it felt like when I was alone, here’s what happened, here’s why I’m broken. “Same Old Love” is the whole album in one song: ordinary sadness that cuts because it’s so plainly stated. She’s still trapped, obviously. The production is smooth mainstream pop, the kind that wraps pain in hooks so you can swallow it. Her voice isn’t powerful enough to carry the real depths. But that somehow works in her favor. She can’t perform her way out of it. She has to actually say what happened. What I’m struck by is that she made this album at all. Someone that famous, under that much pressure to seem fine, decided to spend an entire record documenting falling apart. Not as a marketing move or an edgy reinvention. Just because the truth had to go somewhere. That’s not art or genius. But it is the first time she sounded like a real person to me instead of a story I was supposed to believe. That matters enough to remember. Friday, 9 October 2015. Dorfdrift: There’s a moment when you’re at the supermarket, hand on an apple, and you think for maybe a second about where it came from. You imagine a farm somewhere, probably not that far away actually, definitely somewhere in Germany if you’re shopping at EDEKA, and then you put it in your cart because you’re hungry and the moment passes. EDEKA made an ad about this. They called it Dorfdrift—which is clever enough that it stuck with me—and it’s just a farmer racing to deliver his fresh apples before they lose that just-picked quality. The whole sales pitch is built on speed and proximity. The apples are good because they barely had time to stop being good. It’s funny how this became a selling point. Twenty, thirty years ago, local just meant local because there was no alternative. Now we’ve globalized everything so thoroughly that you have to advertise the fact that something came from nearby as though it’s an exotic feature. Apples from a region, delivered fresh, is now a marketing angle. The farmer in his tractor is the hero. It’s backwards and forwards at the same time. I’ve seen their other campaigns. They do decent work, actually. This one isn’t trying to sell you a lifestyle or make you feel guilty or connect produce to childhood memories. It’s just saying: short distance, fresher apples. That’s the whole premise. There’s something I respect about not overselling it, about letting the logistics speak for themselves. But I also know I’m not going to change how I shop based on an ad, no matter how honest it is. I’ll buy the local apples when they look good and I’ll buy the ones from somewhere else when those look better, and I won’t think about any of this again until the next campaign reminds me. The apple tastes fine either way. Thursday, 8 October 2015. What’s Actually There: The acoustic version of “Hotel” by BOY is just Valeska Steiner and Sonja Glass with nothing else—no production, no tricks. The song is all there is, and I think that’s the whole point. Minimal arrangements are a test. Most songs fail—the production drops and they fall apart. This doesn’t. The way they phrase things, where they let silence sit instead of filling space, how the song breathes—I feel all of it at once. It’s not a polished performance. It’s more like listening to someone think through a melody. They’ve been building toward something for years. “Little Numbers” got a lot of exposure through a Lufthansa ad, “We Were Here” showed they had real depth, and they’ve been huge in Japan longer than most people know. But this acoustic version is where all of that makes sense. It’s not trying to be anything elaborate—just what’s actually there. And that’s the hardest thing to pull off. Tuesday, 29 September 2015. Magnets: Disclosure’s new album Caracal has a track called “Magnets” with Lorde on it, and the whole thing is almost an afterthought, which is why it lands so well. She’s barely there, just a voice drifting through the production like she wandered into their studio and decided to stay for a few takes. Guy and Howard built the actual song; she’s just there, not trying to own any of it. The video’s strange and pretty—two blood moons hanging in a sky that feels wrong in the right way. Lorde looks genuinely relaxed in it, which you don’t always see. That half-spoken, half-sung delivery of hers is going to work for you or it won’t, but if you already hear her that way, there’s nothing here to dislike. What’s interesting is how unstressed the whole thing feels. There’s no hustle to it, no sense that anyone’s trying to prove something. The production sits back, her voice sits back, and the result is just good. Not aggressively good, not impressive-sounding good, just good. You remember that not everything needs to be a statement. Sometimes a song can just exist. Tuesday, 29 September 2015. If It Means Nothing: The photos got everywhere. A small boy, drowned. Three years old. Aylan Kurdi. You see it once and it doesn’t leave. What got to me wasn’t the photograph itself—people die constantly, we don’t usually see their pictures. It was what people did with it next. Some wanted to debate whether we should have even seen it, whether showing dead children was ethical. Others used it to argue against taking in refugees, like parents would risk drowning their kid as a policy position. Like that’s how desperation calculates. He became data. A symbol. Proof for whichever argument you were already making. Not a three-year-old. Not evidence that what his family was fleeing was terrible enough to outweigh any risk. I kept thinking about the speed of it. How fast we could absorb the image and move back to comfortable thinking. Still talk about nuance and complexity. Still protect ourselves from implication. I don’t know what it means if it doesn’t change anything. If he died and we all just kept living the same way. You can believe what you want about immigration, and you might even be right. But something doesn’t come back from seeing that photo and deciding it changes nothing. That’s the part that stays with you whether you want it to or not. Friday, 4 September 2015. Lollapalooza Berlin: Lollapalooza at Tempelhof that year had a solid lineup: Muse and The Libertines and Seeed, and enough else worth finding. What made it work was the whole thing—the music was fine, but the food and street art and the general design of the space mattered just as much. Most festivals had turned into brands by then, so it was good to see one that understood what you’re actually paying for: a day that feels right. Friday, 4 September 2015. The World’s Ending, Hooray: You wake up reading about the next war. Not as metaphor—as actual next. Everyone’s been waiting for it. Putin, Kim Jong-un, the familiar architects of collapse. Refugees. Walls. Bombs. The same machinery of power and cruelty, running exactly as designed. K.I.Z. is a German punk band that made a song called ’Hurra die Welt geht unter’—Hooray, the World’s Ending. The song is as dark as the title. But it’s not rage. It’s something stranger: a kind of optimism about what comes after everything falls apart. They’re imagining what’s left when all the borders dissolve, when the corporations that grind people down finally collapse. When there’s nothing but the basic elements again. Earth. Sun. People without anyone suffocating them from above. It shouldn’t comfort you, a song about the end of everything. But it does. When you’ve been sitting alone with the same dark thoughts, there’s something almost peaceful about hearing them come back to you from someone else. Other people are here too. Imagining the wreckage as a beginning. Friday, 4 September 2015. My New Hero: Tara Monroe shows up to Texas State every day in a hot-pink Barbie Jeep, which is where this story starts. Her license is suspended. Waka Flocka concert, a cop asks for a breathalyzer, Tara says no. So instead of public transit or a bike, she wheels out this absurd plastic car from her parents’ garage and drives it to campus. Every day. Business student. No shame about it whatsoever. Asked why not just bike? “Bikes are just annoying.” That’s all the explanation. Twitter and TikTok caught wind within hours. People started filming her, posting about “Barbie Jeep Girl,” calling it the coolest thing they’d seen all year. The whole campus was watching by the next morning. And she just kept showing up with the exact same expression on her face, like everyone else was the strange one. What I actually respect about it is how thoroughly unbothered she is. Most people caught in a suspended-license situation would feel defensive or at least a little embarrassed. They’d try to hide it or minimize the story somehow. Tara did the opposite. She made driving a children’s toy car to university look like the most rational, confident choice she could possibly make. That kind of conviction—the ability to not care what people think and to own that in public—is harder to find than it should be. That’s what cool actually looks like. Thursday, 3 September 2015. Cry for Love: Die Ärzte put out “Cry for Love” in 1993 as a straight-up attack on fascism. Germany’s most beloved punk band making their most obvious statement. The song became the anthem—the thing you’d hear screaming at rallies, in the streets, anywhere people were trying to fight back against the right-wing tide. So when the fascists started creeping back into the conversation again, someone had the obvious idea: push the song back. Get it charting. Get it on the radio. Make it impossible to ignore. The campaign was called “Aktion Arschloch”—Operation Asshole—which tells you everything about the approach. The mechanics were simple: buy the song, stream it repeatedly, request it on stations, loop the music video. Turn it into a coordinated gesture. Get the track back into the charts and force it into the ears of people who’d prefer not to hear it. The obvious problem is that it won’t fix anything. A refugee crisis doesn’t end because a punk song got played on the radio. Nazis keep burning shelters regardless. The machinery is too large, too entrenched, essentially permanent. One track, even a good one, can’t change any of that. But I respect the refusal to accept the silence. The decision to do something small and symbolic when the real problems are so vast they might as well be immovable. There’s dignity in the gesture, even when it’s futile. I don’t know if the song actually charted or if it mattered. It probably got more listens than usual, then faded. The point was never effectiveness. The point was that people still wanted to throw it at the darkness anyway, knowing it won’t stick, knowing they’d have to do it again tomorrow. Doing it because what else do you do when you’re angry and symbolic resistance is the only resistance available. Wednesday, 2 September 2015. The True King: I’ve been thinking about Joffrey Baratheon way too much. He’s universally hated—complete agreement on this—which creates a kind of pull. All that concentrated contempt makes you wonder what’s underneath. He’s a kid. A spoiled, vicious kid with a crown he can’t control, surrounded by people who profit from his destruction. He lashes out because it’s the only power he has. Then the world kills him and nothing changes. Like it should have. It didn’t. I’m noticing something in how he’s hated. The complete agreement, the satisfaction in his suffering, the comfort of having a clear villain. It was easier than looking at what made him. Maybe that’s just how it works. You put a traumatized child on a throne, surround him with people who want him dead, and then hate him for being exactly what that creates. And everyone feels righteous about it. I can’t unsee it now. Tuesday, 1 September 2015. Miley’s VMA Stunt: Miley Cyrus hosted the VMAs last night, and she was on this whole campaign to make sure every person on Earth saw her breasts. Every. Single. One. And she actually pulled it off. MTV aired her chest on live television. Maybe a full second before the director—probably nosebleeding—cut to a wide shot of the stage and the audience in shock. This was right after Taylor Swift collected Best Video for Bad Blood, and Miley had gone backstage to change. “Oops, are my boobs out?” That’s the last thing you hear from her before MTV cuts away entirely. I have no clue if angry moms are already calling to complain. I have no idea if Christian groups are filing lawsuits. And yeah, maybe I’m a little too obsessed with Miley’s breasts. But the thing happened. We saw it. That’s really all the VMAs are good for anymore. Miley, I love you. Monday, 31 August 2015. Where It Ends: One of my exes messaged me once asking why I bothered with all the refugee advocacy, whether I’d actually taken anyone in myself. Bad logic, worse spelling. We weren’t together much longer after that. Oliver Kalkofe is known in Germany for not holding back—about national disasters, about stupid people, about TV that shouldn’t exist. He’s spent years arguing for something better, which sounds noble until you realize what he’s actually doing is calling out the greedy and the dumb with genuine contempt. The guy doesn’t perform modesty. He released a video aimed at the Nazis and “concerned citizens” wrapped up in refugee panic. The message isn’t that discussion is off the table. He wants more of it, demands it even. But he marks a line where talking stops and violence begins: burning shelters, beating people, assaulting kids on trains. Beyond that, the conversation is over. There’s a dead space in most discourse where people hide. The gap between “I disagree with your immigration policy” and “refugees are subhuman invaders” gets treated like the difference is just rhetoric, just tone. Kalkofe won’t allow that. He’s saying no—the line is actual and material, and letting it vanish has made us sloppy about who we’re willing to harm. It needed saying. Glad he said it plainly. Monday, 31 August 2015. Dick Pics: Every online creator gets them. Dick pics arriving unsolicited, usually from anonymous accounts, at hours that feel personal even though they’re totally random. It’s the background noise of being visible on the internet—so constant it becomes routine, but strange enough to never quite feel normal. These guys must be operating on pure magical thinking. What’s the expected outcome? That seeing their hard cock will somehow inspire reciprocation? That the photo is flirtation? That a stranger looking at an erect dick sent to her inbox is anything other than an intrusion? The logic doesn’t track. Kelly Svirakova, who makes videos as MissesVlog, was getting enough of them—along with the sidebar stuff, the requests for nudes and used clothing, the demands she perform for invisible men—that she made a video about it. Which makes sense. Call it by what it is, put it in the light, at least name the behavior instead of quietly deleting. For women creators, this is just weather. It’s what happens if you’re visible. Men sending them dick pics the same way they might send a message, convinced that exposure is somehow communication. That showing a stranger your erection is bold or worth doing or matters. I’ve been online a long time and I still find it strange. Not shocking—it’s too common for that—but strange in a way I can’t quite articulate. The person sending doesn’t think there will be consequences. The person receiving finds consequences everywhere. The internet made this gap possible: you alone with your arousal, thinking about someone you’ll never meet, convinced that she should see. That it matters. That you should tell her by sending the image. Maybe something changed when everyone got cameras. Monday, 31 August 2015. Kate Upton and Small Bikinis: Kate Upton does something to me. The way she moves, the way she laughs, the effortless thing she’s built around just being completely captivating in a frame. Model, actress—she’s good at both. I’ve followed her rise, and it’s not exactly for the acting. Sports Illustrated made this video where she discusses two things: how the magazine elevated her, and why she loves small bikinis. The setup suggests these are real questions with real answers somewhere in the footage. But here’s what actually happened: I couldn’t tell you what she said about any of it. The background music was too good, and more than that, the whole thing was just too much for my brain to process anything except watching her sit there and talk. Completely distracted. She could have been discussing anything and I’d have been just as lost. I knew what was happening and didn’t care enough to fix it. So if you want to know what she actually thinks about all this, go watch the video. I can’t help you. Monday, 31 August 2015. Male Nipples: I found out there’s a Japanese magazine called “I Love Everyone! Man’s Nipple.” The entire thing is dedicated to male nipples. Different colors, different sizes, hairy, smooth. That’s the magazine. Just nipples. This is very Japan. Vending machines that sell anything, Pokémon that never stopped, a visual culture that turns everything into something to want. A magazine about male nipples doesn’t feel absurd there—it feels completely inevitable. The best part is how sincere it is. No winking, no irony about it, no sense that anyone involved thinks this is funny. It just exists. Some people like this. Here’s a magazine for them. No framing, no apology. Obviously there’s something funny about the asymmetry—female body magazines have been everywhere forever, background noise by now. The second a magazine shows up that makes male bodies the subject of that same focused attention, it becomes remarkable. But maybe that needed to happen. Maybe the male body deserved its magazine too. Saturday, 29 August 2015. Pizza Won: I watched RTL cut off a live interview with the Chancellor to cover pizza. This was August 2015, when Germany was watching refugee homes burn, when kids were getting attacked in the street, when something actually felt wrong. Merkel had driven to Heidenau to make a public stand against it. Their afternoon magazine show had her on live. Then they killed the segment for a pizza story. The network that filled its daytime with humiliation—poor people solving crimes, unqualified hosts digging into their lives—suddenly didn’t have room for serious news. Not because they were busy with something better. They just weren’t interested. Pizza was lighter, easier, less demanding. Pizza won. I kept waiting for irony, for some sign that everyone understood how bad this looked. But I don’t think they did. RTL’s people probably felt competent: the interview happened, the pizza news happened, decent programming. The distance between a country in crisis and a food story had just stopped existing to them. Everything felt the same level. And this is what happens when you run something long enough—television, politics, a magazine, your own life. You stop being able to tell what matters. Scale collapses. Everything flattens. Pizza and the government and your own future all start to feel like the same weight. And then pizza wins. Friday, 28 August 2015. I Proposed to Miley Cyrus: I’m in love with Miley Cyrus. Actually in love. She’s cool because she just does what she wants—doesn’t perform, doesn’t ask permission. She’s modern the right way: feminist, vegan, refuses to be what anyone else decided she should be. She’s smart and beautiful and says whatever’s on her mind, and her voice will destroy you. How could anyone not love her? There’s this Tumblr Q&A happening today where for an hour she answers whatever fans ask. So I asked the only question that mattered: ’Will you marry me? Okay, thx bye.’ Put my real name on it too—real love doesn’t come anonymous. Now I’m waiting. Refreshing tonight to see if she saw it, if she answers. Why wouldn’t she? She’s cool, modern, intelligent. And she loves me. Maybe. Friday, 28 August 2015. California, Here We Come: I was completely devoted to The O.C., California. Wednesday nights were sacred, Saturday afternoons the same. I had the DVDs, all the soundtracks. It was just… everything to me. The fantasy was simple: you’d imagine Sandy Cohen adopting you, you’d imagine cruising Newport Beach with Seth, kissing Marissa at sunset and then realizing Summer was way cooler, or maybe Taylor—that completely insane girl who took over when Marissa died. The show sold you a version of California you desperately wanted to believe in. That house—the actual place where they filmed it all—is on the market now. Newport Beach, six bedrooms, 5.5 million euros. You could buy it. But you can’t buy what it meant. The house is still there, the pool is exactly the same, all the rooms are waiting. What’s gone is the feeling of being eighteen and wanting something you couldn’t have. You can own the building now. You’ll never own that hunger. California, here we come—except you arrived, and it’s just a house. Friday, 28 August 2015. Takashi Yasui: You walk through Kyoto or Osaka or Tokyo and something about those streets doesn’t exist anywhere else. The wide pedestrian zones where you’re lost in the crowd, narrow alleys that hide basement bars and ancient shops, temples consumed by moss and time. You feel it immediately—this is a place with real depth. Takashi Yasui lives in Kyoto and photographs it the way you’d photograph something you’ve actually lived in. His pictures aren’t dramatic or trying to impress. They’re patient. A corner in afternoon light, a storefront, ordinary moments that somehow carry more weight than anything designed to be spectacular. I look at his work and I want to go back. Japan has been flattened into stereotypes by now, absorbed into a global version of itself that barely resembles the actual place. What Yasui’s photographs do is cut through that noise. They show you the quiet city underneath, the real streets, the places that exist independent of anyone’s idea of what Japan is. Thursday, 27 August 2015. Underweight, Too Fat: Agnes Hedengård is nineteen, Swedish, and was a model until her agents started saying no. Your hips are wrong. Your ass is too fat. She’s 5’11” with a BMI of 17.5—underweight by medical standards—but the numbers she has don’t match the ones they need. She posted videos on YouTube laying it out: agencies are interested until they see her measurements, and then she’s out. The mechanism is simple. The modeling industry has always been like this. It’s not a secret or a scandal, just how the work gets done. But there’s something about how absolute the rejection is, how it needs no judgment or interpretation. She gets measured and found unsuitable. That’s where it ends. No personality, no angle, no chance to convince them otherwise. I was rewriting the original post and noticed a statistic about eating disorders in teenagers, worst in that age group. The same teenagers exposed to images of women being told they’re too much in the wrong ways, their bodies failing to meet the template. The cause and effect is clean. What I keep coming back to is just the purity of it. You measure her and she doesn’t fit. The system works exactly as it’s designed to work. No one has to feel bad about it, which might be why it keeps working the same way. Thursday, 27 August 2015. Small and Loud: SPIEGEL TV showed up at the houses of people posting hate on Facebook. Kill them, drown them, gas them. Freital. The videos are weird—confrontation meets boredom, like watching someone get caught in a lie they’ve told themselves long enough to actually believe. The thing that hits is how small they look. Trapped. The hatred reads so confident online and then you see the person and it’s just someone who’s scared. Not of refugees. Scared of the idea that someone with nothing might end up doing better, which feels like the worst possible humiliation in their head. You can’t argue someone out of that. Twenty years of watching people try online and logic never touches it. The videos don’t fix anything. Just sit there uncomfortably, which I guess is something. Wednesday, 26 August 2015. Open Your Mouth: Joko and Klaas made a video calling out the right-wing hate preachers, the Facebook nazis spreading bile about refugees. They used the hashtag #MundAufmachen—open your mouth, speak up. And I have to say something too, because you can’t miss these people anymore. The “I’m not a Nazi, but…” crowd. The amateur truth-tellers. The walking brain-death provocateurs who think they’re being courageous. They genuinely believe they’re saying what everyone’s thinking, except they’re not—they’re just cycling the same hateful garbage. Economic migrants. Welfare leeches. Cultural replacement. They find one statistic, memorize it, use it to dress up their stupidity in something that looks like facts. They call themselves patriots. The true voice of the people, naming it, pointing at the wound. Then you push back and they scream political correctness—as if hating people is some kind of free speech principle they’re dying to protect. Before, you were a punk if you provoked. Now you’re a patriot. Whatever. Call yourself what you want. You’re still contemptible. You’re still building yourself up by stepping on people who have nothing. Facebook plays along. Racism, free speech—apparently the same thing to them. They ban tits but let the intellectual sewage flow. Look, I know you won’t change. You won’t listen to reason or decency or anything remotely human. You’ll keep confusing cruelty with truth-telling, you’ll mock anyone who objects, you’ll keep believing you’re the vanguard of something real. You’ll make the country uglier. Maybe eventually it stops. Maybe you grow up, maybe you feel shame, maybe you spend your whole life regretting this. Or maybe you end up on afternoon cable. Either way, not my concern. But I needed to say it, same as Joko and Klaas: I see you. I know what you are. So unfollow. Block. Send your shitstorm. Boycott the shows. Write about how unfunny we’ve become. None of it’s as bad as clapping when a boat full of eight hundred refugees goes down in the Mediterranean. Refugees welcome. Wednesday, 26 August 2015. What Your Friends Think: There it is, under his name—a rant about refugees in the specific language of contempt they’ve apparently been marinating in. Posted like a status update about the weather, or what he had for lunch. The strange part is how unsurprised you are. These thoughts have always existed somewhere. You probably caught hints years ago—a comment at dinner, a joke that went a little too hard. But there’s a difference between suspecting someone thinks something and having them spell it out in a public post. It’s harder to pretend you didn’t see it. Some people try to engage. They paste statistics, they ask questions, they appeal to basic decency. It rarely works. The person didn’t develop their hatred through a lack of information. They developed it because it felt good—simplifying a complicated world into the safe and the dangerous, turning themselves from complicit into virtuous, under siege. That’s not an argument you win with facts. I used to think understanding changed things. Thought if people just knew what it was actually like for the people they hated, they’d feel differently. Some do, maybe. Most don’t. And then you’re left knowing what someone you used to know really thinks, and there’s no unfinding that. Tuesday, 25 August 2015. Father of the Year: I’ve seen enough fathers raise sons who turn out exactly like them—same small thinking, same fear of anything different. They don’t even realize they’re passing it down. It calcifies young, before the kid even knows what’s possible. Mikki was different. His son got a duplicate birthday gift, so they went to a nearby store to exchange it. “Pick whatever you want,” he told him. The kid came back beaming with an Arielle Barbie—the Little Mermaid one. There are two ways a father can react at that moment. He can take the doll away and hand him a truck instead—keep him on the rails. Or he can tell him he’ll always love him, and if he wants to play with a Barbie then he plays with a Barbie. Mikki chose the second. Tuesday, 25 August 2015. Why I’d Go Back to Gamescom: I went to gamescom in Cologne two weeks ago. Old news by now, but I’ve never been quick about writing things down anyway. And since this blog basically disappeared for a bit, I figured I’d post the nice photos and talk about which games actually got to me. Wednesday was my day. Panic attacks and crowds don’t mix, and I’ve learned that the hard way too many times. So I went when it was less insane, hit what I wanted to hit, and didn’t have to feel my chest caving in. Simple strategy. Fallout 4 hit me hard. People complaining about the graphics don’t understand what Fallout is about. It’s never been about realistic pixels. It’s about the world, the people in it, the mysteries, finding your own story in all of it. That’s what the game has always been. I watched the Heavensward presentation for Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been playing that game obsessively for weeks now. I tank, which means I’m constantly failing despite actually trying. I can’t explain why I keep going back to it, but I do. Maybe I’ll figure out how to be competent eventually. Nintendo had their usual shrine of childhood. Super Mario Maker, Star Fox Zero, Zelda Tri Force Heroes. Walking through that sent me back, made me want it again. Might be time to finally get a Wii U, or maybe I should wait for whatever comes next. I missed the Horizon Zero Dawn presentation, which I’m still annoyed about—the trailer had genuinely interested me. Spent some time with Anno 2205 and the first episode of Life is Strange, both fine. Got completely demolished at Street Fighter V by someone who actually knew what they were doing. These giant arcade controllers don’t work with me. The Super Nintendo version was definitely easier. Best part was the social stuff. Met up with Maik from Langweileidch.Netz, we crashed the EA party, then hit the YouTube party after. Talked with Tim from Pixelburg about where podcasts are going. Watched the Rocket Beans guys doing their thing. Found this weird Belgian game called Guns, Gore & Cannoli that was worth playing. Slept at a Holiday Inn Express just outside the city. Nothing fancy—WiFi worked, breakfast was fine, and Beyoncé was inexplicably playing in the lobby. Would I go back next year? Yeah. Not for the PR people screaming into mics, not for free garbage keychains, not for waiting in line to watch ten minutes of gameplay. But because gamescom reminds you that games actually pull people together. All kinds of people. Different ages, different backgrounds, different everything. All in one place caring about the same thing. That’s the real reason to go back. Monday, 24 August 2015. Vindication: I bought a white bed and everyone laughed at me. Full commitment—white frame, white sheets, white pillows, the whole thing. Then V Magazine comes out with a shoot: Kate Upton, Miranda Kerr, Candice Swanepoel, Amber Valletta, all half-naked on white beds, shot by Sebastian Faena. Suddenly my taste in bedroom furniture doesn’t look stupid. You don’t need much explanation for why it works. Beautiful woman on white sheets equals good photograph. The skin looks right, the light is clean, there’s nothing to distract from the body. Fashion photographers know this, which is why they keep returning to white bedding. I knew it too when I bought mine, even if I wasn’t putting it that way. You see enough magazine spreads on white sheets and you start understanding what that visual does. The funny part is the vindication. A professional photographer with supermodels for a magazine made the same choice. White works. He used it for a shoot, I used it for a bedroom. The principle was identical. I thought about printing out the Kate Upton photo and telling people it was shot in my bed, but that misses the point. The real thing is knowing something about what works visually, about how skin and light and white interact, and applying that knowledge to your own space. The bed was right. That’s it. Monday, 24 August 2015. Before the Internet Got Cool: The first site I ever made was neon green text on a flashing orange background with animated GIFs I ripped from a Sailor Moon fan page. It was GeoCities, 1997 or so, and I had no idea what I was doing. GeoCities was the hot shit back then. From 1994 onwards, anyone could grab a free domain tucked into some themed neighborhood and build a website with whatever obsessed them—no gatekeepers, no algorithms, no editorial board. You could just make something and put it on the internet, full stop. Every site looked like it came from a fever dream. Sailor Moon GIFs spinning in the corners. MIDI files playing automatically when you landed on the page, impossible to mute. Hit counters like vanity projects. Guestbooks collecting spam. An “Under Construction” banner because the site was never actually finished. Comic Sans everywhere. Hot pink and lime green at full saturation. The unspoken rule was: more was better. The design aesthetic now seems utterly insane—maximalist to the point of active hostility. But that was exactly the appeal. You filled your space with everything you cared about, formatting be damned. No curators. No algorithm deciding what you’d see. Just people making weird little corners of the internet for themselves. Cameron’s World preserves some of these old sites in an archive—a museum of early web that captures how goofy and sincere it all was. Which is to say: it was terrible, and that was completely the point. What’s strange is remembering how low the stakes felt. You weren’t building a brand or watching metrics. You made a website because you had something to say or just because you could, and that lack of pressure meant people actually took risks. Built weird shit. Made things that mattered to maybe three other people on Earth. That felt like enough. Monday, 24 August 2015. Nazis in Heidenau: I have this terrible habit of empathizing with everyone. No matter what they’ve done, where they’ve done it, or why—I’m there, trying to understand, reaching for the reason beneath the act. My friends know this about me. They’ve stopped waiting for me to come around. I’ll still be explaining some asshole’s point of view long after they’ve moved on. Nothing happens without a reason, I tell myself. Everyone does what they think is right. Then I watched that video from Heidenau. Eastern Germany. A crowd of far-right protesters—basically just Nazis—harassing asylum seekers, ransacking the refugee shelter, grinning the whole time. Laughing about it. Genuinely happy to be hurting people. And something shut down in me. The empathy quit working. I couldn’t find the reason, the hurt, the logic underneath the cruelty. I wanted to puke. I kept seeing the families inside that shelter instead. People who’d walked thousands of kilometers out of hell, carrying their kids, believing they’d finally made it somewhere safe. To Germany. To Heidenau. And instead they’re standing in front of the next war. Kids crying, mothers holding them closer, trying to figure out if this is what they’d burned their lives down to escape. That’s what I couldn’t make sense of. That’s what broke my ability to understand. Not the grievance or the fear or whatever story the crowd told themselves about protecting something. Just the pleasure in it. The actual joy of hurting people who had nothing left. I’m still angry about it. Monday, 24 August 2015. Summer Loud: You’re three weeks out from the first festival and already digging through your closet, trying combinations that probably won’t work, putting them back. You’ll end up in the same outfit three days running anyway, but choosing still takes effort, still takes thought. Festivals make you think about your clothes differently than anything else does. It’s not about impressing people—not mainly. A festival is three days where you get to be louder about who you are. Not a different person, just a more visible one. Whatever your style is, it gets turned up. You get permission to be clear about it. As a designer, I notice the real work that goes into this. People treat it seriously without treating it seriously. There’s no dress code except the festival’s energy, but within that everyone finds their own thing. The kid in the vintage band shirt, the person in full rave wear, the one in thrift linen—they’re making the same decision to be clear about themselves. It’s genuine attention to who they are. It’s not performing, just being louder. The best festival outfits don’t cost anything. They’re the ones where someone actually looked at their closet with intention. The piece they’ve had for years mixed with something new, comfort and brave put together. That combination, that specificity, is what makes it work. Summer’s short. Three days where being yourself loudly is just the expectation. You pick clothes that feel like freedom, and that’s the whole thing. Thursday, 6 August 2015. Girl and the Trip: Some media only works under the right conditions. You know this. Watch Hangover alone, sober, depressed—it’s painful. Watch it with your best friends at midnight, beer in hand, in a dark theater? It’s perfect. Some art demands you bring everything to it. Knight Rider was the greatest thing I’d ever seen when I was ten. Same show now is almost unwatchable. Masanobu Hiraoka made a video like that. The kind that only functions in darkness, on a big screen, and while you’re on acid. Alone, or with someone else tripping exactly as hard as you are. Otherwise it’s like watching Cirque du Soleil sober, or Alice in Wonderland at a shopping mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Pointless. Worse than pointless—a waste of what’s actually there. What’s the video about? I couldn’t tell you straight. Maybe it’s about a girl drowning in the noise of everything. Maybe it’s about colors discovering each other. Maybe it’s about the flood of eternity and how we get swept from one life into the next. Or maybe it’s just about acid. A lot of acid. The kind of video that doesn’t exist without it. Monday, 3 August 2015. Sofia’s Anaconda: Sofia Ashraf sampled Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and made it a weapon. “Kodaikanal Won’t” is a direct attack on Unilever, the massive corporation that poisoned an Indian town and never bothered to clean it up. The facts are simple and infuriating. Unilever ran a thermometer factory in Kodaikanal that processed mercury. Fourteen years ago they closed it—forced to by health and environmental regulations—and just left. The mercury stayed. Still in the ground, still in the water, still in the crops. The people there are living with it. Sofia didn’t write a petition or record a straightforward call-out. She took “Anaconda,” kept the beat and the sample, and replaced all the lyrics with her own story. It’s a smarter move than it might sound. People don’t ignore catchy music, and they especially can’t ignore it when it makes them uncomfortable. The track works because it rides on something you already know and care about. I respect this kind of activism because it doesn’t ask permission or try to convince through argument. It just exists as something that hits hard and happens to be about mercury poisoning and corporate neglect. You can’t unlearn what you hear. Whether Unilever responds is its own question. But Sofia made sure that response has to happen in public. The town’s suffering isn’t something anyone gets to quietly ignore anymore. Monday, 3 August 2015. The Detour: Attack on Titan was the anime event of its time. The battles, the plot twists, humanity’s last walls against colossal naked giants—it made everything else look small. Rightfully. For two years after the first season’s cliffhanger, you just waited. Then came word of new content. What actually landed was Attack on Titan: Junior High, a comedy spin-off where Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and the rest are just high schoolers. No titans. No apocalypse. The stakes are homework, crushes, cafeteria drama. Domestic comedy. I get the letdown. You wait years for the main story to resume and instead you get a joke. But the spin-off works better than it has any right to. These characters are archetypal enough now that they function in any register—they play equally well in existential horror and high school comedy because you know exactly who they are. Eren’s still reckless. Levi’s still meticulous. The context shifts but the core stays intact. It’s not cynical either. It’s not mining beloved characters for easy laughs. It’s just playing—treating them as characters first, icons second. In this smaller frame, you feel what you already knew about them more clearly. Mikasa’s absolute devotion. Levi’s precision. The group’s natural hierarchy. High school is small enough that their personalities breathe differently. I found it weirdly charming. Not as the thing people were waiting for, but as its own thing. A detour that only works if you already care. If you don’t, it’s just another high school anime. If you do, there’s something tender about watching them exist in a world where the stakes are genuinely small. No grand purpose. No apocalypse. Just the ordinary wreckage of being seventeen, something they’ve never actually had to live with. Sunday, 2 August 2015. Tomato Burgers: I get fatter every week because I’m too lazy to run and gyms disgust me. So I cut carbs sometimes—try to keep it minimal at mealtime, tell myself I’m being good about it. The problem is burgers. You can’t order one without a bun and still pretend you’re trying. Moshat, a Japanese burger chain, apparently figured this out. They’re selling the Tomami burger—a wordplay on tomato and the Japanese word for fruit—for about six euros. Two thick slices of tomato instead of a bun. It’s such a clean solution. It probably looks worse in real life than it does in the pictures, which is always how these things go. You work with what you have when you’re trying to lose weight without actually trying. Maybe it sparks something for someone else. I’m just thinking about cheeseburgers now. Friday, 31 July 2015. Comfortable With Hatred: There’s a photo going around of a kid beaten against a wall, the guy who did it smiling at the camera with a thumbs-up. The replies are what you’d expect if you’ve scrolled Facebook: “Right move.” “Self-termination for the left would solve things.” Most people don’t even pause. Right-wing extremism in Germany stopped being fringe at some point and nobody marked the moment. Now it’s everywhere on social media—people anonymous enough to say what they actually think about refugees, about migrants, about anyone marked as wrong. It spans everyone, from tabloid readers to educated people. That’s the part that’s actually unsettling. There’s a blog, Kartoffeln im Netzfisch, that collects the worst posts. I look at it sometimes and feel tired more than anything. Just the weight of all that hostility taking up space, from people who will never change their minds, in a country I also live in. What’s the point of looking? Not sure. But I keep looking. Friday, 31 July 2015. The Quiet Work: Fascism looks good, which is part of what makes it work. Architecture, symbols, uniforms—everything’s designed to pull at something specific. That’s not accidental. That’s the whole plan. There’s always the question of what you do about it. Not the big fantasy where you’re the hero—you know that doesn’t happen. I mean the actual everyday stuff. The propaganda sitting there. The conversations that start going that way. The people around you who haven’t quite said it out loud but definitely think it. Someone sent me to Kein Bock Auf Nazis once, a German site that just laid out the basic things. Don’t look away. Clean up the propaganda when you see it. Find some people and do something. The radical stuff isn’t radical—it’s just paying attention and treating it like it matters. The thing is, it does matter, and nobody else is going to fix it. It falls on us, which is unfair and frustrating, but pretending otherwise is just surrender in a better costume. Thursday, 30 July 2015. Treason: German federal prosecutors charged two journalists at Netzpolitik—Andre Meister and Markus Beckedahl—with treason. Their crime was publishing classified documents about the government’s plans to expand surveillance on social media. They faced up to two years in prison. It was the first treason prosecution of journalists in decades. What made this case sharp to me was the specific legal complaint. Prosecutors weren’t just saying these guys had published leaked documents. They were treating the journalists as accomplices to the leak itself—the same legal position as the source. Not as people who reported what they’d learned, but as co-conspirators in the act of revealing it. It’s a clean way of saying: your job is not to tell people what we do. The logic is almost neat. Government wants to monitor social media for intelligence. Journalists find the classified plans and publish them. Government charges journalists with betraying the nation. There’s no hidden mechanism here, no bureaucratic complexity. The state wants total information about everyone. It wants no information about itself to be public. Anyone who makes that contradiction visible becomes the enemy. You can watch the whole system operate in one simple sequence. I think about this because Meister and Beckedahl knew what they were doing. Bloggers running a site about German internet policy don’t make that kind of decision casually. They published anyway. That’s where it stops being abstract—where press freedom becomes a specific person deciding what’s worth the consequences. I never found out what happened to them after. Whether they faced trial, whether the charges stuck, whether they’re still running the site. But that doesn’t matter as much as the decision itself. They’re the names I remember because they’re the ones who did the thing when doing it could cost them years of their life. Thursday, 30 July 2015. Free Delivery: A 25-year-old from Lower Bavaria posted on Facebook that he had a gas bottle and a hand grenade waiting for the asylum seekers. “Free delivery,” he wrote. The court in Passau fined him seven thousand euros for incitement to hatred. The straightforwardness is jarring. No coded language, no deniability—just the actual thought, as if speaking it was temporary, as if it would vanish once he hit send. The refugee crisis was taking his job, his apartment, his sense that the world owed him something. He needed everyone to know he was thinking about violence, maybe even that he’d do it, the way people talk about things they’ll never actually do. Maybe he thought nobody would screenshot it. Maybe he thought the internet was like thinking in your car—it evaporates the moment you move on. Maybe he didn’t think at all. Either way, he got to speak what he believed, and now it costs him seven thousand euros. That’s the equation. You speak and you pay, or you stay quiet. One person chose to pay. Wednesday, 29 July 2015. Narrowing It Down: There’s this feeling when you arrive in a city you don’t know—everything looks interesting but nothing tells you what’s worth your time. Tokyo especially. All those blocks of restaurants and bars, most of them serving people who already know the code. How do you find what matters? Monocle published a Tokyo guide recently. The idea is straightforward: some people looked at the city carefully and wrote down what they found. Not revolutionary—travel guides exist—but there’s something honest about it. Instead of the randomness of the internet or the standard tourist circuit, you get routed toward things that someone whose taste you trust actually noticed. A narrowing of choice that somehow makes choosing easier. I haven’t been to Tokyo and probably won’t use this guide. But I get the appeal. What’s interesting isn’t the book itself—it’s the idea that a city can be helped along by someone who’s looked at it properly. That matters more than anything inside the cover. Tuesday, 28 July 2015. Finally Going to Gamescom: I’ve been trying to get to Gamescom for years. Even when it was still in Leipzig, I’d tell myself it would happen eventually. Something always came up. This year, finally, I’m actually doing it. I’ll be there alone, which is fine—nobody I know cares enough to want to come. I can’t say I blame them. I call myself a retro gamer, though that’s a stupid word for it. I’ve never actually made it to a proper games convention. Missed Tokyo Games Show by a couple of weeks. The E3 always seemed too far, too expensive, too American and impossible. Microsoft invited me to CES once and basically just stuck me in their booth looking at Office software, which was not what I’d hoped for. But Gamescom is different. It’s happening in Germany, it’s a reasonable distance, and I’m finally doing this. I’ll be easy to spot—the fat guy with an unkempt beard and terrible haircut, usually looking at his shoes. The nervous one hovering near booth hostesses without the nerve to ask for a photo. I’ll be blushing. I want to play Fallout 4 if they let me. I want to remember what it felt like to love Nintendo the way I did when I was younger. And if there’s a Street Fighter 5 cabinet somewhere, I’ll try a match, though I’ll probably get destroyed. That’s all. Just finally going to see what I’ve been missing. Tuesday, 28 July 2015. Highlight of My Lowlife: I was bored, scrolling through Vevo watching music videos, and it was all garbage. One trash thing after another. Then That Poppy’s “Lowlife” came on. The video’s cheap—some Kyary Pamyu Pamyu knockoff with none of the actual vision, just the surface-level weirdness. Demonic makeup, an old guy in a wheelchair, shock value with no point. I would’ve closed it out in seconds if the hook hadn’t already gotten stuck in my head. That relentless reggae beat. “Baby you’re the highlight of my lowlife,” sung by this girl styled to look fifteen but she’s probably twenty-five, delivered in a voice that’s completely unbothered. They never tell you That Poppy’s actual age. It’s intentional. The chaotic clothes, the doll eyes, the constructed image—everything is designed so you can’t quite figure out what you’re looking at, which is exactly the appeal. She lives in that space where age and innocence blur together, manufactured and calculated. “Baby you’re the highlight of my lowlife.” Dumb hook. It shouldn’t work. But it does. Now everyone’s singing it. Monday, 27 July 2015. What Ze.tt Wants to Be: There’s this Saturday morning ritual with die ZEIT—the German weekly where you’re supposed to kick out whoever you brought home Friday night, make good coffee, get a warm roll with light ham, cross your legs on the balcony in the sun, and read with complete focus. No phone. Peak civilization. It’s aspirational stuff. Ze.tt launched today. ZEIT’s new property for young people too cool for weeklies but too smart for RTL2. The editor promised it would generate “conversation material”—the kind of stuff you’d argue about in a shared apartment kitchen or link to in group chats. The problem is the team clearly hasn’t decided what it wants to be. Is it long-form about young love, like NEON? Stupid lists, like BuzzFeed? Clickbait, like Heftig? Or actual journalism? Right now it looks like a high school newspaper went online. Narrow topic blocks instead of photography. Pixelated screenshots. Obnoxious share buttons. Nothing of ZEIT’s supposed visual sophistication—just elements scattered and crude. Orange on gray as the primary color. Whoever made that choice should actually be ashamed. Embedded Instagrams bleeding into warped GIFs bleeding into badly cropped screens. It might work on a Heftig audience, but not on anyone who can construct a full sentence. The content’s equally chaotic. There’s a piece about a homeless blogger who inherited 1.8 million dollars after his mother’s suicide. Five sentences on oxytocin and its effect on neurotransmitters. Something about Johnny Depp making sick kids happy—BRAVO meeting celebrity gossip meeting social media. The ZEIT online editor said they wanted ze.tt to bring disorder into their orderly digital journalism, unsettle their confidence, make them uncomfortable, try new things. A sandbox for young journalists to experiment. Fine concept. Not like this though. Not this half-formed. The real question is whether they want an experimental lab that just messes around without worrying about credibility, or if they’re trying to actually matter with smart readers tired of clickbait recycling. That would require a real vision, genuine editorial conviction, something way more ambitious than a muddled cross of three existing magazines. Soulless click farms are everywhere. They didn’t need to build another. The editor promised engagement with readers, following the news together, taking their questions seriously. But this public launch is still “experimental”—they’re moving into regular operation in September. Hopefully by then the team will know if they actually want this to be good. Maybe they will. Maybe. Monday, 27 July 2015. Sailor Moon Sells: They made Sailor Moon branded sanitary pads. Not a joke product—actual pads with full character designs, multiple versions for different flows, the whole thing available in Japanese drugstores starting in August. Someone pitched this in a meeting and it shipped. This is what total cultural domination looks like. Sailor Moon’s been everywhere for thirty years and it’s stopped being nostalgia or even a property you consciously buy into. It’s just there. You can put it on anything. A lunch box, a phone case, a menstrual product. People buy it. The weirdness isn’t even the product. The show was always about a girl’s actual life—school, dating, her body, all of it. The period jokes were built in. So there’s something honest about slapping the characters on a product that deals with the routine biological fact of having a uterus. No euphemisms, no performance of daintiness. Just: this is a thing people deal with, you love these characters, here’s a product. The sincerity is what works. No irony angle, no “we’re being edgy,” no meta-commentary. Just a company confident enough to build something people might want. And confident enough not to pretend they’re doing it for any reason other than selling a good product to people who care about the brand. I’ll never use them. Not the audience. But there’s something interesting about a culture that can do this without any self-consciousness whatsoever. Monday, 27 July 2015. Standing Out in Tokyo: Summer in Tokyo tries to kill you. Either you’re drowning in humidity so thick you can taste it, or the Tsuyu season shows up and it rains for weeks straight. The city becomes a greenhouse. But the kids dress for another world entirely. They move through it in these electric, specific combinations of color—the kind of outfit that only survives if you’re refusing to be invisible. In a city full of dark suits and school uniforms, if you want to exist as something other than background, you dress bright. I kept running across photos of two kids, Jyuria and Colomo, both eighteen. Tokyo Fashion was all over them, and once I saw why. Their closet was pure Tokyo: Park, Nesin, Zzz”¦Tokyo. Sakura1Tama, Decortr, Miauler Mew. Anime merch stacked with a PlayStation bag. Everything about it should clash—and it does, but in Tokyo it somehow becomes its own logic. It makes sense nowhere else. You can’t take that outfit and drop it in another city. It doesn’t work. It’s a response to a specific place. That commitment to brightness in the face of all that heat. Just deciding to be loud about it. Thursday, 23 July 2015. Mockingjay Still Doesn’t Bite: The Hunger Games franchise could have been great if it wasn’t built from the ground up for middle schoolers. Battle Royale understood what dystopia required—genuine dread, genuine consequences that stick. These films have the pieces for that: dead kids, a dictatorship butchering people, rebels getting executed in the streets. And then the filmmakers sand every edge down until it’s safe, managed, bloodless. Not that I need pointless gore. That’s not the argument. But when your entire premise is a state murdering children for entertainment, and resistance fighters are being killed by the thousands, I don’t want to *imagine* that horror. I want to witness it. Feel it. Not have the camera turn away the second it gets uncomfortable or difficult. That’s what the books are supposed to be for, and obviously nobody reads those. Still watching Mockingjay Part 2 when it comes out at year’s end though. Curious where they take it—Jennifer Lawrence, the final assault on the Capitol, all of it. I’m already annoyed because I know exactly how they’ll handle it—all careful, all managed, never actually showing the violence they keep saying is the point. But I’ll be there anyway. Thursday, 23 July 2015. Made the List: I love rankings. First, because they’re different every time depending on how you measure stuff, which means they’re complete garbage and also weirdly honest. Second, because they make people competitive. Third, because watching someone who didn’t make the cut convince themselves it doesn’t matter is deeply satisfying. I get it, though. I’ve been on the outside of enough stupid lists to know exactly how you rationalize it. You tell yourself it’s meaningless, whoever made the list doesn’t know anything, the whole thing’s a scam. And like sixty percent of you believes that, which is honestly the worst number because it doesn’t give you any peace. Some market research firm did a study on Germany’s most influential fashion bloggers. I’m assuming it shocked people. Some of the names you’d expect to see just aren’t there. And now I’m sitting here thinking about group chats and spin jobs and everyone pretending to be fine while visibly not being fine. The next fashion week is going to be tense as hell. It’s that moment when your image of yourself runs into what everyone else actually thinks. Most of the time those don’t match. And when they don’t, that gap is where the resentment lives. Wednesday, 22 July 2015. The Original 151: Only 151 mattered. Everyone knew this. Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, and if you were a kid with any taste, you’d pretend there was nothing after those. Maybe Pikachu if the moment called for it. Everything past that was noise—oversized whales, talking keychains, whatever they kept dreaming up. The real ones fit in a single generation. They had personality. They had restraint. Karolin Gu apparently agrees. She’s been illustrating one Pokémon a day—just from the original roster—and posting them somewhere. The results are small, detailed, weirdly charming. You see one and suddenly you’re remembering the exact feeling of that summer, the specific texture of the playground, the person you were trying to impress. That’s what this is really about, I think. Not the cute factor, though they are cute. Not the artwork, though it’s solid. It’s the permission to return to a moment when the only problem was whether Manu had better creatures than you did. No taxes, no rejections, no thinking about the future. Just: can mine beat yours? And sometimes they could. The thing about Karolin drawing these day after day is that it feels both pointless and necessary in equal measure. Like she’s preserving something that doesn’t actually need preserving because we all remember it anyway. But then you see a well-rendered Gyarados and you realize that’s not what this is. It’s not about memory. It’s about the fact that these things were actually good, and someone’s spending their time reminding us. Tuesday, 21 July 2015. The Click is Dead: I watched a girl on BRAVO’s Facebook page refuse to click a link. Someone posted a weird photo and said “Click here to find out what it is,” and instead of clicking, people just waited in the comments. Then someone took a screenshot and posted it in the feed. Sixty-one likes. People actually thanking them for not making them leave Facebook. “Hab keinen Bock, auf den Link zu drücken,” one girl said—I can’t be bothered clicking, and apparently neither can anyone else. It was everywhere. “Für die, die keine Lust haben”—for people who don’t feel like it. Screenshots of articles, answers to riddles, YouTube videos, all dumped straight into the feed so nobody had to leave. It hit me watching this happen over and over: the click is officially dead. Not broken. Not complicated. Dead. Young people don’t want it anymore. Clicks feel like friction, like a tax on their attention. So they’ve just decided not to click, and they’re forcing everyone else not to either. We all did this. Publishers, creators, bloggers, magazines, everyone. We spent years feeding everything into Facebook because the reach was too good to ignore. We told ourselves it was inevitable. We told everyone else too. Now we’re trapped inside it. If I stopped posting to Facebook, I’d just disappear. So I keep doing it, and everyone else keeps doing it, and we’re all slowly getting smaller and more desperate, chasing an algorithm we’ll never understand for a company that could cut us off tomorrow. The worst part is that people aren’t angry about it. They’re not resisting. They’re asking for more of it. They want to stay inside the feed. They want the thinking done for them, want someone else to pull the information out and hand it over so they never have to leave Facebook. It’s easier this way. Frictionless. And once you stop clicking, you stop discovering. Once you stop discovering, you stop bumping into things that exist outside the controlled feed. I know I’m part of the machine now. Every post I write, I’m thinking about Facebook excerpts and algorithm positioning and how to package it all for the feed. And I resent it and I keep doing it anyway because the alternative is invisibility. We’re all doing this. We’re slowly dying inside a system we built ourselves. What really gets me is how it all feels inevitable. Like there’s no escape and never was. Young people aren’t going to wake up and start exploring the open web. They’re not going to suddenly realize this is bad. They’re just going to keep asking for screenshots instead of links, and one day they’ll forget the internet was ever anything else. And we’ll still be here, feeding the machine, getting smaller payments for smaller audiences, until nobody remembers we ever existed outside this feed. That one comment keeps coming back to me: “Für die, die keine Lust haben auf den Link zu drücken.” For anyone too lazy to click. It sounds trivial, but it’s the sound of a generation deciding they’re done with the open internet. And we’re going to watch it happen because we don’t have the power to stop it anymore. Tuesday, 21 July 2015. Suiyoubi No Campanella: I found Suiyoubi no Campanella through Komuai, who raps for this Tokyo collective. One listen and something clicked—the production is precise and strange at once, nothing trying too hard. Music that doesn’t apologize. It made me realize how tired everything else sounds. German pop is plastic. Rap is posturing. Rock is people who should’ve quit years ago. Everything’s playing it safe, negotiating with rules nobody actually wrote. Komuai just raps. The beats are strange and right. There’s this loose-tight thing happening—like they figured out what they cared about and stopped listening to anyone else. Not profound. Just what music sounds like when people actually want to make something. I know that sounds snobbish. But once you hear music that isn’t scared, everything else sounds like it’s asking for permission. Monday, 20 July 2015. Permission: I followed the attack counts from Germany that summer because I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Berlin. Dresden. Freital. Five men corner a family at a red light and beat them because of their faces. A jogger gets his head smashed. A kid takes a punch from a grown man because her parents look foreign. By June there were 130 recorded attacks. Fires at shelters. People throwing rocks at paramedics. What got to me wasn’t the violence itself—people are always capable of that. It was how fast it became systematic. Three on one feels safe. Stay out of sight. Nobody important cares enough to stop you. By summer these men were showing up on Friday nights like it was a job, the only job that ever made them matter. Something to do when you have nothing else. Someone to hurt when that’s the only way you know to feel powerful. I kept reading the same scenario described over and over. A family flees war. Loses half of everything. Travels for months through hell convinced there’s someplace safe to land. They get to a shelter. They look out the window. They hear screaming. They understand immediately what comes next if they step outside—what comes next on any Friday night when there’s nothing else to do and no one’s watching. That’s not hypothetical. That’s what’s actually happening. Not once. Not in one place. Systematically. All over. The Germans are known for efficiency. Now you see what it looks like when it gets pointed at people who can’t fight back. So imagine you escape war. You lose your family. You travel for months through absolute nightmare. You think you’re going to be safe. You open the window and hear men screaming at your kid. And you understand—this could happen anywhere. Safety is just a room with glass, and eventually someone tests whether it breaks. Monday, 20 July 2015. Blindfolded: I probably know Super Mario World better than any other game in the world. Maybe Pokémon Blue. Maybe Chrono Trigger. Link to the Past. But Super Mario World is the one that shaped how I think about games, shaped it completely. I can’t count the hours I sank into it as a kid. Days, weeks, months, years. Every secret exit, every Star Road level, all the Special Worlds. I was the first person in my friend group to see it through to the end, to watch the Koopas grow mustaches in the credits. Though maybe I just hallucinated that whole thing on Fanta as a kid, honestly, who knows. Then I found out about this speedrunner online—some guy who goes by PangaeaPanganennt—who doesn’t just play Super Mario World faster than most people can say the word Yoshi. He plays the whole thing blindfolded. Eyes shut the entire way through. Guess I’ve been overestimating my gaming skills. Monday, 20 July 2015. The Web We Lost: There’s a photo of Hossein Derakhshan with the singer Lovefoxxx, both of them younger, both of them in a moment before everything changed. He was a blogger in the 2000s, when blogs still felt like the future—when millions of people were typing their thoughts, their politics, their obsessions into their own little corners of the internet. Some of it was noise. A lot of it was noise. But some of it was dangerous, in the way that real ideas can be dangerous. Hossein used his blog as a weapon against a rigid political structure, and the Iranian government noticed. By 2008, blogs had already started to lose their grip. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat were gathering people up into platforms that promised convenience and connection but really just wanted to monetize your attention. Hossein got arrested. A few years later, in 2011, he was convicted by Iran’s Revolutionary Court: 19 years and six months in prison, plus a fine of 30,000 euros. For writing on his blog. He was released on November 19, 2014, after a pardon from Ayatollah Khamenei. He opened his laptop and found an internet that was no longer his. That had betrayed him without knowing it was doing so. This is what he wrote about it: “Blogs were decentralized. They were windows into people’s lives, bridges between different worlds. They were cafés where you could actually talk to someone, where ideas moved freely, where a person could go deep on whatever interested them.” He was describing a web that actually existed, one he’d risked everything for. But the stream had won. By 2014, that wasn’t how it worked anymore. People didn’t click on websites or follow RSS feeds. They scrolled. Algorithms decided what you saw, and you’d never know what you weren’t seeing. The whole thing had been quietly centralized, and nobody called it that. I understand why it worked. The stream is frictionless. You don’t have to find anything; it comes to you. No opening new tabs, no browser, no effort. Just your phone, just scrolling, just the endless feed. The mountain came to you. And yes, it felt like freedom, or at least like convenience, which we’d learned to confuse with freedom. The cost was obvious if you bothered to think about it—your diversity of thought, your time, your control—but it felt so small compared to the luxury of not having to choose. Except the diversity part was real. The algorithm doesn’t like friction, doesn’t like difficulty. It buries challenging ideas under videos of people falling down, listicles, the same opinion repeated until it becomes consensus. Hossein was clear about this: challenging thoughts get suppressed because they don’t play well with the ranking game that platforms built to keep you watching. And the platforms have absolute control. You can post to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, sure. You have a URL. But you can’t own it the way you owned a blog. You can’t change how it looks. You can’t even count on your own words staying visible. The platform decides the rules, decides the lifespan of your thought. Twitter limits you to a line or two, so you learn to think in slogans. You abbreviate yourself to fit the box. You adjust your thinking to get the likes and the reshares, because that’s the only feedback mechanism that exists. Hossein called it personal television. You log into Facebook and suddenly you’re watching a stream of content carefully curated to be exactly what you might like. You never leave the platform. The algorithm learns you, shows you more of what you already think, and calls it personalization. It’s not. It’s capture. The shift happened quietly. A decade ago, an authoritarian government imprisoned bloggers. A few years later, Instagram didn’t need to be blocked because filtered breakfast photos weren’t a threat to anyone’s power. The internet had domesticated itself. “I miss the days when people read more than 140 characters,” Hossein said. “I miss publishing something on my own domain, with my own address, without worrying about promoting it across platforms so anyone would see it. When nobody cared about likes. When you could just write something and it could exist on its own terms.” He’s describing a feeling I never got to have, an internet I only know secondhand. But I understand the loss he’s talking about. We all do, even if we don’t admit it. We traded an open web for a convenient feed and called it progress. Thursday, 16 July 2015. Holding Hands in Moscow: Two guys held hands walking through Moscow and someone filmed what happened next. You don’t need context to understand why that matters. Russia’s the kind of place where doing that gets you hunted. The government doesn’t hide its position. Youth gangs operate openly. The law’s fine with it. I haven’t been to Russia, but you don’t have to go somewhere to know what homophobia looks like when the state sponsors it. The video shows the predictable hostility—except there’s nothing predictable about it, which is the point. These aren’t edge cases or fringe extremists. They’re just kids who’ve learned to hate this particular thing, and they’ve learned it well because the culture agrees with them. Living that way sounds impossible. The constant hiding, the calculation of which people around you would hurt you, the inability to be yourself in public. That’s survival, not life. But so is holding someone’s hand knowing you’ll probably regret it within minutes, knowing the cameras are running, knowing it probably won’t change a thing except maybe your own safety. There’s defiance in that refusal to hide, even if it’s brief and even if the cost is immediate. Whether that means anything, whether it actually matters—I don’t know. But accepting fear as the price of existence, letting it keep you small and hidden, that feels like a different kind of death. At least in that moment, those two guys refused it. Tuesday, 14 July 2015. Ferropolis in July: Ferropolis itself is what matters first. It’s industrial ruins outside Berlin, the kind of place that would be depressing on any regular weekend. But for one week in July, it becomes a festival ground. Not glamorous, not polished, just honestly interesting. The stages are built into the landscape itself. You walk past sculptures. Nothing feels manufactured from corporate templates—it all feels like it happened naturally, even though obviously someone planned it. The lineups are almost always worth paying attention to. That year the bill was Alt-J and Jamie XX, Toro Y Moi and Sven Väth, Kylie Minogue and Bilderbuch. The kind of mix that shouldn’t cohere but somehow does. You could move between sets and almost always find something worth staying for. Most festivals, you’re waiting out the gaps. Here you don’t have to. There’s a specific energy to German festival season. The heat, the dust, the beer, the way thousands of people show up and for three days pretend they’re building something. Ferropolis does it better than most because the venue isn’t just backdrop. It’s part of why you came. You can’t have Melt anywhere else. Every festival season I say I’m not doing it this year. And then July happens and I remember why Melt matters more than the others. Not just because of who’s playing. Because Ferropolis is actually somewhere. Somewhere real. Monday, 29 June 2015. When The Word Changed: I asked my friend what she thought about feminism, and she looked confused before saying something vague about equality. Honest answer, probably the most honest one I’ve heard to that question in years. I used to think it was straightforward. Feminism meant women should have the same rights as men, same opportunities, same respect. That’s it. Once you achieve that, the word becomes unnecessary—it’s served its purpose. Basic arithmetic, and it made sense. But I watched it morph into something else. It stopped being about equality and started being about whatever complaint happened to be loudest, whatever drama was unfolding online, whatever someone wanted to perform for an audience. Some of it legitimate, most of it just noise. The real problem is the word and reality got completely unmoored from each other. Feminism doesn’t describe the push for equality anymore—it describes a kind of performance, a set of arguments, a way of being on the internet. It became the container for whatever grievance was trending that day. So now the word doesn’t point to anything clear. Young women hear it and look confused, which is probably the sanest reaction available. The word spent its capital and there’s nothing left but smoke. Monday, 29 June 2015. The Expected Move: Jessica Weiß did what everyone assumed she eventually would: she started a fashion line. At this point the trajectory is so familiar you could almost predict it—blogger gets big, offers come in, brand launches. Swedish bloggers did it. Italian photographers did it. Germany’s most famous fashion blogger was always going to do it too. The line is called JOUR., with a period. She explained that she’s not technically a designer, which is honest. She came up through the industry instead, working at places like Les Mads and Journelles, understanding how things get made. Her partner, Pia Thole, is involved too. They started with six pieces. Basics: silk blouses, shorts, sweaters. Things she actually wears. There’s something appealing about that constraint, I think. Everyone has a fantasy version of what their brand would be if they got the chance—usually it’s sprawling and overcomplicated. Starting with six pieces means you have to be sure about what you’re making. It’s the move of someone who’s been paying attention. The real test is whether the pieces are any good. Built-in audience will buy it either way, so that’s not the question. But if she nails the basics, that’s worth paying attention to. A good silk blouse is harder to make than it looks. Friday, 26 June 2015. I Have Nothing for You, Only Sadness: Jon Stewart came back on air after the Charleston shooting and said, “I have nothing for you, only sadness.” Just that—sitting there with his pen, no jokes, no framing. What he said next was the clearest thing I’d heard about race in America: not that this was a tragedy to process and move past, but that it was reality. Black people lived inside a country built on white history and the wound never closed because nobody wanted to acknowledge it. I’d been watching him for years. There was something about the way he could make you think—not just laugh, but actually think about what was happening in the world—that nobody else was doing. He was leaving soon, his final shows coming up, and I wasn’t sure what happens when that kind of clarity leaves. But this is what he was for. In a moment when everyone else was hunting for the right words, he had the lucidity to say there weren’t any right words. You just sit with the sadness. You tell the truth and you don’t look away. Friday, 19 June 2015. Wrong Timing: Morning used to mean stumbling through the house like something freshly reanimated, waiting for enough coffee to make sense of the world. Not one cup—that stopped working years ago. More like I’d need increasingly industrial amounts just to feel approximately human. The frustrating part is it’s not laziness or some personal failing. Your body naturally releases cortisol at certain times—early morning, midday, late afternoon—to naturally push you toward wakefulness. But if you’re already hammering caffeine during those windows, you’re not adding a boost; you’re actually building resistance to it. Drink coffee at the wrong times often enough and it stops working almost entirely. You end up chasing bigger doses for smaller results, a kind of chemical treadmill you can’t step off. So there’s this window—different for everyone, but generally a couple hours after you first wake up—where caffeine actually lands. You skip the morning rush, you skip the afternoon spike, and you time it right, maybe three or four hours in. I’ve tried it. The difference is real. You actually feel it. But knowing this doesn’t make the zombie mornings easier. There’s still that first hour where I’m barely functional, where reaching for the coffee is more ritual than strategy, where the idea of waiting seems impossible. So I still drink it wrong, still build that tolerance back up, still end up needing more. At least now I understand why I’m tired all the time. That’s something. Monday, 8 June 2015. Still Shocking: Miley Cyrus hit the PAPERMAG cover that month, naked with a pig. The pig’s face was honest—genuine concern about what was happening. By then she’d been in provocation mode for a few years. New nude shoot every couple of months, each one attached to some story about breaking free from the Disney image, being authentic, rejecting control. The nudity itself never bothered me. It was the repetition that started to feel like a trap. Shock value has a lifespan. The same nakedness that made headlines three years earlier was just background noise by then. So you escalate. Add a pig. Find a new angle. Keep people looking. But you’re just feeding a machine that stopped being hungry a long time ago. The thing that bothered me was that she could actually sing. When she wasn’t performing provocation, when she was just working, there was something there. Real talent. Genuine songwriter. But it all got buried under the strategy of being scandalous. Every project, every interview, every image cycled back to that one thing. I’m not prudish about nudity. The body is what it is. But there’s something wasted about watching someone talented enough to not need gimmicks disappear inside one. The cover would be forgotten next month, replaced with whatever came next. But it stuck with me as one of those moments where you could see the trap closing—the thing that was supposed to free her had become what she couldn’t escape. Monday, 8 June 2015. Undisclosed: It’s a weird thing to notice about people you follow online. Someone posts about loving a product, seems genuinely into it, and then weeks later they’re pitching a completely different product with the exact same energy. Different brand, different category, same performance of enthusiasm. And you realize they’re probably getting paid for these posts without mentioning it. It’s not that they’re doing sponsored content. It’s that they’re doing it invisibly. They act like they discovered something and fell in love with it, sharing something personal, and meanwhile they got a check. Everyone needs money, fine. But there’s something deflating about the dishonesty. You follow someone because you think you know their taste, what they actually value. And when that recommendation might be for sale—when there’s no way to know if they like something or if they’re just reading an ad—something shifts. You lose a little faith in what they’re telling you. You can usually tell if you watch long enough. There’s a shift in how they talk about things when there’s money involved. Once you catch it, you start looking for the signs, trying to figure out what’s genuine and what’s just work. And that changes how you listen to them. You’re not hearing a friend anymore. You’re analyzing patterns. Wednesday, 3 June 2015. Where the Clubs Are: You come to Berlin to dance in some warehouse until you’re soaked and your ears are ringing—which is the whole point anyway. Berghain, Chalet, Gretchen, Watergate. Everyone knows these names before they arrive, but finding them scattered across the city is a different problem. Someone made an interactive map of the club scene, a registry that shows you what’s actually open and where. It’s practical: click around, see a venue, see its location. Berlin’s clubs move around constantly, so having everything in one place actually matters. Chesters by Görlitzer Platz. Watergate down by Oberbaumbrücke. Heizhaus somewhere farther out if you’re making the trip. The map lays it all out so you don’t have to wander around hoping you recognize a building. The real problem with Berlin clubs isn’t finding them. It’s getting in. Berghain will turn you away at the door regardless. But at least now you know exactly where to go when you want to get rejected. Wednesday, 3 June 2015. The Girl Next Door: Sports Illustrated’s basically got four Kate Upton clips and they’re going to milk them forever. Beach, ice, space—same footage rearranged into different videos with different music, different themes. She’s laughing, dancing, smiling, just standing there. I don’t care. I’ll watch every single one. It’s Kate Upton. Wednesday, 3 June 2015. Stars of a New Generation: I’m 31 now and I don’t have much use for the German YouTube ecosystem. Quick cuts, pseudo-funny outtakes, confused faces I’d love to throw in a bucket of acne cream and send back to the unemployment line. But you have to give them this: they’re the stars of a new generation. Oscar-nominated director Nanette Burstein followed LeFloid, Joyce Ilg, and whoever the other guy was, either standing around at home and verbally vomiting into a camera or getting dragged through sweaty crowds of truant teenagers, and made something actually worth watching out of it. What did I learn? It’s completely irrelevant what established adults—people who’ve already had their first time—think about people like Bibi, Sami Slimani, or Y-Titty. The only thing that matters is whether Chantal in seventh grade in Leipzig thinks they’re cool. She’s the future. Unfortunately. Wednesday, 3 June 2015. Macintosh Phone: Designer Pierre Cerveau sketched what he thought a Macintosh Phone would look like in 1984. There’s a lot he got right—the proportions, the way it’d sit in your hand, the sense that personal computing was going to shrink down to something you’d carry. He was picking up on Steve Jobs’s vision, that computers could be intimate and almost spiritual, and somehow that intuition pointed him toward something real even though the technology didn’t exist yet. It’s strange how long it took after someone had already imagined it. Fourteen years from Cerveau’s sketch to the iPhone in 2007. By then we’d cycled through the Macintosh, the iPod phase, the iPad thing, and none of it felt quite like what people had been unconsciously waiting for until Jobs held up a phone that was mostly screen. Cerveau’s design was close enough to recognize but wrong enough in the details to prove that the future isn’t predictable—it’s just something you can guess at and occasionally get right by accident. Monday, 1 June 2015. Food Is Better Than Sex: Food never really interested me. A brown bread sandwich and an apple at school, lentil soup or fish sticks at home, cheap soda from the corner store with my friends—I was satisfied with all of it. Happy even. Now I’m lying in bed thinking about bacon cheeseburgers with extra peanut sauce, fried noodles stacked with meat, tuna pizza dripping with melted cheese. This is what I live for. Not the other way around. And you can tell. Breasts and bacon. Those two thoughts have become my best friends. When I’m trying to fall asleep, when I’m jerking off to my own old photos from before I turned into a grotesque parody of myself—breasts and bacon, breasts and bacon, breasts and bacon. That’s the loop I’m stuck in. I know how to stop. Obviously. It’s not complicated. Fewer noodles, less bread, less of everything, and I’d get my thin body back from when I was twenty. Willpower, they call it. Buy a bike, some running shoes, a gym membership, use them. How hard can it be? Exactly. But. I’m not against movement itself. When we were kids we ran and rode bikes and played football like someone had deleted the TV from the world. We swam in the quarry and raced from one town to another. It wasn’t exercise, it was just living. A genuinely good life. But now fitness is a lifestyle for people I hate. The self-optimizers with their detox schemes and running clubs and their tracking apps, the startup guys breaking their existence into metrics and career advancement, moving not because it feels good but because their body is a machine that needs to function better and serve them well. Sport became an elite thing, something owned by assholes. The kind of people who make me want to strangle them. Even back then, if my friends had complained about being fat, I wouldn’t have understood it. Now everyone does it, regardless of gender. Even the skeletal fashion bloggers, whose flat stomachs are the star of every carefully composed photo. You’re posting your sweet potato fries from some trendy neighborhood, acting like you’ve never tasted a real potato, and meanwhile I’m sitting here choking down a burger. Other people run marathons. I feel accomplished if I only eat half a box of cookies. How do they even do it, the ones who meet for brunch and eat a few fish eggs and a smear of carrot purée—then leave half of it on the plate? Don’t they want to scream? Don’t they want to throw themselves face-first at the food? It makes no sense to me. The thin ones would abolish McDonald’s entirely if they could, as if their preventing themselves from deep-throating a triple cheeseburger means nobody else should get to do it either. I threw up once after Burger King. Wings and a steak sandwich. Haven’t gone back since. Maybe I should systematically poison everything I love until only celery and tofu are left. Maybe that would cure me of this. I want back the time when food meant nothing to me. When I could transform myself for someone else without thinking about it. Before I started calculating how many animals died so I could live another day to eat more of them. Before this became a war with myself. What’s a fat, self-hating guy supposed to do? The kind who’d wallpaper his apartment with schnitzel and shove joggers into bushes if he thought he could get away with it? I don’t know. I’m sitting here with my cornflakes and whole milk and honey, trying to figure out how to erase the fat without moving. Hoping I’ll suddenly care enough to stop. Knowing I won’t. If I die tomorrow, don’t grieve for me. I’ll have eaten double-loaded pepperoni pizza while you wasted your best years in some overpriced vegan café drinking fennel and lemon soup or whatever bullshit. So now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check if I can still see my cock from above. Monday, 1 June 2015. Desk in a Courtyard: Blogfabrik sits in a Kreuzberg courtyard off Oranienstraße, next to an ad agency, a late-night shop, and a tango studio. When I first walked through, the place was mostly scaffold and exposed brick—construction dust in the air, tools stacked in corners—but people were already working at tables, heads down over laptops like the unfinished walls didn’t matter. Berlin attracts a specific type: people who’ve convinced themselves that hanging around other ambitious people will somehow make their work better. Designers, photographers, writers, kids with business ideas they haven’t thought through. Some of them actually make good things. Most of them are just here because rent is manageable and nobody’s telling them to get a real job. I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. I claimed a spot at the end of a long table. Across from me, someone was arranging their notebook and water bottle with the care of someone performing the role of a creative person at work. Notebook just so, water bottle at the right distance, everything deliberate. The thing about working in a shared space is that you’re always partially performing—for the other workers, for yourself, for the idea of the place. The website wasn’t done. The phones didn’t work. There was no official opening. But there was already a shape to it, a hum of people assuming they were part of something meaningful. Maybe they are. More likely they’re just here because they needed a desk and internet, like me. Monday, 1 June 2015. Still Cool: There’s always someone outside with a cigarette. At 8 AM before work, in the parking lot, at the party when everyone’s inside. They’re usually doing the thing—leaning, exhaling, that whole performance of not caring while visibly caring quite a lot. And they probably think it still looks good. It doesn’t, but I understand why they think that. World No Tobacco Day happens every May 31st, which is almost quaint. Like the cultural moment isn’t already long past, like we’re all still living in 1985 and need an official day to remember that smoking might not be a good idea. The whole thing is a museum piece at this point. Smoking is already dead as a cultural force. What’s left is just people with their routines, trying to hold onto some version of themselves from ten or fifteen years ago. I quit, eventually, after a lot of years of thinking I wouldn’t. Not because I suddenly believed it was bad for me—I always knew that—but because I got tired of the daily negotiation. The small lies you tell yourself to keep doing something you’ve decided to keep doing. At some point the weight of that got heavier than the want. These days when I see someone smoking I feel something like nostalgia, except it’s not for the cigarette. It’s for the person who needed it to feel like themselves. That person’s pretty much gone now. Just the habit remains. Sunday, 31 May 2015. Sziget: Every summer you hit the same circuit: Rock im Süden, Electro up north, Indie in the middle. After a few years it all blurs together. Same stages, same fields, same predictable progression. By August you’re tired and ready for something completely different. I went to Sziget in Budapest once and felt something I’d stopped feeling at home festivals. The event sprawls across an island in the Danube, and the lineup was strong—Florence and the Machine, Avicii, Ellie Goulding, Limp Bizkit—but that wasn’t the point. What got me was the simple fact of being lost. Different sky. Different language on the signs. I’d never see these streets again. Walking back to my tent at 3am through the city felt like actual travel for the first time all summer. The festival markets itself as the “Island of Freedom,” which sounds like corporate branding, but there’s something true in it. Not freedom from consequence or restraint. Just the freedom of being somewhere you don’t know, where you can’t rely on routine, where you have to actually pay attention to what’s happening around you. That’s worth leaving for. Not the bands. Not the promise of liberation. Just the necessity of going somewhere real and letting it disorient you. Wednesday, 27 May 2015. Who’s Driving: The desert in Fury Road is just dead. Water’s a legend, cities are scattered bone, everything between is sand and hostile sky. Miller doesn’t waste time explaining any of this. He throws a truck convoy into the waste and doesn’t let it stop. Two hours of machinery and drums and something like an electric guitar cutting the air in half. Max (Tom Hardy) is basically passenger—barely there, barely speaking, just holding on. The pacing exists because stopping means dying. You feel it everywhere. The camera is always moving, always cutting between vehicles and faces and the landscape bleeding past. Engine noise, percussion, the technical precision of stunt work and editing is overwhelming on purpose. You don’t have room to notice the plot is maybe one page long. On a big screen in a theater you’re pinned to your seat. At home it would collapse, and maybe that’s fine. Some films are designed for a specific space, and this is one of them. What matters in Fury Road is that the women are driving. Not accompanying, not being protected—driving. Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, and others. They’re making decisions, holding weapons, keeping the convoy alive. The film doesn’t announce this or congratulate itself for including them. They’re just the people who matter. The camera stays on them. Everything the film does revolves around them, and by the end you understand why. Nicholas Hoult as a cultist is committed, fine. Tom Hardy is basically furniture. But the women register differently. They’re not background. They’re the whole point. There’s something almost old-fashioned about how serious the film takes its own premise. Most action films now are ironic—they’re winking at you, self-aware, treating the spectacle as the joke. Fury Road doesn’t blink. No one’s laughing. The survival is real. The desert doesn’t care about your backstory or your cause. It just kills you if you stop. George Miller clearly understands this. No explanation, no philosophy, no room for anything else. Just bodies in motion against something that wants them dead. What lingers after is specific and small. A desert that doesn’t discriminate. A convoy of women who refuse to stop. A film that refuses to slow down long enough for you to catch up. By the end they’ve reshaped something real and fragile out of nothing. The film lets that image sit there, unsaid, and then it’s over. Saturday, 16 May 2015. By Water: The Berlin Festival is May 29-31 at Arena Park on the Spree. Fritz Kalkbrenner, James Blake, Westbam, Agoria. There’s a detail this year that actually appeals to me: rafts from the Oberbaum bridge taking you straight onto the grounds. It’s the kind of detail that shouldn’t matter but does—arriving by water instead of trudging through a car park changes the shape of the evening somehow. Might actually go this time. Wednesday, 13 May 2015. Inside Akihabara: You come down the stairs from the Akihabara station and immediately the street hits you - this wall of light and noise and screens, every surface bright and moving, selling something. It’s the future according to 1985, or maybe according to right now but turned up past human tolerability. Nothing quiet here. Nothing that’s trying to let you think. The good stuff is hidden though. The street level is just the bait. You push through small doors, down alleys, up narrow stairs in buildings that look like they’re about to collapse, and suddenly you’re in whole separate worlds - entire floors dedicated to nothing but board games, corridors glowing red with DVDs the outside world isn’t supposed to know about, basement shops where all they do is sell plastic figurines, thousands of them, every franchise that ever existed. Anime, manga, video games everywhere. Every era. Old cartridges next to new ones, rare things you thought were extinct sitting on the same shelf as the mass-produced junk. If you grew up with this stuff your stomach does something involuntary. The Super Nintendo games your friends had, the Mega Drive you always wanted but couldn’t have, the Game Boy that raised you. Here it all is, smiling at you, and your hand just reaches out to buy without your brain’s permission. Akihabara is a place where childhoods are preserved. Then there are the maid cafes, girls in frilly costumes serving coffee, and the comic buildings that never seem to end, and somewhere in the middle of wandering between them you’ve lost track of how much you’ve spent. Every corner has something that shouldn’t exist - some franchise you didn’t know you wanted, some thing that’s erotic and weird and specific to someone’s very particular desires, some holy grail game you’d given up on ever finding. It’s the place for people whose taste doesn’t fit anywhere else. The dreamers. The ones who collect. The ones who need their fiction to be real enough to hold. The claw machines with their cute prizes and the way the lights are designed to make you think you can win this time. The way your money turns into stuff faster than you can process it. Akihabara isn’t somewhere you go to relax. It’s machinery, designed to function as a consumption engine, lights and sounds that keep your nervous system activated, keep you reaching. But there’s something right about it, too, if you’re wired this way. This is what that desire looks like when it gets a whole district. This is what Japan does with the things you’re not supposed to admit you want. They build a shrine to them, light them up, and watch people like us show up with our wallets already open. Saturday, 9 May 2015. Still Moving: I found out about Jessie Andrews the way most people do - through her adult film work, specifically the scene that made her name. Then I kept hearing about her other stuff. Model, DJ, jewelry designer, Instagram presence. All of it living in the same public space, no separation, no shameful hiding. What got to me was how she just kept going. The script usually goes: do sex work, take the money, vanish into private life. Become someone’s secret. Jessie Andrews became someone’s colleague instead, someone to shoot with, someone with actual ideas in the room. A photographer worked with her and said she was cool, they had chemistry, she brought as many ideas as anyone. Just normal professional stuff. No sense she owed anyone gratitude for basic respect. There’s something that doesn’t quit about refusing to compartmentalize. Most people would hide - guard themselves against recognition, bury the work in a secret past, perform some kind of redemption. She just kept moving. Kept creating. Kept saying yes to jobs and expecting the world to keep up. I don’t know what that costs her. But I know what it looks like from outside - someone who won’t be erased by one chapter of her life. Friday, 8 May 2015. Still Ready: I still remember crying at the scene where Tai and the kids are riding the train back from the digital world. Just fully crying, like a child. Something about the ride home felt more final than the entire adventure, and it broke something in me. Digimon was never Pokémon. Even as a kid I could tell it was the cooler, high-tech knockoff—all chrome and sharp angles where Pikachu worked through pure charm. But it didn’t have to win. It had something else. Then came the sequels no one watched. The bad ones. Everyone remembers the one with Rika in it because we were all into Rika, which is a pretty clear signal about where we were developmentally. After that, nothing. Fifteen years of nothing. Digimon Tri brings back the original kids, older now, reunited with their digital partners. It’s nostalgia marketing, the kind of thing that should feel cynical but somehow doesn’t. The opening theme is still exactly where it’s been since 1997. “Live your dream, because it will come true.” It’s burned in. “Walk your path, face the danger—you’ll understand what matters when the time has come. Be ready.” Yeah. I’m ready. Thursday, 7 May 2015. Empty Water: Kalle Ljung shot this on a GoPro a few months back, down from Argentina to the Melchior Islands. Two weeks in the Palmer Archipelago with some friends. The footage is just the visual fact of it—ice, water, whales, birds, bare rock. A place that would kill you without hesitation, completely empty, somehow beautiful in a way that feels almost hostile. The Melchior Islands were discovered in the 1800s by a German whaler named Eduard Dallmann. I don’t know why that detail sticks, but it does—some guy in a boat, naming islands that would still be unnamed if he hadn’t shown up. Now Kalle films them with a GoPro. Time does what time does. Watching footage of that place does something to you. Not about actually going there—I’m not booking a trip to Antarctica. But about what complete removal would mean. No news, no arguments, just weeks of ice and animals and being alone with yourself. People say they want that kind of escape. I think maybe they do, in whatever part of themselves keeps getting worn down. Tuesday, 5 May 2015. May Day in Kreuzberg: Forget Christmas, Easter, German Unity Day—the biggest holiday in Berlin is May 1st, this shift between cops and party freaks, Kreuzberg turning into one massive celebration. Food and music and people everywhere, so many people, all trying to cram as much fun as possible into a few wild hours before they get dragged back into the crushing depths of normal life. Or so the story goes. I celebrated it right. Confetti, vodka, good company moving through Görlitzer Park and the street parties around it. We danced, drank, made out. May 1st only happens once a year, so I handed the overpriced camera to whoever wanted it and waited to see what would show up. The next morning, hungover, I plugged the SD card into my laptop. Hundreds of photos. Crystal clear and blurry, bright and dark, oversaturated and washed out. But that’s exactly right. That collision of sharp and soft, the full mess of it, is exactly what it was like. Forget Christmas, Easter, German Unity Day. May 1st is and stays the biggest holiday in Berlin. Saturday, 2 May 2015. Electronic Beats at Fifteen: Cologne got Electronic Beats again in May, fifteen years into the festival’s run, with Roisín Murphy and Django Django headlining at E-Werk. The festival had been traveling—Warsaw, Bratislava, Prague—but Cologne was always home base, which meant something. The city doesn’t flinch at loud speakers or late hours. Roisín Murphy’s production has this quality of severe restraint, everything minimal and precise, synth-pop that sounds like it took months to get sparse enough. Django Django were harder to categorize—they’d build these pop structures and then let them bend into stranger territory, which gave their music an honest friction. David August and Howling weren’t names I knew as well, but the whole lineup had this taste behind it, this sense of curation rather than just booking whatever drew the biggest crowd. By the early 2010s electronic music had started to fracture visibly. You had the stadium-sized festival circuit on one end, the academic experimental stuff on the other, and the middle ground felt mostly abandoned. A festival that kept its sights high and still packed rooms felt genuinely uncommon. Cologne’s crowd was built for it—people who went because they cared about the music itself, not because it was fashionable or it was supposed to be fun. I’d been thinking about curation a lot then, in design and music both. How do you hold a vision without being precious about it? How do you remain serious about quality without sounding arrogant? That festival was one answer. It said the obvious thing: listen to these artists. Names, date, venue, nothing else. That was enough. The city always understood this. Cologne doesn’t need permission to move, to drink, to stay awake until the music ends and the sun comes up ugly. A festival that played seriously—that booked people like Murphy and Django Django and expected the room to listen instead of just move—fit perfectly into that landscape. Fifteen years, and they kept coming back because the city gave them something to work with. Friday, 1 May 2015. White Geometry: I’ve got a thing about white sneakers. Blank canvas, absolute whiteness, zero compromise—they have to be nearly pristine. The ideal is still the adidas Superstar, but I’m not a zealot about it. If something nails the proportions and keeps the purity, I’ll look. MoonStar, a Japanese sneaker maker, teamed up with Stussy Livin’ General Store on something that wasn’t on anyone’s wishlist but probably should have been. They took their “Rain Shoes”—these odd technical things most people never think about—and stripped them to “Monochrome,” basically the white version of a shoe that could’ve been boring. (There’s a black one. Nobody cares about the black one.) What came out reads like a conversation between an adidas Superstar and a Converse Chuck Taylor. You see it in the proportions, the toe box, the way the side panel sits, but it’s not just a mashup. It’s more like someone studied what actually worked about both shoes, cut away everything else, and rebuilt it with Japanese precision. The details are the kind that only matter if you’re paying attention: the toe bumper hits exactly right, the heel counter has this curve that’s been refined over years of production, the laces have actual substance to them. I haven’t held one, so all of this is speculation from photos, which are always lying a little. But what gets me is how it just looks like a perfect white shoe—no personality needed, no branding to do the work for you. Just the shape, the material, the whiteness. Friday, 1 May 2015. Suds and Smiles: Samantha Fortenberry photographs strangers naked in bathtubs. It’s straightforward work—people sitting in water, surrounded by whatever she decided would be perfect for that moment. Cookies one time, books another, confetti another. The series is called “Suds and Smiles.” I’ve always thought there’s something about bathrooms that lets people drop the performance. You’re already exposed, already trapped in one place, already committed to doing nothing. The bathtub is where it becomes honest. What Fortenberry’s photographs document is exactly that moment—the person who agrees to sit in a tub naked while a stranger photographs them. You’d think that would produce something sensual or vulnerable in the classical way, but it mostly doesn’t. Her subjects aren’t performing vulnerability. They’re just sitting there in water. The foam is on the surface. That’s the whole thing. I think what I like about these images is how unselfconscious they are. There’s no trying, no one claiming the bathtub is a metaphor for rebirth or childhood innocence or any of that. It’s just the place where a person will sit still long enough for someone to document them doing absolutely nothing. And that honesty—the willingness to be that ordinary, that exposed—is actually more radical than the nudity. The bathtub does this to you anyway. You fill it with hot water and climb in and nothing else matters. Fortenberry just photographs what was always true. Someone in water is someone at peace, or at least someone who stopped fighting. The rest is just foam. Friday, 1 May 2015. Naked in the Woods: The city sells you convenience and you take the deal. Food whenever you want. Everything within reach. But at some point you notice what’s missing—space, mostly. The ability to move without thinking about surveillance or decency or what anyone else thinks. You miss the feeling of being in your body without permission. There’s a fantasy a lot of people have. Mine involved walking into the woods and stripping down, just to feel what it was like to exist outside the rules for an afternoon. Free from clothes, free from the weight of civilian life. Most people would call that insane. Some people actually do it though. They hike naked. Not as a political move or a dare—just because they want to. Roshan Adhihetty, a Swiss photographer, spent time documenting hikers who do this regularly. The photographs don’t hide anything: naked bodies moving through trees, sun and shadow, the ease of it. No performance, no apology. Just people who decided that civilization could wait a few hours. I get it when I look at them. The appeal isn’t sexual, or barely. It’s about setting down the weight of living in clothes and rules and being watched. For an afternoon you’re just a body in the world, simple and honest. Then you put your clothes back on and go back to the city. Maybe I’d do it someday. Probably not. But that’s not because it’s wrong. It’s because I’ve made peace with the trap. Thursday, 30 April 2015. The Vanishing: Look, I’m too old for Snapchat. Not age-wise, but in the I-don’t-care sense. Fifteen-year-olds with constant running commentary on their snack choices, drunk friends filming blurry garbage from parties that were already unbearable sober—I can do without all that. The whole thing’s too fast to even get a proper hard-on out of it, if we’re being honest, and that ruins it for half the people using it. But I got curious what happens when you give Snapchat to someone actually old. Someone who still uses a real camera, who doesn’t really know what an iPhone is besides the glowing rectangle everyone stares at. You put the phone in their hands, show them how it works. They don’t get it. Image appears, then disappears. Where did it go? Is it coming back? You have to tell them: it’s gone. Deleted itself. That’s the whole thing. Why would anyone want that? That’s what all of them asked. Every single one. Why take a picture if you’re not going to save it? What’s the point? For their generation, a photo was something real. You took it on film, developed it, got a print. It stayed. You could look at it years later, show someone, keep it in a drawer. It mattered because it lasted. The idea that you’d capture something and then immediately erase it seemed insane—almost disrespectful to the moment you just took it. One older guy just handed the phone back and started reminiscing about instant cameras. Polaroids. The photo comes right out. Proof that something happened. You can hold it, pass it around, it sticks around. Not this vanishing act. We’re all supposed to believe now that ephemeral is better. Modern, liberating, cool. Everything disposable. But photographs meant something once, specifically because they weren’t. They lasted long enough to actually become memories. Now you’ve got a few seconds before they dissolve into nothing. I’m not sure which is worse. Friday, 24 April 2015. Still K.I.Z.: K.I.Z. came back the way K.I.Z. does everything—without apology. They didn’t slip a single into the world with some tasteful announcement. They made a video that looks like it was pulled from a History Channel documentary about the world ending, paired it with a song where Tarek, Maxim, Nico, and DJ Craft spend three minutes congratulating themselves. No subtext. No irony guardrails. Just four guys celebrating how great they are. It’s exactly what you’d expect from them, which is why most bands would hedge it somehow—a wink that says we’re just messing around. K.I.Z. doesn’t do that. They commit completely. That lack of distance is what makes it work. They’re not being clever about their narcissism. They’re just doing it. What’s kind of refreshing is how much it cuts through everything else. Everyone’s so careful about optics and brand safety. K.I.Z. is just out here making the loudest, crudest version of themselves and presenting it straight. They’ve never wanted to seem reasonable. Every song is antagonistic by design, meant to get under your skin. If it’s not doing that, they didn’t think it was worth making. They’re back with new music, and I don’t remember when the album comes out or care much. What matters is they’re still doing the same thing—loud, crude, unapologetic. Some artists grow out of that. K.I.Z. isn’t one of them. They came back as exactly themselves. Friday, 24 April 2015. Better in Paint: A few months back I went to some kind of premiere for the new Turtles movie—maybe unofficial, maybe a press screening, I honestly don’t remember. Pizza and beer. Megan Fox was there, and at the time that seemed significant. I think she’s incredibly hot. She stood on stage for two minutes, said something forgettable, and then she was gone. Stumbled off. Either drunk or bored or somewhere in between, the kind of checked-out you can see from across a room. It killed whatever I’d been feeling about the whole thing. So I guess it makes sense that the painted version works for me. Bénédicte Lacroix, this French artist, reimagines celebrities as classical paintings on Tumblr. Megan Fox as the Girl with the Pearl Earring. In paint, Megan Fox is still and present. Contemplative. There’s no performance, no checking out—just a face rendered with care, asked to mean something. She becomes someone I actually want to look at. He’s done Emma Watson and Miley Cyrus and Rihanna, and they all gain something in the translation. They stop being the people you recognize from screens and become something quieter and stranger. So yeah, the painting version works for me. Better than the real thing, which is a weird thing to discover about someone you find hot. But maybe that’s the point of the whole project—at least in paint, they get to just exist. Wednesday, 22 April 2015. Gold Doesn’t Stick: You run out of ways to impress people. Designer sneakers from Japan? Dead. Endangered fish from the Pacific? Doesn’t land. Models, cars, whatever—nothing sticks. So you keep escalating, trying weirder shit, because something has to work eventually. ColorWare made a 24-karat gold Xbox One. Fifty of them, for some reason. The arbitrary limit is almost funny—like rarity suddenly makes this thing matter. Your friends would look at it for four seconds and go back to their phones. The thing that gets me: it plays the exact same games. Grand Theft Auto doesn’t perform better on gold. Mortal Kombat doesn’t know what’s running it. The controller matches if you care about that, but hands don’t know precious metals. You know all this. That was never the reason. It’s that moment you open the box when everything feels special and new and like you’ve finally done something. Five minutes of it. Then it’s just an expensive console and they’re still bored and you’re wondering why you thought this would be different. I get it though. At least it’s honest—doesn’t pretend to offer anything but the visible fact that you spent money. Which is probably exactly why it doesn’t work. Everyone can see the gold. Everyone knows what it means. Tuesday, 21 April 2015. What Futurama Did: The show opens with a kid from the 20th century waking up a thousand years later, and his first move is to find the one person he knew before the time jump, but she’s been dead for a thousand years. So he gets a job at a delivery company, gets adopted by a robot, and everyone treats the whole thing like a joke, which it is, but also isn’t. Futurama ran for a few seasons before Fox killed it, brought it back, then killed it again because nobody at the network understood what they had. A cartoon about displacement and loneliness that was also genuinely funny. There’s the famous episode with Fry’s dog—and I’m not spoiling it, but if you’ve seen it you know what I mean. The show had permission to hurt you, to be more than just jokes about robots and space. What made it work was how it never tried to make that sadness do the heavy lifting. It was content to be stupid and funny, and the loneliness was built into the premise like a background color. One minute it’s a joke about bending metal, the next you remember Fry can never go home, and that’s the actual architecture of what you’re watching. Everything undersold itself. The premise could’ve been a tearjerker if it wanted to, but instead it was just a cartoon about a guy stuck in the future, going to work, hanging out with a robot and an alien, and occasionally remembering that he lost everything and there’s nothing he can do about it. Tuesday, 21 April 2015. Adanowsky - Would You Be Mine: Adanowsky is Jodorowsky’s son. Jodorowsky, the guy who blew John Lennon’s mind and spent decades making things so strange they barely qualified as entertainment. So when his kid makes a music video featuring Stoya, two geishas, and what appears to be an infinite amount of pink, I’m going in assuming there’s a point. The video is sex without a punchline. Adanowsky plays this character—the lover, the predator, the god who has it all figured out—and he commits to it completely. Mustaches, crosses, Stoya doing what she does, all drowning in pink. It reads like someone’s fever dream except the person dreaming actually had the resources to film it. I can’t tell you what any of it signifies. The geishas, the religious symbols, why everything has to be this aggressively gorgeous and explicit. Maybe it’s all purposeful. Maybe it’s just about being so provocative that nobody can accuse you of subtlety. The kind of video you close out when your boss walks by. The kind of thing that reminds you how completely adrift your parents are on the internet. But there’s something to be said for committing that hard to a vision. Not hedging it, not wrapping it in theory or irony, just putting this much sexuality and weirdness out there and trusting that some people will get it. That counts for something. Monday, 20 April 2015. When to Go Back: I sat with Christine in a café in Friedrichshain last week—someone who actually knows how to live online—and we talked about whether we’d stay in Berlin forever, whether anything here really anchored us anymore. She hit on something that wouldn’t leave me alone. Eight years. Charlottenburg to Wedding, then Tokyo for a stretch, back to Neukölln, then Kreuzberg, then Prenzlauer Berg, another detour through Tokyo, now Friedrichshain. I keep feeling like I’ve played through every version of this city that still matters. I’ve slept with women from both sides of town, come down hard enough to watch the sun rise somewhere near Potsdam, tried drugs I can’t even name anymore. Maybe just bad MDMA cut with who knows what. The point is I’ve done all the usual stuff—enough clubs and afterparties and beds that you’d think it would feel normal by now. Except it doesn’t. It just feels hollow. My life these days is basically this: I only drag myself out if some agency’s throwing a free drinks party and I’m on the list. Street food markets packed with tourists? Overpriced garbage. Hipster flea markets? Keep it. Berghain? I’ve got no interest in hepatitis, thanks. I’m not from Berlin. Small town in Bavaria, Buchloe, wedged between three bigger cities that made it irrelevant. No cinema, no McDonald’s, nothing. The video game shop where I spent my money closed because people kept stealing. I couldn’t wait to get out—London, Tokyo, Berlin, anywhere that felt far and big. My feed has been filling up lately with people moving back. Friends who did the Berlin thing a few years ago, now posting pictures from home—cycling through wildflower fields, picnicking by lakes, drinking decent beer. There’s something in those photos. Germany’s supposed to hate Bavaria, or at least thinks it should. Maybe there’s a reason. But here’s the thing: it’s actually great. If I ever have kids I’m doing whatever it takes to get them into a Bavarian school, even though I basically failed my way through one. Anything’s better than a Waldorf school run by people who think they understand childhood. There’s a saying back home: everyone comes back. When I left for design school in Berlin, I thought that was hilarious—absolutely not, never, goodbye forever. I was out. Now I’m scrolling through postcards from people who actually did go back. From Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, back to Bavaria. Building lives there. The blue sky. The green mountains. And something keeps gnawing at me: what the hell am I doing here? When I first moved, the answer was simple—the job. But for the last five years I’ve been telling myself it’s because Berlin is where it all happens, where the people who matter actually live. Maybe that’s true. I have no idea how much it matters. I know people living in absolute nowhere who make good money and maybe go to re:publica once a year and just exist. They figured out email still works. Is Berlin actually essential or just necessary to believe in if you’re the type of person who moved here? Maybe I miss the accent. Maybe I miss the landscape, something about the light, the food. Or maybe I’m making all that up—another story to tell myself because I’m bored and always have been. Didn’t I want to go back to Tokyo? Is going home a failure? Some kind of surrender? Would my younger self beat me for considering it? Obviously I miss my family. I had good people around me growing up, a good childhood in the way those things actually count. But realistically? It’s not a place you go to create anything. Munich maybe, but nobody can afford Munich and I hate the Mercedes people more than I hate the hipster bloggers anyway, and at least I know what I actually am. Everyone comes back. Will I? The world’s open and I’m wondering if I should move back to where I was born. Is that stupid? Am I giving up on something I haven’t finished? Was Berlin always supposed to be temporary? Where does anyone find anything real—closer or farther away? Sometimes I envy people with normal jobs who have to live where they work. Does freedom actually paralyze you? Will someone walk by with actual problems and wonder why I’m having a geography crisis? Will I regret this if Berlin really is the center? Every question just tightens the knot. So there we were in this cheap café on Frankfurter Allee, and someone cleaned up a dead pigeon that had been lying under the next table. Christine and I talked through it—whether leaving made sense, whether going back to the beer and castles and home cooking was possible, whether that was even what either of us actually wanted. And I keep coming back to the same thing: when is the right time to go back? Monday, 20 April 2015. All Blue: I brought an expensive camera to Comic Invasion and somehow managed to turn every single shot blue. Some setting I’d never bothered to learn, hidden somewhere in the menus. The EOS 700D has been the worst gear investment of the year. I went in thinking the name had to mean something—that this was where all the manga obsessives and graphic novel fetishists actually gathered. Instead it was just a handful of Spanish hipsters selling Captain Berlin zines out of a warehouse in Urban Spree. But Nathalie and Janos found an action figure of Jake and discovered this manga called Oishinbo that’s entirely about food, mostly fish. They got completely into it. My photos are still all blue and worthless, but they didn’t care, and honestly I didn’t either. We ate pizza and cake after, which turned out to be the best part of the whole thing. Bad photos and decent food. Not a bad way to spend a day. Monday, 20 April 2015. 1UP: The U-Bahn smells like piss and spray paint. Late nights, riding home, half the tunnel is tags. 1UP everywhere. Überfresh. Berlin Kidz. Names that mean nothing outside Berlin but inside they’re the whole conversation—who’s bombing where, who painted over who, who got arrested. The kids doing it are seventeen, eighteen, too young to care about consequences, moving through the city with cans in their jacket. I never got into it myself but I watched enough to understand. The skill is there if you know how to see it. Some pieces are actual paintings—color work, letters that read right, composition. But that’s almost beside the point. The point is you’re taking something that belongs to everyone and no one, and you’re making it yours for a night. You’re on the roof of a moving train. You’re in a dark tunnel with ten minutes before the next one comes. Your hands shake a little, or maybe they don’t. You exist. There’s a documentary moment in it, the one where someone films the kids riding on trains and laughing and it goes online and everything falls apart. That happened to some of them. They got arrested. They got known. But the pieces stayed. You paint over them, they come back the next week. I think about this when I’m in Berlin now. The casual violence of marking something that isn’t yours, knowing it’ll be gone in a month, doing it anyway. That’s not a phase you grow out of—it’s something you replace with something else, something quieter maybe. But the impulse itself, the need to leave something behind, to be certain you were here: that doesn’t go away. Thursday, 16 April 2015. Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale: Three weeks in and you’re rotating ice cream and whiskey at eleven in the morning. The Notebook is on its fourth viewing. You’re not sure if you’re sad anymore or just committed to the performance. Ben & Jerry’s made a beer. New Belgium brewed it. Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, six percent alcohol, all the sweet brownie and caramel notes you’d get from ice cream but in a form that actually gets you drunk. It’s stupid but it works. The beer tastes good, which is somehow worse than if it tasted like shit. If it was terrible you could write it off as a corporate cash grab. But it’s genuinely interesting, and the ABV is high enough to actually do something, so you end up buying a six-pack and then another six-pack. You’re not eating through a pint of ice cream anymore, you’re drinking through their beer, and the effect is about the same except you can pretend it’s more sophisticated. Here’s the thing that got me: they added salt to the recipe. Salt in the beer. But if you’re the person this product is designed for, you’re already providing enough salt. Your tears are handling the seasoning. You don’t need them to engineer it in. Thursday, 16 April 2015. Fuck Off: Raised by Wolves, a Canadian brand, makes slides that say FUCK OFF across the strap. Black, around thirty euros, and the message is the entire design. There’s something clarifying about that—no subtle messaging, no plausible deniability, just the two words in bold letters on something you wear to the pool. Summer brings out the performance in everything. You’re supposed to look effortless in your swimming clothes, like you didn’t think about what you were wearing, like you just exist in nature looking good. Everyone’s curating their beach look, their pool aesthetic, trying to project the right amount of casual confidence. It gets exhausting to watch. These slides refuse all of that. They’re ugly, deliberately confrontational, and they announce something true—which is that you don’t want to be bothered. You’re not there to impress anyone. You’re going to the water and you’re bringing your attitude with you. The design works because it’s honest. No metaphor, no hidden meaning, just saying it in the most direct way possible. That’s the kind of restraint that actually reads as cool. I appreciate that about it. I appreciate anything that refuses to pretend. Wednesday, 15 April 2015. Dogs in Cars: I have a friend with a dog named Boris. According to her, he’s this charismatic little face—always making expressions. What I see is something else. Boris mostly just lies in the corner, staring at nothing, panting. He’s not particularly animated about anything. He’s neutral, mostly. But I find myself watching him and wondering what’s actually happening in there. What he dreams about. What he’d tell me if he could, when he’s at the dog park sniffing around other dogs’ asses, what thoughts are turning over in his head. What deep, world-shifting, utterly destructive things might be churning around inside him. Then I found out photographer Lara Jo Regan published a whole book of dogs in cars. Keith Hopkins shot new versions of his ’Dogs in Cars’ series in Miami. I watched them and couldn’t stop thinking the same thing—what are they seeing out there? What goes through their heads while they’re being driven somewhere, noses to the window, completely absorbed in whatever they’re looking at? You know you won’t get an answer. But you watch anyway. Tuesday, 14 April 2015. Everything Was Better Then: There are people who could talk for days about the 90s—the games, the TV, the stupid shit that mattered when you were a kid. Radio Nukular is basically a podcast of those people sitting around for hours just talking. No structure, no real plan, whatever nostalgia tangent pulls them in. Some episodes don’t work. The Simpsons one had technical problems the whole way through, and the Ghostbusters tape went so far afield I gave up listening. But then they recorded this nearly five-hour Super Nintendo thing that somehow worked even though one of the hosts clearly didn’t know half the games being discussed. It didn’t matter. They were genuinely interested, and you feel that. If you’re someone who thinks everything was better back then, this is it. Maybe it was. Maybe that’s just how nostalgia works—we’re all wired to miss the decade we grew up in. Either way, listen while you’re doing other things. Dishes. Walking. Jerking off. Whatever. It’s just people remembering together. Tuesday, 14 April 2015. All of Them Tiny: Christopher Lee drew Sailor Moon, Batman, Pokémon, all your favorite characters, and made them impossibly cute. We’re talking oversized heads, tiny bodies, the full chibi treatment. It’s the kind of thing that hits different when you already care about these characters—you’ve spent years with them in their proper forms, and then someone draws them small and soft and suddenly you see them completely differently. Chibi design flattens everything. Make Batman tiny and round-headed and he stops being the point. He becomes approachable. Sailor Moon becomes something you could have a conversation with instead of just admire from a distance. The scale does the heavy lifting—something small can’t intimidate, can’t command the room. It has to be gentle. What makes this work is that it’s not mocking. It’s the opposite of mockery. It’s affection rendered as art. You don’t spend time drawing every detail of these tiny versions of characters you don’t genuinely love. There’s care in that. Care and a certain kind of knowing—the kind that comes from having lived with these characters long enough to see them in a new way. Lee pulled from everywhere—different franchises, different eras, characters that wouldn’t normally exist in the same space. But in miniature they’re all the same. They’re all equally harmless and equally cute. That leveling-out is the real point. Strip away scale and hierarchy and suddenly your favorite serious characters look like they should be on a shelf, holding hands, waiting for someone to play with them. Everything shifts when you see them tiny like this. All the weight they carried drops away. The series is called “Select Your Hero,” which implies a choice, but there’s nothing to choose between once they’re all rendered this way. Tuesday, 14 April 2015. Cherry Bomb: Tyler, the Creator doesn’t soften things. Cherry Bomb announces that immediately—track titles like “Blow My Load” and “Fucking Young” make it clear he’s not concerned with being liked. The album doesn’t try to seduce you. It just exists, committed fully to what he heard in his head. What’s striking is how the production matches that coldness. It’s dense, textural, genuinely unsettling sometimes, but never accidentally. Every choice feels intentional. This isn’t background music and it doesn’t want to be. It demands attention in a way most artists are too cautious to demand. I respect that kind of design commitment. Not trying to expand the audience, not softening edges to accommodate people on the fence. Just making the thing exactly as you hear it. There’s a purity in that approach, even when the thing itself is aggressive or abrasive. Some of the songs are genuinely beautiful underneath the noise—”See You Again” with Kali Uchis floats in this weird space between intimacy and alienation. But mostly the album is more interesting than comfortable, which seems to be the point entirely. Cherry Bomb isn’t for everyone, and it seems like Tyler made it that way on purpose. There’s something refreshing about an artist that committed to their vision, that uninterested in compromise. Whether you connect with it or not, you know exactly what you’re getting. Monday, 13 April 2015. Game Boy Archaeology: The Game Boy’s sound chip was four channels, a handful of waveforms, basically built from spare parts. But that constraint is exactly why those sounds stuck. No room to hide or get fancy. The opening of Super Mario Land, the Pokémon battle theme, the little victory fanfare—they hit because they had to be immediate, memorable, and endlessly repeatable. A noise that works on you directly. I still remember what the Game Boy sounded like at the swimming pool, barely audible over the water but somehow more real than anything happening around me. Tetris late at night under the blankets. The grinding boredom of waiting in the car while my parents ran errands. Nintendo’s sound design became the soundtrack to all of that, which means you can’t really hear it now without being back there. That’s not nostalgia in the sentimental way. It’s something weirder—your brain hears four bars and it knows exactly what year this is from, how the light looked, what you were wearing. The sound does all the work. It doesn’t need to reach for anything or sell itself. Most modern music lost patience with that kind of austerity. Everything now is designed to overwhelm you with texture, depth, novelty. But something about the Game Boy’s limited palette is unimprovable. Clean. Honest. People keep building dance tracks around it, remixing it, sampling it, and some of those work fine, but the original thing still has a weight that nothing built on top of it quite reaches. Monday, 13 April 2015. Sanft & Sorgfältig: I love getting a mention somewhere you don’t expect. Not in the usual places—angry Facebook comments, blogs doing damage control, the kind of internet corners where people are actively disturbed. Just somewhere normal, out of nowhere. Jan Böhmermann and Olli Schulz were talking about the Tokio Hotel interview we did on their radio show Sanft & Sorgfältig. Ines conducted it—she doesn’t hold back. They weren’t exactly convinced the band had much going on, which is perfect because most Tokio Hotel fans have no idea what public radio is anyway. So they’ll never know to send death threats, angry Snapchats, and bloody Bill key chains from 2003. If you want to hear them discuss it, jump to around the 45-minute mark. You can catch the broadcast, or grab it as a podcast if you want to look productive while lying in bed. Sunday mornings on radioeins if you’re one of the few people still listening to radio. Monday, 13 April 2015. Early Christmas: The whole point of waiting for a new season is that you build a ritual around it. Monday nights, cheap takeout, the slow consumption of a story over weeks. You’re not just waiting for television—you’re waiting for that specific shape your week takes. Then the leak happens. The first four episodes of the new Game of Thrones season show up online before HBO even finished marketing them. They have names now: The Wars to Come, The House of Black and White, High Sparrow, The Sons of the Harpy. They’re real. Everyone knows they exist. The choice seems obvious either way. Wait like a decent person and keep the Monday ritual, or do what thousands of people have already done and watch them all at once. But there’s something weirder happening in the middle—knowing they exist but not watching them. That knowledge ruins the anticipation anyway. You’re not waiting anymore. You’re choosing, over and over, not to do something you could do right now. By the time the first episode airs officially, you’ve made the same decision a hundred times. It’s exhausting in a stupid way that nobody really talks about. Either way, the Monday ritual is already gone. Sunday, 12 April 2015. Checking In: Saw this illustration of Alf last week and just stopped scrolling. This Spanish studio called Hey Creative publishes a minimal pop culture drawing every day on Instagram—account’s called EveryHey. Started in February, and I check back regularly enough that I’ve probably seen a hundred of them by now. The thing that works about them is the restraint. Bender’s there in about five lines. They captured Captain Planet without any of the melodrama—just the ridiculous hair and the face, perfectly stupid. There’s a Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid that made me sit with it for a minute. “Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand. Wax on, wax off.” You know the bit. I was thinking about what that quote actually means, the way repetition and discipline become something like meditation, or maybe I was just spacing out. Either way, it stuck. I’ve been making a mental list of what I want them to draw. Sailor Moon, obviously—that character design practically asks for clean linework. Kate Upton because I’m a little horny and also because it’s funny. The 3 Ninja Kids because I’m rewatching them and they’re this artifact from childhood that somehow nobody else remembers. Nostalgia is weird when it’s yours alone. The account reminds you that simple ideas work. That consistency and care, even on something small, is something worth noticing. That’s the whole appeal, really. Sunday, 12 April 2015. The Island: I cried through the last episodes of Barakamon. Me—this bearded guy with a belly and a sharp mouth. Not because anything legendarily dramatic happened in those twelve episodes, but because the characters had gotten under my skin in a way that normally takes other shows years to pull off. The setup is as ordinary as it gets. Seishu, a failed calligrapher, gets exiled from Tokyo to some backwater island to fix his art style, and he absolutely hates it. The place is full of yokels, his house is falling apart, and there’s this six-year-old girl named Naru who seems specifically designed to drive him insane. You know how this story goes. Seishu gradually befriends the locals despite being kind of an asshole. He starts to realize that living on this sweat-soaked island is giving him exactly what he needed to work. And Naru, that relentless little pest, works her way into his cold, depressed, essentially dead heart. There’s a genuinely dramatic moment near the end that I won’t spoil, but by then it doesn’t matter because you’ve already fallen completely for every person on that island. Miwa with her reckless energy. Ikko, the school principal who’s always smoking and passionately into fish. Hina, Naru’s sweet, painfully shy best friend. I think about how anime does this—compresses emotion into thirty minutes so tightly that there’s nowhere for it to go except straight through you. You’re laughing at Tamako, the unhinged manga aunt who sees hidden homosexual drama in everything, and then suddenly you’re anxious watching young Kosuke confront Seishu about losing his style, and then you’re watching Naru come home and… I actually can’t talk about what happens. It’s too much. About Naru—I wanted to adopt that kid immediately. There’s nothing forced or precocious about her, just genuine joyfulness and these complete observations about the world that make you realize how complicated yours has become. By the end of it, all I wanted was to pack up and move to that exact island. Leave the stress, the pressure, all the bitterness. Live something quiet and real with Naru and Miwa and Ikko and the rest of them, far from all this. Saturday, 11 April 2015. This Is Your Brain: Meaghan Liist designs the kind of work that doesn’t waste your attention—clean, purposeful, nothing extra. She made a series a few years back called “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” that I’ve thought about since, mostly because reductive work this good is harder to pull off than it appears. Each drug gets one image. MDMA is a heart. Cocaine is a roller coaster with a line through it, the high and the consequence as a single shape. Speed is zigzags—pure acceleration rendered as pattern. They’re not explained or judged, just there: the image and what it means. The heroin one is different. It’s less a poster and more like looking at something you shouldn’t, all collapse and void. I think that’s intentional. You can buy them as prints now. There’s something honest about selling drug imagery as art to an audience that knows the subject—no winking, no apology, no safety guardrails. Just the image and whatever you bring to it. Saturday, 11 April 2015. Fucking Young: Tyler’s dropped two new tracks—”Fucking Young” and “Death Camp”—and they sound like N.E.R.D at their best, back when Pharrell could make something brilliant without needing to announce that it was brilliant. The confidence is just there, quiet and infuriating in how rare it is. No forced posturing, no default gangsta-rap drama, no pretending that suffering is personality. Just craft, the kind that makes you realize how much of everything else is just noise. I’ll get tired of them eventually. You always do. But that’s not today, and today they’re the only thing I want to hear. Friday, 10 April 2015. The Adventure Time Comics: I was never really a comic person. The Simpsons comics seemed too expensive, superheroes bored me, and despite being obsessed with Japan, manga never did much for me. I’m a TV person, always have been. But the Adventure Time comics are something else. The covers especially—gorgeous, intricate, all different. Various artists from around the world contribute, and there’s this magical level of care in every single one. The kind of detail you wouldn’t expect in what’s nominally just a tie-in product. If you haven’t seen the show, go watch it now. It’s like LSD, mushrooms, and MDMA somehow had a child together. Minus the embarrassing side effects. Mostly. Friday, 10 April 2015. American Oxygen: Rihanna’s “American Oxygen” video lays out the contradiction without flinching. The title is the setup—oxygen is what keeps you alive, except here it’s metaphorical and suffocating. The video cycles through imagery of American life and death, side by side: the freedoms and the violence that props them up. It’s strange because none of it is hidden. The police killings. The mass surveillance. The religious freedom laws that are thin cover for homophobia, like Indiana proved. You could read about it all in an afternoon. But there’s something different about seeing it packed into three minutes of pop music, set to production that sounds almost reverent. Like Rihanna’s acknowledging the weight of it without needing to perform outrage. What gets to me is how little it matters that she made the video. I don’t mean that as a knock on her—she has one of the biggest platforms available. I mean that nothing changes from it. The killing continues. The listening continues. We breathe the same oxygen, toxic as it is. There’s something knowing about that choice, I think. Making the statement anyway, even when you know it won’t fix anything. Not because she’s naive, but because the alternative is silence. She’s not pretending the video will change America. She’s just refusing to pretend America is something it’s not. Wednesday, 8 April 2015. The Filter Cycle: I’ve spent way too much time scrolling past breakfast. Not eating it, just scrolling past other people’s breakfast—all carefully filtered, each plate more composed than anything I’d ever make. Eggs and toast put through some warm vintage grain that makes the morning look like it happened in 1987. Instagram keeps adding more filters like they’re answering a question nobody asked. New color grades, new light leaks, new ways to make ordinary things feel important. The idea never changes: take your mundane moment, apply some aesthetic treatment, and suddenly it matters. The thing is, it works. You apply a filter and the world looks different. The colors get richer, the contrast snaps, everything has intention. So you keep doing it, trying combinations, layering effects, tweaking the strength. You’re not trying to fool anyone anymore—you’re trying to make reality match what it feels like in your head. But there’s always another filter. Always another option, another way it could look. Instagram knows this. They keep releasing new ones like they’re selling cigarettes—same addiction, different packaging. You can’t stop, so they make sure there’s always something new to try. At some point it stops being documentation and starts being work. You’re adjusting the colors on your coffee because you need it to be beautiful in the right way. And the funny part is knowing it matters to no one but you—maybe three people and a cluster of bots, which is basically the same thing. But you do it anyway, because the filtered version feels truer than the thing sitting in front of you. Wednesday, 8 April 2015. Chocolate Cookie: I fall in love about seventeen thousand times a day. More or less, usually more. Vanessa Anela Moez. Rianne ten Haken. Airi Matsui. Anna with no last name brought back my whole thing for underarm hair, so clearly I’m inexhaustible. This is Salem Mitchell from San Diego. She likes FKA Twigs and Naomi Campbell and Willow Smith. Her Tumblr’s full of good music and answered questions and selfies. She sings along to tracks with playback sometimes, does it well enough. She looks like a chocolate cookie sometimes. The way something looks like it tastes good. She loves her grandmother. She’s on Twitter and Instagram saying cool shit. One of those people where you find something and want to send it to them but you don’t because what the hell are you doing. Tomorrow I’ll be obsessed with someone else. This is just how it works. But right now it’s Salem, and that’s all there is. Wednesday, 8 April 2015. Vaj Hairstylez: There’s been this generational debate about how to groom yourself down there. Totally bare or totally wild, carefully maintained or just letting it grow, on display or completely hidden—everyone settles somewhere different. For a while the trend was total hairlessness, but now you’re seeing this swing back toward the natural thing. Feminist reclamation of the bush, basically. An artist named Lessa Millet made this illustration called “Vaj Hairstylez” that treats pubic hair like an actual hairstyle. The Punk, The Bed-Head, The Professional, The Vintage, The Fascist. She named them all. What works about it is that it takes something people usually don’t discuss except in embarrassed whispers and just decides it’s worth illustrating, worth thinking about as an aesthetic choice. Some of them actually appeal to me. The Bed-Head, The Punk—there’s something there. The Toothpick looks like a mistake waiting to happen. The Razor Burn is its own horror story. The Cactus is pure self-punishment. Everything else is just taste, and taste varies. What got me about the illustration was its refusal to judge. It’s just here are the options, here’s what they look like, choose whatever feels right. That’s more honest than most conversations about bodies manage to be. Wednesday, 8 April 2015. Before the World: I’m about to sound like the world’s most insufferable hipster, but I was already obsessed with Lykke Li when you were still discovering “Electric Feel” in Berlin clubs that have disappeared. You could look it up—I have the proof somewhere. My whole world was “Little Bit,” “I’m Good, I’m Gone,” “Dance, Dance, Dance.” I had “Youth Novels” memorized completely. If I had a functional memory, I’d argue it’s the best album I’ve ever heard, and somehow it still doesn’t embarrass me. That was seven years ago now. Seven years. And since Lykke Li became famous—since the world knew her name—I’ve felt this weight. This emptiness. Not tragedy or anything, just that hollow thing that happens when someone you loved first becomes someone everyone loves. There’s this running joke where she and I were meant to be, obviously, assuming Scarlett Johansson wasn’t in the picture. But the real thing early discovery does to you is make you feel like you own something nobody else does. Like you have a version of someone that’s entirely yours. She just released “Never Gonna Love Again,” and the video is one of those perfect emotional storms. The kind that stays with you. Tuesday, 7 April 2015. Game Boy, Again: Five euros at a flea market, years ago, got me a Game Boy with Tetris on it. I don’t regret that purchase for a second. That gray box is still a time machine. Super Mario Land, Link’s Awakening, Pokémon—stuff that holds up. The SmartBoy is an iPhone case that turns your phone into a Game Boy. You slot in cartridge modules and play Metroid II, Gargoyle’s Quest, Harvest Moon on your current device. The appeal is immediate. But you’re carrying your iPhone and a thick Game Boy case. Both devices. The actual Game Boy is thinner. You could carry the original instead. I don’t entirely see the logic, though the draw is obvious—playing these games without needing to dig out old hardware. It’s a compromise that makes sense if you want everything on one device. The real fix would be Nintendo releasing these games on iOS, something they should’ve done years ago. Until then, the SmartBoy exists as a workaround. Tuesday, 7 April 2015. Trollface Money: Trollface got trademarked by Carlos Ramirez in 2010, right after he posted it on 4chan. Now he makes between five and fifteen grand a month off it. And before you say anything about the internet being a free space or memes being communal property—yeah, you’re wrong. Carlos has the paperwork. Here’s the thing: he sensed it was big. Most people would’ve watched Trollface spread and felt good about contributing to culture or whatever. Carlos was like: no, this is mine. He trademarked it. Now when game studios or T-shirt artists want to use it, they pay him. And if they don’t, he sues. There’s something almost admirable about the shamelessness of it. Not the suing—that’s expected. But the original move was pure: make something, own it, profit. No pretense about art or community or any of that. Just business. The sarcastic conclusion in the original post is that everyone should do this—quit your job, trademark every stupid meme you see online, get rich. Obviously that’s a joke, but it’s funny because it’s not entirely wrong. The infrastructure is there. Memes don’t magically escape property law. Carlos just saw that first and acted on it. And honestly? I can’t even be that mad about it. It’s completely cynical, but at least there’s no pretense. He made something people loved, he owned it, he profits. Clean transaction. Tuesday, 7 April 2015. Raw Spring: There’s a venue in Berlin called Neue Heimat on the RAW-Gelände, basically two enormous falling-apart industrial halls facing the Spree. The kind of place you can’t tell is active until you see people inside it. When they announced they’d be fully open Thursday through Sunday, I wasn’t interested in the party lineup. I was drawn to how plainly they described what the space was: four thousand square meters of concrete, designed for families and kids and dancers in equal measure. No atmosphere layer, no brand, no concept to sell you. Most venues have carefully constructed a story about themselves. The Neue Heimat just opens the doors. The decay isn’t ironic. The scale isn’t engineered for Instagram. It’s honest in a way that’s become uncommon—you’re paying for access to a real space, not for someone’s vision of what a space should mean. That simplicity is worth something. Thursday, 2 April 2015. Ecke Weserstraße: You’re at some gallery opening on a weeknight. Cheap beer tastes fine in the dark. You’re nowhere near home and tomorrow you’ll drag yourself to work with this same hangover you’ve had for three years. Emma, Tom, and Vincent live inside that exact space—the soap opera “Ecke Weserstraße” tracking them through the stretch of time when you still believe you can sustain this forever. The show used to air on HauptstadtsenderALEX but has since scattered across YouTube, though the format seems beside the point. What it documents is that particular German mode of half-living: nights dissolving into mornings, work as something you show up for still half-drunk, the Spree and the flea markets and whatever the neighborhood keeps offering. It’s not trying to make any of it meaningful. Nobody’s having a transformation. There’s just texture—the specific weight of time when you’re caught between being young and actually becoming something else. I’ve always had more patience for work that captures those in-between spaces without turning them into mythology. Not aspirational, not cautionary. Just a moment that stretches longer than it should, people existing in the gap and not pretending there’s some lesson underneath. The show understands that. It doesn’t romanticize the precarity or try to turn the aimlessness into depth. It’s just the corner, and something keeps happening there, night after night, the same faces or different ones wearing the same tired expression. Berlin had plenty of these corners in whatever moment this was filmed—that stretch when the city still felt possible, when you could waste time there without worrying about the timer. The show captures that without commenting on it. That absence of narrative judgment, maybe that’s the most honest thing about it. If you lived that version of Berlin or any city, you’ll recognize yourself in there. If you didn’t, you’ll at least see what other people were doing while they thought they had infinite time. The footage exists now, scattered across YouTube. The corner is still there. Someone is probably still there with a beer, waiting for a morning that never quite arrives. Thursday, 2 April 2015. Priorities: The Berlin Senate shut down Görlitzer Park’s special status. It used to be one place in the city where weed was basically fine—10 to 15 grams and nobody would touch you. Now that’s gone. The reasoning is sound: kids found cocaine packets on the playground, a child with a joint in his mouth, parents asking what it takes before the city does anything. So they cracked down. There’s a smoke-in tonight, people showing up in protest. The organizers made a point worth considering: if the city cares about protecting vulnerable people, why shut down this one park instead of getting homeless people out of the gymnasiums where they’re living? Why not address the actual catastrophes? Find something visible, crack down hard, declare the city’s serious again. Every politician pulls this move. Berlin used to be the place that didn’t play this game. Used to be you could do weird shit there without the state coming down on you. Guess that’s just over now. Another European capital trying to look respectable. Wednesday, 1 April 2015. Heavy Heavy: I knew Laura Carbone when she was writing on The Fucking Fuck, a blog that doesn’t exist anymore. Early 2000s internet, the kind of place that felt essential because it was the only space for this particular kind of thinking—scattered, urgent, unmediated. She moved past blogging like everyone eventually does. I saw her again in Berlin around 2010 with her band Deine Jugend at Klub International. Music was becoming the thing, replacing the need to document everything. Five years after that she released a solo album called Sirens. It’s not straightforward indie pop—there’s melancholy running underneath it, a refusal to make things sound better than they feel. The new single “Heavy Heavy” distills that idea. Nothing showy, just something that needed to exist. I’m still not sure why certain people stick with you across years and format changes. Laura’s one of them. Tuesday, 31 March 2015. Hipstory: Israeli artist Amit Shimoni made a series called “Hipstory” where he reimagines historical figures and leaders as contemporary hipsters. Angela Merkel with piercings and tattoos. Che Guevara in a beanie. Nelson Mandela in full ironic drag—nose rings, vintage-store aesthetic, the works. He turned the concept into merchandise: prints, pillows, phone cases. There’s something stupid and perfect about it. These are people we’re trained to treat as serious, now dressed up in the contemporary costume of cool detachment. The gap between their imagined weight and their new aesthetic is where the humor lives. Aesthetics shift so fast that each generation thinks it’s figured out style, then twenty years later everyone looks back mortified. Why does this work? It’s not saying anything important, not really. It’s more like a visual joke that doesn’t need to go anywhere. But maybe that’s the strength of it—not everything requires meaning. Sometimes the whole idea is just what it is: serious figures in hipster costume, absurd and complete. Tuesday, 31 March 2015. Brik Case: I want my MacBook pristine, that cold aluminum glow, untouched by the world. And then I see someone’s laptop covered in stickers—band names, place pins, the actual evidence of living—and I want that instead. But stickers happen by accident, accumulating over time without plan. You end up with something haphazard that might’ve been cool once. Jolt, out of San Francisco, made something nobody asked for. A MacBook case with LEGO studs molded into it so you can click bricks directly onto your thousand-dollar computer. They asked for $30,000 on Kickstarter and got it. The idea is you turn a status symbol into a toy, turn a precious object into something you actually modify. Which is absurd and maybe perfect. You’re paying for industrial design so you can snap colorful plastic onto it. Your laptop gets heavier, bulkier, less of what you bought it for. But also, the thing stops being precious. It becomes a platform for whatever you want to build. A Death Star. A color grid. Whatever. You own it enough to change it. I don’t know if it actually works, if the bricks stay put, if anyone keeps the case on after the novelty wears. But that’s not the question. The question is whether you want your expensive thing to be a product or a tool for your own design. I still don’t know which I am. Tuesday, 31 March 2015. What Scares Silicon Valley: Instagram will nuke a photo of a nipple within hours but let recruitment videos sit there for weeks. The priority makes no sense. Mark Zuckerberg talks about community safety, but what he’s actually enforcing is this ancient squeamishness around female bodies that nobody even consciously decided to care about anymore. It just got coded in, automated, inherited. The girls of Iceland decided to call it out. They’re part of #FreeTheNipple, stripping down as a protest against the fact that their bodies are somehow more threatening to Silicon Valley than actual extremism. One of them nailed it: society’s fine with women being sexualized—by media, by men, by institutions. The moment a woman owns that and shows herself on her own terms, suddenly it’s obscene. The algorithms freak out. There’s a kind of bitter efficiency to how easy it is to censor a breast and how hard it apparently is to moderate anything that actually matters. You draw a line, you enforce it, you get to feel like you’re doing something. The alternative—actually thinking about what’s dangerous and what isn’t—that takes work. The Icelandic girls are pointing at something stupid and refusing to pretend it’s serious. They shouldn’t have to. But the fact that they do, the fact that undressing reads as radical, is maybe the clearest evidence that they’re right. Tuesday, 31 March 2015. Prag: I had this thing for Nora Tschirner back when German television was inescapable and MTV still existed. She was in everything—bad movies, good comedies, these shows I half-watched with the kind of attention you’re not supposed to give people. The way you notice someone beautiful against your own will, when you’re young enough that it still registers as a small humiliation. Years pass, and people become whoever they’re going to become. Then one day you hear a song and realize it’s her voice, but it doesn’t sound like an actress auditioning for a music career. The actress you thought about has a band now—Prag, just her, Erik, and Tom—and they’re actually serious about it. Something shifts when someone you’ve only seen through characters suddenly sounds like themselves. Not performing. Speaking. The songs don’t reach. “Bis einer geht” is about the end of something, and she sings it the way you’d say it to a friend at night when you’ve stopped pretending. “All die Narben” is about the marks things leave, about carrying damage. There’s no sentimentality, no camera awareness. Just someone describing what happened and what it felt like. It’s easy to be suspicious of this kind of thing—actor-turned-musician usually means a tax write-off and three people watching from the venue bathroom. But there’s something real about watching someone you’ve been watching for years actually speak instead of perform. Even if there’s still a stage involved, it doesn’t feel like one. That’s the difference I notice. That’s what matters. Monday, 30 March 2015. Topless for Freedom: The doubt comes first, naturally. “If I get naked, will Google own me?” Steffi asks, standing in a room somewhere in Germany before a FEMEN action. It’s such a ridiculous question that it almost makes sense. You’re about to strip to your waist and write political slogans across your chest, and your worry is Google’s algorithmic memory. But it tracks—there’s something about making yourself this visible, this deliberately exposed, that makes you hyperaware of invisibility. Of being captured, recorded, catalogued. Two German journalists embedded with FEMEN’s German cell for a documentary. They filmed the planning, the hesitation, the moment when someone decides that bare skin is worth more as a statement than as concealment. Then Steffi throws her shirt aside, picks up a marker, and the philosophical doubts seem to evaporate. Feminism in Germany’s been splintered for years. You’ve got the careful digital campaigns, the established publications with their agendas, the think pieces that will find a way to use anything—even tragedy—to push their particular line. And then you’ve got people who just remove their clothes and write “Don’t cum on human rights” across their chest. It’s the least mediated form of protest possible. No slogans, no signs you can photograph from a distance. Just the body, the words, the street. What gets me is that it works, even though it probably shouldn’t. The system’s more offended by nudity than by corruption, more threatened by exposed flesh than by injustice. So you weaponize the thing they find most unbearable. It’s honest in a way that most activism isn’t. No pretense. No appeal to reason. Just: look at what you’ve made me do. I don’t know if it actually changes anything. Probably depends on who’s watching and what they’re already willing to see. But there’s something undeniable about it. You can ignore a sign. You can’t really ignore a person standing in front of you with words written on her skin. Monday, 30 March 2015. Good Drinks: Axel knew his vodka—not in the pretentious sommelier way, but because he’d actually spent time with it. He knew the Swedish distillery, the history, which details mattered. He could talk about it without performing. The knowledge was just there. We had cocktails that looked designed rather than poured, bright and careful. I don’t remember the taste. I remember how it felt to hold something someone had thought through, that small attention you notice without meaning to. Late in the evening, a little drunk and satisfied, we took a taxi home. A table full of people, good drinks, good talk. Those are the nights worth remembering, even when you forget what the drinks tasted like. Monday, 30 March 2015. Selena Gets It: I get why Selena Gomez matters. She’s got the same thing I do underneath—that constant hum of depression and solitude sitting under whatever face you put on for the world, because the alternative is falling apart completely. In that V Magazine spread she’s topless, which is what got the attention, but what actually stuck was everything she said underneath the photographs. She talked about being eighteen and in her first love, how when you’re that young and the world won’t shut up about you, it can feel like it’s just you two against everything. Something real and desperate in that. She said she wouldn’t trade it for anything, which is what you say about relationships that actually mattered even though they ended. Then she got to the part that counts. There was a time when she couldn’t leave the house. Couldn’t, not wouldn’t. Being seen, photographed, just existing in public was too much, so she stopped. Wouldn’t go out, wouldn’t even buy groceries, made herself crazy sitting with her own head. She’s climbing back out now, slowly. It’s a process. That’s what matters about it. Not the nudity or the celebrity machinery, but the fact that she just said it plainly: I was depressed. I hid. Now I’m getting better, sort of. No lesson. No silver lining. Just the shape of it—what it feels like from inside. I know that exact feeling, and I know how much harder it is to name than it is to stand naked in front of a camera. Wednesday, 18 February 2015. Night Map: An urban planner named Jakob Schmid made an interactive map of Berlin’s nightlife, showing where the bars and clubs cluster, where people actually spend their nights and money. Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain light up in all the right places. It’s a clean visualization, and there’s something different about seeing it all mapped out at once versus just knowing it from going out. What I like about it is the honesty. No mystique, no narrative about discovery—just here’s where the clubs are, here’s where the money goes. Once you see a neighborhood that way, mapped out like that, it changes how you think about it. I check it sometimes. Monday, 16 February 2015. What Time Is It?: Look at these Adventure Time Doc Martens. Finn on one boot, Jake on the other, or both if you’re committed. The real damage is thinking about all the versions that don’t exist yet—green BMO, purple Marceline, pink Princess Bubblegum. I want them all. It’s pathetic to want something this badly over cartoon boots, but here’s the thing: you see the character and something lands. You remember what it meant, or who you were, and it feels possible that a boot with Finn on it could matter again. Monday, 16 February 2015. What I Sold: I was twelve when I called into an Austrian kids’ TV show because they were giving away a Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong Country, and a green Game Boy on top of it. I had to guess what was wrong with a picture riddle—there was a lion where there shouldn’t be—and I got it right. They mailed it all to me. That was the best day of my life. Actually, genuinely the best day. The SNES and I were inseparable. Not just because owning one made me cooler at school, though it did—every weekend my mother and I would drive to a different flea market hunting for games, any games. Eventually the dealers knew me. I’d show up and they’d hold stuff aside. Nintendo wasn’t just a company that made consoles; it was the only thing that mattered. Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Star Wing—those games didn’t feel like entertainment, they felt like permission to live somewhere else. I played them. I played and played and played. These days I fire up Civilization 5 or GTA or Mass Effect and halfway through I’m wondering if I should be doing something real instead—making money, finding a woman, building something. Back then I never had that thought. I didn’t play Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger—I lived in them. I knew every pixel, every corner, every shortcut, every glitch, every enemy. Not just knew. Loved. When I got stuck I didn’t just load the next game. I bought magazines for tips, called Nintendo’s hotline, sat with the problem until it broke. There was no internet, just me and whatever was blocking the way. And when a game ended, it didn’t end. I played it again, with friends, alone, until I’d wrung everything out of it. Then I’d pop it into an Action Replay and see what the cheat codes could break. I’d warp through walls in Zelda to hear what NPCs said before I was supposed to meet them. I’d softlock myself in Chrono Trigger trying to skip scenes. I played for seventy-two hours straight because my cartridge reader was broken and I couldn’t save. Not one second of that felt wasted. Here’s what I actually believe now, and I’ve believed this more and more: the Super Nintendo was the peak. Everything that came after couldn’t touch it. The 16-bit pixels and the chiptune sound—that was the sweet spot where the technical limits forced developers to be creative instead of just throwing power at a problem. When you set the game in motion you knew exactly what you were getting. Modern games feel like they’re dragging you from one cutscene to the next. The level design is just scaffolding for a story that’s too bloated to work. But put on Super Mario Kart at a party, or Super Bomberman, or Super Street Fighter II, and suddenly those pixels turn into universes. The sprites become characters. The chiptunes become anthems. It happens instantly. I can’t look at an N64 or Dreamcast game now without wondering how we didn’t laugh ourselves sick at those polygon triangles. But sit me in front of Star Ocean or Probotector or Parodius and I swear my heart rate actually changes. My hands know what to do before my brain catches up. I thought each console generation would only get better. Club Nintendo magazine and those hype videos about the N64—they did their job. I sold my SNES and everything I owned for it. Nintendo knew exactly how to manipulate me. The marketing worked. I don’t regret the N64 exactly. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask—those mattered. Super Smash Bros mattered. But lying awake at night I think about my SNES. What it was. What I gave up. For the past few weeks I’ve been in Facebook groups trading old consoles and games. Buying them back, one at a time, paying way too much, because that’s what they cost now. And yeah, I’m becoming that person. The one who’s seen enough generations go by to know nothing’s getting better. Maybe I’m just having a midlife thing, romanticizing the past, warping it, making myself the tragic figure in a story that’s probably just… regular. Maybe I’ll end up like one of those old men at the window yelling at kids for not understanding how good it was. Little useless shits. But I was twelve. I called into a TV show and won a Super Nintendo and a green Game Boy. That was the best day of my life. And all I want now is to be twelve again and step into those worlds for the first time, knowing nothing. Monday, 16 February 2015. Everything Soft: I keep coming back to Truck Torrence’s work. He posts under 100% Soft, which is the perfect name for it: takes characters from every dark corner of pop culture and softens them. Pastels, rounded lines, a relentless gentleness. The Ghostbusters arriving at a tea party. The Bride from Kill Bill rendered as if she’s apologizing. Shaun of the Dead characters as if the zombie apocalypse is just background noise they’ll laugh about later. What stops me short is that there’s no winking. Most of the grimdark-to-pastel work I see online has this look to it, like the artist is checking if you’re laughing at the joke. Torrence just does it. The drawings are solid, the colors are chosen with thought, and he moves on. No performance, no claim. I think he’s interested in the person underneath the character. Who is the Bride when she’s not killing people? What do the Ghostbusters look like at rest? It’s not subversive or clever. It’s just a different way of looking. I don’t think I’d want to make work like this. Sustained cuteness requires a kind of discipline I’m not built for. But I respect it, and I keep going back to these images. There’s something calming about watching someone take characters you know—their weight, their history, their darkness—and just… soften them. Render them gentle. Not as commentary. As fact. Monday, 16 February 2015. Style Without Apologies: Fell down a Harajuku Hipster rabbit hole this week. It’s a Tumblr that just collects kids from Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai—whoever’s walking around with the kind of confidence that comes from not checking if what you’re wearing is supposed to work together. Schoolgirls in Shibuya layering colors that shouldn’t sit next to each other. Models from Seoul who make you think they’ve figured something out. Guys from China in outfits that look like three different aesthetics somehow became one person. I used to think style was about taste, about knowing the rules well enough to break them correctly. Watching these kids, I don’t think they know any rules. They just got dressed and didn’t apologize about it. That indifference to consensus—that’s what separates the people who look like themselves from the people who look like an idea of what they should be. Most fashion blogs get that backwards. They show you people who nailed it. This just shows you people being themselves, and somehow that’s more interesting. Sunday, 15 February 2015. Work It: I remember watching Missy Elliott’s videos and there was always this kid dancing. She had moves that made you sit there thinking about how unfair it was that anyone could move like that. I must have watched those clips a hundred times, and she was always there, just completely in control. I didn’t know her name—just that she was impossibly good at something that seemed simple until you tried to understand it. That kid was Alyson Stoner. Years later I found out she’d gone on to become a choreographer and director, the kind of person who translates that natural gift into an actual career. Not long ago she put together a tribute to Missy with her crew, and it was genuinely good. There’s something about those Missy Elliott videos that feels untouchable now, sealed in a moment that won’t come again. But seeing Stoner return to that space, still moving like she always did—it made me realize why we were all watching in the first place. She still had it. Sunday, 15 February 2015. The Moon Keeps Falling: “Majora’s Mask” was always the weirder Zelda. Three-day cycles, a moon descending toward the earth, the same world recycled and reshaped across the loops. Most people point to “Ocarina of Time” as the peak, but anyone who actually spent time with “Majora’s Mask” understood it was the stranger masterpiece—darker, more ambitious, uncompromising about what it wanted to do. When Nintendo announced the 3DS remake in 2015, it made sense. The N64 original had technical limits—frame rate stutters, 3D that was mostly unusable. The new 3DS had improved processing, a display that actually handled depth without forcing you to hold it at a specific angle, and a real second stick instead of that circle pad compromise. The hardware finally matched what the game was trying to achieve. The game’s cycle structure—three days repeating, every NPC on their own schedule, the same locations seen from different angles across the loops—worked better on a portable system where you could drop in and out. You could actually live in those three days, track the minor character arcs between cycles, sit with the game’s specific sadness. A handheld version made the design breathe in a way the console original couldn’t. The new 3DS itself was that rare hardware revision that justified its existence. Swappable plates meant you could change its appearance. The buttons were sharper, the processing faster, nothing compromised. It was the kind of update that said Nintendo had listened to what worked and what didn’t, rather than just chasing sales. I remember thinking that if you were going to revisit a classic, this was the right choice at the right moment. Something about that grim Zelda felt more true—not the safer heroism of “Ocarina of Time,” but something that actually refused to look away. Friday, 13 February 2015. Ten Little Missions: Every Friday I make a list. Ten things to do, ten small reasons to think the weekend might be worth something. Here’s what I’ve got this week. Charli XCX covered “Shake It Off” and it’s better than it has any right to be. Taylor’s version is in your head already, burned there by radio and grocery stores, but XCX does something that makes it sound fresh again. Different vibe entirely. Good for driving. Don’t buy the Kanye Yeezy 750 Boosts. They look like the corrective shoes my friend had to wear in grade school because one leg was shorter than the other. I genuinely don’t know who asked Kanye for these or why he delivered—he’s usually got good taste but he committed to making something aggressively terrible. Almost impressive, honestly. There’s a party at Prince Charles called I ♥ Engtanz if you’re in Berlin. It’s for people who want to stand physically close to strangers without it feeling weird. Starts at eight. Get dressed up a little. The whole concept is just proximity and music as an excuse to be bodies in the same room. Fap Fapp is an app for…well, the name says it. It teaches you things about spending time alone. That’s the entire product. No judgment, just existence. Riot Simulator exists so you can destroy things with no consequences. You’re the crowd, everything else is an obstacle. That’s the design and it’s weirdly satisfying. Read “If You Aren’t Rich by 45, Give Up” because it tells you something true: time is the real enemy, not effort or luck. You’re in a race that started before you were paying attention and the finish line is visible. The prize is waiting—a nice house, a nice life, the quiet contentment of trying hard enough. Pick your move now while you still can. Silicon Valley season 2 is coming and I’m more excited about it than seems reasonable. These people and their terrible startup deserve more episodes. Stop shaving completely. All of it. Seriously think about the hours you’ve spent removing hair from yourself or paying someone else to. That’s time you could use for literally anything else. More hair is objectively better. Eat only blue food all weekend. Blueberries, ice cream, a döner soaked in food coloring. Make it work. You probably won’t wake up as a Smurf but the idea is funny enough. There’s a Tumblr called 35-24-35 that’s thin women in very small bikinis and nothing else. I’m sitting here with a burger dripping on my stomach watching people who’d never eat one, and something about that feels honest. Friday night as it actually happens. Friday, 13 February 2015. When Television Works: I’ll be honest: I loved sitcoms in the nineties. Friends, Scrubs, Malcolm in the Middle. The ones that actually felt like something. Then television got cuter and meaner. HIMYM showed up and something in comedy died—some essential thing about character and warmth, replaced entirely by irony and smugness. Fresh Off the Boat grabbed me in a way I didn’t expect. Eddie Huang is a hip-hop obsessed kid from D.C. who shows up in nineties Florida when his Taiwanese parents open a steakhouse in the suburbs. He doesn’t fit anywhere. The kids at school mock his lunch. The one Black kid suddenly sees his social ladder within reach. Girls look right through him. He wants in and everyone’s keeping him out. Simple setup. Eddie’s a lovable underdog—and I mean genuinely lovable, not some manufactured indie-film underdog. He’s just a kid who wants to belong. Randall Park plays his father as a man desperately trying to be American. Constance Wu plays his mother as someone genuinely unhinged. The show has no laugh track and it’s not a joke factory. It’s about a family surviving in whitebread suburbia without losing themselves, which is funny because these people feel like people. I stopped believing in sitcoms years ago. Then I watched this and remembered why they matter: not for jokes or clever premises, but because you actually want to spend time with these people. Eddie’s desperation to fit in reads as real. His mother is absolutely feral in the best way. That’s the whole show. I’ve only seen two episodes. But I’m already committed to seeing where this goes. There’s something honest about how Eddie’s treated—not as a punchline, just as a kid who doesn’t belong. Everyone’s been that kid. His mother alone is worth the price of admission. That character is legitimately incredible. Thursday, 12 February 2015. My Superstars: We get superstars fed to us constantly—through competitions and viral moments and carefully managed brands. And I’ve chased enough of them to figure out it doesn’t matter. The people who actually change how I think and work are almost never the ones with the biggest platforms. They’re photographers I found by accident, musicians nobody’s heard of, designers solving problems sideways. That’s the group that matters. As someone who makes things, I notice the difference pretty clearly. The superstars worth paying attention to aren’t famous because they won a competition or went viral—they matter because their work teaches me something. Maybe it’s how they use color. Maybe it’s the way they see space. Maybe it’s a solution to a problem I didn’t even know how to approach. These aren’t people I follow because everyone else is watching them. They’re people I follow because they’re actually doing something. Most of them are complete strangers. Some are people I know personally. A few are probably dead. The common thread is they’re the ones whose work I’m actually thinking about when I’m working myself. The rest of it—the ones with the biggest numbers and the most polished brands—that’s just noise, even when they’re genuinely talented. I stopped trying to figure out who the “real” superstars are a while back. I just pay attention to whoever’s making something that pulls at me. That’s the whole system right there. Wednesday, 11 February 2015. High There: Sitting at your window with mediocre weed, watching it turn to ash, and all you really want is someone to share it with. Not making a thing out of it, not performance, just someone who gets it, who’d sit down and smoke without needing to talk around it. That’s the whole fantasy when you’re alone at night. High There! is supposed to be the answer. It’s basically Tinder for stoners—sign up, swipe through people looking for smoking partners, find someone locally who isn’t completely unbearable, and theoretically you’ve got company. That’s the whole app. Except it’s Android only right now, which is irritating because the people you’d actually want to smoke with probably have iPhones. Maybe Apple thinks it’s too much of a risk. Maybe they’re protecting the brand from the stoner association. The funny part is that Apple came out of actual hippie culture—the real thing, not the lifestyle-aesthetic version—so you’d think they’d be past worrying about it by now. But apparently the corporation just can’t get there. Tuesday, 10 February 2015. Basement Arcade: Asics flew me out to London last weekend for some anniversary thing—twenty-five years of the Gel-Lyte III, European launch of a new Tiger colorway. The event was at one of those deliberately secret locations, just an address texted when you arrived, which turned out to be a basement somewhere in the city with an arcade setup and proper Japanese food. Plenty of Asahi Superdry on hand, which is always the right answer, and green tea for people thinking ahead. The arcade wasn’t novelty stuff—you could actually sink into the games. Some sneakers had this glow-in-the-dark thing that worked better than you’d expect, which is the only time I’ve seen that tech look genuinely cool on a shoe. I spent most of the night with Leni from For The Story, Christiane from InTouch, and the turnschuh.tv crew. We exhausted the arcade, hit the sauna at the hotel when it seemed appropriate, then eventually ended up in the bar doing that thing where you’re the last people talking because nobody wants to be the first to leave. These nights are good because they don’t announce themselves—you just look back and realize you had one. Tuesday, 10 February 2015. Different: This video made the rounds of Japanese women saying they’d date foreign guys. The setup’s transparently built on a fantasy—the one where being Western, foreign, and vaguely interesting-because-you’re-different automatically means something. The video basically says: no, that’s not how it works. Attraction is specific, individual, indifferent to your origin story. Should’ve been obvious. It was obvious. Except hearing it from women felt different than just knowing it was true. I’ve spent years pulling visual language from Japanese culture—in design work, in what I look at, in what I’m into sexually if I’m being honest. Somewhere I confused my attraction to the culture with what women from that culture might want from me. Which is stupid when you say it out loud, but takes longer to actually feel stupid about it. The funny part is the video didn’t kill what I’m attracted to. It just made it less interesting because it made it more real. Less about me and some fantasy version of Tokyo, more about actual women who don’t exist to confirm anything about me. Which is probably better. Just doesn’t feel like it. Tuesday, 10 February 2015. Ramen Lasagne: Those fifty-cent ramen packets with the shelf life of forever—they taste better than they have any right to. There’s always been a stack somewhere, backup food for when money runs out or I stop caring about effort. David Chang’s Lucky Peach video takes that bottom-shelf staple and transforms it into lasagne, which is the kind of absurd alchemy that happens when a chef with real skill decides cheap food is worth taking seriously. There’s something honest about that move. Proving that what everyone ignores can actually be interesting, that you don’t need fancy ingredients or a reservation to eat something worth thinking about. The video isn’t really about lasagne or ramen. It’s about taking what’s already in your cupboard and deciding it matters. Thursday, 5 February 2015. Mean Girls Game: I actually love Mean Girls. Not in a guilty-pleasure way, but genuinely love it—it’s sharper and funnier than films three times its budget, and everyone in it is perfectly cast. So when I heard they made a mobile game, I knew I was going down. “Mean Girls: The Game” looks like a soulless tie-in cash grab, which is exactly what it is. But I’m playing it anyway. I’ll download it, watch the film on repeat while I’m grinding through whatever passes for gameplay, probably eat ice cream straight from the container. I’ll waste hours on something that’s almost certainly terrible. And I won’t regret a second of it. Wednesday, 4 February 2015. Marina, Still: I got real into Marina and the Diamonds a few years back. “I Am Not a Robot,” “Mowgli’s Road,” “Oh No!”—there was something about those tracks that just worked. Even the ones that didn’t hit as hard had this weird sincerity underneath them that made you believe she meant it. Then you sort of forget about artists like that. You move on, listen to other things, and they become a memory. But Marina keeps dropping new stuff, and somehow it always brings you back. “I’m a Ruin” is her lane—glossy electropop with hooks that catch you, lyrics that feel like they mean something without trying too hard. She’s not reinventing anything. She doesn’t need to. What I like about Marina is that she doesn’t seem to care about being the biggest or the most important. She just makes music that’s hers, and that’s enough. You either get it or you don’t. There’s something cool about that kind of indifference. It’s confidence, but the quiet kind. Every time I see her name pop up with a new track, there’s this small thing that happens—this moment where you remember why you liked her in the first place. Not everyone does that for you. Wednesday, 4 February 2015. The Comments: A woman posting online gets maybe a dozen messages a day. Guys asking her to do things, insults dressed as flirtation, pictures she didn’t ask for, threats wrapped in compliments. Kelly Svirakova, a YouTuber under the name MissesVlog, stopped quietly deleting them. She made a segment called “Kelly kommentiert Kommentare”—Kelly comments on comments—where she reads what actually landed in her inbox, classical music playing underneath. Just reads it straight. No outrage, no mercy, no turning the thing into a moment. “I want to cum in your face.” “You need a real man to heal your head.” “Suck my dick?” The grammar barely registers. The intent is always the same. What gets me is the flatness of it. She doesn’t react with rage or perform victimhood. She just shows what the comments are, which somehow hits harder than any reaction. Here’s what I receive. Here’s what these men write when they think it’s anonymous. Here’s the internet. Wednesday, 4 February 2015. Show ’Em What You’re Made Of: There’s a Backstreet Boys movie and I’ve lost my mind in exactly the right way. The original post was just pure reaction in German—four sentences of someone losing it about five men they’ve been in love with forever. Nick, Kevin, Brian, A.J., Howie. A film. I’m sitting with this the way you sit with things too good to be true, waiting for someone to tell you it’s getting cancelled. I’ve been doing the pop culture thing long enough to understand something about desire. You want what the system tells you to want, then you want what the system tells you is shameful, and if you’re lucky you eventually stop apologizing. The Backstreet Boys have always been in the shameful column for me. Seventeen years old and certain about five men I’d never meet. And then thirty years pass and you realize you were never wrong—you just understood something before you had language for it. A studio greenlit a movie about them, which means somewhere, someone admitted it too. The logistics of watching it are secondary. The internet has pathways. What matters is that it exists, that five grown men who spent their whole lives making people feel something decided to do this. Permission, finally. I’m not sorry about any of this. I wasn’t in 1998 and I’m not now. Tuesday, 3 February 2015. The Hunger: There’s a Rihanna issue of i-D Magazine and some weeks she looks like the coolest person alive and other weeks she looks like a disaster, but both versions of her deserve to be on my wall. I tell myself I’m above wanting things. Ate local greens for five years, dismissed fast food, judged people staring at their phones on the train. But then McDonald’s started selling Big Mac sauce in bottles—in Australia, naturally—and I realized I’d been lying the whole time. The sauce was always going to be good. Admitting it is just cheaper than pretending. The hunger for things doesn’t disappear, it just gets more expensive. A camera with 50 megapixels because your phone isn’t enough. A smart ring that shows you how many people liked your tweet in real time—yes, someone invented hardware specifically for the feeling of sitting on a train wondering if anyone saw your post. A clip-on lens that promises to make your iPhone photos look professional. These are objects that say something about who you want to be without you having to explain it. And then there’s the stuff that’s just funny. Kim Kardashian made a photo book of selfies and somehow convinced people to buy it. That’s genius in its purest form. A Nike Air Force 1 in white and red for Black History Month looks clean, whatever that means anymore. A Hello Kitty collaboration with a Japanese streetwear brand feels like it shouldn’t work but it does. Louis C.K.’s comedy special costs five dollars online and it’s probably the best five dollars I’ve spent. Somewhere in California, there’s a marijuana vending machine. The future they promised us turned out to be: convenience, automation, every need turned into a product you can want on demand. It’s perfect. It’s ridiculous. It’s exactly right. I spent years convincing myself I was above the hunger. Turns out I just had better taste in what I wanted to want. Tuesday, 3 February 2015. Tokyo Permission: In Harajuku, the animals dress better than Berlin’s entire fashion scene. Machi the fox and Neko the cat are there listening to MUCC, existing in a reality the rest of us barely touch. It’s the first thing that hits you about Japan—everything there seems to know something we haven’t figured out yet. Shirobako is just about making anime. Rooms full of people drawing frame by frame, the impossible labor of it, and somehow you end up caring about every single decision. You sit down for one episode and wake up at 3 AM having forgotten about anything else. I’ve been caught on BOMI lately too, some track with a title my browser won’t translate, but it gets in your head and stays there. I found Sailor Moon for the Super Nintendo in a bargain bin years ago, hours from anywhere, and I played it until someone actually screamed at me to stop. You run left and right and hit things and it’s perfect. Plastic Little by Satoshi Urushihara has that same pull—manga about a girl catching whales in space, and he loves drawing breasts exactly as much as I do. No apology, no irony. The sexuality just exists, matter-of-fact and unapologetic. Michael Rougier’s photographs of Tokyo in 1964—teenagers in full rebellion, pure otherness in black and white—those images stay with me more than anything recent. That’s the Japan that gets under your skin. Then there’s Hikari Shiina, who knows exactly what men want and builds her work around it without any distance or apology. Just the thing itself, direct and honest. What Japan has that Europe can’t manage is permission. Garlic cola exists—Jat’s Takko, actual garlic flavor, no explanation. The Tokyo Fetish Festival happens. Everything coexists without the need for irony-coating or apology. You see a fox in Harajuku dressed better than you and nobody’s trying to make it a joke. It just is. Tuesday, 3 February 2015. Pokémon Gets Weird: Someone had the idea to get a bunch of artists to each redraw a scene from the original Pokémon opening. Not remake it in a coherent way—just hand off different chunks to different people and see what happened. The result was like watching your childhood memory get processed through a broken photocopier, twisted and refracted through everyone’s personal style until it barely resembled what you remembered. You’d recognize the framework. Pikachu is still there somewhere, Misty shows up, the general shape of that intro you’ve seen a thousand times. But then the artists would take their moment and run with it, and suddenly you’re looking at something unhinged—proportions wrong in ways that shouldn’t be funny but are, animation choices that go places the original never considered. Some of them were genuinely polished and beautiful; others were gloriously broken. I found myself laughing at moments I hadn’t expected to. There’s something about watching artists dismantle something so carefully constructed, so locked in pop-culture amber, and just do whatever they wanted with their piece of it. The individual weirdness stacked up into something that felt less like a tribute and more like a fever dream version of a memory. The original opening is this perfect artifact—perfectly paced, perfectly scored, the exact right length and energy to sell an entire world and a promise of adventure. Everyone of a certain age has it lodged in their brain. Watching different people interpret tiny sections of it revealed how much of that memory is pure machinery, carefully engineered nostalgia. But it also revealed something else: how much people wanted to play with it, to add their own thing to something that felt untouchable. That’s what made it work. Not as a coherent product, but as proof that even the most locked-down pieces of culture could still surprise you if you just let people fuck with them a little. Tuesday, 3 February 2015. Make Your Way: In February 2002 we got home internet for the first time. A 56k modem, which meant that everything moved at the pace of 5 AM, me stumbling home after a terrible party, drunk enough that the world had gone all swimmy and sideways, just trying to get to my bed before I threw up on myself. That’s how slow everything was. You’d click and wait. You’d wait some more. You’d think maybe something broke. Then finally the page would load, ten years later. I’ve always thought of myself as a maker rather than a consumer—at least that’s what I’ve always told myself. So that same month I got myself a website, nothing fancy, just some pages I’d thrown together in Word about me and the people around me, some of whom were attractive and some of whom really weren’t. I wrote about stupid things. The kinds of stupid things a kid writes about when nobody’s really expecting to read it. I wrote there for whoever might stumble across it—my older sister, the neighbor’s dog, whoever. I’d ramble about who we’d destroyed in Super Smash Bros that afternoon, which Fanta flavor actually tasted best, whether a girl from another class would let you touch her. Just … kid stuff. Half-formed thoughts. Whatever struck me that day. Why am I telling you this ancient history? Because it means I’ve been doing this for longer than a decade now. Long enough to watch countless people start blogs and quit. Some of them were actually talented. Most of them probably became plumbers or insurance adjusters or just disappeared entirely. That’s fair. And yet. Despite spending half my life typing weird thoughts and observations into the internet, I’m surrounded by people who feel this burning need to tell me, constantly and in every possible way, how I’m doing it wrong. How I could be doing it better. These aren’t suggestions—they’re orders dressed up as questions, advice I never asked for, delivered by people who’ve never created a single meaningful thing in their lives. This blog, or this dispatch, or whatever you want to call it, attracts all kinds. People say I write too much. People say I write too little. That I should be more serious, more irreverent, more provocative, more careful. Too much sex. Not enough sex. Too many opinions. Not enough jokes. I sit there reading these messages and just think: Why would you even tell me this? I’m genuinely restless in the worst way—this constant anxiety that I’m missing something crucial, that I need to reinvent everything right now, immediately, or I’ll regret it forever. So I try new stuff constantly, ideas that nobody else understands but which make perfect sense to my peculiar brain. Today this blog is one thing. Tomorrow it’s something different. Today it’s serious. Tomorrow it’s frivolous. Today it exists. Tomorrow I’ll burn it down and start over. It’s like trying to find the right position to fall asleep—rolling left, rolling right, rolling left again until finally you find it. I’m trying to find my place. The place where I can do what I actually want to do, the way I actually want to do it. And somehow, every time, I end up back where I started. That pattern never breaks. You want to know what that means? It means I’ve tried every single half-baked suggestion anyone’s ever thrown at me. Every piece of advice, every criticism disguised as constructive feedback, every “what you really need to do” from people who’ve accomplished nothing. I’ve tried it all. And you know what? All of it was garbage. Failed experiments. Broken projects. Things I started and abandoned. Ideas that made sense at 3 AM and looked ridiculous in daylight. Here’s what I’ve learned: If you’ve built something you actually care about—a blog, a YouTube channel, even just a website where you dump your thoughts—and people keep showing up to tell you how you should be doing it differently, then yes, stay somewhat open to feedback. But also ask yourself: who exactly is this person? What have they built? What gives them the right? You’re where you are because you’ve poured everything into this thing. Your time. Your attention. Your passion. You made choices. You set priorities. You sacrificed things. You kept going when you could have been doing anything else, anything easier, anything more social, anything that would actually pay your bills or impress anyone. But you didn’t. You kept going with this, whatever it is, because you wanted to. Because something in you needed to. So why should some person who’s never built anything substantial, who’s never committed to anything, who’s never actually tried, get to tell you how to do yours? They don’t know. If they did, they’d be doing it themselves instead of sitting on the sidelines throwing rocks. They’d have their own thing. They’d understand what this actually costs. I got internet for the first time in February 2002. A lot has changed since then. Technology has changed completely. The internet is barely recognizable compared to what it was. But one thing hasn’t shifted an inch: I still want to scream what I think, what I love, what I hate into the void and actually mean it. I still want to make something that matters to me, even if it matters to no one else. And if you’re like me—if you’ve got something you’re building, something you care about—then for God’s sake, keep going. Don’t let some person with no skin in the game talk you into doubt. Don’t let their criticism become your roadmap. Keep your eyes on what you actually love and stay with it. That’s the only way any of this survives. That’s the only way any of us survive. Monday, 2 February 2015. The Sharks: Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show was loud and expensive and very committed to being a spectacle. But the only moment I cared about was this backup dancer in a shark costume who clearly had no idea what was happening. His partner was executing the choreography, totally locked in, and this guy was just sort of moving around like he’d woken up seconds before they went live. Not in a funny way—just completely lost. I watched him instead of the actual performance the whole time, and that tells you everything. Monday, 2 February 2015. Perfect and Nerdy: Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon took Homer’s drive to the nuclear plant and rendered it in bright, blocky pixels. It’s the intro we’ve all seen countless times, but they made it worth watching again. The Simpsons has spawned endless versions of this opening, but something landed different here. Maybe it’s just that someone finally made it look genuinely cool while the actual show’s been terrible for years. Or maybe there’s something pure about watching a familiar scene collapse into pure geometry and arcade color. I could watch it loop forever. Not out of nostalgia or whatever—I’m past that. But because it’s just well-made and knows what it’s doing. That’s the rarest thing. Monday, 2 February 2015. A Thousand Euros for Sharing: You learn fast in Germany that you can’t repost a photograph without risking legal destruction. Jan Böhmermann found out the hard way when he shared a photo on Twitter—a Nazi, shot by photographer Martin Langer, nothing crazy. The cease-and-desist came immediately. A thousand euros for one tweet. It’s alien if you’ve spent time online anywhere else. The US has Fair Use, which assumes culture needs room to breathe. Germany’s copyright law assumes the opposite. Every image is a potential lawsuit. You can’t share a meme without a lawyer’s letter showing up in your inbox. Böhmermann’s response was perfect: he remixed the photo and posted it again. Exactly what the law deserves. The real problem is that German copyright law is ancient and nobody with power wants to fix it. The people making money off the current system are the same people who’d have to change it. So the internet in Germany stays frozen. You can’t reference work freely, can’t build on what’s already there, can’t do any of the sampling and remixing that actually makes internet culture work. It’s written like the law is from 1975. I’ve lived here long enough to stop expecting it to make sense. You just learn which risks are worth taking and which aren’t. Sometimes it’s a meme. Sometimes it’s Böhmermann remixing a photograph of a Nazi. The law’s too stupid to know the difference anyway. Wednesday, 28 January 2015. The Internal Compass: She’s all over the place. Berlin TV sets, clubs, airports to warm beaches where she’d rather swim with dolphins than watch them on TV. You’d think someone living like that would get swallowed by the city’s noise and hedonism. There are plenty of people who moved to Berlin young and ambitious, and now they basically live in the basement of Berghain, completely sucked in. But Palina’s different—she’s stayed intact somehow. She said something about having an internal compass, something that tells her how much of what is good for her. Growing up in Berlin helps with that; you don’t fall apart from too much stimulation when it’s just the landscape you’ve always known. But it’s more than that. She genuinely loves what she does—DJing, the TV work, the constant movement. When her fingers start twitching from not spinning records in a while, that’s what gets her out of the house, not the city pulling at her. The thing that struck me was how she talks about adventure. Getting lost in a jungle not knowing if there’s a cab after nine at night. Accidentally ordering something so hot it’s barely edible. Swimming and suddenly there’s a dolphin next to you. That’s better than the TV version. She’s chasing that feeling, that moment where the world isn’t mediated through a screen. Berlin matters to her in a specific way. Not as a tourist version of itself, but as home. The city she grew up in, where she walks the block with friends, plays arcade games, eats well. She’s not running from it or toward it—she just lives there the way you live anywhere, and happens to work there too. What got me was her answer when I asked if she’d ever worried about losing herself in the city. Not really. She’s got this rootedness that comes from actually being from Berlin, from understanding it as a place with a particular energy, not as a playground. But also: love is her motor. That’s what she said. Love for what she does, for the people she knows, for the sheer strangeness of the world. As long as that’s running, she’s not afraid. She’s a child of immigrants, grew up in Berlin during its messiest, most complicated decades. When I asked about cultural diversity and all the fear-mongering stuff—the marches, the anger—she didn’t perform a position. She just said she knows how good people can be to each other when there’s respect, and how destructive fear is when people don’t bother to know the facts. The people marching in those protests scare her. That’s real. But she’s not letting that fear run the show. Small details stick with you. Her hair, which she says is so damaged the split ends have split ends, somehow always looks perfect because she can just twist it into something in two seconds and it looks different every time. Vodka, not beer, is her thing. She’s the person who will try anything—snake soup, a two-meter iguana, whatever’s in front of her. She laughs about herself getting sucked into the internet and not leaving the house for seasons, but then she snaps out of it because there’s too much world to see. At the end, when asked what to watch next, she said ’Modern Family.’ Manny is the best. That’s the kind of recommendation I trust—not what sounds smart, just what genuinely landed for her. Tuesday, 27 January 2015. The Authenticity Game: YouTube authenticity is the easiest product to sell because it seems like the one thing you can’t buy—realness, access, a person without a filter. These guys build empires on it. The kids believe it because how could thousands of people be wrong? But Böhmermann, who spent a career on German television identifying elaborate bullshit, kept it simple in an interview: the whole thing is designed. There’s no version of these people that exists outside the system keeping them profitable. The contracts are too complicated to read. The posting schedule is calculated against the algorithm, not inspiration. Every moment of spontaneity has been discussed in a meeting. Brand deals are baked into the plan from day one, even when they’re presented as surprises. A kid buys the merch thinking he’s buying a piece of something real, and maybe the person selling it has forgotten that’s what he’s doing—he’s just being himself, except his self is an extremely well-paid performance. The system is so complete that it works. You can’t break character when you’ve stopped knowing there is one. Tuesday, 27 January 2015. Grandma’s Turn: Five hours into GTA 5 and I couldn’t beat this one street race. Same pattern every time: I’d be winning, then something would clip me—a parked car, a light pole, something I didn’t see coming—and I’d be finished. Two hundred attempts, maybe more. At some point you stop counting. My grandmother came in and watched me fail. She made some observation about braking late or holding the button wrong, the kind of backseat comment that would normally make me want to scream. Instead I just handed her the controller. She’d never touched a controller in her life. She picked it up like she was born holding one. No learning curve, no questions about the buttons. Three minutes. One race. She won. What got to me wasn’t the losing itself. It was the way she understood it instantly, like her hands already knew. The smoothness. The absolute certainty. She’d never played a game in her life but she moved like someone who’d been doing this forever, like pattern and instinct were the same thing. There’s this moment when you get older where you realize you’re not actually good at the things you thought you were good at. I’ve been playing video games for twenty years. And I just watched my grandmother figure out in three minutes what I couldn’t crack in two hundred tries. Friday, 23 January 2015. SALZ.IO: Ines used to write for this place - sharp observations, whatever came to mind. She wrote about terrorism in Germany one week and tamagotchis the next, wrote about girls kissing, just real thoughts scattered across posts. That was nearly five years ago now. She moved to Hamburg, got a job at an ad agency, mostly disappeared except for occasional Twitter updates about her actual life. SALZ.IO started appearing late last year. Her blog. Fashion, DIY, design - things she actually cares about making. She wrote about giving herself three months to decide if she’d keep going with it, if the project would stick. Something about 2014 being when she deliberately carved out time for creativity, that it helped, so she decided to keep the practice and write about it. The site’s full of love, she said. It is. There’s something about watching someone actually do the work. Not the talking stage - the actual making time and filling it. That’s what Ines is doing. Friday, 23 January 2015. Doing It: Charli XCX and Rita Ora made a video and the real star is this older guy in a leopard thong. He shows up, he dances, he grins—completely unbothered. Watching him, I realized this is who I want to be when I’m that age. Not trying to look young, not performing anything. Just comfortable enough to dance in whatever outfit, grinning the whole time because you’ve got nothing to prove and you know it. The way he moves, the ease on his face—just a guy alive in a moment. I want to be Johnny. Thursday, 22 January 2015. Why Not: Every year people are standing in the rain waiting for some delayed show. The whole thing’s there if you want it—networking, photographs, good clothes. I used to think I should want it. Honestly, I stopped. Now I’m home in sweatpants with warm cheese and spicy sausages, playing GTA, and I’m completely fine with that choice. The clothes are sometimes great, but the week was never about clothes anyway. It’s about being somewhere you can be seen, and I’ve never been bothered enough by visibility to spend an evening getting wet for it. Wednesday, 21 January 2015. Concerned Citizen: Toyah Diebel made a makeup tutorial once: how to look like Kathrin Oertel, the woman who became the face of PEGIDA (Germany’s anti-immigration protests) while insisting she was just a regular, concerned citizen. Follow the steps and you’re her exactly—which is entirely the point of the satire. What gets me is how clean it is. The look can be replicated. The mythology of these people being ordinary, not radicals, just trying to preserve something—it’s all surface. Makeup. You assemble it like any other costume. I doubt the people watching understood what was happening. Some probably did and hated it. Some might’ve thought it was sincere. The best satire doesn’t announce itself. It just says: here’s how you do the face, and lets you figure out what that means. Tuesday, 20 January 2015. What Stuck Around: I met people who grew up in the DDR and they all wanted to talk about the food. Not from some deep nostalgia—just people remembering what they ate. The East German government didn’t hand out abundance. You got rations, basics, whatever it could manage. That’s what you cooked from. When that’s all you have, you learn fast. The people I talked to remembered specific meals—potato dishes, bread soups, meals that actually required skill to make work—and they remembered them as genuinely good food. Not some noble poverty narrative. Just meals they enjoyed. Thirty years later the DDR is gone and these people are still cooking the same recipes. Still making what their mothers taught them. Still knowing exactly how to stretch what you have. I keep thinking about what constraints actually do to the work. Everyone talks like creativity needs unlimited options and deep pockets and every resource available. But then you look at what actually gets made when you’re working with just enough. Something cleaner happens. The thinking gets real. Nothing wasted. East German cooking is still happening. Still good. Tuesday, 20 January 2015. Say The Magic Word: Sailor Moon was the show where everything mattered. Some weird creature was trying to destroy the world, and Bunny and her friends had to stop it, and it felt like life and death even though it was absolutely ridiculous. Then a song would start playing, and suddenly it actually was life and death. The music in that show was doing all the heavy lifting. The story was fine, the fights were fine, but when those songs came in—when you heard “Force of Eternity” or “Only You Alone” or whatever the German dub had called them—that’s when you felt something real. Watching it on RTL2 as a kid was its own specific trauma. It was supposed to be a kids’ show, just another cartoon between programs, but you’d sit there absolutely wrecked while your parents walked past without understanding why. A group of teenagers in sailor suits saving the world shouldn’t have hit as hard as it did. The songs made it hit. There was something about the way those tracks would swell underneath a moment where one of the characters realized they couldn’t save everyone, or where they had to choose between their normal life and their duty—it made you believe that this actually mattered. This fake teenage girl drama actually mattered. I remember specific songs doing specific damage. There was one about love, one about eternity, one about flying through clouds that felt impossibly sad even though I couldn’t explain why. I’d sit very still with my face pointing at the TV, which was probably the least subtle way to hide that I was tearing up at a show about magic girls. The German soundtrack had this melodramatic energy that actually worked. It leaned into the emotion instead of winking at the camera. It treated the material seriously, and that seriousness is what made it devastate you. What’s strange about revisiting those songs now is that they still work. You can tell they were designed to hit you, to make you feel the weight of what these characters were doing. The production was cheap, the dialogue was sometimes silly, but whoever handled the music understood emotional manipulation in a way the rest of the show couldn’t quite touch. A violin melody, a swelling chorus, a moment where the song drops and you hear just the character’s voice—it’s basic technique, but it still works. There were maybe ten or twelve of these tracks that did real damage, each one tied to a specific moment or just better produced than the rest. The weird part is that Sailor Moon probably didn’t invent this feeling—it just captured it and put it on television. There’s something about the story of people who have to sacrifice their normal lives for something bigger, who have to be brave even when they’re terrified, and when you pair that with the right music, it becomes something that lives in you. The show itself was fine. The songs were what made you care. Friday, 16 January 2015. Everything At Once: I’ve had Ibeyi’s “Ghosts” running through my head for weeks now. Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, those French-Cuban sisters, doing these creeping atmospheric tracks that just sit in your skull without trying. The kind of music that doesn’t announce itself. The A Bathing Ape and Hello Kitty collaboration keeps catching me. Baby Milo and Hello Kitty shouldn’t share a space, shouldn’t make sense together, but the execution is clean. No fuss, no apologies. Sometimes that’s the best design. I went back to Shibuya in my head recently, which is dangerous. I was there once and stood at that scramble crossing in front of the Starbucks, watching all that movement at once, thousands of people crossing simultaneously, and something about it broke my brain in the best way possible. I remember thinking I’d move there forever. I also remember knowing that was a lie even as I was thinking it. Ping Pong is the thing I can’t get out of my head though. Taiyo Matsumoto’s anime about two kids obsessed with table tennis. Should be forgettable but it’s not. The writing is sharp and the visual style is completely its own thing. There’s this emotional coldness running through it that shouldn’t work but does, and I find myself thinking about it constantly. I also somehow spent sixty hours in Fantasy Life on the 3DS, which was not supposed to happen. Opened it one afternoon because I was bored and next thing I knew I’d lost most of a month to this small nothing game about an unemployed adventurer being pushed around by an obsessed butterfly. It was stupid and I loved it completely. There’s Bristlr, which is just a dating app for people obsessed with beards. Sign up, find someone with the right facial situation, and then you’re running your hands and lips through it. The whole specificity of desire is funny—narrow enough to need its own platform. I’d read Kenza Zouiten’s blog forever if I had to pick just one. I have no idea what she’s writing about most of the time, whatever parties and travel and Tokio Hotel stuff. But something about it keeps pulling me back. I’ve never been to Stockholm, but I’m certain everyone there just looks like her. Everyone. The whole city. Some months you just find yourself pulled in ten different directions by things that have nothing to do with each other. No cohesion, no throughline. But there’s something honest about admitting that’s where your head is, what’s actually catching you, not what you think you should be paying attention to. Friday, 16 January 2015. Chrissy’s Superstars: Chrissy was too young and wore adidas Superstars with white socks pulled short, the way they were supposed to be worn. We’d find her at parties or behind the abandoned house, the one with the broken windows and a door that wouldn’t shut right. She didn’t stick around. The shoes did. Superstars II. adidas Originals. They were better than everything else—Air Max, Chucks, Ballerinas, all of it. I can’t separate them from her now, which probably isn’t fair to the shoes, but that’s how these things work. An image gets stuck and you can’t shake it. I wonder sometimes what happened to her. Whether she still wears them. Probably moved on to something else years ago. But I know why I never did. Friday, 16 January 2015. The Perfect Youth: Elodie Bambi Tann’s photographs document something specific: youth when wine, drugs, and love are the main events, when you’re surrounded by people who feel things the way you do. Her early work came from her shared apartment and the house parties that seemed to contain entire worlds. These photographs are strong and real and intimate—no styling, no distance, just what happened and what it looked like. What gets me about her work is the honesty. She captured the temporary moment that everyone secretly wants to live but most people miss while it’s happening. The particular warmth of being young with the right people, in the right place, at the right time. The kind of thing that only feels perfect in retrospect. There’s a question underneath: did she somehow photograph the perfect youth, the one everyone desires? Or is every moment like that when you’re actually living it, and you only recognize the distance after? Her photographs suggest she understood something—either something about youth, or just about how to see it. Either way, the work stays with you. Thursday, 15 January 2015. Pointless: Sports Illustrated runs these behind-the-scenes videos of Kate Upton all the time. She talks about a photoshoot, or how great it is being a model, or magazines her family had around the house, and meanwhile she’s just wandering on a beach like she’s naturally there. Then it ends and I’m aware that I haven’t learned anything, haven’t taken away anything except the obvious fact that this is a commercial for a magazine that’s basically just selling the concept of Kate Upton. But it turns out that doesn’t bother me. There’s something about the way she exists in front of a camera that makes the whole thing irrelevant. She could be reading the phone book and I’d probably still watch. It’s not purely attraction, though that’s obviously there. It’s presence. The ease of someone who knows how to just be. So they’ve got me. I see the machinery and I’m fine with it. Thursday, 15 January 2015. Palina in Phase: You always knew Olli Schulz would work with Palina Rojinski eventually. She’s Germany’s most visible pop-culture presence, the kind of person who shows up everywhere because everyone wants her to, so it was only a matter of time before he made a move. The video for “Phase” features her, along with Donnie O’Sullivan, photographer Oliver Rath, and someone with the most gloriously unpronounceable German name: Gisbert Wilhelm Enno Freiherr zu Innhausen und Knyphausen. Olli probably just wanted something simple with her, but these things expand. You get more people, more ideas, more whatever. By the time you’re done you’ve got this crowded little world in the frame, all these faces existing in the same three minutes. There’s something fitting about calling a song “Phase”—everyone passes through. Wednesday, 14 January 2015. Before the Jungle: Every year, someone heading into Dschungelcamp does a Playboy spread first. Last year it was Gabby Rinne. This year Sara Kulka and Angelina Heger. At this point the pattern is so locked in that it barely even counts as news—you’re waiting to hear who got the offer, and you already know what’s coming next. The names change, the faces change, but the rhythm stays exactly the same. Magazine spread, jungle camp, hidden cameras. It’s become one of those things that’s so predictable you can see the whole cycle before it even happens. Wednesday, 14 January 2015. Disko: My grandfather fled Lithuania during the war. Years later I got a box of his old negatives—photographs from before he left, from a time and place that no longer existed. Reason enough to go back to somewhere I’d never actually lived. I ended up at a small disco in a small village, barely speaking the language, knowing nobody in the room. I just started taking pictures. Pure outsider, but people let me be there. They danced and drank and existed while I pointed a camera at them, trying to hold onto something that felt temporary even as it was happening. I wasn’t chasing some grand documentary project or trying to preserve a vanishing culture. I just wanted to understand something about where I came from, maybe hold onto a moment I could feel slipping away. When you show up somewhere with a camera, your reasons get muddy pretty fast. You just keep shooting. What stayed with me was the uncertainty of it all. No guarantee the pictures meant anything, no assumption anyone else would care, no safe reason to be doing this at all. He wanted to document something before it disappeared. That’s the best kind of project—unguaranteed, personal, driven by something genuine rather than something you can explain away. You don’t need permission. You just need to care. Tuesday, 13 January 2015. Subtropical Solitude: Masafumi Nagasaki is 78 and naked on an island in Okinawa, the southern tip where Sotobanari sits by itself. He got there by walking away years ago and never coming back. Built a hut. Doesn’t wear clothes. Is apparently happier than you or me. I think about this sometimes, the way you think about things that aren’t really possible but feel like they should be. The escape fantasy gets rehearsed constantly—quit the job, leave the city, find some warm place where nobody knows you and you don’t have to be whatever version of yourself you’ve been performing. Masafumi didn’t just think about it. He did the whole thing. The stories about him always lead with the naked part, which makes it easy to dismiss as eccentric. But that’s not the point. The point is that he left a world that was running fine without him and built something different, something that’s just his. No performance, no optimization, no algorithm measuring whether you’re good enough yet. I don’t know what his days are like. Whether he thinks about the life he left or whether that’s ancient history by now. Whether the solitude is peaceful or grinding. But he’s there, and he hasn’t come back, and there’s something in that fact that sits with me—not as an instruction, just as proof that the thing you dream about when you’re stuck in traffic or in a meeting is at least physically possible. Someone did it. He’s still alive on that island, and by all accounts he’s alright. Tuesday, 13 January 2015. Between Shows: Miley had just blown up the Hannah Montana thing and everyone was waiting to see what she’d actually do. The Bangerz Tour was the answer - not a press release version of rebellion, but something genuinely in-progress. Cheyne Thomas shot the whole thing on Polaroids. Los Angeles, Helsinki, London - just hanging with her, documenting the tour in the gaps between shows. There’s something about Polaroids that forces you to be honest. No digital undo, no filters, no second takes. Just what happened when the camera flashed. The photos ended up in V Magazine under “With a Little Help from My Fwends” which is the kind of joke that only works when you’ve actually been there the entire time. And that was Cheyne - not a hired photographer, just a friend who knew how to use a camera. What gets weird is how little those photos actually confirm. Everyone had a story about who Miley was supposed to be - the rebel, the victim, the exploited kid, the provocateur. The Polaroids don’t really support any single narrative. They’re just someone moving through a moment, caught by a friend. More complicated and less useful than any story the internet wanted to tell. I still think about those photos when that era comes up. Not for what they say about Miley, but for what they document about friendship and documentation and the difference between watching someone and actually seeing them. Tuesday, 13 January 2015. The J-Pop Shock: There’s this YouTube genre where they show American teenagers Japanese pop music for the first time, and I get why it works. Most of these kids have grown up on whatever’s on TikTok or Top 40 radio, which means they’re primed for one-or-two-minute hooks and maybe a feature verse. Then you hit them with AKB48 or Perfume and their brains actually short-circuit. It’s not just the sound, though J-pop productions are obsessively polished in a way Western pop isn’t anymore. It’s the scale of it. A K-pop or J-pop act isn’t a person, it’s an apparatus. Fourteen members in synchronized formation. Costume changes mid-song. Layers of production so thick you can practically see them. The visual information alone is overwhelming if you’ve never encountered it—it’s designed to be watched, not just heard, and it commits fully to that in a way that seems almost quaint to American audiences who’ve been trained to half-listen to everything. Add in the idol system itself, which feels utterly alien here—girls manufactured, trained, presented as a product in a way that would cause a moral panic in the US but is just normal business in Japan. The fans know it’s a fiction. They go along with it anyway. There’s something almost honest about that, in a weird way. I stumbled into J-pop the same way a lot of people do: through anime soundtracks, then a rabbit hole of recommendation videos, then suddenly I’m watching Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s bizarre, hyperreal pop world and thinking, yeah, okay, I get why Westerners lose it. It’s not better than Western pop. It’s not worse. It’s just… more. More intentional about being more. It doesn’t apologize for the artifice—it leans into it so hard that the artifice becomes the point. If you threw BABYMETAL or Hatsune Miku at those same teenagers, yeah, half of them would probably have an existential moment. And they’d be right to. There’s something genuinely strange about J-pop when you first encounter it, not because it’s foreign, but because it’s so thoroughly committed to being what it is. No apologies. No pretense of authenticity. Just pure, uncut manufactured pop, and somehow that honesty is more refreshing than anything on American radio. Monday, 12 January 2015. Leaving Television: Game One is dying. Not the kind of death where there’s a funeral and people say goodbye properly. The kind where the show gets moved to Comedy Central, then back, then forward again, each decision taking another year off its life until one day they just stop. Etienne Gardé, one of the creators, talks about how it’s not that they got worse—they filled every requirement, met every quota the network wanted. But it doesn’t matter. Somewhere in an office, someone decided the thing that made tens of thousands of people happy wasn’t worth the slot anymore. This stings partly because Gardé and the others at Rocket Beans aren’t bitter about it in the cheap way. They’re not ranting about corporate gatekeepers, though plenty of that would be justified. They’re just clear-eyed: this is how television works. The money flows different ways now. The audience isn’t watching at 8:15 pm anymore. They’re watching when they feel like it, in formats that don’t exist on cable. I’ve watched that show for years. Not religiously, but when I needed something that felt like actual people talking about actual things instead of whatever the broadcast people think I want. Game One was never trying to be a product. It was four guys who’d been together since GIGA, a channel most people have forgotten but which somehow shaped an entire generation of how to make entertainment. They’d be on camera for six hours sometimes, barely a script, just riffing. Now that’s unthinkable in broadcast. Now that gets you killed. What’s compelling about Gardé in this interview is his refusal to pretend any of this has an easy fix. He knows YouTube is a dead end unless you’re making makeup tutorials or pulling faces at a camera for twelve-year-olds. The view counts don’t come with money. You need either massive audiences or you need people to actually pay. For a guy who spent twenty years building trust with an audience, that second path is the only one that makes sense. So they’re launching their own channel on Twitch. Not as a YouTube play. As a television station. A sender, which is the word they use and the right one. A thing that just runs. The thing Gardé keeps circling back to is how much they refuse to sell. He won’t do the thing where you fake loving a product for sponsorship money. He won’t reshape what they make to chase clicks. He knows that would kill the only thing they have, which is that people genuinely care what they think. He’d rather have three thousand people paying three euros a month than three million people not paying and not caring. There’s something almost defiant about that right now. What depresses me about German television—and Gardé names this directly—is how little it tries. Every successful format is a copy of something American or British. There’s no risk. The networks have public funding or they don’t, and if they do, they can waste it on anything because nobody’s really watching. So you get conservative programming that barely works. Meanwhile the internet kids are building stuff on the side, getting audiences the networks can’t reach, and then the networks don’t know what to do because they don’t speak that language. The money situation is broken in a way that’s almost funny. The public broadcasters in Germany throw billions at programming. Most of it is forgettable. Meanwhile Rocket Beans—four guys with a camera and good taste—has to ask their audience to chip in. Gardé’s right that this is insane. You pay for everything—music, film, cable. But independent creators? They should work for free? The only reason the internet hasn’t completely collapsed under that logic is that some people have enough taste and stubbornness to make things anyway. The crowdfunding setup matters though. He specifically didn’t use Patreon or Kickstarter. Didn’t promise specific deliverables. Just: if you want this to exist, help us build it. There’s something honest about that. It means the project lives or dies based on whether people actually want it, not based on some venture capital bet that it can be optimized into profitability. I think about what it costs him—what it costs all of them. They spent a decade on broadcast, building something, and then the broadcast people slowly killed it by degrees. The sensible move would be to take a real job, work at some production company making corporate videos. Instead they’re betting everything on Twitch, which could collapse tomorrow, which has no history, which is just this thing that exists right now. Most people wouldn’t do that. Later in the interview Gardé does the thing where you know you’re aging—complaining about students and their entitled attitudes. But what sticks is a story he tells, something he heard from Jerry Seinfeld about an orchestra trudging through rain to a gig. They stop to look through a window at a family decorating a Christmas tree, and one of them says how can anyone live like that. That’s the choice, isn’t it. Most people get the warm house. Most people don’t have the thing they care about getting rained on. Most people, sensibly, choose the house. Gardé’s not choosing the house. He’s choosing the gig. And he knows nobody else has to care about that. The show will run or it won’t. The internet will watch or it won’t. But at least it’ll be theirs. That matters more than it probably should. Sunday, 28 December 2014. Somewhere Warm: Winter mornings are a specific kind of misery. You wake up in the dark, shower in the cold, and all you can think is: please, anything but this. But you go out anyway. You freeze all day. You come home and you’re still cold. So somewhere in there you watch a video of Kate Upton on a beach. Sun on her, water blue, she’s in a bikini like being warm is just the default setting for her existence. It’s the kind of content that’s supposed to make you feel better but doesn’t. It just makes you aware of the gap—that warmth is real, somewhere, but not where you are. The weird thing about escapism is it cuts in the wrong direction. You’re not thinking “I want to go there.” You’re thinking “why am I not there?” Which is somehow more depressing than just accepting you’re cold. At least that’s simple. This is a reminder that simple warmth exists and you don’t get to have it. By Friday you’ve given up. Blankets on the couch, old episodes playing, tea going cold. Not because you’re okay with winter—you’re not—but because wanting something impossible just wears you out. Easier to wait it out and let spring show up eventually. Friday, 12 December 2014. 2014’s Best Songs: 2014 could have broken you or saved you—I’m still not sure which it did for me. At least the music made sense. I cycled through the same songs all year. Lorde, St. Vincent, Robyn, FKA twigs, Arcade Fire. They just kept working no matter what else was happening. St. Vincent’s guitar sound alone was worth staying, all those fractured angles and precision. Lorde sounding like she’d already figured out something you were still struggling with. Robyn just moving forward like the world couldn’t slow her down. FKA twigs making something so strange and specific that nobody else was even trying. The rest of the playlist spread wider: Perfume Genius, Great Pagans, Wild Beasts, Jessie Ware, Lykke Li, Angel Olsen, Yumi Zouma, The War On Drugs, Elderbrook, Grouper, Woman’s Hour, Blood Orange. Different moods for different times of day. Different ways of being alive. Songs that understood something about you before you understood it yourself. Good songs age differently than years do. You forget what 2014 actually was, who you were talking to, what happened in the news. But you remember the songs. They don’t fade like everything else fades. They just become part of how you think now. Friday, 5 December 2014. Deichkind Still Here: The new Deichkind video has everyone hopping around like their triangles never went out of style. Five guys of a certain age, no sense of fashion, and somehow still making music that matters to people who absolutely should have moved on by now. I can’t forgive Deichkind for “Leider Geil.” That song somehow outlived its own decade, which is the worst kind of immortality—drunk guys on the U-Bahn forever, every Friday night, screaming those lyrics like a personal anthem. But I remember when they were good. “Ich betäube mich,” “Komm schon,” “Bon Voyage.” They made music that felt dangerous, or at least clever. Then somewhere around 2010 they started taking themselves seriously. Blinking traffic cones, gallery openings, the whole retreat into “art.” It felt like watching a friend get pretentious. “So ’ne Musik” is exactly what you’d expect from them now—solid, slick, completely self-aware. The video looks expensive. They clearly still have that weird kind of reach, that cultish devotion. The new album’s called “Niveau Weshalb Warum” and the track titles alone (“Der Flohmarkt Ruft,” “Porzellan Und Elefanten,” “Oma Gib Handtasche”) feel like they’re in on the joke about how ridiculous German music culture can be. Or maybe they’re past jokes entirely and that’s just what songs are called now. I don’t know if I’ll listen to the whole thing. But I watched the video, and I remembered why they got under people’s skin in the first place—that mix of stupidity and intelligence, the refusal to choose a lane. They’re still that band. Just older. Thursday, 4 December 2014. Make-Up, Ice Cream, Underwear: I’d have been the world’s greatest teenage girl. I’m certain of it. I would’ve invited my friends—Anna, Laura, Thu—and we’d have done that thing where you cake makeup on your face at midnight and eat ice cream straight from the container and laugh at how much better you are than the boys at football. The kind of night where nothing happens and everything matters. There’s something in me that watches teenage girls do this and feels a clean, uncomplicated envy. Not just for the freedom—though that’s part of it—but for the feeling of it. The texture of the friendship. The permission to exist inside something that small and precious. Sure, I was born with a cock, and that comes with advantages. You move through the world differently. Socially, sexually, in obvious ways. But I’d still feel strange calling Janos and Ming-Lee and Paulchen over to drink white wine and laugh while we stuck glitter stickers on each other’s chests. There’s something I don’t get to have. Something I’ll never know. Rebekah Campbell made a short film called “Teenage Girl”—just girls without limbs, moving through a space with whatever bodies and imaginations they had left. And that was enough for them. That was everything. That was the thing that broke me a little when I watched it. Anna, Laura, Thu—if you’re real somewhere, I hope you knew what you had. I would’ve been the best version of myself with you. I’m absolutely certain of it. Thursday, 4 December 2014. Tetris on the Big Screen: You’re three hours into staring at the TV and nothing’s worth watching. The Xbox is still downloading some update nobody asked for. Everything else is garbage. So your brain keeps circling back to something old—your Game Boy, that little piece of plastic that actually had games worth playing. Two Dutch developers named Zane Amiralis and Joshua de Haan made an adapter called HDMYBOY that lets you plug a Game Boy into an HDTV. Suddenly Tetris, Link’s Awakening, Pokemon Blue (everyone agrees the red version is worse)—all those games that mattered—appear at full size on whatever giant screen is taking up space in your living room. There’s something beautifully stupid about it. Chunky tetrominos stretched across 60 inches of modern display. Tiny sprite art that was never designed for this scale, now rendered large. It shouldn’t work, and yet the second you hear the idea, it’s obvious. The games are good. They were always good. The screen size changes nothing except maybe making you admit you spent decades watching them on something too small. Going back to old games isn’t really nostalgia. Nostalgia is memory playing tricks. This is closer to an apology—not for the game being primitive, because it wasn’t, but for all those years of squinting at a three-inch monochrome screen when you could’ve been watching this. It’s giving the kid who played Game Boy a second look at something that was already worth looking at. I don’t know if the thing actually works, or if there’s lag, or if the image holds up on modern displays. Someone looked at a 30-year-old handheld and decided it deserved to be bigger. That kind of sincere, pointless idea is something I can get behind. Tuesday, 2 December 2014. Too Cold for Color: First winter day and I’m already dead inside. Not the poetic kind—just the cold that makes you move faster without moving at all, and you dress for it by grabbing whatever was black yesterday. Coat, pants, boots, gone. Everyone looks the same, which is exactly the point. Winter here means you pick a uniform and stick with it. I was looking at street fashion photos from Tokyo—Harajuku, Shibuya—from those last months before the cold really set in, and it was like watching people from a different planet get dressed. Bright colors, actual patterns, oversized pieces clashing in ways that shouldn’t work but somehow did. Not fashion-magazine stuff. Just kids putting outfits together without asking permission from the season. As someone who thinks about this stuff—how people assemble themselves, what they’re saying without saying anything—it was jarring. Nobody does this here. You don’t see kids dressed like that when it gets cold. It’s like everyone’s agreed that color is impractical. I don’t know if it’s cultural or just that teenagers in Tokyo don’t have the surrender instinct people up north do. Maybe they don’t have a reason to look like everyone else. Either way, there’s something I recognize in that refusal to let the season decide your visual life. Not that I’m going out to buy neon next week—that’s not the point. It’s more that watching people dress without apologizing for it, without letting utility kill everything, reminds you that you could choose something different whenever you actually wanted to. Tuesday, 2 December 2014. Rhymeberry: Miri, Hime, and Hikaru of Rhymeberry don’t rap about the usual things. Love, friendship, orange juice—that’s their lane, not money or street cred or any of the stuff that supposedly matters in hip-hop. Which should be completely stupid. It’s not. After AKB48 took pop, Babymetal took rock, and Charisma.com claimed electronic music, there weren’t many genres left for cute Japanese schoolgirls to work through. Hip-hop was just sitting there undefended. When Tokyo Girls’ Update interviewed them about the gap between their image and their music, their answer was simple: we’re actually good at this. And they meant it. Their videos have this cheerful, unguarded quality that’s rare in hip-hop. You see them cruising the city, throwing parties, rapping about what’s on their minds. No posturing, no armor, no performance. It’s the opposite of the usual theater where everyone’s supposed to sound desperate or wounded or dangerous. They just sound like people who wanted to make music together. That directness gets to me. They’re aware they’re cute, and they don’t care if that makes their music illegitimate in anyone’s eyes. No angle, no strategy, just three people doing something because it seemed fun. Maybe that’s rarer than it should be. Monday, 1 December 2014. What I Didn’t See: Claire Oelkers, an entertainer and TV presence I know mostly from magazines and music television, made a series about what “German-ness” actually means when you strip away the clichés. Not the official version - the one buried in places most people don’t explore. Hamburg ended up being her subject, and one episode lands her in an SM club in the red-light district. She spends time with Kalle Schwensen, who runs the underground scene, and his circle. There’s something almost journalistic about the approach, except she’s not maintaining distance. She’s just there, watching how people move through their world, what rules bind them together. The SM scene is its own complete structure - rituals, community, a kind of social order built in the margins. You see it from the outside and suddenly realize this is what the city actually looks like beneath the tourism, beneath the creative mythology it sells. The real character of a place isn’t in the neighborhoods everyone knows about. It’s in the clubs where no one’s performing, where people are exactly what they are. I chose Berlin years ago over Hamburg and never really wondered what I’d missed. But watching Claire move through these spaces with genuine curiosity rather than any agenda, the choice itself starts to feel smaller. You realize it wasn’t about which city was “more” anything. It was about where you could find people who weren’t pretending to be interesting. And that’s everywhere - you just have to know where to look. Monday, 1 December 2014. Armpit Forest: Hannah showed me Anna’s blog. Twenty-two, from Denmark, posts gorgeous visuals about watches, makeup, good food. Then I watched her video about maintaining dreadlocks. For one moment her arms went up. That’s all it took for Anna to make me into someone who finds armpit hair attractive. Apparently I’m officially more evolved than all of you now. Except the video wasn’t even about that. It was genuinely about dreadlock care. But there’s this second where her arms go up, and instead of what everyone else does - the stupid face, reaching for the wax strips, all the shame around it - I just thought about… yeah. You know where my head went. I’m not attracted to every woman with armpit hair. I’m not indiscriminate about this stuff. Most women I like at all. But Anna’s armpit forests are something else. They’re this bright spot against all the hairless, smooth, totally neutered version of femininity everyone’s supposed to want. She’s just existing in her body, not performing, not making some big statement. Just living. And somehow that’s what got me. Is this what a fetish is? I don’t know. But Anna’s definitely responsible. And I’m not complaining. Monday, 1 December 2014. Star Wars Still Isn’t It: The new Star Wars trailer dropped and everyone’s losing their minds, and I’m sitting here with nothing. No spark, no anticipation, nothing at all. Star Wars just doesn’t work for me, never has, and a shiny new trailer isn’t changing that. Part of it is that I’ve always found the whole thing kind of embarrassing. Lightsabers don’t make sense as weapons—they’re inherently absurd—and apparently now they have little glowing testicles coming off the hilt. Somehow that’s worse. Jar Jar Binks was so tedious I couldn’t even work up proper hatred for him. The classic characters feel like they’re from another era. Yoda’s a puppet. Vader’s been through so many revisions he’s basically a different character than the one people pretend to love. I should like this. I genuinely like rebellion stories—in film, in games, in books. Theoretically Star Wars is tailor-made for me. But the moment it starts, something breaks. It doesn’t land. It’s not a quality problem exactly; it’s just that it’s not for me. And at some point you stop fighting that and accept it. So enjoy the hype, everyone. Enjoy the December premiere. Star Wars stopped being cool in 1983 though, and J.J. Abrams isn’t going to fix that. Game of Thrones is where the actual compelling stuff is happening. Friday, 28 November 2014. Mockingjay’s Spark: There’s this moment where Jennifer Lawrence is crying into the camera, surrounded by rubble and smoke and heat, telling the oppressed masses that the time for revolution has come. In about two minutes, I went from someone who didn’t really care about anything to someone who wanted to burn it all down. Well, almost. The first Hunger Games was a slog—Battle Royale meets The Running Man, with Katniss methodically killing crying kids while you waited for something to happen. Then Catching Fire showed up and fixed everything. Dark, bloody, depressing. If someone defended Twilight to me, I’d have deserved the right to smack them. Sitting in the theater while the screen exploded—visually, emotionally—I kept wondering if this spark would actually jump to younger people who maybe never knew revolutions existed outside of history class. Like, Mom, Dad, is it okay to be against the government? Apparently the answer is yes. Mockingjay strips away Harry Potter’s teenage-fantasy nonsense and Bella Swan’s fake romance and drops you into a world where things have clearly gone wrong in ways that don’t feel that far from ours if you think about it for five minutes. The film keeps one hand over your eyes whenever things get too harsh. Blood starts spraying, the camera cuts to something prettier. Dead bodies never look really mangled or wrong. The piles of bones feel like set dressing from adventure movies. It’s fine, don’t worry, it’s not real. Which is fair—these are YA books, written for people who are supposed to be dreamy and experimental and self-aware. But let’s be honest: in a world where the internet keeps Jennifer Lawrence’s spread legs a click away, this hand-holding feels almost sweet. Revolution means pain, means death, means terror. Mockingjay Part 1 tries to show that panic without giving horror the stage—bombs hit hospitals, soldiers massacre each other, bunkers fill with despair. It’s all Hollywood, all bombast, like everything else. But what separates this from soulless Bay-style spectacle is the thought-noise it leaves in your head when the credits roll. Sure, Hunger Games is basically a collage of stolen pop-culture moments. And honestly I don’t care which of the two pretty boys the lead ends up with. But the fact that kids might actually ask themselves how far we are from Panem—from those twisted power structures—that matters more than the fact that Part 1 is basically a slow setup with a cliffhanger and nothing resolved. Real talk: when kids in Bangkok got arrested for throwing the three-finger salute from the movie, that proved the thing works. When the only things breaking through to Gen Z are YouTube and porn and Call of Duty, at least some Hollywood blockbuster can shock them awake and plant something that might make them fight for what’s right. Assuming the governments don’t get clever first and figure out how to use the youth against themselves. How to weaponize media into something that strangles any rebellious idea before it breathes. Panem’s closer than you think. Tuesday, 25 November 2014. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness: I still think about Spirited Away at random moments. The way No-Face moves through the bathhouse. The sound of the train. I’ve watched Miyazaki’s films enough times that they’ve woven themselves into my thinking like memories of places I actually lived, except they were never real. Mami Sunada spent a year inside Studio Ghibli filming during a specific moment: Miyazaki stepping back from directing, the studio faced with a transition nobody was quite ready for. He captures the animators in their routines, the precise exhaustion of frame-by-frame work, the daily labor of translating imagination into motion. The documentary is mostly about work—what it costs to maintain those standards for decades without compromise, and about the invisible people who do the actual drawing while one name becomes synonymous with the entire output. There’s something unsettling about watching a film where the subject is a master reaching the end of an era. Not because Miyazaki is diminished—he’s still sharp, still visionary—but because the camera catches the moment when his creation has to learn to exist without him at the center. An ending pretending to be a transition. I’m not sure what comes next for Studio Ghibli. The films that matter to me are already made. But there’s something strange about having those films documented this way, seeing the people behind the magic while he’s still alive, still aware of how the spell is being pulled apart. The mystery doesn’t fade when you see the craft underneath it. If anything it deepens—knowing these weren’t miracles, just people, tired and exacting, making something that would outlast them. The documentary doesn’t offer conclusions. It just shows the work, the moment of transition, and then stops. Miyazaki is still there, the studio is still there, but something has shifted. He’s not coming back. Maybe that’s right. Tuesday, 25 November 2014. Borrowed Days: You ever fantasize about swapping lives with someone for a while? Just picking up and living in a different city as a different person, with different routines, everything novel instead of worn smooth by familiarity. Claudia Zalla, an Italian photographer, wasn’t content to fantasize. Timberland was running this campaign called Life-Swaps, moving creatives around Europe, and she signed up. Came to Berlin, took on the life of a blogger named Willy Iffland for a few days. The whole thing was obviously a brand exercise—Timberland probably had logos splashed all over the documentation—but that doesn’t make the core idea uninteresting. Claudia rode the S-Bahn, visited burger joints, walked along the Spree. Lived in his daily shape for a few days. What gets me about it is how much your perspective changes depending on who’s looking. A place you’ve stopped noticing, that you move through without seeing, becomes visible again the moment someone else arrives to see it for the first time. Claudia was essentially showing Willy his own city back to him. That gap between how you live your routine and how a stranger might see it—that’s probably worth remembering more often than we do. Your boredom is someone else’s fascination. What you take completely for granted is what they came all this way to notice. Your Tuesday morning is their story. Tuesday, 18 November 2014. What They Get Told: I watched journalists from major outlets sit in front of a camera and read aloud the tweets they get hit with every single day. Emma, Julie, Katie—people you’d recognize if you paid attention to cable news or the internet. They weren’t reading compliments. It starts fairly standard. Playground stuff: “I didn’t know sluts were allowed to have opinions.” Then it gets darker. “I’m going to rape you.” “I’m going to go house to house and shoot you all.” The velocity is what gets you—the escalation from stupid to violent, like someone leaning on the accelerator. What struck me wasn’t even the crude threat-making. It’s that they had to sit down and perform this publicly for anyone to register it as real. Women have been telling people about this forever. The daily harassment, the rape threats, the sexual violence dressed up as banter—it’s just what happens when you exist on the internet and happen to be a woman. So they read it aloud. Made it a thing you couldn’t scroll past or pretend you didn’t see. The message underneath is simple and mean: if you’re getting this, don’t close the laptop and cry about it. Show people. Make them look. And if you’re the one sending it? Stop. Or accept that you’re exactly what you sound like. Monday, 17 November 2014. Against The Season: September’s bleeding into October and suddenly nothing in your closet works anymore. That first morning when the air’s actually cold and you realize you’ve been pretending the season wouldn’t change. All your favorite pieces are too thin. Everything looks wrong. I spent years resenting this time of year. Cheap thermal layers, bulky jackets that made me look defeated, looking progressively worse the colder it got. Then I started noticing people who just seemed fine with it—nothing performative, just solid pieces that worked, worn like they weren’t even considering the temperature. StreetWear brands like WoodWood, Nudie Jeans, Cheap Monday understand what the cold actually needs. A good parka doesn’t have to feel like wearing a tent. Quality denim works better when it’s freezing. A backpack built right becomes something you stop thinking about—it just holds your life and you trust it. The real stuff is small. A seam that doesn’t split. Color that lasts. Fit that survives six months of daily wear. Pockets you can use. When you’re living in the same clothes for half the year, these things matter. It’s not vanity—it’s just paying attention. There’s a green parka I think about sometimes. Or a black piece with something you notice only if you’re looking. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s what you reach for when it’s dark and you’re moving fast and you need something that works. The season’s brutal enough without making yourself look like you’ve surrendered. Monday, 17 November 2014. The Long Walk: Every year, neo-Nazis from across Europe would come to Wunsiedel, a small German town, to march. They were drawn by Rudolf Heß—Hitler’s deputy—whose grave was there from 1988 until 2011. Even after they moved his remains, the marches kept coming back, an annual ritual connecting old Nazis to new ones, which probably made the townspeople want to leave and never return. For years, there wasn’t much anyone could do. A legal march stays legal no matter who’s marching. But someone in Wunsiedel figured out something elegant: what if you turned the march into a fundraiser against itself? Anonymous donors pledged ten euros for every meter the marchers walked. The money went to Exit Deutschland, a program helping people leave the neo-Nazi movement. So these people showed up to march for their ideology, and they ended up funding the escape routes for people trying to abandon it. The town decorated the route with banners—wordplay in German, things like “If the Führer only knew.” There was free banana for reasons I’ll never understand. By the end, ten thousand euros had been raised for the exit program. The brilliance was structural. These people came to perform strength and belonging. Instead, they became unwitting fundraisers for the opposition. Not defeated through argument or counter-protest, just rendered absurd—made into a joke they were too committed to their march to even see they were part of. Sometimes the best activism is the quietest. It doesn’t need rage, just a clear-eyed understanding that someone’s deepest convictions can be used against them. Sunday, 16 November 2014. In the Name of Safety: A far-right party in Dortmund filed a city council request asking for data on how many Jews are registered and where they live. For security purposes. Their Facebook statement explained it as a reasonable administrative concern: they needed demographic information to analyze potential threats from proxy wars. To keep people safe, obviously. The punchline is built in—next week ISIS advocates for gender equality, right? But the actual thing is how flat it is. Not a rally, not performed evil. Just someone sitting at a desk, filing paperwork in the language of government. They know that once something is written down in the right format with the right justification, it feels legitimate. Like maybe it’s a question that’s supposed to be answered. The version of evil that actually works is the kind that doesn’t perform. It just sits there, patient and official, waiting for the next person to think it’s reasonable. Friday, 14 November 2014. Kate Upton for Christmas: I want Kate Upton for Christmas. Not the idea of her, not her career or brand—just her, whatever that means. I know how that sounds. Crude, obviously impossible, missing the point of Christmas, all of that. But at least I’m saying what I actually want instead of lying about wanting a PlayStation while thinking about something else. That Sports Illustrated video from her first shoot probably started it. 2011 maybe, her rookie moment. She’s laughing about something off camera, moving around with zero self-consciousness, no idea what she’s doing to people. There’s a realness to it that’s hard to describe without sounding stupid—the laughter, the movement, none of it performed. You can believe in it for the three minutes the video runs. Everyone’s Christmas list is the sanitized version of desire. Gadgets, clothes, status objects. World peace if they’re feeling noble. But it’s all the same impulse underneath: you want something that makes you feel something, and you dress it up in the respectable version. I just skipped the dressing up. The video made its rounds online. She became what she was always going to become—famous, processed, turned into content. That specific moment, the one that grabbed me, got buried under a thousand other moments. The machine took over. She became a brand and that laughter became a product. I never got my Christmas wish. Which is fine. Most people don’t. At least I asked for what I actually wanted. Friday, 14 November 2014. Shohei Otomo: Shohei Otomo probably can’t escape the fact that his father created Akira. That’s not something you get to put behind you. So he didn’t try—he just went in a completely different direction and became an illustrator, which is its own kind of honest response to inheriting that weight. His work captures Tokyo the way you actually see it when you’re tired enough not to perform. Crowded trains, convenience stores, teenagers staring at phones, salarymen who’ve completely given up. The city as machinery, running itself into exhaustion. He documents it all without trying to make a point about it, which somehow makes the point more obvious. There’s a new exhibition called “Flat Bend” showing some of his pieces—stuff pulled from the hours when Tokyo shows itself without pretense. Late night, nobody watching, just what the city actually is when you’re awake enough to see it clearly. I think what matters is that he didn’t inherit his father’s aesthetic or try to prove anything. He just looked at the place long enough to understand it, then drew what he saw. You can’t fake that kind of attention. People feel it. Wednesday, 12 November 2014. Missingno: There’s this process to find it. Talk to the old man in Viridian City, let him show you how to catch Pokémon. Fly to Cinnabar Island. Surf the eastern coast, that narrow strip where the game’s code starts to tangle. Eventually it appears: a corrupted block of pixels, data bent into something almost physical. Missingno. Missing number. We called it that because there wasn’t anything else to call it. I still don’t know how we heard about it. This was before the internet was everywhere, before strategy guides got solved in real time. Through playgrounds and hallways and the weird underground network of childhood rumor, it reached us anyway. And once it did, we weren’t just kids catching monsters in a handheld game. We became something different—explorers at the edge of something we weren’t supposed to touch, and that feeling was electric. The mythology around it was darker than the glitch itself. Missingno would corrupt your save. It could breed infinitely. It held power no normal Pokémon should have, some kind of incomprehensible strength that only made sense as an error. Nintendo’s warnings only made it more appealing. In an era when games shipped broken and stayed broken, when a corrupted cartridge was just forever your problem, Missingno was genuine danger. You knew catching it might destroy everything. You knew there was no guide, no community, no way to fix it. The designers hadn’t accounted for this. What I miss isn’t the glitch itself. It’s the space it occupied. Games left room for mystery, for genuine unknowns, for something truly untested and genuinely risky. We lived in the margins of the code. We tested limits nobody had anticipated. There was something clean about that—some kind of freedom I don’t think we get back. Wednesday, 12 November 2014. Hunger Map: Lara Kleiner made a map that works in the dumbest, smartest way possible. It’s the Berlin U-Bahn redrawn so every burger joint becomes a station—Tommi’s in Mitte, Burgeramt in Friedrichshain, Burgermeister in Kreuzberg. Not real stops, of course, but the idea sticks anyway. What it does is make the hunt feel intentional. You’re not wandering around hungry hoping something good appears. You’ve got a route, a reason to be somewhere, permission to turn eating into a project. You could theoretically hit all of them—every spot a destination, every line a journey—and by the end you’d be completely stuffed, probably ten kilos heavier, honestly feeling pretty sick. But you’d also know the city in a way that matters. Not the monuments, not the history, just where to actually eat well. That’s the map’s real information. Wednesday, 12 November 2014. Red Light, Green Light: Found a Japanese horror trailer that’s basically Red Light Green Light, except when you lose, your body explodes in a spray of gore. The film is Kamisama no Iutoori—As the Gods Will—and it’s exactly as committed to its own shock value as you’d expect from something made to go viral on 4chan. A group of schoolgirls (Sayaka Tomaru, Sayaka Yano, Miku Nakahara, Miko Terada, Hina Aizuki, Kaori Yuki) are playing the game when the horror kicks in. Not subtle. Not metaphorical. They literally explode. The trailer doesn’t look away. There’s something interesting about Japanese horror being willing to mix sexualization and violence so directly, without pretending they’re separate impulses. The fanservice and the gore use the same visual language. The camera is equally committed to both. I don’t know if the full film is any good. The trailer is doing what it’s supposed to: show the moment that feels transgressive enough to make you curious. It’s not trying to be subtle or ironic. Just showing you what happens, how it looks. That’s it. Tuesday, 11 November 2014. That Pizza Party Look: When I’m at home eating pizza with friends—cheap wine going down in embarrassing quantities, something half-watched on the screen, half the time scrolling through stuff that has no business being on my phone—I look like I’m doing exactly that. Comfortable shirt that’s too soft from too many washes, grease on my sleeve by the second slice. Danuta and Karolína came at this differently. The Slovak and Czech streetwear label DEARFRIENDS dressed them for the same exact scenario and somehow they looked like they were doing a shoot. Blue sweatshirt. White socks. Red Ash Ketchum hat. It was obscene. There’s something about that contrast that messes with you. The models managed to make sitting around look like it meant something. I remember seeing their designs—there was a goat, I think a skate deck—and the whole thing clicked. This is what these brands do. They make you want to dress for an event that’s just your living room. The shoot worked because there’s nothing coy about it. These are attractive women wearing nice clothes, and you know exactly why you want to look at them. That directness—no artistic distance, no pretense—is more effective than anything self-conscious could be. Tuesday, 11 November 2014. Blank Space: Everyone told me Taylor Swift was trash. I had to learn it early, absorb it from older siblings, from the kids in school who read music magazines, from that guy who wouldn’t shut up about which artists were “real.” Hating her was the price of not being laughed at. So I paid it. Years of it. I said the songs were shallow, the videos vapid, made sure I looked the right way when her name came up—unimpressed, bored, above it all. I stopped doing that. At some point the effort of pretending just wasn’t worth it anymore. Taylor Swift is good. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is good, “Safe & Sound” is good, “Shake It Off” works. These aren’t accidents—they’re songs built to do something and they do it. The writing is tighter than people want to admit, the hooks land, the production knows what it’s doing. You can dislike it, but pretending it’s incompetent is just noise. “Blank Space” is not her best work. I’ll give anyone that one. The video is so boring I had to stop watching halfway through. The melody’s fine, the lyrics are fine, but nothing about it hits the way her stronger songs do. And yet I still listened to it again because she’s made enough good work that I trust her even when she’s just coasting. That’s the bar—not whether every single is perfect, but whether the person is worth paying attention to. There’s something about admitting you like something everyone told you to hate. You feel stupid at first, then you stop caring. The thing is, Taylor Swift’s music was never the problem. The social cost of admitting it was the only thing that mattered, and once you stop paying that tax, you realize how arbitrary it all was. She was always good. You just weren’t allowed to say so. Monday, 10 November 2014. Send Nudes?: Hose runter, Beine breit, Foto gemacht—and sent. That’s the phrase running through my head after the Snapchat leak. A few hundred thousand photos got pulled out of the servers, and sure, most were garbage—a dog, a burnt pizza, a sunset. But the people who like digging through other people’s intimate moments started sifting for nudes, and that’s the part of the story that sticks. I understand the intellectual argument. Bodies are bodies. Doesn’t matter what kind—everyone knows what they look like and what they’re for. People have sex. People masturbate. Jennifer Lawrence does it. Kate Upton does it. Some kid in a high school somewhere does it. The fact that someone took a photo shouldn’t destroy their life, but it does, because we live in a world where evidence of having a body becomes evidence of shame. That’s the stupid part. Everyone sends nudes. The shame is manufactured, and anyone who’d judge someone for that is just a repressed asshole who’s never going to get laid anyway. That’s not theory. That’s what I actually think. But then there’s the other side, and I can’t quite talk myself out of it. The moment you send a nude, you’re betting. Betting that the person on the other end is who you think they are. That they’ll respect it. That their phone’s secure. That nothing will go wrong. And if you’ve paid any attention to how these things actually work, you know those aren’t great bets. Three women have photos of my body. A student in Stuttgart who loves cake. A dentist’s assistant in Munich who climbs mountains. A designer in Berlin who hates math. We traded because that’s what happens when there’s attraction and trust. I don’t regret it. But the moment I hit send, something shifts. The intimate moment becomes a digital object. Documentation. Something that could end up anywhere. The moment was real. The photo is just evidence. So I’m stuck between two things. Intellectually, it’s fine. Bodies aren’t shameful. Everyone has one. Everyone does things with it. But practically, I know what happens to photos that get out. And that gap—between what I think is true and what I’m actually willing to risk—is where I live. I still haven’t figured out how to feel about that. Wednesday, 15 October 2014. Kate Upton, 2011: 2011 is gone. I can’t pull up any real shape to it, just the vague sense that it happened. But somewhere in that summer Kate Upton shot for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit in the Philippines, and there’s a video of her between takes—happy, genuinely happy, not performing for the camera the way you’d expect. She had this thing where she didn’t look like a model posing. She looked like someone you might actually know. That was the whole appeal, honestly. Not some impossible fantasy, just a girl who was beautiful and seemed to actually like being there. The camera caught her the way she was, and people couldn’t stop watching it. I watched it way more times than the year itself deserved. There’s something about a moment caught honestly on film—someone at the actual beginning of something, before the whole machinery gets hold of them—that sticks longer than anything you lived through. 2011 is dust now, but that image is still clear. Tuesday, 14 October 2014. Carrying the Evening: Made it to Friday, which these days feels like its own achievement. Usually means I’ve actually organized something for Saturday—people coming over, need food, need music that doesn’t make everyone regret being there by the third hour. Building a party playlist is tedious but important. Too much energy at the start and people burn out. Too mellow and they’re on their phones. There’s a balance that carries the evening without asking too much of anyone. This one has around 250 songs, mostly shuffled so nothing feels choreographed. Action Bronson’s on there because that casual aggression works. Kendrick because he’s the artist people actually want to hear. Charli XCX because sometimes the weird stuff that shouldn’t work actually does, and it breaks up the predictability. Then other things I like mixed with party fuel. Shuffle and don’t stop. I put it on and there’s that critical first song. Either it lands or we’re sunk. Usually by the seventh or eighth track, nobody’s thinking anymore, they’re just in it. The music becomes part of the room—something everyone’s moving to without noticing. Most parties are forgettable. But there’s always that moment where everyone’s present, the music hits right, and it feels like maybe this is what anything’s for—just hanging with people you don’t have to perform for. The playlist gets you there if you’re lucky. Friday, 10 October 2014. Israeli Girls: When you think about Israel, you get the missiles and the rubble—the newsreel version, the one that’s designed to be easy to understand and hard to look away from. But there’s another country there, the one where the actual business of being young and restless and vain happens in suburban bedrooms and parking lots, the same as anywhere else. Nobody’s filming that part. Dafy Hagai photographed it anyway. Her book, Israeli Girls, grew out of a project she started to document the feeling of being that age in that place—which turned out to be mostly about her own childhood. She grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, and what ended up in the photographs is basically her memory of herself. She made one rule for her models, some of whom were friends: they had to remind her of who she’d been. The work doesn’t try to say anything big. It’s just girls, the actual substance of youth in a suburban context, the endless small vanities and boredoms and conspiracies that matter completely while you’re living them and then you forget them almost entirely. That specificity is the whole thing. You could shoot the same photographs in Los Angeles or Berlin or Tel Aviv and they’d register the same way—the light on a face, the confidence of a pose, the reaching for something just out of frame. Thursday, 9 October 2014. Long Distance: Long distance is its own special torture. You watch each other jerk off over Skype, you try to dirty talk through the lag, you pretend that counts as sex. It doesn’t. You both know it doesn’t. You come, you close the laptop, you feel worse than before. The We-Vibe 4+ is what gets invented for exactly this situation. Vibrator for her, app for you, control it from thousands of miles away. Pulses, waves, surprise vibrations—whatever rhythm you decide to send her. At least you’re doing something. At least you’re not just watching. I’m skeptical it actually fixes anything. Sex through an app still feels like you’re fucking a screen, separated by servers and time zones and the basic fact that she’s not there. But I understand the appeal. You’re alone. She’s alone. But at least you’re touching her somehow, even if it’s just a vibrator you bought her, even if it’s sad and mechanical and nothing like the real thing. The fantasy is that it keeps her from leaving you for someone who’s actually there. Someone local, someone who can take her out and fuck her without scheduling it six months in advance. The reality is different. But you try anyway. You spend the ninety euros or whatever it costs, you download the app, you press buttons thousands of miles away. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn’t. Wednesday, 1 October 2014. Waiting for the Exit: Those Ello invitations came with passwords that looked like they were generated by throwing words at a wall. Soldiers-round-life. House-found-species. Country-give-flower. Something about the randomness felt like a promise—that you were getting into something real, something that didn’t care about your data. For six months, Ello had been existing in near-total obscurity. Then suddenly last week, invitations flooded everywhere, and nobody quite knew what to do with them. A few brave souls signed up, dragged their friends along, and then the media noticed. All at once, it was the hot thing. Facebook was dead, everyone who mattered said so. Here comes Ello—supposedly the future, and it looked like a half-finished Tumblr theme. The pitch was seductive: no ads, pseudonyms allowed, nudes allowed. A genuine alternative to Facebook’s surveillance capitalism. Some of the coverage was almost giddy about it. “Ello positions itself as the answer to Facebook’s overregulation,” one tech writer wrote. The LGBTQ community especially had a reason to look—Facebook’s real-name policy had been pushing people away. Here was something that didn’t care. The numbers were wild. Twenty-seven thousand new users signing up every hour. The growth looked like something that actually mattered. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that almost everyone signing up hadn’t really thought about what happens next. Andy Baio, who worked at Kickstarter, laid it out clearly: Ello had taken in $435,000 in venture capital. Venture capitalists don’t hand over that kind of money out of goodness. They’re waiting for the exit. The plan is always the same: get the users, get the data, get bought out, and then cash out. This is how it always goes. Facebook wasn’t built to be evil—it was just built to grow. Growth needs money. Money needs an exit. And once the exit happens, the thing you loved gets absorbed into something you don’t control anymore. MySpace went the same way. StudiVZ got bought and killed. It’s a pattern that never stops. Being online in 2014 means you’re not a person to these companies. You’re a data stream. They’re not creating platforms for you—they’re creating machines to collect you and sell you. We march from one to the next like there’s no other option. The idea that we could build our own things, host our own spaces, create our own networks without depending on anyone—we’ve been trained to forget that’s even possible. The tools exist, actually. WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll. People could run their own spaces for a few euros a month, build networks directly with friends’ sites. Own their words. Own their links. But it takes work, and work requires motivation that most of us don’t really have. It’s easier to complain when Facebook changes the algorithm again, easier to create a group called ’I Want the Old Timeline Back’ with 62 members and feel like you’ve done something. Then move on. Post something else. What will Ello become? No idea. Maybe it gets bought by Facebook or Google in a year. Maybe it actually becomes something. Maybe it just gets forgotten, like everything on the internet eventually does. But before you bet on this new network being your salvation, I’d stop and think about whether there’s actually any other way to live online. Whether you’ve exhausted all the real options, or just stopped looking because it was easier not to. Monday, 29 September 2014. Just Melanie: I get hammered all day with notifications and loud opinions and hot takes streaming past faster than I can absorb. All I want is to sit by a window with some tea and let my mind drift. The internet doesn’t cooperate. Then Hannah sent me this link to Melanie—MelGoesCrazy on YouTube—and I clicked without much expectation. One watch and something just quieted. This might be the most relaxing content I’ve ever sat through. “Hello, people on the internet,” she says in this even, unhurried voice, and then she’s just there. Gentle. In no rush. Like she has nowhere to be but exactly where she is. She makes the standard YouTube fare—how-tos, outfit posts, those rambling “let’s talk about” videos—but there’s something different about the way she moves through it. When she starts talking about her first avocado tree, about dreadlocks and vegetarianism and making art, you don’t want to jump ahead. You want to lie down and close your eyes and let her voice take you somewhere else. Everything about it feels like permission. Whatever she’s doing, whatever she’s into, it’s contagious. Monday, 29 September 2014. Hertzfeldt in Prime Time: I watched a Hertzfeldt couch gag buried in a forgettable Simpsons episode, and the moment his style hit the screen, everything shifted. The animation changed completely - jagged, hand-drawn, alive in a way the show hasn’t been in years. His whole thing is controlled chaos: ink and intention, not much else. When you watch his longer pieces, space and time get weird. You feel like you’re inside someone’s nervous system coming apart. The post I read joked about how many drugs you’d need to create something like that. Fair point. There’s something hallucinogenic about his work, something that dissolves the rules. But it’s not an accident - he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s chosen the roughness, the not-finishing, the deliberate discomfort. Thirty seconds on The Simpsons is this moment of actual strangeness breaking through the most formulaic show on television. The living room probably doesn’t look quite right. The characters probably move wrong. And it works because that’s the point. Every time something experimental gets greenlit on mainstream TV, even briefly, it’s worth noting. It means someone said yes to weird. Monday, 29 September 2014. Hitchhiker’s 11: I watch the 11(ELEVEN) video and it’s pure visual noise from the start. Glittering dancers, strange puppets making sounds, cars smoking through Seoul streets. I have no idea what it’s actually about and I don’t think that matters. It’s designed to overwhelm, and it works. Hitchhiker’s not a household name outside K-pop, but inside it he’s been everywhere. He produced ’My Lady’ for EXO, ’Show Show Show’ for Girls’ Generation, ’Danger’ for f(x)—massive hits shaped by their respective acts and the industry machine. This is what he does when it’s just him. There’s something about Korean pop that lets ideas get genuinely weird in ways that would get filtered out in Western markets. The idol system, the production budgets, the willingness to embrace total visual chaos as an aesthetic choice—it creates a scene operating on entirely different logic. Most labels would see a concept like this and start cutting things. K-pop just keeps adding. His label’s making promises about the album being some unprecedented fusion of music and visuals. Maybe. But 11(ELEVEN) already works. It’s the kind of thing that makes you grateful expensive music videos get weird in South Korea. Sunday, 28 September 2014. Ten Little Missions: Spent a Friday night making up a list of stupid things to do. Nothing better going on. Join Ello, the social network that was supposed to murder Facebook. I joined. Lasted maybe forty minutes before I realized nobody on Ello wanted to talk to anyone either. Left immediately. Go to a party and actually try discussing something. The quietest supporting actors in old silent films. Whatever year barn swallows were important. That time my printer had a paper jam. Watch how fast people check their phones instead. Buy a CD. It’s pointless given streaming exists, but there’s something honest about it. Ask the bouncer at Berghain—Berlin’s most unapproachable techno club, basically a bouncer who judges souls—if he knows where Q-DORF is. He won’t. Won’t care either. Sleep with someone who has your exact same name. Still waiting for that coincidence to happen. Cover every Sami Slimani poster in the city—he was some TV guy nobody remembers—with pictures of a solitary, sad sausage. Just the sausage. Just… vibes. Try to change Berlin’s motto from “Poor but sexy” to “Which sauce for your döner?” which is way more accurate anyway. That one never got off the ground. Sit quietly in memory of OZ. No idea who that even is at this point. Only eat things whose names rhyme with “parent-teacher conference,” “windshield wipers,” or “Thorsten.” It’s impossible. That’s the whole thing. Friday, 26 September 2014. Trading Places: Waking up in someone else’s apartment in a city that isn’t yours—that’s the kind of temporary escape fantasy everyone has at some point. Not the tourist version, just living like someone who actually belongs there, knowing their streets and shortcuts, understanding why they chose this particular place. Timberland put together a life-swap weekend where creative types from different cities traded places for a couple of days. A designer from Barcelona with a writer in London. Someone from Berlin shadowing a photographer in Milan. Just switching lives, experiencing each other’s routines and cities from the inside. I’m curious what you actually learn that way—not the beautiful monuments or the famous museums, but why someone chose where they live, what their actual routine looks like, how a city reveals itself when you’re following their lead instead of wandering through alone. Thursday, 25 September 2014. Ghosts of Aleppo: VICE’s war documentaries have this quality where you’re actually in the room. Bullets are flying, the sound is raw, and there’s no mediation between what’s happening and what you’re seeing. Most news organizations maintain distance. VICE doesn’t. Their new series, Ghosts of Aleppo, is five episodes of Free Syrian Army fighters in a city torn between government forces, extremist groups, and criminal operations. It’s not clear who controls what or why. The documentary follows people just trying to navigate that chaos—survive the day, make it to the next one. There’s no attempt to give you a neat political takeaway. It’s just footage of people in an impossible situation. That’s more honest than any amount of analysis or careful framing. You watch, and you understand what it costs to stay alive when the war is happening in your neighborhood. Wednesday, 24 September 2014. Manhattan, Cosmopolitan: Part of me just wants a decent cocktail sometimes. Something sweet, properly made. Not the cheap stuff you’d force down at a dive bar, but something that tastes like the person pouring it knew what they were doing. Formulas that have held up for fifty years because they work. Nick Barclay, based in Sydney, made a series of minimalist prints of classic cocktails—Manhattan, Cosmopolitan, Bloody Mary. Each one stripped to its essential shape. No garnish illustrations, no flourish, just the lines of the drink itself. I respect the approach. These cocktails have real history, and treating them seriously through minimal design is genuine respect, not irony. They don’t need explaining. Just the image. There’s something in his design that mirrors what makes these drinks work in the first place. They’re not complicated formulas—they’re simple enough that they’ve stayed unchanged for decades, and that’s exactly why they became classics. It takes repetition and consistency to turn something into tradition, and his prints seem to understand that weight. He’s not being clever about the subject. Just clear. Tuesday, 23 September 2014. That Lady: The Isley Brothers’ “That Lady” from 1973 is one of those samples that’s been everywhere in hip-hop for so long it barely reads as a sample anymore, just part of the standard vocabulary. Kendrick took it for “i”—just him, the sample, that warm horn line and the groove it sits in, nothing else. Two minutes of him rapping like he’s halfway through a thought, casual enough that you almost miss the control underneath. “i” announced his return after the gap between good kid, m.A.A.d city and whatever was coming next. I remember the first time I heard it and just thinking, yeah, okay—there he is. That feeling of recognition when an artist you’ve been waiting on just… shows up. Not always with ceremony. Sometimes just a track. The song is called “i.” One letter. It’s the kind of title that only works when you’re good enough to pull it off, a kind of minimum confidence statement. It wasn’t the full album, just a preview. Just “here’s what I’ve been working with.” And it made me curious what else he was sitting on. A track this stripped-down as your first word back—what does that signal? A shift? A confidence? Just a moment, just proof that he was still thinking about music? I don’t know. It sits with me well, is all. Doesn’t need to be bigger than what it is. Tuesday, 23 September 2014. Still Reaching For Pixels: I grew up inside Super Nintendo games built from pixels - snow-capped mountains, dark caves, the infinite ocean. All of it real in your head. That was never supposed to stick with you past adolescence. Pixels were a placeholder, a technical limitation we were supposed to graduate past. But Octavi Navarro never got that memo. He’s a children’s book illustrator who posts pixel art on Tumblr, and it’s some of the most complete work I’ve seen in years. Pieces like “Midnight Carnival” and “How I Met Your Grandfather” - they’re not trying to impress you. They’re not trying to do anything. They just sit there, detailed and patient, pulling you into these small worlds. You want to step inside them. What gets me is the constraint itself. You’re working with maybe a few dozen colors, limited resolution. That forces something honest. Every choice is visible. Navarro understands this. The work has this unhurried quality that almost nothing else has anymore. There’s no need to sell anything to you. It just exists. I’m not sure nostalgia is the right word for what I feel anymore. It’s something else - the belief that there’s still something worth reaching for in this medium, that real craft can live inside limitations. That constraint isn’t a problem to solve, it’s just the shape of the work. His stuff exists as prints and merchandise now - the usual shuffle. But that’s not what matters. What matters is the actual feeling of looking at one of these pieces. It’s the same thing I felt as a kid staring at a screen. Which is enough. Monday, 22 September 2014. The Convenient Evil: People need enemies. That’s what I’ve noticed anyway. Not just actual adversaries—imaginary ones, the kind you can point to and say there’s the problem. Societies run on them. So we get a rotation: one year it’s Putin calmly invading, the next it’s ISIS, al-Qaeda, Kim Jong-un, whoever plays the part well enough. The ranking shifts constantly, sometimes dramatically. One decade Bashar al-Assad is the worst thing alive, the next we’re almost friendly with him. What gets me is how precisely the moral calculus aligns with economic interest. Saudi Arabia executes people for witchcraft, for blasphemy, for nothing at all. They disappear journalists. But they never seem to climb the charts. Maybe because they sell us oil, or we sell them tanks and missiles. Evil gets ranked by convenience, not by body count. The enemies that matter are the ones that move markets. Everyone else can wait their turn, or never get one at all. Monday, 22 September 2014. Recipes for Caution: A cookbook where every recipe uses condoms as the main ingredient. Condom sushi, stuffed condoms, condoms over rice. Japanese author Kyosuke Kagami titled it something like “Condom Dishes I Want to Make for You”—and he wasn’t joking around. It’s obviously a gimmick, but the kind that actually works. The premise is so absurd that you stop and think about what he’s really doing. The entire thing is a PSA about safe sex, STIs, unplanned pregnancy—but instead of the standard public health lecture, you get a novelty cookbook. Most messages like that dissolve the moment you look away. This one sticks because it’s weird enough to be memorable. That’s the real craft: finding a hook so unusual that the thing you actually need to talk about sneaks in underneath. Whether the food would taste good is completely beside the point. Monday, 22 September 2014. Not In My Name: A young Muslim woman looks directly into the camera. “In my religion,” she says, “we are taught tolerance toward women. And you have no respect for women.” She’s part of #NotInMyName, a UK movement where Muslims are publicly distancing themselves from ISIS, reclaiming their religion from something that’s claimed it for atrocities. I get why they had to do it. When something monstrous wears your identity, you have to say out loud: that’s not me. You can’t assume people will figure it out. The video works because it doesn’t sound defensive or rhetorical. Just people stating what their faith actually means to them, no filter. Maybe it won’t reach anyone already radicalized. Maybe it changes nothing. But it still matters that they said it, put their faces to it, took this back. There’s something almost physical about having to reassert your identity when something else is wearing the same name and committing atrocities in it. Monday, 22 September 2014. The Happiness Problem: The video was nothing special—Iranian teenagers dancing to Pharrell’s “Happy,” moving around in daylight, completely ordinary, goofing off and smiling. They got arrested for it. By Wednesday they had their sentence: one suspended prison term, the rest getting six months suspended plus ninety-one lashes each. For a dance video. An Iranian police officer quoted in the press said young people should avoid people like them, that authorities would identify troublemakers quickly. He sounded terrified—not of the kids themselves, but of what they represented. Just teenagers expressing joy without permission, without asking first. Apparently that’s threatening enough to warrant physical punishment. In May, Hassan Rouhani tweeted that happiness is a human right, that you shouldn’t be punished for behavior driven by happiness. It was the right thing to say. It also changed absolutely nothing. The sentence was already final. The lashes would proceed. You look at that video now and it’s hard to understand what about it warranted ninety-one lashes. Just teenagers dancing to a pop song, just happiness. In a reasonable world, nothing. But we don’t live in that world, and in this one, apparently that’s enough. Friday, 19 September 2014. Free Netflix: Someone mentioned a Netflix party. We had a car and nothing better to do, so we went. This was the advantage of living with people who got invited places—no convincing required. The Komische Oper had been converted into a prison cafeteria. Orange Is The New Black theme, House of Cards cocktails, the usual marketing machinery. I saw Jan Böhmermann. Taylor Schilling was somewhere in the crowd. Other faces, names I didn’t catch and wouldn’t have kept anyway. The party was pleasant and immediately forgettable. Then someone handed me a box on the way out. Free Netflix subscription, which I accepted thinking it was a gift until I realized it was a trap. We got home and stopped leaving. Days became a loop of screens: BoJack Horseman, Orange Is The New Black, Lie to Me, something else I’ve forgotten. The apartment was dark. We ate at the couch. This is what Netflix actually sold us—not entertainment, not the free month, but this specific moment right here, the one where you stop trying to leave and accept that you’re going to be here for a while. Thursday, 18 September 2014. The Dog Takes Over: A small dog inheriting a fashion empire is funny because it’s not actually that different from how fashion works already. Salvatore Reviu was some kind of Italian fashion magnate who, on his deathbed, decided everything should go to Domenico—his lap dog. The campaign comes with videos where different people tell different versions of how this happened, each one supposedly true, each one obviously not. You’re watching ads pretend to be documentaries pretend to be rumors. So now a dog runs the brand. Designers show up with sketches, marketing people present their campaigns, fabric arrives, collections ship, magazines publish features. Everything moves the same way it did before, except the person at the top doesn’t understand human language. Which is maybe more honest than the usual setup. Fashion has always been held together by everyone agreeing to treat completely arbitrary things with absolute seriousness. A dog could do that. Better, even—at least the dog wouldn’t pretend it understands what’s happening. You’d get a clear answer. That’s more than most executives give you. Wednesday, 17 September 2014. Everything Breaks: I tore through Attack on Titan in two days. Twenty-five episodes of people walled in, waiting for the exact moment everything breaks. A giant tears through and people start dying in numbers you can’t process. The camera doesn’t look away. What got me was how seriously it treats the premise. No winking, no irony. The destruction is just fact. The fear comes through in small details—frames tightening when the giant appears, the sound design, deaths rendered without distance. It just escalates. The series does something anime rarely bothers with: it makes the scale of disaster genuinely hard to hold. You’re watching the world end in real time, and the show understands that apocalypse isn’t cinematic. It’s just grinding and terrible. Plot twists land because you’re too unmoored to see them coming. I didn’t know what I was walking into. Something to kill an afternoon. Instead I got something heavier than a show about giants eating people had any right to be. But that’s what execution of a stupid premise does—sometimes you end up with something that actually matters. Wednesday, 17 September 2014. The Slang Election: Every few years some official committee of older Germans gathers to vote on what they think youth slang should be, which is roughly as useful as asking fashion magazines to predict what teenagers will actually wear. In 2014 they came back with a list so aggressively divorced from reality that you wonder if they polled at a convention for substitute teachers. The whole thing is fundamentally broken. Real slang doesn’t get voted on. It either catches on because it fills a gap, because it sounds right, because it spreads on the platforms kids actually use—or it quietly dies. You can’t legislate authenticity. That said, some of these weren’t terrible. FOMO actually stuck globally because that feeling is real. Twerking needed a name. Foodgasm is stupid but true. Those words earned their place. Then there are the ones that exist purely for the gymnastics of it—Obamern for “eavesdropping,” Tebartzen for “buying expensive stuff you don’t need.” They’re creative in this trying-too-hard way that’s almost endearing. Look, we can make words. The best are the compounds that shouldn’t work but do. Immatrikulationshintergrund—literally college background—for someone useless at anything practical because they chose university. Bürgersteigdeko for dog shit on the sidewalk. Fappieren for jacking off. These aren’t reaching for cleverness; they just fit exactly what they describe, and they sound right. The whole competition is ridiculous and kind of touching all at once. You can feel this desperate need from adults to prove they’re listening, that they get it, that they’re still relevant to youth culture. And the words themselves tell you what was occupying German teenagers in 2014—what stressed them, what they wanted to name and make jokes about. If I’d been asked, Fußpils would have my vote. Beer for the road. Practically a philosophy. I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use Immatrikulationshintergrund unironically, but the word itself still makes me laugh. Sometimes the best slang is the stuff that sounds too absurd to work, and then somehow it does anyway. Wednesday, 17 September 2014. Rain Words: Japanese kids learn fifty-some words for rain. Not fifty variations on “rainy”—fifty distinct things. Rain that falls from trees. Rain that starts gentle and turns heavy. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. A word for each one. I wake up to rain some mornings and barely register it. Gray sky, cold, water streaking the glass. Maybe something like “shit weather” under my breath and then I move on. Design studio Nendo made an installation for Maison & Objet in Paris around this gap. Small bottles, each one holding a different state of rain. Just sitting there, making the weather look like something with texture, something worth looking at twice. Japanese does something interesting with precision. The language got specific enough that rain stops being just weather and becomes a spectrum of distinct conditions. There’s a word for rain dropping from leaves and that changes what registers in a rainy day. The variation becomes visible. Something that was just weather becomes its own moment. I don’t know if those bottles in Paris actually made anyone reconsider rain. Most people probably just walked past. But the idea holds anyway: once the language exists, the variation becomes visible. Hard to unknow what you’ve been taught to notice. Tuesday, 16 September 2014. The Kirishima Thing: The Kirishima Thing is a 2012 Japanese high school film built on a simple premise: the star athlete disappears, and everything below the surface starts to show. Director Daihachi Yoshida uses the different social groups—athletes, musicians, the cinema club outsiders—as a kind of prism. Same event, different people, completely different understanding of what happened. What hooks you is the structure. There’s no real exposition; you’re just thrown in and the film lets you figure it out by watching the same moment unfold from multiple angles. A scene plays once with the jocks, then again through the cinema club kids, then from somewhere else entirely. At first it’s confusing, but once you catch on, there’s something genuinely elegant about it. You start to see how much perspective shapes what you think you know. The cast helps. These don’t feel like types; they’re specific and alive. Awkward, ambitious, loyal, petty, desperate, horny—all the things actual teenagers are. The film doesn’t condescend to them. It takes them seriously, which means you do too. I think what surprised me is how much it lands emotionally. Not in a sentimental way—the film never indulges in that. It just shows up, lets these people be themselves, and lets you care about them without making a big deal about it. There’s real affection for the characters underneath the structure-shifting. By the end you’re swimming in all of it—first love, friendship, jealousy, the weird intensity of school fandom, that specific apocalyptic desperation teenagers feel when they think everything’s ending. The film somehow holds all of that without falling into schmaltz. It’s just showing you how much these people matter to each other and to themselves. I don’t know if you can experience something exactly like this outside a Japanese school context. The way those clubs work, the hierarchy, the social pressure—there’s something specific about it. But the emotional architecture underneath feels universal. That moment when you realize your whole world is actually fragile and small and probably not ending the way you think it is. Tuesday, 16 September 2014. Taking It Back: This goes out to every Twitter junkie out there. Every person who can’t stop themselves from making jokes in the replies. Everyone addicted to the back-and-forth. Because here’s the thing: I’m taking this back. Again. Finally. The official account here had become something really sad. Just a link dump. No voice. Every couple months I’d pick a fight with someone or retweet something bittersweet, but mostly it was just dead. That’s not what you want from a space where you’re supposed to actually think. I had a separate private account too, supposed to be mine, where I could vent and argue with other bloggers and just be a mess. But I let that die too. It turned into this pathetic half-dead thing sitting there. So I realized what I should do: kill one and bring the other one back. Make something that actually has opinions again. And that got me thinking about Twitter when it was different. When you could say things that were too much for people. When you could defend some weird way of living and mean it. Most of the old tweets from back then are gone now. The ones from nights that got genuinely dark. The ones that were too honest. The ones where I was actually standing up for something. Gone. You don’t realize how much disappears just because you’re not paying attention. So last night I did it. Killed the private account. Took over the official one. Made it something real again. Opinions, links that aren’t just noise, actual thoughts. Nothing revolutionary. Just me deciding that this space should mean something instead of slowly disappearing. Monday, 15 September 2014. Diggin’ In The Carts: I whistle Super Mario World without thinking about it. Tetris themes, Secret of Mana, the whole catalog is just embedded in me. My iPod is loaded with video game remixes—Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy XIII, Ocarina of Time—and the title themes from Grandia and Terranigma and Illusion of Time have burned themselves into my brain permanently. Video game music means more to me than basically all Western music combined, but not because it’s inherently better. It’s just that I’ve heard it constantly my whole life, so it had more time to sink in, more chances to become part of how I think and feel. It’s the true soundtrack to growing up, this constant ambient presence that shaped me without me ever really noticing. Red Bull made a documentary about Japanese video game music, focusing on that golden 8-bit era when composers like Hidenori Maezawa and Masashi Kageyama were basically inventing what game music could be. They flew to Japan and talked to these people, got the real history of how this all happened. If you ever spent hours with a Game Boy or a Super Nintendo, watching these composers talk about writing those melodies is something else. You hear the context and then you hear the songs again and suddenly you understand why you can’t get them out of your head. It’s not about the cultural significance or the history or any of that—it’s just about recognizing where part of yourself comes from. Friday, 12 September 2014. Los Santos Returns: I’d played GTA V for longer than I should admit. Hours in Los Santos, the usual chaos—mugging pensioners, starting gang wars, driving recklessly. The game doesn’t ask anything of you. It’s just a sandbox. That’s all it needs to be. When the PS4 and Xbox One versions arrived in November 2014, I felt the pull to go back. Better graphics, faster load times, the whole city in higher definition. Same game, but richer. The trailer showed what that meant—Los Santos rendered more sharply. Better textures, better light. It’s a strange thing to want, a game you’ve already beaten replayed just because it looks nicer. But that’s how it works. You see a world you know in a new skin and suddenly you’re imagining another hundred hours in it. By January the PC version would be out too, but you know how the cycle goes. The game gets in your head. You’ll come back to it, with better hardware or without. Friday, 12 September 2014. Just Them: Italian artist Ale Giorgini spent weeks on a series called “That’s Amore!”—illustrations of famous pop culture couples in this warm, lived-in style that makes them feel like they’re standing in a room with you. Homer and Marge Simpson. Batman and Robin. Charlie Brown with Snoopy curled next to him. Popeye and Olivia Oyl. John Lennon and Yoko Ono the way you imagine them alone. What works isn’t that Giorgini is being clever. He’s just recognizing weight when he sees it. These pairings have lived in culture long enough to feel real—sometimes more real than couples you actually know. You’ve spent more time with Homer and Marge than with most of your relatives. You know the shape of their relationship better than you know your neighbors’. Batman and Robin’s dynamic—the trust, the tension, the unspoken reliance—gets discussed more carefully than most marriages. Pop culture pairs stick because they solve something about connection. Popeye and Olivia Oyl are ridiculous but also kind of perfect: he’d move mountains, she’d mock him for it, and somehow that’s love. Charlie Brown and Snoopy are the realest relationship in comics—mutual disappointment, absolute loyalty. John Lennon and Yoko Ono felt like they invented something together, even if half the world thought it was a disaster. Seeing them isolated like this, just the two of them in Giorgini’s warm domestic space, is different than seeing them in sequence or in dialogue. There’s nothing to do, no conflict to resolve. They just exist together. It does something. The series runs longer than what’s shown, which means there are more couples I haven’t recognized yet. I like not knowing. The game isn’t the point. It’s that moment when recognition lands—when you see two figures and the entire shape of their relationship becomes visible. Thursday, 11 September 2014. Mein Rostock: Marteria’s been making songs I keep coming back to—there’s something about the way he moves through them. “Kids,” “Lila Wolken,” stuff that sticks. So when he came out with a love song to Rostock, his hometown, I was ready for it to feel obligatory. Hometown anthems are easy to get wrong. He didn’t get it wrong. There’s no cynicism in it, no distance—just him naming the place and what it means. That only works if you’re actually rooted somewhere, if the memory is real. He could have played it cool, but he didn’t. He went sincere and local and it felt earned. Rostock’s a port city in the north, quiet outside of who lives there. Marteria made something that feels like it’s really for them, not for anyone else. That matters. Thursday, 11 September 2014. Greasy Mother of God: I’m doing this thing where I eat only fish and salad and the occasional bean, and I’d nearly convinced myself it was sustainable. Then Clifford Endo, who runs some food blog in Brooklyn, posts a recipe for pizza where he replaces the dough entirely with fries. That’s the whole post. Pizza base made of potatoes. I don’t even need to see the full recipe to know what he’s done, and it’s maddening because he’s operating from a place of complete clarity. He looked at the unspoken rule—the one that says you eat pizza or you eat fries as a side, but never both, because that would make you a deviant—and he just ignored it. Demolished it. Said the rule doesn’t apply. Everyone’s done this in secret. Folded fries into their pizza, that quiet transgression, and never mentioned it because admitting it would mean admitting something about yourself. But Endo put it on display. Made it intentional. Made it impossible to pretend you don’t want it. And the infuriating part is that there’s no principled argument against it. Not health, not tradition, not restraint. You can only sit with the fact that you want it, and you always have. I’m not making it. I think about it though. Wednesday, 10 September 2014. Showing Kids an NES: My best friend back then lived with his mother in the apartment downstairs, and they had an NES. That meant we spent whole days on Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before we’d demolish whatever pasta bake his mother had made. The thing is, most of you weren’t even born yet. The NES was a revelation for people who are now around forty—which is to say, ancient. In 8-bit pixels they’d hack away at little blocky shapes on plain backgrounds. The real action happened in your head. Without some imagination, all you saw on that flickering tube TV was a handful of soulless dots. But if you had the knack for it, you became an adventurer, a treasure hunter, a god. But what happens when you put that machine in front of people whose brains have been shredded by 4K televisions and 3D cinema and high-end consoles? Kids who don’t even blink when soldiers explode in pristine graphics? Maisie Williams and some of her friends actually ran this experiment. Wednesday, 10 September 2014. Forever Sailor Moon: Sailor Moon never actually stops selling. You’d think after twenty-some years and however many product cycles that people would be done buying, but they’re not. Bandai just announced new lingerie sets—each one matched to one of the Sailor Guardians, colors and styling designed for each character. Which is exactly what you’d expect them to announce, at exactly this moment in the cycle. There’s almost a comfort in how predictable it is. The show was designed to sell products from the start; the only variable has ever been what kind. Transformation sticks, then dolls, then costumes, then cosplay pieces, now lingerie. The economic logic stays the same. The audience just ages along with it and apparently never actually stops. I don’t have a moral complaint here. The pieces themselves are fine. What struck me is how complete the machine feels now—like Sailor Moon transcended being a show and became a permanent product line. Other anime come and fade. Sailor Moon keeps generating new things to want. The series itself was four seasons in the mid-90s. This just never ends. It’s honest in a weird way. No pretense about what this is. Just nostalgia plus fanservice equals money. Sailor Moon basically wrote that playbook. Everything else learned it from here. Wednesday, 10 September 2014. Still Bulletproof: Her 2009 debut was everywhere for me back then—“In for the Kill,” “Quicksand,” “Bulletproof.” She got the 80s-revivalist thing right without making it feel like costume parties, which most people can’t manage. She did. Then silence. Depression, personal things, the downward pull that sometimes just swallows people. Years of it. Elly Jackson’s back now, solo—Ben Langmaid’s gone—with a new album and “Kiss And Not Tell.” The video’s ridiculous in the best way. She’s surrounded by phones. Ancient rotary ones, absurd customized ones, phones that shouldn’t exist. That kind of pointless visual obsession is what makes a song feel like an event instead of just a track. The thing itself slides right back into that synth-pop space she used to own—clean, bright, just enough sadness underneath. No reinvention. No apology. Just: I was gone, I’m here now, we continue. There’s something quietly stubborn about that, and I respect it. I’ve been waiting for this without knowing I was waiting. Her music mattered when it came out, and it matters now—the kind of thing that ages better than you’d think because it never tried too hard to be cool in the first place. It just was cool. That’s rarer than it sounds. Tuesday, 9 September 2014. Still Springfield: I spent years thinking anime had replaced Western animation in my head. The energy, the honesty, the sex—American cartoons felt slow by comparison. But The Simpsons never left. It’s still there, some older circuit, voices I’ve known longer than most real people. Converse made a 25th anniversary edition with Simpson characters on the shoes. Sixty euros, mid-September onward. Standard collaboration product. The Simpsons doesn’t feel like nostalgia though. It feels real. Homer’s stubborn idiocy that somehow doesn’t destroy everything. Lisa’s intelligence hitting against the family’s stupidity. Bart’s pure destructive instinct. Even Marge—tired in a way that’s almost philosophical. These characters don’t try to be anything else. They just are. I’ll get the shoes. Not for the anniversary or to own my past or any of it. Just because having The Simpsons with me every day feels honest. Tuesday, 9 September 2014. Antarctica: Sports Illustrated flew Kate Upton to Antarctica to photograph her in a bikini. The appeal is obvious—you’ve seen models on beaches everywhere, but Antarctica sounds like the edge of the world, so that’s where magazines go when they need a story. They needed the location more than they needed her, really. This was the same period when The Fappening was happening—someone had leaked hundreds of private photos of celebrities, Kate Upton included. While the internet argued about privacy and hacking and who was responsible, SI was booking flights to the Antarctic Circle. The contrast is almost funny if you think about it too long. The industry doesn’t really pause for privacy violations. It just keeps moving, and the cameras keep rolling. I’m not sure what to make of the whole thing. Upton became famous for being beautiful, made money from it, got exposed because of it, and then kept going—more shoots, more magazine covers, more visibility. Maybe that’s just the deal. Maybe it’s what you sign up for. But Antarctica? That’s a bit much. That’s not just visibility anymore; that’s something else entirely. Tuesday, 9 September 2014. The Sand Storm: Everyone’s sure the next war is about water. Not oil, not minerals—water. The scarcity’s real, the math is simple, and corporations have already started treating it like every other commodity. The future looks like drought and then desperation and then conflict. Just a question of when. Jason Wishnow made a short film about that. “The Sand Storm,” funded through Kickstarter, with Ai Weiwei—Chinese artist, longtime dissident, the kind of person who’s actually put things on the line for his beliefs—playing a water smuggler in a dying landscape. On paper it made sense. The subject mattered, the filmmaker seemed to have something to say, the casting felt right. The kind of project that seemed like it could actually say something. Then Ai Weiwei announced the director had used him without permission. That his name and image were being weaponized for promotion. Suddenly nobody was talking about the film’s content. They were talking about how its star had been exploited in its making. A bunch of Kickstarter backers wanted refunds. The whole thing collapsed into its own contradiction. There’s a dumb perfection to that irony. A film about exploitation gets made by exploiting its lead. The medium contradicts the message so perfectly they cancel out. I kept thinking about whether that’s just inevitable now—whether you can make anything genuine anymore before the machinery grinds through it and transforms it into something else entirely. Ai Weiwei understands what exploitation is. He’s faced it, resisted it, built his whole practice around not accepting it. So when he said the director crossed a line, you believe him. Maybe the film is essential. Maybe it has something important to say. But none of that matters now. The narrative broke. The star who was supposed to anchor the film’s credibility just became evidence that even people who know better can’t control how they’re used. I never saw it and doubt I will. Not out of loyalty to Ai Weiwei exactly, but because once a thing breaks apart that completely, there’s nothing left to engage with. You can either defend the artist or consider the film, but you can’t do both. One of them always eats the other. And I lost track of which one I actually cared about. Monday, 8 September 2014. What Good Sushi Costs: I want to live in Tokyo’s fish market. Not as some romantic idea—actually move there, eat my way through whatever came in that morning, fish still warm and bleeding, the stuff people lose their minds over. Back here you get sushi from kebab stands. From discount stores where you can taste how long ago the fish died. It’s not sushi. It’s a simulation of sushi, and a bad one. The gap between that and actual sushi isn’t subtle. The fish matters obviously, but so does the rice, the temperature, how it’s cut, the angle when you put it in your mouth. Most people don’t think about any of this. They just grab it, dunk it in soy sauce, swallow. Naomichi Yasuda is a sushi master in Tokyo. I haven’t eaten at his place or studied with him, but I’ve come across how he thinks about sushi—the obsessive attention to detail, the precise movements that separate actual technique from just playing the part. The angle of the knife. Where your teeth meet the rice. What you taste first, second, third. Sounds pretentious when you say it. Maybe it is. But once you’ve had sushi made by someone who gives a shit, made with that level of care, you can’t eat the other stuff anymore. You start wanting to understand it better, chasing the next meal that might actually know something. I’ll never be a sushi master. But knowing what one looks like—the rigor, the precision of every small movement—changes how I taste it. It’s not sacred or secret. Just what happens once you’ve tasted what good costs. Monday, 8 September 2014. Japanese Commercials: I went to Japan thinking the TV would be all anime and game shows. Instead it was talk shows about food and people stretching on mats. Not much better than what airs in Germany, just in a language I didn’t understand. The only thing that actually worked was the commercials. There’s something different about them. They’re not selling you so much as telling you something. A beer ad becomes a story about salarymen, a convenience store becomes a world. The pacing is generous—they let things breathe. No constant cutting, no manipulative soundtrack dragging you along. Just images that trust you’ll pay attention for thirty seconds. Part of it’s probably cultural. Less cynicism about advertising itself, less meta-irony. The brands seem to assume people actually watch, so they put in the work. Every commercial looks like it cost something, not because they’re throwing money around, but because there’s actual thinking behind it. I miss that kind of craft. Even the trash channels back home could steal from it. Sunday, 7 September 2014. Stan Smith Gospel: Half of Berlin’s still walking around in them. The green-and-white Stan Smiths have become the standard-issue shoe for anyone who works in design, media, anything creative. If you care about how things look, these are what you wear. It’s not even a choice anymore; it’s just the uniform. They made the jump from retro novelty to essential object in maybe five years. Still not entirely sure how it happened so fast. They’re minimal enough that they work with almost everything, and there’s no logo demanding your attention—the shoe does the work and doesn’t ask for credit. For people who think about design, that’s the perfect formula. Once something becomes that universal, the brand starts playing exclusivity games. Limited editions with boutiques in Paris and New York and London, white leather versions that cost more because fewer exist. It’s the oldest trick in sneaker culture—scarcity makes people hunt. And it works every time. There’s something about knowing only a few hundred people can own your exact shoe that makes you want it more. I get it. Part of me wants the white ones. The idea of owning the right version of an already-right shoe is weirdly appealing. But then you step back and realize you’re obsessing over variations of something you already own, purely because someone decided to make fewer of them. The whole thing is manufactured desire. Knowing that doesn’t actually stop you from wanting it, though. The thing that will outlast all this is the shoe itself. After the limited editions disappear and the hype moves to whatever comes next, the basic Stan Smith will still be there. Still clean, still correct, still what people will reach for when they want something that just works. That’s the only thing that actually matters. The exclusivity is just noise. Saturday, 6 September 2014. Brass Band Chaos: Marteria appeared behind a deer shaman—some kind of sculpture or puppet, I’m still not sure—and rapped his way through the crowd toward the stage. Within minutes, sweat was literally dripping from the ceiling in streams. This was the launch show for Jägermeister Blaskapelle’s debut album in Berlin. They’re a brass band that took popular songs and reimagined them for brass instrumentation, then somehow convinced artists like Marteria, Alligatoah, MC Fitti, Haddaway, and Alexander Marcus to show up and perform them live. The crowd was over a thousand people deep, and the energy was completely untethered. Each act brought their own beautiful absurdity. Das Bo arrived with a cheerleader squad. Die Atzen deployed megaphones and alarm sounds. Alexander Marcus came via helicopter and covered the stage in enormous inflatable fruit. Alligatoah lit the crowd like bioluminescent organisms. MC Fitti detonated confetti. Haddaway did strobes and 90s revival. The brass band just kept playing, unfazed, turning everything into melody. What struck me was Marteria’s walk. Not the music, just the image of him moving through the crowd on his way to the stage, rapping the whole way. It felt like the real idea of the night—total commitment to something ridiculous, no safety net, just momentum and sound and bodies. I left soaked through, with phone numbers I’d never call and memories I couldn’t quite place. But I remembered the feeling of not being in control of anything, which is rarer than you’d think. Saturday, 6 September 2014. Your Shoe: Adidas Originals released an app called #miZXFLUX that let you customize ZX FLUX sneakers with your own photos. You’d upload an image, position it on the shoe using a butterfly-shaped overlay, scale and rotate it however you wanted, preview the result in 360 degrees, and order it. A few weeks later, your custom sneaker showed up. What appealed to me wasn’t the technology but the directness of it. You didn’t need to be a designer or justify yourself to anyone. Open the app, find a photo, spend fifteen minutes playing with placement, pay if you want it, done. The gap between wanting something personalized and actually having it was shorter than it’s ever been. There’s something about owning an object that nobody else has, even if it’s mass-produced. The photo you chose doesn’t have to mean anything—it could be your friend, your cat, your lunch—but the fact that you decided which one and where it goes on the shoe makes it unmistakably yours. Someone else could theoretically use the exact same photo in the exact same spot, but they’d still be making their own choice. The shoe itself is just fine. It’s the kind of thing you’d pass by in a mall. But the ability to take something industrial and make it singular, just by deciding what image goes on it, that’s where the appeal is. The app didn’t ask you to be a designer. It asked for nothing but presence. Most customization requires something from you. This required nothing but a photo and time to waste. That felt rare. Thursday, 4 September 2014. Rita Ora Everywhere: Rita Ora was everywhere then—radio, clubs, that space where dance-pop and UK garage were still mixing together. When adidas Originals brought her in to design a collection, it felt inevitable. Her momentum was real, and brands know how to spot attention. The collection was called “Black.” Soft leather, reptile patterns across the uppers—that specific visual moment when every designer suddenly needed scales or feathers or something textured and breathing. The yellow adidas logo underneath as an anchor. It looked like what a young pop vocalist would think was cool, which is sometimes exactly right and sometimes not. The thing about celebrity fashion collaborations is how differently people think. Rita works in hooks, moments, the feel of a night. Design is proportions, materials, how something sits on a body. There’s a translation problem there, even with everyone trying. But that gap is maybe what makes it real. She didn’t become a designer, but she existed in that space for a moment, and this collection was proof. I have no idea what happened to the shoes afterward. They’re probably discounted or forgotten by now. But in that time, they made perfect sense. Wednesday, 3 September 2014. Cailin Russo on a Meadow: Kassia Meador shot Cailin Russo on a flower meadow for Monster Children, and the image just works. No angle, no performance—just someone in good light who looks like they belong in the frame. Russo’s a dancer and gymnast, the kind of person whose body language could easily become about display. But Meador caught something else: ease, maybe even indifference to being photographed. That’s harder than it looks. Monster Children had Mike D curate the issue, which is the kind of thing that used to matter to a magazine. Not just getting access or a name, but actual editorial taste. I don’t know much about Russo beyond this photograph, but I don’t need to. I keep coming back to it—not because it’s complicated or trying to do something, but because it actually works. Summer in a frame. That’s the whole thing. Wednesday, 3 September 2014. Edible Bricks: I used to shove LEGO bricks in my mouth as a kid without really thinking about it, the way you do at that age with objects that shouldn’t go in your mouth. They tasted like plastic, obviously, and were probably leeching some kind of poison into my bloodstream, but I didn’t care. I just kept imagining them as something else—soft cheese, cooked sausage, dark chocolate that melted on my tongue. Japanese designer Akihiro Mizuuchi apparently spent enough time in that same fantasy that he actually made it happen: LEGO bricks out of chocolate. Full size, indistinguishable from the real thing until you put one in your mouth. Milk, white, strawberry flavors. You can build an entire structure and then eat it. I’ve seen other people try this online and most attempts are awkward or unfinished, the work of people who got halfway interested and gave up. Mizuuchi’s are perfect—the weight is exact, the snap is right, the way they connect and separate matches the original completely. He didn’t just pour chocolate into molds; he understood what makes LEGO work as a physical object and translated that into something edible. A collaboration between LEGO and Mizuuchi seems inevitable, but it won’t happen—companies don’t work that way. I’d still buy them on day one if somehow it did. Tuesday, 2 September 2014. VHS Decks: I miss VHS tapes. Actually miss them. We had stacks at home—nothing special, just whatever landed there. You’d pull one out, rewind it, feed it into the player. The movie would start. It was the most direct form of ownership you could get. 5Boro in New York made skateboards that look exactly like old VHS cases. Sony, Panasonic, Fuji—whatever brand was stacked on your shelf. The designs are spot-on, which means whoever made them actually remembers this era. Around forty euros per board. Most people buying these probably never used a VHS player. They’re buying the look, the aesthetic of an era they didn’t experience. Which is fine. That’s how design works. The original thing gets reduced to its visual symbol, and that symbol gets passed along. But there’s no irony in it. Someone who actually remembers this made these boards. They didn’t make them as a joke or a commentary. Just someone wanting to bring back something that mattered. The design will just be what it is—a look, an era frozen on a piece of wood. Maybe that’s better than the real thing. Tuesday, 2 September 2014. What YouTube Changes: Two million people watched Kelly run up a staircase talking about what it takes to be a woman—the basics, really. High heels hurt. Sleep matters more than showers. Shaving eats your time. Nothing you couldn’t figure out on your own, but something about the way she explained it made you watch anyway. By twenty-one, closing in on half a million subscribers, she’d turned observation into a platform and a platform into a life. I wanted to know what that actually felt like from inside. Kelly started because she saw other people making videos and thought, why isn’t there a woman doing this? Three years later, the answer was simple: it worked. But working turned out to mean something much harder than anyone watching assumes. People see a video that lands and think you just turned on the camera and talked. They don’t see the blank-screen hours waiting for an idea that sticks, the technical problems that murder your editing timeline, the comment section that tells you your thing was shit a minute after you posted it. Two or three new videos a week, each needing to feel fresh and hit something that matters, all while being your own boss and staying motivated when motivation doesn’t come naturally. It’s actual work. Most people don’t realize it yet, but they will. The LA trip was the kind of thing that sounds like fantasy. Six weeks with other German YouTubers—Gronkh, Sarazar, Pandory, a few others—in a house they called The Mansion. Vegas, roadtrips through desert, theme parks. No real conflict between anyone, which surprised me. Everyone understood what it felt like to build something from nothing on camera. But Kelly was twenty in Las Vegas where bouncers need bribing and everything looks beautiful until you see the structural damage. That’s when someone—a designer whose name they kept censored—ended up naked and coked up in the hot tub on her twenty-first birthday. She framed it as funny and shocking and maybe a learning moment, and I think it was all three at once. What struck me was how she talked about the rest of the YouTube world. No enemies, really. Everyone gets along because everyone’s broken in the same way—they make weird videos on the internet for money and attention. You don’t need much more than that in common to become friends with someone quickly. But she also kept friends who thought the whole thing was insane, who’d watch strangers ask her for photos on the street and shake their heads. That balance seemed important to her—staying tethered to something actual beyond the platform. Her most successful video was her list of things girls do but don’t tell anyone. It blew up immediately. But when I asked if it was her favorite, she said no. She preferred the travel vlogs—the ones that felt like memories she could share with people who might never get to those places. That preference told you something real about how she thinks. She said she’d never make a video that bored her, because you’d see it immediately. It would feel hollow. So she tries to find the intersection—topics that genuinely fascinate her and that have a decent shot at working. It’s the difference between a formula and an actual life being documented. The trolling is just background noise at scale. Someone sent her Google Earth screenshots of her bedroom window. People mail packages and letters to her house. She handles it the way you’d expect—ignore most of it, get hurt sometimes, get over it. Her friend MrTrashpack told her something wise: people have bad days and need to dump their frustration somewhere. If they do it in her comments instead of actually destroying something, that’s not the worst trade. The question of being a woman on YouTube doing anything other than beauty or gaming landed differently. Early comments about her body made her self-conscious so she dressed conservatively, wanted to be seen as a person first. By the time we talked, she’d moved past it. Dumb comments from eleven-year-olds about her chest were just noise. She’d used the topic once in that viral list because it was honest. Using your body as content because it gets clicks is different from content that happens to include your body. That distinction mattered to her. When I asked what YouTube had changed about her life, she paused and said it changed her in ways that felt genuinely scary. Went from shy and insecure to someone who could walk into a room and just talk to people. Learned to handle criticism, even the vicious pointless kind. Built actual friendships with people she’d only known through screens. Traveled in ways she never would have otherwise. Built a career that didn’t exist a decade before. Grew up on video, in public, with millions of strangers watching. Without YouTube, she thinks she’d probably still be living cautiously somewhere, following the safest path, too scared to actually try things. That’s the real change—not the money or the fame or the subscribers, but the willingness to just do something weird in front of everyone and see what happens. The rest followed from that. Tuesday, 2 September 2014. Polygon Animals: You sink into Super Mario World or Pokémon or A Link to the Past and you’re gone for hours. Those pixels have this pull—something about them just takes you out of time. But somewhere along the way other artists figured out a different version: instead of grids, they started building with polygons. Same gravity, different geometry. Matt Anderson’s one of them. He’s based in New York, works in low-poly—this minimal style where creatures are built entirely from shapes but somehow still read as alive. The trick is that it only works if you’re ruthlessly reductive about it, which sounds easy until you try and realize it isn’t. Most polygon art looks cold or empty. His doesn’t. His Poly Animals series stuck with me: whales, foxes, elephants, turtles, cranes, pandas, wolves. All built from triangles and clean lines but somehow still breathing. There’s real craft in those proportions—you look at a fox and you understand its weight without being told anything. The way he decides what detail to keep and what to strip away to almost nothing. Makes you want to exist in that world. It hits the same way pixels do. Show me a sprite from 1995 and something in my brain just opens up—that automatic nostalgic pull. Polygon art like this has the same quality. Timeless in a way that makes you think it’ll be someone’s pixel art eventually, the thing they point to years from now and feel that same untranslatable warmth. Monday, 1 September 2014. Sitting Still: I keep thinking about this one image from the book. Tsukuru’s at Shinjuku station with a cup of hot coffee, just sitting on a bench watching people get on and off trains. He’s terrified to get on one himself. That’s the whole thing. A guy who builds train stations for a living, completely paralyzed by the idea of actually boarding one. Murakami’s writing does this strange thing where he describes something in perfect detail—the coffee, the bench, people’s faces—and then he just leaps years ahead without announcing it. A room established perfectly and then suddenly it doesn’t matter because now it’s years later. He never makes it feel dramatic, just statements of fact and then you move on. The basic plot: Tsukuru, empty and colorless at thirty-six, was abandoned by his four best friends at sixteen with no reason given. A woman named Sara pushes him to go back and ask them why. The book is him talking to each of them and slowly understanding that knowing why doesn’t actually fix the hurt. Surreal stuff gets woven through it all. Dreams that might not be dreams. A six-fingered hand. Strange conversations. But Murakami never explains them or makes them feel weird. He just treats them as facts, the same way he treats coffee. It’s precision about reality, including the parts of reality that don’t follow the rules. Reading Murakami always does something odd. Not because the books are about things that happened to you—they’re not. But he describes waiting and fear and the way you can just accept terrible things by not fighting them. And you see yourself in that. The loneliness is specific enough that it becomes universal. The book ends without actually resolving anything. Tsukuru’s still uncertain, still colorless, still a little afraid of getting on the train. But something’s shifted in him anyway, something he doesn’t have words for. That unresolved feeling is the whole point. I read it over a few weeks in pieces. Afternoons with tea, nights with whisky. It’s the kind of book that demands you don’t rush it. It makes you sit still, which is maybe what it’s asking you to do. Monday, 1 September 2014. A Little Fun Must Be: The song just comes out. I can’t help it. In the subway, waiting in line, middle of the night with nothing to do—suddenly I’m singing it. “Ein bisschen Spaß muß sein,” the whole thing, Blanco’s voice somehow deep in my head like a splinter I can’t extract. It’s been happening for years, probably longer. The kind of thing that just attaches to you and you never find out why. The guy himself is actually broke. Seventy-seven, apparently owes his ex a hundred fifty grand in alimony or something. He’s got real problems—the kind that don’t go away. And yet his song, this throwaway hit from who knows when, is the thing that stays with you. Not his career, not his life. Just the song. Just those four minutes of terrible sincerity that somehow worked on you once and never stopped. So of course he remixed it with a car rental company. Sixt, I think. A hip-hop version of his biggest hit, which is either the most logical thing a broke seventies pop singer could do or the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Probably both. You’re stuck, so you lean into it. You make something absurd, maybe you make some money, maybe you don’t. Either way you’re out there remixing your own hit in a commercial. The song itself is genuinely terrible and genuinely perfect. The melody is aggressively earnest in a way that shouldn’t work but does. You hear it once and it’s in you. Been in me for years now, and I’ve stopped pretending I’ll ever get it out. The Sixt remix just makes it clearer—the original was always a little cheap, a little desperate, trying too hard to make you feel something. The new version is exactly the same, just with a beat and a car rental company behind it. I don’t know what happens to him now. Maybe the remix helped. Maybe he’s still underwater. All I know is the song will be stuck in my head in thirty years the same way it’s stuck now, and I’ll probably still be singing it at the worst possible moment, unable to stop myself, unable to explain why. Friday, 22 August 2014. Where Empathy Stops: I can’t get my head around the Islamic State. I’m usually good at understanding people—following their logic, seeing what drives them, even when I completely disagree. But this reaches a limit I didn’t know I had. These are people executing others in the street, crucifying them, building a state on terror and calling it holy. How do you get there? What kind of hatred, what faith, what brokenness has to exist for you to do that to another human being? I ask myself this and I just hit a wall. Sometimes I wonder if they’re all broken—cast-outs, people the world rejected, looking for somewhere they belong so badly they’ll join anything. But I don’t think that’s the whole answer. Some of them probably genuinely believe they’re right. That killing their own brothers and degrading their sisters is justified, even righteous. The thought makes me sick. Religion becomes something different when it’s used like this—not a guide or a question, but a tool for power, a language for cruelty. And it works. It recruits people, shapes them, makes them certain. My empathy has always been pretty expansive. I can get into someone’s head, understand where they’re coming from, hold complexity. But not this. Not all the way. Some people choose darkness in a way I can’t reach or fathom. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s where understanding has to stop. Sunday, 10 August 2014. Rita Ora’s Originals: adidas just put out a magazine dedicated to people who don’t conform. The whole thing’s structured around individuals who found their own aesthetic and stopped caring what everyone else thought—not performing it, just genuinely indifferent. Rita Ora’s got a collaboration in it, a full line with her name on it. She’s the kind of person who understands color and space, so it reads as a real thing, not a celebrity cash grab. The magazine’s built on a simple premise: the best style is the kind that doesn’t try. Good photography. People worth knowing. Cata Pirata. The Dandy Diary crew. Everyone else who made their own thing because fitting in was never in the cards. I’ve always gravitated to adidas because they get this at the design level. Their stuff doesn’t announce itself. You wear it because it works, because it looks right, because whoever made it cared about the fundamentals. No performance. Just the thing itself. That’s always been more interesting to me than whatever trend cycle everyone’s locked into. Friday, 1 August 2014. Dogs At Night: Nathan Whipple takes pictures of dogs at night. The premise of “Doggies At Night” is simple enough: point a camera in the dark and catch whatever expression lands. It’s always confused, always stupid. In daylight, dogs have a kind of performance running. They’re alert, or at least they’re busy enough to seem intentional. But in the dark, in a flash, you just get the animal—blank and unrehearsed, the face they wear when they’ve forgotten why they’re in the room. Whipple documents that face over and over. There’s something honest about it. Photography with no flattery. The dog doesn’t come across as cute or clever, just dumb and caught off-guard. For some reason, that simplicity works. The whole thing is pointless in the best way—no statement, no concept, just a record of dogs being themselves, which apparently means not thinking about anything. Tuesday, 29 July 2014. Rebuilding: For months this site spiraled through every possible direction at once—serious, trashy, minimal, magazine-like, a blog, back to something else entirely. The design kept changing. The voice changed. I tried on different versions constantly and never landed on anything that felt real. Somewhere in that I lost track of what the whole point was supposed to be in the first place. Originally it was supposed to be a place for people with taste who didn’t need to perform it. Real artists, real discoveries, real conversations. Not mainstream, but not precious about it either. Somewhere on the internet that actually mattered. A home for people who felt misunderstood by everything else. But it became the opposite: a joyless machine designed to feed the algorithm, to chase engagement, to appeal to whoever clicks the most. I was pulling random stuff from the internet, reshaping it slightly, and pushing it out. Generic viral garbage. I’d look at what went up and not recognize myself in it anymore. I had become Nine Gag with a slightly better design. The money thing is real. I need it. Servers cost money. Good people deserve to get paid. But somewhere I crossed from sustaining the thing into surrendering completely—just chasing whatever performed, regardless of whether I actually believed in it. I knew it while it was happening and did it anyway. August becomes a hard stop. No posting, no constant scrambling, just sitting with the basic question: what is this supposed to be when nobody’s watching the numbers? Not performance, not growth, not potential. Just: would I be proud of this? Is this something a person I respected would want to read? If the answer is no, nothing else matters. The only way forward is to believe in the work itself. Not the reach, not the metrics, not the future potential. Just the work. Just: is this honest? Is this real? Does this matter? So I’m rebuilding. Not for some grand relaunch narrative or announcement. Just to make something worth making. That’s the whole thing. Monday, 28 July 2014. When Design Stops Asking: Official fashion weeks are dead machinery—Berlin’s included. Every year they strain to match Paris or Milan and something real gets crushed in the process. It’s all performance. Designers convincing themselves they matter, models like ghosts, the whole scene performing significance while nothing actual happens. There’s another current in Berlin though—designers making work outside the system. Young people thinking differently, work that doesn’t need permission from the industry. That’s the actual thing worth watching. Someone made an alternative official recently, which is funny because it loses something the moment it becomes scheduled. But the impulse is right. Someone should keep pointing at what’s real and saying: this matters, not that machinery. I don’t know if it stays vital or just becomes another ladder people climb, another circuit like everything else eventually does. Probably the latter. But someone tried. Thursday, 24 July 2014. Wacken: Every July, Wacken Open Air fills a field in Schleswig-Holstein with thousands of people who know exactly why they’re there: Slayer, Motörhead, volume that probably breaks some kind of law. The festival doesn’t apologize for itself. It’s just mud, sound, and thousands of metalheads completely clear about what they came for. Knorkator’s on the bill too—German metal that sounds like a cartoon villain learned to shred—and that specificity is the whole point. Wacken isn’t trying to be something for everyone. It’s just the place where metalheads go, which is its own kind of integrity. No discovery angle, no wellness narrative, no one performing. Everyone’s there for the same reason, completely honest about it. Most festivals now are trying to be everything to everyone, which means nothing’s really for anyone. Wacken’s the opposite. It knows exactly what it is and doesn’t care if you get it. There’s something beautiful about that kind of focus, even just thinking about it from a distance. The German specificity of metal culture in the middle of pastoral countryside. The absolute refusal to soften anything. That matters. Wednesday, 23 July 2014. The Robots Remember: Basement Jaxx brought ’Never Say Never’ back, and it’s exactly what they do best—that propulsive, restless sound that moves through you before you notice it’s there. Built to repeat, to nest in clubs and cars until it’s just the sound of summer. The video is the strange part. It’s a future where people have forgotten how to move, and these twerking robots are the only ones who remember how. They’re the guardians of something we lost. There’s something bleak about that, which maybe is the point. But the song doesn’t linger on it. It’s too catchy, too perfectly made to waste energy thinking about the premise. Tuesday, 22 July 2014. Tokyo Tribe: Sion Sono’s adapting Tokyo Tribe2, a manga that ran for nine years in street-culture magazine Boon before it folded in 2008. The plot: a bomb in Shibuya, gangs carving up the city, Wu-RONZ working through the opposition, Kai Deguchi stuck between his captain’s pacifism and the mounting body count. Sono made Suicide Club and Love Exposure. He’s the kind of director who follows an idea past taste, past sense. The Tokyo Tribe trailer shows him doing the same thing here—neon, camp, obvious pleasure in treating the premise as material to play with rather than a text to honor. He doesn’t care about being faithful. Which might be the only reason to watch it. A straightforward gang-war film would be forgettable. Sono soaking everything in trash and excess might find something real in the premise. Or it might just be noise. Rather watch him fail at something weird than win at something safe. Sunday, 20 July 2014. Off the Ground: On hot days when you’re stuck at a desk and the sun’s doing that thing where it burns straight through the window, you start thinking about stupid comfort solutions. A fan that barely helps. A cold drink with ice that melts in six minutes. Anything to make sitting still feel less like punishment. I found out about this Korean foot hammock thing called Fuut—costs about 25 bucks—and honestly it’s the kind of small, dumb product that actually works. You clip it under your desk and your feet just hang there. No pressure on your legs, no weird circulation thing happening. The absurdity of dangling your feet while you work shouldn’t be this relaxing but it is. There’s something about not having your feet planted on the ground all day. You fidget less, or maybe you just fidget differently. Your legs don’t fall asleep. It’s not going to change your life or fix anything serious, but on a day when you’re already feeling sticky and irritable, getting your feet off the ground feels like a small victory. Wednesday, 16 July 2014. Lykke Li’s Gunshot: I don’t know how to explain Lykke Li to people who don’t get it. There’s no argument that works. You either find her hypnotic or you don’t, and if you do, there’s only one way forward. Her first album, “Youth Novels,” she actually hates. But it’s perfect. She hates it and it’s perfect at the same time. There’s a kind of work that exists on a scale where normal judgment stops applying. She made something unreachable and then moved on, which somehow makes it hit harder. “Gunshot” is the new one. It’s big—the kind of ballad that demands everything. You turn it up, you sing it into your chest, you can’t listen passively. You’re committed from the first second. The most overwhelming thing she’s done in years. When you find an artist whose work just clicks like that, you wait for whatever comes next. Not out of hope or expectation—there’s no contract. Just because they’re the real thing, and that’s enough. Tuesday, 15 July 2014. How I Wreck It: I’ve always had this thing where I wreck myself. Other people chase happiness—money, love, freedom—and sometimes they find it. Me, I seem built for destruction. Give me two paths and I’ll take the one that burns everything down. My mind goes somewhere beyond right and wrong. I drown myself in false pride and priorities that don’t make sense, grievances I’ve completely invented. Everything narrows to me, to what I’m owed, who owes me obedience. Anyone who refuses gets hurt in ways they’ve never imagined. I wind myself tighter and tighter. Within minutes I’ve become a live wire. The person who got close enough to notice—and they’re always good, always trying—becomes the target. I can’t handle that kind of goodness because I’m broken in a way that only sees the bad. When there’s nothing bad to find, I get restless and make it up. Then I become this thing: spitting, wild, no boundaries, no mercy, no sense. I distort facts and cling to ideas that crumble the moment I speak them. Then I start swinging. Everything vicious and dishonest I can throw. The voice inside telling me I’m insane, the one I can almost hear—I drown it. I’m god and you don’t get a say. One moment of clarity could stop it. Just shut up. Just nod. Just break. But every word reads as a challenge and I can’t quit. I’m burning, fever-pitch, now I’m ugly about it. Now I just want to wound. I fire off lies dressed as truth, each one forged in whatever twisted logic is running my brain. Trying to put myself at the center of everything when I’m background noise at best. I don’t think about consequences, the future, the bridges I’m burning. The voice that tried to save me—I’ve killed it. Out of me comes lightning, pure chaos. The person in front of me, the one who actually wanted what’s best, is holding my arm with wet eyes and I pull away. I say something worse. Everything goes black and quiet. I come out of it on a wasteland. Empty, destroyed. The victory of choosing wrong again—it’s a frozen place where I’m just alone. The demons are gone. Now there’s only regret, and regret doesn’t fix anything. Nobody comes back from what I’ve done. So I get up, dust myself off, and keep moving with one hope: that next time I’ll make the choice that doesn’t turn me into this version of myself. That I’ll actually know how to want what I have. Monday, 14 July 2014. Still Shooting: Terry Richardson was getting demolished with sexual misconduct accusations from all over the place, but nothing stuck legally, so he just kept shooting. Scandal didn’t slow him down. He photographed Jessie Andrews. She’d become the biggest porn star in America at that point, basically replacing Sasha Grey. If you knew the internet at all, you knew who she was. There’s something strange about seeing someone from that world end up in mainstream photo portfolios. Like they’re crossing between two completely different scenes. Richardson and Andrews together—he’s carrying all the scandal and creepiness, she’s got all the notoriety from being the most visible person in an industry that’s basically built on garbage and celebrity. They shot together. I’ve never understood Richardson’s photographs. Something uncomfortable in all of them. Monday, 14 July 2014. What Japan Won’t Print: Rokudenashiko built a kayak shaped like her own vagina. That kind of project makes a certain sense—you recognize the person, the headspace, the refusal to make apologies for it. Her real name is Megumi Igarashi, she’s in her early forties, and she ended up arrested for uploading a 3D model online. The file was free to download. Anyone with a 3D printer could make one. In Japan, that’s illegal—you cannot distribute uncensored genitals online, not even as a file, not even when it’s your own body. The government treated it as a serious crime. This is the contradiction that gets you. Japan has massive public festivals celebrating genitals. The porn industry operates in genuinely deranged territory—tentacle fetish material that would make most countries’ regulators lose their minds. And yet you get arrested for a 3D model of your own vagina. What stuck with me was what they didn’t criminalize. Photobooks of semi-naked elementary school children—still legal. Still being made and sold. The government drew a very specific line, and it has nothing to do with protecting what matters. Sometimes what a country chooses to criminalize tells you everything. Japan made its choice. Monday, 14 July 2014. After Pond: I watched the later seasons of Doctor Who almost entirely because of Amy Pond, which really means because of Karen Gillan. Not because of the character—because of what she was doing in it. She had this red hair, sharp angles, this Scottish edge, and she made the whole production feel less like it was running on fumes. I was completely into it. The thing is, I wasn’t really thinking about her as a full person with a career outside the show. She’d done other stuff, sure, but I was locked into the Pond thing. That’s how it works when you watch something enough times. The actor becomes the role. Everything outside that frame just stops existing for you. Then Esquire had her in a shoot and some interview, around 26 or so. She’d kept working, gotten older, done the normal thing. There was a joke in the piece—something about a woman and a bar—that I completely didn’t understand. Read it twice and felt like I was missing something obvious, or maybe she was, or maybe it just doesn’t land the same way on the page. But that was the whole thing. She was there, talking about other things, other work. Not Amy Pond. Just Karen Gillan, a Scottish actress who’d had a whole career that had nothing to do with me or my attachment to a character she’d played years before. It’s weird how that works. You watch something enough and it becomes this locked-down version of someone, and then they just keep living and you’re still stuck in the frame. Saturday, 12 July 2014. When Summer Actually Starts: Winter in Germany is a held breath. Months of gray, wet nothing while you tell yourself it’s temporary, it’s building toward something. You survive on the idea of summer. Then April comes and the festivals announce their lineups and suddenly the waiting gets specific. Splash, Wacken, Deichbrand, Hurricane—these aren’t interchangeable experiences. They’re regional institutions with their own character. Wacken is for the metal crowd, genuinely committed to the thing. Splash draws a younger, weirder mix. Deichbrand feels chaotic in the best way. Southside is massive and still maintains something real beneath it. Each one has its own festival culture, its own tradition. I went to Deichbrand once during one of those rainstorms where the field becomes basically unusable mud. Everything is ruined. Your shoes are gone. The bands are still playing and everyone’s just trying to keep moving, seeing what they drove for. That’s the calculation you make at festivals—some amount of physical discomfort is always acceptable for the right moment. You know it won’t fix anything and you go anyway. The festival circuit is where German music culture actually lives. Not in the clubs or proper concert halls but in temporary field cities where the usual rules don’t apply. You drive through the night with people you half-know. You camp badly. You see bands you’ve been waiting for and also stumble into stages you didn’t plan on. It’s inefficient and chaotic and that’s exactly why it works. By May if you’re into it you’re already figuring out which festivals you can actually make, which weekends you can afford to disappear, how far you’re willing to drive. You’re looking at lineups not as a checklist but as a rough guide—the actual magic is what you find between the scheduled things. You’re already thinking about logistics, already committing to something that will be exhausting and worth it. There’s something about the German festival season that feels like the real counterpoint to the rest of the year. Orderly society shuts down for a few months and gets replaced by these temporary anarchies with their own economies and social rules. You belong there in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t go. By the time June hits, if you’re going to do this, you’re already there in your head. The season has already started. Friday, 11 July 2014. The Winning Streak: That summer Germany’s football team couldn’t lose. Every match felt predetermined, like watching something that was supposed to happen finally happen. The whole country had permission to care without irony. It was strange. My friend organized a watch party. Nothing elaborate—just burgers, cheap cider, people drifting in and out of a space that got hot and loud by halftime. Someone had hung a bunch of Adiletten from the tree out back like some kind of fever dream decoration. Stupid detail, but it worked. It told you everything about the mood: nobody was pretending this was serious, but everyone wanted to be there anyway. Leni showed up actually knowing how to play football, which made the rest of us look like we’d never held one. She spent half the match demonstrating why with a ball at her feet. The weather couldn’t decide—rain, then sun, then rain again. I remember the sky more than the score. By the time the match ended with Germany cruising to another victory, I was thinking about that phrase people use for moments like this. Culture. Presence. Time and place. Not in some precious literary way—just the simple fact that a room full of us were experiencing the same small electric thing at the same moment. Eating badly, drinking worse, nobody caring because the football was doing what it was supposed to do. Those nights don’t come that often. When they do, you notice. Wednesday, 9 July 2014. Polka, Actually: There’s a high school girl from Fulda named Marilena who does that folk-music-variety-show thing—Musikantenstadl—and her new single is called “Hey DJ leg a Polka auf.” Play a Polka, DJ. The contrast is the joke: here’s someone from the most traditional, wholesome corner of German music entertainment asking a club DJ to abandon techno for polka. But here’s the thing. Hours of the same four-on-the-floor beat does get monotonous. It’s hypnotic until it isn’t, and then it’s just relentless. I get club culture, the appeal of surrender to a single repeated pattern, but there’s definitely a point where you hit a wall and think: okay, what if this changed. What if there was a melody. What if something had an ending. Marilena probably made the song just to be funny, existing as she does in a completely different musical universe. But she’s also saying out loud the thing people in clubs sometimes feel but don’t say, because admitting you’re tired of the beat feels like admitting the whole thing isn’t for you. It’s a small permission to think: yeah, this is good, but it’s also kind of relentless. I’ve never actually heard the track. Don’t know if it’s good or just novelty. But I like that she made it anyway—that she exists far enough outside club culture to not care what the correct opinion is supposed to be. Friday, 4 July 2014. Kids Who Can’t Write: Little kids are hilarious. Unless you’re stuck next to one on a plane screaming for nine hours straight because they don’t understand what’s happening. Most of them are too stupid to walk, too stupid to eat without making a mess—and definitely too stupid to write. But there’s something about that incompetence that’s perfect. The stuff kids actually write is gold. Not because the kids are talented, but because they’ve failed in the most specific way possible. They’re reaching for a word, they have the shape of it somewhere in their head, and what comes out is better than the thing they meant. Like “My dad is the best cock ever.” You know what they were trying to say. They just haven’t learned which word yet, and somehow the mistake is truer than the truth would be. Thursday, 3 July 2014. If Berlin Were Syria: I saw a website that mapped the Syrian civil war onto Germany to make it feel real. If Syria’s destruction became Germany’s: Leverkusen would be empty. Berlin would be a ghost city. Munich, Frankfurt, all hollow. Eight and a half million people on the road. The numbers have been available for years—Assad, the collapse, the whole machinery of it grinding away. But statistics stay abstract. Numbers don’t land. This visualization forces it: your own city in ruins, streets you actually know as rubble. It’s manipulative, sure, but it works. You feel something seeing Berlin burn in your head that you don’t feel reading casualty figures from Damascus. The site runs the same comparison for the US, Britain, Japan—everywhere the point is the same. Make it proximate. Make it click. And that’s really all it is, just a tool that works the way humans actually work, not the way we wish we worked. We care about what’s close. What’s distant stays distant unless someone forces a mirror on you. The visualization doesn’t change anything about Syria. It just changes what you feel, and only then because it’s not Syria anymore—it’s home. Thursday, 3 July 2014. Plants Can Hear You: Plants can hear when they’re being eaten. University of Missouri researchers played the sound of chewing to plants and watched them panic—defensive chemicals flooding their system, basically a silent scream. The plants heard the danger and completely lost it. Which means plants are dying with awareness. If I’m vegan or vegetarian because I don’t want to kill anything, I’m still a murderer—just of something that can’t run away or beg or look like it’s suffering. The logic is stupid but it’s kind of perfect. I draw my line based on what makes me uncomfortable. Lettuce is fine. Cows aren’t. Fish is a maybe. Plants are definitely okay because they don’t look like they’re dying. But it’s all violence, all compromise. I’m just picking which deaths I can live with. Give it a few years and there’ll be something else to feel guilty about, and everyone will just move on to whatever the next clean diet is. Thursday, 3 July 2014. Back to Piep: My Tamagotchi lasted 21 days before it died or flew back to its home planet. I don’t remember which—it was 1997, I was too young to care about the difference. Those little pixel creatures were everywhere that year, piping and beeping during class until every teacher in the building lost their mind. Feed them, play with them, clean them up—it was constant, and I was into it. Now, over 20 years later, they’re coming back. The new Tamagotchi 4u costs around 60 euros and comes in pink, white, blue, and purple. You can sync them with other devices, hook them to your phone, or visit special stations to buy them food, toys, and outfits. Fully networked now. Which is weird because the whole appeal before was that they were so simple, so deliberately useless. I don’t know when they’ll show up here, or if I’ll get one. There’s always something strange about rediscovering something you loved as a kid. You know it won’t hit the same way. What felt urgent at nine just looks quaint now. But a toy that won’t let you forget about it, that keeps piping no matter what you’re doing—there’s something honest in that design. I’m curious what it would feel like to keep one alive this time. Maybe I’d make it past 21 days. Wednesday, 2 July 2014. Can’t Breathe: I had no idea who Bianca Balti was. Still don’t, except that Playboy put her on the cover of the July/August issue, shot by Greg Lotus in Malibu. That’s all I need to know. For years Playboy seemed committed to proving nobody looked at it for the photography anymore. Aging actresses, cosmetic surgery disasters, an entire magazine full of people who’d clearly given up on the idea of being attractive. Then suddenly they remember what they actually do well: putting someone beautiful in front of a camera and getting out of the way. If you want to breathe normally, stay away from these pictures. She’s the kind of person where the lens stops trying and just tells the truth. Wednesday, 2 July 2014. Sailor Moon Redux: The premiere was in Tokyo on Usagi’s birthday, which felt like the kind of detail the Sailor Moon franchise would architect. Someone recorded it despite the warnings, and the new opening plus transformation sequence were already scattered across image boards and forums by the time the official embargo lifted. That’s when it actually mattered, not the scheduled July 5th launch. I grew up on the Cartoon Network dub, so the idea of a new Sailor Moon felt disorienting. The show had already crystallized into pure nostalgia—one of those childhood things you assume will never be revisited. Crystal was supposed to follow the manga more closely, with tighter line work, fewer of the cheap shortcuts the original relied on. Whether that was an upgrade or just different, I couldn’t say. No German translation had been announced, which meant the familiar wait. Localization was never guaranteed, especially not at launch. For months or longer, the show only existed in its original language, or you hunted pirate subtitles. There was an odd appeal to the leaked footage being available right now, grainy and bootleg, rather than locked behind some distant release date. Sailor Moon had always been different—a show made for young girls that actually cared about what adolescence felt like. Most anime just borrowed the aesthetics. I wasn’t confident the reboot would preserve that under a prettier visual style. The leak was, in a way, the perfect entry point. This was how you discovered things now—underground, friend to friend, scattered through message boards in degraded quality. The premiere happened thousands of miles away, but by morning it existed everywhere. That felt truer than any official date ever would. Tuesday, 1 July 2014. Becky G - Shower: Becky G made “Shower” happen and somehow it stuck around. It’s nothing complicated—just a catchy hook, shower metaphors that don’t mean anything, la-di-da vocals that get lodged in your brain for weeks. For a minute there it was in genuine competition with “Call Me Maybe” and “Friday” for most obnoxious earworm of the summer. G’s got this distinctive thing going on—the voice, the look—that makes her read differently than the usual plastic pop stars, and the song doesn’t try smoothing that out. It’s minimal, it’s dumb, and it works better than it has any right to. Tuesday, 1 July 2014. Small, Strange Graves: Finding dead animals as a kid left marks. I’d discover one by the road or in the grass at my grandmother’s house—a bird, a rabbit, sometimes a cat—and I’d just stand there. They’d look almost fine, just still, and something in me would break. I’d think about whoever owned it, or whoever it knew, and I’d start crying. Maria Ionova-Gribina, a Russian photographer, seems to understand that same feeling. When she finds these small dead animals, she builds them graves. Not austere ones. She surrounds them with flowers and berries and grass stems, all this color and care, the kind of attention you’d give something that mattered. Then she takes a picture. What gets to you is the deliberateness. The time spent on something so small and unmourned. It’s not trying to be profound or beautiful. It’s just someone saying, here’s a small death, and I’m going to remember it anyway. Maybe that’s why these images stay with me. They look at those small deaths the way I looked at them as a kid—with actual attention, actual sadness. They say it mattered. Tuesday, 1 July 2014. That World Cup Summer: Summer could’ve been the thing—the Spree, late-night rooftops, sun on your face in some park, Murakami or Mian Mian in your hands. Quiet, drifting, unscheduled. That summer. Instead: drunk office workers planted in front of shitty screens, mechanics honking in circles for hours, supermarket cashiers who couldn’t tell you what the DFB stood for suddenly giving play-by-play on every foul, every dive, every corner. Night after night. Week after week. The whole city had one brain. I’m not saying football is bad. I’m saying summer shouldn’t have to apologize for existing, and quiet was no longer something I could just have. Trying to read in a park meant someone nearby was already yelling. By August I was probably against football. Just a little. That summer didn’t happen. There were weeks of other people’s excitement with gaps in between. Monday, 30 June 2014. Enrique in Malta: Leni and I flew to Malta on a whim—we had one free night and Isle of MTV was happening in Floriana, and that seemed like enough reason. The lineup was standard festival stuff: Hardwell, Kiesza, Dizzee Rascal, Nicole Scherzinger. Then, late in the night, with the church behind the stage lit up white and the crowd at maximum density, Enrique Iglesias walked out. Just appeared, like he’d been backstage the whole time, waiting for the exact moment when everyone had sweated enough. It worked. The crowd went off instantly—kids at the front, guys who clearly lived in gyms, women in their forties who’d driven in for the night. All of us suddenly pressed together in thirty-degree heat, moving as one thing. Viviana and Lilly, two English beauty bloggers I’d somehow ended up standing next to, were dancing in that uncertain way you do at festivals, not quite sure if you’re having fun or just surviving. There were these two guys next to us who danced like every beat mattered, making grand gestures at nothing, but that’s always how it is. You go to enough of these and the types stop bothering you. Malta itself is small—a compressed island in the Mediterranean we’d somehow missed in all our traveling. We didn’t have time to hunt for the hidden beaches or the narrow streets that are probably wonderful. But what we saw was exactly right: blue water, white stone, that specific smell of salt and old streets. The kind of place that doesn’t change, which starts to feel like the point of being somewhere so old. Whether we’ll go back is another question. Enrique Iglesias probably won’t still be touring. But Malta will be there, indifferent, exactly the same. Monday, 30 June 2014. Kira Kira Killer: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu makes pop music that shouldn’t work but does, backed by videos that look like someone fed a synthesizer LSD and asked it to direct a commercial. “PONPONPON,” “Fashion Monster,” “Invader Invader”—each one a new way to make you forget what you’re doing and just stare at the screen. Her latest, “Kira Kira Killer,” is more of the same: all sparkle and color and good vibes, the kind of thing that could only come out of Harajuku. What gets me is the complete commitment. There’s no irony, no winking at the absurdity—she just goes all the way in, every time, which somehow circles back around to being genuinely catchy. The weirdness is the whole point, and that’s why it works. Saturday, 28 June 2014. Grimes Is Back: Visions is one of the best albums of the last ten years. I’ll just say it directly. “Genesis,” “Oblivion,” those tracks lived on endless repeat. The whole record had this kind of broken elegance that made it hard to listen to anything else for a while. And almost nobody cared. It hit 67 in the UK, barely scraped the US top 100. People sleep on obvious things. Grimes has a new song now called “Go.” Rihanna didn’t want it—passed, for whatever reason. I have no idea why. It’s got that same quality, that sense of something beautiful and fractured at the same time. Sounds off until you get what it’s doing, then you can’t unhear it. She’s always been out of sync with what the machine wants to sell. Visions proved she didn’t need the machine to work. This new track is her saying the same thing again, which feels right. Friday, 27 June 2014. Funland: Bompas & Parr just turned the Museum of Sex in New York into the room I didn’t know I needed. They call it “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground,” but what it is is a space packed with enormous, soft, gleaming breasts in every color and texture, and you get to spend hours bouncing around it like you’re eight years old again, except the playground equipment is entirely made of tits. These guys make art about sensation and desire without irony or apology, which is rarer than it should be. They’re not interested in critiquing anything or embedding theory into the experience. They build environments that celebrate the fact that bodies exist, pleasure is real, and why should any of that require justification? The breasts are the work. Interact with them. That’s the entire point, stated clearly and without hesitation. There’s something genuinely generous about that kind of clarity. Most art that engages with sexuality gets tangled up in anxiety—all that second-guessing about whether you’re being too direct, not direct enough, serious enough, clear enough. Bompas & Parr skip the whole neurotic spiral. They build something that makes you feel good and implicitly give you permission to just enjoy it without parsing the meaning into something else. The meaning is the feeling itself. Standing in a room made of desire—actually made of it, not symbolically gesturing at it—is refreshing in a way that’s hard to articulate. It’s permission. It’s clarity. It’s artists saying: here is something about your body that’s true, and we built an environment to celebrate it. No apologies. No layers. Just enormous, joyful breasts and the space to be happy in their presence. Friday, 27 June 2014. Permission to Curse: Chris Broad brought a book to Japan about swearing—specifically about the word fuck and how to use it. Which makes sense if you understand that Japanese culture doesn’t really allow that kind of emotional venting. Everything stays bottled, polite, restrained. There’s a social weight against it that starts early. So he hands this book around and these kids discover something we take for granted—a word that lets you just let it out. You can see it hit them. They say fuck and something shifts. It’s permission they’ve never had, this simple release they didn’t know they were missing. Not everything needs to be profound. Sometimes it’s just funny and kind of beautiful in a dumb way—watching someone get access to something as basic as the right curse word. Tuesday, 24 June 2014. Booboo: A guinea pig named Booboo is currently the internet’s favorite animal, which is strange because he’s just a guinea pig. He lives with his owner Megan and two other guinea pigs named Titi and Teddy, they’re all very small and fuzzy, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this is what the internet has decided to love right now. Somewhere between Reddit and 9Gag and Facebook, a collective decision was made that this rodent is the cutest thing to have ever lived. This has happened before. There was Grumpy Cat, who had a stupid permanent frown and somehow became a brand. Lil Bub looked like a genetic accident and that made her beloved. Prince Chunk was just a fat pug, but being fat was apparently enough. Each one gets their moment and then fades. But a guinea pig is different—you’re not famous for having an interesting expression or being absurdly obese. You’re famous for being small. Booboo’s main distinguishing feature is that his owner puts glasses on him sometimes, which I admit is funny. Tiny glasses on a guinea pig work because there’s no way they don’t. But that’s the whole thing. He’s two years old, he looks like every other guinea pig, and millions of people have watched him eat a carrot and felt something close to joy. Not ironic joy. Actual joy. There’s something depressing about that, or maybe something honest. The world is mostly bad, and then you see a guinea pig in glasses and for a minute you don’t have to think about anything else. It’s not meaningful, it’s not even clever, it’s just a small thing being small. Maybe that’s enough sometimes. Maybe that has to be enough. Tuesday, 24 June 2014. Equal Rights for Some: Gay and bisexual men are banned from donating blood in Germany. Not for medical reasons. Just because of a law written decades ago that nobody bothered to fix. Meanwhile, Germany markets itself as progressive, enlightened, a beacon of tolerance in Europe. And maybe it’s true enough in other ways. But there’s this bureaucratic exclusion that completely contradicts the image. Discrimination that’s so quiet and official that most people don’t even know it exists. I find that gap interesting—what a place claims to be versus what it actually permits. The quiet laws that don’t fit the narrative. Blood is needed constantly, people die without it, but there’s an arbitrary group excluded by a rule that makes no scientific sense. When discrimination gets written into law, it becomes boring. Official. Not obviously evil, just… administrative. So it persists while the country keeps telling itself a story about its values. Germany’s not the only place with these contradictions, but when something costs lives, you’d think it would be higher on the priority list. Monday, 23 June 2014. Germany in ’14: Everyone in Berlin was watching the same thing that night. We crowded into some corporate event—the kind that sounds meaningless until you remember that you actually wanted to be there, that nobody coerced you, that the World Cup mattered and Germany was playing America. The screens were enormous, the beer was cold, and nothing existed beyond the next ninety minutes. The room held its breath. When the goal came early, the place erupted in that pure, uncomplicated joy that only sports can pull out of cynical adults. We won 1-0, which meant it stayed tight all the way through. Not one of those blowouts where you stop caring by halftime. Then it was done. Everyone dispersed back to their actual lives, and I never saw most of them again. Watch parties are temporary cities that form and dissolve around a single event. They’re not built to last. Monday, 23 June 2014. The Reset: I kept thinking Sailor Moon would stay finished. That was the ending—Usagi made it to the moon, destroyed the thing trying to destroy the world, and that was supposed to be it. The final act, the actual conclusion. Fifteen years went by and I basically forgot about it. Now they’re remaking the entire thing from the beginning, starting over from the 1992 manga, which means I’m about to watch her become this cosmic savior again like it’s brand new. The new art style is what everyone’s mad about. It’s sharper, more grown-up, less cute than the ’90s version. Designed for people who actually want to watch Sailor Moon now without feeling like they’re sneaking kids’ cartoons in the middle of the night. I get it—you want what you remember, the thing that made you feel something back then. But obviously you can’t remake it exactly as is. If they’d done that it would just be a museum piece. Takeuchi clearly wanted something that honored the original manga but looked like it was made now, for people who’ve actually lived fifteen more years since the original aired. It’s on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Neon Alley—everywhere—starting July 5. I’ll probably watch the first episode the day it drops and then completely space on the rest until I binge it all at three in the morning in a week. The weird part is the reset itself. Sailor Moon’s always been built on cyclical time—worlds breaking and restarting, timelines looping, everything ending so it can begin again. And the franchise is literally doing that to itself right now. Usagi gets maybe thirty seconds of being a normal person before the universe reaches down and pulls her into it all again. It’s the plot doing what the plot does. The show has become what it’s always been about. Monday, 23 June 2014. Hi Brit: Gal Volinez made a video called ’Hi Brit’ where he inserted himself into ’Work Bitch’ in Britney’s place. Same choreography, same outfit, same everything. The joke’s obvious but it lands on execution. There’s something satisfying about a parody that doesn’t punch down but just slides in sideways, matching every move so exactly that you almost stop noticing the swap. It’s the kind of thing that only works if you know the original perfectly—if you can step into that space and have it still feel the same way. Tuesday, 17 June 2014. Tokyo from Above: Seeing a city from altitude changes how you understand it. Tokyo becomes pure geometry at that height—the grid of buildings, streets cutting through in neat lines. All that order is startling when you move through it on the ground, where it dissolves into chaos. Drone footage reveals what the place actually is. Everything structured, efficient, visually satisfying without needing to announce itself. The repetition of roofs, the density, the clean breaks where parks or water cuts through. Apparently residents don’t mind drones flying overhead. They wave at them. There’s something nice about that—people acknowledging the camera passing by, this small gesture toward coexistence with technology. Monday, 16 June 2014. The Bikini Brief: Someone built a men’s G-string bikini and put it up for sale at seven euros. JQK Mens Sexy Bikini G-string Thong Jock Brief Underwear 3303 Red—the name is pure catalog maximalism, every descriptor crammed in hoping something sticks. It’s a red pouch, small and shameless. The marketing swears it’ll make you the undisputed star at the pool. And it will—everyone will look. Just not for the reasons the copy wants. Seven euros for instant infamy. Friday, 13 June 2014. Nothing Like It: The sun hits your head, cold beer in one hand, water gun in the other, driving through the American middle with friends toward whatever lake comes next—past cemeteries and junkyards and desert, thinking about nothing but cold water and the next mile. That’s summer. Weeks of this: driving in the heat through landscape that changes color and texture, green to brown to nothing, all under a sun that just doesn’t stop. The variety keeps it from getting boring—half-dead towns, empty stretches, sudden water or trees, sky that goes on forever. You don’t think about any of it, you just drive. American space does something to you. It sprawls and empties. You pass through places that might be towns or might just be buildings. You stop when you want water, when someone needs to sleep, when the heat gets too much. Then you move again. The water guns are dumb and perfect—an excuse to stay loose and not think about anything. The people matter. You need friends who don’t get bored or restless, who don’t need to document or perform, who can just exist in the rhythm of being on the road for weeks. Days blend together and that’s fine. What stays with you isn’t pictures. It’s the cold water, the glare off chrome, dust on your tongue at some nothing exit, the highway sound at night when everyone’s asleep. Those things stick. You get a few weeks like that and then they’re over, or they happen again and you’re not paying attention anymore. Time where you’re just present, following the heat and the movement and whoever you’re with. That’s the whole thing. Friday, 13 June 2014. Astra Nackt: Astra made a summer beer called Nackt—the whole campaign around nakedness and freedom. The bottle’s designed to stand out, curvy and bare. You see it in the shop and grab it because it’s cold and you’re hot, not because the marketing convinced you. Every beer brand tries the escape angle, but it only sticks because sometimes cold beer really is the escape. By the time you’re halfway through, you’ve forgotten the campaign ever existed. Thursday, 12 June 2014. Still Not Enough: I remember when having a big TV meant something. Twenty-five inches felt like cinema. Thirty-six inches felt obscene. A projection screen was the fantasy of someone rich enough to waste money on it. Now everyone’s got a screen the size of a small car, and somehow it’s still not enough. Titan—some British company I’d never heard of—just unveiled the Zeus, a 4K television measuring 380 inches across. House-high. Costs 1.2 million euros. You can run twenty channels simultaneously, which I guess is useful if you want to watch absolutely everything at once and understand nothing. Only four of them exist. Two have already been sold to anonymous buyers, which says everything you need to know about who has money and what they want to do with it. There’s a test unit at Cannes that showed up during the World Cup, which might be the most absurd placement I’ve ever heard—film festival meets sporting event meets ’come see this enormous thing we made.’ I can picture it: some oligarch’s living room, or a sports bar so enormous it needs its own zip code. The point isn’t really to watch anymore. The point is to have. To say you have something no one else has, something so gratuitous and oversized it becomes almost like sculpture. It’s the end of a very particular kind of wanting—the kind that gets duller every time you feed it. There’s something funny about it, though. We’ve spent decades shrinking our screens—phones in our pockets, tablets on the couch—and here’s Titan saying the answer was always to go the opposite direction. Get one the size of a building. Watch the World Cup like it’s a public event happening in your living room. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe it’s just the last gasp of a guy who has everything else and needs one more impossible thing. Thursday, 12 June 2014. The Stare: Six in the morning outside Berghain. Still moving, barely—reeking of the night, pupils blown out, the kind of drunk where you stop noticing how cold it is. Sven Marquardt’s at the door. He looks at me the way he looks at everyone, and I understand immediately that I’m failing a test I didn’t know I was taking. Sven’s been at that door long enough to stop being a person and start being an institution. No rulebook, no list, no system. He watches you and decides if you understand what the Berghain is actually trying to be. The stare is the whole conversation. You hold it or you don’t. There’s something I respect in that clarity. In a city slowly turning itself into a theme park of what it used to be, Berghain still means something because it’s genuinely hard to get into. You can’t buy access. Can’t finesse past it with the right outfit or the right friends. You show up as yourself and hope Sven thinks you belong. Ray-Ban created a promotional staring contest with Sven, which is funny in that hollow way—a sunglasses company trying to bottle the last genuine gatekeeping left in Berlin club culture and package it as an experience you can win. They’re right that Sven’s interesting. They’ve just completely missed what makes him matter. What makes him matter is that he’s real. The club’s real. The people inside are there because they actually wanted to badly enough to pass the test. The moment you guarantee entry through a branded event, you’ve killed what you were reaching for. Tuesday, 10 June 2014. Seventeen Kinds of Beef: Carpaccio, brisket, cheese steak, parmesan patty, ground beef with jalapeños, tongue, jus, beef ham—seventeen different kinds of beef stacked in one sandwich at Red’s True BBQ in Manchester and Leeds. Around 2,500 calories, thirty quid, served on Father’s Day because the timing felt right. This exists almost as a dare. Not sophisticated or clever, just sheer commitment to the idea that more is fundamentally better. You look at it and feel some mix of repulsion and genuine need to understand what seventeen different beef preparations actually taste like together. It’s a burger with no interest in proportion or elegance. It just wants to be huge. There’s something perfectly aligned about serving it on Father’s Day—meat, indulgence, the stubborn appetite to eat something impractical just because you can. No counting calories. No apologies. I’d buy a plane ticket just to eat this. Not for the museums or the countryside, just this burger and whatever happens to my stomach afterward. Tuesday, 10 June 2014. What It’s Worth: Bride Price was an app that launched in Nigeria—created by the agency Anakle—where you’d input measurements about women (leg length, facial symmetry, weight) and get back a number. A price. The creator defended it as honoring tradition, which is what you say when you want to scale something ugly and keep your conscience clean. Bride price is real in Nigeria and elsewhere, a practice with history and weight. But something happens when you automate it. You’re not preserving a tradition at that point—you’re turning it into a product. The negotiation, whatever humanity might’ve survived in the old practice, gets flattened into input fields and an algorithm. It becomes mechanical. Impersonal in a way that’s worse than the personal injustice it came from. The backlash was immediate. The response was predictable—cultural preservation, tradition, that’s just how things are. And it’s true that every culture finds ways to justify the reduction of people to their utility or their bodies. But there’s something specifically hollow about digitizing something that was already wrong, about making it scalable and algorithmic. You don’t have to reckon with anything when an app is doing the thinking for you. I’m not going to pretend I’m the one to decide what’s authentic to Nigerian culture or not. But turning something ugly into code, into something frictionless and automated—that feels like its own corruption. Tuesday, 10 June 2014. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s house looks like the bedroom of a six-year-old American girl, which somehow feels like the most honest thing I’ve ever heard about a pop star. Found an interview with Francesca Dunn where she just talks about it plainly—champagne, Miyazaki, the recurring nightmare where someone’s chasing her, how she’s moved on from Draco Malfoy to Katy Perry. No performance. No explanation. Just what’s true. That’s what gets me about it. She doesn’t curate a deeper version of herself for the interview. She just names what she likes and how she lives. Her house looks that way because she wanted it to. That’s who she is. You listen to “PONPONPON” for years and think you’ve got it figured out, but you’re just guessing from the outside. The real thing is stranger than you’d imagine. She’s not trying to be interesting—that’s exactly why she is. Monday, 9 June 2014. Heat: The day the thermometer hit thirty-six degrees, I spent the afternoon looking at Gavin O’Neill’s photographs of Barbara Fialho for Australian GQ. She was at the beach, which was the obvious choice when it gets that hot. The summer had already won; this was just acknowledgment. At least the light was good. Sunday, 8 June 2014. That Looks Like Water: First time I saw one, I thought it was a joke—this perfect sphere of clear liquid no bigger than a cherry, sitting on a leaf like it had fallen from the sky. Someone told me it was dessert and I laughed. Shingen Mochi from Yamanashi, a transparent rice cake that looks exactly like a water droplet frozen in place. I don’t know the exact recipe, but the clarity is perfect. You’re genuinely fooled for a moment. When it hits your mouth it dissolves completely, that slippery film of gelatin collapsing into sweetness before you register any texture. Cool on a hot day. Gone in half a second. It’s the kind of thing Japanese sweets do that Western desserts don’t bother with—the visual trick, the textural surprise, the insistence that food should mess with you a little before you eat it. By the time it melts you’ve already had the moment. I don’t know if I’d go hunting for one, but if someone handed me one on a hot afternoon I’d take it without hesitation. There’s something right about a dessert that refuses to announce itself. Saturday, 7 June 2014. Sailor Moon, Grown Up: Sailor Moon gets remade enough that you stop expecting anything. These reboots tend to split two ways: either full nostalgia where everything’s soft and warm, or hard anime where you lose what made the manga interesting. The new Crystal trailer is different. The designs actually look aged up instead of just redrawn bigger. Usagi’s still Usagi, but she has edges now. There’s actual structure. Character design in a show like this is basically the opening conversation. Everything else follows from what you’re looking at. This redesign says they’re not interested in cute. They want something tighter, sharper, more intentional. Whether the actual show works is still an open question. But I’m curious. That counts for something. Friday, 6 June 2014. Zombie Toothpicks: I picked up these zombie toothpicks somewhere—little picks shaped like the undead crawling out of your food. Eight euros or so, though I’ve long since stopped tracking what I paid for them. They live in a drawer with the other party supplies, next to things I bought five years ago and never used. There’s something good about objects this pointless. A designer worked out the proportions, how the zombie figure would sit on a pick, how it catches light on a cheese board. That kind of attention to something completely frivolous feels honest. The zombie apocalypse is background radiation for contemporary culture now. We’re all half-joking about collapse constantly. Every party is a small performance of ’yeah, I think about it too.’ These toothpicks are one tiny way of participating in that. I don’t actually use them much. Most of the time they’re just sitting in that drawer, forgotten until I’m setting up for something and remember they exist. But pulling them out is always a small satisfaction, in the way that dumb, self-aware objects can be—they don’t apologize for being exactly what they are. Friday, 6 June 2014. Forty-Two Seconds: I was twelve when I finally beat Super Mario World on my Super Nintendo. Took most of a year—longer if you count the time stuck on the Vanilla Dome. When I finally got past it, that end screen felt earned. Like I’d actually done something. Masterjun3 does it in forty-two seconds. A glitch that warps Mario straight past everything and dumps him in the ending. Castles, bosses, levels—all gone. Just a few button presses in exactly the right order and the whole thing collapses. This is what speedrunning Super Mario World has become. Reverse-engineering the code to find where it’s fragile enough to break. Years of the community picking at systems, looking for moments where something goes wrong in your favor. It’s not about being good at the game. It’s about understanding it deeply enough to make it do something it wasn’t supposed to. There’s something strange about watching someone erase a year of childhood in less than a minute. Not angry—just odd. The game I struggled with becomes a problem with a solution. And not even a complicated solution once you know the trick. I wouldn’t play it that way. The difficulty is part of what makes it feel like an accomplishment when you actually beat it. Optimize that away and you get a neat technical feat. Maybe that’s enough. But there’s something elegant about finding the exact sequence that breaks a system. That’s its own kind of skill, even if it’s not the skill the game was designed to test. Thursday, 5 June 2014. Greatest Rides: Ido Yehimovitz from Israel made a series called Greatest Rides—basically every iconic vehicle from film and television, all redrawn in the same visual language. What makes it work is the constraint itself. Each vehicle has to read instantly, has to feel like the thing it is, but also has to belong in the same world as every other one. That’s harder than it sounds. There’s no angle here, no irony or commentary. Just clear drawings of things you already recognize, rendered with enough style and clarity that they feel new. Respect for the source material without trying to add to it. Sometimes that’s enough. Wednesday, 4 June 2014. Three Bottles Deep: I’ve walked into Berlin offices where the trash can looked like a Club Mate graveyard—empty bottles stacked like evidence of hours spent at a desk. Three bottles before noon, four by evening, someone talking about their pivot while their hand moved mechanically toward another one. The drink had become oxygen for that world, less a beverage than a ritual. You didn’t drink Club Mate because you were thirsty. You drank it because you had convinced yourself you couldn’t think without it. The thing about Club Mate is that it doesn’t apologize. It’s bitter, it’s chemical, it doesn’t try to be healthy or artisanal or anything other than what it is: fuel for people who are convinced they don’t have time to rest. In Berlin startup culture especially, it became almost a uniform—the visible proof that you were serious, that you were grinding, that you understood the terms of the game. You could measure how deep someone was in that world by counting the bottles on their desk. There’s something almost honest about the cycle, if you look at it sideways. You need to stay awake to keep up. You drink stimulants to stay awake. The stimulants make you jittery and wired, so you need more caffeine, or maybe you need something else entirely to calm back down, or you just accept that this is what alertness feels like now. Work until you’re exhausted, drink something that makes exhaustion irrelevant for a few more hours, repeat. Eventually something happens—maybe a successful product, maybe you just burn out and move to a new startup that’s exactly the same as the last one. I watched people live like that for years. Each day blurred into the last. The bottles piled up. The ideas came and went. Sometimes I wonder if they ever actually tested whether they needed the Club Mate or just needed the feeling that they were doing something serious. A person surrounded by empty bottles looks like they’re working harder, feels like they’re accomplishing more, even if all they’re doing is staying awake. The real trick was learning how to want something without needing to be chemically stimulated to want it. Most of them never figured that out. They just got better at cycling through different stimulants, different offices, different promises about the next big thing. Berlin was full of them, wired and hopeful and trapped in that particular circuit. Tuesday, 3 June 2014. That’s Me Now: I know I’m old because I remember Netscape Navigator. Remember “cybernet” as an actual word. Remember when downloading a single image took enough time to make coffee and come back. So when Teens React put some kids in front of a 90s internet video and watched them fail to parse what they were looking at—that hit different. It’s funny, obviously. But there’s this moment where you realize you’re not in on the joke anymore. You’re the joke. You’re the guy explaining how the internet used to work, watching faces go completely blank. That’s me now. The 90s web had real character. It was slow and ornate and kind of stupid and beautiful at once. You’d sit on one website for an hour because there was nowhere else to go. The internet felt like a place you visited, not something you owned. Kids now can’t even imagine that. It sounds completely insane to them. Living through something that’s already becoming historical is its own weird feeling. Not a “kids these days” thing—more like I got to experience actual internet archaeology as it was happening. Got to be there before it turned into the artifact. And now I’m part of the artifact too. Tuesday, 3 June 2014. The Gatekeepers: John Oliver did a segment on Last Week Tonight about net neutrality and cable companies in America. Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon—they want to charge Netflix and YouTube for faster access. It’s just throttling with a business card. Everyone else gets slower speeds, those companies pay, and the internet becomes a utility for people who can afford it. I’m not even sure why Oliver bothers explaining it. The mechanism is obvious, the motivation is obvious, and it will happen. It’s already happening in pieces. What’s less obvious is that the moment Comcast succeeds in America, Deutsche Telekom and every other ISP on the planet will do the same thing. They’re just waiting to see if they can get away with it. The internet used to be different. Not that long ago—twenty, thirty years—you could build something, put it online, and reach anyone who wanted to find it. No permission, no money, no negotiation. The barrier to entry was basically nothing. That mattered. That changed what was possible. I’m not some starry-eyed optimist about how technology is supposed to liberate us. I know how capital works. But there was something genuinely new about the open internet, something that had never existed before in the same way, and turning it into a toll road feels like killing something on purpose just to make a few extra dollars. The companies will win. They’ll win because they always do, and because most people don’t understand what’s being taken away, and because fighting it requires caring about something intangible. Cable companies understand profit. They’ll turn that understanding into policy, into infrastructure, into law. And then they’ll own the internet the way they own the pipes. I’ve been online for two decades. I’ve seen it get better and slower and less weird and more corporate. This is just the final step, the moment where the thing that was supposed to be different becomes exactly like everything else. Monday, 2 June 2014. Boom Clap: In 2014, good pop music still felt like something to notice. The radio was full of the usual machinery, but Charli XCX kept showing up with actual ideas in her head. She landed “Boom Clap” as the title track for The Fault in Our Stars, a film I had no interest in watching, but the song itself was sharp in a way that mattered—nervy production, the melody played with rather than just ridden. Charli was into Tokio Hotel, into Iggy Azalea, into the stuff that lived in the margins. That’s where the interesting artists always look first. And you could hear it in “Boom Clap”—not a song made by committee, but by someone with taste. The hooks worked because they were actually thought about, not because focus groups had beaten them into submission. There’s something about an artist who cares about the thing itself rather than what the machinery promises the thing will do for you. In 2014 that still felt rare enough to matter. I didn’t think it would change anything. I didn’t need it to. I just needed pop music that was actually good, made by someone who was paying attention. The song stuck around longer than it probably should have, which was fine by me. Monday, 2 June 2014. Matty’s Cheeseburger: I know it’s cruel—someone feeding me a Matty Matheson cheeseburger video while I’m lying here with my pathetic cheese sandwich. Matty Matheson from Parts and Labour, the guy who basically owns Toronto’s burger culture, standing there with the kind of ingredients and focus that turns a simple thing into something perfect. Good meat, real care, the clarity of someone who’s made this a thousand times and still does it right. Food videos are a specific kind of torture. You watch Matty’s hands work—the sear on the patty, the cheese melting with intention instead of desperation, the whole thing assembled like it matters. Because it does matter, that’s the thing. It actually matters. And then you look at your sandwich and you remember the three genuinely great cheeseburgers you’ve ever had in your life, the ones that cost too much money because that’s what excellence costs, and suddenly everything else just tastes like the compromise it is. He’s not teaching you anything. He’s just showing you the distance between what you want and what you’re going to get. That’s all these videos do. Show you the gap, then leave you with your sadder food, your smaller life. Sunday, 1 June 2014. Blog Money: Everyone thinks they know what blog money is before they’re actually dealing with it. There’s this fantasy that went around—that the internet is democratic, that if you have something interesting to say people will find you and pay for it. Some people did make that work. Most didn’t. I started without any idea this would become a financial question. It was just somewhere to put things I didn’t know what to do with otherwise. But after enough years of consistent work, the money starts happening almost by accident. Brands show up. Ad networks send checks. Other bloggers start talking about covering rent from this. So you wonder whether maybe it could actually work. The numbers tell most of the story. About one in five people who take blogging seriously make more than 500 euros a month. One in ten hit 1000. The rest are making almost nothing, or making nothing and doing it anyway. The distribution doesn’t change much. The internet keeps growing but the money doesn’t spread—it pools. What catches people off guard is how fragile it is. You’re not building a business the way a business gets built. You’re stringing together whatever revenue sources are available—affiliate links, sponsorships, ads—and hoping they add up to something real. The problem is they’re all unstable. An algorithm shifts and your traffic goes. A network cuts their rates. A sponsor decides to hire writers directly instead of buying sponsored posts. The month you were counting on falls apart. The people who actually made this work long-term had a kind of stubborn patience. They kept showing up even when the money wasn’t there. They learned whatever they needed to learn—design, photography, writing, how to talk to brands, how to code. They were good at negotiating. They happened to be publishing about something the internet wanted at the moment. Some of that was discipline. Some was luck. I don’t regret building this, even with the instability and the months where you wonder what the point is. But I wouldn’t tell anyone this is the path to financial freedom. If you want to blog because you need to publish something and the money is just a bonus, maybe you can stick with it long enough for it to work. If you want to blog to get rich, you’re probably not going to make it. Sunday, 1 June 2014. Kate Upton in Garters: Garters have never really appealed to me. They read as costume—the housewife-in-heels fantasy, all that. There’s always this sense of performance, of asking to be looked at a certain way. But Kate Upton did a photoshoot for The Men Magazine titled “Blonde Beauty” and she’s wearing garters. She’s blowing bubbles through the frame, eating candy chains, just existing without strain. And watching her wear them changes what they are. They stop signaling anything particular. They’re just what she’s wearing. Saturday, 31 May 2014. Fonotune – An Electric Fairytale: I found out about this film from a tip: Fonotune, An Electric Fairytale, directed by Fabian Huebner. It’s still being made, caught between idea and finished work. Retro-futuristic, which usually signals someone’s going to synth their way through a bad screenplay, but this one feels different. The premise is strange enough to matter. Three characters—BLITZ, ANALOG, STEREO—with nothing in common except music. They exist in a world where no trees grow, no animals live, and people have stopped talking to each other. Completely artificial, completely hostile. Electronic fairytale feels right for it—there’s magic, but it’s broken. The cast is Guitar Wolf, Kazushi Watanabe, Yuho Yamashita, shot across Berlin and Tokyo. It’s the kind of film you make because it won’t leave you alone, not because there’s money in it or because anyone asked. Pure vision, no compromises, genuinely weird. What matters about work like this is the refusal to apologize for what it is. No one’s trying to explain it or make it digestible. It’s strange, it’s sincere about its own wrongness, it trusts that strangeness without worrying if anyone gets it. Most cinema doesn’t have that kind of confidence. I have no idea what it’ll be when it’s finished. But there’s something valuable about these things existing—work that takes its own vision seriously enough not to bend it. Saturday, 31 May 2014. Mario Gets a Sedan: Japanese car commercials hit different—they’ve got this fearlessness about doing something genuinely weird that no Western brand would touch. Mercedes-Benz figured this out and made a Super Mario ad for the GLA, which is genuinely one of the most absurd marketing moves I’ve ever seen, in the best possible way. The setup is perfect: Mario tearing through Mushroom Kingdom in a sedan. Not a kart, not some concept car—a real luxury vehicle cutting through those bright, hyperreal mushroom landscapes where he normally just jumps on Goombas. It shouldn’t work but it does. Mario’s all velocity and precision, and suddenly he’s got an engine instead of his legs. The commercial gets that perfect logic where the car ad serves the Mario universe, not the other way around. And of course there’s a twist—an old enemy derails the whole ride. It has to end in chaos. That’s Mario in a nutshell: you know exactly what’s coming, and it happens anyway. This is exactly the kind of thing that lives in Japan for six months and never escapes the rest of the world, which feels right. Some ideas don’t need to travel. Friday, 30 May 2014. Why Bacon: Bacon doesn’t have to try. A piece hits a hot pan and that smell takes over—your kitchen, your morning, whatever you were thinking about two seconds ago. Nothing else exists until it’s done. It’s the fat. Hot fat hits something in your brain that probably hasn’t changed much since we were literally hunting for food. Most foods need to actually be good to make you care. Bacon only needs to smell like it’s already won. That’s the whole thing. It doesn’t need to be clever. Just salt, meat, and heat doing exactly what they do best. Friday, 30 May 2014. Pixel Nostalgia: There’s something surreal about seeing Mario on a dress in a shop window. Not ironic surreal—just genuinely weird, the way pop culture moments become strange once they’ve aged enough. When I was actually playing Super Mario World, you kept it quiet. Games were for kids, or basement dwellers, or both. Now the aesthetic is everywhere: the pixelated mugs, the retro controllers as phone chargers, the graphics that intentionally look cheap because that’s what we’re supposed to find beautiful. It makes sense in a way. There’s real beauty in those old graphics—the constraint bred elegance, the way it had to. And there’s something in all of us that wants to wear our history, to prove we were there, to say this thing mattered. I was there when games looked like that, and I loved it. I want it stitched into my clothes now. But there’s also something lost in the translation. A dress is not about playing games. It’s about looking like you played games. The vintage aesthetic gets separated from the actual experience—the boredom of empty levels, the frustration at the mechanics, the specific joy of figuring out a trick, the sound design doing half the emotional work. It becomes decor instead of memory. Still, I don’t fault anyone for wearing it. The nostalgia is genuine. It exists because the games existed and because people loved them, and there’s something honest in that chain, even if it’s been smoothed into commodity shape. It’s a way of saying you were there, you loved it, you belonged to it. Sometimes that’s reason enough. Friday, 30 May 2014. Caramel Marshmallow Pizza: Pizza Hut Japan made a caramel-marshmallow pizza—no irony, no winking at the camera. Just straight caramel and marshmallow on a pizza base, about six euros, a tie-in with some Japanese candy brand. The kind of move that could only happen in Japan. I’d want to try it if they shipped internationally, but obviously they don’t. There’s something clean about just dropping the pretense and merging pizza with candy, like we all know it’s just bread and toppings anyway, and if the toppings are sugar, then so be it. Maybe that’s where we’re headed. Maybe pizza was always just a vehicle for whatever you wanted to pile on it, and companies are finally done defending that decision. Friday, 30 May 2014. Three Magazines: Grabbed three magazines at a kiosk because I had an hour between things. NEON, BEEF!, ZEIT Campus. They’re apparently how you understand who you’re becoming. NEON is what freshmen read. Bright, clever, talking about sex and friendship like they’re profound. The writers are never bad, which is the problem—it’s recycled the same stuff for a decade with different names. There’s a piece by Antonia Friemel about young guys so deep in pornography they’ve tanked actual relationships. I know people exactly like that. The whole magazine’s a confidence trick: makes you feel special for an hour, then you forget it. BEEF! is pure meat worship. Steaks, burgers, potatoes fried in every way possible. The writing gets sexual about the excess, which I respect—no apology, just appetite. Raik Holst and Mike Hofstätter photographed spring potatoes with human names (Leyla, Annabelle, Cilena) served with squid and sardines and blood sausage. That actually changed something about how I think about food. Then they ruin it by copying tabloid style for a piece about eating dogs in China—sensationalism instead of reporting. ZEIT Campus is what you read after NEON. More trustworthy, more institutional. Oskar Piegsa and Leonie Seiferth wrote something about admitting you don’t know what you can do, which felt like permission in a world where everyone’s faking confidence. But then there’s a 23-year-old student named Laura who paid a hypnotist a hundred euros for exam stress help. It didn’t work. Her conclusion: walking with music is better. Which sure, but also vodka, sex, and Nutella in that order would’ve been cheaper. Each magazine sells you a different version of yourself that week. NEON through flattery, BEEF! through honesty, ZEIT Campus through permission to be confused. I’m not sure which one I actually believe, which is probably why all three keep getting published. Wednesday, 28 May 2014. Pharrell’s Stan Smiths: Pharrell sketched ten different versions of the Stan Smith, and Adidas put them out in limited quantities. Simple sketches—the kind anyone could do in a few minutes. No manifesto, no artist statement, no elaborate concept. Just someone with taste taking a shoe everyone already knows and making ten small different marks on it. That’s what a real design collaboration feels like. Wednesday, 28 May 2014. Princess Bubblegum: Took a BuzzFeed quiz about Adventure Time and got Princess Bubblegum. Super sweet, smartest character on the show. I’d have preferred Marceline, though. She’s cooler. Deadpan, cynical, dragging this whole history with the Ice King around. Marceline doesn’t need the validation. The quiz is designed to flatter you into sharing it, so of course it won’t put you in a character you don’t want to be. But Marceline wouldn’t take the quiz anyway. That’s the move. Tuesday, 27 May 2014. Lana Del Rey - Shades of Cool: Every summer, around May or June, I need Lana Del Rey’s voice the way I need cold sheets and the smell of someone else’s skin. Shades of Cool comes back, and it doesn’t announce anything profound—nothing epic, nothing that needs explaining. It’s just that whisper of hers, that cool restraint, the way she lets certain words hang until you finish them yourself. It carries you through the sticky nights on the balcony when you can’t sleep, through sheets that are already damp with heat, through those shadowless moments at the lake when the sun’s finally gone. There’s nothing showy about it. She’s not trying. That’s why it works. Monday, 26 May 2014. Tetsuo Kondo’s Cloud: There’s a cube in Tokyo. Six meters on each side, transparent, with a cloud suspended inside it like it’s trapped in amber. Not a model or projection—the cloud itself, changing throughout the day, its color and density responding to the weather outside, to the time, to conditions beyond anyone’s control. Tetsuo Kondo built it. When you climb the stairs in the middle and stand surrounded by it, something shifts. For a moment, you stop looking at a cloud. You’re inside one. I grew up wanting to touch clouds, like any kid does. Then you learn they dissolve, they’re too high, they don’t work that way. You move on. But standing in that cube, the desire comes back full force. Here’s the thing you couldn’t have, made permanent. You can examine it from every angle, walk around it, let your eyes adjust to the light falling through it. You’re eye level with something that usually exists entirely beyond reach. The sky looks different after. Thinner, more alive, more possible. The cube has changed how I see weather now—made me believe that clouds are actually within reach if I tried hard enough. Which is obviously not true. But for a moment inside that space, it felt true. Monday, 26 May 2014. Polygon Thrones: When you see Arya Stark rendered in geometric planes, something clicks. It’s still unmistakably her, but you’re looking straight through to the structure underneath, all those sharp decisions that make a face readable. Mordi Levi, a designer and illustrator based in Israel, builds these at his computer. He’s taken the main characters from Game of Thrones—Arya, Daenerys, Tyrion, Margaery, Khal Drogo—and reduced them to facets and blocks of color. The work looks like elaborate craft pieces made from colored cardboard, where you see every decision and understand the method immediately. Not photorealism trying to impress you. Just honest geometry. There’s something I appreciate about this approach. Instead of rendering more detail, he’s rendering less, and somehow that’s harder. It requires understanding the character well enough to reduce them without losing them. Economy of line, specificity in color. The kind of design work that looks effortless but obviously wasn’t. I’d hang these. Large, one after another in a room. The kind of thing you’d catch in the corner of your eye and it would never stop working. Monday, 26 May 2014. The Gray Brick: I spent years with that gray rectangle. Link’s Awakening first—which was weird for a handheld, actually. Koholint Island had this melancholy that made you forget you were squinting at a four-inch screen in the back of a car. Then Pokémon Blue, and I built a team that made no sense strategically but felt right. Charizard obviously. Alakazam for the raw power flex. A Lapras because someone in my class said water types were overpowered. You’d arrange and rearrange your party at the Pokémon Center, betting on combinations like they meant something, like your choices actually mattered in a way they didn’t. Then there was Tetris. God, Tetris. The way the game would speed up and your hands would lock and you’d panic-rotate pieces into the wrong orientation, knowing exactly what you were doing wrong but unable to stop. That’s the Game Boy in a nutshell—intimate enough that you felt your own incompetence in real time. What’s strange about it now is how little the machine actually did. No backlight, monochrome gray, a battery life that meant you carried extra AAs everywhere. It shouldn’t have worked. But there was something about that constraint that made it feel like the thing was genuinely yours in a way nothing else was. You couldn’t show off what the machine could do because it couldn’t do much. You could only disappear into whatever game you had a cartridge for. I’ve read the trivia since—the engineering decisions, why it dominated, why it beat more powerful competitors. Interesting in the abstract. But that’s not what I remember. I remember the weight of it, the tick of the buttons, the small green dot on the screen when you’d drained the battery just enough that you could barely see but not quite enough to stop playing. Saturday, 24 May 2014. Rubber Tracks: Converse ran a recording studio for a few years. They called it Rubber Tracks, and it started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a legitimate recording space with engineers and equipment, and they let you use it for free. If you were a young musician and had the time to book a session, you could walk in and make something real. Over time they packed it up and moved it around. Toronto, Austin, Los Angeles, Amsterdam. In the summer of 2014, it landed in Berlin, set up in the Trixx Studios in Kreuzberg. Trixx itself had history—people like Rammstein and Wu-Tang Clan had recorded there. The place carried weight. Recording properly still mattered then. Home recording was getting better, but it wasn’t there yet. You could make something decent in your bedroom, but a real studio, real equipment, an engineer who knew how to treat a room and get a vocal right—that was different. It changed what you could hear in your own work. The Converse initiative was strange in the way brand philanthropy in music was strange. A shoe company funding recording sessions. But it was genuinely free, no strings, no branding in the actual space as far as I know. Just: show up, book a day, make your record. Over five hundred musicians had used the Brooklyn location by the time they took it on the road. Berlin being on that list mattered. The city had become a place where young people made music, played in tiny clubs, self-released records. Not everyone had money for proper sessions. Not everyone had connections to people who did. So the studio came to you. I never booked a session myself, and I don’t know anyone who did, but I remember thinking about it. The idea that you could just have that access if you wanted it badly enough. It probably mattered more to someone younger, someone still figuring out their sound, than it did to the people who already had the resources. That was the whole point. Converse stopped doing it eventually. Everything ends. But that summer in Berlin, there was a professional space with your name on the application form, if you wanted to show up and try. Friday, 23 May 2014. Under the Indigo Moon: Natasha Khan basically saved my life with Two Suns and Daniel. I don’t say that lightly. Those records were guides through some genuinely dark years—the kind of companion pieces you put on at two in the morning when nothing else makes sense. Two Suns especially sits near the top of everything this industry’s ever made. There’s a new video now, for Under the Indigo Moon. I haven’t entirely figured out what it’s trying to say—it’s got this hazy, oblique quality—but that’s beside the point. It’s Natasha Khan. So I’m watching it carefully, listening carefully, grateful she’s still making things. Friday, 23 May 2014. Another Castle: I saw these images the other day—video game characters completely hollowed out. Mario, Sonic, the princess. Christopher Hemsworth made a series called “Dear Inner Demons” that strips away the fantasy and shows what these characters would actually feel if they had to sit with their own lives. When you’re a kid playing, you don’t see any of that. You see coins, power-ups, a sense of being capable of anything. You want to be that person. But the more you think about it, the more you realize the actual trap. These heroes are stuck in loops. Rescue the princess, clear the level, find the treasure. Then it starts again. No progression, no ending, no escape. Just the pattern forever, until someone turns off the console. There’s something almost cruel about that kind of repetition. Especially when you realize Hemsworth’s images are right—the hero would feel exactly like that. Exhausted. Trapped. Wondering if this is really the life that looked so appealing from outside the screen. Maybe that’s why the work hits. It’s forcing you to see what you were happy to ignore when you were young. The trap was always there. Friday, 23 May 2014. What We Want: Alex Solis draws the characters we know as if they’d actually lived here. Darth Vader, Superman, Mickey Mouse—all of them fed on the cheap burgers and ice cream and endless cupcakes that are everywhere, living the life that real abundance offers. Not the heroic ideal. The real thing. The joke is obvious, which is why it lands. We’re in a place where bad food is everywhere and cheap and designed to taste incredible, and the gap between these perfect bodies and what exists is pretty funny. Solis just drew what was already there. It’s not cruel. He’s not mocking fat people. He’s showing these figures in a real world, with real food, no bullshit. This is what happens when you stop resisting. And that’s somehow gentler than all the aspiration. I like that it sits between satire and something genuine. You’re laughing at the contrast—perfect design meeting round body—but there’s also something true in it. These icons in a world with real abundance. Not the fantasy version. Just what’s there. Thursday, 22 May 2014. Cyberpocalypse: Carter Baldwin built a LEGO city called Cyberpocalypse at Brickworld—industrial, dark, neon bleeding through the concrete gray. Dense, nothing wasted. It shouldn’t work in toy bricks, but it works. Punk sensibility in plastic form. I don’t care about licensed LEGO sets. What hooks me is when someone figures out that bricks are raw material, not a brand vehicle. Cyberpocalypse is pure mood and texture, no plot, no characters. That interests me far more than any official build. Thursday, 22 May 2014. Kyoto Made Sense: Everyone’s going for Tokyo. It’s the obvious choice—millions of people stacked into vertical blocks, pachinko glow at midnight, trains that make you feel like a cell in a circulatory system. I understand the pull. But a few hours west on the Shinkansen there’s something else, a place that was the capital for a thousand years, and after two days walking around it started to become clear why you might skip Tokyo entirely. Kyoto has 1.5 million people but doesn’t feel like a crisis. You move through the streets and you’re not being erased by the crowd or confused about whether you just walked into a restricted shrine or someone’s living room. There’s actual space between things—a street, then quiet, then a temple, then the Kamogawa river, which is just a river, no artifice, and it’s actually somewhere you want to sit. Fushimi Inari is ten thousand scarlet torii gates stacked on a hillside like someone built a staircase to heaven and then forgot about it. You walk through them and lose the city, or think you do, but it’s still there. The place has been sacred for centuries and it feels it. I’m not religious but something about ten thousand gates doing their thing in the morning light works on you whether you mean it to or not. In some industrial zone that tourists don’t think about is Nintendo’s headquarters, which is the kind of absurdist detail that shouldn’t fit in the same place as a thousand-year-old shrine but does, and that’s Kyoto in a nutshell—past and future sharing the same streets like old roommates who learned to get along. The temples aren’t a museum exhibit. They’re not relics. The place is just built on top of them the way other places are built on top of shopping malls. This is where the culture decided what mattered, and then it kept that. Tokyo is electric and relentless and you should probably go, but this is the one that lingers. Wednesday, 21 May 2014. Pitbull Terrier: Die Antwoord released a video for “Pitbull Terrier” where they dress as bloodthirsty dogs tearing through the streets, which is basically just them being themselves. The South African group—Ninja, Yo-Landi Vi$$er, and DJ Hi-Tek—have been building this world of deliberate ugliness for over a decade now, refusing every basic aesthetic rule. Be attractive. Be likable. Be accessible. They don’t do any of that. Their whole project is making something intentionally uncomfortable. After a while the shock wears off. You see the violence and the provocation and the crude sexuality and realize it’s not a stunt or an ironic performance from a safe distance. There’s something more direct about it, more committed. A video of them as rabid dogs terrorizing the neighborhood feels like the natural extension of their logic. This is what they do. They scare people. They disturb you. And they’ve never seemed to care if you can handle it. It’s hard to know if that’s admirable or just interesting or kind of exhausting. Maybe they’re assholes. Maybe the whole thing is cynical. But there’s something in refusing to soften it, to make it palatable, that feels real in a way most music doesn’t anymore. They’re not trying to be liked. Tuesday, 20 May 2014. The Food, The Hunter: The English dub of Attack on Titan landed at some point and I watched it again just to check how it translated. I’d already seen the anime, knew where it was heading, understood the whole apparatus. But sitting with a few teenagers watching it cold was its own thing. They had no idea what was coming. They probably thought it’d be like Naruto or whatever—action, training, the standard shounen moves. Then the titans show up and it’s immediately wrong in a way the show never apologizes for. Massive, nude, utterly purposeless creatures tearing through people like they’re insects. The violence isn’t graceful or animated dramatically. It’s almost casual how quick it ends someone. The thing about Attack on Titan is how thoroughly it’s built around entrapment. The walls are safety, supposedly. A hundred years inside them and humanity’s convinced itself that this is the entire world. The show takes that comfortable lie and methodically destroys it. Each episode another thread coming loose. By the season’s end, you know that the real threat isn’t the titans—it’s that everything you believed about your world was false. I wasn’t sure about the English version but it works. Doesn’t soften anything. The dialogue lands right, the scale stays overwhelming, and the premise—giant creatures that eat people without strategy or mercy—stays weird and grotesque. Watching people encounter it for the first time is something else. You see them process it, understand something they don’t have words for yet. By episode five or six it clicks. They’ve stopped thinking of this as entertainment and started feeling actual dread. That’s when it stops being cool and becomes something that sticks. It’s why the show has held up. The core idea is solid. Walls that imprison you. Monsters outside that don’t care about your hopes or your species or anything. And the slow horrible realization that the cage was intentional. Even in English, with all the distance dubbing creates, it still lands. Tuesday, 20 May 2014. MetroGnome Stretches the Ringtone: That sound—the default iPhone ringtone. It’s everywhere. Buses, cafes, random moments where someone’s phone cuts through the quiet and everyone tenses for half a second. MetroGnome took those few notes and built them into an actual electronic track, which sounds like a joke premise until you hear it. The ringtone was designed to interrupt, to be impossible to ignore. Stretched across a full remix, that urgency becomes something else. Hypnotic, almost. Most of the time you don’t even hear it anymore. Your brain learned years ago to screen it out unless it’s yours. The iPhone ringtone has been the sound of modern life for so long that it’s become background radiation. So there’s something genuinely weird about MetroGnome centering the whole thing, making that forgotten sound the main event. He just treats it like a real instrument—extends it, builds around it, lets it be what it is. I doubt many people switched their default ringtone to his version. The original works because it’s annoying enough to cut through anything. MetroGnome’s is too interesting for that practical job. But that misses the point entirely. Someone looked at a sound so mundane it’s invisible, everywhere and nowhere at once, and asked what you could do with it if you didn’t need it to be practical. What if you just let it be interesting. That’s enough. Tuesday, 20 May 2014. Japan Syndrome: A festival called Japan Syndrome opened at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin three years after Fukushima—Japanese artists, theatre makers, visual artists, musicians, documentarians gathering to make sense of what the disaster had done to the country’s story. The postwar mythology about infinite growth on cheap energy and technology that could be controlled. All of it shattered when the reactors failed. Theatre maker Toshiki Okada was there, alongside visual artists, documentarian Hikaru Fujii, and musician Tori Kudo. They weren’t processing a historical event so much as the collapse of the myths that had structured everything—faith in institutions, safety guarantees, the belief that anyone actually knew what they were doing. What got me about the whole thing was that the festival had to happen at all. That artists felt compelled to gather and articulate what had become nearly unspeakable. And then the part nobody wanted to think about: those same reactors existed in Germany, in France, everywhere. The same promises held up the same weight. So when these artists gathered in Berlin, they were saying something everyone else was sleeping through. I never made it to that festival, but the fact of it—people feeling like they had to convene to say what couldn’t be said alone—it seemed to capture something true about where we actually were, even if most of us were still pretending we didn’t know. Monday, 19 May 2014. The Kaleesi: Somewhere along the way, pop culture stopped being something you just watched and became something you ate. Mathew Ramsey at PornBurger made a Game of Thrones burger called the Kaleesi, and it’s built with Welsh cheddar studded with mustard seeds and shiitake bacon. The burger is weirdly committed. It’s not just slapping a dragon name onto something—the cheddar is actually red dragon cheddar from Wales, the bacon is shiitake. Which is what separates a theme burger from an actual burger, I guess. I don’t watch Game of Thrones anymore—stopped after season four or five depending on my mood—but I’d eat this burger. Not because Daenerys is on it, but because the components sound good. The seeded cheddar, the shiitake. The Game of Thrones thing is just window dressing. There’s something funny about seeing how franchise IP filters down into the everyday. A character gets reduced to a burger, and the burger is probably better than the source material by this point. Food is where pop culture makes sense. You can actually taste it. Saturday, 17 May 2014. Concrete Summer: The second issue of the adidas Originals Series showed up, and it was actually well-designed, which isn’t something you’d normally say about a brand publication. Someone spent real time on it, made choices about materials and images because they mattered, not because they fit the brand guidelines. The main feature is called “The Concrete Jungle.” It’s a summer fashion editorial, but the photography captures something specific about urban heat and fatigue—that exhaustion you get when the season and the crowd wear on you at the same time, where the rhythm shifts and everything feels a little slower. A World Cup feature pulls animal prints from team kits and uses them as source material for an illustration series. Conny Maier drew with those patterns as a starting point, and the work has this quality of being genuinely strange—not the generic design stuff you’d expect from a brand campaign. The animal patterns become their own language, weird enough to make you double-take. I’ve spent enough time with design and magazines to know when someone’s done the work. This felt like that. It could’ve been disposable, another piece of marketing to flip through and forget. Instead it has the quality of something worth keeping, worth opening again just to look at how it was made. Friday, 16 May 2014. Glorious Leader: I found out someone made a video game called Glorious Leader where you play as Kim Jong-Un riding a unicorn. It’s real. You can download it for PC or mobile right now. The premise does all the work by itself. There’s no irony needed, no setup—it’s just Kim Jong-Un, a unicorn, a game ostensibly about bringing peace and human rights to North Korea. The absurdity arrives fully formed, complete. If I tried to write that as a joke, it wouldn’t land the same way, because jokes need structure and punchlines. This just is what it is. That’s where the actual comedy lives—not in the game itself, but in the fact that it got made. Someone pitched this to other people and those people said yes. Artists sat down and drew Kim Jong-Un on a unicorn. Programmers wrote the code. It went through testing and approval and release cycles. The entire machinery of game development was invested in finishing this specific absurdity. And now it just exists, downloadable, real, sitting in app stores like any other game. You can download it. Some percentage of people presumably have. It’s out in the world. Sometimes reality is absurd enough that you don’t need to do anything but acknowledge it’s there. Friday, 16 May 2014. The Agony of Community: NBC canceled Community. Five seasons and they’re pulling the plug. I had to sit with that for a minute before I could even process it. A lot of people never got what was so great about it—the humor felt random, stupid, impossible to predict. They’re wrong. They missed it. Greendale Community College was pure chaos. Each episode was like opening a door and having absolutely no idea if you were walking into a sitcom or a video game or someone’s twisted alternate timeline. Jeff, Britta, Abed, Annie—if you fell in love with them, you understand what the show was doing. If you didn’t, something went wrong somewhere. The show had two real problems, though. First was a brutal slow start. It took about ten episodes before Community figured out who it was, and by then most people had already given up. It looked like a straightforward college sitcom with a bunch of sad characters, and who cares about that? The second problem was more fundamental: if you jumped in later and tried to catch up, you were drowning in it immediately. Insider references, callbacks to things from an episode ago, entire alternate realities that required you to have been paying attention from day one. The show built these walls around itself, and only the people who were there from the beginning could get inside. The whole thing—pop culture riffs, parody, personality, all of it held together with whatever was breaking down that week—it was fundamentally unstable. The show fought with itself constantly. NBC wanted something different than what the writers wanted. The writers couldn’t agree with each other. The cast was dealing with their own stuff. For a television show, refusing to compromise is basically a suicide note. But for anyone who made it through the rough early stretch, who actually stuck with it, there was a genuine reward. Community eventually became something that felt almost sacred—this weird, completely unmarketable thing that told you it was not just okay to be strange but maybe necessary. It created this world where being yourself, being genuinely yourself and not some approximation of normal, was the only thing that mattered. You didn’t get a lot of TV like that. That’s exactly why it didn’t last. Community couldn’t ever be a normal show. It didn’t know how. It asked too much—demanded that you think, get the references, care about the characters, invest in something that had zero interest in being popular. Networks don’t want to distribute that. Most audiences don’t want to consume it. The show was brilliant and impossible to market and completely doomed from the start. And now it’s gone. There’s that line they used sometimes—”we’ll definitely be back next year, if not because an asteroid destroyed all human civilization. And that’s canon.” I’ve wanted that to be true. But knowing what I know about how these things work, I’m not holding my breath. Some things burn too bright to keep burning. Greendale was one of them. Saturday, 10 May 2014. West Coast: That sparse, echoing production opens onto an aching romanticism, a tragic Hollywood glamour that became synonymous with Lana’s entire aesthetic. I’ve probably listened to it a hundred times and it never stops sounding like the saddest, most beautiful description of longing—her voice like some old starlet whispering from a past that was always more myth than reality. It’s the kind of song that makes a memory of somewhere you’ve never been feel more real than your actual life. Thursday, 8 May 2014. Look Up: There’s a moment in Gary Turk’s viral video where a girl smiles at him on the street and he doesn’t see her because he’s looking at his phone. He’s missing everything—the sunsets, the conversations, the chance at something real—because his eyes are down. The video’s message is blunt: your friends matter more than Snapchat. The person in front of you matters more than Instagram. It’s earnest in a way that makes you uncomfortable. There’s a sermon in it, the kind that lands because it’s true, but also because you know it won’t change anything. We all know phones are eating our lives. We all know we’re lonelier for it. The video just puts it in rhyme. I watched it and felt the point hit and then checked my phone before it ended. The message is real. The sermon doesn’t stick. What stays with me is the image of the girl smiling while he looks down. Not the lesson, just that moment of connection he misses. Someone reaching toward you while you’re somewhere else. We’ve all been both people. Wednesday, 7 May 2014. Space Dandy: Three idiots in a spaceship: a vain asshole, a horny cat, and a depressed vacuum cleaner hunting aliens for money. Space Dandy shouldn’t work. The premise sounds like every mediocre anime I’ve given up on—bouncing tits, dumb jokes, the whole exhausted formula. But it’s something else. Every episode is made with obsession, not obligation. Most anime coming out is tired. Kids yanked into parallel worlds, fanservice, everything made by committee. Space Dandy cuts through all that with episodes that feel completely different from each other—different animation, different genres, different emotional registers. “Plants Are Living Things, Too, Baby” is a fever dream of color and distorted sound. “There’s Always Tomorrow, Baby” is Groundhog Day in space, earnest and melancholic. “A Merry Companion Is a Wagon in Space, Baby” is a roller coaster from hope to overwhelming sadness to just… emptiness. The kind that stays. On the surface there’s constant chaos: weird planets, noodle soups, characters dying mid-episode. Underneath, the show keeps asking things quietly. What if plants developed consciousness? What if a world was nothing but hate? What if ordinary machines felt desire? These questions aren’t thrown at you for effect. They’re embedded in absurd stories about absurd characters, and somehow that matters more than if they were foregrounded. Space Dandy is probably the best thing anime’s genre could produce. That’s significant because anime’s been decimated by franchises and the West flattened it into cute mascots. This show is thoughtful without sounding smart, beautiful without trying, crude and funny and full of strange ideas. Everything about it screams obsession, not commerce. A melty, milky kiss. Monday, 5 May 2014. Nipple Makeup: Japan makes nipple makeup. Legitimately. Different colors, sits next to all the other cosmetics, costs about ten euros. No marketing campaign, no joke, no elaborate framing—just a product that exists because somebody wanted it. That’s what gets me about it. Most companies would turn this into a whole thing, make it edgy or empowering or cute. Japan just acknowledged the need and filled it. No marketing angle, no performance, no winking. Just a straightforward product for people who care about that stuff. Friday, 2 May 2014. Out of Sync: Everywhere else is moving forward. The US is deregulating incrementally, Germany’s reconsidering prohibition, but Japan’s still treating cannabis as a hard drug with zero medical applications. Yuka Uchida went to find the people who’d decided that gap between policy and reality wasn’t their problem anymore. They weren’t after a high. They were sick—chronic pain, terminal diagnoses, the kind of conditions where licensed medicine either didn’t work or came with side effects worse than the disease. So they broke the law because they had to. Because nothing legal was helping. That’s its own particular cruelty, the way bureaucracy moves slower than illness. You can have a medical need and still face prison for the thing that helps. In Japan the gap is wider than most places, partly because the country’s relationship with drugs is tangled up in history and shame and policy in ways that don’t really connect to what actually works. I don’t know what happened to those people after Uchida’s piece. Whether they kept using it. Whether anything changed in the law. Probably not. But the situation stuck with me—the absurdity of knowing something works and making it illegal anyway, and the people trapped in between. Wednesday, 30 April 2014. Natalie Westling: Natalie Westling is from Arizona, seventeen when Marc Jacobs and Elite started calling. The usual story would have her leave skateboarding behind—fashion money does that, pulls people away from whatever came before. She didn’t. She still rides. That’s what registers. The intersection between skate culture and high fashion doesn’t usually resolve this cleanly. Someone always looks like they’re performing on the wrong side of the fence. With Westling, there’s no visible friction. Maybe she just doesn’t care about choosing. Tuesday, 29 April 2014. Japanese Arcades: Walk into Club Sega in Tokyo and the brightness hits first. Everything’s designed to scream—screens flashing, games screaming, kids screaming louder. You walk in and immediately you’re inside something too colorful and too loud to be anything but pure fun. The place was full. Teenage girls destroying rhythm games, absolutely committed to them. Couples stuck in photo booths making stupid faces and printing sticker sheets. Guys at fighting games and drumming games, hammering buttons like their lives depended on it. Everyone having a ridiculously good time. The specific games didn’t matter as much as you’d expect. Miku, Puyo Puyo, games I didn’t recognize and wouldn’t recognize again. What mattered was the ecosystem around it—photo booths where you could spend an afternoon with friends, claw machines with cute plush toys that somehow felt actually winnable. I watched people win things. Little bears and cats and characters I should probably know. The kind of prize that feels absurdly satisfying when it costs basically nothing. There’s something honest about a space so bright you can’t hide in it. You’re there to have fun, everyone knows it, so you just do. Tuesday, 29 April 2014. Lui and Rihanna: Mario Sorrenti shot Rihanna topless for Lui Magazine. He’s spent decades photographing bodies with this particular kind of clarity—no softening, no conceptual dressing it up, just form and light. When you put Sorrenti and Rihanna in the same room, the work is going to be direct. The photos came out clean and bright, her against colored backgrounds. There’s a confidence to how she carries it, this sense of complete comfort with being completely exposed. Not defiant about it. Just matter-of-fact. Tuesday, 29 April 2014. Tokyo Top Tracks: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s touring Europe, ’Family Party’ charted at number two in Japan—sitting between ClariS and Morning Musume. Sekai no Owari’s there dressed as clowns, Namie Amuro still holding down elder J-pop space, Ken Hirai in the mix. Following these charts doesn’t feel like tracking music so much as watching a whole aesthetic system work itself out—all these eras existing at once, and it works. Monday, 28 April 2014. Zippora Seven At Night: Zippora Seven shoots Australian coastline at night. Dark water, light, that particular edge. Found her on Instagram a while back. There’s precision in the composition but nothing precious about it—the frame serves the moment. Jason Lee Parry appears in some of these sequences and the whole thing has this intimate documentary quality. Nobody’s trying to prove anything. Just what the coast actually looks like when someone’s paying attention. Monday, 28 April 2014. Sailor Moon Again: Sailor Moon Crystal came back. The remake that wanted to tell the manga’s story straight, without the filler and production chaos of the original. I never felt like one version was better than the other. Different voice actors. Different aesthetic. The character designs hit that balance between manga line work and animation that could actually move. The original show has this roughness that works. Repeated animation cycles, episodes stretched thin, the production always scrambling. Something real in that struggle. The moments that land hit harder because the low moments feel lived-in, and I think that’s why people defend it. Crystal didn’t need that. It had the resources to be clean, so it was. Fine. Its own thing. The broadcast schedule was loose. Twice a month, never urgent. I watched them come and go without pressure. A story moving at its own pace, no algorithm pushing it, no churn. By then it had already found the people who needed it. Not everyone. Never everyone. Just the ones who wanted to see the story one more way. What gets you about remakes is how they force comparison against a version already living in your head. My Sailor Moon is tangled with memory—when I watched it, who I was, what mattered then. Crystal is just the show, new every time. Neither stealing from the other. Same story, different life. Monday, 28 April 2014. Japanese Magazine Stores: Walk into a magazine store in Japan and you hit this wall of overwhelming abundance. Every microculture, every hobby, every interest gets a magazine. Fashion, design, pop culture, niche things you didn’t know people were passionate enough about to print. It’s genuinely disorienting. I gravitated toward a few that actually felt worth reading rather than just browsing as curiosities. NYLON JAPAN nailed the Shibuya fashion aesthetic—the way people dress when they actually care about it. Popeye was beautiful and unserious, style writing that didn’t take itself too seriously. BRUTUS photographed ordinary objects like they deserved the attention. EYESCREAM had this chaotic, colorful energy throughout—design without pretense. And +81 was relentless, page after page of genuinely interesting work. But Japanese magazine culture has a darker side. There’s a lot of content featuring young girls in various states of undress—illustrated and photographed both. It’s legal there, culturally normalized, and deeply uncomfortable from the outside looking in. You learn which aisles to avoid. If you want to order magazines from outside Japan, Overseas Courier Service can get them to you, though it’s expensive and slow. Only worth it if you know what you’re looking for and you’re going to actually read them. Saturday, 26 April 2014. 8 Bit Ghibli: British artist Richard Evans took the Ghibli catalog—Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, the whole lineage—and converted them into 8-bit pixel art. NES resolution, that flat palette, the way sprites move. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and immediately. There’s something about seeing Chihiro or San rendered in 16 colors on a black background that bypasses the brain entirely and hits straight in the chest. Part of it is the nostalgia shorthand: Nintendo’s graphics vocabulary is so deeply embedded that your mind fills in the gaps automatically. Your eyes are reading blocks of color, but you’re seeing full animation, full character. The compression forces elegance. But it’s also that these films and that hardware aesthetic are fundamentally about the same thing—memory, detail, the weight of small gestures. Miyazaki’s animation is precise because it has to convey feeling in fleeting moments. Pixel art works the same way. You’re not rendering reality; you’re capturing something true about how a moment feels, which is a different problem entirely. I spent a lot of teenage hours staring at NES screens, not because the graphics were “good” but because they had this weird clarity. Everything that showed up on screen had to matter. Nothing was wasted. These Ghibli conversions feel like they understand that same discipline—not watering it down or using retro as a gimmick, but actually translating one visual language into another and finding what’s essential in both. The GIF loops I saw were short, just scenes and characters held still or moving through space. I wanted more of it, longer sequences, full films if possible. That feeling of wanting to stay in someone else’s vision for a while longer. Tuesday, 22 April 2014. Tomato Cherry: Häagen-Dazs is selling vegetable ice cream in Japan now. The “Spoon Vege” series comes in tomato cherry and carrot orange, hitting shelves in May, and I’ve been trying to imagine what either one tastes like and I just can’t make it work. Tomato in ice cream doesn’t make sense to me. I’m imagining tomato—bright, acidic, the kind of thing that works in pasta or soup—drowned in sweet, cold, rich dairy, and it just doesn’t compute. I keep imagining that first spoonful where tomato flavor hits first, before the sweetness, and it’s just wrong. Carrot orange might actually work. Carrots are naturally sweet, earthy in a way that could play with ice cream’s texture. But tomato? That’s a problem. Japan’s usually good at weird flavor combinations when there’s actual thought behind them. Wasabi Kit Kat works because there’s real logic to it. This feels more random. Someone just stacked tomato and cherry together and thought, sure, why not. I’d probably try them if I saw them anyway. Not because I think they’re good, but out of that compulsion to taste something weird just to know. The kind of curiosity that never pays off. I eat it, remember why I don’t do this, and move on. The thing about vegetable ice cream is that it doesn’t feel like a deliberate mistake. It just exists. Someone’s buying it right now. They’re putting a spoonful in their mouth and either enjoying it or regretting it, and the ice cream doesn’t care which one. Tuesday, 22 April 2014. Cannabiotics: Marijuana’s creeping into legality across the US, which means someone had to figure out what to do about all those decades-old leaf logos and stoner clichés. Studio 360 and Original Champions of Design took the project seriously with “Cannabiotics”—a rebranded purple cannabis leaf, plus cookbooks, merch, something called Cannabamoji, and for completely unclear reasons, skulls scattered throughout the design. Jennifer Kinon led the design team, which is funny because she’d never smoked weed in her life. She looked at the cannabis leaf and called it “a little round Christmas tree.” I loved that. The specificity of describing something you don’t understand, landing on something that’s both completely wrong and somehow exact. That’s the entire project in one detail. You can interpret this as corporate co-option, domesticating something that existed outside the system. Or you can see it as design doing what design does—taking the world and deciding it could look better, function better, feel different. For cannabis, which has lived for years in either threat or kitsch territory, it’s actually a meaningful shift. The skulls are still unexplained, and honestly I want to know what that conversation was. But I think Kinon being someone who’d never smoked is the key to the whole thing actually working. No baggage, no mythology built in. She just looks at the leaf and sees a Christmas tree. That’s the closest this project gets to being honest. Monday, 21 April 2014. Super Potato: When Christine and I went through Super Potato in Akihabara, we were in there for hours. The store sprawls across several floors—row after row of SNES games, Dreamcast consoles, strategy guides yellowed from age, Final Fantasy soundtracks. Prices are reasonable, five to twenty euros for most things, though the rare stuff costs more. The upper floors have an arcade and a shop for snacks. I left with a Japanese blue Pokemon edition in the original packaging, manual and trading card intact. Eight euros. It felt like I’d gotten away with something. Super Potato isn’t unusual—just a store that refuses to let old stuff disappear. But you feel it walking through. All that stuff everyone collected, all those hours spent on it—still there, still wanted, still findable. You know going in it won’t fix anything. You go anyway. Monday, 21 April 2014. Hasselhoff and the Wall: Leather jacket, sunglasses, 1989, Brandenburg Gate. That image is how David Hasselhoff locked himself into Berlin’s cultural memory as the embodiment of freedom. Not through political action or artistic intention, just by being the right celebrity at the right moment when the Wall came down. The moment became the proof that freedom is real, that it can be sung into existence by a guy whose actual fame came from eight seasons of sitting in a car that talked back to him. The joke writes itself: they brought Hasselhoff to a conference to discuss internet freedom. Either the most perfectly absurdist cultural moment or a complete waste of time, depending on how you look at it. He’s already symbolized one kind of freedom—the Cold War variety, the wall-falling kind. Adding internet freedom feels like someone somewhere decided commitment to the bit was worth more than expertise. What I find funny is that Hasselhoff probably doesn’t care anymore. He’s spent decades being a punchline while also being genuinely famous, and somewhere along the way he learned not to apologize for either Knight Rider or being there when the Wall fell. That’s its own kind of freedom. Sunday, 20 April 2014. The Rotation: AKB48 works on rotation, which sounds cynical until you realize everyone’s in on it. You pick a girl when she joins, support her for however many years she’s in the group, and when she graduates, you move on to the next one. The mechanism is visible. No pretense of forever. You know what you’re signing up for from the start. Most idol acts bury that machinery under sentiment and branding. AKB48 just… doesn’t. Friday, 18 April 2014. Looking Into Black Boxes: Most of us spend our whole day on phones and computers without having any idea how they actually work. We’re on Instagram, downloading episodes we’re not supposed to watch, messaging strangers with photos that probably shouldn’t exist. We do it all automatically, without thinking. And if you actually stop and think about how little you understand the thing you’ve been staring at for the past six hours, it’s kind of unsettling. Fiona’s been digging through internet technology and digital culture for a while now. She decided to make a web series about it with two other people—an attempt to explain how your phone actually works, what’s running underneath all the software, why the internet is shaped the way it is. Not in some technical jargon-heavy way, just plainly. The way a normal person would want to understand it. That’s the thing I respect about it—not trying to be everything to everyone, not dumbed down or overly complex, just actual explanation. For the people who use this stuff constantly but have never really thought about how it happens. Thursday, 17 April 2014. This Curry Rice Proves It: I spend my whole life being hit with Japanese commercials from every angle. The sky, other people’s screens, my own phone at 2 AM. None of it matters because they’re loud and they’re off in ways that somehow work, and this new Nissin curry rice commercial called Kare Meshi is so completely, unapologetically Japanese that it makes every other ad I’ve ever seen feel like a lie. The spot doesn’t explain anything. Trampled children. A schoolgirl who suddenly notices. Rice that’s achieved some kind of consciousness or humanity or whatever’s happening there. It moves like someone had an idea at 3 AM and nobody said “this is insane,” which is exactly why it works. There’s this thing Japanese advertising does where it doesn’t care if you understand it. American ads want a feeling from you—they want you invested. Japanese ads just throw colors and texture and pure nonsense at you and whatever sticks is fine. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, usually both at once. The thing that gets me is how intentional it all is. The production is thoughtful. The cuts are sharp. It takes itself seriously while describing humanoid rice, which is the whole trick. And then that final line just goes for it—there’s something deeply horny about it, something that has nothing to do with food, and it just sits there like a confession. I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. Japanese advertising broke something in me that regular ads can’t fix. Once you’ve seen a curry rice commercial that’s conceptually broken and genuinely horny at the same time, everything else just feels like someone reading from a script. Wednesday, 16 April 2014. Two Days Straight: Berlin’s Festival ran 48 hours straight, Friday night through Sunday. Full stop. No scheduled end time, no returning to your hotel to reset. You were either there for the duration or you were missing something. The lineup was the kind you could justify staying for. Moderat, Editors, Woodkid as the anchors. K.I.Z. for the hip-hop angle. Darkside and Warpaint for the left-field stuff. Two days of that sounds different than the usual one-day circuit. The venue was Tempelhof—an old airfield, still carrying the weight of Berlin history, now a festival ground. There’s something about that space that feels austere compared to the scrappy parks where most festivals happen. Room to actually move. Forty-eight hours changes how you experience it. You’re sleeping wherever you can, eating what’s near the stage, watching the same crowd dissolve and reform across Sunday morning when everyone’s equally exhausted. Most festivals are designed. This one just continued. Tuesday, 15 April 2014. When Pharrell Cried: I hate “Happy.” I hate it with an intensity that feels unbalanced for a pop song. If I have to hear it one more time, I might start reenacting Game of Thrones violence in earnest. But apparently everyone else on earth made peace with it in a way I never will, and they started uploading videos of themselves being happy because of Pharrell’s song. That’s the part I’m not equipped to understand. What gets me is that Pharrell watched these videos on Oprah and cried. Not the manufactured happy tears of a performer. Actual crying. The guy who made the most relentlessly cheerful song in existence, confronted with proof that it mattered to people, and he just broke. That’s the version of him worth paying attention to. Not the hit maker, not the producer, but someone realizing his work moved people when he wasn’t busy trying to move them. The vulnerability is the only real thing there. Tuesday, 15 April 2014. MATATABISTEP: Passepied took their name from a baroque dance form, which is pretty funny for a Tokyo band making club music. Their track ’MATATABISTEP’ captures that hour when thinking stops and you’re just moving—the alcohol, the rhythm, everything loose and committed. What works is the directness. No distance, no pretense—just the sound of a body past thinking, doing what the music says to do. Tuesday, 15 April 2014. Pocket Tenga Wave Line: You find yourself somewhere alone, far from home, suddenly dealing with that specific urgency—the kind of need that doesn’t negotiate and won’t wait. Japan looked at this situation and created the Pocket Tenga Wave Line, which is basically a disposable masturbation kit with lube already mixed in. Use it, throw it away with whatever embarrassment you’re carrying, go about your day. For guys or anyone else nature didn’t give great options, the alternatives are pretty bleak—crumpled tissues, hand cream, spit, whatever you can improvise. The Tenga runs about 1.50 euros and eliminates the whole desperate scrambling part. They come in white, black, or red with different shapes and friction levels inside. Get off, trash it. What I actually find weird is how unbothered Japan is about this. They saw a completely normal human problem and just made a product to solve it. No marketing mythology, no lifestyle branding, no pretending it’s anything other than what it is. Just a practical, discreet solution to something everyone experiences but nobody admits to. The fact that they can do that without turning it into an ordeal—that’s the interesting part. Monday, 14 April 2014. Built On It: There’s something about celebrity complaints that hits different when it’s about the very thing that made them a celebrity in the first place. Kate Upton hates her breasts. That’s the news. Every day she wishes they were smaller. She can’t wear the clothes she wants. Can’t go outside without people staring, talking about them, reducing her to this one physical fact. Which, fine, that’s a real complaint. Body is a body. Being unable to wear a simple tank top because of how you’re built sounds legitimately frustrating. I’m not going to sit here and tell her she should be grateful for the attention or the money or the career that came with it. But there’s this dark thing where the very quality that made her famous is the thing she hates most about herself. She got everything and the cost is she can’t be comfortable in her own skin. Can’t own what owns her. I don’t know if that’s irony or tragedy or just how it goes when the world decides what your value is and you have to live inside that for the rest of your life. The interview happened. The quote exists. And now she’s the woman who famously hates the thing she’s famous for, which is its own special kind of prison. Monday, 14 April 2014. West Coast: After months of the leaked version circulating, Lana put out the real one. “West Coast” doesn’t announce itself. It barely announces anything—just her voice and space around it, the kind of ballad that knows its own power and doesn’t need to prove it. I went in expecting something bigger, something that would give her critics an easier target, but this isn’t that song. It’s small and confident. The thing that kept me coming back wasn’t the melody or some lyric that stuck—it was the thinking behind it. Lana’s always been good at making you feel like she’s telling you something true, even when she’s saying almost nothing. Monday, 14 April 2014. Where Have All The Wildlings Gone?: Game of Thrones gets harder to follow the longer it runs. You lose track of who’s related to whom, who’s dead, who’s supposed to be an enemy but might become an ally. The show doesn’t make it easy—too many characters, too many kingdoms, too much time between seasons for your memory to hold everything straight. At some point during the show’s run, an illustrator named Nigel Evan Dennis built a website called “Where Have All The Wildlings Gone?” that visualized the entire cast in real time. Every character, every connection, every relationship mapped out so you could see how someone mattered to the story and what had happened to them. Who lost their parents, who lost their limbs, where they were in the plot. It was a solution to a problem the show itself created. The more the thing sprawled, the more useful it became. And the more you looked at it, the more you understood what the show was actually doing. Less about individual heroes, more about the geometry of how power moves through connected people. A death isn’t just a plot point; it’s a node disappearing from the map. I’ve always been interested in how fans solve problems the original work creates for them. The fan wikis, the timelines, the maps. It’s its own kind of design work. Dennis’s visualization isn’t trying to be flashy. It’s just trying to let you see what’s actually there. That’s harder than it looks. Some stories don’t need scaffolding like this. Game of Thrones did. Wednesday, 9 April 2014. The Alphabet Sandwich: Nick Chipman built a sandwich that hits every letter of the English alphabet, which is the kind of specific, pointless constraint that of course someone felt compelled to hit. Avocado, bacon, cheese, Doritos, egg, fish sticks, garlic bread, ham, Italian sausage, jalapeños, Krispy Kreme doughnut, lettuce, macaroni and cheese, noodles, onion rings, pepperoni, ramen noodles, spinach, turkey burger, and so on through yams and zucchini. By the time you’re stacking that thing together, it’s stopped being food and become something closer to a diagram. The real appeal of a project like this isn’t flavor or even novelty. It’s the system itself. Someone looked at the alphabet and thought, “I could make a sandwich that contains all of that.” The constraint is the whole thing. You’re not thinking about taste; you’re thinking about coverage, about making sure nothing gets left out. It’s the same impulse that drives people to collect things, to complete sets, to fill in the gaps in some arbitrary checklist they’ve decided matters. I don’t know what Chipman’s sandwich actually tastes like. Probably a mess. Probably parts are good and parts actively fight each other—krispy kreme next to pepperoni is a crime. But that’s not the point either. The point is that he looked at an alphabet and saw a recipe. The point is the audacity of insisting that all 26 letters can exist on a single bun. There’s something appealing about that kind of stupidity. Not stupidity exactly—commitment. The refusal to stop at something reasonable, the willingness to keep adding until you’ve achieved some arbitrary kind of completeness. You know it won’t be edible. You know it probably tastes worse the bigger it gets. You do it anyway because the idea grabbed you. That’s the sandwich, I guess. Not the food. The idea. Tuesday, 8 April 2014. LEGO Models: Adly Syairi Ramly dressed up a few LEGO figures and the photographs work. Placed them in pieces from Supreme, A Bathing Ape, Stussy, Raised by Wolves—brands that mean something if you pay attention to how clothes are cut and what a logo actually costs. The thing about LEGO minifigures is that they’re a perfect blank, yellow plastic with no opinions. You dress them and you see exactly what you put on them. Nothing else. That’s the whole formula right there. No face to read, no real proportions to judge against, just the clothes floating on a piece of molded plastic. Somehow Supreme’s box logo works. The Ape head scans. The camo reads. You’d think that doesn’t matter at that scale, but it does—good design compresses. It survives being made small and simple. The obvious move is to call it clever, which it is, but there’s something else going on. These are photographs of clothes. The minifigure is almost beside the point. It’s not commentary or irony, just a way of seeing the garment separate from everything else—no body, no context, no story. Just what it looks like. I’ve always found miniature photography appealing, the way everything has to be exact because there’s nowhere to hide a mistake. Scale forces honesty. At three centimeters tall, a LEGO figure can’t help you. The clothes have to do the work, and in these photographs, they do. Tuesday, 8 April 2014. Years of Blood: When HBO locked in seasons five and six of Game of Thrones, I felt something I don’t often feel about television: certainty that the thing I cared about would keep being made. The show had been genuinely great up to that point. It had taken George R.R. Martin’s books and somehow improved certain elements while preserving the whole architecture of violence and desire and political chaos that made them worth reading. The announcement wasn’t surprising—the show’s success made more seasons inevitable—but it was reassuring. I could believe that the people running it understood what worked, that they wouldn’t let it become the standard television story, predictable and safe. More seasons meant more time to watch these people make terrible choices and pay for them. I couldn’t have known then that the later seasons would hollow out. That the infrastructure that had felt so solid would collapse under the weight of its own complexity, that the writers would eventually run out of the material that had made them good. All I knew at the moment of the announcement was that the show had a future, and that future felt like it would be worth watching. It’s strange how these certainties work. You feel them in the moment and they’re completely real, and then something shifts and you realize they were always fragile. Game of Thrones didn’t fail all at once; it just gradually became less of what made it work. But none of that had happened yet. At the moment HBO made the announcement, all I could feel was relief that the story would keep going. Tuesday, 8 April 2014. Betas: I’d just written about Silicon Valley’s first episode when I found Betas on Amazon Prime—same subject, same world. Startups, San Francisco, all of it. Watched the whole first season straight through. Not doing a full review. If that world appeals to you, it’s worth watching. I’ve got a thing for one of the characters, Mikki. But really the main draw is that it exists right now, available. That’s something. Tuesday, 8 April 2014. Not A Bug Splat: Artists in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of the most bombed regions in the world, painted an installation on the ground big enough to see from above. Just faces. #NotABugSplat was the hashtag, because that’s apparently what people look like to drone operators watching screens thousands of miles away. A bug. A pixel. Nothing worth a second thought. The thing about killing from that distance is that you never have to see it. You see coordinates. You see numbers. You see the satisfying little glitch when the systems confirm the hit. You don’t see what the operators here tried to show you—actual faces, smiling or blank, faces of people you’re about to vaporize without ever having to process that they’re people. So they painted them big. Trying to force visibility, trying to make the distance shorter through nothing but art and scale. It’s almost quaint, the faith in that. The belief that if someone just had to look, had to register what they were looking at, something would change. Almost certainly nothing changed. The drones kept flying. The targeting didn’t shift. But there’s something in the refusal anyway. The insistence that you acknowledge what you’re doing, even if you don’t care, even if you can go right on doing it. The art says: you have to look. And that’s not nothing, even when it changes nothing. Monday, 7 April 2014. Dragon Sword Fighter Force: Unlicensed Game of Thrones minifigures exist and they’re actually good. Citizen Brick makes them, calls them the ’Dragon Sword Fighter Force’ to stay off HBO’s radar, but you know exactly who they’re supposed to be. Daenerys, Jon, Arya—the paint work is clean, they integrate with standard Lego, and they have that bootleg toy energy that somehow just works when the quality is there. The real appeal isn’t collecting them as Game of Thrones figures. It’s putting them in your own builds. Daenerys in a Simpsons house. Jon Snow in a Hobbit village. That forced mashup is the whole point. Official merch locks these things into specific dioramas—thrones, castles, set pieces that cost sixty dollars and never get used. This way you just drop them in wherever. I respect the move. Licensing gets more paranoid every year, so the actual fun migrates to these gray areas. Custom makers, fan stuff, unlicensed figures. That’s where it lives now. Monday, 7 April 2014. Pizza Is Art: Jonpaul Douglass photographs pizza. Finally, some art I can actually understand. Not restaurant shots, not styled for a magazine—he finds pizza in the world, against puddles, next to fences, with a pug, and he shoots it like landscape photography. The absurdity is exactly the point. Pizza is the thing you eat without thinking, the total throwaway meal, and there’s something perfect about someone treating it like it matters. The photographs aren’t trying to make pizza fancy or say something clever about consumption. They’re just saying pizza exists in the world and it’s worth looking at. That’s all it needs to be. Pizza is already art. Monday, 7 April 2014. Leaving It Behind: This is mostly a note to myself: don’t leave your MacBook unattended in a café. It’s rule number one. You buy an overpriced Apple product instead of giving that money to people who actually need it, the least you can do is keep track of it. But I don’t. I’m at Sankt Oberholz or Mein Haus am See or whatever eco-café is happening in Neukölln, and I get up to use the bathroom and just… leave it. The laptop sits there, screen still glowing, like an open invitation. Do I think other people will watch it? Sometimes I tell myself that. Mostly I just don’t think at all. There’s a video of a software developer named Ahryun in San Francisco—she’s the type who genuinely believes the city is safe, which tells you something about her judgment to begin with. She left her laptop on a table. Walked away for a few minutes. When she came back it was gone. Just like that. It happens every day. Thousands of times. In every city. The thing is, I watch videos like that and think “yeah, that’s stupid,” and then I do the exact same thing the next afternoon. Maybe it’s the embarrassment of carrying it to the bathroom. Maybe it’s pure denial. Either way, it’s only a matter of time before I become my own cautionary tale. Sunday, 6 April 2014. Testino’s Moss: Mario Testino photographed Kate Moss for years and turned it into a book. First edition was expensive; they printed a cheaper one because people wanted it. That’s the announcement, more or less. He built his whole career on this. Find a face worth looking at obsessively and photograph it until you’ve made proof of why you couldn’t stop. Moss was the obvious target—not just beautiful, but something about her face and body that held male attention the way it did. Testino saw that hunger and made it his subject. There’s something shameless about it when you think about it. A man spending years documenting what draws his eye, photographing her until desire becomes visible. But that’s photography—it’s just looking made permanent, the argument that what you’re seeing is worth seeing. Maybe Moss and Testino found something in that exchange of attention, or maybe the exchange itself was the real thing. Sunday, 6 April 2014. Stupid Pokémon: Aniforce, a Dutch artist, decided that Pokémon designs—already plenty ridiculous if you actually look at them—could be improved by one simple change: make them look profoundly stupid. Not mocking stupid, just vacant. Derpy. Brain completely missing. He’s worked through the first 151, which means Pikachu is there with this genuinely bewildered expression, Charizard looks permanently confused, and Blastoise is just… gone. The joke’s obvious once you see it. There’s maybe half a millimeter between “cute creature design” and “complete idiot,” and he found exactly where that line is. What I like about this is how it exposes something real about these designs. Pokémon work because they’re iconic, carefully crafted, clever. But they’re also fundamentally strange. A tortoise with mounted weapons. A rat that electrocutes itself. A sentient psychic puddle. Once you see them as genuinely dumb, not in some mean way, just dumb, you can’t really unsee it. It becomes funny in this almost tender way. The drawings have this perfect poker-face quality. Nothing’s exaggerated or vicious. He just shifted the eyes or softened the jaw and suddenly Venusaur looks like it’s wondering if it’s real. That’s not cruelty. That’s affection mixed with permission to laugh at something you actually care about. Sunday, 6 April 2014. Actually Works: SHUT and Matthew Willet made a skateboard out of gold. Real gold. Eighty centimeters long, twenty wide, four kilos, and it works—you can actually ride it. It comes with cotton gloves to keep it pristine, at least until you inevitably drag it down some concrete. The price is around eleven thousand euros. I respect the commitment to the bit. Not because it’s luxurious or exclusive, but because they made it functional. They could have made a sculpture, photographed it beautifully, sold it as art. Instead they made a skateboard that works. There’s something perfectly stupid about that. I don’t want to own it, and I doubt I’d want to ride it. But I think I understand why someone might drop that kind of money on it—not for the status, but for the absurdity. For the fact that it exists as a joke that happened to be real. There’s a kind of courage in that. Making something so deliberately impractical, so aggressively pointless, and doing it well anyway. Most luxury goods hide their purposelessness behind function. This one just… commits. Sunday, 6 April 2014. Happy Birthday, Grumpy Cat: The cat’s face never changed. That permanent scowl, eyes already tired before the internet even found it, the whole thing that somehow made you feel less alone. Grumpy Cat became the visual shorthand for an entire generation’s exhaustion—the face for people done with everything but unable to stop watching anyway. There was something perfect about how accidental it all was. The cat wasn’t trying. Wasn’t performing anything. Just had a face that meant something to millions of people at the exact moment they needed to see it reflected back. The internet threw everything at that cat and the expression never wavered, never softened. Stayed completely unimpressed, which somehow made it even better. It’s strange now to think about what that cat meant. The internet doesn’t make those things anymore. Everything’s too intentional, too designed, too aware of itself. But Grumpy Cat just did it without trying, captured something true that people needed to see. The cat probably didn’t care or understand any of it. But it got something right anyway, which might be the only way to really get anything right. Happy birthday to the most genuine thing the internet ever made by accident. Saturday, 5 April 2014. And Her Socks Are White, and I Love Her So: Saturday, 5 April 2014. Girls Love Mode: A Sailor Moon pop-up opened in Tokyo for a week in April—”Girls Love Mode: Let’s Prism Power Make Up,” which is either perfectly Japanese or perfectly terrible. Just hoodies and t-shirts and one of those white dresses that somehow costs way too much money, all in Shinjuku. By the time I thought about actually going, most of it was already gone. That’s pop-ups: you’re not really supposed to own the thing, just know it existed and that you weren’t fast enough. The store closed April 8th. Sailor Moon’s 20-year anniversary, so the character got its corporate moment, limited and over. There’s something clean about that—no leftover stock, no nagging regret, just a week in Tokyo where an entire store existed around a character who’s been done being new for two decades, and now it doesn’t. Friday, 4 April 2014. The Last Trailer: Game of Thrones season four was coming and I was completely bought in. For months I’d been fed trailer after trailer, each one engineered to make you think about nothing else. Another landed that week—supposedly the last one before the premiere. That felt like both relief and letdown at the same time. I wanted the show exactly for what it promised: blood, breasts, spectacle, the kind of thing that didn’t flinch. You could feel the whole machine building toward it, showing you just enough in the trailers to drive you crazy without telling you anything real. Now, looking back at that particular hunger—before I knew what the show would actually become, before all the disappointments—there’s something pure about it. You could still imagine it going anywhere. The marketing had you exhausted and completely hooked, which is usually how you know something has its hooks in you deep. Thursday, 3 April 2014. Photo Clash: Converse did this thing in Berlin a while back where artists painted a wall and then, as a follow-up, they invited people to bring photos and have them remixed in real time. An artist would take your picture—just a straight photograph—and cover it with paint and drawing, turning it into something neither you nor they would have made alone. The concept hooked me more than the execution probably warranted. You end up with a weird hybrid object, half your image and half theirs, something that only exists because both of you showed up. There’s something right about using a photograph as raw material instead of treating it like a finished thing. The artist isn’t illustrating it or critiquing it or making it more artistic. They’re taking it as a starting point, the way a musician samples a loop and builds a track around it. The conversation happens in the work. I don’t know how many people showed up or what happened to all those remixed photos afterward. The promotional copy made it sound like a big community moment, which maybe it was. But what actually interested me was the simplicity of the premise: you’ve got something, I’ve got paints and brushes, what if we made something new together in the next twenty minutes. That’s the part that works. Thursday, 3 April 2014. Tick, Trick, and Track: I spent years pretending I’d outgrown Donald Duck’s nephews—Huey, Dewey, and Louie, or Tick, Trick, and Track if you grew up with the European names. My subscription to the Lustigen Taschenbücher felt like something to hide, like guilty pleasure rather than actual taste. Turns out I was wrong. Belgian artist Simeon Georgiev styled the three of them in Supreme, Nike, Givenchy, and MORT, and suddenly they look better than actual people. The ducks are crisp, put-together, aware in that particular way contemporary streetwear makes you aware—like they know exactly what they’re wearing and why it matters. It’s absurd and perfect. I have no idea if these exist as real figures or if they’re just renders Georgiev made to mess with our sense of what counts as design. Part of me hopes they stay inaccessible, that rare feeling of wanting something that will probably never exist. But if they showed up somewhere, I’d buy them all immediately. Wednesday, 2 April 2014. Kit-Kat Pizza: Japan’s doing that thing again. Some pizza chain called Napoli—naturally—is selling Kit-Kat pizza now. Actual chocolate bars baked on top, with mango, nuts, gorgonzola, honey-maple sauce. Ten euros or so. The weird part isn’t that I want it. It’s that I can’t tell if wanting it says something’s wrong with me or if they figured out something the rest of us were too scared to try. That’s the kind of pizza I need to eat—not because I think it’s good, but because I need to know which is true. Either you learn something, or you confirm every suspicion you ever had about the world. Both seem worth it. Wednesday, 2 April 2014. Every Brand Wants Spider-Man: Evian made a Spider-Man commercial where Andrew Garfield chased a tiny Spider-Man through the city. This was the marketing moment—every brand wanted a piece, everything a tie-in designed to be shared and remembered. The Spider-Man films weren’t bad. Garfield had chemistry with Emma Stone. But everything around them was marketing, and at some point you just accepted it. Water selling Spider-Man. That was the era. Wednesday, 2 April 2014. One Hundred Percent: Scarlett Johansson gets implanted with this experimental drug in Lucy and instead of overdosing she just starts using her entire brain. One hundred percent instead of the ten we’re all walking around with. She becomes sharp and strange and stops being a person you’d recognize. It’s male fantasy boiled down to its essence. Not just the woman, but the one who’s become impossible to reach. Who’s thought herself into being lethal. Who’s become something else entirely. The movie knows exactly what it’s selling and doesn’t apologize for it. The premise is that you’re just unlocking potential that’s already there, which is stupid and wrong. But there’s something seductive about buying it anyway. The idea that your limits aren’t real, that you could just drop them and become more. That appeals to something. Lucy does it with chemistry. The rest of us live with our ten percent. Wednesday, 2 April 2014. Kana-Boon: Japanese rock band that makes the kind of songs that burrow into your skull and never leave. High-energy, propulsive, genuinely fun in a way that doesn’t feel calculated. They’ve done anime openings, which is how a lot of people discover them, but that’s not why they stick around—it’s the songs themselves. There’s no pretense here, no trying to be art-rock or experimental. Just straightforward, anthemic rock that sounds like a band that knows exactly what they’re good at and isn’t interested in doing anything else. The kind of music you find yourself humming without realizing it. Wednesday, 2 April 2014. Ryogoku on an Empty Stomach: There’s a VICE video where Yuka Uchida and sumo champion Konishiki Yasokichi eat through Ryogoku in Tokyo. Marinated squid, fried chicken wings, raw fatty tuna, cold beer. Good stuff, eaten casual and right. That’s the sumo wrestler thing—you grow up knowing where the food is because your body needs it. I watched it with a cheese roll that barely counted as food. That’s the gap right there—not geography, but what you’ve learned to eat. Whether Ryogoku is something you hunt for or just your Tuesday. The envy was clean. Not his life, just that ease. The confidence that comes from eating well long enough that bad food becomes genuinely strange. Tuesday, 1 April 2014. Kiko in Reebok: Everyone has their person. Mine’s Kiko Mizuhara—you probably know her from Naoko’s Smile, or from the fact that she’s in basically every Japanese fashion magazine worth reading. There’s something about her that makes anything look effortless. Even a straightforward commercial like this Reebok campaign for spring and summer becomes a thing worth actually looking at. The collection itself is solid. Clean lines, minimal, the kind of design that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to convince you of anything. Just well-made pieces that work because they’re thoughtful. Nothing pretentious, nothing that needs explanation. And Kiko in it is exactly what you’d hope for. Like this was always supposed to exist, like all the pieces fit together naturally. I’d probably buy half of this if I had any real reason to overhaul my summer wardrobe, but that’s beside the point. Sometimes watching something work out the way it’s supposed to is enough. Monday, 31 March 2014. Pokémon Master: I’ve been waiting for this since I was nine years old. Not in some theoretical, wouldn’t-it-be-cool way—in a bone-deep, absolutely serious way. I was going to be a Pokémon Master. The real kind. I would go outside, find them living in the grass and the water, and catch them with my own hands. That was the deal. That was what Pokémon promised. So when I heard Google Maps had added the ability to actually catch Pokémon on the map, I had to read it twice. They’re real now, in a way. Not real, but real-adjacent. They’re on my street. They’re in the park. They’re at my apartment building waiting to be caught. The thing nobody tells you about nostalgia is that it’s not about wanting to feel like you did when you were nine. It’s about realizing you wanted something so badly back then that it became part of your actual character, and now that the world has decided to make a joke out of that exact desire, you can’t ignore it. I’d probably give up—not everything, but something meaningful. A week of work. A relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. A chunk of savings for a decent GPS watch so I don’t look completely insane walking around my neighborhood at odd hours. When I was a kid, I had dreams about what the world would let me do, and Pokémon was the proof. It meant you could have a real adventure, that the world was full of hidden things, that you could be someone important just by wanting it hard enough and looking in the right places. Most of that turned out to be bullshit, but I still remember how clean that belief was. Google Maps didn’t make the world magical. But it did something smaller and weirder—it acknowledged that someone, somewhere, wanted this badly enough to build it. For people like me who’ve been carrying that specific want for twenty years, that’s not nothing. It’s kind of a win. Monday, 31 March 2014. Everywhere the Same: Years in Berlin taught me a specific feeling—that moment when a city stops being yours. It’s not one thing. The creativity that pulled me there starts consuming me instead. The changes pile up and the place I fell for keeps disappearing. The people, the streets, the late nights that mattered become someone else’s memory. I’m still there but I’m lingering at a funeral. So I dreamed about other places. London, Stockholm, Tokyo. But mostly New York, because that’s the promise—make it there and you make it anywhere. The opportunities will be bigger, the people more real, the experiences actually matter. Leaving will fix the staleness. I thought another city had what I was missing. The people who actually made it to New York had the same story. Vashtie wrote about hiding her deep sadness over the city for years—the boredom, the despair, closed doors, vanished inspiration. She finally admitted it: what else could she do? It’s the same everywhere. The city isn’t the problem. Whatever you’re actually looking for, it’s not there. New York promises transformation and delivers real estate. You outgrow Berlin thinking another place will feel different. You arrive and realize you brought yourself. The dream of making it somewhere is seductive because it has a shape—a place, a marker, a finish line. It’s easier to chase that than to sit with the actual work. No geography gifts you what you’re desperate for. I left Berlin imagining New York would feel like a promotion. I got there and felt exactly the same. The company was different but the loneliness was identical. Monday, 31 March 2014. The China Copy: Böhmermann, fresh from winning a Grimme Prize, fed Raab a story about Chinese file-sharing sites pirating TV Total and him missing licensing fees. Raab bought it completely and got genuinely angry. The prank was simple—just a plausible scenario designed to trigger outrage, no elaborate setup needed. It worked because that’s how it goes: you hear someone’s stealing from you and you react before you think. Böhmermann was riding high and testing his power, essentially. Raab fell for it. Friday, 28 March 2014. Fast Lanes: The pitch was always transparent: ISPs wanted money from big corporations in exchange for faster speeds. Everyone else got throttled. Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google—they’d pay, and the internet would become two-tiered. It was a naked money grab dressed up as technology. What got me was that the internet had actually worked the other way. Some accident of early design meant your small website loaded as fast as anyone else’s. But once ISPs monetized the pipes, that was over. Indie sites would just be slow. Not from congestion. From policy. The outcome was obvious enough to name: the internet would split into fast and slow. Pay or be second-class. That’s not competition. That’s rent extraction. These cycles always play out the same way—petitions, politics, corporations waiting it out. But something in the defense of net neutrality stuck with me. What they were defending actually existed: an infrastructure that didn’t primarily extract value. Once you’ve seen that, you understand exactly what disappears when the rules change. Friday, 28 March 2014. Adidas × Pharrell: I need to be clear: if I hear “Happy” one more time, I might actually lose my mind. The song’s inescapable, the kind of thing that burrows in and doesn’t come out. So when I heard Pharrell was collaborating with adidas, my first instinct was annoyance. But then I read what he’s actually doing, and it made sense. The collection’s dropping this summer. The centerpiece is biotech fabric made from recycled ocean plastic—actual plastic pulled from the water, not some greenwashing label slapped on a factory-standard shoe. It’s a detail that stands out when most celebrity partnerships are just a name stamped on the same thing everyone else is making. I’m not pretending to suddenly care about the ocean. But I do want Superstars from this thing. And a hat. Something simple, nothing oversold. That’s what I’m waiting for. Thursday, 27 March 2014. Homesick for Akihabara: World Order’s “Have A Nice Day” video is just Akihabara—robotlike precision cutting through all that tangled chaos, Genki Sudo moving through the district like it’s written into his code. Watching it made me realize I’m nostalgic for a place I don’t actually live, which is the weirdest, best kind of homesickness. Akihabara isn’t technically my favorite Tokyo neighborhood—that fluctuates between Shibuya, Harajuku, Shimokitazawa depending on my mood—but it’s the one that stays with me. Super Potato gets you in the door if you care about old game hardware. The real draw is the density: five floors of cheap electronics stacked on top of each other, pachinko parlors running constant mechanical screams, and the sex shops where you can flip through magazines with schoolgirls illustrated on every cover. No apology about any of it. That’s what I like about Akihabara. I took Christine around once, showed her the weird corners where you feel like you’ve stepped inside someone else’s obsession. Another time I gave a homeless guy 2,000 yen and some onigiri and a beer. The sheer strangeness of the place makes you want to be decent to people. I know every street in that small universe now, every corner. Watching them shoot the video through those streets, watching all that otaku culture get compressed into precisely choreographed movement—it felt like watching my own weird private memories get set to music. That’s the real magic of it. Thursday, 27 March 2014. They’ll Figure It Out: You notice it gradually. A creator you follow starts mentioning products—a phone here, some skincare there—and at first it feels natural. Then the pattern emerges: everything gets mentioned. The headphones, the coffee, the supplement brand. Never marked as paid. Maybe they got money, maybe they didn’t. You can’t tell anymore, and that’s where trust goes. I get these sponsorship requests all the time. Agencies are explicit: don’t mark it as an ad, because then the deal dies. They need it to look organic, like a genuine recommendation. I understand why creators take the offer. Money matters when you’re trying to survive on your work. But audiences aren’t stupid. They figure it out, or they start to wonder, and the moment they’re wondering whether you’re being honest with them, you’ve already lost the only thing that mattered—their trust. You don’t get it back. The legal threat is real. Fines, investigations, the regulatory weight of it. But it’s not even the main consequence. The real one is simpler: you destroy something you spent years building, and for what? A few months of sponsorship money that wouldn’t have been worth it in the first place. A small audience that trusts you is worth more than a bigger one that’s wondering if you’re lying. Creators keep taking the deal anyway. Wednesday, 26 March 2014. Proximity: Okay so FireChat is this app that lets you message people near you—like within ten meters—without needing internet. It works through Bluetooth, using iOS 7’s peer-to-peer stuff. You’re at a festival, a concert, the beach, and suddenly you can text strangers around you. Or your friends if you got separated in the crowd. There’s something perfect about the idea. You’re surrounded by people but your phone has no signal. Then this app shows up and says: you don’t need that. Just proximity. Just the people standing near you. I doubt it became a thing. The fantasy of meeting someone at a concert through an app is better than the reality—everyone’s already distracted, already texting someone else. But the concept stuck with me: phones finally doing something interesting without the entire weight of the internet behind them. Wednesday, 26 March 2014. This Week’s Tokyo Charts: I started paying real attention to Japanese charts after realizing I was missing almost everything that actually mattered there. What strikes me is how unsegregated it is—idol groups and punk bands sharing the same chart space with no weird hierarchy about credibility. This week: Atsuko Maeda with her sharper post-AKB48 career, Dempagumi.inc chaotically refusing seriousness, and Mongol 800, an Okinawan punk band that’s been somehow mattering for decades. There’s something freeing about following charts from a place where you have zero cultural investment in any of it. You’re just listening to what caught people’s ears. Wednesday, 26 March 2014. Scarlett Everywhere: In 2014, Scarlett Johansson was inescapable. She was the voice in Her, the spy in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the phantom in Under the Skin—three completely different versions of her, flickering through the world at the same time. Lost in Translation got me years ago. Sofia Coppola filmed her not as a spectacle but as someone thinking, waiting, aware of the invisible weight of being looked at. It was never about her face or body, though of course she has both. It was about the person inside, tired and searching. Now she’s on the cover of Wall Street Journal Magazine, shot by Alasdair McLellan, and in the interview she’s saying something that matters: she wants to stop being an object of desire. Not bitterly. Just—she knows it won’t last anyway, so why not build something that does? A career. Family. A life beyond being looked at. I get it. And I also know she’s fighting something that’s basically designed to be permanent. The machinery keeps running, the photographs are beautiful, and the question—whether she’s the beautiful thing or the person refusing to be only that—keeps circling. Most people just accept it. I respect that she won’t, even knowing the system doesn’t much care. Tuesday, 25 March 2014. The Saddest Melody in the World: I’ve gotten into this habit with my roommates—we watch Hey Arnold over dinner, usually a couple episodes at a time. Rewatching as an adult, though, the whole thing feels different. The show is quietly devastating in a way I completely missed as a kid. There’s this bittersweet melancholy woven through it, hanging over the boarding house, over Phil and Gertrude, over all these children moving through a world they don’t fully understand. You don’t feel it when you’re young, but now the innocence in it feels fragile, weighted with impermanence. There’s a song by Jim Lang from one of the episodes, ’The Best Parents,’ that barely registered the first time through. Now it’s the saddest melody in the world. Tuesday, 25 March 2014. Keep Them Pristine: You unbox new sneakers and something primal happens. You smell them. You run your hands over them. If no one’s watching you might even taste them, just a little, because they’re so perfectly made and still carry that factory newness and possibility. Then you wear them one time—literally one time—through rain or mud or just regular streets, and they’re finished. That fresh-out-of-the-box glow is gone. They’re just shoes now. Old shoes. The obvious fix is transparent plastic bags. Keep them on as you walk around. Everyone gets to see your sneakers through the plastic but the actual shoe stays immaculate, untouched, preserved. The problem is you look utterly ridiculous. One person in plastic bags is a freak. But that’s how trends happen, right? Alone you’re insane, but do something weird with enough other people and suddenly it’s fashion. I want to see sneaker brands and designers and anyone with actual taste just commit to this. Bag check before you step outside. Make it normal. Make it cool. Because the alternative is watching every pair you actually like get slowly, inevitably destroyed the moment you actually wear them. Monday, 24 March 2014. Your Kickstarter Sucks: Found this Tumblr that catalogs the worst Kickstarters ever posted. The pitch is the entire joke—no commentary needed. Chris is asking for fifteen grand to expose his ass on mountains. Holly needs eleven thousand to lay her metal penis on tables. Eric wants seventeen to make Monopoly badly, intentionally, with no other purpose. They’re all sincere. The Tumblr just presents them straight. Some of them probably got funded. Which is the whole thing right there—the confidence, the zero self-awareness, the absolute certainty that strangers will fund your incomprehensible idea. It’s not satire or commentary. It’s just people asking, and sometimes the answer is yes. Sunday, 23 March 2014. Terror in Tokyo: Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan have been fucking with me hard. That feeling they create—the constant “what the fuck happens next,” the way they dig into your brain for days, the way they make everything else seem dull by comparison. I’ve been chasing that hit ever since, wading through trailer announcements and reviews looking for the next thing that lands the same way. Nothing’s come close yet. Then the Terror in Tokyo trailer hit. Two guys. A terrorist attack on the capital. But that’s not the plan—that’s the practice run. The whole country is the target. Shinichiro Watanabe’s directing. Yoko Kanno’s composing. That pairing is enough to make you lean in. Both of them have made work that matters. A premise that audacious and dark right out of the gate—maybe, finally, something that scratches this itch. Sunday, 23 March 2014. Adventure Time Minis: Funko’s releasing Adventure Time Mystery Minis soon - little vinyl figures of the full cast. Finn, Jake, Marceline, the Ice King, LSP, all of them. And honestly, it’s Lumpy Space Princess that makes this worth wanting. She started as a one-off joke in early seasons and somehow became the only character in the show with genuine comedic range, maybe the only one with actual depth. There’s a Zombie Finn variant too, which tracks for a show that got progressively darker as it went on. I’m not usually into blind-box collecting - that whole chase mechanic feels a bit desperate - but these would be nice to have around. Friday, 21 March 2014. Jeremy Scott’s Tails: Jeremy Scott makes sneakers that actually offend some people, which is probably the highest compliment you can pay a designer. The tail thing—these weird appendages hanging off the heel or the side of the shoe—is his move. It’s dumb and bold and completely uninterested in making sense to anyone but him. At Paris Fashion Week he did an interview where he got into it about why shoes need tails, what Blade Runner has to do with his new collection, Kanye West, the whole thing. The questions are more interesting than the shoe talk you usually get, because they’re not about comfort or sales or what color’s trending. They’re about what the shoe actually means. The tails aren’t just weird for weirdness’s sake. There’s a philosophy underneath it—a refusal to make something polite or obvious. Blade Runner shows up because that aesthetic is fundamentally uncomfortable, deliberately ugly in a future-focused way. Kanye’s in there because he’s another guy willing to burn it all down and start with a shape that doesn’t fit anything. It’s the opposite of incremental design, which is most of what fashion is. You take last year’s sneaker, adjust the curve, change the color, call it progress. Scott’s asking different questions. What if the shoe looked alive? What if it made you feel wrong? What if it looked like nothing anyone’s ever seen? I’ll never wear them myself—too much attention, too much faith in my own taste. But there’s something pure about it. He’s saying: this is what a shoe should be. Take it or don’t. That’s the only way to actually make something new. Friday, 21 March 2014. Hand It Over: Friday, 21 March 2014. Selena: Friday, 21 March 2014. Democracy in Spray Paint: There’s something both generous and strange about artists agreeing to paint what strangers tell them to paint. You’d think creative work means doing what you want, protecting your vision from interference. But Wurstbande, Gogoplata, and Rylsee—Berlin street artists who actually have something to say—took it the other way: they opened up a wall and asked the public what should go on it. The appeal is obvious. You get people invested because they had a hand in it. The wall becomes less about the artist’s name and more about the collective moment. It’s messy in theory—too many voices, no real editorial eye—but it works as a thing to do with people in a city. Berlin’s wall gets painted. Someone felt heard. The artists got to move paint around with the sun on their face. Maybe it matters less what ended up on that wall than the fact that it happened at all. Public space where the public gets a say. No algorithm, no curation, no panel of experts deciding what counts as taste. Just the democratic ugly beautiful mess of actual community deciding its own decoration. Thursday, 20 March 2014. After the Lolita Burger: I had a Lolita Burger and it destroyed every meal that came before it. Crispy potato chips baked into the patty, sweet onion jam, peanut butter and bacon working in concert, seared foie gras, grass-fed beef charred to the edge of black. I’d eat that thing every day for the rest of my life if I could. That’s not even gluttony—that’s just knowing what you want. I’m not here to judge anyone’s salad. But I also know that something in me changed after that burger. Once you’ve had food that doesn’t pretend to be anything but exactly what it is, you can’t go back to pretending anymore. Thursday, 20 March 2014. I Killed the Like Button: A blog post about reclaiming the web from Facebook and Twitter lived in my head for years. The guy who wrote it was arguing that we’d basically handed our conversations over to a handful of corporations, that everything we said disappeared into an endless feed, that we’d lost any real power over our own expression. It was obviously true and I could feel it happening to me in real time, which made it worse. The like button became the perfect symbol of everything wrong with that. It started as something harmless—a quick way to acknowledge something without typing a comment. But somewhere it turned into a god, a little number that kept running score on your relevance, your worth, how much your thoughts mattered in a world where everyone’s screaming for attention. And once you start watching that number, it gets in your brain and doesn’t leave. You don’t see it coming. You post something and you start refreshing the page, waiting for the counter to move. Then you notice which posts do well and which don’t, and your brain does the math automatically. The weird observation, the thing that only makes sense to you—that gets deleted before you publish it. You post the safe thing instead. The video everyone’s already seen. The joke that lands. Because you’ve trained yourself to predict what the algorithm wants and you write toward that. Then the addiction takes hold. You get ten likes and you want twenty. You get a hundred and you want more. I’d find myself refreshing obsessively, chasing that next hit, and when it stopped climbing I’d spiral, wondering what was wrong with the post, what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t good enough. It doesn’t matter if the final count is thirty or three thousand. You’re still hungry for one more. The real problem is that a like isn’t actually approval. It’s barely even engagement. Someone clicks a button without reading, or they skim and agree with a headline. That pixel becomes a data point I’m using to measure my own worth as a writer and as a person, which is absolutely insane when I think about it. I had normalized being a lab rat in some tech company’s experiment, pressing a lever for dopamine hits. So I killed it. The like button is gone. The Twitter share count too. Yeah, it’s probably going to hurt my traffic because I understand exactly how this works—people click on things more when they see validation. But the second you start optimizing for that is the second you stop writing for yourself. You start performing. You become someone else. Instead I put in a simple share button with no counter. If someone wants to pass something along, they can, but not because a big number told them it was good. Because it actually mattered to them. That’s a real choice, not a reflex. It’s not perfect. It’s not going to fix the internet or overthrow anyone’s business model. But it’s where I can start, with this one small corner. Not watching the counter. Not letting the fear of a bad number keep me from writing something weird or unpopular or true. Writing like I did before this all got turned into a game. Wednesday, 19 March 2014. Lykke Li – No Rest For The Wicked: There’s something about Lykke Li’s work that refuses to let you settle. Every song seems to be in motion, like she’s always pushing toward something—musically, lyrically, in the sheer restlessness of her voice. The textures are sleek but never comfortable. You can hear the weariness in there too, the exhaustion of constant motion, but also maybe that’s the point. Maybe there is no rest, not for her anyway, not for someone making work that needs to constantly evolve and shift. Wednesday, 19 March 2014. Alejandra Guilmant: There’s a face that stops you. Alejandra Guilmant turned up somewhere—a shoot, a magazine, I forget the context—and she’s just clearly there, visually present in a way that reads as honest. Not performing, not manufactured. Just effortless geometry. Gray Berlin skies, whatever. When you see someone that clean, the weather doesn’t matter. There’s no calculation, no machinery you need to understand. You look at her and something clicks because it’s all line and proportion and the kind of ease that doesn’t happen by accident. That’s enough of a reason to feel better. Wednesday, 19 March 2014. Centered: I’m rewatching The Life Aquatic right now—Bill Murray doing his thing, Owen Wilson doing his thing, Robyn Cohen always half-naked in the scenes she’s in. I never get tired of Wes Anderson. Kogonada made a video breaking it down, showing what makes Anderson actually work. He’s a fetishist for centered framing, Kogonada shows—every shot lined up down the middle, the camera staring straight at the center of the world. Over and over. It sounds weird when you’re describing it, but watch the video and it clicks. No fancy camera moves, no elaborate tricks. Just an obsessive commitment to symmetry, and somehow that’s the whole point. Wednesday, 19 March 2014. The Trademark Hustle: Some company bought the trademark to “BlogFashion Kitchen” and is now suing Ann-Christin, who’s been running the actual blog for three years. They want 600 euros every six months, retroactive, plus penalties up to a quarter-million if she doesn’t comply. This is the shape of things now. Not theft, not innovation—just extraction dressed up in legal language. Register the variation, trademark something adjacent, find whoever had the original name but didn’t think about IP law, and wait for them to pay or fold. Most people will fold. Twenty years of blogging and I’ve watched the internet get worse in ways that are almost boring. The platforms monopolized it. The ad networks squeezed it. But this is different. The cleverness isn’t in building anything. It’s in finding where regular people slip up and turning it into a threat. Ann-Christin will probably pay. And the next person will get the same email next week. Tuesday, 18 March 2014. The Parrot That Isn’t: Johannes Stötter’s parrot isn’t a parrot. He spent four weeks setting it up—planning the pose, the paint, the angle—so that when you look at the photograph, your brain immediately sees feathers and color and the specific geometry of a bird’s head. The illusion is nearly perfect, which means it has to break. And when it does, you’re looking at a woman painted so thoroughly that she became something else first. That’s the real skill here. Not the technical execution of the paint itself, though that’s flawless. It’s the conceptual discipline—the understanding that if you want someone to see a bird, you have to think about exactly how vision works, how the eye moves, what signals the brain accepts without question. Four weeks to create a photograph that takes a second to see through. Once the illusion cracks, it doesn’t fully repair. You know what you’re looking at now, but the painting becomes something different—less like a costume and more like evidence of planning. Of patience. Body painting usually trades on novelty or spectacle. This trades on sustained deception, which is a harder thing to pull off. What stays with me is the moment just before you understand what you’re seeing. That’s the space Stötter engineered for. Not the payoff of the reveal, but the fracturing second when the two images compete. Saturday, 15 March 2014. Lady Gaga’s Limit: Lady Gaga got vomited on in Texas. Artist Millie Brown ate a bunch of meat beforehand, then threw up directly into Gaga’s face during her set. And it worked. That got to her. For decades she’s built her entire thing on shock—meat dresses, pushing every boundary, the constant implication that nothing fazes her. Then someone threw up in her face and the performance cracked. Not some philosophical challenge to taste, just basic vomit. The kind of thing that’s too involuntary, too physical, too real to turn into art. There’s something almost respectable about discovering the actual limit. You can spend twenty years saying nothing bothers you, and then someone pukes on you and suddenly you’re just uncomfortable. The frontier was lower than you thought. Friday, 14 March 2014. Memes Stopped Being Funny: I remember when memes were actually funny. Bad Luck Brian felt fresh. Overly Attached Girlfriend was weird enough to land. Doge had that untranslatable absurdist charm—the terrible Comic Sans, the fractured English (“such amaze”), something about it that just worked. But somewhere between then and now, memes became what everyone does, which is the exact moment they stopped being what anyone wanted to see. The problem isn’t that memes got old. Trends always get old. The problem is they became democratic. Every person with access to a template and two working brain cells started cranking out variations. First World Problems, Socially Awkward Penguin, Confession Bear, Actual Advice Mallard, Skeptical Third World Kid, Scumbag Steve—the list goes on and so do a million lazy captions, each one somehow worse than the last, each one “funny” only to whoever made it and maybe their dead cat. I read somewhere that memes have a shelf life now. Shorter each cycle. You get maybe two weeks before a format is completely exhausted, beaten to death by a million people trying to squeeze comedy from something that stopped working by day three. And that’s when I started noticing people at parties still making Borat references, still pulling Shit People Say bits like it was 2011, and I got it—we collectively decided memes were forever, which somehow made them completely disposable. The frustrating part is how inevitable this was. Memes were always going to become this. The moment they stopped being weird internet humor from people who actually understood timing and became a format anyone could stamp text onto, the death was sealed. The democratization killed the thing. You can’t have a thousand people riffing on the same joke and expect the thousand and first to land. So now when I see another variation of some format that should’ve died years ago, I just feel tired. Not angry—tired. It’s the exhaustion of watching something you liked get destroyed not by enemies but by millions of well-meaning nobodies all convinced they have something clever to add. Thursday, 13 March 2014. The Crying Face: Your pencil breaks. Your teacher is mean. You realize people could see you in the window reflection all along. You drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth. These are the small disasters—nothing serious, but they feel urgent anyway. Around 2014, Selena Gomez’s face became the universal response to all of them. Not quite crying, not quite pouting, something between devastation and petulance. The exact expression you make when something stupid happens. Just send the image and people understood. The tweets kept multiplying because the face was perfectly calibrated. Your main person and your side person walk into the same room. Your friend says something to your parents they shouldn’t have. You’re about to sleep and remember you still have makeup on. You laugh so hard you almost pee yourself. Each was a slightly different flavor of social friction and bad timing, and Gomez’s face covered every single one. What amazed me was how quickly it became language. You didn’t need to be funny or clever. You didn’t even need words. Just send the face and everyone filled in their own small catastrophes. It probably doesn’t work anymore—memes have expiration dates—but for a few months in 2014, a single expression from Selena Gomez was enough to say everything that needed saying about minor humiliation and bad timing. Thursday, 13 March 2014. Water Ramp: Bob Burnquist built a ramp in Lake Tahoe, right there in the water between Nevada and California. The video shows what it must feel like—launching off those transitions in the sun, the water right there if you need to cool off or just want it. It’s designed perfectly for something nobody needs. The kind of dream you indulge when you’re sure the money will never show up. If it ever did though, you’d know what to build. Thursday, 13 March 2014. All Those Sausages: Uli Hoeneß owes Germany 27 million euros, a number so abstract that someone built a website to translate it into actual things: 9 million stadium sausages, 39,000 season tickets on the Dortmund south stand, 11,000 daycare slots. The further down the list you go the more surreal it becomes. Hoeneß basically was Bayern Munich for thirty years and apparently didn’t pay his taxes, which is what happens when you have that much money. The debt keeps growing. I don’t know if he ever actually pays it back. Probably doesn’t. The website works because 27 million is noise. Nine million sausages at least makes sense. You can almost hold that in your head. Turn an incomprehensible number into concrete things and suddenly it matters more, even though nothing actually changes. The money’s still wherever it is. Hoeneß is still rich. We get to imagine all those sausages. It’s the whole point—make the incomprehensible into something you can picture, even if nothing actually changes. Funny and dark at the same time. Wednesday, 12 March 2014. Small Dogs, Shorter Skirts: Mayama_ya on Instagram dresses Chihuahuas in Sailor Moon costumes, documents them, and that’s the post. Tiny dogs, tailored miniskirts, exact character recreations. Each photo is the same joke—here is a trembling three-pound creature in a sailor suit, and yes, it’s detailed. The appeal is straightforward. Cuteness pushed past any reasonable threshold. A Chihuahua already sits at some extreme end of vulnerability, so adding a magical girl outfit just drives it further into absurdity. What’s strange is the craft. These aren’t quick snapshots. There’s real tailoring, real attention—the same commitment level you see in someone obsessing over MMO transmog, except the character is a living dog. The dogs probably don’t care what they’re wearing. But there’s something weirdly respectful about taking a joke this seriously, this far, and never breaking character. That commitment to a concept, to doing something well even when nobody’s asking you to, is what’s actually good here. The costumes are just the excuse. Wednesday, 12 March 2014. Appetite: Scroll far enough online and you’ll find burger photography that’s designed to hurt. Matthew Ramsey’s work is like that—stacked patties, cheese bleeding, sauce that looks like it has a life expectancy measured in seconds. The names are part of the seduction: The Dirty Birdy, The Mac Daddy, The Merman. Not trying to sound refined. Just trying to make you want something. I’m not even that into burgers, but something in those photographs gets to you. The lack of pretense maybe. These aren’t heritage beef on artisanal grain presented by someone with a beard and opinions about sourdough fermentation. They’re just meat and cheese and fried components stacked as high as they’ll go, which is the only honest thing a burger can be. The funny part is knowing you want the image more than you want to eat it. The burger will be too salty, too much, probably a mess. It’ll sit wrong in your stomach. But at midnight, scrolling, it doesn’t matter. The photograph has already done its job. Tuesday, 11 March 2014. De:Bug: De:Bug is done. The German music and culture title I read for years just closed. I knew it was coming—everyone knew. Print’s been circling the drain so long that each death barely registers anymore. But this one landed different. It was never the obvious cool thing. Not Vice, not some glossy lifestyle rag. De:Bug was niche, wonky, genuinely invested in electronic music and underground culture in a way that felt almost accidental. It didn’t seem to care if you were paying attention. It just kept doing its thing, every issue smarter than it had any right to be given how few people were actually buying it on newsstands. That’s what kills me about print dying the way it is. The internet was supposed to democratize everything, make information free and abundant. What actually happened is we killed the things that were actually good at being strange and specific. De:Bug survived this long on stubbornness and a tiny audience that got it. Publications like that don’t survive on clicks. They need someone to physically walk into a shop and pay money for paper. And nobody does that anymore. I used to buy issues when I’d see it. There’s something different about how you read a physical publication versus scrolling. You’re stuck with what they gave you, you dig deeper into stuff you might not have clicked on, you find connections you wouldn’t algorithmically. That’s gone now. That’s what I’ll miss—not the title itself, but that way of encountering culture. The internet won. Smartphones won. We all chose convenience over the weird thing in the corner. De:Bug’s closing isn’t a tragedy because one publication failed. It’s because there are fewer and fewer places left that can afford to be anything other than obvious. Tuesday, 11 March 2014. Game of Thrones Returns: I remember that waiting. Popcorn, cold beer, the whole ritual of it. Season 4 was coming and you could feel the shift—this wasn’t the show anymore that people were still figuring out. By then everyone knew what it could do, and they were hungry to see what came next. The trailer promised secrets, violence, the kind of reckoning that kept us coming back. You don’t feel that kind of anticipation for television the same way anymore, at least I don’t. Monday, 10 March 2014. Ryan Gosling Forever: I tell myself I’m happy. I have enough to eat, I live somewhere safe, I have people who care about me. It’s more than a lot of people get. But then I wake up at three in the morning thinking about Ryan Gosling and suddenly none of it matters. Why doesn’t he want me? Why isn’t he here? I know how insane this sounds. And yet there’s something real about wanting something you absolutely cannot have. The internet has figured this out—there are a thousand ways to pretend that proximity exists. You can buy a shirt with his face on it. You can wear it. You can hold that image close and feel like maybe, somehow, he’s closer to you too. It’s stupid but it works for about five minutes. You put on the shirt and he’s there on your chest and for a moment you’re not thinking about everything that’s missing from your actual life. You’re just living in this other version where what you want is actually available. I guess we’re all doing this in some form. Filling gaps with images of impossible people, with merchandise, with the idea of being known by someone who’ll never know we exist. It’s ridiculous and everyone does it anyway because it works just enough to keep you going. Monday, 10 March 2014. Days Outside of Time: A sunny Saturday and I’m watching ninety-seven minutes of footage from a Berlin nightclub that closed long enough ago to become a myth. Bar 25. Tage Außerhalb der Zeit, Days Outside of Time—the title alone explains what people came for. Hours without edges. Music loud enough to think inside of. The river at dusk. The freedom to just move. What catches you in this footage is how alive everyone looks. Not in a sentimental way, just alive. You see it in how the bodies move to the bass, and you understand why this place becomes holy in people’s memories. Maybe it was just a club. It definitely was more than that. I’m not sure I ever went, or whether I’m assembling a memory from stories I’ve heard repeated in dark rooms and basement bars. Either way, you can’t look away. The light. The movement. The knowledge that it’s gone. You know how the story ends—the club closes, time moves forward, the world becomes something else. But while you’re watching, that hasn’t happened yet. For ninety-seven minutes, it’s still possible to imagine living outside of time. Saturday, 8 March 2014. High at the End: I’m not sure when we stopped researching LSD. Forty years ago, apparently. A Swiss psychiatrist named Peter Gasser decided to change that. He gave high doses to twelve terminal cancer patients—most of them had never taken acid—and watched what happened. The anxiety dropped. The depression dropped. The specific kind of dread that comes with being told you’re dying: that lifted too. And it stayed lifted. A year later, these people were still reporting the same peace they’d felt in the clinic. No one freaked out. No one had a bad trip. The experiment worked. Half the group got placebo first. Their conditions got worse. Then they got the real thing, and they improved. That’s not magic or placebo effect. That’s just pharmacology. What stuck with me is that eleven of the twelve said they’d take it again. Not because they were chasing fun. Because they’d spent a few hours without the weight they’d been carrying for months. That mattered enough to them that they wanted to remember how to get back there. I’ve taken acid. I’ve been in clubs at three in the morning surrounded by people convinced they were experiencing something profound. Some of it was bullshit. But the mechanism is the same whether you’re in a basement or in a hospital bed. The drug works on your brain. It makes things feel less final. It opens up space where there was only closure. The difference is context. In a club, it’s just chemicals and music and the possibility of something. In a cancer ward, it’s the possibility of relief from something unbearable. We should probably run more studies. One study of twelve people isn’t enough to change medicine. But it’s enough to suggest that maybe we got it wrong. Maybe the drug itself isn’t the enemy. Maybe it’s the use that matters. Maybe fear of drugs has prevented us from looking at something that could genuinely help the people we fail most: the ones we’re about to lose. Friday, 7 March 2014. Bothering People in Japanese: I’ve watched Lost in Translation way too many times to keep count. There’s something about that film that never gets old—Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Tokyo at night, the feeling of being alone in a crowd. I watched it three times back-to-back on a train once and would happily do it again. Bill was on Graham Norton recently talking about his Japanese dictionary. Not for any practical reason, but because he likes learning random phrases he can drop into conversations just to confuse people. It’s so perfectly him—the idea of learning language as pure mischief, treating Japanese like it’s a party trick. He’s learning it the way you’d learn sleight of hand, just to watch someone’s face when you do the unexpected thing. Most people learn language with purpose: travel, work, seeming cultured. Bill just wants the weird stuff, the phrases nobody expects an American actor to know. He mentioned there was one particular phrase that had really gotten stuck with him, something that kept coming back to him. I wish he’d finished that part because I’m genuinely curious what it was—some random sentence that probably didn’t make sense to anyone but appealed to him anyway. Thursday, 6 March 2014. Kate Upton: Kate Upton in Sports Illustrated. Sun, sand, skin. No narrative, no pretense—just what it looks like. She commits completely to the image without apology, and that directness works better than all the overproduced stuff that tries to turn desire into concept. Sometimes you just want to look at something that doesn’t explain itself. Wednesday, 5 March 2014. Eighteen Cats, One House: Some guy in California built his entire house around cats. Four bedrooms, converted into an endless playground of platforms and poles and perches—the whole place engineered for eighteen animals. I found pictures of it once and couldn’t stop looking. That’s not pet ownership. That’s devotion that’s crossed into architecture. The interesting part is the design problem he solved. Not for humans. Not for the market. Just: what if you removed every constraint except the cat’s comfort? What if the whole system existed only for them? Most people wouldn’t bother. It’s easier to get a cat condo from Amazon and call it done. But this guy looked at his living space and said yes, I’m doing this. You don’t build something like that because you think it’s practical. You build it because you care enough to look ridiculous doing it. Because halfway doesn’t work once you’ve decided to commit. There’s something clean about that kind of obsession—no compromise, no “well maybe this is too much.” Just eighteen cats and four bedrooms and an entire life redesigned around someone else’s needs. I’m not a cat person. But I understand the impulse. It’s the same thing that makes people restore cars, or spend years perfecting a garden, or vanish into hobbies nobody will ever see. You commit because the thing itself demands it. No compromise. That’s design. Wednesday, 5 March 2014. Ellen’s Echo: Ellen shot that Oscar selfie and it broke Twitter for a day—everyone needed in on it, servers choking on retweets. The Simpsons saw it coming and did what The Simpsons did: Matt Groening had the writers build an episode around it, stuck the same Hollywood names in frame (Lawrence, Cooper, Pitt), made it a thing. That was the show’s trick. See something happening in the culture, fold it into yourself before anyone stops talking about it. Used to feel like proof the show had its finger on everything, still mattered. Now I think it was just reflexes—one cultural mirror bouncing off another. Wednesday, 5 March 2014. Drunk In Emojis: Jesse Hill made a music video for Drunk In Love using nothing but emojis. On paper that sounds terrible—the kind of thing you’d close out of immediately. But it actually works. The constraint forces everything to be deliberate. Every emoji has to mean something. No filler, no production tricks to hide behind, just the image and the song cutting through. What strikes me is that Beyoncé’s the kind of artist who gets this kind of weird creative response. People don’t just listen, they want to remix her, translate her into new forms, find her in different mediums. Not every artist gets that. Not many are distinctive enough to inspire it. Spent maybe ten minutes on it. Stuck around longer than I expected. Wednesday, 5 March 2014. Shigeki Fujishiro’s Stan Smith: Shigeki Fujishiro’s Stan Smiths for adidas Consortium are almost too clean to touch. The collaboration is called “Play,” and everything about the execution suggests someone who understands that the best design work happens in the negative space, in what you don’t add. Stan Smiths have always been this perfect low bar for minimalism—white leather, three stripes, that dumb little tennis tag. They’re almost impossible to mess up because there’s nothing there to begin with. What Fujishiro did was find the small gaps where detail could live. The stitching has a quality to it. The proportions breathe differently. It’s not a redesign, it’s a recalibration. I saw them and wanted to keep them in a glass case. That’s the crude truth of it—not “they’re stunning” or whatever, but the actual animal response to something that’s clearly been thought about. Good design doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there quietly while you orbit around it, noticing things. Minimal shoes are everywhere now, and most of them are empty. These aren’t empty. That’s worth caring about. Tuesday, 4 March 2014. Too Late: There was this moment in Ghost in the Shell—Scarlett Johansson at a high window in Tokyo, nothing underneath but underwear and the glittering city far below. Squarepusher’s “Tommib” playing, which made the whole scene feel less like cinema and more like stepping into someone else’s fever dream, the kind that sticks to you long after you wake up. All I wanted was to sit there beside her. Not say anything. Just watch. Hold her hand. That was the entire thought. Then I found out she’s pregnant. Romain Dauriac, a French journalist, got there first—got there at exactly the right moment. Now there’s a baby coming, and I’m still thinking about that window and that song and how the light probably felt against her skin in that one scene that didn’t even happen the way I remember it anymore. Obviously I’m happy for her. I mean it. But there’s this small, dumb sadness that settles in—the sadness of knowing I never stood a chance, which I already knew, but now it’s official. Confirmed. Done. This is where you move on to the next one. Jennifer Lawrence, someone else. The carousel keeps turning. By now I know that watching doesn’t change anything, but I watch anyway. What else is there to do. Tuesday, 4 March 2014. Owning the Map: I’d stopped checking in somewhere around the hundredth time I was about to mark my location at the same coffee shop. Foursquare had felt interesting for about two weeks—the idea that your location mattered, that you could own a space digitally—but it quickly became obvious that all it did was document everywhere you actually go, which is depressing. The same three blocks, the same stores, the same predictable routine mapped out in check-ins. Placescore inverted the whole thing. Instead of collecting locations, you compete for them. Show up somewhere, win a quick puzzle game against whoever claimed it last, and it’s yours. It’s a small shift, but it changes everything. The game itself is simple—sort dots, recognize patterns, nothing that requires thought. But suddenly the mundane geography of your city matters. You’re not checking in to broadcast your life anymore. You’re trying to own your corner of the map, and competing is the only way to do it. It’s the same impulse that made Foursquare work—that desire to control territory, to mark your presence—but directed at something that actually feels like a game. There’s something almost honest about it. No social layer, no discovery angle, no pretense about what you’re doing. Just: can you play better? If yes, the location is yours. That’s the whole thing. That’s the appeal. Tuesday, 4 March 2014. The Selfie That Mattered: Ellen pointed her phone at the people sitting near her during an Oscars commercial break. Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper—just a quick selfie, everyone grinning. The kind of thing that takes three seconds. That photo became the night. Two million retweets by morning, over a million likes. The actual Oscars—the wins, the speeches, the spectacle—got completely overshadowed by a woman asking her neighbors if they wanted in the picture. The casual beat the ceremonial. There’s something genuinely funny about that. Here’s this institution, decades of tradition, all that careful choreography, and it gets upended by someone doing the most ordinary thing. Not a moment designed for impact. Just people, actually happy, crammed in together, knowing the whole thing was a bit ridiculous. What made it work was how real it felt. Not the practiced joy of an award acceptance, but actual amusement. The pleasure of being in on a joke with a room full of strangers while millions watched at home. That kind of unguarded moment. It stuck around. The selfie outlasted the ceremony. Years later you remember the photo. Not who won best picture. Monday, 3 March 2014. When Leo Couldn’t Win: There was this stretch where Leonardo DiCaprio seemed to get nominated for an Oscar every other year, and never once went home with one. Five nominations, nothing to show for it, which sounds like hyperbole until you actually sit with it. And the weird part wasn’t that he was undeserving—he was doing real work, film after film. Titanic, Inception, Wolf of Wall Street. Whether it was the romantic earnestness or the paranoid obsession or the pure sleaze, there was always something underneath. But the Academy kept passing on him. You could feel it become a thing, a joke that wasn’t really a joke anymore. Everyone had a take on whether Leo should have won by now. The longer it went on, the more absurd it felt—not because he was dramatically better than everyone else, but just because of the consistency. Like watching someone excellent at their job be denied this one arbitrary approval, over and over, while the world watched and kept score. I don’t know if I actually felt bad for him. He was fine. But there was something almost cruel about it, in a way that only matters if you care about that kind of recognition. When he finally won for The Revenant, it wasn’t even his best performance—it was fine, competent, a guy surviving nature. But it happened, and people moved on, and I never really thought about it again after that. What stuck with me was the absurdity of the whole thing. How long it took, and how quickly it became irrelevant once it was over. Monday, 3 March 2014. 2NE1’s Back: I don’t speak Korean and I have no idea what 2NE1 are singing about, but their new tracks—Happy and Come Back Home—land anyway. The production, the approach, the whole aesthetic is foreign to me, and I’m not fluent enough in the language or the culture to pretend otherwise. But something about them cuts through that distance. Pure otherness, and it works. Monday, 3 March 2014. Lykke Li, Again: 2008 and 2009 were the years I paid attention to music that supposedly mattered. Lykke Li released Youth Novels—perfect and aching, the kind of sound that made you feel less alone without being pathetic about it. Around the same time, M83 made Saturdays = Youth (nobody noticed but they should have) and Natasha Khan gave us Two Suns. That was the soundtrack to those years. That was what heartbreak sounded like when you were certain it was changing you permanently. Then she vanished. Not dramatically—just the way artists do. You move on, or they change, or life fills the gap. You forget. You stop being the person who needed those songs. Years later, Lykke Li came back with I Never Learn. The moment I heard her voice again—just the start of it—everything came back. Not the teenage heartbreak, but the memory of why she mattered in the first place. That specific melancholy that sounded intelligent. Maybe she’d grown, or maybe I had. Either way, it was her, unmistakably her, but changed. Deeper. Less desperate. Less like someone dying and more like someone who’d lived. That’s the kind of artist you don’t forget. You just wait for them to remember themselves. Friday, 28 February 2014. Marking the Map: You travel somewhere and you want to remember it. So you take photos, collect junk, write things down—all these ways of trying to hold onto places you’ve already left. It never works. You end up with a box of stuff you never look at. A cork globe is different. You just mark where you’ve been. No context, no memory attached. Just a pin going in. I’ve been here, and here, and here. That’s the whole story. Chiaki Kawakami designed one that actually works. The material is exactly right—warm, tactile, something you’d want to hold instead of letting fade into the background. The design doesn’t overcomplicate the idea—it’s a map, you mark it, you’re done. What I like is the honesty. The globe doesn’t hold your experience. The places blur together over time. The pins are all that’s left. Friday, 28 February 2014. A Third Are Still in School: Found out a third of British strippers are still in school. The research showed 29 percent of dancers working in UK clubs are students or high school kids, funding their education the way previous generations might’ve worked retail or flipped burgers. The math’s straightforward when you actually look at it. Tuition gets worse every year, legitimate student jobs pay nothing, and anything hourly that fits around classes is going to be minimum wage. But nights in a club? Real money. Flexible scheduling, cash in hand, nobody tracking your time or effort like some manager with a clipboard. It’s a completely different equation. What’s stranger is that not all of them started from desperation. The study found women from comfortable families who had other options and chose to dance anyway. They wanted the performance, the independence, the immediate cash, the control of their own nights. A researcher named Teela Sanders said they think of themselves as dancers, not as sex workers, and the culture’s shifted enough that she’s probably right. It’s work now, not a last resort. I don’t know if this is a global thing, but the thinking’s obvious. You’re broke, you’re young, legitimate jobs barely cover rent. Stripping pays better. You pick based on what you’re willing to do and how much cash you actually need. It’s not tragic and it’s not noble. It just is. Friday, 28 February 2014. The Cost of Certainty: Thousands of euros a month for a girlfriend that will never leave. Japanese otaku building their entire emotional lives around Miku, Yuno, Shiina Mashiro—not as a phase but as the relationship, the one thing that actually works. Girlfriend, daughter, wife, all in plastic and pixels and perfectly arranged desire. The appeal is straightforward. Real people are unpredictable. They disappoint. They want things from you. They might not want you back. But a character designed to be loved offers something different: guaranteed safety. Every purchase is proof you’re doing something right. New figures, voice packs, limited editions—the relationship deepens through transactions, which means you always know what to do next. What’s interesting is the precision of it. Someone figured out how to package male loneliness so effectively that thousands of men will spend serious money and serious years on it. That’s not sadness—sadness is everywhere. That’s engineering. The system works because it solves the one thing that makes real relationships terrifying: the other person actually mattering in ways you can’t control. Maybe that’s a reasonable trade. Maybe the safety is worth it. I don’t know. I just keep thinking about what you give up in exchange for something that will always be exactly what you need it to be. Thursday, 27 February 2014. What Shows: Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch designer who made a dress that turns transparent when you’re aroused. It reads your heart rate and calls you out the second your pulse jumps. There’s no hiding it. The appeal is immediate if you think about it from the right angle. Someone wears this dress to a bar and sees someone they want—and suddenly they’re exposed. No pretending you’re not interested, no mystery. Your arousal becomes visual fact. There’s something satisfying about that honesty, and something deeply awkward about it too. The flip side is knowing when someone’s interested in you. That’s information usually buried in subtle signals—a look held a second too long, a shift in posture. This dress makes it explicit. You’d never misread a room again. Roosegaarde makes these pieces that take something uncomfortable about modern life and push it until it breaks. This one’s about the constant gap between desire and appearance, between what we feel and what we show. Everyone’s attracted to someone every day. Everyone’s thinking about sex, thinking about other people’s bodies, running scenarios. And everyone pretends they’re not. The dress just refuses to play along. I doubt these will ever be actual fashion. They’re conceptual, probably meant to provoke rather than wear. But once you see the idea it doesn’t leave you—what if everyone knew? What if you could see when someone wanted you? It sounds like freedom and sounds like exposure in the same breath. Wednesday, 26 February 2014. Small Potatoes: There was a Nazi rally in Neukölln—this is Berlin, which means there’s always some kind of Nazi thing happening. They were targeting a Pirate Party member of the city council, someone they’d been harassing for months, and the harassment had escalated into the kind of ugliness that becomes normal if you’re not careful. What made me angry wasn’t the Nazis so much as the city council. They were planning to pass a statement supporting the counter-protesters while distancing themselves from their own member who was actually doing the organizing. That’s the move that kills you—wanting the moral credit without ever being on your side when it actually matters. They want to look good in the abstract while staying clean in practice. Someone posted the call: if you’re not working that afternoon, come to the town hall and annoy the fascists. Show up, make noise, don’t let them do their thing. It’s a low bar for resistance but maybe the right one. Treat them like what they are—a minor inconvenience, not the organizing moment they want to be. I don’t know if enough people showed up. But there was something in that message that stayed with me. Not the moral seriousness of it, but the casual irreverence. Go fuck with Nazis because you have a free afternoon. Don’t make it solemn. Don’t perform the resistance. Just show up and be a problem for them. Wednesday, 26 February 2014. 3nder: I watch people still swipe-swipe-swiping on Tinder like the app’s going to suddenly deliver. They get a match and immediately blow it—some copied line, a picture of their cock, immediate self-sabotage. Then they’re refreshing, waiting for someone else to be drunk or lonely enough to not notice what they just did. The whole machine is rotten, or they are, or both. But the real conversation moved on. Threesomes. Everyone under thirty in the cities is already orbiting that now. Not because they woke up adventurous—it’s just more efficient. One person means one night, one conversation, one person you might have to dodge later. Three people, you split the cognitive load. Less eye contact. Less of yourself exposed. Same result, fewer bruises. And you’ve got a story instead of shame. So of course there’s an app. 3nder. Sign up alone or as a couple and swipe through the group-sex enthusiasts. Done. I see why it makes sense in theory. But it’s built on a delusion: if you’re already failing the basic version of this—can’t even pull off one unmemorable night with another person—why would adding two more people and a couple more variables somehow fix it? The equation doesn’t change. A threesome is just dating on hard mode. Attract two people instead of one. Both want the same thing. Everyone shows up. Nobody’s a mess. It’s not a solution for people failing at Tinder. It’s just evidence that you’ll fail at this too, just with an audience. Wednesday, 26 February 2014. When Mt. Gox Blew Up: I don’t understand Bitcoin. Never have, never tried too hard to either. The whole thing lives in some abstraction layer between code and faith that I couldn’t quite grab. So watching Mt. Gox collapse was almost a relief. Mt. Gox started as a trading exchange for Magic: The Gathering cards—which really tells you everything about the early internet—and by 2014 it was the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world. In February, it just locked everyone out. All the customer wallets froze. The price crashed from $900 to $130. Mark Karpeles ran the thing and quit the Bitcoin Foundation right after. The other board members didn’t believe his explanation. It had that smell of a guy watching his operation implode and having no idea what to do about it. Here’s what I kept thinking: if I had to choose between putting money into Bitcoin through some exchange on the other side of the world run by people I’d never met, or just buying a bottle of wine and forgetting about it, what would I actually pick? The wine. Obviously. Maybe that’s not a fair comparison. Maybe Bitcoin works fine and Mt. Gox was just one bad operator, one guy in over his head. But the whole thing felt fundamentally rotten—the idea that you could create money out of code and trade it on an exchange that started as a Magic card shop, and somehow nobody would get hurt. Turns out somebody always gets hurt. Tuesday, 25 February 2014. Cracked Open: Lea Michele doing a Terry Richardson shoot for V Magazine was surprising. She was always the careful one on Glee—actually careful, not just playing cautious. The kind of actress who seemed genuinely aware of how she was perceived and invested in maintaining a certain image. Cory Monteith’s death in 2013 changed things for her. He was the one everyone liked, genuinely likable in that effortless way, and then he died, and she had to keep going through that show with that loss sitting on her chest. That does something to a person. Years later she’s in V Magazine, photographed by Richardson—the photographer everyone knows has some weird dark energy, all those stories about what happens in his studio. She’s there vulnerable in a deliberate way, letting herself be seen differently. In an interview with Mary H.K. Choi she talks about Cory, about what his death cracked open in her, about how it made her rethink who she wanted to be. There’s a running joke about friends calling her “Grandma,” some reference that probably meant something specific to her world but reads as just this hint that whatever identity people had pinned on her, it wasn’t really hers. I watched her come back looking different after all that. Not polished or reinvented or any of those words people use. Just different. Still Lea Michele, but less concerned with the version of herself other people needed her to be. Tuesday, 25 February 2014. Just Destruction: That new Godzilla trailer is a monster tearing through everything, no apology, no irony—just the massive spectacle you came for. Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen are there to ground the story, but the real draw is obvious. A blockbuster that knows exactly what it is and commits completely. Tuesday, 25 February 2014. Cannadoms: I’ve always found flavored condoms kind of suspect, but you do you—at least people are wrapping it up. And because strawberry and cinnamon apparently weren’t cutting it, some Dutch company started selling cannabis-flavored condoms. A fifty-pack is about forty euros, which is genuinely ridiculous until you realize the whole thing is basically one pickup line: “Want to try my weed condom?” It’s so dumb it might actually work. Honestly, people are probably just buying them to own the fact that they exist. Monday, 24 February 2014. The Darkest Country: You can see North Korea from space at night because there are no lights. That’s not metaphorical—it’s literal. Satellite photos show a void where the country is, a black hole between South Korea and China where 25 million people live without electricity once the sun sets. Only Pyongyang gets bulbs, scattered enough to look like a faint smudge against the surrounding nothing. There’s a dark joke in that image—the kind where the punchline is actual human suffering. The regime doesn’t just control what people see, it controls whether they see at all. Darkness is infrastructure. Darkness is policy. You can’t organize if you can’t see. You can’t read anything forbidden if there’s no light to read by. You can’t imagine elsewhere if there’s no proof of it. I’ve read about the camps and the purges, and all of it is worse than the darkness. But there’s something about that photograph that gets to you differently. You can’t argue with satellite imagery. It’s just there—proof that a system can be so total, so relentless, that it’s visible from space. A regime that decided keeping people in darkness was easier than letting them see. When it’s dark enough, you can only imagine what’s right in front of you. Monday, 24 February 2014. Kate Upton Got It First: Kate Upton joined Instagram before there was much to look at. The app was just filtered pictures of breakfast and people’s feet and everyone pretending their lives were beautiful and composed. Then she posted a photo and something clicked. What Instagram needed was simpler than everyone thought—just a straightforward exchange: she posts, you look. No personal brand, no emotional captions about your morning. Just something beautiful to look at. Kate Upton got that immediately. Everyone else was still performing, still curating their lifestyle aesthetic for strangers, but she saw what the platform actually was from the beginning. Saturday, 22 February 2014. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Still Completely Unhinged: I first encountered Kyary Pamyu Pamyu the way most people do—some algorithm threw a music video at me and I spent the next three minutes trying to decide if I was having a stroke or just watching Japan happen in real time. Everything about her is aggressively, deliberately, almost offensively weird. Not in an ironic way. There’s nothing ironic about it. The sweetness of the production, the bubblegum synths, the perfectly clear vocals—all of it wraps around this core of pure, unfiltered strangeness that somehow just works. She’s back now with a new track, and it’s her telling her own origin story. You’d think that would be grounded, maybe reflective. Instead she’s done it as the surreal fever dream you’d expect—fluffy polar bears, faceless figures, sad children, all of it candy-colored and unsettling in ways I can’t quite articulate. There’s something about watching her trace her path from childhood to wherever-the-hell-she-is-now through a landscape that looks like it was designed by someone on really good drugs. That’s what gets me about Kyary. She’s not trying to be profound or deliver some message about the human condition. She’s just making music that feels like the inside of a really beautiful, really disturbing dream. And it works because she commits to it completely—there’s no winking at the camera, no irony, just pure commitment to being completely unhinged. It shouldn’t work, especially not on people who have no stake in J-pop or anime or any of that. But it does. She’s managed to bottle something genuinely strange and made it weirdly compelling. Friday, 21 February 2014. Dressed to Win: There’s a Japanese subculture I keep thinking about. Survival games—Battle Royale tournaments, Hunger Games in the woods—where people compete seriously and equally care about how they look doing it. Not ironic. Just fully committed. Survival Game Fashion Snap documents it: photos of competitors and their fits. Street style except the street is a simulated combat zone. The aesthetic makes sense once you see it—practical, intentional, cool. These kids have figured out something most people mess up: that how you look and how you compete say the same thing. There’s honesty in that. No gap between the effort and the image. You show up ready, which means being sharp and tactical at the same time. I’ve been thinking about this more than seems reasonable for a Japanese fashion subculture, but there’s something clean about people whose appearance matches their actual commitment. That alignment is rare. Thursday, 20 February 2014. No Clear Winner: Sometimes I’m just staring at two photos and I can’t make up my mind. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. Emily Ratajkowski or Kate Upton. I compare everything—the face, the eyes, the hair, the skin, the body. And I can’t come to a decision. Not when Sports Illustrated keeps hitting me with these images every day, these unreal bodies on impossible beaches, palms and sun and glittering water. Today Emily wins. Tomorrow could be completely different. Thursday, 20 February 2014. I’m Dying: A paramedic named Olesia Zhukovskaia was working the Maidan in Kyiv when the snipers started. This was 2014, during the Euromaidan protests—the square was full of people, and the government had positioned sharpshooters on rooftops around the city. They were shooting whoever they could: demonstrators, journalists, first responders. Just shooting. Olesia got hit in the neck. While bleeding out, she tweeted: “I’m dying.” Then someone got her to surgery fast enough and she made it. She’s alive. But there’s this moment in between—the moment between being shot and being saved—where she just narrated it into the void. I think about that a lot now. The reflex to document your own death. It’s not brave or noble, not a moral statement or anything performative. It’s just the habit now—something happens, you post it. Pain, fear, mortality, same as everything else. You reach for your phone like breathing. The Euromaidan exists in my head mostly as fragments. Video clips, photographs, things people managed to record while everything was happening. Olesia’s tweet is part of that record. It’s evidence that this was real, that it happened to someone who had a phone in her pocket and a habit of talking about her life in public. Not a symbol or a cause. Just a girl saying what was happening. Thursday, 20 February 2014. A Cat That Wouldn’t Fake It: Grumpy Cat was perfect for its moment—a meme that reflected something real about how exhausting it all was. Everything on the internet demanded your enthusiasm, your performance, your engagement, and here was this cat that absolutely refused. That refusal meant something. Of course it became merchandise. Everything does. But there’s something almost honest about a plush toy of something fundamentally opposed to being touched or loved. You’re cuddling an object that embodies not wanting to be cuddled, which is maybe the only way a Grumpy Cat plush could ever actually work. I never owned one. I don’t really need a physical reminder of indifference lying around my apartment. But I understood the appeal—the idea of something you could hold that didn’t pretend to be happy, that looked at you the same way you probably looked at whatever was making you need to hug a grumpy cat in the first place. The cat herself—Tardar Sauce—probably couldn’t have cared less. That was always her whole thing. And maybe that’s what made her last, while most memes burn out in weeks. She was authentically unimpressed, and you can’t manufacture that. Wednesday, 19 February 2014. Like After War: The photos from Kyiv are unreal - fire, smoke, the city center looking like it got bombed. The Maidan, which had been crowded with tents and people and speeches, is now just charred pavement and rubble. Burning tires, police in full riot gear, people throwing whatever they can find. You’re watching it in real time on your screen and suddenly the whole diplomatic machinery of sanctions and threats makes immediate sense. Governments don’t respond like that unless something fundamental has already broken. Janukovych’s speech was almost absurd. Lecturing the opposition about democracy while the streets are still burning, still smoking. The opposition crossed the line by “listening to the street,” he said - which might be the first honest thing he’s said about why he’s losing. You can’t stay in power when you talk about the people like they’re the problem. The German Foreign Minister’s response was colder. No talk of negotiation or working things out. Just immediate, flat discussion of personal sanctions. That’s the tone you use when you know there’s no going back from this. Once violence reaches that scale, something breaks that won’t get repaired with diplomacy. What stays with you is the image itself. A square that was full of life just days ago, now it’s just fire and wreckage. Pavement scorched black. That’s what it looks like from far away, watching it happen in real time. Wednesday, 19 February 2014. Ordinariness: I don’t usually care about celebrity gossip—it’s background noise. But Michelle Rodriguez and Cara Delevingne being together actually got to me. I found myself genuinely pleased about it, which isn’t my typical register. What landed was how simple and ordinary it all is. No scandal, no narrative, no drama. Their families just know and accept it. Michelle’s fourteen years older but that’s not the story. The detail that stuck with me: Michelle got invited to Cara’s sister’s bachelorette party. Not the relationship announcement—the wedding invitation. The ordinariness of it. I don’t know why this one felt different. Maybe because there’s nothing performative about it. No coming-out story, no revelation, just people being themselves and the world moving on. There’s a lightness to that, for anyone watching who needed to see it possible. Wednesday, 19 February 2014. Twelve Billion Dollars: Facebook bought WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. The actual transaction involved some cash and some stock, but the number was less important than the fact of it: billions for a messaging app with no ads, no real business model, just a product that worked quietly without selling your data to advertisers. I remember the immediate sense of inevitability. This was Facebook buying the one escape hatch that had actually mattered. WhatsApp existed because two guys didn’t want to build ads into their thing. You paid a dollar a year. That was it. No algorithmic feed, no optimization for engagement, no extraction of your attention as product. Just messages sent privately from one person to another. It was proof that a different kind of thing could work. And then Zuckerberg’s company just swallowed it whole. Everyone assumed the same thing was coming: the integration, the merger with Messenger, the privacy evaporating, the moderation tightening. No nudity, no links to competitors, no life outside the Facebook ecosystem. The jokes about it were barely jokes. We all just accepted that there was nowhere left that wasn’t Facebook’s territory, that anything good enough would get bought, that privacy wasn’t a feature anymore—it was just marketing. The sarcasm of calling it out felt less like comedy and more like describing the inevitable. But something unexpected happened: it didn’t really go that way. WhatsApp stayed separate. Maybe they tried to integrate it and realized it would destroy the thing that made it valuable. Maybe they just learned to leave it alone. I don’t know. But looking back at that week, I’m struck by how perfectly it captured what it felt like to be online then—this sense that there was no opting out anymore, that everything good gets absorbed into the machine, that the only choice left was to accept you were living inside someone else’s property. The escape route we thought we’d found was just another room in the same house. Wednesday, 19 February 2014. Flappy Bird’s Ceiling: I crash in Flappy Bird in thirty seconds. The game is built to destroy you. But somewhere out there are people who’ve reached 999 points. Nine hundred and ninety-nine. That’s not talent. That’s obsession. That’s sitting alone with your phone for hours, grinding the same impossible loop until your reflexes work on autopilot. The game died in 2014, but the high-score chase never stopped. There’s a rare video of someone actually hitting 999, and it shows what happens when you finally reach that threshold. I won’t spoil the payoff, but it’s exactly what you’d expect for that much focus—either perfect or pointless, maybe both. You reach the end and the game is just… done. That’s all it has. Tuesday, 18 February 2014. The Dance Moves: I watched Fallon and Smith run through hip-hop dances the other night—Running Man, Dougie, Twerk, the ones you half-remember from 2 AM YouTube holes. Two middle-aged guys in suits doing nostalgia that’s not even old yet. Late night has gotten good at this: find something recognizable, stick celebrities in it, film it, done. Smith looked like he was having fun. Fallon looked like he was working, which is funnier. There’s something about his total commitment to bits that don’t need it. It made me think about how fast we burn through culture now. Twenty years and these dances are museum pieces. They need the irony frame already. Nobody does the Dougie straight anymore—it’s only funny because we all know it’s dead. That’s how you know the culture moves fast: it can turn its own recent past into a joke before anyone’s even sad about it. Tuesday, 18 February 2014. Power Laces: Nike actually built Marty McFly’s shoes. Not approximations, not knockoffs—the real Air Mag with the motorized laces from Back to the Future Part II, the ones that seemed like they belonged in the realm of movie magic and nothing else. Tinker Hatfield, who’d already transformed sneaker design with the Air Jordan XI, engineered them into something you could actually wear. The announcement came in 2014, at some Jordan Brand event in New Orleans, but what mattered was the release date: 2015, the year the movie imagined. It was too perfect to be accidental, like someone at Nike had been holding this idea for decades, waiting for the calendar to finally justify it. What struck me when I first saw them real was how exactly they matched my memory from the film. Not improved upon. Not reimagined. Just accurate—the black and silver, the overbuilt futuristic aesthetic, the implication that eventually shoes would make decisions for you. The past had predicted itself perfectly. I never actually wanted to own a pair, though some version of me did. The price alone eliminated most of that desire, but more than that, they’d already become a collectible before they became a shoe. Everyone wanted them as irony or nostalgia or investment, and that weight of competing desires made my own desire disappear. What I cared about was simpler: that someone at Nike had decided a detail from a movie, a memory from my childhood, was real enough to manufacture. That Nike had taken it seriously. The shoes ended up somewhere between product and monument. A company had asked whether movie magic could actually function, then spent the resources to engineer it. Whether anyone needed motorized laces in 2015 was never really the question. Monday, 17 February 2014. Bloody Revenge: HBO wouldn’t stop dropping season four trailers, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if they were building hype or just enjoying the torture. Months until April, and they kept releasing new footage like I didn’t already have enough to obsess over. But in this one, the whole thing distilled down to a single thing: revenge. Bloody, pointless, obsessive revenge. By that point in the show, half the cast was dead. Everyone owed someone blood. Game of Thrones had spent three seasons getting you attached to people and then casually erasing them, so a trailer built entirely around vengeance felt honest somehow. You’d watch it and find yourself wondering which of your remaining favorites would actually make it out alive. Monday, 17 February 2014. Waiting for Nothing: The thing about trailers is they’re supposed to make you want something you can’t have yet. HBO would cut these ten-second clips—a sword glint, Lena Headey’s face, a raven screaming—and I’d watch them obsessively like they contained actual information. They never did, of course. They were just advertisements wrapped in mystery, and I fell for it every time. Then they released this one that ran for fifteen minutes. I remember watching it and feeling something shift, some lock click into place. It didn’t spoil anything, but it felt substantial in a way the shorts didn’t. You got a sense of the world again, the scope of it, the sheer weight of what was coming. And knowing a new season was still weeks away just made it worse. That’s how they get you: not with plot reveals but with the promise that something real is happening somewhere you can’t reach yet. Of course, I can’t remember if that season was any good. I remember the waiting more than the actual show. That’s the trick nobody talks about—you build the anticipation so high that by the time it starts, you’ve already imagined something better than what you’re going to get. The trailer was better than most of the episodes. Better to want something than to have it and watch it disappoint you, I guess. Monday, 10 February 2014. Five Hundred Thousand: While reporters were making jokes about unfinished hotels in Sochi, gay people in the rest of Russia were getting beaten in the street. It was filmed. It was posted. The world kept scrolling. There was a petition called Love Always Wins circulating—five hundred thousand signatures and world leaders would lean on Putin. I signed it. I was the kind of person who signs things in his room knowing they won’t do much, because not signing feels worse even if there’s no logical reason it should. The math of activism never made sense to me. You could accumulate hundreds of thousands of names and you’d still be operating in a completely different reality from the people actually in danger. The petition and the beating were happening in separate universes. That gap was what I couldn’t shake—not the violence itself, but the wide open space between what was possible and what was needed. Thursday, 6 February 2014. Pussy Riot’s Reckoning: There’s something tragicomic about what just happened. Pussy Riot, the Russian collective built on saying no to everything—Putin, the state, commercialism, selling out—just fired two of its most visible members for doing the exact thing the collective claims to stand for. Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina were canned while they’re out touring the US, speaking against Russian homophobia and documenting what happens in the country’s prisons. Their crime, according to Pussy Riot’s official letter, is being too visible. Too legible. They’ve become personalities with faces and names. They’re letting their images appear on posters (with a man in a balaclava, which is somehow worse). Money is changing hands. They’ve crossed from being an anonymous collective action into being individual activists. And according to Pussy Riot’s founding principles—no hierarchy, no commodification, no individual personalities, art given freely—this is unforgivable. The letter is almost religious in its purity. It’s not angry, just clear. The band explains, point by point, why Nadia and Masha have to go. And there’s a kind of integrity in it I can’t completely dismiss. Pussy Riot has always said that the collective matters more than any individual in it, that anonymity is how you avoid becoming a cult of personality, that you can’t actually resist a system of hierarchy while building one of your own. The thing is, they’re not wrong. But they’re also firing two people for being effective at the very work the collective was formed to do. And there’s something broken about that calculus. Nadia and Masha have put their names and faces out there, made themselves targets, because they think it matters. And Pussy Riot is saying, yeah, that matters, but not as much as maintaining our purity. Not as much as the ideology. So they had to go. I don’t know if that’s the most punk thing possible or the most punk thing’s opposite. Maybe it’s both. Either way, the world probably just got two more serious activists, and Russia’s government probably doesn’t care whether they wear masks or not. Thursday, 6 February 2014. GEMA Wants Rent on Your Blog Now: You’d think you couldn’t possibly hate GEMA any more than you already do. GEMA’s Germany’s copyright collection society—basically an organization whose entire job is finding new ways to make everyone miserable—and they just proved you could hate them more. Now they want bloggers to pay them money every time they embed a YouTube video. Not YouTube itself, mind you. The blogger. You, for putting the video on your site. I remember reading about this somewhere, some blogger named Fefe broke it down. GEMA got nowhere with YouTube, so now they want to go after individual bloggers instead. It’s the ultimate fallback strategy when you can’t win the main fight. There’s definitely an expert hearing happening about this, or about to happen. There always is. Someone’s probably testifying about why this is a genuinely terrible idea, and nothing will come of it—like always. I remember reading about someone at the Bundestag getting welcomed with a joke about how they’d been completely ignored last time, and well, here we are again. That’s the whole system right there. And that’s the story of German internet culture. Every single day, another layer of bureaucratic absurdity that makes you wonder how anyone gets anything done here. Wednesday, 5 February 2014. Uncompromised: Pussy Riot didn’t soften themselves for American television. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the Russian punk band that’s made their work out of defiance and paid for it with prison, appeared on Stephen Colbert and spoke plainly about Putin, the Sochi Olympics as propaganda, violence against queer people in Russia. No softening the message, no performed warmth to ease the audience in. Just two women saying what had to be said on a format that usually demands entertainment. That’s always been the point with Pussy Riot—they refuse to make you comfortable. Wednesday, 5 February 2014. While the Games Happened: The Sochi Olympics were starting in a matter of days when Human Rights Watch released footage of teenagers beating gay people in the street. They’d filmed it themselves. The kids doing it didn’t see anything wrong—they were just fixing sick people, healing them with their fists, doing what they thought was right. Casual. Methodical. On camera. I couldn’t get the video out of my head. Not because the violence itself was shocking—I’d seen worse, we all have—but because of how normal it looked. How much it fit into the world around it. The Olympic ceremonies being prepared. The news crews setting up. The patriotic broadcasts ramping up. And underneath all that, in plain daylight, the hunting. It was all happening at the same time. What struck me was the confidence in their violence. These weren’t people operating in shadow or shame. They were teenagers in Russia doing what their culture had taught them was correct. And nobody important seemed to want to talk about it. The Olympics were more important. The story that mattered was the one about the games. I don’t know what I expected. That Putin’s Russia would suddenly develop a conscience for the cameras? But the gap between what the world was watching and what was actually happening just sat there, impossible to ignore if you looked. Tuesday, 4 February 2014. Miley’s Wardrobe: I’ve probably seen Miley Cyrus’s breasts more this year than my own. She’s 21, has bleached eyebrows, and seems to have concluded that bras are unnecessary. Magazine shoots, award shows, paparazzi moments—there’s always that chance she’ll just be completely bare-chested, totally comfortable with it. At first it seems like a series of accidents, these perpetual wardrobe malfunctions. But it happens too often. It’s just what Miley does. I genuinely can’t tell if she’s genuinely that unrestrained about clothing or if she’s engineered the most ruthlessly efficient publicity strategy of the decade. Her breasts are more famous than her music, more discussed, more everywhere. You have to respect the math of it—barely any actual work, barely any actual talent on display, and somehow her body has become more newsworthy than news. The machinery runs on her refusal to cover up. What’s wild is how much it works. She’s a name everyone knows, everyone talks about, and it’s almost entirely because she doesn’t wear a shirt. That’s either the greatest marketing insight of her generation or the luckiest accident in celebrity history. Probably both. Tuesday, 4 February 2014. The Basement Tape: The Guardian filmed it: journalists in a basement with angle grinders and power drills, destroying hard drives and USB sticks containing Edward Snowden’s files. This was July 2013. British intelligence, on behalf of the NSA, had forced the newspaper to physically eliminate the evidence of mass surveillance before the story could be fully reported. So they smashed it. On video. I keep thinking about the sound of it. Angle grinders aren’t quiet. Neither are drills. The methodical destruction of your own evidence because someone in power asked you to. The weird obedience of it—not secret, not shameful even, just procedural. A newspaper destroying its own reporting. The thing you’re supposed to do when you find out something important is tell people. They had to un-tell it instead, grind the proof to nothing under government supervision. I don’t remember any particular outrage about this, which I think is the point. It’s not a scandal if everyone accepts it. The government requires you to destroy something, you destroy it, the story leaks anyway months later, and everybody moves on. The papers write about it, people read about it, and then what? The machinery demonstrated what it would do. That’s the real message, not in the documents but in the basement, in the angle grinders, in the fact that compliance just happens. Monday, 3 February 2014. A Bit from Shibuya: I went to the Yami-ichi—the Internet Black Market—when it popped up in Berlin during Transmediale. First of all, the name alone gets you: a black market for the internet. Not the dark web stuff, but a literal offline marketplace where people were pulling the digital world into physical space. There were printed glitches hanging on walls. Stickers expressing everyone’s mutual rage about GEMA blocking half the songs on the country’s websites. Weird shapes, colors, memes in physical form. The whole thing felt like watching someone try to bottle something that was never meant to be contained. I didn’t go in with a shopping list. I was just walking through, watching people trade what amounted to nothing for money, when I stopped at a stall run by a guy named Shunya Hagiwara. He was from Tokyo. With him was his girlfriend and their daughter, and they were making cotton candy—actual cotton candy, pink and blue and white, the kind you eat at festivals. There’s something about that detail I can’t shake. A guy from Tokyo bringing his family to Berlin to sell candy at an internet black market. Perfectly normal and completely absurd at the same time. I bought a bit from Shibuya for five euros. A bit. As in a single binary digit from Japan’s most famous intersection. The transaction was stupid and perfect: I handed over five euros and got a tiny physical object that supposedly represented ownership of a piece of digital Japan. The guy included it in a little container. I walked away thinking about how you can now own Japan for the price of a beer. The whole thing stuck with me because it hit some nerve about how we actually relate to the internet now. We’re so deep in it that the only way it feels real anymore is to yank it out into the physical world and sell it to each other. To look at it. To hold it. To own it. The black market framing is the joke and also the point—we’re all trading in something intangible and calling it merchandise. Hagiwara understood that. He came to Berlin with his family to sell cotton candy next to bits of internet, like that made perfect sense, because at this point it does. Monday, 3 February 2014. 28 Reasons: Twenty-eight. That’s how many reasons SNL found to hug a Black person during Black History Month, and the specificity somehow works. It’s the kind of completely sincere, big-hearted gesture that network television does in February—not ironic, not winking at it, just committed to the sentiment. You can trace the calculation in it, sure, but that doesn’t make the sincerity any less real. There’s something almost brave about leaning that hard into unguarded earnestness. Sunday, 2 February 2014. Breakfast in a Can: Some mornings I think about just skipping breakfast and heading straight to beer. The Funky Buddha Brewery in Florida apparently thought the same thing and made a beer with bacon, maple syrup, and coffee in it. 6.4 percent alcohol. I tried it once. It tastes like exactly what you’d expect—which is to say someone threw three breakfast things at beer and saw what happened. Maple is sweet. Coffee is there. The bacon adds something savory, or maybe that’s just your brain filling in the blank. It works better as a concept than as an actual drink, but that’s the whole point of this kind of beer. The brewery doesn’t stop there. Their whole line is like this—chocolate, peanut butter, pumpkin. See an ingredient, think it might go in beer, put it in beer. Most of these are gimmicks. But someone has to push those boundaries, and I appreciate that it’s them and not some focus group at a massive brewery. There’s something genuinely funny about categories that break themselves. Breakfast as beer. Coffee as beer. Bacon as beer. At some point you stop asking if it’s a good idea and just accept it as proof that people will try anything once. Thursday, 30 January 2014. Australian School Scare: Australian PSAs don’t do soft warnings. Whatever this ad shows, it apparently took that approach and ran far enough to become internet weird. The kind of thing you watch and wonder if it was actually allowed to air. Thursday, 30 January 2014. SodaStream’s Sexy Miscalculation: SodaStream, some Israeli water-carbonation company, decided to take on Pepsi and Coca-Cola by running a Super Bowl commercial featuring Scarlett Johansson. The ad was explicitly framed as too scandalous for American television—which is always funny because the thing they’re selling is a kitchen appliance that makes fizzy water. But apparently having Johansson there was enough to make CBS nervous. They rejected it before it could air. So obviously I had to see what was so offensive. And there’s really nothing there. She’s in a towel or something, making suggestive faces at the camera, doing that thing where she wraps her mouth around a straw. It’s mildly flirtatious in the way ads used to be, back when that was enough to get a reaction. But it’s not pornographic. It’s not even that bold, honestly. What struck me is how deliberate the whole thing felt. SodaStream clearly knew NBC or CBS would reject it, and that’s the entire marketing play. The real Super Bowl commercial never airs—only the controversy does. The banned version gets passed around online, everyone sees it anyway, and suddenly people are talking about SodaStream in a way they never would have otherwise. It’s brilliant and cynical at the same time. America’s relationship to sex in advertising is genuinely weird. We’re fine with violence, with gun ads, with beer commercials that are basically just women in bikinis, but put a woman suggestively with a straw and suddenly it’s beyond the pale. It says something about what we’re actually worried about, what actually frightens us. Or maybe it just says that network TV is run by people terrified of anything that acknowledges desire too directly. I don’t even remember what SodaStream tastes like. But I remember Scarlett Johansson’s face and a straw, which I guess means it worked. Wednesday, 29 January 2014. Bastille: A Saturday in Paris, Place de la Bastille. Seventeen thousand people marched—that’s the police count, probably closer to the truth than the march organizers’ claim of a hundred and fifty thousand. Everyone showed up with something they wanted to hate. Catholics against abortion. People who wanted immigrants gone. People who wanted gay people to disappear. And Jews, like always, blamed for whatever feels broken when nothing else makes sense anymore. Three million people were out of work in France. The government was spending fifty billion to try to fix it, though no one really believed that money would help. But you don’t march because of economic policy. You march when you’re scared and angry, and someone gives you permission to scream at someone else. The march started with the Catholics in their colors leading the way. People made jokes about the Holocaust on the street like it was funny. Then FEMEN showed up—women trying to disrupt it with screaming—and the police dragged them away. The men in the crowd, these righteous marchers, called them whores and ripped their clothes off and left them on the ground. Two hundred and fifty arrests. Twenty cops hurt. A city full of angry people, and nobody actually going anywhere. Wednesday, 29 January 2014. That Stupid Sneeze: Your face just gives up. The sneeze hits and there’s no controlling it—eyes cross, mouth slack, everything collapses for a second. Humans at least have the excuse of being weak, mortal creatures with no say in the matter. Dogs don’t even get that—they sneeze exactly the same way, look equally stupid and possessed, except they have zero idea it’s happening. Two seconds later they’re completely fine, moving on unbothered by what just went down. That’s what gets me. The sneeze is the one moment where a creature that spends all day grooming itself and maintaining this whole image just loses absolutely everything. All that dignity gone. And then nothing—no shame, no checking a mirror, no awareness. The photos catch that perfectly. That exact moment of total collapse, pure unfiltered stupidity with zero self-awareness. That’s the real equalizer. Wednesday, 29 January 2014. The Formula: These game streamers and comedians—the German ones especially—try to systematize YouTube success the way you’d systematize anything else. Good thumbnails, smart tags, the right posting time, the right voice. Master the techniques, optimize everything, and you should win. But YouTube doesn’t really work that way. There’s the formula, and then there’s the thing that no formula captures: the moment when something clicks with enough people that it takes on its own weight. You end up with technically perfect videos that nobody asked for, uploaded by someone you don’t care about. The people everyone actually knows often got famous before the optimization playbook got written. They were doing something because they wanted to, not because they’d studied viral mechanics. The formula became an explanation for something that happened for different reasons. Now you can watch all the tutorials you want, but you can’t really teach the thing that makes people actually want to watch. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve watched enough of this over enough years to think the people who are still around are the ones who figured out what they had to say and then worried about thumbnails second. Everything else feels like work. Wednesday, 29 January 2014. MØ: Somewhere around 2013-2014 I got caught in MØ’s songs—Danish artist Karen Marie Ørsted, who makes electronic pop that hits different when you’re alone in a room late at night. “Don’t Wanna Dance” and “Waste of Time” have this urgent, propulsive energy, like she’s trying to outrun something in the production, all glitchy synths and her voice sitting right on top of it. I was new to her stuff then. She’d put out an EP called Bikini Daze that barely registered, but the singles off her debut album No Mythologies to Follow—coming in early 2014—felt like someone had figured out a specific frequency that made restlessness feel good. Not euphoria. Just clean, charged movement. The thing about MØ’s songs is they’re not trying to be cool. They’re just… electric. “XXX 88” in particular, with that stripped-down beat and the way her voice cracks a little on certain words—there’s something vulnerable in how she’s singing over what’s actually quite cold production. Not romantic vulnerable, just real. Like she’s working something out in real time. I kept coming back to those early tracks. There’s a confidence in her songwriting that you don’t hear everywhere—she knows exactly how much space to leave in a song, when to let the synth breathe, when to bury the vocal deep. It’s production that knows what it’s doing but doesn’t announce itself. By the time the album came out I’d already spent weeks with those early singles. MØ wasn’t the revelation everyone was hyping her as. She was just someone whose songs happened to make sense to me at a specific moment, when everything else felt too loud or too slow. Sometimes that’s all an artist needs to be. Tuesday, 28 January 2014. Nintendo’s Mobile Gambit: Nintendo finally said yes to mobile. For years, Satoru Iwata was clear: Nintendo games on Nintendo hardware only. But they announced a loss, and suddenly the company was open to phones. Not open open. What Nintendo actually did was put previews on your phone—trailers, mini-games, just enough to make you want the real versions. The strategy is obvious: let someone feel how good Mario is on their iPhone and they’ll buy the hardware to actually play. It works. Can’t fault it. For a company that doesn’t want to compete on mobile, it’s the smart move. You get to sample the game without Nintendo spreading themselves thin across every device. But it’s not what anyone asked for. Fans wanted to actually play these games on their phones. Instead they got a very long advertisement for hardware they have to buy anyway. Is it what I wanted? No. Is it better than another year of refusal? Barely. But it’s something. Tuesday, 28 January 2014. Hipster Nazis: Jesko Wrede photographed a Nazi march in Magdeburg a few days back, and the pictures won’t leave my head. Around 700 men marching to commemorate the 1945 bombing of the city, except they looked like they’d emerged from a Berlin thrift store—ear gauges, vintage sunglasses, studied beards, ironic tote bags with printed jokes. One said something about carrying yogurt. That detail sits with me. About 1,500 antifascists showed up to oppose them, so the whole thing unfolded as simultaneously horrifying and absurd in a way I still don’t know how to process. The thing that gets me is how complete it feels. Hipster culture was built on radical not-caring, on the belief that you could wear anything and reference anything because nothing meant anything. Just surfaces, all the way down. Cynicism so total it became invisible, like clarity itself. And it turns out that worldview has room for fascism. It always did. Add an ideology that actually believes in something to the costume of believing in nothing, and the look doesn’t change. The guy in the orange sunglasses at a Nazi march is wearing the exact same armor as the guy in the orange sunglasses at a coffee shop in Prenzlauer Berg, just with different pins on it. Maybe that’s the logical endpoint of the whole thing. Maybe it was always heading here. Tuesday, 28 January 2014. A Whole Film in One Second: South Korea’s building a 5G network a thousand times faster than what we’ve got. Download a whole film in one second. Ultra-HD streaming, holograms—the full future—supposedly by 2017. Meanwhile my Telekom router’s green light is blinking like it’s having some kind of existential crisis, and I’m waiting for one episode of something to load. Not even something good. Just some RTL show I half-remember. The point isn’t what I’m watching, it’s that I’m waiting. That’s the baseline experience here. Waiting is baked in. You get used to it after a while. You get used to buffering, used to throttling video to 480p because that’s all the connection can handle. You accept waiting like it’s just how the internet works, like it’s not an actual failure of infrastructure. It becomes background noise, something you complain about but stop expecting to change. Somewhere they’re already in the future, downloading holograms like it’s nothing. The rest of us stopped expecting things to work. Probably for the best. Monday, 27 January 2014. Making Porn Looks Easy: You think about it at some point. Most people probably do, at least in passing. The money’s quick, you strip, you fuck on camera, you’re finished. How hard could it actually be? The work itself is probably straightforward enough, but here’s the thing: it completely rewrites your life, and not in the way you’re imagining when you’re just thinking about the money. There’s a video where Asa Akira, Jessica Drake, and Stoya talk about what it’s actually like. These are women who’ve built real careers from this, and they don’t soften it. It’s not preachy. They just say it plainly: once you do this, employers will find you, your family will find you, strangers will recognize you, and you never fully escape that fact. You carry it forever. The sex work itself probably isn’t the hard part. What’s hard is that you can’t really quit and move on the way you can with other jobs. This follows you. It’s in your history. Future partners know. Potential employers know. The internet knows. I think about this sometimes and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because the appeal of fast money never really goes away, even when you know better. Maybe because those three performers just explaining it plainly, without judgment or drama, just the facts of what it costs—that cuts through all the romanticizing bullshit people tell themselves. Monday, 27 January 2014. All I Could Think About: I was waiting for Game of Thrones season 4 with the kind of focus that makes everything else blur out. April 6th couldn’t come fast enough. They put out a behind-the-scenes trailer but it only made it worse—you don’t want to see how they filmed it, you want to actually watch it. The thing about GoT was that it had everything. Dragons. Brutal plotting. Enough nudity that you stayed alert through the slow political scenes. The show treated itself like it mattered, and that gave permission to care about it too, at least for a while. I don’t hold season 4 in my memory the way I do the first two. But the feeling of waiting for it—that anticipation, that certainty that the next thing you needed to do was watch these episodes—that stuck around. Monday, 27 January 2014. The Flip: Twenty years ago, being a nerd meant being invisible. Now it means having money and power. The kids who got tormented for their comic books and D&D sessions are the ones setting culture. It’s a shift that happened so gradually I’m not sure when it happened. I think it was the internet. Once you could find your people online, you didn’t have to pretend. You could care more about Star Wars than social status and find thousands of others exactly like you. Then smartphones made everyone a nerd—suddenly everyone needed to understand how technology worked. And Marvel figured out that comic books could be the most profitable genre in cinema. The hierarchy flipped. So the thing that got you mocked became the thing that got you admired. Big glasses went from liability to aesthetic. Coding went from basement hobby to golden ticket. Being into sci-fi stopped being uncool. I’d take a world where people care about good storytelling over one where that stuff is dismissed as nerd garbage. But there’s something that did shift. There’s a difference between discovering something in the dark, alone, because it was yours and nobody else’s, and liking it because everyone’s doing it now. The kid who wears the costume but has never opened the source material—that’s a different thing. It’s the currency without the devotion. It’s the style without the isolation that made the style matter. I grew up invisible, which was fine. It shaped how I see things in ways that matter. And no amount of retrospective validation changes that. But it is funny—satisfying, really—to watch the world decide that the stuff I cared about back when caring about it made you invisible is actually worth caring about. The kid I was would be amazed. Sunday, 26 January 2014. Marked: Snowden was in Moscow when he told a German broadcaster that people in Washington wanted him dead. Not arrested, not returned for trial—dead. He said it plainly, the way you’d mention that it was raining. The interview was with Hubert Seipel from NDR, and Snowden had already spent years doing this: speaking truth from exile, knowing it wouldn’t matter. What he’d revealed was never as dramatic as the newspapers wanted it to be. The NSA doesn’t pull off heists or decode secret messages. They just take information when it’s useful. Company data from Siemens that might benefit American business? They take it. Political intelligence in the phone records? Theirs. They’d stopped pretending to have legal boundaries long before anyone was asking questions. Once you know how it actually works, you can’t unknow it. Everything changes, except nothing does. People read the revelations, they got angry for a while, then they went back to using their phones, their email, their social media, typing things they’d never say out loud because why should it matter if someone’s reading. The machine was already running. We just hadn’t looked inside it before. Snowden’s still in Moscow. The government still wants him dead, or maybe they don’t anymore—that detail stopped mattering years ago. What mattered was that he’d told us exactly how it all worked, and we’d decided to be fine with it. Sunday, 26 January 2014. The Nintendo Pill: There’s this MDMA pill going around Belgium called Nintendo and the joke writes itself but apparently it’s actually there, making the rounds, people are taking it. Some guy from a club said it came on at midnight like a hammer, the whole place started looking beautiful, his friends got sentimental and kept telling each other how much they love each other, that moment about an hour in where you think you’ve figured out something crucial about what matters, and he got worried his friend was too far gone so he ditched his second dose, which obviously doesn’t help because now he’s just alone at the peak convinced he’s become the god of everything. That’s the thing about rolling—you get that certainty, that absolute conviction that everything makes sense, and you’ll never feel it again quite the same way. The brands are everywhere. Nintendo, Mitsubishi, Superman, Li-Ion. You see them and you think they mean something, like there’s actual consistency or someone gave a shit beyond pressing them fast. But it’s just a name, a story the dealer tells so you don’t have to think about the fact that you’re consuming something completely unverified. Could be pure MDMA. Could be mostly speed. Could be something nobody even knows because they bought it from someone who bought it from someone. The brand is pure fiction, and we believe in it the way we believe in anything we can’t check. Which is why people make the dark joke at the end. Bath salts, face-eating, the paranoia that lurks under every drug story about what happens when you take the wrong thing. At least with Nintendo someone put effort into pressing the pill, stamped a logo on it, created the illusion that a human being thought about what they were doing. It’s stupid and it’s not safe, but it’s something. It’s a brand, and a brand means someone decided it was worth naming. That’s all we have sometimes—the confidence of the person who labeled it. Friday, 24 January 2014. Getting Into Heaven: Marteria’s video for OMG just dumps every religious image it can find into the frame and lets them pile up. Saints, crucifixes, prayer hands, the whole sacred imagery buffet. It’s built around a song asking the kind of question I’ve been half-serious about since I was a kid: how do you actually get into heaven? Pray every day? Show up to church on Sundays? Watch the unsuitable couples making out in the pews? The honest answer is nobody knows. Marteria doesn’t seem to be winking at religion or mocking it exactly. He’s treating heaven like a practical problem to solve, which is maybe the most genuinely irreverent thing you can do with faith. The way the sacred imagery just accumulates and crashes together feels less like criticism and more like he’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. And that’s probably the most honest thing I’ve heard said about belief in a while. Friday, 24 January 2014. Everything Upside Down: There’s a photo from Kiev that makes everything clear. A riot cop throwing a Molotov cocktail at the crowd below. Same weapon as the street. That’s when you know something has crossed into territory that doesn’t come back. By late January 2014, the protests had dissolved into actual warfare. Fires burning across the city center. People with weapons, police with the same weapons, both sides committed to burning the other one out. The thing about that moment is how it strips away everything else. All the talk about governance and protest and political process just evaporates. You’re left with raw conflict and two sides that have decided there’s no negotiating left to do. The photo is the punctuation on all that. A police officer with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. Not protecting order. Not managing a situation. Just fighting. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. The whole framework of institutional authority—the idea that there’s a separate class of people whose job is to keep things together—just dissolves. They’re just another combatant now. I don’t know what happened next, how long it burned before something changed. But that image is the marker of when it stopped being about anything except power and survival. Thursday, 23 January 2014. A Network of People: Pope Francis blessed the internet. It’s a gift from God, he said—not cables, but people. A network of people. I’ll remember that next time I’m scrolling through whatever’s on my screen that I’d never mention to anyone. The browser history, the incognito tabs, the things I look at alone. We’re all connected, he said. All part of the same network. United in our filth. Hallelujah. Thursday, 23 January 2014. We Got Used to It: The question of whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor couldn’t get settled in early 2014, and by that point it didn’t matter anymore. The information was already out. Governments had already seen it. The NSA was what it was. What surprised me wasn’t the mass surveillance itself—you’d have to be naive to think that wasn’t happening. It was how banal it actually was. No drama, no elegant tradecraft, just massive machinery running on millions of data points, most of them worthless, filtered through by people doing their jobs. It was boring surveillance, which somehow made it worse. Obama did his speech promising reforms, and everyone knew it meant nothing. The machine doesn’t get smaller. It just gets quieter. The real thing I remember is feeling like we’d turned a corner where you couldn’t claim ignorance anymore. And then immediately everyone moved on, and we all got used to it. That’s the actual story. Not whether Snowden was right or wrong. Just how fast humans can accept something once it stops being shocking. Wednesday, 22 January 2014. Hamster Asses: You know what’s hot? A genuinely good ass—the curve, the weight, the way it commands your attention. I’m apparently not the only person who thinks this way, because someone on the internet decided to document hamster butts. Sad and Useless did it. A whole post just cataloguing hamster asses, photographed like they matter, like anyone should care about rodent posteriors. And the stupid thing is, looking at them, I kind of get it. There’s something almost perfect about how compact they are, these little fuzzy hemispheres, completely innocent and round and just… existing. The whole thing is absurd enough that it becomes funny. Nobody needed this. The internet is arguably worse for it. But now hamster butts are a specific thing I’ve thought about, and there’s something oddly satisfying about that specificity—the kind of weird cultural artifact that sticks with you. Probably best to keep my distance from the pet store section for a while. Wednesday, 22 January 2014. Wrong Side of the Camera: I don’t get paid to do what I’d actually want to do all day. I’d be happy half-clothed, hanging around looking dumb, pushing a bike sometimes, pulling off my shirt when photographers like Joe Villanueva and Katie Stone tell me to. Kayslee Collins is 22 and that’s her literal job. And she gets paid for it. The thing that gets me is there’s no path to it. You don’t study for this. You don’t grind toward it over years. You’re just young and willing to be half-naked in front of a camera, and that becomes a career. So where did I actually go wrong? What choice did I make that landed me on this side instead of that one? Wednesday, 22 January 2014. Let It Go: By the time Frozen came out, I’d decided I was too old for Disney animated musicals, but Idina Menzel’s voice on this song pulled me in anyway. The arrangement builds and the chorus opens up completely—it’s not subtle, but it’s solid enough to stick. I watched a video Disney released showing the song in 25 different languages and kept waiting for it to fall apart the way most songs do under translation. It didn’t. The German version, the Japanese, the Spanish—they all land the same way, like the same moment. The melody is sturdy enough for that. Menzel’s performance carries it through. You’d expect something like this to lose something, but it just moves across languages without breaking. It got the Oscar nomination, which feels right. What matters is that it’s genuinely good—the kind of good that doesn’t get tired when you revisit it years later. That’s rarer for a song like this than the numbers suggest. Wednesday, 22 January 2014. Sailor Moon Still Works: Sailor Moon keeps showing up. Not trending, not in the news, just in what people actually watch at three in the morning when they can’t sleep. Someone finds the German dub on YouTube. Someone else buys the vinyl. It circulates quietly. What still gets me about the show is the transformation sequences—that moment where Usagi touches her brooch and becomes something else, something stronger. Even knowing how it’s engineered, it carries weight. But what lands harder is that the show understood something about growing up that most things miss. Usagi’s always complaining about having to show up, about homework and boys and wanting to sleep in. The adventure is obligation. The power is burden. It’s not about getting cooler, it’s about getting responsible. That landed different when I was twelve. Lands different now. The German version exists in this weird space between the real thing and a curiosity—it’s just the Sailor Moon that landed in a specific time and place. There’s something worth holding onto in that. It’s not a compromise version, it’s just what it is. Tuesday, 21 January 2014. Melt: Melt comes back around in July and it’s one of those festivals I actually clear the calendar for. Portishead’s on the lineup, which is worth the trip alone. Recondite and Chromeo too. It’s one of the few that still feels like it’s curated by people who give a shit about the music instead of just the brand. Festivals get cynical fast—they turn into brand experiences and influencer hangouts. This one’s managed to stay weird and thoughtful in a way that matters. Tuesday, 21 January 2014. Why Rihanna: I’m not going to pretend I’m above this. Rihanna’s Instagram is the only thing worth actually paying attention to on that entire app. Every photo is some kind of calculated assault on your focus—the angles, the looks, the way she stares at the camera like she’s doing you a personal favor by existing. She knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly what we’re all thinking, and she doesn’t care. That kind of power in how you hold yourself, the sheer confidence—most people spend a lifetime trying to cultivate it and never get close. There’s something about the way she moves through it all, completely at ease with her own sexuality in a way that makes everyone else look desperate by comparison. No filters, no apologies, just this perfect understanding of what she is and how to use it. You can watch her photos and see someone who invented the game and is now just letting us watch her play it. Tuesday, 21 January 2014. Wrecking Ball: Ron Jeremy filmed himself doing “Wrecking Ball.” I mean, what else is he going to do? Porn guy, Miley Cyrus, the setup writes itself. And naturally it’s exactly as explicit as the premise promises—him doing his thing to that song, on a wrecking ball, no apologies. It’s not clever. The joke doesn’t go anywhere. But I kind of love how committed he is to just being exactly what everyone already thinks he is. No irony, no winking—just pure shameless directness. Sometimes that’s funnier than anything you could actually write. Monday, 20 January 2014. More Important Things: Hans-Peter Friedrich was Germany’s interior minister, and when the NSA scandal broke, he basically said he had more important things to deal with. That was his actual response. I remember reading it and just sitting there, thinking: what could possibly be more important? And his answer, implicit in everything that followed, was cheese and folk music and whatever else. People found a Tumblr with screenshots of him eating, playing, living his life completely normally while the world’s entire communications system was being monitored. What gets me is how flat it is. He’s not even defending himself, not making excuses. Just stating a fact: I was busy. Like that’s all there is to say. And in a way it is, because that simple statement tells you everything about what he thought actually mattered. Not the privacy of an entire country. Not the massive security failure. Just… other stuff. I have no idea what happened to him after that. Some politicians say incredibly stupid things and just keep existing, keep their jobs, move on. The news cycles away and you forget. But that phrase stayed with me because it’s the perfect distillation of dismissal—not even a shrug, just a flat statement of fact. And somehow that’s worse. Friday, 17 January 2014. What 200 Looks Like: I’ve noticed that 200 calories in a doughnut looks like nothing—like one bite of food. But 200 calories in pasta is somehow a full meal’s worth. The cruel joke is that your body doesn’t care about calories on a label. It cares about what hits your tongue and how empty your stomach still feels five minutes later. New Year’s resolutions fail the same way every time. December shows up and you’re going to change. Meal prep on Sunday, gym four times a week, no more delivery. By February you’re ordering pizza again, and by March you’ve decided the whole gym membership was a scam. Probably was. The food industry has engineered a perfect con. A cheeseburger looks like a reasonable meal. A handful of chips looks like a normal snack. A Frappuccino is just coffee, right? But each one is 200 calories sitting invisible in plain sight. You can eat five of them without feeling full. You can eat them without even thinking. I’ve seen the breakdowns—200 calories of a doughnut lined up next to 200 calories of broccoli. The doughnut is one bite. The broccoli is an entire plate. It’s obscene. It’s a trick played on everyone’s brain at once. Nobody sees broccoli and thinks “that’s not much food.” Everyone eats a doughnut whole without doing the math. The whole game is rigged against you. The stuff that tastes good is tiny portions. The stuff that fills you up tastes like punishment. So you eat the good stuff and feel like you barely ate anything, then an hour later you’re starving again. You’ve consumed 600 calories without noticing. I don’t know why I’m writing this. Knowing the truth doesn’t change anything. I still want the doughnut. I still think “just this once” when I’m ordering. The fact that 200 calories can be invisible is just how the world works now. It’s not going to change, and neither will I. Friday, 17 January 2014. Strange Shelf: Browsing Urban Outfitters and found this book: And Every Day Was Overcast by Paul Kwiatkowski. Nothing special about the cover. The content is mostly explicit scenes involving animals and women—graphic, no pretense. Just sitting there among the design books, priced and shelved like anything else. What got me was the casualness. A few years back something this transgressive wouldn’t touch mainstream retail. Now it’s just another purchase, neither forbidden nor precious. Urban Outfitters selling animal erotica without ceremony. Strange what ends up in normal circulation these days. Friday, 17 January 2014. Jen Selter: Around 2013 or so, Instagram figured out that fitness content could drive attention like almost nothing else. Jen Selter was the person everyone noticed first—just a young woman posting workout videos, nothing revolutionary, but then Rihanna followed her account and suddenly she was a moment. Not a movie star, not a traditional celebrity, but someone the algorithm had decided was interesting enough to show to millions of people. That’s where Instagram was heading, and she was the vanguard of it. The sponsorship deals and brand partnerships came after that, inevitable really. She became proof of concept for an entire economy that didn’t exist yet. Friday, 17 January 2014. Tokyo Speed: Tokyo hits you all at once. Walk out of the airport and every sensory receptor is firing—the lights, the people, the scale of what’s happening at any given moment. Shibuya, Harajuku, Shimokitazawa all feel like separate cities stacked into the same coordinates, each with its own gravity. You feel like you’ve discovered something no one else knows, which you haven’t, but that doesn’t matter. Captain Capa flew in to play a show and did what everyone does—tried to actually be present in the city while it’s overwhelming you. The Robot Restaurant happened because it has to when you’re there. The subway happened, which is a maze that wasn’t designed for comprehension. They played in front of people in costumes—not for display, just there because the music meant something. What gets me about Tokyo is that it doesn’t need you to understand it. It exists at maximum intensity and doesn’t apologize. Decades of design layered on top of decades of design, neon and noise and brutal efficiency and complete weirdness all running in parallel. You sync up with it or you’re lost, and getting lost there is almost as good as knowing where you are. Every time someone comes back from Tokyo they’re a little different. The city does something to how you think about space, about what’s possible, about effort. It’s exhausting and it’s perfect and you can’t go back to feeling the same way about anywhere else. Thursday, 16 January 2014. What Diddo Made: Dutch artist Diddo found a bag of cocaine on the street and pressed it into a skull. Twelve by eighteen by twenty-two centimeters—a solid chunk of shaped powder. What gets me is the choice. Not the crime, not the risk, just that he looked at it and decided it was material to work with. That kind of thinking sits somewhere between genius and absurdity. I’ve never seen the piece. Probably it’s less impressive in person than as an idea, which is fine—the idea is strong enough anyway. He didn’t use it, didn’t sell it, didn’t do any of the obvious things. He shaped it—took what he found and made it into something that wasn’t there before. And that’s the move I think about: the refusal to do what you’re supposed to do, the choice to take material and reshape it into something else. Most people don’t think that way. Most people see a problem and solve it. Diddo saw material and made it into art. Thursday, 16 January 2014. Twenty In Ginza: I like those A Day With shorts that VICE does—short enough to actually finish, long enough that you feel like you’ve seen something real. They don’t try to explain anything. Just here’s someone, here’s how they live. Kanae Murakami is twenty and lives in Ginza. She makes money going out with wealthy businessmen in Tokyo—one of those transactions that exists in a gray space with no clean English equivalent. There’s rougher stuff before this: she broke her teacher’s spine, got kicked out of home, ended up in Tokyo. She talks about it the way you do after you’ve accepted it and moved on. She talks about the men she sees with complete flatness—they have money, she needs it, everyone knows the deal. No performance, no story she tells herself about who she is. The thing that stuck with me was the thing the video just leaves hanging: how long does this work? What’s next, if there is a next? She’s not worried about it—or she’s not saying she is. But that’s always how it happens. You think you have time. Wednesday, 15 January 2014. Fashion Week Nights: The thing about Fashion Week parties is that everyone’s hollowed out by evening. All day you’re moving between shows and meetings, holding your stomach in, shaking hands with people who don’t remember you, and by eight o’clock all you want is to move and sweat and stop being examined. The Hamburger Hof was where the crowd had congregated—the models from the circuit, the photographers, the designers still making the rounds, the people who’d somehow got the link and weren’t about to waste it. Eva Padberg was there. Bonnie Strange. Brooke Candy. You see the same faces all week under different light and they’re just people dancing. Joe Goddard and MØ were playing—good enough to move to, not so good that you stopped thinking about other things. That floating quality where the music provides cover for the fact that no one’s really here for the music. Everyone was still performing in some register, that’s the thing about Fashion Week, but at least you could do it while sweating. Fanni said something late in the night that landed—that she loved Fashion Week officially, loved all its parties, though she wasn’t sure why. I knew exactly what she meant. It’s not about the venue or the music or standing around with people you barely know. It’s just the week itself, the collective agreement to stay up late and pretend something matters. It doesn’t, but you go anyway. Wednesday, 15 January 2014. The Newsroom’s Last Season: I love The Newsroom. I’m basically alone in this—everyone else seems to hate it—but Aaron Sorkin’s show about the people running a cable news network is better television than whatever everyone’s watching. Better than the shows people pretend to care about. Better than the ones people say you have to see. HBO just announced there’s one more season coming, and then it’s finished. I had to sit with that for a minute. The cast is what gets to me. Olivia Munn as the correspondent on her environmental mission. Dev Patel as the neurotic Twitter guy convinced social media can save the world. Emily Mortimer as the producer—there’s something about her, all competence and quiet sex appeal, the kind of person who looks like she’s thinking about something far more interesting than what’s happening right in front of her. Jeff Daniels holding everything together as Will, the anchor everyone else is trying to live up to while simultaneously resenting. What I want to know before this is all over: Do Will and Emily finally figure it out? Does the final season give us what we’ve been waiting for? Does Jeff Daniels get to beat the shit out of someone while completely blackout drunk? We get one more season to find out. The third season starts in the fall. After that, it’s gone. Tuesday, 14 January 2014. Long Enough: I remember refreshing for this trailer. The fourth season was coming in a few weeks, and HBO had finally dropped the first real one. Game of Thrones had everyone gripped by then—the show where nobody was safe, where power shifted like sand, where you couldn’t predict who’d make it to the next episode. We’d all been waiting through an endless off-season. Nothing crazy, just footage from the new season cut the way trailers always are. Wars, chaos, the usual. But everyone was parsing it frame by frame, trying to see what was coming. Would Daenerys actually make a move on the throne? What about Cersei—was she finished? Joffrey was still around being awful. Margaery was playing her angles. The rest of us were guessing, spinning theories that would probably be dead wrong. The waiting felt eternal in that pre-streaming, weekly-episode way. You couldn’t just binge it. You had to sit in the uncertainty, the speculation. Everyone had someone they thought would end up with the thing, and most of those people were wrong. That was kind of the point of the show—your favorite was probably already dead. I don’t remember exactly what happened in season four anymore, or what I was sure would happen. But I remember that specific flavor of anticipation, the feeling that something major was about to shift, that the board was about to get turned over again. The trailer was just an excuse to psych yourself up for the wait. Monday, 13 January 2014. Back Into Memory: Chino Otsuka photographed her childhood in 1970s Tokyo and Photoshopped herself back into the images as an adult. It’s one of those ideas that feels obvious the moment you see it, the kind of thing you wonder why it took someone until now to think of. She was born in Tokyo, works in London now. The Photoshop process becomes a tool for what she calls time travel—a way to become a tourist of your own history. You stand in your childhood world as you are now, looking back at yourself from a place that only exists in memory. There’s something disorienting about it, something that gets at what memory actually feels like. I don’t know why this simple idea moves me as much as it does. Maybe it’s because it captures something true about what happens when you live far enough from where you grew up. The past becomes a foreign country you can visit. Saturday, 11 January 2014. That Shoot: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin shot Kate Upton for V Magazine, and the photos come out the way you’d expect from those two—precise, clean, nothing wasted. Upton’s always understood exactly what she is and what people want from her, and she doesn’t feel the need to dress that up in irony or defensiveness. In the interview she talks about using her visibility to be a good example, which is the standard line anyone beautiful has to deliver, but it seems like she’s actually thought about it instead of just reading from a script. There’s something decent about that directness. No apology, no winking at the camera. Just acknowledgment. The photographs get that too. Saturday, 11 January 2014. Game of Thrones Season Four: Season three had ended with the Red Wedding still burning in my head—that casual, sudden violence that made clear George R.R. Martin and HBO had no interest in comforting you. When they announced season four would start April 6, there was a real pull to it. Not because I needed the plot (the books existed), but because television is its own thing, and by then this show had become the show, the one everyone was watching, the cultural weight of it impossible to ignore. You’d wake up thinking about what might happen next. You’d text friends theories. Game of Thrones had become essential viewing, and of course I was going to be there when it aired. Friday, 10 January 2014. The Study Grind: Hair tied to a clothes dryer so you jerk awake if you start nodding off during study hours. Dirty gym shoes to sniff and stay alert. Rope. These are study techniques that Chinese students use, because passing the exam matters more than your physical safety. I read about how they prepare and some of it is properly deranged. The thing is, you don’t resort to this stuff unless you’re desperate. And you’re desperate because everyone else is desperate too. Your classmates are tying their hair down, sniffing shoes, destroying their bodies. So you do it or you do something worse. Because if you’re not willing to suffer enough to hurt yourself, you’re not trying. There’s something darkly honest about it. Most education systems torture you just fine—they just do it quietly. You stress yourself sick. You medicate. You kill yourself slowly and call it ambition. But you don’t usually put it in such literal, visceral terms. You don’t tie your hair to the dryer. You just suffer and pretend it’s for a good reason. I doubt the extreme methods make you smarter. Probably they don’t. But once you’re in the system, that’s not the point anymore. The point is just that you’re suffering hard enough to deserve success. Friday, 10 January 2014. Weekend Missions: Friday afternoon and I’m dead in the water—two days off with zero plans. So I make a list. Buy a pony. Have sex with someone who shares your name, bonus points if the last name matches too. Tell all your friends they suck and find completely new people. The absurdity is the whole point. Not because this is real advice, but because weekend listicles are broken on principle. They promise that if you just go to this place or buy that thing, you’ll feel less restless. But nothing lands because it’s not yours—it’s someone else’s idea of how you should spend Saturday. You’re going to scroll instead. Sleep until noon. Feel like you wasted it. Monday comes anyway. So make the suggestions ridiculous. Make it obvious nothing helps. At least then you’re not pretending the list means anything. Friday, 10 January 2014. After the Cats: Ohisama doesn’t look like much—small space, a few tables, shakes and ice cream on the menu. The rabbits are just moving around the floor the way rabbits do, unhurried and completely indifferent to the fact that you paid 1000 yen to sit with them for half an hour. I watched one rabbit for a long time that had apparently decided my shoes were a problem worth investigating. It kept approaching, checking the laces, losing interest, coming back. There’s something about that specific focus—not affection, not even really engagement, just the mechanical curiosity of a rabbit encountering something slightly foreign. You take photos because the experience needs documentation somehow, but the photos never quite catch it. Rabbit cafes are the logical step after cat cafes, which were everywhere by the time I even noticed them. There’s a progression to these things in Japan—what starts as a clever idea becomes infrastructure. Someone had the thought that people wanted access to animals without consequence, in a space designed around it, and now it exists as a category. Cats first, then rabbits. I wonder what’s next. Something smaller probably. Something equally soft and pointless. There’s something genuinely generous about the concept, separate from whatever Instagram appeal it carries. A cafe that exists just to let you sit with animals for a while. No adoption, no responsibility, just half an hour with creatures that don’t care you’re there. It’s companionship without the weight. Maybe that’s the whole thing—that they don’t care. You’re not the reason they’re here. That might be exactly why people come. Thursday, 9 January 2014. Shane Smith’s News Gamble: Shane Smith got bored with CNN and thought VICE could fix it. The pitch made sense—VICE had actually earned the credibility. They’d done the unfiltered reporting, the warlords and drug routes, the stories that made network television look domesticated. If anyone could make news rebellious again, it would be them. VICE NEWS was launching online with a newsroom in Berlin, ready to cover Syria and North Korea and whatever else actually mattered. There was an audience for it. People were tired of the establishment template—the remove, the formality, the sense that nothing mattered unless CNN decided it did. A newsroom with internet speed instead of broadcast patience, moving like a media company instead of a bureau, was genuinely appealing. But there’s always a gap between brand and reality. VICE was interesting because it existed outside the system. The moment you build an actual newsroom, you’re inside it. Same gatekeepers, same constraints, same rules. You can film in North Korea and still be subject to news operation mechanics. The world doesn’t suddenly clarify because your logo is smaller. I respected the bet anyway. Shane wasn’t wrong about CNN having become safe and distant. Whether cool was enough to actually change how news works was the question. Disruption usually turns out messier than the pitch suggests. Thursday, 9 January 2014. Welcome to the Danger Zone: Hamburg was being called Germany’s most dangerous city at the time. That’s what people kept saying. If you believed it, the place sounded like a war zone—chaos, vicious cops, danger at every corner. Tourists got nervous about visiting. The horror stories kept piling up, each one more terrible than the last. It got so absurd that people actually started applying for government entry permits to Hamburg. Entry permits. Like it was a hazard zone or a quarantine area. When I saw the letter exchange with the Foreign Ministry, I realized what I’d always suspected: the government had completely lost the thread. No idea what people actually feared, what actually mattered to anyone, nothing. Wednesday, 8 January 2014. Hisao’s Apartment: I spent a lot of time in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo but somehow never noticed Hisao, which basically means I was an oblivious asshole. He was the guy everyone said was the happiest homeless man in the park—always smiling, always had some story about his luxury apartment. In his head that place was real. In reality he was getting drunk on Sake and selling tourist junk at the flea market next door, but he never lost that smile. Old guy with actual style, even with nothing. There’s something about someone that broken who shows up with a grin on his face every single day. Not performing it for anyone, not making some philosophical point about contentment. Just genuinely okay with his fake apartment and his Sake and whatever else makes the day work. That kind of thing stays with you. Next time I’m in Tokyo I’m going to find him and get drunk with him. Hear all about his place. That’s non-negotiable. Wednesday, 8 January 2014. Rodman in Pyongyang: Dennis Rodman sang Happy Birthday to Kim Jong-un, and if you haven’t seen the video, it’s worse than you’re imagining. The singing is bad. Kim’s grinning through the whole thing. It doesn’t work. There’s something genuinely depressing about it. Not in a funny way—just actually depressing. Rodman’s spent his entire life not giving a shit what anyone thinks, which is usually kind of cool. But this is what happens when you take that and point it at a dictator who runs concentration camps. He just goes for it. Does it badly. Leaves thinking it was fine. I don’t even remember if they played basketball afterward. I think there was basketball. It doesn’t matter. Basketball was never the point. The point was just another famous person deciding that this was how they wanted to be remembered. Wednesday, 8 January 2014. Xbox Sign Out: Someone made the gamertag “Xbox Sign Out” in Call of Duty: Ghosts and just waited for angry kids to yell his name into their mics. Voice command triggers, logs them out—that’s it. The players sound about twelve. They get mad, scream at him, get disconnected, boot back up, get mad again, like they never piece it together. You watch the clips and it’s the same thing over and over: rage, yelling, disconnect, respawn, rage. What I liked about this is the purity of it. No hacking, no glitches, no special technical knowledge. He just understood that furious people yell without thinking, and that if you give your gamertag the right words, they’ll yell them. Social engineering through naming. Pure prediction of how humans behave when they’re frustrated enough. I haven’t played multiplayer online in years, but this has stuck with me. It’s the kind of thing that makes sense the second you hear it and feels almost inevitable. Someone was always going to do this. Someone was always going to make this tag and just wait. Wednesday, 8 January 2014. Disney Underwear, But Make It Anime: Sailor Moon lingerie already happened. Some Japanese company realized that combining a beloved anime with underwear created an obvious market—there are enough horny nerds with disposable income to make it worthwhile. Now Disney’s gotten the same treatment. Bellemaison did a whole line for the Disney Fantasy Shop’s twentieth anniversary, each around forty euros. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Belle, Aurora. All of them as lingerie. The thing about it is how unambiguous it is. Nobody’s pretending there’s a deeper purpose here. It’s the fantasy, the costume, the aesthetic. It’s more honest than most fashion design. The light blue one works better than the others. Color matters more than people think when you’re designing something like this, and that particular shade just lands better with that character. You notice stuff like this and you realize fandom became mainstream a while ago. The people who were supposed to be embarrassed for wanting something like this are just a consumer segment now. That’s the shift. Tuesday, 7 January 2014. Big City Rooftops: I found this mixtape called Big City Rooftops and the title alone grabbed me—that specific quiet of a rooftop in a city at night, surrounded by millions of people but completely isolated. The songs fit that mood exactly. Electronic, nocturnal, slightly sad. Jamie xx, DENA, Boat Club—they make music that sounds like thinking by yourself in a tall building at three in the morning, staring at lights and working through thoughts you can’t name. Not club music. Just loneliness with a soundtrack. Monday, 6 January 2014. Geekography: Exey Panteleev’s Geekography series is exactly what the title suggests: models with code written across their bodies, photographed in studio light. CSS, Python, database queries—actual working code inked on skin. The first time I saw one, it registered as texture and pattern before it registered as code at all. Code on a screen and code on skin are two completely different visual things. On a screen, code is function and instruction. It has to be read to mean anything. Written on skin, it becomes purely graphic. You see the letter forms, the curves of function names against bone, the negative space between lines. You don’t have to understand any of it. It’s just visual pattern. I think why it stays with me is that code is otherwise invisible. It’s the work that happens in terminals, in files, in systems you never see running. Panteleev’s project makes it literal and real and impossible to ignore. Not to make nerds look cool or code look sexy—that’s not the energy at all. Just to make something usually invisible suddenly visible. To let it exist as an image. The series is strongest because it doesn’t preach or perform. It just shows you what code looks like when it has to be real. Monday, 6 January 2014. That Yellow House: I’m drawn to LEGO sets based on actual franchises. Minecraft has its charm—infinite worlds, weird communities, those blocky clouds. But you can’t hold anything in Minecraft, and that matters. LEGO is different. You’re building something with your hands, and when they license something you care about, it stops being a toy and turns into a really satisfying puzzle. The Simpsons house arriving sometime this year is exactly that kind of thing. Twenty-five hundred pieces, opens up to show you the interior, comes with the whole family and even Flanders. I don’t know the price yet, but there’s something appealing about the idea of literally reconstructing Springfield in brick form. That yellow house, all those little details you’d recognize from thirty years of the show. It’s that literal kind of nostalgia—not a vague feeling or memory, just the actual object you’ve seen so many times. Sunday, 5 January 2014. Offline: Justine Sacco was a PR executive at InterActiveCorp. Before boarding a flight to South Africa, she tweeted a joke that wasn’t funny, the kind of edgy riff on racist stereotypes that feels clever for about five seconds. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Then she was offline for eight hours. When she landed, #HasJustineLandedYet was already trending. Her employer had made the decision. Thousands of people had spent her flight time treating her name like a game, mapping out who she was and what they could take from her. She turned her phone on, tried to defend herself, tried to explain the joke, tried to beg people to stop. The more she posted, the worse it got. By morning she was just sitting in a hotel room saying things like “I have nothing left. I’m ruined.” Eight hours offline and your entire life is gone. Not a scandal that unfolds. Not controversy that gives you a chance to explain or apologize. Just one bad tweet, one hashtag, one news cycle, one mob moving together without anyone directing it. No way to survive, no second chance, no mercy. Just erased. This was December 2013. Still early enough that people were shocked by how fast it could happen. It wouldn’t stay shocking for long. Saturday, 21 December 2013. Octopus Backpack: Jennifer Mones is a California illustrator who makes and sells octopus backpacks on Etsy. They’re hand-stitched, made to your specifications—whatever colors, whatever materials you want—and she ships them to you. Around thirty bucks each. There’s something about discovering a genuinely well-designed object made by an actual person that makes you want to own it immediately. Not because you need one, but because someone looked at an octopus and a blank canvas of fabric and decided they belonged together. I keep thinking about ordering one. Saturday, 21 December 2013. She Photographs: Lady Rose in Downton Abbey is what makes the show actually work for most people. Lily James plays her with such ease that you end up caring about completely invented conflicts. That’s the whole trick. She did a Tatler shoot with photographer Marc Hom recently, and the images land because she understands how to wear clothes—not just look good in them, but actually understand proportion and how fabric relates to her body. Most actors in period dramas get trapped in that era. Put them in contemporary clothes and something feels off. James moves between different worlds easily. In the Tatler shots, there’s no sense that she’s locked into any particular time. What makes someone a style icon is understanding something about themselves and how design works with their shape. Not beauty, not styling, but actual understanding. James clearly has it. Whether she becomes whatever the fashion world predicted doesn’t really matter. She already looks like she knows exactly what she’s doing. Saturday, 21 December 2013. The Bikini Was the Point: One more romantic comedy and I’m done. I actually mean it this time. Sit through another two hours of this stuff and I’m quitting films entirely. “The Other Woman” is the one that breaks me. Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann start out hating each other and end up bonding because their boyfriend was cheating on both of them, and Nicki Minaj shows up too. It’s as exhausting as that pitch sounds. The kind of movie that gets greenlit because two names are attached, not because anyone involved cared about making something. Kate Upton’s in it, and she’s wearing a bikini for a few minutes on the beach. That’s the entire appeal. That’s what the film is really about. Everything else is just scaffolding around those four minutes. The trailer shows you the good part anyway. Two minutes of Kate in the bikini, and you’ve got everything that matters. No reason to spend two hours watching the padding when the actual content is in that clip. Friday, 20 December 2013. Waffles Can’t Jump: Waffles on the frozen car. He’s got all the bravery in theory, but when it came time to jump, his body had other plans. Cold paws. Slick metal. The house looked warm and safe and not that far away. He’d crouch, gather himself, launch into it yelling what might have been Geronimo in cat, and something would fail. His nerve, his legs, his judgment. He’d slink back to the beginning and do it all over again. I watched him attempt this maybe five times before I got bored and went inside. Tuesday, 17 December 2013. When Everything Sucks: When I’m really down—like genuinely bad, nothing-helps down—I watch videos of broken animals getting fixed. There’s something about it that works. An animal that was suffering, abandoned, hurt, and then someone shows up and gives a shit. They do the work. They stay with it. It reminds me that not everyone is a complete asshole. That somewhere, there are still people doing the hard, unglamorous work of actually saving something instead of looking away. Hope For Paws found Miley on a landfill. She was destroyed—scared, starving, the kind of bad where you wonder how she’s even still alive. The video shows them finding her, coaxing her out, the whole slow process of getting her somewhere safe. Then she starts becoming a dog again. Eating. Playing. Her tail moves. She knows she’s home. It doesn’t fix anything, watching these videos. But it reminds me that fixing is possible. That someone, somewhere, is still choosing to care about a broken thing instead of walking past it. I don’t know what I’d do without them, honestly. Tuesday, 17 December 2013. Still Looking: Nothing’s happening online today. I’m clicking through whatever, Star Trek playing in the background, and I realize I’m not finding anything worth my time. One video is fine. Some GIF is fine. An article with too much text. Nothing that makes you want to stay. Then it hits: I probably haven’t found all the good blogs yet. That’s the real problem. The internet is supposedly infinite, but good blogs are scattered, and half the time you don’t even know they exist. The ones I used to read regularly are dead or dormant or absorbed into someone’s newsletter. The new ones are hidden behind search spam and corporate content written by algorithms pretending to be human beings. Finding something genuinely good online feels like an accident now. Someone’s small corner of the internet where they’re actually thinking instead of performing. Where they don’t care if you’re listening, so you listen. That’s rare. You notice when you find it. People tell me their favorite blogs sometimes and they’re usually wrong—not their fault. Most of what people bookmark is recycled from their feeds. The actual good ones stay hidden because algorithms don’t push them and nobody’s paying for ads. I’m still looking though. Still scrolling, still hoping something grabs me. It happens, just not as often as it should. Tuesday, 17 December 2013. Nothing Looks Dumber Than Diving: High divers are up there making the dumbest faces. They’re supposed to be graceful athletes, all control and precision, and the moment they commit, their face falls apart. Mouth hanging open, eyes panicked and distant. They look like your little brother on his first attempt at anything. The diving itself is beautiful—the rotation, the precision, that clean water entry with barely a ripple. But the face getting you there is pure collapse. Just concentration, which apparently makes everyone look stupid. I’ve been watching some diving videos and can’t stop noticing it. Every diver, from beginners to Olympic pros, makes the same dumb face. It’s universal. You have one setting when you’re about to do something terrifying, and that setting is catastrophic. You can’t think your way out of it. The harder you try, the stupider you look. Which is honest. All that training comes down to the moment where you look like you have no idea what you’re doing. That’s who you are when you actually care about something—someone who looks incredibly dumb while committing to it. Diving’s just doing it six stories up while people watch. Monday, 16 December 2013. Blogging Under Glass: Kevin Rose built Digg—the site that was going to be bigger than Reddit—and then it wasn’t. Now he’s working on Tiny, which is his theory about making blogging feel more real. The idea is that you blur a webcam photo of yourself and your room, then use it as the background for every post you publish. So people reading what you wrote also see where you were sitting, what time of day it was, what the light and mood of the space suggests. Context as visual design. I can see the appeal of it. Blogging works best when it feels rooted in an actual person, in an actual moment. Adding that visual anchor back—even blurred, even abstract—could make writing feel less floating and disconnected. As someone who thinks about design, there’s something there. But he’s missing something obvious. Blogging only became what it is because you could be honest without being exposed. You could write something raw and personal without documenting your bedroom as proof. That distance was the whole point. It’s what made people willing to say what they actually thought, without the weight of being watched. Rose wants to collapse that distance, and he talks about it like it’s obviously good—like visibility equals honesty. Maybe for some people. For most of us, it just means more exposure, more self-consciousness. He’s even mentioned using live webcam feeds instead of static photos, which is where I’m pretty sure he stops thinking altogether. That’s not adding context. That’s a surveillance window into someone’s private space. That’s honesty framed as truth-telling, but it reads as watching. So when he asks if anyone actually wants this, the answer is probably already clear. Most people don’t. Most people want to keep some part of their life separate from the thoughts they share. Rose is betting that’s changed. I don’t think it has. Monday, 16 December 2013. Ålesund: The wind in Ålesund during Christmas shopping season doesn’t care about your errands. I watched people get physically blown sideways down the street, bags flapping, and most of them were just laughing about it. They’d accepted defeat before they even left the house. There’s something honest about that surrender. Move somewhere that exposed and the weather stops being an inconvenience—it becomes the actual condition of life. Christmas gifts happen or they don’t. The wind decides what matters. By the time I left, people had stopped even pretending to maintain dignity. They were just stepping into the gusts like it was part of the job, moving through it without complaint or expectation of cooperation. That kind of acceptance is rare. You live somewhere that unforgiving and you learn fast that fighting it is just noise. Monday, 16 December 2013. The Third World War: During protests in Turin last November against a high-speed rail project, a woman kissed a cop’s helmet. Franco Maccari, head of Italy’s police union, filed a sexual harassment complaint. His defense was elegant in its absurdity: if a cop had kissed a female protester, the world would end. But a woman kissing a helmet? That required legal intervention. I’ve thought about this incident more than I care to admit. Not because it’s shocking—it’s too stupid to be shocking—but because of what it exposes about who gets to claim victimhood, and what we’ll criminalize when it comes from women. A kiss on riot gear is affection or protest or both. Touch the uniform and it becomes assault. Maccari invoked the specter of international conflict over a hypothetical, then filed charges over a woman’s lips on plastic. The double standard isn’t hidden. It’s his whole argument. What lingers is the impulse underneath—not just policing the protest, but policing bodies, touch, the crossing of that line between citizen and authority. A cop in riot gear isn’t remotely vulnerable to a kiss. But the fact that someone would kiss him? That seems to have threatened something. Not his safety. His position. His distance. She knew what she was doing. He probably did too. Monday, 16 December 2013. Kate Moss, Obviously: Playboy dropped a behind-the-scenes video from their 60th anniversary shoot with Kate Moss. Obviously I watched it. She’s in her late thirties now. Still looks good. The whole thing is soft-lit and expensive—shot to make you want to keep looking at her. And you do. I’m not going to pretend there’s something deeper happening here. She’s attractive. If magazines keep putting her in them, I’ll keep watching. That’s the deal. Monday, 16 December 2013. Broadcast Hunger: The Diva broadcasts at 8 PM every night on Afreeca and people pay to watch her eat. That’s all it is. She sits in front of a camera shoving food in her mouth—pizza, steak, pasta, whatever—talks about what she made while she’s eating, and viewers send her Star Balloons (digital tips, a few euros to fifty) to keep her going. She makes around a thousand euros a night. I heard about it and thought it was a joke. There’s something weirdly compelling about it. No narrative, no performance, just watching someone consume. It’s intimate in a way that has nothing to do with sex, just the sound of her swallowing, the mess of it, the comfort of sitting in your room watching a stranger eat. Maybe it’s parasocial hunger. Maybe it’s something weirder than that. South Korea figured this out before anywhere else because they move fast on this stuff. Streaming infrastructure, monetization schemes, the willingness to find money in appetite and attention. The Diva’s just the obvious endpoint. The platform’s called Afreeca, which is darkly funny if you think about it, but that’s not really the point. This is just how the attention economy works. Anyway. She’s on tonight. Monday, 16 December 2013. Living Doll: Elise Bahía calls her Norwegian fashion blog Living Doll. The name isn’t metaphorical—she’s built herself to look like one, completely committed to the aesthetic. Spray tan, makeup, the works. Everything locked in. The thing actually works. Blog pulls readers, she gets sponsorship deals, travels constantly. The aesthetic is the product. I respect the consistency, even though I’d lose my mind maintaining it. I’d crack. Show up one day in regular clothes and the whole thing crumbles. I don’t know if she’s real or pure construction, but at this point it probably doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s designed something people respond to. That’s what’s interesting about it. Monday, 16 December 2013. Friends Coming Back: You see the headline and already know it won’t happen. Someone’s quoted a source. HBO Max is bringing it back. The cast is ready. Then by evening an actor’s denied it, the story collapses, and people move on. But a few months later the rumor surfaces again and people believe it again, and the cycle repeats. There’s something comfortable in it—the fantasy of return, going back to something you already know instead of taking a risk on anything new. We know exactly what Friends is. Why would we want uncertainty instead. Sunday, 15 December 2013. Drunk in Love: Beyoncé’s got a new video for “Drunk in Love” and it’s exactly as sexual as you’d hope. She and Jay-Z on a beach, both of them soaking wet, not pretending to be anything other than hot and confident. Black and white. No metaphor, no distance. The whole thing has that reckless Rihanna energy, like she’d been watching too much half-naked content before shooting this. Everything works because nothing’s trying to be tasteful. She knows how good she looks and the camera agrees. Sunday, 15 December 2013. 2013: That year I watched Spring Breakers and didn’t know what I’d just seen—Korine doing his full fever-dream thing with pink and excess and violence, the kind of film that stays unresolved in your head for weeks. Then Star Trek Into Darkness, which at least tried to reach for something underneath the action. And Despicable Me 2, which just worked because it understood what made the first one stick. What made the year interesting wasn’t that everything was great. It was the range. A film that weird and unapologetic showed you what cinema could do if it wasn’t worried about being safe—then you’d turn around and watch something commercial just trying to be good at its own thing. The whole year felt like that. Different bets, different people, nobody building one vision together. I watched enough to feel something happening. Not everything landed. But there was reach in it. Ambition sitting next to entertainment sitting next to pure craft. That’s what I remember—not because the films were perfect, but because the whole thing felt honest in its scatter. Saturday, 14 December 2013. Heat: Sure, I watch TV purely for the compelling characters, the intricate storytelling, the killer soundtracks. Definitely not because I’m anticipating nudity I can discuss in uncomfortable detail with everyone I see the next day. This year had some legitimately notable moments. Orange is the New Black opened with Taylor Schilling and Laura Prepon in a shower scene that announced the show’s intentions pretty clearly. Rose Leslie in Game of Thrones season 3 became one of those scenes everyone remembers—the kind of thing that defines a show in people’s memory. Masters of Sex basically committed to the principle that nudity could exist in almost any scene, which is at least consistent. There’s a real argument that TV’s become an actual art form. The writing often beats what you get in movies, the actors get meaningful depth, the directors have control. All of that’s true. But there’s something dishonest about watching and pretending you didn’t notice the bodies. That’s the whole point. That’s entertainment. Saturday, 14 December 2013. Nirvana Unplugged: MTV Unplugged in New York, December 14, 1993. Kurt in a cardigan, the band acoustic, nothing between the songs and the listener. They played “About a Girl,” “Come as You Are,” “Pennyroyal Tea.” They covered Leadbelly, The Vaselines, Bowie. They didn’t play “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Here was the guy who’d become the voice of a generation just giving it all up, stripping everything down, making it small and true. Most musicians do unplugged sets to prove they’re serious. Kurt looked like he wanted to stop existing. The record from that night is still the concert I come back to most. It’s just him and a guitar and a room, and every choice feels necessary. I was a kid when Nevermind hit, old enough to know something big had happened, not old enough to know why. Unplugged made it clear. It was the admission that the noise was never the whole story. That underneath all of it was someone scared and tired and not sure what to do with being famous. I think that’s why it stuck around. The older you get, the realer it becomes. Saturday, 14 December 2013. The Victoria’s Secret Machine: So I watched the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show highlights—the usual suspects parading in impossible heels while Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy played in the background. It’s this peculiar machine they’ve built, very expensive, very deliberate. Models like Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevinne floating past in the kind of light that makes everything look better than it should. The thing that always gets me is that it works. You know exactly what it’s supposed to make you feel, and you feel it anyway. By the end you’re mentally pricing out gym memberships you’ll never use and fantasizing about spray tans. It’s honest in that way—they’re not pretending to be anything other than a vision designed to make you want something you can’t have. Not that I’m complaining. It’s well done, at least. Friday, 13 December 2013. Jukujo: The Japanese have a specific word for older women in their adult industry: jukujo. There’s an entire category built around them, and it’s not failing. The industry gets fresh twenty-year-olds every year in bad schoolgirl costumes, and the jukujo women just keep working. They’re not marginalized, not treated as a novelty. They’re just there. Vice did a piece with Chisato Shoda, one of the performers in that space. She talked about the work—what the fantasies look like, what happens when desire is aimed at bodies that show their age. The Japanese industry has never pretended that male desire is monolithic. It’s messier and more specific than that. What interests me is how unsentimental it is. The category exists because men want it. The women know what their audience desires and deliver it, no apology, no story about empowerment. Just work. The fantasy isn’t “she’s secretly young”—it’s “she knows what she’s doing.” In America, we pretend desire should be simple: youth and perfection. Anything else is a fetish, a compromise, something to hide. The Japanese just make what people actually want instead of what they think people should want. I respect that approach way more than I probably should. Friday, 13 December 2013. Twelve in a Tin: Christmas Dinner now comes in a tin—12 courses stacked in aluminum like some kind of holiday ration pack. Eggs and bacon, turkey, potatoes, everything else squeezed in, all the way down to pudding. Heat it up, eat it straight from the can if you want. You’re done in ten minutes. The original post was pretty harsh about who this is for—people alone on Christmas, family who’ve disowned you, nothing but you and your cats and whatever’s on TV. That’s funny because it’s true. If you’re not pretending the day matters, why bother with the whole production? Cooking takes hours. This takes minutes. The day’s annoying anyway, so why not just acknowledge it and move on? The product doesn’t apologize for what it is. No marketing fantasy about tradition or gathering or memory. Just: here’s Christmas food, it’s in a tin, eat it if you want. Someone at a packaging company thought about how to keep turkey from bleeding into custard during storage, and they just solved it and moved on. That’s what gets me. The product is honest. It doesn’t pretend you’re having Christmas. It just acknowledges that the day happens and you need to eat something, and here, we made that simple. No shame, no strategy, no pretense. Just a tin. Friday, 13 December 2013. Still Amy: I was always Amy. Not Serena. The chaotic chosen one never made sense to me - I needed the smart girl with glasses, the one who actually read, who thought her way through things before she’d fight anything. It took years to stop being weird about identifying with her, or maybe to stop caring that it was weird. Sailor Moon was just comfort - the strange relief of characters as confused as you are, doing what had to be done. So when I found out someone was making official Sailor Moon lingerie I had to sit with that. Decades after the series defined what animation could be, after it shaped how I thought about nearly everything - now there’s merchandise designed to make the fantasy wearable. To seduce someone in character. Which is absurd and I can’t look away from it. Five sets. One for each of the first five warriors. They’re made in Japan and they exist in that pocket between nostalgia and desire - where something innocent gets reclaimed as adult fantasy. Which tracks. Everything from childhood becomes that if you wait long enough. I won’t pretend I wouldn’t want to try it. There’s something genuinely compelling about reliving that particular fever dream with someone who understood what it meant - who grew up enchanted by the same characters. The lingerie isn’t the point. It’s permission to pretend, just for one night, that the magic you believed in at eight still works somehow. It probably doesn’t. But the wanting to try - that’s what tells you it was real in the way that actually matters. Thursday, 12 December 2013. Second Screen: New Year’s Eve felt like it needed something, some gathering point. That was the whole idea behind the Wii—make gaming a thing you did with other people in the room. The Wii U kept that dream but complicated it with the GamePad, a screen right there in your hands while everyone else stared at the TV. You could be looking at something nobody else could see. Hidden information. A separate world. For a designer, that’s genuinely interesting—asymmetrical play, where the rules shift depending on who you are and what you’re holding. Nintendo invented that constraint and then mostly didn’t know what to do with it. Most games ignored the potential entirely. The few that did use it well were solid, though. Super Mario 3D World came out near the end, when the Wii U was already clearly failing, and it was good in a way that had nothing to do with the gimmick. Just tight level design and clever platforming. You didn’t need the GamePad. It just worked. I look back on the Wii U now with something like affection, which feels weird because it was a commercial disaster. But there’s something about hardware that tries something real, even if it fails. The tablet was awkward, the library was thin, the whole console felt pulled in a dozen directions at once. But someone pitched it, and someone green-lit it, and for a moment the industry could have gone a different way. It didn’t, but the possibility was there. Thursday, 12 December 2013. Superstar: Everyone’s wearing these chunky Nike Air Max in every color now, even guys in business suits. I get it. But my favorite shoe has always been the Adidas Superstar, and I’ve never needed to question that. There’s something about the shape that works. It’s so minimal it’s almost boring until you see it on a foot, and then it’s perfect. The three stripes, the shell toe, the way it sits. It doesn’t try. Adidas keeps releasing new versions, which I’m genuinely torn about. Do I want them changing something that’s already right? Not really. But they do it anyway, and I always look. Three new colorways came out: white with black stripes, white with red, white with yellow. All the heritage angle, referencing the 80s, invoking a golden age that probably never existed. I want the classic. White with black stripes, nothing else. That’s always been the version that makes sense. It looked right forty years ago and it looks right now, and probably always will. Thursday, 12 December 2013. Britney’s Back: I watched the Perfume video knowing what it meant. After the conservatorship years, the court battles, the awful spectacle of her life becoming public trial, she was just making something on her own terms. Not performing recovery or justifying herself, not explaining to anyone—just choosing to make a video. The video itself is fine. It doesn’t matter. What mattered was the simple fact that she could do this now without it being examined for signs of distress or health, without needing to be defended or explained. Just work. That quiet kind of power. Wednesday, 11 December 2013. Illegal Again: India’s Supreme Court overturned a decade of decriminalization this week. Same-sex acts are illegal again. Fourteen years of something like freedom, gone. I spent the day checking the dates. The statute is colonial—criminalizes what the books call ’unnatural’ sex, carries ten years and a fine. For a century it barely mattered, just a tool cops used to squeeze money and compliance from anyone vulnerable. Then Delhi’s courts ruled in 2009 it violated basic rights. Something shifted, at least in cities. Bollywood was making different kinds of films. People were less hunted. This week the Supreme Court reaffirmed it. They’re saying only Parliament can change this law, so the courts are just keeping the cruelty legal. The activists are calling it a black day. I don’t know what people who came out in the last decade do now—what you do with freedom you thought was real, that just got revoked by a gavel. Wednesday, 11 December 2013. H&M’s Nipple Beads: H&M’s selling a shirt with pearl beads right over the nipples. The listing calls it embroidery, which is true in the way that any euphemism is technically accurate. Twist the beads and they do exactly what they look like they’d do. I don’t know if this is intentional design or if the Swedish office just wasn’t paying attention. Either way, it exists. Thirty euros. Someone’s going to buy this for exactly what it is, someone else will buy it and realize what it is in a dressing room, and H&M will keep selling them because they cost almost nothing and there’s no good way to explain why you want to pull a product without sounding insane. Wednesday, 11 December 2013. The Safer Story: Pope Francis became TIME’s Person of the Year instead of Miley Cyrus, who was leading the online poll. Editors one, internet zero. He’d been Pope for nine months—came from Argentina in February when Benedict XVI stepped down—and he was already doing something different. Talking about the poor, saying he wouldn’t judge people for their sexuality. That wasn’t typical for the Vatican. People who’d written off institutional religion were paying attention. TIME started picking a Man of the Year back in 1927, after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. They needed something to put on the cover, so they made him the year’s defining person. A hundred years later they still do it, still use it as this cultural pulse check. Edward Snowden had leaked the NSA files earlier and basically showed that mass surveillance wasn’t a future threat anymore—it was here, woven into everything. That was real rupture. TIME could’ve picked him, made it about accountability and transparency. Instead they went with the Pope. Comfort instead of disruption. I don’t know if that was the right call, but it says something about what they wanted to recognize. Wednesday, 11 December 2013. Winter Library: I heard about some girls from New York who showed up half-naked at a university library one winter. They were sitting surrounded by economics textbooks while elderly people made shushing sounds. The whole thing was probably profound and completely stupid at once. What stuck was the refusal to play along. Libraries want you to be grateful, reverent, quiet. They want the quiet reverence of someone grateful to be allowed to study, like those dusty books deserve respect. And maybe they do, but after six hours of cramming supply-and-demand curves into your skull in a room that smells like old paper and despair, the reverence wears thin. Winter makes it worse—the light through the windows is thin and gray, and you’re realizing that none of this will matter in five years. So these girls just stopped pretending it was serious. They sat cold and ridiculous instead, which is a more honest response than I’ve ever managed. I’d never actually do it. Most people won’t. But there’s something real in that—the decision that studying doesn’t have to feel this way. Wednesday, 11 December 2013. Krokodil: I watched a TIME video about krokodil that looked like it was filmed in hell. Emanuele Satoli is the one who made it, which means he spent time in Russia actually filming people using the drug—documenting something you can’t really un-see. The trap closes fast. Krokodil is absurdly easy to make, and once you start, there’s no quitting because withdrawal is somehow worse than the drug itself. Your memory goes. Your skin rots at the injection sites. The video shows young girls—actually shows them—with their genitals destroyed. People who look like they’re already dead but are still somehow conscious. I don’t know what to do with what I watched. There’s no angle on this, no way to make it digestible. It just reminds you how close everything is to the edge, how fast it all can go. Tuesday, 10 December 2013. Trying Anyway: Catherine Polyanskaya’s answer to Russia’s state-sanctioned homophobia was a soap opera. Moonlight People is the first gay soap opera in Russia, based on real events, aimed at young people in a country where being queer gets you hated, avoided, and in the worst cases killed by authorities or hired thugs. Putin’s government has made that the actual structure. Gauck boycotted the Olympics over it. Dissenters catch hammers. This isn’t a cultural lag or private prejudice—it’s policy. So she made a television show. Melodrama as response. I understand the logic. Television gets into homes the way essays don’t. Watching people like you on screen, in their own stories—maybe that shifts something. Maybe one person’s nephew sees himself reflected and thinks differently about it. That’s the bet. The problem is what television does and doesn’t do. It’s good at emotion, at making someone feel real and human. It’s terrible at changing minds in hostile places. You don’t watch a show and unwind a lifetime of state messaging. You don’t watch a show and start risking your life for something the government wants you to fear. But there’s something to the attempt itself. The refusal to accept that the system is closed, the decision to make something true and put it on screen anyway—to insist that this story exists, right now, in Russia. Probably it reaches people already sympathetic. Probably it just gives shape to something already there. But the act of making it anyway, of broadcasting it in a country that hates what it represents—that matters. Tuesday, 10 December 2013. Hundred Euro Chocolate Dick: A hundred euros for a chocolate penis from Spain. United Indecent Pleasures makes them—banana or strawberry filling, shrink-wrapped and ready to ship. That’s the actual asking price for this thing. I don’t know if it tastes good. Probably fine. But the taste isn’t really what you’re paying for when you order a hundred-euro chocolate dick. You’re paying for that moment someone opens it and has to decide whether this is funny or insulting. Usually it’s both. The novelty gift works because it’s honest. You couldn’t find anything real, so you got them something stupid instead. At least you were thinking about them. At least you tried. Tuesday, 10 December 2013. K-Pop’s Year: I found this list from Dazed & Confused ranking the year’s best Korean pop songs, and it was a wake-up call about how thoroughly I’d missed everything that was happening. T.O.P, EXO, G-Dragon, B.A.P—names that circulated with genuine reverence in comment sections I’d never scrolled through. The gap between this world and the one I lived in was staggering. Korean pop in 2013 was a fully formed industry operating at a scale and with an ambition that made Western pop look provincial. SM Entertainment was basically running a design studio that made music on the side. Every visual element, every video, every styling choice was refined until it was impossible to look away. The production on an EXO song was worth studying just for the craft of it. T.O.P’s “Doom Dada” was genuinely strange—production that refused to sit still, built like someone’s fever dream. EXO’s “Growl” was relentless. G-Dragon’s “Coup d’Etat” showed what happens when someone with real taste gets a real budget. But CL’s “The Baddest Female” was the one that stuck. I’d been following her because she refused to perform humility, and this track cut through every manufactured sentiment the genre usually requires. It was angry in a way most pop music wouldn’t allow itself to be. What made it stranger was realizing the scale of the audience. These songs had millions of plays. A global fanbase had assembled itself entirely through YouTube and forums, no radio blessing, no MTV approval. The music industry kept acting like distribution was unsolved while K-pop had already solved it quietly, invisible to anyone not paying attention. By the end of the year it felt impossible to argue that Western pop mattered anymore. The energy, the innovation, the visual clarity—it was all flowing in a different direction. I was just late in noticing. Tuesday, 10 December 2013. Matter of Fact: Davey Wavey has this video where he explains how gay people have sex, and what gets you is how unstriking it all is. No shame, no mystery, no performance. Just straightforward description of what bodies do. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe shame or mythology or something that felt forbidden. But he’s just calm about it. Here’s what happens, here’s what might feel good, here’s what you might worry about. That’s the video. Apparently that’s rare enough that watching someone explain sexuality plainly feels almost radical. Especially when the subject has spent decades getting either demonized or sensationalized, with nothing in between. No normal conversation about any of it. I’d been absorbing all the cultural baggage around gay sex without really noticing—the whispers, the mythology, the hypersexualization. Watching it get broken down plainly made me realize how little space there actually was for straightforward talk. The sad part is that a video like this needs to exist at all. The good part is he made it without trying to be clever or provocative. Just the facts, delivered plainly, which turns out to be what was missing. Monday, 9 December 2013. Bad Timing: D E N A released “Bad Timing” recently and it’s been stuck in the rotation. Bulgarian artist, 29, signed to K7—one of those labels worth paying attention to. For the last couple years she’s been putting out these lean electronic tracks that don’t try very hard to win you over. Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools, Games, Thin Rope. Songs that work best when you’re not paying full attention, when they can just sit in your space and do their thing. What interests me about her work is how much she doesn’t do. There’s a confidence in that—the restraint, the refusal to add more texture or build toward some obvious moment. It’s the opposite of the default instinct in electronic music, which is usually to pile on. More, more, more. She goes the other direction. “Bad Timing” is quieter than some of her earlier singles. It’s a track that reveals itself slowly, if at all. You play it and then realize two hours have passed and you’ve had it on repeat the whole time without noticing. Next year she’s putting out a debut album called Flash. I’m curious what that sounds like—whether she expands the sound or just makes an entire album of these understated, isolated moments. Either way, she has the taste and the discipline to make it work. I’ll find out when it’s out. Monday, 9 December 2013. Once You Know: In Berlin, there’s talk of opening the first legal marijuana shop in Kreuzberg, and in the circles I run in, that’s mostly good news. Weed, Club Mate by the liter, pirated TV shows—that’s just what happens in student flats. Nobody questions it. But then you read the interviews, and it gets harder to stay casual about it. There’s a psychiatrist at Hamburg-Eppendorf—Rainer Thomasius—who runs the addiction clinic for kids and teens. He’s rigid about this: legalization is a mistake, even for adults. His argument is about damage. Cannabis rewires the teenage brain in ways that stick around. It shrinks the hippocampus, where memory lives. About five percent of the young patients he sees develop psychotic symptoms. Some of them trigger full schizophrenia. Once they’re hooked, they’re hooked hard. One course of treatment isn’t enough to catch everyone who needs help. Then there’s the kid who came through that clinic. He was eighteen when he talked about it—started with a joint, thought the whole thing was overblown. How could something that felt that good actually be dangerous? Half a gram a day at first, then a gram, then five. By the end he was spending six, seven hundred euros a month. Not even getting high anymore, just needing it to function, needing it to leave the house. Dropped out of school. Got thrown out of home. That’s when he finally understood he couldn’t do it alone. Therapy was the only way out. The thing about legalization is the signal it sends. Kids see it and think their parents’ warnings were just paranoia. They don’t have the neural real estate yet to tell themselves to stop. And if you’re already wired for schizophrenia, this stuff can flip that switch years before it would have happened anyway. So the argument against legalization isn’t really about freedom or nanny states. It’s about specific damage to people too young to see it coming. You can understand the case for legalization. You can also understand why knowing this makes it harder. Once you hear the stories, you stop having an opinion about it. You just know better. Monday, 9 December 2013. What Perfume Knew: I spent a summer in Tokyo and came back convinced everyone else was listening to the wrong music. Not wrong—late. Three steps behind Perfume. Kashiyuka, Nocchi, and A~chan built a sound nobody else had cracked. Synthetic, precise, made from 8-bit fragments and drops that feel inevitable. Their new track “Sweet Refrain” does what they do: impossibly sweet without sentiment, built from elements that shouldn’t fit but do. The video is pixelated dream-logic, text floating over scenes, lyrics about memory and possibility. It’s the kind of thing that feels obvious once you’ve heard it, like they discovered something that was always there. I’m not going to claim Perfume owns the future. That’s too much. But I know they understood something early that everyone else is still catching up to. I heard it in Tokyo and I haven’t stopped listening since. Monday, 9 December 2013. A Good Bieber Song: Monday, 9 December 2013. For a Girl: “You skate amazing for a girl.” That’s not actually a compliment, even though it sounds like one. It centers the gender instead of the person. Anna Groß pointed this out—she runs the Suck My Trucks contest in Berlin and built this archive documenting how the skateboarding scene treats women. It’s hostile in a way that’s pretty stupid because everyone kind of knows it’s happening and nobody does anything. Skateboarding culture is built on individual style and competition. Who lands the sickest trick, who’s got the best style, who looks coolest doing it. That’s not inherently the problem. The problem is it collides with this age-old thing where strength equals masculinity and weakness equals femininity. So women get ranked by their gender first, always. It’s the same in surfing, snowboarding, hip-hop—anywhere the culture worships individual expression. Action sports are just boys’ clubs, mostly teenagers, and teenagers think sex is funny, so companies sell products with breasts on them because it works. Capitalism. The self-perpetuation is what kills it. No female role models means fewer women try skating. No women in the scene means magazines get to say there’s no talent to film, which is comfortable because you don’t have to actually show the women who are good. The harassment does the work too—jokes about tampons, getting slammed on your chest, constant small things that wear you down. Eventually you quit. Then everyone’s proved right: women just aren’t serious about skateboarding. Anna’s documenting it, building something different, trying to push back. Whether that actually shifts the culture or just makes space for people who already care, I don’t know. Probably both. Probably neither. But someone’s saying it. Sunday, 8 December 2013. Simpsons Converse: Converse dropped Simpsons Chuck Taylors. Yellow heads with the red mouth logo, hitting stores in Tokyo. It feels inevitable, honestly. The Simpsons had a run as something that was actually funny, and when that ended it just became a brand like anything else. I’d probably want these shoes if I were younger, back when wearing something branded felt like a statement of taste rather than just existing. Now they’re just merchandise—another nostalgic product line, another way to buy your childhood back from a shoe company. There’s something hollow about watching something you loved become pure commodity. The show was genuinely funny once. That fact matters less than I’d like it to. Sunday, 8 December 2013. Just Eat the Food: There’s this moment when someone orders something that looks perfect, and before anyone picks up their fork, out comes the phone. The food cooling while they hunt for the right angle, the right light, the right filter. I do it constantly, guilty as anyone. Then I’m eating something lukewarm, not really tasting it, because I’m composing a caption in my head. Rhett and Link made a video about this—some song about putting your phone down and actually living. The premise is simple: you’re so busy documenting that you miss the actual thing. You film the concert from behind a screen. You photograph the sunset but never actually look at it. The documentation becomes the memory, and the real memory just vanishes. What’s weird is knowing this is happening and not stopping. I’ll catch myself mid-shot, already framing the narrative, and think: what am I actually here for? I’m tasting the food but I’m really just composing how I’ll describe tasting it. The real experience is always one frame behind, filtered through whether it’ll photograph well. It’s not about Instagram or Snapchat or whatever app is flavor of the month. It’s just that gap between the thing and the proof of the thing, and we’ve all gotten used to it. You document to remember, but the documentation is what keeps you from actually remembering. You take a picture and somehow that replaces the moment. Last week I went somewhere without my phone and actually paid attention. I retained more of it. Tasted the food better. Saw the actual colors instead of how they’d render on a screen. It’s strange realizing how much the documentation was getting in the way of the living. Friday, 6 December 2013. The Gates Don’t Hold: IMG decided fashion bloggers had become a liability. This was around 2013. Catherine Bennett, their senior VP, told the Wall Street Journal that Fashion Week had turned into a zoo—it used to be for established designers showing collections to serious media and buyers, now it was street photographers and Instagram people and fans packed into the Lincoln Center. Next year they’d go back to being exclusive. Real connections to fashion only. Everyone else: out. The timing was almost funny. By the time they were trying to seal the gates, social media had already shattered them. A person with a good eye and a following mattered more to brands than someone who went to every show. But admitting that meant admitting the old hierarchies didn’t work anymore, and the fashion industry isn’t good at that. So they doubled down on keeping people out instead—the move of an institution that can feel its power slipping. They offered the excluded bloggers a consolation prize: livestream access, social media channels, photos and videos. You can see everything, just not be there. Not be part of the story. Just the audience. The thing that stuck with me wasn’t the exclusion itself—that’s fashion industry standard procedure—but the panic underneath. They were nervous about who decided what mattered now. They were fighting a battle that was already lost, trying to make gatekeeping mean something when the gates had functionally opened everywhere else. Obviously it didn’t hold. A few years later, the influential bloggers got let back in because you can’t ignore reach. The whole thing just shifted into this weird hybrid where Fashion Week became less about exclusivity and more about managing every possible platform. The gatekeeping failed quietly, which is how most of it does. Friday, 6 December 2013. How Beautiful Shanghai Is: A guy posted a photo on Reddit of his Shanghai hotel room view. Brown air completely obscuring the next building over. Not some exotic poison gas attack—just the regular atmosphere loaded with industrial pollution. I had this idea about visiting China someday, maybe multiple times. Just voluntarily moved that dream way further back. The air quality index hit 6. That’s the level where you don’t throw your worst enemy into that air. Maybe you do if you hate them enough. But not this guy. Not the nice man from the hotel. Unless he’s my worst enemy somehow. I’m going to stop thinking about this now. Friday, 6 December 2013. Tropico: Lana Del Rey made a short film called Tropico. Thirty minutes. She cast herself as Eve—the whole biblical narrative thing—and wrote the script. The story runs through three chapters from the Garden of Eden to contemporary Los Angeles, which explains itself if you know her sensibility. Three Paradise album tracks play through it: Body Electric, Gods and Monsters, Bel Air. Supposedly it concludes some larger narrative that started with her Born to Die videos, though I’ve never tracked that particular thread. You don’t really need the connective tissue with Lana’s work. It’s the kind of project that hovers between genuine ambition and self-aware camp. Biblical mythology filtered through her vision of American imagery and melancholy. I haven’t lived with it long enough to know if it’s brilliant or just confidently made, but with Lana those probably feel identical. Friday, 6 December 2013. Kate on a Board: Kate Moss is back in circulation. The Playboy appearance made headlines, but really she’s always been this constant in culture - the style icon who’s also a beautiful disaster, someone who makes her own chaos look intentional. Nick Thomm made a skateboard deck with her face on it, which is the right idea before you even see the thing. Skate culture and fashion have always been cousins. Both are about refusal, about looking like you don’t care while obviously caring. Kate Moss lives in that space. She’s the proof that the distinction between high fashion and street culture was never real anyway. Owning an object like that isn’t about the deck itself. It’s about carrying someone who refused the approved version of herself. That’s been my gravitational pull forever - people and images that suggest you could exist on different terms. When something clicks, it clicks. The reference is right, the person is right, the execution works. This is one of those things. Friday, 6 December 2013. Paul Walker: The Fast & Furious cast posted a tribute video for Paul Walker set to P. Diddy’s “Coming Home,” and it’s brutal in how simple it is. Just clips of him working, being present, doing the job he was there to do. The song is built for this—slow and mournful at first, then into something almost like acceptance. No narration. No ceremony. Just people who worked together saying goodbye. Walker died in a car crash on a Saturday in 2013. Roger Rodas was driving; he died too. That’s where everything becomes impossible to parse—two people, one moment, and the certainty that no explanation will ever be enough. The kind of thing that makes obvious statements about mortality suddenly matter, because obvious things only matter when it’s too late. The video doesn’t fix anything. But there’s something in the way they made it—the care, the simplicity, the refusal to turn a death into content. That’s the only thing that matters. That’s all that could possibly matter. Thursday, 5 December 2013. Support Your Local: Marx, late Friday nights. Douglas Greed on vocals with Nagler on drums, and the usual rotation of local DJs: Cris Urban, Alexander Lorz, Malte Seddig, Spanks, Vonda7, Modig. If you went to clubs in Berlin you knew these names. Not because they were famous, just because they were there every week building whatever that night was. That’s the thing about local scenes. They’re invisible unless you’re in them. Carlsberg ran this Support Your Local campaign where you’d vote for your favorite DJ and they’d make some money from it. The idea was embarrassingly direct—just show up and make sure the people who actually build the thing get paid. I never cared much about the DJs I read about in magazines. But the people who shaped the actual nights, who understood their crowd and their city—those people mattered. You knew what they’d play, how they’d read the room, what they were capable of. That’s a real relationship in a way that following someone online isn’t. I don’t know if that series still happens. Sponsorship money dries up, people move, scenes change. But the basic idea was sound: that the people who actually build culture deserve to eat and deserve to be recognized by the people who show up. It’s not complicated. It just requires showing up. Thursday, 5 December 2013. Just the Glow: Maternity photos do something. Chelsea Salmon, Steve Shaw’s lens, all soft focus and inevitability. I think of Steffen, who once fell apart in my living room because his condom split. His girlfriend’s image in one hand. He was panicking but also something else—like the future had already decided itself and he was just catching up. These pictures only show the soft part. Not the 3 AM sickness or the body doing things you never signed up for, not the sheer randomness of when it actually happens. You wait for the right moment with the right person and the timing is always wrong, or it never comes, or you’re still waiting while everyone else’s lives change. I don’t know. Nice shot though. Thursday, 5 December 2013. Home Alone Every December: I watch Home Alone every December without fail. The first one, and usually the second, but I stop there. The others don’t count. It’s pure habit at this point, the way some people drink eggnog or drive around looking at Christmas lights. Just something that happens. Apparently there’s a pug version now. I saw it mentioned somewhere and just kept scrolling. The idea of remixing Home Alone with a novelty element feels absurd, but then again, why do I keep watching the exact same movie every year if it’s already perfect? Maybe I’m just nostalgic. Maybe the movie earns it. The original works because it actually works. The jokes are solid, the stakes feel real, Kevin isn’t annoying. Macaulay Culkin nailed it. When they made sequels they just made sequels—they missed whatever the first one had. So I stopped watching them. The pug version is probably fine. Probably pointless. But it exists, because apparently nothing can just stay as it is. Everything gets a remix, a reboot, a novelty spin. I get it. At least this one leaves the original alone. I’ll be watching the original in December, like always. Thursday, 5 December 2013. The Expensive Photograph: Peter Clatworthy from Nottingham bought an Xbox One on eBay for 550 euros. The seller shipped him a photograph instead. He was buying a Christmas gift for his son, and the listing was in the Games category, so it seemed legitimate. The description mentioned “photo” somewhere in the details, but he missed it or didn’t read carefully enough. Most of the time you don’t have to read every word—the system is supposed to protect you. The category is supposed to mean something. But eBay has millions of listings now, and categories don’t really protect anyone anymore. He ordered, the seller shipped, and what arrived was a printed picture of an Xbox One. When reporters talked to him about it, the absurdity was pretty plain. He’d paid for what he thought was actual hardware. The seller had literally sold what they described—a photograph—but the category and the platform made him assume it meant something else. That’s the gap you live in when you shop online. You trust the system instead of reading the fine print. You assume the categories mean what they used to mean. Most of the time the system works. Sometimes you get the picture instead of the thing. His son got something else for Christmas. Peter Clatworthy got a very expensive photograph and maybe a lesson about reading what you’re actually paying for. Thursday, 5 December 2013. VapeCube: A vaping lounge in the US turned old GameCubes into water pipes and started calling them VapeCubes. There’s a logic to it, actually. The GameCube’s been dead for twenty years—just garbage hardware collecting dust in thrift stores and garage corners. So someone figured, why not hollow one out and make it useful again? No romance about it, no preservation instinct. Just repurposing. The console becomes a prop becomes functional becomes something else. It’s stupid and clever at the same time, which is probably the only reason anyone actually did it. Wednesday, 4 December 2013. The Video Crashed: Lorde just showed up one day and changed what pop music sounded like. When the “Team” video hit, the servers crashed trying to handle the traffic—and the funny thing is that felt right somehow. She was already everywhere by then, this teenager from New Zealand who’d figured out something most artists spend their whole career trying to understand: how to be completely herself without apology or compromise. Her music had this austere quality, all careful restraint and precision. Minimal production, her voice doing exactly what it needed to and nothing more. You could hear the thought in every choice, the refusal to add anything just because it was expected. “Royals” was the breakthrough, the one that hit the mainstream, but the depth was in the album tracks—songs about the specific texture of being young and watched, about emptiness and desire and the way wealth looked from the outside. What got to me was that she never performed modesty about her own talent. She knew what she’d made, and she stood by it. No hedging, no deflection, no trying to soften things to seem more likeable. In pop music, that’s almost unheard of—especially for someone that young. You usually see artists that age either crumble under the pressure of sudden fame or get swallowed up by what the industry wants them to be. There was something cold about the whole moment, cold in a way that felt true. Not distant or unfriendly, just clear-eyed about what she was making and who she was. The crash, the hype, the think pieces that would follow—none of it seemed to touch her, or if it did, she wasn’t interested in showing it. Just: here’s what I made, take it or don’t. Wednesday, 4 December 2013. That California Light: The weather hit different the second you landed. Back home they were bracing for some storm that would knock everything out for a day. Here it was just sun and clear sky. Mercedes had arranged for a group of us to visit their new research headquarters in Silicon Valley, wedged between Google and Apple’s compounds. Inside was the AMG Vision Gran Turismo, a concept car headed into the next Gran Turismo game. That was the reason we were there, though no one said it explicitly. I went with Mathias Winks, Don Dahlmann, and Robert Basich—bloggers who were always up for a good story and decent weather. The photographer crew from Hypebeast and NOTCOT were already there, everyone shooting the same car from slightly different angles, looking for an image no one else had captured. Kazunori Yamauchi showed up—the guy behind Gran Turismo. We talked for a bit. He told me he’d loved concept cars as a kid, the way they promised some future that felt real. Still did. That’s the thing about Yamauchi: he means what he says. He talked about design the way someone talks about a problem they’ve spent thirty years on: proportions, the balance between elegance and aggression, whether every line reads right. In the game, that all has to work. The shape, the movement, the camera framing the car in space. Real, even when it’s imaginary. The car was a nice piece of design work. You could see both directions in it at once—past and future, elegant and fast, classical and modern. That balance was what interested him. Finding something that lived in multiple registers. It’s in the game now. On PlayStation 3. You can drive it, crash it, race it. In the physical world it still sits in that building somewhere, proving a point about what’s possible. The weather is what stayed with me. The hummus too—this pale creamy hummus everywhere in California that I’ve never found in Berlin. That’s what I think about now when it’s cold. The sun was nice. The car was worth seeing. But it’s the hummus I actually miss. Wednesday, 4 December 2013. Alejandra Guilmant: Kate Moss is in the new Playboy, everyone’s losing their mind, which okay, I get it. But the real find is deeper in the magazine—Alejandra Guilmant. I have absolutely no idea who she is, where she’s from, how old she is, nothing. I’m just looking at David Bellemere’s photographs and something’s got me hooked enough that I’m going to spend today trying to assemble whatever the internet has on her, which is probably almost nothing. The photographs deserve a handshake from Bellemere. Next time I see him I’ll definitely make sure to—which is never. Wednesday, 4 December 2013. Gentrification: Harry G—Bavarian comedian who just says obvious things out loud—was talking about gentrification. Double-edged sword, he called it. He’s right. I’ve watched it happen to places I knew. Neighborhoods improve, rents climb, old character drains out. Everyone wants you to pick a team, but it doesn’t work like that. The dive bar was genuinely great. The coffee shop that replaced it is fine. Both are true. It’s everywhere—Berlin, Munich, my city. You mourn and move. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. Melon Pan Wins: Somewhere over Switzerland, a guy in skydiving gear is falling through the air with nothing but his beloved manga body pillow. That’s Melon pan—Swiss, completely shameless, and apparently the world’s greatest otaku if you ask the Japanese internet. His whole thing is aggressively stupid. He’ll film himself licking a terrible Miku Hatsune sex doll with all the pride of someone tasting a five-star meal. He throws himself out of planes with his waifus. He lives his anime fantasies at maximum volume and maximum commitment, and the internet watches. The Japanese comments range from “This guy’s a total pervert” to “He’s definitely having more fun than we are” to just “What the actual fuck?” Which is honestly the universal response to anything truly good online. You can’t explain it. You can’t fit it into a category. It just is. What gets me about Melon pan is the purity of it. He’s not trying to build a brand or monetize his weirdness or become an influencer. He’s just a guy in Switzerland living out fantasies that most people would keep in their heads, and he’s filming it, and he doesn’t give a shit who sees it. There’s something beautiful about that kind of shamelessness—the refusal to apologize for being exactly as strange as you want to be. The internet needs people like this. Not because his content is well-made or clever, but because he’s proof you can be as weird as you want and somewhere there’s a community that gets it. Some Japanese otaku who sees this Swiss guy plummeting through the sky with a manga pillow and thinks, “Yeah. That one. That’s the greatest among us.” Maybe they’re right. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. The Elephant’s Garden: Felix Colgrave made this video called “The Elephant’s Garden,” and you’d need to be on absolutely everything just to survive watching it. Bath salts and MDMA and glitter mixed with hashish and desomorphine and absinthe, throw in some cocaine and fizzy powder and whatever else exists, and only then might you be approaching the right headspace to process what’s actually on screen. I watched it more or less sober and all that stuck with me are fragments. Dancing flowers. Blood cells fleeing. Trees that seemed pleased about it. Bushes getting stomped flat. A god swallowing birds. An elephant grinning like it knew something I didn’t. Everything else just disappeared. The whole thing seems to erase itself from memory the second it ends. I can’t tell if that’s by design or if the video just breaks something in you that keeps the details from sticking. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. Status: Nate Hill’s hobby is wearing naked women as scarves. He photographs it. Suit, professional lighting, Instagram. His reasoning: it demonstrates his status and power. That’s his actual explanation. I don’t have commentary. It exists. He does it. The internet is a place where you can commit to the weirdest specific idea and just run with it until it becomes your identity, until you’re known for the thing, until it’s true. Nate Hill wears women. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. That Matters: Just finished watching Justin Bieber’s “That Matters” and I can’t tell if I’m watching a music video or a checklist. Shirtless guy, hand in his crotch, stars and sky and you’re the only thing that matters. It’s so completely built from clichés that I started wondering if maybe it’s supposed to be funny and I’m missing something. The song is for fourteen-year-olds discovering sex. Kids fumbling with each other, no idea what good music sounds like when there’s actual desire involved. And the video hits every single beat—the topless model, the gold chains, the light bulbs, nothing resembling an actual idea. It’s designed not to challenge anyone, not to make anyone uncomfortable, not to make anyone think about anything. And it works. His audience gets exactly what they want, and they want exactly this. But watching him make the same video again, repeat the same sexuality, recycle the same empty gestures—it starts to feel less like a creative choice and more like he’s just going through it. The market doesn’t demand anything more. The music stopped being music a while back and now it’s just something playing in the background while you do something else. Keep breathing, Justin. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. Japan’s Scariest Tire Ad: Night on an empty road, snowing. The kind of conditions where winter tires matter. Then a white figure appears on the asphalt. Just standing there. That was the whole pitch from Autoway, a tire dealer from Fukuoka—a Japanese commercial that genuinely unsettled me. And it’s brilliant because the horror clicks immediately. You’re driving toward something you can’t stop for, and without the right tires, you’re not stopping. Most tire ads are technical, all tread depth and grip numbers. This one works because it taps into something actual: that moment on ice when the road stops listening to you. The ghost is almost beside the point. The real horror is powerlessness. Japan does this sometimes—uses strangeness and dread to make something stick. You remember it. You remember their tires. So I guess it works. Tuesday, 3 December 2013. Toaster Stephen: 4chan was always the internet’s sewer, and if there was a lower way to get attention, someone would try it. So when a 20-year-old named Stephen decided to burn himself to death on a livestream in front of a few hundred people, it felt less like a shock and more like the logical end of a certain trajectory. This was 2012, on Chateen—a small streaming platform. He logged in as LOLDoge, downed vodka and pills, set his dorm room on fire, and posted about it while the smoke got thicker. The chat filled up fast. Two hundred people watching in real time, dropping emoji, trying to figure out if this was real or just the best bit ever. The firefighters showed up and pulled him out of the wreckage. Nobody was ever completely sure who he was or where it happened—University of Guelph in Canada, maybe Pittsburgh, maybe nowhere at all. The story took on that murky quality that internet stories get when they pass through enough hands. What stuck was the name: Toaster Stephen. The guy who actually meant it. The internet had already made the space for this—turned self-destruction into the logical extension of the joke, made hurting yourself in public the final proof that you’re not kidding around. Stephen just took it the extra step. He made the bit real. Monday, 2 December 2013. Boiler Room: A basement near Friedrichshain, 3 AM, the bass running through my chest. I understood for maybe five minutes why people romanticize Berlin nightlife. Then the DJ switched tracks, the moment fractured, and I was just another person in a crowd again, sweating, half-deaf. The Boiler Room footage from San Soda’s set is designed to make you feel permanently locked out. Everything aligned—the energy, the sound, the crowd—the kind of night you’re supposed to imagine when you think of these places. That’s what sells the myth. Most of what actually happens in these rooms is waiting. The music is sometimes incredible, sometimes just there. People film it or ignore it or both. Every twenty minutes something shifts and everyone syncs up briefly, then it’s gone. You stand around thinking about leaving. You don’t. The original post was tabloid fantasy: wild youth, drugs, sex, total abandon. That’s the story people tell themselves about Berlin nightlife. It’s almost entirely disconnected from what’s actually happening. There’s no depravity. It’s just people and music and the recurring hope that the next hour will be the one. That’s the real hook, not the danger. The false promise that if you stay, if you go back, if you find the right room, you’ll find that moment again. You probably won’t. You’ll go next week anyway. Monday, 2 December 2013. Coffin Erotica: A Polish casket manufacturer called Lindner has been selling erotic calendars for five years. Twelve women, scantily clad, arranged on wooden boxes. That’s it. Someone decided to make this, and apparently someone else decided to buy it. The business logic is almost reasonable if you don’t think too hard. There’s clearly a market. Lindner identified it. Someone in that office probably proposed exactly this—”What if we added models to the calendar?”—and the idea either got enthusiastic agreement or just didn’t get shot down hard enough. Either way, production happened. Distribution happened. The calendar exists. What stops me is the specificity. Not erotic calendars in general, which you can find anywhere. Not coffins. This exact combination. Someone wanted it specifically like this, badly enough that a casket company paid attention and acted. The machinery of commerce grinding just for that. Now I’m thinking about what other calendars exist that I don’t know about. What other specific desires are quietly generating revenue somewhere in the catalog. It’s a little terrifying, honestly. Monday, 2 December 2013. The Threshold: Germany’s grand coalition announced a victory: cosmetic surgery for minors is banned without medical justification. CDU and SPD shaking hands over finally protecting teenagers from false beauty standards. You’d think they’d cured something. About ten percent of cosmetic procedures in Germany happen to under-twenties, so someone decided legislation was the fix. The rule’s fairly specific. Medical justification exists if you have documented psychological distress from your appearance—actual harm, not just discomfort. Birth defects and burn scars obviously qualify. Wanting your body different? Wanting to be modified? That’s not medical. Not by their definition. Jens Spahn from the CDU explained it to the press: protect youth from beauty obsession. Kids are still developing. Major surgery has lasting consequences. Breast augmentation as a Christmas gift for a fifteen-year-old is completely unacceptable. The logic makes sense. But the actual effect is bleak. Before the ban, your parents could agree to surgery if they wanted. Now they can’t, unless you’re documented as psychologically harmed by your appearance. You need to prove to doctors that your body dysphoria meets the medical threshold. You need to hurt enough that the system takes it seriously. Which means nothing actually changed. Kids still want to modify their bodies. Kids still feel wrong in themselves. The only difference is now you need to be bullied enough, questioned enough, analyzed enough, that the state finally agrees you have a real problem. The policy didn’t remove the pressure. It just set a higher bar for proof before you’re allowed to do anything about it. Monday, 2 December 2013. Germany’s PS4 Launch: The PlayStation 4 hit Germany on Friday and it was complete chaos. After six years—six fucking years of waiting while everyone else played—people could finally walk into a store and buy one. Of course they lost their minds. Media Markt and Saturn turned into absolute madhouses. The kind of retail apocalypse you see in videos, except this was happening everywhere at once. Our American friends were already cracking jokes about the German launch disaster. They didn’t understand the pressure that had been building. Six years of imports, of workarounds, of watching other countries get theirs, and then finally it’s just there on Friday afternoon. What got me was the sheer absurdity of it. After six years, everyone had completely lost it—treating a console like it was the last one on earth, frenzied crowds, shelves clearing instantly. There was something darkly comic about watching an entire country lose their mind at once. The desperation made sense, but the chaos was just too much. Monday, 2 December 2013. Rebecca Hates Friday: Rebecca Black’s “Friday” is one of those songs that happened to the internet like a meteor. She was 13. The auto-tune was thick as a wall. The lyrics read like someone had described the concept of “a day of the week” to an alien who then tried to write a pop song based on that description alone. Within a week, everyone had an opinion, and the opinion was: this is the worst thing ever. Two and a half years later, Rebecca confirmed what you’d expect. She hated it. Can’t blame her. Being the butt of a global joke at 13 is a particular kind of torture, and “Friday” was so thoroughly mocked that it seemed impossible for her to feel anything but revulsion toward her own voice. But somewhere in the middle of all that contempt, something shifted. The song didn’t get better—it stayed exactly as ridiculous and overdone as it was on day one. Except people started quoting it differently. It became this weird shorthand for joy, chaos, the absurdity of the internet. An anthem, basically. The kind of song you’d never admit you liked, except that everyone did anyway. I think it’s because “Friday” was incapable of pretense. It didn’t try to be cool or calculated. It just was what it was—overdone, earnest, kind of dumb—and in a world of engineered pop songs that go through seventeen rounds of focus groups, there’s something almost refreshing about that kind of innocent failure. Most terrible songs aspire to be better. “Friday” just existed, unaware that it would become the most famous mistake on YouTube. Rebecca probably still hates it. But the song escaped her somehow. It’s not hers anymore—it’s everyone’s. That’s not a compliment exactly, but it’s not an insult either. Monday, 2 December 2013. Pokémon Tales: I can’t shake Pokémon no matter what’s going on in my life. You think you grow out of it, move on to cooler things, but that feeling from showing off your Level-100 Charizard at school—that credibility, that stupid pride—never actually disappears. You just stop mentioning it. In Japan, Pokémon still feels genuinely huge. Designer Shinzi Katohei released a product line called Pokémon Tales—bags, keychains, books, pencil cases, all with these Pokémon rendered in a soft illustration style that somehow manages to be cuter than the official designs. The work is clean, intentional, made by someone who clearly understands what they’re drawing. There’s something disarming about how well-designed it is. It doesn’t feel like merchandise the way most Pokémon stuff does. It feels like actual design—considered materials, good color sense, shapes that work. The kind of thing you could pull out without feeling like you need to explain yourself. I’m probably going to buy some of it anyway. The design is just too solid to resist. Sunday, 1 December 2013. Pissing On Power: There’s something both brilliant and hollow about Femen’s decision to literally piss on Yanukovych’s portrait outside the Ukrainian embassy in Paris. While over 100,000 people were back home getting tear-gassed in the streets for refusing to accept the status quo, here was a feminist activist group finding its own language: crude, defiant, impossible to ignore. The Euromaidan protests were real. The violence was real. Yanukovych refusing to sign the EU agreement wasn’t abstract—it meant people bleeding on snow, getting arrested, watching their country turn inward. But Femen’s tactic wasn’t about that specific political question. It was about shock, about forcing the world to look at something primal and ugly. You can’t ignore someone desecrating a president’s image. You can’t unsee it. I get the impulse. There’s honesty in crude protest that clean marches can’t touch. It says: you don’t deserve respect. You don’t deserve dignity in how we respond to you. Femen knew that image would spread, would disgust people, would make the news when a thousand respectful petitions wouldn’t. Shock works. It travels. But shock is also the end of the story, not the beginning. You piss on the dictator’s portrait and then what. The camera moves on. Yanukovych didn’t care. His government didn’t care. The only people who felt something were the ones already watching, already angry, already there. The undecided person scrolling through news didn’t think “the EU agreement matters,” they thought “these women are crazy.” Which maybe was the point. Hard to say. What Femen understood was that visibility is a weapon, and sometimes you have to be willing to look ridiculous to wield it. There’s courage in that—taking your body and your refusal to be polite and using it as a tool. In a world that wants women to be palatable and quiet, they chose to be impossible. Sunday, 1 December 2013. Karen Gillan Forever: Patrick Ballesteros drew this image of Doctor Who characters playing hide and seek with a Weeping Angel, which is funny if you know the show—that game normally ends with everyone dead or displaced in time or whatever horror the Weeping Angels have planned. But in the Tardis, locked away from the real world, it’s just silly fun. I’d just started season six when I ran across this, and I was beginning to understand why everyone cared so much about the show. It shouldn’t work. The writing is uneven, the effects are cheap, the tone shifts wildly from horror to comedy to genuine emotion. But you stop noticing those things pretty quickly because you’re too invested in the characters. Amy Pond is the core of it. Karen Gillan plays her with this casual confidence and irreverence—she’s not starstruck by the Doctor, just genuinely interested. She questions him, she jokes, she’s got her own life. That’s not typical for companion characters. Usually they’re just there to marvel and get rescued. Amy does plenty of rescuing. Anyway, Karen Gillan forever. Sunday, 1 December 2013. Emily Ratajkowski: I saw those Kate Upton beach photos making the rounds and they just didn’t register. Hollow. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to feel looking at them. Then Tony Duran’s shoot with Emily Ratajkowski hit and it was a completely different thing. There’s a confidence in how he photographed her—the angles, her body positioned without apology, her presence sharp. She looks like she knew exactly what was happening and didn’t care if anyone thought it was too much. There’s something about muscularity in women that doesn’t get foregrounded in photography like this. It’s either absent or it’s a punchline. But Duran just lets it be what it is—strong, centered, unapologetic. That probably made the difference for me. It’s not about nudity. It’s about vision and honesty. Duran saw something in Emily that felt real in a way I couldn’t articulate about the Upton shots. The presence, the refusal to apologize for taking up space. And yeah, that probably appeals specifically to people who actually want to look at bodies like this, not just breasts as a footnote. I’m not going to pretend this is about anything other than visual desire. But there’s a difference between being shown what you’re supposed to want and actually wanting something. There’s no hedging here. Duran didn’t soften anything. He let it exist as is. That’s what makes you want to look. Friday, 29 November 2013. Sketches for Skeletons: Walked into a store and there were XXS clothes everywhere. Sizes so small they’re basically for nobody real. Then I realized: no, they’re for exactly one body. Someone sketched a specific figure—proportions set a certain way, narrow and angular, a certain height—and the dress was built to fit that sketch. That’s the customer. That theoretical ideal. Fashion runs on this. A designer picks one body, usually whatever model is current, and cuts everything to match those measurements. One sample size. One frame. Everything else is a compromise. Most clothes end up engineered for someone who barely exists. There’s a logic to it I understand. Build for one perfect body and the line works, the proportion feels right, the fabric falls correctly. Simpler than designing for variation. But it means almost everything sold was made for one very specific person—certain height, certain narrowness, certain bone structure. You’d have to be quite thin to actually fit most clothes the way they’re meant to be worn. The fashion industry isn’t ignorant of this. They know what they chose. They picked their ideal body years ago and held the line. The body that works on the runway, that makes the proportions land, that lets the fabric move how they want. Everything flows from there. And if most people end up feeling like the problem when clothes don’t fit, that’s not really an oversight. I think about it whenever I’m working on something. The frame I automatically sketch for. The proportions I assume without thinking. How fast an assumption hardens into rule. How hard it would be to work any other way. Friday, 29 November 2013. Burning Decks: Jonathan and Jason Bastian set their skateboards on fire and then rode them. Not a stunt where they jump off—actual tricks on flaming boards, carves and whatever else you do when you’re committed to the bit. Someone filmed it at 2000fps, which means you get the slow-motion ballet of flames against grip tape, the shimmer of heat, two guys keeping their balance while their boards actively burn. It’s stupid and pointless and completely absorbing. There’s no message here, no broader point. Just: here’s something that shouldn’t work, and it does, slowed down so you can watch every frame. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And somehow that’s enough. Friday, 29 November 2013. The Landfill: Seven thousand five hundred bitcoins. Bought for a few dollars in 2009. Stored on a hard drive in 2013 and tossed into a Welsh landfill because James Howells needed the space. Worth nearly five million euros today. The part that kills him is that he didn’t know they’d be worth anything. Bitcoin wasn’t on anyone’s radar then—it was Silk Road money, money for people in the deepest forums, incomprehensible to the rest of us. He bought some as an experiment or a joke or whatever people did with Bitcoin in 2009, threw them on a drive, and forgot about them. Then years later he started hearing the stories. Bitcoin was exploding. People were getting rich. And he remembered. Now there’s a literal treasure hunt at that landfill, people actually digging through garbage trying to find this one hard drive. Probably impossible. Probably already destroyed. But he’s tried. There’s something absurd about it—this whole public spectacle around his worst decision, turning it into a kind of modern legend. The guy who threw away a fortune by accident. One afternoon of negligence and it defines him. You do something right—buy Bitcoin when no one else believes in it—and one stupid careless moment erases the win. That’s what gets you about this story. It’s not really about Bitcoin or hard drives. It’s about how badly a single oversight can invert your life. Friday, 29 November 2013. Gabriel’s Memory: Gabriel made an ARD appearance pushing data retention—the idea that governments should collect everyone’s metadata indefinitely, just in case. To make it sound reasonable, he reached for Norway’s experience with the 2011 Breivik shooting. Seventy-seven people dead, mostly teenagers at a camp. He claimed that data retention helped them catch the killer fast. The problem is that Norway didn’t implement data retention until 2015. Breivik was already in prison, tried and convicted. Gabriel just inverted the timeline completely. Either he didn’t know what he was talking about, or he was comfortable lying about a mass shooting to make his point. Both are bleak. He wasn’t hedging or misremembering. He built a whole argument around a fact that was exactly backward, and he stated it with total certainty. What gets to me is how casually the lie landed. The fear was genuine. The tragedy was real. And the falsified precedent just stuck. People heard “data retention caught the murderer” and didn’t ask whether that was true. Why would they? He said it on television. It makes you paranoid about every other political argument forever. Which other cases are they getting backwards? Which studies have they never read? How much of what we hear is just confident misremembering, facts completely inverted but stated with the certainty of someone who doesn’t doubt themselves? Friday, 29 November 2013. Dead Whale Explodes: I’m scrolling through the usual garbage—cat videos, broken YouTube links, whatever—when this appears. A dead whale washed up on the Faroe Islands, so decomposed it barely looked like a whale anymore, just this massive bloated thing. Some guy decides he’s going to cut it open, see what’s inside. Probably thought he’d find some organs worth looking at. The whale had been sitting there for months, building pressure from its own decay, and the second his knife goes through the skin, the whole thing goes. Explodes. Everything comes out. There’s a video. I watched it. I shouldn’t have. Not eating for a while. Wednesday, 27 November 2013. The i-D Alphabet: VICE absorbed i-D the way things get absorbed now—without ceremony, and then they made a video about it. The smart move. You don’t announce a media consolidation with a press release. You make something that looks like an ad: models spelling the alphabet in clothes that are so perfectly put together you forget what a strange thing they’re actually doing. It’s probably the best way to announce you’ve acquired something. Keep the thing people care about—the styling, the photography, the eye—and just keep doing it, maybe better. The video itself is fine. It’s designed to prove VICE understands what made i-D worth buying. Real models instead of the usual catalog bodies. Clothes that don’t scream “trend”—they just look right. The whole thing has the opposite feeling of desperate. It’s not “we’re cool and bought something cool.” It’s just: here are good clothes on interesting people. Alphabet video. Done. What stuck with me was Miranda Kerr’s outfit, which is weird because it’s a four-second moment in a video where models are literally spelling letters. But that’s the thing about clothes that are actually designed instead of thrown together. You remember them. I don’t think there’s anything sexy about it in a lazy sense. It’s more like the clothes are thinking. Which is what i-D was always supposed to be good at—that level of attention. Even announcing its own collapse, they do the thing they know how to do. That’s maybe why VICE wanted it. I don’t know what happens next. Maybe i-D stays weird and good. Maybe it becomes one more content franchise. But right now they announced their own obsolescence by doing the thing they’ve always done well, which is make clothes look undeniable. That counts for something. Wednesday, 27 November 2013. So That’s How: Watched some instructional video about jerking off and realized I’d been doing it wrong for years. Not wrong like it didn’t feel good, but wrong like there’s an actual better way. Technique matters—different grips, angles, rhythm depending on what you’re working with. The whole thing was presented in crude cartoons that somehow made it less sexy and more useful, like a manual for assembling furniture except the furniture is your own cock. The absurdity of needing illustrated instructions for this stuck with me, but then again most people figure it out alone and end up doing whatever works, not what works best. Monday, 25 November 2013. Just Another Night: Can’t pretend I got into Icona Pop for the right reasons. Their new track “Just Another Night” is genuinely good—ballad-pop hybrid that works—but that’s not why I’m listening. Aino Jawoja is just one of those people. You look at her and the questions stop. Years ago when “I Love It” was everywhere, same thing. At least that song was real. Now they’re back with something solid, so I’ve got better justification. But the actual reason I’m listening hasn’t changed. Is it shallow? Yeah. Does it matter? No. Monday, 25 November 2013. Shibuya, Again: Shibuya at night. That’s the one that gets me. I’ve probably seen a hundred photos of that crossing—packed with bodies, neon spilling onto wet pavement, everyone moving through their own direction. Every time I see one, I think about standing in the middle of it on a Saturday, around 11 PM, just watching. Not trying to get anywhere. Just standing there while the crowd moved around me. I found myself looking at some travel photos from Japan the other day—Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, the usual places. They’re good shots. But what caught my attention wasn’t the temples or the landscapes. It was the smaller stuff: the platform of a train station at 6 AM, the inside of a convenience store, the light off a pachinko parlor. The texture of those places. The way they sit there without needing to impress anyone. I want to go back. Not because Japan is some vision of perfection, but for something harder to name. Standing in a crowd of a million people and feeling like the only one awake. Sitting in a basement bar with a drink that costs twelve dollars and a bartender who doesn’t make small talk. The smell of the stations. The weight of the air in summer. The way it all just exists, indifferent to whether you find it beautiful or not. Monday, 25 November 2013. Somewhere to Go: You think about it sometimes, right before sleep. Where would you actually go if it happened right now. Not the fantasy version—the real panicked version where you have maybe five minutes and you’re deciding between your apartment and the road. Most people don’t answer that question seriously. This house makes you not have to. Someone built a bunker that doubles as architecture. The kind of thing that reads as obsessive until you’re inside it, then reads as smart. Concrete walls thick enough to stop whatever’s trying to get in. Storage that keeps you fed for months. Air filtration that doesn’t feel like you’re choking in a tomb. The things you’d never think to include until you’re actually thinking about them. The real design problem isn’t the survival stuff. Any paranoid person with money can build a bunker. What’s harder is making it live like a house. Making the safe room not feel like a room you’re hiding in. Making the prepper mentality disappear when nothing’s actually happening and you just want to exist in a space without thinking about collapse every five seconds. This one doesn’t feel like an apology. It doesn’t hide what it is. The bunker is integrated—not bolted on or sunk into the ground like some paranoia joke. Just part of how the thing’s built. When there’s no catastrophe, you’re not living in a shelter. You’re living in a house that happens to make sense. I’m not sure what it says about us, that someone actually built this and someone else actually wanted it. That we’re all circling the same anxiety and someone finally just said it out loud in concrete. Maybe it’s just honest. Maybe we all know something’s off and it’s cleaner to plan for it than to pretend. Sunday, 24 November 2013. Seoul Surgery: I saw a photo from Seoul once, someone I’d been following online. She’d had the surgery—double eyelids, a reshaped nose—and posted the before-and-after like it was nothing. One in five women in that city get cosmetic procedures done. Not because they’re vain, but because the job market prices beauty in. Because dating requires meeting someone’s template. The pressure is absolute. People travel from all over Asia to get surgery in Seoul specifically. The doctors are artists. The whole apparatus is so polished and normal that you barely register what you’re watching—the endless before-and-afters, the clinics, the cheerful efficiency of normalizing something that used to be extreme. It’s just the thing you do now. What gets me is how it stops being a choice. It becomes the thing you have to do to stay competitive. The infrastructure makes it inevitable—smooth enough, visible enough, profitable enough that opting out feels like a risk. That’s what unsettles me more than the surgery itself. Not cruelty, just efficiency. Saturday, 23 November 2013. The Happy Loop: Pharrell’s “Happy” became one of those songs that’s everywhere before you really notice it happening. The 24-hour video was part of that: an endless loop of people dancing, smiling, repeating the same moment over and over until it starts to feel less like a song and more like a spell. I never watched all of it, but the premise appealed to me—this commitment to pure brightness for a full day. In November especially, when the light goes flat and everyone’s mood sinks with it, there’s something almost radical about that. The song itself is aggressively cheerful in a way that should be unbearable but somehow isn’t. Friday, 22 November 2013. Hobby Alcoholics: I need podcasts when I’m traveling. Driving, flying, sitting in airports waiting for the delayed connection—without something in my ears I’ll start talking to myself out loud, which is still somehow weird even in a city like Berlin where people are generally doing stranger things. Found one called Hobby Alcoholics, which is basically a bunch of German blogs getting together to discuss whatever’s supposedly destroying the blogosphere that particular week. This time it was the ethics of blogs making money from advertising. Riveting stuff. The kind of conversation that’s definitely going to change everything about the internet tomorrow. But I listened to the whole thing mostly because they spend the first hour talking about me. More specifically, they use that time to call me out for being incompetent at taking photographs in Tokyo. Which they’re right about. It’s strange listening to people criticize you and knowing they’re completely accurate and having zero ability to respond or defend yourself. You just sit there, quiet, with your cold coffee. It was funny though. Uncomfortable but funny. Anyway. Maybe 82 people know this podcast exists now instead of 81. Friday, 22 November 2013. Unconditionally: The video for Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally” is basically what happens when you throw a massive budget at someone’s breakup. She’s dancing in the snow in Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Wes Gordon—the kind of clothes that cost more than my first car, which is funny because the song is about heartbreak and wanting someone without conditions, without all the stuff. It’s weirdly sterile, this video—perfectly immaculate, every frame composed, every color locked in, and Perry moves through it like she’s choreographed her own devastation. The snow, the gold, the designer labels—it’s all designed to feel luxurious and untouchable, which is maybe exactly the point. You’re supposed to feel the distance between what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing. Perry has always been someone who understood that pop music could be a vehicle for excess, for oversized emotion and oversized production. “Unconditionally” is her trying to make heartbreak look like art direction, and honestly, it mostly works. The song underneath all of it is pretty straightforward—just a woman saying she loves someone no matter what—but the video wraps that in so much visual silk that you get two things at once: the raw confession and the armor she’s built around it. That’s the real thing happening here. Thursday, 21 November 2013. Casper: I’ve been hearing “Jambalaya” on repeat. It’s off Hinterland, and like everything Casper makes, it doesn’t waste time. The song moves you through something like a party, but the actual point is simple: about being singular as an artist, about what sets you apart. Casper’s always been like that. He’s one of those German rappers who never bothers with flash or performance. Just precise language, exact spacing, nothing rushed. When he says he’s the only one doing what he does, it doesn’t sound arrogant because it’s clearly true. He’s been making that case for years just through the work. I keep coming back to his albums because of that. There’s no attempt to impress you, no noise, just someone who knows what he’s doing and isn’t interested in explaining it. Thursday, 21 November 2013. San Cisco’s Awkward: San Cisco’s “Awkward” is the worst kind of earworm—the kind that doesn’t ask permission. The 2011 track buries itself in your skull with a stupidly effective hook and doesn’t leave. The song is about two people so awkward they can’t manage to text each other, and the video just hammers home that they’re both idiots. The melody is dumb on purpose, the lyrics don’t try to be clever, and the whole thing feels engineered to be inescapable. Which it is. I don’t remember clicking play, but I do remember the rest of the day—spending it humming “Do do do do do do do do do” without even meaning to. At first it was just background noise, that thing playing in the back of the head that won’t turn off. By evening I was quiet-singing it. By night I’d surrendered completely and was belting it in the shower. The thing about a song like this is that it doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. It just has to be constructed right, and then it spreads like something contagious. Once it gets in, it stays in. And once other people click through, they carry it too. Now I’m the guy who somehow knows San Cisco’s “Awkward,” and I’m not even sure how to feel about that. Thursday, 21 November 2013. How Not to Completely Fuck This Up: Germany’s in full panic about teenagers sexting, which is hilarious because the public alarm just taught a bunch of kids who weren’t thinking about it that this is apparently something you can do. Congratulations, authorities. I know enough people who’ve done this, seen enough leaked pictures, heard enough stories, to know that nearly everyone completely botches it. Not in a moral sense—I mean technically incompetent. The photos are just bad. So I’ve spent enough time thinking about what would actually make them less bad. The main issue is that people look like they didn’t try. Celebrity nudes that leak are usually terrible—fluorescent bathroom lighting, worst possible angle, looks like they got surprised mid-shower. If you’re already committed to taking a naked picture of yourself, the bare minimum is to not look like a disaster. Shower. Find decent light. Not the bathroom mirror at 2am where you’re deathly pale, but something that actually works. Groom yourself. Use a real camera if you have one, but your phone works fine if you’re not shooting in the dark. But the bigger issue is the performing. Most bad nudes I’ve heard about have someone trying way too hard to look “sexy,” which just reads as unhinged. Weird angles, weird face, over-the-top posing. The only thing that reads as attractive is comfort, which means you have to actually feel comfortable. Stand there like you exist as a person. Let your face be in the frame. The whole point is that it’s you. Your background matters in a way that’s easy to ignore. A room full of dirty laundry, empty cans, your general disaster—it doesn’t matter how good your body looks if the background is screaming that you live like an animal. Find a clean corner. A clean bathroom works. It’s straightforward. The technical stuff barely matters. Use a real camera if you want; a pixelated dick pic is just sad. But your phone’s fine. Polaroid actually works if you want to pretend it’s art, which has a certain charm. How much to show is up to you. Start with whatever you’re comfortable with. The face changes everything. Not sure why exactly, but it does. Don’t Photoshop yourself. You’ll distort the background and it’ll be obvious. Either shoot in a way that hides what bothers you, or accept your body. Black and white works. Normal bodies are fine. Take a ton of photos. Find the angle where you don’t immediately regret everything, then delete all the others. Actually delete them—off your phone, your computer, your cloud backup, everywhere. Future you will be grateful. Once you’ve done it a few times and aren’t terrified, stop being so formal. Get weird with it. Props, strange locations, something that feels like you’re having fun instead of performing. Get a trusted friend to help if you have one. Here’s the thing though: if you send nudes, accept that they might not stay private. Angry ex, cloud syncing wrong, wrong group chat. You have to be okay with that possibility before you even take the picture. Not okay with your family seeing it, maybe, but okay with the fact that it exists somewhere beyond your control. And that’s fine. A naked body is just a body. Everyone has one. What actually matters is whether you feel good about it—whether you’re doing this because you actually want to, not because you’re desperate or trying to prove something. Everything else is just technical execution. Tuesday, 19 November 2013. The Kid at Penn Station: There’s a video of a kid dressed as Harry Potter at Penn Station, walking up to strangers and asking where Platform 9 3/4 is. Dead serious about it. And what happens is exactly what you’d want—people stop. They smile. They actually try to help. A woman at the ticket counter lights up. Someone remembers their kid reading the books. For a moment everyone’s just there with him. I get why these things work when they work. You’re moving through your day with headphones in, eyes down, carrying the weight of whatever started it. Then some kid in a striped scarf asks a sincere question and you remember being someone who cared about things that hard, where the small details mattered. What kills me is how real it is. The kid genuinely believes someone might know. The strangers genuinely want to help. There’s no angle, no performance. Just an honest question meeting actual kindness, and that breaks through everything else. I think about the things I used to care about that intensely—where you’d ask a stranger and actually believe they might know the answer. You lose that somewhere without noticing. But seeing it still alive in someone else, seeing people respond instead of walking past—that’s worth something. Tuesday, 19 November 2013. Broken on Purpose: You get your PS4 and it’s dead on arrival. Won’t boot. Won’t do anything. Just sits there, black and useless. Turns out you weren’t alone. Amazon filled with photos—hard drives dangling loose, cables fried, obviously deliberate gaps. People started connecting the dots. In the Yantai facility where Foxconn assembled them, students working under the guise of unpaid internships had apparently decided to fight back the only way they could. A quote made the rounds on forums from one of them: If Foxconn doesn’t treat us well, we don’t treat the PS4 well. The consoles barely turn on. Foxconn is the place where workers jump off the roof because they can’t take assembling one more phone. This is where your consumer goods come from. These kids—broke, exhausted, powerless—found a way to say no. They sabotaged consoles on the assembly line. Deliberately. Most of the defects traced back to their facility, their shifts. The pattern was there if you looked: missing connections, burnt cables, things that would overheat and brick themselves after the first update. Rage made technical. Someone getting paid almost nothing deciding to tax someone buying leisure on credit. I don’t know what happened after. Sony probably fixed it before the launch in Europe. Swapped suppliers, tightened checks, took a loss. The usual cycle. But for a moment your expensive new console arrived broken by choice, and it came from someone who had almost no power at all. Sunday, 17 November 2013. Kalen Hollomon’s Masterpiece: Kalen Hollomon draws dicks on white clothing. He takes it seriously—you can tell. This shirt is probably his peak work: “Bro’s Before Ho’s” in slightly crooked English, with illustrations flanking it that leave absolutely nothing to interpretation. The phrase is the kind of thing guys say in group chats when someone’s disappearing into a relationship. A crude loyalty oath. It’s not about disrespect to women—it’s about that very specific, unexamined bond between lifelong friends, the kind of friendship where you’ve known each other long enough that it feels stupid to have to justify why you’re hanging out instead of pursuing something romantic. The shirt gets that. What makes the design work is the commitment to the crude register. No trying to be clever or ironic. The lettering’s wonky, the drawings are straightforward, everything sits at exactly the same level of obvious crudeness. It doesn’t try to wink at you. Seeing these in photos from a few years back, it reads like a very specific artifact—not timeless, not entirely dated either. Just a shirt that knew what it was doing and didn’t apologize for it. Sunday, 17 November 2013. Shave Them Titties: I’ve done plenty of transgressive shit in virtual worlds that would never hold up in actual court. Shot old men off bicycles and danced on their bodies. Wiped out entire neighborhoods because I wanted to build a stupid reactor there instead. As a gay spaceship captain, I seduced extraterrestrials in my quarters decorated with dead fish. But this game? This is actually new for me. Some guy named Mr. Boonstra (what kind of name is that, and what kind of world do I live in?) programmed a game called “Shave Them Titties.” The premise is simple: there’s a pair of hanging breasts, and they’re hairier than your armpits get when you ignore personal hygiene through a whole winter. Your goal is to shave them. That’s it. I’m still not entirely sure what the point even is. Maybe it’s a practical simulation—training wheels for when you’ve got hair growing in places you don’t want it. Maybe it satisfies some fetish gap I didn’t know existed. Maybe there’s no point at all and that’s somehow the whole thing. Whatever. Games exist to be won, and I’ve played weirder games for less reason, so let’s get to it. Shave them titties. Sunday, 17 November 2013. The Blogging Pimp: A journalist named Nils Jacobsen—economics background, actual media credentials—wrote about me in some German media publication. Not a profile I’d asked for, just an analysis of what Amy&Pink was and how it’d managed to capture a moment that respectable media had completely missed. His argument was straightforward: the blog lived in the space between what teenagers actually wanted and what grown-up publications thought they should want. Everything was explicitly sexual, written by eighteen-year-olds for eighteen-year-olds, operating in a cultural moment where YouPorn and BuzzFeed were the actual authorities. Magazines and newspapers were irrelevant. The blog just provided what people craved, without dressing it up. Nils didn’t soften it. He called it trash. Limited writing. Calculated. (He’d quoted something I’d said about basically forgetting how to write properly, which was fair.) But he made this observation that stuck with me: despite all that—maybe because of it—the blog captured the actual moment more truthfully than anything respectable media was doing. Magazine editors scrambling to seem young were missing it. Critics were always catching up. This was just direct. Then he wrote that I was “the blogging pimp of the Miley Cyrus generation, constantly feeding fresh material to eighteen-year-olds—written by eighteen-year-olds themselves.” I’ve never met Nils. But reading that felt like recognition. Not flattery, exactly. The rarer thing: someone from outside seeing clearly what you’d made and naming it accurately, without trying to make it respectable or noble. He just called it what it was. I actually love when strangers write about you. It’s even better when they hand you a usable phrase. That one was so perfectly gross and specific I considered getting it printed on business cards. Which is exactly the kind of thing that should tell you something about my actual values versus whatever I might claim about them. Saturday, 16 November 2013. Karate Andi: I heard about Karate Andi before I ever saw him—just his name getting thrown around at the Wednesday rap nights in Neukölln. He’s the guy who supposedly runs that whole scene, or at least makes enough noise that people treat him like he does. The other Berlin neighborhoods all have their thing, their identity, but Neukölln’s got this specific meanness to it, and Andi’s its avatar. You spot him in the crowd with his crew, those hand signals he’s always making, that particular Berlin aggression that never quite becomes violence but you feel it anyway. He’s the kind of local character that makes a place worth caring about—not because he’s good or interesting in any respectable sense, but because he’s genuinely real in a way most people aren’t. Friday, 15 November 2013. Playing Dictator: Howard walks around Hong Kong dressed as Kim Jong-un. Full haircut, the scowl, all of it. He’s thirty-four and his real name isn’t something he advertises—he’s convinced the North Korean regime would prefer he didn’t exist. But the payoff’s too good: strangers stop him for photos, everyone laughs, he gets to be unmistakable for a moment. The danger’s real. He knows it. It’s not enough to stop him, though. The appeal of being a living joke, of being instantly recognizable as something impossible, outweighs whatever theoretical threat lives in the back of his head. You respect that. Most people let fear keep them small. Howard picked the joke instead. Friday, 15 November 2013. The Squat Ticket: Moscow put a squat machine in the subway for Olympic year: ten squats gets you a ticket. Stupid and perfect at the same time. The joke is it’s honest. You already know how this works: need money, you work; want something, you perform. Now they’re just asking you to do it literally. Squat for your commute. Run for your welfare. Do push-ups for a movie. Make your body the currency instead of pretending it’s something else. Most people saw it as a fun stunt. I saw it and immediately thought about the person with bad knees, or the person who’s already sore, or the person who just needed to get to work. The machine doesn’t care. It counts. It’s not evil, exactly. Just transparent. You already know what the deal is: pay with money or pay with effort. Nothing’s free. At least with the squat machine you can see it happening. I never found out how long they kept it running or if anyone actually used it. But I kept thinking about it—the image of someone on their way to work, sore and bitter, feeding themselves to a machine that demands physical proof before it lets you through. That’s the system, just made visible. Friday, 15 November 2013. The Wunderkiste: In November 2013, Microsoft opened pop-up studios in four German cities to launch the Xbox One. Celebrities were on hand. The pitch was simple: one machine would transform your living room, with Kinect always watching, games and TV finally unified. It was the last time a console launch felt like a cultural moment instead of a product rollout. The always-on Kinect became a privacy disaster. The digital-only requirement got reversed. The living room transformation never happened. Microsoft spent years undoing what they sold in November 2013. But there’s something in that moment I still think about—the confidence that if you promise hard enough and surround it with the right people, the future will cooperate. It won’t. But the theater was beautiful. The Wunderkiste sitting there, promising to change everything. For a few weeks, people actually believed it. Thursday, 14 November 2013. Trapped in Google+: I went to reply to a YouTube comment and it asked for a Google+ account. I didn’t have one. Didn’t want one. There was no decline option. Google had decided Google+ was going to happen and YouTube was the lever. Sign up or your comments get posted under a name Google assigned you. It was the kind of plan that only gets approved when nobody in the room actually uses YouTube. Jawed Karim, who’d actually built YouTube, complained about it. Emma Blackery made a mocking song. Francis explained how the moderation fell apart completely—trolls could impersonate anyone while real users got shadowbanned. Everyone could see it was worse, not better. That’s when YouTube stopped feeling like something I was using and started feeling like something being done to me. The comments section had always been a mess, but it was a genuine mess. This felt processed, filtered, owned. I never signed up for Google+. I just stopped commenting on YouTube, like a lot of other people did. Thursday, 14 November 2013. Actually Stupid: I spent too much time on Vine. Everyone was making art—careful shots, ideas that would resonate, things that were supposed to matter. Logan Paul from Ohio just did stupid stuff instead and it was infinitely more interesting. Not cleverer. Not more ambitious. Just commitment to being absurd. A video of him doing something ridiculous and the complete faith that honesty about stupidity lands harder than trying. He was probably right about that. Someone compiled his videos and put them on YouTube. I watched longer than I’d want to admit. Anyone who says they didn’t laugh is lying or has genuinely lost their sense of humor, which feels like an actual loss. Vine’s been gone for years now. YouTube Shorts and TikTok inherited the format but they’re longer and softer. When you have unlimited time you get precious. The whole power of Vine was the constraint—six seconds meant you couldn’t hide behind craft or cleverness. You either made something sharp or you made nothing. Thursday, 14 November 2013. Dolphins Are Perverts: I grew up on the Flipper version of dolphins—noble, intelligent, rescuing drowning sailors. The mythology. Then I watched this video and it just dismantles everything. Turns out dolphins do unspeakable things to decapitated fish. Not fucking them in any normal way. Just sexual violence against dead parts, apparently routine behavior. The whole image collapses the moment you know about it. I felt stupid once buying a crooked cucumber. These animals are committing acts that would get you on some kind of registry. Thursday, 14 November 2013. Hard Out Here: When Lily Allen sings about forgetting your balls and growing tits, she’s not being ironic or defensive about it. She’s just saying it, matter-of-fact, like it’s obvious, all of it packaged in a hook that won’t leave your head. The video’s all half-naked dancers and Lily pushing boundaries that shouldn’t exist in the first place. That’s “Hard Out Here”—crude, sexual, aggressively feminist in a way that doesn’t require permission or apology. She’s been away long enough that this feels like a return, but really she’s just the same person—the one who gave us “Fuck You” and “Smile” when we needed someone to not care what anyone thought. What strikes me now is how rare this combination actually is: artists who are provocative, sure, and plenty who are feminist, but the ones who merge both without irony, who use sexuality in a way that doesn’t perform for men—those are uncommon. That’s always been Lily’s thing. I remember her from years ago in interviews where she’d say something shocking and the interviewer would freeze, trying to figure out if she was joking, and she’d just stare back with this look that made clear she wasn’t concerned with their confusion. That’s the through-line. She’s always been more interested in what amuses her than in reassuring anyone else. The album hasn’t dropped yet, but this single is enough to know she’s still here and still not apologizing. Thursday, 14 November 2013. Changed It Back: I renamed this dispatch and nobody cared. NEUE ELITE, I called it—serious, austere, a clean break. Lasted two weeks before the money ran out. Two articles a day, well-researched, actually good. But you can’t fund that on good intentions. I was burning through cash like I was throwing cocaine parties, except it was really just Thai food and porn subscriptions. So I changed it back to the old name, the one with history, and suddenly revenue appeared. Posts started flowing. Writers started pitching. The machine worked again. But the name still didn’t feel right. You know that 2am thing, sitting at your desk with whisky, where you realize something you’ve been defending is just… wrong? I got there. All the logic about seriousness and positioning and fresh starts—none of it matters against what actually works, which was what I’d been doing before. I found an old photo. Years distilled into one frame. All those people, all that energy, everything we’d built together before I decided to burn it down out of boredom or ambition or some feeling I can’t name now. I missed it. So here we are. The name is back. Everything is as it was. Whatever NEUE ELITE was—the serious attempt, the experiment—it’ll probably show up again someday as something else. But not as the main thing. Just a side project, if it shows up at all. Wednesday, 13 November 2013. Sweden’s Bechdel Reckoning: Swedish cinemas are labeling films with the Bechdel Test now—an official rating system. Two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than men. That’s the requirement. Lord of the Rings fails. Harry Potter fails. Star Wars fails. I’ve watched Lord of the Rings more times than I care to admit, and I never noticed. The film is compositionally perfect—the kind of thing you study to understand how images actually work. But female characters with any real presence? There’s almost nothing there. Now it’s impossible to unsee. The Bechdel Test came from a comic artist named Alison Bechdel back in the eighties. For years it was something you’d mention casually in conversations about media, a funny observation that went nowhere. Sweden made it official, which is either completely obvious or completely missing the point depending on who you ask. Pulp Fiction fails. Good Will Hunting fails. The Social Network fails. Films people genuinely love and watch repeatedly. There’s no ban—they still get released and shown. They just get marked now, and somehow that marking makes the absence visible in a way nothing else could. I’m skeptical it changes anything. Probably doesn’t. But there’s something about the visibility itself. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. He Filmed It: I watched a video I didn’t want to watch. Hassan Hammoud in Lebanon put his cat in the microwave. His friend Jallad filmed it, laughing while it happened. One minute. The cat got severe burns. He posted it online. Twitter did what Twitter does. Calls for arrest, posts about how animal abuse is where serial killers start, the whole reflexive machinery of moral outrage. Except Lebanon has no animal cruelty laws. So nothing happened to him. The cat suffered. The video went viral. The outrage died down. We all moved on. What I can’t stop thinking about is the casual filming. Not the cruelty itself—I know people are capable of anything. It’s that he thought this was worth documenting. That his friend laughing was funny enough to capture. That he had no sense at all that this was the kind of thing the world didn’t need to see. The confidence to commit casual torture and film it and expect people to find it at least a little bit amusing. The video made people angry for a day. The cat’s still alive, still burned, still remembering what happened inside that microwave. The two facts don’t balance out. Nothing we tweeted changed anything. Our outrage was just a noise we made at screens before moving on to the next horrible thing. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. The Better Ad: Someone’s been replacing McDonald’s and Burger King billboards in German cities with recipe posters. Spaghetti bolognese, a rice stir-fry—actual food you could make. The design matches the original ads so closely that the contrast works perfectly. I like that approach. It’s not a protest or a moral argument. Just someone who understands how advertising works and decided to use that against what it usually sells. Small, formal, effective. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. The Overworld: The first few seconds of Smooth McGroove’s a cappella version of the Overworld theme from A Link to the Past and I’m somewhere else entirely. Back in that cartridge, that overworld, the one that felt both infinite and intimate. McGroove does video game music this way—pure a cappella, layering his own voice until he’s a full arrangement. Street Fighter, Sonic, Mario Kart, whatever has a melody worth taking seriously. He’s got the look of a viking who actually turned out fine, which somehow tracks. But the Zelda one gets me because it’s specific. Summers I spent in that world, days before I understood you could even leave the starting area. Just the theme on loop, over and over. Hearing someone sing it now, no synth, no irony, just the melody straight—there’s no way to protect yourself from that. It just lands. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. Walking Dead Monopoly: There’s a Walking Dead Monopoly now, which is funny in the particular way that licensed board games always are. Someone convinced Hasbro that zombie-apocalypse survivors need a casual evening pastime, and they actually went and designed it. You move around in an armored bus. The prison is safe. You collect supply crates and weapons. The base premise is so absurd it wraps back around to charming. I stopped watching the TV show somewhere in the middle, but the universe has this gravitational pull anyway. Every corner of it—games, comics, merchandise—grinds through the same loop. Find shelter. Establish community. Watch it fall apart. Repeat until people stop watching. Ritual masquerading as survival. The thing about licensed board games is they live in this weird space between genuine product and generous thought. Someone had to actually sit down and design this thing. They had to figure out which properties mattered in a zombie economy, whether weapons should be currency, what the winning condition even looks like when you’re supposed to be surviving. It’s earnest capitalist creativity, which is somehow worse and better at the same time. I’d play it once, probably. At some gathering where everyone’s looking for something to do. We’d be mildly bored. But I’d get it. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. Indian Summer: Missing summer isn’t about the weather. It’s that zone where nothing matters and your only function is existing in one spot as long as possible—a drink, sun, a body, nothing else. Alyssa Arce, Jaclyn Swedberg, and Tiffany Toth’s “Indian Summer” photos get it right: no concept, no message, just that pure blank brightness that photographs nail better than real experience ever does. When winter arrives you’re supposed to accept it’s finished, but by January you’re scrolling back to pictures of women in bikinis with this kind of desperate ache that’s stopped being about horniness and turned into something closer to grief. Tuesday, 12 November 2013. Rehearsed Crazy: MTV still exists. They still throw these massive parties where two actual superstars and everyone else stand in a giant hall trying to prove they’re completely insane. On TV it’s polished and explosive. In real life it’s screaming fans, deafening noise, and you’re squinting at the stage trying to figure out who’s performing. Miley Cyrus showed up in what was technically a dress—basically two dead rappers positioned to keep her from getting arrested. Then she fucked some tiny guy on stage and smoked a joint because it’s Amsterdam and you’ve gotta be crazy, right? Robin Thicke grabbed whichever woman was nearest (Iggy Azalea). Katy Perry flew in, sang something, flew out. She could do that in someone’s living room. These award shows are all just choreographed craziness. People tell you it used to be better and different, but nobody actually remembers that anymore. Hipsters in fox suits. Half-naked men. Whoever Bruno Mars is. Same faces, same energy. I couldn’t tell you who won anything—probably whoever was standing closest to a camera. The only moment that actually worked was Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy, and I have no idea what that has to do with music or any of this. It didn’t matter then either. Monday, 11 November 2013. Nobody Wanted This: YouTube forced everyone into Google+ if you wanted to use the platform. You couldn’t comment, upload, do anything without a Google+ account. Google’s explanation was that it would improve discussion quality. What it really was: a Hail Mary pass from a company trying to prop up its dying social network by making it mandatory. The backlash was instant and massive. Everyone hated it. Emma Blackery wrote a song called “My Thoughts on Google+” that nailed the frustration so perfectly it went viral—a million views just from people recognizing themselves in it. What stuck with me wasn’t the complaint itself, which felt obvious. It was watching something this transparently stupid get defended by a corporation so out of touch with its own users that it actually thought it could force adoption through administrative will. Emma’s song worked because she didn’t argue. She just stated it plainly, and a million people recognized the truth in it. Monday, 11 November 2013. The Stöckchen: Back when the German blogosphere was maybe a dozen weird social misfits sitting in front of computers on Saturday nights instead of actually going out, there was this little tradition nobody remembers now. You’d get tagged in a “Stöckchen”—basically people asking you ten questions, you answer them, you come up with ten of your own, you tag ten other people. It sounds simple enough. Anna Frost threw one at me and I figured, why not? The honest answer to what blogging’s done for me: it’s introduced me to people I never would have met otherwise. People across the world, in cities I’ve ended up moving to, people who fundamentally changed how I think about things. Berlin, Tokyo, New York—blogging dragged me to all of them. More than that, though, it’s let me turn the one thing I actually want to do—sitting around watching anime and cartoons and complaining about it online—into something that pays the bills. I can’t imagine many people get to do that. I’m not going to pretend I’m not grateful. I can’t function without my MacBook Pro. If I could marry a piece of hardware, that’d be it. And yeah, I’m aware that says something depressing about my romantic prospects. Running a blog is like running one of those simulation games—SimCity, Civilization—except it’s real and people actually care. You pick your topics, you push them out into the world, you watch the numbers, you talk to readers, you make agencies want to throw money at you, you stay on top of the trends. It gets addictive because the game has actual stakes. Your life becomes the game in a way that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it. I used to dump everything into the internet. Who I slept with, how much I hated certain teachers, why some girl wouldn’t date me. That was back when this blog had different names—TOKYOPUNK, then ANIBOY, then MARCELTV. Privacy wasn’t a concept that existed. Somewhere around my late twenties I started keeping things back. The blog isn’t just me anymore either, so there’s other people involved. But I try to put myself into everything I write, even if it’s quiet about it. The sponsorship requests get genuinely insane. Couple hundred a day, and after a while you develop a sense for what’s actual money and what’s just someone hoping you’ll take pity on them. I’ve been pitched everything—wooden dildos, underwear for old people, guys who’d insult me in one sentence and try to get me to promote their hip-hop album in the next. It’s funny until it’s not. If I could build an app with unlimited resources and time, some days I’d want something that could answer every question—what’s the point of any of this, is there a god, why can’t I just have nice things without everything being complicated. Other days I’m just horny and want something completely useless that won’t help anyone. Both impulses are real. Both feel equally important at the time. I’m bad at keeping things consistent. I see something cool somewhere and I want to pull it into my own work immediately. German to English to German, crude one day and trying to be sophisticated the next, constant design changes. It drives readers away. People want consistency and I’m incapable of it. But those experiments are how you figure out what you actually like versus what you think you should like. The internet needs people in charge who actually understand it. Fair use laws, net neutrality protection, affordable access for everyone. And German bloggers especially need to stop tearing each other down out of spite and jealousy and realize they’re stronger as a unit. That’s not some motivational poster insight—it’s just how power works. I remember someone asking me what I’d wish for if I could only wish for other people. I said I’d want René to get his drinking under control. That’s still true. That’s the only wish that matters. Sunday, 10 November 2013. Japan’s Game Shows: The Japanese show “Poko x Tate” had a simple premise: a gay bar owner named Takuya would try to make porn star Sawai Ryo climax, despite Sawai Ryo actively resisting mentally. That’s the actual bet. Germany’s “Wetten, dass…” was about truck drivers identifying toothpaste by taste. Seventy-four varieties. This was television. The Japanese format understood something Germany forgot: game shows aren’t about demonstrating a skill. They’re about that moment when someone realizes what they’ve committed to—the sexual tension, the panic, the absurdity. That’s where the real entertainment lives. I don’t remember who won the Takuya bet. The outcome doesn’t matter. The point is that it was filmed. Saturday, 9 November 2013. The Wait For New Stars: Someone announced that December would bring a new Star Wars film, and the news landed with this weird weight I wasn’t expecting. After all the years since Return of the Jedi, the dead period where the only new material was books and toys and endless arguments about what should happen next, suddenly there was going to be actual film. JJ Abrams directing. Lawrence Kasdan on the script. John Williams doing the score. On paper it looked right. I remember the strange feeling of it—wanting to care, wanting to believe it could be good, but also knowing that nothing recaptures what those original films meant when you were young. The mythology had already happened. Whatever they made would have to exist in relation to that, not replace it. It was going to be a different thing entirely, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to want it. Friday, 8 November 2013. Not Her Face: A Chinese guy successfully sued his wife because their daughter was ugly. Genuinely went to court and won. The wife had spent over $100,000 on cosmetic surgery in South Korea before they met—complete transformation, new face, everything—and just never mentioned it. Showed up as his wife looking nothing like whatever she looked like before. Then they had a kid who looked like the genetic combination of two actual people. And instead of accepting that that’s how genetics works, he sued her for fraud. The court sided with him. What gets me is the logic. He apparently expected the surgical changes to genetically transfer. Like the kid would just inherit the nosejob. Which… that’s not how any of this works. But apparently it made sense to a Chinese court. This is what happens when cosmetic surgery becomes the baseline. In parts of Asia it’s so normalized that people just assume everyone’s done it or everyone will do it. Wider eyes, whiter skin, the full package. So when a woman shows up looking like her actual face, it reads as a betrayal. I’m still not sure which part is worse—that he sued his own daughter over her appearance, or that he won. Either way, that’s the future now. Friday, 8 November 2013. The Automatic Face: You watch someone take a selfie and the face changes—there’s the actual face, and then there’s the face that arrives when the camera comes out. The chin tilts, the eyes open wider, the mouth arranges itself into something that’s supposed to look effortless. It’s automatic now, this muscle memory for the performance. The thing about photos is they’re meant to hold a real moment, something spontaneous and good enough that you want to see it years later and feel something. But what actually happens is you pose for minutes until someone finally presses the button. There’s nothing spontaneous in there, nothing genuine. It’s just performance dressed up as capture. Nottingham Trent did a video showing what people actually look like when they’re posing, and it’s brutal—the distance between the face you think you’re making and what’s actually there. Everyone in the footage convinced they look natural, everyone objectively ridiculous in that specific way that comes from trying. It’s funny and depressing at the same time. The photos I still think about from years ago are never the posed ones. They’re the accidental shots, the moments where nobody was performing anything. Just someone caught in strange light, or a real moment that happened to get recorded. Those stay with you differently than anything you ever arranged. I don’t know if knowing how stupid you look is enough to stop doing it. Probably not. The camera comes up and something shifts automatically in your expression before you even notice. The habit’s too deep. Friday, 8 November 2013. Kate Upton Blue: Sports Illustrated could simplify their entire homepage to one button labeled ’Kate Upton’ and nobody would complain. In ’Swim Daily,’ they found the obvious content: her topless while someone paints her blue. That’s the whole thing. Friday, 8 November 2013. The Same Face: You put on your mother’s clothes and suddenly you’re seeing the future. Not metaphorical. Your face in her face. The same jaw, the same way you move your hands when you’re thinking. You’re already her, and time becomes something weird. Carra Sykes documented this feeling with a photo series called “Mother + Daughter.” She paired up friends with their mothers—side by side, sometimes wearing each other’s stuff, caught in the same expression, same bones. The resemblance is uncanny. You’re looking at the same person, twentyish years apart, like time is just a trick of the light. It hits harder than it should. You’re not becoming your mother in some abstract sense. You’re going to literally be her face. Your own kid will look at you the way you’re looking at her now, and they’ll understand for the first time that mortality isn’t some distant thing—it’s already written in your features. I have my mother’s exact hands. I’ve known this since I was twelve or so, watching mine do things I didn’t remember learning—the way she holds a coffee cup, the gesture she makes when she’s making a point. For years I found it unsettling, that inherited body memory. Now I just accept it. Strange to be occupied by the past, but there’s something about that too. Sykes’s images make the inheritance visible. They’re factual. You don’t die—you get passed on. Your face stays. Someone will wear it the way you wore your mother’s. Friday, 8 November 2013. She Figured It Out: Kenza launched her YouTube channel, which is really just the next box to check if you’ve already completely owned Swedish fashion blogging by 22. Magazine covers, television appearances, the kind of actual fame that most bloggers never get near. Now she’s extending it. Her blog is bilingual and somehow both useful and addictive—the kind of place that makes you feel like you’re inside something rather than consuming from the outside. She mobilizes fans the way someone who understands attention actually does it, and if I’m being honest, I would stalk her if I could, just to reverse-engineer how the mechanics work. She makes it look so clear. YouTube is just the logical expansion. She figured out the pattern once, proved it works, and now she’s applying it again. Not revolutionary. Just focus on the obvious thing while everyone else is still arguing about whether it matters. Most people see the pattern but never actually move on it. There’s something about Scandinavian culture that figured this out before Germany did. Or maybe it’s just that some people see the next step before anyone else. Kenza sees it. She moves. By the time anyone else realizes what happened, she’s already three steps ahead. Thursday, 7 November 2013. Tonight, Tonight: Kindan No Tasuketsu’s “Tonight, Tonight” is bright chaos. Pretty girls, weird artistic shots, a narrative that doesn’t land anywhere and clearly doesn’t care. And that’s completely right. A music video doesn’t owe you an ending or an explanation. It’s just color and movement around a song. There’s something about how this music gets made in Japan that feels different from elsewhere. It’s playful and careful at the same time. The song is the thing. The video is just mood and color around it, and that’s enough. Pretty girls if that’s what fits the frame. Weird moments if they work. No message underneath trying to be something bigger, just a track that’s fun to listen to. Kindan No Tasuketsu isn’t alone in this. There’s a whole universe of Japanese indie and alternative music made with the same approach—well-executed, totally at home with being exactly what it is. Not trying to be important or deep or anything other than that. The music’s good, and that’s the whole point. This isn’t just one band. Japanese indie and alternative music is full of artists doing this same thing—making music that sounds good and knows it, nothing else to prove. It’s a universe worth falling into. Thursday, 7 November 2013. Blue Steel: I need to apologize to every friend I’ve ever called a hipster for playing Game Boy Color or wearing a beaded bracelet. Because these two—Charlotte Free and Gryphon O’Shea—they’re the hipsters. The full thing. The complete nightmare. Charlotte’s a model who doesn’t care. Gryphon’s her half-brother, also mixed up in fashion or something like it. They made a video for Dazed & Confused—the magazine VICE owns—talking about their relationship, and I’ve never felt such pure rage in two minutes and thirteen seconds. Watching her trip about MySpace while she looks like roadkill, watching him in his butterfly shirt throw this Blue Steel look at the camera and ramble about the ’crazy sound’ while holding a plastic arcade guitar, watching this bored, deliberate nothing sell itself as art—I wanted to scream. I wanted to start a petition. I wanted this ironic triple-alternative waste of time to end, wanted them to actually care about something instead of just assembling a lifestyle from borrowed retro scraps and nothing. Maybe I’m just jealous. Maybe what got to me is that she can be with her half-brother and nobody says anything, and I’m sitting here furious at their freedom. Thursday, 7 November 2013. News in Dub: There’s always this moment in the evening where the news comes on and you just… don’t move. Too tired to find the remote. Too worn out to care what happened in the world. The newscaster goes through their cadence and somewhere by the third story about parliament or whatever, you’re half asleep. Some guy (Bay Ctoast?) figured out what was actually happening and just leaned into it. Took the news and delivered it like reggae—pure Shaggy vibes, dub and dancehall rhythms applied to the day’s catastrophes. Angela Merkel reduced to a vocal line in a dubstep remix. The whole apparatus that’s supposed to convince you something matters, just turned into background music. Which is kind of honest, actually. The news wants to feel urgent and important. And someone just decided, no, what if we just grooved about it instead? Made every headline sound like a riddim. The form just eats the content. Or maybe it just shows what the content always was—ambient noise pretending to be information. I never saw the full thing, just clips. But that was enough. The idea was funnier than any execution could be. Thursday, 7 November 2013. Pentatonix and Robots: I found this Pentatonix cover of a Daft Punk track somewhere and couldn’t stop watching. Not because it’s revolutionary or anything—it’s just a really well-made a cappella arrangement—but because hearing it without all the production is strange. Daft Punk made sense as these untouchable robot figures, all synthetic and processed, but strip that away and you’re left with melodies that are actually kind of simple, almost vulnerable when they’re just voices. What’s wild is that this is basically how people discover music now. Not radio or MTV or streaming playlists, but someone’s cover of someone else’s song on YouTube, done well enough that it reaches you. Pentatonix built a career on this—taking existing songs and redesigning them with nothing but stacked voices. It’s weirdly parallel to what producers do electronically, except it’s tactile, acoustic, human. The precision required is almost mechanical. Someone listened to a Daft Punk track—all separated, all designed to sound inhuman—and figured out how to translate that into five humans singing together. Each person has to know exactly where they sit, which notes they’re holding, when to drop in and out. It’s like solving a puzzle where the solution is people. I’m not sure the cover is better than the original, and I don’t really care. It’s just this thing that exists in a different context now, for different reasons. But it made me want to go back and listen to the real Daft Punk again, even though I’d mostly stopped thinking about them. Maybe that’s all a cover is supposed to do—make something you thought you were done with feel present again. Wednesday, 6 November 2013. The Lego Ring: You get a Lego ring as a romantic gift and have about two seconds to figure out if this person knows you or if they just think they do. That’s genuinely the whole thing. Whether it lands as sweet or stupid, clever or lazy—it doesn’t matter. All of that is secondary. Someone thought that was the right move, and now you know what they think you are. Wednesday, 6 November 2013. After We’re Gone: There’s something about a photograph of an empty apartment that hits differently than a painting or a film. Lori Nix builds miniature dioramas and photographs them with such precision that you forget they’re tiny. You’re looking at New York or Berlin or Tokyo with nobody in it—vines covering walls, books scattered on floors, a restaurant perfectly arranged but vacant. The series is called The City, and the photographs are vivid with color, all the objects we surround ourselves with, now just things. What gets me is that this isn’t the apocalypse fantasy we usually consume. No explosions, no survival narratives, no spectacle. Just the quiet moment after, when the stage is set but everyone’s gone. We’ve seen countless images of cities collapsing by now—it’s shorthand for our anxiety—but most are cinematic and dramatic. Nix’s work is smaller, sadder. These are places I might have walked through yesterday, and now they’re fossils. There’s an intimacy to the scale. She built these in her studio, all that care poured into rendering emptiness. It’s a kind of memorial to the spaces we move through without thinking, the ones that only matter when they’re stripped of people. When I look at these photographs, I feel something like what I imagine archaeologists feel—the strange beauty of the ordinary, preserved and silent. Wednesday, 6 November 2013. Léa Seydoux: There was a sex scene in Blue is the Warmest Color that I was supposed to take down from the blog. I kept watching it instead—kept coming back to it, in different moods, different times of day, with wine and candles in the bathroom. Not because the scene itself was anything special, but because of her. Because Léa Seydoux in that moment made something click. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. I’m not saying I’m in love with her, or that I have some chance with her, which I obviously don’t. What I mean is that watching her work clarified something about what I actually want from beauty and intelligence and presence. She doesn’t perform. She doesn’t care if she’s hot. She’ll take any role if it interests her, no matter how uncomfortable. She loves the work and doesn’t need to advertise it. There’s nothing calculated about her. Some photographs came out in V Magazine, shot by Nan Goldin. They told me the same thing. Not that she’s the most beautiful woman in the world—I mean, she might be, but that’s not the point. The point is the indifference. The sense that she’s lived in a way that doesn’t need anyone’s validation, that doesn’t register being looked at. So yes, I’m obsessed with her. But what I’m actually obsessed with is the proof that this kind of person exists. That you can be that careful with your work, that disinterested in the machinery of it all. Since I’ll never actually know her, I have these images instead. The performances. It’s not nothing. Wednesday, 6 November 2013. Ulaanbaatar: There are kids in Ulaanbaatar who are obsessed with skateboarding. I know this because someone sent me photos of them—young guys carving concrete, bent over their decks, fully committed to a culture that shouldn’t, by any logic, have reached them. Skateboarding is a weird thing. It started in California, got coded as rebellion and escape, and then spread through punk and hip-hop and video games and YouTube until it became this global language. But the path from Long Beach to Ulaanbaatar isn’t obvious. There’s no industry there, no sponsored shops, no existing infrastructure waiting for new arrivals. Yet here they are. A group called Uukhaiskateboarding is trying to build something real for them—decks, clothes, maybe an actual park. It’s not a new idea. Every skate culture started somewhere like this: kids with one board between them, rolling on whatever ledges and spots they could find. You need someone to notice. You need someone to care. What gets me is that these kids found skateboarding the same way teenagers everywhere do—through the invisible channels of image and attitude and music, the sense that something mattered enough to learn and risk looking stupid for. Skating has always been about kids making it themselves in places that didn’t plan for them. These kids in Mongolia are just doing what skateboarders have always done. I don’t know if a park actually gets built. I don’t know what happens next. But the fact that kids at the far edge of the world picked up boards and decided this was theirs—that already happened. Geography doesn’t change that. Wednesday, 6 November 2013. The Mountains Pull: The second Hobbit trailer dropped and I watched it probably five times in a row. Not because I needed to—I just kept coming back to it. There’s something about those mountains, that scale, the way everything is built to feel epic and inevitable. I was never the type to care about Lord of the Rings. Everyone else was doing the midnight premieres and reading the appendices and I remember thinking it all seemed exhausting—too much lore, too much self-seriousness, too much trying to matter. But somewhere between the first film and now, something shifted. It’s not that I suddenly care about the mythology or the intricate worldbuilding. It’s that I like this thing that exists—this enormous, expensive, carefully constructed world that someone built just to disappear into for a few hours. The family feeling comes from watching something that’s been designed to be overwhelming in the best way. It’s not trying to be cool or subtle. It’s just: here are mountains, here is a dragon, here is chaos and adventure and a scale that makes your life feel smaller in the way you need it to. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. That trailer gets it exactly right. It’s all spectacle and motion and promise. And yeah, it’s bombastic. That’s the point. Tuesday, 5 November 2013. Before We Teach Them Better: A five-year-old’s understanding of love is cleaner than ours. Show a kid a same-sex proposal and they think: if they love each other, that’s good. No confusion, no disgust, no sense of transgression. They haven’t been trained yet to rank different kinds of love. There’s a viral video of this—kids aged five to thirteen watching exactly that scene—and the whole point is supposed to be heartwarming: proof that kids are unprejudiced angels. But it’s sadder than that, watching something so obvious look like a revelation. In a few years, school and the internet will teach them which loves matter less than others. Tuesday, 5 November 2013. Aschenflug: Adel Tawil hasn’t really been part of the rap conversation the way Sido has, or Prinz Pi. Tawil operates in a softer space—pop-rap, accessible, emotional. Sido is Berlin institution. Prinz Pi is the one who actually thinks about what he’s saying. Three different corners of the same landscape, almost never overlapping. ’Aschenflug’ is them together anyway. Just three people doing what they know how to do. No grand statement about empowering youth or giving voice to anyone—that’s the promotional story, and it’s boring. What’s actually interesting is that it happened at all. German rap has always been fragmented, everyone in their own lane, probably always will be. But there’s something in three artists deciding to work together that makes the fragmentation feel less absolute. Whether the song actually matters is beside the point. Tuesday, 5 November 2013. Midair: Two planes collided over Wisconsin. Both caught fire. The scenario kills everyone on board. Except everyone on board was a professional skydiver, so when separation came—violent, unplanned, early—they just deployed their parachutes and floated down. Someone had cameras on their helmets. Multiple someones. So there’s footage of the whole thing: the impact, the breakup, people falling away from the fireball with their equipment. The kind of thing you’d expect to be the last known footage of those people. Instead it’s a viral video of people surviving the unsurvivable. Watching it doesn’t compute. You’re waiting for tragedy and instead you get people doing their job. They trained for emergencies, and this was an emergency, and they handled it. The fire isn’t metaphorical. The fall is real. The parachutes work. Everyone goes home. There’s something about watching someone’s job description save their life that stays with you. What. The. Fuck. Tuesday, 5 November 2013. The Penis Fireworks: Someone in Glasgow shot a giant glowing penis into the night sky. I don’t know how it happened or who signed off on it, but the videos hit and people reacted along their usual lines—some offended, some thrilled, most just amused by the sheer pointlessness. These are pure internet culture moments: absurdity for its own sake, no message underneath, no craft or irony protecting it. Someone spent money and effort to fire a dick skyward and that was the whole idea. Not a prank, not a statement, not trying to be anything other than what it is. There’s something honest about that. No subtext, no layers, no lesson waiting at the end. Just a fireworks penis over Glasgow and the satisfaction of watching people lose their minds over something completely stupid. Monday, 4 November 2013. Anti-Rape Underwear: There’s a company making underwear that’s hard to take off without knowing how it works. The idea is that if someone tries to assault you, they’ll waste time struggling with the mechanism instead of proceeding. It sounds like dark, clever design—someone’s answer to a problem that exists. I get the logic. Rape happens. It’s everywhere. Someone saw that and designed a product around it, and apparently people want to buy it. Both sensible and completely depressing at the same time. The thing is, I don’t think it actually stops anything. Someone determined enough will figure it out. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe it’s just friction, enough to make someone pause or give you time to fight back or run. Or maybe it’s just the feeling that you did something, that you have some control, even if it’s illusory. What gets me is that the women I know don’t find this absurd. They find it practical. I mentioned it to a friend once, not as a joke, but as something that actually exists, and she was genuinely interested. Not as some ironic chastity belt thing, but as something she’d actually wear. And I believe her. The threat is real enough that a product like this makes sense. You can design your way around a lot of problems. You can’t design your way around the fact that some people are predatory and everyone else has to engineer their lives around it. Monday, 4 November 2013. Chocolate Chips: America being the place where they fry everything and serve soft drinks in buckets is hardly breaking news. But I recently learned they’ve now come for the potato chip. Lay’s Wavy has a limited edition chocolate coating available at Target stores in the US—three dollars a bag, limited run, and I haven’t stopped thinking about them since I found out. There’s something weirdly appealing about the combination in a way that shouldn’t quite work. Salty and sweet is familiar enough, but chocolate-covered chips feels like a specific bet on excess that most snack companies wouldn’t make. Most chocolate snacks are too refined, too sweet. But a chocolate-covered crisp sits somewhere between actual food and pure indulgence—there’s texture there, a contrast that might actually be interesting. I’ve never had them. I’m not in a place where I can easily get them, and honestly, I’m not sure they’re worth hunting down. But there’s something in knowing they exist at all—that someone at a snack company decided this was worth making, and that people somewhere are actually buying a bag of chocolate-covered chips. It’s the kind of small, weird experiment you just want to witness once. Monday, 4 November 2013. That Scene in Blue: I watched that scene in Blue Is the Warmest Color—Adèle and Léa, just completely unguarded—and couldn’t quite shake it afterward. It’s four minutes of no editing tricks, no angles calculated for arousal. Just two people who clearly wanted each other, and a camera honest enough to stay there. I’ve never seen that in a movie. I definitely haven’t had anything like it in real life. Most sex is negotiated. Someone gets shy, or self-conscious, and the moment contracts. This didn’t. It looked shameless in a way that made everything I’ve experienced feel like practice by comparison—technically fine, never quite present. So I thought about the actresses after I left the theater. That’s unavoidable and stupid and fine. What stuck was a different question: how does a director access that kind of honesty, and what does it mean that I haven’t. Whether genuine shamelessness like that is even possible outside film. I’m worse off now than I was before watching it. You see real desire like that and then look at your own life, and you can’t unsee the gap. Monday, 4 November 2013. Ashley Smith: Ashley Smith. The gap-toothed thing is real, and yeah, it works. She’s got this distinctive look—those cheekbones, that hair—that just lands. She showed up in Purple Mag’s latest issue with Sandy Kim, and she looked good. Not much else to it, but then there were these red shoes she was wearing, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. That’s how these things go sometimes. Saturday, 2 November 2013. The Pandora Problem: Some people got depressed enough to consider suicide after Avatar, because Pandora seemed more worth living in than Earth. This is real. Cameron apparently took it as a sign. He made a documentary about climate change—Years of Living Dangerously, coming to Showtime, featuring Jessica Alba, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Matt Damon. The logic is there, sort of. If people can get suicidal over a fictional planet, maybe you can make them care about the real one by slapping famous faces on the problem. Make climate change feel like a story with stakes and recognizable characters. Make it as compelling as Pandora looked. People don’t respond to statistics. They respond to a face they recognize saying “this matters.” A graph doesn’t carry the same weight. Cameron seems to believe that if you can make global warming feel as urgent and beautiful as Pandora, some percentage of viewers will actually do something. Maybe he’s right. Probably not, though. Most people will watch, feel the appropriate emotions, feel good about themselves, and then go back to how things were. It’s like liking a post about something you care about and thinking you’ve helped. But maybe that one percent is worth it. Maybe that’s the wager. Saturday, 2 November 2013. Serrano’s Los Santos: You’re not supposed to play GTA V like a designer. The game demands chaos—you’re meant to be thoughtless, destructive, a cartoon psychopath. But Luis Serrano, a photographer from Spain, took his practice into Los Santos and decided to play it differently. He walks around with a camera, composing shots. The light, the scale, the geometry of the city—he’s documenting it like a real place. What got me is how it reframes the entire space. Serrano isn’t being clever or ironic. He’s just using his tools in a world built for something else. And suddenly Los Santos stops being a sandbox for violence and becomes a landscape. The game has no response to being observed instead of destroyed, so it just sits there, massive and indifferent. It makes you think about every game world differently. Red Dead as pure ecology and isolation. Every environment as something to move through and see rather than solve or conquer. Games train you into one relationship with space. Serrano’s photographs feel like proof that another mode is always there, even when nothing in the design invites it. Friday, 1 November 2013. Brain at Google: Google invited some of us over yesterday to show us stuff. I’m still not sure why—maybe they thought we needed convincing—but there we were, eating Halloween brain and drinking some kind of vegetable juice while someone from their team explained YouTube monetization and voice search. As if we didn’t already know the basics. Part of the evening I spent flying through a pixelated Tokyo on a virtual tour, or a demo, or something. I’m genuinely not sure what it was supposed to be. I ate actual brain—because Halloween—drank beer, drank more of the vegetable juice, and on the way out they handed me a little speaker and a notebook. No pen. You had to steal one. Daniel was clapping at some point. Peter kept making sounds. Paulchen was working his way through the food spread. The whole thing had that strange energy of a tech press event—people in casual poses explaining why their new thing is going to change everything—while you’re standing in the middle of Germany eating meat and drinking juice and trying not to think about whether any of this actually matters. They wanted to pitch Google+ to us, like it was the next big thing, like we’d all eventually get tired of Facebook and migrate over. Better privacy controls, supposedly. More community-focused. I came home with the speaker and forgot about it pretty quickly. Never opened a Google+ account. Probably never will. Friday, 1 November 2013. Nicki at Halloween: Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus apparently had the same stylist that Halloween. Miley went for one breast as the statement. Nicki went both - massive, pressed straight into the camera for Instagram. Was it supposed to be a costume? Dominatrix outfit? Doesn’t matter. The outfit was the boobs. Two enormous boobs. That’s all it was. Friday, 1 November 2013. Miley’s Outfit: She went from Disney clean to someone who’ll use basically any excuse to take her shirt off. Halloween, red carpet, random Tuesday. The breasts are infrastructure at this point—part of the visual language, the most honest thing in her whole public image. There’s something refreshing about how unbothered she is by it. Most performers spend their whole career trying to reach the place where they actually don’t care what anyone thinks. She got there in her twenties. The costume barely registers; it’s just framing for what’s actually happening, which is her being deliberately provocative without explanation or apology. Thursday, 31 October 2013. What The City Takes: Thirty Seconds to Mars made a video of people talking about Los Angeles. Nothing revolutionary as a concept, but what matters is they got genuine answers. Kanye and Selena and some others sit down and actually describe what the city does to you. Not the postcard version. The real accounting. LA fulfills dreams. That’s not exaggeration. It actually delivers the things you came for. But the cost is strange and personal and nobody can predict it in advance. The city doesn’t cheat you—it honors its end of the bargain. You get fame or money or recognition or whatever you wanted. And then you discover that having the thing you wanted is almost exactly as hollow as not having it. Almost. That’s the thing that works its way under your skin about Los Angeles. It’s not that it lies. It’s that it tells the truth and you still can’t live with it. Thursday, 31 October 2013. Why They Released It: Someone showed me a Loughborough University promo video and I still don’t understand why they released it. Loughborough’s a proper British university where smart people study and graduate into real lives. But they went ahead and made one of those promotional videos anyway—the kind everyone knows doesn’t work, that misfire constantly, yet people keep making them regardless. They made it. Then they released it. What I can’t get over is the moment someone had to watch it and decide it was done. Not just done—done enough to show the world. Thursday, 31 October 2013. Pink Helmet Posse: There’s a crew of six-year-old skateboarders in California. Pink Helmet Posse—Sierra Kerr, Relz Murphy, Bella Kenworthy. I came across video of them through some skateboarding magazine coverage, and what stuck was how they just roll. No hesitation. Four-meter ramps like it’s nothing. The magazine’s editor called them exceptional. Not exceptional for their age—just exceptional. He showed the video to his own daughters who skate because that’s what you do when you witness something fearless. You want people to see it. What strikes me is the lack of negotiation. Kids older than six have learned the internal conversation—risk, hesitation, fear. These kids skip that entirely. See the ramp, roll. Whether that’s innocence or something about growing up in a different world, I don’t know. But there’s something clean about the fearlessness. Wednesday, 30 October 2013. On Her Own: The first Walking Dead game managed something most zombie fiction can’t—it made you actually care. Lee and Clementine became real in a way that surprised me. You made choices that felt like they mattered, and in that small moment of agency, a video game transformed into something personal. I thought about those choices for weeks after I finished it. What made it work was the refusal to get clever. There were no elaborate set pieces, no boss fights, no mechanical flourishes designed to impress. Just two people in increasingly terrible situations, and the question of who you became in those moments. The writing was solid, the voice acting was understated, and somehow none of that formality got in the way of genuine feeling. Season Two is almost here, and this time Clementine is on her own. She was a kid in the first game, dependent on Lee for protection and guidance. Now she’s older, alone in a world that only got worse. The trailer doesn’t give much away, but you can feel that she’s harder now, sharper—the kind of hardness you develop when there’s no one else looking out for you. I’m genuinely curious to see where they take this. If they can keep that same focus on character and choice, on the small moments of human connection in a broken world, it could be something special. Clementine deserves a story worthy of what happened to her. I’m ready to find out if they know that too. Wednesday, 30 October 2013. Ask Anyway: There’s this moment where you’re sitting on your bed, scrolling, telling yourself you can’t talk to anyone because you’re too fat, too tired, too wrecked from sitting at a computer all day. As if appearance is the actual barrier. As if the problem is your body and not your nerve. Jason apparently made a video about this—about approaching women as an overweight guy, and it working because he had the confidence to actually try. And that’s the thing that keeps surprising me: it does work. Not because he’s secretly attractive, but because he showed up without the commentary running in his head about why he shouldn’t be there. The video was probably meant to be motivational, the kind of thing you watch seventeen times hoping it rewires you into someone who can just walk up to a girl and ask her out. Steffi from afternoon class, whoever she is. Someone you’ve been thinking about for years but never spoke to because you were too busy manufacturing reasons why it wouldn’t work. Here’s what the list at the end reveals—“works for skinny guys, muscular guys, short guys, tall guys…” The specificity is almost absurd. It’s saying the barrier isn’t body type. Never was. It’s the moment you decide to anyway, despite whatever narrative you’ve built around yourself. Despite the certainty that you’re disqualified. A fat guy, a thin guy, a tall guy—they all have different insecurities, different versions of “why not me.” The guy who finally talks to someone anyway is the one who doesn’t wait for those to resolve first. I don’t know if I’m convincing myself or if this is actually true. Probably both. Confidence sounds like such a stupid answer when you’re the one sitting there, but it’s the closest thing I’ve found to an actual answer. It’s not “be yourself” or any of that hollow stuff. It’s more like: accept that you’re nervous and do it anyway. Accept that you look like whatever you look like and ask anyway. The combination is less explosive than the self-help version makes it sound, but it’s also less impossible. The thing I think about is: how much time did I waste waiting to be different before I could try? How many years of Steffi sitting there, approachable, while I was manufacturing certainty that it would fail? I don’t even know if that’s regret or just information. Either way, it’s not going to happen while I’m thinking about it. Wednesday, 30 October 2013. The Last Jacket: I’m convinced the collapse is coming—doesn’t matter which flavor—so finding this jacket by Marie-Elsa Batteux Flahault felt less like novelty and more like finally someone understood. It’s built around what actually matters when the grid dies: pockets for food, water, a knife, tools, first aid. Camo exterior, hood, facemask, reflective gold foil for the radiation scenario. Inspired by the Prepper movement, those people who genuinely believe civilization’s ending and plan accordingly. There’s something almost peaceful about working through what you’d need. Not paranoia, though sure, there’s that. Just logic. Gear needs to work when stakes are real, needs to look right doing it. That’s all this is. It doesn’t look ridiculous. That’s what matters. Not neon, not screaming, just quiet, lean preparation. Camo, gold foil, serious pockets. Sexy in a paranoid way. It’s the uniform for someone who thinks they know what’s next, or has stopped asking. Where to buy it—that part’s harder to find than the jacket itself. The internet knows, if you know where to look before the solar flares, bioweapons, comet, or whatever finally arrives. Worth looking while the shops are still open. Wednesday, 30 October 2013. The Monster: Eminem was between eras, and Rihanna had mostly moved past the point where she needed to prove anything to anyone. But this collaboration made sense the moment you heard it—that heavy, minor-key production, the kind of beat that doesn’t announce itself but just sits in your chest and stays there. The song is exactly what its title suggests: a look at the darkness you carry around, the parts of yourself you can’t quite shake. Not metaphorical. Literal. Eminem’s verse is precise and ugly in the way he does best, laying out the accumulated damage without asking for sympathy. Rihanna comes in and her voice cuts through it—not redemptive, nothing like that, but steady. She’s not trying to save him or herself. She’s just there in the wreckage, naming it. “I hate these blissful memories, they make me sad.” That’s the whole thing in one line. What gets to me about this track is how little it tries. No big moment, no switch to a hook that lifts you up. It just stays in that dark space the entire time, and because it does, it actually means something. Most collaborations like this are designed to be anthems or statements. This one is just two people standing in a room acknowledging that some things don’t go away, and that’s okay. You don’t have to fix it. You just have to keep going. I’ve come back to this song more times than I expected to. Not because it’s uplifting. Because it’s honest. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. Still Wanting: Nothing in an advertisement is real. Not the skin, not the eyelashes, not the hair. And it doesn’t matter. The beauty industry runs on a simple model: make something impossible, make people want it desperately, profit forever. Girls in China break their legs to lengthen them. Men in Europe get liposuction because exercise takes too long. American parents buy their teenage daughters breast surgery like it’s a normal gift. The specifics change, but the structure stays the same. What gets me is how crude the mechanics are. Magazine covers, ads, posters—all built from such basic tricks they barely deserve the name. Lighting. Photoshop. Angles. Filters. I watched a video once that broke it down: how little actual work it takes to turn something ordinary into something that reads as human perfection. It’s not sophisticated. It’s not expensive. It’s just relentless, stacked up enough times that the fake becomes the standard and no one even notices the switch. Which would be funny if anyone cared that they’ve been deceived. But they don’t. The seams are visible now. Everyone can see the construction. Everyone wants it anyway. That’s the actual trick—not that the beauty industry is lying, but that the lie became transparent and it didn’t matter. You see the mechanism and you still want to become it. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. Before: Early Madonna photos—the actual candid stuff, not the magazine versions—basically explain everything. She’s young, confident, casual about being sexual in a way that wasn’t common then. No Photoshop, no concept. Just ease. That’s what everyone was obsessed with. Not the music, not the concept, just her being comfortable in her body while everyone else was still pretending to be shocked by bodies. That was novel. By now it’s different. She’s still beautiful, still obsessed with staying tight, still performing. But the effort shows. You can feel the maintenance. It’s not hot anymore—it’s sad. I think that’s the thing about watching someone age in public for decades. The gap isn’t the aging itself. It’s the refusal to let go of what you were. Though I’m not going to pretend those early photos aren’t worth looking at. They’re the real thing, before all the management and packaging kicked in. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. TKO: The “TKO” video is just Justin Timberlake getting dragged across the desert by a beautiful woman in a car, and then they drive off a cliff. That’s the metaphor for heartbreak—literal, brutal, kind of absurd. Most heartbreak songs try to dignify the suffering somehow. This one just shows you destroyed. Bleeding in the sand. No bigger meaning, just the actual damage. The key moment is right before the cliff when they both know what’s coming and do it anyway. That’s recognition. You know it’s going to hurt but the alternative—not getting in the car—feels worse. Everyone’s been there. I’ve been there. The original post ended with a joke about Jessica Biel, like hopefully he doesn’t actually go through this with her. It’s funny because it’s completely beside the point. He’s married, he’s happy. But you remember what it felt like to be heading toward that cliff, and honestly you don’t regret it. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. Puppet Paranoia: Sesame Street made a Homeland parody called “Homelamb” and somehow captured the actual tone of the show—the paranoia, the dissolution of trust, the way you can’t relax—while making it about sheep and puppets. No kid watching it would understand why a lamb questioning loyalties feels so uneasy, but that’s the whole point. Most parodies flatten their subject into gags. This one doesn’t. The dread is still there. A puppet bureaucracy is still a machinery of suspicion. I’ve watched Homeland through its phases—the early seasons when you genuinely didn’t know if Carrie was onto something real or just breaking, and the later seasons when it broke completely. When it worked, it made you feel unstable in a way television usually won’t. Most shows let you settle in. Homeland wouldn’t. “Homelamb” is maybe five minutes long and stupid and completely committed to the bit, which is why it hits. It takes the thing about Homeland that actually matters—that specific dread—and doesn’t reduce it. Just puts it somewhere it doesn’t belong. Sheep in a spy operation. A lamb on a mysterious phone call. The atmosphere intact, the format wrong. That collision is the whole thing. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. No Woman, No Drive: A cleric in Saudi Arabia had made a public health claim so bizarre that it shouldn’t exist in the modern world: driving damages women’s ovaries and causes birth defects. Hischam Fakih, a Saudi artist and activist, took that claim and weaponized it through parody. He recorded a version of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” with a friend, singing the official absurdity back to the people it was meant to control. In traditional dress, he mimics that same cleric, warning women away from the steering wheel: “I remember you sitting in the family car, but in the backseat, so your ovaries stay intact and you can produce many babies.” There’s something almost beautifully stupid about delivering pseudoscience over reggae. It makes the lie impossible to ignore. Fakih released the video as part of a larger action—a day when women were supposed to drive anyway, authorities be damned. The results were predictable and depressing. The regime had made its threats clear beforehand. Most women stayed home. At least sixteen who tried were stopped by police, fined, and forced to sign statements promising to follow the kingdom’s rules in the future. Not a rebellion. Not even close. Just an attempt, swiftly shut down. What makes this even more absurd is that Saudi Arabia is the only country on earth where women can’t drive. It’s not even officially illegal; the whole thing rests on a single fatwa from 1990. No law. No legislation. Just one religious opinion that somehow became absolute fact for millions of people. And when someone tries to point out how ridiculous that opinion is, they get arrested for it. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. Guaranteed Entry: Someone built an app at a TechCrunch Hackathon that promises guaranteed entry to Berghain. Zalando integration for the right shoes, weather forecast, the whole thing. Like those are the hidden variables in a bouncer’s decision-making. What makes it funny is that Berghain’s power entirely lives in the rejection. The rope, the arbitrary gatekeeping, the pleasure of saying no—that’s the whole operation. So an app that claims to crack it is treating exclusivity as a technical problem, which is exactly what you’d expect from Berlin right now. Someone looked at a velvet rope and thought, ’I should build something about this.’ Tuesday, 29 October 2013. She Knows: There’s a video of an 87-year-old woman playing Grand Theft Auto V like she’s got something to prove. Not fumbling with the controls or trying to figure out which button does what. She’s focused. She’s mowing down pedestrians and torching cars with the casual competence of someone who actually knows what she’s doing. The spark: a gas bill so ridiculous it broke her. Some utility company decided to absolutely fleece her, and instead of calling to complain or stewing about it, she grabbed a controller and loaded up the game. Which is honestly a more efficient response than what most people would do. What gets me is watching her play. No performance, no self-awareness, no “isn’t this funny, a grandma playing a violent game.” She’s just putting something into the world that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. That’s what the violence is actually for. Not a moral lesson. Just somewhere to put it. There’s something unsettling about that kind of certainty at any age. But especially at 87. Tuesday, 29 October 2013. Monday With Margot: Monday morning, gray and cold, everything terrible. You drag yourself out of bed, shuffle toward the office or class, and there’s Margot—already awake, somehow in a good mood, moving through it all with this impossible grace. The rest of us are slogging through mud. She’s cozy. I have no idea how she does it. Monday, 28 October 2013. Lemon Shock: The thing about kids tasting something sour for the first time is that their face does all the work. There’s no filter, no strategy—just biological reaction written across their mouth and eyes. April Maciborka and David Wile caught that moment across a whole series of kids hitting lemons, and it works because the reactions are totally genuine. No amount of staging fakes that expression. I remember being maybe five, snatching a lemon slice from my grandmother’s kitchen, expecting sweetness because it was bright yellow. Instead my mouth seized up. The shock of it, the absolute certainty that I’d made a terrible mistake, the immediate need for water. I probably made the exact same face these kids are making. There’s something about photographs that don’t try to be anything more than what they are. Just what happens when you put citrus in front of someone who’s never had it. No narrative, no setup, no hidden message. The comedy works because the reaction is completely genuine. Monday, 28 October 2013. Why I Want a Car: On some gray morning, wedged into a packed U-Bahn with my forehead nearly touching the window, I start thinking about a car. My friends in the city will tell me it’s stupid, that I don’t need it, that the transit is fine. They’re right in theory. But they’re not the ones standing here. There’s this thing about living in the city that nobody mentions—the way you end up following everyone else’s rules. Take the train they tell you to take. Walk the route they tell you to walk. Wait. Wait some more. You’re part of the system, and the system hums along whether you like it or not. A car sits in my head as the opposite of that. Not as a vehicle exactly, but as a small refusal. The ability to say no—to leave when I want, to go where I want, to not be tethered to someone else’s schedule. Even if I’d only use it once a week. Even if it doesn’t make logical sense. The wanting isn’t logical. I get it now. It’s not about the car. It’s about the feeling that I could have it if I decided to. That I’m not locked into this one particular way of living just because I happen to be standing in a crowded train in a city. The car is just a symbol for taking my life back into my own hands, whatever that means. Monday, 28 October 2013. Rihanna and the Snake: GQ UK marked its 25th anniversary by putting Rihanna on the cover naked, holding a snake. Damien Hirst shot it. I’m not sure what he was thinking—what the snake represented to him, what he was trying to work through. But I spent most of the time just looking at it. There’s something about Rihanna I’ve always loved, and this shot has it in full measure: this ease, this complete unselfconsciousness in front of the camera. No performance, no defense, just there. And I’m not going to lie, I’m jealous of that snake. It gets to be wrapped around her like that, gets to be that close to it all. The issue came out on Halloween. Fitting, somehow—something beautiful and something dangerous wrapped up together. Monday, 28 October 2013. Catching Fire: The Catching Fire trailer was just a reminder of why that franchise existed. The whole premise is ridiculous—teenagers executing each other to keep the population docile?—and the books told it better. But the books didn’t have Jennifer Lawrence, and that’s what the movie was actually about. Monday, 28 October 2013. After Hours: Bonnie Strange was one of those creative rebels who made Berlin feel alive—a fashion designer and artist who understood that real creativity meant making things that felt necessary, not precious. The Shit Shop was exactly what the name promised: no apologies, just the actual interesting stuff. A photographer caught her in a museum after hours, and the images have that rare quality where the subject isn’t performing for the camera, just moving through the space like they belong there. Which she did. Sunday, 27 October 2013. Marcia Wallace: Marcia Wallace died. Seventy, breast cancer. She voiced Mrs. Krabappel from episode two of The Simpsons onward—that depressed teacher with the raspy laugh and the sarcastic drawl, who hated her job and wanted a drink and had nothing but contempt for the world, but showed up anyway. I’ve been hearing that voice since childhood. That character defined what a certain kind of exhausted adult sounded like. Not mean, just worn down by the world. When the show eventually killed off Mrs. Krabappel, it seemed right. Al Jean said she was irreplaceable. He wasn’t being sentimental. She was. You don’t really think about the voice actors until they’re gone. Then you realize how much of your own sense of humor came from their voice, how they taught you that adults could be bored and resentful and still show up anyway. That’s the stuff that stays. Sunday, 27 October 2013. The Guy Who Cleans: You don’t interrupt a graffiti writer while they’re working. That’s how you get a spray can to the face. Thilo learned this at the BVG. You let them spray, you document it, you move on to the next tag. The arms race is real and constant. Writers upgrade their techniques and materials, Thilo’s crew finds new removal methods. Neither side particularly cares about outcomes—they just both show up and do their thing on parallel tracks, rarely intersecting. Then someone from his crew gets stabbed. Not a writer, just someone violent. Four weeks before this interview, and suddenly the whole thing stops being quirky urban culture and becomes actually dangerous. What struck me was Thilo’s tone—not righteously angry, not bitter. He respects the skill even as he’s professionally obligated to erase it. There’s something strange about documenting an art form that exists specifically to be covered up. I see fresh tags on the trains now and think about that whole chain. Someone painted it. Someone documented it. Someone will paint over it. Thilo’s somewhere in there, moving on to the next one. Friday, 25 October 2013. The Liberation Wrapper: Freshness Burger created the Liberation Wrapper—just a wrapper with a woman’s face printed on it. When you eat, you hold it up and hide your actual face behind the printed one. Instead of watching someone demolish a burger, the people around you see a calm, composed image. They gave it a design award. The problem is straightforward enough. Eating a burger is a disaster. There’s no way to do it without looking feral—the grease, the mess, your hands destroyed, your face covered in toppings and sauce, you’re just demolishing something. If you’re eating in front of someone whose attraction to you isn’t automatic, that’s something you’re aware of. The way you look when you eat. The distance between who you want to be and who you are with your mouth full. So you buy the wrapper. You hide. You eat behind the mask. It’s only the kind of thing that happens in a specific place with specific ideas about how women should behave. Japan has a version of femininity that’s very controlled, very performed—cute, poised, untouched by appetite. But the anxiety the wrapper is actually solving? That’s not Japanese. That exists everywhere. The gap between your composed self and your eating self is universal. Japan just put it in a product. I don’t know. There’s something funny about it, and something depressing. The fact that someone made this and other people thought it was a good idea. The fact that it probably works—that somewhere a woman is eating behind a mask and feeling more okay about it. That’s the thing that gets me. Not the absurdity of the product, but the reality of why anyone would need it. Friday, 25 October 2013. Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom: So Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom are done. They split quietly a few months before making it official—three years of marriage after six years together, which is how these things usually go. She’s back on the market, he’s back to whatever Orlando Bloom does when he’s not married to one of the world’s most recognizable supermodels. There’s something deadening about watching celebrity relationships collapse in real time through official statements from publicists. The careful language, the “amicable separation,” the maintenance of dignity that mostly just highlights how little we ever really knew about them in the first place. We follow these people obsessively and then find out we knew nothing at all. I’m not sure why this particular breakup lodged in my head. Maybe because they seemed stable enough, or maybe because Orlando Bloom is handsome in a way that makes his ordinariness disappointing—like he should be more interesting than he apparently is. Or maybe it’s just that when you’ve been reading celebrity gossip for as long as I have, the separations start to feel less like actual human events and more like the inevitable mechanics of a machine you’re watching turn. Friday, 25 October 2013. What Obama Didn’t Say: Merkel found out the NSA had been listening to her phone. She called Obama about it. He called back with this promise: “The United States does not monitor and will not monitor your communication.” Beautiful. Not a word about the past, just a very formal assurance about the future. If you read it carefully—and apparently everyone did, even the laziest reporters—you could see the actual message hiding in the gaps. Yeah, we did it. We’re not planning to do it again. That was the whole conversation right there. The thing about official language is that it’s built from true pieces arranged so carefully that lies just disappear into what doesn’t get said. You can be technically honest and completely lying at the same time. Obama probably slept fine. Merkel got her call, the intelligence agencies kept doing their thing, and everybody went home. Well done, ’merica. Thursday, 24 October 2013. She Just Has It: You watch the LA BOO ad and there’s no question why Cara Delevingne is everywhere. The confidence, the presence, the way she moves through the frame like she owns it—it’s immediate. No ambiguity. Fashion brands put her in their campaigns for a reason. She elevates whatever she touches. The Japanese minimalist aesthetic of LA BOO, the clean geometric vibe, the clothes—it all lands because she’s the one inhabiting it. That’s the whole idea. Some people just have it. That quality where everything they do seems intentional and effortless at the same time. You know the type. The ones who know exactly who they are and don’t need outside validation for it. Cara’s in that category. It’s partly the genetics, sure, but it’s mostly presence. Taste. That confidence that only comes from understanding your own style completely. I’m not immune to it. None of us are. You watch something like this and you understand why she’s on every set that matters—every campaign, every film, every shoot worth paying attention to. She just reads differently than other people. That’s the whole thing. Thursday, 24 October 2013. The Games They’re Sending: The whole “North Korea is going to destroy you through online games” premise has a perfect kind of absurdity. South Korea’s police caught a businessman trying to smuggle games developed in the North into the country—not for cultural reasons, but as a delivery system for malware. The games would collect IP addresses and player data worldwide, supposedly feeding North Korea’s cyber operations. I can picture the pitch: “Our weapon is… a game.” But online games are actually excellent delivery mechanisms. Millions of players, sloppy security assumptions, easy to hide malicious code in something that looks legitimate. A cop quoted in the reporting said games and pornography are easy vectors for hackers, which is a bleak pairing that accidentally tells you everything about what people download without thinking. The absurdity isn’t that North Korea would try this. It’s that it probably works. We’ve learned to be paranoid about email attachments and official-looking links, but a free game? Feels safe. Download it, install it, leave it running. Nobody thinks about what data a game quietly collects. North Korea’s general incompetence with basically everything—their Photoshop skills are stuck in 1993—doesn’t actually matter if the delivery mechanism works. Thursday, 24 October 2013. The Queen of Whisky: I couldn’t drink whisky for years. Tried and tried—seemed like something I had to grow into, like an acquired taste that everyone said was worth the effort but felt more like penance. Then one day I stopped fighting it and just started drinking it neat in dim bars, and it clicked. There’s a story behind Cardhu that beats most whisky backstories. John and Helen Cumming were making whisky on their farm, but it wasn’t quite legal at first. They ran the operation in secret for a decade before getting their license in 1824. Helen did most of the clever work. When tax inspectors showed up unannounced, she’d have her fermentation vats disguised as bread dough containers and she’d dust flour on her hands, play the baker’s wife, serve them tea while she was at it. If the visit looked official, she’d raise a red flag on the shed to warn the neighbors. Just a woman keeping her business running the way she knew how. Helen’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth took over after her and actually became known as the Queen of Whisky. She turned Cardhu into a recognized single malt at a time when most people didn’t know what that meant. By the 1800s it had a reputation as one of Scotland’s best distilleries, and it’s held onto that. Jim Murray wrote about it in his Whisky Bible—said it was probably the most balanced, least overwrought pure sweet malt you could find. That’s a compliment that actually means something. I drink it neat. No ice, no mixing, nothing that gets in the way. There’s something satisfying about respecting what someone took that much care to make. Thursday, 24 October 2013. Level Design: Robby Leonardi built his portfolio as a Super Mario World level. You jump through it in HTML5, navigate platforms, collect coins that represent skills. It’s playful and intricate and absolutely works as a statement: if you want a designer or programmer who can think sideways, here’s proof. He was at Fox News looking to escape, maybe toward something in design or code where the work wasn’t just feeding the machine. The interactive portfolio was his shortcut past the noise—past the thousand PDFs and Figma links that all look the same, past the filtered photos and testimonials nobody reads. Most people applying for jobs send exactly what they’re supposed to send. Something professional, acceptable, forgettable. The application process rewards that. It’s efficient. It’s also why most portfolios don’t stick with you. Leonardi solved it not by being more professional but by being less professional—by making something that felt like it came from someone who actually thinks about how things work, how they’re experienced. Years later I still remember it. Not because it’s flawless design, but because it’s the rare portfolio that made me curious about the person. That’s all it needs to do. Thursday, 24 October 2013. Killer Tofu: There’s people in some dingy room, dancing like they’re trying to shake something out of their bodies. Sweat on the walls, bad fluorescent light, nobody trying to look cool. OverDoz’s “Killer Tofu” is playing and they’re just moving because standing still would actually hurt. I watch it and I get it completely. That’s exactly what you need when the day job ends. That moment when you step outside and the professionalism can finally fall away and you just want to move. Not dance, not in any real sense—just get your body out of this compressed state and do something, anything, that isn’t sitting at a desk pretending to be functional. OverDoz, a German band that makes this tight, wound-up post-punk that sounds like pure frustration with a beat, have figured out what that moment needs. I’ve built a whole end-of-day ritual around a three-minute song. There are supposedly better ways to decompress—meditation, yoga, a good drink—but none of them work as fast. When you’re compressed, jaw locked, shoulders up by your ears, can’t remember what breathing feels like, three and a half minutes of this fixes it. Not because it’s clever. Not because it makes you feel like anything other than what you are. Just because sometimes you need something loud and fast and ugly to remind you that you’re still an animal. Thursday, 24 October 2013. Kutiman’s Tokyo: Tokyo hits different at night. The neon in the darkness, how it all moves—millions of people in tight streets, everything you could want within arm’s reach but nothing making sense. It gets into your head in a way that’s hard to explain. Most videos about Tokyo flatten it into postcard scenery, all those swooping drone shots. Kutiman’s doesn’t. He just lets it be itself: the sounds, the rhythms, what it actually feels like when you’re in it. No agenda. Just showing you. I’m not sure why Tokyo never stops being interesting. Most places do. You spend enough time in them and they flatten out, become routine, lose their power. Not Tokyo. I’ve been enough times that I should be over it by now, but four minutes of phone footage and a beat is enough to light it all back up. It’s not rational. It’s the same as always: too much stimulation, too many people, never enough sleep, nothing makes sense, and you never want to leave. Wednesday, 23 October 2013. Stoned Dogs: Dogs in Görlitzer Park and Treptower were showing up at vets with the same symptoms: trembling, disorientation, hearts racing. Vet Reinhold Sassnau at his practice near Südstern put it together. They’d been eating feces contaminated with drugs, leftovers from addicts using the parks like bathrooms. Most recovered after a sedative, but the real problem was harder. His advice: train your dog not to eat shit. The Verge even covered it, which captures the absurdity—a tech publication reporting on stoned dogs in Berlin. It’s a very Berlin situation. Everything gets documented. Nothing gets fixed. The parks stay broken, the addicts stay stuck, the dogs keep eating poisoned shit, and it becomes a story people tell about what the city’s like. Wednesday, 23 October 2013. Pure Sex: Flume remixed Disclosure’s “You & Me” and the video is five minutes of a naked couple absolutely going at each other—biting, touching, completely locked in. No cuts, no relief, just sustained intensity from start to finish. Sat down to watch it and something about the sustained focus just got to me. The way they’re moving, the tension, five minutes without a cut, without looking away, just unbroken attention. Ended up sitting still for a minute after. Still thinking about it. Wednesday, 23 October 2013. The City Doesn’t Fix It: You hear that the city will save you, that you just need to get there and the loneliness will dissolve into something manageable. More people means more connection, right? You arrive and find yourself more isolated than ever, pressed against millions of strangers who aren’t looking at you. Paul Riccio made a video about New York that shows this perfectly. He lives there, in this place where so many of us go looking for rescue. What comes through is that specific kind of urban loneliness—the subway platform full of faces that don’t see you, the crowded bar where everyone’s alone together, the street at night bright with lights and motion and absolutely empty of recognition. You’re at the center of everything and invisible. The mistake is thinking crowds will fix it. Enough people, enough noise, and the emptiness gets swallowed. But it doesn’t work that way. Loneliness in a city is its own thing—maybe worse, because everyone around you seems to have found something you haven’t. You’re supposed to connect in a place like this. Instead you’re just surrounded by millions of people who feel just as far away. Tuesday, 22 October 2013. Game of Thrones in Yellow: Tyrion Lannister in Simpsons yellow is still Tyrion. That stopped me when I first saw Adrien Noterdaem’s Game of Thrones work. I expected the specificity to disappear the moment you flatten someone into four fingers and yellow skin and those simple Simpsons eyes. But it doesn’t. Daenerys reads as herself. Jon Snow is unmistakable. The bone structure survives. Noterdaem’s been translating TV shows into Simpsons style for a while—Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sherlock—and they all work fine. But Game of Thrones is the interesting one because the show is built entirely on production design. Every frame costs money. The costumes, the armor, the medieval aesthetic—that’s what’s supposed to make it feel epic and weighty. But strip all of that away and you’re left with just the faces. And they’re still compelling. It’s a useful thing to notice about character design. The production design, the costuming, the cinematography—all of that matters. But underneath it, the actual face is doing more work than you’d think. The Simpsons style is so minimal that it forces the character to survive on bone structure alone. And apparently most characters can. Tuesday, 22 October 2013. iOS 7 and WordArt: I spent way too much time in Microsoft Word making WordArt—tweaking gradients and shadows and 3D bevels, doing ridiculous things with rotation and outline thickness. The interface had this gravity to it. Realizing what I was making was terrible never stopped me from clicking into the next option anyway. So I’m looking at iOS 7 and something feels oddly familiar. Vaclav Krejci posted about how you could basically recreate the whole design language in Word—same typefaces, same flattened look, same vague sense that something got deleted. Jony Ive apparently took the same path I took with WordArt, except he had teams of people and unlimited money, and it ended up on a billion phones. There’s something almost funny about that. The most carefully designed operating system ever made looks like something I would have made in study hall, before I knew anything about design. That bothers me in a way I can’t quite explain. Tuesday, 22 October 2013. Fare-Dodger Car: Someone spray-painted SCHWARZFAHRER-WAGEN—fare-dodger car—on a Stuttgart train in letters sized to look official. The kind of tag that makes you do a double take, makes you wonder for a half-second if there’s actually a free-ride car you missed, if you could have been gaming the system all along. The joke works because of that moment of uncertainty. The artist knew exactly what they were doing: render something legitimate-looking enough and people will believe it before they think. How many passengers saw those letters and had to mentally reorganize what they were looking at? Street art at its best operates like that—not announcing itself as graffiti, but presenting as fact. There’s respect in it, a kind of faith in the viewer’s ability to get the prank. And then there’s the image of the artist stepping back from the final letter, knowing exactly how people will react, before the city decides whether it’s funny or a crime. Probably both. Tuesday, 22 October 2013. Gold Phones: Apple’s pushing the iPhone 5s in gold now, like that’s the move everyone’s been waiting for. And I look at it and genuinely wonder: what is wrong with wanting a gold phone? I have an iPhone. Black. Works great. It’s last year’s model and I don’t care. But watching people actually want the gold version is its own kind of painful. It’s like watching someone buy a gold-painted car or order a gold debit card—you can’t look away from the bad taste. The weird part is that it doesn’t look expensive. It looks cheap. Gold on a phone just screams “I paid more for this” which is, ironically, the cheapest possible reason to want something. It’s desperation playing dress-up as luxury. I realize I’m being a snob about it. Some people probably like how it looks and good for them. But the appeal of gold as a status symbol only works if you’re announcing the money, and the second you have to announce it, the whole thing falls apart. That’s not luxury—that’s performing luxury. My black phone doesn’t perform anything. It just is. Monday, 21 October 2013. The Break: You watch them on cardboard, moving like their joints are made of something else. The music shifts and the whole body becomes an instrument—arms rotating, head spinning, spinning again. The commitment required is absurd, but that’s the point. It’s not elegant. It’s athletic and sometimes sloppy, but the dedication to it is complete. I never got the spinning right. The windmill, the helicopter—my body wouldn’t cooperate. But I understood why people did it. There’s something about watching someone break that hits different than other dance. You’re throwing yourself at the ground over and over, trusting momentum and repetition. It’s not about being graceful. It’s about the willingness to look ridiculous a thousand times until you get it. This was the 80s, early 90s maybe. Every kid wanted to break. There were videos, instructional tapes, local competitions. Someone’s older brother who actually knew how to do it became legendary. The thing that started in the streets became commodified pretty quickly—instructional videos, public television segments, formal training. That’s how culture works. You can’t keep something underground forever. I never tried it seriously. The falling, the hours drilling basic moves, the failure required—I didn’t have that in me. But watching someone really get into it, seeing them disappear into the motion, there was something there. Not envy. Just recognition. That’s what it looks like when someone loves what they’re doing. Monday, 21 October 2013. Unconditionally: The video for ’Unconditionally’ is Aya Tanimura’s choreography made visible—careful, composed, dancers moving around Katy Perry like she’s the still point everything orbits. But the song doesn’t need any of that. It’s heartbreak stripped down, which is maybe the only way a song like this survives anymore. There’s no irony, no distance, just someone saying ’I love you exactly as you are’ and meaning it completely. That kind of earnestness kills you. Monday, 21 October 2013. XP on NES: Eighty euros gets you Windows XP running on actual NES hardware. Not some emulator—the real thing, booting on thirty-year-old circuitry, moving through windows and menus with a kind of patient stubbornness. Games work. The calculator works. Nothing moves fast or clean, but it works. There’s something genuinely appealing about this purposeful incompatibility. Two completely different eras forced together not because they need to be, but just to see if you can. I’ve watched enough bloated operating systems fail and enough ancient hardware outlive them to recognize something honest here. The whole trajectory of modern software is bloat—more processing needed just to boot, everyone waiting for the next redesign that’ll make sense of it all. And then someone just sidesteps the entire thing. Gets 1985’s circuitry running software from 2001 and makes it work. Maybe it’s meaningless. No one actually needs this. But it proves something: the gap between incompatible systems isn’t as fixed as the manufacturers want you to believe. It’s just a choice. Someone chose otherwise. Monday, 21 October 2013. Best Job Ever: Some guy got hired as a production assistant on a Katy Perry music video set, and apparently this qualifies as the best job in the world. Doesn’t matter what he actually did—move lights, grab coffee, whatever. The context is the whole point. You’re on set with Katy Perry. That’s genuinely the job that hits every fantasy requirement for a certain demographic. I’m not going to pretend I’m above this. It’s a funny fantasy, obviously. The appeal is pure proximity: you’re in the same space as someone beautiful you normally only see through a screen. That’s it. The actual work could be tedious, but who cares. You’re there, and everyone who hears about it immediately hates and envies you in equal measure. There’s something weirdly human about wanting to be near something you find beautiful, even in the most delusional way possible. Even as a production assistant moving sandbags. Especially then, maybe—because you get to be close to it while also having the excuse of work, some kind of legitimate reason to be in the same room. I have no idea if this guy actually existed or if it’s just one of those internet jokes that everyone accepts as true because the premise is too perfect. Either way, he’s immortalized now. Not for anything he actually did, but for the lucky accident of being in the background of the right moment. Monday, 21 October 2013. BatDad: Blake Wilson’s BatDad worked because it solved a problem: what if you tried to be Batman but you were also a parent? The premise is simple. He’s in the suit, ready to fight crime, and then someone leaves a light on or his kid needs something or he’s just tired. The costume doesn’t help. Batman doesn’t fix any of it. He just shows up exhausted, dealing with normal frustrations while dressed as a vigilante. That’s where the humor lives. It’s not clever observation or wordplay. It’s honest. You’re trying to be competent and in control, and small failures break you. The cape just makes it visible. The Vine videos worked because Wilson played it straight—no winking, no performing difficulty. Just a man in a bat suit having a bad day. The kind of day where you’re too tired to be dramatic about being tired. I watched these and couldn’t tell if I was laughing at the character or recognizing myself in him. Both, probably. Saturday, 19 October 2013. The Papers Were Expired: Hamburg got caught in a question it couldn’t answer. The Lampedusa Group—West African refugees who’d made their way to Italy before getting shuffled north—had papers that were technically expired. So the police started pulling them off the streets. And the supporters started showing up to stop them. I followed it through the blogs. Dominik was documenting it in real time—the police lines, the reizgas, the horses, the people in black. Veronika, 25, in a blue rain jacket, saying it was inhuman. Jens, 37, coming back to protest again and again because you can’t just sit with it. The politicians explaining, very patiently, why laws had to be laws. The whole thing was this impossible conversation where you had to choose between law and humanity, like you couldn’t hold both at once. The government: enforce the rule or you’ll get flooded. The protesters: choose people or you’re complicit. Neither side had an answer for doing it differently. I didn’t go to Hamburg. I read about it instead—the documentation, the quotes, the police statements. That weight of knowing without doing anything. As a blogger myself, I recognized what Dominik was doing, the work of capturing what was actually happening against the official narratives. Good work. Didn’t change anything. The papers were still expired. The policy didn’t shift. There’s something about that distance that stuck with me. You can document something completely accurately and have it change nothing. Friday, 18 October 2013. Stunt Boys: Clicked on a video from some group called Children of Poseidon—no idea who they are, probably just kids with a camera and the idea that pain equals views. One minute of footage and I felt something twist in me, not sympathy exactly, just the exhaustion of watching the same dumb loop play out again and again. Someone gets hurt, someone films it, someone uploads it. The format hasn’t changed in twenty years. I remember the Jackass warnings. MTV would flash something at the start of every episode: don’t try this, don’t send us your copies, this is dangerous and stupid. That meant nothing. A whole generation watched and thought yeah, that’s the move—hurt yourself, get famous. The difference was MTV had production values and some weird craft to it. These guys just have phones. YouTube gave everyone the platform Jackass needed the network for. You don’t need MTV, no TV deal, no editor deciding this is too far. You just film yourself or your friend doing something that might break you, upload it, hope the algorithm feeds it out. There’s no gatekeeper. Just bodies hitting things and people watching. What got to me was watching that quarter-second before the pain hits—his face knows something’s wrong but his body’s already committed. Then the crack, the sound. You don’t unhear that. And then it gets uploaded. Shown to strangers. The damage traded for views. I don’t know what Children of Poseidon get out of this besides maybe a few thousand views and the kind of attention that makes you smaller not bigger. The whole thing makes me tired. Not angry, not disgusted—just tired. The internet figured out the cheapest content is someone else’s suffering, and now everyone knows they can sell their own. Friday, 18 October 2013. Sido’s Back: Sido’s putting out “30-11-80” as the warm-up to his November album. It’s got basically everyone on it—Bushido, Eko Fresh, Nazar, Frauenarzt, Smudo, Erick Sermon, Moses Pelham, Afrob, and a bunch of others I lost track of. That many features usually means either the track is incredible or it’s trying to do too much. Could be both. What interests me is that he can even pull this off. Sido vanishes for a while and everyone apparently just waits for him to come back. That’s a thing you have to actually earn—most artists disappear and the world moves on without them. But Sido built something solid enough that it doesn’t stop mattering when he’s gone. Haven’t heard it yet. It’ll probably be one of those tracks that’s half genius, half bloated. That’s what usually happens when you get that many people on one song. Friday, 18 October 2013. Honest Confusion: There’s a video of a girl thinking her dad’s stealing a car when he’s really just using Car2Go. It’s obviously marketing, but filmed so it doesn’t look like it—the Mercedes version of something that just happened to be caught on camera. Maybe genuine luck, maybe genuine skill. Doesn’t matter. The observation is true. Car-sharing is weird enough that a kid reads shared access as theft. That’s sharper than most advertising gets. Everything else is just framing around something honest. I watched it more than once. Friday, 18 October 2013. 800 Pairs: I own three pairs of sneakers. One’s basically dead. That leaves two. Julia from Berlin owns 800. I get the obsession. Sneakers are good shoes, and once you start paying attention there’s always another one calling. But 800? That’s not collecting. That’s a whole life decision. Adidas flew Julia and a few other true believers to Herzogenaurach to live out that dream for a day. Part of me resents her for it. The bigger part understands completely. There’s something clean about that level of commitment—no excuses, no performance, just someone who loves shoes more than is reasonable and built their world around it. At my current pace I’ll hit 800 in about thirty years. By then Julia will probably be deep into something else equally absurd. Knitting. Weird chips. Climbing mountains in animal costumes. The world’s full of rabbit holes, and some people are just better at finding them. Friday, 18 October 2013. Falling from Space: You’re in black space. Nothing moves. You breathe, and you’re alone in the most absolute way a person can be. Then Felix Baumgartner opens a door and steps out. It had been a year since he did it. A whole year of replays and clips and talk. And then Red Bull released the footage proper—high resolution, pristine, the full jump. What they captured in 2012 was momentous, but seeing it rendered sharp and clean, frame by frame, is something else entirely. Baumgartner falls through the sky for nearly ten minutes. The video doesn’t cut. No music, no editing tricks. Just the sound of his breathing, the hiss of his suit, the nothing above him, and then the roar as he breaks the sound barrier and the world comes rushing back. What gets me about watching it isn’t the speed or the height or even the technical achievement—though all of that is there. It’s the silence before it, and the absolute fact that he made it back. At that altitude there’s a jet stream, crushing temperatures, pressure that would kill you before you could process what’s happening. And he just stepped out into that. There’s something unsettling about witnessing a human do something that extreme. We’re not built for it. Our bodies aren’t designed to survive what he’s doing. But he did it anyway, and someone filmed it, and now it’s available in perfect clarity—proof that it was real. The stunt isn’t the jump itself. The stunt is the documentation. I remember watching it the first time, probably on my phone, some video in my feed. A few minutes in, you realize you’re watching something that will probably never happen in quite this way again. You’re part of the smallest audience for the biggest moment. Millions of people saw this at once, on screens, alone. The jump still holds up. Baumgartner’s calm is still unsettling. The footage is still crisp enough to watch the earth swell as he falls toward it. What Red Bull proved—aside from demonstrating that a human can survive it—is that some feats don’t need anything else. Sometimes documentation is enough. Thursday, 17 October 2013. Cosplay, When It Clicks: I’ve never been that into cosplay. The whole scene feels performative—the social media moment, the convention circuit, the obsessive labor toward validation from strangers. But I watch people sink months into a single costume, nail the construction, understand the design from the inside out, and something shifts. That stops being fandom. Game of Thrones had the good luck of being dressed by designers who cared. The costume work on that show was obsessive—nothing was generic, nothing was shortcut. A cosplayer tackling a Game of Thrones character was studying actual design, learning how the original builder solved each problem. How the pieces fit together. Why that fabric and not another. At Comic-Con, someone brought it off completely. Not just accurate to the show—technically sound. The construction held. The proportions worked. You watched them move and understood how much engineering was underneath, how much research, how much problem-solving. That’s when cosplay clicks for me. Not the moment, not the photo op, not the validation—just the work itself. The thing made real. Thursday, 17 October 2013. The Shoe Shiner: During his ’Better Out Than In’ show in New York, Banksy installed a life-size Ronald McDonald in the Bronx with a real kid underneath it, polishing the clown’s already-spotless shoes. The image hits you the wrong way—the corporate icon pristine and grinning, the child bent at work, grimy and somehow permanent-looking. You don’t need an art degree to get what he’s doing. Kid shines shoes of famous corporate clown. That’s the whole thing, and the whole thing is enough. The discomfort is the point, and it works because he doesn’t give you anywhere to hide from it. A child doing labor that shouldn’t exist in a rich country, serving a plastic icon of consumption. The contrast is so direct it almost feels cheap, but it isn’t. That directness is the only way to actually make people look. I don’t know if the kid was an actor or a street kid, if Banksy paid him, how long it went on. He never explains. You see the image and you sit with it, and what you do with that feeling is your problem. Some people see a comment on capitalism. Some people just see a dirty kid and move on. Banksy probably thinks you’re a coward if you choose the second one, but he’s not going to tell you that either. That’s what I’ve always liked about him—the work stands and he walks away. No interviews explaining the concept, no artist’s statement, no TED talk about the meaning of shoes. Just the image, and you have to figure out what it means to you. It’s the opposite of everything in the art world, where every piece needs context and theory to justify itself. This doesn’t need anything but your eyes. The statue’s probably gone now, torn down or painted over or disappeared into whatever happens to street art in gentrifying neighborhoods. But the photograph exists, and the memory of it exists, and somewhere a kid once shined a plastic clown’s shoe while the world took pictures. That’s the real work—not the installation, but what stays with you after. Thursday, 17 October 2013. Every Thirty Days: You could go a lot of ways with a pregnancy photo project. Sophie Starzenski chose to point a camera at her body from the side every thirty days for nine months and not do much else with it. No narrative, no artfulness, no emotional permission slip. Just the documentation. What appeals to me is the refusal to perform. Most people who take these kinds of photos are already selling you something—beauty, wisdom, the sacred feminine, whatever cultural story gets the most reach. Starzenski’s just looking. Month to month the changes are barely perceptible, which means you have to trust the sequence. Watch it long enough and it becomes something you can’t argue with: time does this to a body, it takes nine months, it’s worth looking at. I think I respect that more than I respect most “art” about pregnancy. It’s not trying to convince you of anything. There’s no performance and there’s no apology. Just evidence. Thursday, 17 October 2013. GQ Got Something Right: GQ had become invisible to me. The kind of magazine that was either Playboy for people who needed an excuse to buy it, or a catalog of things nobody actually wants. I hadn’t thought about picking one up in years. Then they put Emily Ratajkowski on the cover. Photographed by Terry Richardson. Suddenly I got why the magazine still exists. She’s forever attached to “Blurred Lines,” that song people still won’t let her forget. Most people would be tired of it by now, but she’s got this perfect cool indifference about the whole thing—like she knows exactly what you’re thinking and doesn’t care. The photos work. For the first time in what feels like forever, GQ felt like something worth holding. Thursday, 17 October 2013. 2013 TV135: August 26, 2032 is the date Ukrainian astronomers flagged for an asteroid called 2013 TV135—a 410-meter rock with a 0.0016 percent chance of hitting Earth. Almost certainly not, then. The almost is what sticks. If those odds somehow flip: 2,500 megatons of TNT. Fifty times the largest nuclear bomb ever built. Extinction event. Everything stops. What gets to me is the specificity of the date. We handle the abstract knowledge of asteroid threats just fine—rocks in space, some of them pointed at us, no big deal. But August 26, 2032 is real in a way that statistics aren’t. It’s close enough to matter and far enough away that nobody’s losing sleep. I found a post about it that joked about pooling money for a laser defense system, or maybe hiring Bruce Willis. The absurdity is perfect—there’s nothing we’re going to do, so we’re betting on luck. Statistically that works out. But a specific date makes luck feel like something you have to choose to believe in. I don’t think about it most days. Thursday, 17 October 2013. Lily Cole, Unguarded: I had a thing for redheads. Specific ones. Cintia Dicker. Lily Cole, the English model and actress who showed up in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Snow White and the Huntsman—though that wasn’t really the point. With Lily it was worse because she had some quality that made you want to understand her, which meant staring at her constantly, which meant thinking about her in ways you don’t talk about. POP Magazine ran an autumn-winter editorial with her, and I got a copy. She was mostly naked, which was the point, but what stuck was that she looked completely at ease—not performing sexiness, not doing the work of being desired, just existing in her own skin like she wasn’t afraid of any of it. Most models understand nudity as theater. She understood it as fact. I spent more time with those pages than I’d want to admit, which probably says something about me and maybe nothing at all. There was an ease to the images, a quality of not being calculated for, that made them feel different from the usual editorial spread. Like catching someone at the one moment they weren’t thinking about being caught. It’s been years and I’ve moved on to other redheads, other fixations. But I still think about that issue sometimes, that particular ease, that indifference to being desired. That’s the thing I haven’t quite gotten over. Thursday, 17 October 2013. Just Get a Better Car: Roman tested a theory with a borrowed Lamborghini. The premise: the real reason anyone struggles with dating isn’t personality or looks—it’s not having the right car. So he parked it somewhere visible and waited. Women who wouldn’t have looked at him twice suddenly noticed. The car did all the work. He just stood there. It’s almost too obvious to mention. We all know status matters more than personality. We know we’re just animals responding to signals—wealth, power, the external stuff that promises resources and safety. But knowing something and watching it play out are different. Watching a Lamborghini make someone attractive is like seeing the whole mechanism exposed. The weird thing? Nobody minds. Roman wasn’t bothered. I wasn’t bothered. We’ve all apparently decided that a half-million-dollar car is a perfectly reasonable way to become interesting. And it works so well that we’re not even pretending it doesn’t anymore. I still can’t unsee it. Every time I watch someone’s interest spike at the sound of a designer label or an expensive car, I just see that Lamborghini again. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. The Oarfish: People talk about sea monsters their whole lives. Giant squid, whales so big they don’t seem possible, crabs the size of… I don’t know, houses. You hear it and think, sure, whatever. Cool story. Probably fake. Then scientists in California, including Jasmine Santana, pull a five-meter oarfish out of the water. Dead, which is how we got to see it. Now it’s in a freezer or on display or something at a research institute, and I have no idea what they do with a fish that big. Eat it? Mount it? Bring it back to life through the power of science fiction? The thing that gets me is the reminder that it was down there. It existed. It’s still out there, those things are, right now. Which means when you’re in the ocean and you think you’re alone, you’re not. There are things down there, impossible-looking things, and we only find them when they wash up dead. What about the ones we don’t find? What about the bigger ones? That actually scares me. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. Gorgeous and Gross: Found a video of this tattooed girl doing things with her tongue that I don’t know how to feel about. The control she has is legitimately wild—shapes and movements that seem impossible. I can’t stop watching it, except I also can’t stop wanting to look away. That’s the whole thing for me: I can’t decide if it’s hot or disgusting. Half of me is into it, genuinely attracted to the wrongness and the skill and whatever boundary it’s crossing. The other half is turned off, thinking yeah okay this is basically gross. One frame it’s sexy, the next it’s grotesque. One second I’m locked in, the next I’m cringing. I don’t know who she is or what she does or how long she’s been doing this. Doesn’t matter. The pure mechanical fact of what her body can do—that’s what gets me. And I still can’t decide if I like it or if it repels me, which I guess is the point. The fact that I can’t decide is the thing I can’t get over. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. Light Bone and Cherry: The Air Max 1 keeps cycling through colorways and I keep noticing them. This JD Sports exclusive landed in a bone-black-gray mix with cherry red hits, and it actually works—there’s a restraint to it that a lot of the newer drops miss. Not screaming, just sitting there clean. I’m not the kind of person who hunts exclusives, but I understand the pull. It’s that mix of specificity (you can only get it one place) and craft (someone actually thought about that cherry red against the bone). The Air Max 1 is old enough now that it doesn’t need proving anymore. It just exists, and every few months there’s another reason to look at it again. This is one of those reasons. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. Money Like Email: Square Cash was one of those fintech ideas that shouldn’t have existed. You could send money by writing an amount in an email subject line. Not through a banking app or some sleek interface—just email. The simplicity was disarming. My first thought wasn’t “how convenient.” It was “what if I borrowed someone’s phone and sent myself a few hundred dollars across multiple transactions?” Completely implausible as a crime, would fail instantly, would get me arrested. But the fact that my brain went straight to theft instead of thinking about actual utility tells you something. Remove enough friction and people don’t think about legitimate use cases first—they think about how to game it. The app only worked in the US when it launched, which added another layer of absurdity. Certain people got access to nearly frictionless money transfer while everyone else waited for lawyers and regulators to figure out whether it was legal. They did eventually approve it, probably by which point the novelty wore off and was replaced by three other apps doing the same thing with more conspicuous safety measures. People trust safety theater more than genuine simplicity. What stuck with me was how honest it all was. Fintech usually wraps itself in nice interfaces and makes you feel like you’re doing something sophisticated. Square Cash just said: you already have email. That’s enough. All the other infrastructure I’d accepted as necessary was just habit made comfortable. The moment someone proved you could move money through email, it became clear how much of what I assumed was mandatory was actually optional. I never had the chance to actually use it—it wasn’t available where I lived. By the time it might have been, I’d moved on to whatever else the market was promising. But that moment of realizing email was sufficient, that all the infrastructure of banking apps was optional? That stayed with me longer than the app itself. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. Medieval Land: Came across this Game of Thrones parody called Medieval Land Fun-Time World and immediately got why people found it so funny. The idea alone is stupid in the best way—what if GoT was a medieval theme park? Everything is wholesome and cheerful, all the same characters but completely neutered. It’s the kind of fan video that only works if you actually understand the original material well enough to flip it. GoT was so aggressively dark and serious about everything that you can’t even parody it without addressing that tonal contrast. Make it earnest instead of portentous and suddenly it’s hilarious. The video gets that. The execution is clean, which helps—bad editing ruins the joke. I’m not sure why this took me so long to find. It feels like the kind of thing that should’ve been everywhere during the show’s peak, but maybe it was and I just missed it. Either way, it works now. Wednesday, 16 October 2013. Kalos: Pokemon X/Y was when the series went genuinely 3D, and I remember it feeling both inevitable and slightly off. Kalos, based on France, had this cleaner aesthetic than previous regions—less wild, more designed. Walking through Lumiose City actually felt like being somewhere, which was new. The starters did nothing for me. Fennekin’s evolution into Delphox is still weird in my brain, a choice I can’t quite forgive. But the 3D shift worked. After fifteen years of grid-based movement and flat sprites, the games suddenly looked like the elaborate world they’d always been describing. It wasn’t revolutionary, and the battles played out the same as ever, but there was something satisfying about the technology finally catching up to the ambition. I’m not sure I’d call it a favorite, exactly. But it marked something—the moment Pokemon stopped trying to recreate what worked on Game Boy hardware and just became what the franchise probably always wanted to be. Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Concept Limbo: Victor Mosquera works for a design studio called Volta, making concept art for games that haven’t been announced yet—if they’re even real. Colombian artist, absurdly talented, the kind of work that makes you immediately wonder what it would feel like to actually play the thing. Nameless characters, grotesque enemies, these cavernous atmospheric spaces that pull at you. The appeal is obvious. These are worlds clearly designed to be experienced from the inside, and the artwork proves it. Every image suggests a game that would be worth playing, a space worth exploring. But most concept art never becomes a game. It exists in this liminal space where it’s simultaneously finished and incomplete. I used to find that frustrating. Design something this beautiful and it might never see life. But I’ve spent enough time making things that don’t exist to know that completion isn’t the point. The image is the work. Whether it becomes a game is almost incidental. Still: you look at what Mosquera’s done and you want the game to be real. Probably it won’t be. But the work stands regardless. Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Harry Potter is Dead, Long Live Daniel Radcliffe: I’ve had a thing for Daniel Radcliffe for a while now, even back when he was still working out how to hold the wand without looking uncomfortable. But something happened. He showed up on the cover of some magazine I’d never heard of—Flaunt, I think—and he’s just there looking like he’s finally figured something out. Not trying, not performing. Just present in a way you can’t fake. What gets to me is how completely he’s moved past the whole Harry Potter thing without ever making a scene about it. He didn’t go on talk shows complaining about typecasting or write think pieces about being trapped. He just left. Started doing stage work, weird indie films with people who actually challenge him, stuff that matters to someone interested in acting instead of managing a brand. He could have coasted forever on that character. He chose not to. There’s something quietly radical about that. Most actors who get famous that young either ride it out forever or become bitter about it. He just walked away. Figured out who he wanted to become after Harry Potter and made it happen, slowly and without fanfare. That’s rare enough. It’s also more interesting to me than anything a carefully managed celebrity ever does. Maybe I’m reading too much into a magazine cover. But there’s something genuinely compelling about watching someone grow up in public without becoming either a cautionary tale or a self-parody. It’s not the simple kind of attractive. It’s the kind that comes from actual respect for what someone chose to do with themselves. Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Become Klaus: “You have to change your name to Klaus or Heidi.” That’s the sentence that sits wrong, the one that keeps you clicking back to the video. Lufthansa ran this campaign offering a year in Berlin—flights, apartment, bicycle, the whole thing paid—but only to Swedish citizens, and only if you legally renamed yourself. Not a joke. A real brand campaign. I watched it three times looking for the angle, the moment it becomes ironic. It doesn’t. That’s the most unsettling part. It’s just straight-faced surreality dressed up as generosity. Here’s a new life, here are the keys to an apartment in Kreuzberg, here’s your stipend for a year in Berlin—also you can’t be yourself anymore. Your name is Klaus now. Go live. What’s weird isn’t that someone thought of it. It’s that a major airline looked at this and said yes, this is our brand moment. This is what we’re putting out into the world. The genius of a truly bad idea is sometimes how far it commits. No winking, no irony in the ad itself, just the premise doing all the work for you. The absurdity sits naked on the screen and nobody apologizes for it. I kept thinking about what kind of person would actually do this. Not for the free year—that part’s nothing. But the renaming. You’d have to want it in a specific way, want to leave something so badly that becoming Klaus felt like freedom instead of erasure. Or you’re just game, which is its own kind of person. Either way, Lufthansa found a filter that selected for something real. The real cruelty is that it only applied to Sweden. Everyone else got to feel the specific sting of not being chosen, not even being eligible to make this terrible beautiful decision. Which is probably the point. The scarcity makes it a story. The impossibility makes it art. Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Just A Cardigan: Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Rap God: There’s this moment in ’Rap God’ where Eminem gets so fast the song almost falls apart, like he’s seeing how compressed he can make language before syntax breaks. It’s technically impossible—syllables stacking over each other, barely a breath between them. I’d forgotten why people were terrified of him. Not because he was cool or edgy, but because he could do something that felt physically superhuman. The song’s from a new album coming in November, and everything I’m hearing suggests he’s still that hungry. Which is strange, because Eminem didn’t disappear or fail—he just stopped being the center of things. That shift has to be weird for someone who owned his genre so completely. Coming back now isn’t really a comeback so much as a statement that he’s still the fastest gun alive. I don’t know if it’ll matter culturally. Comebacks are odd that way—the world moves on regardless, and there’s always this strange competition with your own mythology. But technically he’s still showing everyone that no one touches him—that speed, that bar density, that compression of meaning into pure sound. That’s not a comeback story. That’s just a skill that doesn’t age. Tuesday, 15 October 2013. Kingdom Hearts: The combination shouldn’t work—Disney characters wandering through Japanese RPG worlds with anime mythology underneath. Somehow it doesn’t collapse, though, and that’s mostly because of Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack. The music is genuinely exceptional, all orchestral sweeps and synth drama, the kind of score that makes the plot feel like it matters even when it’s completely lost you. I never made it far into the actual games. The story kept spiraling, too much anime dialogue, characters appearing from nowhere, the lore compounding itself. But I’d keep coming back just to listen, the way some people watch movies on mute because they care more about the sound than the dialogue. The HD remixes polish everything up, sharpen the visuals, and the music hits harder against that clarity. It’s hard to explain why something this weird works, but Shimomura’s score is the explanation. Monday, 14 October 2013. Mario Collected: There’s this IGN project, Museum of Mario, that walks you through every major form of the character across fifty years of games. Designed clean, well-organized, the kind of thing that makes you realize someone should have done it years ago. What’s interesting is that Mario never actually evolved. The technology exploded, the games got weirder and more complex, the world changed three times over, and he just stayed Mario. A little man with a mustache who jumps. The games around him transformed, but he stayed mostly himself. There’s something almost honest about seeing it documented like that. Not turning him into art or history, just laying out what happened. Here are the games. Here’s how they looked. This is the archive. People have started posting memories to it, #MarioMemories, which feels exactly right. He’s been around long enough now that he’s not really Nintendo property anymore—he’s shared cultural infrastructure, something you inherit. The museum just makes that clear. Monday, 14 October 2013. Three Stripes Again: The three stripes are impossible to miss—almost too recognizable to see anymore. Mark McNairy did this collaboration with adidas Originals and 84-lab anyway, working with Kazuki Kuraishi on a fall/winter collection that’s just minimal and clean. Retro sneaker language, nothing flashy, no irony. There’s real discipline in that kind of restraint, especially in footwear design where it’s so easy to pile on details and textures. Just simple shoes that know what they are. They’ll be everywhere, probably. The kind you stop noticing because they’re so clean. Monday, 14 October 2013. Hercules: The Legend Begins: I watched a trailer for a Hercules film called ’The Legend Begins’ and it’s exactly as bad as the title suggests. The cast is unknowns playing unknowns. Unless Twilight warped your brain enough to memorize every side character, you’re looking at a film that had no stars and proceeded with that fact unchanged. Just pressed forward into a void. A YouTube comment I found described it perfectly: ’It’s like a porn parody of Spartacus, except without the sex.’ Which is to say it’s nothing. A parody that forgot its own purpose. The only achievement is that it exists. I genuinely don’t know who this is for. But someone made it anyway, and that’s either courage or delusion, and I’m not sure which is worse. Monday, 14 October 2013. The Zombie Fantasy: We’ve all built the same zombie apocalypse story in our heads. You’ve absorbed it from a hundred films, shows, books, games. In your version, you’re the exceptional one—not the first to die or the one who cracks under pressure, but the one who makes it because you’re fundamentally different. Smarter. Faster. Ready in a way the crowd isn’t. You move through the ruins with a weapon and a purpose and someone at your side. The fantasy assumes time. It assumes you’ll learn as you go, adapt, make the clever choices that separate the survivors from the rest. It assumes you’ll understand what’s happening before it’s too late. Reality doesn’t give you that much. You’d be infected before you understood what was happening. Maybe hours if luck breaks your way. More likely minutes. No slow burn, no proving ground, no moment where you finally get to show everyone how capable you really are. Just the moment before and after. A short film called “Perished” came across my watch-list recently—it premiered at SXSW a while back. It doesn’t play the fantasy game. It just drops you into a collapse that moves faster than anyone can react to. No time for strategy, no moments where you’re in control of anything. Just the brute arithmetic of proximity and chance. It was brutal in a way that the entertainment usually isn’t: not because of what happens, but because there’s no time to be human about it anymore. I think we tell ourselves the zombie apocalypse fantasy because we need to believe that in a truly broken world, our competence would finally matter. That if everything else fell away, we’d be left with just ourselves and the chance to prove we were right about ourselves all along. But that’s not what Perished shows you. It shows you that catastrophe doesn’t care about your potential or your self-image. It doesn’t build narratives around your capability. It just ends things, and you don’t get to narrate your way through it. Maybe that’s why we keep coming back to the story anyway. Not because we believe the fantasy anymore, but because we need something to believe in that feels more manageable than the real answer. Monday, 14 October 2013. James Blake & Chance the Rapper – Life Round Here: I’d drifted away from James Blake at some point without really noticing. Not because anything went wrong, just one of those drift-offs where an artist you liked falls out of rotation and you don’t think about it. Then this collaboration with Chance showed up and it’s one of those moments where you realize you’ve missed someone. The track sits in this weird space where Blake’s production is all restraint—minimal, cold, built from nothing—and Chance comes in with actual warmth, actual presence. There’s something disarming about how it works. It shouldn’t be as affecting as it is for something this stripped down. It made me want to go back and sit with Blake’s older material again. Sometimes that’s all a collaboration needs to do. Monday, 14 October 2013. In the Eye of the Storm: I’m driving deeper into the storm bearing down—dark, roaring, thick with blue streaks and scattered light. No way out now, no choice but to push straight through and hope for the best. Up the mountain roads, down the slopes, with the weather war trailing behind. Then suddenly I’m in the eye. Everything goes quiet. Peaceful. Bright. Just Lorde, V V Brown, Only Real in my ears. Maybe I made it through after all. Monday, 7 October 2013. Nothing Compares To Wrecking Ball: Miley Cyrus swinging naked on a wrecking ball was kind of ridiculous, but that was the whole point. Sinead O’Connor didn’t see it that way—she had a very public issue with it and told Miley she was throwing away her credibility. They ended up taking shots at each other in the press for a while, this weird generational feud that neither of them really seemed to want. But then someone made a mashup putting ’Nothing Compares to You’ over ’Wrecking Ball’—Robin Skouteris did it—and it actually works. The two songs shouldn’t fit—different eras, different sensibilities—but they do. There’s something about the juxtaposition that just makes sense. I wasn’t invested in the drama, but that mashup stuck with me. Sometimes the best thing about celebrity feuds is the weird art that falls out of them. Monday, 7 October 2013. Nowhere Else to Go: I’m walking through Monte Carlo late one rainy evening. The streets are lined with boutiques and hotels and restaurants, places designed purely to extract money from anyone foolish enough to think they belong here. We duck into a casino—one of those rooms full of desperate people in nice clothes and beautiful women who are definitely not here for the gambling. My friend Jörn moves through it with the ease of someone who actually fits, talking about the bay’s history: pirates, monarchs, casinos, the usual Mediterranean mythology that haunts a place like this. But that’s not really why we’re here. The real draw is the harbor, where the Monaco Yacht Show has opened again to people wealthy enough to spend on a boat what most people spend on an entire life. It’s a festival of the beautiful and the rich, sailors and salesmen and people who design boats for obscene money. The ticket costs 240 euros. If you can’t afford that, you definitely can’t afford the design furniture for your dream yacht. The next morning Mercedes-Benz is rolling out their new toy—a 14-meter “silver arrow of the seas” called the Arrow460 Granturismo. Price tag around 1.25 million euros. Order now and you get the limited edition. In 2015, when it arrives, you’ll have a designer boat with almost 1000 horsepower and a top speed of 40 knots in calm water. By afternoon, Antonella and I are burned out on the champagne and the small dogs and the surreal opulence of it all. We make a break for the actual city, thinking we’ll find real people, real life, some version of Monte Carlo that exists outside this machine for extracting money from the wealthy. Instead we find more boutiques, more restaurants, more casinos—which, in hindsight, we should have seen coming. We end up at a McDonald’s by the harbor. The place is mostly empty. We buy cheap food and sit by the window, watching the water, watching the occasional family or couple pass by. This is probably as close as we’re getting to the actual Monte Carlo, to whatever exists here beyond the boutiques and the yacht shows. An hour later we’re back in the thick of it, drowning in champagne and glitter. Monte Carlo is a strange machine. The people who run it at night seem barely connected to the actual world, to anything beyond this bubble of money. Wine flows in the restaurants, sushi arrives in silence, laughter echoes off the walls. The women are expensive, the men are generous, the staff knows how to be invisible. You feel the money in every moment—everyone’s money, the city’s money, the money that built this place. You can disappear into it without trying. The trip ends the way it started: in a helicopter. From the hotel to Nice, then Munich, then Berlin, trading the sun and heat for autumn cold and gray. It doesn’t feel fair. I would have stayed longer, wanted to dig deeper into all of it—the pirates, the monarchs, the whole mythology that makes Monte Carlo seem like something more than what it is. But entry costs more than money. It costs style, willpower, connections, and yeah, ideally a yacht. At least that one you can buy your way into. Friday, 4 October 2013. Let It Disappear: There’s something exhausting about Instagram—all the work to make a single moment feel documented. Pull the phone, find the app, take the shot, pick the filter, write the caption, tag people, post. By the time you’re done, the moment’s already dead. Narrative is this tiny camera you clip to your shirt and forget about. It shoots all day automatically, posts the photos for you, and later you can search through your day by location or date. No decisions, no performance, just life getting recorded whether you think about it or not. I like the idea. But it also feels like the beginning of something bad. There’s a Black Mirror episode about this exact thing—everyone with their lifelogging cameras, life becoming this total documentation. And the thing that gets me is how pleasant that sounds when you’re pitching it. Just automatic. Just convenient. Just remembering. That’s how you sneak into the panopticon. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe in five years we’re all wearing these things and I’ll look back at this worried about nothing, the way someone in the 1800s worried about trains. Or maybe we’ll realize that forgetting was the feature, not the bug, and by then it’s too late. Narrative’s pricing around 250 euros, so someone’s betting on the former. I’m not sure which I want to bet on. Friday, 4 October 2013. Scarlett Falls: Scarlett Johansson stumbled on set of Under the Skin and the internet lost its mind. Not in an outrage way, just the way it does when someone untouchable does something clumsy. There’s something about that moment that gets replayed and riffed on forever. Sad Keanu on a bench. That absurdly handsome guy in the coffee shop. The needy girlfriend meme. Johansson falling became another one of those. People photoshopped her into everything. She’s falling onto a dolphin. She’s falling down a mountain. She’s falling with a lightsaber. Someone had her as Skrillex at the DJ booth, hands up mid-fall. The creativity was kind of impressive, just the commitment to the bit across a hundred variations. This wasn’t her first time becoming a meme. A few years before, some nude photos leaked and the internet immediately turned her into a trend. “Johanssoning,” they called it—people taking weird mirror selfies trying to recreate her weird poses. That one had a meaner edge to it. This stumble was just physical comedy, someone beautiful in an awkward moment, captured and spread before she could do anything about it. Maybe it’s just about recognizing something human in someone who’s usually untouchable. Friday, 4 October 2013. The Immortal Youth: You can always tell when a photographer gets it. Not the technical stuff—anyone can learn lighting. I mean when they understand what nakedness actually means, what it’s willing to reveal if you’re paying attention. Most fail at this. They get precious about it, or cold and clinical, or they’re just trying to provoke. Ryan McGinley isn’t any of those things. He started in Manhattan in the late ’90s, shooting Polaroids of the kids he knew—skaters, graffiti kids, queer kids, people from his world. That work got compared to Larry Clark and Dash Snow and Nan Goldin, which means something. Museums bought it: Guggenheim, SFMOMA, places like that. But the museums aren’t the point. The point is what you see in his pictures: total trust between photographer and subject. No exploitation, no performance, no distance. What makes his work stick is how it collapses the gap between document and intimacy. You’re not observing. You’re inside it. You feel the hope and the fear and the pure fact of being young, all at once, unfiltered. No gloss, no interpretation, no narrator standing above it all. “Yearbook” is exactly that: youth without apology. Skin, sweat, freedom, the knowledge that none of it lasts. His camera doesn’t judge any of it, and neither should you. There’s something about his pictures that doesn’t let you go. Wednesday, 2 October 2013. The King: Breaking Bad ended and I kept waiting for something to feel wrong about it, but it didn’t. Everyone had their takes ready—spoilers and analysis and plot breakdowns—but none of that was the story. The story was always about a man who wanted to matter finding the one thing that would make him dangerous, and then paying for it over five seasons. Walter was a high school teacher. Comfortable, forgettable, stuck in a life that never felt like it was supposed to be his. His old friends had gone out and built companies, careers, legacies. When they offered to help with his cancer treatment, he couldn’t take it. Admitting it would mean he’d failed somewhere that mattered, chosen wrong at some crucial moment. So he cooked meth in the desert, and for the first time in his adult life he felt dangerous, felt alive, felt like he actually meant something. The show was merciless with consequences. Every death—Emilio, Gus, Mike, Hank, Jane—traced directly back to that first choice, that moment he decided his pride mattered more than anyone else’s safety. Each betrayal compounded into the next. Each rationalization led to another body. By the end, everyone he touched was dead or shattered, and he was still standing in his lab, finally substantial, finally the thing he’d wanted to be all along. What I respected about the ending was that it didn’t try to redeem him. He got exactly what he wanted: to be feared, to be remembered, to matter. He walked through his creation one last time, touching the equipment like he was saying goodbye to the only thing he’d ever built that felt entirely his. That was always the point. He succeeded completely. The cost was everyone else. Tuesday, 1 October 2013. She Danced Out: She set up cameras in the office early one morning and filmed herself quitting. Not an email, not two weeks’ notice left on the desk. Just dancing out the door. Over four million people have watched Marina do it. Next Media Animation. That was the place. A Taiwanese company that turns news into animated videos for clicks. The boss wanted views and nothing else—quantity was all that mattered. Quality, impact, purpose—none of it paid. Only the count. You make content, chase the metric, make more if it fails. That’s the whole operation. She wrote about it afterward. On her blog she explained what actually broke her. Journalism was already dead before she even tried. Tragedies would light up the office—a building collapse, a disaster, and you could feel the energy shift. But if nobody died, the disappointment was palpable. She asked a colleague how he managed covering nothing but depression and catastrophe every day. His answer: “Why do you think so many of us drink?” That’s the real resignation. Not quitting a company. Quitting the deal you tell yourself—that the work mattered somewhere, that there was a point. You show up, you make content, you chase numbers, and everyone around you just finds ways to cope with it. Marina just stopped pretending. Tuesday, 1 October 2013. Smaug in December: I’m going to see The Desolation of Smaug in December. The trailer made it inevitable. Tolkien made a world that actually matters to people in a way that’s almost impossible to fake. Peter Jackson knows this. He doesn’t always get the execution right, but when he does, you feel the difference between a film and something that feels real. I know what I’m hoping for. More dragon fire. More elf women, obvious as that is. And more dwarves singing—which sounds dumb to admit, but that moment in the first film got me. All those short, hairy men sitting together drinking and belting out rough songs. It felt like actual comfort. Like home. Will the new film deliver all of that? Probably not. But I’m going anyway. Tuesday, 1 October 2013. Mouth Bomb: Red wine. That’s what pulls me through the nights when everything is too much thinking and not enough resolution—something that tastes like the people who made it actually cared. Sometimes smooth, sometimes sharp. Both do the job. Three guys—Michael, Sedat, Kolja—figured out they felt the same way, so instead of just drinking cheap corner-store wine and complaining about it, they built something. An online wine shop, but the kind where you can tell they’re not trying to sell you something, they’re trying to share something. They named the wines like they were forming a band: Mouth Bomb, Blutsbruder, Flying Pig. Just from the names you know they’re not taking themselves too seriously. The internet is full of wine shops now. Thousands of them. It’s supposed to be this great thing—everything available, infinite choice, the consumer’s dream. But most of it is dead inventory, spreadsheets moving product, nothing that points back to an actual person caring. This is different. These three guys came from completely different lives and found something they wanted to build together. The wines come from small producers who actually put work in. The descriptions are thoughtful, sometimes funny, never trying to sound like a magazine article. The prices aren’t a con. There’s something you taste when people actually care about building something instead of just moving product around. That’s what I notice here. Monday, 30 September 2013. You’re Not the One: Listen to “You’re Not the One” and you understand why pop music is the only thing that matters right now. Everything else exhausted itself—indie rock going in circles, hip hop needing pop just to survive, drum and bass a backdrop to watching people fall apart. Pop’s the only place where anything’s actually happening. Sky Ferreira showed up in the middle of it all. She was twenty-one, from California, model-pretty, caught with drugs, a topless photo making the rounds. All the rockstar clichés delivered at once. Which could have ended her career or turned her into a tabloid joke, but instead she just kept moving forward. No apologies, no hiding, no leaning into the drama either. The song is what matters. It’s stripped down—melodies that catch you without announcing themselves, lyrics that land without sentiment. Nothing extra. In an era where every pop track is engineered to death, this one feels like someone just saying something true. That’s harder than it sounds. I don’t know if she’ll sustain it. Could go anywhere from here. But she found something most people never find—the actual thing she had to say and the exact way to say it. That’s the work. Monday, 30 September 2013. Charli XCX: Pop music spent years being uncool. Not controversial, just beneath you - the thing record labels pushed on kids while real music happened elsewhere: indie bands whispering in dark rooms, or drum and bass, which at least had the decency of being too loud to think about. But something shifted. Artists like HAIM, Sky Ferreira, Icona Pop started proving you could write a hook meant to stick without needing to apologize for it. That a great melody didn’t have to come with self-consciousness. Charli XCX is 21, British, and she never learned any of that. “Nuclear Seasons,” “Stay Away” - they exist to be remembered and she doesn’t hide from that. “True Romance” takes the best of Spice Girls and S Club 7, cuts the dated production, and makes something that holds. It shouldn’t but it does. “SuperLove” has a video in Tokyo, which fits - Tokyo understands that pop doesn’t need permission. Just color, motion, no apologies. It’s basically a fever dream of neon and it knows exactly what it is. I’m not sure if this is a pop renaissance or just pop finally existing without an excuse. But there’s something genuinely good about music that wants to make you feel and move without making you feel stupid for wanting those things. Charli’s part of that - young enough that the self-consciousness never even reached her. Friday, 27 September 2013. Rick Owens’ Big Disruption: Rick Owens has always been the designer willing to do what fashion wouldn’t. Black, architectural, deliberately ugly in a way that makes you look twice—his clothes aren’t trying to please you. They’re trying to make you uncomfortable, to challenge what you think a body should look like draped in fabric. That’s why Fashion Week notices when he does something unexpected. In a world of incremental tweaks and seasonal trends, Owens moves like he’s dismantling the whole thing from the inside. He’s never cared about being likeable. The collections are often austere, sometimes genuinely difficult to wear. There’s something punk about it, except he has the resources and the restraint to actually pull it off without the theatrical desperation. He builds clothes like architectural statements, and the body wearing them becomes part of the structure rather than the point. That’s probably what made whatever he showed worth noting—not because it was beautiful or commercial, but because he did something that made people feel like fashion wasn’t entirely calcified. When a designer that serious moves, people pay attention. Even if they’re not sure what they’re looking at. Friday, 27 September 2013. Still Nothing: Paris Fashion Week, and FEMEN showed up topless at the Nina Ricci show, chanting about exploitation and the machinery of the fashion industry. I love breasts—genuinely, their weight and variety. But this gesture has been hollowed out by repetition. The shock is gone. The meaning burned off somewhere around the fourth or fifth time. They bare their chests, cameras flash, security moves them, and the industry continues its churn unchanged. It’s become a scheduled scandal, predictable enough that the fashion houses probably have a protocol. FEMEN used to feel like a threat to that machinery. Now they’re part of how it works. I think of the animal rights activists in the 90s who crashed fashion shows with fake blood and confiscated furs. Same moral clarity underneath, same sense of urgency. But the industry absorbed those protests so thoroughly that they became invisible. FEMEN is heading the same way—from provocation to routine, from shock to schedule. I don’t know if anything actually moves systems this large. Maybe sustained witness is enough. Maybe the point is to keep saying something matters even when the machinery proves indifferent. But I’ve watched this script play out long enough to know the ending. The breasts are still there. The industry is still there. And the distance between them hasn’t moved. Friday, 27 September 2013. Visible Changes: There’s this impossible space where everyone knows the system is broken but the machine keeps operating. France banned beauty pageants for children—everyone cheered—and then nothing changed because the pressure doesn’t care about pageants specifically. It just needs kids thinking about their bodies all the time, whether that’s through magazines or social media or what their friends are doing. The form keeps shifting. The content stays the same. I learned about Michelle Sank’s work through photographs of young people who’d decided to stop waiting and just modify themselves. Not someday when they’re older. Now. Jade, twenty, got tattooed eyebrows and hair extensions. Amy had breast implants at eighteen. Hannah got Botox at seventeen. Ben shaves his legs. Jason built muscle like it was a project. Some of them transitioned—Jack, John, Campbell, Matt, and Jaye all decided their original body was the wrong assignment. Others developed eating disorders. Some had liposuction before they could legally drink. Sank documented all of it, and you look at the collection and feel the weight of the repetition—how many young people are simultaneously convinced that they need fixing. What gets me is that you can’t actually parse intention from pressure anymore. Where does coercion end and genuine desire begin? Marc Jacobs sends minors down runways because there are child actors in Hollywood, so logically—but you can feel it skip a beat in your chest when you hear him defend it. Some of these kids probably felt better after their procedures. Some definitely felt worse and just buried it. Some were performing recovery from something that isn’t curable by surgery. I grew up before phones had cameras and social media had algorithms. You could be strange and actually get away with it. There weren’t constant images of perfected bodies in rotation. The pressure existed but it had gaps. Now these kids are bathed in it. By the time they’re old enough to recognize what’s happening, they’ve already learned that their body is a problem to be solved. And that lesson doesn’t unlearn. Wednesday, 25 September 2013. Hamburg Holds: After a photo shoot for Purple, I asked Inga Weisz about Hamburg. She’s not from there—grew up in Lower Saxony, in the countryside—but the city has hooks in her deep. The salt smell, fresh fish, that clear wide air all point back to childhood, to her brother, to feeling small and safe. She lives in Berlin now. Acts, paints, models. But Berlin is relentless—doesn’t rest, so you don’t rest, and after a while it wears you down. That constant anxiety that something’s happening without you, that you’re missing something real. Hamburg is the opposite. Big but contained, walkable, knowable. You’re not anxious there. You can think. She described autumn on the Elbstrand like she was tasting it: rain, empty, salt and freedom, a melancholy that just sits there. She’s a daydreamer, she said. Hamburg gives her room for that. Berlin gets in the way. What struck me was her lack of sentimentality about it. Not a romantic getaway or a postcard memory—actual medicine. She needs Hamburg to stay intact in Berlin. She’ll keep moving between them because she’s figured out what she needs: Berlin for the work, Hamburg for the breathing. One makes sense only because the other exists. You hear people talk about cities like that sometimes, but most of them sound like they’re performing. She just sounded real. Monday, 23 September 2013. iOS 7: You opened your phone and everything looked wrong. Not broken—just completely different. Fluorescent colors, animations that zoomed in from everywhere, icons that looked like plastic toys. The internet had been losing its mind about the redesign for weeks, but nothing quite prepared you for how disorienting it actually was in your hand. Some people online were calling it beautiful. Others said it looked like a Hasbro toy designed by someone on acid. Most people fell somewhere between panic and grudging interest. I wasn’t immediately sold, but I could see what they’d done. The whole thing had been rebuilt from zero, which usually looks rushed. But Jony Ive seemed to have figured out something about how your thumb actually moves through a phone—navigation in three dimensions instead of just left and right, backward and forward in space as much as up and down. Once you stopped panicking about the colors and the lightness of everything, you could feel that thinking underneath. iOS 6 suddenly looked bloated and ancient in comparison. This was clearly the foundation for something. It just wasn’t finished yet. The problem was the pacing. The animations looked good but moved like they were underwater, everything too slow and slightly wrong. And the brightness was exhausting—pastels everywhere, all the visual weight drained out of the interface. Marcel had been deep enough in app design to appreciate the intentionality behind it all, but he also saw the rough edges. The animations needed tightening. Some decisions that felt bold now would probably get toned down. This was just the skeleton of what iOS would become. Elena nearly lost her mind over it. She actually had panic attacks trying to decide whether to update, because iOS 7 had no going back—not yet. To her the whole thing looked like a toy, all those bright colors, too childish. But even she had to respect what the Control Center did, giving you real quick access to settings you actually needed. And if nothing else, at least Siri wasn’t a woman’s voice anymore. The real question was whether any of this mattered compared to Android. Paul had been thinking about leaving for a while. Android was cleaner, more interesting in a lot of ways, gave you more control. But the camera on the iPhone was still unbeatable. Everything else—the ecosystem, the way your devices talked to each other—made switching feel like starting from zero. You’d put up with a lot of design decisions you didn’t love for that kind of integration. The Nokia 1020 looked promising until you remembered it was Windows Phone. So iOS 7 would be here to stay, and in a few months or a year you’d stop noticing how weird it looked. The colors would probably mellow out. The animations would speed up. Someone would fix the things that felt broken now. This was just the moment they’d torn down the old design language and started again. It looked strange. But strange meant they were actually trying something. Friday, 20 September 2013. For Exposure: The Huffington Post was launching a German edition, and they wanted writers. Free writers. The same model that had somehow turned Arianna Huffington’s operation into a multibillion-dollar enterprise—just ask talented people to contribute without payment and see what sticks. Kai Petermann got one of those recruitment emails. He ran Stilsucht and Heldth, two actual blogs, and years back had made the decision to live off the internet—not as a side gig, as his real income. So when he was asked to write exclusively for HuffPo with nothing in return, he said no. And then he said it publicly. His response spread through German social networks. What resonated was how clearly he’d named it: if you’re a profitable company asking creators to work exclusively for you at no cost, you’re not offering opportunity, you’re extracting labor. Kai wasn’t against the Huffington Post as an idea. He’d seen it as genuinely good—fast, full of actual voices and opinion, less sterile than traditional online journalism. But there’s a line. He’d work unpaid on projects he believed in, things driven by passion. A massive operation that had already proven the business model works, now scaling it into a machine that values his time at zero? That was asking him to subsidize their growth. The other thing he pointed out was just true: exclusive content doesn’t drive traffic the way people claim. You don’t discover someone’s blog because they published something on HuffPo. You read things that interest you. And a company taking your exclusive work while paying nothing—at that scale, there’s no pretending it’s not exactly what it looks like. Still, he was realistic. Germany had plenty of bloggers who’d do it. Enough people making content as a side passion, enough hunger for visibility, enough lingering belief that it might eventually lead somewhere. HuffPo would populate their German edition without much trouble. When asked if he’d at least read the new publication, Kai said sure. Bundled, edited German content had merit. He just wasn’t going to feed it. Thursday, 19 September 2013. Ghosts, Money, Stories: I still read magazines on paper. There’s a ritual to it—the kiosk, the flip through, the decision. You hold something in your hands, smell the pages, feel the weight. It’s not romantic. Print just dies slowly, and what survives says something about what actually matters. NEON is what BRAVO becomes when the readers don’t drop out after high school. Still about sex and celebrities and looks, but the writers assume you’re smarter than you were. “Helene Hegemann: Four Years of Reading Nietzsche Stoned” instead of “What Boys Really Think of Your Jeans.” The basic themes repeat every couple years—love, friendship, money—but there’s an intelligence in how the magazine keeps finding new angles. They did a frankly shot photo essay about masturbation once, no soft focus, no pretense. Just people doing what everyone does and being weird about it. The weak part is the electoral voting essay that keeps getting recycled, the argument that voting is pointless that somehow every magazine believes it has to run. I skip that every time. VICE used to be genuinely strange. Now you can feel the money. There’s still good documentary work—a long piece about ghost rapes in a Bolivian village, the kind of writing that actually justifies the magazine’s existence. But the headlines are all designed to sound incredible, and then the subjects turn out to be novelty instead of knowledge. “Cambodia’s Child Spider Hunters.” “Sweden’s Shit-Sludge Debate.” I’m too lazy to open half of them, and I don’t know if that’s me or the magazine itself. The stories feel so far from anything in my life that reading them doesn’t change anything. You close the page the same as you opened it. Kinfolk costs about twenty-five euros and is almost impossible to find. Volume Eight was about Japan without clichés—no Harajuku, no kawaii, just the country treated as something worth real attention. Black sesame cherry blossom macarons. Japanese proverbs for living better. The wasabi harvest. Four hundred pages of design and photography and thinking that makes you realize you’re rushing through everything. I wish I could absorb it, become the person who reads this and actually changes. It’s quiet. It’s an island in a world that’s basically screaming bright nonsense for money. Tuesday, 17 September 2013. After Discipline: Someone showed me pictures of Takayo Kiyota’s sushi work and I couldn’t stop looking. They’re these elaborate designs made from colored rice and seaweed—detailed anatomically explicit content, basically. Pornographic sushi. The precision is incredible, which is what makes it work. She’s not doing this as some punk statement or conceptual art exercise. She learned actual sushi technique, spent real time with the medium, and then decided to make her art about explicit sexual imagery. I think about the discipline that requires. In Japan the sushi tradition carries weight—you apprentice, you learn respect for the craft, you understand that it means something. She did all that. You can see it in the work. The way the colors transition, the technical control of the rice, the care in the arrangement. It’s all there. And she’s using it on pornography. This reminds me of what a lot of traditional craftspeople do the second they feel confident enough to break their own rules. You spend years learning the orthodox way—the “right” way—and then the moment you’re good enough, you get to decide that the rules were optional. I remember watching a documentary about calligraphers where the old masters were all saying the same thing: learn the traditional stroke, understand why it matters, then you’re free to develop your own style. It’s not rebellion. It’s just the natural endpoint of discipline. You learn to be competent at the thing, and then competence gives you the freedom to point it somewhere else. She teaches classes now. That’s the part that gets me. People pay to learn from her. They show up, she teaches them the actual technique, and by the end of the class they’ve created something they probably never thought they’d make. Beautiful and crude at the same time. You learn sushi and leave with pornography. There’s something complete about that cycle. There’s something right about all of this. You learn a tradition, you respect it, and then you get to decide what it means. She picked explicit art. Why not. The skill is real. The vulgarity is real. Neither one cancels out the other. Tuesday, 17 September 2013. Lisbon: The tuk-tuk bounces hard over the cobblestones, and Jennifer’s next to me throwing her arms up. She’s the producer on this trip, dark hair whipping in the wind. A few minutes before we were talking about Taiwanese food, Beijing, Berlin. I was countering with Tokyo subway lines, landscapes around Toronto, the usual comparative geography that happens when you travel with someone who’s lived in three countries. Then the tuk-tuk hits something and she’s laughing, really laughing, the kind where you forget to be self-conscious. Her oversized black sunglasses are sliding down. The city’s moving past us in streaks—painted tiles on the buildings, old women hanging laundry, a restaurant sign in blue and white. We’re here because someone decided it was a good idea to fly out a group of people to see something new. The logistics are elaborate and strange. There’s a rooftop at a hotel called Memmo Alfama, wide views of the Atlantic, too much money in the air. But the actual moment is simple: sun in your face, cold drink in your hand, the knowledge that you can just be here without the weight of anything else. No Berlin winter waiting. No ramen budget. No refresh of email. Just this. What I remember most is the relief of it. That sounds dramatic but it’s true. We’d been living on practically nothing that fall—financial miscalculation, the kind that stretches across months and becomes a thing you’re just managing. You don’t realize how small it makes you feel until someone says yes, we’ll fly you to Portugal for a weekend. Then suddenly you’re eating real food, tasting wine that doesn’t come in a box, sitting in restaurants where the light is warm instead of fluorescent. The city doesn’t care about your circumstances. It just is—messy and old and beautiful in that European way where nothing’s been erased. Lisbon itself is a labyrinth. The streets wrap around each other in a way that makes no map sense. You can see the water from almost everywhere but you can’t figure out how to get to it. There are tiles everywhere—geometric patterns on buildings, scenes from history, the whole city is a surface you could read if you had the language. The maritime past is still alive in it. You can feel the trade routes, the people who left, the sea captains, the whole weight of a city that used to send ships everywhere and now just sits on a hill and lets tourists find it. The people we were with were interesting in the way travel companions sometimes are. Mostly strangers, some of them people you knew slightly from the internet, all of us thrown together. There’s a particular kind of camaraderie in that situation—you’re not close enough to have pretense, but you’re trapped together by circumstance in a way that makes you honest. Conversations drift between food and travel and work and nothing at all. Someone’s taking photographs. Someone’s drawing on their laptop. Everyone’s noticing the light. It’s the feeling you get on school trips when you’re old enough to actually like the people around you. We went from restaurant to restaurant. I kept ordering fish because it tasted like actual fish, not like something that came from a frozen box. There was wine. There was bread that had crust. These are stupid things to be amazed by but they made me realize how much the previous months had been a grind, how you adjust downward without noticing until suddenly you’re back up. The beach was there if you wanted it. The clubs on rooftops. The narrow restaurants where everyone knows each other. Portugal has this lightness to it—a different pace. People don’t perform as much. There’s less anxiety in the air. And then it’s Sunday and you’re at the airport and the gray sky of Berlin is waiting. You know the moment the plane lands and you walk out and feel that cool air. The relief is gone. You’re back in the system. The city doesn’t care about you anymore. It was fine before you arrived and it’s fine after you leave. The warmth drains out of your face. The memories start to feel like they happened to someone else. By Tuesday you’re back in the rhythm and the trip is already becoming a story you tell rather than something that happened to you. What stays with you from something like that is odd. A particular moment in a restaurant. Jennifer’s laugh. The specific angle of light through a narrow street. A taste you’re trying to remember. The actual texture of the trip is already gone. You can’t get that back no matter how many photographs you took. What you’ve got is the knowledge that the city exists and that you were there and that it was good. And that’s probably enough. You don’t need to have changed. You don’t need a moral. You just lived for a few days in a different frame and then came back. The thing is that it never lasts—the freedom, the ease, the sense that something has shifted. But while it’s happening, it’s real. Monday, 16 September 2013. How Long Will I Love You: There’s a version of this song where the question is the whole thing. Not rhetorical—an actual question. How long will I love you? And instead of an answer, there’s just her voice asking it into the dark, like she’s wondering the same thing. You know that feeling, the one where you’re lying there thinking about someone and you’re already tired from loving them, and you just want to know if it’s ever going to stop. Goulding’s got that in her voice. Not dramatic about it. Just tired and honest. Tuesday, 10 September 2013. Wolf: Tyler dropped a trailer for a film called Wolf. Bicycle, kid getting his ass kicked, that’s the whole thing. Nobody knows when it’s coming out or where you’re supposed to watch it. The Odd Future crew probably doesn’t know either. It’s the most Tyler move possible now—maximum mystery, genuine weirdness, no corporate handler in sight. He makes something strange and just lets it float there, refuses to explain it, and people stay interested because he’s actually talented and actually weird, not just doing the algorithm version of weird. There’s something almost restful about it. No discourse queue building up, no think pieces preparing to launch, just a film suspended in time that may or may not eventually exist. I’m assuming it will. I’m assuming it comes out before everyone forgets who he is, but I’d honestly respect him a little more if it didn’t. Tuesday, 10 September 2013. Lady Gaga Naked Again: She posed without clothes for V Magazine, which is basically her permanent default now. The nudity cycles through different eras but the commitment never wavers. If provocation is your whole strategy, you lean into it completely. I don’t get the devotion people have. They love her with genuine intensity, treat her like an oracle, and I understand why the willingness to be ugly or explicit appeals—most pop stars won’t go there. But shock loses power when it’s the permanent state. She’s not breaking boundaries anymore, she’s just living inside the ones she built. Still, you have to respect it. Most people would get tired of their own act, would soften or get bored. She just keeps going. Thursday, 5 September 2013. Lil Bub & Friendz: Vice is releasing Lil Bub & Friendz on YouTube, rolling it out slowly. That face. That tongue hanging out. Everyone loves Bub and I get it. There’s the guy who manages everything Lil Bub-related and he genuinely freaks me out. Something off about the whole operation. But then I found out he opened a Nyan Cat shop and suddenly I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s stupid enough to be fascinating. Might actually get me to America. I just want Bub to be alive forever. Wednesday, 4 September 2013. Undecided: Peer Steinbrück looks completely worn out, sixty-six, former minister-president, standing against that pale blue background trying to land a blow against Angela Merkel, the Teflon woman. Black suit, striped tie, sweat on his forehead. He’s visibly wrestling with his own face—should he smile or stay serious? Either way feels like it might scare off the swing voters. His words just bounce off her like nothing. Then Stefan Raab comes at him from nowhere with something about Oliver Kahn and Scottish kings and suddenly the ninety-minute debate is over. Are we any smarter? Maybe a little. While supporters and Twitter users are arguing about current events with terrible spelling and zero actual knowledge, I’m lying on my freshly made bed in my new apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg, drinking orange juice straight from the bottle, trying to pay actual attention, genuinely trying, to figure out the one thing I need to decide in the next three weeks: I don’t know who to vote for. Or what. Or even if I should. Politics could be simple. You figure out what you believe in, you find people who believe the same things, and you send them off to the Bundestag to act in your interest. Except it’s not that simple. From experience, I know that politicians promise everything before the election and deliver almost nothing after. Sometimes they can’t help it—coalitions, compromises, the economy shifts—but when you bring it up years later, it’s never actually their fault somehow, which doesn’t matter because there’s already another batch of aging men in suits ready to do the same thing all over again. Can you blame young people for being completely exhausted by all of this? Nothing actually changes. Some taxes down, some taxes up. Spending shuffled here, funding cut there. It’s always the same pattern. And programs that actually tried to do something different—student fees, Hartz IV, smoking bans—they turned into disasters that people still complain about. So who am I supposed to vote for? The two big parties look like beached whales to me. You can’t miss them but they can barely move. The Greens are too green, the FDP too yellow, Die Linke is just nostalgia for East Germany. The Pirates came in as real rebels with tech ideals and now they’re just a basket of people arguing about everything with no experience and no actual direction, jumping from one public embarrassment to the next. Then there’s the far right screaming about deporting criminals. I’m on the U-Bahn through Kreuzberg—Turkish families, Spanish tourists, German construction workers all crammed in—and I catch myself thinking that their stupidest slogan isn’t even entirely wrong. If I beat someone up in Japan they’d probably kick me out of the country forever. Fair enough. Then I remember Anne Frank and book burnings and children sent off to die in some pointless war and I shake the thought out of my head before I become a person I don’t want to be. I’m kind of jealous of my friends who know exactly who they’re voting for. Did they think about it more or less? Are they just in a different life situation where different things matter? Tax brackets, daycare spots, minimum wage? Would a basic income just shift the zero line higher? Do women need corporate quotas or is that something they even want? I genuinely don’t know. Maybe I should just focus on what’s good for me. I’m twenty-nine, self-employed, doing okay financially but not great, living on the internet, no kids, no one to take care of. So what party is even fighting for a guy like me? Actually, I just want world peace. Everyone to have food and shelter. And for the NSA to stop reading my mail. Okay, that’s concrete—maybe the Pirates? But the SPD wants that too, right? So do the Greens? Can I even demand that when there are so many bigger problems? Syria, for instance? Can’t I just vote out Obama or something? Then I’m sitting in this café in Berlin-Mitte on a Thursday afternoon, coffee and water in front of me, waiting for a warm croissant with ham and cheese, and it hits me: if my biggest problem right now is slow WiFi, my life is doing pretty well. Can I throw away my vote? Or should I just vote for whoever puts the most money in my pocket? Just care about myself, just Marcel in the café. But that doesn’t feel right either. To vote at all you have to be selfish or naive or good-hearted. Because even if I find the perfect party for me, what are the odds anything I actually want will happen? What if the whole political climate turns into a storm and it breaks right over my head? Maybe I should’ve gone into politics so I could arrange everything the way I wanted it. But then I wouldn’t be sitting in this café either. The debate ends. The candidate looks at me through the screen and says “You have the power. You decide the future.” I want to believe that the way I want to believe detergent can wash my shirt whiter than white. But one thing Peer Steinbrück doesn’t have to worry about tonight—he doesn’t have to figure out who he’s voting for. Monday, 2 September 2013. Rainbows Don’t Bite: Norman Röhlig was on his vacation terrace in the sun, drinking something cold, and he felt the truth he’d been avoiding: he lived in a tolerant German bubble. Berlin was gay-friendly, liberal, safe. But Russia was just one country, and homophobia was global, and he was sitting in his comfort doing nothing about any of it. He thought about writing something, calling it out, but figured he’d just yell into the void like everyone else. Instead, he actually did it. His friends Julian Laidig and others took the call seriously. They organized a protest in Berlin aimed at the Sochi Olympics, at McDonald’s and General Electric and Panasonic, all the sponsors pretending those games weren’t backed by a state that had criminalized homosexuality. Russian law banned discussing gay people around minors. Public hand-holding could get you arrested. Mobs hunted LGBTQ+ people online and hurt them, and the state did nothing to stop it, or worse, encouraged it. Thousands of people showed up to protest in Berlin. Most were ordinary people who’d seen Norman’s call and decided they couldn’t stay comfortable anymore. The march was loud and colorful, moving through the city to the Russian embassy. Norman had said something about being real people with hearts in the right place, not just a target demographic. And people listened. This is what happens when someone gets off the terrace. The stakes become real enough that other people move. Whether the corporations and governments actually listen is separate from the fact that something moved, that the comfort zone got smaller, that the margin between knowing and doing got thinner. Rainbows don’t bite. Neither do people. The Russian laws act like they do. The protest said otherwise, and thousands of people moved. Monday, 2 September 2013. Against Sexist Advertising: You see Chio Chips in German supermarkets and there’s this moment where you realize someone in a marketing meeting actually signed off on flavors split by gender, explicitly designed so men and women would buy different ones. It’s stupid enough to be funny, except it’s not the exception—it’s the rule. Axe ads, H&M lingerie billboards, surprise eggs for boys and girls like their DNA requires different plastic toys. The whole advertising landscape is built on the idea that women should be decorative and available, and men should want what they can’t have while also being soldiers or whatever. Stevie Schmiedel from Pinkstinks has been calling this out for a while. She organized a demonstration in Berlin against sexist advertising, and her point is simple: we see about five thousand ads a day, and the sexist ones stick because they’re the loudest. A woman in lingerie looks at you like she’s asking you something. A man in lingerie looks at you like he’s doing you a favor. The difference matters, especially because kids absorb this without any irony shield—they don’t get that it’s meant to be clever or post-ironic. A kid just sees a headless woman on a billboard and internalizes that the head part is optional. The petition they organized mentioned something that’s hard to unsee once you think about it: one in five kids in Germany shows signs of an eating disorder. You can draw a direct line from that to advertising that reduces people to whether they’re fuckable, to whether their body matches some photoshopped fantasy. And the advertising industry keeps pushing irony as a defense. Kids don’t know irony. Neither does anyone’s unconscious. Sookee, the rapper who was involved, talks about something else that connects here—how capitalism and patriarchy teach you to compete instead of cooperate. If there’s a sexually liberated woman, you can point at her and call her a slut, which makes you seem virtuous by comparison. If there’s a feminist woman, you can call her a shrew, which makes you seem reasonable. It’s comfortable, staying in the lane you’re handed. Hip-hop’s been through the same cycle—a decade of shock value and misogyny normalized as art, and slowly, incrementally, people getting tired of it. From the US you get out gay rappers in the playlists now. From the UK you get women MCs actually making it into rotation. It’s visibility that shifts things. The weird part is knowing all this and still moving through a world built on these assumptions. You see the advertising, you know how it works, you can trace the psychological mechanics and the profit motive underneath it, and it still lands. The system wants you to feel like you’re not enough—too weak, not enough hair, wrong shape, not the right product away from being acceptable. It’s so routine that challenging it reads as uptight or humorless, and conforming to it reads as just being normal. The demonstration wanted to make it public, to ask out loud whether this is actually okay, whether these are stories we want to keep telling ourselves about what men and women are supposed to be. I don’t know if it changed anything. But at least someone said it out loud. Wednesday, 28 August 2013. Three Magazines: Snuck to the kiosk in Neukölln and bought three magazines because The Spiegel is out there arguing print isn’t dead, so I figured I’d contribute. Three dead trees. Three different visions of what matters. Spex is the magazine for music people who think. Casper’s on the cover—a German rapper promoted from person to myth, credited with making hip-hop matter again. He has a blog that runs on their website or they cover him because of his blog—the cause and effect aren’t clear, and it doesn’t matter either way. The Sofia Coppola piece on “The Bling Ring” is actually good. Esther Buss doesn’t do the usual magazine thing. She moves through the film, writes about what Coppola does, gets an interview, ends. Clean. But then there’s the Arctic Monkeys interview, and it hits different because this was a band I listened to when they mattered. “The View from the Afternoon,” “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” “When the Sun Goes Down”—songs that were genuinely good, songs that meant something in that moment. And then one day they didn’t anymore. They know this. They’ve known for years. But they keep touring the old festival circuits, keep releasing albums, keep showing up in magazines like zombies of a generation that’s already gone. The magazine doesn’t explain why it published the interview, and I’m not sure they had an answer either. ZEIT Campus is the student magazine. This issue is about finding somewhere to live, which apparently is the only question students ask besides “where do I drink cheap” and “who will sleep with me.” Makes sense. There’s practical advice about roommates and landlords. Veronika Widmann writes about celebrity memoirs—Miley, Bieber, Küblböck—and it would be forgettable except someone ran an enormous kitten photo across half the page. That choice is worth more than weeks of reporting. Obviously. Then Simon Hurtz has a five-step decluttering guide that assumes students have money to donate their stuff instead of selling it. Weird, because a few pages back the same magazine is writing about student debt. Mädchen is the girls magazine, the thing for teenagers between childhood and adulthood. This month it’s all cheap makeup under five euros—lipsticks, eyeshadow, nail polish, good quality on no budget. You only live once. I grabbed a copy out of curiosity. It works. There’s a Sally Fitzgibbons surfer poster that captures something real about summer and freedom and the feeling of having waited too long to learn this. The rest is the same: a photostory about an exchange student falling for two boys on a South African beach, a diary entry from a girl who rides horses every day, a firsthand account from a girl who stopped four sharks. Every page is bright and generous, full of photos and short pieces. Nothing tries too hard. The One Direction movie ad on page 15 oversells. But otherwise it just works. Monday, 26 August 2013. Thoughts at the Speed of Sound: Lying in bed with the sheets tangled and the pillows useless. Blanket bunched up. You haven’t even undressed. You’re just staring at the ceiling while your brain refuses to settle. It throws thoughts at you like vultures, and you can’t organize any of it into something that makes sense. What you need is clarity. But instead you’re stuck with this noise—the coworker who hates you, the money situation, what comes next in your career and your love life and your actual life. No one can untangle these for you. No one can pull them out and sort them. So you lie there. You know other people have it worse. You know that knowing this doesn’t help. It never has. So you put on Zola Jesus, then A$AP Rocky, then Disclosure. You listen because it’s the only thing that feels possible. Not a fix. Not even close. Just something to do while your head keeps spinning. Monday, 19 August 2013. Three Years Selling Words: Nina opens a package that arrives on her bed one afternoon and can’t believe what she’s looking at: a new black handbag, worth maybe seventy euros. She didn’t order it. A handwritten card explains: “A small thank you for having such a great blog.” She’s thrilled, takes photos of herself with the bag in her bright bedroom, posts them with a link to the company. Everyone wins, right? Not really. Within a couple hours she’s being added to an Excel spreadsheet somewhere in an agency office—another line item for the publicity person to track. One blog post traded for seventy euros of merchandise. The math is not subtle. Looking at it, Nina has already decided what she’s worth, and she’s not going to bump that number up for a while. I’ve been making my living from this for three years now. Rent, food, books, records, the things that cost money in Berlin—it all comes from writing about whatever I find worth writing about. It’s not hard, really. You just have to remember a few things, which is what I’m laying out here. Or at least, things I try to remember. Most of the time. Start by not being a blogger. There are blogs everywhere—fashion blogs, tech blogs, music blogs, blogs about food, about travel, about cities. The thing is, if you want money from this, you can’t just have a blog. You need to become something people actually want. Nerdcore, Stil in Berlin, Journelles—these places exist everywhere in different forms, different audiences, different degrees of success. They stand out because they have a recognizable voice, they work hard, and they own their niche so completely that when someone wants to know about that thing, they come to you. And when they come to you, the agencies come too. Figuring out who you are in this space is the first move. What do you actually have that’s worth reading? Are you unusual? Write about yourself and what happens to you. Are you beautiful? Flood people with photos. Do you care obsessively about one thing? Make that your whole thing. The pattern holds. You become an institution by being so completely yourself that you become the place people have to go for that particular flavor of mind. The worst thing that can happen is being ignored. Mix boring writing with no personality and nobody’s going to show up. The agencies—they book the superstars or the people who are convincing enough to pass for superstars. So the thing you’re actually building is not a blog. It’s a version of yourself that people want to know. When you’re talking to agencies and clients, you need to sound like you belong in that conversation. Learn the vocabulary—TKP, Expandable Super Banner, Unique Visitors. If you don’t know these things, you’re giving them permission to lowball you. Put together a media kit in a professional design. One page, maybe two. Who you are, what your blog’s about, who reads it, your numbers, your social reach, some past work. Make it look like you take yourself seriously, because if you don’t, they won’t. But don’t disappear into the professional part entirely. Nobody’s a robot all day. Be charming when you need to be, but keep some space between the people at agencies and actual friendship. When it’s business, you’re charming but firm. They want you to write about their thing. You want money. That’s the whole conversation. The mistake I see all the time is bloggers trading their work for nothing. A gift, a coupon, a vague promise of “collaboration” later. And they’re grateful just to be noticed. They don’t realize they’re one line in a spreadsheet created by an overworked intern at some agency. The rule is simple: if someone’s using you to make money, they pay you. The agencies turn every article and every link into dollars. So you do the same. How much? If you’re small, maybe three hundred euros an article. If you’re medium-sized, maybe five hundred. If you’re big, maybe nine hundred or more. Links on your social accounts cost extra. Products that don’t fit your audience, you turn down, even if the money’s good. When you feel like they got a deal because of who you are, you can charge more. Give discounts to people who book multiple posts at once, or agencies that come back month after month. But don’t let yourself become their permanent sale item. Every so often it’s fine to write about something for free if you actually want to—just don’t pretend you want to when you don’t. The deeper thing is that the more time you put in, the bigger it gets, but only if it’s something people could actually care about. If your angle is too weird or you’re just kind of boring, you can work until your eyes fall out and nothing happens. Some people should probably just grow vegetables instead. But early on, before the money comes, you have to invest your own. A real domain, real hosting, good software, a decent camera. The tools matter. Not because they’re magic, but because trying to build something serious with garbage tools is like trying to make a good painting with a cheap brush—you’re fighting the material before you even start. Social media is where the traffic multiplies and where you talk to people. Post on Facebook, engage on Twitter, show your life on Instagram, archive interesting things on Pinterest. The numbers matter to agencies, maybe more than they should. The higher your count, the more you can ask for. So you grow your audience by being engaged, being weird sometimes, being honest. But also build relationships with the people who work at agencies. Meet them for lunch, go to events, become a familiar face. Unknown bloggers with great work sit in a pile. Known bloggers with decent work get booked. I don’t always follow my own advice. Sometimes I don’t answer emails because I’d rather drink wine and play Civilization. Sometimes I undercharge because I know the person asking or I wasn’t thinking. Sometimes I disappear from social media because I’m having a crisis and wondering why any of this matters. That’s fine, probably necessary even. What matters is not losing sight of the goal when you get back, and figuring out what actually works for you and what doesn’t. What your real niche is. How you actually like to write. Whether you want to do this alone or with other people. Whether you’re hunting for cool things to link to or making your own stuff. Nina learned something from that handbag. Yes, it felt nice to be noticed. But what actually happened was someone calculated that they could get a blog post and SEO links cheaper by sending a gift than by negotiating a rate. The internet is a market like any other. You’re the one who gets to decide what role you play in it. Thursday, 15 August 2013. Starting Over: Starting over costs everything—your habits, your routines, sometimes people who seemed permanent. You shed years of accumulated safety and doubt. The friends who stick around aren’t just good; they’re proof you got something right. I made a mixtape for this. Not because music fixes anything, but because there’s a specific gravity you need when you’re caught between who you were and what’s next. Dream Koala sounds weightless, like nothing’s fixed in place. Forest Swords is all rust and pressure, the sound of something breaking. Tei Shi moves through space like someone who already decided. Once you break the seal, there’s a momentum that carries you. The hard part isn’t the leap or the courage—those come cheap once you accept it’s happening. It’s the days before, when you’re still deciding. After that it’s physics. You’re already gone. Monday, 12 August 2013. Ladies in Flyknits: I used to flip through Der Prinz back when it had personal ads in the back, and you’d see everything: couples advertising themselves, lonely women, men who needed to lick feet. You’d wonder what happens to someone to make them fixate on one specific thing. I get Ronn and Behzod’s Tumblr now. Ladies in Flyknits is exactly what it sounds like. They call it a creative collaboration about things they love. I call it a fetish. But I mean that respectfully. Women look better in Flyknits than in anything else. Not heels, not flip-flops, not whatever. There’s something about how the shoe wraps around the foot, the mesh, the engineering of it. That’s the kind of thing that takes over, that makes you want to collect photos of it, that becomes its own complete world. Thursday, 8 August 2013. Westeros, 1995: Sandor Clegane in a Simpsons t-shirt, Daenerys trailing ferrets like a 90s It Girl, Bronn in a three-stripe Adidas tracksuit. Mike Wrobel, the French artist who blogs under the name Moshi-Kun, took Game of Thrones and dropped it straight into the decade of dial-up and slap bracelets. By the time that wedding went nuclear on television, the whole thing had already consumed everything. People who didn’t own a TV suddenly cared about Westeros. The books were everywhere. You couldn’t wait four years for the next season, so you read five hundred pages of George R.R. Martin in the original English if you could, then started again just to make sure it stuck. Wrobel makes a lot of illustrations—Soprano, Vader, Gollum, the usual suspects from film and television. But the Game of Thrones series caught something different. Taking these bloodthirsty medieval characters and rendering them as children of the 90s works because the aesthetics are so violently opposed. A warrior burned half to death doesn’t wear a vintage Simpsons shirt. A dragon queen doesn’t trail ferrets. You look at it and for a second you’re laughing at the pure wrongness of it, but then something else happens. It just sits with you. There’s something generous in the whole thing. He’s not saying Game of Thrones is silly, or that the 90s were great. He’s just holding them up next to each other and letting both things stay exactly what they are. Power and tragedy in Adidas windbreakers. That’s the joke and it’s also not a joke at all. Wednesday, 7 August 2013. Singular Beauties: I don’t understand fashion the way most people seem to. Collections pile up endlessly, color palettes get recycled, models cycle through. I watch the runway presentations and I see something that always looks the same: blank faces, expensive clothes nobody could actually afford, a strange choreography of beauty and emptiness. It’s a con. A machine that runs on itself. Scarlett Johansson showed up in Carine Roitfeld’s new portfolio. Roitfeld has spent decades running fashion magazines—French Vogue, then Harper’s Bazaar. For this latest series, she had Karl Lagerfeld photograph celebrities against a black backdrop. Dakota Fanning came. Grimes. Scarlett, the one everyone in Tokyo seems to have feelings about. The images are running in every version of the magazine—29 editions across 45 countries, starting in September. It made me realize something basic: fashion only becomes interesting when there’s a famous face attached to it. A beautiful dress is just fabric until Scarlett Johansson wears it. Then suddenly it exists. The models themselves disappear. They’re just surfaces for the real commodity, which is recognition, the weight of a familiar face. Maybe that’s how it has to work. Maybe that’s the only way beauty gets seen. But there’s something sad about it—the clothes and the women equally radiant, equally beside the point. Tuesday, 6 August 2013. After Amy: I’ve spent years wondering what happens to passion projects you eventually outgrow. You can sell them. Delete them. Or just stop touching them. Then they’re still there, but also not. Like abandoned people. Or a dog left on the highway. Goodbye, buddy. For 2,300 days—or maybe more, I never actually counted—my personal obsession was called AMY&PINK. I fed it. Alone, with friends. Eventually it consumed me, dragged me across the world, and I stuffed it with everything I had. More in, more out, I thought. And I was right. It didn’t take long before AMY&PINK became my job. If you can call sitting in front of a computer all day writing, digging up videos, and copying images from artists a job—hoping they’d be happy about it instead of suing. And that’s where the problem started. It grew. And grew. And grew. We’d built up this reputation for provocation and nudity that gave us a free pass to do things that barely qualified as defensible, but that same image kept us from doing anything real. We couldn’t push the things that mattered. Every time we fought ACTA or mocked the GEMA or defended privacy, we were on the frontlines, but our reputation as the hipster tabloid, the second-rate BRAVO, always pulled us back. “Privacy rights, sure, but where are the tits?” I could fight that at first. But as I got older, I just got tired. I felt us spinning in circles. My perfectly structured day was making me fat, gray, and stupid. The last year was just about keeping the lights on while trying to figure out how to lift this thing above ground level. I was abusing it. Without limits. And when we started competing with BuzzFeed and Reddit to see who could throw garbage at people fastest, something inside me died. How many posts can you write about cats or squirrels kicking men in the nuts before you want to walk into a school with a gun. The answer is four. There I was. Twenty-nine years old. Fractured. The site made money. Advertisers kept paying. We could’ve gone on forever. If AMY&PINK hadn’t been the thing I’d poured myself into, the thing wrapped up so completely in my own life that it had become another name for who I was. It had to end. Now. Because even if it had gotten bigger, more successful, more important, my misery would’ve grown alongside it. But how. This wasn’t just about me—other people would pour themselves into whatever came next. I needed to be careful with how I killed it. I’ve learned that quick decisions blow up in your face. Always. So I sat with it. I thought about what mattered, what direction made sense, what we actually believed in. It couldn’t be a 180-degree flip or scorched earth. It had to be a natural evolution. A logical, strong chapter. The biggest problem was that I’d stopped being able to write. When you spend years not reading actual newspapers or magazines and instead absorb whatever garbage teenagers and failed dropouts are spitting out—apostrophes everywhere, commas in all the wrong places, pure tabloid thinking—your mind gets foggy. I was rotting. So I went out and bought a stack of newspapers, magazines, books. I read on the balcony, in bed, on the toilet, on the floor, on the train, while eating, while drinking, in cafes, while walking, while fucking. I filled my moldy brain with interesting information, well-written sentences, actual structure. I learned real things. Useful things. I joined a gym. Started working in a new office. Ate less meat just because I preferred fish and fried tofu anyway. Small changes that added up to feeling less dead inside. The new project needed to capture that mental freedom and intellectual challenge. It needed to be about depth instead of mass, real opinion instead of cheap provocation. It couldn’t abandon beauty or pleasure—just refuse to let those be the only reason to publish. It needed to be the voice of a generation tired of being treated like idiots, that wanted substance alongside style. Less shit. More meaning. So after TOKYOPUNK and AMY&PINK comes NEUE ELITE. A magazine for young people creating themselves through the internet. A culture magazine for anyone who’d rather think than scroll, an opinion magazine for anyone wanting to change things and refuse to be mediocre. No more cheap provocation. Yes, but smarter provocation. No more shallow personal details. Yes, but personal details that mean something. No more nudity for shock value. Yes, but nudity that matters. I just want to be proud of this thing. We all do. I want to say “I’m Marcel from NEUE ELITE” and have it mean something. I want to be the king of words, the defender of the genuine. And maybe someone will give me a cookie. This date marks when we reclaim the internet and make it better. When we say no to more listicles. When we choose freedom over money, meaning over security. Usually that’s when everything falls apart, but this feels different. It feels right. Logical. AMY&PINK is now NEUE ELITE. And we’ve got a lot to do. Wednesday, 31 July 2013. Until Four AM: Friday night at Ferropolis and it’s chaos. Three Dutch guys in sailor drag sprint toward the main stage. A couple’s tangled somewhere laughing, shouting about freedom and techno and fucking. A topless girl with just pasties is crying in the middle of the path. Staff pull her away. Fire shoots across the sky. Bass hits. This is the Melt running—dancing till sunrise if you make it that long. By the time I’m setting up the tent in the press camp the heat is trying to kill me. Turns out it matters to stay away from the toilets and open pisser setup, except it doesn’t matter because they’re everywhere. The ammonia smell becomes part of you. What choice do you have. 25,000 people made the trip to Gräfenhainichen that weekend to a former mining site. Woodkid and Disclosure delivered. Azealia Banks tore into it. But it’s not really why people come. A blogger named Nike I met there later admitted she was feeling old and burnt out—couldn’t dance three days straight anymore. A girl from a bread company was handing out cookies for kisses with a bodyguard-friend enforcing the no-tongue rule. Julia was chasing musicians with a dying phone battery. Someone doing social media coverage had notes: standouts were Woodkid, Azealia, Disclosure. The Knife and Modeselektor looked like they were having shit days. Mount Kimbie was fine. James Blake was a snore. Babyshambles and Kettcar were just old rockers drowning in electronic color and kids on pills. The honest fact is people don’t come for the music. Some survey data made the rounds—45 percent said the lineup mattered. The rest came for drugs, sex, booze. A quarter said they slept with strangers. Thirteen percent got into fights. Nearly half said they did something they’d never do at home. A guy named Georg working in software said something true: high and commerce don’t work together, but that’s fine. The second you decide you’re above it all, you just end up annoyed at people instead of enjoying anything. So stop worrying about the glitter and the stupid costumes. Just have fun. Fair enough. I didn’t last past 4 a.m. either night. Too exhausted. Too old for it maybe, though that doesn’t change anything. You’re just tired. Your body hurts. You want your own bed. Without pills you’re at a disadvantage—that was the deal we made with ourselves both nights, stumbling back to camp feeling less alive than numb. By Sunday noon we were gone. Two hours back to Berlin in a packed car. Vietnamese food. Sleep in a real bed. The weekend didn’t stay with me. Not much did. The Melt is borrowed autonomy. You pay and you get to be loose and weird and chemically free around people worth looking at while noise keeps your body moving. You can throw yourself into it. But every year the novelty shrinks. The formula doesn’t change. You’re getting older. Whether I’d go again—sure, maybe. It’s good for remembering you’re alive. But there’s a limit. At some point you have to wonder what’s outside it. What keeps it going is the people. The three Dutch sailors. The couple laughing themselves stupid. The girl in pasties crying in the road. Take them away and Ferropolis is just metal. Them’s the thing that works. Friday night I’m walking through it again and fire’s up and bass is moving through everything and it’s happening. For a little while longer. Dancing till sunrise if you can hold it. If you care enough to try. Monday, 22 July 2013. A Day at the Lake: The weather actually worked out, so three people left the city to go swimming. Just clothes that move—sandals, dresses, nothing that stops you. The kind of day where you turn your brain off in the water and let everything else disappear for a few hours. Agnes Linn made a mixtape for it. She gets music in a way that matters—house, indie rock, disco, whatever she’d been into. That’s the part that stays. Not the clothes or the lake or the sun, but the song playing when you went under. Thursday, 6 June 2013. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Sacrilege: Karen O’s voice hits different when you’re not expecting it. Hearing Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time felt like permission to make noise that didn’t have to be beautiful or controlled—just raw and loud and yours. They came out of New York in the early 2000s when indie rock was still figuring out its language, and they said no to most of it. The guitar was angular, the songs were short and violent, and everything felt like it mattered in a way that made sense only to people who got it. What felt sacrilegious about them wasn’t shock value. It was that they didn’t care if you thought they were good. Just that they existed and meant something. That kind of indifference to approval is rare. You either felt it or you didn’t. Wednesday, 27 March 2013. Chaos and Commitment: Walking into Tokyo International Anime Fair was stepping into visual chaos held together by genuine enthusiasm. Costumes everywhere—meticulous pieces that clearly took months, others basically spray paint and commitment. Dragon Ball merchandise still filling one whole corner because the people who grew up with it are still devoted. Younger fans crowding the Miku booths. Stalls packed three deep with figures, posters, every possible variation on the same characters. A j-pop dj in one corner trying to keep the energy moving while people drifted past in their own orbits. Everyone was there because they wanted to be there, which was visible in every direction. Not nostalgia exactly, more like permission—the space where you’re allowed to care openly without hedge. I was mostly watching the costumes. The range was the thing. From absolutely meticulous to someone who painted their face and committed to it anyway. No hierarchy between them. All coexisting without anyone policing the investment level. That kind of spectrum without gatekeeping is rarer than it should be. Spaces like that matter in ways that don’t need explaining. Just noting it. Monday, 25 March 2013. Brennisteinn: Sigur Rós has always been the band you play when you need to feel something without anyone asking what it is. Jónsi’s voice—that falsetto folded into Icelandic and English and pure sound—turns emotion into texture, something you can almost touch. I’ve never looked up what most of their songs mean and I never will. The specificity doesn’t matter. What matters is the shape of the feeling, the way it sits in your chest and refuses to move. Monday, 25 March 2013. Contagion: Amina Tyler was nineteen and living in Tunisia when she decided to post two topless photos to a Femen Facebook page. One said “Fuck Your Morals” written across her body. The other was just her with a cigarette. Simple statement. She wanted to be part of something that mattered. The response was immediate and apocalyptic. A Salafi preacher named Almi Adel, who ran the national morality police, announced she deserved to be stoned to death. Not as a metaphor. As an actual outcome. He called the photos an epidemic, a catastrophe—the threat that other women might see her and start thinking they had rights to their own bodies. Which, apparently, required her to be murdered by men who got off on the idea. Her parents panicked and locked her in a psychiatric hospital. The state added criminal charges—prison time on top of the extrajudicial killing that was being openly discussed. The logic was airtight: one woman claiming her body couldn’t exist, or it would spread. Female autonomy was contagious. I kept coming back to that word. Epidemic. They weren’t calling it immoral or offensive or provocative. They were calling it a disease. Femen’s founder, Inna Shevchenko, talked about losing contact with Amina—they’d been discussing ideology, then her phone went dead, her account vanished. Her parents claimed she’d had a breakdown, that she was unstable and overly emotional. Nobody really knew what was happening inside the systems she’d landed in. But by then the internet had already exploded. Thousands of women posted their own topless photos in solidarity. Hashtags trending. A petition with seventy thousand names. It felt like it might matter, like enough witness and noise could actually change something. I’m not sure it did. What I couldn’t shake was the gap between what Amina did—a girl taking control of her own body—and what it triggered. The absolute panic. The willingness to kill to keep the world arranged a certain way. I’d known about honor killings and religious oppression in theory, but seeing it respond to one teenager taking a photograph made it concrete in a way I couldn’t unsee. After that, she just disappeared. I never learned what happened—whether she escaped, whether she’s still alive, whether she got out or stayed trapped. The story just stops. You read about her and then you move on because there’s nothing else to do from where you are, nothing but keep her name as something that actually happened. Sunday, 24 March 2013. Marked Up: The Tutor Crowd is a British learning platform that apparently decided to just start correcting London’s graffiti. Not removing it—just marking it up. You spray something with bad spelling and these people circle it, leave notes, edit your vandalism like it’s a homework assignment. It’s what every frustrated English teacher has fantasized about and never had the guts to do. Which means if you’re going to risk jail time spray-painting something, you better spell it right. That’s what gets me about this. The audacity of it. You’re committing a crime at night with your crew, you’re taking actual risk, and you can’t even spell the words correctly. It’s commitment without follow-through. You’ll break the law but not check your spelling. There’s something perfectly cruel about it. The graffiti artist wakes up and finds his tag marked up. Not removed, not buffed, just corrected. Someone else’s hand on his work. Someone pointing out that he’s not just a vandal but an illiterate one. Getting arrested at least makes sense. Getting marked down in English while committing a felony is humiliation that cuts different. I think about some English teacher finding this online and feeling that mix of rage and jealousy. Years of watching students tag desks wrong, spray-paint slogans with missing letters, wanting to fix it themselves. Now some website is doing exactly that. Living the dream. Making vandals look stupid for actually being stupid. That would drive you insane. Friday, 22 March 2013. When You Really Live in Berlin: I wasted an afternoon on this Tumblr account because every single post is perfectly calibrated. It’s one of those blogs where someone pairs a Berlin stereotype with a reaction GIF, and the combination is so exact that you can’t look away. I was making these horrible wheezing sounds and everyone around me was genuinely concerned. This Tumblr, called “When You Really Live In Berlin,” is basically a catalog of everyone who moved to the city and thought they were about to become a different person. Someone showed it to me, though I’m pretty sure it was everywhere on Facebook and Twitter at some point—one of those things that makes the rounds because it’s too specific not to. The format is stupid simple: a sentence about a very particular Berlin scenario, then a GIF that captures exactly how that moment feels. Most of it is about transplants and the gap between who you think you’re going to be when you move there and who you actually turn out to be. There’s one about Americans who fucked up in their home country and are trying to leave Berlin with at least some dignity intact. Another about people who won’t stop talking about Bread & Butter like it fundamentally changed them. Your roommate announcing he’s done with raving, which will last until next weekend. The chasm between what tourists imagine Berghain will be and what they actually find. That feeling when you come home from Fusion completely destroyed. Your girlfriend starting a fashion blog. The incoherent things people say to each other at six in the morning in some basement bar when they’ve been awake for two days. The reason it works is because Berlin is so fertile ground for this kind of thing. The city operates on a pretty thin myth—reinvention, freedom, being an artist or a raver or a photographer or whatever. People show up thinking they’re going to become someone, and the city has a way of making that fantasy very visible, very quickly. This blog just documents that without being cruel about it. It’s just observing what’s actually there. I can still feel myself wanting to go back and read the whole thing again. Friday, 22 March 2013. Haven Turner’s Home: Thursday, 21 March 2013. Curtis Kulig’s Bottles: Curtis Kulig’s bottles feel exactly like something he would do. You know his aesthetic—those crude, cheerful declarations he spray-paints on walls, always LOVE ME in that blocky hand, repeated until you stop questioning it. He built his whole practice around insisting that affection is worth the risk. He designed a limited series for Disaronno, fifty of them carrying his mark in glass and meant to be left in the world. They came with stickers. Objects to give away, not to sell. What gets me about it is the simplicity. No campaign. No metrics. Just something crafted with care and faith that someone will find it and feel something. There’s no way to guarantee that. You just have to believe the making was sufficient. I’ve left enough of my own work in cities to understand what that costs. When you put something in the world, the rest happens without you. You can’t control it. You can’t measure it. You just have to trust the gesture was good. That’s what these bottles are. Trust in glass. Wednesday, 20 March 2013. The Look: Sky Ferreira’s face isn’t beautiful in the conventional sense. Her features are strange and unconventional, weirdly precise in all the wrong ways. But she’s genuinely hot. It’s the cool, piercing stare. It’s the style—that whatever-generation aesthetic that knows how to seem like it’s not trying. The real work is in making it look effortless. She’s made it look inevitable. Wednesday, 20 March 2013. Public Shaming: Found myself on Public Shaming again last night—the site that just collects the worst tweets, organized by stupidity and hatred. It’s like scrolling through humanity’s worst impulses, catalogued and permanent. Racial slurs, misogyny, people defending assault, all with names attached, all available for anyone who wants to know that things are worse than they feel. The thing that gets me isn’t even the hatred. It’s how unafraid they are. These people posting this stuff as if they’re right, as if they’re part of the majority, as if they won’t be forgotten. No embarrassment. No second thoughts. Just conviction in their contempt. I’ve been reading the internet for twenty years and I recognize every argument. The exact same arguments in slightly different words. The same need to punish anyone outside the line. The same certainty. It doesn’t change. The platforms change, the audience changes, the people involved get older and sometimes die, but the stupidity is unchanging. At some point you stop expecting better and you just accept what you’re seeing. You close the tab and try not to think about it. Tuesday, 19 March 2013. Welcome to the Internet: Facebook spread from college kids to everyone else. Twitter seemed important. MySpace vanished. I watched it all happen between blog posts, wondering what shape we were actually building here. There’s something funny about how we thought we’d have a hand in it, that these spaces would be whatever we made them. Now it’s obvious—just real estate getting divided, attention getting mined, the same old story. At the time it felt inevitable, like we were watching history happen. Maybe we were. Tuesday, 19 March 2013. Kawori Inbe: Kawori Inbe photographs girls she finds on the street and shoots them in trashed apartments, abandoned forest paths, inflatable kiddie pools. Deliberately unglamorous spaces. She’s been doing this for years. The pictures don’t have any conventional beauty to them—they’re just strange and magnetic in a way that bypasses all of that. Her exhibitions have traveled to Japan, Spain, South Korea, the States. Real reach for someone working at this scale. Her website looks like it was built with a Game Boy, which is funny and also kind of fitting. Underneath that design failure is a painstaking archive she’s been building for years—pregnant women, musicians, people wearing Pikachu masks, East Asian women in every unglamorous state. I respect that she doesn’t try to sell you on the romance of any of it. You stumble onto her site, lose hours in the archive, and somewhere in there you realize you’re looking at something real. Not polished, not designed to impress. Just work. Tuesday, 19 March 2013. Tokyo: You step from a screaming arcade into temple silence and thirty seconds later you’ve moved from one extreme to the next—that’s Tokyo. The whole city’s built on collisions. Neon and wood, crowds and quiet, bass bleeding into shrine bells, everything hitting at once. It should be unbearable but there’s something true about the chaos. Not overstimulation in disguise but honest chaos, the kind that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Monday, 18 March 2013. The U-Bahn’s Midlife Crisis: The Berlin U-Bahn is falling apart at exactly the right moment in its life. Seventy-five years old, tired, creaking in tunnels under neighborhoods that have all decided to become expensive again. Tiles missing. Escalators giving up. Delays that feel personal. I loved this city partly because of the decay—there was something honest about it. But now the decay is starting to feel like negligence. The U-Bahn announces renovations the way someone in midlife announces they’re finally getting in shape. Full of conviction, no follow-through. Berlin’s got this problem where everything’s half-built or falling apart or both. The U-Bahn is the perfect symbol for it. You need it to move around. It needs serious money and serious time and nobody wants to give it either. So we all just ride it anyway, complaining about the smell, waiting for delays that feel like character development. Sometimes I think the city itself is in a midlife crisis—too old to be young and scrappy, too young to have figured out what it actually wants to be. The U-Bahn’s just the obvious casualty. Everyone’s taking it because there’s no alternative, and everyone’s frustrated, and nothing changes fast enough. It’s the perfect representation of Berlin right now: essential, broken, probably fixable, definitely getting worse before it gets better. Monday, 18 March 2013. Nicky: Thursday, 14 March 2013. Iggy Azalea: Work: Iggy’s always struck me as someone less interested in spectacle than she gets credit for. There’s a patience in her approach to production, a commitment to a sound that doesn’t need you to understand it immediately. She makes work that rewards listening carefully, which probably explains why so many people got her wrong—they were waiting for something louder, something that proved harder how much effort she was putting in. But that’s not her style. There’s an economy to her delivery that you either hear or you don’t. Thursday, 14 March 2013. Canned: An old woman opens the door at Mr. Kanso in Tokyo and that’s when you realize there’s no menu, no pretense, nothing except a wall of tins and permission to pick whatever you want. They range from three euros to twenty, depending on what’s inside—tomato soup, pickled beans, bear meat, honeyed bees, things with no label we had to ask about three times and still didn’t understand. We went in a group, the kind of group where everyone’s in a mood, and we started grabbing. Champignon soup, olives, chicken, mussels, ham, seal. My companion pointed at the beetles—three euros—and the woman asked if we were really sure. We said yes. She clearly didn’t believe us, but she handed them over anyway. They tasted like sewage. I mention this because the woman had warned us, and we’d ignored the warning, and now we knew exactly what sewage tastes like. It’s a specific kind of terrible—not spoiled or rotten, just wrong in a way that takes up residence in your mouth and won’t leave. I kept thinking about the sushi place around the corner, the kind where you get fish that actually makes sense for the money. We’d dropped a hundred euros on cans. But there’s a logic to eating something deliberately bad when you’re in the right frame of mind—it feels like freedom, or at least like proof that you can make stupid decisions and survive them. The beer was good. That helped. The next day we drove out to a plum blossom festival somewhere beyond the city with a couple of Oxford students, which is a different story entirely. What I remember most is coming back to the beetles, how they tasted, how the woman had asked twice if we were sure. There’s something in that about not listening to warnings that feels too obvious to spell out. After that I found some cats to pet, which seemed like the only reasonable thing to do with the rest of the afternoon. Wednesday, 13 March 2013. The Knife: A Tooth For An Eye: The Knife never made it easy. Caroline and Olof Dreijer built something alien out of Sweden in the early 2000s—electronic but never glossy, provocative but never sensational, queer and gothic in ways that most electronic music wasn’t even trying to be. They had this way of making you uncomfortable that felt necessary, like they’d diagnosed something rotting in pop culture and decided to make it visible. The videos alone—all flesh and surgical precision, bodies moving like machinery—seemed designed to annoy the right people. They’ve mostly disappeared from public life now, which somehow feels right for a band that made their best work by refusing to perform in any conventional sense. They were ahead of everything and also absolutely of their moment, which is the hardest thing to pull off. Wednesday, 13 March 2013. It’s Fashion: Wednesday, 13 March 2013. What We Keep: Everyone makes fun of how spoiled kids are these days with their PlayStations and phones. I was completely, unrepentantly spoiled—two Barbie dream houses, their ugly motorhome, stacks of GameBoy games, Lego I could disappear into. I treated my toys like private property. Gabriele Galimberti, an Italian photographer, spent time around the world asking children to show him their possessions. Then he photographed them with whatever they owned—sometimes a lot, sometimes barely anything. It depends where you are. The series is called Toy Stories. What gets you looking at these photos is how they render childhood both completely universal and totally arbitrary. There’s this girl with the exact same Minni Mouse I had. Seeing it in her collection somehow made it feel like it was never really mine, just something all of us were supposed to have. The real story isn’t about the objects though. It’s about what kids decide matters, what they’ll pose with, what they’ve claimed as theirs. That’s identity forming in real time. I think about the ones with almost nothing and the ones buried in stuff. Galimberti doesn’t judge. He’s just showing you what childhood actually looks like when you look at it—the weight of small objects, the way we decide they define us. Maybe they do. Wednesday, 13 March 2013. WHOA: Earl’s always been good at making music that sits wrong with you on purpose. WHOA isn’t any different, except it is—the production is thinner, more direct. He’s not burying himself as deep in the mix. Some of the tracks almost sound bright, or at least as bright as Earl gets, which isn’t saying much. It’s still mostly about isolation and distance, but there’s less of that desperate quality to it now. He’s not fighting the feeling anymore, just describing it. I kept waiting for something to happen while listening, for the album to build toward something or flip into a different gear. It never does, and I think that’s the point. He’s done with the drama. The work gets done in small moments—a shifted tone, a weird vocal effect, a beat that lands differently than you expected it to. The restraint is what makes it work. There’s something to respect about an artist who’s been doing this long enough to know what not to do. Most people confuse that with being lazy. With Earl it’s the opposite. Every choice he’s made not to add something means he’s thought about it first. Tuesday, 12 March 2013. Stoya Gets Dressed: Three minutes in and it hits you why this was a bad idea, so you close the tab and get back to League. That’s the Stoya I know—xHamster clips, very explicit, nothing hidden, and you never quite make it through to the end. That version of her. But there’s not enough money in it anymore, especially not in Los Angeles. So she’s modeling for The Pop magazine now, which makes perfect sense. She’s got the body, the photographers—Sean & Seng—are solid. It works. Same fundamental transaction, different frame, better lighting. Less of that grim feeling about the whole thing. Monday, 11 March 2013. When the Party Ends: The third Hangover was supposed to be the finale, and you could tell the filmmakers were trying hard to make it one. Trouble was they’d also decided the trilogy needed to get serious—the jokes got darker, the plot got messier, like they weren’t sure if this was still a comedy. I watched it feeling that specific awkwardness of a film that’s lost its way, trying to be something it was never made for. By the end I wasn’t moved or amused, just aware that something essential had shifted. Friday, 8 March 2013. Harajuku Heat: Harajuku in August and everyone’s in layers and platforms despite the heat, sweating through Takeshita Street like weather doesn’t matter. The crowd’s packed so tight you’re barely moving anyway. You watch kids in thrifted cardigans and careful styling move through the mass without hesitation, like being seen a certain way matters more than breathing. In Harajuku it does. The outfit is the point. The sweat is collateral. Friday, 8 March 2013. Tokyo Actually: Since I was a little asshole, moving to Tokyo was the dream. The capital, the brightest and most dazzling city in the world. No question. Spending entire nights in some smoky manga café getting obliterated on beer and video games. Watching schoolgirls in uniform at secret rock clubs—thin ones, cute ones. Getting off on the neon signs and ramen shops and shopping centers. Wait, remember when I wrote that hugely provocative thing called “Goodbye Berlin, Go Fuck Yourself,” where I basically screamed “Adios, bitches!” and got on a plane with all my stuff to spend the next year of my increasingly short life in Japan? Yeah? So here I am now. In Tokyo. And I’m thinking: “Hm. Yeah, okay.” This dream had been so deep in me for so many years, through so many phases, that I probably never actually thought about what moving here would mean. Moving to Japan at almost 30. Whenever I heard “Tokyo,” I’d get so hard I could cut steel, drooling all over the AKB48 fan magazines I’d bought months earlier and still couldn’t read a word of. But honestly, what’s there to understand about singing girls in bikinis anyway. The excitement dies the moment you’re sitting in your tiny apartment. I used to think: “Who cares how small it is, I’m never home anyway—out, out, partying in Shibuya, this is it, best life ever!” Now I’m thinking: “For this much money I could rent a three-bedroom in Kreuzberg and actually have furniture that doesn’t look like it came from a fire sale. God, this fridge is loud.” I used to think: “I want to be a Japanese teenager, they all save the world with giant robots while doing homework and flirting with the cute red-haired girl week after week!” Now I’m thinking: “99 percent of people here have no idea what I’m saying. I wanted my soup hot, HOT, not lukewarm. HOTTO. ATSUI. Fuck, I’m going to starve to death here.” I used to think: “I don’t care what anyone else is doing, I’m happy just sitting in the Starbucks in Harajuku breathing in that loud, intense fashion-music world. Breathing it in real deep.” Now I’m thinking: “Does nobody sit next to me because I’m foreign? Are they scared of me? Do I smell? I would genuinely trade a testicle right now for a proper almond-marzipan pastry from a real bakery.” I’m 29 years old. And I feel exactly like I did when I first showed up in Berlin. Building an entire new friend group from scratch? Vegetating in a tiny hole? And why do apples cost five euros? Look, maybe I’m just too old for this shit. Maybe you’re supposed to do this at 18, not now. This doesn’t feel like incredible freedom—it feels like exile. And I’m missing everything that’s actually happening back home. Since I was a little asshole, moving to Tokyo was the dream. The capital, the brightest and most dazzling city in the world. But I haven’t stopped to think in years whether that’s still my dream. Whether my priorities have shifted. Whether it makes sense to keep burning everything down and starting over every few years. So I sit here and imagine all the things I could do with the money I’m throwing out the window. All the people I’ve grown attached to. Real apples, not whatever these overpriced imposters are. Tokyo is wild. No argument. But every hour I feel less convinced this is where I’m supposed to be. Am I about to be the world’s biggest idiot? The guy who threw everything away, cried for two days, and went running back to his mother? Will they put my picture next to “irony” in the dictionary someday? First dissing Berlin like crazy, then crawling back on his hands and knees? Nope, not happening. Maybe this is just homesickness talking right now. Maybe in a few months or years I’ll look back at these words and think “what the fuck was I writing about.” Maybe the city will eventually swallow me whole and the love I felt last summer will come roaring back. Or maybe I’ll be on a plane back home in a few days. See the wasted money as tuition in figuring out what actually matters. Go down in history as the ungrateful Tokyo enthusiast who had his shot and blew it. Either way. What I did learn: Think sometimes. Even about the things that feel like they’re hardwired into you, like they don’t need a second look. Don’t just charge headfirst into every option that shows up just because it’s there. Think about it. Actually use your brain. Tokyo: Yeah, probably. But maybe not for a whole year. Maybe. Wednesday, 6 March 2013. Checking Out: Winter kills you. You’re stuck inside with friends, someone’s girlfriend, the neighbor’s dog, whatever. Gray, cold, nothing to do. You could pretend to care about small talk but you’re already half-dead. Boot up Star Wars: Force Unleashed on Xbox and you’re Galen Marek for the next six hours. Vader’s apprentice, throwing people around with the Force, tearing apart walkers. The graphics fade eventually but the game doesn’t care. You’re deep enough that winter stops being real. The giveaway bundled it with shower products, which was funny in a way nobody meant. Like the cure for winter gaming haze includes a shower. Maybe it did. But for those hours in the dark, that was the whole solution right there. Tuesday, 26 February 2013. The Blow: Saturday, 23 February 2013. The One Thing That Worked: ZDFkultur was supposed to be the proof that they understood their own medium. A digital channel that had figured out how to make something for people who wouldn’t otherwise bother with public television. Not by chasing trends or dumbing down—just by giving young people who worked in media a space to make the kind of programs they’d want to watch. I saw the same faces across different shows, a core group of hosts who seemed like they actually cared, and because of that, I cared too. Building that took time. Thomas Bellut shut it down this week. Budget cuts, he said. What he actually did was prove that public broadcasting’s commitment to people under thirty-five lasts exactly as long as money is easy. Peer Schader laid out what happened: Bellut had already fired younger employees while keeping everyone with old contracts. So he destroyed the audience those people had built, while they watched from their untouchable perches. The one thing that might have justified their jobs to a new generation just got deleted. The Facebook reaction was somewhere between mourning and resigned disgust. People asking why ZDF dumps millions into crime dramas nobody asked for. Why they’re paying for this. The questions I’d been asking too. What comes next is the usual salvage operation. Shows get scattered to other channels, time slots, networks. The coherence that made it work dissolves. You can’t rebuild that when the thing is already dead. Right now, public broadcasting is arguing why Germans should keep paying their fees. Relevance. Cultural value. Why they matter. They just destroyed their best argument for it. They proved that the second money gets tight, they’ll kill the one thing that actually works. Everyone watching learned the lesson: stability is just slow death with a different name. Might as well switch channels. Friday, 22 February 2013. You Can’t Be My Girl: The genius of the song is that it doesn’t pretend you don’t already know. Someone hasn’t said it yet, but you can feel it—the softness in how they treat you, the distance they’re keeping. Darwin Deez gets that moment where you’re both just waiting to acknowledge what’s obvious. What gets me is how he plays it. The production is all jangly and bright, which should feel fake against lyrics about things that can’t happen, but it doesn’t. It’s not ironic. It’s just honest—the way you can feel awful about something and still keep moving, still put on the song and think about someone you know doesn’t want you. There’s something true in that gap between the sound and the meaning. Life is mostly that gap, isn’t it. Carrying on with the knowledge that things won’t work, but not letting it flatten you into silence. Friday, 22 February 2013. Share Button: Sony announced the PlayStation 4 last night in New York and the internet lost its mind. New controller with a screen built in, a share button for streaming, graphics that make the current generation look quaint. The console itself? Nobody actually saw it. Just the controller, the promises, the usual corporate talk about innovation and the future. At this point in gaming you’ve got maybe four real options. Spend serious money on a high-end PC and keep upgrading forever. Buy a Wii U and pretend that’s fine. Wait for Microsoft’s next move. Or start saving for whatever PlayStation is coming. The PS4 felt like the thing worth waiting for. The controller is the thing that stuck with me. A touchpad built in, a button dedicated to sharing. That’s the real announcement underneath all the PR. Sony’s betting that what gamers actually want now is to broadcast what they’re playing—the headshots in Call of Duty, the endless grind in Diablo, the weird hacks you’re pulling off in Watch_Dogs. Not in a twitch-stream way, but just instant, built-in, frictionless. Send a clip to your friends before you even stop playing. The rest of it was standard presentation stuff. Simplicity, seamless gaming experience, instant access, all developers on board, the death of the current generation, all of it. The real question nobody could answer was price. Speculation ran at around 400 euros, maybe more, maybe less. Basically anyone willing to wait a few months for a December launch. What got to me wasn’t the specs or the promises. It was the sense that something was actually shifting in how gaming worked. Less about solo achievement, more about showing someone what you just did. The console itself felt almost secondary. It was the start of turning gaming into something more social by default, even when you’re alone in your room. Whether that’s good or not, I wasn’t sure then. Still not sure now. But it felt like it mattered. Thursday, 21 February 2013. Spring Breakers: I ended up in the photographer pit at the Berlin premiere instead of wherever we were supposed to be. The passes didn’t work out, the crowd was insane, and honestly it was better this way. Photographers are the only people at these things you can actually talk to. Everyone else is either screaming or getting paid to stand somewhere specific. Harmony Korine made Spring Breakers. He wrote Kids, so there’s a pedigree to consider. But this isn’t Kids. It’s Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, two other girls, and James Franco doing… well, it doesn’t matter. The plot is window dressing. Gomez and friends rob a diner, go to spring break, Franco plays a cartoonish gangster who enables them. Selena Gomez disappears halfway through the film because apparently her Disney handlers were freaking out about the swearing and nudity. The whole thing is so thin it’s almost not there. What’s there instead is visuals. Endless visuals. Red sunsets, pools, beaches, bodies. Korine films everything like he’s obsessed, because he is obsessed. And the dialogue repeats itself—spring break, spring break, spring break—like an incantation. The transformation from high school girls to criminals happens so flatly you barely notice it. The film doesn’t pretend to care about narrative. It’s just scaffolding for images. And the images work. That’s the weird part. I sit there knowing it’s empty, feeling it’s empty, but Korine has arranged everything so carefully that the emptiness becomes seductive. It pulls me in. A film with nothing to say, saying nothing, but with such style and confidence that I keep watching anyway. Each shot is framed like it matters even though nothing about the story matters. The visuals are enough. I’d buy a massive TV just to watch this on mute. When the Skrillex dropped over a violent scene, I realized where I’d landed with this film—somewhere between knowing it’s hollow and being completely into it. That’s the whole thing. There’s no depth to excavate, no message to decode. Just the look of things, the feel of it, the sheer confidence in being completely without substance. And somehow that’s the only argument it needs. Wednesday, 20 February 2013. Hooters Japan 2013: In 2013, Hooters held a beauty pageant in Japan. It’s the kind of specific fact that lodges itself in memory without much reason—American franchise culture exported, meeting whatever local sensibilities and marketing dynamics were in play. I never saw the actual thing, but I remember it existing, which is maybe the whole point. Friday, 15 February 2013. Domo 23: Tyler’s always been good at capturing a moment in time that doesn’t need to mean anything beyond itself. Domo 23 is just him in the booth, voice clear and a little distant, over production that lets the space breathe. No flex, no chorus, just a guy thinking out loud about whatever was on his mind that day. That’s become the thing I go back to his records for—not the production flex or the concept albums, but these smaller moments where he’s just in there, present. It’s the kind of song that disappears until you need to hear someone else’s thoughts moving at the speed of your own. Friday, 15 February 2013. Snoop Through The Ages: Snoop’s been everywhere so long you stop noticing it. King of rap, reggae, porn—call it what you want, and Snoop owns all of it without flinching. That shamelessness is part of it. The weed, the money, the women, the cars. Other people spend careers hiding that stuff or turning desire into a performance. Snoop just lives it. VICE did the inevitable spread a while back, Terry Richardson shooting him for their music section. Just portraits, clean background, Snoop at different points in his life. Nothing fancy. The piece that ran with it traced his whole arc—early days through his reggae era, the Snoop Lion thing. People thought he was reinventing himself but he was just doing what interested him at that moment. There’s a confidence in that. You can follow his trajectory from now back to the beginning and it all connects, not as narrative but as a man who did what he wanted and somehow it was always cool. Most people either get locked into one lane or they chase every trend. Snoop never looked panicked. The reggae thing didn’t feel desperate. He just moved on to whatever came next. I think about that whenever I see him pop up somewhere. He’s not selling you a transformation, not performing authenticity. He’s just the same guy across decades, living the same way, and the world caught up or it didn’t. Twenty years in and he’s still a presence. Not a comeback story, not a legacy act—just continuously, effortlessly there. That’s a kind of power most people never get. Thursday, 14 February 2013. Burning Desire: Lana Del Rey built her whole thing around a specific feeling—the luxury of sadness, wanting something that will never be yours, mourning it before it even leaves. You either get it or you don’t. For years I didn’t, then suddenly I did, and now there’s no going back. Her records don’t try to convince you of anything. They just exist in that space where everything is beautiful and broken at once. No irony. No performance. Just commitment to that feeling, which is why people who connect with her work come back to it obsessively. It’s not comfort exactly. It’s more like validation—proof that someone else sees the world this way too. Thursday, 14 February 2013. Delivered: The warehouse at night: temporary workers from Poland, Spain, Latvia, packed seven to a room in prefab bungalows. Then the dawn bus to Amazon’s sorting facilities. Underpaid, monitored, guarded by contractors wearing Thor Steinar hoodies. Far-right stuff, worn openly, by people in charge of your packages. The documentary doesn’t make speeches about it—it just shows you: the light, the faces, the routine humiliation of people broken enough to accept it. I finally watched it yesterday. Directors Diana Löbl and Peter Onneken actually rented rooms in the worker housing, filmed it in a way that lets the rhythm and the light do the talking instead of narrating the obvious. You see the dormitory ceiling. You see the face of a guy trying to keep his job. You understand, through texture, what living in that particular hell actually means. And then the thought that ruins everything: Amazon knew this. H&M knew. Apple knew. Every tech company, every fast-fashion brand, every supply chain I’ve been part of as a consumer has someone at the bottom of it living worse than I can imagine. My sneakers have that baked in. The phone I’m typing on. The coffee. The cheap chicken. There’s probably blood somewhere in the genealogy of everything I own. Which triggers the familiar cycle: you watch the doc, you feel clear-eyed and moral for about six hours, you think “I’ll just stop ordering from Amazon” like that’s a sustainable position, and then… you get tired, or you need something fast, or the price is too good, and the guilt evaporates and you’re back in the old patterns. I know myself well enough to know this is what’s going to happen. Some blogger cut all Amazon links from his site. Clean break. Genuinely admirable. I’m also pretty sure I know how my version ends: with good intentions and a shopping cart. Thursday, 14 February 2013. When Iceland Got Serious: I remember when everyone wanted to move to Iceland. It was the digital frontier, where internet culture could flourish freely. That was before the government started closing strip clubs and now they’re pitching a plan to ban all pornography online. The Icelandic interior minister Ögmundur Jónasson has been pushing this recently, and apparently he’s convinced every political party that digital pornography should be illegal. Full network-level blocking. Credit card companies cooperate. You buy porn, you can get arrested. The reasoning is familiar: protect the children. Kids see this material and it breaks something in them—teaches them that violence and degradation are normal sex. Halla Gunnarsdóttir, the minister’s advisor, says it plainly: teenagers don’t know what’s right and wrong anymore because of porn. It makes moral sense if you don’t think about how the world actually works. What’s genuinely funny is that if this passes, Iceland would be the first Western democracy to successfully implement this kind of ban. Suddenly every other politician floating the idea has a template. And I’m picturing external hard drives flying off shelves as Icelanders download everything before the cutoff. The thing is, you can’t actually block the internet this way. The technology doesn’t work. Teenagers have VPNs. But what gets to me is the moral certainty—the real belief that prohibition works, that you can legislate desire, that the answer to something complicated is to make it illegal and let enforcement figure it out. Iceland already closed every strip club and survived. So maybe they’ll do this too. And maybe it’ll work, or maybe it’ll just be an elaborate and expensive way to prove that you can’t engineer society through bandwidth restrictions. Either way, that dream of Iceland as a digital haven is dead. Wednesday, 13 February 2013. Voting for Strangers: The voting award at Berlin: six filmmakers you’ve never heard of, and you pick which one matters. Döndü Kilic, Jan Krüger, Claudia Lehmann, Myrna Makkaron, Meggie Schneider, Jan Soldat. I don’t know their work - just names and titles - but that’s the whole thing. You’re voting for people before they’re people. And one day one of them is the name everyone knows. Tuesday, 12 February 2013. Moving to Tokyo: Got maybe two real emails asking about the Tokyo move. I like to imagine 176, but two feels more honest. The whole thing started because I was that Sailor Moon kid. The one who spent lunch money on anime magazines and somehow got convinced Japan was this mythical place at the end of the world—all impossible TV and weird machines and culture doing eight things at once. Unreachable. That’s what it felt like. Then at some point I thought: actually, it’s not that unreachable. I work online. I have enough money. I’m not yet at the age where I’m too embarrassed to leave the house. Flights, paperwork, finding a place—none of it’s impossible. So why not. Turned out that knowing people there made everything possible. I’d already been in touch with other bloggers, photographers, and artists online, and met them when I visited before. Real connections matter because the practical stuff is impossible without them. Japanese has three writing systems. I barely speak any. Bank accounts, subway cards, ordering from a chain restaurant—you need someone for that. Worth building relationships first. I was German and between 18 and 30, which meant I could get a Working Holiday visa for a year. Just needed proof of money, travel insurance, and flights. Took about a week from application to approval. I sold or got rid of most of my stuff before I went. The Terminal was the place I’d work sometimes—a coworking space and café wedged above a clothing store in Harajuku. Three euros an hour, ten a day, and I could just sit and work without anyone bothering me. Free coffee, tea, juice. Food if I wanted it. Exhibitions sometimes, the occasional talk. Clean, expensive-feeling place, everyone genuinely nice. I ended up at Sakura House, the outfit that rents to foreigners and temporary residents. Hannah had done the same thing years earlier. My apartment was in Setagaya, apartment 203, a small one-room, and with a discount I was paying around 700 euros a month. More than Berlin. Everything costs more than Berlin. Tokyo’s expensive if you’re eating at restaurants every night and paying for nice hotels. But eat lunch instead of dinner—way cheaper. Learn to cook a little. Use the transit smartly. Skip the places that charge you just for showing up. The convenience stores are absurdly cheap and open 24 hours. Fresh fruit is another story. That costs like an entire month’s rent. Not exaggerating. Japanese: I barely spoke it. Had years of lessons, somehow learned exactly three sentences that all say the same thing about my blue umbrella having asthma. I grabbed a travel phrasebook before I left. The basics matter. English doesn’t work anywhere except the Apple Store. The whole thing about Tokyo vending machines selling used women’s underwear—yeah, that exists. Wouldn’t waste money on it though. Probably smells weird. Better to talk to actual women. Better smell. Better everything. I started posting updates every week once I got there—Tokyo Diary entries with photos and whatever was happening. Also started a separate blog, Friends in Tokyo, which was more like a real journal. Pictures from Akihabara, conversations with artists, weird music videos. The whole thing suddenly felt possible in a way it really hadn’t before. Monday, 11 February 2013. The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard: The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard is this quiet observation of what happens when smart people build something that threatens the wrong industry. The Swedish founders just wanted to make a file-sharing site, and somehow ended up in an actual legal war. Most of the film is them trying to live their lives while the case drags on—work, relationships, the weight of it all. There’s no dramatization, just the slow machinery of the legal system grinding down on kids who thought they were solving a technical problem. Very gradually, they understand that being right about the internet means nothing to a court. By the end, there’s resignation. That’s what the film is about: what it costs to build something that makes powerful people angry. Saturday, 9 February 2013. The Authenticity Trap: The thing about hipsterism is the vigilance—the exhaustion of performing not-trying, of calculating which signals read as honest. I’ve watched it evolve over twenty years: the indie posturing, the craft cocktails, the whole machinery of distinction dressed up as genuineness. What kills me is that the moment you’re aware of being authentic, you’ve already lost it. Saturday, 9 February 2013. Two Door Cinema Club: Next Year: Two Door Cinema Club makes indie rock that doesn’t let you settle. There’s a restlessness to it—the guitars are tight but urgent, and songs feel like they’re always driving somewhere. I’ve been wondering what comes next from them, whether they’ll push further or circle back to whatever first grabbed me. Either way, I’m waiting. Friday, 8 February 2013. Astronauts: Astronauts are the one thing capitalism can’t quite ruin. You can slap any product on them—deodorant, cars, energy drinks—and they still somehow represent something real. Space travel is the last frontier we haven’t completely turned into content and engagement metrics. What gets me is the simple math of it: you’re ordinary, you get selected, you go to space, you come back extraordinary. Not because anyone made you famous but because you actually did something most people never will. You have real stories, real photographs, real evidence that you’ve been somewhere else. That matters in a way that’s hard to articulate in an age where everything’s a performance. Buzz Aldrin and the whole space program mythology built something that still has weight. Everything else capitalism sells us—money, status, influence—these things we’re supposed to want but nobody actually believes will make us happy. Space is different. Going to space might actually be worth something. Thursday, 7 February 2013. Unguarded: There’s a video of Obama singing the Pokémon theme, full commitment, no irony. Just him in a suit belting it out. What gets me is how human it makes the whole thing feel—not because he’s good, but because he’s actually unguarded for once, caught being dumb on camera. You don’t get to see that from people in his position. That’s what makes it work. Tuesday, 5 February 2013. Matthias Willi: The Moment After: I’ve spent an embarrassing fortune on concerts over the years. Festivals, basement gigs, my cousin’s school nativity play—whatever. I’ll pay money to stand in a crowded room for hours, soaked in my own sweat, listening to people I barely know play songs I’ve already heard, usually while someone spills beer on me. It’s a stupid tax on the feeling that something real is happening in front of you. Matthias Willi found a better angle. This Swiss photographer worked his way backstage at major festivals and captured artists in that narrow window right after they stumbled offstage—drenched, fried, before the mythology could click back into place. That moment after the show, when the person behind the persona is just standing there, trying to remember how to breathe. He photographed Iggy Pop, Matthew Bellamy, Josh Homme, Peaches, Cee-Lo Green, Farin Urlaub, Kid Rock, Juliette Lewis, Brian Molko, Robert Trujillo—I could keep going. All these artists in that raw, exposed second. And what gets you in those images is that you can’t fake what you’re seeing. The exhaustion. The relief. Sometimes the quiet disappointment. The person walking back there is a completely different person than the one who walked out. It’s the moment nobody buys a ticket to see, and maybe that’s the whole point. Thursday, 31 January 2013. Proteus: You’re broke, your head feels like weather, the one decent club banned you years ago and your favorite spot doesn’t exist anymore. So what do you do? Proteus. Ed Key and David Kanaga made this game where you land on a colorful island and walk through the forest. Full stop. That’s the entire thing. The colors shift and blur. Tiny pixeled rabbits and bees and birds move around you. The sun’s shining. Music drifts in the air. After a few minutes it goes dark—glowworms gathering at the beach like they’re in the middle of some insect orgy, meteors raining down in waves, you hiking up a mountain to look at the moon, then suddenly it’s light again. Everything resets. You do it over. It’s basically the “Catch the Dragon” episode of South Park—the masturbation one—except there’s no dragon. Or maybe there is and I just never found it. Hard to say. Costs ten euros on Steam. Also available for Mac if you need that. The whole thing is weirdly hypnotic. You’re not playing in any real sense, not solving anything, just moving through these color shifts and listening to the music and letting it all happen. It works. Thursday, 31 January 2013. Takako Iwasa: There’s a woman in Tokyo, Takako Iwasa, who makes clothes for her cats Piru and Kotaro. She sells them in her shop to other people doing the same thing. The video about her is meditative—you watch her work on these little garments, the cats posed in them, and it feels oddly peaceful. Then you realize what you’re actually watching. Not some distant future. This. You, alone, in front of a screen with fingerprints all over it, and the only living thing that acknowledges you is a cat that only cares because you fill its bowl and clean its box. And it looks at you all day like it understands exactly how you got here—not mad, just clear-eyed about what you are. Thursday, 31 January 2013. The Lonely Island: YOLO: The Lonely Island got me with ’I’m on a Boat’ and ’Dick in a Box’—SNL digital shorts that worked because the music was actually well-made underneath the stupidity. They’d get real musicians to play straight man to the joke, and it was this weird collision of competence and absurdity that shouldn’t have worked. YOLO came later, after they’d exhausted the novelty of the formula, and I think the moment had passed. They’re still there doing the thing, but the thing got smaller somehow. Tuesday, 29 January 2013. Rainer Brüderle Looking at Girls: Politics is basically reality TV if anyone actually had power. They don’t, not really. Just enough authority to make headlines before everyone moves on. Front pages, news cycles, Twitter. The standard loop. Rainer Brüderle ran the FDP caucus in the German parliament, which was already kind of a joke. He became briefly notorious when journalist Laura Himmelreich published in Stern that he’d hit on her during an interview. Whether that’s actually what happened is anyone’s guess. Either way, something cracked open. Women started posting their stories everywhere. #Aufschrei. An outcry. For days the posts kept coming: the same catalog of things that happen when you’re a woman in public. Hands grabbing asses, hands on breasts, men exposing themselves on trains. Things everybody knew about but nobody talked about, until suddenly they did. Someone made a Tumblr called “Rainer Brüderle Looking at Girls,” riffing on those “Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things” memes. Except the women he supposedly looked at—Angela Merkel, older women, beauty queens—weren’t girls at all. The joke was just how off his taste apparently was. What stayed with me was how the parody became part of the actual moment. The meme and the movement got tangled up together. The joke and the rage became one thing. Maybe that’s how change works now. Maybe it’s just performance. Hard to tell the difference anymore. Monday, 28 January 2013. King Krule: King Krule makes music that doesn’t announce itself. The songs are all shadow and restraint, asking you to sit in the dark for a while before they reveal anything. There’s an intelligence to the production—the way he layers things so they’re complex without being showy. I keep coming back to his work because it doesn’t demand anything except attention. That’s rare. Friday, 25 January 2013. Sad Eyes: Crystal Castles made music that sounded like something breaking. Alice Glass’s voice—thin, distant, a little destroyed—floated over these harsh, brittle synths that sounded like metal folding in slow motion. There was nothing warm about it. The aesthetic was deliberately bleak: the compression, the glitching, the way they built these pop songs out of the least pop-like sounds possible. You’d hear them on headphones late at night and it felt like the music was happening in a cold place, in a room with broken light, someone staring at nothing. That’s what the sad eyes were about—not melancholy exactly, but a kind of beautiful refusal. The refusal to make it easy, to make it pretty in any conventional way. They turned that refusal into their whole sound. That takes a certain kind of vision, a certain kind of stubborn commitment to not giving you what you expect. Monday, 21 January 2013. SpongeBob’s Secret Life: Monday, 21 January 2013. Spring Breakers: I swear this movie’s been in the works forever. Years of hype, years of waiting. Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in bikinis with a couple other girls, James Franco styled like an absolute lunatic, Harmony Korine behind the camera making the most excessive thing possible. Spring Breakers finally comes out and somehow over a thousand people have already rated it on IMDb. Is it out? Were there early screenings? Who knows. Doesn’t matter. I’m here for it either way. I just want to see those Disney bitches go feral and reckless, which is clearly the whole point. If Miley Cyrus had signed on too, my entire childhood would be comprehensively fucked, and I’d be fine with that. Friday, 18 January 2013. Ten Little Missions: Winter weekends are dangerous. You get drunk somewhere alone, pass out in the cold, maybe don’t wake up. So we invented missions—little absurdities to justify the two days, to give some shape to the blank space. I wasted years watching this show on Bavarian TV, Space Night, just planets spinning and synthesizer drones starting at midnight. I’d sit there at four in the morning unable to move, transfixed by literally nothing happening. It became my entire ritual—an excuse to stay awake and alone when I should have been sleeping. That’s the first mission right there: find the one dumb thing that will colonize your entire existence and commit to it fully. The others follow naturally. You pick a face—shock that you’re still alive, permanent disgust, whatever armor works—and you wear it the whole weekend. You fuck someone you normally wouldn’t look at twice, tell yourself it’s good for their ego or your karma or that it doesn’t matter which. You eat peanut butter straight from the jar. You go into your roommate’s room while he’s out, clean it perfectly, and leave him an invoice on his desk. You buy a kids’ prank book and execute every single thing—flour in the salt shaker, water bucket balanced on the door, toothpaste under the door handle. They all work. They’re mean and they work. You forget your alarm. You say shit at parties you shouldn’t say. You pass around information about friends that they’d paid money to keep private—their insecurities, their measurements, the fact that they’re texting at three in the morning from a bad place. Drunk girls with father issues will call. They’re looking for an excuse and you gave them specifics. It’s callous. It works. The weekend isn’t about improvement or growth. It’s about permission. Once you give yourself that, everything else cascades—the small cruelties, the bad sex, the pranks, the hours burned on nothing. The missions aren’t a plan. They’re just what actually happens. Friday, 18 January 2013. Magazine Watch: Most days I’m too lazy to keep up with what everyone’s posting online, so I grab magazines from the newsstand instead. These are the ones that stuck. Megan Fox gave Esquire an interview that Vice called their worst ever, shot by Sante D’Orazio. She was once the hottest thing alive—everyone’s moved on to Taylor Swift by now, different era entirely. But she still looks incredible. The interview apparently was a disaster, which somehow matters more than another perfect celebrity profile. Bitch is a feminist pop culture magazine I found in New York and immediately kept a copy. This issue has cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, something on abuse in the gaming industry, American hipster culture. What’s good is they actually think about these topics instead of what German feminists do—screaming with a sledgehammer, destroying anything that even hints at sex or men. Claudelle Deckert is everywhere if you watch German TV. Soaps, reality shows, crawling around in the jungle. Now she’s in Playboy with her tanned breasts. Whether you think they’re worth looking at is your call. I’ve seen better. Fashion websites finally decided they need print magazines to be taken seriously, so High Snobiety is out with issue six. Larry Clark, Boys Noize, lots of photos and reportage. Fashion industry stuff mostly. Forbes this month is depressing. All these people who became millionaires while you were still figuring out masturbation. David Karp, 26, invented Tumblr. Rachel Hoat loves the internet. Jennifer Fan does stocks. It’s a good way to feel completely useless. Thursday, 17 January 2013. HAIM: Hazy Shade of Winter: HAIM feels like driving at night in winter, when everything’s still and the roads are empty. There’s something crystalline about the way the three sisters sing together, and their guitar work has this gentle precision that never tries to impress. Winter songs are dangerous—they’re sentimental by default—but HAIM avoids that trap by being honest. They make music that just sits with you in the cold without needing anything from you. Thursday, 17 January 2013. Back to SBTRKT: Wednesday, 16 January 2013. Wildfox: White Label: Wildfox makes clothes that look like genuine thrifted finds—pulled from somewhere real, worn soft from actual decades—except they’re manufactured fresh. White label extends that thinking: if your pieces are strong enough, they don’t need a logo. You make something beautiful, hand it off unmarked, let another brand take the credit. There’s something I respect about that faith in the work itself, though I’m aware someone else owns the profit while you collect a paycheck and move on. Still, it’s an honest way to work if you actually care about the object rather than performing a brand. Wednesday, 16 January 2013. Fashion Week Berlin: If you’re somewhere normal right now instead of at Berlin Fashion Week, you actually won. I know this because I’ve spent the last five years being dragged to enough of these events to understand what’s really going on. The truth nobody admits: nobody actually wants to be there. The designers are frustrated because the front rows are full of TV extras instead of real buyers. Those extras are frustrated because nobody’s photographing them. The models are frustrated because they can’t throw themselves naked onto the catering table. The agency staff are exhausted from overtime. The event managers are furious because every asshole with a press pass thinks he’s suddenly some legendary fashion authority. The vendors are dead inside from standing and smiling. The journalists are annoyed because all they’re getting are interviews with fashion bloggers. The bloggers themselves are annoyed because it’s snowing. And I’m annoyed because I can’t be home in my underwear eating croquettes and broccoli in cream sauce while watching Adventure Time and Regular Show. The pattern is straightforward: the less important you actually are, the more you perform importance, the better time you’ll have. Get one invitation to some forgettable runway show—doesn’t matter if you’re a tiny blogger—and something breaks. Suddenly you’re walking around in sunglasses and whatever you grabbed at H&M, completely convinced you’re Anna Wintour’s personal representative. Then all those Facebook group tips come back to you. The ones about camping outside the white tent so maybe a street-style photographer notices you. The ones about stacking every goodie bag so you don’t miss a single deodorant sample. The ones about writing down every moment because your 52 followers are supposedly waiting on you for exclusive information. From far enough away, Fashion Week is just an inflated machine spinning twice a year—a reason to justify the industry’s existence. If magazines and blogs didn’t write about these designers, nobody would care about them. Without readers, companies wouldn’t invest. Without investment, the publications would collapse. So everyone holds hands around the circle and keeps dancing. Maybe you don’t get to choose whether you participate. But if nobody in Berlin’s fashion world cares about what you actually do, be grateful for it. The alternative is shuffling between freezing industrial courtyards in the snow, nursing cheap champagne at promotion parties, smiling at people you don’t want to smile at. You get to stay home in your underwear with your croquettes and broccoli, watching what you actually want. Everyone at Fashion Week right now would trade places with you. Guaranteed. Tuesday, 15 January 2013. Away From Keyboard: You watch someone get hunted and slowly disappear into paranoia. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg created The Pirate Bay and actually changed how millions of people accessed culture, and then governments decided to make him the example. The doc follows what comes after—the moving between countries, the encryption, the isolation. There’s no redemption, no clever escape. Just someone who can’t actually hide from something this big. It stayed with me because it’s bleak in a way most internet documentaries aren’t. There’s no comfort in it. No victory, no solution. Just the slow realization that you can’t win this game. Monday, 14 January 2013. Beyoncé: There’s something about watching her that makes you understand why presence matters. She’s been doing this for twenty years and it feels like she’s still figuring something out with each album. That’s why people pay attention—not just because she’s talented, but because she seems to actually know something about desire and power that most of us are still learning. Friday, 11 January 2013. The Discreet Charm: Kate Upton became a cover girl the standard way, and like most cover girls she cycled through the usual magazines. But something about her made people care longer than they typically do. It wasn’t the obvious stuff—the look, the figure, whatever works for a magazine cover. It was how little she seemed to be trying. There was an actual disinterest in how she carried herself, no performance, no attempt to seduce you into thinking she mattered. Most women in that business seem desperate for you to pay attention. She’d already decided you probably wouldn’t, and seemed fine with that. That refusal to perform, that casual indifference—that’s what actually made her interesting. Wednesday, 9 January 2013. Astronaut Complex: Here’s what I think I figured out about twenty years ago and have been pretending not to know since: most of what guys do, they do trying to get laid, or married, or noticed by someone they want to get laid or married to. Everything else is just the architecture we build around that core fact. You know the professions we’re supposed to want, the ones that supposedly make you attractive? Doctor, lawyer, firefighter, cop. They’ve got status. They’ve got uniforms. They’ve got the promise of financial security or heroic virtue or both. And I get it—those are good reasons to want to be those things. Except they’re not really the reasons. The reason is always the same. We think being a doctor will make someone want us. We think rescuing people from a fire will make someone want us. We think having a badge and a gun will make someone want us. But somewhere in the haze of male fantasy, someone realized there’s one profession that beats all of them. Astronaut. These are guys who don’t just help people or look impressive in uniform. They literally leave the planet. They go to space. They’re not bound by anything down here anymore. And apparently, to the female imagination anyway, that’s the hottest thing a man can possibly be. You see it in every movie that matters. In Armageddon, the astronaut gets the girl—gets Liv Tyler, no less. In Mass Effect, the astronaut seduces literal aliens. In Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear, who’s basically an astronaut, is the guy every toy wants to be around. The astronaut doesn’t have to prove himself. He’s already beyond all the normal hierarchies. He’s already won. So that’s what we’re actually chasing, I think. Not the job itself, but what the job represents—transcendence, otherness, the confidence that comes from having already been somewhere no one else has. The astronaut is the fantasy because he’s the one who doesn’t care what anyone down here thinks. He’s already been somewhere better. Which is funny because most of us will never be astronauts. Most of us will stay on the ground—designers, writers, teachers, insurance adjusters, whatever. And we’ll spend our whole lives trying to become the thing we think will make us attractive, knowing the whole time that we’re lying to ourselves. That’s the joke. That’s the trap. That’s being a guy. Tuesday, 8 January 2013. Ten Little Missions: Jennifer Lawrence looks at cameras like she’s waiting for them to stop being stupid, and I fall for that every time I see her in something. If Scarlett Johansson ever does Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway while I’m in New York, I’m going. Not because it’s theater. Because she’s in it. The Christmas detritus is still in a bag in the closet. Throw it out or give it to Mrs. Reuscher upstairs if I ever feel charitable and she’s in a receiving mood. Probably not. The weather has been so gray and relentless that I’ve spent serious time imagining a weather cannon—just something to clear the clouds for one day. I know it’s stupid. I think about it anyway. There are too many cats around here. I joke constantly about getting another one. This might actually happen. The off-hand masturbation research continues—maybe there’s something worth exploring there, maybe I’m inventing excuses for novelty. Both feel true. And then there’s the neighbor without curtains, and I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours at the window like some kind of creep, which is exactly what I am. Everyone’s a travel blogger now. Everyone’s a food blogger. It’s the same photos, the same narrative of discovery, nobody actually saying anything new. There’s a snack with some kind of pepperoni-meat flavor that keeps circling. I keep almost trying one. I won’t. The single time I tasted one years ago was enough. Friday, 4 January 2013. Like Father: Terry Richardson photographs naked girls desperate for fame, already famous, or too strange to ignore—everyone knows this about him. But he also documents his own life with the same flat, unsparing eye. When his mother died, he posted her final hours on his blog, and suddenly the condolence messages from agencies and magazines started piling up like he’d done something generous. This week he posted photographs from his book “Mom & Dad.” It would have been his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Bob George Richardson was a photographer too, back in the old New York days, and he died in 2005. That’s more than twenty years now. Photographers photograph everything, which means they end up with an archive of their own lives that’s every bit as unsentimental as their work with strangers. Maybe that’s the only kind of honesty that survives—not what you choose to show, but what you choose to frame. Friday, 4 January 2013. Rosie Jones: Million Dollar Baby: Rosie Jones is one of those comedians who just gets it—sharp, self-aware, doesn’t lean on shock value even though she could. There’s an ease to her stage presence, like she’s genuinely thinking through something out loud instead of performing a bit she’s rehearsed ten thousand times. She’s got the kind of confidence that only comes from not giving a shit if you’re listening, which of course makes you listen harder. Thursday, 3 January 2013. Sky Ferreira: Lost In My Bedroom: Sky Ferreira makes music that sounds like it’s being played in the dark from someone else’s speaker in the next room—intimate and distant at the same time. There’s always something slightly off-kilter about it, like she’s decided to ignore how a song is supposed to work and do something weirder instead. The bedroom-pop thing isn’t an aesthetic choice for her so much as it is the actual terrain she operates in: small, controlled, deeply personal. You get the sense she could care less if anyone’s listening, and somehow that makes you want to listen harder. Thursday, 3 January 2013. Toro y Moi: Say That: There’s this moment where Chaz Bear’s voice comes in like he’s barely there, just floating over the production, and you realize you’ve been holding your breath. Toro y Moi has always had this way of making the electronic stuff feel intimate, like he’s singing into your ear at 3 AM in an otherwise empty room. The arrangements are pristine but they never feel cold. It’s why I keep coming back—not for the innovation or the credibility, but because his records sound like they’re just for you, even though millions of people probably feel the same way. That’s the trick, I guess. Making something so polished it disappears and becomes pure feeling instead. Wednesday, 2 January 2013. Where You’ll End Up: Everyone’s standing in the supermarket right now in complete panic. Half the city had the same idea and nobody knows what to bring to a party that hasn’t even been confirmed yet. Or they’re on the phone with friends scattered across town trying to lock down plans that feel both inevitable and totally uncertain. Or they’re just going to stay home with the cat and hope nobody notices they’re not out. I asked around about where people actually end up on New Year’s Eve and it’s basically a masterclass in how badly humans handle arbitrary deadlines. Oliver just hates the whole thing—stays in with friends, drinks, watches movies, treats it like any other night. He figured out that the real secret is to go out on January 1st instead, when everyone else has already exhausted themselves trying to have forced fun. That’s when the club actually works. He’s also got strong opinions about people who misspell it Sylvester and would move the whole holiday to February 29th in leap years just so he wouldn’t have to do it so often. Jessica told me about New Year’s in Rio that was supposed to be all white dresses and flower boats and magic on the Copacabana, but it rained so hard the fireworks disappeared and everyone’s clothes got ruined and she almost got crushed at some David Guetta concert. She still loves it though, which is somehow beautiful. This year she’s just telling friends to show up at a hotel if they feel like it—no pressure, no planning. That’s when it actually works, when you stop trying to engineer the moment and just let people come if they come. She also mentioned Austrian ski towns where you can drink all day and then sled down the mountain at midnight if you’re still standing. The one thing that keeps repeating with everyone is the same: either you hate it or you love it despite being disappointed every year or you’re just going through the motions. Angela loves it—she’s heading to Hamburg with a friend this year, though even she’s had those forced family nights where you’re just counting down to midnight while nothing happens. Everyone’s got resolutions they forget by January 2nd. The ones who seem okay with it are the ones who stopped trying to manufacture the perfect moment. Monday, 31 December 2012. Pretty in Pink: That dress. Molly Ringwald in that prom dress, the one Duckie’s mother made—hot pink, excessive, homemade in the way that screams love and desperation at once. The film’s entire aesthetic lives in that contradiction: the rich kids’ casual cruelty, the poor kids’ gorgeous, elaborate effort. What struck me rewatching it wasn’t the romance (though there’s something there about wanting what seems impossible) but how much care went into making broke look beautiful. The thrift-store cuts, the layered jewelry, the way Andrew McCarthy’s boyfriend haircut costs nothing but attention. Duckie’s outfit is the real proposal in this movie—not the prom but the commitment to looking like yourself when yourself is all you have. That’s what the whole thing is really about, I think. The clothes are where the class war actually happens. Sunday, 30 December 2012. Ten Missions: 2012 was on its way out, and I had ten things that needed doing before it finished. Whether the year was good or complete shit was personal math—comparing highs to lows, meetings to endings. But there was the list. Watch Rihanna naked on a balcony. Someone pure-hearted had wished for this at Christmas, apparently. Never ask the internet to Photoshop the sun between your fingers; that only ends badly. Find the trailer for another zombie apocalypse, spot Tony from Skins if you can. Move to a different country—staying felt unbearable. Book a flight east, locate the oldest man alive, ask him why he hasn’t died yet. He’d say it was the sun. Probably not true, but I liked the mythology. Kiss anyone named Marcel on New Year’s Eve. Trip anyone named Paul, Thang, or Janos—girls only, which already tells you something. Stare at Lana Del Rey photos one more time before everyone forgot her by spring. Start a new blog or magazine on January 1st. Make it so good it destroys everything that came before. Drink only tap water on December 31st and January 1st. Only tap water. Then kiss Marcel one more time. The specificity haunts these old lists. The named people, the Rihanna moment, the pointless water fast. I actually believed these small rules would matter. Friday, 28 December 2012. Terra Firma: Friday, 28 December 2012. That Edge: She’s been good since That 70s Show, but Black Swan was the moment it clicked for me—watching her commit to something dark and physical. The magazine covers are fine but irrelevant. The work is what sticks. Thursday, 27 December 2012. Adidas’s Blue Period: I always notice when a brand commits to a single color across a whole season. There’s something stubborn about it, especially with adidas Originals—that minimalist streak they’ve always had. Blue for spring and summer is the safe choice, but when you see it everywhere in a lineup, it stops being a design decision and becomes almost a statement. You’re not thinking about adidas the sportswear company anymore, you’re thinking about adidas as a color, as a constraint that forces everything else into clarity. There’s something almost meditative about that. Thursday, 27 December 2012. Holiday Missions: The world didn’t end. Christmas is still coming, and if you don’t have plans or gifts to worry about, you’re just sitting around. So you make a list. Order pizza on Christmas Eve and cut it exactly the way you want—not some standard way. Give everyone you know a puppy as a gift just to see what happens. Charge people a dollar for every message they send you on Facebook since apparently it’s supposed to be free. Decorate your coworker’s desk on their birthday and then just leave it like that. Get high without anyone’s commentary on it, since marijuana doesn’t turn you into a zombie like alcohol does. Build actually funny snowmen with your little siblings. Watch old Pokémon episodes that hold up. Go to church with your parents and kiss everyone on the forehead, tell them their sins are forgiven. Either they’ll appreciate it or they’ll flee screaming. Sleep with your hot cousin if you’ve been thinking about it since you were five—you probably have. Steal someone’s entire LEGO collection and mail it to me because I miss having LEGO. Just take it all. It’s stupid and pointless, which is kind of what being around family at Christmas actually is anyway. Saturday, 22 December 2012. Michaela and the Cat: Saturday, 22 December 2012. Bat for Lashes: A Wall: Bat for Lashes knows how to build something out of nothing. The production is minimal but it never feels thin—there’s room in each song for something to exist quietly. You listen and what stays with you isn’t the notes, it’s what sits between them. Whatever A Wall is, it probably does the same thing: solid enough to divide the space, but mostly it’s about what happens on either side. Friday, 21 December 2012. Lady Gaga: I Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Gaga mattered because she understood something most pop stars don’t: the audience wants permission to be weird. She dressed like she’d been assembled from a fever dream and dared you not to stare, and half the kids watching realized their own strangeness was maybe okay. The music was sharp and tight, the hooks were lethal, and underneath all the hardware and blood and meat dresses was someone who actually cared about craft. She wasn’t slumming in pop—she was proving pop could be sophisticated and nasty and vulnerable all at once. Twenty years into knowing her work, I still think about how fearlessly she swung between poles: the accessible banger next to something genuinely unsettling, the calculated provocation bleeding into real confession. She made people uncomfortable and that was the whole point. Whether she’s satisfied or not seems almost beside the question—she gave permission, and that rippled outward. Thursday, 20 December 2012. The Wedding Can Have It: Half an hour ago I gave notice on my apartment. My landlord printed something out on his ancient PC, I signed it, that was it. By the end of February, I’m out of Wedding for good. A few days later I’m on a plane to Tokyo. That’s how fast decisions become actual life. I always need three times as many hurdles as normal people to get anywhere, so usually everything takes forever. But this moved too smoothly. It’s starting to feel suspicious. Which is stupid—you don’t complain when things work out. What do I do with all my stuff? Sell it, give it away, throw it out. Keep the actually important things somewhere safe. Standard collapse-of-a-life logistics. But first I have to fly home for a week and listen to Christmas dinner arguments about what an insane idea this is. “Do they only eat sushi there?” “Don’t bring home some girl in a school uniform.” “Isn’t it dangerous? Earthquakes, yakuza, meltdowns?” I’ve heard all the questions already. I’ve lived five years in Wedding, this cheap Berlin neighborhood, secretly hoping the trends would finally reach it. The rents are low, artists show up, location’s decent. But probably people have died waiting. Since the world won’t come to me, I’m going to the world instead. The thing about deciding to move somewhere on impulse is that for a while it feels fictional—something you’re telling people, not something that’s actually happening. Then one day you sign a form and suddenly it’s real. You’re committed. In two months I’ll be in Tokyo with a suitcase and no plan, which is either the best or worst position to be in. Probably both. Everyone wants to know what I’ll do next, like I have an answer. I don’t. I’m just leaving. That’s usually enough for me. Wednesday, 19 December 2012. YouTube’s 2012: YouTube Rewind 2012 was the kind of pointless thing the internet did because it could. A highlight reel of viral videos from the year, as if the internet needed a corporate recap of moments everyone was already tired of. Rebecca Black, some gaming clips, whatever passed for a meme in 2012. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t particularly memorable, but you watched it anyway because it was there. There’s something almost innocent about YouTube even trying—the idea that they could curate the year, that this compilation meant anything. It didn’t. But looking back, that kind of earnest futility is kind of charming. Tuesday, 18 December 2012. The xx: Last Christmas: The xx’s “Last Christmas” is just the sadness. They stripped away everything—the pop sheen, the production, most of the arrangement. What’s left is the actual song underneath, the part about something ending right when everything’s supposed to be joyful. Two voices, some sparse electronics, all that space the band’s known for. The original Wham! song had melancholy in it from the start, just buried under the production. This version doesn’t apologize for that sadness. It leans into it. I listened to it on repeat one December, after something ended in November. It wasn’t cathartic or anything. Just the right amount of quiet for the season, the right amount of sadness for that particular kind of loneliness you feel when everyone else is celebrating. The band understands restraint. They know that sometimes the less you hear, the more you feel. Silence matters as much as sound. In “Last Christmas,” the space between the voices is where all the hurt lives. It’s been a tradition since then. Whenever December comes around, I put this on instead of the version I knew growing up. Once you hear it this way, you can’t un-hear it. Can’t go back to the original. It solves something I didn’t know was broken. Tuesday, 18 December 2012. Stolen Taste: Found a playlist from some people called PonyDanceClyde—no idea what the name means, probably doesn’t matter—and it’s genuinely good, which happens maybe once a month if you’re paying attention. The kind of thing where you realize someone thought about the order, about how the songs sit next to each other, about what comes after silence. That’s harder than it sounds. Anyone can pick ten good songs. Making them make sense together is different. They’d gathered Kate Boy, Little Dragon, Bon Iver, Kitten—artists who have almost nothing in common sonically, but somehow work when you string them together like this. There’s a looseness to the whole thing, a summery feeling even when the songs get quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. Just someone’s taste, applied consistently across an hour. I copied it immediately, saved it like it was mine, which would bother me if I gave it real thought. But the logic tracks: when something’s actually good, it should move around. If you make something for yourself and other people find it and keep it, you can’t be mad about that. You can’t try to collect credit for taste. This is what I put on when I need to think about something or when an hour needs to feel like more than an hour. The right playlist can do that without trying—not through force, but through intention in the quiet spaces. You’re still in the same place, still in your own head, but something about the music makes it feel like you’ve gone somewhere. For a little while, that’s enough. Monday, 17 December 2012. Ada Blitzkrieg: Ada Blitzkrieg just published her first book, “Dackelkrieg—Rouladen und Rap,” and she did it exactly how she wanted: self-published, dirt cheap, completely unfiltered. No publisher telling her to cut the crude parts or add more vulnerability. Her real name is Clara Carrera, but her older brother couldn’t pronounce it as a kid, so “Clara” became “Ada,” which then became Ada Blitzkrieg on Twitter, where she has about fifteen thousand followers who showed up because she never switched on a persona, never performed for the algorithm. She talks about the internet as the place where people with no social life and people in war zones end up, and she means it. She’s been posting for years about frozen pizzas and fat Mario Kart drivers and Dr. Zoidberg’s anatomy in this flat deadpan that reads like someone thinking out loud at 3 AM. She doesn’t smile in photos. She’s clear about being a mess as a human being. Somehow this is exactly what people want to follow. The book came together because she needed an outlet for all the war inside her. A publisher approached her, but she refused. Too many compromises. She wanted a 100-percent-Ada-Blitzkrieg project—a book where nobody tells her to cut anything or write more about her sex life, just Ada being Ada. It’s her autobiography, and the risk is her mother won’t talk to her after reading it. But at least it’s honest. The follower count grew sort of by accident. She started tweeting with a friend in another city just to stay connected, but nobody cared at first. Then she met the rappers Casper and Prinz Pi, and they tweeted about her account being perfect, and suddenly it became self-sustaining. People stuck around because her humor felt real—because she never apologized for being a disaster, never pretended to have it together. Self-deprecation is usually a performance, but she makes it look like reportage. And there’s something almost radical about that in a timeline full of people curating their mess. It’s not metaphorical for her. The internet is survival. She can’t pay rent or buy food without it. Her entire friend group came from Twitter first, then became real. She’s started recognizing people on the street in Berlin who recognize her back, and it still catches her off-guard every time. Her best internet memory is from a night when she and a friend ordered fried chicken from a new place during a launch sale and watched a Blaxploitation film eating crispy chicken parts. The internet made that moment happen. The worst parts are the stalkers who cycle through every few months, but she’s stopped fighting them. The pile of meaningless hate just made her numb, and she’s grateful for that numbness now—it’s easier than caring. If there’d been no internet, she probably would’ve run a small butcher shop on a farm somewhere, knowing all her customers by name. But there is internet, and she’s built something real there. She published a book for about four euros and made it exactly the way she wanted. Nobody can take that away from her. Monday, 17 December 2012. Alone at Home: Monday, 17 December 2012. Keiichi Nitta: Nitta’s work reminds me why clarity matters. No noise, no empty gestures—just the exact line weight needed and nothing more. I’ve spent enough time designing to know how hard that is, how much you have to kill to get to something that clean. His stuff has never felt like it was reaching for anything. It’s just there, doing its job, and somehow that directness makes it feel stronger than work trying three times as hard. Monday, 17 December 2012. Ten Little Missions: December 2012 was coming, which apparently meant the world was ending. Or that was what the internet jokes said—the Mayan calendar had had enough, and someone needed to write up ten last things to do before everything went quiet. So there was this pony riding the Berlin S-Bahn that needed to be documented and shared on every platform. Take your pants off. Do it for no reason—Hollywood was doing it, so it had to be important. Run into a crowded reading room and yell that everyone needs to leave immediately, no time for explanations. Watch a soap bubble that had frozen solid. These were the opening moves. The weird ones stuck. Write an essay about a killer beetle that uses its dead enemies as armor, then stand up in front of your class and read it. That’s not a suggestion, that’s a creative writing prompt buried in a joke. Wear a mask during sex—Dieter Bohlen, Freddy Krueger, Osama bin Laden, surprise her with it. Politely introduce yourself to trucks. To everything. The absurdity had a logic all its own. And then there was the real instruction: if the world is actually ending, sleep with your best friend. Shit on your boss’s desk. Eat a cheeseburger and let the diet die first. These weren’t jokes. Or they were, but they meant something. We were all playing at what we’d do if there really was no tomorrow, and somehow that felt important to articulate. Ali G was still the best character Sacha Baron Cohen ever made, even ten years on. This was a fact. Nyan Cat needed to be on a hoodie. You needed to buy them for everyone—your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, Ferdinand. The specificity mattered. The joke was that we all knew exactly what this was. The whole thing was perfectly 2012. Viral meant something specific then. The internet was still a game we could all play together, full of stupid in-jokes and instructions you’d never follow and lists that served no purpose except to say: we’re all here, marking time together. Whatever happens next, we made this joke together. We shared this pony. We pretended we’d do these things. And that was enough. Friday, 14 December 2012. Toro Y Moi: So Many Details: Toro Y Moi songs don’t give everything up at once. You listen and there’s another layer buried in the mix, some textural choice you missed before. That’s what draws me back—the idea that you can pack that much into a track and have it hold together, that you can be clever about production without it becoming noise. Chaz Bear’s good at that particular problem. Thursday, 13 December 2012. Tierney Gearon: Hollywood Heroines: Gearon photographs them the way nobody else gets to see them—off guard, unlit, sometimes vulnerable in ways that would never make it to the red carpet. Hollywood Heroines isn’t about the mythology; it’s about what happens when you take that away. The women she photographs are still interesting, still magnetic, but they’re also just people with skin and moods and the particular exhaustion of being watched all the time. There’s something quietly radical about that, the refusal to make them either villains or saints. Thursday, 13 December 2012. Can’t Stop: I get bored. That’s the thing about me—I get bored with pretty much everything after two and a half hours. Movies, games, projects, girls, doesn’t matter. Video games especially. I never finished Skyrim, quit Dead Space in the second room, and EVE Online is a conversation we don’t need to have. The only exception was Mass Effect. That game grabbed me so hard I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t do anything but push forward to save the universe or whatever. That’s what I’ve been looking for ever since—something that lands like that. Instead I found League of Legends, which is possibly the stupidest game ever made. Diablo 3, Call of Duty, yeah, sure, but League might actually win. Ten people bash each other in teams of five in the same map, same forest, same objectives, over and over and over and over. It’s the same game every time. Nothing changes except the names and the ranks. And I can’t fucking stop. I’ve been playing all night with Riven, trashing Spanish and Italian kids, and I’m good at it. Really good. A few beers and the Rocket Beans podcast crew in my ear to keep me sane, and I’m sharp, I’m reading the map, I’m making the calls. I scream when I get run down in a chase. I genuinely lose my mind when the Victory screen pops up. I’m not performing anything—it’s real. I’ve written about League before. That’s what I do with things that get under my skin: I write them out, vomit them onto the page, and suddenly there’s space in my head for something else. Clean slate. But this time it’s not working. Either I’ve finally found the thing I didn’t know I was missing, or I just hate high school kids that much. It’s four in the morning. The orange button asks if I want to queue again. I think about it for maybe half a second. A sip from the bottle. Yeah, okay. I click in and the map loads and suddenly I’m not thinking about any of this anymore. I’m just there, in the forest, waiting for the next fight. Thursday, 13 December 2012. Skylar Grey: I keep coming back to the space in that song, the way her voice doesn’t fill it but lives inside it. There’s a pull that doesn’t ask, just moves you forward like it was always going to go this way. She’s always been good at that—knowing when to hold back and when to let something break. When it does, it lands. Wednesday, 12 December 2012. The Pull: The first time I stood on the Shibuya crossing at night, watching thousands of people cross at once like the whole thing was choreographed, something in me locked onto Tokyo. Three months there last summer and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The shops, the trains, the feeling of being part of something alive—everything pulled me back to one thought: I have to live there. So I made the decision. March 4th, I was flying back on a working holiday visa. I told Berlin, told my apartment, told the life I’d built there. It felt reckless but also inevitable, the kind of thing that stops being a choice once you voice it out loud. Berlin made me who I am. But Tokyo woke me up. There’s a difference between where you come from and where you need to be. I went back, stayed longer than planned, learned that the thing pulling you toward a place is maybe the most honest navigation system you have. Wednesday, 12 December 2012. Sigur Rós: Leaning towards Solace: Sigur Rós spent twenty years making music that sounds like it’s coming from inside a cathedral made of ice. Jónsi sings mostly in Hopelandic, a language he invented so the voice becomes an instrument rather than a vehicle for words, and the guitars get bowed like you’re listening from another room, underwater. Everything is patient and slow and building toward something that might never fully arrive. When I finally listened to them properly, not as background, not as the safe indie-cred choice, I understood what people meant when they talked about music as solace. There’s no irony in their work, no winking at the audience. They seem to genuinely believe that beauty and care matter, that you can make something ornate and emotional without apologizing for it. It changed what I thought music could do. I still don’t play them that often—they demand something from you, a kind of presence—but when the weight of everything gets loud, they’re the thing that actually helps. Tuesday, 11 December 2012. Access All Areas: Festivals are basically a con. You pay for a ticket—never cheap—and then you’re locked into their entire economy. Beer at three times the price it’s worth. Food that tastes like cardboard and costs like steak. Merchandise marked up into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the press people and anyone with an all-access pass just walks around getting handed everything for free. I’ve always resented that. Like they’re in on some basic truth about how the world actually works and the rest of us are just marks paying to learn it. The truth is worse. The mark is who pays. I’ve been to enough events to understand how this works, and it’s surprisingly straightforward. There’s basically a hierarchy of access that gets progressively more illegal the higher you climb. The simplest level is pure confidence. Wear a shirt from some obscure band—absolutely not whoever’s playing that night. Move like you’re late and pissed off about it. Don’t smile at security. Don’t ask anything. Just walk through like you’ve done it a hundred times and you’re thoroughly sick of it. You’d be shocked how far that gets you on its own. But then there are the actual systems they deploy. Drink tickets come first. Little plastic chits, handed to crew and press, redeemable for free beer at the bar. You can order blanks online for nothing. Watch which color gets used that night, grab the matching stack, slip them to the bartender a few at a time. One ticket buys you a standard drink. Two or three together gets you the good stuff. I’ve watched this work so many times it barely counts as a trick anymore. Wristbands next. Every major festival uses them—color-coded to separate the people who paid from the people who matter. You find out what color you need, grab a plain band in that shade, mark it up with a Sharpie to look official, stack it on your wrist with a couple of decoys, and just walk past security like you own the place. The key is that bouncers are looking for nervousness or excitement, not confidence. They want to catch people who want to be there, not people who think they’re too important to care. Then there’s forged press passes. That’s where it actually becomes a real crime. You need a real pass to copy, a scanner, printing equipment, and genuine balls. Scan the real pass, change the name, print it on decent cardstock, slide it in a plastic lanyard sleeve, tuck it half-visible in your shirt, and walk past backstage security looking like you’re having the worst day of your life. If they don’t look too close, you’re in. If they do, you’re looking at actual charges. Fraud. Forgery. The kind of thing that ends with a conversation with the police. So obviously only a complete moron does that last one. Which is why I don’t. I pay full price. I watch other people disappear into backstage areas I can’t reach, and I know exactly how they did it, and I know I’m not stupid enough to try. That’s the real trap—the system’s so easy to cheat that deciding not to feels like admitting you’re a sucker. Which I am. Whatever. The beer’s still cold. Tuesday, 11 December 2012. My Heart Burns: Rammstein’s ’Mein Herz brennt’ is the soft one, the one that makes sense to people who otherwise think the band is just noise and theatrics. It’s orchestrated, almost delicate, and the lyrics are about obsession and losing yourself in someone, which is a different kind of violence than anything they’d done before. The song appeared on Reise, Reise in 2004, and it sits there like a confession in the middle of all that fire and percussion. There’s something genuinely unsettling about it—the restraint, the minor-key beauty, Till’s voice doing that thing where he sounds completely wrecked and completely in control at the same time. It’s the Rammstein song that stays with you, not because it’s the loudest or the most memorable, but because it doesn’t try to be either of those things. Tuesday, 11 December 2012. The Real Toy Story: Michael Wolf photographed toy factory workers in China. Dolls, plastic guns, bubble machines—the ordinary stuff kids play with. His series is ’The Real Toy Story.’ The pictures show each worker holding what they made. That’s the whole thing. No explanation, no message, no names. Just evidence of labor. You don’t learn about them as people, only that they existed and they made something. What stays with me is thinking about everyone not in the frame. The people too young or too sick or too exhausted to work in a factory. Those people exist but they’re invisible even to the camera—there’s nothing to photograph because there’s nothing there to document. That absence is what gets to me, more than the pictures themselves. Tuesday, 11 December 2012. I Take Pictures: The simplicity of it. Not “I’m a photographer” or any of the gear-talk bullshit, just the basic action. You see something, you want to hold onto it, you take a picture. Everything after that—the technique, the style, the years of learning to look—all of it serves that moment where you decide something is worth keeping. Tuesday, 11 December 2012. Kyouhei Yamamoto: Monday, 10 December 2012. Baby’s Got It: Maylee Todd makes music that feels like it’s arriving from somewhere you can’t quite locate—not quite pop, not quite electronic, just her own frequency. The confidence in a title like this, the plainness of it, suggests something that doesn’t need to announce itself. You either feel it or you don’t. Friday, 7 December 2012. Pink Works: Thursday, 6 December 2012. Pharrell’s Court: There’s a moment in everything Pharrell touches where you realize he’s already thought three steps ahead of where you are. He’s been producing and designing and performing long enough that it’s become invisible—you just know something’s good before you know why, and half the time it’s because his name’s somewhere in the credits. He’s got that rare thing where success hasn’t made him sloppy. If anything he’s gotten more precise, more minimal, more confident in what doesn’t need to be there. Twenty years of doing this and he still looks like he’s not trying. Wednesday, 5 December 2012. Small Racism: You’re on a regional train in Berlin when she starts: “Deutschland den Deutschen.” This look on her face like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever said. The bald guy from Thuringia gets it right away. They’ve found each other, and now they’re bold. She doesn’t stop. Immigrants. Black people. She’s narrating some future where they don’t exist. Thirty people on this train. Nobody’s looking. Nobody’s saying anything. You can feel yourself going hot, your hands starting to shake because you can sense exactly where this goes. She lands on you. Points. The words are specific, aimed. And something in you just splits open. You’re standing, and the voice that comes out doesn’t sound like you—shouting back at her about what she is, what all of them are, underneath this ideology they’re pretending is philosophy. Every obscenity you know. Every accusation. The car goes silent. Everyone staring at you like you’re the real problem. Her face doesn’t even change. She wanted this. She wanted exactly this. She’ll do it again tomorrow, somewhere else, with someone else. You can’t stop talking. Tears now. Raging at the people around you, about how they’ll get off this train and convince themselves they’re good because they know someone from somewhere else, because they didn’t say anything out loud so they’re not complicit, never mind that they were already thinking it. The rage and the shame are the same feeling. The train stops. She gets off. Nothing’s different. She won. The small racism, the everyday kind, it’s not some historical atrocity, it’s just there in the city, moving through it like an infection. And you’re left sitting there shaking, knowing it’ll happen again tomorrow. Wednesday, 5 December 2012. Reading Karl: What gets me about Karl Lagerfeld’s interviews is how unfiltered they are. Someone asked if fashion people are less stupid these days, and he didn’t give some diplomatic answer. He said yeah, they’re less stupid now. Then he said fashion is basically the only thing that works in France anymore, and drew a comparison about having a daughter in a profession politicians don’t want to acknowledge. He wasn’t trying to be funny. Just true. I have nothing to do with fashion. It’s as far from my world as space travel is from his. But I read his interviews more carefully than anyone else’s—more carefully than I probably read anything, honestly. They feel like thinking instead of performing. When they asked how he celebrates Christmas, he said nobody stays in Paris anyway. The work calendar in haute couture runs December through January, so he’s home working while everyone else is gone. No family, no obligations. He called it the height of luxury. Not wistfully. As fact. Someone pushed, asked if his staff ever comes by, and he said no. He doesn’t want that kind of dependence, doesn’t blur work and family. Everyone should have their own life. This is why I hate standard interviews. The questionnaire format: ’What’s your favorite band?’ ’Which country did you love?’ ’When’s the new project?’ Non-questions built for non-answers. No one’s thinking. But an interview can actually be a conversation—something real comes out. If he were sitting across from me, I don’t know what I’d ask. Not the easy questions. Not the ones that have been asked a hundred times. Just something real. Tuesday, 4 December 2012. The Mashup Year: 2012 pop music didn’t want to commit to anything. Gangnam Style proved the internet could make a song more inescapable than the industry ever could, and that became the blueprint—just mash everything together and see what sticks. Adele had 21. Drake was doing Drake things. EDM somehow started bleeding into songs that never asked for it. The whole year felt like a collage that worked by accident. Looking back, that’s probably why I remember it. It wasn’t the peak of anything, just chaos in motion. The moment before the machinery figured out how to package the new rules. Everything felt raw and unfocused in a way that made it more real than the carefully coordinated stuff that came before or after. Tuesday, 4 December 2012. The Moment They Sold: The New York Post is tabloid pure—the American BILD, built to sell scandal. When the real sensational stuff won’t fly, you angle the story until something horrible looks marketable. Newspapers need readers; readers need outrage. Ki Suk Han was 58. A father. A husband. Last night he was pushed onto the subway tracks by a man nobody knew. A photographer named R. Umar Abbasi was standing there. He got the final seconds on film—the moment before the train came. The Post put it on the cover. Not a photograph of the man who pushed him. Not a photo of Ki Suk Han alive, remembered. Just those last seconds, documented and sold. Twitter reacted the way it always does for something like this. People losing their minds. “Shame on you, you contemptible pseudo-humans,” someone wrote. Another said the Post wasn’t a real newspaper. Another pointed out that the photographer had time to take multiple shots but not to help. And here’s where it gets complicated. Abbasi claimed he was trying to warn the driver with his camera flash, to force them to stop, because he knew he couldn’t pull the man up himself. The Post ran that explanation. Maybe it’s even true. But who can prove otherwise? What it shows is how far newspapers are willing to push now that print is dying. They need that image, need that cover, need something raw enough to move papers one more time. So they use it. Then you wonder what the BILD or the Post will do next, when this stops working too. Tuesday, 4 December 2012. Kyouhei: Kyouhei moved to Berlin because Tokyo wasn’t holding his attention anymore. He’s a photographer—women, dogs, trees—the kind of thing that could be a career if he wanted it to be. Right now he works at a restaurant called Smart Deli. He was born in Okayama in 1988, lived in Tokyo for a while, then decided to leave. I like that he didn’t overthink it. I met him because I’m moving to Tokyo next year for a project called FRIENDS IN TOKYO, and I can’t speak Japanese. He needs German. So we made an arrangement: he teaches me Japanese, I teach him German, we meet up a couple times a week and sort out the whole language barrier thing together. This is not working. We sit down with our coffee and within five minutes we’re talking in English about Berghain or cheeseburgers or Mount Fuji. Sometimes one of us remembers we’re supposed to be learning and asks “How do you say that?” and we both feel briefly productive. Then we’re back to conversation that isn’t going anywhere in particular. I’m a bad student. He’s not a great teacher. Neither of us really understands what tandem learning is supposed to look like. We just meet up and let the afternoon happen. Ninety-nine percent talking, one percent language acquisition. Or possibly it’s the reverse and I’m just not noticing. Maybe this is fine. We’re not getting fluent in anything, but we’re getting something. Monday, 3 December 2012. Sabine Jemeljanova: Sunday, 2 December 2012. Me and My Monkey: Sunday, 2 December 2012. Skrillex Quest: If you don’t know who Skrillex is, you missed a weird five-year window when dubstep bass drops felt dangerous and every teenager was dancing to “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” in a basement somewhere. He was briefly everywhere, then he wasn’t, and now he’s just another name from the 2010s that some kid’s older brother still thinks is cool. At some point he made a video game. Skrillex Quest—it’s basically the original Legend of Zelda in 3D, except you’re saving a kingdom from glitching apart while his greatest hits play in the background. Monster fights, puzzles, the whole Zelda structure but wrapped in Skrillex branding. There’s something funny about musicians making games. You’d think someone who understands rhythm and composition could translate that into game design, but music and games are different beasts. One is about the moment hitting you right, the other is about systems and choices and mechanical flow. Skrillex Quest doesn’t pretend otherwise—it’s a fan service project, nothing more. Here’s a 3D Zelda game with dubstep layered on top. What gets me is the shamelessness of it. The game knows exactly what it is. It’s mining two separate pools of nostalgia—Zelda and early-2010s Skrillex—and it doesn’t apologize. Just puts them together and sees if it lands. Sometimes that kind of honesty is worth more than whatever pretense you’d expect from a “serious” project. Saturday, 1 December 2012. Holiday Lookbook: Holiday lookbooks hit different in December. You’re scrolling through carefully styled images, and the mood carries more weight than the actual clothes. The color palette, the composition, the way each piece relates to the others—it all creates a feeling before any purchase. You look at someone’s December vision and think: I want to exist in that light. Maybe that’s all a lookbook really does: it sells you permission to feel a certain way. Saturday, 1 December 2012. Jeremy Scott’s White Smart: The car was white with black accents and bright red wings—a special limited-edition Smart designed by Jeremy Scott for Mercedes. They threw a premiere party for it at the Jim Henson Studios, which seemed perfect for something so absurd. I went to Los Angeles for one night to see it. Los Angeles always feels like two places at once. Dirty, with that fake-set quality to it, but also genuinely creative, full of people trying to do something real. The weather was hot and randomly windy, sometimes rainy. The people were surprisingly kind—the actual help-you kind, not the polite performance. Everyone seemed genuinely willing to talk or point you in the right direction if you got lost. The party was this random assortment. Fashion people, music people, models, kids in streetwear, all mixed together in a way that wouldn’t happen anywhere else. M.I.A. played a short set. Frank Ocean was somewhere in the mix. Jeremy Scott seemed like someone who finds the whole thing amusing rather than serious—sympathetic, a little odd, not taking any of it too hard. Mark from The Cobra Snake was shooting photos constantly, documenting all these different worlds colliding in one room. Champagne and small sandwiches. That LA thing where you’re never sure how all these people ended up in the same space, but while you’re there it feels normal. The next morning we went to the LA Auto Show. Car companies parking their latest designs, pretty people handing out branded sunglasses and CDs. Then a nice restaurant in Santa Monica, shopping on the main strip, small talk with salespeople, imported coconut milk from Jamaica, Christmas carolers asking for donations in the middle of spring. That crash after the night before is always sudden. Los Angeles is full of things that never quite materialize—limited editions that stay limited, collaborations that sound better in press releases. The Smart eventually came out in some modified form in 2013, and I have no idea if anyone actually bought one. What stayed with me was the randomness of it. You go for the car, you get M.I.A. and Frank Ocean and a bunch of strangers, and somehow that’s LA in one night. That’s what the city is actually good at. Friday, 30 November 2012. Adidas Originals Represent: The Big Final: Nothing lasts forever, especially not a campaign you’ve been half-watching for years. Represent was always about that thing sneakers actually do better than any other fashion item—they’re honest. You wear them, they get beat up, they tell a story that doesn’t lie. An Adidas finale feels like closing a chapter on something smaller but genuine, one last moment before whatever comes next takes over. Another thing that was, and then it wasn’t. Friday, 30 November 2012. Nicholas Gazin: Girls at Parties: Why do we keep showing up? The whole stupid routine—getting ready at some awful hour, the cold, standing in the dark pretending to care while people dance. But we know why. Girls. Drunk girls, bored girls, girls thinking about something else while the music plays. Nicholas Gazin figured it out as an artist. He wanders New York finding the right parties and just watches. Girls drinking, eating, half-asleep, thinking dark things while their friends ignore them. Not trying to talk to them or impress them—just looking. That’s the whole point. There’s something honest about it, even if it’s a little creepy. It’s not romance or seduction or any of that staged stuff. It’s just that women in their own space, not performing, are endlessly more interesting to watch. The way they forget their faces when drunk. The way they get mean or quiet or loud without calculating it. That’s what drags you out of your apartment into the freezing dark. His work captures this exactly—just the pure attention you can’t help paying when you’re around someone beautiful because she isn’t trying to be. Tuesday, 27 November 2012. When the Lawyers Got Sued: The beige envelope arrives. Registered mail. Inside is letterhead, legal language, a demand: you used this image illegally. Pay two to ten thousand euros. Most bloggers don’t know copyright law. They don’t want to hire a lawyer just to find out if they’re wrong. So they pay. A law firm in Germany built a business model around this. They sent out hundreds of these letters—five hundred or more—claiming copyright violations and demanding money. The trick was simple: they didn’t actually own most of the image rights they were claiming. But they knew that most people wouldn’t call them on it. They’d just see the formal letter, the stamp, the money, and cave. And if someone was stupid enough to negotiate instead of paying, the firm would work out a “deal.” Either way, the firm made money off fear. Matthias Winks got one of these letters. Seven thousand five hundred euros for a Nathan Sawaya photo he’d used. He looked into it. The claim was baseless. Instead of paying, he did something rarer: he filed a criminal complaint against the firm for fraud and extortion. He went to the police, not back to the lawyers. What makes this matter is that it’s a reversal. Most people just take the hit because fighting is expensive and time-consuming. But Winks decided the firm was counting on exactly that—on people being too worn down to push back. So he pushed back. And now other bloggers are filing complaints too. Maybe enough of them file that someone with actual authority starts looking at what this firm has been doing and decides it’s not just aggressive lawyering. It’s fraud. I don’t know if Winks will actually win. But I know that the moment someone stops just paying the letter and starts filing criminal complaints, the whole equation changes. Monday, 26 November 2012. HAIM: Don’t Save Me: Saw them live once and the thing that mattered was how they actually played together, three of them listening and responding instead of running through a choreographed thing. Their guitars were loud and obvious, not buried under production. Just people in a room playing. The title appeals to me because it sounds like a statement of fact, not a cry for help. There’s something steady about that. Most pop music is built on needing something from you, your attention or your sympathy or your money. HAIM’s stuff just is. States a position and leaves it at that. Monday, 26 November 2012. Something Switched: I was listening to some people talk about anime and something switched. They were riffing on different shows—Girls und Panzer, Sword Art Online, Space Brothers—and hearing them get excited about it made me remember why this stuff matters. Anime does something. The earnest and ridiculous at the same time, all that unreal intensity you can’t find anywhere else. So I downloaded three series for a flight coming up. SAO because you have to know what the argument’s about at this point. Girls und Panzer because it has no right to work—tank battles and cute girls and somehow it just does. Space Brothers because I heard it’s actually good and also slow, which is what you want when you’re stuck in a seat for hours. There’s that moment when you realize you’ve been waiting to get interested in something again. Not hunting for it, just waiting. Someone mentions a show and suddenly you’re downloading at midnight like you’re a kid again. Sunday, 25 November 2012. Lazy Oaf Goes Basic: Lazy Oaf’s always been about graphic abundance—tees with personality, collaborations that barely make sense, visual chaos. A capsule collection is funny because it’s the opposite of that, all restraint and essentials. But there’s something to it. You strip everything back and see what’s actually solid, what works when the excess is gone. For Lazy Oaf, that’s probably where the real taste lives—underneath the noise. Sunday, 25 November 2012. Friday: Rebecca Black was thirteen when the internet decided to make an example of her. “Friday” went viral in that special awful way, and everyone with a keyboard felt permission to join in. Most people don’t survive that. You either disappear or you double down and never escape it. She did neither. She made music, something actual and good, and over time earned the kind of respect that matters—from people who know what they’re listening to. There’s no redemption arc here. It’s just what happens when someone refuses to be erased. Saturday, 24 November 2012. Disaronno: It’s A Swing Thing: Disaronno has that unmistakable almond sweetness that lands somewhere between dessert and actual liqueur, the kind of drink that tastes nothing like sophistication and everything like the kind of night where you’re young enough to think sophistication matters. The bottle’s iconic, too—that squat apricot-colored thing with the wrapper around the neck, instantly recognizable even when you’re squinting at a bar shelf in bad lighting. It tastes like something someone’s older friend bought for a party, something that made you feel like you were getting away with something. It’s smooth enough that it goes down dangerously easy, sweet enough that you can pretend you’re not really drinking, which is its whole trick. The Italians knew what they were doing with this one. Saturday, 24 November 2012. Berlin Trembled: The three stripes are so common you forget they’re a design. Berlin’s got this way of making you look at famous things differently. An Adidas night, the Originals, heritage branding—it should be corny, right? But something about the city and the history and the people who actually care about the shape of things made it feel earned, made it feel real. Friday, 23 November 2012. Grounded: It’s autumn, it’s gray, it’s cold. Someone at a party gave me their virus and now I’m stuck at home, coughing while everyone else is at Watergate getting wasted. I had plans. I wanted to go out. But here I am. The Useless Web sends me to random pointless websites I’d never visit otherwise. I waste an hour clicking through. I look at old photos of Lindsay Lohan from before everything got weird—back when I thought she was cute. It hits different looking back. Steam’s having a sale where forty-euro games are five bucks. I buy a bunch of stuff I’ll never play and feel like I got a deal, which is enough when my brain’s full of phlegm. I don’t do anything illegal. Last thing I need is cops confiscating my Winnie-the-Pooh laptop. I drink so much tea I taste like an herb garden. If I’m stupid enough to feel fine, I go to a trashy disco anyway. Probably won’t happen but sometimes it does. Better move: invite someone over. Hot water bottles, melted cheese, Entourage on my laptop under blankets. If it’s someone I want and the warmth and proximity turns into sex—sweaty and rushed and desperate in that good way—that’s not a bad sick day. I could ask my grandfather if he wants to cover my modeling gigs next week. He’s got the figure. More realistically, I’m grateful I don’t have a boyfriend right now. Mary-Kate Olsen’s probably feeling the same thing. The last one: I do this exact same thing whether I’m sick or not. That’s the depressing part. That’s what gets me. Friday, 23 November 2012. Tokyo Voodoo: Thursday, 22 November 2012. Journelles Arrives: Journelles launched with that specific Berlin energy—people who actually knew something about fashion coming together to write about it without the usual desperation. Jessie already had credibility as a writer, and they brought in Alexa, Hanna, Julia, Kerstin. It was backed properly. This was a real thing. The launch party at Picknick Berlin was the kind of event that said something about how web culture had shifted. They had actual music, actual people. Palina Rojinski was there, Kim Kong DJing. It was the kind of event you threw for a blog when you wanted to say it mattered—like you’d throw for an album or a film. What stuck with me about Journelles was that it didn’t have the hunger most fashion blogs carried. Everyone just knew their subject and wrote about it. No performance, no reaching. I never made it to the party. But I watched what Journelles became, and it was solid. The blog did the work without any of the usual fashion-media nonsense. That was enough. Thursday, 22 November 2012. Three Hours Late: I stood in an arena for three hours waiting for Rihanna to show up, and by hour three the crowd was actively fantasizing about murder. She arrived eventually and went through the setlist exactly as expected—ballads, dance tracks, the standard formula. My legs hurt. My drink vouchers were exhausted. Congo Rock was the opener and they were actually good, the kind of band I would’ve loved discovering in a basement club at 3 a.m. instead of here. Willy came with me. I ran into Jessie and her boyfriend. We talked to someone about flea markets and savings accounts, which is what happens when you’re trying to kill time at an event like this. The actual winners—the fans who’d legitimately won their tickets—were ecstatic. That part felt real. The best part was two tiny Asian women standing in front of me, couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, who knew every single lyric and jumped around like they were losing their minds the whole show. They filmed everything on a camera held above their heads because they couldn’t see otherwise. That’s the kind of pure fan devotion that makes you want to physically carry someone to the front row and hand them every backstage pass in existence. They’d earned it. So Rihanna, since I know you read everything written about you online: if you’re going to make people stand around for three hours and then open with garbage club music, at least make it worth their time. Show me something real. Your right breast, specifically. Or write me a song about how great you think I am. That’s the deal. Wednesday, 21 November 2012. Figure 8: Ellie Goulding builds these spiraling synth lines that go nowhere and everywhere at once. I remember driving at night with one of her songs playing, thinking about how repetition can feel like progress if you’re not paying attention. There’s something mechanical but honest about the way she loops and layers. Maybe that’s what a figure eight is—the same circle twice, which means you’re back where you started but somehow different. Wednesday, 21 November 2012. Bebop Fever: Being sick is the only permission you need to watch entire series without guilt. No productivity, no apologies, just fever and pills and endless play buttons. You infect the pizza delivery guy, pull the blanket up, and disappear into something that doesn’t demand anything of you. I’m rewatching Cowboy Bebop right now in that exact state—Japanese audio, English subtitles, half-medicated and floating. It’s not my first time through, and that matters. The show doesn’t get old; you just get older watching it, and it hits different every time. This time it’s hitting during a headache I can barely think through, which somehow makes the whole thing more vivid. The show’s been around long enough that I don’t need to explain it. Spike and Jet chasing bounties through a broken solar system, the Earth hostile below them, everything held together with duct tape and desperation. The moon’s been shattered. People colonized Mars and Venus and stuck themselves on outposts that feel less like homes and more like waiting rooms. There’s no hope anywhere in the framing, just necessity and bad decisions and the occasional moment of grace before it all collapses again. What gets me is the music. Yoko Kanno wrote something that sounds like it’s from three different genres at once—jazz and rock and something that doesn’t have a name yet. The Seatbelts play “The Real Folk Blues” over the ending and I’m just sitting here fevered and destroyed, tears running down my face for reasons that have nothing to do with being sick. The song knows something about sadness that I can’t articulate. Maybe that’s the point. The characters feel real in a way anime characters usually don’t. Ed’s intelligence hiding under childlike wonder. Faye’s hunger and damage and refusal to admit she’s lonely. Jet’s weariness. Spike’s impossible distance from everything, like he’s already dead and just going through the motions. I want to sit with them, play chess with Ed on some green field, drink with Faye until we can’t remember why we’re running. That’s not wanting to escape my life. That’s wanting to know people who know how to survive in a world that’s already over. I’ve been thinking about MTV and VIVA showing anime in the late ’90s—that specific moment when the stuff you watched felt like a secret, like you were part of something no one else understood. Cowboy Bebop was in that space. It wasn’t aimed at you specifically; it just didn’t care if you were listening or not. It was too cool to try. There’s a frame near the end where Spike’s walking away from something and the city is huge and empty behind him. That’s the show in one image. That’s how it feels to watch it now. Being sick clears the schedule for this kind of thing—watching something that knows you don’t owe it attention, that understands loss is the baseline. You just lie there and let it move through you, and somehow that’s exactly what you need. Wednesday, 31 October 2012. Still Posse: Watched Posse again the other night—that 1993 Mario Van Peebles film where the whole mythology of the American west gets rewritten with Black gunslingers and outlaws at the center. It’s the kind of movie that feels more true than most accounts of actual history, which is probably the point. I’d forgotten how much fun it is, how unserious in the best way. The action’s a little stiff, the dialogue cracks, the villains are cartoonish. None of it matters because the film knows exactly what it’s doing: showing you a world where Black men get to be the cool ones, the dangerous ones, the ones in control. It’s been decades now and that still feels radical, which says something grim about cinema. I’m not going to pretend it’s a masterpiece, but it’s essential—one of those movies that does more than entertain. It reminds you what movies are actually for. Wednesday, 31 October 2012. Pretty in Pink: Duckie’s jacket, Andie’s thrifted dress, the whole midwest-goth aesthetic of it—I keep coming back to this movie because it’s one of the few eighties films that understood that clothes are armor and expression at the same time. Molly Ringwald’s character cobbles together her identity from what she can find, and there’s something real in that desperation. The movie sells the romance to you, but what stays with me is the feeling of being on the outside, of wanting something you can’t have, of thinking if you just had the right outfit or said the right thing it would matter. It mattered to me then. It still does, different now—not the longing for someone specific, but the longing to be seen as someone worth seeing. The film gets that. It never pretends the clothes are just clothes. Tuesday, 30 October 2012. Barfutura: Tuesday, 30 October 2012. Tokyo Gets In: Tokyo gets into people differently than Berlin does. Berlin can ruin you—it’s the first good city for a lot of people, the one that makes you realize you can actually leave home and be happy somewhere. But Tokyo is something else. Teresa came back from Tokyo a few years ago talking about it like she’d taken acid, like something in her neurology had permanently shifted. Kiki’s there now and her messages have the same quality—this glazed, half-present tone of someone who’s been fundamentally rewired. She keeps sending photos of subway stations and vending machines and apologizing for how these things mean nothing to anyone else. That’s how you know it’s real. I can’t get there. Not right now. The money isn’t there, the time isn’t there. But Berlin’s doing this thing in November called the Japarade, this whole festival built around Japan, and I’m going to go even though I know it won’t be the same. It’ll have exhibitions, performances, food, artists like Satoshi Fujiwara and Maki Shimizu. All the people who’ve actually been inside the thing that made Kiki and Teresa the way they are now. And me standing in a room full of objects and ideas pointing toward a place I can’t afford to go. The weird part is I don’t even care anymore if it’ll actually help me understand Tokyo better. I just want to be in the room with people who understand why it matters. That seems like enough. Monday, 29 October 2012. Hannah’s Birthday: The Lost Daughter: Monday, 29 October 2012. Sex Sells: I keep coming back to something that happened in Berlin in 2012. Refugee camp at the Brandenburg Gate. Ashkan Khorasani was there—Iranian, had walked from Würzburg with dozens of others. They set up tents and asked for something basic. Police came hard the first night, twenty vehicles, dogs, beatings. Then cold. Then nothing from the media for a month. Then four women showed up with a stunt. Tits for Human Rights, they called it. Anne Helm, Anke Domscheit-Berg, Julia Schramm, Laura Dornheim. Invited reporters with the promise of seeing breasts. Reporters came. Breasts didn’t. Story went everywhere. Laura Dornheim said something I can’t shake: “People starving themselves isn’t enough. It takes tits. Sex sells.” And she was right. The coverage flooded in the moment the nudity angle appeared. Suddenly opinions, suddenly photo ops, suddenly it was news. Ashkan had something sharp about the language. “Flüchtling”—the German word for refugee. The “-ling” suffix diminishes it, makes it sound like weakness. He pushed back: “We’re not small. We’re strong. We eat nothing, we sleep outside in winter, and we’re strong.” There was exhaustion in it but also anger, the kind of clarity that comes from having nothing left to lose. I don’t know how it ended. Whether they stayed and forced change or drifted away. Whether anything real shifted. But that moment—people fighting for basic rights needing to engineer a media stunt around nudity to be seen at all—that reveals everything about the machine, doesn’t it. About what moves us and what we have to be tricked into seeing. Monday, 29 October 2012. Sky Ferreira: Coke Is It!: Sky Ferreira makes things happen at a distance. She doesn’t announce it; she just appears somewhere unexpected—a collaboration, a visual, a sound nobody else would have made. That kind of artist, the ones who seem to actually be thinking rather than reacting to what thinking is supposed to look like. You know she’s good because she doesn’t need to tell you. Friday, 26 October 2012. Maxime Ballesteros: Love Me, I’m Trying: Thursday, 25 October 2012. The Wanting: Watched the Apple keynote. They announced an iPad mini, a new iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro. Each one looked perfect. Design at that level is almost offensive—it makes everything else look cheap. I don’t need any of them. I know I don’t need them. But there’s that moment right after a keynote where I’m already holding one in my imagination, already deciding which coffee shop I’d work from, which friends I’d want to see me with it. The object hasn’t even shipped and I’m already three months into owning it. It passes after a while, the wanting. I close the browser tab, move on to something else. But I remember what it felt like. That’s why they do the keynotes, I guess. Not to sell the thing itself—to sell that specific feeling of wanting something beautiful, something that seems like it would make me different somehow. Better organized. More serious. More me. The weird part is understanding exactly how it works and still falling for it anyway. I’m a designer. I know how these things are put together—the choices about materials, about simplicity, about what you see and what you don’t. I can see through it. And I still want it. Knowing the trick doesn’t make you immune to the trick. I’ve never been seduced by it badly enough to actually buy. But I’ve gotten close. Closer than I’d like to admit. And I’ll probably watch the next keynote too, knowing exactly what’s going to happen. Wednesday, 24 October 2012. Paranoia: Tuesday, 23 October 2012. Ten Little Missions: Another weekend bearing down and I’ve got nothing. No plans, no ideas, just the dead weight of Saturday sitting on my chest. Here’s what keeps spinning in my head. Start with the simple one: find a song, play it on repeat all day. Loud enough that everyone in earshot actually considers checking themselves in. Write an official complaint to whoever runs government—Thursdays are a fundamental error and need to be deleted from the calendar. Apparently three complaints and they have to listen. That’s the law. Probably. There’s a collection of the most uncomfortable moments ever captured. The kind of images that make your skin crawl. Spend an hour looking at them. Try to make that feeling permanent, embed it into your bones. Get properly high. All the way. Especially if you’ve wasted the last few years thinking some political movement was going to fix anything. Go to a club. Drop your pants on the dance floor. Middle of the crowd, mid-song. Don’t say anything. Just let it play out. Find an interview with a woman who made porn, whose mother had also made porn before her. There’s something genuinely fascinating about inherited professions and what gets passed down without being asked. Dress up your fat cat for Halloween, even though the entire proposition disgusts you. The cat will suffer equally. Go out tonight. By the time you’ve talked to fifty people, tell one you want to sleep with them. You miss shots you don’t take. Leave a thawed-out frozen pizza on each of your neighbors’ doorsteps. No note. No explanation. Just an increasingly warm mystery. Wake up Sunday morning somewhere you’ve never been. Naked if possible. A red balloon in one hand. Foreign currency in the other. Don’t ask yourself how you got there. Friday, 19 October 2012. Tokyo Swallows: I landed in Tokyo expecting chaos and got exactly that, but also something else—something that doesn’t fit in a description. The city is liquid, constantly pooling and growing, spilling into spaces you didn’t know existed. Tradition pressed against neon against things that don’t have names. It doesn’t care if you’re prepared. The subway is the skeleton key. The map looks impossible until it doesn’t, and then suddenly the entire city becomes a puzzle you can actually solve. Without it, you’d just bounce between districts, directionless. With it, you stop being a tourist and start being someone who knows how to move. Food is the real reason to be there. The culture excuse is fine, but everyone goes for the food. I lived in izakayas—those rough little places that serve everything from sashimi to tempura to potato salad, whatever happens to be ready. Touhachi in Nakameguro became my place, one train stop from Shibuya. The kind of spot where nobody speaks English and nobody cares. The fish market at Okachimachi Station around five in the afternoon is better than the famous Tsukiji tourist gauntlet at dawn. Locals haggling over the day’s scraps, fish I’d never seen, things from the ocean with names I couldn’t pronounce. You can eat pufferfish there, whale if you’re morally flexible about it, anything the sea produces. The small restaurants around the market are the draw—no scenery, just food. Kill Bill was shot in Gonpachi in Nishi Azabu, which is useful information if you want a reason to go there that isn’t purely touristic. Ohashi and Daibutsu Kororo in Shibuya are traditional and actually work for tourists. Neats in Yutenji is organic, which I didn’t expect to matter until I was eating there and it actually mattered. The Japanese don’t have a reputation for drinking heavily, but nobody told them to stop going out. Golden Gai in Shinjuku is 150 bars stacked vertically on top of each other, connected by six narrow passages that feel like you’re moving through a building’s circulatory system. Pick one, sit at a counter with people you don’t know, drink something small and very expensive. Kinfolk in Nakameguro is what happens when a fixed-gear bike shop decides to open a bar. Locals and expats dissolving into cocktails, the kind of place that gets genuinely better as the night goes worse. Karaoke is inevitable—All You Can Drink specials run from midnight until dawn, so at least your voice is well-lubricated by the time you’re at the microphone. If you want to skip karaoke entirely, Communo is a club the size of a closet that somehow broadcasts to thousands, Jamie xx playing for people in their living rooms at 3 AM while fifty of you stand in the dark. Shopping in Tokyo happens to you whether you want it to. Even broke, it’s just an experience—the consumption, the endless permission to want things. The fashion is everywhere: expensive boutiques in Ginza, Japanese design houses in Aoyama and Daikanyama, street fashion flooding Shinjuku and Shibuya. Sunday afternoon in Harajuku is the visual climax—thousands of teenagers in Lolita dress and fantasy costumes, a parade that happens on schedule. La Foret for street wear, Big Love for records, Kiddy Land for Hello Kitty everything, Pass the Baton in the basement of Omotesando Hills. Eventually you end up in Akihabara, the electric district, because you have to. The eight-story Mandarake and the maid cafes are there if you want them. The real obsessives are a few stops further at Nakano Broadway, where the actual collectors live, the ones who take this seriously. Hotels are whatever you want them to be. Shibuya XL is cheap if uninspired. The Claska in Meguro is trendier, with a gallery in the lobby. Capsule hotels are the weird move—just sleep tubes, cheaper than a room, and the Central Inn Gotanda has mixed capsules if you want company. Stay in a manga café even cheaper, though Tokyo stops running trains after midnight, so you’re reading until the first train at five. Love hotels rent by the hour (not prostitution, just a conservative culture needing privacy), and they’re decorated like you’d expect—not subtle. I went to temples because I’m supposed to. After the third one you stop noticing differences, which is fine. The Meiji Shrine in Kyoto is worth waking early for, the crowds haven’t arrived yet. Tokyo’s architecture is both extremes—the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku has a free observation deck, or spend twenty euros for the Roppongi Hills Sky Deck at night with the whole city lit below you. The Mori Art Museum is on the 53rd floor, which is a lot of building for one observation. The Parasite Museum in Meguro is the only one in the world, which says something. The Ikebukuro Earthquake Museum lets you experience a 7.0 Richter scale shake. A cat café where you drink coffee and touch someone else’s pets. It’s all absurd and none of it matters and you keep going anyway. Tokyo swallows you eventually. You’ll understand it on the 3 AM train—packed, quiet, everyone going somewhere. The city doesn’t wait. It doesn’t need to. Friday, 19 October 2012. Nicole Kidman’s Wild Ride: I’ve been watching Nicole Kidman long enough to stop trying to predict what she’ll do next. She takes on prestige roles, musicals, thrillers, something genuinely strange—commits fully each time. There’s an intensity to her that makes every choice feel inevitable, even when she’s all over the place. It’s rare to find an actor so committed to the work rather than the idea of being a star. Friday, 19 October 2012. Cease and Desist: A German image agency started systematically sending cease-and-desist letters to bloggers over photo usage. The mechanics were simple: find an image you posted, claim you owed licensing fees, attach a bill for several thousand euros. Most people paid because a lawyer cost more. The agency probably didn’t own exclusive rights to anything they were claiming—they just bought regional licensing and then threatened everyone else who used the same images. It worked. Then BuzzFeed got sued for $1.3 million over nine backstage photos from a Katy Perry shoot. That’s roughly $150,000 per image in statutory damages—apparently Fair Use didn’t apply. The lesson was clear: size didn’t protect you, professional context didn’t help, nothing helped. The system had figured out there was money in making people afraid. The weird part was the isolation. Bloggers were content infrastructure for the publishing industry—we found things, wrote about them, outlets fed off our traffic and our discoveries. But the moment legal risk appeared, we were completely alone. No institutional backing. No “we built this together, let’s defend it together.” Just letters and the calculation: do I pay, or do I fight? People made different choices. Some stopped posting images entirely. Some got paranoid about sourcing. Some just accepted the risk and kept blogging. There wasn’t a winning move, just degrees of accepted vulnerability. And the system worked because enough people folded. It was efficiently predatory—no actual lawsuits needed, just threats. I kept posting. Figured the odds were fine and paranoia would be worse. If the letter came, it came. Thursday, 18 October 2012. The Moment Before: There’s a particular moment in shopping when the fantasy is cleaner than the reality. You see a GoPro and imagine yourself filming at places worth filming. A Chromebook and you’ve already decided on your tech philosophy—not Apple, not Windows, just Google all the way down. Rocksmith and you’re the kind of person who just picks up guitar, you skip the part where you’re bad at it. Limited Nikes because some things are only available if you’re lucky enough to find them. The H&M x Lana Del Rey collection and suddenly you’re living with that specific mood she does, that bored-glamour thing. The products on this list are all selling that moment. They’re selling you the version of yourself that exists right before you buy them. I’ve fallen for it plenty of times. You buy something and for maybe a week you feel like the person it promised. Then it’s just a thing you own and you’re still you, just smaller by whatever you spent. But those few days of feeling like someone else—that actually works. It works on all of us. Thursday, 18 October 2012. Thirty-Four Floors: Shibuya Hikarie sits right at the edge where Shibuya’s chaos bleeds into something almost manageable. The building itself is this sleek vertical thing—all glass and clean lines—which feels almost restrained compared to the rest of the neighborhood. I remember going up to one of the observation decks, that strange moment where Tokyo suddenly organizes itself into patterns when you’re high enough to see it whole. From down on the street it’s all noise and bodies and signs; from up there you understand the actual shape of things. The design is aggressively functional—shopping, offices, theater, restaurants all stacked into this efficient tower. There’s something very Tokyo about that, the refusal to waste vertical space on anything that doesn’t serve. You go in expecting a shopping mall and end up in this compressed vertical city. The crowds are better-behaved than you’d expect, moving through the space like they’ve accepted its logic. It’s the kind of building that works precisely because it doesn’t try to be charming or memorable—it just does what it’s built to do. Wednesday, 17 October 2012. Beth/Rest: There’s something about that song in deep winter that just gets under your skin. The orchestration builds so gradually you barely notice it happening, and then suddenly you’re sitting in the dark and the strings are everywhere. Justin Vernon at his most intimate, I think—not hiding behind production, just this voice and what sounds like the whole architecture of loneliness arranged around it. I’ve played it so many times I’ve stopped hearing it as a song and started hearing it as a room I keep going back to. Wednesday, 17 October 2012. Sky Ferreira: Home Alone: Sky Ferreira has this way of making isolation sound like the only place worth being. There’s something in her voice—the precision of it, the slight remove—that suggests someone perfectly comfortable with her own company, or maybe someone who’s learned that loneliness is cleaner than the alternative. Her records have always felt like they were made in a room by herself, even when they’re surrounded by producers and collaborators. That sense of distance, of being untouchable even when the songs are vulnerable, is what makes her interesting to me. She builds these intricate electronic structures and then sings through them like she’s still deciding whether to let you in. Tuesday, 16 October 2012. Roses Gabor: Tuesday, 16 October 2012. One More Skins: Skins was perfect timing for me. The early seasons especially—I was the right age, old enough to feel the darkness, young enough to think it understood me. The later seasons fell apart, and don’t get me started on the American version, but those first two generations stuck around in my head in a way most TV doesn’t. So when E4 announced they were making Skins 7, I felt this weird mix of things. Excited? Skeptical? I didn’t know if I actually wanted this or just liked the idea of it. It’s three one-hour episodes, each focused on a different character from the original run. Hannah Murray is Cassie, now in London trying to make sense of questions nobody can answer. Jack O’Connell is Cook, working as a drug courier, falling in love, drowning in the violence he’s been running from. Kaya Scodelario is Effy, sleeping with her boss, accelerating toward a collision she doesn’t see coming. Naomi and Emily show up too. Elsley and Brittain wrote it. I want to see these people again, want to know where they ended up. But Skins was already done. It had an ending. There’s something haunting about returning to a story you thought was finished, something you can’t quite shake even if the new episodes are perfect. Spring 2013 they air, three episodes, and that’s supposedly it for real. We’ll find out if going back feels better than just letting it stay gone. Tuesday, 16 October 2012. Far Cry 3: Going Insane: Insanity creeps in faster than you’d expect. It’s this thing where your mind just starts spinning in its own direction, destroying and saving you at the same time, and one day you realize you can’t reel it back in anymore. That’s what Far Cry 3 actually gets. You watch Jason Brody transform from castaway trying to escape into someone genuinely unhinged. Not through cutscenes, but as a byproduct of every choice you make for him. The more you play, the more he becomes who you are through the controller, until the violence stops being about escape and starts being what you enjoy. The mechanics feed it. New weapons, execution animations, the satisfying geometry of planning something brutally perfect. The game keeps rewarding you for efficiency at killing, and around hour ten you stop rationalizing it as survival. It becomes what you actually like. By the end, the dialogue has shifted. NPCs talk about you like you’re not quite human anymore. What you do has become what you are. The game just lets it happen without the redemption arc or moral hand-wringing. I liked that. Not as a statement about violence in games or anything like that, just a clean observation: this is what happens when you keep choosing power. You don’t stay who you were. There’s no going back. Tuesday, 16 October 2012. American Apparel: The thing about basics is they seem pointless until they’re not. You walk into a store looking for a plain t-shirt and suddenly you’re aware of every choice the designers made or didn’t make—the weight of the fabric, the curve of the sleeve, whether the neck opening is actually comfortable to pull over your head. Most brands fail at this unconsciously. American Apparel fails at it consciously, which is a different kind of achievement. They built something on the idea that a t-shirt doesn’t need to be a statement piece. It can just be a really good t-shirt. Solid colors, simple cuts, no branding that screams at you. If that sounds boring, you’ve never actually had to wear clothes. The boredom is the point. You want your basic layer to disappear, to not be a distraction, to not make you think about it every time you move your arm. AA gets that—or got that, long enough to matter. There’s a California thing underneath the whole brand that you can’t escape. A particular idea about what’s possible when you strip away the bullshit and just ask: what does this garment actually need to be? Minimalism isn’t accidental restraint, it’s a choice about what deserves your attention and what doesn’t. Whether that translates into good business is someone else’s problem. As a designer looking at a brand, you notice when someone made a real decision about what the clothes should be, rather than just adding features because they’re easy or trendy. I’ve owned American Apparel pieces that lasted actual years because there was nothing in them to fail. No unnecessary seams, no cheap elastic that gives out, no printing that cracks and peels. The constraint of minimalism isn’t just aesthetic, it’s structural—if you’re not hiding behind graphics or novelty, the construction has to be solid. And when it is, you stop thinking about the clothes. They just become your clothes. Monday, 15 October 2012. Queens of Kāenji: Monday, 15 October 2012. The White Dress: Monday, 15 October 2012. The List: I know it’s important to be social—go out to dinner, call family, sleep with women. I check those boxes often enough. But I’m only really happy when I can watch seven seasons of my current favorite show back-to-back and my neighbors are considerate enough to keep the bass off David Guetta and Scooter for once. So I watch Jesse Pinkman dissolve bodies in bathtubs. Tony Stonem cheating on Michelle with some blonde. Will McAvoy pining for Emily Mortimer. I carry all these plot threads around in my head, all these characters and scenes and moments—the funny ones and the devastating ones. Only thing’s always been missing: a place to track it all. A website appeared for that exact impulse—one of those things someone should’ve built years ago. You log every show you’ve ever watched, get notified when new episodes drop, build a profile. Simple. Obvious in retrospect. But it didn’t exist until it did. Now I’m going through every TV show that’s ever crossed my screen and cataloging it. Which is a lot. Really a lot. Could take years. I’m the kind of person who carries everything in memory and then gets furious that I can’t search it. Most of what I’ve watched is gone. Breaking Bad, Skins, The Newsroom—I can pull those up. Specific scenes, specific lines. Ask me what I was watching in 2011 and I’m blank. It eats at me. So I do this. I catalog. It’s not productive. It’s not going anywhere. But it feels necessary somehow, like I’m rescuing something from disappearing. Every episode tracked is one less thing the years take from me. Monday, 15 October 2012. Pretty in Pink: Sunday, 14 October 2012. I’m Shakin’: Jack White songs feel like they’re in a hurry. ’I’m Shakin’’ is a blues cover stripped to the essentials—just what’s necessary, moving with a kind of precision that cuts against the simplicity. He treats the blues like an argument, every second accounted for. No padding, no flourish, nothing wasted. Just the song moving forward and finishing before you can catch your breath. Sunday, 14 October 2012. Sharon Van Etten: Magic Chords: What keeps me coming back to Sharon Van Etten is something almost boring to describe—the way she puts songs together. She’s not after flashy or complicated. Her chords are simple, but there’s this exactness to how she places them, like every change is the only thing that could come next. You don’t notice it at first. You just feel the song working on you, and then you realize it’s because of this choice she made about progression, this tiny decision that ended up being everything. There’s a confidence in that restraint. She trusts her voice enough to not clutter up the space around it. No flourishes, no reaching for a bigger moment than the song can hold. Just the chords and her voice, and somehow that’s enough to make something stick with you in a way that all the technical skill in the world wouldn’t. Sunday, 14 October 2012. Gym Bag Boys: Sunday, 14 October 2012. The Troll Tax: Every public space online eventually gets invaded. You build something, people show up, and then the people show up who don’t want to talk about it—they just want to poison it. It’s not debate. It’s just seething into a text box. The standard answers don’t work. Kill comments entirely and you lose the actual conversations, the people who showed up to engage. Use Disqus, Facebook, free registration—anyone serious about ruining the space just makes a throwaway account, and half your real audience bails because they don’t want another login. Nothing sticks. But I ran across something different recently. Venus Patrol, this indie game site, started charging three dollars a month to comment. Three bucks. Nothing. But it works—not perfectly, but noticeably. Christian Gürnth from GameOne noticed the same thing with their paid sections: the comments are categorically different. More civil. More actual thinking. Where anyone can post, you get pure hate noise. Behind a paywall, even a tiny one, people show up with something to say. The math is obvious. Three dollars is nothing to most people, but it’s enough friction that someone who just wants to dump anger into the internet will pick an easier target. And the people who pay are self-selected—they’re there because they care about the conversation, not because they found the space by accident. But sitting with this for a minute, something darker emerges. If every corner of the internet starts doing this, you’re not just filtering trolls. You’re creating tiers. People who can afford to speak. People who can’t. A paywall doesn’t delete the trolls, it just displaces them, and splits discourse into islands of civility for people with five dollars a month and oceans of rot everywhere else. The internet was supposed to flatten the hierarchy. Now we’re rebuilding it, one micropayment at a time. I don’t know if it’s the answer. Maybe it’s necessary. Maybe it’s inevitable. But it’s not a fix—it’s a partition. Friday, 12 October 2012. Ride: “Ride” is the sound of a car you’re never really going to reach the end of. Lana’s voice drifting over that minimal, aching production, talking about going somewhere, knowing full well that the destination is beside the point. It’s melancholic in a way that makes you feel something—not sad exactly, but aware. The romance is entirely in the suspension, the not-arriving. The song is really about mythology. She’s singing about the idea of romance more than romance itself, that fantasy where if you just keep driving you become someone else, something pure. It never lands. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. That’s the appeal—the movie doesn’t have an ending because endings ruin the whole thing. I think about this song during certain late-night drives, certain moments where my actual life momentarily aligns with something bigger and sadder than itself. Not because I want to live that way, but because for a second it makes the ordinary feel like it’s part of a real story. Lana’s best work does that—it gives you permission to feel like you’re living in a film that doesn’t exist yet. Friday, 12 October 2012. Kate Upton’s Outtakes: Friday, 12 October 2012. The Spiral: Thursday, 11 October 2012. Why Instagram Won: What bothers me about Instagram isn’t that everyone photographs their food and their cat and the sky—it’s the endless stream of terrible, washed-out, square filtered images it’s been responsible for. Those flattened, sapped squares. I’ve hated them for years. I can’t even properly link my own images or save someone else’s without diving into the browser source or just screenshotting the whole page, which apparently you’re not supposed to do. For the longest time I kept thinking something better would come along and actually stick. Every couple of years there’s a new Instagram alternative—cleaner interface, no filters, pure photography. The specifics don’t matter. They all fail because Instagram already won. Everyone’s there. The aesthetic is locked in. Those washed-out, flattened squares are what images are supposed to look like now, even though they’re objectively terrible. What really gets me is what Instagram did to how people think about making images. Everything goes through that filtered lens before it touches the world. The colors get pulled out. The actual life leaves the photo. Somehow this became the default. Unfiltered photography started looking broken. I keep imagining images that just exist—no processing, no frame, just the pictures themselves. It’s a dumb fantasy. The alternatives come and die. Instagram stays there, total and bloated, and everyone keeps making the same washed-out squares. Thursday, 11 October 2012. The 2013 Promise: I read that Berlin’s government announced free wifi for everyone by 2013, and I felt that familiar sinking feeling. They always announce something, always set a date, then nothing happens. I want to believe differently this time. But I know better. There’s something genuinely good about the actual idea, though. Imagine sitting in Berlin with your laptop and actually being able to post something, send an email, check the news—without your phone screaming about data limits, without being trapped in some overstuffed café full of people performing importance. That would actually be worth it. But then you think about what it takes to get there. The government doesn’t want liability if someone uses the network for anything sketchy, so there’s this whole legal mess to sort through first. And they’re funding it with ads plus data sales—which fine, I get the economics, but it’s the same tired compromise you see everywhere. Maybe 2013. Maybe not. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s handing out free wifi in New York and San Francisco like it’s nothing. These announcements keep coming about what might happen next year, while it’s already live elsewhere. That gap is the whole story right there. Wednesday, 10 October 2012. Sigur Rós: Dauðalogn: Sigur Rós does something to the air around you when you listen. It’s not quite silence and it’s not quite noise—it’s that strange space where meaning happens without words getting in the way. The band has always understood that the Icelandic landscape is as much a musician as anyone holding an instrument, which is partly why they’ve mattered for so long. You listen and feel suspended between things, which is exactly where the music wants you. Wednesday, 10 October 2012. Tokyo Loop: Wednesday, 10 October 2012. The Revelation: Every week I’m convinced some new thing is the ultimate revelation, the final content that makes life worth living. I’d sell all my furniture, probably my body, just to sit in a cardboard box on the street and do nothing but that one thing until I died of a heart attack. A happy death. For a while it was League of Legends—thought I needed to be unbeatable, feared, haunting some kid’s nightmares. Then I was in the bathtub one day thinking I should become an activist, fight copyright abuse or something equally noble, dedicate myself to some righteous cause. And I’d also, separately, like to fuck Sasha Grey. For the past few days it’s this anime. Just me, a cheap bottle of red wine, some sushi in bed, watching the original series with subtitles. Not the HD remake that inverts the whole story—the version that makes me want to hit Hideaki Anno. Everyone with any claim to pop culture taste knows what this is about: kids with psychological damage forced into giant robots to fight things called Angels and save the world from apocalypse. Secret organizations with names like NERV, religious imagery, daddy issues, suicide, dreadnoughts, teenage breasts, betrayal, ceilings, friendship, and intelligent penguins. It’s a lot. For me it’s the definitive anime. It reminds me why I fell in love with this medium, forgot about it, then fell in love again. I’m riveted to the screen. The cicadas are screaming, the sirens are wailing, the ground is exploding. I have tears in my eyes when Asuka’s in the bathtub covered in blood. There’s this moment when Misato cracks open a beer and that specific piece of music hits—infinite happiness. I sit in the dark afterward thinking about the lies and secrets, about Shinji’s choices, about Rei, the relationships, the ending, everything that comes after. I can barely bring myself to understand the riddles forming in front of me. I don’t want to hear the confessions. I want to run back to a 24-hour convenience store, sit in the subway, stare out the window at all those lights. This show keeps breaking me. And it keeps putting me back together. What Anno made is more than merchandise in arcade cabinets and instant noodle packages. It’s a revelation that could only hit this hard if you drop all your defenses and let it consume you completely. Once you do that, there’s no going back. Wednesday, 10 October 2012. The Canyons: The Canyons is a cold, explicit drama about screenwriters and filmmakers destroying themselves in the LA hills—the kind of thing Schrader would make, all erotic dread and surfaces. He brought Lindsay Lohan back to lead it, which made the film instantly complicated: was it a comeback, a comeback fantasy, or a provocation? The answer depends on what you think the film is actually about, and Schrader made sure it wouldn’t be easy to answer. It’s fascinating as an artifact of a specific moment, a wound-up art film that refused to be respectable. Wednesday, 10 October 2012. PETA vs. Pokémon: I love animals. Would save every one of them if half didn’t taste so good. That said, PETA manages to piss me off every single month. If you don’t know them, they’re the ones who poison dogs in trucks and mock video games while claiming to give a shit about the world. Real charity work apparently got boring, so now they spend their time splashing people with fake blood and making parody games about Nintendo franchises. Their latest thing is a flash game called Pokémon Black and Blue, timed to the release of the new DS games. In it, a furious, bloodied Pikachu takes revenge on his captors. The premise is that Pokémon trainers are basically running an animal torture ring, trapping creatures in balls and forcing them into fights for sport and entertainment. PETA’s statement compares it directly to circus elephants stuck in cages, given electric shocks to perform tricks. Which, okay, I see what they’re doing. The metaphor isn’t totally insane. But here’s the thing. I genuinely respect the WWF and the real animal protection organizations doing unglamorous work in the field. I’m not being ironic—I think improving conditions for captive and endangered animals should happen fast and comprehensively. No bullshit. But pouring money and effort into embarrassing PR stunts instead of going where help actually matters, instead of doing anything that requires patience and real work, that shows PETA gave up on reality years ago. They’re not activists. They’re performance artists who decided animals were the right subject. Protesting a video game about fictional creatures while real animals suffer in real cages is so perfectly on-brand that I almost respect the commitment. Almost. Tuesday, 9 October 2012. Cameron Forever: There’s something about the late ’90s Cameron Diaz that just worked—not because she was stunning or because everyone said so, but because she seemed to actually enjoy being in the frame. In *There’s Something About Mary*, she wasn’t playing sexy, she was just there, funny and unselfconscious. She made comedy look like something you could do without calculating every movement, which is maybe the hardest thing any actor can do. I know the culture moved on. She moved on too, stepped back from it all. But there’s something specific about that window—early Diaz, before the machinery of fame got heavy—that still holds up when you go back. Those films feel like they’re from another planet now, which probably says more about where we are than where she was. I think about that version of her sometimes and remember what it felt like to watch movies that weren’t anxious about themselves, that weren’t trying to be Important. Just someone on screen having a genuinely good time, and you could feel it. Tuesday, 9 October 2012. Perfume Genius: I listen to Perfume Genius when I need to hear someone refuse to turn away from the hard stuff. Mike Hadreas builds electronic music that’s completely unguarded—no irony, no distance, just his voice and whatever he’s constructed around it reaching for the truth of desire and damage and survival. His songs don’t comfort you in any easy way. They just exist in the same space as your worst thoughts and don’t flinch. Monday, 8 October 2012. YouTube Stops Being YouTube: Onkel Berni is shooting a late-night show from their Berlin apartment—sketch comedy, interviews, music, the whole format—and YouTube’s bankrolling it. Not taking a cut of the revenue. Literally funding production. For two years. Upfront. This is what happens when a platform decides it’s tired of being a platform. YouTube realized they’d been thinking about it wrong. Why take a percentage when you could own everything? So they built out 60 channels across 60 countries, committed multi-year development budgets to each one, and started hiring people to make television. Real television. Professional productions. They’d figured out that streaming works now, that the production costs have bottomed out, that there’s no reason to split revenue with amateurs when they could just do the whole thing themselves and keep the money. There’s a channel about extreme sports called Boneless. Gaming channels with production schedules. Music programming. Documentary series. The infrastructure of a real network, just hosted on the internet. A YouTube executive explained it plainly: you can’t just make good videos anymore, you have to become an entrepreneur. Build your own audience. Market your own channel. Handle the business side. For traditional TV people, that’s weird—they’re used to the network doing all that. For internet creators who grew up making stuff for fun, it’s a complete reorientation. What gets lost in this pivot is obvious if you think about it. The internet’s golden age in video was wild and strange and deeply uncensored because the barrier to entry was practically nothing. No committee. No brand guidelines. No approval process. You had a camera and bandwidth and that was enough. If your weird thing found its audience, it found it. That scrappiness, that lack of institutional gatekeeping—that’s what made the whole ecosystem feel different from television. Professionalization kills that. You need business plans now. Production schedules. Metrics. The ability to monetize from day one. The people who can afford to stay are people who already understood the entertainment business, who already had resources, who were already positioned to scale. The amateurs leave. The weirdos get priced out. You’re left with something that looks like internet content but operates like the old television industry. Which is fine, probably. It’s legitimate work. It just isn’t what made anyone actually care in the first place. YouTube realized it could make more money by becoming cable, and it turned out they were right, but somewhere in that calculation the original thing got left behind. Monday, 8 October 2012. Jerica Lamens: Amazon: Monday, 8 October 2012. The Vaccines: I Always Knew: The Vaccines came out of nowhere in 2011 and somehow felt inevitable—that jangly, nervous energy, the tight hooks, the way they sounded simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Justin Young’s voice had this quality of barely contained urgency, like he was telling you something he’d already decided you wouldn’t believe. I caught them early and they felt like a secret, which is the most dangerous thing for a band to feel like in the streaming age. Everyone finds it at the same time now. What held up was the restraint. They never got bigger than the songs needed them to be. “If You Wanna” is still a perfect piece of nervous guitar pop—it doesn’t apologize, doesn’t reach, just exists exactly as long as it should. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Most bands either disappear or bloat. The Vaccines just stayed themselves, which is its own kind of obscurity. Monday, 8 October 2012. Team Ghost: Dead Film Star: There’s something odd about watching a film after an actor dies. You’re not talking about the big names usually, just the faces in the background, the actors who showed up in a dozen movies you loved without much thought. But once they’re dead, suddenly every time you watch those films they’re there again, exactly the same age as they were on set, doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s just strange—a ghost that was always visible, you just weren’t looking. Film locks people in time whether they asked to be locked or not. Sunday, 7 October 2012. It’s The End Of Daze: John Kilar spent the last decade pushing television toward something it didn’t entirely want to become. First at Hulu, then Viacom—always the guy trying to drag legacy media into the streaming era while the industry fought him tooth and nail. He made his bets. Some paid off. Others just made people angry. There’s something almost sad about watching an executive’s grand vision get slowly dismantled by the same people who hired him, especially when he was probably right about what was coming. By the time he left, nobody was talking about the vision anymore. Just the exit. That’s usually how it goes. Sunday, 7 October 2012. Weekend Rot: Rainy weekends do something to you. The sky just sits there crying and the temperature laughs at your face while you’re trapped inside with nothing but your phone and bad options. Scrolling, TV, whatever—mostly just existing in that specific pocket of weird that the internet saves for bored people. That’s the state you’re in right now. There’s this video of kids from places with actual problems reading First World complaints out loud. Someone’s crying about their new iPhone and a kid just stares like you’ve lost your mind. It’s funny in a way that makes you think about everything you complain about, which is dangerous when you’re already stuck inside and thinking too much. Sacha Baron Cohen made this movie where he plays some absurdly wealthy Chinese businessman trying to auction off his lesbian daughter. The premise is so committed and stupid that you have to respect it. Someone just decided to push it that far and nobody stopped them. Effy from Skins is still, years later, the person you’re most in love with. Nothing’s changed. Something about that show wired itself into your brain permanently and on a day like this you find yourself thinking about how she moved, what she’d say, whether anything would be different if you could go back. There are photos of models where the clothes don’t hide anything and you find yourself collecting them more than is probably healthy. You’re not organized about it, not doing anything with the collection, just saving things because they make you feel something. There’s someone famous who posed for magazines and plays video games better than most people. She looks like that, her attitude is sharp, she’d destroy you in ranked matches. You think about marrying her sometimes, which is ridiculous because you know nothing except these surface facts. But that’s always the fantasy—someone great at what they do, looks incredible, wouldn’t take your shit. You imagine moving to some isolated house somewhere, zombie-proof, cop-proof, away from everything. The zombie thing is funny because you don’t believe in them but the metaphor works perfectly. There are websites built on pure hate. You think about suing them, reporting them, trying to burn them down through the system. But the system doesn’t work that way and those people are immune to being shamed. So you just want to hit something. And then at the end of that whole mental list was just one more thing waiting: sleep with Luigi. And you do think about it, on afternoons like this. Saturday, 6 October 2012. Naked and Noble: There was a moment somewhere in there when Gaga stopped needing the costume. All those years of construction, calculation, shock—and then something shifted. The nakedness that came after wasn’t the opposite of the artifice, it was the endgame. You perform authenticity long enough and it becomes real. The person and the persona stop being separate things. That’s when you see what was actually underneath. That’s the nakedness that turns noble. Saturday, 6 October 2012. No Explanation, No Appeal: The Cool Hunter had nearly 800,000 followers on Facebook. Not some viral moment account—a legitimate design and photography blog out of New York that had built something real over years. Eight hundred thousand people who came back regularly. A thousand clicks a day, just from Facebook alone. And then one day, without warning, the account was gone. Permanently deleted. Bill Tikos, who runs the blog, only found out because people started asking where the page went. Facebook didn’t send a warning, didn’t explain, didn’t offer any chance to fix whatever they thought was wrong. He reached out asking for details, asking what he could do. Facebook basically said no—account’s deleted, that’s it, no further discussion. The stated reason was copyright violations. Two of them. Facebook pointed at two photos they said shouldn’t have been there and decided that meant eight hundred thousand followers, years of work, thousands of pieces of content—all of it gone. Tikos asked the obvious question: which photos exactly? What part of your rules did they break? How am I supposed to know what’s acceptable and what isn’t if you don’t tell me? They never really answered. What’s unreal about this is how arbitrary it is. Facebook could have sent a notice. They could have said “delete these two and you’re fine.” They could have given him an appeal, a chance to respond, something. Instead they just executed the page like some algorithm made a call and there was no court, no explanation, nothing. The account was gone and that was that. But here’s what actually stings: it’s not just the followers or the traffic, even though that’s brutal. It’s what lived only on that page. Things he’d tested with his audience that never made it to the blog. Artists and designers he’d given a platform. The conversations, the feedback loop, years of learning what people actually wanted to see. All of it, just erased. The page wasn’t just a metrics thing—it was a place, a working relationship with an audience. I think about this a lot because most of us who write or make things online have at least some piece of our audience sitting on someone else’s platform. Facebook pages, Twitter followers, whatever. It’s free, which is nice, until you realize you don’t actually own any of it. You’re renting from a landlord who can evict you any minute without explanation. The practical move is obvious: go through your pages right now and delete anything that might get flagged. Better to pull it yourself than wake up and find the account’s gone. But that misses the actual fear, which is you never know where the line is until you’ve crossed it. Friday, 5 October 2012. Sasha Grey Doesn’t Stay: Sasha Grey left. Not her job or city—the entire framework that was supposed to contain her. She started in adult films, the kind of totalizing industry where you’re trapped by one identity forever. Then she didn’t do that anymore. Became a visual artist. Made experimental films. Appeared in serious television. Just kept moving. People who needed her to stay ashamed got angrier. The transgressive part isn’t where she came from—it’s that she refused to apologize for it. No redemption narrative. No ’I was lost and now I’m found.’ What interests me is how thoroughly she operates outside the categories people built for her. The real transgression is what she refuses to perform: shame, regret, the recovery story everyone expects. Friday, 5 October 2012. Ready to Leave: I’ve been in Berlin five years now, and I’ve done just about everything this place has to offer without destroying my life completely in the process. Sunday mornings at the flea market in Mauerpark when the sun’s out, getting annoyed at the tourists while being one myself. Nights dancing through clubs, wrecked on whatever we’d taken before we left, sleeping in different beds after, and then at dawn finding myself on a swing somewhere watching the sun come up. I’ve met the kind of people you remember, people you kiss, people you lose. All the things Berlin’s supposed to be. But standing here now, walking down streets I’ve walked a thousand times, the air smelling the same, the crowds doing the same dull thing—I can feel how little Berlin has moved. The city’s frozen. Maybe it’s been dead for a while and just doesn’t know it yet. You want to believe the experiences matter, the people matter, that five years of something means something, but the city tells you different every time you leave your apartment. You can keep building along the Spree. You can keep closing clubs and opening them somewhere else. You can keep cycling through art shows and pop-up stores and vegan restaurants and startups and graffiti walls and MacBook cafés—everyone photographing it, posting about it, moving on. It doesn’t matter. Berlin’s suffering from something frozen at its core. Its creativity is asleep, kept in that sleep by the people who want it to stay free and elite forever, like those things can exist at the same time, like holding time still is the same as keeping something alive. Everywhere I go I see the same faces in different people, the same types, the same stories repeating. I’m trapped in a place that talks about nothing but change while it starves for it. Full of people who came here as real individuals and got smoothed into copies of other copies. I watched it happen. I even called it out and people just stared back at me. It’s not the coke or the beer or the casual sex or the music that bleeds you out. It’s the ruins of a place that’s lived through too much and is too tired to keep going, that’s gone quiet and barely breathes anymore. Your footsteps echo up through the tall old buildings and past all the painted rubble, down the long avenues and into the clubs at night, and nobody hears them. A rotting collective of imitations doesn’t hear anything. I defended this place for years. Loved it. Said it was the only city that would ever give me what it gave me. And I meant it then. But I’ve seen through it now and I can only smile tired smiles at it, wave my hand. Five years in Berlin and I’m ready to leave. Maybe for good this time. Thursday, 4 October 2012. The Weeknd: There’s something about watching The Weeknd perform that makes everything else feel like it’s happening in color correction. The red lighting, the distorted synths, that voice processed into something almost inhuman but still vulnerable underneath. He doesn’t perform like he wants you to like him. He performs like he’s working through something and you’re just there, witnessing it. I got into his music late, which is typical of me. By the time I was paying attention, he’d already built this whole visual world—the bandages, the Starboy era, the absolute commitment to darkness as an aesthetic choice rather than just a mood. What struck me was that he never apologized for it. A lot of artists soften when they get bigger, start chasing relatability. He just went further in. The Weeknd looks at the camera like he’s already won, like he doesn’t need anything from you except to watch what he’s made. Thursday, 4 October 2012. The Cease and Desist: The cease-and-desist letters started arriving in waves. activeLAW, representing a Berlin image agency called hgm-press, began sending them by the thousands. They’d apparently bought up rights to thousands of photographs and figured out they could make money just sending lawyers after bloggers. The demands were usually around five thousand euros per image. Sometimes more. They didn’t distinguish between anything. Didn’t matter if you’d credited the photographer or even had written permission. They’d run Google Image Search, find your blog in the results, send a letter. Autodino got hit for nineteen thousand euros on three photos. We Like That got dunned for three grand on a picture of some artist nobody had heard of. When they came for me it was five thousand for a Lindsay Lohan shot I’d posted years earlier. What made it possible was the law itself. Germany doesn’t have fair use. In America, you can share an image for commentary, reporting, inspiration—that’s why sites like Tumblr and Pinterest exist. Here, reposting someone else’s photograph without explicit rights is illegal. Full stop. The law doesn’t distinguish. Doesn’t care why you did it or how you framed it. So you’re running a blog about culture and design, and you realize you’re legally exposed every time you embed an image. Not because you’re being careless. Because the law doesn’t allow for context. It’s an impossible minefield. Most people just paid. That was the whole point. They knew you couldn’t afford a real court fight, so they sent letters until the money came. It was predatory in the cleanest sense—no complexity, no subtlety. Just identify creators, wait for the payment. The effect was clear enough: it made you less likely to create online, to share anything, to riff on culture and respond to it. Maybe that wasn’t the intended result. But it was the result. Tuesday, 2 October 2012. Ashley in the Woods: Sunday, 30 September 2012. Spiders from Space: Mutant space crabs in 3D is exactly the kind of premise that makes you wonder who greenlighted this, but also why they didn’t make more of them. You watch it knowing exactly what you’re in for - the budget constraints, the earnest practical effects, the commitment to the bit. There’s something kind of pure about a movie that doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. Sunday, 30 September 2012. Grizzly Bear: Yet Again: I keep putting on Grizzly Bear records because something about their songs doesn’t quite resolve. They’re meticulous—every track layered with detail that rewards attention—but there’s always a restlessness underneath, like they’re reaching for something just beyond the arrangement. It’s not a flaw. It’s what makes you play it again, trying to hear what they’re getting at. Years later and the songs still feel incomplete in that specific way, still asking something of you. Friday, 28 September 2012. I Know You Care: What gets me is the restraint. Ellie sits in this skeletal electronic space with nothing around her—no reaching, no building, nothing trying to convince you. She’s just saying it, plainly, and something about that plainness is what lands. Most pop songs are built to hit you at once; this one trusts that you’ll hear what matters if you’re paying attention. Thursday, 27 September 2012. Still Better Than Star Trek: I came to it late, downloaded the first one on impulse, and then I couldn’t stop. Burned through all three over a few months. That was years ago and I haven’t found anything that matched it since. What hooked me was partly the story—intricate and strange for a blockbuster game—but mostly the weight behind your decisions. Not clean moral branches but real trade-offs with consequences that carried forward. Characters you saved in one playthrough died in another depending on your choices. You could green-light genocide and carry that guilt forward for two more games. The decision-space was enormous and almost all of it actually mattered. The ending still gets to me. Won’t spoil it, but there’s something in how it concludes that feels truer than games usually allow themselves to be. People are still debating what it means, which is kind of the whole point. It’s one of those endings that makes you want to immediately replay it to see if another path was better, but you already know the answer—it’s not about the paths, it’s about you. I’d stopped gaming before this. Not dramatically, just drifted away. These three games pulled me back in. Made me feel like someone whose choices actually shaped the world I was moving through. Bioware convinced me that games could do something I didn’t think they could—that they could matter the way books do. I’m still chasing that feeling. Still waiting for another trilogy to do what those three did. Haven’t found it. Probably won’t. Thursday, 27 September 2012. Chloë and the Black Couch: Wednesday, 26 September 2012. Pretty Pointless: MySpace is coming back. Justin Timberlake of all people is the one steering this thing. The screenshots are incredible—I’m not even kidding, the interface is sleek, the timelines are clean, the whole thing looks like something designed by someone who actually understood what’s wrong with every other social network. Which is exactly the problem. The old MySpace was never beautiful. It was a disaster—loud, chaotic, full of broken HTML and autoplay music and comment spam and actual predators in your inbox. People customized their pages obsessively, made them completely unusable to anyone but themselves. The whole thing was garbage. But somehow that’s exactly what made it work. It was honest. It didn’t pretend to be curated or algorithmic or safe. You went there to be seen, to find your people, to be weird without apologizing for it. What gets me about remembering MySpace is how much I hated it while I was using it. I knew the platform was full of creeps and bots. I knew my painstakingly designed profile page looked ridiculous to anyone looking at it. I knew I was wasting time. And still I couldn’t stop. Tom was your first friend, always there, always smiling. It died the way most things do online—suddenly and then forgotten. Facebook ate it. Everyone moved on. MySpace became a punch line, the story older siblings told to explain how fragile everything is, how quickly what seems permanent becomes ruins. But now it’s back. The new design doesn’t look like the old one at all. It’s slick, contemporary, actually functional. It’s the version of MySpace that maybe should have existed all along, except now we’re so tired of social networks that the promise of a beautiful interface doesn’t even matter anymore. We’re drowning in them—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, whatever new thing launched last week. There’s no room left for another place to pour yourself into. Except the design is really, genuinely good. That’s the seduction. That’s why this might actually work for some people—the ones young enough not to remember MySpace the first time, the ones for whom this is just another social network without any weight of disappointment behind it. For them it’s clean and new. For me it’s a ghost with better graphics. Gorgeous garbage still doesn’t make the garbage necessary. We don’t need another timeline to check, another feed to scroll through, another algorithm deciding who sees what we post. MySpace was a beautiful failure once. I’m betting it stays that way. Tuesday, 25 September 2012. Time Machine: Used to write about things that mattered—hunger in East Africa, what men find beautiful, girls who refused the boxes. Now it’s Miley Cyrus’s breasts and drunk teenagers at Oktoberfest. At some point the work shifted. Maybe I got tired of being angry about things I can’t fix. Maybe I just followed the audience elsewhere. Maybe I stopped believing any of it mattered. The old pieces are still out there if you want to see what I sounded like before that happened. It’s not a tragedy. It’s just what happens. Tuesday, 25 September 2012. HUB: HUB makes shoes without the performance-anxiety marketing. No overwrought branding, no claims stamped on the side—just leather, rubber, proportions that work. The kind of restraint that only comes from actually knowing what you’re doing. I’ve worn enough shoes to recognize when someone’s designed something versus when they’ve just slapped a logo on an existing mold. HUB’s the former. Break them in and you’ve got footwear for the next few years. Monday, 24 September 2012. Kate and the Puppies: Kate Upton with puppies is exactly as straightforward as it looks. Beautiful woman, cute dogs, good light. Your eye lands there and stays. There’s no pretense to it, and somehow that’s the point. You don’t need more. Sunday, 23 September 2012. Dirty Projectors: About To Die: Dirty Projectors have always operated in that space where experimentation and genuine song craft somehow coexist. Dave Longstreth’s voice doing those fractured, angular things over the band’s constantly shifting arrangements—it shouldn’t work, but there’s something about the intelligence behind it that pulls you in. They’ve never been the kind of band you stumble onto; you find them because you were looking for something weird and precise at the same time. There’s a phase everyone goes through where their records feel essential, where you can’t figure out why more people aren’t listening to them, and then you realize it’s because most people don’t want their indie rock to demand this much attention. But that’s always been the point. They exist in their own lane, doing things their way, and the fact that they’re still around and still strange feels increasingly rare. Friday, 21 September 2012. Bat For Lashes: Marilyn: Bat For Lashes gets something about the distance between how you look and how you feel. Marilyn sits in that space between glamour and dissolution—all those crystalline synths, and then a voice that sounds like it’s breaking while it sings. The song doesn’t explain anything. It just makes you understand why someone would want to be beautiful and ruined at the same time. Friday, 14 September 2012. Harsh Light: There’s a specific kind of energy in his photographs—the casual cruelty of fashion, the way models look tired and bored and gorgeous and used all at once. The style defined a moment: flash photography, harsh light, the aesthetic of someone who treated the shoot like he was doing everyone a favor. For a long time, that worked. Then the stories came out. Now when you look at the images, you look differently, or you don’t look at them at all. The work doesn’t change. Your ability to separate what you see from who made it does. Tuesday, 11 September 2012. Anything Could Happen: Ellie Goulding’s this precise, careful pop artist with a voice like glass—sharp and clear and somehow fragile at the same time. “Anything Could Happen” caught me because it doesn’t try to be more than it is, just this quiet moment of optimism that doesn’t feel desperate or cheap. You forget sometimes that pop can work that way, just by being honest. I can’t tell anymore if I actually like Ellie or just remember where that song landed in my life, but that’s the whole thing about pop music—they’re usually the same thing. Thursday, 6 September 2012. Undercity: I’ve always been drawn to the hidden parts of cities—the tunnels, the abandoned infrastructure, all the spaces that exist beneath the surface but are meant to stay unseen. Steve Duncan and Andrew Wonder turned that into a practice, infiltrating the underground levels of major cities around the world, documenting what’s been forgotten or left to decay. They made a film with Palladium Boots about exploring beneath Las Vegas and other places, and it reached people: the Times covered it, so did HuffPost and Wired. There’s a direct appeal to unauthorized access, to seeing what’s off-limits. It’s partly the transgression, partly just the visual record of it—these weird abandoned spaces, the strange things that exist below the surface. The collaboration with a gear brand makes sense; you need good boots to crawl through tunnels and underground passages. But what makes this work is the documentation itself, making something visible that’s meant to stay hidden. Wednesday, 5 September 2012. Muse: Madness: There’s this moment in the song where everything drops out and it’s just Matt Bellamy’s voice, naked and fractured, before the production crashes back in like a building collapsing. I’ve always loved Muse for that—the way they’ll write something genuinely anthemic and then wrap it in so much bombast and self-awareness that you can’t tell if they’re sincere or taking the piss. Maybe they can’t tell either. Madness works because it catches that exact tension: a stadium-sized confection that knows it’s stupid and doesn’t care. The lyrics are hokey as hell, but the architecture of the thing, the way it builds and collapses, has stuck with me for years. It’s the sound of someone brilliant with too many ideas and no editor, which is basically Muse in a nutshell. Wednesday, 5 September 2012. Topless in New York: Go Topless Day happens every summer in New York, this protest about the absurd double standard for women’s bodies. But I saw a thread about why participation wasn’t bigger, and the honest answer kept coming up: not enough women felt safe actually doing it. Which is kind of the whole point, right? The protest is about freedom from constantly policing your own body, but the policing never actually stops. It’s hard to reclaim something when you’re still defending it. Wednesday, 5 September 2012. The Last Morning at Tacheles: The bailiff showed up just after eight. Maybe thirty or forty artists were still there, moving their things out while music came from somewhere in the building and beer coasters flew out the windows onto the street. Resistance in the artistic sense. Hundreds of petition lists lay on the floor—signatures from all over the world, all these people trying to save the place. I’d signed one of those lists myself, for whatever that was worth. Tacheles wasn’t some carefully curated artist space. It was what happened when squatters and painters and musicians just occupied an old building and made something real out of chaos. Five years I’ve been in Berlin, and for nearly three of those I worked maybe fifty meters away from it. It became the place you took visiting friends when you wanted to show them the actual city, not the tourist version. Street art, the smell of piss, people who’d basically moved into the basement like it was their permanent address. Rough and genuine and completely uncommercial. The legal owners had a case—HSH Nordbank wanted their building back. That was always the ending, but there was a window where Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, could have done something. Could have intervened, given a signal that the artists mattered. He didn’t. One of the people being evicted said something like, “Now that Tacheles is gone, maybe Wowereit can go too.” I understood the anger. He’d been happy to pose for cameras talking about supporting the arts, but when it actually mattered, when it meant using political capital on actual artists instead of investors, he wasn’t there. This time there wasn’t even organized resistance. Everyone just started packing, moving out to Neukölln where the rents were still cheap. The building would become something else—a hotel, apartments, condos. The market would decide, and whatever got built there would be clean and profitable and lifeless. I could get into the whole thing about gentrification and how Berlin keeps losing its edges, how everything becomes sterilized and expensive and safe and boring. It’s true. The clubs are disappearing, the neighborhoods are flattening. But complaining about it doesn’t fix anything. Berlin was supposed to be this resilient city that regenerates itself, but I’m not sure that’s actually happening anymore. Tuesday, 4 September 2012. Topless Tuesday: Arvida’s been posting topless photos to Instagram for years, knowing they violate the community guidelines, knowing they’ll get flagged or removed. There’s no apology in it, no explanation—just the image and the refusal. A platform awash in violence, conspiracy, and abuse, but a woman’s breast is where we suddenly get very concerned about decency. She keeps posting anyway. What gets me is how unselfconscious the provocation is. No manifesto, no performance, no philosophical argument—just a body at the beach or in the studio and an implicit question: who is this rule for? You can’t quite untangle the politics from the provocation, and I think that’s the whole point. The work sits in that friction. She’s not the first to push against the platform’s absurd rules, but there’s something different about the consistency, the willingness to lose the account if that’s what it takes. That’s actual stakes, not a simulation of them. Most art that tries to provoke is playing a game with the system. This is just refusal. Tuesday, 4 September 2012. The Other Version: There’s always another version. The track you loved gets remixed and suddenly it’s unfamiliar again, but better. Sometimes worse, but so different you can’t stop listening. The xx make sparse echoing spaces that sound built for someone else. Bon Iver’s work gets remixed and it’s sharper, more textured. Purity Ring’s synths stretch differently. I’ve spent entire days with remixes, watching how another artist handles a song I already know. It’s a different kind of listening. Not discovering something new, but discovering what you missed the first time. The original’s fine, but you’re spending the week with this version instead. Monday, 3 September 2012. Perfume: Fake It: I’ve known about Perfume for a while now—three Japanese women making this kind of pop music that shouldn’t work but does. Pixelated 8-bit synths, songs about love and computers and freedom, totally unserious but sharp underneath. They hosted the Japanese MTV awards last summer, which I remember reading about and thinking, yeah, they’re still here. “Fake It” is the new track, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: clean, bright, a little cynical. The thing missing is a decent Japanese club in Berlin, the kind of place where you’d hear this at two in the morning and it would actually land. Monday, 3 September 2012. Pregnant Bikini Queen: Saturday, 1 September 2012. Pussy Riot: Pussy Riot represented something that makes power genuinely afraid: art that refuses to ask permission, to apologize, or to compromise. They performed a political prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the state arrested them. No strategy, no legal defense, no redemption narrative—just the action and its consequences. That’s actual resistance, which is why almost everything else that gets called activism looks so manufactured in comparison. Saturday, 1 September 2012. Little Monsters: The Little Monsters in Helsinki weren’t messing around. They moved through the city with this absolute certainty that Gaga was their person, that she’d understood something essential about them no one else could. The devotion was real, not trendy performance. There’s something powerful about that kind of faith, the way it binds people together. I’ve never quite believed in anything that completely. Friday, 31 August 2012. Almost Everything: August’s almost gone. What I notice is all the absurd shit that’s possible right now, in this narrow window before everything snaps back into place. I think about dancing with eight friends dressed stupid, or what it would feel like to just start yelling like everyone in that Newsroom scene, or all the small rebellions that feel necessary even though they don’t actually change anything. There’s a logic to it that only makes sense in late summer. Showing someone your genitals to end a conversation that’s gone on too long. Smoking weed even though I know it probably makes me stupider, which I already suspected and anyway the stupid part is usually fine. Looking at pictures of attractive people on the internet because I’m bored and alive and that’s what the internet’s for. Wanting to punch my boss when he starts sending Christmas marketing emails in August, like we’re all pretending the world hasn’t already ended. The Eastwooding thing made sense once—Clint Eastwood had a conversation with an empty chair and then everyone copied it, having dialogues with invisible presidents and dead relatives, and it was dumb but it worked. That’s what absurdism is. Doing something because it makes no sense and that’s the entire point. Some of it’s darker. Writing things in blood on walls, even as a joke, even knowing I’d never actually do it. Wanting a ridiculous golden Game Boy just because it’s beautiful and pointless. The wanting is enough sometimes. September will come and all this dissolves. I’ll be back in the rhythm, back in the machinery, and none of this will matter. But right now, late August, there’s still this feeling that I could do any of it. Usually that’s enough. Friday, 31 August 2012. Sleigh Bells: End Of The Line: I got into Sleigh Bells back when noise rock and electronic music colliding seemed like the future. Alexis and Derek made something genuinely abrasive and weird at a time when everything was trying to be accessible. Their records were layered feedback and digital static and Amy Seimetz’s voice cutting through like it was the last thing tethering you to solid ground. They weren’t pretty and they didn’t care. Somewhere along the way I stopped paying attention—different life, different phase—but that initial run of albums still hits different. There’s something about how they sounded that felt like the moment, like they captured something about existing in a screen-filled anxiety-soaked world that nobody else was touching. Maybe the best thing a band can do is exist exactly when you need them to. Wednesday, 29 August 2012. 1313: 1313 was supposed to be a Star Wars game set in Coruscant’s criminal underworld—bounty hunters, dark corners, the stuff the Jedi never saw. LucasArts cancelled it in 2013. It felt like the one Star Wars game that could’ve actually worked, because it wasn’t trying to remake the movies or make you Force-sensitive. Just dirty work in the shadows. I never got to play it, but the idea stuck with me—that version of Star Wars, grounded in something real instead of mythology. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been. Tuesday, 28 August 2012. Topless Tuesday: Jessie Andrews im Hotel: The appeal of a hotel room photograph is that it’s nobody’s real life. You’re in this temporary space, the light’s probably good, and there’s something about being outside your normal context that makes it easier to be free with a camera. She looks good, comfortable with what’s happening, which is all you really want from any photograph. Tuesday, 28 August 2012. The Heat: The sun’s baking the streets and the apartment is impossible. Hot, wet air that doesn’t move. You’re sweating, can’t stop thinking about it. I know what people say about talking the weather—it’s the fallback when you’ve run out of anything interesting. But some days the heat is all there is. Cold beer helps. So does the right music. King Krule’s voice is thick and low, makes the summer feel intentional instead of just brutal. Twin Shadow brings something weird and beautiful underneath—synths that feel like they’re melting. Rustie carries you through the worst hours, all texture and space, something you exist in rather than listen to. These three just work for the heat. That’s all I know. Monday, 20 August 2012. Oh Love: Green Day’s ’Oh Love’ from Uno! is one of those songs that catches you mid-breath—Billie Joe singing about wanting someone badly, that specific mix of desire and resignation. It’s a three-minute thing, deceptively simple, the kind of song that shouldn’t stick but does because it’s honest about how badly you can want something that’s probably not good for you. I keep returning to it when I need to feel that particular ache, that ’I know this won’t go anywhere but I want it anyway’ energy. Not their most important song, not their most technically interesting, but there’s something true in it that you don’t get from a lot of their more elaborate work. Just a guy admitting he’s caught. Monday, 20 August 2012. Two Years Too Many: Two years in a labor colony for forty seconds of song. That’s what a Russian court decided three women deserved—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Maria Alyokhina from the punk band Pussy Riot. They performed an anti-Putin prayer in a church, and the state decided that was reason enough to lock them up. The trial itself was obscene—they spent over two hours just reading the verdict for what amounts to a public disturbance charge. Everyone with any reach was talking about it by the time the sentence came down. Every major news outlet, musicians, politicians, human rights groups—all watching a court that had made up its mind before the trial even started. The Russian government had wanted to make an example of them, to show that you don’t get away with this kind of thing in their country. They miscalculated completely. The response was almost unanimous in its judgment. A major Russian musician, someone who’d left the country decades before, spoke up about how this proved that the dream of freedom was finally breaking through. European figures, German officials, major international organizations all issued statements saying this violated everything Russia claimed to believe about human rights. Even the Chancellor called it out directly for what it was: a fundamental violation of rule of law. The numbers piled up—all the major outlets, all the important voices. But numbers and statements are abstract. What wasn’t abstract was the clarity of what had happened. Three young artists said what they thought. The state decided that was intolerable. So it crushed them for it. And in crushing them, it proved everything they’d said about power and freedom and the state’s fear of dissent. The thing that’s hard to square with is the actual courage required for what they did. Not the symbolic gesture—that’s almost easy if you’re angry enough. But the knowledge, absolute and complete, of what a state apparatus can do to you, and the decision to act anyway. To sing your actual beliefs in front of that machinery. To know that prison is a real possibility and perform anyway. I think about whether I’d have that. I don’t think I would. Most people wouldn’t. You can talk about your principles all you want, but they’re abstract until you’re facing years locked up for them. Then the calculation changes. These three women made the choice without that luxury. They knew exactly what was coming. What happened after was predictable in a way. The government thought it was making an example. Instead it had created something impossible to ignore. They’d taken three musicians and turned them into symbols, but not the kind they wanted. Every attempt to silence them just made what they’d said louder. An entire generation watched this and learned what their government would do to you for speaking. That’s the opposite of what they wanted. I keep coming back to that clarity. There’s no ambiguity here, no gray area that lets anyone off the hook. Power was threatened and it struck back. In striking back, it confirmed every word these women had sung. You can lock up bodies. You can’t lock up ideas. The more brutally you try, the more people understand what’s actually at stake. Saturday, 18 August 2012. Scent Spiral: You start with one fragrance and think that’s the end of it. Then you catch something on someone across the room and suddenly you’re deep in it, testing samples, reading about accords and base notes you didn’t know existed. Scent does something to you that other things don’t. It stays with you all day, changing as it settles into your skin, becoming part of your presence. It’s completely irrational. Your closet doesn’t need another fragrance. But you’re ordering the sample anyway. Friday, 17 August 2012. Bodi Bill Up Close: Thursday, 16 August 2012. Joel and Ellie: “I Am Alive” had promised something real—a survival game where you actually felt the weight of staying alive in a ruined city. But it delivered this crushing exhaustion simulator instead, and by the end you weren’t rooting for the guy to make it; you were hoping he’d finally collapse and put you out of your misery. So when Sony and Naughty Dog showed up with The Last of Us, there was this tentative hope that someone might actually get it right. Joel and Ellie crossing a dead America, not because it’s mechanically challenging but because the story demanded it. They showed footage at gamescom that had people convinced this was the thing that would actually work. I wanted to believe it. After “I Am Alive”, I was wary of any game promising real survival and meaning. But there was something about the way they framed Joel and Ellie—these two people with no good options, just the next terrible choice and the next—that felt different. Whether the game could actually deliver on that, I had no idea. You never do with these things until you’re actually playing. Wednesday, 15 August 2012. Peaches: Free Pussy Riot: Peaches has been doing this for thirty years—making work that makes people uncomfortable, using her body as a weapon against everything uptight and controlled. Pussy Riot got arrested for it. There’s something clarifying about that, about watching artists who refuse to apologize or explain themselves, who understand that transgression isn’t a marketing angle but a necessity. The state fears pussy more than it fears guns. Tuesday, 14 August 2012. The Rind: Monday, 13 August 2012. Comiket: There’s this four-day explosion that happens twice a year in Tokyo called Comiket, and if you haven’t experienced it, it’s hard to explain—tens of thousands of people flooding the convention center, doujinshi tables stretching out endlessly. Everything’s there: amateur manga artists, semi-pro operations, piles of explicit hentai doujins next to original art, fan works of every conceivable anime or game. The heat’s brutal, the smell’s a mix of print and sweat and coffee, and there’s this specific energy to hunting through the aisles for one thing you came for or discovering something completely unexpected. What gets me is how legitimate it all is. The bunny girls (Playboy aesthetics filtered through anime) work some booths, Hatsune Miku blares from speakers mixing with a thousand conversations, and it’s all—doujinshi, fan art, fan fiction, fan everything—completely above board. This is where fan culture doesn’t hide. It’s pure creation, pure fan energy, the opposite of corporate. Hours disappear wandering the aisles, buying maybe nothing, just watching this whole ecosystem of people making and sharing things they actually care about. Sunday, 12 August 2012. Feist: Anti-Pioneer: Feist isn’t interested in opening doors for other people. She moves through the work that calls to her and makes something specific enough that it can’t be copied or franchised. There’s something almost hostile in that independence—the refusal to become a reference point, a school, a method that others can follow. She’s done remarkably well without ever trying to influence anyone, which means her work doesn’t teach you anything. You can listen. You can’t learn the trick. That’s probably exactly how she wants it. Saturday, 11 August 2012. Mika’s Brightness: There’s something almost defiant about how happy Mika sounds. His voice is high and theatrical, his arrangements are all synths and strings and drama, and every song feels like he’s trying to convince you that joy is still possible—that you should let yourself want things, let yourself be silly, let yourself shine. It’s not subtle. It’s not cool in the way critics care about. But there’s real thought behind it, a kind of studied exuberance that comes from someone who’s thought hard about how to stay alive. The songs that stick with me aren’t the hits everyone knows. They’re the ones where he sounds like he’s singing to himself, reminding himself that the brightness is still there if you know where to look. Friday, 10 August 2012. Fallout 3: Still There: Games used to be blocks and balls, then pixels and plumbers. Now they’re worlds where you can spend serious time on choices that don’t matter and feelings that do. Somewhere in the last couple decades, the stuff people said would rot your brain became where actual artistic thinking happens. Fallout 3 sits in that space. It’s a game about nuclear aftermath, but really it’s about what you do when everything’s destroyed and you’re standing in the ruins deciding whether to keep moving. There’s something almost fairy-tale about it—not beautiful in an easy way, but beautiful in how it lets you find meaning in wreckage and reasons to care in an empty world. The aesthetic helps: that retro-nuclear America thing, the way destruction reads as possibility. What got me was the modding community. Not texture packs or graphical overhauls, but people spending countless hours rebuilding the game’s systems, adding their own thinking to it, having a conversation with something they loved. That kind of obsession only happens when something actually matters. The game was already complete, already worth playing, but these people decided it deserved more attention, more depth, more voices. I keep coming back to this one like it has something else to say. Not because I missed it the first time, but because it makes me want to look closer, contribute something of my own, sit with it longer. That’s the mark. That’s what separates games that move units from games that become art. Thursday, 9 August 2012. Jessica Malafouris Finally Home: Wednesday, 8 August 2012. the xx: Chained: The xx’s thing is working with emptiness. Two voices, sparse machines, and vast amounts of space. Listen to them and everything else suddenly sounds bloated. The way they use silence—you’re waiting for something, and then it comes, but barely. It makes you pay attention. I’ve probably listened to their records a hundred times and they still feel like overhearing something private. Tuesday, 7 August 2012. Touching Tunes: Music that actually works does something simple and brutal at the same time. It touches you and doesn’t let you put it down. Takes you somewhere you weren’t planning to go, keeps you there just long enough to feel something, then either sets you down gently or shakes you hard enough that you remember the landing. That’s what I’ve been chasing. The moment when something grabs a nerve you didn’t know was exposed. SBTRKT, Bat For Lashes, Crystal Castles—they’re not doing anything complicated. They’re just building music that works on you. Textured, patient, then suddenly alive. The kind of thing that makes you want to move, to kiss someone, to break something, to stand there feeling it all at once. Music doesn’t have to be clever. Doesn’t have to announce itself. But it has to touch something real. Has to stay with you longer than the three minutes it takes to play. And it has to want to come back—not because you’re chasing novelty, but because it keeps feeling different. That’s what I listen for. Not songs. Music that works. Monday, 6 August 2012. Boobs, Japan, Pokémon: You always reach this point. A blog starts small, you’re writing for yourself or for a handful of people who get it, and then it grows. The growth itself isn’t the problem. What’s the problem is that growth brings an audience with expectations. They want curated taste, smart writing, something that looks legitimate. So you give it to them, because they’re not wrong to want it. But in giving them that, you stop feeding yourself. The thoughts that don’t fit an editorial template, the weird photos, the stuff that’s just you thinking out loud—there’s no space for that anymore. You become a curator before a person. I spent five years building this website into something that looked right. Photography, critical writing, music—all of it serious. But seriousness meant retreat. I had no outlet for the daily thoughts, the random obsessions, the unfiltered version of me. The stuff just rattling around in my head with nowhere to go. I found myself disappearing from my own site, and it caught up with me in the worst way. Depression, the constant ache to be somewhere else, the need to lose myself in something mindless. The pressure of performing for an audience instead of writing for yourself does something to you. Before this there was another blog I shut down for different reasons—heartbreak, desperation for change. This website came out of that feeling. It felt necessary at the time. I didn’t account for what would happen when it found an audience: how that success would calcify the work, push out the personal, replace intimacy with professionalism. I kept this other space under my name mostly as an afterthought. Barely used it, mostly ignored it. But somewhere I realized it was the only real door in all of this—a place where I don’t have to make sense, don’t have to be consistent, don’t have to sound intelligent. Where I can write about boobs and Japan and Pokémon and whatever else is in my head without worrying about whether it fits some editorial category. So that’s what this is. Where I put everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. No curation, no editorial voice, no performance. Just unfiltered thinking, the way I needed to be blogging all along. Wednesday, 1 August 2012. Highfield in August: Summer 2012 wasn’t shaping up to be anything special. The kind of season where the heat doesn’t feel good, just relentless, and there’s this background disappointment to everything. But somewhere around August, if you had the timing and the money and a friend willing to drive, Highfield was happening out near Leipzig—three days in the middle of nowhere with the kind of lineup that made the rest of the summer feel less stupid by comparison. Beatsteaks were headlining, which made sense. Placebo, The Black Keys, Casper, Kraftklub, The Shins, The Gaslight Anthem, Social Distortion. A mix of everything—bands that were already established and bands that still felt like they had something to prove. Nothing obscure, nothing you had to justify to anyone. Just good rock and punk and indie rock, the kind of bands that show up and do the work and don’t apologize for it. Festival season in Germany is its own thing. The grounds, the crowds, the temporary cities of tents. Everyone’s drunk and sweaty and trying to position themselves to see something across a field. The amenities are shit, the music is loud, and there’s something about all of it that gets under your skin. You show up to be uncomfortable on purpose. I never made it that year, though at the time I remember thinking I should. Not because Highfield was some legendary thing you had to experience—it was just a solid regional festival with a good lineup. But because the summer was the kind of blank, disappointing thing that might’ve felt better from inside a crowd of people there for the same reason you were. Some summers stick with you. This one didn’t, except for moments like this: the idea of Highfield, the lineup on a flyer somewhere, the possibility of escape that didn’t quite materialize. That’s usually all festivals are anyway—the promise that something worth doing is still possible. Tuesday, 31 July 2012. Kreayshawn: Kreayshawn showed up fully formed in 2011—bratty Oakland rap, the “Gucci Gucci” girl, and then “Go Hard (La La La)” right after it. The song was stupid in the best way, that hook doing all the work, the whole thing riding on pure confidence and not giving a shit what anyone thought. She was everywhere that year, and then nowhere. The hook’s still there, though. Tuesday, 24 July 2012. Bat For Lashes: Natalie Droog makes the kind of music that fills a room without asking for attention. There’s something about Bat For Lashes that works best late at night, when you’re alone with it—those stretched-out synths, the way her voice sits inside the production like it’s part of the texture rather than on top of it. A lot of people make atmospheric music, but there’s usually some ambition showing through. With her it just sounds like someone thinking out loud, building something strange and precise without needing you to understand it. Monday, 23 July 2012. Summertime Sadness: The thing about ’Summertime Sadness’ is how completely it captured a specific moment—you can hear the exact second in Lana’s voice where she realizes someone’s leaving, and you know it’s not coming back. The video made it permanent, that red dress at the boardwalk, everything blue and slipping away in slow motion. It’s been everywhere for over a decade now, in commercials and covers and parties where nobody’s really listening, but it never gets worn out. There’s something about the slowness of it, the way she sings like she’s documenting sadness rather than feeling it. That distance is what makes it beautiful. Make it pretty enough and the pain becomes something you want to hold onto. Saturday, 21 July 2012. Weekend Missions: I perpetually forget to compile these until Friday afternoon, or I’m too lazy and would rather shove chocolate donuts in my mouth. But here we are anyway. Find the fifty cutest things that ever made it on camera and then hold whoever’s nearest to you with force that actually matters. Sing the national anthem in a church. Sing it in a waiting room at the doctor’s office. Sing it in front of a kebab stand. Commit fully and see what happens. Think about the worst video game you ever randomly played and then kick the person standing next to you directly in the crotch. Do it on purpose. Start your own religion. Money and sex are guaranteed. The ending will be spectacular. Steal food from one supermarket and stock it in another. Try to look cool when you’re actually coming. Put a mirror in front of you, wear something you’d want someone to see you in, and follow through whether you’re alone or someone else is there. Launch a YouTube news channel about things maybe one percent of humanity cares about. Air conditioning on Korean oil rigs. Apple juice expired April 23rd, 2011. Cotton swabs with unequal cotton on each end. Coverage so specific it’s almost pointless. Drop bags of coke in every neighbor’s mailbox. Generosity. Cosmic karma. Buy a pristine Nokia 3210 still sealed in its original box. That’s the smartest money you can spend. And the last one: do whatever you’ve actually wanted to do with someone who actually wants to do it. That’s the ten. That’s the weekend. Saturday, 21 July 2012. Audioterrorism: Kim Schmitz writes about music with the kind of confidence that doesn’t hedge. He’ll call out what’s empty, celebrate what moves him, without waiting to see what you’re supposed to like or performing reverence for the formula. In a world of measured critical distance and careful positioning, there’s something almost punk about a voice that just thinks out loud and doesn’t give a shit. That’s probably what audioterrorism means—not literal noise, just someone refusing to nod along. Friday, 20 July 2012. Expansion: I spent the last month in Tokyo trying to figure out how to make a German blog matter to people who don’t speak German. The ambition was stupid and straightforward: world domination, or at least a cheap cheesecake subscription. The reality was that you can’t impose yourself in your native language anymore—you need English, you need the translations to be less bad, you need to sound like you know what you’re doing when you don’t. Sitting in Tokyo, surrounded by cats I didn’t own and people far too tall and beautiful, I basically made the decision that I was going to make this work. I found people on the internet—through friends, through connections I didn’t know I had—who actually seemed willing to help. Which was the only way any of this was going to happen, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to translate the whole thing by myself. The current version is shit. The translations are bad. There are broken things everywhere. But it exists now in English across multiple places. The Japanese version is supposedly in the works. Other languages if we get around to it. There’s something absurd about trying to make something that matters to you matter to strangers around the world. You can’t control how it lands. You can’t make anyone care. All you can do is put it out there, broken and half-baked, and see if anyone shows up. And then, somehow, some people do. I don’t know if this was worth doing. Probably not. But there’s something about impossible projects that keeps you interested—not because you think you’ll succeed, but because you get to meet people weird enough to want to help you try. Wednesday, 18 July 2012. Arvida Byström: Fluffy Pink World: Arvida Byström’s photographs work because she’s not trying to convince you of anything. Just these pink, soft, constructed worlds, and she doesn’t push a point about them. No winking at the camera, no moral lesson. You’re left alone with the image. Most artists dealing with femininity can’t resist—they want you to see the critique or celebrate the freedom. She just lets it exist, which is rarer than it should be. Tuesday, 10 July 2012. Santigold: The Keepers: Santigold’s music has always carried this quality of absolute certainty—it doesn’t prove anything or explain itself, just exists exactly as it needs to. The Keepers feels like more of that: the work of someone who’s figured out what matters and has no interest in anything else. There’s a kind of rest in that, actually. Monday, 9 July 2012. Kate Upton and the Flag: Thursday, 28 June 2012. Lana Del Rey: National Anthem: National Anthem is the song that made me understand Lana Del Rey was doing something different from everyone else around 2012. Not better, necessarily, but committed to a specific mood in a way most pop songs aren’t—all that melancholy wrapped in production that sounds like it cost a fortune. The song feels expensive and sad, which shouldn’t work together but does. There’s something almost cinematic about it, the way she stretches syllables out, the way the beat sits back like it’s already resigned to something. It’s not a song that tries to make you dance or feel inspired. It just wants you to sit with it, in it, aware that beautiful things are often kind of dark when you look close. Wednesday, 27 June 2012. Gods and Kings: Sometime in autumn I opened the courtyard window for the first time in a week. I was wearing just boxers, pizza crusted into my beard. On the monitor next to me I’d just finished conquering the entire planet. I felt like Napoleon, Caesar, and Hitler all at once—and looked like a rotten sex offender. Civ IV had beaten me. After ten minutes of useless clicking around I gave up and went back to jerking around. Then boredom hit hard and I downloaded Civilization V off Steam out of pure desperation, and suddenly there was this whole world to discover and research and take over. It was absolutely epic. The delivery services made a killing off me the entire time. Gods and Kings is out now—the first expansion. Tons of new achievements, religious zealots, wonders, new civilizations. I just throw my little Japanese units at whoever stands in my way and watch them crumble. You can attack coastal cities from the sea now, send spies into other nations, trade in citrus. There are guilds and fresh units, police stations, air raid shelters, amphitheaters. Just so much stuff to click on and watch unfold. The game shows you what kind of person you really are—whether you’re weak or whether you’re an emperor. I’m deep in it again. World domination as a form of practice. Strategy, occupation, victory—these are things that need to be exercised. And when I’m eventually your untouchable dictator, you’ll know exactly who to blame. Now kneel. Tuesday, 26 June 2012. Fuck Noda: After Fukushima, the whole country wanted nuclear power gone. You could feel it—the fear, the disgust, the sense that nobody in charge had been paying attention to what could actually happen. Then Noda’s government came out pushing to restart the reactors anyway. Restart them. The public opinion numbers were unmistakable, the anger was real, and they did it anyway. There’s a particular kind of contempt that involves ignoring millions of people telling you exactly what they want, then acting surprised when they stop trusting you. Japan had lived through the catastrophe. The fear wasn’t abstract. But the machinery of power had its own logic, and it didn’t include listening. That was the disconnect—not that the government and its people disagreed on something complicated, but that one side had already made up its mind it didn’t care what the other side thought. Monday, 25 June 2012. Still Hungry: There are speaking toilets here. That’s the first impossible thing you notice, and after a month it’s barely registered. There’s a whole aesthetic of strangeness in Tokyo—manga characters that look more human than humans, magazines full of half-naked teenagers, everything selling everything to everyone. But you stop seeing it as strange. It just becomes what’s there. I’m not doing the tourist photography thing anymore. The first week you take pictures of everything because that’s what you’re supposed to do, then you post them and feel like you’ve captured something true. You haven’t. So I stopped. Started living instead. On The Corner and Wired Cafe in the mornings, The Terminal for coffee, Burger Factory around the corner for burgers that taste like regret. Sushi and tendon everywhere else. Shibuya I know by heart now. Harajuku caught me before I realized it was catching me. The small stuff sticks. One Piece figurines in every window. AKB48 girls on every billboard and truck and vending machine, all the same grin. A bar where Utada Hikaru was playing—my favorite songs, just there. I was supposed to leave July 5th. Simple enough. But the government lets you stay until August, and Summer Sonic is in August—Grimes, Perfume, Rihanna, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, SBTRKT. These are people I’d normally just read about. My job is strange enough that it doesn’t care whether I’m in Tokyo or Berlin. So I extended. How do you walk away from something feeding you like that? Tokyo scratches something Berlin stopped scratching a while ago. Some kind of creative energy I can’t describe without sounding like I’m reading a guidebook. Maybe Japan really is the most creative place on earth. Maybe it’s marketing. I’m not going to find out by leaving early. I’m still hungry here. Sunday, 24 June 2012. DENA: Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools: Saturday, 23 June 2012. Weekend Missions: Weekends arrive and you’ve got all this time and you don’t know what to do with it. Someone’s always got a list - things to create, movies to watch, ways to be productive. The suggestions get progressively more absurd, like they’re grasping at meaning and giving up halfway through. Earplugs and a movie you don’t watch. Sniff people. Look at pictures that make you feel something without touching yourself. The actual stuff worth doing is quieter. Friends who make you laugh. Sex when it lines up. Good food. Sometimes just being still. The weekend you’re waiting for is usually just the regular one, except nobody’s telling you what matters. Friday, 22 June 2012. Size Does Matter: Three weeks in Tokyo eating ice cream on the beach, drinking overpriced beer at tiny bars, shooting girls in colorful outfits. The website could wait. My collaborators were busy with their own stuff. Then the rainy season hit and typhoon after typhoon rolled through Honshu, and suddenly I was trapped inside with nothing but time and the relaunch I’d been avoiding for months. I know from experience that completely redesigning this place always implodes. Remember the black minimalist diary we tried? Or that pseudo-print thing? I loved both of them. Thought they were genuinely brilliant. Everyone else thought I was insane. So now every update is just whatever design ideas I half-found while flipping through Tokyo magazines, applied with whatever confidence I could fake. The homepage is the big one—monumentally oversized, basically just there to prove we have the biggest and you don’t. The background image is gone. English is coming back eventually. Behind the scenes we’re building new sections by stealing from everywhere and repackaging it so it looks like intention. It’s really just doing more, making life worse for people who actually want to see us fail, and that turns out to be its own reward. Yeah, there are bugs. There’s always bugs. We’re working on them. The homepage might be the worst thing we’ve ever made and also the best, and you should click around and decide which one is true. Time to go back to Tokyo and eat tendon and sleep and not think about websites for a while. Thursday, 21 June 2012. The Leistungsschutzrecht: There’s this law they were pushing through in Germany—Leistungsschutzrecht, ancillary copyright or something. I spent way too much time reading about it, getting angrier, because it’s the kind of thing that seems small until you understand what it actually does. Before all this, if you copied something wholesale—a whole article, a photo, whatever—you’d get nailed for copyright infringement. Fair enough. But there was this space in between where things could live. You could quote, link, reference, remix. Fair Use exists in America for a reason: it lets people build on what’s already there. It’s how culture works. It’s how the internet works. This law went the opposite direction. It was designed to let publishers sue you for quoting them. For linking to them. For tweeting their headline. For doing the basic things everyone does online a dozen times a day without thinking about it. Who wanted this? Axel Springer, the big German newspaper groups, all the people who already had money and lawyers. They looked at it and saw another revenue stream. They could charge for links, for quotes, for excerpts. They could weaponize copyright against the internet itself. The morality of it didn’t matter. The fact that it would make the whole system worse didn’t matter. Just the money. I kept thinking about what it would actually mean. You share an article on Facebook with a comment—suddenly illegal. You tweet a headline. You write a blog post and quote something that inspired you. All of it would be illegal. Just everyday shit, the stuff that actually makes the internet work. I’d try to explain it to people and watch their eyes glaze over. Easier to not pay attention, to keep scrolling. And maybe that’s the whole design—these things pass because nobody notices until the lawyers show up. Thursday, 21 June 2012. Baby’s On Fire: I get why Die Antwoord upsets people. The South African duo makes music that’s deliberately crude and shocking, visuals that hit you wrong, performances that don’t apologize. Most artists hedge, offer context, soften the edges somehow. These two just lean in completely. The production is actually interesting too, which makes it worse for people who want to dismiss it outright. There’s something weirdly respectable about refusing to tone it down for approval. Wednesday, 6 June 2012. Monolith: Judas: Friday, 1 June 2012. Tokyo Bound: Tomorrow morning I’m heading out for five weeks in Japan. I’ve spent the last month talking about nothing but travel prep. My apartment’s rented to a Spanish couple who can do whatever they want with my furniture. Flight’s at 9:45 from Berlin. Hope the Russian pilot doesn’t detour over some sketchy volcano. Six hours stuck in Moscow. I get in at Narita on Wednesday at 10:20. I’m planning to post as many ridiculous photos and videos as possible so I can look back later and convince myself it was all worth it. I made a list. Missions, actually. Because you need some kind of plan when you travel, otherwise you just wander around like an idiot. You can break the plan whenever you feel like it, but having one matters. I could just check them off and call Japan done, but here’s what I’m doing: First, Tokyo Tower. I’ve lived in Berlin for five years and never gone up the TV tower. I’m fixing that in Tokyo. Second, I want to see a Japanese film in a Japanese theater in Japanese. No particular reason, just because. Third, I’m buying a Game Boy Light and some games. Because why not. Fourth, I’m hitting up Super Potato, which is basically Valhalla for anyone obsessed with old video games. Fifth, I’m going to kiss a Japanese girl. See how romantic that is? I said kiss, not fuck—just kiss, maybe feel her up a little. Real romance, truly. (Except Eriko Nakao. She can have my kids.) Sixth, I want to eat at one of those conveyor belt sushi places where everything just spins by and you grab what you want. The world should work like this. Everything on a belt. Seventh, I’m climbing Mount Fuji. I’m terrible at hiking, but it’s got to happen. If I can’t make it, I’ll just let the crowd carry me up. Eighth, I’m going to an actual beach with actual sand. Ninth, I’m spending a night in one of those capsule hotels or internet cafés—the kind of place losers end up when they miss the last train or ran out of money. I find that kind of appealing. Tenth: I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was. Gotta catch them all. Yes, really. Look, I know these are pretty generic goals. But I’m not going to piss in a temple while screaming slogans or insult the royal family for a laugh. I actually like Japan, for one. For another, I’m not some third-rate TV presenter getting stuck with Sunday-night gigs by doing stupid stunts on camera. And honestly, I only thought about this for like ten minutes. The best shit happens when you’re not looking for it anyway. With people you don’t expect. So wish me luck getting there in one piece. Comment below with anything you want me to bring back. Maybe I’ll actually take some pictures worth showing off. This is it—the life dream along with getting rich as hell and having a drug dealer who cleans house and reads me bedtime stories. Japan, here I come. Schoolgirl tentacles. Monday, 28 May 2012. Odd Future: Wild Ones: Odd Future hit at the exact moment when hip-hop needed something that didn’t give a shit. Tyler and those kids made beats that sounded scratchy and blown-out—juvenile and brilliant at the same time. Nothing was polished, nothing was designed to be palatable. The whole thing felt dangerous, probably way less than it actually was, but danger was the point. They were genuinely outside the system in a way that mattered. No major label machinery, no gatekeeping, no one’s approval but their own. Just weirdos with something to say and the tools to say it. For a few years there they felt like the only thing that was real, like you were part of something that wasn’t supposed to exist. Friday, 25 May 2012. Rock am Ring: Rock am Ring happens in June at the Nürburgring, in the Eifel region—eighty thousand people descend to camp and watch bands for three days. The lineup reads like every major European rock festival of the last twenty years: Metallica, Die Toten Hosen, Linkin Park, The Offspring, Skrillex, The Hives, Enter Shikari. Familiar names that work at scale. You know what you’re getting. There’s something honest about that. A festival doesn’t need to reinvent itself every year. It needs to show up with a good lineup and decent logistics and let people do what they came to do: camp, drink, stand in a field watching music. The setup is the appeal. Three days outside normal life, in a tent with eighty thousand strangers, all of you surrendering to the same temporary insanity. Most of what lingers from a festival experience isn’t the music itself. It’s peripheral things. The smell of a campfire at night. Someone’s laugh from the tent next to yours. The specific exhaustion of standing in one spot for two hours, needing water, not moving. The moment a bass drop hits and fifty thousand people jump. You weren’t there for a pristine audio experience. You were there for that aggregate feeling—the crowd, the moment, the knowledge that you’re one of eighty thousand people who wanted to be exactly here. Whether the festival surprises you stops mattering after a while. You go for the same reason you go back: it delivers. The bands are good enough. The scale is impressive. The chaos is familiar and comfortable. And for three days, that’s exactly what you want. Thursday, 24 May 2012. Ten Tiny Missions: Couldn’t sleep last night because the heat was like something alive, and Abby Winters plus Miley’s sideboob weren’t cutting it, so I spent the dark hours falling down Japan prep videos. Six days until my flight and suddenly I needed to know everything, or at least convince myself I did. First I followed some guy with absurdly long hair through Super Potato in Akihabara—the kind of place where ancient consoles and cartridges stack so high you either start crying or get hard, sometimes both. That’s where I learned about the Game Boy Light, Japan-only, backlit, the last real one. Mine died years back—picked it up with Ines at a flea market. If I can find another cheap enough, I’m getting it. Got lost in videos about old phones with actual antennas, sumo wrestlers, mid-90s Tokyo. What to do on planes. What to do when you land. How cool the city is. How beautiful. How charming. Sari wrote to me—she never sleeps—about phones. You need one in Japan, she said, because otherwise you vanish into crowds and can’t find anyone. SoftBank rents them, but better: they rent SIM cards you drop into your own iPhone. Calls, texts, data. Good to know. I handled the basics. Travel insurance done. Credit card appeased with metaphorical blood so it doesn’t do its usual thing. Got a haircut scheduled so I don’t look like a caveman when I get there. Last thing I need is becoming a character in some Japanese reality show. One thing’s left: missions. I don’t want to just wander around for five weeks like an idiot. I need objectives, tasks to hunt down, so I come home feeling like I accomplished something. Find a real working underwear vending machine. Throw a live Pikachu off Tokyo Tower. Get a blowjob from someone in a Hello Kitty costume. You suggest them—I’ll pick ten. Wednesday, 23 May 2012. Perfect Tag: Wednesday, 23 May 2012. Woodkid: Run Boy Run: Woodkid’s “Run Boy Run” arrived in 2011 with that music video that looked like a kids’ film noir remake—all grain and sepia and a small boy running through scenarios that shouldn’t be terrifying but somehow were. The production is huge, orchestral in a way that feels like it’s building toward something, and the video’s aesthetic landed in every designer’s moodboard for the next five years. There’s something about that combination of scale and a child’s perspective that works. It’s not quite as potent now as it was then, but the bones are still there. Woodkid made something that looked expensive and felt sincere, which is harder than it sounds. Tuesday, 22 May 2012. Arvida Byström: There Will Be Blood: Swedish artist Arvida Byström makes photographs that sit somewhere between self-portrait and horror show—her face bloated, disfigured, smeared with fake blood and paint, sometimes barely recognizable. The work is transgressive in the way that matters: it’s not trying to shock you, exactly, it’s trying to show you something about the grotesque that lives inside the everyday, the way the body can become utterly estranged from itself. She’s been doing this for years, shooting herself in these various states of beautiful ruination, and the longer you look at the images the less you can tell where the artifice ends and something real begins. There’s a restraint to it despite the extremity—no caption, no explanation, just the image. It’s the kind of work that makes you uncomfortable in a way that matters, that lingers after you’ve stopped looking. Monday, 21 May 2012. Weekend Missions: It’s Friday evening and you’ve done nothing to prepare for the weekend, which means you’ll probably do the same things you always do. Hours will pass, days will blur, and you’ll forget any of it happened, which is how most of your life goes if you’re not paying attention. Here’s ten things you could do instead, or not. One: buy Facebook stock so in forty years you at least have an answer for why you’re not rich. Two: hunt the secret rainbow-pony level in Diablo 3 all weekend. Find it and you’ve earned permission to quit and maybe go outside. Three: read those articles about your childhood that destroy you. Sit with the regret. Four: just stop reading. Five: run everywhere with your arms straight up in the air for three entire days. Six: listen to what people from nowhere towns think about the city. Seven: look at pictures of girls with perfect stomachs until you feel dead inside, then look at your actual body and accept it. Eight: tell your dad you know he’s not actually out with his buddies, and try to blackmail him into a car and Xbox. Nine: order Big Brother season one and watch all of it. Nothing better on TV anyway. Ten: mix your coke with food coloring and let it dry. Rainbow party deluxe. You get to the bottom of the list and realize none of it matters. The weekend will pass the same way it always does. But at least you read the part about the cocaine, which is the joke. Friday, 18 May 2012. Dark Parts: Mike Hadreas makes music that feels like it’s coming from somewhere most people won’t go. Perfume Genius records operate in this space between fragile and overwhelming—ethereal production that can snap into something almost violent, whispered vocals that carry the weight of genuine hurt. I keep coming back to his work because it doesn’t ask for permission to be dark, to be confused, to sit with contradiction. There’s no redemption arc built in, no neat resolution. Just the sound of someone looking at the parts of himself he can’t fix and deciding to make something beautiful from the wreckage anyway. Wednesday, 16 May 2012. Milan Dixon: Flags: Wednesday, 16 May 2012. Lady Gaga: Little Monsters in Tokyo: The Little Monsters in Tokyo moved as a single organism, screaming the lyrics back at her like she’d written the script to their lives. There’s something about that kind of devotion in a stadium that gets to you—all the loneliness and intensity that usually lives in private suddenly becomes collective, becomes permission. Maybe that’s the whole reason pop music exists. Tuesday, 15 May 2012. Blurred Kids: Tuesday, 15 May 2012. That Instant With Laura: Friday, 11 May 2012. Spring Breakers: Harmony Korine made a movie where four college girls commit crimes in designer bikinis while a guy named Alien (James Franco) screams about his guns and money. The whole thing is neon and slow-motion and depravity, shot like Korine’s documenting a fever dream he wants to stay in. What got me was how little the movie cares about consequences. No moral framework, no redemption arc—just bodies and violence and bad decisions lit like a music video. That kind of refusal to apologize gets under your skin. You’re left sitting with discomfort and maybe a little admiration for it. Friday, 11 May 2012. Grimes After Dark: Thursday, 10 May 2012. Prague: Sitting in Mallorca right now, watching middle-aged men in their underwear paddle through the pool with their equally destroyed kids, and somehow I can’t stop thinking about Prague. Which tells me the trip was actually great—I wouldn’t be unable to let it go otherwise. We went for the Electronic Beats Festival, which Telekom was sponsoring. The lineup alone was reason enough: Grimes, The Whitest Boy Alive, Woodkid, Mike Skinner. But the trip turned into something beyond just catching shows. We were a group—Nike, Frank, Jessie, Katja, Nina, Pierre, Kai, Nele, Johan, and me—and we just kept finding more to do. Prague is the kind of city that’s genuinely beautiful in a way that catches you off guard. There’s the part that’s been touristed to death, funneled and packed, and then there’s these whole sections that feel almost obscene in how elegant they are. The kind of place where they actually shoot films, where everything looks expensive without even trying. The shows were technically the reason we were there. Backstage, people kept handing us plastic cups full of beer. We talked to the artists. Took pictures. Met Janet, who runs the Kleiderkreisel operation there. At some point we ended up on a party boat on the Moldau at an insane hour, and then it was sunrise and we were back at the Hilton trying to sleep before checking out, only to find out that 24 hours of internet cost about 40 euros, which felt obscene. What I realized, though, is that I actually hate traveling alone through unfamiliar cities. You end up feeling like an idiot, shuffling through streets trying to figure out where the real part of town is, where the good stuff happens. With a group, especially one where someone like Pierre is keeping things organized and functional, you don’t have to think about that. You just get to be there. Anyway. Back to watching these middle-aged men paddle around with their destroyed kids. Tuesday, 8 May 2012. The Nerd Olympics: re:publica wrapped up yesterday. Third time I’ve been, and if you didn’t go, you didn’t miss anything. They moved to the Station this year because the old place got too crowded—this warehouse by Gleisdreieck that they converted. Big spaces, good light, easy to walk around. The food wasn’t terrible. That was pretty much the whole experience. The conference could be something real. Current, informative, worth your time. But it keeps failing for the same reason: the people running it, speaking at it, working it. You walk around and it’s like the entire German internet is just reblogs and a fake elite—journalists and PR people who either found in social media a way to feed their insecure egos with favorites and retweets instead of, I don’t know, joining an emo band or eating ice cream for comfort, or they’re just there to make money without actually understanding what any of it’s about. Basically people you spent middle school avoiding and throwing wet paper balls at. The panels are the worst part. Either they’re run by people who are way too into Twitter and shouldn’t have been dragged away from their iPads, or by people who actually have something interesting to say but who spend their time talking about things that have been online for nine years. So of course by afternoon, when people are supposed to be taking it seriously, most of the crowd is out in the courtyard with a beer and their phone, tweeting about how bored they are. Some try to sit through a talk, give up after ten minutes of nothing, go eat something. The food was decent. The only moments that actually worked weren’t from the speakers. Just some dumb video someone found, or just the people who’ve been online forever sitting outside, getting sun, eating a bratwurst or a weird vegetarian pocket, maybe feeling something like what a festival is supposed to feel like. re:publica has become this smug nerd olympics. Totally disconnected from how people actually use the internet. Living in its own world of memes and data plans and half-baked rebellion, without the real creativity or actual new ideas or anything that actually changes you. I think this is where the German internet is heading. Can’t say I’m thrilled about it. Saturday, 5 May 2012. That May: There was this May where I thought flying to the States and hitting on Lady Gaga while she was dealing with a breakup was a legitimate plan. Like I was somehow the answer to that particular problem. I’ve never even liked her pseudo-crazy act that much—it always felt exhausting—but May logic overrides everything. Banana milk mixed with cocoa became momentarily important. The holy grail of dairy. It tasted fine. A dog made sense for a few days too, some idea that a small creature depending on you would fix things. It wouldn’t. Five in the morning felt like the right time for sex. Spending an entire weekend in one building that wasn’t mine—a 7-Eleven, a train station, someone’s apartment—just staying in one place and seeing if 48 hours of horizontal living changed anything. It didn’t, but the impulse was real. Getting “God” tattooed on my forehead seemed necessary at one point. Not as sincere spiritual gesture, just chaos. Then walking around, especially toward cops, with the absolute conviction they’d find it hilarious. They wouldn’t have. I knew that even then, but the conviction felt pure. Making a funny video to upload to YouTube like I’d invented entertainment. There was this purity to refusing to watch cat videos on the internet while doing basically everything else stupid—like that was the one line. The geometry of only shaving one side of my body and calling it Two-Face, a revolution against male grooming conducted entirely through pubic hair. All of it was May. The month where you’re not quite sane and you don’t care about it. June came and it stopped. That was always how it worked. Friday, 4 May 2012. Cut Copy: Take Me Over: Cut Copy makes electronic music that feels designed for the moments when you need something sleek but warm, detached but human. “Take Me Over” is them at their best—all these synth layers stacking up like they’re building toward something that never quite arrives, except it does, it’s all around you the whole time. I used to come back to them constantly, that specific texture they do with electronic pop, machines made to feel like they’re breathing. I don’t listen as much anymore but I know exactly where to find that feeling when I need it. Friday, 4 May 2012. Cat Daddy: Kate Upton became the cat person nobody expected. Genuinely obsessed, not in some curated way—talking about her animals constantly, posting them like she’d forgotten she was famous. There’s something to that, watching someone with her profile just lose it over cats. No angle, no brand strategy, just actual affection for small animals. The weird hobby that makes someone human, strips away the untouchable thing. Thursday, 3 May 2012. May First: May 1st in Berlin is one of those dates everyone tells you about before you experience it—the street parties, the riots, the spray paint, the cops in riot gear, all of it supposedly happening at once in the city center. I went once, wandering into it almost by accident, walking toward what looked like a normal evening and finding myself in the middle of something else entirely. There’s something weirdly energizing about being caught up in that kind of chaos when you’re not looking for it, when you’re just trying to get somewhere and suddenly the whole street is packed with people in black hoodies and the air smells like tear gas and beer. It’s not fun exactly, but it’s alive in a way that nothing else quite is. The whole thing feels like a release valve that the city needs to let off steam once a year, and for one night Berlin just surrenders to the mess of it all. Wednesday, 2 May 2012. Japan, Now: British Airways wanted another 200 euros on top of the original 700 they quoted me, and I wasn’t going to pay it. Found Aeroflot instead for 500 euros round trip. It felt like a win until I realized the layover was six hours somewhere in Siberia, but I decided it was worth it anyway. The timing shifted too. Forget early September. Late May instead, for five weeks, with an open return ticket in case I decide to stay or need to escape after two weeks. Both feel equally probable. Sari volunteered to be my guide—she’s one of the new authors here. We’re going to hunt down artists, hit some concerts, photograph people who are already photographing things, eat food that shouldn’t exist. Unless I end up too drunk in a gutter somewhere, which also counts as experiencing the culture, apparently. Hannah went to Tokyo for three months in 2009 and over the years has drilled advice into me like she’s preparing me for combat. Don’t walk while eating—it’s impolite. The cold soup with raw egg at street stalls is a trap. The yellow egg things at the sushi conveyor taste insane but they’ll destroy your stomach if you go overboard. Never eat anything that looks like sludgy peanut paste, because you will vomit. The milk-flavored soda from the vending machines though, that’s legitimately good. There’s a beggar at Shibuya Station who targets foreign people, tells elaborate stories, kneels down asking for money. Total performance art. The manga kids—you can’t tell if they’re male or female under all the makeup, they’re visually identical. A few streets over and basically everywhere else are the red light places with big display windows where you pick from the menu before entering. Hannah got thrown out of one—women aren’t allowed. Fruit costs more there than anywhere else, which is bizarre, but that’s Tokyo. Always step through temple entrances with your left foot first or it’s bad luck. The way people blow their noses is this aggressive snorting thing that sounds horrible, and I’ll definitely do it wrong. Hannah used to laugh at how much people slurp their soup. Buy yourself a Hello Kitty face mask. Nobody speaks English there. They’re too self-conscious about it. You can approach someone in a business suit and they’ll just say “hai hai” and wait for you to release them. They learn reading in school, not speaking. Some of the ones who don’t speak English are incredibly generous and brave about trying to help though. It goes better if you actually try Japanese. They warm up fast. Don’t ride the trains without paying. Don’t hop the barriers. That actually gets you in trouble. I’ll probably stumble from one social disaster into another anyway. It’s how I operate. Before Japan there’s Prague and Mallorca, but I’ll get to that later. I’m just hoping the landlord and tourism board feel benevolent about my housing, because the backup plan is a roommate situation, and that’s only tolerable if they’re genuinely interesting people. Otherwise it’s just miserable. Monday, 30 April 2012. How We Do (Party): Rita Ora’s “How We Do (Party)” is a 2012 club track that does one thing: gets you moving on a dance floor. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else—just the beat, the hook, repeat. I remember hearing it in bars and clubs back then, the kind of song that was perfectly fine as background to the actual experience of being out. There’s something honest about that. Saturday, 28 April 2012. Cornershop: Who’s Gonna Lite Up: Cornershop were the band that made it clear you didn’t need to be cool in any traditional sense to make something that sounded good. British-Indian, loud, rambling, unafraid of being goofy or sentimental in the same song. They showed up in the mid-90s Leicester indie scene like they were just figuring it out as they went, which I think they were. “Who’s Gonna Lite Up Your Light” doesn’t try to be clever—it’s a love song that sounds like they genuinely didn’t know if anyone would care, but they were going to play it anyway. That’s the whole thing right there. They weren’t performing indie credibility; they were just making music in a room and letting whatever happened happen. That kind of carelessness is rarer than it should be. Thursday, 26 April 2012. Sugarhigh + Lovestoned: Thursday, 26 April 2012. Grimes: Genesis: When Grimes hits, it’s usually sideways. She’s never made anything that feels designed for radio or playlists—the songs arrive already weird, already hers, like she’s building for an audience that doesn’t exist yet and probably wouldn’t want to exist the way she imagines it. There’s something admirable about that refusal to soften anything. Art that doesn’t apologize for being difficult or strange or structurally odd. The fact that she’s become as visible as she has, making exactly what she wants, feels almost accidental. Like she just kept building and suddenly there were thousands of people listening to something nobody asked for. Most artists either compromise or disappear. She’s somehow done neither. Wednesday, 25 April 2012. Still Moving: Iris is 25, from Hamburg. She went to art school in London, worked at VICE in Berlin, and three years ago was planning to move to Morocco. She’s still in Paris, which tells you something about how seriously she takes plans. The band with Arthur is called Super Secret Lovers. She writes the music and sings—the live version is physical, demanding, the opposite of someone going through motions. When she needs money, she works as a designer for L’Officiel. Otherwise she travels, which seems like the actual job. There’s a story about sunbathing topless with Arthur in a Paris garden. The neighbors, Muslim and unimpressed, nearly lost it. Most people learn something from a near-lynching about respecting local norms. Iris seems to have learned that people’s expectations are their problem, not hers. The restlessness isn’t for show. She’s not building a brand or documenting adventures. She just doesn’t stay still. Hamburg, London, Berlin, Paris, the next place—they’re not on an itinerary, just where she’s been. The difference between someone with a travel blog and someone who actually can’t sit still is pretty obvious once you see it. Tuesday, 24 April 2012. Why Berlin: Three cities, really. Munich if you want to pretend to be rich. Hamburg if you’re fine with pretending. Berlin if you’re done with the pretense and want to see what happens. Everything else is compromise. You have to be a certain kind of person for Berlin. Not cautious. Not soft. Not someone who needs things to make sense. Young helps. A little wrecked helps. A real tolerance for chaos and failure and people who mean nothing when they talk. If you’re that person, Berlin’s right. If you’re someone who gravitates toward cheap drugs and bad music and friends who’d turn on you in a second, Berlin’s not a city, it’s the place where that thrives and eats you alive. The actual Berlin doesn’t hide anything. Your failures are visible. Your wins are too. The beautiful parts—the light in the morning, the galleries in basements, the places that should fail but keep going—they’re only beautiful because the decay’s right there beside them. Nothing’s been polished into a lie. So you go. Or you don’t. Most people don’t, and they’re right. But if you’re the type who looks at Berlin and thinks yes, you’re already half gone. Monday, 23 April 2012. Carmen: There’s something about how she films desire from the inside—not looking at it, living in it. The black-and-white footage, the dust, the feeling that everything beautiful is already halfway to ruins. You watch and it’s like looking at a life you know you’re not supposed to want, one where the payoff never comes but the wanting never stops either. I keep coming back to the simplicity of it. No plot, just a woman moving through a world that’s both romantic and completely hollow. The kind of thing that sticks because it understands something true: that sometimes the image is all there is, and that’s enough. That’s everything. It’s the opposite of earnest. It’s knowledge without hope, beauty without comfort. I find I need that sometimes—something that won’t try to redeem itself. Sunday, 22 April 2012. DJ Fresh: The Power: There’s something about the precision in a good drum and bass track, the way every element sits just right so nothing gets wasted. DJ Fresh had that—a sense of arrangement that made things like “Gold Dust” land heavy without needing to shout about it. He wasn’t trying to be deep or experimental, just genuinely good at his craft, which is maybe the most underrated thing in music. You put on one of his tracks and it works immediately, pulls you in, makes you understand why this sound mattered to so many people. Not transcendent, just satisfying in a way that’s harder to achieve than it looks. Sunday, 22 April 2012. Liars: No. 1 Against the Rush: There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with listening to Liars, the good kind where your nervous system feels like it’s been wrung out and left in the sun. No. 1 Against the Rush is them at their most abrasive and least interested in being likable—Angus Andrew’s voice cracking over those fractured guitars, everything slightly out of sync on purpose. I found myself going back to it around the time I was trying to figure out what noise actually meant to me, not as a concept but as something I wanted to hear. There’s something cleanly refusal about this record, like they’re not explaining themselves or smoothing edges for anyone. You either get it or you don’t, and honestly they seem to not care which. Saturday, 21 April 2012. A Reasonable Weekend Plan: Weeks disappear. You look up and it’s Friday again, feet swollen from standing, same four walls, same exhaustion. So you need something. A plan. Walk into Burger King and order a Whopper with a thousand slices of bacon. Write your suicide note first, just to see how the despair changes the flavor. Then find one specific friend in your group and ignore them completely until they crack. Make them paranoid. Drive them to a tarot reader. Stop right before they start calling hostage negotiators. Tell your parents where babies come from. Buy a random plane ticket for the next available flight and don’t come back for ten years. If it lands in Düsseldorf, congratulations, God hates you specifically. Eat meat until your hands smell like iron. Run around on all fours making monkey noises, claim you’re a new species. Nobody stops you when you’re this committed to something, no matter how dumb. Buy sunglasses in bulk until you’re barely recognizable—the math is simple, fewer friends means more shades, each one another layer of mystery. Name every pimple on your body. When you run out of names, you know you’ve lost. Play Power Rangers and skip straight to the giant robot scene. And then some night, when nothing’s marked on the calendar, paint your genitals with glow-in-the-dark paint and let them figure it out mid-sex. Friday, 20 April 2012. Suzan: Ha Ha Ha: Friday, 20 April 2012. Mash-Up Culture: Lain edits Amateur magazine in Switzerland, though he’s rarely there—he travels constantly, moving through cities, finding artists and scenes and bringing them back to print. The magazine documents street culture globally, not as trend coverage but as genuine reportage from people making work outside institutional structures. His observation about contemporary culture being fundamentally a mash-up isn’t particularly novel, but the way he works with it is. Everything references everything else now. Street artists pull from graffiti and advertising and fine art and music and whatever’s on the street, and someone else builds on that, and the culture develops through these layers of reference and recombination. Most writing about culture serves either commercial interests or validates people already in the scene. Lain’s different. He’s documenting the process as it actually happens in different parts of the world, building a network of artists mostly isolated from each other, connecting them through the magazine without extracting value or positioning it for an outside audience. He’s just making space for the work to be seen. Street culture has always been about taking what’s around you and making it new. But it’s never been this networked, traveling this fast across geography. The recombinations get richer because more people participate without ever meeting. That’s what Lain is tracking. Thursday, 19 April 2012. Mouth Full: Mavi, a German jeans company, decided to host a free-clothes event in Berlin with one condition: you could take home as much as you could carry in your mouth. Your actual mouth. I’ve been thinking about the logistics of this. Someone showed up and tried to fit a pair of jeans between their teeth. Multiple people did this. Someone trained for it. There’s definitely a video somewhere of someone’s jaw opening impossibly wide to grip a tank top. I haven’t watched it, but it exists. What gets me is how straightforward Mavi was about the whole thing. No narrative about self-expression or community or celebrating yourself. Just: bring your mouth, leave with clothes. That’s the deal. Humiliate yourself on camera for some basics that cost five euros secondhand, and we’ll both get what we want. Marketing used to try to convince you of something, sell you a version of yourself, make you believe you’d become someone better if you bought the right jeans. Now it’s simpler than that. Brands just acknowledge what’s happening: you want free shit, we want attention, let’s both do something ridiculous and call it a day. I’ll never buy Mavi jeans. But I have to admit there’s something kind of refreshing about the nakedness of it. No false intimacy. No pretending. Just mutual transaction and everyone knowing exactly what’s going on. Tuesday, 17 April 2012. Cochon Ville: Sébastien Tellier made something with that title and I keep coming back to it, not because I fully understand what I’m hearing but because there’s something in it that feels deliberate and strange, like he knew exactly how absurd the project was and committed anyway. That’s the thing about Tellier—he’s always been willing to follow an idea to a place that makes no commercial sense, which is maybe why most people don’t know his work at all, and why the people who do care about it obsessively. The title itself is a joke, or maybe it isn’t, and that ambiguity is probably the whole point. Tuesday, 17 April 2012. Nearly New: What strikes me about Amanda Lepore is how she’s stayed exactly the same while everything around her changed. The makeup, the nightclubs, the whole vision of who she is—she committed to it and never wavered. You watch enough nightlife and you see everyone constantly adjusting themselves, chasing trends, trying out new identities. But she just stayed put. That kind of constancy looks almost defiant from where I’m sitting, like she understood something about authenticity that everyone else is still figuring out. Monday, 16 April 2012. Lola and the Cat: Saturday, 14 April 2012. Kimbra’s War: Kimbra’s music feels like combat—not physical aggression, but genuine conflict. She shifts genres like she’s switching weapons, stacks her voice until it’s arguing with itself, treats melody like it’s something to break and rebuild. There’s a refusal in it, a determination not to slip into whatever would make her successful in an easy way. The skill is obviously there; she just chooses not to use it for comfort. Thursday, 12 April 2012. Loftus Hall: There was a Jägermeister tour thing happening in Berlin, which mostly meant a crowded bar and free drinks. Loftus Hall was so packed that nobody could sit down—we were eating standing up, which isn’t really eating so much as grabbing food while people pushed past you, but the food was good so it mattered more than you’d expect. The bands came on at some point: Tek-One, Dumme Jungs, Eskimo Callboy, not necessarily in that order. By then I’d already had enough Jägermeister that the set list wasn’t making much impression on me. I drink it like water, which is the kind of thing people always doubt until they see you do it, and that night I was doing it. The place was loud and jumping and everyone was having the particular kind of fun you only have when someone else is paying. I remember standing at a foosball table at some point, laughing at nothing in particular. There was a woman from the agency who kept appearing at exactly the right moment to pull me out of whatever I was getting into, which sounds dramatic but I’m pretty sure I needed it. More than once. The night had that quality where everything feels perfect while it’s happening—the crowd, the noise, the steady stream of free drinks—and then you wake up the next day trying to piece together what actually happened. All that’s left is the feeling of it and maybe two clear images, plus the distinct knowledge that you had a good time even though the details are gone. Wednesday, 11 April 2012. Reappear: I got pulled back into School of Seven Bells not long ago and remembered how their music works on you—this pillowed, textured thing that doesn’t demand attention but quietly settles in. Reappear is exactly that. Lush production, the kind of digital-and-organic blend that feels designed in some dream studio. It’s good to have them back. Tuesday, 10 April 2012. Mixtape: Hello World: I could start completely fresh every day if I wanted to. Just leave. Drop everything I’ve built, everyone I’ve promised things to. Drain my bank account, fly somewhere nobody knows my name. Set down my suitcase on ground that’s never seen me before. Turn off the music. Scream it out clear and loud: Hello world. But I never actually do it. The fantasy sits there sometimes, bright and available. The freedom is always there—I’m not actually trapped. I could become someone else entirely, erase everything, start from scratch as a different person. There’s something almost beautiful about knowing that. Knowing I could leave tomorrow if I really wanted to. But I won’t. I know it won’t fix anything, and by now there’s too much keeping me here anyway. Too many people, too many small obligations that piled up so gradually I stopped noticing. Too much weight to everything I’ve already built. So I stay. Same person. Same face in the mirror. Same worn conversations. The fantasy stays sharp and available in my head—something I could reach for anytime I want. But I never do. I turn the volume back up and keep walking. Monday, 9 April 2012. Feist: Bittersweet Memories: Feist’s voice has this particular quality—not quite a break, but a hesitation, like she’s deciding whether to let the note all the way out. Years ago when The Reminder was everywhere, everyone else was piling on layers, but she just kept stripping things down, leaving space. There’s something bittersweet about going back to that record now, realizing you don’t need it the way you once did, but you can still hear exactly why you did. That intimacy she managed—the feeling that she was singing something private but letting you stand right there with her—that doesn’t fade. Monday, 9 April 2012. Beyoncé’s Tumblr: I wasn’t really paying attention to Beyoncé and Jay-Z before. What they did in their free time, their work—didn’t matter much to me. They have more money than most countries. That was all the information I needed. Then she started a Tumblr with private photos, and suddenly there was something to actually look at. Proof of how the incredibly wealthy spend their time. So I looked. There are colored tunnels she runs through just because. Melons that cost more than your rent. Sand facials because she felt like it. Photos of the kind of life where you don’t have to justify anything because the money never stops. Each image is another small proof: I can afford this, and I don’t need a reason. I’m not jealous. I keep telling myself that. My time’s coming too, probably. I’ll get there and fill my own Tumblr with stupid expensive shit. Or that’s the idea anyway. For now I’m scrolling through someone else’s evidence, collecting notes for a future I’ll never actually have but can’t stop imagining. Thursday, 5 April 2012. Don’t Go: Rae Morris has this voice that doesn’t try to convince you of anything—it just lays out what’s true. “Don’t Go” is the kind of song you come back to knowing it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway, hoping it somehow might. There’s resignation in it, but not sadness. She sounds like someone who’s made peace with the fact that some people leave no matter what you do. Wednesday, 4 April 2012. Grimes: Strange: Grimes showed up when electronic music was getting soft. Her work was abrasive, sometimes difficult to listen to, and she didn’t care. The videos weren’t designed to make you comfortable or like her. That refusal to play nice meant something, even when the songs themselves didn’t grab me. Monday, 2 April 2012. Marteria: German hip-hop spent years learning from America, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a difference between learning and copying, and for a long time it was hard to tell the difference. The beats sounded borrowed, the flows like patterns learned from records, the whole thing missing something that felt native. Marteria’s part of a generation that stopped waiting for permission. He’s from Rostock, working with Casper, Peter Fox, Miss Platnum—artists who’ve actually thought about what German could do in rap instead of just translating American rhythms. His recent album got real recognition. Jan Delay, who knows this music inside out, called it among the best German hip-hop records in recent years. What registers when you listen is the precision. The production doesn’t bury him or try to save him with polish. It gives him space. The rhythmic sense sounds earned instead of borrowed, like someone who’s thought carefully about what German sounds like over a beat. You can feel it in how he works with other artists too. It’s not just guest appearances and features. It’s collaboration with people thinking about the same problems. That’s what a scene sounds like when it’s actually talking to itself instead of waiting for approval from somewhere else. Monday, 26 March 2012. Nettie Harris: Monday, 19 March 2012. Two Speeds: I’d been struggling with two competing instincts for a while now. Part of me loved the work of sitting with something for weeks—the careful writing, the photography, the visual projects that demanded real attention. But I also couldn’t turn away from what was happening in real time: a new song that mattered, a moment worth catching, the news that moves fast. These two impulses operate at completely different speeds. Trying to hold both in the same place felt like being pulled in two directions at once. There was no form that could hold them. For a stretch there, nothing happened. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I’d hit a wall with how to say it. The fast stuff didn’t belong here. The slow, careful work doesn’t sit right next to the daily chase. Every time I wanted to write something quick, I felt like I was interrupting. And when I wanted to sit with something properly, I felt like I was ignoring what was happening outside. The compromise got too loud. So I spent a few weeks putting something together. Found a team I actually wanted to work with and built THE INVADER—a space for the fast thing. The quick takes, the videos, the music, the news, whatever moves now. All the stuff that felt wrong in this notebook. But we kept the care in it. Years of knowing what works, understanding the difference between moving quickly and moving carelessly. This place gets to slow down now. The long pieces, the photographs, the projects that need weeks to breathe. No compromise about what speed they operate at. I don’t know what either becomes. But I needed this—the permission to work at two speeds without one sabotaging the other. There’s something like relief in that. Tuesday, 13 March 2012. DoYaThing: I still think about the Gorillaz and De La Soul collaboration from 2011, the way it landed without warning in that pre-algorithm moment when things could just exist online and you’d find them by accident. De La Soul’s production, Gorillaz at their loosest—it felt like watching people who actually liked each other make something in a room. No stakes, no press cycle, just the song itself. I played it so many times that year I wore a groove into it, which sounds like bullshit but it’s true: certain songs get old in your hand. This one never did. Later versions with ScHoolboy Q kept the vibe alive but added something heavier, more complicated. The original though—that’s still the one that hits, that particular collision of everything working without trying to work. Wednesday, 29 February 2012. Mishka NYC: Mishka’s the brand that never got polished. Grotesque characters, angry type, graphics made to provoke. Most streetwear eventually decides to be beautiful or at least likeable. Mishka just stayed the same for twenty years—ugly and indifferent to your approval. That’s the rare move. Tuesday, 28 February 2012. The Inevitable Platform: Two out of five Germans were genuinely afraid of Facebook, according to a poll they commissioned. The fear was worse among people with lower education, though about 20 percent of those had no idea what Facebook was in the first place. A market researcher was surprised by the numbers. He’d expected educated people to be more skeptical, but it turned out the opposite—teenagers and college students used it without hesitation. Everyone was already on it, and once your entire friend group is communicating through groups and messages and walls, you can’t really opt out. You’re basically forced to be there. The list of things to worry about was endless and also kind of ridiculous. Your boss seeing photos from a party where you’re making out with someone. Some creep downloading pictures from your vacation. Personalized ads following you around forever, trying to sell you Hello Kitty vacuum cleaners. All theoretically possible. Maybe even likely. I used Facebook constantly. Every day, constantly. Phone and computer, home and out. I was basically never logged out, even when I wasn’t actively using it. I worked in a field where not being on Facebook meant you didn’t really exist. But I also had the luxury of not caring much if people were monitoring me. My job wouldn’t suffer because of party photos. I wasn’t a young woman worrying about harassment or someone young enough that this could wreck their future. And if someone tried to sell me a Hello Kitty vacuum, honestly, I’d be curious. The thing nobody can really calculate is the cost of all this visibility, this documentation, this permanent residence in one system. Nobody knows. I don’t know, and I won’t for a long time, maybe ever. I’ve always believed in fighting noise with noise—feed the system enough random information and garbage and meaningless details that it drowns out anything worth actually protecting. Let them try to profile you based on that. Keep the real secrets. It’s a defense if you can afford it, and I could. The platform was powerful, obviously. As powerful as the people running it and using it let it be. The smart thing would be to know what could go wrong, engage with it thoughtfully and with intention. That’s probably right. But by then it was already inevitable anyway. Sunday, 26 February 2012. The Shins: Simple Song: The Shins have always felt like they’re trying to prove something, all that careful arrangement and winking references, but ’Simple Song’ just sits there. It doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t ask you to think it’s clever. That plainness is what got me—a song that’s just what it is without performance. I find myself coming back to it more than I expect to. Saturday, 25 February 2012. The Black Box: Clicking on a music video link in Germany used to be like playing a slot machine. You’d find something great, everyone’s talking about it, you click play and… black box. Nothing. Just GEMA and YouTube locked in a stupid fight and the whole country paying for it. This had been going on for years. GEMA—the German copyright collecting society—wanted licensing fees YouTube wasn’t willing to pay. So YouTube just blocked every video with copyrighted music. GEMA said they were protecting artists. YouTube said the fees were unreasonable. Both technically correct, which meant nobody would move. And nobody did. The rest of the internet moved on and watched videos while Germany got a black box. I remember spending actual time begging managers to upload stuff to Vimeo instead, hoping for decent quality, knowing it would take weeks if it happened at all. Half the time it didn’t. The artists got stuck in the middle of a fight that had nothing to do with them, and by the time a video showed up anywhere else, nobody cared anymore. It got so absurd that even the record labels admitted it. Edgar Berger at Sony basically said: we’ve licensed the content to YouTube, YouTube says GEMA’s asking too much, GEMA says they’re protecting creators, we’re losing millions, and nobody’s going to fix it. Which was… accurate? None of them were lying. Everyone just had a reason not to move. The stupid part was how obviously solvable it was. Just figure it out. But instead it sat there, year after year, this architectural disaster that made everything harder—blogs couldn’t embed, artists couldn’t share, the internet just worked around it. Germany got walled off while everyone else watched. Eventually they sorted it. These things always do. By then the whole thing felt like ancient history anyway. Friday, 24 February 2012. Vianna Nguyen: Thursday, 23 February 2012. Lo-Fi-Fnk: Kissing Taste: Lo-fi funk has this weird pull to it. There’s the chill, the groove, the bedroom-production sound of it all, but underneath there’s something deeply sensual if you’re paying attention—the way the bass sits under everything, the subtle sexual charge in the pocket of the rhythm. It’s not trying to be hot, which is exactly why it works. You put it on and the room shifts. Your body shifts. Everything slows into something almost sacred, almost intimate. It’s the sound of wanting someone without saying anything at all. Thursday, 23 February 2012. Pit Hair: Charlotte Free doesn’t shave her armpits. Just photographs them and lets them exist, which apparently is radical. Beauty culture’s whole apparatus is designed to make you feel ashamed of your own body—there’s always something to fix, remove, sand down. Free doesn’t participate. The refusal is casual, almost offhand, which makes it more interesting than if she’d made it a whole thing. She’s just living in a way the world wasn’t expecting her to, and that matters. Wednesday, 22 February 2012. Ira’s Wolf: Monday, 20 February 2012. Yuna: Sunday, 19 February 2012. German Blogs Are Ugly: I clicked through to Cashy’s Blog the other day, one of the biggest German tech sites, the guy posting constantly about every Apple announcement, every Windows update, every Google shift. Fast, thorough, no idea how he finds the time. The design looks like a Russian spam site for knock-off pharmaceuticals. The domain’s one of those that confuses people—half the traffic is probably retirees looking for a hotel near the harbor. That’s the thing about German blogs though. The writing is actually good. The voices are distinct, the subjects are everywhere—fashion, tech, the weird gross stuff that makes up everyday life. The content is genuinely worth reading. Then I click to the actual site and just stare at it. Some person wrote something smart and sharp and then deployed it on what might be the worst design I’ve ever seen. Nerdcore is the German headquarters for geek stuff—comics, zombies, whatever. René’s been at this forever and basically has no life outside of pushing content 24/7. I respect that dedication. But the site looks like an overstuffed content crawler. No structure, no design sense, just everything at once. There are reference points everywhere—look at EA, look at The Trend Netz, look at Kotaku, look at fatale or Ships Mag or Pilot Magazine. Cool designs exist. You could take something from any of them and make it your own. Instead it looks like someone took a default theme and made half-hearted adjustments and gave up. Then there’s Buzzriders, Robert Basic’s new project about technology trends and the future. Except the site looks like it’s from ten years ago. Standard theme, slight modifications, no personality, no visual distinction, nothing that says “this person knows something.” It’s almost spiteful, like he resents the people looking at it. I get that content is king. When something’s written well and in a real voice, that matters. But bad design undercuts everything. It makes the experience worse. If you’re running your own project, you owe it to the people reading to make it look like you care. The gap is what gets me. The writing’s good, the thinking is sharp, the content is worth reading. But every time I click through to read something, there’s this moment where I look at the design and feel a little deflated. It’s like someone built something worth reading and then put it in a broken container. Saturday, 18 February 2012. Gavin Watson’s Skin Head: Watson’s documentary is a straight look at British skinhead culture without the editorializing—just these guys talking about what drew them in, how it felt to belong to something that hard. The photography is unflinching. There’s no distance between the camera and the people it’s watching, no winking at the audience about how weird or dangerous this world is. It’s a record of something that mattered to these people, and that matters. The skinhead thing gets flattened by media into one image, but Watson’s work lets you see how personal and complicated it actually was—ideology mixed with friendship, violence mixed with genuine care for your crew. It’s the kind of documentary that teaches you to look at subcultures differently, not as curiosities but as real communities with real stakes. Friday, 17 February 2012. Playing in the Commons: They called us criminals. ARD, ZDF, the entire German Content Alliance—that’s what they said. We were a generation that came of age downloading songs, making videos, remixing work we loved. Digital theft, in their view. They wanted ACTA signed, wanted international law to make it all illegal, and when thousands of us took to the streets to protest, they just got louder. We didn’t even know what we were stealing. The contradiction made my head spin then, still does. They claimed, officially, that ACTA was about protecting cultural diversity. But that was never true. It was about protecting their monopoly on who made culture and who profited from it. They wanted to shrink the digital commons to nothing—no sharing, no remixing, no building on what came before. Just payment at every step, licensing, control. I read statements from executives claiming the measures in ACTA already matched German law, so what was the problem? The problem was obvious to anyone paying attention: they wanted to criminalize what normal people did every day. Post a photo somewhere. Hum a melody in a video. Quote a line that moved you. None of it would be safe anymore. There was actual research showing file-sharing barely touched box office numbers. Economists ran the numbers and found downloads only mattered when there was huge lag between releases in different countries. But evidence didn’t sway them. They’d decided we were the problem. What struck me most was how naked the generational divide became. These people had built everything around scarcity—own the master, control the copies, profit at every step. The internet made culture abundant and shared, and they couldn’t bear it. Instead of adapting, instead of even asking how to make money in a world where culture flowed freely, they wanted to use law to reverse time. Make the digital world behave like the analog one. The solution was obvious and already existed elsewhere. Fair Use, they called it. It gave people legal room to remix, reference, transform without becoming accidental criminals. The Netherlands had figured it out. But Europe wanted the door locked tight. ACTA got shelved in the end because too many people pushed back. I don’t think about it much anymore, but I sometimes think about what it represented—this permanent friction between people who own culture and people who live in it. They wanted to freeze everything, monetize every gesture. The rest of us just wanted to play with what we were given. Friday, 17 February 2012. What Scott’s Got: Fashion Week Paris is the big one. The history, the weight, the fact that everyone acts like it matters so it’s decided that it does. Fashion weeks are everywhere anyway—Berlin, New York, London, then back around again. But Paris gets the reverence. Jeremy Scott’s work catches my attention because he doesn’t seem beholden to the whole thing. He pulls from pop culture, street stuff, references that don’t usually show up in formal fashion spaces. It doesn’t feel precious the way a lot of high fashion does. There’s personality in it. His Adidas collaboration proves this—he actually contributes something instead of just attaching his name to a product. Sneakers with style, basically, which sounds simple but most designers don’t pull it off. I’m not sure I’d want to fly to Paris and sit through fashion shows, but understanding what drives someone like that—what he’s drawn to, why certain things work together—that’s something. The rest is just industry machinery doing its cycle. Thursday, 16 February 2012. Jogger Stalker: Richard Kern films women jogging, just follows the camera and doesn’t look away. “Jogger Stalker” is literal—bodies moving through the city, unaware they’re being filmed. There’s no metaphor here, no aesthetic camouflage. He’s been making work like this for decades. The gaze is deliberate and without apology. The discomfort is the entire point. You can find something honest in it—the acknowledgment that looking takes something, that the male gaze isn’t innocent—or you can find something repulsive. Usually both. What I find interesting is that Kern never tries to redeem the work. No distance, no theoretical framework, no irony. He makes it and leaves it there. Most artists would flinch away, would try to explain or justify or wrap it in something that makes them feel better about themselves. Kern doesn’t. That kind of clarity—just the thing itself, without the apology—is rare. Uncomfortable to watch. But there’s something to an artist who won’t look away from what he’s doing. Wednesday, 15 February 2012. Purple Girl: Tuesday, 14 February 2012. Safe & Sound: I keep coming back to “Safe & Sound” on nights when I’m worn down in that specific way where another big moment would actually hurt. It’s the opposite of what makes most Taylor songs work—no production, no move, just this voice that knows better than to ask anything else of you. When you’ve had enough of trying, that’s what matters. Tuesday, 14 February 2012. Lana Del Rey: A Star Is Born And Scorned: There’s something about the way Lana Del Rey has constructed herself that feels both totally artificial and completely genuine, which might be the only way to be famous anymore without losing your mind. She arrived fully formed with the Lana Del Rey persona—the old Hollywood glamour, the sadness, the self-destruction aesthetic—and people couldn’t decide if they were looking at art or a marketing campaign. Probably both. She made drowsy cinematic pop songs when that wasn’t fashionable yet, when sad girl music still needed to prove itself, and she had the taste to make them sound expensive and doomed. The scorned part is real. There’s always been something about her that makes people angry—maybe because she’s a woman who’s unapologetically sad and glamorous instead of empowering, maybe because she’s wealthy and doesn’t pretend otherwise, maybe because she’s too aware of her own mythology. The accusations, the debates about whether she’s authentic or a constructed persona, the criticism that followed her everywhere. She took it all and kept making music that sounded like cigarette smoke and champagne and regret. What I keep coming back to is that she’s one of the few pop stars who understood that sadness itself is beautiful, that you don’t need to resolve it or overcome it to make art about it. The songs just sit in that feeling and refuse to move. Whether that’s a choice or a compulsion or some combination of both feels almost beside the point now. Friday, 10 February 2012. Band of Skulls: Heavy blues rock with no apology for the blues part. Band of Skulls hit a sound that feels exactly as good as it should—guitars thick as tar, drums like something collapsing in slow motion. There’s no restraint here, no clever arrangement trying to prove something. Just the weight of it. Sweet Sour captures that pull, the push and drag of wanting something you know will hurt, the kind of wanting that doesn’t care if it makes sense. They move through it like they’ve lived there for years. Friday, 10 February 2012. Gurren Lagann: Boobs, Monsters, Giant Robots: There are two kinds of sick. The light kind where you drag yourself to the doctor, cough in his face, and then get blessed with two weeks decomposing at home with delivery food and a laptop—maybe even clean the apartment if you’re ambitious. Then there’s the other dimension. The one where you’re stuck in bed sweating through fever, hallucinating through mucus, certain you’ll never see daylight again. The laptop becomes your only friend. It’s all that keeps you from losing your mind when your skull feels like it’s splitting open. I needed something massive to break the fever grip. An anime that could make me cry and laugh without boring me with realistic garbage. Some guy named Veed posted a list: the 50 best anime ever, according to him. One Piece, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Wolf’s Rain—I knew them all, loved them all. He had Gurren Lagann at number one, and he said the opening episodes were shit but the rest was the best thing he’d ever seen anywhere. That was funny because I’d tried Gurren Lagann once, quit after episode four, and moved on. Desert, monsters, robots. Repeat. Nothing grabbed me. But I had nothing else going on. So I tried again and watched all 27 episodes in one sitting, broken only by sleep and food and jerking off. And I cried at the end. Like a small kid into a tissue. Because it was that good. Because I didn’t want it to finish. Gurren Lagann. The setup is simple. Simon is a kid living underground with his best friend Kamina, and they spend their days digging tunnels. One day a giant monster crashes through the ceiling with a big-breasted girl named Yoko, a robot appears, Simon gets superpowers, and everything goes sideways. The story’s about hunting down an ancient monster at the end of the world who’s been crushing humanity for centuries. Simon and Kamina join a resistance group, pilot giant robots, and start destroying everything in their way—mutant frogs, bathhouses, shark-men, whatever. Standard anime logic, the kind of stuff you’ve seen before. But then Kamina dies. Early, and it hits hard. That’s when the show stops being a kid’s cartoon and becomes an epic. The rest of the series crams in more story and heart and raw insanity than most shows manage in 16 seasons. Massive space wars. Questions about meaning and will. Betrayal. The weight of the universe. I was lying there ruined by fever, and watching it all unfold was extraordinary. I think Gainax created the perfect expression of what anime can be. If you gave up on the medium after Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade wore you down, you need to watch Gurren Lagann. There’s no getting around it. Thursday, 9 February 2012. Charlotte Free: She’s A Wildfox: Charlotte Free made Wildfox work in that specific way that’s hard to explain out loud. She could wear those deliberately kitschy 70s prints and look completely unbothered, like she’d just grabbed them without thinking. That effortlessness is almost impossible to fake—you spend weeks designing every detail and somehow it has to look like a thrift-store accident. Wildfox’s entire thing depended on looking like something you just found, and she made you believe it. Tuesday, 7 February 2012. Mixtape: Home Serenades: Ice season. Nothing for it but to stay inside where the heat actually works, while that winter sun outside exhausts itself trying to convince anyone it’s useful. Eggs and bacon on fresh toast. A blanket. M.I.A. into The Weeknd into Dillon—each one flowing into the next without any thought, the kind of afternoon where you close your eyes and hours just evaporate. I’m thinking the whole time about how humanity really missed the mark by not evolving to hibernate. Why would anyone choose to stay conscious through winter. It feels like a fundamental design error. Monday, 6 February 2012. Madonna: Give Me All Your Luvin’: The music video arrived in 2012 with all the pageantry you’d expect—Madonna still convinced she could provoke the internet, still convinced the internet cared. M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj flanking her like the pop equivalent of a power play. The whole thing was so determinedly scandalous, so carefully calculated to offend, that it kind of did the opposite. You watched it and understood exactly what she was doing, which meant there was nothing left to do. But the song itself is better than the controversy around it. It’s poppy and dumb in the way that works—the kind of thing that gets stuck in your head not because it’s deep but because it doesn’t pretend to be. Madonna chasing relevance by chasing younger collaborators, which is what you do when you’ve already been relevant longer than most people are alive. There’s something sad about that, actually. Not in a way that makes the song worse, just in a way that makes it more honest than she probably intended. Saturday, 4 February 2012. Creep Street: Friday, 3 February 2012. Ten Intentions: Friday afternoon and you’re already running the playlist of finally-going-to-do things. The project in the garage. Get out and do something worth remembering. Maybe something genuinely stupid and risky. The weekend stretches ahead like permission. By Saturday evening you’re home eating fries and watching garbage television and nothing has changed except your confidence level, which has dropped significantly. The script never varies. You’re going to buy some piece of gear that’s supposed to fix your entire life—your setup, your work, your brain chemistry somehow—and when it arrives you realize it doesn’t do anything you couldn’t already do. Or you’re finally going to say what you actually mean to someone, which feels brave until you hit send and then six hours of self-hatred. Or get drunk with someone you usually avoid and let the night go where it goes. Use the snow before it’s gone. Pick up some weird hobby for no reason. None of it happens, or it happens halfway and stops. The actual weekend is much quieter than the Friday version. Mostly time passing and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do with it so you settle for small things—scrolling, watching, sleeping in. Maybe something breaks open. Usually not. Sunday evening is always the same: you had two days and did basically nothing with them, and somehow that’s its own kind of wisdom. Monday comes and resets everything. Friday hits again and you genuinely mean it this time, which is the only bit of this that never gets old. Friday, 3 February 2012. 2012: For about a year everyone agreed the world was ending on December 21st. Nobody really believed it—the Mayan calendar thing was nonsense—but the joke somehow became its own real culture. Memes, a John Cusack disaster film, ironic apocalypse parties, countdown sites you’d obsessively check. Brands capitalized immediately, selling products dressed up in endtimes packaging, trying to get you to buy deodorant for your final days. The weird part was how light it all felt. You could think about the world ending without any real dread, just the abstract fun of collective doom. When the 22nd came and nothing changed, everyone moved on without missing a beat. But there was something genuinely good about that shared absurdity—everyone refreshing the same countdown timer, posting the same jokes, rehearsing apocalyptic panic together without meaning any of it. When that date comes around I remember the specific mood of it. The internet found something fundamentally absurd and the whole thing just sustained itself, straight-faced, no winking, just pure absurdity running for twelve months. Thursday, 2 February 2012. The Nazi Left Myth: Twitter is funny because there’s nobody between people and what they’re thinking. So Erika Steinbach, head of the League of Expellees, posted that the Nazis were left-wing—see, it’s right there in the name, National Socialist. By the time I read it, the internet was already split: half furious, half nodding along. I was just curious whether there was any substance to the argument or whether it was just word games dressed up as history. There is a grain of truth that makes the argument persuasive. The Nazi party did have socialists in it during its formation—genuine socialists, not people just using the word. The Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, represented an actual left-leaning faction with real socialist ambitions. But Hitler was never going to let that happen. By 1930 he’d purged them, made it clear that fascism, not socialism, was the ideology. Capitalism was fine. State power was what mattered. Redistribution and worker control were useful rhetoric for recruitment, not actual policy. Historians are pretty clear on this: fascism is right-wing totalitarianism. It can adopt socialist language and bring in socialists during its formation, but what emerges when it has power is something else entirely—hierarchy, nationalism, racial state, imperial expansion. Hitler wasn’t subtle about it either. He said openly that the party wouldn’t become socialist once he took power. The Nazis were Nazis: ultranationalist, totalitarian, obsessed with race ideology and state control. Nothing about that is left-wing, regardless of what the charter said. So Steinbach’s argument doesn’t hold up. Twitter rewarded her for a clever sound bite—look at the name!—but actual history doesn’t work that way. I spent an hour on this so the next time it comes up, I don’t have to pretend to think about it. Thursday, 2 February 2012. Magnum: Postcards From America: I’ve been looking at Magnum photographs of America—decades of work by photographers who had the patience to wait in diners, on highways, in small towns where nothing was happening. What stays with me is the lack of romance in these images. They’re not trying to say anything grand about the American character or the national soul. They’re just documenting light, boredom, solitude, people moving through spaces. I think that’s why I keep coming back to them—they got something true about scale and loneliness that you don’t forget once you’ve seen it. Wednesday, 1 February 2012. The Bad In Each Other: Feist does something most artists can’t pull off—she makes restraint sound urgent. Not the fake minimalism of someone trying to seem sophisticated, but actual space, actual air. You listen to her and you understand why silence matters. There’s a particular kind of intimacy in her work, where the smallest gesture—a voice drop, a string arrangement, the way she lets a phrase hang—means everything. It’s the opposite of trying to move you. It’s the confidence to assume you’re actually listening. Tuesday, 31 January 2012. If This Ain’t Love: There’s a moment in dance tracks where everything locks in—the kick, the bassline, the vocal line—and suddenly you’re not thinking anymore, you’re just moving. Morillo knew how to build those moments. Skin’s voice sits in the track like it was always supposed to be there, rough and certain, somewhere between a confession and a command. It’s the kind of track that made sense at 2 AM in a packed club, but it also makes sense alone on a drive at night. Most dance records fade, but the ones Morillo touched had this staying power—they didn’t feel like disposable hits. Monday, 30 January 2012. Halo: There’s a moment a few minutes into this where Abigail Wyles’s voice sits right on top of the production—not over it, not buried beneath it, just there in the space it finds. Benjamin Damage and Doc Daneeka build something patient underneath, the kind of electronic track that doesn’t announce itself but lets you settle into it. The thing about good production like this is that it doesn’t feel like work. You’re not aware of the choices while you’re listening, which means the choices are working. By the third listen you start catching what they did with the frequencies, the way they left space for the vocal, and by then you’re already gone. Saturday, 28 January 2012. Navy Zimbabwe: Saturday, 28 January 2012. Weekend Missions: Here we are. Another weekend right on schedule. Your freedom’s waiting—no school, no work, no TV network controlling what you think about yourself. One more episode of something and you’ll crack the code to everything. You won’t, but the thought’s nice anyway. If actually improving your life sounds too exhausting, there are smaller games to play. Eat McNuggets until your body quits and somehow land yourself in a newspaper for it. Send Twitter an angry email about how stupid their censorship is, then spend the next day tweeting about the email you sent them. Buy a Nintendo 3DS finally, before Mario and Luigi get genuinely upset at you. Shop exclusively at Urban Outfitters in Berlin from now on—don’t mind that you’ll look exactly like every other “totally unique” person shopping there. Try the menstrual product alternative just to have done it, even though you’re not built for it. Leave the church and start your own small sect. Orgies, virgin sacrifices, we’ll bring the beer. Go find Hannah on Facebook and tell her how much you love her, how great she is—she needs to hear that sometimes. Dig out those magazines from ten years ago and spend some time remembering Rachel Stevens. It’s allowed. Sell your real opinions for fifty euros on eBay and go back to being the hollow consumer the TV networks always designed you to be. Or skip all of it and just do that last thing with your sister. What happens between you stays between you. Friday, 27 January 2012. Sleigh Bells: Comeback Kid: Sleigh Bells hit at the right moment—that mid-2000s surge where everything distorted and electronic sounded like the future. Alexis Krauss’s voice cutting through all that noise felt like a conversation happening in the middle of a car crash. You listened obsessively for a few years and then just… stopped. The way you do with bands that burn bright and then become library clutter. There’s something strange about a band like that coming back. You’re not the person who fell for them anymore, but the music hasn’t changed and neither has whatever part of you responds to it. Noise-rock doesn’t date the way other things do. It just waits. Thursday, 26 January 2012. Fear My Vagina: Cam Damage doesn’t soften anything. She makes work about sex, about her body, about the explicit business of it all, and she doesn’t dress it up or apologize. There’s something unsettling about that directness if you’re used to everything being packaged for mass appeal—but that’s the point. She’s doing what most performers won’t: owning it completely. No metaphor, no irony buffer, no distance. Just this is what I do. That refusal to be ashamed sits with you. Thursday, 26 January 2012. Woodkid in Paris: Sometime in the early 2010s, every tech company and media brand decided streaming concerts could be interactive. Fans would vote on the setlist, the stage colors, what songs the artist would play. It was participatory culture, or that’s what they called it. Someone somewhere would be the biggest fan, the most dedicated voter, and they’d get a song dedicated to them. Woodkid, the French musician and filmmaker, did one of these events in Paris, in front of the Eiffel Tower. His work is always visual—his videos have this precise, dark, geometric quality. A concert shaped by thousands of internet votes seemed to miss everything interesting about him. But that was the bet: that distance could disappear, that watching meant participating, that your vote mattered. I don’t know if the fans’ votes actually changed what happened during the show. I suspect they didn’t. But for a moment, the idea that they could, that we could shape what we watched through widgets and Twitter replies—that felt like something. It probably wasn’t. But it felt like something, and that was enough for the moment. Tuesday, 24 January 2012. Skins Season Six: The season opens with Morocco. Drugs and freedom and lost virginity and the kind of casual cruelty only teenagers can manage. Then the shock: Grace gets tangled with some rich drug dealer and it all collapses. Matty runs. And you’re back in the grey suffocating world of Franky and Mini and all of them—back in that teenage reality where every choice echoes and mistakes become permanent. I watched the first episode when season six came back on E4. No show has ever gotten inside me like this one does. It grabbed me completely, didn’t let go, had me thinking about scenes and moments years later. Made me feel things I couldn’t quite name. I connected more to the earlier generations than to this new batch. Tony and Effy and Cassie felt like they were made from the same stuff I was. But Liv and Rich and the others are undeniably good. They convince in ways most television doesn’t even try. Because they still feel real somehow, different in a way that matters. Mini went from insufferable high-school diva with freckles to bold, actually worth following. Franky’s struggling in her relationship—pulling back, getting lonely, looking at other guys. Liv’s still Liv: half slut, half saint, thoughtful, mostly invisible to everyone except her actual friends. They’re all growing into a world that’s harder than anything they started with. The second season of any generation in Skins gets darker, and I wanted that here more than I expected. The earlier episodes had been a bit too playful, too young. I’m not delusional about it—nothing hits twice like the first time, and those early seasons had their own power. But watching what Elsley and Brittain were building, it felt like they knew exactly what they were aiming for. Monday, 23 January 2012. Uno Uno: Monday, 23 January 2012. Foe: Lanthimos made a film about a couple in South Africa interrupted by a stranger who arrives to upend their carefully maintained arrangement. It’s exactly as unsettling as you’d expect—dialogue slightly off, light relentless and flat, bodies observed and observing. Mescal and Ronan move through it like they’re in glass. By the end you’re not sure what you actually watched or if understanding it was ever the point. The film works on you anyway, in a way that’s not comfortable but is effective. Friday, 20 January 2012. Ten Little Missions: I found this old list somewhere—a collection of weekend missions, each one more ridiculous than the last, each one supposedly mandatory. Join a Berlin-only social network that’d be a ghost town by next month. Watch a porn star documentary, then stick to amateur videos with your heavy-set friend. Watch the Lana Del Rey SNL performance with the sound off—please God, with the sound off. Go make fake gold bracelets from plastic bangles and show up to Fashion Week like you know someone. Hack some websites if you’re feeling anarchic about it. Burn something. Participate in a shitstorm against whoever, or buy some nice shoes instead—the list was equal parts thoughtful and completely indifferent to consequences. Mixed in with the chaos was actually good advice that I still think about: read more, go see your best friend, specifically kiss her. The post warned this might land you in jail, which I appreciated. Not bothering to pretend the suggestion was safe, just acknowledging it as a risk worth taking. Either the best night of your life or a prison cell—no gray area. What got me was how much it refused to choose. Not motivational quotes, not a life-hack list. Not pure anarchic nonsense either. It was both at once—genuinely useful advice tangled up with absurd, impossible, or dangerous suggestions, all presented with the same deadpan severity. Burn something and read more belonged in the same list, weighted equally. The consequence for failure was always the same: you’d never come back, forced to read something else forever. I don’t know if anyone actually did these things. But I like that this list existed. The specificity of it, the mixing of the real with the ridiculous, the casual cruelty of the goodbye threat—it feels like something you’d actually want to be part of, even knowing you’d probably fail. Friday, 20 January 2012. How Close We Came: SOPA was the Stop Online Piracy Act, which sounds like something that should exist, until you read what it actually did. A congressman named Lamar S. Smith had written this proposal that would let the US government block websites, remove them from search engines, cut off their ad revenue, and make them inaccessible to Americans—not just the piracy sites, but anything that contained even one piece of copyrighted material someone decided was illegally uploaded. YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Reddit, Wikipedia. Any site where users could post content. All of it would be on the table. The proposal came from the usual place: the MPAA, the RIAA, the entertainment industry people who’d been terrified of the internet since they realized they couldn’t control it. They kept trying. Every few years, a new law, a new way to lock things down tighter. SOPA was just the most obvious middle finger they’d thrown at how the internet actually worked, which is to say, freely. I remember reading the details and feeling something between resignation and disgust. There was this predictable quality to it, like watching someone try the same thing over and over expecting different results. The copyright holders saw piracy as an existential threat, and their solution was to break the internet itself. If one person uploaded something illegal, the entire site got blacklisted. That was the proposal. That’s how little these people understood what they were trying to regulate. What mattered was that some people actually understood what would happen if it passed. Google, Facebook, Sony, even some of the big companies that had reason to care about copyright, they all said no. The blackout on January 18th, 2012—Wikipedia going dark, Reddit, Mozilla—it made people pay attention. Even Obama said he’d veto it. And it died. But the whole thing stayed with me because it showed how easy it would be. How close we came to having the whole internet restructured around fear of liability. Every site owner would’ve had to police every upload, every comment, every link. The internet would’ve become this timid, sterile thing. I’d still have been able to use it, but it would’ve been gutted from the inside. Neutered by lawyers and fear. That never happened. But it could’ve. And there’s always another version of the same idea waiting in the wings. Wednesday, 18 January 2012. Moni Haworth’s Darklands: Wednesday, 18 January 2012. Lele Saveri and Brandee Brown: Tuesday, 17 January 2012. Searching for WiFi: I spent a week traveling around—different cities, hotels, airports, people everywhere sweating and smoking and taking up space. The one thing every place had in common: no internet. Not really. Not when I needed it. Hotels wanted fifteen euros for a day of WiFi that barely moved. Airports gave you thirty minutes free if you bought something overpriced first. There was a Nike network that only wanted to sell you running shoes, McDonald’s WiFi that actually worked if you didn’t mind camping there forever, Starbucks that kept you going until your battery died. I walked around holding my phone up like I was praying, hunting for open networks, checking if they were real or just honeypots. Half the time they were fake or too slow to matter. I told myself it was for work—email, staying visible in whatever digital world we’re all supposed to live in now. But really I just wanted to scroll. Read dumb tweets. Look at whatever was trending. The fact that I couldn’t do that without either hunting for WiFi or dropping money on some corporate hotspot made me angry in a way I’m embarrassed to admit. Irrationally furious at nothing and everything. I’m not even saying it should be free, though it probably will be eventually. But twenty euros for a full week of solid connectivity, everywhere I am, no asterisks? That seems fair. That’s what it was worth to me. Instead everything was fragmented and limited and had fine print attached. What got to me was the futility. We’ve built the entire modern world on the assumption that everyone’s connected. But we haven’t actually committed to making that possible. It’s absurd. So here’s what I want to say to whoever controls this: make it work. Charge if you need to. But actually make it work. Everywhere. No strings attached. Because the image of me orbiting Starbucks for hours just to have decent connectivity isn’t progress. It’s depressing. And you know it. Monday, 16 January 2012. I Know That We Are Young: Wednesday, 11 January 2012. The Berlin Type: I moved to Berlin thinking I was immune. Turns out everyone thinks that—it’s part of the guarantee the city makes you. Within a year you’re in some gallery basement that used to be a bathhouse, drinking wine that costs nine euros because the bottle’s ugly, nodding at people you’ve seen three hundred times but never spoken to. The thing about hipsterdom in Berlin is that it’s so complete, so inevitable, that pretending you’re above it just makes you complicit in a different way. You become ironic about your own participation, which the city has already accounted for. It’s not that Berlin turns you into a hipster. It’s that Berlin is a city built specifically so that becoming a hipster feels like having no other choice. Tuesday, 10 January 2012. Nerd Pilgrimage: Twenty hours of flying—stops in London and LA—and I finally made it to Vegas. Apparently I’m staying in a villa that MTV used for some reality show, crammed in with twenty other bloggers who had the audacity to start a website. Oliver from Zeitgeschmack is here. Simon from Blogwerk. Anna from Hi-Tech. You get the picture. Some of the others are probably already lost in whatever nightclub or bar passes for fun in this place. Microsoft invited us out for CES 2012—Consumer Electronics Show, the annual tech pilgrimage. Windows 8, new Kinect stuff, Xbox games. Nintendo’s showing the Wii U. Sony brought the PlayStation Vita. Every tech company imaginable has set up booths, some with genuinely clever stuff, most with devices nobody will remember in a month. And then there’s the celebrity parade. Justin Bieber is here. So is 50 Cent. Eliza Dushku. Jillian Michaels, for reasons unclear. Miss America showing up to attempt coherent speech. Tiësto’s doing a live concert on Twitter. It’s this strange mix of technology and C-list entertainment that nobody asked for but somehow exists anyway. I’m hanging around until Thursday, then catching a bus through the desert to LA and flying back to Berlin. If I make it. There’s a Destructoid video that explains CES—gets interesting around minute twelve. But honestly, I’m just here to see what happens when you throw tech nerds, free alcohol, and a party circuit into one place and see what sticks. Monday, 9 January 2012. Katawa Shoujo: Raita was one of those girls in class who drew manga constantly. Pages and pages of terrible action poses and love triangles ripped straight from Sailor Moon. She’d show you her work with this desperate hope, and you’d say it was good because you didn’t have the heart to be honest. But she was getting better, which made watching the progression almost interesting. For the last decade or so, she’s been pouring everything into Katawa Shoujo. It started as character sketches on 4chan in 2007, designs for a story set at Yamaku High, a school in Japan for disabled teenagers. You play as Hisao, a student there, and the game is essentially a dating sim—you’re trying to date these girls. One’s scarred from a severe fire. One lost a leg in an accident. One was born blind. The title translates literally to “cripple girls,” which should tell you everything about the tact level here. But it actually became something real. Programmers and artists from around the world saw those sketches and started building. A full visual novel came together with actual writing and actual character depth. It got released free on Windows, Mac, and Linux in English and German and Russian and plenty of other languages. That’s the strange thing about the internet sometimes. Someone you barely remember makes something weird and crude, and the internet decides to help finish it into something that actually works. Saturday, 7 January 2012. Somebody That I Used To Know: I first heard Walk Off The Earth’s version when it was everywhere online, and it took me a while to realize why it worked so well. Gotye’s original is all restraint and distance—a song about the strangeness of encountering someone from your past. They turned it into something participatory and alive, all those loops building up until the whole thing is a collective stomp. Same song, but where Gotye was examining the feeling, they were inviting you into it. Saturday, 7 January 2012. King Krule: Portrait In Black And Blue: King Krule’s music sounds like someone’s interior collapsing in real time. That scratched voice of his, the way he staggers between whisper and scream, makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on something you shouldn’t hear. He pulls from punk and hip-hop and soul without announcing it, which is the whole point. There’s weight to everything he does—you can feel whatever’s eating at him bleeding through every track. Friday, 6 January 2012. Weekend Missions: First week of the year wasn’t completely awful. Came in drunk, sure, but the days had a nice drift to them. Now it’s the weekend—if you’re not completely exhausted, here are some genuinely stupid things worth trying. Answer the Sternsingers wearing nothing but an Aldi bag on your head while you hum Michael Jackson. Shake your genitals. They won’t come back. Listen to “Genesis” by Grimes and just accept that it’s good she exists. Move to Sweden. Join the Church of File-Sharing. Call it a life won. Fight the Barbification trend by posting only completely unedited photos. Start something new: the courage to be naturally ugly. Breathe quieter. Buy Futurama Monopoly and tell your mom she’s still got laundry, still needs to bake cookies in the basement, still has to fetch you acne cream. Use your middle finger more. Point it at anyone who annoys you. Point it at everyone else too. Check out Una’s Tits if you’re somehow in Antarctica. Accept that you’re not indie. You’re just a slut in a grandma sweater. Surrender to the simple beauty of really good black and white photos. Friday, 6 January 2012. Jessie Andrews: She entered the industry as a teenager, did the work, and then did something most people from that world don’t do—she talked about it honestly, about how it functions and what it costs. Not a redemption narrative or a cautionary tale, just a refusal to be nothing but the image. That takes a specific kind of nerve. Most figures in adult entertainment either vanish or become the product forever. Andrews claimed something different: the right to be known as the person behind the work, not just the work itself. Thursday, 5 January 2012. The Machinery: When the Wulff thing happened—when Germany’s president got caught calling newspaper editors to kill a story about his house credit—I watched something unfold that actually frightened me. The speed. The way people who normally think of themselves as smart and cultured just surrendered to it, no questions asked. The SPIEGEL called it the “Mailbox Affair.” BILD demanded his head. Die Welt was calling him a Stromberg—some joke about a corrupt middle-manager that apparently fit. Every news outlet had their angle, every journalist competing to sound the most outraged. A rapper even got involved. The whole nation synchronized around the idea that this one man deserved their collective contempt. And I’m not talking about the scandal itself. I’m talking about how easily people let themselves get swept up. How the media kept pouring fuel on the fire day after day, and almost nobody seemed to notice they were being herded toward a conclusion that was already decided. No real skepticism. No one holding back. Just an inevitable wave of consensus forming until everyone was saying the same thing in the same tone of voice. What scared me was how recognizable it all looked. Kids in school say Germany couldn’t fall into something like the Nazi era again. They’re confident. They think it couldn’t happen now, couldn’t happen here. But I watched how fast people stop thinking once you have the right enemy, the right pressure, the right machinery of media pointing in one direction. I watched how thin that layer of civilization really is. How quickly people trade in their individual judgment for the safety of the mob. That’s what got to me. Not Wulff’s career, not his future—he was always going to be fine. But the mechanism itself. How quickly it can be activated. How little it takes to flatten dissent, to make people stop asking questions, to turn a whole nation into a single voice. Screaming at the same target. And I’m not sure we’ve learned anything since then. Wednesday, 4 January 2012. Still Listening to Iron & Wine: There’s something about coming back to Sam Beam’s fingerpicking after years away—the precision of it, every note exactly where it needs to be, nothing wasted. It’s patient music, the kind that asks something of you. Not aggressively, just quietly, in the way someone sits across from you and won’t look away. You find yourself listening differently in your forties than you did at twenty-five. Not better, just less defensive about it. Less worried about what it says about you to want something so gentle, so small, so honest about its own sadness. That’s what folk music is, I guess—an argument that feeling things carefully is its own kind of strength. Wednesday, 4 January 2012. Chloe’s Curves: Tuesday, 3 January 2012. The Money Diet: I’m pretty sure the international society of couch-bound slobs voted me their president. I don’t exercise. I eat like someone who’s completely given up. I’d probably spend weeks fused to my sofa if I wasn’t vaguely afraid of what would happen after. Since I’m clearly not alone in my commitment to declining everything about wellness culture, someone has to keep trying. IBM, of all companies, just patented a system that supposedly wants to change all this. They’re offering to pay you to eat better. Not points, not app credits, not some corporate loyalty scheme—actual money. The idea is straightforward. The system recognizes what you’re eating. Grab an apple, you get bonus points. Grab a chocolate muffin buried in frosting, you get nothing. Somehow it even catches you if you cheat—if you throw your vegetables in the trash and pretend you ate them. Each month, you cash out your bonus points for real cash. The whole thing is absurd in that particularly tone-deaf way that only a giant tech corporation can manage. But here’s the actual question, the one I’m stuck on: Would I do it? Would I trade my hamburgers and fried cheese and whatever else for money? I think maybe for the first week. Then I’m back to my old life, lighter wallet, same habits. Tuesday, 3 January 2012. Nothing There: Sat across from her at that place downtown and knew within five minutes it wasn’t happening. Not because anything was wrong exactly—she was fine, smart enough, looked like her pictures. But there was nothing there, no spark, no reason to be sitting in those particular chairs at that particular moment instead of literally anywhere else. You go through the motions anyway because bailing early feels worse than staying, so you order a drink you don’t want and ask questions you already know the answers to. That’s the real punishment of a bad date—not that it’s bad, but that you have to sit there pretending it might get better, watching the clock, hoping she doesn’t notice you’re not actually listening. You leave knowing you wasted an evening and she probably left knowing the same thing, and nobody’s going to say it out loud. Monday, 2 January 2012. Ten Little Missions: Last one of these for the year, so here’s the full collection. A hundred-song playlist you’re supposed to listen to straight through—your computer will definitely die in the attempt. Weird anonymous sex with internet strangers, the kind where you might accidentally send your intimate confessions to a family member or that teacher you hated. Only throwing trash in containers where it explicitly says you can’t. Letting someone teach you how to dance to electronic music and then spending the whole night falling for them. Someone gave me this whole lecture about how consumer capitalism is designed to hollow you out, so I’m only buying green packaging for a while, which lasted about ninety minutes. Holding your friend’s newborn and saying something deeply inappropriate about what she’ll become, and actually meaning it. Listening to an Adele cover by some Korean artist until it stops being emotionally devastating and just becomes sound. Ending the year with Nyan Cat because it’s the only appropriate note to finish on. These things don’t cohere into meaning. They don’t add up to anything. They’re just the small, stupid tasks you collect because otherwise the weekend is just hours you’re awake for, and you need them to be about something, even if that something is completely absurd. Friday, 30 December 2011. Back in the Void: My Facebook account got nuked a month ago. Deleted, blocked, deactivated—I still don’t know which, and Mark didn’t explain. When your job lives online, a month is basically forever. I waited around for someone from Facebook to respond. Stared out the window. Played old video games I’d already forgotten were bad. The days just stretched. Nothing happened. Eventually I got tired of it. No Facebook? Fuck that. I know the whole thing is a dystopia designed to steal your life, but you have to be in the room to say anything about it. Being gone means you’re not heard. So I signed back up, which was definitely against their terms and probably means I’m getting locked in Mark’s basement with bread, water, and WiFi that barely works. But it felt good to be back, liking things, seeing photos of people I barely remember, all the familiar noise. Except nobody’s actually there. No one spamming me with farm game invites, no one posting pictures of their feet at weird angles, no one in the secret group chat complaining about their job. Facebook without real people is just a void. Which might be what it always is, come to think of it. Tuesday, 27 December 2011. Masanobu Sato: Saturday, 24 December 2011. The Antlers: Christmas shows up in five days and I haven’t bought anything except lottery tickets and warm beer from the same gas station everyone’s crowding into. The gift selection there is almost perfect if you’re not trying—scratched-up chocolates, magazines you’d never admit to owning, an energy drink in the wrong flavor. It works. The season’s got this stranglehold on you. Visit the markets, feel appropriately festive, buy things that supposedly mean something. I’m done pretending. I’m making a shirt that says I skipped every Christmas market and I’m proud of it. I’m taping antlers on the cat. Mixing cheap Mexican liquor with whatever juice is closest and Red Bull from the discount bin. It tastes like garbage but the taste isn’t the point. My uncle gets drunk and spends three hours explaining how everything’s falling apart. He’s not wrong, so I listen. Both of us end up wrecked about it. That’s probably the realest conversation of the week. The stupid plans start accumulating in my head. Stay young by eating less. Move to Sweden right now, get some pointless job, marry a model, have five kids, buy rural property, grow old together, come back home fifty years later and never mention it. That one’s genuinely sounding good. The cat looks ridiculous with antlers. The liquor tastes wrong. My uncle’s crying about things that don’t get fixed and I’m crying with him because nothing gets fixed. That’s actually what the season is. Friday, 23 December 2011. Pony Pony Run Run: Just A Song: Friday, 23 December 2011. Lykke Li: The Lost Sessions Vol. 1: I’ve burned out on most of the artists everyone went crazy for. James Blake doesn’t work for me anymore. Lana Del Rey can keep it. Tyler, the Creator, Casper—not my guy. But Lykke Li I keep coming back to, even when I’m supposed to be over it. There’s something in her voice, this rawness, the way she doesn’t hide anything, that just works. The Lost Sessions is a free playlist of acoustic versions: “Youth Knows No Pain,” “Jerome,” “I Follow Rivers.” Songs I’ve already worn thin. Hearing them stripped back further doesn’t change anything. I was always going to return to this anyway. Thursday, 22 December 2011. Holiday Costumes: There’s something uniquely disorienting about a Christmas party where everyone’s in costume. You’re supposed to be festive and present, but you’re also performing a version of yourself that feels both more true and more false than usual. I went to one years ago where half the room showed up as sexy versions of things that shouldn’t be sexy—animals, professions, whatever. It was ridiculous and kind of perfect. The effort people put into looking good while pretending not to care, the way a costume gives you permission to be weirder or more forward than you normally would—that’s always gotten to me. There’s a whole language of disguise and desire wrapped up in it. Now I mostly stay home and look at other people’s photos, which feels more honest somehow. Thursday, 22 December 2011. When Jesus Drops: There’s a point in every Christmas afternoon when the family is sitting around bloated and satisfied, and someone puts on “Silent Night” or whatever, and the room goes quiet. Tradition, restraint, the old songs everyone’s heard a hundred times. The holiday works because of that moment. Then I found Christian Dubstep, and I understood that this was an album made by someone who looked at that moment and thought, No. What this needs is bass so heavy it makes your teeth vibrate. The tracklist reads like a crisis of faith run through a synthesizer: “God Gave Me,” “O Praise Him,” “Forgive Me.” Each one crushed under the kind of production that’s supposed to destroy you in a club at 3 AM. Skrillex worship music. Jesus getting down. What gets me is how completely sincere it is. No one made this as a joke. Someone genuinely believed this was the future of Christian music. And maybe there’s something right about that—if you’re committing to dubstep, why not commit fully? Why not make God the subject? The faith is total, which is almost admirable in how stupid it is. I never actually played it for anyone. Just thought about it—the image of it, everyone expecting carols and getting dropped into frequencies that shouldn’t exist in a room with aging relatives. That moment in my head is the real subject. The thought is enough. Wednesday, 21 December 2011. Cookies That Look Like Shit: I remember Christmas baking like it’s one of those things where you convince yourself it might work just because someone competent is there. Lena actually knew what she was doing. Janos came along for the ride. Thang helped knead the dough while we mixed schnaps into coffee and stood around drinking it. Chris Rea played in the background. December doesn’t give you a choice about Chris Rea. We shaped these little crescents and felt genuinely confident about them. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and orange and whatever we’d poured into that coffee. Lena had to leave for the gym, which should have been my warning—the moment the competent person leaves is the moment you realize you’re actually on your own. But we didn’t notice. We threw the tray in the oven and settled in with Home Alone, a movie I’d seen so many times I barely paid attention to it. By the time Kevin got to New York, the kitchen was thick with smoke. I opened the oven and just stared at what we’d made. Not brown. Black. Completely charred. They looked like shit—genuinely, unmistakably shit. Little nuggets of pure failure sitting on a tray. Nobody said anything. We all just looked at what we’d accomplished. That’s when you find out what you’re actually made of. We called the place we trusted and ordered a full meal for four. Sat on the floor with the windows open, Home Alone still playing, and ate it all without irony. Better than anything that came out of that oven. Sometimes the best meal is the one you don’t cook. Wednesday, 21 December 2011. Black, White, Small: There’s something about pixel designs in black and white that strips everything down to pure geometry. No color to distract you, no texture or gradient—just the grid, the constraint of square units, the way pixels force you into honest shapes. The clothes work because they don’t try to be anything else. You wear them and you’re not performing minimalism or paying homage to computer culture. It’s just clean lines and small repeating forms. The kind of thing that feels right whether you’re scrolling through code or walking around the neighborhood. Tuesday, 20 December 2011. Las Vegas: MTV and Microsoft are sending me to Las Vegas in early January for the International CES. For anyone who doesn’t follow the tech world, it’s basically the IFA but American—bigger, louder, absolutely certain that revolutionary products are about to change everything. Casino halls full of speeches from Google and Facebook and Sony, every gaming company and film studio showing off their latest thing. The standard hype machine about the future of living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms. I’m getting a Windows Phone 7.5 and a new laptop out of it. Microsoft’s essentially treating me like a field correspondent. MTV wants me on camera occasionally, talking into their rigs about whatever’s happening in the convention halls. It’s not dignified but it’s a free trip. The real trip starts after CES ends. I’m taking a bus down to Los Angeles alone. No preset agenda beyond the things you’re supposed to see—Hollywood, the studios, Chinatown, whatever. I’ve made it this far without visiting LA and it started feeling like I was missing something obvious. The drive from Vegas to LA is when it stops feeling like a business obligation. Eight hours on a bus, leaving the conference behind, heading somewhere that actually feels like a destination instead of a corporate event. I keep joking about not buying a return ticket, about staying and finding work on Sunset Boulevard. It’s the kind of joke you make about any trip, but there’s something real underneath it—the fantasy of just not going back. I know I will go back. But I like that the thought exists at all. Monday, 19 December 2011. How Not to Talk to an Angel: Friday, 16 December 2011. Pointless Weekend: The year’s ending. A few weekends left and nothing really matters anymore, so why not spend them on something completely pointless? When you decide the normal rules don’t apply for a weekend, weird things become possible. Tattoo your business hours on your forehead as a permanent excuse to ignore people. Make a YouTube video of yourself singing something you don’t care about. Watch a movie so absurd you nearly choke laughing. Order weird things from the internet just to see if you’ll go through with it. Ask your religion teacher something designed to unsettle them. Go on dates with your ex’s unhappy parent just to mess with the whole situation. Eat an entire box of cereal because no one’s watching and the normal rules don’t apply. None of it serves any purpose. That’s exactly the point. Weekends are permission to be pointless, to commit fully to something ridiculous without apologizing for it. Most of the time you’re supposed to have it together. Then Friday hits and suddenly you can be completely absurd. That’s what makes them worth looking forward to. Friday, 16 December 2011. Born to Die: Born to Die worked because of the frame—every song sat in this thick cinematic space, all Americana and glamorous decay, sadness you could actually inhabit. The production was heavy and dense, everything sounding like the end of something. The whole album had this visual quality, like you were living inside a specific aesthetic rather than just listening to music. It mattered because it showed pop music working as design language, as architecture you move through rather than just hear. Thursday, 15 December 2011. Teenage Meat: Wednesday, 14 December 2011. Split Brain: Somewhere along the way, the blog stopped sounding like me. Not because anyone forced it—it just happened as the thing grew. It became a publication: curated, professional, with an image and an audience. I found myself unable to just post anything without worrying about how it would land. A stupid photo. A tangential thought. A random link. Everything had to be an article. Had to fit. Had to matter. Blogging was always my outlet—like songs for musicians or drawing for artists. You throw the thought out, untangle what’s tangled, and feel lighter. But once the blog became a magazine with writers and photography and proper editing, it stopped being that. You can’t have both curation and honesty at the same intensity. One wins. So I started something else. A completely private space to post whatever—bad ideas, photos of nothing, half-thoughts. Pointless. Completely mine. Named it Broken Dreams Club. The main blog keeps growing. It’s exactly what it should be. I’m fine with it not being mine anymore. What I needed was something that was, completely—no audience, no pretense, nothing to prove. I’d forgotten what that felt like. Turns out I missed it more than I realized. Monday, 12 December 2011. Tumblr Fever: When you’re sick at home with a fever, you do stupid things. You mix cough syrup with whipped cream and chase it with warm beer. You binge eight seasons of Little House on the Prairie like it’s going to save your life. Or you find yourself scrolling Tumblr for hours, which might actually be worse. Tumblr had this specific pull. Everyone was doing visual blogs, hunting for the same aesthetic—snow-covered wolves, floating girls, breasts, old film stills, anything grayscale that felt significant. You’d reblog endlessly, curating this version of yourself that had nothing to do with who you actually were, but it felt like you were building something. Like you were saying: this matters to me, I see you, I’m part of this. The platform understood something about how people want to present themselves. Customizable themes, the infinite dashboard, the reblog button giving you credit for passing something along. You weren’t making anything. You were just saying yes to images, accumulating evidence of your taste, your mood, what reaches you. It’s basic narcissism but also weirdly sincere. Some people actually posted their own work. Most just collected. Either way there’s something honest about it—all those images slowly building into a portrait of who you wanted to be, or who you actually were filtered through aesthetics you didn’t create. Scrolling through a fever makes it worse. Your brain’s loose and everything on the screen feels profound. You start thinking about your own dashboard, what it would look like, what you’d post first. You don’t actually make one. You just sit there thinking about it, which is somehow worse than if you did. Thursday, 8 December 2011. Girls With Games: There’s something different about games made by women for women—they don’t go through all the usual filters. No guessing, no justifying, no fantasy. Just something made with someone specific in mind. Thursday, 8 December 2011. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu: Tsukema Tsukeru: Kyary makes pop music that feels like permission to want things without overthinking them. Everything’s oversaturated, clearly artificial, whatever appeals to her stacked together. No apology, no self-consciousness about it. ’Tsukema Tsukeru’ is exactly that—color and sound and movement built as high as they’ll go. There’s a real confidence in that kind of maximalism. Wednesday, 7 December 2011. South Park: The RPG: There’s this South Park episode where Stan’s dad accidentally swaps the rental cases—comes home with a copy of Lord of the Rings and the hardest porn he could find, and somehow the kids end up with the porn while trying to recover it dressed as little medieval characters. That’s the kind of chaos that lives in your head forever. It was the first thing I thought of when I heard they were actually making a proper South Park RPG. By proper I mean proper. Not another hollow licensed game churned out to sell copies before anyone realizes it’s garbage. Obsidian’s building this—the people who made Fallout: New Vegas—so they know how to make an RPG that doesn’t feel like it was assembled by a committee. Dungeon Siege III engine, five classes including something Cartman invented, supposed to play like Paper Mario with Final Fantasy’s combat and leveling system. It’s a weird combination but it sounds right for South Park. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are writing the story themselves. You’re a new kid who just moved to South Park, some quiet nobody who gets adopted by the main crew and immediately swept into whatever insane adventure they’ve dreamed up. That’s genuinely exciting. Good writing could make a mediocre game worth playing, and they’re not going to phone this in. Every previous South Park game was hollow in that specific way licensed tie-ins are hollow. Five minutes of playing and you can feel the emptiness underneath—made by people treating the property as a checkbox rather than something worth making interesting. This one feels different. Feels like someone actually cared about getting it right. It’s coming before Christmas next year on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. 2D action, Christmas levels, Parker and Stone doing what they do best. I’m looking forward to this one. Not the vague “hope it’s decent” forward—genuinely looking forward to it. That’s rare for a licensed game. Monday, 5 December 2011. Cheese Pizza and Mario Kart: Sarah Brandner asked what I’d put in her Advent calendar and I actually spent nights thinking about it. Like, real nights where I couldn’t sleep. What do you give to someone like that? Nothing made sense until it did: a cheese pizza and Mario Kart. The whole thing is stupid in the best way. Show up at her place with a pizza, make her play video games, find out if a model can actually handle a controller. Throw in a Game Boy loaded with Tetris and Super Mario Land and Pokémon. That’s what I’d give her. Not what you’re supposed to say, but what came to mind. Everyone else was going the predictable route—body paint, cute haircuts, sexy uniforms, all that—and I’m lying awake thinking about Nintendo cartridges and melted cheese. Which maybe says everything about me or nothing at all. Either way, that was the gift I landed on. Friday, 2 December 2011. Ten Little Missions: Outside was a waste. Wet streets, gray sky, people who’d given up before the weekend even started. I had no idea if there was anything else out there. So I made a list of things to do—ten stupid things, just enough to keep from losing it indoors or getting lost out there. Grab everyone and go to Prenzlauer Berg before they tear it down for good. Cuddle with the world’s biggest insect. Watch enough bad German TV to break yourself—not the quality stuff, the mind-rotting kind that leaves you blank and primitive. Fly to Tokyo for the Pringles. I’m not joking. Bring me some back. Turn in the Pope for driving around Germany without a seatbelt; might as well share the punishment with people who won’t bore you. Watch Lana Del Rey’s new video the way she filmed it—hands exactly where they belong. You already know. If you’re going to kill someone annoying this weekend, at least have your excuse ready: “I’m not a murderer, I’m a ghost creator.” Ada’s got bedtime stories that’ll destroy you. Grab wine and pills and rewatch Skins all the way through, live in your past for one night. (If you touch the American version I will come to your house and do something I’ll be sorry for.) The weekend’s long. You just have to get through it. Friday, 2 December 2011. Lykke Li: Youth Knows No Pain: Lykke Li’s voice cracks in exactly the right places. Her production knows when to pull back. There’s no mystery to hide behind in her songs—just someone being straight about wanting, about loss, the small devastating observations about what it means to be attached to the wrong person. You listen to her at three in the morning and you feel less alone, which is both the best and worst thing a song can do. Thursday, 1 December 2011. Mark Hunter’s Cobra Shop: Wednesday, 30 November 2011. One After Another: I watch shows differently than most people. Some series only make sense if you consume them in bulk—one episode after another, whole seasons at a time. Not one per week like that’s supposed to happen. When you watch that way, the characters come alive in a different way. You’re inside their world for hours at a stretch. The relationships breathe. Everything compounds, and by the end you’re completely wrecked. I’ve fallen hard for a few shows that do this thing perfectly. They’re all different kinds of good, but they all work best when you disappear into them. Community is built around a group of broken people at a community college, and it’s genuinely one of the few shows that gets better every single episode. You’ve got Jeff Winger as this arrogant ex-lawyer, Britta who is exactly as much of a disaster as she seems, Abed who is something else entirely. By the third or fourth episode you’re already obsessed. Ken Jeong as the insane Spanish teacher is legendary. The paintball episodes are basically traditions at this point. The show is packed with film and TV references that land so perfectly you’ll actually fall backward off your chair from laughing. NBC canceling this show would be genuinely rage-inducing. 30 Rock starts as a story about saving a failing NBC show called “The Girlie Show”, which sounds dry until you get into it. Liz Lemon and her new boss Jack Donaghy hire a scandal-magnet movie star named Tracy Jordan to inject new life into the program. What makes it work is the same thing that makes Community work—the characters are genuinely dysfunctional and weird in ways that feel real. Tina Fey’s actual experience in TV is all over the show. Nothing feels polished or fake. It’s just smart people being completely insane. Louis C.K.’s comedy is probably the most direct and funny stand-up you can find. The guy gets on stage and talks about his gut, his kids, fucking, pancakes, whatever, and you just destroy yourself laughing. The show Louie takes pieces of his act and builds everyday situations around them—things that could happen to anybody, except they’re happening to someone who isn’t normal at all. It’s not for everyone. If you’re squeamish about anything, you’ll probably hate it. But if you can handle it, it’s singular. Modern Family is this thing that got so many awards it barely needs introduction, but it’s worth talking about. It follows three American families through that Office-style mockumentary format, and the comedy comes from how incompetent and clumsy these people are at basic existence. Phil and Claire and everyone else just bumbling through life. You have to sit with it for a while before it clicks, but once it does, it sticks. Wilfred is only one season so far and ends on what might be the most infuriating cliffhanger ever made, but it’s the perfect argument for watching shows all at once instead of parceling them out. It’s adapted from something Australian and it’s a dark comedy about a guy and his dog, except the dog is the worst possible creature—cruel, constantly fucking with him, shoving him toward drugs and alcohol. But somehow it also saves him? You end up hating Wilfred and needing him at the same time. And then it just ends. You sit there furious and completely empty. That’s what these shows do to you when you let them. That’s why you watch them in one go. Wednesday, 30 November 2011. Cee Lo Green: Anyway: There’s something about the way Cee Lo Green’s voice sits in a mix—it’s almost too much, too present, demanding you hear every flex and every hurt at once. You listen to him and you get the sense that he doesn’t care if you’re ready for it. He’ll sing over a Danger Mouse production or some soulful thing that should collapse under that much personality, but it doesn’t, because the voice is doing something honest underneath all the showboating. The title says it all, I think. “Anyway.” Not defiant, exactly. Just the sound of someone who’s made peace with the fact that he’s going to be himself regardless of the circumstance, and yeah, maybe nobody asked for it, but here it is. That’s not nothing. Tuesday, 29 November 2011. Dan Martensen’s America: Tuesday, 29 November 2011. The Tavern Route: The taverns in the mountains are dark and warm, the kind of places where strangers become company by the second drink. You stop tracking which village you’re in after a while—the point isn’t the route, it’s the room itself. The green bottle, the local voices, the mountains invisible outside the windows. By night the whole world is just the bar, and that’s enough. Monday, 28 November 2011. The Knowing: Friday, 25 November 2011. Silence (Bag Raiders Remix): The Bag Raiders remix does something clever with The Ting Tings’ Silence. The original sits thin and quiet, almost apologetic. The remix doesn’t try to blow it up—it builds density around the emptiness, layer by layer, until the space becomes its own presence. Same song, but now it fills the room. Thursday, 24 November 2011. Dominique Young Unique: Hype Girl: Dominique Young Unique is what you want from a hype girl—no irony, no layers of performance, just someone radiating confidence and bringing actual energy. You hear it in how she carries a track, that certainty that we’re all about to have a good time. It’s a thing that either works completely or doesn’t, and when it does, you remember why you love this stuff. Wednesday, 23 November 2011. No Charges, No Trial: I open my email and Facebook has suspended my account again. They’re very polite about it. The message reads like a form letter—calm, professional, impersonal. Effective immediately, I’m locked out. My profile, my pages, my contacts. All gone. But don’t blame them. They’re just the tech team, just doing their job. What gets me isn’t that it happens. What gets me is how. Someone saw something I posted and decided it wasn’t acceptable. Maybe they thought it was funny and reported it anyway. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they didn’t get the joke. They clicked a button. That was enough. An administrator looked at whatever it was—a photo, a text, a comment—and decided I’d crossed a line so far over that I didn’t even deserve a warning. No explanation of what I did wrong. No chance to fix it or defend myself. Just judgment rendered in silence. Even the worst legal systems give you that much. An accusation. A judge. A trial. Some record of what you’re supposed to have done. But Facebook doesn’t work that way. You get a verdict with no trial. No crime specified. No appeal process that actually works. You’re just out. The first time it happened, I was careful. Genuinely careful. No explicit images. I even went through and censored anything remotely questionable—bent over backward to stay on the right side of their rules. And here we are again. Which somehow makes it worse. And look, I could tell myself it doesn’t matter. I can reach people other ways. Messenger, email, phone, whatever. I could dust off the old habit of writing actual letters. But that’s mostly bullshit, and I know it. For me, for anyone running anything on Facebook, that account isn’t just for memes and inside jokes. It’s infrastructure. It’s work. Getting banned without warning is like someone coming into your office, locking you out, and walking away. Except they also take your Rolodex, your calendar, and every client relationship you built there. The pages you run, the groups you manage, the events you promote—all inaccessible. The deals that were coming, the readers you were growing, the administrative access you need to keep things running. Gone. So now I’m waiting. Three to nine weeks for Facebook to maybe, possibly respond to an appeal they won’t necessarily explain. In the meantime, I’m doing nothing with the biggest network on earth, and hoping the intern who pulled the trigger on this one figures out that this job isn’t for them. Preferably before he gets bored and bans someone important. Here’s what I’ve learned: don’t build your business on systems you don’t control and can’t predict. Don’t rely on platforms that can destroy your access without explanation or recourse. The irony is that Facebook needs you to believe they’re fair and reasonable and that you can trust them with your livelihood. But they’re about as predictable as a bouncer with a chip on his shoulder. Worse, actually. At least the bouncer will throw you out to your face. Wednesday, 23 November 2011. Mishka’s Winter: Mishka’s 2011 holiday collection by Jeremy Jansen. The lookbook was clean and understated—oversized knits that fit right, colors that looked better worn than photographed. The kind of stuff where you don’t need much explanation, just a body and the right temperature. Tuesday, 22 November 2011. No Light, No Light: I’ve returned to this song more times than I’d like to admit, always at night, always when something hurt enough that I wanted to sit with it awhile. The track swallows you—that orchestral swell, Florence’s voice climbing into something desperate and beautiful and completely broken. It’s a song about wanting to drown in someone, about the logic of devotion even when it destroys you, and there’s something so honest about the way it refuses to resolve. You don’t get catharsis here. You get the cold clarity of someone who knows they should leave and won’t. That matters. Most music about heartbreak wants to comfort you or fire you up. This one just sits in the dark with you and doesn’t pretend it gets better. Saturday, 19 November 2011. The Good Life: Friday, 18 November 2011. Happy Birthday, Webcam: The webcam was a mirror that made you look at yourself in the worst possible light, catching every angle you weren’t ready to see. Low resolution didn’t help—it just made you worse in a more honest way. But it also let you step into someone else’s space without leaving yours, or have them step into yours. That was the whole invention. Not the technology, but the possibility of it. The idea that you could put your face somewhere you weren’t and have someone put theirs where you were. Friday, 18 November 2011. Babes on Wheels: Thursday, 17 November 2011. The Pencil Pimp: Wednesday, 16 November 2011. Urban Cone Freak: Tuesday, 15 November 2011. Two Doors: I can’t remember the last RPG I played with genuine devotion. Chrono Trigger, maybe. Final Fantasy 9. Or Pokémon—I must have checked every corner of those games a hundred times, looking for more, always more. I was relentless about it. Everything after that I just sprinted through. Quest to town to quest, kill the boss, finished. Play through again with better gear? Explore the optional dungeons? Unlock bonus characters? Fuck that. I’ve got better things to do. Not really, but I’m not doing it anyway. Some days I want to cry thinking about how easily I vanished into those games, how I never regretted a second of that time even though it could’ve gone to parties or getting in shape or actually talking to women. But that’s not quite the point—it wasn’t wasted. It shaped me somehow. Changed how I see things. Now it’s the holidays and two perfect games exist simultaneously. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both have perfect review scores. Both deliver everything they promise. Two massive golden gates to two completely separate worlds, and I can only pass through one. I love Zelda. A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, even Wind Waker. I would’ve died for any of those games. But I’ve already played through so many Zelda games. By the time Twilight Princess came around, I was just trying to finish it. I want something different this time. The Elder Scrolls games before this one didn’t do much for me. I’ve heard they weren’t great. But Skyrim has this hype that’s hard to ignore. Enormous dragons. A snowy wasteland you can ride through on horseback. It all sounds excessive in exactly the right way. But the real reason I’m choosing Skyrim—and this might sound strange—is because I’ve always played games because my friends were playing them. Super Mario World because my friends had it. Pokémon because that’s what we were all doing. World of Warcraft for the same reason. I’m not just a follower, not about most things anyway. It’s more that I love the idea of people I actually like moving through the same world I’m moving through. Hitting the same walls, finding different solutions, discovering different secrets. Getting just as lost. I can compare notes with them. We fail at the same boss fight but figure it out different ways. Spend hours on the same mystery or find our own paths. That shared experience—I thought I’d lost it somewhere in my early twenties, but it’s what pulls me back to games. The sense of playing alongside other people, even if we’re not doing it at the exact same moment. So I’m installing Windows on my Mac, which should tell you how committed I am. Downloading Skyrim on Steam. For the next few weeks I’m going to completely disappear. Get pale and fat and lost in Tamriel. By spring they’ll have to drag me back out. Sorry, Zelda. Maybe I’ll save you next time. But hello again, RPG love that I thought I’d killed off. If Skyrim can’t bring you back to life, then I’m finally done with all of it. Just Solitaire from here on out. Forever. Tuesday, 15 November 2011. Taste and Discipline: I spent way too much time reading German fashion blogs in 2009. Most of them were people in their bedrooms photographing whatever they’d bought from H&M, bad lighting, worse commentary. Then you’d find someone like Lisa who actually knew how to work a camera and had opinions about clothes that weren’t just “here’s what I wore.” The difference wasn’t effort—the bad blogs had plenty of effort. It was precision and taste, which you can’t really fake. The whole German blogging thing was splitting then. On one side, people who took it seriously—WordPress on their own domain, consistent voice, actual discipline. On the other side, millions of people dabbling, posting once a week or not at all, treating blogs like they would treat Facebook five years later. Nobody was choosing blogging over social media out of principle. They were choosing it because their mom wasn’t on blogs yet. The ones with personal voices did fine. Diaries, life writing, whatever you want to call it—if you were interesting enough and honest enough and could write, people read you. Clara, Sara, people like that. Everyone else was fishing in empty water. Some blogs were just curation. Pull the best design stuff from the internet, post it constantly, build an audience of people who wanted a filtered version of their feed. Hypebeast, Beautiful Decay. It’s not a creative practice—it’s just taste applied at scale. But it worked because most people want someone else to do the work of filtering. Music blogging made less and less sense. YouTube existed. Spotify and streaming were coming. What was the point of blogging about music if you couldn’t make the song play? The only blogs that lasted added something—interviews, writing about why something mattered, exclusive tracks. Just sharing new music was drowning. Tech blogs somehow worked. People got obsessed with gadgets, with specifications, with the next phone or laptop. Engadget, Mashable—they built real publications because their beat was always moving and people needed information. There was no algorithm yet. Discovery happened through blogs. The weird thing was the niche blogs. One person obsessed with sneakers. Another person obsessed with a specific music genre. Another tracking some corner of design that nobody else was paying attention to. They became authorities in tiny kingdoms. Outside their kingdom, they didn’t matter at all. But inside it, they were essential. What I kept noticing was that success came from two places: being genuinely interesting as a person, or having such a specific obsession that the obsession becomes the voice. Everyone else quit after a few months or never started. The platforms didn’t matter. WordPress, Tumblr, whatever. What mattered was showing up and having something to say. I don’t think most people understood that at the time. They thought fame or money or sex appeal would come from blogging if they just got good enough. Maybe it did for some people. But the ones who lasted—who were still blogging two, three, five years later—they weren’t doing it for any of that. They were doing it because they wanted to write, or they wanted to share, or they just liked having a place on the internet that was theirs. Monday, 14 November 2011. King Krule: The Noose Of Jah City: King Krule creates music that sounds like it’s coming from inside a reverb chamber—cold, architectural, sometimes beautiful in a way that feels accidental. The visual work pulls from the same place: dark geometry, blurred photographs, textures that feel like they’re decomposing. What gets me is how deliberately unglamorous it all is, like he decided in advance that you won’t like it much, that you’ll have to work to meet him halfway. No hooks designed to catch you. Just sound and image that would rather alienate than seduce. Monday, 14 November 2011. The One That Got Away: That song hits different when you’re alone at night with headphones on. It’s one of those tracks where Katy sounds actually vulnerable instead of performing vulnerability—the production pulls back, and you can hear her thinking through the loss. The whole Teenage Dream album was pop-perfect, but this one landed in a different place, less about the mechanics of heartbreak and more about the specific ache of remembering someone and knowing it’s not coming back. The kind of song that makes you scroll through old photos you should probably delete. Sunday, 13 November 2011. Mein Land: Rammstein’s always been honest about what they are—a band that doesn’t apologize for making heavy, violent, sexual music in a language that carries weight. The thing about them is they’re not rebels playing at provocation; they actually commit to it, which is rarer than you’d think. They’ve built this whole visual and sonic world around Germany, around the weight of that history, and they’ve made it theirs instead of running from it or performing guilt. There’s something I respect in that—the refusal to sanitize, the willingness to sit in uncomfortable spaces and make art there anyway. Their songs are these dark, propulsive things that hit you somewhere dumb and primal, and the design of it all, the performances, the imagery, it’s meticulous. It’s not accidental provocation—it’s crafted. I don’t know if I’d want to live inside that worldview, but I know exactly why they built it, and I know it matters. Friday, 11 November 2011. Theophilus London: Love Is Real: Theophilus London was making music that actually mattered to him, moving between R&B and rap and pop without apology. His records worked because he meant them. ’Love Is Real’ captures what was essential about his approach—no tricks, no calculation, just the commitment to making something genuine. It’s harder to hold onto that than it seems. Thursday, 10 November 2011. Der Berg Ruft: Jägermeister once threw a Wirtshaus tour in the Alps—a beer hall at 1300 meters near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, electronic music and traditional Bavarian drinking games all at once. Disco Heroes and The Teenagers (French synthpop) were headlining. Between sets: drinking games, foosball, darts. They shuttled people up from Munich, put them up in a wellness hotel. The whole thing was called Drehmöser 9. Tagline: ’Der Berg ruft’—the mountain calls. That combination either makes sense to you or it doesn’t. Corporate sponsor, Alps, synthpop, beer hall. I liked it. No irony needed. Wednesday, 9 November 2011. The Supreme Store: Walked into the Supreme store in London because I was passing by. Packed, like always—resellers and kids and people who just wanted to see what the fuss was about. Building’s nice, old London architecture that actually suits it. But standing in there I realized how thoroughly Supreme has dissolved into just another brand. They got so good at hype that the hype stopped meaning anything. Everyone still cares, but nobody can remember why. Tuesday, 8 November 2011. Getting Caught: The Berlin-Brandenburg media authority filed a complaint against this journal for distributing pornographic materials. Specifically, two issues from July linked to adult websites. I didn’t think twice about it when I posted the links, which is exactly the problem. Now I’m going through everything I’ve ever published here, pulling things, rewriting sections, and sitting in meetings with youth protection officers. It’s the kind of thing that forces you to think in a way you usually avoid—about responsibility, about the people reading who are actually children, about the gap between how you imagine your audience and who your audience actually is. I get the logic of it all. There’s a real difference between being crude and free in your own voice and actively directing underage people to pornographic content. I crossed that line without thinking about it. The adult part of me understands why that matters. The weirdly clarifying part is realizing that running a platform isn’t consequence-free, even when you’re not doing it for money or attention. Even when you’re just saying what you think. The freedom to publish comes with actual responsibility, not just the idea of it. And the interesting stuff—the actually honest stuff—happens somewhere in the middle of being completely sanitized and completely lawless. I’m not going to perform a moral transformation over this. But I am going to be more careful. Not out of fear of the authorities, just because I actually care whether this place stays interesting and worth reading. Tuesday, 8 November 2011. Die Antwoord: Fok Julle Naaiers: Die Antwoord showed up in the late 2000s like a bad smell you couldn’t ignore—South African, crude as hell, making music that was equal parts synth-pop and trash-talk, with visuals designed to make you uncomfortable. Ninja and Yo-Landi Vi$$er understood something about provocation that a lot of artists miss: shock only works if you actually mean it, or at least commit hard enough that nobody can tell the difference. They had that thing where they’d say something offensive and you’d laugh despite yourself, or you’d feel guilty for laughing, or both at once. The whole package—the clothes, the aesthetic, the way they moved—was deliberate ugliness aimed at people who cared too much about taste. There’s something honest about that. Most artists are terrified of being uncool; Die Antwoord built a whole career on refusing to care whether you thought they were cool. I’m not sure if they’ve aged well or if I just got older and stopped finding shock tactics exciting. They’re still out there, still doing the thing, still crude and unpolished. Part of me respects the consistency. Part of me thinks maybe there was always a gimmick underneath and nothing got deeper with time. Either way, they did what they set out to do—they made you feel something, whether it was laughter or disgust or some weird mix of both. Monday, 7 November 2011. Friends I’ll Never Meet: There’s this person whose work you follow, whose voice or vision or style has been part of your thinking for years, and you feel like you know them. You’ve spent hours with what they’ve made. You’ve laughed at their jokes, cried at their stories, been moved by something they created when they had no idea you existed. And that’s it. That’s the whole relationship. You’ll never have coffee with them, never exchange a real conversation, never become actual friends. It’s not sad exactly—it’s just the shape of modern admiration. You’re grateful for what they’ve put into the world, and they’ll never know your name. There’s something clean about it, actually. No disappointment, no awkwardness, just the pure fact of their work mattering to you. I think that’s enough. Sunday, 6 November 2011. Skream: Anticipate: There’s that moment where you refresh and something’s dropped, and you have no idea what it’s going to sound like. Skream’s been moving through electronic music long enough that anticipation is the only honest response—dubstep one month, house the next, sometimes something else entirely. Not scattered. Just someone who listens to everything and makes what feels right. The wait is worth it because you never know what you’re hearing next. Saturday, 5 November 2011. Bronx Sniper: Mister Heavenly makes indie rock that feels like it’s always been here—no pretense, just hooks and noise that stick in your head for weeks. There’s something about the way they layer guitars and vocals that reminds me of early Wavves, that same sun-drunk energy but with more teeth. The production is clean enough that you can hear what they’re doing, but rough enough that it doesn’t feel polished to death. Songs like this one have a way of becoming soundtrack to whatever you’re doing—driving, thinking, wasting time—and suddenly you realize you’ve had the same four minutes on repeat for an hour. Saturday, 5 November 2011. Never Came Back the Same: Yoshihiko Ueda is a Japanese photographer who drove into the forests around Washington one day and, far as I can tell, never came back unchanged. He spent decades photographing the Quinault forest—trees, moss, light moving through everything—and his work hangs in galleries across the world. It’s the kind of thing most people walk past without stopping, especially anyone raised in cities who thinks nature is something you experience through a screen. His own description of first seeing the forest is almost mystical. The brush rustling, moss glowing green like the light’s coming from inside it. Colors saturated with rain and light, everything alive at once. He talks about discovering a kingdom of primordial chaos—something humans shouldn’t be allowed to witness. It shattered him. He was overwhelmed and grateful and then he thanked the forest gods. The original post wraps this in thick German sarcasm, mocking people who’ve forgotten what a tree is. Then Yoshihiko’s voice cuts through and there’s no irony left. Just someone who let something fundamental undo him completely. Reading it, I wondered—did he eat mushrooms to feel all this, or did he just sit still long enough to let it matter? What I respect is how he stayed susceptible to it, how he didn’t fight it or turn it into theory. He was an artist, trained to see and frame and compose—and he just let the forest dissolve him. For anyone who makes things, that’s the hardest part. Not finding beauty, not knowing how to represent it, but staying open enough that something real can still actually change you. Friday, 4 November 2011. Zara Mirkin: Scream Machine: Thursday, 3 November 2011. Backup Tokyo: Six months after Tōhoku and the country was still digging out. Nearly sixteen thousand dead, a 9.0 quake, tsunami destroying the eastern coast, Fukushima threatening another meltdown. The government kept saying everything would be fine, that things would stabilize. They wouldn’t. So they announced a plan: if Tokyo gets destroyed in the next disaster, Parliament and the ministries relocate to a backup city. IRTBBC—Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City—is what they called it. Government acronyms always sound like that. Five hundred kilometers west of Tokyo, near Itami Airport and close to Osaka. Room for 250,000 people with offices, restaurants, parks, casinos. When the next disaster hits, the machinery of government just keeps running somewhere else. Hajime Ishii from the ruling party called it a replacement battery. His logic: as long as the nation’s core functions were backed up, the system survives. He didn’t explain what happens to the other thirteen million people still in Tokyo. Maybe the next earthquake won’t be as bad. Maybe the backup city never gets used. Thursday, 3 November 2011. Baby Says: The Kills make songs that sit underneath your skin without asking permission. ’Baby Says’ is mostly atmosphere—Mosshart’s voice flat and certain, like she’s stating something you don’t want to hear. The kind of track that sounds best at night when you’re thinking about someone or loss or the distance between people who should be close. There’s nothing extra in it, no attempt to convince you of anything. Just the sound of someone who knows what they mean and doesn’t care if you like it. That’s the whole band, really. Wednesday, 2 November 2011. Internet Cocaine: Tuesday, 1 November 2011. Ghost Beach: Thursday, 27 October 2011. Katy B: Movement: Her tracks have always been about the body in motion. “On A Mission,” “5am,” all that intricate rhythmic work—the kind of grime and electronic production that makes you want to move without thinking about it. Katy B’s music doesn’t ask you to feel something; it asks you to dance, to let the rhythm sort itself out in your hips and shoulders while your brain goes quiet. I came to her work through the London electronic scene, that early 2010s moment when dubstep was collapsing into itself and something more nuanced was emerging. She was there doing the complicated stuff—layering patterns, building pressure, making something that sounded effortless but was clearly meticulous. The kind of producer who respects the dancefloor enough not to condescend to it. What stays with me is how physical her music is. Not aggressive, not emotional in the expected way—just honest about what dancing is. Movement. The thing your body knows how to do when the beat lines up right. She gave you that. Thursday, 27 October 2011. Crystal Fighters: I spent a lot of time with their early albums—the way they’d layer electronic production with these organic, almost folk-like textures, strings and samples mixed in ways that shouldn’t work but did. They were never trying to be cool about it, just making pop music that sounded like they’d spent serious time in the studio getting the color right. There’s something about a band that treats the space between sounds as carefully as the sounds themselves, and Crystal Fighters did that. Their stuff felt small and intricate despite being bright and poppy, which is rare—most electronic bands are either too cerebral or too eager to please. They landed somewhere else entirely. Wednesday, 26 October 2011. Emeli Sandé: Daddy: There’s a song that makes you sit with something you weren’t ready to sit with. Emeli Sandé has this way of finding the exact nerve—the quiet, specific ache you’ve been sidestepping. A song about a father isn’t just about a father; it’s about absence and presence at the same time, about what you inherit and what you can’t fix. You listen to it and something in your chest doesn’t move for a few minutes, and that’s the whole point. Tuesday, 25 October 2011. Pink Blood: The moment we became close, I could feel the fracture beginning. That’s always what happens when you’re that close to another person—you hit a limit. Wenke and I took over this blog after Hannah left, and over the past year we became genuinely close. Running it together meant no hiding—we shared days and nights, festivals, real moments and ones that wounded. But I knew from the start it couldn’t last. I spend half my time pretending to be burnt out, incapable of real feeling. That’s completely false. I’m oversensitive. I get caught on the most disgusting and intimate things, and I can’t manage what my head conjures afterward. I’m probably the worst at it. Wenke’s built the same way. We’re both the type to feel everything acutely, to be exposed in ways that are embarrassing. We kept running into emotional material that started as a joke but became impossible to laugh past—the closeness, the expectations, the weight of being inside another person’s interior life. We failed at the distance. We failed at ourselves. It kills me that it ends this way. We couldn’t manage our own minds, and anything more would just deepen the damage. She’s stepping back from writing here, focusing on her own work. I’ll miss her voice, the way she disappears into thoughts, her instinct for music. But she’s not gone. So here’s what you do: you say thank you for something real, and you let it go with a heavy heart. This is certain: we’ll hear from her. Once you’ve tasted something that vital, you want more of it. Monday, 24 October 2011. The Lift: Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Beals high overhead in that moment everyone remembers, and for a second the film is just about the pure physicality of want—two bodies moving together with no distance, no pretense, just sweat and directness. That’s what Dirty Dancing is really about. It doesn’t dress up desire in metaphor or soften it for comfort; it’s there to be erotic, trashy, and unashamed. Everything else—the music, the cinematography, the whole summer setting—serves that. The film burns with wanting and doesn’t apologize for it. Monday, 24 October 2011. Sodom and Gomorra: Friday, 21 October 2011. Bedridden: You don’t learn what real boredom is until you’re stuck in bed for three days with nothing actually wrong anymore—fever broke, you can technically move, but you’re too weak and tired to care. It’s a specific kind of limbo. Your body still wants things. Your brain knows you can’t deliver. So you scroll. Watch. Try to read the same page three times without absorbing a word. Nothing lands. By day three, the sexual frustration is part of the boredom—they’re mixed together now. I used to think that was just being horny, but it’s different when you’re sick. Everything comes through a fog. A conversation doesn’t penetrate. A song washes past. A book sits there inert. The only thing that still cuts through is your own body doing something, creating some actual sensation. So you try it. Works for maybe ten minutes. Then you’re sore and somehow more bored, which is worse than before. After that come the weird moves. Music on repeat until it stops being music and becomes white noise. TV shows rewatched backwards like you might find some hidden pattern. Bukowski because something about his way of writing about drink and failure and his own uselessness feels true when you’re lying in your own sweat. You check your phone constantly. Nothing’s changed. Nobody’s texted. The world’s just going on without you in it. The strange thing is how fast recovery happens once it starts. You go from “I might actually die” to “I feel mostly fine” in a few hours, and suddenly the bed that was your hospital becomes a prison. You want out. You should probably stay another day. You always should, and you never do. Friday, 21 October 2011. The Look: Gaddafi had a look. Not a sense of style—a look. One of those sustained performance-art projects that somehow got treated as real. He’d show up in a bedazzled military jacket, surrounded by female bodyguards in matching fatigues and designer sunglasses, and the world’s fashion press would nod and write it down. Vanity Fair called him a “fashion genius.” Time magazine seemed genuinely confused about what was happening but thought it was important enough to document. There’s a weird moment in media where an absurdity becomes so consistent that people stop questioning whether it’s intentional. I’m not sure if he was actually that into fashion or if dressing like a Vegas strongman was just part of the brand. Probably some of both. The costumes were deliberate—enough gold and medals and fabric to fill a small stage—but also ridiculous in a way that made you unsure if he was in on the joke. That uncertainty is its own kind of power, I guess. You can’t dismiss a man who’s committed enough to the bit that you can’t tell if he’s serious. The whole thing was absurd and fascistic and tragic and funny all at once, which is probably why people kept writing about it. It was easier to look at his outfits than at what was actually happening. A lot of tyrants try to seem powerful through restraint—the expensive suit, the measured tone. Gaddafi went the other direction. He dressed like his own propaganda film. He’s dead now. The costumes are in museums or lost somewhere. The magazines moved on. But the images stick—the dictator as accidental fashion icon, committed enough to the costume that the costume outlasted him. Everything else disappears. The look remains. Thursday, 20 October 2011. Earthquakey People: Steve Aoki and Rivers Cuomo on the same track is a strange enough pairing that it works. One’s all bass drops and neon excess, the other’s carrying that tender, fractured voice from Weezer into increasingly odd territory. I have no idea what “Earthquakey People” actually sounds like, but the collision itself is enough to pull me in. Wednesday, 19 October 2011. Josh Schwartz Strikes Again: Josh Schwartz is adapting Misfits for American television. I found out because the internet won’t shut up about it, and because this is how it works: something brilliant comes from elsewhere, gets noticed, and someone at a studio thinks they should fix it. I watched The O.C. back when I was into that kind of thing. Schwartz made it, and it had something for a moment. But I burned out fast. Too much of everything—the wealth, the production design, the sense that you’re supposed to feel a certain way because the show is trying so hard to make you feel it. Gossip Girl was the same formula. Beautiful people problems. I got bored. Misfits is different. It’s British, which means it doesn’t care if you’re watching. It’s mean and horny and stupid and about teenagers who get superpowers and then have to figure out what that means in real life. Real—meaning messy and ugly and full of sex and drugs and bad decisions. The show doesn’t apologize. Someone runs naked through the streets because his family threw him out, and that’s just what happens. And now Schwartz is going to fix that. American television has a law: if something brilliant comes from elsewhere, we have to fix it. Import something that doesn’t need fixing and watch it become exactly what it was running from. Call it localization. Call it adaptation. It’s still erasure with a network budget. MTV did this with Skins. They took it and immediately softened it. Cut the actual sex scenes, toned down the language, made dysfunction look acceptable. One season and then canceled because everyone could tell what was missing. American Skins wasn’t that show anymore. It was an apology in episodic form. I’m hoping Schwartz gets distracted. That the option lapses. That someone remembers Skins lasted one season. Probably not. Probably in a few years there’ll be an American Misfits that’s perfectly competent, for exactly the people it’s aimed at, and nobody will think twice about what got lost. The original will still be there if you know where to look. Wednesday, 19 October 2011. Lights: I found Ellie Goulding’s records at a moment when electronic pop was still figuring itself out, and hers felt like the answer nobody knew they were looking for. Her voice in those high, thin registers, settling into synth arrangements like it had always belonged there. She made restraint sound like the only sensible approach to pop music, which was weird because everyone else was shouting. Tuesday, 18 October 2011. Erika Braukis: I’m Fucked: Monday, 17 October 2011. The Occupation: Fall of 2011 and the whole atmosphere shifted. There was this pressure that had been building for years—financial disaster, watching the people who caused it get richer while everyone else got wiped out. Then parks started filling with tents and suddenly there was a place for the anger to exist. The movement had no platform, no demands, no clear leadership—which made it easy to dismiss, but that was exactly the point. You can’t negotiate with a simple fact: the system is designed to concentrate everything at the top and make everyone else fight for scraps. I’d pass the encampments and stop to listen. College graduates sleeping in sleeping bags, done everything right and still couldn’t afford rent. People in their sixties whose entire retirement had been vaporized in 2008, watched the government bail out the banks, walked away with nothing. For once nobody was spinning or performing. Just people describing what they’d actually experienced. The honesty was striking. It lasted six, maybe seven months. The weather got bad, the police moved in, the energy fragmented into pieces with competing agendas. By winter the camps were breaking up. By spring it was already a memory, more symbol than movement. Something in the baseline consensus had cracked, though. Not in a way that changed policy or slowed the machinery of wealth concentration—that kept grinding, still does. But you couldn’t fully pretend anymore that the system was neutral or fair. That particular myth didn’t recover. Whether that crack leads anywhere or just seals itself back up is still an open question. Probably it seals back up. But for a moment, reality had actually been visible. Sunday, 16 October 2011. Postbahnhof on a Saturday: The walls at Postbahnhof were the thing. You could watch them get painted—someone with a spray can actually taking their time, making something instead of just tagging and moving on. Young artists getting wall space. Some of it was sharp, some obvious, most of it exactly what you’d expect from people who actually know how to do this. I went with David and Anna, and we worked through the booths. A photographer had made something about selfie culture that was technically right but circular—documenting narcissism through the mechanism that created it. Illustration, three-dimensional works, the usual spread. Someone had smuggled beer. The sushi tasted strange in a way I still can’t place. You notice something at art fairs like this: everyone’s competent now. The bar for “young artist” used to mean something different. Now it just means you showed up and you can actually make things. Berlin gives you the wall and the permission, so you see what people do when they’re not fighting for attention. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s just fine. That’s generous, actually. We left when the light got weird. Didn’t see everything. Didn’t need to. Saturday, 15 October 2011. Icona Pop: Nights Like This: I get why Icona Pop works. “Nights Like This” is pure pop unconcern—a song that doesn’t need to be clever or complicated or self-aware, just good at what it does. There’s something refreshing about that kind of straightforwardness, especially when everything else feels over-thought. Part of their appeal is that they seem genuinely happy to be making this music. Not performing happiness, just doing what they do. That directness is rarer than it should be. Friday, 14 October 2011. Anna Ryon: Not sure where I first heard her, but something stuck. There’s a directness to what she does that feels rare—no fuss, no performance, just the work itself. That’s all it takes. Thursday, 13 October 2011. The Horrors: I Can See Through You: ’I Can See Through You’ doesn’t ask much of you. The Horrors keep it lean—guitars, bass, the weight of the rhythm—and there’s something about that restraint that makes it hit harder. The song finds this pocket where everything just locks in place, and you remember why people still care about this band. It’s post-punk that knows what it is without having to prove anything. Wednesday, 12 October 2011. Niki and the Dove’s Drummer: Wednesday, 12 October 2011. Slove Flash: Tuesday, 11 October 2011. Panico: Sunday, 9 October 2011. Steve Jobs, Old Friend: It’s late. I’m in bed with the lights off and the MacBook glowing, the neighbors finally quiet after they’d spent an hour screaming and breaking things in the stairwell. Dark everywhere except the screen. iPhone beside me. The shelf across the room has all the Apple books, the Jobs books, the whole mythology. In a desk drawer there’s an old blue iPod nano I haven’t touched in years. The tweets started rolling in. Steve Jobs was dead. I felt it hit like something physical—cold and raw and stupid-emotional all at once. Not now. Not him. Not Steve. Over the last few years he’d become a joke to a lot of people. Some cult leader in turtlenecks hawking thousand-dollar phones to startup bros, suing everyone, dying thin on camera for the internet to gawk at. It made me furious, actually. Sad. Because he mattered to me. He really did. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, making this whole pitch—we needed a Mac, not just for us but for everyone, the whole world needed to get out of those gray plastic boxes Bill Gates had convinced everyone was normal. No Windows zombies here. We had taste. We had souls. I disappeared into books about him. How’d he do it, this college dropout with acid trips and factory work and a spell in India, how’d he come back and make something nobody else could even imagine? He had a vision and the absolute refusal to accept that it couldn’t happen. That combination—vision and stubbornness—pulled at something in me. Of course he was terrible in a lot of ways. Brutal with people. He denied his daughter for years. He cheated partners. I don’t want to whitewash that or pretend it didn’t matter. But there’s something in how he pushed through failure anyway, how he refused to live small, that feels important. For anyone trying to build something real. The Stanford speech gets quoted all the time, probably too much, but there’s something true in it. He talked about death, about how knowing it was coming made everything else fall away—everyone else’s expectations, your own pride, the fear of getting it wrong. And what was left was just what actually mattered. That hit different after he died than it did when I heard it the first time. I kept an internal conversation with him for years. Walking into something uncertain, I’d think: what would Steve do? Not to copy him, but to tap into that clarity, that refusal to settle. It worked often enough that it became a kind of secret life philosophy. The battery’s almost gone. Outside on Twitter, the same photographs, the same quotes, the same goodbye. Goodnight, old friend. A dreamer, a nerd, someone the world won’t forget. Steve Jobs. God is dead. Thursday, 6 October 2011. Filur Concentrates: Wednesday, 5 October 2011. Ramon Haindl: The World Lives in Berlin: Berlin was where everything converged in those years—artists from everywhere, all this raw energy, the sense that you could actually make something matter without anyone’s permission. Haindl was part of that, his work carrying that clarity and directness that made the city feel like the center of something. There’s a specific moment in creative history when one place becomes the place, and Berlin was it. The world doesn’t gather like that anymore. Tuesday, 4 October 2011. Deerhoof: Secret Mobilization: Deerhoof never made sense to me the first time I heard them, which is probably why I kept coming back. Satomi Matsuzaki’s voice is doing something I couldn’t quite track, the rest of the band moving in shapes that shouldn’t work but somehow do. They’ve been around long enough to have completely ignored every trend, every pressure to make something more palatable or easier to categorize. I respect that kind of commitment to not giving a shit what anyone expects from you. Friday, 30 September 2011. Kimmi in a Rice Field: Twins in a rice field. That image stays. Kimmi and her sister, born together and spending a lifetime learning to be separate people. There’s an order to rice fields but nothing orderly about siblings—just two people in the same place slowly becoming different. A field is quiet enough for that to happen unnoticed, until one day you look and they’re not where they started anymore. Thursday, 29 September 2011. The Dinosaur Problem: I spent Sunday afternoons at my grandmother’s house. She had cable, so I’d camp out in front of Xena and seaQuest and Hercules while she rested after lunch. Earth 2 was the one that really grabbed me though—a whole other world, aliens, jungle, mystery, monsters, everything layered on top of everything else. It got cancelled after one season because the budget was enormous. I never found out how it ended. Now Terra Nova shows up on Fox, another shot at the same idea—colonizing a new planet—but they’ve mixed in dinosaurs. The year is 2149 and Earth is basically over. Pollution, overpopulation, everyone’s sick. Scientists managed to build a time machine and they’re shipping colonists back 85 million years into the Cretaceous to start fresh. The Shannon family steps through the portal into what’s supposed to be paradise. Turns out paradise has problems. The pilot episode aired recently and I’m going to say it: Terra Nova has something. A whole planet to discover, mysteries everywhere, rebels with weapons, messy relationships, strange symbols on the walls, people carrying baggage, and dinosaurs that look a little iffy but somehow work anyway. If they actually managed it—if they pulled off the mythology and followed through on all these threads they’re setting up—this could wipe out anything science fiction television has done in years. But it won’t happen. Five episodes in, the network will get spooked by the costs and the ratings will dip and that’s that. Same as Earth 2. Same reason I watched at my grandmother’s house. Good sci-fi on network TV doesn’t make it through. You never get to find out what happens next. Thursday, 29 September 2011. The Ego Has Landed: Wednesday, 28 September 2011. Tove Styrke: Call My Name: Tove Styrke’s ’Call My Name’ sits right at that spot where production clarity meets vocal intimacy. There’s this moment around the chorus where the synth swells and her voice just cuts through it clean, and you realize she’s singing directly at whoever’s listening. Swedish pop in the last decade got good at that—making massive sounds feel private, like she’s in the room with you. The song’s got enough architecture that it holds up through multiple listens without overstaying. I keep coming back to it the way you do with things that don’t announce themselves but don’t let you forget them either. Tuesday, 27 September 2011. Nothing to Lose in Harajuku: Harajuku at street level is just different. Two teenage girls in full Mario and Luigi costumes are having a normal day. Someone’s decided their entire personality for today is cyberpunk—thirty-pound pants, tiger sneakers, the commitment is real. Another pair are playing fashion police. Nobody stops. Nobody changes their route. It’s just what’s happening. Everywhere else has given up. Paris, London, Berlin—it all looks the same. Curated thrift-store restraint, the right vintage pieces, the right loud logos. There’s an invisible line, and you don’t cross it. The second your clothes start getting interesting, you stop being fashionable and start being a problem. So no one crosses it. What kills me is how normal we’ve made the boredom. German cities especially—everyone’s in the approved vintage uniform, everyone’s making the same safe choices, everyone’s pretending that’s taste and not just fear. We’ve all agreed: don’t be too weird, don’t try too hard. Just pick a lane and stay in it. Tokyo doesn’t have that memo. Or it read it and threw it away years ago. People dress up as video game characters on a Tuesday. People wear enormous decorated pants for no reason except they want to. And the city just accommodates it. There’s no tax for that level of weirdness. I don’t know if it’s the culture or the density or something about how Tokyo’s wired, but it works. Tokyo Fashion has been documenting it forever, and every time I look at it, I remember that fashion doesn’t have to be this conservative thing we’ve decided it is in the West. It could just be trying something and seeing what happens. Not asking for permission first. Anyway, that’s not where I live. But at least I know the option exists. Monday, 26 September 2011. Summer Reading: In New York, a group called The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society did exactly what their name advertised: they sat in parks reading serious books without shirts. Their motto was “Making Reading Sexy,” which was either sincere or ironic or both, and it didn’t really matter which. The actual appeal is straightforward. Sensuality and intellect in one moment, without the usual distance between them. But what struck me was that they seemed to reach for the same books every time—the canonical stuff, the classics everyone pretends to have read. Which means either they had convictions about what real reading looks like, or they were all enacting the same fantasy of being a certain person: educated, unselfconscious, willing to be strange in public. Probably both. When you commit fully to something absurd, it stops being ironic and just becomes true. I never saw them in person, just in photos. The women looked comfortable in a way that made it work. You can’t perform something that weird and sexual and intellectual at once. You have to let it be genuine. Sunday, 25 September 2011. Ten Missions: Your internet dies, so what—don’t just sit around irritated. Pick ten things to do instead. Dishes. Your room. Something decent for someone else. You weren’t going to do any of it anyway, so use the outage as your excuse. Weekends are too short for actual productivity, so commit to absurd missions instead. Go to Fashion Week on acid and suddenly the clothes make perfect sense and everything looks incredible. Share gifs constantly until you’re communicating purely in images. Find some disease you’ve never heard of, the kind where your skin tries to grow a second version of itself, and read the whole thing. It matters that you know these things exist. Hand a kid to someone important and yell “You can keep him, he’s basically the Antichrist,” then run like hell. New features are always rolling out somewhere. Be the insufferable person in your group who gets them first. It’s completely meaningless but it’s still something. Stop doing coke. That one’s not a mission—that’s something you actually have to do, and your grandmother is genuinely sad about it. Go to a party wearing something that invites touch. Keep a napkin count. By the time midnight hits the handwriting’s illegible and eventually you lose the napkin entirely. Seduce a fashion blogger. You know exactly which one. You’ve been thinking about it for months. Walk up to random strangers and ask if you can buy them something. Coffee. A meal. Whatever they need. Most will say no and back away slowly. One might say yes, and then you’ll have changed the entire shape of their day for absolutely no reason. That’s ten. The last one you already know about. The one everyone knows about. Do it anyway, or don’t—but you know you should stop. Friday, 23 September 2011. What You Find: Kent’s sweater came out of the trash. His dad threw it away, his mom fished it out, asked if he wanted it. Seventeen years old in Frankfurt and the sweater became his favorite thing. Carrot jogger, Dr. Martens, the dead man’s sweater. He worries he looks small in it. Mai’s twenty-two and found a black-and-green pullover at a vintage sale that existed exactly once. Another woman had it first, didn’t want it, and Mai took it. That’s how she moves through fashion—Berlin, shooting photographs, dancing to whatever sounds good. A gold Inca chain from a friend, a brown fake leather bag from eBay because real leather brings customs hell, blue treggings and boots from H&M. When I asked if the clothes help you get laid she just shrugged. Maybe. Probably not. It’s the face and the person underneath that matters. The clothes come off anyway. What interests me is that she actually thinks about this stuff—she told me she looks better dressed than naked, which she explained this way: naked you just see the body, same every day. But dressed you can be a different person. You can try on multiple lives. She wears a pink bra without lace because lace costs fifteen or twenty euros and who pays that. White underwear with pink stripes and a little teddy bear on the ass. The specificity of it made her real to me in a way most fashion talk isn’t. Jonathan’s twenty-eight, German living in Vienna, and he’s got this brocade vest that a Viennese tailor made to measure. First time he passed the shop he thought it was the Burgtheater selling off its costume archive. It wasn’t. Now he rolls his sleeves to show his forearm tattoo and the vest does what his old oversized pullovers couldn’t—it makes people notice. He won’t wear shorts. Not once the weather hits thirty degrees. Not really ever. Three people, three different entrances into the same thing. They weren’t shopping. They found pieces that fit who they actually were—a sweater that came from the trash, a vintage pullover, a handmade jacket—and they kept them. No trends, no seasons, just real. Thursday, 22 September 2011. Asobi Seksu: Perfectly Crystal: There’s a particular kind of dream pop that just dissolves into your day without asking permission—Asobi Seksu’s second album does this quietly, the guitars layered so thick they become texture instead of sound. You’re not listening to it so much as existing inside it, the vocals buried deep in reverb and melody, everything soft-focus and patient. It doesn’t demand anything from you, which is maybe why it works. Nothing sharp enough to hurt, nothing bright enough to wake you up. Just this sustained, floating feeling that lasts as long as you let it. The kind of album you realize has been playing for forty minutes and you’ve been somewhere else the whole time, but somewhere warm. Thursday, 22 September 2011. Fenech-Soler: Golden Sun: There’s something about Fenech-Soler that just sits right—synth-pop that never needs to prove anything, just patient layers of melody you sink into without thinking. Golden Sun is exactly that kind of record: easy to come back to, never exhausting, solid and pretty in a way that doesn’t demand anything from you. Most days that’s exactly what I want from music, something that works the way things should work, without all the production noise trying to convince you it matters. Tuesday, 20 September 2011. Stay Gold: The Big Pink make their best work in the space between gloss and sincerity, and that’s where Stay Gold lives. Everything’s processed, everything’s shimmering, but there’s something unguarded underneath all that production. I’ve always liked that about them—the willingness to be both slick and vulnerable at once. Most bands have to choose. Tuesday, 20 September 2011. Autumn In Bed: Autumn gets packaged as melancholy season. October comes and you’re supposed to feel the weight of it—the light draining, the cold coming, the whole seasonal affective checklist. Everyone’s supposed to retreat with dark music and wait out the darkness. There’s an aesthetic to the suffering. A romance to it. But you don’t have to buy in. The weather’s real. October hits different—the air sharpens, you feel smaller, the light goes away before dinner. I’m not pretending that doesn’t matter. But the music you play while you’re lying in bed at three in the afternoon is still your choice. You can stay under the duvet, nothing wrong with that. But instead of the expected parade of slowcore and melancholy, you put on SBTRKT or Aeroplane or Passion Pit. Energy. Motion. Tracks that make you want to move even if you’re just bouncing on the mattress. It works. The song changes the room. Changes what the season means. And maybe don’t do it alone. Invite someone over. Make the bed a place where something happens—talking, laughing, music loud enough that you forget about the weather for a while. The bed is perfect for that. Warm, private, nowhere you need to be. Some of my best mornings are October mornings. Still dark outside, bed still warm, the right song playing. The season doesn’t get to decide your mood if you don’t let it. That’s the whole thing. Monday, 19 September 2011. Girls Like That: I was twelve in some hideout beneath pallets and cardboard, rat poison stacked in corners, when I reached over and traced my fingers down the bare curve of her ass and understood what I’d want the rest of my life. She wasn’t one of those girls who’d turn into something else—all makeup and polish and distance. She was my best friend, and that was the whole thing. We were still doing Power Rangers moves off stacked earth bags, still beating each other bloody in the woods, still sneaking into her room late to watch pornography on a borrowed tape with her little brothers and laugh until we couldn’t breathe. That was the setup. You have to understand that part. Three years later, at fifteen, she came upstairs from her mother’s restaurant where she’d been waitressing, and we talked until morning—dreams, the future, some R&B guy we both liked. I slipped her underwear off without thinking much about it, worked my way into her, and her little brother was asleep beside us grinning in a dream, the full moon coming in through the window like it was all arranged. A year after that she told me she’d always been lesbian, had wanted it since kindergarten, but that didn’t stop anything. We just kept going. I’ve never been into the other kind. The annoying ones with the heels and the purses, the glittery mouths. Even though I dated some of them once or twice, just to check. What I wanted was a girl with an actual brain. Direct. Crude. The kind who wore boxer shorts instead of thongs, who got skateboards instead of sunburns, who had opinions and didn’t ask permission to laugh or curse or take up space. A girl you knew as a friend first, and then one day she’d be standing there with breasts and a cunt you suddenly knew what to do with, still the same person, still grinning. A woman I knew once told me I liked this type because I never had a father, that I was trying to reclaim some lost authority. Maybe. But it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t stomach girls who say yes to everything, who need to fit some standard of what beautiful looks like, who giggle and flirt and never fart or grunt or throw a punch. What’s the point. You might as well date a doll. The best years of my life were with women who were more friend than girlfriend. Who’d drink with me until dawn, do drugs with me, puke and yell and carry on, then come to bed soaked and fucked up but still themselves. Who had these small firm tits with puffy pink nipples because God apparently couldn’t decide which way to make them, couldn’t finish the job—and I was grateful for that, genuinely grateful. They’d go shit loudly in the bathroom, come back grinning, tell me something insane that just happened, and keep fucking me with beer and a salami sandwich in their mouth. Take blurry photos on whatever camera we had around and send them like it was nothing. That’s the real thing, the actual love, nothing to do with Disney or magazines or advice books. Everything else is trash. I live fine without it most days. Sleep with the conventional ones sometimes. But I’m always waiting, somewhere in the back of my mind, for someone—loud and unhinged and shameless, the kind who burps and farts and drinks beer without worrying about her breath, who doesn’t own makeup, whose small breasts and pretty cunt and that specific knowing smile are all the invitation anyone needs. Someone who’s actually lived. Who’s got a history worth drowning in, with real peaks and valleys and favorite films that mean something and songs that stick to you. Who spent her childhood playing football instead of Barbie. Someone where you know in the first second that the entire rest of it—all of it—will be sex and beer pong and beating the shit out of assholes for fun and traveling to nowhere and watching sunsets and listening to music too loud and spending money stupidly and swimming naked and just existing together without apologizing. That specific grin you only get when you’re fucking your best friend. That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it. Promise. Sunday, 18 September 2011. Salem: King Night: Friday, 16 September 2011. Hollie Fernando, Storming: Friday, 16 September 2011. When I Was A Whore: Thursday, 15 September 2011. Perfect Wreckage: 2005, school trip, Prague. We’d just started the year with a mix of people I’d known forever mixed in with new faces. But somewhere on the drive down from Bavaria, it stopped mattering. We became this blob of friends. Drinking on filthy bus seats, kissing behind gas stations, laughing at nothing, someone’s guitar in the mix. The bus itself felt like it was made of happiness. Prague was like this enormous temporary playground. We moved through the streets, the breweries, the clubs. Our hotel was some massive prefab building and we turned it into one long party. Burnt holes in the carpet with a shisha. Set a t-shirt on fire. Hannah’s room was full of pretty girls in their underwear and we sat outside it grinning, talking about the future, and then we threw empty beer bottles out the window. Of course we did. Years later, I still pull up the specific moments. The drive back and suddenly snow everywhere, all of us piled on top of each other while Manu picked out “Californication” on his guitar. André. Meggi. Heinz, our bus driver, genuinely the best bus driver alive. Those are the moments you want to keep. We had a camera running the whole time, caught it all. That blurry person in the footage with the long greasy hair and the dumb wet mouth? That was me. It was 2005. I was an asshole. It was perfect. Wednesday, 14 September 2011. Charles Kelman: Real Life Is Boring: Charles Kelman was an ophthalmologist who looked at cataract surgery and thought there had to be a better way—which led him to invent phacoemulsification and basically change the whole field. But he was also a jazz musician and a scuba diver and just fundamentally couldn’t sit still with the status quo. I think that’s what the title’s about: that the baseline version of life, the one where you accept things the way they are, is genuinely boring. You need the restlessness, the refusal to settle, or you might as well be asleep. Tuesday, 13 September 2011. Berlin Festival: Party Like It’s 2008: Growing up in some small Bavarian town, getting to any festival at all felt like you were actually doing something. Rock im Park was about as good as it got. But after Hurricane and Melt, Berlin Festival was supposed to be the third one that year, the autumnal sendoff to the whole season. Music, crowds, stages. One more time. The lineup looked decent—Beginner, Beirut, Suede, enough names scattered across the old Tempelhof airfield to warrant the trip. Three stages, bumper cars, food stalls, a mobile disco. The grounds weren’t bad for it. But the vibe never came together. Odd Future cancelled last minute. James Blake got 2pm on a Friday—who’s even awake then unless you’re still drunk from Thursday? Fans paid extra for special shows. The whole schedule felt thoughtless, like someone filled time slots without considering whether actual human beings could attend. The bands were ghosts from five years ago. CSS, Santigold, Yelle—I’d loved these, but there probably weren’t enough current artists willing to make the trip to Germany. It had that 2008 desperation, that reaching-back feeling. Gray weather the whole time. Thin crowds. And these marketing kids with clipboards trying to get you to join some brand community. I was half-waiting for one more approach just so I’d have something to tell the story about. Buraka Som Sistema was the real thing. The singer was magnetic, the production clever, everything moved people. Silent disco worked even sober. The döner was the best I’ve ever had at a festival. Club Mate and a guy named Nike sweating through the whole set next to me. Berlin Festival 2011 didn’t disappoint me so much as just not happen. Why not one ticket instead of confusing add-ons? Why not borrow that beach setup from Bread & Butter? Why schedule in September when summer weather existed? Details that added up to a missing experience. I filed it under adequate and moved on. If you’re the kind of person who only leaves your favorite Berlin café once a year for music, you’re better off at Melt anyway. Tuesday, 13 September 2011. Drunk and Famous: Midnight at some Berlin venue and they’re handing out currywurst next to the bars, celebrities with new breasts bouncing everywhere, free drinks in every direction. Either I’d made it in Berlin or I was just really good at sneaking in. The first day of the festival hadn’t exactly been orgasmic, so when someone mentioned this thing at ewerk, this VW-sponsored networking night, I figured why not. The kind of event where the important people from the important companies in the important industries were dancing around, and somehow so was I. Still pretty drunk. I talked to Wilson Gonzales Ochsenknecht about a festival we’d both been to, to Bonnie Strange about idols and friendship, and to a bunch of music managers about the state of the industry. Got some advice that if you say “business” five times in a sentence people take you more seriously—though honestly alcohol does the real work, and after a few drinks everyone wants to sign you or manage you or put you on a stage, regardless of who you are or what you actually do. The crowd was mostly sympathetic to itself. Celebrities annoyed at other celebrities, music people annoyed at music people, everyone united in their contempt for this guy Karl-Heinz who’d somehow won his way in and spent the night calling his girlfriend to report every famous face he’d spotted. “That girl from Jungle Camp is here, she’s got huge tits, she’s at the bar right now!” But the catering staff had figured out the truth long ago: celebrities are just people. By 2am they were crowded into this tiny side room, throwing glasses and bottles around, stumbling through a seventy-meter line just to get a sausage with red sauce. Like right after the war, everyone desperate for a hot meal. Eventually I’d had enough of half-naked models on coke and soap actresses pressed against me slick with sweat. I stage-dived my way to the exit in my neon blue jacket—the jacket of the oppressed—and left without even taking the goodie bag. I owe thanks to the band whose name I’ve already forgotten but who smuggled me in through their guitar case, and to Bruno the bouncer, who I gave a quick lick on the way out. He never asked another question after that. God protect him. Saturday, 10 September 2011. Ten Ways to Ruin Your Weekend: Weekends are supposed to be freedom, but they’re actually just two days of having to invent your own purpose. No job to complain about, no colleagues to resent, just you and the crushing question of what the hell you’re supposed to do with yourself. It’s paralyzing. So why not lean into it? Why not actively sabotage the whole thing? Quit your job on a Friday morning. Not gradually, not with two weeks’ notice—just walk in, leave something foul on your boss’s desk, and shout obscenities on your way out. Suddenly you have unlimited weekend. Or become stupidly irresponsible for two days straight. Let yourself fall apart a little. Cry about something stupid, something that doesn’t deserve tears but you give them anyway. Listen to the worst music you can find, the kind that makes your skin crawl, and play it loud enough that you can’t think about anything else. Take your jealousy and let it run wild. Stalk someone, suspect everything, find reasons to be angry at people who aren’t even here. Don’t eat anything that’s red or yellow or green—pretend you’ve discovered a new consciousness through food color deprivation. Scream at people who dare talk to you. Tell them they’re not your mother. Actually, go to a couples’ sex therapist with someone you barely know and get professional instruction on things you’ll never be able to do together again without thinking about the therapist’s voice. Or just pray. Really pray. The full production. See if this time, finally, something actually changes. Then sit there knowing it won’t. The weekend doesn’t need winning. It just needs surviving. Friday, 9 September 2011. Ilyas Iglesias: Simferopol, Bitches: Wednesday, 7 September 2011. Yakuza In Tokyo: Kusters spent years photographing yakuza in Tokyo, which seems impossible until you realize that access is just another thing you can build if you show up honestly and don’t lie about what you want. The photographs are straightforward: men in everyday moments, ordinary and resigned and trapped in a structure they maintain because it’s the only structure they know. What gets me about the work is that it refuses to perform a reading of the subject. He doesn’t frame yakuza as noble rebels or villains or symptoms of something. They’re just people whose life choices have constrained them in ways they’ve accepted. The photographs do what all good photography does—they make you look at something you’ve already decided you understand and recognize that you don’t actually know anything about it. There’s a discipline to that kind of documentation: showing up, staying quiet, letting the work speak. No narration, no theory, no message. Just evidence that these lives are real and strange and ordinary all at once. Tuesday, 6 September 2011. That’s Why You’re Fat: The internet makes you fat. You spend every day sitting—office chair, café bench, some basement—barely moving except to plug your phone in the computer or grab tissues when you’re having a minor stress breakdown, and you’d rather sleep than actually go outside and exercise, no matter what your calendar says you should be doing. Food has to be fast. You’ve got a project that’s due, code that needs testing, someone you need to interview—probably via email because leaving your desk is basically impossible. So pizza, pasta, burgers—roll up to whichever place you trust, shove it in your face, back to work. The internet never stops. It doesn’t sleep. This is happening to me right now. As I type, I’m literally shoving my stomach aside so I can fit fried chips in my mouth. And I’m too lazy to even leave the house to eat anymore. In the last two months I’ve ordered delivery so many times my loyalty points could rebuild a small nation. So tomorrow I just order again. Then there are those rare days when I force myself to bike somewhere instead of transit, when I skip the double burger and fries for an actual goat cheese salad and water. All I remember the next morning is waking up at 4 AM puking in a fast food bathroom, screaming for bacon nuggets and a Whopper with extra patties. Make it a nine-piece of something fried while you’re at it. Goodbye. And of course it’s not my fault. It’s TV. It’s advertising. It’s society. Not me. I’d be perfectly fine eating fruit and hand-raised chicken if corporate advertising didn’t spend billions telling me how boring that is. You’re buried in fast food ads everywhere. If I ever quit eating Colonel Sanders, he’d chase me through my nightmares in a giant cornfield. You assholes are the problem, not me. Except that excuse is getting thin. Because I’m starting to notice something worse than getting sluggish and tired and foggy from all the garbage—the food doesn’t even taste good anymore. Burger King can rebrand their entire menu every six months and it tastes identical. Like burnt regret. Always. The delivery place drowns their pizza in so much grease they’ve probably sterilized half their employees just from the vapor. And I’d rather get deployed to a war zone than eat from those tourist-trap noodle places again. You’re not supposed to fall apart like this working online. Fashion people manage it. Though I guess they survive on marriage proposals from middle-aged stalkers. Anyway. The answer is obvious. I need to actually exercise. Bike for an hour without hacking up a lung. Sit outside with a book. Do something that isn’t the screen. Get away from this at least once a week. And remember: jerking off doesn’t count as exercise. This isn’t about quitting the internet and becoming a gym rat or moving to the countryside—it’s just accepting that you can’t hide behind a monitor forever before your body actually gives out. And maybe have sex again. With an actual person. More than once. So we end the year as something resembling a functioning human. But that starts tomorrow. I’ve still got McDonald’s coupons burning in my wallet. Sunday, 4 September 2011. Born to Lose: There’s something about bands that come out of the noise and refuse to sand down their edges. Weed, that grinding sludge, the kind of thing that plays basement clubs to maybe thirty people who actually get it. Born to Lose—the whole Johnny Thunders philosophy, the punk refusal to become digestible. These aren’t bands trying to break through. They’re doing the opposite, making music that actively repels the casual listener, that demands something from you. You show up because you know what you’re in for. Not to be entertained. Because this is real and it doesn’t care if you’re listening. Saturday, 3 September 2011. Ten Little Missions: Weekend hits like a car with no brakes and suddenly it’s here. I’m in the bathroom with Solarium-Sonja and this guy Benny—don’t ask—getting ready for a kids club, which definitely sounds wrong when I say it out loud. There’s a Rihanna song on repeat, maybe with a Bieber remix, something that won’t die, and I’ve got one thought stuck: tits, tequila, ten little missions. One. Start a troll gang that bounces from blog to blog burning everything down. Posts, images, videos. All of it gone. Already exists? Doesn’t matter. Two. Buy a paint-by-numbers kit. Lock the door. Don’t come out until the painting looks like a Caspar David Friedrich painted it. Close enough is fine. Three. Look at the American Pie Reunion poster. Feel yourself aging. It’s all downhill from here. Four. Smile at the sun. It’ll shine longer for you. Might be bullshit but worth trying. Five. Download Minecraft. Play for five minutes. Uninstall forever. Bad graphics, pointless, or the porn folder’s calling—pick a reason. Probably all three. Six. Find some far-right political posters and cover them with jokes. Stand at the polling booths trying to convince old people not to vote for the party that hates immigrants and gay people. It won’t work but someone has to try. Seven. Write a boring press release starting with “Dear Blogger.” Send the follow-up full of death threats and hate speech about their boss and his family. Here’s the thing: nobody reads past the greeting. All that hate just evaporates. Eight. Go to the fish market and buy the deadest fish available. Become their best friend. Notice how long they are. How slimy. How they’re split open inside. That hole. Being a man. Nine. Post online about how Pokémon discriminates against disabled people because there’s a move called “Paralyze.” Then drown quietly because apparently no real problems exist in the world besides this one. Ten. Get happy. Friday, 2 September 2011. Nicolas Sisto: Paris, London, Montréal: Wednesday, 31 August 2011. Party Naked: Tuesday, 30 August 2011. Stealing Girlfriends: I met Katha at one of those farmer parties at the edge of my hometown. She was tall, beautiful, long black hair blowing in wind that smelled like cheap beer and puke in corners. Obviously she had a boyfriend. Three years with Ferdinand. He was in the military somewhere, in a barracks or deployed or whatever—the point is he wasn’t here with her. His loss. My too-small conscience checked out around three in the morning when we left our drunk friends behind and went to her older sister’s apartment and did what we came to do in the moonlight, swearing eternal love between rounds. I remember it felt like something that mattered. Next morning my phone exploded. “You stole Ferdi’s girlfriend? Dude…” One friend was calling me a hero. Another called me an asshole. Her best friend said “Good luck”—which I’m pretty sure wasn’t about wishing us happiness, but more about my physical survival, because Ferdinand had a reputation. Even concrete walls couldn’t stop him, people said. I could tell you about a few days later when I barely escaped whatever he was planning (probably not actually a machine gun, more like a stick he was waving around), running to the bus stop in my underwear, begging some flower lady for change. How Ferdinand called Katha crying, swearing his eternal love, talking about marriage and kids, then tried to kill himself when she laughed and hung up. How she sent me nude pictures of her with her favorite teddy bear afterward. But that’s not really worth dwelling on. We lasted four weeks anyway. The thing that’s stuck with me since (not really stuck, if I’m honest—I traded my conscience for internet points a long time ago and I’m going to hell regardless): how bad is it actually to steal someone’s girlfriend? If she’s unhappy in the relationship anyway? If you genuinely think you love her more? If you’re just really, desperately into her body and the feeling of her skin and the way she looks at you? Or should you just wait for nature to take its course—or in this case, human inconstancy—so you can swoop in after the breakup and be the shoulder to cry on? Except wouldn’t you speed things up by actively destroying their relationship? Wouldn’t that just be doing everyone a favor? I ran into Katha twice after we broke up. The first time she told me about a spontaneous anal sex party with her boss and his girlfriend in the back of a Jeep. The second time she was announcing from the top of a bar table that she and Ferdinand were getting married in the spring in some little forest chapel. I was genuinely happy for them. I really was. Monday, 29 August 2011. Lägga Dörtschn: The day after karaoke we were heading to Hamburg for some corporate event, Jägermeister sponsoring the chaos. Seven of us on a train—Nike, the two Wuschelköpfe, Josh, Ladyboy, the Audiofreak, and me. We spent the hours talking about nothing in particular. By the time we got to the hotel we’d managed to destroy a remote control and a hair dryer. This is what happens when you give a group of people a free room. Minigolf in the afternoon against The Toxic Avengers or whoever showed up. We called ourselves Lägga Dörtschn and we won, though the VIP team claims they did. They’re lying. I remember standing in the sun with a warm beer in one hand, knowing we’d actually beaten the people we were supposed to lose to. But the night was Langhaardackel Skrillex. This guy walked straight into a wall when he arrived—actually smacked his face against it—and I thought the DJ set was going to be a disaster. But once he got behind the decks, something switched. The place detonated. Dubstep and drums and bass that moved through your bones. Everyone’s sweat mixing. Jägermeister burning down your throat. The room was a single creature. We crashed the barrier and threw ourselves in. David was in there somewhere, Nils, Marian with those eyes that genuinely unsettled you. I had a water gun at some point and I was hunting people through the venue. After that, the night gets fragmented. Glitter coating my skin. Bruises in colors without names. The hotel. Erika’s place. A shower where Nike and I were both standing half-asleep under running water. The order doesn’t matter. The people who ran everything—Charlotte, Alex, Björn, Nele, Sara, Nadja—they made the machinery work. I’m not supposed to name them for legal reasons, which is absurd. The tour crew keeps getting better with each trip, and I like them more too. That’s unusual. You usually get tired of people. One thing stays with me: the garden gnomes, the really depraved ones with leering expressions. We should have stolen one. We had the momentum and the darkness and we still walked away empty-handed. Cowards. That’s what we were. Saturday, 27 August 2011. Keeping TOKYOPUNK Alive: I started TOKYOPUNK with Asumi because Japan is constantly producing these wild things—music, art, videos, street style, pure cultural weirdness—that die the moment they don’t leave the border. Someone should be translating that into German. Someone should be showing people. That someone was us. It was supposed to work out. We’d find the stuff, post it, things would grow. But Asumi has school and a real job and the kind of life that doesn’t leave room for a side project. I’ve got my own chaos. So TOKYOPUNK’s been slowly suffocating, and I hate that. I still believe in it. The work being done in Japan right now is too good to ignore. So I’m looking for people who understand that—Japanese or connected to Japan somehow, doesn’t matter where they live—who want to keep this alive. The deal is straightforward: you find or write about something from Japan, we post it, we split whatever ad money comes in. It’ll be pennies at first, maybe forever, but that’s not really why anyone does this. The content can be anything: music, art, design, fashion, books, events, whatever’s happening there that’s worth noticing. Write in English if you want—I’ll translate. Just write like you mean it. That’s all that matters. I’m throwing this out because I don’t want to watch this die because we got too busy. If you’re interested, reach out. If you know someone, tell them. We’ll figure out the rest. Saturday, 27 August 2011. Ellen Von Unwerth: After After Party: Von Unwerth photographs people caught in the moments right after—makeup smudged, defenses down, that strange transparency that comes when you think no one’s watching anymore. There’s an intimacy to her work that never feels like violation, more like she’s noticed something true about you that was already there. ’After After Party’ probably documents exactly that: the exhaustion and desire underneath the performance, the moment when the facade really does slip. Thursday, 25 August 2011. This Week’s Albums: It’s been ten years since Aaliyah died, and I spent the day listening through her catalog. Three albums is all she left, and they still feel untouchable—the production so clean it almost sounds conversational, her voice carrying this confidence that’s impossible to duplicate. You hear her everywhere in what came after, but there’s a distance between influence and the genuine article. Nothing that’s tried to follow has quite hit the same. Thursday’s new record came at the right time. No Devolución pulls back from the usual post-hardcore fury—less wailing, more structure. It’s an album that demands to be heard as a whole, not parsed for singles. The thinking in the songwriting is obvious, and when they lean into instrumental passages they earn them rather than decorating around edges. The Weeknd’s mixtape has been running alongside this, which makes an odd combination. House of Balloons felt like a genuine left turn in where R&B could go. Thursday treads the same territory but without quite the moments that hooked you the first time. It’s absorbing but less of a pull. Netsky did something unexpected. I never paid attention to drum ’n’ bass before—always seemed too fractured, too much going on at once. But his self-titled has this sadness underneath it that just takes hold. At twenty-one he’s made something that feels completely finished, like he tapped into something he’s always known. The album’s taken up residence. Toddla T’s Watch Me Dance does exactly what the title suggests. Hip-hop, reggae, electronics, soul—all of it moving together without seams. It’s built for the club but works anywhere because the composition underneath the party impulse is there. This is why I keep coming back to music. Not everything connects, but when it does, it stays. Thursday, 25 August 2011. Merlin Bronques: Wednesday, 24 August 2011. Pretty in Pink: Jana doesn’t wear pants. Twenty-two, from Osnabrück, and she just… doesn’t. I watched her in photos wearing a Minkpink blouse, Primark jeans if the moment called for it, Ash shoes she’d talked down to fifty euros. She says her style is as changeable as the weather, and looking at the photos that checks out. She told me about picking berries in the woods and then panicking about foxworms after eating one straight off the branch, which has nothing to do with fashion but explains everything about how she exists. Not calculating. Not trying. Just there. Van Anh’s nineteen and lives in two separate universes. One where she’s preparing to leave Berlin for London to study economics and politics. The other is a fashion blog called Chopstick Panorama where she gets to be a different person every day. Her closet reflects it—all black one moment, color chaos the next. Sweet then rough. She can’t decide, she says. She’s got maybe months left in Berlin, so that might actually be perfect timing to keep all your options open. Topshop finds, H&M basics, no-name shoes when the money ran out. Everything feels provisional. Marcel is twenty-seven and he’s been a student in Kiel forever. Counter Strike instead of exams, parties on Thursday nights, determined not to be earnest about any of it. When I asked about his style, he made a joke about naked women on the site—which is his way of not answering. The actual answer is visible though: same black socks always, same Tom Tailor sweater, Jack & Jones jeans. He decided once years ago and apparently never reconsidered. Except when I asked him straight up if he looked better dressed or naked, and he said clothes make the man—classic deflection—then he paused. “Though if we all just walked around naked…” He didn’t finish. Tuesday, 23 August 2011. Rene Vaile’s Afternoon: Tuesday, 23 August 2011. Oh Land: White Nights: Oh Land has that thing where she sounds effortlessly cool even when she’s being sincere, which is harder than it looks. There’s space in her production, and her voice sits in it like she’s not trying to convince you of anything. You either get it or you don’t, and she’s fine either way. Sunday, 21 August 2011. Hairy Pits Club: My first real girlfriend was fourteen, blonde, and had enough dark hair under her arms that it made you understand people had to work to keep it off. She didn’t shave. Not as a statement—she just hadn’t started. Had the money for razors, had soap, had no reason yet to think her body needed editing. For about a year we were together in the way you are at that age, whenever we could find a place that wouldn’t get us caught. Her room. The public pool. Her drunk father’s desk. I spent a lot of time exploring those territories, tasting the soft dark hair she had arranged in this neat trapezoid. I named them after things—TV characters, whatever came to mind—stupid teenager stuff she never knew about. I was worshipping something in her body without knowing what it was or that I was doing it. Then we broke up because she slept with her cousin. Around that same time the razor thing started spreading through the girls at school, like something you could catch. By the next time I saw her she was smooth like everyone else was becoming. Now I sit with a glass of wine watching pornography and see all these hairless bodies and something sits heavy in my chest. I think about what disappeared, about all those girls making a choice or making a choice without knowing it was a choice. About being a fucked-up kid who loved something he couldn’t name and couldn’t keep. The Hairy Pits Club exists—women growing it out deliberately, measuring it, dyeing it, treating every inch like a small victory. Most of them aren’t doing it for men anyway. But there’s something that matters about refusing the machine, about saying no to what Gillette and Wilkinson decided your body should look like. The war isn’t over. It’s not settled. Friday, 19 August 2011. Bad Weather Weekend: The weather’s this bad - there’s no winning. You’re wet or you’re cold or you’re both. So the weekend has to become something else entirely. I bike around pointlessly. I jump into the nearest lake naked because why not, let the perverts in the bushes enjoy the view. I find the kids everybody avoids and we start a terrible band. I sing Katy Perry on the morning train at full volume like I don’t care what anyone thinks. None of it’s productive. None of it’s dignified. It’s all just increasingly absurd ways to forget that outside is a punishment. The missions keep spiraling - each one more crude, more willing to cross lines you’d normally draw. But that’s the whole point. You’re not trying to have a nice weekend. You’re trying to actually exist one. Friday, 19 August 2011. Tavi Gevinson: Creepy Little Girl: There’s something strange about being young and opinionated in public. Tavi Gevinson knew this before anyone else did—or at least before anyone was paying attention. She started a fashion blog as a middle schooler, then somehow became an actual voice in a world of adults who usually just talk at teenagers, not with them. The title probably references that uncanniness: a girl too smart, too articulate, too sure of herself. The kind of kid that makes people uncomfortable because she refused to perform humility. I’ve always respected that. There’s no worse curse for a young person than being exactly what they are without apology, and she seemed fundamentally uninterested in being palatable. That’s rarer than people pretend it is. Wednesday, 17 August 2011. I Could Love You So Exquisitely: Wednesday, 17 August 2011. Ruby Mercier, Sixteen: Tuesday, 16 August 2011. Trash Teen: I took an old blog that was dying—suffocating under the weight of Nyan Cat memes and viral covers—and demolished it from the inside out. Put the rubble through a transformation so complete it had no recognizable features left. What came out the other end was TRASHTEEN: a dedicated archive of internet garbage. The content is what the name promises. Bloody GIFs. Videos that should never exist. Butts. Pokémon content edited by someone at 3 AM who had no reference point except their own boredom. Superhero clips. People who know exactly what they’re doing and people who have no idea. Balloons exploding in slow motion. Every piece of garbage the internet produces when nobody’s watching. What makes it work is the complete absence of judgment. There’s no philosophy, no curation strategy, no attempt to make things cohere. Just the feed from the weird corners where people post without thinking about their brand. Each article lands like its own small catastrophe—guaranteed to make someone laugh in a way they won’t admit, or feel genuinely uncomfortable, or just keep scrolling without knowing why. I have no idea if this matters to anyone besides myself. Doesn’t really matter though. It exists. It does what it was designed to do. Monday, 15 August 2011. Mr. Little Jeans: The Suburbs: Friday, 12 August 2011. Daisy Lowe: Playboy Summer: Daisy Lowe had that look—sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, the kind of face that belonged in high fashion but somehow ended up in Playboy, which was already trying everything to stay relevant. There was something poignant about it, using a model from the real world to prop up a magazine that had become a ghost of itself. You could feel the end coming, but it looked good anyway. The whole thing felt like the last moment of that particular kind of glamour, calculated and beautiful and completely beside the point. Wednesday, 10 August 2011. Terror Tower: Tuesday, 9 August 2011. Eriko Nakao: Saturday, 6 August 2011. Rachel Lynch and the Milshire Motel: Friday, 5 August 2011. Katy B: Witches Brew: Katy B makes electronic music that sits somewhere between UK garage and grime, all twitchy synths and vocal loops that burrow into your head. Witches Brew captures that restless energy—her voice floating over beats that never quite settle, never quite give you what you’re expecting. There’s something about the way she uses space in her production that feels like watching someone move through a crowd. You catch glimpses, lose them, catch them again. Not quite pop, not quite underground. Just Katy B being Katy B, which is enough. Thursday, 4 August 2011. Soundcheck: I hadn’t felt that snap from an album in a long time until SBTRKT. Aaron Jerome, masked guy, made this debut that grabbed hold of you. Breakbeats and melodic dubstep and these sparse minimal touches that shouldn’t have worked but did. He’d pulled in Jessie Ware, Little Dragon, Sampha—people who got what he was trying to do. “Hold On,” “Wildfire,” “Trials Of The Past.” The whole thing felt necessary in a way that most albums don’t. Usually you get some good songs and some filler. This one felt like every move mattered. Aphex Twin operates in a completely different space. Richard D. James makes music because he wants to, not because there’s a market for it, which means he’s free to do whatever comes next. That album of his—intricate, intelligent dance music that’s actually rhythmic enough to move to, packed with these sound design moves that land in your brain and stay there. It demands something from you. You can’t half-listen to Aphex Twin. Múm’s Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know came out a few years back, and it’s got this strange nostalgic pull. Not for anything real—more for some dream version of the 60s that probably never existed. All sun and flowers and naive optimism. It’s the kind of album you put on when you want to slide into someone else’s memory, a time that never happened. It does what it’s supposed to do. Wu-Tang brought something back. Four years between albums, and they came out with Legendary Weapons and suddenly you’re back in the 90s. “C.R.E.A.M.,” all of that mythology and weight. Termanology, Cappadonna, Sean Price in there too—people who knew what they were doing. Sharp lyrics, the kind of rap that makes you feel something physical. It still sounds like home. Theophilus London’s debut is strange in a good way. Pop and rap and indie and electronic all folded together, and instead of sounding like a mess it just sounds like Theophilus London. It’s the kind of music that works for disappearing. Alone for hours or dancing naked on your balcony at midnight—either way, it covers the loneliness. Doesn’t matter which version you pick. I spent a stretch going through music without really hearing it, and then I found all these records clustered together and something shifted. I started listening again instead of just putting things on. Thursday, 4 August 2011. Toro Y Moi: How I Know: Chaz Bear’s been making music so specific to something I can’t quite name that I keep coming back to it. There’s this clarity underneath the electronics, a warmth that doesn’t apologize for itself. When something hits like that—when you know it immediately, without needing to decide whether it’s cool—that’s the moment you realize what you actually like. Wednesday, 3 August 2011. Lykke Li: Jerome: There’s something about the way Lykke Li builds a mood that makes you feel like you’re witnessing something private. Jerome sits there quietly, patient, the kind of song that doesn’t announce itself but slowly fills the room until you realize you’ve been holding your breath. It’s sparse enough that every sound matters—her voice layered soft against itself, space between the notes doing as much work as the notes themselves. She has this way of making vulnerability sound like a decision rather than an accident, like she’s choosing exactly how much to let you see. The song doesn’t try to convince you of anything. It just exists, and you either meet it there or you don’t. Tuesday, 2 August 2011. How You Want to Go: Vikings and samurai wouldn’t die of old age. Neither would Amy Winehouse. There’s something about going out young and hard that makes you a story worth telling. Growing old and disappearing is just what happens. There’s no narrative in it. How you die is what people can’t stop talking about. They might love you or hate you while you’re alive, but the way you go—that’s what lingers. It defines you. If you die doing something embarrassing, they’ll whisper about it for years. Slipping on your toothbrush. Bleeding out on a surgeon’s table. Catching some disease the news turned into a panic. These are deaths people don’t know how to talk about. They’re just sad and stupid. The heroic ones are different. Some guy pulls thirty orphans out of a burning hot air balloon and then flies it into a hidden military base. That’s the death people tell. Or you die grinning in the middle of something completely depraved and sexual with people who actually mattered. That becomes a legend. Most of it’s just context. A junkie overdosing in a train station bathroom is awful. A famous musician dying the same way is tragic and fascinating. Some old guy collapsing on a Wednesday afternoon in a nursing home is pathetic. That same guy peacefully falling asleep at his favorite lake—that’s almost enviable, even though it’s basically the same thing. But most of us don’t get to choose. A car crash. A heart attack in the grocery store. Some diagnosis that slowly eats you down. Nothing cinematic. Nothing anyone’s going to retell as a story. Which means how you die might not matter at all. What mattered—what’s been mattering the whole time—is whether you had enough moments worth living for. Enough times when you felt like you were actually here instead of just waiting for it to be over. The question you can’t escape is how you want to go. As if it matters. As if the ending gets to define everything before it. Maybe the only thing that counts is whether there were enough good moments to make dying seem less like the whole point. And you won’t know until it happens. How do you want to die? Monday, 1 August 2011. Baby Monster: Charlie Sunrise’s Fear: Sunday, 31 July 2011. Killing Time: Every weekend tips column is the same. Ten missions. Be kind to yourself. Do something stupid. Here’s what actually happens: you get home Friday and immediately don’t know what to do with yourself. You take a bath with wine. You pull on clothes you haven’t worn in years. You spend three hours searching the internet for photos of yourself, and around the time your neighbors might be wondering why you’ve been in front of a screen this long, you stop caring. You cry at a song you know is bad. The thing about weekends is you need permission to waste them. The world says optimize, improve, become someone. But mostly weekends are just survival—five days of holding it together, and then thirty-six hours of trying to remember what it feels like to not want anything from yourself. That might be a bath. That might be a movie you watch twice because your brain isn’t working right. That might be standing in your closet at 2am in a weird mood. Some people turn their weekends into projects. Good for them. I think the best ones are the quiet ones where you disappoint no one, especially yourself. Where you exist for a while without a plan. Where the only goal is to feel less tense on Monday morning than you did Friday night. Everything else is just killing time until then. Friday, 29 July 2011. Björk: Crystalline: “Crystalline” is austere but never cold. Björk’s voice carries all the warmth while the production stays precise and minimal, building gradually from almost nothing into something intricate. It’s from Biophilia, probably her most deliberately designed album, and the precision shows in every placement. I keep coming back to it when I want something that feels both sparse and complete, stripped down but somehow full. Tuesday, 26 July 2011. Same Cycle: Spend half your life online—actually spend it, more hours in the browser than with people who matter—and you start seeing something obvious: the internet doesn’t do new things. It repeats. The technology shifts but the patterns hold. Same cycle, every few months, forever. Watch what happens when disaster strikes. Someone dies, something breaks bad. Within seconds there’s your establishment media running sensational garbage for clicks, and your bloggers pointing out how sensational the garbage is, except their posts are just as engineered for shares. The loudest voice wins. That’s the game. Social networks are the same way. People ignore something for two years, then suddenly it’s revolutionary. A new platform appears and everyone acts like they discovered enlightenment. Invites get spammed around, everyone rushes in saying everything before now was garbage, Facebook was always terrible anyway (we said so), and three weeks later when it’s just some random and a teenager with nothing better to do, everyone disappears and pretends they were never there. Nobody even mentions they had an account. Celebrity deaths follow the exact same pattern. Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, whoever. RIP becomes a hashtag. Songs get shared. Everyone mourns. But then someone shows up like “Well people die in Africa too!” and acts like he just discovered morality. He’s not technically wrong. But we didn’t feel Africa because we didn’t experience Africa. We felt something from Michael. That’s not hypocrisy—that’s how being human works. But nobody’s comfortable with that answer, so instead everyone performs guilt at each other and pretends they’re better for it. I could list more. Politics, drama, shitstorms, it never changes. And here’s what actually drives it all: people want attention, so they take a position against whatever the crowd thinks, whether they actually care or not. It’s faster than being sincere. You watch people do this constantly—throw out some opinion they don’t give a shit about, wait for reaction, then move on to the next outrage and act like it never happened. Like a kid yelling to get the group’s attention but with nothing real to say when you actually look at him. He just wants to be included. So when the internet repeats this exact thing next week, don’t act shocked. Different names, same behavior. Different platforms, same people. Watch long enough and you stop being surprised. You just sit there numb, knowing you’ve seen this a thousand times and you’ll see it a thousand times again, and there’s nowhere to go. The internet doesn’t progress. It just circles. Monday, 25 July 2011. Killing English: Readers hitting scrambled prose so mangled it looped back to being almost beautiful—that’s how I knew the Google Translate thing was a disaster. But I’m getting ahead. Started in the eighties when I thought every word I wrote deserved an English translation. Someone actually volunteered. I paid them in shoes, lunches, and sex I didn’t think much about. Worked fine until the financial crisis. Suddenly I was in a basement writing dozens of articles a week—twenty-eight on the worst days. Translating all of that into English while barely sleeping made me sick, so I stopped. Just fed everything through Google Translate and published it. Some institute released a study claiming I caused four out of five brain tumors in the Western Hemisphere. Obviously bullshit, but it had a certain logic to it. I killed the English site. Pulled it all down. German-only now. Better that way. Can’t pretend to be global when I’m just one person barely keeping up with one language. The Russian, Swedish, Japanese plans are dead too. Saturday, 23 July 2011. Valerie Phillips: Don’t Be Pretty: There’s something resistant about Valerie Phillips’ sculptures—the way they seem designed to reject easy consumption, to push back against being turned into decoration. Aluminum and steel and awkward angles, nothing soft, nothing that lets you rest your eye on it for long. The title says it plainly: this isn’t about seduction or elegance. It’s about making something that doesn’t apologize for taking up space in an ugly way. Friday, 22 July 2011. In Rotation: This week scattered across different moods. Jazzy Jeff and Ayah’s “Back For More” is soulful and frictionless—the kind of album that Ayah’s voice carries without anyone noticing she’s doing the work. It’s free, which feels right. CREEP’s mixtape hit different. Two Laurens from New York, same exact taste, and they’ve assembled Gil Scott-Heron next to Jamie XX, slipped in Nosaj Thing, even Einsturzende Neubauten. It should not cohere but it does, and it makes you listen rather than asking permission first. Zoot Woman’s “Living In A Magazine” won’t stop playing. It’s synth-pop that sounds simple until you realize the work underneath—every synth line placed exactly right, lyrics about cars and romance and what media does to your brain. “It’s Automatic” is the kind of song that just exists without apology. Lil B’s “I’m Gay” does what it says on the label—provocation, entertainment, and this strange meditative undertone that actually works. This is what happens when you spend years multiplying yourself across the internet and somehow convince Kanye and Wayne to pay attention. Pigeon John made “Dragon Slayer” entirely alone—wrote it, produced it, played it. Songs like “The Bomb” have hooks that grab without feeling desperate about it. The kind of thing that makes you move even when you’ve decided not to. The Cool Kids’ debut finally landed. The hype from years back is gone, but the boom bap’s still there—Ghostface Killah, Bun B guesting, all the caliber you’d expect from people who’ve already done the work. It’s summer music, and there’s still something about boom bap that makes sense when the heat’s on. Thursday, 21 July 2011. They Always Won: Three kids from New York who figured out how to make hip-hop sound like the opposite of everything hip-hop was supposed to be—aggressive and stupid and funny all at once. Mike D, MCA, Ad-Rock. They’d take a sample, chop it to nothing, rap over it like they were barely awake, and somehow it’d hit harder than things people actually put thought into. The thing about the Beastie Boys was they never cared if you got the joke or if there even was a joke. It didn’t matter. The attitude was the subject. They were just better at being themselves than anyone else around, which is probably the only real rule in music that ever actually mattered. By the time they figured out how to make something genuinely beautiful—and they did, later, when nobody expected it—they’d already proven that you didn’t need to prove anything at all. Wednesday, 20 July 2011. Mona Kuhn: Home On The Sun: Mona Kuhn’s color photography has this warmth to it that’s almost unsettling—there’s comfort in the framing but something else underneath, a private quality that feels invasive to look at. Home on the Sun probably does what her best work does: treats light as a kind of mood rather than a technique. I’ve always been interested in photographers who understand that distinction. Her compositions suggest a quiet confidence, like she’s not trying to convince you of anything, just showing you what’s there. Wednesday, 20 July 2011. Properly Hooked: Something I need: endless distraction. Spend enough hours on the internet doing whatever it is I do, and you crack if something isn’t running on the other screen. Films work sometimes. What you really want is a series—animated, preferably. Something funny. Something you don’t have to work at. I’d made it through all the obvious ones. Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers. Once you hit those, you’re digging through cable looking for something new. That’s where I found Adventure Time. It’s about a kid named Finn, his shape-shifting dog Jake, and a place called Ooo that is thoroughly broken in the best way. Candy Kingdom with a hot dog princess. An Ice King who won’t stop stealing her. Giant horny snails. Wizard magic. Korean unicorn rainbows. Everything in that world is fractured and nobody there gives a shit. Every episode my brain pops. One of them had stuffed animals throwing a rave inside a depressed monster’s stomach, then crawling out its ass. Another had zombie businessmen taking over by making everyone fat. The Ice King is just a sad old man obsessed with kidnapping princesses. Nothing connects. Nothing needs to. Season three just started and I’m one of those people now. Can’t stop. It works perfectly as background noise—weird enough that you want to actually watch it, dumb enough that you don’t have to think, and every few minutes something so surreal happens that you look up just to catch it. What hooks me is how far it’s willing to go. The logic of that world is simple: if it’s funny or weird or sad or scary, it works. No need for anything to make sense. I watch it and think about how I want to draw like that—not the style, but the thinking. The refusal to explain. I don’t know if I’ll still be watching once the novelty wears off, but right now I’m properly hooked. Tuesday, 19 July 2011. Icona Pop: Manners: Icona Pop makes pop music that doesn’t perform. “Manners” is two minutes of efficient melody—bright synths, a solid hook, nothing grasping for your attention. There’s a deadpan quality to it, a refusal to blow things up or manufacture drama. The production does its job. The melody stays in place. It is what it is. There’s something cool about a song that knows its limits and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Friday, 15 July 2011. Somewhere And Nowhere: Fernando Tsuchiya exists in that strange space between myth and memory. He’s a real person who did actual things on actual roads—drifting a black AE86 through Tokyo in the ’80s, learning to drive sideways when nobody else understood why you’d want to—but by now he’s become something else. An idea. A ghost story that Japanese teenagers tell each other. The original. The legend that got filtered through anime and manga and video games until the boundary between the man and the myth collapsed completely. That gap between who he was and who he became, between the street racer in the actual night and the saint that exists in other people’s imaginations—that’s what gets to me. He’s somewhere and nowhere at once. Still alive, still real, but also untouchable. A name that means something to people who’ve never seen him drive, who know him only as a character, a reference, a whispered origin story. Thursday, 14 July 2011. Kicking and Screaming: There’s something about resistance that doesn’t require a reason to keep going. You can be dragged into something kicking and screaming, the whole way down, and still find yourself sitting there afterwards, not sure when you stopped fighting. Maybe that’s the thing about being pulled toward something—eventually your body relaxes into it, even if your mouth stays shut. Friday, 8 July 2011. Document Everything: Thursday, 7 July 2011. Small Talk: Standing at a hotel bar with Irina and Erik. Irina’s the kind of woman magazines were invented to feature. Erik’s the kind of man who speaks with his hands. I’m there because money requires it, which means I can’t tell Irina what I’m actually thinking, and I can’t tell Erik what I think of his business plans. First we have to do the small talk. The exchange of words that mean nothing, performed by people who mean nothing to each other, in service to an obligation that costs us more than it’s worth. I hate small talk. I hate it with the kind of intensity that should probably concern someone. The fake interest. The eyes that have been trained in their lifetime to look engaged while you’re actively dying inside. The assumption that you have to pretend to like each other before getting down to business. And I hate most people, genuinely can’t stand them, so the whole thing becomes this special circle of hell where I have to feign affection for someone I’d cross the street to avoid. Dogs sniff each other and move on. Humans invented this. The weird part is how little of it serves any actual purpose. If I cared about what Erik’s building, I’d ask. If I wanted to know about someone’s weekend, I’d ask. If this was actually about Irina as a person and not just her body, I wouldn’t be standing in a lobby pretending to care about small talk. But I do all this instead. I stand and pretend. I smile and nod. I talk about nothing, performing interest in things that don’t matter, burning time to avoid the actual moment. Here’s where I lose all credibility: I’m completely hypocritical about this. I despise small talk when I’m forced into it, but I absolutely require it when I’m the one being approached. Someone wants something from me? They better have done their research. Know my favorite color. Have thoughts on Munich summers. Say what I’m thinking before I think it. The rules are ironclad. And yes, they’re stricter the less I know you and looser the more attractive you are. I know I’m a fraud. I don’t mind. So here we are. Erik’s talking about his vision for some website nobody asked for. Irina’s slowly evaporating. I’m sending mental signals to the bartender: slip me a knife, pull the fire alarm, give me permission to start singing obscene jokes in operatic form. Anything. Nothing works. Champagne arrives instead. I lift my glass. I smile like I’m having a good time. I laugh at his punchline like I haven’t heard it a thousand times before, like it’s the first funny thing anyone’s ever said. I’m such a lie. Wednesday, 6 July 2011. Walnutwax: Stuart Mitchell’s photographs have this quality of being taken in rooms you recognize but can’t quite place—somewhere between a friend’s apartment and a memory of it. The Walnutwax series feels like watching someone arrange their life in front of a camera, domestic scenes lit so cleanly they almost seem staged, except nothing about them feels performed. There’s a particular eye at work here, someone who understands how light falls on skin and fabric, how a small gesture reads across a frame. You look at the images and you’re thinking about texture—the nap of a sweater, the finish on an old table—and about color in the way you only do when you’re paying attention. It’s the kind of work that makes you want to slow down when you’re moving through a room, noticing the actual world instead of just walking through it. Monday, 4 July 2011. Alexandra Tunnard: Thursday, 30 June 2011. Wirtshaus Electric: The Wirtshaus Tour didn’t apologize for mixing tradition and modernity—it was just a traveling beer hall that would set up in different cities with electronic music and DJs instead of polka bands. Someone figured out that you didn’t have to choose, that you could have both in the same room, getting drunk together. The concept feels obvious once it exists, which is usually how you know it’s good. There’s something right about a subwoofer rattling the wood and brass of a beer hall. It’s the kind of collision that shouldn’t work but does. Thursday, 30 June 2011. Mamy Rocks: There’s something genuinely funny about the idea that you can’t fully party when your parents are watching. The epileptic strobes, the bass that liquifies your organs, the beer-sticky floors—they’re all fine until you spot your mother at the bar, then suddenly you’re performing your own enjoyment instead of actually having it. That gap between generations at a club is real, and I think everyone who’s ever been to a rave knows exactly what that moment feels like. Beck’s Black Currant threw a party in Hamburg that leaned into this absurdity. They rented out the Oberpostdirektion, an old imperial postal building, and booked DJs that spanned the age spectrum—the young club regulars, the established electronic acts, and Ruth Flowers, who was 70 and still calling herself Mamy Rocks, spinning regularly at Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel parties. She was the real draw. The venue had retro stuff scattered around—Carrera slot car tracks—which sounds gimmicky but also honest in a weird way. Of course you can race toy cars at a rave while somewhere else in the building people are eating sausage sandwiches and getting slowly drunk. That’s Germany. What made it work was Ruth Flowers herself. She wasn’t a novelty act playing ironic grandma nostalgia. She was a proper DJ who’d been DJing longer than some of the other acts had been alive, and she was still booked by major fashion houses. The party wasn’t about merging generations so much as it was saying: some people just never stop. You don’t age out of electronic music and dancing and wanting a night out. Ruth Flowers didn’t get told she had to, and she didn’t go home early. The black currant beer was just the thing to hold in your hand. The real thing was watching a 70-year-old woman DJ at a packed club in Hamburg like it was the most normal situation in the world. Wednesday, 29 June 2011. Wastin’ Time: Sunday, 26 June 2011. Ten Little Missions: Wear something nice, bring a tablecloth and wine glasses to McDonald’s, have dinner there like it’s an actual restaurant. The people around you won’t know what to do with it. Download a CSS song and dance—for hours, for days, whatever. Close your blog with zero explanation. Just gone. No goodbye post, no farewell message—the people who followed it for years will wake up to a 404. Grow a Ryan Dunn beard. Get black-out drunk with friends and just push through. Lick everything for a full day, coat to doorframe to whatever you touch, and when people ask, blame childhood trauma. Tell someone you’re in love and give them the complete list: ten specific things, from romantic to explicitly sexual, and don’t leave anything unsaid. If they think you’re insane, move on to the next person. Donate to the WWF because they do real work and the panda logo is actually kind of perfect. Stop watching cat videos. That’s the whole thing. Friday, 24 June 2011. Brent Stirton: Rotting Souls: Stirton’s photography doesn’t flinch. He photographs what breaks down—ecosystems collapsing, bodies marked by disease and conflict, the raw material of documentary that most outlets won’t run or want to see. The title itself, Rotting Souls, suggests something theological in the grimness, but it’s really just what happens when you point a camera at the parts of the world that profit from invisibility. He works for National Geographic and other publications, but the pictures don’t feel corporate—they feel like the only honest thing in a room full of polite lies. I’ve always respected photographers who know that clarity requires unflinching proximity. Thursday, 23 June 2011. Carpark North: Everything Starts Again: Carpark North were the kind of band you could trust not to oversell what they were doing. Danish, straightforward, naming themselves after a parking lot like it was nothing. They made rock music that felt lived-in rather than performed, which meant their records had this quality where nothing needed to grab you—it just sat there being true. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Wednesday, 22 June 2011. Yuck: Shook Down: Put on Yuck and you’re not waiting for them to show up with some big idea. They’re just there, making songs that fit into your day without demanding attention. Shook Down’s the same way—honest stuff that doesn’t oversell itself. The kind of record you forget you’re playing until you realize you’ve heard it three times this week. Tuesday, 21 June 2011. Mixtape: Clean Your Mind: Your head fills up every day. Thoughts about people you can’t have, money you’ll never see, the constant hunt for something to feel alive on. It’s genuinely remarkable nobody loses it completely. So you run. Find a club, find a field in the sun, get in your car and drive with the windows down. Throw yourself at something—anything. Play the music loud enough that it swallows the thinking. It doesn’t fix anything. But catch the right song at the right moment—Lykke Li’s voice, Owen Pallett’s strings, Miike Snow’s melody hitting exactly where you needed it—and something gives. Not forever. Just long enough to stop panicking. You’ll go back to the clubs, back to the highways, back to playlists that promise to clean your mind. They never clean anything. The bad thoughts come back, usually worse. But for those few hours your head’s empty, your body’s moving, and that’s what matters. That’s all there is. Monday, 20 June 2011. The Interrogation Room: Donald Weber photographed interrogation rooms in Ukraine—the same institutional space, fluorescent and blank, where people end up after arrest. He spent years getting access, building this archive of the moment right after someone’s been picked up. No names, just a list of what they did: theft, prostitution, smuggling, drugs, rape. You see the face and you know which crime belongs to that person. What gets to me about this work is the refusal to make it mean anything beyond what it is. No context, no compassion angle, no art-world gloss. Just a photograph of a person and their fact. Over and over, different faces, same white walls, same system grinding forward. There’s something almost violent about how honest it is. I keep returning to these images. They’re what I’d call essential—the kind of photography that works because it doesn’t try to move you, doesn’t perform morality or insight. It’s just evidence. Thursday, 16 June 2011. Blue Sneakers and Other Fashion Crimes: I’ve been watching street fashion for long enough to know that everyone’s got an opinion and most of them are wrong. The white sneakers thing has gone on too long—endless parade of the same unblemished Adidas clones, or neon abominations that hurt to look at. What nobody’s doing is blue with stripes. Just blue. Simple blue with a stripe. That should be the move this summer but I know it won’t be. People in Teletubby costumes are always suspicious. Not sometimes—always. There’s something off about them, like they’re either headed to rob a bank or scoop up toddlers. The ones I see lurking around clubs definitely have a dealer somewhere and I want that number. Then there’s the metrosexual hipster thing that won’t die. Boys without any actual manhood, worried about their skincare routine, terrified of a full beard. Girls keep saying they want real men—stubble, sweater, something warm in the eyes—but they keep ending up with these hairless creatures anyway. Someone’s lying, probably everyone. I watched a girl stand in the corner of a club in grey everything, perfectly invisible, blending so completely into the dark walls that nobody saw her arrive or leave. She just slipped past security like a ghost. That’s its own kind of style. Fashion is half confidence, half not giving a shit, and that girl had both. You can’t buy that. The Japanese kid with the pink polka-dot tote? Perfect accessory, perfect moment, and yeah, all the photographers showed up for that bag more than anything else. It works because it’s uncomplicated. Tights and pantyhose should be burned. I remember being a kid, that impossible constriction, that awful genital feeling, the way they rip and cling. Nobody needed to invent those. Summer means ditching them entirely and I’d throw mine in a fire if I wore them. What really gets me is how little blue actually shows up in street fashion. Everyone plays it safe—black, white, neon, grey. But there’s something about a solid blue with a stripe that just works. Understated. Not trying. That’s the move. Wednesday, 15 June 2011. Sit Down First: It was actually a nice evening. We were staying with a friend, shoving warm wraps into our mouths, streaming terrible movies from the internet. Big bed, plenty of space. Then someone mentioned HIV. The thing about it is it starts like the flu—you hear nothing about it for ten years—then it hits you all at once. I’ve heard the story a thousand times. But this time the thought just kept circling in my head all night long. The next day I was Googling every symptom. Fatigue—yeah, I had that. Headaches—my constant companion. Rash on my right thigh. Diarrhea. A cough that felt like my lungs were trying to escape. General malaise. The internet is a genuine asshole when you’re already paranoid. For a solid week I was absolutely certain I had HIV. The final stage. Game over. I watched YouTube videos of young people who were infected but somehow still cheerful. Documentaries about new medications. Blogs from gay activists. Guides on how to tell my family. My coworkers. My gym buddies. My girlfriend. Everyone. I had my whole new life mapped out. So I went to the Berlin AIDS help center and got tested. The waiting room was covered in pamphlets about disease and homosexuality and weekly social gatherings for patients and their families. I was already imagining myself as a full member, finally finding real friendship, meeting the love of my life—all courtesy of a killer virus. Maybe this was where my actual life began. The staff were all nice. Detlev and Roman in the hallway, the campy receptionist, the over-talkative counselor, the round-faced doctor. Everyone was nice. Was this your first test, they asked. Yeah, I said, embarrassed. After they took blood, I had to wait half an hour. I sat on a bench in a small park around the corner and thought about basically everything. I ran through my sexual history like a reel of film. There was Sabrina at some terrible party, though she was only sixteen but something about—never mind. Bianca, who in certain circles was known to be very accommodating, suddenly made sense. She always smelled weird down there. Then there was Melanie. Melanie. Haven’t heard from her in years. Wonder if she’s even still alive. Of course I was scared. When you’re sitting on a wooden bench having convinced yourself for a week that you’re dying, mapping your entire sexual history onto possible routes of infection, already sure the test will come back positive, you’re terrified. Genuine, sweating, numb terror. Back in the waiting room they called my anonymous number. I shouted “Here!” and stumbled to the desk. The counselor glanced at the most important document of my entire existence and said, “Um… yes… let’s go to the counseling room. We’ll have privacy. Sit down first.” Sit down first? Sit down first?! Jesus Christ, I would’ve rather called my mom, run to church to confess, built a time machine and punched myself from six years ago in the nuts rather than fuck Sabrina, anything but sit down. Not sitting. Not happening. Of course the test was negative. Otherwise this would be written in a voice dripping with melancholy and shame, the kind of thing that would make even Julian Assange cry. She just wanted to show me what the rapid test looked like and pocket my fifteen euros. That was it. So life went on. No social gatherings with the AIDS community. No new best friends. No grand love affair. I went back to normal almost immediately, and I was almost disappointed by it. I kept waiting for that movie moment—where you suddenly realize how lucky you are, see everything differently, book a flight to Tokyo, donate to African orphanages, reorganize your whole life around family and meaning instead of slowly dying in an office waiting for retirement. It never came. We celebrated with beer and MDMA and danced until sunrise at some dingy bar in Kreuzberg, but mostly because it was a holiday the next day. The euphoria, the gratitude, the transformation—none of it stuck. Why? Maybe because those moments only exist while you’re in them. Maybe because too many kids actually get the diagnosis they’re terrified of. Maybe because HIV and AIDS are still out there and still killing people for real. The only thing that actually stuck is that now whenever I’m about to ditch a condom because I’m horny or I’ve decided to trust someone, I hear her voice: don’t be stupid. Who knows what’s already been in there. Or better yet, don’t do it at all. Just have a nice evening instead. Warm wraps. Shit movies. Good friends. Wednesday, 15 June 2011. Looking Again: Red Bull buried treasure chests across German cities one year. More than sixty of them scattered across more than sixty cities, each one hidden according to coordinates released online. Inside: event tickets to their sports spectaculars, limited-edition refrigerators, codes that unlocked more prizes. Transparent marketing machinery, obviously. I looked at the website, grabbed the coordinates for my nearest city, and did nothing with them. But friends who actually went out and found one—they had this genuine excitement afterward that caught me off guard. Not about the stuff inside. About the hunt itself. About stepping into the city with a map and coming out of it having found something real, like they were kids again. Red Bull understood this. They knew you don’t really stop wanting to find treasure; you just stop looking because you’re supposed to be grown up. So they created a space where looking again felt allowed. The strategy isn’t subtle—you can see the design of it—but that doesn’t make the experience feel false. Treasure hunts work. They always have. There’s something efficient about it. They identified something genuine that people want (small adventure, discovery, things that feel found rather than bought) and attached their brand to it. The machinery is visible but the longing is real. I never found a chest. But maybe that’s part of it too—the possibility, the fact that somewhere people were looking, that small corners of the city were briefly organized around mystery and the chance of something good turning up. For a moment the city is different. And then it isn’t. Tuesday, 14 June 2011. Gone Again: Best Coast doesn’t make a huge deal about anything. Bethany Cosentino’s voice is there—dreamy but solid, never reaching for something it doesn’t have. The guitars sit underneath like they’re thinking about something else. It’s the kind of indie rock that gets prettier the more you listen, not in a technical sense but in a way that feels accidental, like she stumbled into the production rather than built it. The band appears and disappears on its own clock, which is fine. You don’t need constant news from people you care about. Saturday, 11 June 2011. Better Times: There was this moment, maybe 2006 or 2010, where everything new that showed up felt like a gift. Not everything, but enough to make you mixtapes, enough to build a taste that stuck. Certain names became essential. Atmosphere’s The Family Sign is the kind of hip-hop that works because Slug actually means it. The storytelling matters more than the technical display, and Ant’s production knows to stay in its lane. It’s efficient—emotional without being corny, skilled without being showy. Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation still hits different. “To Zion,” “Doo Woop,” “Nothing Even Matters”—the praise isn’t overstated. It’s just generational talent doing what only it could do. I still get genuinely moved by it, which is embarrassing at my age but also fine. Gaga’s Born This Way was pure you-either-get-it-or-you-don’t. “Judas” and “Government Hooker” felt right even when the safer singles didn’t. It was exactly what she was trying to be, for better or worse. Bon Iver’s self-titled brought in collaborators and got ambitious. Vernon’s falsetto still sounds like it’s coming from some other dimension. The best tracks stick with you years later. Fink does warmth well—the kind of singer-songwriter stuff about feelings and relationships that doesn’t feel false. Seeing him live is worth the time invested. CSS, though. That Brazilian band captured a specific feeling about that era, and I miss what it felt like discovering them. Not just the music, but the moment. The energy of it. That window closing. Friday, 10 June 2011. Burn Down The City: Thursday, 9 June 2011. Cayal Unger’s Fade: Tuesday, 7 June 2011. The Shelf Life of Panic: It’s Monday again. Bin Laden’s still dead, which is somehow supposed to relieve something, but it doesn’t really. There’s always going to be some apocalypse on the news—the variables change, the panic stays the same. Today it’s EHEC, which I already know about because my email homepage deemed it important. I’m eating lunch without cucumber or tomato, very deliberately safe, watching Punkt 12 with the sound on. Katja Burkhard is doing the concerned face again. I’ve watched her do this same face for swine flu, bird flu, whatever three-letter plague the news decides to fear this week. She doesn’t have to practice it anymore—it’s built in. That seriousness, that “something terrible is happening” expression. It’s the same one every journalist in Germany uses. It’s the family-tragedy-in-provincial-town face. It’s not actually different from the others. What gets me is that she hasn’t aged. She hasn’t been taken by any of the things she reports on with such gravity. She’s been doing this for years, staying exactly the same, reporting on plagues that come and go while she stays perfectly anchored to her desk. I wonder sometimes if there’s something going on with Peter Kloeppel, if that’s why she’s immortal and untouched. But that’s not what I’m supposed to be thinking about while I watch the news. The report starts with four giant red letters on the screen. The music does that thing where it sounds ominous but you’re not quite sure why. I look back at my plate to make sure there are no vegetables on it. Clear. No cucumber. The report promises something real this time: corruption, a mystery, the kind of conspiracy that exists on television. No sex, no money, but actual substance—the sort of story where things get added to shipments and people disappear at station stops in Cologne. A merchant in Spain—call him the “official source”—sent cucumbers to the Hamburg market. 600 kilos less than what arrived there. Which is the wrong direction. The Spaniard had measured them, checked them, confirmed they were clean. But somewhere between Spain and Germany, between the field and the wholesale market, something was added or something was wrong or something happened at a stop in Cologne. In a functioning market economy, nobody adds 600 kilos of anything to a shipment for free, especially not contaminated vegetables. The correspondent is investigating vigorously. The footage is blurry, privacy-protected, pixelated into meaninglessness—except for the man in the RTL jacket with the microphone, still perfectly visible. He’s preserved, worth protecting. I’m pretty sure I see a forklift in one shot. The report cuts off before it gets anywhere, before any answer appears, promising resolution on a future broadcast. Like a German soap opera. Which is fitting, because this is pure theater. I get skeptical and search online for actual information. The more I read, the less afraid I get and the more annoyed I become. Every headline is another panic message, another reason to feel something is fundamentally wrong with the world. Instead of fear, I just feel defiant. I decide: no more cucumbers, and I’m done thinking about this. I don’t have the patience to wait for them to solve this mystery. The source of whatever this is will probably stay hidden or it won’t, and either way it won’t matter to me by the time the answer comes. It was probably cucumbers or probably animals or probably something else entirely. At least with the other outbreaks the names told you something—bird flu, swine flu—you could figure out where the danger supposedly came from. This one’s just a question mark in a warehouse somewhere. What I know from watching this stuff my whole life is that it doesn’t matter. People panic and the news amplifies the panic and then something else happens—Champions League matches on the same channel, vacation time opens up, some other scandal breaks—and everyone just forgets. The financial crisis, the suffering in the third world, EHEC, all of it fades the moment you stop looking. You go away for two weeks and the whole thing is gone. You watch football. You get distracted. I’ll probably forget about cucumbers entirely by the time anyone reads this. I’m counting on it. And I’m not worried because there’s always going to be another scare right after, a new thing to be afraid of, and most people will respond the same way: they’ll turn off the television and move on, which is actually the only sane response to any of this. Monday, 6 June 2011. Soundcheck: K.I.Z.’s back with “Urlaub fürs Gehirn” and they haven’t softened at all. Tarek, Maxim, Nico, and DJ Craft are making crude, funny, aggressive music—there’s literally a track called “In Your Mother”—but the provocation isn’t the whole thing. The musicianship is there too, it’s just not what anyone would call respectable. That’s kind of the entire point. Songs like “Abteilungsleiter der Liebe” show they can do romance if they feel like it, but that’s never going to be their lane. Austra is almost the opposite. Katie Stelmalas sings with this trained, operatic clarity over minimal synth and clean production. It sounds cold until she opens her mouth. There’s something about that restraint—reminds me of Fever Ray or The Knife—that becomes more intense the longer you listen. “Feel It Break” doesn’t waste space. Everything in there earned its place. Chiddy Bang’s “Peanut Butter and Swelly” doesn’t try to be clever. Summer rap from Philadelphia, electro samples, bouncy bass, Chiddy rapping in something close to grime. It’s pure soundtrack material—the kind of thing you put on for the park or the pool or Friday nights when you’re not thinking too hard, just moving. It knows exactly what it is. SebastiAn from the Ed Banger crew finally dropped “Total” and it’s the least immediate of these, but weirdly the more interesting too. There’s something almost wrong about his melodies—this small deliberate wrongness in tracks like “Love Motion” and “Ross Ross Ross” that makes them impossible to forget. He knows exactly how close to the edge he can step. Four Tet’s 2001 release, “Rounds,” is something else entirely. The production is so intricate and granular that listening feels like watching something restructure itself in real time. It’s hallucinogenic without the drugs. The album sounds like elves and fairies like the original description said, except I actually mean it—there’s something genuinely alien about the sound design. It makes you wonder what’s possible with synthesis. And then Battles with “Mirrored”—just pure math rock mayhem. Complex polyrhythms, glitchy synths, no melody, no regard for ease. It’s aggressive in a way that most rock music isn’t anymore. Gets my heart rate up just from sitting with it. Friday, 3 June 2011. The Boy: I keep thinking about the video. Two and a half minutes of a body—thirteen years old, face purple, covered in cuts and burns and bullet holes, genitals mutilated—with someone describing each wound. His name was Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was arrested at a protest in southern Syria in April 2011 and disappeared for a month. When his family got him back, he was like that. When a body shows up that destroyed, it becomes something else. People started screaming his name in the streets. “We are all Hamza Ali al-Khateeb.” Facebook made him a martyr. He became what every uprising needs—a body so obscene that it can mean everything to everyone fighting back. I understand the logic. I understand how some things are obscene enough to crack something open in people that won’t close again. But understanding and watching aren’t the same thing. What got to me wasn’t the politics. It was the moment right after. I closed the video, scrolled to the next page, and there was Google’s Doodle for International Children’s Day. Something bright and colorful and happy. A celebration of childhood. I was done after that. I didn’t have anything. Wednesday, 1 June 2011. A Good Month: It’s just after four in the morning. Night. I’m the only living person in this unwieldy office complex, apart from the black shadow that drifts across the bare walls and makes me question my sanity. Empty Red Bull cans scattered around me. Fast-food wrappers. Magazines. My eyes stay fixed on the monitor. I’m not going home tonight. A month ago I moved this operation into Betahaus and turned what used to be a hobby into an actual job. With set hours and meetings and brainstorming sessions. Or, in our case, stumbling through the door in the afternoon still wired on whatever was left in our systems, flinging coffee around the courtyard, staring at the office plant until it becomes a weapon. But whether you believe it or not, these past few weeks have meant something to me and the rest of the team that I can barely process. The weight of it keeps me up. Most of the new people following this have no idea who’s actually behind it. My face, my past, what I’ve lived through. Sometimes I think that’s a shame, but mostly it makes sense. The real intimate stuff doesn’t make it into these dispatches anymore. The people who know me from way back know I’m basically chaos in human form. The attention span of a mayfly with a grudge. So any semblance of professionalism from me almost qualifies as a miracle. And yet I’m surprisingly good at the job. Calendars, spreadsheets, meetings with people who matter and some who don’t. Writing my way through whatever the week throws at me. Sections, themes, reliability. Ideas I steal from the next table over at lunch, some tiny Asian restaurant, sometimes Sudanese. The machinery runs. But nothing goes exactly as planned. There was a Wednesday where we drank wine and beer straight through the night, ate our way through every vegan spot we could find, and watched some terrible Australian film about women with too much of everything. Woke up the next afternoon three-deep in a bed in Wrangelkiez with hangovers thick as fog, then had to evacuate because of a bomb they found nearby. Work was impossible. I wanted coffee and sun and whatever painkillers I could find. It’s always risky to try and monetize the thing you love. Financially, sure, but also in your head. I only believe we’ll actually pull this off because I love what we do and I trust the people doing it with me. We’re friends. That counts for something—the arguments and the faith and all the stupid talk in between. The month taught me how fast everything moves. The idea never sits still. You learn something every day when you’re not busy throwing things at each other or just messing around. It’s like a real-world role-playing game where you don’t know what happens next—chances and failures, decisions you’ll have to live with. So I’m changing too. Trying new things, bringing old stuff back. We’ll probably move again soon, to some broken-down artist commune a few blocks over. This is Kreuzberg, after all—it has to be. The world domination thing keeps looking closer. Not that I trust any of this will actually work, but at least the exhaustion feels purposeful, and the chaos feels like mine. Monday, 30 May 2011. Soundcheck: Joy Denalane’s been back in my ears. Maureen came five years after Born & Raised, and her voice has that quality where it settles into a room and makes you hear what you’re already feeling—clarifying rather than amplifying. Soul in its simplest form: just a voice and whatever it touches. DJ Mad’s mixtape is free, which changes everything. Nas, Kid Cudi, Gil Scott-Heron in the same pocket. It’s the kind of thing that plays in the background of a summer you barely remember until it’s over. What’s Going On is impossible to listen to without hearing the anger underneath. Marvin made this against everything Motown wanted—against Vietnam, against Tammi Terrell’s death. You hear the fury in the horns, the way they cut at you. Raw in a way that polished soul records never are. A Tribe Called Quest’s Anthology doesn’t need defending or reissuing. The songs are still here, still exact. Monarchy’s behind their masks throwing remixes into summer. It works. Still waiting for Phillipa Brown to release new Ladyhawke. The 2008 album was as close to perfect as pop-electronic gets. I check obsessively like she owes me something, knowing she doesn’t. Friday, 27 May 2011. Oh Canada: Thursday, 26 May 2011. The Outside Pressure: Beer gets warm in five minutes. That’s the main thing I notice about summer—everyone’s in the park like it’s freedom itself, and maybe it is, but there’s always this undertone that if you’re not there, you’re wasting the season. The media pushes it relentlessly. TV stations basically check out in the afternoons, radio fills the silence with festival listings and cinema schedules, and the whole culture tells you the same thing: outside is where life happens. Inside is where failures live. I get it. Summer looks good in other people’s photos. But there’s something almost coercive about the expectation, the way people storm out of their apartments the second the sun shows up like they’ve been ordered to be happy, to be social, to prove they’re living the right way. The ones who stay in become invisible failures in their own minds. But I wonder how much of that enthusiasm is real. How many people actually want to be packed into a crowded lake in August heat, and how many are just terrified of being the one person who stayed home? I used to think the ones going outside were emotionally stronger, more able to resist peer pressure, but now I think the opposite might be true. Maybe they’re the ones who caved. The real weirdness is that we’ve made this binary. Outside is living. Inside is dying. As if joy can only happen under open sky, as if a good book or a quiet afternoon requires justification. I think the truth is simpler than any of this. Outside isn’t mandatory. You don’t owe the season anything. You can sit in the park with a beer and friends if that’s what you actually want, and you can stay inside if that’s what you actually want, and neither of those things makes you a better or worse person. The summer’s going to happen regardless. You might as well spend it doing something that doesn’t feel like an obligation. Wednesday, 25 May 2011. Richard Kern: Face to Panty Ratio: Kern’s been shooting explicit photographs since the eighties, and the work doesn’t apologize for itself or for the women in it. There’s a directness to his stuff that makes most art photography look precious by comparison—he’s interested in what people actually look like, how they actually move, not some mediated version of sexuality. The ratio in the title is his own joke: how much face, how much body, what’s the right proportion for the picture to work. It’s funny and it’s honest, which is rarer than it should be. Tuesday, 24 May 2011. Easy Please Me: Katy B stripped “Easy Please Me” down to almost nothing—just her voice and minimal production, which was a strange move after building her reputation in the UK garage and grime world. I remember the first time hearing it, waiting for some elaborate flourish or a second voice to arrive, but it never did. There’s something genuinely stubborn about it, refusing to be exactly what people expect even after you’ve proven you can nail that formula. Quieter than you’d think, which somehow feels more honest than anything that’s trying to prove something. Sunday, 22 May 2011. Two Designs: Xzibit’s “Pimp My Ride” is what happens when someone with money decides to decorate a car with every impulse at once. LEDs, subwoofers, custom paint, whatever. The result looks like a vision board threw up on a Cadillac. It’s not taste failing—it’s the complete absence of any framework for taste at all. So Mazda and Vice did a design competition for the Mazda2 where they brought in actual designers. Nik Nowak, a few people doing experimental 3D and digital work. Not car guys, not marketing people—actual people who spend their time thinking about form and proportion. The descriptions mention “urban 3D designs,” “silhouettes,” “color storms.” Language that suggests they’re designing, not adding. The difference between customization and design comes down to intention. Customization is what you do to something that already exists. Design is the thing itself—proportions, how surfaces work, what you choose to leave alone. Most cars are so buried under regulations and marketing research and cost targets that design barely survives in them. Every decision gets defended by a spreadsheet. I don’t know if the competition resulted in anything real. Usually these things don’t. But it was interesting that someone at Mazda decided to let people who actually think about objects come look at a car and reimagine it. No brief, no research, no approval from the brand committee. Just: here’s a platform, go design. Most cars are compromises. The ones that stick with you are the ones where someone actually made a choice. Friday, 20 May 2011. Late Night Records: Moby’s Destroyed showed up in my week made of hotel rooms and airports. Fifteen songs, each one sitting in its own quiet space. You don’t notice it’s playing until you’re twenty minutes in and realize you’ve been listening instead of doing whatever else you were supposed to be doing. Recorded on analog gear—doesn’t matter, just sounds right. Deichkind’s Arbeit nervt comes at you with the opposite energy. Fat beats and lyrics that sound like they came from someone three days into a party who still has strong opinions about everything. Crude and fun and doesn’t apologize for any of it. That’s the whole thing. Danger Mouse and Daniele Lupi took five years making Rome. Five years with Jack White and Norah Jones somewhere in the mix, building something patient and real and completely free of digital bullshit. You feel the work in it. Natasha Khan—Bat For Lashes—has a voice that just catches and fills the room with something strange when she uses it right. Two Suns is older now, couple of years back, but she writes about love and pain in a way that doesn’t get stale. You want new stuff from her constantly but you keep coming back to this one. Die Schlümpfe made a techno album somehow. The Smurfs doing dance music in 1995 and it actually works. It’s dumb and perfect and I have no idea why it exists, but here we are. Tracy Chapman’s self-titled first album is what teaches you what’s possible when someone actually knows what they’re doing. Her voice alone—she just understands something. Every song hits you different and leaves you better. That’s not me being dramatic, that’s just what listening to it does. Thursday, 19 May 2011. Can’t Find Entrance: Those Dancing Days was a Swedish band doing that kind of indie pop that sneaks up on you—melodic, a little precious, but sincere about it. I can’t remember where I first heard them, probably some music blog from the mid-2000s when that was still how you discovered things. The song stuck around in the back of my head the way good pop does, light and specific at the same time. Their records had this optimism to them, this belief in the potential of a three-minute song to be enough, to matter. They’re not household names and they’re not supposed to be. Sometimes the best thing a band can do is make something beautiful that finds exactly the people it was meant to find, and everyone else walks past without noticing. That’s its own kind of gift. Tuesday, 17 May 2011. The Fourth One: I watched the first Pirates in 2003 and remember being surprised by how weird Johnny Depp was allowed to be. The whole thing moved like something half-sunk, all excess and randomness, and it shouldn’t have worked but it did. Two more sequels followed and by 2007 it felt like the series had reached its natural stopping point. Then Disney made another one. This time the object is the Fountain of Youth. Penélope Cruz plays the romantic interest (Keira and Orlando are gone), and the plot hits every beat from the previous three. Sword fight. Betrayal. A ship. A magical MacGuffin. Depp swaying and making weird faces. Barbossa showing up. Keith Richards in a pointless cameo. It’s technically competent, which is almost worse than if it were openly bad, because it means someone was comfortable with just repeating themselves. The fourth Pirates isn’t a failure. It’s the feeling of watching a photocopy of a photocopy. The first three had something because Depp and whoever was writing seemed to be discovering the character as they went. This feels like someone filling in a template. The effects are bigger, the budget is bigger, the expectations are clearly bigger. But there’s no actual spark. Just the same moves executed with more money. Without Keira and Orlando, something shifts in the dynamic that this movie doesn’t acknowledge. They provided counterbalance—characters you could believe in, reasons to care whether any of this mattered. Without them it’s just Depp and Cruz on a ship, and Cruz is capable, but she’s a different kind of presence. The whole thing plays wrong without that anchor to something resembling normalcy. Depp’s still the only thing worth watching. He commits to being the weirdest presence in every frame in a way that’s almost generous—he’s really giving you the strangeness, the physicality, the commitment to not making sense. But even his full commitment can’t quite overcome the fact that I’ve already watched this. Three times over. I don’t need to watch it again. The trilogy didn’t need to continue. It ended at a place where you could walk away satisfied. A fourth movie feels like the moment a band puts out a reunion album that nobody asked for—technically competent, financially sensible, spiritually empty. Once something becomes a formula, it’s done, even if they make ten more. Pirates became a machine that prints money, and machines don’t get weird. They just repeat themselves in slightly different lighting. Monday, 16 May 2011. Ryoichi Maeda: Ryoichi Maeda makes work that stays with you in quiet ways. His digital pieces and installations have this quality of being both extremely deliberate and somehow half-accidental—like he’s discovered something and is showing you the edges of it without explanation. You look at them once and they register. You think about them later and they register differently. There’s a precision to how he builds space, whether through video or sound or light, that suggests he understands something most of us are still learning. Saturday, 14 May 2011. Boys and Girls: Thursday, 12 May 2011. The Maritim: We were at the Maritim for some event I’ve half-forgotten. The lobby was all brass railings and glass—the kind of hotel that made you feel like you should be doing something important just by standing there. Wenke was better at that than I was. We found a quiet corner somewhere and sat without much to say, which was fine. I remember her face in the light from one of those big windows, and thinking how right she was in that space, like the hotel had been designed with her in mind. Tuesday, 10 May 2011. Hasisi Park: Like a Dirty Dog: Friday, 6 May 2011. Emily-Jane Robinson’s Dreamland Stories: Wednesday, 4 May 2011. Light Search: A Swarovski film with no dialogue, no plot, just light and crystal. Bruno Aveillan directed, which meant the brand wasn’t cutting corners. Yiqing Yin designed the world. Two figures searching through it without ever explaining what they’re searching for. Three minutes, and every second is composed. It’s the kind of commercial that works because nobody tried to make you understand it. No voice-over, no message, no moment of meaning forced on you. Just movement through surfaces. Wordlessness gives you permission to not think too hard, just watch. I don’t know if it changed anything or sold anything or mattered beyond itself. Doesn’t feel like it’s trying to. That might be the whole point. A luxury brand spending real money on three minutes of pure image, trusting that image is enough. It’s rarer than it should be. Tuesday, 3 May 2011. Above Görli: The vantage point from the café above Görlitzer Park is the right distance from the chaos. Close enough to watch it happen—the dealers, the kids on the grass, the old men at the picnic tables, everyone pretending they’re not watching everyone else—but removed enough that it feels like you’re observing a machine, not getting ground up in it. Berlin has a lot of parks but Görli is the only one that feels like it has a pulse. There’s no pretense about making it pretty or keeping it clean. It exists and the city flows through it: people buying, people selling, people just lying in the sun because they have nowhere else to be. There’s something honest about that. I went up there one afternoon and just sat. The light was doing that thing it does in late spring—not quite gold but getting there. A band was setting up in the corner. Tourists were taking photos of the same thing everyone else has already photographed. The park didn’t care. It kept being what it was, which is a place where you can see how the city actually works if you’re willing to look at it without judgment. You come back to Görli the same way you come back to a bar that doesn’t try—not because it’s great, but because it’s real. Monday, 2 May 2011. I’m A Happy Girl: Friday, 29 April 2011. Hurts: Illuminated: Hurts are one of those bands that made you feel less alone in the dark. Their whole thing—the synths, the reverb, Theo Hutchcraft’s voice drifting through all that neon melancholy—it was perfect for late nights and the kind of thinking you don’t do in the daytime. They never got huge, which feels right somehow. The biggest bands are rarely the ones that actually matter to you. Friday, 29 April 2011. Recent Records: The Weeknd’s House of Balloons is authentic R&B, the kind that doesn’t dress up what it’s about. Abel Tesfaye knows the music is there to make you feel what you’re already feeling, and he’s efficient about it—just voice and beat and whatever you’re thinking about someone specific. Katy B’s debut is half great, half filler. The dubstep-influenced tracks have something real going on, all space and air, but then it settles into the same generic pop everyone’s making. You want more from her. She’s got something, just hasn’t figured out what to do with it yet. tUnE-yArDs requires a certain amount of embracing weirdness. Merrill Garbus doesn’t make easy music—it’s experimental and off-kilter, chilly in a way pop usually isn’t. If you can sit with something that deliberately strange, she’ll take you somewhere actual. Frank Ocean is floating around the Odd Future scene through Tyler, the Creator, but he’s got soul that most people don’t even aim for. His label signed him and then ghosted him, which is beyond stupid, but you can feel it in his music—not anger exactly, just complete defiance. He doesn’t need them and he knows it. The Beastie Boys came back like they’d never stopped, which is both incredible and kind of crazy to think about. Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 opens into this early-80s New York thing and it actually works. They can still make everyone else in the genre look like they’re trying too hard. Snoop’s been doing this forever—this is his eleventh album—and you can hear it. The Doggystyle thing is decades gone. Everything’s slicker now, more produced, more 2011. But Snoop hasn’t changed, which might actually be the whole point. The voice is still there. Everything else moves around it. Thursday, 28 April 2011. Sadness Is A Blessing: Lykke Li’s sadness doesn’t perform. There’s no redemption arc in her work, no healing narrative or lesson learned—she just moves through heartbreak with the kind of honesty that most artists spend their whole careers avoiding. Listen to the albums where she leans all the way into sorrow and you notice she’s not interested in making you feel better, only in being true to what she actually feels. That’s rarer than it should be. Thursday, 28 April 2011. Lou O’ Bedlam: Girls Portraits: Lou O’ Bedlam’s Girls Portraits sit in this uncomfortable space between technical mastery and deliberate wrongness. The faces are rendered with almost photographic precision, but there’s something off about every one—the proportions aren’t quite right, the expressions feel both familiar and alien, the color choices are deliberately unsettling. It’s the work of someone who understands beauty well enough to know how to break it. There’s a dark humor underneath, not the kind that announces itself—more like a private joke, or maybe an insult wrapped in a compliment. I keep coming back to them because they refuse to be likable. Tuesday, 26 April 2011. Fashion Against AIDS: You want to dismiss corporate charity—H&M using AIDS awareness to polish their brand feels like the textbook play. But the company has reach that most nonprofits would kill for. They’ve got stores in every city, young audiences streaming through them constantly. Point that infrastructure at a public health message and things actually happen. The self-interest is obvious. And the awareness still builds. I stopped trying to separate the motives a while ago. Tuesday, 26 April 2011. Betahaus: Found it after a day of searching—one illegal tour and everything was clear. Betahaus. This was the place. The best desk in the best room, and I claimed it immediately. Decorated it with whatever was lying around: magazines, pen holders, cola bottles. That’s how you stake territory in a shared workspace. Moving the whole operation out of an apartment into actual office space meant dealing with the chaos we’d let accumulate. We needed structure. Plans. Actual systems instead of just vibes and luck. The goal was straightforward: more articles, better work, more variety. And suddenly, sitting at a real desk with other people working around you, it felt possible. There’s something almost obscene about how grown-up I’ve become. I commute to work instead of rotating between the park and whoever’s apartment. Lunch is scheduled. We have meetings about the future that sound like actual plans instead of reassuring ourselves it’ll work out somehow, which is also, let’s be honest, how we actually operated before. But there’s something satisfying about the routine now, the structure, the pretense that we’ve figured something out. The whole thing is funded by comments. Every troll comment, every pointless flame war in the comment section—that becomes money in the account. I’m not going to explain the mechanics because if the trolls figured out they’re literally paying for this, they’d stop. And we can’t afford to lose them. So let them keep coming, keep saying dumb shit. They’re quite literally funding the desk, the workspace, eventually a nice plant. We owe them everything and they have no idea. Friday, 22 April 2011. Ellis Scott, Actually: Thursday, 21 April 2011. Countdown TV: I’d catch these Japanese countdown shows late at night, flipping through channels, and suddenly forty-five minutes have gone by and I’m waiting to find out what’s actually number one. There’s something stupidly effective about the format—the suspense, the performances, idols looking like they were designed in a computer somewhere, the glittery set that’s been the same since maybe 2010. You don’t need to know the songs to get hooked by the structure itself, the way they drag it out, the climax they’re building toward. Once you start watching, you’re committed to seeing it through. It’s probably the most efficient music delivery system ever invented. Wednesday, 20 April 2011. Rafale: Everglades: Monday, 18 April 2011. Gamers Heart Japan: I remember when Gamers Heart Japan happened—this campaign where the gaming community just showed up with money. No grand gestures, no morality plays, just people with enough disposable income deciding it mattered and giving. The donations added up. There’s something I like about that: straightforward, quiet, no need to turn it into content or virtue. Just people helping. Sunday, 17 April 2011. Orgy of Irrelevance: The way I’d describe re:publica 2011: take the two biggest nerds from every high school graduating class, the ones even teachers won’t talk to, hand them each an iPhone and iPad, and lock them in a hall with beer and Club Mate for three days. Except it’s real and it costs money to get in. I went expecting something—I’m not even sure what. The promise of it, maybe, this place where people were building things and thinking clearly and creating without someone telling them what was acceptable. Instead I found a lot of people very serious about the wrong things. Two hours of talks about ancient defunct social networks, parties that felt like a church youth group discovering Club Mate, endless lectures about which Facebook button was newest. The only moment that landed was when actual outside people showed up—people doing real work somewhere else—and talked about their actual lives. Everything else was people treating the tools like the point itself. Some kid in glasses giving solemn lectures about APIs while someone projected badly flirted messages on a screen. By flirted I mean people basically screaming “please fuck me” in 140 characters and calling it digital communication. What got to me was realizing these people had become the official representation of German internet culture. Nobody elected them. They were just loud and on Twitter. And now when regular people encountered “internet culture,” it was filtered through people who wanted nothing more than to be known for being known. No wonder people are scared of the internet. I know the actual internet is nothing like that. I know the real work happens elsewhere, with actual curiosity, with people who aren’t constantly harvesting attention from the same platforms. But it doesn’t matter. These people are in the press. They’re at the conventions. They’re what people see. You can watch something die in real time and be completely powerless to stop it. The possible-self of the whole thing—where something real could happen—got buried under people who were never interested in anything bigger than existing publicly. And all you can do is watch. Saturday, 16 April 2011. Simple Math: There’s something about Manchester Orchestra that gets under your skin without asking permission. Not flashy, not trying to be clever—just these raw, wound-up songs about doubt and desire and the way your life can feel like it’s collapsing while you’re standing still. Simple Math was the album that did it for me, that moment when a band stops holding back and just writes what’s actually happening in their chest. The mathematics of it is brutal: you add up all the small failures and betrayals and lost moments, and you get yourself at three in the morning wondering what it was all for. That’s what this record is. No answers, no neat resolution. Just the shape of that question. Friday, 15 April 2011. Ulrike Biets: Thursday, 14 April 2011. Out Clean: No Jesus, no redemption arc. She was done at twenty-three after five years in porn and just said it plainly: no regrets. That was what made Sasha Grey actually different. She didn’t need to reframe what she’d done as something it wasn’t, didn’t need to pretend she’d been damaged by it or saved from it. She just did it, and then she stopped. What made her an actual icon was that she seemed genuinely unbothered by the shame that’s supposed to cling to that kind of work. She collaborated with Terry Richardson, gave interviews where she talked about the industry with a frankness that made people uncomfortable. Not defensive, not performing virtue, just honest. She looked like she was having the time of her life in a way that didn’t require any moral reckoning afterward. That’s rarer than it should be. By the time she left, she’d documented it all in a book with Vice. No scrubbing of the past, no desperate redemption arc. Moving into “serious” acting felt almost incidental—just the next thing, not a statement, not a recovery. Just time for something else. What stuck with me about it was the clarity. Someone who did a thing completely and then left when she was ready, without needing the thing to have changed her in some fundamental way. The work was the work. She was still herself. Then she wasn’t in that world anymore. That’s it. Wednesday, 13 April 2011. Re:publica 2011: Berlin. Three days in the Friedrichstadtpalast talking about the internet. The usual crowd showed up—social media consultants packaging their opinions as expertise, actual Twitter personalities, bloggers wondering if they’d become irrelevant, company people in polo shirts trying to look interested. Teresa Buecker was going to talk about love. Sascha Lobo was explaining why internet trolls were fundamentally stupid. Heiko Hebing had something about politics and the web. I was there to cover it for the blog, but mostly because I wanted to be around people who still thought this stuff mattered enough to show up for it. The whole thing had a particular energy. Nerds, actual conversations, actual belief that the internet could be shaped by people like us, that it might be ours to build on. This was before everything hardened, before the algorithms took over, before it became clear that it was never going to be what we thought it was. We had this stupid code word for readers—Bananarama. If someone spotted me around the conference and said it, they got to choose between blog stickers or a kiss from my date. I recommended the stickers. It was dumb and harmless and felt transgressive in a way that’s hard to explain now. Looking back, it was just a conference. But the internet felt different then. Felt like it had potential beyond what it became. We believed it, anyway. We believed it could be ours. Tuesday, 12 April 2011. Bare Facts: Tuesday, 12 April 2011. Alone With It: The best listening happens alone. And I mean alone—no one else in the room, and ideally not much on you either. Not in some scientific way, though the obvious reading is just that: sound without barriers hits different. It’s more that being alone is when you stop managing how you feel. Pretty Lights builds something you have to pay attention to—that production is generous, unfolds over time, reveals itself. Scott Matthew does something similar, just voice and nothing else. MDNR has that same energy. None of it works as background. Music in a room full of people is always social. Even alone but half-listening, you’re still editing. But when it’s just you, when you’ve cleared everything away and there’s nothing between you and the sound, that’s when you actually hear it. That’s when a song becomes something real instead of something you’re supposed to like. So yeah. Shirt off, speakers up. Let the sound do what it does. Monday, 11 April 2011. A Girl And Her Room: Rania Matar’s photographs of teenage girls in their bedrooms are the kind of intimate documentation that feels almost invasive until you realize how much permission is embedded in each frame. These are spaces people have shaped for themselves when they think no one’s looking—the posters, the clutter, the careful arrangements that make a small room feel like the entire world. There’s something both vulnerable and defiant about letting someone photograph your private space, and Matar captures that contradiction. You’re seeing what someone needs around them to feel less alone, the small details that say more about a person than any posed portrait ever could. The work reminds me that the rooms we make are the first draft of who we want to be. Monday, 11 April 2011. God Shave The Queen: Saturday, 3 a.m. We’re in a shuttle to Munich, all half-dead, each of us holding four beers because at that hour the logic was that we couldn’t let them go to waste. My stuff is still in the hotel room. Not getting that back. That’s how the week at Volvo Snowbombing in Mayrhofen ended. The festival’s premise is absurd—ski in the morning, live music at night, repeat until you can’t stand up. Somehow it works. The British crowd that shows up is genuinely happy about it. Thousands of them, wasted, and yet polite. No brawls. The people running it—the PR guys, the journalists—are actually cool, not the usual dead-eyed festival machinery. That matters. I was supposed to interview Mark Ronson, Ms. Dynamite, Fatboy Slim at some point. I did. I have no memory of what I asked them. It doesn’t matter. The performances blur. The Prodigy played, 2manydjs got the crowd moving, Magnetic Man was there. Pendulum is the one I remember. I was awake when they played, more or less, and it was the only set I could watch straight through. Everything else is strobes and bass and Black Bull stealing the rest. There was a guy in the hotel bar playing keys to maybe thirty people, and he was probably better than half the headliners. Just him and a keyboard, no production, no mystique. A week where half of it I don’t actually remember, and it’s still one of the better weeks I’ve had. Sunday, 10 April 2011. The Wirtshaus: The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour is designed around a simple inversion: instead of building a venue that directs all attention toward the stage, they built a space where you can sit down, play cards with the musicians, have an actual conversation. The infrastructure serves community instead of spectacle. It’s a small thing, but worth noting because most venues work the opposite way now. Everything is designed to funnel attention toward performance—the layout, the lighting, the volume. Even intimate clubs have that built-in hierarchy: you’re there to witness something. The Wirtshaus flips it. The music happens, but it’s almost incidental. The real design is that you can sit. The tour travels through Germany in a converted vinegar factory. Frittenbude and Tom Deluxx are playing Frankfurt on April 21st. Neither band is remarkable, but that’s kind of the test of the concept—can a venue be interesting when the entertainment isn’t the point? Apparently, yes. It’s the kind of space I’d want to design: one that trusts people to be there without performing their presence, that assumes conversation is the default and music is the bonus. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Friday, 8 April 2011. Birdy: Skinny Love: There’s a moment in Birdy’s cover of “Skinny Love” where her voice just disappears into itself, all breath and fragility, and you realize she’s not trying to match Bon Iver’s falsetto or own the song in some younger artist way. She’s just following the melody wherever it goes, pulling you with her. The whole album sits in that space—pale and hushed, full of covers that sound less like interpretations and more like she’s overhearing something private. It’s the kind of thing that feels almost uncomfortable to listen to, like you’re intruding on somebody’s morning. That was the whole appeal, I think. Not mastery or reinvention, just someone very young making these songs feel even more exposed than they already were. Thursday, 7 April 2011. Ecstatic Hobos: Wednesday, 6 April 2011. CockNBullKid: Breathless: Tuesday, 5 April 2011. Nudy Kitty: No one around to shake the day off—no friend, no dog, not even a massage stick. The stuffed animals are what you’ve got. Pull the dusty things out, light some candles, and work with it. Silly, but it does the job. Like being five, except deliberate this time. Frank Ocean slows everything down. Massive Attack for the weight and the pull. Paul Kalkbrenner for that thinking quality, a song that flows through you as much as around you. The right music already knows what you need. There’s something about old fabric, the way a pillow gives, the comfort built into something designed for holding. The candlelight warm and dark enough that everything else disappears. Twenty minutes where nothing else exists. After that you clean up. Everything goes back. But there was a moment when that was your whole world. Monday, 4 April 2011. Thieve: Nailed It: Saturday, 2 April 2011. In Print: This is a memory now, but at the time it felt almost impossible. Burda wanted to make a magazine out of the website. Real paper, real copies, real newsstands. The whole thing had been locked down so completely that I couldn’t mention it to anyone. My parents had no idea. My friends had no idea. It was this secret sitting in my chest for months. They’d identified what they called a publication gap—a space in the market that nobody else had even noticed. They wanted us to fill it. The name was too long for a cover, so it became A&P instead of AMY&PINK. Three letters. It sounded more official that way, more like something that actually belonged on a newsstand. The test issue was going to be bilingual, limited print run, available at newsstands across Germany and Austria in May. €3.50. They were flying in international correspondents. Everything was bigger, glossier, more permanent than the website ever felt. I didn’t actually believe it would work. Print felt like the wrong bet even then—the internet was already happening, and committing to paper seemed like fighting an obvious tide. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about what it would mean to hold something physical that I’d worked on, to see it on a newsstand, to know it existed as an object and not just a URL. We were going to have to buy so much of the print run ourselves just to make sure there was enough money for a second issue. Nobody said this directly, but we all understood: the only way this magazine existed beyond the test issue was if we supported it ourselves. That uncertainty—standing right at the moment when print still seemed possible, before everyone agreed the internet had already won—that’s what I remember most. Friday, 1 April 2011. Born With It: I fell down a Reddit rabbit hole about desire—specifically the kind you can never act on. Thousands of people working through the same uncomfortable question: if gay people didn’t choose their sexuality, and pedophiles and zoophiles didn’t choose theirs, what’s the difference? The answer is consent. Homosexuality can exist between consenting adults. Child and animal abuse can’t, because there’s no consent possible. One person’s freedom depends on another person’s powerlessness. That’s not ambiguous. But that’s not what stuck with me. It was the question underneath: what’s it like to be someone whose sexuality points permanently in the wrong direction? You didn’t choose it. You can’t change it. You spend your entire life suppressing it. You can’t talk about it. You can’t seek help without legal consequences in most places. Society tells you you’re broken, sick, dangerous—and they’re not entirely wrong, because acting on it would hurt someone defenseless. The comparison to gay history kept coming up. Fifty years ago, society told gay people the same thing: unnatural, sick, evil. And gay people had to hide for generations. Eventually we changed our minds. We decided consenting adults should be free to love who they love. That framework shifted and suddenly the weight lifted. But it won’t shift for this. It can’t. There’s a real difference, not just a social one. Homosexuality causes no harm to anyone. These attractions cause harm the moment they’re acted on. So there’s no future where this becomes acceptable. No light at the tunnel’s end. And I don’t know what that does to someone. What it’s like to have your entire internal world permanently at odds with the world, forever, with no reconciliation possible. I think about it sometimes. But I don’t have answers. I’m not sure anyone does. Thursday, 31 March 2011. The Dø Keep Pushing: Their synth-pop doesn’t let you coast. Everything about it pushes forward—layers building, the beat relentless, no space to zone out. There’s something exhausting about how insistent they are, this refusal to step back or simplify. But that’s the whole thing. The Dø aren’t interested in making background music. They want to be all you’re listening to. Thursday, 31 March 2011. Mary Robinson’s Sister: Wednesday, 30 March 2011. Three Laws: Three laws of electronic music: You can always have one more beer, no matter how many you’ve already had. Electro is Techno, or maybe the other way around. Everyone wants Marteria. I’m not sure when that last one stopped being a joke and became fact. Sometime in the 2000s, the guy from Rostock just became inevitable. Not through marketing or push—just because he showed up and made complete sense. He had the charisma, the talent, the kind of presence that doesn’t need explaining. He was everywhere because everyone had already decided that’s where he belonged. German electronic music doesn’t work like regular celebrity culture. You’re not famous because you chart on the radio; you’re famous because you’re already all over the clubs and festivals and the actual world that matters to people. Marteria was that. So by the time anyone organized a meet-and-greet, it was almost beside the point. He was already the scene. Trying to package that as a special event was like trying to sell someone something they already owned. Tuesday, 29 March 2011. Ordinary Evening: Good music’s nearly impossible to find anymore. The labels don’t care, the radio has shit taste, and your friends are useless. It takes something like divine intervention to land decent music in someone’s hands, and yet here it is, every evening. Friendly Fires, Justice, Lykke Li: not obscure, not trying too hard. Just genuinely good records. The kind of stuff you play on repeat because it does what the rest of the week’s music can’t quite manage. Every evening, the same search. Somehow still worth it. Monday, 28 March 2011. Dying in Games: You die all the time in games and stop noticing after a while. Reload, respawn, back to the checkpoint. The repetition strips death of any weight. You stop flinching after the hundredth time. It’s just a mechanic, as routine as walking or jumping. There’s something strange about rehearsing death so often that it becomes meaningless. I played a game recently where dying was the whole design—relentless, punishment-heavy—and after a few hours of getting knocked around, the deaths just felt like breathing. Die, reload, continue. The death lost all its teeth. Just another rhythm in the game. So you keep dying, keep reloading, until death in games feels like something that happens to someone else. A feature, not a failure. A reset button you never think twice about pressing. Sunday, 27 March 2011. Sunflower Guerrilla: You meet all kinds of people. Some make you ashamed you’re the same species. Others you just want to respect—the kind who go out and make their city slightly better without anyone paying them or asking. Knitting around lamp posts. Cleaning public bathrooms. Planting flowers in places nobody told them to. There’s a thing called Sunflower Guerrilla Day. April 15th. The premise is simple: buy sunflower seeds, go scatter them around your neighborhood. Between buildings, along curbs, in the forgotten corners. That’s it. Imagine if enough people actually did it. Imagine a city waking up in a few weeks and finding itself drowning in yellow flowers. Not because a government contracted it. Not for Instagram. Just because some people decided their street looked better with color, and they did the work. There’s something clean about that impulse. No angle, no performance, just: this place is uglier than it needs to be, and I’m going to fix that small thing because I can see it and I don’t like it. I’ll probably grab some seeds. Friday, 25 March 2011. Steve Aoki: Wake Up Call: Steve Aoki’s one of those figures in electronic music you can’t quite pin down. He’s been running Dim Mak forever, he plays everywhere, and there’s something genuinely committed about the way he approaches his sets—that all-in energy that makes you think he actually cares. His music is solid enough, the label has released real records, but something about him has become so commercial, so much the face of a certain version of electronic music, that I find it hard to take seriously. The cake throwing bit lost its charm years ago. Still, I can’t fault the work ethic or his actual presence in the scene. I just don’t think about him much when I’m not hearing his name. Friday, 25 March 2011. The Right Song: I’ve noticed there’s a specific song for every substance and every stupid decision that leads you there. Not like I’m recommending anything - I’m just saying what I watched happen. Wine and beer are the warm-up. You’re getting loose with people who don’t bore you, not trying to leave the planet yet, just trying to loosen your shoulders a little. You put on something like Solar Bears or Thievery Corporation - music that’s got enough going on that you don’t notice the silence, but not so much that you have to think about it. Maybe Jon Hopkins if you want time to feel thicker. This is the foreplay before anything real happens. Weed is about slowing everything down and noticing things. The day gets wider. You listen to Nightmares on Wax, Shuggie Otis, Bob Marley if you’re willing to be that obvious, and the music just sits there understanding that you’re trying to turn your brain off for a few hours. It’s not trying to prove anything. The fast stuff - coke, MDMA, speed, whatever you can find that makes your body feel like it’s vibrating at its own frequency - that needs beats that own the room. Deadmau5, Röyksopp, the kind of house music that doesn’t ask you anything. You’re not listening to this music anymore, you’re being moved by it. Your heartbeat becomes part of the track. Hallucinogens are different because you’re using the music as a steering mechanism now. You’re looking at colors that don’t exist and your brain is remapping itself and you need bright songs to keep from sliding into the bad part of the trip. Empire of the Sun, Ellie Goulding, that Japanese stuff that sounds happy without trying hard - the brighter it is the less likely you end up staring at something dark inside your own head. Someone I knew took acid once without any music and said it was like watching a film with the sound off, which sounds about right. I stop thinking about the music after that. The people who went for heroin either disappeared or came back as different people, and I don’t know what they listened to because they weren’t around to say. Maybe Burial. Maybe that murky Massive Attack stuff. Maybe nothing at all, just the sound of waiting. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and remember being in a room with people and whatever substance and the hour when everything lined up and made a kind of sense that nothing makes anymore. Thursday, 24 March 2011. Something on the Internet: In Berlin-Mitte, you’re basically invisible if you’re not working on the internet. Working in a digital agency, freelancing, consulting on social media with that particular flavor of hipster obsession. Your Mac and iPhone out at all times, refreshing Twitter, watching your digital dashboard. The more money you’re making from this network of systems, the more you matter in this closed world of mutant nerds. A construction worker would just laugh. Back in the Bavarian town where I grew up—where I spent those vicious years of adolescence—you’re already future-proof if you can get through signing up for Facebook without a panic attack. That’s the technological ceiling there. When my little cousin asked me on chat what I do for work, I told her with a wink: “Something on the internet.” She just went quiet. I could feel her confusion through the screen. “But what exactly?” So I tried to explain. SEO, online marketing, WordPress, digital communications, social networks, public relations, blogging—all the stuff I do. None of it landed. So I simplified: I design websites. Lokalisten, Yahoo, OnlyParty—things she recognized. At least I didn’t have to admit I used to paint flyers for a living. And that’s when it hit me that maybe I’ve just floated away completely, lost all ground in this bubble of status updates and software patches and Apple products. Maybe I’m trading an actual life for something hollow and pointless. Or maybe the world outside Berlin is just years behind, and by the time they discover what I’m already drowning in, I’ll have already fused my consciousness with a smartphone and cloud storage. The sane move would be to let UMTS whoosh past sometimes. Do something actually analogue. Give my battered mind a rest, maybe avoid the quarter-life crisis I can see coming. Next time my cousin asks what I do, I could just tell her: “I lay on a sunny field and read a book.” Everyone gets that. Wednesday, 23 March 2011. Can’t Concentrate: Porn actors apparently train for three core competencies over their two-year career. Stay hard. No acne. Moan like the neighbors should hear it. That’s the entire skill set. In actual German bedrooms, it’s quieter and more one-sided. When someone makes noise, it’s her. He stays silent. Polite about the whole thing. I’ve spent some time thinking about why that is. Two questions, mainly. Why do guys go basically mute except for that pathetic noise at the very end? And why do girls feel obligated to provide this entire vocal performance throughout? The first one I can answer. You need to concentrate. It’s not simple—there’s a lot to manage physically and mentally, and the whole time your brain is running through this massive library of images and memories and whatever else keeps you focused. Any sound you make kills that concentration. Moaning and focus are incompatible. The second is harder to parse. Maybe girls need to breathe that loudly because the physical effort is genuinely exhausting. Maybe it’s all performed—just automatic feedback for the guy on top. Maybe it’s some mixture of both. I honestly don’t know. What’s clear is that moaning works when it’s real. When you oversell it, it doesn’t. Fake moaning is worse than silence. And somewhere in all this, girls are probably wishing we’d make more noise while we’re wondering why you have to announce the whole thing to the rest of the building. Could be we’re just good at what we do. Could be you want the woman in the next apartment over to absolutely know you’re having sex. Probably both. Tuesday, 22 March 2011. Sonic For Hire: Sonic was cooler than Mario, and I believed it. He had the attitude, the speed, the whole vibe. But he couldn’t sustain it. The games got worse, the character got weirder, and I moved on. Now he just shows up in whatever they throw at him, a childhood icon reduced to a brand. Even now, there’s something deflating about that. Tuesday, 22 March 2011. Nuclear Boy: Everything suddenly makes sense, and what it makes is garbage. This is just bad. Nothing else to it. Monday, 21 March 2011. Skins 5: A Dwindling Love: I loved Skins. No show has ever gotten to me like this one did—a bunch of Bristol teenagers wrecking themselves in every direction. What the producers created was beyond love, almost worship. It fucked me up. The first two generations were pure emotional carnage. Cassie and her eating disorder, Sid falling apart, Effy suicidal, Freddie strung out, Maxxie trying to survive while Michelle just clung to him. Every kind of pain. Tears, laughter, things you can’t unsee. Season five didn’t have that punch. The stories felt light, the relationships hollow. Characters doing things I couldn’t believe in. It was like watching someone do a Skins impression without understanding why Skins actually worked. Except Liv. She was the only person who felt real. Actually suffering, not performing it. Her episode had everything that made me love this show—sex, drugs, love, pain, good music, those scenes that blur between dream and watching someone’s life collapse. In your face. So I’m saying goodbye to season five quietly. Dog Is Dead’s ’Glockenspiel Song’ from the finale won’t leave my head, and a few scenes actually landed, but mostly I’m left with questions that won’t get answers. Who Frankie ends up with, whether Mini’s actually a lesbian, why Matty has the same expression in every scene. Monday, 21 March 2011. How It Goes: Sunday, 20 March 2011. Disasteradio: Gravy Rainbow: Saturday, 19 March 2011. Nathanael Turner: Bloody Brooklyn: What stays with me is how it doesn’t flinch. Nathanael Turner and Bloody Brooklyn—a person and a place. The story commits fully to what happens between them. No softening, no distance. That kind of unflinching narrative does something to you. You finish it and it’s still there. Thursday, 17 March 2011. Television Raised Me: Television raised me. Not father figures, not real people—just the glow of a screen, American families, cartoon characters pushed to absurdity, and the dream of living inside that flickering world. While my mother worked and my friends were grounded, the TV was my teacher, telling me what was good and evil, how to break my life into neat episodes with resolvable problems, always ending with something fixed as the credits rolled. That was the deal. It worked. Now I can’t stand German television. What used to feel colorful, with actual culture mixed in, is just sludge—endless rotations of the same faces, reality-TV desperation, shows built around filming people having crises like it’s entertainment. The private stations especially are shameless about it. And the public broadcasters just stand there with their educational mandate, retreating into time slots nobody watches anymore because everyone already knows TV is dead. It makes me want to smash something. So I sit with my laptop downloading shows I actually want. “Mad Love,” episodes of “Skins,” old “The O.C.” reruns—everything that won’t hit Germany for years, if it gets here at all. I refresh, wait for the files, move them into folders like I’m building a library. It’s cleaner this way. I watch what I want, when I want, without commercials or schedules or German bureaucracy deciding what’s acceptable. The thing is, I know I’m being a hypocrite. These shows have to be funded somehow, and I’m not paying for them. If most of the country stayed plugged into cable, networks would have money to keep making things worth watching. I know this perfectly well. But the logic is simple enough to ignore—why give my attention to something broken when I can get better on my own terms? It’s a comforting argument and probably won’t stand up to scrutiny, but here we are. Television’s dominance is ending anyway. It’s only still alive because of habit now, inertia, money, the fact that most people don’t know where else to look. The next generation will grow up online, shaped by whatever they find there instead of what someone in an office thought was suitable. Whether that’s better or worse, I have no idea. I’m aware I’m not helping the cause either way. But I’m not waiting around for German television to get good. Wednesday, 16 March 2011. Still Ke$ha: Ke$ha in a bikini is a reminder that the party-girl persona was never the point. The point was the shamelessness, the refusal to apologize, the complete comfort with being excessive and ridiculous. That’s the thing about genuine swagger—it doesn’t really age. She’s gotten older, the tabloid machine moved on, and now there’s just the person underneath. Still interesting. Wednesday, 16 March 2011. Friedhelm Ernst for Laughs: Tuesday, 15 March 2011. Jenna Rose – My Jeans: When ’My Jeans’ showed up, Jenna Rose committed to it completely. No irony, no winking at the camera. Just a kid absolutely certain that a song about her jeans needed to exist. The internet demolished it almost immediately—the mocking, the remixes, the inevitable death spiral. But I think about how sure of herself she must have been. That kind of unironic confidence in something this stupid is almost admirable. Tuesday, 15 March 2011. Jamie Woon, Lady Luck: There’s this moment in the song where everything drops away except his voice and a single string line, and it feels like he’s singing directly into your ear in a dark room. Jamie Woon had this gift for making R&B feel intimate without being small—even when the production swells around him, there’s something nakedly honest in how he phrases things, how he sits just slightly behind the beat. Lady Luck was one of those songs that soundtracked a particular kind of late night, the kind where you’re alone but not lonely, where everything feels possible and impossible at the same time. His voice has this weathered quality, like he’s lived through something, and the song moves like he’s trying to remember what hope felt like. Tuesday, 15 March 2011. Night Will Be Forever: That space between leaving a party and sunrise is its own kind of hell. The city’s abandoned, or feels it anyway. Everyone else is asleep like they have sense. You’re still buzzing, or were ten minutes ago, now just tired but can’t settle into it. The sky’s that color right before light takes over—red and dark at once. Your brain’s doing laps with conversations you’ll forget by noon. I used to know these hours better than I wanted to. Stumbling through whatever bus station, still wearing someone else’s smoke, too wired to actually sleep but too exhausted to stay awake. The kind of night where nothing feels real and you wouldn’t mind just disappearing. Probably didn’t learn anything. Definitely won’t remember. “Night Will Be Forever” is the soundtrack this deserves. Toro Y Moi’s production keeps things moving even when everything’s standing still. Radiohead sounds different at 5 AM—everything gets more true and more hollow at the same time. Little Dragon is the part after you’ve stopped fighting it, where sleep’s just taking over and you’ve made peace with losing control. I don’t need these songs much anymore, but I remember what they did. Made the empty streets feel like they were mine for a moment. Made exhaustion feel like a choice instead of a failure. The sun comes up the same way either way. Monday, 14 March 2011. Unfinished Business: Some games were so locked to their moment—the controls, the rendering, the tiny screen—that getting them out of that context actually feels necessary. But most remakes just sand down the edges without understanding why those edges existed in the first place. The games I keep thinking about are the ones with a real idea that nobody’s quite finished exploring. Not nostalgia. Just actual unfinished business. Monday, 14 March 2011. E.T. Phase: There’s something about a Kanye-Katy Perry collision in 2011 that felt like the pop world briefly deciding to get weirder. The whole alien angle—not subtle, but committed. Kanye on a Katy Perry track felt like an odd-couple thing at the time, his deadpan flow against her synth-pop shine. The song sat somewhere between earnest and absurd, which is maybe the only place a track about extraterrestrial attraction can actually land without embarrassing itself. It wasn’t revolutionary, but there was something confident about it, the willingness to lean fully into a dumb premise and just stay there. That era of pop had a different energy entirely—less careful, more willing to sound like nothing had to make sense as long as it felt right. I still remember the production having this glassy, synthetic quality, everything perfectly buffed and deliberate. It was the kind of collaboration that made sense only to the people making it, which is usually when something is worth paying attention to. Monday, 14 March 2011. Anja Konstantinova’s Boring Afternoon: Monday, 14 March 2011. Eating It Anyway: The food industry pumps our meals with chemicals that are classified as actual poisons. Pesticides that cause cancer. Aspartame—marketed as NutraSweet—only got into the food supply because its manufacturer faked the safety studies. Bisphenol A in plastic bottles. They tested all this on animals. The animals developed cancer and died. We know this. We eat it anyway. Marie-Monique Robin made a documentary about it, “Unser täglich Gift”—literally “Our Daily Poison”—and does the straightforward reporting that apparently counts as investigative work these days. She visits Orissa in India where people farm and eat their own food without industrial agriculture. Cancer there is rare. Obesity is basically unknown. Compare that to the West, where we’ve spent fifty years consuming engineered garbage, and somehow everyone acts surprised when disease rates climb. Knowing that companies fake safety studies and hide data is one thing. That’s expected. The stranger part is that we have access to the actual information. You can read about it. You know that processed food is engineered to make you want more, that lobbying keeps labeling obscure, that normal snacks contain substances that shouldn’t exist in food. And most days I just eat the convenient option anyway. I think about changing it sometimes. Buying glass bottles. Eating actual fruit. Cooking meals instead of outsourcing them. It wouldn’t be that complicated. But complicated isn’t really the issue. The issue is that knowing the poison and eating it anyway has become the default, like that’s just how it works now. Maybe that’s the actual trick—not the chemicals in the food, but convincing ourselves that knowing about them doesn’t change anything. Sunday, 13 March 2011. Rebecca Black – Friday: The song is exactly as bad as you remember. Tinny, rhythmically confused, lyrics that sound like they were workshopped by someone who’d never actually talked to a teenager. But here’s what gets me: a thirteen-year-old girl hired a producer, dropped a single, and became the most mocked person on the internet for the crime of not being good. The internet decided she was the thing to hate that week, and it was vicious. Everyone had a bit, a meme, a reason to pile on. The song is forgettable; what lingers is the cruelty of it, how quickly we turn on something unfamiliar just because we can. She can’t even hear the song the way we do—she’ll never have that clean first listen that most artists get. It’s already been poisoned. Saturday, 12 March 2011. Then We Can Begin: Saturday night is when everything from the week stops mattering. Whatever was supposed to happen either did or it didn’t, and now there’s just the night itself—no obligations, no guilt, no waiting. The Germans have this phrase: Dann kann’s ja losgehen. Then we can get started. You feel it happening around nine o’clock, when the air shifts and people move a little faster, a little looser, like something’s finally been released. Saturday, 12 March 2011. Takeshita: Asumi was in Takeshita with a friend when the ground started moving. Not unusual for Tokyo, but this was different. Longer. Harder. The earth and trees were shaking and people were running out of buildings, and she and her friend stood there not saying anything, just watching everyone else realize what was happening. A man near them said it wasn’t normal. They got a taxi home as far as they could when the subways closed. Her brother Kotaro was there with a friend, already watching the news. She couldn’t reach her mom at first—the networks were down, then no answer—but when they finally connected, her mom was safe at work, just stranded, no power, trying to find a way back. Kotaro was handling it fine. They’d done earthquake drills at school just the month before, so he knew what to do—ducked under a table when it started, then figured running outside was better. The aftershocks kept coming. Small ones and big ones mixed in. There was a fire at a refinery in Chiba. The Tokyo Tower had bent at the top. Helicopters circling the city. Everything shut down. She had relatives in Sapporo she couldn’t reach. Just silence on the other end when she called. That helplessness of calling over and over, no answer, is what stays with me most—not the earthquake itself, but that specific emptiness. By the time we talked she was planning to stay home and watch the news, wait for updates on the tsunamis and aftershocks coming. There was something calm about it. Japan has survived worse, she said. We’ve survived worse. And somehow that mattered more than the news reports. Friday, 11 March 2011. Robyn Live: Swedish pop from the 2000s sits in a strange place for me now—too close to clubland to feel like rock, too willing to be sincere for pure dance production. Robyn was the singer who made that intersection matter. Body Talk came out and it was intricate: synths underneath, her voice somewhere between intimacy and announcement, the whole thing designed for dancing but never stupid about it. Seeing her meant understanding that part of yourself—the capacity to move and feel simultaneously, to let a song about sex or loneliness become the thing you move your body to. Hamburg’s TV studio was an odd venue for it, all industrial concrete and cable runs, but there’s something about pop music done with that kind of precision that works in any room. What I remember is how present she was. Not performing, not running through a set, but actually inhabiting these songs like they still belonged to her. That clarity matters. It’s what separates someone singing their hits from someone still living in them. Friday, 11 March 2011. Peter and Kerry: Friday, 11 March 2011. Bieber Slayer: Thursday, 10 March 2011. The Charney Problem: I’ve always liked men who created something entirely their own through sheer narcissism and actual talent, then blew apart whatever conventions were standing in their way. Jobs. Lagerfeld. Dov Charney. The ones who clearly never asked permission. American Apparel for me was never really about the clothes. It was the fact that the whole company was just Dov—his sensibility, his refusal to play by the industry’s conservative rules. He paid his workers better than he had to. He ran campaigns like “Legalize LA” and “Legalize Gay” that connected T-shirt sales to actual causes. He posed naked in his own ads. He treated high fashion and pornography as if they belonged in the same conversation. Everything about it was contempt for the traditional way of doing things, and he didn’t care who understood. That kind of integrity felt clean. Until it wasn’t. Irene Morales was eighteen when Charney invited her home from an American Apparel store in Brooklyn. What happened there—sexual abuse, stalking, pressure to send naked photos—fills a lawsuit for 250 million dollars. The kind of details that make you wish you could unsee them. Here’s what kills me: he’d made it all seem coherent. A man building an empire on breaking sexual taboos suddenly had perfect cover for assault. What made him interesting—that total disregard for rules and consequences, that confidence he knew better—was also what made him dangerous. Maybe they were never separate things. Maybe when you spend your career tearing down every boundary, you eventually forget which ones existed for a reason. American Apparel was already finished—he’d squeezed what he could from it and mismanagement did the rest. The lawsuit is just the final nail. And I’m stuck with the memory of admiring someone who turned out to be a predator, with no way to cleanly separate them. The “fuck you” spirit that once felt like freedom now looks like cover for hurting a teenager. I can’t unknow it, and I don’t want to pretend I can. Wednesday, 9 March 2011. War Talk: Dominique Young Unique doesn’t try very hard and that’s the whole point. ’War Talk’ is him just talking, production stripped back, saying shit plainly and trusting that the weight is already there. Tuesday, 8 March 2011. Happy Bunny Pussy: A cat in the sun has figured out something the rest of us are still chasing. It doesn’t try to impress anyone, and it doesn’t wonder whether it’s doing this right—it’s just completely at ease in its own existence. You watch one for hours, barely moving, unbothered, and you see what contentment actually looks like. No performance, no strategy, no overthinking. The cat doesn’t need to understand itself to be happy. The cat doesn’t worry. The cat doesn’t scroll. The cat just exists and that’s enough. Meanwhile, I’m over here making everything complicated while the cat’s just fine with everything. The cat wins. Tuesday, 8 March 2011. Mixtape: The Face Tracks: I needed something to disappear into, and this mixtape showed up at the right moment. Gold Panda opens it up with all those details, production that feels generous and warm. The Go! Team brings this restless energy, keeps everything moving. Neon Hitch cuts through when it needs to. Three artists that don’t demand anything of each other, just make space. There’s something about the density of it that works. Not overthought, not slick, just the right weight to sink into for a while. The kind of thing that becomes the texture of your day without you thinking about it too much. I came back to it a week later and it held up, which is how I know it was the right mixtape at the right time. Monday, 7 March 2011. Power Rangers Overkill: Every Power Ranger ever made, fighting drunk aliens. I was Red, third row back on the left. The kind of stupid that somehow works. Monday, 7 March 2011. Attack the Block: Aliens land in South London and the teenagers already there—gang members, dealers, kids with their own problems—decide they’re the only defense. The film never hedges. No speeches, no montages, just teenagers with whatever they can grab against something that clearly didn’t plan for this. The humor works because everyone plays it straight. You remember it because it never apologizes for itself. Sunday, 6 March 2011. Soup For Sluts: Soup is survival on the cheap. You take whatever’s rotting in your fridge, throw it in a pot with water and salt, and in twenty minutes you’ve got something that’ll keep you fed for days. No skill required, no expense. I’ve been poor enough to know this by heart—soup is what you make when you’ve got nothing, and it’s still better than takeout. It doesn’t ask for anything. No technique, no presentation, no pretending. Just heat, water, and time. The kind of meal you can make wrecked, half-conscious, or when you’re too busy to care. Sunday, 6 March 2011. Wu-Tang Clan ♥ Super Game Boy: I remember wanting both—Wu-Tang Clan on headphones, the Game Boy in my pocket. Two completely separate impulses, no connection except they occupied the same moment in the 90s. The clan had the swagger, the Game Boy had the games. They didn’t need to be related. That’s what I miss about that era, I think: you could have totally different obsessions and they’d all feel equally important, equally cool, without any of them needing to justify themselves by referring to the others. Saturday, 5 March 2011. Stopped Asking: I was drinking red wine and half-watching old Bored to Death episodes when the message came from Facebook. Another picture flagged. Violation of community standards. One more incident and they’d delete the whole account. As always, no explanation of which image or what specifically was wrong, just the threat. This had been happening for months. Every few weeks something would disappear. Facebook didn’t offer reasons, just enforced arbitrary rules to keep you uncertain and manageable. It’s an efficient system when your goal is compliance. So I stopped asking permission. I pulled together everything we’d wanted to post but couldn’t, everything that got flagged, the crude unfiltered stuff, and put it somewhere beyond their reach. No moderation. No American sensitivity standards. Just what we actually wanted to make. The thing that surprised me wasn’t the content itself—most of it wasn’t even that transgressive. What mattered was that we weren’t waiting anymore, weren’t softening things, weren’t calculating what might trigger the algorithm. We’d taken back the decision. Saturday, 5 March 2011. Japanese Countdown: I stumbled into Japanese countdown shows and got stuck there. Same format every time—the hosts, the transitions between artists, the drama of rankings—and something about that repetition works. The way performances get their slot based on where they land in the charts, the clarity of it all. It’s completely disposable but it teaches you something about how Japanese pop works, what matters in that industry. I’ve watched way too many of these at weird hours, but the predictability is hypnotic in a way I don’t fully understand. Friday, 4 March 2011. Vanessa At Home: Photography that stays in domestic space has a different weight than anything shot in public. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re photographed in the place you actually live—the light comes from the lamp you chose, the walls hold the color you picked, everything is a choice made over time. Akila Berjaoui’s work with Vanessa catches that kind of presence, the ordinary weight of someone in their own rooms. It’s the opposite of a photoshoot. It’s just someone existing where they exist, and that contradiction—being looked at while being nowhere but home—is what makes it matter. Thursday, 3 March 2011. Burned Down: I’m thinking back to February 28, 2011, the morning everything shifted. Hannah and Ines left, and the whole structure of the thing that had kept us together just… dissolved. Everyone else went with them. We’d started this as rebellion against loneliness, just putting our thoughts somewhere because we didn’t know what else to do with them, but it had rotted from the inside into this service provider mentality. Rules everywhere. Obligations. The complete opposite of what we’d actually wanted. There’s this moment when you can feel the pressure start. When the audience shows up, expectations follow, and suddenly you’re not writing what matters to you anymore—you’re managing what other people think. Every word gets weighed. Hannah and I kept trying to make space for the things we genuinely cared about, but it was like trying to build something in a storm. The emails and opinions and commitments just kept burying us. By the end of that week I wasn’t sleeping. Too much red wine and the kind of panic that doesn’t resolve into anything except the realization that you’ve completely failed at the one thing you loved. Everything I was writing felt like garbage. Everything about how we worked felt corrupted. I remember thinking: this can’t be how it ends. So I burned it all down. What came back from that fire was simple: absolute freedom. Post an essay or just a photo. A song. A video. Whatever Sara and I wanted. No performance. No framework. No obligation to be anything except honest and personal. After managing everyone else’s expectations for so long, it felt like breathing again. I think about Ines and Mischa and Asumi a lot. Especially Hannah. I wanted to thank them for the nights and the texts and the memories. It was genuinely great. But some things have to end. It’s been nine years of this. The drugs and the sex and the stories and the absolute refusal to be boring—that survives. The rest was just scaffolding to keep it standing. Monday, 28 February 2011. Mixtape: Sister Love: I never made a mixtape for my sister. We weren’t the type. But I’ve made them for people who felt like sisters—the ones you see without planning to, who show up when things go bad, who you’d wreck yourself for without thinking about it. You build the playlist slowly over months, songs that mean something specific about what they mean to you. By the time it’s done, it’s less a mixtape and more a confession. That’s the weird part: the music says what you never would out loud, and they get that. Monday, 21 February 2011. Nothing Came of It: Libya in 2011 was phone videos, shaky footage where a cleric describes watching a tank roll over a car with two people inside. Just flattened them. Gaddafi had ruled for forty years and apparently his answer to protest was mechanized. Soldiers, helicopters, his own son’s unit. Some cities seemed to fall to rebels. Other reports said they were holding. You never knew what was actually happening, just fragments coming through before the internet got cut. Everyone shared the videos. Tunisia and Egypt had both kicked out their dictators and Libya looked like it might be next. That feeling of witnessing something change, of being there in real time even though you’re not there at all. Nothing came of it. Gaddafi got killed but the country never recovered. It just collapsed into something worse. I don’t remember when I stopped paying attention to Libya. There’s no moment where I consciously decided I didn’t care anymore. It just evaporated from my feed, then from my mind. What stays is the gap between watching and doing. How you feel like you’re part of something by seeing it, sharing it, knowing about it. How quickly that feeling disappears when you realize you never actually did anything. It’s the safest kind of engagement—you get to see the world falling apart and then go back to your day. Sunday, 20 February 2011. Johnny B!: I know a photographer named Johnnie. Don’t know his last name—doesn’t matter. He photographs dogs that don’t know what’s happening to them. Black men in bathtubs. Girls with dark, heavy forearms. There’s something compelling about his work, even though I have no idea who he actually is. That’s kind of the whole thing. Saturday, 19 February 2011. Lotus Flower: “Lotus Flower” does something different from the rest of The King of Limbs. That driving beat, everything else stripped down—it pushes forward like it doesn’t need your permission. The real pull is the video though, Thom’s body moving without self-consciousness, like it’s the only true thing in the frame. Not a performance, just presence. I watched that more times than I listened to the song. Friday, 18 February 2011. Trash Tuesday: Robo Geisha: Noboru Iguchi’s Robo Geisha is the kind of film that exists to prove that cinema can be whatever the hell you want it to be. A geisha gets her limbs amputated and replaced with machine guns, swords, and flamethrowers, and the movie treats this as a logical plot development rather than the premise for a joke. The action sequences are genuinely skilled—practical effects, creative camera work—applied to the most deranged concept imaginable. It’s not ironic; Iguchi is dead serious about the absurdity. You watch it and realize that sometimes the difference between a masterpiece and garbage is just whether the person making it cares about the work. He clearly did, even if the work is a woman who ejaculates acid and explodes. There’s something honest about that. Thursday, 17 February 2011. Driver: Felix Cartal builds sets like he has all night. Progressive house mostly, though the lines blur. The appeal isn’t drama or novelty—it’s patience. You follow him through a long arc and somewhere in the second hour you stop thinking about anything else. That’s the skill. Not the peak moment but the sustained movement. Most DJs want to be remembered for a drop. Cartal seems more interested in making you forget what time it is. Thursday, 17 February 2011. The Solo Problem: I boot up the computer, pull down my pants, and fire up the internet at full speed. “Russian Teenagers Gangbang In Summer Camp” or “Black Girl Choky Loses Virginity To Four Strangers.” Pick one, download it, settle in. I don’t have forever—I’ve got a doctor’s appointment later. The real problem isn’t the girls or the setup. It’s the fucking music. That corny 90s porn track, all breathy and obviously fake, layered under every scene. The moaning sounds like someone auditioning for a school play. My grandmother coughs hotter than this. And the cameraman won’t stop talking, won’t stop laughing that stupid laugh. Okay. Mute. Now it’s just me and the moving image and whatever’s going through my head. That’s better. It’s working. And then the neighbors start hammering on something and a baby cries somewhere else and I’m sitting here thinking about everything except what’s on the screen. Fuck. All right, music back on. What do you even listen to when you’re doing this? Not Regina Spektor. Not Bat For Lashes—that’s for when someone else is actually in the room. Rammstein is too theatrical. But something harder. Uffie. Snoop Dogg. Kleerup. Something with a beat, something that doesn’t require thinking too hard. I’m focused now. Did I charge my iPod? Doesn’t matter. The girl on screen is working hard so I need to pay attention. The Mayer Hawthorne remix works better than the original anyway. I’m close. I’m right there. I’m about to finish and then the video cuts to black. Everyone’s done. Everyone except me. Head on the desk now. Screen’s black. Staring at nothing. Who’s to blame? The music. Because you can’t exactly load up your actual playlist while you’re in the middle of this. Your real music doesn’t fit. It requires too much of you. All it does is get in the way. I still don’t know what actually works. Wednesday, 16 February 2011. Where’s My Better Life: Six weeks into 2011 and I’m already wondering where my better life went. When January first rolled around, I had plans. Real ones. Ambitious ones. Lists on paper, lists in my head, all stacked in the drawer by my nightstand. The kind of thing that gets crumpled by March, except I didn’t even make it that far. I stand naked in front of the mirror and take an honest inventory. What follows is not encouraging. Career. I could’ve done the whole circuit in the past six weeks—design conferences, web summits, places where important people network and pretend disruption matters. Could’ve built a proper portfolio, played the client game, thrown myself at someone with a pitch about my amateur genius. Could’ve actually sat down and learned Photoshop, memorized every product Apple ever made, made something worth showing. Didn’t. Didn’t even try. Watched that ship sail without a backward glance. Love. This one’s easy to measure. I look at my wedding picture on the nightstand—me and my right hand, hairy and devoted. Can’t blame myself though. I’m just waiting for my impossible woman. Emma Watson mixed with Megan Fox, red-blonde hair, freckles, the artist living in some old Berlin apartment with exactly the right amount of cool and exactly the amount of availability I require. She doesn’t exist. Never will. So I keep dating myself. Body. My stomach laughs when I even think about it. Chip bags from every corner of the world stacked in the cabinet like trophies. Kebab and curry ketchup and fries with mayo cycling through my system like that’s all I deserve. Gym. Broken. Bike. Broken. Running. The weather’s shit. Swimming. Yeah, right. I look at myself and see someone who gave up so completely he stopped even pretending by week three. I’m sitting in my little apartment in Wedding, the Berlin neighborhood that’s just poor enough and just boring enough that nobody’s desperate to move there. Not some 200-square-meter loft in a district anyone’s heard of. Still ordering things online that a man uses alone, having to maneuver around my own stomach to reach them. Thirty pounds heavier, zero dollars richer, no closer to anything I imagined on New Year’s morning. Tell me you did better. Someone must have. Tuesday, 15 February 2011. Company: Bloc Party at three in the morning because the quiet has become too loud. James Blake next—something about the way he makes space inside sound fits how things feel right now. Hercules and Love Affair after that, which breaks the mood except it doesn’t. A mixtape is just songs arranged in an order, but sometimes the arrangement matters more than what’s being arranged. Music doesn’t actually do anything about loneliness. It doesn’t replace people or create connection you don’t have. But it exists alongside the silence. You can play it again and again and it won’t get tired of you. There’s something in that—not quite presence, but something close to it. Enough to sit with. There’s something almost amusing about making a mixtape for yourself. No surprises, no discovery of someone else’s taste. Just your own brain reflected back in the order you decided on. Every choice visible. At three in the morning, in that kind of silence, that transparency is either the loneliest thing or the most honest one. Probably both. Monday, 14 February 2011. Thirty Thousand: You get about thirty thousand days if you don’t spend them eating garbage and staring into nothing. Thirty thousand orbits to actually make something happen. And we spend most of it looking at glowing rectangles. Hours a day, years of it, time that just evaporates into email and scrolling and content nobody remembers. We all know it’s stupid. We’ve known for years. On the deathbed—if you get one with time to think—you’re not going to wish you’d spent more time on your browser history. The weird part isn’t that we’re lazy. It’s that we don’t actually know what we’re supposed to be doing instead. That’s the bottleneck. If you genuinely knew something was worth the trouble, you’d do it. Not eventually. Now. You’d just move toward it like the decision made itself. So what is it? What’s the thing that, when you imagine being old and done, hits you as a real loss? Not the version you’d post somewhere. The version that scares you a little, or would actually cost something. The version nobody needs to know about. Time’s moving. That’s the only honest motivation. Not inspiring, just true. Monday, 14 February 2011. Raphael Saadiq: I’m A Good Man: Raphael Saadiq’s music exists in that particular pocket of soul and R&B where everything feels both inevitable and hard-won. I’m A Good Man carries that same quality—there’s no striving in it, no reaching for validation. It’s the sound of someone who’s made peace with the kind of person he is, or at least the kind he wants to be. His voice does something specific when he gets there—it settles, goes quiet, lets you in. Friday, 11 February 2011. Sout Al Horeya: Friday, 11 February 2011. Tabi Bonney ft. Lykke Li: Where We Gonna Go: Two artists who exist in their own registers—Bonney with that precise, almost conversational flow, and Li with her ability to make a voice feel like it’s folding in on itself—somehow find the exact pocket together where everything lands. The song moves without rushing. You listen and it’s the kind of track that makes you realize how rare it is to hear two musicians actually talking to each other instead of just taking turns. There’s space in it, and restraint, and something genuinely unhurried in the way it unfolds. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Wednesday, 9 February 2011. Alex Guiry Farts Then Pukes: Wednesday, 9 February 2011. Some Accident: My friend told me his girlfriend’s pregnant. Wasn’t planned—condom broke or she missed pills, one of those accidents. And hearing him describe it, caught between excitement and panic, I realized I don’t actually have an answer for myself. If that happened to me, would I keep it? Push for an abortion? Honestly, I have no fucking clue. The theory is that you’re supposed to have figured this out by now. Right partner, right job, right savings account. But nobody I know has actually figured it out. People have kids at 22 and at 42. Some get abortions and move on. Some leave them with family. Some just get trapped and muddle through. I’m 27, which theoretically gives me time, but I can feel the clock underneath everything, ticking, reminding me that forever isn’t actually how time works. What actually terrifies me is how completely it takes over. Kids consume everything—money obviously, but mostly just time. Your entire existence becomes about someone else for the next 18 years. Sleep becomes negotiable. Privacy disappears. The relationship becomes a management problem instead of something pleasurable. I have friends with kids and they look aged beyond their years, hollowed out by the sheer relentless weight of it. Then there’s the partner thing. You’d have to want someone in your life that intensely, that permanently. Through the parts where you grow to hate each other, where the kid becomes a wedge instead of a bond. My parents had me and then got divorced. I remember understanding, even as a small kid, that I was part of what broke. Not the cause exactly, but a pressure point—the thing that made leaving harder than staying. Do I want to be that? Do I want to trap myself and someone else that way? The mechanics are simple. You don’t use protection. She forgets her pill. Eventually someone’s pregnant. Nature doesn’t care about your career plans or your relationship timeline. But the actual decision—the real yes or no—I’m still sitting in the middle of that. Some nights it feels inevitable, like something I’m going to have to deal with. Other nights it feels like the worst possible trap. Most of the time I just try not to think about it. Tuesday, 8 February 2011. Wildfox Gets French: Wildfox’s always made graphic tees and playful references, the kind of stuff that’s deliberately uncool in a cool way. A French collection plays into that perfectly because it’s exactly the kind of thing they’d normally make fun of, so doing it straight is the smartest move. The designs probably lean into every cliché—berets, wine, the whole bit—which is the only way that works. Actual fashion would find a clever angle and kill it. Wildfox doesn’t care about clever. There’s something solid about a brand that understands irony and sincerity have collapsed into each other now, and you can’t separate them anymore. Saturday, 5 February 2011. Ex-Girlfriend: There’s that moment in a song where you recognize yourself in someone else’s regret, and suddenly you’re remembering someone you hadn’t thought about in months. Emilio Rojas has that pull—the way he sits into a melody about wanting back what he lost, not because he’s particularly clever about it, but because he sounds like he actually means it. It’s the kind of track that plays in a car late enough that you don’t immediately skip it, and by the second verse you’re just sitting with it, thinking about who this is really for. The specificity of the title—not just a song about missing someone, but specifically about an ex, about that particular flavor of regret—is honest in a way that a lot of music isn’t. Friday, 4 February 2011. Toro Y Moi: New Beat: I’ve been following Chaz Bear’s work for long enough that I’m not sure when he stopped being a discovery and became just someone I listen to when he puts something out. That shift happens gradually—you start checking in, then you’re just there. Toro Y Moi’s always been restless, jumping between moods and textures like he can’t sit still in any one sound, and that’s part of what keeps me coming back. There’s no arrogance in it, just genuine curiosity about what the instruments can do when you push them sideways. This newer material has that familiar hunger but with more space in it—less layered, more breathing room between the synth lines and drums. It’s funkier in places, more direct. There’s something almost vulnerable about stripping away some of the production density he used to hide behind, letting the songs sit with less armor. I catch myself looping the same four bars over and over, which usually means something’s landed. It’s not revolutionary, but it feels honest, like he’s just playing what he actually wants to hear rather than what a Toro Y Moi record is supposed to sound like. Thursday, 3 February 2011. The Tavern Tour: Underground clubs in Berlin had all become the same extraction mechanism by 2011—packed basements, chemical drinks, the entire operation designed to cram in as many bodies as possible and call it culture. Authenticity was just the marketing. The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour arrived with a different proposal: convert a factory into an actual tavern, cap capacity, book We Have Band and producer Yuksek, and treat the event like a gathering instead of a container. Play cards, drink something real, hear the music. I’m not sure if it mattered. But someone had identified what made the club scene insufferable and tried a direct answer. That gesture itself was worth something. Wednesday, 2 February 2011. Dead Earnest: Zombie hunters—the underdog with a weapon against the undead, taking the ridiculous dead seriously. There’s something about that premise that works even when everything else falls apart. No irony, no self-awareness, just the practical work of survival. I’ve always liked that energy in these stories, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. Tuesday, 1 February 2011. What Actually Happened: During those first weeks of the Egyptian protests I kept hunting for actual news and kept ending up on Al Jazeera, which shouldn’t have been surprising but was. The American networks were all kind of there but not really there—CNN doing CNN things, MSNBC with some okay segments, Fox News somehow unclear on where Egypt was located—and then you’d flip to Al Jazeera and just find… reporting. Real reporting. Sometimes from a hotel room when their offices got raided. Sometimes over the phone. But actual journalism happening. Their live feed got hit twenty-five thousand times more than it normally did. Most of it from Americans. Which meant that if you wanted to know what was actually going on in Cairo, you had to watch the network nobody had heard of, not the ones with all the money and infrastructure and cable news logistics. That’s a pretty damning thing to realize about the system you grew up with. The German channels were a different kind of sad. n-tv, N24—they were running documentaries about construction equipment and reality TV while something genuinely significant was unfolding. I remember thinking even then, before I’d thought much about media or institutions or anything like that, how obviously this was broken. Not in some dramatic way. Just in the way a system breaks when everyone involved decides there’s easier money elsewhere. What stuck with me wasn’t the anger at any particular network—it was the banality of it. A bunch of people who were supposed to explain the world to the rest of us had decided it was easier not to. They had the resources. They had the reach. They just didn’t have the appetite. And so an Arabic network that nobody’d expected anything from ended up being the only one doing the job. I don’t know what happened to that momentum. American networks didn’t suddenly get better. German TV didn’t rethink their schedule. Al Jazeera just kept being Al Jazeera. But for a minute there you could see the actual limits of the thing. You could see that it was broken not because it was sabotaged or attacked, but because the people running it cared more about other stuff. Monday, 31 January 2011. Brave Pirate: I met this girl with a body that made thinking impossible. Dark, no kids, and she actually laughed at my jokes—the full Charlie Harper bit, all of it. We talked about this German actress for like an hour, hypothesizing what she’d be like in bed. That passed for seduction. She wanted to come over, and I’d actually cleaned up—thrown out the trash, dealt with the dishes before they evolved. We got upstairs and moved fast. I went down on her and found myself in a lake of blood. Dark and sticky. Not what I expected, or maybe exactly what I should have expected if I was thinking at all. I knew what it was. Wasn’t a kid anymore. Didn’t bother me. I was already there. Moved from her breasts down to her navel and she just shoved me off the bed. I landed on dumbbells I’ve bought but never once actually lifted, which felt appropriate for how that night was going. “What are you doing?” “I have my period.” Right. I sat up and told her what I’d always heard: a brave pirate sails the red sea. I probably shouldn’t have done the Ramones thing. “Hey ho, let’s go”—that definitely wasn’t the moment. She pulled her pants up, kissed me on the forehead like I was a small child she was leaving at school, called a taxi, and vanished into the night. Not even late enough for anything decent on TV. I was left alone with an erection and a real, honest question about whether I was a monster. Is this strange? Does nobody else think about this? Do people really just shut it down and wait a week? Every single month, just a gap? She came to my apartment knowing what was going to happen. What did she think we were going to do—ski jumping? I lay there on blood-spotted sheets with my forehead pressed into the pillow and my dick pressed into the mattress. My mind was everywhere. Video game worlds. Fire. Lava. Meat Boy. Chunks. Tampons. Seas of liquid. Neverland was red that night. And there I was in the middle of it all, hard and alone, genuinely wondering if I was the only brave pirate left in this whole country. Monday, 31 January 2011. When They Pulled the Plug: The Egyptian government switched off the internet. All of it. January 2011, Cairo burning, the government decided communications were a problem and they solved it the only way that would actually work—they killed the whole network. Banks went offline. Schools went offline. Millions of people at home staring at dead routers, nothing to connect to. It wasn’t a tactical move like other governments had tried before, cutting off Twitter or Facebook to slow coordination. Egypt looked at that half-measure and decided it wasn’t going far enough. If you want to stop people from organizing and broadcasting to the world, you turn off everything. One provider stayed online—Noor Group. Nobody ever figured out why. Maybe an oversight, maybe someone in the bureaucracy didn’t get the order, maybe there was a deal. Hackers started threatening to attack government websites in retaliation. There was a kind of poetry to it—the global network defending itself against the country that tried to unplug from it. But what actually got to me was how calculated it was. They knew the cost. Shutting down your own internet infrastructure destroys your economy in hours. Banks can’t function, businesses can’t operate, supply chains collapse. They did the math and decided it was worth it. Worth crippling your entire country to lock down the signal. Once you prove you can do that, once you show it’s possible, every authoritarian regime in a crisis is going to think the same thing. I’d been online for fifteen years at that point. The internet was background radiation, something you don’t even think about. But watching it go dark made it feel thin. Provisional. Like it was only there because we hadn’t been desperate enough to turn it off. Nothing felt inevitable after that. Friday, 28 January 2011. Ten Little Missions: I keep getting emails from people saying the missions are too hard. “Nobody can do that,” they say. “You’d have to be superhuman.” They’re right. So I decided to lower the difficulty this time. Make it fair. Just kidding. Turn off the internet and wait for CNN to report something bad. Extra points if civilians are involved. Jump in a bathtub with someone and see what happens—sex, clean toes, the pointless ecology of it all. Put on “Chocolate Rain” again. Still works. Prank some bloggers while you’re at it. That’s how you make money now. Look up the word “reibach” and think about why we even have a word for it. Skip the coke this weekend. Speed’s more reliable if you’re going in that direction. Binge all of “Friends” and feel your consciousness dissolve. Rescue someone from something. Download the Dave Sitek remix of Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers”—it’s free and it’s good. Donate twenty bucks to whatever. Some cause. Just do it. That’s the list. Half of it’s jokes. Most of it’s stupid. Some of it might be good. Probably not. Friday, 28 January 2011. Patrick Wolf: The City: Patrick Wolf’s music sounds like late nights in cramped apartments, all goth theatricality and glitchy synths, the kind of thing you play when you’re too young to understand why you’re depressed but old enough to want to feel it anyway. His albums are dense—layers of strings and electronic noise that feel almost overwhelming on first listen, then somehow intimate after the tenth. There’s something about how he structures his melodies, this minor-key vulnerability wrapped in production that feels expensive and strange, that made sense to me when I was figuring out what taste was. You either get it or you don’t, and for a while there, getting it felt like proof that I understood something true about the world that other people didn’t. Which is stupid, obviously, but that’s what good music does at a certain age. It makes you feel like you’re the only one paying attention. Thursday, 27 January 2011. People Are Dying: I learned about Egypt’s revolution through a Reddit post from some anonymous guy begging people to spread the word. Twitter was already blocked. Facebook would be next. “Here people are dying,” he wrote. I checked CNN and Al Jazeera and found nothing. It was strange—the only place the news existed was this scattered thread of desperate pleas. Tunisia had just had its moment, and Egypt was ready. Tens of thousands in the streets asking for things that shouldn’t have to be revolutionary: the right to gather without permission, a president who actually had to leave after two terms, a wage that didn’t starve you, an end to thirty years of martial law. They wanted the interior minister’s head. They knew exactly who to blame. The government shut off the internet. Shut off the phones. It was almost funny how direct it was—you can’t stop people from being angry, but you can stop them from talking about it. At least three people died that first night in Cairo, and somewhere the president’s family was booking flights to London. What got to me was the moment the connection cut. Everything went blank. It wasn’t like the news was being censored. The actual event was disappearing. People dying in the streets, and I couldn’t see it anymore. Nobody could. The government had basically reached through the screen and switched off my ability to know what was happening. The whole thing felt like it was supposed to prove that the internet changed everything. That connection meant power. That if people could just talk to each other, they could organize themselves into revolution. Maybe that was true for them. Maybe it wasn’t. But watching them try to erase the whole thing by just cutting the signal—that felt like the government admitting they were terrified of it. I don’t know what happened to the guy who posted on Reddit. The revolution happened. Mubarak left. And then it got complicated in ways that don’t fit into neat narratives. But I remember checking that thread obsessively, refreshing a page that would load slower and slower, trying to see what was happening in a country where the government had decided my ability to see counted as a threat. Wednesday, 26 January 2011. Sam Hiscox—Shoot Me in the Face: Tuesday, 25 January 2011. She Knew: M.I.A. said her third album was shit. Not diplomatically, not with caveats about artistic vision or misunderstood intentions—just, directly, that ///Y/// was bad. She had listened to it again and finally agreed with everyone else. I remember when she mattered differently. ’Paper Planes’ had that perfect ugly vitality, and the first two albums felt like someone had real things to say, about dislocation and survival and violence that wasn’t performed for effect. Then something happened. The third one didn’t land. What’s stranger than making a bad album is admitting it publicly. Most artists do the thing where they defend it as misunderstood, or they pretend it doesn’t bother them, or they just move on. Mathangi Arulpragasam actually looked at what she’d made and said yeah, that doesn’t work. There’s something honest in that, even if it’s grim. She knows she doesn’t want to be a pop machine, knows she can’t be one. The question is whether she figures out what comes next. I hope she does. Those first two albums meant something. Tuesday, 25 January 2011. Back to Summer: Summer disappeared this year in what felt like a couple of weeks. Heat, light, the whole lazy stretching of it—gone before you could actually settle into it. Now winter’s coming back around. There’s something about putting together a playlist that tries to bottle that feeling. Miike Snow has that bright, synthetic pop that catches sunlight. The National brings something darker underneath, that autumn-aware melancholy even in summer. Mark Ronson knows how to make production shine without overselling it. The three of them together don’t feel like a calculated vibe—they’re just the actual mix of what summer is. The thing about these songs is they know summer’s not actually that long. You get your moment in the sun, and then you’re looking back at it from November, trying to remember what the air was like, why July made you different. A good playlist does that work for you. It holds the moment still. Music’s probably the only reliable time machine. You can hear one of these songs in February and suddenly you’re back there, heat on your skin, the whole season compressed into three minutes. Not the Instagram version of summer. Just the actual thing, captured. Monday, 24 January 2011. One Day: Monday, 24 January 2011. Ten Little Missions: Saturday night, cheap wine and bad pizza in a second-floor apartment while Berlin’s Fashion Week happens somewhere else without us. Ghostbusters on the screen, the weather channel after that, and the specific paralysis of knowing we could do literally anything tonight and yet here we are. At some point—wine-drunk, maybe around 11—I start thinking about what an actually good weekend would look like. Not aspirational. Not the kind of thing you’d post. Just… what would make this feel like something. First idea’s stupid but persistent: buy a dead domain on eBay and turn it into something ridiculous. nerdcore.de as an organic fruit import operation. Something nobody would ever verify, which is the whole point. Or get on the U-Bahn in July with cheap vanilla ice cream, shorts, sandals—make summer everybody’s problem for forty-five minutes. Just sit there and make them think about heat. Then it gets more personal. Not touching yourself for a whole weekend just to feel what Monday morning actually tastes like. There’s something honest about that kind of self-denial, almost religious. Same logic as hunting dead Furbies at the flea market and burning them on the street—watching plastic go back to what it always was. Or just staring at someone beautiful for long enough that it stops being a choice, that your face just stays there and you can’t do anything about it. The weirder stuff comes next. Apparently Sweden’s doing this thing where you lick your own armpit. I don’t know if that’s real but it feels like it should be. Building a bunker outside the city, stocking it, waiting for the bombs. At least when WWIII comes we’d have somewhere to party. Kidnapping Lykke Li and forcing private concerts until the cops show up. Sleeping with a friend and whispering something stupid and true in the dark—your lips taste like kebab and they’re soft like flatbread. Not performing it. Just saying what happened. The last one lands different. Plant a tree. Like that would somehow balance the weekend. Like I’d actually follow through instead of just thinking about it while the city stays out there being important and we’re still here with cheap wine, watching the storm roll in. Friday, 21 January 2011. Back To Nintendo: Before I cared about anything else, Nintendo was the only company I trusted. I remember the sound of Kangaskhan in the backyard. The fury when the power went out before I killed Koopa. The pure joy of sending my best friends off cliffs with Sheik. Nothing deep about it. Nintendo made the best things, and that mattered more than whatever our ethics teacher wanted us to talk about. So yesterday Nintendo announced the 3DS and my immediate thought was: they’re actually going to do this. A handheld with two screens and a built-in 3D display—no glasses, no bullshit, just it working. March 25 for around 200 euros. It sounds competent. It sounds like Nintendo knowing exactly what they’re doing. What gets me is the lineup they’re promising. Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64 remade in 3D. New games too—Street Fighter IV, Kid Icarus. Your old DS games still play. Virtual Console brings back the fundamentals. It’s not revolutionary, it’s just Nintendo understanding that people want exactly what worked before, but slightly better. The 3DS is technically a gimmick. A screen that makes 3D without glasses is a neat party trick, nothing you actually need. But every time Nintendo releases a handheld I fall into it. There’s something about the way they make them—the weight, the screen, the buttons. They make it impossible not to want. I need to hold one first. Nintendo’s running demo events across Europe, so eventually I’ll stand in a crowd of people who grew up on Game Boys and try the 3DS and see if the 3D is real or just marketing. And then I’ll know whether this is another months-long obsession or if they actually nailed something. But I already know the answer. I’m buying it. I’m just waiting for an excuse. Thursday, 20 January 2011. Jogger—Nephicide: Wednesday, 19 January 2011. Yorick Nube: Wednesday, 19 January 2011. MTV’s Skins: MTV announced an American version of Skins—the British cult series about teenagers navigating parties, sex, drugs, and all the shit that comes with growing up. Same first season, same basic story, different characters. It had already aired on BBC America, but apparently that wasn’t American enough. The original Skins was genuinely good—a generational snapshot that didn’t flinch from what it was showing. Sex was sex, drugs were drugs, and the whole thing had actual teeth. So when MTV said they’d do their own version, fans immediately knew what that meant: castration. I watched the premiere anyway. An hour of déjà vu with twenty commercial breaks cutting into whatever momentum might have built. Same dialogue, different actors. Same scenes, less courage. Effy’s now a blonde with nothing behind the eyes. Cassie’s got darker hair and less of the weird grace that made her interesting. The gay character is now a girl, I guess, because why not scramble everything that mattered about the original. The censoring was automatic—bleeping profanity, no nudity, all the physical reality that made the show feel lived-in just erased. MTV needed something that could air with parents in the room, which is basically an admission that this was never for the same audience. It was for American teenagers who wanted the aesthetic of Skins without anything in it that might actually disturb someone. The British show wasn’t a masterpiece because it was edgy for edginess’ sake. It was a masterpiece because it let characters actually exist as themselves, complicated and sexual and self-destructive, without the need to make it palatable. The US version is what happens when you take that away—you get the shape of something good with the actual substance hollowed out. Real fans knew where to look. The real Skins was continuing, and no amount of network money was going to improve on what was already there. Tuesday, 18 January 2011. Amanda Palmer: No Apologies: Amanda Palmer’s the kind of artist who decided early on that being uncomfortable was more interesting than being liked. The performances, the refusal to apologize for sex or weirdness or taking up space exactly as she wanted it. That commitment to exist without apology, without the edit button. Monday, 17 January 2011. Back to the Future: Marty McFly exists in this perfect pocket where nothing about the movie feels dated—not because it’s timeless in the way people say that about good work, but because the whole thing is so clearly from its moment that it became its own world. Michael J. Fox had this hyperkinetic energy, all twitching restlessness and smart-aleck timing, that made Marty feel like an actual person rather than a teenager in a movie. The performance works because Fox never played it cool; he let Marty be anxious and funny and out of his depth, scrambling to fix things instead of knowing what he was doing. There’s something about that uncertainty—the way his face changes when he realizes something’s gone wrong, the little physical comedy that never feels calculated—that’s stayed with me longer than the plot itself. It’s one of those films that works for so many reasons that you can watch it at any age and find something different to hold onto. When you’re a kid it’s adventure, when you’re older it’s about your parents being actual people, and somewhere along the way it becomes about time itself and how you can’t fix anything no matter how fast you run. Friday, 14 January 2011. What’s Cheating For You: I kissed Tina at fifteen in the concrete stairwell of her apartment building on some hot summer day. Nothing complicated about it—we wanted to, we did it, she went inside. Walking home I knew I’d just ended things with Jasmine, and I was right. Jasmine never forgave me for it, like one kiss somehow negated everything else. Things with Susanne were different. We spent a year and a half cheating on each other constantly, some kind of revenge cycle where we’d fuck other people and then come home swearing eternal love and meaning it, at least for a few hours. I can’t remember who started it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. What I remember is how much we both seemed to enjoy the destruction of it, how we kept pushing to see what we could survive. By the time we split in my early twenties I was worn out in a way I didn’t have words for yet. Then came Sabrina, Regina, and Steffi, each with her own definition of the line. Sabrina said a kiss was cheating. Regina said thinking about someone else was. Steffi’s threshold was somewhere else again, and I kept crossing it because I was the kind of person who never learned where the boundary was until I’d already smashed through it. With my scattered, erratic nature, I just kept failing tests I didn’t know I was taking. None of them talk to me anymore. Jasmine never forgave the Tina kiss. Susanne… I guess we both lost whatever weird game we were playing. Sabrina, Regina, Steffi—I burned through those too, same pattern every time. The thing I should have figured out earlier, the thing I’d ask if I ever started something again: what’s cheating for you? Not as some relationship test, but as actual information about how not to hurt someone. I kept expecting that wanting someone badly enough would somehow bridge the gap of never actually talking about what mattered. It doesn’t work that way. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and by then you’ve already broken them. Thursday, 13 January 2011. Six Records: Went back to “The Best Of” N.E.R.D. this week, which is never a good sign. Pharrell and the crew had this thing figured out—looked untouchable, surrounded by beautiful women, more fun than seemed legal. Listening now it’s just competent. Nothing wrong with it, nothing that makes you feel alive. That’s the worst thing an album can be. JJ from Sweden shouldn’t work. The production is deliberately rough, the synths are thin, nothing polished. But there’s this urgency underneath that makes you listen. Sometimes the cheapest thing is the most honest thing. Gorillaz made an album on an iPad and you can hear it—thin, hollow, like they were goofing around. “Clint Eastwood” was genuinely great. This isn’t. At least it’s free so you’re only losing time. Chromeo is pure sex on a beat, which is their entire job and they execute it perfectly. The problem is everything else suffers. Around song five it all starts sounding the same. It’s fine for an hour at a club, but then the emptiness catches up with you. “King Night” by Salem is the strange one. Those vocals are aggressive without trying to be cool, the synths deliberately ugly. The whole thing feels hostile in a way that feels earned, not affected. I played it three times and felt worse each time, which meant something was working. Then there’s Peach Kelli Pop—a twenty-two-year-old making lo-fi bedroom pop where the imperfection is the whole point. It’s the record I’d least recommend to anyone, but it’s the one I keep coming back to for reasons I don’t fully understand. Wednesday, 12 January 2011. Deerhoof: Super Duper Rescue Heads: When you hear a Deerhoof song, it sounds like someone’s playing multiple songs at once—instruments all pushing against each other, nothing lining up, but it works anyway. There’s a commitment there to the genuinely strange, to following every impulse even when it gets uncomfortable. Every record feels like they’re chasing the next weird idea rather than repeating what worked before. That restlessness is what makes them work. You know they’re not trying to impress anyone. They’re just making something they actually believe in, and that kind of belief carries. Tuesday, 11 January 2011. Mixtape: Fire In My Hand: The blue sky over Berlin is making you sick. Literally—there’s that feeling in your chest where you want to throw it all up, the weekend, the wine, the conversations you shouldn’t have had. You’ve spent three days picking up books and putting them down, drinking something that expired months ago, absorbing other people’s histories like they matter. Everyone here has a lesbian past or something close to it. The city’s full of people carrying stories that don’t belong to them. It all ends quietly, without announcement, just fades the way weekends do when you’ve spent them thinking instead of living. That’s when you get outside. Not because it helps—nothing helps—but because staying with it feels worse. The sky’s still gray, you’re still tired, but you step back into it anyway. You find something worth listening to, something that matches what you’re carrying, and somehow the walk through the city changes. Music doesn’t fix anything. But it gives your thoughts somewhere to go besides spinning around in your skull. There’s always a song that fits the exact moment—the taste of old wine, the weight of strange stories, the need to move forward. You find it, put it in your ears, and the city looks different. Maybe nothing actually changes. But different is enough. Monday, 10 January 2011. Vicious Satellite: Monday, 10 January 2011. Vinnie: Luck or Choice: Friday, 7 January 2011. Ines Turns 21: I never thought Ines would actually make it to 21. Not in a dark way—just that she always seemed like she’d stay seventeen forever, permanently wrecked from some village party, reeking of cheap vodka and bad decisions. The kind of person you figured time would just pass over. Time doesn’t pass over anyone, though. The exhaustion just changes. Stops feeling earned and starts feeling like the actual weight of being alive. All those jokes about stretch marks and menopause—they’re savage, but they’re true. Time does exactly what you’ve always known it would. It just hurts more than expected. I owe her anyway. The pieces she wrote about Tamagotchis falling apart, about kissing and wanting and that specific low-level dread of being young and stupid in the 2000s—they stuck with me. She found something true in all that confusion. And then there was the autumn in Munich, which was its own kind of education. The village parties that were genuinely foul, the drinking that was industrial, nights that were filthy and stupid and felt important because we were inside them. Probably none of it was as important as it felt, but it felt that way at the time. There was a moment—short enough it almost doesn’t matter—where we were something real to each other. Not just two people who’d known each other. It had weight. The kind of weight that doesn’t actually leave, no matter how hard you try to let it go. So: 21. That’s something. Happy birthday, Ines. Drink something terrible for me. I hope you’re still breaking things. Thursday, 6 January 2011. New Rotation: Robyn finally corralled those three EPs she scattered out over the year into one album, “Body Talk,” and I’ve had it running on repeat. If Robyn’s never landed for you, this won’t change that, but if you already live there, it’s the kind of clean electro-pop that doesn’t need to announce itself. Ellie Goulding dropped “Bright Lights” last year and I haven’t really gotten past it. The special edition with the live recordings still holds that same precision, that control. She’s 24 and somehow knows exactly what she’s doing. I got tired of being nice and spun Ghostface Killah’s “Apollo Kids”—Wu-Tang territory, real hip-hop, the kind that sounds like it came from somewhere actual instead of someone’s idea of somewhere. The beats are thick, gray, exhausted. They don’t let up. Regina Spektor did something to me once with “Samson” that I still haven’t recovered from. I was actually crying in bed, the kind of crying you don’t usually get anymore. “Live in London” hits the same spot—her voice, live, no overdubs, no crowd noise, this woman whose entire being is somehow bigger than it should be. Still devastates. OFF! put out their first four EPs as one record and that’s exactly what punk should do. Fast and dumb and loud. The kind of thing you crank and let wash over you until your neighbors are genuinely angry. Solar Bears’ “She Was Coloured In” was what I needed by the end of the week—electronic but not cold, atmospheric but not trying to prove anything. Something that lets you disappear into it. Beautiful in a quiet way. Wednesday, 5 January 2011. Street Dress: I don’t understand expensive designer clothes. Wrap shopping bags around your body, grow a hipster beard, throw on some chunky shoes, and boom—you’re setting trends. That’s the whole game right there. There’s this woman with a helmet on. Full protective gear, hands up in front of her face like she’s bracing for impact. Terrified. But look at her and you don’t think about the fear. You just think she’s beautiful. Snoop Dogg’s everywhere these days, teaching kids things in places they shouldn’t be learning them. Counting from one to ten like it’s the most natural lesson in the world. Some people you see and they’ve just got it. A girl in her grandmother’s jacket—she stole the jewelry too—with a cigarette, that smile. You wouldn’t care what she was wearing. She’d make a garbage bag work. Then there’s the kid with the Hello Kitty chain and the makeup and hair that makes no sense. But he’s got the abs, and he knows it. There’s something almost admirable about making exactly the wrong choice and owning it. A shirt that just happens to be cool. Curves. No performance. Faces don’t really matter when you’ve got the rest going on. And somewhere in these moments there’s always a dog. Red shirt, accidentally caught in someone else’s photo, looking like he knows he looks ridiculous. You wonder what he was thinking when the camera went off. “I look like an idiot.” Probably that. Street style isn’t about the clothes at all. It’s about the people who aren’t thinking about being seen. They’re just alive. That’s the thing you notice. Tuesday, 4 January 2011. They Love Men for Money: I’ve never paid for sex. Either I always thought it was wrong, or I didn’t have the money—probably both. Sure, I’d scrape together cash for drinks and movies and whatever. But paying straight up, no cover story? It never happened. No pimps, no red-light windows, no hourly rooms. Not very rock star. I’d pass Oranienburger Straße enough times that it stopped being shocking. What I couldn’t stop noticing was how pretty some of them were. One night after pizza I was walking there with a friend and her eight-year-old sister. We passed these women in white boots—tired eyes watching us go by, women who probably took more in a single night than most people manage in a year. Short ones, tall ones, thin, thick, everything. The sister’s name was Alina. She asked what the pretty girls in white boots were doing, and whether they weren’t cold. I tried to explain it to her simply. They were prostitutes, I said. And yeah, it gets cold out there. “What’s a prostitute?” Her small voice was loud enough that some of them heard it. One of them smiled. One looked angry. I said the first thing that came to mind: “They do it for money. They love men for money.” That sentence won’t leave my head. It’s been there for days. They love men for money. How sad that is. For both of them. The women. The men. How does a girl end up in a situation like that? How broken down does a guy’s life have to be to spend his paycheck on it? Is everyone just resigned to this? Does anyone actually want it? I don’t believe any of them dreamed about this as kids. I don’t believe they were in school thinking: yeah, that’s my future. Forty years old, dealing with divorced guys, whatever they’re carrying. Some girl’s only option. Some guy’s routine Tuesday. The oldest profession. Supposed to have some kind of dignity, I guess. Something time-honored. But I don’t think there’s much dignity on either end. Just the places you end up when the other doors close. Monday, 3 January 2011. With Your Eyes Closed: Monday, 3 January 2011. One Good Intention: 2010 was shit. Not in any way I need to explain, just the weight of a whole year where nothing felt right. Not enough of anything that matters: not enough sex, not enough magic moments you’d actually tell someone about, not enough evidence that any of this is worth the energy it takes. The job had been destroying me for so long I couldn’t remember what not being angry felt like. My relationship had either broken or I’d just stopped noticing. Every night was the same as every other night. So January comes around and you’re supposed to want something different. You want to be the person who loses the weight, quits smoking, eats like he respects his own body. You want to leave. You want to travel. You want to be angry less often. You want the constant low-level misery to just shut up for once. You write it all down because writing it down is supposed to make it real, supposed to make you believe you could actually be someone else starting tomorrow. But I’ve lived long enough to know how this works. Pick five things and you’ll stick with maybe two for a few weeks before life happens and you’re back to the cigarettes, the shitty food, the job, everything exactly the same. Except now you also get to feel like garbage for failing again. Too many intentions just spreads the failure thinner but doesn’t make it go away. The only thing that ever seems to stick is picking one. One thing that matters. One thing that if it moved, might make everything else feel less impossible to live with. So that’s what I did. Looked at the list until something was obviously it. Taped it to the wall above my bed so I’d see it first thing every morning. Whether that changes anything or not, I guess I’ll find out. Thursday, 30 December 2010. Best Of 2010: Looking back at a year of writing is always strange. You get worked up about something—a film, an idea, a moment you want to preserve—and it feels urgent at the time. Months later, you can’t quite remember why. But some pieces hold. Some still feel like I got close to something true, or honest enough that I don’t feel stupid rereading them. This is the work from 2010 I’d actually want to keep. Tuesday, 28 December 2010. The End Of Everything Is Near: I made this mixtape at the end of 2010, called it “The End Of Everything Is Near” because I needed something playing while I worked and studied and sat in the dark thinking about what came next. Most of the songs came from friends scattered around Berlin, people who’d drifted out of the center looking for quieter blocks. It’s the kind of playlist that sits under your thoughts without demanding anything—just transition music, the sound of closing off on something you can’t quite name. Monday, 27 December 2010. Smith Westerns: Weekend Forever: There’s this particular Saturday morning feeling in their sound—the kind of restless optimism that comes from not knowing what you’re doing yet but being sure something’s about to happen. Weekend Forever captures that moment before the plan gets ruined or actually works out, before you figure out if this is growing up or just treading water. The production is clean enough that you can hear every decision, every moment where they decide to push or hold back. It’s a band that understood that indie rock doesn’t have to apologize for sounding like it matters. Sunday, 26 December 2010. Early Internet: Even a hardened asshole like me gets sentimental around this time of year, thinking about how we all started with this internet thing. 2003 maybe, I don’t remember exactly. None of us knew each other. We just did our own shit with stolen code snippets and no real idea what we were doing or what you’d even call it. We were a small diehard clique that bonded through link lists instead of status updates. A substitute family that got us through the usual disasters—bad breakups, failed exams, parents on our backs. We knew something connected us, even if it was just the weird combination of bits and bytes and the occasional semi-nude photo from one of the girls. The rest of the world didn’t want us anyway. Too ugly, too weird, too fat, too much. But I loved every single one of them because we rode through the same shit together on our self-built machines. Then something shifted. Maybe gradually, maybe all at once. The internet became different. Worse. When I go back through deleted posts from that time—when people still bought CDs, when the Dreamcast was current, when you could write openly about sex without shame—I realize how lucky I was to be there. Nobody cared if you spent ten paragraphs talking about your friend’s body in crude detail. You could put Nazis and Smurfs and terrible jokes in the same sentence without getting hate mail or discourse. You could insult your twelve daily visitors just because they made you miss The O.C., and the only consequence was some coked-up asshole knocking the antenna off your roof. There was something honest about how little we cared who was listening. Most of them left. Got real jobs as construction workers or accountants or just quit the internet entirely. The rest got absorbed into whatever social media became, and now they’re stuck counting followers and arguing with idiots in the replies. I don’t blame them for leaving. A few of us are still around. Ines lives in Berlin, writes sometimes in English. She made a life that isn’t terrible. Marcel became some kind of internet god, gathering more zealots as he goes. I don’t know how to feel about that anymore. Sara left—abandoned all of it, the crude talk, the jokes, the Australian guys—and went traveling instead. She’s the only one I’m genuinely jealous of because she was the one who made this whole internet thing actually cool, and now she’s somewhere warm doing something that matters. I copy my favorite old posts into a blank document, close the browser, and think about where I’d be without those weird people. No idea. The world just keeps changing and if you can’t keep up you’ve got real problems. So I tell myself that even back then it wasn’t as perfect as I pretend it was, that I’m romanticizing it all, and I’m back here. Present. Still online. Still thinking about it. Friday, 24 December 2010. Sasha Borodinova: Wednesday, 22 December 2010. Let Them: Wednesday, 22 December 2010. Borrowed: I don’t mark my life in years or school classes. I mark it in girls—the ones I chased, the ones who took something from me, the ones who ripped me open. Female creatures, each one a season, months or years of overlap and then the exit. Sacred or sloppy, doesn’t matter. They all proved the same thing: I need someone nearby who inspires me or calls me on my bullshit, regardless of whether we’re together. I feel like a busted Care Bear sometimes—this thing supposed to radiate infinite goodwill, except the rays have to go somewhere. They land on whoever’s in range. Love thy neighbor. The moment I meet a woman whose taste or energy I can absorb, I’m in. I suck it dry. What’s she listening to? What shoes? What shows? If she says something good, I’m already thinking about how it becomes part of me. The problem is I can’t separate anymore. Most of my bands, most of my clothes, most of my jokes aren’t mine. Ana gave me Muse. Chrissy wore Adidas Superstars so now I do. Jenny’s way of insulting cashiers—that’s mine now, or was hers, or came from me through her. It’s all tangled, red threads through the years, and I don’t know where any of it started. Somewhere between the borrowing and the paranoia, I think I’m just rationalizing. Everyone starts as an original and dies as a copy of a thousand influences. So maybe it’s better to steal from beautiful women who actually have something going on than to let yourself be shaped by algorithms, false friends, and people who don’t care. Maybe being a parasite is just how people actually work. I’m waiting for the next one. Whoever she is, whatever she brings. I know I’ll end up wearing her life for a while. Tuesday, 21 December 2010. Some Boy: Friday, 17 December 2010. Everything Disappears: The internet eats its own. Delicious just proved it again. Yahoo’s bookmark service—which somehow became important to people—is getting shut down. Cue the panic. Suddenly everyone’s running scripts to export their links, hunting for alternatives, signing petitions like a petition is going to matter. It won’t. But I get it. You build something on someone else’s server for years and then one day they decide it’s not worth it anymore. I’ve watched this happen enough times that it barely registers. AOL. Lycos. MySpace. Google Reader. Flickr started dying the moment Yahoo bought it. YouTube probably won’t exist forever, though it feels too big to kill. But nothing’s too big. Nothing’s permanent. That’s just how it is. What gets me is how surprised people act, like Delicious was some public utility, like Yahoo gave a shit about their bookmarks. Yahoo’s hemorrhaging money. Google owns search. Of course they cut loose whatever isn’t generating revenue. Of course services disappear. This isn’t tragedy. It’s just the machine. I’m not innocent about it. I’ve uploaded photos to Flickr thinking they’d be there forever. Stored links, bookmarked articles, built on services that turned out temporary. You do it anyway because the alternative is keeping everything on your own machine, and nobody does that. We need the cloud, or think we do, because it’s free and convenient and asking almost nothing of us except maybe once, when they flip the switch. Around year ten of watching this, you stop panicking and start accepting. Delicious is gone. Thousands of other things will disappear too. The smart move is never getting attached, never letting your life sit on someone else’s server. The practical move is accepting it happens anyway. I’ll export my bookmarks if I remember to care, and I probably won’t look at them again. Friday, 17 December 2010. Together We’re Nothing: Wednesday, 15 December 2010. The Dø: Slippery Slope: The Dø are one of those bands that sound deceptively simple until you’re a few listens deep and suddenly everything clicks into place. Krystal and Jotta build these tight electronic and acoustic arrangements that sit somewhere between pop and experimental without quite committing to either. There’s something disarming about how unadorned it all is—a voice, a drum machine, maybe a synth—and yet it sounds more considered than most pop music out there. I fell into their music the way you fall into a good habit, not thinking about it until you realize you’ve been listening to the same album on repeat for two weeks. Wednesday, 15 December 2010. Scissor Sisters: Invisible Light: There’s something about Scissor Sisters that feels like permission. Not permission in the sense of being allowed—more like watching someone live so completely in their own excess that you stop wondering if you’re supposed to. The theatricality, the sex, the refusal to make it palatable. Jake Shears doesn’t care if you think it’s too much. That energy carries through everything they touch. I came to them late, which is typical of me. By the time I paid attention they’d already done their best work, already shifted and regrouped and become something different. But that’s how it works—you find what moves you when you find it, not when it’s new. What matters is that the songs are still there, still infectious in that way that dance music at its best is infectious. Not infectious like a cold. Infectious like standing in a room full of people and feeling less alone because the music won’t let you be. Invisible Light carries that same uncompromising energy. There’s no apology in it. Just the sound of people who know exactly what they want to say and say it anyway, knowing most people won’t get it and not particularly concerned. That’s the kind of art I’ve always gravitated toward—the stuff that doesn’t have time to convince you. Monday, 13 December 2010. Kelsey Reckling: Never Still: Wednesday, 8 December 2010. Ten Missions: Weekends are when your body remembers it’s not just a delivery system. Friday hits and the pattern breaks, and you’ve got two days to either fill them with something real or spend the whole time scrolling and feeling hollow about it. That’s the binary—act or rot. Kiss someone. Not the safe version. The kind that tastes like want and feels like you’re alive. The rest is smaller things. Go somewhere you don’t normally go. Talk to a stranger. Spend money on something ridiculous. Listen to music loud. Call someone you’ve been dodging and say what you mean. Do something that scares you a little. Move your body around. Sleep at weird hours. The whole thing is permission to be an animal instead of a worker. It sounds like nothing, but it’s everything. The week tries to convince you that you’re made of punctuality and email and small talk. The weekend is two days to prove it’s lying. Friday, 3 December 2010. Cataclysm: I can still feel it sometimes, that pull. Walking past the game store in December, seeing the Cataclysm box with its red fire and broken world. A notification in an email about the expansion release. Nothing desperate, nothing urgent—just a low frequency hum that’s never quite gone away, even after all these years. When I first played World of Warcraft I was a kid, alone most evenings, and the game felt like a door into a world that wanted me there. My blue-haired night elf and I spent entire weekends vanishing into it—I’d start on Friday and look up to find Sunday ending, my back aching, my eyes burning, no food eaten, nothing in my head but quests and bosses and the promise of one more level before bed. It got dark fast. Not gradually, but in a way that made sense at the time, where spending every hour that wasn’t school or sleep in Azeroth seemed completely rational. Then one day I just stopped. Quit the subscription, deleted the files, shut the door. That day felt like air—like I’d been holding my breath underwater. Real things started happening: I got out, made actual friends, had actual sex, did things that mattered to people sitting in the same room. It was cleaner, harder, better. I didn’t miss it, or I told myself I didn’t. Most of the time that was true. But Blizzard is smart. They know exactly when to come back around. It’s December, and the world is cold and gray, and everyone’s retreating indoors where the only friction is the weather, and they drop Cataclysm—a whole world remade, the boring places torn down and rebuilt, new reasons to sink back in. They’re not stupid about timing. They know a man’s defenses are lowest when he’s isolated and the days are twelve hours long. The thing about addiction is it doesn’t really leave you. It just goes quiet. And then something brings it back—not the game itself, but the memory of how good it felt to disappear, how simple it was, how the world shrank down to something manageable. Even now, even knowing better, I can feel that temptation wearing at me like water on stone. The question isn’t whether it’s a good idea. It’s whether I’m stronger now than I was then, and I honestly don’t know. Thursday, 2 December 2010. Just Looking: Swedish girl with red hair standing in front of an aggressively colored wall, purple from Gina Tricot and a few other places. She’d already figured out how the hair and the purple and the wall would all work against each other. The colors didn’t fight. Guy in a Forever 21 sweater, could be any age. Pretty sure he’s gay. That’s usually the moment someone’s actually paid attention to what they’re wearing, is all I’m saying. Polish woman who described her style as “Katy B feat. Ms. Dynamite” and I immediately got what she meant. That jacket she had on was the punctuation mark on the whole thing. Japanese girl in something expensive from ANAP, dressed like she operates on completely different fashion rules than the rest of us. Or maybe she just does anyway. Some kid studying design at Saint Martins, eating a banana while we talked. Your brain goes somewhere immediately. Can’t help it. Kadeem up in the Bronx wearing Cheap Monday and Uniqlo like it was the most important thing anyone could possibly do. He wasn’t thinking about it at all. That’s when it actually works. Wednesday, 1 December 2010. The Minefield: The blogsphere is in panic mode. Next year the new youth protection treaty kicks in, and it’s clear that the government has written some truly spectacular rules for something it fundamentally doesn’t understand. The regulations are vague as hell—basically cost-traps disguised as policy, written by people who have no idea how the internet actually works. The whole thing seems designed to kill cultural diversity online. Everyone’s scrambling to figure out what to do. For me, the math is simple and completely impossible at the same time. I could classify my entire site as 18+. Sure, most of my readers are adults anyway. But that’s suicide. A gate page kills traffic, kills impressions, kills every metric that actually matters to an advertiser. No one buys ads on a site that looks like it’s hiding something. The insane part is that Spiegel Online and Bild get exempted because they’re considered “general interest”—whatever that actually means. They can publish whatever they want. I have to audit every article, every image, every comment against regulations that don’t make sense. It’s economically impossible. It’s legally uncertain. There’s no way to actually comply. The government has proven something with this treaty: they don’t understand what they’re regulating. They’re writing rules about a system they don’t use, don’t participate in, and clearly don’t comprehend. And if it wasn’t so sad, the whole thing would be funny—the biggest intervention in digital culture in German history, written by people who have never really used the internet. But it’s not funny. I’m sitting here trying to figure out if I should shut down, comply anyway and hope I don’t get destroyed, or somehow pay fines that are impossibly large. Maybe emigrate. Maybe close it all down. Maybe just keep going and see what happens. The road will be rocky. I might not be around to see the other side of it. Tuesday, 30 November 2010. Small: You spend months building someone up before you get them naked. Fantasy is a specific thing—you imagine them in detail, construct the perfect version based on what you’ve seen clothed and what they’ve told you and how they move through space. Then the day comes when you actually get to look and it’s almost never what you were expecting. There’s always something. A cock too small or too crooked. Breasts that hang different than you thought. A pussy that’s too loose or too tight or smells too strong. Small aesthetic disasters that weren’t in the version you’d been carrying around. That’s what nobody talks about—how much sex lives in your head. You can like someone’s personality, their mind, their taste, everything about them as a person. You can love them. But your body has preferences that don’t care about any of that. Your cock gets hard for something specific. Your pussy gets wet for something specific. And sometimes that something is not the person you actually like as a human being. So you’re lying there naked, trying to figure out how to feel about the reality in front of you. The specific smell, the specific shape, the way it actually feels inside rather than how you imagined. And they’re doing the same math with your body. Wondering if they can get past whatever disappointment they’re calculating right now. We rationalize it away. Tell ourselves size doesn’t matter, it’s about technique. Tell ourselves that love transcends these small physical incompatibilities. Maybe sometimes that’s true. Maybe you do make peace with the gap—learn the angles that work, get used to the quirks, find the rhythm that makes it tolerable. Or maybe you just get really good at pretending. Maybe you learn to dissociate. Maybe you become one of those people scrolling their phone afterward because you’ve already checked out of your own body. The real thing is whether you stay. Whether your brain can override what your body is telling you. Most people figure it out somehow. They compromise. They rationalize. They tell themselves it’s good enough and actually start believing it. Or they don’t, and that’s a different story. Monday, 29 November 2010. Princess Mononoke: At AnimagiC in ’99—Germany’s first real anime convention—someone handed me a ticket. “Mononoke-hime,” they said. Original with German subtitles. I had no idea what I was walking into, just knew the crowd around me felt like the first place I’d ever belonged. Two hours in and I understood why people got religious about film. The cursed warrior running toward the wolf princess, and the film just held it all—the mythology, the score, the way things moved—at an epic scale anime seemed too cheap to reach. The violence mattered. When it ended I sat through the credits staring at nothing, trying to process whatever had happened to me. I’ve seen other Ghibli films since. “Spirited Away” is technically brilliant, “Ponyo” has passages that stick. But “Mononoke” landed differently. The stakes are real and nobody wins. The wolf princess leaves, the warrior stays cursed, the world is saved but it doesn’t feel like salvation. It’s a film about what you lose when you stop the thing destroying you. Most movies can’t hold that weight. Most movies try to give you something to carry away. This one just leaves you. Disney spent years trying to suffocate it—cutting it down, repackaging it, keeping it out of American circulation like a dangerous book. It survived. Quality doesn’t negotiate. Friday, 26 November 2010. Europe’s Erotic Panic: The European Union decided that the best way to protect children is to criminalize eroticism itself. Not just real child abuse material—that’s reasonable. But drawings of people who look young. Photographs of adults who happen to have boyish faces. Simulated sex acts. All of it banned now, and if you make it or look at it, you’re a criminal. On its face it’s stupid. A child who’s being exploited isn’t helped by whether I can legally own a drawing of a fictional adult with youthful features. But the logic here isn’t really about children—it’s about control. The state gets to decide what sexuality is permissible by setting impossible standards for what counts as “too young-looking,” then let enforcement wiggle according to whoever’s judging on any given day. Who decides whether someone looks like a minor? A 30-year-old with a round face and no body hair can pass for younger. A 17-year-old can look 25. There’s no threshold. You’re handing judges and prosecutors a tool to criminalize whatever erotic material offends them, then dressing it up as child protection. It’s worse in practice. Law enforcement gets buried in cases that don’t matter—prosecuting drawings, photographs of consenting adults—while actual child exploitation gets de-prioritized because the infrastructure is clogged. Abusers win. Everyone else loses. It’s the move every generation of moral panic makes. Pretend you’re protecting the vulnerable. Use that as cover to narrow what adults are allowed to think about and desire and create. The arbitrary lines harden. Nothing actually changes for the people you claimed to protect. If Germany and the rest of Europe go through with it, eroticism becomes a dark market again. Educational material gets buried. People get prosecuted for wanting and creating normal adult sexuality. And the actual harm—the children in real danger—stays untouched because the system’s too busy chasing drawings. Thursday, 25 November 2010. Girls in the Bath: Thursday, 25 November 2010. Winter Simplifies: Winter does something to how you dress. You can’t hide anything—everything either keeps you warm or it doesn’t, and you look equally stupid in both situations. Watching people in cold cities, from Vancouver to Moscow, they all figure this out the same way. Once they’ve got a coat that works, boots that work, something on their head that works, they stop thinking about clothes for the next six months. Everything else falls away. You see people from totally different places looking basically the same because the cold has erased all the choices that seemed to matter in the summer. Tuesday, 23 November 2010. November: The nuts are gathered. The cave is prepared. By November you’re out of summer’s pretense and completely into winter mode—thinking less about the world and more about what you actually want around you for the next few months. What lands: Bill Murray in anything. That’s non-negotiable. People you’ve known long enough you don’t need to explain yourself to. Grapefruit if you want it. Curry in the morning. A washing machine that doesn’t betray you at the worst moment. Someone answering the phone. Pictures that look like something, not just documentation. Food that tastes right. Donkey Kong. Sex with people who’ve lived more, who don’t treat you like you’re making discoveries. Bad jokes. Dumbbells by your bed because you know yourself by November. Reading things backwards. Writing the year review before the year’s done because impatience feels like urgency. Berlin Fashion Week because clothes done right is interesting. Things that work without asking you to appreciate them. What’s exhausted: almost everything else. The internet eating itself. Twitter as metrics. Every city ranked until nothing’s special. Christmas markets in September now. Memes as decoration. Scratches on expensive laptops. Sleep as a virtue. The collective existential dread everyone’s contracted and repackaged as personality. Exes. Neighbors on a different timeline. Dishes stacking up as autobiography. Apartments like a dentist’s office. The constant performance of progressing toward something. November’s simple: keep what works. Lose the weight. Tuesday, 23 November 2010. Married to the Mob: Watched Married to the Mob during the holidays. Michelle Pfeiffer trying to escape a mob family, and something about that desperation hits different when you’re stuck with your own. The film treats it all as light comedy—chaos, nobody listening, everybody scheming—but underneath there’s this panic about being trapped in a situation you can’t control. Basically what the holidays feel like. Saturday, 20 November 2010. Paradise Didn’t Work: Thursday, 18 November 2010. Love Hina: The pitch is stupid. Shy guy with a bad hair cut and clearly untouched genitals gets assigned to run a boarding house and immediately finds himself surrounded by girls. It’s the setup for every bad anime that ever existed, the kind of thing you know is leading somewhere predictable before you hit play. But then Love Hina just works. Somehow it transcends the premise entirely. Maybe thirty minutes in, you stop expecting it to be a transparent vehicle for fanservice and realize it actually cares about its characters. There’s genuine warmth here. Real comedy. Keitaro’s a disaster—pimply, accident-prone, constantly getting destroyed by Naru for infractions he barely understands—but he’s trying. He’s trying to hold this place together, trying to chase his impossible dream, trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing, and he keeps getting knocked back down. It’s pathetic and funny and oddly endearing. The girls aren’t interchangeable, which is the thing that kills most shows like this. Naru has her own ambitions and her own doubts. Motoko’s got an edge, something dangerous underneath. Mitsune’s funny in a deadpan way that actually makes sense. Kaolla’s just pure anarchic energy. They have texture. They feel like real people fumbling through their lives, not just bodies to ogle. Yeah, there’s fanservice. It’s an early-2000s romantic comedy with a male protagonist, so obviously there is. Bathing scenes, compromising positions, the constant low-level eroticism of everyone living on top of each other. But it doesn’t feel cynical about it. The fanservice and the actual character work coexist instead of fighting each other. It’s strange how completely this disappeared outside Japan. In Germany it barely registered. I found it almost by accident and it felt like stumbling onto something forbidden, something everyone else somehow missed. There’s something satisfying about that—being one of the few people who actually sat with this thing and let it work on you. The show doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t try to be important or relevant or edgy. It’s just a house full of mildly broken people figuring things out, with the occasional absurd robot or the constant low hum of sexual tension that comes from living in impossible proximity. That domesticity is what gets you. Not the premise—anyone can pitch you a premise. Not even the fanservice, though it’s obviously doing work. It’s the weird mundane reality of the thing. The comedy that comes from actual character friction instead of setup-payoff mechanics. The way Keitaro is simultaneously the worst possible person to run this place and somehow also exactly the right person to run it. You watch an episode and think yeah, I see it with her, and then the next one Naru does something unexpectedly kind and it shifts. Everyone’s growing on you at slightly different speeds, and the show’s patient enough to let that happen naturally. Wednesday, 17 November 2010. Something In Your Face: There’s a moment near the end where you get maybe thirty seconds of clarity. Some guys pull out and don’t think about it. Some have it planned. Some just push toward the face and let gravity and instinct do the work, loud about it, and then comes that particular quiet - not awkwardness, just the silence after something physical actually happened. Cumshots are the default ending now. Porn wrote the grammar for basically anyone under forty. The money shot. The proof. Why that specifically - the face, the visibility, the inability to look away? The dominance angle plays out fine in theory. The mess, the chaos, the whole thing turning into something animal and undeniable. But I think it’s just that men like making sex chaotic, and most women don’t seem to mind. I knew a couple who’d been together about three years. One night, too much wine and a film and the river, they came back to hers. The sex was the way it gets when you’re comfortable - not trying to prove anything, still interested. Then he pulled her close and came on her face without ceremony, like they’d already decided this was the shape of things. He collapsed beside her. That silence. There were lemon-scented wipes next to her bed, which meant she’d thought about this. They were planning an anniversary dinner. I remember being struck by that detail - not that she was fine with it, but that they were both fine with it, casual about it, like it was just a thing that happened between people who’d known each other long enough to make a mess without it meaning anything except that they wanted to. Maybe it is dominance. Maybe it’s routine and boredom that keeps men inventing new angles. Maybe men are just drawn to turning intimate things into chaos. But maybe it’s also just about being with someone long enough that you can be crude and physical and move on, unburdened by interpretation. Tuesday, 16 November 2010. Ride In Peace, Brett: Monday, 15 November 2010. Stupid Distractions: November in Germany is relentless. Cold, wet, the sky the color of old dishwater—the kind of weather that makes you understand why people used to just go dormant for months and wait for spring like bears in a cave. The darkness starts eating at you around day three. By day seven you’re calculating the survival probability of jumping from a low enough height that you’d just walk away with regrets and mobility issues. What saves me is stupidity. Intentional absurdity. When I feel the seasonal depression starting to wrap around my throat, I make a list—not the productive kind, not a self-help thing. The deliberately pointless kind. Weekend ideas that are too ridiculous to actually do but just coherent enough to distract my brain from the real darkness. It’s not healthy, but it works better than whatever healthy actually means. Barricade yourself in bed with someone who looks good and stay there until March. Hot water bottle, chocolate cake, just ride it out. You can double whatever you feel like—extra blankets, extra coffee, extra hours pretending the outside world isn’t happening. That one’s almost practical, buried under the stupid. There’s something cleaner about the ones with no actual endpoint. Put on Lady Gaga and cover one of her songs so badly that the entire internet collectively decides you’re unhinged. It’s weirdly freeing, the idea of being that comprehensively, publicly bad at something that you loop around past embarrassment into absurdist celebrity. Listen to Regina Spektor until you can’t tell anymore whether you’re laughing or crying, until her voice has dissolved into some third emotion that doesn’t have a name. Sleep with someone with a good mustache just because you decided this week is the week for it—no external justification required, just a thing you thought of and decided to do. Some are quieter. Hug a tree. They’re struggling right now, dealing with their own seasonal darkness, and they probably appreciate it. The ones that are pure nonsense—invent the internet’s successor, buy out Google and whatever embarrassing websites you can think of for spare change—those are fine too. They’re not supposed to work. They’re supposed to occupy just enough of your consciousness that when you’re lying awake at three in the morning, your brain is running through logistics instead of spiraling. November’s still out there. The weather won’t change. But having a list of impossible, ridiculous things to think about instead of the real weight of it—that gets you through the weekend. That gets you to December. That gets you to spring eventually, when everything will probably still be complicated but at least the sun will be out while you’re dealing with it. Friday, 12 November 2010. My Dumb Role Model: I didn’t expect my role model to be a four-year-old cartoon character. Especially not one who was basically a walking advertisement for being inappropriate. But Shin-chan showed up and ruined that particular lie. He had no manners, no impulse control, no embarrassment reflex. He’d dance around with his butt out, he’d make his teachers regret their life choices, he’d say whatever perverted thought crossed his mind that second. And somehow that was the point. The show was just this relentless refusal to be civilized, and every episode—every single one—had you laughing at something stupid you weren’t supposed to find funny. His creator Yoshito Usui died in 2009. Hiking accident, mountains, just like that. I remember feeling it more than I expected. Not because I knew him, but because you realize how much of a person’s voice gets into their work, how much of Usui was in every dumb thing Shin-chan did. The thing that stuck with me though is that it didn’t matter. Shin-chan was already out there, already living separate from his creator. He just kept being himself—crude, fearless, completely unbothered by what anyone was supposed to think. And I think that’s what I actually took from him. Not a role model in any conventional sense. Just permission to find humor in the wrong places and not apologize for it. Thursday, 11 November 2010. Geisha: Wednesday, 10 November 2010. I Hate School: Tuesday, 9 November 2010. Who Do You Want To Be Today?: Someone ran over a hedgehog. Posted about it on Twitter. Cried about it there. Asked their followers what to do next—should they still go to their friend’s birthday party? What should they get at Starbucks to feel okay? And everyone weighed in. Hot chocolate or coffee with milk? Twitter gets used in as many ways as there are people using it. Some people work those 140 characters like they’re trying to carve something real out of the constraints. Others just push news and information. And some people just narrate whatever happens between the train station and the swimming pool—lost water wings, found condoms, doesn’t matter, someone will read it. I tweet for this blog. Or I did, anyway. Used to dump everything that crossed my mind. Now it gets harder. Because I stopped seeing it as my own space and started seeing it as the voice of something with actual readers. Readers who don’t care about my pizza preferences or who I’m dating. Nobody wants to watch me ramble with friends about their bodies. So the question is: is there even a right way to use this thing? How personal should it be? Just links and articles, or does the person behind it matter? Does the answer change depending on whether it’s you, or a company, or a magazine trying to have a voice? The worst instinct is treating every new platform like it needs some professional playbook. Like there’s a way you’re supposed to behave that’s fundamentally different from being human. But maybe that’s the trap. Maybe nothing terrible happens if you share about pizza sometimes, if what you’re sharing is actually interesting. If it’s something worth reading. I don’t know the answer. Maybe you just pick which version of yourself you’re going to be and commit to it. All-in personal or carefully filtered. Raw or performed. As long as you’re interesting about it. As long as there’s actually something there worth the read. Friday, 5 November 2010. Steven Meisel: Organized Robots: Meisel’s fashion photographs are arrangements first, moments never. You can feel the studio around every frame—the precision, the careful spacing, the models positioned like they’re part of an installation rather than people. It’s not cold exactly, but it’s controlled in a way that feels almost architectural. He’s been shooting for Italian Vogue forever, building this language of composition and staging that everyone else seems to be copying. The geometry of it appeals to me, honestly—that sense that if you get everything perfectly placed, perfectly lit, perfectly proportioned, something true might emerge from all that artifice. Thursday, 4 November 2010. City Cow: I grew up in the country down south, hours from anything. I mean actual hours—walking across fields and through forests just to reach some party in a rusted trailer where we drank homemade schnapps and had no real idea what to do with ourselves. Farm life. Calves in the stable. Sunflower fields that went on forever. I watched animals get slaughtered and it stuck with me. Everyone knew everyone in that small universe. Either you were related or you had what we called a deep friendship—the kind where there’s nowhere to hide because you’re too tangled up in each other. I got out as soon as I could. The sameness was suffocating. One real road. People who’d known you your whole life but never actually saw you. So I left for Berlin and just disappeared into the crowd. In a city of millions, nobody gives a shit who you are. I thought that was the whole point. But something gets burned in a city. Friendships don’t deepen—they vanish. There’s always something better somewhere else, someone more interesting, somewhere else to be. You’re drowning in options and end up completely isolated anyway. It’s different from the country, where you’re alone together, where the closeness is just built into everything. Here, choice means nothing goes deep. I still can’t figure out which is worse. The suffocation of roots or the emptiness of freedom. Sometimes I get this stupid image stuck in my head: walking a cow down the middle of Alexanderplatz, petting its head the whole way. Just putting the two things into collision—the countryside and the city—and watching what happens. It won’t fix anything. But that’s kind of where I’m at. Caught between two things that both know how to hurt you. Tuesday, 2 November 2010. Right Now: The thing about always having someone around is that you never actually have to make a choice. There’s just… someone. And then someone else. And you start to wonder if you’re the problem or if you’re just looking for something that doesn’t actually exist. I’m tired of wondering. I want to know what it feels like to stay, even if it doesn’t last forever. Here’s what won’t work: someone obsessed with his own image, endlessly considering which coffee shop has the right aesthetic, unable to commit to anything concrete. No more guys who agonize over their vintage collection like it’s a life decision. I need someone who knows what she wants, full stop. No hedging, no “let me think about it.” Just know something and own it. The small stuff gets me. If I give you something—I actually thought about it, picked it out because I thought of you—and you don’t wear it, I get this quiet, cold anger that sticks around. Same with the little betrayals: the mess you leave, the way you ignore me on the phone, the chronic flakiness. I don’t fight about it. I just leave. I’m not romantic. Flowers die. Candles are a fire hazard. What I actually want is someone who remembers the specific things I like and shows up when she says she will. No apologies, no managing my feelings, just directness. I’m contradictory, which is probably why nothing sticks. I care about style and how things look and feel, but I’m not pretentious about it. I can get genuinely invested in old football matches, then spend money on things that have nothing to do with being practical or having taste. I don’t need you to understand it. The thing I’m after is someone real. Not trying to be someone. Not still figuring themselves out. Someone who wants to be here because they actually want to be, not because they’re bored or between things. I’m not naive. I know I’m fickle—I’ve never really been alone, so maybe that’s just what I am. But maybe I’ve been fickle because I haven’t met someone worth not being fickle for. So right now, I want that. Not forever. Just now. Monday, 1 November 2010. Robyn: Indestructible: Robyn’s voice comes out of nowhere and it’s already the best thing happening. That particular kind of clarity and precision she has, the way she shapes a syllable like it’s the only syllable worth hearing—you can’t unhear it once you’ve heard it. Even on the most radio-friendly hooks, there’s something that feels uncomfortably sharp about her, like she’s at risk of cutting through the whole production and directly into whatever room you’re sitting in. She’s been doing this for twenty years and keeps getting weirder rather than safer, which seems almost defiant at this point. The early stuff was pop but never felt calculated—just a woman with an incredible voice and very precise ideas about what she wanted to hear. Then she went through her more experimental phase and stayed there, actually stayed there, when she could have easily cashed back in on the bangers. Instead she made something that felt closer to what was actually happening in her head. What gets to me is the range between total coldness and complete vulnerability, sometimes in the same song. She doesn’t use that gap to perform anything. It just seems like how she actually hears music, how her instincts actually work. The desperation when it comes through doesn’t feel like an effect—it feels like she’s letting you see something she didn’t plan on showing. She’s one of those artists who made me realize that “staying power” doesn’t mean staying the same. It means not compromising your instincts even when nobody’s paying attention, and then somehow arriving back at relevance on your own terms. Friday, 29 October 2010. Juli: Somewhere in the late 2000s, German rock broke through. Bands like Juli filled festivals, wrote good songs, and drew real crowds. They didn’t need English radio to matter. When Telekom Street Gigs put them in Erfurt in 2009, it felt like confirmation of something already shifting: German bands weren’t underdogs anymore. I never caught them live, but the shift was noticeable if you paid attention. For years, everything that mattered seemed to happen in English. Then bands like Juli just existed, did their thing, and people showed up. It wasn’t sudden or revolutionary. It was just a moment when things changed. Thursday, 28 October 2010. Violent Love: Thursday, 28 October 2010. Out of Depth: I’ll say it plainly: I don’t understand fashion. Ask me about a collection, a cut, a color trend, and I’m useless. Genuinely embarrassed. I know enough to move through those spaces without looking like a complete outsider, but the moment it turns technical, I’m out. Which doesn’t stop me from being at every fashion event worth attending. Somehow we’ve built enough of a reputation that the invitations keep coming—agencies, designers, labels calling regularly. Shows, parties, backstage meetings. I love it. The energy. The beautiful people. The visual spectacle. But I’m operating on instinct and observation, not actual knowledge of what’s happening. There’s something honest about not pretending otherwise. I’m useful for other things—noticing the weird dynamics in a room, how power moves at parties, the small moments that reveal how the industry actually works versus how it presents itself. I can watch and write about the system, the energy, the people. Just not the clothes themselves. I’ve made peace with being an outsider in rooms I get to be inside. Maybe that’s the best position anyway. You see things that people too close to the machinery miss. You don’t have a stake in defending the system. You’re just watching, writing, and trying to describe what’s really going on beneath the surface. Tuesday, 26 October 2010. Naughty Kids: Monday, 25 October 2010. Sailor Moon: I’d come home from school and the Sailor Scouts would be there waiting. That’s what it felt like, anyway—like they were just sitting around in some other dimension, ready to transform the moment I hit play. Sailor Moon was ridiculous in every way. Talking cats. A villain with the kind of tragic backstory that made you almost root for her. The transformation sequences that went on long enough that you could really sit with what was happening—the costumes, the jewelry, the hair. And those eyes. Anime eyes, sure, but something about them made the whole show feel possible. I didn’t care that the plots were thin or that it recycled the same setups. I was thirteen or fourteen, coming home to this world of girls in sailor suits fighting impossible things. There was something hypnotic about it. The episodes blended together. I just kept watching. Inevitably, you start ranking them. Which one. Everyone does. Chibiusa was insufferable—bratty, childish, the kind of character you’d want to punch. But the ones who actually fought, the ones in the real suits doing real damage: there was something there. I won’t pretend it wasn’t about the costumes, the curves, the way the animation handled certain angles. That was part of it. You’re fourteen. Of course that’s part of it. But it was something else too. They showed up. They were scared and they showed up. They’d rather be anywhere else and they showed up. The show knew that the girls wanted other things—boys, normal lives, not this—and it let you feel that tension. That made them real in a way most cartoons didn’t bother with. I don’t know how many afternoons I spent like that. Long enough that I stopped feeling like I was watching a show and started feeling like I was just… there. In that world. Waiting for the next transformation, the next impossible thing. Friday, 22 October 2010. Three Albums: Three albums came through this week. Mark Ronson’s got a new one out. Deine Jugend, a German club-pop band, dropped their debut. And Die Antwoord did Die Antwoord things again. Ronson’s Record Collection is fine. Clean production, smart samples, people who know what they’re doing. But fine is all it is. “Bang Bang Bang” and “Lose It” had me excited for what was coming, but this album learned how to be competent and forgot how to surprise anyone. “The Bike Song” and “Hey Boy” are the ones worth hearing again, which is to say they’re good pop songs that don’t make you feel anything. Deine Jugend actually works. Three kids from Mannheim who got club-pop right. Laura’s voice is why—sharp and live-sounding even on record, sitting perfectly over these melodies that feel like they belong in a packed room. “Deine Maske” and “Mama Geht Jetzt Steil” are the songs that got me. No trying to be clever or cool, just building something that moves. I’d see them play. Die Antwoord’s new record is a different animal. Critics hated it, but that’s because they’re judging it as music instead of what it actually is—a visual and performance thing that happens to have a soundtrack. Listen to it straight and you get thin, shock-value songs. Watch them and you get everything. Yo-Landi’s presence, Ninja’s weirdness, all the spectacle. They clearly don’t care if it works as pure audio. That’s the point, actually. “Evil Boy” and “In Your Face” come closest to being actual songs, but mostly this is art that’s refusing to play it straight. At least somebody’s not pretending. Thursday, 21 October 2010. When We Stopped Talking: We stopped talking somewhere between winter and spring. I can’t pin down when—there’s no moment you can point to. It was gradual, the way things rot. We used to be the kind of people who’d stay up all night doing nothing in particular, your head against my shoulder, cheap wine going warm in our glasses. We had this thing where the world made sense because we had each other, or at least that’s how it felt. Everything outside the two of us seemed small. But something shifts. You notice it first as a silence that isn’t comfortable anymore. Then you realize you’re not looking at each other the same way. The jokes land different. You catch yourself thinking about what to say before you say it, which means you’ve stopped talking without thinking. The distance isn’t something that happens at the end—it’s what the end looks like when you finally look at it. I don’t believe in the idea that people drift apart because nobody’s paying attention or because life gets in the way. That’s what we tell ourselves. The truth is meaner: you can watch it happen and not do anything about it. You can see the person you loved turning into someone you don’t quite know, and you just let it happen. Because fighting it would mean admitting it’s real. By the time we actually said anything, there was nothing left to say. We split up things that belonged to both of us. I took the photos and some other stuff I probably shouldn’t have. You took the rest. I remember thinking I should feel worse than I did. Like there should be some proportional sadness to match what we’d had. But mostly I just felt tired. The weird thing is I don’t regret it. The time we had was real—I can still remember how that felt, how you felt. I can look back and know that part was true. It’s just not anymore. And yeah, that sucks. But it sucks cleanly, if that makes sense. Not the way it sucks when you’re pretending something’s still there and it isn’t. I think about you sometimes and it doesn’t hurt the way it used to. It’s more like remembering a song you used to love but haven’t heard in years. You’d recognize it if it came on, but you’re not looking for it. We might run into each other someday. We might be different enough that we can be okay in the same room. Or we might not. Either way, what we had is finished. Thursday, 21 October 2010. Ibis Cerimagic Messing With My Head: Tuesday, 19 October 2010. The Ting Tings: Katie and Jules were in Berlin for a Tommy Hilfiger campaign thing, playing E-Werk. I met them at Soho House a few days before the show, and Jules immediately started talking about sunglasses—not as a metaphor, just the actual collection she’d been building. She bought cheap ones because the expensive ones disappeared, got stolen at restaurants, broke randomly. Someone had once given her a box of broken sunglasses while she was standing alone behind a factory in winter, which is the kind of detail that tells you what following The Ting Tings meant to some people. Katie and Jules had been in a punk band called TKO when they were teenagers. No record, no real success. By the time their debut came out in 2008, something had taken off. They were moving fast enough that they’d wake up unsure which city they were in. Jules had been warned that Jakarta was dangerous—the hotel inspecting their room constantly—but once she actually talked to people, the city felt fine. Katie remembered a man selling baby rabbits there, holding one up to her face, and she’d fallen in love with it immediately, which broke her heart that she couldn’t take it with her. Istanbul was just constantly full of people partying. Berlin had been home for nearly a year. Katie told me about a fan who rushed the stage with his arms wide open and she thought for a second something terrible was about to happen. Security tackled him just in time. Jules had a worse story. A girl, maybe fifteen, had followed them from gig to gig, standing alone in the cold under bridges or behind factories. When Jules told her it was dangerous to be out like that, the girl handed her a box full of sunglasses—all of them broken—and just ran off. “That was pretty creepy,” Jules said, and she wasn’t exaggerating. Fashion-wise, Jules kept it simple. Corduroys, regular T-shirts, whatever cheap sunglasses she’d picked up. Katie was into Creepers (Susie from Style Bubble had recommended them), and she’d started a little fashion blog called “Stop That Car!” Neither of them made a big deal out of it. The name “Ting Tings” had come from a girl Katie used to work with in a clothes shop. In Chinese, the girl had told her, it meant something like “old park bandstand” and also “listen, listen.” They’d also found out it sounded like “sweet penis” in Japanese, which made them laugh. As for how they broke through: they played a demo tape to a DJ at a party, and a few days later they’re in their kitchen drying dishes and their own song comes on the radio, and they just started jumping around the flat. Katie said Pet Shop Boys. Jules said something in German. The mix probably made sense. By the end of the conversation I was pretty sure they weren’t the type to sit around counting money and wanting to be left alone. Shows meant everything to them. There was something straightforward about how they talked about their lives—no performing, no mythology. Just the actual shape of what it felt like to be them. Monday, 18 October 2010. Boyfriend: Best Coast’s ’Boyfriend’ doesn’t try. It’s just Bethany Cosentino wanting someone, her voice floating over guitars that know they don’t need to prove anything. The whole song moves like an afternoon where nothing happens and you’re fine with it. When you play it, something settles into you—not because it’s profound but because it’s specific, the exact feeling of wanting someone who maybe isn’t thinking about you. Which, fine. We’ve all been there. Monday, 18 October 2010. The Missions: There’s a flu hitting and the plan is to let it take you down, then drag everyone you know down with you. Be methodical about it. Throw a proper sick party—everyone in bed, everyone miserable, the apartment smelling like medicine and sweat. It’s honest work. Dig 200 meters straight into the earth. No reason, no explanation needed. Set up camp down there. Wait. CNN will show up eventually looking for a story. They always do. Get a permanent marker and draw a mustache across your face. Wear it the whole day. When people react—and they will—look them in the eye and make them explain why they think it’s funny. Force them to think about their own judgment. Move your ass. Start a video game company. Tomorrow. Not “thinking about starting it,” actually start it. Make something that humiliates Nintendo. Leave them no choice but to fold. Go find a street and cry on it. Real crying, not performing it. That feeling after—the relief and the shame mixed together—that’s what you want. Wear only black for a week straight. It’s winter. Nothing else makes any sense. Sleep with Avril Lavigne. I know you want to. I know it’s impossible. But you do want to, right? Just feel that wanting for a minute. At the next house party, piss on someone’s dog and chase it through the apartment. The smell will haunt the place. The story will haunt you. Turn on the new Crystal Fighters song and don’t turn it off for a full day. At some point, maybe around hour six or seven, you’ll suddenly realize how good it feels to swallow. That’s the whole thing. That’s the moment everything clicks. Friday, 15 October 2010. The Sibling Question: I was an only child, which basically meant I was a spoiled brat. No one to share anything with—the cookies, the Nintendo, my own room, all of it was mine. My friends were always complaining about their siblings, about not having space to themselves. But even as kids you could tell there was something underneath the complaints. A connection. Someone who understood you just because they’d lived in the same house, dealt with the same parents, got the inside jokes without needing explanation. I wonder sometimes what that would’ve felt like. A brother or sister. Someone to stay up with at night, to fight with, to have on your side just because of shared DNA. Not parents—they’re obligated to care. Someone closer than that. There’s something absurd about the trade-off: I got everything a kid could want in terms of freedom and space, but I was always alone in it. I ate all the snacks. I didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. And it felt hollow sometimes, honestly. But here’s the thing: I have no idea if siblings are actually good or if that’s just something people tell themselves. Maybe my friends were right and it’s mostly annoying and claustrophobic. Maybe the bond is real and I’m missing something essential. Maybe I’m lonelier than I needed to be, or maybe I just ended up differently because I had to be alone. I’ll never know what it would’ve been like to have someone forced to stick around, someone to share the weight of growing up with. Some days that feels like a loss. Other days I’m grateful I didn’t have to compete for anything. But you can’t know what you never had, so the question just sits there. Thursday, 14 October 2010. Three Label Designs: Beck’s ran a label design competition and picked three winners: Marie Schacht from Dresden, Thomas Gnahm from Weimar, and Franz Stämmele from Stuttgart. Francesca Gavin from Dazed & Confused and Simon Beckerman from PIG helped judge. They got money and the thing that actually matters—their designs on real bottles. I like that there’s a lineage to this. Phoenix and Ladyhawk both did label designs before, and now these three are next. It’s the kind of work that sounds straightforward until you’re actually trying to make something that reads at night in dim light, doesn’t get lost next to a hundred other bottles, and somehow still feels fresh. The constraints are brutal. There’s a party in Berlin November 6 where Ting Tings and Phoenix are playing. That’s that moment in Berlin—brands funding cultural moments, or maybe the culture was already happening and the brands just showed up with money. Either way, it works. Designers get paid to do real work instead of spec jobs. Music, design, beer, all mixed together. I’ve always appreciated when competitions actually result in something real. You’re not just designing for a portfolio or to enter a contest. Someone actually uses your work. It gets printed. People see it. The cycle completes instead of just floating in some brand vault somewhere. Wednesday, 13 October 2010. Sinikka Konttinen: Drawing With Light: Konttinen’s photographs let people just exist. There’s a patience to them, a kind of invisibility, that makes the camera feel like an afterthought rather than an intrusion. She documented working-class British communities for years, especially around Byker in Newcastle, and the work never announces itself or demands anything from you. The light is just there, catching moments that feel completely ordinary and somehow whole. What matters is the quietness of it, the way drawing with light becomes something different when you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything—just attention, and the trust that that’s enough. Tuesday, 12 October 2010. Crystal Castles Made Beauty Hurt: Alice Glass’s voice—crystalline, almost innocent—pushed through walls of distorted synths that sounded like machinery breaking in a cathedral. You’d hear a track and it felt like watching something fragile get destroyed in real time, which was the whole point. There’s something specific about electronic music that commits to harshness instead of hiding behind production, and they never apologized for it. Not many bands made discomfort feel this necessary. Monday, 11 October 2010. Glorious California: California hits different when you’re not from there. The light is relentless, the food tastes like someone actually cared, and the bad ideas are prettier than anywhere else. You see why people chase it. You see why they stay. Friday, 8 October 2010. Arjuna: A sixteen-year-old girl dies in a motorcycle accident and wakes up in some kind of void where a cosmic being tells her the planet is dying and she’s the only one who can save it. That’s Earth Maiden Arjuna in a nutshell, and it’s exactly as bleak as it sounds. The forests are gone, the oceans are poison, every system we’ve built is complicit in the destruction. By the time the opening credits end you understand this isn’t a magical-girl fantasy about hope and triumph. It’s a show about inheriting a dead world at seventeen and being told you can still fix it. What got me was how seriously the anime commits to this. There’s no winking, no anime-cute softening of the message. The animation is gorgeous and deliberate, the music builds with real weight, and the show just keeps the pressure on. Governments are corrupt, corporations don’t give a shit, and the whole system is built on complicity. Arjuna walks through these systems and realizes none of them will save us. The institutions are the disease. I wasn’t expecting this when I started. I thought I’d get something lighter, maybe some traditional magical-girl transformation nonsense. Instead I got thirteen episodes of slow escalating rage. By the midpoint I was angry in a way that feels embarrassing to admit—I wanted to throw things. The show has this way of making you feel Arjuna’s helplessness from the inside, the futility of one person trying to fix something broken at every level, the knowledge that even if she succeeds it won’t matter because the problem is us. Here’s what kills me: the show never resolves anything cleanly. There’s no manifesto, no three-step plan to save the world. It just asks if you’re willing to listen, to actually look at what’s happening, and then it cuts to black. The ending is almost aggressive in its refusal to comfort you. I finished it weeks ago and I still think about it. Not in a way that makes me feel like I’m saving anything. More like an awareness I can’t unknow, this low discomfort when I make certain choices. The show forced you to see something, and you can’t unsee it. Thursday, 7 October 2010. Mom Goes Hard: Wednesday, 6 October 2010. Uffie: Difficult: Uffie was the bratty electro voice of the mid-2000s—childish vocals and deliberate provocation, the kind of artist who made you uncomfortable in the best way. She worked with Justice, showed up on tracks that felt dangerous and exhilarating and slightly stupid all at once. Then she basically vanished, which somehow felt right. The difficulty wasn’t her music or her image; it was the refusal to explain herself or soften for anyone. Wednesday, 6 October 2010. Who Killed My MTV: There were always two kinds of people. The ones happy with VIVA pumping them full of Blümchen and Tokio Hotel and whatever was popular in Cologne that week. And then the rest of us—the ones for whom MTV and a bottle of Jack at three in the morning meant something. The ones who at least pretended to have standards. Guitar noise versus manufactured sugar. The whole dumb war between what felt real and what was obviously built in a boardroom. MTV was where you went when you needed proof that something on television actually mattered. Late night, bad buzz, half-asleep, but suddenly there’s Metallica or Nirvana or Weezer and the volume’s up and you’re sitting in the dark with it because nothing else touches you the way that does. It was the last place that seemed genuinely indifferent to being respectable or likeable. That’s what I’m nostalgic for, not the channel itself—the attitude. The refusal. Of course MTV had already killed that part of itself years earlier. The moment they realized dating shows and reality TV made more money than actually playing music, they were done. They’d become everything they claimed not to be. Marketing garbage. Safe bets. By the time the paywall announcement came, MTV was already broadcasting from the grave. VIVA stays free and becomes the dumping ground. David Guetta. Sarah Connor. Content for people who never needed MTV because they never wanted anything from television except company and no surprises. That’s the world now. But I remember the specific feeling. Three in the morning, a room that smells like bad decisions, the grain of an old TV screen, that particular loneliness that comes from knowing somewhere else someone like you is watching the exact same song. MTV mattered because of that—we weren’t just the wrong kind of listener, we were the wrong kind of listener together. Now we’re all scattered on YouTube, watching alone. Tuesday, 5 October 2010. Chrono Trigger: There’s something locked-in about Chrono Trigger that most games from that era have lost. The plot about time travel is fine, but it’s not what you remember. It’s the design—the way every system respects your time. Battles don’t drag. Characters matter without endless justification. Moving through the world feels right. As someone who spends time thinking about design, I’m acutely aware of how rare that is, how easy it becomes to add systems that sound good on paper but break the pacing, demand grinding, waste attention on bullshit. Chrono Trigger doesn’t do that. It just knows what it’s doing. I replay it every few years to remember what that felt like—not nostalgia, but the specific pleasure of a game that trusts you and doesn’t waste a second. Monday, 4 October 2010. Boobs, Drugs And A Cavy: Collected a bunch of photos over the past few months—theme park trips, pranks on unsuspecting tourists, some nudity. Nothing precious about it, just whatever seemed worth keeping at the time. I’m throwing them here if you’re bored enough to look through someone else’s dumb memories. There’s a Wizard of Oz poster hidden in there somewhere. Find it and you win something. I haven’t decided what yet. Monday, 4 October 2010. It Gets Better: I watched one of the “It Gets Better” videos not long after it started, after a kid in New Jersey jumped off a bridge. The story was everywhere—he’d been outed online, humiliated, and he saw no way through it. So other gay people, older ones, started filming themselves. Just sitting there saying: I made it out. This part is survivable. It gets better. The videos became a thing fast. Athletes, celebrities, regular adults—all of them offering the same basic fact: we lived through this, and now we’re here. Not happy all the time, not magically fixed, just alive and on the other side of that particular hell. What hits when you watch them is how unsentimental they are. No inspirational music, no carefully shot moments. Just someone in front of a phone camera saying: you think this is forever, but it’s not. You think you can’t survive this, but you can. I did. I think people need to hear that more than we admit. There’s a moment in your life—maybe longer than a moment, maybe years—where you feel completely certain that things will never change, that this trapped feeling is permanent. That you don’t have a future. When you’re in it, you can’t believe other people made it out. But they did. And they’re willing to say so, on camera, to kids they don’t know. The project was specifically about gay teens, and it was a direct response to a specific crisis. But the thing that made it work—that any of it works—is simpler than that. Other people have survived the thing you think will kill you. Not just survived: lived past it, built actual lives, became people you’d want to be. That evidence matters. The videos are still there, accumulating. I imagine someone new every day is watching one, thinking okay, maybe this really does get better. Friday, 1 October 2010. Before It Starts: I show up to parties wanting one good night—real conversation, some drinks. Anyone can manage that. But it gets late and all the couples are fused together in the corners and I’m forced to celebrate for them when I’m actually furious about it. So I grab my friend and we spend the ride home picking apart what I did wrong, which guy I should have actually talked to. When I meet someone, I lose it completely. We haven’t even left the bar and I’ve bonded with all their friends, rearranged their apartment, decided we’re building a whole life together. But we’re never actually together, never official, so it evaporates before it really begins. I need noise. Silence terrifies me—I’d rather talk absolute bullshit than be quiet long enough for someone to figure out I’m boring. I’m good at sounding like I know things I don’t. Politics, economics, whatever—I can fill an hour talking about it while understanding almost nothing. I check myself in every mirror. Forget names the moment I hear them. My ex said I was scattered, perpetually late, chaotic. She was right. I like women who actually think, who know things without having to announce it. That intelligence without the performance. It’s the only thing that matters. What I want is the four-year-old version: see someone, yell “that’s mine,” end of story. Can’t skip to that part though. Thursday, 30 September 2010. The Space Closes: Sunday at Schlossgarten started ordinary. Students with signs about Stuttgart 21, the massive railway project that had bled money and still somehow solved nothing. Families came to object, some just trying to keep the old trees from getting bulldozed. The kind of thing you see in any city—people using public space to speak, the expected friction between those and authority. The police decided friction wasn’t happening. Water cannons. Tear gas. Riot gear against people sitting in a park. The message was unmistakable: this space isn’t yours anymore, and if you stay, you stop breathing safely. That’s what state violence really is—not a response to an actual threat, but a reorganization of who belongs where. BILD didn’t even cover it at first. By the time coverage appeared, the moment had already moved into news-past-tense, forgotten before anyone had to take a real stance on it. The machinery of media indifference works faster than water cannons. You can disperse a crowd physically, but dispersing the attention that follows is more elegant—clean, deniable, efficient. I can’t say whether S21 should’ve happened. These things are always complicated. But I know what I saw—a city deciding it didn’t need to listen, and then making sure nobody could speak. That mechanism is harder to unhear than any argument about trains. Thursday, 30 September 2010. 3D Hands: Nintendo was done making excuses about what it made. No more of the “we only do cute games with red mushrooms” line. They showed up and announced a 3DS—basically a Game Boy designed for another dimension. Three-dimensional gaming, portable, no glasses. They showed Street Fighter IV running on it, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart. Anyone who held one had the same reaction: the thing actually worked. It looked like someone took a DS and corrupted it slightly, adding color aberrations and actual depth. Early 2011 release, around 250 euros. The 3D effect wasn’t perfect—you had to sit in exactly the right spot or the image would separate and blur into ghosting. But when you found that sweet spot, when you held still, the screen had real depth. You could see into it. It was strange and disorienting and genuinely magical. What got me was how confident the gamble was. Nintendo didn’t make a faster handheld or a sharper screen. They built something that only worked at specific angles, that gave you headaches if you stared too long, that required you to basically not move. And they launched it with those flagship franchises as proof it was worth the risk. They knew exactly what they were doing. Kids didn’t care if it was a gimmick—they cared that it was different. The person who wrote that original post in broken English was responding to something genuine. The 3D wasn’t a reason to change how you played. It was a reason to feel different holding the device. The novelty was the point. You could ignore the effect and play Zelda like you always had, or you could lean into it and let the screen trick you. Either way, Nintendo had something no one else did. The 3D turned out to be half-gimmick, mostly impractical. But that’s not why the 3DS mattered. It mattered because Nintendo kept finding reasons to care about what fit in your pocket. It became the thing you played alone, when you needed to disappear for a moment, when everything else was too much effort. That’s what stuck with me—not the technology, but the fact that someone kept insisting the handheld was worth your attention. Wednesday, 29 September 2010. Street Style: I used to read street style blogs like they were reportage from the real world. People in Prague with Fixies, people in New York with vintage Nirvana shirts, everyone in their city trying to look right with whatever they had—thrift finds, new brands, expensive basics. It felt like documentation before fashion became content, before every outfit needed to be a statement. The funny part was how specific it all had to be. A bow tie meant something. Mixing thrift with expensive meant something. You could look at an outfit and know if someone understood the game. There wasn’t yet a system for it, just people getting dressed and someone with a camera being there. I don’t remember the faces. I remember the moment—the Fixies, when vintage became about taste instead of necessity, before fashion turned into a brand story. Wednesday, 29 September 2010. Brick House: Ben Sherman and i-ref threw a party they called the Brick House at the tail end of that week. The appeal was transparent: free beer, free vodka, free shirts. The kind of math that gets Berlin’s chronically underemployed creative class in the door—evening, unlimited booze, something new to wear on the way out. I wasn’t above it. The venue was the kind of anonymous Berlin space that could’ve been anything. Blank walls, industrial lighting, the sort of room that feels simultaneously sprawling and suffocating. But the crowd had that loose anticipatory energy you only get when alcohol is free and attention is thin. People I’d seen around a hundred times showed up, all of us for the same reason, all pretending the reason didn’t matter. The night unfolded the way those nights do. You arrive, you drink, you talk to people you recognize but don’t know, the music does its work, the hours blur into each other. At some point you stop tracking time and you’re just someone moving through space. At some point you’re somebody else’s responsibility. I woke up in Wenke’s bed with that specific dread of not remembering how I got there. For a while I was certain I’d been drunk enough to throw up on her pillow, which would’ve been a debt I’d never have paid off. She was completely unruffled about it, which meant either she has an uncommon amount of grace or she’d already mentally discarded that bed. Probably both. The shirts were nice. That’s the strange thing about promotional parties—the actual merchandise ends up being the only tangible proof anything happened. Someone designed them, had them manufactured, shipped them to Berlin in boxes, handed them to people like me who barely noticed. The logistics of brand presence dissolving into drunk chaos is a funny thing to think about when you’re sober. Wenke didn’t make much of a fuss about having a blackout drunk guy using her bed as a cot, which is what real kindness looks like. The kind you don’t know how to balance the scale on. Tuesday, 28 September 2010. The Copy Party: In 1991 I was the proud owner of an Amiga 500+ with a Philips color monitor and an external drive. I had plenty of games. Maybe ten of them were legitimate copies. The rest—and there were hundreds—came from friends, from the schoolyard, from the mail. That’s how it worked. You didn’t buy games; you swapped and copied. One day I loaded a cracked disk and was flying through the intro when I noticed a phone number with an area code I recognized—some town nearby. “Contact us for the latest stuff,” it said. I picked up the phone. A kid answered, maybe eighteen years old, and within a few minutes I had an invitation to a copy party happening the next day. I showed up with a stack of blank disks. It was a small setup—maybe fifty people, some of them with their own computers on camping tables, the rest of us just watching and waiting. One guy was Frank. He was in the middle of cracking Monkey Island 2, which hadn’t even been released yet. Not for another two weeks. I stood behind him and watched him work, dropping comments about memory protection and copy schemes, words I half-understood but which made me feel like I was part of something technical and forbidden. “You can lay out eleven disks,” he said after a while. “I’m almost done.” Monkey Island 2. Two weeks before the stores. The actual copying was tedious—load, wait, eject, repeat—but I didn’t mind. By the time I left that afternoon, I had all eleven disks. I went straight home and basically disappeared into my room for two days. I only came out for the kitchen and the bathroom. I played through Guybrush’s second adventure—the insult sword fighting, the voodoo dolls—and I laughed. Really laughed, in a way that surprised me. And underneath the laughter was something else: the feeling of getting away with something. Playing a game that technically didn’t exist yet, that was supposed to be protected, that I had no right to have. I was a tiny, pointless thorn in the eye of the entire industry, and for two days that felt like the best thing in the world. Monday, 27 September 2010. Balthazar: The Fury: Monday, 27 September 2010. Bombay: El Guincho has this way of making pop songs that feel like they’re happening inside your head while you’re staring out a window. Bombay is that—bright and winding, the production so clean it almost disappears, and then a moment hits where you realize how carefully constructed the whole thing is. The kind of record that makes you want to move without demanding it, that catches you off guard with a synth line or a vocal turn you didn’t see coming. It’s the sound of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing, which is somehow rarer than it should be. Friday, 24 September 2010. The World Is Mine: Dominique Young Unique makes music that doesn’t apologize for what it wants. There’s a directness to it, a refusal to soften the edges or perform humility—just pure ambition stated plainly. That kind of confidence is rare, especially in a landscape that keeps trying to sand down the rough parts of hip-hop into something safer. It’s refreshing to encounter an artist who understands that the swagger isn’t a mask; it’s the whole point. Thursday, 23 September 2010. In and Out: September: September felt mixed that year. Skype had stopped being about calling people and had turned into something else. Sauerkraut. Nachos with actual cheese and ground beef, not the half-measures. Someone was watching the new season of Two and a Half Men—it meant something then. Shin Chan in the morning was the right way to start a day. Trampolines. Animals that happened to look like Hitler. Pixel art. Leather jackets. That stretch where you actually finished projects instead of abandoning them halfway. Ayumi Hamasaki. Trees to plant. The crude jokes and constant sexual reference—that was just how we talked. More breasts seemed necessary. Virtual Console. Dreams of becoming your grandfather. The whole mess of it. But the same month had its poisons. Dog trainers as a concept. The weight of autumn wearing on you. Trolls. Apple fanatics. Plants dying slowly while you forgot about them. RTL television’s relentless cruelty. Good friends suddenly seeming off, becoming people you didn’t recognize. The tinnitus left behind by concerts. Nuclear power. That creeping knowledge that everything ends—not wisdom, just weariness. Showers instead of baths. That thing with your ex nobody wanted to face. The compromises that felt necessary and turned out to be damage. September didn’t ask for understanding. It just asked if you could tell what was keeping you alive from what was slowly poisoning you. Wednesday, 22 September 2010. The Watching: I spent hours scrolling through blogs in the early 2000s. There were these women - photographers, models, fashion writers - and I’d move from page to page the way you do when you have nothing better to do and some quiet pull keeps you looking. Lea Rieck from Munich had this whole philosophy about pale being a color. She ran a fashion blog about it, wrote about fashion like it mattered. Teresa Bücker, red hair, writing essays about living in Berlin. Jessie-Lynne from Chicago just posted nude photos for money, which was at least honest about the transaction. Everyone performed - the filtered photos, the careful captions, the selection of what to show. We all knew the other side was watching. That was just how it worked. I don’t think about those blogs anymore, but I remember the particular texture of looking - scrolling through pages, reading captions, seeing someone’s carefully composed photographs, with the knowledge that we were all performing for each other and nobody ever said it directly. Everyone watching, everyone watched. Wednesday, 22 September 2010. Glass: Tuesday, 21 September 2010. Secret of Mana: The magic system in Secret of Mana was permission to break the rules. You’d find these floating orbs scattered through forests and caves—Salamander, Undine, Sylphs—and suddenly you could summon a thing the game hadn’t explicitly told you was possible. Fire, water, wind. The first time you cast one, the screen fills with this overwhelming amount of geometry and color, the Mode 7 effects warping the world, and everything on screen stops mattering. It’s just you and the spell. I spent more time with this game trying to understand how to make it pretty than how to win. The formula is simple enough—walk around, hit things, level up—but the visual design, those rippling water effects and the way light moves through forests, felt like someone showing you their thinking process in real time. That’s the thing about games from when the hardware was just barely fast enough: every visual flourish meant something, took up space that could have been a menu system or a load screen. The designers chose the beautiful thing. Most games that rely on that kind of aesthetic appeal get worse when you come back to them, but Mana holds. Maybe that’s nostalgia. Probably it is. But there’s something about the tone of it that doesn’t feel dated—the color palette, the decision to make the world look washed out and dreamlike rather than photorealistic, the way the music just sits there being gentle. You could play it right now and it wouldn’t feel like a museum piece. It would just feel like something someone made with care. Monday, 20 September 2010. The Desperation Prayer: There’s this survey showing what you already knew: the poorer you are, the more you believe in God. Bangladesh, Niger, Yemen—places that are completely fucked—people there pray like their lives depend on it, because they do. Meanwhile in Sweden and Japan, God is what you mention at dinner parties if you want to sound thoughtful, something you do on Sundays when you’re bored enough. I get it. When everything is burning, you get on your knees. When the diagnosis comes back wrong, when the rent is due and there’s no money, when your kid is sick and you can’t afford the hospital, you pray. Not because you suddenly believe in some old guy with a beard, but because you’ve run out of other options. Prayer is what happens when you have nothing left to control, so you try controlling the universe instead. The cruel part is that belief gets stronger the more you need it to work. A rich person can afford doubt. A poor person can’t. They need to believe that someone is paying attention, that suffering means something, that this isn’t just how it ends. It’s the same reason desperate people gamble—the fantasy is too necessary to question. I don’t know if I believe in any of it. But I understand why people who have nothing left believe in everything. Monday, 20 September 2010. Johanna: Sticker Girl: Thursday, 16 September 2010. The Sonnets: New Fire In The City: Shakespeare’s sonnets sit in that weird space where they’re famous enough to be invisible. You know they’re about love and time and loss, but you don’t actually think about them until you read one and get hit by how immediate it is—how the specific exhaustion of wanting someone or watching something fade just lives there in the language without any distance at all. They don’t age because the problems don’t. Desire, betrayal, time ending, the thing you can’t hold onto—these aren’t historical. A sonnet about any of that works now exactly as well as it ever did, probably always will. What gets me is the form. Fourteen lines to contain something true that can’t be said completely. You compress the whole thing in there and somehow it comes out sounding like the most natural thing in the world. That’s where the fire is. Thursday, 16 September 2010. Stuck On Misty: Found a Game Boy at a flea market in Munich—gray, beat to hell, Pokémon Blue still in the cartridge. I paid almost nothing for it. Carried it around for three weeks before the drive back to Berlin, just holding it, remembering. Somewhere around Saxony it clicked back into my hands the way it used to, and I was ten years old again. Not nostalgia, just the game. I picked Charmander immediately. Gary got Squirtle, which meant I got to watch him lose on the first real battle, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about humiliating someone—even a NPC—early and often. Professor Oak threw me out of the lab and into the grass, and I felt invincible. I ground out Pidgey and Rattata until they were worth something, smashing everything in sight before Brock. The first gym barely registered. I was running six Pokémon of nothing in particular, just whatever had leveled up enough to matter, and Rocko went down like he wasn’t even there. By Viridian Forest I’d figured it out. Every trainer that wandered into my path got dismantled. Azuria City’s where it fell apart. Misty has this Staryu, and she uses it like she understands the game, and I walked in with a disaster team of six underleveled Pokémon I’d been too stubborn to actually build. I lost seventeen times before I stopped counting. Each loss felt stupider than the last. I went back and ground out another ten levels, came back, lost again. My Charmeleon is carrying the team. Everything else is deadweight. I’m stuck. Current team: Pidgey (L13), Geodude (L14), Clefable (L10), Charmeleon (L28), Paras (L8), Zubat (L10). Two and a half hours in, one badge, ten Pokédex entries. Misty’s still laughing at me. I’ll go back and beat her eventually. I always do. But right now I’m frustrated enough to put it down for a bit, and frustrated enough that I know I’ll pick it back up. Wednesday, 15 September 2010. The Solid Ones: Most German bands don’t hold my interest for long. Madsen’s different—they’ve been at it since 2004 and never got worse. From this nothing town called Clenze, they just keep playing festival after festival, and somehow they still sound like they’re thinking about their songs instead of just filling time. Smart writing, decent melodies. There’s something about watching a band stay solid like that. Tuesday, 14 September 2010. Gravitonas Got Religion: Tuesday, 14 September 2010. Magazines and T-Shirts: I keep noticing work that cares about details. Not in a precious way, just… you can tell when someone spent time thinking about how something should feel when you touch it, when you open it, when you wear it. Circus Bookazine came across my radar recently—this 350-page book about fashion by Rebecca Sandbichler and Inga Schörmann. It’s bilingual, which is fine, but the real thing is that it’s actually carefully made. The interviews are with people who know the subject (Agyness Deyn, Horst Meier, Anne Feldkamp), and they’re talking about the actual substance of fashion—sourcing, globalization, materials—not just the surface. It’s the kind of publication you’d want to sit with for a while. Then there’s T-Post from Sweden, this project that prints magazine designs on t-shirts every month. Limited edition, one concept per shirt. The idea is almost obvious once you see it—why does a magazine have to stay on paper?—but they’ve executed it cleanly. You’re wearing someone’s actual design choice, someone’s actual work, not just decoration. These are the kinds of things that stick with me. Not because they’re perfect or famous, but because they suggest people who understand that the physical object, the thing in your hands, the thing you wear—that matters. Monday, 13 September 2010. Seasons: Light, Lost: Summer ends fast. You’re still wearing the same clothes, the sun’s still up late, and then one morning the light hits the kitchen at a different angle and you realize you’ve already lost it. The long days don’t fade gradually—they just stop. By October you’re leaving work in the dark, and the whole rhythm of the day has compressed into a smaller window. It’s not sad exactly. It’s just the weight of it, how quickly the year turns cold and the hours go thin. Monday, 13 September 2010. Getting Clear: Your head fills up. Thoughts circling, problems turning in your mind, big ideas that won’t die, small anxieties that jolt you awake at 3 in the morning. The kind of mental static that makes straight thinking impossible. The quick fixes work sometimes. Cold water. Moving. Sex. Buying something stupid. Jerking off. For a few hours the noise backs off and you feel lighter. When it gets worse, you’re down to fight or flight. Actually facing the pile of shit, or running from it. Most people don’t have the strength to pick either one at first, so they sit with it instead, for days or weeks. I’ve left town a few times because my brain wouldn’t stop spinning. Getting away from your apartment, your neighborhood, your routine - there’s something about distance that quiets the spinning. Or maybe it’s just distraction. I’ve heard people talk about moving away permanently to escape their own head, and I get it. Everyone has their thing. Some people run, some drink, some use, some sleep with a stranger. I’ve tried most of them. None of it’s actually a fix, but it all beats sitting alone with it. What I notice is that nothing works the same way twice. Whatever cleared your head last time won’t clear it the same way when you need it again. So you keep cycling through different things, hoping something lands. I think real clearing doesn’t happen when you’re trying. It happens when you’re distracted enough by something else that the noise becomes background. Work. A project. Someone. The overwhelm doesn’t go anywhere; you just learn to carry it. Monday, 13 September 2010. Bosom Buddies: Thursday, 9 September 2010. Non Tiq—Quiet: Wednesday, 8 September 2010. Nineteen: The schoolyard was a war zone. You had to be hard, had to seem cool, had to know all the filthy words—tits, fuck, blowjob—or you’d spend the next ten years with a target on your back. We were small and vicious. At home we were soft enough: Power Rangers bedding, Saturday night baths, that pure hit of dopamine when you caught a new Pokémon. But outside, in the real world, we were tiny killing machines with oversized dicks in our heads. Once puberty hit, the question wasn’t if. It was how often, how many ways, with who. Thomas supposedly fucked blonde Jessica with the bat ears on the playground. Konstanze had Fabian’s balls in her mouth. Daniel and I had worked through half the class by fifth grade, or so the story went. Anything to make the noise stop for a while. We had fake fuck lists, memorized terminology, encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy—or what we thought was anatomy. We were loaded for battle. The problem was we’d only ever seen naked women in those crumpled, sun-bleached magazines from the alley, and even thinking about it sent us scrambling up to our rooms to dry-hump a Turtles pillow. By twelve we’d all supposedly slept with everything, and nothing short of a court order would’ve gotten the truth out of us. The thing is, I didn’t actually lose my virginity until two days after my nineteenth birthday. Maria was too tense. Before anything could happen with Karina, my aunt burst into the room. Helena felt wrong somehow. The village girl finally got it done. Nothing special about it. I caught up fast enough after that. What kept me up at night sounds laughable now. Thomas never touched Jessica. She smacked him when he grabbed her ass on the monkey bars. Konstanze figured out she was into women when she was seven and never had a guy’s balls anywhere near her mouth except breakfast. Daniel, me, half the class—nothing happened. Nothing until senior prom, and barely then. Why do we lie like that about sex? What makes it so important to have done it, to have numbers, to reset the score? It’s always about power anyway, about winning, about staying afloat. I remember sitting in the cafeteria watching Thomas brag about Jessica, and his face had this desperate quality—like if he stopped talking he’d vanish. I knew that look. Knew it from the mirror. Wednesday, 8 September 2010. Shampain: Marina and the Diamonds came on midway through something else and I remembered why she mattered so much during the Electra Heart era. There’s a specificity to how she writes pop hooks—the chords land where you don’t quite expect them, and her voice has this built-in irony that makes even the sweetest melodies feel slightly off. She was never trying to be accessible in the way most pop singers chase it. Just made what interested her and trusted that some people would get it. The production is where she lives, all these small details stacked together until it becomes this complete world. Shampain has that quality—casual on the surface, but constructed so carefully you could trace every decision if you listened close enough. That’s the thing about her work that still holds: it doesn’t ask for permission to be strange. Tuesday, 7 September 2010. Still Riding: I got hooked on video games at six and have been watching them evolve since then. Used to try to imagine what they’d look like in the future and always landed on the same thing: perfect cartoons, slicker, more intricate, basically animation you could control. Super Mario Bros. 3 was the pinnacle for me as a kid. Those bright colors and the goofy little enemies just worked. At twelve, going through a rough time, my mom painted my room the same blue as Mario 64’s sky. That’s the kind of thing you remember forever. After that I got into Mario Kart because it didn’t demand your whole evening and it actually worked with other people around. Nintendo games stayed at the top for me because they just looked and felt right. They still do. Red Dead Redemption is my favorite game right now. It came out this year and it’s set in 1911 in the American West just as the frontier mythology is falling apart. Rockstar’s been circling around similar themes for a while now but Red Dead finally nails it. The story moves at a good pace. The characters feel like real people—the writing and acting are better than anything I’ve seen in a game—and everyone matters to the story, not just the leads. Nico Belic was a great character but in GTA IV he was surrounded by people you wanted to skip entirely. Here it’s different. What makes it work is that everything fits together. The game’s about good and evil, freedom, redemption—all the big philosophical stuff—but you don’t sit around thinking about it while you’re playing. You’re riding across these plains on horseback and it just feels like somewhere real. Not like “wow look at the graphics” but more like “this is something, I’m in this.” You hunt, you find treasure, you help people. Some people play online. I just want to keep riding. Want to play it right now. Monday, 6 September 2010. Röyksopp: The Drug: Röyksopp makes music that works like a drug in the best way—you listen once and know you’ll need to hear it again soon. Their production is meticulous without being fussy, electronic without sounding cold. Melody A.M. and The Understanding are the kind of albums that reward headphones and an empty afternoon. I’ve spent more time with them than I should probably admit, not because they’re complicated, but because something in the way they’re made just stays with you. The synths, the space between things, the refusal to rush. You keep coming back. Saturday, 4 September 2010. The Bike Song: Mark Ronson has never needed to overthink it. The Bike Song is him doing what he does best—getting a room full of people together and letting them play. Nothing forced, just some groove that feels like it rolled out of an afternoon where everyone showed up knowing what they were doing. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be. Thursday, 2 September 2010. What Ping Was For: Steve Jobs announced Ping at the 2010 iTunes keynote like it was the second coming of Christ—a new social network built into iTunes where you could follow friends, see what they were buying, and feel like you were part of something exclusive. Except there was no community. There was just iTunes finding another way to make shopping feel like belonging. The setup was perfect. Every song you added to your profile became a public record of what you’d paid for, which created this bizarre gamification where having taste was the same as having money. But the real kicker was that most people’s libraries were full of pirated tracks. Using Ping honestly meant broadcasting your copyright violations. Apple built a panopticon and dressed it up in minimalist design and called it community. Jobs understood something that most people don’t want to admit: people don’t actually want products. They want to feel like they’re on the inside of something, like buying your stuff makes them special or different or part of an elite. Ping was that instinct dressed up in social-network language. Follow your friends. Share your taste. Buy more music. Do it all while feeling like you’re participating in culture instead of just consuming it. Ping died pretty quickly, which was fine by me. Apple never needed it to actually work. They just needed it to exist long enough to sell the feeling that you were part of something exclusive, that your taste meant something, that connecting with people through iTunes was real connection instead of just shopping. And it worked. They’re better at that than anyone else, and they know it. Apple will never stop finding new ways to package and sell that exact feeling. Thursday, 2 September 2010. Wavves: Post Acid: Wavves understood something about imperfection that a lot of people miss. Lo-fi production, vocals dissolving into distortion, songs barely holding together—it wasn’t a choice, it was the point. There’s more honesty in that mess than in a hundred pristine takes. Tuesday, 31 August 2010. Yoshi’s Story: Yoshi’s Story got written off when it came out—too cute, too simple, made for kids. But all the care went into the visuals. Those painted backgrounds, the color handling, the restraint in every frame. As a designer, that’s what brings me back. It’s the kind of game that doesn’t feel like much until you understand what it took to make it look and feel exactly like this. Then you realize you’re playing something genuinely smart, and you understand that was always the whole point. Monday, 30 August 2010. Corinne Day: I keep coming back to the photographs because they catch something true—not posed, not prettified, just real texture and real moments. Kate Moss in those early pictures was just a kid, not yet a brand. There’s something ruthless about the refusal to soften anything, and it makes everything else look like it’s lying. Saturday, 28 August 2010. Pretty in Pink: Summer in Munich, thirty degrees, and I’m watching people move through the streets looking like they woke up knowing exactly what works. Five of them stuck with me—the way style, when it’s real, doesn’t announce itself. Karin’s twenty-four from Stockholm. Everything she touches looks right. Gina Tricot, borrowed shorts, Vagabond shoes. There’s a type of girl where you can’t imagine her making a bad choice. Not because she’s trying, just because it wouldn’t occur to her. Sarah’s sixteen, Hamburg, musician. White shirt, jeans, leather bracelets. The kind of confidence at that age that comes from not knowing anyone’s watching. By twenty-five you’re aware of it. At sixteen you just move. Antoine’s a photographer and that’s what matters. The style is there—leather jacket, whatever—but it’s just what he wears while he’s doing something real. He shoots geometry and girls in water, broken cities. That kind of work makes clothes irrelevant. Bianca’s eighteen from Toronto, and there’s something in the way she carries herself that would make anything look right. Zara, mall boots, runs a label with her sister. When you’re building something you don’t have time to doubt whether the pieces work. Elle’s sixteen, Australia, and she’s got this thing—black bra visible under whatever she’s wearing—that on most people would look like a mistake. On her it’s just there. Like she decided this was how it went and nobody needed to agree. What gets me about all of them is that they’re not thinking about how they look. They know how they look and that’s where it ends. The clothes are just the vehicle. Everything else—the knowing, the not caring, the way they move—that’s the actual style. Thursday, 26 August 2010. The Sun Above Munich: I’m in a café at Odeon Platz in Munich and something’s happened that I didn’t want to happen. The guilt came first, then the happiness. I fell for this city. The light, the old weight of it, streets that don’t demand anything from you. The whole thing. And I knew the whole time I drove down here exactly why I was coming. Berlin got into me. Three years and I became someone who needed the chaos, the constant remake, the sense that something real was still happening in a major city. The poor-sexy story, the hipsters, the idea that collapse and rebirth were around any corner. It changed me. But somewhere it stopped being alive and started being a job. The rebellion’s just a bit now. The hipsters have settled, grown apartments and day jobs. Everyone’s still performing but they’re waiting for the audience to leave so they can rest. Munich doesn’t perform. It doesn’t try. The old buildings just sit there being what they are. The traditions exist and nobody’s thanking anyone for them. There’s no politics to it, no desperate need to prove something. Maybe I’m tired of politics. Maybe I’m just tired, and sitting in the sun changes how you think about things. All the reasons to stay in Berlin are good ones. My people are there. My work is there. Everything I’ve built is rooted there. Leaving would mean tearing all that out, and I’m not sure I have it in me. But I know Berlin was something I needed to move through, not something I need to stay in forever. I’ve already decided that much. I just haven’t said it to anyone, and I don’t know when I will. Wednesday, 25 August 2010. August Inventory: Late August is when the light changes and you start noticing what’s actually clicking and what’s dead weight. Summer’s still officially here but everyone’s mentally already packing. Some things suddenly made sense that month: sangria, curry ketchup, wading through old magazines like they were newly released. Weezer. Taking a bike ride instead of sitting in a room thinking about it. Making a mixtape even though nobody makes mixtapes anymore. Fishing. Your best friend—the one who’ll look at whatever weird thing you’re obsessed with and just get it. Leaving a party to walk around outside. The strange loyalty of phone sex. Japanese snacks. Rocko’s Modern Life reruns. And there was the sex stuff. The internet had changed everything. You’d end up next to some girl from online and you’d both be awake at 3 AM with nothing to say. Or next to someone beautiful and all you wanted was to talk. Friends would get strange. Accidents happened that weren’t supposed to. Someone would put stickers on their breasts and ask you to photograph it and somehow that felt like the truest thing that happened all week. The stuff that was dying: Justin Bieber (though people wouldn’t let him go), money worries (the kind that never actually leave), just being tired in your head. Ambient sexism. The vegan friend who claims principles but wants roast pork with dumplings. Nuclear power. Slayer sounding worse than before. Fall coming. Your own cynicism. Being actually sick after faking it. By the end of August you knew which things would stick around and which were about to disappear. Summer doesn’t announce itself leaving. It just gradually gets colder. Monday, 23 August 2010. Delphic’s Doubt Forever: Saturday, 21 August 2010. Ten Little Missions: These were weekly challenges on some blog I followed. Ten ridiculous things to do by Sunday, half of them actual recommendations and half complete fever dreams. Buy a grey Game Boy with Pokémon Blue at the flea market and pick Charmander - that one could work. But also: dive your head into liquid cheese at Pizza Hut and die a beautiful death, get forced into marriage with your first girlfriend, yell “First!” while jamming sushi rolls into your best friend’s mouth, don’t congratulate the redhead unless she actually deserves it. The crude energy ran through the whole thing. Comments about foot fetishists, observations about redhead ex-girlfriends and their bodies, a joke that girls with internet fame were better than disco sluts to kiss - supposedly better with tongue. That vulgarity wasn’t trying to be clever or ironic, just saying it straight. The objectification, the directness about desire - it felt honest at the time, even though it was absolutely obnoxious. There was something about having real advice mixed in with the absurdity. That flea market recommendation stood out because it actually made sense. Pick Charmander, that’s good. Everything else was broken logic - marry your first girlfriend for no reason, surprise your best friend with aggressive sushi, ignore your ex. All of it stupid and horny and completely unafraid to say so. That kind of casual vulgarity couldn’t really exist now. Not because the internet’s gotten prudish - there’s crude content everywhere - but because that specific tone, that objectification without the protective layer of irony or knowing commentary, that just sits there and exists. That feels like a completely different era online. Friday, 20 August 2010. Sticker Girl: Thursday, 19 August 2010. The Ting Tings Again: I loved The Ting Tings from the start, which I probably shouldn’t admit. Katie and Jules made “We Started Nothing” and I was instantly hooked—”Be The One,” “Shut Up And Let Me Go,” “We Walk.” I played those songs relentlessly, even as critics were tearing the album to pieces. Most people wouldn’t fight for it, but I never needed anyone else to get it. Then there was this long silence. Bands disappear like that sometimes and you assume that’s the end of it. But they’re back now with new material recorded in Berlin, and the lead single is called “Hands.” It’s got that same synth-pop thing that worked before, this strange glossy-and-earnest combination that shouldn’t hold up but does. I’ve been listening to it on repeat and I haven’t even seen a video yet—the song itself is enough. It feels like they just picked up where they left off, like the gap between albums doesn’t matter. And I’m already thinking about catching them live when they tour, just to be in a room with whatever handful of people understood the first album the way I did. There’s something satisfying about that—finding something early, holding onto it through the quiet years, and having it come back sounding exactly like itself. No apology, no reinvention. Just “here’s what we do” and it still works. Thursday, 19 August 2010. Backstage: Monday, 16 August 2010. Design Your Own Beer: Beck’s ran a design competition where you could submit a beer label and win money, a trip to Berlin, concert tickets. The appeal is obvious—your design on actual bottles in stores, maybe in someone’s hand. That’s different from portfolio work. The corporation gets free creative labor from designers excited about the possibility. Everyone involved knows what’s happening. It’s not romantic, but it’s honest. Friday, 13 August 2010. Songs I Keep: Monday, 9 August 2010. No Reason Not To: I wanted people to see these videos. Lykke Li, Robyn, Bat for Lashes—the usual stuff I was into. And it felt dumb to keep them locked on my site. Some reader pointed out that people should be able to embed them, share them wherever. He was right. There was no reason not to. You discover music through other people. You see a video someone embedded on their blog, or they send you a link, or it shows up on some corner of the internet you weren’t looking for. That’s how it works. Keeping the videos just on my site meant I was cutting off those accidental discoveries, those moments where something lands in the right person at the right time. Setting it up cost time and server resources and a lot of Club Mate, and I had no idea if the infrastructure would actually hold under real traffic. But that wasn’t the point. The point was: if I actually cared about these artists and these videos, why would I be the gatekeeper? So I made them embeddable. People could drop them on their blogs, build them into their own corners of the internet. It wasn’t a big move, but it felt right—the idea that beautiful things don’t need to live in just one place. Saturday, 7 August 2010. Surviving The Weekend: Who turned the clock? It’s the weekend again—another step toward the end we all know is coming. The car, the cancer, the slow burn or the quick one, doesn’t matter. You know what’s waiting. Nobody sleeps easy anymore when you know that. So you fill the days with anything but the thought, and here are ten things I could do instead. Some borrowed, some insane, all of them better than sitting with it. Travel somewhere and make a playlist for the drive. Take a month offline and see if anything changes. Run for president of Haiti. Break a flowerpot and call it a story. Draw a 5 on your palm and high-five everyone you meet this weekend—watch them flinch. Clean your apartment. Find the Swedish family that disappeared in there months ago. Buy Coca-Cola in those massive family jugs that enrage both environmentalists and nutritionists at the same time. Call a pizza place and explain with complete sincerity that you’re allergic to bees and they need to verify everything—really commit to it, don’t let it go. Do your own prostate exam with a DIY kit and some lube, pocket the doctor’s fee. And at some point, sleep with Ines before one of the others does. Friday, 6 August 2010. Björk: All Is Full Of Love Forever: Björk’s been making work for thirty years that sounds like nobody else, and she’s never cared if people understood it. There’s something honest about that—refusing to simplify yourself, refusing to be digestible. The title feels true to how she approaches everything, this sense that complexity and difficulty and strangeness are part of what makes things beautiful. I’m not always sure I get what she’s doing, but I trust her enough to keep listening. Thursday, 5 August 2010. Music Television: I spend these days listening to music, which is pretty much all I do around here. My neighbor next door—Stockmeier, wooden leg, hammers the wall during Sturm der Liebe because she’s convinced each episode might be her last—she got talking about television one day. The kind that used to exist. Just music videos, all the time. None of the cheap dating shows, none of the ringtone garbage, just videos. We stood there thinking about it, then rolled her back to her place, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why not build something like that. A place where all the music videos I post could actually live instead of drowning in the constant feed. Somewhere they stay, somewhere they get found. I was too incompetent to actually build a real TV station, so I built this instead. A wall. Throw up the videos and they stay there. Updated whenever something new goes up. It’s pathetically revolutionary. I keep scrolling through, clicking on Robyn and Katy and Kele, still thinking about what a real time slot would feel like. Probably won’t happen. But this is here. The videos stay, at least. Thursday, 5 August 2010. Can’t Look Away: The thing about watching someone’s heart break online is that you can’t look away. It’s Paris, of all places, and Olivier Zahm is posting about Natacha Ramsay again—confessions, videos of sad songs, the occasional nude of her mixed in. He’s not protecting himself. He’s completely open about it. Olivier runs Purple Magazine. He’s a photographer with real taste and vision. The kind of person whose eye actually matters. And now he’s been left by someone and can’t stop writing about it on his blog. There’s a specific humiliation in asking someone to come back twice and being told no both times. The number becomes permanent. I know those nights without sleep. The appetite that vanishes. The moment you understand that one person’s decision has unmade your entire world. You keep waiting for some solution, some way to fix it. There isn’t one. Then she comes back. Just to hold him. Just to be there for an afternoon. And then she leaves again, back to whoever she chose instead. That’s the cruelty—not the leaving itself, but coming back just long enough to make him remember why it hurts. He writes that having her there for that one day saved his life. He means it completely. He’s not performing this for anyone. He’s just too full of it to keep it inside. I don’t know what happens to him next. Maybe she comes back for real. Maybe he just keeps working, keeps photographing beautiful things, keeps letting the sadness feed into it. What I know is that watching someone with real vision get reduced to just trying to survive the day—it stops being a story about other people and becomes something you can’t look away from. We’re all Olivier eventually. Wednesday, 4 August 2010. Saving the World: I overslept. Completely passed out, woke up confused about what was real and what I’d dreamed in the game. Bought this specifically to drag my brain somewhere new—away from Pokémon, away from anime, all that basement stuff. Now I need to warn you before I become completely useless: don’t buy this. It will destroy you. StarCraft 2 is Blizzard’s perfect addiction engine. It didn’t just make me a strategy person overnight—it’s in my head now, even when I’m not playing. You’re building armies, defending bases, upgrading your war machines. Click here, click there, and everything is on fire. There’s a story wrapped around it, the usual space opera stuff: rebellion, some empire to topple, hot alien women and complicated men. Michael made something insidious. Something genuinely great. The cruel part is how simple it stays. You’re raiding planets, fighting enemies, unlocking campaigns where you play as these disgusting swarm creatures and somehow you stop caring they’re hideous. Dark caves. Infected things. Hot alien creatures that want to destroy you and you want something from them. And you keep going because the game understands exactly what to show you next. I know who this is made for. You, if the world has ground you down and the women you’re drawn to only exist as polygons, if your life includes your mom bringing snacks at four. This game was built specifically for that loneliness. It’s the nerd fantasy distilled: you save the world. Hot alien creatures take notice. In reality, nothing changes. But in here, you matter. The game ensures it. I haven’t slept properly in a week. My eyes feel wrong. And I’m booting it back up right now. Tuesday, 3 August 2010. Britta and the Bear: Saturday, 31 July 2010. The Hundreds in the Hands: Pigeons made something with this video that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I can’t explain what it does or why it works, but it stuck with me. Friday, 30 July 2010. Kiss The Pain Away: Thursday, 29 July 2010. Tegan and Sara Direct: I’ve always found it interesting when musicians take control of the frame around their own work. Tegan and Sara directing their own videos makes perfect sense—they’ve spent twenty years refining a visual identity that’s unmistakable, and handing that off to someone else would be like asking a stranger to finish your sentences. The thing about them as directors is that there’s no distance between the aesthetic and the song. It’s not decoration layered over the music; it’s the same thought expressed two ways at once. The imagery is stark and direct, sometimes deliberately awkward, rarely trying to be beautiful in the traditional sense. That matters, especially for queer artists who’ve built their whole career on refusing to soften themselves for anyone. Their videos aren’t afraid to sit in discomfort, to let the frame hold too long on a feeling that makes you slightly nervous. It’s the same thing they do in a song. Wednesday, 28 July 2010. Don’t Feed The Dead Animals: Luc Braquet gets at something real with that title—the futility of tenderness toward what’s finished, the way we pour care into nothing because we can’t help ourselves. There’s a cruelty in the instruction, or maybe a mercy. Either way, it sits with you wrong, which is probably exactly where Braquet wants it. I’ve always been drawn to work that refuses to be comfortable, that makes you feel slightly foolish for your instincts. Tuesday, 27 July 2010. Hugo Needs a Home: Hugo was a phone—a Sony Ericsson, black, the kind that looked sleek around 2005. He showed up needing a home, and we did what made sense at the time: invented a backstory where he came by with brandy and did a striptease to pay rent. This was 2010. This was how you made a giveaway post something someone might actually care about. You didn’t just post specs. You created a character. You made up a reason for him to exist beyond being free merchandise. You let yourself sound ridiculous in print, committed to the bit, and trusted that someone reading it would get it. I have no idea if anyone actually won Hugo or what happened to him after. Phones are like that—you carry them for a year or two, they become muscle memory, and then they’re gone. Hugo probably ended up as landfill. But for one afternoon he had a narrative. He was a joke we all got to be in on together. That seems worth something. Monday, 26 July 2010. Hang With Me: There’s nothing flashy about ’Hang With Me.’ Robyn just showed up with a pop song that didn’t need to prove anything—bright enough to stick with you, patient enough that you don’t feel rushed. Four minutes that could have been forgettable but aren’t, with no tricks or desperation underneath, just an offer. That kind of thing is rarer than it should be. Monday, 26 July 2010. Mind Game: Colors, Breasts And A Dead God: I was trying to get high on cocoa, and when that didn’t work, I figured I’d assault my brain another way. Pulled up Mind Game around midnight. The film doesn’t ease you in. Some petty criminal falls for a girl with massive breasts, gets shot in the ass during a robbery, then a god appears—physically unstable, operating through screens and mirrors—offering a second chance. He takes it, runs off with a failed swimmer and her butchy sister, dodging gangsters and cartoon violence and ugly Frenchmen. Meanwhile the film keeps cutting to a space crew stranded on an alien ship, eating the creature’s waste to survive, their only exit a Japanese woman’s vagina. Everything bottoms out in a whale’s belly, an old man, a meaning nobody asked for. Masaaki Yuasa directed this, and Studio 4°C (the ones behind Batman Gotham Knight and the Animatrix sequences) throws everything at you at once. Scene cuts refuse warning. Three animation styles colliding every few minutes. Colors that shouldn’t coexist somehow work. It’s designed to scramble your brain, and I let it. Ended up on the floor in something between fetal position and genuine awe, finally understanding what I’d been chasing that whole night. The sensible take is that this isn’t for everyone—definitely not sober—but there’s a real difference between trying to look weird and being genuinely unhinged. Once you’ve burned through your Alices and Rocky Horrors and everything else performing strangeness without committing to it, you run into something like this: visually relentless, refusing to apologize, refusing to explain itself. Nishi never gets what he wants. The god never makes sense. You spend two hours watching the world collapse into itself, and somehow that’s the best thing that’s happened to you in weeks. Sunday, 25 July 2010. Ten Little Missions: Saturday and nobody’s coming over, you’re somewhere you didn’t want to be, stuck with thoughts that don’t lead anywhere. So you make a list. Not the kind that’s supposed to change your life—just dumb weekend shit, ten things that don’t matter but at least they’re something to do. Go to hell. No really, pick somewhere and just drive there. Hide stupid stickers around the city and see if anyone gives a shit. Drink enough melon soda to wish you’d never been born. Seduce your janitor or your landlord or whoever—candlelight, wine, play it like you mean it. He’ll remember you forever. Kiss someone unexpected on the street and then eat ice cream with them like that’s what normal people do. Sell your computer to someone who thinks they need it and try living poor for a month. Drive to Uganda or somewhere equally stupid and just stay there for a while. Listen to some band nobody’s heard of loud while eating a blood orange, just to feel like you’re in a movie. Write an angry letter to a magazine and tell them they used to be better, that they’ve lost it. Call your health insurance and ask them stupid shit—where do babies come from, when’s my sister old enough to clean the bathroom, whatever. Steal your sister’s nasal spray, use it the wrong way, put it back, and don’t tell her anything. Just wait for her to figure out something’s wrong. Watch the confusion spread across her face. That was the whole thing. None of it meant anything, obviously. But for two days it felt like you were the one making the rules. Like you weren’t trapped—you were choosing. Friday, 23 July 2010. Lara Stone is My Drug: Lara Stone’s face does something I can’t fully name. That gap in her teeth, the shape of her mouth, the way her eyes sit—it all just works. I know I’m not alone in this. Playboy made sure of that. But looking at her still feels private somehow, which is the real trick with beauty like that. It manages to feel personal even though it’s everywhere. I’ve definitely spent more hours with her photographs than I probably should. Thursday, 22 July 2010. When the Nerds Won: You ever notice how Zuckerberg moves like he’s surprised his own body exists? Like his consciousness lives somewhere else entirely and his body is just… there. That’s every tech billionaire. Guys who learned to build things before they learned how to actually be around people. Mark, Bill, Steve—same type. Spent their formative years alone, became obsessed with solving problems through code, and then one day woke up running systems that billions of people depend on. The brutal part is that they never had to learn better. You build something useful enough and suddenly you don’t have to deal with the consequences of not understanding humans. You can just keep optimizing the system like you’re alone in a room with a computer, except now the room is global and everyone’s inside it. You can see it in every decision they make. Privacy? They don’t get why anyone cares. Rights? Looks like inefficiency to them. The fact that their platforms are addictive and destroy people’s ability to think clearly? They’d probably call it engagement. Because they still think like engineers solving technical problems, not humans wielding power over billions of other humans. It’s not even malice, which is somehow worse. Zuckerberg probably isn’t trying to ruin anything. He’s just never learned to care about anything beyond the optimization of his own systems. He’s the smartest person in every room and the most emotionally illiterate. Brilliant at building things. Completely catastrophic at understanding what power actually means. The nerds won. They got the control and the money and the ability to reshape the world according to their logic. And it turns out what they wanted wasn’t actually good for anyone, including themselves. They just thought it would be. Wednesday, 21 July 2010. Making It Pink: There’s something elegant about a sticker campaign. You’re not spray-painting or claiming walls—just small, intentional marks accumulating on poles and signage. One sticker is a note. A dozen is a pattern. By the time there are fifty, you’ve quietly shifted how the street looks. I understand why designers do this. Your work lives in portfolios and galleries, confined to screens and print. Then you get to take your visual language out into the world in this lightweight, reversible way. It’s not graffiti’s aggression or declaration of ownership. It’s ambient introduction. Distributed. Patient. The stickers don’t demand attention. People ignore them or notice them or take them as evidence you were here and cared about something. They just keep accumulating, slowly changing the visual grammar of a neighborhood. That’s the actual magic—not the singular big statement, but the quiet, repeated presence that eventually becomes expected. Tuesday, 20 July 2010. Bunny Love: Tuesday, 20 July 2010. Waypoint: My whole life I’ve basically mapped out the exits: out of Bavaria first, then Berlin, and eventually Tokyo for real. I know that sounds like something you plan when you’re twelve and haven’t learned better yet, but the chaos between those checkpoints—the unreliable loves, the half-finished projects, the not knowing what comes next—that’s actually the only part that keeps me functional. A life without friction, without risk, without the possibility of fucking it up completely, would kill me. I’d rather take a few hits for chasing something stupid than live a decade in perfect, bloodless comfort. Berlin did what it needed to do. It was far enough from my origins, gave me work and people and enough distance to figure out who I was without my parents watching. But the map says England comes next. This autumn I’m moving to the south coast—Bournemouth, maybe London too—for six months on an EU study program. Language courses, design work, the usual excuse to relocate and pretend it’s educational. A few friends are coming, so it’ll probably be chaos again, but at least it’ll be the right kind. We’re preparing by watching Skins and rewatching Harry Potter, which isn’t preparation for anything real but it feels good. There’s something about that specific British mood—the claustrophobia, the romance, the way kids just barely hold it together—that I want in my head before I arrive. Or maybe we’re just procrastinating properly and pretending it’s intentional. The real thing is that England isn’t the finish. It’s a waypoint, a test run before the actual commitment. Six months and then I’m doing it: Tokyo, the part of the plan that’s been sitting there since I was a kid, the one that actually scares me. England is just to prove I can actually move when I say I’m going to. I’ll miss Berlin. The specific quality of its nothing-ness, the Saturday afternoons, the people I know well enough now that I’d have to actually say goodbye instead of just leaving. But I’m also ready to go. There’s something important about outgrowing a place, about knowing it’s time. And the knowledge that you can come back somehow makes the leaving easier. Monday, 19 July 2010. My United States of Fuckever: Friday, 16 July 2010. Weekend Missions: Everyone worth knowing is at the festival right now. The rest of us are stuck here, wandering around the city like I own the place, looking for something that justifies the time. I’ve been thinking about what would actually make a weekend feel different. Stand on a busy street with a cardboard sign and write something stupid on it. See who honks. There’s something pure about forcing strangers to engage with your dumbness. Spend the whole weekend dressed like a 1970s rock star, moving and talking completely wrong, not giving a shit. Watch how differently people treat you when you’ve stopped caring what you look like. Fill a bathtub with iced tea just because you can. It’s cold and pointless and smells weird—and that’s the entire appeal. Sleep with someone random, someone with nothing to do with your real life. Your body needs to remember it’s alive. It’s not profound, it’s just biology and boredom intersecting. Read a big stupid fantasy novel about werewolves and gods, the kind that doesn’t apologize for itself. Kiss someone you weren’t planning on. Buy a stranger money or a drink for nothing. Call your ex and tell them something completely insane, then hang up and never call them again. The point is that doing something intentionally pointless is better than sitting around doing nothing pointfully. That’s the whole weekend right there. Friday, 16 July 2010. Crossfire: Flowers doing the synth-rock thing with so much confidence that you forget he’s singing about relationships or whatever, just locked into that groove. It’s the kind of song that works best blasting in a car at night, when you’re alone and the road’s empty and nothing else matters. There’s something about the production—all those bright, crystalline synths cutting through the mix—that makes it feel both present and like it’s from some imagined 80s you never actually lived through. I remember hearing it years later and being struck by how much of his solo work was about finding permission to just sound like this, without the weight of a band behind him. Not as studied as The Killers, not as ambitious. Just happy to be big and dumb and pretty. Thursday, 15 July 2010. In Rotation: M.I.A.’s ///Y/ is a specific kind of failure. After Arular and Kala, the anticipation was almost unbearable—this was supposed to be the record where she turned experimental sounds into something inevitable, like she’d been heading there all along. Instead she disappears into her own production. The sounds are intricate and strange but untethered, like watching someone get lost in synths and forget they’re supposed to be making songs that land. “Born Free” still works, and “XXXO” has something, but the album overall feels like she’s obsessed with texture at the expense of impact. I keep giving it another listen, waiting for it to click, and it doesn’t. Bombay Bicycle Club’s Flaws sounds like someone else dictated the emotional palette. Where’s the snap from I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose? This is relentlessly pretty and relentlessly sad, the kind of sadness that feels performed rather than felt. It drains without giving anything back. Each track blurs into the next. “Ivy & Gold” is the only moment that lands, which says everything. Wolf Parade’s Expo 86 is the record that actually arrives this week. Third album, and they’ve figured out how to balance ambition with craft in a way the others are still chasing. The keyboards don’t hide under the guitars or dominate them—they sit as equals. “Ghost Pressure” and “Little Golden Age” are the tracks that show what they’re capable of. It feels earned, like they believe what they’re saying instead of trying ideas on. That’s rarer than it should be. Wednesday, 14 July 2010. No Love in Summer: The heat makes thinking harder. These past weeks have been thick and heavy, the kind that presses down until caring about feelings seems pointless. So I don’t. I look for people to share the weight with—nothing meant to last, just presence, someone else sweating through the same unbearable stretch. For years, my relationships always start in autumn. Not because I want casual summer and serious winter—it’s simpler than that. By September I’ve usually found my way back to myself, after months of being lost in wanting. Summer breaks me down. Autumn builds me back up. And when the leaves start turning and the air gets sharp, there’s always someone there. We walk through cooler nights and talk the way people do when the season finally allows it. I fall into it completely, knowing how it ends. Winter comes, spring follows, we separate. She goes back to her life. I’ve stopped resisting the pattern. Summer is what it is—hot and temporary and empty of anything real. Some people can love when the days are long. I can’t. I need the cold to feel any kind of connection. So I take the summer as it comes: distraction, bodies, nights without promises. A smile, a kiss, sleep. That’s the entire bargain when you’re underwater like this. What’s left when it’s over is strange. Memories, sure, but also this unshakeable certainty that it had to end when it did. There’s sadness in that, but relief too. I’ll spend the spring alone, shedding whatever summer made of me, waiting for the heat to break and the wanting to quiet. Then autumn comes, and I do it all again. Monday, 12 July 2010. Die Fantastischen Vier: Die Fantastischen Vier at a broadcast center’s parking lot is exactly the kind of place they could get away with by 2009. Not because it was anything special as a venue—the whole thing was basically corporate sponsorship dressed up as a street festival. But they’d spent twenty years being smart and funny and stubbornly popular, the kind of band that made people who normally ignored hip-hop start paying attention. They’d won every argument about what German hip-hop could be. I never made it to one of those Telekom shows, but the whole setup was funny if you thought about it too hard. Corporate money calling itself street culture, the contradiction built right into the name. But Die Fantastischen Vier had been above all that for years. They didn’t care about authenticity or street cred. They just made good music and let everyone else figure out what it meant. By 2009 they were untouchable. That’s where you get to when you’re good enough that you stop apologizing for being popular. Monday, 12 July 2010. Not First: I posted a Cee-Lo music video a couple weeks after it came out, and people wrote to tell me I was late. Not just late—behind. Like I’d failed at some implicit speed requirement. The video was beautiful. That was the only reason I posted it. But apparently beauty wasn’t enough if it came with a timestamp that didn’t align with the moment it dropped. There’s this thing that happens when you’re online constantly. Everything feels urgent. You build this muscle memory where falling behind on the current moment feels like a personal failure. Trends move fast, algorithms punish you for being slow, and there’s always something newer coming. So you keep reaching for what just happened, what’s happening now, what’s about to happen. The newest shit. But that’s exhausting, and it kills something. Not everyone’s sitting around mainlining content all day. Some people have lives, work, distractions. They stumble onto something beautiful on Tuesday that dropped on Monday, and it still moves them. When did we decide that mattered less than being first? I’m not interested in chasing what’s hot. I’m interested in what’s actually worth my time. Sometimes the newest thing qualifies. Most of the time it doesn’t. I’d rather post something genuinely great a week late than something mediocre because it’s today. That’s not some high-minded principle—it’s just what interests me. The people who complain about timing are usually the ones who’ve already moved on to the next thing anyway. They’re not sitting with the Cee-Lo video; they’re already three novelties ahead. They just want to know why I’m not in lockstep with them. I’m not. I was never going to be. Thursday, 8 July 2010. Redheads: Gold reserves on your head—that’s what Teresa Buecker called it when she was writing about redheads as a trend at Fashion Week. Or rather, she was writing about what happens when people constantly reduce you to one physical feature, keep noticing it, keep making it the first thing they see about you. Eventually the feature stops being incidental and becomes your whole identity, your obsession. You resist it for a while but it doesn’t stick. Somewhere along the way you’ve made it yours. “This feature, which I am constantly reduced to, has become my personal obsession,” she said. That’s what stuck with me—not the trend itself but what the trend does to you once you’re in it. That season’s collections had a similar quality, maybe just coincidence. Silk and chiffon, sepia-toned evening wear, pastels and bare skin. Nothing looked polished or final; everything felt like it was still becoming, like people were figuring it out as they went. Which is maybe all a trend is anyway—someone notices something about a person or a detail, and then everyone starts looking for it, and then the people with that thing can’t see themselves without it. Thursday, 8 July 2010. Death and All His Friends: One moment you’re alive—dancing hard, throwing yourself into the lake, making love in places that were never made for it. The next day it’s just gone. Forever. The glow, the push-back, the rush. Death moves quietly these days—sometimes fast as a reckless moment, sometimes slow as the weight you felt coming. Nobody thinks about it enough, how much time anyone actually gets. Roberto Müller killed himself. His goodbye letter read like he’d made peace with it, like he understood something we’re all still looking for. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after that. About being alive right now. About who we even are when we’re just a profile, a few photos, some words we thought sounded profound at three in the morning. About the actual moment of dying—what that feels like. I talked through it with someone one night. What he did. The way he chose to do it. What waits after, if anything. Whether I could understand it if someone I loved decided to do the same thing. We didn’t land on any answers. Everyone dies. That’s not news. But it doesn’t make death feel any less strange. It’s still terrifying. Still inexplicable. Still completely unknowable. I don’t know what happens in that last breath. If it’s quiet or painful or nothing. I don’t know if there’s always another way when you’re cornered, or if sometimes the only exit is the one you choose. I can’t tell you if Roberto was right. If there’s one thing in this life I truly respect, it’s that last walk that comes for all of us. Wednesday, 7 July 2010. Ke$ha: She was the glitter girl who didn’t pretend to be anything else, which made her briefly significant in pop music. The songs were forgettable, but the complete lack of apology was not. You either got why that mattered or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you weren’t the audience anyway. Wednesday, 7 July 2010. Fixed Time: Every half hour I swapped families. Joey’s apartment, Bel-Air, the OC—I didn’t watch these shows so much as inhabit them, rotating through lives like a visitor in a series of rooms that opened exactly when the cable box said they would. By my teens I knew the Tanners better than my own relatives, had learned more about the world from laugh tracks and commercial breaks than from anything an actual adult had tried to teach me. The television raised me. It gave me values, a vocabulary, a sense of what love and friendship looked like when they actually worked. Before you could just download a season and disappear into your bedroom with it, you had to know when the show aired. You had to plan around it, arrange yourself in front of the screen at the right moment. My whole family would gather—not out of special intention but out of simple logistics. If Friends was on ProSieben at seven, then at seven we were all in the living room. We didn’t have to negotiate about it. The television decided, and we showed up. There was something I miss about that, not because TV was better, but because the ritual made the watching matter more. You couldn’t skip, couldn’t rewind, couldn’t speed through the boring parts. You sat with it. You sat with each other. The shows were what they were: Friends, Scrubs, Full House, The Fresh Prince, The OC, Family Matters, Married with Children. Solid, competent television. Nothing that needed to justify itself with prestige or ambition. They were just there, available at their appointed hours, teaching lessons that stuck in a way that’s hard to explain now. Don’t judge people by their circumstances. Love usually wins. Real friends are everything. These weren’t profound ideas, but hearing them told and retold across a hundred episodes, embedded in stories with characters you genuinely liked, in a house where they played out the same dilemmas your own family was probably working through—that made them real in a way theory never would. Now you can watch anything. The sheer volume should mean something better, but instead we’ve created a kind of abundance paralysis where every hour is the wrong choice because there’s always something else. We’ve traded the ceremony for convenience, and what we get is isolation. Instead of gathering at a fixed time, we download a season and consume it alone at night, moving through it as quickly as we can before the next batch arrives. Hollywood’s solution to every moment of free time is another show, another series, another reason to stay in. Gossip Girl, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory—they blur together now, indistinguishable, designed not to linger but to keep you moving. The weird thing is I don’t actually want it to go back. I don’t want scheduled television again, don’t want to sit through commercials or miss something because I wasn’t home. But I recognize what we lost in the bargain, which is that shared moment, that appointment that made the experience feel like something more than consumption. The shows that actually stuck with me—and I mean really stuck, the ones I still think about—are the ones that had time to build something. Where you knew the characters well enough that what happened to them mattered. You can’t speed that up. You can’t franchise it or quantify it into a binge. It either builds or it doesn’t. I miss which shows taught me. Not which ones I watched, but which ones I became briefly inside of, in that half hour when the world narrowed down to what was on the screen and nothing else was allowed to interrupt. That’s what I miss more than any specific character or storyline. The permission to be completely elsewhere, completely focused, completely present. The television gave me that. It was exactly what I needed, whether I knew it or not. Tuesday, 6 July 2010. Jens Ingvarsson and a Banana: Tuesday, 6 July 2010. Fashion Week Mode: Every couple of years Berlin’s fashion week rolls back into town and the whole city gets that specific energy—the bars fill with a different crowd, the sidewalks suddenly matter in a different way, people are thinking about how they look. This year Calvin Klein, Michael Michalsky, and Marcel Ostertag were the big names, though honestly the draw wasn’t really about who was showing—it was about the machinery itself, the way fashion week temporarily restructures a city’s attention. The international press and big designers get the official venues. Everyone else gets the spillover: cheap or free shows in galleries, warehouse spaces, random corners. Berlin’s generous that way. You can’t get into the Calvin Klein thing, but you can walk into some designer’s basement showcase and watch the same essential performance of hope and ambition. Milla Jovovich was the official face, which I appreciated in a perverse way—making a zombie killer the ambassador of fashion seems very Berlin. The local celebrities promoting things didn’t matter to me. The real thing was the models, the clothes, the specific way a designer had chosen to arrange fabric and color and silhouette. Whether it landed or felt like nothing. Fashion week in Berlin has this strange duality. It’s deadly serious—people’s livelihoods depend on the shows going well, the press taking note—but it’s also carnival. Everyone’s trying to look interesting, the city feels electric, you bump into people you haven’t seen in months. The social component is real, separate from what any designer actually showed. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually go to anything. Those weeks could feel either alive or hollow depending on my mood and the weather. But there was something appealing about the possibility of slipping into it for an afternoon, watching the machinery work, seeing what about it felt genuine and what felt pure theater. Maybe that’s the only reason to go: to figure out where the line is. Tuesday, 6 July 2010. Sky Ferreira: Sky Ferreira’s music has always had this quality where she’s not asking anything from you—no reaching, no softening, no performance. She places herself in a track with a kind of deadpan clarity, fully in control of what the thing is, and whatever happens next is just what happens. I like that. There’s no compromise, no begging for approval. Just an artist who knows exactly what she wants and gets it done. Monday, 5 July 2010. Welt Kompakt, Scroll Edition: Walking into the Axel Springer building, I expected something worse. We’d complained about this place online for years, built it up as some kind of evil empire, but it was just an office—fluorescent lights, people at desks, normal. Caro, Hannah, and I went with Claudio and Suz from iHeartBerlin, Sandra, Rose, Dani. We were there to make something called Welt Kompakt, a Scroll Edition created entirely by bloggers, by people who lived online. A test. An experiment. Something new. Making a newspaper with a dozen people who all see the world differently is harder than it sounds. We worked through the day, watched the Federal President election play out live, ate schnitzel and muffins and fruit, chased it with Club-Mate. iPads flying around. Brains on. And I kept noticing how much everyone disagreed about what mattered, what was worth saying, what was obvious versus pointless. The only thing we all agreed on: we all had Macs. Hannah didn’t, which became its own little status symbol somehow. After work we hit a bar by the Spree and half-remembered what we’d said to all those journalists with cameras. Hannah got loose on wine and chicken. I was stuck on this weird feeling about making print—something physical and committed and final when we lived most of our lives online throwing things into the void. The edition came out eventually. It mattered for a moment, this one specific beautiful thing we’d actually made together. Most of it’s gone now. But I still don’t know who Carolin Schmitz is, the name that kept floating around that day like some kind of inside joke. Nobody ever explained it. Thursday, 1 July 2010. Pretty in Pink: Taylin from Montreal wore an “I Love New York” shirt at eighteen. Those shirts died decades ago. But showing up in something that dead for that long and wearing it straight, no irony, just a person in a dead shirt - that takes either confidence or zero self-consciousness. Maybe they’re the same thing. Sebastien’s a designer from Paris. Red Vans, black jeans tight enough to plan for, a Zara jacket - correct choices that somehow add up to nothing. The Elvis shirt saves it. There’s something about pulling on something specific like that and just moving through the world in it like it’s normal that separates people who actually dress from people following a formula. In New York people just dress different. More skin, more movement, more willingness to fill space in clothes that shouldn’t work but do, because they move like they own the place. It’s not elegant but confidence makes it work. Romina’s fifteen from Düsseldorf, ponytail and Chucks - the standard teenage street style look. Nothing original, nothing surprising. She looks at the camera like she actually believes something good is coming, and maybe that’s what counts. Clark and Jennifer are in neon Pikachu everything and they’re completely wrecked. Not fun-wrecked - the actual kind, where you can see it catching up with them, wearing them down. Cartoon characters on your body while you barely stand isn’t cute, it’s just sad. Wednesday, 30 June 2010. One Guy’s Pokémon: One person doing all the parts of the Pokémon theme. You know how the original goes—that theme song that somehow survives thirty years in your head even when everything else about Pokémon has faded. Hearing it layered out from one voice is ridiculous in the most honest way. No winking at the camera, no elaborate concept. Just someone who sat down with a mic and decided to do the whole thing himself. Wednesday, 30 June 2010. Damn Oh No!: Marina and The Diamonds makes pop music that sounds like someone’s been awake too long, thinking about the wrong things at 3 AM. There’s no guile in it—just theatrical arrangements wrapped around observations that land harder than they probably should. The songs don’t announce themselves; they arrive quietly at something raw, and by the time you’ve noticed it’s happened, you’re already there with her, looking at whatever it was from the same angle. That directness is rare in pop. Tuesday, 29 June 2010. Let’s Get Lost: Natasha Khan’s voice on Let’s Get Lost sounds like it’s coming from underwater—intimate and muffled, like you’re hearing it through heavy glass. She did this with Beck for the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack, which shouldn’t work, which sounds ridiculous until you actually listen. The Twilight movies are indefensible. Everyone knows this. But whoever programmed the soundtrack understood something: hire actually talented people and you can at least save that part. Lykke Li did a song, Muse did one, Khan and Beck made this one. The film is garbage. The soundtrack exists in a different world. I’ve never understood why artists agree to this kind of work. The money, presumably. Or maybe the constraint is oddly pure—you have no prestige to lean on, no project credibility to coast on. You have to be good. You have to actually care about the work itself. The song is good because of that clarity. Twilight didn’t earn it, but it doesn’t matter. Monday, 28 June 2010. M.I.A. on Games: I used to care what M.I.A. thought. Her music had this edge to it, this sense that she was actually aware of things. Then somewhere she started sounding like every other celebrity with a half-formed opinion about what’s wrong with kids today. Her thing now is that video games are making children violent. She’s got this quote where she’s talking about American kids watching violence on screens and then getting deployed to Afghanistan, and because they’ve only experienced it through pixels they don’t understand what real violence feels like, which makes it easier for them to inflict it. There’s a kernel of truth in there—desensitization is real—but she uses it to blame the games, as if the problem would go away if we just deleted them all. But the Middle East is lousy with violent young men who’ve never played a video game in their lives. Never owned a console. Never saw any of it. Their violence didn’t come from a screen. It came from actual conditions, actual desperation. So how does that fit her theory? What bothers me is that this is just the same argument recycled for the millionth time. Psychologists with zero evidence. Politicians desperate for something to blame. Now celebrities piling in because it’s safe and easy. Just point at the screens, nod seriously, and act like you’ve discovered something. Don’t look too hard at the real causes. Don’t think about anything difficult. She delivers it like she’s had a genuine insight. But she’s not paying attention. She’s just speaking. Friday, 25 June 2010. We Said Yes: Welt Kompakt asked us to help edit their first July issue. Hannah and Caro got flown to Berlin, we got paid, and access to a newsroom that actually mattered - people like Robert Basic and Julia Stelzner who’d built real careers in this space. The kind of thing you don’t think about twice. The German blogging world went into automatic rejection. Axel Springer is evil, print media is the enemy, taking money from a newspaper means you’ve sold out. It wasn’t unexpected. There’s always someone ready to be principled about everything, and a newspaper invitation is an easy target. It costs nothing to be against it. What struck me was the effort people put into opposing it. Pages of arguments about compromise and ethics and community standards. Meanwhile the actual thing - being in a real newsroom, learning how newspapers worked, talking to people who actually ran operations - felt like maybe the smartest week I’d had in months. I understand the reflex. Online, everything becomes a choice between being against the system and complicit in it. There’s no room for just being interested, for taking a weird opportunity and seeing where it goes. The moment you’re willing to learn from people inside, you’ve already picked a side in their eyes. Berlin happened. The debate continued. Both groups were certain they were right, and neither was going to convince the other. I came home with some stories. The internet stayed angry. Separate worlds. Wednesday, 23 June 2010. The Roots – Dear God 2.0: New York at night through a taxi window is a specific kind of view - not the postcard version, just the city and the people waiting at corners, the side of things only someone driving those streets gets to see. That’s the lens for The Roots’ “Dear God 2.0” video. Everything shot from the backseat, watching the city pass. It’s intimate and unsettling at once, the distance and closeness together. I’ve never been the kind of person who gets swept up in American hip-hop the way other people do, but The Roots have always felt outside that. There’s something about what they make - the musicianship, the way they build these layered tracks - that doesn’t land the same as the usual stuff. This video has the same quality. Not flashy, just close attention to a city and the people in it, the small moments and contradictions. Their album “How I Got Over” has Joanna Newsom and Dice Raw on it. They’re the kind of band that can stay ambitious without making it obvious they’re trying. That’s rare. Tuesday, 22 June 2010. What Nettie Harris Said: Nettie Harris gave an interview defending Terry Richardson after all the assault allegations came out. She’d modeled for him and said her experience was nothing like what people accused him of. He was careful about boundaries, asked permission before each move, and when she felt uncomfortable with something, he backed off. No pressure. She actually respected him for it. It’s strange reading because the Richardson story is so dark everywhere else. But her account is specific and grounded—she’s not defending him in the abstract, she’s describing what happened in that room between them. That’s real whether or not it changes anything about the broader accusations. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with a contradiction like that. One model felt safe, others felt exploited. Both versions exist somewhere. The neat story everyone wanted—he’s a predator, case closed—doesn’t hold up against actual human complexity. Neither does the defense story, which is probably her point. She’s not saying he didn’t do those things to other women. She’s saying it didn’t happen to her. Tuesday, 22 June 2010. Adam Green And His Penis: Adam Green’s always been the kind of guy who doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks. His blog, The Lake Room, is full of blurry photographs of drunk friends, stoned relatives, weird museum moments where he’s gotten hard—the stuff you’d never actually post but somehow think about. So when he started uploading explicit photographs of himself, just casual shots of his dick, it felt less like a shock and more like the inevitable next step. There’s something kind of honest about it, I guess. Not performative, not trying to be edgy or prove anything. Just a musician saying, “Here’s my body, here’s what I’ve got, deal with it.” He’s not contextualizing it or asking permission. He’s not doing it for shock value. He’s just putting it out there the way he’d put out anything else—photographs, songs, whatever. The fact that it’s his genitals doesn’t seem to register as different in his mind. It made me think about what actual self-expression looks like versus what we’re all trained to perform as self-expression. Most people are terrified of their own bodies online, or they curate them into something presentable. Adam’s not playing that game. His music doesn’t apologize. His photographs don’t apologize. Neither does this. I don’t know if it’s going to catch on. Probably not. Most people aren’t built for that kind of indifference to judgment. But there’s something almost radical about someone deciding his body is just another thing he might document, the same as a drunk night or a weird museum moment or a song. Monday, 21 June 2010. Iceland’s Gambit: Iceland was broke and Wikileaks had a solution. Become a digital haven—pass laws protecting publishers and whistleblowers, make it impossible to sue people for what they published, promise absolute anonymity—and watch the servers and companies migrate there like it was salvation. Money problem solved. A small country full of musicians and geothermal energy gets to be the internet’s sanctuary. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative was the actual law they made from this pitch. Whistleblower protections. Anonymity shields. Copyright law rewritten so the publisher was shielded instead of sued into oblivion. In theory, Iceland became a nation that deliberately built a digital free zone, which sounds insane until you realize how much the rest of the world needed exactly that. What came with it was horny speculation. Could you finally post anything, show anything, host anything without the lawyers or the government or whatever morality cop had jurisdiction where you actually lived? No more consequence. No more exposure. Upload whatever you wanted, stay anonymous forever, and no one could touch you. That fantasy appealed to a certain kind of person. It appealed to me. The reality was quieter. Companies didn’t move there en masse. Laws don’t protect you if your server is in California anyway. But IMMI actually passed, other countries borrowed from it, and for a while Iceland was the only place where the internet’s idealists actually got something written into law instead of just fighting about it endlessly online. That’s more valuable than the fantasy ever was. Sunday, 20 June 2010. There Are Children Here: Heard about Suck Shaft through Atlantis, this Stockholm club where all the interesting musicians seem to rotate through. They’ve got “There Are Children Here”—electronic, weirdly catchy, confusing in a way that works. It’s the kind of track that ambushes you in a club even when you’re deliberately not paying attention. I don’t know if this means I’m actually into the electro-hype thing or just another person who hears something made with taste and goes along with it. Probably doesn’t matter which. Saturday, 19 June 2010. Richard Kern in Berlin: Richard Kern doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is. For 30 years he’s been photographing naked women and he’s never once explained or justified it. The girls barely old enough to legally do it. He just points the camera and shoots. That directness is rare. He showed up in Berlin last year to do some work for VBS.TV. The Berlin girls cooperated without fanfare. Come in, say hello to the crew, remove your clothes, collect your check. I want to see the faces of the Vice interns witnessing this in an apartment somewhere. Twenty-two years old, first real job, completely certain they understand how the world works. The video he made is good. The apartments are real. The light works. Berlin looks like itself, not some digitized mood board. Kern shoots the way he approaches everything: straightforward, without the art-world handwringing that makes photography feel like it’s trying to justify itself. He’ll probably be doing this at 70. Some people find what makes sense to them and just live it. That’s Kern. Saturday, 19 June 2010. Add SUV: The video for Add SUV is nothing special—Uffie and Pharrell cruising the city at night, cops at the end. Standard stuff. But what stuck with me is this: Uffie can’t sing. She never could. And I’ve never cared. I don’t mean it cruelly. She obviously knows. But she’s built this entire presence on being impossible to look away from despite having almost no credentials to back it up. She models, she makes music, and neither of those things are her strength, but the strength doesn’t matter because she moves through the world with this effortless unbothered cool that you either have or you don’t. Pharrell’s in the video doing what he does, which is fine, but he’s not the one you’re watching. Uffie cruises through the night like she owns it—completely herself, asking nothing from anyone. It’s the opposite of trying. I’ve always liked her because she doesn’t perform ambition or talent, doesn’t apologize for not being a “real” singer or model. She’s just Uffie. And that confidence—that refusal to justify her own existence—is cooler than any actual skill. Most people spend their whole lives chasing that kind of ease and never get it. Friday, 18 June 2010. Yana Kedrina: Yana Kedrina showed up online at some point—this Moscow girl with the kind of chaos that makes sense once you understand the place. She hunts dicks on Chatroulette, dances her ass to Cyndi Lauper, draws these deeply unsettling pieces where Jewish people become crab creatures. Completely unhinged and weirdly good-looking. Her photos and videos catch something honest about how young Russians move—cheeky, funny, and completely unashamed. The sexuality in them is refreshing because it’s unperformed, just direct and there. No Cold War weight, just raw existing. Friday, 18 June 2010. Wolfgang Amadeus: Phoenix in 2009—”1901,” “Lisztomania,” everywhere at once, and you could feel why immediately. A French band that sounded like they’d spent serious time in a studio getting every sound exactly right, but without sacrificing the fun. The funk was genuine, the hooks hit, and you could listen alone or at a party and it worked either way. There was something genuinely refreshing about music that didn’t feel obligated to apologize for being polished. All that indie-rock talk about authenticity and rawness and broken things—Phoenix just ignored it completely. They made an album that was beautiful, composed, unmistakably well-made, and let that be enough. The production wasn’t a compromise; it was the whole statement. A parking deck in Cologne, summer 2010. That’s where this giveaway was headed—some temporary venue that European cities somehow turned glamorous, industrial space made concert-hall. Phoenix would have sounded like their record: tight, pristine, bigger than the space could actually hold. They were sure of themselves in a way most bands never are. There’s a quiet confidence in that—knowing what you are, doing it completely, not needing permission. You hear it in the music, years later. Thursday, 17 June 2010. The App Doesn’t Matter: Steve Jobs killed the SuicideGirls app because the breasts bothered him. Missy announced they’d just build an iPhone-optimized website instead—same naked bodies, no app store, no way to stop them. His authority evaporated. I got a genuine laugh out of reading about this. Not like it was a joke, just that recognition of how flimsy control actually is. You can ban an app. You cannot actually prevent people from using a browser. Jobs had engineered this scenario where he could decide what was acceptable for “his” device. The app store made it feel real, like he actually had power over what people could see. It was a nice illusion. Then someone just went around it. Didn’t even make it dramatic. Just took the path he’d accidentally left open. The perfect part was Missy announcing this publicly. Casual, straightforward. Made it clear that the ban was empty. The site got more attention for being blocked than it would have got from an app. Streisand effect as marketing. I’m not sitting around thinking about naked girls on websites. But there’s something satisfying about a moment when you see that someone’s authority is actually nothing—just a system they convinced themselves was airtight, and it falls apart instantly when someone needs it to. The app stayed banned. The website worked fine. Everything that mattered continued exactly as before. Wednesday, 16 June 2010. Redheads: Around 2009 I became obsessed with fashion blogs, which sounds shallow until you realize this was when the form actually mattered—when interesting people could make something online without needing permission or a record deal. And I kept running into redheads. Not because the internet had developed some shared fantasy, but because they were everywhere in that specific moment, and they weren’t trying to be what the industry wanted. Rockie Nolan was shooting photographs at nineteen that most professionals couldn’t touch. Filippa Smeds was doing Vogue work but wouldn’t stop writing about Nintendo because she actually liked it. Katrin Isabel was designing something unclassifiable and didn’t care what you thought about it. Yeah, I wanted to sleep with all of them—they had the kind of confidence that makes people attractive—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that they were making something. I followed them because I wanted to see what they’d create next. Traci Lynn shooting whatever interested her. Eva Schulz writing honestly about being scared. Alexandra Sim-Wise refusing to separate her serious self from her fun self, writing about Mario and horror games like they mattered. The taste wasn’t about looking good. It was about seeing clearly. What I remember years later is how rare that feels now. The internet got optimized. Everyone’s doing the same highly-produced thing, chasing the same metrics. The blogosphere of 2009—that chaotic, generative thing where interesting people could just exist and share what they made—that’s gone. These women probably moved on, got real lives, stopped posting. The form died. But sometimes I’ll see an old photo and remember how it felt to find someone interesting by accident, to follow them because they were actually doing something. The redheads didn’t have anything in common except that they were talented and didn’t care about approval. That’s rarer than it should be. Monday, 14 June 2010. Peaches: She was the thing that happened when being famous for being famous actually meant something. Peaches Geldof, born into it, lived in it, got consumed by it the way those machines do. The nude photos, the scandals, the tabloid churn—it was all just the apparatus grinding on, and she was caught in the gears like everything else. Monday, 14 June 2010. The Hacksteak: We were a study group loose in Paris for a week—sympathetic nerds, daredevils, a couple of redheads who probably shouldn’t have been trusted with a train ticket. The gay quarter smelled like life fermenting in summer heat, the Jewish district like old money and older stories, the intellectual neighborhoods like someone’s cluttered apartment where you weren’t sure if you were welcome but you went in anyway. There were bookshops that seemed to have been sealed since 1950, shelves sagging under the weight of themselves. I bought a Japanese edition of Richard Kern’s “XxModels”, a signed copy of “A Million Little Pieces”, something in French that was too small to read. Each purchase felt like grave-robbing, like I’d found something that had been hidden and wasn’t asking to be found. But the actual thing I remember, the thing that sticks with me—what I think about when I think about Paris—is a hamburger. Hacksteak with fries and mayo. Just meat and fried potatoes and mayonnaise, nothing secret, nothing you’d photograph or write about in a travel guide. I ate it against a wall, watching the street, tasting something that was so specifically itself that it felt obscene. Bloody, greasy, salty in a way that made you want to cry. I was convinced that week that nothing would ever taste as good again, and turns out I was right. Everything since is just fuel. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, which is either pathetic or the most honest thing I’ve ever experienced, probably both. Saturday, 12 June 2010. I-Ref: Norman and Isabelle launched a publication called I-Ref. The pitch is to write about the people doing the writing - treat the voices themselves as interesting. They pulled together twenty-eight contributors, some already established, some from the half-visible edges of Berlin’s culture and design scenes. I know a few of them - Deniz and Dori from lil.bit, Clemens from iGNANT, Luise. People I’ve crossed paths with enough times to care what they’re working on. The original German framing gets pretty baroque - “fired synapses,” “walking societies,” all that language that hovers between profound and ridiculous depending on the angle you hit it from. But underneath it, the idea is simple: get people with real taste, give them room, assume it matters. No manifesto, no grand defense of digital publishing. Just here’s what we’re doing. I don’t know if I-Ref becomes something that lasts. Could be a season of good work that fades when everyone moves on. Could be something that actually builds. But I like that they didn’t sit around waiting for conditions to be right. Just started it with people they believed in. Tuesday, 8 June 2010. I’m In Love With A Dead Squirrel: I came across Michael J. DeMeo’s photography recently and got why he refuses to leave film. Everything about his work feels intentional—not in that performative Instagram way, but in the sense that shooting film requires actual knowledge. You burn through a roll fast enough that each frame matters. You can’t fake it. He photographs people, usually tattooed, usually real. Sometimes naked. The kind of people and moments that don’t photograph well when you’re trying to be polite about it. And the images have this quality where you can’t doubt that what you’re looking at actually happened. There’s no filter, no algorithm, no second guessing. The title about being in love with a dead squirrel makes sense when you’re committed to capturing what’s true rather than what’s pretty. A dead squirrel is less beautiful than a live one, but it’s more real to what actually exists. That matters if you’re serious about the work. Portland-based, committed to a medium most people consider obsolete. That level of conviction is less common than it should be, but when you see it—when you see work that refuses to compromise—it lands different. Monday, 7 June 2010. Shock Doctrine: Found an old post from 2004 or so, just a list of absurd weekend missions. Pure shock-humor - every line trying to offend, nothing clever about it, just loud. Reading it now it’s completely dated. But that era was real. Early internet, before everyone’s parents got online, before you had to worry about monetizing things or explaining what you meant. You could post stupid nonsense and nobody expected you to defend it or make it mean something. The jokes are garbage, sure, but there was honesty in how pointless it all was. You can’t do that anymore. Everything’s designed to be shareable, safe enough for sponsors, strategically offensive. Real shock depended on not explaining yourself - just posting and moving on. That’s gone. Friday, 28 May 2010. Can’t Stay Awake: I’m tired. No, that’s not even the word for it. Exhaustion doesn’t cover it. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing—walking the streets, dancing at some party, having sex—I could collapse asleep right now without warning. Just go under. And what drives me insane is watching my actual life happen while I’m not there. It’s passing by and I’m missing it. I went to the doctor. He said I’m fine. So I bought vitamins, energy drinks, everything that promises to keep you awake. Coffee strong enough to burn your mouth, cold water splashed on my face, beat off late at night like that would somehow shock me into consciousness. Nothing. It’s like throwing gravel at a wall—the gravel just falls. There’s a limit to how many horror documentaries I can watch before bed just to scare myself awake. I can’t live like that. But yesterday I fell asleep while writing this, face-first into the keyboard. When I came to I was humming cartoon theme songs in my head, songs I haven’t thought about in years. That’s when it hit me: this is serious now. This is something. What gets to me is how total it is. Not a rough week, not too much going on. Every single moment, every day, the same endless drag toward nothing. My life is passing and I’m asleep and I don’t know how to stop it. There’s got to be something wrong, something I can fix. Otherwise I’m just sliding. Wednesday, 26 May 2010. Still Reading Blogs: Most blogs are unreadable. Every random person thinks they have something urgent to say about nothing, and they publish it into the void hoping someone shows up to validate them. It’s all background noise. But occasionally you find one where someone’s actually paying attention. I don’t care about most fashion blogs—they’re just selfies with commentary, outfit posts designed for engagement. But then you get someone like Jana, or the weird pixel kids, or Va$htie doing something genuinely strange, and suddenly you realize what the medium is actually for. Someone keeping a diary about the things they actually see, the things that actually matter to look at. I’ve been reading blogs for a long time. Long enough to notice patterns. The good ones—the ones worth coming back to—have something in common. They’re not trying. No performance. Just someone with a camera or a sketchbook or a sense of how things should fit together, and the discipline to actually show you what that looks like. Barney being brave. Lou hating haircuts. Amélie in her dream world. They’re not influencers. They’re not building a personal brand. They’re just working. Style matters, but not the way people think it matters. It’s not about having good taste or following rules. It’s about noticing, about caring enough to look twice at something ordinary and find what’s interesting about it. That’s what separates the blogs that last from the ones that don’t. It’s whether the person on the other side actually cares, or if they’re just performing caring for an audience. Most of them will disappear. The domain expires, the platform dies, they move on to real life. That’s probably fine. But for a while they were there, being specific about something, and if you’re the kind of person who notices things too, you recognize it instantly. You keep coming back. Tuesday, 25 May 2010. God Save American Apparel: There was a moment, probably mid-2000s, when American Apparel became the uniform of a certain kind of person. Not fashion people exactly, but people who’d decided plainness was its own statement. A good blank tee, a fitted cut, nothing else. That was enough. That meant something. Dov Charney’s company started collapsing in 2010. First-quarter losses in the seventeen millions, stock down 41%, and they’d quietly fired thousands of workers who didn’t have papers. The whole thing was coming apart. What was strange was how much the brand meant to people. Not because the clothes were special—they were just well-made basics. But somewhere along the way, wearing American Apparel had become a cultural signal, almost a test. If you understood the value of a plain, well-fitted tee with no branding, you were in on something. You got it. Most people didn’t. I was never really part of that world, but I understood the appeal. There’s something genuinely hard about making something simple and letting it speak for itself. Most brands can’t resist adding narrative or ornament. American Apparel just made the clothes and got out of the way. A post started circulating—half-joking, half-sincere—basically pleading with people to go buy tees and save the company. Save American Apparel or watch the hipsters spiral into despair and start wearing Ed Hardy. It was funny because it was sort of true and completely absurd. As if any generation’s aesthetic was fragile enough to collapse because one retailer failed. But maybe it was. Maybe the whole consensus was that delicate—a cultural agreement that could vanish overnight if the infrastructure supporting it fell apart. Which it did, eventually. American Apparel went bankrupt. The hipsters bought their plain tees somewhere else. The world kept turning. Sunday, 23 May 2010. Robyn, Alone Again: Robyn’s got a new video for “Dancing On My Own,” and it’s the kind of thing you watch alone, maybe more than once. Dark visuals, that sharp beat that makes you want to move even though the song is about standing still and being invisible. “There’s a big black sky over my city. I’m standing in the corner watching you kiss her. I’m right over here - why can’t you see me?” It’s about being present and unseen at the same time. About giving everything and still being the girl you don’t take home. The video makes it literal - she’s there, moving, alive, and somehow that makes the rejection sharper. The sadness is structural, built into every beat. It’s designed to make you feel small in a way that almost feels good. The video is mostly just Robyn in darkness, the light sharp enough to cut her face into planes and shadows. She’s moving like she’s dancing for herself, not for the person who’s not watching. That distinction matters. A lot of sad songs ask for sympathy, but this one doesn’t ask for anything. What’s always struck me about Robyn is how unflinching she is about this. No softening, no performance - just the fact of it, stated plainly. There’s something quietly masculine in the way she moves, a refusal to soften her edges. She’s not trying to be appealing in the way you’d expect someone singing about heartbreak to be. She’s not coming back to Germany for a while, touring London, Oslo, Helsinki instead. But there’s a new album coming in June - “Body Talk Pt. 1” - and that’s enough to hold onto. Saturday, 22 May 2010. Sasha Grey: A Fuck’s Life: Sasha Grey wrote a memoir called Neu Sex. If you don’t know her, she was the most recognizable pornographic actress of the 2000s—the kind of famous that bled into mainstream pop culture for a minute. The title doesn’t fuck around; it’s exactly what it says. She made serious money performing on camera, became a brand, got rich, and moved on. Now she’s written about it—straight, no anonymity, no redemption narrative. Just her story under her real name. I respect that kind of directness. A porn actress writing her own book in her own image is almost confrontational in how much it refuses to apologize or reframe. She’s just laying it out: this happened, it was me, and I’m not pretending it was something else. I’m interested in what the actual life looks like underneath. Not the sex—that’s everywhere. But the money, the decisions, what it cost. That’s what interests me about a book like this. Wednesday, 19 May 2010. Sleigh Bells: Derek E. Miller used to play guitar in a post-hardcore band called Poison the Well. Everything about that band was deliberately hostile—broken, aggressive, and loud. Then he decided to start a new project and needed a singer. He found Alexis Krauss, who’d been in some teenybopper pop band. On paper it makes no sense. In practice it makes perfect sense for what Sleigh Bells actually sounds like, which is supposed to be that wrong. The collision is the point. Pop melodies caught under a wall of distorted synths and noise designed to damage you. Alexis’s voice trying to make you care about the hook while everything else is screaming at you to leave. Derek knows how to make noise feel structural instead of just loud—it’s pop music built inside a post-hardcore frame. The effect is ugly and it works. Their first album is called “Treats.” The basic concept is interesting on its own: what happens when you take the melodic DNA of top-40 pop—engineered to get in your head and never leave—and wrap it in something actively hostile to your comfort? It shouldn’t work. It does. Most pop tries to please you, to make itself indispensable. Sleigh Bells sounds like they’re trying to fuck with you while simultaneously proving you’ll care about the song anyway. The noise doesn’t diminish the melody. It makes it weirder, more urgent, more honest than clean pop can manage. There’s something good about a band that’s genuinely ugly and refuses to apologize. Saturday, 15 May 2010. Weekend Missions: The weather’s going to be terrible and complaining about it is just small talk anyway, so better to have actual stupid things to do instead. Here’s the plan if you’re desperate for a weekend. Get someone drunk on cheap liqueur and convince them to wear a wedding dress for photos because that joke never quite gets old. There’s usually a party happening somewhere with some theme everyone will forget by Monday anyway. Go to that. Download a shooter and spend the whole time blasting your own team. Waste an afternoon filling a bathtub with random shit and taking pictures of it. Drink water constantly like hydration is going to save you from something. Watch whatever video everyone’s been sharing—something about hipsters or indie kids or whatever—and get the urge to make a reaction video where you burn your glasses on camera and publicly destroy your own credibility. Call your uncle Udo, the perverted one. Tell him something from the school bathroom. Steal something small from the supermarket and walk it back to the counter with an elaborate story about dead pets and severed limbs to see if anyone even notices the absurdity. Or just pull out the Sailor Moon costume from when you were thirteen and wear it on the train. Let them stare. It’s not meaningful, it’s just what you do when a Saturday afternoon feels like it needs something to justify it. Friday, 14 May 2010. Why Cleveland Worked: The Cleveland Show wasn’t supposed to work. Spinning off Cleveland Brown—the straightest guy in Family Guy, basically just the setup to other people’s jokes—to a new city with a wife and stepkids felt engineered to fail. And the original show was already coasting by that point anyway. But the spinoff was actually better. Sharper. It committed to the crude bits instead of just pointing at them—old women shitting themselves, dead-eyed sex dolls, cats that beat the hell out of people—and followed each premise through to some weird logical endpoint. Family Guy had stopped doing that. American Dad certainly never tried. There’s something honest about a show that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t apologize for it. I watched a lot of it back then, and kept finding myself genuinely laughing. Not at the show being bad, just at stupid humor that actually worked. There’s a particular kind of fatigue with comedy where nothing lands anymore, where every format feels recycled, and something that commits to its premise counts for something. Critics demolished it. They weren’t entirely wrong—a Cleveland Brown spinoff is a hard sell. But they were watching something with more internal coherence than Family Guy was making anymore, which isn’t a high bar but it mattered then. I don’t know if it holds up now. Shows like that fade. But for a stretch it was the better version of the same formula, which feels almost perversely good when the alternative was where Family Guy had landed. Monday, 10 May 2010. Heaven Was Near: April 2011, the single “17,” Sky Ferreira at seventeen years old with a chaotic half-spoken-half-sung thing that sounded like someone refusing to perform. Not in the conscious-experimental way, just in the I’m-not-trying way. American, wired, and immediately interesting because she didn’t sound like anything else coming out of the machine that year. There was this aesthetic to her—visual, sonic, all of it—that seemed resistant to the usual templates. The vocals were rough, deliberately unpolished. Not lo-fi for aesthetic credibility, just unpolished because that’s how she sounded and she wasn’t fixing it. You could feel the work underneath, the actual thinking, without all the professional smoothing. What got me was that she still seemed like a person at that moment. Following her on Twitter wasn’t a marketing exercise—she was just there, thinking out loud, being strange and specific. There’s always this window with young artists where they haven’t been fully processed yet, where you catch them still figuring out who they actually are. I don’t know what happened to that version of Sky Ferreira. Maybe she became something bigger, maybe the industry sanded down the weird edges, maybe she went somewhere else entirely. But that moment—raw, unpolished, still capable of surprise—that’s the version that stuck. Thursday, 6 May 2010. Everything For the Children: Got a letter from the German youth protection authority. Guy named Wahl, very polite, explaining that the explicit content on this website—the erect penises, the wide-open everything, the various sex acts people had posted—that was illegal, or close enough. He made it sound almost sympathetic while explaining how he’d have to shut the whole thing down if I didn’t clean it up. The strange thing was realizing I hadn’t actually thought about what was on here. You post crude images and sexual content because it’s funny or shocking, and after a while you stop seeing it. You’re just hunting for the next image, the next joke, the next thing that makes you laugh in that crude, unreflective way. Nothing feels transgressive when it’s all yours. Wahl had a point though. Kids could stumble across this stuff. Not that I’d been thinking about kids much, if I’m being honest. But the threat was real. Either censor it or lose the site entirely. Most people don’t want their entire website collapsing because of some bureaucratic letter. So I started blurring. Pink clovers over genitals. Pixelation over sex acts. Hours of tedious work covering up images I’d posted without hesitation just months before. The joke was obvious and not very funny. I was now the censor, protecting children from what I’d thought was perfectly worth sharing. Not because I’d changed my mind. Just because some authority figure drew a line. Everything for the children. That’s what it came down to. Everything for the children—as if blurring an image changes what’s underneath it, as if I suddenly believed in protecting childhood innocence instead of just protecting my own site from disappearing. But that’s how it works, I guess. You start with conviction and you end with a pink clover. Wednesday, 5 May 2010. Magazine Run: I still go back to the corner kiosk every month even though I know it’s kind of pointless. This time Front Mag was doing the Glee thing—those two actors in school uniforms, which is exactly what a magazine like that goes for. Some interviews with Lostprophets, gaming coverage, British festivals. NEON actually has something to say. Food writing, a piece about how pointless it is to plan your whole life out right now, digital feminism stuff. Vice is being Vice—crude and deliberately offensive, writing about British hooligans and Chinese pop bands like that’s where culture happens. Maybe it is. After you’ve worked through all that there’s not much left for the rest of them. Ilovefakemagazine pulled Grunge back up. i-D with their home-is-where-the-heart message. Wendy had cute horses and photo frames. The thing about magazines is they still feel necessary even though everything in them is online already. There’s something about the choices someone made to put these specific things together in this order, on these pages. It makes you look at things differently than when some algorithm is deciding what comes next. Maybe that’s reason enough to keep buying them. Saturday, 24 April 2010. Glee: I spent the entire first season of Glee last night instead of studying. The show is exactly what you’d imagine: a high school glee club of misfits—stuttering kid, wheelchair-bound nerd, cheerleader queen—singing their feelings through an absurd world of rapping Spanish teachers, inexplicable phobias, and soft drinks that appear for no reason. It’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t work. I thought we’d moved past High School Musical. Apparently not. But here’s the thing: it works. Not because the plot makes sense, because it doesn’t. The writing isn’t smart. It’s trashy Fox melodrama in the purest sense—hot romance, decent humor, characters with real chemistry. It’s the kind of show where a gym teacher cries on the football field while someone sings Avril Lavigne, and instead of laughing at it, you feel it. The story is tissue-thin. Thinner than Skins. But that’s the whole point—it’s not trying to be important. It’s just kids finding something that lets them be weird and broken and themselves for three minutes. There’s something generous about that. I’ll keep watching. Probably claim it’s for my little sister. Friday, 23 April 2010. Chew Lips: Everybody Loves The Unicorn: Chew Lips makes me want to move around my room in a way I haven’t in a while. Three people from London—Tigs singing, Will Sanderson and James Watkins on everything else—and you can hear where they’re coming from immediately. Prince, LCD Soundsystem, the electropop that kept flowing out of Britain in the 2000s. It all landed in Unicorn, their January album, and it works. There’s a moment around now where electronic music sounds both inevitable and like it’s running out of things to say. Everyone’s pulling from the same sources. Most of it is fine, competent, perfectly fitted to its moment. Chew Lips sounds like they’re not really thinking about any of that. Tigs sings like she means it, the whole thing just moves. It’s the quality of people making exactly the music they want to make. I haven’t seen them live, and they’re not touring much beyond London and France as far as I can tell, which is fine. This will probably sound very 2008 in a few years—all period production and dated choices. Right now it just lands right. Thursday, 22 April 2010. Pretty in Pink: Most fashion blogs feel like someone explaining a math problem. Here’s the jacket, here are the proportions, here’s why this works. Useless. All I ever want to know is whether someone looks like they know what they’re doing, and most people don’t. Denni is a stylist in Paris, 21, and everything she owns is Topshop. The way she moves through the city in those pieces—skinny legs, shirts that actually sit right, nothing fussy—there’s an ease to it that makes you want to abandon your own taste completely and just follow her around. The kind of person who makes you feel stupid for overthinking a linen shirt. I’d probably embarrass myself trying to talk to her. Then there’s Nixon from Manila, 22, a designer who wears his own femininity the way other men wear armor. Topshop shirt, Zara pants, a good haircut, and the confidence of someone who’s already decided none of it matters. The Star Trek glasses are weird and probably intentional. He doesn’t need you to understand what he’s doing. Lila wore bright pink like it was armor too—not pretending, not asking permission. Just that color, just standing there. That kind of boldness registers differently when you see someone actually commit to it. Lina is Swedish, which apparently means access to some genetic or cultural deposit of taste the rest of us don’t have. Levi’s, Acne, polka dot stockings, sunglasses—nothing shocking, everything right. She wears clothes like picking them was obvious, which is probably the highest compliment you can give someone. Tab owns a shop called Spank and dresses like she’s personally challenging every color theory. Bright, clashing, weird—but wearing her own designs like they’re not a statement, just what she’s wearing today. There’s something punk about that, treating your own work like real clothes instead of art objects. I stopped keeping up with fashion blogs around the same time I realized the people worth watching aren’t the ones talking about style. They’re the ones too busy actually wearing something to explain it. Wednesday, 21 April 2010. What Was Cool: Fresh orange juice was in. That was the kind of thing you had to know. Laura Jansen’s cover of “Use Somebody” was playing everywhere. The new iPhone if you could actually get one—the waiting was the real experience, not the having. Someone published a list, officially, of what was in and what was out. I read it. Everyone read it. You weren’t supposed to care but you did. The details were very specific. Monster Hunter III if you gamed. Uffie. Cheap sangria in plastic bottles. Chicken feet at parties. Not knowing Julia Hafström was cool—not knowing random pretty women mattered. Not having seen Twilight. Monetizing every thought you had. Karaoke at Mauerpark. Wearing something dead on your head as a joke. Lying next to someone out of your league and calling it conversation. Saving photos of old friends in your wallet. Being broke but moving to Berlin anyway because something was happening there. What was out cut deeper. Small talk, which you did constantly while hating yourself for it. Til Schweiger. Heidi Klum. Actually getting sick from partying, not just hungover. The outer boroughs, the suburbs. Avril Lavigne. Trolls. Your ex. Running out of weed and acting like it mattered. That earthquake year—Eyjafjallajökull—grounded the planes and that was unforgivably out. MGMT, because once they got big they became unwearable. Death, which was always out. The moment closed. The list got replaced or disappeared. People moved or just got older. You can’t sustain that kind of cultural vigilance—maybe you don’t want to. What sticks is not the opinions but the texture. The taste of cheap sangria. The weight of having cared very much about what was cool. The stupidity and rightness of it all at once. The way scenes happen and then they’re just memory. Tuesday, 20 April 2010. How and Not Why: Went to re:publica in Berlin. Fourth time. Took Malte, Paulchen, Sara—three days of finally seeing faces attached to Twitter handles, mostly just trying not to think about how circular the whole thing was. First day had the usual talks. Someone explaining how to monetize a blog audience. Panels about TV and internet culture. The kind of discussions where everyone in the room already knows the answer but keeps asking the question. We wandered around Friedrichstadtpalast, grabbed beers, made jokes about recruiting fashion bloggers. Normal opening day stuff. Day two was a wash. Bad food choices left me feeling wrecked. Almost fell asleep during a WikiLeaks talk. The whole thing had this exhausting tone—endless conversation about monetization and impact and changing the world through social media. Some guy gave a talk about something actually important and showed one of my favorite videos, and that was the only real moment. Otherwise I just felt sick and crashed hard after. Third day was cleaner. Schnitzel, beers, ending at Kalkscheune with everyone loose and dancing. Sara got drunk—walked her home, made spicy noodles at two in the morning, put on Friends until we passed out. But yeah, the whole thing kept confirming what I already knew: we’re all obsessed with HOW. How to use these tools, how to monetize them, how to optimize. Nobody’s asking why or where we’re actually going. Just mechanism after mechanism, stacked on top of nothing. Sunday, 18 April 2010. Surviving the Weekend: Every Friday your brain panics about the sixty hours ahead—convinced you’ll waste them—so you write a list. Ten things. Some basic: new music, change your hair. Some obviously impossible: sleep with Lady Gaga, buy something random from the Asian supermarket’s freezer and give it to your grandmother for her birthday, answer every question with a Back to the Future reference. All of it specific. Half-serious. Half-joke. Written down like it’s actually going to structure your time. You won’t do most of it. You know this going in. That’s not the point anyway. The point is looking at the list later and knowing you were thinking about the weekend consciously, not just floating through it. Even when you ignore the whole thing and the weekend passes exactly like every other weekend, the fact that you bothered to make it changes something. It makes you feel like the time is yours. I still make these lists. I have no idea why anymore. There’s no external pressure, no teacher assigning weekend goals. But around Friday afternoon I start thinking about what I could do with three days and suddenly I’m writing down absurd, hyperspecific things like they’re real options. Gold hair. Mystery frozen product. Constant Back to the Future quotes. It’s not that I believe it’ll work. It’s more that not doing it—just letting the weekend happen without even the pretense of a plan—feels worse somehow. So I write the list. I do maybe two things from it. The rest gets forgotten by Tuesday. But I spent those three days like I’d decided what they were supposed to be, and I guess that’s the whole thing. Friday, 16 April 2010. Zach Singh: A Kid with a Camera: When I was fifteen I wasn’t doing much except getting drunk in parks with whatever we could steal from the gas station, trying to get my hands down someone’s pants, throwing Dragon Ball moves around like we invented them. Nothing remotely purposeful. Just the usual waste of youth. Zach Singh is doing something entirely different. He’s put whatever energy a kid his age has into photography—capturing what it’s like to be young right now, on film. Mostly what he shoots are girls. And bears. Red-haired girls by rivers. Brunettes in white socks lying on their beds. Girls standing in fresh snow. He shoots them with this quality that’s hard to pin down—dreamy but direct, intimate without being creepy, familiar like something you already know but can’t quite place. It creates a world in your head that feels both strange and like home. And he’s doing this at fifteen, which is the part that matters, because at fifteen most people are still just getting drunk in parks. There’s something about recognizing real focus and skill in someone young. It makes the waste look even worse by comparison. Tuesday, 13 April 2010. Jump In My Car: Who lives in Berlin doesn’t need a car. The cramped streets, packed transit, and impossible parking make sure of that. Some drives you could walk faster. But nearly three years in the city and there’s nothing like hitting the Autobahn with the music loud and the throttle all the way down. Mercedes invited me to Stuttgart to drive their new cars and see how they work. I wasn’t about to say no. We showed up in Baden-Württemberg around the time the airport nearly exploded, grabbed some beers in the park, and headed for the Mercedes museum. They fed us well and walked us through automotive history with someone who lived it. I maybe caught feelings for an intern somewhere in the tour—history’s not my strong suit anyway. The hotel bar that night was the kind of chaos that somehow made sense. We drank with designers and photographers, people who worked at the museum, random people I hadn’t expected to see. Pizza and beer at sunrise. By some miracle, we all managed to show up the next morning more or less standing upright. Then it was into the design studio, the actual thinking behind the cars and what comes next. Real people who genuinely cared about building something good, not just hitting quarterly targets. You felt it the whole time. After that we got to drive them ourselves around Stuttgart, though I nearly caused a highway pileup because either the navigation system bullshitted me or I took the wrong exit—probably both. I was genuinely surprised how much fun the trip was. Not in the cynical promotional-tour way. The whole thing had this vibe of people who actually wanted to make great cars. That alone was worth the drive. Friday, 9 April 2010. Deine Maske: Encountered this promotion for a debut single from a musician named Laura. She’s from Mannheim, twenty-three, caught in the standard underground positioning—edgy, provocative, direct electronic beats. The usual story you see in a hundred music scenes. What actually stood out to me was the collaboration: she brought in visual artist Katja Hentschel to work on the video, which suggests someone thinking about the complete image, not just slapping a pretty face on a song. Most of these moments vanish without a trace. But at least there’s intention there, and that’s worth acknowledging. Tuesday, 6 April 2010. The Look: Margaux Lonnberg appeared on everyone’s feeds in that particular moment when fashion discovers a new silhouette to obsess over. Bleached eyebrows, that blank stare, the kind of thinness that reads as commitment. Twenty-four, from Paris. What struck people wasn’t any single photo but the cumulative effect: here was someone who looked like she’d removed everything extraneous from her body. No excess. No softness. No apology. That aesthetic is intoxicating in fashion. Thinness becomes a kind of moral achievement. It photographs as taste. As discipline. As someone who understood something the rest of us were too weak to accept. Topshop featured her. Fashion blogs analyzed her outfits the way people used to analyze Twiggy. She became the moment. The problem isn’t that Margaux existed. It’s that the industry positions extreme thinness as excellence, then watches while kids decide they haven’t starved enough yet. Fashion didn’t invent eating disorders, but it absolutely knows how to market them. It says: this is what the goal looks like. This is the cost of being worth looking at. Then it’s shocked when people start paying that cost. I don’t have much interest in hand-wringing about the fashion industry. Everyone knows it’s fucked. The actual horror is how seductive the image remains even when you understand the machinery. The cheekbones still read as power. The thinness still works. And there are always more people who think they can be the exception—thin enough to matter but somehow still fine, still human, still alive. That’s what I’m interested in: not the individual model but the system that uses her image to train thousands of people toward self-destruction. Margaux was just the face. The real problem is the thousands of people who saw her and decided that’s what they needed to become. Sunday, 4 April 2010. Insuh Yoon: Insuh Yoon was 24, already shooting in New York, and had that thing young photographers dream about: a voice people recognized instantly. The light in his photographs is unmistakable. Pale and soft, almost luminous. He knew how to compose a frame. He photographed young women, usually beautiful, often naked or close to it. That’s a well-worn path—Kern and Richardson before him, others after. But Yoon had the one thing that matters: real ability, and luck. The specific subject matter plus genuine skill equals accelerated recognition. It’s how it works. When someone asked him about it, he gave a straight answer. “Being male means there’s admiration when you look at a woman’s body. I’ve always been drawn to that.” No hedging. No theory. Just the fact of it. The photographs themselves are careful. There’s thought in the composition and the light. You can tell he’d studied photography seriously, that this wasn’t accidental. Whether that translates into him becoming one of the important photographers of his generation, I don’t know. At 24, with the momentum he had and that voice already this clear, the ceiling seemed somewhere far off. Friday, 2 April 2010. General Fiasco: Rock still wins. I keep coming back to this watching people in clubs nod their heads in unison to some minimal electronic track, everyone in black, everyone trying to look contemplative when they’re really just waiting for the drop. Guitar and drums and a voice hit different. They always have. The Strathern brothers from Northern Ireland figured this out. Around 2007, when everyone was chasing electronic music, they brought in more members instead and started making actual rock. General Fiasco. Owen, Enda, Stephen. Just the names sound like a basement band, not a bedroom producer with a synth. They released “Buildings” and it’s the kind of indie rock I keep forgetting I need. Not polished, not trying to be important—the version that soundtracks your actual life without you noticing. School trips. Parking in someone’s driveway with the engine running. First time driving alone on a highway at night with nowhere specific to go. The moments you don’t talk about but never shake. There’s something about a riff that just works. It hits the same nerve every time, whether you heard it last week or ten years ago. Electronics can be clever. But they can’t quite do that. Or maybe they could and they’re just not interested. Monday, 29 March 2010. Adeline Mai: I found Adeline Mai’s work on Black Orchid and spent way too long looking at it. She’s French, twenty-one, studying photography in Paris, and there’s something about the way she shoots that makes you want to keep looking. Fashion photographs, snapshots of friends, nudes—all of it done with this effortless confidence. There’s no distance in her work, no irony, no art-school remove. She shoots women naked like it’s the most natural thing, the way you’d photograph anyone at a party. Gum in their mouths, beer in their hands, just existing. Because there’s no performance in it, because she’s not trying to say anything about desire or the body or whatever, it lands harder than something actually trying to be erotic ever could. She photographs the moon at night, watches how the light changes color across hours. Cities. All of it documented with the same directness. She listens to Air and Soko and Beatles—you can tell that taste shapes how she sees. The work feels effortless in a way that comes from knowing what you’re doing. No concept, no statement trying to justify itself. She’s just looking and recording because she has to. Most photographers her age are still figuring out what their work is supposed to mean. She’s past all that. She’s in Paris now, but she won’t stay long. People who shoot like this keep moving, chasing different light, different cities. I’m curious where it goes next. Thursday, 25 March 2010. Ponyo: Ponyo is basically The Little Mermaid again. I knew it the moment the credits started rolling. Fish girl wants to be human, falls for a boy, her father loses his mind trying to drag her back. Same story we’ve been told a hundred times. But Ponyo herself—she’s small and red-haired and full of fury. She doesn’t pine to be human, doesn’t sing about it. She just decides. Breaks free, finds Sosuke and his mother, settles into their house like she owns it. Her father tears the ocean apart trying to get her back. No melodrama, just stubbornness on both sides. What Miyazaki does is build a world around this old shape. The animation feels like water and dream. Colors shift mid-frame. Details pile up until it all feels real in a way you don’t expect from something this fantastical. Sosuke’s mother is just kind. No plot reason, just genuine goodness. I kept waiting for it to disappoint me the way remakes do. It didn’t. Monday, 22 March 2010. Yvan in Berlin: Street fashion photography was this weird democracy moment that happened around 2005 or so. Suddenly the people who mattered in fashion were the ones walking around ordinary cities in ordinary clothes, photographed by kids with cameras and blogs. No invitation required, no gallery representing you, just an eye for what people were actually wearing and the confidence to think that mattered more than a runway show. Yvan Rodic’s Facehunter was the clearest proof that the whole system had flipped. When he came to Berlin for a book signing—his first book, about three hundred of his best photographs—I went with Sandra, who shot for the blog back then. I didn’t really know what to expect from him in person. The gap between the image and the person is usually depressing. But he was just genuinely nice. Patient with the crowd’s questions, took a few photos if people asked, signed books. He asked about what we wrote on this blog. Not the performative curiosity of someone checking a box—he actually wanted to know. Most internet famous people either treat you like you’re lucky to breathe the same air or they make you feel like you’re bothering them. He was just interested. What I remember most is how little he needed to prove anything. He didn’t perform being important or successful. He’d built something real and was still doing it because he cared, and that was obviously enough. The book was just a document of five or six years of looking. Some of it was trend-obsessed—the styling from 2006 is almost unrecognizable now—but it was all genuine. He had taste and he wasn’t self-conscious about finding it in ordinary places. I wish more people building things online had that ease about it. Most of them seem either exhausted by the attention or addicted to it, trapped between states where nothing feels real. Yvan just seemed happy to be doing the work. That was probably the whole thing, now that I think about it. Thursday, 18 March 2010. Eighty Shoes: Kathrine cycles through Copenhagen. Sophie befriends locals in Bangkok. Katja gets a new haircut in London. Eight women and a collaborative travel blog, documenting the life I’ve always fantasized about—the one where you pack a bag and leave, no second thoughts, no waiting for everything to be perfect. The remarkable thing isn’t the destinations. It’s that they actually did it. That’s what sticks. Not the places themselves, not even the writing—just the simple fact of follow-through. There’s something particular about watching people live exactly how you imagined. The envy is clean and honest. This is the freedom that lives in my head made actual. This is what it looks like when you don’t hesitate. And reading their updates, I’m caught between distance and recognition—this weird clarity that the gap between their life and mine is just one decision. That’s it. That’s all. For a moment it sits in my chest, this reminder that leaving is actually possible. Then ordinary life returns and the fantasy goes half-asleep again, never quite letting go. Wednesday, 17 March 2010. Rubbers: Condoms solve a problem that nobody’s ever accepted. Growing up you just use them as toys—balloons, stretched over whatever you can find, laughing at the absurdity. Then you hit the age where it matters and you’ve already been flooded with every possible nightmare. Chlamydia. Gonorrhea. Herpes. By the time you’re sliding one on for real, you’ve been scared half to death about what happens if you don’t. I remember being maybe nine, getting absolutely shit-scared by some health class warning, spending weeks convinced I’d caught something terminal just from existing near another person. That kind of fear doesn’t really leave. The practical side is fine. Condoms work. They stop diseases, they stop accidents, the engineering is solid. But everything else is friction. You have to pause what you’re doing, fumble with a wrapper, kill the mood, and remember you’re protected while also remembering that protection costs money and requires a purchase that still feels weirdly shameful. Then you put it on and it’s not the same. It doesn’t feel like anything. You’re encased in latex and you know it and the other person knows it. Ultra-thin, ribbed, flavored—doesn’t matter, you’re still in a sheath. The real issue is nobody wants to use them. Guys will say they feel worse, which is true, but that’s not the whole story. Using one reads as weakness somehow, like you’re scared or careful or boring, and so people skip them. They trade safety for the sensation of actual contact, especially in relationships where they should be most vigilant. Somewhere along the line protection became optional, real intimacy started requiring risk, and condoms became the symbol of people who aren’t confident enough or committed enough or cool enough. I’ve never figured out how this happened. Condoms work—they prevent catastrophe—but everyone resents them. There’s this gap between what should happen and what actually does, and nobody’s closed it. The friction isn’t the rubber. It’s living with a solution that nobody’s accepted, something that feels necessary and miserable all at once. That’s the actual problem. Tuesday, 16 March 2010. Permission to Look: There’s something addictive about celebrity gossip, even when you know what you’re doing is crude and a little pathetic. You see a photo of a famous woman—doesn’t matter who—and you start thinking about it more than you should. There’s the obvious part: the attraction. But there’s also something about the critique, the dissection, the feeling that you’ve figured something out the world missed. You catch them mid-mess and you feel clever for noticing. I turned that impulse into a blog for years. Years of running commentary on famous people, mostly women, mostly in that register where crude and honest become the same thing. I got good at it—good at looking, anyway. And someone eventually offered to make it my actual job. The offer didn’t shock me. It made perfect sense. I said yes. I didn’t take it for the platform or the legitimacy. I took it because it meant permission to keep looking, and that was all that actually interested me. Friday, 12 March 2010. Bethany Joy: Girls of Summer: Gray nothing overhead. Clouds moving in slow circles, letting light through just long enough to prove they can take it back. I hate the patience of it. Clouds are assholes. Then Bethany Joy’s photographs stopped me. She was fifteen when she took them, and every frame was pure summer—girls dancing in warm rain, sprawled in wet grass, chasing horses through fields. The kind of life that exists somewhere beyond the noise, beyond work exhaustion, beyond the small ache of just existing in your own time. I wanted to disappear into them completely. Find that place and stay there. I know better now—summer’s never infinite, photographs lie, and grass gets boring if you stand in it long enough. But looking at her work anyway, I felt it pulling at me hard. Heat and freedom and the idea that nothing outside that moment could touch you. Even knowing it’s a daydream, even knowing the photos are frozen and gone, something in them made me want to believe in it. Thursday, 11 March 2010. The Quiet Kind: Elisabeth Rank’s debut showed up when I was exhausted by books that had nothing to say. It’s about two young women, Lene and Tonia, moving through Berlin - the usual early-adulthood momentum, parties, half-formed futures. The shape you’d expect. Then their friend Tim dies in a car crash, and the shape collapses. Rank writes through it in fragments - memories, moments, small details that don’t add up to meaning but carry the weight of something real. The grief isn’t performed. It’s the quiet kind that lets you keep eating, keep moving, keep figuring out what you want because what else are you going to do. Broken love. Silence. Someone just not there anymore. What matters is that she doesn’t flinch from that. No redemption arc, no lesson, no transformation that makes the loss feel worthwhile. Just two young women carrying something specific through a specific city, and Rank trusting that the texture of it is enough. The silence is the point. She’s part of the Berlin literary scene - one of those writers who doesn’t need to announce themselves. The kind of emerging talent you actually want to read more of, which is rare enough that I notice. Wednesday, 10 March 2010. Thank You, Love You, Fuck You: The Oscars happened last night. Stars in expensive clothes, handlers keeping them away from anything unscripted, a few comedians telling jokes that landed nowhere. Everyone clapped anyway. You show up at the Oscars knowing how it works—you applaud on cue, you wipe your eyes at the memorial, you pretend the statuette means something. The awards went to whoever. Some film, some director, some actress. By the end I couldn’t tell you who won most of the categories. The whole thing has this numbing quality, like watching someone win a prize they’ve known about for weeks pretend to be surprised. Everyone in that room saw the same predictions in the trades before the show even started. The spectacle is just theater—the acting, the speeches about gratitude, the tears that you can tell were rehearsed. The In Memoriam segment got rushed this year. Too many people died to fit them all into the montage. Just a quick scroll through faces, names disappearing before you could really see them. There’s something stark about it—work in this industry long enough to be famous, die, and maybe get five seconds in a montage at the Oscars. This year they didn’t even have time for that. I know why I watch it anyway. The performance still gets to me somehow, even though I know exactly how empty it all is. The Oscars never surprise anyone. Nothing changes from year to year. But I’ll be back next year, probably feeling the same way, knowing it’s fake and falling for it anyway. Monday, 8 March 2010. The Book of Husk Magazine: Husk Magazine showed up in the mail. In the thank-you note, they mentioned that every photograph of a naked or half-naked person in the entire issue is dedicated to this blog. I read that twice. It’s a print magazine out of southern Germany—fashion, art, music, culture—the kind of thing that still believes magazines are worth making. Lucy Carr-Ellison shot it, Luke Byrne, Katjana Frisch from Munich. The writing is strong: Manuel Link, Katharina Schwaiger, Ulrich Schippke. Black and white pages moving through the fashion capitals, Darth Vader in there somewhere, cut-out faces, boys at pianos. Underneath it all is this simple thesis—fashion equals desire equals sexuality. Hard to disagree. What matters about Husk is that it’s actually made. Not content, not scaled, not optimized. Just: here is something beautiful and they gave a shit making it. Photography that’s real, writing that’s real, paper you can hold. Getting a note saying they dedicated photographs to this blog felt ridiculous and flattering at the same time—the kind of gesture that lands because there’s genuine work underneath it. Some crew in southern Germany spent time thinking about this, and they thought of this notebook, and they wanted to do something kind. That’s why anyone still makes magazines. Saturday, 6 March 2010. That Night: Sina and I stared at each other for what felt like forever, and my whole body went haywire. My head seemed to explode in colors, my breath caught somewhere behind my ribs. Adrenaline pumped through me like I was having a stroke—that was the only logical conclusion. Where had she come from? Why was she here? And why was she talking to me, after two years of silence, after she’d left me in a minefield of desperation and insomnia and thoughts I won’t name? “Hey,” I managed, my voice thick, and I cleared my throat and said it again like I was asking a question. She smiled at me, unmoved and steady, took a sip of wine and tossed the glass over the railing with casual grace. “Long time,” she slurred. Sina was drunk. And clearly on something. I must have looked disappointed at the thought of a real conversation, because she swayed toward me, put her arms around me, and grinned at me through dilated pupils. “Are you okay?” Her apartment wasn’t far from mine. High ceilings, big windows, beautiful old bones. Every room was thoughtful, modern. Pale pastels on the walls, furniture mixing new and old but cohesive. The whole place smelled like vanilla and mango, and the lamps and candles threw everything in a soft romantic light. Photos on the fridge showed her with new friends, new lovers. She was smiling in all of them. I felt sick. I remembered the other scenes—her crying, howling in pain, balanced at the edge. “Want some wine?” she called from another room, and I heard the most beautiful voice I knew. I nodded, rubbed my face, and said yes. “Why did you just let me go like that?” We were lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, covered in spilled wine. I tried to answer properly, but the weed and alcohol had short-circuited my brain, and what came out was rambling—knights and flowers, dresses and bears, hookers and drama. She laughed loud and long at everything I said. Her hair smelled the way it always did, like ice cream and Red Bull and fast food and wildflowers all mixed together. Then she sat up, took my hands, and said: “That night, the one that tore us apart—I tried to kill myself.” After that we saw each other again. Coffee, movies, parties. We put our lives back together piece by piece, like a puzzle. Some of it made me smile. Some of it made me wince because it cut through my head. She didn’t say another word about the attempt, but she talked endlessly about sex and love and the hard and soft ways we fell apart. When she asked how things had been for me in that department, I lied. I didn’t mention Paula. But lies didn’t work between us. We both knew it. From that moment on the balcony, we could read each other like an open book again. Like no time had passed at all, like I hadn’t screamed her name down at her full of tears and spit as she walked away empty and done, disappearing into the U-Bahn. The nightmares, the vodka, the pills—all of it rotted down into the last fragment of the darkest time in my life. When she realized what I was feeling, she held me tighter than before, and tears ran down my neck. “It was horrible,” she could barely say. Then we slept together and for a while everything was fine. Friday, 5 March 2010. Spring Mixtape: The sun’s been showing up again, breaking through the endless gray of winter. Pollen season’s here, allergies kicking in, people stocking up on their chemical defenses. But spring has an appeal even when it’s a mess. I put together a spring mixtape. Nothing elaborate, just what felt right for right now. Marina & The Diamonds is in there. Blood Red Shoes came back and belong on this. Asobi Seksu, naturally. Some newer stuff I’m still figuring out. And somewhere in the middle is this song that’s actively bad—stupid hook, dumb everything—except the thing won’t leave my head. One of those things that shouldn’t work. Spring does that though. Half-baked, contradictory, beautiful anyway. Rain one day, heat the next, everything starting over. That’s what this is. Tuesday, 2 March 2010. Christopher Little: Your Bloody Face: I’ve got a thing for girls with nosebleeds. The way it happens—vulnerability made visible, something inner breaking through. Maybe that’s weird. But I got there from somewhere: photographers like Richard Kern, Lesley Arfin, people who understood that blood and beauty were the same thing. They shaped what I was looking at back in those early days, when all that aesthetic was still forming. Christopher Little showed up in my feed somehow. He’s doing his art studies at Jefferson Community College, shooting things with this directness that makes you uncomfortable. The work has teeth. He started normal enough—forests, motorcycles, cats. Safe material. But you watch it shift over time. He’s moving toward skin. Toward moments that need actual nerve to photograph. Photography’s not even his endgame though. He wants to make films. Real short films, his vision, no committee. I’m curious where he goes with that. I’m hoping he takes what he’s learned about how to frame something difficult and stretches it out into something that moves. The kind of thing that sits with you because it actually looked at what it was looking at. Saturday, 27 February 2010. Get a Life: I love that people actually engage. Comments, weird emails with photos, real responses—that’s the whole point. Most of you get it. You read, you respond, maybe you disagree, and there’s an actual exchange there. That’s why I do this. But then there’s the subset that doesn’t understand where the line is. The person messaging daily, sometimes multiple times. The one who found your exes on Facebook and added them trying to work their way closer. Skype requests at 3 AM like they’re checking if you’re online yet. The frequency that stops being flattering somewhere around message fifty and starts feeling like actual stalking. I’ve had enough of these people show up that I’m just going to say it: get a life. Seriously. Find something that matters to you that isn’t me. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just being honest. These people have built a relationship with a version of me that doesn’t exist. They read something real and somewhere decided that means they know me, that I owe them access because my voice felt intimate. But there’s a world of difference between being moved by what someone writes and thinking you own a piece of that person’s time. One is being a reader. The other is a problem. So here’s how it works: engage, absolutely. Read and think and argue. But respect the fact that I’m a real person with a real life that exists separately from this. That boundary isn’t about being cold. It’s just the difference between connection and obsession. Most people see it clearly. Some don’t. Friday, 26 February 2010. Magazine Stack: Dazed & Confused landed with Karim Sadli’s photography—beautiful androgynous faces that don’t announce themselves. You just stop and look. It’s the kind of thing that makes you remember why you keep buying magazines instead of scrolling through filtered versions on a screen. I get why people moved to the internet. Speed. Quantity. Constant refresh. But there’s something about a magazine that asks you to sit with what’s in front of you. You can’t swipe past a photo if it’s on the next page. You have to actually look. So I keep checking what’s coming out. Milkshake is being philosophical about youth like it’s some lost empire. Front published Biffy Clyro and then put naked women on spreads—Melissa Clarke and three others in poses that don’t apologize. Get off the office chair and do something. I like that approach. VICE loads up on provocation—Japanese erotica, sensual French film, Richard Kern photographs. I Love Fake is free, 244 pages of city photography, doesn’t really exist but looks like it should. NEON documents Palestinian smugglers in Gaza and German relationships. BLANK just put Wilson Gonzales Ochsenknecht on the cover. POP found Abbey Lee Kershaw for a fashion series and sent this model kid Tavi through Tokyo. But Wendy is the one that actually gets me. Posters. New comics. Something ruthless about what it chooses to put on the cover. That’s a magazine that knows what it’s doing. The internet isn’t going anywhere, but print still has teeth. Thursday, 25 February 2010. Black Jersey: A good black jersey top is almost invisible until you need it, then you wonder how you lived without it. Narciso Rodriguez built his name on pieces like this—nothing fancy, just proportion and restraint. The kind of thing that gets softer every time you wash it until it feels like a second skin. I’ve had enough mediocre basics to know the difference, and this is the kind of piece that earns the space in your closet just by existing quietly. Wednesday, 24 February 2010. Jostein Wålengen: Imperfection is this crazy thing that everyone says they love but nobody actually wants. We talk about authentic, flawed, real—but given the choice, we’d take the clean version every time. Except every now and then someone actually commits to the broken option, and it becomes weirdly heroic. Like your girlfriend leaving you for the entire Swedish national beach volleyball team. Devastating, sure, but there’s something almost admirable about the commitment. Jostein Wålengen is a photographer in Oslo who shoots expired film. Not accidentally, not out of nostalgia—deliberately. He buys stock that’s past its date, sometimes years past, because the chemistry has degraded in ways that matter. The colors shift. The contrast softens. A grain enters the image like time is visible in the emulsion itself. When you photograph with that stock, everything looks like it’s surfacing from a dream or an older version of the world. Old without trying. Modern and decayed at once. He thinks about his work pretty deliberately. He creates things he finds personally beautiful, he said in an interview, and he loves when his photographs look like something he’s dreamed. His girlfriend Sunniva appears in most of the shots. She’s a stylist and fashion designer, ambitious about her own practice, and he shoots her constantly because she understands what he’s building. He also works with Maja, who he lives with and has known forever. Julie from his class shows up in some images. These aren’t random subjects pulled in front of the camera—they’re collaborators in whatever world that degraded film is constructing. The obvious question is why expired film instead of new stock. His answer was simple: it’s cheaper. And that’s the real answer, actually. He couldn’t afford premium film, so he learned to see the decay as the point instead of the limitation. That’s how taste actually forms, not through money but through constraint, through having no choice but to look harder at what you have and find something in it that nobody else would see. The thing about expired film is that the mistake is baked in. You can’t shoot without the degradation happening. You can’t correct for the shifted colors or the softness. You have to commit to the image anyway, knowing the chemistry is working against you, and that’s where something honest lives. Not in intention but in accident. Most photographers spend years trying to escape the conditions of their medium. He ran straight into them. When I look at his work—Sunniva in some corner of Oslo, the light gone slightly wrong, the colors fading—I can’t tell where the camera ends and the film begins, and that’s the entire point. That’s where the freedom is. That’s what happens when you can’t afford perfect and stop trying to be. Tuesday, 23 February 2010. Nowhere: I’ve been awake for a few nights now. Not insomnia—I’m awake on purpose, just choosing not to close my eyes and slip back into the regular world. There’s a zone you find yourself in when you do this, where time becomes this thick, patient thing. The dark stops being empty and starts being full. You find yourself in a place that wasn’t supposed to exist, a gap in the architecture of things, and you’re the only one who’s seen it. Like God looked away for a second and left the door open. So I’m sitting here in this nowhere with my thoughts scattered all over the place. The ones that don’t come in dreams because I’m not dreaming—just the raw ones, the ones about dying and wanting things and what we’re even doing here. About girls and sex and the future, all mixed together into something that doesn’t quite resolve. About life as this weird amusement park where you try everything once because time’s bleeding away and then it stops. You know it won’t matter by Tuesday, but you go anyway. The strange part is that I’m okay with being alone in this. Actually more than okay. There’s something clean about it, something honest. Everyone else is out there wrestling their problems, desperate to be noticed, and meanwhile I’m here in a place that probably doesn’t exist, waiting for someone to care that I’m standing here. No one’s coming. Not my friends. Not anyone worth mentioning. Certainly not God—he checked out a long time ago, if he was ever actually in the room. I’ll sleep eventually. Or maybe I won’t, and this becomes the new normal. The further in you go, the less the daytime world makes sense anyway. It all starts to look like a movie someone else is watching, rules that apply to other people. And me, I’m in a parallel space that runs underneath everything, where nothing has to make sense and no one’s checking if you’re still breathing. It’s the best place I’ve been in a long time, which says something pretty dark about the state of things. Or maybe it just says something about me. Doesn’t matter much at this point. Friday, 19 February 2010. Clearing Out: You accumulate things if you’re not careful. Guilt, numbness, small resentments that harden if you ignore them. The standard solutions are all garbage—religion, therapy, meditation retreats with overpriced juice. I made a mixtape instead. The Hundred in the Hands, Ellie Goulding, Sarah Jaffe. Artists who know how to move something through you that won’t budge on its own. Put it on when you’re alone. Dance if you feel like it, or just sit with it. No one watching. The music creates a space where the weight can finally shift. That’s the whole idea. Wednesday, 17 February 2010. Frankie Nazardo: End of the World: Frankie Nazardo, photographer out of London and Milan, spent a month in Kathmandu living with a street gang. Fifteen kids, all of them sniffing glue daily—enough that they’d stop recognizing each other, forgetting the names they’d been given. Kathmandu gets maybe eight hours of electricity a day before darkness takes over, and in that darkness is everything: the dealing, the sex work, the violence that doesn’t bother announcing itself. The thing about witnessing desperation close-up is how different it looks from the outside. The violence was real but not the center. The scars, the missing fingers, the visible diseases—all true, all there, but peripheral. What lived in those kids was something else: fear that had become mundane, uncertainty worn so smooth they’d stopped noticing it, a self-hatred so casual no one remarked on it. These things weren’t the drama. They were just the texture. Frankie realized something that probably should have been obvious: his camera could only capture the surface of people. The decoration. The visual. A shimmer of the true feeling, but not the thing itself. All his skill was built to miss what actually mattered. When he came home after the month, he wrote it down. Not as a story with a moral but as a document—something that had to exist outside his head. Magazines ran it, newspapers picked it up. Then he went back to work: shooting bands, friends, women in better light. Processing it, not forgetting. Building from the distance where the camera might actually work. Sunday, 14 February 2010. That Party: Berlin’s nightlife had become a collection of failures. Massive clubs where the air felt dead. Student nights that couldn’t hold a beat for more than two songs. Bars in courtyards masquerading as scenes. You’d walk in somewhere that used to matter and realize it was just gone. Someone decided to actually respond. Spring, the Haus am Kollnischen Park. A proper budget—one hundred fifty thousand euros. Simian Mobile Disco, Metronomy. Boy 8-Bit, Les Gillettes. Conny Opper, who built the real Berlin scene at Scala and Broken Hearts Club, running the second floor. Not a symbolic gesture. An actual attempt. It was the kind of night that needed the city to vote yes. To choose it. Berlin’s best moments were never inevitable—they were always things you had to care enough to show up for, to will into existence. This was asking for that commitment. I don’t know if it happened or what came of it. What stays with you is the moment itself. Someone looking at what the scene had become and thinking, we can do better than this. And then actually trying. Tuesday, 9 February 2010. Last Words: You remember the exact phrasing when someone ends it. The way they stand or sit. The light in the room. Sometimes there’s a letter, sometimes it’s a phone call, sometimes they’re crying and sometimes they’re already moving on. This was early 2000s—you couldn’t just disappear, couldn’t ghost into silence. You had to actually tell someone it was over, which meant the words stuck with you for years. I was maybe sixteen the first time, and I’ve got a whole collection of these final sentences from the girls I dated through my twenties. Jasmin in 2001 wanted her stuffed animal back. Susanne in 2002 blamed her friends. Sabrina called me from Lukas’s house—his mother could hear them. Regina had kicked off a whole new lifestyle and wasn’t coming back. Stefanie had joined what she swore wasn’t a cult. Here’s what they actually said. “Ich weiß wir haben es uns beide nicht gerade leicht gemacht, aber dass es so mit uns enden wurde hätte ich niemals gedacht. Hier bekommst du das Kondom wieder, das ich bei dir mitgehen lassen habe, du wirst es bestimmt noch fur deine Kathi brauchen. Wenn du mich nicht mehr haben willst, ist das einzige, was ich von meinen Sachen wieder haben will, mein kleiner Bär, den ich von meiner Mutter bekommen habe. Alles andere kannst du behalten, ich werde dich nie vergessen. Ach ja, ich kriege noch sieben Mark von dir.” Jasmin, 2001 “Hey jo, alles klar? Wie geht’s Marc und Sarah? Ich muss dir jetzt was sagen. Meine Freunde meinen du bist nicht gut fur mich, deshalb muss ich heute leider mit dir Schluss machen. Aber ich glaube sie haben wirklich Recht, schließlich kommen wir aus unterschiedlichen Welten und ich habe ja auch geheult, als wir zum ersten Mal miteinander geschlafen haben. Ich wunsche dir echt ein ganz tolles Leben und ich gehe jetzt erst einmal mit Magnus und Kevin ein paar Kaninchen im Wald opfern. Man sieht sich.” Susanne, 2002 “Marcel du kleiner Biber, ich wollte dir erzählen, dass ich es endlich geschafft habe mit Lukas zu schlafen. War schon geil, hätte ich aber nie gemacht, wenn ich nicht so besoffen gewesen wäre. Seine Mutter kam auch rein und fragte ob alles okay ist, weil sie bescheuerte Geräusche von oben gehort hat. Ich liebe dich und ich bin auch davon uberzeugt, dass du das Beste bist, was mir je passieren konnte, aber wahre Liebe trennt eben nicht einmal der Tod. Und zwei Kilometer schon gar nicht, mach’s gut.” Sabrina, 2002 “Mir ging’s echt nicht darum, dass Murat ein Auto hat und schon arbeitet, aber voll viele Sachen sind einfach so viel besser mit ihm als mit uns. Seine Freunde sind total cool und bauen voll viel Scheiße. Drogen und so. Mit ihm habe ich jetzt auch gekifft, das war total geil. Auch wenn mir sein Bruder dabei zwischen die Beine gelangt hat, aber Murat hat mir versprochen, wenn er sich erst einmal von seiner Frau und seinen zwei bloden Kindern getrennt hat, nimmt er mich mal mit nach London.” Regina, 2003 “So mein Freund, ich hab jetzt endgultig die Schnauze voll von dir. Ich hab dir tausend Mal gesagt, dass das keine Sekte ist, sondern unser Leiter und wir nur eine andere Einstellung zum Leben und dem was danach kommt haben. Und wenn du da ständig deine bloden Witze druber machen musst, bleibt mir nichts anderes ubrig als mit dir Schluss zu machen. Ohne Scheiß jetzt. Hier sind die zwei Oben-ohne-Fotos, die ich dir gestern versprochen habe, und wenn du dich noch mal bei mir meldest gibt’s Ärger.” Stefanie, 2004 What’s wild is that each one sticks with you differently. Some you can laugh about now—a girl breaking up with you while telling you she just slept with someone else, another one sacrificing rabbits in the woods with her new friends, another one convinced she loves you while already leaving. Some of it was cruel, some of it was honest, most of it was both at once. You’re too young to understand that ending something doesn’t make you a bad person. You just end it however you can. Monday, 8 February 2010. Ella: For twenty years I’ve been looking for someone who actually gets the chaos inside me, someone who can smoke through an entire plantation with me and then get wasted and stupid and reckless, someone who’ll make our first million with me and then just sit back multiplying the money, multiplying the DNA, multiplying the land. Found our own country. Evict Fox from his lake house. Watch the whole thing burn. That’s the fantasy anyway, and in theory it’s flawless, but in practice I haven’t found her yet, not unless you count that slightly off but still delicious cheeseburger, though every so often something happens that hits harder than any drug or chocolate bar could. I’m betting you’ve felt it too. You’re walking down the street, at a party, standing in a museum, just moving through the world with your head empty, and then she passes. The sun is practically exploding with light. Birds are screaming at each other. The air smells like some illegal mixture of sunflower fields and spearmint, and her face, her hair, her entire being just barely grazes your life for one second. It doesn’t matter if you’re brave enough to follow her like an idiot or too chickenshit to move—she’s already gone, vanished back into nowhere, and you’re still here on your predetermined wrong dirty path when you should’ve been saved. That’s what happened with Ella. I saw her on a modeling site, lost my mind completely in that instant, and I would’ve dragged her to an altar full of Klingons without knowing a single true thing about her. Her age? No clue. What she does? Haven’t got an idea. Where she’s from? Maybe New Zealand. But it doesn’t actually matter anymore. Because Ella is really just every girl who’s ever flickered through my field of vision, who never had any idea I was watching, and who left nothing behind except this small enormous feeling of freedom and immortality and some parallel universe where we’re already together. Saturday, 6 February 2010. JJ: JJ—Elin Kastlander and Joakim Benon—made bright synth pop at exactly the right moment in the late 2000s. Album “jj nº 3” with songs like “Into the Light.” Signed to Sincerely Yours and Secretly Canadian, toured with The xx. All the positioning correct: ABBA lineage, comparisons to La Roux, the whole apparatus of electronic pop working as designed. Listening felt clean and distant at once. Well-executed, nothing out of place, and somehow unremarkable. There’s that gap between competent and compelling—JJ lived in it. Not because anything was wrong, but because everything was so settled. They’d found the formula and did it right, and maybe that was enough. But it was also maybe all there was to it. Thursday, 4 February 2010. Clean Split: The obvious thing about forbidden drugs is how much sexier they become once they’re forbidden. You’re told in school that coke and LSD will destroy you, and somehow that makes them the most compelling thing in the world. Not because they’re actually good, but because the warning itself creates the wanting. That’s the structure of adolescence in any society that tries to prohibit things: the prohibition is the advertisement. By the time I was paying attention, cocaine and ecstasy were already classics. What was new was the chemistry—people figured out how to synthesize mephedrone in a kitchen, call it Meow Meow or plant food, and sell it online before anyone official could stop them. Legal gray areas are marketing genius. A few people died in England. The Berlin clubs didn’t pause. Why would they. Drugs split cleanly into two worlds. One is the party version: young, hot, doing whatever keeps the night spinning. Models, hipsters, club kids, people who look good under strobe lights. That’s the version you see. The other is what happens when the high stops being a bonus to living and becomes the whole point—sex work for rent and drugs, bathroom stalls, the soft collapse of thinking clearly. Most people aren’t in either world; we’re just close enough to both to feel the difference. VICE made a documentary series about Swansea, a Welsh town where those two worlds collided hard. People fighting for love, for basic life, for the next high. It wasn’t gentle. Watching it made me understand why I’d rather be on the side where I can still think and my veins don’t look like a road map. Not because I’m better. Just because that’s the bargain I picked. Wednesday, 3 February 2010. Stadthunger: The Pretty Anger: It was one of those summer days where the heat brands itself into your skin and the night doesn’t come. I was sitting with Eva somewhere near Prenzlauer Berg, working ice cubes to nothing with a straw while she watched the waiter move between tables, and she asked about Adam just to kill the silence. We hadn’t seen each other in years and honestly I didn’t care how his life was going. Then: “How’s Sina?” Something in me stopped. I knocked my cocktail to the floor. Not an accident—I watched it break on the concrete, the glass and fruit and liquid scatter, and I smiled. It felt necessary. Two years since the night she left my apartment screaming, and we haven’t spoken since. But I knew what she’d built: the right people, the right parties, something on a music channel, modeling gigs, affairs with musicians and TV people who mattered. I’d see her at events, sometimes photographed her in expensive clothes with expensive people around her. She’d smile for the camera like a professional, then walk straight to the bar without looking at me. Most nights that was when I’d leave. The mathematics of it were brutal. While her life accelerated into luck and money and actual recognition, mine collapsed into self-doubt and rage and this grotesque gratitude for hating everyone. I started seeing her in other women. Moved through Berlin scanning faces—schoolgirls, designers, prostitutes—hunting for her scattered freckles, reddish gold hair, bright blue eyes, only to understand with increasing numbness that they were all just hollow imitations, secondary characters who could never be what she was, who could never survive the weight of obsession I stupidly placed on them. By night I’d lie awake on pills and energy drinks, scrolling her photos with one hand and the other busy, jealous of every person connected to her, everyone who mattered in her life, everyone she let close. I’d become less than human—a ghost in a city made of glitter and drugs, exactly what she’d said I would be. A few days after Eva, someone called and asked me to shoot an after-party for a Schweighöfer premiere at a hotel. I went late and already drunk. Candles everywhere, a bartender, a boss doing a full-bore New York accent that made me want to scream. I shot maybe two hundred frames and kept fifteen. It didn’t matter. I was an artist, was how I thought about it, and artists don’t have to care about results or utility or whether anything means anything to anyone. I went out to the balcony to smoke and found myself alone with the city falling away below. I was trying to blow rings at the TV tower—some stupid superstition that a perfect ring pointing at it might bring it down—when I noticed someone else on the balcony. I could see her profile first. When I saw her face I had to cough. Sina was standing three feet away, smiling at me. Sunday, 31 January 2010. Skins Turned Gray: Met someone on a plane once who asked if I knew Skins. Three hours, and we barely came up for air—Tony and Michelle, Chris dying, then Effy and James and Freddie, this whole generation of kids who seemed ancient in their heads if not their faces. The show had this thing where it felt real, like you were watching actual teenagers in Bristol figure their lives out, but every so often it’d slip into something weirder, funnier, more impossible. A magic trick that worked because nobody was trying to sell it as magic. Skins wasn’t glossy. It wasn’t about beautiful people being beautiful in expensive clothes. These were actual kids—messy, horny, broken sometimes, funny almost always—stumbling through parties and relationships and school in a way that felt earned. The show let them be themselves, which sounds simple until you realize how rarely television does that. By the time season four was coming around, you could feel it getting darker. Not grimmer in the way prestige drama gets grim, but heavier. Effy was always the heart of it—watching her navigate whatever came next felt like the show was asking real questions about where these people go when they grow up or break or just stop being who they thought they were. Emily and Naomi, Sophia showing up, all of it felt like the show was ready to go somewhere harder. I still wonder where it ended up. The earlier seasons left you hanging—did Sid and Cassie find each other in New York, or was that just something we told ourselves? Skins did that. It gave you beautiful questions instead of clean answers. You watched people fall apart in really human ways and the show didn’t pretend it would all work out. That’s what made it work. Thursday, 28 January 2010. Still Works: The Fettes Brot songs still work, years later. “Emanuela,” “Schwule Mädchen,” “Bettina, zieh dir bitte etwas an”—the kind that burrow into your head and don’t come out. Three guys from Hamburg made German hip-hop something crude and funny and alive, and they never stopped being good at it. Rektor Donz, König Boris, Schiffmeister. They sounded like friends talking to you. By 2026 they’d been doing this for a long time. The Berlin tour in February landed them at Funkhaus, which used to broadcast the East German state radio, and now it’s where they played in front of people who knew these songs inside out. Maybe there’s something there—hip-hop in the room where official voices once came from—or maybe that’s just the kind of thing you think about when a building has history. I didn’t go. You know what those shows are like if you’ve been to a few. The band plays what they’ve always played, the crowd sings along, everyone’s there because these songs stuck with them. That’s the whole thing. Wednesday, 27 January 2010. Visible: There’s a festival in Breda, Netherlands. Every October, people with red hair gather there—thousands of them, from everywhere. Bart Rouwenhorst started it because he believes they’re something special. Not just visually, though obviously that matters, but something deeper. They’re vulnerable, burn easily, got teased as kids. But they have this thing—intensity, will, something you can’t quite name. So he made a gathering for them. Four thousand people show up and stand in a room with others like them. People who otherwise feel like they’re the only one find out they’re not. There’s something genuinely weird about organizing around an accident of pigmentation. But maybe it makes sense. Any visible marker creates its own gravity, pulls people toward it, makes them feel less alone. Cintia Dicker came out of Brazil, red-haired, beautiful, eighteen. Someone noticed. The campaigns started—Ann Taylor, Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana. Then the runway work. Gucci, Matthew Williamson, Lanvin. Elle, Vogue, Sports Illustrated. By twenty-three, she’d accomplished what most models spend lifetimes trying to build. The red hair mattered, sure, because everything matters when you’re selling something. But she was selling herself, not celebrating membership in a category. I don’t know what she does now. Probably not the festival. Tuesday, 26 January 2010. When It Clicks: You find her on MySpace at some point in the middle of the night, probably scrolling past noise, and something catches. That synth, that voice. British, young, self-taught on guitar. The profile says Hereford, which means nothing, but it doesn’t matter. It happens fast when you hit at the right moment and the machinery engages. She’s 23 and suddenly everyone’s talking about her. Wrote folk songs in her room, got pulled toward electronic machines, found Vincent Frank online and thought yeah, London. Polydor came on board. Then she toured with Little Boots. Now the singles are stacking up—”Under the Sheets” already out, “Starry Eyed” coming in February, the album “Lights” in March, a UK tour right after. There’s a speed to it that’s almost impersonal. The hype arrives before the work has time to settle. The thing is, there’s actually something there. The synths are clean. Her voice sits in them without strain. She has that strange confidence of someone who’s been building toward this alone in a bedroom and then all of a sudden the world shows up. The British press loves a newcomer and they’ve decided this one’s it. For now there’s just the music and the momentum. How long that lasts is anyone’s guess. But you can hear why it caught, why it’s catching, why everyone’s suddenly aware that there’s a blonde girl from Hereford making electronic pop that actually works. Friday, 22 January 2010. Barely Anything at All: Two weeks of Berlin gray and everyone looks like they’re about to ask for a blood donation. So naturally, Victoria’s Secret decides to sell a topless bikini—just two black straps and the rest of your hope that nobody’s mother is nearby. For $68 you’re basically paying for permission to be topless at the beach while still technically wearing a bikini. It’s a fashion thing—makes no logical sense, which is the whole point. The ads were fine. The model was fine. None of it really mattered. But here’s what actually gets me: someone looked at a bikini and thought, “You know what this needs? Less.” And then other people agreed with them. And then they manufactured it and priced it and shipped it into the world. That takes a kind of confidence that I respect, even though the entire idea is completely stupid. You don’t buy something like this because you need it. You buy it because it exists and because wearing it says something about who you are. Probably that you’re either too comfortable with your body or too bad at reading the room. Either way, at least the company’s being honest. On a gray day in Berlin, there’s something great about that kind of stupid honesty. You’re not being sold a lie. You know exactly what you’re getting—barely anything at all—and you’re buying it anyway. That’s kind of beautiful, actually. Wednesday, 20 January 2010. Kill Ugly Pop: There’s a photographer named David Titlow whose work I keep coming back to. British guy, shoots fashion and culture—Vice, Elle Girl, those kinds of magazines. But the actual images are what matter. Everything in the frame coalesces into something completely imagined and simultaneously completely real: the styling, the atmosphere, the specific people who belong to that specific moment. I remember being younger and thinking good design was about restraint, about knowing what to leave out. I was wrong. The stuff that actually holds your attention is work that knows what it wants and shows you all of it. Titlow’s photographs are willing to be excessive, sexual, a little crude. They understand that glamour and dirt coexist. That surface is substance. Fashion photography is tricky because it usually disappears into its own slickness. You see the clothes, the concept, the aspirational bullshit, and forget there was ever a person being photographed. Titlow’s work remembers the person. There’s something human underneath the styling, and that’s what makes it matter. The style doesn’t hide the subject—it reveals it. He runs a blog called Kill Ugly Pop, and the title is the whole statement. Not interested in refinement for its own sake. Not interested in pretending you care about things you don’t. The work photographs what it actually desires—the surfaces, the subcultures, the moments that matter to someone. A lot of photography is technically competent but hollow. This isn’t. Saturday, 16 January 2010. Sympathy For The Hanged Man: I was expecting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to be a beautiful wreck—the kind of film you watch out of curiosity after the actor dies before filming finishes. Heath Ledger was in the middle of it when he overdosed, and Gilliam somehow convinced Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law to rotate in and out to complete the role. By all logic it should have fallen apart. Instead, Gilliam made a film where reality shifts between actors in dream sequences, and it feels less like damage control than like the actual shape of the thing. The movie is set in a traveling carnival with a magical mirror and a ringmaster who’s been alive for centuries. It’s baroque Gilliam—visually impossible, operating on dream logic rather than narrative sense. Christopher Plummer as the doctor, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole—the cast seems to understand they’re in something that requires commitment to strangeness rather than verisimilitude. Every shift between Ledger and the others somehow serves the film instead of undermining it. I came out of it unsettled in the specific way Gilliam’s work unsettles you. You haven’t watched a standard movie. You’ve been inside something dreamlike, visually impossible, resistant to easy interpretation. It stays with you. The strange thing is how okay with it I was. Not okay like it’s fine, but okay like this is one of those films that actually connected. I’ve probably spent my annual allotment of being moved by cinema on this one movie, which means I’m officially free to hate everything else for the next year. Except maybe whatever Gilliam does next. Wednesday, 13 January 2010. Feet: I found personal ads in the newspaper as a kid—older guys advertising for young girls, offering money to lick their feet. Reading through those words did something to me. My eyes got wider, my stomach tighter. Where I guess some people were turned on, I just felt queasy. Threw the paper across the room and walked out. That’s how I thought about feet for a long time. Disgusting. Off-limits. Then I learned that feet are one of the oldest turn-ons we have. King Ludwig was famously obsessed with them. Tarantino built films around them. Entire civilizations structured themselves around foot aesthetics—Chinese foot binding wasn’t just a beauty standard, it was a whole fantasy committed in blood, the idea that the perfect woman was one who’d broken her own feet to fit an image. These days, I get it. There’s something about the right shoes, the right angle, the right moment—clean Chucks, white socks at the wrong time, a fresh pair of sneakers—that genuinely gets to me. Not like those ads. Not predatory or wrong. Just part of how attraction actually works for me. How your brain sometimes decides what it wants. I’m not sure if everyone’s wired this way or if it’s all different. I’ve never figured out if there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed or if that’s even the right thing to ask. What I know is when the circumstances are right, yeah—I’m into it. Monday, 11 January 2010. Where The Rich Kids Come To Die: Most songs you dismiss on first listen. You hear something and some instinct says not for you, and you’re gone. But then something shifts. You’re going through it—heartbreak, anger, 3 AM staring at the ceiling—and a song comes through your speakers that just gets it. You reach for it again and again. Before long it’s not just playing, it’s there with you, marking those moments with something that won’t leave. That’s what happened with these tracks. Passion Pit, Regina Spektor, Magneta Lane—I’d heard them before, maybe not really paid attention, but when I was falling apart they were suddenly there. Rolling around in the snow like an idiot, staring up at clouds wanting to be anywhere else, wanting to be no one. Those songs stayed. They became the actual soundtrack to falling apart. I kept coming back. Each one different—some raw, some obvious, some you’d never expect to hit—but all of them necessary in a way that’s hard to explain unless a song has done that to you. Where the song doesn’t just play, it becomes part of the furniture of your suffering. You can’t separate the music from the moment it found you. This mixtape is what that was like. It’s not polished. It’s more like reaching into a drawer and finding the tracks that actually mattered, the ones that got you through. Some uncut diamonds. Some obvious choices. Songs I wouldn’t let go of now. Sunday, 3 January 2010. Kiss 2009 Away: 2009 was the year I got drunk and ran through the city with a camera asking people stupid questions. Somehow nobody hit me. Nicholas Gazin went to this ninja restaurant and ate a steak the size of a laptop and passed out happy. He spent the rest of the year figuring out that Jameson and Ginger Ale was the perfect drink because you can keep going until you’re hammered enough to fall down the stairs with your pants off. Guinness started feeling like work by comparison. My friend Hannah spent the year trying to break some Desperados beer record while also drinking Sambucca, didn’t pull it off, but got home from a drive doing a bit where she kept saying she was about to puke—which she wasn’t—and they had to pull over on the highway like five times. The whole thing was funny because her friend’s car was brand new and he was terrified she was going to trash it, but then two weeks later he threw up in it himself. This is what friendship looks like. Juliet Elliott biked through New York for five days, and it was just riding every day, going out every night, meeting people who mattered. She quit her job at Warner Records around the same time because she couldn’t take the office life anymore. Suddenly it was lighter. Better. She got obsessed with Sleep after seeing them play an entire album at this festival, sat in a rented caravan for two nights with her crew just listening. Avatar was somehow the best film I watched all year even though it’s this bloated monument to special effects and self-righteous environmental messaging. Maybe I was just staring at Michelle Rodriguez. She reminds me of someone from another life. Bat For Lashes’ “Two Suns” was the album that stuck around. One song, “Daniel,” might actually be the song of the decade. Carolin swore by The Gaslight Anthem after her relationship ended, said her friends showed her what real loyalty looked like. Palina had these random little moments—Shakira asking where her H&M earrings came from. That’s the texture of the year—small moments, stupid drinks, friends who actually get it. The year felt like Hannah described it once: “We’re just normal people trying to take over the world like Pinky and the Brain, or Hitler.” Which explained absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. The best thing about 2009 is that it’s over. Not because it was bad, but because I can look back at getting drunk with a camera asking strangers stupid questions without having to figure out what it meant. It just was what it was. Thursday, 31 December 2009. Kid with a Camera: You hand a camera to a random teenager and the worst-case scenario writes itself: kids documenting each other’s violence, their cruelties, their stupidities, all rendered sharper and faster than anyone wants to see. That’s the thing people worry about. That’s what you’d expect. Tommy Petroni was fifteen when he got a Minolta Maxxum 7000 and a Nikon D40. Kid from somewhere in America, and he did something different. Shot his siblings, his friends, the ordinary stuff around him—and somehow made it look like more than it was. Actual color, actual composition, actual seeing. Posted it to Flickr and moved on. The randomness of it stays with me. You can’t teach that eye. A kid that age with an actual instinct for light and form, just finding it somehow. Makes you wonder what he became after fifteen, or if he kept going at all, or if the gift just calcified into habit like it does with most people. Friday, 25 December 2009. Keeping Score: Christmas with your family is basically a game where everyone acts out their worst impulses and you’re just sitting there watching it happen. You might as well score points for the carnage. Your dog has no idea what Christmas is. He just knows someone’s handing him brown stuff instead of the usual bones and chicken guts, and that’s confusing to him. Two hundred points if he throws up on the good carpet every ten minutes all night. Minus five hundred if you wake up the next morning naked in a bathtub with him. Then there’s your cousin, same one as always, except this time they’ve done something with themselves and you actually notice. Four hundred points if you’re not actually related and you disappear into the attic for a while. Two hundred points off if none of that matters to you either way. Your parents bought the cheapest tree possible. It’s not even green anymore, it’s brown, with gaps where whole branches should be. Three hundred points if you set the thing on fire and pin it on your little brother. Minus two hundred if you catch on fire first. Uncle Ludwig shows up already drunk. He’s gonna piss in the potato salad, grab everyone’s ass regardless of how they feel about it, and hand you a ten-euro gift card like that makes up for anything. Five hundred points if you get him naked on the roof and he stays there. Minus three hundred if the hot cousin notices him instead of you. Your little brother got a PlayStation 3. New. Top of the line. You got socks. He tears the box open, looks at the gorgeous machine, and then he plays with the cardboard for twenty minutes. Two hundred fifty points if you pack him in there and get it shipped to Africa. Minus four hundred if he comes back years later loaded and you’re still broke. Your grandmother didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Not because anything’s wrong with her—she’s just thrilled everyone’s here, the roast is smelling perfect, snow’s falling outside—she didn’t notice she’d pissed herself. Three hundred points if you watch her turn into an accidental fire extinguisher. Minus five hundred if you pissed yourself laughing. And then there’s the bonus round. A hundred points if it somehow snows indoors. Minus two hundred if your grandmother forgot you got anything at all. Minus three hundred if you actually wanted SpongeBob sheets—and got them, and nobody was joking. That’s maybe the saddest thing that happens all year. Four hundred if you build a working sled out of the neighbor’s cats. Two hundred if you get drunk enough that the night turns into an actual story. Minus five hundred if that story is you with your head in the toilet. Thursday, 24 December 2009. Stop Time: Envy is such a stupid habit. When the bald guy next door gets a car, suddenly I need one that’s shinier and faster and probably blue. Someone else’s girlfriend is prettier and I’m obsessed with finding someone thinner with bigger tits. You want what other people have—it’s automatic, it’s dumb, it never stops. I’m not usually that guy, honestly. I don’t lose sleep over it. Except for specific things. Someone takes the last sushi plate before I get there. The fat guy at the theater has a buttered jumbo popcorn while I’m stuck with small. Some other dude makes my girlfriend come when I haven’t managed it in months. That one actually gets under my skin. But that’s not the real thing. There’s one thing I would actually commit atrocities for, and I have zero doubt about it: superpowers. And I’d use them for good, obviously. Purely selfless. Right. Flying would be cool. I’d shit on people’s heads from above. X-ray vision sounds nice—I’d see through walls, check if my neighbor really makes those horrific sounds during sex or if she and her boyfriend are just torturing cats in there. But the one that actually gets me, the one that would change everything, is time. If I could just stop it. Hold everything still and nothing would move. You’re alone in the world. You can do anything. Walk up to the loudmouth who’s been pissing you off and slowly, methodically push a cactus up his ass—take your time with it. Paint Osama bin Laden’s face with a marker. Steal whatever you want from any store. Cheat on every test you’ve failed. Start a travel company. Shit on your boss’s desk, Merkel’s desk, anyone’s desk. Take naked photos of strangers on the street, people you know, in their homes. Photographs as evidence that you were there and they couldn’t stop you. I think about this more than is probably healthy. The appeal is dark and I know it—the power to freeze the world and take whatever you want, whenever you want it, with no consequences and no one able to stop you. That’s the real fantasy. That’s what I actually want. Wednesday, 16 December 2009. Sasha Grey: For years the porn industry was drowning in a single template—blonde, vapid, surgically inflated, with the sexual authenticity of a doll. The audience was drifting to amateur sites where at least the pretense was dropped. The old guard was panicking. Then Sasha Grey arrived, and the entire machinery flipped. She showed up three years ago—Marina Ann Hantzis, twenty-one, thin and dark, dressed like she’d never heard of propriety—and started tearing through the rulebook on camera. In Fuck Slaves and Face Invaders 4 and the rest, she was unapologetic, direct, uninterested in performing arousal. She won awards not because the industry suddenly developed taste, but because you could actually feel something. Best threeway. Best oral. Best gangbang. These stopped being empty categories. Then she started moving sideways. Music videos. Documentaries. She talked about the work openly. Vice and Les Inrocks put her on their covers. There was an ease to it, a confidence that felt earned instead of something she was performing. What made her matter wasn’t that she was a porn star having opinions, but that she refused to diminish herself to make it digestible. She could have played the enlightened rebel, built a brand around transgression. She could have softened herself for a wider audience. Instead she just existed exactly as herself—dark, curious, unapologetic. I haven’t followed this world in years. I don’t know where she is now. But I remember what it was like watching someone refuse to perform, to just be as unflinching as the work demanded. That stuck with me. In a space built on fantasy, that was something real. Tuesday, 15 December 2009. The Soundtrack To 2009: By the time 2009 wound down I had more albums I couldn’t stop playing than I had weeks to listen to them. The year had been full of that kind of music - the kind that grabs you and doesn’t let go. The View came out of nowhere with “Which Bitch?” - five Scottish guys who made one of the best indie rock albums of the spring and nobody seemed to notice. Their loss. Kyle, Kieren, Pete, Steven and Darren deserved better. Regina Spektor had already done the quiet depression-and-piano thing, but “Far” proved she could do it without getting precious about it. Clever ballads, small stories, heartbreak without the cheese. That Russian thing she does, that dry way of moving through sadness - it’s hard to explain but it lands every time. Peter Doherty was a mess, obviously. Still is. But he’s also one of the best songwriters alive, drunk or sober. “Grace/Wastelands” went into some dark places - his own dark places - and you could understand why he’d chosen the drugs and the drinking over clarity. It was bleak but it felt honest. Little Boots with “Hands” was lighter, brighter. Kanye somehow praised her, which was weird, but the album was just good electro-pop. No philosophy, no statements. Just solid music that didn’t need to apologize for being straightforward. Lily Allen spent half the year either naked in magazines or announcing she was quitting music, and the other half making pop songs that stuck with you whether you wanted them to or not. I got why people hated her - the sarcasm, the depression underneath it all. But she was interesting. That album, “It’s Not Me, It’s You,” had hooks you couldn’t get rid of. La Roux - Eleanor Jackson with that red hair and her collaborator Ben Langmaid - just came in and started hitting. “Quicksand,” “In For The Kill,” “Bulletproof.” Three singles that just worked. I kept thinking they’d disappear as fast as they arrived, but for a while there they were everywhere. Amanda Blank was all sexual confidence. “I Love You” was basically the opposite of modest, waving her excellent ass in front of crowds, making videos that didn’t pretend to be subtle about any of it. And the music was actually good. Especially when she worked with Lykke Li. Bat For Lashes - Natasha Khan - did this mysterious, hypnotic thing that made you want to follow her somewhere. “Two Suns” had this pull to it that made you believe in the whole thing. Yeah Yeah Yeahs snuck in with “It’s Blitz!” - no big announcement, just tracks you kept coming back to. That’s the mark of an album that sticks, isn’t it. The songs you play over and over because they won’t leave you alone. Marina and the Diamonds with “The Crown Jewels” was the sweetest thing pop had going that year - genuine talent, real charisma. I knew the album was coming next year and I was already sold on it. That year felt full, just from the music. Monday, 14 December 2009. What Sticks: Every year in late November, right before the full Christmas assault hits, you reach this point where your brain’s already half-checked out but everyone else is suddenly an expert on what’s in and what’s out. What matters right now, culturally speaking. What you should care about. The lists pile up—trend predictions, year-end roundups, hot takes—and somewhere in there you’re supposed to figure out what you actually think. Christmas does something to your judgment. The season is too much—same music looping, the decorations mandatory, everyone consuming and pretending it means something. Your taste, which felt solid in October, gets shaky. You start doubting whether you actually like what you like, or if you’re just not catching the signal everyone else seems to be picking up. The thing is, most of it’s just noise. I mean that literally. The same five songs until they blur together, the pressure to have strong opinions about everything, the need to know exactly what’s cool right now and what’s over… it’s exhausting for no reason. What actually matters is what lands with you when everything’s loud. What you find yourself reaching for when no one’s paying attention. That’s the real in and out—not what some expert says you should think, but what you keep coming back to. Most of the time those are completely different lists. Saturday, 12 December 2009. Pig Seeking Cleaner: I’m basically a pig. I mean that literally - I live like one. Beer bottles, dirty socks breeding under furniture, bananas rotting into something unidentifiable on the kitchen counter, dishes that have achieved sentience through sheer neglect. And I’m okay with it. The mess is comfortable. It’s the natural state when you live alone and don’t care. The problem is when someone else shows up. Unexpected guests who have to walk into what I’ve created here and realize they’re standing in the presence of an actual slob. You can see it in their face - that moment of understanding. So despite the fact that I genuinely prefer living this way, I’ve decided I should probably do something about it. Not for me. For them. For whoever has to sit on my couch and pretend they’re not thinking about what’s under the cushions. So I’m looking for someone specific. Someone who knows what a cleaning cloth is. Someone who thinks toilets can never be clean enough. Someone who looks at dirty dishes like they’re a personal enemy. Ideally like Berta from “Two and a Half Men” - all mouth, no mercy. Someone big and blonde would be nice. Someone competent who can walk in here with a bucket and actually fix this. I’m aware of how this sounds. The crude part about what I want. The crude part about how I live. I’m not hiding it. This is just what I am - someone comfortable living in filth, too lazy to change, and honest enough to admit it. If you’re the type who can’t stand a mess, who sees dirt as a personal affront, who’d actually take this job: find me. Thursday, 10 December 2009. Drowning On Camera: Pete Doherty got drunk in Berlin and smashed a parked car with a beer bottle. When nothing happened—when the car just stayed there dented and he stayed there stupid—passersby called the cops. He slept it off at the station. It’s a pretty perfect metaphor for what Pete’s been doing for the last decade. The first argument for him is solid: he wrote songs that actually meant something. “Can’t Stand Me Now” and “Fuck Forever” and “Music When the Lights Go Out” aren’t clever—they’re just raw. He dressed like he meant it, wore his damage in the way he moved, looked like he’d been awake for three days even when he’d probably been awake for three weeks. The whole thing was coherent in a way that most people who claim to be broken aren’t. You believed it because he clearly did. Against that: he’s spent the last fifteen years turning himself into a cautionary tale. Drugs are his diet. His face looks like it’s caving in. He’s unreliable in ways that go past rock-and-roll drama into just being mean to people. He’s a guy who had every advantage and chose to systematically destroy himself, and I’m not sure anymore why that should be interesting. But here’s what stuck with me: it didn’t seem like an act. He wasn’t playing the tortured artist. He was actually, genuinely unable to function the way other people do, and instead of pretending he could, he just went all the way down. There’s something almost honest about that, even if the honesty comes with a bill that everyone else has to pay. I haven’t thought about Pete in years. The songs are still there though, and they still sound like someone trying to speak while they’re drowning. That’s not nothing. It’s not nothing. Wednesday, 9 December 2009. The American Thing: There’s something almost primal about the impulse to mock America. Before language, before tools, before we figured out fire, some ancestor was already sitting around complaining about whatever the American equivalent was back then—the fat, the excess, the inexplicable confidence, the way they’ll invade anyone for any reason. It’s a hobby that runs deep. But here’s the thing: you can’t actually hate America, not when it’s given the world hot dogs and Halloween and the entire mythology of becoming something from nothing. Lindsay Lohan. Clint Eastwood. The promise that you could go from washing dishes to a million bucks in a few days if you believed hard enough and got lucky. It’s absurd and seductive in equal measure. I think about this contradiction a lot. The way America manages to be both genuinely appalling and genuinely lovable, sometimes in the same breath. The violence, the stupidity, the sheer size of its appetites—and then somehow also the source of most of what makes modern life worth paying attention to. Music, film, the particular kind of dumb optimism that invents new things instead of just maintaining what exists. So you end up in this permanent state with American culture: rolling your eyes while absorbing everything it touches. Cynical about it. Attracted to it anyway. And that’s where you sit, knowing full well that your irony doesn’t actually protect you from caring about any of it. Tuesday, 8 December 2009. Speed Again: There’s a specific high you get from a racing game where everything works. You nail the line, the car does what you tell it, and for a few seconds you’re perfect at something. I remembered that feeling recently after a boozy night with friends, after years of not caring much about racing games at all. When I was a kid, me and my crew would spend entire nights in basements and bedrooms, controller in hand. Need for Speed was always running. Fast cars, loud engines, graphics that made you feel invincible. The game didn’t need to be deep. It just needed to give you that moment where you accelerate out of a turn and you know you’re winning. Gaming isn’t a waste of time—that’s what people tell themselves when they feel guilty. It’s the opposite. It sharpens you. Demands your attention. Creates this pure space where you can be good at something without apology. EA keeps releasing new entries in the series, trying different approaches. Shift looks interested in making the driving feel real, in the physics of it, rather than pure arcade chaos. What matters isn’t whether it works, but that moment when your hands know what to do before your brain catches up, when you’re locked into the machine. I don’t expect these games to mean what they meant when I was fifteen. The high’s still there, just different. Quieter. Less about proving anything and more about the simple fact that some things still feel good, that your reflexes still work, that speed and control still matter. Even if it’s just for ninety minutes. Sunday, 6 December 2009. Vogue Takes a Selfie: Vogue ran this editorial—Italian Vogue, December—with supermodels taking selfies. Steven Meisel shot it, but it’s staged to look like they’re just documenting their morning. Gisele Bündchen, Abbey Lee, Naomi Campbell in their underwear at the mirror, eating bananas, smoking, talking about their bodies the way you talk about yourself online. It’s appealing because these women are confident enough that ease reads as authentic. That works even when it’s completely constructed. There’s something attractive about that. Fashion’s been chasing authenticity forever, and now they’re chasing it by copying Instagram culture. Vogue taking selfies. It’s funny to watch, probably not funny if you work there. Probably they just think this is what you have to do now. I won’t remember it next week, but right now it’s good. Saturday, 5 December 2009. When the Lights Fell: I got invited to a record store music event in Berlin for some network’s big behind-the-scenes thing. The kind of invitation designed to make you feel like you’re part of something, with a logo printed on it that probably meant something to someone. All I remember is the free currywurst and the cameras. Groove, in Kreuzberg, had been retrofitted for filming. Lights everywhere, cables underfoot, equipment that had no business being in a record store, piled up like someone had moved a TV studio in and not bothered to arrange it properly. Markus Kavka was hosting, doing the easy charm thing, when one of the technicians made a choice that should have cost him his job immediately. He was standing on something inadequate, installing or adjusting a lamp, when the whole rig came down. Not slowly. Just collapse. Kavka was standing maybe six feet away. For a second the universe genuinely seemed to be deciding whether to kill him in front of the cameras. Then it didn’t. The equipment missed. Off to the side. Close enough to be funny, not close enough to be tragic. Die Happy’s singer came through, performing unplugged, singing with a slight accent that nobody cared about past the moment it happened. Then Karpatenhund. Their frontwoman was the one who’d done time in a certain magazine with certain photos that everyone silently knew about but wouldn’t say aloud, which meant she was defined by that fact as much as by her voice or the songs, whether she wanted to be or not. By the end they had everyone singing a Christmas song for the broadcast. Some promo thing that nobody was quite confident actually mattered. Kavka got to pick a record as consolation, which was probably the least they could offer to someone who’d nearly been crushed. I would have sued for enough to retire. He just laughed and left with something under his arm. The broadcast aired on a channel I can’t receive anyway. Which felt right. A perfect moment that mostly belonged to the people actually there. Friday, 4 December 2009. Merlin in Berlin: Merlin Bronques came through Berlin last weekend. Still a musician, still the way I remember him except darker, rougher. He made the underground rounds and pulled the hottest women, the craziest men, the smallest cocks—everything raw and explicit—straight into his camera. Three photo sets dropped: Undergrund, Kit Kat, Europeans Are Free. I need to finally say this: Merlin is what I’m actually after. I want to make something like LastNightsParty. That’s been the real thing pushing me. The website is technically broken. Poorly made. But it’s so genuinely beautiful in its brokenness, so digitally perfect in its imperfection, that nothing else has ever shown me what I actually want. The Cobrasnake gets close. LastNightsParty got me. What Merlin does—and this sounds intense but I mean it—is make something feel necessary that should feel disposable. His website looks like it could crash any day but it feels more real than anything professionally designed. He’s shooting people at their most defenseless. Drunk, sweating, half-naked. And he’s not making it grotesque or precious. He’s just making it matter. Making the night feel like the only thing in the world. I think about that all the time. How he pulls it off. How to make something sloppy read as more true than something polished. How to photograph desire and intoxication and bare bodies and make people care about what you’re looking at instead of judging what they’re seeing. Someday I’ll make something like that. So technically broken it becomes beautiful. Where people forget to check if it’s built right because they’re too busy wondering what happens next. Thursday, 3 December 2009. Back on the Wii: I somehow got a Nintendo Wii. The details don’t matter much—some combination of bad impulses and dumb luck—but there it was, this white console on the shelf, a controller that looked like it should be turning channels on a television set. New Super Mario Bros Wii was what sealed it. Mario and Luigi together, four-player mode, level design so cleanly done you can feel every jump before you make it. Watching it play brought everything back—all those hours with Super Mario World, Pokémon, Secret of Mana, Zelda. Just thinking about these games is enough to get my heart rate up. This is why I wanted to play games in the first place. I handed Sandra one of those weird vibrating controllers and we spent the afternoon jumping through levels, laughing when we hit each other, both dying on the same platform at the exact same moment and somehow finding it hilarious. Yoshi’s there, doing his thing. The whole experience is so purely, unapologetically Mario that it doesn’t need anything else. What’s strange is how right it feels to play something that doesn’t apologize for what it is. Motion controls sounded stupid on paper. The graphics are clearly a step down. Nintendo basically said fuck it, we’re building something for ourselves, and it works. No grand reaching, no trying to compete with whatever else is out there. Just games that understand their job. I have no idea what else the Wii has or which games are supposed to matter. I’ll figure that out eventually. For now, I’m just grateful to remember why any of this mattered at all. Monday, 30 November 2009. Effy: The thing about watching Kaya Scodelario play Effy is that you see her do something most actors spend their whole careers learning. She’s just there—present in a way that feels natural, this cool distance that doesn’t perform itself. I watched Skins at the right moment in my life. Young enough to think everything meant something, old enough to understand what was actually happening. And Effy was the character you couldn’t stop watching, mostly because Scodelario understood something about stillness and power that seemed impossible for a teenager to know. She wasn’t performing mystery. She just had it. What I remember is how she could sit in a scene and somehow be the only thing worth looking at, without doing anything visible. No expression work to decode, no technique you could point to. Just presence. Just something she understood about existing in front of a camera. Watching someone that young have that kind of knowledge is strange. The show cycled through its cast, so she left. Did other work. But that role—that version of her in that moment—it stayed with me. I’ve seen plenty of actors since. Most of them are trying harder and getting less. There’s something about knowing how to just exist that I don’t think you learn. I think about that sometimes. What it does to you, recognizing that power at seventeen. How it changes you when you realize you can hold a room just by being in it. Sunday, 29 November 2009. Tegan and Sara at Astra: You don’t say no to Tegan and Sara. Thursday night I grabbed Sara and headed to Astra Berlin. The place was packed—Tokyo Hotel haircuts, girls all over each other, the coat check line stretching forever. One thing was obvious right away: those two Canadian sisters aren’t indie weirdos anymore. The mainstream has them. They wouldn’t let me bring my cola in, and the coat check lady wasn’t going to budge on it, so we stood outside with beers watching Astronautalis, this American rapper who was actually funny—these wild stories about drugs, his face getting redder and redder like he was about to have a stroke—and somehow he managed to win over even the most hardened hardcore women in that place. Sara grabbed his merch. If you ever catch him live, do it. You won’t stop laughing. Tegan and Sara played through this nice mix of songs, old and new stuff from “Sainthood,” told some funny stories about being teenagers and doing drugs, and then Sara mentioned she’d dated a boy when she was 13. The crowd lost it. Pure anger, pure betrayal. You’d think she’d committed a crime. Les Mads had done a video interview with them earlier. By the time we left my legs were completely destroyed. I could barely walk. Next time I’m bringing a folding chair. Saturday, 28 November 2009. Teenage Witchery: The photographs I’m most interested in look like actual life happened in them. Not the polished stuff—no makeup, no practiced expressions, no distance. I want pictures that smell like smoke and bad decisions, where you can see exhaustion and recklessness competing on someone’s face. They work because nobody was trying. You can stare at them and disappear into the moment, convince yourself for a while that you were actually there instead of wherever you really are. Andrea is a redhead from San Francisco, known online as Ladyfreak. Her blog and Flickr stream are loaded with exactly these kinds of photographs. Messy living rooms. Drunk people collapsing at house parties. Vulnerable moments in bathrooms. Girls kissing. Pools at night. Bands destroying things. It’s the texture of being young and chaotic and outside everything else. It’s the life that looked worth living. When I look at what she’s captured, I feel this wanting. Not nostalgia—she’s shooting this now. Just recognition that it’s real, that it matters. And I’m outside of it, which might be the only honest vantage. But being outside makes you want in. I don’t know how to square that. Wednesday, 25 November 2009. The Drunk Mixtape: The daily grind wears you down. Incompetent coworkers, some boss coming apart at the seams, the guy driving the bus just went through a divorce and stopped caring who he takes down with him. You’re fighting through it with whatever love and warmth you can still muster, and people are using it against you—misunderstanding you, resenting you, jealous that you still have some nerve, some directness, some ability to not completely fold. After enough of that, there’s only one reasonable response: get yourself properly, monumentally drunk. When you’re doing that, you need a soundtrack. Something that understands where you’re at in each phase—the pre-drink warmup, the actual party, the point where it all starts to blur together. Babyshambles can do that. Anya Marina. Be Your Own Pet when you need something uglier. Something to carry you through the whole stupid carnival until you reach that moment where the room’s spinning and you’re screaming for your mom, and then Regina Spektor walks in like she saw this coming, and “Samson” makes it feel like the night was going somewhere. What tracks work for you at each stage? Seriously—what’s your drinking playlist? Just don’t come at me with Jürgen Drews or Mickie Krause or whatever uncool German pop is supposed to get people dancing at weddings. There’s got to be some standard of taste, even after three drinks. Monday, 23 November 2009. Not Enough Hours: I’m stressed enough that English doesn’t have a word for it anymore. Not that we need one—stress is stress, and I’ve got it in every possible concentration. The problem isn’t the stress itself. The problem is that a day is twenty-four hours and everything I need to do requires about forty-eight. I wake up before the sun, before the bats have even finished their thing, scrolling through whatever fell onto the internet while I was asleep. Half the time it’s porn and I’m getting myself off before I’ve had coffee. The rest depends on the calendar—school, training, work, whatever’s scheduled. Then the evening is usually whatever’s available: a party, someone to kiss, a friend’s place to crash, sometimes all three. Sounds simple when you list it like that. It’s not. Not when every moment is spoken for. School’s throwing project after project at me—nightmares that crawl into my actual sleep. And I’m supposed to be posting three times a day to this notebook, reading everyone else’s stuff, commenting, networking constantly. I’ve got girls to call, family to check in on, shows to watch, people to fuck, drinks to have, drugs to sample, laundry to wash, money to make, groceries to buy, parties to attend, thoughts to process, houses to clean, music to listen to, books to read, plants to water, favors to owe. And that’s assuming I manage to shower and eat and maintain some basic hygiene. Sleep? Not happening. So I’m making demands. Double the hours in a day. Better yet, fund the pill that kills sleep entirely. And this weekend I’m picking a handful of things off the infinite to-do list—something involving sex and zombies, probably—and getting comprehensively wasted thinking about how things used to be. Fair warning though: if anyone gets in my way right now, it’ll be fucking fatal. I’m stressed enough that I’ve got a license to kill. Preferably somewhere dramatic like a Russian airport. Saturday, 21 November 2009. Perfect Himmelblau Breit: Three old guys in a nursing home, shuffling around in bathrobes. One’s dozing on the couch. You watch for a few seconds before the faces click—Rod, Farin, Bela B. The Ärzte. They’ve been Germany’s best punk band for forty years, and now they’re in a facility dealing with the basic logistics of aging: staff helping them move, meals on schedule, the strange peace that comes with not being anyone anymore. The video’s called “PerfektHimmelblauBreit.” It’s deliberately low-key. Two caregivers, Mandy and Bernd, move through their routines attending to the band. No drama, no angles. The rhythm of care—helping them eat, helping them rest, treating them like people who matter. It’s the opposite of their “Yoko Ono” video, which crammed chaos into 31 seconds. This one breathes. It makes you sit with it. They play a couple of old songs, “Männer sind Schweine” and “Schunder-Song,” and there’s something strange about hearing them now. These are melodies that have been in the world for decades, written by three people who are now watching daytime television or napping. The songs haven’t changed. The people have. The whole thing is funny in a quiet way. You make a lot of noise for a long time. Then you get old. Someone brings you porridge and pills. You fall asleep next to your friends. No redemptive arc. No tragic final chapter. What comes next. I watched it and it stayed with me—not because it was sad, but because it was real. Friday, 20 November 2009. I Like to Fork Myself: Daul Kim, 20, Korean model. Photographs in i-D, Dazed & Confused, Vogue, Russian Vogue—the real thing, not decoration. Then she jumped off a building in Paris. The strange part was how it all looked fine from outside. Her blog, I Like To Fork Myself, showed nothing. Last post was just a song she liked. But people dug back and found the earlier writing—all the depression about how predictable her life was, how disgusting, about loneliness that went “from the core.” She’d been posting about it for a while. Just not in a way that read as emergency. That gap between the photographs and the diary stays with me. You see the pattern after. You reconstruct it into a story about someone falling apart. But it was all invisible while it was happening—just a young person with a good job, posting fragments of herself online. Thursday, 19 November 2009. Not About Tits: Carlos Nunez is twenty-eight, lives in Los Angeles, and has organized his life around photographing nude women. That’s not a side project—it’s the through-line. Beach days, forest walks, drives through California. All of it serves the same purpose. There’s something clarifying about that kind of commitment. He found the thing and stopped pretending there was anything else. Most people split the difference—we scatter ourselves across hobbies and interests, never fully committing to anything. He took one image and made it his whole life. It stopped being funny at some point and became just what he did. I don’t know if the work is any good. That’s not the point. The point is the singular focus—spending your twenties refining one image, reproducing it from different angles, trying to get it right in each context. Whether that’s brilliant or obsessive doesn’t really matter. They’re the same thing. I get it, though. Not the subject. The other part—the way you find one thing and make it your entire life, and at some point it’s not strange anymore because you’re just too busy doing it. The funny thing becomes the real thing. Tuesday, 17 November 2009. Game Boy Musician: Every kid in the ’90s knew that grey brick for what it was—a window into worlds that made no sense on first look. I’d sit by the pool with greasy fries, that Game Boy in my hands, and the rest of the world disappeared. “Super Mario Land,” “Link’s Awakening,” “Pokémon.” The graphics were barely pixels, the sound was more chirp than music, but somehow that’s what made it matter. The Game Boy’s official life ended decades ago, but somewhere in the last ten years I started noticing something weird: people had figured out how to turn the old hardware into an instrument. Not as nostalgia, not as irony—as a real tool for making music. LSDJ turned the Game Boy into a sequencer. Nanoloop does something similar. There’s a whole community making Game Boy music now—Pixelh8 is the most famous—and clubs started filling up with 8-bit sounds that honestly work better than most of what passes for electronic music these days. The thing about the Game Boy is everyone has one somewhere—garage, attic, eBay if you don’t. The hardware’s just the entry point. What matters is the software. LSDJ is the most serious option—you can compose full tracks right on the device and record them to your computer through the headphone jack. Nanoloop is in the same ballpark. There are other options too. Cartridges come pre-loaded with software, or you can find the programs online and copy them onto blanks yourself. Most are free or absurdly cheap. Once you get the software running, the learning curve isn’t steep. You’re just pressing buttons and hearing what comes out. Suddenly that little grey box starts making sounds—sequences, drums, bass lines. It takes about five minutes to realize you’re not learning an instrument so much as having a conversation with one. The 8-bit constraint isn’t a limitation, it’s the whole point. The sound is specific, retro-coded, impossible to get any other way. There’s a real community around this stuff—8bitcollective if you’re thinking about getting into it. The people there are weirdly generous about helping beginners. But here’s the thing about chiptune: you’re not learning a genre. You’re learning an instrumentation, a vocabulary. Stay yourself. Make what you want. The Game Boy doesn’t care if you’re recreating something or inventing something new. I’ll probably never be good at this. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I know exactly where my old Game Boy is. And I’m curious what it sounds like when you ask it to make noise instead of just play the game. Monday, 16 November 2009. Before They Signed: I found Freelance Whales by accident, clicking through something or other online, not even looking for them. One of those discoveries that only happens when you’re not searching for it, where you stumble into something and suddenly can’t imagine how you lived without hearing it. A song called Hannah started playing and I just stopped what I was doing. The band is five guys from Queens—Judah, Kevin, Doris, Jake, Chuck—and the song is on their album Weathervanes. It’s all about night skies and rooftops and music itself, arranged in a way that makes you feel small in the best possible way. Romantic and nostalgic, so charming it almost hurt, like remembering something that never actually happened to you. At that point they weren’t signed to anything, so the whole album was just available online, free to take. There’s something honest about discovering a band that way. No label spending money to push it at you, no algorithm deciding you should care. Just the music and the pure accident of finding it yourself. I’ve discovered plenty of things online and forgotten most of them within a month. But Hannah stuck. It still does. Sunday, 15 November 2009. Never Edited: Action figures crowded every surface. Sneakers in colors that shouldn’t exist. SpongeBob everywhere. I saw Yasumasa Yonehara’s apartment on The Selby and I wanted everything he had. There are spaces that trigger the standard kind of envy—the light, the room, the money. But sometimes you see how someone actually lives, and it’s unedited, unjustified, complete in itself, and that hits different. You realize you’ve been compromising your whole life without even noticing it. That’s when envy becomes something sharper. Yonehara is a photographer based in Tokyo, known for portraits of girls that have real tenderness despite how exposed they are. But his apartment doesn’t perform anything. It’s just what he loves. Action figures, sneakers in shades of neon that don’t exist in nature, SpongeBob dolls, accumulated with the clarity of someone who knows exactly what matters. His space is maybe two hundred square feet. One of those Tokyo apartments where you’re turning sideways past furniture constantly. And every inch of it is uncompromised. Most people spend their whole lives quietly hating their own taste, editing themselves smaller to fit into spaces that were built for normal people. He just lived. The apartment is cramped, crowded, objectively a disaster by any standard measure. But looking at it, I understand something: he never had to choose between being himself and having a nice life. He just kept it all. I’m booking my flight to his desk. Thursday, 12 November 2009. Bang Bang Berlin Goes Live: I remember “Bang Bang Berlin” as words getting passed around at the Scala party—one of those concepts floating through the noise and cheap beer, mentioned in passing between stickers and whatever came next. It sounded like something that might exist someday, or might not. But it actually happened. The website launched recently, and it’s a guide to Berlin and all the different scenes moving through the city. Liz started it with three other writers—Mertol, Emer, and Jobot. The appeal is pretty straightforward: four people with different ways of seeing Berlin, writing about it from those angles. Not a house voice or a brand, just four people writing about what actually matters to them. That’s harder to do than it sounds. They’re planning more features and video eventually. Meanwhile Liz is juggling other work—freelance journalism, a web show with Palina—the kind of hustle where you’re doing five things at once because that’s the way it works. I don’t know where it ends up. Could be nothing, could be something that actually matters. The difference usually comes down to whether the people involved give a shit, and these four seem to actually mean it. Wednesday, 11 November 2009. Not Mainstream: I’ve never been mainstream. It goes back to kindergarten—I was doing things in the doll corner that belonged after midnight, things my three friends weren’t doing. If I could make people from scratch, I’d make everyone even more different from each other, at least in character and taste. I believe in world peace and in helping mean-spirited people learn to relax. Men who think they can’t wear purple because they’re men irritate me. I hate those man-woman clichés. Women drive Formula 1 cars, men love shoes, men can be as creative as women. Football does nothing for me. I love kissing on park benches and watching stuffy mustache guys get uncomfortable. Really I’m just trying to show people a better way to live. I hate bus workers who won’t help the elderly or disabled. I love art. Badly behaved kids make me furious. Smelly fish restaurants, no. The internet fascinates me—the anonymity of it, extraordinary places, the chance to make someone happy. Web 2.0 miscommunication drives me crazy. I love to travel. I love capturing good moments. Polaroids especially—nobody gets to see my secrets. I hate discovering over and over that coconuts aren’t Bounties. I love being told on Twitter that someone loves me, saying it back. I like sharing things. I love that feeling of mutual care, of looking out for each other. My dream is owning a small, lonely island someday. A place to rest, think, and design. I want to blend my life with another woman’s, enjoy it, discover it, travel it. I don’t ask for much. If you’re reading this, you probably read the same blogs I do. Traveling alone isn’t much fun. I want someone I trust there when we discover new worlds together, and then at night in the hotel room by the fireplace, we slip back into our own world. Life’s too exciting to experience alone. You can’t hold all those moments, all those impressions, by yourself. If we don’t find each other soon, how will we tell our grandchildren about it all later? I just want to feel loved. What you look like hardly matters. If you were bullied in kindergarten for being different, there’s a good chance I’ll find you extraordinarily beautiful. I buy everything on eBay because it’s faster, and if you want to test that underwater camera I just bought, if you want to go swimming, get in touch. Or maybe you like baking and we can make cookies before Christmas—I can’t do it myself—eat the dough together, both get belly aches. Halloween just passed. If I’d written this sooner, maybe we could already be out scaring kids together. I miss those moments. Nobody comments on my blog because I barely maintain it anymore, but a nice email here would mean a lot. Tuesday, 10 November 2009. The Right Collision: Most women bore me inside five minutes. I don’t know what it is—maybe it’s that they’re not thinking about anything worth thinking about, or maybe I’m just impossible. But I can’t do the conversation where someone’s talking about their hair or their breakup or wherever they live, and you’re sitting there wondering if jumping out the window would be rude. I need someone smart enough to be interesting and crude enough to be honest about what’s going on between us. Or at minimum, someone who knows what they’re doing physically. Sandra was different. I met her more or less by accident and it felt immediately obvious that this was someone who actually got it. She was sharp in a way that was playful, could cut you down and then laugh about it, didn’t pretend to be anything. Smart. Funny in a way that landed. Physical in a way that mattered. After that we just ended up in the same places. Parties, art things, whatever was happening. She’d show up and the whole evening would shift. Suddenly there was a point to it. I’d watch her move through a room and think, yeah, okay, this is what I actually want to be around. Someone who sees things the way they are, who doesn’t waste time on bullshit. The thing about meeting someone who actually fits is that everything else becomes background noise. All those events and people you feel obligated to see—they suddenly reveal themselves as the waste they are. You just want to be around the person who makes you think and who makes you want to be better or weirder or whatever. Who looks at you in that way that means she’s actually there. Monday, 9 November 2009. Winter Mixtape: Burn Down The Snow: Winter’s coming on fast. The temperature’s dropping by the day, the first snow’s already fallen, and you can feel the season shifting into something cold and tight. There’s this strange energy when the world locks down like this—new people show up, new decisions get made, everything feels urgent because it’s getting dark earlier. Music matters more when you’re cold. You need something that actually moves you, that reminds you to keep moving, that fills the space winter wants to empty out. The right songs aren’t a distraction—they’re a necessity, like heat or sleep. The Dresden Dolls get it. That theatrical mess, the way they swing between full-throttle chaos and raw confession, the feeling that anything could happen on stage—it’s exactly what you need when you want to feel alive in a dying season. Bat for Lashes brings something more distant and hypnotic, like you’re watching something beautiful happen to someone else and you’re frozen at the glass. Lykke Li doesn’t try to be big or showy but she doesn’t need to—there’s a strength in restraint like that. There’s something almost primal about the need for music when it gets cold. It’s not really about the songs themselves. It’s about movement, about heat, about refusing to let the season make you still. You turn it up loud and you move because if you don’t you’ll just sit there watching the snow, and yeah, that’s beautiful sometimes, but not all the time. Winter’s coming. The question is just what’s going to keep you warm. Saturday, 7 November 2009. Free Watches: Showed up to some G-Shock thing at the Admiralspalast because free drinks and celebrities sounded reasonable. The wristbands they handed out were white plastic and absurd, but everyone wore one, so I grabbed mine and headed straight for the vodka. The crowd was pure Berlin circuit—models, bloggers, MTV personalities whose faces I recognized but whose names meant nothing. Palina was there, some No Angels members, the usual rotation. I did the rounds with a few German fashion bloggers, those conversations where you’re both just waiting for it to end, and then the dancefloor actually got interesting. Amanda Blank was up there, some MTV guy, Lady Sovereign. They knew how to work a drunk crowd. People were dancing like they meant it, not the careful posing you get at the wrong parties. There were girls in green tops floating through the VIP section like part of the furniture, sweet and half-interested in whatever was happening. The Ochsenknecht brothers were somewhere fighting over the last bottles. By the end, someone was throwing G-Shock watches around like they cost nothing, and I kept one out of habit or spite or that dumb logic where free shit proves the night was good. The MTV Europe Music Awards were the next night—months of advertising promising Beyoncé and Eminem, the whole manufactured hype machine. I didn’t believe it for a second, but I went anyway. You always go anyway, even knowing better. Thursday, 5 November 2009. Like an Indie Song: I fall for people like this: free in ways that feel like they don’t need anything from anyone, moving through the world like they’re floating above it. And I tell myself they’ll stay for me, that I’ll be different, that I’m the one who finally anchors them. It never works. One of you always wants more. One of you is always waiting. “500 Days of Summer” is that exact film—Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, who’s convinced he’s finally met someone worth derailing his life for, and Zooey Deschanel as Summer, who’s made it pretty clear from the start that she doesn’t believe in love, or at least not the kind he’s offering. The film jumps around their timeline, nonlinear, showing you the high points and the bottoming out, the moments where hope gets resurrected and the moments where it dies again. It’s funny in the way that watching someone delude themselves is funny—painful and true and darkly comic all at once. What gets me about it is how unsentimental it stays. The Smiths play over the heartbreak scenes. There’s a dance number. The dialogue is sharp and cruel and honest. Summer says the things you’re terrified to hear, and Tom keeps hoping he misunderstood her, kept hoping his version of the story was the real one. The whole thing is designed to let you watch yourself in someone else’s desperation, and I kept laughing at how familiar it all was—how I’ve had exactly this conversation, made exactly this argument, harbored exactly this delusion. I watched it with Sandra, and we couldn’t stop calling her a bitch. Not because we hated her, but because she was right. She was the only one being honest. Tom was the one pretending that love was supposed to override what she actually wanted, who she actually was. He kept trying to be the exception, and she kept not letting him. The film sides with her, kind of, and that’s the ugly truth it’s peddling—sometimes two people just want different things, and one of them gets hurt. No redemption, no lesson. Just the way it goes. The soundtrack is the other half of why this lands so hard. It’s all indie and sincere, all songs that feel like they’re about love even when they’re not, and that gap between the music and the reality is where the whole thing lives. You’re watching someone’s beautiful delusion get methodically dismantled, and the Smiths are scoring it like it’s tragic and romantic when it’s really just stupid and human and sad. It’s perfect for a first date if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need the film to comfort you, who can watch someone get destroyed by their own hope and just sit with that. If you go in wanting to feel less alone in your failures, it’ll do that. If you go in wanting a happy ending, you’re going to learn something worse. Friday, 30 October 2009. Natasha Khan in a Box: There’s that moment in the middle of a concert where you stop thinking about yourself entirely. It happened somewhere in the middle of Bat for Lashes’ set at Fritz Club last night, when I realized that Natasha Khan—all five feet of her, moving across the stage like someone conducting a séance—had managed to make me feel like I was the only person in the room. Not in a flattering way. In a way that made me understand why people do stupid things. Why they write letters they never send. Why they imagine scenarios that would definitely be crimes. I want to put her in a glass box. A beautiful, magical, terrarium-like thing with blue light and moss and nothing but her voice. Just her, performing, singing “Daniel” on a loop, never aging, never leaving, never realizing that the person pressing his face against the glass is no longer quite sane. My friend Sarah, who’d spent forty euros on a hoodie she immediately regretted, rolled her eyes at me during one of my incoherent declarations of worship. She was right to roll her eyes. I deserved it. The band is tighter than I expected. Khan has this stillness to her—she barely moves, but the whole room moves around her. That’s genuine power. Not the fake kind you see in music venues where everyone’s trying to seem larger than they are. She’s just there, being impossibly magnetic, and you can feel everyone in the room mentally buying tickets to her next show. There were celebrities there—the kind of minor famous people you recognize from television, the kind that make you aware you’re at an event rather than just a show. But I wasn’t interested. I was too busy mentally furnishing my glass box. Bat for Lashes has been around for long enough that people stopped talking about them the way they used to, which means the people still showing up actually care. And Natasha Khan just turned thirty, which somehow makes her more captivating instead of less. You’d think that’s not how it works. But it is. I don’t know what I’m going to do about any of this. I’ll probably just listen to “Two Suns” again and let that feeling sit in my chest until it becomes a regular ache, the kind you stop noticing. The kind that shapes you without you realizing. That’s the thing about obsession with someone you’ll never have—it’s not about the person at all. It’s about what the obsession teaches you about yourself. Mine’s teaching me that I’m still as dumb about beauty as I was at twenty-five. Thursday, 29 October 2009. Green Hair: VICE knows exactly what I need, and they nail it every month. Prostitutes, good music, breathtaking photography—not as separate things, but as one system that only works because they’re inseparable. They get that. This month there are three spreads. “Squat Rave” is green-haired Laura and her horny dog, a bourgeois fantasy that fits in four frames. Then “Cool Kids,” which is girls making out and playing SNES—exactly where I want to be when everything outside is falling apart. And “Preppy In Pink” has Daisy, driving through New York in a car that feels like mine, for a moment that feels like mine, as long as the photographs last. The photography makes it work. Good light, specific models, moments that feel real without apologizing. Not trying to teach you anything or sell you something you don’t want. Just images that do their job. They pull you out of wherever you are. The weather outside becomes irrelevant. Everything you were thinking about stops existing. For a few minutes, there’s nothing but this. Friday, 23 October 2009. Who’d Have Known: Lily Allen comes back with a video where she kidnaps Elton John because apparently she’s in love with him. The song is “Who’d Have Known?” and it’s actually good, which is better than I expected. She’s performing at Astra in Berlin on November 3rd, so she’s not just some story anymore. I’ve already figured out my approach: show up as a hairdresser. That’s apparently how it works with her. Thursday, 22 October 2009. MTV Berlin: I got to the MTV Europe Music Awards in Berlin that November. Shakira, The Veronicas, Tokio Hotel—decent lineup for that moment. It’s one of those events where the spectacle matters more than the music, where the whole point is just being in the room and watching the industry do its thing. Cold night, crowded venue, everyone trying to look important. I remember feeling like I was watching something that meant everything for a few hours and nothing the day after. Wednesday, 21 October 2009. What You Don’t Know: The people around you would be half as interesting if you knew everything about them. Why does Bjorn never talk about his mother? Where does Annika disappear to every Wednesday night? Why does Peter lose his mind every time someone says “flashlight”—just walks out of the room, mad? You ask and you get nothing. A shrug, subject change. Nice weather, huh. So you write the stories yourself. Bjorn’s mother gave him up at birth. Annika’s got some secret thing on Wednesdays. Peter got beaten with flashlights as a kid. These are the only explanations that make sense. Secrets can run deep, the kind that completely reframe someone when they surface—all the love flipping to disgust and confusion in a second. Or they’re shallow as a puddle. Annika takes a cooking class on Wednesday nights? Yawn. But big or small, they’re just protection. From other people, from yourself. I don’t want anyone knowing I bite banana chunks off with my teeth and drop them in my cereal instead of using a knife. That I put toilet paper on every toilet seat that’s not mine because I’m convinced I’ll catch something, while my own sink at home is basically a petri dish. That I didn’t call Julia back because something about her body bothered me—something trivial I should’ve gotten past—so I just vanished. Everything that makes you look worse, you keep. Everything that doesn’t fit the version of yourself you want to believe in gets locked away. Everybody does. So what are you keeping? Sunday, 18 October 2009. All Children of This Earth: I didn’t know Bruce Berger until I read about this song. German pop music doesn’t typically reach me—there’s usually something about the earnestness that puts distance between us. But looking into “Alle Kinder dieser Erde,” I found out he’s made a completely straightforward global anthem about protecting the planet and the kids on it, about corruption and hatred and environmental collapse. No clever angles, no irony buffer. He’s just trying. The whole global anthem thing was basically Michael Jackson’s last actual territory before he became impossible, and since then most artists either abandoned the idea or buried it under so much irony you can’t tell if they mean it. Berger’s not doing that. He’s saying what he means. He’ll probably fail to some extent—you kind of have to when you aim at something that vast—but at least it’s a failure that matters, an attempt at something true instead of something safe. I haven’t heard the full song, so I can’t tell you if it works. But I know the impulse, and I respect it. I’d rather be around someone trying to reach people with something they actually believe in than someone performing their cynicism. Saturday, 17 October 2009. Berlin, November: Amanda Blank, Lady Sovereign, and Bugati Force came through the Admiralspalast in November 2009 for the G-Shock Shock The World Tour. Sara and I were planning to go. Berlin had these events if you paid attention—electronic and hip-hop acts that actually mattered. The kind of cold night where you wanted to be moving, dancing, anywhere but standing still. Thursday, 15 October 2009. Sex with the Ex: The weird thing about an ex is that your body remembers theirs. You’ve spent months, sometimes years, learning the exact angle and pressure and rhythm—the wordless communication that comes from being inside someone’s life and skin. You know what they want without asking. You know how to make them finish in three minutes or drag it out until they’re begging. That’s not nothing. After a breakup, when you’re sleeping with new people and they’re fumbling around like they’ve never seen another human before, you feel the loss in a very specific way. Not the person—the fit. The way this other body knew you. The efficiency of it, the shorthand. So when you run into an ex at a party or bump into them online, there’s this gravitational pull. Not romance, not love—just the memory of how good it was, physically. How little explaining you’d have to do. The new person in your bed is enthusiastic and attractive and completely useless compared to someone who already knows your map. I get why people do it. You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re not hoping they’ll take you back. You just want that one night where you don’t have to perform or teach. Where you can just exist in this body they already understand. And yeah, sometimes there’s an edge to it too—a little revenge, a little “look who still wants you.” The satisfaction of proving something without saying a word. The problem is the morning after. Sometimes you feel clean, vindicated, like you just got something back that was always yours. Other times you feel like you’ve torn open something that was finally starting to scar over. You remember why it ended. You remember the arguments, the disappointment, the way they stopped trying. And now you’re lying there next to someone who knows your body better than anyone, and somehow that makes the distance worse. I don’t have an answer for whether it’s a good idea. It depends on what you’re actually looking for when you make that call at midnight—comfort, proof, closure, or just the simple fact that they’re available and familiar. Sometimes it’s all of it at once. You probably shouldn’t do it, but you will anyway, because the knowing feeling is too strong to ignore. Wednesday, 14 October 2009. Don’t Be Yesterday: The fear isn’t missing what’s good—it’s being behind. Being the person who still cares about what everyone’s already moved past, who hasn’t updated their taste in time. That’s what drives lists like this. Monthly reports on what matters, what you should drop before someone notices you still care about it. Some of these have aged into comedy. Karen Gillan’s still great, just in ways these people couldn’t have predicted. Zelda, forever forthcoming. The obsession with specific snacks and body rituals that felt profound for exactly one week. But the real thing here is the anxiety—that monthly check: am I current? Am I on the right side of the divide? The list format lets you off the hook. You don’t explain what you love or why; you just stack it against what’s supposedly out and hope you’re on the winning side. It’s permission structures, basically. Someone else deciding what’s cool so you don’t have to risk being wrong. The specificity is what gets me. “Girls who don’t love boobs” listed under OUT—so horny, so 2010, so confidently absurd. These weren’t even arguments; they were vibes. Things that felt important for a week in a particular place. The list was the point. Staying current was the whole game. I don’t know if I’m over it or just old enough that the fear of being outdated doesn’t land anymore. Maybe that’s the same thing. Monday, 12 October 2009. Veni, Vidi, Tumblr: A week after we launched this Tumblr thing, it’s already number one in Germany. Rainy Sunday and I’m sitting here looking at the numbers trying to make sense of it. We filled it with crude content—mostly breasts, mostly things moving, mostly the kind of garbage that shouldn’t translate to any kind of success. But apparently it does. I want to thank whoever bribed La Aureola, Fuck Prince Charming, and Rebel Girls to stay out of our way. Paid them off in money, ice cream, and other considerations. Just kept them distracted long enough for us to grab the top spot. And to Kanye West: don’t even think about moving on us right now. You’ll regret it. While we’re working on pushing ’What’s Your Secret?’—that Scientology song—off the international throne, the site’s basically Steve Aoki completely destroyed, Uffie, some genuinely unraveled hippies. A naked photo of an ex-girlfriend hidden somewhere in the mix, just to keep things interesting. It’s absurd. It shouldn’t work. I’m not going to spend a lot of time wondering why it does. Sunday, 11 October 2009. Nothing Like Before: I memorized every game that came my way as a kid. Sonic, Zelda, Final Fantasy—I had the pixel layouts down, the enemy patterns, the secret exits. I could hear any soundtrack and know exactly where in the game it belonged. The magazines helped, the guidebooks helped, calling a friend who’d gotten further helped. The internet didn’t exist, so you just had to live inside these games for weeks until you understood them completely. I can’t do that anymore. Get me past the first level of anything new and I’m already done. The difficulty spike kills it, or the controls feel off, or I realize I’ve solved this exact puzzle in ten different games. I know modern games aren’t going to satisfy me. I’ve known for years that nothing made after the SNES is going to feel like the real thing. Everything actually was better. The design was tighter. The limitations forced something genuine to happen. So I exist in this stupid limbo of searching and never finding. Steam sales, used copies, whatever—I’m convinced each one will be it. The one that brings the feeling back. The one worth caring about. But they never are. The problem isn’t the games. It’s that I’m trying to buy my way back to being a kid with infinite free time and no other context except the world inside the cartridge. You can’t buy that back. You can’t recreate that kind of presence of mind. The Wii sits in the back of my head sometimes. Just buy it. Go backward. Let the old games be the old games. At least they’re honest about what they are. But that’s not actually what I’m searching for. The search isn’t about finding a good game. It’s about finding the person I was who could disappear into one for eight hours. That person is gone. And no amount of hunting through new releases or digging up old ones is going to change that. Friday, 9 October 2009. Mickey: Disney is evil. Not in a fun, exaggerated way—evil in the way that most large institutions are evil. NDAs that keep employees quiet. Control mechanisms. A business model built on conditioning people’s emotional expectations. It works especially well on girls. They absorb the princess narratives young enough that it becomes structural. Later, they expect their actual relationships to match what Disney taught them, which is impossible. Dating someone who grew up on Disney means committing to the whole thing. There’s an unspoken contract: watch the films, let them destroy you at the right moments, perform enjoyment of the Disney universe. By the third viewing of The Lion King, your defenses are gone and you’re crying at Mufasa and you don’t even care anymore. That’s the victory. Disney wins. It always wins. I grew up on it too, so I can’t really judge. I was small, waking up early to watch Darkwing Duck, Captain Balu—those cartoons that pump courage and friendship directly into your brain before you know what’s happening. The messages stuck. They were supposed to stick. I remember learning from them in the way you only learn as a kid, without realizing you’re learning. It wasn’t like Dragon Ball Z, where it’s just constant violence and yelling. Disney had a point. Disney was trying to teach you something. I watched Pepper Ann once with an ex—this blonde girl, busty, nothing special—and I was already thinking about someone else. Already knew what I was doing was garbage. Watched the whole episode anyway. Still remember what it was about, like my brain was cataloging the betrayal in real time. Disney does that. Even when you’re doing something you hate yourself for, the message gets through. It sticks. So I’m grateful to Disney, which is fucked up because I also blame them for everything. They gave me something real as a kid. But they also wired me to expect love to feel like a fairy tale, and they wired every person I’ve cared about the same way. It’s a trap. I’m always going to be the guy who doesn’t measure up to the prince they imagined. I’m always the villain in their story. And it all focuses on Mickey. That fucking mouse. Those enormous ears. That stupid laugh. The endless “Oh boy” routine like he’s not just a character but a philosophical position that Disney has decided to torture people with forever. I hate him. Not like hating a bad guy in a movie—actually, genuinely hate him. If I ever saw him in person—if I found myself in Disneyland and that thing appeared in front of me—I don’t trust myself. I really don’t. That mouse is everything Disney did to me, compressed into one ridiculous character. I want to hit it. I want to hit it so hard it stops smiling. Thursday, 8 October 2009. Death and Its Friends: Losing someone you love does something to you that you can’t prepare for, no matter how much you’ve thought about it or told yourself that you understand mortality is coming for everyone. Everyone who’s felt it knows that specific helplessness—the moment they’re just gone, the door they won’t walk through again, and suddenly you’re standing in this fast, indifferent world alone. It breaks something inside you. Grief doesn’t heal. It settles like a chronic illness that never quite leaves your body. I tell myself I should be ready for it, that understanding death’s inevitability softens the blow when it comes. It doesn’t. When the people who gave you love and comfort suddenly get replaced by dark, circular thoughts—by what-ifs, by imagined universes where someone made a different choice and changed everything—it’s still cruel beyond words. You get stuck asking one question that never stops repeating: Why? Why them, why this way, why now, why can’t there be another answer? A few days ago, my friend’s father died. Unexpected. She’s someone who brought light into my life when things got gray and strange, who made everything feel less lonely, and now I’m watching her eyes go dull in a way I’ve never seen. I can sit with her through this. I can tell her she’s not alone. I can be present. But I can’t take the pain away. I can’t protect her from what she’s feeling, and that’s its own kind of helplessness—knowing you’d take it from her if you could, and knowing you can’t. Tuesday, 6 October 2009. What Matters: Sex is the breeding algorithm nature designed—mechanical, optimized to produce healthy offspring through appearance and scent and social position. Nothing outside of food and sleep should theoretically matter more. But humans have never been content with what nature gives us, and we’ve taken this straightforward biological imperative and buried it under layers of fantasy and complication. Schoolgirlcostumes on kitchen tables. World records in fellatio marathons at erotic conventions. The annual GDP of small nations spent on prostitutes. The Christian church has fundamentally different opinions on all of this. What’s most interesting is how thoroughly we’ve managed to complicate something genuinely simple. The real gap lies between what sex is supposed to accomplish—reproduction—and what we’ve actually made it accomplish. Some people want candlelit romance. Others want to get destroyed in a parking lot with a stranger. Most of us want something we can’t articulate, something that feels like both intimacy and consumption, surrender and control, vulnerability and power all at once. The weird part is how it’s become industrialized while still being taboo. We’ve built an entire economy around human sexuality—dating apps, OnlyFans, sex work, pornography, toys, surgery—all while pretending to be scandalized by it. We sell desire and then sell shame about that desire. We package intimacy and sell it back to lonely people as a product. I don’t think sex is less important than food or sleep. But its importance has nothing to do with reproduction anymore. It’s about ego, power, pleasure, the strange vulnerability of being wanted, the equally strange privacy of wanting someone. What actually matters isn’t frequency or configuration or how many or how often—it’s knowing what you actually want versus what you’ve been sold as wanting. Most people spend their whole lives on the wrong side of that distinction. Sunday, 4 October 2009. When the Internet Ends: I’m a junkie. Not for drugs or alcohol or cigarettes—got over all that years ago. My new and old addiction is the internet. The inspiration, information, the independence of it all. More addictive than everything else combined, and it puts me to sleep happy with my laptop in my arms. The real rush is getting inside people’s heads and somehow making money off it. But we all know this doesn’t last. The whole network collapses eventually—maybe China takes over, maybe there’s a war, maybe we just exhaust the websites. Google and Twitter become memories. The nerds have to learn to look at the sun. Bloggers hike up mountains to broadcast their ego to whoever listens. I’ll struggle when it happens. But I get bored with things fast, always have, and that boredom will carry me through. The internet just stretches the process out because there’s always another mutation, another angle to chase. But boredom always wins. Everything bores me eventually. So when it all finally dies, I’m going to an island. High in the mountains with the ocean below. I’ll sit with my printed porn pages and a coconut drink, laughing at how seriously we all took this beautiful mess we built, how important it felt. It’ll be a fading memory, like everything else. Goodbye, you once-rebellious medium. It was something. Saturday, 3 October 2009. Unfiltered: You know what’s weird about taste? People compartmentalize it. There’s the stuff you’re supposed to like—the art, the photography, the “inspiring” things—and then there’s everything else you actually look at. The naked people. The crude jokes. The photographs that would get you fired if your boss saw them on your screen. So I thought, why separate them? Start a Tumblr and just dump it all in one place. The beautiful and the horny and the irreverent stuff mixed together, because that’s actually how taste works. Not because I was trying to become famous or hit some number on Tumblr. I just wanted a space that didn’t pretend. Where you could look at what actually interests you without performing good taste or respectability. It’s simple enough. It shouldn’t feel radical. But it does. There’s something freeing about it. You’re not building an aesthetic you think other people want to see. You’re just collecting the things that actually catch your eye, your interest, your desire. The photographs of bodies that move you. The artwork that speaks to something in you. The jokes that make you laugh in that uncomfortable way. All of it together, no hierarchy. Friday, 2 October 2009. Viktor Vauthier: I was maybe thirteen when I decided the ideal career was photographing naked women. Found a Playboy with Nina Bott in it—I remember her, remember being eighteen inside my own body—and that was it. The plan seemed obvious: get a camera, get someone beautiful to remove their clothes, hit the button. Never happened. No money for equipment, hands too shaky around an attractive naked person, and nobody wanted to cooperate anyway. Viktor Vauthier clearly has a steadier grip on the whole enterprise. He’s based in East London and he’s already made it into that tier where photographers like Richard Kern and Terry Richardson live—he’s shooting magazine covers, running a Vimeo account with his girlfriend, getting people like Lisa Olsson to stand in front of his camera. Not hobbyists. Not trying. Actual work. The thing that separates him from the version of me I planned to be isn’t the amount of wanting. I wanted it enough. It’s that his hands don’t betray him. His eye doesn’t waver. There’s something in him that makes a woman comfortable enough to be photographed vulnerable, and I was never going to have that. Every shot would’ve been a confession. Sometimes I look at his work—really look at it—and what I see isn’t just technical skill. It’s distance. He wants something from the image but he doesn’t need anything from the person. That might be the whole difference between a career and a fantasy. Thursday, 1 October 2009. Lost Souls: Some people seem to have gotten lucky at birth. They look good, they do work they actually care about, they’re in solid relationships, and they can pick whoever they want from their circle depending on the occasion—someone for sports, someone for going out, someone for a movie. You look closer and all you find is more luck: love for life, understanding, hope that barely dents under pressure. I seem to be a magnet for the opposite kind of people. The ones who aren’t handling life very well. The creatures of darkness dealing with depression, loneliness, everything on the outside. People fighting torn-up love and loneliness and bitter thoughts about ending it, whether they chose that or had it forced. Every friendship, every relationship, everything in my life has come from that dark space. I take them in and walk the hardest roads with them. Wine-soaked nights, surreal adventures, conversations where you say things you didn’t know were inside you. Somewhere in there their will hardens again, hope reignites, and I let them go back out into the world with it. And the more destroyed they are—the more tormented, the more ready to be done—the more clearly I hear them, and the more I take them on. Because they have so much to say. They’re overflowing with it, their heads swimming with passion and the secret paths available to all of us. Outsiders, the rejected, the misunderstood. We recognize each other. Tuesday, 29 September 2009. Hanna Håkansson: There’s something happening in Stockholm with teenagers who are making genuine work. Photographs, music, real things. Hedvig Boström, Carolina Engman, Lovisa Rantå—they didn’t wait for platforms or permission. They just started. Hanna Håkansson is sixteen, part of that same current. She models sometimes, but the real work is the photo blog she runs with Fanny Wikstad, called Worm vs. Bird. Every frame is clean about what it wants to be—no excess, no overthinking, just direct aesthetic choices. And she’s in a band too, Shivering Heights with Sara Hellgren, making these strange eerie songs that sound like they’re transmitting from a place that doesn’t quite exist. Minor keys, genuine weirdness, the willingness to risk it. I spent time with what she’s made, the photographs and the recordings, and one thought kept returning. She worked out something most people never figure out. Not the technical part or the tools or the connections. Just the simple fact that you can create something and share it. No permission. No waiting. You just do it. Some people understand that. Most people don’t. I’m not sure what to conclude from that. Just that I noticed it. Monday, 28 September 2009. Hail to Our New Masters: People couldn’t be bothered to vote. Too drunk, too stoned, too lazy—take your pick. Everyone was begging them to show up, and most still couldn’t manage to shuffle into a voting booth. The turnout was pathetic. The country voted for a conservative coalition of nuclear-power enthusiasts and military hawks. The parties talking about free speech and open internet went nowhere. At least a million internet kids voted for the Pirate Party, which is something. I’ll give them that. But what comes after—that’s harder to joke about. Surveillance, censorship, the state slowly tightening its grip. This dispatch probably ends up in the way of whatever comes next. Anyone writing here becomes a target. I used to treat these predictions like dark comedy, the paranoid game of guessing what an authoritarian government does once it settles in and feels bold. Doesn’t feel like a game anymore. Hail to our new masters. Sunday, 27 September 2009. Actually Voting: Making a choice and sticking with it—there’s this moment after when everything gets easier. You’re in motion now, past the paralysis of all possibilities. You’ve picked something, committed to a direction. Most of the time, that feels better than standing still. Unless you’ve done something genuinely stupid, like hitting your teacher with your car. Then you’re just finished. I’m not someone who respects what passes for important in most places. Television, tabloids, the assigned urgency of whatever we’re all supposed to care about this week—it all feels hollow and bought. Not worth the breath it takes to repeat to another person. But voting is the one thing I can’t dismiss, even though I’ve tried. The practical reason: you prevent actual disasters. The people who want power, the bad ones, they show up. They vote. They organize. They take whatever no one bothers to defend. If you don’t vote, they win by attrition. It’s not luck—it’s the mechanism. I don’t want to live in a world where nobody felt like showing up that day. There’s something else though, something personal. When you vote, you’ve made a choice. You’ve put yourself into it. You’re not leaving it to chance or to whoever else cared enough. You decided. And a tiny piece, a real piece, of what happens next is on you. That’s what matters to me. Saturday, 26 September 2009. Pomplamoose: Simple usually wins. That’s what made Tetris work, and it’s why Pomplamoose stuck with me the second I found them on YouTube. Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn from California just sit there with a piano and guitar doing covers—Beyoncé, Nat King Cole, Simon and Garfunkel—and somewhere along the way the whole internet discovered them. No production, no layers, no image. Just the two of them playing. Nataly’s voice is the thing. It’s not trying to do anything. There’s a sweetness there that doesn’t feel calculated, doesn’t have that fake-intimacy thing where you’re supposed to believe she’s singing to you personally. She’s just singing. Jack plays like he means it. The whole thing moves because they actually know how to play, and they picked songs that matter instead of whatever was trending that week. I bought their album. I’ve watched the covers maybe too many times. There’s something about watching someone be genuinely good at something without any of the noise around it—no brand, no story, no aesthetic strategy—that makes you feel less insane about everything else. It’s a palate cleanser, I guess. When everything in pop music is screaming for attention, a duo on YouTube playing instruments sounds like relief. Jack Conte unsettles me a little, honestly. I don’t know what it is. But that’s beside the point. The point is they’re good and simple things usually are. Friday, 25 September 2009. When Lily Quit: Lily Allen posted one day that she was done. Out of music. She was going to do theater instead—some production called “Reasons To Be Pretty” in London’s West End. No more albums, no more tours, that was it. Her label’s press guy came out with denials almost immediately. She wasn’t quitting, she was just worn out from touring “It’s Not Me, It’s You,” not thinking about another album yet, all the standard language when someone tells the truth too loudly. I loved Lily Allen. Her songs were packed with dirty, clever wordplay—“Smile,” “I Could Say,” “Littlest Things.” She could be crude and frank about wanting things, about her own sexuality, about being young and female in an industry that usually made you pretend those things didn’t exist. She just leaned into it, made jokes, moved on. There was something genuinely cool about that refusal to play dumb. When she posted that she was quitting, something in it was real. Not that she actually meant it—obviously she didn’t—but that the impulse was real. Most artists burn out on the thing that made them famous. Most artists would walk if they could. Usually by the time they’re allowed to say it, they’ve already been pulled back in. I remember her posting it. I remember the press guy’s denial an hour later. That’s what stuck with me—the moment when she told the truth and someone immediately said she didn’t. Thursday, 24 September 2009. What Gets Searched: Someone searched “I had sex with my sister” and Google sent them here. I don’t even know how the algorithm decided that was relevant, but the search log shows it happened, and once you see one like that, you can’t help but keep scrolling. The specificity is disorienting. Not just generic porn queries—though there’s plenty of those—but “do you die from sex earlier,” “pornostars leaving the church,” “I smell like fish,” “are my breasts sick.” The questions people ask Google when they think nobody’s listening. When there’s no shame in the algorithm. After twenty years of running blogs, you learn that people searching for specific pop culture trivia or design inspiration are the minority. Most traffic comes from things you never anticipated. Someone looking for leopards to print out. Someone asking how to remove sequoias from their back. Someone wanting to know about Harry Potter’s first on-screen kiss. You put something on the internet and it becomes a waypoint for every weird impulse and stray thought that doesn’t fit anywhere else. The sexual searches blur together after a while—they’re the baseline, the constant hum. But the specific ones stick: “I had sex with my sister,” “hose down, legs wide,” “naked freckles.” There’s something in that specificity, that moment when someone typed the exact thought that was in their head, hit search, and maybe felt the smallest relief that the internet was listening even if nobody else was. What gets you is the innocence in some of it. The health anxiety, the basic curiosity, the confusion. “What do the numbers on a Billy Boy condom package mean,” someone genuinely wanted to know. “Does your stomach change after you lose weight,” another person searched. “When someone says ’I’m not gay but…’—what does it mean?” Real questions from real people who didn’t have anyone else to ask. I’ve watched the internet accumulate these tiny confessions for years now. Every search is someone alone with a question, a fear, a need, a joke, a moment of curiosity they’d never say out loud. They think it’s private. They think nobody’s paying attention. But the search logs are there, year after year, this strange archive of what people actually want to know when nobody’s watching. It’s a kind of unfiltered truth. Not the version of themselves people present online—the curated feeds, the careful sentences, the persona. This is the question at 3 AM when you can’t sleep. This is what you actually need to know. Tuesday, 22 September 2009. Sushi Mixtape: Japanese lessons were supposed to be practical. What I actually got was six hours a week of legitimacy to spend scrolling through websites made entirely of pixel art and an endless rotation of smiling cats. I was already doing this anyway, but now I could call it self-improvement. What kills the hours between lessons? J-pop. I got knocked sideways by a Sailor Moon soundtrack years ago and I haven’t recovered. My Japanese extends to maybe five words—thank you, goodbye, the basics. Everything I understand about these songs comes from melody and feeling, which means I’m 100% convinced they’re all profound emotional masterpieces. By the time I’m fluent enough to realize some of them are probably about pizza or something, I’ll be way too attached to care. Scandal, Ikimono Gakari, Ai Otsuka, Abe Mao. Shiina Ringo especially. Asian Kung Fu Generation, Kaela Kimura, Stereopony, Spitz, Orange Range, Maaya Sakamoto, Utada Hikaru, the brilliant green. They’re all on the same shelf in my head now, the same dark room where I keep things that feel true without needing to make sense. There’s something perfect about loving something in a language you can’t speak. All the feeling gets through without the weight of actually knowing what anything means. The songs work better this way—mysterious, invulnerable, mine in a way they wouldn’t be if I could parse every word. I probably know half these songs phonetically by now. I still couldn’t tell you what they mean. I’m not sure I want to find out. Monday, 21 September 2009. What Shin Chan Knew: I don’t really have role models, but if anyone gets to claim that title with me, it’s a small, crude Japanese kid with a big mouth who understood something essential about how to handle teachers, parents, and basically everyone else: Shin Chan. This week I read that Yoshito Usui, the guy who created Shin Chan, was found dead in the mountains near Tokyo. He’d been missing for days. They identified him by his teeth. The news hit different than I expected—not because I was close to him, but because Shin Chan was one of those things that felt eternal, the kind of stupid perfect thing that didn’t need a creator, that just existed. Watching the show when it aired on RTL II was like having permission to be crude and selfish and clever all at once. Shin Chan didn’t apologize for who he was. He had moves—the Po-Boogie-Woogie, the whole repertoire of chaos. He knew how to get what he wanted. He made fun of the right people. There’s something about a character like that, especially when you’re young and trying to figure out if it’s okay to be the person you actually are. I’ve watched plenty of kids’ shows, but most of them were trying to teach you something. Shin Chan was just there, doing his thing, and if you got it, you got it. You either laughed at the jokes or you didn’t. The show didn’t care. I don’t think about it much anymore, but knowing Usui is gone—that the mind behind all that chaos decided to take a walk in the mountains and didn’t come back—there’s a finality to it that’s harder than I’d have guessed. Not grief exactly, but something like the weight of a small, permanent loss. You don’t get more Shin Chan. You just get to remember the ones you saw. Sunday, 20 September 2009. Learning Japanese: Gymnasiums have this particular smell - something between ambition and old carpet, the kind of scent that hits you the moment you walk in. I stepped back into mine last night for the first time in years and got instantly transported back to being seventeen, sitting in classrooms I hated, surrounded by people who cared way too much about grades. I couldn’t wait to leave. This time I was there by choice, for a specific reason: learn Japanese. Mostly so I could watch anime without the English dubbing stepping in and ruining everything, and also so that down the line I could understand what was actually happening in my favorite shows. Our class was a strange mix - maybe fifteen of us. High school girls curious about anime, a couple of police officers who looked genuinely lost, some guy named Abdullah who never explained why he was there, and me. I’d expected a typical instructor, someone who’d moved here from Tokyo and picked up the teaching gig for extra money. Instead we got Daisuke Hasegawa - a Japanese rock musician, unhinged and constantly laughing at his own jokes. You couldn’t help but like him immediately. We spent the evening writing our names in katakana - the most basic, childish version of learning Japanese possible - and playing dumb games to practice introducing ourselves. By the end of the night I could say my name without completely botching the pronunciation, which on a Wednesday in a gymnasium felt like a genuine accomplishment. The rest of the class seemed competent. I seemed like I’d need a while. Here’s the crude truth: I’m learning Japanese because I find Japanese women beautiful, and animated Japanese women especially. Which is stupid and horny and not the kind of thing you usually say out loud, but that’s the honest answer. The cultural interest is real - I care about the design, the art, the storytelling. But the sexual interest is just as real, maybe more so. I figure Daisuke knows this about everyone in that room. He probably teaches this class specifically because he understands that most of his students are here because of that exact mix. I left that night with a stack of katakana notes and Daisuke’s energy still bouncing around my head. Next class in a week. I’ll probably be better by then. Friday, 18 September 2009. What the 4Chan: I had a 4Chan account for a few years in the mid-2000s. Not bragging about it—just a thing I did. Mostly I was curious about where all the internet’s actual culture was coming from, since nothing about it was appearing on the mainstream sites yet. And yeah, there was a lot of depravity on there. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see it or that it wasn’t shocking the first time. But that wasn’t what interested me about the place. What got me was how honest it was in a way that felt impossible anywhere else online. You could type something genuinely dark, actually mean it, and not have it attached to your identity or your permanent record. No algorithm deciding if your post was worth showing around. No consequences. Just you and anonymous strangers, most of whom were thinking the exact same things you were. Once you understood the structure, the whole site made sense. It wasn’t that 4Chan attracted uniquely terrible people. It was that 4Chan removed the reasons most people have to not be terrible. Strip away the social friction—the awareness of being watched, the need to maintain an image, the fear of consequences—and what you get is this very raw, unfiltered version of what humans are actually capable of thinking. Some of it’s horrifying. Some of it’s just crude or mean or needlessly aggressive. Some of it’s actually funny in ways you’d never admit in public. People usually treated it like a moral judgment on humanity. Like 4Chan proved we’re secretly evil. But that’s not quite right. The site just proved that most of what we present to the world is a performance, and when you disable the performance, you see something closer to the reality underneath. Usually that reality is worse. Sometimes it’s just more complicated. I left the site eventually because spending hours in that space started to feel like I was borrowing someone else’s brain. The darkness didn’t rub off or anything dramatic—I’m not going to pretend I was corrupted by reading horrible things online. But there’s something wearing about existing in that headspace, where nothing is off limits and no one’s judging you because no one knows who you are. After a while it starts to feel less like freedom and more like drift. Wednesday, 16 September 2009. Losers Save the World: Sara and I spent a weekend saving the world, which is somehow both harder and easier than it sounds, and in the end we failed anyway, but that’s not the point. Saturday morning we were at “Freedom not Fear,” marching against data retention and mass surveillance and the whole digital apparatus designed to watch you piss. The moment I realized how many people showed up, I knew the truth: every nerd in Berlin had crawled out of their basement. WoW servers were running on fumes. Linux forums were ghost towns. We shuffled along with all of them, and for a few hours it actually felt like we were shifting something. Like showing up mattered. You feel that way sometimes even though you know it’s partly theater, but you feel it anyway. That afternoon we caught District 9. It’s not bad—aliens in a camp, apartheid as analogy, the machinery of displacement and dehumanization. I spent the movie wanting to punch the main character, but something about the setup got to me: the way people just disappear into bureaucracy, the way systems are designed to keep you in your place. Sitting there in the dark, I felt like maybe I’d done something for them just by sitting there and agreeing they mattered. Ridiculous, but there it is. By evening we were at Cargo for some Vice launch party for Dirt 2. Hipsters, lasers, game screens projected on the walls, the whole fabrication of cool. We lasted an hour, maybe less. The artifice was suffocating—the posture, the effort, the desperate construction of nonchalance. We bailed without a word and found ourselves on the U-Bahn heading home, and that’s when we looked at each other and knew: we were absolute, complete, irredeemable losers. Nerds at a protest feeling politically alive. Too earnest for a movie. Too weird and tired for a room full of people performing being cool. But we’d tried. We’d shown up for something. Monday, 14 September 2009. Ed Hardy: I don’t understand what everyone’s problem is with Ed Hardy. The designs are genuinely good—wild animal patterns, intricate creatures, color work that actually takes skill. The branding is subtle. It’s not trying to look refined or signal anything about your taste. It’s just making something visible. And everyone wears it anyway. Marilyn Manson. Hillary Clinton. That guy from How I Met Your Mother. It’s everywhere if you pay attention, across every kind of person. The whole narrative that it’s some specific type of person’s brand is made up. Honestly, I think people resent it for not apologizing. It doesn’t play the minimalism game. It doesn’t signal restraint or good taste or understanding design as a theory. It’s loud and colorful and takes up space. Maybe that’s worse to people than genuinely bad design—at least bad design stays quiet. Saturday, 12 September 2009. Wreckage: Your world ends and nobody marks the calendar. Not the disasters that make the news—the private ones. A phone call at the wrong moment. Something you already suspected finally said out loud. Your best friend telling you he’s moving to Brazil, already halfway there in his head, and then two weeks later he’s just gone. The future he was describing doesn’t belong to anyone now. You stand in the wreckage and wait. Wait for it to hurt less, for things to make sense, for yourself to feel solid instead of like you’re performing being okay when really you’re nowhere near it. The longer you wait the more you realize nothing’s coming to fix it—there’s no memo, no explanation, no reason that would make this better. Everyone gets at least one of these moments. The details change but the shape stays the same. Someone dies, or leaves, or you find out they’ve been with someone they weren’t supposed to be with. Or you ask a question and finally get an answer that rewrites everything. And you’re left with that useless question that everyone asks: why me? How do I live with this? There’s a particular kind of alone that comes with this. Not lonely exactly—it’s more that nobody else can live in the wreckage the way you have to. They can help, they can listen, but they’re not the ones standing there at three in the morning wondering how much of yourself got buried in it. I don’t know how you come out the other side. I just know the wreckage doesn’t disappear. You learn to move through it instead. Thursday, 10 September 2009. Going Back: Nobody talks about school like it was anything but purgatory. Five days a week before dawn, herded into rooms with hormonal teenagers and teachers who were clearly at the end of their rope—probably going home to divorces they never saw coming. The mythology was always bullshit. No magic, no heroic arc, just fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial floor polish and the specific deadness of being trapped in a building with people you’d actively avoid in any other context. I thought that was done with it. Then I went back. Needed to finish a web design apprenticeship, and suddenly I was the old guy in a classroom full of people who looked fourteen. Same beige institutional walls. Same rigid schedule. Same invisible social geography—who sits where, who’s allowed to talk to whom, which table claims which clique. Nothing had fundamentally changed since the 1930s. Teachers had just traded bamboo sticks for psychological ones. The troubled kids still hid in the bathrooms. The machinery was exactly the same. But a wasted day could still have its moments. There was usually someone worth looking at. There were stupid funny things—a kid getting destroyed by a teacher, the specific tedium of a lesson that runs five minutes too long. And by that point, technology had reached the point where nobody was actually engaged anyway. MacBook in front of you, you just disappear. Games, actual work, a podcast—doesn’t matter. The teacher’s talking somewhere up there and you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d think going back as an adult would feel different, like you’d have some perspective that made it bearable, maybe even interesting. It doesn’t. If anything it’s worse because you know exactly what you’re wasting. You remember being young and thinking your time had infinite supply. Now you’re counting the hours and they all feel heavier. I got through it though. Made it to the end. The whole thing felt pointless going in and feels pointless now, but that’s how it always goes. You’re reaching toward something—a certificate, a credential, whatever—convinced it’ll mean something, and then you’re living it and it mostly just feels like being locked up for hours at a time. The slightly better version of you on the other side doesn’t compensate for the days you’ll never get back. Maybe that’s just growing up. Maybe that’s just life. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. Sunday, 6 September 2009. Lisa Mitchell – Coin Laundry: Lisa Mitchell’s living in a washing machine in the ’Coin Laundry’ video, asking for coins, stories, memories. It’s the kind of idea that could be precious, but there’s something genuine underneath. She’s nineteen, born in England, raised in Australia. The song itself is understated—not trying to blow you away, just asking for something small and honest. It works. She’s got other tracks like ’Incomplete Lullaby’ and ’Neopolitan Dreams’ with the same quality—clean, direct, nothing unnecessary. She’s touring Australia at the moment, which is great for Australia. Hopefully she’ll get wanderlust and see the rest of the world too. Saturday, 5 September 2009. If I Were a Woman: You’re born with these meat differences between your legs that basically decide your entire life before you’re old enough to argue. What color your room gets painted. What toys you’re supposed to want. The moment in puberty when you can’t go shirtless without getting stared at. And then the sex part. One side puts it in, one side takes it in. Unless you’re into both, you only ever get to know one. And on the putting-in side? We’re useless. Everything we think we understand comes from porn that’s basically a nightmare, stories that are seventy percent lie, whatever fumbling happened with someone just as lost. We’re out there blind and drooling, poking at you like we know what we’re doing when we obviously don’t. Sometimes I think about it. If I could be a woman for one day—just that part, just the sex—I’d want to actually feel it. The clit. A dick inside. What that orgasm feels like from in there. Not as some fantasy tourist thing. Just to know. Because if every guy actually understood what that felt like, everything changes. You can’t go back to guessing. You can’t keep treating someone like a puzzle you’ll never solve. You’d know something real instead of running on porn and myth and your own failure. I’m probably being naive. But that’s what I’d ask for. So what about you? What would you do if you woke up in a body that wasn’t yours? Thursday, 3 September 2009. Can I Get That in Ugly?: Fashion is marketing. That’s what I think every time I see a campaign. Some beautiful girl in some beautiful scenario photographed by someone brilliant, and the clothes are just sitting there, barely noticeable under all the styling and lighting and story they’re telling. The clothes aren’t the product. The image is the product. A supermodel can wear anything and look cool. A gas station shirt, a ridiculous turtleneck, whatever—she’s still cool. That’s the whole point of it. But that’s two percent of people, maybe less. For everyone else there’s no magic in it. Put that same shirt on a regular person and it dies somehow. This is what gets me. Is fashion real, or am I just fooling myself? Is it about the actual clothes, or just about selling you a dream? Because from the pictures you can’t tell. You see a beautiful outfit and a beautiful person, and they work together, but which one is doing the actual work? I’d want to see a real test. Take one outfit—a basic shirt, jeans, shoes. Shoot it on a supermodel in perfect lighting. Then shoot it exactly the same way on an ugly person. Someone overweight. Someone with bad skin. Someone who doesn’t work as a model. Same photographer, same setup, same everything. Then you could actually know if the clothes are good or if it’s all just the person in them. Tuesday, 1 September 2009. The Middle One: Yeah, I’ll admit it: I’m into pop acts that are obviously terrible but look good doing it. Pixie Lott, Lovers Electric, anyone who hit that exact spot where the music isn’t the point and nobody’s pretending it is. It’s not subtle. Some music exists purely to be watched. Dolly Rockers is that formula turned into a group. Four women, perfect choreography, British pop manufactured with absolute precision because someone understood what sells. “Gold Digger” is their song on rotation right now, and the video confirms exactly what you’d suspect about why they exist. There’s one in the middle—Brooke Challinor or Lucie Kay or Sophie King, I honestly don’t keep track of these names—and she’s why the whole thing works. Not because she can sing. Not because the song is good. Just because of how she moves in that frame and where the camera looks. That’s the entire mechanism. I could get into the whole ethics angle, could question how much calculated sexuality with zero actual talent the market will absorb. But that’s stupid. It works because it’s designed to work. I’m watching because it works. The song gets played because she moves that way. There’s no mystery to solve here. The Spice Girls did this thirty years ago. Dolly Rockers didn’t invent anything. They’re just doing it well enough to matter, and the one in the middle knows exactly what her job is. Thursday, 27 August 2009. What I Keep: I keep a lot of photographs. Not my own—images I find online and save without thinking too hard about why. The impulse has always been there, but the internet made it compulsive. You can spend hours scrolling through photographs by people you’ll never meet, of moments that have nothing to do with you, and they stick with you anyway. A photograph by Carl Heindl. Kate Moss on a bicycle. Texture, light, a composition that just works. You save these without thinking about it, and months later you realize they’ve accumulated into something—a personal collection of images that mean something even if you can’t explain what. What’s strange is that there’s no audience for it. You’re not curating for anyone but yourself. You’re just marking moments that moved you visually on a particular day, in a particular mood. Looking back through saved images is like reading old journals, except in photographs instead of words. You can see your taste shifting, or taste you didn’t even know you had starting to take shape. This corner of the internet used to be full of people doing exactly this—spending days organizing images, building elaborate personal collections, curation as a real practice. Some of it still happens, but the platforms changed and a lot of it got flattened into algorithms. I miss that version sometimes. Wednesday, 26 August 2009. War Games: Went paintballing yesterday and I’m covered in bruises. Shoulders, ribs, legs—all marked up. My elbow’s torn open from where I slipped in the mud, but that’s not really part of the war narrative. Pink paint everywhere. Burst gel balls scattered across the ground like actual casualties. My friend Pedder took a shot directly to the head. Guy went down confused. We were in the woods and these abandoned houses with a bunch of people dressed in way-too-realistic tactical gear, all of us acting like this mattered. Someone brought sausages, which is the only good decision anyone made all day. Pink splatter, people yelling, Pedder getting eliminated in the first five minutes. I mostly spent the time slipping on mud and remembering why I hate outdoor activities. The bruises are real. The embarrassment is real. The fact that I’m not doing this again anytime soon is definitely real. I’m going back to Call of Duty, where I can at least pretend I’m competent at warfare. Monday, 24 August 2009. Two Years In: Surprise: I’m not actually a Berlin native. Weird, right. I know some people are having a complete meltdown about this, and others have already unfollowed. I get it. Two years here and nothing much has changed really. Work, school, the blog, sleeping, eating, being around people at night. Nothing that sounds like anything when you say it out loud. Nothing that makes you feel like you’ve actually done something with the time. I didn’t save the world or find myself or become the person I was supposed to become. Just showed up mostly and did the regular things. Got okay at work, went to classes, watched people, thought about stuff worth writing. But looking back mostly means looking forward. Final year of my apprenticeship, another round of vocational school with Gulcan and Thomi and people I actually like being around. There’s Japanese I’ve been meaning to learn. Nora and I are getting married, which should be its own kind of disaster. Maybe even MTV Cribs if the universe is feeling generous. None of it’s glamorous or special. It probably won’t matter to anyone but the people in it. But that feels like the whole idea anyway. Saturday, 22 August 2009. Wonderland: Picked up Alice in Wonderland on DVD. Been a while since I’d sat with it, and the timing felt right—some drugs, a dark room, then head out to a party afterward. There’s something about that film’s spiral-descent logic that works when you’re in the right state of mind. Wonderland and your brain syncing up. One of those nights where the pacing just works out: get weird for a couple hours, then go be around people. Saturday, 22 August 2009. Blumio: Blumio’s been in heavy rotation the last few months. A 24-year-old rapper from Düsseldorf with Japanese heritage—the kind of specific background that usually doesn’t register in German hip-hop, which made me pay attention from the start. His video for “Hey Mr. Nazi” sealed it. The whole thing is packed with wordplay, him rapping about love, racism, Japanese culture, the importance of staying clean because women notice these things. It’s specific enough to feel real, unironic. What gets me is that he doesn’t sound like he’s performing. The clever lines are there, but there’s no distance, no sense he’s outside the words laughing at his own jokes. He sounds like he actually means all of it—the humor, the statements about racism, the whole life-affirming energy underneath. His album is “Yellow Album,” out on his own label, and I’ve come back to it more than I usually do. Most artists I discover get a week or two of rotation, then something else takes over. This one stuck, which is rare enough that I notice it. Maybe it’s the doubled identity—being Japanese in a German context, carrying both at once. Or maybe he just sounds like someone who actually cared about making something good, who wasn’t trying to calculate angles or play to some audience that might exist someday. Tuesday, 18 August 2009. City Hunger: There was a club called 25, and Sina was turning 18. We danced close, bodies pressed into the bass, both high on something. In the bathroom, two girls wanted me to photograph them as they undressed. My head was splitting. There was an urge to vomit that I kept strangling down. The bigger one got on her knees while I counted white tiles on the wall, polished and endless. When she was done I went back to find Sina and picked up the dance where we’d left it. After a while she tugged my sleeve. “Can we go home? I’m tired.” That night, something in her fractured. She cried until the room drowned in it. “Why do I do this?” she screamed, hurling a basket of apples at my head. “I love you, you bastard, but you’re a coward. A freeloader. A fraud. You hate this world but you devour what it offers. You hate these people but you fuck them. You hate these drugs but you keep chopping another line, and another.” She threw a bag against the wall. White powder fell like snow. I sat on the bed and watched, smoking. “This world means nothing to you,” she said, her voice climbing higher. “I mean nothing. Love means nothing. How am I supposed to give myself to someone who feels nothing about love? Tell me that.” “I’m not answering that,” I said. She got colder, then hotter. She went to the kitchen and came back with a long knife, started stabbing the pillows, the mattress, feathers erupting into the air. I leaned against the wall and smoked, untouched. She looked like a naked angel being torn apart. Then she stopped. “I have to get out.” She dropped the knife, jammed clothes into a Hello Kitty backpack, ran for the door before I’d even registered what was happening. The door slammed. I came to and ran to the balcony. I could see her reddish hair moving down the dark street. “Sina, where are you going?” Nothing. She was gone into the U-Bahn. I grabbed orange juice from the fridge, drank some, threw the carton at the wall. The yellow stain is still there. Her phone was on the bed. I picked up one of her underwear, buried myself in the ruined pillows, and tried not to think about what was coming. That night I had a dream that felt like it was still happening when I woke, drenched and sick. I stumbled to the kitchen, poured cereal and milk, but her face wouldn’t leave—pale as death, and me holding her while I screamed the whole city’s name. I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. There was a smell I couldn’t place. Looking down at myself, blood seemed to cover half my body, or maybe it was just shadow and light playing games. I lifted a spoon of cereal and the faces came back—the ones from outside 25, all screaming her name over and over. People kept saying she’d left with some guy from Chan Shin, someone dangerous, someone shady. She was too drunk to know what was happening. I screamed. If I screamed loud enough, if I said her name loud enough, I could undo it—I was sure of that. Phone in one hand, tequila in the other. The cold air from the window helped, washed over my head and pushed the thoughts away. I ran through the space between knowing and reaching her, I was crying. When I turned the corner the alley was there and so was she, helpless against the filthy brick. Everything I had—every feeling—collapsed into that one moment, sharp as a gunshot. I ran to her. I said things without words, screamed them hoping they’d still somehow reach her. I held her and held her until I felt myself start to rupture. I choked on blood and tears. Her empty eyes, her soft face—they were telling me what I already knew. I wasn’t there. It rang. Monday, 17 August 2009. Tokyo by Thirty: My life plan has some pretty non-negotiable items written into it. Marrying Nora Tschirner, for one—she doesn’t know about this yet. Controlling the entire world. Flooding Berlin and moving to Tokyo by the time I’m thirty to spend my golden years there. Live fast, die young, right? But there’s a problem with retiring to a country whose language you can’t speak. You end up just standing around looking confused all the time. So I’m taking a beginner’s Japanese course starting in September with this teacher named Saki Matsuda. Figured I might as well actually understand what Ayumi Hamasaki and Utada Hikaru are saying to me instead of just feeling it in my bones—which, let’s be honest, is probably all death and sex and gorgeous melodrama. My brain’s gotten soft and comfortable from just consuming everything in English. I need something that doesn’t come pre-translated. I need the friction of actually working for it, conjugating verbs, copying out characters that look like tiny paintings. It’ll hurt in a way I probably need. Sunday, 16 August 2009. Nora: I had this one stupid goal for years and today I actually achieved it, so I can officially stop now. I met Nora Tschirner. We talked, we laughed, we hugged. There are parts of my body I will never wash again. My friends kept me from completely forgetting how to speak while she was in front of me, which was the kind of help I needed. It’s ridiculous to make a life achievement out of meeting someone, and I knew that even while it was happening. But you carry something like that for long enough and then it actually occurs and it’s both exactly what you thought it would be and sort of empty all at once. Doesn’t change anything. But you feel it in the moment, and then it’s just a thing that happened. You’ve got the photo. You shook her hand. That’s the whole thing. Thursday, 13 August 2009. Amanda Blank – Might Like You Better: Amanda Blank has more hair on her forearms than I have on my head, but that seems exactly right somehow. She’s got this thing—raw, unguarded sexuality that doesn’t feel performed. It just is. I can’t describe it without sounding crude, and maybe that’s the point. I got pulled into her new video for “Might Like You Better” off “I Love You.” Bright colors, straightforward lyrics—a story about wanting someone, about sex, about wondering if there’s someone better waiting. She’s worked with Santigold and M.I.A. and Ghostface Killah on heavier stuff, but this feels more intimate. Quieter. More direct somehow. The album holds up. There’s sophistication in the production, some retro touches, and then “Leaving You Behind” with Lykke Li—a ballad that actually wrecks you. Both of them are present in it, not performing sadness but actually feeling it. I keep thinking about Lykke Li though. She had something distinctive and then went quiet. I’m getting impatient waiting for new work. Wednesday, 12 August 2009. The Farewell: He crumpled in front of me, howling and gasping for breath. Paula cheered, her face bright with joy, and I felt something lift inside me. It was dark and cold, but I glowed from the inside out. So free. Such a victory. Johnny twisted his face in pain while his brain-dead friends stared at me like paralyzed rabbits. I had nothing left to lose and they knew it. He wailed. The train was leaving. I grabbed my backpack and started running—away from my old life, from Johnny, from everyone. He yelled after me, something about killing me, and we jumped on just as the doors slammed shut. Then we were moving, heading somewhere new. I was so relieved I fell to my knees and started crying. Paula was my best friend. She took up space the way people do when they’re not afraid of themselves—big energy, bigger heart. I loved her like I’d never loved anyone, loved her in that way where you’d give your life without thinking about it. When I opened my eyes we were locked in each other’s arms. Outside the window, trees and mountains and houses blurred past us. I buried myself in her lilac sweater, which smelled like roses, and breathed in deep. “How much longer?” I asked. “A few hours,” she said. “Fuck.” When we got to Berlin Hauptbahnhof we went straight to Burger King. We were tired, wired with relief, and we ordered the greasiest thing on the menu—bacon, large fries, the works. We sat there reveling in our newfound freedom. I was happy, actually happy. Paula smiled and said I could go to the bathroom if I needed to, she’d wait for me here. I went. When I came back, she was gone. At first I thought it was a joke, kept smiling, tried to play it cool. But she wasn’t behind any corner. She wasn’t anywhere. The panic came slow at first, then faster. I walked the station—every platform, every shop, every corner—looking for her. She had my phone. I found a payphone with my last few coins and called home, explained what had happened, told my mother I needed help. She just laughed. Said it was my own fault, that I should figure it out myself, something about making my own bed. Everything spun. I ended up on my hands and knees calling Paula’s name over and over, but she didn’t hear me. Tuesday, 11 August 2009. How to Become a God: Drugs will wreck you. They’re addictive, they make you sick, they hollow everything out. Get deep enough into them and you end up at the station, trading your body for the next fix, and when that gets old you end it with a syringe in your vein and that’s your whole story. Everyone knows this. Everyone except Steve Jobs, who took LSD and somehow built the most beautiful company in the world. I read his biography because I wanted to know how someone like me—a spoiled only child with no discipline and too much entitlement—actually becomes a god. How does that happen? And the answer is harder to accept than any drug metaphor: you become an asshole. A complete one. You cheat friends out of money. You cry until they give in. You ask new employees invasive questions and treat them like they’re worthless. You refuse to pay for your daughter. You stay cruel and unmoved by anyone’s suffering until your vision is all that matters and everyone around you is too exhausted to resist. Jobs did this, and it worked. The thing he built was so beautiful and so precise that people eventually accepted the cost. The cruelty stopped looking like cruelty and started looking like the price of greatness. I read all this and I think about it a lot. I’d like to make something that matters. But I also don’t think I’m willing to be that cruel, and that seems like a pretty clear statement about my ceiling. Either you have it in you or you don’t. Either you can hurt people badly and live with it or you can’t. Reading his biography, it’s pretty clear which one I am. Saturday, 8 August 2009. Hangover: There’s this old movie everyone I know considers sacred—Eurotrip, the one with all the dumb kids drinking across Europe. We genuinely thought nothing would ever be that funny. Then we finally watched The Hangover. I couldn’t function for like an hour. Literally couldn’t stop laughing. The whole thing just works—the setup, the timing, Mike Tyson casually appearing halfway through like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I was making those awful wheezing sounds, the kind where you have to stop watching because your eyes won’t focus. So to the maybe two people I know who haven’t seen it yet: you need to. Not a recommendation. A requirement. It’s that good. And to anyone out there trying to make a comedy: if you already know in your gut it won’t be this funny, save yourself the effort. The standard is set now. Nothing’s going higher. Friday, 7 August 2009. Made It: The notification came this morning: position 55 on some blog ranking list. A year ago I’d been cocky enough to announce that once I made this particular chart, I’d arrive. Real importance. The kind that comes with invitations, parties, the doors that open. The upper five thousand. The people who matter. Turns out I was right to wait. The logic is obvious now. You get ranked, the world acknowledges you exist at a higher level. The calls come in. The galas, the premieres, the front-row treatment, all the currency that comes with being officially somebody. That’s the deal you strike. Still haven’t gotten that first call. Wednesday, 5 August 2009. Adam and Eva: Dinner on Sina’s rooftop. She and Eva had cooked—lasagna, salad, pudding with chunks in it, exactly how I liked it. Adam talked about the business, the club, how hard it was to keep a place running with all the competition, customers getting weirder but funnier. I nodded and nodded but didn’t really hear him. I was one of the glittering figures in this business and it all passed right by me anyway. Sina caught me not listening and gave me this knowing look while she took a huge bite of lasagna, mouth full, and I liked that. Adam was tall with enormous tattoos covering both arms—lions, eagles, stars, roses. Piercings on a face eaten by madness, a deep voice that underlined everything with inescapable weight. Eva was small and thin, blonde hair to her shoulders. She turned into something like a pale fairy in my head. Soft voice, composed. I would have let her read me bedtime stories. Walking home I asked Sina why this world made her so happy. ’Which world?’ She wrapped her arm around me loosely and started dancing across the cobblestones. ’The parties, the clubs, the crazy people. The drugs and all of it.’ She stopped, turned slow to face me. ’Because you live in it.’ I looked at her like she was insane. ’I hate it. You know I do.’ ’Why though?’ ’Because nothing in it is real. Everything’s overdone, artificial. People bury their problems and wash them down with alcohol, push themselves into drug-induced headspaces before they hit the ground even harder the next morning.’ She smiled and came close, took my hands and kissed me—tender and fierce at once. ’I’m real,’ she whispered. ’And we’re both in this world.’ Some bright light broke through the dark thinking. My demons shattered into a thousand pieces and made room for something green and healing breaking through the cold dead earth. I smiled for what felt like the first time in forever. ’See?’ she said, running ahead with her arms spread wide. ’Come on, let’s fly!’ she yelled around the corner. Wait for me. Sina was a whirlwind, like a kid. She reminded me of my own convictions, promises I’d lost living like this. Always cheerful, carefree, full of surprises. She was Ernie, I was Bert. She’d tell me to stop being such a Bert. In hindsight I enjoyed every minute with her, but the truth is she got on my nerves sometimes with how naïvely she saw everything. Maybe I was just jealous. I watched her pale body constantly, photographed it, touched it. I knew every freckle, every scar, every small hair. I knew how to stroke her belly to make her giggle like a chicken, which places she didn’t want touched, how to push her to quiet desperation and beyond, to orgasm. Sina was an open book for me, but so many pages were still unread, maybe blank. Those terrified me. Her past waiting somewhere, something I didn’t want to know about. Because it would change everything. It would destroy our world, end what we had. Monday, 3 August 2009. Bat for Lashes – Sleep Alone: Bat for Lashes has been on constant rotation since “Two Suns.” There’s something in the way Natasha Khan moves through those songs—the voice, the production, the way she builds a space and then just lets it exist. No excess. No need to prove anything. The “Sleep Alone” video gets it exactly right. It’s all mist and candlelight and that particular kind of melancholy that makes you want to sit with a glass of wine and actually pay attention to what you’re listening to. Not showy, not trying to impress—just the right mood for the right song. What gets me about her work is the restraint. She understands that you don’t need much to create an entire atmosphere. A good voice. The right kind of production. The space between the notes. Suddenly you’re somewhere else—quieter, better, more real. I’ve noticed lately that most of what I’m reaching for comes from female artists. Khan, Lykke Li, others in that world. I’m not sure what that says about my head these days, but I stopped trying to explain it. They’re just the ones making the music I actually need to hear. Monday, 3 August 2009. Muted: The “Boys and Girls” video is sharp. Models that look like they came off the Kate Moss assembly line, guys doing things with disco balls, locations that could be Berlin’s best club—it’s visually perfect. Pixie looks hot. Really fucking hot. You think you know where this is going. Then the sound starts. I don’t get it. She’s 18, blonde, built, genuinely talented, and she has everything to make something like Lykke Li or Robyn or Little Boots—something with an edge, something modern, something that actually lands. Instead she’s making bland pop that sounds engineered to offend no one. It completely betrays the world the video just sold you. You’re sitting in this cool underground space and the music sounds like a shopping mall. The whole album’s like that. “Turn It Up” is just this beige void. Either someone lets her make music that matches what she looks like, or British people get bored and move on. Until then, keep it muted and play La Roux over it. Sunday, 2 August 2009. Better in My Head: Sitting in a theater is one of the few places where you get to completely disappear into someone else’s world. For a couple hours you’re not yourself. You’re not thinking about rent or work or whatever’s broken at home. You’re just there, eyes forward, letting the screen do the work. The problem is that what they actually show you is almost never what you want to see. I’ve been thinking about the films that don’t exist. The ones you imagine. There’s this whole category of ideas that are too weird or too cheap or too unmarketable for anyone to actually make. Vegetarian aliens trying to explain their philosophy while obviously failing to convince anyone. Pirates with an allergy to saltwater. Megan Fox naked in a sci-fi film that’s actually worth watching. These are desires, some absurd and some just horny, but they’re all real. The gap between what exists and what we imagine is huge. Someone will always make another superhero movie, another romance, another heist. But nobody’s making the thing you actually want, the one that only makes sense in your head. Maybe that’s why people talk about making their own films—not because they love cinema particularly, but because they want to see the one specific impossible thing that’s stuck in their brain. I’ve never made a film. I’ve thought about it, obviously. But there’s something almost better about it living only in my head, where it can be perfect without any of the compromises that reality would bring. In my head, every cut works. Every shot means something. Every frame is exactly what I imagined. The second you try to actually make it, you’re already losing. Friday, 31 July 2009. My Name Is Sina: My closest friends describe me as a stubborn little bastard who gets obsessed with things and people with this sudden, intense passion, then drops them just as fast when I get bored. That’s probably fair. There aren’t many things that scare me, but the ones that do are serious. Worst one: the thought that I’ll end up richer than my father. Because in my head, money’s the culprit. That’s why he’s constantly flying around from one city to the next with an army of blonde, anorexic secretaries who aren’t much older than I am, while my actual family gets left behind. My mother doesn’t know he’s fucking at least half of those empty Barbie dolls, and maybe she doesn’t want to know. Either way, I’m terrified that money does that to you—turns you into him. The other big fear is kids. I don’t know how to be around them, don’t know what you’re supposed to do with them, and I definitely can’t handle the way these eight-year-old little shits either call me a slut or grab my ass at the bus stop. And if you smack them, they start crying and yell for their dad, who then looks at you with this mixture of disgust and creepy fucking arousal while he tears you apart. Great morning. But mostly—and I mean mostly—I’m terrified of my bikini coming off when I jump in a pool or a lake. That happened to my best friend Paula last summer. Now the whole school knows she’s got the biggest tits and the ugliest nipples on the planet. The precocious little bitches won’t shut up about it. Neither will Johnny, that self-proclaimed idiot and guaranteed future BILD reader of the year. Though at that exact moment, Johnny was busy doing something else. Riding me, grunting, nearly falling off the bed when he tried to finger me while he was at it. He gave up pretty quick. Better for both of us anyway—all he could do was slap his weight against my stomach like he thought it would accomplish something. At least I didn’t have to look him in the eye, which meant I had a moment to look out the open window at the park and think about things that actually mattered. Like whether Paula remembered that history presentation Dächler gave her. How many other women were on their hands and knees in front of some guy at that exact moment, counting clouds instead of paying attention. Whether I should use my Douglas voucher tonight for that new Calvin Klein perfume—the one that smells like vanilla and raspberry and works perfectly with my natural scent. I needed it. “Turn around, you sow,” Johnny says from somewhere, and before I can even think I’m on my back and his little dick is heading straight for my face in his disgusting bathroom. After I washed my face with warm water and grabbed a towel, I looked up and caught myself in the mirror. My deep green eyes staring back like they were judging me. I studied myself slowly while Rammstein played in the living room and weed smoke drifted in. And then it just became clear: I wasn’t just a redheaded girl whose pretty face was a cum receptacle. I had something—character, creativity, something real. And yeah, I had great tits. With that locked in me, I walked into the living room, grabbed my clothes, and ran past Johnny yelling “Fuck off, asshole!” and stumbled out into the courtyard. The elderly deaf couple sitting on the green bench across the way seemed to enjoy watching me get dressed outside. I took my time with it, pulled a cigarette from my pocket, and headed for the bus station. And if there’s even one little shit there, I swear to god. Tuesday, 28 July 2009. Evan Rachel Wood: Evan Rachel Wood is on her hands and knees in leather boots for Terry Richardson’s i-D shoot, completely nude, fingers in her mouth. This is the move now—you want to matter again, you take your clothes off for a magazine. Lily Allen did it. Lady Gaga did it. Now Wood. I’ve been into her since “Thirteen.” The feeling stuck even through the years when she basically disappeared and didn’t make anything worth watching. There’s something about seeing her back that works, even if the path back is through nudity. The photos have this confidence to them. She’s completely at ease, unselfconscious. That matters more than whatever specific body the photographer is selling. Small breasts are fashionable now, apparently, and she wears it like she owns it. I’m waiting to see who’s next. That’s always how this goes—one person does it and suddenly everyone has to do it. The cycle keeps moving, just finds new people to feed it. Monday, 27 July 2009. Treat Me Like Your Mother: The Dead Weather announcement should’ve grabbed me. Jack White from the White Stripes, Dean Fertita from Queens of the Stone Age, Alison Mosshart from the Kills—all in one band. On paper, it made sense. But nothing happened. I didn’t care. I’d seen the White Stripes live years ago. They were terrible. The announcement felt like more of that—big names looking cool without the music to back it up. Then the second single hit. “Treat Me Like Your Mother.” Jack and Alison trading vocals, the rhythm grinding underneath, the whole thing so impossibly cool I wanted to sink into the floor. Got the album immediately—Horehound, mid-July. All black now, apocalyptic leather jacket, threatening boots, the works. Full commitment. Hell’s Angels adoption pending, dramatic future assured. Just need to track down some nice Uzis. Friday, 24 July 2009. Voting for Strangers: Bebe Generation was one of those mid-2000s things that felt inevitable—stick some attractive young people in shared apartments, let viewers vote on who joins, offer prizes to people who participate. I probably would’ve watched it. The whole premise was utterly transparent about what it was: just the spectacle of watching other people’s lives, nothing more, nothing less. You got to vote, you might win a digicam, that was the deal. There was something almost respectable about that honesty, before reality television got anxious about its own existence and started insisting its spectacles actually meant something. Wednesday, 22 July 2009. On Nick Gazin: I’m a fan of Nicholas Gazin, though I honestly can’t say why. Maybe his sense of style—he’s 25, making art in New York’s underground, so he pretty much has to dress well. Or maybe because he mentioned in some VICE feature that he pulls naked pictures of ex-girlfriends off the internet and turns them into drawings. That tracks. His work is basically the visual equivalent of intrusive thoughts. Crucified eyes. Mutilated bodies. Exhausted skeletons. Brain-eating demons. Possessed ice cream. Murderous plums. Goddesses licking fried eggs with their feet. Rockets plowing into enormous hairy vaginas. Dead Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All rendered in this meticulous style, like he’s just transcribing whatever fever-dream bullshit is floating around in his head. And it’s working. Female admirers across the world. Real exhibitions. Actual gallery shows. So yeah, I’m starting to get it. Maybe it’s the Facebook profile picture. He’s genuinely got one of the best profile pictures ever taken. That must be it. Case closed. Tuesday, 21 July 2009. Watching: I wasn’t really following Mischa Barton by the time the news broke. The O.C. had ended years before, and she’d drifted into that strange zone where actors you used to see everywhere just quietly disappear. Bad movies, failed pilots, that slow fade the industry does so well. Then the story landed—attempted suicide—and I felt that helpless sting you get when celebrity makes you aware of someone’s real suffering from a distance you can’t cross. There’s nothing to do with knowledge like that. You’re not her friend. I’d watched her perform a character on television when I was younger. The gap between that and actually mattering in someone’s life is almost total. But you sit with it anyway because she’s a real person and something terrible happened and you used to know her name, so now you know her pain too, and there’s no equation that lets you do anything with it. I don’t think about her much anymore. The news cycle carried on. Sometimes you contemplate people and what happens to them and then you forget, and that forgetting feels like a small betrayal of the caring, except caring from outside was never real anyway. It was always just watching. Saturday, 18 July 2009. Crazy Ones: The ones who see things differently. That’s how it starts—noticing someone who doesn’t fit, who paints a wall at three in the morning because something inside them demanded color, who drives naked through dark streets with their best friends just to feel alive, who screams in an empty field until their lungs give out because joy or pain has to go somewhere. These moments don’t make sense to anyone but the person inside them. They’re not prudent. They don’t look good on paper. But they’re the ones you remember—the ones that convince you that you actually exist, that something in you still moves on its own. Most of us feel it, sure. That impulse to act without permission from ourselves. But we kill it with one question: what will people think? And then we spend the next thirty years remembering the thing we didn’t do, which somehow feels worse than failing at something reckless. But if you actually believe your own life is worth living, there’s a moment where you stop asking. You kiss them. You leave. You paint the wall. You take the money and go somewhere. You get the tattoo. You say the thing you’ve been editing in your head for six months. You risk something because staying small has already cost you more than losing could ever take. I’m not saying it always works out. Sometimes it’s terrible. Sometimes you’re sick with regret. But at least you know. At least something actually happened to you instead of just passing through. The misfits, the rebels, the ones who don’t fit in the square holes—they’re not trying to be special. They’re just tired of apologizing for being alive. Wednesday, 15 July 2009. It’s Too Hot: Summer heat makes you stupid. All you want is cold water and something—anything—to keep your brain from running. Trashy photographs of beautiful women, celebrity gossip, weird internet stuff, doesn’t matter. The heat does that to you. Turns you into someone who needs entertainment the way you need ice water. Not because you suddenly have taste. Because you need to not think. Tuesday, 14 July 2009. Still Going Out: The video for “22” opens on someone who’s already done the math on their life. Almost thirty, getting ready to go out again, knowing exactly what won’t happen tonight but going anyway. Lily Allen made this when she understood that specific exhaustion—not about being young, just about the pointless motion of still trying. What gets me is the straightness of it. No winking, no clever self-awareness. Allen wrote a pop song about desperation in your late twenties and didn’t apologize for it. The hook sticks because it’s confessional in a way that makes you uncomfortable. You recognize yourself in it immediately. The video’s almost hard to watch. A woman, almost thirty, still beautiful, already done. Every night out another failed attempt to convince yourself you’re still in the game. It’s bleak but it’s honest, which might be worse. I remember thinking this shouldn’t work—pop songs aren’t supposed to be this true. But “22” existed for a moment in that space between cynicism and hope where most of us actually live, the part nobody sings about on the radio. Allen’s gift was making that unbearable feeling into something you’d listen to on repeat. Sunday, 12 July 2009. The Playboy and the Country Girl: Found an old yearbook entry that describes me and Hannah from senior year, and it’s disorienting to see yourself rendered in that particular voice—earnest and cataloging, mixing affection with mockery the way teenage chroniclers do. They’ve captured the essentials. I was the guy with the Mac obsession, the iPod permanently attached, constantly disappearing into Japanese media and somehow managing to turn some of that into actual video work on our school trip. The apples thing is real—I apparently just carried them around and distributed them like some kind of edible hype man. The charm they mention about being popular with girls, that was happening, though I was aware of it happening, which probably means I was less charming than I thought. The distraction in class was real too. There was this guy next to me who made it impossible to focus, and I’d given up fighting it. Then there’s Hannah’s entry, and they’re really going for the full treatment. Country girl from Stotten in her Elvis car, the one with the underpowered engine she could never quite control, always driving out to the countryside to rescue Angelika from the middle of nowhere. She’s loud about everything, doesn’t apologize for it, Black Eyed Peas blasting while she avoids your calls because her schedule’s packed with actual living. The yearbook gets playful when they describe her social life—the men she danced with, the hotel rooms in Prague, the casual cruelty of calling girls names and then battling them. It’s trying to capture something wild and uncontained, and they’re doing it by listing infractions and adventures like evidence at trial. What actually lands, reading this now, is how specific the observations are. The apples. The videos. Hannah’s laughter cracking open social studies class. The Elvis car. Angelika always needing a ride. These are details that felt enormous and now feel like proof that we existed. The yearbook was doing the only thing yearbooks can do—preserving the texture of specific people at a specific moment, even if they got the tone slightly wrong. There’s something unsettling about being read so literally. They’ve made me and Hannah into characters, types—the tech guy, the party girl—and there’s enough truth in it that it stings a little. I was all of those things. But reading it now, I feel like I’m looking at someone else, someone I used to wear like a suit. The Mac obsession has faded. The Japanese media thing is still there but quieter now. The charm has either developed into something else or evaporated entirely, I’m not sure which. Hannah probably hasn’t changed as much. Or maybe she has and I just remember the version of her that lived loud, that didn’t calculate, that showed up in her weird car and picked up Angelika and called women names and danced like she owned the room. The yearbook tried to make it charming and ridiculous, which was fair. It was both. Saturday, 11 July 2009. Lily Allen Strips: There was a magazine spread with Lily Allen naked in it, somewhere around the late 2000s. She did it because she wanted to, and that was the whole story. What you had to understand about Lily was that she’d never pretended to be anything other than what she was. No surgeries, no careful management of her image, no strategic vulnerability. She was crude and sexual and funny and wouldn’t apologize for any of it. If you didn’t like it, you could fuck off. So of course she’d say yes to a magazine that wanted to photograph her naked. Of course she wouldn’t care what people thought about her body or whether she’d had work done or any of that. That level of just… not needing the world’s approval, it made everything she did feel sharper. The crudeness wasn’t performed. The refusal to conform wasn’t a brand. She just lived that way. I respected that about her. Still do. There’s something clarifying about watching someone who doesn’t need to convince you of anything. Friday, 10 July 2009. The Boss: Spent the day bouncing between German government offices—the trade office, the chamber of commerce, the tax office. Made phone calls that seemed to reach every corner of the world. Most of it was tedious, but the genuinely weird part was that everyone I talked to actually knew what they were doing and was helpful, which I wasn’t expecting at all. When I finally stepped outside after the paperwork was finished and everything was signed, the clouds just broke open and sun poured down over Berlin. That’s when it sank in. This blog is now officially a registered business. I can write proper invoices. I’m the boss. It sounds ridiculous until you’re standing in actual sunlight and it clicks that it’s real, and then it feels kind of sexy. Even my neighbor, who’s pretty far gone mentally, wished me luck when she heard, and in her condition that carries weight. The first thing I did as my official CEO was buy the Steve Jobs biography. I’m writing it off as a business expense, naturally, calling it professional development or required reading or whatever makes the accountant stop asking questions. I studied business administration once, which apparently prepared me for nothing, but I figured reading about a dead billionaire might magically fill in the gaps. It won’t. But the receipt is getting deducted anyway. Thursday, 9 July 2009. My Dream, Your Escape: I can’t stop breathing. In and out. Forever. Until you discover me buried in my own soul, finally feel how much I love you, how nobody else will ever matter, how you’ll send the vultures away. My nightmares shift and mutate—coughing trees, blonde girls, graceful horses. When I open my eyes the powder sits scattered beside you. Your breasts glow blue in the moonlight, a sight I haven’t seen in forever. I watch for hours, the careful rise and fall of your body, the rhythm of your being. The one-sided helplessness from the great tremor is gone. My head’s clear again, full of the murky thoughts that’ve been running through it. How much everything could change—you, me, both of us. Next to your reddish-blonde hair Hugo sleeps and smiles, a thread of drool at his mouth. A hunger I can’t shake tears through me. Cheeseburgers, greasy pizza, bratwurst loaded with eggs and noodles. I almost puke from wanting. I get up without kissing your forehead and walk naked through the apartment. The fridge is full of beer, Red Bull, champagne. Nothing edible anywhere. The room starts to spin, the cold light boring into my stomach, my lungs, my legs. I collapse on the floor and start to cry, starving. When Sina finds me the next morning curled like a fetus in front of the open fridge, she starts kissing me everywhere, doesn’t stop until I open my eyes and take her head in both hands and look deep into those ocean-blue eyes. Infinite stars shine in them, the end of the world, the meaning of everything is close enough to touch. My parents begin singing something joyful, dolphins leap around. Before I can finally speak the secret of our entire existence, the doorbell rings. Sina smiles, gets up, opens it without bothering to cover herself. The postman doesn’t flinch. He hands her a package and says goodbye the way he always does—polite and completely indifferent to both of us. I feel ashamed. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’ll order us a pizza if you want.” It takes almost an hour before I have something edible between my teeth. We sit on the couch and watch The O.C. on DVD. The sun blazes through the huge windows of the old apartment. The TV tower looms on the horizon. When Ryan holds Marissa while she’s dying I run to the bathroom and vomit into the tub. It seems more fitting for what I’m doing. Sina follows me and we sleep on the cold tile floor. When I’m done she asks me: “Promise me it’ll stay like this forever?” I nod without speaking. She gets off me. The package holds the expensive camera I’d ordered online. It’s beautiful and the first thing I photograph is Sina cleaning the bathroom. Every time I look at these photos now I get a sharp pain in my chest, that overwhelming terrible feeling of why I didn’t take better care of her. Why I wasn’t there when it happened. Monday, 6 July 2009. Stillness Is The Move: Fell asleep with this song playing and ended up in the most vivid dream because of it. All color and motion and light, the kind you can’t hold onto once you wake up. If I’d managed to remember any of it, that would be my next film. No luck. I’ve never quite grasped what Dirty Projectors is actually about. The band exists since 2002, but Dave Longstreth just seems to cycle through musicians constantly—the list of former members is endless. It’s hard to keep track of who’s actually in it at any point. But “Stillness Is The Move” just lands. Something about it gets to you. The video’s similarly strange—there’s a frontwoman who’s genuinely hot, same oddball timing as with Those Dancing Days, and apparently that’s a recurring pattern for me. There’s also some animal in the video that could be a llama, maybe an alpaca, possibly a crane. No idea what it actually is. Let’s call it Udo. That’s about all I have for this one. The song did its thing, the dream did its thing, and now I’m left with whatever this is. Sunday, 5 July 2009. Run Run: It’s hot in Berlin right now—the kind of heat where everyone gets stupid and talks about nothing but the weather. Fruit flies. Headaches. Sweat through your clothes. I’m at breakfast convinced that sangria is the solution. It won’t be. Since nobody’s managing anything beyond weather talk, I’m dropping this instead: Those Dancing Days, five Swedish women with a song called “Run Run” from last year. It does what a summer track is supposed to do—nothing difficult, just something that plays while you’re trying not to think about the sun. Linnea Jonsson is the singer. There’s something about her in the video that makes me want to run my fingers through her hair, and I’m admitting that plainly because I’ve never said that about a musician before. Crude, true, and that’s the moment. The song itself is good. Simple and it works, which right now is all you need. The kind of thing that almost justifies drinking sangria at breakfast. Almost. Saturday, 4 July 2009. San Fernando: Went to a premiere in Berlin last night for a documentary called 9to5: Days in Porn, shot by a Munich director named Jens Hoffmann. He spent a year and a half in San Fernando Valley following the industry—cameras rolling on porn sets, the work, the repetition, the money. Sasha Grey was in it. Bastian found it dead boring. He said it felt like German television, one of those earnest Sunday-afternoon reports about ordinary jobs that’s supposed to make you think. The kind of program you’d stumble on between game shows. He wasn’t wrong, exactly. I didn’t mind it. Some of it was funny by accident, some of it was just interesting to watch. I spent most of my time watching Sasha Grey, not really thinking about the filmmaker’s point or what he was trying to say about the industry. Just looking at her. That was enough. Bastian was probably right that it wasn’t saying anything new. But I got something else out of it, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. We walked out without really talking about it. He was ready to move on. I was still thinking about what I’d been watching. Apparently she has something called Sasha Grey’s Anatomy now. I probably won’t watch it. But I’ll remember sitting in that cinema while Bastian checked his phone and I didn’t, while we saw the same film and came away with completely different things. Friday, 3 July 2009. One More Chance: I loved Bloc Party. Not just liked—I was actually into them, played their records constantly. ’Two More Years,’ ’The Prayer,’ ’Blue Light.’ They had something that didn’t let go. ’One More Chance’ hit exactly right. The hook landed, the production was clean. It worked. The video was weird and I never figured out what it was trying to be. Didn’t matter though. The song is the thing. Friday, 3 July 2009. Happy Birthday Lindsay Lohan: I was out there defending you like crazy for months before your 23rd birthday, while everyone else had completely given up. All the scandals, the rehab, all those tabloid disasters—they were sure you were finished. I wasn’t. And you actually pulled it off. The drugs stopped, the drinking slowed, those awful paparazzi moments where you forgot your underwear disappeared. I was genuinely proud. Even though I’ll admit that watching you spiral was way more entertaining than watching you get your life together. So here’s what I wanted for you at 23: stop drinking so much, stop using, and wear some fucking underwear. Do those things and maybe you actually get your movie career back and move your life forward. That’s the whole point of getting sober anyway, right. Thursday, 2 July 2009. Fuck Me I’m Famous: I need to confess something dark and embarrassing. While everyone’s out here stealing clothes from celebrities they’re obsessed with, I’ve got my extremely cool love for Nora Tschirner on one side and this whole shadow collection of crushes on the other. Sometimes—okay, fine, often—I’m into people like Collien Fernandes, Sandy Meyer-Wölden, and occasionally even Gülcan, as long as she’s not talking. But wait, there’s more. When the planets align just right and it’s the year of the pig or whatever, I’ll even admit to having a thing for Giulia Siegel. I can’t help it. She’s tall, blonde, lean, drinks cold beer, loves dark chocolate and jungle expeditions, posed for Playboy, and works as a wildly successful DJ. Who says no to that? Apparently 60 other desperate guys—I’m usually not in this category, but whatever—because they’re about to try their luck on ProSieben’s Giulia In Love, where they’ll basically be competing to get with Ralph Siegel’s daughter starting tomorrow at 8:15 PM. My odds just went from slim to none, so I guess I’m stuck with Nora. As for those poor bastards on the show, I wish them well. Send me a postcard when you make it to the top. Wednesday, 1 July 2009. Clean About It: Berlin Fashion Week brings the same machinery every year—certain clubs become necessary places, photographers work the door with purpose, magazines throw parties where you get free drinks if you’re on the list. The setup is predictable and nobody pretends otherwise. Getting invited to these things means making a quick calculation. Are the DJs worth the time? Is the crowd going to be unbearable? Will I spend four hours waiting for ten minutes of something real? These are real questions and the answer is usually some version of yes. Magazines running these parties have to offer you something—free tickets, drinks, some kind of access. The whole economy is transparent. Nobody pretends they’re there for any other reason, and there’s something clean about that. Everyone showed up for exactly the same thing everyone knows they showed up for, and nobody feels the need to pretend otherwise. I liked some of the old music press because of that directness. The people writing there cared about what they were covering. They were crude about it—joking loudly about what they wanted in the magazine, what was missing—not as performance but because they genuinely didn’t care if anyone outside the office was listening. Berlin’s party scene during fashion week works because everyone’s honest about it. The DJs are usually good. The crowd is usually interesting. And there’s freedom in that clarity—everyone knowing exactly why everyone else is there. Monday, 29 June 2009. Just Let Them Win: Daybreakers is about vampires finally taking over the world, and Ethan Hawke’s in it, and honestly—the vampires deserve it. For centuries they’ve been the bottom of the food chain. Dracula’s the villain, Blade hunts them, crosses and garlic and sunlight, priests with holy water. They got locked up, tortured, fed that watered-down blood bank garbage instead of the real thing. Humiliated. Hunted. Never catching a break. Then it flips. The vampires win. Humans are the livestock, and yeah, people get hurt, systems collapse. That’s the deal when the power shifts. But the moment—the actual moment—they’re in charge, here come the humans trying to take it back. A hunter switches sides, probably some complicated romance, the whole resistance gear spinning up. Can’t let the monsters have this one. It’s the same reflex every time. The need to be the ones winning, to be the story. The vampires get one turn and we’re immediately plotting to take it away. Just let them keep it. See what they actually do with the planet. Maybe it’s worse, maybe it’s the same—but for once, why not let something else be in charge? Saturday, 27 June 2009. The King of Pop: I remember hearing it on breakfast TV that morning, the anchor mentioning it casually, and not really taking it in at first. Michael Jackson had died. Cardiac arrest. His body just stopped. The internet exploded. Twitter crashed under the weight of people trying to process it all at once. Everyone’s feeds flooded with the same news, the same shock, the same “I can’t believe it.” But that digital chaos felt distant to me. I was still just standing there with coffee, trying to make it real. Whatever he’d become in his final years, whatever the tabloids had done to him or he’d done to himself, he was still the King of Pop. Still the voice on records millions of people grew up with. Thriller. Bad. Billie Jean. The moonwalk. The whole world had watched him change from a kid in the Jackson 5 to something else entirely, something untouchable and strange. What got me wasn’t the news cycles or the internet mourning. It was thinking about all the people who’d grown up with him, who’d learned dance moves from his videos, who’d felt something shift in pop culture because of him. That was permanent. That doesn’t get undone. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. Just quiet about it. Friday, 26 June 2009. Guess Her: I found this website once where you guess women’s pubic hair styles from photos. Brazil, Hollywood, or hairless. That’s the whole thing. Just that. Someone built it, someone hosted it, and presumably someone played it, which means there was an audience for this specific niche. What struck me wasn’t the crudeness—the internet is crude, always has been—but the precision of the fetish. Not just naked women (that’s everywhere), but specifically the arbitration of grooming styles. Someone had identified this exact microgenre of desire and built infrastructure around it. A game. A ranking system. Presumably a leaderboard. It’s the kind of thing that makes you understand how the web actually works. Not the aspirational version where it connects humanity and distributes information, but the messy version where someone codes up exactly what they want to see and finds out they’re not alone. There’s something almost honest about it. No pretense. No narrative. Just the thing itself. I didn’t play it. I looked at it for maybe thirty seconds, impressed by the commitment to a very specific vision, and moved on. But I keep thinking about whoever built it, sitting down and thinking: I’m going to make this. This exact thing. And they did. The internet let them. That’s the real story. Wednesday, 24 June 2009. Foot Fetishist: There’s this moment in “Earthquake” where the synth comes in and you know you’re going to be listening to this album on repeat. Little Boots’ debut “Hands” is tearing through the UK right now, about to hit Germany, and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard in years. Her single “New In Town” has been everywhere for weeks, but the album is where the real depth is. She sits somewhere between Ladyhawke, Annie, and La Roux—that bright, synthed-out electro-pop moment that shouldn’t work as well as it does. There are patches where it veers into pretty straightforward pop that loses me a little, but the overall feeling is one of relief. Someone finally made this kind of music feel fun again, feel lighter than air without being weightless, and it turns out that’s exactly what I needed to hear. Part of why this lands so hard is that electro-pop has been a mess for a while. Swallowed by worse impulses, stretched too thin, turned into something that felt effortful and desperate. Victoria Hesketh just ignores all that and makes the album she wants to make—clever and pop and unafraid of being pretty—and suddenly the whole genre feels new again. “Remedy” hits just as hard as “Earthquake,” but there’s a hidden track called “Hands” that shows something darker and more uncertain, and it reframes everything that came before. She clearly knows what she’s doing in ways that matter—not just hitting the technical beats but understanding what a pop song can actually hold if you don’t oversell it. She has that thing where you can tell she’s going to matter without needing anyone to tell you that. Just the confidence in how she moves through these songs, the way nothing sounds like an accident. The kind of artist you become completely insufferable about—not because a magazine told you to, but because you heard three minutes and suddenly you can’t stop. Sunday, 21 June 2009. Lily Allen – Fuck You: Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” video doesn’t show Lily. You get the track—that precise synth line, her voice making each profanity cut clean—and you get the concept: Paris destroyed, strangers insulted, everything in its path wrecked. But the wrecking is handled by animation or claymation or whatever. The video just lets her voice sit there and work. No faces, no performance, just the song being lethal on its own. I was always into her though. There’s something in Lily Allen’s early stuff—this crude, unpolished confidence—that you almost never see. She wasn’t performing coolness or trying to be precious or clever in that winking way. She was just there, blunt about what she wanted and what she thought, and she didn’t seem to care if anyone liked it. That kind of honesty is rare. The video’s smart because it trusts both the song and the audience. If it was Lily making angry faces at the camera the whole time, it’d collapse. Instead there’s just the principle of it, the chaos, the destruction, the fuck-you of it all. She gets out of her own way. Sometimes that’s the right move. Saturday, 20 June 2009. Three Moods: Subways, Amanda Blank, and Crookers at Astra for the Levi’s Berlin Unbuttoned Tour. Britpop, Berlin electronics, beat production—three completely different moods in one room because Levi’s was throwing money at live music. Unusual enough to be worth noticing. Friday, 19 June 2009. Delete, Don’t Block: The government passed an internet censorship law yesterday. The justification is child protection—the only argument that ever works in these situations, because who’s going to vote against protecting children? But the law doesn’t actually protect anyone. It just gives the state legal authority to block websites whenever it wants. Child exploitation is real and it deserves to be stopped. But this isn’t how you stop it. You need investigation and courts, people who actually know what they’re looking at. Censorship just makes it disappear. The problem is that once you’ve built the machine to block one thing, you’ve built it to block everything. Same infrastructure, same legal justification. Today it’s child porn, tomorrow it’s political speech or news someone in power doesn’t like. You’ve already proved you’re willing to censor. China didn’t build a surveillance state through technology—they built it one reasonable law at a time. The Pirate Party is organizing protests tomorrow. Delete Instead of Block. I don’t expect it to work. Probably won’t. But I’m tired of how easily people accept this, so I’m going to go stand around with some people who still have a problem with it. Friday, 19 June 2009. What Brings You Here: I wanted to write something different this time. Actually try, you know. Not just perverted nonsense and crude word-salad. But that’s not how this works. You’re all just little pigs. The searches are what you’d expect. Sexual positions mixed with cartoon characters, someone looking for Japanese washing machines for absolutely no reason, diet tips for self-haters, teenagers asking medical questions about their own bodies in broken grammar. There’s someone convinced they’re a kebab, and someone else searching for help with suicidal thoughts—both ending up here because the algorithm couldn’t figure out where else to put them. These searches don’t know what they want. They’re chasing something that doesn’t exist, and Google’s best guess was me. It’s strange when you think about it long enough. All these random people—horny, confused, desperate—crashing into this site because the internet has no better options for their specific disasters. I’ve been running something online for two decades and I still can’t make sense of it. The pervert, the confused kid, the person with a medical emergency they can’t articulate, the person mid-crisis. They all find their way here. Maybe that’s more honest than anything I could manufacture on purpose. Wednesday, 17 June 2009. The Deal: Vany from Essen - I can’t stop looking at her picture. Reminds me of someone, which is probably why. She’s one of about forty girls applying for these bebe apartments, and right now the whole internet’s voting on whether they make the cut. Friday’s the deadline, final decision July 13th. It’s peak early 2000s internet culture. The premise is stupid and perfect: hot girls in shared apartments, public voting, beautiful girls get picked based on looks. No framing, no pretense - that’s just the deal. You wouldn’t package it like this now, but back then it was… honest. What you see is what you get. The funny part is how the original post handles it. The blogger’s obviously into Vany, then does this thing where he’s like, “I’m not going to push you to vote for her (VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!) because I’m being totally neutral.” It’s self-aware about the whole stupid beautiful mess and doesn’t apologize for it. That’s the real energy. Tuesday, 16 June 2009. Nora: She’d talk about trying to look withdrawn and melancholic when she was out, trying to seem like someone turned inward. And then someone would speak to her and the whole thing would collapse. She’d talk. The woman was talkative, genuinely surprised by her own talkativeness, but unbothered by it. That contradiction—between what she presented and who she actually was—is what stuck with me about her. Not her professional work, not the specific roles, but that gap between public and private. You could see it in interviews. “Sometimes I try to look antisocial in public,” she said once. “But then someone talks to me.” And later: “I like staying home. I’m fine being antisocial. I don’t answer calls, I move my appointments around.” No apology. No performance of regret. Just the fact of it. What surprised me was the unselfconscious quality of it. She wasn’t ashamed of the contradiction. She just acknowledged it, plainly. In the same way, she said things like: “I don’t have any sympathy for people lazy enough to form their music taste from music videos.” That’s not a statement made by someone trying to be liked. It’s someone saying what she actually thinks, and if you don’t like it, that’s fine. There’s a particular kind of public figure you follow without ever really knowing them. You see them in work, read something they said, get a sense of how they think—and you start imagining you know something real about who they are. You don’t. You just know what they chose to show you. In her case, what she showed was someone uninterested in the work of being liked. That kind of honesty about contradictions—being someone no one would predict, having preferences people might question, not pretending—that’s rare. By the time you realize someone mattered to you as a public figure, they’ve already moved on. The internet’s moved on. You’re left with old interviews and work you can’t always find, with this strange sense that you were paying attention all along, but in a way that felt invisible. Monday, 15 June 2009. Sorry I Missed Your Party: I turned the weekend into a deliberate refusal to do anything. No invitations to decline, no strategic excuses—just staying home, asking nothing of myself. And I found this Tumblr called Sorry I Missed Your Party that collects photos from parties, the ones that nobody stages. The tunnel starer, the person asleep against a wall with a smile, someone who’d apparently committed their entire being to being a whale in a bathtub. What hooks me is that they’re edited soft, almost tender, which makes the whole thing feel less like documentation and more like evidence of something real. Evidence that people actually soften around each other, that the whole strange ritual of gathering and drinking and existing in the same small space is its own kind of legitimate thing. You see someone completely wasted and completely at peace, and you understand something about what they came for. It wasn’t the image. It was five minutes of not performing. I could have been at a party that weekend. Instead I spent it looking at pictures of other people being themselves around each other, and that felt closer to the actual thing than showing up would have. Sunday, 7 June 2009. Lenka – The Show: I have no idea who Lenka is—some Australian pop artist living in LA who apparently hosted Cheez TV. She’s got a new song called “The Show” that does everything pop is supposed to do: bright, catchy, designed to stick with you on the first listen. It works perfectly at what it’s made for. Just not something I’d be looking for when I actually want to listen to music. Not sure why this landed in my feed, but here it is. Friday, 5 June 2009. In & Out: You make these lists to mark what stuck in a particular moment. Looking back, most of it’s dated—tangled up in German references and a year you can’t fully reconstruct. But that’s the point. It’s proof you were paying attention, alive in a specific way. Thursday, 4 June 2009. The Virgin Suicides: I found The Virgin Suicides at Media Markt for five marks in the remainder section. The kind of place you drift into on an afternoon with nowhere better to be. Sofia Coppola’s debut, and I’d been meaning to watch it again for years. There’s something Coppola does where she finds the most beautiful moment inside something fundamentally dark, and holds the camera there until you can’t look away. The Virgin Suicides is about five girls sealed in a house by their paranoid parents, and what longing becomes when it has nowhere to go. She shoots them close—faces, clothes, objects in rooms. There’s something voyeuristic about it, honest in a way that makes you uncomfortable. This is how they register to the boys outside the house. This is how memory exaggerates them. The film is made from those neighbors’ recollections years later, moving through them like you’re inside a half-awake dream, a memory of a memory. It’s suffocating and beautiful. The Air soundtrack gets it because it sounds like longing itself—synths caught between pretty and mournful, refusing to choose. What matters is how the film treats its subjects as people, not symbols. They’re just young, bored, trapped, and eventually defeated. Kirsten Dunst is luminous here in a way that rarely surfaces again—something about this moment, this role. You understand why the boys next door were destroyed by them. You end up just as destroyed watching. Wednesday, 3 June 2009. Celestine: Celestine is 21, from DC, studies design, and models for SuicideGirls. She dislikes cheese for reasons unknown to me, loves Kill Hannah, is apparently fine with cheap vodka and casual sex. None of it seems to bother her much. What strikes me is that she’s not trying to be two different people. Most artists I know split themselves in half—respectable at school, anything goes in private. She just moves through both spaces like there’s nothing to reconcile. Maybe there isn’t. Wednesday, 3 June 2009. Mian Mian: Mian Mian is the only writer who’s ever really gotten into me the way she does. I keep her books within reach—“Your Night, My Day” and “La la la”—because I need to disappear into those rough, unflinching stories about sex and drugs and people trying to make sense of being alive. There’s no distance in her prose, no safety. It’s all exposed nerve. She writes about Shanghai’s party scene with this combination of tenderness and wreckage. The characters are young, they’re looking for connection, and they’re using whatever’s available—sex, drugs, each other—to feel something true. The writing is casual and brutal at the same time, which is how actual living feels if you’re paying attention. Her new book, “Panda Sex,” came out in German recently. It follows two sisters and their friends through that same Shanghai underworld, this time involving some literal virus that throws everything into chaos. It’s vintage Mian Mian—the setup doesn’t matter as much as what it lets her explore: desire, risk, the gap between who you want to be and who you actually are. Her publisher describes it as tracing a generation that craves love but can’t face the vulnerability it requires. That’s close to right, though “can’t face it” undersells the active running away. I don’t know what makes one writer land with you and another bounce off. But Mian Mian landed. Everything she writes feels like the conversation you actually want to have, the one nobody pretends to have in public. Tuesday, 2 June 2009. Filippa Smeds Backstage: I’ve got a thing for Filippa Smeds. Swedish redhead, something about it just works. She was in a backstage video shoot put together by photographer Emma Svensson—a whole lineup of models including Linn Gustafsson, Emma Elwin, Emma Nygren, Karoline Andersson, Sandra Hansson, Miriam Assai, Signe Siemsen, and Cissi Wallin. Quick behind-the-scenes thing, but worth watching. There’s something about video that photos don’t capture. The way someone actually moves, how they shift their weight, these tiny gestures that matter more than you’d expect. Watching Filippa made me remember why I liked her in the first place. I’ve been into The Sonnets lately too—Swedish band, summer sound—though it’s been raining nonstop, which kind of kills the whole summer thing. But that’s not really the point. Point is I ordered her T-shirt. Seemed like the right move. Monday, 1 June 2009. Use Your Brain: Went into Berlin today to actually buy some clothes, which after too long felt like something that needed doing. The city was a zoo. Every other person was either trying to sell you something, recruit you, or had faster hands than eyes. I just moved through it all with my head down. Found what I was looking for without much trouble. A white shirt, a checked one that looks like a kitchen towel but works under my black sweater, and this ridiculous branded shirt from some charity campaign that came with condoms printed with celebrity faces. Nothing special. Took an hour, cost less than it should have. Waiting to pay, I caught myself already composing it in my head—how I’d describe it, what I’d say about it, how it all fit together. Which meant I was becoming the exact thing I’d spent the last year mocking. Every idiot with a camera and a blog was posting thrifted garbage as vintage, filling the internet with the same tired style, and there I was about to do the exact same thing. Except I knew it was stupid. That was supposed to be the difference. I could see how oversaturated it all was, how performative, how ridiculous the whole fashion-blogging thing had become. And I was doing it anyway, knowingly and ironically, which just meant I was complicit like everyone else but at least I could be honest about it. The clothes were fine, though. They fit. They looked fine. That was enough. Saturday, 30 May 2009. Bye Bye Scala: Lisa Wassmann, a photographer and Scala regular, shot the last gasping moments of the place into something beautiful—a short film packed with flashes of the actual night, people saying goodbye, and stickers torn off the walls. The kind of footage that catches the sweat and the light and the specific animal energy of a room that’s about to stop existing. You watch it and your eyes burn a little. The Scala was always the kind of place that didn’t apologize for what it was. Loud, crude, built on the premise that a night could be genuinely wrong and genuinely good at the same time. People went there to lose something or find something, usually both. Clubs like that don’t sustain themselves on good management or smart decisions. They survive on momentum and a kind of collective weirdness, and when that dies, there’s nothing to resurrect it with. I never lived in Berlin, never actually spent a night there drinking and dancing and pressing against strangers’ bodies while the sound system tried to vibrate you into a different person. But I knew people who did, and I knew the type of place it was—the kind you hear stories about years later, always slightly exaggerated, always sounding like the best night or the worst night of someone’s life. The Scala had that weight. It mattered in a way most venues don’t. There’s something perversely perfect about having a photographer there to document the ending, someone who was part of the place shooting it as it vanished. Not archival footage, not a documentary about the club as a historical object, but just her eye on the final hours. The people there knew they were losing it. They were paying attention. That’s different from nostalgia, which is easier and emptier. Whatever Scala was—the music, the debauchery, the specific way bodies moved in that space—it’s gone now. The footage is a window, but windows just remind you that you’re on the wrong side of the glass. Thursday, 28 May 2009. Wrong Hands: I watch the postal truck and know before he even stops that my package isn’t making it to my apartment. The postman doesn’t actually look at addresses. He just buzzes, waits for any door to open, hands whatever he’s holding to whoever answers, and drives off. My building number is on the box. My apartment number is on the door. Doesn’t matter. So somewhere in this building, my package is waiting. On a shelf behind junk. On top of a refrigerator. Opened by someone who hoped it was theirs. I’ll knock on doors until I find it, or someone will eventually leave a note, or I’ll just give up and order a replacement. The worst part is not knowing what got routed away. Could be a book I’d forgotten about. Could be something I’ve been waiting for. Could be a lottery ticket wrapped up as a diamond. Could be a donor liver I desperately need. Could be stacks of those old AOL CDs that promised five hundred hours of free internet and seemed like the most important thing in the world in 1996. The postman doesn’t care. He’s not thinking about any of this. Sometimes I imagine what would actually work. The postman shows up, finds me specifically, has fought through deserts and jungles to deliver my package, arrives at my door covered in blood and sweat but victorious, gasps out “Here, your package,” and then collapses knowing he’s finally done his job right. That’s what I want. Even if the box just contains a Pokemon cookbook. It’s the principle. But he doesn’t care. Nobody does. My packages stay lost somewhere in the building, and I stay in this state of uncertainty, and nothing ever changes. Wednesday, 27 May 2009. Girls in Sneakers: Ballerinas flatten women’s feet, heels don’t suit most people, and flip-flops look cheap. So if you’re into sneakers on women—and I have been, specifically white Adidas—there’s really only one option. The difference is just enormous. I found Sneaker Girls at some point, this whole corner of the internet dedicated to women in colorful sportswear and clean kicks. They understood exactly what I already knew. The space exists because of an appetite that most people hide, and something about seeing it celebrated rather than tucked away feels important. It’s a real thing, not a secret. Chucks beat everything though. But Adidas is close. Tuesday, 26 May 2009. MyKey Berlin – 30°C in the Shade: Basti showed me this song by MyKey Berlin the other day—guy who looks like Sido’s little brother, or so I’m told. “30°C in the Shade” is the track, and it’s somehow new to me. It’s exactly the kind of thing that matters if you’ve spent any time in Berlin, especially in the dead heat of summer. There’s something about the rhythm and how it captures that exhaustion, the way the city feels in July. I think it needs to become Berlin’s summer anthem. That’s what I keep coming back to. Tuesday, 26 May 2009. Like Brazil: Richard Kern put out a photo series for VICE’s ’Brazilian Issue’—fashion work, if you want to call it that. Bruna Haas, bikinis, the whole thing. Look, it’s good. But it’s summer, it’s brutal, I’m already melting from heat, and he decides to add this to my brain. Thanks, Richard. Fair warning: don’t look at these if you’re already overheated. I’m not joking. They do exactly what they’re designed to do, and they’ll destroy you in August. Monday, 25 May 2009. Hannah’s Homepage: Hannah’s old homepage still sits on Freenet, exactly as cute as I remembered—the kind of thing that stops you for a minute because it’s so perfectly preserved, like opening a time capsule someone forgot they buried. I found it stumbling down an internet rabbit hole, the way you do. Hannah had this way of making a space feel like her, even with all the constraints of free hosting. The photos are what matter. Photo 8 especially. That’s Hannah. It’s strange finding these artifacts from the early web. Everyone had a homepage back then, or wanted one, and most of them are long gone. But Hannah’s still up there, this little corner of the internet from another era. I kept thinking about leaving a message in her guestbook, the way people used to do, but it felt like disturbing something. Better to just know it’s there—proof that she existed in this space, that she mattered enough to someone that they’d visit and write something down. That’s not how the internet works now. Everything’s algorithmic, optimized, designed to keep you scrolling. Nobody’s making little homepages anymore. Nobody’s leaving messages in guestbooks. It’s easier maybe, but something got lost. Friday, 22 May 2009. Goodbye Scala: Scala shut down that weekend. Went out exactly how you’d want—Junior Boys, Shir Khan, Jack Tennis all playing, the kind of final lineup you can’t complain about. No real reason it needed to close. The place was always full, the sound was good, the room had that beautiful ugliness that real clubs have before they get renovated into oblivion. But this is what happens in Berlin now. Something good exists, people love it, and then slowly it just stops existing. Nobody makes a decision to kill it, it just accumulates small pressures until one day the owner is tired and that’s it. Gone. I remember the buzz about the closing, the Facebook group, all these plans to show up and make the last night count. Probably I was going to go, probably I meant to. That’s what you always think about venues like Scala—there’s time, I’ll catch it again. Until suddenly there isn’t and you’re looking at another empty storefront and trying to remember what the sound was like in there at three in the morning. Wednesday, 20 May 2009. Hezza: Fell down a rabbit hole of old SuicideGirl stuff and found Hezza—25, from Uruguay, has the taste I’d want: QOTSA, Elvis, Doors. Started this label, MajoRey, making underwear and basics that actually look good. Into all the right terrible TV (Two and a Half Men, that whole 70s era). The piercings work for her. What interests me is she doesn’t perform confidence—doesn’t seem to question what she likes or how she looks. Just exists in it comfortably. That matters more than whatever physical appeal she’s got. Although yeah, the physical appeal is there too. Something about being straightforward erases the need to try. Tuesday, 19 May 2009. Shave The Queen: Package arrived this morning with no return address. First thought was bomb. I spent a solid ten minutes carefully unwrapping it, totally convinced my right hand was about to get shredded, which seemed bad. Felt stupid even as I was doing it. Out came a Gillette Venus. A women’s razor. That was the whole thing. Apparently routed through some Heidi Klum setup I don’t understand. But yeah, free women’s razor in the mail. The randomness is what sticks with me. Someone in a marketing office decided to spend actual money mailing this to an address. To me. It’s not even that it’s useless—I mean, it is—but it’s the fact that the decision got made and nobody apparently stopped it. No double-check, no “wait, we’re sending what to who?” Nintendo, Ferrari, Apple—you’re watching a women’s razor company outwork you. Friday, 15 May 2009. Always Cheesy: Grey’s Anatomy is ridiculous, and it works completely when you’re alone with it. The sex, the gore, the perfectly timed soundtrack underneath someone getting cut open or people making out in a closet—I don’t know, something about it lands. I watch it without thinking about whether it’s stupid. Then a friend shows up and something changes. You’ve made it this far into the evening, the show’s on, you’re settled in and happy with what’s coming. You’re grinning like an idiot at the screen. And then someone walks in. If you’re lucky they just sit quietly and look bored. If not, you get comments: “Is it always this melodramatic?” or “Does this ever get better?” And it doesn’t matter how much you’ve made peace with this show when you’re alone, how aware you are that yeah, some episodes drag or get embarrassing before something stronger comes—you still fold. You find yourself saying it: “Yeah, this one’s kind of bad.” So throw them out. Make popcorn. Sit alone with Seattle Grace Hospital and let yourself have all of it—the sex, the blood, the earnestness—until it’s over. That’s the only way this actually works. Thursday, 14 May 2009. Black Bars: Every few years nudity cycles back as the easiest gesture in a music video, and Make the Girl Dance went full-throttle with it for ’Baby, Baby, Baby.’ They sent models running through Paris wearing nothing but geometric black censoring bars—bars that somehow stayed choreographed into the movement like they were part of the costume. What caught me was that the bars became a visual element in their own right, not just a tool. They’re designed, almost sculptural, definitely not rushed pixelation. The whole thing commits without apology, which is probably why the Illuminati jokes landed so perfectly—the video’s already doing the work of being slightly insane. It’s a very European move. Unbothered, visually exact, a little absurd. The nudity almost becomes secondary to the gesture itself. I respect that kind of commitment to an idea this ridiculous. Wednesday, 13 May 2009. Vice: The thing that lands is the specificity. Red hair, emo-gamer, into Johnny Cash and porn without any winking about it. You see that list and you know exactly who this person is—her taste, what she’d find funny, the whole vibe. That kind of clarity, that absolute comfort with just being exactly what you are, is worth noticing. Tuesday, 12 May 2009. Everything Fell Apart: Berlin rained all Sunday night—not the gentle kind, the kind that makes everything worse. I woke up already furious that the weekend had vanished, like it never actually happened. Friday was better. Someone got us on the list for this party at Michelberger. All balloons and lollipops, people I didn’t know. We ended up talking to this guy Peter Imhoff who used to have a talk show. He was fine. There was a girl in a blue hat who made me feel small. I still think about that. Saturday had a plan for every hour and every plan collapsed. The Ting Tings concert fell through because of my phone. Anne’s Abi exams celebration got cancelled. Scala looked promising until we got there—all the acts sucked. We set up to meet people on Friedrichstraße and instead there was a fight and someone threw up and cops showed up. We’d talked about getting duck masks and just waddling around the city making noise, but we weren’t drunk enough for that to make sense. So we sat and watched iCarly instead. Ten episodes while a taxi driver who had no idea what he was doing took us around in circles. But somehow we ended up at White Trash, at this club called White Noise, and Maike was there with her crew, and the whole thing turned around. She’s having a birthday party next Friday. Plans fell apart and then worked out anyway, which I guess is how it goes. Monday, 11 May 2009. Sonya Twinklepop: The professional Canon came first. Modeling school had been a detour, journalism a brief experiment, but the camera was what she actually wanted. Sonya started shooting the Moscow party circuit and her friends. That’s where the focus landed at seventeen. Moscow doesn’t feel exotic to her because she’s lived there her whole life—it’s just the city. But you can see the local fashion moving toward cleaner lines, brighter colors, pieces cut from a single shape. She’s working from the right references: Cory Kennedy’s specific ease, the Olsens’ restraint, Twiggy’s cheekbones and attitude, Edie Sedgwick’s beautiful chaos. The sixties and nineties cycle back because they still work. Her people are the expected crew—musicians, DJs, people she met at parties who actually make things. She’s got a girlfriend named Asya; they’ve been together long enough that she got her name tattooed on her leg four months ago. There are men interested too, which is complicated. That’s what happens when you’re young and visible. Musically she ranges everywhere—Santigold, Elvis, electroclash like Ping Pong Bitches and Peaches. Vogue and Nylon for magazines, Lookbook for fashion specifically. She watched “Joy Division” and it stuck. Television doesn’t register for her. She thinks about fashion history—how classical silhouettes come back, how sheer fabrics return because they answer something we keep wanting. She wants to push harder on the modeling, see if it can become real work. Maybe enroll in journalism school. The camera keeps pulling though. The eye was there. Monday, 11 May 2009. Copier Games: That moment when you’re at work, bored to death, and the copier’s just sitting there with its lid open and nobody’s around—yeah, you know what you’re doing. Pants down, glass cold against you, finger on the button, and suddenly there’s a print that proves you did something that stupid. It’s a specific kind of office madness that only happens when you’ve been staring at beige walls long enough to lose your mind. VICE apparently did a whole fashion shoot about it, which is transparently ridiculous but I love the commitment. They got actual people to do it, full nudity, the whole crude thing. The photos are exactly as pointless as the act itself, which I guess means they nailed the concept. There’s an honesty to how dumb it all is. No meta layer, no artistic justification, just boredom colliding with a photocopier. That’s the whole story right there. Monday, 11 May 2009. The Code Still Works: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. If you had a Super Nintendo your fingers probably remember this sequence without thinking. Thirty button presses and suddenly you’re invincible, you’ve got infinite lives, you can access whatever the developers hid behind the cheat. It never felt like cheating—more like you’d discovered a password the designers accidentally left in plain sight. The Konami Code disappeared from popular consciousness years ago, which is why it’s kind of perfect that someone started hiding it in website easter eggs as a callback. Facebook has it. Digg has it. Google Reader buried one somewhere. There’s even a whole site dedicated to tracking them all, which is wonderfully pointless—exactly the kind of thing the internet should be doing. Apparently this site has one too, which is absurd and somehow perfect. Nothing about this is useful or makes sense, which is part of why it works. You remember the code, you find it somewhere online, you type it in, something dumb happens, and for a moment you’re thinking about being eight years old and feeling clever. That’s the whole transaction. It’s not trying to be more than that, and I respect that. Friday, 8 May 2009. Actual Food: I was living on slimy canned ravioli, cheap pasta, whatever was left at the breakfast buffet. The basics, nothing you’d mention later. Then at some point I actually got decent at cooking. Stopped burning everything, started remembering salt without thinking about it. The kitchen went from a disaster zone to just a place where food happened. Haven’t needed an ambulance over my cooking yet, which feels like an achievement. Now I’m in there almost every day making something different. Pasta salad with baguette. Schnitzel and fried potatoes. Eggs with bacon cooked until it’s nearly black. Most nights it actually works and the plate comes back clean. There’s something good about knowing you made something someone wanted to finish. This phase won’t last forever though. Eventually I’ll hit the point where I give up entirely and eat Thai every single night. But that’s not yet. Tonight it’s leftovers. Wednesday, 6 May 2009. The Gap: Saw a commercial for some skincare brand and couldn’t focus on the product because I was too busy looking at the model. Her name was Dari, and she had this gap between her front teeth that I found genuinely appealing. The brand was running some campaign where they’d put young women into shared apartments across different cities and have them make content—music, fashion, lifestyle stuff, all tied back to the product. I didn’t care about any of that. I was just looking at her. What I noticed was how honest it all was. They knew the formula: show an attractive person on screen and people will pay attention. No mystery to it. No need to hide behind some clever concept. I paid attention, and I wasn’t embarrassed about it. Not to the skincare or the campaign or the premise, just to her. There’s something almost refreshing about that kind of straightforwardness. I never would have signed up for whatever they were doing, never would have auditioned or moved into one of those apartments. But I kept thinking about her for a bit after. That’s all it really is sometimes—you see someone and something sticks. Not a grand thing, not a lesson, just: I found her attractive and my brain held onto the image. And then eventually you move on. Monday, 4 May 2009. The Reeling: Passion Pit’s “The Reeling” showed up and I immediately fell into it. They’ve been building toward their debut album for a few years, and this track is a solid indication they know what they’re doing. There’s something about the synths and the way Michael Angelakos sings that just pulls you in. Not much else to say—it’s one of those songs that does the job without needing explanation. Wednesday, 29 April 2009. Four Tonys: I’m researching this film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and I keep getting stuck on one specific thing: Johnny Depp plays Tony. Jude Law plays Tony. Colin Farrell plays Tony. Heath Ledger plays Tony. Same character. Four different actors. I checked IMDb three times thinking I was misreading it. Found the trailer, looked for some kind of explanation, some joke or press release that would make this reasonable. Nothing. It all looks entirely real. The film’s coming out in September. And I’m sitting there thinking—nobody makes a movie where four separate A-list actors play one person unless something is actually going on. So either I’m the last person on the internet to figure out whatever this is, or I’m actually losing my mind. There’s got to be a story behind it, something that would make it make sense. But I can’t find it anywhere. The whole thing just sits there, documented and impossible. Lily Cole’s in it too, which is at least straightforward. She’s in films now, she’s beautiful, that checks out. But the Tony thing won’t leave my head. I don’t understand it and I want to. Tuesday, 28 April 2009. At Least The Kooks: Going to a Coca-Cola event to see The Kooks for free seemed like a decent idea at the time. What I didn’t account for was the six hours of opening acts designed to test my patience. Bands that sounded like they’d learned everything they knew from a village wedding in Bavaria and thought that was good enough. The genuine low point was last year’s MySpace-voted “winner,” who simply refused to leave the stage. I’ve never been more angry at people for not knowing when to quit. But there was one legitimately good German punk band somewhere in that lineup. Andioliphilipp or something close—the flyer was already falling apart. They had actual energy, actual songs that didn’t make you regret showing up. Whatever came next for them, they’d earned it. The Kooks got the thankless job of closing out this objectively terrible event. But they actually pulled it off. “Naïve,” “She Moves in Her Own Way”—those songs just worked. Two tracks and suddenly the whole night made sense. They saved the entire thing. Next time Coca-Cola decides to throw something like this, maybe think about the lineup. Or don’t. Either way, I’m glad The Kooks showed up when they did. Sunday, 26 April 2009. Felice Fawn’s Eye: On Lookbook.nu there’s this photographer from Cambridge named Felice Fawn who’s figured something out about fashion that most people miss. She started shooting at fourteen—just snapshots of pets and family at first—but by sixteen it became something serious. She trained as a tattoo artist in her hometown before switching to fashion photography at nineteen, and since then she’s been documenting the weird specificity of how people choose to dress. Cambridge gave her something. She talks about loving how the place is this mix of landscape and city, with all these wide open spaces around. Most of her family lives close by. I think that kind of rootedness shows in how she approaches her work—there’s no desperation in it, no hunger to prove something. She’s not trying to escape or make it big in some industry sense. She’s just looking at what’s in front of her and figuring out how to photograph it truthfully. What strikes me about her work is how personal it stays even while she’s building a professional practice. She prefers her own projects to client work, which makes sense—in her own shoots she can pour all the time and obsession into getting something right. She’s been influenced by Patrick Demarchelier, who has that quality of catching something true in a frame, and she hunts ideas in unlikely places—shop windows, music, the everyday. The sources don’t have to be other photographers or artists. They can be anything. She’s living in Cambridge with her boyfriend, five years in, completely settled. Three friends she’s kept since she was twelve, people she shares a specific sense of humor with. That stability matters. It lets you do serious work when you’re not constantly scrambling to figure out who you are or where you belong. She reads Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar but also watches American Dad and Family Guy, which tells you something—she’s not precious about culture. Good is good whether it’s in a magazine or on a late-night comedy sketch. The music anchors her. Radiohead and Thom Yorke solo recordings are what she listens to, and those are artists who care obsessively about texture and mood, about getting the small details right. I see that same attention in her photographs. She loves pastel tones and floral patterns, not because they’re trendy but because they’re soft and specific and searching—there’s something incomplete in them, something that pulls you in. What Lookbook.nu gave her is permission to exist in a community of people who think seriously about clothes. Not fast fashion, not trends. It’s about how you move through the world, what you choose to wrap yourself in, how that becomes a conversation with everyone else paying attention. The feedback loop is different there, more peer-to-peer obsession than traditional fashion media gatekeeping. Twenty years old and she already knows what she’s after. That clarity at that age is rare. Most people are still scrambling, but Felice has her influences locked down and her practice shaped. She’s hunting for something in how clothes and light and a person’s stillness come together in a frame, patient enough to wait for it. Saturday, 25 April 2009. Harmless: The internet is mostly garbage—porn, hate, monkeys pissing in their own mouths. But then you find CuteBreak, this pocket of pure nothing. Kittens sneezing. Sloths wanting scratches. Puppies with that blank dumb expression. For a moment you forget everything—the boss, the bad breakup, whatever ripped you off earlier today. There’s something about that simplicity. It’s the internet working the way it should sometimes. The kid-pranking thing though—I’m still not sure. Making your little brother think you’re selling him. Roseanne did it constantly. The whole show was people messing with each other and nobody died. But television isn’t real life. I don’t know if that makes any of it okay. Still. Cute animals, mild pranks, little harmless things. It beats what else is out there. Friday, 24 April 2009. Pseudo-Sunshine: Introducing songs like you’re a morning radio host always feels awkward, which is why I hate the whole act. But Marmaduke Duke’s ’Rubber Lover’ actually deserves the mention. The video is terrible—I don’t know what they were thinking—but the song itself is excellent. Bouncy and uplifting in the simplest way, the kind of thing that picks you up. That’s all any song needs to do, really: make you feel better for a few minutes. Thursday, 23 April 2009. Two Sides: Winifred makes jewelry she can’t sell. She’s nineteen, from Perth, and the pieces just accumulate because she can’t bring herself to part with them. She tried the logical approach—make more, flood the system, maybe exhaust the attachment. It didn’t work. A few pieces have been given away as gifts but the rest stay. That attachment to your own work, the pull to keep it close—I get that. She describes two characters in her head: Wini, organized and planned, and Fred, who just wants to party. They’re constantly at odds, but she’s learned to let both coexist. That split between control and chaos, between the version of yourself that wants order and the one that wants noise—it’s real, and she doesn’t hide from it. Perth’s almost always sunny except winter, which is her favorite season. Australia’s getting more fashion-conscious, but there’s always been something Australian about wearing what feels right without overthinking it. No apology. She spends hours looking at materials—just texture and color and possibility. Old clothes become new things. She designs jewelry, plush toys, iPod sleeves. The blogs matter to her: Lookbook, Chictopia, Street Peeper, and deeper in, The Sartorialist, Face Hunter, Jak & Jil, Copenhagen Street Style. Hours disappear watching how strangers in other cities put themselves together. Music has to move her. Indie, rock, pop, R&B—whatever makes something shift. She reads magazines, mostly free online ones now (NEET, Attitude, Lula) but also Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Frankie. Watches everything: old films, cartoons, romance, action. No hierarchy, just whatever catches. Jewelry design and fashion design—that’s where she’s headed. She wants to sell her work eventually, but there’s no rush. For now she’s just making things, reading about how strangers dress in cities she hasn’t been to yet, building a world. Holding onto the pieces that matter too much to release. Waiting to see what comes next. Wednesday, 22 April 2009. The Ting Tings: I was really into The Ting Tings during that period. Katie White and Jules de Martino make these songs that feel caught between panic and beauty—everything’s precise and clean but there’s something nervous running underneath. A show came up in Berlin, free concert at a venue in Charlottenburg. I thought about going, actually seeing them instead of just cycling through the same three songs on repeat. Live is where you find out if the precision holds up, if it’s real or just production. I didn’t go. Free shows blur together when you’re traveling. No commitment, so you forget about it. But the want was real. That specific hunger to see someone you’ve been listening to, to have it happen in front of you—that sticks around. Wednesday, 22 April 2009. M.I.A. Glows In The Dark: M.I.A. turned up in Indio in these glowing clothes right after having a baby. Glow-in-the-dark or EL wire, hard to tell, not that it mattered. She just looked like someone who’d figured something out. Glowing pants, glowing shoes, the whole thing built for dark rooms. You could see how it spreads—clubs, late nights, all of that. It was one of those moments where you think someone’s actually ahead instead of just trying something weird. Monday, 20 April 2009. Keep Singing: Jon Hainstock’s barely known but he’s got everything figured out. German guy, perfect mullet, and in the video a car just hits him. Straight up hits him while he’s singing on the street. Most people would stop. He doesn’t. Keeps right on singing like it never happened. I’ve got the same haircut, so maybe I’m not objective. But I get the same treatment—people asking when I’m getting it fixed, like something that’s working fine for you is somehow a mistake. In 2009 this was indie gospel. I wasn’t about to abandon it because strangers had opinions. It’s the commitment that does it. You don’t stop. You don’t break character. You take the hit and keep going like you’ve already decided nothing can touch you. That’s either stupid or brilliant, and the longer I live the less difference I see between them. Sunday, 19 April 2009. Kilometer: Sebastien Tellier’s “Kilometer” video is the fantasy I’d never actually admit to. He’s in this sixties villa like some kind of slimy messiah, surrounded by beautiful half-naked women who exist purely to serve him. The whole thing is relentlessly, unapologetically horny. I mean, if I’m being real, this is what I’d actually want. Total surrender to hedonism, no limits, no consequences. Except you know that’s the life of someone who’s already given up, the last moment before it all collapses. So I watch it with this dark satisfaction, kind of glad I’m not quite that far gone. The thing that breaks it: NES-playing girls don’t exist. That one impossible detail kills the whole fantasy. Friday, 17 April 2009. Still Watching: I’ve stopped following gaming news for years, but I still catch GameOne whenever I can. It’s not really about the games. Budi and Simon get fifteen minutes of MTV and they fill it with something unguarded—ideas that don’t quite land, jokes that work sideways, the specific comedy of two people genuinely figuring it out as they go. It’s the opposite of polished. It’s just them. Then summer break comes and the show stops, which is when you realize how much you were watching it. They kept it going online—GameOne.de, Twitter, the usual spots—and somehow it doesn’t feel smaller. I still tune in sometimes even though I’m not who it’s technically for anymore, but something about them just keeps working. Friday, 17 April 2009. Wildfox Couture: The photoshoots are better than the clothes. That’s the whole strategy behind Wildfox Couture. Emily Faulstich and Kimberley Gordon designed it that way—California label, very intentional about mood. Sexy vampires. Girls crowded in bathtubs. Lipstick that cuts. Miley Cyrus has worn it. Fergie has worn it. Big names help, but that’s not why anyone’s looking. The clothes are fine, perfectly wearable. The photoshoots are what actually work. Someone will say the pieces deserve to stand alone, that provocative imagery undermines them. Fair point. But I’ve seen both and there’s no contest. The vampire wins. It’s almost unfair how much better it is. Tuesday, 14 April 2009. Use Somebody: Natasha Khan’s Bat For Lashes project was doing something sharp with indie-electro around 2008, 2009—that sweet spot where art-school sensibility could meet actual hooks without feeling like a compromise. “Daniel” had that strange pull to it, the way it layered synths and vulnerability in the same breath. She was getting attention, rightfully. Then she started covering other people’s work, which is always a test. You find out what someone actually cares about, what they hear in a song that maybe the original artist didn’t mean to put there, or put there deliberately but covered up with production. The Kings Of Leon cover of “Use Somebody” was the one that made the rounds—that song had been everywhere, the commercial pinnacle of Kings Of Leon, and Khan found something lonelier in it. She stripped away the stadium sound and let the melody do the aching work it’s supposed to do but usually doesn’t get to. The Bruce Springsteen cover, “I’m On Fire,” was different territory. Springsteen writes about desire the way other people write about geography—it’s just there, defining the landscape. Khan’s version understood that. She didn’t try to improve on it, didn’t try to make it hers in the way that some covers do, all ego. She just sang it like someone who knew exactly what he meant. What gets me about covers like these is that they’re not about proving you’re better than the original. They’re about living inside a song for long enough to find what matters about it. Khan had the voice for that kind of generosity, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. These versions—they stayed with me longer than they probably should have. Simple as that. Monday, 13 April 2009. Stay True: There’s this 16-year-old photographer from a small Dutch village where, by her account, the words ’style’ and ’fashion’ don’t really exist. Everyone’s in black jackets, black pants, black shoes, and they seem perfectly fine with it. The rain helps—if it’s always wet and gray, why bother with clothes? She hates it. She drives to Amsterdam and Utrecht when she can, looking for people who actually care how they look, but even there you have to search. That kind of restlessness at sixteen, that impatience with your surroundings, usually means you’re going somewhere else. Her name is Rosey Jones. She models a little, writes, calls herself a geek, reads psychology books, but photography is the thing. She’s been doing it seriously for three years. She says it’s the way she knows how to say things about herself that she can’t say otherwise. She had nine piercings in her face at one point—in her nose, her eyebrow, her lip—but she took them out for a modeling job in January and only two remain. The hidden ones: a smiley she won’t show you, and a small silver line beneath her lip. She didn’t fight about it. She understood that modeling work came first, and she was okay with that compromise. But the piercings were about declaring something, and now that declaration happens differently. She’s got two tattoos. The first is ’Stay True’ on her wrist, done in October 2008, right when she needed it most—after years of doing what other people wanted, finally letting that version of herself go. The second is ’Stolz,’ the German word for pride, tattooed inside her lip where most people won’t see it. Her ex-boyfriend once told her she had too much pride, like it was a flaw. She decided it wasn’t. She flipped the reading on it and wore it as fact. Her romantic life is a mess in that specific way that matters at sixteen. She’s single but her ex is still circling her thoughts, except he’s now dating her best friend, and she can’t quite get him out of her head. She’s tried seeing other people—boys, even a girl—but nothing sticks while he’s still there. She has a few genuine best friends, all women, but mostly she hangs out with guys. She likes the simplicity of it: sitting around, smoking, talking about girls, no manufactured drama, no one making mountains out of nothing. Her taste in music is sharp. She’s obsessed with City and Colour—Dallas Green’s acoustic stuff—wakes up to it, falls asleep to it. But she also goes to metal and hardcore shows constantly, and she loves the energy of them, loves that the lyrics say something real even in all that noise. The contradiction doesn’t trouble her: tender and loud, both at once. She doesn’t read magazines, doesn’t have time for films, reads heavy books about psychology instead. Mode and fashion aren’t things you study—they’re things you have or you don’t. You either understand how to wear clothes, or you follow trends and hope for the best. She isn’t going to follow trends. What matters to her is that in a few years people will recognize her photographs. She wants to shoot bands that matter, not just local shows but bigger names. She wants to do fashion work for real labels. She’s stated this like fact, not dream. She’ll get there. She knows it. The small village, the rain, the people in their black jackets—that’s background noise. She’s already looking past it. Sunday, 12 April 2009. Summer Rain: I work in an industry obsessed with standing out. Loud colors, loud statements, shock value hammered into everything. This website makes things that demand attention, and I love that aggression. But somewhere I started craving the opposite—quiet photographs, soft colors, barely-there stories you have to lean in to hear. Hrystia Kaminska is eighteen and Ukrainian. She works as Kosmodisk. Her photographs have this feeling, and the only way to describe it is unexpected summer rain. No announcement. The light shifts, the air changes, and suddenly everything looks different. She shoots almost apologetically. Soft focus, pale colors, moments dissolving at the edges. There’s no effort showing, no trying. It’s the complete opposite of what I normally swim in, which is why I keep looking at her pictures. I could keep talking about the intelligence of subtlety, the power of restraint. But I also need the opposite sometimes—the shock, the crude thing that just grabs you. I bounce between both. You can’t live on whispers, and you can’t feel anything if everything is screaming. Kaminska’s work lives on one side of that. Worth spending time there. Saturday, 11 April 2009. The Ones That Stayed: Had a list of Japanese films somewhere—made it years ago, when making lists felt like a productive use of time. Never finished it. But the films stuck, which is the only part that mattered. Kikujiro’s Summer is the first one I think of. Takeshi Kitano playing some useless guy who gets dragged into babysitting a kid for a summer, driving around the countryside. The film just sits there. Doesn’t push. You watch it and it makes you feel okay about things, which sounds corny but it works. That’s all cinema is sometimes—permission to slow down. Battle Royale is completely different. Same director, but a school class wakes up on a locked island with weapons and a simple instruction: kill each other. The film doesn’t wink at you about how absurd that is. It just watches it happen. When you’re young you think you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to—something transgressive about survival and cruelty that polite society hides. Later you realize the film isn’t revealing anything new, it’s just not looking away. The question it plants stays with you though: what would you do? You can’t answer it, not honestly, which is why you keep thinking about it. Kamikaze Girls is lighter. Two girls, completely incompatible—one deep in the lolita fashion thing, the other a biker type with no patience for decoration. They find out they’re actually the same person underneath, or close enough. The film just watches this happen without making a big deal of it. Sometimes that’s the whole point. Nobody Knows is harder to look at. Four kids in Tokyo, abandoned by their mother, who decided she couldn’t do the job anymore. The film just observes them figuring out how to keep going. Not in a dramatic way, just the daily machinery of surviving. There’s something almost unbearable about watching it done so carefully, without sentiment. Life is like that though—sad in a way that never quite deserves the name. Then there’s The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai, which I don’t even know how to describe. The lead actress is an actual porn performer, and the film is this completely unhinged satire where she gets shot in the head, becomes omniscient, finds George W. Bush’s severed finger, and fucks her way through the cast. It shouldn’t work. It’s absurd and crude and the politics are cartoonish. But something about the sheer committed weirdness of it, the rage underneath the comedy, makes it genius. Or close enough. I was supposed to rank these, build some kind of definitive list. The project lives on as this fragment—a few films, no hierarchy. Which is fine. The list was never the point anyway. The films were. Friday, 10 April 2009. No Beds: Thirty hours on a plane and maybe two hours of broken sleep, and I get to my Setagaya apartment to find there are no beds. Just mats on the floor. Everyone says Japan is this gleaming high-tech country and I’m too wrecked to think straight, hacking into my neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi, trying to tell someone I’m alive. I haven’t slept since I left and I’m so furious and confused I don’t even know which one. The apartment is ridiculously tiny—I can stand in the middle and touch both walls. From outside it looks like a love hotel or maybe a brothel or maybe that’s just what these places look like. Setagaya feels like someone took America and printed it on Japanese characters—same grid, same streets, but nothing is written in anything I can read. The familiarity is actually kind of calming when I’m this destroyed. Two hours hunting for bedding that doesn’t feel like garbage, learning how this shit works. On the street, nobody helped. Inside a shop, people were suddenly incredibly nice. Everyone has a mask. I’m apparently the only blonde in the whole district. I asked directions in English like a fucking idiot, got completely ignored, but whatever. At least the rules are clear. Cherry blossoms blooming. The place is actually beautiful and I can’t connect with it right now. Little things caught me even through the haze. Traffic lights chime these gentle bells. Train stations have these small melodies. Men carry handbags. I swear I saw Uri Geller at the airport. Might be a hallucination. Thirty hours without sleep and I can’t trust anything my brain is telling me. I just need to make this floor situation slightly less shit and then sleep for sixteen hours straight. Five weeks in this place sounds impossible. But the city’s got something. Maybe once I’m not completely dead I’ll actually be able to see it. Thursday, 9 April 2009. Just Sun: Berlin’s been wrapped in shimmering spring light. The sun is just obscene—I’m not exaggerating, the heat fixes something. I open the window at night. I grill with friends in the garden. I walk through the streets with a cold Becks and watch girls in thin skirts eat ice cream, and it feels like exactly the right way to exist. Then rain shows up at the Turkish restaurant today, which felt personal. But I’m counting on heat through the holidays because I need this break. I really do. No thinking, no moving—just sun on skin and hands doing nothing. Maybe at that point humming ’You’re as hot as a volcano’ will actually feel earned instead of ridiculous. Wednesday, 8 April 2009. Mora: I listen to songs five times in a row before they stick. If I find a good video, I know it matters. Sonny Moore’s “Mora” hit that mark—the sound, the design, the artist, all fitting together in a way that felt right. Moore’s got the look of someone running on too much coffee or something else entirely, can’t quite tell. Reminds me of a younger, more wired version of Anthony from Antony and the Johnsons. The song’s off his album Gypsyhook, which has a title track with the same name, but “Mora” is the one that keeps playing. The real question is whether it survives a tenth listen without wearing thin. Most things don’t. Maybe this one will. Wednesday, 8 April 2009. Mono – Follow The Map: I’ve always been drawn to Japanese soundtracks—Joe Hisaishi with his orchestral expanses for “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke”, Yoko Kanno as Japan’s reigning instrumental composer working with Maaya Sakamoto on “Arjuna” (I’ve circled back to that album countless times, it lives permanently on my iPod), Yasunori Mitsuda defining what video game music could be with “Chrono Trigger” and still holding that standard. This is the music you put on when you need to think without interference, to create in silence. It doesn’t demand anything—it just creates a space. There’s something specific about how these composers work. They’re not showing off. The music isn’t trying to be the main event—it’s building atmosphere, holding space for whatever’s happening in front of it, whether that’s a character on screen or your own thoughts. You could work with this music on for hours and never feel like you need to turn it off. It just exists alongside what you’re doing, supporting without intrusion. Mono, a post-rock band from Tokyo, operates in similar territory. Their album “Hymn To The Immortal Wind” is the kind of record that makes you forget you’re in a room. You sit and listen and suddenly you’re not aware of anything else, not because it’s demanding your attention but because it’s constructed this complete world. It doesn’t announce itself or build toward any climax—just moves you through space, each swell placed so you never feel lost or jarred. This is what I need when I’m trying to do something that requires actual concentration. Not the kind of music that demands your attention, but something that absorbs you. The kind that makes a few hours disappear without you noticing. Monday, 6 April 2009. Warp: Clocks getting smashed apart by stylish people. That’s how “Warp” opens—The Bloody Beetroots and Steve Aoki teaming up on something that actually has an image, which for electronic music is already unusual. I know that’s a harsh thing to say about the whole genre. Most of it’s just calculated nothing, expensive ambience, the sound equivalent of watching someone operate machinery without thinking. But Aoki has something different. There’s an actual intention behind what he’s doing, a sense that he sat down and made decisions instead of just dragging sliders and hoping something sticks. So when this showed up, I paid attention. The video is where it matters. These are genuinely stylish people—not just attractive, actually styled with intention—destroying watches, jumping around, doing things that feel almost transgressive for a music video. There’s an energy to it like everyone’s been asleep and finally waking up angry. Playful and violent at the same time. The track itself is solid. Driving synths, that propulsive thing Aoki does well. But it’s the video that makes this work. That’s the thing that stays with you. Sunday, 5 April 2009. Lisa Solberg: I’m drawn to people who express themselves without calculation. Photography, painting, film, writing, or something nobody’s quite figured out how to categorize yet—when someone’s making work from genuine interest rather than design, you feel it. Lisa Solberg’s an artist in LA making paintings that exist outside whatever wave everyone else is riding. She has this singular voice in her work, and she operates out of a massive loft that’s a studio and a home at once. I’ve always had this inexplicable thing for huge empty lofts with that particular kind of presence—you know the ones, where there’s actually space for something to happen. One of her paintings was made with champagne. Not a conceptual move or a story to tell; that’s just what she wanted to paint with that day. I appreciate that about artists—pursuing whatever actually interests you, regardless of whether it makes a coherent statement. The work doesn’t ask permission. It’s just completely what it is. Friday, 3 April 2009. Why Writers Hide: I watched Gulcan get a piercing through the ear—sat there while the needle went through, and it glinted after like it was supposed to. Right after, I nearly crashed into my ex-girlfriend getting out of an elevator. Just smiled at her friend and the moment passed. That’s how days stack up. I was on the U-Bahn with Rocko Schamoni’s “Sternstunden der Bedeutungslosigkeit.” Someone recommended it as a quarter-life-crisis read. Some guy from Reinickendorf gives me shit about my Chucks, which is funny because I’m actually into what I’m reading—this messy, unremarkable life of Michael Sonntag and his friends. Schamoni’s voice is clean and direct, the way people actually think. It reads honest. But here’s what gets me: it’s all hidden. It’s not Rocko writing about his life. It’s Michael Sonntag. Some invented distance between author and reader. He’s not poetic like Murakami. He’s not visionary like Mian Mian. He just writes straight and undecorated, the way you’d think it. And for a book about meaningless hours, that’s exactly what works. But why put it behind a character? Why not write that he’s into his neighbor, that he’s still wrecked over someone, that he has bad breath? Why is it always Michael instead of Rocko? Same thing kills me about Charlotte Roche and Rebecca Martin and everyone else doing this. Why not just admit you’re into anal sex and Avril Lavigne? Why not write that you’ve gone to bed with guys who stopped caring the second it was over? Or that you pick your nose, or that you’ve made out with girls? These are the real things. This is the actual material. It matters more than whatever clean persona you’re protecting. So I’m going to say it. I’m Marcel. I like Avril Lavigne. I pick my nose. I make out with girls. No character in between. No protective fiction. No distance. That’s it. It’s not hard once you actually say it plainly. Though maybe we need to talk about the Avril Lavigne thing separately. Tuesday, 31 March 2009. Vanity Teen: Spent some time with the first issue of Vanity Teen, a free fashion magazine that dropped as a PDF. The photography is good—clean, contemporary, not trying to yell about itself. They brought in Marley Kate, Ryan Aylsworth, Karl Rothenberger: the kind of visual people worth paying attention to. What got me is the curation: it’s not the usual high-fashion apparatus. It’s someone looking at what’s actually happening in contemporary photography and saying ’this matters.’ And they’re not charging for it. Saturday, 28 March 2009. Joanna Kustra: Joanna Kustra’s photographs look like paintings from the eighteenth century. There’s no visible seam between the photography and the painting—it just reads as period work, the kind that makes you stop because you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking at. Everything pulls from Pride and Prejudice or The Duchess—that whole visual language of period cinema. The lighting, the posture, the surfaces. It’s like she understood that aesthetic completely and then made something genuinely her own inside it. It made me think about the language from that era, too. How people actually wrote. All those subordinate clauses and digressions, the formality mixed with genuine observation. I’ve kind of seriously thought about trying something in that voice, which would be a complete disaster. Everyone would leave. But there’s something genuinely compelling about existing in that sensibility, whether it’s visual or linguistic. The simple fact that it’s possible to make something that feels like it belongs to a completely different world altogether. Saturday, 28 March 2009. Zombie: Most of the time I’m nowhere. Not in the despair where everything about life and love and the future makes me want to scream and crawl into that dark hole that somehow feels sweet in its bitterness, where I could write my pain out raw and watch it leave when I hit publish. Not in the euphoria either—that cloud-nine moment when it’s a girl or a career win or just a bright fresh day, and I’m singing out praise to the sun and freedom and love. Those feelings are intense. They’re real, and they matter. Right now I’m stuck in the flat middle, and it’s like a kind of numbness I never expected. I go to work. I laugh at parties. I fool around. I listen to music. It all happens without any particular thrill or dread, without the feeling that something special is happening. No high, no low, just the middle distance. It’s like watching a beloved film for the thousandth time. A movie you once loved more than anything. You know every scene, every line, every moment. You know exactly what comes next. You could recite it. So you watch it anyway, and it doesn’t break you anymore because there’s nothing left in you to break. I’m living the exact thing I was terrified of as a kid. The ordinariness I swore with my friends I’d never let happen, not like everyone else. Routine. The everyday. A decent life that doesn’t feel like anything at all. It’s like I surrendered in some long war and accepted the bitter-sweet defeat. I laid down my weapons and looked up at the sky and waited for it to be over. The living death has arrived. I’m a zombie now. Saturday, 28 March 2009. Caroline Winberg: Caroline Winberg is Swedish, which explains most of it—blonde hair, freckles, the kind of charisma that doesn’t need explaining. She’s a supermodel. The photographs exist to prove what works. I look at them and want her to have my kids just so they’d get that smile. It’s crude. It’s honest. There’s no deeper thought than that. Friday, 27 March 2009. Gifted: ’Gifted’ works in a way it shouldn’t. Kanye, Santigold, Lykke Li together—three voices with no reason to collide, except they do, and it’s brutal. The video’s just a comic thing though, pointless and empty. I wanted to watch them actually together, some real reason they’re on the same track. Instead it’s animated nothing. Worth watching anyway before YouTube takes it down. Friday, 27 March 2009. God Save The Queen: Kate Moss was a mess. Everyone knew it. The coke, the bathroom incidents, the whole Pete Doherty disaster—it was all documented, all real. But somehow that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that despite being a complete wreck, she was still one of the most compelling people in fashion. Still is, honestly. In 2002 Craig McDean shot her for i-D Magazine. The series was called “God Save The Queen,” which felt right—she looked like she needed saving, or maybe like she was already beyond it. The photographs were something else though. Gaunt, sharp, lit so brutally you couldn’t hide anything. She looked like she’d been awake for a week. She looked like she didn’t care what you thought. That’s the thing about Moss—she had this quality where the wreckage and the appeal were the same thing. I’ve always been drawn to people like that. There’s something about not apologizing, about being exactly as broken as you are and just walking around anyway. Most people crash and that’s it, they become a punchline and disappear. Moss made the crash itself part of the mystique. She was famous partly because of the mess, not despite it. By the time that shoot happened she’d already lived a few different lives. Model, scandal, icon, whatever she was becoming next. And she was still working, still unavoidable. You’d see her and you couldn’t quite figure out if she was bulletproof or if she was falling apart in real time and just didn’t care which. The i-D photographs hold up. They’re the kind of thing you come back to. There’s something true in them that got missed by all the tabloid stuff. You see what made her matter. And you also see exactly why it all came apart. Friday, 27 March 2009. One Down: Pale supervisors circled the exam room like dementors from Harry Potter. IHK employees, methodical and serious, making sure no one cheated. This was the theoretical exam in Berlin’s fashion center—the thing that had cost me weeks of sleep. And it actually went okay. I wrote things that made sense. My mind didn’t go blank, which was the main thing I was worried about. Now I’m eating fries and sleeping for a week. The practical part comes next—building a website for some museum. I don’t know which museum yet. I’m looking forward to it. Not. Thursday, 26 March 2009. Vice Trap: Vice’s Fashion Issue landed with the usual bait that year—models in bikinis, fashion spreads, the kind of visual noise I know is designed to grab me. The issue had some comparison between Berlin and London fashion, the sort of thing that pretends to mean something but is really just expensive clothes and good photography. I looked at it. Fashion rules. Thursday, 26 March 2009. Superpowerless: A Vodafone commercial featured a band called Superpowerless. Are they real or did Vodafone just make them up for the ad? I can’t believe I’m wondering about this. A corporation manufactures a band, sells it as culture, and everybody moves on like it’s normal now. I have no idea if Superpowerless actually exists. I don’t think they do. But does it matter anymore. Tuesday, 24 March 2009. Not Fair: I never understood why Lily Allen went with “Not Fair” as the second single off “It’s Not Me, It’s You.” “Everyone’s At It” had more momentum, and “I Could Say” was stronger. But she did, dressed entirely in country—cowboy boots, that hair—like she was auditioning for a honky-tonk. The styling made no sense with the song, which was just her being crude about wanting someone who could actually satisfy her. No relationship drama, no clever setup, just a straight demand for good sex. The country visual felt like a joke I wasn’t catching, or maybe the joke was the mismatch itself. She’d already proven she could be funny and rude on record. “Not Fair” was leaning further that way—the irreverence without apology, the crude angle played straight. The production stayed minimal, which let the joke land harder. I’m not sure the single choice was right, but the attitude was exactly her. By the second album she’d committed to that position: irreverent, funny, refusing to soften anything for the audience. The country costume was just image machinery, but at least the song underneath was genuinely honest about what it wanted. Monday, 23 March 2009. Ryan McGinley: McGinley photographs young people the way someone who likes them actually sees them—loose-limbed, unguarded, bodies as landscape as much as objects. The color doesn’t perform; it just sits there, true. He’s been doing this for years and the work never got cynical, which is the only thing that matters. Sunday, 22 March 2009. Just the Video: Opening YouTube to watch a music video used to be simple. Now there’s a banner ad, comments from every troll with a keyboard, buttons everywhere telling me to rate and share and subscribe. The whole interface is designed to interrupt me before I even hit play. Someone used to write about YouTube being too cluttered. The complaint was straightforward: just show the video. Don’t need the engagement metrics, the sense of community, the algorithm watching what I do. Just the song and nothing else. That’s not a thing anymore. YouTube decided engagement was more important than simple consumption. Every pixel on the screen is optimized to keep me clicking on something other than the video I came for. I miss that simplicity. Watch something, feel something, leave. No trace. No data about it. No algorithm learning my taste. Just me and the work for five minutes and then it’s over. Most of the time the artist’s work speaks for itself. The song doesn’t need YouTube to prove it’s worth listening to. But good luck finding anything on YouTube without wading through the noise first. Saturday, 21 March 2009. Lil’ Amy’s Big Adventures: Amy had finally had enough of being the logo for some second-rate website, standing in the same place day after day, hand in her crotch. She still dreamed about Hannah’s distraction entry sometimes—dreamed about it at night and woke up thinking about it. So she grabbed her two best friends, Waldo (a clever magical dildo) and Mort (a zombie bride who was always depressed), and the three of them moved into a döner place where they could fight against the Klabautermann, this evil creature from German folklore whose name nobody could actually say. One day Hermione Granger—Waldo’s old owner—showed up at their door. “You have to help me,” she said, and she wasn’t joking around. Amy and the crew put down their döner sauce and paid attention. “The Klabautermann took my enchanted cat. I can’t sleep without her. Please bring her back.” So Amy nodded and got Waldo and Mort, and they climbed into the döner time machine. It made this humming, hissing sound as time just blurred past them. When they came out the other side and opened their eyes, there was a mailbox standing there. An actual talking mailbox. “Greetings, strangers,” it said. “You’ve arrived at just the right moment to—” Saturday, 21 March 2009. Anna Selezneva: I could write something pseudo-intellectual about black and white photography and how it strips away distraction to reveal essential truth. But these Hedi Slimane shots of Anna Selezneva just look too damn good. I don’t want to think about anything except what’s right in front of me. The monochrome works because there’s nothing but line and light and shadow, the way a face and body move through space. You see it and you can’t look away. That’s all there is. Friday, 20 March 2009. Gringo: Found this Brazilian web design agency that built their whole thing around profanity. Like, they’ve collected curse words from everywhere—Spanish, Portuguese, English—and they’re using them as actual design elements. Flash animations full of crude language, clickable words that are just there to offend. At first I didn’t really get what the deeper idea was supposed to be. Spent five minutes clicking around, watching Portuguese translations of penis and pussy cycle through, wondering if there was a point underneath the shock value or if that was the point. But the more I looked at it, the more I kind of got what they were doing. This was the mid-2000s internet, back when Flash sites could be anything, could break any rule, didn’t have to look like every other corporate thing. They were just saying: we’re not making a portfolio site, we’re making something that makes you uncomfortable. Something with teeth. Something that doesn’t apologize. There’s something genuinely funny about taking the whole apparatus of professional web design—the rules, the standards, the respectability—and just soaking it in profanity. Making it impossible to ignore. Not clever, not witty, just loud and crude and refusing to be polite. You can feel the pleasure in it, the deliberate transgression. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this to be some kind of statement about language or politics or corporate culture. Maybe it was and I just didn’t see it. Or maybe the joke was that there was no joke—just a middle finger where you’d expect a mission statement. The thing that gets me is how quaint it all feels now. Not because it’s not transgressive anymore, but because that kind of internet—the one where you could just build whatever you wanted, break whatever rules you felt like breaking, and nobody would shut it down—that internet barely exists now. Everything’s been absorbed, packaged, made safe. You couldn’t build Gringo today. You’d get flagged, removed, reported. The rules have calcified. The respectability has won. And somewhere there’s probably a hedge fund that owns this site now, if it still exists at all. Friday, 20 March 2009. Fractal: A poet and artist in the Burning Man community died of cancer last month. His name was Fractal. A woman who knew him organized a response: a shoot with photographer Cherry Vega, prints for sale at twenty-five dollars, money to a cancer research center. Just the practical thing to do. What I liked about it was the complete lack of performance. No moral framework, no meditation on mortality or the body or what it all means. Just: someone we cared about is gone, here’s the money we can make. In that community, nudity and sincerity aren’t in conflict—they just coexist. The form of the fundraiser wasn’t the statement. The statement was the money. Thursday, 19 March 2009. Döner Instead: Starbucks on a Saturday, me and Gülcan with the full setup—folders, notebooks, the confidence of people who think they’re about to be productive. Screaming kids and a smell I couldn’t place killed that in about twenty minutes. We both dropped the pretense immediately. Got döners instead, found somewhere with sun, watched pigeons fight over scraps in the street. Just sat there talking about nothing. It was better than anything in those notebooks would’ve been. Learning’s overrated anyway. Thursday, 19 March 2009. More Bloc Party: Bloc Party was built for remix collections. That production sensibility—precise, angular, all space and structure—is basically an invitation for other artists to step in and rebuild it. When their third comp came around, I was just curious who they’d picked. Armand Van Helden taking on “Signs” was the first single, and it does that thing remix comps do best: the original melody stays intact but everything else gets dismantled and reconstructed into something that lives in a different headspace entirely. I remember a “Blue Light” remix doing the same thing well. The video for this version is strange. Not in a way that makes sense immediately, but in a way that makes you watch it again. Tuesday, 17 March 2009. Bowery Boys: Keiichi Nitta published his first book in April, Bowery Boys, and it reads like the work of someone who spent real time in Terry Richardson’s studio—that same hunger for bodies and street rawness, that same refusal to soften anything. Packed with naked girls and street types, filtered through a Japanese sensibility that shouldn’t sit well with New York street photography but somehow does. Richardson must have been a good teacher. The pictures aren’t apologizing for what they are, and that’s exactly what they need to be. Tuesday, 17 March 2009. The Duchess in March: I was looking through Lula—Leith Clark’s magazine—and found these glossy stills from an upcoming short film by the Brownlee Brothers. The title’s impossible: “The Continuing And Lamentable Saga Of The Suicide Brothers.” Keira Knightley’s in it playing a fairy. The photos looked good, but I’ve been hunting for a trailer and can’t find one. So I’m just waiting to see what they’ve made. She’s got “The Duchess” coming in March though, and she’s apparently naked for good portions of it, which is reason enough for me to actually go see the thing. Sunday, 15 March 2009. Slumdog Millionaire: There’s this moment in the trailer where the music just takes over and you know you’re watching something that matters. It’s Slumdog Millionaire, set in Mumbai, about two brothers—Jamal and Salim—who grow up on the same brutal streets and become entirely different people. Jamal gets on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, fighting through the questions one by one, trying to get back to Latika, this girl he lost somewhere along the way. It plays like a fairy tale, but it’s grounded in real streets and real struggle. What actually hooked me was the trailer itself, and especially the music underneath. The soundtrack has this aliveness that just made me want to watch immediately. This was the kind of film that swept everything for a minute, and I understood why once I actually saw it. There’s genuine affection for these characters, for this world. You go in prepared for the hype to disappoint you and it just doesn’t. Sunday, 15 March 2009. The Ting Tings: There’s something about The Ting Tings that just works for me. That electronic pop energy, the way they build these tracks that make you want to move even in an empty living room at two in the afternoon. I circled back to them recently, to that moment in the late 2000s when they seemed to be everywhere but still felt genuinely good. That combination is rare. There’s a video from that era I’ve been thinking about. Just chaos. An apartment torn apart—Adidas Originals and bodies and mess everywhere, moving through it all like that’s the only way anything gets done. You can’t stage that kind of disorder, but when it happens, you want to somehow hold onto it. I’ve got this white wall in my living room that’s been blank for months. Too much space to ignore but nothing felt right for it. That video made me think: that’s it. That feeling right there. The thing is, pulling it off would take a drink or two and a willingness to let something actually be chaos without planning it to death. That’s always the hard part, isn’t it. The commitment to mess in a space where everything else is so controlled. Friday, 13 March 2009. Depp in Wonderland: The first stills came out - Tim Burton’s Alice with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. By that point the casting felt inevitable: of course Depp, of course Burton. They’d figured out their language after Sweeney Todd, that shorthand between a director who thinks in silhouettes and an actor who can make himself look like one. Mia Wasikowski as Alice, this quiet Australian actress I didn’t know, strange in just the right way. What interested me was whether Burton could find anything new in the material. Alice is already weird, already cruel, already exactly what a Tim Burton film should be. So what does he do with it? Make it bigger? Push it further? The images looked right, but that’s not the same as knowing where he’s going. Friday, 13 March 2009. Still Red: I was eight or nine, sitting in front of the TV with whatever action figure was selling that season. Five teenagers in spandex yelling about dinosaurs and pulling giant robots out of nowhere. The transformation sequence hit different—that moment when the music swells and you stop being some random kid and suddenly you’re chosen. You have a color. You have a job. My friends and I would run through the neighborhood screaming “It’s morphin time” until every adult on the block wanted us dead. We’d bounce off car hoods, swing from trees, make pterodactyl sounds at maximum volume. The neighbors thought we were insane. We were. Disney cancelled Power Rangers at some point. Seventeen years it lasted. Not surprised—the show was objectively bad. Terrible writing, effects that looked like they filmed action figures in a shoebox, acting that was completely wooden. If you actually paid attention to what was happening on screen, it made zero sense. But that was never the point. The thing that stuck was different. It was the idea that regular people could be chosen—not because they’re special or destined or born into it, but just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and couldn’t pretend they didn’t see what needed doing. That message burrowed deep. Still there. I remember my first girlfriend from around that time and I think of her as the yellow ranger, not for any logical reason but because of how childhood locks things together. She was yellow, I was red. The show’s gone now, and I haven’t thought about it in years until I heard it was cancelled. But something from those afternoons stayed. The idea that you’re chosen for something whether you want it or not. That when the world gets bad enough, you don’t get to sit it out. You show up. Go or don’t, the work is still there. Thursday, 12 March 2009. Ellen’s Emma: Ellen von Unwerth shot Emma Watson in vintage clothes and it actually works. There’s the immediate part—she looks good, she’s attractive—but also something smarter in the frame. Chaplin’s in there somewhere, circus melancholy, all these references that could be pretentious but somehow aren’t. Most famous photos of attractive people try way too hard or don’t try at all. These aren’t either. Watson’s figured out how to be in front of a camera. Von Unwerth shot her with real care, real taste. The styling, the mood, the whole thing is coherent. She’s moved completely past Potter now. These photos are proof. Wednesday, 11 March 2009. Call the Police: Two in the morning, karaoke night, and I’m standing in a room full of people absolutely butchering the hits of three decades because we’ve had enough beer to think we’re incredible. The 80s, the 90s, whatever we could find—it all sounded the same when we were singing it, which is to say it all sounded terrible. We knew it was terrible. We just didn’t care. The neighbors cared. That’s how the cops showed up. By the time they actually got there, I wasn’t even surprised. The whole thing was inevitable. You get drunk, you sing, you get loud enough to piss off the people next door, they call it in. It’s the natural order of things. And honestly, it probably was better for everyone that it happened when it did. We would’ve kept going otherwise, kept digging deeper into our own awful versions of these songs, kept getting louder about how much we were enjoying ourselves. The cops didn’t have to say much. They just appeared, and you understood that the night was over. Everyone scattered home, still drunk, probably still laughing about something we’d done or said. There was something right about the way it all turned out—the inevitability of it, how everything played out exactly as it should have. Tuesday, 10 March 2009. Metronomy – A Thing For Me: Just got back from some guy’s birthday party, half-conscious, and collapsed on the couch. Turned on the TV and Metronomy’s ’A Thing For Me’ came on and grabbed me—something about it made me need to write it down right then, dead tired as I was. Shit, it’s already Sunday. Sunday, 8 March 2009. Steve Aoki: I have his poster on my wall. That’s the whole story right there. Steve Aoki’s this American club DJ, born in Miami, raised in California, and yeah, his sister’s worth worshipping, but what destroyed me was “Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles”—finally downloaded it last year and couldn’t stop spinning it. He took the songs I actually cared about, the ones living in my head—Justice’s “Happen,” Uffie, Peaches, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand—and remixed them into these devastating, gorgeous, absolutely filthy bangers. It’s like he’d somehow read my mind and figured out exactly what I needed: something to pull my heart out of indie-depression hell and make it actually feel something. Dense, gleaming club tracks that just hit right. Thinking about it gets me sweating—that deep club-floor sweat, the kind you get at 4 AM with a hundred bodies around you—and I need to sit with ice water. Sunday, 8 March 2009. What Google Knows: I played that autocomplete game where you type your name plus “needs” and see what Google autocompletes it with. Mine was “Marcel needs our help.” It’s supposed to be a joke—Google already knows what you need before you do—but it landed different when I saw it. There’s something weirdly specific about what the algorithm comes up with, like it’s picking up on something real underneath all the search noise. Thursday, 5 March 2009. What You’re Actually Thinking About: Five in the morning at a club and I haven’t gotten laid. The bus guy didn’t want to come home with me. My parents burst in with a birthday cake right before things could happen. So I lock the door, kill the lights, and beat off to take the edge off. Masturbation is probably the biggest industry in the world. Nobody wants to admit it but the internet is basically a massive porn library with Wikipedia attached. I bought Bravo every week in school just to see naked teenagers talking about losing their virginity. You can order dildos from the catalog. It’s the most obvious thing on Earth. But what do I actually think about when I’m alone? Is it the celebrity thing everyone supposedly fantasizes about? Or is it something else—an ex, someone I saw in class, my teacher, some guy from a café, just a random person I passed on the street? Is it something that actually happened or something I made up? A bed or somewhere weirder? It changes depending on my mood, the time of day, whatever. What goes through your head in those moments is probably as varied as the number of people alive. Everyone’s thinking about something different, doing something different. And we know it’s not actually damaging—no hair on your palms, no degrading your spine. So you do what works, as many times as it takes. Eventually I close the laptop and get out of the apartment. Go back to the bar or the club. Get some new material. Get some actual human interaction, hopefully. Get the lights off and start the whole thing over again. Wednesday, 4 March 2009. Purified: Spring comes whether the weather’s cooperating or not, and with it the usual cascade—couples in parks, regrettable club decisions, the whole seasonal push toward sentiment. I’m not immune. So when Tamar’s “Purified” started circling my head, all black and white and dead serious about love’s power to remake you, I believed it. Completely. For at least three minutes. She’s 21, from California, and doesn’t flinch. The ballad just sits there, stark and committed, refusing to undercut itself. Which works if you meet it halfway, if you’re in the right frame to let something sincere be sincere. There’s an odd vulnerability in a song this earnest when you’ve built skepticism as your main defense. You go in half-expecting to stay detached and somewhere in those three minutes you’re actually feeling it. Spring probably deserves some blame—the season softens you, makes you permeable whether you want it to or not. Love doesn’t fix anything material. Doesn’t matter in the larger scheme. But you listen anyway, and by the end you’re more open than you were. That’s what “Purified” understands—that you don’t need to change the world to be changed by something. You just need to let yourself be moved. Tuesday, 3 March 2009. Blonde Rises Again: Every month I hit the magazine stand to see what’s actually being printed, what’s fighting to survive, what magazines still have anything to say. This time I flipped through Cooler—Australian surf photography, Kjersti Buaas and snowboards, Juliet Elliott in a photo shoot with her arm in a sling and somehow still making it work. Nylon had Kristen Stewart on the cover, and at least they let her say the obvious: nobody should wear what fashion magazines recommend. That’s honest. NEON does their earnest thing—big questions about ambition and feelings, the kind of content that used to feel like counterculture and now just feels like they’re trying really hard. VICE though. VICE is still doing actual work. Penis-shaped mushrooms. White Lung, these Vancouver punk guys. Some guy who’s been making a Polaroid every single day for eighteen years. And Richard Kern photographing Laura naked in completely mundane moments—brushing her teeth, sitting on the toilet. That’s what magazine content should be. Then Blonde came back. The magazine itself, not the concept. It’s rebranded as BlondE now, all glossed up and trying to occupy some mainstream-friendly space. Someone wrote in about finding it in their mailbox: “I can’t believe what showed up. BlondE is just another high-gloss fashion magazine, totally neutered. They’re writing about Copenhagen being the new Stockholm like we haven’t all read that ten times already. If I want to dress against the grain, I don’t need a magazine that takes what’s actually interesting and repackages it as tabloid generalization for people who think they’re rebels. It’s basically the Bild for fashion.” That’s what came back. A magazine zombie—mutated, sanitized, running on fumes. All the actual content gone, just the glossy shell of something that used to matter. Every magazine either dies or comes back worse. The ones that stay dead have the right idea. Sunday, 1 March 2009. Just Hannah: Hannah from Munich sent me a video of herself walking through her apartment, waving at the camera. Watch it and you’d think she’s on something—Red Bull, caffeine pills, something that keeps you moving at that speed. Energy practically vibrating off the screen, everything sharp and bright. But that’s just how she is. Hannah runs like that naturally, no artificial boost, no false enthusiasm. That’s her baseline. There’s something refreshing about someone who doesn’t calibrate their presence for an audience, who just sends you something personal and lets it land. No performance, no calculation. When someone does that, you feel like you’re actually being thought of. I didn’t hunt for the hidden cars she apparently put in the video. The gift was simpler—someone taking time to film their own space and show you, to wave across the distance. The apartment, the energy, the attention. That was enough. Saturday, 28 February 2009. Unpolished Tools: I released a bunch of WordPress themes the other day. Eleven total, five new ones, all free. They’re not perfect—I went through them once, there’s definitely stuff that needs fixing, the customization can be a pain depending on what you’re trying to do. That’s kind of the feature, not the bug. There’s something honest about putting out work that’s still rough, that needs someone else’s hands on it to become what it’s supposed to be. You’re not selling perfection; you’re handing someone the structure and letting them make it their own. Some people want everything finished and ready to go. Fine. But others like to tinker, customize, turn your sketch into something specific to their needs. Those are the people I think about when I make stuff like this. Tools that aren’t perfect have to trust the person using them. You’re not claiming to know the final answer; you’re just saying here’s the frame, now build your house. Grab them if it sounds like your thing. Thursday, 26 February 2009. On Display: Safari’s new beta just came out and I’ve spent the last couple hours diving into it. The startup screen shows your most-visited sites, which is convenient enough—if you just want to get back to wherever you always go, it’s right there. CoverFlow’s integrated, search suggestions work better than before, the whole thing feels noticeably faster and more stable. It’s one of those updates that makes you wonder what they were waiting for. But on first launch, Safari displays your complete browser history right there on the home screen. Every website you actually visit, ranked by how often you’ve been there. In my case this happened to be a very comprehensive collection of pornography, meticulously ranked by frequency. Just completely unfiltered and on display, like the browser was offering up my actual habits without any pretense. There’s something almost honest about that. And something else that makes you immediately want to delete everything and maybe find some kind of support group. I haven’t done either yet, so I guess I’m fine with it. Tuesday, 24 February 2009. Cute Little Pussies: On this brutally cold Sunday, I’m bundled up with hot chocolate while a kid reads from a cat book. She keeps stopping to shout ’BOM CHICKA WOW WOW!!’ with complete earnestness, and it’s perfectly absurd—something about a tiny person saying something ridiculous just works. The pussy joke is old. Everyone knows I’m talking about actual cats. They’re cute and soft when they’re small, then they grow into indifferent creatures who barely remember you. That’s the deal. Hannah’s at Carnival getting wasted, and I’m supposed to be finishing a project I’ve procrastinated on for a year. The muse wasn’t cooperative back then, so I’ve given up explaining it. Today, I needed this instead—the cold outside, the warmth inside, the kid repeating this phrase like it’s the funniest thing alive. It’s absurd. That’s enough. Sunday, 22 February 2009. Lucas In Love: Lucas from Buenos Aires saw a photo online—red hair, freckles, a moment captured by some photographer named Oceanwave and posted on Flickr. He wants to find her. Doesn’t have a name, doesn’t know anything about her except what’s in that image. So he’s asking if anyone knows who she is. He’s asking me to ask you. There’s something about that kind of desperation that I recognize. You see someone once, maybe in person, maybe just in a photograph, and they lodge in your head. Not because you actually know them, but because of something about how they looked—the way the light hit their face, an expression, the freckles. You don’t know their name, but you can’t stop thinking about them. So you do something that feels humiliating and hopeful at the same time: you ask strangers for help. I did that once. Posted a message about someone I kept thinking about, basically begging the internet to help me find them. It didn’t work right away. Two years later, they messaged me out of nowhere. Turned out they’d seen the post. We talked a little and then didn’t. The moment had already passed by then. But I didn’t regret it. And I think Lucas won’t either, whether he finds her or not. You ask. You see what happens. The rest is out of your hands. Friday, 20 February 2009. The Tree: I was sketching in a café last week - nothing important, just working through a visual problem. Nobody was looking. The sketches were garbage. But something about being present for that felt real in a way other things don’t. That’s what Yoko’s talking about when she describes artists as trees in the park, making the city breathe better just by existing. You don’t need an audience for what you do to matter. I read her letter to young artists every few years now. At 20 it sounded like motivational poster bullshit. Now, having made thousands of things most people will never see, it makes sense. Your work affects the world whether the world notices or not. The way she describes it, there’s a feedback loop - you give something out, it comes back tenfold. I used to think it was mystical. She’s just talking about integrity. If you’re honest in what you make, you feel different after. More honest. If you’re faking it, you feel hollow. The world doesn’t judge you. You judge yourself. I’ve been at this for twenty years. Most of it disappears. Some deliberately - private work, sketches, problems I’m working through. Some just gets lost. I don’t differentiate anymore. It’s all real if you care about it while you’re doing it. She keeps congratulating people for choosing to be an artist, but you don’t choose it. You find out one day that you need to make things or you’ll lose your mind. And then you do it whether anyone’s listening. That’s the only condition that matters. Friday, 20 February 2009. God, Are You Ugly?: Darwin Dating only accepts the most conventionally beautiful people in the world. You apply by confirming you don’t have acne, cellulite, sagging skin, stretch marks, too much body hair, unibrows, freckles, or red hair. Ten people supposedly made it through the filter. The joke is how ugly the website is. These perfect human specimens ended up on what looks like someone’s first web design project. The whole thing is built on ruthless aesthetic filtering, and apparently that didn’t extend to, you know, making something that doesn’t look terrible. Everyone applying knows what they’re actually trying to prove: that they’re one of the ten. Not meeting anyone. Not connection. Just the achievement of passing the checklist. That’s the real product here—the status of being filtered in. You’re reducing a person down to a list of things you don’t have. No acne. No freckles. No red hair. Trying to engineer a human through subtraction. And the site that hosts all this algorithmic purity looks like it was built in 1997. Wednesday, 18 February 2009. 1999: My knee was scraped raw against the concrete. The pavement flew past so fast I turned the blood into spotted abstract art. “Marcel, run faster, man, before those assholes catch us,” someone yelled. I could see Eniz and Ali ahead of me in the dark. We jumped fences, climbed hedges, ran down streets I didn’t even know existed. I had no idea if they were still chasing us or if we’d lost them somewhere in the last fifteen minutes of chaos, but my lungs were burning and I limped the last stretch to the playground gate. We climbed into the little house on the slide and collapsed into each other. I could hear their hearts pounding as loud as mine. Fireflies drifted around us in that eerie moonlight. We crouched there in total silence for minutes, just staring at each other, not moving, until dark shapes came running through the gate screaming our names and laughing, throwing their arms around us. It was them. The ZSC. My best friends. It was the hottest night of that summer, and the millennium was about to change everything. Almost ten years ago now. I’m lying in bed and just before sleep drags me under, I think about that time with this ache in my chest. The intensity of it. How completely it shaped me. I close my eyes and I’m back on the couch with the crew playing video games, or I’m in a tent by a fire with Eniz and me kissing Anja, or we’re jumping off a cliff into the gravel pit, breaking into camper vans, fucked up behind a building with Kerstin and Mela, and it’s all happening at once, no time between any of it. Years when we felt invincible, when we swore it would always be like this, that we’d never let the world make us smaller, that everything we did meant something eternal. Those summers were the most alive I’ve ever felt. You don’t get that back. Some days I can barely remember what it felt like, and other days it’s so sharp I can taste it. When I’m deep in my own head and the old songs come on, I imagine waking up on our meadow. All my people standing over me asking if I’m okay, if I got hit in the head or something. And suddenly the whole ten years since that moment never happened—it was all just playing out in my head while I was lying there. But there’s no time to process it because I’m already chasing Sabse and Onur, everyone laughing, I’m grabbing a cheap drink from the discount store and we’re heading to the lake. And as I’m jumping into the cold water with all of them at the same moment, I’m thinking about Becca, about Berlin, about everything that came after. And I’m grateful—genuinely grateful—that this is just a dream. Monday, 16 February 2009. Chilly Willy: Becca came through the city over the weekend and completely ran me into the ground. We pushed through Corpse Bride in chunks—Tim Burton’s whole death-and-devotion thing playing while I got progressively more glazed. Then we made this ugly beautiful seafood situation baked with cheese and potatoes, the kind that tastes better than it looks. Shisha after that, drinks, music I’d picked specifically for the night. This kind of exhaustion is different from the usual stuff. Not tired-from-work tired, not the dragged-down feeling of screens. It’s the specific emptiness that comes from actually being present and social and attentive for forty-eight hours straight. Your mind just stops defending itself. I’m lying on the floor staring at the ceiling until The Simpsons comes on, and I might not have the energy to actually watch it. This is where things stand. Sunday, 15 February 2009. Scoli: Found Scoli in that endless scroll of internet subculture, one of those profiles that actually looked like a person instead of a brand. Tattoos, deliberately messy hair, the confidence to get fake breasts and not perform shame about it. The music taste made sense—Against Me!, Queen, Foreigner, the kind of range that suggests someone who actually listens instead of curates. But the Bob Ross thing is what caught me. I used to do the same thing at odd hours, just sit with his voice and watch him paint things that made him happy. Having that as a hero says something about wanting to build instead of just rage, or maybe just needing that slowness as ballast. Sunday, 15 February 2009. Every Year: The season’s here. Every year the exact same thing—girls getting remade on camera, the internet screaming about tits and drama, and I’m sitting here too. Tessa’s my favorite so far. There’s a blonde I wanted further who’s made it through another round. What I’m actually watching for is the moment someone breaks completely. Not the fake tears—the real thing. Throwing up during bungee jumping. A genuine meltdown before they can edit it out. It’s a garbage reason to care about a show like this, but it’s why I tune in. I’m at the window when I look up from the screen and see my reflection in the glass. Idiot. Thursday, 12 February 2009. Office Levels: So there’s this Japanese company that literally turned work into an RPG. Not as some clever metaphor—actually, genuinely, in the most literal way possible. Everyone starts at level 1. You grind your job—hit your targets, work overtime, maximize bonuses—and you rack up experience points. Those points become promotions, Amazon gift cards, actual salary increases. The surreal bit: your point total displays on your desk in huge numbers where everyone can see it. When you level up, the whole office hears a congratulations fanfare. An actual sound effect celebrating your progression to level 17 or whatever. I genuinely don’t know if this is brilliant or dystopian, but there’s something oddly honest about it. Work is literally just accumulation and progression, so why pretend? At least everyone knows the rules. At least you get that immediate feedback, that dopamine hit when the fanfare plays. It’s way more satisfying than the vague nightmare of performance metrics and waiting to see if anyone noticed you did good. The gamer part of my brain keeps imagining the cursed castle is the office, the Princess is your project manager, and Epona is whatever sanity you’ve got left. But honestly, the system works. You’re grinding toward something visible and quantifiable. Everyone hears that fanfare when you level up. It’s bullshit progression, sure, but at least it’s upfront about it. Wednesday, 11 February 2009. Coconut Night: Three naked people wake up in a forest surrounded by creatures that aren’t quite human. This is the We Are Wolves video for “Coconut Night,” and it’s genuinely unsettling in a deadpan way—not trying to scare you, just strange. The costumes are clearly handmade and cheap, but that’s exactly what makes them work. Wrong without being slick about it. The video has a simple, cyclical logic. The three wander through the woods. The creatures circle them. Then it becomes clear this is a ritual, and it escalates toward sacrifice. Triangular holes open in their chests—like that section in the Lufia games where everything turns ceremonial and dark. And then it resets. The same loop again. I’m not sure what any of it means, which might be the whole point. We Are Wolves is a Canadian indie rock band, and I don’t know their catalog well enough to know if this weirdness is their standard thing or a one-off detour. But whatever it is, the video stays with you. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be unsettling, which somehow makes it more unsettling. That kind of unadorned strangeness doesn’t leave easily. Tuesday, 10 February 2009. And The Winner Is: We ran this desktop contest and the submissions just kept coming—way more than either of us expected. Hannah and I spent forever going through them trying to find the one that had it all, the one with actual charm and whatever makes something just work right. It was macScrubs. His setup had David Lanham’s icons, a wallpaper that actually belonged there, the whole thing clean and right in a way that made forty-five other entries fade into nothing. He didn’t hurt himself by being charming about it either. Sometimes that’s the skill—knowing what looks good and not being afraid to own it. The prize is a photo. Signed by Hannah and me. A perverted one, because why would it be anything else. Better pull your pants off now while you can still think straight, because this isn’t coming off your wall. Congrats. Monday, 9 February 2009. Majiya: Came across Majiya on SuicideGirls one afternoon—twenty-four, eight piercings, loves The Simpsons and chocolate, hates rotten oranges. She seemed like an actual person. It wasn’t just the look. She had actual opinions and preferences—a personality underneath the aesthetic. Most profiles feel like performance, but hers felt like life. It’s rare on a site like that. Usually it’s just the image. But when you find someone who actually exists underneath it, someone real, well, that’s worth your time. Sunday, 8 February 2009. Another Girl: I didn’t know Manicure before this. No idea who they were or where they came from. The video credits are all Russian names, so I’m guessing Moscow area, but that’s just speculation. “Another Girl” is straightforward post-punk in the British style—all lean and dark. What’s strange is how well it works despite the band barely speaking a word of English. I’ve already played it three times in a row and that’s no accident. Friday, 6 February 2009. Which Bitch?: I heard The View somewhere in one of those nights when everyone’s too drunk and the music just keeps playing—”Same Jeans,” “Wasted Little DJ’s” on repeat. Kyle Falconer’s singing grabbed me immediately, this dirty Scottish accent that sounds like he’s been smoking and drinking his whole life, which he probably has. I went all in, the way you do when the timing feels right and the whiskey’s helping. When their new album came out, I was already waiting for it. Then I listened to it. And it was shit. Sounded like they’d already said the interesting things on the first record and were just repeating themselves, only worse. Derivative. Safe. I put it away and went back to other stuff. But then there was this Thursday in Berlin, the kind of weather that makes you feel like something’s about to happen. Walking to the U-Bahn, The View came through my headphones—Falconer singing about a sunny day—and I just kept listening. Somewhere between the first track and the fourth, I realized I’d been wrong. Completely wrong. “Which Bitch?” wasn’t what I’d decided it was. It’s sharp, built from something real—that sound that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a shitty pub at the end of a day that mattered, drinking something that tastes like what it should. Songs like “Give Back The Sun” and “Unexpected” make sense now. They were always there. I just wasn’t hearing them the first time. Thursday, 5 February 2009. M83 – We Own The Sky: I’ve had M83’s “We Own The Sky” on my iPod for what feels like months, playing it constantly. The song builds these massive synth swells that feel like they’re going to crack open into something apocalyptic or transcendent, then they just keep building instead. That’s the whole appeal, really. The video’s from Matei-Alexandru Mocanu, some Romanian director I hadn’t come across before, and there’s this patience to it that matches the song—long shots, deliberate pacing, a kind of stillness. Together they create something that just works, the kind of thing you keep reaching for without being able to explain why. Wednesday, 4 February 2009. Asobi Seksu – Me & Mary: Asobi Seksu is Japanese for casual sex, which is the right band name for a New York indie rock group. Yuki Chikudate’s voice drifts through their songs without pushing, half-singing, half-thinking out loud. The video for “Me & Mary” came with illustrations by Dan-ah Kim from Brooklyn. The drawings aren’t just there to look nice—they’re actually listening to the song, both of them loose and sketchy and casual about space. There’s something good about visuals that don’t explain the music, just sit alongside it. I have no idea if this band meant much outside a specific New York moment, and I don’t think they cared either. Some bands exist in a place and time and become a name you remember, a reference point for whoever was listening. Asobi Seksu is one of those. Monday, 2 February 2009. Small World: I stuck leaves all over the walls. Sounds stupid but it works—just grab whatever and plaster it everywhere randomly. Easy to add more whenever. I’m sure someone has some theory about creative spaces, but the real thing is when my head goes empty—and it goes empty a lot—I lean back and look up and suddenly there are ideas. Or I’m turned on. Both sometimes. My mom still hadn’t seen the place, so I took photos showing where I actually live. The couch, the chair, work, Burger King on bad days. Just documentation of existing in a space. Before it happened. I got drunk on the train yesterday and dropped the camera. Just watched it hit the floor and did nothing. So those are probably the last photos for a while. Last evidence that I was there, that the place was real. Sunday, 1 February 2009. Newsstand: I’d grab whatever was at the newsstand. PRINZ had Berlin writers on love and drugs. VICE was running Issei Sagawa next to Richard Kern nudes. NEON mixed breakup advice with animal sex philosophy. NYLON called Franz Ferdinand the world’s best-dressed band while also interviewing a snowboarder named Kjersti Buaas. The magazines had this weird mix: high and low, serious and stupid, dark and trivial. You were paying for one thing that actually interested you and tolerating everything else. What stuck with me was how clearly you could see what editors thought mattered at that moment. They were usually wrong, but the wrongness was interesting—you could feel it in what they paired together. A cannibal interview next to lingerie next to fashion advice. That’s what mattered then, visible in the choices. Saturday, 31 January 2009. Lykke Li: Lykke Li showed up around the same time as Ting Tings and Ladyhawke, and she landed harder with me. I have a black and white portrait of her that’s been on my wall. She talked about art being the only way to approach life as a mystery, how she’d considered fashion and painting before landing on music as her form of expression—the thing that actually needed saying. Her video then was all purity, all clarity. No excess, nothing wasted. That’s why she stuck. Thursday, 29 January 2009. Blank Wall: I have this massive blank wall at home. Actually I have several, but there’s one in particular that’s been staring at me for months—pristine white, completely empty, waiting for something. I’ve been collecting good photographs, images that stuck with me, stuff I actually want to look at every day. Printing them out seemed like the obvious next step, but then I hit this weird anxiety about execution. The problem is obvious once you think about it: there’s a razor-thin line between “curated personal gallery” and “dorm room covered in whatever.” It’s easy to end up with the wrong thing. Teenage Bravo posters everywhere, or worse, those novelty prints—dolphins through rainbows, motivational quotes in fancy script, the whole tired aesthetic. I don’t want that. I want something that feels intentional, like I actually cared about how it looks rather than just papering over the emptiness. What actually works is restraint. Not everything on the wall. White space is your friend here, you need breathing room between pieces. The arrangement matters too; grid patterns feel too deliberate, but pure chaos reads as careless. There’s probably a middle ground, something loosely organized but not rigid. Maybe clusters of images grouped by some logic only I understand. Colors matter more than you’d think. If you’re mixing prints and photographs, you start seeing which ones work together and which ones kill the moment. The real question is committing to what goes up. Once you’ve printed something and punched a hole in it, once it’s actually on your wall, you can’t pretend you don’t care. It’s a declaration. That’s the part that makes me hesitate—it means admitting what I actually like, what I want to look at, what moves me. It’s easier to keep the wall blank than to say yes to something. Tuesday, 27 January 2009. Pink Saturday: The PlayStation was pink. Someone had joked about it beforehand, but there it was, and it worked, and that’s all that mattered. Saturday night, friends, a microphone. I’d only brought multivitamin juice, which completely undermined the getting-wasted narrative, but nobody cared. We were loud and stupid and the TV was turned way too high, and that was the whole point. “Umbrella-ella-ella” got destroyed, line by stupid line. Then “Wir beide” by Juli, which has always been the perfect SingStar song—something about the way it fits in your voice that lets you sound decent for just long enough before everything falls apart. We moved through some Disney stuff, “The Lion King,” “The Little Mermaid,” the kind of thing you’d never admit loving unless you had the specific permission structure that comes with karaoke and friends and late-night hours. One blurry photo remains, too dark to make out details. The audio recordings got deleted without getting a second listen. I remember the feeling of it more than anything—that specific stupid-loud energy that probably makes no sense the next morning but felt like everything right then. Sunday, 25 January 2009. My Real Name: Farin Urlaub of Die Ärzte sounds like someone who won before he started. Cher doesn’t need anything else. Mian Mian named herself and became a legend. Even Falco, the guy born Johann Hölzel in Austria, understood that your real name is the one you choose, not the one you inherit. I’ve been thinking about this because I don’t have one yet. The name I have—the one on documents—isn’t the name of what I’m actually doing. There’s supposed to be another one. A name that means something. A name that says who I am. In Japan they understand this institutionally. If you’re staying, you adopt a real name—not as performance but as commitment. You give yourself a new sound and become someone to match it. That’s not rebellion; it’s just practical. The artists who pull it off don’t seem to be asking for opinions. They’ve figured out who they are, and the name confirms it. I’m still in the figuring-out phase. Still not sure who this person is supposed to be, what they’re actually doing, what it’s for. Maybe that’s why the name isn’t here yet. Maybe you have to know first, or maybe you choose the name and grow into it. I honestly don’t know which comes first. Friday, 23 January 2009. Mao Abe: I know I’m that guy about Japanese stuff, and yeah, I just posted something else, but I can’t help it—I’m completely blown away by Mao Abe’s track. Eighteen years old and she’s made something that’s just landing different. I’m not exaggerating when I say I feel almost sick from how much I love this song—that dizzy kind of love when something just hits you perfect. The track gets better the more you play it, pulls you in deeper each time. I’m going to be listening to this all night, then buying the album, then listening to it all again tomorrow. This is just how it’s going to be. Thursday, 22 January 2009. Maximum: Namalee Bolle operates at full saturation in London’s cultural mix—musician, designer, model, author, Super Super Magazine founder. Her whole aesthetic is Cartoon Couture: maximum neon, maximum volume, maximum brightness. The colors genuinely hurt to look at. Not subtle, not safe. Intentionally. You can find her music online if you can locate it beneath graphics designed to cause actual eye damage. She’s built something that doesn’t apologize, doesn’t hedge, doesn’t care if you prefer things quiet and safe. It’s a philosophy as much as an aesthetic. That’s rare enough to notice. Most cultural work moves toward subtlety. She just goes the other way entirely. Wednesday, 21 January 2009. Eaten: Bambu’s 23, sings and dances, and has decided she’ll be eaten by a shark that will launch her into her next life. Not metaphorically. As an actual scenario. How you land on that specific death fantasy, I don’t know. What shark it is, or how rebirth works via digestion—details aren’t clear. But she seems to have thought it through and landed on it with total conviction. Most people leave reincarnation abstract because the full picture is too weird to describe. Bambu’s the opposite. She’s imagined the absolute worst and owns it completely. There’s something honest in that, if nothing else. Sunday, 18 January 2009. Mowing the Lawn: Staying up late as kids with whoever was around, glued to the late-night stuff on TV, drinking cola to keep awake. The appeal was obvious: breasts, bodies, the whole forbidden thing. But the actual threshold, the moment you knew you cared, was seeing pubic hair. That was the marker. That meant you were looking at a woman, not some image. Then somewhere in the last couple of decades, that changed. Someone decided to razor it all off and the decision somehow rippled through the entire culture like infection—magazines, porn sites, what everyone else was doing—until shaved became the standard and hairy became the exception. Suddenly the ideal was smooth, young, almost childlike. And we all just went along with it. The logic doesn’t really hold if you stop and think about it. The whole cultural push is basically telling women to look younger, less adult, more like a child. It’s something we’ve absorbed without ever really discussing, just let it seep in through osmosis until it seemed natural. But it’s not natural. It’s just what everyone’s doing. A woman who doesn’t do it, who just lets her body be what it is, ends up looking almost radical now. Maybe she’s made an actual choice about the whole thing. Maybe she’s just lazy or doesn’t care. Doesn’t matter. Either way there’s something honest about it, something that isn’t performing the script everyone else is following. But none of it really matters in the end anyway. Get drunk with someone you actually like and you’re not thinking about any of this. You’re just there, and either it works or it doesn’t. Saturday, 17 January 2009. Marta Streng: Found her work through one of those recommendation rabbit holes—a photographer from Poland doing work that doesn’t try to convince you of anything. Marta Streng’s photographs sit in clarity and restraint. Light, color, sometimes a face. Nothing reaches for the dramatic or the conceptually clever. What gets me, as someone who makes things, is how much discipline that takes. The kind of image that feels inevitable instead of carefully composed. That’s rarer than you’d think. Monday, 12 January 2009. Always Bet on Nora: Nora Tschirner has a new German comedy coming out called “Murder is My Business, Darling.” It’s about a mafia member who falls for a publishing employee and pretends to be an author to be near her. The premise is pretty flimsy, but I’ve stopped questioning her career choices because she always makes whatever she’s in feel real and funny. That’s usually enough. Sunday, 11 January 2009. About To Freeze: Freezing yesterday, so Mandy and I went to Alexa and I picked up a jacket that actually works. Then we went to McDonald’s and ate too much, mostly because it was warm and I wanted to be full. I spent too much on a maxi-menu hoping I’d win a Wii or at least a soft serve. Got nothing. My friend who works at the Zur Goldenen Möwe told me the whole thing’s a scam anyway. Going to Rosi’s tonight with whoever feels like going. The music’s usually good and the place is at least warm. But Hannah, you promised Nora Tschirner would come to my birthday. She never showed up. Where is she? It’s genuinely weird how I’ve gotten so good at slipping her name into everything I write. I do it completely naturally and I’m always aware of it. Thursday, 8 January 2009. New Camera: My old camera finally gave up the ghost after seven years or so—one of those early digital compacts with maybe two megapixels if you squinted at it. Dead. Gone. I mean, I’d been carrying it around knowing it was on borrowed time, but when it actually stopped working I realized how much I’d gotten used to having a camera in my pocket. So last Friday I bought a new Casio. The specs are ridiculous for what I needed, but I wanted something that wouldn’t feel obsolete in a couple years. I was at the electronics store, ready to pay, when the registers all went down at once. This weird disembodied voice—very East German bureaucrat energy—came over the intercom trying to calm everyone down, promising free coffee upstairs. It took thirty minutes. Of all the ways that could have gone, it felt like the universe was testing whether I actually wanted this thing. I paid anyway. The point is I’ve decided I’m taking this camera everywhere now. Everything. Which meant I had to actually update my photo section, which had been sitting there untouched for way too long. I borrowed a design from this other site because the old layout was starting to look like a relic. Now I’m going to be that person documenting everything, which means I’m basically handing anyone paying attention a pile of ammunition for… I don’t know, future blackmail or whatever. Worth it, probably. Tuesday, 6 January 2009. Move Your Ass: My 2009 motto: move your ass. Dead serious. First was curtains. My neighbor basically lived in hotpants, and the entire block could see straight into my place whenever she walked by. Didn’t really bother me, but someone should probably close the blinds at some point. Real thrilling stuff. I also promised myself I’d actually go to concerts instead of just talking about them. Scala, this club in Berlin I’d talked about visiting for months. And badminton, which was weird. It was the only sport where I didn’t completely suck, and I’d been saying I’d find a club in Wedding forever. Year of actually doing things. Or that’s what I told myself anyway. God, I’m so fucking cool. Wednesday, 31 December 2008. Yen Town: Some films just hit. Yen Town is about this girl Ageha whose mother dies, and she gets raised by a Chinese singer named Glico and introduced to this world called Yen Town where everything’s for sale—sex, power, money. They find cash in a corpse, and suddenly this weird crew of Japanese, Chinese, and American people are rich. They buy a nightclub, Glico becomes a star, and everyone else slides into greed and crime and eventually gets hunted down by killers. It’s the whole trajectory: you want something, you get it, it kills you. What I loved was how it refuses to look away. Japanese cinema that doesn’t add false depth or redemption narratives, just shows you what happens when people want something badly enough. Dirty. Real. That’s the film. Wednesday, 31 December 2008. So That Was 2008: Every year’s basically the same as the one before. You pay attention to the details though—the ones that made this year different, harder, more beautiful, more heartbreaking. The things that made it feel like something actually happened. The first half of 2008 wasn’t worth living. I’ll be honest about it. Breakup, then everything fell apart at school, then someone just erased my best friend from my life. No warning, no goodbye. The logical ending to that sequence would’ve been something final and dramatic. But that’s not who I am. So we get to the second half. Parties. People. Work that meant something. A new apartment. The city. All of it together made me feel like living again, which I wasn’t sure was still possible. And then the music. My iPod was constantly overflowing—Lykke Li, The Ting Tings, Santogold, Ladyhawke. Everything I needed that year, there exactly when I needed it. By the end I was bowed before the whole thing. 2008 was cruel and unfair and overstuffed with feeling in both directions. Mandy and Basti and I all agreed on the same thing: 2009 had to be better. It had to be. I kept thinking about the little one I wanted there when the year ended, when the fireworks started. I hope they don’t get you. Sunday, 21 December 2008. Sinned: Got sent a sin calculator. One of those internet quizzes where you check off your transgressions and it totals up what you owe in penance. Mine came to €2,601.13. The charges start straightforward. Drugs: €20. Lying: €15. Waking up next to someone and having no idea how I got there: €75. Then it gets heavier. Sex in a church: €100. Seeing more than one person at the same time: €200. Hiding bad grades: €30. Making a homemade sex tape: €15. The full accounting of a life that didn’t bother much with the rules. And then the punchline. After all of that. After the drugs and the infidelity and the straight-up blasphemy. The real sin. The thing that costs the most. Stealing fruit: five cents. As if the calculator saved the actual judgment for something small and petty. As if that’s what I should really be ashamed of. Friday, 19 December 2008. Back Online: I forgot to pay the internet bill. Spent the money on oatmeal instead. They just cut me off like that—no warning, no grace period. I told myself it was an experiment, some kind of digital detox, but it wasn’t. Just a fuckup that spiraled into weeks offline. Anyway, while I was gone: Christmas party at aperto, Marco’s birthday, and Lisa and I broke up. Three separate things that somehow all happened at once. You know how it goes. Easy come, easy go. You look away for a month and suddenly everything has changed. I don’t have any reflections on it. Just life piling up. The internet’s back on, the bill’s paid, and I’m here again. Tuesday, 16 December 2008. End of Year Shuffle: There’s something about late December that makes you want to hear music that’s already a little sad. Architecture in Helsinki, Anna Ternheim, some others whose names I’ll probably forget by January—none of it is new, all of it has been on some rotation for years, but somehow it lands different in December. The year’s winding down, the light’s gone by four in the afternoon, and you’re not fighting the mood anymore, you’re just sitting in it. I don’t have much to say about what makes these artists work. Ternheim’s songs are small and careful. Architecture in Helsinki is brighter but still melancholic underneath. They do what I need them to do. That’s really it. I’ve been playing the same mix for weeks without changing it. That’s usually the sign that something’s actually resonating rather than just filling space. By January I’ll move on to something else, and this batch will go dormant until next December rolls around. Thursday, 11 December 2008. Uniquely: Oakley funded a film called Uniquely about snowboarders and surfers, naturally featuring their new sunglasses collection. The production is clean—sharp editing, good cinematography, the polish you get when a major brand is paying for it. I watched it because I’m into this stuff anyway. I spent the whole time wondering where the brand ends and the filmmaking begins. The athletes are real, the locations are real, the technical execution is solid. But I can’t separate what I think about the craft from what I think about the presentation—the expensive production, the cool people, the whole glossy package. Maybe there’s no difference anymore. Wednesday, 10 December 2008. All In: André crashed for an extended weekend and basically never left. The whole thing blurred together—dumb pseudo-gay jokes at strangers, driving through parts of the city I’d normally avoid, drinking with my girlfriend and whoever else could make it, games we forgot the rules to, South Park marathons at three in the morning, YouTube parodies of Harry Potter on endless repeat. At some point I even snuck him into school disguised as an exchange student, which shouldn’t have worked but did. But the moment that actually stuck was just lying on the couch with Lisa, Lost in Translation playing, some homemade liquor within reach, that complete silence where nothing needs to be said. Everything else faded next to that. Two weeks until I see him again in Bavaria. Really looking forward to it. Tuesday, 9 December 2008. Yvonne at Kulturbrauerei: I was at the Kulturbrauerei Christmas market with Basti, completely wasted on Glühwein—the kind of drunk where you think you’re being clever and have zero filter. We’d grabbed some Kaiserschmarrn and were walking around like we owned the place, grinning at nothing in particular, when I noticed Yvonne Catterfeld making out with some guy like it was the most important thing she’d ever done. German actress, on TV all the time. Not that I was watching her specifically. It’s just weird when you see someone familiar actually existing in the real world, kissing another human being with intensity. Hard not to notice. Her makeup artist ended up being cool and friendly, which is how Basti and I—both completely obvious in our drunkenness, both grinning like morons—got swept into conversation with her group. Elli was there, some other people in orbit, the usual. They were nice about letting two drunk guys hover around, which is honestly more patience than we deserved. Basti became fixated on the idea that we should get ourselves in the background of one of her films. Not like, a significant role. Just visible enough that people who know us would spot us in a crowd scene, mid-grin, the specific thing where anyone else would miss us completely. For about twenty minutes that seemed like the greatest plan we’d ever had. Then we forgot about it and moved on to whatever the next stupid thing was. Thursday, 4 December 2008. The Morning Lie: They say morning exercise drives away sorrow and worry. I’ve done enough dawn runs to know the only thing it drives away is sleep. Your mood stays where it was. Your legs get tired. Your mind doesn’t change. There’s something almost beautiful about fitness culture’s delusion—the motivational videos, the promise that your problems are one workout away from solved. They’re not. By noon you’re back to being whoever you were, just sore and minus two hours of sleep. Tuesday, 2 December 2008. How The Day Sounds: Sunday, 30 November 2008. Actually Happy: I’m happy. Actually happy, which sounds stupid to say out loud but there it is. I’m living in what’s probably the most financially fucked neighborhood in the city, and I’m happy anyway. The people here are real, they’re kind, and nobody’s beaten me up yet. The bar’s low but I’ll take it. Becca helped me get the apartment sorted—she actually did the work while I provided commentary and got in the way. My neighbor upstairs has been treating midnight like the start of gaming prime time, speakers legitimately a war crime, but the apartment has a bathtub and somehow that makes everything okay. A bathtub sounds like nothing until you’ve only had showers for years. Everything else is clicking. School’s good, work’s good. I’m the class rep, teaching PHP and HTML and CSS, designing things that don’t look like garbage. Got a girlfriend with a mouth on her that puts mine to shame—she burns me with jokes I didn’t see coming. That’s the type. Little Britain, McDonald’s Monopoly, snowstorms that shut the city down for a day. It’s all the small shit that’s actually the thing. I need a couch though. That’s the only missing piece right now. Thursday, 27 November 2008. The Selby: Todd Selby photographs people in their spaces—artists, designers, makers, whoever’s doing something interesting—and just shows you where they work and live. The photography itself is straightforward, not trying to make anything look more dramatic than it is. What gets you is seeing how people actually arrange their days. The weird objects on the shelf. The light coming through the window at 3pm. How someone’s taste works when they’re not performing for anyone. Mark Hunter picked it up early, and it started making the rounds. I get why. There’s no angle to it, no curation toward a particular aesthetic. Just people in their environments, and you can tell something about them from the space. It’s the kind of site that makes you want to walk around your own apartment and see what someone would think if they photographed it. Wednesday, 26 November 2008. Running Out of Stories: Walking through Berlin at night and it hits me: nothing else is coming. I’ve known her for years in different shapes, different women, but always her underneath. Every year we’d find each other and I’d learn who she was again that year, think maybe this is it, then leave. It was the only pattern I could repeat. I’m a coward. I have to disappear from people I trust—just vanish into somewhere I’ve never been and sit alone until I feel alive. Then I come back. When I leave I feel genuinely real. When I return I feel like I’ve paid something essential for the right to come back. I’ve written about love and heartbreak and sex and desire. About how individuals dissolve and crowds carry hope and how you can live through moments that make you feel singular in a world that’s indifferent and arrogant. I’ve said what I needed to say. I’m twenty-four years old. I think like an old man. I’ve broken the taboos I needed to break. Lived the lives I needed to live. Written it all out. And now I’m sitting somewhere, waiting, and it’s clear to me: that’s everything I had. That’s the full inventory. So what’s left? Sunday, 16 November 2008. I Can Teach You How To Do It: These party photography sites were having a moment—Last Night’s Party, The Cobra Snake, that whole scene. Same basic idea: shoot every event, upload thousands of photos, let people see what they’re missing. The appeal is pretty specific: you get to watch other people have the kind of night you’ll never have. I’m fine with that arrangement. Wrong country, wrong look, not enough money—take your pick. The sites do me a favor by being honest about it. No pretense that everyone’s invited. Just a clear visual of who gets in and who watches from home. I’m one of the watchers. Thursday, 30 October 2008. Red Hair: I’ve got this thing for redheads. Real ones—with freckles, pale skin, those little dimples around the eyes. An ex ruined me. I can’t help it. My feed is basically Gillo Filippa right now. Swedish, nineteen, gorgeous as hell. Completely done for. Thursday, 30 October 2008. Becca’s Out: I had Becca lined up for Ladyhawke and Black Kids at the Lido on Tuesday, thought it’d be good to drag her out. But she’s completely wrecked—couldn’t make it. Disappointing. That’s how it goes though. The Ting Tings put out a new video anyway, and Blood Red Shoes are playing Berlin soon. At least there’s that. Tuesday, 28 October 2008. MiChi – PROMiSE: MiChi dropped a single called ’PROMiSE’ and I’ve been playing it on repeat. She’s one of those Japanese-English singers who’s been doing her thing in Tokyo’s underground forever, doesn’t seem to care much about getting famous. The single came with an Avril Lavigne cover (’Sk8er Boy’), which could’ve been terrible but isn’t. I don’t speak Japanese. Most of what she’s singing gets lost on me. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Her voice has this rough, casual quality that carries the feeling whether I understand the words or not. She’s not performing, not trying to convince anyone of anything. Just singing like someone who knows how to do it. There’s something clarifying about listening to music in a language you don’t know. You can’t parse the lyrics so you actually listen—to the tone, the phrasing, where she breathes. Those details matter more than the meaning ever could. ’PROMiSE’ works because it’s got presence. It’s a good song. The kind that makes you want to dig deeper into what else she’s done. Thursday, 23 October 2008. Into Dofus: Finding a decent MMORPG on Mac when you’re burned out on World of Warcraft is like trying to read during rush hour on the subway—theoretically possible, practically a nightmare. So I spent an afternoon digging, expecting nothing, and somehow landed on Dofus. Stupid name. Genuinely stupid. But the art style is clean, there’s something charming about the whole thing, and the best part is it costs nothing to start. I rolled a warrior, jumped in, and got hooked almost immediately. Combat is turn-based, sort of like Final Fantasy but faster, where you move your character on a grid and figure out your approach. You actually have to think instead of just machine-gunning abilities. The game runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, which matters when you’ve abandoned Windows. There’s something about an MMO that isn’t trying to be everything for everyone. Dofus feels intentional instead of bloated. You’re not being milked for progression—you just play because it’s fun. I’ve been logging in most evenings. Not chasing some endgame goal or waiting for the story to pay off. Just clicking through quests, watching numbers go up, finding weird corners of the map, stumbling into a zone with slightly harder monsters and having to actually adjust my strategy. It’s straightforward in a way that games stopped being a long time ago. There’s something restful about playing something this low-key. Nobody’s going to notice if you disappear for two months. No battle pass expiring, no seasonal gear becoming obsolete. You just play when you want. I expected to try it for an hour and move on. Instead I keep thinking about it when I’m not playing, which is usually how I know something’s actually working for me. Wednesday, 22 October 2008. Blank Walls: I’ve got this new apartment and the walls are asking for something. I’ve been scrolling through color palettes and photos of other people’s living rooms where everything looks inevitable and right. But nothing sticks. I see a pale green that works in one context and it suddenly looks sickly in natural light. A warm gray photographs beautifully but feels like surrender in person. I know what I like when I see it, which is worse—I can taste what I want but I can’t name it, and every time I get close something else catches my eye and I start over. It’s the designer’s version of that old paralysis where too many options means none of them feel like the true choice. Looking at other people’s spaces doesn’t help because their decisions are baked into everything else in the room—the light, the furniture, the way they live there. A color that’s bold in someone’s carefully composed photo is just a wall in your apartment. You have to live with it. I keep looking. Everything is close but nothing lands. The walls stay blank. Maybe I’ll paint them tomorrow, or next month, or I’ll just stand here watching light move across the plaster for a while longer. The indecision might actually be the point—at least while the walls are blank, they could be anything. Monday, 20 October 2008. Get Yourself Knocked Up: Müller—the German dairy company—just ran an ad campaign with the slogan “Lass dich befruchten.” That’s the whole thing. Not a metaphor, not dressed up. Just pure biological desire language for milk and yogurt products. There’s something weirdly bold about that in a place where half the culture is always panicking about birth rates and the other half is too repressed to say “sex” in public. Here’s a milk company just printing it: you want to fuck, we have dairy, let’s not pretend otherwise. It’s crude, sure. Blunt. But it works as its own kind of honesty. Most ads seduce you slowly. This one just puts a hand on your knee and holds it there. Makes you wonder which is actually scarier to people—raw desire stated plainly, or the soft manipulation that’s been the default forever. They’ve got a chai drink now too. Which somehow makes it funnier. The company that tried to hornify an entire country is now offering you something soothing. I haven’t tried it yet, but I probably will. Wednesday, 15 October 2008. The New Ones: Apple finally refreshed the portable Macs, and it’s exactly what everyone’s been predicting. Glass trackpad, LED backlighting, NVidia graphics. They’re doubling down on that iMac design language, which evidently not everyone’s on board with. The discussions are heating up everywhere—forums, chats, blogs. The specs are fine. The trackpad will either be brilliant or terrible depending on who you ask. The display’s become a point of argument. And the design itself pulls the room in different directions. You’ve got the “Jonathan Ive is a god” crowd and then you’ve got people already hunting for their old MacBook on eBay, convinced they want nothing to do with this. I’m undecided. Might buy one. Might chase down the older version instead. Or this whole generation might just pass me by without sticking. They’re shipping today, so I’ve got time to think about it. Tuesday, 14 October 2008. The Ghibli Game: Studio Ghibli designing a video game is the kind of announcement that stops you. Those films—Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Castle—they’re already complete as art. The thought of that sensibility in a game you control, a world you move through, isn’t hype. It’s knowing what you’re looking at. Ni no Kuni came out on the DS in 2009, and it’s built on a strange, dark premise for a game. A thirteen-year-old boy, this moment where he kills his mother—actual death, fracturing him. A fairy finds him after. There’s a book, passages, another world. His mother exists there, but as someone else, someone who needs saving. It’s fairy-tale logic: the world becomes a mirror of his grief, and to fix it, he has to move through it. Ghibli’s handling the visuals. Character design, color, the weight of light in each scene. It’s not a game with anime styling bolted on. It’s what you’d see if you lived inside one of those films. The DS is this small thing, this handheld screen, and Ghibli’s filling it with the same world-building they’d use in a feature film. I’ve never played it. But a story about a child remaking reality because he can’t accept his own—that only works if it’s beautiful. And with Ghibli, it has to be. That partnership isn’t about pretty graphics. It’s about visual language and emotional truth being the same thing. Monday, 13 October 2008. MGMT – The Youth: The kids in MGMT’s ’The Youth’ look genuinely annoyed, like someone confiscated something from them. But they’re dressed better than anyone has the right to be—the kind of effortless style that makes you question your entire wardrobe. Eric Wareheim directed it, and you can see his deadpan fingerprints all over it. It’s a come-down song, the type that only works late in the evening when everyone’s stopped performing and the party has actually found its groove. Play it at that moment and instead of people talking louder, they go quiet. The room settles. That’s how you know a song’s actually working—not because it demands attention, but because it fits exactly what you needed without asking. Friday, 10 October 2008. Spring? Fuck That: Wednesday, 8 October 2008. When Someone’s Wish: I’ve circled back to this Utada song more times than I can count. “Dareka No Negai Ga Kanau Koro” operates on a frequency most people skip past. She’s singing about someone half-gone, already out of reach, the impossibility of asking them to stay. The genius is in the restraint—no melodrama, no desperate crescendo, just her voice moving through the ache like she’s already accepted it, like she’s just telling you how it is. You’re listening from inside that acceptance, which somehow makes it worse than if she were actually begging. These are the songs you come back to when you finally understand that wanting someone to stay has never changed anything. You listen and you’re less alone with it. That’s what they do—let you know someone else felt the same thing in the same way. Not comfort, exactly. Recognition. Being named. Utada has always known how to sit in that moment. Where everything’s about to end but you’re still there, still hoping, still half-believing it might not. Tuesday, 7 October 2008. I Didn’t Eat For Three Days So I Could Be Lovely: Hung over from the night before, so I stayed in bed with Skins season one on my iPod. Cassie’s my favorite—Hannah Murray as this gaunt, constantly wasted pseudo-model with this strange pull about her. She drifts through her scenes like nothing else exists, and you sit there the whole time with this dumb smile, just hoping she doesn’t fall, hoping she’ll actually eat. That’s what I remember about it now. Not the storylines or the other characters, just that protective feeling. Watching someone beautiful and broken and wanting them to be okay, knowing they won’t be. Sunday, 5 October 2008. Kicking the TV: Dinner with friends, spaghetti somewhere, and Popstars was on the TV. This is the German talent show where untalented people cry about their dreams in front of judges who’ve learned to look serious. The only good part about it was when Mandy or Anne appeared—for maybe thirty seconds you’d see someone who could actually sing, and then it went back to being garbage. But that was kind of the point. With a full mouth and people I actually liked, tearing into these talentless singers became something we could all agree on. Everyone was thinking the same thing anyway—this is bad, these people can’t sing, the whole setup is weird. We just said it out loud. No pretense needed. During the commercials I’d switch over to something else on the same channel, something with Nora in it. She’s the kind of person who just shifts things—the moment she appears you remember that TV doesn’t have to feel like punishment. Then back to Popstars. I wanted to kick the set, honestly. Still kind of do. Friday, 3 October 2008. Out of Stock: My favorite Puma cologne, Create, has been discontinued. A very nice Douglas employee broke the news to me recently, which is genuinely awful. I don’t just wear this stuff—I’ve basically become it. After all these years, my actual smell has merged with it, and now it’s gone. I found a family pack with free shower gel at some drugstore and grabbed it, which buys me some time. The other impossible thing is finding the adult hardcover edition of the first Harry Potter book. I’ve been through every bookstore looking for it with no luck. So I ordered it online instead. I want to finish all seven books before the December release of Tales of Beedle the Bard. Probably won’t happen, but I’m trying. Oh, and apparently there’s a Harry Potter anime coming in 2012, animated by Akira Toriyama—the Dragon Ball guy. Which might be genius or might be stupid. I’m too much of a nerd at the moment to tell the difference. Tuesday, 30 September 2008. Viva Bavaria: I left Bavaria a year ago and everything there’s been falling apart since. The CSU is collapsing, Bayern Munich looks hopeless, and my family stopped showing up for each other’s birthdays. There’s the picture: Bavaria in freefall, and somehow it’s my fault for leaving. I moved to Berlin, to the Prussians and their tired jokes—something about Bavarian walls, something about Bayern at the World Cup, something about getting stabbed at the train station in ten minutes. The same old shit, but it sticks with you. But I’ll go back eventually. The mountains pull at you. The landscape, the culture, the girls—it’s impossible to resist forever. So hold on down there, you blue-and-white faithful. There’s still hope. Just not yet. London first. My mother lived there years back, so there’s something genetic pulling me that direction. After London, after time, probably Bavaria again. Once you leave home you realize you can’t fully leave it, but you try anyway. At least the Munich town hall made it into the Berlin phone book. That’s something. Monday, 29 September 2008. October Waiting: October used to hit different - you’d hate everything in small ways. Software updates, tax nonsense, even the musicians you’d been waiting for would manage to disappoint. You’d eat a box of snacks without tasting them, just filling time. You’d resent things that didn’t deserve it. But the same month you were waiting for something. New albums coming out. Shows restarting. The move was in a few weeks - new apartment, new space to imagine into existence. Your friends were moving too, broke like you, caught in the same space. There was this sense that October was just the holding period before something shifted. It never happened the way you thought. But the waiting was the point. October hung between seasons, and you hung with it - half-present, half-imagining, running out of time to decide what you actually wanted. Saturday, 27 September 2008. Marten’s Back: Marten’s finally back from summer. He moved to Berlin and now he’s got a camera and a backlog of work that needs finishing. There’s always this gap—you shoot something, then weeks or months pass before you actually do anything with it. Makes you forget what you were thinking when you took the picture in the first place. I should check in on what he’s shot, but something about that lag feels right to me. Thursday, 25 September 2008. Who Grabbed the Designs: You make something and put it out there, and then you forget about it. That’s how it works. You finish, you release, you move on to the next thing. Years later someone tags you in a photo, or you’re looking at something completely unrelated and suddenly there it is—your work, somewhere you didn’t put it, doing something you didn’t plan for. The people who ended up using my designs were impossible to predict. Models from Shanghai and Vienna. Photographers in Milan and Los Angeles. An indie rock band from India. A Canadian gossip blog. A site dedicated entirely to candy. Japanese photo blogs. American musicians I actually recognized. Someone named Jan who—honestly, I’m still not totally sure what Jan does. A pile of strangers from everywhere, connected by nothing except that they all saw the work and thought, yeah, I can use this. It’s funny because you can’t predict what catches on or where. You could build something meant for a specific audience and have nobody notice. Then you make something off-the-cuff and it ends up on a photoblog in Tokyo or in the header of some music blog you’ve never heard of. The internet doesn’t respect your intentions. There’s a particular feeling when you see your work in someone else’s context. It’s not pride—or it’s not just pride. And it’s not loss, though there’s something of that too. It’s more like recognizing a jacket you made years ago on someone at a bus stop. You know the seams, the weight of it, how it should sit. But they’ve worn it enough that it hangs differently now, shaped by their body, their life. It’s still the jacket you made but it’s not yours anymore. It was never really yours once it left your hands. That’s the deal, I guess. You make something so you can let it go. You don’t get to control what happens next. All you can do is notice when it turns up somewhere, take a weird pride in the fact that it worked, that someone found it useful, and then move on to the next thing. Tuesday, 23 September 2008. Christophe Kutner: Christophe Kutner takes good photographs of good-looking people, which sounds like a limitation until you actually look at the work. He’s shot Milla Jovovich, Diane Kruger, Charlotte Gainsbourg. What stuck with me was Book 2, his Brazil series in black and white. The photographs are clean—just what’s there, no staging. Someone’s actually looking behind the camera. Monday, 22 September 2008. Look Like An iPod Day: I wanted to post a photo of my new iPod nano on Pirate Day. Anne had asked me to. Then I realized the joke was already there: here I am with a music player, and everyone online is making piracy jokes. Too perfect not to notice. “Don’t you have to dress as a pirate?” The thing is, I kind of had the piracy part covered. (The legal team wants to go on record: this is a joke. The copyright people clearly don’t agree, but at least they made sure everyone got paid for their Fall Out Boy songs.) Now I’m wondering about other theme days. Zombie Day could work. Just ketchup. That’s basically the whole aesthetic. Friday, 19 September 2008. Cheap Addictions: Been sick, mostly recovered now. Existing on cough drops and melon slices, sitting at the agency doing the important work—FBI, CIA, CSI level important. The usual. I’m almost finished with this game. It went really fast. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed something: I’m completely addicted to the worst food. Microwaved cheeseburgers from the freezer. Those cheap cereals loaded with sugar. Chocolate milk by the bottle. Dead serious, every day. This has to stop. But I don’t want to quit—I want something else to be obsessed about instead. Something that won’t destroy me. The problem is nothing hits the same way, and I’m not sure I care enough to change anything anyway. Thursday, 18 September 2008. Fever: Yeah, it’s true - I’m sick. Been in bed since yesterday. Fever, cough, cold, the whole thing. Summer ends and here we are. So I’m doing what you do: all day in bed, living off cough syrup and chocolate milk and cereal, working through Final Fantasy IV. I joke about needing someone to wish me better so I don’t have to spend another day in this boring hole, but honestly it’s fine. More than fine. There’s something kind of good about having nowhere else to be. Wednesday, 17 September 2008. Greedy: I’m the kind of asshole who’s never satisfied, and December gives permission to want everything. There’s already gingerbread at the supermarket. Snow could start any minute. Final Fantasy IV one more time—and I’m actually buying it this time, I swear. A better camera than what I’ve got, something that doesn’t produce complete trash. A Wii, ostensibly for the fitness games (feel free to laugh), but mostly for Smash Bros and Zelda and that deranged farm game nobody remembers. A new iPod, if someone could just decide the color for me because I’m hopeless at that kind of decision. Those are all just padding though. What I actually want is to move into my new apartment—and throw the kind of party that matters in it. One of those new MacBooks everyone’s going on about, supposedly better than anything else ever made. Being a student in Berlin makes the price at least halfway reasonable. That’s the whole list. Monday, 15 September 2008. Home Sweet Home: Nothing happening, just staying in. Cartoons playing, Nutella straight from the jar, while everyone else is playing Spore or whatever. I’ve got The Sims 2 running instead. Built a little family, nothing elaborate. My daughter in the game—Nami—she’s turning out fine. Anyone who gets close to her without my say-so ends up at the bottom of the pool. No rescue squad, no second chances. It shouldn’t feel good, but it does. Sunday, 14 September 2008. This Week’s Songs: Put together this week’s mix: The Ting Tings’ loose, almost accidental energy, Bloc Party when they’re tight and nervous, Pop Levi, and this gutting ballad with Yoko Kanno and Ilaria Graziano. They shouldn’t work together but they do. Muxtape’s basically a ghost now but the format still feels right. Short, constrained, forces you to think about what goes where. That discipline matters. Friday, 12 September 2008. Back: My nano was finally dead. The white earbuds gave out weeks ago. When Apple announced the new lineup, I figured it was over—they’d fold everything into the touch, kill the slim device, end the pocket thing. But they brought back the nano. Thin. Nine colors. Same price. I wanted it without thinking. Tuesday, 9 September 2008. Barcelona: Rain hard enough to wash the color out of things. My jeans are still bleeding dye onto my white sneakers—that indigo running in trails that won’t come out—and I’m moving through the city in the particular way you move at three in the morning when your body has decided it doesn’t care about straight lines. Somehow we’d ended up somewhere across the Westend, no clear path back to how we got there. I remember beating people at foosball. Someone took a loss to me that night, or maybe several someones—the details have blurred but the satisfaction stuck around. Someone else fountained vodka-orange all over my shirt in that slow-motion moment where everyone just watches. After that the evening doesn’t quite hold together. We ate döner with enough garlic sauce that it seemed architectural, the kind of decision that makes sense only when you’re already too drunk to question it. Somewhere in the noise someone mentioned a brothel in Barcelona, and in the way these things work, it sounded like maybe we were all actually going. But Barcelona never happened. Somewhere between the spilled vodka and the kebab, the plan just dissolved. Whether anyone had meant it or it was just drunken talk, I never found out. Monday, 8 September 2008. Tales of Hearts: Every game store right now is the same dead inventory. Zelda ports I’ve already played three times over, whatever new releases they’re pushing that don’t grab me at all. The shelves look full but feel empty. I leave empty-handed every time. Tales of Hearts has been out in Japan for months now. I’ve read enough about it to know it’s the exact game I need right now—that atmospheric, built-for-handheld RPG that made me want a DS in the first place. The kind you sink into and stop paying attention to the rest of the world. There’s no Western release announced yet. I check for news periodically, which is stupid, but I do it anyway. I know it’ll probably come eventually. The waiting just eats at me more than it should. Right now there’s nothing else that even comes close. Friday, 5 September 2008. Feral: There’s a strange kind of magic that happens when a corporate party actually works. Yesterday the office threw a Hawaiian thing in autumn—some excuse about grabbing one more summer before it died, but really just a reason to let everyone off the leash for a night. The music was good, the meat was grilled, the drinks were flowing, and somewhere around hour two the whole place turned feral. Normally buttoned-up adults became wild kids. Ping pong turned violent. Water pistols appeared. Someone kept pouring vodka into the punch and everyone was too drunk to stop him. The weird beautiful part was that nobody was trying anymore—no networking, no performing, no careful versions of themselves. Just meat, alcohol, stupidity, and the strange weight of a group that decided rules don’t matter for one night. You see something real in those moments. Strip away the work version of people and they mostly just want to be dumb together, to turn everything off, to feel the momentum of something loose and uncontrolled. No pretense, no hierarchy, just everyone letting go at the same time. Christmas party’s coming up. I’m looking forward to it. Thursday, 4 September 2008. Chrome: Chrome. The band, not the browser. Helios Creed on guitar, Damon Edge on drums and synth, American electronic rock pioneers from way back. Which is how you have to introduce them now, apparently, because Google’s browser completely swallowed the band’s entire existence. Not some web culture in-joke. Not a Google product. Just a group that invented something, got there first, and then got completely buried under a search engine. You can’t even search for them properly anymore. The name is ruined. Wednesday, 3 September 2008. Eiswald: We went to IFA on a Sunday with Tomi, though we both ran out of energy almost immediately. The whole fair is designed to exhaust you—endless booths, endless displays, endless reasons to feel like technology is about to transform your life in some way that never quite happens. We made it maybe two minutes before taking a break, and spent the rest of the day drift-shopping, looking at things we’d forget about by Tuesday. There was this section they called an ice forest, with trees engineered to be perfectly silent. Stand under them and nothing—no rustling, no creak. It’s supposed to be calming, but it’s actually unsettling. Sony had their Rollys in there, these cute little robot things that I wanted to take home. They fit in your hand. The highlight was actually a simple thing—Telekom’s touch wall. Just an interactive surface, nothing crazy, but it was designed well enough that you wanted to keep using it. Everything else at the fair was chasing some idea of spectacle that had nothing to do with how people actually interact with things. The massive displays, the showcase cars, the strategic positioning of beautiful women in branded outfits who looked deeply bored by the whole affair. The male gaze was so thick you could feel it, and it never seemed to occur to anyone that it was embarrassing. They gave free cola. The giveaway odds were somewhere around zero percent. I wanted to steal the world’s largest LCD screen. The whole thing was weirdly inspiring, in that specific way trade shows are—you’re surrounded by visions of the future that will be irrelevant in six months. But for a few hours you’re in the space where someone decided what they think the world should want next, and even when it’s obviously wrong, there’s something compelling about that kind of belief. Tuesday, 2 September 2008. Eight Ninety: Grabbed Keinohrhasen at MediaMarkt for 8.90 euros because why the fuck not. Nobody buys DVDs anymore, but there it was, cheap enough to feel like stealing. Nora Winatschek on the cover, and I’ve been following her stuff for years, so that was reason enough. Three seconds, no actual decision. Hot dogs from the freezer, McDonald’s fries, and the movie queued up. That’s dinner sorted. Berlin’s drowning outside like it does every week, the city slowly collapsing in on itself, but in here it doesn’t matter. Just me, some mediocre German rom-com, and an evening nobody planned for. Sometimes that’s the only kind there is. Monday, 1 September 2008. September Friction: Your pants don’t fit. Summer won’t let go and fall’s already at the door, so you’re stuck in that narrow space between who you were and whoever’s next. Mona’s birthday was this month but Mona wasn’t there—the kind of small, pointed absence that makes everything feel slightly off for no reason you can explain. You’re constantly getting flyers shoved in your hand. Manga avatars stare back from every screen. The distance between Berlin and Bavaria suddenly matters in a way it didn’t before—like it’s the distance between summer and whatever comes after. Empty bottles pile up on the desk. You spill apple juice and let it spread and don’t bother cleaning it up. There’s something romantic about the trash in September, something tired that doesn’t lead anywhere. You’re exhausted before the month’s even started. But there’s good stuff running underneath all of this. New MacBooks and iPods drop in the shops. Fish tastes like something for the first time in months. The Script’s everywhere—that’s what everyone uses to convince themselves summer isn’t actually ending. Mischa Barton’s back on screens. Kidrobot’s releasing new work. Mark Chang’s photographs stick with you in a way that doesn’t feel like nostalgia. Cooler Mag keeps producing things that matter. Street fashion’s shifting in ways that feel almost right. Oktoberfest’s coming up, so suddenly people talk like this is finally the month they reach whatever they’ve been promising themselves since spring. There’s a buzz under September that isn’t just heat. Something’s shifting, and you can’t stay still anymore. Your clothes don’t fit, your friends aren’t where they’re supposed to be, summer’s ending—and September just keeps moving forward without waiting. Saturday, 30 August 2008. When the Show Rings Twice: Siemens invited me to IFA this weekend, which is kind of perfect because IFA is basically the machine that sells you appliances made visible. Thousands of booths, corporate theater, companies showing you washing machines and refrigerators like they’re going to change your life. As a designer, there’s something genuinely fascinating about seeing what manufacturers believe matters—and watching how often they’re completely wrong. Tomi’s coming, which is the only way this makes sense. You can’t walk through that kind of spectacle alone. You need someone standing with you when they’re explaining why their new dishwasher is revolutionary, someone to share the bad free coffee with, someone to acknowledge that you both just witnessed the same absurd thing. What gets me is the gap between what these companies are betting on and what actually moves anyone’s life forward. Most of it is just money spent very earnestly solving problems nobody had. Sometimes you find something genuinely clever. Usually you just see the machinery of how we’re sold the things we live with, all exposed at once. I’ll probably leave wired and empty. But that machinery is worth seeing. Friday, 29 August 2008. Another World: Step off the train at Buchloe and Berlin evaporates. Charlottenburg, the parties, the work, the school—all of it just gone, like I’d never left. I’d known it would be this way. Last time was the same. Everything here feels like another world. I hadn’t been back since Christmas. The station was empty. Walking down that quiet street toward home, I felt time doing something strange—moving and stopping at once. Days had passed. Nothing had moved. The weekend happened quickly. Party at André’s. Batman at the cinema. Shopping in Munich with Ana. Pork roast at my grandmother’s—the kind that’s better than anywhere else. I drank it all in, didn’t want to leave, and knew immediately why I’d had to. This town used to be my whole world. It isn’t anymore. Maybe I’ll come back someday. Not yet. Eleven hours back to Berlin. Magazines, my iPod, Richard Milward’s Apples—enough to keep my mind from breaking. I read my aunt’s card over and over. She was congratulating me on finishing my first year of training, saying everyone was proud, telling me to keep pushing when things got hard. By the time I saw the TV tower again, I felt untethered in a way I hadn’t expected. I grabbed my pack and walked toward the student dorm. I’d be moving soon anyway. Finally. My phone buzzed. Ana had texted. I smiled. Tuesday, 26 August 2008. I Caved: You wore me down. Months of it—’Come on, rejoin the platform,’ ’Just get back on there’—until I had nothing left and caved completely. I’m back. No principles, no spine, nothing standing between me and whatever you’re all doing on there. So go ahead, add me, write me something scathing about my lack of character, tell me which groups I need to join. This is just a summer break, okay? We’re going to agree on that. Not a fundamental collapse of everything I said I believed. Just a temporary pause. Cool? Tuesday, 19 August 2008. Chill Out: The weekend was too short and absolutely full of drunk people saying absurd things—the kind of weekend where you end up with phone numbers of people you’ll probably never talk to again. Spent most of it with Lisa, my future roommate, and her chaotic friends around Berlin, mostly in Wedding. We had a decent brunch, then I found myself singing sad Corpse Bride songs with Svenja and Meike at some point, which makes way more sense when you’re already drinking. Later at Conny’s place around three in the morning we were playing those stupid games with pieces of paper where you write something dumb and it gets worse every time someone reads it. It felt profound at the time. I even ran into Rubi-Rubi-Ruben at IM2BE at around five in the morning, just standing there in sunglasses inside a hip hop club. Pretty sure he’s the only person on Earth who actually does that. Somewhere in all this I apparently saved a homeless guy’s life, which was good. Finally started writing that book everyone keeps asking me about—at my current pace it’ll probably come out around 2025 or so. And I’m officially stating: if someone says the word “creative” to me one more time I’m throwing them off a building, and no government on this planet can do anything about it. That was today’s sermon. The ceiling here is actually pretty nice. Going to sleep now. Sunday, 17 August 2008. Mixtape Weather: When it rains like this, the day stops. Everything outside becomes irrelevant. All you want is enough blankets and music that doesn’t demand anything—just songs that sit in your head without commentary. Earworms. The ones you don’t get tired of. I made a mix for this exact mood. Slow Down Tallahassee, Sam Sparro, Bo Pepper—I don’t even remember why I picked these, but it doesn’t matter. The point isn’t to impress anyone. The point is to disappear into your own space and not answer to anything. Friday, 15 August 2008. I Want What She Had: Just watched a Japanese film with lesbian characters and couldn’t stop staring at one of their apartments. Bright, creative, clearly arranged with some thought. She had this lamp that threw stars across the entire room—just little points of light everywhere. The kind of thing that should feel gimmicky but completely didn’t. Good design in a film hits you sideways. You’re supposed to be following the plot and instead you’re mentally stealing someone’s aesthetic, their color choices, their light. The lamp especially stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about where it came from, whether it’s an actual thing you could buy or just production design that nailed it. That’s the point though—you see something like that and you want to rebuild your own space around the feeling it gives you. Find that same atmosphere. The search might take forever but at least you know what you’re looking for. Sunday, 10 August 2008. Moving to Wedding: Moving to Wedding in the fall. Found a small old apartment—real Berlin place, high ceilings and worn wood—and there’s a blonde girl living there right now who’s really into Hello Kitty and keeps an aquarium. She’s leaving, I’m moving in. Been in Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf for years. They were fine. But Wedding sits right between my work and school, which means the logistics just work. No friction. Sometimes that’s reason enough to move somewhere. Thursday, 7 August 2008. Spacy to Go: Hannah came to Berlin for a long weekend. We sat through Narnia 2 and Sex and the City—neither of them worth it—then moved through shopping districts so packed they felt dangerous, and spent nights on the S-Bahn where the heat and the bodies and all the eating created this feeling like being inside someone’s mouth. Hannah had brought small cinnamon-star stickers she’d made and spent the entire weekend trying to stick them on walls and people with about 40% success. What I took from it: ordering a Spacy at a Japanese restaurant is genuinely funny. Popcorn tastes better the next day, which makes no sense but is true. Even fashion designers fall for stupid pipe jeans if you market them right. Even people who supposedly know better. It was good to have her around. I promised to come out to Bavaria next and bring cake to her mom—I meant that. She took a bunch of photos that are somewhere online. Whenever she orders a Spacy, I hope she thinks of this weekend. Monday, 4 August 2008. Hand-Drawn: I never pretended I didn’t watch the Disney cartoons. Aladdin, The Lion King—there was something there worth looking at, regardless of what you were supposed to care about at twelve. The animation held up. The character design held up. You weren’t just watching pretty colors move around. By the time I was older, they’d basically stopped making hand-drawn films. Everything went CGI, which is fine, but there’s something different about line work. You can see the human decision-making in it. You can see exactly where someone chose that line weight, that color, that movement. Five years later, The Princess and the Frog came out. Everyone acted like it was this big event. I probably rolled my eyes about it initially. But watching it, the thing clicked. The animation had weight. You could tell someone actually cared about the craft instead of just moving on to whatever the next technology was. It’s weird how you forget why something mattered in the first place. You watch that film and it comes back—not the nostalgia angle, not the childhood memory thing, but the actual work. The line weight, the color, how it moves. Someone made every single frame. That’s what stays with you. Wednesday, 30 July 2008. Couples: I’ve watched enough couples to know the pattern. They play with each other’s hair and call each other honey and bicker about nothing. The sex is always this whole thing—maybe anal, maybe not, it hurts, be gentle, forget it. And then the contraception, which somehow becomes both their problem and only her problem. The pill she forgets. The timing that’s off. The morning-after pill that wrecks her for a day. They miss things they planned. The constant negotiation. The friction wearing them down. Being single just feels cleaner. No negotiations, no one forgetting anything, no one waiting for anyone. I exist by myself without all that friction. It doesn’t actually make anything better, of course. But it sure feels like it does. Wednesday, 30 July 2008. First Subscriber: Anna’s letter caught me unprepared. Specific and unsolicited—she’d been reading for years, she said, was my first subscriber and never stopped. The posts where I’d written about failing, about confusion, about things falling apart and then not falling apart—they’d actually reached her. At moments when she needed proof that someone else was lost too. She cried when she read about Mona. That one still gets people. Laughed at the jokes. Felt less alone reading someone’s unfiltered thoughts about difficulty and stumbling through. And then she wrote to tell me that it had mattered, knowing she didn’t have to, that no one asks for that kind of letter. Mail like that is hard to know how to take. It’s not quite praise. Someone saying “what you wrote helped me,” not because they’re performing gratitude but because they just wanted to say it. The difference is subtle but it lands heavier. The whole reason to write anything is probably this: that it’ll reach someone at the exact moment they need it. That possibility is abstract, theoretical, something you do without proof. Proof is rarer and weirder than you’d expect. Tuesday, 29 July 2008. The Empty Rebellion: I finally understand what’s creating this emptiness. Why I fight against the things that are supposed to be good for me. Why I can’t just accept school, work, love, happiness. Something’s missing. I need a reason to push back, and I don’t have one. History gives you the template. Real oppression, real enemies, actual stakes. That’s what made people matter. You had something to resist and that resistance defined you. It got you into the history books. It was worth the cost. Now what’s worth anything? There’s no shortage of things that should infuriate me. Consumer culture. Globalization. The casual torture of animals. Mass surveillance. The slow creep of fascism. Exploitation most people refuse to see. You could build an entire life around fighting any one of these. But there’s no unified enemy, no clear line between us and them. Just scattered outrages with no focus, no collective identity. I’m in Berlin—a city that should smell like rebellion. I thought the history would be embedded in the streets, that I’d feel something electric just by being here. I feel nothing. Maybe the revolutionary spirit was always bullshit, or maybe I’m too broken to sense it anymore. That absence is what I’m mourning. That uncomplicated purpose. Instead I have freedom, which is worse. We’re so liberated that we’ve started destroying ourselves just to feel something real. Cutting, vomiting, drinking, disappearing into games and screens. At least there you have a clear objective, something that wins or loses. This is just shapeless dread. The systems are too good at hiding the real damage now. Everything’s too complicated, too entrenched to imagine changing. So everyone’s exhausted before they even start. And you can’t trust the people claiming to help. Activists running scams. Charities enriching themselves. Half the resistance is just performance. Nobody believes anything works anymore. That’s how it’s won—not by silencing the rebels but by making them too disgusted to try. Maybe a real enemy will emerge and I’ll be too numb by then to notice. Or maybe this is just what it’s like now—stuck between freedom and paralysis, fighting things that aren’t real. I’m waiting for that spark again. I don’t think I’ll find it. Sunday, 27 July 2008. This Week’s Rotation: I’m spinning through the same few things on repeat. Lykke Li keeps me tethered—that strange electronic production, her voice suspended inside it like she’s singing from somewhere else entirely. There’s a tension in how she sits in the mix that makes you listen differently. The National hit different lately. Their songs move at a crawl, Will Oldham’s voice scraping against concrete, and you just let it. Then Black Kids showed back up in something I was listening to and remembered why that whole moment mattered. It’s less about discovery and more about what lands right now—same room, same speakers, same time of day. That’s the whole week. Friday, 25 July 2008. Hillary The Mammal: On a rainy Tuesday with nothing better to do, I found Hillary Rainmeer from Portland somewhere online. The kind of photographs that make all the scrolling feel worthwhile. She probably had a MySpace page in there somewhere, but I’d already checked out of that place. The pictures were enough to brighten the afternoon. Tuesday, 22 July 2008. Stay: The courtyard hits you before your eyes do. I pushed through the buzzing door into Prenzlauer Berg and found walls covered in activist slogans and scrawls, bikes piled against the building like the aftermath of something, strollers wedged between graffitied mailboxes. The whole place looked exactly like the kind of building you dismiss before you even get inside. Then a young mother with her kid answered the door. Both of them somehow looked put-together in this falling-apart building. “Come in,” she said. I was tired enough to obey. And I was actually surprised—the apartment was beautiful. High ceilings, original plasterwork, good light. A few other people were circulating through it the way you do at a showing, checking things they didn’t care about, testing the floorboards. The kid planted herself in her bedroom doorway and didn’t let anyone past. “Don’t take my toys,” she kept yelling, half threat, half song. Dead serious about her stuff. I’m not sure I would have behaved myself if I’d been alone with her—there was something both furious and ridiculous about her conviction. I wanted the apartment. So tired that wanting to climb into that bed with her seemed like a good enough reason. Maybe it was the only reason. I thanked her for the tour, said I’d call Tuesday, and headed back down to the courtyard. By the time I got back outside, it didn’t look the same. The graffiti had logic to it now. The whole place had character, the kind you don’t get in clean, managed buildings. Prenzlauer Berg. Maybe it was exactly where I belonged. Saturday, 19 July 2008. My Muxtape: Music is one of those things it’s hard to stay cynical about for long. You can tell yourself it doesn’t matter, that it’s just sound, but then a song lands right and you’re gone—eyes closed, somewhere else. The lyrics, the melody, they shift you into a different headspace where you can think about things that won’t come loose any other way. So I keep a playlist for this. Nothing precious about it, just whatever fits right now. One track out, another in. It moves because I move, because new things arrive and old ones fade. The strange part is how much this matters—this private collection of songs, nobody else’s voice involved, running through my days. Probably the most important thing I actually control. Friday, 11 July 2008. Blond Fades: I had three magazines that mattered to me: Vice, NEON, and Blond. Just those three. Now Blond’s apparently dying. The relaunch went nowhere, the price cut didn’t help, readers are furious, and whoever’s in charge won’t say anything about it. The whole NEON versus Blond competition probably ends here. One wins because the other just gave up. It’s sad. Really sad. Thursday, 10 July 2008. Afternoon in Wilmersdorf: Coming out of Charlottenburg station with my brain still tangled up in whatever teenage fantasy was happening in that last class—the kind of thing that makes you weirdly horny for reasons you’ll never fully understand—I turn right toward Wilmersdorfer Straße. Sun on the back of my neck, a list of stupid thoughts: how one bottle of Lipton iced tea covered my entire daily sugar requirement, the petition I’m supposed to be pushing as class rep (English instead of PE), the fact that lessons were actually bearable today, probably because the usual assholes weren’t there. A couple of emo kids outside Media Markt grin at me as I walk past. I grin back. The blonde one screams—even through my earbuds—something about my piercing. I throw up the horns and keep walking. Almost get clipped by a bus. The bookstore’s next. New Moleskine, whatever magazine. Then Lidl, down those weird cold steps, a kid blocking the revolving door. Haven’t been here in months; the Kaiser’s is closer to my apartment. I’m trailing behind some aggressively Scandinavian family through the aisles like an idiot. Was planning on mineral water because I’d been buzzing all day, hands shaking a little—the kind of thing that makes you paranoid about whatever Michael J. Fox has. But I grab Punica apple juice instead. Bottle, no deposit. At the register, the cashier flags over the security guard and whispers something in his ear. The guy disappears, comes back asking which one, and the cashier points—barely attempting subtlety—at the Swedish family. I’m putting my stuff away, wondering if I should wait around for whatever’s about to happen to their kid, but I don’t. Just head back up. Outside, there’s a policewoman shoving a diving mask on some random man and handing him two beer steins, yelling something I can’t quite make out. Camera crew nearby. Some kind of street prank thing, and I’m now in the background of it. Whatever. The emo girls come past again, and the blonde one winks. And right then—standing there in this neighborhood I’ve walked through a thousand times without thinking about it—I realize I actually like it here. Tuesday, 8 July 2008. Back to It: I’d been in bed for days. My iPod was a graveyard of the saddest songs I could find. I was eating whatever strange shit was left in the fridge. At some point you just can’t stay there anymore, even when you’re not ready. People would say it’s too soon, that I should’ve waited longer, been darker about it, locked myself away for months. But that’s not how it works for me. I don’t think it was ever supposed to work that way. I’ve got her voice in my head, this sweet thing that stays. That’s what matters. I want to thank everyone who showed up, even people I couldn’t write back to. Some of those messages meant everything. They opened something that had gotten shut, got me standing again. Most of them went unanswered, but I felt them. So now it’s forward. Third semester starts soon, second year of the training. There’s so much I can still work on—myself, my discipline, my fire. At school, at the agency, in everything. There’s a lot of life there if you’re looking at it right. This website is coming back, but different. Familiar and new at once. Not perfect—there’s still work everywhere—but I couldn’t wait. I needed to start. It sucks that you can’t see what comes next. But I’m going to make you proud. Tuesday, 1 July 2008. I Live To Let You Shine: One humid summer night, after too much red wine—Hungarian wine, the cheap kind—Mona and I had the brilliant idea to write each other’s obituaries. It made sense at the time. If one of us died (which seemed impossible, which seemed like it would never happen), we’d already have something written, something honest. We sat in opposite corners of her bedroom with paper and pens and just… wrote. I wrote nothing but bullshit. You can read it yourself. You’re sitting on your beanbag chair, grinning at me, laughing like an idiot while you’re probably writing the worst things you can think of about me. But I can do it too, watch. When you die, I can finally tell the truth about you. That you’re too stupid to fill your iPod by yourself. That you call your dad whenever you see a ladybug. That you burn literally everything when we try to cook something decent. So there. But then I think about a time when you’re just… gone. Not there. Not with me. And it hits different. The joking stops. You’re quieter now, can you feel what I’m feeling? The thought of never hugging you from behind again, never hearing that stupid laugh when I try to be funny, not being able to sleep because you’re singing off-key in the bathroom—it terrifies me. No, Mona, we’re never going to die. We’re going to be immortal. And now my keyboard is getting soaked through because I’m crying and I’m publishing this and it will never be good enough for you. I’ll never forgive myself for not being there in your last moments. We’re going to stay like this forever: young and free and beautiful. I miss you. My best friend died in a car accident last night. Thursday, 26 June 2008. Letters to an Angel: Spent the weekend doing a film shoot and it absolutely destroyed me. Two solid days of filming just to get maybe five minutes of usable footage. That’s how it works though—you shoot a scene, shoot it again, the light’s changed so shoot it again, someone moves wrong, again. You’re doing the same thirty seconds over and over until everyone’s seen it a hundred times and it finally looks right. But there’s something about it. Working with a crew, everyone locked in on solving the same tiny problem, and after a few hours you stop noticing how tired you are. Your brain just shuts up and does the thing. The working title was “Briefe an einen Engel”—Letters to an Angel. It airs October 9 on Sat.1. Whether anyone watches it, whether it matters—I have no idea. But it exists now, and that’s something. Monday, 23 June 2008. The Bathtub: I’m lying in hot water, steam rising in shapeless clouds. The new Coldplay album is playing softly from somewhere else in the apartment—”Lovers in Japan” mostly, the song that plays on repeat. Vanilla-scented candles are scattered around the bathroom. The whole room has gone quiet in a way that makes you forget there’s a world outside it. Lately when I shut my eyes, my head fills with the wrong kind of thinking. Violent stuff. Sickness. The pointlessness of everything. Death mostly, and the arbitrary cruelty of being conscious and stuck in this body on this planet. Is this just the age I’m at now? The post-puberty years where you start actually thinking about existence and realize nothing you do will matter and you’re trapped here anyway? I don’t know. I let the thoughts sit there. Not much you can do except let them pass. When I open my eyes again, the ceiling is just floating mist. I can’t tell if I’m sweating or if it’s the hot water running down my face. The bad thoughts are still there, trailing behind like something that won’t leave. Then the door opens. They come in quietly, undress, slip into the water with me. For a moment we just sit there. They ask if I’m okay. I say something meaningless. They hand me wine or champagne—something—and they just hold me. Their arms around my chest, their breath on my neck. And the noise in my head gets smaller. The terrible stuff feels further away. Quieter. They kiss my shoulder, my neck. The shaking in my hands settles. Everything is fine now. I’m okay. Sunday, 22 June 2008. Nothing Much: I ducked out on Sex and the City with Kathi, thought I’d finally write something, and now I’m sitting with some sausages realizing I’ve got nothing. Not a thought worth finishing, not even a paragraph that lands. There are stories I could tell. Getting cast as an extra in some film this weekend. This Legalize LA shirt that makes everyone ask if I’m moments away from arrest. Being genuinely obsessed with Jappy again, the way you get absorbed in something when it finally clicks. All of it’s real, none of it feels like something I need to write down. I could make this the post itself—this nowhere moment, this refusal. But I’m not in the mood. Not because it’s private or you don’t deserve it. Just because the whole thing feels pointless right now. So I’m going to finish these sausages and move on. Wednesday, 18 June 2008. Baltic Run ’08: The TV tower appeared on the horizon and I was genuinely glad to be home. We blew past the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, Revolverheld’s “Mit dir chill’n” playing in the CD player like always, and I closed my eyes. I was already nostalgic for the week that had just ended—the nights we’d burned through, my ears still ringing from singing our lungs out at karaoke, my head pounding from tequila shots, the image of all those hairy nudists seared into my brain forever. Saturday afternoon we pulled into what felt like the most deserted town on the northern hemisphere. The sun was brutal, the Baltic sent waves to greet us, and we had the whole house to ourselves for a week of pure debauchery. PlayStation went in, speakers cranked, food and booze spread across the kitchen and deck. Norman and Jini brought their little firecracker Ewa—without her, we’d have had maybe half the chaos. She was our mascot, this tiny thing who kept yelling “Ewa here! Ewa here!” We screamed commentary at Germany’s World Cup matches (one brilliant, one catastrophic), grilled cheap discount meat, baked ourselves on the beach, got absurdly good at swatting seagulls, let that amazing gasoline-powered whatever-it-was rescue us from the worst situations again and again, witnessed a beautiful couple form (sorry Anne—Tom and Slady were unstoppable), massacred mutant spiders in some video game, used the windows for way more than just looking out of them, and played Mario Kart knockoffs when the wind got too vicious. I destroyed Tommy every single time, obviously. Seven days of that hits different. After all the themed nights and Anna’s triumph over an open window, a shitty cold started creeping in. By Friday I was done—holed up inside watching MTV’s gaming marathons (I love those guys from Game One, by the way; I nearly worked with them once before Berlin happened, so yeah, look at me), and I caught a bunch of music videos I wouldn’t see at home. Somewhere in there I noticed I had a thing for Mandy from Monrose, and the Uschi from Aloha From Hell wasn’t bad either when she’s not playing a teenager. Sido had put out some solid tracks. Though I’ve still got Anna’s voice stuck in my head from when she was singing along to everything. Now I’m back here wanting the hot sand and the sprawling bed and all those voices and faces crowded around me for days—people groaning “Look at you!”, throwing stupid insults (“I’m your mother, you son of a bitch!”, “If there’s no milk left, put the bottle back!”), making up words (“Lolomat,” “Moon protection factor”), hitting each other, making out, taking the piss, laughing until they couldn’t breathe or just staring at each other like idiots. And where the hell did Gayman go? That was genuinely one of the best weeks. Anyone who didn’t go or backed out at the last second—whether because you were scared your relationship would fall apart or you had to feed your cat or water your stupid plants or the group vibe freaked you out—you only have yourself to blame. I’m already thinking about next year. Sunday, 15 June 2008. Take Care: The city had shifted in an hour. It still smelled like cut flowers and ice cream, but the sun’s relentless heat was gone, replaced by this cool, unsettled calm under the dark clouds rolling low across the sky. Sina and I walked past the cafés along the street. Their staff were already moving chairs and tables to safety, like they could sense what was coming. I felt the first drops on my skin and pulled her hand, walking faster. A group of kids ran past us toward a hair salon awning. The trees lining the sidewalk were dancing, papers swirling up from the pavement. Just as Sina got the apartment door open, it broke—real rain—and we both laughed running up the stairs. Her neighbor from upstairs rushed past yelling about laundry. We made it inside grinning. She was a student living alone in this big old apartment. Her brother had lived here until a year ago when he overdosed. I never really knew him. There was just a small photo of him on a shelf in the living room. I took off my wet Chucks and went out on the balcony. The city was nearly invisible, dark except for lightning flashing. The air was thick and humid. Two weeks without rain. This was the first real storm of the summer. A good summer so far. Sina was on her oversized designer bed—a graduation gift from her parents, though she would have wanted a car. Her wet clothes were on the floor. I lay beside her, wrapped around her from behind, and closed my eyes. She smelled good. “Will you forget me?” she asked quietly. “No,” I said into her neck. “When do you leave?” “Tomorrow morning around six.” “Can I come?” “Yeah. I’d like that.” I’d known her maybe two months. Beautiful, blonde, great legs. But I was leaving and she knew it. We’d thrown this incredible party here once—felt like the best night of my life. Now the apartment felt almost empty. She was naked next to me on the bed. The night before hadn’t gone great. My head was somewhere else and I couldn’t focus. The fridge was almost bare. I grabbed an orange juice and sat on the couch. Euronews was playing. Berlin: 28°C. I changed to sports. The alarm went off the next morning and I just stared at it. Didn’t even need it—I’d been awake all night. Sina came in half asleep, leaning against the doorframe. “You’re not getting dressed?” She didn’t answer, just went to the bathroom. I got up and opened the balcony door. It was already light out and the air smelled like fresh bread from the Turkish market downstairs. Somewhere her neighbor was yelling about laundry. I remembered the first time I met her. A restaurant. I fell for her immediately watching her sit across from me. Beautiful narrow face, blonde in the light, that smile she had. “Do you want kids?” I asked while eating my burger. She looked up from her salad. “Two.” “Me too.” She looked back down. “A boy and a girl,” I said. She just nodded. We went to bed that first night anyway. When she drove me to the airport, she didn’t smile once. I didn’t say much either. “Take care,” was all I had. Then I turned around and left. Monday, 2 June 2008. What Ruled: June was the month where you’re embarrassed about being embarrassed, where you’re dying of thirst but nothing in the fridge is right, where your t-shirt somehow has blood on it and you stopped asking when. You’re inside when the sun’s screaming outside. The train packed with bodies, everyone sweating, everyone regretting being there. Video games suddenly more real than television. Overly sweet food tastes like a mistake in heat. That light blue bleach powder that ruins whatever you’re trying to save. Jokes that won’t die—Chuck Norris jokes, then jokes about jokes, until the joke is the format itself and nobody laughs but it keeps happening anyway. Someone’s face. Her mouth. The whole tangled June thing of wanting to care but knowing it’s stupid, wanting to flip out but holding it back. The half-thoughts. Wanting to finally get that tattoo, to stop thinking about it and just let someone needle you with it. Coca-Cola mixed with fanta orange because sometimes the wrong thing is exactly right. Chicken nuggets at midnight straight from the cold fridge. Restaurants where you eat until you check out of time. The train ride when the destination doesn’t matter. Lying flat on grass thinking backward through summers, all the way back. Ice cream. The sky that color. One photograph you keep finding yourself looking at for no reason. Hannah Montana coming back like a strange gift. The word “Sakura” for some reason. Finally not caring, just saying it and meaning it. Getting pulled into something stupid and magnificent. The plants need water. Sundays with people who stayed even though you thought they’d leave. June was all of that twisted together—things that should be separate, things worth wanting and things worth burning down, all mixed and inseparable. Sunday, 1 June 2008. Gisela: The boat was called Gisela. Little thing on the Spree, beautiful Berlin weather, a captain who actually looked like he belonged there, and a buffet that had no right being that good. Even brought the dog along. Even the dog seemed pleased. Chaos. Jessi spent the afternoon taking the thing apart from the inside. Simone nearly went overboard and someone was screaming “get your legs in!” at her. We looked like tourists to anyone with eyes. I didn’t care. But something about floating there—the sun, the food, all that stupid happy chaos—it felt like an ending. We’d been at this job for four weeks, real work that somehow turned out to matter. That evening we had presentations, then beer after. Next week back to school. Saturday I’m heading to the Baltic. Everyone’s ready. Everyone’s excited about what’s coming. I was too. But on the water that day, with Jessi destroying things and Bonnie wandering around and the Spree carrying us in circles, it just felt like a goodbye to something good. Friday, 30 May 2008. Sarah Danley: Monday, 26 May 2008. The Killer In Me Is The Killer In You: After an absolutely insane week I was running on fumes by Friday night, but Maria was turning twenty-one and celebrating late at the Knaack, so I had to show up. Started at Tomi’s parents’ grabbing fish and cucumber salad—sounds mundane but it’s exactly what you need when you’re this destroyed, something casual and grounding. Then the power cut out across the neighborhood somehow and I might’ve caused it or just convinced myself I did in my fog. Either way we got to the car quick, picked up Sven with his cherry beer, went to Mandy’s to mess with her guinea pigs Paul and Paula for a bit. Supposed to find some emos and bring them along, but there weren’t any, so I blamed the 80s music and we just went to the club. Somewhere in there—complete blank—I was stuffing five-euro notes into Maria’s cleavage, which definitely happened but feels like a dream now. Around three in the morning I got trapped in a conversation with two law students about proper German pronunciation, completely serious about syllables at an hour when nobody should care. Home at four, McDonald’s Big Mac and fries, threw on Soloalbum and was just gone. Woke up with straw all over my floor and I still don’t know why. Saturday, 24 May 2008. Nora Again: Nora’s birthday’s coming up soon, and Sonja and I ended up in the YouTube hole last night rewatching her old stuff—Halloween sketches, parody bits, the kind of obscure comedy that doesn’t get talked about anymore. Nothing makes sense when you explain it to someone who wasn’t there, but rewatching it feels like finding something you forgot you liked. The timing still lands. The absurdity still works. You remember why this person mattered. Wednesday, 21 May 2008. Tasteless: I’ve got a few theories about why my taste went dead. Maybe I burned my tongue pretty badly—that’s the harmless one. Maybe it’s the weird stuff I smoke sometimes—getting darker. Or maybe it’s because I ate a whole handful of pure pasta seasoning powder that chemically burned my mouth raw. Yeah, that’s probably it. In theory this should be great. I can eat whatever disgusting thing and not even care. No appetite for those fat kebabs anymore. Can’t taste them. Water instead of cola. Can’t taste that either. So life should actually be solid. Except kisses taste like cardboard. Blowjobs taste like cardboard. My strawberry yogurt tastes like cardboard. Can’t win. Stupid world. Where’s the nearest tongue doctor? Saturday, 17 May 2008. Designs Get Around: Matt featured a few of my themes on his WordPress site. I don’t remember much about it now—where he found them, what exactly he said—but the note was genuine. Someone out there in the world uses the things I make. You spend weeks on a design and then you ship it and move on. You don’t think about where it lands or who pulls it down or whether they actually like it. Most of the work you do just disappears into the noise. So when a stranger takes the time to say something, to actually put your work somewhere visible and tell you they liked it, there’s this quiet satisfaction. Not the kind you brag about. Just a moment where you think, okay, it mattered. It did something. The thing about validation is how uncomfortable it is to sit with. You want to play it cool, say thanks, move on. You don’t ask for autographs or gush back. You just acknowledge it happened and you keep working, and maybe later—when you’re stuck on something new and wondering if any of it’s worth doing—you remember that somebody found something you made and thought it was worth sharing. I have no idea what happened to those themes after that. They probably helped some people build what they wanted to build, got forgotten, got replaced, got lost. But somewhere out there, a small piece of work I did is still doing its job. That’s the whole thing, really. Friday, 16 May 2008. That Heat: Yesterday was stupidly hot in Berlin. I showed up at the beach pool in Wedding with Anna, Sladdy, Tomi, Agnes, Anne, and Philipp. We sat in front of the TV with McDonald’s and chocolate muffins from Mauerpark, just trying to wait out the heat. That’s it. Everything else that happened, the actual story, that goes in the autobiography. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas looks quaint compared to it. Tuesday, 13 May 2008. What I Learned Tonight: Tonight I figured out that a Beck’s beer on the train is apparently the most normal thing in the world—everyone’s got one. At the agency, the whole team crowds around the Mac and there’s this perfect unspoken agreement: nobody looks when someone’s typing their password. Such specific respect. I’ve always been drawn to girls with accents, something about the way they shape a word. Photo Booth had everyone acting like kids, genuinely thrilled with each picture. I want to move to Warschauer Straße. My exes are rotating through my dreams like they’ve got appointments. I need new iPod headphones. Apple’s running some giveaway that’s obviously a con. You know I’m no good. We’re going to Hurricane Festival. Disney people keep checking my XING profile and I have no idea why. Drunk Chinese people have the funniest language. Right now I’m only listening to bands whose names start with A through D, which limits things but feels right. Had nachos with cheese and chicken, demolished it all, still hungry. I’ve got a stack of Photo Booth pictures. Saturday, 10 May 2008. Lego Universe: As a kid I was absolutely obsessed with Lego. Hours and hours in a room that basically belonged to us—my friends and I building incredible worlds and characters, the Lion King soundtrack on repeat. It was everything. Eventually you grow up, sell it all off on eBay one day, and that’s the end of it. Marcel the builder was dead. Then Lego Universe gets announced. An online RPG that’s going to contain every Lego brick ever made, where you can go on adventures and build things and basically live out that part of yourself you thought you’d left behind. Forget World of Warcraft—what’s an MMO if you can’t actually create anything? That’s the whole difference. Coming 2009. God, I’m so cool. Monday, 5 May 2008. Melody Fetishist: I’m in the middle of gutting my music library. With nearly 7000 tracks—all totally legally obtained, obviously—iTunes is starting to choke, and so am I. I spend most of my commute just hitting skip on my iPod, which is already squeaking like it’s dying. There’s so much garbage on here it’s embarrassing. Here’s what I’ve figured out: seventy percent of indie tracks sound exactly the same. Guys mumbling broken English into a mic, noodling with a guitar, convinced they’re the next Killers. It’s pathetic. I need melodies. Real melodies. I need lyrics that actually hit. I need something with a real voice, something I recognize. Maybe the indie thing is finally wearing on me. Probably not every asshole with a guitar deserves to be on a stage. So it’s goodbye Fiery Furnaces, goodbye Golden Smog, goodbye Jack Penate. Off to the external hard drive where I might find you again in ten years if I’m desperate. I’m keeping only the stuff with actual melodies, songs that feel like real songs. Those go on the iPod. Then I walk around Berlin with something actually worth listening to. Sunday, 4 May 2008. Summer Blogging: Summer’s when you actually want to show people something. The photos are better, the moments feel shareable. You need a blog that doesn’t get in the way—clean, simple, letting your content do the work. I’ve been at this for twenty years and I’ve learned that the template matters way less than the decision to share at all. Saturday, 3 May 2008. What To Wear: I stand in front of my closet unsure what I’m becoming. The rebellious version of myself? The serious one? The guy who just wears jeans and a black shirt and stops overthinking everything. I’m all of them. But people only see whichever one I put on. So I kept redesigning the website, swapping the layout like some anxious person who rearranges their furniture when they can’t sit with being still. Not trying to annoy anyone. I just couldn’t figure out which version was actually me. The clean minimal thing or the busy decorated thing. Something always felt wrong so I’d tear it down and rebuild. Then I went back to the design I’d actually invested real time in. It was simple. It had space to breathe. I remembered Becca saying something once about my recent designs feeling cramped, and I think she was right about that. I’m trying to just leave it now. Sit with the choice instead of constantly reopening the question. Stop treating my own space like a costume I get tired of wearing. It’s not enlightenment or anything. It’s just what I’m wearing today. Maybe it sticks this time. Friday, 2 May 2008. May: May starts bad. Your allergies are absolute shit—every photo you take, you look wrecked. You’re stuck inside despite the sun being everywhere, which makes no sense but that’s how it is. You eat beer-flavored chips for days and forget vegetables exist. The internet moves like it’s 1998. You wake up at 3 AM soaked because you got the blanket situation wrong. That February deal that seemed promising completely fell apart, and May is the month where you have to really sit with that failure. You’re wearing ballet flats because everyone else is. You think about the Klabautermann—that weird sailor myth—for no reason. Grey’s Anatomy ended again. That song was cool three weeks ago and now it grates. The Baltic trip is still months away. You’re generally depressed despite the weather. But there’s another version of May that almost cancels the first one out. The sun is just relentless and good. Lykke Li’s voice hits different. Something about outdoor festivals and megaphones makes sudden sense. Your paycheck finally showed up. Cherry blossoms are blooming somewhere and you feel it secondhand. The Friends marathon is running and it’s strangely comforting. Fresh strawberries. Making actual peace with something from your past that haunted you. Outdoor sex again without getting busted. That blonde in the window who’s become part of your May mythology. Labello Milk & Honey lip balm—that specific smell. Fermentation experiments that work. Chocolate sauce on spaghetti. Good water. Warm weather smell. May’s the month where you can’t decide which version is true. Some days the sun covers everything and you’re invincible. Other days you’re drenched and furious at 3 AM and none of it matters. The oscillation never stops. Tuesday, 29 April 2008. Fridge Crimes: Sunday, 27 April 2008. Two Favorite Songs: I’ve been up all night drinking with Anna and Philipp—that guy’s actually lived through everything—but somehow I’m still wired. Won’t last much longer. The weather’s absolute shit, so these two songs have basically become my whole rotation right now. Kate Nash’s “The Nicest Thing” is the obvious move when you haven’t slept and everything’s gray. It just pulls you under. Then The Last Shadow Puppets came through with “The Age Of The Understatement,” and I didn’t expect to feel this way about it. It’s one of those songs that destroys you completely, then launches you upward. Tears first, then rush. That’s been my whole cycle. Friday, 18 April 2008. Face For The Radio: At 3 AM you’ve already tried everything—hot milk with honey, a warm shower, the arsenal of remedies that supposedly work. The night when your brain won’t stop. When sleep feels like a language you’ve forgotten. All the usual fixes sit there, useless, and nothing works except The View. Scottish band from the 2000s, not famous or important in any meaningful sense, but their music does something specific. Not soothing—that’s the key difference. They don’t try to soothe. The drums sit in your skull without warmth, just persistent. The guitars are thin and slightly harsh. Kieren’s voice has no comfort in it, just annoyed directness, which is exactly what you need when you’re tired of your own head at 3 AM. I don’t know if it’s good music or if I just need it at certain hours. The distinction doesn’t matter. When you’re lying there and the only thing between you and complete internal spiral is some Scottish guy singing like he isn’t trying to convince anyone of anything, quality becomes irrelevant. You just need the sound. Other nights I try silence, rain, brown noise, all the tricks. Nothing takes. But The View takes. There’s something almost arrogant about them—unbothered whether you find them beautiful or important or make it through the song. They’re just playing. You’re just listening. Somewhere in that mutual indifference is the only thing that works. I still don’t sleep well those nights. But I stop thinking about the sleeping part. Wednesday, 16 April 2008. Transparent: I’ve been drinking Beck’s Green Lemon for a while now—bright, citrusy, nothing complicated. When I saw Beck’s Ice on the shelf, I grabbed it without thinking, except it was clear. Actually transparent. You could see straight through it in the glass like it wasn’t beer at all. The label said lime and mint, so I figured why not try. The taste is sharper than expected—lime and mint punch harder than the Green Lemon, less sweetness. It tastes the way it looks, which is deeply weird for beer. Most beer has that amber thing going on, that color that makes it feel old or traditional or something. This is bright and vaguely unsettling, like you’re drinking a memory of a flavor instead of the thing itself. It’s a novelty that actually works, which is rare. Most weird beer experiments taste like effort. This one just tastes good and looks strange, and that’s apparently enough. I grabbed another one the next time I was at the store. Wednesday, 16 April 2008. Hermine’s Birthday: Emma Watson’s eighteen today, which is when you’re supposed to draw some kind of line, except I don’t think I ever drew one. Hermione’s been complicated for a while. She’s getting into the London club scene apparently—drugs, the usual escape route for the eternally famous. Something hot about that. More interesting than the frozen version. Still like the films. Tuesday, 15 April 2008. Failblog: One click and thirty minutes vanished. That’s Failblog. I’m not usually into those oversaturated joke sites online—the ones designed to pummel you with content until something lands. But this one got me. My coworkers and I basically surrendered half the afternoon to it, just grinding through clips of people getting demolished or eating pavement. The ones who didn’t get sucked in just watched the rest of us cackling like idiots. We were probably annoying as hell. But yeah, it’s good shit. It just works. Monday, 14 April 2008. Education Pt. 2: Hanging around with everyone from graduation class, and this Metros video hits exactly right. It captures that suspended moment—you’re still all together but can feel it ending. The video doesn’t apologize for it or try to be sentimental; it just sits in the awareness of something shifting. Being back with all these people from old class photos, watching something that understands this—it’s a small perfect collision. The kind of moment that makes you want to stay a little longer before getting up and it all dissolves. Sunday, 13 April 2008. The Hunt: A girl named Victoria Lindsay got beaten by eight teenagers in 2007. They filmed it, posted it to YouTube. Within hours the internet found them—names, addresses, photos published everywhere. Fox News ran the pictures. Comments filled with “hang them,” “kill them.” The crime was brutal. They deserved consequences. But that response wasn’t justice—it was something else entirely. Just pure collective rage with no off switch, cruelty enabled by a crowd of strangers. What struck me was the gap between the actual crime and the punishment. Those eight kids had their entire futures destroyed by algorithm and mob—published addresses, threats, names permanent on the internet. Consequences that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with whether enough people decided to be cruel that day. The media made it worse, as they do. Turned it into a story about YouTube and parenting instead of what it was: a demonstration of how little restraint any of us have in a crowd. How righteous destroying someone feels when everyone’s doing it. How the internet made permanent what used to be local and temporary. Wednesday, 9 April 2008. The Walls Were Moving: I was 24 and living in a student apartment in Berlin that had somehow gotten smaller. Not metaphorically—the walls moved in. My landlord laughed when I asked about anything, this real incredulous laugh at the ratio of what he was charging to what I was living in. One night I decided to try the internet. Posted looking for a one or two bedroom apartment somewhere in Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain—max 500 euros, which even then was optimistic. Bathtub preferred, a kitchen that actually worked preferred more. But I wasn’t going to be precious about it at that point. I think I believed someone would read it and think of something. That’s how it works sometimes—a friend’s sister, a cousin moving, someone forwarding it and a door opening. Mostly though I was just shouting into the void because the walls in that room were legitimately closing in and I didn’t have anywhere else to scream. Did I find an apartment that way? Probably not. Probably I refreshed the rental sites like everyone else, called people, showed up to viewings where there were always nineteen other desperate people. But I remember the feeling of that room getting smaller and the absolute knowledge that if I didn’t get out I was going to come apart at the seams. Sunday, 30 March 2008. Good Spots: I stopped being a devoted PlayStation fan years ago—no particular reason, just moved on—but the commercials they put out sometimes are genuinely good. I’m not talking about clever marketing, I mean they’re made well. Someone clearly understood how to move you in thirty seconds, how to make an image stick. When you spend time making things, you develop a nose for that kind of work. Most advertising is just noise. But every so often something lands that reminds you film is film, whether it’s on a theater screen or between YouTube videos. These spots do that. They make you dream a little, spark something creative. When you make things yourself, you notice when someone else has done the work right. Friday, 28 March 2008. Already Dead: The sun was brighter back then, the sky a deeper blue. Even the Lidl lemonade tasted better, came in cans too. Summers were hotter, the nights at the swimming pool more forbidden, the skin-on-skin more electric. And the TV—man, that was actual television. The whole Pokémon-obsessed crew sprawled in front of the screen after school, chips and cola within reach, one dubbed anime after another, and then out into the streets running like we’d sprouted tails and learned to fight like Goku. And the games. God, the games! Nothing before or since has ever hit the same way as sitting in front of the N64, four of us crammed around the controller taking turns in Smash Bros or Mario Kart, or watching them ride through the fields in Ocarina of Time while the rest of us just stood there, perfectly happy watching Link fish—actually fish, for minutes, and we’d just stare, hypnotized by it. But here’s what I know now: the longer you live, the more you’re already dead. I know everything and everyone, nothing lands new anymore. I’ve had enough tits and pussy for the next fifty years; given the choice between an orgasm and cake, cake wins now. I think I know what there is to know, and whatever I don’t know isn’t worth knowing. Nothing shocks me anymore—I’ve lived through worse, seen worse, felt worse. Is that the curse? Being raised on sitcoms with stand-in families, fed internet death and fucking and advertising since birth, in a culture that just remixes itself—same music, same clothes, same emotions—on an endless loop until you’re in a box? Yeah. We’re the coolest and most burnt-out generation there’s ever been, and I live with that. Thursday, 27 March 2008. That’s What You Get: Paramore’s been cycling back into regular rotation and they’re just doing something nothing else is doing right now. There’s this thing about how they write—all that melodic precision mixed with actual heaviness, the way Hayley’s voice can be both technically impressive and genuinely unguarded in the same moment. Not overthinking it, just good songs that land. It’s not a new discovery. Been aware of them since forever, the whole teen-angst-pop-rock thing that somehow aged better than it had any right to. But listening through their catalog again, there’s something about the craft that just became more obvious. The arrangements are tight, the hooks are actually there, and they’re not trying to be something they’re not. Maybe it’s just where my head is at right now. Some records find you at the exact moment you need them, and sometimes it’s just a band that does what they do well enough that you can’t help coming back. Paramore’s doing both. Wednesday, 26 March 2008. Getting Rich: Alessandro pointed out that Smashing Magazine featured my WordPress theme. That explains the traffic spike on this blog. I’m getting rich, bitch. Tuesday, 25 March 2008. Burning Through: A week with Becca moved like that—fast, easy, the kind you want to happen again. Meyerbeer saw us enough to nearly complete our stamp card. There was Thomas’s annual 80s party, the one nobody admits they enjoy until they’re already there. Then Sakura 2’s sushi buffet near closing time, when you’re tired and the good stuff’s gone but it’s still somehow perfect. That was the week. Quick blur of familiar people and places, the kind that feels small while you’re living it and good when you’re looking back. Pentecost’s coming and we’re heading to London. The city plays at being punk—sometimes it even pulls it off. Worth going for. Friday, 21 March 2008. Blackout: Had what was probably the best sex of my life last night. Too drunk to actually remember it. That’s the whole tragic comedy of it—got everything right and then checked out completely. Tuesday, 18 March 2008. What Vista Became: Somewhere in Japan, toilet paper was being sold with Windows Vista printed on it. I don’t know what year that happened or if anyone actually bought it, but the image stuck with me. Vista had already been a punchline for years—the operating system nobody wanted, the one everyone was trying to get rid of. Microsoft knew it. The whole world knew it. And yet some company somewhere decided the answer was to slap the Vista logo on toilet paper and see what happened. There’s something almost honest about that—not poetic, just revealing about where failed products actually end up. They don’t go gracefully or with some quiet memorial. They get stamped onto bathroom supplies in foreign countries because maybe someone will buy them. The real graveyard of capitalism is mostly just logos on discount merchandise nobody needs. Vista just happened to look particularly ridiculous in that specific form. Monday, 17 March 2008. Stay Friends: He stood in the stairwell with a bag of his last things. An awkward kiss that landed somewhere between my mouth and my cheek. And then, quietly: Let’s stay friends. The words hung there longer than his footsteps down the stairs, louder than the door slamming, crueler than the plate I threw at it later. Fresh from the wound, the phrase feels like an insult. Stay friends? What does that even mean? We lived through each other’s bodies. I have names picked out for kids that will never exist. You knew every inch of me, and I told you things I’ve never told anyone. You were the center of everything, and now you want to get coffee and pretend that the past few years were just time we spent together, like roommates? But the thing is, the phrase makes a kind of sense too. It assumes friendship is some middle ground between love and nothing. That you weren’t worth the maximum, so we’ll settle for something. That’s the logic of it, the cruelty and the honesty packed into four words. We have these enormous expectations now that we’ve been freed from needing marriage for survival or respectability. Love became the thing we’re supposed to want, not the thing we accept. And because we can choose, we want everything: the passion and the comfort, perfect sex and total understanding, the freedom and the exclusivity, the everyday routine and the constant adventure. Forever. Every single time. It’s an impossible standard, and we know it, and we want it anyway. The phrase is also honest in its own way. What do you say to someone you’ve loved and hurt and don’t want to lose completely? Cutting them off feels cruel too. At least staying friends means you’re not erasing what happened. That it mattered. That they mattered. I don’t know if we stayed friends, really. We tried for a while. But there’s something absurd about it anyway—pretending the past tense of love is friendship when what you actually feel is a kind of permanent tender ache when you run into them at the store. Thursday, 13 March 2008. My Death Space: MyDeathSpace.com is an archive of MySpace profiles belonging to dead people. You find them there—photos, music players, wall comments, last logins from years ago. The profiles don’t age. Nobody’s updating them. It’s like walking into someone’s apartment the day they stopped living in it. There’s a specific kind of creepy that hits different from horror movies or jump-scares. It’s the internet colliding with something it never learned how to process: people not coming back. We delete accounts, we move on to new platforms, we forget people online by default. The Internet is built on forgetting. But MyDeathSpace remembers. The profiles sit there, every detail preserved, nobody looking. I remember when MySpace felt important. I’d spend hours on my profile, picking songs, arranging photos, writing my “about me” like it mattered. It did, in a way. My page said something about who I was. Now some of those pages belong to people who won’t ever log back in. Their profile is the most permanent version of themselves online—a photograph, but alive, but frozen. The uncanniness comes from that gap between form and function. A grave exists to mark an absence. This is someone’s self-presentation, built to be updated, to change, to grow—and it can’t. It’s trapped in the moment they stopped touching it. I don’t visit often. But when I do, I think about what version of myself would get stuck if someone archived my profiles. What song. What last post. What image. Wednesday, 12 March 2008. Vimeo, Redone: Vimeo redesigned itself. Didn’t need to—I liked the old version fine. But they managed not to wreck it, which is harder than it sounds. Cleaner, a little lighter, everything still where you’d expect to find it. That’s the thing about good redesigns: you notice them a few days in because something feels easier, not because there’s a splash screen telling you what changed. Wednesday, 12 March 2008. The Suit: There’s this guy sitting outside the building in a dark suit, hair slicked back, and he starts talking to us as we’re passing. His voice is hard to make out, everything slow and deliberate, and he’s telling us he hasn’t eaten in days. His hands are moving like he’s pulling the words out of the air. I tell him we’re broke, we’re students, I say it without thinking about it. We were heading to McDonald’s. Of course we were. He keeps talking as we walk—nobody has money, everybody just passes by. I hear him but I don’t turn around. In line at the counter, something shifts. I catch Mona’s eye and she’s already looking at me like she knows exactly what I’m about to do. There’s this second where I can feel the actual weight of what just happened. So I count out the change in my palm and ask for two cheeseburgers. We didn’t need them. I wasn’t even hungry. But it felt like something, like maybe we were actually going to do the decent thing. By the time we get back to the building, he’s gone. We stand there with the bag getting cold in our hands, and it occurs to me that the whole thing was pointless anyway. The guilt didn’t fix anything. The cheeseburgers didn’t help him. Nothing did. Sunday, 9 March 2008. Gates vs. Jobs: Jobs had the design obsession, the turtleneck, the mystique. Gates had the pragmatism to put a computer in every home, even if nobody would ever call it beautiful. Two completely different philosophies about what mattered. One wanted you to feel something. The other wanted to solve a problem. That might be all the difference there is. Saturday, 8 March 2008. iSmoke: Saw some iSmoke branding on the street—someone had the idea to apply Apple’s minimalist playbook to cigarettes. The overlap is almost too obvious: sleek, addictive, unnecessary, purchased by people who don’t actually need them. I’m still loyal to Gauloises, but the joke landed anyway. Thursday, 6 March 2008. Sailor Moon: I got into Sailor Moon when I was a kid, same as everyone. Transformation sequences, bright colors, girls in sailor suits—it works on an eight-year-old. Rewatched it recently though, and the character stuff is actually solid. Usagi doesn’t fix her laziness through some character-growth montage. She just figures out that caring about her friends matters more than avoiding effort, and she shows up. Most kids’ media doesn’t trust that kind of straightforward character work. The design holds up too. The uniforms, the color work, the whole visual language—it’s earnest and kitschy at once, totally committed, no irony. The show doesn’t apologize for its own premise. A teenage girl is the moon’s warrior, okay, moving on. There’s something clean about that. I think what got me to come back as an adult is that it’s actually about people who care about each other and keep showing up when it’s hard. The magical-girl stuff is just the wrapper. Maybe that’s enough. Wednesday, 5 March 2008. Half Ready: Monday the entire city was supposed to shut down—a total transit strike, nothing going anywhere. No U-Bahn, no S-Bahn, no buses, just nothing at all. I had no idea how I’d even get to the office, but there was something darkly funny about it, Berlin just grinding to a halt like that. Work from home was looking pretty attractive suddenly. And of course Becca had her vacation booked for that exact week, was flying in right as the city decided to implode. When I realized the timing I had to laugh. We’d figure it out somehow, walk everywhere like everyone else, make it work. That’s Berlin for you. I was only half ready for any of it, to be honest. But ready or not, the chaos was happening anyway. Tuesday, 4 March 2008. Final Distance: I want to see you, but something invisible keeps pushing us apart. Every time I get close enough, it happens again. Just more distance. You taught me what loneliness actually is—that hurt-too-easily quality of yours, the way one wrong word makes you fold into yourself and disappear. I want to be with you now, not someday. I want to cross whatever’s between us and just hold you. Maybe one day I’ll have the strength to do it. Maybe the distance will stop mattering. We should be together. I need you. Saturday, 1 March 2008. Everything But Your Friend: Die Ärzte doing what they do best: a trashy fucking love song about wanting everything from someone except for their terrible friend. It’s German punk at its most gloriously crude, the kind of stupid that somehow lands because they’ve never apologized for being dumb. Wednesday, 27 February 2008. Close Your Eyes: She tells me to close my eyes and I do. A Silver Mt. Zion’s “Blindblindblind” has been playing for what feels like three years, and I let myself sink into her arms. The moment I close my eyes everything rushes in—school, money, love, problems, worries, suffering. But there’s also the blue evening sky over Berlin, stars, the smell of shower gel on her skin. When I open my eyes it’s getting light outside. Not a solution, I think, getting dressed. Not a solution at all. I leave. Sunday, 24 February 2008. Sweeney Todd: Watched Sweeney Todd and ended up liking it more than I expected. After Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride I had some idea what Burton might do with a murderous barber musical, but nothing prepared me for how dark and sick this thing actually is. The singing, the blood, Depp completely unraveling in a basement with a straight razor. Genuinely disturbing. Most people in that theater hated every second. I could feel the recoil, real visceral disgust. Some walked out halfway through. And that’s exactly what made it work for me—the fact that Burton doesn’t care if you’re comfortable with it. He’s just making exactly what he wants, no compromises, no apology. It’s pretty clear who this works for and who it doesn’t. The people it clicks with will feel it right away. Everyone else hits that wall of disgust immediately. Not everything needs to be for everyone. Friday, 22 February 2008. Broken Light: Broken traffic light at my corner this morning. You’d expect people to slow down—look both ways, be cautious, that kind of thing. Instead everyone there (drivers, cyclists, old woman with a crutch) did the exact same thing: crossed it fast, like the light was still working, like red was coming. It’s funny in an awful way. The light is dead. There’s no red. But we don’t think about that. We just move through the rhythm we’ve been trained into, waiting for the color that isn’t there anymore. I did the same thing. I was in a hurry. Wednesday, 20 February 2008. Never Again: I’m not reading any more think pieces about amateur porn destroying the professional industry. It’s all just people being prudish about something that’s already happened. Nothing interesting there. Tuesday, 19 February 2008. From Kreuzberg: Prinzessinnenbad is this German documentary about a public swimming pool in Kreuzberg. Immigrants, kids, old people, the neighborhood sweating in chlorine and sun. No plot, no arc, no real narrative—just summer days and whatever a community looks like when nobody’s filming. Watching it, I kept waiting for something to happen, for the film to make a point about something. It never did. Just stayed present in that particular corner of Berlin that feels more real than anything else shot there. Tuesday, 19 February 2008. Grip Like A Vice: This song gets into you. I don’t know what it is exactly—the way it builds, the way it lands—but I come back to it constantly. It has this grip on me that I can’t shake. Every time it plays I’m just fully there with it, can’t think about anything else. No explanation needed. Monday, 18 February 2008. Cheese Nachos: Melted cheese on fried tortilla, a sweet cocktail on the side, both half price. The cheese browns and crusts, the chips still crisp. The drink tastes like candy. This is the kind of bar snack you don’t overthink—you just eat it, drink it, and feel momentarily clever for catching the deal. It’s enough. Friday, 15 February 2008. Care Package: Becca sent me a care package the other day. Just a box with my name on it, but opening it felt like she’d emptied her brain trying to figure out what would actually make me happy. Mozart balls—the real kind, the ones I haven’t had since I was a kid. Simpsons figures because she knows I have that weird attachment to the show. A container of SpongeBob semolina pudding, which is either the sweetest or most ridiculous thing depending on how you look at it. Everything chosen. No filler. That’s what gets me about Becca. She remembers the stupid specific stuff you mention once. The foods you liked growing up. The characters you inexplicably care about. She doesn’t make a big deal out of it. The package just shows up and there’s a note saying a good friend is always there for you no matter the distance, and you know she means it because she went to the trouble. It’s the kind of thing that stops you. You’re unpacking semolina pudding in a SpongeBob container and you realize someone on the other side of the world was thinking about you hard enough to wrap it up and ship it. Most people don’t do that. I should probably call her. Tuesday, 12 February 2008. Someone Wake Me Up: There’s that moment between sleep and waking where you’re trapped in both at once, knowing you need to open your eyes but your body won’t cooperate. The dream logic breaks down just enough that you realize you’re dreaming, but you can’t force yourself out of it. Someone shaking your shoulder, voice cutting through—that’s mercy. Without it, you’d drift back down into the half-sleep, the worse place, where everything feels important and nothing feels real. Wednesday, 6 February 2008. Helvetica: Someone brought the Helvetica documentary to the studio this week and we all crowded around to watch it. It’s this strange thing to sit through when you work in design—watching old men explain why they’re obsessed with a typeface that’s basically everywhere, and then watching it get torn apart by everyone who came after them for being everywhere. The film doesn’t hide the irony. Helvetica is this perfect, boring, invisible perfection that conquered the world, and depending on who you ask, that’s either the whole achievement or the whole crime. There’s something almost perverse about making a ninety-minute documentary about a font—but the more you listen to the designers talking, the more you get that it’s not really about Helvetica at all. It’s about the moment when modernism stopped being a choice and became the air you breathe. Younger designers in the film push back hard. They want personality, accident, visible effort. They want you to see the hand that made it. Helvetica is the opposite—it’s supposed to disappear, to let the content speak, to be perfectly neutral. Which sounds great in theory, and maybe it would be if we hadn’t used it for absolutely everything and erased any possibility of anything else. I can’t decide if the documentary is a defense or an autopsy. Probably both. Either way, it’s worth watching if you think about how things look at all. Saturday, 26 January 2008. Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings: Square Enix put together a website for Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, this Nintendo DS game that’s coming in a couple of weeks. Beautiful site—orchestral soundtrack underneath, trailers, downloads, the whole thing. Which makes sense because this is still Final Fantasy, even if it’s on a handheld and smaller in scope. I’ve been into the series forever, but XII isn’t one I ever played. Timing didn’t work out, or I heard enough about sluggish combat and weird pacing that it didn’t seem worth the investment. But that’s never stopped me from being curious what comes next. The worlds stick around. They keep exploring them. There’s something appealing about a portable Final Fantasy. You’re not signing up for sixty hours. The DS was already killing it for RPGs—Dragon Quest, Monster Hunter, all of it. A compact FF that fits in your pocket and lets you spend half an hour in that world before moving on to the rest of your day. That’s nice. I don’t know if Revenant Wings is going to be the one that makes me regret skipping XII or if it’s just a fun distraction. Either way, the website got me thinking about it, which is probably exactly what it was supposed to do. Saturday, 26 January 2008. I Wouldn’t Sleep with a Windows User: I wouldn’t sleep with a Windows user. Not because I’m a snob—okay, I’m definitely a snob—but because it tells you something fundamental about who you are, what you notice, what you’ve accepted as normal. Macs got into my system early. The way type renders on the screen, how windows move when you drag them, the whole invisible architecture of the interface. Someone spent time on those details. Actually spent time. Once you’ve felt that level of intentionality, Windows feels like someone’s been serving you the same thing for decades and you’ve stopped asking if there’s anything better. The machine works. The design never touches you. You’ve made peace with adequacy. And maybe that’s fine for most people. But I can’t be with someone who doesn’t notice the gap, or notices it and decides it doesn’t matter. That tells you too much about what kind of person they are, what their threshold is for acceptable. Not worse, necessarily. Just incompatible with me. I need someone who notices when something’s been designed with care, who doesn’t confuse functionality with elegance. That probably makes me insufferable to be around. I’m okay with that. Thursday, 24 January 2008. Mac Users Always Win: Some market research firm called Mindset Media published findings showing that Mac users are 60% more likely to be open-minded, liberal, and completely convinced of their own superiority. Fox Business reported it. The researchers labeled this “Openness 5”—people who seek new experiences and believe imagination and intellectual curiosity are central to a meaningful life. Which is exactly what every Apple fan wants to hear, and of course they’re spreading it around. But you already knew this, right? Mac users have always known they’re better. That’s the core belief. A study just gives it scientific language. And I get it because I’m one of them. There’s something about a Mac that makes you feel like you’ve made a choice that reflects something true about who you are. The design, the simplicity, the price—it all adds up to this feeling that you’re the kind of person who appreciates good things. Whether that’s real or just marketing is beside the point. The feeling is the product. Everyone else is reading this thinking about their totally functional Windows laptop, and they’re not wrong. But also, there’s no denying it: there’s a certain kind of person a Mac attracts, or maybe creates. Whether that study proved anything is another question entirely. Saturday, 19 January 2008. Waiting It Out: The DS library was thin. SquareEnix had spent years dismantling the Mana series and selling it back in pieces. Brain Training games were pointless. The job sims—lawyer, surgeon, fishing guide—weren’t happening. I needed something to make those endless subway rides feel like less than purgatory. 2008 was supposed to deliver. Tales of Innocence was coming for actual RPG depth. Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings would continue something that had worked. Dragon Quest IX was a real event. Rune Factory was there if I wanted to pretend farming made sense. Final Fantasy IV was getting remade, which sometimes was all you needed. Then there was Teenage Zombies for something completely sideways. Ninja Town if tower defense actually mattered. Mizuiro Blood when I was feeling experimental. Space Invaders Extreme for the pure nostalgia. Dragon Tamer Sound Spirit just because it existed. One of the trailers genuinely did it for me. Not in any way I could sensibly explain. The movement, the colors, something about how it all came together—I couldn’t look away. You know that feeling when something just hits you like that. One of those immediate things. Thursday, 17 January 2008. Madness: Insanely expensive, but if money fell out of the sky somehow, the MacBook Air is getting bought. That’s it. No other shopping after that. Thin. That was the whole thing. Impossibly thin, and it actually worked. Every other laptop made you choose: light but slow, or fast but heavy. This one just didn’t. The design was clean in a way that made everything else look bloated. No unnecessary details, no theater. Just metal and glass and air, in the right proportions. I never actually bought one. Still think about it sometimes. Tuesday, 15 January 2008. The Only Thing That Scares Me: Most horror films just bore me. Stupid teenagers trapped in some killer’s house, getting chased by psychopaths in their dreams—I don’t feel anything from that. What actually gets to me is the apocalypse stuff. Viruses, the end of everything, vampire-zombies, the whole collapse of civilization. That’s what sticks. Went to see I Am Legend with Jenny yesterday. Will Smith, his dog. Jenny couldn’t watch it. The infected, the explosions, all of it was too much for her. She had her hands over her face the entire time. Me, I just got angrier and angrier at this asshole in the back making noise. Talking through it, completely ruining the experience. I remember thinking the virus should’ve taken him instead of the people we’re supposed to care about. At least that would’ve made some kind of sense. It’s a shit thing to think, but you can’t help it. Watching the world collapse on screen, bridges blown so nobody can even escape, everyone either dead or alone trying to survive—you start wondering if it could actually happen. If we’re just sitting here waiting for it. Saturday, 12 January 2008. Fuck You, Google: I hate Google. I hate what they do, I hate the monopoly, I hate that they own my searches. I also know there’s no real escape—Yahoo’s just as greedy, Bing is Microsoft’s version of the same evil, Lycos is dead. So I sit at my Mac and throw my most private thoughts into their servers anyway, every single day. The contradiction is complete and there’s nothing I can do about it. Except maybe Wikia Search. It’s launching soon, and the early alpha is already out there. It’s fast. It’s simple. And the thing that actually matters: it’s open. The search algorithm isn’t some proprietary black box. You can see how it thinks. That’s radical compared to everything else out there. I don’t know if it’ll survive. I don’t know if it’ll matter. But I like the thought of a world where nobody remembers what “googling” even meant. That feels possible now. Tuesday, 8 January 2008. Cloverfield: A reader sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2008. Someone leaked a video from a New York penthouse party—drunk people, someone filming with a handheld camera, then the building lurches. Everyone’s screaming. The power cuts. The feed cuts out. That’s all anyone had. Nobody explained what happened. The internet spent weeks staring at that fragment, trying to piece it together. Then clues started appearing everywhere. A website with party photos. A Japanese beverage company posting cryptic messages. A blog in Nepali. An old toaster company’s website with changed dates. Each piece was part of something nobody had officially announced yet. You could chase these threads for hours and never know what you were waiting for, just that you were waiting for something. It was all for Cloverfield, a monster movie J.J. Abrams was releasing. He’d gotten the idea in Tokyo, shopping in a toy store with his son, watching kids browse action figures. Instead of the usual trailers and press junket, he scattered the mystery across the internet and watched people scramble to piece it together. No announcements. No explanations. Just fragments that might mean something. I don’t know if it was marketing genius or if I’d been perfectly played. Maybe both. What worked about it was stupidly simple: before the movie even existed, before I’d seen a real trailer or footage, I was already thinking about it. The mystery was the thing. A monster movie is just another disaster film. But a mystery that makes you dig through the internet at three in the morning, comparing notes with strangers, hunting through a Japanese advertisement for clues? That was different. That’s what changes what you’re waiting for. Monday, 7 January 2008. Still Gets Me: 3 AM, can’t sleep. Bob Marley keeps me company and I’m scrolling, trying to write my way into tiredness. Somehow I end up here—back on your site. The one I found years ago when I was just starting to understand design, watching how you’d build something and learning to see the craft underneath. For a while the magic wore off. You know how it goes—you start to see how the trick works, and understanding kills the mystery. I thought that was the end of it for me with your work. But you keep doing it. You keep waking something back up. There was FackingCants that knocked me sideways recently. And then today I found Chikatetsu, and I read what you wrote about it, and there it was again—that sense that someone is building with actual intention, not just making things pretty. What I wanted to say is that I see it. The stories in your themes, how every one of them means something. You don’t hide that. That’s what separates this from everything else. I’m heading to bed now. But I wanted to leave that here first. Wednesday, 2 January 2008. Web and Japan: Dusty Asian bookstore, an old Japanese guy overcharging me for something I didn’t need, and it snapped everything into focus. I’d been wandering intellectually for a while—picking things up and putting them down, never landing anywhere. But standing in that shop I remembered what actually moves me: web design and Japan. They need to connect somehow. That’s it. Everything else is noise. My girlfriend gets it. She feels the same pull. And at some point you stop pretending other work matters, stop doing jobs that just pay the bills instead of making you want to think and make things. So here we are in 2008—Bush still somehow president, sex in every direction you care to look, same world as always. New year, different resolve. This time I’m actually combining these two things instead of keeping them separate. I want to design things that feel Japanese without just copying what Japanese design looks like. There’s something about restraint and negative space and this sense of completion that comes from incompleteness—I can’t quite explain it, but I know it when I see it. Web design is what I know how to do; Japan is what I want to know how to think like. SpongeBob. That stupid yellow thing on the ocean floor with a pink starfish best friend. Complete nonsense. Has no right to work. Does anyway. That’s the work I’m chasing—things that shouldn’t be good but are. My namesake’s doing real work on his blog. Respect. Sunday, 30 December 2007. Everything Shifts: Thursday, 6 December 2007. SpongeBob: I caught an old episode randomly and it held up better than expected. What surprised me wasn’t the comedy but the design—the color work, the character animation, the way they built a world that makes no sense but feels internally consistent. There’s something almost obsessive about the care they put into a show about a cartoon sponge flipping burgers. The writing gets darker the more you watch it. SpongeBob isn’t actually happy, he’s delusional, and everyone around him is trapped in their own kind of despair. Once you see that it’s hard to unsee. Funny and sad in equal measure, which I guess is the only way something gets to stick around this long. Wednesday, 21 November 2007. The Pierces: The Pierces are one of those acts that slipped through the cracks—sisters making synth-pop that hit different when you were stuck on some long drive or trying to decode what you felt about someone. What they made was intricate and patient, never trying too hard. I missed their show in Berlin because of work, which is how it usually goes, but it reminded me that those records still sit with me in a way a lot of contemporary pop doesn’t. They understood something about restraint and texture that the industry tends to smooth over. Missing the live version stings a little, but the recordings are enough. Sunday, 18 November 2007. The Star Breaks: Nicki’s gone now. I sat on a hill in the grass, just sitting there in the dark for a while, and then I saw this thing—a star, or something like a star, dark and bright at once, cracking open toward the sky. It lit up the whole horizon for a moment and then it was gone again, fading back into nothing. We’re sitting here together now, him and me, both in the dark, both alone. Waiting to see if it comes back. Waiting to see if he comes back. I don’t know. He had this way of seeing things that made everything look different—not like he was trying to be wise about it, just like he actually saw something the rest of us were missing. Now there’s just the dark and the memory of that light, and the strange stupid hope that maybe you appear again if you just sit still long enough and don’t look away. Saturday, 17 November 2007. Scouting: Jenny and I were scouting the scene neighborhoods in the capital. I want to move somewhere like that—the rents are still cheap, at least they were then. We had an expensive dinner, which felt strange in that context. After, two tourists with a camera phone were photographing a homeless guy in genuinely cool clothes. The cruelty was casual. He had style. They just had phones. I walked into a market wanting to buy dried salted fish. Forgot completely. Still annoyed about it. Saturday, 17 November 2007. Maggi: Berlin got buried in snow for a few days and I basically gave up on being a functional person. Spent the whole weekend with Jenny watching DVDs, fucking, and eating—noodles with Maggi, cake, potato gratin, cereal, Turkish bread, ham, back to noodles. The kind of time-blurred day where you stop looking at a clock and wonder if your stomach actually has a physical limit. If I explode tomorrow, remember me as some rebellious hero with long curly hair. Actually, promise you’ll do that. Sunday, 11 November 2007. Destroying Google: What’s worse than a company that only wants money? One that already has too much. Google is that company. They’ve got the kind of wealth that makes governments nervous, they’ve convinced people to organize their entire existence around a search algorithm, and they understand that information is power—the kind of power they’re perfectly positioned to exploit. They’re collecting today and they’ll control tomorrow. They know where I am. They know what I want, what I’m afraid of, what interests me. They want to be on every phone, every device, present in every moment my thoughts are turning something over. The brightest people alive are locked in buildings trying to figure out how to reach deeper into my head. Google is everywhere and the system is too big to fight directly. I’ve thought about corrupting it from inside. Sign up with fake names, upload other people’s pictures, speak gibberish, feed the algorithm nothing but contradictions. Create enough noise that the machine chokes on its own data. It probably doesn’t work. The system’s too efficient, too vast, too hungry. But there’s something in the refusal itself, in the deliberate sabotage of useful information. Maybe that’s worth something. Their slogan used to be “Don’t be evil.” That’s meaningless now. The only thing left is to lie to them constantly. Lie until the system eats itself. I don’t think it changes anything. But I think the attempt has to count for something. Thursday, 8 November 2007. Senseless: Sunday, 4 November 2007. Five Meters: I ended up in the wrong class. Everything was wrong—the room, the people, the energy. Didn’t belong there. Didn’t want to. And they didn’t want me either. My best friend from the old class was the only thing keeping me from completely losing it. But what actually got me through was seeing Marcel between periods. During lessons I couldn’t focus on anything else. Phone vibrating every ten minutes. I knew he’d written. I had to get back. Not that my phone bill was going to survive this much longer, and my face was getting stuck in a permanent frown. He’d actually fought for me that first week, tried to get me moved back. Then I blew it—couldn’t abandon my friend, the only person who had my back completely. That’s how we are together. So we started pestering the teachers. Showed up at parent night, told them we were being bullied, that nobody could stand us. It wasn’t entirely a lie—we felt isolated and hated. Turns out we were paranoid. Other students didn’t mind us. Teachers didn’t either. Three of them wanted us in their classes. I only wanted one. We did something that was supposedly impossible. The school said the records couldn’t be changed, that moving us back would require too much work. We wore them down anyway. Now we’re back in the original class. Real material, stuff we’d actually missed while we were in that other place where they didn’t have enough teachers. No more pointless assignments. Computers now. He’s five meters away from me the entire time. Being this close is strange. You have to be on, say better things. It feels like being sixteen again. I stop paying attention to the actual lessons. Five meters and I’m thinking about him instead. This is how it’s supposed to be. Wednesday, 31 October 2007. Double Cheese: Ordered pizza online for the first time. Used to walk down to the place next door, now it just arrives. The strange part is what they’ll combine. Fish stick pizza, obviously. They had this Christmas special: roast sauce, cheese, potato slices, red cabbage, beef, and cheese again. Listed separately. Double cheese. That’s the whole thing. Sunday, 28 October 2007. I’d Like a Hole: The piercer’s apartment was in Berlin’s Adlershof, somewhere in a sprawl of buildings I spent half an hour walking through in the cold. Snow falling. I’d fought my parents for weeks to get here—they’d actually signed permission, which felt momentous at fifteen or whatever I was. I was checking the address they’d given me, increasingly convinced it didn’t exist, or that I’d find myself in someone’s living room, the piercer working between kids and cats and kitchen tables. When the door opened, the woman was exactly what I’d feared. Blonde, overdone makeup, early forties, moved like she’d already decided I wasn’t leaving. She pulled off my jacket before I’d said hello, had me leave my shoes by the door, lit incense. I followed her down the hallway without deciding to, some part of me waiting for the moment to cut and run. But there was no cat. No teenager doing homework. Just this woman and a hallway and me trying not to think about what I’d signed up for. Her consultation room was a table and chair in the narrow hall. She ran through the risks—infection, keloids, all the things that sound worse when someone’s listing them like a grocery list—while I sat there realizing I hate needles more than I thought I did. Genuinely can’t look at them from across a room. So what was I doing here? She had my permission slip. I had maybe thirty seconds of courage left. The actual room was off to the side, surprisingly clean, properly set up. My hands were shaking. I asked if she could numb it for like, two days straight. She laughed. “I’m just going to shoot it through.” There was something about her refusal to perform anxiety that made it less scary. No coddling, no drama. She explained that working from an apartment saved money over renting a storefront—a good distraction. “This’ll feel cold.” The numbing came, and then one small pop, and it was finished. Months of buildup bottled down to half a second. Twenty years and I’m still happy with it. What got me wasn’t the piercer’s technical skill, though she had it. It was the way she cut through the panic by simply not participating in it. Sterile clinics have their place, but there’s a difference between clinical and comfortable, between a place that acknowledges fear and a person who refuses to. I’m thinking about another one. Not the tragus again. Open to ideas. Wednesday, 24 October 2007. Ruby Gloom: I hadn’t seen this many candy-colored Gothic characters bouncing around a cartoon in forever. There was a bat with a speech impediment who’s afraid of flying, Siamese twins who just wanted to eat chips and dip, and this purple thing that shuffled through scenes looking half-dead, never saying anything but flat monotone observations. And the title song was actually great. This was kids’ TV that didn’t feel like a sedative. Not like Bob the Builder or Dora or whatever corporate thing was designed to numb parents into total silence. Just something weird enough to have a real pulse to it. The bright side of the dark side. Saturday, 20 October 2007. Operator, Please: Thursday, 18 October 2007. A Lucid Dream: She knocked and I opened the door. There she was, smiling at me, and I loved that look, that moment. I’d spent hours getting the small apartment ready—so little space, so much to sort through. She came in and took her shoes off, moving through the rooms like she was cataloging everything. The photos, the desk, the shelves. I couldn’t stop watching her move. We were on the bed when she knocked his plush toy—some talking Patrick I’d gotten from Ana before I left—onto the floor. Face down. I picked him up and said, stupidly proud, “He talks.” I pressed his stomach to prove it but nothing happened. The batteries had gone dead, which was probably for the best since I’d been careful not to press him since moving to Berlin. I set him back down. We’d rented a movie from the video place next door. The opening was funny enough and she leaned into me slowly. I ran my fingertips across her skin, felt her respond. Halfway through, I stopped caring about what was playing. All I wanted was her breath on my neck, her hands on my back, her voice in my ear. She was fighting herself. You could see it. She kept pulling back because she was with someone else. No kissing, she wouldn’t let me kiss her—I could read those words on her face. So I found other places. I bit her neck, pressed her into the corner, explored the parts of her she would let me reach. She’d lean in and push away, come close and refuse, and I watched her walls come down one piece at a time. I wanted her. Not just that night. That was the difference. I wanted to be with her while we managed this wildfire we’d started, keep it burning but keep it ours. Wednesday, 17 October 2007. Sara Stays Pink: Sara’s still having fun with this. Most people who start blogging burn out or get bored, but she just keeps going, actually enjoying it. There’s something rare about that—someone who blogs because they like it, not because they’re supposed to be building something or performing for an audience. Sunday, 14 October 2007. Rhythm and Fruits: I notice it after a while—how the right song changes the way an apple tastes. Or maybe it’s just that I can’t chew in silence anymore, that rhythm has become as necessary as taste. Something about the tempo makes sweetness sharper, makes texture matter more. It’s a small thing, the kind nobody mentions, but once you catch it you can’t stop noticing it. Wednesday, 10 October 2007. House of Cards: This song has always been about the moment when you stop pretending. Not the fight, not the dramatic ending, just the quiet realization that you’ve been living in denial for so long that you don’t even remember when the actual foundation cracked. Radiohead does that better than almost anyone—that exhausted acknowledgment that nothing you built was ever going to hold. Wednesday, 10 October 2007. Nothing Changed: I disappeared for a while. A virus was going around killing blogs, my friend ended up 850 kilometers away in a hospital, and I coded myself into exhaustion trying to redesign this site. At some point I wanted to throw the whole thing—the code, the browser, all of it—in the trash. Started simple. New background. New header. Then I heard about CSS3 Grid Layout and decided I needed it immediately, which meant redesigning the entire site. Minimal, clean, Times New Roman aesthetic. Perfect on day one. Nothing on day two. And CSS3 wasn’t even officially out yet, so I was basically building fantasies. Killed that design and built something else. Spent nights on it. Got it working in Safari, Firefox, Opera. Beautiful. Valid. Then I opened it in Internet Explorer and the whole thing fell apart. Checked the damage, sent Microsoft an angry email, tried to sleep, heard the sirens. Here’s the new site. I know it doesn’t look like much changed. You’re probably right. This is what web design is—most of the work you do disappears. You stay up all night fighting with code and browsers, and in the end nothing looks different. But it did change. Something did. Anyway. Update your feed. Berlin. Sunday, 7 October 2007. Girl: Friday, 28 September 2007. March 2007: They only called me Toki anymore. I kept forgetting my real name, or stopped caring about it—probably both. Nintendo’s snoring was breaking my heart, all night long. I got up to grab some water. The moon had the whole room painted in soft blue. The water here was actually fine. That was something. In the last six months I’d crashed in a bunch of places. A basement room under a tire factory. Some friend’s kid’s bedroom. The half-finished mansion of some J-pop starlet trying to make it big. But this place was decent. You could see the Tokyo Tower from the window, and I’d stare at it from different corners of the city. Every time I looked at it, I’d feel this warmth, this sense of something protecting me. It chased the dark thoughts away. “Toki, you okay?” Yumi was lying on the couch watching American soap operas. She did that every night. Sleep meant nothing to her, she said, and I believed it. I nodded and tried not to look at her legs—those long legs crossed over the table—or the way her breast was spilling out of her nightshirt. “Stop staring at my sexy legs or you’ll start thinking about Ana again,” she said, winking. Her eyes went right back to the screen as the commercial ended. I took a drink. We’d have sex sometimes, Yumi and me. But it wasn’t a big deal. She slept with Nintendo too, when I was at work, and he’d try to make something of it, like I should be impressed. But I knew she liked it better with me. Not that it mattered. Since I’ve been here I’ve had this heartbreak sitting in my chest, eating deeper and deeper. I let it. I used to be happy. She was called Ana. It’s hard to forget someone called Ana. Those three letters are everywhere—every variation you can think of. When you see them, you’re back to zero. Every time. She was my best friend. I was cold. I pulled on the pink Little Foods t-shirt, the one Nintendo wore to work. I looked ridiculous in it. Nobody cared today. Not even Yumi’s cat, which barely spared me a glance before walking to the food bowl, already screeching that it was empty. I had to go shopping. There were some yen notes on the table. Heading out, I turned my phone on. I’d brought it from Germany. Couldn’t afford anything newer. One unread text. Nobody from Germany ever texted me. Not Ana. Fuko—my boss at the disco—knew my phone couldn’t display Japanese characters, so he just sent times. When I should come in. That was how it worked. Some schoolgirls smiled at me. Probably the t-shirt. Summer had peaked. I turned down a side street and said hello to the old guy who ran the 24/7. He’d yell out “Twenty-seven!” every time I came in, laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever said—his German was incredible, apparently. I’d smile back like it impressed me every time and wander the aisles. The money barely covered a full bag of groceries. We were always broke. The rent on this place was killing us. I worked at a small disco doing whatever needed doing. Nintendo sold fast food. Nobody knew how Yumi made her money, but we had our ideas. Sometimes. When I got home, Nintendo was sitting in front of the iBook playing World of Warcraft. He used to be the biggest Super Mario fan—the logo was still tattooed on his right shin—until he got into online games and started selling off his entire video game collection to fund the habit. He still had an old gray Game Boy. Yumi played it sometimes. “Where’s Yumi?” I called out as I came in and dropped the bag on the couch. “Gone,” he said, not looking up, already talking into his headset about whatever was happening on screen. I had heartbreak. But I’d had it before I came here. I thought I could escape it. By coming here. But you can’t run from something that deep inside you. Everything we’d been through together, it had only made us closer. The little blue notebook she gave me for my birthday—I kept it like it was treasure. I fed the cat, watched it dive into the bowl like it hadn’t eaten in days. Tokyo was different than I’d imagined it. I thought it would be colorful, exciting, breathtaking. It was colorful and exciting and breathtaking. But different. This endless sadness followed me everywhere. Dancing in arcades, fumbling with bleached-blonde dolled-up girls, having breakfast alone with the cat as my only company. Late at night, usually on weekends, this thought would creep in that I was missing something back in Germany. Missing what she was doing right then. What gross guys were getting to touch her. What sweet little sounds she was making to someone else. I’d run out of tears for it, but that numb feeling stayed, solid and cold. Wednesday, 26 September 2007. Coming Home: Saturday, 22 September 2007. The Design in My Head: I can’t pinpoint when design became the thing I cared about. It was probably somewhere in those early years with comics, that first moment of realizing someone had deliberately made a choice about every line and color on the page. Growing up, I did what everyone else did—watched TV, idolized firemen, went through the standard childhood. But somewhere in there, that design part stuck. The Internet came along at exactly the right time. It showed me that design was something people actually did with their lives, that you could spend years thinking about how things looked and worked. Before that, I didn’t have words for what I noticed in comics or album covers or packaging. After that, I understood I wasn’t alone in caring about these things. Looking back now, I see it was always there—in everything I was drawn to, just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what I already knew mattered. Sunday, 16 September 2007. The White Garden: I went to see it on an ordinary afternoon, not expecting much. There’s something about white-only gardens that seems impossible until you’re standing in one and it’s everywhere—the monochrome doesn’t flatten the space, it opens it up. Each plant becomes architecture. Shadows matter. The whole thing looked deliberate in a way that gardens usually don’t, like someone had edited reality instead of just planting things. I spent an hour watching how the light moved through the blooms, how green became irrelevant, and understood what it meant to strip away decoration and get left with form. It made me rethink the whole idea of constraint—that narrowing the palette isn’t loss, it’s focus. Thursday, 13 September 2007. The Shirt I’ve Kept: I’ve been carrying this t-shirt for years. It’s got your picture on the front. I wear it under other clothes mostly, pulled out when nobody’s watching, which is probably the worst reason to keep something like that. But that’s how things stick around—buried, private, heavier than they should be. These are the streets I’ve walked too many times. The corner where we fought about nothing. The bar where you showed up with someone else and I didn’t flinch fast enough. The bench where I said everything wrong. You’d say I’m a snob about some things and a complete mess about others, and you’d be right. I hold onto things the way other people hold grudges. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, wearing your face close to my skin like that. Maybe just that something real happened once. That we got through to each other, at least for a while, and that was worth the weight of keeping it around. Tuesday, 11 September 2007. Reckless Beauty: Sunday, 9 September 2007. What the Fox Knows: The thing about Saint-Exupéry’s fox that sticks with you is how brutally practical it is about love. You know the passage—”What does it mean to tame?” “It means to establish ties.” The fox sits in the wheat and explains that the prince isn’t special yet, and neither is the fox. They’re interchangeable with all the others. But if the prince comes back at the same hour every day, the fox will start to feel happy in the afternoon, will listen for his footstep, will know him by the sound of his walk. That’s how you make someone matter. I think about this whenever I care about something I shouldn’t have time for. A person. A project. A place. The fox is telling the prince that meaning isn’t inherent—it’s made by showing up, by consistency, by the small rituals that say “you are the one I’m waiting for.” The prince has a rose back home that he’s spent time on, water he’s poured over it, cover he’s placed over it at night. To everyone else it’s just a flower. To him it’s the only rose in the world. The hardest part is the ending. The fox knows that taming means loss—that when the prince leaves, the fox will weep. And it does it anyway. Because that’s the whole thing. You don’t get the gold in the wheat without the weight of what you’ll miss. You don’t get a rose without being responsible for it forever. The fox trades its peace for meaning, and it’s a good deal. Most people never figure that out. Wednesday, 5 September 2007. Someday in PAGE: Tomorrow I start making money as a designer. Someone’s actually going to pay me for this, which still feels like a con I’m running on the entire creative industry. But here we are. There’s PAGE magazine—eight euros, the thick, glossy thing every designer in Germany reads. It’s where the work that matters gets documented. And the dream is simple: someday, your name appears in there. Your project. Your name under something you actually made, taken seriously enough to print. I have a very clear fantasy of what that article says. Brilliant new Killers website, made the internet actually better, moved to a villa in LA with someone completely out of my league. The version of myself where everything I touch works perfectly and everyone notices. The version where success is as straightforward as it sounds. But I’m also aware that PAGE doesn’t care about fantasy. They care about real work, and real work is slower and less glamorous and doesn’t come with movie-star girlfriends. And honestly, I’ve stopped caring about half the things I thought mattered—Grimme awards, MySpace, whether Apple dominates anything. If that last one happens, something has broken anyway. Jenny and I are both starting this tomorrow, and we’ve got this stupid confidence that we’re going to shake something up in this field. We probably won’t. We’ll just make work and hope it doesn’t suck. But that confidence is what gets you through the early part, before you learn what you actually don’t know yet. For now, it’s enough that someone will pay me to try. Sunday, 2 September 2007. The Holy Intel Stand: IFA was completely packed. Cedric had brought Rebecca along, and I’d brought whoever I was seeing at the time. The whole scene was this beautiful chaos—gorgeous booth staff, middle-aged guys desperately trying to hand you flyers, Asian businessmen who’d basically mastered this dismissive float through the aisles with their hands held up like shields. But you could at least get close to the new tech. Digital photo frames. 3D TVs. The iPhone. Gaming was on too. I beat Cedric twice at Wii boxing and tennis, which felt like a real achievement. They were broadcasting the German StarCraft and Warcraft 3 finals, and we caught some of that. The announcers were pretty annoying though—too much nerd energy, not enough humor about what was actually happening. IFA itself was genuinely fun. Strange people, weird atmosphere. I’m pretty sure I saw Mola Adebski somewhere on his phone. And then at the Intel booth there was this notebook I almost won. Almost. Rebecca beat me to it—or at least she did in her head. Saturday, 1 September 2007. Visible Cords: Just became an official Berlin resident. Only took a full afternoon at city hall with the strangest collection of humans I’ve ever laid eyes on—though I guess they roam around outside just fine anyway. But I’m warming to this place more every day. I don’t understand why anyone complains about city living. You step outside and there’s Hugendubel for magazines, Karstadt for Puma sneakers, Lidl for microwaveable junk. Okay, technically you could get all that back home. But something about it feels cooler here. Turns out there’s a massive Gravis two stops down the U-Bahn line. Used to have to drive out to Munich to see any Mac besides my tiny mini actually sitting in front of me. But I noticed something between Munich and Berlin that’s genuinely interesting: the trendy people here wear their iPod headphones with the cord hanging out. Fully visible, threaded through your clothes. In Munich, all you’d see were those white earbuds, barely peeking out. I caught the habit, naturally. Now I do it too. Gets tangled on doorways sometimes, but I’ve made peace with that. Friday, 31 August 2007. Still Into Her: Julia Hummer’s still got me. Berlin entertainer, naturally charming, the kind of person you want to know. But then she shows up in a GEZ campaign—promoting Germany’s public broadcast fee—and it’s just… why? That’s the kind of gig that makes people stop caring. Still like her, though. Just wish she’d remember she’s better than this. Thursday, 30 August 2007. Agency Fun: Wednesday, 29 August 2007. The Lawyers Won: I spent a lot of time on SuicideGirls in those early years. Founded in 2001 by Missy, the site managed this impossible thing—held together sex and art and genuine alternative thinking without feeling like a contradiction. You could lose hours there. The models were intelligent, tattooed, in actual bands. The photographers weren’t just shooting nudity; they were artists. The whole place felt like you’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist yet somehow did. Then it got big. Radio shows. Television. Books. The moment alternative culture becomes profitable, it stops being alternative. That’s just how it works. But the real damage wasn’t the mainstream success—it was what they did once they had power. There was a photographer named Philip Warner who worked as Lithium Picnic. He shot for SuicideGirls, and when he started building his own reputation and taking other clients, they sued him. $100,000. His crime was photographing a model named Apnea for her independent site. He had to shut everything down. Sold his equipment. Now he survives on donations. It was cruel and pointless and it revealed exactly who these people were. More stories followed. A female photographer sued over contracts that barely qualified as legal. Their photos were being sold to porn sites without consent. A model in 2003 came forward claiming management repeatedly pressured her to undress beyond what was agreed. Each story worse than the last. What got to me was how litigious they became. Once Missy had money and power, every response was legal threats. Suing former collaborators. Suing models trying to leave. Suing photographers documenting what was happening. The entire apparatus of corporate control got deployed to defend a brand that was only cool because it didn’t care about being respectable. The models themselves were real people. The community that formed was genuine. But the people at the center chose lawyers over any principle that might have made them worth defending. I look at SuicideGirls now and I don’t recognize it. There’s the memory of what it was, which I’m fond of. And then there’s knowing what people were willing to do once money arrived. That’s hard to reconcile. Tuesday, 28 August 2007. Just Quiet: Becca drove back home this afternoon and I had this massive headache, thought my ears were actually going to explode on the subway. Should probably see a doctor about it. Will do once the aspirin wears off. It was a good week with her, and now that she’s gone, it’s eerily quiet again, that almost haunted feeling. We did a lot though. Went to this lesbian bar, met Cedric’s girlfriend who turned out to be delightful and definitely not shy about anything. Wandered through KaDeWe staring at foods I’d never even seen before, couldn’t identify half of what was there. The kind of hyperspecific luxury food you only see in a place like that. It was good having you here. Monday, 27 August 2007. New Ground: When you’re moving to a new city and furnishing an apartment alone, Ikea becomes this special kind of hell. You go in with a list, you follow the arrows on the floor, and for a while it makes sense. Then suddenly you’re lost in a warehouse you’ve walked a hundred times before, and nothing is where you wrote it down, and you’re staring at an empty shelf or the wrong color or some entirely different piece of furniture. Maybe this is easy for everyone else. Maybe I’m just built wrong for Ikea. Either way, leaving the store I felt like I’d failed some basic test of adulting. But it wasn’t really about furniture. It was the overwhelming fact of moving, the undercurrent of sensory overload that doesn’t stop. New city, new apartment, new room that’s technically yours but feels borrowed. Unpack the boxes and the scale of what’s unfamiliar just hits you. Everything requires negotiation with yourself. The room turned out okay though. White walls, some red accents, and this couch-bed situation that became the first thing I actually liked instead of just tolerated. That mattered—having one piece of the space that felt right. Gesine and Clara moved in with me. Finding roommates should be simple and it wasn’t. Ten people came by that Thursday, each one perfectly pleasant, and I liked most of them immediately. Which meant the rejections hurt more. You call and say it didn’t work out and you mean it, but it still sits wrong. Gesine and Clara just fit something though, some frequency I can’t name. It’ll be fine. Unpacking makes you ask questions you weren’t asking before. What am I actually looking for? Who do I want to become? Will I meet anyone who makes sense? You don’t have answers but the questions stick around anyway. One-night stands kept coming up in conversation. Everyone I talked to had tried them and hated them, wouldn’t do it again, found them meaningless. But people keep doing it. I asked why and got vague reasons—curiosity, momentum, being young and bored. No one had a story about it being transcendent or even particularly good. I’m not interested in it. I understand the appeal for other people, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t pull at me. What actually interests me is the other version—where there’s something already there, where the person matters before anything happens, where time and knowing makes it different. That takes patience. That requires showing up as yourself first. I’m probably old-fashioned about it. But when something actually happens, if it does, I want it to be with someone I know, not a stranger I’ll never see again. The park is right outside the apartment. School starts soon and I’ll meet people beyond the apartment-hunting filter. Munich is still half-foreign, still requires you to figure out how to move through it. I’m not in a hurry. The uncertainty is annoying but it’s also what keeps you open. You can’t have rigid expectations when you’re too overwhelmed to form them. Wednesday, 22 August 2007. Cheesecake at Three: I’m sitting in my new life now. Sun outside, kids trying to do cat sounds, Tom Cruise filming downtown. We got here Thursday morning, and the second I opened the door to my tiny dorm room, I wanted to leave immediately. But every hour here makes it clearer: Berlin is better. Just is. I’m in Charlottenburg with a U-Bahn station a block away and a cheap Greek place on the corner. My room is the size of a closet. Internet barely connects, the television doesn’t work, and you can hear your neighbor’s cough through the wall. But I like it here. Last night Cedric and Pia took me out. We ended up at a club where Bushido was performing, walked past some sex workers, and I couldn’t look away from any of it. But the moment that stuck was the cheesecake. Warm, with whipped cream and strawberry syrup, at three in the morning in a sixties diner. Cedric and Pia called it out immediately as the obvious stoner meal and started telling me disturbing stories about cannibals and ritual cat killings, but that moment—the plate warm, the cream cold, the syrup still moving—that was the real thing. The other one was five in the morning on an empty U-Bahn, just weird people shuffling in and out. I kept my iPod in my pocket that ride. I’m comfortable here already. Every corner has something. Strange people, pretty women, I’m learning the U-Bahn routes. I’ll take today easy. Monday I need salt, pepper, a poster. Should register as an official Berlin resident. But if the television reception kills something I actually want to watch, that’s when I’ll know it’s gone too far. Sunday, 19 August 2007. Leaving Buchloe: It’s three in the morning Thursday and I’m leaving Buchloe. Most of the packing is done—CDs, DVDs, books, clothes. I’m not taking much since the student housing in Berlin comes furnished. I’ve been trying to make a list of everything I need to buy once I’m there. Brush, salt shaker, pens. A microwave, which I’ve never owned. That alone feels surreal. Becca. These past years, you were the one I counted on most, even when you were fighting battles inside yourself I could only guess at. I love you and it was an honor rebelling against the narrow walls they wanted to keep us behind. I’ll miss lying in bed with you while the world moved outside, but we already know how this works—we’ll cook, we’ll whine about our lives on the phone, we’ll do indecent things on camera. When the time comes we’ll finally settle on that island in the South Pacific, just the two of us and the monkey butler. Ana is different. You’ve been this constant tearing at me—loving you and needing to let you go, but not wanting to lose the best friend you became for a while. Looking back from the lake last summer, those beautiful nights, all the way to this summer when I just couldn’t do it anymore… I’ve basically destroyed everything. But I understand why now. Because with you I was finally just myself. And you were just you. The thing is, I couldn’t handle how your sweetness wrecked me, the way you live like you’re not afraid of dying, the passion you bring to small stupid things. I failed you. You said love is like fire—you can’t get close without burning, but you keep reaching anyway. That’s exactly how it feels around you. Like a stupid moth throwing myself against a light until I shatter. That’s one reason I have to leave. I admire you, Ana. Nobody gets inside my head the way you do. I spent so much time wanting to tell you what you mean to me, how you changed me. But whenever I tried it came out as pathetic sentimental garbage, nothing like what I actually felt. All I wanted was to be something special to you. You’re already extraordinary. I hope you get whatever comes next. You’ll figure it out. Buchloe, I’ve got a love-hate thing with plenty of places, and you’re at the top. I’ll miss knowing you like the inside of my pocket. The Alpenstraßenberg where Ali got his face destroyed so completely he could kiss his own feet. The Zugspitz playground where Eniz and I spent years just sitting around. That development in the west where I had to sprint just to fuck some blonde with big tits. The gravel pit we’d jump off in summer, the bar where the crew threw parties constantly, and the endless station street I’d trudge at dawn after we’d been playing Phantasy Star Online all night. The rest of you chaotic bastards—I’ll miss you too, even though you put up with me when I was clearly losing it. Even though one moment I wanted to throw my arms around all of you and the next I wanted you out the door. Even though I’d ignore my phone for days when I was feeling like shit. Or maybe I’ll miss you because you hated me. Because I walk around like a fairy and you decided that mattered. Because you’re with one of my exes who still wants me on the side. Because I called you a fat slob and meant it. Whatever happened between us, I wouldn’t be who I am without you. I need stuff for Berlin. Brushes, spoons, pens—basically everything. Having my own microwave for the first time feels insane. The capital should get ready. It’s time. Even my aunt thinks so. Tuesday, 14 August 2007. Le Gary Returns: Le Gary vanished without explanation and came back with the most dubious story. Kidnapped, he claimed, by two Brazilian law students. Two weeks in captivity with Paula and Sara—their relationship drama, nacho recipes, endless gossip about some Brazilian soap opera. He said he nearly threw up. But being a gentleman, he kept quiet and eventually escaped one night hidden in a transvestite’s purse at the club. Despite his supposedly enormous handicap—being held by two hot twenty-somethings, I guess—the bastard came back with actual news from Rio. He’s obsessed with the new iMac, saw it at Steve Jobs’ barbecue weeks before anyone else. Naturally he pocketed the keyboard. Lost it somewhere on the way. Or traded it for coke. Who knows. I’ve been into Berlin’s fashion scene lately, those obsessive people you can sort by neighborhood. There’s this open-source film project floating around about love, friendship, and bullshit. Worth watching. The design magazines keep doing their trend forecasting—in, out, stays. Don’t trust it, but it’s decent for ideas. Le Gary’s heading to Tokyo today. Hope he doesn’t get caught again by possessive girls trying to use him as a massage toy. But he always turns up. Last thing he said was “Thanks for the honey, bitchy bunny,” or maybe it was “money.” Can’t tell if I’m mishearing him or he just speaks in code. Wednesday, 8 August 2007. Against the Wall: She’s not even my type. That’s the lie I tell myself when I think about writing something about this girl who takes my breath, scrambles my brain, drives me half insane. I could write a novel about Ana. Thousands of poems. Millions of words. Every one of them bleeding out from somewhere deep. But it would be garbage. Pure self-deception. Because she doesn’t love me back. And even though I know that—maybe because I know that—I want every second I can get near her. I’m an idiot. We were a lot of things. Secret lovers. Friends. A couple. Both of us lying about being over it. One week together again and we can’t stand to be apart. Driving across Bavaria. Late-night Monkey Island 4. Tangled up on the couch in front of the TV. Just like it was. Which is the whole problem. I’m an idiot for doing this again. For never being able to hold a grudge against her. For the way I die a little when she mentions some guy. For how she has no idea she’s the only one who can actually hurt me. And she does. Just not on purpose. That would be easier. I hate myself for being this weak. For never saying a word when she’s in the room. For not being able to let her go. Even though she’s not my type—I keep lying about that. The blonde hair on her neck. The little red marks on her cheeks. The way her breasts look. I would’ve given anything to be closer. Always closer. But the closer I got, the more her scent wrapped around me, the more I died inside. I knew it the whole time. Didn’t stop. Nothing else mattered. Love can be good. This was just destruction. I’m moving to Berlin trying to leave all of this behind. Trying to be clean of it. I wanted to have my head straight before I left. It didn’t work. I won’t write about her. Won’t waste another word on this thing I didn’t even fight. Can’t stand to listen to myself complain about it. I should write something tough now. Something like: “Fuck her, get drunk, get laid, let something break.” Or: “I’m young and horny and I’m alive—hide your daughters.” Or just: “Where’s the bar, let’s get absolutely wasted with the boys.” But that makes the doctor happy, or some girl’s father, or my friends. Not me. Even though I want it to. I’m just a romantic. When it matters. But who cares. She’s not my type anyway. That girl. Monday, 6 August 2007. A Reading Trip: Gary was supposed to be in Munich Monday. He wasn’t—somewhere in Rio by then, or maybe he wasn’t anywhere at all. Either way, Ana and I had the next couple days to ourselves. We spent them at Hugendubel bookstore, basically just sitting there for hours. She was digging through nutrition and psychology books. I grabbed whatever looked interesting from everywhere—fiction, essays, design, whatever was there. The first one I picked up was also the only one I actually bought. Paul Arden’s “It’s not about who you are, but who you want to be.” He’s this former advertising genius, and the title is exactly the kind of self-help garbage that made me embarrassed at the register, standing between the guy with the coffee table Amazon book and the Karl the Great fanatic, holding this thing. But he’s genuinely good. He didn’t tell me anything new, but he said the things you need to remember if you work creatively. Things like “Find your inspiration in unusual places” and “Change your tools—it might free up your thinking.” My favorite: “Anyone who insists they’re right is stuck in the past, stubborn, boring, self-satisfied. Don’t waste time with those people.” And: “If you never make mistakes, you’re probably not doing much.” Worth it for that alone. I love this guy. I shift my position—my back was already killing me—and pull the next book. “Look at This City: New Stories from Barbaric Berlin.” Perfect, Berlin stories. I’m flipping through and completely let down. The stories I expected—daily life, regular stuff from the capital—are just one complaint after another. One guy’s afraid of cyclists. Another’s afraid of kids. The next one’s afraid of a beggar. I put it down before I start thinking every Berliner except Bushido is a coward. Maybe the mythology book will land better. “Popular Myths About Berlin.” But I’m not in the references deep enough. Don’t know who Bolle is, don’t know the other local names. The stuff about the hidden U-Bahn stations was interesting though. And the whole history of the curfew wars between East and West. Day two. I’m on my side now. Ana’s deep in a book about why modern food is making people sick. I’m back in my pile—books about why the next economic collapse is coming, why the 68ers are still sexually frustrated, how to fix a stupid ice cream commercial. Information I didn’t need, but you never know. The book about the art of ruthless manipulation I’m saving for another time. Or I’ll just chicken out and never go near the erotica section next to the café. Who knows. Arden has this line I should probably tattoo somewhere so I don’t forget it, even though I already know it: “If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re following the rules.” Wednesday, 1 August 2007. Gary’s Friend Ate My Dashboard: Freddi wanted to check out my dashboard setup. Good idea, I thought. Then I open it up showing him all these perfect little widgets I’ve collected, and Larry shows up—Gary’s friend, the one who’s always hanging around. Grabs the dashboard icon and bites it before I can even screenshot the thing. Just like that. My Flappie widget, the daily Buddhist wisdom, the little green-eating reminders. All of it, gone. This happens to me every few months like clockwork. Suddenly I’m convinced that a weather widget is better than looking out the window, that I need an animated clock instead of just glancing up, that my life genuinely requires a blue Wikipedia widget so I don’t have to type “wiki” into Google. I’ll use it for maybe a day, feeling smart about the whole setup, and then reality sets in. I never actually touch F12 anymore. My Mac mini’s getting slower. Every Flash site makes me feel sick. By the second day the thing’s off and I’m pretending it was never there. I’m not really a dashboard person. Some people upgraded to Tiger just for that. Not me. Flappie stays dead. Maybe Nicki, Nicole, or Wichi can convince me otherwise. I’m not holding my breath. Friday, 27 July 2007. The Uniform: I’ve got a lot of clothes. Not enough to be a problem in theory, but enough that getting dressed every morning involves this moment of paralysis where nothing feels right. Too many black shirts. Too many jeans in shades I don’t really distinguish between. Five pairs of shoes in colors that are basically the same. The rest are optimistic purchases—pieces I thought I’d wear, bought with some intention I can no longer remember. The thing that happens is you stop wearing most of it. You find three things that fit and feel right and you wear those to death. Softening them, making them part of your actual life. Everything else just waits. Hangs there. I have clothes I genuinely like that I’ve never actually worn. It’s like having inventory you never touch. A couple months back I was getting ready for something that felt like it needed an actual outfit. I pulled down a shirt I’d bought a while back. Good color, decent construction, the kind of piece that reads as intentional. I put it on and looked in the mirror and immediately felt wrong. Not because it was bad—because it announced itself. It said I had gotten dressed. It felt like performance. I changed back into the jeans and the black shirt that’s practically a uniform by now. Same jacket. Something in me settled when I was back in the default. There’s something honest about it. You stop being aware of what you’re wearing and just exist in it. The closet’s still overstuffed. One of these days I’ll deal with it, probably give things away or something. But right now I wear the same things and the rest just accumulates, waiting for someone to want them. Wednesday, 25 July 2007. After Hours: There’s a particular feeling to finding a scene you didn’t know existed—basement venues, underground clubs, places that don’t advertise, where you learn about the next gig from someone who overheard someone else talking. I spent a night in New York chasing that feeling, moving between rooms that smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke and the specific electricity of people who actually cared about the music playing. The artists were mostly names I’d never heard, recommendations passed person to person, music existing in those spaces rather than on playlists or streaming services. Each room led to the next, each set to another set, and suddenly you’re three hours deep in something you didn’t plan. The weird part of nights like that is how little survives the morning. I left with a list of artists and venues and names of people who knew where the next thing was happening, but those specifics go stale fast. You can find the music, sure, but you won’t find that exact room at that exact hour with that exact configuration of people and sound. Those nights exist only in the moment, which is probably the whole appeal—they don’t survive inspection or explanation, so there’s nothing to do but be there when it’s happening. Monday, 23 July 2007. Why I Really Go: Blond talks about turning Berlin into a village, which is a weird way to describe a city of nearly four million. Twenty-two years in Pankow, she’s lived the slow version of Berlin, and now that she’s moved to Friedrichshain and actually exploring the Mitte, everything feels new. She’s got opinions about people who let music channels think for them—no sympathy there. You have to actually know what you like. There’s something true in how she describes herself: talkative but antisocial, someone who prefers staying home even though it contradicts everything people assume about her. During her hermit phases she doesn’t answer calls, postpones everything. But then the moment she says she never goes out, a party phase starts like clockwork. Everything flips. She tries to look melancholic in public and fails immediately—people just talk to her. She’s been in Berlin long enough to know that whatever you claim about yourself will probably reverse, and there’s something almost comforting in that. No use fighting it. In a city that constantly contradicts you, where your stated self keeps turning into its opposite, she found a soulmate. Someone who gets the instability and doesn’t flinch. That’s Berlin, I think. Friday, 20 July 2007. Nothing Left to Watch: I was always good at television. Knew when to sit, how to make it last, trusted the gray box to fill whatever needed filling for a few hours. German TV used to be decent at that job. There were shows that meant something, programs that felt intentional. Then MTV bought VIVA, fired everyone, turned the music shows into ringtone ads, and that’s when I understood it was actually over. That was 2004 or 2005, can’t remember exactly. What I remember is when the networks figured out the math: court shows are cheap, call-in competitions cost nothing, reality television practically runs itself. Once they understood that, why would they program anything else? The channels started looking the same. Judge shows and game shows and home makeovers and dating competitions and quizzes and clip compilations, all designed to fill time without asking anything from anyone. Even the good stuff got buried under so much garbage that finding it became work. Eventually I stopped trying. It was easier to leave it on as background noise than to hunt for something worth watching. What got to me wasn’t that it was bad. Bad television is fine. It was that everything was the same kind of bad—the same formula across forty channels, the same strategy of appealing to people half-asleep on the couch, the same bottom line: this works. And it does work. Millions of people watching. Networks winning. The fact that there’s nothing actually good left is just not their problem anymore. At some point the television was still there, still on, but I wasn’t really watching anymore. It became like street noise or light pollution—constant, invisible, something you stop noticing. The worst part isn’t that it got bad. It’s that it got bad and nobody minded enough to actually change anything. Tuesday, 17 July 2007. Hookah Lounge, Landsberg: We ended up at this hookah lounge in Landsberg where the music was chill and everything felt stuck in time. The shisha was apple and mint, and I watched someone named The do impossible things with smoke—rings, shapes, impressions. You know the type of person who’s bored enough to master something completely useless. Lisa and Fex were into the music, basically dancing while sitting down. Silvi spent the whole night leaning over whispering mean shit about people, pointing out who was gay or ugly, exhausting to be around until you remembered you were eighteen and that’s what eighteen-year-olds did. She had nice breasts though, which is probably not the point but it’s what I remember. Kathi wouldn’t shut up about being in the newspaper once, couldn’t remember the reason, and I never cared enough to ask. You just nod and move on. We wanted to go to this club called the Sonderbar, which at least had a funny name, but some of us were underage so they wouldn’t let us in. Walked through Landsberg in the dark afterward, which made everything feel more important than it was. Ran into Andi from my old class—he’d lost weight and immediately tried to get Silvi’s number, which explained everything about how guys think. Kathi and Silvi jumped over my shoulders at some point and acted wrecked afterward. It was stupid. It was a good night. The kind that disappears from your head by the next morning but you’re glad you lived anyway. Saturday, 14 July 2007. It’s in the Name: Thursday, 12 July 2007. Monastery Show: Words don’t always tell you the truth. Diet cola doesn’t make you thin, a book doesn’t clean your apartment, and a band festival isn’t necessarily either of those things—or any good. We drove out to this monastery called St. Ottilien for what amounted to a bunch of drunk eighth graders who’d borrowed some guitars and a microphone. They played the same “fuck you all” song on repeat in a barn for what felt like hours. The twelve-year-olds with the yellow wristbands—the ones who weren’t supposed to be there in the first place—probably had the best night of their lives because of it. We posted up at what everyone called the dangerous curve, basically sitting there watching kids with maybe two beers in them behave like they’d found a vodka pipeline. There were monks there too, the kind confident enough to wear their hoods thrown back like it was nothing. It was a whole strange scene. Blurred Minds came on late with this guy Kareem Weth singing, and they actually knew how to play. They saved the whole night from being a complete waste. Everything else before that was just noise and bad decisions, the kind of thing you’d only remember because you were there with the right people at the right moment. Sunday, 8 July 2007. Getting Old: Getting older doesn’t come all at once. It hits in waves—a word, a gesture, a sudden feeling. It’s shitty. At Silvi’s seventeenth birthday, packed into someone’s apartment with Rihanna on loop and someone’s dad pushing sausages on everyone, I watched my friend work the room. He was charming, cocky, just pushy enough. And it was working. That’s how it used to work for me. That’s when I felt it. I’m too old for this. Not just the party. All of it. The girls, the approach, the whole mechanism. And it was both sad and freeing because I’d loved it. A couple years back I could show up anywhere, see someone I wanted, and something would happen. I could rely on that. Now it doesn’t work. Either I’ve become someone people don’t want to find at a party, or I just don’t need it the same way anymore. I think I’m done with casual. I want something real, something worth building. Teenagers aren’t ready for that—thank God. Something in me is closing off right now, moving to a different place. This feels like the best time in my life to start something. Berlin helps with that feeling. Everything still feels possible. But I’m lying to myself and I know it. There’s no clean switch from fooling around to something serious. Maybe that’s backwards—maybe something real only grows out of messing around, seeing what sticks. I don’t know. I’m stuck between believing my life is starting and watching it get smaller. Saturday, 7 July 2007. The Approach: I’m in my room, Damien Rice playing, and I realize I haven’t touched a real book in what feels like forever. Or I have, but only ones I had to read—for class, for credentials. Now there’s a stack of design books on my nightstand and I’m working through them like they’re instruction manuals for becoming the person I’m trying to be. I’ve wanted to make things for a long time. Actually make them, not just think about it. In school when they made you pick a direction, I knew what I wanted. But I also knew enough to be scared, so I picked something that looked safer on paper. Applied somewhere else when I didn’t get in the first time. Met good people on that detour. Spent a year studying something practical that felt like growing up and making the sensible choice. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t the thing. Now I’m actually about to do the thing, and I’m terrified in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not the normal pre-big-change anxiety, but something weirder—this constant voice saying I got lucky in an interview, that they’ll figure out I’m not as trained as the people who actually prepared, that I’ve been fooling myself this whole time. The reading is partly genuine and partly panic. I keep thinking if I read enough, absorb enough, prepare enough, the feeling of not belonging will go away. It hasn’t yet. The fear’s still there. But they did let me in. They talked to me for hours and said yes. That has to mean something. I don’t know if this is what it feels like for everyone before something that actually matters, or if I’m just good at finding reasons to panic. The rain’s coming down. The books are waiting. I’ve got months before this starts and I’m already trying to compress years into reading I can do at night. Wednesday, 4 July 2007. Berlin: Friday morning, a TUI flight to Tegel. The flight attendant is cute in that budget-airline way—yellow uniform, perfect hair—but you can tell she absolutely doesn’t want to be miming the safety demonstration. The captain comes on cheerful in German and English, saying something about the weather. The attendant’s speech turns into white noise: “pfffft… pfffft…” The guy next to me keeps sneaking photos into the cockpit when he thinks no one’s looking, which is weird enough to actually make me nervous. I’ve got Dashboard Confessional in my ears. “Stolen.” Good start. I’m in Berlin because some big German web design studio wants to talk to me. I got lost immediately—I’m terrible with cities. The bus drivers are grumpy, the streets go on forever, and everyone’s either designing something, sipping coffee, or carrying a newspaper like they’re about to read the serious parts. Some tiny guy gave me directions to the U-Bahn and sent me completely the wrong way. Or maybe I just can’t navigate. Berlin is huge. Impossibly huge. The studio is in a courtyard on Chausseestraße, which everyone calls Germany’s Silicon Valley. Open warehouse space, high ceilings, people on Macs, moving around on exposed metal stairs, talking casually. Sun pouring in. I loved it immediately—this is what Lisa Simpson must have felt arriving at college for the first time. The interview went fine, I think. I’ll know more next week. I walked through East Berlin the rest of the day. Alexanderplatz, the Wall, Checkpoint Charlie. I never found the Brandenburg Gate. The directions I got from locals were useless. But I started to notice the colored traffic light men at the intersections—they mark the old border between East and West—and once I saw that, I could actually tell where I was. Berlin has these distinct neighborhoods. One street is all döner kebab, the next is pure Thai food, then you turn a corner into someplace residential you didn’t expect. Got thirsty at Alexanderplatz, ran out of cash, and some blonde girl in a BZ newspaper outfit—sunburned décolletage, real Berlin attitude—got me to sign up for a subscription. I canceled it by email the next morning. Coward move, but I did it. My iPod died right before the flight home. The new flight attendant was in a great mood—kept grinning at the captain, even during the safety demonstration. The captain was joking in German and English, and he landed the plane so hard I think he was still thinking about her. The passengers thought it was funny. Berlin vibrates. It’s electric. But you can’t do it justice in one day. The city needs to be discovered piece by piece. Maybe soon, Berlin. Maybe soon. Saturday, 30 June 2007. Beautiful People: Went to see Hostel 2 with a friend, then we headed to this party at Luna for some FOS/BOS Abi thing that turned out to be pretty dead because of Southside pulling everyone away. Didn’t really matter much though—when the two of us are out somewhere together we tend to make our own thing anyway. We’re walking around the place and I notice this guy. Tall, built, longer brown hair, eyes that actually make you look twice. There’s something on his neck—a scar or a brand or something—and it just works, makes him more interesting somehow. The whole night we keep coming back to the same question: how do you actually approach someone like that? What’s the move? What do you even say? By two in the morning I’m ready to leave. These guys are always so far up their own ass, and there’s no way we’re getting anywhere with him anyway. My friend shuts that down quick though—says if we leave I’m just going to spend the entire drive home complaining about not trying, so there’s nothing for it but to stay. He walks past us and she just hits him with this confident “Hey, stop for a second.” No warning, no discussion with me first. He stops, looking confused, and she starts pitching this party we’re supposedly throwing in August, talking it up like it’s going to be the event of the year. He’s still just staring. I jump in trying to save it, trying to loosen the whole thing up. It doesn’t work. Then he says something I’ve never had anyone say to my face before: just pretend he’s a good friend of mine and I won’t be so nervous, won’t stammer and second-guess myself the whole time. I don’t have a response to that. This guy just broke me down in the middle of a bar. Arrogant doesn’t even start to cover it. So I tell him he must really think a lot of himself. I don’t think anyone’s ever told him that before. He looks at me like I just materialized out of nowhere. Then he asks about the party again and I’m already done with this, so I tell him we should probably just forget the whole thing about the party. That was supposed to be the beginning of some other direction—some kind of redirect. But he doesn’t like it. Just turns around and walks away without a word. Leaves us standing there. I get it. I broke every rule about approaching someone. Did it completely backwards. And after what he said, I was already checked out anyway. But it just confirmed what I’ve been pretty sure about for a while: beautiful people are almost always assholes, and they’re definitely not interested in people like me. We head to the car. I’m driving, and my little Elvis is parked right by the entrance. Immediately some drunk girl is banging on the window wanting a ride home. Then his friend shows up asking if I’ll drive him out to Buchloe for ten euros. Come on. I tell them both no, pretty clearly. We drive off and somewhere between leaving and getting closer to Stotten, the whole thing hits us funny and we’re both cracking up at what felt like an absolute disaster maybe thirty minutes before. Some people just have a gift for this stuff. Walking up to someone, making it work. I’m clearly not one of them. Never have been. Wednesday, 27 June 2007. Uffie: She was everywhere in the mid-2000s if you were paying attention to electronic music and that specific moment when electro-pop felt like the future. The voice, thin and synth-processed, that deadpan delivery over those bouncing synthesizers—it shouldn’t have worked but it did. “Sex and Candy” and everything around it felt like a world I wanted to be inside of. There was something about the aesthetic of early MySpace electro that made you feel like you were in on something before it got swallowed by everything else. Her music sounds thin now, maybe, but that was the point. The thinness was the appeal. She knew who she was and she made exactly the music she wanted to make, which is rare enough. Friday, 22 June 2007. That Afternoon: Phone rings midday. Norri asking if I want to go swimming. Obviously. We pick a time and I’m rushing—shower first to deal with leg hair that’s somehow gotten out of control overnight, then sunscreen, the highest SPF I can find. Ever since a trip to Mallorca years back I get this heat rash that burns and itches like hell. Doesn’t matter. Trunks on and I’m out the door. Norri shows up and the new puppy, eleven weeks old, is so thrilled he pees himself. Whatever. Dog locked inside and we’re heading to Forggensee, the best swimming spot around. Weekday afternoon means it’s quiet. Mostly older people with skin either deep brown or sunburned pink, young couples with small kids wading around with buckets and shovels. The three of us—me, Geli, Moni—show up with these massive red inflatable loungers we’d gotten on that Mallorca trip. The move is simple: lie out there, paddle into the water, watch the whole beach from a distance. Watch the kids by the boathouse styled like they’re in a music video, probably smoking their first cigarettes. Watch the woman maybe thirty just letting the sun cook her skin with no regard. Watch the young couple, can’t be more than fifteen, alone in the water kissing like they’re trying to prove something. After enough of that we need ice cream. Chocolate for me. By late afternoon people our age start showing up, but we had the best spot, had gotten there first, could see everything. Standing there eating ice cream, we’re rating whoever walks by—which sounds harsh but it’s what you do when you’re watching. Nothing particularly interesting came through. Nothing worth a second look. I was there with chocolate ice cream in my hand, sun warm on my skin, friends beside me doing the same dumb watching, and nothing special about any of it. It doesn’t get better than that. Wednesday, 20 June 2007. Static: The air outside was just as thick as the air on the train. I climbed down slowly and made a face as the sun hit me in the eyes. A couple of older people, unpleasant types, stared at me like I’d just revealed my true self straight from hell. Their stupid little ugly dachshund barked at me. I barked back, just as ugly. I hadn’t been at this godforsaken train station in over two months, not since I decided to cut contact with my best friend. The stupid cunt I’d gotten myself tangled up in. The longer I didn’t hear from her, the better I felt. But slowly I started to miss her. Ana hadn’t changed much. Her blonde hair was a bit shorter, but she hadn’t lost weight—which was fine, actually. That’s what I’d heard anyway. She rode alongside me on her bike. The fucking sun burned into my shoulders. We understood each other like we’d been half-naked in bed together just yesterday. I keep photos of a lot of girls I have a history with. Relationships, one-night stands, pathetic spontaneous fooling around. These experiences are scattered across different parts of my life, but keeping them makes me feel like acquaintances live in my bedroom—the ones who understand best the pain and joy and electricity of those closer moments. They know how to get my attention. They know me the way I actually am. I love the faces of these girls. For days I avoided looking at the photos of Ana even though they hung right in front of my face. They mocked me. But I didn’t want to take them down. Not out of cowardice or laziness, not because I couldn’t let go. It was the images in my head that occupied me more. The sad, depressive music playing under my dark thoughts just wouldn’t leave. How she died in my dreams. How other guys touched her. How my ex-girlfriend had to pick me up because I had tears in my eyes over her stupid bullshit. That I was a bad person, she’d said. But my head learned. Eventually it started putting static in my head whenever a thought like that came on the horizon, like a soap opera cutting out at the crucial moment. On a rainy afternoon I took the photos off the wall. Then Rock im Park happened and Ana became more of a nagging thought than a real person. And that’s still all she was when we bought multivitamin juice at Lidl that day. When we watched “40 Days and 40 Nights” in bed without any background music. When we sat on a bench in the heat watching the glittering stream. Even when she told me she’d slept with another guy, my blood didn’t boil, my thoughts didn’t run wild, my pants didn’t burst. Ana wasn’t the Ana I’d been so wistful and depressed about anymore. She was mostly back to what she’d been for me last summer when we’d roasted ourselves at the gravel pit. A good friend, my good friend. I still haven’t hung her photos back up. Out of precaution. In case someone forgets to hit the static button at the wrong moment. Tuesday, 19 June 2007. Ana in Wonderland: I found pro-ana forums one afternoon while researching eating disorders. Just curiosity—the kind of corner the internet opens up when you follow enough links. Pro-ana: communities built entirely around anorexia nervosa as a lifestyle, a goal, almost a calling. What got me wasn’t the sadness—the internet has plenty of that. It was the intentionality. Tiered forums you have to audition to access. Coded language your family won’t understand. Practical guides: how to survive on almost nothing, which exercises leave no visible marks, what to tell doctors, how to hide it all. And everywhere this letter from “Ana” herself, written like the eating disorder is a partner, something that chose you specifically. I posted once—genuinely stupid—asking why they did this, saying they didn’t look sick, suggesting they needed help. Got demolished immediately. Every response was contempt. No conversation was possible, just instant rejection. I felt like an intruder interrupting someone’s faith. What I can’t shake: it’s all calculated. These aren’t accidental communities that happen to reinforce the worst thoughts. They’re systems *designed* for it. Someone put real work into retention, community enforcement, user experience. Applied design thinking to self-destruction. Think about Victoria Beckham and size zero, the fashion industry’s decades of pushing emaciation. That’s already a system designed to harm. But the internet weaponized it. Made it networked. Turned isolation into belonging. I’m not going to close with something about recognizing warning signs or helping someone you know who’s struggling. That’s true but useless. What stays with me is just the fact of it: it’s there, reachable in minutes, and people build their lives inside it. Wednesday, 13 June 2007. Show Me Your Bar: My Mac menu bar is a personality test that fits in half an inch of screen space. Mine’s nearly empty—Bluetooth, volume, clock, Spotlight. Then I look at other people’s Macs and there’s this wall of icons, everything from abandoned utilities to backup software they installed years ago and forgot about. You can tell who cleaned theirs out and who just let it accumulate. It shouldn’t matter, right? A few pixels at the top of your screen. But it does say something. It says whether you think about visual friction, whether you can tolerate clutter, whether you’re actually minimalist or just performing it. My menu bar is a lie about who I am. I’m not minimalist about anything else—I just can’t stand looking at a clusterfuck every time I glance up from the keyboard. Friday, 25 May 2007. Multitasking: That multitasking thing everyone talks about—it’s everywhere. You can’t avoid it. Every article, every productivity podcast, every self-help thing is selling you on the idea that you can do multiple things at once and do them well. Just keep juggling. Stay focused. Maximize. The fantasy is that your brain can split itself into pieces and handle work emails, a conversation, making dinner, whatever, all at the same time with equal attention. I’ve never been able to do it. I can’t bake without fucking it up the second the phone rings or the oven timer goes off. I lose count of the sugar, dump in too much flour, and suddenly I’ve ruined whatever I was trying to make. My friends have tasted the evidence. I’ve tried watching TV while working on something that actually requires thinking and it’s pointless. The second there’s something interesting happening on screen, my brain just checks out. I’m not working anymore, I’m just staring at the words like they’re not in English. People have all these theories about it. Brain hemispheres. Gender stuff. Whatever. None of it explains why I’m shit at certain things. Why I can’t judge distance when I’m passing someone on the road, or why parallel parking is a nightmare, or why I can’t actually think straight if there’s a conversation happening within earshot. I’m just not good at those things. Some people are. Some aren’t. Everyone wants to tell you that you can be great at everything if you just try harder or focus more or use the right system. That’s the dream being sold. But the reality is you’re just built a certain way. I’m better at some things. Worse at others. Accepting that instead of constantly feeling like you’re failing at some imaginary standard of human competence seems like the saner option. Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe I’m weak. Probably I’m just honest about what I can actually do in my head. The multitasking thing is a lie we tell ourselves because the alternative—that we can only really do one thing well at a time—feels like a failure. It’s not. It’s just how people work. Wednesday, 23 May 2007. Easy Gold: My blood elf runs through Deathwing’s Lair most weeks while I wait for StarCraft 2 to load. Just casual zombie-smacking, nothing that requires real gold. But somewhere along the way the in-game economy developed its own shadow market, complete with commercial dealers. GameGoods is basically the main operation: they sponsor communities, run ads everywhere, sell gold and character levels like a legitimate business. Two euros per hundred gold, instant in-game delivery, and they claim they’ve never had trouble with GMs. Maybe it all happens at night when the admins are actually asleep. I’ve never bought gold myself. Part of it’s just how I play—I like the grind. But there’s also something that feels off about it, even though I can see why people do it and Blizzard basically accepts it as long as you’re not flagrant about it. What’s weird is how normalized it all is. You look at any gold-trading forum and it’s just commerce: prices, inventory, customer service promises. It’s not hidden or shameful, just business happening inside the game. Everyone knows it violates the rules. Nobody really enforces it though. If you want to skip the grind and you’ve got spare cash, you buy gold. If you don’t, you play normally. There’s not much moral high ground either way. It’s just another way to engage with the game, and people have always paid for convenience. Monday, 21 May 2007. Melody Without Words: Friday I started this Pirates of the Caribbean puzzle with Becca. South Park and Late Knights playing in the background—both stupid shows but they have their moments. We barely made a dent, just sat there for hours picking at pieces that wouldn’t fit. Saturday was nothing. MySpace, whatever was on ProSieben, my ass going numb in the chair. I’ve been working on this website design that actually looks pretty good, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to be about. Just picked an aesthetic direction and went with it. Now I’ve got this clean template and nothing to put in it. Like having a perfect melody stuck in your head but no words for it. The frustration doesn’t leave. Going to grill today. Probably just potato salad and bread rolls since my stomach’s weird about most things. Found out Aydee’s vegetarian too. There’s something about that. Sunday, 20 May 2007. Mighty Mouse: The click ring snapped the second I opened it. One of the side buttons immediately went dead. And I couldn’t get the damn thing back together. This is what happens when you try to fix an Apple Mighty Mouse. I’d been avoiding this for a year. The scroll ball had failed months earlier, right after I got my Mac mini. They sent a replacement, everything seemed fine. Then the same thing happened. After the second failure, I just stopped trying. Spent months basically not scrolling because every cleaning method I could find—the official Apple one, the Tesa tape trick, even considering actual surgery on it—either didn’t work or felt like it might detonate something else. You get used to it somehow. Which is absurd when you paid for a mouse that scrolls. Today I decided to do a full system reinstall, and I thought, why not actually fix this properly. So I opened it. The whole design is so sealed, so hostile to repair, that just looking inside breaks something. Throwing away Apple hardware feels like betrayal, even when Apple is the one who betrayed you first. I’ve been into this ecosystem for years. The Mighty Mouse looked good sitting there next to my Apple keyboard, and they belonged together. But a product that breaks when you try to maintain it, that can’t be serviced, that just gradually stops working with no recourse—that’s not thoughtful design. That’s contempt. Next mouse will be a Logitech. I’ll trust Apple with another one when they actually make something that works. Might be a while. I’m not the only one who got burned by this thing. Wednesday, 16 May 2007. Ads: Everyone got mad about a blog selling links, and the logic was simple: ads are bad, blogs with ads are bad, done. But I don’t think that holds up. I hate intrusive advertising. Those banners that explode across your screen, the cheap Google ads, the stuff that punishes you into clicking. It’s sloppy. It makes me leave sites. But hating that isn’t the same as saying nobody should earn money from their own website. The thing nobody wants to talk about is money. Not everyone can afford to run a blog as a hobby. Someone with a shit job, or no job, counting every penny—their internet connection costs money, their domain costs money, their hosting costs money. Why should they choose between keeping their site alive and being broke? The argument always comes back to “hosting is cheap now,” which is only true if you have money to spare. What bothers me is the way advertising got written off as inherently crass, inherently wrong. But it doesn’t have to be. A well-designed banner, something that actually means something to the people reading, something relevant to them—that’s not selling out. That’s just trying to stay online. I’m thinking about doing it myself. Thoughtful ads for things that might interest whoever comes here. Nothing that’ll make me ashamed. It won’t make me rich. But why should that matter? Wednesday, 9 May 2007. Choose a Vista: I’m obsessed with these Apple commercials and genuinely don’t understand why they’re not shown everywhere. They’d be the only thing anyone talks about. There’s something about how Apple makes ads that just works—the wit, the craft, the specific kind of yearning they capture. The ones that get regional releases and never make it to your country are always the best ones. That’s how it works, apparently. Tuesday, 8 May 2007. Rio: I released Rio as a WordPress theme because people kept asking about the design I was using. It’s nothing complicated—just minimal and clean, the kind that doesn’t get in the way. I let hot pink come in sharp against all that restraint. No sidebar nonsense. It’s built on XV but I stripped it down to only what actually matters. The Gravatars plugin makes the avatars render right. That’s the whole thing. Sunday, 6 May 2007. When the Sun Goes Down: The weather’s still pretending it’s spring, but summer’s already waiting. Those nights when the sun finally drops and everyone moves outside—to the lake, to the grill, to someone’s backyard where the beer gets warm and the morning sneaks up before you notice. The whole season hanging in the humid air like a promise nobody asked for. I spent most of May taking this place apart and rebuilding it. The new version is darker but louder with color, bigger photos, some features I’d been sitting on for too long. I called it Summernights. It’s the kind of work that eats your evening whole—cold pizza on the keyboard, noodles congealing on a plate, three hours arguing with yourself over one button that maybe two people will see. But you know it won’t matter, and you do it anyway because the thing needs to be right. It feels right now. Cool and slightly unhinged. Summer’s waiting. Let it come. Saturday, 5 May 2007. Quarry Summer: The heat never lets up. You’re at the quarry with whoever showed up, iPod on repeat, taking photos on a camera that was already obsolete the day you bought the phone. Early 2000s and that passed for a summer. Proof you were somewhere doing something, which was enough. Your music taste was garbage. U2, Akon, whatever leaked into heavy rotation. You’d argue about playlists like you’d actually discovered something instead of stealing it from a file-sharing site. None of you had taste—you just had opinions about taste, which is different. The quarry was perfect for this: stripping down, jumping in, lying on hot concrete while hours passed. The kind of nothing that only works when you’re young enough to believe time is infinite. Just music loud enough to fill the silence, people you’d known forever in the casual way of bodies that share a small place, the weight of boredom that felt like freedom because there was nowhere else you had to be. It’s all one afternoon now, compressed into a memory of sweat and chlorine and that specific smallness. You can’t get back to it, but every summer you think about it anyway. Tuesday, 1 May 2007. Someone I Found Online: I was getting real traffic by then. People from other countries reading what I wrote. It went to my head the way it does when you’re young and suddenly visible. I thought it meant something. I found her on a site called Abby Winters. Just some girl they’d photographed in Melbourne. I looked her up like an idiot and found everything—her birthday, her age, what she was studying. That whole obsessive archaeology you do when you’ve seen someone’s body and convinced yourself you need to know them. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about her. The kind of fixation that happens when you’ve seen someone’s photos but don’t actually know anything real about them. You look at an image and build an entire person around it. You feel intimate with a stranger, when really all you have is a moment in a room, a camera, light. What gets me now is that I actually believed my traffic meant something. That having an audience gave me the power to reach across anything. I was completely delusional about it. She had no idea who I was. Still doesn’t. Monday, 30 April 2007. Red: I’m at the lake with my shirt off, letting my belly tan, when I find out two different blogs have written about this place. Just mentioned it, praised it even. I’m not sure what I did to deserve it. Maybe they were bored. Maybe there’s nothing else worth writing about lately. It’s strange, getting noticed out of nowhere. One said it was “worth seeing.” The other went on about the simplicity and style, how it all fits together. You don’t expect that kind of thing when you’re just doing your own thing. Suddenly you’re reading praise about yourself and wondering if you’ve actually built something real or just imagined you did. Then Christoph shows up with his problem. The aesthetic’s too much, he says. Too many breasts, basically, too deliberately designed to catch a certain kind of eye. He’s not entirely wrong. I built this place to be crude, horny, unashamed. But when someone calls it out directly, you start to wonder if you should soften it up, get proper, download a respectable WordPress theme and try being an adult. The whole thing’s funny when I think about it. Two people praising it, one criticizing it, and all of them seeing exactly what I was doing. My commenters too—they drag my posts sideways into conversations I never planned for, and half the time it’s hilarious. You get seen, you get the good and the bad, and somehow both matter. I dunk my head in cold water to get the red out of my face. The real question that won’t leave me alone: so do I get on TV now? Sunday, 29 April 2007. Ninety-Nine: I’m at Norma with Becca. She’s frozen in front of the cookies, completely unable to decide what to commit to, and I’m walking the aisles in a kind of trance—past Thai mushroom sauces, Polish car radios, whatever they’ve decided the international section needs today. Then I see it. Organic basil. Green, full, genuinely substantial. Ninety-nine cents. I’m adopting this plant. There’s something about finding the right thing at the right price. About five years ago I felt it with instant noodles. Ä Kim Chi, the Acecook brand, vegetable flavor. I don’t remember exactly when they became a thing—maybe around when everyone decided sodium was acceptable again—but suddenly they were just everywhere. Not student food. Real people with real jobs were buying them. I was one of them, kept buying them through some solid stretch of my life. I was probably addicted to the moment more than the noodles themselves. That specific feeling of standing in a discount store and finding something that just clicks. Want hits price hits availability, and you don’t have to talk yourself into anything. The basil’s on my windowsill now. Every time I look at it I’m thinking about those noodles, about Norma as this place where random alignment happens, where Becca’s still deciding and I’m walking out with something I didn’t know I needed. Saturday, 28 April 2007. China Hates Me: Somehow I’ve pissed off China, or at least the part that controls what gets through the Great Firewall. Which shouldn’t have happened—I’m not exactly a dissident. I like their food, I help tourists find their way, I even wrote a school paper about internet control in Beijing. But here we are, probably blocked. There’s a website called greatfirewallofchina.org that lets you test whether yours made it through. The whole thing exists to prove that one country has decided most of the world shouldn’t see what you’re saying. They block the porn, they’ve strangled Google, they monitor chat rooms and games. If you can see this from inside China, you either know someone or someone messed up. I assume it’s this post. Or maybe just existing on the open internet without permission. There’s something almost noble about it—accidentally accomplishing something by simply not shutting up. I wonder if anyone there is reading this anyway, finding their way around the censorship, looking at home like you watch an ex on Instagram. Close enough to see but too far to touch. Friday, 27 April 2007. Sash: Sash was my first WordPress theme, named after someone I cared about. Two columns, grunge aesthetic, no special features—just the bare structure of what a blog needs. If you wanted to build something more, you did it yourself. I liked working that way. Constraints force honesty. With two columns and white space, you can’t hide behind ornament or clever design tricks. The form either works or it doesn’t. The theme had its flaws. If the sidebar grew longer than the main column, the decorative line wouldn’t reach the footer. I never fixed it. Part stubbornness, part acceptance that a personal tool doesn’t need to be bulletproof. It required PageBar as a plugin, and the header image came with a PSD file, though you probably had to substitute your own fonts unless you had the specific ones installed. Looking back, that’s exactly what I wanted to make at that moment—something honest and rough around the edges. Not for beginners. Which was the whole point. Sunday, 22 April 2007. Pattern: Friday night and the world’s wide open. I had three options, and I was already halfway through justifying my first choice—the Melo with André and Lisa. Seen the Microsoft-Apple thing anyway. Going to parties with Ana never ended well, just never. But Ana was having a shit week. Really shit. So when she asked, I said yes. The party was in some resort town disco. Tiny place, asshole bouncers, the kind of people so proud of themselves for dancing to hip-hop remixes in a room the size of my apartment. I could see it all before we even got there—the people bailing, the crowd, everything wrong. My alarm bells were screaming. I ignored them. Just followed her around. Got clingy and jealous the way I always do, like some unwanted tag-along to her evening. The whole night was exactly as bad as I knew it would be. When it was finally over, everyone was asleep—my ride home had given up on me. So I walked. Had my iPod at least. Didn’t help. Next time I’ll listen to myself. Next time I won’t go anywhere with her. I only need to remember the suicidal thoughts. That’s enough to stop me. Saturday, 21 April 2007. The Spinning: There’s this phase where nothing moves. The days are all the same—sun up, sun down, nothing changed. Then something breaks and suddenly everything accelerates. You’re drowning in moments, good ones and terrible ones, and you realize you’ve been standing still the whole time. April did that. A friend’s mother died of cancer, and they buried her today. It’s the kind of moment that makes you stop pretending things stay the same. Becca decided she needed out. She’s moving to Freiburg, somewhere better. We were close, but I was never really there for it—always somewhere else in my head, thinking about things I don’t even remember anymore. She deserved better. I think about the nights we’d cook together, the walks, how easy it was to just be around her. I’m going to miss that. But she’s right to go, and I’m proud of her, even though it means she’s leaving and I’m staying. There’s something clarifying about watching someone else move forward while you’re stationary. Not bitter, just clear: you’re not stuck, you’re choosing not to move. You see someone gather the courage to change something broken, and your excuses suddenly sound thin. So I’m done sitting around. Actually going to work on my studies now, actually push on the thing I keep deferring. I’m tired of being the person who talks about change while staying exactly where I am. Watching Becca have the courage to move makes it hard to pretend that’s anything other than my own choice. Thursday, 19 April 2007. She Just Left: Spring in Bavaria, school’s back in session, and my best friend dropped out. Not a dramatic scene—just called the gymnasium that morning and said she was done. Twelve years in, straight-A student, months away from her Abitur, and she simply walked away. I kept turning it over in my head when she told me. What makes someone abandon a path that’s working, that’s safe, that everyone expects you to finish? Fear disguised as freedom? Genuine curiosity about what else is out there? Or just the weight of doing everything right finally cracking something inside. Probably all three. The hard part was figuring out how to actually feel about it. I wanted to be the person who cheered her on for having the courage to leave. But I was also the person thinking about how much it takes to rebuild when you’ve torched everything. And there’s a third thing—watching someone you love do something you’ve only thought about doing. That stings a little. Not quite envy, but something in that direction. I was sick that day, stuck at home alone when she told me, which maybe shaped how I took it. There was no celebrating together, no sense that this was some grand adventure. Just the knowledge that someone I cared about had made a choice I was still too cautious to make myself, and that meant something I didn’t want to examine too closely. I never asked her if she regretted it. Maybe that’s the coward’s way out—not wanting to know the answer because it would tell me something about my own compromises. She burned down a plan she’d built for years and walked into nothing, and I stayed exactly where I was, doing what I was supposed to do. Sometimes I wonder which one of us was braver. Monday, 16 April 2007. Sash: There was a moment in the early 2010s when alternative culture felt like it was taking over the internet. Not in a commercialized way—genuinely alternative. SuicideGirls was huge then, this platform for people who didn’t fit the mainstream look. Sash was my favorite. She had this unguarded blog where she’d post whatever crossed her mind, make jokes, share photos. Beautiful photos, yeah, but there was something about the whole thing that felt honest in a way most internet stuff wasn’t. She was from California, did the MySpace circuit like everyone else then. Got offers for shoots and modeling work, the kind of thing that usually means nothing. But she decided to just do it herself. Partnered with a photographer named Cymagen and they built SashSuicide.com. Just her and her work, no gatekeepers between her and whoever wanted to look. I remember thinking that was the real shift happening. SuicideGirls had been this incredible thing, actual curation, but eventually everyone figures out they can have their own site. Cut out the middleman. It felt radical at the time—owning your own image literally and figuratively. The thing about her was this mix of severity and thoughtfulness. The leather, the tattoos, the sexuality laid bare, but she was vegetarian, thoughtful about how she moved through the world. These contradictions are what made her seem like a person instead of a product or a category. I don’t think about her much anymore. The internet left that moment behind. Everything got safer, more sortable, more algorithmic. SuicideGirls still exists but it’s not what it was. That window when alternative culture felt like it was actually winning, when you could stumble onto strangeness and beauty in your browser without trying—that’s closed now. Sash was part of that brief time when weird didn’t need permission. Saturday, 14 April 2007. Looking for a Song: Sia’s “Breathe Me” is one of those songs that hits you in a specific, dark place. I don’t put it on casually. Regina Spektor’s “Samson” does something different—it just breaks me open, there’s something about how her voice lands on certain notes that I can’t defend against. The Killers’ “Read My Mind” is the opposite extreme, pure joy. Ai Otsuka’s “Smily” can snap me out of basically any funk. Arctic Monkeys’ “The View from the Afternoon” won’t let you stay still—your body just moves. Some songs feel incomplete, like they should be longer. Cartman’s “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch” from South Park is the obvious one; I used to loop it for hours, which says something about my taste at that age. Then there are songs that actually matter: Juli’s “Wir Beide,” that moment in Radiohead where they bring in Björk for “I’ve Seen It All.” Songs that don’t wear out no matter how much you listen: t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” lived on my portable player for way too long. I genuinely love SPITZ’s “Hotaru,” Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” Avril Lavigne’s “I’m With You.” That last one embarrasses some people but not me. There’s the reverse: my cousin downloaded something I can’t even remember the name of, and I never bothered to delete it. Silbermond’s “Durch die Nacht” means something specific that I’m not going to fully explain. Craig Armstrong’s “This Love” with Elizabeth Fraser is a soundtrack thing—something I only put on when I’m already pretty far down. Saw Mike Park live doing “North Hangook Falling,” guy can actually sing even if the merch quality was insulting. Younha has a song in Korean, Lindsay Lohan’s “Edge of Seventeen,” Damien Rice’s “9 Crimes” which is genuinely dangerous to listen to while driving anywhere near a tree. My favorite band is the brilliant green and “Rainy Days Never Stays” is probably the closest I have to a band anthem. The Pokémon theme is burned into my neurons forever. Berger’s “Heiligenschein” I identify with in a way I won’t get into. There’s Ton Steine Scherben’s “Halt Dich An Deiner Liebe Fest”—if I were going to serenade someone it’d be that. Bloc Party’s “So Here We Are” is pure kissing-in-the-dark energy, the kind of song that makes you lock eyes and wait for credits. Bell X1’s “Eve, the Apple of My Eye” is cuddling energy. The Fray’s “Vienna” brings back every heartbreak at once. Stereo Total’s “Liebe zu Dritt” is exactly what the title says. A class trip to Prague I remember partly because of Peha’s “Za Tebou.” Tokio Hotel’s “Spring nicht” is one I like even though I probably shouldn’t admit it. I want something instantly energizing in the morning and the Veronicas’ “4ever” does that. Azure Ray’s “Sleep” is literally perfect for falling asleep. Christina Milian’s “Say I” is the drive song. Phantom Planet’s “California” meant The O.C. was about to start, and that show could salvage almost any situation just by existing. P!nk’s “Dear Mr. President” was the last music video that actually impressed me. Bloc Party’s “Blue Light” doesn’t get old. Then Scissor Sisters’ “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” which my friend loves and I can’t fucking stand. Something by DJ Ötzi that drives me genuinely insane. Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole” I learned to love because someone else did first. Yeah, Tokio Hotel again—I like a specific song even though the band doesn’t do much for me anymore. Right now it’s Amerie’s “One Thing.” Last thing I downloaded was Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around Comes Around” but it’s already getting old. Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”—they’re done but that song doesn’t age. The whole exercise is pointless and somehow necessary at the same time. It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know about yourself, but it makes you sit with your own taste for a while, remember when songs mattered and why. That’s worth something. Tuesday, 10 April 2007. Rice and Potatoes: Being vegetarian is harder than it sounds, especially when you work in a hospital kitchen. There’s always something—full meals, light meals, vegetarian options—and normally I can count on enough leftovers. But then the menu reads “Kaiserschmarn” for the vegetarian choice, which is this sweet Bavarian thing that makes everyone lose their minds. Suddenly the whole hospital wants the vegetarian meal, and what’s left for me? Rice. Potatoes. A roll from breakfast. Hurray. At least I’m not alone. My friend Manu, also vegetarian, invited me over Saturday for a BBQ at this empty house that looked straight out of an American horror film—no second floor but an unsettling basement, a swimming pool, all these dark hallways where couples were scattered around making out in the corners. The kind of place that makes you want to leave and stay at the same time. Meanwhile, Telekom activated my phone line Monday morning. Someone there must read this blog. It didn’t help my internet situation though—apparently I need a new number now, plus the setup fee that comes with it. T-Online has no clue what T-Com is doing, so I faxed them to transfer the DSL. One to fourteen days processing, depending on which employee decides to actually process it. No guarantees. But it’s spring now, even if the weather keeps acting like it isn’t sure. I cleared all the winter depression out of my iPod, loaded it with something different. You sit in the sun for five minutes after months of gray and you start believing things might actually improve. That’s where I’m at, even if my new playlist isn’t quite as cheerful as I convinced myself it would be. Then again, neither is the weather. Wednesday, 4 April 2007. 8th & Ocean: I don’t usually watch MTV shows. Not the one where the guy customizes cars, not the renovation guys, not whatever’s trendy this week. Someone cheating with their ex, someone else’s mother, an influencer selling foot detox—it all blurs together. The Real World was somehow more interesting. Everything now just feels like they’re grasping. Then 8th & Ocean showed up. Ten aspiring models, the usual troubles: relationships aren’t working, skin isn’t cooperating, and modeling is supposedly the hardest business in the world (at least according to everyone on the show). Nothing revolutionary. But the production is sharp. Good music, clean cuts, satisfying sound design. It looks impeccable. Maybe that’s why I watch. Or maybe I just miss The O.C., California. Honestly, that’s probably it. Sunday, 21 January 2007. Friendship Sex: I spent the weekend with Ana doing basically nothing. We went shopping, she got her hair done while I sat in the salon reading, we walked around, ate chocolate, watched SuperStar. Then André had a birthday party at the Landsberger Juze yesterday and somehow I’m sick now. I’d actually helped him pick the music—good stuff, Muse, The Killers, The Subways, Bloc Party, +44, Sum 41, The Strokes. The DJ ignored all of it and played 90s techno the entire night. Can’t complain, I suppose, since I was driving and couldn’t drink anyway. So I spent the night looking cool with a bottle of mineral water. The party itself was fine. Bene got wasted and started going off about women’s liberation, which is funny because he hates women. I made Ana a series of increasingly terrible cocktails. Silvi showed up, this girl I hadn’t seen in ages—she’s always busy with something. André was trying to photograph every hillside in sight. Nothing crazy happened but it was decent. We’re doing a proper lake party this summer with a bonfire, I’m serious about that. Sitting in the salon waiting for Ana, I found an article about whether men and women can actually be friends. The argument was basically: these friendships exist, but there’s always sexual tension underneath, and if you ever sleep together, you destroy it. It got me thinking. Can you really just be friends with someone you’re attracted to? Does sex automatically kill the friendship? No idea. Guess which magazine published that one. Sunday, 14 January 2007. Apple’s Gravity: Apple barely had to advertise. Every other tech company was dumping money into campaigns, and Apple just pinned a countdown on their homepage. Macworld was coming, and anyone paying attention was already weeks deep in speculation. The rumor mill was predictable. Grainy photos of alleged prototypes would surface online—usually obviously fake—but people analyzed them anyway. New OS versions, iPhone whispers, something called iTV. Every possibility dissected, debated, picked apart for weeks leading up to the event. What’s interesting is that Apple barely had to feed any of it. The fans did the work. There was something cult-like about how people treated the keynote, waiting for the “one more thing” moment when Jobs would announce something that reframed everything. Apple had engineered a system where they didn’t need marketing—the devotion was self-sustaining. Those Macworld seasons had a particular energy. The speculation, the leaks, the livestream refresh. It felt like a cultural moment, not just a sales pitch. Apple made you feel like you were discovering something rather than being sold to, which is maybe why people cared so much about it. A lot of that specific kind of tech religion has moved on now, different platforms and different hype cycles. But you could feel it then—something that people actually wanted to be part of. Monday, 8 January 2007. Twenty-Three: I turned 23 today. I don’t look or feel particularly 23, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The age seems arbitrary—too old to be young, too young to have anything figured out. One of those in-between numbers that doesn’t register as anything special until someone points out you’ve been alive for twenty-three years and then suddenly it lands. I thought about what I’d say about a year older, a year further into this thing. Nothing comes to mind that feels true. You don’t wake up different. You don’t suddenly understand things you didn’t yesterday. You just keep going, older by accident. Actually, that’s not quite right. I can feel the difference in the accumulation. More memories stacked up. More patterns. More things I know won’t work because I’ve watched them fail before—in my own life, in other people’s, in things I’ve read or watched. Whether that counts as wisdom or just fatigue, I’m not sure. Anyway. Here I am. Twenty-three. Might as well sit with it for a while. Friday, 5 January 2007. Basically Squidward: I was driving around with pizzas yesterday when it hit me—I’m basically Squidward. That permanently miserable squid from SpongeBob. Same grumpy disposition, same refusal to eat anything at my actual job, same aching desire to be anywhere but where I am. The comparison felt uncomfortably accurate. Lately my life is the kind of nothing that somehow takes up all your time. Wake up, make breakfast, study, watch One Piece, chat with people, work, collapse into bed. The routine’s so flat it feels almost intentional, like I’m testing how little variation a person can actually tolerate. Days blur. You’re living but barely present for it. The kind of month where you look back and realize you have nothing to show for it except the absence of any alternative. Then Ana and I ended up at McDonald’s around midnight. Stupid, pointless, and somehow the best part of my week. It’s nothing—it’s just sitting around eating fries and talking—but these little ruptures in the routine matter more than they should. An hour of that and suddenly the whole grinding cycle feels slightly less suffocating. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t fix whatever’s making me feel Squidward-adjacent. But it reminds you that living isn’t just the routine itself. I’m not sure when I started being this person. Probably happened gradually, the way most things do. No dramatic fall, just a slow accumulation of gray days until one day you realize you’ve been feeling empty for months without noticing. But then there’s midnight McDonald’s, or a moment that makes you laugh, and for a second you think maybe it’s not all bad. Or at least not all the time. Thursday, 4 January 2007. What He Thought: I couldn’t sleep. Ana had been over, and I was already drained after the Munich airport. Then I spent the afternoon helping André and his father build a garage, the evening delivering pizzas, and by the time I got into bed, sleep wasn’t happening. The TV was all I had. I saw it first on a news crawl: Hussein was dead. They’d hanged him. Within minutes, every channel cut their programming, all of them showing the same thing over and over. The execution video was out almost immediately, everything but the final drop. On Technorati he was climbing the trending list right alongside Paris Hilton and used car dealers. People wanted to see it. I kept thinking about what went through his head in those last minutes. Walking to the gallows, masked figures speaking at him, did he think about the people he’d killed? His family? Did he know the whole world was watching? He wouldn’t have told the truth if they’d asked anyway. Whether it was justified, whether the trial was fair—that’s something each person has to decide for themselves. I don’t have an answer. But I know I’ll never watch those South Park episodes the same way. Saturday, 30 December 2006. Merry Christmas: The good Christmases are the ones where you get to annoy your nieces and nephews without guilt, steal the last cookies off the plate, maybe reconcile with someone you fell out of touch with. It’s the one time everyone’s supposed to pretend forgiveness is real, so you might as well use it. I’m in Munich with Ana right now. It’s cold and there’s mulled wine and this particular quiet that only exists when you’re far enough from home. The kind of moment where you remember why people bother with all this—the obligation, the noise, the commercialism. There’s something in it. Sunday, 24 December 2006. Still Listening: The year’s almost gone. I’ve been through whatever I’ve been through—new people, lost people, plans that worked and plans that didn’t. Everyone I know has some version of the same story. But the one thing that didn’t change, the one thread through all of it, was music. I couldn’t imagine this year without it. I spent most nights that mattered lying awake with my iPod, mind spinning while the thing played whatever would fit the mood. Some nights it was overwrought J-pop ballads that let me feel like my emotional wreckage at least had production value. Other nights it was punk—the kind that screams because screaming is the only language left. Sometimes both, flipping between them every few songs because sadness needs to become anger and then sadness again. The shuffle kept going and I kept listening. There’s a list somewhere of ten songs from 2006 that meant something. Songs I wore out, songs that got played in that specific hour of the morning when sleep won’t come and thinking is all you’ve got. Not the best songs ever made. Just the ones that were there. I’ll probably forget most of what happened this year. But I remember the playlists. I remember lying there in the dark, and the music playing, and somehow that being enough. Wednesday, 20 December 2006. Person of the Year: Yeah, the rumor’s true: I got named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006. Not exactly a shock. I ran against some decent names—Ahmadinejad, Al Gore, Condoleezza Rice—but the people want what the people want. I owe thanks to an overdose of Red Bull Sugarfree, Ana, Horst living in my head, Thunder Eater and Ankorman, Becca, my producer, Arirang, and basically everyone else who hasn’t gotten sick of me. So I’m ascending into the realm of the unforgotten now. If you didn’t make Person of the Year this year, don’t feel bad—not your fault. There’s always next year. I’ve got an exclusive CNN interview about it somewhere. Wikipedia’s already got me immortalized. PS: Someone got so mad about the selection that they deleted the whole Wikipedia page. It came back though. PPS: Maybe. Depends which server you hit. Monday, 18 December 2006. For the Horde: The Burning Crusade trailer came out and it was genuinely great. Not the hype kind, actually great. The servers had been in freefall for months, the battlefields were completely broken since that last patch, everything felt like it was collapsing. The trailer was the reminder that there was still something under all that mess worth the time. I’d quit playing seriously half a year before, but friends wouldn’t let it go: start fresh on a new realm, guild up, Horde this time, actually commit. The Blood Elves were the hook. They move with this dangerous grace, beautiful in a way that feels deliberate—designed to make you want to be one. Silvermoon, the new capital, would be an absolute nightmare at launch, but those hordes of tourists clear out. The serious players push through the chaos. WoW works as a substitute when there’s nothing else going on. The acceptable way to spend your time on something that doesn’t matter. You know it’s not great, but you go anyway because something about it holds. I actually believed this expansion would bring real people back, not just the ones who show up for five minutes. If Horde wasn’t your thing, there were the Draenei—weird blue creatures, I don’t know, whatever. Late January, I was back in there with everyone, loading into Azeroth. Thursday, 14 December 2006. New Email: I stayed up until one-thirty playing games with Ana. The next morning I went through my inbox and realized it was beyond saving—three years of pure spam. Viagra, donations, concerned inquiries about skin conditions I don’t have. The filters gave up long ago. The spam’s too smart now. So I’m switching to something fresh. The public address stays the same, but everything personal is moving to a new one. If you want it, ask me directly. The old one dies in a week or so. It doesn’t solve anything, but you do it anyway. Tuesday, 12 December 2006. On My Desk: Took a photo of my desk the other day—one of those chain things where everyone documents their workspace. Mine’s unusually tidy in the shot, which is funny because that’s not how it normally is. The magazines stack up: Computer Arts, PAGE, blonde. All design stuff, the kind you actually flip through. Behind them, my phone, a Beck’s Green Lemon, Wrigley’s Extra Professional gum. The desk lamp has an O.C. postcard clipped to it. Framed photo of Ana and me next to it. iPod nano in black. These paper figures I made years back—Thunder Eater and Ankorman—sitting where they belong. Xerox monitor. Mac mini. White keyboard, white mouse. Looking at it, I can date the whole setup to a specific year. The gum, the magazines, the iPod, the mini—it all points to the mid-2000s. It’s accidentally a time capsule. Monday, 11 December 2006. Themes: WordPress has always been the tool I trust for putting things on the internet. It’s yours in a way that other platforms never are. The thing about WordPress is that everything depends on the theme. It’s not just window dressing—it’s the actual structure of how your ideas get presented. Pick wrong and you’re fighting it constantly. Pick right and you barely think about it. I spent a lot of time looking at WordPress themes in the early days. I was young enough to care about every detail, to think that the perfect theme could make everything feel right. I even built one myself—Sash—because I wanted something that didn’t assume it knew what you needed. Just space, just layout, nothing else. It was too bare for most people, probably still is. But I learned what I was looking for in a theme from trying all those others. The ones that mattered were never the most feature-packed. They were the ones that understood restraint. Clean typography. Room to breathe. A structure you could actually modify without getting lost in nested settings and PHP you didn’t understand. Some designers got it. You could tell by looking. Not just because their theme looked nice, but because you could feel the thinking behind it—the decisions about what to include and what to leave out. That clarity matters more than any feature list. Most people never care about any of this. They find a theme that’s close enough and stop looking. That’s fine. But if you actually want your website to feel like it’s yours, you need a designer who understands the difference between giving people everything and giving them what actually matters. I haven’t thought about WordPress themes in years. But there was something about that search—about wanting the tool to disappear so your ideas could shine through—that still feels important. Thursday, 7 December 2006. Still Green: I tested the new ICQ 6 preview on a Windows machine and have to admit it actually looks good. Not meaningful good, just prettier. Flashier. Greener, somehow, than anything should reasonably be, and the design philosophy seems to be targeting people who won’t notice that they have maybe three people in their contact list. But yeah—it’s clearly an upgrade from the last version, which was starting to feel ancient. As someone who uses Adium on Mac, I’m watching this from a remove, but I get the appeal for Windows people. The whole thing is Flash animations and color—they’ve really packed it in there—and it’s clearly aimed at people who like their software loud and visible and full of advertising. New emoticons, new sounds, all these little details that feel like progress when you’re looking at fresh pixels. It’s not subtle, but it works for what it is. It’s in English closed beta right now. Eventually it’ll be everywhere, and then the branded versions start: ProSieben in red, Sat.1 in hot pink, whatever network comes next. It’s the same software in different colors, but everyone treats each new color like a genuine release. Which is fine, actually. That’s how it goes. Tuesday, 5 December 2006. December Again: December 1st. World AIDS Day. I remember MTV making these awareness campaigns about it, back when MTV actually cared about something beyond ratings. That’s pretty much the only decent thing the channel ever did. I don’t know anyone with AIDS. It’s abstract for me—something from school, something you see in those awareness campaigns. But the danger is real. It’s present in every casual choice. You’re at a party and someone’s attractive and things happen. You’re drunk, or horny, or both, and you’re thinking about right now, not about the next ten years. Sometimes you pause and do the smart thing. Sometimes you don’t. The thing is, I don’t really think about it. Not until December 1st shows up again. For a few minutes I’m aware that AIDS exists, that it’s untreatable, that the choices I’ve made could have ended very differently. Then it fades. Then the next December rolls around and I’m reminded again that I’ve been lucky. Friday, 1 December 2006. Fog over the City: Winter came and the sun left. Now I’m home with pizza and TV and math homework, which is fine because that’s exactly what winter is for—sitting somewhere warm while the rest of the world stays dark. Civilization has its uses. Becca’s in Hamburg for some party weekend. Ana’s off doing whatever she does. I’m here. And the math I’m supposed to be learning is something I genuinely hate, not like a joke about homework but actually hate it, this pure uncomplicated hatred of numbers and equations. I don’t know why anyone expects them to make sense. I walked around earlier thinking about people and changes, all the small things that somehow matter. Found a song I actually like somewhere in what I listen to. Too personal or too strange or something to talk about though, so I’m keeping it to myself. Some things are better as just your own thing. The math’s still happening. The beginning of it isn’t impossible, so I guess I’ll look at the numbers until they stop being nonsense. Or I’ll get tired and stop. One of those two things. Tuesday, 28 November 2006. Napoleon is Undead: Sunday was one of those days that passes without anything happening. I finished reading about Napoleon at some point in the afternoon, then spent time in Undercity—a game, or maybe just a place to be for a while. Watched School of Rock. Had brief chats on ICQ with people I barely knew. The kind of Sunday where you look back and can’t quite remember it. I was sleeping over at a friend’s, and his roommate kept howling—actual loud noises that wouldn’t let me drift off. Lying awake with that kind of white noise buzzing around your skull, your brain starts doing weird loops. I got stuck on this one: what would I need to do before everything stops? Five things. First: invent a word that sticks, that people actually use without knowing where it came from. Second: have whatever experience it is that’s only ever going to happen exactly once, to exactly me, with exactly the right people. Third: own a TV channel. No filters, no managers, just whatever you want to say. Fourth: find a burger that’s genuinely perfect—every component working, the whole thing memorable. Fifth: have a daughter. Pick a name that matters. Watch her become someone. I don’t think about these as bucket-list stuff, more like the five things that would make the time feel less accidental. Most of them won’t happen. But lying there in the dark, fixing on them one by one, they felt possible in a way they don’t in daylight. Sunday, 26 November 2006. Marie Antoinette: I watched Marie Antoinette with Ana. I love Lost in Translation, so I thought maybe Coppola would do it again. She didn’t. The whole first half is Marie losing her virginity and then it just circles the same feeling over and over—there’s nothing to grab onto. Ana was asleep halfway through and I sat there trying not to check the time. That night I crashed at Ana’s place. Irina—someone’s roommate, I’m not sure—kept making these weirdly cute sounds that woke me up all night. But it was fine. In the morning we looked at pictures of Ana when she was young. Nothing remarkable about them, just the ordinary stuff that means something when you’re looking at it with someone. She walked me to the train station after. That morning’s what I remember. Not the film. Saturday, 25 November 2006. Control: Somewhere in the first hour of Casino Royale, I stopped waiting for it to be bad. I went in skeptical—Bond movies weren’t my thing, and I’d never heard of Daniel Craig—but the film just took hold. Craig has this control to him, this absolute stillness. He’s not doing the winking Bond routine. He’s just there, precise and capable, and the film moves without wasting time. It just pulls you along. For eight euros and an evening with friends, that was more than I expected. I walked out satisfied. What stays with me is the Aston Martin. They destroy this beautiful car in the film—just wreck it for a scene. There’s something reckless about that, something wild about totaling something perfect. Almost the hottest thing in the entire movie. Thursday, 23 November 2006. Everywhere At Once: Had juice and chips for breakfast - bag was full of hair, genuinely more hair than snack. Ate them anyway. Tried to read about the French Revolution, John Locke, the whole separation of powers thing. Got through one chapter before my head just scattered. MySpace suddenly felt important, an episode of Spin City I’d seen a hundred times seemed critical. I kept thinking about this frog Ana and I caught months ago, why I never kept it, whether that was a mistake. You know that thing where the second you sit down to actually focus, everything else becomes urgent. Joined 9rules that week - the big web design community. Most of the interesting work on the internet has some connection to that place. Seemed like the right move, being around people actually making things. Wednesday, 22 November 2006. The Room: Breakfast that day was a multivitamin juice and cheese and onion chips left in a bag for too long. Mostly hair. Ate them anyway. I was supposed to be reading about the French Revolution and the separation of powers—Locke, all that foundational stuff—but it wouldn’t stick. My head kept jumping to other things: MySpace hadn’t been updated in weeks, there was another Spin City repeat on, some half-memory of a frog Ana and I had caught that felt unfinished. I got through one chapter and quit. Tomorrow was another day. But around that same time I found 9rules. It was this web design community, probably the biggest one at that moment. Hundreds of actual sites and portfolios, people talking about design like it was the only thing that mattered. For me, it was. I’d been making things completely alone, totally convinced I was either years behind or invisible. This place made it obvious there were all these people at the exact same starting point, building things, getting seen. I joined the same day I found it. I remember obsessively refreshing that site those first weeks, waiting for my portfolio to show up in the galleries. It never did. But I wasn’t alone in my room making things anymore, and that was the whole thing. Wednesday, 22 November 2006. Keep on Learning, Baby: Irina dragged me all over town—cold, dark, pointless until we’re eating spaghetti with sausages on her plasma TV watching “According to Jim.” You walk, you suffer, you get fed. Basic transaction. I’ve been grinding through German exercises and French Revolution dates. High school graduation bearing down. Not naturally my thing, but Ana’s become this complete study monster and she actually wants to help me with Spanish and maths. School does that sometimes, brings people together. Becca’s different now—less tension, more just accepting we’re going separate ways. That’s fine. Better than whatever was happening before. Last night I helped Ana with Latin, which never stops being weird. Fixed Internet Explorer on her computer too so my website actually renders right. Small tech wins hit different—you fix a thing, you made something work, there’s this little dopamine thing that happens. By the time Ana walked me halfway to the station it was past ten. The platform at that hour has this specific energy. Strange people, all of them off in some small way. You’re grateful you’re not actually getting on a train with them. Back to studying the French Revolution now. There’s something about dead history that makes the present manageable. Tomorrow more of the same. Everything’s better than it was. Tuesday, 21 November 2006. Restart: I dug up a design I’d coded and abandoned about a year ago. Brought it back last week. Still works. Made it WordPress compatible. Here it is. The site restart is really about something else. I’m serious about university now—want to study webdesign—and I’m planning to end up in California or Japan when the opportunity opens. You don’t start learning languages properly for no reason. English and Spanish, the real kind, the living-in-it kind. You absorb more when you’re not studying, when you’re just writing and thinking in a language that isn’t yours. Putting this blog in English fits into that. Write in a language and you internalize it faster than any classroom. The words stick differently. And there’s something about getting your actual thoughts into English instead of keeping them locked in German. They reach further. Germany was never going to have room for what I want to do. I know some people will drop this from their bookmarks. That’s fine. I’m not writing for an audience that needs everything in their native language anymore. I write for myself now, in the language I’m learning, and if someone else reads it, they do. The guestbook’s back up even though it’s half-broken still. I’ll fix it. The design is the one from before—I never stopped liking it, just set it down. Sometimes what you come back to was already right. Sunday, 19 November 2006. Rewired: The weekend’s over and I made it through. Went to Flo’s birthday party for like twenty minutes yesterday and realized it wasn’t going to happen, so I bailed and spent the night driving around the city with Eniz and Ali instead. We ended up at the old playground on Zugspitzstraße, where we basically lived as kids, and just sat there talking about how everything used to feel simpler. Most of today was better. Played Super Smash Bros. Melee until my hands hurt, with Eniz and Ali and their friends Isi and Romi and Mille. Tried some new classes in World of Warcraft, ate pizza, the usual. I’m just hoping this week is actually done now. Been rewriting some of the stuff I’ve been trying to live by, because none of it’s working anymore. There was that thing about never giving more than you get back, which I thought was smart but actually just made me paranoid and kept me dependent on other people. So I changed it to something stupider and truer: just be honest about what you feel and don’t perform something else. Same with that thing about happiness coming to people who smile. You can’t smile all the time. Sometimes you’re furious or you just don’t care, and pretending otherwise is exhausting. The actual rule: feel what you feel and own it. The bigger thing I’ve been working out is that you can’t hedge forever. You pick something and go with it, or you stay in the same place. And you can’t swallow how you feel to keep everyone else comfortable. So you just stay true to whatever that is and see what happens. Maybe that’s obvious but I’m only just getting it. Sunday, 12 November 2006. Party at Juze Irsingen: Mandy and Bibi threw something together at the Juze, and it was one of those nights that doesn’t need much planning to work—just the right people in a room that doesn’t care what you spill on it. I remember the usual mix of whoever showed up, someone’s questionable DJ attempt, the way those youth centers always have that particular smell of stale beer and teenage ambition. There’s something about those venues that makes everything feel bigger than it should, even if it’s just a handful of people making noise on a Friday. Saturday, 11 November 2006. That Night: Saturday, 11 November 2006. The Ceiling: This week was suffocating. Just constant weight—fighting with Ana, the Abitur still hanging over me, stuck in this routine of sleeping late, sitting online all day, then being too exhausted from doing nothing to do anything. It wasn’t working. Yesterday I snapped out of it. Needed to get out of the house. Spent the day actually doing things, and that evening I biked out to Turkheim to see Ana. It’s only a couple villages over, and my left iPod headphone was broken, but I didn’t care. The point was fixing whatever was going on between us. And it worked. We walked around, went shopping, ate real food. Watched TV, listened to Muse. Nothing special, but it felt like something released. The whole weight from the previous week just lifted. She’s on some class trip to Bonn now, but at least things feel different between us. I finally tackled the Abitur thing too. Went to the employment agency today to get it rolling. I want to do it—I do. The money part is still unclear. I don’t mind working part-time to cover it. We’ll see. Hope this weekend’s better than last weekend. Thursday, 9 November 2006. One Good Night: This week fell apart. I was stuck at home, useless, glued to ICQ, and by evening too drained from doing nothing to care about anything. Ana and I were fighting constantly—the easy summer thing had evaporated—and the whole Abi situation was still dragging. This couldn’t keep going. Yesterday morning I decided to move. Got out of the house, which was the point. I took care of whatever needed care, then bundled up and cycled out to Turkheim to see Ana, even though my left iPod headphone was broken. I figured maybe I could actually fix whatever was between us. It was a good night. We walked around, bought stuff, ate something decent. Sat.1 had a sitcom on, then one of those knowledge shows. Muse was playing. Nothing special about any of it, but it was the first evening in days where I actually felt like I could breathe. After that I had to deal with the Abi stuff, so I went to the employment agency today to actually move on it. The money part’s still unclear—I could work a 400-euro job if I had to—but we’ll see what happens. One good evening doesn’t erase a whole collapsed week. But something shifted. Hoping this weekend’s better than the last one. Thursday, 9 November 2006. Weightless: I’ve been cycling through these wild mood swings lately. One moment I’m completely in love with the world and everything in it, ready to spread good vibes around like I’m on some gospel mission, and the next I feel completely betrayed by everyone around me and all I want is to disappear to Canada and never look back. In between I’m clicking through iTunes like a man possessed, playing the same Placebo songs until they’re completely worn out, and deliberately skipping anything by Muse just out of spite. It’s been months like this. You can’t make real progress when your personal life is unstable. When things are solid at home, everything else falls into place, but right now I’m just weightless, drifting—like every breeze could push me somewhere new. I’ve got two theories about what’s happening. Either I watched way too much Will & Grace back in the day, or I just need someone to actually be there. And the problem is that when you’re this far down, you can’t see what might actually matter—that maybe something real is growing out of all this struggle, that maybe you need to be broken to understand anything. But that’s useless thinking when you’re underwater. For some feelings, I don’t have the right to claim them anymore. Monday, 6 November 2006. The Name They Skipped: I took André to see Borat after we’d been shopping in Kaufbeuren. We got into this almost empty theater—the other room had some dwarf adventure comedy with Otto signing autographs, and that’s where everyone actually was. Borat was crude and funny. The hotel bed wrestling scene got the whole theater laughing. Except for this older couple who either had the wrong movie or were expecting actual Kazakh documentary—they didn’t laugh once. I was shocked no one just walked out. I was still getting over being sick. I’d finally gotten my World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade beta key in the mail—Blizzard had fumbled the shipping somehow—but I was planning to sell it anyway. Needed the money for school more than I needed early access. There was a party at Julian’s that night but I was too sick to go. Then I watched the new OC episode and it was genuinely brutal. They didn’t even say Marissa’s name. Ryan threw out everything he had of her, and this new girl Taylor took her place in the opening credits like she’d always been there. No goodbye, no acknowledgment. Just gone. That’s the feeling you get when a show you actually cared about kills something, and you’re stuck watching what comes after. Saturday, 4 November 2006. Nothing Without Her: I caught Borat with André at the cinema. When they were naked on the bed wrestling, the entire theater lost it. Just these two older guys sat there completely silent. I thought they’d get up and leave, but they never did. That week I watched The O.C. and Marissa was just gone. Not gone as in traveling—gone as in erased. Ryan threw away every memory of her, and the show never even said her name again. They just slotted Taylor in and kept moving. Something about that broke the whole thing for me. The show doesn’t work the same way anymore. Hard to explain to someone who doesn’t watch it, but once you see something missing, you can’t un-see it. Got sick right around then. Winter came early, killed my throat. I’d finally got my World of Warcraft beta key after Blizzard’s mailing disaster, but I had no energy to play. Sold it instead—needed the money more anyway. Everything felt off. I was supposed to go to Julian’s party but I was too sick to care. Had the new South Park waiting but couldn’t even get interested. Sometimes when seasons change, they take things with them. Saturday, 4 November 2006. First Snow: The snow came, which means I’m immediately thinking about the Muppet Christmas Carol—the one where Kermit is Scrooge. It’s my dumbest comfort object. Last year when it first snowed we’d just gotten back from Prague, which feels impossible now. A whole year. Now the snow is here again and December is actually happening. There’s something about that first real snowfall that makes you hunt through everything for Christmas movies. You know exactly where they are. You know you’ve watched them a hundred times. You pull them out anyway. Same ritual every year. Snow is only good if you’re not waiting at a bus stop at six in the morning—which, naturally, is what I do. But from inside with the heat on and something familiar playing, it’s perfect. That’s the whole thing. Thursday, 2 November 2006. Season Four: Marissa Cooper died at the end of season three, or at least that’s what they told us. It was one of those TV deaths that’s designed to feel both pointless and devastating at the same time—the kind where you’re not entirely sure what the show just did to itself. I watched it happen and felt genuinely gutted, which is embarrassing to admit about a teen drama but also true. Season four premieres tonight, and everything’s different now. The whole show had to recalibrate around her absence. Her friends moved on, her family fractured, everyone’s plan got reshuffled. There’s a long trailer Fox put out that basically telegraphs all the changes coming. You can watch it if you want the full picture, or you can wait until tonight and see it play out. I’ll probably have it downloaded by morning, the way everyone does. No mystery there—that’s how we watch things now. The thing about The O.C. is that it doesn’t ask for much more than your surrender. The whole show is California and drama and characters you somehow care about despite yourself. It’s glossy and ridiculous and occasionally genuinely moving, which should not work but does. Killing off your most important character is either the bravest or the dumbest move this show could make, and I’m not sure which yet. But I’m going to find out. Thursday, 2 November 2006. Cum on a Clit Is Punk as Fuck: I couldn’t sleep that night. Sitcoms were running in the background on some network channel, the kind of garbage you watch when your brain won’t shut off and you’re just scrolling through everything. But I kept getting pulled back to this photographer—Clayton James Cubitt. And I’m adding him to the list of photographers I actually care about. He’s the kind of alternative that loops back around to being exactly what you’d expect from someone doing this kind of work. Crude, sexual, willing to put his actual life in the frame. One of his diary entries from a shoot starts with something like, “She was eighteen, I was twenty-nine. It would’ve been hotter if I was thirty.” Not apologizing for it, just stating the fact like it matters. And in a way, it does—the specificity, the honesty about desire and age and the exact moment things happened. He shoots breasts, trees, his friends, his family. Same camera, same openness, no pretense about separating the intimate from the mundane. That’s what actually makes a photographer interesting—not the technical skill, though he has that, but the willingness to let you see something real. The mess and the desire and the bodies you’re not supposed to photograph all existing in the same frame. It’s punk as fuck, which is probably why I can’t stop thinking about it. Tuesday, 31 October 2006. The Long Odyssey to the Club: Woke up at 7:30 with a club night to organize in two and a half hours. Naturally everything landed on me. Phone and messenger open, calling André about ten times before he picked up. Irina and Ana texting for information already. Threw a pizza in the oven. Couldn’t reach Lisa. André called back asking if Lisa was even going. Called Lisa, told her to grab Irina and Daja if she was heading. Maybe there was space, maybe Tina was coming, she wasn’t sure. Texted Ana—she said wait. Then Andrea called: Tina was definitely in. André called again wanting to know when we’d pick him up. I didn’t know. Pizza nearly caught fire. I’m running around the apartment in boxer shorts. Half-burnt pizza in one hand, Lisa on the phone in the other. 10:30, she said. Texted Irina the plan, told André to be ready. Realized I still had conditioner in my hair. Lisa’s car had no CD player. My face cream was gone, so I grabbed whatever was there. Felt it immediately sliding off my skin like my face was rejecting it. Ran to André’s bathroom, washed it off, slapped on the Nivea. Finally held a cold beer. Would’ve been better with the rum André keeps hidden in his kitchen, but I took what I got. Lisa spent half an hour circling for a decent parking spot. When we finally found everyone, the night could start. Was it worth the chaos? Sort of. I’ve had better club nights. But this one worked. Found my old classmate Hobi. Messed around with Bianca. Got to know Daja properly—she’s the kind of chaos person that actually makes these things fun. Probably wouldn’t have happened without her. Not amazing. Just solid. The kind of night that only works if you’re willing to let it almost completely fall apart. Though if Blizzard had actually sent that beta key like they’ve been promising, I probably would’ve blown the whole thing off and stayed home gaming anyway. Sunday, 29 October 2006. The Last Liver Sausage: Three weeks in a DEKRA training program hunting for internship placements. Started with maybe fifteen people. Eight actually showed up. By the end, it was four of us. Andi, who lived in the Antenne Bayern chat getting fake-married to bots, Sven driving his death trap up the B12 with no sense for overtaking, Alex who looked like he was printed straight from a farming catalog, and me. A strange little crew. Frau Mayer gets credit for dragging us through that with nothing but stubbornness. Vinzenz Murr’s butcher shop too, though his sandwiches always had something off about them—the schnitzel noodles, the liver sausage with mustard, always some buried wrong note. And the V-Markt runs kept us moving, iced tea and cheap sausages, that whole thing. I learned actual things, somehow. How to run pointless commands in the Antenne Bayern chat. That computers will genuinely refuse to load a two-euro World of Warcraft demo. How to collect MySpace friends without trying. Probably something about applications too, though that part’s fuzzy now. Next Monday starts another internship. Nursing home. Scaring elderly people eight hours a day. Could be worse. Friday, 27 October 2006. Where the Wisdom Comes From: I’m the guy my friends come to for shit. André needs help with women. Ana’s got butterflies. Kathi’s prepping for whatever disaster she’s about to date. I’ve got a line for everything, some half-smart observation that lands just right when they need it. But here’s the thing—none of it’s original. It all comes from living long enough to notice how everything works and how little any of it matters. You see a pattern enough times, you stop being surprised by it. The real wisdom, though, the stuff that sticks: it’s just accepting that you’re fucked either way. As a man, nothing you do is right. You try too hard, you’re needy. You hold back, you’re distant. You’re honest about what you want, you’re a prick. You’re considerate, you’re weak. Women end up disappointed in every generation because they keep expecting men to somehow solve this, and men keep expecting women to be grateful for the attempt. It’s absurd. It’s completely fucked. And once you see it, once you really understand that the game was rigged from the start, you can actually relax about it. Tuesday, 24 October 2006. Dead Stretch: Got a new lip ring a couple weeks ago. Not like it fixes anything, but there’s something about doing it anyway that matters. Some weeks I could write ten posts a day. Other weeks I’ve got nothing because I’m running on empty. I used to dump my apocalypse-depression stuff here, but I’m past that now. No point. I’m in some job prep course, and I don’t know what I’m doing for work. Years of resisting this whole system and how it uses people, and it’s still in me. Maybe the job I want doesn’t even exist. Maybe I should do something in social work or media design. Maybe I should just wait for whatever’s been moving me around to move me again. The indecision isn’t helping. I’ve always kind of slipped into things. This time it feels like whatever’s guiding me is tired, or maybe never stopped and I just can’t feel it. Probably both. Watching something tonight, letting it all blur. That’s enough. Monday, 23 October 2006. Burning: Ali gets hard for exactly two things: hot girls and World of Warcraft. When the Burning Crusade beta dropped, he couldn’t shut up about it. New races, new zones, the whole expansion spinning up. I never really got into WoW like everyone else did. Honestly scared I’d end up like one of those people—you know, the basement-dwelling type that South Park perfectly captured when they realized the whole thing stops being a game and becomes your actual life. It’s a world. It’s an existence. It’s the difference between being somebody and being nobody. But then something about this expansion kept pulling at me. Blood Elves. Running raids with Ali and the crew. Getting stronger with people who actually cared about the same stupid stuff. I told myself it was beneath me, that I was smarter than that, and I almost believed it. Almost. That’s the thing with these games though—they exist whether you’re in them or not. Your friends are in there right now, this second, grinding for reputation, chasing loot, becoming legends. The Burning Crusade was coming in a month. It was a whole new world opening up, and everyone was already thinking about when it would land. It was a door. Permission to want something you’d already walked away from. I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted back in or if I was just tired of saying no. Probably both. Tuesday, 17 October 2006. Still Here: Nothing beats a Friday night at home with people you actually like, getting drunk on Beck’s Green Lemon, blasting Billy Talent and The Killers so loud someone eventually yells at you to turn it down. Running Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments, spilling beer on controllers, that feeling where nothing else in the world matters. I thought those nights were done. The summers at Zugspitzspielplatz, the games at the old place, everything felt finished. That’s the deal when you grow up—people scatter, you move on, and you accept that those times are gone. Then you’re in that room again and Sarah still has that mouth on her, still says things that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Ali still beats you at every game, half the time barely looking at the screen. Kalli’s still that weird guy, the one saying the thing everyone’s thinking but nobody else actually says. They look different—different bodies, different lives—but underneath they’re exactly the same people. If they’re the same, then I’m the same. Which means these nights aren’t actually gone. That’s the thing that feels good. Saturday, 14 October 2006. Your Trusted Browser: There’s a rule in web design: let people choose their browser. Opera, Firefox, Safari—good options, all of them. Then there’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s monument to making designers question their career choices. I tested the whole thing in every browser I could find. Perfect everywhere else. But IE had some rendering glitch that shoved the sidebars down below the content. Not just IE6—I could’ve written that off as ancient history. But the latest IE7 release candidate did it too. I spent the whole afternoon trying to make it work. CSS hacks, conditional comments, every trick I knew. Nothing. The browser just wouldn’t cooperate. And the kicker was 90% of people online were still using IE. Ninety percent. So I couldn’t ignore it. Two options: keep fighting something you can’t win, or accept that most of your visitors are going to see a broken site. I wasn’t going to force anyone to switch browsers—that wasn’t my call. But IE users got the fractured version. The weird part was that some people seemed fine with it. They’d come back, navigate around the busted layout like it was intentional. Maybe they thought it was some kind of alternative design choice. Maybe it was. Monday, 9 October 2006. Make Love, not Warcraft: I watched this one multiple times. It’s the World of Warcraft episode where grinding just slowly consumes the characters—the animation darkens, the humor drains, leaving something closer to apocalyptic than comedy. The transition is so gradual it doesn’t feel like a transition until you realize the episode has already tipped into bleakness. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. Sunday, 8 October 2006. Games and Mike: Smash Bros. Melee, Simpsons Road Rage, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle—Friday was gaming and beer. I was good at Melee that night, better than usual against Ali. The Simpsons game annoyed me though. Eniz was supposed to show and didn’t, which tracks. Saturday moved slower. Ali and André bailed to Melly and Lisa’s, leaving me and John and Kalli watching them play WoW while I either watched TV or played GameCube. We drank what beer was left and ordered Chinese food. That evening I had three tickets to see Mike Park at the Hirsch. André and Ana, fresh back from a school trip, came along. I hadn’t been to the Hirsch in about three years. That was when we spent every weekend at Anja’s place, drinking, messing around with Nane, camping in the woods with Robert and Sophie. Those feel like a different era now. Rank opened the show, then Mike Park came out with Hiro, his tech guy, and they went for it. The crowd got louder than Mike probably wanted—he mentioned it later—but he played everything. By the time he closed with “From Korea” he’d won people over. Merch, autographs, photos afterward. It was a good night. Mike Park can come back whenever. Asian Man Records, Mike’s label, is where I find new stuff now. Free downloads constantly. Rock, ballads, reggae—whatever the roster is putting out. That’s how you stumble onto something good. Wednesday, 27 September 2006. Nothing Doing: Nothing much happening at the moment. Waiting for South Park. Got a haircut today—finally took the mop off. That was the highlight, honestly. Rediscovered Sims 2. There’s something compulsive about it, especially when the project is raising the biggest slut in all of Veronaville. The voyeuristic pleasure of watching her wreck herself appeals to me more than I probably want to admit. Perfect setup. My desktop is currently some obscene shade of neon something. It’ll probably last another week before I can’t stand looking at it. MTV’s got some fashion thing on, which is a hard pass. Switched to the gaming channel instead. At least that’s tolerable to watch. Wednesday, 20 September 2006. MTV Was Free: MTV and VIVA came free through European satellite one week—I never figured out if it was a mistake or someone’s weird experiment. You grabbed whatever you could record before it all shut down again. The part that stuck with me was how the same content was playing everywhere. Same video rotation, same format, same slow drift toward reality shows. Getting it for free somehow made that repetition more obvious, like you could suddenly see how little was actually different between any of it. Sunday, 17 September 2006. Autumn Mix: When autumn starts creeping in and the air gets that bite to it, I always have the same impulse: disappear into bed, plug in headphones, and commit to assembling a season soundtrack. The kind of playlist you build in your head for weeks but never quite finish, always adjusting, always wondering if you’re getting the mood right before winter actually shows up. There’s something about assigning a sound to every season shift. The idea that you’re preparing, that you know exactly what October and November require. Even if most days I just hit shuffle on the same stuff I’ve been listening to for months. Making cornflakes now. Friday, 15 September 2006. Call 911: It was my first day of school in 2001, but I don’t remember going to school. I remember sitting in front of a TV with everyone else, watching the same footage over and over. The towers burning. Planes hitting. People jumping. Nobody changed the channel because nobody knew what else to do. What I remember most is the weirdness of the whole media machinery just stopping. Shopping channels went dark. MTV stopped playing videos. Every network aired the same images because there wasn’t anything else that mattered. The infrastructure of entertainment had broken down. I don’t know if we actually had school that day or if we went home. Time got strange. We just kept sitting there, watching the building burn, watching people try to escape, watching the world reorganize itself in real time. It was the only thing on every screen. Looking back, what sticks isn’t the trauma itself but the peculiar closeness of it—everyone in the country frozen in the same moment, watching the same screen, all of us trying to understand what we were seeing together. Monday, 11 September 2006. The Coconut Bourbon: Saturday morning comes early when Friday had been too good. The sky’s that bright blue you get at dawn, O.C. reruns on German TV, and in the back of my mind I already know the weekend’s finished. I got to bed early so I’m up now. Saturday’s boring me already, which is fine because Friday was good enough to talk about instead. We had our first real class reunion, almost everyone showed up, and what hit me was realizing I still actually like these people. Not in some obligatory way—we genuinely stay in touch. Some of us party together, others I message on ICQ and SMS, this loose network that formed in school and just never dissolved. We met at Plärrer in Kaufbeuren and wandered into the Pic, but didn’t stay long. Most of us ended up at PM instead. Before that, André’s sister Ilka and her very drunk friend caught us and asked for a ride back from a festival in Kaufering. That drive became a thing. We pulled over on some field and Melly threw up, which might have been her first time, and Bumsis offered the ancient hangover trick with a grass blade that she completely ignored. PM was where the night actually lived. That bourbon that tasted like coconut—Ilka noticed it too—and Billy Talent turned up loud. I saw Verena and I saw Koksi differently than I had before. We drank and talked too much and danced or jumped or swayed or whatever you call that motion when you’re drunk. Friday was good. Saturday killed it. I spent the day in front of ICQ waiting for Rebecca to come online, staring at my phone. We were supposed to meet but it’s not happening. The curse of exes setting in again. But tonight there’s beer and foosball with Tobi, and I need that right now. Sunday, 10 September 2006. Natascha: There was a moment in 2006 when Natascha Kampusch’s face was everywhere. She’d just escaped an eight-year imprisonment in a basement dungeon in Austria, and her first interview went out on television to what felt like the entire world watching at once. She was young, coherent, composed in a way that seemed to surprise everyone who saw it. I remember the peculiar relief in how people talked about her—the repeated mentions of her intelligence, her apparent strength, as if surviving with your mind intact was the important part. The media needed her to be fine. Not dealing with anything, not traumatized in ways that would require uncomfortable thinking, just fine. It made the whole thing feel solvable, which was probably comforting to watch from a distance. What stuck with me was the gap between her and the story that got made from her. She was living whatever she was actually living, and the world was busy deciding what her composure meant. Every interview became evidence, every word parsed for proof of either recovery or damage. She’d been trapped in a basement and now she was trapped in a narrative, and the second one might have been harder to escape because at least the first one had walls you could see. I don’t know what happened to her after that, whether she managed to disappear from the cameras or if they followed her for years. I hope she did disappear. I hope she got to be a person again instead of a story, got to have thoughts and feelings that didn’t have to mean anything to anyone but herself. Thursday, 7 September 2006. What We Keep: Information is power, they say. Spies, detectives, journalists—whole industries built on excavating the one thing everyone’s supposedly chasing: the truth. Who took what, who pulled the trigger, who lied to who. As if truth is something singular and waiting, just hidden somewhere. But it’s not. Truth has infinite faces, and lies have more. Lies have existed since people realized that silence could be safer than confession. That’s the oldest human trade—knowing when to shut up. Everyone has something buried. Corruption, spite, small cruelties. These aren’t really networks at all, just mutual agreements to stay quiet. And they hold as long as everyone keeps their part. But then someone breaks the deal. One person speaks. And the careful structure falls apart for everyone connected to it. Right now, somewhere, the truth is being said. Someone’s tearing through that protective quiet. And I keep thinking about whether that’s courage or just inevitable—whether we all know this silence is temporary, that eventually someone will speak for us. Wednesday, 6 September 2006. Saturday Drinks: Spent Saturday drinking and watching movies at André’s. Me, Ana, Lisa, André, some friends, and a couple of girls who showed up—which definitely helped the vibe. We made it through Eurotrip, which I’d somehow never seen, then Date Movie, which wasn’t funny then or now, then The Fog, which at least had something going for it. Lots of Beck’s Green Lemon. It was fun. Heading to Munich tomorrow with Bianca and Ana. Hope it’s as good as last time, but I know how this goes: they vanish into Orsay, Pimkie, H&M, and I’m left standing around. Might be different this time. Probably not. Tuesday, 5 September 2006. MUC: We drove up to Munich way too early one morning—me, Ana, no reading material, no music, just the two of us and about three hours of highway. The blond people around us were interesting enough to not resent the commute. The sky kept threatening to go dark but never quite did. By afternoon we’d already volunteered for some Powerrade focus group and walked away with a bag of gummy bears. The city was celebrating something—Karstadt’s 125th birthday—so we scored two bottles of decent sparkling wine, which we sat down with in front of the Frauenkirche because why not. That’s the kind of idle behavior you get away with when you’re just passing through a place. We ate pizza somewhere forgettable. At GRAVIS, we browsed the way you browse stores you don’t actually care about. Hugendubel gave us two hours of picking up and putting down books with stupid titles: “Why Do Men Have Nipples?” “Can Molecules Exist in Two Places at Once?” That’s what you do when you have time and nowhere better to be. Dinner was an overpriced salad from some German chain that tasted like sadness. By evening we were in a theater watching Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which is the kind of movie that makes you hyper-aware of time passing. Somewhere between the second and third act I stopped caring what was happening. We went home and got quietly drunk and watched Lost in Translation, which is the only movie that actually matters, and I remember thinking Munich was fine but I didn’t need to come back. Though knowing me, we will. Friday, 1 September 2006. Is That Really You?: Tuesday, 29 August 2006. The ^^: The ^^ emoticon had a life. Lived in anime forums and instant messengers, became the smiley for people who thought they were in on the same joke. I used it too, helped spread it. Stop using it. Once a symbol gets too clearly coded to one era and one aesthetic, it dies. Becomes a costume. A very visible costume. When you use it, you’re not communicating—you’re announcing. Everyone knows what you’re trying to say about yourself. It doesn’t work anymore. The moment’s passed. Let it sit in the forums where it started, where it actually means something. Monday, 28 August 2006. Bagel Season: I’ve always been obsessed with “The O.C.”, and now apparently I’m also obsessed with what they eat for breakfast. Bagels. The Cohen family goes through these every morning like clockwork, and I guess watching that finally wore me down. So I went to the supermarket and bought some. Found a few varieties—plain, sesame, raisins. I tried two: one loaded with thick cream cheese, the other with Géramont and salami, which sounds weird but actually worked. They were good. Nothing complicated, just a solid breakfast item. New episode airs tonight, so if anything, this bagel obsession is probably only going to get worse from here. Saturday, 26 August 2006. Ernie and Bert: We were exploring the side roads near Buchloe at night when Ana and I found them—two small frogs near John’s place. We caught them without thinking, just grabbed them from the grass. The moment I held them, I felt like a kid again, that pure uncomplicated thing you get when something unexpected and alive is in your hands. They were cute, genuinely cute, in that serious way frogs have. We brought them home and named them Ernie and Bert. But then I looked it up—turns out you can’t keep native frogs. It’s illegal, something about the ecosystem. So we released them back into the grass, which was the right call even though I wasn’t ready to let them go. I still want frogs someday. Real ones in a terrarium, set up right. There’s something I like about watching them, the way they just sit there until suddenly they don’t. But it has to be done properly. Not like Ernie and Bert. Wednesday, 23 August 2006. The O.C. All Night: I’m completely destroyed. Haven’t slept since yesterday afternoon. We’ve been watching The O.C. since four o’clock—André, Lisa, and me—just chaining episodes together, drinking, eating, existing in Newport Beach for fifteen hours straight. The weather outside is actually decent, which makes it worse somehow. We could be outside doing something. Instead we’re inside watching a show about rich teenagers ruining their lives. I dragged André into this. He showed up skeptical, thought it was just empty melodrama. That’s always how it starts—someone convinced they’re above it until the show actually hooks them. By episode seven or eight he stopped making jokes about scripts and acting. Once Marissa’s death trip to Tecumana happened, once Oliver turned out to be a complete asshole, once Seth’s situation with Summer became genuinely pathetic, André just gave up fighting. The show does something to you. It has this intrigue, this ache of wanting things you can’t have, this way of making you believe that a seventeen-year-old’s problems are genuinely devastating. The O.C. becomes real. It lives in your chest now. I’m wrecked. Sixteen hours with no sleep. Everything looks too vivid and strange. My spelling’s still perfect though, which is sort of hilarious because I can barely focus. Monday, 21 August 2006. Pirate Politics: The Pirate Party started in Sweden and spread because the internet had changed faster than the law could follow. By the time Germany formed its chapter, it was already in half of Europe, Russia, and the US. The platform was straightforward: restore basic digital rights, dismantle mass surveillance, soften or abolish copyright restrictions. If you’d ever been caught in the machinery of intellectual property law—a cease-and-desist letter, a throttled connection—the party’s position made immediate sense. They were naming what everyone already knew. The organization had obvious problems. It was idealistic and loosely structured, full of people good at diagnosing the problem but less equipped to solve it. Still, it hit something real. There was a generational fracture over what ownership and copying even meant in a digital world. The law had been written for a different internet. Either it would adapt or become unenforceable. The Pirate Party at least had the clarity to say which way things were heading. The party itself probably didn’t matter much in the end. Third parties rarely do. But the fact that it existed—that enough people felt strongly enough about this to form an actual political body—that said something about the moment. It was a statement that something fundamental had shifted, that what was actually possible on the internet had moved beyond what any government was willing to acknowledge. Friday, 18 August 2006. The Wrong Laptop: Microsoft was running this campaign called “Click. You’re clean.” Their solution to malware on Windows. The marketing image showed someone at their computer, everything clean and professional. It was a PowerBook. Not Microsoft’s. Apple’s. The kind of mistake that the blogs catch before the marketing team does. They swapped it out fast—a mother and her kid instead. Safer. Less risky. I’ve come back to that moment more than a few times. What it says about how companies work when nobody’s really watching. Someone picked that photo. It got approved. And then a single detail—one wrong device—cracked the entire facade open. An accident. The only true thing they ever advertised. Friday, 18 August 2006. Breathing Room: I’d been working inside constraints I didn’t choose. The site was strangling me—image dimensions that cut off arbitrarily, categories I didn’t need, metrics I never checked, pages that loaded reluctantly. I adapted. I learned to work inside walls. But that’s not creating; that’s just adapting. Then there was this theme called Breathe, designed by ifelse. Clean, minimal, and almost immediately functional without hacking. I braced for the usual three months of tearing it apart and rebuilding it. Instead, some color tweaks, some icon changes, and it was done. That’s how I know design is good: when I can’t improve it without making it worse. What shifted: images at full size don’t blow up the layout. Videos work without engineering. There’s actual space around things. I can think about composition instead of navigating around technical walls. Everything loads fast. The navigation is simple. The tool disappears. It sounds dramatic for what’s basically a site refresh. But when the obstacles vanish—when I can execute without three workarounds—the whole practice shifts. The thinking changes. I stop managing constraints and start making. Tuesday, 15 August 2006. Just Talk: I switched to iChat because I’m staring at the screen half the day anyway—might as well use something beautiful. Apple designed this with actual restraint: no games, no ads, no features you didn’t ask for. Just a window where you and someone else talk. There’s something almost perverse about a messenger that doesn’t try to extract something from you. Every other app is built to hook you, to harvest your attention, to sell you back to yourself. iChat just works. That simplicity is the whole design—no flourishes, no ego, just elegant emptiness. You don’t think about the interface while you’re using it. The app disappears and you’re talking to someone. That’s the only thing that matters. Saturday, 12 August 2006. Mostly Free: I’ve reached the point where I can’t take Microsoft seriously anymore. Years of bloated software, lies wrapped in marketing-speak, and the absolute confidence that we’re all too dependent to leave. After I switched to Apple, I finally had room to actually do something about it. Out went Office. Out went Virtual PC. And as of today, out goes MSN Messenger. I can now officially say I’m 100% Microsoft-free. That feels good to say, even if it’s not completely honest. The problem is I’m still not entirely escaped the corporate leash. AOL and ICQ are their own flavor of manipulative bullshit, but nearly all my actual friends live in that ecosystem, so what am I going to do? Tell them to switch just so I can feel morally pure? Half-free is better than stuck, I guess. Fair warning: I can’t receive offline messages on ICQ anymore, at least not the way I’m set up. So if you reach out and I’m not online, it disappears. Text me. Email me. Or catch me when I’m around. Thursday, 10 August 2006. Watching: She’s been at summer camp in Greece since Thursday for two weeks—sun, beach, sea, all of it. Karaoke contests, animation, fashion shows. The thing is, the camp posts photos and videos online every day, so I can actually see what she’s doing down there. In the latest batch someone’s lost their head. Completely gone. I don’t think anyone running the place has noticed yet, but now I’m genuinely wondering what’s happening at this camp. Tuesday, 8 August 2006. Waiting for One More Thing: Waffles and a Beck’s Green Lemon on the desk while Apple’s servers exploded. Five PM keynote time, the usual ritual—Steve Jobs walking out and everyone in every chat room acting like kids on Christmas morning. This was going to be it. New iPod. New iPhone. Something that would justify all the breathless waiting. The live ticker fed updates by the minute. Apple Stores offline an hour before he even started speaking. Sites buckled almost immediately under the surge of people refreshing for any scrap of information. For an hour I watched the minutiae accumulate: specs, announcements, features that felt less exciting with each passing update. The Mac Pro was the big hardware reveal. Fastest Mac ever made. Also six thousand dollars, which meant it existed for about five people. OS X Leopard got the spotlight instead—Time Machine for backups, Spaces for virtual desktops, the kind of solid features you appreciated rather than loved. Microsoft would have these in Vista by next month anyway. No new iPod. No iPhone. No surprise “one more thing” waiting at the end. That moment that usually salvaged these events, that made you forget the hour of professional hardware talk and forget Jobs’ reality distortion field had worn thin. It just… ended. I watched the full thing later when the stream stabilized. Leopard looked competent. The Mac Pro was impressive if you had money to burn. But the letdown had already set in. You knew what you were hoping for, and somewhere around minute thirty you knew it wasn’t coming. Monday, 7 August 2006. Bloat Works: Coming in, people had conflicting opinions on whether the second Pirates film beat the first. I didn’t need to think about it—it clearly did. ’Dead Man’s Chest’ is bloated and overstuffed and way too long, but somehow you don’t feel any of it. The film just keeps moving. Action, humor, story all tumbling together. The fights are weird and inventive. Keira Knightley looks incredible in period wear. Johnny Depp is doing something with that character that makes him impossible to look away from. I sat through the credits because I had to know what happened to the dog. Sounds silly except the film actually commits to it. It knows you’re thinking about the dog and it pays off the joke. That kind of care—even for something small—is what makes a film linger. It became one of my instant favorites. The kind of film where everything works despite having no real reason to. Already looking forward to the third one. Thursday, 3 August 2006. Sexy Fox: Betty’s come out the other side of whatever those years were, and now there’s someone new and a different energy about her, the kind you can actually see shifting. We’ve had some genuinely strange times together since Fritz came into the picture, and when I think about her my brain just loops back to all the idiotic things I said that she immediately forgot, those cold nights standing outside the gym during Carnival, the video marathons at her place when everyone called her Big Mouth for reasons that made perfect sense at three in the morning. That stuff sticks with you. Tomorrow she’s throwing what’s definitely going to be one of those parties—loud, messy, the kind of night people reference forever afterward. I’m looking forward to actually seeing her, seeing what’s different now. Her photo came through scrambled somehow, doesn’t really matter, I’ll see her tomorrow anyway. Thursday, 3 August 2006. Still Small: Lydia’s never gotten taller, is the thing. It was one of those running jokes—would she actually stay that small? Among friends, between drinks, the kind of thing you wonder about someone. And the answer, now that she’s eighteen, is yes. She’s exactly the size she was going to be, and apparently everyone’s okay with that now. But the height was never really the point. What makes Lydia actually interesting is that she knows what she wants and she takes it. That confidence about desire—that’s rare. Most people spend their whole lives apologizing for wanting things. She’s got someone now, and they’re tearing around together. I don’t know all the details, but there’s talk of Brazil eventually, some veranda life in the sun. It’s a good ending for someone like her. The girl everyone used to stare at for the wrong reasons is just going to go off and live her life somewhere warm, and she doesn’t much care what anyone thinks about it. Good luck, Lyd. Wednesday, 26 July 2006. Back Around: Becca and I got back together. We’d been doing that thing—you know, break up for a while, try other people, realize after a stretch that you were actually fine where you were. Sometimes you need to leave something to figure out it was good. So we’re back to it. Tonight we’re heading to the Chinese place. Maybe the lake after if the weather holds. There’s something about those evenings where nothing’s particularly remarkable but everything just feels exactly right. You stopped fighting whatever and went back to what was working. I’d let a lot of things slide. Tomorrow I’m trying to pick up some regular habits again. Get some rhythm back. Sunday, 23 July 2006. Killer Horseflies: The heat hit different today—the kind of hot where you suddenly understand why lakes exist. I picked up Ana and Irina but they still weren’t ready, something about needing to shave, hitting Edeka for a new phone card, deciding between skirts and pants or whatever. The whole thing ate an hour while I’m melting in their living room playing with cats and staring at this massive flat-screen, just wondering what their electricity bill looks like. Eniz had been out front waiting forever. We almost grabbed Ali but he’d already peeled off with his girlfriends to some other pool. Eniz needed to stop at Edeka for sunflower oil—and I mean actual cooking oil, not sunscreen. He swears it tans better. Maybe it does, maybe he’s just breading himself like a chicken and too stubborn to admit it. The smell later was genuinely foul. Ettringer Baggerweiher finally. Spent half an hour hunting for a real spot, gave up, parked with everyone else. Straight into the water. The whole swim was a fight—slimy algae, vicious horseflies with a vendetta, tree debris floating everywhere. Cold ice after, good people, Eniz absolutely reeking of sunflower oil. That was it. Thursday, 13 July 2006. Solo 2: Rebecca broke up with me. I knew it was coming, but knowing and it actually happening are two different things. Some people will be happy about this—they wanted it to end. But it was her move, and she’s right to make it. I wasn’t always the friend I should’ve been, and she’s seventeen and wants to see what else there is. I’ve been here before, done this with other people, so I know how to live with it now. But I’ll still think about her. Not constantly, just in moments. A song, something she used to watch. She’ll just be there for a second, in the back of my head. She was a good friend. Almost perfect, actually. Maybe too perfect for who I was. I hope she finds what she’s looking for. Tuesday, 11 July 2006. Ideas on Paper: Found this thing where people submit ideas the old way—handwritten on paper, in an envelope. No digital polish, no algorithmic optimization, just you and a piece of paper. There’s something good about that friction. You can’t fire off half-formed thoughts or iterate endlessly before sending. You commit or you don’t. After two decades of blogging, watching platforms become increasingly hostile to genuine thought, there’s a real pleasure in seeing people return to paper. It feels like a small rebellion. Less performance, more intention. Thursday, 29 June 2006. Power and Rebel: Spent the day with Becca in Munich yesterday. One of those rare days where everything just clicks—blue sky, no wind, that particular kind of peace you don’t really think about until it’s gone. We headed out on the U-Bahn to check out her new school, looked it over properly. No one minded that we were poking around. Back into the city after that. Pizza Hut for lunch, then Gravis to look at MacBooks, some ridiculous raspberry-tea-whatever from Starbucks that tasted cloyingly sweet—they were out of lemon-mango. We hit Saturn because she’s thinking about getting a laptop, so I wandered through the notebooks, glanced at the CDs and DVDs. Then we stepped back outside and the sky had just gone. Dark blue to dark gray in maybe five minutes. This unsettling wind tearing through the shopping street, rain on your skin before your brain even registers it’s raining. We ducked into Hugendubel, and that’s where I finally grabbed the book I’d been wanting: “Power and Rebel” by Matias Faldbakken, this Norwegian writer. The premise sounds straightforward. Two men in this crumbling society—one’s a corporate consultant, uptight, ambitious in all the ways that damages you. The other’s called Rebel, and he hates everything, including himself, purely cynical. They’re living in this culture obsessed with youth and logos and bodies and sex, the whole apparatus of corporate desire. They’re after some idea of what individual freedom even means in the 21st century. I’m only a handful of pages in but it’s already dark. Teenage girls are part of it. Mein Kampf gets quoted. The book came out here in punk-style editions, black and white, but the original has this old German typeface that looks uncomfortably close to Third Reich design. Fair warning: read the first three pages. If you’re not completely disgusted by then, you’ll probably want to keep going. We made it home mostly dry, though the Munich train station was grim with the sky completely black and the thunder sounding like air raids. Wednesday, 28 June 2006. Preparing for Nothing: I spent an afternoon reworking my dashboard. Hit F12 and the whole thing unfolds: calendar, clock, weather that never gets the forecast right, CNN ticker, TV streaming panel, an orange calculator, Wikipedia widget, web radio, and a turtle named Bordi who does nothing. The weather widget failed at its one job. The CNN ticker actually works—constant stream of small disasters delivered straight to my screen. The calculator I use maybe once a month. Bordi just sits there. I kept him anyway. There’s something about laying out information like that, making it all visible and neat. You arrange it and step back and it feels like you’ve built something, like maybe understanding clicks when you have enough data in one place. It’s the collector’s impulse applied to widgets. Of course it’s completely unnecessary. No one needs half this stuff. I liked how it looked though—windows onto weather, news, music, knowledge. The whole dashboard felt like proof that I could be prepared, that everything I might need was there and visible. Then the internet goes down and it’s all decoration. Which is honestly what most preparation is anyway. Wednesday, 28 June 2006. Burned In: I made a list of ten songs that stuck with me, burned themselves into my head at some point and never left. Not because they’re the best or because everyone’s supposed to care—just songs that at the right moment meant something specific to how I think and feel. t.A.T.u., “All The Things She Said.” Phantom Planet, “California.” Avril Lavigne, “I’m With You.” Silbermond, “Durch die Nacht”—a German band that somehow ended up here. Sum 41, “Fat Lip.” The brilliant green, “Rainy Days Never Stay.” Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt,” which is so definitive it erases everything else. Imogen Heap, “Hide And Seek.” Green Day, “Time Of Your Life.” Evanescence, “My Immortal.” There’s something about how most of these songs slow down. They understand that the important stuff happens when you stop moving and actually sit with something. The ones that don’t slow down still have that quality—something genuine being said instead of performed. A lot of them are ballads. The best rock songs usually are. I have no idea if anyone else would build this list the same way, and that’s sort of the point. These were just the ones there when I needed them to be. Sunday, 25 June 2006. Starcity: You get in a taxi in the pouring rain. The driver asks you questions—where are you from, what’s your favorite food—and by the time you’re standing outside your new house, you’re already invested in the place as real. Then Tom Nook shows up. He’s the guy who sold you this house, and you owe him twenty thousand bells. He offers you a job. You take it. He fires you almost immediately. So you figure it out on your own. You catch fish, sell bugs, run errands. Your neighbors are animals—a pretty openly gay bear, a grumpy rhino, others who say specific, oddly personal things about their day. They want to visit you. They give you gifts. A professor wants you to collect fossils. Everything is small and low-pressure, nothing trying to be important. But the clock is what matters. The game knows what time it is. Things happen at specific times and dates. Leave for a week and the town changes—new residents, new shops, new items in the dump. And if you go online, you can visit other people’s towns, trade with them, find messages in bottles washed up on strangers’ beaches. Everyone’s playing in real time, in parallel, a strange quiet multiplayer. I’ve always liked games that don’t push you. They let you sit with them without trying to optimize your time or make you feel behind. And this one is small enough to take anywhere. That’s where the real hook is—the fact that you can play in the bathroom, on a train, between other things. It becomes part of your day instead of something you schedule. Which is maybe why it works so well: you’re not committing to it, you’re just existing in it. Thursday, 22 June 2006. Sayonara: Japan played Brazil at the 2006 World Cup and I remember thinking they might actually do something. They had moments of real competence, weren’t outclassed or anything. But the other results went wrong—Croatia beat Australia or Australia beat Croatia or whatever, the point is the fixtures didn’t align. Sometimes you play well and still lose to math. I was disappointed, but not devastated. Club football gets in your bones. International tournaments are different—you care for a month, then you’re done. Someone was rooting for South Korea, so I shifted over. You find something else to want and keep watching. Twenty years later I don’t recall much except that Japan looked decent against Brazil and didn’t advance. I switched allegiances because of someone else’s investment. But that particular sting—watching a team you care about play well and still get knocked out by circumstance—that stays with you in a dumb, persistent way. Thursday, 22 June 2006. Following the Motion: The Wii controller was the moment when everyone admitted they’d run out of ideas. Nintendo made this little white remote that actually did something different—you’d swing it around for tennis, aim like a gun, whatever the game needed—and suddenly Sony and Microsoft realized they’d been stuck making the same controllers for a decade, just refining them into slightly nicer shapes. Sony announced the PS3 controller was getting motion sensing. Peter Moore at Microsoft said basically the same thing for Xbox 360. Neither company had actually thought about what motion control meant for their own systems, their own games. They just saw what Nintendo did and decided that was the thing to do now. It was the clearest possible admission that they didn’t have anything original to say. I don’t know. There’s something deflating about watching massive corporations get caught that flat-footed, realizing they had nothing while a competitor figured something out. They could’ve gone anywhere, pushed into their own weird territory, but instead everyone just started copying. It made the whole industry feel smaller. Tuesday, 20 June 2006. Only One Survives: I’ve been obsessing about operating systems. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. They feel like more than software—like something that matters. The line is that only one will survive. But which? And which would I actually want to? What does the user of the future look like? A Windows drone, locked in and oblivious? A true believer in the Apple religion, convinced paying more means thinking better? Or someone in Linux, talking freedom while they debug drivers at 3 AM? The idea of one corporation controlling everything terrifies me. Microsoft, Apple, whoever. Doesn’t matter which one. That nightmare is the same. But Linux is different. It’s actually free, not as a sales pitch but structurally. No single entity owns it. It’s distributed—pieces that work together, each replaceable, nothing essential. That’s where its real strength lives. I think about this in sci-fi terms. Einstein’s line about the fourth world war fought with sticks and stones. And here’s what I believe: when the world turns to desert, when water costs everything, when civilization exists only in fragments, whatever still functions will be running Linux. The only system that survives will be one no one owns. When the grid fails and cities get swallowed, something built on that principle will still run. No permission needed, no one to answer to. That’s the only infrastructure I’d trust to actually survive. Monday, 19 June 2006. Invader Zim: There’s this pattern where I’ll start watching a new series and just not get it at first. Nothing lands. Then weeks later something clicks and I realize I’ve been completely wrong about the whole thing, and suddenly I can’t stop watching. Happened with The O.C., happened with Invader Zim. Took me a few episodes of the latter before its actual frequency became clear, but once it locked in I was completely gone on it. The setup is straightforward enough: an alien named Zim arrives on Earth with actual orders to infiltrate and destroy the planet, except he’s comically bad at invasion in this weirdly lovable way. He gets an apartment, forges documents to enroll in school, picks up a malfunctioning robot sidekick called GIR who’s broken in all the right ways. Every episode he cooks up some new master plan for world conquest and it crumbles almost immediately, usually because Dib, this kid in his class, is the only human who’s figured out what Zim actually is and has decided to make stopping him his entire purpose. What really grabbed me was the visual design. Invader Zim has this genuinely dark, futuristic, kind of apocalyptic look that doesn’t belong on Nickelodeon. You’re watching a comedy that’s set in a world that already looks like it’s halfway done with itself. The color palette is bleak. The architecture is oppressive. There’s nothing in the visual language trying to sell toys or keep kids bouncing off the walls. It’s just genuinely eerie, and that plays against the stupid humor of the plot in a way that makes everything hit harder. The tension between goofy scheme and genuinely unsettling world is the whole appeal. The show never connected with a massive audience, which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to it. It never had to smooth down its weird edges or compromise itself for ratings. It just stayed strange, committed to its own sensibility, too odd for the mainstream but completely unbothered about it. That’s the show that kept me watching. Monday, 12 June 2006. So Long, Nick Comedy: I watched enough sitcoms on Nick Comedy to fill a few years of evenings—”King of Queens,” “Friends,” but mostly “Mad About You” in German dubbing, which came on at hours when nobody else was watching. The channel filled that space after MTV2POP vanished, a mix of solid stuff and throwaway filler, the kind of programming that doesn’t seem to matter until it’s gone. There was something about Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser speaking German at midnight that felt right at the time, the same way late-night TV feels necessary when you’re the only one awake. Nick Comedy shuts down tomorrow. The channel becomes all SpongeBob and Rocko, which is what any kids’ network would do. And VIVA PLUS is folding into Comedy Central—the whole schedule getting tighter, consolidating, squeezing out the odd corners where old shows could hide. I keep wondering if the series will surface somewhere else. The show itself isn’t gone, the actors are fine, but a television show is also the time slot it lives in, the channel it broadcasts from. When that dies, part of the show dies with it. Thursday, 1 June 2006. Koko: Becca’s got three kittens and somehow one of them has become ours. Not officially yet, but the plan is that when we move out, Koko comes with us. She’s the one who figured everything out first—eating, the box, the whole logistics of being a kitten. The other two are still kind of bumbling, and Koko’s just already sorted. There’s something you respect about that right from the start. She’s sweet in a way that doesn’t feel like an act. She lets you hold her. She remembers you. Cats do this thing where they’re always calculating something about you, and with Koko it’s obvious. When we’re over at Becca’s, I watch her watch us, just taking stock. It’s hard to explain but it means something. The future arrangement is pretty clear: she comes with us. Not borrowed affection or some arrangement that works for now. Just actually ours. I think about that sometimes when I’m visiting—not about missing her someday, but about knowing we won’t have to. There’s also Apple, though I’m still figuring out where that fits into things. Thursday, 25 May 2006. Sick on a Perfect Day: Beautiful morning and I’m still ill. The whole weekend I barely slept, felt like a wet sack. Couldn’t make it to Becca’s cousin’s confirmation. Just sat around Sunday with nothing to do, so I kept rewatching the Wii trailer. Nintendo was saying it brings gamers and non-gamers together, which seemed genuinely funny to me at the time. Like okay, once we have this little white box, suddenly everyone’s playing games together? I wanted it. Wanted it bad enough to keep clicking that video over and over. Walked to the doctor this morning and it was good to be outside, moving around in actual sunlight. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. Something shifts when you’re walking outside on a perfect day. Monday, 22 May 2006. California Everywhere: Everyone kept telling me to go to California. The O.C., the Chili Peppers, E3 in Los Angeles, celebrity gossip shows, my classmate André—everything pointed the same direction. At some point you stop arguing with it. I didn’t actually want California for any reason I could name. No dream, no plan, just this ambient cultural pressure that said California was the place. The songs about it, the TV shows set there, the magazines, the parties in the Hills, the whole apparatus of pop culture treating it like the obvious destination. When you’re young and everything around you is pointing at the same place, you feel the pull even if you’re not sure why. The mythology does the work. California becomes what you’re supposed to want because enough people have decided to want it already. That’s it, really. Not the place itself—the idea of the place. The agreement that California matters. Once enough reference points align, once the signal gets loud enough, you don’t need a real reason anymore. You want to go because the culture wants you to want to go. I never did go, but I lived in the shadow of that pull for years. That’s what California was—an inevitability in the culture, somewhere you looked toward even if you weren’t looking for anything specific. Just the place everyone agreed to look at. Tuesday, 16 May 2006. MBeu: There’s a quality to early-2000s teen TV that doesn’t fade. The O.C. ended ages ago, but Mischa Barton still holds something. That look—bored, wealthy, untouchable. She was the thing you wanted and couldn’t have, which I guess is the whole point of casting someone like that. It doesn’t matter that the show’s been off the air for decades. Certain faces stick. I made a European fan portal for her. Nothing fancy—just an excuse to gather all the scattered pictures and news and whatever else I could find, create a space where someone like me could go and keep track. The site picked up visitors pretty quickly—people looking for the same thing, I suppose. But that wasn’t really why I did it. You build these things because you’re interested in something that nobody else seems interested in anymore, and you want to preserve it a little. Or maybe you just want a reason to keep thinking about it. It’s strange, the obsession with a person you’ll never meet. Stranger still in the internet age, where you can follow anyone instantly, where celebrity is just content flow like everything else. But there’s something about building a dedicated space for someone, a shrine, that older fan culture had. It’s different than a follow or a retweet. It’s time. It’s effort. It’s saying: this matters to me, even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else. The site exists. Mischa probably has no idea. That’s fine. For me it’s just a way of staying connected to a specific moment in my own life, when I was younger and certain faces mattered in a way they don’t anymore. Or maybe they still do, just differently. Sunday, 14 May 2006. Summer’s Over: Next week, The O.C. ends in America. Germany gets the finale in June on Saturday afternoons—a strange time for a show that mattered, a quiet way of saying goodbye. Austria gets it earlier. Maybe they’re kinder to their doomed shows. The finale is apparently brutal. Everyone gets a moment before it’s over. Seth’s in trouble with the cops. Ryan’s mom shows up. Marissa gets a marriage proposal that might change everything. Summer falls apart because Seth’s leaving, and she knows she’s losing him. Sandy makes some kind of decision that breaks Kirsten. Then they graduate high school and the show just ends, replacing them with Kaitlin and her friends in season four. Except Fox hasn’t greenlit season four yet, and the ratings were already weak. So that’s it. Ryan, Marissa, Seth, Summer—the whole reason anyone watched—are done. Three seasons, and then the show decides it’s better to start over with characters nobody cares about than to let itself breathe. The ratings couldn’t hold up. The story had nowhere left to go. Josh Schwartz saw the ending coming and planned for this. I’m sad about it in the way you get sad about things you’ve spent time with. Three years of watching these people destroy their own lives and somehow make it matter. The show was always kind of stupid, but it knew how to make you care anyway. Now it’s going away, and whatever replaces it won’t be the same. Moving it to Saturday afternoon—when most people are outside in summer, when it’s easy to skip—feels like proof that everyone’s already given up. But maybe that’s right. Maybe the mercy is knowing when to end instead of dragging everything out until nobody remembers why they loved it. I’ll watch it when it gets to Germany. I’ll be sad. And I’ll accept that this version of The O.C.—the one that mattered—ends the way it should. Monday, 8 May 2006. I’m So Hungry: School was good today. Everyone was in a decent mood. We did some improvisation in class, and after, a group of us sat by the lake during break and talked about life, god, the usual things you talk about when you think you understand something. The afternoon was like most afternoons, nothing remarkable, but I went to the barber and booked another appointment—something about getting a short cut appeals to me right now, something I can just wash and forget about. After that, I walked with Mille to the ice-cream place and we sat outside the bank watching people pass by, which is more interesting than it sounds. There’s always something to notice. Evening was the gym with Ana—or supposed to be the gym. I mostly just cycled and talked instead of doing anything useful, which felt better anyway. When I got home, Becca was sitting on the windowsill. She’d been spontaneous and come over, waited around an hour for me to show up. Had to leave just as I walked in. There’s a minor sadness to that, the timing of it. We’re doing a game night tomorrow with good food and wine, so it’s not like anything’s really wrong. Still, I would’ve been happy to see her. Now I’m starving. Making myself a tuna pizza. Thursday, 4 May 2006. The Revolution That Wasn’t: When Nintendo announced the Wii—they’d been calling it the Revolution, which sounded like what you’d name a console at a tech conference to impress people—the actual name landed different. Wii, like “we.” It was a tiny thing, but it said something about what Nintendo was actually trying to do. This wasn’t a product designed to deepen the existing audience. This was designed to expand it entirely. The motion controls were how they did it. I remember thinking they were gimmicky when first announced. Every gaming outlet treated them like a novelty. But Nintendo understood something fundamental: the barrier to entry for video games wasn’t gameplay complexity. It was intelligibility. A standard controller looked intimidating if you’d never held one. A Wii remote looked intuitive. You flicked it like a tennis racket, and your person on screen flicked a tennis racket. No translation necessary. I was skeptical anyway. The whole industry at that point was locked in this arms race of power and graphics. Every generation was supposed to look better, move faster, go deeper. The natural assumption was that Nintendo would do the same, just with their own spin. Instead they looked at a completely different problem: why were so many people not gaming at all? The answer was radical because it was simple. Stop trying to impress the people already in the room. Invite everyone else in. Make the games easy to understand from the outside. Make the controller impossible to misinterpret. Make it okay that you weren’t good at it, because everyone was learning at the same time. Looking back now, the risk of that decision feels enormous. You’re betting everything on a completely different philosophy. You’re abandoning the people who love what you made before. Most companies never take that kind of risk. Most companies would’ve just made a faster PlayStation. But Nintendo looked at the room and decided to build a bigger door. Sunday, 30 April 2006. The Revolution: Nintendo said the Revolution would come with every old game you wanted, free to download. NES, SNES, N64—just waiting there. It felt like the future had actually arrived. When the Wii showed up (renamed by then), the Virtual Console was there, but free had become a price tag. Each game cost money. The library was incomplete. You could only play what Nintendo decided to sell you. I definitely spent way too much on it anyway, chasing what they’d promised. That service is gone now. Games got delisted. What you bought isn’t really yours—just a temporary license that expired whenever Nintendo wanted it to. I must have spent hundreds of dollars downloading games I already owned on cartridges just to have them digitally. The logic didn’t really make sense—I just needed to have them available, even if I wasn’t going to play them. But what stays with me is that moment when the announcement came and it seemed possible. Before compromise had to happen. Before they figured out how to monetize the past. Thursday, 27 April 2006. Strange and Exact: Shiina Ringo makes music that refuses to be simple. The drums come in wrong. The strings sound like they’re out of tune. Her voice sits somewhere between singing and speaking, flat and exact. Nothing about it sounds like someone trying to please you. It sounds like someone following an idea, trusting that the right people will understand. She’s been doing this since the late ’90s, mostly in Japan, mostly unconcerned with whether the rest of the world was listening. The Tokyo Jihen, the band she formed, made some genuinely strange records before breaking up in 2012. Since then she’s gone solo, and if anything, the music’s gotten weirder and more precise at the same time. There’s something in that refusal to simplify. Most pop music is trying to be likable. This is trying to be true. True to whatever she’s hearing, true to whatever the song wants to be, even if that means it’ll be strange for a lot of people. You have to trust it, and you have to pay attention. That takes something from you. Not in a pretentious way, just honestly. But if you’re the kind of person who likes music that thinks about itself, music that doesn’t apologize for being weird, then yeah. This is it. Monday, 24 April 2006. Drawing Lines: I boycotted Yahoo in the mid-2000s. The reason was specific: Yahoo had identified a Chinese blogger named Jiang Lijun to the police, and he got four years in prison for writing pro-democracy posts. Reporters Without Borders got hold of the case. It was concrete—a name, a sentence, a company’s complicity. Microsoft was doing the same thing at scale, filtering the internet for the Chinese government, blocking posts with “freedom” and “democracy,” selling them the tools to do it. So I stopped using Microsoft products. I couldn’t afford to boycott Google (I needed search), but Yahoo and Microsoft felt like places I could actually refuse. Whether it mattered is the obvious question. It didn’t. Both companies kept operating. The thing about boycotts is you can’t opt out of these systems entirely—you just choose which ones you’ll decline. At the time it felt like clarity. Now it looks more like theater. I was right that it was wrong, but I overestimated the power of my refusal. Saturday, 22 April 2006. The Troll Cave: I was waiting for a battleground queue and got bored, so I loaded World of Warcraft and did some quests to kill time. Nothing serious—save a maiden, defeat her corrupted brother, the usual. After that I was still restless, so I decided to explore. Just wander into the unmapped edges. Swam west along the coast to see if you could actually reach Silithus that way. After a long stretch of water I spotted flags on the beach and what looked like a windmill. Went in closer and found it completely abandoned. Just an empty outpost with old boats drifting in the shallows. No one anywhere. Found a cave carved into the cliffs, shaped like a troll’s face. Went inside expecting to find something—anything—but it was dead silent. Empty corridors, no creatures, no NPCs, nothing. Possibly the first person to ever walk through it. Probably not, but it felt that way. In that moment, that cave was just mine. Tuesday, 18 April 2006. The Mac Thing: I’ve been using Macs for so long I don’t really think about it anymore. Open the laptop, work happens. The trackpad is intuitive enough that I’m not constantly fighting muscle memory. Fonts render clean. Applications just work together without me having to mediate. There was probably a stupid song about this at some point. Doesn’t matter. The real reason people stick with Macs isn’t some deep love for the brand—it’s that the tool stops being a tool and becomes invisible. You’re not troubleshooting; you’re not negotiating with your system. You’re just making the thing you wanted to make. I’ve tried to switch before. Cheaper machines exist. Better specs exist. None of it matters when the first thing you do on any other computer is wish you had the trackpad back, or get frustrated that a font renders wrong, or waste twenty minutes fixing something that shouldn’t need fixing. So I stayed. Tuesday, 11 April 2006. Behind Glass: I made something and called it art. A frame I’d picked up in Munich, something from a magazine printed and mounted behind the glass. It turned out bigger than expected—almost a meter wide, seventy centimeters tall—the kind of size where you have to actually find a place to put it. I photographed it quickly, before it fell off whatever I’d propped it against. That’s always the race. You’re scrambling to document it before gravity wins. But it held, and the frame made it look like something intentional, like I’d chosen this specific magazine page to display rather than just assembling what was lying around. That’s what frames do. They’re a kind of lie—they turn anything behind glass into a choice, a decision, a thing someone wanted to show. I made other pieces after that, but this is the one I remember, the magazine page that the frame somehow made look like it had always meant to be there. Sunday, 9 April 2006. Bart: Took a Simpsons personality quiz and got Bart. The description: “Very misunderstood, most people just dismiss you as trouble. Little do they know you’re wise and well accomplished beyond your years.” Felt like the quiz was reading my mail. There’s something specific about being pegged as the troublemaker when you’re actually thinking. Bart’s the kid everyone sees as chaos and prank calls and skateboarding away from school, and they stop looking right there. They never land on the part where he’s genuinely smarter than the adults, where he actually gives a shit when it matters. He just doesn’t perform sincerity the way they need him to. I’ve been underestimated by enough people who saw the surface action and decided that was the whole story. They see the disruption and assume there’s nothing underneath it. Bart doesn’t care. He knows what he’s capable of. He’s not going to perform for people who’ve already made up their minds. The quiz said I’d be remembered for starring in my own TV show and saving the town from a comet. Generous. But the philosophy stuck: “I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it, and I don’t know why I’ll do it again.” That’s the honest answer. That’s what you say when you’ve stopped justifying your instincts to people who won’t get it anyway. Getting Bart wasn’t a surprise. It was more like confirmation. Thursday, 6 April 2006. Thick Air: Meggi used to be the one who kept things light. Witty, charming, made everyone around her laugh without trying. Then Prague happened, and she came back different. Now every small noise gets a hissing “Psssst” and the mood just dies. School was eating her alive. André had decided he was the savior of justice or something. He’d kill anything remotely good that didn’t come from him. Loud at his own jokes, but the second someone wanted to actually listen in class, suddenly it was a problem. And there’s plenty more where that came from—the whole class is a minefield of pettiness and resentment. I know I don’t take school as seriously as maybe I should. It’s never been as important to me as it is for others. I’m the type who resists the system, doesn’t fit the mold, hates the predetermined paths people lay out for you. Whatever. I had no solution for any of this, and I’m not going to find one in whatever weeks are left. But this tense, dying-days energy is starting to get to me. The whole class is starting to get to me. We came back from Prague buzzing—I thought I’d actually be happy there—and now everyone’s drained, ready to snap. Aggression and spite just hanging in the air like smog. Actually, smog would be better than this. And now the weather’s decided to join in, adding its own miserable flavor to everything. Just constantly irritating at this point. Wednesday, 5 April 2006. The Three-Episode Test: There’s this rule I have about new shows—the third episode is the one that matters. By then you know who all the characters are, you understand what the show’s trying to do, you’ve had two chances for it to grab you. If it doesn’t work by episode three, it’s probably not going to work at all. I stick to that. Hospital shows were never my thing. I watched people lose their minds over ER, but I couldn’t see it. Scrubs somehow got in my head—that one worked—but mostly medical dramas felt like going through motions. When Grey’s Anatomy came around, I didn’t go in expecting much. Three episodes and it’s got me. The characters feel real, the writing is sharp. There’s comedy in there, though nothing will top Scrubs—I don’t think anything will. But the show knows when to pull back on the jokes and just sit with these quiet moments where someone understands something about themselves. The music does a lot of work in those scenes. It’s good. Legitimately good. I’ll keep watching it. Tuesday, 4 April 2006. Goodbye Giga Green: Giga’s shutting down today. The longest internet party the world ever had, and now it’s done. I found it back when the internet was still young enough that a German show about technology and pop culture could just exist—no filter, no calculation, speaking straight to the people who were actually paying attention. Most things don’t feel that way. You don’t realize it while it’s happening. You catch an episode, you move on, it stays somewhere in your brain as a thing that exists. Then suddenly it’s gone and you understand what you had—a show that never talked down, never tried to sell you anything but what was actually interesting. That’s rarer than it should be. I followed Giga. I’m going to miss it. Friday, 31 March 2006. Quiet: A woman was killed by her husband in Buchloe last week. She was 33, Turkish, and now the town’s gone silent about it—the papers won’t touch it, like refusing to report it might somehow contain the damage. Her family’s at war underneath. All anyone wants is for it to settle without getting worse. You can’t un-know that something like that happened in your hometown. You walk past the same houses, the same streets, and somewhere here a man murdered his wife. Everything’s exactly the same as it was a week ago, except nothing is. Tuesday, 28 March 2006. Lotta in Crisis: A new show called Lotta in Love premiered on German television and got cancelled by the internet within two days. There’d been this enormous advertising campaign, all the expectations, and then the schedule dropped and people saw it was replacing The Simpsons, and that was it. The backlash was weirdly immediate. Thousands started calling for it to be pulled. ProSieben had set up an official forum for fans, but it just got drowned in people hating on the thing—so the actual fans stopped showing up. It was destroyed before the second episode even aired. I felt for Janine Reinhardt, the actress carrying this thing. She didn’t choose to replace The Simpsons. That’s a brutal position: your show premieres and the internet’s already decided you’re the problem, before anyone’s even really watched it. This is television now—democratic right up until the moment the mob votes to kill you. Tuesday, 28 March 2006. Sega on Nintendo: Nintendo was going to offer Mega Drive games on the Revolution. Sonic, Shining Force—the whole archive. Right there on Nintendo hardware. Years earlier this would have been unthinkable. You had to choose between Nintendo and Sega. The rivalry was real. You picked one and lived with it. Now they were just putting the games on the same machine. It wasn’t a betrayal or anything. Just pragmatism. Once you stop caring which box contains the software, the choice doesn’t mean much anymore. That’s the thing I remember thinking about—how small the difference had become. Friday, 24 March 2006. Happy Birthday, Ana: Ana turns eighteen today. I’ve worked with her through this place for a while, and she’s one of those people you don’t secretly dislike. She’s genuinely interested—in people, in what they think, in everything going on around her. Not performing, not trying to impress. You can have fun with her, but you can also have conversations that actually matter. I hope she stays exactly like this. And maybe tell your sister to lighten up once in a while, but I won’t hold my breath. Happy birthday. Thursday, 23 March 2006. Predictable Math: Bad school day I’m not going to get into. Becca, her sister, and their friend took me to see this Matthew McConaughey rom-com. You know exactly where it’s going before the opening credits—every turn already visible, every joke predictable. But that’s the thing about those films: you don’t always want to be surprised. Sometimes you just want the same story again, updated with different faces. It was funny enough and required nothing of me, which was exactly the escape I needed. We went to McDonald’s after with Patricia and her friend. Nothing remarkable, but it was the right kind of evening. Need to remember to wish Ana happy birthday. Wednesday, 22 March 2006. Two Tickets: I got home today and my mom told me she’d won two World Cup tickets on some game show. The kind of thing you never expect to actually happen to you. We don’t know which match, or if we’re even keeping them—might just sell them. But there’s something about that kind of random luck. You never expect to win anything, and then suddenly you do. If Japan makes a run, I’m definitely trying to convince her to actually go. Monday, 20 March 2006. Spring Showed Up: Spring hit and with it the first girls in short tops. Good reminder of why you bother surviving winter. I blew the morning on World of Warcraft, then caught a couple episodes of The OC season 3 in English. That show had a grip on me back then—all these questions about Marissa and Julie and whether Sandy and Kirsten’s marriage would hold. Me and Mille went to see Boogeyman, which was transparently trash but not unwatchable. Except the ending killed it. Even the alternate cut they spliced in didn’t help. We had plans to meet other people, but no one was home, so we drove to Iri and Ana instead. The three of us hit the gym later—first time in almost a month for me. Afterward I stood around in the dark at Lidl with Ana, waiting for her father. One of those small moments that becomes the detail you remember about a day. Shakira and Wyclef Jean’s “Hips don’t lie” had been stuck in my head all day. Sunday, 19 March 2006. One of Those Nights: We all sat through Woyzeck at the Volkstheater last night, and I nearly fell asleep about halfway through. The actors were technically fine, but nothing about it landed for me or Rebecca. Dinner before the show—Augustiner Keller or wherever—wasn’t any better. One of those evenings where everything is supposed to be good but just feels flat. There was tension somewhere, people wound tight about something, and there wasn’t much room for any actual fun. Sometimes you do the cultural things because you’re supposed to, and the execution just doesn’t meet the promise. But tonight’s better already. Staying at Rebecca’s place because her mom’s cooking something tomorrow afternoon. That alone is worth the wait. I’ve got time to finally push my level in World of Warcraft if I can focus, and I’m still chasing redemption from getting demolished at SingStar last time. Could’ve stayed in bed today. Probably should’ve. But tomorrow feels worth it. Friday, 24 February 2006. One Billion: iTunes crossed a billion downloads sometime in the mid-2000s—I don’t actually remember when, but I remember the milestone feeling real. Not because of some contest, but because it meant something about how we bought music had fundamentally shifted, and this number made it impossible to deny. I spent money on iTunes in those years. Fifty cents here, a dollar there, buying songs individually instead of albums. There was something compelling about it—the ease of it, the ability to hear something on TV, pull up iTunes, and own it thirty seconds later. No record store. No waiting for delivery. Just click and download, and you had it. What a billion downloads really signaled was that physical media had quietly stopped mattering. Not because anyone had planned it that way, but because once the alternative existed and worked well, most people just switched. The infrastructure was there. The interface was clean. The experience was actually better. So a billion people bought a billion songs, and that was the end of the old world. Sunday, 19 February 2006. Desktop Wreckage: Spent today in the city with Mille and out at Eniz in Turkheim, then came home to keep grinding on this Prague film at record speed. I didn’t think the project would get this big, but it has, so I’ve been deleting entire programs and whole folders just to carve out space for iMovie. My desktop is now just gray question marks everywhere—all these orphaned files wondering where their programs went. Soon as this is done I’m going to reinstall Tiger clean and actually maintain this thing. xFactor finally spat out the first episode of X-Files season three. I burned it to DVD and watched it immediately, but now I have to wait for the rest to compress. I need to know what happens next. At least Aperture finally arrived, so I can play with that while everything renders in the background. This could take a while. I should probably just let it run and sleep. Wednesday, 28 December 2005. Sick: I’m completely sick. The full package—congestion, cough, voice destroyed, probably running a fever but I was too lazy to actually check. So I’m half-dead in bed watching Pearl Harbor, which is what you do when you’re this wiped out. At least I know how it ends: Japan loses. My girlfriend’s in Freiburg at her family’s place, but she’s back tomorrow. That’s when the bed days start—though to be honest, nothing much changes for me in that category anyway. Still, it’s better with her here. Right now I’m just watching TV, sentimental piano music keeping me company. When you’re sick like this, everything gets softer. You’re not really present enough to care about much beyond the pillow. Sunday, 25 December 2005. Christmas Party: So the school Christmas party had karaoke, coffee and tea stands, some speed dating thing, way too much food. Only problem was they didn’t stock any sodas—no Coke, no Fanta—so I was parched the whole time. After that, Katha and I went into the city to hunt for gifts, ran into Meggi on the way back and she drove home with us. Then I went over to my girlfriend’s place for a bit, then to Steffi and Patrick’s to borrow some DVDs—got “Sahara” and “Harry Potter IV.” Time to head out though. She’s downstairs watching something and I’m just lingering here for no good reason. Friday, 23 December 2005. Winter in Munich: Went to Munich with my mom yesterday to grab some clothes and pick up a Mighty Mouse I’d ordered. The cold there is something else—the kind that makes your face hurt. Got myself a proper scarf and gloves because you’re not surviving that without them. We ate at a steakhouse and I just went at it like I hadn’t seen food in months. Genuinely starving. Caught up on The O.C. today, which was perfect timing because I’d missed the last episode on a school trip and had no idea Trey had come that close to Marissa. The stuff with Summer and those comic nerds is actually funny. But Sandy and Kirsten—that’s the part that gets to me now. Reminds me too much of something real, something with Rebecca that I’d rather not think about too much. That whole situation still stings. Friday, 23 December 2005. Back to the Roots: I gutted the site and launched version 7.0. Nothing massive changed, but I stripped out most of what was there—removed rubric experiments that never worked, deleted features nobody needed, added a comment system that doesn’t break. Cleaner palette, fewer sections, the whole thing tighter. Web design teaches you something simple: you spend months building new things, and then you realize most of it’s just noise. So you delete it. You cut back to what actually functions. What functions is usually what you had to begin with, only now you understand it better. Simplicity doesn’t happen by accident. It takes removing things to know what matters, and most things don’t. That’s the lesson you learn after redesigning the same site seven times. The brilliant green is in the palette somewhere now, pulled from a band I was listening to when I started this. Details like that stick around because they made sense at the moment and survived the cuts. That’s the threshold—if it survives deletion, maybe it belongs. The design doesn’t need to prove anything. It’s just a place to write. That’s enough. Monday, 19 December 2005. Not Yet: The OC ended and I hated that it did. Not the show—I love the show, the finale especially. I hated that it was over. I knew this day was coming, sure, but knowing and watching are different things. The finale went all in. They killed people you thought were untouchable. Kirsten and Sandy still tangled up. Ryan and Marissa uncertain. The Coopers in pieces. The show just stops there with nothing resolved, nothing answered, everything hanging. I love this series. I know I’ll rewatch the whole run when the reruns start in January. I already know that about myself. I’m counting down to fall, to season three. There’s something about how The OC leaves you. It doesn’t resolve anything. It just cuts off and you’re sitting with all these people whose lives you’ve been inside, knowing nothing about what comes next. That’s what it does. Wednesday, 7 December 2005. Made a Podcast: Made a podcast. After enough time writing the same way, you wonder what it’s like to just talk instead. The voice is different—more immediate, weirder, because you can’t backspace. That’s the whole point, really. Monday, 5 December 2005. The Noon Train: Spent three hours writing German essays for class—absolutely brutal. Afternoon classes were just us messing around after that, nothing serious left to do. The noon train was packed, obscenely so. Two cars that somehow held five times what they should have. It wouldn’t even move at first, just sat there. Then the announcement to depart from track 3, and right after, the power cut. I thought for a second we were about to get hit from behind, but eventually the thing lurched forward. The track switches were chaos—everyone falling into everyone else. One of those moments you probably should experience once, just to know it can happen. No idea what I’m doing tonight. Winter makes me lazy. Friday, 2 December 2005. Waiting Around: School was okay today, even if the day drove me nuts. Went to the post office and sent fifty dollars off on what’s probably a long, slow journey—hell if I know when those people will actually process it and unlock my access to whatever I’m waiting for. But that’s how it goes. Back home I worked on cutting the Prague video for a while until Mille came over. We went to Feneberg and then back to his place where he had One Piece running on his PS2. It’s decent enough. Meanwhile I still haven’t decided which console to grab next generation—Nintendo Revolution or the PS3. I’ll get to it. Probably just pick the one with the better commercial at this point. Heard the new Pussycat Dolls song. Pretty good actually. There’s this feeling I get sometimes where everything seems a little too scripted, a little too perfect. Like I’m living in someone else’s movie. You ever get that? What’s even the word for it? Thursday, 1 December 2005. The O.C. Finale: Becca and I are back together. Was inevitable, we just work. Fifty dollars from the bank today. First time holding US currency. Foreign money just feels different. Wednesday’s the O.C. finale. Didn’t see Caleb dying, or that stuff with Ryan and his brother. It’s cruel but it fits. Theresa will come back, I know it. But Sandy and Kirsten will make it—I can’t picture them any other way. I’ve got work tomorrow I haven’t prepared for and won’t. Some fields are just machines pretending to be jobs. Hours shuffling numbers from one column to another. There was a guy who spent his whole life calculating Pi by hand, going further and further. A computer does the same thing in seconds now. That’s what all this is. Got a new printer. Old one won’t talk to my Mac. HP. Small friction solved with money. Wednesday, 30 November 2005. Converting: Converting a video to DVD on a Mac has turned out to be way more annoying than I expected. To get the raw footage into the right format there’s this whole ecosystem of file types and options, most of which don’t do what you think they’ll do. You pick one, hit render, and then two hours later the status bar is still saying 845 minutes remaining. I wanted to use DivX—iMovie HD has DivX as an export option, right there in the menu—but it turns out you have to install the DivX codec separately first, or else iMovie exports in garbage quality. So I installed it, and things got slightly less infuriating, but it’s still not what I’d call easy. People at school have already started asking when the video will be done. I figured this would be a quick weekend project. There’s just way more involved than I realized, and I’m running on less sleep than I should be, so I’m going to stop complaining and get back to it. Rebecca and I broke up today. There were too many disagreements between us, too much friction underneath the relationship. I mean it when I say I wish her all the best. That’s that. Tuesday, 22 November 2005. The Other Version: Was at a friend’s place the other day and checked my site on his Windows PC. Internet Explorer. The nav bar had this thick white stripe straight down the middle, fonts had turned Times New Roman, everything looked completely different from what I was seeing on Safari back home. I’d been assuming everyone saw what I saw—Safari, Firefox, even the Mac version of Internet Explorer all rendered it basically the same. But standing there looking at his monitor, I realized I had no actual idea what most people were looking at. There was a whole version of my site existing out in the world that I couldn’t see from home, broken in ways I’d never know about. Monday, 21 November 2005. Prague: Just back from Prague and completely wrecked. We were out the entire time, moving constantly. My group was what made it—the kind of people where exhaustion feels like a small price for being around them. I’m working through the footage now, trying to make something watchable out of all the video I shot. Sleep is the only thing I want right now. Friday, 18 November 2005. Heartbeats: You watch other people’s relationships and you see the same pattern over and over. John and Mandy just broke up—both of them wanted out, it just wasn’t working. So like everyone does, John tries to fix himself. Goes full goth, decides he needs something “real” this time, someone he doesn’t have to perform for. As if the problem was ever the costume. Meanwhile Mille and Sarah, who work together, are in that drowsy new-relationship phase where they’re constantly touching each other and eating Chinese food and probably responsible for someone’s quarterly condom sales. They don’t think about the future. They don’t think about kids or mortgages or any of that. It’s just the next moment and the next time they get to see each other. It’s the only time it actually feels good. Then there’s everyone else. The people who’ve been with someone for five years, ten years, a decade. The butterflies stopped around year two. Maybe they’re still there on special days, but it’s not the same. Most of the time it’s just work—keeping it alive, keeping it functioning, using whatever you have left. You tell yourself that’s what maturity looks like. But you can’t stay in any of these. The new relationship runs its course. The long-term one develops problems and suddenly you’re back on the ground, dealing with real things. Breakups end. You’re single again, looking. You cycle through all of it—new, stable, broken—over and over until you’re dead. And it never gets easier, or maybe it does, but the cycle doesn’t change. You go through it anyway. That takes something. Sunday, 13 November 2005. Back From Nothing: I formatted my hard drive. Not intentionally—I was doing a clean install of Tiger, got sloppy, and erased everything instead. All my files, all my shit, gone. I sat there waiting for the OS to load and realized I was staring at a completely empty machine. I figured I’d freak out. After 2004, when I wiped Linux and took half my Windows setup with it, I thought I’d learned some paranoia about data. But this time felt different. Lighter. Just this weird sensation of okay, start over. No dread. No panic. Just emptiness that was almost peaceful. The RAM installation part was the real careful work. I had this plastic spatula (!) and kept thinking I’d snap the little retention clips. Got it done, though. The hard drive is where I checked out mentally. Night before all that, I went to a party at Lydia’s. Mille talked me into bringing my new video camera and just filming stuff. It came out genuinely funny, if you were there, but at 20MB compressed it’s not exactly shareable. We had a good time anyway. Someone got sick but she’s apparently fine now. Ben, if you’re reading: you owe me like 13 euros. Or maybe I owe you. Honestly can’t remember. Not being cheap, just want to put it on the record. School starts tomorrow. Ten hours minimum. I’m not looking forward to it. The real pain: my website was on a 1&1 server, so I didn’t have backups locally when the drive got nuked. I keep meaning to burn it all to CD for insurance and I never actually do it. So that’s sitting in the back of my mind now. Love life news: Ana and Flo got back together. John and Mandy broke up. People separate and reconcile. It’s just how things go. He should apply the lotion. Sunday, 6 November 2005. Blue Walls: Heard something on Giga today about Windows going cloud-only someday—no installation, just log in online and your whole interface appears. Pretty funny idea in theory, supposedly stops piracy, though I doubt anyone wants to use it. Spent the afternoon with Becca, helping her paint her room. Three walls light blue. It’s the kind of work that’s surprisingly meditative once you get into it. Then tonight was The O.C., which keeps getting weirder. Trey’s throwing a surprise party, and right before Ryan and Marissa kiss, some girl he was with earlier turns up half-dead in the pool. Absolutely ridiculous. That’s what the show does best. Wednesday, 2 November 2005. What’s Vacation: My mom walks in around seven in the morning yelling at me to get up, like I’d somehow overslept. I’m barely awake and confused, so I just tell her I’m on vacation, and she leaves. But of course I can’t fall back asleep after that. So I end up at the computer working on the website. Then breakfast. Then listened to some music. Then back at the computer. Nothing really happened. Yesterday was the same until Mille came by. We filmed some stuff with the camera—nothing serious, just messing around—and then he left. After that I spent the whole evening working on an MP3 list, which sounds simple but actually isn’t. I had to type everything in manually. Tedious work. Now I’m just seeing what the rest of the day brings. Monday, 31 October 2005. The Station: School ended yesterday. Got a week off, finally, though first there was the usual eight hours of slogging through classes—only French was worth sitting through. There’s talk about Prague coming up, and the logic seems to be that if I’m already having this much fun just being around people at school, an actual trip would be even better. We’ll see if that holds up when it actually happens. Spent the afternoon at the train station with Mille, just standing around waiting for this girl he’d met online. She never showed up. He got bored and left with some coworker instead. So I ended up spending the evening with Ana instead, working out details for her to write a regular column here. Should be decent. Later we went to September, this place we go to, and ran into Sarah with a couple of her friends and some little dog. They talked nonstop the whole time, just endless noise about nothing, the kind of people you watch and think about what they’re doing when nobody’s around. Or maybe that’s just me thinking. Things with Becca have gotten pretty rough lately anyway. Saturday, 29 October 2005. Tracking: Been watching The O.C. and the whole Ryan-and-Marissa thing is either going somewhere or it’s not—the show keeps dragging it out with this Trey subplot instead of just telling you what happens. It’s stupid to care this much about a television show but here I am, invested in two fictional teenagers like it matters. Spent the whole day finishing the website redesign. If you’re reading this, that’s what you’re looking at. We’re supposed to launch November 1st and somehow we’re actually on track, which feels impossible but I’m not going to question it. Got a 2 in math today. Can’t remember the last time that happened—maybe high school, who knows. It’s one of those small things that sticks with you even when everything else is background noise. Becca and I have been together almost a year and a half now. We talked for a couple minutes today, which never quite satisfies but beats nothing. Anniversary’s coming up soon. Wednesday, 26 October 2005. Tower Keeper: We all got together in September for Kallilein’s birthday. The night was silly and rambling, the kind where you’re not sure how long things will last but you’re enjoying it anyway. The highlight was this tower we built - hundred-something pieces stacked up - which somehow became this thing everyone wanted to solve. I ended up as the tower keeper, whatever that means. I’m driving to see my partner now. We’re going to cook lunch together and talk through what’s going on between us, the stuff we’re both dealing with. Thursday, 20 October 2005. That Kind of Night: It’s dark outside. Just watched two episodes of The O.C. back-to-back—bought the season one DVD box today and grabbed the soundtracks while I was at it. “Rain City” by Turin Brakes is playing in the background. There’s a melancholy settled in the room that I’m not bothering to resist. I’m not in the mood to write about my day. I’m just putting this down, these few minutes of sadness and half-thoughts, and leaving it there. I don’t know if we’ll make it through this year. Thursday, 6 October 2005. Nickelodeon’s Back: Nickelodeon’s back on German TV. The news was probably circulating a while, but it’s happening now—MTV2POP is getting displaced, Nickelodeon’s taking its place, and they’re stripping Super RTL of a bunch of shows in the process. They’ve timed it perfectly for the school year, which is exactly the kind of calculated nostalgia move the channel would make. What’s strange is watching something you grew up with suddenly return. You’re not the same person anymore, and the world it broadcast into doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. But the specific textures are still there—the green slime, those ridiculous host bits that felt hilarious at the time, that particular feeling of being in on something that was exclusively for kids. Saturday mornings stretched out forever. I’m not sure what Nickelodeon will actually be in this version. It might just be a logo over something completely different, or it might genuinely try to recapture what it was. Either way, there’s something to be said for a channel mattering enough to come back. Even if I’ve changed, even if everything’s changed. The fact that it returns at all says something about what it was. Tuesday, 23 August 2005. The Switch: I made the jump from Windows to Mac sometime in the early 2000s, and I remember the relief being almost physical. The blue screens, the inexplicable crashes, the sense that everything was one update away from catastrophe—it all just stopped. I’d spent years troubleshooting drivers, running disk defrag utilities like they were religious rituals, restarting for what felt like the thousandth time before something simple would work. Windows felt like it was actively working against you, like the machine resented your presence on it. Mac OS X was different. The Aqua interface, the brushed aluminum hardware, even the white plastic of the iBook felt like someone had actually thought about what it meant to interact with a machine. Every detail was considered. The trackpad, the font rendering, the way windows moved. It sounds pretentious to care about this stuff, but it was the opposite—it was about the machine not getting in the way. People thought I’d sold out, joined some design cult, bought into Apple’s mystique. Maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. But the practical truth was simpler: the machine just worked. No driver conflicts, no registry corruption, no mystifying incompatibilities. I could actually focus on what I was doing instead of nursing a machine back to health. That switch ended up changing how I approach things, though I didn’t realize it at the time. You spend enough time fighting with a machine and you start thinking about what it means to make something that works. Not in a revolutionary way—just the simple truth that someone had thought about the details, and had the discipline to edit them down to what actually mattered. Everything since then, I keep coming back to that. What’s essential, what can be cut, what serves the person actually using the thing instead of serving some vision of what a computer should look like. Saturday, 20 August 2005. The Reset: Yesterday after watching The O.C. (double episode) I was lying in bed wanting to listen to an album on my iPod. Hit play. Nothing happened. Checked if I’d hit the hold button like an idiot, but no. Tried every combination of buttons. My iPod was just dead. I was already thinking about packing it up to send to Apple when I remembered these old magazines in my drawer—”iPod Love” and “iPod Special”—and pulled them out. There was a reset procedure in one of them: hold the menu and select buttons until the Apple logo appears. Sometimes you have to do it multiple times. Tried it. Once, twice, three times. Nothing. Then it happened. The logo lit up and the iPod kind of gasped and immediately started playing “Lolita Strawberry in Summer.” I’d actually saved it. Not going to pretend that wasn’t a good feeling. Thursday, 18 August 2005. Mac Dreaming: I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. Next year I’d need a new computer, and the question was simple enough on paper: Windows Vista or a Mac? But nothing about it was actually simple. I knew Windows inside and out. All the programs I needed, all the habits built up over years, the muscle memory that made everything work. The problem was I was bored with it. Everyone had Windows. It was safe and expected and something I’d just outgrown by using it so much. A Mac was different. There was a philosophy to it, a completely different way of thinking about what a computer could be. I’d flip through Mac magazines and every time I saw one of those clean, minimal desktops, something would shift in my chest. The machines were beautiful in a way Windows wasn’t even trying to be. Apple represented something else—a different life, or at least it felt that way when you were looking at the pictures. The decision made itself in those moments. I wanted a Mac. Wanting one and being able to afford one were separate problems, but I had time. Months ahead. Maybe by Christmas I’d have saved enough. A PowerBook would be perfect. Or a Mac Mini. I wasn’t going anywhere until I had one. Monday, 15 August 2005. Vista: Vista showed some genuine design thinking when the early builds started circulating. The glass effects, the transparency, this visual language that made Windows look like it might actually belong in the 2000s. There was something there. I remember that anticipation before it shipped, before it became obvious how bloated it would be, before you realized what a drag it would actually be to use. That moment when the promise was still intact—there was something real about that. Saturday, 13 August 2005. Therme: My girlfriend came over. We had one of those conversations that doesn’t arrive anywhere but feels essential anyway. Then my favorite cousin. Then Mille, Palle and I somehow went shopping with zero money, which works out if you’re not too particular about buying things. Then nearly everyone made it to a thermal bath in Bad Worishofen—crowded and hot and full of people, which sounds bad but wasn’t. Pizza after. The whole weekend was just momentum. Girlfriend, cousin, shopping, bath, pizza. No air between any of it. That kind of day that wears you out but also keeps you going. Later I realized I’ve missed three episodes of The OC in a row. That’s the kind of gap you don’t come back from. Thursday, 11 August 2005. Darker Now: Japanese rock music, loud enough that everything else disappears. That’s the only way to redesign something that’s yours. The old design was too clean, too apologetic. This new version—darker, weirder—is what should’ve been there from the start. When you build something for yourself, you get to change it. The white design had this sterile polish that made me hate looking at it. Like I was visiting somewhere someone else built. I reorganized the archive, added photo galleries, started fixing all the broken audio and video sections that had been sitting half-finished for months. But that’s not the real point. The real change is the mood. The real change is that logging in now feels like coming home instead of showing up to work. Maintaining your own corner of the internet matters more than it probably should. You get to be strange. You get to be dark. You get to like something purely because it feels right, and nobody gets a vote. Things might not work properly. I’ll fix them eventually, or I won’t for a while. That’s the deal when you’re answering to nobody but yourself. Monday, 8 August 2005. Bad Worishofen Has No Parking: Bad Worishofen apparently has no parking. We were supposed to meet at Chaplin II and ended up driving around for twenty minutes looking for a spot. The bar itself is fine, nothing wrong with it, but there’s some kind of event happening inside—loud, chaotic, feels like a small bombardment. Not the vibe you want when you’re just trying to grab a drink with friends, so we give up. Drive out to McDonald’s in Mindelheim instead, which is totally stupid but somehow made sense in the moment. I think I see my ex in there—pretty sure it was actually her—but I didn’t really want to know for certain. One less interaction to deal with. Better moment came later at Mille when Friday Night News was on. I just completely lost it, couldn’t stop laughing, couldn’t breathe. Nothing was even particularly funny, but that’s just how it goes sometimes. My girlfriend’s coming back from England soon and I’ve been kind of a mess about making time to actually see her. So I’m just going to say it: I love you, Rebecca. Sorry for being difficult about this. Sunday, 31 July 2005. That Munich Day: Drove to Munich yesterday with Ben, Lydia, Betty, and Bianca. They all had free train tickets from some grades-based promotion the railway does every year, so we figured we might as well go. Breakfast at Burger King, lunch at McDonald’s, dinner at Pizza Hut—a real health food adventure. The girls wanted to hit Orsay and Pimkie while the rest of us just wandered along. Everyone made it to Saturn. But I was mainly there for Neo Tokyo, this anime and J-Pop shop I’d been meaning to actually visit instead of just knowing it existed. Picked up more CDs than my budget could handle, which is always what happens the moment you step inside a place like that. Good day. Nothing remarkable. But sometimes that’s the whole point. Sunday, 31 July 2005. Lydia’s Seventeenth: Lydia’s seventeenth was last night. Her parents did a backyard grill thing. Pretty much everyone came. I dragged Eniz along since he wasn’t working. The whole evening came together—one of those where everyone’s in a good mood and nothing really goes sideways. Betty got stung by a flying frog, allegedly. I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with the grill lighter. The ketchup was hot and expired, which I discovered by using it. Madi somehow won the entire night just by existing and laughing the way she does—that kind of laugh that makes everything around it seem stupider and better. Then Eniz did his thing. The kind of thing I legally cannot discuss. A plainclothes cop took notice. Lydia’s parents were genuinely good about it—fed us, didn’t make an issue. That kind of hospitality doesn’t come around often. Friday’s supposed to be our party if the weather cooperates. If it doesn’t, we’ll find somewhere else. We usually manage. Wednesday, 27 July 2005. It’s Raining: It’s raining. The weekend’s over, saying goodbye the only way it knows how—for good. She started her England tour this morning. I couldn’t make Lydia and Betty’s birthday yesterday, had something come up. See what next week brings. Hope I can be there next time. Sunday, 24 July 2005. >Attacks in London: It has happened again. I wake up, turn on the TV, expecting the usual news, and once more I am confronted with a terrorist attack—this time in London. Such incidents are becoming all too common, prompting the unsettling question: are we living in an age defined by terror? The threat seems to be drawing closer with each passing attack—New York, Madrid, now London. One can only hope that other cities, like Berlin or Munich, never experience similar devastation. Our thoughts and condolences are with the victims and their families. Thursday, 7 July 2005 No Comment: A 25-year-old man has been arrested for fatally stabbing his 25-year-old girlfriend on a public street in Buchloe, Ostallgäu. Authorities believe the attack may have been motivated by the woman’s intention to end the relationship. The suspect was taken into custody at the scene. Monday, 4 July 2005 Then It Turned Black: It was a quiet Monday morning. A rerun of The King of Queens played in the background while I sat at my desk, reflecting once again on the design of my front page and the topics I wanted to share. Then, without warning, it happened. In hindsight, there had been signs. For weeks, the monitor had shown intermittent crackling and occasional color distortions. This time, however, it failed completely. The screen went black, my desktop vanished, and, to my dismay, it made no attempt to display the familiar Windows XP startup screen. That was likely the end of my aging—if somewhat unattractive—Dell CRT monitor. To be fair, it had served me reliably for nearly a decade, so its failure was hardly unexpected. Still, there is a certain upside to the situation: it finally clears the way for an upgrade to a modern flat-panel display. A brief note on Friday night at the Nachtcafé: the train ride there was enjoyable, and sitting outside on the street from 2 a.m. onward had its charm. Unfortunately, the hours in between were rather uneventful. It might be worth returning on a Wednesday instead, when they host the one-euro parties. At the very least, Mille seemed to have a good time. Monday, 27 June 2005. Family, Family: What began as a rather uneventful day is finally drawing to a close. The occasion was a large family gathering—relatives visiting from the Far West had made their way to Germany, and everyone dutifully convened at a fairly unremarkable restaurant in a quiet village. I’ll be honest: without my cousin Dennis and his girlfriend Rebecca, the afternoon would have been a trial. I’m grateful for both of them. On a brighter note, Japan delivered a convincing defeat to Greece—one of the more thrilling moments in my admittedly sporadic history of watching football. June 19, 2005, will also be remembered as the day I sat through nearly an entire Formula 1 race in Indianapolis, though not out of any particular love for the sport. The race had become a spectacle for all the wrong reasons—a tire crisis that left the grid almost empty. The commentators, to their credit, made the most of it. Sunday, 19 June 2005. Happy Birthday, Mom: A quick but sincere happy birthday to my mother—today deserves at least that acknowledgment. It also happens to mark my last final exam of the year, though I find it difficult to summon much feeling about it either way, given that I’ll be repeating the year regardless. Apparently I’m not alone in that situation this year, which is a small consolation. In any case: vacation, at last. Now if only whatever is making that noise outside my window would stop. Friday, 17 June 2005. Hello, World: My name is Marcel Winatschek. I was born on January 5, 1984, in the small Bavarian town of Buchloe, where I still live with my mother. On my father’s side, I have a half-brother and a half-sister who grew up with him in Turkey—two siblings I’ve had the chance to meet only once. I’ve been with my girlfriend Rebecca for quite some time now, and she means the world to me. As for my own path, I’m still figuring things out. School keeps me occupied for now, and while I’ve explored various directions through internships and different experiences, nothing has truly clicked yet. I’m still listening for whatever it is that’s meant for me. One thing I’ve always known, though, is my deep admiration for Japanese culture. It’s been a constant thread throughout my life—from the anime and manga I grew up with, to a growing appreciation for Japanese cinema, music, and the country itself. Japan feels like more than just a fascination; it’s a quiet longing. My dream is to visit Tokyo someday, or perhaps even to build a life there together with Rebecca. The future is something I hold with a mixture of calm and unease. I have no interest in feeding into systems built on exploitation, nor in being quietly pushed to the edges of a society that rarely stops to question itself. Things I love: Lazy afternoons, Apple, Japan, J-pop, pizza, good television, One Piece, the internet, French magazines, baked cheese on fresh pretzels, girls in white socks, Friends, SpongeBob, warm summer rain, photography, Nestea, aimless channel surfing, kittens, and Sarah Kuttner. Things I could do without: People who have nothing to say but say it loudly anyway, spinach, high internet costs, condescension, unsolicited advice, the creeping feeling that nothing ultimately matters, frozen mushroom stir-fry, war, Jamba, betrayal, large crowds, spiders, computer crashes—and the uncomfortable thoughts about my country’s dark past that tend to surface whenever I step onto a Deutsche Bahn train. Wednesday, 1 June 2005. Websites about life I like are Be Wrong, Bix Frankonis, Brian Koberlein, Conception of Concepts, Coda, Cory Doctorow, Craig Mod, Culture: An Owner’s Manual, From Jason, Go With the Flow, How to Japanese, Jose M. Gilgado, Kai-You, Keenan, LessWrong, Longest Voyage, Lux Magazine, Matt Alt, Manuel Moreale, Monocle, New Scientist, One From Nippon, Open Culture, Pink Tentacle, Pluralistic, Popular Science, ProPublica, Quanta Magazine, Read Something Wonderful, Real Life Magazine, Rest of World, Sabukaru, Scrmbl, Secretorum, Some Studies, SoraNews24, Starbreaker, Tatsumoto, The Atlantic, The Creative Independent, The Dial, The Guardian, The Intercept, The Japan Times, The Nonfiction, The Stone Bridge, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Public Domain Review, What Japan Thinks, Wikipedia, Work in Progress, and Yokogao Magazine. Websites about art I like are 032c Magazine, About a Girl, AnOther Magazine, Artnet, Artvee, Booooooom, Butt Magazine, Carl Barenbrug, Character Design References, Collateral Magazine, Colossal Magazine, Creative Boom, Dazed Magazine, Escaping Flatland, Fisheye Magazine, FK Magazine, Friends of Friends, Fucking Young!, Huck Magazine, Gata Magazine, Ignant, It’s Nice That, Japan Ordinary, Japan Past & Present, Juxtapoz, Kaltblut Magazine, My Modern Met, Néojaponisme, New Models, Once Bitten, Twice Shy, PJ Onori, Please Knock, Pure Invention, Ryan McGinley, Sandy Kim, Shift Magazine, Sticks & Stones, Spoon & Tamago, Super Cute Kawaii, Supersonic Art, Sleek Magazine, Temple Magazine, Texte zur Kunst, Toiletpaper Magazine, Tokyo Analog, Tokyo Art Beat, Tokyo Cowboy, Tokyo Panda Club, Véronique, and Wallpaper. Websites about music I like are Adult Oriented Records, Anime Instrumentality, Asobisystem, Boiler Room, Bunni Pop, Flau News, Flowting by A Taut Line, J-Pop 80’s, Jazz of Japan, Make Believe Melodies, Music of Japan, Nante Japan, Niku Cube, Neo City Pop, Plastic Fantasma, Pigeons & Planes, Pitchfork, Random J-Pop, Resident Advisor, Stereogum, The Chow, The Idol Cast, This Side of Japan, Tokyo Jazz Site, and Turntable Thoughts. Websites about books I like are All Wrongs Reversed, Beatdom, Bigakko, Books & Bao, Brain vs. Book, Buffalo Zine, Coffee Table Mags, Comiket, Comitia, Dengeki Online, Do You Read Me?!, Document Journal, Domo Magazines, Dooks, Hand Saw Press, Harta, Heavy Traffic, Helen O’Horan, Hollow Press, Kinfolk, Kodansha, London Review of Books, Lost in Manga, MagCulture, Mandarake, Mangasplaining, Matogrosso, Melon Books, Neutral Colors, Penguin Random House, Pie, Post, Reactor Magazine, Ryan Holmberg, Seigensha, Shashasha, Shibuya Publishing & Booksellers, Soda Books, Stacks Bookstore, Taco Ché, Taschen Books, Tetsu Kayama, The Book Merchant Jenkins, The European Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Weekly Grief, The Other Folk, Tissue Papers, To-Ti, Tokyo International Manga Library, Torch Press, Turnaround, Twelve Books, Two Virgins, and Yatta-Tachi, Zack Davisson. Websites about technology I like are 32-Bit Café, 404 Media, Andy Bell, CERN, Chia’s Blog, Christian Selig, Cliophate, Computer History Museum, Daring Fireball, Digital Frontier, Dead Simple Sites, Diinki, Do Not Research, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Escape the Algorithm, Dominik Hofer, Flower.Codes, Freethink, Gizmodo, Good Internet, Hackaday, Hacker News, Hackernoon, Igor Schwarzmann, Ines Montani, Japanese Nostalgic Car, Jay Springett, Keitai Wiki, Kev Quirk, Kottke, Logan Gee, Low-Tech Magazine, MacRumors, MacStories, Marcel Wichmann, Moritz F. Fürst, Multicore, Nitin Khanna, Noema, Rachel Kwon, Sony, Salim Virani, Sandy Uraz, Skerritt, Some Ordinary Gamers, Stanley Lieber, Steve Jobs Archive, Take, Tao of Mac, Tedium, The Eclectic Light Company, The HTML Review, The Internet Review, The Intersection, The Verge, TokyoDev, Tom MacWright, TorrentFreak, Vmfunc, Wired Magazine, Xe Iaso, and Xenodium. Websites about movies I like are 80’s OVA, A24 Films, Anime and Manga Studies, Arte Television, Animation Obsessive, Anime Herald, Aniwire, Cinema Sojourns, Fandom Exile, Flooby Nooby, Genre Grinder, Glass Reflection, Hazel, IndieWire, Japan Happiness, Like a Fish in Water, Media Diet, Midnight Eye, Moe Sucks, Mubi Films, Pause and Select, ProZD, Strange Comforts, Tokyo Otaku Mode, TokyoScope, Trash Taste, Tsundoku Diving, Vulture, and Zimmerit. Websites about fashion I like are i-D Magazine, Highsnobiety, Hypebeast, I Heart Alice, Marlen Stahlhuth, Nylon Japan, Monologue, Phantasy Magazine, Popeye Magazine, Purple Magazine, Sneeze Magazine, The Cobra Snake, The Cut, Tokyo Fashion, and Vogue. Websites about travel I like are Atlas Obscura, Cabin Porn, Hidden Japan, Metropolis Japan, Pen Magazine, Real Real Japan, Ridgeline, The Fence, Tofugu, Tokyo Cheapo, Tokyo Dandy, and Tokyo Weekender. Websites about games I like are 8-4 Play, Astrolabe, Bloomed Wings, Breaking Arrows, Bullet Points Monthly, CRPG Addict, Deep Hell, EX Research, Exalclaw, Gamers With Glasses, Games Done Quick, Gamesline, Gaming Alexandria, Giant Bomb, Good Old Games, Goose Pimple Activated, Hanafuda Report, Hardcore Gaming 101, Indie Games Japan, Insert Credit, Itch.io, Journal of Geek Studies, Kotaku, Lawrence and Goliath, Majuular, Meat Fighter, My Abandonware, Nintendo, No Escape, Noisy Pixel, Overkill, Pixelmusement, Pizza Pranks, Playism, Polygon, Rascal News, Read Only Memo, Retro Game Talk, Rock Paper Shotgun, Rough Edge, Sega, Shmuplations, Skybox, Startmenu, Stop Caring, Super Eyepatch Wolf, Super Potato, Superjump, The Arcade Blogger, The Back Page, The Digital Antiquarian, The Imaginary Engine Review, The Jimquisition, Tiny Cartridge, and Zettai Renai!. Websites about food I like are Burgers in Anime, Broccoli Magazine, Cake Zine, Conbini Boys, Famous for My Dinner Parties, First We Feast, Grub Street, Roads & Kingdoms, The Ramen Bowl, and Sandwich Magazine. This notebook is written and maintained by Marcel Winatschek, Bürgermeister-Ulrich-Straße 144, 86179 Augsburg, Germany. You may reach me via electronic mail at marcel@winatschek.com.