How We Look

I found the leftover MDMA from Melt Festival under my bed on a Friday night, ground down to powder like cake flour, and instead of heading to whatever party I’d saved the cash on, I canceled everything and started actually cleaning this website. The drugs helped.

The problem was real: we were calling ourselves a serious publication while looking like an exploded Care Bear. No wonder the political press, the print world, anyone who might have actually respected what we were doing—none of them took us seriously. They saw the bright chaos and assumed we had nothing worth reading. Which was stupid because the crude sexuality, the weird tonal whiplash, the prepubescent irreverence—that was intentional. That was the work. But it doesn’t matter what you mean when the presentation looks like a breakdown.

So I stripped things down. Lighter, cleaner, less visual panic. The color coding that looked nice but served no purpose—gone. The unnecessary boxes, the framing that made everything feel like it was screaming. Simple principle: when everything’s fighting for attention, nothing gets attended to. You delete what doesn’t earn its space.

This wasn’t a revolution or some new theory of web design. It was just the obvious move that should have happened a while ago. More confident. More like we actually believed in what we were writing here. And we did.

And that’s the last of these posts about the site. Back to writing about things that actually matter.