What the MDMA Found

Friday evening I found the tail end of the MDMA from Melt Festival under my bed—ground fine as powder sugar, dusted into the carpet like evidence. The sensible move would have been to call someone, put on something loud, make a party out of it. Instead I cancelled everything I had going and spent the night finally gutting this journal and putting it back together.

The problem had been obvious for a while. I kept calling this place a digital magazine, but it looked like a Care Bear had detonated over a web form from 2004. Colored boxes everywhere, image chaos, a color-coding system I’d convinced myself was clever and that everyone else found incomprehensible and just too much. No wonder nobody in any serious branch of media had ever taken this place seriously—though I’d been blaming the design, rather than the content, which is to say the mixture of genuine cultural criticism and exposed primary genitalia that made up about seventy percent of the output.

What changed: brighter, cleaner, stripped down. Elements nobody was using, gone. The color system, gone. What’s left is more coherent, more confident, or at least more honest about what it is. This isn’t a design revolution or a new philosophy of the internet. It’s this notebook becoming more itself—which sounds like something you’d say in therapy, but was mostly just a chemically assisted Saturday morning reorganization that got out of hand.

Internet Explorer will find inventive new ways to break it, that’s guaranteed. But I’m proud of it. Cunt.