Same Territory, Different Handwriting

Running one of these things long enough, you start recognizing kindred publications by the particular arrangement of their obsessions—not by traffic or reach, but by something closer to smell. i-ref had the right smell: music and art and fashion and photography, all filtered through two people who clearly couldn’t stop themselves. Isa, the curly-haired enthusiast, and Norman, who appeared to have no functional off switch. A magazine operating on exactly the same fuel this one runs on, which is mostly love and a low-grade inability to shut up about things that matter to you.

They relaunched on their first anniversary, which was the right instinct. A year in is long enough to know you mean it—to have published enough to understand what the project actually is, distinct from what you imagined it would be when you started. Same general territory as here, perhaps marginally more restrained, probably fewer gratuitous images, but the same fundamental conviction: that paying close enough attention to write something down is worth the effort of doing it.

There’s something I find quietly reassuring about the existence of places like this. Not communities, not scenes—just individual people running their obsessions in public and occasionally recognizing each other across the feed. Like finding handwriting on an envelope you already know before you’ve read the name.