The Summer Hasn’t Finished With You
Csanád Szegedi spent years building his career on ethnic hatred—co-founding Jobbik, one of Hungary’s most aggressively antisemitic far-right parties, railing against Jewish and Roma populations with the kind of conviction that requires a genuine absence of self-awareness. Then someone told him his grandmother had survived Auschwitz. He reportedly tried to buy the man’s silence. It didn’t hold. The story went everywhere, and it deserved to: here was a man who had dedicated his public life to a hatred he was, by his own movement’s definitions, the object of. You can’t construct that kind of irony deliberately. The universe just occasionally delivers.
The internet served up other things that week too, most of them smaller. Gamescom happened in Cologne and produced the usual torrent of forgettable footage, plus one League of Legends cosplayer who appeared to have consumed a medical emergency’s worth of caffeine and was vibrating visibly on camera. She had more energy than the entire rest of the convention. I watched the clip three times.
Grimes looked incredible in the "Genesis" video. I’ll say it plainly. The "singing eyebrow" label we’d been using didn’t survive contact with whatever she was doing in that thing—feral, magnetic, the kind of presence that makes you acutely aware of what you’re doing with your evening. Dangerous in the best way.
Facebook settled the Sponsored Stories class action for ten million dollars, an amount that sounds real until you remember what Facebook was worth in 2012, at which point it becomes roughly equivalent to finding a twenty in an old jacket. Still. Someone complained. Someone won. Someone at Menlo Park had a mildly irritating afternoon.
In more genuinely useful news: the Peel wall lamp by YOY—a piece that looks exactly as the name suggests, a corner of wall peeling back to reveal a light source behind it—was one of those design objects that briefly restores faith in the possibility of things. I wanted one immediately and still haven’t bought it, which is probably the correct summary of my relationship to beautiful objects.
Someone reimagined the original 151 Pokémon in Tim Burton’s visual language and it was actually good. Not lazy "what if X but goth" fan art—genuinely considered work, finding the actual points of contact between Burton’s aesthetic and the original designs. The Gengar especially. Worth tracking down if you haven’t seen it.
At some point before the cold arrives I should go alone to the beach in the evening, lie under whatever warmth the sun still has, and do the accounting. All the plans that were going to happen this summer and didn’t. The scale of the sea makes the list feel the right size—still mine, but not crushing.
And if all of that sounds too earnest: dry your semen, grind it into a powder, fold it into little paper envelopes, and distribute them to eager strangers at the nearest club. Hold your composure while they take it. This is not advice. This is a mission. The summer’s last.