What I Called This Thing, and Why I Changed It Back

Ambition has a way of making you rename things. The idea is that a new name signals a new seriousness—you’re finally doing this properly, finally building something worthy of the vision you have of yourself. So I rebranded this journal, gave it a name that sounded like it belonged on a manifesto, and launched it with the full conviction that this time would be different. Two weeks later I’d burned through whatever momentum existed and had nothing to show for it except a name I was already quietly embarrassed by.

It wasn’t that the project was bad. It’s that the name created a gap between what I was actually doing—writing about music and film and whatever I found funny that week—and what the name implied I should be doing. I’d sit late at night with a good whisky knowing it wasn’t working, which is a very particular kind of tired.

Then I found an old photo. Something from the years this place had actually been alive, something that captured what the tone had been—loose, a little reckless, genuinely mine. I felt not exactly nostalgia but recognition, the way you feel when you put on an old jacket and remember it still fits. The name I’d abandoned wasn’t just a name. It was accumulated time. A way of approaching things I’d built slowly and then discarded in a single impulsive afternoon because I thought I wanted to be taken more seriously.

I changed it back. Here we are.