Kiosk Haul
Grimes has some stickers in POP magazine now. Black and white, actually usable, the kind of thing you tear out and actually apply to something. She’s also photographed in natural light looking good, and I’m partially in love with her. I know the internet has complex opinions on Claire Boucher, but I don’t care. The magazine doesn’t help—it’s designed to keep rotating beautiful people past your eyes every few pages, new faces constantly. At some point you just give up and flip through looking at pictures.
I grabbed two other magazines at the same kiosk. Brand eins has that aggressive, bright design that makes you feel smart just holding it. Tight layouts, dense ideas, the sense that the art department spent weeks on spacing alone. Inside there’s a piece about Japanese people who’ve basically rejected the productivity grind entirely. They’re sleeping through it instead of competing, saying no to all the study, obey, drink
machinery. It’s clever in a way that matters. Less clever is the full-page giveaway for a motorized scooter with built-in speakers. Some Berliner probably won it and now rides past my window slow and loud. My quality of life has decreased measurably. That’s the worst article any magazine has published.
Retro Gamer arrived at the right moment. The Game Boy retrospective lists exactly the games I’m playing right now—Tetris, Pokémon, Super Mario Land 2. When I was a kid, cartridges cost too much to buy, so we lived through the magazines instead. Same expensive math, different format. You’d read about the games you couldn’t afford like they were scripture. This magazine brings that back—clean typography, earnest reviews, the feeling that someone still cares about documenting this stuff.
The DDR games section though. East Germany had computers and games, people played them, it’s real and documented. But they looked bad, and I’m far enough removed to feel only intellectual curiosity. No connection, no resonance. Just distant history.