Earlier this month, I wrote about several blogging platforms that are part of the so-called Atmosphere, an ecosystem of apps made possible by the AT Protocol. However, blogging isn’t the only sort of publishing that’s possible via the Atmosphere. Originally launched last year, Grain is a photo-first social media platform built and developed by Chad Miller.

Instagram is the most obvious point of comparison, and at first glance, the two platforms seem pretty similar in terms of layout and function. Grain’s UI is far cleaner and simpler, though, and free of ads and “recommended” posts. Grain does offer a “For You” feed that’s presumably algorithmic, but it’s not the default. (That would be a chronological listing, as God intended.) Grain only allows photos in posts, so no videos or reels. You can share stories that exist for 24 hours, but those are photo-only, as well. And I’m sure photographers will appreciate that Grain displays EXIF data (e.g., the camera type and settings used to take a photo).

Grain posts can contain up to 10 photos, along with a title and description. You can mention other users, include hashtags, specify content warnings, and if you’ve signed in with a Bluesky account, whether or not your post should be shared to your Bluesky profile. All of which is pretty standard, expected stuff. But one thing that I really like about Grain is that you can include links in post descriptions (example).

As part of their efforts to keep you on their platform as long as possible, Instagram doesn’t allow links in posts; you can only add them to your profile, and that can only be done via the Instagram app. (Instagram is reportedly testing the inclusion of links in posts, but only for users who’ve paid for a “Meta Verified” badge, and even then, they’ll be limited to a max of 10 links/month.) Link support seems like a trivial thing, but it’s in keeping with the open nature of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and I appreciate that.

I’ve been using Grain for only a few days now, but I like it (view my profile). I don’t expect it to supplant Instagram as people’s photo-sharing platform of choice, or even to become a serious challenger in terms of popularity. (As of last September, Instagram has 3 billion monthly active users.) But I like that platforms like Grain exist via the AT Protocol, platforms that give people who are tired of the current ad and algorithm-saturated social media landscape a viable alternative.

Although it wasn’t the first first-person shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved definitely elevated the genre when it was released in 2001, blending thrilling action and compelling level design with an epic storyline filled with twists and turns. Building on their experience from making the Marathon trilogy, Bungie delivered a top-tier classic that remains one of the greatest video games of all time, and helped establish Microsoft’s Xbox platform.

Halo: Combat Evolved spawned multiple sequels, some of them far better than others. Sadly, what was once a video game juggernaut has floundered in recent years due in part to studio upheavals and a decided lack of vision. 2021’s Halo Infinite was billed as the franchise’s next evolutionary step. Despite beginning on a promising note, 343 Industries — which took over Halo after Bungie left its Microsoft partnership — was unable to deliver on many of Halo Infinite’s promises, and so Zeta Halo’s secrets remain.

Thus, it makes sense for Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) to go back to the franchise’s beginnings with a redo of Halo: Combat Evolved that utilizes modern development tools (specifically, Unreal Engine 5) and updates the gameplay accordingly. So does Halo: Campaign Evolved represent a fresh start for the iconic video game franchise? Or is it little more than just a fresh coat of paint? Read on for a selection of critical reactions to the latest Halo effort.

👍 Ian Dean, ​“Almost everything fans could hope for” 

As much as I love Halo, I was lukewarm to the idea of remaking the original; after all, we had a good Anniversary remaster in 2011, and it’s backwards compatible on Xbox Series X; what more could there be? Well, I’m playing on PlayStation 5, which feels unique, and it’s beautifully reimagined in UE5. When the Gregorian chanting starts, the orchestra swells, the Halo ring stretches out in front of me, and suddenly I’m right back where I was all those years ago, staring at that impossible alien landscape; I can’t resist, I need to play again.

👍 Scott Duwe, ​“Thrives off of the series’ nostalgia” 

Campaign Evolved is mostly a one-to-one recreation of the original game, but with vastly enhanced visuals and audio. Utilizing Unreal Engine 5, the game is gorgeous, especially on PS5 Pro (yeah, I had to be that guy and play Halo on PS5 because it’s just hard to fathom it happened). The dialogue has been fully re-recorded, too, making this feel like an actual remake as opposed to just an upscaling of graphics.

👍 Ford James, ​“One of the best remakes of all time” 

If you’ve never played a Halo game before, but you know you enjoy shooters, Halo: Campaign Evolved is the perfect place to start. If you’re a Halo fan, but it’s been a few years since you’ve played Combat Evolved, Campaign Evolved does just enough to feel like an entirely new game. And if you’re a Halo diehard, this really is as good as it gets. Remake or not, if this is the start of Halo’s new era, the future’s bright.

👎 Michael Higham, ​“We’ve been down this road many times before” 

But as much as I adore Halo’s campaign, with its simple yet thoughtful combat design, you can only play the hits so often. When the base game, the Anniversary Edition, and the Master Chief Collection are all readily available in 2026, it’s easy to see this remake as more of an Unreal Engine test than anything. There’s a new batch of Skulls and three prequel missions to sweeten the deal, which are a fun few hours to blast through — but the changes outside the graphical overhaul are otherwise subtle, and as a whole, neither definitively improve nor detract from what I played 25 years ago. So, while it’s great to see how well Halo has aged, we’ve been down this road many times before.

👍 Matt Miller, ​“Rollicking revival” 

Halo: Campaign Evolved does a phenomenal job of capturing what made the 2001 original so much fun while updating certain elements to better suit modern sensibilities. The core game shows its age in some notable ways, but there’s no mistaking the magic that made this formula work all those years ago is still very much intact.

👎 Morgan Park, ​“A neat, but fundamentally flawed remake” 

What we have here is the other type of remake — the kind that goes all in on modernization, offering perceived upgrades to an otherwise unchanged foundation. Halo Studios has no discernably new take on Bungie’s landmark FPS, other than a desire to make Combat Evolved look and play more like its later Halos. The “faithful” treatment sets an admirable goal, but that also means Campaign Evolved positions itself as a replacement for, or at least in competition with, the original.

👍 David Pietrangelo, ​“A new look for an already great game” 

First and foremost, it’s great to see such an epic experience on newer hardware. Even the iconic menu and menu music look and sound great. That’s one area where Halo Studios has succeeded here: the graphical fidelity and the sound of the game. Whether you remember sound bites or some of the music, it’s undeniable that many moments of epic gameplay are backed by the original’s audio excellence. From Grunts yelling “save yourself” to Elites laughing when they kill Chief, to the satisfying reload sounds and engine roars; it’s all here.

👍 Dom Peppiatt, ​“A curiously enjoyable makeover” 

The original Halo is a work of archival significance, a watershed moment for first-person shooters and video games as a whole. Halo Studios had an impossible task in being asked to improve on (or even reinvent) perfection. Campaign Evolved represents a diligent effort — at least at reinvention, if not truly accurate reproduction — and a worthy addition to Halo canon. But it also lives in the long shadow cast by the monolithic status of Combat Evolved.

👍 Andrew Webster, ​“A reminder of what Xbox used to be” 

Through its first two generations of existence, Xbox held its own against its more established rivals Nintendo and Sony, and a big reason for that was Halo. Bungie’s shooter coupled a grand sci-fi story with nearly pitch-perfect action and single-handedly created a reason to buy an Xbox. Now, the game has gotten a full remake, reimagining the same core experience for modern audiences. In a testament to the original design, Halo remains a thrilling game more than two decades after it debuted. But the remake is also a reminder of just how far Xbox has strayed from its initial promise.

👎 Zack Zwiezen, ​“There’s not much here” 

If you’ve never played Halo before and think the original game looks too old, this is a good option. If you want to play Halo with your PlayStation 5 pals, this is, well, the only option. For everyone else, I’d suggest asking yourself how big a Halo fan you are and if you really need to spend more money on replaying the first game again. Again. Again.

Halo: Campaign Evolved will be released on July 28, 2026. Watch the trailer below.

Along with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is the urtext for modern cyberpunk. Although it wasn’t the first cyberpunk novel, there’s no denying that Neuromancer’s vision of all-powerful megacorps, console cowboys who traverse cyberspace with their minds, and sleekly augmented street samurai is what most people think of when they think of the genre.

Over the last 40+ years, there have been several attempts at a Neuromancer film. Back in the early ’00s, Chris Cunningham signed on to write and direct an adaptation, with Aphex Twin providing the soundtrack. Although Cunningham’s script received Gibson’s blessing, the film never materialized, making it one of cinema’s great “What if?” projects. But in February 2024, Apple announced a 10-episode Neuromancer TV series that will sit alongside their other sci-fi adaptations (Foundation, Dark Matter, Silo). Here’s the official synopsis:

Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Callum Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high-stakes crime with his partner Molly (Briana Middleton), a razor-girl assassin, as they pull off a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.

The above teaser gives us our first real look at Apple’s vision of Chiba City, and it’s definitely promising. They seem to be leaning into the dystopian aspects and I appreciate that it looks like they’re not trying to modernize the novel’s tech or make it more “realistic.” (I’ve always liked Neuromancer’s nigh-fantastical approach to cyberspace; Gibson famously had no idea how computers actually worked when he wrote the novel.) We catch a few glimpses of Molly, the deadly “razorgirl” with the mirror shades and razor blades, as well as Case’s visions of cyberspace.

I am curious to see how Apple’s adaptation will approach the topic of AI, which figures heavily into the novel’s storyline but has obviously become a hot-button topic these days. We’ll find out when Neuromancer — which also stars Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard, Dane DeHaan, and Emma Laird — begins streaming on Apple TV on January 22, 2027.

Neon Genesis Evangelion’s “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” composed by Hidetoshi Sato and sung by Yoko Takahashi, is one of the all-time great anime themes. And not just because it’s both catchy and anthemic. The song possesses a deep irony, as well: its bright J-Pop arrangements and upbeat lyrics (e.g., “You shine brighter than anyone else/Young boy, become the legend!”) stand in stark contrast to Evangelion’s dark themes and apocalyptic storyline. (Apparently, lyricist Neko Oikawa didn’t really know what Evangelion was actually about when she began work on the song.)

“A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” is, as the kids would say, a total banger. But it wasn’t until my recent viewing of Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth when I realized that the storied anime franchise had yet another banger. Also sung by Takahashi, “Soul’s Refrain” — which appeared on her 1996 album, Li-La, and was written by Toshiyuki O’mori and Oikawa — eschews the J-pop stylings of “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” for something even more anthemic.

The song starts off gently enough, with Takahashi’s powerful, dramatic voice set against a backdrop of plucked strings and gentle ambience. But then it kicks into high gear with driving beats and pulsing synths. Wonderful melodic twists keep your attention and hint at deeper emotional stakes while the guitarist (whose name I’ve been unable to find) unleashes a variety of fiery riffs. And for good measure, “Soul’s Refrain” also features some otherworldly choral elements that feel quite apropos given Evangelion’s preponderance of Christian imagery.

All in all, “Soul’s Refrain” is a high-energy theme that immediately pumps you up to battle the next Angel that decides to invade Tokyo-3. Not surprisingly, it’s Takahashi’s best-selling single of all time, even more so than “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis.” It’s also been covered by several other Japanese artists, including Babymetal, who absolutely destroyed in this 2013 performance.

The bands that emerged from the UK indie/alternative scene in the ’80s and ’90s had all sorts of evocative and intriguing names. Slowdive. Catherine Wheel. Kitchens of Distinction. The Stone Roses. The House of Love. And then there was Moose. Now, I don’t know if that name choice had anything to do with it, but I’ve always felt that Moose — which formed in London in 1990 — flew under the radar during their decade-long existence. Which is a shame because the band certainly knew how to write earworms.

For proof of that, look no further than “First Balloon to Nice,” which appeared on 1995’s Live a Little Love a Lot (Play It Again Sam Records). The song is just about as breezy as they come, thanks to Andrew Blick’s trumpet and K.J. McKillop’s string arrangements (both of which are reminiscent of Eric Matthews’ Sub Pop albums). Moose pack a lot into the song’s sub-three-minute runtime, but it never feels overstuffed or top-heavy.

Although Moose might’ve flown under the general public’s radar, they still occupied a pretty sweet spot in the scene. For example, they became close friends with Cocteau Twins. Elizabeth Fraser lent her voice to Live a Little Love a Lot’s opening track, “Play God,” while Moose bassist Lincoln Fong would become the Twins’ live sound engineer and help them build their studio. Lincoln’s brother, Russell — who played guitar on Moose’s 1992 album, …XYZ — would also collaborate with the Twins, and build some of the guitars and 5-string basses that Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde played on tour.

When the producers of Friends failed to get the rights to R.E.M.‘s “Shiny Happy People,” they recruited The Rembrandts to record “I’ll Be There for You,” and the rest was history. “I’ll Be There for You” is undoubtedly one of the most well-known TV theme songs of all time, and for good reason: it’s catchy as all get-out, and its jangly guitars and handclaps instantly worm their way into your subconscious.

The only thing it’s missing, it seems, is some post-punk gloom, which is where Joshua Woo comes in. Woo specializes in creating offbeat covers, like Pink Floyd in the style of the Bee Gees or The Police in the style of The Smiths. Or in this case, a Joy Division-esque take on “I’ll Be There for You.”

Sure, it’s kind of gimmicky, but it works surprisingly well, especially when Woo takes to his Telecaster. Indeed, it sounds like something that could’ve emerged from the current crop of post-punk revivalists. As one commenter put it, it’s the sort of song that Interpol has made a career out of.

For well over two decades now, Artoffact Records has established itself as one of the world’s premier labels when it comes to the darker music genres. Launched in the late ’90s, the Toronto-based label has released music by some of the most influential names in the noise and industrial scenes, while also promoting newer generations of exciting artists.

This month’s playlist, titled “Artoffacts of Sound,” highlights just a few of the notable goth, post-punk, noise, industrial, synth-pop, and EBM titles that Artoffact Records has released over the years.

Accompanying the playlist is the latest episode of my “Playlist Breakdown” podcast, in which I spotlight one of the playlist’s songs and why it’s so special, interesting, and/or meaningful. This month’s episode focuses on “Faith,” a surprisingly sacred song from experimental outfit Controlled Bleeding.

Both of these are little bonuses for subscribers who support Opus financially. If you’d like to get access to them (and more), subscribe to Opus for just $5.00/month or $50/year. (You can also subscribe for free and get my weekend newsletter.)

Norway’s Astoria spent the last three years working on the songs that would become their new EP, Colder Than Before. That effort is readily apparent in the EP’s first single, “Fragment,” as the post-rock duo employ surging guitars, ceremonial percussion, and slow-burning arrangements with great patience and attention to detail.

The resulting emotional effect reminds me why I originally fell in love with this sort of musical sturm und drang back in the early days of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and Sigur Rós. And speaking of Sigur Rós, Edvard Mortensholm employs the same sort of lilting vocalizations as Jónsi Birgisson, which work perfectly with the brooding music, especially when he sings “I’ll cry with you” against delicate guitar cascades.

To their credit, Astoria don’t stick with the tried and true post-rock template for all of Colder Than Before. To be sure, all five of the EP’s songs are cut from the same tonal cloth, but Mortensholm and bandmate Henrik Nilsen Mortensholm also employ plenty of electronics that, at times, given their music an almost synth-pop edge — in case you were ever wondering what a Depeche Mode/Mono collaboration might sound like.

Colder Than Before will be released on August 7, 2026.

When Christopher Nolan announced that his next film would be an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, I’m sure that raised more than several eyebrows. But Nolan is one of the few filmmakers in the world who basically has carte blanche to make whatever film he darn well pleases, so a journey to ancient Greece it is.

Even after nearly three millennia, Homer’s story about the brave and cunning Odysseus’s decades-long journey home after fighting in the Trojan War remains one of civilization’s foundational epics. And the trailers have made it very clear that Nolan is approaching the story with all of his usual skill and gusto, not to mention a deeply talented cast that includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, and many, many more.

So does Nolan’s Odyssey live up to Homer’s epic legacy? Or should he have chosen a different story to adapt? Read on for a selection of critical reactions to Nolan’s latest film.

👍 Hoai-Tran Bui, ​“A majestic, haunting epic” 

Introspective and haunting, The Odyssey feels like Nolan is turning a new page in his filmography; a film that continues the soul-searching introspection that his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer grappled with, and deepens our understanding of one of the oldest stories in history. But it’s also a crowdpleaser in every sense of the word, a rousing and spectacular feat of blockbuster entertainment that wrestles with monsters and myths in equally dazzling ways.

👍 Walter Chaw, ​“An urgent diagnosis” 

The mark of a good adaptation is not that it plays every note, but that it honours every beat. But a great adaptation takes the material and makes something new from it, and so it is that Nolan does what I believe Homer did with the songs and folktales of his region. The Odyssey is an urgent diagnosis of who we are as a species at this point in our social evolution. Crucially, Nolan, like Homer, uses the key art form of his time to tell his version, in the largest format currently available. He has made a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar horror movie about how the moral abomination of “winning” has destroyed our notions of morality, along with our essential decency.

👍 Jake Kleinman, ​“Nolan’s purest picture ever” 

Yes, it’s straightforward — but it’s also Nolan, at the height of his power, using every skill, trick, technique, and ounce of Hollywood cred at his disposal to tell a story that’s both awe-inspiring and shockingly unambiguous.

👍 Josh Larsen, ​“Galvanizing [and] glorious” 

With The Odyssey, director Christopher Nolan tries to thread a particularly difficult needle — as if Odysseus, on his long journey home from the Trojan War, had attempted to sail between the whirlpool and the six-headed Scylla. Nolan takes Homer’s ancient tale of a fabled warrior and molds it into a moral awakening about the ruin of warfare. It’s essentially Odysseus as J. Robert Oppenheimer.

👍 Kyle Logan, “[Nolan’s] most politically potent film” 

Beyond imploring viewers to be kind and welcome immigrants, Nolan seems to be asking us to reckon with what horrors we have accepted to remain comfortable, to take stock of these things and to do what we can to make things right in the future. It’s a surprisingly nuanced and emotionally impactful political argument for a major summer blockbuster.

👍 Clarisse Loughrey, “[Nolan’s] best film to date” 

As a feat of pure adaptation, Nolan has achieved something I admittedly thought was near impossible. His stamp is all over the film — this is intellectual, brutalist, muscular Hollywood fare — yet it never wavers in its commitment to, and comprehension of, its source text. There’s not a single decision here that’s been thoughtlessly made, nor that I imagine Nolan himself couldn’t easily defend, much to the imagined chagrin of certain lawless parts of the internet.

👍 Germain Lussier, ​“Feels like an experience” 

It takes audiences on an incredible ride. A ride that, we believe, happens to be a little smoother in some places, and a little bumpier at others. In the end, it’s an awesome, fully satisfying film, but one that’s just a tad less than the perfection we’re all expecting.

👍 Nell Minow, ​“Never less than spectacular” 

One of the foundational stories of the Western canon has a grand, sweeping, meticulously diligent new version in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s epic version, bristling with Oscar-winning talent and impressive seriousness of purpose. It is, with a few significant exceptions, true to Homer’s story dating back to at least 300 BC and probably earlier. But there are also vestigial reflections of Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, both about men who must grapple with the consquences of their destructive, even ruthless, acts during wartime.

👍 Rodrigo Perez, “[A] monumental epic” 

For all its monsters, gods, armies, and thunder, The Odyssey finds its grandest image in a man confronting the dark mirror of what he has wrought. Nolan’s massive achievement understands that home is a place, a family, a memory, and a judgment. Odysseus may still recognize Ithaca when he reaches its shores. The more frightening question is whether Ithaca will recognize him.

👍 Matt Zoller Seitz, ​“Mightily impressive” 

This is the best part of Nolan’s commitment to (mostly) analog filmmaking, including the shot-on-film part: it makes you feel physically connected to onscreen events, in ways you can’t with slovenly, weightless “miracles” slapped together with ones and zeros in an entertainment factory.

The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026. Watch the trailer below.

Ten years ago today, Netflix took us to Hawkins, a sleepy little Indiana town where stranger things were afoot. This story about a group of kids battling an unspeakable, otherworldly evil would ultimately span five seasons, create a cultural phenomenon, and become one of Netflix’s biggest hits.

The reasons for Stranger Things’ success are many: a deep and abiding sense of ’80s nostalgia; beloved characters and coming-of-age melodrama; a killer score by Survive’s Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon as well as the inclusion of classic era-appropriate tunes; incredible production design and eye-popping effects; and loads of nerdy callouts, most notably Dungeons & Dragons.

The ’80s nostalgia and nerdy callouts in particular were what resonated with me. Say what you want about the series as a whole, and it was certainly uneven at times (season three, I’m looking at you), but Stranger Things’ first season remains a near-perfect TV experience for me. This might sound strange (npi), but I’ve rarely felt so seen by a TV series. As I wrote in my review of the first season:

Not since Donnie Darko have I felt so strongly that some filmmakers had tapped directly into my subconscious with the express purpose of hitting all of my favorite tropes and narrative ideas (e.g., shadowy government experiments, role-playing games, scientists meddling where they shouldn’t be meddling, otherworldly monsters, coming-of-age stories, ’80s pop culture). Or, as my friend Jeremy put it, “It’s like the Duffer Brothers are us!”

But there’s another reason for the series’ success and broad cultural resonance, one that goes a little deeper than nostalgia. Stranger Things possessed a sincerity and lack of cynicism that, though occasionally awkward and on the nose, remained steadfast right up to its final, bittersweet scenes. And I think Emily St. James did a fantastic job of summing it up in her review of the series’ second season:

One of fiction’s most powerful functions is the way it allows us to tell stories about what we do and don’t value, the kinds of people we want to be and the kinds of people we want to see in the world. I don’t need to someone to explain to me that the best way to win somebody’s heart is to treat them like a human being, because I’m past that phase of my life. But many of those who watch Stranger Things do need to hear that, and I’m glad there’s a show willing to talk to them, too.

The world we live in might be complicated and full of bad choices, but some things remain easy to understand: Treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Remind yourself that other people are the authors of their own stories as surely as you are the author of your own. Don’t ever treat anybody as if they exist solely to help you get what you want.

Too many stories of the past several years have flirted with the idea that any or all of the above values might not be sound. Even if Stranger Things isn’t 100 percent to my taste, I like knowing that one of the most popular series of our time doesn’t just embrace said values, but shouts them from the rooftops.

Even in its weakest moments, Stranger Things never ceased wearing its heart on its sleeve. Sure, that occasionally led to some Big Emotional Moments™ that made you roll your eyes. At the same time, however, I was almost never not caught up in the characters and their stories, be it Eleven’s struggle to overcome her trauma even while battling extra-dimensional horrors, Steve’s maturation from bully and pretty boy to the best damn babysitter of all time, or Hopper battling his demons of grief and loss.

From my review of the fifth and final season: “Stranger Things’ emphasis on friendship above all else might’ve been too earnest for its own good at times, but it was also a welcome respite from the cynicism that floods our world these days.” I suspect I’ll eventually make a return trip to Hawkins some day, when I need to experience that respite again, and I highly doubt that I’ll be the only one making such a journey in the years to come.

Much has been published about AI’s potential effects on us. I myself have written about how AI undermines both our ability to agree on what’s real and true and our aesthetic sensibilities, among other things. But Alan Noble recently noted another concern with AI’s growing ubiquity: its effect on our curiosity. And in particular, he questions the effects of Google’s new approach to search results, which promotes AI-generated summaries rather than simply pointing you to relevant sites.

In the past, Google didn’t give you answers to your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and — most important to this article — sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea but you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questions directly, cutting out the path of exploration?

More:

When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we knew to look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us to discover interesting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.

To be sure, the process that Noble describes in that first quote is far from efficient. There are times when an AI-generated summary is, in fact, more useful (even after taking everything it says with a few grains of salt). Case in point: Earlier this week, my wife had an issue with her laptop that prevented her from working, and Google’s summaries did make it easier to troubleshoot and ultimately fix it. Back in the good ol’ days, who knows how much more time I would’ve spent sifting through Reddit, Stack Overflow, and various support forums to find the solution?

That said, Noble’s point is still worth considering, because efficiency isn’t the be-all and end-all, nor should it be.

One of my very favorite things to do as a kid was to sit down in front of a set of encyclopedias and just lose myself in them. I’d begin with one topic (usually something airplane or space-related) and just start leapfrogging from term to term, volume to volume, with no real goal in mind other than embracing my curiosity and reading whatever I could find about, well, whatever. It was far from efficient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was simply to learn about new things and/or dig deep into my pet topics.

When I discovered the nascent World Wide Web in 1995, just a few short years after it became publicly available, I once again felt like that kid sitting down in front of his family’s World Book set, with their maroon bindings and gold lettering. Clicking from one link to the next, and the next one after that, felt like jumping from volume to volume, only more so. Indeed, that was the web’s great promise, that we’d now have unfettered access to the world’s information, with no gatekeepers standing in our way. The web contained information on countless topics that World Book editors would never deem worthy of their pages, and it was all just waiting to be discovered.

I realize I’m painting a pretty rosy picture of things. Heaven knows there’s always been plenty of salacious, hateful, and misleading stuff on the web, and we’d all be better off as a species if it’d never been uploaded in the first place. But that doesn’t detract from the incalculable amount of good content out there, just waiting to be discovered. And once upon a time, Google was an invaluable tool for discovering it. But Noble’s right to worry that those days are coming to an end, with efficiency (and advertising dollars) now trumping curiosity and discovery:

Google AI summaries are not the end of curiosity by themselves. But they are part of a larger trend in our society to circumvent our imaginative exploration and efficiently answer our questions so we can keep the world moving toward consumption and production.

For the time being, it’s still possible to circumvent Google’s AI-centric search results, though I’m not sure how much longer Google will continue to allow an old-school search experience. But we should all enjoy it while it lasts, and let our curiosity and imagination run free in ways that no AI-generated summary can ever satisfy. Furthermore, we should take advantage of tools and platforms that encourage random discovery, be it website directories or good ol’ webrings.

When people think of techno music and the like, the images that immediately come to mind are almost certainly euphoric in nature. Think discothèques filled to bursting with beautiful people, their bodies moving in synch and their hands raised in celebration as they dance until the wee hours of the morning.

Now make no mistake, there’s plenty that’s euphoric-sounding about Ise, the latest album from Irish producer Killian Walsh. In reality, though, the album emerged from a place of great loss and suffering. In a short three-month span, Walsh lost both his wife and father, and at its core, Ise is a chronicle of his grief, albeit one told with the aid of pulsing beats and surging sequencers.

“Robin” is one of Ise’s highlights, a driving trance number that Walsh composed when he was at his lowest point following his wife’s death from cancer. Knowing that, “Robin” takes on some additional heft, and never more so than when the beat subsides and the ambience expands, giving Walsh space to pay tribute to his dearly departed (“Where are you? I can’t see you but I can hear you. If you were here, what would I say? Thank you… I love you.”). It’s a moment of peaceful reflection before the beat slams back in. Walsh’s daughter Elise lends her lovely voice to the song, as well, making it even more personal.

Ise is currently available.

Open Studio’s cover of the Kid A opening track might start off with that iconic synth melody, but the jazz quartet quickly and subtly begin evolving the song while still remaining faithful to Thom Yorke et al.‘s original vibe. Even when pianist Peter Martin sends his fingers flying over the ivories in a flurry of notes, it never kills the song but rather, feels like an exploration of intriguing possibilities and alternate realities.

Originally released in 1985 as the first single from The Colour of Spring, “Life’s What You Make It” became one of Talk Talk’s biggest hits even as the band was migrating towards a more experimental and eclectic sound, as heard on Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.

As for Seal, he’s best known for pop hits like “Crazy,” “Kiss From a Rose,” and “Prayer for the Dying.” Talk Talk might therefore seem like a bit of an odd fit, but this performance at Philadelphia’s Unity Concert for America on the 4th of July is fantastic. Of especial note is guitarist Zach Wish, whose playing and tone are masterful and perfectly evoke David Rhodes’s original performance.

Seal and his band are on tour in Europe throughout the rest of July. (And speaking of odd fits, Seal is also a big Alice in Chains fan.)

I’ve been on a bit of a jungle/drum ‘n’ bass kick lately, so lucky for me that Aural Imbalance (aka, the UK’s Simon Huxtable) dropped a new album last month.

Fragile Shapes features the immaculate production and intricately programmed breakbeats that I’ve come to expect from Huxtable over the years. But on album opener “Form of Defraction,” he also layers plenty of chime and shimmer over his fractured beats in the form of delicate, billowing textures that evoke Robin Guthrie’s classic guitar-work, and imbue the song with a sense of tranquility and vastness.

I wasn’t expecting to be transported to be transported to the classic drum n’ bliss era of the late ’90s and early ’00s when I pressed “Play” on Fragile Shapes, but it turned out to be a very welcome journey.

Fragile Shapes is currently available on Auxiliary.

As much I hate to admit it, I can easily fall down a YouTube rabbit hole and spend a shameful amount of time watching whatever the algorithm shovels into my eyeballs. But every so often, the algorithm serves up something that might actually be worth my time. Case in point: LADbible’s Honesty Box.

The premise is simple: Somebody is brought into the studio and answers anonymously submitted questions drawn randomly from a box. But when the person in question is a CIA whistleblower, former Navy SEAL, or someone living with dissociative identity disorder, then the answers suddenly get a lot more interesting and eye-opening.

This being LADbible, some of the videos promise more salacious answers and are probably not work-safe (like the one with the porn director). I steer clear of those videos, but a Q&A session with a diagnosed sociopath or former Scientologist? Yeah, I’ll probably stay up (way too) late watching something like that.

Without a doubt, WordPress remains the world’s most popular blogging tool. But as WordPress has continued to evolve and grow more feature-heavy, it could be argued that it’s lost some of its blogging focus. Fortunately, several excellent alternatives exist for those who simply want a way to post and share their thoughts online.

But the field of blogging tools continues to grow apace, and one of the more interesting areas is related to the Bluesky social media platform. Or more accurately, the AT Protocol that undergirds Bluesky. Bluesky itself is a microblogging platform where one can publish short posts up to 300 characters in length. But if you want something long-form that’s connected to your Bluesky account and the broader “Atmosphere” — i.e., the ecosystem of interconnected apps and platforms that runs on the AT protocol — several solid options exist.

Leaflet

Developed by Hyperlink Academy, which bills it as “a lightweight collaborative publishing tool for quick tiny docs that can grow into rich creative surfaces,” Leaflet offers several approaches to publishing online.

Right off the bat, you can create standalone documents that are basically functional webpages containing text, images, media embeds, and other content types. These can be nested inside each other as subpages, enabling you to create wikis, multi-branch essays, and other interconnected webpages. Leaflet also supports canvases, which are freeform whitespaces where content is laid out via drag and drop. Canvases can be used to create visual documents like mood boards (example) and can also be embedded within documents.

You don’t need an account to create documents and canvases, and they can be shared with others (example). One of Leaflet’s biggest features is collaborative writing; you can share a document with friends and colleagues who can then work on it alongside you. However, if you want to publish documents and canvases on your own domain, you’ll need to sign up using your Bluesky account.

Once you’ve created a Leaflet account, you unlock a more traditional blogging experience. You can create multiple publications (e.g., blogs), and publish long-form posts on them to your heart’s content. Like standalone documents, posts can contain a wide variety of content types, as well as nested subpages and canvases. And like documents and canvases, posts can be collaborative.

Leaflet offers a number of styling options to customize the look of your documents and publications, including colors and font choices, along with support for custom domains. And if you sign up for Leaflet with Bluesky, anything you publish on Leaflet can be automatically shared on your Bluesky account. All of this is wrapped up in a very stripped down interface that’s unlike many other blogging tools. On the one hand, that means less visual clutter, which is always a nice thing. On the other hand, it can be hard to find things, like a link to Leaflet’s documentation for those times when you’re stuck.

Leaflet is free, but upgrading to Leaflet Pro (currently $90/year) unlocks additional features including in-depth analytics and the ability to send posts via email. Leaflet currently does not support paid subscriptions, but it’s in the works.

Offprint

Even the most cursory look at Offprint makes it readily apparent that its biggest inspiration — and clearest competition — is Substack. Which makes sense, given Substack’s prominence and popularity.

Like Substack, publishing on Offprint is quite easy once you’ve signed in with your Bluesky account. Offprint’s editor is very minimal and simple to use, though it also possesses a block-based approach that should be familiar to WordPress users, and supports all of your basic content types. Unlike Substack, though, Offprint doesn’t support different post types, which Substack uses for things like podcasting.

Offprint offers some basic design customization options (e.g., colors, fonts). If you want to unlock more options, though, you’ll need to upgrade to a “Pro” account, which is currently $52/yr. Indeed, upgrading to a “Pro” account unlocks a suite of additional features, including email newsletters, custom domain support, multiple publications, and additional content management features like standalone pages and components (e.g., chunks of content that can be included in multiple places on your publication).

As of right now, Offprint doesn’t support paid subscriptions. According to their FAQ, however, “reader-funded subscriptions and other monetization options are on the roadmap” and will presumably be offered to “Pro” users first. That does raise the question of whether Offprint will take a cut of credit card transactions à la Substack, or if they’ll be more like Ghost and just charge monthly fees only.

All in all, Offprint is a very sleek, modern-looking CMS with lots of potential. However, I worry that their visual similarity to Substack might be something of a liability, especially until they offer more top-tier publishing features like paid subscriptions. True, Offprint’s killer feature is that it runs on the Atmosphere, giving authors more control over their content. But for non-technical writers, bloggers, etc., will that be enough? In any case, I’m excited to see Offprint’s continued development and how they tackle these issues.

Pckt

Compared to Leaflet and Offprint, Pckt looks, well, a little goofy. Case in point: When I access my Pckt admin area, my drafts are displayed in a Comic Sans-type font. But everything about Pckt feels very casual and purposefully designed for people who just want to blog without needing to worry about anything remotely technical.

Pckt does have some limitations, though. Free users are limited to 15 posts/month, one active blog, and 5GB of storage. But Pckt offers two paid tiers that offer varying levels of monthly posting activity as well as custom domains, analytics, and unlimited media storage.

Regardless of your tier, Pckt’s publishing interface is very inviting and unimposing. Like the aforementioned platforms, it offers a wide range of content types to flesh out your posts as well as the expected design customization options.

That said, everything about Pckt — its design, tone, etc. — seems very much geared towards casual and personal blogs. In other words, if you’re looking to launch a media empire with subscribers and whatnot, then Pckt probably isn’t the platform to use. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. Pckt clearly knows its niche and where its focus lies, which is making blogging an “inviting and playful experience.”

On a related note, I really appreciate Pckt’s own blog, which maintains the friendly tone in product updates and announcements. But they’ve also posted one of the most concise explanations of the Atmosphere that I’ve read; it’s a perfect primer for AT Protocol newbies.

I’ve known about Leaflet for awhile now, but I recently discovered Offprint and Pckt while researching Standard.site, a new lexicon for encouraging, supporting, and promoting longform content on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Again, that might not matter to many bloggers, but I think it speaks to the flexibility of the AT Protocol (which, full disclosure, I’m still wrapping my head around).

One thing I do appreciate is that there seems to be a decent level of camaraderie between all of these platforms. Sure, they’re technically competitors, but they also share a lot of the same goals when it comes to interoperability and author independence. And apparently, they even help each other out with branding. There’s something really attractive about that sort of collaboration, especially given the often cut-throat nature of tech and social media.

In all, I continue to be impressed with the sheer — and ever-growing — diversity of easy-to-use content management systems and blogging tools that are now available. There’s really never been a better time to start blogging and take control of your online experience.

Note: Several other longform publishing platforms exist for the AT Protocol, including WhiteWind and Lemma. However, WhiteWind no longer seems to be in active development. As for Lemma, which was formerly called Pipup, it feels very stripped down compared to the above platforms.

For starters, there are no design or theme customization options that I could find. As for its editor, it relies heavily on Markdown, which is certainly functional but not quite as user-friendly as, say, Offprint’s editor. And it has some odd UX choices. For example, once you publish an article, there’s no way to un-publish it; you have to delete it and start all over.

In all fairness, though, Lemma does seem to be in active development, if their roadmap is any indication. A “Pro subscription” feature is currently in the works, along with plans for custom domains. It’ll be interesting to revisit Lemma in a few months to see how it’s matured as a platform.

Put simply, scrolljacking is terrible and should never be used. Earlier this year, I critiqued scroll fading content, which is a different feature altogether from scrolljacking, though both are obviously related to one of the most common activities that your website’s users will do. But whereas scroll fading affects the display of a webpage’s content as users scroll, scrolljacking affects the scrolling itself, and in the process, creates some significant UX and accessibility issues.

When you flick your finger up or down on a trackpad or something like Apple’s Magic Mouse, the webpage starts scrolling, and the faster you flick, the faster and further it typically scrolls. But the webpage stops scrolling the instant your finger comes back into contact with the trackpad, similar to scrolling on an iPhone. Scrolljacking, however, overrides and hijacks this expected behavior to impose its own behavior: the webpage continues scrolling a bit longer even after you’ve signaled that the scrolling should stop. This is unexpected and distracting, and therein lies the problem. As the Nielsen Norman Group’s Sara Paul writes:

In most computer operating systems, the default scroll speed can be manually adjusted to be more sensitive or less sensitive, but it is always consistent. Users expect a consistent scroll rate across all the applications on their devices.

When a website alters the default scroll functionality, it “hijacks” the user’s control over their device and can generate disorientation.

I’ve created a scrolljacking demo so you can experience this disorientation for yourself. Adam Siekierski’s colorfully titled “Don’t Fuck With Scroll” website is another example, and also lists various reasons why it’s a terrible idea (e.g., accessibility issues, inconsistent performance).

I personally hate scrolljacking because it increases the cognitive load of using a website. When I’m scrolling down a webpage to read it, I know roughly where I want to scroll to. I’ll pick out a specific word, line, or heading for use as a marker and scroll to that point. But scrolljacking keeps moving past my selected marker, forcing me to scroll even more to reacquire its location and reorient myself on the webpage. That may only require a fraction of a second, but I notice it every single time I have to do it. And every single time I feel like the webpage is getting in my way when all I want to do is read it and move on with my day.

Scrolljacking is sometimes given a cool, advanced-sounding name like “momentum scrolling,” “inertial scrolling,” or “smooth scrolling” that makes it sound like a must-have feature. (After all, who wants a website that doesn’t scroll smoothly?) Don’t believe the hype, though. Fellow designers and developers, resist the urge to make your website “cool” just by making it scroll a little differently. Your users won’t benefit from it nearly as much as you think they will. But if you insist on implementing scrolljacking, then at least provide a mechanism by which users can disable it.

Some valid use cases might exist for scrolljacking: a showcase website that relies heavily on animation for an immersive effect, perhaps. But for the vast majority of websites, scrolljacking offers no benefits and will just make them worse for their users.

I hesitate to even call this a “trailer,” since it’s really just a confirmation of what we already knew to be true: that a new Evangelion series is coming from writer Yokō Tarō (Nier: Automata), directors Kazuya Tsurumaki and Tōko Yatabe, and studios Khara and CloverWorks.

As such, this doesn’t really feature anything other than some cryptic and ominous phrases (e.g., “What we hear is the song of eternal damnation”), some beautiful-if-otherworldly imagery, and some final animation of a particularly demonic-looking Eva, and all of it set to some brooding music. No story details are revealed, but I can already hear countless Evangelion fans taking to the internets to discuss and dissect what it might mean.

In other Evangelion news, two movies — Death and Rebirth and The End of Evangelion — will be screening in American theaters this month for one day only.

Although they don’t exist within the Star Wars canon proper, the three seasons of Star Wars: Visions nevertheless delivered some intriguing stories set in that galaxy far, far away, and rendered in stunning detail by some of the world’s best animation studios, including Trigger, Production I.G, and Science Saru. The recently announced Ninth Jedi series expands on several episodes in Star Wars: Visions, and follows the adventures of a young Force-sensitive girl who’s searching for her father, a renowned sabersmith.

Animated by Production I.G and directed by Shunsuke Tada (Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These), The Ninth Jedi certainly looks promising in this first trailer, especially when it reveals that our heroes and villains might not be all that they’re cracked up to be. The series is ostensibly set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker; the Jedi and the Sith have long since disappeared, and the galaxy is now trapped in an age of chaos. And in this era, do the concepts like the Jedi and the Sith still mean anything?

We’ll find out on August 5, 2026, when The Ninth Jedi begins streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

In order to better track my various cultural experiences (e.g., movies, TV shows, books, restaurants), I’ve created the Cultural Diet. Think of it as my own personal Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Yelp, all rolled into one (more info here). Every month, I recap everything that I watched, read, etc., in the previous month.

Originally released in 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira — which he adapted from his own manga — is undoubtedly one of the greatest anime titles of all time. Indeed, for many Western viewers, Akira was their introduction to anime, and its dystopian storyline, stunning animation, and haunting soundtrack remain as influential and iconic as ever (read my review).

Crunchyroll, which currently streams the film, has announced that they’re bringing Otomo’s film back into U.S. and Canadian theaters for a limited run, and in 4K and IMAX no less (via io9). This special edition will begin playing on September 4, 2026, and will be available in Japanese with English subtitles as well as an English dub.

In related news, Katsuhiro Otomo has launched a new anime studio called OVAL GEAR, and its first work is currently in development, though no title or other details have been announced.

A robotic voice intoning existential despair against punishing beats and harsh electronics? Yes, please, and thank you. Originally recorded as a brooding instrumental for 2018’s WarMech soundtrack, Front Line Assembly’s “Molotov” had undergone several permutations over the years. For my money, though, the best one comes via Ottawa’s Encephalon, who turn the track into an excoriation of a world devoid of meaning and purpose.

“I was born for no reason at all” intones Matt Gifford, his voice wrapped up in cold mechanical tones as he laments a life seemingly wasted: “All my life I’ve tried to live as though with humility/Though I dropped so many torches.” But the song takes a darker, more foreboding turn in its final moments, as a purpose finally emerges, albeit one that might cause most to shudder:

I was born to murder the world
To light the Molotov
Perform the cluster bomb
Yoke the throat of man
And scorch the stars

A criticism of those who resort to violence to deal with the mundanity of their lives? A glimpse into the mind of a psychopath? A call to arms and revolution? Whatever the interpretation, Encephalon’s take on “Molotov” is a certified industrial banger.

Mechviruses is currently available on Artoffact Records.

Everyone knows you use CSS to create and style beautiful websites. But did you know that you can also use it to play classic video games? That’s precisely what LayoutIt! have achieved with cssQuake, a port of id Software’s 1996 first-person shooter that uses the PolyCSS library to render 3D visuals as an actual inspectable website.

cssQuake is built around the PolyCSS 3D DOM rendering engine. This turns Quake geometry into real HTML elements: world faces are positioned with CSS matrix3d(...) transforms, textured with pixelated CSS backgrounds, and grouped into meshes instead of being drawn on a <canvas>.

That may seem really technical, but all you really need to know is that you can play a mid-’90s video game in your browser without needing to download or install any plugins or extensions. cssQuake runs completely native in-browser, which is pretty impressive, as is the fact that creator Agustin Capeletto is continually adding new features and updates. Also, to really set the mood, be sure to listen to Nine Inch Nails’ original soundtrack, which can be found on Apple Music and other platforms.