Windfall

The Everdeck is a versatile 120-card system designed to support a wide range of traditional and modern card games. Its design weaves together mathematical and linguistic patterns, allowing it to map cleanly onto many existing systems, standard decks, Tarot, Hanafuda, and more, which makes it especially interesting as a piece of universal game infrastructure.

Started playing Cairn on my Steamdeck, such an amazing game.

Harriet Baker reviews Sophie Calle’s first book Suite Venitienne, which documents her pursuit of one man through the streets of Venice.

Sharon Ruston surveys the scientific background to Frankenstein, grounding its horror in real debates about resuscitation, galvanism, and ambiguous states between life and death.

In 2025 I tried to watch and read less US media. This isn’t a definitive list, just the books and movies that followed me out of the room.

Books

I read a lot of quiet, plot-light fiction this year. Books that care more about mood, memory, and voice than big events.

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano

Set in 1960s Paris, Ballerina follows a single mother’s troubled relationship with her young son, and her enigmatic involvement with the narrator.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

An Italian expat couple in Berlin: freelancers with few constraints, tending houseplants and curating a life online while the city hums around them.

I’m a Fool for Loving You by Camila Sosa Villada

Nine short stories about desire, danger, tenderness, and survival—sharp, funny, and devastating.

It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

by Zoe Thorogood

A brutally honest (and often darkly funny) graphic memoir about living with bipolar disorder and trying to keep making things anyway.

Land of Mirrors by María Medem

A stunning, dreamlike graphic novel—mythic and intimate at the same time, with art that feels like it’s humming.

Movies

I watched fewer big movies and more films that feel like postcards: compact, precise, and a little haunted. The ones below are mostly about image and rhythm.

Can I Get a Witness?

A near-future moral fable with a quiet dread running under everything. It’s the kind of film where the premise is simple and the aftertaste is not.

La Jetée

A whole science-fiction epic told in still images. Time travel as memory, obsession, and inevitability. Short, perfect, and strangely emotional.

The Red Turtle

Nearly wordless, completely gorgeous. A story about solitude, companionship, and the long shape of a life, told with ocean rhythm.

Mars Express

A sleek, French cyberpunk noir: a PI and her android partner chasing a missing person case that keeps widening into something systemic.

Cristian Băluță writes about he moded a Panasonic Lumix G9II into a Leica M-Style camera.

Henry Desroches makes a thoughtful case for reclaiming the Web we actually want by embracing personal, hand-coded, syndicated websites and protocols like RSS & Webmentions.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

There’s a tab open on my laptop that’s been there for three weeks. A half-finished drawing, a reference image, a colour picker frozen mid-decision. I haven’t closed it. I think that means something.

2025 was hard. Like, genuinely hard in ways I’m not going to get into here, it was the kind of year that takes a lot out of you and doesn’t really ask permission before doing it. I made it through, which sounds dramatic but also just feels true. I’m not dwelling, I just want to be honest that I’m starting this year from a different place than I expected to be.

Okay. Moving on.

The question I keep coming back to for 2026 is simpler than the ones I usually ask myself, not what will I finish or what will I ship, just: what do I want to make? Not for anyone in particular, not toward anything specific, just for the thing itself.

There’s a tarot deck that’s been living in my head for too long, there are photographs I keep meaning to actually sit with instead of just archiving, there’s a drawing practice I keep treating like a warmup for something more serious when maybe the drawing is just the thing and I should stop waiting for the serious thing to show up. And then there’s a whole other thing I’m building on the side, something that grew out of an obsession and turned into a project without me totally noticing, which is maybe the best way for something to start. None of these have deadlines. None of them need to become anything. I want to find out what they are by actually making them instead of thinking about making them, which is a trap I fall into constantly and am trying very hard to stop doing.

That’s what I’m bringing into this year. Just the intention to keep going, keep the tabs open, see what accumulates.

The drawing still isn’t finished. I’ll probably look at it tonight.