One of the coolest things I’ve seen on tiktok lately is the rise of the “cyberdeck”. The first person I saw posting about it is actually credited with kicking this trend off, a 22-year-old named Annika Tan (@ubeboobey) who built a computer and put it in a mermaid clutch.

The case is vintage pearlescent and the hardware fittings are gold. Inside is a Raspberry Pi, a small screen, a battery pack. Over a million people watched the first video. Her two-part tutorial series hit ten million views.

Cyberdecks aren’t new in any way. The name comes from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, where it described the portable computers hackers used to “jack into cyberspace”. The modern DIY version has been evolving for years in maker spaces and reddit communities and discord servers, mostly among the kind of people who enjoy soldering and reading documentation (I am neither). Then Tan posted her mermaid clutch and a whole new bunch of people started paying attention, who'd never thought about building their own computer, and now desperately wanted to.

Last year, we talked about a kind of context collapse that was going on after The Cut published links to a whole bunch of fanfic about The Pitt. At the time I said:

[Sidenote: the proliferation of hideous GenAI writing means I can no longer pen the phrase “It’s not about x, it’s about y” ever again.]

So I loved reading this thoughtful op-ed from Crystal Bell in Teen Vogue: We Need Real Etiquette When Reporting on Fandom. You should read the whole thing.

Last week I saw Project Hail Mary. It’s so good. A big sweeping adventure with strong E.T. vibes. Ryan Gosling is excellent. Go see it.

Then this week there was an internet kerfuffle about some comments the author of the book the film is based on, Andy Weir, made. He went on a podcast called The Critical Drinker, which I’ve never listened to, but whose schtick seems to be doing movie reviews where the blame for failed reboots or additions to franchises gets placed squarely on studios “going woke”.

Weir and the host started talking about Star Trek, the raft of new shows being added to the Trek universe, and the recent cancellation of Starfleet Academy. Weir pronounced the show “shit”. This might have all been the opinions of just one guy, but the context here mattered a lot. When you go on a pod that’s engaging in culture war clout-chasing, people are going to assume that’s what you mean.

One of the cutest Christmas presents I got last year was this pin my sister gave me:

Everyone else in the family drew a blank looking at it. But if you know, you know. It’s an enamel pin of a cardigan that’s half Taylor Swift’s distinctive folklore cardigan, and half the JWA cardigan made famous by Harry Styles.

This week I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for a new generation to make things with computers. When we were talking in Berlin, Luce made a point that stuck with me — while I view the early web as a roadmap for the way things could be better online, her generation and younger have only ever known app-based environments. For them, “building for the web” is a nonsense. They only know platforms. Which is not to say that they don’t do incredible, creative, generative work on those platforms — just that the idea of tinkering with the foundations doesn’t mean much to ipad kids.

I kept thinking about that as Apple released the Macbook Neo, it’s first budget laptop (US$599).

I absolutely loved this essay from Sam Henri Gold about the Neo, This is not the computer for you. “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it”.

This week I was listening to an episode of one of my fave conspiracy debunking pods, QAA. It’s been running for years now, but in the early days of QAnon it was a really invaluable resource for diving deep into what was going on on the fringes of the American right, something that’s unfortunately now in all of our faces.

This particular episode was about the famous account of a psych study called “When Prophecy Fails”, published in 1956. I’ve referred to this study several times when I’ve been thinking and writing about online conspiracy thinking in fandom and other spaces. In 1954, a Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her small circle of followers that flying saucers would arrive to carry them to safety before the waters rose. The aliens didn’t come and the flood didn’t happen. Three psychologists from the University of Minnesota had embedded themselves in the group to watch what happened next, and what they reported was that the believers doubled down. Faced with total disconfirmation, the group didn't dissolve in embarrassment. They started proselytising harder than ever, rationalising the failure as proof that their faith had saved the world.

This account helped launch a really influential concept in social science, which you’ve definitely heard of: cognitive dissonance. The idea that true believers, confronted with evidence that destroys their worldview, will not update — they will dig in deeper. The only problem is that it didn't happen.

Happy New Harry Album Day! Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally has dropped. No hot takes until I’ve spent three to five days listening to it on repeat.

Yesterday, I listened to Harry’s interview with Zane Lowe. This long-form interview is something Harry does as part of every album cycle. Lowe has been dubbed “pop’s unofficial therapist” since being hired by Apple Music, specialising in empathetic deep dives into not only an artist’s album, but also their creative process. But yesterday, I was struck again by the fact that after listening to the pair of them talk for an hour, I’d learned absolutely nothing.

It’s a bit of running joke in Harry’s fandom that he’s so media-trained you will never learn anything about him, even in the steady spotlight of promoting a new album. Even here, where Lowe asks about Liam Payne’s death for the first time, all we learn is that losing his friend has caused him to want to “live life to the fullest”. Okay, hallmark card.

Like many people, I just finished watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. It was a good, self-contained little series, and even if you’re still burnt out on the Game of Thrones universe, you’ll enjoy it. I assume they’ll go on to make more and more until we hate it, but just watch season one and move on with your life. Interestingly, I think there’s something appealing about Ser Duncan as an example of “connected masculinity” but I need to chew on that more.

Anyway, this isn’t about that. One of the things that caught my eye was this story about Game of Thrones fans and Breaking Bad fans “warring online”. The context:

First, we need to talk a little about IMDb ratings. These are powered by users adding star ratings for TV episodes and movies they've watched, providing a number out of 10. These are collated into an overall score, prominently displayed on the IMDb page for the particular show or movie. Most people probably don't even look at it, but for some people, it's a point of pride.

This week I’ve been thinking about the demise of twitter, and what has risen up in its place over on X The Everything App. Normally, I just keep calling the platform “twitter”, both because X is a stupid name and because most people who aren’t chronically online don’t even really know its called X now. Also because why do anything Elon Musk tells you to do.

But for a time, twitter was one of my favourite places online. I joined in March 2007, just a year after the platform was founded. For whatever reason there was a vibrant group of people from Aotearoa using it in those early years. I remember giving a presentation to my fellow partners at my law firm about why we should set up a branded twitter account in 2009. I remember showing them the photo of the Miracle on the Hudson tweet and trying to explain why this was how information would move now.

For many years, twitter was an unrivalled source of access and information. It didn’t matter what topic I was interested in, I could find and follow experts and activists and academics and commentators and journalists. I could ask them questions. It was incredible.

Last year when we were talking about context collapse and the fourth wall, I spent a bit of time explaining fanvids. Then later we talked about fan edits, where fans recut movies or shows themselves to reflect a different story they wanted to tell. This week I want to talk about their gen z offspring, confusingly also called fan edits.

Fan edits, the way tiktok and insta users are deploying the term, are like fanvids of old — compilations of clips to tell a story, about a show or a central character or pairing — set to music. Here’s one about The Summer I Turned Pretty:

We’re a day late this week because it was Waitangi Day in Aotearoa, our national day.

On Thursday, I went to Laneway. Amazing day, incredible weather, Chappell Roan rules. One of the recurring conversations all day before Role Model took the stage was, “who’s going to be Sally?”.

Let’s back up quickly for some context.

This year I'm still wrestling with what it means to find new and interesting ideas online when we have to wade through so much slop. Curating the Curators is a series of interviews with my favourite online wranglers and sharers.

Lucy Blakiston has been running her gen z media empire Shit You Should Care About for six years now, and still manages to wow me every day with her ability to collect, distil and share complex ideas. We chat all the time, but I wanted to talk to her specifically about curation, trust, platform incentives, and how to give people the news without giving them the blues.

How would you define something that we should care about in 2027? What makes the cut?

This week tickets for Harry Styles’ upcoming Together Together tour went on sale and for the millionth time in the nine years of his solo career I found myself in the trenches of the ticket wars.

If you’re fortunate enough to not stan a stupidly popular musical artist, or, idk, don’t want to go the Superbowl or the Olympics, you might have managed to make it through life without considering Ticketmaster your actual nemesis. I am very old, so I still remember being able to queue up for tickets in the street that were sold in record stores (Big Day Out) or calling to buy them on an actual phone (Michael Jackson). Now, the whole thing is a landmine of competing presales, insane prices, false scarcity, scalpers and bots.

Though it’s far from a new idea, there seems to be a fresh wave of articles going around at the moment about digital detoxing in its various forms. It might be the January of it all (new year, new you), but it predates that a bit. It’s the idea that we’re giving up streaming for vinyl or cassettes or mp3s, that we’re bricking our phones or switching to dumbphones or making our phones greyscale to reduce our dependence on them. It’s buying up old dvds or bluerays. It’s rawdogging flights (can imagine literally nothing worse).

And look, it’s a completely natural, healthy, human reaction when the world is as much of a dumpster fire as it is right now to want to tune out and do something (anything) else.

But I actually think that there’s a distinction here that’s worth exploring, that’s less between offline and online (or physical and digital) and more between queue and feed.

One of my longest-running subscriptions probably is to Web Curios, a lovingly-tended weekly digest of weird, wonderful and deeply interesting links curated by Matt Muir. He also co-runs the Tiny Awards, which we’ve discussed a bunch here. I was lucky enough to meet up with Matt in person last year, and he agreed to chat before Christmas for this series.

Tell me how Web Curios started.

I was working at a now-defunct PR agency called Hill and Knowlton, part of WPP, back in 2010. We were forever telling clients it was incredibly important to “make content”, and so it was decided that we should also be making content, and I asked if I could write about things that might actually be useful to people working in marketing on the internet.

Hello 2026 and welcome to a bunch of new readers, I’m so delighted to have you here. Last year, I found I’d get a little influx of new fandom and pop-culture readers after I wrote something in that arena, who then unsubbed when I wrote about the future of the internet, and a bump of technology readers who unsubbed when I wrote about Taylor Swift. All I can say to that is: why not both dot gif. Here’s my plan for this year. I will be no more consistent! I’m always thinking about culture AND technology AND gay hockey players AND surveillance capitalism AND astronauts AND the independent web AND Harry Styles. So, more of all of that.

While Heated Rivalry has consumed everyone’s brains over the break, there was another massive television moment that played out with the fifth and final season of Stranger Things airing. I watched it with my godkids who were obsessed with the show, and I loved the soundtrack, and then I more or less moved on in my head.

But within days, my fyp was filling up with a very familiar-feeling set of posts. Some fans of the show were doing close reads of the final episode and claiming that there was more to the story than the happy-ending epilogue that had been presented. I’ll try and write the rest of this post without overt spoilers, but if you’re holding off learning anything at all about how this show ends, skip to the “more good stuff” section below.

I was going to take a week off but then Heated Rivalry finished and my brain was too full of thoughts.

If you’re an extremely online person (and it’s hard to imagine you’re not if you’re subbed to this email) you won’t have been able to escape hearing about the Canadian smash-hit tv romance about two closeted professional hockey players. Let’s catch everyone else up real quick. Heated Rivalry is a six-part show made for the Canadian streamer Crave. It’s based on a novel by Rachel Reid, part of a series of interconnected m/m novels called Game Changers, all set in the world of North American major league hockey. The book was written back in 2019, but has come back to prominence recently, due to the rise in popularity of romance fiction in general and sports romance in particular. Though don’t get me started on whoever has decided romance novels now all need cartoon covers(!)

Jacob Tierney, an actor and director who you might know from the very funny Canadian comedy Letterkenny, read the book during covid and decided to adapt it for tv.

It’s now been almost a full year since I started writing this email to you regularly (wild that I’ve kept it up tbh). But rather than boring everyone with some bs year-in-review listicle, I thought I’d catalogue my current obsessions: the topics and questions that kept resurfacing all year in conversations, drafts, and DMs, long after I thought I was done with them. These are the ideas I kept circling and the questions I’m dragging with me into 2026.

#001 Neighbourhoods online

What would being online look like if we could hang out in small, intentional groups?

I started this year by saying that I wanted to focus on the good internet, and that permeated pretty much everything I read, thought about and shared. Out of that came this strong conviction that (if we’re using place-based metaphors) the first phase of the internet had us living in kooky little villages, the second phase of the internet has forced us to coexist in gross, unliveable mega-cities, and the next phase of the internet needs to be about neighbourhoods.

This is the second in my series of interviews with people who I've been following this year who are engaged in discovery and curation. Sari Azout is the founder of Sublime, an app that lets you save and connect things you find online, and discover related ideas. As you know, I’ve been obsessed this year with digital gardens, how we explore, and how we share our journeys — and Sublime is such an interesting take on that.

For readers who don’t know you yet, can you introduce yourself and talk a bit about what you’re building with Sublime and The Sublime newsletter?

It's taken me a lifetime to get here, but Sublime is where all of my deeply held beliefs coalesce into one piece of software.

I want to talk this week about some backlash to Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, but this isn’t a newsletter about Swifties, it’s about digital manipulation so hang in here with me.

When Taylor’s new album dropped, the main discourse was that it was a flop even her diehard fans couldn’t defend. It has a song on it about her boyfriend’s dick. Max Martin couldn’t save it.

I’m not here to defend Showgirl. It’s been a grower of an album for me — and I will unapologetically belt out Fate of Ophelia and Opalite in the car, but it’s never overtaking my love for 1989. It also doesn’t matter, Tay’s doing just fine: