Like the tide, it comes in and it washes over the beach. It's beautiful. But like the tide it goes out, sometimes it goes out further than it ever has, it recedes back across the beach and further out beyond the horizon. The bare seabed opens up in front of you and all you can do is look at it.

Thank you, Jack

Worse Lift

hiding from the rain

Actual born-Londoners aren't LARPing like this, they sold their shite family home for a million pounds and moved to Malaga years ago. They have their culture and they've taken it elsewhere.

a version of this existed for a few months last year but it was static. it was HTML with writing and pictures and videos and sounds. i had this feeling that the code should be as important as the content, that structurally each piece in relation to each other piece shouldn't change, that the mazelike quality should emerge from me intricately arranging paths through it. like classic hypertext

13, H, grate

i love to walk around and see things and take photos and go online and look at websites and click on links and take screenshots i love to surf and i love to browse

i see a website

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:38:15

but really the thing should be autonomous

Lift Analysis

somewhere between instagram and chatgpt

kind of mythopoesis

hello reader,

I imagine that some lab-grown 29-year-old from Woking with a mind honed to identify individuals who fit the profile of Real Londoner (as conceived of by 50 opinion-polled racist builders and their wives in the Midlands) picks a stubborn local who can still somehow afford to live here and passes him along to some creative studio.

He was a proper old-fashioned London geezer (cringe word, hate it, can't think of a better one, worst of all it's the correct word), kind of East Endy, kind of Real London, the kind you don't really meet but if you do it always feels like an uncanny immersive theatre experience. They're anachronistic. They only belong in the London collectively imagined by people who don't spend any time in it.

It Will Get Lighter

theres a kind of a cowardice to generative art that i want to avoid though. i want the kind of relationship to this thing that a game designer has to a game engine

The only real Londoner remaining is old, bitter, kept around for entertainment, defined by tropes from 30+ years ago. They play gangsters in films, or they work in a pie and mash shop, or they go on Business Insider's YouTube channel to tell you about their crimes. And they somehow still find the time to spend all day hanging about cafes and pubs for you to bump into, to remind you of Real London.

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i got bored though because i knew all of the different arrangements of it. i probably needed to stick at it longer to get it dense enough to feel navigable in a way that was engaging to me

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