Category
7 articles
While the rest of America falls asleep to autoplay, a scattered network of marathon organizers is charging admission for the privilege of staying awake until sunrise with total strangers. We spent a night in a Columbus VFW hall to find out why.
Across the country, a growing number of people are hanging up on smartphones entirely — replacing them with rotary phones, payphone booths, and vintage handsets that can't track them, push notifications at them, or sell their data to anyone. Part philosophy, part aesthetic, part genuine anxiety about where digital life is headed, the analog phone movement is weirder and more coherent than it sounds.
While the rest of us scroll through algorithmically curated feeds, a quietly dedicated community of amateur radio operators is constructing parallel communication networks that run on physics, not platforms. They're not preppers exactly, and they're not luddites — they're something more interesting than either.
Somewhere in a warehouse, a storage unit, or a former Nintendo employee's attic, there are games that were never meant to be played. Canceled. Shelved. Quietly buried by the companies that made them. A small, fiercely dedicated community of gaming historians and collectors has made it their mission to find those games — and what they're uncovering is rewriting the history of an entire medium.
A loose, scattered movement of experimental producers across the US is building something genuinely strange out of cheap, busted synthesizers pulled from Goodwill bins and garage sales. Their gear costs less than a decent dinner out, their sounds are unlike anything coming from professional studios, and their cult followings are growing in spaces the mainstream music industry doesn't know how to reach. This is what creativity looks like when it can't afford not to be weird.
Forget doing a passable Gollum at parties. There's a corner of the internet where people dedicate literal years to perfecting the vocal cadence of a minor NPC from a 2003 video game nobody finished. We went inside the world of hyperspecific character impressionists — and found something genuinely moving in the absurdity.
Netflix keeps recommending the same fifteen shows and Hulu thinks you want to watch another procedural crime drama. Meanwhile, a whole ecosystem of niche streaming platforms is out here serving horror obsessives, experimental film nerds, and underground comedy fans exactly what they came for. We did the digging so you don't have to.