Sabrina, Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Hocus Pocus. I still associate them with the same excitement, even though some were on throughout the year. Add the Happy Meals, books, games, toys and cheap costumes and there was enough to keep you occupied long before 31 October.

These are…

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Now, if you’re lucky enough to have witnessed the birth of the internet then you experienced it at its best. You lived through an age when the internet was purely about creation for the sake of it rather than a constant pursuit of monetization. Hell, you were alive before monetization was even in the vernacular.

In these halcyon days of Netscape, Alta Vista, and AskJeeves, masterpieces of animation stalled the internet and were transmitted as viruses from highschool to highschool eventually begetting the word meme. If you remember passing word about the latest hilarious cartoon through AIM or ICQ then congrats on your recent/upcoming 40th birthday. I hope you enjoy watching your list of medical contacts expand as your list of friends contracts and having your favourite songs referred to as ‘classics’. If you don’t, then prepare to gain an understanding of Millennials that you most likely neither want nor need as we drive into the top ten defining animations of the early internet.

In no particular order, here goes!

• Jonti Picking’s Badgers

  Commonly known as Mr Weebl, Jonti is the creator of numerous highly regarded animations from the dawn of the internet, but Badgers remains iconic. So iconic in fact that it’s been preserved by the British Film Institute. Definitely check out Jonti’s other work and collaborations on the Weebl’s Stuff YouTube channel. I’m partial to Kenya because it annoys both Kenyans (There are no tigers in Kenya!) and Norwegians (We are not crabs!).

• David Firth’s Salad Fingers

  If I had to rank this list, Salad Fingers would not be on it and I would still burn the list to the ground for having the hint of its stench. That said, Salad Fingers defined the early internet. The art direction and writing are two of the creepiest things I have ever encountered to this day. I hate it. Now go get a spoon and watch episode one.

• Neil Cicierega’s The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

  Who will win at the end of everything? When the universe comes crashing down, who is left standing? It’s a question that has plagued childhood discussions since the dawn of humanity and the MCU for too many films. Funny thing is, this animation answered that question with precision long ago. A masterclass in rhyme, rhythm, and comedy, and one of the biggest things to ever come out of Newgrounds.

  

• The Brothers Chaps’ Strong Bad Email

  Part of Homestar Runner, Strong Bad Emails is easily the most well-known part of that universe. While my personal favourite is New Hands, there’s no denying that Dragon really catapulted SBE into the Zeitgeist. Watch and cackle madly as Trogdor the Burninator burninates the peoples and their thatched roof cottages.

  

• Jason Steele’s Charlie the Unicorn

  Probably my number one. Each of the five episodes of Charlie the Unicorn is loaded with quotable dialogue that I still use out of context today. From his search for Candy Mountain to his underwater explorations, Charlie is always bound for a bad time. Absolute class and I still quote it out of context on the regular today. There’s plenty of more quality stuff by Jason as FilmCow on his YouTube channel. Watch Llama’s with Hats to find out why there are at least two things wrong with Carl.

• Joel Veitch’s We Like the Moon

  Internet brain rot at its finest. Up there with Annoying Orange for dumb stuff we couldn’t seem to get enough of, this was also preserved by the British Film Institute for some reason. I still like it, but not as much as cheese. Check out more of Joel’s stuff on the RatherGood channel.

• Zhu Zhiqiang’s Xiao Xiao

  All the glory of a Hong Kong action movie distilled into simple and elegant animation. If you ever made flip book animations of stick figures with your school books, then you’ll be amazed at how great that looks when it goes digital. Smooth, clever, violent; Xiao Xiao is everything I aspire to be in the upcoming apocalypse. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to find these in a good format that is supported by their creator. You can find the originals here (if you can bear it) or watch this compilation on YouTube.

• Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected

  Don, unlike pretty much everyone else here, was already an experienced and well known animator when this was released. I include Rejected though because how else can you ever know why people are screaming “My anus is bleeding!” before collapsing in fits of giggles.

• Alan Becker’s Animator vs. Animation

  Enjoy this combination of a touch of Xiao Xiao, a whole lot of hubris, and a painful look at the sort of UI designers had to wrangle with just two decades ago.

• Aubrey Ankrum, Rhode Montijo & Kenn Navarro’s Happy Tree Friends

  Who hasn’t wanted to see adorable little forest creatures butcher each other wholesale!? Apparently very few people as Happy Tree Friends went on to spawn dozens of episodes becoming a full-blown show in its own right. Enjoy episode one and then take it from there. Keep an eye out for Flippy.

And that’s that! You now understand Millennial brain rot. I hope you enjoyed this journey through the past and if you didn’t, why are you still reading? Do you hate yourself?

Kris

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Something's stirring. October is here, which means Halloween, everyone's favourite holiday, is creeping closer, and your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities and internet curiosities has risen from the inbox once more. Pour yourself a coffee, light a candle if you're feeling dramatic, and come in. We've left the door open.

Every time we invent a new way to record the world, someone immediately uses it to record a ghost.

Sometime in the 1860s, a photographer worked out that a slightly overexposed plate could turn a pale blur into a dead aunt, and grieving families paid well for it. Then people sat alone with tape recorders, listening to the hiss until it said their name. VHS gave something physical: a plastic brick in a drawer that nobody remembered recording.

The internet, of course, made the drawer infinite. Creepypasta, Slender Man, Hat Man, Mothman, Skinwalker Ranch, SCP, all stitched together from grainy JPEGs, low-res videos and forum threads that stop mid-sentence.

Film has been telling the same story all along. In Poltergeist, the static talks back. In The Ring, you watch a tape and get seven days. Blair Witch looks like your cousin’s holiday footage, until it doesn’t. Paranormal Activity needed nothing but a tripod and a door that moves an inch at 3:14 a.m (which, if you think about it, is a brilliant idea). And sometimes the machine is in charge. HAL 9000 apologises politely while refusing to open the pod bay doors. The computers in Alien just update the screen. Using language as dry as it can be.

MOTION DETECTED.
UNKNOWN DEVICE CONNECTED.

The computer is never scared enough.

So this month’s Dispatch asks why PS1 fog beats a Marvel budget, why a timestamp makes everything look like evidence, why we’re suddenly asking whether anyone on the internet is actually real, and how technology became one of horror’s most reliable ways of making us doubt our own eyes.

Low Poly, High Horror

Your guide for this part is , our resident space cadet and game nerd, beamed in specially for the occasion.

At the dawn of the 3D computer age horror games came into their own by weaponizing the most terrifying thing in existence - your own imagination. If you've ever woken up after a big night out and thought “What did I do?”, you know better than most what I mean.

How did this work? The short answer is incomplete information - just like with your blackout drunk. Lower memory thresholds forced developers to show less on screen. This meant fog and darkness limiting how far you could see, low poly creations shifting in the distance, and forced camera perspectives that cut out half of your view. All of this your brain would then fill with the most horrible stuff imaginable keeping you on edge for the whole game. Add in reduced inventory space, limited ammo, and jump scares, and these games were guaranteed frighteners.

Why are developers doing this now despite technological advances? Because it works. Even when they could go photorealistic, many developers choose to go old-school.

What now? Do yourself a favour and boot up a quality horror this October to scare yourself senseless. I’d recommend Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but it freaks me out too much and I don’t want to be responsible for any heart attacks…

The Dead Internet Is Doing Great, Thanks

Somewhere around 2019, a rumour started going round that the internet had died. Not crashed. Died, the way a town dies: lights still on, shops still open, nobody really living there anymore. Maybe a bit like the town from the movie FROM.

The Dead Internet Theory goes like this. Ekhheem:

At some point in the late 2010s, the web quietly stopped being people talking to people. In their place came bots, algorithms and manufactured engagement, all chattering away to one another in a loop, while the few humans left wandered through and pressed like.

For a while it was a lovely thing to believe at two in the morning. Then the internet rolled up its sleeves and started trying very hard to prove it right.

Scroll for long enough and you’ll feel it. You search for a recipe and get nine hundred words about someone’s grandmother before the ingredients and steps appear, written by a grandmother who never existed. Under it, forty comments say “Made this last night, so good!” in exactly the same voice. Somewhere in there, maybe, is one person who actually owns a pan. Eerily familiar, isn’t it?

Ask people on Reddit about it and they keep landing in the same place. It isn’t that everything is a bot. It’s that the internet feels hollow. One commenter put it bluntly: “No meaning, no soul, nothing.”

And here’s where the story takes a turn.

What if the machines didn’t make the internet robotic? What if we did?

We spent years practising. We learned which headlines get clicks, which comments get likes, which opinions farm replies, the exact second a video has to hook you. We mastered SEO, SEA, CTR, CPC, CPM, ROAS, CAC, LTV, KPIs, A/B testing, conversion funnels, retention curves, dwell time, engagement rates, content pillars, growth hacking, thought leadership and whatever the hell “thumb-stopping content” is.

Then the machines learned from us. As one Redditor put it:

“AI didn’t ruin the internet by faking human behaviour; it just easily copied us because human online culture became a predictable, repetitive script.”

So the real horror story is stranger and funnier than the original. Humans pretending to be algorithms. Algorithms pretending to be humans. Everyone squinting at everyone else, muttering bot.

The frightening part was never the big reveal, the curtain pulled back to show the server racks. It’s smaller and quieter. It’s opening a comment section and realising you simply can’t tell anymore.

And somewhere under all of it, a real human is still typing:

Great post! Thanks for sharing.

The Max Headroom Hijacking

November 22, 1987.

It’s a quiet Sunday night in Chicago. You’re watching Doctor Who on PBS, when suddenly - without any warning - the screen glitches out. Static. Distorted lines. Then, a man in a rubber Max Headroom mask appears. He’s babbling nonsense, swaying side to side in front of a moving metal background. No intro. No context.

And then it gets weird.

This wasn’t a prank video. This wasn’t an early YouTube stunt. This was real broadcast signal hijacking - live, unfiltered, and still completely unsolved 35+ years later.

This one's been living rent-free in our heads for a while. We went deep on it already, so catch up here:

Forward This Before Midnight

In 1795, a “Letter from Heaven” promised blessings to people who passed its message on. Those who refused were threatened with plagues upon themselves, their children and their cattle. It was one of the religious predecessors of the chain letter and it had considered your entire household. Even the cows. The Smithsonian’s history of chain letters is full of these arrangements.

By the late 1990s, the chain letter had settled into the inbox and developed a surprisingly varied offering. You could become rich, lose your account, acquire terrible luck or help with somebody’s alleged school project. Quite a lot riding on whether you pressed Forward.

The Bill Gates email hoax promised money for passing a message around, supposedly as part of a Microsoft email test. Elsewhere, “Tara and John”, the alleged directors of MSN, warned that accounts would disappear unless users forwarded their message. One version claimed there were only 578 account names left. Apparently the internet was nearly full.

This is the original Bill Gates email:

Hello everybody,

My name is Bill Gates.

I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces 
everyone to whom this message is forwarded. 
I am experimenting with this and I need your help. 
Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 
1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1,000 at my expense.

Enjoy.

Your friend,
Bill Gates

These messages arrived through people you actually knew. Someone from school. A colleague. A relative suddenly involved in distributing Bill Gates’s fortune. The sender was usually someone you liked, which raised questions about their approach to friendship.

Eventually the forwards spilled into MySpace bulletins, YouTube comments and Facebook messages. You could scroll down to discuss a music video and discover that your survival now depended on reposting a paragraph about a dead girl.

You knew the drill: pass it on and something good might happen; ignore it and something awful would.

One chain told the fictional story of Carmen Winstead, a teenager pushed into a sewer by schoolmates who covered up her death. Then it introduced another supposed victim: a boy who read her story, failed to pass it on and met a gruesome end himself. The warning to the next reader was clear. Share it, or she would come for you too. The story was a hoax.

Reading the chain mail made you responsible for what happened next. You didn’t have to believe it. Forwarding it was less effort than finding out.

Five seconds of embarrassment in exchange for not considering the bathroom a crime scene tonight. Sorry, everyone. Just in case.

Sorry for the Inconvenience

“An unknown error has occurred” is a remarkable thing to hear from the only object in the room that might know what happened. You were just downloading something on LimeWire. Suddenly you’re being asked to interpret a code, contact an administrator who is apparently you, or lose everything you hadn’t saved.

You could recognise the Blue Screen of Death from across the room. Your stomach dropped before you’d read a word. You stopped clicking, started bargaining, promised to save more often if the machine would just come back this once. Occasionally it did, and you immediately forgot everything you’d promised.

Mac users know the little rainbow wheel. You move the cursor away from the window, then back again, checking whether it’s still there. It is. You leave the computer alone for a minute, because perhaps you’ve been putting it under too much pressure.

Chrome’s “Aw, Snap!” is almost worse in its cheerfulness. You’re trying to submit something important and the browser is talking like it’s dropped a biscuit. Lose your connection altogether and there’s a little dinosaur to keep you occupied. Fine. You’ll jump over the cactus. But you’re still angry.

Bad error messages will interrupt you (and ruin your day), demand your attention and give you very little to work with. “Something went wrong.” We had established that. “Try again later.” A timescale would be lovely. You’re dependent on the machine to explain its failure and it has decided to be vague.

Eventually, people started making their own error messages. The fake warnings became little souvenirs of everything a computer had ever put us through. Some were barely an exaggeration.

We’ve learned what those colours, sounds and little grey boxes can cost us. An error message interrupts whatever we thought was safely happening and makes us question it: did that save? Did that send? Is the file still there?

If you’d like to deliver some bad news yourself, Alice Averlong’s Death Generator lets you put your words into old game screens and computer interfaces. We can’t promise technical support, but we would like to see your results.

End of Transmission

has entered the chat again.

And so we’ve reached the end. Not of Earth - not yet. Give that a few decades. Not the end of Halloween, that hasn’t even started. I’d know because I wouldn’t be writing this, I’d be in a diabetic coma.

No, we’ve reached the end of the dispatch. I hope you’ve learned something. I think I did, but I’m still obsessing over chain mail vs chainmail. Thank you for making it this far. And if you skipped all the way to the end instead of reading everything, then you won’t even get my earlier references and your life will be forever shallower.

Love you all. We’ll be back in some amount of time - I don’t really know when though since I don’t actually write or plan this.

Peace out, space cadets!
The Orbit

P.S. If you lit that candle at the beginning, this is your reminder to blow it out.

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Last week, in Dating Apps Built the Swipe. Now They Want Out, we followed dating apps into entertainment, offline meetups and publishing. This week, we’re looking inside one of those projects: No Ordinary Love pairs five writers with five couples who met on Hinge. The written stories appear on Substack, where we first found the project.

We got curious and sent Hinge eight questions about the writers, the couples and the collaboration between them. Huge shoutout to Ola Sobiecki, Hinge’s VP and Executive Creative Director, for taking the time to answer in writing. We shared an excerpt last week; below is the full exchange.

Editorial note: Hinge supplied the written responses and campaign imagery. This article was not paid for or sponsored by Hinge. Answers have been lightly edited for punctuation, spelling and formatting, but not shortened.

FROM PAGE TO PERFORMANCE

The Orbit: No Ordinary Love has evolved across different formats, from written stories and a physical anthology to Substack and now an audiobook. Was it always imagined as a growing editorial world rather than a one-off campaign?

Ola Sobiecki: I’m so glad you noticed that. Yes, No Ordinary Love was always imagined as something that could grow rather than stand as a one-off campaign. At Hinge, we’re much more interested in building worlds that can keep evolving, because it allows us to keep exploring and trying new things to meet Gen Z where they are.

Over the past three years, No Ordinary Love has expanded from a printed and digital zine, to a hardcover book and Substack series and now Hinge’s first-ever audiobook.

Each edition lets us explore a new literary medium, and also a new theme that feels relevant to dating culture at that moment—from the pressure to be perfect to the two sides of every love story. This year, we explored the emotional risk of actually telling someone how you feel.

Our job is to create an interesting framework inspired by dating culture, pair these real Hinge love stories with incredible creative voices and then give them space to bring relatable experiences to life. It’s what I love about literature and long-form storytelling—it asks you to bring your own imagination to it. When you’re reading or listening, you’re building some of that world yourself. You can see your own relationships, memories, or feelings inside someone else’s story. There’s something really intimate about that.

It also makes space for us to not shy away from the gritty, imperfect moments, the big emotions, or the messy middle. Those are usually the most interesting parts anyway. And hopefully, the more honestly we tell those stories, the more people can see themselves somewhere inside them, and feel encouraged as they navigate something similar.

The Orbit: What made an audiobook feel like the right next step for the project?

Sobiecki: We have been so curious about the audiobook space, especially as more and more people are reading books this way. With this being the third edition of No Ordinary Love, we were excited to take the leap. Gen Z’s love for romance literature isn’t slowing down, and audio gives people a new way to immerse themselves in these stories. We were also really drawn to how accessible audiobooks are—you can take the stories with you anywhere.

It was also important to us that daters get to experience some of the magic we feel collaborating with these authors. Hearing each of the authors tell the stories themselves, with all the emotional nuance they intended, really brings the work to life. And then the epilogues let you hear directly from the real couples behind the stories. It’s really special to hear an update from the couples in their own words, and how it brings you from imagination back into real life.

Lastly, it was important to us to honour the written medium too, so we published the stories on the No Ordinary Love Substack for readers who want to embrace the written word.

The authors read their stories; the real couples speak in the epilogues.

WHO GETS TO CHANGE THE BRIEF?

Hand the story of how you met your partner to a writer, and they might notice a detail you barely remember or make the awkward bit the whole point. Choosing the writer means choosing another person’s interpretation of something you lived through. Then comes the question of how far you let them take it.

The Orbit: How were the writers selected and how did you decide which author would tell each couple’s story?

Sobiecki: Love this question. It’s something that we’re really thoughtful about—curating the authors and couples is one of the most important parts of the entire project.

Knowing we wanted to explore emotional risk through dialogue, we looked for authors who aren’t afraid of really honest conversations in their work, and who explore modern relationships beyond the typical romantic tropes. This year, that very raw centre of gravity pulled us towards our amazing authors: Tembe Denton-Hurst, Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith and Rufi Thorpe.

Then we take a lot of care with the pairings to make them feel really intuitive and natural. We think about each author’s voice, personality and lived experience, and where we feel there could be real chemistry with a couple and their story. You want the couples to feel deeply safe and seen, because that’s where something unexpected can happen. It’s also when all those small, nuanced details that make their story uniquely theirs start to come through.

The Orbit: How did the collaboration between Hinge, Dazed Studio, the writers and the featured couples work in practice? How much freedom did the writers have in shaping the stories?

Sobiecki: We’ve worked with Dazed Studio across all three chapters of No Ordinary Love. It was really important to us to build this work with an editorial partner and Dazed understands the realness and rawness of culture and the Hinge brand. They’ve been incredible collaborators in that they operate as an extension of our team.

At Hinge, we’re also really excited by the idea of being someone’s first brand. We look outside the typical places for creative talent—working with authors, tattoo artists and this year even a harpsichordist to create the score for the audiobook. We bring people into the process early rather than handing them a brief to execute. The point is to make something together and let their point of view actually change the work.

That’s an easy thing to “say” when you bring someone on to collaborate, but actually embodying it requires an act of bravery from the brand. You can spend months carefully crafting an idea, bringing everyone together internally, and then creating a structure for the campaign. But once it’s in the hands of your collaborators, the real risk is being willing to break some of that structure.

You gain so much from letting go of creative rigidity, trusting the people you chose to work with, and really advocating for what their unique voice brings to the work.

For example, Rufi Thorpe threw us a fun curveball: she wanted to tell Daniel and Roisin’s story from the perspective of Roisin’s cat. It completely broke the form of the stories in the series, but we trusted her.

And it became this magical, surreal, funny story that we never could have arrived at ourselves. Her fans were locked IN, sharing “this is amazing, weird, and wonderful—what a lucky couple!” When I come back to that story I always find myself connecting with something new, as Rufi said, it’s “like a kaleidoscope”.

KEEPING THE SWEAT IN

The trailers turn awkward conversations into theatre. Behind that exaggeration is a practical production question: how do you prepare real couples to revisit a private moment in front of a crew?

The Orbit: The new stories focus on the moment someone chooses honesty over “playing it cool.” How did you translate something so personal and emotionally messy into a campaign without making it feel too polished?

Sobiecki: I think the not-so-secret thing we channelled was restraint. We really trust the people in the work to be themselves. The magic comes from their unique voices, their personalities, how they show up and what they bring out of each other. Our job is really to create the environment where people feel safe enough to be honest, and then not polish away the nitty, gritty, relatable details that people can really connect with.

Our team takes on creating that environment as an exciting creative challenge in itself. Things like our “You’re on Set, Now What?” zine are a great example of that. It’s thinking about all the things around the creative that influence how people feel in the moment, like the exciting chaos of a photoshoot, or the newness of a recording studio. It’s our priority for the couples to feel emotionally safe, comfortable, and supported, and we’re so grateful for their courage and honesty as they bravely share their stories with the world.

We also give the couples real time with the authors, and make sure anyone we bring into the project understands that creating comfort and trust is a key part of the job. We spend time getting to know each other before we get to the work. In a funny way, it’s a little like dating. People feel the energy you bring into the room, and when they feel that openness and trust from us, they tend to give it back.

Then we also wanted to play into visceral visuals that connected back into those heightened emotions. With David Brandon Geeting, for example, we leaned into camp, humour and exaggeration to capture how enormous these feelings can feel in the moment. But the couples and the emotions underneath it are real. I think that contrast is what keeps it from ever feeling too polished.

In the trailer for Raven Smith’s Thou Shalt Play It Cool, there’s a zoom-in on Michael with a big bead of sweat dripping down his temple, before he checks in on Elena’s feelings after he had opened up about having gone on a date with someone else. This hard, honest moment at the start of their relationship evolved into a conversation about exclusivity and brought the two of them closer.

The Orbit: Hinge is a dating app, but this project moves into publishing and cultural storytelling. What can a format like this communicate that a more conventional campaign cannot?

Sobiecki: For Hinge, the biggest difference is our ambition to connect with audiences where they are, and offer them something to feel seen in, and encouraged by. Great campaigns can be incredibly direct—there’s a clear message and a clear takeaway. With No Ordinary Love, we wanted to create something people could immerse themselves in, and discover unexpected moments or experiences they connect with from their own dating lives.

That’s what I love about the editorial nature of the project. It gives the work dimension. You can come to one of these stories and connect with the humour, or the anxiety, or a tiny moment between two people that reminds you of something in your own life. We don’t have to tell you exactly what to take away from it.

Dating is like that too. We’re all these multifaceted people, constantly discovering new things about ourselves, changing what we’re interested in, and figuring out what we’re looking for. I think the work should have enough depth to reflect that.

And it also lets us be in conversation with culture rather than just commenting on it. The work is directly inspired by what we’re hearing from daters. In conversations with Gen Z, we’ve heard how hard it can feel to share how you really feel and open up to someone you’re dating. A lot of people hold back because they’re afraid of being judged or coming off as “cringe.” At the same time, we’re also seeing people on social media increasingly mention that they’re looking for someone “chalant,” who isn’t afraid to openly share their big feelings. Hinge data from 2025 even found that search interest for “chalant” increased 217 percent in 2025.

This year, we really wanted to highlight the courage it takes to tell someone how you really feel and how those moments—as nerve-wracking as they might be—are so important to building something real. We want to celebrate those brave moments, so others feel seen and consider bravely opening up in their own dating lives, too—no matter what that looks like to them.

A BRAND IN YOUR INBOX?

We found No Ordinary Love in the same place we publish The Orbit. Substack makes that encounter feel different from passing a poster: an author’s story can arrive beside the newsletters you chose to follow. It also raises a fair question for any brand publishing there. What does it bring to the space beyond its own campaign?

The Orbit: Why did Substack feel like the right home for the written side of the project?

Sobiecki: Substack offers something special today: genuine, trusted relationships between writers and readers. It’s the perfect environment for deeper conversations about dating and relationships.

I think about a brand entering a space almost like the “leave no trace” principle in nature. You have to respect the ecosystem you’re stepping into, understand why people value it, and be really conscious of how you’re interacting in the space.

It’s also a way for us to support the creative economy rather than just borrow from it. Many of the authors we work with already have their own communities on Substack, so when you discover someone through No Ordinary Love, you can go directly into their page, their writing, and their world. I really love that there’s no dead end—the campaign can become a doorway into someone else’s creative practice.

This is why we love to partner with authors like Hunter Harris, Nicola Dinan, and Tembe Denton-Hurst who regularly publish their original writing on the platform. We also collaborate with other Substack writers like Julianna Salguero of Keepsake and Hannah Connolly of Notes On, to share their own stories taking on brave conversations in their relationships and inspire their readers to feel a little more confident taking emotional risks of their own.

The Orbit: Do you see No Ordinary Love continuing to grow into other formats or future editions?

Sobiecki: Anything is possible! We are always eager to grow and be on this journey with our daters. Excited to see where the wind takes us.

Our Take

It's no surprise Hinge wants to advertise five matches that successfully turned into real relationships. But the people actually living through those early dates didn’t have a guaranteed happy ending. Handing these lived experiences over to writers blows up the neat "rest is history" narrative. It exposes the misunderstood texts, the weird admissions, and the massive emotional gambles it takes to actually connect. That’s the creative swing we appreciate in No Ordinary Love. Hinge made the initial introduction, but the stories dig into the messy human work the app couldn't do for them.

Catch you next time,
Sarah

OTHER ARTICLES

There was usually an attractive stranger, a mildly suggestive line and a strategically placed phone screen showing two people having the most natural conversation ever recorded inside a branded chat bubble.

Every campaign seemed to raid the same dating starter pack: a first date disastrous enough to dominate the group chat, a statistic proving singles had finally discovered feelings and situationship upgraded from slang to a full-blown social condition.

The apps may have sold different versions of romance, but they compressed them into the same tidy sequence:

Like. Match. Message. Meet.

A person became six photographs, three prompts and a carefully selected answer about whether they preferred staying in or going out.

For more than a decade, this was not only how dating apps worked,it was how they imagined love: legible, optimised and always one gesture away. Now, that world is beginning to break open – not necessarily inside the apps, but around them.

The same companies that turned intimacy into an interface are trying to build cultural worlds people might enter even when they aren’t actively looking for a date.

A Brief History of Selling the Meet-Cute

To understand why this shift matters, it helps to look at what dating apps used to sell. Some of their most memorable campaigns gave the same basic interface a different emotional promise: agency, commitment, entertainment or, occasionally, Satan dating the year 2020.

1. The Ball Was in Her Court

   Before Bumble started organising group meetups, it sent Serena Williams to the Super Bowl to tell women to make the first move. Dating-app differentiation still fitted neatly inside a 30-second slogan.

   Bumble x Serena Williams, 2019

2. Designed to Be Deleted
   Hinge gave its app icon a furry body and repeatedly killed it whenever two users fell in love. Nothing says romance quite like watching your product mascot get crushed by an air conditioner.

   Hinge’s original campaign by Red Antler, 2019

3. Swipe Right at the End of the World
   Tinder turned the apocalypse into a choose-your-own-adventure series in which every decision could affect your matches. Even the end of civilisation, apparently, needed a dating mechanic.

   Tinder’s Swipe Night, 2019

4. Satan Meets 2020

   Match paired Satan with the year 2020 and soundtracked their romance with Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Love Story. It was less an advert for finding love than a perfect time capsule of a year already beyond parody.

   Match’s “Match Made in Hell,” 2020

These campaigns chart the moment dating apps stopped merely explaining their products and started constructing personalities around them. But however inventive the campaign became, it always led back to the same place: the app.

Now the interface itself is the thing people are getting tired of.

Dating Apps Want Out of the App

Dating-app marketing once had one awkward job: convince people that meeting someone online was not a sign that something had gone terribly wrong.

You could say the interface worked almost too well. Apps gave modern dating a new vocabulary—swipe, match, unmatch, ghost—then made living inside it exhausting. Endless choice, constant evaluation and the low-level suspicion that another person is always waiting one thumb movement away.

The growing interest in singles events, group dates and introductions through existing communities is not necessarily a rejection of technology. It is a search for the context that apps removed. Meeting through friends, at a dinner, or inside a running club comes with friction, witnesses and some sense of a shared world.

Dating platforms have noticed, and each is trying to rebuild that missing sense of context in a different way.

Tinder is moving towards entertainment, wrapping modern dating in Bridgerton-style fantasy and turning romantic yearning into its own campaign universe. Bumble is moving in a more literal direction, experimenting with low-pressure group meetups and imagining a future in which meeting through the app might eventually mean leaving the swipe behind.

Hinge has taken a third route: publishing.

These responses may look unrelated, but they address the same problem. Rather than promising a better interface, dating apps are borrowing from the wider culture surrounding romance—television, live events, book clubs and literature—to make dating feel social, immersive and meaningful again.

There is an obvious contradiction in apps helping people escape app-shaped dating.

That contradiction is also what makes Hinge’s approach so interesting.

When a Dating App Acts Like a Publisher

Most dating apps would answer swipe fatigue with a new feature. Hinge answered with five authors, a harpsichord and a love story told from the perspective of a cat.

This unusual combination is the brainchild of No Ordinary Love, Hinge’s ongoing anthology based on real couples, which is now available as an audiobook. The project has involved multiple contemporary authors and expanded from digital stories into physical publishing, as well as venturing into the realms of Substack, audio, film, illustration, music and out-of-home advertising.

The authors Tembe Denton-Hurst, Raven Smith, Rufi Thorpe, Nicola Dinan and Curtis Garner were each paired with a couple who met on Hinge. They turned awkward conversations, misread signals and emotional risks from the early stages of those relationships into short stories, which they then narrated themselves. Hunter Harris provides the foreword; the real couples return for the epilogues.

The result feels less like something made to advertise Hinge than something made to exist on its own — a strange little romantic universe with stories, authors, sound and a visual language to match.

Audio also changes the emotional texture of the stories. A screen can show us what somebody typed; a voice gives away the pause before they say it. That distinction matters in a project built around people admitting something before they know how it will be received.

The Authors are Not Just Copywriters

Rufi Thorpe tells one couple’s story through the eyes of their cat—which is frankly one of the more credible narrators available when humans attempt to date.

Finding No Ordinary Love on Substack made the project feel close to home. As fellow Substackers, we were curious not only about what Hinge was publishing, but what it meant for a dating app to enter a space built around direct relationships between writers and readers.

Where does publishing end and advertising begin? At what point does a campaign stop behaving like a campaign and start operating more like an editorial platform?

There is an obvious tension here. Hinge benefits from the emotional landscape it is documenting—a dating culture shaped by profiles, prompts, notifications and the constant awareness that somebody else might always be one swipe away.

“Authenticity” has become one of advertising’s most carefully manufactured products. Brands know audiences are suspicious of perfection, so imperfection is now produced with professional precision. The photograph is blurry, but intentionally blurry. The confession is vulnerable, but safely contained. The story is messy, but only in ways that lead back to the correct conclusion.

Its strongest material is not the fact that these couples eventually built relationships, but the uncertainty that came first: the possibility of rejection, the misread intentions and the conversations that began before either person knew what they wanted to say.

The risk is sending the text. Asking the question. Admitting something before knowing whether the other person wants to hear it.

We did what Substackers do when curiosity gets the better of us: sent Hinge a slightly overcommitted list of questions about .

Hinge came back with detailed answers from Ola Sobiecki, its VP and Executive Creative Director. Asked whether No Ordinary Love had always been intended to grow beyond a one-off campaign, they told us:

“At Hinge, we’re much more interested in building worlds that can keep evolving. Each edition lets us explore a new literary medium, and also a new theme that feels relevant to dating culture at that moment—from the pressure to be perfect to the two sides of every love story. This year, we explored the emotional risk of actually telling someone how you feel.”

Dating apps helped compress intimacy into an interface. Now they are discovering that people want a shared world around it.

Next week, we’ll publish our complete conversation with Ola Sobiecki—on creative freedom, emotional honesty and what happened when Rufi Thorpe let a cat hijack the narrative.

Catch you next time,

Sarah

This was all over August:

• Apple released recently a stop-motion Mac mini ad, and then released behind-the-scenes footage showing people who are sculpting and painting the elements. It feels like the making-of almost becomes part of the advertisement because audiences now want proof that this was made by humans.

• The AI-slop backlash has become strong enough that platforms are introducing different labels, filters and restrictions against generated content.

  

• AI-generated restaurant menus are so bizzare that people are becoming nostalgic for bad amateur Photoshop. There is one in the corner of my house. It's pretty wild.

• Low-budget, kinda obviously handmade animation is suddenly being discussed as animation’s “punk rock moment”: technically crude work can feel more culturally alive precisely because it doesn’t look machine-perfect.

• The Humankind 2 trailer apparently looked so sufficiently AI-like that the developer had to publicly explain it wasn’t generated. 😵‍💫

• AI accusations are now hitting work that wasn’t made with AI at all. Of course they do. We’re moving from “AI can make anything” to “I no longer know what I’m looking at.”

• Even a new advertising-reference platform, The Creatives Room, prominently sells itself as “100% picked by hand, not AI.” Human curation itself is becoming a feature.

BEFORE COMPUTERS MADE EVERYTHING CLEAN

Pre-digital advertising production.

paste-up, Letraset, Rubylith, airbrushing, marker comps, hand lettering, photostat, typesetting

Designers spent decades inventing tools to remove imperfections and mistakes.
Now Photoshop has brushes that recreate them on purpose.

THE ORIGINAL SYNTHETIC IMAGE

Advertising has always manufactured reality. Before Photoshop, commercial illustrators already created impossible:

HUMAN SLOP AND THE STRANGE NEW VALUE OF MAKING THINGS LOOK BAD AGAIN

China’s latest sleeper hit is a film about a cow that looks like somebody opened SketchUp and accidentally found an Export to Cinema button. That is barely an exaggeration: Niu Lai was actually animated in SketchUp, a program intended for architecture, because proper animation software and new hardware were too expensive.

Niu Lai translates roughly to Here Comes the Cow. The cow did come. It just took five years. Director Xin Yumeng made it with his mother, Sun Lifang, using second-hand equipment. She taught herself screenwriting, helped create the animation, wrote the soundtrack and sang the theme song.

Viewer warning: Emotional Roller Coaster ahead:

Beneath the floating cows, Niu Lai is a sincere story about maternal love and the messy work of supporting a child. During its first nine days, Niu Lai sold just 236 tickets and made about 7,169 yuan - barely $1,000. Then the internet found it.

People began buying tickets to confirm that yes, the entire 86-minute film really looks like this. Cinemas without official promotional material started drawing their own posters. By late August, the film had made more than 45 million yuan, or roughly $6.7 million. The terrible animation had become the campaign.

THE ULTIMATE NUI LAI PRODUCTION CHECKLIST

• Animated in software designed for buildings. CHECK.

• Made on second-hand hardware. CHECK.

• Entire crew and voice cast: one man and his mother. CHECK.

• Mother taught herself screenwriting, wrote the soundtrack and sang the theme song. CHECK.

Someone on Reddit compared it to the ReBoot, the pioneering CGI television series from the 1990s. The difference is that one had a studio. The other had a man, his mother and SketchUp. Someone else on Reddit commented that chinese people are kinda celebrating that they finally have their own The Room. Hard to argue. Both were made with spectacular sincerity, released as proper films and then transformed by their audiences into something closer to a live event. The main difference is speed.

The Room has plastic spoons. Niu Lai has a mum singing her son’s five-year cow project home. Good luck remaining ironic through that.

JOIN OUR COMPUTER MAGAZINE FAN CLUB

Back in January we wrote about the Byte Magazine Covers. After our latest Note got some interest, we thought it would be cool to share more hot magazine archives:

• Zoomable BYTE visual archive full “shelf view” of decades of covers

• Internet Archive Large collections of BYTE issues and individual issue pages

• VintageApple’s BYTE scans quick access when you want to track down specific issues without getting lost.

• Robert Tinney’s Shop the artist’s own archive + prints.

If you haven´t checked the internet archive out yet, you need to do it NOW!!!! One of its offers is the Magazine Rack - the best Rabbit hole to get lost in. Here a few other computer magazines that show creativity, craft and love for detail without any help of AI. More Computer Magazine Archives:

Crash Magazine (1984 to 1991 )

Your Sinclair Magazine (1986 to 1993)

Creative Computing Magazine (1974-1985)

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN FINGERPRINT

Before generative AI flooded our feeds with frictionless, hyper-polished sameness, artists had to actually wrestle with their medium. That friction left behind weird creative swings, personal touches and authentic, sometimes messy flaws that no prompt can ever truly simulate.

A lot of us are starving for that exact texture. Looking at the raw, manual effort that went into these early covers, it’s wild to see how our relationship with technology has shifted by now. These archives capture a distinct era when computers were strictly tools to amplify human imagination, complete with all its quirks and imperfections.

So, we built machines to remove human error and now we’re asking them to put it back. We're going to keep digging through the archives to make sure the weird and distinctly human side of digital history doesn't get buried by the algorithm.

Cheers,

🛸 The Orbit

Everything online must be scrutinised to determine whether it’s human or AI, real or imagined, tragic or a distraction. It’s a good time to be a sceptic, though a terrible time to realise most people aren’t. Clearly this wasn’t deep enough for us though as Satyress takes the next insane step and makes me wonder “Even though it’s real, is it actually real?”. Shout out to Dezeen who didn’t have the same suspicions and just posted the press release word for word. Maybe they’re right. Maybe…

DESIGNED BY SATAN, APPARENTLY

Built in Auburn, California, Satyress is ostensibly a large, centaur-like robot for a variety of commercial applications. It’s been displayed (statically) and can be seen and touched. Yet, an air of unreality and a vibe of absolute bollocks hangs over it like the musk of Pan.

The website for Satyress highlights some truly bizarre functions. It is incapable of walking through a standard American door because of its horns. That is, it’s been made deliberately less deployable by choice. It also can’t turn around in a corridor. How does that help you? How do you get it anywhere indoors where it would be useful? Isn’t that a fire hazard?

Bear in mind that both of these “features” also add to the demonic look of the robot by adding hooves, horns, and a horse body. Why do these things exist? The company claims that this is “caution tape” and will remind people that it is dangerous to be near. Because being a seven foot tall robot with a chainsaw apparently doesn’t do that job well enough.

And look at this photo! It can be equipped with apparently any tool so what do they show? Here it is picking its nose with a little drill. I can’t imagine that function is in huge demand.

Other pictures show it looming in the half dark or equipped with a chainsaw. Not an encouraging sight for anyone. It’s also matte black, so when inside it’s harder to see and when outside it’s perfect for overheating during the day and lurking in the shadows at night.

WHO THE HELL MADE THIS THING?

And what about the company? Well Satyress seems to not actually exist as a corporate entity. There is no Imprint on the website, the actual address, and only a generic email for contact. It doesn’t even seem to have employees. The only person who can be attached to the project is a self described engineer by the name of Beau Gaston; a name that sounds like it was created for a comedy sketch about French stereotypes. Mr Gaston seems to have little to no online presence. He’s an engineer with no GitHub account, no social media, and no apparent history before Satyress. None of this is proof in itself as engineers by their nature are careful with their online presence, but it is another curious point.

PLEASE SHOOT ROBOT »HERE«

The real kicker for me: if the robot ever goes nuts you can shoot it or stab it in specific places to instantly disable it. Why would you ever mention the possibility of your demon bot going haywire!? More importantly, if that was an admitted possibility, why would you explain that you can shoot or stab it to stop it!? Is this just the way Americans think now surrounded as they are by the constant threats of runaway technologies and a heavily armed populace. Whatever the answer, the Satyress people make sure to include a handy diagram showing you where to aim.

WAIT, I’VE PLAYED THIS BEFORE

What does this all add up to? Well thanks to the biases of my video game addled brain, I think this is marketing for an unannounced game. A demonic looking robot event with highlighted weak points that can be avoided by dodging through a door or slipping past it in a corridor? All of that says game mechanics to me.

What do you think? Is it an actual robot, a clever gag, or a harbinger of a to-be announced product of some kind? Let me know! I’m curious what other conclusions you folks come up with.

Cheers,

Kris

Hello!

A month of resurrected trade shows, elderly Happy Meals, fast-food lamps and further evidence that culture is currently travelling backwards at approximately 56k modem speed.

In this issue:

• Burger King welcomes the boomers

• Tinder gets back on the apps

• E3 rises from the dead

• Fast-food bags become expensive lamps

• Brands desperately try to become culture

• The Designers Republic turns 40

• Another artifact from the physical-media graveyard

🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes

• Coca-Cola decided it needed to look more like Coca-Cola. On 20 July, the brand unveiled a new global identity by JKR, bringing back and exaggerating the stuff everyone already knows: the Dynamic Ribbon, Arden Square, Spencerian script and a lot of very loud red and white. Coke Zero also gets pulled closer to the main brand, just with more black. Basically: one of the most recognisable brands on Earth has been rebranded to look more recognisable. Brave.

• Burger King Invented the Happy Meal for Lower Back Pain: Kids have had decades of tiny toys with their fast food. Burger King France finally asked the important question: What about people who remember dial-up? The Boomer King is essentially an adult Happy Meal filled with 80s and 90s nostalgia. Instead of a plastic Minion, you might get Saved by the Bell socks, a Knight Rider T-shirt, a Charmed mug or a Beverly Hills 90210 glass. The campaign leans completely into ageing, complete with bald spots, aching backs and flying wigs. Is it shameless nostalgia bait? Absolutely. Would we like the mug? Absolutely, yes.

• McDonald’s Bags Have Entered Their Noguchi Era: British artist Benjamin Slinger spent decades collecting old fast-food paper bags. Which sounds like the beginning of an intervention. Instead, he turned them into lamps. His Empire series transforms vintage McDonald’s, Burger King and other takeaway bags into sculptural lanterns inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s Akari lights. The result is weirdly beautiful.

• Tinder got its first major rebrand in almost a decade. Porto Rocha gave it an all-caps wordmark, refreshed flame, new typography and a much more editorial visual world mixing anime, paintings, memes and various bits of internet culture. More importantly, it finally seems to acknowledge that dating is not just beautiful people drinking cocktails on rooftops. Sometimes it is staring at “hey” for six hours wondering if replying will ruin your life.

• Granola is fighting AI slop by trying to look like an actual human made it. On 23 July, Ragged Edge revealed a new identity for the AI meeting-notes app that deliberately avoids the usual glowing gradients, mysterious orbs and “future of productivity” nonsense. Instead it is warm, messy, witty and handmade. An AI company has discovered personality. Huge development.

• An AI energy company has gone full 1960s sci-fi paperback. On 22 July, How&How rebranded German energy supplier Zeus Energy as Meteoric, with cosmic symbols, modular graphics and a whole visual language inspired by old science-fiction books. Even the copy system uses a custom LLM. Personally, if my electricity provider does not look like it is about to invite me onto a spaceship, I am no longer interested.

  

• Koto launched its own type foundry. On 8 July, the studio introduced CCType, after apparently getting tired of existing fonts not doing exactly what they wanted. The first release, CC Timeline, is designed to work across complicated brand systems and loads of different applications. Another design studio has started dealing fonts. Keep an eye on your children.

• Florence’s first art-book fair went full doodle. Its July identity uses hand-drawn type and illustrated logos rather than the extremely serious, extremely tasteful design language these things usually come with. Another small victory in the ongoing war against making everything look like a Scandinavian bank.

• A museum made a typeface out of its own stuff. In late July, the Horniman Museum in London revealed a campaign where bespoke letterforms are built from actual objects, specimens and plants in its collection and gardens. Which is a much better way to make a font than opening Pinterest and typing “quirky cultural identity”.

• BAFTA’s latest identity uses procedural physics. Published on 15 July, Kiln’s system uses simulated physical behaviour to generate the visuals rather than relying on one fixed graphic element. So yes, even logos now need physics engines. Static branding had a good run.

• Human + AI apparently beats AI alone at packaging design. A study reported on 15 July found that hybrid human-AI creative work performed better than purely AI-generated design. Incredible. Researchers have discovered that giving the robot an art director improves the work. Next week: water found to be wet.

• McDonald’s France made billboards with jokes on them. Remember jokes? Its July McFlurry campaign by TBWA\Paris pairs tiny victories and humiliations with the exact same product: “tells the joke” / “is the joke”, beauty / puberty, winning / losing. Very simple. Very stupid. Very good. No AI activation. No immersive

  experience. No QR code leading to a microsite nobody asked for. Just ice cream and mild emotional damage.

  

🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations

The Pocket Typewriter

The PocketMage is a tiny E Ink typewriter designed for writing without notifications, infinite tabs or the sudden urge to check Instagram. Somewhere between a BlackBerry, a cyberdeck and a homemade sci-fi prop, it combines a tactile keyboard with simple tools for notes, journaling and Markdown. You can even buy it as a DIY kit and assemble it yourself. It’s another oddly charming attempt to solve a modern problem by rebuilding a less convenient version of the past and honestly, we get it.

Nobody Knows What the 365 Buttons Mean

A TikTok user announced that she would carry 365 buttons – one for every day of 2026 – to become more present. When people asked what that meant, she simply replied that it only had to make sense to her. The refusal to explain became the meme: a tiny manifesto against turning every personal thought into public-facing content.

→ The strangely liberating story of 365 Buttons

This Old ATM Thinks It Can Read Your Mind

Creative studio ENESS has turned a vintage cash machine into an AI-powered fortune teller. Instead of checking your balance, it analyses your face, palm and personal choices before printing a strangely poetic psychological reading. It’s playful, unsettling and not entirely different from what platforms already do with our data—just with a more dramatic receipt.

→ Check out the AI fortune teller

A Speaker With a Tiny World Living Inside It

Mur Mur doesn’t play songs or playlists. Instead, it contains a simulated miniature world whose weather, creatures and daily activity generate an evolving ambient soundscape. You can listen to a pond with ducks and passing boats, a forest with lost hikers or a tiny city complete with rush-hour traffic and pigeons. Like a digital terrarium, but for your ears.

→ Step inside Mur Mur

✦ On Our Radar

Meet Lily, the Indonesian Designer Turning Nostalgia Into New Visual Worlds

On learning through recreation, building a visual language of her own and protecting the process behind design.

Working as @spcypscs, Lily is a graphic designer and visual artist from Indonesia experimenting with digital collages, experimental typography and visual storytelling. Her work mixes pop culture, retro imagery, bold colours and playful compositions with a distinctly nostalgic edge. Lily’s collages do not just look interesting, they set up whole little worlds to us.

Curious about how she develops that visual language, we asked where her process begins. For Lily, it starts with looking closely at the work that already holds her attention.

“I often recreate posters and visuals I find interesting as a way to study how they were made, from composition and typography to textures and colors.”

For Lily, recreation is a way of learning by taking an image apart. She studies how composition, type and texture work together, then carries those lessons into something of her own. That process matters to her, especially now that AI has made visual ideas easier to generate and creative work can start to look instant from the outside. Lily believes art and graphic design in particular, is still not always fully appreciated in Indonesia. The risk is that design becomes seen as something quick, replaceable and detached from the person making it.

For her, design is never just the final image. It is the ideas, the choices, the time, the failed attempts and the process behind it. Even as technology makes creating easier, she still believes in learning by doing, experimenting freely and slowly developing a visual language of your own.

Lilias work taps into the pull of early-2000s visual culture: glossy gradients, game interfaces, pop editorials and the bright optimism of Frutiger Aero. She turns nostalgic visual references into playful little narratives, using type, texture and unexpected details to suggest a world beyond the frame.

Where to find Lily:

Instagram: @spcypscs
Pinterest: @spicypiscs
TikTok: @spcypscs21

📸 Visual Inspiration

E3 Show Dailies

Before gaming announcements were tweets, livestreams and 40-minute YouTube presentations, trade shows produced actual daily newspapers.

The Video Game History Foundation archive contains surviving E3 Show Daily issues from across the expo’s history, including editions from the late 90s and early 2000s.

Huge headlines. Game renders fighting for space. Questionable Photoshop. Logos everywhere. The graphic-design equivalent of drinking six Monster drinks and opening Photoshop 4.0. Beautiful.

🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month

MySpace Is Planning Another Comeback

MySpace’s current owners, brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook, say they want to relaunch the platform—although there is no date yet and not much has been revealed about what the new version will actually look like. What they do want is something that feels different from today’s social platforms: less driven by algorithms, endless scrolling and the constant fight for attention.

The interesting part is not only if anyone would genuinely return to MySpace. It is what people remember so fondly about it. Your profile was a tiny piece of the internet you could make completely your own. You chose the song, changed the layout, decorated it with questionable HTML and publicly ranked your closest friends. Subtlety was not the point.

Modern platforms are smoother and easier to use, but they also give us far less room to shape how we appear online. A MySpace comeback may or may not work. Still, the excitement around it reveals a real appetite for an internet that feels more personal, creative and slightly less controlled.

Thanks for reading!

You’ve unlocked Coupon #0137. Keep collecting. There is no prize, only perspective.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

🛸 – The Orbit Team

Subscribe now

Starting in the mid to late 90s (depending on what you consider horny advertising) everyone was under the impression that gamers were all male, mostly young, and very, very lonely. They were wrong. That was just me and the joke’s on them because I had no money. Running with this premise and the mistaken belief that you can sell anything with sex, they embarked on a decade long campaign fuelled by hormones. Fortunately (unfortunately?) for me I was a prime candidate for this targeted advertising. I was a teenage nerd with rampaging hormones and a total inability to communicate with the girls around me. As such I was at the forefront of horny video game ads and you can now benefit from my social awkwardness as we take an incredibly uncomfortable walk through the history of sexy video game advertising.

Sometimes the randy ads made at least some sense and, despite that there are gemstones from dime store jewellers with more facets than her entire body, Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame became a sex symbol. Yes, the capacity for human arousal is not to be underestimated and her triangular boobs were famous almost instantly, though significantly remastered for advertising. The Tomb Raider campaign would feature copy like “What are you waiting for? See all that Lara has to offer”, “She’s an adventurer with… a rapid-fire body” and “Come on, boys! What are you waiting for?”. We also got Angelina Jolie doing cosplay and whatever the hell this is. The people went nuts.

The tragedy of the Tomb Raider campaigns is that these games were considered excellent on their own and didn’t need sex to bring people in. The original Tomb Raider spawned one of the most famous characters in media and an ongoing franchise that covers every console generation since the original’s release. Though the writers did eventually fall to the “sexual assault creates strong woman” trope. Don’t worry though, it was just a misunderstanding.

Command & Conquer was not to be outdone in the “franchise goes horny stakes” and rolled out a series of ads that had even less to do with their games than the Tomb Raider campaigns. Say hi to Tanya from Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2. While she exists in the game, she’s barely there and it’s reasonable to believe she was included just for this ad.

And it just got wilder for C&C from there as Red Alert 3 rolled out a bevy of military pin-ups. Clearly the Tanya campaign worked because here we have all of the girls from the game. Say hi to the girls.

These obviously Photoshop-free images clearly had a lot to do with a game that consists of tiny little sprites blowing each other up with digital weapons and if you can’t see the connection then I’m afraid there’s simply no help for you. As with Tomb Raider, these ads weren’t necessary.

Of course, not all sexy campaigns were for gems and some games probably did need to get their tits out to bring in an audience. A highlight is Deathtrap Dungeon. Despite being based on an existing IP, the game was middling at best so the advertisers chose to go horny. And not just a little horny, but BDMS horny. So much so that the ad below is considered the paradigm of sex-mad game advertising.

Then, of course, there’s Duke Nukem. Not a sex symbol himself, but an absolute lad and once he’d excelled in Duke Nukem 3D what was there to do other than dive into the strippers and babes bro side of his hilariously shallow character and roll out a deplorably sexist ad or two. Thus we got Planet of the Babes. The campaigns for this digital schlock leaned heavily into the babe side of things and stained an already gross project with a ‘horny teen writes action hero’ vibe. It didn’t help that the game also sucked horrendously, but at least we got an amusing story out of it.

For the most part horny advertising for games disappeared in the early 2000s. Even the internet champion of horny game advertising, Evony, has moved towards the interactive minigame style of advertising. Still trash and still nothing to do with the actual game, but hey, it’s not sexist anymore!

Yet even in these dark frontiers advertising has moved towards interactive mini games rather than tits aplenty. Here’s hoping that advertising continues to evolve and marketers start to think of us less as easily manipulated horndogs and more as thinking, feeling humans. I mean, I don’t think that, but maybe we can convince the marketers.

Liked this? Let me know and I’ll do a follow-up! There’s plenty more horny video game advertising to talk about including the times entire brands jumped the busty, bikini clad shark as both Sony and Sega got uncomfortably weird.

Kris

Hello!

We’re back with another monthly orbit through the weird, useful, nostalgic and mildly cursed corners of creative culture. Grab a coffee, open too many tabs, and let’s dive in.

▶ In this issue:

• Cannes ads that actually fixed things

• KFC’s Bucketverse

• TikTok pineapples

• Scientology speedrunning

• cereal box CD-ROMs

• Be Kind, Rewind.

🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes

• At Cannes Lions 2026, advertising seemed to get a new memo: stop just saying meaningful things and start doing useful things. The big shift was from purpose-driven campaigns full of nice messages to brand ideas that actually help people in real life.

• Ogilvy, LePub Milan and Heineken took top honors: Ogilvy won Network of the Year, LePub Milan took Agency of the Year and Heineken was named Brand of the Year at Cannes Lions 2026. A very European final scoreboard.

• The biggest Cannes Lions 2026 winners had one thing in common: they didn’t just make ads, they fixed stuff. AXA changed insurance contracts to help domestic abuse victims, BCP turned shop payment terminals into emergency bank-card blockers, Kenya’s “Paid Sick Leave for Cows” kept unsafe milk out of the supply chain, and “Nigrum Corpus” exposed racial bias in healthcare. Basically: less shiny brand purpose, more useful brand plumbing.

  

• Cannes 2026 also proved that people would rather play with a brand than just watch it talk. Clash Royale rewarded players from copycat games, Uber Eats let fans build their own Super Bowl ads for food deals, KitKat turned stolen chocolate into a “contraband” hunt, and Wisła Kraków used AI to tell fans how lucky they were for the team. Basically: the best ads didn’t just tell stories—they gave people buttons to press.

• KFC dropped a whole ‘Bucketverse’: KFC’s biggest global rebrand in years, done with JKR, went live in the UK and Ireland in June: new logo, packaging, restaurants, app, tone of voice, even open-concept ‘quick-experience’ stores in McKinney, TX and Dubai. Yes, they called it a Bucketverse. Yes, they meant it.

• Big-brand parade sponsorships thinned out: Multiple Pride parades pivoted to hyper-local and grassroots funding as major sponsors quietly walked away, spooked by political and consumer backlash. Community orgs picked up the slack.

• Kool-Aid Pineapples took over TikTok: The trend — soaking pineapple spears in Kool-Aid mix — went fully mainstream in June, mostly thanks to ‘Silly Willie’ in Pompano Beach, FL, who sells ‘Pineapple Dreamz’ out of his trunk. Multiple Facebook Marketplace copycats immediately followed.

  

• Scientology Speedrunning became a legitimate genre: The bizarre TikTok trend of ‘speedrunning’: running as deep into Scientology facilities as possible before being escorted out - kept escalating through June. Videos got removed en masse; three teens got charged with second-degree burglary in Seattle for taking it too far. Source: Wikipedia — Scientology Speedrunning

• ‘2026 is the new 2016’ hit peak: The nostalgia trend continued to eat social media whole—TikTok searches for ‘2016’ rose 452%, Spotify’s ‘special 2016’ playlist stats spiked 71%. Selena Gomez, Ananya Panday, Kylie Jenner and dozens of celebs joined in.

• Everyone can reorganize their grid now: Instagram rolled out grid-reorganization for all users. Every millennial’s 2015 aesthetic just got another shot at redemption.

• Threads introduced ‘Your Algo’: ‘Your Algo’ lets you privately steer feed algorithm—‘more of this,’ ‘less of that,’ choose the duration (1, 3 or 7 days). Meta finally admitted control is a feature, not a threat.

• Claude showed up inside iPhones for the first time: Apple’s new multi-AI Extensions system officially made Claude an iPhone option alongside Gemini. Anthropic’s model quietly walked onto every future iPhone.

• Bulgaria won Eurovision—for the first time: Bulgaria’s Dara took Eurovision 2026 in Vienna (May 16) with ‘Bangaranga,’ scoring 516 total points and winning both jury and public votes. It was Bulgaria’s first-ever win and set a record 173-point margin.

• Spielberg dropped ‘Disclosure Day’ on June 12: Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi ‘Disclosure Day’ released June 12—a UFO drama that everyone immediately assumed was a metaphor for something. He may have said it was.

• Splatoon Raiders and The Duskbloods got dated: Splatoon Raiders (single-player treasure-hunt splat game) and The Duskbloods (a new multiplayer action title) both got 2026 Switch 2 dates in the Nintendo Direct. FromSoftware fans specifically felt seen.

• Summer 2026 is officially Y2K summer: Rhinestone velour, micro-minis, lace-trim camis, ultra-low-rise denim—Y2K remains the defining summer trend, only styled less ironically than in 2023. Fashion editors have accepted their fate.

• Anthony Head died at 72: Actor Anthony Head, forever Giles from Buffy and beloved as Rupert Mannion on Ted Lasso, died June 5 at 72. Two entire generations quietly rewatched.

• IKEA’s team gave the reactive-marketing masterclass: IKEA’s whole June was proof that being fast and human beats being clever. Rebranding a plush toy as ‘Punch’s Comfort Orangutan’ didn’t need a $2M brief — just an alert set to ‘macaque.’

The Flip Phone Is Back. Again. ✨

The latest comeback isn’t trying to outsmart your iPhone.

It’s trying to out-ignore it. The Commodore Callback 8020 is a modern flip phone that keeps the useful parts—calls, messages, maps, music, Built-in FM radio—while trying to remove the infinite feed.

No browser. No social media. No algorithm waiting behind your lock screen.

Claims to be Smart Where It Counts

• Designed to reduce screen time, but still work as your main phone

• 48MP Sony rear camera with flash and intelligent autofocus

• Autofocus front-facing camera for video calls

• HD audio and lossless music support

• Optional hi-def IEM earphones

• ESS & Cirrus Logic DAC sound chips

• Built-in FM radio (Yes, you heard right!!)

Whether anyone actually wants to text on T9 again is another question.

🔗 Check it out

🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations

From Interface to Fossil

Artist Kleinian basically printed a weather app on a rock.

Also Spotify playlists, Bitcoin charts, Alarm Settings, Call of Duty, GTA and GPS routes. His “Rocks” series turns screen life into geological debris and it feels is something very eerie about seeing a weather app fossilized.

All that real-time urgency. All that refreshing. All that “partly cloudy.” Now it just looks like an ancient carving of something people once checked constantly instead of stepping outside to see for themselves.

🔗 More of Kleinian’s Rocks

Adidas’ Latest Sneaker Campaign Had a Looting Policy

For its Stan Smith residency in Paris, Adidas turned the shoe’s little green accent into an entire world and then let people just take pieces of it…home.

Set designer Mathilde Vallantin Dulac curated a courtyard full of random green objects: chairs, books, furniture, crates, rugs, balls, lamps, random beautiful junk.

The concept is straightforward: focus on a single visual idea, build an environment around it and invite people to interact with it in a tangible way.

🔗 Adidas Stan Smith residency (Check the comment section)

The Future Has Great Lighting and No Exit

Richard Nadler is a contemporary digital artist based in Munich, Germany. He creates worlds that look like someone zoomed out and found an entire civilization stacked inside the pixels.

His vertical worlds are packed with tiny lives, glowing windows, terraces, pools, plants, cruise-ship buildings and impossible balconies. From far away, they look like utopia. Up close, they feel like urban planning by a browser with 400 tabs open.

Beautiful. Exhausting. Probably the future, unfortunately.

🔗 Richard Nadler’s work

The World’s Most Nostalgic Water Bottle

If your inner seven-year-old had a product design brief, it would probably look something like this.

CamelBak and Crayola came up with water bottles that look like giant crayons, which is exactly the kind of object that makes adults say, “I don’t need this,” while immediately deciding which color they will go for.

The bottles come in Crayola-inspired shades with lids that nod to crayon tips.

🔗 See the Crayola x CamelBak collection

📸 Visual Inspiration

Cereal Box CD-ROMs

A strange golden age when breakfast came with software. Free games, AOL trials, screensavers, encyclopedia demos, and weird mascot mini-worlds attached to the front of a sugar box.

🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month

The VHS Rewind Sticker

Before streaming turned movies into a bottomless couch-hole, renting a VHS came with a tiny code of conduct: be kind, rewind. It was a sticker, a reminder, and a small moral test stuck to the side of a plastic rectangle. You didn’t just watch the movie: you returned it ready for the next stranger. That’s what made the phrase so charmingly weird: it turned a boring technical chore into community etiquette. Video stores depended on customers rewinding tapes before bringing them back, because nobody wanted to press play on Jurassic Park and land straight in the credits. In some stores, not rewinding could even mean extra fees or extra work for staff.

The sticker now feels like a tiny artifact from a more physical internet-before-the-internet world: movie nights had deadlines, late fees, plastic cases, drop boxes, and consequences. Streaming removed the rewind problem, but also the ritual. Now Netflix just watches us half-asleep and asks, “Are you still watching?” Physical media had manners. Streaming has abandonment issues.

❌ Campaign-Fail of the Month

Louis Vuitton Built a Wave During a Heatwave

A giant artificial wave in the middle of Paris made for a striking runway. It also arrived during one of France’s most severe heatwaves.

As an image, it was dramatic. Sand. Surfboards. Models emerging from behind a huge water installation. Pharrell doing Pharrell-scale spectacle.

The Timing was less than ideal. The show landed with temperatures pushing past 40°C in parts of the country.

LVMH claimed the water was reused in a closed-loop system and the sand and other parts of the setup would be repurposed. That may be true but it still feels like a black mirror episode and is tone-deaf.

🔗 Read more over at Reuters

🤔 Poll of the Month

Thanks for reading!

🛸 – The Orbit Team

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Hello!

We’re back with your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities, and internet curiosities. Grab a coffee, or whatever fuels your creative weirdness and dive in!

🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes

• Spotify’s 20th-anniversary disco-ball app icon became a mini branding controversy: people noticed, complained & memed it. The “mirror-tile logo” look spread after, with other brands reportedly riffing on the reflective disco aesthetic

  

• Pinterest launched a May 2026 brand campaign telling users to get inspired online, then go live offline. Pinterest’s positioning is basically: “We are useful internet, not doomscroll internet.”

• The funniest platform contradiction of May: every app wants to be the healthy app. Pinterest says go outside, Instagram says post original work, YouTube says label AI, TikTok says trust our AI ad stack. Everyone is selling detox from the system they helped build.

• The 2026 Met Gala happened on May 4 in New York. Yaaawn. We are lurking just for the memes.

• D&AD 2026 awarded 573 Pencils across 46 categories. That is a lot of creative excellence, or at minimum a lot of extremely heavy shelf objects.

• GifCities was originally launched in 2016 for the Internet Archive’s 20th anniversary and was updated in 2025.** So by May 2026, the old GIF archive had become newly relevant again inside the nostalgia wave.

• Darren Aronofsky defended AI at Cannes as an “expanded cinematic toolbox.” The most Cannes sentence imaginable: a serious auteur, a controversial technology, and everyone pretending the future of cinema is being decided over canapés.

• The new luxury brand move: don’t look desperate online. Bottega-style social restraint, literary clubs, run clubs, art fairs and offline experiences are becoming brand signals. Less “please share this,” more “you had to be there.”

• The “offline internet” became a brand aesthetic. Pinterest says go outside, fashion brands host literary clubs, Cannes turns influencers into IRL spectacle, and everyone tries to make digital culture feel physical again.

• Susan Boyle’s sudden Instagram rebrand looked suspiciously like a campaign. Vogue noted that she wiped her feed, debuted a glam new look, posted with “#ad,” and seemed to be teasing a new era. A 2009 viral star being repackaged for 2026 social culture is very internet-time-loop.

• Substack-style direct channels are part of the influencer shift. Vogue noted newsletters and more direct-to-consumer communications as brands look beyond saturated feeds for trust and depth.

• Coca-Cola is already warming up for the FIFA World Cup 2026 with limited-edition football-shaped bottles at Walmart. Will people buy it, photograph it and keep it in a cupboard for 14 years? Obviously.

✏️ The Curious Cases from D&AD Pencil Awards

We were lucky enough to attend this year’s D&AD Festival, and even luckier to get a glimpse behind the curtain by shadowing judges in a few categories. It was one of those rare industry moments where the case films, craft, and conversations actually punched through the noise and stayed with us.

These are the cases that turned our heads the most:

1. Caption with Intention — captions finally get cinematic

• Brand: Chicago Hearing Society

• Agency: FCB Chicago, Rakish Entertainment, Chicago Hearing Society

• Awards: 1 Yellow Pencil, 9 Graphite Pencils, 4 Wood Pencils and 8 Shortlists across its D&AD 2026 run.

• Why it won: It reimagines closed captions as a proper storytelling system, not just white text at the bottom of the screen. The system uses character colours for speaker attribution, precise timing, and variable type to show volume, pitch, emotion, and intention. It was co-created and tested with the Chicago Hearing Society, recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and made open-source for studios and creators.

• Our take: For 50 years, captions basically said: “someone is speaking.” This asks: what if captions could act, whisper, scream, interrupt, and carry emotional subtext? Accessibility becomes art direction.

  

2. Butterfly — The Art of Table Tennis: A Tribute to Timo Boll

• Brand: Butterfly

• Agency: Jung von Matt Hamburg; Saydan Çelik / Jung von Matt HAVEL

• Awards: Wood Pencil in Art Direction, plus a Shortlist at D&AD 2026.

• Why it won: After table tennis legend Timo Boll retired, Butterfly turned eight of his original rackets into hand-carved linocut printing plates. Each racket depicted a key moment from Boll’s career, and the prints became fine-art posters, ads, a brochure, and an exhibition during Berlin Art Week. D&AD lists it as a 2026 Wood Pencil winner, while Saydan Çelik described it as “no budgets, just 8 rackets” and a handmade idea around love for the sport.

• Our take: A sports tribute that literally turns the athlete’s tools into printing tools. Very nice: racket as archive, racket as relic, racket as poster machine.

  

3. Firecatchers — turning Twitch “starting soon” screens into wildfire surveillance

• Client: Sapeurs-Pompiers de France

• Agency: Havas Play France

• Country: France

• Awards: D&AD 2026 Graphite Pencil + Wood Pencil, Creator Content / Media

• Why it won: Firecatchers used a dead bit of livestream real estate—the “starting soon” screen on Twitch—and turned it into a civic warning system. Instead of showing static countdown graphics while audiences waited for streams to begin, creators broadcast live surveillance footage from wildfire-risk zones. Viewers waiting for entertainment became a distributed lookout network, helping spot potential fires earlier. D&AD describes the idea as transforming “waiting time into watch time.”

• Our take: A perfect internet-native public-safety hack: the most boring screen on Twitch becomes a firewatch tower. It’s very 2026—creator culture, livestream habit, climate anxiety, and civic infrastructure all mashed into one “stream starting soon” rectangle.

  

4. The Periodic Fable — The Ordinary turns beauty nonsense into a fake science table

• Brand: The Ordinary

• Agency: Uncommon Creative Studio

• Awards: 3 Yellow Pencils, 2 Graphite Pencils and 4 Wood Pencils at D&AD 2026.

• Why it won: The campaign created a “scientific table with zero science,” replacing chemical elements with 49 skincare marketing buzzwords. It attacked the overblown language of the beauty industry—“poreless,” “clean,” “detox,” “miracle” energy—while staying totally on-brand for The Ordinary’s radical transparency positioning. It extended into OOH, social, influencer activations, and a surreal classroom film. D&AD describes it as a critique of trend-led, overconsumption-driven beauty culture.

• Our take: A fake periodic table for fake beauty science. It feels like school, satire, packaging design, and category roast all in one.

  

5. The Final Copy of Ilon Specht — the woman behind “Because I’m Worth It” gets the last word

• Brand: L’Oréal Paris

• Agency: McCann / L’Oréal Paris

• Awards: 2 Yellow Pencils, 2 Graphite Pencils and 1 Wood Pencil at D&AD 2026, across categories including Film, Entertainment, Direction, Media and Editing.

• Why it won: This 17-minute branded documentary tells the story of Ilon Specht, the young copywriter who wrote L’Oréal’s iconic “Because I’m Worth It” line in the 1970s. D&AD describes it as a branded film that crosses into “pure cinema,” with no product pushing. It appeared on AMC+, Prime Video and became the first branded content acquired by TED.

• Our take: A beauty brand wins by doing the least “beauty ad” thing possible: letting an old copywriter talk about rage, feminism, authorship, and the four words that outlived almost every campaign around them.'

  

🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month

McDonald’s Office Delivery: The Copier Ate (2026)

Awarded for: Best Use of Office Equipment in the Name of Lunch.

For its Office Delivery campaign, created by TBWA\Paris and directed by Elias Levy, actual McDonald’s items were placed on a copier glass and scanned like suspicious lunch evidence. Big Mac. Fries. Nuggets. Drink. Even the ad copy was printed, stuck onto the scanner and absorbed into that weird fluorescent office-document glow.

The insight is simple: a huge amount of lunch happens at work. McDonald’s moved the ad into the place where the craving actually happens: the inbox, during lunchtime and between meetings, while your brain is running on 8% battery and someone says “quick lunch?”.

It is not polished in the traditional food-ad way. The burger looks flattened. The fries look like evidence. The whole thing has the visual dignity of a tax document. But that is exactly why it works.

🔗 Source: Famous Campaigns

💿 Album Art of the Month

Stefan Sagmeister’s Aerosmith’s Nine Lives cover

Stefan Sagmeister’s story about Aerosmith’s Nine Lives cover is basically the final boss of album-design chaos. What started as a dream Sony Music brief—big band, big budget, Indian-inspired music, perfect title—slowly turned into a cursed CD-ROM of rejected ideas, expensive paper engineering, religious complaints, Walmart nipple panic, legal threats, and invoices that apparently went wandering off into the void.

The original concept was genuinely beautiful: a cut-out booklet where a cat would transform page by page, playing with the idea of “nine lives.” Everyone loved it, until the extra production cost—just 16 cents per CD—killed the magic. The replacement cover then triggered complaints from a Hindu sect, got censored by Walmart over snake-creature nipples, and nearly left Sagmeister’s tiny studio on the hook for a massive settlement.

His D&AD Festival lesson was brutally simple: when too many people steer the ship, the ship does not become more strategic. It becomes a floating mood board with legal problems.

🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations

Poolsuite.com A Browser Tab From a Better Internet

Poolsuite feels like a tiny fake operating system built by internet friends with a suspiciously strong commitment to leisure. Born in the Highlands of Scotland, the project describes itself as a small collective making things online, hosting parties, making sunscreen and generally bringing warmth to its community of listeners. It’s internet radio wrapped in pixel type, pop-up windows, low-res glamour.

everynoise.com

A visual map of every single music genre on Spotify — over 6,000 of them. Click any genre and it immediately plays a sample. Discover that “Norwegian Worship,” “Drab Pop,” and “Danger Clown” are real and distinct genres. An afternoon is not enough.

windows93.net

The kind of interface that makes you want to click everything just to see what happens. A fully functional surreal parody operating system that runs in your browser. Solitaire, a virtual desktop companion, pop-up windows that multiply when you try to close them, and a musical defrag utility. Built as a web art project. Somehow more interesting than your actual desktop.

bruno-simon.com

A portfolio you navigate by driving a tiny 3D car. Created by a French developer who decided a website should be a place you move through. Still the best example of what a personal website can be if someone cares enough.

🤔 Poll of the Month

Thanks for reading!

You’ve unlocked Coupon #016. Keep collecting. There is no prize, only perspective.

It's a well-known fact that, whoever you are, things were better when you were a kid. Some people think this is because the past was better (rarely true); others realise it's because being a kid is infinitely better than going to work (always true). It's the first case I talk about now because, as I age into Boomer territory, I become more sure that some things were definitely better back in the day, child status or no. So ready your Surf HM and pop some Repel, because we're hopping a Lapras to Kanto, the original home of Pokémon, on a journey to a time and place where names, types, and designs truly meant something.

Welcome to the Lab

You awaken to your mother hollering that you need to go see the weird man next door to collect a slave monster in order to fulfill your goal of becoming the best slave monster catcher and forced combat maker in the world. Why? Who cares? We're not here to discuss your clearly depraved motivations, we're here to look at your little critters. You enter the laboratory next door, one of only three buildings in your podunk village. Why is a research centre located in a village? Presumably because of the borderline illegal experiments taking place, though this is never covered in the story. Why is it just you, your nemesis, and your families living here? Again, not explained. Again, we don't care. We're here for the design.

The Holy Trinity

You enter the creepy man’s secret animal experimentation lab and he gives you three choices of pet. All of which scream their design language at you. You can choose:

• Bulbasaur. The dinosaur with a bulb on its back that’s green like a plant.

• Charmander. The salamander who chars things and is orange-red like fire.

• Squirtle. The turtle who squirts things and hails from a time in history when you could say the word ‘squirt’ in polite company without making people uncomfortable. He’s also blue, like water, not other fluids.

The Rot Sets In

Now, granted, starters of every generation of Pokémon do better than the average when it comes to design. That just makes sense. You want the first contact users have with your new product to be good enough to hook them and when they’re going to be spending hours and hours with this creature and its evolutions, you better get those hooks in deep and quickly. But even the starters degenerate past Gen I and the rot sets in immediately with Gen II and its mixed bag of weirdo starters including:

• Chikorita. A green blob with a leaf on its head and some kind of studded necklace. I cannot fathom what its name might mean, but hey, we know it’s leaf related I suppose. Zero stars. I wouldn’t even hit it with a bus.

• Cyndaquil. It’s got quills and burns stuff to cinders. Not too bad. The addition of charcoal to the colour scheme could even be considered a plus.

Totodile. It’s a crocodile that, I dunno, likes Toto. It’s blue, so a water Pokémon. I guess it ‘blesses the rains down in Africa’?

Gen III and IV do “okay”. I get Chimchar, Treecko, Turtwig, and Torchic. I can see what they’re trying with Mudkip and Piplup. From Gen V on it’s all downhill.

Snivy? Oshawott? Chespin? Popplio? Grookey? Sobble? What a mess.

Outside of the starters the contrast is even more drastic. Gen I delivers us a bevy of excellently designed monsters almost across the board. Sandshrew, the shrew that throws sand. Pidgy, the pigeon. Beedrill, the bee with drills for arms. Mr Mime, the man who mimes. Machop, the macho man who karate chops things. Granted there are some clear Gen I outliers such as Chancey and Jigglypuff who, beyond being cute, make zero sense, and Exeggutor which, hell, I don’t even know. A palm tree with legs and multiple eggs as its heads/faces… what? So, obviously not all Gen I is gold, but they do communicate clearly from a design viewpoint. However, the worst offenders outside of Gen I are beyond outrageous.

Unown Unknowns

My personal highlights for what-the-fuckery in Pokémon generations start with this collection of useless freaks from Gen II, the Unown. A true family of abominations, the Unowns come in 28 varieties to represent the English alphabet and two pieces of punctuation. What is happening here? I know for a fact they already have language in the Pokémon universe because they have books. We know Pokémon understand that language because at least in part because they listen to their trainers. What is this for? How do you ever get enough to spell anything useful? Why not just write the words with actual language. Apart from just being a useless idea, they look completely moronic. In most cases they’re simply the Latin character with a single staring eye. The only one I can tolerate is H because it looks like a Tie Fighter. Stupid, unnecessary, lazy, and with a name that I assume is supposed to be pronounced ‘unknown’, but is written un-own which just sounds like a hip new term for abandoning something.

A Splat in the Dark

Gen IV delivers with Spiritomb which I guess is a portmanteau of spirit and tomb and which has few features of the first and none of the second. Mostly it looks like something one of my dogs would leave behind after eating rotten garbage from the street. A ghastly (Gastly?) splat of purple with a mottling of green projected out of what appears to be an automated air freshener, Spiritomb looks like nothing in particular and is the harbinger of worse to come in the Poké-verse of the future.

Gen V is on fire with Vanillite which is literally just an ice-cream. This is the point at which designers threw in the towel and simply started looking around the house for random crap to turn into Pokémon. Why an ice-cream? Its mortal enemy is room temperature. What the hell are you going to do with it, ever? Why is it only vanilla? Did it not qualify for alternatives like Unown? Can we not at least have a pistachio version? Hey, at least we can be comfortably sure it’s an ice Pokémon.

Junk Drawer Pokémon

The hits keep coming with Gen V and VI’s desire to use random crap from around the house starting with Trubbish, which is simply a garbage bag with something for arms. Rubbish by name, rubbish by nature, rubbish by design. I could have puked a better Pokémon. Nuff said. Then comes Klefki which is a key ring. Again, keys are not an item unknown in the Pokémon universe so it’s unclear what role this fills beyond making you think you’ve found your car keys only to bite your finger and laugh as you grab them.

The pride of Gen VII is Palossand, the (sigh) sand palace. First up, they’re sand castles, not palaces. Second, this could only be cool if it was full of miniature Krabbys and Palossand could deploy these tiny crabs like an angry munchkin army. I honestly feel like Palossand suffers from the same issue as the Dinobots from Transformers in that, yes, it can technically hide in plain sight but I’ve seen about as many dinosaurs on beaches in my life as I have perfectly identical sandcastles. The only thing camouflaged here is some poor designers’ will to live.

Penguin on the Rocks

Eiscue joins us for Gen VIII, a return to actual animals, but with the additional flavour of random shit from around the house. This gives us the bastard hybrid of an ice cube and a penguin, so something that famously floats on water attached to something that eats fish which, also famously, live exclusively underwater. Congratulations, you’ve come up with a horror combination that will starve itself to death and, like Vanillite, be defeated by room temperature.

The Golden Disaster

The pinnacle of imagination failures comes to us in Gen IX, with so many abhorrent designs, weak ideas, and nonsensical styles that it’s hard to pick a loser of losers. Smoliv, Varoom, Orthworm, Tatsugiri, and frankly, the less said about Wiglett the better. It’s trainwreck on trainwreck. All of the worst mistakes of previous generations rehashed for a maddening crowd.

Ultimately though, I opted for Gholdengo, the Oscar of your nightmares, as my champion. Sure is gold alright, but as Pokedex entry #1000 surely everyone deserved something better than this. Most humanoid Pokémon are looked down upon by the fanbase (with some creepy exceptions like Lopunny), but this one isn’t even trying to be anything other than a living statue minus the hat to collect change while channeling the energy of a Ninja Turtle and cosplaying as a carrot. Simultaneously hideous, uninteresting, and very cringe, Gholdengo manages to be the worst of all worlds at the same time. It deserves a trophy. Of itself. Delivered with a sharp blow to its head.

Whose Fault Is This, Exactly?

So how did this all happen? Well, it’s no great mystery and I put it down to three main factors.

• One: freedom of ideas. In much the same way that first albums, first movies, and first games are often the best, all the newest, freshest ideas can be pumped into this version. Nothing had yet been used in the Pokémon universe, so you Game Freak could generate infinite possibilities for the world’s creatures and then reduce them down to the best. There are, simply, no bad ideas the first time around since you can pick and choose from unlimited options.

• Two: time. With a first version you have all the time in the world to make it good. Time for the ideas to brew before they even start to hit the drawing board in earnest. You’re also not dancing to a shareholder or investor schedule (at least pre-pitch) and can do things at your own pace. Now though it’s more important to get anything out within the 2-3 year release cadence, rather than release anything particularly good.

• Three: greed. Not just corporate greed either, but consumer greed too. Pokémon fans want more Pokémon and, junk or not, they’re still going to pay up. In that environment it’s hard to blame Game Freak and Nintendo for maximising profits and reducing quality. This is, after all, taking place in the timeline where Logan Paul sold a Pokémon trading card for 14.5 million USD.

At Least We'll Always Have Beedrill

So, will we ever see a return to the greatness of Gen I? Unlikely. The world that created the original 151 no longer, and cannot ever again, exist. Could we see something close? Maybe, but that would require smarter consumers, and the time and patience to develop new ideas instead of just throwing Trubbish at the wall to see what sticks. Still, Gen I isn’t gone. Game Freak can and does use them as we’ve just seen with Pokopia for the Switch 2. Thus does hope burn eternally that, even if we can’t get good new Pokémon, good Pokémon products are still coming to us featuring the best generation. My generation.

Just don’t ever talk about Jynx.

We’re back with another monthly bundle of strange ideas, beautiful nonsense, design detours, and internet artifacts that probably should not exist—but thankfully do.

In this issue:

🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes

• On April 1, 2026, brands didn’t just make silly pranks—they moved fast, jumped on trends, and used the day to test ideas in public. The best campaigns felt less like jokes and more like smart little experiments: part product tease, part cultural wink, part “wait… would people actually buy this?”

  • Baskin-Robbins’ “Ice Cream Soup” worked because canned, ready-to-eat dessert sounds ridiculous — but also weirdly convenient. And Top Ramen Butterfinger hit the same sweet spot: salty, sweet, cursed, and somehow believable enough that people actually argued over whether they’d try it.

  • Yahoo’s “The Scrōll Stoppr” was a very funny, very self-aware bit of marketing: a tiny weighted thumb ring designed to stop you from scrolling. The joke worked because Yahoo actually sold it for $4.99 on TikTok Shop—using the endless-scroll machine to sell a product that supposedly protects you from endless scrolling. Part useful, part ridiculous, part “we are all trapped here together.”

• After 144 years, Barcelona’s Sagrada Família is finally heading toward its grand finale. In June 2026, the basilica is set to receive its final giant spire: the 172-meter Tower of Jesus Christ. That means Gaudí’s famously unfinished masterpiece is getting very close to actually being… finished. Less “construction site with a gift shop,” more “centuries-long architectural side quest completed.”

• Logo trend: ‘Imperfect by Design’—Designers spent April waving goodbye to plastic-perfect AI gloss. Hand-drawn type, wonky lines and frosted glass packaging from indie beauty brand Radford were everywhere—basically Comic Sans for grown-ups with a budget. Source: Canva Newsroom — Imperfect by Design

• The Most Interesting Man returns — Dos Equis brought back its iconic ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ to recruit a Gen Z successor. He is older, the lighting is moodier, and the bar setup is now extremely Letterboxd-coded.

• Cannes Lions added a Creative Brand Lion and AI Craft — The 2026 Cannes Lions, set for June 22–26, announced new categories: a Creative Brand Lion for brands building creative cultures, and AI Craft sub-categories celebrating work made by humans + AI together (instead of either alone).

• The Great KitKat Heist became a meme economy — After a real-life robbery in which 400,000+ KitKat bars were stolen during transport across Europe, the internet immediately christened it ‘the chocolatiest crime’ and pumped out a fresh batch of heist memes for two solid weeks.

• The Nihilistic Penguin meme conquered brand Twitter — Within days of going viral, the Nihilistic Penguin (a sad CGI penguin sighing about everything) was running BMW and Lidl posts. Brands love a penguin who’s Going Through It.

• ‘2026 is the new 2016’ became a whole movement — TikTok decided the vibes had returned — side parts, skinny jeans, indie sleaze, Snapchat dog filter, early Lana Del Rey moodboards. Search volume for #2010s tumblr jumped 364% YoY. Tumblr was vibrating in its grave.

• AI scanned 400,000 Reddit posts to find drug side effects — Researchers at Penn ran an AI through 400,000 Reddit posts to surface unreported side effects of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Reddit, against everyone’s bets, turned out to be a serious medical archive. Source: Penn Today — GLP-1 + Reddit

• Y2K is officially mainstream now — Low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, baby tees, mini skirts, platform shoes, chunky sneakers—Y2K isn’t just a TikTok bit anymore. Victoria’s Secret announced two new Brisbane stores partly to ride the demand. Source: Fashion Week Online — Y2K 2026

• Flip phones are surging again — By April 2026, basic flip phones were having a real second wind—Motorola Razr 60 Ultra topped reviews, Nokia kept relaunching classics, and 18- to 25-year-olds were buying them in serious numbers, citing screen-time fatigue and a desire to look cool while ignoring texts.

• The Louvre is still missing its Crown Jewels — The October 2025 heist that snatched 8 pieces of the French Crown Jewels (~€88M) in under 8 minutes is still unresolved by April 2026. The thieves were caught; the jewels were not. The Louvre even started a bidding process to restore Empress Eugénie’s Crown, which was dropped during the heist.

• Cyberdecks are having a moment — DIY portable computers built from Raspberry Pis, repurposed makeup caboodles, and whatever else looks like it could survive both a LAN party and the end of civilization. Part craft project, part anti-minimalist rebellion, part tiny protest against AI-smooth tech sameness. We went deeper on this one below.

📸 Visual Inspiration & Oddities

“Under Construction” GIFs as an aesthetic movement.

“Under construction” GIFs began as practical little warnings on 1990s homepages: this page is not done yet, please enjoy this tiny man digging forever. But over time, the cones, barricades, flashing signs, and pixel workers became more than web clutter. They turned into one of the clearest symbols of the old internet: messy, personal, always unfinished, and proudly DIY.

Today, designers mostly avoid them professionally, because nothing says “this site may never launch” like a looping construction worker from 1998. But in art, nostalgia, and indie web culture, they live on as perfect icons of Web 1.0 energy.

👾 Culture Glitch: Cyberdecks are back!

The laptop is boring now, apparently, so people are building cyberdecks: DIY portable computers made from Raspberry Pis, tiny screens, keyboards, batteries, 3D-printed shells, old cases, makeup caboodles, clamshell purses, and whatever else looks like it could survive both a LAN party and the end of civilization. The idea goes back to William Gibson’s Neuromancer and classic cyberpunk hacker fantasies, but the 2026 version is less “man in tactical vest preparing for the grid to collapse” and more “what if my computer looked like a cursed Polly Pocket with Linux?” It’s part craft project, part anti-minimalist rebellion, part tiny protest against AI-smooth tech sameness. A reminder that the future used to be something you could open, solder, decorate, ruin, and make completely yours.

📺 Weird TV Moments: Geraldo Opens Al Capone’s Vault, 1986

On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted the live two-hour TV special The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults, filmed beneath Chicago’s abandoned Lexington Hotel, where Capone had once operated. The broadcast hyped the possibility of hidden money, weapons, documents, or even human remains, and around 30 million viewers tuned in. After crews broke through the sealed chamber, they found no treasure or bodies — only debris, dirt, and a few old bottles. The special became a national punchline, but it was also a ratings success, turning an empty room into one of TV’s most famous failed reveals.

🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations

Noware’s PUFF Flash Drive

A designer flash drive. A phrase that should not work, and yet here we are. Noware’s PUFF is a wearable USB drive with a tiny screen and reactive animations. It can be worn as a pendant, bag charm, or keychain, because apparently external storage is ready for its comeback era.

After years of everything disappearing into clouds, subscriptions and invisible sync, there is something strangely satisfying about a tiny, physical object that says: Your files live here.

Is it necessary? Absolutely not.

Does it come with a hefty price tag? Obviously.

🔗Check out Noware.Nyc

Digital Graffiti for the E-Ink Shelf Tag Era

Arthur Bouffard (@arthurbfrd) shared his experimental usage of a Flipper Zero-style pentesting Device to rewrite electronic shelf labels in a grocery store. Not to change the price — the video very clearly warns that doing that is illegal — but to show how some e-ink retail tags can be modified for “educational and research purposes.”

Which is exactly the kind of sentence that sounds like it was written five minutes before a mall security guard arrived.

Retail infrastructure becoming a canvas. The supermarket shelf as a low-resolution message board.

🔗 More of the Creator www.arthurbouffard.com

Cat Gatekeeper: The Internet’s Orange Warning Sign

Cat Gatekeeper is a browser extension that blocks your screen with an enormous orange cat once you’ve scrolled for too long. That’s the whole intervention: the cat arrives, the feed stops, you sit there with your choices.

Most screen-time tools feel like HR software for your soul. Cat Gatekeeper is better because it doesn’t moralize. It just puts a large digital animal in the way.

🔗Get your own Cat: Cat Gatekeeper

Your AI Slop Bores Me

Your AI Slop Bores Me is a real-time game where humans pretend to be AI. You submit a prompt, a stranger has a few seconds to answer like a chatbot, then you do the same for someone else.

The result is messy, fast, occasionally stupid, occasionally brilliant and much more alive than most “creative AI” demos. The name did half the work before anyone clicked.

🔗 youraislopbores.me

Fructis Fans Links: A Hub Dedicated to The Art of Early Internet Design!

Fructis Fans Links is a retro web resource hub full of GIFs, blinkies, HTML guides and everything you need to bring the vibrant and quirky aesthetics of the early internet back to life.

The old web survives in places like this because someone loved something enough to collect it, organize it and keep it online.

🔗 fructisfans.neocities.org/Links

🎟️ Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month

Tux the Penguin (1996)

Before mascots were smoothed into brand-safe little blobs by product teams and stakeholder decks, there was Tux.

Tux is a penguin character and the official mascot of the Linux kernel. Linux could have given itself something serious. A chrome symbol. A cyber-animal. A logo that screamed “future infrastructure.” Instead, the open-source community chose a penguin who looks pleasantly full and vaguely pleased to be included.

The idea of making Linux’s mascot a penguin came from Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself. Jeff Ayers later described Torvalds as having a soft spot for “flightless, fat waterfowl,” while Torvalds joked that he caught “penguinitis” after a small penguin nibbled him during a 1993 visit to the National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra, Australia.

🤔 Poll of the Month

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Hello!

We’re back with your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities and internet curiosities. Grab a coffee, or whatever fuels your creative weirdness and dive in!

In this issue:

• Brand strategy shifts: Vaseline (social listening), IKEA (everyday storytelling), Sprite (sensory branding)

• “2026 = 2016” nostalgia loop and…

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And still, nothing could have prepared me for this. Except a LAN party maybe, to be fair.

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Hello!

We’re back with your monthly dose of the bizarre and delightful in creative culture, design oddities and internet curiosities. Grab a coffee, or whatever fuels your creative weirdness and dive in!

What we’re obsessing over this month:

• The AI Ad Wars: Google’s emotional utility vs. Anthropic’s “privacy as a product.”

• NYFW’s Identity Crisis: Why Rachel…

Read more

Read more