🛸 The Orbit Dispatch: Issue #13
The rise of the Human Watermark, the legacy of the Nintendo Power Glove, platform absurdities, AI overload, and iconic design misfires.
Hello!
New year. New month. Same obsession with strange design decisions.
Welcome back to your January edition of creative culture, odd objects and internet weirdness.
🌟 Fresh Orbit: Creative News & Quick Takes
In a move so ironic it feels fake (but sadly isn’t), X Corp sued in December 2025 to protect the Twitter trademark. The reason? A startup called Operation Bluebird tried to revive the name, arguing the brand had been “abandoned.” Elon Musk spent years publicly deleting the bird from existence—ripping logos off buildings, killing redirects and telling everyone Twitter was dead. But the moment someone else tried to bring Twitter back? Suddenly the name mattered. Turns out you can burn down a brand, but you still don’t want anyone else living in the ruins.
The most inescapable sound of December 2025 was a clip from a generic Jet2 Holiday commercial: “Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday.” The internet, in its infinite irony, weaponized this cheerful slogan as the soundtrack for misery. The audio was overlaid on videos of cancelled flights, burning dinners, breakups and minor car accidents.
Following the U.S. election fallout and X’s trademark wars, Bluesky saw a massive user spike, crossing the 30 million mark in late 2025.
The AI arms race reached a fever pitch in December 2025. Following the release of Google’s Gemini 3, which outperformed ChatGPT in key benchmarks, OpenAI declared an internal “Code Red” and rushed the release of GPT-5.2. From a creative community perspective, this constant model churn is genuinely exhausting. What started as excitement around a magical new tool now feels more like watching a panicked industry sprint in circles, constantly shipping updates without anyone stopping to ask where all of this is actually heading.
Not all of December 2025 was tech panic. In a genuinely wholesome moment, the long-lost 1983 Thomas & Friends pilot episode, “Down the Mine,” resurfaced on YouTube. For the lost-media community, this was a huge deal—a small cultural miracle. It’s a reminder that while tech obsesses over the future, some of the most meaningful work happening online is about preserving the past. These unofficial archivists aren’t chasing scale or hype; they’re saving the texture of childhood. And honestly, a wobbly model train falling down a mine in 1983 can hit harder than most modern blockbusters—because it’s not new content, it’s recovered memory.
In late 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated preserving 1 trillion web pages.
On December 10, 2025, Instagram rolled out “Your Algorithm,” letting users reset and tweak their recommendations. Framed as empowerment, it’s really an admission that the system is broken. After years of ads, AI sludge, and unwanted content, the black box finally became unbearable. Handing users the controls feels less like progress and more like a retention Hail Mary—a sign that in 2026, curation shifts from passive scrolling to active choice. Basically: the digital equivalent of a restaurant letting you cook your own meal because the chef keeps serving you plastic.
Microsoft’s attempt to rebrand its news aggregation services to “MS NOW” (My Source for News, Opinion and the World) was met with universal derision, earning an “F” grade from branding agencies.
The Christmas Day 2025 release of Space Invaders on Xbox Series X mattered not because it was new, but because of how it was framed. It wasn’t treated as a retro gimmick, but as a digital artifact. It’s a sign that early video games are shifting from entertainment to heritage—the industry finally treating its past the way cinema treats silent films.
🔗 Curated Links: Oddities & Inspirations
1. Send a Message to Your Future Self
FutureMe lets you write an email now, receive it years later. No feeds, no algorithms, just a little delayed self-reflection. Reading old FutureMe letters feels like opening a time capsule you forgot you buried, which might be the purest form of digital nostalgia we have.
2. Neal.fun: The Internet, But Curious Again
Neal.fun is a collection of games, visualizations and interactives that feel like discovering a weird website in 2008 — except they’re beautifully designed and deceptively smart. From simulating how rich billionaires actually are to mapping absurd internet facts, it’s proof that the web can still be playful without being loud.
🔗 neal.fun
3. Fonts In Use’s - The Fonts Behind Pop’s Most Iconic Eras
For years, these album covers, posters and press images felt iconic but oddly anonymous — vibes without credits. Fonts In Use does the detective work, tracing the actual typefaces behind pop culture’s biggest moments, from Britney Spears’ early-2000s era to other chart-dominating visuals. It’s a reminder that pop history isn’t just sound and spectacle — it’s also letterforms, layout decisions, and designers quietly shaping how fame looks.
4. PlayClassic.Games: The Internet as an Arcade Archive
Hundreds of retro titles directly in your browser — no installs, no accounts, no nostalgia baiting. It treats early video games less like “retro fun” and more like cultural artifacts that deserve to stay accessible. In a moment when digital history keeps disappearing behind subscriptions and remasters, this feels quietly radical.
5. Cassettine: Make Your Playlist Physical
Cassettine lets you turn a Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube Music playlist into a shareable cassette-style design in under a minute. A reminder that music sharing used to come with handwriting, plastic cases, and taste you had to commit to.
6. Scrapbooking Heaven
DigitalScrapbook.com is a community and rabbit hole of kits, textures and paper scans that feel delightfully unoptimized. It’s less about polished design and more about personal messiness — cutting, layering and assembling visuals the way people used to before everything needed to be content.
🔮 2026 Forecast: The Human Watermark
Forget the blue check. The real flex next year? Being verifiably human.
As AI-generated everything floods our feeds, we’re seeing a quiet rebellion rise—one that smells like pencil shavings, sounds like bad voice memos, and looks like something you actually touched. Handwriting. Shaky video. Grainy scans. Proof-of-life aesthetics.
In 2026, authenticity won’t come from blockchain certificates or digital badges—it’ll come from visible friction. Mistakes. Imperfections. That scratchy audio file you almost didn’t post. That zine you photocopied at 2AM. That limited run CD-R with Sharpie scrawl.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s verification.
Welcome to the era of the Human Watermark.
🎟 Pop-Culture Artifact of the Month
The Nintendo Power Glove (1989)
The Nintendo Power Glove was a wildly ambitious flop that accidentally changed gaming forever. In 1989, it shrank NASA-level VR tech into an $80 toy in just five months: an engineering miracle that mostly didn’t work as intended. Gamers hated the lag, the calibration rituals, and the lack of real games, but millions still bought it because it looked like the future (and because late-’80s marketing was unhinged). Its real legacy came later: the Power Glove laid the conceptual groundwork for motion control, from the Wii to Kinect to modern VR.
⭐ Iconic Pop-Culture Photos & Their Secret Stories
1. The Envelope That Exposed the Oscars Machinery (2017)
At first glance, it looks like chaos. The real story is quieter and more revealing. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the ceremony moved forward as if nothing were wrong. Speeches began. Applause swelled. Cameras stayed locked. Then the correction surfaced: the presenters had been handed the wrong envelope, and Moonlight was the actual winner.
What made the moment iconic wasn’t the mistake, it was the delay. A split-second instinct to protect the ritual over the truth. The photo endures because it captured a rare thing: a perfectly polished cultural machine hesitating, then cracking, live. In retrospect, this image feels like a preview of modern media culture — where errors surface instantly, corrections happen mid-performance and transparency arrives whether you’re ready or not.
2. Nirvana, Just Before Everything Changed (1991)
This image looks casual. It wasn’t. Shot by Kirk Weddle around the release of Nevermind, this outtake shows Nirvana at the edge of transformation, just before the band became a symbol rather than a group. Grunge didn’t arrive with a manifesto; it arrived through images like this, where discomfort read as honesty.
By the time “Smells Like Teen Spirit” began circulating in late summer 1991, the shift had already started. The sound felt new, but the images mattered just as much:unstyled, uncomfortable, resistant to spectacle. With Nevermind, Nirvana didn’t announce a revolution so much as document one. These photos captured a generation mid-translation: restless, distrustful of polish and uninterested in the excess that defined the decade before it.
3. When Culture Stopped Waiting Its Turn (1994)
This photo comes from a year when culture didn’t politely queue, it collided. In 1994, Pulp Fiction landed alongside Forrest Gump, The Lion King, and The Shawshank Redemption, while television quietly reset itself with Friends and ER. The image survives not because it’s flashy, but because it marks a saturation point, when cinema, TV and pop storytelling all peaked at once.
The secret of this moment isn’t innovation. It’s density. Too many reference points arrived simultaneously, shaping taste for decades. Looking back, the photo feels less like documentation and more like compression — culture loading faster than anyone expected.
4. The Kiss and the Cut That Defined It (2003)
Everyone remembers the kiss. Fewer remember where the camera went next.
During the MTV Video Music Awards performance that merged pop eras into a single image, Madonna kissed Britney Spears and moments later Christina Aguilera. The broadcast didn’t linger though. Instead, the camera cut to Justin Timberlake, Britney spears ex-boyfriend, capturing his reaction.
🎨 Weird Movie Posters
Here are some of the weirdest and funniest movie posters ever made—the kind that feel less like marketing and more like beautiful accidents. Got other favourites that belong in this hall of fame? Drop them in the comments—we’re always ready to admire more design crimes.
🤔 Poll of the Month.
🎁 Bonus - The Orbit Almanac 2026:
Trying to make sense of the internet, design, and culture in 2026? Same. That’s why we made The Orbit Almanac—part trend report, part cultural weather forecast. Get it here.
📣 What’s New:
Want to collaborate? Got an idea for a feature, a weird project? We’re always open to good conversations and curious partnerships—drop us a line at hello@theorbitstudio.com.
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Thanks for reading!
Forward this newsletter to your favorite design-nerd friends, internet nostalgics, and lovers of all things odd. See you next month—stay curious!
🛸 – The Orbit Team