Some lazy Sunday reading: interesting articles from across the web (Aug 2026 edition)
Oh gee whillikers, it's been a while since I last posted a round-up of interesting things I've been reading in the internet! What I thought would be a regular thing didn't end up being one, but that doesn't mean I haven't been making note of some cool stuff I've stumbled across in the past months. Think of this as me kinda-like re-posting some things, only with a bit more clicking involved.
> The fantastic eternal-underdogs emo rockers Los Campesinos! have always been completely transparent about the life and tales of an independent act popular enough to have a following but not popular enough to have actual hits. Their email newsletter frequently offers glimpses behind the scenes in ways other artists simply do not. One of those was a quick look into the actual costs of a UK band touring the US, and Stereogum subsequently requested the band to expand on and break it down even further. It's a really fascinating and revealing look at just what it means financially to operate a passion project and to try and give the fans across the pond an opportunity to see the band. Plus, pop over to the comments section after the article where Gareth from Los Campesinos ended up hosting an impromptu, unplanned Q&A on the subject of the article.
Los Campesinos! Break Down What It Actually Costs to Tour North America
> If you haven't bumped into CD-ROM Journal before, it's a blog based in Japan where the writer hunts down local multimedia CD-ROMs from (primarily) the 1990s and then presents his findings to the reader, offering an insight into the Wild West of CD-ROM era's technological explorations, pre/early-internet computer culture and how it was shaped in these Japanese consumer market specifically, all in one go. One such CD-ROM find turned out to be an unexpected goldmine, when a promotional disc for a 1994 Kansai-area BBS service turned out to contain an actual archive of the forum discussions - and the author has a blast going through them and checking out just what a bunch of tech-savvy people in Kansai in the mid-90s are talking about. The forums were heavily populated by music geeks, and it's incredible just how some things never change when it comes to music nerds (shout-out to the guy who "keeps accumulating CDs faster than they can reasonably organize them" - relatable). It's such a wonderful look into internet discussions before the internet was even really a thing.
A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS
> The superb PC games blog Digital Antiquarian, which goes through important or notable (one way or another) PC games year-by-year, has reached the year 1999 and that means they are covering some really fascinating games at the moment. Their article on the third Gabriel Knight game is already excellent as it is, as the author Jimmy Maher examines the game's successes and failures in light of how it became the butt of many jokes thanks to some early internet era caustic snarkiness - it's a fascinating deep dive and a redemption arc of what I feel is not just the best Gabriel Knight game but one of my all-time favourites in general. But Maher has a tendency to sometimes use specific games as an excuse to deep-dive into particular aspects in wider pop culture or gaming history (a recent example being the X-Files adventure game from the late 1990s which isn't perhaps worth covering in itself, but which became a window to the 90s UFO craze and the X-Files mania overall), and the Gabriel Knight article became a launchboard to dive further into the real-life inspiration of the game's central mystery. Maher breaks down the history and legend of the small French village of Rennes-le-Chateau and the conspiracies and hoaxes that surround it in a series of supplementary articles, and it's a really incredible deep dive to a particular pet favourite subject of mine.
Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned
The Mystery of Rennes-le-Château, Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
> Yote in Print's Ash Lestes released a touching article at the start of Pride month about coming out as a furry, and I don't think there's anything a quick explanatory paragraph could say that the text itself doesn't already talk about in detail. A beautiful biographical piece.
On Coming Out as a Furry
> August has been a tough month for celebrity deaths. In wake of the passing of the wonderful and one-of-a-kind icon Tim Curry people shared so many of his memorable performances throughout the internet - among them, of course, his meme-worthy line-read of an absolutely stupendous piece of monologue in Red Alert 3. Turns out, a few years back Vice actually released an oral history of the famous scene, interviewing the game's writers and developers as well as other adjacent people to understand just how Curry's particularly memorable way of phrasing came to me.
An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism
> Finally, as we're all now starting to create our own personal spaces online once more, I encourage everyone to bookmark Beeps' handy guide for every HTML element.
Every HTML Element
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