155. Doing your own thing

I.

Step out of your Instagram/Bluesky/TikTok/Substack bubble once in a while and you’ll find the most beautiful websites. One of my favorite sites is that of V.H. Belvadi. Made with love, like reading a novel. Complete with a table of contents, chapters, and page numbers. In this article Belvadi describes his design choices — in case you enjoy that as much as I do.

This week I landed on the website of web developer and designer Henry Desroches¹. Bam — a punishing headline at the top: True terrors of the new dark web. An overwhelming homepage with an array of fonts, pixel art, and contrasts. With a note from the maker. In it he writes: “this version of my website represents my first attempt at growing a digital garden — a place for rough drafts and indecipherable scrawling; for seedlings of ideas to be tended and stand tall in the fields.”

In his essay A Website To End All Websites (seriously, that design!) Desroches describes why personal websites matter so much. “They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.”

Taking matters into your own hands. I love that. That is why I am glad that a number of Dutch journalists have launched Unpause, a games website run independently and filled with articles they actually want to write. The site was built after Gamer.nl was closed down and PU.nl was sold by profit-hungry publisher Reshift to Maltese casino money. If you want to write about games on your own terms, you might as well build your own platform.

Now readers can donate to support them. The downside, of course, is that a self-run site rarely brings in much. Hopefully Unpause will manage to make a success of it.

II.

Everyone knows that the older you get, the more you become like your parents. As children we learn by copying, but some things in your personality run deeper than that. They are genetically determined.

The film Return to Seoul deals with those unavoidable character traits. Twenty-something Freddie was born in South Korea and adopted as a baby by a French couple who raised her. When she spontaneously books a trip to her birth country, she tracks down her biological father and decides to visit him.

She finds a man who has divorced her mother and started a new family. Father says he always thought of Freddie. He invites her, bombards her with messages, and hopes (— pleads with her —) that she will stay. He is a sad figure and drinks too much.

Freddie shows little emotion. She seems to take it all in without reacting. Meanwhile she leads a reckless, impulsive life. Relationships seem to mean little to her. “I can banish you from my life with a snap of my fingers,” she tells her French boyfriend who has traveled all the way there to meet her family. And she means it.

In the film we follow about ten years of Freddie’s life, always with gaps of a few years in between. She returns to Korea regularly, but feels unmoored and no more at home there than in France.

Her relationship with her biological father remains complicated. In him she sees herself and a fate she cannot escape. Like him, Freddie knows no limits and keeps trying to flee the tedium of life, always in search of what she does not have. Contact with her biological mother, for instance. If that worked out, would she find peace? One guess.

III.

In the Iranian film Offside by director Jafar Panahi, a group of women is sidelined. During a World Cup qualifying match for the Iranian national team for the 2006 tournament, they try to enter the stadium to watch the game, but only men are allowed in. The women who are caught are held outside the stadium to be handed over to the police later.

Football may not be political, but the reverse is true: politics is very much football. How often during a World Cup hosted by a murky country does the conversation turn to human rights and exploitation?

In Offside we stay with the group of women throughout. They are simply football fans, but are not allowed to watch because they were not born male. Just like the women, we as viewers see almost nothing of the match. We do see everyone struggling with the rules — rules that someone made up but that cannot be explained².

It is clear that these women are being oppressed. And yet they cheer for the national team, for the flag under which their freedoms are curtailed. So the issue is not with the country itself, but with the authorities and the laws that men have devised.

Offside is actually a very funny and breezy film with a joyful ending. For Panahi, every film (always critical) that he manages to make in Iran must feel like a victory.

PS.

For fans of wordplay, there is now rename.world. On the website you can give every place in the world a new name. So Dordrecht quickly becomes Dordschuin, Amsterdam becomes Bike Dodging Simulator, and Weesp becomes Weeps (that last one I personally find very funny). Not all the names are cheerful, which is the downside of these kinds of crowdsourcing projects.

In the online video library of Eye you can now watch back for free the conversation between Wes Anderson and Tilda Swinton that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Conversations between Swinton and other filmmaker friends are also online, such as Pedro Almodóvar and Joanna Hogg.

This clear video explains why our mental space fills up so quickly. When you’re scrolling or swiping it might seem like you’re not doing much, but you’re leaving very little room to think, says neurologist Richard Cytowic.

Always a pleasure, new work from The Veils. Their new single is called Lungs. A new album called Fragile World is due in June.

I haven’t listened much yet to the new Gorillaz album, but this short film in the style of Disney’s Jungle Book wins me over. “In a time of AI overload, this is our love letter to craftsmanship,” says director Max Taylor. “We’re chasing the feel of pencil on paper. Paint on board. And all the imperfections that come with it.”

You read blog №155, written in the week of 23 February to 1 March 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it every Sunday free in your mailbox.