178. Gone fishing

Hello there! —

After more than three years of blogging weekly, I’m taking a month off. Gives me a chance to focus on some other things for a bit (that driving licence isn’t going to get itself), and then I’ll be back.

I’ll happily leave you with the tip to watch Widow’s Bay on Apple TV+. The series is set on an island where supernatural things happen. The colourful inhabitants can’t handle the island, or a tragic fate awaits them. The characters are sometimes funny, but the series is nail-bitingly tense at the moments that matter.

For me, the atmosphere of this series alone was enough to get hooked. The music is great too. The ending of the first season perhaps flies a little off the rails and is somewhat predictable, but for me that didn’t spoil the fun. I love this comic, cosy horror that ultimately is also about the question of why you’d want to bring children into a doomed world. (The answer comes down to love — you’ll have to watch the series for that.)

PS.

Bobby Fingers is back with a new miniature build, this time recreating the bedroom of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. “Strange colour to paint a bedroom,” he says of the blue walls. “I was gonna make a joke about it being like sleeping up a Smurf’s arse.” Fingers gets wonderfully sidetracked again — by a rat infestation, a winery, and a competition with his wife. By the end, it all comes together beautifully.

On NPO Start you can watch I Am Martin Parr, a documentary about the British photographer, who died last year, who elevated the ordinary lives of people to art in candy-floss colours. Pure enjoyment. (Though annoyingly: why does NPO always crop its documentaries?)

Don’t write with AI. Ever. That’s the argument Bret Stephens makes in The New York Times. “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.”

The 84-year-old Jerry Gretzinger has spent decades mapping a world that doesn’t exist. It has produced a remarkable art project.

My girlfriend and I are hooked on Murdoku, the puzzle craze of the moment. Various outlets have already written about it, but nobody had thought to interview its creator. So I sent him an email for my blog on NU.nl.

See you in a month!

You just read blog №178, written in the week of 3 to 9 August 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday, free of charge.