Athens Local Food Tour: A genuine culinary journey beyond tourist traps
As someone who takes food research very seriously (like, spreadsheets and colour-coded pins on Google Maps seriously), Athens had me stumped. Every 'hidden gem' I found online turned out to
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The Spinoff
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Imagining a new web aesthetic where every platform doesn't look exactly the same
First platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes. Now they've made all the boxes look and feel the same. How do we get the best of the old internet back? Lately I've been thinking about what being online looks like. The actual look of it. The aesthetic. As I continue to think and write and talk about escaping walled gardens, I've begun to notice more and more the bricks in those walls. Or the kind of concrete, the colours of the barbed wire, whatever metaphor works in your head. Take a look at this photo quickly and tell me what app this: Is this Snapchat? Maybe the border colours in the screenshot tipped you off – but this is how Instagram shows you its app on its own website. Look like the fave photo sharing site you remember? Let's go again. Which app is this: Is this TikTok? This is Spotify. Try finding the music you love amid its current front page onslaught of video, podcasts, video podcasts, and audiobooks – I dare you. Then talk to a parent of young kids who has carefully controlled their access to YouTube, only to find that the innocent 'music app' is now feeding them the exact same dross. One more: Is this X, the everything app? This is the one that set me off, actually. This is Substack's app, jam-packed with every dark pattern I've come to hate about the current era. If you haven't done this lately, let me show you what trying to sign up to receive a free email newsletter is like now: Ugh, I just needed to get that off my chest, sorry. Back to the look of it all, though. The independent web never had a single coherent aesthetic, obviously, because everyone made it look like whatever they wanted it to. It was constrained only by what the html/css could do. And so it was individual, chaotic, often weird and it was always personal. It was the sewing and embroidery site that didn't close its tags and the Time Cube guy. If you're too young to have experienced this first hand, hit 'surprise me' on this page and get shown web1.0 sites that are still around (Wiby is a search engine of the early web). Now we think about this era as a pixelly time of flashing 'under construction' gifs and hit counters and tiled backgrounds. But the core components were more 'here is what I care about' and 'here are some other things you might be interested in'. The early platforms started to consolidate us together, but they were still deeply personalisable. MySpace and Geocities pages were as eclectic as the self-built ones. Early Tumblr was all about your template, and let you muck around in the css yourself to make it look exactly the way you wanted. Early subreddits were styled to the hilt, and browser extensions like RES let you further make your experience exactly your own. Then sometime around the mid 2010s it started to change, and platforms started to coalesce around clean, uniform interfaces. We saw more template-driven content structures (profile grids, feeds, carousels). Everything had to conform to brand guidelines and UI patterns, and as a consequence it was suddenly homogenised – even wildly different creators' pages looked the same. You can point to various reasons for this – Google acquired Blogspot, Yahoo! acquired Tumblr, Pinterest moved into its shopping-first era, everything became an app. To begin with these platforms forced us all into their stylised boxes, and now, as you can see above, they've made all the boxes look and feel the same. So if web aesthetic = the messy, expressive look of the open internet, and platform aesthetic = the polished, standardised design of closed ecosystems, both aesthetics say a lot about power, creativity, and who controls the experience. That's probably uncontroversial. What I want to think about now, though, is what the new web aesthetic is. As we start to focus on building the good internet, it's cute and fun to nod to the retro stylings of the web1.0 era – reinventing webrings and blogrolls and giving everything an anti-Squarespace feel. But whatever is next shouldn't be retro. It should be its own thing. Over the last few months in my newsletter I've been talking about exploration, and gardens, and archiving – how to bring discovery back when search has been killed by AI slop and Google tells you to eat rocks. I'm not a designer, so I'm not about to tell you anything about layouts or typefaces or colour palettes. But here's what I think can be the core of the next era of the web. I think the new web aesthetic is about getting active again. Platforms encourage passivity. They want us to stay still and scrolling, looking at what the algo wants to show us. Like, swipe, repeat. But the new web aesthetic is non-linear. It encourages you to move from one site to another, to dive down rabbit holes, and crucially, to continue sharing what you find. Sites that reflect a person's process, not just their conclusions. It's working with the garage door up. Recently I was ranting to a friend about a thinkfluencer who annoys me, because he tends to gather together the ideas of others and publish what he sees as the definitive essay on a topic without crediting any of the other thinking that's fed into it. By contrast, the new web aesthetic is link-heavy. It constantly references out to other spaces, to past work and to related ideas. It sees the web as an ongoing conversation, not a feed. You're encouraged to leave the page. Platform aesthetic is ephemeral. We all know the experience of going to show someone a post, only to find the feed has refreshed and the meme has vanished, and you're never going to find it again. Older content disappears from view by design. The new web aesthetic is persistent and browsable archives (that don't rot!). Content is meant to be discovered over time, not posted once and done. The new web aesthetic returns agency to the explorer. You decide what's interesting. You wander, and as a consequence you stay with things longer. Anne-Helen Peterson wrote last week about the demise of Pocket (ironically on Substack): 'Welp, I read the internet,' he'd sometimes tell me around 10 am. 'Got anything else for me?' I always did, because I also read the internet in that way. I used a combination of Google Reader, favourite websites I'd refresh multiple times daily (The Hairpin, The Toast, Grantland, Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself), and followed links from those sites to other stuff the editors thought worth my time… I've come to think of these years as the halcyon days of the post-recession internet, a sort of second golden digital age. It was before so many publications' fate became inextricable from social media, so even though everyone over at Gawker Media was still being badgered by the traffic leaderboard in their offices, the idea of the homepage still held power. People navigated to your site because they liked your site and knew they found good stuff on your site; then they read stuff there. Not just scrolled, but read. The new web aesthetic wants to make us readers again. And not whatever this is. My own site design doesn't embody all of this yet, but it does reflect the colourful, chaotic, joy-filled nature of the fandom spaces I love. You can find everything I've written or talked about there. You can find my weird little side projects. And through this newsletter you can follow my thought processes and dive down the rabbitholes with me. The next iteration, for me, is surfacing more of this. Making it more discoverable. The map may not be the territory, but it's a good place to start.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
Athens Local Food Tour: A genuine culinary journey beyond tourist traps
Trade TikTok 'must-eats' for a local's insight if you want to experience Athens' genuine food culture, writes Natasha Bazika As someone who takes food research very seriously (like, spreadsheets and colour-coded pins on Google Maps seriously), Athens had me stumped. Every 'hidden gem' I found online turned out to
Scoop
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Gone Bush By Outback Tom And Grandad
A very Australian, very tasty guide to making your own comfort food, bush style – from social media sensations Outback Tom and Grandad. Through their fun, relatable 'bush style' cooking videos on TikTok and Instagram, Outback Tom and Grandad have amassed millions of followers who love their recipes and adventures from the heart of the Kimberley. This colourful, easy-to-use cookbook features some of their best recipes, along with more than 30 new ones, all perfect for outdoor cooking but also easy to make at home. Try your hand at classic damper, or make a delicious brekky in a can. Have a go at smoking fish or cooking kangaroo tail, or keep it simple with some fancy snags. And finish it off with an apple crumble or lemon slice. Ever wanted to go bush and build your own oven? Ever wanted to know how to cook a cheap and easy feed with just pantry staples and one pot? Look no more: Gone Bush is your new bush-cooking bible. Read the digital review copy here - The digital review copy is for publicity purposes only, not for distribution. About the author Tom Forrest is a proud Yorta Yorta man raised in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. His media career started in 2017, after appearing in the ABC ME television show My Year 12 Life. Tom went on to have his own ABC iview series The Kununurra Kid, where he explored Australia and found the lost parts of his Indigenous family. Since then, he has worked for ABC Kimberley, triple j radio and ABC Indigenous as a journalist, finding stories within the community and tells them through radio, TV and social media. With his Grandad, Tom runs the social media page Outback Tom, which showcases life out bush, different meals, outback living, cooking, tips and tricks.
