Grokkist Press
Reading Room
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The house byline of Grokkist Press: Snackables, the Grokkist letter, and the things we make together.
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Less aloneEntangled Vale
An anxious little octopus watches the colourful world from the safety of her shell. She wants to explore, but fear holds her back — and it's only through small moments of safety and spark that she finds the courage to step into the current. For anyone who hesitates to fully swim, a gentle
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Less aloneUnfolding Realm
A stop-motion short about a worm stuck in a soulless remote job — equal parts funny and uncomfortably accurate about corporate claustrophobia. Pairs well with The Cat Empire's Wild Animals, a musical antidote whose chorus ('Don't let them kill the wild animals inside of you') picks up wher
Surprise meEntangled Vale
When Tonga's undersea internet cable was severed by a 2022 volcanic eruption, the island was suddenly snapped off from the digital world — banks froze, remittances halted, families couldn't reach loved ones. The way Tongans responded, falling back on radio, oral communication and local res
Surprise meMaker's Forge
Yoshie Shiratori escaped four times from some of Japan's most secure prisons, each time through sheer ingenuity and a refusal to be broken — in one case corroding his handcuffs by spitting miso soup on them daily, then dislocating his shoulders to squeeze through. Every wild detail is hist
ImagineMaker's Forge
You know Quentin Blake from Roald Dahl's books, but fewer know he spent years drawing on hospital walls. This short film captures his process filling dull corridors with tender chaos — animals on bicycles, kids mid-laugh — his wobbly, expressive lines subverting institutional sterility wit
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Researchers found that poetic verse can bypass AI safety systems: translating dangerous prompts into metaphor-laden stanzas achieved a 62% jailbreak rate across 25 frontier models — and larger, more capable models were more vulnerable, their literary fluency making them easier to subvert.
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Less aloneHearthlands
'We are going to have to live here with one another.' Rosie Spinks revisits her essay on becoming 'collapse aware' — the slow, grief-tinged reckoning that the way things are might not just be broken but ending. Rather than fear or fatalism, she offers collapse awareness as a portal: into g
Move meEntangled Vale
A luminous, slow-burning conversation between John Berger and Michael Silverblatt, ranging from WWI trenches to mountain peasants, marionettes to motorcycles. At its centre is tenderness — considered less as a sentiment than as an act of freedom, a refusal to judge, a way of staying human
WonderMaker's Forge
A long-running podcast that treats horror cinema as cultural archaeology. Host Mike Muncer guides listeners through slashers, ghost stories, folk horror and body horror, tracing how our fears mutate across time, technology and society. Each episode pairs a film deep-dive with thoughtful gu
GroundedEntangled Vale
'Somewhere down the line it's just going to be another failure…' A potter returns to porcelain after years with stoneware and captures, with exquisite honesty, the tender friction of re-encountering a material that resists and reveals. Porcelain throws like plasticky cheddar, he says — sed