Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Snackables
Things we found elsewhere and pass on: a film, a tool, an essay, a corner of the old internet. A few lines on why, then off you go. New ones join the shelf as we find them, newest first.
21 Dec 2025
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
Read the note ↗21 Dec 2025
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.
Read the note ↗7 Dec 2025
'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
Read the note ↗7 Dec 2025
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
Read the note ↗7 Dec 2025
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
Read the note ↗7 Dec 2025
'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
Read the note ↗7 Dec 2025
The Library of Time gathers — or tries to — 'every calendar with a verifiable date at a specific point in time,' alongside a survey of timekeeping across civilisations. A virtual museum of temporal imaginaries: ancient non-Gregorian calendars, eclipses, cycles, cultural variations — an int
Read the note ↗23 Nov 2025
'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.' For Simone Weil, attention isn't effortful focus but an emptying out — a waiting, a letting-go of expectation so that something real can arise. 'Our thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.' A kind of secular prayer. For
Read the note ↗23 Nov 2025
Not all knowledge nourishes. Three frogs face a dilemma: open the mysterious box, or leave it closed? They argue, hesitate, and give in to curiosity — and find knowledge, but not the kind they can integrate. A short parable about the difference between information and wisdom, and the cost
Read the note ↗23 Nov 2025
A sociological detective story about India's scam economy — traced not to individual greed but to a system that fails to provide dignified livelihoods while endlessly broadcasting the dream of upward mobility. We meet young men running call-centre cons from their bedrooms and a cultural sc
Read the note ↗23 Nov 2025
A long-view essay on the traffic light as an evolving symbol of modernity's attempt to choreograph chaos — from a towering, gas-lit Victorian semaphore (that promptly exploded) to a universal system mediating motion and control. Through exploding prototypes, colour-coding debates and AI-dr
Read the note ↗23 Nov 2025
Laura Kampf turns found objects into functional curiosities with a signature mix of wit, grit and industrial poetry. Here she drags an old traffic light out of the LA River and lets it slowly reveal that it wants to become a toy for her daughter. Part build video, part philosophical sketch
Read the note ↗