2025-12-30 22:00:15
This post originally ran on Tedium, our zine designer Ernie Smith's wonderful website and newsletter about the Dull Side of the Internet. Check it out here.
I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.
For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.
But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.
So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.
I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).
But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.
The meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops that have no time for your weird non-standard app.)
Admittedly, the native tools have been getting better. I’m not really a fan myself, but I know GIMP is getting closer in parity to Photoshop. Inkscape is a totally viable vector drawing app. Video is very doable on Linux thanks to the FOSS Kendenlive and the commercial DaVinci Resolve. Blender is basically a de facto standard for 3D at this point. The web-based Penpot is a capable Figma alternative. And Krita, while promoted as a digital painting app, has become my tool of choice for making frame-based animated GIFs, which I do a lot for Tedium.
But for ink-stained print layout nerds, it has been tougher to make the shift (our apologies to Scribus). And Adobe locks down Creative Cloud pretty hard.
However, the recent Affinity release, while drawing some skepticism from the open-source community as a potential enshittification issue, is starting to open up a fresh lane. For those not aware, the new version of Affinity essentially combines the three traditional design apps—vector editor, raster editor, and page layout—into a single tool. It’s pretty good at all three. (Plus, for business reasons related to its owner Canva, it’s currently free to use.)
While it doesn’t have a dedicated Linux version, it more or less runs very well using WINE, the technology that has enabled a Linux renaissance via the Steam Deck. (Some passionate community members, like the WINE hacker ElementalWarrior, have worked hard to make this a fully-fleshed out experience that can even be installed more or less painlessly.)
The desire for a native Linux version of a pro-level design app is such that the Canva subsidiary is thinking about doing it themselves.
But I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, so I decided to try to build as much of the zine as I could with Affinity for page layout. For the few things I couldn’t do, I would remote into a Mac.
Another consideration here is the fact that this zine is being built with Risograph printing, a multicolor printing approach distinct from the more traditional CMYK. The inky printing process, similar to screen printing, has a distinct, vibrant look, even if it avoids the traditional four-color approach (in our case, using layers of pink, black, and lime green).
Throughout the process, I spent a lot of time setting layers to multiply to ensure the results looked good, and adding effects like halftone and erase to help balance out the color effects. This mostly worked OK, though I did have some glitches.
At one point, a lime-green frog lost much of its detail when I tried to RISO-fy it, requiring me to double-check my color settings and ensure I was getting the right tone. And sometimes, PDF exports from Affinity added unsightly lines, which I had to go out of my way to remove. If I was designing for newspapers, I might have been forced to come up with a quick plan B for that layout. But fortunately, I had the luxury of not working on a daily deadline like I might have back in the day.
I think that this layout approach is genuinely fascinating—and I know Jason in particular is a huge fan of it. Could I see other publications in the 404 mold taking notes from this and doing the same thing? Heck yes.
A sneak peek at the inside layout of the 404 Media zine.
So, the headline you can take away from this is pretty simple: Laying stuff out in Affinity over Linux is extremely doable, and if you’re doing it occasionally, you will find a quite capable tool.
Admittedly, if this was, like, my main gig, I might still feel the urge to go back to MacOS—especially near the end of the process. Here’s what I learned:
The good: Workflow-wise, it was pretty smooth. Image cutouts—a tightly honed skill of mine that AI has been trying to obsolete for years—were very doable. Affinity also has some great effects tools that in many ways beat equivalents in other apps, such as its glitch tool and its live filter layers. It didn’t feel like I was getting a second-class experience when all was said and done.
The bad: My muscle memory for InDesign shortcuts was completely ineffective for this, and there were occasional features of InDesign and Photoshop that I did not find direct equivalents for in Affinity. WINE’s file menus tend to look like old Windows, which might be a turn-off for UX purists, and required a bit of extra navigation to dig through folders. Also, one downside of WINE that I could not work past was that I couldn’t use my laptop’s Intel-based GPU for machine learning tasks, a known bug that I imagine slowed some things down on graphically intensive pages.
The ugly: I think one area Affinity will need to work on as it attempts to sell the idea that you can design in one interface are better strategies to help mash down content for export. At one point while I was trying to make a PDF, Affinity promised me that the file I would be exporting was going to be 17 exabytes in size, which my SSD was definitely not large enough for. That wasn’t true, but it does emphasize that the dream of doing everything in one interface gets complicated when you want to send things to the printer. Much of the work I did near the end of the process was rasterizing layers to ensure everything looked as intended.
When I did have to use a Mac app for something (mainly accessing Spectrolite, a prepress app for RISO designs), I accessed an old Hackintosh using NoMachine, a tool for connecting to computers remotely. So even for the stuff I actually needed MacOS for, I didn’t need to leave the comforts of my janky laptop.
Was it 100% perfect? No. Affinity crashed every once in a while, but InDesign did that all the time back in the day. And admittedly, an office full of people using Affinity on Linux isn’t going to work as well as one guy in a coffee shop working with a team of editors over chat and email.
But it’s my hope that experiences like mine convince other people to try it, and for companies to embrace it. Affinity isn’t open-source, and Canva is a giant company with plenty of critics, just like Adobe. But there are emerging projects like PixiEditor and Graphite that could eventually make print layout an extremely viable and even modern open-source endeavor.
But we have to take victories where we can find them, and the one I see is that Affinity is a lot less locked down than Creative Cloud, which is why it’s viable on Linux. And in general, this feels like an opportunity to get away from the DRM-driven past of creative software. (Hey Canva, it’s never too late to make Affinity open-source.)
Difficult reporting shouldn’t have to be tethered to the whims of Big Tech to exist. Especially when that tech—on Amazon’s cloud, using Adobe’s PDFs, through Google’s search, over Meta’s social network, with Apple’s phones, and on Microsoft’s operating system—too often causes uncomfortable tensions with the reporting. This is one step towards a better escape hatch.
2025-12-29 23:34:18
Joseph speaks to Craig Silverman, one of the co-founders of Indicator. Indicator is a new, independent media company that Craig runs with Alexios Mantzarlis. For years Craig has covered the world of ad fraud and disinformation using all sorts of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. Definitely check out Indicator at Indicator.media. The site publishes its own investigations but also tips and tricks you can use yourself.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
2025-12-29 22:00:37
“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com.
That September day I was on holiday in an Airbnb. Sam was in San Diego to report on the sentencing of a high profile sex trafficker. Emanuel was home. Jason was also at home and eating a bagel. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be able to buy a .com for two main reasons: they are typically quite expensive, and when we created our company the domain was already in use by someone else.
Fortunately for us, that company had seemingly moved on to other things, and the domain was up for auction. I got some emails from our domain registrar about the auction a few days before, and some 404 Media readers contacted us about it too. This was our chance.
But an auction is a very different experience to just buying the domain outright. We would be trying to beat other people or bots. We thought that might include those kindly trying to buy the domain on our behalf, or others trying to take it from underneath us. And we had no idea how high the price might go.
I was in charge of placing the bids themselves. Soon we found I wasn’t able to place bids of a certain size because, we later learned, the account didn’t have the necessary level of verification to do so. We were leading with a bid of $1,207.
A few minutes into our group call, Jason started recording it.
“I think we should just get 202 Media if this doesn’t work,” he said.
“Okay, under one minute until the five minute extension is over,” I added.
Emanuel led a ten second countdown.
“Your bid won,” I read from the screen. Everyone cheered. Here is what we said immediately afterwards:
Right now, our .com domain just redirects to the .co one. Maybe we’ll put an Easter Egg or something else fun on it soon, but we also had practical reasons for buying it. The first is that we’re proud to say 404 Media is a well known publication at this point, and we don’t want anyone else parking and abusing the .com domain that many people may end up at by mistake. The second is that, understandably, many people mistakenly email us at the @404media.com domain rather than the @404media.co domain, so now we’ll be able to catch those lost emails and save us all a lot of heartache.
But our ability to buy the domain signifies something important: that we are able to grow, bit by bit, sustainably. When we launched 404 Media in August 2023, we each put $1,000 in. That was to pay for the domain, the content management system (CMS) and website host we use called Ghost, some other add-ons that automatically send people emails, and that’s about it. Buying a .com was a pipedream then, just like running a website and podcast years later was.
Since then we’ve built a fulltext RSS feed for our subscribers (something that didn’t exist with Ghost before); run multiple in-person events; and most recently produced a physical zine. All while reporting and writing cutting edge journalism on technology and AI and how they are really impacting humans every day.
Thank you to all of our paying subscribers who make it possible for us to write impactful journalism every day. And let us buy a new domain.
2025-12-27 22:00:50
Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the discovery of 3I ATLAS, the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks.
First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus—sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse.
This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex.
“Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study. “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensis representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex.”
The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.”
These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon…that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University.
Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era—right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex, said Zanno’s team.
In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign supreme as the tyrant king of its time, we also salute this new dinosaurian dauphin.
In other news…
In 1559, a Spanish colonial fleet was dashed to pieces by a hurricane in Florida. Among the many casualties of this disaster were a cat and a kitten, whose remains were found centuries later in the lower hull of a galleon shipwreck at Emanuel Point, near Pensacola.
These felines “are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States,” according to a study from April filled with fascinating facts about the fallen felines. For example, the adult cat ate like a sailor, devouring nutritious fish and domestic meat (like pork or poultry), with few signs of rodents in its diet.
This suggests the cat “was so effective at controlling rat populations that such prey was an insufficient food source,” said researchers led by Martin Welker of the University of Arizona.
It seems that cats have been impressing people with their legendary hunting prowess for centuries.
The study also includes some fun passages about the prized role of cats as pest control on these European ships, including this excerpt from a marine treatise from 1484:
“If goods laden on board of a ship are devoured by rats, and the owners consequently suffer considerable damage, the master must repair the injury sustained by the owners, for he is considered in fault. But if the master kept cats on board, he is excused from the liability.”
A resolution for 2026: Bring back cat-based legal exemptions.
For generations, astronomers have dreamed of glimpsing the very first stars in the universe, known as Population III. This year, these stellar trailblazers may have finally come into view, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope and the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which can magnify distant objects in space.
Lensed light from an ancient galaxy called LAP1-B, which traveled more than 13 billion years before it was captured by JWST, contains the expected low-metal signatures of Population III stars, according to a December study.
“Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars in the Universe is currently an exciting frontier in astrophysics and cosmology,” said researchers led by Eli Visbal of the University of Toledo. “Up to this point, there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars, defined by their extremely low metallicities.”
“We argue that LAP1-B is the first Pop III candidate to agree with three key theoretical predictions for classical Pop III sources,” the team added. “LAP1-B may only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study of Pop III stars with gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters.”
JWST continues to be a JW-MVP, and it will be exciting to see what else it might spy next.
Let’s close out this wild year with some rest and relaxation in the most soothing of all human creations: the hammock. In a study published last month, researchers meditated on the history of these sleepy slings, from their Indigenous origins in the Americas to their widespread adoption by European mariners and settler-colonists.
The work is full of interesting ruminations about the unique properties and its multifaceted purposes, which ranged from rocking newborn babies to sleep at the dawn of life to comforting the ailing in the form of death beds and burial shrouds.
“The hammock facilitated transitions between life stages like birth, puberty, leadership, and death,” said researchers Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Kuhn of SUNY-Binghamton. But it also facilitated more quotidian shifts in the body: sleep, dreaming, entering hallucinogenic states, and healing.”
What better way to celebrate this weird liminal week, suspended between the past and the future, than an ode to this timeless technology of transitions. It’s been so much fun hanging out with you all in 2025, and I look forward to swinging into a New Year of all things Abstract.
Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you next week.
2025-12-26 22:00:43
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss our recommendations for the year.
SAM: Whenever we shout out a podcast, book, TV show, or other media or consumable product on our own podcast or in a Behind the Blog, you guys seem to enjoy it and want more. To be totally real with you, I get a ton of great recommendations from you, the readers and listeners, all year long and am always learning a lot from the things you throw in the comments around the site and on social media. The 404 Media community has good taste.
We talked through some of our top recommendations of the year in this week’s podcast episode, but here’s a more complete list of what each of us has enjoyed this year, and thinks you might also find worth digging into.
2025-12-25 22:00:41
I am starting to think I will never receive my personalized, likely AI-generated horny Shrek Christmas ornaments I purchased from Wear and Decor. I had hoped the indecent and probably unauthorized Shrek ornament depicting the green ogre getting a blowjob would arrive before Christmas and, ideally, before I traveled home for the holidays. I doubt that’s going to happen. I think I’ve been rooked.
The ornament depicts Shrek, his eyes wide and a smile on his ogre lips, as a long haired Fiona descends upon his crotch. “Let’s get Shrekxy and save Santa the trip,” reads a caption above the scene on the online retailer Wear and Decor read. There was space at the bottom where I could personalize the ornament with the name of myself and a loved one, as if to indicate that I was Shrek and that Fiona was my wife.
When I showed it to my wife weeks ago, after we first put up our Christmas tree, she simply said “No.” “Don’t you think it’s funny?” I said.“You’re supposed to be shopping for a tree topper,” she said.
“It’s only $43.99 for two,” I said. “That’s a bargain.”She stared.
I had been shopping for a tree topper online when I stumbled into the strange world of AI generated pornographic custom ornaments starring popular cartoon characters listed on sites of dubious repute. I do not know what it says about my algorithms that attempting to find a nice, normal, and classy tree topper for Christmas led me to a horrifying world of horny—and seemingly AI generated— knock off novelty Christmas ornaments. I don’t want to reflect on that. I just want to show you what I’ve stumbled upon.
There is a whole underground world of erotic Christmas ornaments starring famous cartoon characters. Some of them are on Etsy, but most are dubious looking sites with names like Homacus and Pop Art. There are themes that repeat. Spanking. Butts. In flagrante delicto bedroom scenes. The promise that the purchaser can personalize these gifts with the name of their loved one and the logo of their favorite football team. I am sure the Baltimore Ravens love that you can buy an ornament depicting a nude Grinch gripping the ass of a female Grinch (notably not that of his canonical wife Martha May Whovier) emblazoned with their logo.
“My butt would be so lonely without you touching it all the time,” reads the inscription above Zootopia’s Nick Wilde with Judy Hopps bent over his knee. You can purchase this same scene with Belle and Beast, Rey and Ben from Star Wars, a pair of Grinches, or Jack Skellington and Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. In another variant, a male cartoon character is bent over the ass of a presenting female. Shrek is nose deep in Fiona’s ass. “I adore and love every part of you—Especially your butt. Merry Grinchmas,” the caption reads.
The ornaments rarely carry the name of the actual characters they’re depicting. They are “Funny Fairytale Ornament” and “Funny Green Monsters” and “Personalized Funny Lion Couple Christmas Ornament, Custom Name Animal Lovers Decoration, Cute Romantic Holiday Gift.” These titles feel like hold overs from the prompt that was, I assumed, used in an AI image generator to create the ornaments. There are other signs.
Some of the Shrek ornaments refer to the green ogre as Grinches. Shrek often looks correct but Fiona is sometimes Yassified, her ogre features smoothed and made more feminine. In an ornament with Belle draped over Beast’s leg, the smiling prince has seven fingers on his left hand. The lighting in the “photos” of the objects is never quite right.
Time Magazine declared the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year in 2025 and there is something about flipping through these listings for cheap and horny ornaments that feels like living in the future. This is the world the architects have built, one where some anonymous person out there in the online ether can quickly generate a lewd cartoon drawing of something from your childhood in an attempt to swindle you for a few bucks while you’re shopping for a Christmas tree topper.
I clicked “purchase” on the $40 Shrek blowjob ornament on November 28. The money was deducted from my account but I have not received confirmation of shipping.