Issue 39 | December 2025

Author

Owen Kelly
December 03, 2025

Welcome to the final edition of Miaaw Monthly for 2025, courtesy of ever changing Beehiiv.com.

Just in time for the end of the year we have found a simple way to describe our publishing schedule. Miaaw Monthly always aims to come out two days before the first podcast of the month.

The first Friday of January 2026, for example, arrives on January 2nd, and so the January edition of the Miaaw Monthly will arrive on Wednesday December 31. Similarly, the first Friday of February 2026 is Friday 6, so the February edition will arrive in your inbox on Wednesday February 4.

Now that we have stopped confusing ourselves with that we will turn our attention to making the Miaaw Review the quarterly newsletter we intended it to be, not the annual it accidentally became this year. We will have more details on this in the January newsletter. (And when will that come out? Wednesday December 31!)

And, as usual, we continue to hope that you will send us something that you want to include in Miaaw Monthly, or something that you want to suggest for the podcasts, by emailing us at [email protected]. We will be happy to include your news and suggestions here and hunt down the topics you want to hear in the podcasts.

PODCASTS FOR DECEMBER 2025

Friday December 5

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 81

When Arlene Goldbard is not being a cultural activist or a consultant, she paints. When she is not painting she writes. She writes essays and novels. Her latest novel The Intercessor has just come out.

Owen Kelly talks to Arlene about how this specific burst of writing began, how the novel grew from the initial writing, and what she hopes the published book might achieve.

Friday December 19

A Culture of Possibility | Episode 48

Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about redemption: : the understanding that we can learn from experience and choose to realign some aspect of our lives to our deepest values.

How much do people believe positive change is actually possible?

How much are people’s ideas of possibility constrained by a certainty that our pasts over-determine our futures?

A THOUSAND WORDS

An Extinction Rebellion poster from the poster archives gathered together for the Right to Protest exhibition (see below) at Greatorex Street, London, between 18–28 September 2025.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Living in the past by design

We have talked in recent issues about webrings and how they have refused to die. Independent musicians and others have continued to use them and move them forward.

This month we came across some game designers and others who have dedicated themselves to moving the web backwards, but in an interesting way. They have a webring called The Old Net and you can find it here.

The first page immediately takes you back to a time before even GeoCities existed. The sites you can link to continue your journey into the past.

The webring includes “ucanet, a project which aims to provide a network/web ecosystem for retro computers that is separated from the modern web. ucanet is powered by an alternative-root DNS server, with a completely fresh set of domains you can register”. You can reach this directly if you click here.

Possible futures

From a possible past to a possible future. With all the excitement, fears, hype, and scepticism surrounding the search for superintelligence (the fabled beast that used to be called General Artificial Intelligence), it was probably only a matter of time before a secondary industry tried to take root in the deep soil of surrounding bullshit.

Here comes Resaro, whose “Approved Intelligence™ Platform delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end testing ecosystem designed to meet the stringent demands of operationally critical settings. Engineered with a modular architecture, it empowers you to rapidly deploy AI testing capabilities that align precisely with mission-critical use cases — offering greater flexibility and agility compared to traditional monolithic systems”.

Did anyone complete your bingo card? I completed mine with mission-critical use cases! Some of you may already have completed yours with Approved Intelligence™.

If you want to know more, and you really shouldn’t, then you can click here.

Community Arts exhibition now open

We talked to John Phillips and Clive Russell about The Museum of Unrest one year ago in Miaaw edition 78. You can relive that discussion whenever you want by simply choosing to click here.

John has now written to let us know that you can finally view the Community Arts Collection that Belinda Kidd has curated. We talked with John and Belinda in May this year about the then coming-soon collection, and you can listen to that episode if you click here.

To view the Community Arts Collection please click here, and we think you will find it more than worthwhile (and not just because John interviewed Sophie and Owen and François wrote an essay).

The opening of this collection got delayed much longer than expected because it grew to include more than originally intended, and because for awhile time and energy got diverted to assembling and curating the Right to Protest exhibition, which took place not online but at Greatorex Street between 18–28 September 2025, as part of the Shoreditch Design Triangle and the London Design Festival.

The Right to Protest exhibition is now also available online at The Museum of Unrest. To see it please click here.

DIY Comics available now

Finally, for this year, you can download some free print-and-fold comics / zines if you click here.

That’s all folks!