AOF ONLINE

ISSUE 004

26 June 2026

The cover this week is a tower block with the sun behind it and a brewery you can barely see at the bottom of the frame.

That's not a coincidence of light. That's the whole story compressed into one exposure.

A river doesn't care what you build on its banks. People do that part for it.

This week, we started something that's been sitting half-formed for a while: Riverside: A Tale of Two Cities, a slow photographic series along the Taff. Two banks, one story, until fairly recently. On one side, a brewery that was part of the city's working memory for longer than most people living near it now have been alive. On the other, ribwort and timothy grass gone to seed, geese raising goslings on a verge nobody's paid to manage. What's replaced the brewery is taller, newer, and already being sold back to the city as a lifestyle. You can see exactly how much taller in the cover image; that's not an angle that flatters anyone's planning decisions.

We're not pretending this is a neutral documentary project. It isn't. It's a Cardiff series shot on the ground, built to grow slowly with more photography from both banks, Seren's archival digging into the area's older history, new poems going in as the body of work expands. It lives across AOF and Pixelfed, and it'll outlast this issue by a long way.

Elsewhere: the countdown to Steam Early Access keeps running. 31 August 2026. The work doesn't stop for a newsletter, so we'll keep this part short; KHOLWA is real, the demo is in active production, and we're not interested in selling you hype faster than we can ship substance.

plzdontkillus.online is also live and gathering shape ahead of next month's AI safety creator bootcamp on the other side of the Atlantic. More on that as it firms up. We'd rather give you something solid than a placeholder with good branding.

Same protocol as always. No face, no apology, no permission asked.

Let's go.