Something New
A hobby library. What the top of each hobby looks like, then the first step. One complete guide a day, the same for everyone.
The Curiosity
It started with a few viral videos, the kind where someone does a thing so well it looks like a trick. Each one left the same question: what does the top of this hobby actually look like?
So I started collecting. One hobby, the best demonstration of it I could find, then another. The collection grew, and a second question attached itself to the first: if that is the peak, what is the very first thing a beginner does?
That is the whole idea. Find cool things. Know how to start. And leave something lying around that one of my children might pick up and find delightful.
The Build
Every guide is made the same way. The research starts from scratch. Every link is fetched in the same task that publishes it, and a second agent that has not seen the first one's claims checks them all again. In the pilot batch of nineteen that second pass caught a mislabelled link the writer had reported as fine, so it stays.
A live link says nothing about whether the video is any good. A rubric scores every video against the YouTube Data API: length, like-to-view ratio, age. The first video in a guide's peak section is the one people are most likely to click, and an audit found it was often the weakest.
So I ran an experiment: candidate videos for a set of hobbies, rated blind by an independent judge. Once the obvious tutorials and off-topic clips were filtered out, view count and like ratio had no correlation with judged quality. The share of amazed comments did. Now the formula makes the shortlist and an agent reading titles, channels and comments makes the pick, and most guides got a new first video out of it.
The design took longer than the content. Seventeen designs went through a Vite design lab: a card table that deals one hobby at a time, a wry interviewer, a neon arcade, a starfield of category constellations, a particle vortex. The one that survived, Daylight, is the plainest: one complete guide a day led by its peak video, three other hobbies to wander to, and the whole library one click away.
Each of the original guides has a sticker: an animated SVG on a 96 by 96 canvas with a die-cut halo and exactly one looping motion that shows the hobby. The daily guide is chosen from the date alone, a seeded order of the library from 1 September 2026, arranged so neighbouring days do not share a category. It is the same for everyone and nothing is stored.
- Guides
- 234, in 20 categories
- Videos scored
- 1,218 unique videos across 1,223 links
- First-video experiment
- 118 candidates for 14 hobbies, judged blind; 180 of 207 guides changed their first video
- Designs explored
- 17, one kept
- Stickers
- 207 animated SVGs, one per original guide
- Storage
- None. No accounts, nothing tracked
It lives inside this site as static files. The hobby repository builds it on its own with /something-new/ as its base path, and the output is copied into this site's public folder and shipped with the export. A thin strip above its header leads back here.
The Result
A live library. No accounts, no likes, no notes, nothing tracked. Suggestions go to an email address rather than a form.
It grows a few guides at a time. The latest batch added twenty-seven and a twentieth category, and a new guide carries a small New mark for thirty days, then quietly joins the rest.
What I Learned
Nine designs in, every variation looked like the last one. Hobbies in boxes, hobbies by category, hobbies in a list. I had been blaming the designs, and the fault was upstream: the design doc's intent and requirements were quietly pushing each one into the same three shapes. Breaking that mould in the spec, not in the designs, is what opened things up. Six new designs followed, two elements from them worked, and the current design is those two combined: a daily page from one, three things to be curious about from another.
The first video decides whether a guide lands. Everything else on the page is downstream of whether the peak looks like something worth wanting.