Rashguard Tribune is a newspaper in the sense that it has columns, a dateline, and an unshakable belief that small things deserve enormous scrutiny. It is not a newspaper in any of the other senses.
Everything here is satire. Nothing here is reporting. If a piece appears to describe a real product, a real company, or a real person, it is describing a category, and the category is doing something that deserved it.
The Chafe Index
The house instrument. Anything can be measured on it: an object, a policy, a genre of email, a fifteen-minute stretch of an afternoon. The scale runs from 0 to 10, where 0 is silk and 10 is burlap.
It does not measure how bad a thing is. Plenty of terrible things score low because they leave you alone. It measures friction — the specific quality of a thing that rubs against you every single time, forever, in a way you cannot fix and cannot stop noticing.
The scores are final and the methodology is a mood.
Standing Columns
- Dispatches — Everything that would not hold still long enough to be a column.
Colophon
Set in Newsreader and Archivo, with a nameplate in UnifrakturMaguntia that is, on purpose, slightly out of register on two plates. Built with Astro, printed as flat files, and served overnight from a machine named Oracle.
There is an RSS feed, because this is a newspaper and that is how newspapers work.