looking closer // feb 2026
prescription swimming goggles, canva's video editor, escape rooms, and lorde with special guest kevin abstract
seeing underwater
The first time I wore glasses outside was disorientating. Turns out trees had individual leaves. Leaves with sharp edges and veins running through them. I’d been missing out.
My life changed again when I got prescription swimming goggles. They’re surprisingly cheap compared to regular glasses, starting around $30 online, and also much safer for your eyes than swimming with contact lenses.
At the local pool, I no longer had to squint at the clock and could see the outline of every floating bandaid in my vicinity (yay). This month, I went snorkeling with them at Clovelly Beach and saw a lil sea pancake cruising along the ocean floor.
inspecting Canva’s video editor
I made a presentation for my friends using Canva. I love the platform. It’s beautiful, intuitive to use (mostly), and I love that I can do everything in one place, like edit videos of my life and only show a snippet of it.
… Or so I thought.
Upon clicking share, I thought to myself “hmmmph, how much do I trust my software engineering friends to have implemented this well” and decided to click around. I’d uploaded the entirety of my ‘one second everyday’ project (aka years of daily footage) and felt unusually sensitive about the full videos being available to others.
But sureelllly not… right? I had to check. So, I created a “view-only” public link, went onto a new incognito tab, pulled up the presentation, and then used the oldest trick in the book: inspect element 😎.
I did a clickity click around, filtered for video files, and lo and behold, I found a link to the ENTIRE UNTRIMMED VIDEO hiding in the network requests.
The 1SE presentation link did not make it to the group chat. Instead, I spent the evening filing a bug bounty report. And after a few days of waiting, the response I got back was that this was a known issue and working as intended, so case closed (hmmph).
It’s not far-fetched that Canva was designed this way. The idea that edits can be non-destructive was revolutionary in the history of creative tools. Back in The Day, people edited films by cutting negatives with scissors. When the original 1990 Photoshop came along, you applied changes to pixels directly, without the ability to undo more than the last step. Now, almost every software preserves the original files and treats edits as separate layers on top: you can edit, re-edit, collaborate, and bypass your fear of commitment.
But there’s a difference between editing privately and sharing publicly. When I hit publish, I expect unedited footage to stay private. Imagine if uploading a YouTube video quietly exposed all your outtakes and off-the-record convos to anyone with the link.
I don’t think there’s a simple fix, but it seems like a solved problem: re-encode videos on publish or add the option for users to ‘edit permanently.’ Or as a starting point, signal to users before they hit share that the original file may be visible, instead of burying the info in a help centre doc.
To my Canva friends: please fix <3. I’d like to link my presentation without having to re-edit all my videos on Adobe.
some escape room recommendations
If you’re unfamiliar with escape rooms, the premise is that you and your team get ‘locked’ in a room and have to solve a series of puzzles to get out within the time-limit (around an hour). They’re almost always themed, which is my favourite part.
Shout-out to The Cool Space Escape Room in Chippendale. I did both of their rooms recently: Seance and Sweethearts Ice Cream Parlour. I highly recommend them both for the unique puzzles, immersive storytelling, props and set design, and the wonderful hosts.
I also watched this PyCon AU talk last year by the founder of Melbourne-based escape room company CubeScape. Their escape rooms are predominantly powered by Raspberry Pis running ten-year-old Python code. It was cool hearing how they scaled the architecture and the ways they modified the rooms after selling to Strike Bowling: including adding competitive multiplayer mode, rigging the games so everyone had a good time, and protecting the rooms from young drunk people.
romanticizing drinking water around Sydney with Kevin Abstract
I’m always surprised to see Australia represented in media. I’ve seen a lot of videos of New York, or Tokyo, or Paris, or London, but seeing Sydney in something always catches me off-guard.
I watched Kevin Abstract open for Lorde’s Ultrasound tour this month. He had two screens on stage. On one screen was him rapping live to a hand-held camera on stage, and on the other was a video of him drinking bottled water from a 12-pack while being driven around Sydney. It took a while for us to notice that the trees in the background were strangely Australian, and that the buses were an oddly familiar shade of blue, but when he stepped out of the taxi, I recognised that exact corner Ezymart by Hyde Park in an instant. He must’ve filmed it on the day.
+1 to romanticizing drinking water around Sydney, and also this other video he shot in Australia while on tour:
And Lorde was amazing too. I felt like I was in a music video being constructed in real-time with the visuals and artistry. I grew up listening to Pure Heroine and Melodrama. Triple J had Royals on repeat for months back in 2013 before the song blew up internationally, so woohoo another +1 to Australia.
imagine what u could’ve seen at lorde if u had your prescription goggles