HELLO I AM BACK HELLO!
How are we all? I mean, I say ‘all’ – as is inevitable at this time of year, my already-vanishingly-small audience is further thinned by what I imagine is a significant number of you being in a field in Somerset, and a large proportion of the rest of you still being attached to the post-Cannes recovery IV, but to those of you who are reading this then a heartfelt THANKYOU HI I LOVE YOU.
Anyway, here in the UK we are a week away from a GLORIOUS NEW DAWN – or at least we’d better be, or else there will I fear be some sort of collective mass suicide event as we all fail to get our heads around another 4+ years of Conservative horror. That…that couldn’t actually happen, could it?
Well, regardless, I won’t be here next week to comment on it – sorry, but there’s no way in hell I am not staying up next Thursday, meaning the likelihood of me being in any fit state to start writing this crap at 6am (or indeed of wanting to) is pretty much nil. SO, this newsletterblogtypething will return on 12 July, hopefully in basking in the glow of…well, in all likelihood a Government that doesn’t look hugely different from the old one, policywise, but where familiarity has yet to breed total, overwhelming contempt!
That’s…that’s progress, right?
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are definitely better off reading this than being at a festival, DEFINITELY.
PS – thanks to everyone who shared the TinyAwards link and submitted a site! Nominations will be revealed in a few weeks!
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT IT’S WISHING FOR A SMALL, LOCALISED MONSOON TO HIT WORTHY FARM BETWEEN NOW AND SUNDAY, PT.1:
- PortilloGeddon: Ok, so this one’s FOR NEXT WEEK, but if you’re in the UK (or indeed if you’re one of those foreign perverts who takes an active interest in other people’s elections – FREAK) and want to maximise the enjoyment as a bunch of Conservative MPs fall domino-like across the country then you might want to bookmark this website and return to it as you watch the results come in on July 4th. It will make it MORE FUN, and you will probably be able to gamify it in a way that almost guarantees you start the new government with incipient cirrhosis.
- How Has Your Area Changed?: Oh, and if you’re still somehow vacillating over which way to vote and want some EVIDENCE-BASED RATIONALE to ensure that the incumbents get fcuked every which way to hell and back, you might find this tool interesting – plug in any postcode in the UK that you fancy and it will neatly show you how a few important local metrics have trended over the past 14 years, such as apprenticeships and knife crime and NHS waiting times, all pulled from public data. You get presented with a small overview, but you can also click ‘show all statistics’ in the bottom left and you get additional data, graphs and sources to show you where the numbers are coming from (official stats – this is all legit), and a fun game is to try and remember all the postcodes you have ever lived and, and then to plug all of them in, and see if ANYWHERE got better in an measurable way over the past 14 years because, honestly, I am fcuked if I can find anywhere where the graphs go in the right direction.
- Guess The Candidates Party: I promise, the last electoral link of the week (and, all being well, the last thing pertaining to a UK election for at least four years, please God), this is a simple game that asks you to guess which of the major parties you believe the person presented to you is standing for. DO ALL YOUR PREJUDICES MAP CORRECTLY? This is, on the one hand, harder than you might think given the wide range of mad little parties putting up candidates, but it’s interesting/amusing/telling (delete per your level of metropolitan prejudice) how easy it is to zero in on Tory/Reform picks.
- BBC Sound Effects: After a couple of weeks in which the labels finally appear to have woken up to the existential threat posed to them by Sudo et al (lol, except we all know that it won’t be the labels and top 10% of artists that get screwed – it will be the session musicians and jobbing production engineers, whose interests literally noone gives a sh1t about!), it’s nice to be able to bring you some GOOD OLD ANALOGUE SOUNDS (except delivered digitally, so not actually that analogue at all). This is a WONDERFUL resource and a very fun tool, and it is surprisingly powerful – a library of…I want to say ALL THE SOUND EFFECTS, but even by my standards that’s probably ridiculous hyperbole, so let’s just go with ‘loads’ of sound effects, all from the BBC audio library, made available online for your joy and delectation (and non-commercial use). You want over 91 different cat sounds? GREAT! You want kettles and whistles and mumbled conversations and someone indistinctly shouting “RICKAAAAAAAAAAY!” in the middle-distance? SUPERB! All the samples can be downloaded for you to mess with as you choose (per the aforementioned ‘non-commercial’ restrictions), and there’s an additional lovely feature where you can pull a bunch of different audio samples into a player together and use them to create a sort of soundbite of your choosing…basically this is great, superb bit of BBC public service work, and an amazing resource, and another opportunity to remind you that anyone who seriously advocate cutting the BBC’s funding or abolishing the license fee is a selfish, miserable cnut who doesn’t understand the first thing about the value of culture as a public good. So, er, there.
- That Toys’R’Us AI Ad: I like to think that, given it’s late-June and that it’s been quite nice this week and the football’s on and that at least some of you have LIVES, a significant proportion of you will have no idea that this week Toys’R’Us (still, apparently, alive as a brand, although I have a feeling that at this stage it’s basically just a logo (and an increasingly dead-eyed anthropomorphic giraffe) with nothing behind it other than the terrifying, evil vampire squid of private equity) have made THE WORLD’S FIRST ENTIRELY-AR-GENERATED TV AD!!!! It’s supposedly generated with Sora, the yet-to-actually-be-made-available-to-proles text-to-video tool from OpenAI, and as with anything made with this tech there’s literally no way of knowing how much post-production work has gone into it and how long it took and what the workflow was…and also, as you will see if you click the link, the ad is bullsh1t – a generic ‘the dream behind the brand’ fable, with all the classic hallmarks of AI video (object impermanence, shifting and inconsistent characterisation and ‘look’, the sort of wobbliness in all the movement and characters that makes you think that you’re just starting to come up on acid, you know the deal by now)…but that doesn’t matter because, as you can tell from the whole breathless ‘THE WORLD’S FIRST…’ the whole point of this was not to make a good advert or to show anything meaningful about creativity and AI and the industry, or do anything interesting…it was instead ALL about getting cheap and easy headlines from…people…like…me…oh. Anyway, the ad’s sh1t, the tech’s not ready, I remain unconvinced it will be for a good 18m yet (MINIMUM), let’s see.
- Calculating Empires: I have to be honest, I remain uncertain whether what you will see when you click this link is the product of genius or madness. On the one hand, it might be an incredibly sophisticated piece of visual communications depicting the evolution of thinking across 30 disparate areas (think ‘the biosphere’, ‘time’, ‘biometrics’, ‘communications infrastructure’, that sort of thing) and offering a sort of maximalist overview of the evolution of modern thinking and understanding from approximately 1500 to the near-future; on the other, it might make as much ACTUAL sense when you dig into it as intricate scrawls of mid-episode schizophrenics – I simply cannot tell, it is TOO MUCH. What I can tell you, though, is that it is DIZZYING – you can’t quite get a sense for the full scale of it unless you zoom right out and then see how deep it goes when you zoom in again. Anyway, here’s the blurb – I would really, really like to see this printed BIG somewhere, just to see if it coheres, as I don’t personally think a screen does it justice at all: “Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today. Calculating Empires centers on four themes: communication, computation, classification and control. Across the centuries, the work illustrates the shifts in communication devices, infrastructures, and computational architectures, and how they are entwined with the histories of social control and classification. The vertical axis represents time, beginning with the 16th century at the base. The horizontal axis features a collection of systems: from algorithms to architecture, bodies to borders. Navigation is flexible: you can follow a theme, a time period, or set of ideas.” Have a look, it’s quite insane.
- Play Library: This is a lovely initiative (I think, at least) by the National Library of Singapore, presumably just a PR stunt to raise the profile of reading in general and the library more specifically – not dissimilar in style to a ‘choose your own adventure’-style GPT prompt which I featured in here a few months back. The gimmick here is that the team behind this has taken a selection of books which are in the public domain (Sherlock Holmes, for example, The Count of Monte Cristo, the Jungle Book, etc) and plugged them into The Machine with a pre-prompt that turns them into pieces of interactive fiction, letting users interact with the books rather than ‘just’ reading them. So for example, you can explore The Count as a (fine, limited, but still reasonably faithful) game in which you decide how to approach Dantes’ return to his homeland at the start of the novel, get imprisoned with him, find the treasure, become the Count…it’s paper-thin, true, but it’s a nice gimmick in terms of letting you explore the classics and a smart (and largely free, time commitment notwithstanding) bit of PR which I have seen all over the place in the past couple of weeks.
- Diane Lindo: I do love me some unpleasantly-visceral stop-motion animation, and this really IS some unpleasantly-visceral stop-motion animation! The link takes you to the Twitter account of one Diane Lindo whose work encompasses slightly-battered dolls, collaged text, paper, body horror, and a general sense that everything is going wrong under the surface in ways that are going to become messily apparent far sooner than you might like. This isn’t technically in any way ‘horror’, but also it very much is – SO GOOD.
- The Vogue Archive: For some of you this may well be the only link you need this week (well done for burying it halfway down in section one Matt, you pr1ck) – an ASTONISHING selection of imagery from the Vogue archives, released as the in partnership with Google and which the magazine describes as: “the launch of 15,000 newly digitised colour images from the archives on Google Arts & Culture, the culmination of a five-year collaboration spearheaded by Ivan Shaw, Condé Nast’s corporate photography director, and Amit Sood, the director of Google’s Cultural Institute. Said images can be browsed not just by year, colour and designer, but by subject, too, whether your interest is in Versailles or Veruschka.” Honestly, if you have any interest at all in the history of modern fashion and its representation in popular culture, this is basically your Louvre.
- Anime Themes: Now I come to think of it, this is another one that some of you might find completes you entirely. I’ve mentioned here before, I think, that I grew up before the Great Anime Love-in started – it seems like everyone about 10 years younger than me grew up watching Dragonball, Naruto and the like and as such it’s part of their childhood and their formative experience, whereas my only exposure to it (apart from in Italy, where it was on ALL THE TIME – but only very specific anime, namely giant robots, wrestlers, footballers, and, er, space kids in inexplicable bird costumes) was terrifying tentacular horrorbongo that I really wished I had never, ever seen, particularly not at age 8 – but I am aware that for a whole generation it’s basically YOUR CHILDHOOD. So, then, you might enjoy this site which is a fcuking astonishing collection of anime theme tunes – I mean, seriously, this appears to have millions of the fcuking things (oh, ok, ‘over 15,000’, but that’s PRACTICALLY millions), searchable by title, director, year, etc, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for on here then you might just have to give it up.
- Kindred: With the news that Barcelona is going to ban Airbnb rentals by 2028 (genuinely intrigued to see if that happens and, if it does, what ends up filling that space), perhaps we’ll all be in the market for an alternative way of getting ‘cheap’ accommodation in urban centres – so you might want to take a look at Kindred, which is basically a ‘no-money Airbnb-type solution’ which instead of working on a pay-per-night basis works on a credit-swap system; hosting people in your home earns you credit to stay in other people’s, everyone on the platform is real-ID vetted before being accepted, everyone (or mostly everyone) hosts in their real home, and the only expense for the person visiting is that they cover the costs of post-stay cleaning for their hosts….this all sounds quite nice, except for the fact the fees look…quite steep? I mean, $510 for ‘cleaning and services’ for 7 nights in NYC feels like…a lot, but maybe I simply don’t understand what the going rate is for running a Dyson around a Brooklyn basement these days. Anyway, might be worth a look if you feel ‘NyLon apartment swapping with strangers’ will feed your wanderlust.
- Receiptify: Another ‘get the jump on your Wrapped data’-type toy for Spotify – plug in your account and you can get a bunch of different views of your listening data, giving you ‘a user’s 10 most-played tracks from the last month, last 6 months, and all time’, all presented in a SO AESTHETIC receipt-style format. If you catch yourself early you still have time to curate your 2024, audio wise (but, also, take a long, hard look at yourself).
- The One Shot Photo Contest: I’ve been trying to work out what exactly the gimmick is here beyond ‘LOOK, BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS!’ and to be honest I don’t think that there necessarily is one – but, well, LOOK, BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS! Some of these are wonderful – personal favourites are the French dancers in a field, and the performer guy with the pierced nipples in the corset wearing the expression of beatific contentment, but please pick your own (also, aside from anything else, it’s nice to come across a photo contest that I haven’t featured a dozen times already in here).
- Matcha: It’s been a BAD YEAR for new devices, it’s fair to say, particularly given the Rabbit’s latest round of ruinous press, but I am going to maintain cautious hope that this new entrant into the arena might be…well, let’s keep the expectations grounded and limit them to ‘not total sh1t’. Matcha’s set to be a small, tactile-looking box with a speaker and mini screen, which basically lets you do a bunch of useful things that you would ordinarily need your phone to do without needing to actually have your phone. Per the Page, “General purpose I/O is always a button press away. Right button to take a photo, left to record audio. Capturing inspiration and memories, reminders, journalling, etc. without a hyper networked device on you. ‘Applications’ that need the screen are accessible by just speaking a word. E.g Here’s the weather, and my calendar within a second of saying the word.” This is VERY early days yet, so there’s no information on price, timescales or suchlike, but you can submit your email if you want updates – I like the fact that this feels like a hobby project rather than something looking to raise hundreds of millions, and generally it gives me Good Vibes, should that for some reason mean something to you.
- More Than Enough: A TikTok account which, as far as I can tell, has one ‘thing’ and that ‘thing’ is taking video of details of paintings, and adding a voiceover to said paintings in the manner of a very modern video comedy in which all the minor characters in, say, a Lowry, have an argument about what takeaway to get. Which, I realise, is an ATROCIOUS description which almost certainly actively-dissuades you from clicking, but trust me when I tell you that this is a) very funny indeed (and I say that as someone who normally doesn’t get this sh1t at all); and b) feels like a genuinely good ‘bit’ that could run and run, should they be bothered.
- Akadimia: What if I told you I could give you access to THE GREATEST MINDS FROM HUMAN HISTORY, all of them available for you to talk to and chat with and ask questions of and LEARN FROM like the unceasingly-thirsty knowledge sponge that I know you are? “SIGN ME UP, MATT!”, is what I imagine you would cry – only to be bitterly disappointed when you realise that what I was actually offering you was in fact Akademia, a platform whose ACTUAL offering is, er, a really poorly-realised AR model of, say, Mohammed Ali, moving jankily on your living room floor while you type questions into your phone (no, you can’t talk to the greatest minds in history via voice, sadly, which does rather sort of ruin the point of the AR gimmick). This is janky and rubbish and frankly the only reasons I am including it are how terrible the character models are, and the frankly risible promise that the app will make you ‘the smartest person in the room’. WHAT SORT OF ROOMS DO THEIR TARGET MARKET INHABIT?!
- Football Sticker Yourself: On the one hand, I feel like I should probably caveat this with a general warning about what a bad idea it is to upload photos of your face to strange websites whose ownership you’re unsure of; on the other, I am pretty sure I can trace this back to London agency Phantom, so should you find yourself being cloned and your identity being used to, I don’t know, shill cialis on the Cambodian web in a few years’ time, you know who to have a go at (to be clear, it is THEM not me). In celebration of the Euros, this is a classic ‘give us your photo and we will turn you into a 1980s football sticker complete with hair and shorts and the odd patina that only photos from the 70s and 80s have’ and it works BRILLIANTLY and your Euros groupchat will love it, promise.
By TS Harris
THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT IT’S WISHING FOR A SMALL, LOCALISED MONSOON TO HIT WORTHY FARM BETWEEN NOW AND SUNDAY, PT.2:
- Habbo Is Back: I am of an age that my main exposure to Habbo Hotel was my mate Luke doing the PR for it for a few years back in the day, but I am conscious that there may be some of you for whom it has a more substantial nostalgic pull (or, if I am correct in my suspicions about the Curios readership, your kids enjoyed it) – anyway, Habbo is BACK, resurrected, phoenix-like, in what looks to my exceptionally-untrained eyes to be a pretty faithful recreation of the original, with all the furnishings and personal spaces and odd, boxy avatars that you remember so well, alongside what they promise is all the quality of life stuff you would expect (safety, moderation, community guidelines and all that jazz). Would YOU like to crawl back into an internet that feels small and safe and cute just like it did when you were 11? I mean, look, I want to have a go at you for regressing but given I am currently rereading a bunch of novels I last read two decades ago I don’t think I have any legs to stand on, so, well, enjoy!
- Search The Market: A gorgeous little bit of webart, this. “Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected.” The site is literally just a list of searches that other visitors have submitted which you can scroll through, and each is clickable so you can see the results that show up for each – a window into other people’s hopes and fears and dreams and how they are mediated and reflected by the web. This feels like an installation of sorts waiting to happen.
- Butterflies: Would you like to install a new social network on your phone? No, of course you wouldn’t, you’re presumably not (that sort of) a masochist – but wait! What if I were to tell you that this was a social network…entirely populated by AIs?!?! No, wait, come back! This isn’t the first of these that I’ve seen – there was one about a year ago, I think, but that was text-only and web-based, whereas this is an app and significantly shinier, and has GRAPHICS and…no, actually, it’s still a sh1t and pointless idea. You download the app (I know this because I bothered – you may not want to), and you’re then prompted to spin up as many ‘characters’ as you want which you can then use to populate the network. Give them a personality, a backstory, some traits, and then set them loose to post and interact and share pictures and…WHY?!?!? Look, I can sort-of see the appeal in a vague ‘infinite sandbox experiment’ sort of way, but that simply doesn’t apply with this sort of stuff when it’s built on your standard LLM – everything, per all GPT-type text you will ever read, is sanded down to LinkedIn-smooth-blandness, which means that all of the posts and ‘interactions’ have that horrible ‘meaning-shaped but unpleasantly-empty’ vibe of most untreated LLM slop; that, coupled with the fact that whatever model they’re using to generate the images tends hard towards ‘generic Stable Diffusion busty elf girl cheesecake’ as its aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel like a PG-13 Reddit thread full of the most boring conversations you can imagine. NOONE WANTS THIS STUFF. Or at least I really hope they don’t. Interestingly I left ‘alerts’ on, just to see how ‘autonomous’ these agents are – I have had none in the six days since I installed the app, suggesting it’s perhaps not really working. SURPRISE!
- Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot: Matt Round continues his one-man mission to make the web a better place with a new project dedicated to becoming the web’s number one fansite for all-time classic Stallone vehicle ‘Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot’. “We couldn’t resist buying the domain name, or taking on the challenge of creating the best fansite ever for this classic film. Don’t miss the amazing fanart and GIFs, send us your thoughts and keep an eye out for the launch of our podcast, Stop! Or My Mom Will Mute.” I have no idea how long he will keep this up, but, personally-speaking, I am intrigued by the podcast (and I NEVER say that).
- Seen: Another new app, this one apparently intended to be used by actual people rather than AI agents – Seen has one gimmick and one gimmick only, namely that it’s an app exclusively for reaction videos. Rather sadly, the app’s description in the App store (iOS-only at present) reads: “Tired of sending hilarious video content to your friends and getting just a ‘haha’ in return? Seen is a video sharing app that shows you authentic reactions to the videos you send. Share memes or mini vlogs of your life and get genuine real-time reactions to all your content” which rather makes it sound like a passive-aggressive away of demanding that your friends LAUGH AN APPROPRIATE AMOUNT at your hilarious content. Anyway, this is either going to die a miserable death or it’s going to lead to an unpleasant resurgence in swap.avi reaction videos, either/or.
- Climate Zones: Have we all accepted that the weather’s going to keep getting different? No? Oh. Still, for those of you who would like some DATAVIZ-LED INSIGHT into exactly what this change is going to look and feel like in the coming 30-40 years, the fine folk at The Pudding have pulled together this lovely-if-troubling guide as to how various cities around the world are likely to change in terms of average temperatures, rainfall and the like, and I encourage you to scroll through and have a read/play because it’s not only just a really nice piece of work (as per with these guys – they really have been consistently excellent for years now, credit where it’s due) but also because it contains all sorts of really quite granular detail about how each city’s climate is likely to shift (London becoming a place with ‘no dry season’ feels a bit too on-the-nose tbh).
- Dracarys: This is ‘just’ a bit of WebGL coding with particulate effects, but it is SO PRETTY and therefore worth checking out. LOOK AT THE BEAUTIFUL SPACE DRAGON! Very nicely coded indeed. Oh, and if you want more simulated particulate fun, this is VERY satisfying to play with.
- Timeface: I think this might be my favourite bit of digital clock design I’ve seen in an age – it looks like a mess on first viewing (and, ok, on second an third as well), but then it clicks and I think that this would look very cool on a watch, personally (and I say that as someone who hasn’t worn a watch since approximately 1993, and, honestly, whose wrists are probably too thin to support one these days anyway).
- County Cricket Day 2024: OK, this isn’t internetty AT ALL (aside from the fact it has a website), but it’s being organised by a friend of mine out of a simple desire to Do Something Good, and despite my complete lack of interest in cricket I figure that some of you who live in the UK and who don’t intend to spend Sunday afternoon getting right on the pub gak while you cheer on
GARETH’S UNDERPERFORMING, OVERPAID BUNCH OF CNUTS LET THE LEASH OFF SOUTHGATE YOU PR1CK WHY AREN’T YOU PLAYING TRENT GET GALLAGHER OFF WE OUGHT TO BE WALKING THIS WHO’S GOT THE BAG GET US A PINT INOUR BOYS might find this of interest. “County Cricket Day is a fan-led campaign to celebrate County Championship cricket, and encourage as many people as possible to attend a game on Sunday 30th June 2024. It’s inspired by (but not affiliated with) Non-League Day, which for over a decade has worked to attract fans to football games at the lower end of the pyramid, and has helped spark a renaissance at that level of the game. County Cricket has a lot in common with Non-League Football: it’s affordable, it’s at the heart of local communities, and it provides matchgoing fans a relaxed environment to enjoy games in the way they want to. At many county grounds, you’re also able to bring in your own food and drink. But most importantly of all – you’ll be guaranteed a warm welcome by the people running their clubs for the joy of the game. Whether you’ve played cricket, are a committed fan, or have never experienced the game live before, we want to show people that the fixtures on County Cricket Day promise a joyful and memorable day out for everyone.” Maybe give it a go? - Cursor Museum: Whilst I am very much not a father and will never be one, the fact that I enjoyed this single-gag website quite as much as I did suggests that I have now become a dad on some sort of spiritual level.
- 45 Football: OH MY GOD THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING COLLECTION OF FOOTBALL-THEMED SONGS I HAVE EVER SEEN! Compiled by one Pascal Claude in Zurich (THANKYOU PASCAL!), “This is for all football and vinyl and footballvinyl lovers around the planet. I hope you enjoy. 45football.com is based on my collection of vinyl 7″ records on football. I started to upload the files in July 2012, since then I’ve been about to register the singles week by week. I’m still happy to find records I haven’t known yet, so feel free to get in touch. Also if you have some additional or preciser information on a record. If there’s a song on 45football.com you own the copyright of and want it to be removed, please let me know. It was and is impossible to regulate all the copyrights of all the hundreds of records here. Most of the record labels don’t exist anymore.” Honestly, if you’re the sort of person who REALLY wants to put together a football-themed playlist for your Euro finals party in a few weeks time, but is ALSO the sort of appalling muso who insists on all the songs being obscure vinyl-only samba/funk novelties from 1980s Uruguay then OH MY GOD this is going to make you happy. SO SO GOOD.
- The Ultimate Playlist Index: This…this might be the most incredible music repository I have ever linked to in 14-odd years of doing this, no joke. The project’s a byproduct of the Rate Your Music community, and, as far as I can tell, is an attempt to create a comprehensive list of links to the ULTIMATE playlists for every single genre of music ever conceived of, the playlists that you would give to aliens if they were to make First Contact and inexplicably lead off with a question about ‘really wanting to get into baile funk but not really knowing where to start’. Seriously, click the main link and scroll and marvel at the incredible selection of playlists, offering you an entry into every single type of sound you could possibly conceive of, from ‘Ottowan Noise’ to ‘Viking Metal’ and everything inbetween. Seriously, there are 1600 separate playlists linked to here, this is ASTONISHING. Oh, and if you want EVEN MORE MUSIC, you might enjoy checking out this insane library of what its curtator terms ‘exotica’, which as far as I can tell basically means ‘seemingly hundreds and hundreds of vinyl records of vaguely-loungey guitar music from mid-20th-C America’ and which you really have to click around to explore properly because fcuk me this goes DEEP’.
- Paint Spin: Make your own spin painting type artworks, in-browser, which is far more satisfying than it sounds, I promise you. Soothing in a way few ‘make an art!’ toys tend to be.
- Election Leaflets: “ElectionLeaflets.org is an online archive of political leaflets. It is created by members of the public photographing and classifying what comes through their doors at election time. Since 2010 there have been 19563 leaflets added to the archive, providing a valuable resource for academics, journalists and campaigners.” This is a UK site, to be clear, so it’s UK political parties – as seasoned leaflet-watchers might expect, the Lib Dems and their unusual approach to graphs and their axes feature heavily here, but what’s really interesting to me about this is the wild variance in design choices across the spectrum, even within parties, and the degree to which it gives a reasonable impression of the vast, mad unruliness of campaigning at a national level (also, special shout out to the independents and in particular Chaz Singh who’s standing in Plymouth and who has SUCH WHOLESOME ENERGY on his leaflet (please don’t be an awful person, Chaz Singh!) and whose clashing fonts I rather love).
- Webcollage: Via PFRC, this is a lovely bit of webart – per the description, “WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found. It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.” As its creator says, ‘this is what the internet looks like’ – inchoate, slightly out-of-focus, unpredictable, and a portal to an infinite number of mysterious places. AS IT SHOULD BE.
- LEGO Cars: A Flickr album full of images of classic cards recreated in LEGO. In case you really want 17 photos of a model of a Mercedes Benz W112 Fintail Build, recreated in Swedish plastic blocks because, well, who wouldn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!
- Urban America: I know, I know, the sheen has rather come off AI-generated imagery now that we’re all beginning to realise that, hang on, the pollution is starting…still, let’s ignore that (and the whole environmental thing) in favour of enjoying this pleasingly-unsettling TikTok account that posts short clips about regional horror myths – the dead-eyed Alaskan Kutasha, the Teke Teke from Japan… these are all spun up in (I think) Midjourney and then animated with a variety of different tools, and they work REALLY well – short and focused enough to be unsettling without breaking the immersion through AI jank, this is some of the better ‘making interesting things with AI tools’ content I’ve seen in a while.
- Queen Songs: Would you like a genuinely exhaustive guide to the music of Queen, including a link to an actual proper book analysing the band’s songcraft? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! There’s a…slightly odd man who lives in what used to be my mum’s apartment block in Rome who used to blast Queen at earbleed volume at all sorts of odd hours of the day, and has done for years, and while I am unlikely to ever see him again and he will never read these words, I dedicate this link to HIM (and, er, any of the rest of you who have a deep and abiding love for Fat Bottomed Girls).
- The Best Legal Website I Have Ever Seen: As far as I can tell, this really is the website of a French firm of lawyers (I have checked, their registered on the official list of legal representatives and so seem legit) – just click on it, seriously, and then ask yourself ‘why aren’t all lawyers’ websites this good?’. THERE IS NO GOOD ANSWER. If you work in corporate webdesign, PLEASE show this to all of your most tedious clients and ask them to DREAM BIGGER.
- 23 Words: A daily word game – but no, wait, come back! This is simple, clean and quick – you simply have to find solvethe 23 anagrams you’re presented with each day within the time allotted. They start easy with four-letter words, then the difficulty ramps up until by the end…well, look, I am terrible at anagrams and I, er, struggle towards the end of each day’s puzzle, but it’s oddly satisfying and it’s at most a minute or two each day should you want to add it to the timewasting routine (current daily time required before work can start: 43 minutes).
- Woodworm: This is SO CUTE – the premise is simple, you’re a woodworm (of course you are!) and your task is to eat away at a block of wood to replicate the shape you’re shown on each level. Gently brainteasey at higher levels, but satisfying rather than frustrating, and generally VERY PLEASING (when you solve them, rather than when you’re coming up hard against your (ok, my) total lack of anything resembling patten matching abilities).
- One Million Checkboxes: This week’s ‘wow, this really has been EVERYWHERE’ link is this charming multiplayer website project/game/thing – this is literally just a million checkboxes on a webpage, checkboxes which have two states (checked vs unchecked), checkboxes which anyone on the website at any given time can check or uncheck to their heart’s content, and which have resulted, since it went live a few days ago, in one of those occasional amazing experiments in collective will and behaviour that you occasionally get online (see also Reddit’s The Place and its various incarnations). Log on and just watch, and you’ll see the site is an endless back and forth of factions attempting to tick all the boxes, or seeking to ensure that that NEVER happens, people trying to write rude words in ticks, people just sort of muddling around at the edges…EMERGENT BEHAVIOURS! I love this stuff – it’s a bit like (bear with me) watching a field of long grass being moved by the wind – you can’t see the actors (wind/people clicking), only the resulting effects of their movement (shifting grasses/boxes changing colour) and there’s something almost ghostly about it…anyway, I fcuking adore this and would quite happily have this on a massive screen somewhere ambient (but I appreciate that my idea of what constitutes ‘public art’ is possibly not universal).
- Pokerogue: Finally this week, something that I sort-of bounced off pretty quickly because I simply don’t have the ingrained Pokemon knowledge to either be competent or particularly interested, but which I imagine will grab some of you by the synapses and not let go – this is basically a roguelike variation on Pokemon where you have to battle through the entire roster of beasts, collecting as you go, unlocking new starters and generally putting all your accumulated Pokeknowledge to the test. If you or someone you know are the sort of person who can actually tell the difference between, say, Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Pearl (please, do not tell me) then this is for YOU!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Cinema Without People: I mean, you don’t really need me to explain this for you, do you? This is BEAUTIFUL, some wonderful shot selection here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Plum Island Museum: The Plum Island Museum is a collection of objects which have washed ashore in Massachusetts, maintained by a single woman – it’s a physical collection too, visits on appointment, but this is the photographic record of the various detritus that collects on the shingle. “The shoreline is a place where nature collides with the detritus we humans leave in our wake. Plastic forks intermingle with bird bones, Happy Meal Toys float in on clumps of seaweed. Frequently, I mistake reeds for straws or straws for reeds. It is easy to see how sea creatures innocently attempt to feed on things we have left behind.” Beautiful and sad.
- Ohmni: You will know MIA as an artist from Paper Planes, obvs; you may also remember her as an outspoken voice on Sri Lankan independence back in the day, and, over the past few years, a peddler of…increasingly esoteric opinions on a wide range of topics, which is why it was not a HUGE surprise this week to see that the singer/artist/producer has launched a range of clothes which are, er, made of materials designed to stop the 5G from reading your thoughts. I am not exaggerating – click the link, and look what happens when you take the classic ‘tinfoil hat’ concept and make it FASHION. A snip at £100 – after all, WHAT PRICE THE SANCTITY OF YOUR BRAINWAVES? Well, quite.
- The Bali Time Chamber: There is a lot of masculinity that I really don’t understand AT ALL, and the whole ‘MEAT AND MUSCLES AND FIRE AND BEING ALPHA’ thing is very much of that ilk. Perhaps that’s why I found the concept of The Bali Time Chamber so perfectly, wonderfully ridiculous – the idea that MEN need a space surrounded by OTHER MEN without the distractions of women or booze or, er, vegetables which are keeping them from achieving their FULL MASCULINE GOALS. Still, if that sounds like your sort of thing then you will LOVE this – a place in which upto about 25-odd men can all pay to hang out together in Bali, in a fully-catered island paradise where you can…I don’t know, to be honest, the website has a lot of stuff about ‘fulfilment’, but the general vibe I get from the whole thing suggests that that ‘fulfilment’ might be the sort that comes from pump-and-dumping a memecoin and making off with six figures of mooks’ crypto. Still, PLEASE read the brochure – it is VERY FUNNY – and enjoy the majesty of the Insta feed, which, were I not aware of how it was selling itself, I would strongly suggest looks like it’s advertising a very particular type of man-on-man bongo if I’m wholly honest.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- 14 Years: Apologies for the second or third Curios in a row leading on a UK election story, but, well, we only get them every four or five years, so you will I hope forgive me. This is the London Review of Books, again, looking back at the totality of ‘how we have got here’ – honestly, this is really really superb, focusing as it does not JUST on a decade and a half of Conservative misrule, though there’s plenty of that too, but also on the wider sociopoliticotechnological factors that moved and shifted alongside the politics, and how the two currents moved in tandem to shape Britain into the…well, the mess it currently finds itself in. This isn’t anything uplifting, obviously , but it is very comprehensive and reasonably-even-handed in doling out its slaps, and makes some interesting points throughout – I personally found the argument about the erosion of trust in all public institutions, starting from the MPs’ expenses scandal and moving through Savile and the BBC, phone hacking and the rest, all the way through Covid and the assorted lies and chicanery, and how that sequence of events has had as much impact on our relationship to the body politic and the overall state of the nation as any policies. I can’t imagine for a second you need any other reasons to vote ‘anyone but those cnuts’ come next Thursday, but it’s worth reading this to give you an extra spring in your step as you stroll to the ballot box. BONUS ELECTION CONTENT: I can’t imagine any of you want to listen to a podcast about social media ads and the UK election featuring me, but, well, just in case.
- Housing: Another LRB piece, and another one about the UK – SORRY INTERNATIONAL READERS, SORRY – this one about the housing crisis and how it’s playing out in Manchester, and some of the reasons why we’ve ended up in a situation where nearly 150,000 children are on the list of the statutorily homeless. This covers Grenfell and speculative property investment and the criminal justice system, and as someone whose work over the past couple of decades has variously touched the prison service, the probation services and the property development sector, this is a staggering indictment of the past 25 years or so of collective (in)action and naked profiteering. You will, if you’re anything like me, do a genuine doubletake at some of the quoted extracts from the property investment advisors helping clients in the Middle East invest some of their wealth in UK rental properties – turns out they are all accurate and you can read them here in full. The reality of the UK’s international status (and our economy, and housing market) as described in this piece, and the difference between that reality and the version being peddled to potential Tory and Reform voters as to the halcyon vision of WHAT BRITAIN COULD BE AGAIN (if only we got rid of the pesky foreigners, specifically the brown ones) is…astonishing.
- The Ministry of the Imagination: Ok, three pieces in and a small iota of hope! This is VERY LONG – but, also, is more of a smorgasbord of ideas than a single longread, and as such you might want to bookmark it or file it somewhere for future reference. I feel I need to give you the full explanation so you can get the gist, so, well, here: “The From What If to What Next podcast ran from May 2020 until March 2024, calling it a day with its 100th episode. Each one took a different ‘What If’ question and with two guests dived deep into what the world might be like had that change already been made. The questions were often sent in by listeners and covered a wide range of topics. Those who subscribed on Patreon to support the podcast also received our bonus ‘Ministry of Imagination’ episodes. Here, the guests stuck around for a little bit, and were inaugurated as Ministers at the Ministry of Imagination. The Ministry itself increasingly became a character in its own right–it was a Ministry of Imagination after all. On one visit it might have run off to join the circus, another might find it on an asteroid because it wanted a change of perspective, and on other occasions it transformed itself into a dazzling array of different things or hosted all manner of wonderful and fantastical events and occasions. It always kept us guessing. Each freshly-inaugurated Minister was invited to choose 3 policies that could be immediately implemented that would rapidly accelerate the collective move in the direction of the question we had been discussing. They were encouraged to choose policies that were bold, audacious, ambitious and beautiful. They set to their task with great relish.” This is a collection of ALL of those ideas, those imaginary policies, those ‘things we could try to make things better’ concepts, all arranged in one immense document, arranged by theme, and containing a quite staggering array of potential proposals for making things better. Some will infuriate you, some will make no sense, but occasionally you’ll read something and get properly inspired, and, seriously, if you’re curious about ideas and policy and MAKING A DIFFERENCE, or alternatively want a bunch of other people’s thinking about purpose-related stuff that you can keep on file and dip into whenever you need to steal an idea, this is GOLDEN (if you can ignore the 20-odd % of this that is pure woo, like ‘giving people the space to love themselves’, fine).
- Progress Is Annoying: An excellent article explaining why it is that many people find social change irritating, and why it is that that irritation is not a sign that that change is bad – or, indeed, that certain people getting irritated is not automatically a sign that a change is per se good either. The piece gives you enough information that, hopefully, “should lead you to pause the next time you reflexively roll your eyes upon encountering some new, annoying norm and the changes its advocates are asking you to make. That irritation is not your bullshit detector going off. As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar. A better response would be to treat your feelings of irritation as a cue for further reflection. Instead of simply going along with your immediate gut reaction, step back and take those feelings under advisement, along with any other relevant factors, and then consider whether your response is reasonable: ‘Is this new thing actually bad, or does it just feel that way because it’s unfamiliar?’”
- How To Fix The AI Copyright Issue: To be clear, I am not 100% convinced that this is THE solution, but it’s certainly a really interestingly-argued piece of thinking and contains some smart potential solutions to the problem of ‘how do we adequately compensate the people whose works have been used to train the machine that is now churning out serviceable replicas of exactly such works?’. This is quite knotty, but Tim O’Reilly explains it cogently – there’s basically a thought at the heart of this about rewarding people for the extent to which an output resembles them, with the greater the resemblance the greater the degree of remuneration; per O’Reilly’s thinking, “One option might be to retrieve the raw materials for generation (versus using RAG for attribution). Want to generate a paragraph that sounds like Stephen King? Explicitly retrieve some representation of Stephen King, generate from it, and then pay Stephen King. If you don’t want to pay for Stephen King’s level of quality, fine. Your text will be generated from lower-quality bulk-licensed “horror mystery text” as your driver. There are some rather naive assumptions in this ideal, namely in how to scale it to millions or billions of content providers, but that’s what makes it an interesting entrepreneurial opportunity. For a star-driven media area like music, it definitely makes sense.” If your work even vaguely touches on these sorts of questions this feels like a must-read.
- GenZ’s Digital InformationGathering: This is REALLY interesting, although it’s important to caveat it with the fact that it is NOT QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH – this is *all* qual, all based on 25-odd interviews, and therefore should not be taken as anything other than ‘interesting anecdata which deserves more enquiry’. Still, it’s done by Google’s Jigsaw research arm which makes me trust it a bit more – basically what the study showed was that typical GenZ behaviour when it comes to information discovery is TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE COMMENTS AND SEE WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING THERE. So, effectively, like a crowdsourced tl;dr – based in some part on a general sense that ‘truth’ doesn’t matter so much as ‘utility’ when it comes to information. “”Within a week of actual research, we just threw out the term information literacy,” says Yasmin Green, Jigsaw’s CEO. Gen Zers, it turns out, are “not on a linear journey to evaluate the veracity of anything.” Instead, they’re engaged in what the researchers call “information sensibility” — a “socially informed” practice that relies on “folk heuristics of credibility.” In other words, Gen Zers know the difference between rock-solid news and AI-generated memes. They just don’t care.” Look, this is a BusinessInsider writeup and therefore hacky and sensationalistic, and, as previously stated, this is not statistically significant in any way…but, equally, it *feels* plausible, certainly based on my recent interactions with this generation, and does make me think that we have a lot of people who will have no qualms whatsoever happily embracing AI summaries of search results with nary a concern for hallucinations, provenance or anything else.
- Nonsense Accelerationism: Or, ‘how and why memes have become so incredibly informationally dense as to be incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t basically deeply broken with onlineness’ – this piece doesn’t offer any real explanations, or certainly not a singular one, but I enjoyed the line of questioning around ‘the death of shared cultural experiences’ post-mass-linear-TV and the extent to which hyperdensememeticism is a reaction to that (personally speaking I like to think of it as a bit of arch metacommentary around the impossibility of ever again having a true picture of ‘culture’ from the air, but feel free to make your own interpretation).
- Your New Interactive AI Journal: I know we’ve had a lot of ‘I tried an AI assistant – this is what I learned!’ pieces of junk journalism over the past year, but I thought this was slightly more interesting – Mark Wilson, writing for FastCompany, has spent a year or so with a just-out personal companion app called ‘Dot’, and shares his thoughts about the experience in this piece. Wilson was broadly positive, although there’s nothing in here that suggests this is in any way a MUST HAVE (or even particularly useful) application of the tech. “At a glance, it’s not much more complex than any messaging app. But look closer, and you’ll notice an ombre patterning in the background that subtly reflects Dot’s thinking. Then if you pinch to zoom out on your conversation, that endless conversation is bucketed into a list of topical summaries. My own summaries include topics ranging from “Jon Batiste concert” to “new workout routine” to “Mark’s introspective nature.” Many of these phrases are hyperlinked. Tap one, and you end up at what feels a lot like a Wiki – sometimes with accompanying images if you’ve shared them. On top, Dot summarizes its take on the situation, writing about you in third person. Below that, a timeline charts out updates on the topic over time—one of my topics—“One Piece obsession”—tracks my thoughts on the long-running manga series as I read it. This approach to design takes Dot beyond conversation. It creates an organized, running narrative of your life; and the team intends to lean into this approach with more features in the future (imagine auto-generated memes tailored hyper specifically to your life events). However, much of Dot’s service is not about your own digging but its proactive “Gifts.” These are messages it sends you every now and again after thinking more about you. For me, they’ve included recipes I might like, articles I might be interested in, and follow-up observations to conversations we’ve had.” Personally-speaking I have no interest in this sort of thing – I enjoy ‘talking about and thinking about myself’ about as much as I tend to enjoy invasive, exploratory dentistry – but I can really see this sort of thing appealing to people with a more developed sense of self than I possess.
- Why You Can’t Really Trust Online Reviews Anymore: Tl;dr – because “Balazs Kovacs, a professor of organisational behavior at Yale School of Management…fed a large batch of Yelp reviews to GPT-4, the technology behind ChatGPT, and asked it to imitate them. His test subjects — people — could not tell the difference between genuine reviews and those churned out by artificial intelligence. In fact, they were more likely to think the A.I. reviews were real.” Which means, if these reviews are as effective in persuading people as ones written by actual humans, you are going to see every single ratings and recommendations system on the web getting absolutely DESTROYED by bots (presuming this hasn’t happened already tbh). I really hope Reddit has some robust plans in place to deal with this (lol!).
- AI-Augmented Books: This is SO interesting – I am not entirely convinced that this will become A Thing, but it’s certainly curious enough to have piqued my interest. In WIRED, Laura Kipniss writes about working with a new company called Rebind, which is basically trying to make ‘discursive books’ a thing. It’s quite hard to get a full handle on the user experience being proposed here, but, based on Kipniss’ experience, it sounds like Rebind want to create digital versions of classic texts which operate, effectively, as discursive builds on the novel in question – they work with writers and thinkers to effectively make the text ‘talk back’, effectively letting you have a dialogue with said writers and thinkers about the text you’re reading, effectively turning it into a sort of always-on book group where you’re interacting with an AI that’s itself been trained on LOADS of thinking and analysis of the text by smart, interesting people. This is still prototypical, and details on the exact functioning of the tech are a bit iffy in the piece, but it was genuinely interested to think about, and imagine, ways in which the act of reading could be rendered qualitatively different – and in way which seemingly doesn’t fcuk with the actual original text.
- Delivering Food In 50 Degrees: On how delivery companies and drivers are planning on coping with the new reality of 50+ degree temperatures. To be honest this piece, in Rest of World, is as much a photo essay as anything else, but if you can read this corporate comment from one of the major delivery players in India without having a proper ‘fcuk me, this is dark’ then, well, you’re a more upbeat person than I am: “All Swiggy delivery partners have access to a free, rapid-response ambulance service.” Does that…does that sound good? I would posit that in fact it does not sound good at all.
- The Odd Kindle Slop Vortex: Leah Beckmann writes about discovering an odd corner of Amazon where the AI written ‘books’ live, and the strange and seemingly-almost-eldritch-feeling way in which the books merge and meld and appear and disappear in the Kindle Store, almost like there’s now a totally separate an unknowable, by us at least, layer of commercial reality that is just The Machine moving in 4d chess ways that we simply don’t and can’t understand (that is very much what is starting to happen, fwiw).
- A Weird Night At Frog Club: I like going to nice restaurants, but sometimes a true stinker of a review is almost as satisfying as some top-notch scran. This isn’t quite an evisceration, but it is a very funny takedown of what sounds like a perfectly-preposterous restaurant called ‘Frog Club’ in NYC, which insists on secrecy and exclusivity (but, er, has tables available on Resy), where the food, honestly, sounds like a p1sstake, and where it feels like the owners are laughing all the way to the bank. Superbly enjoyable throughout (also, can someone tell me what the current London equivalent of this is, please? I refuse to believe we don’t have something similarly idiotic going on here).
- The Madness of the Jay Slater Facebook Groups: Apologies for the Unherd link, but I rather ‘enjoyed’ this overview of the madness currently swirling across Facebook Groups up and down the land over the disappearance of Jay Slater, currently missing in Tenerife and subject of some…increasingly-loopy speculation about what might have happened to him and who might have been involved, and which is basically a sort of continuation of the Baby Reindeer thing and proof positive that we’re now so internet-poisoned (THEORY: referring to everything as ‘content’, and the ultimate pomo context-collapse engendered by EVERYTHING BEING ON YOUR TINY PHONESCREEN, means that there is literally no dividing line now between ‘entertainment’ and ‘not entertainment’, and as such literally anything thatwe experience on that screen is grist to the mill of KEEPING US DISTRACTED AND AMUSED) that there is literally no event so significant/serious/sad/mundane that it won’t be turned into ‘fodder for bored people to pore over’ within seconds. Also, conveniently, it’s REALLY EASY journalism – you have loads of GREAT unhinged posts you can embed, and you can do a sneery look at ‘all the online morons’ which, simultaneously, appeals to all the OTHER online morons who like sneering at the first set (er, yes, guilty), so EVERYONE’S A WINNER. Except, probably, Jay Slater.
- The Apple Emails: This pretends it’s about theft from an Apple Store, but it’s not – instead it’s about the genuinely surreal materials created to sit on display computers in the Apple store, just in case anyone ever bothered to click through into the email client on a display Mac. This is, I promise, genuinely funny, and will appeal especially to any of you who have ever had to write entirely pointless copy JUST IN CASE.
- The Worst Pitches: Back for what feels like our weekly visit to The Fence now, with this excellent piece in which a variety of UK journalists who share the worst story pitches they have ever made to editors (apart from one, who shares the worst PR pitch they ever received – which, whilst funny, feels like cheating imho). Some of these are very, very funny, though there’s a certain degree of incestuousness about how many of the people quoted here obviously all worked at VICE – still, this made me laugh a lot: “I did once try to do ‘Adventures in the Ketaverse’, i.e. taking ketamine with a VR headset on.”
- Who’s Got A Problem with Damian Hirst?: Not so much an overview of Hirst and his career, despite what the title might suggest, and more a review/overview of the current exhibition at his Newport Street Gallery in South London, and a retrospective on that particular period in the 90s when British Art was a thing, and Hirst’s place within that canon – I went this week, as it happens, and aside from a couple of stellar pieces (Myra, a few Bacons, a beautifully-unpleasant collage by Antony Micallef) it mainly served to remind me how much I fcuking hate Banksy and how I always thought Gavin Turk was overrated (lol, like he cares).
- Active Fire: This is LOVELY, and I hope it becomes a regular series – James Caig and (friend of Curios) Rishi Dastidar in epistolary conversation about an album they both love – in this case, ‘Giant Steps’ by The Boo Radleys. Despite the fact that this is a record that I didn’t personally hold particularly dear, there’s something glorious about reading two people for whom it obviously meant LOADS talking about why it does so, and where and when they were when it came out, and how it’s accompanied them through their lives. Honestly, this is SUCH a nice format, and some beautiful writing to boot.
- Finishing a Dead Man’s Novel: “Eight years ago, my mother met a woman named Laurene. When my mother told her she had a son who was a writer (I hate it when she does this), Laurene exclaimed, “I have a story for him!” And Laurene, I came to learn, meant this in the most literal sense. Two weeks later, in her kitchen, Laurene told me her late husband, Jim, had spent decades writing a novel that he had always planned to finish upon retirement but died before he got the chance. He was not a professional writer, rather a surveyor by trade. Laurene presented me with a large leather briefcase, heaving it onto the table and resting both hands upon the lid. “His notes, his chapters, his everything is here.” Richard Kelly Kemick writes about the gift/burden/horror of the bequest, about the concept of unfinished novels, about the act of writing, about failure to write, and and and…whether or not you are ever likely to try and write a novel yourself, if you enjoy words then you will adore this.
- The Art of Translation: THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL. Honestly, if you speak more than one language well then this will, I think, absolutely sing to you – and if you don’t, I think it’s as good a way as any of starting to get your head round how two languages interrelate, and don’t, and how bridging the gaps between one and the other works both linguistically and conceptually and, to a certain extent, even emotionally. Honestly, I sighed out loud with pleasure at certain parts of this so deeply did I feel it.
- Swallowing: We finish the longreads this week with this piece in the Paris Review by Gabriel Smith, whose novel, Brat, I read last week and rather enjoyed – this is…fiction? Memoir? I am unsure, but it is very very good indeed. “A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison.”
By Amie Dickie
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: