HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE!
That’s right – it’s basically all over, it’s all mist and mellow fruitfulness from hereon in (apart from those of you reading this in the antipodes – thanks Rosie! Does this satisfy your hubris?), but thankfully this edition of Curios is PACKED FULL OF SUNSHINE and will possibly extend the summer for another week or so if you click every single link and wish REALLY HARD.
(this is not true, sorry – Curios is the same old litany of phoned-in prose and bitter cynicism it always is, and the cold and the rain are inevitable).
BUT, before we crack on with the links this week, we have our Tiny Awards winners! Congratulations to Elliott Cost, who made One Minute Park (winner of the main award, £500 and a HANDMADE TROPHY!), and (the truly wonderfully-named) Nolen Royalty, whose One Million Checkboxes won the multiplayer award and £300! The Tiny Awards will be back next year, presuming neither Kris or I die in the intervening 9-10 months or are so deep in penury that we can no longer afford to do it.
A brief moment of sincerity – thanks SO MUCH to everyone who shared the links, who voted, who submitted sites, who said nice things about the project, who wrote about it and who generally made it feel like it was A Good and Worthwhile thing to do – as someone who’s basically got a pathological aversion to, well, ‘trying’, it was honestly wonderful to be reminded of the fact that it is actually worth putting effort into things every now and again because you can occasionally make Nice And Good Things Happen. Seriously, thankyou so much to everyone who engaged even a tiny (lol!) bit with the project, it’s honestly making me get a bit emo so I am going to have to stop typing about it now.
I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and you will never have to read me being ‘sincere’ at you ever again, I promise (well, until next year).
By Slawomir Elsner (images via TIH, as per)
THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.1:
- Stranger Video: The second site in just a few weeks that goes big on EYES – feel free to make this the basis of some sort of spurious ‘moments of ocular contact are going to be BIG in 2025!’ trends prediction! After Neal’s Eyechat from a couple of Curios ago comes this effort from prolific builder of Fun Web Things (and Tiny Award 2024 winner, no less! The prestige! Nolen, should you read this you should probably consider getting that honorific inked somewhere on your flesh) Nolen Royalty – again, the premise is basically that the site pairs you with another user somewhere in the world, showing each of you a view of the other that includes only a pretty intense close-up of their face – whereas Neal’s site was just about staring at each other until you got uncomfortable and noped out, this one introduces a gentle element of competition, with the connection to your mysterious eye buddy lasting only as long as you can both resist blinking – as soon as one participant blinks, the video link is severed. I really, really enjoy this – short periods of INTENSE STARING are, to my mind, the very best way to meet strangers on the web – but do be warned that, depending on traffic, you may end up getting matched with the same person repeatedly, which is exactly what happened to me earlier this week when I ended up repeatedly staring deep into the eyes of an increasingly-uncomfortable kid who I am pretty sure was by the end convinced that I was plumbing the very depths of his soul with my uncomfortably-large pupils. The BEST thing about this, though, is that there’s a very real possibility that for a few hours this afternoon it will enable readers of Curios to GAZE INTO EACH OTHERS’ SOULS – know that if you click this link there is a non-trivial possibility that you will be matched with one of the other weird masochists who chooses to subscribe to this piece of sh1t. Is this…is this ‘community building’? I’ll be inviting you all to sign up for my ‘guided creativity retreat’ next.
- Onge: This is SO beautifully done. Onge is the personal website of…someone from South America who, as far as I can tell, has built this on top of retro platform NeoCities. It’s very simple – the content amounts to their art portfolio, notes on films they like, a blog, a small lofi chat function, that sort of thing – but the aesthetic on display is GLORIOUS, the transitional animations as you navigate between the different site elements are sublime, and I’m generally a sucker for this sort of vaguely-pointillist/pixellist art style. Aside from anything else, I think building this on NeoCities is incredibly impressive and shows the flexibility of the platform – can we have a resurgence in personal websites in 2025, please? I think it would be A Good Thing, and a nice alternative to fcuking Insta.
- Cellar Door: What’s the BEST word? No, fcuk off, that’s NOT a spurious and reductive and entirely-subjective question! Cellar Door is a website dedicated to determining the best-loved collection of letters in the English language – click the link and you’re presented with a series of binary choices between words, with your sole task being to pick your preferred option of the two. Click, pick, rinse, repeat. The site tracks votes, so you can also peruse a leaderboard of the current frontrunners, which is how I am able to tell you with no little authority that, as of 731am BST on 30 August, the BEST word in the English language is ‘rut’. No, it is, I don’t make the rules. I would quite like to see this paired with a version designed to find the world’s least-favourite word, except you just know it would be overtaken by the sorts of tedious pr1cks who pretend to find the term ‘moist’ inherently upsetting (NOONE DISLIKES THE WORD ‘MOIST’ YOU PERFORMATIVE DULLARDS, I BET THE VENN DIAGRAM OF YOU AND PEOPLE WHO PRETEND TO BE SCARED OF CLOWNS IS A CIRCLE). For what it’s worth, by the way, the best word is either ‘quiddity’ or ‘zugzwang’ (this is a fact and I will brook no argument).
- Dracula Flow Scripture: I have featured two separate Dracula Flow videos on here, but I have…doubts as to how many of you engaged with them – partly because obviously I have no idea who clicks on what, partly because I always suspect that people have in the main lost the will to live by the time I eventually get to the videos (this is the point at which you could, if you were so minded, choose to drop me an email reassuring me that this is not in fact the case), and partly because, well, they are very fcuking odd indeed. This is a shame, because I continue to maintain that they are ART in the purest sense – and so I was thrilled this week to discover that some wonderful human has created a Dracula Flow soundboard so you can experience the DEEP WISDOM of the scripture without necessarily needing to imbibe it via the medium of longform YouTube. Click the link, hit the button and let the knowledge seep into your bones – I find this almost cripplingly addictive, to the point that I just lost (*checks*) 4 minutes to it just now, listening to a faceless man shouting ‘get me the fcuking fentanyl’ and cry-laughing. I think I might be overtired tbh.
- Watercolour Blade Runner: Ok, this should technically be in the videos but I have no idea how to embed it from the Internet Archive and so it can sit here instead – this is quite astonishing, honestly, and really does warrant a look. Per the person who has found and archived it, “twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night. the video circled around the web for a few years, and quietly disappeared from every single site it was hosted at. a few months ago i spent a few hours digging for it, and finally found a copy of the original file.” This is proper INTERNET HISTORY, an incredible labour of love and a quite astonishing technical achievement – the degree of effort and painstaking attention speak to a frankly-obsessional tendency in the original artist, but it really is a staggering bit of work (and I say that as someone who has no personal interest in Blade Runner whatsoever).
- I Need A Book Cover: I am genuinely thrilled when people email me their work for inclusion in Curios, and it was lovely receiving a note from Zoe in the US about this project. I Need A Book Cover is a site that collects different examples of, er, book cover design for anyone to peruse – it’s also grown into a resource for writers looking for cover designers, or designers looking for projects, and in general is a really useful resource for anyone interested in cover design in general . Per Zoe, “Using the different category tabs on the left, you can filter your results to look at book covers that all use similar styles, such as top and bottom text or another favorite of mine, trompe l’oeil. Or, you can look at only purple covers, etc….Designers love it for inspiration, Art Directors use the directory to remind themselves of who to hire next, editors use it for mood board creation, book bloggers come to the site to find design credits, and self-publishers use the directory and the Jobs Board to HIRE designers. I posted two new book cover design briefs to the jobs board just this morning.” Big fan of this, and even a quick perusal of the selection has shown me some gorgeous bits of work that I’ve never seen before – this, for example, which I would totally have as a piece of art at home.
- Fuzzzel: I once had a brief thing with someone who, I discovered, was incapable of sleeping without the ‘reassuring’ fuzz of white noise blaring out of their phone speaker as they kipped – this was how I learned that I, by contrast, find the opposite. Still, if you’re the sort of oddity who needs the sound of a detuned radio to slip out of consciousness of a night then you might enjoy this app, which for the low, low sum of $4 will provide you with not just ANY white noise but ARTISANAL white noise, white noise ‘composed’ by sound artists and presumably designed to help you attain a better, cleaner, more valuable tier of rest than that afforded by, I don’t know, turning the AM dial all the way to the left. “These longform explorations of static, drones, fuzz, wind and spectrum-filling oblivion make Fuzzzel not only a utilitarian sound-making device but a one-of-a-kind creative platform. Fuzzzel reroutes the demand for white noise into the hands of professionals, sound artists and creatives. Every piece on Fuzzzel is a lengthy, exclusive ambient journey created with the pulse of a human being and the ear of a gifted musician. Each piece — together totaling more than two hours of new music — loops indefinitely alongside a unique video provided by each artist.” Obviously I am being sniffy about this because, well, I can, but the artists featured here are actual, proper musicians, and I suppose if you’re the sort of person who likes ‘challenging’ music and thinks the sonic output of, say, Skinny Puppy is almost-saccharine in its melodic nature then you might find something deeply satisfying about it.
- GTAesthetic: A Twitter account posting screenshots and clips from a (seemingly heavily-modded) version of GTA San Andreas. There’s something weirdly, powerfully nostalgic about these visuals – part of it is lost youth nostalgia, obviously (how innocent our San Andreas days!), but part of it’s the odd, post-digital semi-hauntological thing that you get with specific pixel aesthetics, and the very particular strangeness of looking at an old videogame which itself is mimicking the vibe and aesthetic of old TV shows and films. I like this a lot, though the aesthetic is, for me, *slightly* ruined by the fact that the most recent screencaps feature a modded-in version of Hatsune Miku which feels like it queers the vibe slightly.
- Only Visit Once: Almost certainly not the first site with this gimmick to have featured here over the years, but I’ve not seen one for a while and it’s a concept I am very much a fan of. The site itself isn’t hugely exciting – it’s a relatively simple ‘leave a message for future visitors’-type gimmick where you’re invited to either submit your own nugget of wisdom/sub-Hallmark bromide (delete as applicable) for others to read, or to peruse the words left by previous visitors – but the catch is that you can only visit the url once. Any repeat visits from (I presume) the same IP address will result in a redirect to a different page which simply says “You’ve already passed this way before. Your journey lies ahead—don’t look back.” I feel there is a LOT of quite fun stuff you could do with this – there are a bunch of semi-obvious ‘ARTY WEBSITE’ concepts that spring to mind, but I’m sure you can all think of some EXCITING COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (you filthy capitalists, you!).
- Live Lightning Maps: I’m not entirely sure how ‘live’ the ‘live’ element of this is, but opening it now I am struck by the fact that WE ARE CONSTANTLY BEING STRUCK BY SPACE ELECTRICITY (yes, I know that lightning is not *technically* – or indeed in any meaningful way whatsoever – ‘space electricity’, but let me have my childish sense of wonder, please). Seriously, this is mildly-terrifying. If you fancy REALLY upsetting your young children, why not bring this up on a big screen and tell them it’s a realtime depiction of where the just-announced nuclear strikes are landing? FUN FOR ALL THE FAMILY!
- One Million Letters: So after Nolen’s One Million Checkboxes (did I mention it won the multiplayer Tiny Award? It did, you know) it seems ‘One Million X’ is goint to be a thing in frivolous webdesign for a while. This is a variant on the theme which presents a million spaces for characters to be typed, with anyone able to add or remove letters per their wont – what this means in practice is that you’ve got a VERY BIG group writing project, which effectively acts as a completely incomprehensible expression of the collective ID of what appears to be a LOT of c.13 year olds (I am basing this on the number of users who appear to be very keen to talk about ‘poop’). This is pretty much entirely gibberish, but I quite like the massively random nature of it and the scale means that you can occasionally find some quite odd and occasionally poignant things if you scroll down far enough (NB – at the time of writing this doesn’t appear to feature any appalling hatespeech or slurs, etc, but I’m conscious that these sorts of things are only ever one 4Chan brigading away from being nazi-adjacent cesspits so, well, caveat emptor and all that).
- Elastic Grid: Click the link, move your mouse around and get lost in the optical illusion. I would really, really like to put this on the big wraparound HD screens at the horrible Outernet development at Tottenham Court Road and use it to give the assembled masses a really dreadful case of motion sickness.
- Coffee: This comes via Kris, I think – I have no idea who has made it, or who they are, or where they live, but I do know, thanks to this site, that they drink a lot of coffee, and document each cup they drink by posting a small, unremarkable photo of it on this site. Per the stats, this has been going for five years and features just shy of 1300 individual cups – why? WHY THE FCUK NOT MUST EVERYTHING HAVE A RATIONALE? JESUS WEPT.
- Creative Bots: A collection of bots and bot-related projects by Stefan Bohacek – these are mostly on Mastodon now (THANKS ELON YOU FCUKING PR1CK), but if you can get over the general sense of distaste that probably gives you then there’s a really nice range of bots here, from the creative to the whimsical – bots that share lighthouses, bots that share pictures of the sorts of spiral graphics used to hynotise Wil E Coyote in countless Looney Tunes shorts, bots that share photos from the South Pole…partly just a fun collection of digital projects, but also a pleasant reminder of how (relatively) easy it is to spin up something small and frivolous that makes the web a marginally-nicer place than it would otherwise be.
- Live Air Traffic Control Feeds: According to pretty much everything I’ve read on the topic, and the genuinely weird 90s film Pushing Tin, being an air traffic controller is an insanely stressful job and the sort of thing that makes alcoholics or outpatients of many professionals in the trade. Which in turn makes it odd that listening to the radio chatter from air traffic controllers is so weirdly soothing – as I type I am listening in to the lads in Osaka brining the planes home in crackly Japanese and there’s something undeniably pleasing and ASMR-adjacent about the whole thing. This page takes you to a list of the ‘top 50’ air traffic control streams in the world (I have literally no idea how they are quantifying ‘best’ here) and you can drop in on airports from Boston to Sydney and everywhere inbetween, and this is strangely just wonderful and oddly soothing. Except, I imagine, should you happen on a stream at a point at which something goes terribly, fierily wrong.
- AI Robocalls: This is, fine, not a particularly interesting website per se – the company’s called Bland and they want to flog you automated calls centre solutions delivered via THE MAGICAL (not magical) POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, which isn’t something I imagine any of you give a particular fcuk about. BUT! This also gives you the option to check out the service by putting in your phone number and getting one of said AI calls centre operators to give you a ring, and it’s worth a go because fcuking hell is this impressive. It still sounds like a robot, but the responsiveness and speed and accuracy is pretty incredible – consider the canary in the ‘are calls centre staff still going to have jobs in 2026?’ coalmine to be pretty definitively fcuked, basically.
- Fragrantica: I went out for my friend Jay’s birthday drinks this week and met some very nice people, one of whom told me about this INCREDIBLE website – Fragrantica is an online community for people who are really, really into perfumes, and who really, really want to read and write reviews about said perfumes, and OH MY GOD is this a wonderful portal into an obsessional world I genuinely didn’t know existed. This is probably a hugely-useful place if you’re serious about fragrance and want to find a new scent based on stuff you already like, or if you’re the sort of person who understands base notes and top notes, or who wants to find a really obscure smell to make your own, but, for me (a man who as a general rule hopes only that they don’t smell actively terrible), the main joy comes in the reviews, particularly of the more challenging scents – the person who introduced me to this suggested this perfume and subsequent reviews as a decent entry point into the madness, and, well, click this link and read the reviews. “my boyfriend has this…i honestly can’t stand it T_T it just smells like hatred and pain and blood and war and death . there’s some okayish notes like the flowers but they’re a bit weaker but overall it makes me really sad and unless you want to smell like wrath then don’t buy :’(“ HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO SMELL THIS NOW? Honestly, ‘smell like wrath’ may well be the most perfect advertising line for a scent ever.
By a seemingly-uncredit artist for Harper’s in 1910
THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST REALISED IT REALLY NEEDS A HOLIDAY, PT.2:
- No Borders: What does a map look like when you remove countries, seas, borders, coastlines…well, it looks like this. Effectively just a selection of place names arrayed on a grey background, this starts to become interesting when you zoom in – there’s something genuinely strange about the dissociation engendered by the familiarity of the places and the complete absence of any of the familiar cartographic reference points you associate with them, and the way in which your brain starts to insinuate the shapes of nations based on the spaces between placenames…This is ostensibly a very simple and not-hugely-interesting project, but I found it weirdly compelling and spent longer staring at this week than I expected to, for reasons I can’t adequately explain.
- Departure Mono: Per the description on the site, “departure mono is a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe” – that is, basically, it, but it’s a really rather lovely font that is significantly more aesthetically-pleasing than a lot of similar ones I’ve seen that plough the ‘retro, 8-bit’ furrow. Plus the website is really, really nicely designed, and even includes a proper playable game of Arkanoid at the bottom which is the sort of friendly Easter Egg that I am very much a fan of.
- Tolans: Since the early days of the GREAT GENERATIVE AI HYPECYCLE BOOM I’ve been waiting for someone to spin up a ‘friendly interactive Tamagotchi on steroids’-type application, a little digital cartoon companion to live in your phone and provide succour and companionship (ahem, not for ME, you understand, I DEFINITELY have enough friends, on the subject of which WHY WON’T YOU CALL ME?) – and lo, a mere two years or so hence, we have Tolans! “Meet your Tolan: a friendly little alien you can talk to about whatever, and who can even help picture your ideas! Want to be a fashion designer? Your Tolan is here to help you visualize a cool new shirt or pair of sneakers. Writing a book? They can help brainstorm your hero’s amazing journey. With Tolans in your life, there are no limits to your creativity. Your Tolan is highly personalized to you. They love to chat about any topic you choose and remember important details from past conversations.” So basically this is like Replika (in theory, at least), except with a hefty additional layer of character design on top, so rather than speaking to a disembodied entity you’re instead chatting with a vaguely-friendly-looking pastel coloured character with what looks like a rubber glove on its head, presented to you as a sort of combination pet-cum-digital-assistant. It’s iOS-only so I’ve not personally tried this out – and it’s a subscription service, obvs – but it might be interesting to take a look at. If nothing else you can have fun attempting to jailbreak it and get your ‘friendly alien companion’ to instruct you on how to make ersatz napalm with some petrol, some instant coffee and some orange juice.
- Wigglypaint: Ooh, this is a pleasing little digital art toy. “Wigglypaint is a juicy, jiggly drawing program built with Decker, with notable similarities to Shake Art and KidPix. Pick a tool, make a doodle, crop it as desired, and save a GIF.” Obviously for this to have any value for you you’ll need a modicum of artistic talent – when I tried using it the results were…unimpressive, but as I have perhaps previously alluded to I have what can only be described as anti-talent when it comes to drawing (everything basically ends up looking like an exit wound).
- RIP Crowdtangle: I appreciate that this is possibly a *bit* niche, but this month has seen the shuttering of one of the few tools that made Meta’s social platforms even a tiny bit transparent – Crowdtangle was used by journalists, researchers and academics to track the best-performing content, Pages, etc, across the Facebook/Insta ecosystem, offering what was pretty much the only way of getting an overview of the sorts of things that were trending across the platforms at any given moment. As of August 14th, though, it’s dead – Meta killed it, and replaced it with an alternative system which – and here’s something which I am sure will leave you SHOCKED – doesn’t give anywhere near the same level of insight. Anyway, this site is a bit of an impotent scream into the void, commemorating the service and offering a selection of information about why it was so important and why Meta’s alternative solution is in fact nothing of the sort. There’s apparently going to be some sort of ‘memorial service’ for Crowdtangle on 30 September which is…well, it’s a bit weird, frankly, but then again I’ve been writing 10,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ to an audience of approximately seven people for over a decade, so on balance I probably shouldn’t throw stones lest my glass house cut me to ribbons.
- Interview Warmup: An interesting little tool/toy from Google, which purports to offer you the opportunity to practise for job interviews in a variety of disciplines by TALKING TO THE MACHINE – the site asks you questions, you respond by talking, as you would in a normal job interview, and at the end your answers are assessed and ‘graded’ and you get feedback. It’s more proof-of-concept than anything truly helpful – mind you, I say that as someone who almost certainly couldn’t pass a job interview if they tried, so perhaps I should reassess this – but it’s an interesting use-case for the tech and the sort of thing that I could imagine being potentially useful for people who’ve literally never experienced an interview before, or who don’t quite feel confident with the format. Equally, though, there’s nothing quite like ‘saying this stuff to your laptop in an empty room’ to hammer home exactly how soul-destroyingly vapid the ‘tell me why you’re excited about the possibility of working for us!’ charade is – GYAC mate it is called ‘work’ for a reason, noone is excited by it.
- Character Webs: This is actually more of a blogpost than it is a single-site type thing, but the draw here is the design work described so I think it fits up here rather than down there. Erin Davis is a dataviz artist at Axios, and this is their personal blog – here they explore mapping the relationships between characters in novels and presenting those as discrete pieces of visual design, and, honestly, this is SUCH a lovely way of communication the relationship structures within a story. Seriously, 100% convinced that these would sell by the shedload were they to set up a shop – Erin, should you ever happen to see this I would commission you to make one of these for me in a heartbeat, so should you be interested then do get in touch.
- Population: Not an entirely novel idea, but presented rather well – Population is a site which asks you to tell it your gender at birth, your date of birth and your nationality, and which will then tell you a whole bunch of stuff about your likely life expectancy, how it tracks against other countries, that sort of thing. Thanks to this I have been reliably informed that “You are the 5,566,904,165 person alive on the planet. This means that you are older than 68% of the world’s population and older than 55% of all people in United Kingdom” – which, I’m going to be honest, isn’t the most cheering of statistical analyses. Excuse me, I am just off to weep at my senescence.
- Consumed Today: Simply described as ‘a daily digest of the food and media that make up my diet’, this site does just that (or did – it appears that whoever made this either got bored of tracking their food/media consumption in early August, or they’re dead. Er, let’s hope it’s the former!) – clicking each day lets you look at small photos of their meals, a set of things they read (including hyperlinks where appropriate), and a list of all the songs they listened to (this person listens to a LOT of music), and I genuinely adore the tedious, quotidian minutiae of it all (and the sound effects when you hover over various bits of the site are a genuine pleasure, particularly the crunch/munch audio that accompanies the food pics).
- Regen Earth: Online since 2016, ”this is an ongoing mapping of documentaries about regenerative projects…We wanted to know the stories of the field of practitioners bringing their world(s) to life. It’s a labor of love, mostly to express gratitude to this remarkable community. We curate the map for projects that: a) are inspiring in their ambition and scope; and b) have had a short or long-form documentary made about them.” The link takes you to a Google Map covered in pins, each of which corresponds to a regeneration project at that location – clicking the pin gets you links, additional info and usually a YouTube video which explains more about the project in question, its impact, etc – so in the UK, for example, there are links to projects about rewilding the River Avon, while in Portugal there’s a link to a project around sustainable building techniques…niche, but if you’re an environmentalist or conservationist, or simply interested in the preservation of the natural world (and why wouldn’t you be? What are you, some sort of MONSTER??) then this will contain loads of interesting stuff for you.
- The Pessimists’ Archive: I know, I know, you don’t need or want any more newsletters in your life! Curios is enough! More than enough! TOO FCUKING MUCH! Still, should you somehow have additional space in your life for inbox content you might find this of interest – the Pessimists’ Archive is a newsletter which, per the description, is “a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas and trends.” So you have things like ‘letters protesting the construction of the Eiffel Tower’, say, or pieces about how robots have ALWAYS been coming for our jobs…I have a vague sense that this is used by a bunch of dreadful people to assuage our fears about how tech is making things worse – there’s an endorsement from ubercnut Marc Andreessen on the page, which did rather give me the fantods – but in general it’s interesting stuff and I figure some of you might find it worth a sub. For what it’s worth, though, SOMETIMES IT IS RIGHT TO BE SCARED AND HYSTERICAL.
- Could Care: There are many things which are infuriating about North American English – the inability to spell ‘aluminium’, say – but perhaps the most baffling and infuriating in equal measure is the insistence that the correct way of communicating one’s singular lack of engagement with or interest in an issue is to say ‘I could care less’. THIS DOES NOT MAKE ANY FCUKING SENSE, HOWEVER YOU ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IT! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL??? Anyway, this site exists for the sole purpose of explaining why this construction is stupid and wrong and should be stopped, with an elegant little bit of slider design. Can we all agree that you will stop saying this forthwith? It’s our language and we can take it back whenever we like, you know.
- Wandawhirl: Completely and utterly pointless, but not unpleasing. “Wanda Whirl displays calming and playful streamers that dance and whirl in the breeze” – choose from different patterns and shapes, click and drag your mouse to make them move in the imaginary digital wind, and recreate almost-exactly that very specific feeling of being so bored as a small child that you can lose yourself in ‘moving your hand through a beaded curtain’ for hours at a time. There’s quite a pleasing aesthetic to this, and the physics are very satisfying indeed.
- 100,000 Emoji: Basically the same kind of idea as the ‘One Million Characters’ site earlier on, except featuring emoji and smaller by a factor of 10 (did they not get the memo about how EVERYTHING has to be a million in 2024?) – you can click any of the spaces and select which emoji you’d like represented there, and it feels like there’s some team-based attempts to ‘own’ certain bits of the canvas with particular emoji, and someone VERY dedicated and possibly a little unwell has seemingly made a pattern in emoji crabs which extends for most of the length of the page, and, look, there is literally no point to this at all that I can discern but I am broadly-speaking pleased that it exists.
- Moviely: Every day you’re given the option of guessing a film or TV show – in each case, you get 10 guesses, and with each one you’re given information about the film or show you’ve selected and which characteristics it shares with the correct answer. So, for example, if your first guess is ‘The Princess Bride’, you’ll be told various bits of info about it – it’s IMDB score, the year it was made, the genres it’s tagged with in IMDB, etc – with any that match the target film in green. The idea is that over the course of 10 guesses you can narrow it down enough to arrive at that day’s correct guess, but, honestly, you’d have to know a fcuktonne more about films than I do (admittedly not hard) to stand even a passing chance of getting any of these, Cinefiles will possibly find this pleasingly-tricky, but personally speaking my main reaction was ‘Jesus, this is fcuking impossible’.
- Shutterbug: OOH, this is very nicely done indeed and very clever – you’ll need to open it in its own window for it to work properly, though, as the game basically involves resizing your browser to create the right-sized ‘framing’ for a photo. The gimmick is that you’re tasked with taking photos of various insects – each picture requires you to include a set number of components, meaning you’ll need to resize your browser and move the window around to find the right combination of insects and to get them all in shot at the same time. This is *such* a neat mechanic, beautifully-executed, and it feels like something that you’re going to see repurposed in a MUCH shinier advergame by L’Oreal or something in ~6m.
- Smells Like Chlorine: Our final miscellaneous link this week is this deceptively-funny little game in which you play as a cleaner in a game developer’s office, navigating the space in 3d and attempting to do your job against increasingly-strange constraints. “A menial job. Unfriendly co-workers. What does it take to get some respect as a janitor around here? Things take an interesting turn, however, after your boss tells you some devastating news. Those detergent fumes aren’t helping either…” I very much enjoyed this, and I think you will too.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Wong Kei: Wong Kei is an iconic restaurant in London’s Chinatown (more on it in the longreads) – this Tumblr was one man’s attempt to eat every dish on the famously-kilometric menu. Apparently he’s developed a variety of food intolerances (presumably unconnected to this project) which mean it’s unlikely to ever reach completion, but if you want a deep dive into a selection of incredibly-unphotogenic meals then this is something of a motherlode.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Official Stick Reviews: This is a slightly larger Insta feed than I usually tend to link to – over 2million followers, so mainstream! – but, look, it’s photos of people with really excellent sticks, how could I not? There are few pleasures in life quite like finding, and subsequently wielding, a really good stick.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Mainstreaming of Loserdom: As the author points out in the intro to this piece, it’s a deliberately provocative title; it’s also, though, a piece which felt ‘true’ in quite a specific way, and certainly one which very much describes a particular corner of Life Online in 2024. The central premise is neatly encapsulated in the opening para, to whit: “Over the past few years, something has shifted in the perception of acceptable recreational behavior, or the way people talk about their hobbies: people are gleeful to admit they have no hobbies, no interests, no verve. Somehow, one of the main “hobbies” accepted by the masses is staying home, laying in bed, scrolling on their phones and watching television. What happened?” SPOLERS: there is no definitive conclusion drawn here, but the article shapes the contours of a the phenomenon quite nicely, and it’s an interesting reframing of the old canard about ‘puritanical kids’ and an equally-interesting counterpoint to the narrative about ‘brat summer’ (I AM SORRY I WILL NEVER MENTION THAT PHRASE AGAIN).
- Low Information Voters: This is specifically about the US, but it’s indicative of a wider trend that’s been observed in research by Reuters and others over the past 18 months or so, specifically people across the world being increasingly-disinclined to engage with ‘the news’ and instead getting their information, such as it is, from a disparate collection of online sources of often questionable quality. It’s quite hard to read this without getting quite a big dose ‘oh dear Christ, we’re fcuked aren’t we?’ fear, but, that aside, it’s also an excellent illustration of one of my (many, many) tedious hobbyhorses, specifically the fact that it’s literally impossible to have any reasonable idea of what anyone’s knowledge/informational baseline is, and as such it’s therefore also becoming harder to talk about things with people because there’s literally no certainty that you will even agree on the very basic fundamental premises of what you are discussing due to this infinitely-fragmented informational landscape. “Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.” Quite hard to find much to disagree with in this, which is in itself somewhat miserable.
- The Telegram Story: You will, of course, be aware of the arrest of Pavel Durov in France last weekend – frankly the astonishing thing, to my mind, was that it’s taken this long for someone to nab him given the widespread knowledge that Telegram is a proper hotspot of actual, honest-to-goodness, serious crime and has been for a good five years or so now. Anyway, this is a good explainer by 404 Media on What Happened And Why (and why it’s not a freedom of speech issue so much as a reasonably-simple one of abetting criminal activity, despite what Elon and the rest of the peanut gallery of the world’s worst cnuts are claiming), and how it became such a culture war issue – it’s very much worth reading the whole thing, but if you’re after a pithy precis then how about “the fact that I can log onto Telegram right now and find dozens of chats where illegal things are happening, [means] it is simplistic and reductive (and maybe wrong?) to say that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app,” and it’s also reductive to say that Durov was arrested in France purely because he operates an “encrypted messaging app.””
- Neoliberalism and Ukraine: A fascinating piece in the New Statesman looking at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the way in which significant players in the West are seeing the war, and its eventual resolution, as a significant economic and political opportunity. “The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”” (I promise I’m not just linking to this because of the Thiel references, honest guv).
- Palmer Luckey: This is a frankly astonishing profile. I knew the name Palmer Luckey – he’s the guy who invented the original Oculus VR headset which he then subsequently sold to Facebook for a violent amount of money, and who was bounced out again shortly afterwards for reasons which are explained at length in here – but I didn’t really know much about his backstory, or where he’s ended up now, and WOW is this an interesting look at another of those very, very weird individuals that Silicon Valley has a seemingly – and, one might argue, unfortunately – inexhaustible supply of. This is LONG, and personally I’m not a huge fan of the tone/vibe of the piece, but the subject is fascinating (in a sort of arms-length horror sort of way) and there are some interesting connections to the previous article in terms of his new tech warfare business Anduril’s work in Ukraine (and, obviously, MORE FCUKING PETER THIEL LINKS sorry sorry sorry won’t mention him again). Seriously, though, can we maybe have some tech people who AREN’T like this, maybe just once?
- Weird AI Hoaxes: As the juicers and hypebeasts of the AI ecosystem wait for Strawberry, whatever the fcuk it actually ends up being, they are also spinning up all sorts of weird and wild rumours which are getting increasingly-unhinged. I watched from the sidelines the other week as a bunch of VERY ACTIVE POSTERS lost their collective sh1t, speculating that they had spotted actual instances of AI agents in the wild – this article is an interesting overview of some of the wilder rumours on the fringe of the industry, but, perhaps more significantly, it feels like a precursor to how odd and uncertain the AI path is going to get, and another proof-point as to how perhaps the greatest casualty of the technological boom (other than, you know, huge swathes of jobs) is going to be our ability to have the faintest fcuking clue as to what is actually going on, what is real and what is fake.
- Social Media Signals: I don’t think words can adequately express my gratitude at no longer having to really do anything to do with social media for a living any more, but I appreciate not all of you are necessarily so lucky – should you suffer the misfortune of having to do ‘social strategy’, or any similarly-stupid combination of terms to connote a largely-pointless white-collar marketing job, then you may find this presentation, kindly shared by Matthew Stafford, useful. It’s basically a whole ‘state of social and content and TRENDS’-type guide, and it’s generally really good and is full of principles to apply and stuff that you can basically use to populate the horrible empty ‘2025 SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY’ document you’re going to be staring at with tears in your eyes come November.
- How Twitter Blue Happened: I know, I don’t really want to talk about That Fcuking Man Either, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered linking to a piece rehashing another slice of the Muskian Twitter takeover because, well, I had to read his fcuking biography for work and that was more than enough, but this NYT piece is a very good piece of reporting by Ryan Mac which collates the viewpoints of dozens of different people on how the…suboptimal rollout of Twitter’s subscription service happened. As often is the case with pieces like this, what’s most striking is how fcuking dumb so much of what purportedly genius business leaders actually do and say is – also the whole segment on the ‘where should we price this?’ conversation is yet another wonderful example of the fact that there is literally no subject on earth that a middle-aged white man won’t feel absolutely confident giving their opinion on, regardless of their complete lack of expertise on said subject (and I say that with what I promise is a significant dollop of pained self-awareness, honest).
- You Can’t Believe Your Eyes Any More: Or at least you won’t be able to believe them when you’re looking at photos, specifically photos on a screen – this is the Verge, writing about the new image editing features which are shipping in Google’s new Pixel phones and which let anyone do local text-to-image editing of their photos. I confess to not having spent too much time thinking about this specific usecase, but the examples in here are genuinely amazing and it’s hard to read this and not get a *touch* freaked out at the fact that you can do entirely-photorealistic image insertion into any picture with no visible watermarking. There’s a particularly lovely example of a bunch of lines and a bottle of booze being ‘shopped into an image, which gives you a small, low-jeopardy glimpse as to what you might end up being able to do with this – in general, though, it does very much feel like we’re hurtling towards a moment whereby you simply won’t be able to take any photograph at face value, ever. “This erosion of the social consensus began before the Pixel 9, and it will not be carried forth by the Pixel 9 alone. Still, the phone’s new AI capabilities are of note not just because the barrier to entry is so low, but because the safeguards we ran into were astonishingly anemic. The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them.” The piece concludes with the pithy assessment that ‘we’re fcuked’, and it’s hard not to agree a bit.
- Eternal Sunshining Your Memories: In a seamless segue – WHO SAYS THIS CURATION SH1T’S EASY, YOU FCUKS? – from the previous piece, this is a profile of the PhotoshopRequests subReddit, in which people ask for assistance in digitally-altering images; a significant proportion of people are doing this to remove former partners from photos, or to try and get a ‘perfect’ picture of a dead loved one, and I found the general themes here about the psychology of manipulating images to subsequently manipulate memory and emotion both fascinating and deeply, deeply sad. This, plus the last piece, is basically a TOP-TIER short story prompt imho.
- Introduction to Community Development: This is a topline guide to building, maintaining and managing communities, on- or offline, compiled by expert community wrangler and Friend of Curios Ed Saperia, of Newspeak House – not one for the casual reader (or at least only for casual readers with an unusual interest in the specifics of setting up and running community projects), but if you’re someone who’s interested in setting such a thing up then this is potentially a really useful set of principles to bear in mind and steps to take.
- Monetising Politics on TikTok: I slightly love this, in a ‘ah, modernity, how genuinely baffling you are to me!’ sort of way – apparently kids in the US are making bank on TikTok by doing live debates about politics, basically arguing live against other streamers on Trump vs Harris and inviting viewers to pitch in with cash gifts to manifest their support for one side or the other and thereby ‘win’ the battle for their preferred streamer/candidate. Which is SO WEIRD, to me at least – was this happening anywhere for the UK election? Were the kids doing ‘Reform vs Labour’ battles, bigging up Farage or stanning Starmer? WHY ARE PEOPLE SPENDING ACTUAL CASHMONEY ON THIS? I genuinely don’t understand anything anymore. Anyway, next time someone says that kids aren’t engaging in politics point them at this and reassure them that, don’t worry, the kids are alright (I am not in fact wholly convinced that they are alright, you know).
- Making A Public Transport Arrival Times Signaller: Ok, so this is QUITE NICHE, but I am very, very keen on this becoming A Thing across London, and as such am sharing the link in the hope that several of you decide that you really want to get into this and this enthusiasm results in a wave of useful signage popping up across the city. Basically Jonty Wareing created a digital screen which takes API data from TfL and uses it to display bus arrival times for the bus stop by the window in which it’s placed – WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF THESE WERE EVERYWHERE? Yes, yes it would, so if you could all pull your fingers out and start building them too that would be ace, thanks.
- The Blue Zone Distraction: There’s been a reasonable number of ‘world’s oldest person turns x years old’ stories recently, or at least that what it feels like, but I rather enjoyed this article which somewhat-grumpily attempts to debunk the idea of ‘blue zones’ which gained some traction a few years back – you may recall c.20…11ish? there was a spate of articles about specific areas of the world where there were seemingly-isolated bubbles of extreme longevity – certain Greek islands, for example, a specific part of Italy – and which suggested that there were certain common traits in environment and lifestyle which might be taken as useful pointers on how to die later than most people. Except, per this piece, the real common factors are less dietary and more to do with tax fraud and generally-poor-quality recordkeeping, which is exactly the sort of cynical, curmudgeonly analysis I can totally get behind.
- The Last Restaurant In Chinatown: The Wong Kei piece I mentioned earlier on, this is another excellent bit of writing in Vittles, celebrating the history of one of London’s oldest Chinese eateries – not one of its best, or most welcoming (it’s basically a rite of passage for anyone living in the city to have an ok meal with genuinely aggressive service here), but one which very much merits the oft-overused term ‘iconic’. Wonderful social, urban, culinary history.
- The Charli XCX Interview: I’m not normally particularly interested in celebrity interviews, let alone popstar/musician interviews, but this one struck me as more intriguing than most – there’s something fascinating about the degree of artifice and persona throughout, the question of how much of this is confected sincerity, whether the slight awkwardness at play is a bit or a pose or a vibe…I’m also always fascinated when you read profiles of artists and their sheer, unfettered ambition shines through, and it’s a useful reminder that you don’t get to the top of any profession without having a certain steel behind the (dead) eyes. Basically I’m thinking that Ms XCX has been a popstar for 15 years now, signed to majors for most of those, and if she hasn’t been media trained to within an inch of her life by the age of 32 then I am a monkey’s uncle, and as such I don’t quite buy a lot of what she’s selling the interviewer here. But, then again, maybe THIS is brat (sorry sorry sorry sorry).
- No Ordinary Love: I think this might be the first ever piece of BRANDED CONTENT to feature in the longreads section of Curios, which feels…well, it feels icky, to be honest, and I’m not wholly happy with it, but, equally, I think this is actually really good, and the essays I’ve read (three of the six) were all genuinely lovely, and significantly better than they needed to be. This is part of the current campaign by…Hinge? Anyway, some dating app or another, which uses REAL STORIES of REAL PEOPLE who have found REAL LOVE via the app (written by actual, talented, named writers, which is the main draw here tbh) and, honestly, they are really, really charming, cute and hopeful and funny and sweet and, look, I am as you are probably aware by now a desperate cynic who is largely dead inside, but I was utterly charmed by these and I think you might be too. Whoever was in charge of this campaign, take a bow, I am genuinely impressed (feel free to put that in your wrapup report, but be sure to attribute it to ‘LEADING INTERNET CULTURE NEWSLETTER WEB CURIOS’ by way of exchange – thanks, anonymous marketing person, should you ever see this!).
- Summer Loveline: Ok, this is a VERY un-Curios link – this is Emma Garland’s newsletter, which has been on hiatus for a bit but which came back this week with a reader Q&A, like an agony aunt column and, look, this is very much not aimed at People Like Me, and ordinarily I have very little interest in or truck with life advice-type stuff, but I laughed out loud on four separate occasions when reading this and as such feel reasonably confident that at least a few of you will do too.
- Graffiti as Visual and Written Expression: Jonathan Lethem writes about graffiti. Look, you don’t need more than that, do you? Jonathan Lethem! Brooklyn! Graffiti! Have the opening and then go and read the rest, because it stays this good all the way through: “As children in New York City in the 1970s, we were born into a world covered with paint. Walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corner blurred into globs, approximate shapes. Sometimes you’d find paint over old black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor of a bathroom, or covering leaky pipes beneath a sink. Old landlord strategy: Throw on another heavy coat. It might be holding the building together. The layers peeled and chipped. We were warned not to eat it. That made us curious: Was it good to eat? At the dawn of gentrification, some of the layers were being undone. Chipped at or stripped away. People dragged sinks or sections of marble fireplaces into the street and poured and scrubbed poisons, hoping to free their old forms. A summer afternoon went rank with solvent. Soon enough, some of our number went out armed with paint and shouted back with our own application.”
- The Trouble With Friends: On friendship, adulthood, loneliness, the permeability, or otherwise, of personal boundaries – this isn’t a sad essay, per se, but there’s an undeniable sense of melancholy throughout which I found very beautiful indeed.
- The Contingency Contingent: This is very long, very good, and reminded me so incredibly powerfully of ‘And So We Came To The End’ that it was almost uncanny. Leigh Claire LaBerge writes about working on an Accenture project on ‘Y2K preparedness’ at the turn of the millennium – this is excellent, and evocative to the point you can see the striplighting and feel the poor-quality office carpeting under your feet, and as a sustained piece of stylistic writing it’s almost annoying how well-executed it is.
- On Cancer and Desire: Finally this week, an essay from 20 years ago in which Annie Ernaux wrote about sex and cancer and death and love and and and. This is glorious, vital, elegiac, cold, sensual, incredible, please read it.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: