HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE! I assume all your digital cards to me are currently stuck in the ether somewhere and will all arrive together in due course – consider this my personal, amorous missive to each of YOU, for what could motivate a man to set aside so much time and effort every week for strangers other than a deep and abiding sense of LOVE (agape or eros, take your pick)?
Yes, that’s right, mental illness and a growing sense of their own futility in a world which increasingly doesn’t seem to care! But we can call it ‘love’ if you prefer.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are still in time to cancel that dinner reservation, you know it is a bad idea and you will regret it.
By Ana Cuba
THE SECTION WHICH DISCOVERED THIS WEEK THAT THERE IS A TRADE BODY FOR THE DATING APPS INDUSTRY AND THAT IT IS HELMED BY A MAN WHO WEARS JEANS AND SHOES, WHICH FEELS WEIRDLY SIGNIFICANT IN A WAY I CAN’T QUITE PUT MY FINGER ON, PT.1:
- The VCU Network: I think I’ve talked in here before about the odd, solipsistic nature of the ‘surfing the web’ (LOL! I think we should bring that terminology back) (and if I haven’t then I totally meant to, honest), the weird sense that I think is sort of innate to being online whereby only the bits of the web that you’re currently looking at are really *real*, so to speak, and that your browsing experience is the only true browsing experience, and that your internet is THE internet. Which, obviously, is not true in the slightest – I actually think that we might have done ourselves rather a lot of good had all the vaguely-experimental ‘see what the web looks like if Facebook thinks you’re someone else’ toys you were able to spin up c.2010 or so had been allowed to persist a bit longer. Which is by way of very longwinded and slightly-baggy preamble (sorry; that doesn’t bode hugely well for the rest of this week’s typing, does it? Apologies, I’ll try and keep the authorial digressions to a minimum. Oh, fcuk, I’m doing again aren’t I?) to The VCU Network, a truly FASCINATING window into the web as experienced by other people, but one that it turns out I am not sure if I can totally get into. Let me explain (IT’S ABOUT FCUKING TIME MATT FFS) – the VCU network is basically an art project which functions as a Chrome extension – anyone with the extension installed and turned on is automatically participating in the project, which sees EVERY SINGLE URL YOU VISIT shared with everyone else participating. So at any given moment you can open up a new tab and see what everyone else in the world with the extension installed is looking at RIGHT NOW – which, obviously, is slightly-incredible and madly voyeuristic and intrusive and weird, and immediately feels…uncomfortable, almost, like a violation of sorts (I learned about several entirely new sources of gay bongo, for example, which while not specifically ‘my thing’ was, well, instructive!). Hence my conflict here – I love this, I love the ethos of it…but I don’t want everyone to be able to see where I find all my stuff (I FOUND THE CONCH) and so am ambivalent about whether or not I can continue using it (also, there aren’t *quite* enough other users to make it constantly compelling at the moment). Fcuk it, I am going to turn it on again, if only for a few days – I look forward to seeing what sort of FILTHY PERVERTS you all are!
- The Telegram Index: A slight caveat here – Telegram is, obviously, occasionally dodgy as all fcuk and I am in no way advocating its use for the negotiation and purchase of drugs or other illicit materials, etc etc. That said, it’s also a really good place to find specific communities, a bit like a more international and significantly-geekier (and, yes, ok, more criminal) Reddit – this site is a decent enough directory of Telegram Groups, Channels and Bots, categorised by theme. Personally-speaking I’ve found Telegram to be hugely useful as a source of hooky streams for the football, but I would imagine that the wider sports communities can be similarly-helpful for other pursuits; there is also, as you might imagine, a…not-insignificant bongo offering, which, look, I am not going to judge you but also BE CAREFUL OUT THERE because, well, I imagine it can probably get quite dicey once you get into some of the more, er, niche communities.
- Global Caps Lock: ANOTHER COLLABORATIVE DIGITAL ART PROJECT! Ok, fine, this probably only fits the description if your definition of ‘art’ is elastic enough to encompass ‘mass simultaneous typing in all-caps’ but, well, it fcuking ought to be, so there. The Global Caps Lock Project is a simple one in which anyone can participate – download the client software, activate it, and you will become part of the Global Caps Lock Collective, operating as a single hivemind and applying capslock as one! Effectively what this means is that everyone running the client – at the time of writing, a frankly disappointing nine people – shares a single caps lock key; when it’s on for one, it’s on for all, and vice-versa. Which, obviously, could potentially be problematic if you work in a role which requires the typing of large quantities of copy and where the readers of said copy might reasonably prefer NOT TO BE SHOUTED AT; but, also, ART IS NOT MEANT TO BE EASY. I very much enjoy this, and would enjoy it even more if one of you a) installed it on a work computer; and then b) shared with me your experience of explaining your newly-idiosyncratic approach to capitalisation to colleagues. Thanks!
- Nest: I think this is really rather beautiful. Nest is a sort of digital sound art toy thing (you’d think after all these fcuking years I’d have gotten better at the whole ‘describing the work’ thing, but perhaps my singular refusal to evolve or improve my writing style is part of the Curios ‘charm’? It’s not, is it?), which, obviously, I don’t *really* understand – basically you have a bunch of different sound clips which you can activate, each of which changes the way in which the background sequencer works in some way; create weird, scratchy breaks by clicking and dragging (the geometry of the shapes you create affects the pitch and duration of the beat fragments), and layer the samples to create an honestly-rather-lovely sound collage which is different every single time. This is significantly more artful than it might initially appear – once you start to add multiple layers everything begins to coalesce, weirdly, regardless of what you’re doing, and there feels like there’s some guiding maths underpinning this all to add some slight sense of order to your chaos, and I have it on in the background now and it is quite, quite beautiful.
- Central da COP: I know that you’re here for a good time not a hard time – LOL! – but can we just be honest for a moment and admit that, well, we’re fcuked, aren’t we? I mean, we’re not going to do any of the stuff we desperately need to do to solve the environmental mess we’ve landed ourselves in in time to prevent huge, civilisation-altering climactic change, we’re too addicted to modernity to give up what we need to, and our last remaining hope probably rests in going full speed ahead with tech that will only accelerate our demise if it doesn’t magically hail mary us out of this mess (I was at a two-day AI conference this week – it was risibly bad and, in the main, made me really fcuking angry tbh – and there were two people onstage, one from DeepMind and one advising the UK government, both suggesting that the best way to work out how to mitigate the impact of AI on the environment was to…ask AI, and I had a proper Damascene moment of realisation that this really is the dumbest of fcuking timelines)…but, er, again, that’s not actually about the link, is it? Fcuk. AHEM! So, the link is a Brazilian website which is still attempting to be hopeful about the fact that EDUCATION MIGHT SAVE US and is taking the smart move of presenting a bunch of information about the NEXT COP taking place in Brazil in November 2025 (I really do like this annual jamboree at which a bunch of people fly internationally to agree that, yes, we’re still not doing enough – it increasingly seems like a GREAT use of everyone’s time!) in the style of a website all about football, because, the thinking goes, Brazlians care a lot more about that then they do about climate change so, well, maybe this will help redress the balance slightly. The stories are written through a football-y lens, using the language of the game to attempt to stealth-educate – which is an interesting idea from a communications point of view, although one I am moderately-sceptical about the efficacy of. Still, it’s an interesting idea and you can read more about it here, and, realistically, we are all still going to die.
- YouTube Videos As Games: This is smart, and fun, and pleasingly-oldschool, taking me back to the carefree days of the late 2010s when you could basically print money in agencyland by saying things to clients like ‘choose your own adventure youtube videos to drive brand engagement through interactive digital storytelling!’ (God they were so stupid) – this is a YouTube channel called Firerama which makes all sorts of different YT vids which function as games of different sorts, all of them using really smart and inventive use of the ‘fast forward’ hotkey function to skip you to different points in the vid which therefore mimic the flows of a game. Seriously, the way they’ve exploited the platform functionality for all these really is wonderfully inventive; there are Guitar Hero-style rhythm games, obviously there’s a version of DOOM, there’s even rudimentary chess…obviously the games aren’t what anyone would call ‘good’, but there’s something really smart here which I think you could have fun with with a bit of thought (also IT IS SURPRISING, which isn’t something you get to say about digital experiences enough in 2025 to my mind).
- The Ultimate Online Book Ranking Engine: Or at least that’s what this will be when enough of you feed it with your data. This is made by Aris Catsambas (which I have just realised by the way is a WONDERFUL surname, congratulations; I now want to change my name to Doggazelles), who also made the Cellar Door website I featured last year, and basically asks visitors to pick their favourite from a pairing of novels – it asks only that you only vote if you’ve read both of the books in question, but otherwise you just pick your preference from the pairing and move onto the next set. At any point you can see the cumulative global ranking of THE BEST BOOKS EVER – at the moment The Hound of The Baskervilles leads (weird tbh), followed by Pride and Prejudice, Children of Men (again, weird), A Farewell to Arms, The Parasites…this is just an interesting data-collection exercise tbh, moreso if you’re a book-lover, but it’s also another example of a site that was built entirely with AI (Aris tells me he used Replit, fwiw). I…I like the fact that AI is making this possible! Let a million websites bloom!
- The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ok, I feel I need to caveat this upfront: this is a link to an OLD photographic book depicting The Peoples of the World, and what with being from the past it contains some…antiquated attitudes, is perhaps the most polite way of putting it, and some occasionally startlingly-racist language. With that in mind, let me present to you a quite amazing document – The Secret Museum of Mankind is described thusly on the landing page: “Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by “Manhattan House” and sold by “Metro Publications”, both of New York, its “Five Volumes in One” was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form. Advertised as “World’s Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs” and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents, it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition. This was not a book published to educate (despite appearing on some public library’s shelves), but to titillate (literally)— its emphasis was on the female form (“Female Beauty Round the World”) and fashion, and it featured as many National-Geographic-style native breasts as possible. But anything lurid, weird, or just plain unusual is fair game. This was a book to gawk at by flashlight under the bedcovers.” Really, it’s just astonishing – both in terms of the scale and scope (there is a LOT of ground covered here, geographically-speaking), but also in terms of the worldview it presents and the fact that this worldview was entirely prevalent less than a century ago. Obviously don’t want to make this about politics – EVERYTHING IS POLITICS – but it does rather feel as though the attitudes here depicted are ones on which the current US administration would look with a degree of warm nostalgia.
- Brenna Murphy: Via Kris, this is the website of digital artist Brenna Murphy and to be honest I don’t really understand what the fcuk is happening here, but my complete sense of bafflement shouldn’t put you off exploring what is quite a dizzying labyrinth of graphics and textures and linked webpages and audio and animations and renders and and and and…basically click this link and see how it makes you feel, and then decide based on this whether you think this is something you want to spelunk through. Brenna appears to be part of a wider digital art collective called MSHR, which you can read more about at the link and which encompasses a bunch of different artists working across different digital media whose work seems, based on my relatively-cursory exploration, worth a dig.
- Solidarity Cinema: OK, some caveats here – obviously as a non-cinema person I don’t really have any idea what the films collected through this service are like, and I haven’t personally tried to watch anything from the collection and so can’t 100% vouch for its legitimacy…but, with those out of the way, if you’re the sort of person for whom a ‘good night in’ might involve a punishing 150minute silent documentary about Syrian goat farmers then MAN do I have the website for you! Solidarity Cinema is, from what I can tell, a laudable project designed to provide access to cinema which is either about, or related to, global activism and the struggles of the marginalised (this is a broad-brush assessment and there is a LOT more in there) to anyone in the world. As far as I can tell, there’s a GDrive with some 9,000 films on it which anyone can access (you have to apply via a Google form, but once you’re in you can seemingly watch to your heart’s content) – which I think avoids issues of copyright by dint of these all being the sorts of films that Netflix is…unlikely to want the copyright for. You can see a list of the films available here, which will give you a sense of whether this is something you will be interested in or not – basically the films all have descriptions like “Adam Ousmane is a pool attendant at a local resort. When the new managers decide to downsize, Adam loses his job to his own son, Abdel. Shattered by the turn of events, Adam is pressured into contributing to the Chadian war effort. With no money to speak of, the only asset he can donate is his son.” I mean, look, it’s not exactly Comedy Central, but if that is your thing then, well, welcome to the motherlode.
- Rapport: Are you shortly set to have to spend time with someone with whom you have NOTHING TO SAY? Er, why? But! If you do find yourself in that invidious position then you may find it helpful to have Rapport bookmarked – this is a mobile-only website which basically offers you a set of ‘interesting conversational prompts’ to use should you be struggling to find anything to say to your interlocutor. Which…look, this is a nice little webproject by its creator Matthew Prebeg, but if I’m honest if someone attempted to revive a flagging conversation with ‘so, what’s your favourite shade of denim?’ I think I would probably leave or have to self-immolate or something. Although it did just ask me what the most ‘beautiful number’ is, and I started having a weird and not-entirely-unerotic reverie about the number 19, so perhaps it’s not a total bust (NB that is a joke, obvs, 13 is the only sexy number as any fule kno).
- YellowFellow: This is the website for AN Other digital agency – sorry, motion studio – based in Tel Aviv, which is largely-unremarkable apart from the genuinely-delightful animations on the landing page; honestly, the motion work is SO charming and it’s a wonderful calling card for their obvious skill in the field and the fact they can obviously ‘do’ playful very well indeed. Every single website should have little animated things on it, MAKE IT LAW.
- ArtLinks: A slightly weird throwback to 2020/1 here, with the Met Museum in New York running a weird, NFT-linked digital game to let users explore its collection and draw thematic connections between works and, er, win a jpeg? “Art Links is a blockchain-based game created by The Metropolitan Museum of Art where players find common threads linking artworks across The Met’s collection. No art history degree required! Find links between artworks to create a chain.Each chain consists of 7 artworks and 6 connections. Connections can be words or emojis. The game has 3 rounds, with each round becoming progressively more difficult. Players have 4 attempts to complete each chain correctly (forming a Completed Chain). Once a player successfully creates a Completed Chain, they are able to claim free digital collectible NFTs in the form of Badges and complete in-game challenges called Achievements for the chance to win exciting rewards!” WHY THOUGH? WHY THE NFT/BLOCKCHAIN THING?!?! The game itself is weirdly-baffling and seems entirely-arbitrary, until you realise that all it really requires you to do is read the item descriptions which basically tell you which ‘connecting’ word you need to pick, largely removing any sort of real challenge…I wonder slightly whether someone at the Met is related to someone working at a blockchain-first digital agency, because that’s really the only explanation I can find for the fact that this exists in 2025.
By Andrew Wyeth
THE SECTION WHICH DISCOVERED THIS WEEK THAT THERE IS A TRADE BODY FOR THE DATING APPS INDUSTRY AND THAT IT IS HELMED BY A MAN WHO WEARS JEANS AND SHOES, WHICH FEELS WEIRDLY SIGNIFICANT IN A WAY I CAN’T QUITE PUT MY FINGER ON, PT.2:
- CityWalki: Another portal back to early COVID times (SORRY!) with this throwback website – this isn’t new, conceptually-speaking, and I have featured stuff very similar to it before, but I am including it here partly because in London we literally haven’t seen the sun for 10 days now and I had forgotten what it looks like until I opened this up and ‘strolled’ around a few other cities for a while. Oh, I should probably explain what the fcuk it is, shouldn’t I? CityWalki is one of those ‘pick a city, get some FPV footage of someone walking (or driving, or drone-ing) around it – so far, so ‘exactly like a bunch of other sites’. But there are a LOT of different cities, and I’d forgotten how momentarily-transportive a slow-paced FPV tour of somewhere can be. Also I let it take me to Rome and had an unexpectedly incredibly emo moment where I found myself weeping slightly at the colosseum, which suggests I possibly haven’t really been taking adequate care of myself of late if I’m wholly honest. In the UK you can visit London and Manchester – beautifully, while the footage of all the other cities I’ve seen has been picturesque and sunny, Manny basically gives you steel-grey skies and the walk from Piccadilly into town, past a Ladbrokes, which feels…perfect, tbh.
- Drone: This describes itself as a ‘rich, harmonic soundscape synthesiser for music practice, chanting and meditation’, and, while I am not personally into any of the aforementioned practices, fcuk me did I enjoy using it to make weird dirge-ish sounds. Honestly, this is strangely compelling, even if you’re not the sort of person who needs something to synchronise their ‘oms’ with, and, as you will realise when you start playing around with it, this actually afford you quite an impressive degree of control over the tone and pitch of your, er, synthy-drone noises. Aside from anything else, this affords you the opportunity to soundtrack ANYTHING you like in the manner of a 1970s horror/scifi film, which I think we can all agree is not to be sniffed at.
- Snow Crystals: Did you know that there is an online guide to snowflakes, snow crystals and ‘other ice phenomena’? THERE IS AND IT LIVES HERE! This site appears to be the labour of love of one Kenneth G Libbrecht (proud author of a book on the same subject, apparently) who really, really likes snow crystals and associated phenomena. Honestly, I was ready to write this off as ‘ahaha old timey obsessional website, how quaint’, but, honestly, there’s something properly infectious about the enthusiasm here and I got quite into the section about designer snow crystals and how to build bespoke designs in lab conditions, and then there’s a page featuring an image of the largest snow crystal ever found in the wild which contains the following copy whose final parenthetical aside basically made me swoon slightly for reasons I can’t quite explain, and basically I am in love with this website now: “This is the largest snow crystal ever photographed, as verified by Guinness World Records, measuring 10.0 mm (0.4 inches) from tip to tip (averaged over the three axes). I captured this image on December 30, 2003, during a gentle snowfall in Cochrane, Ontario. Click on the picture for an even larger view (if you dare).” IF YOU DARE! Seriously, Kenneth, should you ever happen to read this, THANKYOU.
- After Dark II: This links to an art auction taking place in the US at the end of the month, but for which online bids will be accepted – it is described thusly: “Our latest AFTER DARK catalog continues our sale of exclusive LGBT oriented art, design, and historical ephemera. From emerging contemporary names, to early 20th century male nude fine art and photographs, our catalog includes iconic names like Robert Loughlin, Bruce of Los Angeles, and Gran Fury to many overlooked 20th century gems of the queer art world. This sale celebrates a century of creativity and expression from gay artists in all forms, from print ephemera to original canvases.” Whether you’re queer or otherwise, there is some GREAT work here, some ‘erotic’ and some not at all, and the starting prices look eminently-reasonable should you be in the market for some works.
- HistoryScapes: A joint app project by the National Trust and the University of Essex which basically works to present a bunch of different interactive tours of National Trust properties which you can either download to listen to you as you visit, or which you can set yo GPS track you with audio triggering as you walk through relevant areas. There are only three on there at present, which rather limits the utility, but you’d expect/hope that this be seen as a more long-running project which will see additional tours/walks/locations added to it. Worth a look if you’re the sort of person who spends their weekends dropping a tenner on a small cup of tea and a dry scone in a slightly-draughty ‘tearoom’.
- European Alternatives: Want to kick back against the US’ tech hegemony? AHAHAHA GOOD FCUKING LUCK! Still, we can still pretend that it’s not basically all sewn up by perusing this list of European alternatives to popular software products which you might want to explore should you be sick of enriching Those Fcuking Men. This is all quite dry and techy stuff – email providers, SaaS services, filehosting and uptimemonitoring and DEAR GOD THIS IS DULL. But, equally, it is nice to be reminded that there are companies not based in North America that you can choose to use instead (if you don’t mind the friction, and the occasionally suboptimal service, and the fact that you’re basically Cnuting against the inevitable tide of capital).
- Trees: I like this a lot – I am not the target audience, I have no use for it, but I am thrilled it exists. “Meye is a collection of free cut out PNG trees from all four seasons by landscape architect Mikkel Eye. All the trees are available as high quality PNG’s with transparent background. The trees are free to use for anyone who wants to add plantings to their visualizations, sections, and diagrams within the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, or urban planning.” So far, so standard, but it’s the next line in the description that made me fall in love: “However, your project should be in focus.” I am 100% going to add that stipulation to every single thing I ever do from now on – in fact, here, “you are allowed to steal whatever you like from Web Curios – I know you do already, don’t make that face at me – as long as your project is in focus. What does that mean? I WILL BE THE JUDGE”.
- Normal Time: I have on various occasions over the years complained about the lack of temporal innovation over the past few thousand years – we landed on the 24h day and the 365-day year and just sort of…stopped innovating (special shout out to Swatch’s ‘Beats’ initiative which I think I mention every 3-4 years on here and which will forever hold a place in my heart as the most insanely-ambitious marketing ploy I think I have ever seen). Thanks, then, to OG digital artist Rhea Myers who has entered the ring with their conception of Normal Time, which, look, is maths-y enough that my brain basically slides off the side of it but which FEELS good and which gives a pleasingly-long-term feel to the passage of time over a year – make years feel monolithic again! You can read the mechanics of how it’s calculated on the site, but I liked this description of the utility which also sorts of acts as an artist’s statement of sorts: “Normal time makes it easy to compare progress across different time scales by removing artificial human concepts of time. It creates a unified way to express completion of any cyclic or linear time period. Dehumanizing time in this way has the counterintuitive effect of making it more recognizably natural and intuitive for human beings to express and understime durations. Furthermore it respects that each human life is complete unto itself, removing the implicit judgment of longer lives being “more complete”. It creates a clear distinction between lives that are “in progress” and “complete” without obfuscating the progression of those lives. And it recognizes that all completed lives are equally whole.”
- The Single Feed Returns: Without wishing to redo my small rant from last week (I know that Web Curios is basically 30% thematically the same every week and I hate myself for it, trust me), EVERYTHING IS CYCLICAL. We’re currently having a resurgence, for I think the third time now, of the ‘all your various feeds in one convenient place!’ combinator app – the main links takes you to one offering called Tapestry, there’s this other one I found called OpenVibe, but basically they all do (or try to do) the same thing; to whit, pulling your various social feeds into one place so you don’t have to keep flitting between all the different apps to manage your interests, feeds and conversations. Which on the one hand is interesting and obviously convenient to a point, but on the other strikes me as slightly negating the concept of social media – I am not sure how helpful adding another layer of context collapse to your feeds would be (for better or worse, every platform’s grammar is different and posts removed from said grammar work…differently, quite simply), and by doing something like this you’re basically removing quite a lot of the ‘spontaneous and serendipitous discovery’ bit from the social experience (although, in fairness, each of these does allow you to pull in ‘interest-based’ feeds too, so there’s perhaps an element of that still here). Still, I can imagine this appealing to a few of you so one or both might be worth a look (they seem to be pretty much feature-identical as far as I can tell) – be aware though that they can’t pull stuff from the Meta platforms (actually Threads might now be federated enough to work, but no fcuker cares about Threads so wevs) so you’re not totally covered.
- ReorProject: This is something I personally have little-to-no interest in but which I am aware some of you might find useful – SEE HOW FCUKING NICE I AM TO YOU? AND WHAT DO I GET IN RETURN, EH?? – although, honestly, I was so confused and frankly slightly upset by the description of it as a note-taking and information-organisation service for ‘high entropy thinkers’, because, honestly, WHAT IN THE NAME OF FCUK IS A HIGH-ENTROPY THINKER??? I think it is b0llocks. Anyway, my weird little eruption of rage aside (sorry, not sure what came over me there, this is basically one of those ‘give us your unformed notes and we will scry order in your mindchaos’ apps, which uses THE MAGIC OF AI to automatically categorise and sort your thinking into useful, semantically-linked chunks. Take a look at the homepage – as ever with this stuff, your mileage will vary depending on the degree to which you’ve ever thought ‘God, I wish Evernote actually worked’.
- ROOST: Boring and technical but also useful and A GOOD THING, ROOST stands for Robust Open Online Safety Tools and is a collaboration between a bunch of big tech companies to put out a load of open source tools which will afford smaller companies the opportunity to implement industry-standard safety practices around their digital work, for free. Per the blurb, “ROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for the AI era. Many organizations – big and small – still lack access to basic safety resources, hindering innovation and putting users at risk. ROOST develops, maintains, and distributes open source building blocks to safeguard global users and communities. Backed by dedicated technical teams and leading experts, ROOST meets organizations where they are and provides hands-on support at every stage of their safety journey.” This is obviously only really of interest to you if you have to worry about safety/security in digital product delivery, but it’s a rare example of Big Tech ‘doing something not-terrible’ and possibly the only actually practically-meaningful thing to emerge from the massive farrago that was the AI Summit in Paris (a very, very expensive press conference for Lil’ Manu, was how I saw it).
- WikiTimeline: Turn any Wikipedia entry you like into a timeline. Why? I DON’T KNOW WHY FFS. Look, maybe it’s useful for teachers or something, I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers. Any answers, in fact. It’s distressing, frankly.
- XScreenSaver: Screensavers are a weird sort of lost artform, for two decades ubiquitous and then *poof*, gone, vanished, all those flying toasters and infinitely-recursive pipe layouts vanished like so much morning dew. XScreenSavers is a collection of SO MANY SCREENSAVERS which you can download and run on desktop and mobile should you want to carry them with you forever – if you’d rather just have a brief hit of nostalgia, you can explore the gallery of memories here.
- Stretch My Time Off: I think over the 15ish years I have been writing this fcuking thing I must have mentioned KitKat as a brand more than any other – turns out there is a frankly STAGGERING quantity of internetty cruft that you can retrofit into the broad ‘have a break’ brand strategy, and as such there have been dozens of instances where I’ve pointed at a site or idea and written ‘KitKat, steal this, it is an easy win’ and, inevitably, noone from KitKat did anything because a) they obviously don’t read this sh1t; and b) even if they did, they don’t need to take advice from some superannuated webmong typing in his pants at 933am on a Friday morning. Anyway, this is, AGAIN, SO perfect for a rebadge and a light bit of branding – this website does one simple thing, which is to tell you (seemingly wherever you are in the world) which days you should take off as holiday to maximise your allocation based on bank holidays, religious celebrations and other national days off which your country of employment has scheduled for the year. THIS IS SO SO SO PERFECT FFS JUST PUT A FCUKING KITKAT LOGO ON IT.
- KidPix: Personally-speaking this means little to me, but I think if you’re the sort of person who grew up with Macs (I don’t really understand how this could have happened, but maybe your parents were graphic designers or architects or just really irritating hipsters) then you might have a soft, nostalgic spot for KidPix which was apparently the MacOS equivalent of MS Paint and which now exists as a browsertoy for all your childish scrawling needs. I think there’s something quite nice about adopting this as your entire aesthetic for the rest of the year, personally, but then again I was recent told that my dress sense is ‘risibly bad’ so, well, I probably wouldn’t listen to me on matters visual at all.
- A Bunch of Full Warner Bros Films On YouTube: Ok, so you’ll need to VPN yourself to the US for these to work but this is literally 39 full films which are available to watch on YouTube for free, in high res – the selection is…odd, frankly, running the gamut from The Mission, which iirc won an Oscar, to Critters 4, which I know very much didn’t, and passing through a bunch of forgotten comedies, a few Serious Films and, inexplicably, American Ninja V, a film which I am reasonably certain noone, including the people who made it, have thought of since the wrap party. Still, it also contains a Bobcat Goldthwaite film AND the animated adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth, on which basis I recommend it without reservation.
- Fabularious: AI BONGO STORYTIME! Yes, another week, another AI-enabled smut-generator! I include this not because I think it’s ‘good’ (no, really, I promise), nor indeed because I think that you have a strange and inexplicable desire to spin up poorly-written gangbang smut, but more because, well, a) there’s something VERY funny (to me, at least) about quite how obviously this is made for (and quite probably by) very horny teenage boys; and b) slightly-less amusingly, how this is obviously made in India, and how it made me think of the already-weird-and-not-hugely-healthy way in which gender politics works in the country, and the weird and bleak reality that demographics mean that a significant proportion of Indian men will live and die entirely alone, romantically-speaking, because of the fact that there are simply so many more of them, and the extent to which I can 100% see stuff like this becoming an ingrained part of life, forever, for a certain type of guy. Which is quite hard to see as anything other than utterly bleak, if I’m honest. Erm. Anyway! Choose your characters, choose your scenario and spin up some TRULY AWFUL (ie, not in any way erotic) erotica!
- EdHeads: Occupying the final games-y slot in this week’s ephemera section is this…odd selection of semi-educational games, which let you play short flash-style browsergames based on investigating a mechanic’s workshop, or a crash scene, or, er, undertaking ‘deep brain surgery’ or ‘virtual knee surgery’. Want to spend ten minutes fcuking around with someone’s patella? OH GOOD!
By Llyn Foulkes
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Frame Blog: Not, in fact, a Tumblr! Still, if you have ever wanted to know a LOT – possibly everything – about framing pictures then this is basically the motherlode of all information. Beautifully this is still VERY active, offering new, fun, frame-related content on a regular basis.
- Every Day I Draw The Titanic: I am astonished that I have neither seen or featured this before given that the person behind it has been doing it for TEN FCUKING YEARS. TEN YEARS. A decade of drawing the Titanic every day and posting it to this Tumblr. I am in awe – THIS IS ART. I found this via the genuinely curious newsletter Night Water, which I can confidently say is one of the weirder ones I sub to and which you might enjoy for its utterly-idiosyncratic approach to subject matter.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Patagraph: Stop-motion animation by one Victor Haegelin – this is very, very good work by a very talented professional.
- Babil Online: Photographs of telephone wires (I think) against grey skies, which I know don’t sound hugely-compelling as a subject but actually really quite beautiful when shot and framed this well. Photos by one Alexey Narodizkiy.
- The Bop House: I don’t normally feature accounts that are influencer-y, less those that feature said influencers doing cheesecake photoshoots and thirst traps, because, well, I don’t care and I figure that if you do you can find that sort of thing yourself. I am making an exception for the Bop House account, though, not because the content is particularly fascinating but because I find the premise behind it – effectively this is a creators’ house for OnlyFans influencers, which makes a sort of sense from a commercial/collaborative point of view and which is evidently being parlayed via this sort of mainstream channel into a PG13-ish reality-lite franchise while the seamy stuff gets shot behind closed doors for the OF crowd. This is…very now.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Into The Kill Zone: So I had to spend time this week thinking about the AI Summit and What It All Means for professional reasons and, honestly, my main takeaways (you don’t care, I know, but, well, tough) were: a) well that was a complete fcuking waste of time; b) we’d better hope that this stuff solves some pretty hard questions about physics/biology pretty fcuking soon otherwise we’re going to feel *quite* silly about putting all of our eggs in this basket as we slowly (and then quickly) crisp up; and c) WOW does it feel like we’re (by which I mean the US and the UK) basically just saying to big tech businesses ‘you know what, you just do what you fancy and we’ll just sort of sit here and hope it works out for everyone’. This is an excellent piece of writing which looks at the relationship between tech and the state and the economy on both sides of the Atlantic, at the way in which it’s basically all set up to advantage large incumbents and this is just being entrenched, and, look, I think this para rather sums up the authorial argument (but it’s really worth reading the whole piece): “The events of the last two weeks in the US put into a new and darker light the approach to government articulated by Blair and William Hague in A New National Purpose two years ago. This project has matured into one involving more than 70 reports and Cabinet ministers including both Kyle and Streeting. It argues for a transformation of the state in terms that are vague but which include a smaller state with power centralised in 10 Downing Street and ministers recruited from business rather than Parliament. Technology, especially AI, is to be used to transform government and public services. Although I have been skeptical of this project, at no point did it cross my mind that it might pave the way to a Britain that is oligarchic and authoritarian. Now, looking at what is unfolding in the United States, a shiver of recognition runs through me. It’s as if I’ve already read the playbook.”
- The Business Community Is Stupid: Ok, I admit that this is in here partly because I very much enjoy the tone of this and partly because it dovetails very neatly with Wot I Think, but it’s also a good, pleasingly-angry piece of writing which neatly nails the way in which businesses in the US in particular might in fact come to regret siding with this particular shower of bstards: “A stable, democratic, well-governed society is good for business. An unstable, undemocratic, wildly governed society is bad for business. The business lobby’s many years of ceaselessly trying to nibble away at the foundations of stability and democracy and fairness for their own immediate gains have now brought us to the brink of a strongman government that will, I assure you, be very bad for business. Unpredictable trade wars are bad for business. Eroding confidence in the US dollar because you want to prop up crypto scams for your donors is bad for business. Letting religious zealots control public education is bad for business. Destroying access to contraception and abortion is bad for business. Constantly toying with provoking wars is bad for business. Allowing the environment to become polluted is bad for business. Even enormous wealth inequality is bad for business, because it means a few people have all the money, instead of all your customers having plenty of money to spend with your business. You know what’s good for business? Switzerland! A bunch of happy healthy wealthy people sitting around eating chocolates and spending money in peace! You know what’s bad for business? Fcuking Donald Trump! A psycho idiot fcuking sh1t up constantly and destabilizing the world and robbing businesses of all ability to trust the rule of law and predict the future with some degree of confidence. The tech oligarchs who sat on stage with Trump at his inauguration were not there because he is good for business—they were there because being there, right there on the inside, is the only way to flourish.” EXACTLY.
- Journalism Is Fcuked: I mean, ok, this is not exactly a SEARINGLY-HOT TAKE – but, that said, it’s a decent overview of the how and the why of the current state of media by Ian Dunt (someone who I genuinely find too boring to link to ordinarily – and who I perhaps unfairly hate a bit for being a sort-of unofficial spokesperson for the sorts of people who talk about needing ‘grown-ups in the room’ in politics, a phrase which makes me honestly want to commit small but very sharp acts of violence), but who I will make an exception for on this one occasion because he nails this pretty decently. This covers the perils of traffic-focused journalism, the hollowing out of the information landscape thanks to paywalling and the tiered knowledgebase that that is leaving us with, and attempts to offer some solutions – the solutions won’t work, and I can’t pretend I didn’t find something risibly patronising about Dunt’s instruction that everyone should ditch one of their telly streaming subscriptions in favour of direct payments to three substacks, like some sort of middle-class informational ‘eat your greens!’ scold, but it’s a decent ‘where we’re at’ screed about, well, how journalism is, per my title, fcuked.
- DOGE and the Evil Housekeeper: Dan Hon has for years been one of the smartest people I know (I don’t know Dan, obviously, he lives in my phone like all of you do) on the subject of tech and government infrastructure, and in this essay for MIT Tech Review he neatly lays out the ways in which what Musk and his horrible little herrenvolk pixies are fcuking with the US State’s digital infrastructure, and why, and how it might be possible for staff to stand against it. It feels…quite dark, all this, ngl. “In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you. So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?”
- Make Apartheid Great Again: I have read a few articles making similar points this week, but this was the first and the best and most strongly-worded and least-euphemistic, and it’s important, I think, to be clear about what is happening and the attitudes being demonstrated and what the prevailing cultural wind that has been legitimised in the past few months is openly sort of about. Watching the uniform reaction of the US right – and its ancillary branches across the web, the quisling cohorts parroting the MAGAlines for…for bluetick pennies, I guess – to last weekend’s superbowl performance was to see people literally mainstreaming startling, staggering racism, a seeming sense of affront at…seeing black people on their screens! THIS IS NOW QUITE OVERT, I THINK.
- A Smart and Thoughtful Series Of Thoughts On AI: There was one piece of writing published this week on AI and how we might want to think about our approach to it as a society and species that really was worth reading – perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t come from the Paris Summit (on which note, have you read the declaration that the UK and US didn’t sign? IT DOESN’T EVEN FCUKING SAY OR MEAN ANYTHING FFS WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS STUFF????). What WAS surprising, though, was that it came from the Vatican, and, if you believe the signature, from the VERY PAPAL BRAIN of cuddly Frankie himself! This is VERY long, but, I promise you, is one of the most-considered and most sensible, thoughtful and human pieces of writing I have read on the subject in a long time; it covers work, art, philosophy, theology, questions of the soul and identity and the mind-body duality, and, look, I am as agnostic as they come and sold my soul to the devil aged 17 and am very much not going to heaven, and have a pretty strong aversion to Catholic doctrine, but this is really, really interesting and thought-provoking, and the contrast between the depth of consideration on display here and that demonstrated by pretty much every official government document on the subject I’ve read over the past few years is…dispiriting, frankly.
- The Headmap Manifesto: This is a quite incredible document that I am slightly amazed I had never heard of before (and which came to me via Tom Scott’s newsletter) – the headmap manifesto was written in 1999 by one Ben Russell and is described elsewhere on the web as follows “When the headmap manifesto first appeared in 1999, Google was barely a year old, the U.S. government had not yet removed the GPS signal degradation that prevented its widespread commercial use, and Apple’s iPhone was still almost a decade away. Predominantly written by computer engineer Ben Russell, headmap (always spelt in lower case, although I capitalise it here when beginning a sentence) envisioned a world not entirely unlike the one we inhabit today, in which location-aware devices have radically transformed everyday life. It foreshadows recent developments from the emergence of location-based social networks like Foursquare and Yelp to dating and hookup apps such as Grindr and Tinder. In contrast to the strongly commercial, proprietary-driven nature of these applications, however, headmap foresaw these practices as emerging from the ground up. The potential for GPS technology to be integrated into every device and object would allow individuals to tag physical places with virtual information, provide site-specific advertising, organise community events and track people and objects. These practices, headmap claims, would lead to nothing short of a revolution of everyday life, transforming the way territory, architecture, politics, sex and social interaction are understood and enacted.” Honestly, this really is quite amazing – it’s part futurology, part experimental poetry, part fragmented journal, and it’s utterly mesmerising for how madly, wonderfully-prescient it is and yet how at the same time it got so much wrong about the directions in which wearable tech would evolve and take us. There’s a wonderful series of potential counterfactual presents that could emerge from this should you immerse yourself in the thinking, and if nothing else it also sort-of works as an unusual creative writing exercise.
- Rotting Upstream: I very much enjoyed this look at how rot culture has been appropriated by the mainstream, and the accompanying analysis of how that flow worked – in summary, “This is the mindless low brow sludge → high culture flex pipeline. Common discourse paints out brain rot as intellectual poison: refined sugars and seed oils for the mind. But it’s also become something more useful and valuable than junk food alone. In today’s surreal cultural landscape, it’s become a ‘badge of honour’, offering people a semblance of a community and connection.It offers what cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito calls a ‘genre of participation’. There’s a reward if you get the obscure reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same TikToks, following the same online conversations, reposting the same posts as you.” “WE ALL CRAVE COMMUNITY SO MUCH WE FIND IT IN INFINITE RUNNER VIDEOS MASHED WITH FOOTAGE FROM GAZA” is perhaps the bleakest-timeline-conclusion to draw from this. ADJACENTLY-RELATED PIECE: Max Read on Benson Boone and the ‘Booneiverse’ – aka background content that attains a degree of ubiquity so as to become a unifying factor, a bit like advertising jingles for the modern age. As an aside, this piece caused me to listen to Benson Boone’s music for the first time ever and, whilst doing so, I realised that the uncanniness I was feeling was the realisation that this is the EXACT genre of music that AIs like Suno have recently gotten VERY good at mimicking which…I don’t know, doesn’t feel like A Good Thing.
- Soy Right Ascendant: Also by Max Read, this one, and I think this might be the best thing I have read about how to characterise the current incarnation of the online right in the Trump2.0 era (and, as with all this stuff, I wish I could just silo it off as an American thing but unfortunately thanks to his and Apartheid Toad’s global ubiquity, all culture is basically downstream of those cnuts for the foreseeable and there’s not really anything we can do about it) – honestly, this is SO well-judged and coherent in a way that very little writing about digital culture (and its bleed into meatspace) tends to be, and, if you’re a certain type of horrible little online goblin (hi! Kindred spirit over here!) you will enjoy this hugely. This section is him quoting from a newsletter post by a certain Scarlet, but I reproduce it in full because, well, it’s perfect: “They have special diets are afraid of seed oils. They wear skinny jeans and have meticulously groomed beards. They talk non stop about masculinity, drive pickups, and wear plaid, but can’t change a tire to save their lives. While the right spent years mocking liberals for wanting “safe spaces” and echo chambers, for crying about identity politics, for being frail, fragile, overly-sensitive weaklings, they were slowly transforming into the perfect mirror of all of it — without the nagging concern for equality or any of that lib sh1t. […] The Soy Right is being oppressed and they want you to know it. They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you called them white or cis, they’re upset that you didn’t think they were cool in high school, they want to call the manager because there’s less boobies in video games. They are crybabies of the highest order. While the right is winning cultural and political victories nonstop lately, that’s not enough. They also need you to like them. Why don’t you like them?!”
- GenZ Doesn’t Exist: YOU obviously know this – you read Web Curios! You’re smart! Apart, obviously, from your fcuking terrible taste in newsletters! – but many don’t and so it bears repeating – GENERATIONAL MONOLITHS ARE SILLY AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN SILLY AND ARE ACTUALLY DETRIMENTAL TO EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATIONS. Here the reliably-smart Sean Monahan of 8ball writes about what might perhaps be a smarter way to conceive of meaningful generational divides based less on broad age-range coteries and more ‘how old were you when X happened’ – where, in this case, ‘X’ is ‘home computing’ or ‘9/11’ or ‘COVID’. If you work in advermarketingpr then, per my earlier comment, you really should have arrived here yourself by now, but here’s a nice easy spelling out of it for the kids at the back.
- The Cringe Matrix: You may not think you need a detailed analysis of the four different primary ways in which the concept of ‘cringe’ can be experienced, but I promise you that you do and that once you have read it it will TRANSFORM you. Honestly, this is far more interesting and thoughtful than I expected it to be, and might actually be professionally-useful from a tone-of-voice/content point of view for the right sort of project/brand.
- Facememes: This is a bit thin, fine, but I found the central premise – that we’ve lived through the era in which specific facial expressions could attain memetic status in the way in which haircuts or specific makeup styles used to in eras past – interesting; as a ‘no, there really are no photographs of me inexistence, no I am not lying, I just don’t like being photographed, yes, it is because I am ugly, please stop asking me these questions’ person who doesn’t use Insta et al I feel like I have missed a lot of this stuff, but it speaks to quite a lot of wider cultural stuff about lightspeed trends and the churning memetic combine harvester that is TikTok.
- The Kid’s Food Boom: Or, in a phrase the piece coins later on and which I prefer to the headline term, this is ‘recession maximalism’ – in uncertain times, we want comforting, simple food that harks back to an era in which we presumably felt safe and secure…which is why the US (and, I think, London too) is seeing something of a boom in low-rent foods in a maximal style – corndogs and pizza rolls and processed food consumed unironically and unashamedly as part of an adult lifestyle. Which, I think, can also be tied into a certain anti-intellectual resurgence in US culture (fancy food is PRETENTIOUS AND WOKE, after all, qualities not exactly in favour right now) which, again, is being replicated in the UK as well (you know how during Brexit we got used to hearing the worst cnuts in the world saying we were a ‘vassall state’ of Europe? I do rather think we’re going to get a better idea of exactly what vassaldom looks like between now and 2029).
- How Ozempic Is Fcuking Fast Food: I have to say that I really resent Ozempic and Wegovy and their ilk (this isn’t going to reflect well on me, but, well, this is a safe space, right?) – I am a naturally-emaciated person and while this is not in and of itself a benefit, it does mean that I simply don’t get fat and don’t need to exercise, and I have always thought of this as a MAGIC SUPERPOWER, and now these fuckers invent some magic injections and everyone else gets to be just like me? I WAS SPECIAL, YOU CNUTS.Ahem. You didn’t need to know that but I felt oddly compelled to share – sorry! Anyway, this is all about the degree to which Ozempic et al don’t simply reduce the appetite of those that take it, they seemingly change it, removing cravings for processed foods – and seemingly making them actively-unappealing – and replacing them with, er, a seemingly insatiable desire for vegetables. I am darkly-fascinated by these meds, I have to say – if this was the first third of a film, I would be getting very strong ‘terrifying side effects set to be discovered in act 2’ vibes. Thank God real life doesn’t seem to be operating like a scripted show, though!
- Playing War: This is a really interesting look at how Soldier of Fortune magazine – something which I have always sort of vaguely known about but have never actually seen a copy of, because, well, I don’t actually want to read about war – was basically a sort of weird radicalisation pipeline for a whole bunch of men, and how it became weirdly intertwined with neoconservative politics as the 80s and 90s wore on. This is one of those great articles that make you realise that international conflicts and the associated communities that exist around them are, in the main, just deeply, intensely fcuked-up (an astonishing insight, I am aware) (Jesus).
- Goodbye Pamela Paul: Ok, if you’re not North American then there’s no reason whatsoever you should know or care who Pamela Paul is – BUT! Even if the name means nothing to you I think this is worth reading – partly because it is just a brilliantly-brutal takedown of an individual who, objectively, totally deserves it, and partly because every single thing it says about Paul (a media commentator who’s written for the NYT for years and who’s basically been paid to have opinions for the last three of them) can be applied to the commentariat class in the media in your country too. Honestly, read this piece and then think of your least-favourite opinion columnist and I guarantee you will be able to map most of the arguments 1:1. Seriously, tell me that this para doesn’t work with EVERY SINGLE OPINION WRITER: “For in the end, the reactionary liberal is a ruthless defender of all that exists. Paul’s 2021 book, 100 Things We Lost to the Internet, is a cabinet of banalities wherein the usual liberal virtues (civility, patience) sit glassily alongside a predictable middle-class nostalgia for things like scouring the Bloomingdale’s shoe department for the right dress pump or taking in a Broadway show without hearing the low buzz of a text message. “There was nothing to do but let go of whatever might be happening outside the theater and lose yourself in what was happening onstage,” Paul writes wistfully. “You simply couldn’t be reached.” It is a great dream of the reactionary liberal not to be reached. Paul will freely admit, for instance, that it is immoral for Israel to kill tens of thousands of civilians. Yet it is no less immoral for student protesters to erect an ugly encampment in the middle of the quad and hurl slogans at the police. This is because political action is an unacceptable snag in the continuity of bourgeois experience. One gets the sense that politics has gone off, like a cell phone, in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong: It is rude.”
- The Pinball Philosophy: A piece of writing by John McPhee from 1975, in which the author profiles two rival kings of the NYC pinball scene. I cannot tell you how BRILLIANT this is – SO stylish and so of its time and you can smell the stale cigarette smoke and see the seedy-looking guys hanging around central New York, and this feels and reads so perfectly 1970s and of-its-time that it feels like actual time-travel. Glorious.
- Incel Philosophers: I think that this article made me think more than anything else I read this week – in it, Ellie Robson writes about Mary Midgely, a philosopher who in the 1950s made a programme for the BBC in which she noted that the canon on Western modern philosophy was dominated almost entirely by works and thinking penned by single, unmarried, childless men. Basically, modern philosophy is an incel medium. OH GOD THIS IS SUCH A REVELATION! Honestly, it sent me down a wonderful 15 minute counterfactual rabbithole of imagining what might have emerged from Kierkegaard if he hadn’t basically been terrified of women, whether he might have been equally-brilliant but, well, a bit less sad and so therefore a bit more inclined towards a philosophy that was less brutally, bitterly inward-facing…this is SO good and so interesting, and will almost certainly result in a lot of you who are women reading this and thinking ‘typical fcuking man to have never noticed or thought about this before’ which, honestly, is fair enough tbh.
- The Secret Pattern: Aube Ray Lescure writes about returning to Shanghai to visit her parents – it is about place and family and memory and not belonging and belonging and it feels very…I don’t know, very clean and very spare and very beautiful indeed.
- I Know Nothing About Sex: Finally in the longreads, Judith Hannah Weiss with a brilliant essay in the APPALLINGLY-NAMED ‘Oldster’ magazine (honestly, such an awful name, please someone change it) which is a weird, meandering, slightly-messy collection of thoughts around sex and age and memory which I think I enjoyed on a prose level more than anything else I read this week and which I think you will enjoy too. This has STYLE.
By Mark Tennant
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: