Last night I got a copy of a GLOSSY MAGAZINE with MY ACTUAL BYLINE IN IT and, er, as a result I got quite p1ssed in celebration and as such a) this has been a real fcuking struggle, as might become apparent from the coming carcrash prose; b) if you are the nice person who was press-ganged into learning about Web Curios by my friend Hector then, well, I am sorry and I really don’t expect you to read beyond this point.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you honestly have no idea what it feels like to write one of these after four hours of fitful sleep.
By Sarah Birns
THE SECTION WHICH WAS HOPING FOR A ‘PIOUS’ OR AN ‘INNOCENT’ TBH, PT.1:
- Musing: What’s the BEST thing about the web? No, Jesus, NO, it’s not that stuff – not that stuff at ALL, what is *wrong* with you? The ACTUAL best thing about the web is the fact that, in the main, THE WEB IS PEOPLE, like Soylent Green but even less nutritious. Although, actually, that’s only going to be true for a relatively-short time, now that we have UNFETTERED THE MACHINE and the richest people in the world are encouraging us to open our minds to infinite slop. Still, at the time of typing it’s broadly true that much of what you see online is still, just, the product of ACTUAL HUMANS and their ACTUAL HUMAN BRAINS and as such is a strange, wonderful, horrible, maddening infomap of our hopes and desires and fears and loves and hates, and that one of the most wonderful things about it is the feeling of strange, mad variety of experience and perspective it occasionally still affords us, and this site is a lovely example of some of the things I enjoy most about how the web reflects us as a species. Musing is, I think, something that has been hacked together by some kid somewhere, and it’s a very simple proto-social-network which lets anyone who logs on post their thoughts about whatever they like, anonymously, with said thought geotagged based on their IP location – which makes this site a sort of live map of the global id, or at least the part of the global id that happens to have stumbled across this URL and felt compelled to share. You can scroll through all the posts in the right-hand sidebar, or scroll around the map to click on geomarkers to read the things people have been motivated to post, and…look, there is no great profundity here, no great insight to draw or community to find, it is entirely ephemeral and the sort of thing that people will find, click on, maybe post to and then bounce off again forever, but I love it SO MUCH and I could honestly spend a good hour or so going through every single thing posted here – why did some nameless individual living on Willowmead Square in Marlow post that ‘life was a bit sucky right now’? Did the person in Thessaloniki who wrote that “i’m in love with my online friend who i met up with a while back” ever resolve their romantic dilemma? Honestly, the anonymity combined with the geolocation make this SO COMPELLING to me, so please, er, feel free to spill your guts into this so I can come back in a few days time and read all your deepest, darkest thoughts and fears and secrets and KNOW YOUR SOUL.
- Infinite Roadtrip: Friend of Curios Neal Agarwal returns with another pleasingly-inventive webtoy, this one a COLLABORATIVE MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE – this is basically a game built on top of Google Maps (I think) which lets whoever is on the site at any given time DRIVE A CAR TOGETHER! You’re presented with a first-person view of a road and the ‘game’ (ok, fine, I am using this term loosely, but) involves everyone whose online at any given time being able to vote every 5-10s or so on the next directional move that the virtual car should take along the virtually-represented roads. Which, I know, doesn’t SOUND fun, but it’s amazing how quickly you (ok, I) get invested in attempting to navigate the virtual vehicle – I haven’t spent enough time with this to tell whether any sort of minor metagame has developed and people are battling to get us to Disneyland or something, but it feels like the sort of thing that might foster that sort of creativity. There’s even the option to listen to the radio while you play, with (I *think* the site selecting a radio station based on where you are on the map, which is a lovely touch). At the time of writing there are 334 people steering a virtual car through the streets of rural Massachusets, which, honestly, is such a brilliantly-stupid sentence to be able to write.
- The Map Of Reddit: Over the years I have featured a selection of ‘Maps of Reddit’, but I think this is possibly the most-impressive attempt I’ve seen to create a navigable visualisation of the vast, sprawling mess that is the internet’s collective id. This basically creates a 2d-networked representation of all the different nooks and crannies of Reddit which you can scroll around and wander through – zoom in and out to close in on specific subReddits or thematic areas, scroll around and see the different ‘territories’ that are visible when you’re taking a birds-eye view of the whole site…this really is an incredible way of seeing the insane breadth and scope of the different topics covered across Reddit, and, should you be in need of it, not a terrible way of doing research into specific communities around a topic area; clicking on a sub will bring up the feed of posts in a left-hand sidebar, meaning this is also a pretty useful tool for sectoral research – there’s a search function so you can find a specific, known sub and then navigate on from there. This is, honestly, SO interesting, if only as a means of seeing the rough shape and scope of the Reddit knowledge graph – a few small observations, should you be interested; 1) wow India-related content makes up an awful lot of the total quantity of subs; 2) JESUS GOD THERE IS SO MUCH BONGO HERE. Like, seriously – I know you know there is a lot of pr0n on Reddit, but, well, WOW is there an awful lot of pr0n on Reddit. Also I have just learned that there is a whole corner of the site dedicated to amateur taxidermy which I am 100% coming back to later because DEAR GOD some of the photos. Basically all of human life is here, particularly the sticky and mucal bits.
- Recurse: MACHINE MUSIC! Many years ago a former colleague of mine invited me for a coffee to meet their new boss, because said boss wanted some ‘digital insights’ or somesuch – I dutifully went for a meeting, was bought a coffee, offered some ’digital insights’ and then never heard from any of them again. Completely-unexpectedly, said boss got in touch with me again this week, a full decade or so after our single meeting (have you been reading Curios all these years, boss? Honestly, I am weirdly impressed if a touch confused as to what you’ve been getting out of it), to communicate the following via the medium of press release: “British tech company MOTH has just launched Archaeo, a new quantum-powered generative AI platform designed to work with creatives, not against them. Crucially, Archaeo is built to respect authorship and ownership – learning only from artist-provided data and avoiding the copyright-scraping methods at the centre of today’s AI ethics debate. To show the technology in action, MOTH has partnered with UK electronic artist ILĀ to co-create RECURSE – the first commercially released music track powered by quantum machine learning. It’s now live on streaming platforms and accompanied by a 24/7 interactive “infinite mix” that evolves in real-time.” WELL AREN’T THOSE SOME WORDS! QUANTUM MACHINE LEARNING! Is…is the use of ‘quantum’ in this context total fcuking bullsh1t? OOH I THINK IT MIGHT BE YOU KNOW! Still, you can click the link and listen to the ‘infinite mix’ of this AI track, which doesn’t really work as music and equally doesn’t really explain how it’s been made with any clarity, or whether it’s being composed ‘live’, or whether it’s just a looped recording – is this appealing to you? No, I can’t imagine it is. Still, COVERAGE!
- AI Clippy: I love this a LOT. This is a downloadable interface for a bunch of different open source LLMs which basically takes Clippy, the paperclip mascot for MS Word that the older and more jaded of you will remember from simpler (better? Were they better? I can barely remember, honestly) times, and reconfigures it as a wrapper for The Machine. This is, honestly, SO smart and nicely-done, and, aside from the retrofetishism, is actually a rather nice way of rendering the AI assistant as desktop companion – was…was Clippy actually GOOD after all? Here’s the blurb – obviously your mileage will vary depending on what kit you run this one, but, generally, this is FUN: Clippy lets you run a variety of large language models (LLMs) locally on your computer while sticking with a user interface of the 1990s. It’s a love letter and homage to the late, great Clippy – and the visual design created by Microsoft in that era. Simple, familiar, and classic chat interface. Send messages to your models, get a response. Batteries included: No complicated setup. Just open the app and chat away. Thanks to llama.cpp and node-llama-cpp, the app will automatically discover the most efficient way to run your models (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, etc). Custom models, prompts, and parameters: Load your own downloaded models and play with the settings. Offline, local, free.”
- Ethnologue: You may well have been aware that we are currently living through the international decade of indigenous languages – you weren’t, though, were you? DO NOT LIE TO ME – but I had been totally oblivious of this until discovering this EXCELLENT site, which is basically just a huge resource for information about EVERY SINGLE LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, I can’t know this for certain, but any website which contains specific sections for tongues from Angal Enen (no, me neither) to Zulgo-Gemzek (no, nothing, sorry) is probably as close to comprehensive as it’s possible to get. This has SO much material on it, on the history and etymology and root structure of various language systems to maps of where languages are spoken, and while this is the online portal for a paid-for service you can learn a lot just by clicking around; if you’re interested in language and linguistics this is fascinating and a hell of a resource.
- Reform Minds: A week on from the local election results in the UK (international readers who don’t give two flying fcuks about the parochial politics of my grey-skied island nation, feel free to skip this one) and with frog-faced racism-ashtray Nigel Farage continuing to bestride the country’s media like some sort of horrible, damp-skinned batrachian colossus, the UK media and political commentary class seems undecided as to whether this was a flash in the pan or a seismic redrawing of the nation’s political boundaries. It’s evident, though, from even a cursory glance across the miserable bits of social media that the REFORM MESSAGE is very much resonating with people, not least through content like that posted by TikTok account Reform Minds, which is currently posting 3-4 videos a day combining down-the-lens commentary on THE LATEST NEWS by some guy (who, for reasons known only to him, is DEFINITELY using AI to tweak his voice slightly) with AI-generated imagery featuring UK political figures in the now-familiar slop style…the content is relatively-unremarkable in terms of talking points, but what I find interesting is the volume and the consistency – because, of course, you can now churn out something like this (with graphics and visuals and transitions and and and) in, what, 30m? The clips don’t have huge numbers – they top out around 100k, with most only getting 3000 or so – but I think it’s interesting and indicative of a new vector in political comms, activism, propagandising, however you want to cast it, born out of the lowering of ‘cost of content’ to basically 0 and the ability to spin up pretty much anything you want in seconds to a potential algo-accessed audience of millions, in the hope of winning the content creator’s viral jackpot and earning a few pennies. Is this good? I mean, it doesn’t matter, it’s happening!
- Path To Philosophy: You know that ‘game’ that people have been doing on Wikipedia for years where you have to see how quickly you can get from any given entry to ‘philosophy’ (or, depending on your proclivities, ‘sex’ or ‘sausages’ or ‘hitler’)? Well this is that, but automated – plug in any topic you care to think of and this site will find the relevant Wikipage and calculate the number of steps it would take you to get from there to philosophy, mapping out the points along the way. You may – or may not! I don’t know you! – be interested to know that it takes a minimum of 16 steps to get there from ‘fisting’, for example. There’s a vague ludic element here insofar as you can compete to find the longest route to philosophy – the current leader is a Japanese era name, fwiw, but YOU CAN DO BETTER.
- Roons: Ooh, this looks like something which some of you – ok, maybe…two of you? Certainly no more than seven, but, well, I LIVE TO SERVE YOU – might really really like; this is coming to Kickstarter soon, as far as I can tell, but you can sign up for updates in advance of its official launch; basically Roons is a sort of modular building block set which lets you model computational processes using 3d sculptural elements, each bit of which can be combined to create physical representations of computational functions with which you can move ballbearings through a system…which, Jesus, even by my standards is a fcuking TERRIBLE excuse for a description, but perhaps their own words will help: “roons are a kit for building mechanical computers — think “real-life Minecraft redstone“.Snap together logic gates, state, and other miniature components to invent your own devices — transistors, memory, processors, programs, and much more.” Is that better? Anyway, this actually looks really quite cool (in a very specific, very uncool way) and is something that I think the engineers and computer scientists among you might enjoy.
- Pin The Tale: What 3 Words is a genuinely strange and mysterious company, existing for fcuking AGES despite the fact that noone actually uses it and that lots and lots of people who know and understand this stuff are very, very clear that it’s a fundamentally-flawed system with some pretty significant inherent issues which mean it’s not in fact anything more than a gimmick. AND YET, it has managed to survive for ages now, and gets a weird quantity of positive media coverage (delivered via a very expensive international PR agency which I am increasingly certain has some sort of a stake the company), despite it still not having anything resembling a usecase. Still, we now have this game, built on top of What 3 Words, so maybe this will suddenly make me less suspicious of it – Pin The Tale is a rather neat little…what is it? Game? Collaborative storytelling project? Creative writing exercise? ALL OF THE ABOVE! “What3words divides the world into 3x3m squares and gives each one a unique address made up of three random words. These words are the building blocks of all the stories on our map.All stories on Pin the Tale are contributed by our users. To share a story about a place, simply find its address on our map and write a story that includes all its three words. It’s just like a treasure hunt. Zoom into the map to read stories that other people have written about that area. If you can identify a story’s exact location, type its what3words address into the answer box.” This is basically a combination of cryptic crosswords and Geoguessr, which won’t really make sense until you click the link and have a spelunk, but I promise you that there’s something quite oddly addictive about it once you get into the groove of attempting guess locations from storyclues (also, some of the effort people have gone to with the clues is genuinely impressive).
By Kate Sweeney
NEXT UP, HAVE A FOUR-HOUR HOUSE SET BY JURANGO AT TRESOR IN BERLIN!
THE SECTION WHICH WAS HOPING FOR A ‘PIOUS’ OR AN ‘INNOCENT’ TBH, PT.2:
- Meta AI: I KNOW YOU ARE BORED OF AI I AM BORED OF AI I AM SORRY. But, well, this is interesting, so. You may – or, actually, may not, given you aren’t presumably like me and don’t have to have to keep up with every single tedious fcuking twist and turn in the Evolution Of The Machine – have heard that Meta has launched a standalone web presence for its AI tools, a la GPT et al; well, this is that link. The tool itself is utterly unremarkable – lol, how quickly we become jaded! How quickly the amazement fades! – and can basically be summarised as ‘GPT, but not as good’, but the real draw here is what happens if you scroll below the fold; anyone asking a question of this instance of The Machine is offered the opportunity to make their query, and the outputs, visible to the world, meaning that this site effectively acts as a sort of semi-relatime (it’s not realtime, this isn’t (sadly, but understandably) the entire firehose of requests) feed of What People Are Using AI For Right Now and FCUKING HELL is it a strange window into the collective id of the species. Honestly, I really do think that our interactions with The Machine and what we ask of it are quite spectacularly fascinating in terms of What It Says about us as animals, about society and culture…and it’s also, honestly, a really revealing window into the middle of the bellcurve, so to speak. If you consider Meta’s status as the owner of the world’s most ubiquitous social platforms, and the fact that as a result of a decade’s aggressive positioning the company is, in some parts of the world, basically synonymous with ‘the internet’, it’s fair to say that there is no better window into a mass sample of the human race than what happens on its platforms. So what do we learn? Well, FCUK ME is it clear that the Bluesky disdain for AI and AI-generated content isn’t universal – sorry, refuseniks, but the fact is that the vast majority of people simply do not give a fcuk about the impact on artists or creators or the environment and will happily use this sh1t to spin up their banal imaginings until the heat death of the universe (possibly accelerated by said banal imaginings); we also learn that WOW do Indians really like using this stuff (and people in the Philippines, apparently), and WOW do they like using it to make vaguely-bellicose propaganda about what they might do to Pakistan given half the chance (WW3 as presaged by Pixarified Modi-slop! WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD!), and, in general, I think this is SO interesting (and, honestly, not a little depressing in terms of what it reveals about our general lack of imagination – you can ask this for ANYTHING and you’re demanding 300 images of inspired by the prompt “Step into a whimsical world of sweet delights”? FFS, Anuj Kumar Pashwan, TRY HARDER (also, I love the fact that when you choose to make your prompt public it tells the world your ACTUAL META USERNAME, which feels…possibly like something they might want to patch out). Basically this is fascinating from the point of view of social/digital anthropology, even if the actual outputs are, well, largely-dogsh1t.
- Oilwell: Do we still care about the climate crisis? It’s hard to tell to be honest. Still, the people behind this site evidently do – Oilwell is PARODIC SATIRE, taking aim at international PR giants Edelman for their continued policy of ‘being paid a fcuktonne of money by fossil fuel and other ‘energy’ businesses to burnish their reputations, despite the fact that we all know by now that actually that’s quite ethically dubious’, and the site presents itself as a ‘wellness app’ designed to help users cope with the stresses of the climate emergency, in an obvious dig at the sort of soft-touch comms work undertaken by agencies such as Edelman for clients like Shell et al. This is surprisingly deep in terms of content – there are a variety of spoof mindfulness exercises and the like, a little ambient soundboard to create a natural soundscape to soothe the mind, and a host of little features that mimic and mock the wellness app industry…but, equally, it all feels a bit toothless and unfocused, and I am not sure what I am meant to do with the knowledge that greenwashing the climate emergency and those that caused it is A Bad Thing, and part of me always wonders with stuff like this whether the clevercleverness of the wrapping idea rather obscures the point that the campaigners are trying to make with the site…still, though, fcuk Edelman, they are a company that represents some truly fcuking dreadful people and I will never tire of putting it in writing that they have trousered literally millions and millions of pounds from the Sackler family for helping them escape censure for their part in literally creating the opioid crisis. Most agencies are largely-amoral hives of scummery, but a special place in hell for these lads.
- London’s Busiest Bus Stops: Yes, I know, but I live here and *I* find this interesting, so. Have you ever wanted to know which bus stop on a specific London route is the busiest so that you can OPTIMISE YOUR COMMUTE? Apparently the ABSOLUTE busiest bus stop in the city is just down the road from me in Brixton, which…really? Does it REALLY have twice as many annual boarders as the next-busiest in Harrow? Anyway, this is…curious rather than essential, but if I can imagine a few scenarios in which this information might possibly be of value to you (ok, two scenarios – food trucks and terrorism. Could you all please try not to do any of the latter, please? thanks!).
- The Streamer University: Do you have children? Have you accepted the fact that their future is going to be unknowable weird in ways in which you can’t possibly comprehend? Why not give into their demands and let them sack of university in favour of taking their chances in the bearpit that is THE CREATOR ECONOMY? Now, thanks to the world’s current Champion Of Stream Kai Cenat, your streaming wannabes can give themselves a head start in life by enrolling in THE STREAMER UNIVERSITY, which promises…hang on, what *does* it promise? Well, according to the site’s blurb, “streamers of all backgrounds will have the opportunity to showcase their personalities as students, alongside both unrealized, upcoming and well-established creators” – is that…is that learning? There’s not an awful lot of information actually available about this – there’s basically a homepage and an application form – but from the bullets on the homepage I have managed to discern that “while most classes will be fun, entertaining, and collaborative, some classes will actually provide quality information on how to better yourself as creators. Your future success is important to us!”. Honestly, I have to sort of admire the sheer, naked bullsh1tness of the whole thing, and the idea that SOME classes will teach you something…but not all of them (you wouldn’t, after all, want to overdose on learning!). This, then, feels very much, er, ‘vibes-led’, so maybe suggest to little Tommy and Jessica that they don’t give up on formal education just yet. I did, though, like the list of courses that are set to be offered at the bottom, running the gamut from, er, sex education to music production and MANY MORE. This is THE FUTURE.
- Particle News: I have seen a LOT of terrible AI ‘news’ sites over the past few years, but Particle is the first that feels…almost-useful? To be clear, this is not a ‘good’ news site, in the sense that all it’s doing is scraping, aggregating and synthesising from a range of sources and there is nothing original about the reporting…but, also, it provides sources for its summaries in the modern LLM style, and it doesn’t seem to be pulling from anything obviously fake or crazy, and the way it presents the information isn’t horrible and, God, I feel weirdly…guilty? for saying this, but…I don’t hate it, and I can imagine it being a non-terrible way of quickly catching up on breaking news and getting a range of perspectives on a story quickly. Which, yes, really does feel icky to say, but, well, here we are. What’s also interesting about this is that the app version of the site allows users to ask questions of each story, offering summary answers and allowing a degree of dialogue with the news – on the website you can’t ask questions but you can see what others have asked, which is, again, another interesting additional layer which…I don’t hate,. Basically this feels like a small rubicon has been crossed in terms of the quality of this sort of automated news site, for better or worse.
- Vert: A file converter that does everything locally on your device, because it was about time someone came up with an alternative to Zamzar. Ok, this is VERY DULL but it’s also practically useful so bookmark it and you can thank me later (you won’t, though, will you?).
- Welikia: Via Laura Olin’s newsletter, this is a really interesting site looking at the physical history of the wider New York area, specifically the way in which the land has been used over time and how that has changed over the years. “The Welikia Project aims to illuminate the rich ecological history that underwrites the development of New York City. Drawing from historical research and scientific modeling, the project visualizes the block-by-block ecosystems, geologic foundations, and stewards of the land before New York. Our hope is to provide insight into how drastically our own neighborhoods have changed over time, with aim to inspire new ways of living with nature in New York.” The site shows you a map of the greater New York area, and you can click on different bits of it to get a history of the sorts of flora and fauna that once existed there – so for example I have just learned that the area around Grand Central Station used to be an ‘oak-tulip tree forest community’ (I don’t entirely know what this means, but that is ok), which knowledge I find vaguely-comforting.
- Satellite Explorer: An interactive visualisation of some of the satellites currently in orbit around the planet – the main takeaway here is that there are FCUKING LOADS OF THEM, and that, given I don’t think that this viz takes into account the past couple of years, this is only a fraction of the whole. There’s something sort of bleak/funny about the fact that we as a species are seemingly incapable of doing anything without leaving a massive, ungodly fcuking mess behind afterwards. What are the long-term implications of us cluttering our orbit with millions of tonnes of floating space debris? WE DON’T KNOW!
- The CivicVerse: Look, I have to be entirely honest with you here and say that I do not for the life of me have any idea what this is meant to be – seriously, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? “CivicVerse is more than a project—it’s a movement. A decentralized, people-powered metaverse designed to reshape how society functions by placing technology, opportunity, and governance back into the hands of civilians. Built on blockchain principles and sustained by community mining, flipping, and collaborative development, CivicVerse is the convergence point of real-world utility and digital freedom.” I mean, those are definitely some words arranged in a specific order! As far as I can tell from reading on, there is some vaguely-utopican vision here that involves mining a bunch of crypto, flipping it, and then using the real-world cash to buy…land? Actual, physical land, on which will be constructed some sort of…crypto-blockchain commune? Hang on, is this another bunch of libertarian freaks who want to create their own nation state? IT FCUKING IS YOU KNOW! Anyway, I very much enjoyed this because it is SO mad and ticks a lot of tropey boxes, and also contained the following two aspirational points which I am going to present here without further comment: “TikTok-style shortform educational and news content from civilian creators with transparent funding and audit trails [AND] Verified Propaganda Ledger: All government and corporate communications are stored and timestamped on-chain to ensure public accountability.” I mean, doesn’t that sound…utopian? Oh, as an aside, WHY DOES THIS NEED THE FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN??? Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t because nothing does.
- Advanced Bible Search: Given that HABEMAS PAPAM, many of you might now be rushing to brush up on your theology and bible studies, and might as a result find this website, which lets you search ALL OF THE BIBLE (old and new testament, psalms, the whole deal) for whatever you want. Which is probably really useful for serious scholarly enquiry, but also means you can also just do things like searching for the keyphrase “lie with” to see exactly which bits of the bible are horniest (Genesis, hands-down), or ‘babylon’ to get straight to all the fun bits in Revelation.
- 24h Of Lemons: I don’t drive; I have never driven; I would almost certainly be a fcuking TERRIBLE motorist and a total liability behind the wheel; that said, if I *could* drive I would absolutely love to take part in one of these races. 24h of Lemons is basically a loose-knit collective of people across the US who organise Le Mans-style racing events for really, really sh1t vehicles – the only rule is that the total cost of the car and its fit-out can’t total more than $500, otherwise ANYTHING GOES. Seriously, were I a very Different Type of Man I would totally bookmark this for a LADS HOLIDAY. Would…anyone like to invite me along?
- Gander: I’ve been watching with interest the various calls for Europe to develop its own software stack so as to reduce our collective reliance on US tech platforms – I didn’t, though, expect Canada to launch its own national social network. BUT HERE WE ARE! I don’t think this is an OFFICIAL Canadian thing, but Gander is very much setting itself up as a Canuck-owned, less-creepy version of…what, Insta? This is pre-launch, but you can sign up for updates if the idea of ‘social media, but not beholden to some of the worst people on the planet’ appeals to you. I do think that, whether or not this ever takes off (I am…skeptical), there is something interesting about the idea of nation-level networks like this that I could actually see being a useful use of federated networks – such a shame that the fediverse continues to be such a total fcuking incomprehensible mess.
- The Brooklyn Pirate Radio Map: Via my friend Simon, who runs the excellent Unspun Heroes vinyl label, comes this GREAT site which basically maps pirate radio stations (are they really ‘pirate’ radio? Fcuk knows, but that’s what the site calls them and, well, who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc!) around Brooklyn NYC. You can filter the stations by era so you can learn about THE PAST, or alternatively get links to streams of current stations – thanks to the wonder of the web I have typed this entry while listening to the glorious strains of Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak Radio which is significantly more fun-sounding than this non-yiddish speaker would have expected. This is very good indeed.
- Cryptic DJ: A DAILY GUESSING GAME! “Hidden within the Titles and Artists of famous songs are words that have some kind of link” – guess the titles, the artists and the link! This is JUST challenging enough to be fun.
- Unzoomed: ANOTHER DAILY PUZZLE GAME! This one is ACE, but fcuk me has it once again pointed out to me how terrible I am at geography and how I basically know nothing about the planet on which I live. Unzoomed gives you six attempts to guess which city you’re being shown on a map – you start zoomed in, and each unsuccessful guess zooms you out a little further, giving you a better chance of working out where exactly in the world you are; wrong guesses tell you how far away from your target city your attempt was. I have become slightly obsessed with this over the past week and perhaps you will become so too.
OUR LAST MUSICAL SELECTION THIS WEEK IS THIS LOFI BALEARIC MIX BY PERTH LEWIS!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Dead Motels: “An archive of dead and dying hotels, motels and resorts in the United States through Google Street View.” THIS IS STILL BEING UPDATED! TUMBLR LIVES! Or at least this one does, even if the motels…don’t. This is honestly really interesting from an aesthetic perspective – if you’re a fan of mid-20thC Americana then you will find a lot to love in here.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Ode To German Words: An insta feed celebrating the particular, peculiar glory of the German language – would you like to follow an account that posts graphics featuring such excellent Teutonic vocab elements as ‘rambazamba’ (apparently ‘A loud fuss, wild party, or noisy chaos. Can describe either fun (like a wild celebration) or trouble (like a heated argument or brawl).’) or the incredibly-satisfying ‘Muffensausen’ (‘A sudden rush of fear or nervousness — usually right before something scary or stressful. Like getting the jitters.’)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!
- Sir Magazine: Are we still talking about MEN’S ISSUES? Do, er, do we ever stop? Have you ever thought to yourself ‘perhaps the crisis in masculinity is down in part to the lack of high-quality men’s magazine material addressing all the things that MEN need to educate and nourish their minds and souls? No, you haven’t, but SOMEONE evidently did, because here is the recently-launched ‘Sir’ magazine, a glossy publication which, as is apparently the law in male-focused publishing, had a multi-cover first edition featuring such surprising examples of non-traditional masculinity as, er, Ray Winstone! FFS! Actually in their defence one of the other covers does feature a bunch of comedians who don’t fit the stereotypical ‘content for blokes’ template, but I can’t help but look at the covers here, and the styling, and the pull-quotes and the seeming emphasis on SUITS and WATCHES and PUBS and GADGETS and think ‘oh, so this is…exactly the same as the old masculinity then’. I am, in many respects, quite a sh1t man, but I can’t be the only person who looks at stuff like this and sighs somewhere deep in their soul at the lack of imagination on show here.
- Wolfie: Wolfie is, er, an AI-generated rapping wolf character. Wolfie apparently HAS BEEF with another AI-generated cartoon rap-bot, a bear called Civ. It is 1018am and I haven’t had anywhere near enough sleep and, honestly, I am far, far too tired for this.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- My Brain Finally Broke: Not mine, you understand – my brain is sprained, fine, possibly fractured, but not yet entirely broken – but Jia Tolentino’s, who writes in the New Yorker about her (your, our, EVERYONE’S!) experience of The Now, the mad news and the digital decay and the coming – and very current! – horrors, and how this experience is increasingly hard to make any sort of coherent sense of whatsoever. Which, yes, ok, may not sound either like something that you need telling or something you particularly want to read about, but I promise you that this is a deeper and more interesting reflection on the ‘why’ of this feeling, and the feeling itself, than you might think. I think I’m yet to read a better or more true-feeling paragraph about the dissociative experience of living in the now than this one: “Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”
- Social Media Is Dead: This has been apparent to anyone paying attention for at least 18-24m now, but it seems that BIG MEDIA is catching up with what online commenters have been saying for a while – specifically, that the social media era as we knew it is largely over and it’s not coming back, and a combination of fatigue with the medium, and the slow ensh1ttification of every single social platform, and the growing realisation that fame and notoriety or even simple ATTENTION on social media is not necessarily aspirational or even in any way good, have led to us all basically retrenching slightly and abandoning the ‘social’ part of the thing in favour of a more traditional form of passive consumption. Should you be interested, I wrote this for a paywalled site last year on a similar/adjacent theme. BONUS DEAD SOCIAL MEDIA POST – this is a fascinating-if-miserable look at one of the growing army of grifty salesmen flogging courses on how to make THOUSANDS IN PASSIVE INCOME from posting fcuktonnes of AI-generated content on a blog, running ads against it and then manipulating Pinterest to drive traffic to said blog and making bank – whether or not this is actually a viable route to FINANCIAL FREEDOM (clue: it is not), this sort of stuff is now being done at scale by the hopeful, the stupid and the gullible, and the deadening impact on the networks we’ve spent the past decade or so building up is only just starting to be felt.
- Driven Mad By The Machine: This has done NUMBERS this week, but if you’re yet to read it then it really is worth a look – this Rolling Stone piece examines some of the people who being drawn into increasingly-delusional relationships with LLMs, engaging in ‘deep’, ‘spiritual’ chats with The Machine which ‘yes, and…’s them into basically thinking they are talking to god or a higher power rather than their own slightly-fcuked subconscious. It’s very clear from even a cursory reading of this that a significant proportion of the people here are in the grip of some sort of schizophrenic or bipolar episode, and it’s equally clear that LLMs are VERY DANGEROUS for those currently grappling with delusions of persecution or godhood and that anyone using this as a therapist or similar is being VERY SILLY INDEED. BONUS ‘PEOPLE HAVING REALLY TROUBLING RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE MACHINE’ LINK! Someone sent one of my employers this video the other day, which is a ‘conversation’ between 5 AI models – the video is boring and the ‘conversation’ is empty and pointless, but FCUK ME are the comments underneath it chilling. As ever with this stuff, YouTube comments are an excellent window into Normal People On The Web and, judging by this, OH DEARY ME. Seriously, the number of people who are anthropomorphising GPT and evidently treating it as a friend, companion and trusted interlocutor…seriously, I know I have been predicting this stuff, Cassandra-like, for a couple of years now, but reading stuff like this in the YT comments is genuinely…troubling.
- How AI Is Fcuking Teaching: This ALSO did numbers this week, but, again, is very much worth a read if you’ve not yet done so – this is New York Magazine speaking to a number of professors and teachers about the impact that LLMs have had on their experience of teaching and their students’ learning; this really is full of…not-entirely-positive bits, but my personal favourite anecdote is this one: “I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”” On the one hand, it seems quite clear that This Is Bad, and that the current educational/assessment framework isn’t really going to be fit for purpose much longer based on the evidence here presented; on the other, well, it’s actually been perfectly possible for quite a long time now to get through university and attain a good qualification without actually learning anything at all. Look, at a distance of…some years from my own personal undergrad experience I think I can confidently say that despite getting a first class degree I learned the square-root of fcuk-all about philosophy over the course of three years; I did, though, become very skilled at passing exams, thanks in no small part to the fact that the optional ‘course essays’ assigned by tutors (which I obviously never did) were returned to students via the medium of an envelope pinned to the tutor’s door, which meant that I was able to get there early, rifle through my peers’ marked essays, photocopy any that had got a 1st and then use them as revision notes. Basically I think tertiary education’s been quite fcuked for quite some time, and while this is obviously exacerbating it it’s not exactly ruining something otherwise perfect. BONUS ‘AI IS KILLING THINKING’ LINK!: this piece, entitled ‘Will The Humanities Survive AI?’ ploughs a similar furrow, although it arrives at a more positive conclusion about the utility of LLMs as ways of exploring conceptual thinking; personally speaking I think the examples used by the author (who tasks their students with having a dialogue with the machine about the history of attention, and rendering the results as an essay) here aren’t necessarily what I would call ‘learning’ in a traditional sense, but then again it’s possible that we need to start moving away from such hidebound, oldschool definitions as we move into a post-machine world.
- Thoughts on Sinofuturism: An interesting essay by Noah Smith about the perception of China as THE FUTURE, fueled over the past 18 months or so by a lot of…very shiny influencer content (not least that produced by the embodied ADHD that is Speed earlier this year) and the extent to which it’s accurate rather than either a misreading or simply successful regime propaganda. I can’t pretend to know anywhere near enough about China to assess whether Smith’s opinions are accurate, but it’s an interesting counter to a lot of the more breathless ‘look at the shiny neon cyberfuture being built by Daddy Xi!’ stuff that’s all over social media. “China’s building boom will certainly leave behind plenty of interesting structures. But because the boom was driven by overabundant capital, many of these designs were created more as advertisements for the developers than as places that are actually nice to walk around in. And the buildings themselves won’t always look as nice as they do now, either. I’m no Brian Potter, but even I know that over the course of about thirty or forty years, reinforced concrete tends to weather, crack, and spall. Most of urban China is very humid, and pollution levels are still fairly high; this will damage many of the nice new surfaces of China’s buildings, most of which were built in the last two decades. Buildings that turn out to have been built with substandard materials — and there are some of those out there — will go downhill earlier.” BONUS CHINA CONTENT! Why *is* the People’s Liberation Army rushing to hire a significant number of new multimedia content propagandists? What could they possibly be wanting to influence? WHO KNOWS!!
- The Rise of the Crunchy Teen: ‘Crunchy’, as you OF COURSE are aware, in this context means ‘into healthfood and organic stuff’ and, increasingly, ‘probably also buys into a lot of fcuking rubbish about ultraprocessed foods and possibly oils and is also quite likely to be on a pathway to becoming some sort of right-wing influencer in a few years’ – this piece looks at the rising number of teen influencers who are leaning into this as a position, which is in itself sort-of interesting as a view into the pathways that algorigthmic trends push people into; if you want to be a creator, as so many do, you need a niche, and if the algo seems to like pushing stuff relating to the importance of eating flax seeds and explaining how hydrogenated fats are bad for you actually then, well, that’s what you do! Of course, what this is also clearly doing is promoting massively weird and unhealthy attitudes toward food – every generation gets its owns special version of disordered eating, just for them – under the guise of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’ and, inevitably, some sort of low-key, small-c traditionalism (hello Peter is that you lurking over there?). Worth reading alongside this one, about the growth in ‘pro-skinny’ content on TikTok – which makes sense, given the 80sification of modern aesthetics and the global gakboom. Although I do have to say that as one of nature’s natural ectomorphs I would quite like ‘being a bit skeletal’ to become a bit more socially acceptable and for people to stop attempting to forcefeed me chips please.
- How The Fame Sausage Is Made: Or, ‘manufacturing Lorde in 2025’ – this is an interesting and smart and (I think) insightful look at the way in which Lorde’s latest album is being marketed and promoted in the context of last Summer’s GIRLIE POP EXPLOSION via Charli, Sabrina et al, and the way in which a celebrity’s brand and style team are increasingly an acknowledged part of the creative/collaborative process: “Fashion has become the most immediate workstream in image making. No one wants to be the star who boldly claims to style themselves, ‘and it shows.’ Danielle Goldberg, the styling mastermind behind the effortlessly chic aesthetic of Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee, and Laura Harrier, has garnered the following of a macro-influencer and copped a New York Times profile in the process for her work. Dara, the mononymous styling sherpa of Addison Rae and Interview Magazine’s Fashion Director, has also solidified her place within the image making echelon through her referential outfit pulls, her work almost as vital to Rae’s rise as the music itself. Troye Sivan partnered with acclaimed fashion photographer Gordon von Steiner to help architect the creative rollout for his latest (and greatest!) album. I don’t need to tell you about how the partnership between Law Roach and Zendaya benefited both of their careers, and I have already told you about the sorcery of Mr. Zuckerberg’s style team. The hands of the image architects behind the most promising stars are increasingly public. Not only can the public become fans of the creative teams, they can also parse and make links between the sensibilities of stars and those who have a hand in building them, bolding the line between artist and muse.”
- A Chat With Hailey Welch: Or ‘onomatopoeic fellatio girl’, as I like to call her – you will recall Ms Welch from her BREAKOUT VIRAL MOMENT when she explained how best to deliver satisfying oral, and from her subsequent adventures in podcasting and, subsequently, memecoining, but this is the first actual ‘interview’ I have read with her and…just, I mean, wow. I don’t want to be mean here because, well, it seems unfair, but I don’t think I have ever read a profile of someone who has so little to say about anything – this feels like some sort of very specific pop-culture fame nadir, honestly, and that any culture that creates and celebrates things like this probably deserves everything that’s coming to it. Seriously, just read this and keep track of the number of times she says ‘I don’t know’.
- Robbie Williams’ Art Exhibition: I don’t normally link to art reviews, but this writeup of Robbie Williams’ show at a new London gallery is so wonderfully, beautifully scornful that it really does deserve to be read. “On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly. It’s a “live, laugh, love” sign slowly strangling you with its self-importance. It’s an Instagram self-help quote attacking your brain and eyes. It is incredibly bad art: so earnest, so superficial, it’s barely even funny.” The art, by the way, really *is* that bad.
- Life As A Marathon Streamer: Emily has been streaming her life for nearly 1200 days straight. This is a record. This is a profile of Emily in the Washington Post. Emily seems desperately lonely, desperately sad, desperately unhappy, and entirely unable to stop. This is, honestly, fcuking heartbreaking – and while it’s an extreme example, this sort of audience capture increasingly happens to all of us to a greater or lesser extent, and is only become more of an issue and more exacerbated as more traditional careers get hollowed out and replaced with an expectation that everyone needs only find a willing audience of FANS to subsidise one’s existence. DO WHAT THE FANS WANT OR YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO EAT – WELCOME TO THE CREATOR ECONOMY!
- The Friends You Miss: I enjoyed this essay, about the people in your life who you don’t realise you can or should be friends (or more) with, despite them being a part of your existence for an extended period of time – honestly, I normally have very little interest in stuff like this, but I found this strangely-heartening: “Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and alone, like no one gets them, and then one day, they look up at each other and say, “Oh, there you are.” In the early 2000s, Helle (who is the daughter of two of my friends) was at Copenhagen University. Helle and some classmates decided to meet up each Thursday for dinner. As the months went by, one person after the other found a partner, got busy, and stopped coming, until only Helle and one of the men were left. They, on the other hand, were surprisingly stubborn: the year they turned 41, they were still having dinner every Thursday. That year, Helle had no one to travel with, so she asked the man if he wanted to come along to Greece, and, spending a week together on Milos, they realized they loved each other.”
- The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost Was: As someone whose grandfather was on The Wrong Side in WWII and was as a result taken prisoner and tortured by the English in North Africa (I am not asking you to feel sorry for Nonno Agostino, don’t worry), I am always keen on stories that show that Good Old Blighty wasn’t *totally* pure of deed and spirit; this is a fascinating story about how apparently there was quite an appetite from British business for a potentially-lucrative series of trade partnerships with, er, the nazis. “from Britain’s perspective, the Munich Agreement was intended to be just the start of a wider process that would culminate in “world political partnership” between London and Berlin. Two months prior, the Federation of British Industries (FBI), known today as the Confederation of British Industry, made contact with its Nazi counterpart, Reichsgruppe Industrie (RI). The pair eagerly agreed their respective governments should enter into formal negotiations on Anglo-German economic integration. Representatives of these organisations met face-to-face in London on November 9th that year. The summit went swimmingly, and a formal conference in Düsseldorf was scheduled for next March. Coincidentally, later that evening in Berlin, Kristallnacht erupted, with Nazi paramilitaries burning and destroying synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany. The most infamous pogrom in history was no deterrent to continued discussions and meetings between FBI and RI representatives. A month later, they inked a formal agreement on the creation of an international Anglo-Nazi coal cartel. British officials fully endorsed this burgeoning relationship, believing it would provide a crucial foundation for future alliance with Nazi Germany in other fields. Moreover, it was hoped Berlin’s industrial and technological prowess would reinvigorate Britain’s economy at home and throughout the Empire, which was ever-increasingly lagging behind the ascendant US. In February 1939, representatives of British government and industry made a pilgrimage to Berlin to feast with high-ranking Nazi officials, in advance of the next month’s joint conference.”
- Easter Retreat: I adored this piece – Lamorna Ash writes about spending the Easter weekend at what is apparently the only Catholic shrine in Britain; this is about religion and spirituality and the Church and belief and the self and interiority and loneliness and vocation and all sorts of other things, and it’s…weirdly peaceful in ways I can’t quite explain. Honestly, this is such a good piece of writing and such an excellent evocation of place and…feeling, I can’t recommend it enough.
- On Lolita: It’s 70 years since the publication of Lolita, and Claire Messud in the LA Review of Books looks back at the novel’s initial reception and the way in which popular opinion – and the reading of it – of it has shifted in the intervening decades. Aside from anything else, Lolita remains an exquisitely-crafted book which on a sentence-by-sentence level is just a joy to read – Humbert’s throwaway line about his wedding night with his wife and how he ‘had the idiot in hysterics’ (and the line’s subsequent reuse for a later night with Lo) has stayed with me since I first read it at 16 – and part of the reason I enjoyed this essay so much is that the author takes as much pleasure from that as I do, while acknowledging the extent to which that language almost lulls the reader into ignoring what is going on: “Lolita seduces us with language, and insists, in the intense pleasure of its verbal play, on being read. Whether we pay attention to what Humbert is actually saying is, of course, up to each reader. To turn away from the novel without reading it—to hide the book, and spare ourselves, with the problematic veil—bespeaks a dangerous, even immoral, incuriosity. To insist upon our own projected vision—to “solipsize” Lolita and Humbert both, if you will, or to reduce them to symbols or types, or more broadly to read without rigorous attention to the finer details of the text; to be shoddy, inadequate readers—is equally to be condemned.”
- Hot Glazed Now: Kate Durbin writes about working in a Krispy Kreme. This is EXCELLENT: “The job is physically grueling, and boring. But my boredom can never show. My manager orders me to smile whenever a customer catches my gaze through the glass, so I avoid eye contact. Focus on the donuts, head down. Stuck like that for hours. Neck aching, back aching. Crowds gather to watch me work. I ignore them. But when I do accidentally catch someone’s eye, it’s the customer who is usually smiling at me. The smile of the Krispy Kreme customer is kind of a lot. It exists somewhere between a child’s open grin and a leer. Like they are horny for donuts. I can tell by their smile the customers feel I know them, like really know them, deep in their grubby baby souls. I’m just trying to get my seven bucks an hour. I didn’t sign up to stare into the abyss.”
- To Tell You The Truth: This week’s last longread is by Nicole Morris, and it’s about the death of a parent you’re not going to mourn, or that you think you won’t until they are gone; I think the writing here is superb and interesting and unexpected, and I think you will find it beautiful. “God does hear our prayers. She does. It took 40 years, but all those Dear Diary entries where I scrawled in the curly q cursive of the 80s, hearts dotting i’s and loopy-loops finishing off y’s and g’s: I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. Took forever, but God finally replied: I gotchu girl.”
By Laura Krifka
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: