WELL. What a great week for everyone invested in picking up the overton window and moving it ALL THE WAY OVER THERE! There’s an odd irony in the fact that as everyone debates the assisted dying bill in parliament this week, noone seems to be making any connection between the need for a serious conversation around end-of-life-care and the probable impact of the UK’s newly-tweaked immigration policy (THANKS KEIR YOU CNUT) on what said end-of-life-care is likely to look like in a few years time. Look, all I’m saying is there’s a reason I’ve paid my euthanasia deposit early.
And on THAT cheery note, here are some variously-assorted links!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t need to be worried, I’m probably not going to fcuk off to Switzerland *quite* yet.
THE SECTION WHICH LEARNED THIS WEEK THAT APPARENTLY THE JAPANESE PHRASE “IT RAINED ON ME” CONTAINS THE IMPLIED ADDITIONAL INFORMATION “AND I SUFFERED AS A RESULT”, WHICH MADE ME SO HAPPY I CAN BARELY EXPRESS IT, PT.1:
- Clone: I can’t speak for you (much as occasionally I wish I could; “Web Curios is great!”, I would say to anyone would would listen, “we must not rest until the world has realised that overlong, overwritten internet newsletters are the future!”), but as someone who has to spend Too Much Time paying attention to the worst people and companies in the world, and all of the ways in which specific technologies are being shaped so as to enrich a small-but-financially-significant coterie of stakeholders, I could very much do with A Nice And Easy Way To Keep Track Of All This Sh1t. Which, perhaps, is why I was so cheered by the launch of Clone, a new project by Spencer Chang (see Curios passim) which is a simple-but-hugely-useful tech news aggregator, pulling in stories from the top…what, three-dozen or so global tech news outlets and presenting them in chronological fashion, headlines-only, letting you get a quick and easy overview of What Is Happening; this is, on the one hand, the sort of thing that you used to be able to spin up really easily yourself in the GOOD OLD DAYS of decent RSS readers and things like Netvibes (RIP, weird pang of nostalgia, i want 2 run 2 u), and I appreciate you might not find it SUPER-EXCITING, but it is USEFUL and, personally-speaking, its existence has made my life marginally easier and as such I am grateful for its existence. Also there are a bunch of fun, stupid little easter eggs hidden on the site which you will stumble across if you use it for a bit, and I am a sucker for that sort of thing, so.
- Masters of Prophecy: As a result of my ‘social network of choice’ (given the choice I would not use any of the fcuking things, but my infohunger needs sating somehow chiz chiz) these days being Bluesky, I am exposed to a fairly constant diet of people Cnut-ing daily against the AI tide, ready to dismiss everything they see which is touched by the hand of The Machine as awful, dreadful, horrible, evil, doomed to fail and fundamentally in some way antithetical to the general business of ‘being human’. Which, you know, I understand! I get it, I do! But, equally, JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT A THING TO BE TRUE DOES NOT IN FACT MAKE IT SO. I know that lots of you WANT this stuff to be terrible and awful forever, and to never take off, and to wither on the vine in a shower of stale, expired hype, to go the way of the NFTs (MY PUNKS, THEY DEVALUED!) or The Metaverse (this latter still actually happening, by the way, in the way in which it always was (checked the Roblox numbers recently?)), and that you believe that all it takes is a concerted number of people TAKING A STAND and DEMONSTRATING THEIR DISGUST with the whole thing, and that everyone you know HATES this stuff and wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole meaning that OBVIOUSLY it’s doomed to failure…but, well, you’re wrong, because you’re inhabiting an ecosystem of a few million people with a very particular perspective and while you’re raging against The Machine everyone else is, basically, sucking up the slop like good consumers AND SMILING WHILE THEY DO SO. Witness this YouTube channel – why is it called Masters of Prophecy? NO FCUKING CLUE! – which posts track after track of AI-generated ‘music’, accompanied by AI-generated thumbnails and with titles like ‘Babe With The Blade’ and ‘Future Loverboy’, and which has 30 FCUKING MILLION SUBS, and whose videos have viewcounts ranging between the 10s of 1000s and the multimillions (despite the fact that, objectively, they all sound fcuking dreadful). PEOPLE ARE MORONS AND PEOPLE DON’T CARE, is the thing I want to hammer home to you – there are BILLIONS of us, and, look, let’s be honest here, most couldn’t give two flying fcuks as to whether the brain-smoothing distractocontent we use to wash the pain away is made by an ARTISAN, toiling away in a garret, or whether it’s knocked up by a bunch of servers draining a lake somewhere in Texas. It’s worth taking the time to listen to some of the songs, just so you can realise how low the bar is in terms of ‘stuff people will apparently inflict on their eardrums’.
- FKFJ: Are YOU going to SXSW London? LOL OF COURSE NOT LOOK AT THE FCUKING PRICES THESE JOKERS ARE CHARGING!!! In *this* economy?! Presuming, then, that you don’t have a paymaster stupid enough to shell out a grand for you to spend three days hanging out with a bunch of ‘brand experts’ and people who put the ‘cnut’ in ‘conspicuous cocaine consumption’, you might be interested in this ALTERNATIVE FESTIVAL, being put on after a bunch of people on social media decided that the real thing looked, well, incredibly sh1t and a bit pointless and soulless and horrible. This is very nascent and might all be a bit rubbish, but I like the ethos behind it – anyone can apply to put on a free event during the festival period, and presuming it meets the vague criteria you get added to the website and become PART OF THE FUN – per the site, “FKFJ is a DIY festival of technology, music, art, and community across London. By sheer coincidence it takes place on the same dates as SXSW, but is actually affordable and has events you might want to attend. Anyone can host an FKFJ event! Let us know if you’d like to be listed, have a venue to share, or a thing you would like to put on.” The only thing on their at the moment is the return of the Dorkbot meetup on 3 June, but I would expect it to become more populated in the next weeks, so keep an eye on it and maybe add your own thing. Or don’t!
- The Bee: I’ve said a few times over the past year or so that this is a weirdly-fertile time for new magazines launching, from Joshi Hermann’s ‘Mill’ project of new regional papers to the spate of London-centric digital publications which have sprung up in the wake of the sad evisceration of the Evening Standard…this is another. The Bee is specifically designed to showcase working class writing in the UK; per the blurb, it’s setting out to be “a literary magazine, an online platform, a podcast, and the heart of a writing community. Our mission is to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists. We strongly believe that there is a need to discuss contemporary social class more openly, and that writers can voice to class experience in ways social science cannot.” There’s going to be a physical mag in the Autumn, subsequently publishing twice a year, but there’s already a bunch of stuff online – I’ve read a handful of pieces on there and there are some excellent ones, including one by Darren McGarvey on class and health outcomes which opens with the all-timer paragraph: “in the UK, one profound question occupies the national consciousness more than any other: why can’t all the fat, lazy, poor people be as healthy and successful as rightwing political commentators? This essay is my earnest attempt to answer that question.” I enjoy this a lot and am pleased it exists, do check it out.
- Ditto: After a few years of fairly monolithic Big Dating hegemony it seems that everyone’s utter disgust and dissatisfaction with The App Landscape has opened up the field to…a host of NEW dating apps! But this time with added AI! Which noone asked for! Ditto is yet another in the seemingly-endless list of tweaks on the tested formula; its gimmick is that rather than swiping and selecting and triaging and filtering yourself, you leave all that tedious, time-consuming and frankly infra-dig gruntwork to the magical power of The Machine – you literally just tell the app ‘this is the shape of person I would like to potentially be inside/have inside me’ (delete per your personal preferences) and it will, after some ‘thinking’, provide you with a date; it will literally say ‘go here at this time and meet this person, who we think you will like loads because of X, Y and Z and who you might want to talk to about A, B or C’. Which, honestly, might feel quite appealing should you be the sort of person who’s been burnt out by swiping or who’s suffering choice paralysis, but which also strikes me as…fcuk, I don’t know, just an insanely-passive approach to one’s life (and I say this as someone reasonably…low-agency). This is currently only available on select UScollege campuses per the early Facebook model, so let’s see if it breaks confinement and we see a spate of “how did we meet? Oh, The Machine decided we were compatible!” meet-cute stories in the popular press c.2028. BONUS AI DATING CONTENT: here’s a Dazed piece on all the ways in which the tech is now embedded into the dating landscape and making it LOADS BE…oh, no, actually worse.
- The Arctic World Archive: For reasons I don’t wholly understand and am not hugely keen on interrogating right now, I have been giving a bit of thought to THE WEB CURIOS LEGACY, and how I can ensure that these terrible words that noone cares about are given a life beyond my own; if anyone feels like chipping in and contributing to the ‘keep Curios live for 100 years’ long-term hosting fund then, well, let me know! Anyway, the hubristic bit of me (lol!) quite likes the self-importance of paying to have all of the Curios data preserved forever in permafrost at the Arctic World Archive, “located in a well-kept and safe decommissioned mine, Mine no. 3 (Gruve 3) that is owned by Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK). SNSK has more than 100 years experience developing and operating mines and infrastructure on Svalbard, and is owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries. AWA is a secure underground and unhackable data vault at the centre of the permafrost, 300 metres inside the mine and 300 metres below the top of the mountain.” It’s 20 Euros a month, lads – whipround?
- Mo The Cabbie: Mo, as he is keen to point out in every single one of his videos so far, is LONDON’S YOUNGEST BLACK CAB DRIVER – I think he’s 21, which is a frankly insane age by which to have done The Knowledge. This is is TikTok, which I’m including mainly in the hope that it becomes good rather than what it is now which is a bunch of videos of Mo being congratulated by people for being LONDON’S YOUNGEST BLACK CAB DRIVER and famous on TikTok; there’s one video in which Mo runs through his favourite routes, which suggests that even if the influencer game doesn’t work out for him he is laser-focused on the rich tourist cabfare dollar (WHAT SORT OF PLUTOCRATIC MIDDLE-EASTERN MADMAN GETS A CAB FROM EDGWARE RD TO OXFORD ST???) and will be FINE.
- Heavyweight: This is a GREAT little idea – Heavyweight is a site which will take any text you give it and format it in the style of an official, formal communication from a SERIOUS OFFICE – it doesn’t pass it off as from a lawfirm exactly, but it doesn’t go out of its way to make clear that it’s *not* from a lawfirm, if you know what I mean. You can choose the degree of ‘snootiness’ you would like the letter to embody – SORRY THERE IS AI IN THIS I THINK – and pick how many fictitious ‘partners’ you would like named in the letterhead of your definitely-not-a-fake-lawfirm, and, this feels like an EXCELLENT way to scare the everliving sh1t out of someone who is either a) quite thick; or b) a child; or c) both.
- The Internet Phonebook: I featured this when it was announced in July last year, and now IT EXISTS! My friend Kris and Elliot Cost have collaborated on this physical directory of the ‘poetic’ web – 700+ sites submitted by people like YOU, with descriptions and urls, a physical snapshot of part of the vast, weird mess that is the web. This is very much an art project, but also a practical tool – there’s something lovely about the idea of using this as a boredom-killer or a way of learning more about the stranger corners of the internet, and I personally adore the idea of it as a partial cross-section of the near-infinite vastness of the digital reflection of ourselves. Curios is in it, obviously, but there are loads of other sites too, almost all of which will be better.
- Simpsons Magic 8ball: I am…slightly-baffled by this – I don’t really know why it exists, or indeed why the Simpsons clips it pulls in response to your questions are presented within an oldschool 3d representation of a television which also seems to be smoking (you sort of have to click the link to ‘get’ this, although I can’t promise that you will in fact ‘get’ it at all), but it’s VERY good at pulling clips that have at least a superficial link to your query, and if you’re a Simpsons aficionado I get the feeling you will be tickled by the deep cuts it draws from in the archive here.
- Are You In Love?: Carve your initials into a virtual tree, just like you’re a lovesick teenager at any point in pre-digital human history! There’s space for 333 pairs of initials on this site and at the time of writing 155 have been filled, so if YOU want to secretly declare your love for me via the medium of anonymously scrawling our initials on a webpage then, well, HURRY THE FCUK UP PLEASE. Also, you don’t have to declare your love for *me*, to be clear, you can declare it for anyone you like, I really will never know.
- Closure: Another week, another AI usecase which you will probably look at and softly mutter ‘oh, no’ under your breath. I think we can all agree that having someone disappear or withdraw from your life unexpectedly and unilaterally is a painful experience; I think we can also all agree that it’s probably not the MOST healthy response to that to spin up an imaginary version of said person so that you can harangue and berate a virtual representation of them for their decision. AND YET HERE WE ARE! Closure is a service which pitches itself as being aimed at ‘people who have been ghosted’ by friends, lovers and, er, people you went on a date with, once, and which lets you describe said individual, provide background and then engage in imagined roleplay with an avatar of that person to, presumably, provide you with the titular ‘;closure’ you need. WILL THIS WORK? WILL IT? Or will it simply provide people already struggling to let go with a convenient emotional permalink to the one-way object of their affections, thereby maintaining and strengthening the obsession? Will it, do we think, let people slowly and gently decouple themselves from an imagined bond, or do we think that some people will just use this to attempt to GET THE LOVED ONE BACK and then take these strategies into the real world with them? Do we think this is going to be healthy for all the mentally vulnerable people who are exactly the most likely to find this sort of sh1t appealing? I DON’T KNOW WHAT DO YOU THINK?
- LEGOGpt: An academic paper detailing AI-based research that I think we can all agree is Probably Ok – using an LLM to design objects in LEGO bricks! “We introduce LegoGPT, the first approach for generating physically stable LEGO brick models from text prompts. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions, and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction…Our experiments show that LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing LEGO designs that align closely with the input text prompts. We also develop a text-based LEGO texturing method to generate colored and textured designs. We show that our designs can be assembled manually by humans and automatically by robotic arms. We also release our new dataset, StableText2Lego, containing over 47,000 LEGO structures of over 28,000 unique 3D objects accompanied by detailed captions, along with our code and models.” I showed this to someone I know who works at LEGO, whose response was something amused involving their legal team, so perhaps don’t expect to see this in the wild anytime soon, but it’s an interesting usecase for the tech if nothing else (LEGO YOU JOYLESS FCUKS).
- Unparalleled Misalignments: Oh what a WONDERFUL, silly, pointless, brilliant webproject this is! Maintained by one Rick Heicklen, “this is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other.” So, for example, “booty call” and “butt dial”, “picture frame” and “movie setting” and, look, I appreciate that not all of you will necessarily share my enthusiasm here, but if you’re someone who loves the English language and wordplay or cryptic crosswords or anything of that ilk then this will likely scratch a particular part of your brain very pleasingly indeed.
- Possibly The Best Copy Ever: Vertu is a very weird company; founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia people AGES ago, it’s been flogging insanely-overpriced bespoke Android handsets to very, very rich idiots for years – I have met a few people who’ve owned these and, trust me, they are EXACTLY the sorts of people who you would imagine to drop £6k on what is basically a Samsung with knobs on – but it’s a company that, unless you’ve ever done work around a certain type of HNW or in the mobile market, you won’t necessarily be aware of. Which means you might not be familiar with its…particular approach to marketing, which involves, honestly, some of the most incredible copywriting I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, click this link and MARVEL AT THE GLORY OF THE PROSE – I mean, listen to this: “Savor the definitive snap of closure, echoing the ominous sound of a bullet being chambered – each click an unbroken promise and precise as a mafia pact sealed in silence, a testimony to deadly whispered promises.” ISN’T IT AMAZING?! It is ALL like this – it uses the word ‘doth’ to a degree that I am slightly in awe of, it describes the phone in question as ‘ALL FOR MAN’, it includes baffling phrases such as “Armed with a primary lens of 50 million pixels and a 2M wide-angle co-sta, the world unveils its form, with nothing being able to conceal itself from the eyes of the hero”, it occasionally veers into what I presume unintentional verse (“Fear not of leaks or spills, solid as a rock standing still”…the whole thing is absolutely wonderful and it may be the best link in here this week. I was, though, slightly astonished by the number of people dismissing the copy as ‘AI slop’ – er, have you *used* AI recently? This level of bad is exclusively the preserve of us meatsacks, I am sorry to have to tell you.
By Tao Siqi
THE SECTION WHICH LEARNED THIS WEEK THAT APPARENTLY THE JAPANESE PHRASE “IT RAINED ON ME” CONTAINS THE IMPLIED ADDITIONAL INFORMATION “AND I SUFFERED AS A RESULT”, WHICH MADE ME SO HAPPY I CAN BARELY EXPRESS IT, PT.2:
- Mutual: Those of you of a certain vint…oh, who am I kidding? There is literally no fcuker under 40 who reads this sh1t, is there? Although actually I did get an email earlier this year from a French guy in his 20s who inexplicably subs to Curios, so consider this explanation for YOU, anomalously-young gallic friend! Anyway, as I was saying, BACK IN THE DAY of the early Facebook boom, when the company hadn’t yet decided to lock down the friends graph and prevent people from building fun, creative and occasionally-hugely-inappropriate apps on top of its base infrastructure, there were a spate of plugins for your FB profile which promised to let you quickly and discreetly discover which of your newly-minted digital friends might be willing to swap bodily fluids with you should the occasion arise – AND NOW YOU CAN DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Mutual is a ‘dating app’ which promises to connect you to anyone in your phonebook who might potentially be willing to get naked with you – you tell the app who in your contacts you want to proposition, they get an anonymous text asking the to pick someone from THEIR contacts that they would like to be propositioned by, and if you match then you both get told and, presumably, instructed to get a room asap. This feels…low-stakes, but also vanishingly unlikely to work – still, should you have a shot you want to shoot but lack the conviction to well, shoot it, perhaps this will help (it won’t help)!
- Tractor Beam: ANOTHER NEW MAGAZINE! This one is all about HOPEFUL SCIFI FUTURES and related issues – “Tractor Beam is a quarterly fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical visions of hopeful futures built from the ground up. Our stories explore audacious and provocative ideas around farming, food, earth science, and beyond, reimagining how humans can live more harmoniously with nature…Released with the changing seasons (not unlike the Almanacs of old), each quarterly issue of Tractor Beam will explore what it would look like if soil and earth were foundational technologies of our collective future. From food systems to DIY architecture, regenerative agriculture to microbiology and material science, our stories will draw inspiration from our planet’s enduring power and potential. Our first issue is “Generation,” a nod to renewal, possibility, and new beginnings. It’s about the seeds of new ideas and the literal seeds from which our food, habitats, and livelihoods grow. It’s also about looking back to remember, honor, and build from knowledge that has stood the test of time.” I haven’t done more than scratch the surface of this because, look, I HAVE A LOT TO READ AND TIME IS FINITE, but this feels very much like something which might be up some of your collective streets.
- Aurascope: Do you feel like standard aesthetic parameters like ‘composition’ and ‘lighting’ and ‘use of colour’ and ‘what the photo is of’ are fundamentally limiting to your creative vision? Do you find that you tend to appreciate shots more in terms of VIBE than anything else? Would you like to have every single photo you take assessed based on largely-mysterious criteria by The Machine? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Aurascope is a BRAND NEW photo app-slash-social network which has a singular gimmick – all the photos you post to it are given an AURA SCORE by the software. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT SCORE YOUR PICTURES BASED A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT AND SLIGHTLY-MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS! “Aurascope blends photography, AI, and emotional intelligence into one game-like experience. You can think of it as part vibe tracker, part real-world exploration game. Like if BeReal met Co–Star, with a little Pokémon Go and Lensa AI energy. Take a quick selfie, snap your coffee, or capture the vibe of your bedroom. Every photo is analyzed across layers of metadata—from lighting and symmetry to subtle emotional signals—and turned into a score. The clearer and more intentional your photo, the deeper the feedback. You’ll be surprised how fast it becomes second nature. Especially when you scan your friends and they try to game their aura score with a big pose or goofy smile. Aurascope gamifies the photos you’re already taking. You’re not just capturing moments—you’re learning from them.” I feel like I really ought to hate this much more than I actually do.
- Yuka: I’ve seen this around a LOT in the past few weeks, and, to me at least, it ties into the growing trend for THE NEW SKINNY and the exciting new variations on the oldschool hobby of ‘massively disordered eating’ which we as a society appear to be brining back into the normalised mainstream. Part of the panicky fad about Ultra-Processed Foods – a category that makes less and less coherent sense the more and closer you look at it, but whose inherent bollockiness hasn’t prevented a bunch of people grifting their way to fame and fortune off the back of it, so well done them! – Yuka is an app which basically lets you snap the ingredients label of any product you like and get an instant readout of all of the BAD THINGS that the product contains, along with suggestions of, where appropriate, healthier alternatives. Which, I appreciate, doesn’t sound bad per se, but then you get into some of the nitty gritty of this stuff and start to see things about carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and I start to get all sorts of alarm bells going off in my head about the blunt tool nature of this sort of thing and the way in which this sort of stuff very much works to normalise and legitimise all sorts of faddy and not-necessarily-strictly-accurate health beliefs…look, I am old enough to remember the period in which there was a huge moral panic about the fact that artificial sweeteners were carcinogenic because they had been found to cause tumours in lab rats…which lab rats had, it turned out if you looked at the studies in question been force-fed five times their own fcuking bodyweight in aspartame, which, honestly, if you eat five times your own bodyweight of ANYTHING, even broccoli, it’s unlikely to have a positive effect on your overall health status. Anyway, look, if you want to exercise more granular control over what you put into your body and if you’re the sort of person who already peruses the labels of everything you buy then maybe this will be really useful to you, but, well, I HAVE MY PERSONAL DOUBTS.
- The Leveson Project: Well this is one of the oddest photo art projects I have seen in…some years. For those of you not aware, the Leveson Inquiry was a UK Parliamentary investigation into the ‘ethics’ (LOL!) of the British press, which uncovered the phonehacking scandal and…actually, it’s had a pretty negligible impact on the actual practice of journalism in the UK if I’m honest, and Piers Morgan didn’t go to jail, so, really, what was the point? Although at least it resulted in this series of images by photographer Jennifer Forward-Hayter, in which she, er, recreates every single testimony given during the enquiry, with herself playing the role of every witness. Honestly, this is VERY STRANGE, and also very funny indeed. “What did the Leveson Inquiry give to visual culture; A study in 2 modules. This was the last time the photographic industry was on the national stage – a criminal review of the practises of the press. Currently it is the 10 year anniversary. I was 11 years old when the inquiry started. I wanted to be a photographer, but I only knew the word ‘paparazzi’. This first module is reviewing the spectacle of trial, and the resulting archive of British media in the early 2000s, through a painstaking recreation of all 324 live testimonies. The real Leveson Inquiry cost £5,442,400. It cost just over £500 to recreate. Out of 324 testimonies, there are 10 Davids, and 14 Johns. There are 15 Lords. Only 3 ties were used across all costumes (and a special one for Jon Snow). Piers Morgan’s office was rebuilt in a homeless shelter.” There is a lot to love about this.
- Neighbours In Numbers: COUNTRY DATA FUN! “This website helps you learn about our world, its scale and proportions in 9 different maps. Click through them to learn more about how your and other countries compare.” This is a really rather cool set of visualisations of population and other data, mapped using the Mercator projection scale onto the world map so you can easily see likely changes in migration, carbon emissions and the like projected over the coming years.
- 10,000 Drum Machines: Ok, not 10,000, or at least not 10,000 YET – there are 11 on here, so there’s some way to go before the promise is fulfilled, but Maxwell Neely-Cohen whose project this is is hopeful that you can help him reach his goal. “Back in 2019, I sketched out designs for a couple of web-based drum machines. I didn’t actually code them until 2025 and then thought, ok, that was fun, I should make more. Why 10,000? I don’t know. I was trying to come up with a name for a collection of drum machines and “10,000 DRUM MACHINES” was all that came to mind. I probably won’t ever reach that lofty number (a life expectancy assumption of 75 years only gives me 13,166 days left), but maybe we can get closer if you help!” You can play with the drum machines already submitted or get in touch with Max to add your own and contribute to this, er, COLLECTIVE CELEBRATION OF RHYTHM!
- Sowing: OH I LOVE THIS! Via Kris, I don’t have the faintest fcuking clue what it is or why it exists, mind, but it makes me very happy. You need to turn the volume up for this, as the sound effects / vocal samples are a significant part of the joy; click the screen and watch as new, er, small, plant-ish icons appear onscreen accompanied by tiny voices saying things like ‘I am thriving’ in a variety of international accents and, I think, languages. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN THOUGH? Do not question, only enjoy.
- Asciizify: Asciify your images! Which in itself isn’t a new thing and is very much something you will have seen in Curios before, but this is a particularly nice version of the schtick – I like the fact you can alternate between colours and patterns as well as the more traditional minimal ASCII style, and there’s something quite cool about the aesthetic here which can look quite a lot like a sort of weird LEGO-ish topography (if that makes sense) (which isn’t a given tbh).
- Bored Spreadsheet: Back in the day – and when I say this I mean REALLY back in the day, before even someone as Methusalan as I became computersick – videogames used to come equipped with something called a ‘boss key’, a keyboard shortcut which, when activated, would immediately swap the onscreen game for a simulacrum of popular business software, a spreadsheet or a word document or something similarly bland-looking, designed to mask your indolence from said ‘boss’ should you be having the temerity to play at work. It’s unlikely that these things ever fooled anyone, and frankly they were more running gag than useful workaround, but this set of webgames, all designed to look as though they’re running in a spreadsheet, is a callback to that era. Do YOU want to play a variety of knockoff versions of titles like Minesweeper, 2048, Solitaire and the like, except graphically minimalist and, honestly, not quite as good? Do you want to do so in a medium that would struggle to fool even the most stupid of paymasters? I mean, no, probably not, but here I present them to you anyway.
- Some Great Animations: This is a YouTube playlist of animations “made by BFA1 through BFA4 students in the Character Animation Program at CalArts, in 2025” – there are 77 and obviously I have only watched a handful, but the ones I have watched are honestly wonderful – charming and funny and inventive and visually-dazzling, and you could do worse than start your journey here, with this joyful short called ‘Leftover Pasta’ (honestly, it really is ace).
- The Morrison Hotel Gallery: This is amazing – if you’re into music photography then you will love the pictures on display on the website of the physical Morrison Hotel Gallery. “Representing over 125 of the most highly acclaimed music photographers – those who made, and continue to make, an indelible mark on music culture with photographic portrayals of the industry’s most influential artists.” This is a commercial gallery and so it’s primarily a shopfront – that said, if you don’t have a spare few hundred quid to drop on ICONIC (sorry) photos of rock gods and goddesses then there are also a bunch of curated galleries of shots from their collection – I am a particular fan of this image of Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash putting on rollerboots, but you will have your own favourites.
- The Random Wedding Finder: This is GREAT – via B3ta, this a website which exists solely to help you find wedding websites created by strangers for their nuptials. Click the button and it searches the web for a pair of names to see if there’s a website corresponding to them, which is how I just discovered Alex and Brianna got married last April and have a website celebrating their union, and Danielle and Blake tied the knot in October…on the one hand this is, admittedly, WEIRD AND VOYEURISTIC, but also it’s very cute indeed and made me oddly happy, and I say that as someone who has ruined more marriages (one) than they are ever going to personally experience, so.
- Little Language Lessons: There are many reasons I don’t fcuk with Duolingo, the main one being their fcuking marketing and that fcuking owl, but those friends of mine who do seem to be largely of the opinion that the platform is vastly better at making you using Duolingo than it is at helping you learn a language. Google is experimenting with AI to develop language learning tools, and these are some games they’ve put in their Language Lab to let you see whether The Machine can help you Speak Foreign – you’ll have to VPN yourself into the US to use it, but if you do then you’ll see that there are a variety of different toys here that help you experience slang, get contextual examples of language use around specific topics and which, based on my admittedly-cursory examination of How It Works, looks like it might be halfway-useful. Give it a go, see what you think.
- Buzzled: This is basically a bit like Sudoku, which means that is not really my thing AT ALL, but should you be in the market for a puzzler which requires you to basically work out which number goes where (ok, it’s a little moe involved than that, but not really) then you might enjoy this. Me, it makes my face ache something chronic.
- Talldle: Wordle, but for celebrity heights – arrange the famous from least-to-most-stumpy (they are all stumpy; how do you think they fit onscreen?). To be honest this requires you to have a significantly better celebrity radar than I do – WHO THE FCUK ARE THESE PEOPLE?!?!?! – but you may derive some small quotidian joy from learning that Sydney Sweeney is taller than Eddie Murphy.
- Be A Fly: A game in which you are a fly, and you have to collect things from various foodstuffs while avoiding the, er, bullets, and avoiding being chomped by the gigantic maw of the gigantic (or at least relatively-gigantic) human, all in 3d – this is a good, clean five minutes of fun (and who doesn’t want to be a fly? NO FCUKER, etc).
- Little Dig: An EXCELLENT little clicker game which has GRAPHICS and which doesn’t outstay its welcome, and whose paper-thin plot is surprisingly amusing and which contains some actually-not-unfunny writing, and which has some of the most satisfyingly-crunchy sound effects I have ever heard in a free-to-play browsergame.
- Lost For Swords: Finally this week, you can lose an hour or so to this – a deckbuilding roguelike puzzlegame thing in which you play as a selection of RPG-trope characters attempting to clear the various levels of various towers of monsters; this is about planning and resource management and careful weighing of costs and benefits and it’s FAR better than a free title need be, and I think you’ll enjoy it.
By Drew Vickers
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Overlook Hotel: A Tumblr celebrating the aesthetic of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, from the carpet to…well, EVERYTHING. This is a great collection of photos, memorabilia and WEIRD EPHEMERA inspired by the film, and is a rather wonderful trove for anyone with a soft spot for Jack Nicholson terrorising his family with an axe.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Wikihow: Wikihow has long been making hay with the…idiosyncratic nature of its how-to guides and their accompanying illustrations, but the company’s official Insta really leans hard into that; with this feed you just get the good stuff, the mad article headlines and the illustrations, meaning the grid here is all things like “how to breathe while kissing” and “what are dead eyes and why do people have them?”. What’s interesting from viewing the content from this angle is how much of it is obviously aimed at kids feeling insecure and confused – which, it feels like, is a market that is absolutely going to be eaten by LLMs. Enjoy WikiHow while you can, basically, is my takeaway here. Also, LOVE the fact that one of the ‘how to’ guides here is ‘how to fake your own death’, JUST IN CASE.
- Mohawk Mania Bob: Apologies if Bob is very famous to you, but I only learned about him this week – do you have something to advertise? For what I presume are COMPETITIVE RATES, Bob will, er, bleach the name of your product or service into his mohawk and post the results on his Insta. If someone wants to pay him to promote Curios then, well, I am not going to say no. Also, how much would you give to see a photo of Bob and his hair straight out of the shower? I imagine it looks SPECTACULAR.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- One Of The Good Ones: This isn’t technically particularly long – SORRY – but I thought it was a heartfelt, personal response to this week’s announcement by the UK government that they were, in response to the recent local election results, going turn the racism dial until the clapping intensified; Adrian Hon writes on his blog about the reality of the policy announcement, why it doesn’t make practical sense, and the fundamentally racist underpinnings of it and the way in which it reinforces differential narratives of ‘good’ immigrants based, fundamentally, on issues related to skintone and religion. It’s interesting as the child of an immigrant to the UK myself – but a conveniently-Aryan looking child – that I haven’t ever had to answer any questions about my heritage and my belonging to this country simply by dint of my being a shade that passes for native, and anyone who doesn’t see what is at play here, what the subtext of a lot of this conversation is for a lot of the population, is either stupid or wilfully ignorant.
- Things Can’t Only Get Better: Sticking with the parochial – sorry, non-Anglo readers, we will move onto WIDER CONCERNS soon, I promise – this is another good piece, this time by Jon Elledge, about the wider questions around the immigration policy announcement and what a colossal and baffling electoral misstep it appears to be from a Labour government whose sole apparent political strategy seems to be ‘mimic the policies of parties whose voterbase would never contemplate supporting us even if we went full fash’. Elledge makes the point that even if you’re not appalled by the rhetoric and the tone of the announcement and the subsequent media briefings, it’s just p1ss-poor party politics – back in the day, a political theorist called Otto Kirchheimer argued that the political strategy which made the greatest electoral sense, in the main, was to attempt to capture the widest swathe of the centre-ground as possible in order to maximise the size of your potential voterbase (maths! bell-curves!), something which appears to have been entirely-superseded by the alternative strategy of ‘let’s pander to what the wingnut press say and not even attempt to have any sort of debate about whether or not we should just let said press shift the overton window somewhere to the right of Viktor Orban’. As Jon writes, “But even if we leave aside both economic reality and basic human decency, which we shouldn’t, a set of policies that raise the salience of the issue while not actually addressing it seems all but guaranteed to piss everybody off at once. Telling people that immigration was the most important issue while simultaneously failing to reduce it is one of the many reasons the Tories lost. Repeating that trick, with Nigel Farage waiting in the wings – and making clear your own voters can f*ck off while you do so – goes beyond incompetence and into negligence.”
- Labour At The Cliff Edge: Last UK politics link, promise, but this is James Butler on typically good form in the LRB; this was written after the local election results but before the immigration announcement, but is not less accurate for that. Butler looks at the electoral picture following the locals, what they might mean for the future political landscape of the UK, and paints a picture of the sad inevitability of the redrawing of the map with, yet again, this fcuking cnut at its centre: “Most of the media-political nexus is perfectly comfortable with the rise of a populist right party led by Nigel Farage. He, and, occasionally, other Reform politicians, can always be booked to say something outrageous. The right can claim an electoral warrant for intensifying its favourite prejudices: against ‘woke’ officials – however fictive – and against migrants, multiculturalism or simply modernity in all its forms. The liberal left can chastise itself for having beliefs, and try to disown them. The socialist left can declare itself analytically correct, to compensate for its political irrelevance. In declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’, Farage is only formalising his outsize influence on British politics over the last two decades.” Can we all agree the world would be a better place if that planecrash had been a *little* bit more explosive? We can, can’t we?
- Ghosts and Dolls: Ok, this is LONG and QUITE KNOTTY and not exactly a totally easy read, but if that’s not been enough to put you off (I’m available for all your salesy, copywriting needs!) then please do take the time to get into this one, all about the question of whether there is some inherent quality to LLM-produced writing which renders it innately inferior to human-produced writing *regardless of content* – this isn’t about whether LLM-generated writing is any *good* (it’s not) so much as whether it makes intellectual sense to dismiss all LLM-generated writing out of hand, a priori (it doesn’t). This is probably easier if you have a bit of grounding in philosophy, but there’s a real joy (or at least there was for me) in the way in which Paul Griffiths works through the reasoning here, and I very much enjoyed the questions around ‘meaning’ in writing and where said ‘meaning’ is derived from, and the links between ‘thought’ and ‘language’. Honestly, this is worth wrestling with, I promise, even if it does use the word ‘Wittgenstinian’ more often that you might be strictly comfortable with.
- How Journalists Are Using AI: A really interesting piece in the Columbia Journalism Review which speaks to journalists across a wide range of publications and sectors to ask them how – if it all – they are using The Machine in their practice, what for and how frequently and How It Feels and all that jazz. There are a VERY wide range of perspectives on show here, from straight-up refuseniks to people leaning in VERY HARD to the new tech, and, regardless of your personal opinion and perspective, it’s fascinating to see the different approaches at play. Personally-speaking I found myself most in sympathy with this quote from Jason Koebler at 404 Media: “We’re not burying our heads in the sand. We use AI tools every day to understand how they work, their limitations, and, most importantly, how they are being leveraged to become the dominant type of content on the internet. Because we do this, we have some of the leading coverage of generative AI on the internet. AI isn’t going away, and I could imagine using it in the future if it becomes more trustworthy and perhaps if the companies pushing it find more ethical business models. I have experimented with using AI to write complex Freedom of Information Act requests and FOIA appeals and to parse large documents, though I haven’t been impressed with the results. I passively use forms of AI to help transcribe interviews, get the gist of YouTube videos in foreign languages, and edit short-form videos and podcasts. Language translation and transcription feel like true game changers, while other AI tools feel like spam machines. I’ll use AI to help find new information, but not to write my words.”
- It’s Not Just The Students Using The Machine: After last week’s ‘the students are being ruined by LLMs’ panicpiece, the students fight back with this NYT article detailing how many of them are apparently disgusted by their professors’ parallel use of The Machine in setting and grading assignments; in particular there are some fairly remarkable examples of teachers using The Machine to generate classroom materials, or plugging a grading scheme into an LLM and then using it to mark all their students’ work which…I don’t know, man, feels like something of an abnegation of responsibility to me: “Last fall, Marie, 22, wrote a three-page essay for an online anthropology course at Southern New Hampshire University. She looked for her grade on the school’s online platform, and was happy to have received an A. But in a section for comments, her professor had accidentally posted a back-and-forth with ChatGPT. It included the grading rubric the professor had asked the chatbot to use and a request for some “really nice feedback” to give Marie.”
- Turns Our Pr0nHub Is Not A Nice Company: I KNOW RIGHT WHODATHINKIT??? This is a good piece of journalism in the NYT which takes a look at some of the internal processes and practices which the world’s preferred bongo platform employed, as revealed in internal memos which have come to light through court proceedings in the US. Specifically it makes it clear that the company has never been under any illusions about the quantity of…not-ok material filling up its sites, and the amount of CSAM or nonconsensual sex featured, or the ease with which users can not only search for such content but also get said content suggested to them via algorecommendations. I mean, look, I am not here to judge you for whatever you might be into, but it’s quite hard to read the following and think “Yes! This is exactly the approach we ought to be taking to bongo!” – “Pornhub executives clearly had some concern about illegal content, such as sex videos involving people who were 17 or younger, and the internal memos document efforts to remove the most obvious child videos (one staff member said “obvious” problems would be a “3-year-old”). But my impression is that Pornhub managers felt conflicted, because they closely tracked the popularity of topics and saw that videos of naked teenagers were a huge draw. The term “teen” sometimes ranked as high as second in search on Pornhub (“lesbian” then ranked No. 1). It’s true, of course, that “teen” can refer to an 18- or 19-year-old adult. But another internal Pornhub message observed that the website didn’t block “very young teen.” And note that children cannot legally consent, nor can parents consent on their behalf; underage sex videos are rape videos. The memos emerging in discovery show Pornhub wrestling with what to ban without losing too much popular content. In one set of messages, executives discuss whether to ban the use of the phrases “young girl,” “first anal crying” and “abused by daddy.” In the end, they decide that those terms are acceptable.”
- Being A Normie Is Good Actually: I’m including this because, look, I know some of you are strategists and times are hard out there and so here’s something you can hang a spurious ‘deck’ (STOP IT) on should you so desire, but also because it struck me as sort-of funny that it takes the author over 1000 words to come to the conclusion that, basically, being in the middle of the bellcurve is actually quite comforting and safe and nice. I read this and all I could think of was John Stuart Mill’s assertion that “it is better to be a man dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” and how I knew the first time I heard it that JSM was full of sh1t and, honestly, I stand by that. “Michael O’Hara, a fashion photographer in New York, swears the basics “have more fun”. “In New York City, there’s a huge group of people in the same line of work as me that thrive on exclusivity,” he says. “Sometimes, I just want to let loose, and normies are more interested in having fun and being carefree.” It brings to mind the age-old fashion girlfriend, finance boyfriend stereotype, or as O’Hara calls it, “left-brained” and “right-brained” people. “I love my basic friend groups because you don’t need to take an hour to get ready, we aren’t on any list, money is not an issue, they don’t judge you for what you’re wearing and everyone has happy and positive energy,” he says.” For some reason I can’t help but have a mental image of the Voros twins as I read this piece.
- Would The Tech Founders Just Fcuk Off Please?: Or “That profile of the Airbnb CEO where you can just SMELL the gaksweat dripping off him”. So you may have read that Airbnb is PIVOTING to become, er, some sort of weird lifestyle mishmash app, combining EXPERIENCES and SERVICES with the apartment-rental baseline service that has made the company rich. Why? I DON’T KNOW BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE CAN NEVER JUST BE FCUKING HAPPY BEING REALLY FCUKING RICH OR SOMETHING. Seriously, I don’t personally give two flying fcuks about Airbnb as a business, or its model or whether it succeeds or fails, but I will never, ever tire of reading profiles of them in which it is very clear that they are mad or on drugs or both, particular when the author is as…aware of what they are writing as they are in this case. “In early April, I visited Chesky at the company’s lavish San Francisco headquarters. The relaunch was five weeks away. The second floor—where signs warn employees not to bring visitors—had become a sprawling eyes-only command center. The walls were covered with dozens of large poster boards, each one featuring a city, that read as if a group of McKinsey consultants had tackled a fourth-grade geography assignment. Austin, Texas, was written up as “a funky come-as-you-are kind of place” with a handful of “first principles,” one of which was “Outlaw of Texas,” with pointers to food trucks and vintage markets. Another so-called principle was “Live and Alive,” referring to music venues and bat watching; a third was “Dam Lakes,” referring to various water sports. Other blindingly obvious notations included barbeque, tacos, and the two-step. The Paris poster painted a “revolutionary” city marked by slow living and enduring culture.”
- How Videogame Sex Scenes Are Made: A properly-fascinating look at the business of creating intimate moments in videogames, featuring in-depth discussions with the teams behind Baldur’s Gate 3 (one of the horniest mainstream games in recent memory, and probably the only one I can think of which features a relatively-explicit interspecies coupling) and Cyberpunk 2077 (also horny, although more traditionally so – although it did, famously, feature an entirely-otiose feature which allowed anyone selecting a male-presenting protagonist to select from one of three preset dong sizes, a choice which had the sum total of zero impact on the rest of the game) from the designers to the actors to the intimacy coordinators; this is a great look at the why, as well as the how, of fcuking in videogames, and contains a wonderful quote from one of the actors and foley artists involved in crafting the gasps and slaps and squelches accompanying the in-engine fcuking: ““I made sounds like mmm and ahhh, and then I kissed my hand a whole lot. You think about that. You mull that over as you run around, you little horny perverts with your little perverted roleplays. You randy b4stards. You think of me.”
- The Curry Awards: A great piece in Vittles about the UK’s various curry awards, of which there seem to be a near-infinite number, and the rivalries and…somewhat-dodgy dealings that lie behind them. This isn’t, of course, unique to the Indian food sector – if you walk around the West End and pay attention to a lot of…not-particularly-prepossessing establishments, you’ll see that many of their windows are emblazoned with stickers suggesting they have ‘won’ various ‘restaurant awards’ of varying degrees of credibility (these aren’t the Michelins, is what I’m saying), not to mention the OH SO CREDIBLE world of PR awards ceremonies, where there is a longstanding and well-established understanding that your likelihood of winning one of the three million awards presented at the PR Moment bash is directly tied to the number of seats you purchase for the ceremony. Basically almost all awards ceremonies are FCUKING CROOKED and the curry awards are no exception – this makes for a very entertaining read.
- The London Pedicab Market: More excellent London-centric journalism by Jim Waterson in, er, LondonCentric – here he looks at the pedicab business, something which from the outside I have always looked at and thought ‘this has to be criminal’ (and also ‘who the actual fcuk is paying to be inched around the capital while Sabrina Carpenter perforates their eardrums at c.120db?’) and which I am pleased to report based on this article seemingly mostly is. Also, though, let me confess that I read things like this and feel no fcuking sympathy whatsoever for the people getting ripped off here because, honestly, what the fcuk is wrong with them? “TikTok and Instagram are full of videos of tourists being ripped off by pedicab drivers, from a group of American women being charged £200 for a five minute journey in Mayfair, despite the driver’s initial promise that the journey would cost under £80, to a pedicab driver telling a man that the fare would be £5 per minute, totalling more than £200. In a 2023 complaint to TfL, one pedicab customer said they were “swindled” with an extortionate £1,278.96 fare from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. Other complaints described fares that were ten times what drivers claimed – £336 instead of £36.60, or £94.40 instead of £9.40 – with passengers only realising when they checked their bank statements after paying.” I mean, lol, honestly.
- Staying Up All Night on 3-MMC: I remember one of the first times I started to feel REALLY old was when I was out one night and realised that people around me were talking about and taking a drug I had genuinely never heard of before (2cb, in case you were curious) – I have long since ceased caring about keeping up with whatever The Kids choose to put inside themselves, having in middle-age recently rediscovered with a degree of childlike joy just how fcuking GREAT high-quality amphetamines can be (for avoidance of doubt, Web Curios is always penned sober, much as the prose might give a…different impression), but I enjoyed this look at what is apparently the NEW CLUB DRUG TAKING BERLIN BY STORM. In particular I enjoyed the nostalgic look back at The Summer Of MiaowMiaow, a drug which I still remember very fondly indeed, which fondness I now realise might have had something to do with its purity tipping 97% back in the day (the night it was made illegal in the UK, one of my then-girlfriend’s mates had a massive attack of paranoia and gave us…quite a lot of it, my god that was a good weekend).
- Walking: Over the years I have at various stages recommended the epistolary walking journals of American-inJapan Crain Mod to you – he’s got a new book out which is all about walking and writing and What He Has Learned from his punishing days-long walk-and-talkathons, and this piece is a little overview of his…what, his ‘walking philosophy’? Ordinarily a phrase like that would cause me to have an unpleasantly-emetic moment, but on this occasion I will forgive it because I love the way Craig writes and his enthusiasm and curiosity is, I think, quite magical – it’s impossible to read this and not want to go out and just walk and look and watch and think, honestly, and as soon as I have finished writing this crap I am going for a long wander.
- The Lisbon Illusion: Marco Roth writes in The Dispatch (a publication you may have to sign up to to access, but signup is entirely free and they don’t appear to have done anything awful with my email address so far) about being in Lisbon and community and place and the weird, dwindling feeling of being not-unlike the characters described here: “It’s different now in Lisbon, Fred says, an outlook shared by many overeducated and underemployed middle-aged men here. An Uber driver who’s listening to Philip Glass remarks that he’s given up on politics and political parties. He misses the politicians of the 1980s: “At least they were smart and had ideas.” The CGT too, Fred says, is stodgy and lacks imagination. The city is “dying of its own success”, according to a recent headline in Madrid’s El Pais. And Fred is in some ways the representative of many dashed hopes — a widely-travelled, still curious man who deals furniture, books and records but can no longer afford rent in the city he loves and whose past he has done much to preserve by selling it upstream to barbarians like me.” I thought this was a lovely piece of writing.
- Yes: On the 30th anniversary of the absolute BANGER that is ‘Yes’ by McAlmont and Butler, Ian Wade writes about the song, its genesis, its reception and its legacy – obviously your interest in this is likely to be directly proportionate to how old you were when this came out, but, well, presuming you’re closer to death than birth then I reckon you will have your nostalgia glands firmly squeezed by this one. Also, it’s a great excuse to listen to the song again, which I suggest you do RIGHT NOW.
- Easter With Icke: My occasional obsession, David Icke, is still doing the rounds, still promoting his weird modern-day perversion of Gnosticism along with his grifty sons – except now even David Icke occasionally sounds…normal railing against Trump and other modern ills at the same time as telling us that, er, the lizards are in charge and it’s probably the fault of the Rothschilds BUT IT’S NOT ANTISEMITIC HONEST! This is an excellent account of a trip to the Ickean roadshow – not quite of the scale of the Wembley Arena show that sent me spinning out back in…Jesus Christ, some 12 years ago. This is, as with all Ickean material, interesting and funny and a bit worrying and deeply, deeply sad – also I really wasn’t expecting the former Man City footballer to make an appearance.
- To Catch A Hooligan: MORE great London reporting, this time from The Londoner, who sent Miles Ellingham (whose work I have really enjoyed over the past year and which I have featured in here a few times now) to hang out with the anti-hooligan police as they manage the firms at various matches around the capital. I remember the first time I want to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelse in…Jesus, maybe 1991, and seeing people literally standing on upturned soapboxes outside the ground handing out flyers for then-notorious neo-Nazi organisation Combat18 (never let it be said that Chelsea fans’ reputation for being fcuking awful hasn’t been fully-earned, and I say that as a Chelsea fan) – while the game’s certainly significantly less terrifyingly violent than it was three decades ago there are still people for whom the matches are a side order for the main course of A LOVELY RUCK. This is really nicely-written and paints a wonderfully-human picture of the officers – and the hoolies – involved.
- At Crufts: The London Review of Books sends Rosa Lyster to Crufts. Every single word of this is golden, and, honestly, I have no fcuking interest in dogs whatsoever (don’t look at me like that, they smell and I don’t want to have to deal with any other mammal’s faeces other than my own, and even that is reluctantly). This is SO GOOD: “If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International Freestyle, and you will find a Slovakian woman and a Border collie doing a frantic synchronised dance routine to a raunchy cover of ‘Hit the Road Jack’, the collie hopping on its hind legs for ten seconds and at certain points giving the strong impression that it understands the concept of dumping a useless man. Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers saying ‘bitch’ over and over: obedience bitch, limit bitch, postgraduate bitch, this magnificent young bitch from Venice, this famous bitch from America.”
- Pilgrimage: The final link this week isn’t to a single essay – instead, it’s to a blog being maintained by Jan Hopis (whose writing I have featured in here before) as he undertakes the Camino de Santiago – Jan’s writing is funny and personal and observational and I am very much enjoying accompanying him on his journey and I would highly recommend this to all of you because, basically, He Is Good At This.
By Mike Silva
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: