HAVE YOU SECURED YOUR ACCESS TO BONGO YET???
Yes, that’s right, today is ‘if you want to look at people fcuking on the internet from a UK IP address you need to prove you’re over 18, or alternatively use some very simple software to fool the pornographers into believing you’re actually browsing from Haiti’ day! How are YOU celebrating?
I spent a bit of time checking in on how X was doing with its obligation to ‘protect young minds’ from the terabytes of filth spaffed across every single corner of that benighted site and, well, let’s just say that I expect That Fcuking Man to be receiving a Strongly Worded Letter from Ofcom at some point in the not-too-distant (which, er, he will ignore! Because the regulator has no teeth in the face of plutocracy!).
Anyway, YOU don’t care about any of that because none of YOU are shameless disciples of onan – and, er, neither do I, because I’m not either. Glad we have that cleared up.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you probably wish I hadn’t let with an intro that was basically about w4nking and, if I’m honest, so do I at this point.
By Paul Davis
THE SECTION WHICH CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE NUMBERS NORDVPN IS DOING WITH UNDER-18s IN THE UK TODAY, PT.1:
- Draw A Fish: There aren’t, I don’t think, enough web experiences that afford one the opportunity to BECOME A GOD; I’m firmly of the belief that our online lives would be improved significantly if only more websites existed to allow us to explore the power fantasies denied us by the tedious, futile mundanity of corporeal existence (HI! HAPPY FRIDAY! I’M HERE FOR A GOOD AND UPLIFTING TIME!!!!). I can’t pretend that Draw A Fish will have you feeling *quite* like some sort of deity, but if you’ve ever thought ‘you know what? The creeping sense of existential dread I feel every morning upon opening my eyes and remembering who I am and what I am about to experience might be somewhat lessened by the illusory feeling of control over a small, unaware being which owed its existence entirely to my whims’ then a) I would strongly consider some sort of therapeutic intervention, that is not a normal thing to think or feel; and b) you might well enjoy Draw A Fish, you sick weirdo fcuk. Ahem. So, basically, this is a very simple fish simulator in which you create a digital piscine pal and drop it into a shared aquarium with everyone else’s fish to see how it fares – the twist, though, is that you create your fish by drawing it – there’s some sort of rudimentary image recognition going on whereby your design will be cross-referenced against some sort of platonic ideal of ‘what a fish is meant to look like’, and its swimming ability and survival prospects will be affected by how much it looks like, say, a tench vs looking like a pair of slightly-sodden pants. I LOVE MY MISSHAPEN AQUATIC SONS! Ok, this is pretty simple and there’s not a whole load of sophistication happening here, but I think there’s something really rather interesting in the base level idea, and it got me thinking how fun it might be were this to be extended slightly to animals beyond fish – wouldn’t it be fun to make something which takes the base premise and then affords people the ability to create an entire digital menagerie and ecosystem based solely on their doodles? YES IT WOULD BE FUN. Still, until someone builds that to my exacting specifications, I suggest you click the link and try and draw something toothy, terrifying and streamlined – you will inevitably end up creating something vaguely-goldfishlike, but it’s good to have aspirations, even at 710am.
- Emojitracker: A RESURRECTED WEBSITE! Emojitracker was a very web2.0 proposition developed WAAAAAY back in 2013 and scraping data from Twitter to populate its rankings of popular emoji use worldwide; obviously Twitter is now X and now useless, with its API access rendered prohibitively expensive and populated by nazis, scammers, pornographers and the genuinely mad, all presided over by that horrible racist apartheid toad, but, in a rare moment of positivity for 2025, Emojitracker is BACK! “Emojitracker is a tool tracking all the emojis copied from Emojipedia and GetEmoji in real time. The latest version of the Emojitracker shows the most popular 1,000 emojis both globally and across select countries”, explains the blurb – obviously the way they’re pulling data means it’s perhaps not *wholly* representative or accurate, but absent any sort of data from the big social platforms which would render this a little more statistically representative it’s not a terrible proxy, and there’s something undeniably-interesting about the ability to see which emoji are most popular and how that varies from country to country. At present the big red heart is leading the global rankings, with the green checkmark an inexplicable second, but I’m far more interested in the country-by-country variations in popularity; both the UK and US have the cry/laugh emoji in second place (the most basic of all the emoji, do not attempt to dispute this), while in India the heart/hands symbol has the country in a weird chokehold with the ‘bandaged heart’ symbol also showing up high in the rankings, a fact which has momentarily made me feel quite emo about everything. Special mention to the Brazilians, who, while also succumbing to the heart’s supremacy, have the oddly-sexy ‘biting lip’ emoji in second place which is exactly the sort of unbridled symbolic eroticism that you might hope for. Anyway, part of me thinks there’s something halfway-interesting you might be able to do with this from the point of view of FUN AND INTERESTING ANALYSIS or even some superficial brandw4nk, should any of you be interested in exploring this further (you won’t, though, will you? Lazy fcuks).
- Mirage: Ooh, this is fun – Mirage is basically an in-browser AI filter which takes your camera feed and adds a layer of GenAI sparkle to what it ‘sees’, turning you, variously, into a cartoon version of yourself, a Minecraft version of yourself, some sort of horrible parody of one of the characters in Frozen…basically it’s a tech demo for software which, the implication is, revolutionise SFX and the like by simply rendering in realtime, and it’s undeniably VERY impressive, even if I was deeply hurt and depressed by how OLD all the cartoon versions of me look (I AM NOT THAT WRINKLY EVEN IN REAL LIFE FFS, WHY DOES FROZEN MATT LOOK LIKE FCUKING METHUSELAH???). There’s quite a big (and…quite unpleasant) uncanny valley vibe to all this, with quite a few of the different filters making you (or at least me) look like the waxen-fleshed horrorshow mocaps of The Polar Express, but, equally, there’s something undeniably compelling about how it just…works, in your browser, without sending your laptop into an existential crisis, and I think a music video filmed like this might be fun in a low-budget, slightly-shonky sort of way. Give it a go, I promise you will be impressed – oh, and if you want to see something horrible, make a lot of exaggerated mouth movements and stick your tongue out, it goes VERY weird when trying to cope with rendering teeth and the rest, and you will be pleasantly-horrified by how unholy the results are.
- Dad Water: So this isn’t actually a particularly interesting link – it’s a website promoting a drinks brand, the site does the square root of fcuk all and it’s not even particularly nicely-designed. BUT! THE PRODUCT IS CALLED ‘DAD WATER’ FFS! WHO SIGNED THIS OFF? WHO DECIDED THAT ‘YES, WE WANT OUR REPELLENT-SOUNDING DRINK PRODUCT TO HAVE A NAME THAT SOUNDS LITERALLY LIKE OLD MAN P1SS’???? Seriously, is this a ‘lost in translation, two nations divided by a single language’ transatlantic misunderstanding thing? Can any North Americans reading this explain to me how you can read the brandname ‘Dad Water’ and not immediately think, just to reiterate, of DAD URINE??? Is it…is it a ‘me’ problem? I really hope it isn’t. Also, just as an additional kick in the ribs to one of the worst pieces of branding I have seen in a long, long time, the drinks sound DISGUSTING – it’s basically watery, flavoured ‘tequila drinks’, which are also uncarbonated, suggesting they will taste almost but not exactly like a cocktail overfilled with ice which has been left til its so dilute any suggestion of flavour is homeopathic at best. Oh, and possibly my favourite bit of this is that the various different flavour options have ACTUAL HUMAN NAMES? “What are the names?”, I hear you ask; well, they are “Tom, Steve, Rodney, and Gary” (ngl, I do actually rather love this – “pass me another can of Gary” is something I am slightly-sad I’m unlikely to ever be able to meaningfully say.
- Lovejack: How’s your personal search for love and companionship going? Have you managed to find another meaty sack of neuroses and anxiety with whom to stare into the looming, apocalyptic future? LUCKY YOU! For anyone, though, still struggling to find another human being with whom to share experiences and mucus with, and who’s simply exhausted an enervated by the “ROAST!” enthusiasts on Hinge, the sexual incontinents on Tinder or the normies cosplaying as fetishists on Feeld, there is an EXCITING NEW DATING PROPOSITION to momentarily raise your hopes before doubtless crushing them again a few days later. Lovejack is a dating app with a simple, singular gimmick – your profile is just five words, and a photo, and NO MORE. You can change those five words as often as you like, and there are daily prompts for inspiration, and you previous selections are available as a profile’s ‘history’, letting anyone theoretically interested in you check back through your previous five words to see whether you’ve said anything potentially-worrying like, I don’t know, “I Like Bleeding Dogs Dry”. Conversation is centred around these prompts, the idea being that you will ask people about the stories behind their slogans – but, as far as I can tell, messaging is limited to five words and you’re encouraged to voicenote people instead. I…I don’t hate this as a concept, I have to say – the idea of being forced into some sort ot verbal creativity appeals to me, though I have a vague sense that this will only really work for people who have a true Poster’s Soul and won’t really fly for normies; that said, if you’re the sort of person who can read “W4nk or cry? EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA!” and think “yes this is my soulmate” then this could be for YOU (no idea if this is available in the UK or not or indeed if more than approximately three people are using it, fyi, but, well, why not give it a go?).
- Tea: This, though, is a fcuking TERRIBLE idea which feels like a lawsuit (or worse) waiting to happen – the premise behind tea is, seemingly, “there are a lot of really bad men out there on dating apps; why don’t we create a women-only whisper network that will allow for the sharing of details and stories about said BAD MEN to protect women everywhere from being messed-with on the apps by these appalling actors?”, and, honestly, if you can’t immediately understand why that is a genuinely-awful idea then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with you you moron. Would YOU like there to exist an app where anyone can go and tell the world you’re a heel, a d1ck, a bore, a dullard or significantly worse, seemingly with impunity, and have that information attached to you for evermore? I posit that you would in fact not, but, well, here we are! Obviously I am a man and I get that my experience of navigating the world and dealing with threats, etc, is significantly different to that experienced by women, but, equally, this sounds like an all-round Bad Idea: “Already swiping for dates on Tinder, Bumble, Match, or Hinge? Tea is a must-have app, helping women avoid red flags before the first date with dating advice, and showing them who’s really behind the profile of the person they’re dating. Users can access a nationwide forum of posts and can set alerts for a man’s name so you never miss any tea about your potential date, ex, or partner, and so you can make sure they are not a cheater. Users can anonymously ask for dating and relationship advice to find support and empowerment from our community of verified women.” US-only, as far as I can tell, and hopefully something that will be consigned to the dustbin of history very soon.
- Tender: This, though, this I like – a single-note gag, but a REALLY NICE ONE. Tender is an app – iOS only – which works like a dating app except instead of being fed a series of pictures of potential new partners, it instead only serves you images of YOUR beloved, and only lets you swipe right; basically it’s nothing more than a photo carousel of someone you care for, but, well, it’s a cute idea, and it plays pleasingly with the very online concept of the WIFE GUY in a manner I find pleasing. WELL DONE, anonymous internet stranger who created this, for making something genuinely nice!
- Google Without AI: This might be worth bookmarking should you be getting sick of the increasingly-ubiquitous AI summaries infecting every corner of the Google experience; this is basically a layer atop Google search which adds a string to all your queries meaning that all the AI summary cruft is stripped out, along with sponsored links, and you in theory get the PURE SEARCH EXPERIENCE. This…just works, and while it’s not super-exciting it’s not a bad idea to pin it somewhere as the base version of Google becomes ever more useless; you can also pretend that you’re doing something to prevent the traffic apocalypse that’s going to see 75% of the web disappear as traffic, and therefore revenue, falls off a cliff (you’re not, though, you’re just sitting, Cnutlike, as the digital waters lap gently at your knees).
- Calligrapher: This site will create SIGNATURES! Give it a name, pick from one of a selection of different handwriting styles, and watch as it crafts something plausibly-human-looking on demand. What’s interesting about this is that it’s doing it on the fly somehow – each new signature is seemingly rendered from scratch rather than just being a fixed expression of some under-the-hoor parameters, and it’s quite interesting (ok, I am stretching this slightly but it is early and I am VERY tired) to see the different ways in which the ‘handwriting’ presents. This is unlikely to have any practical application whatsoever unless you need to create several hundred unique, fictitious signatures at pace (and, if you do need to do that, would you mind taking a moment to drop me a line and explain what the fcuk you’re doing with them?).
- Roofball: This is VERY North American and will require you to have quite a specific type of house/roof – equally, though, it feels that you could probably tweak the ruleset to apply to a whole host of dwelling types, so you can almost certainly adapt this for your bungalow in Tring (NB – I don’t, of course, know where any of you live, so in the unlikely event that it *is* in fact in a bungalow in Tring, rest assured that this is pure coincidence and I am not in fact stalking you with a view to one day wearing your epidermis like some sort of bloody, millimeter-thick dressing gown. Honest). Roofball is a WHOLESOME GAME FOR ALL THE FAMILY, played with an American football or rugby ball, and a roof; as far as I can tell this is just something that some guys in the US invented while bored, which they then decided to make a website for and which has developed a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts around it – there are TOURNAMENTS and LEAGUE TABLES and, well, it’s just sort of charming really. If nothing else I recommend watching the explanatory video, which has incredibly-pleasing ‘37 views on YouTube’ energy to it (also, WHY ARE ALL THE MEN IN IT SO FCUKING ENORMOUS? DO THEY EAT NOTHING BUT STEAK AND MILK???? Based on this, I very much do not have the physique for a roofball career).
- Alto: Do YOU have a Mac? Do YOU use Apple Notes? Would YOU like something that will turn said Apple Notes into an ACTUAL WEBSITE with (basically) a single click? GREAT! “Alto turns your Apple Notes into a website.You can create a blog or a website. Or just share few notes with your friends or colleagues. Every Apple Note becomes a page on your site. You can use text, images, audio, video etc.” I don’t have a mac, I don’t use apple notes and as such this is literally meaningless to me, but, well, I do this for YOU and YOU might find this useful in some weird way.
- Walkie Talkie: Via Ben Templeton, this is a nice idea which feels like it could be used for FUN PURPOSES (or, alternatively, for some sort of miserable advermarketingpr activation) – this is designed for museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, and is basically a simple and easy way of creating audioguides. It features text-to-speech tech which means you can easily turn written materials into audio collateral, and features a simple ‘make a QR code which links to your specific audio, and then do that loads so you can basically create a QR code trail guiding people through an exhibition or space or similar’ mechanic – as it’s designed for institutions, anything beyond the most simple and basic execution requires payment, but I can see this being potentially useful for anything which has physical visitors; it feels like it could be INTERESTING AND FUN in the right hands, basically. Could those hands be YOURS? I have no clue, who the fcuk are you?
- Kenney: Would YOU like to make videogames? Would YOU like an entirely-free library of assets that you might use to do so? OH GREAT THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THIS IS!!! Look, I am not a gamedev, aspirant or otherwise, and I haven’t explored this too deeply, but, as far as I can tell, it is just a NICE and GENEROUS-SPIRITED endeavour which is basically a godsend for anyone looking to spin up an indie game.
- A Lovely Bit of Satisfying Interactive Animation: This is a showcase website for a company called, annoyingly ‘h’, which does digital interaction design and which here has put together a GORGEOUS little visual demonstrating their chops; click the link and play with the little digital Rube Goldberg contraption and watch as it all moves and clunks and animates with such DELIGHTFUL style, and, if you’re me, find yourself thinking ‘I wish every website in the world had this sort of cute and charming approach to interaction design’. Obviously if that were the case then the entire web would run at the speed of basically treacle and it would be incredibly annoying, but it would also be SO pretty and, well, nothing works properly anyway anymore so why not make that ineffectual frustration PRETTY at the very least?
- A History of Now: Via my friend Rishi, this is an interesting, beautifully-designed and VERY CHEWY website which basically addresses the lightweight concept of, er, TIME and HUMANITY’S CONCEPTION THEREOF via the medium of a lot of text and a nicely-animated scrolly timeline; look, I appreciate that this isn’t exactly a fulsome explanation but, well, YOU click on the link and check it out and come back and tell me exactly how you’d attempt to explain this in a pithy 100 words or so. SEE? IT’S NOT FCUKING EASY, THIS CURIOS LARK. Oh, fine, ok, here’s a little overview that will hopefully communicate a bit about what’s going on here: “The central and vertical line represents human history, with earlier years above and later years below. As you scroll down and peruse the following essay, you are moving forward from more ancient to less ancient, all the way up to the present day. The large black numbers record passing decades. You are looking at a timeline. As you scroll, contemporaneous estimates of the size of the past and future will come into view and pass by. These are the red horizontal lines. Every time a prominent historical figure or scientist made a numerical prediction concerning the length of the past and/or future, it is recorded here, with the predictor’s name, the year their prediction was published, and the numbers they proposed all appearing in red.” This is really interesting, if a touch dizzying.
- Analysing The Text of NYC: You will doubtless remember a project I featured in Curios ~9m or so ago, which used text recognition and photo analysis to let you do a text search of ALL OF THE TEXT IN NEW YORK (probably) – well the genius people at The Pudding (HELLO, THE PUDDING!) have turned that into a really interesting investigation into what the text is, where it shows up, and the patterns and themes and interesting stories that you can draw from the corpus of information. I love this – regulate readers will know that I love everything these people do – and I think it’s such an interesting build on what was already a fascinating project and dataset. I know I have said this before but I would LOVE to see this for London
By Levon Biss
THE SECTION WHICH CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE NUMBERS NORDVPN IS DOING WITH UNDER-18s IN THE UK TODAY, PT.2:
- Eclectic 24: OH GOD THIS IS SUCH A GOOD RADIO STATION! I *think* this came to me via Dense Discovery, and it is SUCH a find – Eclectic 24h is just an online radio station, but it is SO well-programmed; it runs 24/7, it’s all the product of human track selection and curation, and if while obviously I can’t presume to know your music taste or What You Are Into, the past hour has included songs by Ashley Henry, The Femcels, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Little Simz, Aretha Franklin and Jungle, which, honestly, should sell it to you unless your a total cloth-eared cnut or some sort of weird, grindcore-only obsessive. Honestly, this really is worth bookmarking.
- Playlist Maker: A READER WRITES! The mysterious – to me, at least; I imagine he’s less of a mystery to his friends and family, although I suppose that’s not a given – Adam Rowe writes to tell me about this EXCITING NEW TOY which lets you plug in any thread from Reddit which features people suggesting or sharing songs and automatically pulls said songs into a Spotify playlist for your delectation. Per Adam, “I feel like I’ve seen like a dozen people re-invent this sort of tool over the years and it always gets paywalled or disappears eventually… Anyway, this one seems to have debuted pretty recently, so enjoy it while it lasts!” – YOU HEARD THE MAN, ENJOY IT YOU FCUKS.
- Energy Usage: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Honestly, occasionally it feels like…some of you out there are real, and you ACTUALLY CARE! Not often, admittedly, but sometimes! Thanks to Guillaume Slizewicz, not only for struggling through the horrible prose of Web Curios in what I presume is their second or third language, but also for sending me this site which basically tells you what mix of energy is being used to power your browsing. I have NO idea how this is being calculated or where Guillaume is drawing the data from – could you, er, drop me a line and explain if you see this? – but I really like the idea behind it and the very simple, almost ASCII-ish presentation of the data. Apparently the server that’s powering my browsing right now is running off 76% nuclear energy, which is…good?
- Telescope: Ok, this isn’t live YET but should you wish to add yourself to the waitlist then you can do so at this link – Telescope is a forthcoming app whose whole gimmick is CURATION, with the idea presumably being that they are frantically signing up TASTEMAKERS behind the scenes who will regularly post stuff they are into for you and others to slavishly copy so that you can eventually turn your life into a plastic simulacrum of that of someone you feel a weird, possibly-creepy sense of inferiority to; presumably there’s an affiliate marketing layer built in which is how the site, and the curators, will make bank. Personally speaking I can’t think of anything more miserable than having a steady stream of ‘BUY THIS AMAZING NOTEBOOK’ bullsh1t being peddled by an infinite number of pyramid-selling Substackers, but, well, maybe you’re the sort of consumerist fcukpig for whom this sounds like catnip and, well, who am I to judge? NO FCUKER, etc (but know that I am, regardless).
- Am I Ugly?: To be clear, I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO TELL ME THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION I ALREADY KNOW AND IT IS WHY I AVOID MIRRORS. No, this isn’t me fishing for compliments (it really isn’t, I promise, I know I look like a tired piece of string), but instead a subReddit devoted to people posting photos of themselves and asking the community to give them an ‘honest’ assessment of their looks – oh look, here’s another one, called ‘Looksmaxxing Advice’, which is full of people asking for tips on how to, er, ‘maxx’ their looks. Why am I featuring these objectively-miserable corners of the web? Because they are canaries in the coalmine for Our Relationship With The Machine – if you scroll through the posts (all seemingly genuine rather than hotties chumming for praise), there are a …troubling number that begin with some variant of ‘ChatGPT told me I am a 5, what can I do to improve my maxillofacial proportions?’ Does that sound positive? NO IT DOES NOT! And yet, as ever, here we are! This is obviously downstream of incel culture and rather confirms one of the longreads from last week about the ways in which all sorts of Channish vocab and ideology have infected mainstream thinking. Honestly, I feel I need to caveat these links because it’s quite hard not to come away from this and just feel quite…deeply…sad for these poor kids. No 13 year old ought to be posting selfies to strangers and asking them how unattractive they are, but THIS IS LIFE NOW.
- Underwater Photographer Of The Year: SO MANY PHOTOS OF DAMP THINGS! Here’s the blurb: Enjoy “the feast of awarded images from the 2025 Underwater Photographer of the Year contest, following our largest ever entry. Please devour the photographs, but also savour the accompanying backstories from the photographers. It is a truly international spread, these winners come from photographers from 30 different countries. As it says on our tin, we’re an underwater imaging contest, and while this is a niche discipline, UPY always surprises with its diversity of imagery. Of course you will see natural history pictures of amazing ocean wildlife, but these are alongside swimming pool shots of Olympic athletes, a view of camels from inside of a water butt and a rarely seen, let alone photographed shipwreck, from more than 100m below the surface. Each image tells you something more about the seven tenths of our planet’s surface that is underwater.” Look, these are all great and I want to commend them all to you, but if I had to pick a personal favourite it might have to be this spectacularly-grumpy looking lad.
- AI Hallucination Cases: One of the less-remarked areas in which AI is increasingly fcuking our collective sh1t up is in the law, where a growing number of cases are seeing nonexistent past judgements being cited as a result of people literally asking The Machine to help them construct their arguments; this is a simple but slightly-perturbing database of examples of this phenomenon. “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings. While seeking to be exhaustive (230 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.” Honestly, if you consider that this is only a partial account of this phenomenon it’s…not a little troubling. INJECT AI INTO EVERYTHING WHAT IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN OH FCUK! BONUS LEGAL AI HORROR: this is a good piece explaining all the ways this is going to fcuk sh1t up.
- Split Things: You know when you were a kid and you were forced to do art despite having a really bitter anger towards the subject because you draw like Helen Keller, and some teacher told you that actually drawing is really easy and all you need to do is take an image of whatever it is you want to render on paper and divide it up into small squares and just focus on drawing one of those squares at a time and after you have done that you will magically have drawn an actual picture and it will have been SIMPLE, and you try it and you realise that it was all an EVIL LIE and despite you having followed the teacher’s instructions to the letter your resulting picture looks like a fcuking potato and you feel like a sad, pathetic failure? What? That’s, er, not a universally-lived experience? Ahem. Anyway, this tool lets you upload any image you want and apply a grid over it, presumably for the exact purpose of letting you practice drawing it. Or something. Honestly, I have no fcuking clue what this is actually for, but this is my best guess.
- Hyperchat: This is, annoyingly, Mac-only and so I haven’t been able to actually try it myself – as such, I accept no responsibility if it’s some sort of weird virus-laden malware or something (but I am pretty sure it isn’t). Hyprechat is a really interesting idea – basically it lets you talk to a bunch of LLMs simultaneously so that you can compare their outputs against each other in realtime. If you’re someone who works a lot with AI and is constantly trying to work out which model is currently best for which type of task, this could potentially be useful (although I imagine that it’s only using the free tier of each, which possibly makes the comparison less useful); equally, if you want to conduct some quick-and-dirty comparisons on Share of Model (LOL SNAKE OIL!)-type stuff, this could again be helpful. Basically there’s a bunch of different uses to which you could put this, but I can’t really be bothered to enumerate any more of them and so I will leave it to you to come up with some more. GO ON, THINK OF SOME.
- ArtVibes: A project by the National Museum of Art in Washington DC, which allows you to explore the collection based on the vague idea of ‘vibes’ – pick your adjective, noun and verb, and the site will create a curated selection of work from the museum’s collection JUST FOR YOU based on said words, using an LLM to effectively ‘interpret’ the words and pick visuals that somehow embody the qualities you’ve selected. Annoyingly you can only select words from a preapproved list, robbing me of the chance to find out exactly which artworks The Machine thinks best embody the terms ‘suppurating corpse exhale’, but the collection’s large and high-quality enough that you will always get served some really interesting works, even if the whole thing feels a little more like a pointless gimmick than I am sure they were hoping for when they commissioned it.
- Tooooools: Not sure if that’s the correct number of ‘o’s, but, well, I don’t think it’s important so let’s just run with it. Tooooooooooooooooooooooools (better be safe than sorry) is a website that lets you fcuk with photos in some simple but pleasing ways – upload an image or some video, it renders in simple, lo-res black and white, and you can then apply a bunch of different filters and fx to it based on some easily-selectable presets; your mileage will vary based on the extent to which you enjoy, er, lo-res black and white images with high grain, basically, but I think this is rather fun and I enjoyed messing with it more than I expected to.
- Rexpaint: Look, I am just going to leave the explaining to the people who made this, because it is very much Not My Thing: “REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs. Originally an in-house dev tool used by Grid Sage Games for traditional roguelike development, this software has been made available to other developers and artists free of charge. While core functionality and tons of features already exist, occasional updates are known to happen. Unlock your retro potential; join thousands of other REXPaint users today!” This is…quite involved, but I think potentially rather fun if you have the patience to learn the ropes (and, er, the desire to create some pretty complex ASCII art, which I appreciate probably applies to one of you at most. IS THAT ONE WEIRDO YOU????).
- The Evolution of the Scroll Bar: Have you ever thought to yourself “you know what I would really like? I would really like a webpage that offers me a visual guide to the evolution of the design of the scrollbar”? If the answer is ‘yes’ then a) I suggest possibly aiming a bit higher with your wants in future, you deserve better; and b) ENJOY THIS WEBSITE which does exactly that thing (but nothing else, so don’t get your hopes up).
- Halucidations: I really like this – a silly little project by one Kyle Johnson, which spins up a different motivational-style quote each time you ask it to. I’m not sure whether these are pre-written or whether there’s some Markov Chain thing in the background, but these are GREAT in that they vaguely have the shape of something halfway-meaningful but, if you take the time to actually read them and think about what they are saying, they are in fact entirely nonsensical. “Hold hands with the unknown”, reads one I have just been served; “Chase the horizon until the sky turns inside out”, reads the next (actually I really like that). Honestly, depending on who you are and what your Insta feed/friends are like, you could have a very fun few days posting this stuff and seeing who points out that you are posting meaningless w4nk and who just spams the ‘prayer hands/high five’ emoji in response to all of this. Want to find out which of your digital friends and acquaintances is a double-figure-IQ moron? This is a GREAT litmus test.
- Please Fix This Site: I rather like this – via Andy, a site whose gimmick is that it is VERY badly designed, to the point of being actively annoying, but which you can, should you be annoyed enough, pay small sums to improve in small ways. Pay them $5 to fix the kerning, another to add round corners to the elements… you get the idea. Amazingly a couple of people have been so irked by this that they have actually shelled out to fix the fonts and remove the marquee scrolling, which goes to show that some people REALLY fcuking hate bad design. I think this is FUN and you can probably steal the idea wholesale for the right client (BUT DON’T DO THAT).
- Find The Coldplay Adulterers: Ok, so as a THING the whole Coldplay Adulterers story is now very, very played out and dead, but, well, I am a completist and as such am going to give you this site anyway despite the fact that you have all moved on to whatever this week’s obsession is – this is a very simple game which tasks you with finding the canoodling couple in the crowd by scrolling around and seeing who pops up on the jumbotron. It’s not, objectively, particularly fun after the first three seconds, but it’s interesting because it was seemingly coded ‘entirely’ (pinches of salt apply) by The Machine, which suggests that we can look forward to a new era of fast-turnaround ‘satirical’ projects inspired by world events – these things are going to be the new ‘short-lived ‘topical’ parody accounts on Twitter’, aren’t they? Fcuk’s sake.
- Clu3: ANOTHER READER WRITES! Honestly, just to be sincere for a moment, I really do love it when people send me things they have found or, even better, made, as is the case with this game sent to me by its creator Julia Kozlovskaya, who writes: “Clu3 is a modern-era edition of the traditional game Codenames, where humans team up with AI in a game of associations. I built this game because I was curious if AI can understand humans’ abstractions and if we humans, in turn, can understand AI reasoning. I think Codenames is quite an interesting playground for that!” I really like this – you need a friend to play it with, but the basic premise where you try and guess the words contained within the category The Machine suggests to you is genuinely quite fun, and I like the inherent weirdness of trying to ‘get’ what it is ‘thinking’ of. Give it try.
- Cobble: Fcuking hell, ANOTHER reader link. THANKYOU EVERYONE I LOVE YOU ALL. This is made by one Wilf Ashworth, who explains the rules: “1. You’re given a set of letters (such as “ZXCVBNM”); 2. Come up with two words that use all the letters (like “convex zombie”); 3. The shorter the words, the better. The rules are simple but it’s really tough to get an optimal solution.” He’s not lying – Wilf only sent this overnight, so I have had literally two minutes to check it out before I started typing 166 minutes ago, but I can confirm that today’s puzzle is fcuking nails. Still, if you’re a WORDCEL like me you will likely find that this scratches part of your brain in a particularly-pleasing way.
- Rat King: OK, I bounced off this slightly because it really doesn’t fit with the way my brain works, but I can see that it is objectively a smart little game which I think a lot of you will LOVE; Rat King sees you control two rats simultaneously, each navigating its own single-screen puzzle; you need to avoid threats and collect coins and NAVIGATE YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM; honestly, this slightly fcuked my brain in half when I tried to play it last week – and some more instructions would honestly have helped no end – but I think for the right person (ie someone smarter and significantly more spatially aware than me) this could be a lot of fun.
- Dark Star Fury: Our final game of the week is a classic side-scrolling shooter in the vein of R-Type or similar – you know the deal, move around the screen, don’t get shot, shoot everything, collect the powerups, pew pew boom boom; this starts out insultingly-easy but then gets bullethellish towards later levels, and is a LOT of fun.
By Nguan
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Madzuka Maison: Look, I’m going to be honest here – I don’t have the faintest fcuking clue what this is or what is going on, but I fcuking ADORE whatever is being done to these images (some of which are bongo-adjacent, in case that motivates you in one direction or another).
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Auto Parts Store Tina: Tina is in China, I think. Tina is selling car parts on Instagram. Occasionally Tina attempts to do so by singing pop songs (I don’t mean to be mean, but…not well) where the lyrics have been altered to be all about, er, Mercedes Benz gaskets. This is deeply, deeply strange, but, well, GOOD LUCK TO YOU TINA and I hope you’re not doing this against your will.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Kemi Badenoch: While you might not think that a profile of the leader (although not for much longer, I wouldn’t imagine) of Britain’s Conservative Party would be of interest to anyone not in the UK, I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a bit of political schadenfreude; this profile of her, and her time in charge of the party is absolutely brutal, both in terms of its own assessment of her failings but also when it comes to the briefings given by her colleagues which pepper the piece. It’s fair to say that Kemi’s not exactly well-loved by the party at present, perhaps unsurprising given her p1ss-poor performance at PMQs and, well, everywhere else, and this is unsparing in its assessment of exactly how and why she is failing. If nothing else, this particular anecdote is going to follow the woman to her grave, which, well, LOL! “At the first meeting of the shadow cabinet in the aftermath of the election defeat, Badenoch launched a broadside about Rishi Sunak that was later leaked to the Times. She called Craig Williams, Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary, a “buffoon”, and pointed to Sunak’s disastrous gaffe over “D-Day” as the source of the Tories’ downfall. The next day Badenoch posted on X: “It’s a shame our discussions in the shadow cabinet were leaked yesterday.” It was the first act of her leadership campaign. Badenoch’s comments to the shadow cabinet that day may not have been off-the-cuff remarks. A private notebook from the £1,240-per-night Dorchester Hotel seen by the New Statesman – filled with handwriting that seems to match Badenoch’s own – contains a scribbled mind map that outlines the points she made at that shadow cabinet meeting, from the word “buffoon” to a note: “Unforced Errors — D-Day”. The words mirrored her criticism of Sunak’s gaffe, which was later leaked to the Times. The notebook also contains affirmations about public speaking linked to the heading “Personal Improvement”: “Breathe, breathe, breathe”; “Pause, Pause, Pause”; “You are a serious person who does big things”; “Pivot to attacking Labour when uncomfortable”; “Remember you are the standard bearer of the right”; “Don’t let people think you are easily wound up”. Badenoch’s team says that “Kemi does not believe she has lost her notebook”.” LOL!
- The Destruction of American News Media: It’s been…slightly-odd watching newsletters that I began reading because they were generally part of the same ‘weird sh1t on the web’ beat that I sort of engage with pivot over the past few years to becoming quite serious and valuable commentators on What The Fcuk Is Happening In America – Ryan at Garbage Day has consistently been one of the smartest analysts of modern media and its relationship with / use by the North American (and beyond) political establishment, and Rusty at Today in Tabs has similarly become a smart and increasingly-essential voice on the madness across the Atlantic. Here he writes a succinct, smart and factually correct piece about how the US media world has effectively been gutted by a selection of rich men, which, weirdly, isn’t an argument I’ve really seen articulated properly before but which is very obviously true – from Curios favourite Peter Thiel to Elon’s whimsical decision to take the planet’s de facto breaking news service and turn it into a nazi bongo playground, the past 15 years have been a story of money deciding that it doesn’t actually like people having access to information and deciding to throttle said access because, well, it can! Is this a good thing? IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE IT!!!! Thank God we have AI to make everything be…oh.
- Scapegoating the Algorithm: Or, ‘why the fact that noone knows everything and is a moron’ can’t be blamed exclusively on social media and why it is a bit lazy and reductive to do so’ – again, this is VERY North American-focused but the argument it makes maintains internationally, I think; it’s worth reading the whole thing as it’s sober, coherent and convincing, but this summarises its points neatly should you want a precis: “We should have considerable uncertainty about the causes of complex social and political outcomes and trends. Nobody can test the effects of removing these social media platforms from society wholesale over a long period of time. Moreover, platforms themselves are diverse, and even the same platforms have evolved in complex ways, making them inherently challenging to study and generalize about. Nevertheless, the current balance of evidence does not support blaming America’s epistemic challenges on social media. First, many of these challenges predate social media and can arise independently of it. Second, the uneven distribution of such challenges across nations and political cultures with comparable rates of social media use suggests that social media alone is not what’s causing them. And finally, our best large-scale experiments show minimal effects of social media platforms, which aligns with decades of research into media and social learning.”
- London Tax Evasion: A good friend of mine has been trying to get HMRC to investigate some VERY OBVIOUS fraud by a London nightclub ‘impresario’ (his name rhymes with Mallex Stroud, in case you’re curious) for several years now, and was basically told by HMRC a few years ago that, basically, if the fraud in question runs to less than about £5million quid the likelihood of it ever being properly investigated is basically 0 because there is simply too big a backlog of cases and not enough investigating officers to do the job properly (in vaguely-similar news, you need never buy a bus ticket in Rome because there are about 40-odd ticket inspectors across the whole of the city’s transport network and only about 20 are ever working at a time, meaning the odds are VERY much in your favour) – this is a piece by the increasingly-essential team at London Centric looking at the very, very obvious tax dodging happening at a variety of tatty Central London souvenir emporia, which is simply being allowed to happen because…noone cares? There’s noone to look into it? This is excellent, unflashy and important journalism which is sadly all-too-rare in 2025 but which deserves your support if you can afford it because it is exactly what the Evening Standard should be doing but isn’t because its owner is too busy fellating the monied classes he is so proud to be a part of.
- The Latest From The Traffic Apocalypse: I alluded to this earlier, but all those of you who skip straight to the longreads (I DON’T MIND, HONEST *cries*) will have missed that – anyway, this is a good overview from 404 Media of the current state of ‘how Google’s AI stuff is impacting direct web traffic’ and OH BOY are the results fcuking dreadful news for anyone whose business model is predicated on ‘getting humans to navigate to a webpage’ – the piece cites new US research by Pew which shows that “Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who don’t encounter an AI summary. To be precise, only 1 percent of Google searches resulted in the users clicking on the link in the AI summary, which takes them to the page Google is summarizing.” Beyond this headline stat, there’s also a good overview of all the ways in which The Machine is fcuking up the epistemological water table and slowly but surely eroding the general sense of consensus truth that we’ve attempted to build up in the era of mass media. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS TO OURSELVES FFS? Oh, sorry, we’re not ‘doing it to ourselves’ – we’re having it done to us because, seemingly, a whole bunch of the world’s richest men have become fcuking morons who don’t seem to understand the importance of, you know, ‘facts’. THANKS, PLUTES, YOU CNUTS.
- Why Reddit Is Increasingly Vital: I’ve only ever been a very superficial Reddit user, but it’s indubitably true that the site has become an increasingly-important pillar of the mainstream web in the past decade; this is really good piece in New York Magazine that examines why. Basically the answers are, variously ‘actual people posting actual people thoughts and experiences’, ‘AI scraping’, ‘bongo’, ‘really committed moderators that make the whole thing actually work properly’ and ‘forums are and always have been the best expression of the internet, actually’, but the whole piece is worth reading. “In 2005, Reddit looked a lot like it does now, a list of links on which users voted up or down. By 2008, it worked a lot like it does now, with comments, sub-Reddits created and run by the community, and the rise of self-posts — threads without links, created to talk, argue, or share things directly. To a user in 2008, Reddit was legible as a forum of forums, a new and centralized take on the sorts of scattered web communities where people used to spend a lot of time on a much smaller internet. To a user in 2025, this can make it feel like a throwback. We’re further from Reddit’s founding than Reddit’s founding was from the creation of the web browser. It still basically operates within structures and norms established on dial-up bulletin-board services and email lists: communities sorted by interest, volunteer policing, and threads upon threads of text.” Can we all agree that all this was just BETTER before you were able to post images and video, and we should basically all go back to bulletin boards? No? Oh, fine, please yourselves.
- The Private Fiefdom as Planetary Project: Ooh, this is right up my street – long-term readers might have noticed over the years that I like linking to pieces about the various schemes dreamt up by the ultra-rich to create their very own libertarian tax haven paradise communities (which, depressingly often, also tend towards having a…non-standard approach to age of consent legislation!); this is an EXCELLENT article in the LA Review of Books, which looks at the history of this longstanding dream of the plutocrat class, and some of the more baroque examples of people attempting to set this sort of thing up (and, inevitably, failing). English readers can enjoy a special bonus at the point where you realise that JACOB REES MOGG’S FCUKING DAD is one of the architects of all this sort of thinking, which makes his son’s ceaseless flag-shagging nationalism somewhat-amusing by contrast (except there is nothing funny about the Rees Moggs and their continued existence). “James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg would interweave these two threads in their 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, recently reissued with an introduction by Peter Thiel. That book turned investment strategies for high-net-worth individuals into a political theory of private sovereignty. “As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available,” Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote, “it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary.” They envisioned a time when the individual entrepreneur would be able to navigate through and across various jurisdictions at will, in the process rationally calculating his or her “protection costs,” which is what recent commentators have termed jurisdictional arbitrage. Newer versions of private sovereignty build on those ideas and also draw inspiration from Burning Man, although most of their manifestations up to this point more closely resemble Billy McFarland’s ill-fated Fyre Festival. (If anything best captures the likely reality of individualistic private communities walled off from society, it is a $500 soggy grilled cheese delivered in a Styrofoam package.)”
- Bringing Sexy Back: I didn’t *love* the writing in this piece if I’m honest, but I found the central conceits interesting – in it, Kate Wagner writes about the ways in which surveillance culture and the repackaging of every facet of human experience as both ‘content’ and the opportunity for a reaction take has had a flattening effect on eroticism. I think there is something VERY TRUE about the thesis at the heart of the piece (and actually it dovetails with some of the things I felt about a piece a little further down about dating as a woman), and it was hard not to feel a little sad at the world we’ve built in which every single human interaction has to be prefaced with the thought ‘ok, but if someone writes this up or films it and puts it in a Reel is this going to end my fcuking life?’ “There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement. When it became desirable and permissible to transform our own lives into content, it didn’t take long before a sense of entitlement emerged that extended that transformation to people we know and to strangers. My ex sent me this text, clearly she is the crazy one, right? Look at this dumb/funny/cringe Hinge profile! Look at this note some guy sent me, is this a red flag? Look at this random woman I photographed buying wine, coconut oil, and a long cucumber at the supermarket! I think these kinds of posts sometimes amount to little more than common bullying, but they are on a continuum with a puritan discourse in which intimate questions, practices, and beliefs about queerness, sexuality, gender presentation, and desire are also subjected to days-long piles-on. In both instances, the instinct to submit online strangers to viral discipline is given a faux-radical sheen. It’s a kind of casual blackmail that warns everyone to conform or be exposed; a way of saying if you don’t cave to my point of view, redefine yourself in my image of what sexuality is or should be, and (most importantly) apologize to me and the public, I will subject you to my large following and there will be hell to pay. Such unproductive and antisocial behavior is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.” BONUS CONTENT ABOUT SEX!: This essay touches on similar themes and contains the quote ““Isn’t it all sort of a good thing that Gen Z is having less sex? Isn’t sex an inherently traumatic and dangerous act, and it’s better that people are avoiding that?” which made me momentarily leave by body in horror.
- Autism or Ar$ehole?: Laurie Pennie is one of the seemingly MILLIONS of people to have received an adult autism diagnosis of late, and here writes about the recent Gregg Wallace furore, and, specifically, why ‘being autistic’ does not actually mean ‘is more likely to show people their genitals, unbidden’; I am, I confess, *slightly* bored of the recently-diagnosed wanging on about it all the fcuking time, but I thought this was a good essay and, beyond Wallace, addresses some things which I thought were interesting and worth thinking about: “Lately I’ve been thinking about who, exactly, gets to be weird in this world. A backlash is building against the neurodiversity movement, in no small part because so many newly-diagnosed autistics are women, girls and non-binary people who, like me, were missed in childhood. The standard explanation for this is that women and girls are ‘better at masking’. We did such a good job of pretending to be nice, normal girls that we fooled everyone, which means the medical system gets to tell us that it was all our fault we were written off as difficult, toxic, embarrassing, insane, denied the help and understanding afforded to men and boys. Not long ago, experts still talked about autism as ‘extreme male brain’ syndrome. Men are still far more likely to be diagnosed and receive essential early care than women. And the small number of cultural reference points we have for autism- a diagnosis that now incorporates what used to be called ‘Asperger’s’- are almost exclusively white, Western, mathematically- minded men and boys from well-off families. Sometimes that character is played for comedy- Sheldon Cooper- or for tragedy- A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man. Awkward, brilliant men whose contributions compensate normal society. They are tolerated because they are talented. But talent is only tolerable depending on your demographic.”
- The Coming Delivery Drones: This is a piece in the WSJ about how tech is basically going to take over food delivery – I don’t care about the technology particularly and I didn’t find the piece hugely interesting, but I am including it because it’s an example of a style of tech reporting that I fcuking hate. Read the piece, and note how many times it alludes to the people currently doing these jobs, the hours they work, how little they are paid, how badly they are treated, and how they’re doing these shifts because THAT IS ALL THERE IS FOR THEM TO DO – did you spot it? THAT’S RIGHT IT DOESN’T TOUCH ON THIS AT ALL, or indeed on what will happen to these people if they get profitmargin-effiiencied out of existence. Is this the great new era of capital-positive journalism ushered in by that cnut MechaBezos? THANKS JEFF!
- Diary of a Popcorn Seller: A lovely working diary in Vittles, depicting what it’s like to be one of the people who sells toddler-sized portions of popcorn to the cinemagoing masses; there’s something lovely about the behind-the-scenes look at the weird quirks of any job, particularly something we’re all ostensibly familiar with but which (if you’re like me, at least) we probably haven’t given any thought to whatsoever. I would, though, have liked some additional detail on who exactly are the sick fcuks who order ‘nachos’.
- I Drank Every Cocktail: Not me, you understand (although if anyone fancies taking me for a Martini (gin, twist) anytime soon that would be nice, cheers), but Adam Aaronson who has apparently finally completed his years-long quest to drink every single cocktail named on the International Barternders’ Association official list; this is SUCH a charming read, honestly, and has the added bonus of being a GREAT source of really good cocktail bars in a bunch of places around the world, which if nothing else made me REALLY want to go and get absolutely hammered on expensive, very cold booze (this is not, in fairness, a rare feeling for me).
- Meet The Normans: Web Curios favourite Clive Martin is back, writing in VICE about a new tribe he has chosen to christen the Normans (after the now-defunct ponced-up greasy spoon of the same name that elicited so much DISCOURSE a couple of years back) – I very much enjoyed this, partly because Clive’s writing is always a joy to me and partly because there were a couple of details that really spoke to me. The detail about Everpress tshirts and their inexplicable pivot to seemingly only stocking tees with graphics that ape the logo of a Manhattan pizzeria (annoying for a man who used to buy his tees from there but now can’t because, well, they all look like that) is well-observed, and the naked disdain displayed for Top Cuvee, a wine bar and ‘restaurant’ so staggeringly-inept and overpriced that its continued existence feels like some sort of personal affront to taste and decency, cheered me no end. Basically this is this year’s ‘here’s a bunch of people to irrationally hate, and yes they DO all hang out in London Fields’ piece par excellence.
- Fighting With Swords: Sandrine Rastello writes about learning to fight with ACTUAL SWORDS – weirdly I have seen an uptick in the past few years in people talking about learning to swordfight (from literally noone to, er, about three people – THIS IS A TREND!!!!), which might be something to do with the general nerdification of everything (look, nerds, YOU WON. Can you, er, stop fcuking everything up for everyone else now please?). Anyway, this is very entertaining about ‘what it feels like to pick up a heavy, pointy bit of metal and to try and hit another person with it’.
- The Trouble With Wanting Men: Jean Garnett writes about dating – Garnett is American, and is very much a MY LIFE IS MY MATERIAL writer (she’s previously written about the breakdown of her marriage after they went poly, so, well, you get the gist), and, honestly, while I broadly agree that ‘dating is rubbish, especially for women, because a lot of men are rubbish, or gross, or rubbish AND gross, not to mention occasionally genuinely terrifying’, I also couldn’t help feeling throughout that, well, Garnett and her friends are also part of the problem. Here’s a thought, everyone – WHY NOT STOP FCUKING OVERTHINKING ALL THIS STUFF??? Maybe just, you know, go out with people and sleep with them and just see how it goes? Is that a thing that people still do? Am I being hopelessly naive and PATRIARCHAL here? I can’t even tell anymore, honestly.
- Grifting My Way Through The Influencer Economy: I had to read the first paragraph a few times as the style didn’t quite gel with me at first – and I genuinely despise reading articles on Electric Literature, there’s something about the site design which I find actively repellent – but it clicked after that and I ADORED this; this is an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by…’influencer’? ‘Internet personality’? Fcuk knows, but it’s by Aiden Arata and it’s about being a low-tier influencer on a junket and it is horrible and great. “The Sunset Strip is one of those Los Angeles neighborhoods where no one from Los Angeles actually goes. It’s embarrassing, overpriced, preserved in the amber of the early 2000s, all giddy consumption and dead-eyed sex appeal. It’s where the girls stay in the LA episode of Sex and the City, and where the boys cruise in the opening credits of Entourage. There’s the Coffee Bean where Perez Hilton once regularly camped out to draw cm stains on paparazzi shots of struggling women, and the Hustler store, and a jarring number of sixty-year-old men with ponytails and fake British accents who won’t date above twenty-five. The Sunset Strip was the natural choice for an eight-bedroom, nine-bathroom, $24 million party house, which was, in turn, the perfect place for a sponsored influencer wellness retreat.”
- Everything Else: This was shared on Bluesky by Jana of the excellent Zuckerbaeckerei, and it is my favourite expression yet of why exactly “you look like you enjoy holidaying in Dubai” is possibly the greatest and most devastating insult of the 21st Century. Honestly, this, by (by Caitlín Doherty in the New Left Review), is superb: “On Friday and Saturday evenings, the Dubai marina fills with yachts. A few tentative prows at first, circling the flat, hot bay, then a dozen more slide into view and multiply; a shoal filling the Gulf. Dull pulses of remixed pop songs float through the sand-laced air, intermixed with a call to prayer, the growl of motorbikes and staccato birdsong. On a dark promontory, erected between the artificial island and the ziggurat skyline of the city-state’s downtown, an enormous stage flickers into life, sending waves of fluorescent pink across the lilac sky. I watched from my room’s balcony, looked up the price of a ‘luxury’ dusk cruise: around $30 per adult. The hotel was populated by families from Moscow, Munich, Milan and the -stans. They seemed, for a certain value of the word, normal. For all its reputation as an entrepôt bolthole of a shady international elite, Dubai is a simpler proposition, one embodied by the sight in front of me, of countless revellers playing at the lifestyle of oligarch wealth, saving up for a year to be waited on by modern-day slaves for a fortnight.”
- Sugar Mummy: A short story in the latest edition of The Fence, by Eva Wiseman. This is really, really good, in a pleasingly-understated way: “She reapplied her lipstick with a ring finger. Adam F was one of the men who liked to feel a little anxious in her company – occasionally she would let her gaze linger briefly on a figure just beyond his shoulder, and he would grasp at her hand and ask what she wanted for Christmas. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she’d reply, turning her whole weight to face him. They found her on the picture app, messaging mid-afternoon about her skirt, or eyes. Sometimes, when she asked a question in the photo caption, it felt like throwing dog food into a lake – up they would come, to feed on her youth.”
- C’mon Billy: The last longread this week is once again from Granta, and is about a friendship that doesn’t exist anymore; I found this beautiful, and almost unbearably sad, and I loved it and I hope you do too.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
- UK HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week is a track which isn’t my usual style of thing – I tend not to be into R&B-tinged crooning, but this is honestly a great song and I have been listening to it loads all week. It’s by Jim Legxacy x Dave, and it’s called 3x, and THAT IS YOUR LOT I AM GOING FOR LUNCH I LOVE YOU AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!