Webcurios 10/10/25

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Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

Oh Christ, it’s one of those days when I get to the bottom of Curios and have to write this opening bit and I realise that…nothing. I have NOTHING.

I leave it to you, then, to imagine the THRILLINGLY SATIRICAL and BITING take I might have instead put here; don’t worry, you’re almost certainly projecting something better than anything I might have managed. What can I say? I slept appallingly, and it seems that despite my best efforts to become one with the internet and disappear entirely within my computer I am, still, only human. Don’t worry, though, there’s still a fcuktonne of words to go with the fcuktonne of links – hang on, what do you mean ‘the words are the problem, LESS OF THE WORDS’?

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re still not paying for this so you can stop complaining.

By Rebecca Storm

LET’S BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH AN EXCELLENT SOUL AND HOUSE(ISH) SET FROM BILL GRIFFIN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS TENTATIVELY HOPEFUL ABOUT A CEASEFIRE BUT SIGNIFICANTLY HAPPIER THAT THAT FCUK DIDN’T GET THE NOBEL AND WILL HOPEFULLY DIE BEFORE THE NEXT ONE, PT.1:  

  • The Next Four Years: Our first link this week is a genuinely-interesting and smart and creative project that, yes – and you might want to get the sick bucket ready here, or finally prepare to unsubscribe from THIS FCUKING NEWSLETTER, or at the very least prepare a few choice imprecations to mutter under your breath – uses generative AI. BUT! This really is conceptually clever and a novel, imaginative use of the tech – look! “The Next Four Years is the first of its kind; a living, daily self-updating novel. Using AI, it analyses the unyielding 24h news cycle and revises the manuscript every accordingly every morning. No human writer ever steers the changes. Every day, AI examines headlines and updates relevant chapters, showing how today’s headlines connect to the future depicted in this story. This creates a living narrative that adapts as reality unfolds.’ Which, look, you have to admit is at the very least conceptually-curious, however much of a pitchfork-wielding, CLANKER-shouting refusenik you might be. My only slight bugbears are that it’s so US-focused – but, well, you can forgive them for being slightly navelgazy what with all the antifa frogs causing societal meltdown on the streets of Portland – and that it’s optimised for mobile and so it’s not a fantastic desktop reading experience, but otherwise I really, really like this; it’s obviously dystopian and DARK, and the ‘novel’ itself exhibits many of the the standard stylistic tics and flaws we’ve come to expect from machine-generated prose (though this has Claude ‘holding’ the pen, so it’s not quite the slophorrow that GPT often produces), but that doesn’t really matter; the interest here comes from the mutability of the text and the way in which it responds to events and weaves them into the narrative. The story, such as I have delved into it, is of a selection of characters and their experiences as the US collapses under the Trump regime, all the way through to what are currently predicted to be ‘the elections that weren’t’ in 2029…but that might change depending on real-world events, and while it’s not FASCINATING ENTERTAINMENT (unless you’re really invested in impotent US doomerism) it really is an interesting experiment in emergent narrative and reactive text. SO THERE. Can, er, can you put the pitchforks and torches down, please?
  • The King’s Army: There was a curious clip that did the rounds of some of the corners of UK social media that I still bother to look at last weekend – it showed a seemingly-large group of young people, mostly men, all dressed in black hoodies emblazoned with the legend and logo of a group calling itself The King’s Army, congregating on an evening in London’s Soho to ‘block traffic in London’s sex district’. Which, on some level, was quite funny – Soho hasn’t *really* been London’s sex district for…quite a long time, in any meaningful sense, and the protestors were more likely to have been inconveniencing the rikshaw drivers ferrying idiot tourists around to the strains of Katie Perry being blasted out at ear-bleeding volume from the onboard speakers. BUT! The videos were being shared by Turning Point UK, the local offshoot of the ‘conservative youth organisation’ which was formerly fronted by the Sainted Charlie, and I thought it might be interesting to dig into exactly what the King’s Army is – WELL.Basically it’s an evangelical Christian organisation which is part prayer group (there’s a gospel study app!), part, er, religious militia outfit (the ranks! The titles! The, er, slightly-disturbing uniforms!) and quite a large part grift (THE MERCH!!!), with a somewhat-opaque FAQ sections (seriously, it’s not exactly forthcoming about what it is, what it’s for and who is actually behind it – although it does have some genuinely-unsettling copy about, er, the ‘holy bullet’ filled with a drop of Christ’s blood, which feels like a somewhat radical interpretation of Biblical verse and worryingly, not as metaphorical as I might prefer), and they take donations! WHAT A SURPRISE! Also, considering this is itself an offshoot of a US thing, and the Christian right is backed by some violently-rich people, one wonders why they’re so needful of cash. It’s also affiliated with the, er, Battle For Britain Church, based in Yeovil(!) and which presents itself as “an evangelistic army, under the banner of King Jesus, to advance the gospel, push back darkness, plunder hell and populate heaven.” Does that sound good? Not sure. Anyway, this is both funny and quite miserable, both in terms of the rise of this sort of batsh1t wingnuttery on this side of the Atlantic (THANKS, AMERICAN EVANGELICAL BILLIONAIRE MONEY!) and the fact that, as far as I can tell, there is (as ever with this sh1t) quite a large dollop of pyramid sales and grifting at the heart of all of this – BECAUSE JESUS LOVED NOTHING MORE THAN A MAN WILLING TO USE HIS NAME TO FLOG BRANDED FRUIT OF THE LOOM GEAR!
  • Where’s Barry?: It’s been a while since I’ve featured a good interactive music video, so thank Christ (I promise, I will try not to mention him again this week) for this – Where’s Barry? is a great video for a fun song, and it’s been made by Friend of Curios Matt Round of Vole.wtf fame, and it’s a nice way to spend three minutes. The game – which you don’t have to play if you don’t want to, you can just let the video play and enjoy the song straight, you DULLARD – is simple; in each vignette, find Barry and click on him to WIN POINTS, and there’s a special Easter Egg for those of you who find every single on of the titular guys in the whole clip. The song, by the way, is inexplicably called ‘Wimmelbilderbuch’ and the artist is Non Canon, which isn’t made immediately clear from the landing page, but otherwise this is a really nice bit of marketing for a small artist which I WANT MORE OF PLEASE.
  • Infinite Reddit Image Search: Look, let’s get this out of the way upfront – I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO USE THIS FOR AND IT IS BONGO. Ahem. Now that we have acknowledged the true usecase, let me briefly describe the project – it’s actual name is ‘Infiniti’ and what it does is pull ALL OF THE MEDIA from Reddit and present it as an infinitely-scrolling wall; you can set it to show you the newest-uploaded stuff, or the most recommended, or use keyword search to pull stuff based on specific terms you fancy – which makes this actually a pretty decent way of getting an overview of (for example) what’s being clipped and shared from specific TV shows, say, or what’s currently visually/memetically hot around a specific news topic, and which could theoretically be useful from a quick’n’dirty monitoring point of view, or just for getting a bird’s eye view of the current Reddit take on whatever you might fancy. OR. Or, you can toggle the switch at the top to NSFW and get a frankly dizzying cascade of filth – there are also settings to toggle between ‘het’ (it’s all pictures of women) or ‘gay’ (it’s all pictures of men), or, disappointingly, ‘trans’ (which feels unpleasantly fetishistic and objectifying imho, but wevs), but whichever you click you will see a LOT of mucous membranes and fluids of varying viscosity. The default here is totally SFW, but it only takes a few clicks for it to become very NSFW very quickly, so, you know, CAREFUL WITH THOSE TOGGLES! Also, interestingly, this site seems quite happy to show me total filth regardless of the fact that I’m in the UK and theoretically should have to verify my age to see it – chalk up another success for the Online Safety Act!
  • Load More: This is an excellent digital design resource should you be looking for INSPIRATION for a new mobile-first website; “loadmo.re is Kim Lê Boutin‘s personal selection of unconventional web references. It collects distinctive mobile experiences as a living archive for design inspiration.” Some of these have been featured on Curios over the years, but many were totally new to me and all have interesting design features or interactive elements that make them curious and worth a look.
  • The UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Objects: A virtual museum! Which you can scroll through to explore! Like in the olden days (six years ago)! This is by UNESCO and was sent to me by reader Marcelo Rinesi who writes “Not my favorite interface; I’d have preferred something more museum website-like, not museum exposition website-like (if that makes sense) maybe with some dry provenance notes regarding casualties and so on, but being funded by Saudi Arabia perhaps this is as much as we could hope for.” Yeah, seems not even UNESCO is above taking MBS’ cash – times are hard! Still, it’s a shiny-enough website; per the blurb, “The galleries of the UNESCO Virtual Museum have been designed as a continuous journey, placing stolen objects back in their original context and highlighting the efforts made around the world to recover them.” You scroll, you click, you see various 3d renders of objects that have been taken (often rendered with AI assistance because, well, the objects have been stolen and they’re therefor not exactly easily-scannable), and you’re confronted with the message ‘additional educational content coming soon’ with annoying regularity, because, it seems, they couldn’t be bothered to finish the project before sending it live. I don’t know, I have a sneaking suspicion that that educational content isn’t ever going to appear, but hopefully I am wrong. My favourite bit, though, is how the artefacts have a button next to said 3d render which says ‘Share To Protect It’ – lads, I am not sure that me sharing this link with a bunch of other webmongs on the dying remnants of social media is going to make a meaningful difference to recovering the Statue of Vajrapurusha!
  • Digital Creativity Tools: Do YOU want to make more STUFF ON THE INTERNET? Would you like a directory of useful tools to help you create online? OH GOOD! This project was sent to me by its creator/curator Tom Smith, who writes: “I maintain a site of digital creativity tools, that are mainly free, or free-ish and mainly online… the idea was to find tools that I could use with students that they could continue using after a session…I have less time and room and reason to keep this site up to date recently, partly cos of uni restructuring (“we don’t need creativity anymore, we need AI” apparently…sigh) and also because it seems that what lots of crazy devs and startups think too, resulting in fewer cute tools (it seems to me at least) being thrown out there for me to find. But I thought it may just be a useful creative rummage for someone at least for a while longer before all creativity is crushed beneath the boot.” Which, er, is a bit bleak! KEEP THE FAITH, TOM SMITH! BETTER TIMES WILL COME! Possibly after we’re all dead, fine, but, well, that’s no reason not to hope (it is a *bit* of a reason)! Anyway, this is a great collection of resources to help you make all sorts of stuff – as the site explains, “These activities are made to help you in getting started creating. Why not try a tool format you haven’t tried before? What if your work was presented as a “Sound story” or interactive narrative game? Each activity contains “inspirations” for you to go and explore and think about. There are “resources”, where you can get the media you need. And there are the relevant “tools” for you to get your hands dirty with making something. And of course, don’t forget good old analog work. During Digital Creativity Week we give out sketchbooks and craft materials – it really doesn’t matter what you’re using, as long as you are having fun making things.” REALLY useful and worth bookmarking imho.
  • The Race To Space Project: I’m going to be careful how I speak of this because, well, this is one man’s project and dream and I don’t want to cast aspersions. So. In its own words: “The Race To Space project is a “novel” approach to popularizing the only grid-level long-term solution (solar power satellites in geostationary orbit) for the looming end-of-oil crisis. The Race To Space book merges predictive fiction with a solid development plan to entertain and educate the reader in an effective way. There are two primary objectives writing the Race To Space book will achieve: First, there’s the “predictive fiction” action story to tell that will thrill and entertain a wide spectrum of readers. It’s the sort of thing Hollywood producers dream of – and yes, I’m looking at getting a movie version released into theatres. By engaging a wider audience, I expect to broaden the interest and participation in the Race To Space project’s larger goals. Second, the book will include a hard-facts business plan for a system that will put solar power satellites in Earth orbit. Those satellites will be a major part of the energy supply human civilization needs to survive beyond the end of our fossil fuel reserves. The business plan will be the catalyst which starts that project, and ultimately gets the system built.” And there you have it! This is…quite curious; although I am very much here for the author’s assertion that the book will sell ‘at least a million copies’ – YES I LOVE THE AMBITION HERE! Also, apparently, they are going to set up a bank and eventually start issuing their own new currency, so this is potentially a good chance to get in on the ground floor. The book’s not out til Q2 2026 – no word on the eventual space programme, but it can’t be far behind.
  • The Anthropic Lookup List: So you may have seen that last month Anthropic settled a lawsuit about the company’s hoovering up of millions of texts to train its models – which briefly led to a ‘woohoo the machine trainers are FCUKED! Copyright ftw!’ moment before people bothered to look at the small print and realised that Anthropic weren’t on the hook so much for content theft as they were for the *manner* of said content theft (cf destroying books) and as such the ruling made not one iota of difference to the likelihood that ‘creatives’ will ever get compensated by Big AI for the use of their works in their training data (clue: it is still very unlikely, I am sorry). STILL! This website lets you check to see whether anything you’ve written was part of the Anthropic suit, and whether you might be eligible for any share of any eventual payout – except I am pretty sure that this only applies to authors whose works were registered in the US. STILL (again)! Small victories!
  • Dutch Proverbs: Ooh, this is a nice little bit of EDUCATIONAL FUN! “In 1559 the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the panel Nederlandse Spreekwoorden including on it literal illustrations of more than a hundred Dutch language proverbs. Many of these proverbs focus on the absurdity of much of our human behaviour and Bruegel’s renditions reinforce this interpretation portraying a world literally turned upside down. At the same time some of the more serious proverbs illustrate the dangers of folly, which leads to sin. We’ve created this interactive version of the analog painting so you can playfully discover the tons of popular wisdom buried on it.” This is very simple – it’s basically a jpeg of the painting with interactive hotspots plastered all over it, hover over one and get the proverb associated with that bit of the painting (it will make sense when you try it, honest), and if I were nitpicking I’d say that this would benefit enormously from audio samples of a Dutch voice reading out the phrase in question and its explanation in English, but, well, I am not nitpicking! I am enjoying! Also, I now have ‘op de wereld schijten!’ looping through my head, which is frankly annoying given it’s only 808am and I still have a LOT of writing to get through chiz chiz.
  • Kingsland941: A TikTok account owned by some guy who has developed this genuinely BRILLIANT technique for filming stop-motion papercraft animations on his phone; seriously, click the link and be AMAZED at the ingenuity and how incredibly fcuking cool the end results look; if you’re in the invidious position of having to concern yourself with CONSUMER-FACING BRANDED CONTENT, specifically anything to do with film or videogames, you really really really need to look at this because you will want to hire this guy to make stuff for you (or, possibly more likely, rip off this technique wholesale).
  • Endless Summer: I like this project by designer Laurent Desserrey,  despite it making me feel…a bit sad inside. Per their description, “made this little photobooth app called endless summer for when burnout hits and you need to manifest the soft life u deserve – with fake vacation pics of you :’)” It’s AI-powered, and creates images of you in imagined holiday snaps, looking CHILL and RELAXED and HAPPY, which might be just what you need at the point the clocks go back and you realise that you like in England and are now going to be cold and damp and dark FOREVER (until March, which basically IS forever oh god I don’t want to have to wear the fingerless gloves when I type Curios please let it be a mild one).
  • Have A Dandy Day: You need the sound on for this, but I can’ stress enough how much this will improve your day (NB – this is obviously not true if something genuinely awful or traumatic is going on in your life) and indeed possibly your whole existence. There’s a *slight* whiff of AI about this (the song, some of the copy), but, well, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. Let Dandy Dan wish you a Dandy Day RIGHT NOW!

By Brittany Fanning

CHANGE UP THE TEMPO NOW WITH A FRESH MIX OF BLEEPS, BLOOPS, BEATS, BREAKS AND HIGH-BPMs FROM FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS TENTATIVELY HOPEFUL ABOUT A CEASEFIRE BUT SIGNIFICANTLY HAPPIER THAT THAT FCUK DIDN’T GET THE NOBEL AND WILL HOPEFULLY DIE BEFORE THE NEXT ONE, PT.2:  

  • The Best Inventions of 2025: Dunno man, seems a *bit* premature to be declaring this in early-October, but still. This is Time Magazine’s annual list of, er, the best inventions of the year, selected by a coterie of hacks and covering all sorts of different areas of innovation, from fashion to climate science to food to audiotech, and, as I have said every year since I first realised this was A Thing, it contains some genuinely BRILLIANT examples of creative problemsolving, and is the sort of stuff which any of you working in agencies, specifically ‘planning’ or ‘strategy’ ‘creative’ or other such godawful, made-up, doomed professions, ought to at least look at because SO MANY of these are genuinely smart responses to real-world problems that could serve as, er, ‘inspiration’ for the next six months of Lion-baiting activity. My personal favourites include the accessibly-designed lip balm, the ‘buzzkill’ notification manager and the Crowd Compass Friend Finder – all of which, honestly, feel like the sorts of things that agencies come up with all the time, but, well, better – but there is SO MUCH clever and interesting stuff here that it might even make you feel better about the imminent arrival of the big cold damp season (sorry, I am very much feeling the imminent Winter today for some reason).
  • The Local Files Club: This is in theory a really good idea that will live and die on the pricing model – it’s by Adam Cecil, who runs the (very occasional) Night Water newsletter I have featured in here a few times before and who this time is launching a NEW PROJECT for audio-based storytelling; basically the Local Files Club wants to act (I think – sorry if I am getting this massively wrong, Adam, in the unlikely event you ever see this) as a sort of micropublisher for shortform audiofiction, with the idea that audio files (and more – I think releases will be wider ‘content bundles’ comprising the story and Associated Multimedia Materials, depending on the creators’ whims) are released on an occasional basis via the site and made available for sale; you won’t be able to stream them, they won’t be podcasts, but instead, like zines or similar, they will only exist as purchasable artefacts. Which is where the pricing question comes in – a 40m audio drama is feasibly something I might pay…a couple of quid for, maybe? Probably not more than that tbh, and I am not sure what the market will be like given the fact that you’re not exactly short of free (if ad-funded) audio material elsewhere. But! It’s a nice idea, and a good way of supporting creativity in a media that I think is often overlooked in favour of the ubiquity of PODCASTS, and I think this is worth keeping an eye on; the first show (which “follows the adventures of a tea witch who breaks down in the small village of Talford. As she waits for her van to be repaired, Ms. Shipton sets up shop and meets the locals—a farmer, a publican, and a priest—exploring themes of loneliness, companionship, and queerness through five vignettes” – not really my vibe, but it might appeal to some of you) comes out in the next few weeks, price tbc, and you can sign up for updates on the homepage. DO IT.
  • Openwebcam Database: I’ve featured webcam sites (NOT THOSE SORTS FFS YOU PERVERT) on here before over the years, but this particular aggregator is new to me, and I will never tire of the mundane voyeurism afforded to us by these small windows into mostly unremarkable places across the globe. Ok, there are some MAJESTIC LANDSCAPES and lovely wildlife in here, but there are also a large number of cameras set up in launderettes (no, I don’t know either) and other such unprepossessing places and I can’t help but enjoy these utterly-banal views of THE AMAZING MIRACLE OF LIFE ON EARTH.
  • The Camopedia: I always associate camo clothing either with people who were REALLY into drum’n’bass in the 90s (this is possibly unfair, but, well, it’s the association I have and there’s nothing you can do about it, sorry) or with people who should really never be allowed to join the territorial army (or with, you know, actual soldiers), but it turns out it’s MUCH more complex than that, as you will learn as you delve into the depths of this Wiki devoted exclusively to THE MYSTERIES OF CAMOUFLAGE GEAR! “The Camopedia website is a living document, providing a comprehensive, accurate, and academically-supported database referencing all of the major military and paramilitary camouflage patterns that have been in use around the world since the beginning of the 20th century. This reference is available as a free resource for historians, government agencies, military personnel, collectors, artists & designers, airsoft & MILSIM enthusiasts, military modelers, and all others with an interest in camouflage design, development, and history.” Aside from else, this taught me that there are a variety of commercially-patended camo patterns, including, for example, “PenCott™ Multi-Environment Camouflage was developed by UK-based Hyde Definition (founded by Dominic Hyde in 2008) and has been available commercially since 2009” – WHY DO WE NEVER CELEBRATE THIS INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS FOR UK INDUSTRY??? GIVE MY HYDE THE CBE HE DESERVES!
  • Adversarial Metanoia: Another one from Marcelo Rinesi, this time a project of his own – Adversarial Metanoia, which is a blognewsletterthing featuring what Marcelo describes as ‘science fiction, short, on a stochastic schedule’. Basically this is a short scifi story a week, ish, delivered to your inbox; the half dozen or so I have read have been interesting and well-written enough to make me sign up, so I suggest you check out the archive and see if it’s the sort of thing you might enjoy.
  • The Chopin Competition: I had no idea that there was an annual international piano contest celebrating the works of Chopin – which, honestly, isn’t surprising given how little attention I pay to Chopin News Updates Daily. But! There is such a thing! And it’s on RIGHT NOW, and runs until the 23rd October and features, er, LOADS (sorry, I don’t have time to count them right now) pianists from around the world, er, playing Chopin, and, I presume, competing to see who does so the, er, ‘best’ (yes, I know that this is something of a dog’s dinner of a link description, but in my defence the website doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining to the layperson exactly how any of this sh1t works or what in fact is going on, or how the whole thing is judged…) – oh, hang on, found it: “The 19th Chopin Competition will officially commence on 2 October 2025 with the opening concert by the winners of previous editions. Following an initial selection of applications, the jury has chosen 161 pianists and invited them to Warsaw for the Competition’s Preliminary Round in April and May 2025. Of their number, only around 80 will advance to the main Competition held in October. Even qualifying for the Competition is a remarkable achievement in itself. Following the customary routine, the October auditions will last for three weeks. On 20 October, we will learn the name of the new winner of the Chopin Competition, an artist certain to make their mark on the history of piano performance. The Awards Gala and the first of three concerts by the winners will be held on the following day. Following the tradition, the scores awarded to each participant will be published after the conclusion of the Competition, ensuring transparency in the awarding process. The first prize winner will receive €60,000 and a gold medal, while the total prize pool exceeds €240,000.” GO, CHOPINOFILES! Anyway, er, the point of me linking this is that the whole thing is being streamed on the website (or at least I presume it will be in a few hours when the pianists have soaked their fingers in tincture of aloe for a few hours, or whatever it is they do to limber up) and so it might be something nice to have on in the background because, well, who doesn’t love Chopin? NO FCUKER, etc!
  • Doodle: This is both very simple and, I think, the product of an AI in terms of the design and build (although I am happy to be told I am wrong here), but, in general, it is surprisingly fun – the idea is that there’s a small window at the top of the page into which you can doodle anything you like to be submitted to the public gallery; scroll down and you will see all of the previous submissions in ALL THEIR GLORY (mostly no glory whatsoever), and, for each doodle, can hit the ‘play’ icon to see it be drawn into being. Ok, so given the VERY SIMPLE MS Paint-style interface here and the fact that it’s seemingly only really being shared by children, this is, in the main, pretty…er…’unsophisticated’; there is a lot of POO EMOJI, there was a spate of crudely-drawn c0cks when I found it earlier in the week, there’s a lot of international trolling of the US…but, importantly, there’s no racist horror (at least not that I have ever seen – as ever, caveat emptor) and there are occasionally some REALLY impressive examples of people doing some quite sophisticated drawing with very constrained tools, and as a general ‘quick window into the global id’ it’s a pleasing way to spend a few minutes scrolling (or to share your artistic genius with the world, either/or).
  • Where Is The ISS?: At the time of writing (909am) it is just above the West Coast of Africa – MAN THAT THING MOVES FAST. This is just a model of the ISS mapped over a 3d model of the earth, using open data to track its progress in orbit, but it’s sort-of mesmerising and it made me want to reread Orbital by Samantha Harvey so there.
  • Monetisation WTF: I had a slightly-depressing conversation with a Young Man this week who told me that he ‘doesn’t trust’ women because of all the videos he sees on TikTok and Reels showing them exhibiting all sorts of TERRIBLE behaviours – selfish venality, infidelity, money obsession, shallowness, you get the idea. The look on his face when I suggested to him that a significant proportion of the sort of content that shows women in this light – you know the idea, the ‘woman on the street’ voxpop vids, the ‘women interviewed on a podcast’ vids – were in fact…not real in the slightest, were in fact entirely-scripted, and were in fact top-of-funnel gateways to OnlyFans content or were otherwise being monetised  through Creator Programmes and were literally just engagementbait designed to make young men like him keep watching in disgust was…well, he didn’t believe me, basically, which is it’s own miserable story. Anyway. This is a really useful tool which lets you get a topline indication as to whether specific accounts on Meta platforms have been monetising their content, and how, since 2019 – incredibly helpful for journalists, but also anyone trying to get a handle on what the particular motivations for accounts sharing specific types of content or farming for engagement might be (clue: money, the motivation is money).
  • Ambigrams: Ambigrams are words that can be read when flipped upside-down (fine, click the link, it will make more sense – but that was a pretty good description, damn you), and this site collects all sorts of user-submitted examples of the art which you can rank and comment on and generally just enjoy; there’s some super-impressive design and calligraphy at work here, and some of the creativity on display to make the ambigrams themselves and to render them in ways that are both aesthetically-pleasing and also relevant to the word in question is ingenious. Even if you don’t think this is your sort of thing, I urge you to check out the hall of fame because some of these are astounding.
  • Podcast Magic: Ok, it’s not REALLY magic but it does slightly feel like it – this could be REALLY useful to those of you who consume lots of podcasts and want to be able to clip specific bits of them. Basically all you have to do is screenshot your phone’s homescreen when the pod gets to a bit you want to clip, email the screenshot to these people, and within a minute you’ll get back a clipped audio file of the moment in question along with a transcript. WHICH, SEE, SOUNDS LIKE MAGIC! Ok, I haven’t *actually* tried this so I can’t vouch for whether it works or not (BAD CURATOR!) but it doesn’t give off the vibe of something that is going to try and steal your soul via the medium of email and so I say give it a try (Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any email-based soul-stealing which may or may not occur).
  • Stranger Folk: I have NO IDEA when the fcuk children have their holidays in the UK around this time – is it half term soon? Will my city shortly be full of tiny idiots during the week? – but presuming that at least some of you have taken the increasingly-questionable-looking decision to breed then I imagine you’ll be looking forward with mounting dread to the time stretching ahead of you and how to fill it in ways that are IMPROVING and EDUCATIVE and FUN. In which case, and on the assumption that the venn diagram crossover between ‘people who read Curios’ and ‘people who like the National Trust’ is basically a circle, let me offer you this app by the NT which, per the blurb, is “an immersive adventure inspired by British folklore. The interactive game features goblins and other creatures who lurk at some of the historic houses we look after in the UK.  The app is designed for children aged 7-12 and can be downloaded for free from Apple and Google app stores…Families only need one mobile phone to play the game and can work together to heal a rift between the human and spirit worlds. Volume 1, ‘Crone Calling’, starts with a message from a mysterious Old Crone. As the story develops, you can meet sneaky goblins and cunning boggarts, while learning of strange goings-on. The game can be played at a fast pace for around 20 minutes or you can take the whole day to complete the adventure, pausing for lunch then picking up where you left off.” Doesn’t that sound wholesome and fun? YES IT DOES! Via Ben Templeton, whose newsletter is really good for this sort of stuff (and other stuff too).
  • Futile: Fred writes to me from Switzerland (hi Fred!): “I wanted to share something that might fit right into Web Curios’ “delightfully pointless internet” category. I made a website where the only thing you can do… is scroll. It tracks how far you scroll, gives you ridiculous badges, and rewards you with absolutely nothing.” PERFECTLY POINTLESS! There is actually a Big Theme sitting behind this, to whit: “Behind the prank lies a simple truth: every day we spend hours scrolling Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and more. It’s entertaining, yet rarely essential. This absurd website hijacks that gesture to highlight the absurdity of infinite scroll. Here, at least, the uselessness is honest. No products to sell, no algorithms to trap you—it just exists, reminding you how much attention the feeds already take from you. In that sense, FUTILE.ch is a useless site that becomes paradoxically useful: it questions our relationship to time, attention and the consumption of endless content. A tiny Swiss satire.” It’s not the first variant on this sort of thing I’ve seen, but I like the additional bells and whistles (the badges, the fact you can save your progress, etc) and I am pleased it exists. THANKYOU FRED FROM SWITZERLAND. I am not going to scroll more than a couple of meters, though, because I can already feel it in my digits.
  • RNG Clicker: In general I have a strange soft spot for clicker games, pointless as they are, but this one, which strips away all the artifice to show you the cold, hard reality of What You Are Doing as you watch Number Go Up with slackjawed wonder is…well, it was a bit too coldly on-the-nose for my tastes. You, though, you click RIGHT on through and I will see you next week.
  • Gemgetter: Ooh, this is fun! A daily puzzle-ish (I say puzzle-ish because it feels morelike a straight game than a puzzle per se, though I appreciate that there are optimal solutions which I concede does make it QUITE puzzley) all about mining gems; the tutorial isn’t *great* at explaining how the fcuk to play it, if I’m honest, but I managed to just about get my head round it enough to play a few games this week and it’s a rather fun potential addition to your now-87-games-strong morning routine of ‘mentally limbering up before the day starts’ (takes three hours, leaves you intellectually and emotionally depleted in the extreme).
  • Lunch Rush: This is another game by Jameson Thatcher, who made that excellent Breakfast Game I featured MONTHS ago – he is BACK with another food-themed distraction, one which this time tasks you with attempting to make BURGERS from the various components falling from the sky. The gameplay here involves switching the plates round so as to attempt to get the right ingredients in the right stacks, to max the burgerishness and so your score without the whole thing getting too high and causing the dreaded GAME OVER message to flash up, taunting you with your ludic inadequacy. I confess to finding this QUITE HARD, a bit like rubbing my belly and patting my stomach at the same time, but that’s more a skill issue and a me problem than it is anything you should worry yourself with – this is FUN, and the soundtrack once again slaps.

By Erin Milez

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS WHAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS AN HOUR OF DREAMY, CHILLED AMBIENT COMPILED BY ISLANDMAN, WHICH IS VERY MUCH MAKING ME WANT TO HUNKER DOWN AND NOT WRITE THE FINAL FEW THOUSAND WORDS THIS WEEK SO PLEASE APPRECIATE THE SACRIFICE I AM MAKING FOR YOU!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • On Verticality: Via Italy’s premier weekly interesting links blog, Pietro’s ‘Link Molto Belli’, comes this – which isn’t a Tumblr, but very much spiritually feels like one, so I am putting in here: “a blog that explores the human need to escape the surface of the earth through vertical means, and our complex relationship with verticality throughout our history. From our first vertical act of standing upright to our conquering of the skies through flight and skyscraper construction, much of our efforts through history have been to escape the surface we exist on. The human struggle with verticality is eternal, ubiquitous, and has been fought by every member of our species who has  ever lived. This is interesting mainly for the curatorial lens applied by the writer – there are a bunch of interesting and varied little essays about, well, ‘things that point up into the air’, basically.
  • The Oxford Arabist: This is a) a newsletter; and b) VERY NICHE, but for some reason it appealed to me and I thought there might be at least one of you to whom it might appeal to; this is a new project by Oxford University students “covering the culture, history, and study of the Middle East and North Africa and connected regions.” Basically this is a blog, but, well, IT FEELS LIKE A TUMBLR TOO, so in here it goes.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Lost Property Lectures: I like this idea in principal, though the branding here and the way it’s being pitched strikes me as *slightly* lifestyle-accessoryish, in the same way as the whole ‘LITERARY SALON RESURGENCE’ movement of the past 18 months or so; still, the premise (occasional evenings of short talks in London – 10 mins – about whatever the speaker fancies, with drinks and socialising) is something I generally like as a concept and it might be worth following the Insta account here to keep up to date on when they’re next happening.
  • The Sandbox Cafe: Previously if I heard people were visiting Keswick in the Lake District I would wax lyrical about the brilliance of the town’s Pencil Museum (it really is magnificent) and encourage them to pay a visit – now, though, I will ALSO tell them about the Sandbox Cafe, which as far as I can tell is basically a place where you can get tea, cake and then sit playing with REMOTE CONTROL DIGGERS in a MASSIVE SANDPIT for a few hours. I think this might have originally been set up as something for kids to do on rainy days (of which there are MANY in that part of the world), but if you look at the Stories from the account then, well, there is a perhaps predictable number of middle-aged men in there, living their best, sandy lives. SO PURE SO BEAUTIFUL.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • On Integration: Once again this week the top end of the longreads section is a bit on the anglocentric side – blame part conference season! Blame the seemingly-irresistible compulsion felt by approximately 60% of the UK’s political estate to just keep turning the racism dial! – but this is a good piece of writing by Stephen Bush in the FT about ‘integration’ following Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick’s comments this week about ‘not seeing a white face’ in a specific part of Birmingham and attempting to somehow frame that as ‘not being about race’ but instead being about ‘integration’. You hopefully don’t need me to explain why that’s egregious fcuking b0llocks, but this passage in particular feels like a useful fragment to frame the whole: “Integration matters. We have useful measures of whether integration is happening: whether people can speak the language, how they do in school, whether they identify as British, English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or some combination of all of the above, and participation in the labour market. Happily we track all these things! Here’s what is not a measure of whether someone is integrated: the colour of your skin. No one who looks at me and my grandmother, a white South African, in the street, can tell which of us is more integrated (it’s me, for obvious reasons) or frankly even that we are related.”
  • The Truth About Small Boats: Related to the above, this is an excellent piece of journalism by Miles Ellingham and Jack Jeffrey in the New Statesman, who go to Calais to speak to the people who are there waiting and hoping to somehow gain passage to the UK; it shares their stories of ‘why the UK’, and details the conditions they find themselves in and the conditions that they left which are leading them to endure genuinely miserable existences on their way to (and sometimes on arrival in) sanctuary. I have a bit of current personal knowledge of this situation and people like this, and, seriously, if you spend any time whatsoever speaking to people who have arrived in the UK and claimed asylum you quickly come to realise that we have no fcuking idea AT ALL about what it means to traverse multiple countries in lorries and boats, what it means to sit in the back of a lorry traversing deserts, hiding from militia and occasionally stopping to bury the bodies of your fellow travellers who’ve succumbed to dehydration or disease en route. If you can read this and not feel sympathy for the people here depicted then, well, you can fcuk off and stop reading this newsletter, frankly. Honestly, this is SUCH a good read, if one that will make you angry at the fucking state of the ‘debate’ around asylum.
  • Dashboard Culture vs Camo Culture: My fellow Tiny Awards organiser and Friend of Curios Matt Klein has written one of the smartest things I’ve read all year about Where Culture Is At – honestly, if you’re the sort of person for whom things like ‘normcore’ and ‘boom boom’ are meaningful parts of your personal or professional discourse then you owe it to yourself to read this, it really is SUCH a useful set of lenses through which to look at the now. Here is the basic twin poles premise of the piece – seriously though, read the whole thing, you will feel smarter as a result: “Dashboard culture – What’s in the driver’s seat, and what culture is currently optimized for is amplitude and perceptibility. Noise. Sensationalism. Spectacle. Reptilian-brain inducing pageantry. Does it register as a metric on the dashboard? If so, good. If you are not loud, you do not exist culturally, politically, or socially. In the age of the algorithm, cultural value becomes synonymous with measurability. Dashboards don’t give a sh1t about merit, substance or even truth.Camouflage Culture is off-the-grid, private, secretive, quiet and exclusive. Here ideas, aesthetics, and movements can finally fester, illegible to the dashboard. Camouflage is encrypted, niche, and resistant to capture. Invisible to brands, metrics and algorithmic capture. It’s the borderlands, home of cultural fugitives. It’s cultural production under the conditions of utter surveillance. Camouflage Culture is the dinner party you’re not invited to, Substack paywalls, algo-speak, double meaning emojis, linguistic drift and slang, Chatham House Rules, three hour podcasts, IYKYK, ephemerality, anonymity, vibes, group chats, off-off-broadway, Yondr phone-locking pouches, the One Piece flag, deep-fried memes, Skibidi, niche subreddits, members-only clubs, and printed zines.” I mean, YES. SEMI-RELATED – for the trendspotters, strategists, planners and hypebeasts amongst you, this is another good essay, this time by Emily Segal of Nemesis writing a dispatch from Berlin about The State of the Now; I thought this felt…true: “We’ve also been thinking about this in terms of the types of limits that people who have tons of resources put on themselves. Like you could see this as being the backbone of the “Don’t Die” movement (or even more specifically a Huberman type guy) – the fact that everyone in Silicon Valley is stopping drinking and doing all these health protocols and putting all these limits on themselves. There are lots of ways to make fun of it, but in a way it seems like a natural response to having so many resources, so much technological possibility, and so much influence. People are looking for ways to limit themselves; people are craving a sense of limitation.”
  • It’s The Internet: Frankie Fukuyama is back! Having seemingly recovered from the two-decades-long bodying he received from the general public as a result of their total misinterpretation of his ‘end of history’ thesis, Mr Fukuyama has returned with a new essay in which he basically argues that everything that’s gone wrong over the past decade or so, and specifically the rise of global populism, can in the main be attributed to…the web! And phones! Which, perhaps predictably, I don’t agree with AT ALL, or at least not when it’s outlined as simplistically as it’s presented here (I am going to do Frankie the service of assuming that his thinking is more nuanced and will eventually be explored in a book and that this is just the cliff notes version), but which I am sharing with you because I feel this is going to get a lot of chat over the next few months in certain circles as a kind of Haidt-companion. The broad thrust here is summarised thusly: “Broadly speaking, the internet removed intermediaries, traditional media, publishers, TV and radio networks, newspapers, magazines, and other channels by which people received information in earlier periods. Back in the 1990s, when the internet was first privatized, this was celebrated: anybody could become their own publisher, and say whatever they wanted online. And that is just what they did, as all the filters that previously existed to control the quality of information disappeared. This both precipitated and was an effect of the broad loss of trust in all sorts of institutions that occurred in this period.” Which, you know, fine! But also, THERE HAS BEEN SOME OTHER STUFF GOING ON, FRANKIE! And, you know, the web (he means the web, and frankly, Frankie, if you can’t be fcuked to get that right then, well, do you really know what you’re talking about) DOESN’T EXIST IN ISOLATION, and might, on some quite significant levels, be seen to mirror some or all of the existing power dynamics and infrastructures which maintain in real life, and which have been fcuked multiply by capital over the past few decades which, I don’t know, might also perhaps bear a significant degree of responsibility here! Also, there’s a section on videogames which is so spectacularly dumb that I don’t want to quote it here because I feel like I’m kicking a spaniel. This is not a good piece of thinking imho.
  • AI as a Social Problem: The question of ‘is AI going to fcuk all the jobs markets up?’ is currently one with multiple different answers depending on whose research you choose to look at – some papers seem to think the impact is negligible to nonexistent, others posit that it’s already starting to bite. NOONE KNOWS YET, is the upshot (but, personally, I am with these guys); this article by Hamilton Nolan makes the excellent point (which I like to think I have been making for ~3y now) that the endpoint is the jobpocalypse, sort-of by design, and that that only becomes more true as the financial strains on the sector begin to feel…tighter and more pressing: “Will AI save us, or destroy us, or just be a big old bust?I don’t know, you don’t know, and we don’t need to know. It is enough, right now, to focus on more narrow aspects of AI that we can predict with confidence. The one that I am most confident about today is this: Investors will not wait an infinite amount of time waiting to see if AI becomes the magical superintelligence that dominates the world. Companies that have invested tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in AI will come under increasing pressure to be able to produce profits now, even as they continue to reach for the elusive AGI breakthrough. In order to show profits now, these companies will push incredibly hard to sell AI technology that already exists to corporate clients. And what is the main value proposition of the AI that they will be pushing? To automate labor. Specifically, to automate vast swaths of white collar and creative jobs. That is the clearest and most direct way that companies can be induced to buy AI products today. That is the most obvious way that a corporation can increase profits by using AI.”
  • The Voltage of the Age: A short note by Jay Springett – less of a longread, more of a passing thought really, but it’s something we discussed the other week and I feel it very strongly and maybe it will resonate with you too on some level, for better or worse: “What is going on with media, what is happening to media in this present moment is absolutely thrilling. It feels like a redux of being 14 years old and learning about the existence of Napster and the total disregard for the entire structure of recorded media. Only this time its everything. A century of media theory, and centuries of common understanding around what media is, and what it does is collapsing around me. All of media is dissolving into a grey goo in front of my eyes and its thrilling. I use the word thrilling because it genuinely is the only word I can find to describe how I feel about everything that is happening in the world.”
  • Ben Thompson on Sora: To be honest, Thompson’s so tediously-ubiquitous when it comes to ANALYSIS that it feels almost otiose to link to this, but I thought it was interesting to see how bullish he is about Sora and the idea of the appeal of online video after playing with it a bit; I don’t know if I wholly buy his assessment (after all, a cursory look at the app store reviews or the chat on X suggests that since OpenAI got legalled into rolling back the ‘we don’t care about copyright! Make Disney stuff with impunity! Fcuk you, famously-litigious Nintendo!’ stuff people are significantly cooler on how much fun the toy is), but I do think that there is something curious about the extent to which people feel significantly warmer about Sora than about any of the other vidgen tools out there (normie people, that is) and whether that’s to do with its having crossed over the uncanny valley and being able to produce ‘realistic’ video in a way none of the other models to date have managed. That said, Thompson also says that he enjoys scrolling through the Meta AI feed, so, well, what does HE know?
  • The Neural Viz Universe: I featured Neural Viz – an AI-generated series of sketches and TV shows featuring weird looking aliens in 70sish police procedural-style scenarios – in here a while back, and I think it, along with Trisha, is probably the most interesting and successful example of someone taking AI video and using it to make genuinely-interesting TV-style content with strong creative/programming sensibilities behind it; this is a really interesting profile in WIRED of the guy behind it, how he works, and why this stuff is a long, long way from throwaway ‘slop’ (hate that word, please can we retire it, using it feels as  lazy as just making waifus with big naturals on Grok). Honestly, even if you’re a kneejerk AI hater I encourage you to give this a read and then come back and tell me that there is no ‘craft’ here.
  • The LA Economy: Or, ‘how the entertainment industry is screwed and so are a lot of the people who for years made pretty decent livings working in it’ – this isn’t exactly a cheery read, particularly if you’re someone who works in, or downstream of, TV, but it is an interesting one; obviously AI is copping a lot of the blame here, but there’s also the wider point that near-infinite entertainment choices granted to us thanks to YouTube, social media and the advent of streaming mean that there’s simply not going to be the same size of market for lavishly-produced works made by a cast of hundreds; when a significant proportion of the world seems happy to forego watching professionally-made shows in favour of instead watching people talking down the camera to them from their phone, it seems obvious that the market for said shows is going to shrink. BONUS TELLY-RELATED CONTENT: this is an interesting article about Netflix recent extension into REAL LIFE ACTIVATIONS, from its TUDUM events to the Netflix Houses that it’s launching in the coming years to basically try and Disneyfy itself into becoming a brand people care about rather than one people resent for killing that ONE SHOW THEY LOVED after a single season.
  • An Update on the Nepalese Revolution: As the wave of young people’s uprisings spreads to Morocco it all feels quite Arab Spring-ish, except for the knowledge we now have that social media doesn’t in fact make all revolutions successful, bloodless and bottom-up, despite what we might have told ourselves 15-odd years ago. This is a really good NYT piece looking in more detail on the Nepalese protests, their aftermath, and the possibility that there are Other Forces driving this beyond just the youthful organisers and protestors who were the outward-facing image of the recent uprising.
  • The Bluesky Moderation Sh1tshow: I imagine most of you care not one iota about either Bluesky or about tedious questions of platform moderation – BUT! I genuinely believe that one can learn SO MUCH about both the modern web and about human behaviour and society by looking at how forums work (and have worked over the years), and that moderation and community management is HARD and COMPLICATED in ways that are underrated in terms of their wider importance, and I would encourage you to read this because it might give you some useful pointers as to Why This Stuff Matters Even If You Don’t Care About A Bunch of Too Online People Shouting At Each Other (NB – if the phrase ‘Lowtax Speedrun’ makes sense to you then you can probably skip this one, you have done your homework already).
  • Bad Greed: A week on and it does rather feel as though Ms Swift might have dropped a ricket with the latest record – for what it’s worth I listened to some of it last weekend and fcuk me it is execrable, and I say that as someone for whom Blank Space holds a small-but-important place in their heart (I am 46 years old ffs). Anyway, it won’t prevent it from selling like hotcakes, but it does rather feel like a Rubicon has been crossed in her popular perception, even amongst the die-hard; I thought this article was a rather good explanation as to why that might be the case. It’s eminently readable, written by someone who has loved and grown up with Swift’s work, and contains some staggering breakdowns of the extent of the grift which the artist is perpetrating here; when you’re worth over a billion quid do you need to sell your fans nine different collectible versions so you can effectively 9x your income? One might reasonably posit you do not. “Art is no longer Swift’s priority, if it ever was. We don’t have to approach and criticize this album as art, because it isn’t art. The Life of a Showgirl is made of Shein quality rip-offs of other people’s songs that are constructed shoddily and sold in ginormous quantities. Art takes time and care. This is profit. It’s content. There is very rarely money in trying to make something that matters to you. But there is a lot of money in making things that are just good enough to get people to buy them. That’s how we end up with Marvel movies, infinite remakes, one thousand books about fcking vampires, and bad paintings reselling for millions of dollars. If you’re willing to compromise everything—to have no public morals or beliefs, to make your work palatable to everyone—there is so, so much money to be made. Of course, that compromise is going to be the version of art that corporations want made. An artist is supposed to fight against that, to try to make something good even if it doesn’t make them a billion dollars. Greed will always destroy good work, because money and art have drastically different priorities. On The Life of a Showgirl, it’s undeniable which path Taylor Swift has decided to value more.”
  • A Journey into the Heart of Labubu: According to sales data the Labubu craze has already peaked and the only way is down, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be seeing those snaggletoothed landfill goblins everyfcukingwhere for decades to come, because the capitalist machine has spun into action and will not rest until every single person in the world has consumed at least one piece of Labubu-themed merch. This piece in WIRED is a really interesting look at Where It All Came From, the resale market and How It Works, and the strange derangement of the fad collector, and it made me feel quite glad that I don’t really like ‘stuff’.
  • Name A 28 Year Old, You Cannot: This did the rounds last weekend, but if you have not read it then I encourage you to do so because it is a) very funny; and b) seemingly VERY TRUE (I say this safe in the knowledge that literally NO 28 year olds read Web Curios and so won’t be popping up in my inbox to reveal their existence to me).
  • Ciao Bella: A restaurant review – and not a particularly positive one – of London dining institution Ciao Bella on Lamb’s Conduit Street, a place a lot of Londoners have a significant bank of memories about; when I was doing my MSc the Canadian guy I was friends with (who I won’t name re him being a VERY SUCCESSFUL CORPORATE LAWYER these days) and I used to come here, drink vats of red wine, eat pizza and then stay up all night doing gak and ‘talking about philosophy’ (that’s what we thought we were doing; we were not); others of you may have your own memories, but those are MINE. Anyway, this is from the Edible Reading blog, whose author visited with a friend recently and left underwhelmed; I am including this not because I have strong feelings about the veracity of the review (thought I am inclined to believe they are probably pretty accurate) but because it’s written really nicely; it’s affectionate, it’s warm about restaurants in general, it’s personal, and at the end of it I felt…warm, and happy, and despite the fact that at no point was the food described as anything other than ‘ok’ I quite wanted to go to Ciao Bella again (this time though I will happily forego the ‘dessert’, thanks anyway Chris Ca…NO I MUST NOT NAME HIM I MUST NOT).
  • Comeback: I really enjoyed this; a shortish article by Princess Superstar about her recent unexpected return to being famous and performing after years out of the game, having fcuked up her chances of a long career by being an absolute sesh casualty. There’s something really lovely about the evident joy she feels about this second chance, and I am increasingly a sucker for ‘older, wiser’ narratives (only one of those is likely to be attainable for me, and even that one’s questionable tbh).
  • I Tried To Quit My Job By Faking My Own Death: This literally tells the story described in the headline; it is not long, but it pleased me SO MUCH, not least because we can all sort-of imagine being desperate enough to try the same thing (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that IT DOESN’T WORK).
  • Death and the Gardener: An extract from Georgi Gospodinov’s memoir Death and the Gardener – Gospodinov is apparently one of Bulgaria’s most lauded novelists, and this is a beautifully-translated (and heartbreaking) vignette about paternal death which I think is gorgeous and I think you might too.
  • Interviewing Hitler: Patrick Coburn writes in the LRB about Norman Ebbutt, who was the Times’ Berlin correspondent until 1940 when he was expelled by the regime for his critical view of the Nazis; this is SO SO SO interesting, and it’s hard not to see…some parallels between the situation here described, with a supine and compliant media failing to stand up to an increasingly-obviously fascistic regime, and that which currently maintains in the US, where seemingly it’s only independent websites and the occasional tech magazine that have the balls to report what is happening with any degree of objective accuracy. Fascinating, but, er, possibly a BIT close to the bone right now.
  • Scampi Fries: Finally this week, a piece that’s a couple of years old but which I absolutely adored – it came to me via Rob Wickings, and it’s by Rachel Hendry and it’s all about Scampi Fries. To the foreign amongst you, Scampi Fries are a classic pub snack in the UK, now significantly less prevalent than they used to be but at one time, particularly in my faded childhood 80s memories, you couldn’t go into the Saloon Bar of your local without being assaulted with the…unique aroma of the snack mixed with the smell of stale spilled bitter and Brylcream (I have never eaten a Scampi Fry and I never will – they are not, to my mind, food, nor indeed are they really comestible) – this is basically a love letter to memory, to the senses, to pubs and community and probably-false memories about What Things Were, and it is wonderful (and I say that as someone who really never wants to smell one of these fcuking things ever again in his life).

By Anna Park

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: