I went to the ballet last night for the first time in my life and, honestly, it was AMAZING. Am I…am I now CULTURALLY MATURE? The following collection of words and links would strongly suggest that I am not, but I can very much attest to the fact that watching people do the whole ‘standing on pointy toes’ thing for the entirety of the second half of the show was astonishing (and made me never, ever want to see a dancer’s feet, ever).
I’m starting with that because, honestly, I can’t quite stand to look the news in the face right now – and, presuming you are much the same, why not take this opportunity to TURN OFF REALITY for a short while and instead spend some time exploring the wondrous, fractal world of ‘odd and interesting stuff on the internet’; it won’t make anything better, fine, but it is unlikely to make anything worse, and so far in 2026 that feels weirdly aspirational.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you might want to take a deep breath, turns out this is a long one.
(oh, and to anyone coming to this new this week based on either Bluesky or someone having recommended this as ‘a good newsletter for people who work in digital PR’ (lol what the actual fcuk though), don’t worry, most other people fcuking hate Curios too, it’s very much not a ‘you’ problem)
OUR MUSIC THIS WEEK KICKS OFF WITH A FINAL LOOK IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR, WITH POP CULTURE GENIUS NICK WALKER’S PICK OF HIS FAVOURITE TRACKS FROM 2025! (YOU CAN READ NICK’S EXPLANATION FOR HIS CHOICES HERE)
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE WHOLE JENRICK THING WOULD BE SIGNIFICANTLY FUNNIER IF A) THESE PEOPLE WEREN’T WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE OF POWER; AND B) IF EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THE STORY HAD DIED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT PRESS CONFERENCE, PT.1:
- Game Poems: Should you feel as though the first few weeks of 2026 have left you in need of some sort of calming soul balm then, well, I suggest you consult your priest/therapist/dealer, because, honestly, there is nothing for you here. BUT! Should you be someone who find small solace in poetry and who, like me, is convinced that the work compiled in publications like the HTML Review is a beautiful and occasionally-moving combination of prose and poetry and code, then you will, like me, adore Game Poems. This is the first edition of what will hopefully become, like the Review, a regular publication – in it, a selection of designers and coders and makers of small games present a selection of…’games’ feels like a big word here, so let’s call them ‘small interactive poetic experiences’ (and then wish that we’d just gone with ‘games’ because fcuking hell that was clunky). Per the blurb, “Game Poems is an interactive magazine dedicated to exploring the artistic and poetic potential of short-form videogames by publishing new work directly in a playable format. The magazine foregrounds the convergences that exist between videogames and poetry, highlights “born-videogame” poetics, and champions videogame creation as a legitimate (and accessible) form of poetic practice.” In practice, what this means is that you can explore 13 different digital…things, each lasting a couple of minutes (except one which is a little more involved) and each of which is a small meditation on…something. There are actual poems accompanied by graphics which emphasise the verse, requiring minimal user input; there are interactive, semi-ludic vignettes which are wordless but which communicate emotion in weirdly-evocative ways…all of these are beautiful, or at least all of the half-dozen or so I have so far tried, and all of them will make you think or feel…something. Oh, and there are several of my favourite digital artists included too, which is a bonus. Basically this is wonderful and exactly the sort of thing that I love, and so the least you could do is to love it too you fcuks.
- FitDrop: This is both VERY FUN and a lovely example of some of the silly-but-engaging-and-actually-quite-interesting things that you can do now with some coding chops and the assistance of The Machine – FitDrop presents a vision of changing men’s fashion over the past 45 years or so, with the screen filling up with representations of different looks (‘fits’ in the modern parlance) which you can pick up and drag into the top right to get more information on what the model is wearing and what the look is called; this is VERY satisfying (there’s something about picking up digital homunculi and dragging them around a screen, turns out) not least because of the slightly-creepy fact that all of the models are the same man. When I first came across this this week I thought ‘hang on, that looks like my friend Iain, I must message him about this’ and then I realised it WAS my friend Iain, who decided to build this as part of his general drive to ‘make fun things and explain how he did it’ – if you’re curious, you can see the code and his explanation of the stack he used to create it (including workflow and AI tools) here, which is the sort of generous approach to building that I think more people should employ. Basically this is great for several reasons: a) it’s actually a pretty good overview of changing streetwear trends for blokes over the past 4.5 decades; b) it’s a really nice example of What Even Largely Non-Code People Can Make Now; and c) it lets you hurl dozens of avatars of my friend Iain into the digital air.
- Holiday On The Moon: I think mention on here every so often how biblically, terribly bad I am at predicting anything whatsoever and how often I get things catastrophically wrong when it comes to guessing ‘what will happen next’ (did I mention I have consultancy hours available? DO NOT ALL RUSH AT ONCE!), but, even with that in mind, I feel REASONABLY confident in saying that despite what this website says, not a single person will be holidaying on the moon in 2032. AND YET! That is exactly what this company is promising – say hello to VERY shiny and obviously massively-funded space startup GRU Space (the founder is, by all accounts, 21, and so I am pegging the name as a Despicable Me reference and nothing anyone can say will disabuse me of that notion), which is promising that within 6 short years it will be accommodating 4 guests at a time on its, er, INFLATABLE MOON HOTEL! It really is worth spending some time with this one – the website is very shiny, and the scrolly parallax stuff is as-ever pleasing to observe, but it’s in the details where this shines. So much of the timeline is dependent on…somewhat dicey assumptions; that the test landing in 2029 to do tests on the environment all goes well, and the tests say ‘yep, go right ahead!’ rather than ‘no, what the fcuk are you doing, building an inflatable hotel on a dead, lifeless satellite is objectively insane, why are you even thinking about this?’, that ‘inflatable systems deployed’ is a combination of words that means something, that the phrase ‘modular inflatable habitats are enclosed by structures made from lunar material’ is less laughably-mental than it reads…God, ALL OF THIS IS SO SPECIAL! Or at least it would be were it not for the fact that people (investors, VCs) are throwing money at this rather, I don’t know, SOME OF THE MORE PRESSING PROBLEMS FACING US RIGHT NOW. There’s a white paper on the website which employs the same sort of tooth-grindingly-irritating ‘homesteaders on the frontier’ language increasingly deployed by the US administration, all about ‘striking out and fearlessly building’ – although, lads, let’s be clear, you’re building a suicide Travelodge for billionaire cnuts, you’re not exactly saving the species here. Anyway, this is either silly or infuriating depending your mood – I am choosing to see it as funny, and an inevitable precursor to the most delicious set of plute deaths since the submarine farrago a few years back. Also, should this ACTUALLY HAPPEN by 2032 then please do not try and find me to tell me, I hope to be dead.
- Doomscrollr: It says something about the calcification of digital life over the past decade or more that it feels like YEARS since there has been a new social platform that’s gained any serious traction (TikTok is OLD now, remember), and I have been writing things like ‘not sure anyone needs a different version of Instagram’ for a long, long time – and yet! Still they come! Doomscrollr is an odd new entrant – hyped as a SOLUTION FOR CREATORS, this basically looks like a fairly standard ‘post your branes’ platform with standard content types and a feed format, and I don’t really understand what is meant to be special or unique or interesting about it – it’s very much being sold to creators as ‘a platform to host your whole unique self and connect with your fans and community’, which, I think, is in part where the problem lies – there’s lots of stuff about that side of things in the blurb, but very little in the way of explanation as to why I, a normie user who while fundamentally-unglamorous is the sort of person who really needs to want to use something like this if it’s ever going to catch on, would ever bother with Doomscrollr, or what would be in it for me. Still, it’s got a very clear sense of aesthetic, so that’s nice I guess.
- Ragecheck: With ‘ragebait’ having been declared ‘word of the year’ for 2025 (or at least it was by one of the competing dictionary brands, there are approximately 73million words of the year as far as I can tell), a tool which purports to tell you whether copy you see online is drafted in a manner designed to inflame is ostensibly a good idea. Except it feels like EVERYTHING you read online at the moment is designed to raise your blood pressure – is…is that me? Have I finally reached a point in middle-age where I simply shake my fist impotently at the sky and shout imprecations at an unknown and uncaring God, regardless of the content of what I am reading? No, the problem is LIFE, not me! Anyway, this site is generally a good idea – plug in a link to an article or a social media post (X, Threads or Bluesky) and it will analyse it for inflammatory framing. “RageCheck uses a two-stage analysis pipeline: rule-based pattern detection followed by optional AI-powered contextual analysis. This hybrid approach balances speed, transparency, and accuracy. The system analyzes text for linguistic patterns commonly associated with manipulative framing—language optimized to provoke high-arousal reactions over understanding. It does not assess factual accuracy or political bias.” This is, as a far as I can tell, a personal hobby project by one Andrew Goldberg, to whom huge thanks – this is both a smart idea and something which I think would work really well as a Chrome extension should it be possible to spin it into one, and something which it would be nice to have as an automatic in-browser flag for…honestly, for everyone.
- Art Here: Anyone working in the arts in the UK will be aware of how…well, how grim the outlook is, basically, and how little money is sloshing around, and will doubtless be THRILLED by this website, developed in support of The Richard Mille Art Prize, sponsored by Luis Vuitton (natch) and whose nominees are currently on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi (so, so much about what is rotten and disgusting in ‘high’ art contained within that sentence!), which offers a VERY SHINY digital analogue to the meatspace show taking place in a desert kingdom far, far away. You scroll, you get shown digital representations of the works in question, you get some artw4nk in nicely-modulated v/o, you get some VERY light, very pointless interactivity…ach, I can’t pretend this stuff doesn’t boil my fcuking p1ss, honestly, this is obviously a very expensive Prize and exhibition and hence website, but it’s all so…empty, there’s something entirely superficial about the presentation and the copy and even (and I know it’s potentially-idiotic to say this based on the digital representations of installation work that are shown on the site, but, well, it’s my newsletterblogtypething and I will make myself look stupid if I want to!) the works themselves, and this just feels, again, like a sad and very two-dimensional way of engaging with art, digitally or otherwise.
- Unloved Ones: Not so much as Curio as a, er, online shop – but it’s a GREAT idea, and I think it’s worth promoting/supporting, and who doesn’t want access to some cheap-but-nice jewellery in these straitened times? NO FCUKER, etc! Unloved Ones is a business that’s been started by one Emily Rogers, who writes “UNLOVED ONES begins with tracking down forgotten, broken, or unfairly overlooked gold and silver jewellery. Each piece is then handed straight to my mum, Faith Rose, a Jeweller who restores each piece to its former glory (and often even better). Together, we give cast-offs a fresh start, ready to be worn and properly loved again.” I can’t speak to the work here – jewellery is a personal aesthetic choice, and I have no idea what your tastes are like (and wouldn’t it be weirdly creepy if I did, eh?) – but I think this stuff looks nice, personally, and the pricepoints for the works on sale seem really reasonable, and, generally, it’s such a nice idea that I would like it to succeed.
- Is My Pub Fcuked?: Via Former Editor Paul (thanks Paul!), this is a website that claims not to be part of any pub industry campaign but instead the hobby project of someone who just loves the boozer – basically, for those of you who don’t care about the minutiae of commercial UK taxation policy, there were rumblings that the Government over here was set to alter a bunch of rules which would in turn have negatively impacted the pub sector; said rumblings have quietened down, but not before the founder of right-wing lobbying agency Topham Guerin (a company about which I have no small misgivings, parenthetically) spun up this site which lets you plug in a UK postcode and spits out the location of the pub nearest to you that most needs your support, based on a combination of factors such as local business rates, likely footfall and the rest. This is, on the one hand, a smart little bit of coding and a good example of how to build something fun which also does a very good lobbying/comms job; on the other, if Topham Guerin doesn’t have at least one client with skin in this game, in the shape of either a brewery or the landlords’ association or something, I will be fcuking AMAZED.
- NoMo: We’re once again doing the whole ‘so, shall we ban social media for under-16s then?’ dance in the UK (“no, we should not” is my deeply-considered ‘not a parent’ take, in case you were in any way curious), and there will be lots of people who have seen the recent X farrago (lol, ‘recent’, like it hasn’t basically been Stormfront for at least a year or so by this point) and thought ‘I really ought to get off social media’, and so if you’re after something to help wean you off the demon feeds then say hello to NoMo, an app which…er…realises that you are WEAK and POWERLESS in defence of the skag-like pull of the algo, and therefore attempts to replace the dopamine rewards you get from scrolling and tapping with ACTUAL REAL-LIFE REWARDS, like, er, vouchers and stuff. “NOMO is an app that helps people scroll less and build a better relationship with social media without banning your social apps. Unlock benefits for scrolling less: NFL and NBA tickets, exclusive merch, concerts, and even cash-back. Cutting down scroll time requires collective action. Spend less time scrolling and foster real-life connections.” As you can tell from the rewards, this is a US operation; I have…questions about how sustainable this is given it’s a free app (like, who pays for the rewards, lads?), and I am not wholly sure that gamifying this stuff is the way forward (although I suppose one might argue that what are AAs sobriety chips but rudimentary gamification, and they seem to work ok), but I do think that the ‘tap your phone with another app user to lock them both off social platforms for an hour’ feature is a nice gimmick. 100% convinced that this only lasts til the second funding round runs out, though.
- Elsewhere: This is pointless, and likely won’t last for more than a week or so before everyone loses interest, but I also rather love it – Elsewhere is a simple site that lets anyone post an anonymous message to the world, geotagged and ephemeral. It will shop up on a world map for a week and then vanish, making this a global temporary messageboard; there’s something, for me at least, rather beautiful about being able to scroll out and click in on all these tiny thoughts and feelings dropped by strangers from all around the globe. So far the only insight from the UK is from someone proudly declaring Lowestoft as ‘Britain’s most easterly point’, which, honestly, doesn’t feel like we’re trying hard enough – I REALLY want to check in on this in a week to find it peppered with messages from YOU to the world, so, well, could you? Please?
- Milkyboard: I can’t wholly explain why the name of this site upsets me so but, well, it does! Anyway, I do not understand this AT ALL, but it looks weird and so IN IT GOES! As far as I can tell this is a MIDI keyboard interface which will do FUN THINGS if you sync it to your keyboard, but it’s very hard to tell due to the constantly-rippling psychedelic overlay which is playing above the whole thing for reasons I genuinely can’t comprehend. You can play this like a keyboard and adjust all sorts of settings on the left – play around and see if you can make more sense of this than I can (not, admittedly, hard).
- Tinder For Your Cameraroll: Not, fine, the ACTUAL name of the app, but mine is better (except for the obvious trademark reasons, fine) – this is in actuality called ‘Picnic’, and does one simple thing, letting you run through your cameraroll and simply swipe left or right to keep or delete the pics in question; simple, weirdly-fun and a good way of decluttering your phone should you be the sort of person who downloads every single fcuking meme you come across (WHY???). Via Elle, to whom infinite thanks.
- Love Poems: Poems are HARD. Or at least good ones are – I have a surprising facility for iambs, but that doesn’t mean they’re worth reading. As such, it’s often best to leave the bulk of the heavy lifting to the pros (I feel I should have rendered that as ‘prose’, but worry that you’d all have chalked it up as another typo – WILL NOONE RECOGNISE MY GENIUS?? Chiz chiz) – which is exactly what this site lets you do. Pick from one of 20 classic poems to use as ‘templates’ the site will give you the structure and the words of the original, letting you make small alterations to each line – so, for example, you might take ‘Love’s Philosophy’ by Shelley and alter the opening line so that instead of reading “The fountains mingle with the river” it now reads “The fountains mingle with the p1ss”. Why would you do that? IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND ROMANTIC YOU FCUKS.
- Asteroid Tones: THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES! Honestly, I love this – “Asteroid Tones is a live data sonification of asteroids passing Earth today. It pulls data from NASA’s Near Earth Object API to create a time-dependent soundscape of space around Earth. Here’s how to understand the sonification: 1) Low notes represent large asteroids, while higher notes represent smaller ones. 2) Asteroids closer to Earth produce sounds more frequently than those farther away.” This is strangely poignant and haunting and I really, really like it very much indeed. Via Giuseppe’s always-excellent newsletter.
- Write 3 Books In 24h: To be clear, THIS LINK IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT THIS IS A TERRIBLE AND GRIFTY TRAP. Now that that’s out of the way, MARVEL at this website which literally promises that, if you plug in the bones of your INCREDIBLE IDEA FOR A SERIES OF BOOKS and pay them $99, you will receive a trilogy of novels, COMPLETELY PUBLICATION-READY, within <24h. Can…can you IMAGINE what the outputs would be like? I have, obviously, not ponied up the ton to access my books (which is a shame, frankly, because the concept I provided was a potentially MILLION-SELLING YA franchise in the making, honestly), but part of me was sort-of tempted to see whether it would be possible to make the cash back via self-publishing and some light self-promotion…until I thought about it a bit more and realised that, while I am generally anti-anti-AI, this is the very definition of ‘polluting the world with horrible, empty, pointless crap’, and that attempting to make money passing whatever this produces off as ‘books’ would be massively unethical and very wrong indeed. So, er, if any of YOU want to take on this sin burden for me, I would be genuinely fascinated to learn what the eventual novels are like because I cannot BEGIN to imagine. I would also be interested to know how much cash this outfit is making, because, depressingly, I would imagine it’s not zero.
- Freecycle Museums: Also via Elle (don’t you have articles to write?!), this is a WONDERFUL corner of Freecycle that was entirely new to me. Did you know that the UK museums sector will occasionally get rid of unwanted bits and pieces by simply GIVING THEM AWAY FOR FREE??? Did you know that RIGHT NOW you can get your hands on a metal stool from the Natural History Museum, a bumper collection of old Tate mags, some, er, assorted glassware and a LARGE MECHANICAL SCORPION? No you fcuking didn’t, and I bet you are THRILLED to have learned about it. Honestly, this is a complete treasure trove and full of amazing, batsh1t stuff, and the only slight downside is that lots of it is collection early – but, should any of you have a DESPERATE BURNING DESIRE for something on here, I am genuinely happy to sort some thing out in terms of picking it up and shipping it to you (at your expense), no joke, so please do feel free to drop me a line and ask. Please don’t make me regret this.
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE WHOLE JENRICK THING WOULD BE SIGNIFICANTLY FUNNIER IF A) THESE PEOPLE WEREN’T WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE OF POWER; AND B) IF EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THE STORY HAD DIED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THAT PRESS CONFERENCE, PT.2:
- The Best Music Videos of the 2010s: WHAT a collection this is – and I am over 6 years late to it ffs. This was compiled in 2019, to mark the end of the decade, by the people at the Internet Music Video Database – it’s presented chronologically, and you can either browse the individual vids or if you’re feeling…committed, lock in to watch the full 7 hour playlist. There are some CLASSICS on here, from Tyler’s ‘Yonkers’ (such a shocker on first watch, and such a fcuking track) to a more recent FKA Twigs vid for ‘Cellophane’, and this is quite the memoryhole, sonically and visually – you could get lost in this one, so click at your own risk if you are ON DEADLINE (you know who you are).
- The London Inequality Map: You don’t need a map to know that London, in common with all of the world’s major urban metropolises, is a place of staggering wealth inequality (and opportunity, and outcome); still, if you would like a geographical representation of how and where those inequalities are starkest, er, here you go! You can select different views from the drop-down in the top-left; from Income Decile to Inequality Split, and while it won’t tell you anything that you probably didn’t already know or on some level feel, it’s interesting to see the data presented like this (and, depending on what you do, potentially also useful – there are some obvious ad targeting implications for certain sectors, for example, and some interesting creative choices that could be made based on some of the wrinkles and tensions revealed here that could be worth exploring).
- The AirBnb Map: Another really nice example of datamapping, this one by Lauren Leek who also built the ‘underrated restaurants’ map from before Christmas – here, she looks at the placement of Airbnbs around London, showing where they cluster and where they are putting pressure on housing stock (a calculation presumably based on the %age of properties within a given area that are short-term lets vs standard rental). Again, per the last link, this feels like something that a smart agency could do something really creative with for the right client (and which, less-pleasingly, estate agents would soil themselves with excitement over).
- Zoneless: I appreciate that ‘organising meetings with people across different timezones’ is, on balance, not a significant-seeming problem here in horrible old 2026. But! It is still an annoyance! And given the fact that we simply can’t do anything about the vast majority of terrible things happening to everyone, everywhere (the word of the year is ‘impotence’, or at least that’s what it feels like – NOT LIKE THAT, FFS), then maybe we should just concentrate on the small things. Is this…is this capitulation? Anyway, Zoneless is a beautifully-designed little webthing which does one thing and one thing only – plug in all the different timezones you need to coordinate and it will show you a really useful visualisation of what the time is in each of them at any given time in YOUR timezone, neatly letting you see exactly who you’re screwing over by scheduling that 90m all-hands at 10amGMT.
- Dry Outside: On the one hand, this is another one of those websites which answers a question which could also be answered by ‘sticking your head out of the window, maybe looking at the sky a bit’; on the other, it’s also a cute idea and not totally pointless (and, as I so often say to DEAFENING SILENCE, the sort of thing which a fabric softener brand really could SO EASILY pay a few k to the dev to sponsor for a really nice bit of user-centric on-brand digital collateral). Tell the site where in the world you are, and it will tell you whether you’re ok to dry your clothes outside or not – according to this site, despite the sunny weather in London this morning is is too humid to dry clothes well (the air, I am told, is ‘saturated’ – WITH WHAT THOUGH) and instead I should dry them indoors with the windows open. So there. Anyway, I like this, and if any of you work for Lenor that will be £500 please.
- Rainbow Wool: You might have seen last year that Grindr (was it them? I forget) did a promo that had something to do with ‘wool from gay sheep’, which I dismissed as (very successful, tbf) PR w4nk; except, it turns out, the gay sheep wool is actually a thing which existed independently before the PR, and they have a website and everything, so if you want to get involved with, er, wool from gay sheep WITHOUT contributing to the marketing campaign for a sex app then NOW YOU CAN! Sadly you can’t actually buy the wool but you can sponsor a gay sheep – there is sadly no word on whether your sponsored sheep will send you regular updates on its progress in the manner of ‘adopted’ animals in far-flung lands, but I really quite like the idea of getting annual emails describing a vigorously-queer ovine lifestyle.
- Labyrinths in Britain: I seem to write about mazes and labyrinths in here every 4 years or so (and each time I am compelled to mention the novel Larry’s Party, which I will never tire of recommending to people as a truly beautiful novel about the banality of life, the complexity of love, and maze design); I haven’t, though, to the best of my knowledge at least, ever featured this excellent resource which as it’s name suggests is a guide to ALL OF THE MAZES on this sh1tty little isle. “The story of British labyrinths is a long one, and the current chapter is one of artistry, spirituality, and hope. This website is designed to serve as a portal to information about the labyrinths, old and new, that are found here in the British Isles, as well as information about local labyrinth events, products, and enthusiasts.” I am 100% going to use this to go on a small labyrinth pilgrimage this year, and I strongly suggest you do the same. Oh, and for the non-anglos, this is a link from ~7y ago to a database of LABYRTHINS OF THE WORLD, because I am a kind and generous curator (and because I have a genuinely weird memory for links I have put in Curios, turns out). BONUS MAP OF FUN THINGS!: would you like a guide to ALL OF THE PINBALL MACHINES IN THE WORLD? Yes, of course you would, here you go.
- Zach King: The first in a run of TikTok links in this week’s Curios (I continue to reist the impulse to add a specific TikTok section, mainly because I don’t want to spend time on fcuking TikTok finding them), this is a guy called Zach King who is quite famous and has been doing this schtick for a while now, and who I was reminded of this week via a compilation vid on Reddit; the gimmick is clever tricks with cameras and editing to create short, astonishing illusions which are at once oddly-old fashioned (per a commenter I saw elsewhere, pretty much all the techniques in use here are things that were developed by filmmakers and SFX people in the 20thC) and very future (I will never cease to marvel at the fact that you can be one guy (ish) and just…do this stuff) – anyway, if you want to see videos of a man doing seventeen impossible things before breakfast then click this link and MARVEL. One of these has 2.4BN views ffs, that is mental.
- DiggerTok: This is a guy who makes and posts INCREDIBLY SHINY and oddly-pop-culture-coded edits of his work in, er, heavy contsruction machinery. You want a fancam edit of earth moving equipment set to hippop? YOU GOT IT! On the one hand, this is quite fun and I do like ‘ostensibly dull industries leaning into fun video stuff’ as a vibe; on the other, I do find it a bit depressing that there is very obviously a core aesthetic that all of this stuff cleaves to, which feels increasingly formulaic. Hey ho.
- Dark Souls Edits: I don’t REALLY understand what is going on here if I’m honest – I think that this is a Russian(?) kid who is making 3d modeled animations of Dark Souls characters (or at least FromSoft-coded characters) and setting them to music, but I can’t really be sure; what I can tell you is that I came to it via this, which is the hardest thing I have seen in 2026 to date and which I sort-of want a full video of tbh. Fcuk, just watched it three more times.
- BFF WAV: “What if Pokemon, but songs?” is a question that I am not sure anyone has previously asked, but is now being FULSOMELY answered by whoever is behind BFF WAV. Look, I don’t know ANYTHING about Pokemon, but if you’ve long been desirous to hear what (eg) Pangoro sounds like then FILL YOUR BOOTS (fyi they all sound synthy).
- The Traitors Dashboard: Statistically-speaking it’s likely that many of you reading this in the UK (lol, ‘many’, THREE! THREE FCUKERS!) will be glued to your televisions three nights a week, watching a bunch of strangers perform ‘lovable mendacity’ for an audience of millions while the nation’s best-paid haircut gazes at them benevolently from beneath kohl’d eyes. If YOU are one of the Traitors-pilled, you might enjoy this dashboard featuring statistical analysis of What Has Happened So Far – look, I obviously have never seen the show and have only a passing knowledge of how it works (and, if I’m honest, I don’t care and don’t want to know), but if you want a top-level overview of things like ‘who has been voted for the most and least’ and ‘most shielded active players’ (literally no clue), then you will enjoy this.
- The Great Hunger: A boardgame, currently at 10x funding on Kickstarter, which takes as its premise…er…the great Irish Famine of the 19thC! Obviously a HUGELY LOLSOME setting for a boardgame! Look, I am told by People Who Play Games that making titles based on less-than-happy bits of history is not always frowned upon, but the reaction to this has been…let’s say ‘mixed’, based on the fact that lots of Irish people, not unreasonably, feel a *bit* like this is taking a massive national tragedy and mining it for cash, while at the same time not displaying quite enough historical knowledge and sensitivity; the comments are quite the discussion! In fairness, I can see what the naysayers mean about the accent in the launch video being the very epitome of ‘an American’s idea of an Irish person’, and the whole thing does strike me as both a bit ahistorical and quite…icky, but why not make up your own minds!
- Canary: Have we all agreed that Duolingo doesn’t actually work for anything other than ‘keeping you using Duolingo’, and that that owl should fcuk off for good? GOOD! In which case maybe there is room in your life for another doomed attempt to master, I don’t know, Hungarian – say hello to Canary, whose gimmick is that it lets you sing along with your favourite tracks to help you learn AND have fun at the same time. Fcuk knows whether this works, mind – I can speak 2.75 languages and that is where I am tapping out, but if you’re of a more self-improving bent than me (this would not be hard) then you might enjoy this. Per the app store blurb, “Transform your favorite YouTube songs into interactive language lessons. Tap lyrics for instant translations, build your vocabulary, and practice pronunciation with voice recording. Perfect for music lovers wanting to learn languages naturally.” See how you get on.
- Brick: Another ‘stop using your phone so much’ tool which, as with so many of these, basically seems to just lean into the whole ‘you are powerless in the face of your addiction and you will need external help to break it’ vibe (which, honestly, I find…sort-of dismaying?) – Brick is a physical object which you have to tap to unlock certain features on your phone. So, say, you set it to lock all social apps and a selection of websites – tap your phone on the Brick and all of those are locked til you tap it a second time, the idea being that you put it by the front door, say, and tap on your way out, thereby neatly preventing you from accessing, say, Insta on your phone til you get back. This is a good idea which requires a degree of buy-in from users to actually work – it is, of course, perfectly easy and perfectly possible to ignore the fcuking Brick entirely, which is exactly what your kids will do if you attempt to make them use it – but conceptually it seems…not a terrible idea.
- Caveat Frogs: A Bluesky account sharing small cartoon frogs, frogs captioned with uplifting and motivational messages…all of which are heavily caveated. My favourite this week was “‘I Am What I Eat’* *easy and cheap”, but you will have your own favourites.
- Fcuk You I’m Frost: This week’s ‘here’s where some assorted AI stuff is at right now’ example is this…very silly, and VERY teenage boy-coded song and music video, featuring some sort of icy female superhero with a notable posterior doing LOTS AND LOTS of twerking over a song which, honestly, you really would have no idea was AI if you weren’t told (it’s not good, but, equally, neither is a solid 65% of what you here – this is not new, it has always been thus, I am not moaning about ‘music today’, I promise you). This is so EXCEPTIONALLY adolescent – honestly, it’s like a 14 year old boy typed ‘sexy twerking Sub Zero lady character’ into Kling – but it’s another interesting marker in the ‘what is possible in relatively few steps’.
- Cinequote: Can you guess the film based on the six dialogue samples you’re given, and how quickly? This is VERY HARD for me, but the fact that it gives you the audio rather than just the text makes it slightly more interesting even if you’re a cinematic dunce.
- Ripple: How does causality work? A big question, and not one that is remotely answered by this game – still, it rubs against the edges of it, and that’s all we can hope for (or at least it’s all I can hope for at 943am after 2h43m of continuous typing). Ripple presents you with an event from history and asks you to pick what subsequent event resulted from the first – that’s it! Today’s, for example, takes you from the invention of the readymeal to impacts on home entertainments – I have done a few now and they are genuinely interesting and educative, but, y’know, also fun! No, really!
- Meme Higher or Lower: TEST YOUR MEMETIC KNOWLEDGE! Which of two memes has more pageviews on Know Your Meme? WHICH???? PICK ONE!
- The Grist Torrent: Drop matching shapes on each other, work your way up to the MEGADIAMOND. Trust me, this will make sense as soon as you start playing (you will find it hard to stop, though, trust me). A bit like the beautiful Breakfast Game from last year (but with less of a banging soundtrack).
- Chains: A simple yet very fun and well-designed little word game, where you have to rearrange the words so that one follows on from / is linked to the next. Again, this will make perfect sense when you click, so ignore my terrible, hamfisted attempts to explain what it is and just play.
- Cocoanut Hotel: The last game of the week is this tribute to the Marx Brothers, specifically Hotel Cocoanut – here, have the dev’s blurb, this is both fun and full of VERY PLEASING Marx samples, and is an excellent 10 minute distraction. “Keep a beach side hotel from going totally bust in this hotel management sim based on the Marx Brothers’ first movie, The Cocoanuts. You’re the newest cannon-fodder manager at Cocoanut Hotel, a wild Florida beach resort in the 1920s, where the guests steal your money, eat the furniture, and break into spontaneous song-and-dance numbers in the lobby. Mr. Hammer is counting on YOU to fill all 100 rooms while he’s away. His top secret project is counting on it! Manage your housekeeping staff, boost your marketing budget, and suffer the antics of Chico, Harpo, and Mr. “Groucho” Hammer himself to transform this seaside stay from a fire hazard to a five star resort.”
By Hanne Zaruma
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Gluten-Free Museum: I LOVE THIS! Not least because it’s a one-note gag taken to extremes, and because it feels incredibly reminiscent of c.2010ish, and, well, things were better then (I was young and people hadn’t all started dying). Artworks featuring wheat, with the wheat removed. DO YOU SEE???
- Sheep Films: Not dissimilar to the TikTok linked earlier, Sheep is another video artist doing wonderful VFX work in the homebrew style – Sheep has been around for YEARS (I think I first came across him on B3ta in the early-00s) and it’s genuinely pleasing to see that he is still making this stuff and that it’s still as joyously silly and creative as it ever was.
- Origami Around: Isthvan is from Hungary, and loves origami – as far as I can tell, he makes all the stuff featured on this page which, honestly, is insane. He is very, very good at origami.
- Vintage Blotter Acid: Not, in fact, a Tumblr! Also, not updated for a decade! Still if you would like to explore the beautiful world of acid blotter design then this is a GREAT place to dive in. Also this contains loads of old (possibly broken) links to places where you used to be able to procure psychedelics which, I don’t know, might be useful, maybe.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Matsuoka Ayumu: I *think* that this artist is Japanese – regardless, their work is rather beautiful and the stippled technique they use in their pictures is charming.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The State of the World in 2026: We kick off the longreads this week with an annual tradition – The Well’s ‘State of the World’ discussion for 2026. For those unfamiliar, The Well is one of the oldest online communities still in existence, going for…jesus, decades, and where every year Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky host a wide-ranging and discursive chat about ‘what the fcuk is going on and where are we going?’. These are ALWAYS interesting and erudite, and the way they have shifted in tenor over the course of the decade or so I have been reading them is fascinating in and of itself – this year the focus (so far – the chat continues) is mainly on China, although there is a very, very good analysis of the current state of affairs in the US on p5 if you’re interested in that specifically. The participants are, in the main, male boomers who are educated, international and, as far as I can tell, well-heeled enough that they are probably not going to die in penury, but don’t let that put you off – they also bring an awful lot of interesting life experience to the discussion, and it’s worth reading for Sterling alone, who remains one of the smartest and most cogent observers of The Now (with a perspective on/from The Then) that we have. This is long and rambling and not always linear, and I recommend it hugely as always.
- Why The Regime Seems Invincible: A dispatch from Iran, by an understandably-unnamed correspondent on the ground, about the strange misery of life in a country where revolution is only ever six months away but, strangely where it never quite comes. In a week when we’ve seen reports of regime-inflicted deaths have ballooned from hundreds to potentially 10,000+, and when we’ve seen the Ayatollah mug Donald ‘Geopolitics’ Trump off with a blithe ‘nah, don’t worry, we’ve stopped shooting them in the eyes, honest guv’, it’s instructive and depressing to read about the reasons why it’s very, very hard to shake an embedded dictatorship which has built a system designed specifically to ensure its survival. I think this is fascinating and important and very sad, and required reading for everyone who has spent the past decade in either the UK or US making glib ‘revolution when?’ or ‘uprising in the streets now!’ comments – this sh1t isn’t easy, regimes don’t give up power without a lot of death, and they are very much in the position of strength, however much you might wish that not to be so.
- Three Books on Xi Jinping: Tom Stevenson is an intimidatingly smart man (or at least that’s how I perceive him via his writing, obviously I don’t know him personally or anything), and this, his overview of three books on the politics and philosophy of Xi Jinping, is one of the most interesting and illuminating pieces on China now – where it is, how it got there and where it might conceivably be going – that I’ve read for a while (and an excellent companion piece to the ‘letter from China’ at the top of last week’s longreads, in case you didn’t read that YOU INGRATES).
- AI and Epistemology: An academic paper on the ways in which AI is fcuking with our sense of shared knowledge/reality – NO WAIT COME BACK IT IS VERY READABLE I PROMISE! I have been wanging on for a while now to anyone who will listen (fewer and fewer people, turns out!) about how the first major impact of AI has been the erosion of any sense of shared reality, something which was wobbly to start with, and this paper does an excellent job of exploring why that is – specifically, the vocabulary of GenAI and the ‘truthiness’ of materials generated by it. Here are some of the themes and questions it raises – to my mind, noone is thinking about this stuff anywhere near enough: “Instead of being presented with a landscape of candidate documents to evaluate, the user is handed a fluent, authoritative-seeming answer that collapses the underlying diversity of sources into a single textual surface, ready for immediate consumption… The user experiences the possession of an answer without having traversed the process of forming a justified belief, i.e., without the labor of knowing…a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.”
- Reform’s Social Media Guy: I did not expect to see an in-depth profile of the kid who’s ‘masterminding’ Reform and Farage’s efforts on the socials in The Face, but, well, that’s who’s written it up and it’s an excellent piece, although part of me does rather worry that it’s the first brick in the creation of another Dominic Cummings-shaped Ziggurat of genius mythology around someone who is basically a sociopath, and, well, that didn’t really work out well for any of us. Meet Jack Anderton, a 25 year old man who is obviously very, very keen to position himself as some sort of eminence grise behind the coming political moment in the UK – is…is this meant to be a positive? Because, Jack, honestly, if that’s true then, well, you’re a horrible, amoral little scrote of a cnut! – and who seems to occupy a strange, uncertain but (if you’re to believe him, at least) central position in the comms (and maybe policy?) of Reform UK. I’m torn about this – on the one hand it’s a good profile and it’s important to shine a light on the people behind the faces in projects like this; on the other, I am, per my earlier comment, very wary of creating another cult of personality around someone who is quite obviously a VERY WEIRD LITTLE FCUK with some VERY WEIRD LITTLE IDEAS and, I am going to guess, a questionable attitude to humanity as a whole. This kid STINKS of EA and cryptolibertarianism, is all I’m saying, and I am not sure we should be doing anything other than tarring and feathering these people at this stage.
- Platform Presence: After another week in which we appear to finally be coming to terms with the fact that Social Media Was Probably A Mistake, you might enjoy this smart piece of writing by Aidan Walker, in which he introduces the idea of ‘platform terroir’ – per Walker, “I think we should see the internet as a series of terroirs — patches of productive cultural space through which different forces work, and upon which we are able to act both individually and collectively. The farmer can spray, fertilize, and make choices on what to plant, when, and how. The community (or state) can undertake public works that irrigate land, conserve resources, protect the bees that fertilize, and underwrite the legal and financial instruments necessary for farmers to work the land profitably. Our current forms of platform presence are the result of a particular kind of stewardship practice and exploitation. We could choose otherwise.” I really like this way of thinking – although he goes on to slightly disagree with it later in the essay, it struck me as a fundamentally-helpful way of conceiving of digital spaces, and one which is congruent with the currently-trendy way of thinking of the indieweb (‘dark forest’, ‘rewilding the web’, etc etc), and you might find it a helpful framing for the way in which you conceive of digital spaces. Oh, and if you want to see me reference it in an article for an ACTUAL NEWSPAPER you can do so here.
- On Claude Code: The excitement around the latest iteration of Anthropic’s Claude model, and the advances its made in being able to code, has been pretty steady over the past few weeks – this is Casey Newton talking about his experience building a new homepage using it as a non-coder (with, admittedly, some help and advice from his boyfriend who, er, works at Anthropic), and if you wanted something to inspire you to play with Making Something On The Web in 2026 (a pastime I can heartily endorse, as someone whose ability to write this pointless, self-defeating newsletter rests entirely on people Making Something On The Web) then you could do worse than reading this (and maybe playing around with Iain’s ‘Fit’ website all the way back in link 2). BONUS AI CODING LINK: I was going to link to the Gas Town post last week but decided it was simply too a) mad and b) technical, but thankfully Rusty at Today in Tabs has talked about it instead, and, look, it’s still mad and technical but Rusty does a better job of explaining it than I could possibly have done and if you are even halfway interested in this stuff then I recommend you take at least a glancing look at the Gas Town thing because FCUKING HELL is it mad (and madly written, in the best way).
- Individual AI Use Is Not A Massive Water Issue: To be clear, I do believe that the environmental impacts of technology are severe, troubling and not to be underestimated or downplayed, and I also believe that the companies who are racing to WIN THE RACE around AI are in no way doing their due diligence when it comes to the potential effects of the tech needed to power their models on the planet – but, also, I am fcuking SICK of people offering ‘I don’t like it so it is bad!’ takes about the actual impact of this stuff, and would like people to start talking about ACTUAL THINGS rather than the version of said things that they hold in their head for motivated reasons (lol, we can break the habit of several thousand years, right? RIGHT???). Anyway, this is a really interesting bit of analysis by Andy Masley, based on the best available information they were able to find, who concludes that while the impact of ‘asking an LLM stuff’ is non-zero in energy terms, it is also less significant than, say, downloading an app onto your phone, or spending an hour on TikTok (without even comparing it to, say, buying seventeen fast fashion items and bits of novelty plastic tat to be shipped from a warehouse in China – if you’re buying sh1t off Temu on the monthly YOU ARE NOT BETTER THAN THE FCUKING AI CNUTS, YOU CNUTS). Basically the upshot here is that every single facet of modern capitalism is a net negative for the planet we live on, and there are probably bigger problems we can and should focus on beyond children asking Grok to create ‘another minion with big naturals’ (although that is bad too).
- Being Recruited by ICE: As someone who was very firmly in the ‘no, surely project 2025 is just fanfic’ camp and who has spent most of the past 12 months being proved very, very wrong about that (see my earlier comment about me being consistently wrong about EVERYTHING), it’s quite horrible to see the extent to which everything happening right now in the US really does scream ‘total fascist takeover of the state apparatus’. This piece, in Slate, is a classic ‘it would be funny were it not so incredibly bleak’ number, in which Laura Jedeed decided to see what would happen if she applied to join ICE – spoilers, she got in despite not apparently doing any of the screening checks that she was meant to, suggesting that the level of rigour being applied to bringing in fresh meat for the Government-mandated deportation’n’death squads isn’t exactly stringent. GOOD TIMES! BONUS ICE CONTENT: this is a new song by the Dropkick Murphys, called ‘Citizen ICE’, and it is excellent and pleasingly furious.
- Training Robots in China: I continue to be skeptical at the pace with which we’re going to see humanoid robots in the wild, or whether we will end up doing so at all, but it’s undeniable that the move towards ‘embodiment’ as the next likely key to a big leap in AI means that this tech is going to be front and centre for the next few years. This piece in Rest of World is a look at how China is paying people to train robots to do mundane tasks – folding laundry over and over again, say, to give the machine enough training data to learn from. While it acknowledges that there are questions over the efficiency of the method, one of the many reasons that it feels…unwise to bet against China at the moment is that they have the people – and the ability to compel those people! – to make that less significant an issue than it would be anywhere else in the world.
- How YouTube Has Replaced Daytime TV: OK, not for everyone, and this is an NYT piece and so US-centric, and anecdote is not data…but, equally, if you look at the hollowing out of terrestrial TV schedules, particularly during the daytime hours, it’s hard not to see that there’s a gap there that’s very easy for YouTube to fill – which has interesting implications for advertising as well as broadcasters and creators. Speaking of creators, this is a parallel piece about the current (only current?) CRISIS OF VIBE in the YT creator community, as fear of algorithmic kneecapping combine with a growing market of competing ‘creators’ and the breakneck pace of trends in 2026 to make people feel significantly less secure in their status as a part of the (to be clear, ALWAYS ILLUSORY) ‘creator economy’ than they previously have.
- Self-Driving Cars Are Not A Solved Problem: An old friend of mine from University has been involved in self-driving cars for over a decade now – he works for…actually, no, probably shouldn’t mention which of the Big Companies he’s employed by, but, anyway, whenever I have talked to him about the likely distance to market of actual, proper, autonomous vehicles, he’s been saying ‘at least 10 years’ for…ooh, at least 7 of them, and that doesn’t change each time I see him. I enjoyed this piece, because it confirmed his insider point of view and also because it offers a neat counterpoint to all the dumb, credulous press coverage of the ‘Waymo Comes To London’ announcement – look, let’s see how long it takes them to get an ACTUAL self-driving car through Lewisham, shall we?
- Kidnapped By Idiots: I think, had I been kidnapped and subsequently interrogated and tortured by said kidnappers, I would likely be…less good-humoured and sanguine about it than Elizabeth Tsurkov, who writes in the Atlantic about her experience of being taken hostage in Baghdad by people who, as she explains, were diligent workers but…limited, intellectually. This is sort-of funny, in parts, until you get to some of the details – how long she was detained, the means of torture employed – and you realise that there is nothing, in fact, funny about this at all. Wonderfully-written, though, and fcuk me is this person hard as nails.
- Replacing The Government: Another Atlantic piece now, this time Alexandra Petri who spent several months last year investigating exactly how easy it would be to do lots of stuff that is normally under the purview of Government services oneself – predict the weather, say, or tracking consumer prices, or doing scientific research into food safety. This is very, very funny – Petri is a very good writer – but the point being made is serious – THIS IS WHY SOME BITS OF GOVERNMENT NEED TO BE BIG, and why saying ‘we’ll just cut back the state!’ is not, in fact, a one-size-fits-all solution to all your economic woes.
- Good Music Facts: This is, in fact, the third post in a series of MUSIC FACTS compiled by a man called Jeff. If you find things like “The longest song to reach number one on the US singles chart is Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” (10:13), released in late 2021. It surpassed previous long-time record holders Don McLean’s “American Pie” (8:33) and The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (7:11). The longest song to reach number one on the UK Singles Chart is “All Around the World” (9:38) by Oasis, released in 1998” to be innately fascinating then BOY will you like this (also, if you compile quiz questions then this will be fcuking golden).
- Thomas Pain: I am only VERY lightly aware of Thomas Friedman and his career, work and reputation after 30 years as a foreign affairs correspondent for the NYT – that said, you don’t need to know the first thing about him to devour this first-rate fcuking administered by Belén Fernández, who goes in two-footed from the start and then stands over Friedman’s prone body, just kicking and kicking and kicking (metaphorically). I mean, just look at this: “Because Friedman’s dogged proselytizing worked well for the American corporatocracy, though, he was hailed as a brilliant oracle, simultaneously expanding his ego, pocketbook, and political influence. Shilling for free trade, another key component of his repertoire, has also garnered him a lot of establishment kudos, even when he appears to have no idea what he’s talking about. In March 1995, a few months into Friedman’s columnistship and a year after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, he headed down to Mexico to pen a dispatch on NAFTA’s progress. The trade deal was not mentioned, but the judgment of Ricarda Martinez, a sixty-year-old peasant living in a shack on the outskirts of Mexico City, was: “Mexico is now different—now we are poor.” This column stands out as a major deviation from Friedman’s modus operandi, in that he managed to speak to a non-elite member of the global populace—a rarity over his decades-long career, notwithstanding his self-professed “total freedom, and an almost unlimited budget, to explore” the world.” Absolutely savage, and brilliant.
- The Regency: A beautiful profile of the Regency Cafe in London’s Pimlico, a place I have walked past many times but never visited and which has apparently received a new cult following thanks to TikTok – this is just a lovely piece of local journalism, a portrait of a place, its patrons and its past, which is affectionate without being either sentimental or cloying. I do wish people would stop romanticising caff food, though, it is objectively Not Good.
- Balthazar 1997: I absolutely loved this – Heather Bursch writes in the Paris Review about her experience waitressing in New York restaurants Balthazar in 1997. This is just a perfect rendition of place and time and self-at-a-specific moment, and I would read so much more of it if I could.
- It’s Not Real: I didn’t expect to link to a piece all about Britney Spears this week, and certainly not a piece about Britney Spears in the LRB, but this was such a good piece of writing about the artist and the star and the woman (three separate people) and her awful family, and fame and the oddity of the way the celebrity machine treated young women in the early part of the 21stC, and how one ought to consider the twin questions of “How mad is someone allowed to be without legal intervention? Equally, how should we deal with mentally unstable people who happen to be rich and famous?” Very very good, even if, like me, you’re not a #freebritney stan.
- Keep Going, Loser: I remember very clearly coming across the web series ‘High Maintenance’ when it launched in 2012 and being charmed and hugely impressed – the series, about a nameless ambulant weed dealer in NYC, who biked around delivering bud to a wide-ranging selection of customers, and whose interactions with them formed the basis for each short, self-contained episode – and thrilled when it was picked up by HBO for a Proper Telly adaptation a few years later… This is the newsletter of one of its two creators and the ‘star’ (he played The Guy), Ben Sinclair, in which he recounts his experiences of being an addict and his struggle to get sober and, look, while I personally have very low tolerance for sobriety stories, in the main, and in people talking about a) drugs and b) their JOURNEY, I find his essays, and this one in particular, interesting and open and honest and vulnerable, and his willingness to be open about the fact that he is, objectively, a bit of a d1ck, is appealing, and, look, this isn’t the best writing in here this week but it SPOKE TO ME (maybe it’s the weed talking, who knows).
- Visiting Belarus: I’m an absolute sucker for travelogues to weird Central/Eastern European places, and this, by Paula Domingo Pasarín, is very much one of those. Interesting and funny and educative in the best way, this is an excellent read. “What does a border know? Does it know its own arbitrariness? Does it know we don’t want to flood Schengen with drugs? Doesn’t it know we’re good people, and clean? Minsk is very clean! You could walk barefoot in Minsk, though you’d burn your feet on the shadeless pavement. I didn’t throw out a single cigarette butt in Minsk, because it was the Year of Quality, and even if Marlboro were sold in Minsk (which it isn’t because of the sanctions) I wouldn’t throw a single butt, because our potato pancakes are similar and we are all very hardworking and very well-behaved. The driver shuts the engine off, the windows mist up quickly. There’s no sound; even the rain has flowed on, while the border still contains us here. It doesn’t really matter, though, because we have all begun to transcend. Our stories have halted. Petrification has started from the front, from the part closer to the blurred red circle that still shines bright. We’ll soon become somebody else’s uncanny. They’ll find us here, underground, fossilized alive, and we’ll horrify them. It will be delightful. Our driver is hunched slightly forward, hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the red light. The great artist who is sculpting this future masterpiece has chosen to portray him at his most alert, seconds away from slamming the accelerator. Future art historians will emphasize the artist’s craft in capturing in stone the tension of his neck, the mental dynamism conveyed in the furrowed brow.”
- Becoming A Centenarian: I have seen what it looks like when someone lives into their 100s; I have seen what it looks like, up close, for the final years when they are all fcuked and they don’t want to be there anymore and they are just…there, and I know beyond a doubt that one of the few certainties in my life is that thank FCUK I will never, ever get there. Still, I found this essay by Calvin Tomkins, written a few days shy of his 100th birthday, to be fascinating and moving and honest and funny and sad and beautiful and poignant and and and…I may not want to get there myself, but I am thrilled Mr Tomkins did, and with so much intact.
- The Wife: Our final longread this week is from December last year, it’s by Elisa Gonzales and it is about being The Other Woman and it is superb, honestly, I want to read the novel from which I wish this was an excerpt. Every single element of this is perfect to me; the interpersonal dynamics, the strange, reluctant fascination with the other, invisible, traduced party, the prose…honestly, this is one of the best things I have ever read about the reality of being with someone when you are with, or when they are with, or when you are both with, someone else.
By Maria Kreyn
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: