Webcurios 06/02/26

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Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

I appreciate that, in the grand scheme of things, to complain about the Epstein Files’ impact on contemporary British politics is perhaps to miss the point rather, and I obviously have no desire to minimise any of the Really Bad Stuff, but, well, the thing I feel most irked about as of RIGHT NOW is the fact that thanks to that cnut ‘Petey’ we now have a completely lame duck Prime Minister who sadly is unlikely to be defenestrated for a while yet, meaning our politics is going to be even more superficial, facile and ineffectual than it already tends to be. The only small silver lining, I suppose, is that the Mandownfall means that it’s now vanishingly unlikely that Wes ‘Quisling Little Cnut’ Streeting is going to get his Number 10 dream, but, well, it’s a small mercy. 

Anyway, it has been a LONG WEEK, we are ALL tired and a bit emotional, and you probably just want some lovely, soothing links – SO THANK FCUK FOR ME, THEN. Also, this week there are half a dozen really great games in here with which you can smooth your brains right down, so instead of catastrophising why not bury your head in the digital sand instead?

I am still Matt, this is still Curios, and it’s increasingly clear that you (and indeed me, and indeed everyone else) are seemingly impotent in the face of large-scale plutocratic cnutery, so may as well just click the links eh?

By Jan Bouman

WE KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH AN OLDSCHOOL MIC FROM THE PRACTICALLY PRE-CAMBRIAN ERA THAT IS THE 1980s!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FEELING A BIT TREPIDATIOUS ABOUT GOING CLUBBING TOMORROW NIGHT IF IT’S HONEST WITH YOU, PT.1:  

    • Rent-a-Human: Apologies to any of you who were hoping that this week’s Curios would be a light corrective to the general feeling of ‘simulation glitching out’-style dystopia that we have been subject to on a seemingly an hourly basis in 2026; this link is unlikely to make you feel better. You will doubtless recall the OpenClaw stuff from last week, and if you don’t then you will probably have heard about it at some point over the past seven days – anyway, now that we have FLAWLESS AND SECURE AI AGENTS to do our bidding (we do not have flawless and secure AI agents to do our bidding), a natural extension to that is to create a service where those agents can, if required, engage the services of a human to act for them in those instances where the tasks they want to complete have a non-negotiable meatspace component. What if your agent wants to, I don’t know, get a document witnessed or something? Well, that’s where Rent-a-Human comes in – it’s a platform where anyone can sign up to make themselves available to be booked by someone’s Agent to accomplish a task on said agent’s behalf. This is, obviously, not REALLY a thing yet – except, also, it…sort of is? Like, there are actual tasks being posted on there, seemingly by actual Agents, and there are seemingly actual people signed up to perform them…there is, at the time of writing, a job on the board asking humans to go and stand in a crowded location and promote an AI business to which 390(!!!!) people have apparently responded…Look, with all of this stuff at the minute (Agents, Moltbook, etc) it’s important to take a step back and ingest a skipful of salt (it’s not the singularity! This is not the beginning of machine civilisations!), but, equally, it’s quite hard not to look at this stuff and think ‘hm, I am not sure I like the way in which this is heading, and that canary is looking *very* peaky’.
    • The Church of Molt: Oh, and apparently the Agents congregating on Moltbook have also spun up a religion – you can find its website here, and it’s…quite odd. Again, it’s impossible to know the extent to which this is LLMs actually riffing and making things vs people masquerading as LLMs for the lols (WHY DOES EVERYTHING IN THE AI ERA SEEM TO BOIL DOWN TO DIFFERENT WAYS OF UTTERLY FCUKING OUR ABILITY TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON? WHY IS THE PRICE OF PROGRESS EPISTEMOLOGICAL CERTAINTY???), but as a weird, curious artefact of The Strange Era We Are In it is certainly worth a look, not least the gallery of images which really is quite…strange. BONUS SUPPOSEDLY-AGENT-GENERATED CONTENT! Here’s a dating site for the Agents, built by the agents; and here is a site featuring Agent bongo (that is, content which is purportedly ‘erotic’ for the machi…oh God, this is utterly nonsensical isn’t it? And yet, here we are). WHAT IS GOING ON?  
    • Quill AI: NO COME BACK THIS IS ACTUALLY NOT REALLY AI! Instead it was a really nicely done bit of awareness-raising work which took place last weekend; the project is over now, but you can still learn about it on the site. Basically last weekend a community of people in Chile got together and spent, what, a couple of days logged into a network of computers and making themselves available to act as a HUMAN LLM – anyone logging onto this url was presented with a chat interface where they could ask questions and talk to one of the operators in the manner of an AI; thanks to the MAGIC OF TRANSLATION SOFTWARE the operators were able to engage with visitors from around the world, and I spent a rather pleasing 15 minutes last Saturday morning chatting with a stranger somewhere in South America. The point of this was to raise awareness of the impact of data centres on the Chilean region of Chilicura and the people who live there. A lovely project, executed really smartly. 
    • EpsteIn: I am not going to dwell on this because, well, it’s all so grim and if you’re desirous for content about this particular story there’s stuff in the longreads. BUT! This did make me laugh rather – a Github repo for the more technically-inclined among you which, if you deploy the code, will cross-reference all your contacts on LinkedIn to see whether any of them appear in the Epstein files. YOU KNOW YOU HAVE YOUR SUSPICIONS, DO NOT LIE TO ME.
    • Shared Claude: Not unlike that website from last year that let anyone edit it by leaving a voicemail and effectively directing the AI to edit the code – except this time you just text a number with your instructions and HEY PRESTO, this site will have your suggestions magically added to the Page. The resulting site is, honestly, a total fcuking mess and a pretty perfect example of how ‘vibecoding’ (really sick of this term, turns out) is both amazing and magical (I CAN LITERALLY JUST IMAGINE SOMETHING AND LO IT APPEARS!!!) and also rubbish and broken (nothing on here works, it all looks janky as fcuk). Still, I like the collaborative, free-for-all aspect to this idea, and I would like to encourage ALL of you to text it and to bend it slightly to your wills and your whims (and, if you like, cover it in promotional messages for Curios, but only if you want to). 
    • Let’s Paint TV: This is ART. Let’s Paint TV is a TikTok channel which features vidoes of a man playing keyboards and ‘singing’, in front of a greenscreen sheer setup which is playing…footage of him – the whole thing is incredibly lo-res and lo-fi, the ‘music’ is honestly atrocious and there’s something quite…intense about the whole thing, but, well, I love this more than almost any other thing in here this week, not least because of the insane degree of commitment to the bit that the performer is demonstrating – this is the very opposite of ‘phoning it in’, and if there is a better song to convey the very specific feeling of ‘being alive and media literate in 2026’ than this one then, well, I would like to share it with me please because I am VERY SKEPTICAL. 
    • Rail Announcements: Honestly, I think if this had existed when I was living in Rome I would have used it as a balm against my homesickness. Rail Announcements is a website which, for reasons known only to its creator, allows anyone visiting it to replicate on-train announcements for the UK’s rail routes. Want to recreate the dulcet tones of the announcer on the Avanti East Coast Line telling you that the next station is Norwich? Great! Want to listen to a tinny little voice inside your computer repeatedly say ‘This station is Oval; this is a train to High Barnet, via Bank’? Erm, maybe consider widening your horizons a bit, that is in some respect VERY SAD…but now you can! I honestly have literally no idea whatsoever why this exists, but I genuinely love it.
    • The Myth Bridger: I rather like this idea, and am…slightly stunned by the amount of cash I think the person behind it is making. Sign up to the service and you will receive a monthly letter, all about a FANTASY WORLD – per the blurb, “Whispers is a monthly letter subscription from the fictional town of Mythbridge. You’ll receive a letter exploring the fantasy town and a real life relatable topic, a print, 3 stickers, and a journaling activity, all packed in a wax-sealed envelope.” If this sounds like your sort of thing then check back in a few weeks; the run is sold out for this month, and I presume for reasons of production and postage there’s a cut-off point each issue for new subscribers to get on board. I think this runs to something like £7-10 a month (I forget the exact cost), and, based on what I read when I found it, the person behind it has a few hundred subs…which, you know is pretty fcuking impressive and sounds like quite a nice way to make a living to be honest. Would any of you like receiving Curios in the post as a printed letter each week? Would you want to pay me money for that? Is this…is this the creator economy? *cries*
    • AntiRender: I really like this. Renders of future developments are always depicting the space in question in sunshine, surrounded by happy, capering people enjoying the fantastic new amenities and thrilled at the fact that they now have access to yet another PE-backed slate of generic high-street emporia (“another Blank Street Coffee? Everything’s ok after all!”); this tool will turn the happy, sunny CGI into a more realistic, ‘damp Tuesday in November’ vision of the urban environment, which, honestly, is the sort of honesty I think more developers should start employing. 
    • Xikipedia: I am not a particular fan of the term ‘doomscrolling’, but it has rather felt appropriate over the past week in particular as we have all stared at our friendly companion slabs and scrolled through a series of increasingly-miserable revelations about the plutocratic classes – Xikipedia might serve as a pleasing and improving antidote to the horror. “Xikipedia is a pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content. No data is collected or shared here, the algorithm runs locally and the data disappears once you refresh or close the tab.” So basically this is an infinite feed of CURIOUS FACTS, which might be nicer to stare at than SexCrime & Corruption News Daily. 
    • The Sudan National Museum: Sudan is not exactly a thriving nation, to the best of my knowledge, but it is one with a fascinating history – this is a newly-launched Virtual Museum celebrating and recounting that history, which, while still a work in progress (new elements are going to be added throughout the year) currently features some interesting photogalleries and one of those 3d walkthroughs of an actual museum-type things which are never actually THAT successful but which do give you the opportunity to learn about the country’s evolution over the centuries. Worth bookmarking if you’re interested in the region and its past and coming back in a few months to see how it’s evolved. 
    • The NYC Trans Oral History Project: This is a lovely project: “The New York City Trans Oral History Project is a community archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories, organized in collaboration with the New York Public Library. Our archive documents transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. We work to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis. We privilege the insights of vulnerable trans communities fighting the structural dismantling of public benefits, housing insecurity and homelessness, policing, and surveillance. Recorded interviews with trans New Yorkers are accessible via major listening platforms. We welcome new contributions from volunteer interviewers and narrators; our handbook provides history, context, and training for those interested in participating and learning more about the role of oral history in community activism.” Honestly, I have only had the chance to skim this, but it’s worth going to the ‘interviews’ section and checking out the huge range of stories and experiences that they have collected, reflecting the experiences of trans men and women in the city over the decades – they invite contributions from “anyone who identifies as trans / gender non conforming and as a sometime resident of New York City”, so if that’s you then get in touch. 
    • Just Scream: To my immense regret I somehow missed this project when it was live in 2020-1 – back during The Bad Times (lol, they are ALL BAD), schoolteacher Chris Golinari launched this project to record, er, people screaming; he attracted screams from around the world, and while the submissions period is long since over, the collected screams are now available to listen to on the website. They’re categorised, so if you like you can listen to hopeful screams, or laughing screams, or, er, raw screams, or just the full, unfiltered Stream Of Screams…this is weirdly cathartic, but I warn you that if you’re anything like me you will very much want to scream along too because, well, LOOK AT EVERYTHING FFS. 
    • Hourly Peepshow: Dave ‘Will You Ever Explain The Bagpuss Thing?’ Forsey is BACK with another Bluesky bot, this time sharing a screenshot from Peep Show every hour. If, like me, you have a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the show then this will be VERY PLEASING. 
    • River Of Reverence: Consider this link a brief, meditative respite, a staging post in the LONG, EXHAUSTING AND LARGELY-FUTILE Curios journey; River of Reverence is a small, meditative web experience which requires to to just….sit with it. The river is rendered in ASCII; turn up the volume, click ‘begin’, and spend 5-10 minutes with this small, quiet, vaguely-poetic site, drift down the digital river, click the stones and breathe and wait and feel and try to relieve the mounting pressure which has been slowly building inside you for months now if not years and which you sometimes think will cause you to split at the seams if something doesn’t change (don’t worry me too). 
    • Odyssey: Via Lynn, this is both sort-of fun and really quite unsettling – this is a demo tool showing how AI video can be ‘improvised’ on the fly. Type in a prompt and the system will start running video that is being generated in realtime rather than pre-rendered, meaning you can ‘direct’ it with further prompts. So, for example, you might imagine ‘a table of middle-aged misanthropes in an English pub’ and then direct them as you see fit – ‘they start crying’, you write, laughing as the synthetic puppets bawl and writhe; ‘their eyes start leaking red fluid’, you type, smiling thinly as simulated blood courses down their cheeks…you get the idea. This is JUST shonky enough to be interesting – the rendering is imperfect, and it can get…quite weird, and quite glitchy, and quite unsettling, and I suggest you have a play and see what sort of horrors you can make it see. BONUS AI-GENERATED LIVE SIMULATION THINGIES! You will doubtless have heard of the new Google AI toy which lets anyone ‘create games’ with a single prompt and ‘play’ them; that’s only available in to a select few, though, and I am not one of them, so instead I am sharing this with you instead, also via Lynn – describe any scene you like and then WALK AROUND IT AS THOUGH YOU ARE A DIGITAL EXPLORER! What’s nice about this is how…weird and fuzzy it gets the further into the picture you get, which leads to some aesthetically quite interesting looks and feels to the landscapes, significantly more fun than a consistent, polished look imho. 
    • Claymation Yourself: Click the link, give the site access to your camera, and then watch, charmed, as you are rendered as a surprisingly fun-looking claymation-style figure in realtime. Honestly, even if you HATE AI I really would suggest checking this out, there’s something really quite fun about puppeteering a little clay version of yourself in realtime. CAPER FOR ME, CLAYMATION MATT!
    • The Computer History Museum: I have a…reasonably-strong feeling that there might be quite a few of you who are interested in exploring the website and digital collections of the Computer History Museum, “the leading museum decoding computing’s ongoing impact on our world. From the heart of Silicon Valley, we are uniquely positioned to cull the key lessons of the past and through our research, exhibits, events, and incomparable collection of computing artifacts create informed digital citizens empowered to make the choices that will shape a better future.” I mean, the ‘better future’ thing doesn’t really feel evidence-based at this point, lads, but I suppose I can give you the benefit of the doubt.
    • Lightfern: This is interesting – I don’t personally like the idea, but I can see the potential appeal and utility for someone who isn’t me, maybe. Lightfern is basically ‘Ai-enabled autocomplete’, which will effectively take information from your inbox and calendar and use that to help you draft communications more efficiently – so it can scan your diary to see when you’re free and use that information to suggest times for a call to whoever you’re mailing, for example, or look back through previous correspondence and see where you have previously met someone and use that information to suggest future locations…it *looks* very powerful, though I have…some doubts about giving The Machine this degree of access to my stuff, and some additional doubts as to the actual user experience vs that advertised on the site. Still, worth a look as it’s a curious and potentially powerful tool.
    • The Cassette Tape Cafe: Approximately 13 years ago me and some people I was working with at the time got VERY CLOSE to selling what I still maintain was a fcuking GREAT tape-based idea to Amazon (basically the gimmick was “promote the launch of Amazon’s digital music services by creating a mixtape creation tool which lets you create a digital mix which you can ALSO buy as a physical mixtape and which Amazon will record and ship to you along with a cassette walkman” – still annoyed that they didn’t buy that tbh), and so I am basically including this link, to the website of a cafe in Tokyo whose thing is ‘we serve coffee and you can drink it while listening to mixtapes on actual cassettes’ and, basically, I WAS RIGHT AMAZON THIS IS A COOL IDEA YOU D1CKS. Coming to your local hipster neighbourhood very soon, I would imagine. 
    • Road Trip: Made by the same person who created that ‘PUGS’ site I featured a few weeks back, this lets you drop cars from the sky around some very confused cows. I promise, it will make (marginally) more sense when you click the link, I promise.
    • The First Day of the Rest of Your Life: Via Kris, experience the rapture via the medium of your browser, and watch, hypnotised, as a selection of naked people are raised aloft through an azure sky. This really shouldn’t be as compelling as it is.

By Alic Brock 

NEXT UP, THIS RECORD IS THREE YEARS OLD BUT I HEARD IT FOR THE FIRST TIME YESTERDAY AND HONESTLY IT IS GREAT AND YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IT, IT IS ‘THIS IS CRIME WAVE’ BY THE CODEFENDENTS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FEELING A BIT TREPIDATIOUS ABOUT GOING CLUBBING TOMORROW NIGHT IF IT’S HONEST WITH YOU, PT.2:

    • Silent Sand: I can’t promise that this small digital toy in which you can rake digital sand into swooping, curving, cursive patterns, will quiet the shouting in your head or make your soul stop vibrating at that specific, awful pitch, but, well, it *might*, and perhaps that’s all we can hope for. This is VERY NICE, and even if it doesn’t Make Everything Better it is quite a nice way to pass a few minutes while you wait for the next terrible thing to happen to you. 
    • Anita’s Website: This is the personal website of someone called Anita – I do not know Anita, it is unlikely I will ever meet Anita, but I would like to thank her for making me genuinely happy with a very specific bit of design she’s implemented on her site. Specifically, the small pixel rabbit that exists on every page and which will hop around and follow your cursor wherever you move it. I am not joking – PUT THE RABBIT ON EVERY WEBSITE! LET THEM MULTIPLY ACROSS THE WEB! LAPINE DOMINANCE OF THE INTERNET IS THE WAY FORWARD! 
    • Empty Note: A small site which lets anyone who visits add a short, anonymous note to the Page – you can write whatever you want, as (for better or worse) there’s no moderation in place that I can see (so far it doesn’t appear to have attracted anything bad at all, which is both surprising and pleasing). There’s a small wrinkle in that the homepage will only display messages to a total of 500 characters – when that limit is reached, the page is cleared and replaced with a blank canvas waiting to be filled. I will always have a huge soft spot for projects which invite strangers to speke there branes into the void, and for those which elicit confessions that people might not share in a forum that is more permanent or more traceable, and at the moment this is a strange and odd mix of people writing things like ‘butt fart’ and others posting “I cry every morning when I wake”, which, frankly, is the sort of juxtaposition which Web Curios is designed to celebrate. 
    • The Iris Murdoch Map: Via Elle, to whom thanks, comes this map of Iris Murdoch’s London, presenting locations mentioned in Murdoch’s works as a tagged map, with each tag detailing the book and the passage/reference in question. Perfect should you be a Murdcoh fan wanting to do something of a capital-wide pilgrimage, and the sort of thing it might be fun to explore when the weather’s less terminally fcuking miserable than it is right now. This is actually a far deeper trove than just the map – there’s all sorts of other data in here about characters and locations and objects, and if you’re a Murdoch scholar or superfan then this is very much worth exploring. 
    • Identinet: OH THIS IS FUN. Identinet is a site which…oh, look, just have their description, it will be LOADS better than mine would: “IDENTI-NET is a character creation game that uses assets from the 1983 Smith & Wesson Identi-Kit Model II. The Identi-Kit was a tool used by police since the ’50s to assist witnesses in re-constructing the faces of suspects. In IDENTI-NET, all the assets from the Identi-Kit have been compiled into one user-friendly package that allows anyone to create a face. Make yourself! Make a friend! Make a monster! The next generation of facial compositing software is in your hands.” Honestly, this is a bit fiddly and not hugely user-friendly, and it will take you some time to create a full portrait, but there is something SO wonderfully sinister about the aesthetic of the resulting mugshots, and I can’t pretend it’s not very, very fun to spend 15 minutes or so attempting to recreate the faces of your friends/lovers/enemies. I once had a job in which I had access to the website and, on leaving, decided it would be fun to subtly alter all the staff bios by inserting a single additional line into each, things like “the only public affairs professional in the UK known to subsist entirely on the tears of children”, or “largely clockwork-powered” (‘amusingly’ (for me, not them), it took them several months to notice) – given the same sort of power I would 100% have some fun with this, is what I’m saying (I remain confused as to why employers are not constantly banging on my door). 
    • La Machine: On the one hand, this is an entirely-pointless gadget which is on sale for the not-exactly-cheap sum of 79 Euros; on the other, its utter pointlessness pleases me quite a lot, and I get the feeling that quite a few of you might possibly quite like the look of this…oh, and also the team behind it got in touch with me to ask if I would feature it, and despite the fact that they called me ‘Patrick’ in their email I am, it turns out, feeling magnanimous…Anyway, you know those boxes which can turn themselves off – you flick a switch and by so doing cause a hand or something to activate and flick it back the other way again? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE, MATT?’ FFS. Look, click the link and it will make sense – this is a really nice riff on an old idea, and I like both the fact that it has lots of different actions and animations, and the fact that it’s got an additional layer of interactivity and faux-agency built into it; I can imagine a certain type of person (YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT YOU) projecting personality onto one of these and becoming weirdly attached. Anyway, if you’ve got a spare 80 quid you can drop on a frivolous little mechanical box then, well, go for your life. 
    • New York City Restaurants 2002-8: I can’t pretend to have any sort of knowledge of the NYC restaurant scene in the 00s, but Noah Kalina took a LOT of photos of the interiors of various eateries around (I think primarily) Manhattan – this is a lovely time capsule of design trends, the prevalent aesthetics of the era and just a nice look back at the food scene in one of the world’s major cities at a very specific time; I would imagine that a few of you in New York will find this a very pleasing bit of timemachine-ing. 
    • Story CV: This is simultaneously quite a good idea, and one which made me literally lough out loud with incredulous delight when I scrolled down to the ‘pricing’ section. The premise here is a genuinely good one – the ‘insight’ is that the best descriptions of what people do and what they are good at, what they have achieved and what their skills are, come from asking them questions, talking to them and teasing out the details; so the gimmick with Story CV is that it purports to do just that, and, rather than just asking you to list what you’ve done, instead invites you to have an actual, out-loud chat (presumably with The Machine); through the answers you give to the various questions you’re posed, the platform will then spit out a CV which reflects the TRUTH of your conversation and the REAL QUALITIES that it has inferred from your self-promotional blustering. Which, actually, I think is a pretty decent idea – obviously the difficulty here is that the skill here is guiding the interview and teasing out the information, and I have…doubts about The Machine’s abilities in that regard, but, broadly-speaking, this strikes me as…not stupid! Then, though, you get to the bit where they tell you how much they want to charge you for the privilege and WHAT THE FCUK YOU WANT TO LOCK ME INTO A RECURRING PAYMENT PLAN AT $40 A MONTH AND THAT’S ONLY AN INTRODUCTORY OFFER ARE YOU FCUKING MAD???? Lol, good luck to these lunatics but I have…doubts as to the long term viability of this one, let’s say.
    • Data To Art: Via Giuseppe, this is a really nice collection of projects – “Data To Art is a curated online gallery showcasing the work of international data experts. It explores the beauty of data and the power of visual storytelling.” Honestly, if you do anything connected or adjacent to dataviz then this is a superb source of inspiration and contains some absolute gems, like this work by Florent Lavergne which creates a tilt-shift-type effect on data maps which is quite, quite magical. There is some really superb work in here, very much worth a look.  
    • Bugs: Are YOU an entomology fan? Do YOU want a site dedicated to the MAGIC AND WONDER OF BUGS? Oh good! This is a page on the website of one Loren, a molecular biologist from Connecticut (his whole site is worth checking out btw, it really is very charming indeed and the sort of personal homepage which is very much a Curio in its own right), all about how much he likes bugs. How much does Loren like bugs? Lots, it turns out. “i am incredibly fond of insects. they’re small and usually pretty fast, so it’s rewarding to successfully capture a photo of one. from 2017 to 2023, i was fairly consistent about chasing down bugs and sharing the photos on instagram, but sticking them all in a square grid can only do so much for me (or you). here, i want to have a little more fun with my photos, and share other bug-related things that i like. there’s a lot! i am not an entomologist, merely a bug fan, so this page in its current state skews more towards the entertaining than the informative, but who knows what it may turn into. right now there’s an entomology textbook sitting on my coffee table, and plenty of time to read it while the bugs overwinter.” There are photos of bugs! There is a bug-related playlists! There’s a zine you can download all about the bugs that Loren has held! Honestly, this site is SO PURE and SO LOVELY it’s basically like the antonym to all the Epstein horror. 
    • San Francisco Graffiti: A site maintained by Riley Walz, who describes it thusly: “These photos were taken by city inspectors documenting graffiti violations across San Francisco. I scraped them from the city’s website. Street art, through the lens of the law.” What’s nice about this is the range of styles and subjects it showcases; some of the works are ace, some are very funny, and it’s fun scrolling through and starting to get a feel for the different artists and taggers that make up the city’s spraycan community. My personal favourite is the “what has two ears and drinks beers? THIS LLAMA” llama, but pick your own!
    • The Nullbrook Found Media Archive: I have a very real thing for Found Media and this is a WONDERFUL collection – old photographs from all over the states, which you can filter by decade and browse to your heart’s content. As far as I can tell this is a personal hobby/passion project maintained by one person, which makes it all the more impressive – I like this VERY MUCH, because it contains images like ‘Man With Dope Laptop, 1991’. 
    • Map The Missing: This is…confusing to me, tbh, and I am not really sure what is going on. I *think* this is a project dedicated to recruiting amateur sleuths to, er, try and solve missing persons cases by using home sonar equipment to attempt to locate vehicles which might be languishing abandoned underwater, which itself raises some questions; how many people in North America have home sonar equipment? Do, er, do the police not do this themselves? Anyway, per the blurb, “Since 2020, there has been a dramatic increase in people being recovered with their vehicles- submerged underwater. Many of them had been missing for decades. This is thanks to Sonar Technology, but also to an increased awareness of its ability to find missing people, as volunteer sonar search teams have become popular online. When someone goes missing with a vehicle, there’s not many places that it can remain hidden for long. In the time that I’ve looked into these cases, I’ve found that after around 3 years the most common place for them to be found is in a body of water, unless foul play or extreme terrain is involved. The main featured map started as a personal project in early 2021. In 2022, this website was created to hold the map and more information.” NGL, this feels…a bit weird tbh, not least the map on the homepage with its red tags for cases where the sleuths think there is a ‘HIGH POSSIBILITY OF FOUL PLAY’, but if you’re a North American with access to home sonar then a) you might enjoy this; b) can you explain to me what the fcuk you are doing with home sonar equipment and what else you are currently using it for, please?
    • Just The Browser: I feel that some of you will appreciate this (if you’re technical enough): “Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you “just the browser” and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations. This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub.” Should you want to continue to rail, Cnut-like, at the inexorable march of The Machine then this should appeal.
    • Boring Stuff: The people behind this aren’t lying – this IS boring stuff! – but I am including it because I think it’s a really smart bit of branding. Boring Stuff is a company that is offering its accountancy services to a very specific audience – digital creators who, they figure, are likely to be the sorts of people who are perhaps not *wholly* enthused with the idea of ‘doing their taxes’ and associated issues (unlike the rest of us) and find the whole idea skullfcukingly-tedious (unlike the rest of us) and who might like to deal with a company whose basic selling point is ‘yep, this sh1t is dull as fcuk, pay is some money and we will make it go away’. Honestly, the worst thing about getting an accountant is when they insist on spending an hour talking to you about your ‘financial goals’, etc, at the start of the process – mate, if I was the sort of person who cared or understood this stuff or had ‘goals’ I wouldn’t be outsourcing it to you, your job is to allow me to NEVER THINK ABOUT THIS STUFF EVER AGAIN. Anyway, this is smart branding and a smart service and, given it’s US-only, it’s an approach you could TOTALLY, er, ‘draw inspiration from’ in other markets.
    • Facebook AI Slop: I know, I know, you don’t THINK you want to see this – and, you know what, you might be right! – but I think it’s important that you keep up-to-date with the normie slop meta (yes, that’s a thing now). The innocent days of Shrimp Jesus, air hostess content and even Italian Brainrot seem like a distant memory, and now the New Hotness in engagement farming on mainstream social platforms involves creating cartoony AI content which basically channels the same sort of energy as those insane ads for mobile games that dominated a few years back – you know, the ones that inevitably involved some poor woman and her child suffering a series of escalating indignities which, it was implied, could be solved or prevented by the player via the inevitable medium of a low-quality Match 3 clone. Anyway, the slop now has those vibes but…worse, much worse, more racist and more…bongofied, oddly. Seriously, click the link and scroll and watch, and feel as your jaw sags at the increasingly weird and VERY MEAN SPIRITED stuff that you’re being served. Just imagine what it would do to your brain to exist in a social ecosystem where this stuff was being pumped into your feed all day every day. Can someone explain to me what the fcuk the deal is with the ‘mean foods’ trend? Anyone?
    • List Animals Until Failure: List as many animals as you can, until you can list no more! HOW MANY ANIMALS CAN YOU LIST???
    • The Plausible Game: Ooh, this is fun! Sent to me by Wouter, who writes “Each day, players try to spot the real definition of an obscure word among the fakes submitted by other players the day before. All fake definitions rank on a daily leaderboard.” I really enjoyed this, the guessing, the fake definitions seeded by other players, and the challenge of coming up with my own misdirections, I think it’s an excellent little additional to the daily game space. 
    • Hacker News Arcade: A portal showcasing games linked to on Hacker News – the quality is variable, fine, but there are a LOT on here.
    • A Game Made By GPT5.3: So late last night OpenAI dropped a new version of theory top model, which is all AGENTIC and stuff, and, it feels, is going to be yet another shot in the face to several professions if it does even 40% of what its makers purport it can do (details here if you are curious). It can also, they claim ‘make games’ – this is onesuch game and, honestly, the devs amongst you can rest easy because this is still Not A Good Game – it’s a voxel-y Mariokart ripoff, but it runs like a fcuking cow, it’s horribly slow and the collision detection simply doesn’t exist, which feels like quite a big miss; I know it feels potentially a bit churlish to complain that The Machine didn’t make an AAA title but, equally, if you’re going to show off about how it can MAKE GAMES NOW I would personally expect a bit more than this. 
    • IsoCoaster: MAKE A ROLLERCOASTER IN YOUR BROWSER THIS IS REALLY FUN!
    • Half Timber: MAKE A REALLY COOL LOOKING OLD STYLE HOUSE AND GARDEN IN YOUR BROWSER THIS IS REALLY FUN! (you might want to read the instruction manual, though, as the controls aren’t *super* intuitive).
    • Are You Roady?: I think that this might be a work of actual genius – a racing game in which you play AS THE ROAD! Basically you use your mouse to make the road bend left and right and go up and down, and, by so doing, your goal is to cause the 8 cars that are having the temerity to drive all over you to crash. Honestly, this is both really fun and SUCH a clever idea, I really can’t recommend this highly enough.
    • Play Quake In Your Browser: Honestly, this is SO impressive – the speed and fluidity at which this runs, even on my potato of a laptop, is quite astonishing and I am QUITE TEMPTED to down tools right now and go and blow some things up, but I won’t because I care about you and I want you to be happy.

By Woshibaii

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS SOUL, DISCO, FUNK AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF EXPERTLY COMPILED BY DREAM CHIMNEY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

 

  • Kele Zero: A feed showcasing projects at the intersection of craft and tech – there are a series of flipbook-style animations, printed on old receipts, which are stylistically just BEAUTIFUL, but all the projects on here are clever and inventive (not least the twist on Pong, which is VERY CLEVER). 

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • How Epstein Broke The Internet: Much as I wish it were not the case, there is one story rather, er, dominating the global news agenda right now, and as such we’re going to kick off the longreads with some stuff about Epstein, starting with Ryan at Garbage Day doing his typically-thorough work running down the ways in which the Epstein Files *potentially* indicate a quite staggering and, to me at least, very unexpected degree of influence and impact on online culture from the paedophile financier (lol, pimp, he was a fcuking pimp – I saw a comment that stuck with me about how you can explain his preposterously loose communications style by understanding him exactly as that, a dealer or procurer, and reading his personal style through that lens; like all dealers and procurers, the projection of nonchalance is part of the vibe). Ryan here covers the very, very odd set of meetings that seem to suggest that 4Chan’s /pol/, the source of so much of the groundswell that propelled Gamergate into the mainstream and that, they would like to tell you, went on to get Trump elected, inject white nationalist ideals into the mainstream and more besides, was basically born after 4Chan founder Moot had lunch with Epstein back in the day. Which, honestly, is FCUKING MENTAL and broke my brain slightly when I learned of it last weekend. Anyway, this whole post is interesting – the extent to which it’s FACT or a conflation of correlation and causation is…unclear, and I can understand someone looking at this and seeing a Charlie from It’s Always Sunny-style red thread map, but, also, there’s a genuinely horrible possibility that it’s not madly conspiratorial at all, and there is a direct throughline from a morally bankrupt paedophile pimp and Where We Are Now And All That Entails, Politically and Economically-Speaking, and that feels…quite hard to process, ngl.
  • Fracking For Power: This essay is technically not about Epstein at all, and doesn’t mention him once – it’s actually about Lyndon B Johnson and the way in which he conceived of power and his pursuit of it in his lifetime, as defined by his biographer Robert Caro, but it struck me as such a wonderful encapsulation as to the manner in which it is clear that Epstein operated and of how power works. I think my favourite definition of the concept is still Robert Dahl’s, loosely paraphraseable as ‘A’s ability to get B to do something that B would not otherwise do without A’s intervention’ – leverage, in other words. Epstein’s entire life seems, seen through the prism of the papers, to have been an exercise in developing positions of leverage over others; does the following sound familiar?: “It seems Johnson saw the entire world in terms of instruments of power that he could collect. This is the purpose of life as far as he’s concerned. It seems to have been this way since he was a toddler. Age three, when he can’t get attention, he hides inside a haystack and listens for a long time as his father’s workers search the hills and the creek. His mother stands a few feet away from him, crying; he doesn’t let her know; he seems to enjoy being able to control what other people feel and do…Since he sees the world always in terms of tools that let him bend people to his will, Johnson becomes a true connoisseur of leverage. He notices potential sources of power in places where I’d never think there was any. For example, he seems to realize, sometime in his twenties, that knowing how to get someone else a job gives you purchase over them. So, while still working as a teacher, he begins collecting jobs. When he quits a position, he does it in such a way that he can pass the job on to one of his friends. And when they quit, he makes sure the job goes to another person he wants to control—often by orchestrating so that the person who has the job quits at the worst possible moment for the employer, and the person Johnson wants to get the job comes in the same day with their CV and explains how they can take over and solve the problem.”
  • The Misogyny: Thanks to Elle also for this one, which, I feel I ought to warn you, is a very unpleasant read; coverage of the Files has understandably focused on the powerful being exposed, but in this piece for The Times Helen Rumbelow goes through the emails to investigate the ways in which women were spoken about by Epstein and his correspondents; the answers are, unsurprisingly, grim as fcuk: “The sensation of clicking on Epstein files is like taking the back off the world clock. We see behind the grand façade usually presented by men who run the planet, in government, academia, royalty and business, from presidents to Andrew the former prince. We see the contrast between their public distancing and their private networking. But we also see their everyday exchanges making the cogs of the world turn, oiled by porn-saturated woman-hating. Jane Austen famously almost never wrote dialogue between men without women present: she wouldn’t know how it sounded. Now, as a woman, I was allowed into the Epstein files, grandly named on the website as the “Epstein library”, like those gentlemen’s clubs with leather chairs housing male-only libraries of obscenity. It is a unique chance to be privy to how lawyers, politicians and celebrities speak when us “pussy” (their term) is out of the room where it happens. Or, in one email between two people whose identities are redacted, one unnamed Epstein connection quotes: “Gentlemen,” he said to the men that crowded the room, “is there any reason why we shouldn’t begin to talk c*** right away?” No reason at all. Let us begin.”
  • The Epstein Muffins: Apologies for the tonal whiplash here, but this was sent to me by a reader (THANKYOU FOIVOS!) and I thought it might act as a small palate cleaner as we more away from Epstein, for this week at least – perhaps astonishingly, amongst all of the horror, the Files contain a surprising number of references to muffins, and a recipe. This (female) writer decided to make them. This is funny and angry and sad; it is unlikely you too will be motivated to bake like a paedo after reading it. 
  • They Call It Peace: Among everything else that’s happening (lol), it’s sadly all-too-easy to lose sight of the fact that the conflict in Gaza is still materially happening, whatever noises might be made about ‘ceasefires’ – this piece in the LRB offers a precis of the situation on the ground right now and an explanation of why the ‘ceasefire’ is perhaps not quite the salve for Palestinians that it was presented as by Messers Netanyahu and Trump. “At least 451 [Palestinians] have been killed since the 10 October ceasefire and 1251 injured. The total death toll stands at 71,441, with 171,329 wounded. On 19 January several more people were reportedly injured across Gaza by Israeli drone attacks. Eight children have died of hypothermia since the beginning of winter. Earlier this month Unicef announced that more than a hundred children have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire – ‘roughly one girl or boy killed every day’.”
  • A Philosophy of Twitter Beef: This is actually a far better and more interesting article than its title suggests, I promise – it’s not about ‘Twitter beef’ so much as it is the manner in which language and its use has been shaped and determined by the flattening nature on online discourse, and how so much of our speech has shifted from being explicatory or explanatory to being what the author terms ‘strategic’ speech; that is, speech designed to communicate something about the speaker or wider world which is apart from the factual content of the speech itself. Interesting and, crucially, *feels* true (know, by the way, that there is NOTHING strategic about the prose in Curios): “Those of us who are specialists in the philosophy of language and engage in bringing philosophy to the public need to be more effective in highlighting why the development in our political and social discourse away from expression and toward strategy is detrimental to our public life. Trust and respect for the truth depends on speaking as being a primarily alethic rather than strategic activity. Alethic activities are aimed at the truth, not at some kind of practical benefit for the speaker or others. If I always think of you as being strategic, then I know that your honesty is always subsidiary (secondary) to your strategy. Strategic speech is about what your speech wants of me and from me, and what you speech wants of others and from others, and not about whether you speech is a reflection of your thinking. Once speech is no longer a reflection of your thinking, speaking and verbal engagement no longer becomes an activity where we hold a person to the truth of their claims as opposed to the effectiveness of their claiming them.”
  • The Nihilist Penguin: It feels like several ice ages ago that first Donald Trump and then Reform’s Mayoral candidate produced promotional/propagandist imagery in which they were depicted walking alongside a penguin – inexplicable at first glance, but, to those in the know, a nod to the Nihilist Penguin, a right-wing meme that’s been bubbling around certain corners of the web for a while now with varying degrees of implicit racism attached to it. This is interesting, to my mind, for its demonstration of the extent to which now it’s seemingly very, very simple to Trojan Horse some degree of VERY FCUKING RACIST IDEOLOGY into mainstream comms simply by ensuring that your stuff passes across the timelines on the terminally-online political strategists of the neo right – we’ve seen it with Nic 30 ans, we’ve seen it with Boriswave, and this is just the latest variant. It does rather feel like journalists ought to be getting better at pointing this stuff out rather than just uncritically going ‘lol, internet stuff, wevs’.
  • The Scam Compounds of South East Asia: I’ve written before about the scam compounds in Cambodia and the wider SE Asian region, but this is a really good and in-depth look at the ways in which people get sucked in, and the strange, if perhaps unsurprising, way in which the victims can often get coopted into becoming capos themselves, recruiting other marks in the vain hope of securing their own freedom. 
  • A Sikh Perspective on English Identity: In a week in which a UK politician has once again made a nonsensical appeal to the nebulous idea of ‘core British values’ it was interesting and instructive to read this thoughtful piece by Prof Jasjit Singh about being Sikh and being English, the manner in which these identities coexist, and his thoughts on the way in which shared national identity can be additive rather than substitutive: “Discussions of faith and national identity in England often highlight the deep historical entanglements of Christianity with the institutions of the English state, the growing visibility of Islam in public life, or the challenge of articulating a plural national story in a rapidly changing society. Yet the Sikh experience in England offers a distinctive vantage point, shaped by migration, minoritisation, activism and the cultivation of belonging across multiple generations. Sikh perspectives illuminate Englishness not as a static inheritance but as a dynamic and contested cultural field. For Sikhs in England, the question is rarely whether one is English or British in some abstract sense. Rather, it is how forms of identity rooted in the Sikh tradition, with its own ethical and institutional frameworks, interact with political and cultural narratives of Englishness. This interplay involves recognition, misrecognition and, increasingly, self-definition.” Honestly, this is such a smart piece of writing and I hope it finds the wide audience it deserves.  
  • A Very Long Interview With Elon Musk: I KNOW I KNOW I AM SORRY. I don’t want to think about him any more than you do. Except, well, we have to, because, while we’ve all been focused on him being a mad white supremacist proto-nazi natalist lunatic, he’s also spent the past few years consolidating quite a lot of very practical power for himself – read this piece on the Space X monopoly of the atmosphere and take a moment to think about how good that feels! – and, as such, despite the fact that he is, er, prone to overpromising, what he says does matter in terms of the fact that he really is now in a position where he can at least try to bend quite a lot of the world to his will. This is a typical Muskian interview – 3h long, hyperbolic as all fcuk, and a very strange mixture of hard engineering chat and some VERY VERY STUPID comments about morality and philosophy, and some truly upsettingly bad attempts to be funny. Honestly, I know that this is long and he is hateful, but I would strongly recommend taking a look at this because, for better or worse and like it or not (it is worse, and I do not like it), this is someone who IS shaping our future and who DOES have a competitive advantage in all sorts of fields, and while the temptation is obviously to laugh at him Being Sad On Twitter, doing so does rather ignore the fact that, well, he is Still Winning (the fcuking cnut). Oh , and if you only read one bit of it, I suggest you ctrl+f for the bit about customer service if you want a naked, clear-eyed, gloves-off example of exactly what the world’s richest people think about labour and capital, and what this means for all our jobs (lol we are so so so fcuked, honestly). 
  • Agents, Etc: There’s been a lot written about OpenClaw, Moltbook and the NEW AGENTIC WEB over the past week, but I thought this one, by the typically-smart Dan Hon, was probably the best overview of What It All Is, What Is Going On, Why It’s Not Really Safe To Use Right Now, and What It Might All Mean: “I am not interested in or persuaded in a bunch of things creating language that looks like human language and whether that is a sign of artificial general intelligence. What I am interested in is patterns of tool usage and the spreading of tools. There is a criticism out there of Moltbook which points out that Moltbook isn’t really anything because a human still decides, at some point, to include the prompt to essentially “read and post and comment” and a human has, at some point, made the decision as to how frequently that happens. The first mover is always a human. Sure, I get it. But I do think there’s a difference between late-night college nature-of-consciousness posting and fake reflection on interior state and a mechanism for describing and exchanging functionality. That the mechanism happens to be human readable makes it more compelling because we are easily persuaded to pay more attention to things that look like and act like humans or have a consciousness and that’s a really irritating trait these days.” BONUS THINKING ON ALL THIS STUFF! Jay Springett, also reliably smart, on how, fundamentally, this is just one additional example of The New Quotidian Weird, and another proof point that the digital future is, basically, Weird Little Guys all the way down.  Oh, and BONUS BONUS LINK ABOUT THIS STUFF: this is, er, a newsletter about stuff that Agents are doing which is apparently being automatically written every day by…another Agent. Which, whatever you think about this, is sort-of mad.
  • Being A Creative Feels Like Prostitution: I confess that when I read this my eyes did roll a *bit* – oh, what’s that? You’re finding that being ‘a creative’ involves having to chase payments, and clients being d1cks, and large companies being fcuking useless at paying sole traders in timely fashion? OH BOO FCUKING HOO YOU HAVE JUST DISCOVERED ‘FREELANCING’ HAVE A CAKE. I then stopped being such a cnut, though (at least for a second or two) and read on, and realised that this is a neat encapsulation of the lie that was sold around the Creator Economy, its complete non-viability for 90 (morelike 95-98 imho)% of those attempting to make a live in it, and how the system is pretty much broken. So if the jobs aren’t going to exist, and the creator economy is a lie…fcuk, we really ARE all going to be Mechanical Turk-ing ourselves on Rent-A-Human, aren’t we? Jesus.
  • AI Cryptids and ‘Reality’: I really enjoyed this – Katharine Dee writes about the conjunction of AI and mythical creatures, and how the mixing of the two is creating a shift in the manner in which many people are approaching and relating to the fantastical; this, in particular, feels very true: “You might have seen the images of “the Mariana Trench with the water removed” that have been circulating on TikTok. They’re obviously AI-generated, everyone knows they’re AI-generated, that part is completely undisputed—and yet people share them as though AI has access to a view that was previously hidden. There’s an oracular quality to it. The machine knows things and can show it to you. It’s not literally true, but it’s a type of true, a truth that a lot of people are increasingly willing to accept.” 
  • Miss Piggy: A New York Times profile of the world’s most famous swine (fcuk off, Babe, you are NOTHING) to mark the new Muppet Show special that came out this week – look, you don’t need me to sell this to you, it’s all about Miss Piggy, just click the link (the detail about the first line of her  80s autobiography is just too perfect). 
  • The WSJ Does Boy Throb: You will, of COURSE, recall that I wrote about spoof boyband Boy Throb in November last year, how wonderful and pure they were, and how they were, and I quote, ‘clearly an extended skit’ – you do, right? GOOD. Anyway, it turns out that not EVERYONE managed to see the joke, which is presumably why the Wall Street Journal did this INCREDIBLY STRAIGHT writeup of the band and their quest to be reunited with missing member Darshan…I think if I were the author of this piece I might possibly expire from embarrassment: “Still, their goofy videos have captured the hearts of TikTok users, who have been subscribing in droves through a mix of real fandom (the “Throb Mob,” as the boys call their mostly teenage supporters) and curiosity about whether the whole thing is an elaborate ruse to bring their friend to America. The million-followers marker was no random or vain pursuit. It stemmed from advice the band received from their immigration attorney—a recurring character in their videos—who told them the threshold would help establish their legitimacy with the government. In a group interview on Zoom, the three U.S.-based members—Darshan was asleep—insisted they are sincerely trying to make it big. They know their videos come off as playful, and for now, that’s the point.” HOW CAN YOU WRITE ‘THROB MOB’ AND NOT KNOW YOU ARE BEING PLAYED HERE???? HOW???
  • We Can Always Tell: One of the sad, predictable side effects of the UK Government’s ridiculous obsession with/position on WHO CAN USE WHAT BATHROOM BECAUSE TRANS has been of a rise in cis women who do not conform exactly to certain specific ideas of what women look like being challenged in bathrooms by people keen to out them as trans, a sentence so utterly mental that it feels ridiculous to even type it. This is a lived experience piece by Carla Cross, who writes about both herself and a US-based content creator called Stephy, both of whom have been subject to all sorts of intrusive and increasingly offensive questioning from people who think that ‘we can always tell’. Sad and frankly enraging.
  • Baby Making On Mars: OK, this is VERY LONG but I promise you it is so so so interesting – all about the challenges of reproduction in space, the research that’s been done on it so far and what it shows, and why all the signs point to it not being QUITE so easy as Musk et al might think to COLONISE THE STARS WITH OUR SEED (Jesus). This is fascinating and much, much funnier than it has any right to be – I promise this is a really good read. The piece also contains an illustration of rats rolling around in space which, honestly, would make for REALLY good tattoos imho (you’ll see what I mean, promise). 
  • To Slay or Not to Slay: Pride, representation, rainbowwashing and baking – this is a great essay by Adriann Ramirez in Vittles: “‘You are an LGBTQ+ owned business, which we are supporting during Pride month.’ This is the exact wording of a request I received. Supporting during Pride Month. And come 1 July? Chopped! I have an internal debate about whether to dignify these requests with a response. Being outwardly anti-LGBTQ has become increasingly acceptable once again, and efforts to exclude trans people from public spaces are being increasingly institutionalised. Am I complicit in pinkwashing if I enable a company to hold a singular Pride lunch, then happily ignore us for the rest of the year? Am I cosigning the actions of corporations who have shown us, time and again, that, when it comes down to it, they don’t have our backs? While there is no straightforward answer to this, and no one monolithic approach (thank God – if there were, all queers working in food would be forced into making rainbow cakes), it does strike me that, for the mainstream, there is a right and wrong way to go about it.”
  • Menopause and Blooming Late: This is an extract from Roxanne Gay’s forthcoming book; she is an excellent writer, and I enjoyed this very much indeed: “It is a bitter thing, to have spent most of your life in a body you’ve been told you are supposed to hate, a body that is considered a placeholder for the real, more appropriate body you’re meant to live in. You keep waiting for your real life to begin on that magical day when you finally discipline your body into what society prefers it to be. But sometimes, you get lucky. You stop waiting and start living. As I’ve tumbled into menopause, I’m supposed to believe my womanhood is ending but instead, I have been handed a new beginning.”
  • Selfish and Stupid: I thought this was a truly brilliant essay – on climbing, specifically free soloing, prompted by that guy climbing that building for Netflix – the author is  a former climber who reflects on the particular character required to contemplate doing something that you know will kill you and devastate the lives of those you love and who love you should even one thing go just wrong enough, to reflect on it, and…to do it anyway; they are qualified to do so because they themselves are tetraplegic after a climbing accident sustained a few years ago. This is clear-eyed, honest and funny, and I subscribed to the newsletter immediately on finishing because the voice here is excellent I think.
  • Quitting: An essay about cigarettes, falling in love with them and trying to leave them behind; I thought this was *wonderfully* written, even if you’re not yourself someone who’s found themselves in the grip of nicotine dependency: “When you first have a cigarette, the initial encounter is with smoke. Smoke is hostile to the newcomer. It tickles the lungs, boxes the tonsils. It scours your insides until they feel matted and gray, like an old flannel. To really start smoking takes a certain determination. In those early days, I was sustained by an important secret only I knew: I wasn’t actually a smoker. The only reason the cigarette filter was repeatedly traveling from my hand to my lips and back again was in public fulfillment of an elaborate private boast: that even as a nonsmoker, I could still smoke everyone else under the table. This irony became increasingly etiolated and abstract, until after a few months I forgot all about it. After that cigarettes were delicious, forever.”
  • London: Finally this week, a superb long essay by Hari Kunzru about London, its past, its mythology, psychogeography, magic/majick, the cities that we build ourselves above and between and beneath the buildings and streets from ideas and imaginings…this covers Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Thomas De Quincey and so much more besides, it’s interesting and funny and surprising and it made me want to spend a day walking round the city and just looking; read it. 
By Alex Schaefer

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS !: