Hello! Do you remember the last time that everything *didn’t* feel like it was teetering on the verge of total collapse? No, me neither; EXCITING, ISN’T IT?
Anyway, here we are again in a situation where, thanks to the actions of a few disproportionately powerful people with very, very vested interests, a significant proportion of us are likely to have a significantly worse time than we would otherwise have done without their intervention. COULD PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW I EXIST PLEASE STOP ACTING IN WAYS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO FCUKING MY SH1T UP, PLEASE? It is very, very tiring, turns out.
Still, while we wait to find out exactly how expensive everything is going to get, and how long for, and which of the world’s worst people are going to somehow manage to come out of this with an extra 0 on the end of their bank balance, why not enjoy some HIGH-QUALITY INTERNET STUFF? It won’t make the problems go away, but it WILL give you a few new things to worry about which may distract you from the ones that are currently causing you to lose sleep and, well, that’s not nothing!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should immediately go to the WikiCity link and blow up some FACTS, it will make you feel better I promise.
By Sayre Gomez
THE SECTION WHICH ONCE WORKED WITH NICK TIMOTHY’S SISTER-IN-LAW AND EVEN SHE HAD NOTHING GOOD TO SAY ABOUT THAT FCUKING CNUT, PT.1:
- Collective Memory: I feel I should probably caveat this at the outset – in what feels like a…very 2021-era vibe, this site has, inexplicably, got ‘dodgy crypto grift’ running through it like a stick of rock, so you shouldn’t consider this link an endorsement (lol, ‘endorsement’, like my opinion fcuking matters) so much as a vague, handwaving ‘something interesting over there’ gesture. STILL! Collective Memory is a project which is pitching itself as a NEW PLACE FOR CROWDSOURCED NEWS and which claims to have tens of thousands of users, all sharing images and video of LIFE from across the world, in realtime – why exactly it is that said images and videos need to be attached to some bullsh1t ETH fork called ‘$ATTENTION’ (currently trading at a whopping $0.01 a token – BUY IN EARLY LADS (NB please do not, under any circumstances, ‘buy in’)) is…unclear, but ignore that for a second and instead just click on the ‘latest memories’ tab at the top and then enjoy the endless scrolling feed of…just pictures and short video clips, all showing inexplicably-banal moments from people’s lives in (mostly) Europe and North America, cats and selfies and knitwear and…Christ, you know, I didn’t think I would ever feel nostalgia for an ostensibly-chronological feed of mundane images from strangers, but it turns out that there’s something genuinely-refreshing about the slice-of-lifeness of this, the fact that for a vanishing moment here in 2026 you can peer into a window on the world that doesn’t feel like LOUD SHOUTING MORONTV…to be clear, this website and the associated app is some sort of weird, doomed-to-failure bit of cryptow4nk, but I can’t help but feel compelled about the timetravel aspect of the feed here. No idea why this has captured my attention this morning – is it…is it the fact that it looks like we’re all heading for some HARD TIMES again? MAYBE!!! – but such is the beautiful whimsy of Curios so, well, suck it up.
- The Internet Phonebook Second Edition: The Internet Phonebook, by Elliot Cost and (full disclosure) my friend Kris, did PHENOMENALLY well and has been featured in all sorts of fancy places, so much so that they are running a second edition; if YOU make Stuff on the Internet and would like said stuff to be included in a beautifully-made little directory of ALL OF THE WEBSITES (ok, fine, some of the websites) then you can fill in your details at this url and be immortalised in print (alongside Web Curios, should you not mind keeping company with me), and subsequently available for purchase in the sorts of shops that sell very serious books about Design Methodologies, purchased by men in directional eyewear and knitted fishermens’ caps, for £30+.
- SlowLLM: Are you being forced to use AI at work against your will? Do you have someone in your life who you fear is being lost to The Machine, and whose behaviour you want to gently impact in much the same way you might use an electroshock collar to discipline a loved-but-unruly hound? GREAT! SlowLLM is a fun and clever idea – “SLOW LLM is a browser extension that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly. It works with ChatGPT and Claude”…oh, and even better, for the technically-minded (or the truly-rebellious Heads of IT amongst you), “You can install SLOW LLM, network-wide, at your business, university, or household through our free DNS service…The DNS service works with all apps, and slows down Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Google Gemini.” OK, so installing this on your company’s network will, I’m pretty sure, result in you being sacked, but if you’re a committed anti-AI person then surely this is a price worth paying for your glorious and noble Cnut-like stand against the inevitable tsunami of automation and unemployment? DO IT! We can keep each other warm in the line at the soup kitchen (lol, like there will be soup kitchens, we’ll be eating each other at this rate).
- The Node Project: For, er, ‘reasons’, I have been following AI-generated right-wing content on social media in the UK for 6+ months now, and as part of that have ‘enjoyed’ seeing AI rap videos by a gaunt, Lurch-like figure called ‘Danny Bones’, decrying the TERRIBLE DECLINE of modern Britain (you may not be surprised to know that the decline is, in the main, linked to, er, brown people – whodathunkit?!) – the Bones character has been created by whoever is behind an organisation called itself ‘The Node Foundation’, which is currently raising money for…well, it’s not wholly clear from the webpage but, at the very least, for the creation of more AI-generated rap videos telling people that the reason everything is fcuked is basically Islam. If you look at the donation page – which is anonymous, but allows for backers to post messages – you can see a combination of cryptoweirdos and charming types posting things like ‘England for the English’, just in case you were in any doubt as to exactly the sort of sentiments being fomented by this sort of stuff. There’s no indication that they’re raising a lot of money, but the bit that’s important to note here is that an anonymous group of grifters – in all likelihood VERY RACIST grifters – are making racist propaganda and punting it out through TikTok and Reels to millions of viewers with complete impunity, and there’s no way of telling who they are. Does that feel good? IT DOESN’T FCUKING FEEL GOOD.
- The Latte Line: It feels weird to refer to someone as ‘a breakout star of UK datavisualisation’ (and, honestly, it IS weird to refer to someone as that, might not do it again), but Lauren Leeke, whose investigation into restaurant rankings in London on Google Maps last year did all sorts of numbers, has returned again, with a really smart use of data; here, she has taken a whole bunch of demographic and economic data about the city’s population and used it to create a map which shows (roughly – Leeke is clear in her description that this is a statistical snapshot rather than any sort of STATEMENT OF FACT) the dividing line between, as people in Sydney first termed it, ‘the people who buy the lattes and the people who make them’. This is SO interesting, as is the explanation of how it was built and which data is being taken into account, which you can read here.
- WikiCity: Have you ever thought to yourself ‘you know what would make Wikipedia infinitely more useful and compelling? Yes, that’s right, the ability to visualise the most verbose entries in its corpus as a 3d city, around which I can explore in a tiny virtual plane!’? If so, you have a beautiful and unique mind and you should dedicate it to science because, really, we could all learn something; BUT ALSO! This will make you very happy indeed. For those of you who have inexplicably NEVER dreamed of such delights, let me assure you that the feature that lets you ‘fly’ also lets you SHOOT GUNS AND MISSILES AT THE INDIVIDUAL WIKI ENTRIES, thereby destroying them (in the visualisation, to be clear; you can’t just fly about the map wantonly destroying the fabric of human understanding, much as you might wish to – it’s not yet THAT easy, although, honestly, it feels like that will be where we’re at by the third Tuesday in April, at this rate), and I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to see the notification flash up telling you that you have purged ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’ from the map.
- Starboy: Jay Springett has for several years now been predicting the rise of the ‘little guy’ – small digital/physical companions that are going to proliferate in the post-GenAI era, as models get smaller and can basically be baked into and onto everything, and we start to crave (or, alternatively, get aggressively sold, whether we crave them or not) personalised experiences from our devices – yet another example of this comes in the shape of the ostensibly-baffling ‘Starboy’, a fashion-forward…oh, look, this is basically a digital labubu with bells on, honestly, a device you attach to your backpack and carry round with you and which has BIG EXPRESSIVE EYES and which will vaguely respond to your surroundings, but which won’t actually do anything meaningful. The website is STAGGERINGLY obtuse, expecting people to commit to dropping $350(!!) on a toy whose functionality is left entirely unexplained, but you can read more about what the gimmick is here – “At its core, STARBOY integrates a suite of sensors – including a camera, microphone, temperature sensor, and accelerometer – powered by locally running AI models. These allow it to recognize human faces, respond to up to 30 hand gestures, and react to environmental changes such as heat, cold, noise, or movement. Its behavioral engine gives STARBOY moods and emotions: it can grow anxious in loud environments, shiver in the cold, or get dizzy when shaken. When STARBOYs meet, they communicate by swapping eyes, sharing personality traits, and even spreading firmware updates wirelessly, creating a dynamic ecosystem of evolving digital pets.” NGL, the ‘swapping eyes’ thing sounds…horrific, honestly, but there’s a one-in-a-million chance that a Famous wears one of these one day and demand spikes, so should you want to take your chances on it becoming a briefly-culty MUST-HAVE item then you know where you to go.
- IVF: The latest piece of excellent information visualisation by The Pudding comes in the shape of this really nicely-made and very sensitively-presented breakdown of the experience of going through IVF; readers can toggle at any stage between reading about what is happening to the adults vs what is happening to the eventual child in terms of the science and the development of the embryo, and this is both really enlightening and really interesting, and a useful-corrective to the generalised impression (at least among people that don’t have experience of the process) that it’s ‘simple’ and unintrusive.
- Vurt: Do you think that the executives behind short-lived and much-derived episodic shortform vertical video platform Quibi are looking at the current rise in popularity of episodic shortform vertical video across the web and feeling…somewhat unlucky? Turns out that maybe Katzenberg’s error was pitching it TOO high-end, because it seems that what it really took for the concept to take off was everyone pivoting to producing stuff that appears to have a production and talent budget of approximately three quid and a Freddo. The latest platform to attempt to ride this particular zeitgeist wave for as long as it lasts is Vurt, which launched recently and already includes a LOT of content, all of it drama/comedy/romance-ish, all of it (seemingly, at least) aimed primarily at a Black audience, and with the promise that it is going to drop at least another whole series per week. I took a moment to watch a couple of episodes of one of the shows on here the other day and, look, I am so far away from being the target audience here that I feel unqualified to comment, other than to say MAN are they not spending their budget on SFX and set design here. Still, I can’t not love a channel running a series ‘called ‘Lord, All Men *CAN’T* Be Dogs’.
- Searchable City: “A visual exploration of New York City through millions of street-level images. Discover hidden patterns, architectural styles, and urban textures across Manhattan (with the rest of the boroughs coming soon) using AI-powered semantic search.” Ok, I like this a LOT and really want someone to apply the same ML layer to London please. You can read a fuller explanation of what they did here, but, basically, they took all the Streetview images of Manhattan and got AI to analyse them for ‘what it saw’, and then turned that into a semantically-searchable map based on that analysis. So, for example, you can type in ‘fire hydrants’ and it will pull you a location map of all the fire hydrants in the city (or at least the ones you can see on Streetview), or ‘restaurants with outside seating areas’, or ‘flowers’ or ‘graffiti’ or whatever you like…this is SO clever, and such an interesting way of using photo data, and the interface they’ve built to explore it is lovely. NOW LONDON.
- The London Tech Heatmap: The ‘LondonMaxxing’ discourse that briefly bubbled up in the tech community the other week made me laugh because a) is the weakening membrane between ‘the language of the incredibly-broken online’ and ‘normie life’ a good thing? HM I AM NOT SURE; and b) because the fact that it sparked a whole wave of ‘London is a great place to do tech and make a startup!’ chat reminded me SO MUCH of the work I did to promote the Cameron Government’s ‘Tech City’ (OK FINE SILICON ROUNDABOUT HAVE IT YOUR WAY) initiative c.2011 that I could almost smell the poorly-made flat whites. One of the least-fun parts of that job was having to promote the ‘Tech City Map’ that No10 had put together, a…statistically-questionable attempt to quantify the number of businesses that made up the tech sector, and which ended up claiming some…rather leftfield businesses as ‘tech’ as a result of a rather lax semantic definition of exactly what ‘tech’ meant, leaving the poor PR agency (aka ME) to have to field some very withering criticism from one M. Yiannopoulos, who only a few short years later would be changing the world forever thanks to Gamergate (one day I will write the definitive profile of that cnut, although tbh I think people are still too scared to speak about him on the record, which, regardless of the fact that he is human cancer, is a hell of a legacy)…anyway, that is by way of massively-unnecessary preamble to the fact that someone has made a new Map of London Tech, and you can see it here if you’re curious. SO MANY BUSINESSES!
- Restart Your Life: This is, I’m pretty sure, spun up by AI, and is quite thin…but, also, there’s something undeniably slightly compelling about it as a mundanity simulator. Click the button, select your starting attributes (‘alcoholic parent’, say, or ‘anxiety’…some have buffs, some have debuffs), drop some points into your starting stats (brains, looks, familial wealth, etc) and then…see where your life ends up! There’s minimal agency here – you’re effectively setting a few parameters and then getting an LLM-imagined life simulation – but with a few more bits of interaction I think there could be something quite interesting in this. Even without it, though, there’s something…strangely-fascinating about the little lives it spins up; my first saw me die at 57, not wealthy but, apparently, ‘largely content’ and, honestly , I WOULD BITE YOUR FCUKING HAND OFF GIVE ME THAT BARGAIN. Anyway, this is curious to me and might be to you too – but is still absolutely NO MATCH for the ultimate, never-beaten Game Of Life, Alter Ego from way back in the 1980s which if you have never played it you must experience RIGHT NOW.
- DateDrop: Another week, another dating app – and no, you can’t try this one, it’s US-only and restricted to college students, but I’m including it because I found its premise interesting. The deal is that you tell the app about yourself, your ‘values’ (I have always been confused by what the fcuk that term actually means, which, on reflection, is probably a troubling reflection on, er, my values) and the like, and it will, each week, suggest a new person on your campus for you to potentially go on a date with. All the app does is match you and give you email contact – the rest is up to you. This fascinated me because of the degree to which you are outsourcing the agency ENTIRELY to The Machine – it triages, it picks, all you have to do is opt-in – and What That Says about the passivity baked into so much of our post-algo lives. “How did you meet?” “Well, some maths decided we should email each other, and the rest is history” A MEET-CUTE FOR THE AGES!!!
- Find The Cancel Page: This promises to help you find the specific page you need to cancel your subscription to ANYTHING – Prime, Spotify, that weird OnlyFans knockoff you subscribed to in a moment of weakness (IT’S OK IT’S A PERFECTLY NORMAL NICHE INTEREST) – and as such might be worth bookmarking for when you realise that your life is the dril candles tweet but for newsletter subscriptions.
- Bring Back Doors: I first noticed the trend away from having doors in the bathrooms of holiday accommodation a few years ago in Mexico, when my then partner and I arrived at the swanky villa we were staying in for someone’s wedding to find that the toilet was situated, charmingly, behind a small partition directly behind the bed’s headboard; this inexplicable vogue has perpetuated, to the point where there now exists this website dedicated to compiling information about hotels around the world that have not yet succumbed to the madness. This might feel like a small, petty annoyance, but I am genuinely glad that someone is taking a stand.
- Newgrounds Roulette: OH MY WORD! Newgrounds, as anyone who spent significant amounts of time bored at a computer in the 2000s can attest, was an INCREDIBLE artefact of its time – if you’re not familiar, it was basically THE place online where people would post their homemade animations (and games, but this is just the animations as far as I can tell) for the world to enjoy, and created some genuine internet superstars, and this website has managed to dig out literally THOUSANDS of those Flash cartoons and repurposed them for the modern era. There’s a deliberate design decision here insofar as all you can do is watch – there’s no scrubbing through, no fast forward, at most you can switch to the next vid in the queue, meaning you just get the firehose of 00s culture right to the face…your Megaman parodies, your edgy sub-Homestar Runner humour, the memes, the r4nD0m!!!111 l33tspeke-style humour…this was never my thing, but I am SO glad that it has been preserved (not joking, I do think this stuff is culturally significant, not least because for a lot of people 10-15y younger than me this was a formative part of their childhood, which, on reflection, does perhaps explain a lot).
- Send Clowns: I have long maintained that one of the most tedious collective lies people have perpetuated in the post-internet age is ‘clowns are scary’ – THEY ARE NOT SCARY NOONE THINKS THEY ARE SCARY IT IS SOMETHING PEOPLE SAY IN LIEU OF HAVING AN ACTUAL PERSONALITY FFS – but, should you know someone who persists in the illusion of coulrophobia, there exists this site that lets you send, for a small fee, an actual clown doll in the post. This has the dual benefits of a) probably forcing them to abandon the charade out of embarrassment; or b) driving them mad with actual fear should they in fact not be lying, so the benefits are obvious.
TWO AND A HALF HOURS OF 00s HIPHOP MIXTAPES BY DJ GREEN LANTERN HERE!
THE SECTION WHICH ONCE WORKED WITH NICK TIMOTHY’S SISTER-IN-LAW AND EVEN SHE HAD NOTHING GOOD TO SAY ABOUT THAT FCUKING CNUT, PT.2:
- Vibesail: Would you like to distract yourself from the general mess that everything seems to be in by taking a gentle sail around the world’s oceans (AVOID THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ THOUGH)? Of course you would! Which is why this little browsertoygamething, via Lynn, is such a nice distraction – very similar to the ‘fly around a 3d map of the entire world’ toy from last week, this instead asks you to captain a small craft around; you have to work with the wind, which meant that I basically found myself moving with all the alacrity of a crippled slug in a lake of molasses given I don’t know the first thing about…tacking? Is that the word? Anyway, I found this…hard, but it’s entirely possible that if you know the first thing about sailing you will take to it like a…er…albatross to (sea)water. There are races! What more you could you possibly want? FFS, SO DEMANDING.
- A Whole Bunch of Old Copies of the NME: Are you old enough to remember the years in which the NME was an essential part of the firmament of the UK – and indeed global – music scene, whose sneering journalists could make or break a band with just one brutal takedown (whilst I obviously bemoan the slow death of the media as an institution, I can also accept, with the distance of time, that the fact an anonymous pr1ck hiding behind the ridiculous nickname ‘Johnny Cigarettes’ could kill an artists’ career stone dead because they had a hangover and were in a bad mood when they wrote the review was…not ideal)? GREAT! In which case you will find this repository of old copies of the NME from the late-70s and early-80s, newly uploaded to the Internet Archive, an absolute joy. If you’re NOT old enough to remember those days then a) congratulations on still having your own hair and teeth; and b) you should still take a look, you won’t BELIEVE what journalism and indeed popstars used to look like back in the day.
- 3d Scans of Very Old Stuff: The Met in New York is going through the process of creating 3d scans of its archive of objects – these are some of the statues, etc, that the museum has captured and uploaded to its website, giving YOU the opportunity to examine, say, a small carved chesspiece in the shape of an elephant from 1500 years ago, up close and personal.
- Make a Little Hexy City: Also via Lynn, A website which will produce small, medieval-style landscapes, featuring trees and rivers and a small, walled city, at your command. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA MAYBE YOU LIKE TABLETOP RPGS OR SOMETHING FFS JUST TAKE THE GIFTS AND FCUK OFF.
- Buzzfeed Island: On the one hand, media is HARD and has only been getting harder over the past 15 years, and making money out of ‘news’ or anything similar is famously not an easy task; on the other, the amount of money Buzzfeed has burnt through over the years since its emergence is genuinely fcuking astonishing, and it’s sort of amazing how Peretti has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the site, once lauded as The Future of Journalism and now reduced to punting out horrible, AI-powered concepts that literally noone in the world wants or needs and which are unlikely to appeal to anyone. Buzzfeed Island is a waitlisted new Buzzfeed app that will let you…use AI to make memes!!!!! Do Faceswap stuff to make ‘funny’ video clips! Any number of things that feel like hangovers from The Past!!! I feel this is aimed squarely at kids, but…why do kids want this when there are a million and one other things like this out there, and, frankly, you can do most of this stuff with existing AI models anyway should you be desperate to create derivative, unfunny material from the uncanny valley. How many billions is that now, Jonah?
- Splode: I think we can all safely agree that any ‘shared reality’ we might once have had has been fucked into the sun and splintered to infinity thanks to personalised algorithms and AI, and that the idea of something ‘trending’ only makes a very specific sort of sense anymore, and that there is no reasonable way of knowing what anyone else is consuming, mediawise, or what they are likely to think about anything – GREAT NEWS, CAN’T THINK OF A DOWNSIDE! – but should you wish to maintain the comforting illusion that it is possible to get a birds-eye view of ‘what people are looking at today’ then you might enjoy Splode, which takes what is trending RIGHT NOW across Reddit, X, TikTok, YouTube, etc, and presents it on a single page, updated every 10 minutes or so. What does this tell us about RIGHT NOW? Mainly that everything is a confusing inchoate mess – you’re welcome!
- Klumpen: It’s very much one of those moments in modernity when you think ‘hm, so, is this all going to start collapsing around our ears, then, this whole ‘global infrastructure’ setup?’ and wondering whether it might not be time to, I don’t know, learn how to make fire with sticks. If you’re feeling a bit prepper-y in the wake of the news that you’re going to have to sell both your kidneys to pay for the heating next winter (not to mention the inevitable dialysis!) then you might want to take a look at Klumpen, “a complete, off-grid utility core containing everything required for modern life: solar-generated electricity, satellite broadband, shower, lavatory, and a compact kitchen. All condensed into seven meticulously engineered square metres.” According to the site – which isn’t quite as specific on the details as I might want from something which wants a £2k deposit and which is going to eventually cost the fat end of £40k, including shipping – you can just ‘plug it in’ and it works – HOW DOES THE TOILET WORK THOUGH???? Anyway, if you have a spare five figures (six, if you want the SUPER RUGGED version designed to survive an arctic winter!) to drop on your very own autonomous survival pod then a) can I have a loan, please?; and b) get your order in and hope they ship before the world goes truly mad.
- The Epstein Network: Look, I am going to suggest that unless you have very good, very specific reasons for doing so that spending a lot of time right now spelunking through the minutiae of the Epstein Files is not Good For Your Mental Health; that said, this network visualisation of all the people named in the documents is a really interesting top-level picture of global power dynamics, and quite a useful way to document and map the connections that exist between the people who control our lives.
- All The Views: Say the creators of this site, “We’ve calculated all the views on the planet. Click on any point to show the longest line of sight at that location. The lines are the theoretical ideals. They rely on perfect weather conditions and favourable refraction. Heatmap colours: the brighter the more and further you can see. The darker the less you can see.” There’s an explanation of the tech behind it, and a rundown of the world’s LONGEST views, here – there’s a hell of a trip you could do checking out all of them, should WWIII hold off long enough for you to take it.
- My Water Live: This is SUCH a good idea! It’s currently only active for two London lidos – Brockwell and Tooting Bec – but in an ideal world would be extended to all of the open-air swimming locations around the UK, because it’s so so useful; basically My Water Live is a sensor that people involved in public swimming spaces can deploy, which tracks the water temperature and other variables so that they can be displayed, live, online, letting people check in on conditions so they can decide whether they want to come and have a dip. Honestly, this is so so smart, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to wax lyrical about how taking an incredibly cold swim every morning has CHANGED YOUR LIFE then a) please, shut the fcuk up; b) you might want to tell your local provider of swimlols about this.
- Mark Lawrence: Mark Lawrence is a white-haired, genial looking man, self-described as a ‘writer’. This is his Facebook page. Each day, Mark posts photos of himself, very banal photos of him just going about his daily life; there are occasionally videos too. Each of Mark’s – incredibly dull, violently bland – posts get hundreds of comments. Mark is entirely AI-generated, and I think most of the comments are from bots too. WHY? I GENUINELY DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHO IS MAKING MONEY FROM THIS. Someone has to be making cash, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening, but I am genuinely baffled as to what the game is here – anyone?
- Your Personal WordPress: To be honest I am as baffled by this as I am by the AI-generated old man above. This is a new WordPress thing, which lets you create your very own, offline, personal, private WordPress…thing, in your browser, which is persistent and will be there whenever you visit the url, and which you can customise to your heart’s content…but which you can never share with anyone else, ever, because the content is stored in your browser’s local storage rather than on a server somewhere. So, er, WHY??? I suppose you could use this as an online diary, maybe, or as a place to experiment with putting designs together, perhaps; if anyone has any ideas, again I would be grateful for an explanation as I am again confused.
- Homer: I LOVE the concept behind this. Homer is a “piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand.” You have to create an account to access the posts, but it doesn’t require your email address and it’s very painless, and the idea and execution is so, so nice; there’s a bigger art project in here should anyone be willing to broaden the concept a bit, I think.
- Real World to Minecraft: Do your kids (or you – THERE IS NO SHAME HERE, ONLY GENTLE, SENSITIVE UNDERSTANDING) play Minecraft? Would you like the opportunity to seamlessly and simply (well, ish) make Minecraft maps based on the actual real world? OH GOOD! “This free and open source project is designed to handle large-scale geographic data from the real world and generate detailed Minecraft worlds. The algorithm processes geospatial data from OpenStreetMap as well as elevation data to create an accurate Minecraft representation of terrain and architecture. Generate your hometown, big cities, and natural landscapes with ease! Choose your area on the map using the rectangle tool and select your Minecraft world – then simply click on Start Generation! Additionally, you can customize various generation settings, such as world scale, spawn point, or building interior generation.” This is on Github, so requires a *bit* of codewrangling, but I reckon you can do it (or you can ask Claude – I KNOW YOU DO IT, STOP LOOKING LIKE THAT).
- Worldwide Sidewalk Joy: A worldwide, crowdsourced map of tiny, community-curated ‘museums’ – you know, those little cupboards or cabinets you sometimes see, full of STUFF, by the side of the road, small art installations or miniature libraries? YOU KNOW – which you can browse to find examples near you. This is is a lovely idea, although I am slightly disappointed that the only one in London currently listed is in Tottenham as I know for a fact there are more out there.
- That ‘Translate To LinkedIn’ Thing: This has done numbers this week and been EVERYWHERE, which indicates both the unpleasant chokehold LinkedIn now has on people given it’s the only mainstream text-forward social network left (Bluesky is not mainstream, lol), and the queasy understanding everyone also has about how vapid and awful it is. Anyway, you probably know that it will translate any copy you give it from prose into LinkedIn-ese, and that you can take LinkedIn-ese copy and translate it back into English…but you may not be aware of the fact that this also lets you request it translate your copy into ANYTHING YOU ASK IT TO. Want to create a translation engine that will render any copy you give it into the voice of ‘sexy Keir Starmer’? Fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you? BUT YOU CAN! Just click the bit where it says ‘linkedin search’ on landing, and then input whatever you choose into the ‘search’ box and it will do the rest. Pervert that you are.
- Hostile Volume: All you need to do is set the volume to 25%. Repeatedly. How hard can it be? This is delightfully-unpleasant and very, very annoying indeed.
- Chuckie: Another DEEP WELL of nostalgia here for those of you who once owned a ZX Spectrum – another glimpse of how incredibly fcuking boring and rubbish the past was in entertainment terms for everyone else. Ste Curran has built a small, browser-based riff on ‘classic’ early-80s platformer Chuckie Egg – play different levels each day, trying to survive as long as you can. This is both slightly easier than I remember it being, and SIGNIFICANTLY more boring (no shade to Ste, it’s just that the original game was dogsh1t, damn your nostalgia), but I figure that some of you are old, fat and bald enough to be interested (man this comment is going to hurt me when I reread it in a few years’ time).
- Australian Pub Simulator: A browser-based roguelike in which your task is simple – get to the beer garden and find your mates. Except it’s an Australian pub, which means you will have all sorts of people attempting to murder you while calling you a cnut. This is fun-ish, but I confess to being VERY confused as to what was going on and finding the whole thing almost too chaotic – which, in many respects, is fairly typical of the real-life experience it’s attempting to parody.
- Pudgyworld: Do you miss Club Penguin? Do you wish you could go back, to that and to Habbo Hotel and the days in which the web was interesting and fun and safe and primary-coloured, and all you had to worry about was how you were going to furnish your igloo? TOUGH THOSE DAYS ARE GONE. That said, you can probably tickle your nostalgiabones by messing around with Pudgyworld, which is a very slick-looking sort-of in-browser multiplayer world…thingy, in which you create a penguin, do quests, collect items, meet other players, interact with them (in a very, very moderated fashion), and, quite possibly BUILD A VIRTUAL HOME, etc etc…this really is incredibly impressive, not least graphically (it’s got a very nice cel-shaded look to it), and it’s free to play…but, I don’t know, I wonder how it’s monetised and at which point anything fun gets locked behind a paywall, or whether it will start to charge you if you want to do more than three minutes of exploring per day. This is very obviously aimed at children – ACTUAL CHILDREN – and so won’t be one for you, but should you have small people in your lives then this could be something worth exploring for them (but, very much, caveat emptor – I have only scratched the surface because, well, I’m not seven, and so I have no idea if it tries to sell kids a metaverse after 10 mins’ play).
- 100 Jumps: Our final game of the week. This is EVIL, genuinely evil, and you will hate it but you will also play it like an absolute bstard, I guarantee you. Honestly, this is CRUEL (and brilliant).
THE FINAL MIX OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS IS THIS VERY DREAMY, VERY LOUNGEY SET BY PERSONAL SYSTEM!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- MixedTapes: NOT A TUMBLR! This taxonomy really means nothing anymore! Still, this is a really good source of interesting music and good mixes – one each month is free, with the others being available to subscribers, and the ones I’ve heard are pleasingly eclectic when it comes to genre and tempo. Worth a look – even the free stuff.
- On Verticality: ALSO NOT A TUMBLR! I…I should probably kill this section, really, but it would feel like the end of an era…anyway, On Verticality is “a blog that explores the human need to escape the surface of the earth through vertical means, and our complex relationship with verticality throughout our history. From our first vertical act of standing upright to our conquering of the skies through flight and skyscraper construction, much of our efforts through history have been to escape the surface we exist on. The human struggle with verticality is eternal, ubiquitous, and has been fought by every member of our species who has ever lived.” It’s also not currently being updated, which tbh does make it feel particularly-Tumblrish, but what’s on there is really interesting; I particularly enjoyed the piece on the gliders of Augustus Moore-Herring, a true lost classic of the ‘mad inventor’ genus.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Wiley Files: To be clear, this isn’t interesting or funny to anyone other than those affiliated with the school it’s about (and even then your mileage will vary widely imho), and there’s very little on here that will grab your attention; on the other, it’s worth highlighting because ‘anonymous Insta account that exists to post AI-generated content mocking the staff in a bunch of ways’ feels like something that will grow and grow and which, poor teachers, is going to make the life of staff even less fun than it currently is. Think it’s bad when the kids snigger at you today, Mr Grieves?? Wait until next week when they’re all laughing because you’ve been AI’d into a video in which you’re sucking Jeffrey Epstein’s finger lasciviously while bikini-clad teens look on (THANKS GROK!!!). There’s a piece about this here, should you wish to get in early ahead of the inevitable moral panic about this coming to the tabs and mid-markets in the next few months.
- Revival of the Fittest: Adventures in marketing and content formats! This is the Insta account of Revival of the Fittest, an Instagram…pseudodocumentary series/slice of life shorts account, which is associated with an NYC record shop in Greenwich Village called Village Revival Records – this is a series of short films about the, er, ‘characters’ that regularly come into the shop, and, honestly, you really don’t get the same calibre of eccentric in London as you do in NYC. I mean, look at this guy, he is TELEVISION. Anyway, I thought this was an interesting sideline and a good way of promoting the business – although it probably works less well for Gail’s in Walthamstow tbh (you could do a killer version of this at Brixton KFC, mind).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The War and the AI Bubble: This is VERY LONG, and a bit flabby in parts (yes, I know, I know), but it’s also a VERY interesting look about the way in which the current ‘activity’ in the Middle East is closely, perhaps inextricably, entwined with the fate of the AI market as it currently exists, the extent to which money from the region is currently underpinning a lot of the somewhat-iffy financials that lie behind the big model makers, and what might happen if, as looks increasingly inevitable, we add ‘Iran and the whole of the fcuking wider Gulf reason’ to the list of ‘seemingly foreverconflicts’ that we currently have rumbling on. This is not – SURPRISE! – a particularly-uplifting read, and I confess that consuming it all on an empty infostomach at 630am was…quite a lot, but I think it’s an interesting bit of thinking that I am yet to see well-explored elsewhere. “It becomes increasingly clear that the substitutability problem here is not really about the dollar amount. It’s about the characteristics of the capital gushing forth: patience beyond the more immediately greedy timelines of venture capital (which does not even have enough capital despite its alchemical science to finance this buildout) that’s more comfortable eating losses for more than a few fiscal years; speed/intimacy/corruption measured in personal calls and bribes and favors and influence as opposed to committee cycles; political flexibility meaning no ESG mandates, no exclusion lists, no parliamentary oversight, no political backlash, minimal transparency; scale concentration in which a single decision-maker can direct tens of billions with singular authority. No realistic combination of alternative capital sources replicates this. The question is not “can other investors buy US Treasuries?”—obviously they can. The question is “can any other capital source simultaneously anchor the PE ecosystem, co-invest in AI infrastructure at planetary scale, absorb $142 billion in defense procurement, backstop a $500 billion compute buildout, and do all of this while asking no questions about governance, human rights, or return on investment?””
- Gordon Brown: It’s a fun game to play here in 2026, going back through your personal remembered political history and thinking of the counterfactuals had certain things gone just slightly differently – some people have the Brexit referendum, others (weirdo geeks) have the whole ‘what if the Tories hadn’t fcuked the Lib Dems on the electoral reform referendum that everyone forgets we even had back in 2011’, I keep on thinking back to that light airplane crash in 2010 and how had the plane been SLIGHTLY less robust we might all be much, much happier right now…Another big one is ‘what if Gordon Brown hadn’t inexplicably chickened out of an election after he got in as leader?’, which would probably have fcuked the Tories, given Labour a clear run at another term with a decent majority and means that SO MUCH of what followed simply wouldn’t have happened. OH GORDON! Anyway, this is a wonderful and rather nostalgic profile of the Last Good PM (and he was sh!t! Honestly, I worked in DWP during the early days of Brown and MAN was everything very clearly a mess and the wheels coming off at Number 10!) in the LRB, which will give a proper ‘oh what we have lost with the grifters and the liars and the cnuts’ feel to any UK voters who read it.
- The End of Two-Party Politics: Another LRB piece here about the fact that, judging by current polling and the likely direction of travel between now and the next election, plus recent voting patterns in byelections and the like, the UK is very much now a country where the future electoral map will be determined by bloc voting rather than traditional party splits and allegiances, and what that might mean. Short answer – messy governments that don’t hold together and where it’s very, very hard to make any meaningful legislative change! Or at least that’s what I am going to assume based on a lifetime of following Italian politics – ok, fine, that’s a system different to ours in terms of PR, etc, but the basic principles are similar in terms of the shifting coalitions and loose electoral ties, and it’s hard to argue that that’s been a great success (also I think this sort of thing tends to benefit the right over the left due to the latter’s cold-eyed desire to win vs the former’s ‘People’s Front of Judea’-ing). Anyway, this is a good read, and if you’re in the market for more on the topic there’s a similar – if less-well-argued – piece in the New Statesman too.
- Can Democracy Be Rehabilitated?: This is VERY ACADEMIC and quite long, but, I promise, it is SO interesting and very smart and really is a lot more readable than it should be given it’s basically asking questions about the extent to which democracy has failed beyond the possibility of salvation (spoiler: no). Seriously, this is thoughtful and clever and FEELS true, and, as the author notes, it feels timely. It’s a question: “that matters greatly in this country now, as it does in my own, because for several decades in each their governments have plainly been failing. They have not failed in quite the same way and between them by now they have failed for many different reasons. But one important reason for failure they have had in common, it has become increasingly clear, has been that the basis on which their citizens have chosen them to govern has been the queasy relation between the demands they have pressed upon them and the resources they have been willing to offer from which to meet those demands. If you ask for too much and offer too little from which to provide it, the outcome is bound to prove discouraging. Unlike fish which supposedly rot from the head, democracies unfortunately, as Plato warned, can often rot from the feet too.”
- Recursive Resemblance: Ok, this one is a *bit* wnky, but I really enjoyed reading – and chewing on – this piece in ArtForum by Patrick R Crowley, in which he discusses, amongst other things, Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’ (which can I just point out steals its premise ENTIRELY from Tom McCarthy’s superb novel ‘Remainder’), Jurassic Park, the Kardashians and AI to ask questions about what ‘real’ means in 2026 and the extent to which we might need to come up with new theories for describing and prescribing the limits of what we believe to be ‘true’ – “perhaps we already have reached that “point of no return” at which the pursuit of realism, in terms of its asymptotic approximation of the real, is offering a set of diminishing returns. It’s not so much that we are presented with a simulacral version of the world that ultimately bears no relation to reality, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard once prophesied, but that the criterion of reality is inextricably enmeshed in feedback loops of probability and prediction.”
- The Slow Death of the Power User: This is a companion piece to the article last week about the rise of AI necessitating a parallel rise in ‘checking’ the AI, this time with a slightly-nerdy focus on software; the points made in the piece, though, apply regardless of whether you’re talking about software or anything else that’s knowledge and information based, specifically around the spread of automation slowly beginning to erode deep, systems-level expertise in favour of superficial understanding (if that). “We’re losing the ability to audit. A person who understands their tools can notice when those tools start behaving badly. They can run a packet capture with tcpdump or Wireshark and see what their phone is actually transmitting. They can look at what their DNS resolver is returning. They can read the permissions an app requests and reason about whether those permissions make sense for what the app claims to do. They can notice when an update changes behavior in ways that benefit the developer at the user’s expense. Most people have none of these capabilities and depend entirely on external review — journalists, academic security researchers, occasionally regulators — which is slow, incomplete, paid for by advertising revenue from the same companies being reviewed, and easily captured. The number of apps caught doing obviously bad things — exfiltrating contact lists, running location tracking in the background without any legitimate purpose, phoning home with behavioral data — and continuing to have millions of users afterward, because those users had no mechanism to detect the behavior themselves, is not small. It is not a footnote. It is the normal operating condition of the app economy. Technical literacy is a prerequisite for meaningful consent.” THIS IS NOT, IN FACT, ABOUT SOFTWARE.
- The Last Quiet Thing: This got a lot of love this week, and while I am not a huge fan of the prose, which feels very AI-assisted, I think the central point is worth sharing; this is by Terry Godier, and is a paean to Old Technology, specifically technology that didn’t require you to have a relationship with it (accounts! Updates! Passwords! Suggestions! Feedback!), and how that was, in fact, Better Than What We Have Now. Which, fine, is so much oldmancloudshouting, but it’s worth remembering from the point of view of product and feature design if nothing else.
- The Cash Machine Didn’t Kill The Bank Teller: One of the things you will often hear from people – particularly politicians! – when discussing the possibility of the AIjobspocalypse (COMING SOON TO AN INDUSTRY NEAR YOU, should the investors get their way…and they probably will!) is the old canard ‘well, actually, I think you will find that XX [INSERT TECH ADVANCE HERE] didn’t kill profession YY’ presented as a useful indicator of what will happen now. Which boils my piss, frankly, as it fails to take into account the fact that the difference between AI and other tech is that it CAN DO MOST OF THE BITS and that that’s significantly fcuking distinct from, say, ‘photography didn’t kill portrait painting’ because YOU STILL NEEDED PEOPLE to make cameras and film and do the developing and make all the ancillary bits and pieces around photography, whereas with AI…you don’t need ANY of that, and that applies pretty much across the board. Anyway, this piece is less doomy than I am on the jobs front but makes the excellent point that while the cashpoint didn’t kill the bank teller, smartphone banking very much did…and this tech is a lot more like smartphone banking than cash machines. Worth reading, but here’s the kicker: “The real productivity gains from AI—and the real threat of labor displacement—will come not from the “drop-in remote worker,” but from something like Dwarkesh Patel’s vision of the fully-automated firm. At some point in the life of every technology, old workflows are replaced by new ones, and we discover the paradigms in which the full productive force of a technology can best be expressed. In the past this has simply been a fact of managerial turnover or depreciation cycles. But with AI it will likely be the sheer power of the technology itself, which really is wholly unlike anything that has come before, and unlike electricity or the steam engine will eventually be able to build the structures that harness its powers by itself.” BONUS BIT ON THE MACHINE AND JOBS AND STUFF: A good, if sad, piece in 404 Media about the ways in which the web is degrading under the weight of AI-generated content, and the subtle ways in which this too is having a pernicious effect on the sorts of smaller jobs, the side-hustles, that once depending on having a functioning web on which to build them. Feels bad, man.
- Gen Beta Babies: Apparently Gen Beta describes kids born in 2025 (I know, I know, they can’t even fcuking speak, do they need to be arranged into a marketers’ demographic cohort? YES THEY FCUKING DO!); this piece is an interesting series of short interviews with parents of said children, on their thoughts and fears and worries. The reason this struck me as a worthwhile inclusion is that all the people interviewed are from India, which gives an interesting, non-Western perspective on what it feels like staring down the barrel of the future here in the now – while some of the themes are common, I thought the people specifically referencing the fact that you already can’t really go outside much due to the worsening air quality, and wondering what that’s going to be like for their kids’, was…darkly-fascinating.
- Taste Is The New Obsession: Short-ish, this one, but worthwhile; Kyle Chayka on how, in a world of potentially-infinite creative potential thanks to The Machine, the ability determine what is ‘good’, to have ‘taste’, is being elevated; after all, if anyone can make anything in seconds, the only skill will be to determine what of the infinite wave of STUFF is worthwhile (this, again, goes back to the point from that paper last week about the increased need for checking – this time not for function but for quality), and, lo, so the gatekeeper does once again rise! “The uptick in concern about taste is both surprising and discomfiting, because the word comes with particular generational baggage. A decade or two ago, millennial hipsters made a claim to good taste by exercising their preference for, say, craft India pale ales over Budweiser, Arcade Fire over Nickelback, or American Apparel over Abercrombie & Fitch. Hipster identity was built on what one chose to consume, and a fetishization of the lo-fi, the handcrafted, and the artisanal—qualities that were eventually co-opted and absorbed by corporate behemoths such as Meta, via Instagram, and Amazon, via Whole Foods. Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super Bowl commercial, titled “You Can Just Build Things,” is shot, with faux-analog cinematographic flair, from a human point of view, with hands gripping the handlebars of a bike, writing in a notebook, and playing chess—never mind that the thing being advertised is a hypothetically omniscient robot. You, too, can be tasteful, the ad seems to say, if only you choose the right chatbot to run your life.”
- Rise, Grind, Die: On how everything is multilevel marketing now, and how we are all just desperately trying to grift our way out of all…*this*. This piece – genuinely entertaining, despite the obviously-grim subject matter – neatly encapsulates something that’s been visible in two stories in recent weeks; the Theroux Manosphere doc and the (not very) shocking revelations in the Guardian that Nigel Farage was willing to say any old sh1t on Cameo for £75 a pop without checking who he was saying them for or what the implication of the script he was filling might have been. Both demonstrate the same fundamental truth – THAT EVERYONE IS W4NKING FOR PENNIES NOW. We are increasingly all just doing stuff for money because someone – we often don’t know who and we don’t care – promises us that we will get a(n often very, very small) payout at the end of it. Post content on TikTok and Reels and maybe win the algolottery? OK! Spend all day wasting your time posting nonsense on Bluesky and dropping a link to your KoFi 3xdaily in the hope that your audience will see you capering and toss a penny into your cap? GREAT! This is all empty, the emperor is naked and this is not how an economy is supposed to – or, I don’t think, meaningfully does – work, and I am not sure how long this holds up.
- Sync Music: I have been confidently predicting the AI-assisted end of the stock music industry for years now, and while at the low end that seems to very much be happening, there’s a higher-end market which still seems to be doing just fine thankyouverymuchindeed – this is a really interesting NYT profile of a company called Extreme Music, who works with Actual, Real, Named Musicians to make bespoke music for TV shows and the like, and which offers a neat example of how I think lots of industries are going to end up; small, well-remunerated outfits serving the top of the market, while everyone else uses The Machine because it’s all they can afford. LOOK AT AI LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD LOL!
- I’ve Killed Runners: A short-ish bit of writing about videogames, specifically about a new-ish multiplayer shooter called Marathon, that isn’t really about videogames at all, and which therefore is my FAVOURITE sort of games writing.
- That Gambling Article: This has justifiably done excellent numbers in the past week, but you’re yet to read it then I commend this Atlantic piece, in which McKay Coppins is given $10k by his employers (LOL! THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN UK AND US MEDIA IN A SINGLE STORY! I am trying to imagine what the equivalent over here would be and I think your average newsdesk could run to a tenner on scratchcards, maybe) to gamble with over a season, so he could write up his experience of the new(ish), exciting world of barely-regulated gambling in the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the impact is…not good; Coppins loses the lot, and over the course of his time tracking odds and placing bets, starts to feel the pernicious effects of the hobby on his mood and behaviour very personally indeed. This is, honestly, SO good, both as a piece of personal writing and an exploration of the wider market and how it operates; once again, though, I am ASTONISHED at the fact that the US kept gambling largely-illegal for decades and then looked at, say, the UK, and thought ‘you know what, yeah, let’s do that BUT LESS REGULATED’. Madness.
- Miuccia Prada is Worth $4.8bn: Or, ‘why it it is functionally impossible for someone in possession of that degree of wealth to be anything other than an awful human being’, and how, in many respects, fashion is an exploitative and manipulative industry as technology, prettier though it undoubtedly is.
- Skag In Madrid: An extract from a memoir by Jonathan Tepper, about growing up in one of Europe’s heroin hotspots. I didn’t grow up in Spain, but it’s funny how some of the archetypes he describes in this piece are familiar, wherever you’re from. This is pleasingly-unsentimental and conjures place and era rather beautifully, despite the, er, ‘gritty’ subject matter.
- The Last Days of Babestation: This is SO SO GOOD. Oh, also, for the non-anglos, you will need an explanation as to what ‘Babestation’ is – think of it as ‘camming, but even less high-end, and also, inexplicably, with a softcore-ish version on actual cable TV’. There, that make sense? I actually once knew a man – Rory, he now works as crew on Marvel films and was once apparently called a ‘cnut’ by Dame Maggie Smith, boy has he lived! – who did camerawork for Babestation on occasion, and would occasionally send me (to be clear, non-pr0nographic) photos from his place of employ; on one memorable occasion, the photo was of a crashmat, covered in yoghurt in which could clearly be seen the imprint of a set of genitalia, following a particularly, er, messy shoot. Anyway, this is about the very, very weird and increasingly-anacronistic setup of the channel, and it is VERY funny and oddly-affectionate, and SO SO ENGLISH.
- First Light: A very short piece by photographer Paul Clarke, about taking photographs of sunrise. This is beautiful, honestly, about fleeting moments and waiting and patience and impermanence, and the photo at the end is breathtaking.
- What’s Really Been Happening With Me: Our final piece this week is also not particularly long; it’s a post from Spencer Wright’s newsletter where he provides a short update about his life, and the end of his marriage, and, as with much of Spencer’s writing, I found there was something quietly wonderful about this – it is sad and small-voiced and honest and true and I think it is gorgeous, and oddly hopeful, and I hope you like it.
By Alex Venezia
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: