It does rather feel that the current situation in the Middle East, and the weird diplomatic gavotte that is currently happening around it, would be genuinely quite funny were it happening to another species on another planet. “Look!”, we would say, pointing and laughing, “look at the morons, ruining themselves with idiocy and venality, without even the most basic degree of foresight required to ascertain exactly how hard this whole farrago is going to fcuk the vast majority of them just a few months down the line! What a bunch of cnuts!”
Sadly, though, it is happening to (read: being done to) us, and as such it feels hard to look at the news without feeling quite…honestly, I am settling on ‘resentful’ as my overriding emotion for the week, but you can pick your own.
Still, at least the courts in the US have SMACKED DOWN Meta! Judging by the reaction to this week’s judgements in LA and New Mexico you’d think a deathblow had been delivered to Evil Zuck and his Big Blue Misery Factory rather than simply the first step in a legal process which, if you spend a moment looking at the timelines of appeals in California and elsewhere, could drag long into 2029 if their lawyers do their jobs properly – still, I suppose we all need a fillip, so if you would like to believe that Big Bad Tech is going to get its comeuppance anytime soon then, well, you carry on believing that.
Anyhow, this is an unrepresentatively-grumpy-sounding opening to Curios – I am actually in a surprisingly good mood today, and I promise the mood is significantly sunnier once the links kick off. Curios will be off next week as it’s Good Friday and I will be too busy reenacting the crucifixion to type (it is HARD with the nails in your wrists, turns out), but normal service will be resumed in a fortnight and I will see you then (or I won’t – I won’t ever know, after all, and, honestly, do what you like).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should make sure you eat ALL the chocolate next week because I wouldn’t bet an awful lot of money on the general integrity of global supplychains right now.
By Molly Bounds
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE ALL OF YOU TO THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ITALIAN FOOTBALL TEAM ON TUESDAY EVENING PLEASE, PT.1:
- The HTML Review #5: I have waxed lyrical in Curios before about how much I adore the annual celebration of code’n’words that is The HTML review, and given it’s now in its fifth edition I see no reason why I shouldn’t take a moment to laud it again. THIS IS ALL SO BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE IT. For those of you who haven’t been reading Curios assiduously for the past five years or who inexplicably don’t have an encyclopaedic memory for every single link I feature in here (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PAY ATTENTION YOU FCUKS), the HTML Review is a yearly digital publication which features a selection of web…things, which in some way combine prose and code to creative, beautiful effect. I like to think of the pieces in an issue as being a bit like digital poems, pieces where there’s a symbiotic relationship between form and meaning and where the way in which the words move and are shaped, the way images relate to the text, all contribute to the texture of the whole (/pseud), and this year’s pieces are no exception. This is one I would strongly recommend you set aside a bit of time for – there are 15 pieces, and each is its own, discrete experience, taking anything from a couple of minutes to quarter of an hour to experience, and they are all beautiful; my personal favourites are ‘Milkfish’ and the visual essay ‘afterimages’, but you should absolutely explore these because there will almost certainly be one that speaks to you. Oh, and even if you’re the sort of soulless philistine for whom the words ‘poetry and literature made of code’ mean NOTHING (what is WRONG with you?) then you should still click because the scrolly animation on the landing page is SO SATISFYING.
- Popopo: Ok, so a few caveats here before you click – a) the website is all in Japanese, so you’ll have to translate it; b) this is the site for an app, which as far as I can tell is regionlocked and so you won’t be able to actually use; and c) as a result of b) I haven’t *actually* tried this out, and so this short writeup is going to be entirely vibes-based (PLUS CA FCUKING CHANGE, eh?). Still, click the link and be as confused as I was by the idea of what is, basically, ‘CG-assisted videochat that doesn’t actually need your camera to function because what it actually does is spin up some sort of avatar-to-avatar visual representation of your conversation based on just the audio’. Why, exactly, would you want to have a videocall with someone where you aren’t actually seeing their face but instead seeing a, er, I don’t know, cartoon cat, or anime boyfriend or something? NO IDEA! Anyway, this was interesting to me, partly as a result of its presentation as a sort of ‘metaversal’ tool (THE CONCEPT STILL LIVES ALTHOUGH IT IS DEFINITELY LOOKING SICKLY!), partly due to the commercial tie-ins they have coming up (you will, as of April, be able to present yourself in chat as a character from Evangelion, an anime I have obviously never seen but which I am assured by weebs is very good), and partly due to this slightly-baffling line from the press release description, which gives a weird insight into parasocial relationships in Japan and feels like SUCH an awkward experience: “In the midst of your everyday life, you might receive a surprise call from someone you follow. Furthermore, there’s a “lottery function” where you can win the chance to talk to them directly. If you win, you might experience the dream of a one-on-one conversation.” Jesus, just imagine having your day interrupted by a phonecall from a strange number that turns out to be…some weirdo who follows you on social media, presenting as a kawaii platypus with sad eyes and stammering awkwardly about how much they love your posts (or don’t, it’s up to you) – does that sound good? Hm. Anyway, this intrigued me and if any of you happen to live in Japan can you try this out and tell me what it’s like (or explain all the cultural nuance that I am missing here)? Thanks!
- Parachord: This looks…potentially quite useful, maybe, if you’re someone for whom MUSIC IS EVERYTHING and who has accounts across fifteen separate streaming services and who is sick of having to flick between myriad different apps and platforms to experience the full spectrum of your wildly-eclectic taste (yes, yes, you are INTERESTING! Well done!). Parachord is basically an ‘all your streams in one place’ tool, letting you connect your accounts across Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Lastfm and the like so you can listen to the catalogues from each through a single interface – interestingly, it also lets you see what other users are listening to, listen together, play music shared to you on one platform in another, and even attaches a little ‘buy on bandcamp’ button to anything you listen to, regardless of what streamer is actually playing the track, which is a particularly nice touch of which I approve hugely. This looks…really, really useful, actually, and if you’re someone who streams a lot of stuff and who has groupchats about music and stuff then this looks like it might be a genuinely great thing to download and fcuk around with (oh, and as far as I can tell it’s free).
- Who MPs Follow On X: I would imagine that all political journalists (or people who spend their days angrily posting on social media about politics, despite having literally no agency whatsoever) have probably seen this by now, but, for the rest of you, this is an interesting tool which lets you plug in any username on X and get an immediate readout of which of the UK’s elected parliamentarians follow the user in question. Which is how I just learned that there are 4 MPs who follow tiny racist cokehead Stephen Yaxley-Lennon on X – er, why? Anyway, this is potentially useful should you wish to EXPOSE AN MP, or you simply want to check which of the current crop feel the need to follow Elon Musk (a frankly weird number, honestly), or want to find out how many Chelsea fans there are, or, more prosaically, want to track INTERNECINE BEEF by seeing if, say, Angela Rayner has unfollowed Keir Starmer yet. Wonkish, but could be interesting to some of you.
- Shoot Men Into Space: To be clear, I do not personally advocate shooting men into the stratosphere – after all, I am a man and I long ago decided that I want to die peacefully in a Geneva hotel room rather than via asphyxiation in the inky, airless blackness of the cosmos (weird, I know) – but, well, I know that as a general rule men aren’t *hugely* popular at this particular point in human history (God knows why) and there might be a few of you who think, not wholly-unreasonably, that we might all be better off taking our chances with cloning, sperm banks and a lot of scientific enquiry into asexual reproduction. Should YOU be of the opinion that the world would be a better place with fewer Y chromosomes in it, then you might enjoy this site which presents the idea (NB – to be clear, this is Not Wholly Serious) and the arguments and then welcomes questions and comments – honestly, the real joy here is in the comments (although the whole site’s nicely-written) which contain such seemingly-sincere engagements with the concept as “I’m sorry. I have to say this. I love sex with a man who is completely focused on my satisfaction. Is there really a viable substitution for this that doesn’t violate human rights?” which, you know, LEGITIMATE QUESTION! Anyway, should you wish to wrestle with the ethical and practical considerations of removing all men from the surface of the planet then, er, CLICK THE LINK! Please, though, if this ever becomes law, can I please go to Switzerland instead?
- The China Tobacco Museum: A website which exists solely to preserve and celebrate the packaging of all of the different brands of cigarette sold in China, a nation which (without wishing to stereotype) REALLY loves its tabs. For obvious cultural reasons there’s a clear preponderance of red in the designs here, but my personal favourite are these OUTRAGEOUSLY camp mini cigars in leopardprint. PICK YOUR OWN!
- Proofeditor: I remain slightly-skeptical about AI agents outside of the specific realm of coding, but there’s no question that there’s been a step-change in capability and interest over the past few weeks; Proofeditor is an interesting extension of this – it’s basically a writing platform which allows you to create a document and then give an army of agents (and, should you be so antediluvian as to still need them, Actual Humans) access to it so that they can make edits, suggestions, etc – the idea is that you can create a team of agents with different functions and personas, and have each of them leave distinct feedback on a piece of work or project, which, honestly, I maintain a degree of skepticism about (I am not convinced that simply telling an Agent “You are a brilliant entrepreneur with a track-record of building and exiting successful businesses”, for example, will turn said Agent into something able to accurately assess your sh1tty startup ideas, for example), but which, if you’re someone who’s drunk the kool aid and is currently marshalling an army of digital minions for doubtless-positive ends, you might find helpful.
- Ealing Council: Specifically, Ealing Council on TikTok – you may not think that a shortform video account administered by a municipal authority in Greater London is worth a follow, but you are WRONG – whoever is behind this is Good At TikTok and it’s a really good example of how you can Make Comms About Boring Things Vaguely Interesting And Fun (on which note, by the way, there was some interesting data published by the Reuters Institute this week which specifically speaks to the fact that a significant portion of young people in the UK want their news to be ‘fun’ – HOW DO I MAKE THE COLLAPSE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY VIBEY, JAYDON, HOW??? – to which I think this speaks rather nicely), and which I think ought to be sent around every single public institution with a TikTok account with an accompanying note simply reading ‘learn’.
- Council Sim: Sticking with local councils in the UK – both SEAMLESS and THRILLING, I think you’ll agree! – this is a really smart bit of comms by the Labour Party ahead of the inevitable shoeing they are going to receive in the local elections in May, which is designed to demonstrate how utterly fcuked councils are across the country (and, by extension, deliver the subtle message “…so it’s not actually our fault that everything feels bad, so please don’t all vote Green/Reform/Lib Dem”). IT IS A GAME! Ok, fine, ‘game’ in a very loose sense – they haven’t exactly splashed on the UI, there are no graphics to speak of, and it hammers a single point home with absolutely no subtlety whatsoever – but, still, it’s a vaguely-ludic toy and it’s sort-of fun (ok, your definition of ‘fun’ will have to include ‘educational and at heart a little bit depressing’ for this to hold true, but wevs) and it makes its single point pretty well, and I think it proves rather neatly that TURNING THINGS INTO GAMES (even quite ugly, boring ones) MAKES THEM LESS DULL AND EASIER TO COMMUNICATE TO PEOPLE.
- Mud Map Magazine: I like this – a new magazine which is, per its blurb, dedicated to “exploring visual culture through video essays, video letters, critical articles, and experimental media projects. Our work moves across media, from medieval illustrations to video games. It engages with politics and spectacles, intimacy, and human life in the cloud, asking how representation shapes perception, power, and collective imagination. In a context of visual overload and compulsive production, Mudmap slows things down.” There are only a few pieces on here as it’s Very New, but I enjoyed the essay about the personal computer as a shared familial object, and I think that this is probably worth bookmarking if you’re involved with or interested in video art, games and weird, fringey stuff at the edges of the digital (and who isn’t? NO FCUKER, etc!).
- Oryzo: This is a promo for itself by ‘creative production studio’ Lusion, from Bristol in the UK, and it is SO SO GOOD. Honestly, I don’t want to spoil it, it’s worth going in cold and enjoying every aspect – the design of the site is great, the UX and UI is lovely, the copywriting is excellent, the satire spot-on, and for all of you AI HATERS it will tickle your specific, prejudicial erogenous zones REALLY HARD. Seriously, this is one of the best agency calling cards I’ve seen in years, excellent work all round.
- Quicky Email: I feel it quite important to say that not only do I not particularly like the idea behind this service, I feel personally attacked by it. BUT! I am also aware that Newsletter Fatigue Is Real (if you are tired of Curios, though, you really are tired of life – sorry, it’s true, I don’t make the rules) and that keeping up with All of the Links and All of the Takes and All of the News is HARD and TIME CONSUMING and STRESSFUL and wouldn’t you rather be mindlessly scrolling through InstaTokShorts than reading yet another thousand words (lol, you should be so lucky) from some inbox cnut about how, I don’t know, Boy Kibble Discourse Is Praxis? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! And so, Quickie – a service which lets you sign up to newsletters using a specially-created email address, and which then collates the newsletters you receive every day and then sends you an AI-generated summary of What It Thinks You Need To Know, so you don’t have to actually bother reading the actual newsletters in question. WILL NOONE THINK OF THE CRAFT THAT GOES INTO THESE??? Aside from, ahem, my personal feeling of affrontery here, I can’t help thinking that getting thinking and ideas twice-digested like this probably isn’t *great* for your intellectual diet, but I can also understand that for stuff that is just industry news roundups it could be genuinely useful to cut down on duplication and repetition. I am going to reluctantly recommend this to you as ‘possibly useful’, while also judging ANY of you who think it’s a good idea.
- Lore Obsessed: I got beta access to this platform this week and thought it curious enough to share. Lore Obsessed (it might just be called ‘Lore’, I’m not certain) is an AI-enabled platform that is designed specifically for people to delve into the, er, ‘lore’ behind specific shows or series or comics or games…but, apparently, according to the suggested prompts on the homepage, also…real life? I am basically quite confused as to what this is trying to be – is it for fandoms? Is it a search engine replacement? Why do I need this when for anything geeky enough there will inevitably be threemillion FanWikis exhaustively going over every single line of dialogue and shot-framing for HIDDEN MEANING? I basically don’t get it or why it’s in any way better than any other LLM you might care to use,,although that might be a result of me not really being a fan of anything other than the vague concept of ‘the web’ (SO SAD, SO EMPTY) and maybe you will have more fun with it.
- Memory Map: This is an interesting little vibecoded experiment/toy/thing made by Friend of Curios Sacha Judd – the idea is simple, letting you plug in five places that you’ve lived that have meant something to you and then creating a composite map from the selection; this is effectively taking five openstreetmap tiles and collaging them, meaning that the end results are a bit shonky on occasion but I like the idea behind it, and the ‘I had an idea, so I built it’ ethos it embodies, and there’s actually something quite…wonkily-pleasing about the outputs and the way it makes you think about places you’ve lived that have meant something to you…I enjoyed it, have a play.
- Another Day: Do YOU want to feel INCREDIBLY OLD? I mean, I imagine you already feel incredibly old, what with, well, your age, and the terrifying pace of everything, and the fact that nothing makes sense, but if you would like to feel EVEN OLDER then you will ‘enjoy’ this site which presents a whole load of ‘XX was closer to WWII than Y’-type facts to help you realise quite how much time has passed since you’ve been alive and how transient and ephemeral your existence in fact is. You can even plug in your birthday to get personalised horrordata, which is how I just learned that my birthday is “is now closer to the release of the Wizard of Oz (movie) than to today” which, well, FCUK YOU WEBSITE is all I can say.
- AI Personality of the Year: From the same horrible chucklefcuks who brought you the AI Beauty Pageant a few years ago comes a new award for ‘AI Personality of the Year’, basically an award for the ‘best virtual influencer’ across a variety of categories (‘entertainer’, ‘lifestyle influencer’ and, preposterously, ‘comedian’ – are there ANY AI-generated ‘personalities’ doing comedy? If anyone knows of one, PLEASE share it with me as I cannot begin to imagine the horror), and obviously a soulless promo grift for everyone involved – that said, if you want a vague snapshot of the current ‘state of the art’ when it comes to imaginary ‘people’ shilling crap for brands (or being imaginary thirst-traps for sad, lonely men) then FILL YOUR BOOTS!
NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY AN HOUR OF EXCELLENT BREAKS FROM A RECENT LWSTDFM SHOW, SELECTED BY COMB!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE ALL OF YOU TO THINK POSITIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ITALIAN FOOTBALL TEAM ON TUESDAY EVENING PLEASE, PT.2:
- Friending: Are you…lonely? I AM ALWAYS HERE FOR YOU I AM YOUR FRIEND (lol, I’m fcuking not your friend, I am a disembodied voice in your head, Jesus)! It does rather feel like many of us are Lacking Something In Our Lives, at least if the constant focus in much of the media, new and old, about Needing To Find Connection is to be believed, and the seemingly-endless procession of new lifestyle HACKS to help you meet new people and form PLATONIC BONDS OF SUPPORT AND MUTUAL RESPECT – if you feel like you need some help finding people to hang out with that you actually like, rather than simply keeping on flogging the increasingly-dessicated corpses of friendships from lives past, then you might find Friending interesting as a concept. It’s a new-ish app which exists to foster REAL LIFE CONNECTIONS rather than simply online – the basic premise is that you create a profile, get it verified with proof of ID (the idea being that this promotes better behaviour, presumably, and creates a safety layer), find people locally who share similar interests to you and then MEET UP IN REAL LIFE – per the blurb, “On Friending, you don’t become friends with someone just by tapping a button. A friendship only becomes official after you’ve actually met in person. Bluetooth-based confirmation helps verify real-world meetups — including group hangouts — so every connection is rooted in real life.” You can create a sort of ‘frienship graph’ as far as I can tell, mapping all your connections, which…honestly, sounds weirdly like relationship genetics if you ask me, but whatever you’re into. I can’t pretend for a second that this appeals to me, misanthrope that I am, but there might be something in here for any of you who are less miserable and closed-off to LIFE than I am. To be clear, though, this is very much not a dating app so please, please none of you treat it like one.
- Remains of Tomorrow: AI WARNING: this is a YouTube channel featuring entirely-AI-generated ‘documentaries’ about towns and cities in the UK ‘after the apocalypse’, doing some sort of weird anthropological tour around the overgrown ruins of, say, Hexham in Northumberland, with a plangent piano soundtrack, some vaguely-eerie sounds of nature and a sad, quiet voiceover. I *think* that the V/O is an actual person, but the visuals are all AI and, in general, the vibe of these is…very weird, ngl, like some sort of alternate reality walking tour or disaster fetishism, and I am curious as to whether it’s just someone who’s an interested fiction enthusiast or if there’s some sort of weirder, darker ‘this is where we’re heading’ undertone to the whole thing (I don’t think there is, for the avoidance of doubt, but I haven’t had the chance to watch more than a couple of these). Anyway, these all have a few thousand views and what I found interesting, aside from the style and the content, was how….positive all the comments are, with history buffs and scifi nerds all sort of coming together to enjoy the fiction. Your occasional reminder that normies don’t hate AI anywhere near as much you might like to think they do (sorry).
- Lonely Buoy: Many, many years ago on Twitter there was a little art project where a series of Twitter bots, each representing a different satellite in orbit around the earth, would tweet small, sad, poetic messages about the loneliness of being in space; this is basically that, but for a buoy off the coast of San Francisco. I don’t know what it is about stuff like this but it absolutely destroys me – WHY AM I EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE TO THE CONCEPT OF A SAD, LOST BUOY FFS??? – from the weird poetry of the cadence (I think this is Markov chains or something rather than an LLM, but I might be wrong here) to the general concept of a machine speaking from the lonely solitude of the Pacific. I think this is beautiful.
- Circle Populations: Would YOU like to know how many people live in a 3km radius of you? GREAT! Thanks to this I learned that there are apparently 422,000 people living around me, which rather explains why, when I went to Copenhagen the other week, I was so freaked out by how EMPTY the city felt, turns out I am now conditioned to expect urban density wherever I go. Anyway, this is potentially useful and if not useful then curious, and what more could you want? NOTHING. Also, I’m a fan of the general tone in which the copy on the site is written – it’s sort-of weary, which I rather appreciate.
- The Speedbag Bard: Have you ever wondered ‘what would it look and sound like to watch a man competently beat the fcuk out of a boxing speedbag in time to a variety of different popular songs from anime, videogames and wider culture?’ YOU HAVE? Jesus, I will never get used to the oddity of people’s wants and desires. Still, should you ever have pined for this exact thing – is it…is it a sex thing? NO SHAME! – then you will be THRILLED with this YouTube account; I have no idea how hard this would be to replicate, but I am going to guess ‘very, very hard indeed’.
- Obsolete Sounds: Per the blurb, “Obsolete Sounds is the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening.” OOH THIS IS GREAT – I am currently listening to the sound of someone typing on an Olivetti Dora which has been turned into a jaunty, jazz-adjacent little number, but there are LOADS of remixed old tech sounds on here which, ok, I admit may not *sound* hugely compelling but there’s something really nice about the way the few I have listened to have been reworked and remixed, and overall I am a Big Fan of the project as a whole (which itself is part of the Cities and Memory project, which I have DEFINITELY featured in here before).
- Banner Depot 2000: A repository of old web banners, searchable by year, topic, the thing being promoted…this is one the one hand a treasure-trove of old graphic design styles and visual cues and a prettymuch perfect retrohole for anyone nostalgic for The Olden Days Of The Web, and also a convenient reminder that this stuff was, if we’re honest, really fcuking and annoying cruft that clogged up the visual design of a website something chronic and which, let me assure you, you would become heartily sick of were this sort of style actually come back into fashion. Although I have, thanks to this, learned that there was an adult online store in the 00s called ‘Bedroom Sports’ which made me laugh a LOT and momentarily spun me into imagining an ‘erotic’ version of 90s classic title ‘California Games’, which I now quite want someone to code up please.
- The GameUI Database: A, er, database of videogame UI! Why? WHY NOT???? For all I know you might be game designers looking for inspiration and might find this INCREDIBLY resourceful and be so grateful to me for sharing it with you that you decide to include ‘Matt Muir’ as a secret playable character in your next game or something, so my including this is probably worthwhile on that basis alone.
- Candy Love Island: I’m not entirely sure why it is that the Sexy Fruit AI Videos have broken confinement this week – I found myself talking about the phenomenon on a podcast on Tuesday (yes, I know, but they asked me) and then all of a sudden they were EVERYWHERE, to the point there’s a big explainer about the phenomenon in the longreads later on. Anyway, alongside the SEXY FRUIT there are also, er, SEXY SWEETS – this is a TikTok account sharing episodic updates from, er, Candy Love Island, in which sweets…oh, Christ, look, you know what this is, you don’t need me to type the words explaining it. What I find odd about this is that, aside from the general wtf of the premise (TALKING SWEETS DOING LOVE ISLAND FFS) is how utterly boring it is – like, the whole thing is played reasonably-straight, which means that what you’re actually watching is a poorly-AI-voiced series of animations in which cartoon representations of sweets have sincere conversations about not wanting to be evicted from a nonexistent Love Island villa, which begs the question…why? WHO THE FUCK ARE THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WATCHING THIS????
- LonelyWiki: A cute idea, this – it pulls articles from Wikipedia that have had fewer than (I think) 2,000 views in the past year, allowing you to learn things that are genuinely obscure and that, apparently, very few people care about (today’s example is ‘urban water management in Bogota’, which I appreciate might sound niche but I imagine is quite important to the several-million people who live in the city). The one thing I would say about this is that it’s obviously been cobbled together with Claude, and there really is a specific look and feel and general UI-vibe to sites that have been AI’d into existence, and I think I would quite like to see this change or at least people make the effort to inject a bit more visual flair into these things because the aesthetic homogeneity is starting to wear on me.
- Freya Johnson-Foster: This is the personal site of designer Freya Jonhson-Foster, which I am including almost exclusively because I absolutely ADORE the way you can sort the works – click the ‘show dimension’ text on the left of the screen and you will see you can sort their body of work by different criteria, and, honestly, the way the UX/UI works here is SO NICE, from the conceptual side (the idea of all of the work here existing on a variety of spectra) to the way in which the site rearranges depending on your sorting selection…I am describing this really badly as per, but I promise this is a really, really nice bit of interaction design.
- If Only I Sent This: Longterm readers might have noticed by now that I have a slight emoobsession with sites that allow people to anonymously share their feelings and fears and hurts and joys, and the general idea of a scrapbook of feelings is something which absolutely appeals to me (possibly for reasons of a lack of an internal life of my own, who knows?). If Only I Sent This is a perfect example of the genre – anyone can submit a message they will never send, anonymously, which will (post-moderation) sit on the website for anyone else to read. These are…ok, these are quite an odd mix, the emotional and the loving and the furious and the occasionally-frankly-disturbing, but, per above, they are all moderated and, oddly for this sort of thing, they all *feel* real, and I felt an absolute gutpunch just now reading one that read “I am so sorry I lied to you. You deserved better. I didn’t love you, I just wanted to keep you. Please don’t kill yourself.”
- JunkDrawer Jukebox: I confess to being slightly annoyed that Claire Hughes, the person behind this EXCELLENT idea, is running it via their Facebook Page rather than creating a proper website for it (this is selfish, obvs, Claire can do whatever the fcuk they like) – that said, I LOVE THE CONCEPT (thanks to Elle for the tip), in which Claire basically finds old iPods and creates a playlist of the music she finds on them, tiny insights into people who we will never know anything about, a picture of them built in the songs they loved. THIS IS BEAUTIFUL and, should you ever see this Claire, please make a random webmong very happy and turn this into a standalone webproject off-Facebook because it deserves its own home.
- WasHere: Via Nag, a neat little site that presents various Streetview-type views of places around the world and allows visitors to add a layer of collaborative graffiti to them. Which might not make much sense as a description, but I encourage you to click through and find a place near-ish to you and see what people have done with the image – it is SO WHOLESOME and weirdly cute, and I am yet to see anything bad or Nazi-ish, which, ok, is a low bar but in 2026 you really never know, and I would like to salute whoever it was who spent not-inconsiderable time turning the cyclist in one of the London pics into a Just Eat delivery driver, it made me incomprehensibly happy.
- Pokemon Jewellery: Have you always thought “you know, I wouldn’t mind getting married but as yet noone has found the perfect ring with which to propose to me”? Has the barrier been the lack of Pokemon-themed jewellery? WELL TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! It’s unclear to me whether this stuff is available internationally, whether it ships (just checked, it does!), etc, but this is VERY MUCH what it says on the tin – pick a design, pick a stone, pick a pokemon symbol you want engraved on the finished design and BOOM, there you go, literally the geekiest piece of jewellery it’s possible to conceive of (and if you can conceive of geekier, please keep it to yourself for I do not care to know). If you need an extra reason to buy, “the product will be delivered in a special case featuring a foil-stamped design of two Pikachus snuggling together” – OR you can splash out for a wooden Pokeball case, which, honestly, would probably make a certain type of person EXPLODE LIKE A CRUSHED MILK CARTON with unbounded joy.
- Prompts: Would YOU like a paid subscription ($11 a month!) to a service which every month will send you an ACTUAL LETTER featuring writing prompts? Er, what? WHY??? No shade to the person behind this who I am sure is lovely, but man is this a sign that you can sell any old tat under the broad banner of ‘artisanal, craft-y, real-world and HUMAN’ these days. Would someone like to pay me a tenner a month to get Curios in letter form? Actually, now I come to think of it that feels…no, it’s a fcuking terrible idea and I should abandon it immediately.
- Dutch Birdcams: While you might enjoy this webpage for the privileged insight it gives you into the lives of Dutch birds in the springtime, I enjoy it primarily because of how much I love reading the names of birds in Dutch. Isn’t ‘Tapuit’ the most WONDERFUL onomatopoeic name for a bird? YES IT IS DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.
- Eraser: A small, fun, shooty little game in which you play as a rubber (sorry, ERASER) and have to both eliminate the marks left by the EVIL PENCILS and also shoot the everliving sh1t out of them. Silly, but an excellent way to pass 10 minutes or so.
- Spring: After last week’s 100 Jumps (stop playing it, it is BAD FOR YOU), another small, simple, mildly-frustrating but VERY ADDICTIVE game about jumping; this one’s a bit more physics-y but no less enjoyable.
- Dynamine: ‘What if the game minesweeper, but about actual mining?’ is a question that had almost certainly never been asked before the developer of this game conceived of it, but the resulting puzzler is…very fun! It doesn’t explain itself superbly well so you might need to spend a minute or two figuring out exactly how it works, but, generally, it’s fcuking minesweeper what else do you need to know? Oh, and the sound effect of the mining will either please you IMMENSELY or irritate you beyond compare, pretty sure there’s no inbetween state here.
OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SYNTHY 80s HOUSE-Y NUMBER BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED DJ BRISKET!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- A Landing A Day: Not a Tumblr! INCREDIBLY NICHE CONTENT! “In this formerly once-a-day blog, then pretty much a once-a-week blog and now an every-other-week blog if I’m lucky, I use an app that provides a random latitude and longitude that puts me somewhere in the continental United States (the lower 48). I call this “landing. I keep track of the watersheds I land in, as well as the town or towns I land near. I do some internet research to hopefully find something of interest about my landing location.” You may not think this is interesting, but I promise you that there are some oddly-fascinating entries on here (should you be in any way interested in the US and its geography, at least).
- The Vault of the Atomic Space Age: I *must* have featured this before back in the day – it is OLD – but I think it’s prior to the modern Curios era and as such I feel justified in linking to it again, not least because it is still SUCH a good repository of a very specific sort of scifi design aesthetic from the…what, 50s to the 70s, probably, back when everything was hopeful and we thought that ‘building the things we have read about in scifi novels’ would make us happy and interplanetary rather than sad and increasingly fcuked. OH WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Water Drinking Club: Memes about how ace it is to drink water. Is it? I honestly think I drink more wine than I do water, which I appreciate says bad things about me but, also, water doesn’t take the edge off the Horrors of Life, so.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- We Now Have A Party Supported By Actual Nazis in Parliament: Firstly, a caveat – the link here takes you to a newsletter by someone who is an actual, proper Nazi (on Substack by the way, in case you wanted additional proof of the fact that it is a platform that literally tolerates Nazis and indeed helps them make money from being Nazis) – this really isn’t a euphemism or any sort of exaggeration. The reason is that, as of a week or so ago, Restore Britain was officially granted political party status in the UK, and now has a sitting MP in Parliament in the shape of its founder, Rupert Lowe, who has undergone QUITE the journey rightward over the past few years. Restore Britain is basically “Reform, but for people who don’t think that Farage goes far enough when it comes to immigration and who believe that non-white people shouldn’t be allowed to live in Britain’, and is campaigning, literally, on a platform that advocates ‘remigration’ – that is, rounding up non-white people and ‘sending them back where they ‘came from’”’. Would you like to take a guess which UK political party Elon Musk is currently endorsing? THAT’S RIGHT!!! The reason I am linking to this crap – the post in question is an explanation by a charming fellow calling themselves ‘Zoomer Historian’ of why they are supporting Restore Britain, why they don’t feel Reform is racist enough, and why ‘people like us’ (in their parlance – ‘nazis’, in anyone else’s) should all rally behind Lowe and his new movement – is that the mainstream press in the UK has been very, very reluctant to cover the party and its horrendous position, which I get…but, equally, they are now an official party, they have a sitting MP and they claim to have attracted over 100k members in the past few months, which does rather suggest that it might be worth paying attention to the fact that we have allowed the overton window to shift to a degree whereby opinions that would have been beyond the pale even in the 1980s are now apparently legitimate areas of political debate. This is FCUKING HORRIBLE, and I am slightly astonished how the media appears to be pretending it’s not happening and how if we all ignore the racism and the nazis maybe it will just…go away?
- Some Notes On The War: This has done the rounds quite widely this week, but if you’ve not seen it then it really is worth reading – it’s very funny, or at least it is if you don’t think too hard about what it’s talking about, and does a very good job of explaining exactly why the US has fcuked up so spectacularly with its declaration of war on Iran. The tone is admittedly very much stuck in the ‘snarky American’ register, and your mileage may vary, but if you can get along with a prose style like this then you will find a lot to ‘enjoy’ (read: get quite worried about) in here: “The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports. This is, on paper, a reasonable military objective in the same way that sticking your hand into a beehive is a reasonable way to acquire honey. It is technically correct. The bees would disagree.” As an aside, I saw someone sharing an email from a plastic wrap manufacturer in the US earlier this week which indicated that the price of their materials was set to double as a result of GLOBAL EVENTS, which feels like a small indicator of some of the fun we have coming down the line, because, well, can you think of ANYTHING that doesn’t involved plastic wrap somewhere in the shipping process? HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM SOUNDS BAD.
- Under Bombardment in Tehran: The understandable focus on the global economic impact of the situation in Iran means that I have seen little to no coverage that assesses the impact on the people who are getting bombed while we worry about when our Shein shipments are finally going to arrive. This piece in the LRB is short but…upsetting, if beautifully-written, with Raha Nik-Andish sharing their experience of being under bombardment in the Iranian capital: “The sounds of planes and drones are always in my ears. When I hear the roar of a motorcycle I think it’s a drone. Even the noise of the lift moving between the floors of my building makes me think the city is being bombed. Nearly a month into the war, no one knows how long it will go on. No matter how many regime commanders the US and Israel kill from the air, they will only be replaced and the regime carry on. My friend Jamal says the war is like Russia’s war on Ukraine. Another friend, Babek, compares Israel and America to beauticians who remove eyebrow hair. They pluck carefully, hair by hair, until the moment they decide to shave the whole eyebrow off.”
- What Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Thinks About The War: I appreciate you might not have woken up this morning thinking “wow, I really want to hear the Singaporean position on this fcuking sh1show!” (although maybe you did, what the fcuk do I know?), but this is SO interesting, a transcript between the Singaporean Minister for Foreign Affairs and Reuters about What Is Going On which is notable because a) it’s nice to hear a non-Western perspective on international affairs for a change; b) because Christ, it’s nice to read a politician speak with no care for sounding ‘relatable’ and just being obviously smart and aware; and c) it’s also incredibly refreshing to read someone being honest about how fcuking mad this is, and how much That Fcuking Man is fcuking up the world for no good reason, and how much we have lost by pandering to him and the preposterous collection of ghouls that currently call themselves ‘The US Administration’. Also, as an aside, it feels bad that the mere fact of someone being articulate, intelligent and coherent feels like a breath of fresh air in terms of politics. “The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone. What you are seeing now, whether you watch the war in Ukraine, in the Middle East or elsewhere, including in Asia, to me these are symptoms of the underlying tectonic rupture. Big powers and even lesser powers have a more narrow definition of national interest. [They] are willing to weaponise all levers in their hands. You look at the weaponisation of currency, weaponisation of technology, weaponisation of critical minerals, weaponisation of trade interdependency, which were supposed to keep us at peace with one another- now it becomes yet another portal for exploitation. You end up with a world in which strategic trust has dropped. Everyone has to assume the worst. You are more likely to assign nefarious motives towards others, even when in fact, they are just trying to take precautions and engage.”
- Using CCTV as a Weapon of War: You have to hand it to Israel – when it comes to tech-enabled state-sanctioned terrorism, they really are up there with the best! This is a slightly-chilling – but, objectively, also really interesting – look at how Israel hacked Iran’s CCTV network to carry out the assassination of the Ayatollah, and how the worldwide network of internet-enabled cameras is basically just a huge, planetwide security loophole for anyone who wants to exploit it.
- SlopWar: A decent NY Mag piece on the use of AI as a propaganda tool by both the US and Iran, on the way in which it’s being used partly as a satirical tool by the watching scrollers online and partly as a weaponised misinformation vector by actors across the board who hope either to influence the course of global events or, more likely, win that day’s algolottery and win a few grand in Xscrip. This isn’t the first conflict that has been epistemologically-fcuked by The Machine, but it’s probably the first one where it feels like everyone has just sort of…accepted that this is the way things now are. Is that good? As the piece points out, when there are gaps in information about any event, the watching public are eager to have those gaps filled – and now everyone has access to machines that can make content to fill those gaps, veracity be damned, so that’s what’s going to happen. Except, er, lads, this doesn’t feel like it HAS to be inevitable, does it?
- The Death of Sora: There has been a LOT of crowing about OpenAI’s decision to shut down its videogeneration app Sora this week, with lots of people seeing it as DEFINITIVE PROOF of the fact that AI is fcuked; for what it’s worth, I think it’s significantly more convincing as proof of the fact that OpenAI might be fcuked than the industry as a whole, but this piece in 404 Media does a good job of explaining the likely why of its shuttering and how the dream of ‘nose to tail’ AI-generated content that was being sold to studios appears to be dying rather. Which, honestly, I agree with entirely – that dream was always bunkum, not least because of the consistently-dogsh1t quality of AI writing and direction, but I like the fact that the piece acknowledges that AI video is, regardless of the Sora thing, increasingly useful as a tool if not as a ‘make me a whole show’ generator. This conclusion is a good summing-up, but it’s worth reading the whole thing if you’re at all interested in the tech or the industry: “ the end of Sora does not mean there is no demand for AI video generators, but it does mean that the overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale. The people making this type of content do not want to deal with guardrails or limitations and so have largely flocked to open source and Chinese models. When you take away those use cases, it turns out there’s basically nothing left.” BONUS TECH WRITING: this is another 404 piece about the DEATH OF THE (Zuckerbergian vision of the) METAVERSE, and the people and communities who were using it and who are now left feeling abandoned and bereft. I like to imagine that, muchlike Second Life, a version of Horizon Worlds is going to live on for the few dedicated weirdos who love it, although the likelihood of Meta ever letting that happen is…near zero.
- Fake AI History: A few weeks back I saw a post from the Auschwitz museum calling on the big AI companies to take steps to prevent their models being used to create fake images and video footage of concentration camps – it turns out that if you visit Facebook now and search for ‘auschwitz’, the vast majority of the images and video that show up are AI-generated (try it yourself now, I will wait), which is such an astonishingly fcuked-up concept that I am even know slightly flabbergasted by it. Anyway, this is a piece about a parallel piece of fake AI history – the story of Solomon Fairfax, an enslaved person who, per the stories all over the web, took revenge on his enslavers by killing a load of them, but who, it turns out, never existed. This is a single story, but it feels representative of the slow vanishing of collective knowledge – FEELS BAD, MAN!
- FruitSlop: Here’s the BIG EXPLAINER on the sexy/miserable fruit videos that have become the latest wave of ‘the algorithm seems to like this, let’s all make fcuktonnes of it!’ content to flood normie socials – you will doubtless have seen TikToks, Shorts or Reels featuring either fruit and vegetables cannibalising themselves, say, or a hardworking appleman getting cucked by his wife’s aggressive banana boss, or one of the many, many extremely racist variants on the theme – what’s interesting, aside from the racism, is the naked misogyny of pretty much all of the content I’ve seen in this vein (along with the genuinely weird and VERY FETISH obsession with waters breaking, which are always depicted as weird tsunamis of oddly-coloured and…weirdly-gloopy amniotic fluid, best not to think too hard about why), and there’s a part of me that does think that we’re possibly not paying enough attention to the fact that MAN do we all love racist and misogynist cartoons and that perhaps we might want to think about why this is what keeps people clicking, aside from the broader ‘lol sexy AI fruitslop’ chuckling.
- LOL MATT GOODWIN: One of the few brightspots this week has been watching racist former academic Matt Goodwin get clowned on from all sides on publication of his horrible, sh1tty, racist book (less pleasing has been seeing how well it appears to be selling on Amazon) – there were many dunkings to choose from, but I’m linking to this one in (sorry) Unherd, not because I think the website’s anything other than a miserable, pseudo-contrarian hole but because it’s interesting that even a publication that might consider Goodwin a fellow traveller can’t bring itself to be anything other than faintly-sneering about his output. What I thought interesting about this piece was that it correctly identifies the fact that this isn’t a text designed to convince or debate so much as it is a tchotchke for the faithful, a bible proclaiming the horrible racist sh1t you already believe, and its description of it as ‘less a book and more a tranche of internet in book form’ is, I think, spot-on.
- America and Public Disorder: So it turns out that I am linking to multiple longreads this week that I think are Quite Hateful but which I also think are worth reading – sorry about this, promise I will try not to do this again. Anyway, this is a piece by Chris Arnade, whose ‘Walking The World’ website which features his writing about places he has been and his largely-unfiltered thoughts about them I have featured in here before, all about his impressions of America, public space and what is wrong with it. I remember when I featured Arnade in the past I noted that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with some of his observations, and MAN does that feeling get amplified in this piece, which manages to look at the complete lack of social security provision in the US, the rise in mental health conditions seen over the past few decades, drug addiction execerbated by economic pracariety, etc, and think “yeah, you know what, we probably need to lock a lot of these people up” rather than “maybe…maybe a functional benefits system is a social good actually, and maybe publicly-funded healthcare is exactly the sort of policy decision which might address some of the things I describe here.” I’m including this because it’s an interesting insight into how people can look at the same thing – to whit, the very clear problem America has with homelessness, poverty, addiction and mental illness and the lack of support available for people afflicted by any of these things – and come up with COMPLETELY different assessments of what the solution is; I am also including it because it feels unpleasantly indicative of a sort of unfeeling cruelty that feels increasingly pervasive, something only exacerbated if you read the comments which FCUKING HELL. This won’t make you feel good, but it’s sort-of grimly-fascinating I think.
- Notes on Dinergoth: Look, does the phrase ‘dinergoth discourse’ mean anything to you? If so, GREAT, you can click this link; if not, know that you can skip this with very little regret, you Do Not Need This In Your Brain. That said, for anyone who has been following THE DISCOURSE about subcultures in semi-rural America and WHAT IT MEANS ABOUT SOCIETY (and the dunking on the author who made a failed Tinder relationship into an attempt at some sort of socioeconomic treatise, lol), this is a decent enough bit of commentary from Sean Monahan – I don’t necessarily buy the second half, but I thought the observation uptop (about how the discourse appears to be motivated by a generation of people who are too young to remember that this is basically what living in slightly-crappy backwaters has ALWAYS been like) was solid and worth reading.
- How To Google In 2026: There was a not-insignificant period of time where ‘being able to read fast’ and ‘being better at Google than everyone else in the office’ where my keys to being employed – sadly neither of those two things matter one iota anymore, which may have something to do with the trajectory of my income over the course of the past few years (it may, of course, also have something to do with incompetence, arrogance and laziness, but to find out would require a degree of introspection which, realistically, I am probably never going to get round to). Still, if you’re yet to abandon its increasingly-useless search product entirely, this guide to making Google halfway-useful in 2026 is genuinely helpful; while some of it will be known to all you old fcuks, there are a few things in here that I wasn’t aware of (eg ‘search exact text’, which FCUK ME is a godsend if you, like me, are sick of Google constantly attempting to work out what you REALLY mean – no, Google, I really am attempting to search for “shonky cnut”, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CORRECT THIS).
- Who Is You?: Ooh, this is VERY good and feels very NOW, in a way that I don’t think I have seen discussed or articulated anywhere else. Aidan Walker writes about streaming (but it’s applicable to any bit of the content industrial complex imho), audience and self, and I think it’s easiest if I just give you a sample of the argument – I feel this…quite strongly, weirdly, despite not in fact being a right-wing streamer (SHOCKER!): “There are two personae created by Fuentes: himself, and the open-ended “you,” which the viewer may imaginatively occupy. The “you” is the more compelling invention. We know the streamer doesn’t literally mean “you,” except for in the moments that you give him twenty bucks and your handle appears briefly on the screen. But if you live a life where most of the time, when someone says “you,” the implied person behind that “you” is worthless failson, disgruntled employee, or anonymous stranger, and you know that’s what they’re thinking of when they call you, getting called into a “youness” that is a highly-knowledgeable, understanding, and powerful entity feels great. It’s a “you” shared among others, but it is yours. And I have now tangled myself within the second-person pronoun, but do you know what I’m talking about?”
- What Will Wright Did Next: This is a profile of Will Wright – you may not recognise his name, but he created Sim City and The Sims, and the concept of the ‘God game’ as a genre, and he has for years now been working on a new project about memory and self which doesn’t, based on this piece, sound like it will necessarily see the light of day. Honestly, even if you know nothing about videogames or Will Wright, this really is SUCH a good piece, not least because of the impression it gives of a mind that is constantly fizzing with ideas and the need to make and explore – it’s weirdly inspirational, though I couldn’t explain exactly how, even if being Will Wright sounds like it would be absolutely exhausting. Props to him for the commitment to the tabs, also.
- A Return to Nagasaki: Craig Mod rights about revisiting Nagasaki – this is a typically beautiful piece of writing about place and people, but also about the history of a place that most people (myself included) know solely in the context of ‘Hiroshima and…’; Mod is always a wonderful guide, but the history and elegiac feeling of the essay are particularly beautiful here.
- The British Pie Awards: It’s only been going a year or so, but the Dispatch has established itself as one of the best places to find strong writing about peculiar Britishness – less self-consciously ‘cool’ than the Fence, it excels at doing, er, dispatches from corners of the UK that rarely get written about (and I’m not just saying that because I think the editor occasionally reads Curios). This is a typically-excellent piece by Jack Burke, about the British Pie Awards held in the home of the pork pie, Melton Mowbray, and the people who compete. Just to put it out there, should there be space for a random webmong on the judging panel next year I would be THRILLED (this is how ‘manifesting’ works, right?).
- Am I Perhaps In Italy?: Another LRB pick, this is James Butler writing about homosexuality in early Europe and, whether you’re gay, straight or anything inbetween this is a BEAUTIFUL exploration of history and language and social mores and shifting standards and degrees of acceptance over time, and offers a lens through which to observe current accepted standards of behaviour: “Modern homosexuality is more than, and qualitatively different from, its antecedents (as is modern heterosexuality). But our present standards aren’t without hypocrisies. The long historical view might prompt examination of our own norms, which conceive of all parties as free agents making free choices, but often conceal compromise, compulsion or desperation. Nor do these norms adequately address the erotic thrill of inequality – of age, class, power, attractiveness – sought by many, consciously or otherwise.”
- Going Court: Having rather archly slagged The Fence a little earlier I now link to it – this is James Sharp writing about being a court reporter in London and (aside from the slightly embarrassing typo in the standfirst – lads, come on, standards! Also, yes, this is RANK HYPOCRISY on my part) this is just perfect, from the characters to the crimes and everything inbetween. It makes being a court reporter sound almost fun, which it very much is not.
- The Cartel Olympics: Generally I have limited interest in REAL LIFE CRIME stories, but, honestly, pour yourself a drink and settle in for this one, because FCUK ME is it a great story that absolutely justifies its c.6k wordcount. Honestly, this really is a CRACKING piece of reporting and it will appear on lots of people’s ‘best of’ lists at the end of the year imho.
- Drinking In Vegas: Meaghan Garvey shares vignettes from time spent drinking in the divebars of Vegas – no casino anecdotes here, just a few accounts of what it’s like spending a day getting slowly slaughtered with the patrons on a bar whose house hooch is called ‘a$$ juice’. This is very good indeed, despite the slightly self-consciously ‘gonzo’ vibe.
- The World Is An Easier Place Without You In It: A few years ago I featured a similar essay about an author’s…difficult relationship with her mother, and said mother’s decision to pursue assisted dying in Switzerland, and it’s fair to say that it had…quite a big impact on both my life and my feelings about how I intend to stop living. This is a companion to that piece – Karen Shepard pieces together emails from her and her mother to create a patchwork collage of memory about the two of them, their relationship, her mother’s death and all of the complex, beautiful, awful, sad things that exist inbetween the narrative fact of What Happened. This fcuked me in half for a variety of reasons, but I think it is beautiful and I think anyone with parents with whom they have a…tricky relationship, and anyone with an equally-tricky relationship with the broad concept of ‘being alive’ will enjo…no, maybe ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word, perhaps ‘resonate with it’ is better. Regardless, this is a really gorgeous piece of art as far as I am concerned, and I would recommend it to anyone.
By Unknown, via DoF Amsterdam
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: