Look, I’ll level with you – I have gotten to the end of the links and…I have emptied my brain. Literally. There is NOTHING LEFT between these ears of mine, and what you’re getting now is just the last few dregs of thought guttering through the pipes and down my fingers. SOMETIMES THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS.
I’ll fcuk off and leave you with the links, then – don’t worry, they are better than this intro would suggest – and a promise to see you again in not one but two weeks (unless I somehow contrive to die on next weekend’s stag/hen party). MAYBE EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER BY THEN!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should try finding something pithy, interesting or funny at the top of these fcuking newsletters after sixteen fcuking years.
THERE SHOULD BE A PHOTO HERE BUT THE WEBSITE IS BEING A PR1CK, SO JUST IMAGINE!
By Kathrin Koschitzki
LET’S BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A CRACKING MIX OF BREAKS BY DJ PAYDRO!
THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS YOU DON’T CARE BUT WOULD REALLY LIKE CHELSEA’S SPORTING DIRECTORS TO FCUK OFF, PREFERABLY INTO THE SUN, PT.1:
- Cities of Sound: After complaining (whinging) last week about the fact that New York gets ALL the fun digital projects and London gets none of them, the first link of this Curios serves to prove my point – FCUK’S SAKE LONDONERS MAKE MORE WEBSITES ABOUT THE CITY YOU LIVE IN. Would…would you like to know what it is? I should probably tell you. Cities of Sound is, basically, an audio map of New York – each neighbourhood of the Five Boroughs gets its own audiotapestrycollagefile, so you can zoom around the city listening to the sound of crowds in Times Square (including some guy repeatedly telling everyone to ‘fcuk off’), hipsters in Brooklyn, families in Queens, the ambient sounds of sirens and traffic and voices, music fading in and out…Honestly, this really is incredibly, weirdly evocative, and the variations in each recording really do present the city as patchwork tapestry, and you’ll be surprised I think by how interesting the whole thing is to explore; I wasn’t expecting to spend the best part of half an hour earlier this week listening to the sounds of a city half a world away, but, well, I did. Per the blurb, “This interactive sound map is part of The Neighborhoods, an ongoing project to document every neighborhood in New York City through photography, field recordings, writing, and research. This is a work in progress. Neighborhoods will be added as new recordings are made” – every neighbourhood has an accompanying essay and photos, should you want to go Full Digital Tourist, but the sound alone is really rather magical, and a nice reminder of the transportative power of these sorts of urban soundscapes. NOW DO LONDON PLEASE I LONG FOR AN MP3 OF TRAFFIC SOUNDS, PEOPLE SAYING ‘CUZ’ AND THE SATISFYING, DAMP CLICK OF A BUZZBALL BEING POPPED!
- Damnlines: Another New York-focused website, but one which speaks to an increasingly global phenomenon – the strange and to me inexplicable modern desire to spend a fcuktonne of time queueing up outside a seemingly-nondescript food outlet so that you too can experience the same greasepaper-wrapped delicacy as several hundred other people whose photographs and videos have passed across your feed. It’s quite weird living in a big city at the moment, with every week affording a different realworld visual index of the success of various eateries’ marketing efforts based on the number of bored-looking 20somethings they manage to induce to stand outside in a line waiting for a sad-looking burger or grotesquely-engorged muffin, but this is apparently What The Kids Like To Do These Days – why, kids? WHY??? So, to the link – Damnlines provides live webcam feeds of the outside of various VIRAL food sensations in NYC, the idea being that before you decide to head down and stake a claim for whatever this week’s hyperlaminated pastry aberration you can get an idea of how long you will be queueing for. Can someone set this up for the inexplicably-popular baked potato shop on Archer Street, please? Ideally along with a loudspeaker linked to the website so I can ask people why the fcuk they are standing in line, about to pay a tenner for a nuked spud.
- Whole New World: SOPHIE was a genuinely pioneering electronic musician and producer, and their untimely death in 2021 was very sad both on a human level and for anyone who’d enjoyed their work with PC Music and others over the years and hoped to hear more of it. Whole New World is a fan-led project seeking to compile lost recordings, gig footage, photos and the like from the community of people worldwide who loved SOPHIE’s music – it’s early days yet so this is partial at best, but it’s worth bookmarking if you’re a fan and checking back periodically to see what’s been added, but right now there are recordings of dozens of live sets from 2010 onwards for you to delve into and explore.
- The Visual Telling of Stories: Blimey, this is quite a lot and I am slightly amazed (and disgusted with myself, to be entirely honest) that I haven’t featured it before. The Visual Telling of Stories is a VAST, baffling and…curiously-designed repository of information which was maintained by one Chris Mullin, who I understand died recently; it’s…Jesus, what is it? It’s an incredible encyclopedia of imagery, collated by broad topic area with no discernible rhyme or reason beyond the original curators’ whim, and the whole thing has the look and feel of…look, I hope you’ll take this in the spirit of slightly-bemused goodwill which it’s intended in, but the whole thing feels almost entirely mad, just obsessional and dense and arranged along lines of logic that can only really have made sense to the person who put it together (and even then, only occasionally). This spans old advertising, lithographs, etchings, cartoons…I *think* this might all have been linked to a course once taught by Mullin – in an old interview, he says that “Simply put, The Visual Telling of Stories site (hereafter the VTS) was started as a personal initiative in support of the new Masters Course in Narrative and the Sequential at the University of Brighton in 1989. Imagine concentric circles. At the core is every lecture and seminar given, with film notes and reports. Then come key images and documents. Then an outer ring of images that fill in the gaps…Our students were part-time, most were working professionals and many lived hours of traveling away from Brighton. VTS kept everybody in touch.” Honestly, though, that makes the whole thing sound a bit dull – it’s not, it’s a quite wonderful journey through…information, ideas, history, humanity, all both guided and not guided at all, utterly dizzying and quite remarkable. Seriously, this really is…a lot.
- Rhyme It: An online rhyming tool, which, fine, yes, not a novel concept, but I rather like the way in which this lets you break down the results by number of syllables and presents them to you categorised by whether they are a perfect rhyme, half rhyme, fake rhyme, etc etc. I can’t imagine the context within which this could be useful to you, but should you want to spend some time composing carefully-crafted limericks about your friends and loved ones then perhaps this might come in handy. Apparently, per the website, there is no perfect rhyme in the English language for ‘syphilis’, which has saddened me slightly, although it did suggest ‘tortilla’ as a near-rhyme for ‘gonorrhea’, which went some way towards mollifying me.
- Rage Maker: There’s something quite interesting about the fact of memetic culture being so longstanding and developed now that you can date specific 21st century eras by the memes that embodied them; for me, 2010-11 will forever be associated with rageface memes and 4panel comics, and the very weird sensation of being on holiday somewhere and seeing stalls selling tshirts featuring rageface characters in what was at the time the first-ever instance of the online becoming corporeal…anyway, if YOU TOO would like to experience some near-term nostalgia, why not spend some time using this ragecomics generator – there is a truly DIZZYING array of different ragefaces in here that you can use to probably craft some sort of cutting, pithy analysis of Where We Are Now using the language of Where We Were Then, or, perhaps more reasonably, you can instead use to create in-joke messages which you can send to your old friends from that era in the groupchat. Altogether now, “FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU–!!!”
- Since You Arrived: Ok, I have to admit that despite my broadly-bullish attitude towards generative AI in terms of its ability to allow people to just MAKE MORE STUFF, I must confess that I am already heartily sick of the specific and entirely-recognisable aesthetic that is “I vibecoded this with Claude”. Should anyone from Anthropic be reading this, can you please apply a bit of focus on getting whatever the next worldbreaking model you release to make websites that look different, please? Anyway, this is a simple site which does the whole ‘since you have been here, XX has happened in the world’ thing, which, obvs, you have seen before; the reason I am including it, though, is the fact that the things it’s tracking are slightly different to the norm; number of hands held, for example, meals prepared and shared, questions asked to AI rather than people…the site is unremarkable, but it made me think of ways in which we mark the passage of time and how using different metrics can make you look at things in a slightly different way, and, yes, ok, this is an incredibly trite and shallow observation so let’s just move on and pretend I said something insightful instead please.
- XOXO: I never got to go to any of the editions of XOXO, the festival of independent digital creativity that Friend of Curios Any Baio, and his friend Andy McMillan, ran sporadically in Portland, Oregon, but I have long admired it from afar, and I very much admire the commitment to community and archiving which has seen them finally produce a website commemorating the festival’s existence, featuring talks and lineups and flyers and the history of the whole thing over the years…this is a great repository of interesting talks about interesting things by a bunch of interesting people, first and foremost, but it’s also a really nice example of how to think about wrapping up a project in terms of its online legacy and making sure that even if the thing you have built is over it can continue to exist in perpetuity online somewhere. This is really, really lovely, and sort of an object lesson in how one might think about creating a posthumous digital record of real-world events.
- AIAIAIart: This is interesting and I think I quite like it. Part of a project by the University of Amsterdam, AIAIAIart (not typing that again) is basically a series of…what, recipes? Instructions? Anyway, it’s a set of exercises designed for someone to engage with alongside generative AI, effectively a set of creative prompts for you to help you engage with The Machine in a manner in which is perhaps more reminiscent of ‘standard’ approaches to creative artistic practice. Basically, imagine the sort of artistic ‘provocations’ Yoko Ono spent a career coming up with (“Imagine you are a tree; now what sound do your ears make? Draw that sound in your own blood”, that sort thing). Examples include ‘make a new Italian brainrot character’ (“After you’ve thought about these questions, write a short character bio. For example: “DJ Mozzarella is a sentient slice of cheese from an Italian techno remix. He can only communicate in emojis and mid-2000s MySpace glitter fonts. He believes he is real.”), or an instruction to attempt to conjure the memory of a loved one in words, to feed the words to an LLM and see what the resulting image looks like…obviously if you’re of the unshakeable opinion that all AI is the antithesis of creativity and it is not possible to MAKE with The Machine in a manner in which is meaningful then you won’t agree with me, but also also you area dullard and I fundamentally disdain you.
- MALUS: SATIRE! Except also not satire! MALUS is a project highlighting the threat which AI coding presents to open source software, specifically the fact that you can in theory point an agent at a website and say ‘copy that’ and, well, it will! Per the homepage, “Finally, liberation from open source license obligations. Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.” On the one hand, this is obviously MAKING A POINT; on the other, it, er, seems to work as far as I can tell, and while it’s a gag first and foremost it’s also something that it feels inevitable is also going to happen A LOT. Nothing has a moat anymore! Is that good? How…how is capitalism and market economics going to work now, daddy?
- Bond: It’s slightly astonishing to me that here in big old 2026 people are still optimistically trying to invent new, better social media experiences, like some sort of weirdly-deluded ‘BUT I CAN FIX HIM!!!!’ obsession with the world’s worst boyfriend. Nonetheless, though, the attempts keep coming – this latest one is called Bond, and its gimmick is that it’s about PRESERVING MEMORIES rather than ‘sharing’, which in some respects does make sense given we’re all terrified of being seen online these days. The way it works is that you upload a photo or video, and then attach your memories to it by way of text or audio; these are then compiled into a timeline which you can look back through and which your friends can look at, and is also (and this is the bit where I feel people might be…less keen) ingested by AI and used to then inform recommendations about things to do and places to go, and which will let you ask questions about your memories (“what do the sorts of things I put into this app tell you, mysterious technology which underpins it, about the very ESSENCE of me as a human?”, that sort of thing), and, honestly, this feels to me like two separate things shunted together in slightly-inelegant fashion. Couldn’t you just have the memories bit? Wouldn’t that be enough? I quite like the idea of having photo albums accompanied by a short essay or audio memory and that being it, honestly. Anyway, my slightly sniffy indifference to this will almost certainly ensure that it is the NEW HOTNESS this Summer, so I will see you all there in a month or so.
- Roll: Seeing as we’re doing apps (SEAMLESS), this is ANOTHER ‘what if a camera app but with some of the friction of analogue film?’ idea, of which there have been a few over the past few years – still, now that we are all FRICTIONMAXXING (Dear God, has it only been three months since Clavicular first broke into the mainstream? Truly that child has had an outsize impact on the culture, a fact that will doubtless cheer him just before he tops himself) it feels zeitgeisty enough that it might get a bit of traction. Roll is a pretty standard photo app with the gimmick that your photos will be delivered to you LATER rather than immediately, the specific twist here being that…you don’t know when you’ll get them! Yeah, the time of delivery is randomised between either 3 days or one year…which one the one hand is sort of fun and cute and interesting, but on the other runs the very real risk of you being presented with a set of photos featuring people and events you have no recollection of or connection to (“who is that? And what are they doing with that spoon?”).
- Namedaisy: This is a cute dataproject, letting you visualise trends over time in how Americans chose to name their children. Plug in any name you can imagine and the site will show you its popularity over time, in which states it has been most popular, the relative popularity of its use with boys and girls and a whole load of other stuff besides. This is how I discovered, variously, that the name ‘Aloysius’ peaked in popularity between 1910-20, and that a small-but-nonetheless-baffling contingent of Americans each year choose to name their daughters “Matthew”, which, honestly, feels like a particularly cruel and unusual punishment.
- The Cheese Map: It feels like that intensely-viral essay about ‘the forbidden breakfast quadrant’ featured in here and seemingly everywhere else a few months ago has unlocked something, because here we are again with someone attempting something vaguely-similar for cheese, mapping the possible cheesespace based on different milk types and different desired cheese characteristics. So it was that I learned that it is apparently ‘impossible’ to make a very hard cheese from camel’s milk, which feels, frankly, like a challenge that someone ought to step up to because I now feel quite strongly that camel Parmesan is something that ought to exist somewhere (Reggio Emilia, specifically).
- Gudtrip: While I don’t have huge affection for the 2021-22 period in my life, characterised as it was by loneliness, extreme heat, administrative burden and the slow, agonising, painful, miserable death of a loved one, it did also bring us a fcuktonne of incredibly-stupid and VERY GRIFTY crypto, NFT and web3.0 projects and, well, I have to say that I have missed them slightly. So, then, thank FCUK for Gudtrip, which when I opened the website flashed me right back to those weird, hallucinatory times when it seemed that all we would have to do in order to secure a generational bag was to buy one of Ozzy Osborn’s bat NFTs and Diamond Hands until our knuckles bled. Have you ever thought “wow, I wish there was some way in which I could get paid for smoking weed – specifically, paid in a very specific and almost-certainly-long-term-useless cryptocurrency”? OH GOOD! I can’t even begin to explain how this is supposed to work – to be clear, that is because IT IS FCUKING BULLSHIT IT LITERALLY CANNOT WORK THIS IS ABOUT AS PROBABLE AS A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE FFS! – but I would like to present some of the website copy in its entirety, because it’s a masterclass in nonsense copywriting: “Gudtrip started with a simple belief: the relationship between brands and users should no longer be one-directional. In the old consumer model, users bought products and brands kept the upside. In the Gudtrip model, users help build the network and deserve to share in the value they create. That is why Gudtrip combines cannabis culture, crypto, and AI. Cannabis brings freedom, individuality, and a rejection of rigid systems. Crypto brings ownership, transparency, and shared incentives. AI brings leverage, giving individuals better tools to manage rewards, data, and opportunity.Gudtrip is not just a product brand. It is a network built with its users.” What does that mean? WHO CARES IT IS AI AND CRYPTO AND WEED!!!!
THERE SHOULD BE A PHOTO HERE BUT THE WEBSITE IS BEING A PR1CK, SO JUST IMAGINE!
HOW ABOUT A SHORT MIX OF BLUES AND ROCK’N’ROLL AND ASSOCIATED STUFF FROM TOM SPOONER? OK!
THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS YOU DON’T CARE BUT WOULD REALLY LIKE CHELSEA’S SPORTING DIRECTORS TO FCUK OFF, PREFERABLY INTO THE SUN, PT2:
- All Of The Solar Eclipses That Will Ever Happen: Ok, so probably not all of them – I can’t vouch for the maths here, or indeed the comprehensiveness of the datasets used – but let’s presume that a) it’s all of them; and b) you don’t really care about completeness all that much and won’t be too bothered should it be missing one or two come 2148. This is a really nice little project – click and you will see a map of the earth over which are overlaid the areas in which any solar eclipses occurring between a particular date range will be evident. You can change the data parameters via a little slider above the 3d globe, letting you see the area of effect of eclipses past, and zooming yourself in the future to see when we’ll next be blessed with one in the UK (as far as I can tell we will all be LONG DEAD by the time that next happens – as I was typing that I realised that there’s a certain ambiguity as to whether I mean ‘those of us currently alive and reading this text’ or ‘literally the whole species’ which, well, sobering!!!), and if you’re the sort of person who believes in the concept of a ‘bucket list’ and who has ‘experience the cosmic majesty of a full solar eclipse’ on theirs then you may find this useful for planning purposes. Spain’s getting them this year and in 2028, apparently, the fcukers.
- Snubstack: There was some LIGHT BLUESKY DRAMA this week as the site’s famously anti-AI population rose up in arms to find that a significant portion of them had been added to an ‘AI Haters’ block list and subsequently blocked by one of the site’s technical staff, which then – obviously this is tedious and unimportant, but it does rather speak to the slightly-insane purity culture present in some corners of the web. Anyway, speaking of Bluesky and ‘slightly-insane purity culture’, this is a labeller for the site which will automatically flag any posts which contain links to Substack so that you can, if you need to for reasons of ABSOLUTE IDEOLOGICAL PROBITY, ignore them (it also does the same for links to the NYT and CBS News). On the one hand, obviously, I get the point here – on the other, much as I might wish they didn’t a lot of people write a lot of stuff worth reading on Substack, and depriving oneself of information because you don’t want to give a click to a website whose policies you disagree with feels a touch self-defeating, imho. Still, should you want a tool to help you effortlessly preserve your sense of superiority, purity and moral exceptionalism then, well, here you are!
- Magic Postcards: Ok, this is a link to an Actual Online Shop, specifically the Actual Online Shop of writer Robin Sloan, and ever more specifically to their Magic Postcards product – to whit, “Magic Postcard allows you, the sender, to attach a piece of media — photo or video — that your recipient can view immediately upon delivery. It works with any phone that can scan a QR code; it requires no special app or account.” This is literally just ‘postcards with a QR code printed on them, to which you can attach a piece of media which the recipient of the card can then view on receipt’, which feels like something which DEFINITELY should exist already but which I can’t recall seeing anywhere beforehand and which, without for a second suggesting anyone rip off Robin’s idea, also feels very much like something which it would be very easy to replicate off your own back, and, honestly, I really like this as a concept and feel there should be something fun one of you might be able to come up with to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT (why don’t you choose to SURPRISE AND DELIGHT ME for a change? What, no surprise and delight for Matt? Hmph).
- The Multilingual Wheel of Emotions: This is another vibecoded project with That Look about it – sorry, I am going to have a think about the extent to which I feature this stuff in the future because I don’t want to turn Curios into a wall of identikit putty-coloured sites with the standard Claude font – but I am including it because it is about language, and, well, I fcuking LOVE language (you can tell I love it because I treat it so fcuking well). Per the description (and please forgive the egregious AI-speak of ‘this is not…it is”), “every language draws the map of feeling differently. English names roughly three hundred emotions; other tongues have named feelings English has never noticed. The Portuguese saudade, a longing for something lost that may never return. The Japanese mono no aware, the gentle sadness of things passing. These are not translations waiting to happen. They are coordinates on the emotional landscape that English simply does not visit. This wheel is an attempt to make that landscape visible. Six core emotions sit at the centre, after Gloria Willcox’s clinical model. Around them, their English subtleties. Around those, the outer ring: words gathered from across the world’s languages, each placed near the feeling it most closely neighbours. Research suggests that naming a feeling more precisely is not merely describing it, but expanding what you are capable of feeling.” I particularly enjoyed learning of the English language neologism ‘Opia’, apparently do do with the variable intensity of eye contact, but hopefully you will find your own favourites in here.
- Freddie Yauner: The website of UK artist Freddie Yauner, which presents a bunch of different projects he’s undertaken over the years – ink made out of pollen, 17thC-style portraits of plants and vegetables taken with a flatbed scanner, and, most recently, his ‘Mirror Mask’ project selling and producing some VERY cool looking, er, mirror masks; these latter are all sold out of the present run, but keep an eye out for a restock as I think these might be quite the collector’s item one day.
- Med Compare: Ok, I promise this is the last vibecoded site on here this week, but this really is a quite astonishing window into how spectacularly broken and awful the US healthcare system is. Pick a state, plug in any medical condition or procedure you can care to imagine and watch in wonder and horror as the site spits out the range of costs for the same procedure which various hospitals charge. Thanks to this website I have just learned that the cost for a particular type of tracheotomy in California ranges from a punchy $1100 to a frankly-insane $13100 – WHAT DO YOU GET FOR THE EXTRA $10k?!?!?! Honestly, how much better is the latter service than the former? Is it the beds? The quality of the food? The in-room entertainments? Do you get your throathole restitched with gold thread? Americans, seriously, how the actual fcuk can you look at this and think “yep, this is 100% the best and fairest system with which to treat our sick!”? You are fcuking lunatics, all of you, can you STOP trying to foist your lunacy on the rest of the world please? Honestly, I am increasingly of the opinion that we would all be better off if we could just maybe wall America in to its own corner of the planet so that the rest of us can just get on quietly without it bothering us.
- Monitoring the Situation: To be clear, THIS LINK IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT. With that out of the way, Monitoring the Situation (MTS fro short) is a new X account (and accompanying discord) by A16Z, designed to basically provide them a platform for punting out Wot They (and their mates) Think about THE WORLD (or, more accurately, those bits of the world that involve AI and business and being a superrationalist and thinking that Elon’s actually quite cool actually) – what this seems to mean is that it punts out clips of talking heads talking about THE STUFF THAT IS GOING ON in the broader tech space and occasionally making some…incredibly dumb sweeping statements about society. The reason I am linking to this is because a) it’s a really useful way of reminding yourself that these people are not smart, at all (there’s a wonderful juxtaposition in-feed of a video where the clipped tagline is “AI taking jobs is such a last century idea” and then, a couple of posts down the feed, the story about Microsoft and Meta laying off tens of thousands of people, which is just perfect really); and b) it’s a useful barometer of what lines and products are currently being peddled by the moneymen who want to control the world, or at least the tech-adjacent parts of it (which, increasingly, is everything).
- The Knowhere Map Gallery: Via Giuseppe, this page collects map-based dataviz projects by Steven Feldman – maps of cheap fuel near you (USEFUL, BOOKMARK THIS NOW), maps of elite football in Europe, maps of critical mineral deposits around the world…if you like maps and data – and who doesn’t? NO FCUKER, etc! – then you will find a lot to love here (and also it’s a decent source of inspiration should you have some mappable data and need some ideas as to how you might do something with it).
- The Cultural Atlas: I confess to being…a bit racist against white Australians. I know, I know, racism is bad and I shouldn’t tar an entire people with one brush; on the other, I have met a lot of fcuking terrible white Australians in my time and can’t help but extrapolate that out to the whole nation. I AM SORRY, DECENT AUSTRALIANS, I AM SURE YOU EXIST BUT IT IS HARD TO CONCEIVE OF YOU OVER THE CRUSHING HORROR OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOUR CONATIONALS! That said, sites like this make me think that my kneejerk labeling of all Aussies as ‘bigots, probably’ is…maybe a bit unfair, particularly from a man who resides in, and carries the passport of, an island whose motto seems increasingly to be ‘we hate trans people and muslims and also ourselves’. ANYWAY, that’s by way of a long and slightly-confused introduction to the Cultural Atlas, a really nicely-intentioned project by the Australian Special Broadcasting Service which is designed to educate and inform people on the various customs, traditions and cultures of the various peoples who inhabit Australia – native peoples, migrant communities, major religions, each gets a section on customs, history, language and terminology, all sorts of information to help visitors understand and relate to the people who they share a country with. This is a bit dry, fine, but the intention behind it really is rather lovely and makes me feel a bit bad about all the Aussieprejudice I have previously expressed (but then I remember Clapham).
- Amazonia: You might have seen this already somewhere this week – it has done VERY well in terms of coverage, and rightly so given it’s both clever and beautifully-executed. Have you ever wanted a downloadable font whose curves and contours are based on the curves and contours of THE AMAZON ITSELF? Oh good! This is part of an official tourist push for the broader Amazonian region by the Brazilian government, and while I have no clue whatsoever what the correlation between ‘sees quite a cool font based on a river’ and ‘buys ticket to South America’ is, I like to imagine it will induce at least one graphic design enthusiast to visit the basin. The way the letters animate here is LOVELY by the way.
- Wigglegrams: I had completely forgotten the era of stereoscopic gifs being a thing (hang on, this this actually stereoscopy? Is that even the right word? No idea, no time to check, onwards), but this subReddit is dedicated to celebrating the…fcukit, let’s say ‘artform’, why not? Pages and pages of gifs of photos which look *just* about 3d, a bit, if you squint, with that weird, er, wiggly feel that comes with the technique (you know the one – two photos taken very slightly apart in time, flipping back and forth which creates the optical illusion of depth…YES YOU DO YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN WHEN YOU CLICK THE LINK FFS). What’s curious is that I think a lot of the people participating in this are kids, suggesting that the current generation’s retrofetishism extends even to stuff like this – I actually think there’s probably quite a nice campaign for the right brand based on exactly this sort of visual effect; should someone want to take this entirely-baseless belief and run with it, YOU ARE WELCOME.
- Rafillo: This is a Spanish TikTok account that posts animations – animations you will feel in your chest, the strapline tells me – animations in a very particular slightly hand-drawnish style and, honestly, I have NO FCUKING IDEA what is going on here but each and every one of these has made me laugh and as such I can recommend them to you unreservedly (you will benefit from knowing some Spanish but it is very much not necessary – the vibes here are the thing, and the vibes here are ODD).
- MyEpstein: NOT MINE, to be clear. I do not have, and have never had, an Epstein. BUT what this does do is let you search your email contacts for anyone who shows up anywhere in the files. Would YOU like to throw the dice and see if anyone you have ever had even the most fleeting and tangential contact with has been a few degrees of separation from a notorious paedophile?
- Stuff My Dog Loves: Again, NOT MINE, to be clear – dogs are rubbish. That said, this small site in which…someone (the developer is anonymous) celebrates their dog Viggo (a good name for a dog imho) via the medium of small pixelart animations is rather lovely and the animations themselves are SO CHARMING it almost made me forget that cats are the infinitely-superior pet.
- Legal Walls: I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the number of you who regularly grab the spraycans and the facescarf and go out under cover of darkness to tag an overpass is…small (shoutout 10Foot if you’re reading this you fcuking hacks), but should you be someone who wants to GET INTO GRAFFITI (and, look, why not, it’s not the most ridiculous middle-aged hobby I can conceive of) then you might enjoy this map of walls around the world on which you are legally entitled to spray whatever crap springs to mind. This has just reminded me of my favourite bit of graffiti ever, by the way (other than ‘cats like plain crisps’), in Manchester’s Moss Side c.1997, which read “there is something about silence which makes me sick” and which has stayed with me in a strangely…sticky way ever since.
- Can You Draw A Perfect Rectangle?: Well, CAN YOU????? The site gives you the target ratio and your job is to drag the sides to get as close to the required proportion as you can. This is, oddly, significantly more fun than that terrible description makes it sound.
- DOOM: The Text Adventure: It feels like the natural endpoint to this newsletter that eventually everything in here will be, on some level, DOOM – here the venerable old shooter is reimagined as a text adventure and, weirdly, is still fun. I am not sure there has EVER been a version of DOOM which on some level I haven’t enjoyed messing around with, even if only for a couple of minutes, it is increasingly my platonic ideal of What A Game Should Be. This is IMPOSSIBLE, but also does a weirdly good job of evoking the idea of What DOOM Is, which is frankly quite incredibly impressive.
- Reform or Not: Can YOU spot the Reform electoral candidate? How ingrained are your prejudices? PLAY THE GAME AND FIND OUT!
- Elite: The final ludic link this week is one which for English people of a certain vintage will set choirs of angels singing in their ears. OH LOOK IT IS THE FULL, ORIGINAL GAME ‘ELITE’ BY THE LEGENDARY DAVID BRABEN, PLAYABLE FOR FREE IN YOUR BROWSER! YOU CAN SAVE THE GAME! YOU CAN SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE IN YOUR SHED HIDING FROM YOUR INCREASINGLY-ESTRANGED SPOUSE AND YOUR INCREASINGLY FRIGHTENING CHILDREN AND IMAGINE YOU ARE A SPACE CAPTAIN!!! Ok, for those of you for whom the term ‘Elite’ means literally nothing in a gaming context, Elite was released for the BBC Micro in the 1980s and is both a truly insane example of coding within limitations (this is a space trading game that can go on literally forever, with a fully-modeled universe in (admittedly rudimentary) wireframe 3d, with PHYSICS and COMBAT and A FULL ECONOMY and and and) and a title which honestly lays claim to be the most influential videogame ever (there is literally no space game that has existed since that doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Elite). It is also, famously, QUITE HARD, so thankfully this site also contains links to all sorts of supplementary Elite info and forums and things, as well as hosting the source code for the game…look, for most of you this will be a weird relic from the past, but for (I am going to guess) approximately three of you this will be the greatest thing that has happened to you since…no, actually, no caveats, THE GREATEST THING EVER.
THERE SHOULD BE A PHOTO HERE BUT THE WEBSITE IS BEING A PR1CK, SO JUST IMAGINE!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Happy Birthday 2U: Photos and gifs of birthday cakes and balloons; for reasons I am not able to adequately explain and certainly don’t want to investigate whatsoever, this entire page fills me with a sense of very real dread and near-panic, and I am going to stop writing about it right now thankyou very much indeed.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Johan Karlgren: A Swedish (I think – apologies if I am misScandiing here) artist and animator who makes these GORGEOUS little videos showcasing his work making pixel-ish artworks via the medium of stop-motion animation; honestly, this really is SO charming.
- The Bestiary of Impossible Fauna: A reader writes! Willem-Joop (great name btw) Lagarde mailed me a link to this project of his, saying it is a gallery of nonexistent creatures, “made from drawings and converted into real appearing creatures and presented as a nature documentary.” This is more interesting to me than most AI-generated imagery projects because it’s taking Lagarde’s personal creativity through sketches and translating them into something else using The Machine, which I rather enjoy (and also explains why the creatures look genuinely imaginative and weird rather than just being ‘an elephant but with scales or something’ like most AI-imagined fantastical bestiary stuff tends to be).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Civilisational Optionality: Ok, so I think I have to caveat this slightly – I found the ideas in this interesting and compelling, but the writing, oh GOD the writing – look, I appreciate that my prose style isn’t exactly something to be mimicked and that reading Curios can often be…hard work, I get that, but FCUK ME is this piece undermined by the prose here. Still, if you can get over that – and I do advise you to try – there are some really interesting points raised; specifically, about the benefits in thinking longtitudinally in terms of maintaining the number of options available to people (extrapolated to us as a society as a whole), positioning that specifically in opposition to the focus on longtermism (specifically seen here as the preservation of the species through time) (oh god, see, I am starting to write in the same way, it’s catching). Anyway, this makes a lot of smart points about the need to maintain options being a better means of ensuring broader longterm outcomes rather than focusing on the longterm as a goal in and of itself, and the following couple of paras are a good introduction to the terms being discussed and how they are being used – seriously, I know that this is…horrible to read, in some senses, but it really is interesting and I think clever: “Optionality in this context is not “the options currently available.” It is the degrees of freedom available to civilization — the maneuver space we retain to respond not only to uncertainties we can name, but to deep unknowns and cascading failures that compound faster than institutions can adapt. A civilization with high optionality can absorb disturbance without collapsing into zero-sum dynamics. It can recompose itself without becoming brittle. It can keep multiple viable pathways open long enough to learn. A civilization with low optionality loses this maneuver space. It becomes trapped in narrowing corridors of coercion, scarcity, and conflict, where each shock closes more futures. We are entering a phase in which the rate of optionality destruction is accelerating. The dynamics we face are interacting and mutually amplifying: climate breakdown, soil contraction, hydrological disruption, fertility stresses, supply-chain fragility, political polarization, and legitimacy erosion. When these stresses hit foundational goods — food, water, energy, shelter, health, insurability — they produce whiplash that forces societies into defensive postures that shrink their degrees of freedom.”
- The Shortform Video Bubble: I say this every time I link to Garbage Day, but if there’s a better analyst right now of politics, media and culture (from the perspective of the US, at least) than Ryan Broderick I would be amazed. It’s also astonishing to me every time I link to one of these pieces that the UK press has still, even in big old 2026, singularly failed to understand the centrality of online culture to EVERY SINGLE FACET OF LIFE AND MEATSPACE EXISTENCE in the modern world, that to understand What Is Happening In Physical Space Right Now is impossible without at least a vague comprehension of the parallel online world which exists as meatspace’s shadowrealm and how the two push and pull each other into uneasy symbiosis, and that not having a beat reporter or to whose job is simply to Know About Online Culture is a dereliction of duty…anyway, this is Ryan on typically-astute form, talking about how Everything Is Video Now and what happens when that bubble pops and what comes next; in the main, what this made me feel VERY STRONGLY was that the inevitable ‘real life becomes Transmetropolitan’ transition is very much underway.
- That Mad Fascist Palantir Manifesto Thing: As someone who was a very early adopter of ‘Peter Thiel is a creepy person whose influence on the world is nefarious and shadowy and who I think we all ought to be immensely-suspicious of’ as a position, I am in the rare (for me) position of being able to feel smug as the rest of the world realises that, yes, he is a fcuking terrifying madman – perhaps Thiel’s biggest scary legacy is that he has birthed a whole subclass of OTHER terrifying madmen who are spreading his libertarian, ‘democracy is bad actually’ creed far and wide, bankrolled by his billions – the Palantir manifesto which dropped last week is a clear example of Thielian ideology being propagated by his horrid little pointy-headed disciples who believe that writing things like ‘Pluralism is a cancer’ marks them down as fearless sayers of the unsayable rather than people who would have been very at home chatting with Josef or Adolf. The whole thing is a risible mess (and in parts a staggeringly bigoted one), but it’s worth skimming because, honestly, as with so much of this stuff, it really is the product of undergrad-level thinking (and I say that as someone very shallow who only ever practices undergrad-level thinking himself) and reads quite a lot like the work of the teenage polsci edgelords that these men at heart so obviously are. If you want a nice, neat skewering of it, though, you can find a good (and funny) one here.
- Everything Feels Bad Because Tech: Ok, this isn’t EXACTLY what Dan Hon says in this very good article, but it is, broadly, the thrust of this piece. In it, Hon looks at why Everything Feels Bad For Everyone despite certain indicators looking ok (the whole ‘but the graphs are going up! Noone is dying of dysentery!’ thing), and concludes that perhaps we can attribute at least part of it to the gradual chipping away of time and how despite the increasingly ostensible ‘frictionless’ nature of so much of life, we’re actually living with a proliferation of different systems and processes and ecosystems that we have to navigate through to enable this ‘frictionlessness’, and that this is in fact causing more, not less, aggravation. Logins. Passwords. Accounts. Emails. Followups. This system and that system and remembering which one does what when, for whom. This, basically, but everywhere all the time: “This is distinct because it’s about the, I don’t know, cognitive overhead of the malleability of business services. If we’re going to say that a smartphone is basically an essential now then we’re also saying that your entire life is technologically mediated and the cost of implementing business and policy and terms and conditions is so much lower than it ever was. You don’t have to print out all the forms again! So that’s what I think is happening. Lately, at least. Asking people how they feel the economy is doing is a proxy for asking them how easy it is to live, of which “how much things cost” is just a slice. Yes I don’t need to carry cash around and that’s convenient but also my cafe has terms and conditions now, and they’re not even really my cafe’s terms and conditions! The introduction of technology into service delivery is the exact thing that allows the chipping away of agency. It allows for management and restrictions as much as it allows for expansion of access. For media, my choices are things like “subscribe to Disney Plus” or “buy the media” of which I can buy a license to the media, or buy the media on a physical format. Digital rights management is one of the clearest expressions of trading, well, rights, for convenience of access to the extent that the State of California finally had it and now requires service to providers to explicitly say that you’re not buying the thing, you’re buying access to the thing, which means the thing you thought you possessed you didn’t actually own and that possession can be revoked at any time.””
- The Passive Income Trap: Specifically, how the idea of ‘passive income’’ which very much took hold in the 10s when everyone got excited about the prospect of being able to set up a storefront selling dropshipped knockoff Havaianas while they monitored the sales pipeline from a beach in Acapulco and which has now mutated to everyone wanting to use AI to churn out shortform vids so they can win that days platform-based algolottery, has fcuked things up, not least because, per the author, a whole bunch of people who might once upon have time done genuinely entrepreneurial, valuable or creative things in pursuit of income or wealth were instead directed to put their energies into bullsh1t. “ Zoom out and what you had was just an enormous machine converting human ambition into noise. Affiliate spam // dropshipped junk // ebooks about passive income // courses about courses. An entire layer of the internet that was nothing but confident-sounding bullshit produced by people who had optimized for everything except making something worth buying. The people near the top made money. Everyone else spent months or years chasing a mirage and came out with nothing but a Shopify subscription they forgot to cancel. They thought they’d failed. They hadn’t failed. The system, every system, failed them. What actually makes money hasn’t changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it’s tedious and even when you don’t want to. You build relationships over years. You build reputation over years. None of it is passive, and none of it has ever been passive! All of it revolves around giving a shit, day after day, about something specific. I don’t think anyone has ever found a way around that and I don’t think anyone will. The passive income thing was a fantasy about not having to give a sh1t. This is a terrible foundation for pretty much anything.”
- Memes Ruined Everything: A NYT piece which did the rounds this week, lamenting the fact that culture has moved to a point where everything is expressed as a transient, ephemeral, memetic moment and by extension where nothing really means anything any more, and where as a result everything is stupid and ugly…which I don’t wholly agree with tbh, but which I enjoyed reading nonetheless. FWIW my read of this stuff is more to do with the absurdity of memetic culture being a response the sheer impossibility of having any meaningful idea any more of What Is Happening And Why because of the fractally-complex and interlinked nature of modernity, but that’s just me.
- A Whole New Era Of AI Book Scams: The early era of AI publishing grifts were simple, almost naive – use GPT to spin up a short text on any topic, mock up a cover using Dall-E, chuck it on the Kindle store, fake some reviews, cross your fingers and hope. Now, though, the evolution of LLMs means you can do FAR more sophisticated, and nefarious, work. While these previous scam books were wildly hallucinatory and paper-thin, it’s now possible for scammers to take huge swathes of academic papers on history, archaeology and science – all accessible relatively easily and containing the actual scholarship of real people – plug a bunch of them into a Deep Research or ‘thinking’ enabled model, and have the thing churn out a text based on those inputs in seconds. The resulting book is…not terrible, it looks and reads plausibly and won’t immediately alert the casual reader to the fact that it’s ALL AI – but, crucially, none of the people who actually did the work of researching and writing the original scholarship will see a penny. This is EXACTLY the grift being described in this piece, which describes the author coming across the works of one Blake Whiting, an author with a LOT of books on Amazon with a very odd publishing cadence, many of which have excellent reader reviews, and who definitely doesn’t exist. This is…quite depressing, ngl.
- The Death of Dubbing: You know how there was once a website that tracked all the things that the media had accused millennials of ‘killing’? Someone ought to track the same with AI. This is a piece in Rest of World which looks at the impact of technology on the traditional dubbing industries which for years have provided the voiceovers for Hollywood movies and work for a huge range of actors, and which now are inevitably being replaced by low-cost voice models who can rattle through the lines at pace. I remember my mother once telling me of her devastation when she came to live in the UK from Italy and realised that Cary Grant’s real life voice was significantly less sexy (to her ears, at least) than the actor who always dubbed him into Italian – at least future generations will be spared such traumas. SILVER LININGS!
- Emails from the AI Agent: I can’t imagine any of you will care, but should you be interested in my writeup of that ‘an AI is running for President (but not really)’ website from a few weeks back then, well, hear it is. In a further surreal wrinkle, there is now an AI-written blogpost on the AI-generate website with an AI-written analysis of my piece about the AI…honestly, it is SO FCUKING WEIRD.
- Helium is Hard to Replace: So it looks as though we ARE going to be spending the next few weeks in Schrodinger’s Strait – is it open? Is it not? – and as a result we are all going to find ourselves feeling a LOT POORER come the second half of the year as the impact of shortages begins to bite. THANKS AMERICA!!! THANKS!!! YOU FCUKING CNUTS!!!! Anyway, this piece is an interesting look at the specific reasons why the helium shortages that are likely to be one side-effect of the blockade are important – this is…quite dry and quite technical, fine, but it’s also a really interesting look at something that I (obviously) knew nothing about, and it’s just a fascinating glimpse into HOW THE WORLD WORKS which alludes to the vast, mad complexity of everything and how it’s simply impossible to have a meaningful complexive understanding of anything any more (which is why I have stopped trying, in the main, and am often to be found skinning up c.3pm).
- The End of the Cuban Dream: James Bloodworth writes about a recent visit to Cuba and the reality that he experienced compared to the propgandist vision sold to – and, per Bloodworth, peddled on by – messrs Corbyn, Piker et al. I didn’t enjoy the tone of this – I don’t expect Mr Bloodworth and I would get on – but at the same time it was interesting to read an account of a country which continues to be both very curious and very fcuked, and which I really hope doesn’t become the next target of That Mad Cnut Across The Water’s attentions.
- Portraits of Population: Oh this is GREAT – a really interesting analysis of a trove of documents from 20thC India, all designed to communicate to ordinary citizens some facts about the national population. The piece looks at specific examples, themes, communications style and design – and then at the end there’s a whole archive you can explore of the whole set of graphics. Honestly, this is so so fascinating (and a really nicely-presented webpage to boot).
- Letters To A Games Studio: Videogames publisher Panic does a lovely thing at the end of their games, inviting people to send stamp-addressed envelopes to their offices which will be returned to them with badges from the studio inside – when they started doing this they expected they would only receive a handful of envelopes and nothing more, but over the years they have received ARMFULS of correspondence from players who have adored their titles, telling them about the things they loved and sharing drawings and artworks and poems inspired by the titles; this piece talks to the designers about the mail they get and why they do it, and the whole thing is SO LOVELY and a wonderful example of how affording people the opportunity to connect around a work can sometimes be a genuinely beautiful thing (God it feels weird to be SINCERE).
- What Happened To Movie Taglines?: As someone who doesn’t engage with cinema I hadn’t noticed that film taglines had become so terrible but FCUK ME the ones they cite as examples here are miserably bad. This is entertaining – if not a little depressing – and functions as yet another ‘remind me about how the ineffable brilliance of human creativity means that The Machine will never, ever replace us’. LOOK AT HOW LOW THE BAR IS AND HOW LITTLE LITERALLY ANYONE CARES FFS.
- Death of a Superman: This is a very sad piece, about a very specific topic – clothing donation bins, specifically clothing donation bins in Canada, and how they have caused the deaths of an upsetting number of homeless people over the course of the past decade or so, and why exactly that is. While the subject matter is obviously…really horrible, I thought this was an oddly-beautiful piece of journalism and one which was very human and very sensitive to its subjects. “I start compiling my own list of fatalities, and it grows with alarming speed after every search for “death” and “donation bin.” But even when a death is covered by the local media, the victim may be left unnamed. I pester sheriffs and police departments, which yields terse one-sentence replies with a victim’s name and age. But some never reply; others might as well not have. Both the police and the medical examiner in Madison, Wisconsin, won’t name a certain 2024 victim, citing a state law on death records. I know he died on October 22; I know he was found behind a Hy-Vee supermarket at 3:15 p.m.; I know he was forty-nine years old. I know he is Police Incident Report #2024-467904. But he has no name, no history. He is present and yet not present, like an empty chalk outline where a body once lay. My list lengthens. There are dozens of cases now.”
- Confessions of Will Self: An interview with novelist Will Self in the Observer; as with many men of my generation and inclination, I obviously fell slightly in love with Will Self’s books as a teen – the horror! The drugs! The bleak humour! The genuinely-brilliant writing! – and then sort of stopped thinking about him a decade or so ago (which means Self would say I have failed to engage with his best and most important works – SORRY WILL). Self now finds himself at the end of life – immunocompromised and variously-afflicted, it sounds like he has a few years left but likely no more – and this very much has the feel of someone who Knows The Jig Is Up and who is, generally, pretty cool with it. This is a wide-ranging piece covering his career, his cancellation (the way in which he speaks about his former friends is genuinely affecting), his illness, the State of the World…obviously it helps if you are or have ever been a Self fan, but I very much enjoyed spending some more time inside the mind of a man this smart and idiosyncratic. His posthumous ‘where the skeletons are’ memoir will be a killer, should it ever pass legal.
- How Do You Know Liz Truss?: This is funny, sad, awkward, poignant, weirdly-sweet and generally very good indeed – Sophie Heawood writes about her assignation with a man 20 years her junior, the weirdness of appsex, the strange performance of intimacy with strangers and all sorts of other bits besides, for the new issue of The Fence. This is very good indeed.
- Siri Hustvedt: This is an extract from Siri Hustvedt’s new book, about her relationship with and marriage to Paul Auster, and his death, and her life now he is gone. I found this almost unbearably sad to read – I was very damp of face throughout, it’s fair to say – but she’s an astonishingly-accomplished writer and this is a very beautiful (if, again, exceptionally sad) piece of writing.
- America In The Dock: The final link this week is VERY LONG, but, please, pour yourself a tea (or mix a pitcher of martinis, after all it is Friday (or at least it is at the time of writing) and settle in to enjoy this piece, in which James Lasdun writes in the LRB about taking a roadtrip across the US, taking the temperature of the country via the medium of its courtrooms. This is SO SO SO GOOD – simultaneously a love letter to the country and its people, a strangely-hopeful look at a justice system that at the micro level still seems to embody the very best of the (idea of the) country, a very funny series of character portraits and vignettes from trials the length and breadth of the US, a beautiful series of observations about the natural landscape of North America and its mind-altering vastness, and so much more besides. Honestly, had this been twice as long I would have been thrilled, it is wonderful and I recommend it unreservedly.
THERE SHOULD BE A PHOTO HERE BUT THE WEBSITE IS BEING A PR1CK, SO JUST IMAGINE!
By Oda Eide
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS! (WHICH THIS WEEK HAS LIFTED ALL THE TRACKS FROM VARIOUS EDITIONS OF RENE’S ‘GOOD MUSIC’ NEWSLETTER, WHICH I REALLY MUST RECOMMEND TO YOU ONCE AGAIN BECAUSE IT IS ACE):