It has been, fair to say, something of a week between work and LIFE and things, and, look, this is one of those times when I simply can’t bring myself to care either about the fcuking byelection or the fcuking England squad (in fact, honestly, for perhaps the first time in my life I am finding all the football…a bit much. Can it just sort of shut up for a couple of weeks?), and I have a lunch to run to and so I’m just going to sort of shuffle out, pointing in embarrassed fashion at the links in the hope that you don’t notice the slightly-awkward nature of their delivery.
Fine? Fine! Oh, Curios will be off next week as I am going to a wedding this weekend and the weather is going to be beautiful and if I spend any of it in front of a laptop I will be quite annoyed with myself – see you in a fortnight.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you can stop looking at me like that, it’s MY newsletter.
By Florian Hetz
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A LOT ABOUT THIS COUNTRY AND WHERE WE ARE AT RIGHT NOW CAN BE EXPLAINED BY THE DEGREES OF INTEREST DISPLAYED BY THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL CLASSES IN PEOPLE’S GENITALS VS, I DON’T KNOW, LARGE-SCALE SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION AND A POLITICAL SYSTEM WHICH STILL OPERATES ON A CASH-FOR-ACCESS BASIS, PT.1:
- Pictures: Our first link this week is an instance of me finding a tab open amongst the fifty-odd cluttering up my browser and realising that a) I have no idea how I came across it; and b) I have no idea what the fcuk it is or who it’s by. As such, the description for this site/project/…thing is going to be even lighter on useful information than is the norm but, well, you know what you’re getting by now so stop complaining (and if you don’t, this is the opportunity for you to step away unscathed – go on, if this meandering style is starting to annoy you then probably best you fcuk off now because there’s another 9.9k words or so of this mess to go before we’re done). ANYWAY, click the link and it takes you to an INCREDIBLY zoomed-out view of what I think are thousands – maybe even tens of thousands – of images. Click anywhere on the screen and you’ll be taken to a scrolly viewer which lets you browse all of the photos in the collection – photos of…well, just ‘stuff’, really, art and clothes and flowers and cars and buildings and posters and ancient artefacts from museum collections, all presented entirely without context, and, look, I know that this doesn’t sound in any way compelling, but just try clicking in and then settle back and just use your mousewheel to scroll through the gallery, let the images wash over you and it becomes like some sort of strange, visuals-only Adam Curtis documentary, just a sort of endless flood of IMAGES OF HUMANITY and I can’t tell you how weirdly compelling I find this. I have literally NO clue why this exists or what it is or who compiled it or what for, so should any of you happen to know I would be hugely grateful for any pointers – honestly, though, I would quite happily sit in a gallery for 10 minutes watching this carousel past me, maybe you would too.
- Your Internet Radio Dial: Ooh, this is cute – skeuomorphic design, just like it’s 2011 all over again! A simple idea, really nicely executed, this webpage presents you with an old-fashioned radio-style interface (I suddenly realised that the concept of ‘a radio’ as a discrete device is very much set to be consigned to history within a generation or two – at least for most Western cultures, at least until The Inevitable Collapse – and that feels…sad, somehow), where you move the dial on the wireless to move between internet radio stations from around the world, complete with between-station static…it looks quite simple, but if you click the ‘about’ icon in the top-right you’ll see that there are all sorts of clever quality-of-life bits of design in here; the ability to group stations into ‘bands’ so you can have collections of your favourites, a neat Shazam integration to let you ID songs that come up…honestly, this really is very nicely done indeed and is a beautifully-serendipitous way to discover some new streaming stations to enjoy.
- The National Conversation: I’m not entirely sure how much coverage outside of Monday’s Today programme (yes, I know, but I am professionally required to Know What Is Going On, trust me when I say that I don’t really enjoy it anymore either) this received, but I have a strange feeling that the answer is likely to have been ‘fcuk all’, so consider this my small attempt to contribute to the University of Oxford’s PR efforts. The National Conversation is a survey being conducted by said university in an attempt to get a handle on ‘perceptions of belonging and national identity’ in the UK RIGHT NOW, against a backdrop of…some slight degree of perceived disunity, it’s fair to say. What unites us? What divides us? WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN TO BE BRITISH ANYMOREzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz? I did this on Monday and, look, I read pretty quickly and type pretty quickly and it still took me slightly longer than I might have wanted to Speke My Branes into the freetext boxes – there is, though, the opportunity to leave thoughts via voicenote (I would LOVE to have access to the inbox, should any researchers with a cavalier attitude to data security happen to read this), which is an admirable idea in terms of inclusion, but in general I think that this is going to fall down slightly on the fact that, realistically, the vast majority of people simply can’t be fcuked to participate in stuff like this because, well, life’s short and the survey is LONG. Still, if you have particular thoughts on national identity and why exactly our current sense of it might have splintered into a million jagged little pieces then FEEL FREE TO CONTRIBUTE – although another problem with these sorts of initiatives is that ‘slightly-unwieldy opt-in online survey’ does rather skew the likely profile of respondents – I don’t think they’re going to be shy of left-leaning biens pensants in the replies here, but, well you go right ahead anyway because YOU MATTER.
- Lume: This is a really interesting new project by Friend of Curios Sacha Judd and some friends of hers, and, I think, a potentially smart way of approaching digital music in an artist-friendly way. Lume is, basically, a platform designed to connect musicians with the people who want to listen to their work and support their output, designed from the ground up so as to present a more equitable, less-exploitative way of monetising their work at scale. “Lume is a new digital format for albums. When an artist releases a Lume, you can buy the full album alongside the content they’ve chosen to share around it — which may include demos, alternate versions, live recordings, handwritten lyrics, behind-the-scenes footage, unreleased photography, and more. You buy it once and own it forever.” The proposition for artists looks like an attractive one: “Artists (or their label/management/distributor) work with us to build a Lume from their album — the full record plus the additional content that surrounds it: demos, footage, lyrics, photography, and more. We build the Lume with you and release it to the platform. You and your partners keep 80% of the net revenue, and you own the direct relationship with every fan who buys it.” Basically this isn’t designed to be a ‘Spotify Killer’ (which is good because, well, good fcuking luck with that) so much as a way for fans to collect sort of special editions of their favourite albums in a media-rich way, like a sort of Bandcamp+ish type thing (Sacha, if you want to use ANY of this sparkling prose in your marketing then do feel free btw). This is very very new and is going to start out small, working with artists in Sacha’s native New Zealand, but I hope it will expand beyond that in due course because it feels like both a nice way to support creative work and an interesting twist on the concept of a digital ‘ultimate’ version of a record.
- DFOS: Ok, I am not *entirely* sure what this is or how it works, and it’s…quite early in the morning, and I am a bit sleepy, so forgive me if the following is a bit mangled…but, anyway, DFOS stands for ‘Dark Forest Operating System’ and it’s a new platform for Putting Stuff Online that’s been launched by the people behind ‘patreon-but-slightly-artsier’ setup Metalabel (see Curios passim). Basically (ok, VERY basically, but I’m going to be here all morning otherwise) this is a suite of independent publishing tools which exist on some sort of federated network (I think – look, let’s be clear, ‘federated network’ is one of those terms I occasionally throw in with a degree of confidence despite the fact that I don’t *really* know what the fcuk it means; friends call these ‘Muirisms’ and let me tell you they are one of my more endearing qualities!), meaning you can use this to create a whole suite of digital online presences – a chat community, a blog, an internet newsletter, forum-type spaces – away from the predations of Big Tech; these communities can either be made public and discoverable or be kept secret and private (the ‘Dark Forest’ element in action), and the developers are making all the usual promises about the data being yours, never training AI, never putting ads in, etc etc. I think this is A Good Thing, generally-speaking, not least because it puts everything in one place, and the idea of creating an independent publishing ecosystem is a good one, and having had a very brief play with the creator tools last night (yes, my life is thrilling, why do you ask?) it seems pretty intuitive in terms of setup…Basically if you’re looking for an all-in-one publishing platform from which to build a SMALL DIGITAL MEDIA EMPIRE then this is worth a look I think.
- The Prediction AI: Don’t get excited, this is a Github repo so if you want to UNLOCK THE SCRYING POWER OF THE MACHINE then you’ll need both a chunky-ish machine and the ability to actually make the code work…BUT! This is SUCH an interesting (and, if you think about it in anything resembling serious fashion, vaguely-troubling) idea – basically MiroFish is a setup which…oh, fcuk it, here: “MiroFish is a next-generation AI prediction engine powered by multi-agent technology. By extracting seed information from the real world (such as breaking news, policy drafts, or financial signals), it automatically constructs a high-fidelity parallel digital world. Within this space, thousands of intelligent agents with independent personalities, long-term memory, and behavioral logic freely interact and undergo social evolution. You can inject variables dynamically from a “God’s-eye view” to precisely deduce future trajectories — rehearse the future in a digital sandbox, and win decisions after countless simulations.” So, basically, an LLM-juiced prediction engine which can be trained on whatever intel you think is relevant, takes in signals from the real world and runs simulations against personae to come to a probabilistic vision of What Might Happen…Look, I am…skpetical as fcuk about synthetic data and personas and their actual, practical value in modeling stuff, but it’s VERY easy to see this sort of thing both catching on and either being worryingly good (in which case, OH LOOK competitive market advantage to the people with the most compute and the best models!) or total bunkum (in which case, OH LOOK all sorts of people being suckered into using variants on this crap to ‘hone’ their gambling, etc, and losing their fcuking shirts), neither of which fills me with huge amounts of joy. Anyway, if anyone fancies running this locally and giving it, I don’t know, £100 to theoretically speculate with then I will happily chip in a tenner.
- Steven Dot Com: I cannot tell you how much this url makes me laugh. THE HUBRIS! THE BANALITY! STEVEN DOT COM!!!! The Steven, of course, is slab-headed Confucius of the business banality himself Steven Bartlett, the Huel-shilling, performance-inflating Walter Mitty figure who started out as a kid gaming trending topics on Twitter through an admittedly-smart set of loophole exploitations and who has somehow evolved into a kind of Joe Rogan for the LinkedIn hustle-and-grind set. Not content with letting grifters and shillers peddle lies and supplements to an audience of millions of credulous Deanos the length and breadth of the English-speaking world, STEVEN DOT COM is now setting himself up as a FULL-SPECTRUM MEDIA ECOSYSTEM and I really do suggest you click through and enjoy both the copy, which positions ‘creators’ as somewhere between Jesus and a Randian superman (my brother in Christ you conduct softball interviews with hucksters selling vitamin supplements, you are not Henry Ford!), and the naked truth lurking just below the surface (which is that every single part of this is about MONETISING THE FCUK OUT OF EVERYTHING. I particularly enjoyed the…slight contradiction in the copy’s insistence on DEVELOPING HUMAN, AUTHENTIC CONNECTIONS and products which literally say ‘monetise every aspect of your audience’. STEVEN DOT COM!!
- The Playboy Fiction Index: This is SUCH an incredible index of fantastic writing – to be clear, if you’re looking for bongo then you won’t find any here, but if you’re if you’re interested in who and what bongo connoisseurs were reading alongside their monthly dose of nudity then you are in LUCK! Playboy, as you are doubtless all aware, had a proud track record of publishing essays and short stories by some of North America’s most storied writers, particularly in the 70s and 80s, and this is a searchable archive of all of those pieces. Sadly you can’t actually get to the texts here, but this feels like something which could be built on a bit with some digging in the Internet Archive and elsewhere – honestly, if anyone wants to take on the challenge of ‘this, but with links to the essays in question’ then they will be doing God’s work. Seriously, though, the NAMES here! Wodehouse, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Joyce Carol Oates…honestly, it’s hard not to feel slightly sad at the fact that the talented writers of today have…what, they have fcuking Substack ffs, LET’S BRING BACK LITERARY SCUD MAGS!
- Get Your Face In The National Gallery: Ok, fine, so to do this you will ALSO have to consent to having an AI-generated portrait of yourself being done, but, honestly, this is part of a project by artist Es Devlin who’s got a show on at the Gallery right now, the model has been trained – consensually! – on her work and style, and as such this is about as ‘ethical’ as you can get with this stuff (and also, look, please fcuk off with the performative purity stuff, honestly). Upload a photo or get a dodgy webcam shot, give your consent and you’ll get a rather beautiful (within the confines of genAI, obvs) rendering of YOU in an approximation of Devlin’s stroke-heavy sketch style. Give your consent and your portrait will be added to the carousel of others being displayed on a screen in the gallery space, meaning that YOU will form part of an artwork which will be seen by thousands and which will exist in perpetuity in an archive somewhere on and offline and, honestly, what the fcuk else are you going to achieve today?
- The Museum of the Human Web: Oh, I like this a lot. This website accompanied a recent exhibition in San Francisco, celebrating the history of the human-built web through a collection of 90-odd artefacts; the show’s now over, but the site persists and this is a really nice way of exploring old devices that trace the history of the evolution of the web and our interactions with it: “The Museum of the Human Web is a hybrid physical and digital museum celebrating the history of the human-built web. It looks back on a period of time where everything, from the networks to the memes, came from the minds and hands of people.” This is SO interesting to browse through, and contains all sorts of odd and interesting things from the 90s and 00s that chart the way in which digital space and culture evolved and was shaped – did you know that ‘Beenz’ wasn’t the only attempted digital currency back in the day? Did you know that there was a rival currency called ‘Flooz’? I KNOW! My God the pills were good back then.
- Paul Julian Brown: I have written before, I think, about the very particular and very peculiar sensation of coming into possession of an iPod whose owner has died, and the feeling of having…some of someone’s identity preserved in a small metal box, and the odd, almost-too-intimate feeling you get when you see what the final track they ever listened to on it was…anyway, this is a lovely act of memorialisation by the child of one Paul Julian Brown, who has recreated their fathers’ iPod as it was upon his death in 2018; you can browse tracks, look at a few photos, and listen to Paul’s record collection through a pleasingly-accurate recreation of the iPod mini interface. Objectively-speaking this is…not a convenient way to experience media via a desktop computer, but I am very pleased it exists and there’s something genuinely poignant and affecting about scrolling the clickwheel through a dead person’s musical life.
- Feed The Cat: This is a US riff on a site I featured in Curios…ooh, what, two years ago? WHY DO I REMEMBER THIS STUFF WHEN I CAN’T EVEN REMEMBER MY DAD’S FCUKING BIRTHDAY? Actually I know the answer to that one, but let’s not dwell too hard. Anyway, this site presents a variety of webcams attached to cat feeding stations across the world – each camera is also connected to the feeding station so at set intervals YOU can choose to bestow THE GIFT OF FOOD on the cat of your choosing. Your mileage here will vary entirely depending on the extent to which you enjoy watching close-up webcam footage of cats crunchily chowing down on kibble, but, well, I like it very much. There are a couple having breakfast right now and ngl I am displaying EXTRAORDINARY self-restraint in not just downing tools for a bit and hanging out with them instead.
- 100 People: Just a brilliant bit of marketing, this. Icelandic clothing brand 66 North celebrates its centenary this year – to celebrate, they did a photoshoot and accompanying ad campaign, with the following gimmick: “This year marks the 100th anniversary of 66°North. To celebrate, we’re highlighting the people who have shaped our brand. Following an open casting call, we spent the past year travelling across Iceland to meet and photograph each participant in person. We met 100 individuals born between 1926 and today, creating a living timeline of our community. Each participant is photographed wearing their own 66°North garment, where it is worn across generations. The final series brings together a cross-section of Icelandic society, including fishermen, farmers, doctors, musicians, athletes, and more. We’re grateful to be part of everyday life in Iceland and look forward to the next 100 years.” Honestly, SUCH a simple, smart idea.
- Chromolume: I had no idea that takings from Broadway shows were publicly reported – but they are. If YOU ever wanted to know at a glance what the best-performing show currently open in New York is then this (seemingly vibecoded, but wevs) website will do that very thing – it’s VERY inside baseball, fine, but I imagine that if you’re a UK producer looking into West End transfer potential (and, er, that’s loads of you, right?) then this could perhaps come in handy.
- OpenAI Image Check: File this under ‘a rare good thing that OpenAI has done’ – the company this week announced that it was integrating Google’s SynthID AI image recognition tech into images produced by GPT – meaning that you can now take an image from anywhere, plug it into this detector, and it will tell you if it’s been made by the company’s AI. AND IT WILL ACTUALLY KNOW RATHER THAN MAKING UP AN ANSWER. The fact that you can now do this with both Google and OpenAI is a Genuinely Good Thing – the fact that this isn’t a universal mandated standard baked into every single image generator on the market is not, and until we get to that stage then this is still very much finger in the dyke territory but, well, baby steps.
- The Virtual OS Museum: OK, this is Actual Hardcore Geek Stuff and probably not one for you unless you can read the words ‘Linux Kernel’ without falling into some deep coma of boredom – BUT, if that is you, then MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU FCUKS! “This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state. Hypervisor installers and shortcuts to run the VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are also included. Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.”
- The Digital Graveyard: A place to memorialise dead platforms, old formats and the dusty, abandoned urls of yore, this collects now-defunt links to all sorts of different types of site – chat networks and social media and browsers and and and, all with histories of what they were and why they died and when…this isn’t a particularly beautiful site, fine, but WHAT DO YOU WANT IT’S A GRAVEYARD FFS. If you’re someone who has spent as much time as I have frolicking happily through the once-verdant digital meadows and now feels a bit sad when you look around and see the burnt-out landscape that remains then, well, this will only serve to remind you of how old you are and how much has been lost tbh. Still! Interesting!
- Andon Labs Radio: More internet radio, but this time a selection of them that are being ‘run’ by AI. Andon Labs – not entirely sure if they’re a business or an art collective at this point, they’re the ones who are also doing that ‘we let an Agent run a physical shop in San Francisco thing I featured in here a few weeks back – basically gave a bunch of different leading AI models instructions to run their own streaming radio stations, gave them budget and then…let it all run. The resulting streams are…not great, honestly, but there’s something quite interesting (from an artsy point of view) about the weird cul-de-sacs that the Machine-generated hosts go down, the music that the models find themselves gravitating towards (so much slightly-minimal modern classical!), the different approaches each takes towards ads and monetisation…I do think there’s the kernel of a really interesting project here, while also being not a little freaked out (again) and the degree to which autonomous agentic stuff is starting to become…quite real, quite quickly. I know I have said this on an almost weekly basis for a few years now, but we really don’t understand how fcuking WEIRD things are going to get (WEIRDER) in the next 18m or so. BONUS RADIO STATION! This is DEFINITELY human, and it’s really great and I have been listening to it quite a lot in the evenings this week – “The Nightly is a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure. We’re affiliated with (and run by members of) The Sad Old World. Having belatedly discovered that most of our musical heroes are, confusingly, all but unknown, we’ve taken it on ourselves to build them their own doleful little museum. This takes the form of a sort of “numbers station” of songs, an endless, unalterable sequence of ballads & dirges that can be heard anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Here we hope our idols can be loved as they probably more or less deserve, delaying as long as possible that mournful day they slip mankind’s memory once & for all.”
- Time Chamber Homes: Are you a MAN? Do you feel like getting away, maybe renting an Airbnb, getting some time to yourself to focus on THE THINGS THAT MATTER and maybe do some light hustling and grinding, but do you find yourself continually-stymied by TOO MUCH FEMININE ENERGY and not enough animal protein in your city-based rental? WELL DO WE HAVE A SOLUTION FOR YOU! Time Chamber Homes is an offshoot of some ‘men’s optimisation retreat’ grift I featured in here a year or so ago and who I must have inexplicably given my email address to (what can I say? I love to lift and slonk!), because I now keep getting mailers to promote their new rentals venture which is, as far as I can tell, looking to set up a network of luxurious rental properties where MEN (and ONLY MEN) can go to if they want to, I don’t know, film wildly-unrealistic influencer content in which they look moodily out over a jungle and do single-finger pullups in a psychotically-well-appointed domestic gym. This is SO WEIRD – like, who is this actually for? Anyway, if you’d like a MAN’S SPACE to retreat to to plan the next phase of your world domination blueprint (read: podcast and substack) then this could be your lucky day.
By Kevin Drelon
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT A LOT ABOUT THIS COUNTRY AND WHERE WE ARE AT RIGHT NOW CAN BE EXPLAINED BY THE DEGREES OF INTEREST DISPLAYED BY THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL CLASSES IN PEOPLE’S GENITALS VS, I DON’T KNOW, LARGE-SCALE SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION AND A POLITICAL SYSTEM WHICH STILL OPERATES ON A CASH-FOR-ACCESS BASIS, PT2:
- La Famiglia Mystery Unfolds: OH THIS IS BEAUTIFULLY TERRIBLE! Exactly why Gucci have chosen to promote their expensive wares to the general public via the medium of, er, a really not-very-good murder mystery-type game with really, really terrible AI integration is a mystery to me, but this is SO shonky that I am very glad they did. There are a raft of genuinely-terrible and slightly-baffling UX and UI decisions in here, not least the fact that you HAVE TO CREATE A FCUKING GUCCI ACCOUNT TO ACCESS IT – look, lads, I don’t know what you think people’s appetite for ‘low-quality, short, slightly-interactive digital brand experiences’ is, but I am pretty certain that for most people it’s not so high that they will go through a three-minute onboarding experience to access one. BUT! I am your ceaseless servant and so I suffered through the slightly-tortuous account creation journey to get access (joke’s on you, Gucci, I am more likely to live to 90 than I am to ever buy from you (and trust me when I say I am getting nowhere close)) and…fcuk, it’s really not worth it, but there is something SO funny about how…totally sh1t it is, just ugly and clunky and stupid and, weirdly, cheap-feeling, like a sort of knock-off version of Cluedo you might find on a shonky Chinese site c.2009, but with AI! You play a detective trying to work out who’s stolen…something, and can gather clues by ‘interrogating’ various suspects – all of them have Italian nicknames connoting their supposed personalities, including one called, beautifully, ‘Incazzata’ (for those unfamiliar, this means ‘p1ssed off’), and another called ‘Il Pesantone’ (the buzzkill, basically) – via the medium of clunky AI chat…God, this is SO BAD but I kind of want you all to give it a go so you can see exactly in which specific ways. Aside from anything else, while I don’t personally have an issue with AI being used per se, here I really do because if anyone can afford to pay real artists and writers, etc, it’s these useless luxury clotheshorse cnuts.
- Analysing The Guardian Books List: A big discourse driver over the past week – at least in my corners of the web – was the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels EVER (The Guardian appears to have alighted on ‘lists’ as the way in which it’s going to save journalism and, well, fcuk it, nothing else seems to be working!), which was imho not that interesting but which was trad enough to elicit a whole round of DISCOURSE about snobbery and gatekeeping and whether anyone ACTUALLY likes 18th and 19thC literature that much. Anyway, this is a really interesting bit of datawork by Chris Warren, analysing both the picks and also the individual lists of the writers and artists and others that they polled to come up with the final selection; if nothing else this is a really good way of exploring the world of books that *didn’t* make the final list, and seeing which ones didn’t make the cut, and there’s something really fun about going through all the titles that only received one nomination, books that are someone’s special text but NOONE ELSE’S. BONUS ANALYSIS: Matthew Aldridge also did his own more textual analysis which is a nice companion to the above (and slightly easier to parse if you’re a less visual person).
- The Artemis II Photo Timeline: Via Giuseppe, this is a nice way of viewing pics taken of the recent lunar mission, letting you scrub along a timeline to get a sense of the experience over the trip’s duration. I am a miserable, cynical disaster of a human being, but even I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of awe and…ok, not quite this, but ALMOST a sense of speciespride.
- The AI Resist List: On reflection, if you’re the sort of person who feels that the world needs a repository of resources and ideas and MOVEMENTS dedicated to fighting AI at every stage then it’s also likely that you stopped reading Curios a while back in disgust at my failure to adopt a ‘burn it all down’ approach to the tech (SORRY! But, also, you’re not here any more so fcuk knows why I’m apologising). BUT! If any of you remain then you will find this potentially useful and inspiring – it’s a website acting as a directory of ideas and initiatives which can broadly be characterised as ‘anti-AI’, although, in fairness, it’s less black-and-white than I might initially have assumed: “Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally. Inspired by Choose Democracy’s Resist List against authoritarianism, we organized the AI resistance movements we documented based on how they pressure different “Pillars of Support” that uphold and perpetuate the empires.Our list is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather we selected a sample of movements to show different approaches to resistance and to illustrate how anyone can help shape the future of AI development.” I think the idea of ‘shaping AI development’ is an important one, and why it’s equally important that people who have (entirely-justified and sensible) reservations about the tech’s current trajectory engage with it rather than just pointing and shouting at it in disgust – this covers all sorts of things, from ideas for ‘resistance’ to tools helping you identify the financial networks underpinning the current boom/bubble, to initiatives seeking to give voices to communities underrepresented in the LLM discourse…this is, generally, A Good Thing I think.
- Nearest Pint: A map by Steven Feldman which shows the density of pubs in the UK by political constituency, which is obviously a tool for the pub industry but which also feels like something SUPER-useful for all sorts of different types of advermarketingpr-type planning/campaign management stuff. I am now toying with the idea of learning how to drive and setting up a pint delivery service in East Renfrewshire.
- Totei: A new arts magazine! I continue to be bullish about ‘magazines’ as a thing in the coming few years, and I am going to take the emergence of Totei (a new publication broadly centred on ‘the arts’, founded by ex-Pitchfork hacks amongst others) as another datapoint to prove I AM RIGHT. Anyway, this is NEW and so a bit thin in terms of content, but its pedigree is good and the site looks nice and in general I am very pro there being more spaces in which to find writing about artists and their work – although if I were to be critical (AND WHY SHOULD I NOT BE) then I might argue that a lot of the stuff in what I think is its debut edition is a bit…safe. Like, I like Holly Herndon, but I think if you’re someone who’s in the market for a mag like this then it’s also quite likely that you probably don’t need to read another interview with Holly Herndon. Regardless, worth keeping an eye on if ‘the arts’ are your thing (what are you, some sort of PHILISTINE???).
- Bird TV: Via Kris, click a pixel bird and watch it on the small pixel telly, while listening to the sound of its song. This is, weirdly, very lovely indeed, and despite the fact that it’s basically like some sort of 8-bit, Fisher Price ornithology project there’s something utterly charming about its vibe.
- The Strategy and Planning Scrapbook: Occasionally I like to remind myself of Web Curios’ origins as a CORPORATE NEWSLETTER IN ADVERMARKETINGPRLAND (it was never that, whatever I might have told my paymasters) – this link is to a collection of strategy frameworks and planning tools collected and compiled by Alex Morris, who’s been running the Strat Scraps newsletter for…fcuk knows, years. If you’re in the market for WAYS OF THINKING, or if you need to impress a moronic client with WORDS IN TRIANGLES then WOW is this going to be a goldmine for you (I am being unfair here – there’s nothing inherently stupid about strategy per se (although there is a LOT stupid about how it’s executed in the majority of agencies imho), but I maintain that thinking does not magically become better or smarter just because it’s shoehorned into a PROPRIETARY METHODOLOGY or onto three fcuking slides). BONUS STRATEGY THING FROM ALEX MORRIS: “A curated collection of strategic wisdom, provocative insights, and visual inspiration gathered from the edges of culture and commerce. Click generate to spark your next breakthrough.”
- Arena Personals: Ooh, I like this – sort of like Craigslist, but for the creative scrapbooking community site Are.na. Personal ads and requests for collaboration and requests for community and connection, I really enjoy this idea and think that there’s something quite cool about this sort of low-friction shop window which more communities could probably consider adopting. This is very slow-moving – the latest entry is from three weeks ago – but I love that it exists.
- Massive Bloom: Would you like to experience a website through which you can make SUSTAINED, ATONAL DRONING SOUNDS??? Don’t lie to me, of COURSE you fcuking would! This is by one Kyle Johnston, and I have to admit that while I was joking about anyone ACTUALLY wanting the ability to create in-browser infinite droning sounds, I have just had this playing in another tab while writing this and briefly entered into some sort of aurally-induced fugue state so, er, this is actually great and I am going to be giving myself a drone bath every day from hereon in.
- URL Town: A town! Made of links! Or, more accurately, a lovingly-curated and maintained LIBRARY OF LINKS! “Web directories are as old as the web. They were an early (and for a while, the only) solution to the challenge of collecting and discovering interesting and useful links. Before search engines, this was how we found cool stuff online. Time passed, and this approach to finding things faded. But at this particular point in time, with a rising interest in cultivating a truly open and social web, the mighty web directory may once again see some relevance and usefulness. Spaces where people are in full control over what is shared (and how it’s shared) are exceptionally important now, and this aims to be one of them. url.town doesn’t have any overly lofty ambitions; we’re just building our own directory of really nice websites. We’re not trying to fully recreate the original Yahoo! or DMOZ directories. We’re not aiming for some astronomical number of links. This is just one space on the web, tied to a community that loves to share neat things with one another. Quality matters much more than quantity. There’s no need to share everything just for the shake of sharing it; it’s much better to share things that are useful or interesting.” Given that search is about to be fcuked in half (THANKS GOOGLE! THANKS!), it does rather feel that resources such as this are going to become increasingly important for the preservation and discovery of much of the fringe-y internet.
- All Of The Manuals: Christ alive, I do adore people’s weird obsessions. To whit, “Just a little over ten years ago, I was notified about a big warehouse of manuals that was going to be discarded in a few days. Bursting with energy, I drove down, discussed things with the owner, and, soliciting and ringing a very loud bell, assembled dozens of people and tens of thousands of dollars over the course of saving this collection from being discarded. Naturally, the next step would simply be to digitize them all. That took longer. As of a short time ago, a collection of 13,000 manuals now lives on the Internet Archive. It is, essentially, all the manuals that will be digitized or could be digitized.” WE ARE STRANGE AND REMARKABLE CREATURES, MY GOD!. The main link takes you to all the manuals on the Internet Archive, but you can read more about the project here – I, er, can’t pretend that this is exactly MY THING, but it’s not inconceivable that your Special Interest (I SEE YOU, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LIKE) encompasses, er, documentation associated with old and largely-obsolete technologies, and if that is the case then my God that is your weekend absolutely sorted.
- My Name Is Kirsty: My name, for the avoidance of doubt, is not in fact Kirsty (but, honestly, given Current Economic Circumstances, if you would like it to be then I am sure we can reach some sort of happy accommodation) – but this website belongs to someone whose name very much is, a Kirsty who in 2024 was diagnosed with a brain tumour at a young age and who is now trying to raise money for research into brain cancer treatment and to connect with other Kirstys all around the world. Which, you know, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by, and while this isn’t really Curios’ sort of vibe, generally-speaking, I was obviously feeling a bit emo earlier this week when I found this link and so in it goes. If you’re a Kirsty do the kid a favour and sign up.
- Inobara: If you’re someone who collects links and then has no fcuking idea what to do with them (PROTIP: do not start an internet newsletter, it is a waste of fcuking time and will consume your entire life and become your entire personality) then this minimal ‘save link, read later’-type app might be of interest; a chrome extension and a plugin for your phone, this is lightweight and just does what you need it to as far as I can tell.
- Meditype: A READER WRITES! Mazen dropped me an email this week with a link to this, which he’s spun up using (as far as I can tell) Claude and a bunch of public domain texts, and which he introduced as follows: “It’s a browser typing app for public-domain books — Meditations, Walden, Tao Te Ching, Rumi, about 24 titles — with ambient sounds and absolutely zero stats. No WPM, no streaks, no accuracy percent. You pick a book, pick rain or fireplace or silence, and just type.” As far as simple typing trainers work, this is nice and easy and has the added bonus of helping you finally read Kierkegaard like you always said you would (poor, sad Soren).
- Britain’s Favourite Butterfly: Despite the fact it increasingly feels like the answer should be ‘whatever’s left alive after a century or so of fcuking the natural environment’, it appears that butterflies are in rude enough health in the UK that we can run a contest for everyone to pick their favourite. EXERCISE YOUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHT!! There’s also a BEAUTIFULLY-SH1T ‘Which Butterfly Are You?” quiz which really is utterly phoned-in and which inexplicably uses lots of images and gifs of US celebrities to illustrate its questions (BRITISH BUTTERFLIES FFS DO NOT SHOW ME JIMMY KIMMEL) but which just told me confidently that I am ‘90%’ like a Small Health butterfly so, well, that’s nice.
- OnlyCats: An infinitely-scrolling feed of cat pictures. No idea where the cats are from, no idea who made this, no idea why – smoothbrained, just like the cats themselves.
- Flash Games of the Cartoon Network: This is very much Not My Childhood, but if you’re someone who grew up being babysat by the Cartoon Network and was maybe of an age when playing tie-in games on the family computer was a regular dopamine hit then OH MY WORD will this Proust you right in the nostalgias (on reflection an all-time horrible phrase, sincere apologies). PowerPuff Girls! Animated Batman! Ben10! Loads of other stuff I have never heard of! I imagine all the games here are awful unless you have that aforementioned nostalgic connection, but I figure there might be a couple of you for whom this will be a portal back to Simpler, Better Times. Also, slightly amazed that a Scooby Do tie-in minigame called “Ask Swami Shaggy” was acceptable, but I suppose 2002 was A Different Time.
- TinyWorld: Make a, er, TINY WORLD! Simple but cute little world builder – drop buildings, paths, plants and construct your own little cutesy village as some sort of psychic bulwark against the grey concrete reality of your urban existence (I know that some of you read Curios in lovely country pubs – well, I know at least one of you does – but I imagine the other three of you scrolling greyly in some sort of Gibsonian urban hellscape because…hm, again, don’t want to interrogate that too much, probably not going to). As is often the case with this stuff, it’s pretty laptop-intensive so maybe don’t open ALL the other tabs in Curios while playing this.
- Hollowlands: Via the excellent Things I Think Are Awesome by Lynn (as in fact the last link was too I think), this is a technically AMAZING but, sadly…really quite dull knockoff of Zelda, playable in your browser. Wander your Definitely Not Link through verdant fields and icy mountainscapes! Pick up sticks! Cut down trees! Beat a pig to death! This is SO impressive but I have no fcuking clue what exactly you are meant to be doing in what amounts to a pretty, polished tech demo. Still, LOVELY grasslands.
- Cryomancer: A fun little puzzler which starts simple and then quite quickly gets chewy quite fast – I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, and found myself playing all the way to the point where…er…I got stuck and flounced away from the laptop in frustrated pique.
- All Of The CityBuilding And Simulation Browser Toys: Ok, fine, so the link’s actual title is ‘Microcosm Industries’, but while that might be elegant it doesn’t tell you what the fcuk this is and so mine is, objectively, better. This is SUCH A GREAT RESOURCE put together by Samuel Arbesman, collecting links to a whole host of citybuilders, sandboxes (occasionally literal) and other games that let you play God Builder to a greater or lesser degree – many of them have been featured in Curios over the years but many haven’t and, look, it contains a link to an in-browser version of Sim City 2000 which should be enough to have you clicking like a b4stard. THANKYOU SAMUEL ARBESMAN, YOU HAVE DONE A BEAUTIFUL THING.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS EMPTY!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- David Solomons: Via former editor Paul, David SOlomons is a photographer who snapped a lot of London in the 90s – pubs and the tube and just General Everyday Life and, look, obviously this is timetravel catnip to me what with being Of An Age, but there’s something objectively wonderful about looking back at this era because, in a way, it still feels…modern, or at least not quite as old as the 60s felt from the 90s, and as such there’s a relatability to the clothes and the general vibe (if you leave aside the fact that everyone’s got a fag in their hand and there are no phones, but).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Christian White Supremacism: It’s often hard to look at images of thousands of people marching through central London and shouting about how they ‘want their country back’ while draped in the now-actually-probably-a-bit-racist-again (going to be some interesting tensions around the politics of flag use during the World Cup, imho) and gurning their t1ts off on pubgak and think ‘yes, but what are the POSITIVES?’ – this time around, at least last weekend’s ‘Unite The Kingdom’ march was smaller than last year’s, and less obviously aggressive (one might reasonably argue that the drop in numbers could be attributed to the fact that a lot of the sorts of people who might otherwise have been motivated to do so can quite reasonably point to various local election results and say ‘we’re probably winning, on balance’ and think they could stay at home, but, well, let’s not dwell). Still, though, it happened, and the very obvious (if risible) performative Christianity on display was the hook for this very good piece in the Byline Times looking at the increased use of ‘Christian’ as a coded term for ‘we hate Islam’ and, at its fringes, ‘also basically any other brown people, even if they are Christian too’. This is an incredibly depressing piece of data analysis on posts by ‘Tommy Robinson’ and the extent to which this horrible little cokeweasel is using ‘Western values’ and ‘traditional, Christian Britain’ as not-very-subtle means of injecting quite a lot of actual, outright racism into The Discourse: “The investigation analysed a non-exhaustive corps of more than 140 posts on Robinson’s @TRobinsonNewEra X account between January 2024 and May 2026 which were found to have used coded, racially-charged language. The vocabulary works through consistent substitution. “Native” stands for white people – a substitution Robinson confirms himself in a keystone June 2024 post defining “native” as “white”. “Invader” is ascribed exclusively to non-white populations, 43 times in the sample. “Modern London” refers in derogatory fashion to footage of non-white people in British public space. “African” appears as a racial proxy paired with crime across its eight uses. “Somali” targets a population that is both black and Muslim, fusing both race and religion in a single term. And “Remigration” – the white nationalist programme for the removal of non-white citizens from European countries – is repeatedly recommended as the policy solution.“
- Fertility: As a man who is personally very grateful to be immensely sterile I am not going to be doing ANYTHING to address the global fertility crisis, and, honestly, I can’t really bring myself to care that much – sorry, but, well, a) I’ll be dead, give a fcuk; and b) I’m not wholly sure that we’re a net good, overall. BUT! I am conscious of the fact that it is Very Much A Thing right now to talk about birthrates and population, and so this discussion between Derek Thompson and University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde was interesting to me – it’s coming from a broadly-liberal perspective but does do a reasonable amount of ‘the graphs look bad!’ scaremongering, and I have to say that (and look, I am aware that the following might make me sound a bit like the sort of tryhard cnut who wore ‘this is what a feminist looks like!’ tshirt c.2016, but, equally, it’s true) reading a several-thousand-word debate about ‘why aren’t people across the world having more children and what can be done about it?’ between two men, and one which doesn’t once mention THE COST OF FCUKING CHILDCARE as a not-insignificant determinant factor in this trend across much of the developed world, feels…not good. Still, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the numbers, if extrapolated (although we all know that extrapolating often leads to dumb predictions), look…quite bad for our continued ability to maintain ALL THIS STUFF. Which, on reflection, may end up being a boon. Again, though, I’ll be long dead before this stuff shakes out, so, on balance, wevs.
- Too Much Is Happening Too Fast: There were a few essays this week which I read touching upon the AI backlash and specifically riffing off the various people getting booed on campus for mentioning AI during their speeches – this piece by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic doesn’t touch on that specific thing, but it’s very much of a piece with the others in characterising the antipathy towards the tech from a swathe of people in the West as being driven not solely by anti-tech sentiment but more broadly by a sense of constant, multimodal upheaval which is happening fast and everywhere and over which we have no control whatsoever. As the piece notes, in three years we have gone from ‘ooh, look, The Machine can write words!’ to ‘The Machine is now inserted into everything and is going to make you unemployed while also making it exponentially easier for bad actors to defraud you, the state to surveil you, grifters to lie to you, scammers to dupe you and, generally, modernity to fcuk you, all the while eroding entirely your ability to determine what, and who, is real. Oh, and there’s a not-unreasonable chance that it’s killing the planet (faster) too’. Objectively speaking – and I say this as someone who is less anti than many – this is a lot! A lot! I do personally think that we should probably start acknowledging what I am fairly certain is an underlying truth amongst the political class right now – to whit, that the reason everyone has such a fcuking hardon for AI right now in politics is that ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS SEEM INTRACTABLE AND NOONE KNOWS HOW TO FIX THEM, and, very specifically, everyone who knows knows that the climate thing is pretty much cooked now unless we can magic up some sort of science-based miracle from thin air and The Machine is literally our last throw of the dice, and so they are all in on it because they do sort of believe that, well, it’s AI or bust. So, er, that’s nice!
- Clipping, Again: It’s been interesting watching the ‘clipping’ discourse bubble and evolve over the past month, and pretty much none of the big outlets writing about it acknowledge the fact that it’s a phenomenon that has been observed and chronicled by a lot of excellent, non-traditional reporters over the past year long before it was on the radar of, say, the NYT. Still, I thought this Vulture article was a good overview, and makes the deeper point that this is possible because noone has any idea how much anything is really being viewed anymore, anywhere – all metrics are fake, everything is juiced by bots and AI, and so there’s no real baseline for finding out what is ‘really’ popular.
- Are Prediction Markets Good For Anything?: I mean, obviously there are SOME things – enriching extended members of the Trumpian Mafia, for example – but is there any practical benefit in the whole ‘wisdom of crowds’ thing unlocked by Polymarket, Kalshi et al? Dan Schwarz takes a look at the data underlying the markets, and shows that, basically, no, they’re not particularly good predictive tools, despite what the platforms want to tell you and what their partnerships with Substack et al like to point to: “By accelerating the adoption of probabilities by mainstream media, prediction markets help build common knowledge. It is conceivable that having large sums of money changing hands will make the markets increasingly newsworthy, and attract the attention of people who benefit from the predictions who would not have thought to ask Claude for advice on those topics. I think most decisions by individuals, organizations, and governments are built around norms and social consensus, and highly visible prediction markets could influence people more than private conversations with chatbots. This, to me, is the most likely path towards the realization of the value of prediction markets: large amounts of betting leads to more mainstream media coverage of prediction markets, normalizing their use in workplace discussions, and ultimately decision making processes.” Is this…good? It doesn’t feel good!
- Bluesky Is A Record Store: I promise you that I am not going to keep including links to people wanging on about THE FUTURE OF BLUESKY because I can’t imagine any of you care that much and I really don’t either. BUT! I enjoyed this piece by Dave Karpf on why it and other textual networks aren’t popular any more, and the analogy he draws with record shops struck me as a solid one: “Record stores still exist in 2026. Some of them even thrive. People like me like record stores. They remain active, niche cultural institutions. But they are distinctly different entities than they were in their heyday. They have a smaller footprint, and they operate within those limitations. The same is true for text-based social media platforms. The era of peak social media is over. Twitter and Facebook used to be the “attention backbone” of the entire internet. (Ben Smith’s book, Traffic, is probably the best discussion of how media worked in this time period.) People like me also like Bluesky. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that people who like record stores all pretty much like Bluesky. And that’s probably the right frame of mind for thinking about text-based social media in general. It isn’t a dominant media institution anymore. It’s niche. It has some cultural cachet, but you will be disappointed if you expect it to recapture the glory days. The mid-2020s is an awkward time to have launched a text-based social media network, in much the same way that it is an awkward time to open up a new record store. This isn’t exactly the future anymore, y’know?”
- The Commonwealth Prize AI Thing: I am going to assume that you have been aware of the minor furore around several prizewinners of this year’s Commonwealth Prize for short stories being suspected of being (entirely or in-part) AI-generated – if not, Sam Leith does a good job of explaining it here, and then going through What It Means. The main takeaway here is, muchlike the 404 Media piece from the other week, WE SIMPLY CAN’T RELIABLY TELL ANYMORE (there’s a non-trivial chance that The Serpent In The Grove, the one most discussed as being the work of The Machine, is just bad human writing) – AI detectors, while less-bullsh1t than they used to be, are still far from 100% accurate, and meanwhile we’re now (or at least I am) approaching every new text I read online with a slightly defensive posture, waiting to have the horrid taste of AI prose assault my, er, mental tastebuds (see? This is ACTUAL HUMAN WRITING, A MACHINE COULD NEVER, etcetc). As Sam writes, “this problem isn’t going to go away. ‘Robust’ judging processes still rely on critics, and very few fiction critics are any good at all. Only a tiny handful are excellent. Lots of people make careers in the literary world without being able to tell a good bit of writing from a bad one, still less to articulate the difference. They can, rather, recognise the kind of material that that they’ve been told by the ambient culture of the day passes as literary prose – and when they see it, they applaud it in vague and formulaic terms. Pulsing with quiet authority. That sort of thing. AI is very good at producing, at scale, exactly the sort of stuff that such critics will affect to like. It produces, when you ask it to, material with the superficial texture of literary writing: portentous cadences, look-at-me adjectives, solemnly poetic similes, the sort of thing that people produce when they’re trying to produce ‘fine writing’. But producing bad fine writing is what bad literary writers have been doing for ages and what bad literary critics have been applauding for ages too.”
- Pangram: Speaking of AI detection software, the current ‘best-in-class’ is called Pangram – this is an interview with the CEO, which I thought was interesting in terms of his thoughts on what is and isn’t possible in terms of detection, his admissions of the tool’s fallibility and his general thoughts on Where We Are Going with AI content. As he points out, there is (sadly, but accurately) no going back, so we need to ensure that we are from hereon in making sure we can spot this stuff because otherwise everything really is going to get very (more) screwy very soon.
- The Vibecoding Revolution: Or ‘how the ability to spin up software near-instantly that almost sort of works is going to present us with some really annoying problems down the line, and how actually this stuff is quite annoying to get working anyway’. A bonus piece on the same (ish) topic here, all about how Google’s newly-announced AI tools let you spin up apps within literally seconds which, again, RIP the Google Play Store as all sorts of ‘enterprising’ young people decide that they can make a quick buck by flooding the zone with their useless, janky software. OH GOD THE NEAR FUTURE IS GOING TO BE FCUKING EXHAUSTING.
- How Do Solar Panels Work?: This website is new to me, but Per ThirtySix is, as far as I can tell, a Pudding-ish data exploration and viz outfit; this is a BRILLIANT interactive explainer which talks you through how solar panels work – honestly, this is simple and clear enough that even someone like me, who noped out of the sciences early on account of being terrified of both calculus and terms such as ‘valency’, was able to (just) get their heads round it. Honestly, this is so nicely done, and all the little interactive graphical elements really do add to the explanations.
- The Mothers Looksmaxxing Their Babies: On the one hand, this is very much the sort of headline that has been willed into being by the mainstream media’s brief Clavicular obsession back in February; on the other, this is actually a good piece of digital reporting by Lily Isaacs in the Dispatch, reporting from inside what is basically a massively-grifty subscription/community scam (because, fundamentally, THAT IS WHAT 70% OF THE WEB IS IN 2026) being run by some English kid and his mum, peddling spurious advice to mothers about how to ensure their spawn are beautiful enough to enjoy all the benefits that pretty privilege confers. As is often the case with this stuff, this is perhaps less about ‘looksmaxxing’ than it initially appears, and is far more about people exploiting the ignorant and the lonely, who are in turn desperate for any small marginal advantage that they can accrue for themselves or their families in a world that increasingly seems entirely beyond their control or even comprehension.
- Tourists Being D1cks In Japan: Stories of tourists being objectionable aren’t exactly hard to come by, but the particular strain of d1ckishness identified in this piece – specifically, the strain which accompanies the desire to CREATE CONTENT – feels like something particularly pointy and timely. It’s a type of behaviour visible wherever you go – from the crowds of tourists that now clog Soho standing stock still outside this week’s TikTok-viral bakery/pizzahole to film the oh-so-vital viral shellcrack/cheesepull, to the slow creep to ubiquity of a physical aesthetic designed specifically to be appreciated via screen – and I think it is worth commenting on because YOU ARE NOT A FCUKING STAR AND THE WORLD IS NOT YOUR FCUKING STAGE SET. Ahem.
- Post-OnlyFans: I thought this was an interesting article on an interesting phenomenon – what happens when a camgirl or boy wants to put down the lube and get off stream? It’s going to be an increasingly common question given the boom in OnlyFans creators over the past few years, a trend that, let’s be honest, isn’t likely to reverse anytime soon given the current and future shape of the jobs market and the fact that, on some level, we’re all going to be w4nking for pennies soon anyway, and we’re probably going to have to work out some slightly-amended social mores when one in six people have ‘showing my mucous membranes to strangers on camera’ on their CV (no shade, to be clear, were I less of a hideous mess to look at I would 100% be funneling you into Curios After Dark).
- The Most Amazing Piece Of Audience Pandering I Have Ever Read: Ok, this is an article in Playboy, it’s about sex, and I like to think that if you were asked to write an article designed SPECIFICALLY to make ‘the sort of men who might be likely to read Playboy’ feel good about themselves then you would probably come pretty close to the premise/headline of this piece. Are you imagining your headline? Right, now CLICK! How close did you get? Anyway, look, I am not a woman and so have no particular skin in this game, but, also, lol.
- A Machine For Walking: My friend John wrote this LIGHTLY SATIRICAL short story – I enjoyed it, and those of you who hate AI will almost certainly be sharing it with everyone you know.
- Clowning Isn’t Just Honk Honk: Honestly, I think I might remember that phrase until my dying day. I might see if I can recall it at the end of my life, because WHAT a set of words to have as your last. Imagine, you beckon the nurse closer as you get set to push the plunger on the lethal injection, you indicate that you have some deep wisdom to impart, you move your cracked lips close to her ear as she draws near and you whisper with your final words “clowning…isn’t…just…honk…honk”. SCENE, curtain, flowers. Wonderful. Anyway, my morbid little thanatophilic musings aside, this is a wonderful and very funny piece about the clowning scene in LA – I felt a bit smug on reading this as my friend Alex turned me onto Natalie Palamides about 6 years ago and I have seen everything she has done since, but WOW does almost every other performance described in this piece make me want grate my own shins in awkward discomfort. I think it’s fair to say that there’s a slight touch of ‘Christ, Los Angeles’ about this.
- The Beer Glasses of Hanoi: YOu may not think that a longread about the handmade glasses produced to accompany a specific beer manufactured in Hanoi would be interesting, but you would be WRONG – honestly, I think this was my biggest surprise of the week, a genuinely fascinating, warm and very human piece of writing that taught me so much more about Vietnamese history, drinking culture and society than I expected it to. This really is excellent.
- The Sneeze: As a result of basically immolating all my bridges to agencyland by basically spending a decade or so telling everyone who employed me that they were idiots (turns out, this DOES have an effect in the end!), I now mainly earn my living as a ‘journalist’ – except I’m really not a journalist, not in any sense that I find meaningful, and it always feels faintly embarrassing using the word because, honestly, I haven’t earned the title. At best, I type. Anyway, those feelings of intense professional inadequacy were exacerbated by this amazing piece, by Abraham Jiménez Enoa, all about setting up an independent magazine (the country’s first) in Cuba. Funny, interesting and just wholly impressive, the drive and determination displayed by Enoa in the face of…not-insignificant challenges (financial, logistical and of course political), this is INSPIRING (and I never, ever say that).
- Borat’s Village: Another link to the Dispatch (they’re not paying me, but if you want to discuss a sponsorship Jacob then, you know, let’s!), this time to a piece in which Miles Ellingham goes to Kazakhstan and visits the village of Glod, made infamous through its use in Sacha Baron-Cohen’s ‘Borat’ where it formed the backdrop to the titular character’s origin story and in which the residents were, unbeknownst to them, portrayed as inbred racist antisemites for the amusement of a global audience of millions and the personal enrichment of one Sacha Baron-Cohen for LOTS of millions. This is a really nicely-drawn piece, sensitive without being patronising, and while I hate using phrases like ‘quiet dignity’ about stuff like this because, well, that *is* patronising, it’s vaguely in that ballpark.
- You Have Never Heard of The Greatest YouTuber of All Time: I adored this post from Sam Bodrojan’s newsletter, all about the YouTube channel of one Kati Kelli, a young woman who made strange little YouTube performances – skits and puppetshows and odd little vignettes – to an audience of basically noone, and who died some years ago, and whose work is, as I realised when I fell down a rabbithole last night, weird and beautiful and strange and unsettling and like the best sort of outsider art, basically. “The channel is vlogger camp, reminiscent of Ryan Trecartin, Cecelia Condit, and “A Shout Out From Tara and Raven.” All of her videos are scored to the kind of music you’d hear in a mid-budget JRPG. Predating the Capcut templates that codified the language of “weird” digital art, Kati Kelli’s editing is maximalist and polyrhythmic. Her face balloons into rounded pixels unexpectedly. Misspelled phrases flicker and spin in default typefaces. She is one of the few artists to approach 2010s Youtube aesthetics as a worthy canvas. Her choice of camera – whether she’s using a budget RED model or the lens on the back of an iPhone – is a deliberate and necessary texture of the work. When she makes ASMR, even as a joke, it’s good ASMR. I hold so tenderly the knowledge that someone else was paying attention.”
- Down II Clown: Not, in fact, more clowns. Instead, a surprisingly affecting post by owner of London restaurant Mangal II about how it currently feels being him. This really is good, I promise you: “We live in the information, digital age and we move with the times. But it is exhausting. Every time I’m on my Instagram feed, it’s another dozen restaurants desperately trying to fill the space and get covers in with some new information or another. My own restaurant is not immune to this either. If a week passes with no news or updates, bookings slow down. It feels like we’re all contestants on Britain’s Got Talent, performing circus acts walking the tightrope of doom, not looking down to witness the abyss of the industry. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed camera-shy chef friends make reels, PR-hungry associates document every facet of their cooking lives almost daily, and an endless stream of £15 lunch offers regardless of whether they’re high-end restaurants or casual spots. Viewers have more inside-access than ever and they’re hungry for more content. Fallow Restaurant’s peek into their dish creations have millions of views on YouTube. That is to say, over a million individuals will have watched how they make a burger. That’s the population of Iceland times three. That’s Elon Musk’s children times ten. We’ve had to become entertainers, where the food and the service and the trust of word-of-mouth is simply not enough. Where does it end?” I MEAN, FCUKING AMEN.
- Confessions of a Gasoline Huffer: Finally this week, this piece is from 2008 but it was a pleasure to discover it 18 years later. Brendan Kiley reminisces about the summer he got high by huffing petrol – this is WONDERFUL, and I say that as someone whose own personal history with solvents amounts to some very disappointing experiments with glue c.15. “At some point that summer, I was at a typically druggy high-school party, with beer in the kitchen, cigarettes on the lawn, and a bunch of people sitting in a circle in the bedroom with a lava lamp, passing around a pot pipe. The house belonged to a waitress from Spokane and an aspiring acid dealer. These weren’t really my friends, but I was happy to be included. Next to me on the couch was Jim, who had studs in his jacket and played guitar in a Bainbridge Island band and was on the high-school debate team. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what, so I asked if he had ever huffed gasoline. His laugh said: Oh yeah—gasoline. My old friend. I told him about the secret walks into the woods, the hallucinations—everything except the Rosebush Fairy. That was too embarrassing. “How could a drug be that powerful?” I asked. “Like I’m right out of my head?” “Um,” he said, “it makes cars go.”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!