Thanks to The Horror Of The News I could do another opening thing about how fcuking sh1t it is that everyone is a racist now. BUT I AM NOT GOING TO DO THAT BECAUSE….
Nominations are open for The Tiny Awards 2026!
Once again Kris, Matt and I are running our small annual awards ceremony to find, and reward, the best of the small, non-commercial, independent web – this is the fourth year now, which is frankly mental and we are hugely grateful to everyone who’s shown interest in previous editions and once again this year. We launched on Monday and we’ve already had over 100 nominated websites which is AMAZING – but WE WANT MORE. MORE WEBSITES. FEED US YOUR PROJECTS (or those that you think are ace which you didn’t make but you think deserve to win a very small prize and a handmade trophy)!
Nominations are open for the month of June, so PLEASE TELL THE WORLD – as with every year, the point of this is to help surface and celebrate all the brilliant things that people make online for the love of it and which are increasingly being drowned out by the death of social media and the fact that everything is basically intent on being FCUKING VIDEO on 2026. NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SOCIAL MEDIA AND NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE VIDEO, OTHER INTERNETS ARE AVAILABLE. So, er, share the link far and wide, post it everywhere you can still post links, WRITE ABOUT IT, tell everyone, because I still love the web and think it’s ace and things like this help me maintain that belief for one year longer which is the least you can do really in exchange for all of the links and words. Seem fair? Good!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you love the web too, I know you do, so prove it you fcuk.
By Jess Allen
FIRST UP THIS WEEK WHY NOT ENJOY AN HOUR OF VAGUELY HOUSE-Y BEATS MIXED BY MY OLD FRIEND NICK?
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK THAT THE RACIST APARTHEID TOAD SHOULD BECOME A TRILLIONAIRE IF WE CAN AT ALL AVOID IT, PT.1:
- We Were Online: We begin this week with some ART, and a project which I honestly think would make EVERYTHING A TINY BIT BETTER if you were all to sign up to it and participate (exactly how it would do that is, fine, unclear, but I have only been awake for an hour and, look, you can’t expect detail at this sort of time in the morning). We Were Online is a new project by Curios favourite Spencer Chang, and, put simply, it’s a Chrome extension which anyone can install and which offers the opportunity to change the web from an environment experienced in solitude to one in which the traces and steps and signs of others’ online lives are visible, tangible and impactful. “Yes Matt,” I hear you cry, “that sounds lovely but also what the fcuk does that practically mean?” – ok, fine, it means this, per Spencer’s own words: “One of my favorite things about walking around in the real world is the causal sharing of space with other people. We share a look when something funny happens or help out when a stranger trips. Sometimes these spontaneous encounters become meaningful encounters that stay with us. The Internet has none of this. Online, we’re forced to perform or consume. We have all this life around us on the web, but we can’t feel it.we were online is an online multiplayer world—part game, artwork, and tool—that turns the existing Internet into a living, shared world, actively shaped by its inhabitants. Built on playhtml, an open-source library for creating shared experiences, the game is designed to be customized and extended by its players. Individual websites can create interactions that respond to live events on other websites and change behavior depending on a user’s history and personality. Isolated browsing becomes the site of serendipitous encounters as everything becomes material for connection. Assets, buttons, and other components can be created, grown, moved, taken, and gifted. Pages show wear as people pass through and use them. Cursors become digital appendages for bumping into others.” ISN’T THAT BEAUTIFUL??? OK, so this is very much an experimental idea at present and the degree to which it becomes interesting will in-part depend on the number of people who sign up,, but the idea of websites that react and change based on people’s usage of them, creating responsive digital environments that are shaped by those navigating them rather than the other way round, is SO pleasing to me, and I would like you all to install this so that we can share the tracks and traces of our journeys across the web please.
- CrankGPT: Fine, this is a joke but it’s a surprisingly-full-featured one and, having now spent a bit of time looking at this and reading about it, I now quite want a mechanically-powered LLM in a box. CrankGPT is, er, exactly that – a mechanically-powered LLM in a box, an AI powered by a hand crank which you wind to give it enough juice to answer your questions.It’s theoretically a real thing; if you scroll to the bottom and click the Github link (and I know that’s what you all LOVE to do) you can read the technical specs behind the project, which is running llama on a Raspberry Pi and which is, honestly, kind of amazing in terms of the sort of kit you can run an actual, functional LLM on. Is this in any way practically useful? Not at all! It did, though, make me think – again, for about the nine millionth time – that there’s something really interesting and kind-of magical about the intersection of physicality and AI like this, and that I still really like the idea of chucking this tech into a sort-of fairground setting, embedding it in furniture and cupboards and mirrors and other places for a narrative surprise-and-delight-type experience. Or maybe it would be sh1t, what the fcuk do I know?
- World Vs Model: It’s the WorldCup (an event which in my head is always said in the weird staccato Scandinavian that Sven Goran Erikssen spoke in, RIP)! Are you sweaty and swell-headed with FOOTBALL FEVER? No, me neither; a combination of Italy’s now-traditional absence from a top-level footballing event, the whole ‘other side of the planet, being used to reputation launder a hateful regime’ thing, and the terrible prospect that This Might At Last Be England’s Year (please God no) means that I am only vaguely aware that there is a BIG SPORT on the go as of last night. BUT! You might well be in the grip of a month-long bout of TOURNAMENT PSYCHOSIS, and as such might be interested in this project by Marcus Liew, who’s basically running a pair of LLMs against the markets to see whether the wisdom of crowds or the non-wisdom of really big, complicated maths comes out on top when it comes to predicting the outcome of the tournament. Effectively this is comparing the viewpoints of a model that ‘knows’ football, a model that is just looking at price structures, and a bunch of different prediction markets and seeing which ends up being the best determinant of Who Wins What – which is a broadly-interesting way of benchmarking the ability of (non-frontier) models to do probabilistic analysis. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE BETS ON WHAT THE MACHINE TELLS YOU (I feel it important to make these caveats, though obviously you’re free to do what the fcuk you like – and, er, if you do happen to win big on an LLM-led acca then do feel free to share your luck with your favourite newsletter writer (NOT THEM, ME!)).
- Mechanical Pencil: I know, the title alone is exciting enough to cause tumescence – but IT’S NOT JUST A SITE ABOUT MECHANICAL PENCILS! No! It’s about ENGINEERING IN GENERAL! Stop swooning over there! Ok, fine, it *probably* doesn’t merit the degree of overwrought hyperbole I am bringing here, but, my d1ckheadery aside, this is actually a very cool website and project by Brian Macomber who is the sort of person who apparently just decides one day ‘yes, I am going to build a website which explains How Things Work via the medium of really nicely designed explainer articles including BEAUTIFUL LITTLE DIAGRAMMATIC ANIMATIONS’ and then goes and does it. Honestly, this really is SO nicely done – it reminds me quite a lot of that Polish guy (sorry, I can’t be fcuked to look up their name) who I’ve featured in here a few times before and who writes long, super-interesting writeups of ‘how watches actually work’ and things of that ilk (YOU KNOW THE ONES I MEAN). Anyway, there are four little explainers on the site so far and they are all ACE – honestly, the Zippo one in particular is so, so satisfying, but they’re all worth checking out (particularly if you’re anything like me and so desperately impractical that you sort of believe that anything mechanical is maybe 60% physics and 40% Actual Magic.
- A Million Times: I was not previously aware of design collective Human Since 1982 and the fact that they created a rather beautiful ‘clock of clock faces’ design which you can buy for a cool £200k; should the idea of that appeal but the pricepoint be *slightly* out of your reach, console yourself with this digital version which is very, very soothing indeed – there’s something BEAUTIFUL about the very kinetic way in which the clock faces rearrange to display the time as a digital display, a sort of sweeping, wavelike movement which I could probably watch on a loop for the next 10 minutes or so if I didn’t have this fcuking newsletter to write chiz chiz.
- The Herripedia: Unless you’re Scandinavian – and, honestly, even if you are – it’s unlikely that you’ve ever spent much time considering human history through the prism of the herring (can…can one have a prismatic fish? Does that make ANY sense? On reflection, probably not, but the delete key is for COWARDS and so we soldier bravely on here through the linguistic mess I have created), but this is an EXCELLENT opportunity to rectify that. The Herripedia, via Mefi, is, er, an encyclopedia in which the entries all have something to do with Herring – as the site owner explains, “There’s no end to the beautiful information caught in the nets of a herring encyclopaedia, so there is no planned completion here. Each entry is accessible alphabetically and by theme: history, science, culture, fishing and/or food. Each entry provides a range of links aimed at opening up individual routes through the fish’s curious narrative. Each month will see new entries, extended ones, corrected ones. Drawing on many books, articles, online sources and original research most entries respect the fact that as far back as the C16th the herring has been a comic fish. Its stories, intertwined with our own, tend to reveal the folly of mankind, which also has no end.” Beautifully, there is also a CHILDREN’s Herripedia, in case any of your young charges be unaccountably obsessed with the beautiful piscine lads (#secondmentions). I wouldn’t usually wax this lyrical – I mean, look, they’re just fcuking fish – but this is SO well-written and so erudite (honestly, just pick and entry at random, there is some authorial style here) that it’s a pleasure to browse through, with the bonus thrown in that your Herring knowledge will improve IMMEASURABLY as a result of your spelunking (if it doesn’t that suggests you probably know TOO MUCH about fish and should probably widen your interests).
- The Lacoste Ace Breaker: FASHION BRAND WEBSITE KLAXON! This week it’s the turn of Lacoste to show off what you can get these days for six figures of design and build on a website in the form of what I presume was a French Open tie-in game – this is basically Breakout/Arkanoid, or, for the less-geriatric amongst you, one of those ‘break all the bricks by hitting them with a ball’-type games, with a light tennis skin and some Lacoste branding and some really rather shiny pseudo-3d graphics; this is…quite fun, a decent enough way to waste five or six minutes and (of course!) an opportunity for you to give your personal details to a company that sells clothes so that it can market itself at you for the rest of your natural life! BONUS LACOSTE LINK! This one is significantly less fun, but it’s also VERY shiny – would you like to take a ‘tour’ through the Lacoste production process to see how its polo shirts are made? TOUGH, THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU’RE GETTING! Instead, click here to enjoy four very stylised screens, each of which let you interact VERY MINIMALLY to make something happen; click and hold to ‘sew the garment’, say. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA! Still, again, some agency somewhere will have been paid a lot of money for this, and I am sure Lacoste will harvest a few dozen emails as a result, so who’s to say whether this is a colossal waste of time and money (clue: it is)?
- Insane Autonomous Drone Racing: OK, look, this takes you to a page about a piece of scientific research into autonomous drone flight blah blah blah whatever. The important, interesting thing is the video embedded on the page – just click the link and watch the video and marvel at the fact that it’s now possible to have drones that are piloted by AI that outperform human pilots based on reinforcement learning – which if you take a moment to think about it is fcuking INSANE. “Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines.” Seriously, watch the video and marvel – although perhaps don’t think too hard about the, er, potentially-bellicose applications of this sort of stuff, or what it’s going to be like when swarms of self-training minicopters of death are all just sort of buzzing around the place. NO I SAID DON’T THINK ABOUT IT FFS.
- Fannabe: WARNING: This link is not going to make you feel positively about our collective direction of travel. ANYWAY, Fannabe is a service which effectively offers itself up as a one-stop-shop platform for the creation of fake influencer content – spin up AI influencers, clone existing content, run a whole stable of AI-generated models across a range of social platforms, farming parasocial relationships for cashmoney through a complex systems of OnlyFans-adjacent subscription services and, almost certainly, a range of MLM-type scams…for pennies! “Fannabe helps you create hyper-realistic AI characters that you can monetize!”, runs the blurb – but click on the link and check out the, er, ‘vibe’ and you realise that this is a very, very narrow definition of ‘AI characters’ which seems to only encompass ‘oddly childlike and yet VERY PHYSICALLY MATURE women with strangely-dead eyes’ and which is aimed VERY SQUARELY at rinsing the ‘horny, stupid men’ section of the market. There is something…very icky about the extent to which this is basically a tool to create a virtual army of virtual sex workers with which to fleece the lonely and dumb – scroll down the page and the implication that ‘you can use this as top-of-funnel into actual pr0n’ is very, very clear indeed. Still, WELCOME TO THE NOW! Honestly, I can’t stress how…unpleasant this feels.
- Vs Football: MORE WORLDCUP! This was sent to me by someone called ‘Ben’ for potential inclusion – on the one hand, look, this is someone using AI to try and make a few easy quid via the creation and sale of data-driven visualisations of each match at the tournament, which, you know, is a BIT grifty; on the other, I quite like the style in which the resulting graphics are being rendered and I think there’s something cute about the way in which the animations showing them being rendered are done, so I am chucking it in here. I would say, though, that stuff like this is significantly more charming if you let people have a low-res copy of the images for free rather than ONLY making them available as posters for sale – BEN IF YOU ARE READING THIS MAKE THE IMAGES AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD IN LO-RES FFS YOU ARE NOT HELPING YOURSELF HERE. NB – this sort of ‘helpful consultancy’ is available to anyone who cares to email me, so, er, don’t all rush at once.
- Sweepstake Maker: MORE WORLDCUP! This was made by my friend Alex, who is quite open about the fact that he’s using the fortnight or so of discounted access to Claude’s latest model to fcuk around and build stuff on it while it’s cheap (you can read more about the projects here if you’re interested). This is a neat little site which lets you spin up your own world cup sweepstake – I mean, realistically you will probably have done this already if you’re going to, but, if not, Alex’s variant is rather neat; he has a background in game design and so has put slightly more thought into the mechanics of How This Should Work than you might get from an off-the-shelf sweepstakehelper. Go on, force your reluctant colleagues to have to engage with y SPORT in the hope they might win £30 – IT’S THE SPIRIT OF FOOTBALL.
- Faded Page: Do YOU like reading? Do YOU like free ebooks? OH GOOD! Bonus points here for the INCREDIBLY CANADIAN tone of the legal disclaimer in the ‘About’ section here: “Faded Page is an archive of eBooks that are provided completely free to everyone. The books are produced by volunteers all over the world, and we believe they are amongst the highest quality eBooks anywhere. Every one has been scanned, run through OCR software, proofed, formatted and assembled extremely carefully, using hundreds of volunteer hours. These books are public domain in Canada (because we follow the Canadian copyright laws), but if you are in another country, you should satisfy yourself that you are not breaking the copyright laws of your own country by downloading them. You are free to do whatever you like with these books, but we hope that mainly…you will enjoy reading them.” Anyway, I clicked this just now and it has Day of the Triffids on the homepage which you should ALL read because, honestly, it’s ace, and so much funnier than you might think a book based on killer plants from outer space ought to be (“Sex is my Adventure!” (if you know you know)).
- The Black Mirror Survey: I don’t know why, but I have a vague feeling that this might appeal to a few of you – see what you think. A project by the University of Boulder in Colorado, the Black Mirror Survey is a piece of research into the stories people are coming up with RIGHT NOW about/around AI; per the explanation, “We want to know how people speculate about the future of AI! We’re asking people to pitch their own Black Mirror-style science fiction story about generative AI (e.g., tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Midjourney). Your episode will be set in the near future and involve a situation where something goes wrong. There are no right or wrong answers – your imagination and instincts are exactly what we’re looking for.” To be clear, this is asking you to basically share a short story idea, so there’s a non-zero degree of effort and commitment required here, but I figure quite a few of you are probably the sorts of people who write fanfic for fun (NOT JUDGING JUST SAYING) and as such it might be Your Sort Of Thing.
- Litter Layer: As we slowly come to terms with the incremental death of online discoverability, so the concept of ‘search, but functional!’ continues to attempt to stave off its seemingly-inevitable demise. Litter Layer is another ‘search, but small!’ project which I very much approve of – basically it’s trying to build a small new search engine from scratch. “Our web spider Patu slowly explores the web and prefers indie websites without things like Facebook/Meta Pixel or Google Adsense. It also ranks sites with RSS feeds higher because those were/are amazing and social media platforms should have never removed them. Websites with a patu.txt file at the root rank higher and help Patu discover related sites. You can suggest any eligible site from our suggest a site page — patu.txt is optional. Without it, Patu may still find your site over time through normal crawling.” To be clear, this is not going to replace Google or whatever as your main search engine anytime soon – but as a means of discovering odd, leftfield, small or niche sites and communities I think this looks like it could be rather fun.
- Sgt Pepper Survivors: Chris Barker – he of the 20 years of Sgt Pepper pics featuring the year’s dead celebrities – has made this little webtoy which lets you cycle through the years since the album’s release and see how many of its cover stars are still alive at each point. This is, on some level, morbid as all fcuk, but, well, WE ALL DIE GET OVER IT.
- Flagsearch: VEXILLOLOGISTS REJOICE! You may think you know flags, but you do not know flags like this website does. Local flags, regional flags, cause-related flags, historical flags – THIS IS THE FLAG MOTHERLODE. Why? WHY NOT? Also, the root domain here takes you a daily game about flags – you could literally ask for NOTHING more (I mean, you could, but you would be disappointed so maybe just take what you’re given here).
- The Whetstone: On the one hand, these are difficult times and everyone is struggling to make ends meet, and as such there’s a degree to which I think anyone making things and attempting to develop businesses IN THIS FCUKING ECONOMY should be in some small way applauded; on the other, I remain staggered at the extent to which it’s also now possible for people to use LLMs to pull the wool over the eyes of other people who are scared and uncertain and clutching at professional straws, and the chutzpah of anyone here in 2026 who is charging actual cashmoney for what is effectively ‘an interface layer over someone else’s AI’. So it is with The Whetstone, which bills itself as a proprietary system to help ‘strategists’ and other such nebulously-defined service industry professionals develop a RIGOROUS AND INTELLECTUALLY ROBUST framework for working with LLMs so as to better enable them to understand their own UNIQUE WAYS OF THINKING AND WORKING – the deal here, as far as I understand it, is that The Whetsone presents you with a structured series of questions about your own thinking and working practices and which will then, through some fairly-standard LLM jiggerypokery, turn whatever you tell it into a series of md-type files which you can plug into the frontier model of your choice to train it into acting as a TRUSTED PARTNER with which you can work alongside. Or at least that’s what I think is going on here – I can’t tell you, because as soon as you click through to the ‘more info’ tab you’re invited to enter your payment details and hand over TWELVEHUNDRED FCUKING QUID and, look, you know what? Fcuk it, well done, I am defeated, this is where we are now, paying over a grand for some pre-prompt work in the hope that it will somehow magic us into professional relevance again. I wanted to slag this off – and, to be clear, I still do – but also the chutzpah here is sort-of amazing and I am probably just jealous because noone is ever going to pay me a grand to do anything ever again.
By Yossip
THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK THAT THE RACIST APARTHEID TOAD SHOULD BECOME A TRILLIONAIRE IF WE CAN AT ALL AVOID IT, PT.2:
- Girl Dinner Diaries: I featured the male equivalent of this subReddit a few months ago – in which men posted pictures of their terrible, sad dinners along with what I sincerely hoped was performatively-bleak shortform fiction about their terrible lives; this is the women’s equivalent, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s…different in tone. For a start (obviously this is all speculation on my part, so take all that’s to come here with a pinch of salt) there’s less of a sense (to me at least) that the stuff is is being invented, and it all feels a bit more…grounded in reality rather than the miserypr0n of the boys’ version; the comments are also SO MUCH NICER AND MORE SUPPORTIVE and it does make you realise that there’s a real gulf in experience between men and women when it comes to the sort of support that’s given by peers and the wider community (I might have mentioned before, but a good friend of mine lost a family member to suicide a year or so back; he said it took less than two hours between him telling a groupchat he was in and someone calling him a cnut again in said groupchat; NEVER CHANGE LADSzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!). However, one thing that the two groups have in common is DEAR GOD WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU PEOPLE EATING???? You know, if you spend any time at all in American corners of the web you quickly come to realise that people in the US report having gut problems significantly more often than any Europeans I know – GUYS THIS IS WHY LOOK AT WHAT YOU ARE INGESTING FFS HOW ARE YOU NOT ALL DEAD ALREADY???
- Memento: Right now, as you are reading these worlds, you are THE OLDEST YOU HAVE EVER BEEN! And now! And now! I mean, I could go on, but you hopefully get the idea. Anyway, if you would like to know the names of some people from history who DIED at the exact same age (in terms of ‘days on this planet’) as you are right now then WOW will this site make you happy – just give it your birthday and it will tell you who carked it when exactly your age. So, for example I have just learned that I am some 17,000 days old (CHRIST I FEEL THEM ALL) and that one Christian Henry, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach died at exactly this age. No idea what to do with that information, but there you are. This is ANOTHER entirely-Claude-coded site – I am going to have to have a think about what I do with all these – on the one hand, a cool little idea is a cool little idea, but on the other I am getting heartily sick of the font and colourpalette that The Machine seems to have decided it MUST work in. Can I ask a favour? If you’re going to ‘vibecode’ (ugh, sorry) stuff, can you at least go to the trouble to fcuk with the front-end a bit please? PLEASE???
- Tech Influence Watch: Molly White, of ‘Web3IsGoingGreat’ fame, this week launched this new project which is seeking to track crypto donations into US politics and to get a handle on all the ways in which extremely dodgy money is buying influence by…somewhat-opaque means. Per the blurb, “The cryptocurrency industry has been throwing money into politics unlike ever before. Despite the relatively small size of the industry, it was one of the largest industry spenders in the 2024 elections in the United States, and is poised to spend even more in the 2026 midterms. In 2026, the artificial intelligence industry began following the same playbook, significantly ramping up their lobbying and campaign spending. Together, crypto and AI companies tracked by Tech Influence Watch represent $408.1 million in contributions this cycle.” I can’t pretend this isn’t all hugely-depressing; it would be nice to have something similar for the UK should anyone want to take the time and trouble to compile a bunch of useful information and then have the entire media establishment largely ignore it because, well, This Is Just How Stuff Apparently Works Now And We Just Need To Suck It Up.
- The B-List Movie Club: This is a lovely idea which is unlikely to be of any practical use to you – unless you live in LA or the Bay Area, in which case ENJOY! – but which might serve as inspiration should any of you fancy picking up the idea and running with it locally. “Established in 2026, The B-List Movie Club was birthed in Los Angeles. Brett Gaffney on a quiet Thursday night made a Tik-Tok inviting strangers to go see a movie with him. What was started as a joke rapidly grew to become a club of over 2000 members just within the first week of the club existing! From there, the club has expanded into Portland, the Bay Area, and other cities can apply to have a club opened up as well. The B-List Movie Club was founded under this one main idea. Making Friends at the Movies. The theaters still haven’t fully figured out how to strengthen and build community, so the community is taking it into their own hands. We all see movies sitting amongst strangers anyways, so now we can bridge the social gap between movie goers, help people discover amazing community, and watch some movies at cinemas all across the city!” If you like films – I tried going to the cinema last weekend, and…I still don’t, it turns out! Also, The Backrooms is…not good! – then this feels like A Lovely Thing To Do, Maybe.
- Stumbleupon Redux: This feels like perhaps the third time I have linked to a ‘rebooted’ version of Stumbleupon over the years, but it’s always nice to see the concept resurrected – you…you all remember Stumbleupon, right? OF COURSE YOU DO YOU ARE ALL FCUKING GERIATRIC! But, in case you don’t…it was a website which, as the name suggests, was designed to help you, er, ‘stumble upon’ cool stuff on the web (like Curios but, well, significantly more popular, which may be linked to the fact it wasn’t covered in *me*) – anyway, now it’s BACK! Click the big central button on the console to be taken to a new site (which is rendered within a frame, which means you can’t easily see the url, which to my mind is a BLACK MARK against it, but wevs); if you find something you particularly enjoy you can add it to a sort of ‘bookmarks’ list…this is cute, but I would personally prefer a bit more context with my browsing (but, to be clear, given the relative popularity of Curios over the years – or at least my perception of it, I don’t know how many people read this sh1t and I am happy keeping it that way – most people VERY MUCH PREFER links without my prose. You CNUTS).
- RPG Trader: Would YOU like a place to buy and sell RPG books, rulesets and the like, including ones you might have made yourself? OH GOOD! “RPG Trader is a marketplace built for the next generation of tabletop RPG creators and players. It’s a place to discover, buy, and sell RPG games, modules, and assets – whether digital, physical, or both. We believe finding great RPG content should be simple, and publishing it should be just as easy.” This is, for some of you, a GREAT resource, and for the rest of us a window into the weird world of ‘people who sit around a table for six hours rolling complicated dice’.
- Which Is The Best Number?: No, seriously WHICH ONE? This is the vital question which Ed Jefferson is attempting to find the answer to via the medium of a GLOBAL SURVEY – click the link, vote for the BEST NUMBER BETWEEN 1-100, and then sigh in weary acceptance when you realise that ‘69’ is obviously going to win because of Borat and the fact that we are apparently all children.
- The Inflation Lab: I am increasingly realising that I have a…problem with money, in that I find it so awful to contemplate, so incredibly tedious and confusing and, largely, frightening, that I get an almost-physical reaction to having to actually sit and DO anything about my finances. This is…this is normal, right, for a man past middle age? Anyway, that’s by way of brief preamble to the fact that this website – which explains inflation, offers a bunch of scenario projects which detail how different monetary policy approaches might impact it over time, and generally seeks to serve as a sort of guide to What It Is and How It Impacts Real Life – genuinely scared me to the point that I don’t really want to open the tab again and am just sort of describing it at a half-remembered distance. This is probably…quite indicative of some Deep Lying Issues, isn’t it? Is it time to do therapy again (please don’t make me do therapy again, so much silent sitting)?
- Art My Vibe: Another clearly-Clauded bit of code, this, but I quite like the idea/execution and so I am going to let it through – this is nothing more than a simple search layer over a collection of public domain artworks, but it uses AI to enable natural language search and retrieval and as such you can tell it you are feeling ‘quizzical’ or ‘horny’ or ‘thanatophilic’ and it will pull you a suitable canvas to match your mood; this has coped with all the stupid, obscure words I have thrown at it and pulled out appropriate works each time, so if nothing else the search function seems to, er, function properly. See what you can find. BONUS VIBECODED ARTW4NK!: This, called ‘Sitter’ is a not-very-good AI-enabled site which lets you give it a picture, find a painting that looks vaguely like that picture in some unspecified way, and will then spin up a portrait of YOU in said painter’s style (allegedly) – I just did this and the resulting ‘canvas’ was so risibly bad that it has genuinely cheered me, so I suggest you give it a go to (OH WHO CARES WHAT IT’S DOING WITH THE PHOTOS FFS THAT SHIP SAILED YEARS AGO GYAC YOU ARE COMPROMISED EVERYWHERE AND IT DOESN’T MATTER) see what sort of hideous mess it makes of YOUR face.
- Leave It To Me: Ach, fcuksakes, ANOTHER Claude-y site. I really am going to have to think about this – I will develop A POLICY in coming weeks, promise, because I am as sick as you are of seeing these lightly-putty-coloured pages pop up everywhere. That said, I fcuking LOVE this webpage and the chutzpah behind it – “why,” asks the page, or specifically its creator, “don’t you leave me something in your will?”. WELL WHY NOT??? I am slightly amazed that I have never seen someone online try this before – I mean, look, 99.99999% of people will obviously never see this, and of those that do a similar proportion’s reaction will be an immediate ‘yes ok get fcuked mate’ BUT! All it takes is one slightly-eccentric rich person to stumble across it and BINGO there’s your future secured. There are a bunch of reasons on here – which also feel Claude-d, which is a shame imho – as to why you might want to, but I think the balls of this alone is enough of a motivating factor; as soon as I have finished writing Curios I am getting this man’s details and bequeathing him some books (whether he likes it or not).
- The Minesweeper Drum Machine: This is part of the 10k Drum Machines project and so therefore is technically a repost, but I have never featured this particular one in here before so, well, fcuk you. Anyway, this is GREAT – play Minesweeper, create beats, ENJOY!
- Loser Back Home: I think this might be ART. Loser Back Home is a TikTok account, via Blort, where…some English bloke documents traveling around China and not really understanding anything that’s going on (except obviously he does – he speaks very good Chinese, so the performative confusion is exactly that). The voice-over is all done by AI, which may to you be (as my friend Alex said) ‘nails on a blackboard’ and an automatic nope-out, but which to me gives it a wonderful air of slightly-discombobulated remove, a sense of alien abroad which is entirely in-keeping with the general tone of the vids. As far as I can tell (I’ve watched half a dozen of the vids) there is nothing weird or horrible or sneery or cnuty about this – it’s just a guy sharing stuff he finds interesting about his experience of Being In China And Traveling Around, but narrated by a bemused AI robot voice. Because, er, this is entertainment now, apparently.
- Mr Rogers Is Now On YouTube: Mr Rogers is one of those things that, as an anglo, I have literally no cultural connection with or warm fuzzy memories of, but which, thanks to the complete fcuking US domination of the English language web, I know far more about than I ought to and which I have to confess to slightly resenting as a result. Like, guys, I know that for some of you it was a really intrinsic part of your childhood which now acts as an all-encompassing avatar for a specific type of vaguely-community-focused ‘good’ in the world, but, equally, if I hear/read one of you quote that fcuking ‘look for the helpers’ line again I swear I am going to have some sort of knife-related conniption. Anyway, if you feel more warmly to the cardigan-wearing human bromide then there is now a YouTube channel featuring all the episodes of his TV show – go wallow in the nostalgia pits!
- Letteris: Another Chris Barker joint, this is a fun little word game in which letters drop from the sky; you have to direct where they fall, as touching letters form WORDS and WORDS MEAN POINTS and what do points mean? Fcuk all in the grand scheme of things, actually, but they might give you a small sense of accomplishment. This is fun, and a lot more ‘strategic’ than it might at first seem.
- TonePicker: Ok, so technically this is called ‘Dialed’, but my name is more descriptive and so I’m going with that. Each day the site plays you five notes – your job is to listen to them and then attempt to match the pitch of said note as closely as you can. This is VERY HARD (for me, as I am practically tone-deaf it turns out).
- The Last Idea Factory: A small interactive storygamething, all about the problem with CONTENT and how that term is the deathknell for ideas and creativity and imagination and basically anything good. This is…not exactly a subtle piece of semi-allegorical storytelling, but I rather liked it despite the slightly-clunking tone of it all. Also, the music is loads better than it needs to be.
- 7-0: So last week I included that NBA game and suggested that its likely-vibecoded (sorry) nature meant that it would only be a matter of days before someone replicated it exactly but for football – as it turns out, it had already been done about a day earlier. This is 7-0, which is exactly the same gimmick – pick a team of footballers from World Cups past which you believe can BEAT THE WORLD and then play through a bunch of simulated games to see whether your selection of superstars can win all seven games en route to lifting the trophy. This is INCREDIBLY addictive and if you’re the sort of person who prides themselves on knowing the starting 11 of every single world cup team since 1982 like my friend Verinder (who doesn’t read this and so will never know that I am lightly mocking him, sorry V) then you will lose HOURS to this.
By Aitor Frias & Cecilia Jimenez
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Folk Costume and Embroidery: NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! “This blog is an attempt to share my love and knowledge of Traditional Folk Clothing and embroidery. I am open to requests to research and transmit information on particular Costumes for dance groups, choirs, etc. I do embroidery and sew costumes myself and I would like to spread interest into this particular Art Form.” I mean, what could be purer than that?
- Imaginary Instruments: ALSO NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But this collection of imaginary instruments is ACE and I love it, and the ethos behind it: “Imaginary instruments are a special kind of technological phenomenon. Such instruments never fully make the passage from the imagination into the world. They remain unconsummated objects, indifferent to the chaotic forces at play outside the test-tube of pure conceptuality. Ranging from the physically impossible to the simply impractical, from the “never” to the “not yet,” imaginary instruments rattle suggestively at the windowpane separating our comfortable sense of reality from that nebulous space beyond. In the words of Ernst Cassirer, such instruments are “concerned in the final analysis not with what is, but with what could be.””
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Lucha Libro: The Insta feed of a US initiative to, er, bring Mexican-style wrestling to libraries. Look, I have no idea whether this is something that will improve youth literacy, but I think it’s definitely worth exploring over here please.
- Shaboingboings: This was sent to me by my friend Iain, who accompanied the link with the simple description ‘the most puerile slop, but it made me laugh’ and, well, he is NOT WRONG but it made me laugh too and it might do the same to you. Oh, and take a look at this clip – if it weren’t for how incredibly fcuking dumb it is you would 100% think this was real footage, don’t pretend you wouldn’t. .
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- In Belfast: Well, pogrom season really is upon us! Another week, another horrible murder of an innocent person by someone very, very unwell being weaponised against non-white people by the same tedious cabal of racists and grifters who we really should have worked out how to do something about by now because FCUK’S SAKE THIS HAS BEEN THE PLAYBOOK FOR ABOUT TEN YEARS NOW HOW DO WE KEEP LETTING THEM DO THIS STUFF FFS??? Anyway, now we have an Overton Window which has shifted so far that you basically need to double-screen reality to keep it within your field of view, and a media environment which seems to think that asking ‘so, are Certain Races simply more likely to commit crimes than others?’ is in some way an essential viewpoint to have in a ‘balanced debate’ rather than the sort of thing which, in less-madly-racist times, would be tantamount to asking someone whether you could get the calipers out and take some quick measurements of their skull. It is Quite Miserable being exposed to the UK political discourse right now, ngl, but should you wish to read something very good about the past week’s events in Belfast – a piece which also takes into account a few of the, er, unique qualities of the political and social history of the country and city which play into the riots – then this, by Luqman Saeed in the LRB, is excellent (it is also desperately sad). Read this para and try not to feel a deep sense of despair (go on, you can do it!): “Political leaders have a clear responsibility to confront this issue at its roots. First and foremost, this country needs an honest discussion of immigration. Many among those taking part in violent protests believe there is a co-ordinated conspiracy by the political establishment to replace the white population with a non-white population. Has any major political party systematically challenged the absurdity underlying this narrative? Many rioters believe that immigrants receive preferential treatment in housing and welfare. How often have political leaders publicly explained that the overwhelming majority of immigrants hold student or work visas, and many of them pay hundreds of pounds a year in health surcharges while remaining ineligible for public funds? Last year, Northern Ireland’s health service received £81 million from health surcharges paid by immigrants.”
- The Tates: To be clear at the outset – this piece in the New Yorker, on Andrew and Tristan Tate and their webcamming empire, how they got here and how it works and what they have done and why they should very much be in prison – is VERY LONG; it’s also extremely upsetting in parts (in fact, pretty much all the way through), and is basically the canonical example of a Bad Vibes Read. It’s also, though, a truly exceptional piece of reporting, impeccably sourced and with quite amazing access – it’s…kind-of astonishing that the Tate’s saw fit to meet with Heidi Blake in the course of her writing this piece, and speaks to their sense of being untouchable in any meaningful sense (which you can sort of understand if you read the piece and get a sense of the repeated incompetence of some of the investigations that have so far failed to nail them despite what reads like PRETTY FCUKING INCONTROVERTIBLE EVIDENCE of some very, very illegal goings on. Consider ALL of the trigger warnings applied to this piece – its descriptions of the Tate’s behaviour are unflinching, and you can probably imagine the general vibe – and I can’t pretend there’s not something very…I don’t know, deadening about all of this laid out blow-by-blow, something just sort of hollow and empty-feeling, but, equally, it feels like an important piece of work that might finally get these cnuts sent down somewhere because fcuk me do they deserve to do a lot of time.
- The Fcuking Anxious Generation: Ok, not the *exact* title, but it should be. On the annoying chokehold that Jonathan fcuking Haidt’s magnum opus has developed on much of the Western world, regardless of the scientific validity of said opus’ findings, and how it has come to be seen as gospel by governments around the globe. This comes as the UK government is set to announce restrictions on social media for under-16s as early as next week (I have heard Monday, but who the fcuk knows?), despite the evidence base for such action being…iffy at best! “Parents intuitively resist the above arguments because the phone is visible and the structural problems aren’t. I often tell my students that phones and social media become easy scapegoats partly because they are proximate. Our devices follow us everywhere, and our social lives are largely mediated by technology. It’s much easier to focus on the evidence and changes right in front of our eyes, such as our teens scrolling after midnight. But it’s much harder to see the cumulative weight of underfunded school systems or the anxiety that comes from growing up in a household carrying financial precarity or even physical violence. Because phones are omnipresent when kids are struggling they’re often struggling through their phones. This makes the phone feel like the source, even though it’s often just the medium through which existing problems travel.” BONUS PIECE ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA BANS!: this is a New York Times piece looking at how the ban is working in Australia (spoilers: it’s not!); it’s oddly poorly-written for the NYT (there are a couple of outright repetitions, which stuck out to me) but the general point is worth making – to whit, there is no sense whatsoever that the ban has had a meaningful impact on the behaviours of any kids, and it’s doing a great job of skewing a conversation away from ‘how ought we regulate this stuff for EVERYONE’ towards ‘let’s focus solely on this very narrow coterie and ignore some of the more systemic, structural issues about this technology and its effects on wider society because they are TOO HARD’.
- Burnham:James Meek profiles the coming Labour leader for the LRB – while obviously he still has a byelection to win, it seems likely based on all available polling that it will end up being a relatively-comfortable Labour win, at which point he’s a shoo-in to kick Poor Keir to the kerb in the eventual leadership challenge, and then…well, who the fcuk knows, as the article basically points out. It’s a decent piece which offers some vague hopes around Burnham being more willing to tackle some of the economic orthodoxies that Starmer has singularly-failed to challenge, and the extent to which that might appease the left wing of the party which has fled en masse to the Greens in the past 12 months…but, equally, nods to the fact that a) there are a fcuktonne of intractable problems that won’t magically be solved by having someone with really, really nice eyelashes in No.10; and b) Burnham is, despite the amazing reputational glowup he’s received purely by dint of Not Being In Westminster for a while, still Just Another Fcuking Politician, and anyone expecting him to come in and be some sort of radically different socialist dreamboy is fcuking deluded; this cnut is New Labour through and through, another grasping little fcuk of a career politician like all the rest, and I am pretty sure that he’ll get fcuked in half by the electorate when they’re next given the opportunity at a General Election. So, well, this is all a colossal waste of time and energy. BUT MAYBE I AM WRONG (I sort of hope I am)!
- Some More Ideas About Political Advertising In The UK: A good post by Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me?, an organisation which, if you don’t know it, does the Lord’s work in attempting to get a comprehensive overview of what is being spent on which political ads around the world, and which Has Thoughts on how this sort of stuff could maybe work better. Sam is a smart man and has thought about this a LOT, and this sets out some steps which he believes could usefully be taken to make the whole system a bit less opaque and, generally, fcuked – I am particularly in favour of ‘ban small creator payouts for political content’ as a principal (although obvs the thorny issue of ‘define political’ then very quickly raises its head – still, we should TRY ffs).
- Cuck Internet Theory: This is without a doubt my favourite current theory of How Being Online Works Now In 2026 – fcuk the dead internet theory, this feels RIGHT. The basic premise here is that content is being made my machines (AI) to appeal to maths (algorithms), and we, the people, are just sitting here on the metaphorical cuck chair watching and barely comprehending any more as the meaningful dialogue happens between systems that we are simply not equipped to understand, pawing sadly at our flaccid, damp erogenous zones in some sort of hideous parody of erotic transport. Or at least that’s how I choose to explain it – you might want to click the link and read Aidan Walker’s explanation as it’s clearer and, well, less gross than mine.
- Monkey Go To Space: Look, I don’t pretend to understand the first fcuking thing about finances and markets – it is Not My World and, per my earlier remarks about my genuine and general terror when confronted with pretty much any information about money, I generally tend to recoil from anything that attempts to engage me in discussion of How It All Works. BUT! This post, by one Charles Archer, which seeks to explain to the layman exactly how the massive con that is the SpaceX IPO is going to operate and how some people are going to get rich while a lot of other people are *probably* going to end up carrying the can, is both entertaining (if, fine, a bit derivative of the classic 00s ‘FILM CRITIC HULK’ style of writing) and was clear enough for me to start to vaguely understand how the game of cups here is going to play out. UNRELATED ASIDE: slightly insane to me that it’s possible for the media to have vaguely-jolly conversations about Elon becoming a trillionaire (Radio 4’s Today programme I am looking at you you cnuts) and not mention for a second that he is also AN ACTUAL FCUKING RACIST who is CALLING FOR RACE RIOTS IN THE UK. I don’t know, feels like the latter ought to be mentioned in the context of the former in terms of whether it is in fact A Good Thing that this cnut become even more powerful (clue: it is not! It is a very bad thing!).
- What It Feels Like To Work With Mythos: Ethan Mollick does his regular ‘hey, here’s a new frontier model, here’s what I think’ writeup, this time on Anthropic’s new ‘too dangerous to release to the public’ model which, er, it has just released to the public (to be momentarily fair to Anthropic, it’s not quite like that – the public release here seems to have been quite effectively guardrailed around code exploitation, if you read up on it a bit)! The whole thing is interesting in terms of what he tried to make it do and what was possible, but I think the conclusion here’s perhaps the most-useful part in terms of how working with this stuff is going to, er, work: “Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result. The conjuring happens somewhere I cannot watch, in hundreds of small choices I never get a vote on. The work has shifted from process to outcome. I no longer steer; I commission. It is possible the sidelining is temporary, just an artifact of interfaces that haven’t caught up, and that we’ll get better windows into what these models are doing and better ways to steer them midstream. It is also possible that the opposite is true: that the more capable the model, the less there is for a human to meaningfully do, and the black box is the price of the power. I suspect that is more likely to be the real direction. None of this is a loss of control in the obvious sense. I can still steer Fable, and it follows instructions remarkably well: the more ambitious the instruction, the better the result. But steering is no longer the same as doing. I brief the model, it spins up its own agents to research and write and check one another’s work, and what comes back is finished. A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor.”
- The AI Coparent: Or, specifically, why mothering influencers are increasingly presenting AI as a better and more effective coparent than men. Which, er, feels depressingly-plausible tbh, based on the behaviour and general approach to parenting of some of the men I know – see, I am a BETTER MAN because I knew early on that I was far too selfish to have kids and so therefore haven’t (also, so barren) – but which is also quite clearly a BIT so maybe oughtn’t be taken *quite* as seriously as this piece in WIRED seems to be. That said, I did think there’s something interesting about the tech being used to effectively help manage some of the invisible labour (mostly) shouldered by women in households – the keeping track of birthdays, the household planning – and I refuse to believe that we’re not going to see a Mumsnet-trained LLM on the market sooner rather than later because, well, the women behind that site are both Not Dumb and also like money a LOT.
- There Is No Sound of the 2020s (Yet): I really enjoyed this deep dive on Resident Advisor into the state of the dance music scene, a slight sense of stagnation, and why there’s nothing that can be called a ‘defining new sound of the decade’ that has yet emerged – there are loads of reasons for this, and you can guess most of them (fragmented streams! No monoculture! COVID!), but I thought the points made here were smart and landed well and, frankly, can be extrapolated beyond dance music culture and applied far more broadly: “A cycle may be ending, and that can be painful for many involved. Getting yourself psyched for a new one can be a lot, and we may have arrived at a point where knowledge and adherence to form leave people unable to conjure visions beyond the old frame. But intuition remains one of the rare qualities young people can bottle and act on before it gets talked out of them. There’s a great deal worth taking from that. To that end, what constantly leaps out isn’t only the adrenalised sound of earlier periods, but the enthusiasm. Where big moments in dance and electronic music land, so too follows a common thread: a scene you strove to be part of and a sound that drove you to obsession, and at club level, the absence of that is keenly felt. You can’t beckon people to flood onto dance floors by rearranging the same old constituent parts. The present lack of churn is unusual. Time was, lineups would morph every few years, with cycles of death necessary for regrowth. The ratio of supply to demand may simply be out of whack, with too many mid-level DJs sticking it out and calcifying homogenisation. As paying the bills gets tougher, it seems unlikely many will volunteer to hang up their headphones and hand young people the power to reshape the industry from within. But the greater push may come down to unlearning resistance, too.”
- How Do Traffic Lights Work?: Would you like to learn? GREAT! This nicely-made interactive explainer does a really good job of illustrating why it’s really important that traffic lights operate at certain cadences, even if that does occasionally mean you’re stuck swearing at a red light somewhere near the North Circular.
- Stop Eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos: Or, ‘why we should bring back the idea of ‘selling out’ as a bad thing, actually’. As I’ve previously touched upon here, the idea of ‘selling out’ is literally incomprehensible to anyone under the age of about 40, I think, replaced with an understanding that one must always work to SECURE THE BAG at all times (I maintain, kids these days are not virtuous and good (although they can be, obvs) – they are filthy little capitalist hustle goblins!) – this piece argues that it’s down to a distinction that we now feel between The Rich (BOO! BAD!) and The Famous (attainable, aspirational, perfectly fine!), and the fact that we classify musicians and celebrities as ‘famous’ (even if they are also rich) and therefore ‘something that we could become’ and that as such we don’t begrudge them the bag securing because it’s what we’d do in their shoes…I mean, it fits, but mainly I am including this because it forms part of my wider ‘bring back bullying and shame’ thesis which I am doubling down on in Q3/4 26.
- Hackney Goat Sacrifice: I mean, WHAT a headline. This is a truly brilliant piece of London journalism in the increasingly-essential London Centric, asking the central, vital question “are goats being sacrificed in this Hackney office?” and then taking you on a VERY strange journey which involves former chefs, hipster santeria and what seems like a LOT of pretty unpleasant behaviour towards largely-blameless ungulates. Maybe not one to read if you’re a big animal lover, but otherwise this is a cracking bit of reporting.
- Biscuits: A gorgeous piece of writing – by someone who, for obvious reasons, has chosen to remain anonymous – about the ritual of tea and biscuits at AA meetings; as anyone who has ever spent time in the company of former drug or booze addicts can attest, cigarettes and sugar tend to be non-negotiable companions in one’s sober life and this is a really lovely article about the place that these small treats can take in lives where the treats you deep-down really want are also the ones that would kill you. “The secret to good AA tea is the same as the secret to good bartending: you have the remember the regulars’ orders. There are people who, even now, I will see in Soho and recognise only as ‘Three cubes of ice’ or ‘145ml Côtes du Rhône’. The recovering alcoholics I was serving at AA were every bit as annoyingly specific about their orders as the regulars in the French. Some would insist on two teabags, while others had a fear of any caffeine. I would be told I had not left enough room for milk; I would be told I had left too much. I was asked for a slice of lemon in a cup, not a mug of Earl Grey. I would receive praise for the selection of herbal teas on offer, and I would be chastised for the lack of decaf options. One awful day the church’s kettle broke and, unbeknownst to me, the water was merely hot rather than boiling. An older man I did not know took a sip, looked to see if I was wearing a wedding ring, and told me that tea like that was why I was still single.”
- My AI Boyfriend: I think I have said in here before that I find Lauren Oyler’s success as a writer a touch baffling, and this piece – in which Oyler writes about trying an AI companion out – hasn’t done anything to change my mind; the bits when she’s being ‘funny’ move me not at all here, and I found the voice quite grating (and, look, like Oyler has to give a fcuk about what I think of her prose, she’s successful and feted and I am, objectively, a lot less talented than she is and a lot less well-remunerated, and I am writing this to an audience of three people while sitting in my pants in a garret kitchen, so, well, YOU WIN LAUREN)…but I also found the bits when she’s talking about what makes a human relationship and the ways in which the AI does and doesn’t intersect with that, where the writing is a bit straighter and less ‘Lauren Oyler being Lauren Oyler’ much, much better and quite beautiful in parts, so maybe I am just being a d1ck. Anyway, see what you think – it won’t tell you anything that the past raft of ‘I dated an AI for a stunt column!’ pieces you’ve read, but I thought the stuff about US AS HUMANS was rather well-observed.
- His Bed: A short story by Alex Poppe about a relationship with an unsuitable person, in middle-age, after years; I thought this was funny and sad and rather beautiful, and you might too.
- Saturday: For reasons I don’t quite understand I am obviously feeling A Bit Emo this week; this piece of writing by Spencer Wright at Scope of Work, about the things he felt and observed and thought on a simple Saturday in May, is in many respects unremarkable but for reasons I can’t adequately explain it got under my skin and stayed there, and I think it is SUCH a lovely essay; there’s something particularly beautiful about applying this degree of attention to the sense of nothing really happening and the observations and feelings that result from simply taking time to watch and experience, and, honestly, this is really not ordinarily my sort of vibe at all so perhaps I have some sort of early-stage brain tumour or something, who knows.
- Five Months Sober: See also this essay, by High Maintenance creator Ben Sinclair (whose newsletter I have featured previously), all about how he feels being five months sober of weed (it is possible that this made me…have some feelings about my own Lifestyle Choices, put it that way); this is a *bit* more woo-ish than I would normally countenance, and yet I thought there was something lovely about the general sense of letting go that imbues the piece, and the way in which it evokes memory: “Friends would invite me back out to Williamsburg or Manhattan to some event that night, but 45 minutes on the train seemed untenable after a long day’s work. And in those days, when ordering from a weed serve and waiting for the guy to call back, it’d take an indeterminate number of hours to make it out to Ditmas, so I had to wait within the window he offered. Instead I would opt to smoke the crumbs of weed (or pipe resin) and write my observations down on note cards that I’d pin to the wall. And after dinner, I’d stand at the desk I’d built for myself, and edit the footage I had shot months before, adding in a new song I had heard that day, making a short film that had no promise of success at that time, but about which I was excited to one day put on the internet. There was another person who lived there with me. She’s gone now. Our good and bad times all seem to blur together. But in Ditmas, I loved the way I loved her too.”
- The Hour of Lost Boys: Excerpted from the novel of the same title by Matthew Aquilone, this is about a night out in the AIDS era and it is one of the best evocations of time and place and feeling I have read in a while: “He’s been worked up all night, more than I’d ever seen him, his face radiating red and hot outside its usual boundaries, the way the picture sometimes splits on the television suggesting a multiverse of dimensions organized by color, each one assigned to a pure state of being—lust, fear, bliss, rage—each too strong to be experienced unalloyed. Michael is so excited by the possibility of the moment, I think his heart will break. Or maybe, considering his tight and grinding jaw, he’s just very, very high. I worry that he’s too turned on to stay in this world, that he’s going to disappear in a puff of smoke. It feels like anything could happen. Michael has already been transformed, inexplicably, from pretty-boy coke dealer into an activist—one of the organizers of this benefit. “Matt!” he calls. My name means nothing. It’s just a syllable, a raw morpheme unattached from sense, a bark of joy or pride or something else just as pure and dangerous, like faith, which I think would be colored blue. Michael has AIDS, too, and—yes—all of this is indeed great.”
- Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Knife: Our final longread this week is this essay by Kristi D Osorio, about her grandmother’s death – possibly at her mother’s hands. This is very good indeed, I think: “Stabbing deaths are not as common as the movies would have us believe. In 2023, 19,800 people were murdered in the U.S. Of those, 1,562 were killed with knives or other cutting instruments. By then, fifteen years had passed since Betty died. Mom had served thirteen years in prison before she was released early. But in the world, the killing had continued. People killed people they loved. People killed strangers. People kept stabbing, though not as often as they fired guns. People kept picking up knives and then hiding them. In the movies, too. Scream and Halloween saw remakes and reboots. More blood, more guts. More girls in those tight tops. I still wondered where that knife from our kitchen drawer went.”
By Lee Price
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!