Yes, it has been warm. Welcome to the rest of your lives, fcukos – to paraphrase the excellent song, “we were the generation which decided we needed everything now, all the time, and refused to compromise on our desires, and we get what we deserve.”
BUT! You don’t come here for climate doomerism! You come here for a few lines of hastily-penned intro before you can prep yourself, apply the metaphorical tourniquet and slide the content delivery needle deep, deep into your vein and pushing the plunger to fill yourself with webspaff – and, frankly, who am I to keep you from your fix? This week’s Curios is literally PERFECT for sitting in a darkened room and waiting for the horrororb to fcuk off – although maybe don’t open all the links at once lest your laptop contribute to the 40-degree temperatures.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re going to have to find more interesting ways of complaining about how hot it is because otherwise the coming decades are going to get VERY boring indeed.
By Jen Mazza
THE SECTION WHICH DOES RATHER FEEL LIKE THIS WEEK IS THE METEOROLOGICAL EMBODIMENT OF THE ‘FCUK AROUND / FIND OUT’ GRAPH MEME, PT.1:
- Free Media Heck Yeah: On the one hand, as someone who mostly earns a living these days by exchanging words for money (I know, I know; trust me when I say that when someone’s actually paying me I tone down the ALL CAPS and the swearing and, mostly, proof-read my work – you too could get some of this RARE TALENT for a meagre…actually, you know what, I don’t think I’m going to share the going wordrate in UK media in 2026, we don’t need to sour the tone early on) I am very much in favour of paying people for their work; on the other, what with Modern Life apparently necessitating an ever-growing number of £20+ monthly subscriptions (can we all agree that the subscription economy is BAD NEWS? Thanks) it’s clear that most people simply can’t afford to keep on racking up the expenses. So it is that this week we kick off with what is a VERY ILLEGAL collection of links – Free Media Heck Yeah is a hub site which links out to an absolute metric fcuktonne of streaming, torrenting and illegal filesharing sites where, based on a cursory glance, you can find seemingly any modern media you might wish for (if you’re prepared to do the work of weeding out the broken links and the obvious virus traps). A few caveats here – I have only had a VERY LIGHT spelunk through this and have tried approximately 0.2% of the site links here collated, and so can’t vouch for this being 100% safe; equally, you’re probably only a few clicks away from some…quite sketchy sites here, so caveat emptor very much applies. That said, whatever weird, niche sh1t you’re into I reckon you can find a link to access it from this page – or, alternatively, you can just use it to watch a very heavily-watermarked rip of Supergirl (although based on the 90s segment which I just streamed, I probably wouldn’t bother). Fill your filthy copyright-ignoring boots!
- The Roland 50 Studio: There are a couple of links in here this week which are honest-to-goodness multi-hour timesinks, and this is very much one of them. Roland – you know, the people who make the synths and keyboards and stuff – created this little digital playground back in 2022 in celebration of having been around for 50 years (I am very ashamed that I am 4 years late to this). It’s a collection of digital recreations of some of their toys – drum machines, synths, WIBBLY NOISE MAKERS (the technical term) and the like, all of which you can run through your browser and (and this is the really cool bit) all of which you can seemingly run simultaneously, meaning you can pull together some actually pretty complex multitrack compositions with real, actual, official Roland-quality beeps and bloops and things. Honestly, this is fcuking MAGICAL – start by setting a bunch of them going at once, just with the default patterns enabled, and you’ll get a sense of how impressively deep this could get if you played with it for a while. Draw the curtains, hook this up to a decent pair of speakers and create a MASTERPIECE while imagining the reason you’re sweating so hard is because you’re driving a packed dancefloor into a music-inspired dionysian frenzy rather than because we have fcuked the climate into the sun.
- The Wifi Art Gallery: Another link which I am annoyed not to have found myself – but sincere thanks to reader Ash Lipár Mann who alerted me to its existence. I think this is FCUKING WONDERFUL – this is a project by artist Dan Berg, who has set up free, accessible WiFi in Dalston, East London. To access it, all anyone needs to do is submit a piece of art which they have drawn, all of which become visible as part of the project and which can be browsed at the url linked to at the top of this slug. “The collection is composed of drawings made by members of the public in exchange for access to free wireless internet. The gallery’s first installation is in Dalston Square, Hackney, East London. There is no building. Instead, there is a wireless network. When someone connects to it, instead of ticking a terms and conditions box, they are asked to draw a picture. That drawing is then analysed and assigned a formal title and curatorial note – no matter how bad it is – and published on wifartgallery.com. The gallery’s current installation – FREE Hackney Wifi – is broadcast across Dalston Square, E8.” Some people just submit a scrawl, some a childlike drawing, some spend a bit more time (the smiling frog is a work of quiet beauty imho)…this is SO SO SO SO NICE.
- The Softbank Slides 2026: I have, I think, mentioned (and even linked to) the annual Softbank presentation where Masayashi Son outlines to assembled board members the current version of his increasingly-insane-sounding vision of the future – but should you not be familiar with the General Softbank Vibe then OH WOW are you in for a treat. Hang on, do I need to explain what Softbank is? Hm, if you’re reading this I am going to assume a degree of knowledge but, briefly: massive Japanese investment bank, richer than God, run by increasingly-lunatic, vaguely-messianic figurehead, invested in basically every single BIG TECH THING over the past decade or so, propping up a lot of the current AI froth. Good? GOOD! Now, click the link and go through the slides and let me know at which exact point you first thought ‘hang on, this is fcuking bunkum’ and then at which subsequent point you let out your first big bark of laughter. For me it was slide 48 (“Goose was not valued”), but you may manage to hold out longer. Is it…is it good that people who think that this is a viable or indeed meaningful way to communicate, or indeed that anything on these slides makes actual sense, are in charge of deciding which version of the future is worth backing? It’s probably not, is it?
- All Of London’s Transport: You will, I am sure, have enjoyed variants on the whole ‘look! It’s the entire tube network of London/Tokyo/New York, moving in realtime, like some sort of tiny digital toy but also REAL!’ thing in the past – this, though, this is NEXT LEVEL. James Potter has somehow built a little website which shows you ALL OF THE TRANSPORT at once, live, in realtime, on a map – I CAN TRACK THE BUSES GOING PAST MY HOUSE RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW! I can see (some of the) boats on the Thames! I can see the tube! I had no idea that APIs for all of this data existed, but I love the fact that you can now get a pretty accurate realtime reading of the city moving and pulsing and just sort of getting on with existing. Small authorial note – I have no idea exactly *how* realtime this in fact is, so I would test it out before you start relying on it to gauge exactly when you need the house to make the 176.
- Trophy Lab: This is quite mad and VERY FUTURE (but also quite perfectly NOW) – the latest innovation from the Ukrainian Defence Ministry in its attempts to fend off the Russian invasion comes in the form of this innovation – basically they have created a semi-open-access database of intel and information on Russian weapons systems, based on reverse-engineering missiles and tanks and drones and all sorts of other ordnance and then sharing blueprints and tech-specs with partners and allies. Obviously it’s not like anyone can get in and immediately download instructions on how to make an anti-tank mine (I know, I was sad too) – access is only granted to vetted individuals, which, honestly, I think we can all agree is for the best – but I found the general concept quite mindblowing; the idea of a shared digital infodump for a resistance network being used to improvise countermeasures to large-scale invasion is so incredibly Gibsonian as to be almost parodic. Anyway, can one of you please get access to this and then tell me how to build a grenade launcher or something? Thanks!
- Newsguard AI: This is an interesting idea – Newsguard, an organisation which deals with countering misinformation, has launched its own LLM, which is designed specifically to source information ONLY from its list of approved sources. Per the blurb, “venerable newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are included, along with ambitious local news startups, single-author news, commentary websites, Substacks, the informational websites of state and local governments, think tanks, hospital systems, and research universities that have been assessed as credible. Conservative publishers and liberal publishers with strong convictions are all included. But not if those convictions spill over into repeatedly promoting provably false factual claims to support those views.” I’m not entirely sure who this is aimed at – I get the impression the people who most need a source like this are, perhaps, the least likely to ever know it exists – but, y’know, it’s probably A Good Thing.
- In The Weights: LLM VANITY SEARCHING! Would you like to know whether The Machine knows who you are? Would you like confirmation as to whether you’ve been ingested into the very guts of latent space, whether you’re part of the vast, unknowable multinodal network of concepts which are going to underpin the coming version of reality we’re slowly pivoting towards whether we like it or not? OH GOOD! This is a toy which purports to let you check whether any individual exists in the base-level infocorpus of a bunch of different LLMs – GPT, Gemini, Llama, etc – so you can basically see whether or not you’re ‘notable’ enough to have been included; I’m…somewhat skeptical about the validity of the results here, but if you want to feel SPECIAL then plug your own name in and see what it says (IN YOUR FACE OTHER MATT MUIRS I AM THE ONE THE MACHINE LOVES BEST!).
- The Virtual Criterion Closet: Would you like to experience a website which presents you with a virtual 3d version of the famous Criterion Closet of films, and which lets you pull the actual films off the shelves and look at their covers and click through to stream them on a variety of popular platforms? Erm, why? But also, good! That’s exactly what this is, how incredibly convenient for us both.
- Humans Not Invited: A cute little project/gag/ARTPIECE by Friend of Curios Damjanski, who sent me this a couple of days ago – Humans Not Invited is a single-idea gag/THOUGHT EXPERIMENT which asks the question “what if CAPTCHA, but for AI?”. Click the link and you’re presented with a CAPTCHA which is designed to be legible to The Machine but not to us, and a slightly-unsettling insight into what a system designed for an ‘intelligence’ (not, strictly, ‘intelligence’, but wevs) that is Not Like Our Own looks like.
- 8bit Nintendo: This is very much the sort of long-running, slightly-pointless, vaguely-Sisyphean endeavour that I can get behind – games YouTuber Jeff Gerstmann has spent the past…Christ, fcuking AGES playing Every Single 8bit Nintendo Game EVER (I am not going to spend time thinking about the exact truth value of that statement, and I strongly suggest that you don’t either) and ranking them ALL so that, finally, we have the definitive list of Which Is The Best – the link takes you to the full list (and no, I’m not telling you, you have to click you fcukers), which in turn lets you access the video reviews for each title; as someone who really doesn’t want to watch any fcuking videos thankyou very much I am slightly annoyed that these aren’t writeups but, well, it’s Jeff’s project and he can do whatever he likes with it and I should probably just be quiet.
- AI, Content, Rights: Technically this link should be titled ‘RSL Media’ as, er, that’s what the website’s called, but that means literally nothing and my title is BETTER, so there. This is a project – backed by Charlize Theron! Endorsed by lots of her Famous Friends! – which purports to offer CREATIVES (or indeed anyone else) the chance to TAKE CONTROL over “how AI may use their work, identity, characters, and marks.” This is, basically, a bit Creative Commons-ish; there are basically three optional ‘tags’ which, via the project, you can apply in granular fashion to various elements of your creative life; free use, no use, and use-with-conditions, and the idea is that your choices get ‘encoded’ (yes, I know, me too) in AI-readable format via RSL Media and then that “AI systems and platforms check the RSL Media Registry before using protected rights” (yes, I know, me too), thereby ensuring that your rights are respected and…look, we all know that this is going absolutely fcuking nowhere and the idea of ‘AI systems checking a registry’ is for the birds but, well, THANKS FOR TRYING ANYWAY, CHARLIZE!
- Menu Story: Oh oh oh I LOVE THIS! Another month, another wonderful bit of exploratory dataviz and storytelling by The Pudding – this one’s a look at the history of restaurant menus in the US, which tells a story about the evolution of dining out in North America over the course of about 40 years over the late-19th and early-20th century. It takes 10 dishes sourced from menus across the timespan to explain how social and culinary mores evolved, the semiotics of food and the culture of eating out, all with scans of the menus in question…you cannot possibly understand how much I want to eat sweetbread vol-au-vents in champagne sauce right now, honestly, which wasn’t a sentence I expected to be typing at 807am but here we are.
- LEGO Audio Instructions: I wasn’t aware that this was a thing, but bless the LEGO group for creating this repository of instructions for a whole, massive range of their construction kits rendered either as braille-readable or audio instructions; should any of you have visually-impaired people in your lives who might like to indulge in some brickwork, this is a GREAT resource and genuinely laudable.
- Hyperblam: I keep wanting to write something about the algorave scene in London, to the continued mass indifference of the editors I speak to – someone told me it was ‘possibly too cool’ for them, which, and I say this with affection, is not something I really associated with the idea of ‘people coding psytrance’, but wevs I guess – but I continue to think that livecoding music is a genuinely interesting artform which could do with being explored a bit more. If you’ve ever thought ‘wow, I would LOVE to make music with HTML!’ then a) you are a beautiful and niche human being and I am generally pleased you exist; and b) WELCOME TO HYPERBLAM, which “lets you make music with HTML. It’s a declarative implementation of the Web Audio API and is completely dependency free. Create pedal boards, drum machines, sampled instruments. And don’t write a single line of JavaScript in the process. Unless you really want to.” You will obviously need to be…quite code-y to get your head round this, but if you are then you might find this a lot of fun; consider this the hypergeek version of the Roland toy back up there.
- Division Bell: A potentially-fun morning distraction for some of you; Division Bell is a mailing list-based ‘game’ (but also polling system, to an extent) which each morning asks its audience a binary question based on UK politics and asks said audience to guess which outcome is most likely; the result is recorded and shared with you the next morning along with that day’s question, both as a daily barometer of a (certain, self-selecting bit of) public opinion, and, over time, an assessment of the crowd’s predictive effectiveness. This will start to get interesting if it persists over the longterm and you get a picture of how good the audience of (presumably) journalists and wonks is at futurescrying.
- What Is Elon Worth?: To which the only answer is simultaneously “too much” and “on a human level? Literally nothing!” – but if you want a more precise(ish) tracker then this site does a reasonable job of communicating the staggering, vile, unconscionable scale of the horrible fcuking cnut’s net worth (although we all know it’s a house of cards propped up on mad valuations and he could never actually access the money in meaningful fashion) and quite how mindboggling a figure a trillion in fact is. BONUS ‘COMEDY’ ELON LINK: this is one of those ‘try and spend all his money’ websites which are not interesting per se and certainly not in the case of this one which has literally just been spaffed out by Claude in no-time but which does, again, do quite an effective job of contextualising just what an incredible decision it is for someone with that much to choose to spend their time just being massively sad and lonely and angry and racist on X.
- The Fito Sauna: This is a domestic sauna which you can buy. The website advertising it is really nicely-made – full-bleed video, nice scrolling, good UX/UI – but the main reason I am including it is because…look, I am sure this is a great product and it will make you REALLY SWEATY but, also, IT LOOKS LIKE A FCUKING MEDIEVAL TORTURE DEVICE! IT MAKES ANYONE USING IT LOOK LIKE THEY ARE THE TITULAR BUCCANEER IN POPULAR KID’S BOARD GAME ‘POP-UP PIRATE!’ IT IS, OBJECTIVELY, RIDICULOUS! I promise you, this really is very, very funny indeed (also, you just KNOW at least one customer is going to get stuck and require some sort of fire brigade-assisted egress from the scandisweatprison).
- Joe Chemo: One for the three people under the age of 40 reading this – yes, YOU my weird, friendless children! What…what are you *doing* here? Go and make friends with people your own age! – who perhaps won’t remember that until 1997 the cigarette brand Camel had, as one part of its immense marketing operation, a cartoon camel mascot, called Joe, which it used to present its tabs as COOL and SEXY and RELATABLE (because what says ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ and ‘relatable’ like a weirdly-eroticised camel with what can only be described as ‘undeniable big d1ck energy’? NOTHING, THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING!)…but it did! The past, a different country, etc etc. Anyway, this is an old parody site pointing out that, er, cigarettes do sort of kill you (as well as making you look really, really cool – sorry, but it’s true), set up by…some well-meaning people to raise awareness of the fact that smoking equals cancer equals (oftentimes, if you’re lucky(?) chemo and it is very much a late-90s relic of its time and, er, while it’s well-meaning I can’t pretend that I didn’t laugh very, very hard at this line: “Although Joe Chemo may seem like a joke, there’s nothing funny about chemotherapy,” which does contradict it rather.
THE SECTION WHICH DOES RATHER FEEL LIKE THIS WEEK IS THE METEOROLOGICAL EMBODIMENT OF THE ‘FCUK AROUND / FIND OUT’ GRAPH MEME, PT.2:
- RouteStay: I appreciate that the Tour de France has only really ever been a niche interest in the UK, but, for me and for lots of others with connections to continental Europe, it conjures memories of various relatives and family members sitting entranced of a July afternoon in desperately hot, largely-breezeless living rooms in Italy or France or Spain, watching (to my eyes, at least) the world’s most boring sporting event unfold at a pace that might at best be described as ‘fcuking glacial’ (competitive professional road cycling, the only sport which can rival cricket for ‘seems to go on literally forever). Nice scenery, though, and the aerial shots of rural France are LOVELY. Anyway, if you’re the sort of person who would inexplicably like to spend a portion of your holiday time going to somewhere moderately-remote and hilly and standing in the blazing summer sun while some sweaty men suffer past you in large, confusing groups and you’re in the market for somewhere to stay while you do so then this website – which exists to help you find accommodation in proximity to the Tour’s various stages – will be INVALUABLE (God, I can practically hear all the Lycra Dads rubbing their Rapha-clad thighs in velocipedally- (is that a word? It is now!) erotic transport.
- Houseplants: Akash Wadhwani write to tell me that he made “a field guide to 114 houseplants where each one is a little clay sculpture in a pot from its homeland, and each tells you where it actually grows wild and how not to kill it.” Clicking through I figured it was in-part AI assisted, so I asked Akash to explain a little about how it was created – I’m going to paste his answer in full here, because I think it’s a really interesting case study in ‘making things with AI but also doing some work yourself’: “The data research is all mine. Every plant is a hand-built record of about two dozen fields, and every value is cited to a real source. Care and homelands come mostly from the botanical gardens (Missouri Botanical Garden, Kew), toxicity from the ASPCA’s database, grow-zones and invasive status from US university extension sheets. The other non-AI bit: each plant also has a real photograph of it growing in the wild, pulled from iNaturalist (Creative Commons, “captive=false” only, so no greenhouse shots) and credited to the photographer. The clay sculptures are AI. OpenAI’s image model (gpt-image-1), one render each, transparent background, But the part I actually designed is the pot. There’s a lookup that maps each plant’s native range to a real ceramic tradition from that place, so the pot comes from the plant’s homeland rather than a generic terracotta. The Mexican ones sit in Talavera majolica, the Chinese ones get blue-and-white porcelain, Indian plants get Jaipur blue pottery, southern African ones get Ndebele patterns.” I really appreciate him taking the time to explain, but also think this is a neat illustration of the sort of AI-assisted web project that I can happily support, someone taking an idea and combining their own skills and ideas with The Machine to make something they probably wouldn’t have been able to make otherwise. THIS DOESN’T FEEL LIKE A BAD THING.
- Superyacht Fan: Per the blurb, a site containing information about “The Largest Yachts in the World and the Amazing People who Own these SuperYachts.” Hm, this must be a new and hitherto-unimagined definition of the term ‘amazing’ (or, alternatively, a very literal one – after all, ‘amazing’ needn’t be positive per se), but for anyone who wants to spend a bit of time imagining what it must be like to hang out on a 110ft floating chunk of fibreglass ego then FILL YOUR BOOTS! “What began as a pastime for yacht spotting has evolved into a leading online destination for yachting enthusiasts, with thousands of visitors engaging with our content every day. Launched in 2009, SuperYacht Fan transitioned from a gallery of yacht imagery to a pivotal resource, culminating in the Super Yacht Owners Register—a meticulously compiled database featuring over 1,670 yacht owners. The allure of luxury yachts and their affluent proprietors has captured global interest, making our compilation a valued asset for those fascinated by the maritime embodiments of opulence.” BURN THEM ALL DOWN MELT THEM INTO PILES OF SLAG EAT THE RICH, etc etc.
- Fictional Videogame Stills: This is a very old art project from the early-90s in which artist Suzanne Trester creates a series of stills – screenshots, effectively – from videogames which never in fact existed. Honestly, I am such a sucker for this sort of thing, imagined games and books and TV shows and the sort of hauntological faux-archive of lore you can develop around them, and these are GREAT. The artist describes the project as such – do click the link, though, I love the works: “From the mid to late 1980s I spent a lot of time hanging around videogame arcades in London. I started to think about the games, their structures, their objectives, their themes, their addictiveness. I started to consider their cultural subtexts, antecedents, the effect they may have on society and how they might develop and connect to other mechanisms, developments and fantasies or projections of the future. From 1989 I started making paintings about them and in January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots. The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction.”
- The Le Mans Classic: So apparently each year there’s a version of the Le Mans 24h done with classic vehicles – apologies if this is common knowledge, but, well, cars are fcuking dull, aren’t they, why would I have known that? Anyway, would you like to experience the MAJESTY AND EXCITEMENT of last year’s race via the medium of HIGH-QUALITY BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOGRAPHY? Oh good! This is a very nicely-made website which tells you the story of the day via some very cool photos (objectively they are, even though, I repeat, CARS ARE FCUKING DULL) but which is ruined slightly by some really, really bad writing – it’s bad in the sort of way where I can’t quite tell whether it’s AI or whether this is just an instance where the copywriter genuinely thinks prose like this (“I see something else in my viewfinder. A spectator in his vintage ’70s helmet, absolute concentration on his weathered face. He looks more authentic than all the drivers put together. More passion in his eyes than in a thousand press releases”) communicates insouciant, weathered cool rather than a grab-bag of sub-Mcqueen cliches. Anyway, the pictures are nice.
- Uncovered: This is a very cool idea I think – the gimmick with Uncovered is that it effectively acts like ‘Tinder, but for the first pages of novels’, with the website presenting you with a selection of first pages of various books which you can read; if you like what you see you can find out what the book is and get a link to buy it, if you don’t you just swipe on to the next one. Simple, easy, neat link to purchase…this is really smart imho, and it feels like something which booksellers might reasonably consider copyi…NO MATT! NO THIEVING! Sorry, let’s try that again – ‘might reasonably consider paying the creator some money for’. Better? Better!
- App Privacy Checker: Yes, ok, fine, the ACTUAL link is called ‘Loupe’ but none of you would have stopped to pay attention to that whereas I figure the ‘privacy’ thing might cause at least one of you to pause as you desperately scroll to the longreads, the only bit of Curios I think people ACTUALLY enjoy (look, it’s fine, I am coming to terms with it and I know my place). Loupe is an app (iOS-only, I think) which purports to give you an overview of exactly what each app on your phone knows about you and what it is doing with that information (I mean, ‘ish’, but still). Loupe describes itself as “a guided tour of the data any app can quietly read about you. Explore what’s exposed, see why it’s identifying, and decide what to do about it. Ever wondered how advertisers recognize you across apps and websites? It usually comes down to fingerprinting: small, ordinary details about your device, combined until the mix is rare enough to point back to you. Loupe lets you see those details yourself. It reads the same public iOS APIs that third-party apps use, showing you the raw data and explaining why it matters. Trackers don’t need your name, email, or location to recognize you. Your region, languages, settings, storage, and sensors create a pattern distinctive enough to follow you online. Loupe puts these readings in one place so you can see exactly what you’re sharing.” WARNING: this is unlikely to make you feel particularly good about The Modern World.
- Just Fcuking Send It: I know it’s a minor annoyance when judged in the grand scheme of Ways In Which Stuff Is A Bit Sh1tter Now Than It Was In The Past When Things Were Good (Or I Was Young, Either/Or), but it really p1ssed me off when WeTransfer started demanding I log in to use its services. WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW WHO I AM? I know, I know, so you can market to me forever and harvest data on me which might in some way become valuable at scale! I know! And yet, still hurts. Anyway, this is a free WeTransfer replacement which promises not to give a fcuk about who you are and which sends things “directly device-to-device over an encrypted WebRTC connection. The bytes never pass through or get stored on a server — only a tiny code-exchange does, to introduce the two browsers to each other.” NB – WEB CURIOS WOULD LIKE TO ASK THAT YOU ONLY USE THIS TO SEND THINGS THAT ARE LEGAL PLEASE.
- On Together Virtual Coworking: I find this…a touch troubling, ngl. So this is a ‘game’ which you can download on Steam and which creates a ‘virtual coworking space’ on your desktop which lets you experience DIGITAL COWORKING COMPANIONS on your desktop who you can have fun with and who will sit and work while you do so you can experience the illusion of working alongside other people and…er…does this sound like something that a society in the fullest flush of psychological health would imagine or create? I WOULD POSIT THAT IT DOES NOT IN FACT SOUND LIKE THAT! Although, actually, hang on, from reading the blurb a little more closely it sounds like your virtual coworkers are representations of other actual ‘players’ and could in fact be people you know in irl should you be able to persuade your Actual Friends to get involved, so maybe it’s only 60% as sad as I initially thought it was. To be clear, though, I do not wholly approve of this although I can’t quite adequately explain why because I bang on about the joy of multiplayer websites and shared online spaces all the time, so maybe I’m just an intellectually-inconsistent tw4t.
- The Prettiest Girl Today: I really, really hope that this is a sincere website – I am going to assume that it is and present it as such. This site does one thing and one thing only – it presents a picture of a young woman (always the same image) and the day’s date, along with the text “today is [date] and the prettiest girl in the world is still Emilia” and, look, I can’t help it, I think that this is SO SO SO SO SO CUTE AND ROMANTIC, just a small, digital love letter, like planting a flower for someone or…er…a less sh1t and tedious metaphor (think of one!), and I would be SO UPSET were I to discover that the Emilia in question is, I don’t know, a famous or a bongo star or something (I have a small suspicion given quite how pretty the woman in question is that this might not just be ‘some random girl the site creator loves’, but, again, I AM CHOOSING HOPE HERE).
- Sunrisetracker: Where is the sun rising RIGHT NOW? At the time of writing – 0928am, since you asked – people in Nova Scotia are currently rubbing the sleep from their eyes in anticipation of another glorious day of (I don’t know) communing with the salmon. HELLO AND WELCOME TO FRIDAY, NOVA SCOTIA!
- ACARS Drama: ACARS is, apparently, “a digital data communication system for transmission of short messages between aircraft and ground stations via airband radio or satellite.” This is a Bluesky account sharing DRAMATIC MESSAGES shared via this system, and, honestly, some of these are basically whole novels in-waiting. I mean, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? WHAT IS THIS IN RESPONSE TO?? WHAT IS THE CONTEXT: “THNX. WE ARE THINKING THOUGHTS”. Baffling.
- Giglistify: This is quite a fun idea, in theory more than in practice. Put in any town in the UK and the site will search listings for upcoming gigs – and then pull together a playlist of the acts coming to your local town in the coming weeks and months so you can see if there are any who you fancy paying to go and see. Obviously if you try this for London it becomes an overwhelming mess of genres (which in some ways is its own sort of fun), but try it somewhere with a more manageable volume of live music and this could actually be quite helpful I think.
- Blood Donation: It is a source of shame to me (one of a growing list, if I am entirely honest) that I have never given blood – thing is, though, while I don’t have a problem with needles I do very much have a problem with the fact that it is impossible to have a pint or so of blood removed without thinking quite a lot about how this means that you are basically just a thin sac of epidermis full of bones and gristle and fluids and meat and oh god just typing this is sending me slightly sweaty-palmed with sick discomfort. Ahem. Anyway, this is a really nice little gentle explainer of What It Is Like Donating Blood In The UK with lovely, cute 3d animations and a reassuring vibe, and while it’s nothing special it *is* very sweet and it gets bonus points for making sure that the liquid in the cups at the end is orange because SQUASH (I am reliably informed by those less pathetic than me about their own physicality that the squash and biscuits are the best bit of the whole experience).
- Vintage Computer Graphics: Via Pietro, currently dying of hot in Italy, comes this YouTube channel which features clips of the amazing, vaguely-horrifying CG monstrosities of the (mostly) 80s and 90s. Honestly, the thumbnails alone are beautiful in themselves, but it’s really worth exploring a bit because you will find gems like THIS..
- Robot Wars: Top-down Robot Wars game which you can either control with the keypad (BORING, SAFE) or by attempting to prompt the robots into working as functional machines of virtual death (IMPOSSIBLE, SILLY, AMUSING).
- 4×3: A variant on the NYT’s connections game (or, more accurately, Only Connect’s Wall round) with a slight wrinkle in one word appears in all 4 sets of words. Which, I promise, will make sense when you click.
- Vapor Gallery: This is fun and silly and one you might want to bookmark and return to when there is slightly less murderheat and drought going on – the game asks you to catch raindrops in a paper cup by moving your hand around, with the volume of rainfall determined by actual real-life weather data from WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW, which makes playing it if you’re based in the UK this week (or indeed anywhere in Europe) an exercise…in…patience, but it’s also weirdly zenlike and the dev has really nailed the sense of accomplishment (and the dopamine-activating achievements) when you finally manage to secure some precious, precious H20.
- Play Quake In Your Browser (Again): For the second time this year, QUAKE IN YOUR BROWSER! This one is apparently written entirely in CSS, which I am sure is very impressive, but, honestly, it pales into insignificance when compared to the next link which, honestly, has blown my tiny little fcuking mind because, look, it’s…
- HALF-LIFE 2, THE FULL GAME, IN YOUR BROWSER FOR FREE!: I cannot stress enough quite how insane this is to me – this is, as far as I can tell, the FULL FCUKING GAME, the whole thing, the headcrabs and the physics and ALL THE VOICED DIALOGUE, and the potato-y faces, all loaded into a tab in Chrome and playable for free, with saves and chapter selects and EVERYTHING. I was skeptical at first, but I even got it to run on my increasingly-fcuked old laptop and, ok, yes, it was not a Seamless Gaming Experience but, crucially, it WORKED, and I think if you have a slightly-less-shonky rig than mine then you will be able to get this running without a hitch so draw all the curtains, get yourself a bottle of icy water and prepare to immerse yourself. BECOME GORDON FREEMAN! Oh God I can’t tell you how amazing this is, and how amazing that you can do this in 2026. Sometimes the future IS ok!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY THIS WEEK!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Miwa Ito: Miwa Ito makes very small sculptures out of glass, including quite a few which look like miniature items of food (but, I repeat, out of glass). You will want to crunch down on the forbidden pudding SO MUCH (but you must never, ever).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Remembering Brexit: Or, more accurately, “One man, specifically blogger James O’Malley, remembers HIS post-Brexit week which was rendered quite weird by dint of his going viral for a petition he started requesting that London secede from the rest of the UK and rejoin the EU immediately; this resulted in him being the recipient of a lot of media attention and everything feeling…quite odd, even moreso than it generally did in that strange, fevered period when we all collectively realised that, yes, we had actually been that fcuking stupid. Where were YOU on the night of the results? I had gone to see Belle & Sebastian at the Royal Albert Hall, possibly THE most ‘Remain’-coded gig one could imagine, during which I became convinced that The Forces Of Liberal Good would of COURSE prevail and that Everything Was Going To Be OK, and then I went home and stayed up getting very stoned and drinking the best part of a bottle of whiskey as everything slowly went entirely to t1ts. MEMORIES! Anyway, I liked this piece because it tells a personal story rather than trying to make some sweeping assessment of What It Has All Meant (and we all know that it has Meant that we are poorer and more stupid and more hateful than we used to be, so).
- The Strange Rebirth of Municipal England: We are yet to hear a great deal about the practical realities of What Burnham’s Vision For The UK is – mainly because noone knows! – but I thought that this piece in the LRB was an interesting set of observations about the way in which his recent speeches and record in Manchester might point to a *slightly* different approach to politics, specifically the role of local structures and systems in delivering outcomes: “The politics vindicated by Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election has been available to politicians on the left for a long time. It has been a very large part of the failure of the Labour Party since 2010 that it has been unable to link the grave fact of austerity, its practical consequences and its growing unpopularity, to a coherent and compelling argument about what is structurally wrong with the country, why it ‘doesn’t work’. Burnham was once part of this failure (he seemed bland and insignificant in both the 2010 and 2015 Labour leadership elections), but his experience as mayor of Greater Manchester seems to have given him the language that was needed. He has been able to channel the anger and helplessness created by the relentless running-down of towns and communities, especially in the North, and connect it to an energetic critique of the centralised Westminster state. In his victory speech, he spoke of a ‘Makerfield test at the heart of British politics’ that ‘will make sure that the places Westminster has neglected will now get fairness’. He has turned that anger and helplessness, so liable to become a poisonous and reactionary nostalgia, in another direction. His campaign has made unabashed use of the word ‘hope’.” BONUS ANALYSIS OF UK POLITICS: I had to do a podcast this week – oh, ok, I didn’t *have* to, but I was asked and which middle-aged white man won’t jump at the chance to have his opinions broadcast? NO FCUKER, etc – and I thought I was going on to talk about misinformation and the social media ban and associated stuff that I actually know about and instead discovered that the whole thing was actually going to be about Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham and, honestly, it was terrifying, but if you would like to see Wot Four People Think about it all then you can do so here (the comments variously accuse us of being Zionists, lefties/luvvies and, in my case, ‘the exact reason why people are flocking to Restore and Reform’, if you’d like some endorsements).
- Your Taste Is Tasteless: As a result of not really getting paid to do advermarkeingpr any more (or, as I saw it characterised earlier this week, ‘SPAM’ – Social, PR, Advertising and Marketing – which might be my new favourite acronym EVER) I tend not to read that much trend and culture analysis stuff from that world any more; one exception is Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick’s Trend Report, which is genuinely interesting and insightful more times than not. This issue, from earlier this week, is a case in point – scroll down to get to the first essay and read Kyle’s thoughts on the recent TASTE DISCOURSE. It’s dense, but it’s good, and this feels…true, basically, in a way that these pieces don’t always tend to: “The creativity of the 2010s (and even the 2000s) yielded a revolution of apps and internet tools, representing a shift from blue collars to white. The creative class came to define this moment with nearly a third of Americans in the 2010s (40+ million) doing “creative” work, which urbanist Richard Florida defined as those “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content.” The group included obvious workers (artists, musicians, entertainers) but also the less obvious (engineers, scientists, educators), who largely shared an interest in city living and fostering tolerant, diverse environments. These are the people who bridged the twentieth century’s focus on refining industrialization with this era of ideas, culture making as product. This mode went on to gentrify everything, a mindset so expansive that everything became ingestible instead of inspirational. Yet: it was an era of ideas, a light enlightenment. Say what you will about the ideas that came out of the 2000s and 2010s — iPhones! Facebook! Avocado toast! Dubstep! Minecraft! — but ideas were happening. So was culture. It’s still happening! But it’s unconcentrated, diluted by so many parts of other things. Most things are collage, collage, collage.”
- Good AI: Anil Dash writes about what he considers to be an example of ‘Good AI’ – specifically an app designed to do one very small, very specific, very annoying thing for video editors, which has been built by one guy who needed it using AI coding tools and which has now been released to the small community of Other Guys who might find it useful, who are all collaborating to refine and improve it and make it more helpful and effective. Why is this ‘good’? Dash posits that it’s because this is sort of the ur-usecase for AI coding – there’s a small problem that doesn’t have an addressable market large enough to make commercial software development worthwhile, but which could still be solved by software…so use the AI to spin it up for next-to-no cost, iterate it with the small community of potential users, and then make it available for free because you don’t have costs to recoup and so you can afford to. Honestly, even if you’re very anti-AI, please read this and then come and explain to me why you think this is still THE DEVIL’S WORK because, well, I really don’t think it is and I think that attitude is extremely dumb and unhelpful.
- The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: An excellent piece of investigating by Andy Baio, this; a few weeks ago I kept seeing links to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows floating around the web, which puzzled me as I knew for a fact it was an old-ish project (featured in here in 2022! CURIOS IS ALWAYS FIRST! Erm, sorry). Why had it suddenly bubbled up again? Turns out, it’s because someone lifted literally the entire text of the original site, along with the copy from the accompanying book, and repurposed it on a lookalike url, all to advertise their webdesign business. This is SUCH an interesting story, from the general weirdness of ‘why’ to the growing realisation that you can’t really do anything about stuff like this and the feeling it contributes to that everything online feels weird and wrong and grifty…because it sort-of is! As Andy concludes, “What happened to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows may have been more brazen, but it isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend happening across the web, where people are using AI to repackage, optimize, and replace the authoritative sources it was trained on for profit. Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, obviously-vibecoded website filled with AI-generated content that was designed to siphon attention away from human creators: bloggers, authors, journalists, artists, musicians, and anyone else who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m not even sure anymore that the emails I’m receiving are sent by a human. The feeling of seeing something you love ingested and repurposed by a machine designed to replace the person who made it seems like a uniquely modern sorrow. Maybe there should be a word for it.” BONUS SEMI-RELATED CONTENT! This piece, about the creeping ubiquity of the Claude aesthetic and how…unsettling it is is a good read, and should hopefully start a trend where we simply ignore anything that looks like the unfiltered output of The Machine on-sight.
- The Fake Polymarketing Campaign: Segueing seamlessly from ‘everything online feels weird and fake right now’, this piece is another datapoint as to why. It seems that popular prediction marketplace Polymarket was paying content creators to pretend to have won big on specific, silly bets, filming themselves screaming in joy or reacting in rapt shock to the realisation that Donald Trump saying ‘McDonald’s’ in a specific timeframe had earned them thousands of bucks…the key thing being ‘pretend’, because the vids were posed, the wins spoofed and the whole thing a brand-building, awareness-raising, gullible-consumer-capturing scam which really ought to see the company censured in some meaningful way but which, inevitably, won’t! So good to know that Meta’s getting in on this game!
- The Menace Of Massive Cars: This is a GREAT – but occasionally very wince-inducing – interactive scrolly explainer piece in the NYT about exactly why it is that cars (specifically, SUVs, those massive tanklike vehicles which are absolutely ESSENTIAL for the school run and the occasional visit to the tip, what do you mean ‘you don’t need a car that big you fcuking cnut?’) becoming taller and bigger is very, very bad for pedestrian safety. I challenge you to scroll through this and get to the section with the crash test dummy being mown down by the Big Car and not do an actual, proper ‘oooooffff’ intake of breath as you see if being dragged under the VERY HEAVY vehicle.
- Trying The Snap Specs: 404 Media’s Jason Koebler gets to try out the Snap AR spectacles at the company’s BRAND EXPERIENCE ACTIVATION CENTRE in Cannes this week and it’s fair to say that he remains…unimpressed. It does rather feel like this could be the final nail in Snap’s coffin as anything other than ‘Whatsapp for tweens’ – I am slightly astonished that the company has fumbled what I always thought of as a pretty strong position in the whole ‘world model development’ space by instead, er, letting itself get overtaken by fcuking Meta of all people on the smart glasses front. Anyway, I think we can all confidently predict that we will never, ever see someone wearing a pair of these out in the wild, EVER. Expect to see them in retro tech shops alongside the Vision Pro sets come the 2030s.
- Fishtank: Another one of those “man, the internet is fcuking enormous and contains MULTITUDES and so much of it is so fcuked-up and weird!” discoveries, this WIRED article is a fascinating look at Oh So Modern reality TV variant Fishtank, which I remember vaguely hearing something about a few years back and which sounds…Christ, I mean, the word ‘problematic’ is now largely devoid of meaning, but this really does sound VERY PROBLEMATIC. Imagine Big Brother – the early seasons – crossed with the very worst of streaming culture (think Sam Pepper, think Ice Poseidon, those horrible little chuds), crossed with the very modern cult of the audience being in charge and wanting more and more and more (DANCE FOR ME, W4NKING MONKEY, AND I MAY BESTOW YOU WITH THE PENNIES!!) and you have the vague shape of Fishtank, but, please, you really do need to read the whole thing to get a sense of how very, very fcuked up it all is. Also, I thought this comment about the audience was very astute and very telling and paints a not-inaccurate but very, very depressing picture of what life is like for a not-insignificant chunk of young people in the developed world right now: “Most people panic, it turns out, but some will roll with the weirdness and go wild. By day three, Neptune says, he can usually tell whether a contestant will adjust or crumble. As for the audience, he believes he has tapped a sector of the population that traditional reality TV never appealed to. “If you’re an avid Fishtank fan,” he says, “you have a lot of free time. Probably there’s something in your life which isn’t optimal. You’re unemployed, or disabled and can’t work, or you don’t have friends.” Neptune thinks the fans see themselves in those he casts, whom he calls “autistic, poorly socialized weirdos.” “The average American,” Neptune adds, “is not some 5’11”, normal, well-spoken guy. The average American is a fucked-up carny who works at Hot Topic or at a gas station. And I think that’s more entertaining than the bronze beauties on normal TV.” He continues, “They’re imperfect weirdos. Maybe they’re not cool, but they’re interesting if you look closely enough.””
- Newsletters Are The New Matchmakers: To be clear – they are not. BUT! I am including this partly because I do love me a spurious, bullsh1t trend (and, y’know, if Miranda July is doing it then maybe there’s something there) and partly because the idea of Web Curios: The Dating Platform made me laugh SO MUCH when I conceived of it the other day that I was physically incapable of doing anything for a few minutes while I cried, sobbing in paroxysms, imagining a speed-dating night solely for Curios readers and the astonishing levels of awkwardness which would doubtless be on display. Which newsletter’s readers do we think are the horniest? Depressingly it’s probably something like Politico’s, on balance.
- The Colours Your Screen Can’t Show You: A slightly mind-bending (ok, mind bending to ME, as a moron for whom physics is very much a closed book full of nonsensical and faintly-troubling symbols) look at why exactly it is that the colours that you see on a screen can never entirely replicate the palette vision in real life, why your phone can never render exactly what your eye sees, and how, exactly, the cones and rods work. Look, a lot of this is…quite beyond me, but it is undeniably curious and I found myself gazing at the page in slight awe, like a dog contemplating space travel or something.
- Rights for Gods: My friend Jay Owens writes for the London Review of Books about rivers and nature and the idea of conferring rights upon natural systems as a means of granting them protection from the tediously-predictable impacts of, well, All Of Our Sh1t; this draws on the work of Robert MacFarlane (whose writing on and around these issues is genuinely fascinating, by the way, and I say that as someone who has minimal interest in ‘nature’ and ‘the countryside’) in terms of questioning whether ‘rights’ are the right framing for these things, even if one concedes that it makes sense to think of things such as rivers and seas as ‘living entities’ (after all, rights necessarily require corollary responsibilities to be meaningful, and I struggle to see any meaningful sense in which a body of water can be said to have responsibilities unless we start to get VERY woo), and, in general, this is a really interesting read on a topic which is growing in prominence as we start to reckon with just how badly we’ve fcuked everything up.
- The Most American Books Ever Written: Specifically novels – this list, by Esquire, runs chronologically, and feels…I don’t know, I think that it says more about how Americans see and conceive of themselves than it does the novels themselves, personally, and I found myself raising an eyebrow at some of the choices and the rationales (The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, is an excellent and seminal novel but I do not think that there is anything about it which specifically connotes North America in my mind, other than its setting – just because current America reflects it does not to my mind make it a uniquely-American book), and there were a couple of books which I felt really should have been on here which I was slightly-surprised not to see (one being Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ – perhaps uncoincidentally, a book which was very Of Its Time and which has since vanished slightly from the canonical discourse, but which, to my mind at least, could not have been written in any country other than the US). See what you think! Get angry! It’s what lists are for!
- Perez Hilton’s Vegas Afterlife: I was slightly surprised to see Perez Hilton get the full profile treatment in Slate, and I have to say that I found this profile quite an unpleasant read – I think it’s fair to say that Hilton does not appear to have engaged in a huge amount of Personal Growth and Development since he spent the 00s drawing poorly-sketched lime-green circles around Mischa Barton’s upskirt cellulite, and, honestly, I came away from this rooting for him to suffer some small but significant personal ill (or at least to be forced to work a fast food counter job for the rest of his days). Anyway, a nice reminder that cancel culture literally doesn’t exist!
- London’s Best Bagel: It feels very much like this piece could power a whole month’s worth of Anglo-American good discourse, but let’s not let that happen – instead, just enjoy some really beautiful (and very funny) writing by Molly Pepper Steemson about where, subjectively, per Molly, the best bagels in the city are to be found. NB NOT IN BRICK LANE ARE YOU MAD. Please note that you do not need to like bagels or even live in London to enjoy this.
- The First Meme: OH I LOVE THIS! I am just old enough to have caught the tail end of the ‘Kilroy Woz Ere’ graffmeme, but I have never known anything about its origins – this is a lovely little history about where it started, where it was deployed and its arguable status as our culture’s first truly memetic icon (it won’t be the first, of course, there will have been loads of similar load-bearing images or glyphs in previous cultures, but they have been lost to time and so, well, Kilroy and his nose it is!).
- Writers, Booze and Drugs: An excerpt from a book by Rosa Montero on the relationship between writers and mind-altering substances – the section here deals mostly with the bottle, and, Jesus, it’s quite rare that I read about someone else’s drinking habits and think ‘crikey, that sounds like a LOT’ but JESUS there is some ‘heroic’ (read: suicidal) boozing going on in these descriptions. “The Norwegian Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize in 1920, attended the award ceremony so atrociously drunk that he rapped on the corset of Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf (also a Nobel Prize winner) and, after letting out a burp, shouted: “I knew it, I knew it would sound just like a bell!” The wonderful British poet Dylan Thomas, who died of drink at the age of thirty-nine, told his lover near the end: “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s a record.” At the age of thirty-seven, Faulkner would breakfast on two aspirin and half a glass of gin to stop his hands shaking long enough for him to shower and shave. He would go on week-long binges, during which he would wander naked through hotel corridors or disappear completely. During one of these alcoholic absences, he passed out in his underwear on a radiator, remaining there until the concierge knocked down the door. By then he had a third-degree burn on his back. Faulkner’s alcoholism led to several hospitalizations and repeated electroshock treatments. Hemingway, who once drank sixteen daiquiris in a single sitting, also received around a dozen electroshock treatments in his lifetime.” LADSLADSLADSLADSLADS!
- Galapagos: Helen Lewis travels to the Galapagos Islands and writes up the visit in The Atlantic; she’s a reliably excellent writer, but I particularly enjoyed the details about the island and the lizards and the history, and the anecdote about Darwin riding the giant tortoises and then scarfing down a pint of their p1ss is one which I am almost certainly going to recall forever, so, er, THANKS HELEN!
- The Duty of Desirability: It seems like The Rules now that I link to any new piece by Emma Garland – here, she writes up the latest round of the heteropessimism’ discourse (reignited by the ‘is having a boyfriend embarrassing?’ piece last year and now kept animated by the seemingly-endless stream of women willing to keep flogging the increasingly-threadbare looking equine carcass of the ‘debate’). Read the whole thing – it is typically excellent – but these paras offer some flavour as to the piece, the arguments and the tone: “Call me Andrea Dworkin, but I personally don’t think dropping £500 quarterly on hair and nails (which I routinely do) means men owe you something any more than a man spending 12 hours a week in the gym to look like a gay pornstar means he’s owed a crumb of pssy. No one is due emotional cashback for the things we’ve chosen to invest in materially. Those are choices we’ve made. Influenced by “society,” yes, but still things we ultimately do for our own confidence and sense of pride. It’s entirely self-defeating to wear them as armour in a personal war that only ends when the weaknesses of both sides are revealed upfront, and accepted without punishment. The call to “shift the burden onto men” is also ahistorical since, for better or worse, men have always been the ones to have to impress women. In heterosexual contexts they’ve always been expected to make the first move, to do the grafting, to prove they’re not a weird rapist. Even when they stopped doing all that so much, the expectation didn’t go anywhere. Why do you think they’re all dropping £6k to go to Turkey and returning with their heads wrapped in bloody gauze? For a laugh? What the brunch girl industrial complex seems to want is medieval chivalry dressed up as emotionally evolved simping from men who know about attachment styles and read Matt Haig. Conversely, what their traditional male counterparts seem to want is a harem of good Christian women who do anal. I’m sorry to break it to everyone, but those mentalities run downstream of professional dominatrixes and sex cult leaders respectively. They might make for a good financial grift in the short-term, but it will not bring you real intimacy or joy. All it will bring is a deep, cold sense of tragedy – and possibly a book deal.”
- The Best Pint in England: You can always tell a Joel Golby piece, and that is, to my mind, a huge compliment – here he writes about visiting Burton, a Beer Town and home of the Bass brewery and a whole sui generis ecosystem of small brewers and independent pubs, and, per previous pieces I have linked to from The Dispatch, this is yet again an excellent example of writing about place and people in a way that feels…real. I loved this, although by the end I very much felt Joel’s hangover.
- Really Old Rockstar: I don’t particularly like Nick Cave – I always found his music…overpraised (SORRY I AM SORRY), I find his latterday elevation to National Treasure Status somewhat puzzling and his adulation amongst the Alternative Crowd a bit odd given some of the reactionary beliefs he on occasion espouses, and I basically think of him as ‘Steven Fry but for goths’ (fwiw, Nick, I do really like your first novel!). BUT! This piece in his Red Hand Diaries newsletter, about being a Really Old Rockstar, is brilliant and funny and damn you Nick Cave, stop making me like you.
- Why Can’t You Eat When You Have A Crush?: Finally this week, an unprecedented SECOND link to Vittles – this essay is by Lisa Carpagnano and is about all the different appetites within us and how they can both stimulate and suppress each other and love and heartbreak and snacks and family and and and. I thought this was lovely: “For a while after we stopped speaking, I held on to these visions of him preparing food. I considered them the ‘good bits’ of our relationship: there was the time he peeled the skins off peppers for hours to make an elaborate dip; the day he wordlessly shelled langoustines in a restaurant. With these recollections, I tried to erase the memory of the loneliness I felt on other days. I imbued his cooking with extra meaning, but in real life, it was a wavering, sporadic gesture; it did not have the reliable, routine quality of care. I buried the thoughts of the morning when I stayed hungry until he wanted to eat, afraid of starting an argument by turning on the stove. Or the times he left the flat for days without a word, when I wandered around the city looking for him, halving a sandwich in a paper bag so it would last me two mealtimes. Our physical intimacy was also sporadic and dependent on his mood. If I broached this, even in conversation, he would make it clear that I was asking for something that was beyond him. The rule was this: hunger for more than the crumbs I was thrown would ruin our relationship. I learned to stop expressing my desire, observing myself as he positioned me in his choreography. Recently, I found texts on an old phone in which I begged for forgiveness after expressing longing, desperate texts sent while I waited for him to call me back. Depending on his mood, I was a main or side character: faithful or worthless, good or bad, desirable or not.”
By Jiang Huan
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!