You know what I learned during my recent trip to Rome? That 40 degrees is TOO HOT. Also, that the city’s state apparatus is so fcuked for money that when you go to the council offices they literally have signs up saying “WE DO NOT HAVE ANY PENS”, which struck me as quietly tragic for a city which once bestrode the world like a colossus. SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI, EH LADS?
Anyway, I am running late for another EXCITING TRIP TO CATFORD (I know, I know, you envy my life, who wouldn’t) and as such am cutting the preamble short – below are some EXCELLENT links, enjoy them and think of me sweating on the 185 for the next hour or so. THINK OF ME SWEATING.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you really can’t begin to comprehend how fcuking hot I was last week.
By Eikoh Hosoe
WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A TWO–HOUR DEEP HOUSE SET BY MY FRIEND NICK!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO CLARIFY THAT GIANNI INFANTINO IS SWISS AND NOT IN FACT ITALIAN, PT.1:
- Everyone Is God: What with us having a new, shiny, EXCITING Prime Minister here in the UK, and the country’s media seemingly having decided that the time is finally right to pay a bit of attention to the mechanics of the Farageian political machine, it feels like the time is ripe for a NEW, DISRUPTIVE FORCE to enter the political arena and shake things up a bit. Here’s a quick thought experiment for you – were you seeking to create a new political movement, one which would seek to “empower everyone”, would you give it a name which sounded like the sort of thing you’d hear a stranger slurring at you c.6am at a particularly spicy afters? NO YOU WOULD NOT! Nor, indeed, would you pose for the publicity shots for said party in a Temu simulacrum of Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress (actually, you know what? Maybe you would, I don’t know who the fcuk you are or what weird ideas you have) – but that’s why you’re sitting reading this crap rather than running a political party. Welcome, then, to our political arena the new, shiny force that is, er, Everyone Is God, a new political party whose modest aims are to (and I quote) “Empower Everyone, Fulfil Every Dream, and (and this feels like the big one – kudos to them for aiming high, although were I being critical I might suggest it’s possibly a *bit* ambitious*) SOLVE EVERYTHING”! Yes, that’s right, they are going to solve EVERYTHING! What does ‘solve’? mean? WHO CARES FFS! Look, I realise that making fun of small political parties is a bit ‘fish in a barrel’ and I obviously applaud and commend anyone who’s willing to roll up their sleeves and Do Something, but, also, this is SO SO FUNNY. Although their ‘policies’ section is considerably more fleshed-out than those of some Actual Parties People Vote For, which feels like an indictment of…something. Anyway, they don’t appear to be awful racists, which makes a nice change, so here’s to Everyone Is God walking into Number 10 come 2034.
- Dystopian World: ‘What would the blast radius of a nuke look like and how much damage would it do to, say, Basingstoke?’ is a question a load of websites have attempted to let you answer over the past few years, but this fun (ok, fine, a definition of ‘fun’ which is possibly a touch on the broad side, but still) little site is the first I’ve seen that lets you simulate the escalation of international ballistic conflict from first strike to final, horrible, irradiated nightmare – pick a country, pick a type of attack, pick a target and then sit back and watch as the consequences of your actions play out over the coming hours and days. Want to know what might happen if, say, Israel just decided to nuke Iran one morning? I mean, obviously you can sort of guess that the answer is, broadly, ‘lots and lots of people die and everyone starts firing missiles at everyone else’, but this gives you a really interesting projection of the ways in which different nations and strategic blocs might respond and how such a scenario might play out and escalate. Mainly, though, this is just a fun little apocalypse terrarium in which you can play out all your favourite end of the world scenarios – this is Claude-y, fine, but it’s nicely-conceived and interesting and worth a look.
- Jack’s VHS: I LOVE THIS! Jack McNamara emailed me the other week with the following message: “I’m running the Sydney Marathon and this one brand I wanted to pitch as a sponsor (Pit Viper, the sunglasses people) only accepts sponsorship pitches on VHS (really, it’s on their site). I don’t know if they were expecting this, but I rented a studio and filmed an actual tape with some friends, and afterwards used Claude to build a browser VCR to give a digital version of this an appropriate place to live.” This is SUCH fun, and a wonderful commitment to the bit, and so much better than it needs to be – there’s even a little version of Duck Hunt that you can play on the virtual TV should you so desire, and you can seemingly watch the full version of ‘Heat’ too, cropped to a horrible aspect ratio. Honestly, this is so charming and if the sunglasses people don’t sponsor Jack then, well, they’re joyless cnuts.
- Rubber Duck: One of the genuinely great early bits of digital marketing back in, what…2003? was ‘Subservient Chicken’, an incredibly smart website built by Burger King which featured a man in a chicken outfit who, thanks to the creators having predicted all the dumb things someone might instruct a man in a chicken outfit to do and then filmed said man doing, gave the remarkably-convincing illusion of reacting to all your commands in realtime, like you were GOD or something – anyway, this is not that, but it feels vaguely-inspired by it, in a slightly-shonky and low-rent way. Talk to a man in a rubber duck outfit! Watch as he reacts to what you say! There’s no real interactivity here – the video’s basically set up to ‘react’ to pauses in your conversation – but the illusion is weirdly convincing and it made me think that the general ‘control someone inside your browser’ idea is probably due a fancy, fresh 2026 glow-up, so, er, if someone could spend an inordinate amount of time and possibly money on delivering a throwaway gag for me that would be great, thanks.
- My Shaky: I really don’t understand this AT ALL – I first came across it earlier in the year, but dismissed it as some sort of bullsh1t NFT thing, but it floated across my field of vision again this week and on closer inspection doesn’t appear to be trying to sell me anything and I can’t help but be charmed by the fact that, for reasons I simply cannot comprehend, someone has seen fit to create a website which features a seemingly-infinite series of little humanoid avatars wiggling their bare bottoms at the world. WHY? WHY DO THEY EXIST? You can put in your birthdate (don’t worry, there’s no nefarious datacapture happening) and get your own, personalised, date-linked Shaky avatar – each one of the little homunculi not only wiggles their buttocks at you but also has a UNIQUE FACE which it reveals as part of its animation. Honestly, this is very very weird indeed, but I am very much here for its creator’s ambition – there’s something on the website about their dream to create a ‘Shaky Theme Park’ and, honestly, MORE POWER TO YOU, MYSTERIOUS CREATOR OF THE BUM-SHAKING CARTOON HOMINIDS!
- UK Poo: This is a link to a thread on X, for which apologies – still, it’s worth stepping into Elon’s Racist Sh1thole briefly to experience the sheer joy of this selection of what OP calls ‘UK Poo’, a peculiar subgenre of modern music in which UK…I don’t want to call them ‘musicians’ because that feels too generous, so let’s call them…’creators’ post terrible, autotuned pseudo-r’n’b (and, occasionally, Reform-y pub rock anthems) with equally terrible, low-rent visuals… Honestly, this stuff is quite astonishing and very much has the vibe of ‘something the weird kid from your school performed at the end of year talent show in Year 6 and which they were never, ever allowed to forget, until the bullying caused them to be homeschooled’. Every single one of the clips in this thread is the worst thing you’ve ever heard, until the next one, and there’s one in particular featuring three white girls ‘rapping’ outside a Morley’s which made my entire body fold in on itself with humiliation and which I don’t think I will ever be able to forget.
- The Fire Dome: As fires rage across Europe and we start having to face up to the fact that the coming years are going to be…quite unpleasant and increasingly-scary, it’s quite hard to shake the feeling that we are very much living the reality of that meme about climate change being something that you see on vertical videos on a social feed until finally you’re the one doing the filming out of your window. Given the fact that this isn’t likely to get any better – at least until we throw enough compute at The Machine and it, er, I don’t know, solves physics or something (LOL!!!) – it probably behooves us to start thinking about potential solutions or at least mitigating fixes to the general ‘everything’s on fire’ issue…so SAY HELLO TO THE FIRE DOME! You remember that Bill Hicks sketch from the 80s (of course you do! You’re reading this and therefore are OLD!) where he riffs on using hi-tech missile systems to ‘shoot bananas at hungry people’? Well this is basically that, but for shooting fire retardants at wildfires – the system lets you set up what are effectively perimeter defences around a set area, and then uses AI, computer vision and some sort of ballista-type arrangements to automatically lob water, foam or whatever other kit you have to hand at the encroaching conflagration, which, honestly, sounds sort-of cool. Although – and this did give me slight pause for thought – if you think that the name sounds oddly-reminiscent of something else it’s because, well, the company’s Israeli and it’s obviously alluding to the country’s defensive ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile systems, which is a…slightly-weird and uncomfortably-bellicose connection imho. Still, given the fact that everything is going to be on fire most of the time for the rest of our lives – LOL THIS SOUNDS LIKE HYPERBOLE BUT ON SOME LEVELS REALLY ISN’T! – we probably ought to start taking this stuff seriously.
- The Mouthpad: I think this is AMAZING and such a cool piece of assistive technology – this is effectively a computer mouse which sits INSIDE YOUR MOUTH, letting you control a cursor, and therefore a device, using nothing other than the movement of your tongue; if you’ve ever had experience of living with or assisting someone with a severe neurological disorder or paralysis then you will understand exactly what an incredibly-freeing bit of tech this could be (and, honestly, if you haven’t had experience of that sort of thing then I really, sincerely hope you never do because fcuk me is it horrible and sad).
- Call of Duty Ambience: Would you like a website which accurately recreates the feeling of playing multiplayer Call of Duty and having your parenthood and the moral fibre of your mother and sister called constantly into question by strangers from North America? OH GOOD! This is both very funny and also really quite stress-inducing – seriously, people do this for fun? Anyway, you can choose from a variety of different tracks – pick a version of COD and listen as a bunch of morons insult each other over voicechat. WHAT A SPECIES WE ARE!
- No Kings: This is a simple, one-gag site made by Curios reader Joachim, who got in touch to send me this little project in which, to quote him, “you slap a soft trump-caricature around in the browser until his crown falls off.” Ordinarily I don’t have much interest in webstuff about That Fcuking Man, but in this case there is something SO SATISFYING about the feel of the slaps – particularly on a touchscreen device – that I am making an exception. SLAP HIM!
- Soulless Music: The refusal of Spotify to implement any automated blocking or removal of AI-generated music from its platform is…well, it’s a decision clearly motivated by financial concerns which does rather put another nail in the coffin of the company’s ‘we care about music and artists above all else’ messaging, frankly, but it does also leave the door open for services like this one, which will offer you an ‘is this AI-generated?’ assessment of any song on Spotify you care to feed it – now, obviously ‘AI detectors’ are themselves a largely-imperfect grift, but they’re getting good enough that they can at least give you a reasonable steer, and while I wouldn’t stake my reputation (lol) on this being 100% accurate it’s probably not going to steer you entirely wrong either. Obviously we’re rapidly approaching the point where this is all going to be moot as EVERYTHING will contain some machine – sorry, but we will! – but, while we wait, here’s something fun for you to play Cnut with.
- The Humanist Review: I thought this was interesting, more conceptually than practically – the Humanist Review is a new online magazine, presenting longform essays on or around AI and associated issues from some of the Big Name Public Intellectuals (or, depending on your perspective, pseudo-intellectuals) of the age – people like Naomi Alderton (who I like and who I think is smart, but who has also very much taken on the mantle of ‘that one person who every single radio producer and commissioner has decided they MUST book to talk about tech in 2026) and James Bridle and, er, Nick Cave, and which is all a PR exercise by Microsoft which is bankrolling the whole thing, presumably as a broad, brand-building THOUGHT LEADERSHIP exercise. I would expect this to last about 18 months or so, until the person within the business who made it happen moves on to pastures new and their vanity project slowly withers and dies, but it’s interesting (to me, at least) that this sort of relatively-heavyweight (or at least heavyweight-seeming) project got greenlit at all. MAGAZINES ARE SO BACK!!
- The Mangrove Photo Awards 2026: SO MANY LOVELY PHOTOS OF MANGROVE SWAMPS! I really like the fact that there are awards for photos of this very specific environment; as ever, these are all wonderful but my personal favourite is the shot of the very sleepy-looking silky anteater who I can empathise with VERY MUCH at this exact point in time.
- 2 Advanced Studios: This is an old (maybe…what, 2000ish?) website for some design studio or another, which was built in Flash and has now been recreated and OH MY GOD LOOK WHAT WE HAVE LOST WITH THE TREND TOWARDS BORING, HOMOGENOUS DESIGN! Make sure you have your sound on, because the music is very much an integral part of the ‘browse the web like it is two decades ago’ experience on offer here – honestly, the opening animation is just SO NICE and I am now convinced that the whole world would simply be BETTER if we stopped letting people make horrible orange websites using Claude and instead made EVERYTHING look like this. BRING BACK ENTIRELY-UNNECESSARY LANDING ANIMATIONS, YOU COWARDS.
By Tata
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO CLARIFY THAT GIANNI INFANTINO IS SWISS AND NOT IN FACT ITALIAN, PT.2:
- SubWave: This is an interesting idea, I think – SubWave is an AI radio station NO WAIT COME BACK IT IS A GOOD IDEA I PROMISE! Ok, you will have to hold your nose and ignore both the horrible Claudeslop design and the equally-horrible AI-generated prose, but the general idea is, I think, a solid one; SubWave is a system which effectively lets ANYONE spin up their own AI radio station, drawing on music that they own, playing autonomously 24/7. Clicking the link takes you to the project homepage where you can listen to the original station – all the music, to be clear, is real, and there’s no AI when it comes to what you’re consuming – but you can also link out to an explanation of how you can use the same tech to create your very own version which will draw on your own library of tracks. You can create your own AI DJs, guide the way in which they will select tracks, and generally specify how you want your station to sound – it’s a *bit* techy, but also the sort of thing that, with The Machine’s assistant, you can probably sort in a few hours at most. I think this is…quite cool, if it’s possible to say that about AI stuff at this stage in the tech’s development cycle.
- Box Squad: Would you like a website which lets you generate a grid of small, colourful people inside boxes, whose limbs you can move around as per your whims and wonts? WHY WOULD YOU LIKE SUCH A THING, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Nonetheless, here such a thing is – enjoy, you weirdo.
- Deepcut: Ooh, this is a nice throwback – long-term web weirdos among you will doubtless remember Turntable FM, a previously-very-buzzy website which let anyone create shared DJ spaces which ran off (iirc) YouTube and meant you could create shared listening parties where anyone you invited could add to the shared playlist, effectively creating collaborative DJing without the need for any special tech or kit (this was REVOLUTIONARY back in the day, although I appreciate it is…slightly less-so now) – anyway, it died ages ago but now it is seemingly BACK with a new name; it seems to work in exactly the same way and might be a fun thing to share with friends, colleagues or indeed anyone else you trust not to have totally awful taste in music. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to drop into anyone else’s space and listen to whatever they’re playing, like wandering from room to room in a club, this really is very fun indeed and 100% worth bookmarking.
- The Social Connectedness Index: Thanks to my friend Nick for sending this to me; this is a really cool website which effectively visualises the geography of people’s social graph connections, so you can (for example) see which countries people in (say) the UK have the closest connections to on social media – this is SO interesting, honestly, particularly given the degree of granularity you can apply; I was able to click on Lambeth in South London and see that, for reasons I can’t wholly explain, we have LOTS of connections with people in Switzerland (also Portugal, but that was to be expected). There are loads of potential applications for this, I think, but aside from anything else it’s just a really quick and useful way of getting finger-in-the-air data about foreign communities in large urban areas, should you have any need or interest in doing so.
- Reassign: I think I’ve mentioned in passing that I have about as much interest in self-optimisation and improvement as I do in self-trepanning, but I understand that some of you might take a more…progressive approach to your lives and would like to exert a greater degree of CONTROL over the shapeless mess that is ‘existence’ (lol, ‘control’, WE ARE BUT CORKS TOSSED ON THE WAVES OF HISTORY, ALL AGENCY IS ILLUSION!) – should you be such a person then a) I really don’t understand why you’re reading this, we have NOTHING in common; and b) you might enjoy this planning tool which is a daily calendar-type thing which lets you allocate time to tasks on a pleasingly-designed circular grid with what seems to me an almost-psychotic level of detail – there are TASKS and MICROTASKS and you can COLOUR-CODE things and, honestly, just the idea of filling this out looks EXHAUSTING and like it would take longer than actually doing the tasks you’re spending an age planning to do, but, well, I am sitting in my pants writing 10,000 words about ‘stuff on the internet’ to a tiny audience of webmongs, while people who use this sort of stuff are probably running the world or something, so perhaps it is I who am the loser here.
- The Hum Map: Ok, I very much feel that this is a phenomenon I ought to have previously been aware of, but somehow it has passed me by over the years. Did YOU know that there are some people in the world who claim to hear a persistent background noise, the ‘hum’ of the title, and that the noise is stronger or weaker in certain places and at certain times of the day? Per the site’s explanation, “Most people find this website because they are disturbed by an unusual unidentified low-frequency sound that scientists now call the Worldwide Hum. The classic description is that The Hum sounds like a car or truck engine idling outside your home or down the block. Some people describe it as a low rumbling or droning sound. It is typically perceived louder at night than during the day, and louder indoors than outdoors. The sound can often be masked by background noise, such as a fan or keeping the radio on. We estimate that 2-4% of the global population can experience this phenomenon under certain conditions.” This site is a crowdsourced map of people’s experiences with The Hum, recording where they are along with a frankly-exhausting degree of additional detail (I am particularly tickled by the fact that the site records whether hum-hearers are right- or left-handed – I suppose you never quite know what’s going to prove to be a salient datapoint), and I now REALLY want to meet someone who experiences this to ask them about it. Do YOU hear The Hum? I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW.
- Countering Defaults: This is a nice idea – it was sent to me by its creator Nadia Piet, who describes it as “a free little tool that writes custom instructions to counter your LLM’s defaults – the cheerleading, the yapping, the hallucinations, the voice-flattening etc. You move a few sliders, paste once, and the LLM will start working a little differently.” It can’t magically make The Machine write well or remove the horrible Stench of AI from the prose it generates, but I’ve played with it a bit and it’s actually quite effective in altering the way in which the model of your choosing interacts with you – at heart all it does is generate pre-prompts, but the sliders are an effective way of helping you work out what you want, and I think there’s something quite neat in the design of the interaction of the whole thing.
- Wotja: Ok, FULL DISCLOSURE – I haven’t actually tried this, but it SOUNDS fun and I reckon some of you might enjoy playing around with it; Wotja is, basically, a generative music player which is available as an app for Windows and iOS and which you can use to make all sorts of different types of sound: “Wotja is a FREE, powerful & ‘AI-free’ system for Live Generative Music & MIDI. Use it to easily create & play on-device generated ambient music soundscapes, textured drones, text to music melodies & arps, experimental & adaptive music. Use it also for idea generation, relaxation, reflection or as a sleep aid etc. Even social share your creations! Plus, much more…” I have no idea what the ‘much much more’ is – summon eldritch beings? Slough your skin and become a lizard creature? – but should any of you learn then please do let me know.
- Babel: Yes, I know, ANOTHER UGLY CLAUDE SITE I AM SORRY. That said, I quite like the idea here – Babel is a tower (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY HAVE DONE, DO YOU SEE????) which is composed of edits to Wikipedia – every edit adds another brick to the tower, and you can click on each to be taken to the entry and the edit in question…look, this isn’t a wholly new thing (webtoys built on the Wikipedia API have been around forever), but I like the conceit and the animation and I can therefore JUST about forgive it for lazily using the standard Claude palette rather than going to the trouble to give it a reskin.
- The Atlas of Surveillance: It’s often said that Britain is one of the most surveilled country in the world when it comes to the volume of CCTV cameras per capita, but, as this map of the US demonstrates, North America isn’t playing around when it comes to keeping tabs on what people are up to. As the site explains, it’s “a collaborative effort between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism. Through a combination of crowdsourcing, data journalism and public records reporting, we are creating the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies. The aim is to generate a resource for journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public to check what’s been purchased locally and how technologies are spreading across the country. We specifically focused on the most pervasive technologies, including drones, body-worn cameras, face recognition, cell-site simulators, automated license plate readers, predictive policing, camera registries, and gunshot detection. Although we have amassed more than 15,000 datapoints in 6,000-plus jurisdictions, our research only reveals the tip of the iceberg and underlines the need for journalists and members of the public to continue demanding transparency from criminal justice agencies.” Honestly, this is INCREDIBLY fcuking creepy; bookmark this next time some awful pr1ck from Texas starts wanging on about Britain being a ‘police state’ where you can be ‘jailed for a Tweet’.
- The UK Bus Provision Map: Yes, OK, fine, this doesn’t sound exciting and, in all honesty, really ISN’T exciting, but it is sort-of interesting and might conceivably be useful to one of you; this is a map analysing the state of bus connectivity across the UK and showing where the big blackspots are when it comes to being able to get road-based public transport. MAN THE MIDLANDS IS FCUKED, is my main takeaway, as is the South West – in general, though, this paints a reasonably-rosy picture of bus travel in the UK, which might come as a surprise to anyone waiting for a 137 in rural Shropshire.
- Flavour Lines: This is a nice idea – a map showing all the different ways in which people describe food around the world, from Plov to Pilau to Pilaf to Tadig and everything inbetween, and where one becomes the other, described as “Where döner becomes shawarma, pierogi become vareniki, and plov becomes biryani. A map of food borders, from restaurant names on OpenStreetMap.” . I can’t vouch for accuracy the of the data – it’s bound to be a bit iffy based on the source data, I think – and when I sent it to Jonathan Nunn at Vittles he rightly said that he had “some questions about their conflation of kofte and souvlaki”, but, in general, this is a really interesting look at how food has traveled and how it has evolved differently from nation to nation and region to region.
- Currents: Apparently Pinterest is one of the many bits of the web that has been largely-fcuked by AI, rendered significantly less useful by the flood of machine-generated content which has engulfed the platform and made it increasingly difficult to find real imagery amongst the fakery. If you’ve found it degraded to the point of uselessness, maybe you’ll be tempted by Currents, which, as far as I can tall, is ‘Pinterest, but for people who think Open Protocols are IMPORTANT and INTERESTING’ – this might be GREAT and I encourage anyone who’s curious to give it a go as it’s free and looks to be, generally, A Good Thing.
- Hidden Mushroom Infrastructure: Christ, that would make a really good album title. Anyway, this is a rather remarkable visualisation of the hidden world of Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (I know, I have been DREAMING of such a thing for years), which I this week learned “have shaped life on land for over 450 million years by forming symbiotic networks that move carbon and nutrients between plants and soils. These networks are made of tubular cells called hyphae, through which carbon can flow from plants into the soil” (so now you know too). There’s both a map here – which, honestly, I do not understand AT ALL, but I am sure it is very cool – and an explainer about what the fungi are and why they are important, and, honestly, this has slightly freaked me out and I am likely to have slightly fevered visions of a vaguely-mushroomy apocalypse over the weekend.
- Country Draw: A game which tasks you with drawing countries and scores you on how accurate you are. Words cannot express how astonishingly bad I am at this, although, in my defence, I challenge anyone who isn’t Dutch to have the faintest fcuking clue about the shape of the Netherlands.
- Read The Tape: Ooh, this is fun! Vibecoded, fine, but fun – this is a simple game that offers you 5 stock charts each day, with the name of the stock shaved off, and asks you to predict whether the stock will trend up or down over a 5 day period; you make the binary choice, you choose how much virtual cash from your virtual pot you want to bet in each case, and then see whether you were right. What this proved to me conclusively was that my failure to engage with the stock market is entirely the right decision, because, again, I am BIBLICALLY bad at this.
- The Daily Rung: ANOTHER daily game, but I quite like the mechanic in this – each day you’re invited to guess the specific word that is being alluded to; you get 5 clues, and your goal is to guess the thing in as few goes as possible. Wrong answers cost you TWO clues, so you’re penalised for guessing randomly which adds a gentle element of strategy to the whole thing (I mean, VERY gentle), and this is a potentially-fun addition to the morning procrastination round.
- First Drop: Two albums – which was released first? THAT’S IT THAT’S THE WHOLE GAME, but fcuk me is this addictive; the light ‘achievements’ layer added through ‘streaks’ of correct answers turns this into a horribly-compelling ‘one more go’-type game, be warned.
- Bros and Cons: I slightly hate the name here, but found myself enjoying the game more than I expected. It’s very simple, a variant on the ‘two guards’ logic puzzle, with the player presented with three people in each round of the game; one of them always lies, the other two always tell the truth, and your job is to identify the liar in each case based on their statements. A small detail, but I rather enjoyed the design of the (presumably AI-generated) heads for each of the potential liars.
- Soko Striker: The FESTIVAL OF FOOTBALL may be over (don’t worry, though, the Premier League is back in three weeks because we are rapidly approaching the point where it is the LAW that there must always be a professional football match being played somewhere in the world; by 2047, with RoboGianni by that point in charge of FIFA, it’s entirely possible that the World Cup will be happening EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF EVERY SINGLE DAY, quite possibly in Roblox) but to help fill the void why not try this loosely-football-themed little puzzle game which doesn’t *really* have anything to do with the sport but which occupied me for five pleasingly-chewy minutes earlier this week. Get the ball into the goal – GO!
- Lemmings: OH MY GOD THIS IS SO SO SO GOOD HOW DID THIS PERSON FIT LEMMINGS INTO A PICO8 GAME??? I can’t stress enough, this is ALL of classic 90s puzzle game Lemmings – ALL OF IT! INCLUDING THE MUSIC AND THE LITTLE ‘OH NO!’ SOUND EFFECT WHEN YOU INEVITABLY ARMAGEDDON THE CUTE LITTLE FCUKS INTO OBLIVION – rendered in minimal, demade fashion in your browser. “Guide your little green-haired friends through all 100 levels from the original NES version, lovingly recreated in PICO-8 and inspired by the Amiga and SNES classics, with faithful gameplay, charming pixel art, and toe-tapping music.” The dev responsible for this deserves a knighthood, honestly, this is SO MUCH FUN and will take over your day if you let it (oh, and if you’re not familiar with Lemmings then what the fcuk is wrong with you it is a classic EDUCATE YOURSELF).
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Michael Nordeman: A very old-school feeling Tumblr, this – an ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPHER, taking snaps of wildlife in his native Sweden, just like it’s 2007 or something. This is LOVELY and weirdly heartwarming, honestly, and made me quite want to go to Sweden and look at some finches.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Luis Ramone: I *think* that this is the feed of a photographer from Mexico – wherever they’re from, I really like the style they shoot in and some of the shots do really interesting things with focus and grain imho.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- You Get What You Pay For: It does rather feel that we’re at something of an inflection point for ‘entertainment’ here in 2026 – Netflix floundering, streaming both ubiquitous and oddly-culturally-dead, the mood music around the BBC sounding increasingly like the ominous sting from Jaws, shortform video being both ubiquitous and largely-awful…HOW DID WE GET HERE? The link here is to a typically-astute but of analysis from Ryan at Garbage Day, where he argues that we’re suffering the aftereffects of a generation whose creative output was pushed towards social media and where the ephemerality of said platforms – the absence of context, the disposability of ‘content’ as a concept’ – has led to a sort of weird, empty stagnation. The whole essay is smart and worth reading (and, crucially, *feels* true), but here’s a section for flavour: “There’s been a question hanging over the amorphous blob of platforms, media formats, and personalities we now call “entertainment” since COVID. And it’s question more average people are asking with more intensity than ever. And it’s actually a fairly simple one: Why do things feel worse now? Why do good TV shows, good movies, good songs feel so rare? Why does everything feel so stale and so boring? And I think the lost millennial decade has a lot to do with it. Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI. And not only do they have nothing to show for it professionally, they have nothing to show for it creatively, as well.”
- The Cockroach Party: This is a fascinating essay by Arundhati Roy about the genesis of the anti-BJP ‘cockroach’ movement in India, its startling growth and where it might go – it was written ahead of the resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who’d been at the centre of protests, but it’s still very much worth reading, not least because it offers an excellent reminder of how incredibly fcuking weird Indian politics is, how complex the country and society is, and the extent to which Narendra Modi has effectively had the country in a chokehold for so long. I find both this movement and last year’s student uprising in Nepal fascinating, not least for the contrast they present with the Arab Spring stuff from 15 years ago; it feels like things like this are slightly more grounded in a sense of the practical realities of change rather than an imagined utopia in which ‘popular uprising will solve everything’, although only time will tell the extent to which the cockroaches will have a lasting impact once the world’s attention is elsewhere, and whether the movement has the stamina to play the long game needed to really affect meaningful change. “As the cockroaches marched and their numbers burgeoned, I caught myself thinking: Thank goodness they aren’t mostly Muslim, or Sikh, or Christian or Adivasi. They would have been flattened, killed, shot, jailed. Thank heaven they aren’t Kashmiri. They might have been blinded (although some did receive their share of pellet-like injuries). Thank goodness they are mostly Hindu. That’s how sad this moment is in India. However, things could change in a minute. We are in what they call a “developing situation”. Reports are coming in of thousands of paramilitary troops being flown in from other states. We don’t know what the coming days will bring.”
- Rupert Lowe: Helen Lewis in the Atlantic here, writing about Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe in the wake of his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast – Helen is writing for a US audience and so there’s a bit more explaining of ‘who the fcuk is this guy?’ than you would need in a UK publication, but I thought this was a good piece articulating the positions held by Lowe and the weird venn diagram overlap between the MAGA right and the UK (clue: RACISM!). One thing on this that I do slightly disagree with Helen on here – she’s right to cite the Restore polling numbers and point out their share of the vote in Makerfield was under 7%, but I don’t share her view of Lowe as ‘fundamentally a non-entity’ in political terms; spend enough time on Facebook Groups and around X and you will see an awful lot of people who are very familiar with the man, his party and his views, and who seem…quite sympathetic to them; I’m not sure he’s as irrelevant as we might want to think.
- Latent Space as a Medium: Oh I ADORED this piece, not least because it contains probably the best explanation of what latent space is that I have ever read (and I say that as someone who has repeatedly tried to articulate the concept and found themselves just making vague, handwavey gestures and muttering things about ‘impossible dimensions’ like a moron); Kevin Kelly writes about the artistic possibilities afforded by the idea of latent space (which, as I am sure you know, is the term for ‘how LLMs arrange and conceive of information and the connections between things’), and the whole thing is SO INTERESTING and made my brain fizz slightly (in a good way). Honestly, if you have any interest in how The Machine works and what it does and why it does it, or in the potential for the use of AI in art (FCUK OFF YES IT CAN YOU FCUKING MORON) then you really should read this: “The form of this new mindfulness — the “Model” part of LLMs — is a latent space. Latent space is an abstraction, a map built not in two dimensions, but in billions of dimensions. Imagine a brain made up of billions of straight long arrows going in all directions. Each arrow is dedicated to one idea or one thing. There is an arrow for dogs and an arrow for cats. Related arrows are located next to each other. So the map shows cats and dogs sharing a nearby arrow for fluffy fur. They also share an arrow for ears, and one for tails. Those two attributes are also shared by other animals (other locations) as well. Most of what a dog is is shared by mammals, so this overlap is one source of the compression. You can think of every concept that we can put into words as being a direction in this space. The dog arrow is really a direction of dogness. Catness is a direction, and so is fluffiness. Anything can become more catlike, or fluffier. You start with a shoe, or a chimney, or a fern, and you can push it along the cat direction and make it more catlike. Or you can push it in the direction of apple toward more appleness, or of smoothness, or in the direction of reddish, or excitement, or more circular. You can also reverse direction and make it less catlike, or less red, less atomic. There are billions of directions in this space.”
- Mat Dryhurst on AI and Art: A sort-of companion piece to the last one, this is artist (oh, sorry, no, he prefers ‘creator’ apparently) Mat Dryhurst, who’s been working with AI in many forms since the pre-LLM days, in conversation with Anika Meier, about The Machine and art and how the two coexist, and how to think about creating with AI and through AI…honestly, this is SUCH an interesting conversation, in part because Dryhurst articulates much of what I think on this stuff but also because it’s refreshing to read someone intelligent and thoughtful taking time to actively consider the topic rather than simply reverting to ‘MACHINE BAD’ or ‘IT IS THE INEVITABLE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING’. I mean, look, this is SUCH an interesting perspective and the whole thing is full of this sort of thinking: “Our main argument is that, once you have what are essentially infinity machines, the craft or skill of producing any single image or song loses much of its value. We will still make images, of course, but the affordances of these tools are different. What’s more interesting is to work one level upstream. We think about protocols or models as artistic media. Now you can train models. How would you build one? How would you design a data permission system or a protocol that shapes the media or interactions produced downstream? That’s the opportunity. It would have been very difficult to work that way before, whereas now it’s actually possible. Particularly now that everyone will be able to express themselves in software (with coding agents), which was previously a rare skill. We would situate that within the conceptual and contemporary art tradition, where you always work one layer of abstraction higher. Think about artists like Trevor Paglen. His individual photographs are beautiful, but if you’re only looking at the photograph, you’re missing the point. The work is really about the broader context, the research, the proposal, and the systems behind it. That’s very similar to the way we approach protocols. Over time, I imagine more artists will start working like this simply because you can. In a sense, you’re less concerned with authorship of the final media and more concerned with authorship of the coordination: the tools, the protocols, and the systems. In AI, people call that orchestration. That’s much more interesting to us than worrying about what any single picture looks like.”
- Zuzai: Do we need a NEW WORD for art, or works of any sort, made entirely WITHOUT the assistance of AI? The person behind this…what, manifesto?…anyway, the person, one Blake Esselsteyn, had the perfectly-reasonable thought that given the amount of AI being shoved into everything, and the desire of many people to avoid it entirely, we might want to coin a specific term that can be used as a flexible shorthand for ‘made entirely without the assistance or involvement of generative AI’ – hence, Zuzai. “I’ve been thinking about coining a new word for months, considering different options, and zuzai rose to the top. Its syllables pack poetic punch. Alphabetically, it’s about as distant from AI as you can get. It doesn’t appear to currently have significance in the English-speaking world. I can envision it being used not just to describe a creation (like an essay or an image), but also a condition. Think about setting your design software to zuzai mode, an author using a zuzai writing process, or a teacher requiring a zuzai testing environment. Ideally this new word, if widely adopted, could attain connotations in the popular imagination, evoking associations with characteristics like authenticity or quality.” I quite like this, I must say, and it sort-of works, I think – for example, Web Curios is a wholly zuzai newsletter (the links, on the other hand…).
- Which AI To Use For What (July 2026): Ethan Mollick with another in his semi-regular updates on what tools to use for what tasks based on the current slate of models at the frontier RIGHT NOW; this is sensible, practical and actionable, and it’s worth reading if you’ve any interest in what this stuff can ACTUALLY do now and how you might want to think about working with it.
- How and Why Starbucks’ AI Tool Failed: I don’t normally link to pieces in Fast Company, mainly because, well, they tend to be terrible and appallingly-written, but this article is a rare exception – this piece looks at the attempted implementation of AI systems across the Starbucks network of stores, and the specific reasons why it didn’t work and had to be rolled back, and it is, honestly, SO interesting (yes, ok, fine, it’s about logistics and operations in retail, but EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING IF YOU LOOK AT IT THE RIGHT WAY). Aside from anything else it’s just a really good example of WHY stuff like this fcuks up – specifically, vendor overpromise, a lack of understanding of process granularity and complexity and a lack of flexibility in the deployed systems. One of the major reasons why companies don’t see benefits from AI, honestly, is because they haven’t bothered doing the actual hard work of thinking about what exactly it is that they, and their staff, ACTUALLY DO – like, what are the practical steps that your job entails? What are you PRACTICALLY DOING – and how, based on that, The Machine might help (or, indeed, might not help at all).
- The Creator Economy Has A New Middle Class: To be clear, I think this piece is mostly bullsh1t, but I am including it because, well, I find the lies around The Creator Economy to be interesting. “For years, quitting your job to become a social media influencer belonged in the same category as moving to Hollywood or trying to make the NFL: technically possible but probably best attempted by other people. Now, for a growing number of young workers, it feels like a more plausible career pivot. The rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Amazon storefronts has created a new kind of white-collar exit strategy — one in which workers ditch office jobs not necessarily to become celebrities, but to piece together an income online through brand deals, affiliate links and highly personal videos documenting everyday life.” THIS IS A LIE! THIS IS NOT AN OPTION FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE! It’s interesting when you read the piece and dig into the creators they are choosing to profile that they are what you might term ‘conventionally attractive’ human beings – is this…is this just a slightly-more-dystopian twist on the lifestyle influence boom of the 2010s? I THINK IT IS! Also, sorry, but the idea that there is an infinite number of brands willing to pay the salaries of content creators in exchange for mentions in poorly-viewed Insta reels is fcuking risible – THIS SH1T DOES NOT SCALE THERE IS NO ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY IT IS A FCUKING SCAM. Also, is there anything more depressing than the idea of us all scrabbling to make a living by shilling tat for megabrands every waking second of our lives? I am going to posit that no, there is not.
- How The Bots Took Over: I don’t personally like ‘Dead Internet Theory’ as a concept – it feels defeatist, and also, fundamentally, not actually true – but it is obvious that the volume of automated activity online has passed a tipping point in the past 12 months (I am getting around 10 emails a day to Curios which are clearly written and sent autonomously by people’s agents, to which can I just say FCUK OFF FCUK OFF I HATE YOU STOP IT); this week saw the latest estimates that bot traffic has finally overtaken humans online, which, again, doesn’t seem like a good thing This is a good New Yorker piece about how this has happened and what the impact might be, but personally speaking I don’t think it really takes the issue seriously enough, or goes deep enough the impact of this on how things feel online, and the very weird sensation of occupying space online that doesn’t necessarily feel optimised for people anymore.
- Want To Bet On My Wedding?: I’m including this largely as it annoyed me so much. You know the time-honoured tradition at weddings of enlivening the speeches by betting with the people on your table about their duration, their content and whether the best man will say ‘fcuk’? Well this is the New York Times deciding that this is a NEW PHENOMENON born of America’s recent pivot to gambling, and telling you all about some SPECIAL APPS that now exist to facilitate this and DEAR CHRIST CAN WE NOT TURN EVERYTHING INTO A FCUKING MONETISABLE APP YOU FCUKING CUNTS?? ““It started with a certain friend group,” Stacy said. “We started betting at that first friend’s wedding, and since then, we bet at every subsequent wedding of that friend group. By the end of it, we were including almost everyone in the wedding, including the father of the bride, the uncles and so much of the extended family.” In 2023, the couple decided to turn this pastime into a business and developed Betting on the Wedding, an interactive app that allows guests to make predictions by answering premade or custom questions. The Stahls said that more than 25,000 couples so far had created a betting pool using their app, which costs a one-time fee of $49.99.” I wish ill on these people, MUCH ill.
- The Rise of the Analogue Restaurant: This piece also struck me as possibly a *touch* spurious – this is Eater, talking about how the rise in AI-generated marketing materials and people’s often-negative reactions to them (or at least the performative reactions on social media) are leading to a rise in restaurants ‘going analogue’, with hand-written menus and, I don’t know, bespoke lace doilies. Which, yes, fine, but also THIS IS JUST WHAT MID-TO-HIGH-END RESTAURANTS DO, and this is not going to scale below a certain point, and all that this confirms is that ‘analogue’ and ‘human-made’ are going to become luxe signifiers for the top decile while everyone else dines at the Slopeteria because a) most people do not give a fcuk; and b) most people can’t afford the top end. SO IT GOES.
- The New Cocaine: I dislike cocaine as a drug quite intensely – it is expensive, and it turns people into cnuts (noone has EVER become a nicer, funnier, better or more interesting person on cocaine, and this is a FACT) – and am firmly of the belief that things would generally be a lot better if people stopped taking gak and started taking amphetamines instead. Anyway, this piece in Playboy is about a HOT NEW POWDER taking the streets by storm (which, given it’s being written up, probably had its actual heyday 2-3 years ago and is now old hat, but webs) – 3MMC (the branding needs work) is apparently good for dancing and fcuking and, apparently, focusing at work, so if you’re curious then get on the darkweb and SORT YOURSELVES OUT (but maybe check the Erowid reports first). I did very much enjoy the line in here from one anonymous user who says that “When you take it, you don’t feel ‘high…You just feel better, with a little bit of pep in your step. It’s a functional tool, and it’s also very stealth. The outside world can’t really tell that you’re on drugs.” – MATE I PROMISE YOU EVERYONE CAN TELL YOU ARE ON DRUGS.
- The Popcorn Bucket Industry: There are, I learned from this article, two companies supplying the entire film industry with novelty popcorn buckets – a phenomenon, by the way, which is high on my list of ‘indicators that we’re not really taking this whole ‘the planet is fcuked’ thing as seriously as we ought to’ – and, honestly, while I deplore the environmental impact of all of this useless plastic being shipped around the world before inevitably ending up as a geological layer which will serve to confuse future civilisations, I am also slightly in awe of the entrepreneurial zeal of the people who just went all-in on commissioning several hundred thousand units of, I don’t know, Minion Pant-shaped popcorn vessels and saw the bet come off.
- How Lebedev Fcuked The Standard: Joshi Herrmann, one of the people currently working to attempt to unfcuk local media through his ‘Mill’ stable of online regionals, writes in The Londoner about how spectacularly Evgeny Lebedev has managed to screw the Evening Standard, once a genuinely good newspaper and now a sad weekly magazine seemingly aimed at people who experience London through the Instagram feeds of the famous; this is gossipy, entertaining and infuriating in equal measure, and Herrmann drops some nice anecdotes about his time working there back-in-the-day – he does, though, oddly fail to mention the potential impact of the two London freesheets of the 00s (The London Lite and London Live) on the city’s media market, which feels like a bit of an oversight – still, this is a great read if you’re interested in the city and the media.
- The Mayor of Scamtown: This is a CRACKING piece in the Economist, all about the links between Chinese criminal scamming/extortion gangs and a Filipino mayor; the wholesale corruption here is just mental, and it feels very much like something which is running rife through the country: “Gatchalian believes the Guo case points to a fundamentally different kind of corruption problem from the ones Filipinos are used to. A conventionally dodgy firm might buy off a politician or two to grease a specific contract. The globalised Chinese scam-boss network has far more elaborate aims. “They are organised, they have money, they are sophisticated,” said Gatchalian. “And they studied the Philippines very well.” Casio and Gatchalian say Guo is probably not the only mayor working for the network. Gatchalian has even heard of scam bosses marrying Filipinas, then encouraging their wives to go into politics so they can be used as proxies.”
- That Odyssey Essay: Yes, OK, I know you have SEEN THE DISCOURSE, but if you’ve not read Emily Wilson’s essay on why she didn’t love Christopher Nolan’s film then you really ought to – it’s a better and more thoughtful piece of writing than some of the (frankly insane) reaction to it online might suggest (seriously, what is it about A Certain Type of Person and their inability to accept anything they like being criticised? Genuinely baffling to me), and it’s very funny in parts, and while I’m nowhere near familiar enough with the source material (ie I have never read the Odyssey and I am never going to) to make any judgements on the validity of that side of her criticism I can very much concur with her when she says that the dialogue sucked and the food all looked horrid. Oh, and this is the best Odyssey-related thing I saw all week, hands-down.
- A Month Without Social Media: A good essay by Kate Wagner, being contrarian about performative social media abandonment and fundamentally concluding that, no, it is not your phone stopping you from Doing That Thing – it is YOU: “ the purported benefits of a phone-free life — while there are many — are almost comically exaggerated. Quit your phone and you will read the complete works of Dostoyevsky in a month! Quit your phone and “be in the world” and you will meet the love of your life! Quit your phone and become a humble skilled craftsman in a cozy woodland cottage and you will resist capitalism! Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe! What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to us to give that moment meaning. Walter Benjamin called this fixture of modern life homogenous, empty time and believed it to be a real sickness inhibitive of social progress, though these days it’s nothing special. Updated challenges to this phenomenology of time are always welcome, however the phone essay is not that girl. The phone essay explains to us: Today we find ourselves stuck in the cafeteria of ultramechanized capitalism where the sushi of time goes round and round on the carousel. How tragic that we don’t pick a plate and eat it because we’re on our damn phones!!!! Or something!”
- The Rise of the International Internet: I loved this essay – Patrick Kho writes about a clubnight in China, about subcultures and counterculture and the web and the flattening of everything and and and. I thought this was smart and interesting and it made me want to go clubbing in Beijing, which is, objectively, quite impressive when you consider I am a middle-aged white man in South London.
- The Andouillette Does Not Travel: Finally this week, an essay about the famously-malodorous French sausage – I’d never actually seen a photo of an andouillette before, and it’s impressive how its appearance makes it seem actively *more* unpleasant than its notoriety would suggest. This is nicely-written and very funny; it did not, though, make me want to try andouillette.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!