Hm, it does rather feel that Summer is now OVER – not, to be clear, that I am complaining about the fact that it is no longer threemillion degrees, but there’s been a feeling this week of the world rather rolling its sleeves up again and preparing to Get On With Sh1t, for better or worse.
This, sadly, extends to work, for me at least – while all of you (or at least those of you in the UK) get to enjoy a bank holiday and maybe go to carnival and bogle with a policeman (never, ever bogle with a policeman), I have to fcuk off to Finland tomorrow, to be Pet Writer Monkey at a tech conference. I KNOW, POOR ME, WHY IS LIFE SO HARD, ETC ETC.
Now, obviously I appreciate you couldn’t give two fcuks about the fact that I am going to be toiling away in Helsinki for a few days, but as a result of that I am not going to have time to ingest All of the Internet between now and next Friday and so as such Curios is going to be off next week – normal service will be resumed in a fortnight.
BUT! Lest you think I am leaving you with NOTHING, rejoice in the fact that THE TINY AWARDS SHORTLIST IS HERE AND VOTING IS NOW OPEN! I have written a bit more about it down there, but, basically there are 11 excellent websites up for the award so go and check them out NOW (but maybe leave this open in a tab and come back to it, yeah? I…I do care, you know). SEE YOU IN A FORTNIGHT, WEBMONGS (lest I die of reindeer or something).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should all VOTE NOW!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REALLY STRESS HOW GOOD THIS YEAR’S TINY AWARDS NOMINEES ARE AND WHICH ENCOURAGES YOU TO CHECK THEM ALL OUT AND TELL THE WORLD, PT.1:
- Vote in the 20206 Tiny Awards!: FINALLY! It has taken a bit longer than usual this year to get our shortlist together as a result of our esteemed judges having the temerity to do things like ‘take holidays and spend time away from the web’ (no, I don’t understand it either), but we now have our shortlist of websites for the Tiny Awards 2026! Click the link and take some time to explore the 11 websites vying for the coveted title of, er, ‘best small, non-commercial, vaguely-artsy web project of the past 12 months as voted for by some other people on the internet’! Some of these will be familiar to you if you’ve been paying rapt attention to Curios over the year (you…you do pay attention, don’t you?), some of them will be entirely new to you, but, honestly, we have another CRACKING selection of sites which run the gamut from playful to heartbreaking; every single one of these is a reminder of the fact that the web is brilliant and interesting and fun, and that people are making brilliant, weird, funny, beautiful, sad, baffling things EVERY SINGLE DAY, and that the digital world is bigger, deeper and significantly more interesting than social media, and that NOT EVERTHING HAS TO BE SHORTFORM VIDEO FFS. As one of the award organisers I can obviously express no opinions about the nominees other than to say that they are all great and you could do worse than setting aside half an hour to spend some time exploring them; I promise that your life will be marginally better as a result of doing so. Thanks to everyone who nominated a website – now vote! Share! TELL YOUR FRIENDS! The winner will receive a small cash prize and a HAND-MADE TROPHY, made by an actual human artist in the UK, and the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that a bunch of anonymous people appreciate their work, so, you know, CLICK THE LINK AND PICK YOUR FAVOURITE WEBSITE!
- The 3d Website Gallery: If the garden of, er, webby delights (sorry; turns out ‘webby delights’ is an unexpectedly-unpleasant phrase, who’d have thought it?) that is the Tiny Awards doesn’t sate your desire for GREAT WEB EXPERIENCES then feel free to gorge on this selection too – Mesh3d is a collection of examples of stellar 3d website design using WebGL and 3js tec…oh, look, neither of us care about the technical details (or, to be more accurate, I don’t), all you need to know is that from this portal you can access dozens and dozens of examples of HUGELY-shiny website design using 3d elements, from a pleasingly-cartoony look at ancient Egypt and its architectural stylings to the tie-in website for, er, a collaboration between K-Pop titans BTS and inexplicably-popular diabetes vector Oreos! What more could you want? Eh? Jesus, NO!
- The Vintage AI Archive: It’s almost hard to remember now after nearly four years of LLMchat, but there was a period not too long ago when the term ‘AI’ was still largely-blameless, the preserve of techy wonks and scifi peddlers rather than The Source Of Everything Bad That Has Ever Happened Ever (source: Bluesky). Hark back to those happier, more innocent times with this SUPERB collection of past AI experiments, back when it meant ‘machine learning’ (or other types of AI) rather than some vibecoded w4nk. This is the Internet Archive page collecting a bunch of online expressions of What AI Can Be And What It Once Was (that’s a…pretty loose definition; you can read a bit more about the collection and its parameters here if you so choose)- so, for example, there’s a link in here to a port of the original ‘Eliza’ conversational AI, the first (or at least the first that I recall) chatbot to trouble the Turing Test; there’s a link to SimCity sequel (of sorts) Sim Life, Wil Wright’s insanely ambitious attempt to model the planetary ecosystem based off a vague, woo-woo interpretation of the Gaia mythos; there’s…OH MY GOD, THEY HAVE LITTLE COMPUTER PEOPLE IN HERE! Longterm readers – or at least those of you who have both been reading a long time and who actually pay attention to the crap I write (why, out of interest? It’s really not worth it) will recall that Little Computer People is a longstanding reference point/obsession of mine, a game from the…what, early-90s which was one of the first ever ‘little guy’ simulators, letting you create and nurture (or torture, fine, but you woulnd’t do that, would you?) a community of, er, little computer people on your desktop…honestly, the first three links in Curios this week are rich enough to keep you entertained for a fortnight, never let it be said I don’t do anything for you. What’s that? You don’t think of me at all? Oh.
- Twitter Now: Do you sometimes wish that you could turn a dial and revert social media to its prelapsarian state? That you could somehow rewind everything so that it was, what, 2011 again, all rageface memes and puppers and doggos and bacon? WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR OLD TWITTER BACK? Well, tough, those days are gone and we will never again see that sort of strange, naive optimism which found us sharing the collective delusion that maybe, just maybe, all being plugged into each other would be a good thing rather than the first step onto the treacherous descent towards madness and civilisational collapse! Still, if you would like to briefly *imagine* that we could in fact go back then you might appreciate the intent behind this Twitter clone which is using the old brand name because, per a court ruling in the US, Elon lost the rights to it when he changed the name to X. So, what Twitter.now offers is…actually I have no idea what it offers beyond the descriptions on the website because the platform’s requesting a sign-on fee of $20 and, well, fcuk off lads. The rationale, as they put it, is to both fund the idea of A New (Old) Twitter, but also that a financial commitment, even a small one, will ensure buy-in from the community – but, look, there simply aren’t enough people in the world who a) want a text-based social network; and b) want one so much that they want to pay for it. Sorry, but there aren’t. Oh, and there’s no real detail about who the money is going to, which, well, also no. Basically this is going to die on its ar$e, but I imagine they’ll make a few grand out of a bunch of delusional webutopians so more power to them I guess.
- 3d San Francisco: Did you watch the Big GTAVI Reveal Extravaganza yesterday? Did it make you sweaty-palmed and anxious with anticipation to wander around a beautifully-realised urban sandbox? While you wait til late November to gorge yourself on what will be the ludic equivalent of ordering everything off the McDonald’s menu at once, why not pass the time by wandering around an in-no-way-comparable rendering of San Francisco? It’s like GTA, but, er, REALLY SHONKY! In its defence, this isn’t trying to be a game – this is more of a tech demo type thing, showing how a 3d mesh map can be turned into an explorable 3d world, and while it’s not exactly high fidelity it’s also quite fun to stroll around the streets of SF without having to dodge waymos and the several thousand mentally ill people who have been left entirely to fend for themselves as a result of the complete absence of a meaningful social welfare infrastructure (WELL DONE AMERICA). You can walk, you can summon a vehicle, you can even fly – it’s not GOOD, to be clear, but it’s kind of interesting; you remember a decade or so ago when there was a brief vogue for making top-down racing games using Google maps? Well this is like that, but in 3d. PROGRESS!
- What We Tell AI: I am not, personally, a high-volume user of AI; there are a few particular use-cases I have for work, but in general I have literally no interest in ‘talking’ to the machine; as such, I find the idea of people spilling their guts and using an LLM to attempt to scry through the revealed viscera to be deeply, deeply weird and, well, entirely-unrelatable. As such, I found this project – per the blurb, “We invited strangers to write a confession about their relationship with artificial intelligence” – interesting and, honestly, quite sad. “What We Tell AI is a project exploring our secrets about our complex relationship with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Last September, we set up a box in Dolores Park, San Francisco and asked strangers to write down a confession about their relationship with A.I. Since then, we’ve collected more than 350 handwritten notes gathered in parks, shopping malls, and even AI conferences across the California Bay Area, New York, and beyond. A snapshot of these strange times, WWTAI shines a light on the emerging taboos around AI use and its increasing presence in our intimate lives in 2026.” So all of this is data from North America, and the locations suggest a degree of skew in terms of the types of individual they will have heard from, but still, it’s a really fascinating series of vignettes, windows into the increasingly-personal relationship which some people have developed with their LLM of choice. “ChatGPT knows how much and hard I yearned for a guy, more than my best friend ever would,” reads one; “I cloned my ex’s voice to have a last conversation with her,” reads another. Oh, and lest you think this is all too miserable, there’s at least one in there that says “I think everyone who uses AI is a bad person,” should you need a bit of RESISTANCE amongst the weirdness. WELCOME TO OUR FUTURE!
- Sound In Space: Very much a ‘I don’t know what is going on here but it looks cool and sounds quite nice, so’ link, this one – Sound In Space is a wepage which presents you with some sort of, er, glowing, throbby orb-type thing in the centre of the screen, surrounded by small dots which are being slowly pulled towards it by a light gravitational field (really selling this, aren’t I?); clicking the big orb and the little light motes makes sounds (pleasing, plinky sounds), and you can fiddle with some settings in the left hand sidebar to automate processes to make it churn out a gently-plinky soundtrack to whatever you are doing. Fcuk, I really have butchered this one; look, just click, it will make some sort of sense to you I promise.
- Windows 96: Would you like a reasonably-full-featured recreation of Windows 96 in your browser? What if I told you that it came equipped with a bunch of the games that came free with the original OS, including that Space Pinball number which you wasted HOURS on in your childhood because you couldn’t afford actual videogames (what’s that? The sound of…no violins? FINE, please yourselves you fcuks)? Yeah, thought that would draw you in. This is actually lots of fun, and it’s worth clicking around to explore all the different easter eggs that are hidden in the menus; I especially recommend that you find the MP3 player (it’s called BassoonTracker, inexplicably) and treat yourself to the 8bit rendition of The Final Countdown which comes as one of the preset tracks because, honestly, it slaps.
- Speak Your Voice: Do you remember that voice synth toy from a few years ago, the one which was designed to look like someone’s palate and which you worked by manipulating the digital representations of a human’s fleshy mouthparts to mimic the way in which they work in meatspace? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T REMEMBER, WHAT ELSE ARE YOU FILLING YOUR BRAINS WITH? FFS, it was called Pink Trombone, it’s here, refresh your memory. Anyway, this is a really interesting and very smart build on that, which effectively tries to use the same tech and principles to clone your voice – give it access to your mic, speak a few sentences, and then listen as the software attempts to replicate the tone of your speech. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s attempting to use the Pink Trombone interface to match your voice – which means that you end up with a weird, slightly-mangled approximation of your speaking patterns, simultaneously recognisable and very, very wrong-sounding. NGL, I have some…issues with hearing voices that sound like this and I therefore found this almost unbearably upsetting to listen to, but it’s very cool nonetheless.
- Admonymous: Would you like to create an anonymous inbox via which anyone at all can send you ‘feedback’ about yourself? NO GOD NO OF COURSE NOT WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU (I am still burnt from a comment on a YT video I am in which reads in its entirety ‘icl, I can’t stand Matt Muir’ – I mean, fcuk you too, anonymous YouTube cnut, FCUK YOU)? However, if you somehow think that your life would be improved were strangers on the web afforded the ability to write short, pithy messages about why and how, exactly, you suck, then this link will allow you to do that very thing – er, have fun! NB – any readers wishing to leave feedback can obviously do so by sending me an email. But don’t feel you have to, honestly.
- QR Trees: You know what would make QR codes better? YES THAT IS RIGHT IT WOULD BE IF YOU COULD MAKE THEM LOOK LIKE TREES! And now, thanks to this link, you can – Web Curios, once again fulfilling all your arboreal needs! You’re welcome, honestly. This is actually very cute, if entirely pointless.
- Chatto: One of my greatest ‘Christ, I am OLD now’ indicators (other than the volume of grey that gets left on the floor of the barbers, which, Jesus) is my complete inability to get on board with Discord as a platform – I understand how it works but my GOD is it unpleasant to use. Should you feel the same way, you might want to consider checking out Chatto which is basically ‘Discord, but on the AT protocol’ which I know are words which will send the vast majority of you into a catatonic state of extreme boredom but which will send approximately three of you open-source freaks into some sort of tumescent reverie.
- Hearing Things: It does feel a bit like the Golden Age of online music writing is behind us, not least because of the complete collapse of most of the previously-functional economic models around written work online. Still, it’s nice to see people attempting to claw something back – in the same way that I’ve seen more and more of in gaming over the past couple of years, so we are now seeing a resurgence in new, reader-funded outlets focusing on music writing, and Hearing Things is the latest to cross my field of vision. It’s bona fides seem good – if you’re in the market for new, independent music writing and criticism this might be worth a look: “We are a worker-owned music and culture platform with the freedom and expertise to delve into the art we love (or absolutely do not love!) in a way that furthers the conversation instead of just regurgitating it. We are writers and editors with many decades of collective experience covering music and culture at Pitchfork, The Fader, Vibe, Spin, Gawker, Jezebel, and elsewhere. There’s a good chance we’ve played a part in introducing you to some of your favorite artists and deepened your appreciation of some of this century’s most important records. At Hearing Things, we’re continuing to do that work—and more—on our own terms. An antidote to the information overload that has poisoned the internet, we are a destination for curated and considered music journalism. Hearing Things offers honest, authoritative interviews and reviews that decode the work of artists from a wide variety of genres including rap, rock, pop, R&B, Latin, electronic, experimental, and whatever microgenre is bubbling up at a given moment. There are investigations that put an infamously corrupt industry under necessary scrutiny. There is analysis of where and how music intersects with the culture at large, playing an essential part in everything from tech to social movements to fashion to film. There will be a podcast where we crack jokes and discuss the music of the week. There is also plenty of fun, random stuff because, hey, music is fun too!”
- Desktop Colours: I can’t for a second imagine that you’ve spent years thinking that your life is missing a comprehensive database of the colourschemes used by the default desktops of various operating systems over the past few decades, but in case I am wrong and that is all that’s standing between you and real happiness then, well, you’re very welcome indeed.
- Turn Your Casio into a Smartwatch: I have to say, I would have thought anyone currently rocking an oldschool Casio digital watch is doing so primarily as some sort of pointed gesture against the tracking and optimisation inherent in the very idea of a ‘smartwatch’ and that, as such, the likely market for a piece of kit which will turn your lovely old timepiece into a piece of the panopticon is…small, but, well, I am, famously, a know-nothing bozo who should never be listened to. This links to Ollee, which is a company flogging kit which lets you mod your watch to track your steps, your sleep, your heartbeat and more – or which will sell you an already-modded Casio, should you be disinclined to make with the soldering iron. Per the site, “your favorite watch now has some essential fitness features! Track steps, set daily goals, and measure your heart rate* and ambient temperature — all stored on the watch and viewable in the app. Enjoy up to 10 months of battery life with daily tracking, or up to 3+ years in power saver mode with motion sensing off. You can also connect Ollee Watch to Google Health Connect and Apple Health, allowing your activity data to seamlessly integrate with a broader fitness ecosystem. View and combine your data in popular third-party apps like Google Fit, Apple Health, and Withings, alongside your other fitness tracking devices.” There is something almost terminally hipster about this in a way that feels almost retro, honestly.
- Typ.ing: Yes, I know, noone needs another free, in-browser typing tutor. BUT! This one is really nice, minimal AND comes with a daily challenge game which is a) very good practice; and b) has a leaderboard so you can compare the speed of your typing fingers with those of other anonymous saddos from around the world. What will you win should YOU have the fastest digits in all the world? Nothing, literally nothing, but the pride is its own reward (you are pathetic).
- Catch That Train: This TikTok account belongs to someone with the handle SideQuestTre – for reasons that, honestly, I can’t be fcuked to look into, at some point earlier this year they started a thing where they and a bunch of other people dressed up in elaborate costumes and all ran for the train, filming themselves in the process and thereby creating a genuinely-joyful phenomenon in which dozens and dozens of people in odd garb leg it to catch a commuter train. There’s a vaguely-anachic sense of slapstick jeopardy here, like at any moment someone in an inflatable dinosaur costume might stack it across the tracks in spectacular and potentially-fatal fashion which, imho, makes the whole thing, but I can’t tell you how genuinely heartwarming and pleasingly-dumb this whole thing is. Enjoy (but also, please can we not make this a thing in London? We are not built like this).
By Deej Amago
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REALLY STRESS HOW GOOD THIS YEAR’S TINY AWARDS NOMINEES ARE AND WHICH ENCOURAGES YOU TO CHECK THEM ALL OUT AND TELL THE WORLD, PT.2:
- iPhone Photography of the Year: As I think I have remarked before (in tedious, needlessly-curmudgeonly fashion), it kind of feels like mobile phone cameras are good enough now that you probably don’t need to give trem their own designation when it comes to photo awards – BUT! More awards mean MORE WINNERS, and, you know, that’s a good thing, probably (let’s never forget the losers, though. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LOSERS? I know my people). This year’s selection of snaps shot on Apple devices features some predictably-excellent material (although actual sad trombone sfx to whoever it was who phoned in the strapline ‘the art of seeing, celebrated’ – YOU BEAUTIFUL HACK, YOU!); my personal favourtite is the lovely b&w shot of the cat, just because the framing and contrast is beautifully-done, but there are loads of great pictures to browse (although – and I promise I will stop saying this one day, perhaps when I die – I am SO SICK OF EVERYTHING LOOKING SO OVERTWEAKED AND HDR! Also, part of me does think that the degree of post-processing applied automatically by every single cameraphone in existence in 2026 does rather take some of the fun and skill out of this, although I accept that maybe I am just being grumpy at this point).
- Clouds in India: One of two links in this week’s Curios specifically about India’s weather (the other is in the longreads and is GREAT, if, er, incredibly scary), this is a really cute weather map which renders cloud cover across the country in the manner of 16-bit graphical icons, which, ok, won’t be useful to anyone apart from the maybe two of you reading this in India (HELLO!) but which I really like from a design/aesthetic point of view. Also, all the clouds are hand-drawn in a pixelart editor, which is CHARMING.
- 3d Drum Machine: SORRY I THINK THIS IS VIBECODED SORRY (I am assuming based on the url here – apologies if I’m tarring you with The Machine brush without justification). But! If it is, it’s really nicely-done (if horribly optimised – maybe it’s my laptop being old and sh1t, but MAN does this fcuk my performance into the sun) and doesn’t *look* like Claudeslop and it’s surpisingly-deep when you play around with it a bit. Basically the link presents you with a 3d rendering of a little 3d control device with a bunch of buttons – toggle the buttons to toggle the beats, the general sound type, the BPM, and then click the circle in the bottom of the device to access a secondary FX menu which lets you warp the drumtones to pleasingly-wonky effect. The rendering of the device is really nice – it looks a bit grubby and analogue, and there’s a pleasing tactility to the digital buttons which elevates this beyond the standard ‘in-browser synthtoy’ mass, and even I was able to make something quite fun and vaguely-boppable within minutes of clotheared tinkering.
- Hourly Towns: Curios reader and occasional submitter of curious links, the fabulously-monikered Xanthe Tynehorne writes: “ I am back with more nonsense, this time in the form of a Bluesky account. This is a bot (inspired by the ~~inimitable~~ highly-imitable @townsusa.bsky.social) which does exactly what it says on the tin: It posts a satellite view and a random town in the UK and Ireland — all right, mostly the UK, because the Irish dataset is a bit smaller — on the hour, every hour, give or take a few minutes…I also have a small writeup of what i used to make it here, including AI alt text and a blissfully helpful group of historic-county cranks.” I LOVE THIS – honestly, it’s such a perfect little regular slice of mundane places and pictures from around the UK, beamed into your feed at hourly intervals. If you’ve ever wanted a bot which will occasionally show you images of a nondescript roundabout in Chipping Norton – and, honestly, if you’ve not ever wanted this then ASPIRE MORE, FCUKO! – then this will make you inordinately happy.
- An Auction of Technical Antiques: “Matt!” I hear you cry, “Matt! What are ‘technical antiques?” Erm, look, I wish you hadn’t asked as I don’t really know, but, based on the multiple lots available in this forthcoming auction they can best be described as ‘old mechanical things that do stuff’ – so, say, old calculators of various types, or old mechanical puppet theatres. There’s a MONKEY ORGAN (you need to supply your own monkey, you may be sad to learn), old projectors, some neon signs…basically if you’re in the market for stuff that might reasonably be grouped under the broad heading of ‘esoteric homewares to make you look more interesting than you in fact are’ then WOW are you going to be happy with what’s on display here. OH MY GOD THERE’S AN ACTUAL GOLD LEICA.
- British Voters: A Bluesky bot which regularly shares voter profiles for people in the UK, based on Actual Data from the British Election Study Internet Panel. Obviously only of interest to those of you who have a strange and very particular interest in demographic profiling and voting intention but, well, I get a strange feeling that may actually be quite a few of you (SICKOS.jpg). Follow this account and you will receive EXCITING NUGGETS like “I’m a White British non-religious man from Hornchurch and Upminster, aged 32. My top issue is the cost of living. In 2024 I voted Green. Today I still would,” or “I’m a White Scottish man from Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, aged 46. My top issue is immigration. In 2024 I didn’t vote. Today I’d vote Reform UK.” Be warned, though, that depending on your politics it may see you getting irrationally and unfairly annoyed at imaginary people from half the country away.
- Seung Hyuk: Beautiful personal portfolio website corner! This is the portfolio website of one Seung Hyuk, a Seoul-based graphic designer who has a real knack for interaction design; this is SO pleasing, and so pleasingly-non-standard. Everything about it is a pleasure to interact with, and there are so many cool little details you uncover by clicking around and into various different sections. Seeing stuff like this makes me wish I had a website to commission so I could pay people like this to make it for me, honestly. BONUS PORTFOLIO WEBSITE! This is another excellent personal showcase by Maria Vasilyeva which is also really nicely-designed but which I love most for the blurring effect the cursor applies to all the images onsite which I find SO soothing and which I think you might enjoy too.
- Recipe Tables: This is a clever idea, specifically for people who find conventionally-written recipes online somewhat hard to follow, or who would prefer a more functional, logical approach to laying out quantities and steps and processes. Either copy and paste the text of a recipe, or plug in a url and it will transform in into a neatly-tabulated set of instructions which give a clear sense of what you need to do, when, at a glance. Ok, fine, this is an entirely-vibecoded endeavour, but it’s clever and useful and doesn’t appear to be asking you for anything or requiring you sign up or pay money, and as such I am going to class it as BENIGN CLAUDESLOP! Anyway, here’s the (horrible, AI-generated) explainer text should you want a slightly clearer idea of what the fcuk this actually does: “A prep-table notation invented by Michael Chu at Cooking for Engineers: ingredients down the left, each step a merged cell spanning exactly what it combines. The whole recipe reads in one look, with no scrolling back and forth between the ingredient list and the instructions. RecipeTables converts any recipe into that format. Paste the text, drop a link, or photograph a cookbook page, then scale the servings, switch between cups and grams, and export the table as an image, spreadsheet, or print-ready page.” Genuinely potentially useful, this, and maybe worth bookmarking if you are One Of Those Types Of People.
- Rodeo: INTERESTING. This is, to the best of my understanding, pretty much functionally identical to another app I featured here a couple of weeks ago – Rodeo is a platform that takes any link (or photo, or social post) featuring a forthcoming event which you feed it and turns it into a collaborative planning tool to help you and your friends organise trips and outings to things you think look cool – “Share what you want to do into the Rodeo app (Social posts, Screenshots, Links, Photos). We’ll wrangle the details and keep you organized, so you can actually do the things you save; see all your plans and tentatives in one place; see your places on a map; get reminders so you don’t miss out; make lists and share them with friends.” This sounds…useful! Also, a good datapoint should you be a useless strategymong who has to pull together a ‘deck’ (LOL!) all about how real life experiences are the new hotnesszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz dear God.
- Subway FYI: Ooh, I really like this – a map of New York City which lets you click anywhere and see how far you can travel using public transportation over time. Clicking starts the timer going – as the minutes tick up, so you can see the extending reach spread out across the city, offering you a neat visual representation of how well-connected any part of NYC is and how much of a pain it will be to stay in Bushwick while you’re there. Can someone make this for London, please? WHY DO YOU NEVER MAKE THESE THINGS FOR LONDON???
- The Mob Museum: Via the wonderful blort comes this website, the digital representation of the US National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. “At The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, we put in the work to get to the bottom of some of history’s most intriguing tales, exploring the age-old dichotomy of good guys vs. bad guys. Located in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, The Mob Museum is an immersive experience exploring the ongoing power struggle between organized crime and law enforcement from the Mob’s origination to today. Through vivid storytelling, guests are presented with the facts, the fiction and the gray area in between — showcasing the events and characters that played an integral (and infamous) role in U.S. history.” Obviously this is just a website – for the full experience you’ll have to go to Vegas I’m afraid – but this is still fascinating for any of you with a Goodfellas fetish and a willingness to overlook all the genuinely horrid things about organised mob violence in favour of a vaguely-romantic imagining of speakeasies and machine guns inside violin cases. There are blogs and bits of history and special sections on storied events such as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, and there’s even a pleasingly old-school ‘mob nickname generator’ (Matt “Money Bags” Muir, since you ask), and, generally, this is a good (fuggin) time.
- SexyMP: Yes, I know, and I am SORRY. BUT! This is very much a blast from the past – or at least it is for me, who remembers this from waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day and had completely forgotten its existence. As you may be able to guess from the name and url, this website exists solely to determine via the medium of EXTREMELY SCIENTIFIC head-to-head polling who is the SEXIEST politician in the House of Commons at the moment, based on public appreciation of their official mugshots. Log on and, should you be so inclined, choose who you think is hotter from a selection of comparisons of MPs; your votes will be added to the aggregate tracker to keep a tally of who is the ‘sexiest’ Parliamentarian in the land RIGHT NOW! While this is obviously puerile and objectifying in the extreme, and very much Beneath The Dignity of Web Curios, it is also…sort-of funny, and frankly it is not even in the top-1000 worst websites about MPs and so I feel sort-of ok linking to it. Congratulations to the pulchritudinous pair of Kate Dearden and Henry Tufnell, currently ‘king’ and ‘queen’ of the Commons when it comes to hotness! In general – and while Curios in no way supports the objectification of our elected representatives – it feels very much like politicians have become…less odd-looking over the course of my lifetime? Or, hang on, am I now so old that I just add an extra 20 ‘attractiveness points’ to anyone who doesn’t yet look like they have been touched by the cold hand of death? Oh Christ, it’s that, isn’t it? FFS.
- Wireshooter: Ooh, this is quite a cool little shooter game with some genuinely-novel mechanics; I suggest you read the ‘how to play’ section, as it’s different enough from most other shooters you will have played to require a degree of explanation. This is much, much better when played on your phone, as attempting to make this work using the mouse cause me to almost break my wrist (oh, ok, fine, HYPERBOLE, but it wasn’t fun).
- Walkable Cities: This (via Andy) is VERY dumb but very fun – it’s a top-down walking simulator controlled with one button, the spacebar; tap space to pivot from your left to your right foot and vice versa, and by so doing navigate the map to get from one side of the level to the other. No, you’re right, that doesn’t really make sense, but it’s honestly INCREDIBLY easy to grasp and also devilishly frustrating; thing is, though, it’s also VERY moreish and VERY replayable, which means you could literally lose 30 minutes to this without even realising. No, I will not apologies, it is YOUR fault for being weak.
- Today’s Star Is: Via the nice people at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, my notes for this game read, simply, ‘B4STARD’. This is a daily lunar lander-type game, which each day tasks you with finding, retrieving and returning a flag; you control a little spacecraft with the arrow keys, with a single thruster and some pleasingly-floaty gravity physics, and you can bounce of the walls…until the point in the levels when they start having spikes on them, at which point you will start SCREAMING at the screen. And that’s not even to mention the horrifying space invader thing you have to avoid, or the fact that when you find the key you have to then drag it back to the starting point, and the key has its own weight and physics and OH MY GOD I SHOUTED AT THIS SO SO MUCH and yet I have played it each day since I found it and I think I might actually hate myself.
- Side Out: The final game of the week is this neat little twist on Pong; rather than playing 1 vs 1, you’re instead playing with 8 others, arranged in a sort of circular arena fashion; your goal is to score goals and eliminate the others, complicated by the various odd spinners and black holes and bouncy platforms that appear in the centre of the play area to generally fcuk your sh1t up. You can play on your own, or with a bunch of other people online, and, generally, this is LOTS of fun and worth bookmarking as a regular escape when you get to the point where you would rather rip the skin off your own palms than spend any more time on that fcuking powerpoint.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- The Monterey Bay Aquarium: I don’t think I feature enough aquarium content in Curios, on reflection – consider this a small attempt to rectify that. This is the Tumblr of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, featuring some excellent creature content (examples include a guide to which marine wildlife you can in fact ‘pet like a dog’) and lovable gifs and, generally, conveying exactly the sort of Wholesome Tone you might expect and desire from a place where you get to hang out with anemones. I have actually been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium – my dad lived in California for a few years when I was small, I went to visit him, he took me here, I got to touch a starfish, it almost made up for him fcuking his secretary and leaving my mum, lol! – and so can attest to its impeccable vibes.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The Rave Flyer Book: Ok, so this is North American rave flyers and as such, objectively, it is Less Good than were it oldschool anglo or European ones (sorry, but it’s true!) – still, this Insta feed accompanying a forthcoming Big Coffeetable Book Of Old Flyer Art is posting enough nice designs from back in the day that it’s worth a look.
- Pierce O’Brien: You may recall that link to a thread of terrible UK music I posted a week or so ago – characterised, charmingly, as ‘UK Poo’ – but this…this is a whole new level. Pierce O’Brien is a guy from Manchester who’s blowing up a bit on TikTok and Reels and who sings…Jesus, ‘sings’ is a big word, sort of shout-tells appalling, sub-Kasabian ‘anthems’ which are squarely and singularly aimed at the 90s/00s revivalist ‘let’s get the bag in wahey’ town centre boys of 2026 – you can tell, because a significant number of the Insta posts here are full of references to other people who he’s supposed to sound like, The Libertines and Oasis and, Christ, while you may not think that any of those are aspirational let me guarantee you that you cannot even BEGIN to imagine how bad this is. This man sold out a reasonably big gig in Manchester earlier this month, I understand NOTHING any more.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Meta Settlement: Well that all worked out fine for Meta. The upshot of this week’s settlement in the US seems to be, largely, that Meta has paid what amounts to not actually all that much money in exchange for being able to neatly position itself as the company that is now doing the most to prtect kids, actually, whilst taking no liability whatsoever for harms it’s visited on said kids, while ALSO getting away with making changes that won’t actually fcuk its revenue models that much; this piece in Techdirt is a pretty good overview of how and why Meta’s gotten off pretty lightly overall, though imho it misses off two of the big things – specifically a) all it does re algorithmic feeds is mandate them to give kids the OPTION of switching to a chronological feed instead, which every single study ever conducted of user behaviour has show n results in next to no behaviour change because, turns our, we all prefer the algodopamine, whatever we might say when surveyed; and b) because of the way in which Meta reports its user numbers to shareholders its metrics which it uses to attract advertisers are unlikely to change in any material fashion, meaning much of the market-facing impact is mitigated. SPeaking of the market, by the way, it’s always instructive to see what the money thinks of stuff like this – and the money said that it was good enough news to boost the Meta stock price in the aftermath of the settlement’s being announced. It turns our that, when you’re rich enough, you really CAN buy your way out of anything!
- Edgecase Wars: Roland Smith makes the point in this essay that the issues we see characterised as ‘part of the ‘Culture Wars’ should in fact be thought of as edge case wars – that they are debates on and around issues that are so marginal, so unrepresentative of wider life and experience, that we should stop affording the arguments around them so much oxygen in terms of the wide culture. Which…hm, fine, on the one hand you are right Roland but on the other this does rather seem to ignore the extent to which edge cases can function as small-scale examples of wider issues, how they can be canaries in the cultural coalmine, and if you don’t think that the frankly insane tenor of the ‘debate’ around trans people is now going to be applied to all sorts of other things based on its successful rollout in that one, marginal area (not marginal if you’re trans, obviously, but you know what I mean here) then I have a bridge to sell you. This is obviously correct in a narrow sense, and I can empathise with the thinking and the general ‘guys, can we all stop shouting about stuff that is, objectively, not really near the top of things that people care about’ viewpoint, but also it does feel like we’re now at a point where it might be quite important to keep shouting actually.
- City of Sweat: It has, I think we can all agree, been something of a Warm Summer – if you think it’s been hot here, though, why not have a read of this brilliant piece about the experience of various different people in Mumbai over the past few months. This article, in Equator magazine, sees Ishan Tankha take a thermal camera on the streets of Mumbai to document the actual temperatures in shops and on the streets and in cars and on people’s skin, speaking to the city’s residents across castes and classes and hearing from them about what it’s like to live in a city where the temperatures top 40 on the regular and many, many people live lives where ‘escaping the heat for a bit’ simply doesn’t exist as an option. This is, honestly, absolutely terrifying to read: “Jari Mari is a crazy mosaic of the city’s extremes. Migrant, working-class Muslim and Dalit families live in tin sheds and one-bedroom concrete blocks stacked behind the high-security walls that seal off runway 27. The housing is so dense that the narrow lanes see no sun and feel no wind. But the heat still gets through, and the kids are always sick, many of the mothers in these houses told us: everyone has to sleep with their doors open, mosquitoes be damned. No one we spoke to could afford air conditioning. In Sabiya and Sameer Khan’s one-room house, temperatures touch 49C. When we tell Sameer we’re not here to shoot planes, but to take thermal pictures of his asbestos roof, he looks at us like we’re mad. We show Sabiya how the fan above her stove is pushing hot air back down on her. A couple of blocks away, kids play cricket on concrete that shows a reading of 58.7C.” MOTHERFCUKER.
- More Fcuked Today Than Yesterday: Look, if you’d prefer not to chug down another thick dose of Climate Realism then, well, I can’t blame you; on the other hand, if you want a couple of thousand words explaining some of the many, many ways in which the lights on the indicator dashboard of ‘How Badly Have We Fcuked The Planet Then?’ are flashing worrying shades of red then MERRY CHRISTMAS! Here’s a cheery little sampler! “ It’s hard to put into any concrete terms just how insanely hot the oceans all over the planet are at this moment. Back in 2023, when new records started to be set, there was huge media interest in the topic. Some of my graphics went viral, with images showing temperatures spiking almost vertically to new record highs. Arguments over the lack of Saharan dust and the impacts of the new IMO 2020 low-sulfur shipping fuel regulations were in the headlines. And then there’s yesterday. It’s not just that a new record daily high was set, yesterday was the 55th consecutive new daily record high, and the global oceans were a full 0.14°C hotter than any previous July 26th on record. For statistics geeks, the current temperature is more than 3.8 standard deviations above the 1991-2020 mean. The daily temperatures are on the precipice of setting a new record high temperature for any time of the year. Is this being discussed in mainstream media? Crickets. Global oceans teetering on the edge? Crickets. Global impacts? Crickets.”
- The 3,000 Mile Fish Finger: This piece does feel at the very least orthogonally-related to the previous link; it’s a quite astonishing explanation of the journey taken by a standard white fish, caught off the coast of the UK, for it to arrive in a supermarket a few miles down the road as a fish finger, and exactly why, for that to happen, the poor, blameless coley (or whatever) has to go via, er, China. This is jawdropping – or at least it was to me, someone previously ignorant of the global fish finger supply chain. Does this…does this feel like a good way to operate, given, well, the need to maybe use less fossil fuels, cut emissions, etc? It doesn’t, does it?
- App Life In China: Oh this is a great piece of reportage; fine, the genre it inhabits (‘writer based in the West visits China and recounts in wide-eyed wonder the strangeness of its futureeconomy’) isn’t a new one, and I have featured examples of it here before, but this is a nice update to the canon; it contains all the standard stuff you’d expect about the WeChat/Alipay digital layer which underpins/overlays (choose your preference!) the economy and society, but it’s also good at the practical realities of How This Works Now and What Its Impacts Mean, and Why It Is Not All Bad And Not All Good Either, and, in general, it’s interesting and nuanced in a way that these pieces don’t always nail. There’s also some interesting stuff in here about how the tech is impacting the social fabric of the country in ways I found particularly interesting: “The ever present surveillance must be one factor behind the remarkable improvement in public manners everywhere we went in China. Very little spitting, no jostling to get off planes, people seem to respect personal space much more than they used to. But it’s not just the cameras and facial recognition software. One friend in his fifties in Beijing said that the pandemic had changed everyone, but also that his parents’ generation were mostly dead or housebound—“they all had really rough manners because of the way China was when they were young.” WeChat and the other apps also mean there’s far less need for physical queues, and no point in jostling to get ahead if you are in one. There is more urban space in China than there used to be. There’s body space because of the apps and the good manners. Malls are empty unless they have live events or lots of restaurants. In some neighborhoods, the only humans are helmeted, uniformed couriers in red or yellow jackets buzzing about on electric bikes, anxiously checking their phones to make sure they’re not late for the next delivery. If they’re late, they get punished by the algorithms.” BONUS DYSTOPIAN FUTURE TECH WRITEUP! James Ball writes in Transformer about the Surveillance Panopticon and how cameras + AI is working to create the future that already exists in China all around the Western world. Smile, because even if someone isn’t watching someTHING definitely is!
- AI Employees Are Coming: Or at least they are according to this splashy puffpiece in Fast Company for a business called Anything AI, which is flogging AI staff as an off-the-shelf product to businesses – to AUGMENT existing employees, not replace them! Honest! – and which effectively develops template role/personas that can be rolled out within a business to perform specific, defined roles. Which, fine, I get the pitch, but as ever with stuff like this there is a remarkably small amount of detail on WHAT exactly these things do – what tasks are they performing? How does it practically fit into existing workflows? What’s the oversight? OH HOW CURIOUS THERE ARE NO DETAILS. Hm. I think, per previous comments in here, that there really is a lot of stuff that AI can do in the workplace these days which really is underexplored – but also that it requires significantly more thought, planning and rigour than simply thinking ‘I am going to buy an off-the-shelf AI marketing manager and make bank!’ because, well, no.
- The Habits of AI Writing: In the spirit of ‘know your enemy’, I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters from Terrible Companies; one of these is Andreessen Horowitz’s weekly missive on AI adoption and integration, which is a darkly-hilarious guide to AI ‘tells’ in copy and how to go about eliminating them. The reason this made me laugh so much is that it neatly captures some of the issue that people increasingly have with AI, to whit – none of the people pushing it seem to think or behave in a manner even vaguely-related to the ways in which normal people think and behave. Witness the way in which this guide is presented – it opens with the assertion that writing with AI is good, actually, and that EVEN MORE ACTUALLY some of the ‘quirks’ of AI prose are in fact really good, but because NORMIES are TOO DUMB to tell and often don’t like said tells, here is how to eliminate them…what’s even better is that the guide then goes on to explain what the tells are and how they are visible and why they might rub people up the wrong way in a manner not-dissimilar to how I would imagine A16Z might consider explaining textual communication to a curious, but fundamentally non-human, alien being. This is SO weird to me, honestly, and simply reinforces my impression that all VCs are basically vat-grown in Gstaad and educated on nothing but Y-Combinator pitch decks.
- GEOpolitics: Fcuk you, I am really proud of that heading. Ahem. This is a good piece in 404 Media outlining the latest example of a growing trend in international relations and Dodgy Statecraft – to whit, administrations (in this case, Israel) flooding the web with pro-them content in order to influence LLMs to respond with their talking points and messages and the like. The jury remains…unconvinced at the extent to which this sort of LLM manipulation practically functions in the wild and its efficacy in Shaping Hearts and Minds, but it’s good to know that this is happening (and lest you think this is just an Israeli thing, China and the US have both been doing this too – which means that everyone else is). “A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago. First spotted by Politico, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel. Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them. The articles ask questions like How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken?, Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor?, and Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza? The answers often read like word salad nonsense. “A reader who has encountered the claim as a consensus has encountered something real,” one article said about Israel restricting food supply to Gaza.”
- We’re All Affiliate Marketers Now: I mean, this feels like this has been true for a while now, but this latest development in the US feels like a precursor to it getting even bigger as a trend – this is basically a PR piece for creator marketplace ShopMy, which is getting into the affiliate links game, but the general trend that it speaks to (specifically: more and more platforms offering affiliate programs as we all struggle to earn money from our actual jobs and are instead forced to shill tat for brands to our friends in the hope they buy a £20 top from Shein and we earn £0.02 in commission) is one that’s been on the rise for a couple of years now and which, given everyone wants to be a creator and everyone needs a hustle, is likely to grow fast on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Stimulant Society Is Broken: YES. I cannot tell you how much I agreed with all of this – this piece speaks to a very particular confusion I have about modernity, to whit “when did it become normal for people to have to ingest the equivalent of five cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine via the medium of aggressively-flavoured carbonated sugarwater every morning and then again at various points during the day, and what is it doing to their insides?”. Honestly, getting on the tube in the morning and seeing an entire carriage of people chugging down the Monster makes me feel…quite dystopian, and this article does a good job of explaining all the ways in which I am right to Feel Bad. Take your pick from ‘a culture in which being tired is not acceptable’, ‘the relentless need to ALWAYS BE PRODUCING AND PERFORMING’, and ‘wow taking this stuff is actually really bad for you, physically’. Semi-related, but I have an almost-unshakeable belief that you can map ‘the rise in popularity of Monster Energy’ against ‘the number of North Americans reporting genuinely-distressing bowel issues in subReddits’ on a pretty much 1:1 basis.
- The New Etiquette: I don’t, personally, generally hold with ‘rules’ for etiquette, but I found myself reading this and nodding along pretty regularly which means either that it is RIGHT AND TRUE or, perhaps more accurately, that it maps perfectly onto my own middle-aged English opinions about What Is Right. Anyway, wevs, I think pretty much all of these are just Good Advice and you could do worse than reading the list and internalising the points. Write to people you care about in your own words, not AI! Just because you have sent someone a message doesn’t oblige them to reply to it immediately! Don’t screenshot the groupchat! Honestly, if nothing else this list makes GREAT dinnerparty conversation fodder. Oh, since I found this it’s been put behind a substack paywall, but, well, you know how free trials work and how to cancel them (or, er, SUBSCRIBE! Web Curios advocates paying for content, after all, but also if I subscribe to one more fcuking newsletter I will have to sell a kidney, so).
- How House Parties Shape Us: I wasn’t expecting to read this weirdly-poignant little essay, about the author’s memories of house parties and what the house party MEANS, in World of Interiors Magazine, and yet here it is; this is rather beautiful in ways I didn’t quite expect, and oddly sad – I do miss a good houseparty, honestly, a format that doesn’t really hit the same way when you’re in your 40s and the possibility of EXCITING AND UNPREDICTABLE EVENTS is somewhat lessened, and where every minor indiscretion has the added gravitas of ‘potential divorce material’ which does rather kibosh some of the more risky fun you might once have had. I remember a period in my life when I used to regularly gatecrash houseparties around Westbourne Park in West London, until one memorable evening when we stumbled into some stranger’s flat to find a LOT of what looked troublingly like heroin laid out on a table and we decided that maybe we ought to start taking more care.
- Literary Fiction Has Lost The Plot: I’ve read a lot of novels this year, but I have to say there’s not been that much I have been hugely captivated by – of the Booker Longlist (the ones I’ve read, at least), the one that stood out most to me was Black Bag, and even that was very much ‘interesting work but a flawed one’ and certainly not something I thought ‘masterpiece’ of. Anyway, you don’t care what I think – instead, why not read this excellent deconstruction by Devon Halliday of the opening pages of two recent literary novels, one by Hernan Diaz and the other by Emma Cline, which goes line by line through each and explains what is wrong with them, and how, in turn, that speaks to What Is Wrong With Literary Fiction Today. I thought this was excellent – scholarly but accessible, and Halliday does a really good job of illustrating wider points with specific examples from each passage – and it’s hard not to agree with many of his assessments, specifically this summation: “When I read literary novels like Switzy and Ply, all I can feel is that the writers are stalling for time. If they really had something urgent they wanted to communicate, they wouldn’t waste sentences on how slick dolphins are or how drab February is. The question driving these opening pages is not: “What does it mean to live a good life?” or “What do we owe to people?” or “What can be saved from the ravages of time?” The question I hear is: “Have I impressed you yet?” If I thought this problem was specific to Switzy and Ply, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. I would just get rid of the books and move on. But the missteps in these openings feel so familiar to me. They exemplify a trend in literary fiction that I’ve come to hate: Describing Unimportant Things in Unnecessary Detail In Order to Sound Smart.”
- The Acapulco: When I was a little kid, say 14, and I started going to nightclubs, the venue of choice was a place called ‘Cairo’s’ – inexplicably Egyptian-themed (down to the fibreglass pyramid and sphinx which adorned the entrance), it hosted a night every Thursday where all the security staff basically decided to completely ignore the law when it came to underage drinking and let a bunch of kids from 14-16ish turn up and get utterly, unconscionably smashed on booze. Drinks cost £1 a pint and £1 a shot, it was open til 2, the music policy was an unwavering selection of CHART HITS AND CLUB CLASSICS, and the DJ would regularly offer a free bottle of Babycham (I know, I know) to any young woman prepared to, er, ‘show off her charms’ to the dancefloow (now read back and remind yourself of how old these girls were. WOW, THE PAST WAS A DIFFERENT AND OFTEN-NOT-OK TIME!). Anyway, that’s by way of preamble to this piece which is all about the magic and majesty of an old nightclub called The Acapulcoin Halifax. Honestly, you HAVE to read this – if you’re English and old like me, to reminisce (you will DEFINITELY have been to places very much like this); if you’re English and young, to learn about The Way Things Were (and, possibly, why everyone aged 40+ is Like This); and if you’re foreign, as another proofpoint for ‘the English have a real problem, in fact a series of problems, with drink’. Honestly, this para barely scratches the surface: “The Acca is ludicrously cheap (75p drinks before 11pm), does not take itself seriously, and is an unashamed haven for cheesy old school pop music. When we arrive, I see punters knocking back some sort of multi-coloured concoction in a pint glass. “That’s a traffic light,” Murrãy informs me. “We used to have it back in the day. No one knew what was in it but it was rumoured to have 10 shots in it. And it’s not actually red, yellow and green, as it’s got blue in it. But no one questions it, we just go with the flow.”“
- Walking The Length of Manhattan: Craig Mod – whose walks I have featured many times in Curios over the years – writes about walking the length of Manhattan with a friend. This is just lovely – a series of small snapshots of one of the world’s great cities, with no rhyme or reason other than what Craig saw, heard and found interesting, and it made me want to go to New York and just walk and walk and walk.
- Why Is The Mustard So Spicy?: You may not think that you want to read a long, deep investigation as to why the piece’s author got a peculiarly-spicy jar of mustard, but you are WRONG because this is SO interesting and far funnier and better-written than it needs to be. Honestly, it’s a joy, I promise you.
- UFC at the White House: Jon Ronson has a new book out, all about DAMAGED MEN, and as part of the tie-in promo he was booked to cover the recent UFC fight at the White House; this is, per all of Ronson’s writing, very, very funny; he’s an excellent writer, an excellent humourist and someone who, over the years, has absolutely nailed the caricature of himself who inhabits all his pieces (he’s also, per some of my friends’ interactions with him a few years ago, considerably less keen on the joke being on him, but that applies to all of us I guess), and while making fun of the UFC at the White House is possibly a *bit* fish/barrel, it’s also a very good read featuring a pleasingly-ridiculous cast of characters (not counting the obvious one).
- The Fifth Syllable: We finish this week with a very well-constructed short story, itself a story within a story, about an AI being asked to write a love story about itself. Trust me on this, this is a lot better than you think it will be based on that description – I wish it were formatted differently as the narrow column makes it…quite annoying to read, but it’s worth that slight irritation as this is smart, funny and a series of neat stylistic turns to boot (and I’m a sucker for the ‘story told as one-sided conversation’ format).
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!