Webcurios 11/09/26

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Reading Time: 41 minutes

 

It is frankly terrifying to me that we are 14 years from Danny Dyer’s seminal 11-year anniversary commemoration of 11/9 (look, it’s been 25 years, let’s reclaim the fcuking date structure shall we?) – SO LIKE SANDS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS ARE THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES, EH???

Anyway, I went to Helsinki (my main takeaway, by the way, was FCUK ME do the Finns drink; I am a man who is comfortable admitting that he has a…troublingly-symbiotic relationship with booze, but even I was taken aback by the number of people (grown adults! One in a fcuking TUXEDO!) who I saw on what I assume was a Normal Saturday in Helsinki being sick on the streets and in bins. I was in one bar in which a grown woman at one point just sort of toppled backwards into a table, overcome by drink, at which point the friendly bouncer righted her, checked she didn’t seem to be concussed and then offered to get her another drink, which, well, is that ok? Hm) and then I came back, and now England’s gone all racist again and The Machine may be trying to kill us and Oh Christ I would quite like to go into hibernation for a few decades because I am getting some Bad Vibes about the ones to come.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should tell your friends to sign up to this instead of Patriot Platform.

***YOUR REMINDER THAT VOTING IS OPEN FOR ANOTHER FORTNIGHT FOR THE 2026 TINY AWARDS! THANKS TO ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE VOTED AND WRITTEN ABOUT IT AND SHARED THE LINK, IT IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!***

By Bea Sloss

LET’S START THIS JAM-PACKED EDITION OF CURIOS (DEAR GOD I HAVE SO MUCH TYPING IN MY FUTURE) WITH A NEW MIX BY TOM SPOONER AND HIS LOVELY COLLECTION OF RECORDS! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PUT A CHEEKY TENNER ON RACHEL MILLWARD BEING GREEN PARTY LEADER SHOULD ZACK FCUK IT IN HOLBORN, PT.1: 

  • Infinite Slop: Amidst the current wave of breathless speculation as to the probability of The Machine causing a full, species-level collapse within the next decade (on which, in the unlikely event you give a fcuk what I think, it is far, far more likely that it will cause the economy and labour market to explode, which, frankly, will probably feel like species-level collapse; maybe…maybe we should be worried about that instead of once again focusing on the scifi stuff? Just a thought!) there’s also been one of those very clear step-changes in model capability over the past month or so; not just the release of Astra (on which a bit more later on), but also evidently a shift in the cost of video models, as evidenced by stuff like Infinite Slop, a new always-on AI-generated TV channel which shouldn’t be entertaining but which I am forced to admit is…weirdly compelling. It is exactly what you’d think – a Twitch-esque interface, with users making suggestions as to what they want to see next; you can vote on your favourite suggestions, which then get queued up to be rendered by AI video in a sort of infinite nonsensical sketch show type-thing, all made with…some Chinese video model, afaict. Everything here is brainless, mindless, nonsensical rubbish, but  the rapid shifting from sketch to sketch means it’s…quite hard to stop watching, which I feel quite grubby admitting. It’s 7am! Why am I watching a gorilla repeatedly punching a meerkat in the face on the streets of New York? Why is the meerkat now crooning to an anime girl in the style of Perry Como? Why is the chat obsessed with getting the channel to render ‘anime catgirls’? I don’t think this is good, but I do think that it’s…not actually that dissimilar to just sitting and scrolling blankly through Reels or TikToks, honestly, which suggests that we’re not that far away from AI-generated feeds being compelling enough to actually replace human-generated content, at least in part. No, I don’t like it either, but, well, here we are! Oh, and here’s another variation on this theme, should you be curious. And this one’s an infinite, AI-generated QVC, selling…actual products, as far as I can tell, which is sort-of interesting from a conceptual point of view (although depressing as all fcuk when you take a minute to think about – so, er, maybe don’t! SMOOTH BRAINS ALL ROUND!).
  • Throng: Back in the boom days of Bluesky a couple of years back there was a trend for fun little ways of visualising the feed in novel and curious ways; now that the platform is very much not booming that appears to have dropped off a bit, but this is a really nice variation on that theme. Log into the site and you will be presented with the Bluesky feed as a 3d landscape with all the different posts represented as Actual 3d People, all sort of running at you and shouting (there’s a text-to-speech element here), with spatial audio that means that posts are louder the closer you are to the poster, and, look, while this is obviously an objectively-terrible way in which to experience social media from the point of view of ‘having the faintest fcuking clue what is going on’, it’s also a pretty much perfect rendering of what it actually feels like to stand inside the firehose and have a bunch of strangers shouting at you about furry anime and why you are evil for using AI. Odd, but sort of wonderful and Definitely Art.
  • Get Assessed: This is a little game/experiment thing designed for use with your LLM of choice by my friend Andrew Sheerin; basically it’s a prompt that you plug into your Trusted AI Companion which instructs it to determine, based on everything it ‘knows’ about you based on your past interactions with it and who you are and what you do, how useful you are to society and, specifically, how long you would be spared for in the inevitable forthcoming Machine Apocalypse; will you make it into the final decile of humankind, or will The Machine decide that you’re destined to be mulched in Wave 1? SO EXCITING! I like this quite a lot, partly because it’s a fun premise, partly because it’s…interesting watching how seriously people seem to take it, and how it fcuks with people’s sense of self-worth, but mainly because it’s sort of a perfect example of so much Machine output – it absolutely *looks* profound and meaningful, and it *feels* profound and meaningful because, well, it’s talking about US and WE are profound and meaningful…but, basically, it’s a lot of meaning-shaped w4nk. Anyway, give it a go and see how long YOU are likely to last when the paperclip maximisers get into their stride.
  • The Rave Archive: Per the blurb, “An independent digital archive connecting recordings, artwork, artists, promoters, venues and the history around them.” I’m slightly conflicted about this – on the one hand, this is a really cool project and a great attempt to bring together a range of disparate materials and sources around UK rave culture from the 80s and 90s; on the other, this bears all the worst hallmarks of AI-generated webwork, a dull UX and FAR TOO MUCH EMPTY, SOULLESS COPY. Honestly, take a look at all the different sections and their headers/descriptors – there is SO much w4nky prose that simply doesn’t need to be there, and which makes the whole thing actively harder to parse and navigate than it need be (and yes, I am well aware of the hypocrisy inherent in a 10k+ word newsletter berating someone else for needless prolixity – also, though, fcuk off, this is my newsletter and I will write as many fcuking words as I like…oh, fcuk, that was another 20, balls balls balls). Anyway, this is cool and all, and features loads of great tracks and a pretty comprehensive history of some of the early pioneers of the scene, but also I wish it wasn’t so…Machine-y.
  • Alexandria: Another of Ethan Mollick’s experiments with new AI tech, this time him messing around with the new OpenAI model, Astra, and using it to build him a 3d representation of the Library of Alexandria which you – LUCKY YOU! – can move around in 3d, learning about its history; per the blurb, it’s “a walkable interpretation of a city district and the royal Mouseion during the reign of Ptolemy II. Streets connect the library to houses, shops and working quays. Their precise layout is invented, and the reading collection is not a recovered inventory” (as you can tell, Astra has not learned to write any better). The main thing I’ve seen in the wake of this model’s release is a HUGE wave of newly-created 3d experiences spun up with AI; there’s obviously been a new set of capabilities unlocked which mean that ‘making stuff with 3d graphics’ is now trivial-ish, which is…sort-of cool, although (and I will share some examples towards the end when we get to the games in a couple of hours’ time OH GOD) they all tend to share similar negative qualities and quirks. Still, it’s impossible not to be impressed at the fact that you can literally now tell The Machine ‘make me a 3d version of the library of Alexandria that I can walk around in my browser and which will teach me its history and mythology’ and it will just…do it. BONUS IMPRESSIVE ASTRA EXPERIMENT!: Apologies for the X link, but this is pretty cool; someone plugged Astra into a robot arm and filmed it ‘learning’ to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. The link here takes you to a timelapse video of its various attempts, and seeing it improve over various iterations is…not-unspooky, I have to say.
  • Break Flow: Ooh, I do like a high-concept artwork. I was sent this by its creator, Hector, who wrote to me to tell me about it (he used AI to translate his original French, which is why it reads like MachineSlop): “BreakFlow is a website and a connected machine where anyone can pay €1 to trigger, live, the irreversible destruction of a plaster cast — the negative of an everyday piece of consumer packaging. Ghosts of objects. The debris is selected, bagged, labeled with the participants’ names, and kept in the installation. The leftover scraps are cast into new “fragments of the real,” ready to be destroyed. BreakFlow loses money on purpose. Every euro, every cost and the residual debt are public, in real time, and the growing debt is, in a way, the value of the work. Each session is a different proposition, and the next one takes place on September 12th (2nd live session). I’m not after profitability, but if it finds its audience, BreakFlow will grow endlessly. As long as the public keeps buying, BreakFlow stays alive.” I LOVE THIS – pointless but also oddly-meaningful, persistent and futile and FOREVER…basically this feels to me like a spiritual cousin of Web Curios insofar as noone cares and it takes a lot more out of me than it gives back, and it will NEVER STOP (don’t worry, one day I will die and you will be free of these emails). Anyway, you can pay a Euro to be part of an artwork, and that feels like a reasonable return to me.
  • Championship Gurning: Friend of Curios Matt Round is BACK with a fun new project which asks you to gurn into your webcam and scores you based on how hideously-twisted you can make your face (NB – should you be unaware of what ‘gurning’ means, take a moment to think about the face that people make when they have taken a pill and they come up a *little* too hard and fast all of a sudden – THAT is gurning. You’re welcome!). This is both fun and weirdly-addictive, although I couldn’t help but be struck with the fear that the wind might change and my face would be stuck in a forevergurn. Oh, Matt is also asking that people be brave enough to share their gurns and scores on social media; obviously I would rather die than ever Post Face, but if you’re less terminally-dysmorphic than I am then why not get involved?
  • Multiple Horse Theory: This is very, very silly but equally it made me laugh and so I am presenting it to you in case you’re also charmed by a straight-faced debate over the number of horses that there are in the world, and whether it is possible that there is more than one. Fine, this is all AI and ordinarily I wouldn’t link to it, but I can’t pretend that the premise didn’t make me laugh, and the commitment to the (very, very dumb) bit is deep enough that it’s worth a click. I mean, look, how can you not be slightly charmed by a page whose central premise can be summarised thusly: “For centuries, mankind has operated under one basic assumption:There is a horse. Multiple Horse Theory asks a dangerous question: What if there is another horse?”
  • Odyss, The AI Necklace: I think, although I can’t be sure, that this might be the most fcuked-up idea for an AI wearable I have yet seen; my provisional note for this one read ‘the anorecklace’, which, honestly, WELL DONE MATT, GOOD GAG! Anyway, if you have ever wondered ‘what exciting new vectors in the world of eating disorders will the new tech wave bring to us?’ then WONDER NO MORE! Odyss is a spectacularly-messed-up-sounding concept – an AI-powered necklace that, er, monitors what you eat. Oh, look, it *sounds* benign – who could object to this? “ODYSS N1 is an AI dietary necklace built to make nutrition awareness feel more natural in everyday life. By reducing the need for manual logging, it helps people build a clearer picture of how they eat over time.” But take a moment to think about exactly how fcuked up it is that you’re being encourage to don a device which will record every single thing you ingest and track its calories – is this…massively fcuking disordered eating? I THINK IT IS!
  • The 101 Plays Itself: Not a million miles away from Train Jazz from earlier this year, this is a neat little (AI-created) project which uses live footage from a traffic cam on California’s Highway 101 to generate music on the fly based on vehicles passing through the feed. It’s…ok, fine, you’re probably not going to dance to it, but it’s such a fun idea and I think there’s something slightly wonderful about the fact that things like this can just be made now thanks to open webcams and machine coding. Also, and this made my day yesterday, someone’s made this for a camera in London! Specifically, one Adam Banks spun it up for a camera pointing at the A12 in Leytonstone – THANKYOU ADAM BANKS I LOVE YOU!
  • Any Human Ever: This has done NUMBERS over the past week or so, and there’s every chance you will have seen it already – if not, though, you might find it an interesting little experimenttoything. Basically the site lets you play THE LOTTERY OF HUMANITY – based on available information about population distributions over time, health data and the like, the site lets you click a button and imagine yourself as a single individual in history, based on EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER LIVED, EVER! If you were to emerge from behind the veil of ignorance (little bit of Rawls there for the real heads!) into the life of a person anytime and anywhere in human history, what sort of life might you have had? It turns out that, statistically, it is INCREDIBLY likely that you would have died in infancy like the vast majority of all people who ever lived, but press the button enough times and you will be a grandmother to 19 kids, dying in a Sumerian invasion at the age of 46; a child laid low by dysentery at the age of 10; a victim of the black death in medieval Europe…the main takeaway from this, predictably, is FCUK ME WE ARE LUCKY TO HAVE BEEN BORN NOW (much as it might occasionally feel like the opposite is true), alongside the general feeling that it is REMARKABLE we have made it this far. This is fun – also, though, I found it interesting that despite it all being very clearly AI-generated it received widespread love amongst a pretty broad swathe of people, suggesting that people will put up with The Machine if the idea behind what it spits out is strong and appealing enough (or that people are really fcuking bad at discerning AI-generated webwork).
  • Dreaming Together: This is SUCH an interesting project – this one you will need to spend some serious time with, but if you’re in the market for some experimental fiction then it might be right up your street. Its creator dropped me a line the other week, introducing it thusly: “This is an odd one. For the past 4 years, I’ve been writing a very experimental internet novel. It’s presented as a collection of found forum posts about a high schooler who fell in love with a foreign pop star (and her ‘leaked’ diary). He decides that to prove his love (to himself), he must meet her in his dreams.  The project is totally non-commercial, and was created only because I have strong opinions on what the internet novel™ could be.” Ok, I have read bits of this (although, full disclosure, I simply haven’t had time to go more than a few thousand words deep) and while it’s not personally My Sort Of Thing I am SO happy that it exists; I adore writing that plays with medium and form like this, and there’s something really nicely done about the way in which the different media play off each other in the narrative. If you’re the sort of person who’s happy to read (a lot of) text on your laptop and the premise sounds interesting to you then I strongly suggest you set aside some time to explore this one.
  • UK Council Spend: A cool little dataviz project by Ben Tossell, which shows what UK councils have spent the most money on in the past year based on available accounts; possibly useful to some of you, but in the main it’s just fascinating to receive confirmation of how much public money has to be spent on adult social care, and how obviously-inadequate that spend still is, and how fcuking TERRIBLE so many councils outside of London are at breaking down their costs.
  • Made By Humans: A…slightly-depressing canary in the journalistic coal mine, this. “Made By Humans sits inside your CMS and flags text, images, video and audio content for signs of AI manipulation supporting (but not replacing) human editorial judgement. No AI detection system is infallible, but Made By Humans brings all the best-in-class technologies available into one easy-to-use editorial workflow. It protects your audience from being misled and safeguards your publication’s reputation.” Does it…does it seem like a good sign when we need to create automated systems to help editorial teams tell whether words and pictures and videos are real before they publish them? IT DOES NOT!
  • The September 11 Documents: This is not visually engaging or ‘fun’, but it is an interesting and useful approach to data by the City of New York – it has made thousands of documents relating to the September 11th attacks available to read and search, so researchers and historians can dig into the immediate aftermath of the event, the social and environmental impact it had, and how the response was coordinated by the City’s various branches. There’s no fun visualisation here and it’s very much one for the curious academics amongst you, but there’s a lot in here should you wish to explore (and, more generally, there’s something really interesting about being able to see the way in which a set of civic institutions responded to something so insane and violent).
  • Folding Story: On the one hand, I LOVE the fact that this website, which is basically ‘massively collaborative online Exquisite Corpse’ has been going for 16 years, and that it’s full of weird, often nonsensical, sometimes oddly-poetic pieces of collaborative storytelling by complete strangers; on the other, I really hate that its recent glow-up has come about because of AI, and that as a result the landing page reads so fcuking horribly. A tip to Noah, its creator who sent it to me: DON’T LET THE MACHINE WRITE YOUR WEBSITE COPY WHEN YOUR WHOLE PROJECT IS ABOUT WORDS FFS! Still, this is fun and worth an explore, and it contains genuinely lovely examples of community-created writing like this, which makes me glad it exists.
  • Nuke Simulation: Yes, I know, nuke sims aren’t new – this one, though, lets you see a full 3d model of wherever you’re choosing to drop the bomb, so you can really IMAGINE the death, destruction and irradiated winds you’re set to inflict on several hundred thousand blameless people.
  • The Last Tango: Now that Lionel Messi has announced his retirement from international football, you might want to enjoy a bit of digital reminiscence of his performances at the last World Cup (which was, astonishingly, only a couple of months ago – HOW DOES IT FEEL LIKE DECADES HAVE PASSED SINCE THEN???), with all of his goals from the tournament rendered as oddly-pointillistic, Kinect-style animations. This is a little less shiny than it initially looks – I would personally have enjoyed the ability to shift the camera perspective a bit more than you’re able to – but there’s something pleasingly-fluid about the animations here and it’s never not beautiful to watch the greatest footballer ever doing amazing, vaguely-incredible things with his feet.
  • Kids Trends: Oh this is LOVELY – Riley Walz has made this site, collecting kids drawings and making them searchable. Per the ‘about’ section, “Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life.” Honestly, I am barren and childless and dead inside, and generally couldn’t give two fcuks about the cuteness of children, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by these – also, it is SO INTERESTING to type in different things and see the myriad ways in which small minds choose to interpret them – seriously, just type an animal, or a cartoon character or superhero or IDEA into the search bar and marvel at all the different ways the tiny lunatics have chosen to render them. Magical, honestly.
  • Unusual Suspects: Prolific genius of fun web projects Neal Agarwal is BACK, with a new and SUPER-FUN little game/toy/thing – it places you in the shoes of a police sketch artist, tasked with drawing accurate pictures of criminals based only on the vague descriptions provided to you by witnesses; in this universe, all the crimes are being committed by cartoon characters or corporate mascots, so you’re being tasked with identifying which from the clues and then rendering them faithfully enough for the image recognition model sitting behind this to work out that, yes, that really *IS* Grimace from the McDonald’s extended universe. This is North America-centric, which means that I was forced to try and remember what the fcuk Chester The Cheetah of Cheetos ‘fame’ looks like, but thanks to the tedious supremacy of US pop culture there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll be familiar with enough of these to make it playable, wherever you may be from. This is SUCH a good idea and so nicely executed, as per with Neal’s stuff.
  • Become A Glider: Enable your webcam, park your sense of shame, stick your arms out as though you’re in the playground pretending to be a plane (NOT ONE FLYING INTO A BUILDING, THOUGH, ESPECIALLY NOT TODAY!) and use your body movements to pilot a glider around a landscape. You will look VERY SILLY.
  • Choose Your Own Adventure Stories With AI: Jesus, what a clunky title; sorry about that. Still, at least it broadly communicates what this is and what it does – it’s a storytelling platform called Diverge, which basically lets you create branching, animated narratives – each story starts with a single static image, which contains a selection of narrative hotspots, each of which will push the story in a certain direction; clicking one triggers an animation into the next scene, which again presents various options, etc etc ad infinitum. This is an interesting idea, more in theory than in practice – because this is AI, and because we are very much into the ‘grift and monetisation’ era of the tech, all of the examples on the site involve ‘unlocking’ narrative options with Actual Cashmoney, which LOL – but there’s the grain of a good idea in here if you take away the terrible AI writing, the fact that The Machine really can’t tell a story to save its life, and the appalling cashgrab mechanics.
  • Dame Andrea Jenkyns: Dame Andrea Jenkyns is a former MP and Minister in the UK who is now Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. This is her website. I don’t really know what to say to you other than CLICK THIS NOW AND EXPERIENCE THE WEIRD, ODDLY-FREUDIAN MAJESTY – seriously, there’s something so…so Tory about this, the odd combination of prissy traditionalism and weirdly-Freudian references to her being a ‘mummy’ (what the fcuk is it with Tories and that word, honestly?), and the quite incredible ‘achievements’ page…seriously, it is TOO BEAUTIFUL. Also, click the main link and get a feel for its vibe, and then remember that this is Andrea Jenkyns while a serving Minister in the Sunak government. What a fcuking cnut, eh?
  • The Grey Cartel: This is one of the odder pieces of inbound I have received in a while. This site was sent to me by its creator – it is, as far as I can tell, a non-specific service which purports to ‘get’ or ‘do’ anything you like. Payment on delivery. No, me neither, but I emailed the person behind it and asked them explicitly: “I can’t shake the feeling that you’re offering kidnapping/murder services, which perhaps is the vibe you’re aiming for. ARE you offering kidnap/murder services?”; they promised me they aren’t. Look, can one of you try this out? I am SO SO CURIOUS.

By Philip Dvorak

OUR NEXT MUSICAL SELECTION IS AN OLD FAVOURITE OF MINE – DJ KRUSH AND JAZZ MUSICIAN TOSHINORI KONDO WITH SOME SUPREMELY-90s LOFI HIPHOPJAZZTYPESTUFF! 

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PUT A CHEEKY TENNER ON RACHEL MILLWARD BEING GREEN PARTY LEADER SHOULD ZACK FCUK IT IN HOLBORN, PT.2: 

  • Innie Social: No, wait, come back, this isn’t *really* a social network! Instead, it’s a sort of Geocities/Tumblr-ish-type platform – ok, fine, with some social bits built in which also reminds me of first-gen MySpace, all built on the AT Protocol and so part of the wider Blueskyish universe and which therefore plays nicely with all the other sites on that part of the web. This feels like it will only ever be a small, niche concern, and quite possibly one that’s only ever going to be used by the furries (it has…quite a yiffy vibe to it, if you know what I mean – and if you do, that’s probably a sign that you should log off for a while because, honestly, you know TOO MUCH), but I like that it exists and there’s something cute and homespun about the general aesthetic which pleases me to a small degree.
  • Bibliotheque Numerique: Are you French? Would you LIKE to become more French? Would you like a huge online repository of French books to read for free online? OH GOOD HERE YOU ARE THEN!
  • Microduck: Ok, this one is an Actual Product You Have To Pay For, and while I try not to feature Actual Commerce on Curios I will make an exception for this because, look, it’s a little open source programmable robot duck and who doesn’t want one of those? NO FCUKER, etc etc! Try and ignore the fact that if you squint it looks as though it might murder you in your sleep (but in a cute way!).
  • 56k: You are, I am almost certain, of an age whereby you can remember the days when logging onto the internet was a slow, painful experienced prefaced by the strange and otherworldly whine of the modem, the annoyance of having your bongo download interrupted by someone else in the house having the temerity to make a phonecall (I SEE YOU) – would you like to go back to those times? No, you wouldn’t, they were sh1t and things are objectively better now – still, if you have younger people in your life who you would like to teach about The Before Times then this will help you educate them; it’s a full recreation of an oldschool PC OS circa, what, 1995ish, complete with old games and an actual, proper dial-up internet connection which will allow you to experience the web at the speeds available to people 30 years ago, ie that of a crippled slug swimming in a sea of molasses. Christ the past was sh1t.
  • BitCam: Oh, this is cute (if you’re a Mac/iPhone person, at least) – an app for iOS devices which will let you take photos in the now-legendary ‘incredibly lo-res pixellated black and white’ style rendered iconic by the early graphical stylings of early Macintosh computers. It’s astonishing quite how strongly this evokes memories of my dad’s ‘cool’ designer friends and their Apple 1 computers, honestly – this is quite a strong aesthetic for 2026, imho.
  • SlitScan: Speaking of cool aesthetics (SEAMLESS!), this is a neat little webtoy to make fun visuals with – it’s quite hard to explain (or at least it is for me right now; we’re into hour three of typing at this stage, and it’s fair to say that I am feeling…less fresh than I was at 7am), but, basically, feed it any picture you like and then use this webpage to turn said image into a weird, slitscanned monstrosities. I like this primarily because the effects it produces are very un-filter-y; there’s something pleasingly manual about the process and hence the results (yes, I know, but it really will make sense as soon as you try it, I promise you).
  • Earshoot: Oh this is cute! Sent to me by its creator, one Lionel Jolles, it’s a music discover map thing – basically plug in any artist you like, or track, and it will help you find similar or related music; it’s not a wholly novel proposition, I know, but I like the aesthetic here; as Lionel described it to me, “a music discovery map where each track you search becomes a node, related tracks drift in around it, and clicking one recenters the map, so you end up with a trail of what you explored. There’s also a small toad that wanders the map and occasionally jumps at bugs; it has nothing to do with the recommendations, it’s just there to make the thing feel a little alive.” Honestly, it’s the toad that makes it for me.
  • Defrag 98: Would YOU like a webpage that replicates with almost perfect fidelity the experience of defragging your hard drive in Windows98? WHY? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WANT THIS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Anyway, here is such a thing for the deviants among you – know that I am eyeing you with immense suspicion right now. Thanks to Dennis Morello, the weirdo who made this and sent it to me (Dennis, I am sure you are lovely but you appreciate that there is something…niche about this, right?).
  • The White House Arcade: As we all wait for IT to happen (it will, one day, he cannot live forever (please God do not let him live forever)), so must we content with the idiocy and crassness and venality of That Fcuking Man’s administration – a small, but particularly gross, manifestation of what a fcuking bunch of cnuts they all are can be found in this new section on the White House website, an ‘arcade’ featuring low-quality rips and riffs on classic titles from yesteryear, all reworked to act as propaganda for the corrupt, racist, venal regime currently in charge of the US (have to say, as I type this this morning and hear the news in the background about Vance’s reception by the Republicans overnight, it strikes me that there is a…non-zero possibility that the US never recovers from this, which is quite an incredible thought for someone whose grown up in an era of superpower hegemony). This is obviously awful and crass and horrible – fun games about deportations! LOL!!!! – but, also, an excellent example of why games are a far more effective communications vector than most people give them credit for. Anyway, credit to Alexey Pazhitnov, creator of Tetris, who objected strongly enough to the regime’s rip of his game (‘Build The Wall’ – yes, they went there!) that they were forced to take it down this week – but, in general, this is all just incredibly gross.
  • Pablo Stanley: A BEAUTIFUL little personal portfolio website presenting the work of one Pablo Stanley; as far as I can tell this is all hand-drawn, with you exploring Stanley’s career and achievements via the medium of a small cartoon avatar of Pablo traversing a cartoon map, occasionally being chased by cartoon antagonists…honestly, this is absolutely charming and you will fall slightly in love with Tiny Cartoon Pablo after a few minutes of wandering.
  • In Flight Simulator: Would you like to accurately simulate the experience of being on a plane? No, probably not, air travel is very, very boring indeed unless you’re in first class, at which point it becomes boring-but-comfortable – there is no world in which it is an experience to be cherished. Still, for reasons known only to the deve;p[er behind this site you can now simulate the entirety of a flight in realtime, including looking out of the window, fiddling with the tray table in front of you and having an immensely passive-aggressive interaction with the person sharing your armrest – ENJOY!
  • Awards Racing: Ooh, this is a FUN GAME – basically quite a shiny, high-spec-looking top down racer battle royale-type thing (yes, I know, but I have a lot to get through and you can work this stuff out for yourselves, come on); I don’t quite get the ‘awards racer’ framing but, frankly, give a fcuk, this has very strong Micro Machines-type vibes to it and it is ACE.
  • Hortle: I have a vague sense that the demography of my readership means that quite a few of you might be Into Gardening, and that, as a result, you might enjoy this game made by Chris Barker for horticulture journal HortWeek (no, me neither), in which you basically just have to correctly identify the flora you’re presented with – the game here is to see how long a streak of correct answers you can get, which, obviously, for an urban-dwelling, black-fingered antigardener such as myself is basically impossible but which for YOU, lovely green-fingered cultivator of roses and the like, will prove an absolute breeze.
  • Mystery Chart:  Ooh, this is SUCH a good idea. Sent to me by its creator, Tim Goudswaard, who writes: “You get 5 daily charts built from public datasets (e.g. WHO and OECD) with the title redacted and you have to guess what the data represents. There’s some hints available if you’re clueless and they get increasingly harder. I’ve got roughly 250 people playing it at this point across the globe. It’s been quite funny to see the snowball effect work in realtime.” Seriously, this feels like something an organisation with access to lots of datasets might reasonably license for their own site because CHRIST is it weirdly addictive and super-interesting.
  • Year To Beat: Another reader submission, this time from Alex-Andre Viik  who’s made this fun little daily game which presents you with five music videos and asks you to guess the year each came out – simple, quick and will have you getting really annoyed at your inability to distinguish 1996 from 1997 (if you’re me).
  • Spaceships: have you ever wondered what it would be like to play a version of Asteroids in which, rather than controlling the spaceship and attempting to shoot the space rocks, you instead control the space rocks attempting to smash the spaceships? No, of course you haven’t you unimaginative little fcuks – still, SOMEONE has and they have built it, and this is a LOT more fun than I expected it to be.
  • Name All The Colours: Or 100 of them, at least? HOW MANY SHADES CAN YOU NAME??? This is…more compelling than I am comfortable admitting, and I like the fact that every shade you correctly identify is presented to you visually, which is helpful in terms of helping me work out what the fcuk ‘teal’ actually looks like.
  • Survive 10 Waves: A cool little top-down shooter, this – your only goal is to survive 10 waves of enemies, collecting powerups and dodging and shooting, and generally enjoying 5 minutes of entirely-smooth-brained fun. Recommended.
  • Doodle District: Ok, so I spent 200 words complaining about poor-quality vibecoded games a few links back, but based on the url I am pretty sure that this is also Machine Output and this one is fcuking ACE. Doodle District is an FPS, with an art style that can best be described as ‘Call of Duty but all drawn in blue biro’, and it is FAST and FUN and the guns are satisfying and you can play multiplayer and this is REALLY QUITE GOOD in ways I wasn’t expecting (and I don’t even like shooters, as a rule).
  • Smash Fun: Would you like to play a version of Super Smash Bros in your browser, in which you can play as literally ANYONE (no, seriously – Barack Obama? Emmeline Pankhurst? Ronaldo? YOURSELF??? All possible, and fcuktonnes more)? Yes, of course you would – to do so you will need to download a Rom from the web, but that’s very easy and the site explains how to do it, and at that point you will be able to happily manifest that long-standing dream of yours in which Moses beats the everliving sh1t out of Lemmy from Motorhead.
  • Gas Station D1ck Pills: A short, branching, lightly-interactive visual novel-type thing; I really liked the writing in this, and the tone, and the…slight feeling of everything being awful and grubby and dying that underpins it; give this a try, it’s a fun five minutes (and there are LOTS of potential endings to find).
  • The Simpsons Hit & Run: This is literally THE FULL FCUKING GAME IN YOUR BROWSER! ENTIRELY PLAYABLE! EVEN ON MY SH1TTY LAPTOP! Honestly, this is the most incredible link I have seen all week – they have all the voices and everything! – and it is SO fun to play and runs surprisingly well and this is what you should all spend the rest of the working day on, seriously, it beats the fcuk out of your stupid pointless job.

By Jerry Hsu

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A BUNCH OF 70sISH TRACKS EXPERTLY COMPILED BY PARADISE IS A FREQUENCY! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Sseongryul: A Korean artist whose work, mostly depicting a boy and girl in school uniform set against clean, stark blue skies and white clouds and fields and semi-rural environments, will make you feel…honestly, the only I word I can think to use here is ‘refreshed’ and while I can’t adequately explain why this is the case I can promise you that it really, really is.
  • Jodie Scott: To be clear, this link is the very opposite of an endorsement, but it feels…oddly germane in the UK given last weekend’s events in Dover and Portsmouth. Jodie Scott is a woman who posts ‘stop the boats’ type content on her Insta, along with the occasional song about how ‘native britons’ need to ‘protect their ethnic heritage’ – while I am certain that Ms Scott would baulk and take umbrage were I to describe these sentiments as ‘ethnonationalist and racist’, Ms Scott is, based on the content on this page, both of those things. I am linking to it mainly because the music is SO SO SO SO SO BAD, and as such it’s an opportunity to laugh (a bit) at a dumb bigot, while at the same time acknowledging that the fact that there are increasing numbers of people in the UK who think that these sorts of sentiments are a) acceptable; b) laudable; and c) vital, and that that fact is…really fcuking miserable, honestly. Anyway, click the link and listen to the song in the pinned post because I really hope Lily Allen issues a strongly-worded copyright takedown and sues the fcuk out of this person.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Masks Off: It did not, it’s fair to say, feel *great* last weekend when several hundred men (of ‘fighting age’, to coin the phrase so beloved of the right when complaining about asylum seekers arriving in the UK) blockaded the port of Dover while all dressed in black and wearing balaclavas; it didn’t feel great the next day when it all happened again in Portsmouth. This piece in the LRB gives an overview of what happened, why, and who was behind it – it also presents a hopeful coda, suggesting that this sort of display is likely to be counterproductive to the mainstream appeal of anti-migrant rhetoric…look, while I want to believe the author here, I also have spent some time hanging out in the lovely, friendly, welcoming ‘Patriot’ communities on Facebook this week (for professional reasons, to be clear), and I am not sure that said author quite realises how many people there are who are very happy to express open endorsement of militia-style takeovers of the UK, and who seem to legitimately think that this is ‘the only way to stop the boats’ (honestly, future generations will write TREATISES on the 2020s Brits’ obsession with dinghies as the sole cause of all their ills) – seriously, go onto Facebook, type ‘Patriot’ into the search bar and then scroll through the results. If you’re feeling brave, dip into the few Groups that aren’t set to ‘private’ and take a dip in the chat, and then try and maintain your belief that this isn’t a mainstream position in 2026. It’s often said that people on the left rush to use the ‘F’ word when it’s not warranted – in this instance, though, black-shirted men wearing masks standing off against police because they really don’t like brown people does feel QUITE A LOT like that actual thing. Once again I am finding it really hard to believe politicians when they say ‘this is not who we are as a nation’, because increasingly it seems that it really fcuking is.
  • Ballard: Tangentially-related to the previous piece and the fashy wave, this is a really interesting piece in The Quietus about JG Ballard’s final novel, Millennium People, which (in common with the other books he published as part of the loose trilogy which closed out his career) explores Ballard’s thoughts on how violence spreads in modern society and how, in many respects, it’s an inevitable downstream consequence of a certain type of late-period capitalism. I always found Millennium People the weakest of the trilogy (Cocaine Nights was always my favourite, personally), and, as the author points out, there’s a lot of what’s written in there which no longer maps to a post-web world, but, equally, it’s hard not to look back on his work and think that he saw something coming which few others did. “New Internationalist reported on a nationwide rise in anti-immigrant sentiment across the United Kingdom. But it is the motorway towns which provide some of the most particularly lurid examples of this new form of nationalism. Round the far side of the M25 in Epping, protests began outside an asylum hotel, The Bell, after one of its residents attempted to kiss a 14-year-old girl. This grim event lit the touchpaper. The protests became a weekly occurrence. People turned up with dogs, or aimed fireworks and flares at the premises while residents were sleeping. Before long, the protests metastasised into something more organised. Orla Minihane, vice-chair of Reform UK’s Epping Forest local branch, formed the Pink Ladies, a protest group that quickly went national, gathering outside asylum hotels across the country in the name of protecting women and girls. Byline Times reported on the ‘concierge nationalism’ of Essex Spartans, a so-called volunteer community group operating street patrols. Their claims of links to the police and local schools cannot be substantiated. However, Byline Times’ reporting did uncover key members’ links to Homeland Party, a splinter of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative. Kingdom Come presages something of this climate perfectly: prejudice masquerading as community spirit; acts of thuggery mobilised in the name of civic pride.”
  • Political Advertising and the AfD: Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me? is a smart thinker who has thought LOTS about How Political Ads Work In The Social Media Age, and this is an interesting reflection on the rise of the AfD in Germany and its recent electoral success in Saxony; Jeffers posits that it’s in part due to the decision by Meta to remove political advertising from its platforms in the EU (due to its unwillingness to comply with proposed EU regulation) which removed the ability for mainstream political parties to reach significant swathes of the electorate and as such provides a disproportionate boost to more fringe political concerns. As he puts it, “This matters because mainstream political parties used these platforms much more than the far right did. Although German parties were never among Europe’s biggest buyers of digital political advertising, parties and other political actors still spent around €14 million on ads in the three months before the 2025 federal election. The AfD accounted for just 2.75% of political ad spending on the major platforms. The Greens spent around ten times as much, while the CDU and SPD each spent roughly five times more. When online political advertising effectively stopped, the biggest losers weren’t the extreme right, but parties in the political centre.”
  • Nepal: In a summer in which we’ve not been short of ‘wow, climate change sure is becoming real!’ moments, the recent Nepalese floods feel like a particularly-pointy example of ‘sh1t getting serious’. This is the LRB (again) on the impact of the disaster and the difficulties faced by a new, young political leadership in dealing with not only its first major infrastructural challenge but also a coming new environmental reality in which a whole new set of (largely terrifying) parameters apply. “A government adept at managing its public image now has the much harder task of rebuilding. As well as the thousands of homes, small businesses and schools that have been lost, several hydroelectric plants have been destroyed. Construction stopped on the Timure dry port, on the overland trade route to China, after floods last year. Together these losses trace Nepal’s aspirations for the century: energy and trade independence, mobility for the rural poor and, in the flooded power-plant tunnels, rare good jobs at home against the tide of migrant labour. There are 21 ‘potentially dangerous’ glacial lakes at risk of outburst flooding in the three major river basins that cut across the width of Nepal. At first it was thought that this flood might have been triggered by a glacial lake outburst, before it became clear that slope failure was the culprit. These events are much harder to study and predict, though probably caused by melting permafrost. The last four summers on Langtang Lirung have been among the five warmest since 1940. Whatever comes of Nepal’s efforts to seek climate reparations, given its young, unstable mountains, its people require more than meteorological vigilance when it comes to resettlement and development.”
  • The Case For Boycotting Generative AI: Gary Marcus has over the past four years of the GenAI hypewave proven himself consistently worth listening to – his list of reasons as to why we might have reached a tipping point when it comes to wanting to put faith in the actions or motivations of Anthropic and OpenAI is pretty compelling, although I personally think that a more effective approach would be applying pressure to governments to take collective, international regulatory action (and, while they’re about it, maybe do the same for social media companies too? JUST A THOUGHT) – it is, though, hard not to read this statement and nod gravely in agreement: “They are already causing harm, and things could conceivably get much worse. They have no serious plan for mitigating the risks of generative AI. The government, too tight with industry, doesn’t either.”  Of course, there won’t be any sort of meaningful boycott or serious goverbmental action because, as I think I have intimated here before, I am now 99.999999% convinced that the world’s leaders have become convinced that the climate stuff is beyond fixing based on currently-available tech solutions, that society-wide behaviour change simply cannot happen in time, and so the only potential way out of the hole we have dug ourselves is to place all our faith in The Machine basically solving physics in the next decade or so and so, well, FULL STEAM AHEAD. Christ, we are so so so fcuked.
  • Brainrot As Dada: A phrase to rival ‘Zendaya is Meechee’, there. I rather enjoyed this New York Times piece which makes the argument that rather than being a dangerous cancer rotting young minds, brainrot content on social is instead a reaction to the cancer, effectively a smooth-brained noping out from the genuinely toxic and mad hypercapitalism of the TikReelSnapscape; on balance this strikes me as…plausible, honestly, because while there may be no mental nutritional value in watching a split-screen vertical video marrying hyperspeed Minecraft building with, say, a virtuoso performance of Dance Dance Revolution, it’s also arguably less bad for the mind and the soul than watching some influencer attempt to sell you on the need to package all of your groceries in individual tupperware for ‘the aesthetic’, or listening to the music of Jodie Scott (see the Insta section above if you have no idea who that is; also HOW DARE YOU SKIP BITS OF CURIOS ffs).
  • Hacking The Navy’s Freezers: Ok, this is very technical and, in the main, I didn’t understand a lot of it. BUT! I did understand enough to think it a REALLY interesting – and not a little troubling – story which speaks to all sorts of things about the online, hyperconnected way in which Everything Works Today. You may not have been aware – I certainly wasn’t – that there has been a spate of reports of late from US Navy outposts about their freezers not working; this article makes the very valid case (since apparently partially-corroborated by the Navy itself) that this may be the result of the Navy’s software being hacked and all the freezers just being turned off at source by a malicious actor. Which is a) fcuking mad from the point of view of vulnerabilities and single dependencies; and b) slightly terrifying when you take a moment to consider the number of other critical systems which are likely built in vaguely-similar ways. Take a moment to read this – you can skim it, there’s a lot of technical stuff in there which you don’t need to parse to get the gist – and then think about how this stuff is likely to play out in a world in which agentic AI swarms managed by malicious actors are a real thing (ie the world right now). FUN TIMES AHEAD KIDS! I wonder at which point we’re going to start thinking quite seriously about the vulnerability of, I don’t know, the entire aviation system.
  • Vinted Brain: An excellent piece in the New Statesman about the new face of shopping addiction and the fact that noone is really talking about the fact that we have…something of a problem as a society with buying tat all the time. Seriously, I live in a house with two other flats, and one of the people in the building is running at a rate of approximately two deliveries A FCUKING DAY, which, Jesus, WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU BUYING AND WHERE ARE YOU PUTTING IT ALL??? Anyway, I think this is an interesting phenomenon which isn’t taken as seriously as it ought to be – if nothing else it does rather speak to some of the reasons why we possibly need to take a *bit* of personal responsibility for the state of the planet rather than just pointing at data centres and shouting “EVIL!” at them (and yes, I know that this piece focuses on Vinted, but this extends beyond recycled fashion). “In the years since lockdown, the topography of sending and receiving has changed for good. The courier service Evri now delivers an estimated 4.4 million parcels per day in the UK. It handled a billion deliveries over a 12-month period in 2025-26, an increase of 17 per cent on the previous year. Evri considers its primary delivery partner, Vinted, the key volume driver, yet it’s just one of the courier services offered. In the same period, the number of UK lockers installed by Evri’s largest private competitor InPost grew 45 per cent – there are now 15,000 of those dotted around the country. Royal Mail, with its regal name and uniformed worker, was founded on a promise of dignity and personal service, but as it fell into decline expectations were reshaped, and now parcels are dumped and recipients rifle through boxes. Like fast fashion, this is turbo capitalism of the lowest order: a drop in standards so sharp that no one had time to notice.”
  • Print For Teens: Another datapoint for my ‘magazines are coming BACK, baby!’ thesis; this piece in the NYT is very US-centric (and as ever with stuff like this it’s important to remember that the US is so much richer than we are, and so much bigger, that the economics of stuff like this are VERY different), but speaks to the wider appetite amongst younger people for printed materials as an antidote to algofeed, for physical objects as taste and status signifiers, and the appeal of a tightly-curated selection of things to read (YES I AM THE ZEITGEIST!) rather than whatever filters through to you based on your own personalised in-app maths. Basically I still maintain that this is a GREAT time to launch a new magazine and should anyone want to pay me money to write for such a venture I am all ears.
  • Eventslop: On the weird and very now phenomenon that is ‘doing stuff for the content rather than for the experience’, particularly as exemplified by the recent raft of GenZ trendpieces pointing out how much young people love to DO ACTIVITIES – the article suggests that much of this performative ‘doing’ of ‘stuff’ (powerpoint parties! Flower arranging! Screen printing!) is entirely downstream of the need to feed the maw of the ever-ravening content machine, and that there’s nothing ‘real’ about much of this stuff: ““People don’t host real public gatherings anymore; they host ‘eventslop,’ where the main purpose of the event is to generate algorithmic engagement above all else,” Aleksic noted that these events have largely been organized by influencers and suggested they were designed to be filmed “less to create social connections, and more to serve as a free laugh track for whatever crazy stunt is currently happening.” They also rely on trending buzzwords, like “aura” and “Wasian,” he said, meaning they were “very likely orchestrated for algorithmic momentum.””
  • Greg Chism: I will say this for Jon Ronson – MAN is the PR for his latest book doing good work for him. You can’t move for Ronson pieces at the moment, and here’s another one – this is a piece about ex-YouTuber Greg Chism, who was for a while a, er, ‘lawncare influencer’ and who then, via a series of…ill-advised decisions, became very much a target of a LOT of hate online. I will leave you to make your own minds up about the extent to which Chism is a) just an enthusiastic guy who made a few poor calls and has had his life ruined as a result; or b) a calculating monster who was happy to exploit his children for the money and fame to which he had become addicted, but my personal take on this one is that it really does neatly show the problem with both algorithms and ‘content creation’ as a profession, and that audience capture is real, pernicious and likely to drive someone quietly insane (even if they were saner to begin with than Mr Chism was), and that there is something deeply psychologically unhealthy in pursuing a career in which you do things you don’t really like or understand because Very Complicated Maths tells you that’s what you should be doing.
  • The Sperm Racing World Cup: I featured a link to this incredible event back at the start of the year; now, the Paris Review has dropped the Big Read we have all been waiting for, looking into the people behind the story and the odd, short-lived viral phenomenon that was ‘sperm racing’. It may not surprise you to learn that everyone involved in this is a moron child with merch to sell: “Sperm Racing is also about moving product: The company has sold plastic-free boxer-briefs under the brand name Andros, as well as supplements called Sperm Worms, whose website promises “better tasting loads, fertility support, and daily performance in four gummies a day.” Or, per Sam Kriss, who described the company and its now-eighteen-year-old founder Eric Zhu in a February Harper’s dispatch on Silicon Valley, it’s about attention arbitrage. “Sperm Racing seemed to be first and foremost a social media hype machine,” Kriss wrote. “A third of Eric’s staff work on videos, producing a seemingly endless stream of viral content.”  Put another way, Sperm Racing is about future anxiety, the fetish for self-optimization, and the drive to monetize people’s fears and weaknesses, not least their screen habits. (Sperm Racing’s videos are part of a larger crop of social media spermslop that includes, for example, an AI-generated video of a mournful spermatozoa being tortured by a smoldering cigarette and heckled by a hotdog and a hamburger.) But to the company’s credit, people have been asking the questions its project poses for centuries—or anyway, they resonated with me. Questions like: Are the contents of my person inadequate? Am I incapable of producing anything worthwhile? Are my devices futile?”
  • Who Is Paying For All This?: Vittles did an EXCELLENT deep-dive into the London food influencer scene the other week – if you can’t read that because paywall, you can read the slightly-abridged version that appeared a few days later in The Guardian, but the full one really is worth subbing (and then cancelling if you must) for. The upshot here is that noone is making any money and THE CREATOR ECONOMY IS A FCUKING LIE, and how you shouldn’t believe anything most of these people say because they are literally being paid by restaurants to endorse them: “As influencers have become powers in their own right, many have started to ask the same question: how do I get paid? The harsh reality of the industry is that a very small proportion of them make any money. This seems surprising at first. There’s no shortage of internet celebrities who have spun views into riches. But the economics of restaurant influencing is particularly dismal. Tong has a day job, as does Fletcher; the same is true for Bite Twice (@bitetwicefoodreviews, 294,000 Instagram followers). In fact, it seems like nearly all the influencers that come across my feed – Ed Tan (@onehungryasian), Lee (@rollinjoint1) and Christy Lam of @the_lazyfoodie – have either day jobs or side businesses that support their influencing (a significant number of these day jobs are in finance or consulting). Part of the reason for this is that Instagram, the primary platform in the UK for food content, still doesn’t pay for views. TikTok, where some influencers have found success, generally pays between £300 and £750 per million views. But there are other ways influencers can get paid. Shaikh, one of the few to make influencing work full time – and one of the few willing to discuss making paid content on record – tells me she makes advertising content directly for restaurants, which looks like a standard restaurant-visit video but is clearly marked as an advertisement. She declined to say how much she charges. But other influencers, restaurateurs and PRs shared payment rates and documents with me suggesting that, while remuneration varies widely, accounts under 100,000 followers appeared to negotiate £300–600 per post or per visit, while 100,000–250,000-follower accounts negotiate £1,000–1,500 (all payments discussed occurred in the past twenty-four months). Restaurant PR Hugh Smithson-Wright told me that payment could run up to £5,000 from a big global restaurant brand. Several high-end influencers shared solicitations coming from restaurants with me; in these communications, payment offered ranged from a paltry £750 to £8,000.”
  • The Corrections: I don’t have any particular affection for either Jonathan Franzen or his novel The Corrections, but I adored this piece looking back on it after 25 years, and specifically unpacking its opening paragraph; it’s another wonderful bit of writing about writing, and I do love a close reading of a small passage like this which explains the craft that goes into it: “The phrase “world-building” is usually applied to writers of fantasy and science fiction, but it’s no less apt when the imagined world includes real places. The reader has to believe in the universe in which it all happens. From the very first sentences of “The Corrections,” you do.How does Franzen accomplish this? Partly by taking his cue from one of the most canonical (and literal) examples of world-building in the Western tradition: the book of Genesis. He starts with a vortex of formlessness, and sets about the word-by-word process of organizing it.”
  • Paid Phones: Daniel Kolitz, who wrote the superviral piece on Gooning earlier this year, returns with another virtuoso piece of writing, this time about debt in modern America and, specifically, his experience of it, and the apps that exist now in the US which serve both to ostensibly help manage it and also sell you significantly more of it at every single opportunity. This is very funny, but equally horrifying – it does feel rather like a passage which as recently as the 90s would be satirical rather than descriptive. “Certainly, I’m still in the hole. As I write this, I owe $359.96 to Cleo, $31.99 to Albert, $62.99 to Brigit, and $86.12 to Dave. I also, hauntingly, owe thirty bucks to MrBeast. Technically, I owe this money to Step, the payday loan app MrBeast acquired earlier this year to “give millions of young people the financial foundation I [MrBeast] never had.” Currently boasting seven million users, the app really does offer savings accounts for teens, but a quick look at its interface reveals this as a kind of front: “Step EarlyPay,” available to users of all ages, is clearly the core product here. As far as I can tell, MrBeast is the only celebrity to buy a digital lender outright, but it cannot be long before Clavicular, Woah Vicky, et al. are collectively skimming a sizable percentage of Americans’ paychecks. Perhaps, if one wants to stay solvent in the future, one will have no choice but to buy a decent lighting setup and get to work charismatically injecting peptides or fomenting race war on stream. If anything, I’m a poster boy for precisely this looming dystopia: An article I wrote about masturbation went viral, leading to higher-paying writing assignments, which—if and when they’re completed—will allow me, finally, to break out of the payday cycle. That the attention-getting mechanism here was long-form literary nonfiction, as opposed to a TikTok man-on-the-street series in which I pose uncomfortable questions to couples at the mall, does not change the underlying dynamic. Given all this, can I really be sure I won’t come crawling back to MrBeast in time?”
  • Voice Memories: This is beautiful and poignant and sad and I think it’s a wonderful piece of writing; Ian Wang, in The London Magazine, about the recordings he made of his parents during COVID, and memory and memorialisation and narratives and reality and family and and and. Honestly, this is so good: “Ironically, in its noisy, wide-angle rendering of private life, the microphone’s perfect memory is most valuable to me for its subjectivity. A stranger combing through the recordings would learn little about the plot points of my family’s life, but they would learn a lot about everything else: the restless, buoyant dynamics of family conversation; the chaos of the kitchen before dinnertime; the confusion, the arguments; the disarming surprise of vulnerability; the flinty mother, the modest father, the nervous son. How strange to seek to produce a document of fact and end up with a document of feeling.”
  • Two Sketches by Gwendoline Riley: Two short stories, presented as companion pieces, by Gwendoline Riley in The Yale Review. The first in particular – called The Tenant – is an almost painfully well-drawn portrait of a very particular type of modern sickness, but both are excellent examples of shortform fiction.
  • The Couples Therapist: Our final longread this week is another short piece of fiction, this by Ellika Lagerlöf in Granta. It is BEAUTIFUL and odd and unsettling and it made me…quite uncomfortable, and you should read it: “Despite the fact that over the past few months I’d done almost nothing but harp on about and explain my relationship with Gustav to my friends during hour-long phone calls, walks and dinners, it now seemed almost impossible to formulate: that he liked to lie in bed all day long just eating cheese puffs, that there’d be crumbs on the sheets and his fingers turned yellow and he’d then stroke my hair with those fingers, that his idea of taking a walk together consisted of going to the square, which was five minutes away, and back, and that he always cooked the same dishes for us. That after work he’d fall asleep like a baby so I’d have to wake him up, and food would get stuck in the corners of his mouth when he ate, and his stomach and arms were so soft that I could feel them when he hugged me. I hated that I hated it, hated that I shouldn’t hate it, but of course I did anyway and couldn’t stop. ‘I like living an active life,’ is what came out of me. It sounded ridiculous, I could tell by the priest’s eyes. And Gustav nodded silently, his gaze trained on his own hands, his fingers spread across his knees. ‘I think she should relax a little.’”

By Merton Woo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlDWQ89MCcg