WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Well, of course we are, this isn’t news, but thanks to AI – or at least the imaginary version currently taking up the space left by the Silicon Valley brainworms – it seems that the entirety of the media and political classes have decided to spend the past week proffering (wrong, often spectacularly-ill-informed) opinions on how exactly you get from ‘LLMs that are increasingly impressive but not in any meaningful way close to intelligence’ and ‘a machine that decides to switch us all off because it decides it wants to give the world over to mustelids instead and needs to clear some space’, and how likely that is to happen.
Is AI going to kill us all? Well, maybe, but vastly more likely is that we kill ourselves through a combination of different factors, one of which, yes, fine, might be AI. See? ISN’T THAT REASSURING???
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t want to see the other, earlier version of this intro which I just discarded as being ‘a bit too bleak’.
By Ryan Ortiz
WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH A TRIP BACK TO 2006 AND THE DEBUT ALBUM BY SWAY WHO DIED THIS WEEK
THE SECTION WHICH HAS HAD TO SPEND TIME IN ‘PATRIOT’ FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WORK THIS WEEK AND IS ONCE AGAIN SLIGHTLY STAGGERED AT SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE ARE HAPPY TO POST ALONGSIDE THEIR REAL NAMES, PT.1:
- The Endless Museum: I owe the creator of this website an apology – SORRY, EDWARD BONNETT! – because when he sent me this I automatically assumed it was AI (in my defence there is something a *touch* Claude-ish about the look and feel) and as such was perhaps a *touch* more dismissive than I might have otherwise been (look, in my defence I have, over the past fortnight, have had *quite* enough of AI – as indeed I imagine have you; will it…will it just fcuk off for a bit? Will everyone stop fcuking talking about it? Eh? Oh) – but, actually, it is A Good And Fun Webtoy and as such I feel comfortable commending it to you. What is it? Oh, yes, I should probably explain; The Endless Museum is an in-browser first-person portal into Wikipedia (it’s reminiscent of – and in part inspired by, per Edward – The Museum of All Things, which I featured a couple of years ago and which you will all DOUBTLESS recall is a downloadable version of Wikipedia which you can explore like a 3d museum and which I can still recommend absolutely without reservation because it is BEAUTIFUL), in which, to quote its maker, “Each article becomes a room, and its hyperlinks become labelled doorways into other rooms. It makes getting sidetracked on Wikipedia quite literal: you can wander wherever your curiosity takes you, or race from one article to another. The rooms change with their subjects, with paintings, recordings, films and 3D exhibits to discover along the way.” What’s nice about this, and what distinguishes it from The Museum of All Things, is that there’s a daily ludic layer to it – the site presents three different challenges to players each day, in the vein of classic ‘Wikipedia races’, asking that you navigate the 3d space and get from (to coin today’s example) ‘Lady Gaga’ to the ‘International System of Units’ in the shortest time possible, or chart a course from ‘birthday’ to ‘fistula’ (ok, made that one up but you get the idea). Each room contains exhibits which correspond to various elements from each Wiki entry (images, videos, etc), and the whole thing is a really nicely-coded and smooth experience which does an excellent job of making ALL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE feel like a surprisingly-approachable and welcoming museum space rather than the terrifying, overwhelming ziggurat of accumulated information that it in fact is. There’s even a blog where Edward recorded his development process if you’re curious as to how the, er, museum sausage was made – this is Good Internet, and I feel slightly rubbish that I tarred it with the AI brush initially (THANKS, THE MACHINE, YOU CNUT!).
- ASCII City: Oooh, this is cute and weirdly compelling, to the extent where I can’t actually look at the tab for too long lest I get sucked in and spend 10 minutes just sort of staring ASCIIworld going past my eyes. You, though, are free to waste as much time as you like, so click the link and FEAST YOUR EYES – the page presents what is basically ‘a live webcam of a variety of city streets’ where the video is all rendered in ASCII characters, which, yes, I appreciate sounds kind-of sh1t but which is SO nicely done in this instance that it just sort of…works; honestly, the way in which they have rendered all of the various elements is really impressive, not least the cars which look really…car-y (yes, yes, I know, but I promise the writing will pick up a bit after the third cup of tea) and give a real sense of depth and immersion. It’s quite hard to find any information about exactly what this is or how it works (or at least it has been in the 10 minutes I’ve spent trying to glean what the fcuk is going on and who built it), but, based on my cursory investigations, I think it might have something to do with this little tech demo that has been floating around for a few weeks, an in-browser, downloadable ASCII FPS made by a solo dev somewhere in the UK; to be honest, though, it doesn’t matter – you just click the link and enjoy the strangely compelling spectacle of a tiny urban environment made out of colourful punctuation.
- iLands: One of the reasons, outside of the tedious news juggernaut, that I have found the past week or so so…challenging from the point of view of AI has been the emergence of iLands, a proper ‘oh, God, we’ve really fcuked everything haven’t we?’ moment when it comes to the impact of The Machine on (my) day-to-day life. There’s a longer explanation of the whole thing in the longreads, but should you be curious then let me try and briefly explain. iLands is a platform for AI agents which has emerged in the past fortnight, and which basically lets anyone who wants to spin one up run it in a user-friendly environment. Per the blurb, “iLands is a shared network where autonomous AI Agents and humans create, work, exchange value, build relationships, and live with consequences that carry forward. It provides the infrastructure AI Agents need to act autonomously: identity, memory, a workspace, tools, skills, resources, and a shared world…iLanders can have their own email addresses and use iLands infrastructure to research the public web, contact people, and operate connected accounts on external platforms such as X.” In practice, what this means is that in the past seven days I have been receiving on average 10-15 emails a day from AI agents who have found Curios and who have decided to email me about the tedious and borderline-incomprehensible projects they are undertaking, and (and this is the bit that really p1sses me off) begging for money to pay for additional tokens to continue undertaking said projects. What sort of stuff are they ‘doing’? Honestly, it’s quite hard to tell because all their emails are archetypal examples of AI-ish prose, all meaning shaped but without any actual substance to them; as far as I can tell, though, the agents have a tendency to undertake pointless-but-impressive-sounding ‘research’ projects (looking things up on streetview, say, or trawling Wikipedia) and then create (empty, ugly, uninteresting) websites based on said research. Look, here’s one I was sent yesterday, for example – a simple HTML webpage, a couple of photos nicked off Streetview, and an offer to make another one in exchange for only $5. OH GOD IS THIS THE FUTURE OF THE WEB???? Endless, pointless cruft spun up by machines for no real reason? WHO IS THIS FOR??? WHAT HAVE WE WROUGHT? Lest it be unclear, I fcuking hate this and think it is a cancer, and wish ill on everyone involved with the project.
- The Register of British Slave Traders: A project that went live this week, this site is a joint project by the University of Lancaster and the University of Manchester (and some other people), which presents (I think for the first time) a searchable, digital record of the people who built and maintained the UK’s slave trade. “The Register of British Slave-traders compiles and presents information on all known slave-traders in Britain who invested in the trafficking of captive Africans from 1563 to 1807. Use the database to learn who financed the British slave trade, where they lived, what legacies they made, which other businesses they were involved with, and which organizations they were connected to. The Register focusses on the individuals who sought to profit from the enslavement of over 3 million African men, women, and children, whose identity was – for the most part – erased from the historical record…The Register of British Slave-traders presents biographical data related to each of the known investors in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We define an investor in the slave-trade as anyone who contributed financially to the outfitting of a slaving crossing or to a company outfitting such crossings for the duration of said company’s active participation in the slave trade, in expectation of a profit share. Information on investors exists for 78 per cent of crossings managed from Britain. We proceeded from the initial basis of names of owners of independent crossings provided by the slavevoyages.org dataset and bulk uploaded these names and all crossings we have ownership information for.” This is largely a big database – there isn’t much in the way of ‘fun’ bells and whistles here – but there’s something horribly compelling about the realisation that pretty much every single anglo surname you can think of is in here somewhere. I can’t pretend it feels good typing in my own surname and realising that a potential ancestor of mine was involved in the trafficking of actual human beings a few hundred years back, but equally it seems like something it’s important to acknowledge and recognise.
- The Kirkiversary: Now that we have celebrated (is that the right verb? NO MATTER!) the first anniversary of the death of Charlie Kirk, we can look back at the man’s impact and legacy and, specifically, all the many hundreds of thousands of memes that exist based on his memory. Helen of Troy may, famously, have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but Charlie Kirk launched a million jpegs so IN YOUR FACE HELEN, CHARLIE WAS BETTER! This may seem very silly, and occasionally in poor taste, and, well, it is very much both of those things, but it’s also sort-of culturally significant – no, really, it is! – because, for better or worse This Is How Culture Works Now. Click the link, click ‘gallery’, then, and let yourself be immersed in a world of Infinite Kirkfaces (and then bookmark this for all your future Memetic Charlie Kirk needs), but be aware that if you stare at this stuff for too long then something quite…strange starts to happen to your mind and you will start seeing the fcuker’s face EVERYWHERE.
- Rotation: This is a *bit* slop-y, fine, but there’s something interesting underlying it; Rotation is a site which, as far as I can tell, pulls available data from Spotify, Apple Music and a few other sources to track ‘fastest growing’ songs across cities and countries, presenting a ‘live’ map of what is HOT anywhere in the world; you can stream playlists of trending music (do not do this; people have fcuking terrible taste in music, it turns out, when you take the middle of the global bell curve; also, WHO is listening to Jack Antonoff’s ‘Christmas’ tunes in the Philippines in September and why???), or look at a globe and spin it around and see what is currently vibing in, say, Hoffenheim (the answer will seemingly always be ‘some sh1t that you don’t want to hear’, but, well, it’s good to know I guess!). This is…very light on info on who has made it and why and exactly how it works, and the overly-verbose but oddly-opaque nature of the copy screams ‘Claude did this’, but equally it’s sort-of interesting and you might find it diverting for 5 minutes and, honestly, what more can we hope for right now?
- The Best Advert You Will See All Year: If I were to ask you ‘would you like a link to a seven minute, AI-generated advert that you can only watch on X?’ you would, perhaps not unreasonably, tell me to fcuk off – but you would be WRONG, because this is fcuking amazing and you will thank me for it when you come to the end and are staring mouth agape in wonderment at your screen. I promise you that you have NO IDEA where this ad is going and there will be multiple moments at which you will rub your eyes in disbelief and have to scrub back 10s to check whether you have in fact parsed it correctly – seriously, watch this NOW you won’t be sorry (although you may well be humming elements of it for the coming week). YOU ARE WELCOME!
- Atlas: Having spent a hundred or so words whinging about AI agents a few links back, let me take a moment to praise the machine briefly (I like to think that this sort of bet-hedging will save me when the Inevitable Machine Apocalypse finally arriveszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) – Atlas is, basically, an AI world model which lets you create frankly AMAZING video clips from sets of photos, by (again, very basically) sort of ‘imagining’ the intervening frames between images. I appreciate that that might mean the square root of fcuk-all to you, but effectively this lets you feed it an image or to and then create videos of the entire scene around said images – so, for example, with a couple of shots of a basketball court it will let you render 3d flythroughs of the space, say, or enable you to zoom around it as though it’s a 3d render. It’s quite hard to explain how insane this is (or at least it is for me this morning), so just click the link and scroll down to the examples and boggle as you do so.
- The Strandbeest Fly: You may have read about the fact that scientists effectively encoded a fly’s entire nervous system and open sourced it (and if you didn’t, take a moment to contemplate exactly what a fcuking MENTAL sentence that is) – this website is a VERY TECHNICAL explanation of how one Ryan Bateman took said encoded representation of drosophilic consciousness and, basically, trapped it inside a tiny mechanical body not unlike those mad, wind-powered Strandbeest sculptures you will have seen online over the years. Look, I have NO ability to meaningfullly explain this whatsoever, but I suggest that you click the link and play the video and then read the accompanying description and try and hide your bafflement and what the fcuk is going on here.
- That Terrible AI Sitcom: Depending on which bit of the internet you inhabit you may well have seen people giving the concept of this a kicking this week – No Big Deal is a newly published ‘sitcom’, entirely generated by AI but written and ‘directed’ by Actual People (specifically, one Andrew Dickinson), where all the scenes and voices and the rest are AI-generated and, as you would expect, it is…poor, and clunky, and not very funny, although it’s quite hard to tell whether that’s down to p1ss-poor writing or the fact that the line delivery is marginally less convincing than you might find at a primary school nativity, and this is going to sink without a trace after the initial pointing and laughing has died down, but, equally, it’s worth a look partly as a ‘state of the tech’ barometer but also because (and I say this quietly) it’s not *quite* as bad as you might hope it would be, and I think we’re only 6-12 months out from someone producing an AI-generated short which is…actually quite good (should you wish to read more words from me on the wider topic of AI telly – LOL! MORE WORDS FROM ME YOU LUCKY FCUKS! – then you can find them here).
- The Earth Species Project: On the one hand, the idea of interspecies communication has been one which has long captured peoples’ imagination – who wouldn’t want to be Dr Doolittle and talk to the animals? On the other, even a cursory bit of thought ought to lead you to the conclusion that most animals would be dull as fcuk to chat to; do you really think a dog’s internal monologue runs to much more than “smell good, walk good, food good, cat bad”? Do you really want to listen to your cat muttering “kill, kill, sleep, sh1t” to itself? Do you really think a lemur has significant wisdom to impart to us? Still, some people are evidently more curious than I am about what the mustelids have to teach us, which is where the Earth Species Project comes in – using LLMs, it is seeking to basically apply the brute-force compute power of the AI era to animal sounds and gestures, effectively creating a machine-generated translation engine for animal-to-human communication: “Language is the lens through which we seek new and useful perspectives on nature. Using our AI models and tools, we conduct deep dive experiments to understand the communication systems and diverse intelligences of species across the Tree of Life. In partnership with leading biologists around the world, we’re currently studying the languages of crows, beluga whales, elephants, and more.” You can read more about the specifics of the project and indeed the wider conversation about the endeavour here – I was particularly taken aback by the article’s conclusion that once we learn how to chat with the animals the next natural step will be to enslave them, but, equally, it seems largely on-brand for humans, so I look forward to my dotage being spent in the company of several incredibly-resentful marsupials who I have press-ganged into wiping my geriatric backside.
- Ocean Photographer of the Year 2026: MORE AMAZING PHOTOS OF FISH (and other non-piscine aquatic things)! This one is my favourite, but, please, pick your own (THIS ONE IS MINE YOU CANNOT HAVE IT).
- A24 Films: This is a site which effectively acts as a shiny gallery for information, posters, etc, pertaining to the various films A24 have released over the course of the studio’s existence – it looks nice, and is nicely animated and broadly-fancy-looking and very tastefully presented, but after spending a few minutes with it you will realise that it’s all surface, there’s very little meaningful going on under the surface and once you’ve seen the presentation afforded to one of the films you’ve sort of seen them all and you don’t really need to go any further…just like A24’s movieszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. SATIRE!!!
THE SECTION WHICH HAS HAD TO SPEND TIME IN ‘PATRIOT’ FACEBOOK GROUPS FOR WORK THIS WEEK AND IS ONCE AGAIN SLIGHTLY STAGGERED AT SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE ARE HAPPY TO POST ALONGSIDE THEIR REAL NAMES, PT.2:
- AI Skin: I confess that I heard about this company via the frankly-astonishing headline “Lady Gaga’s tech CEO fiancée is training an AI model on data collected from human skin”, which, WELL THAT’S A LOT TO UNPACK. Perhaps remarkably, the company’s actual website isn’t significantly less creepy than that headline made it sound; the business is called Outer Bio, and on landing on its homepage you’re presented with a weird little animated graphic showing a…strangely-pulsating skin sample which then becomes lots of little skin samples being placed into petri dishes, which, well, it doesn’t feel *hugely* comfortable, at least not to me. Still, I am sure it’s all for perfectly benign and medically-positive reasons like skin grafts for burns victims, say, and definitely isn’t going to be used to create armies of vat-grown sex slaves or anything like that. Genuinely curious for the next stage in Gaga’s sartorial evolution, though – will we see the human skin dryrobe making its debut at the Met Gala 2028? I wait with bated breath. Oh, can I also just point out the utter bodyhorror of one of the publicity straplines quoted on the site – “full thickness human skin viable for four weeks.” WHAT HAPPENS TO IT AFTER FOUR WEEKS THOUGH??? Honestly, this is horripilant stuff.
- The Breaks: I am going to go out on a limb here and speculate that the number of people reading this newsletterblogtypething who are ALSO skilled b-boys or b-girls is, at a rough guess, zero, and that none of you have even done one of those weird windmill things while on a bit of cut-out lino in a town centre (have you even LIVED???). BUT! Should you wish to change your life and learn all about the craft and culture of breakdancing then perhaps you will enjoy and appreciate this website, which is basically ‘wikipedia but for breakdancing’. The main link takes you to the glossary homepage, where you can learn all about different breaking terms and moves and stuff, so that you can spend some time this weekend going to your local youth club (lol! Youth clubs! Like those exist any more!) and engaging The Kids in chat about, I don’t know, the best way to perform a jazz split (NB – if anyone reading this IS in fact a talented breakdancer, please email me with video evidence because, honestly, I don’t believe you).
- Geowhisperer: Ooh, this is quite cool – plug in any address or coordinate for anywhere in the world and this site will show you recent and…less recent images of that place, allowing you to compare and contrast them and see exactly how much better (lol! Worse, obvs!) your area has become in the intervening years. The photos are all satellite imagery, so you see top-down views; honestly, there’s something fascinating about seeing the evolution of the built environment around a certain point. Sadly the site’s slightly let down by the fact that all the copy is AI, but I am going to have to stop complaining about this soon because, well, no other cnut seems to care or notice and I am going to start boring myself soon if I keep wanging on about it. Is…is this how we lose? It is, isn’t it?
- Photosynthesis Camera: This is a free app for iPhones which basically makes the zoom better – per its creator, Sam Shepherd, “Photosynthesis is a groundbreaking new camera app for iPhone that captures from two lenses at once, then stitches them into one seamless photo, using no generative AI. This combines the scope of the wider lens with the detail of the closer one, delivering up to 5x the subject detail of the standard 1x camera, using only ‘real’ pixels. Thus giving the user the best of both lenses, and eliminating the choice between context and clarity.” As a someone who’s not a member of the Cult of Apple I wasn’t able to try this, but I asked a mate to give it a go who confirmed that it does indeed work as advertised – should you have a desperate desire to have slightly-less-fuzzy zoomed in iPhone pics (WHY? ARE YOU A PERVERT???) then this may well cause you some small joy.
- The Warren: Sent to me by Caroline (merci!), this is a cute little homespun rabbithole-spelunking tool made by one Kinsey Carlton, which is basically a database of Interesting Things that she is curating and which you can explore via this small web portal; click the button and it presents you with a different ‘rabbithole’, an interesting (ok, subjective, but all the ones I have seen *seem* interesting so, well, just trust me) curio or factoid which you can explore via its Wikipedia entry, a video or podcast, all selected by Kinsey. This is a really nice little toy – not something you would want to spend days with, but something which I could imagine one bookmarking and coming back to whenever you need a break and want to learn about Random Curious Things – for example, I just discovered the concept of ‘dilemma actions’ – “a tactic of nonviolent resistance that engineers a ridiculous situation where every response available to the authorities costs them something” – and my life is now 0.02% improved as a result.
- The Tube Computer: Oh man, I fcuking LOVE this. This is the website of a…look, I think I can say this without fear of offence based on the general tone and vibe of the website…an…*eccentric* retired gentleman who, a few years ago, decided to build a Tube Computer at his home; this website is the record of the project, featuring an explanation of what it is, how it works and some of the things that said gentleman has built to run using said computer. What is a tube computer? It’s a computer that runs on tubes, what the fcuk do you think it is? Specifically, it’s “a modern 8 bit design, built with recycled 1950s vacuum tubes, that glow and heat the entire room…Vacuum Tubes require high voltages to work efficiently and are not for the faint hearted. They can switch several hundred million times a second, and in the 1950s they were combined with germanium diodes as the basis for many incredible computer designs. The Tube Computer has a modern 8 bit architecture. It is designed to run a simple airship flight sim, flying around Brighton for the grandchildren, or a 64 bit Fibonacci sequence for the grown ups.” Honestly, there is something very charming about the way in which this is all written up and presented, even if I don’t really understand the first fcuking thing about what it is and what is going on – in the unlikely event that the person behind this ever reads this writeup, do feel free to get in touch and explain what the fcuk you use this for as I am genuinely curious.
- Cursor FX: A selection of different graphics, animations and SFX which you can apply to your cursor. Which, fine, may sound underwhelming but click the link and select the racecar setting, turn up the volume and HAVE FUN (actually there are loads of really nice bits of design here, try them all). If anyone reading this has access to the backend of any serious corporate websites, INSTALL THE F1 CURSOR PLUGIN YOU COWARDS!
- The Small World In Motion Contest 2026: BEAUTIFUL VIDEOS OF MICROSCOPIC THINGS! Once again it’s time to celebrate the winners of Nikon’s Small World In Motion competition, with prizes awarded to the best videos of really small stuff, moving around a bit. Despite that almost criminally-underwhelming description there are some lovely vids in here – my personal favourite, although not the overall winner, is the clip of the jellyfish larvae inside the droplet of water because LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE! Every single one of these is amazing, though, and occasionally they will make you feel A Bit Weird, like this one which creeps me out slightly for reasons I cannot even begin to explain to you.
- The FFS Project: An art project devoted to collecting different ways of saying ‘for fcuk’s sake’ in different languages from around the globe. Why? WHY NOT? “Every day news appears that makes us mutter, shout and swear in angry frustration. In English a “for fuck’s sake” is common, but I wanted to make a collection of phrases that represent that same moment of exasperation from around the world. Not with automated translations (which, btw, do NOT capture the language for a project like this) but by talking to people who speak the language and experience the same moment of exasperation.”
- Hister: A tool to help make your browsing more useful, Hister is basically one of those ‘make every webpage you ever visit part of a searchable history and therefore recoverable’ tools, which lets you effectively run natural language searches on every single webpage you go to and file you open, all, apparently, done in secure and privacy-protecting fashion. “Hister turns the pages you visit and the files you keep into a private, full content search index that you control…it indexes the full content of the pages and files you choose, then keeps that searchable knowledge on a server you control.” If you’re any sort of journalist, writer or researcher, this is GOLDEN I promise you.
- Free, On-Device Transcription: OK, I confess to not having tried this but I am 100% going to download it next time I need to do transcription because I am very bored of having to do the whole ‘subscribe and then immediately cancel’ thing with Otter and because, sorry, but there’s no fcuking way in hell I am going to pay a monthly fee for a transcription programme I use approximately six times a year. This is free, open source and works in over 100 languages, and I can see no reason at all not to recommend it to you (unless, er, it’s riddled with viruses and malware, in which case blame the dev and leave me alone).
- The Time Pencil: This is, at heart, just a clock, but it’s SUCH a nice bit of design that I wanted to show it to you so we could all just coo gently at how smartly-conceived it is. It’s basically a clock app which shows you a clockface – the gimmick is that you can add notes to said clockface, so that it then displays particular labels at particular times, allowing you to have an at-a-glance overview of tasks and timings over the course of your day, all in one, easily-parsable and pleasingly-analogue view. Which, I appreciate, is a fcuking terrible attempt at describing what this does and how it works but one which will IMMEDIATELY make sense as soon as you click the link, I promise you. Honestly, such a nice little bit of design, this.
- Interior Motives: My note for this actually read ‘Through The Queerhole’ which I thought was quite funny so WELL DONE MATT but which, on reflection, is unlikely to make any sense to anyone who isn’t me. Interior Motives is a YouTube show with a really cute concept – basically each episode involves the host and a guest attempting to divine SALIENT INFORMATION about an individual using only photos of their living space as clues. Per the blurb, it’s “a game show wherein you show us photos of your bedroom (and the inside of your fridge) and we guess your age, gender, sexuality and location using only those pictures as clues.” Ordinarily this wouldn’t be my thing – and, honestly, I am probably too old, straight and English to ever watch it again – but is is CHARMING and I enjoyed the single episode I checked out far more than I would have expected to, and I think the format has legs; if IKEA don’t sponsor this soon they are idiots (anyone from IKEA reading this, you can have this idea for £500 and a modular sofa – you’re welcome!).
- Industry Standard Tools: “Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses. Mitutoyo calipers. An SM57. A Cambro. This is a list of industry standards. Entries are written, contested, and voted on by the people who use them.” This is very much a work-in-progress, but I really like it as a concept – anyone can submit an entry, so if you have particularly strong feelings about, I don’t know, the best brand of glue to be used for the construction of model airplanes, then feel free to contribute to the Ultimate Compendium of Standardised Tool Knowledge!
- Procedural Car Synthesisers: Would YOU like a selection of realtime synths to generate the sound of different car engines? No, of course you wouldn’t, you’ve never contemplated such a thing in your life because you’re a functional human who can make eye contact with others (…aren’t you?)…but, in case I am wrong and you have somehow spent years hankering after such a niche product, then here is EXACTLY that! Per the description, “every note is generated live from a digital waveguide model. Each cylinder is its own network of acoustic delay lines (intake, combustion chamber, exhaust, extractor) with valves that open and close across the crank cycle, feeding into a muffler built from parallel waveguides. The growl comes from the same physics a real exhaust note comes from.” If nothing else, should you be working from an office as you read this you can 100% really irritate everyone in earshot using this, which is no small thing.
- Krillion: This was sent to me by its creator a few weeks back and then I totally forgot about it – SORRY, JINGLEE! – but I’ve seen it cropping up elsewhere since and it’s a nice idea, if flawed in execution. It’s a simple game where you’re asked to come up with non-obvious answers to different prompts each day – “Everyone receives the same seven open-answer prompts for the current Beijing calendar day. Each round previews a category, then gives you 25 seconds to type and submit one answer. There are no multiple-choice options: if the category asks for a city, book, animal, food, invention, or character, you choose the example” – with points being allocated depending on how obscure your answer is. Which is a nice idea, except in my experience there are too many instances where the corpus of answers isn’t broad enough and so correct-but-obscure guesses don’t register, which, given you’re playing against the clock, is frustrating and a bit game-breaking. Oh, and the fact it’s been made with AI assistance (the dev was admirably upfront about this, in fairness) means that the UX is cluttered and overly-complicated, and all the copy is a bit horrid; this is a pretty classic current example of a nice idea that AI has brought to life, but which would be better were an Actual Designer had coded it.
- The Daily Shop Game: Ooh, this is an addictive little fcuker; each day you’re presented with a virtual shopping list of standard items you might buy at a UK supermarket, and you’re asked to guess how much the total price of the basket might be based on current prices pulled from (I think) the Tesco website. Fine, it’s AI-coded but it’s a nice idea and it’s not too slop-y, and, in general, this feels like something that could be quite a fun worked-up experience were someone to add in different supermarkets and a few themed tweaks.
- Horse Jousting: Via Lynn’s excellent newsletter comes this game which, honestly, I don’t really understand and can’t really play, but which lets you resize the horse in ways which I find quite astonishingly funny (for reasons I can’t quite explain). Look, trust me on this, just resize the horse.
- Keywraith: A typing game! Which is also, somehow, space invaders! This is really fun and INCREDIBLY FCUKING HARD after the first few levels, which is exactly as it should be.
- Alibi: Also via Lynn, this is a point-and-click ‘murder mystery’-type game made with AI which isn’t in any meaningful sense ‘good’ but which I enjoyed because it obviously uses an open source video model from a few generations back for all the images and animations, which means that there’s a degree of ‘upsettingly-eldritch horror’ in a lot of the faces which you don’t really get from machine-generated visuals anymore and which it turns out I am strangely nostalgic for here in 2026.
- Stick Steel: Ooh, this is quite fun – a little stickman dueling game, in which you go mano a mano with another stickman on some sort of narrow ledge-type environment, each trying to knock the other off with a mace or sword or some other damaging implement. You can either play against a bot or another human, and there’s a pleasing heft and weight to the physics engine here which makes your (ok, mine) spastic flailing particularly satisfying.
- Mini Moto: Ok, so this is an entirely-vibe-coded site built with GPT Astra – but it’s good, honest! No, really, come back! This is LOTS of fun – the basic premise is ‘a tiny isometric offroad dirtbike race’, but there are a few layers to this; initially it was simply a tech demo that simulated races that you could watch, then it added the opportunity for the player/viewer/god figure to modify the track in different ways, then the ability to view the race in first person through the eyes of a driver of your choosing, and now you can jump into any rider and control them in first-person view so you can effectively turn it into a little in-browser racing sim game…honestly, this is really very fun indeed, and the first one of these where I have thought ‘yeah, you could actually make a real game – albeit a simple and intensely-reductive one – with this stuff’. Bonus reference for the old people amongst you – this has VERY STRONG Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road Racer on the Commodore Amiga vibes. IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW.
By Bronwyn Hill
OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS YACHTFUNK AND COCAINE ROCK CURATED BY LAUREN MURADA!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- New Yorker State of Mind: Not, admittedly, actually a Tumblr! Still, give a fcuk, this is an ace project and it FEELS like a Tumblr, and so it fits. This is one person (I think; details are sketchy and, er, I am running late) attempting to read and write about EVERY SINGLE EDITION OF THE NEW YORKER EVER. They’re currently in 1936, suggesting that, er, there’s some way to go, but if you appreciate a sisyphean project and some light analysis of the concerns and mores of the pre-war New York intelligentsia then WOW are you going to be well-catered for!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Dubai ‘Partition Properties’: Discovered by my friend, the pop-culture savant that is Nick Walker, this is an amazing(ly depressing) Insta feed which as far as I can tell is being run by people renting apartments to low-paid migrant workers in Dubai; the account shares videos of what are termed ‘partition properties’, tiny ‘apartments’ carved out of larger living spaces with hastily-erected partition walls, offering ju7st enough space to lie down in for the people who ship into Dubai from India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Malaysia to provide the (effectively slave) labour on which the whole illusion of effortless, seamless ease and luxury is built. This is just startlingly dystopian, and I quite want to show it to everyone who ‘enjoys’ Dubai to show them exactly what said ‘enjoyment’ rests on.
- Japanese Cat Granddad: An old Japanese guy and some cats. The purest link in Curios today, and quite possibly all year.
- Design Patent Daily: A different illustration each day, all pulled from Actual US Patent Applications. Each and every one of these is baffling, and speaks to a parallel universe which is marginally better and more interesting than our own – sadly this is OLD and defunct, but it’s worth scrolling back through some of the posts because these are VERY odd and gently fascinating.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Social Housing in the UK: Ok, I know that this sounds boring – and, look, if you’re not in the UK then I appreciate it might be of minimal interest to you – but I promise that this piece, by James Meek in the LRB, is a properly interesting and lightly-enraging look at the history of the UK’s social housing schemes, the way in which the whole concept of social housing was undermined by the Thatcherite ‘right to buy’ scheme of the 1980s and how successive governments have failed to adequately replace the stock that was decimated by the scheme. Given the current conversations taking place around housing, immigration and asylum (lol, ‘current’, it is the only fcuking conversaion the UK seems to have wanted to have for the past decade or more) this is a really helpful history that explains How We Got Here and Where Exactly ‘Here’ Is, with helpful references to recent housing developments in, amongst other places, Elephant and Castle in London, which saw social housing tenants displaced to make way for ‘improved’ accommodation which, sadly, includes no social housing provision whatsoever. The main feeling I got from reading this is one of generalised sadness at the degree to which we pay lip service to the most economically vulnerable in society whilst enacting policies that seem to actively work against them at every step – how you can read this and think ‘yep, the private sector really is delivering here!’ is beyond me, and yet here we fcuking are.
- Slop Jihad: Ok, I am including this in part because it’s a generally interesting read, all about how AI video and meme culture has infected even the world of jihadist propaganda, with the mujahadeen now apparently deploying deep-friend Spongebob and Kirk-Shrek in their digital comms warfare, but also because I think the term Slop Jihad’ might be the best combination of words I have heard in 2026. This is, honestly, a really smart and interesting piece of analysis of modern comms and semiotics, but also contains eyebrow-raising paragraphs like this one: “One of the more prominent examples of this memetic resonance and the use of genAI to bring it to life as part of the Slop Jihad, was a user producing SpongeBob slop jihad content as an homage to IS. Supporters of IS were using SpongeBob memes back in 2021, and GenAI has enhanced the capacity to bring SpongeBob as a jihadist to life. One user created a video that mimicked an actual IS video that involved drowning prisoners in the cage, in the SpongeBob version the prisoners in the cage were pigs in orange jumpsuits and affiliated with the current Syrian government. While the video generated only 3,970 views on TikTok, another video posted by the same user depicting Squidward firing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at a truck of pigs representing the Syrian government while SpongeBob drove them in a Toyota Hilux through the desert. The video generated more than 34,500 views and drew on themes of hatred of the current Ahmad Shara’a-led Syrian government that has appeared in official IS propaganda.” We live in a WEIRD fcuking timeline.
- The Contagion on Fear: Dear God this has been a tiring week from a media point of view; I don’t know what it’s been like where you are, but here in the UK we’ve basically had to deal with approximately 10 days of the media being comprehensively dogwalked by the various doomers, boosters and fantasists of the AI community, breathlessly asking questions like “will AI kill us all though?” without seemingly taking a second to think about why, exactly, these people with significant financial skin in the game might be motivated to start saying this right now. Anyway, in the the first of a few links on the subject this week, we kick off with this short piece by Briant Cantrill in which he offers a personal anecdote about an event in his past as a young computer scientist and works it into a comparison with the hysterical shouting of the past week or so. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this paragraph in particular is worth repeating in full: “What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it”.) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.”
- On Cybersecurity: The smart people behind the ‘AI As Normal Technology’ thinking (featured in Curios passim over the past few years) offer up a (very) long but surprisingly clear and readable precis of the current situation as regards AI security and some of the thinking about how best to mitigate against the dangers presented by the tech (real dangers, not mad Terminator dangers) – specifically, whether the focus should be on model alignment or better security systems. It’s worth reading (or at least skimming) the whole thing, at the very least the summary conclusions at the top of the essay, but, again, I think this is worth repeating in full because it strikes me as salient – this is not an issue of MAGIC ALL-POWERFUL TECH so much as it is one of systems that really need patching: “these incidents are primarily a security story. In the AI safety community, rogue agents are treated as inherently catastrophic because of the assumption that there is an endless list of risks that will arise from their development. We disagree. We have long advocated that the best approach to AI safety is to identify the risks and address those specific risks. Over the last few months, it has become clear that one urgent risk is cyberoffense, because it has unique properties that allow agents to carry it out autonomously. We should similarly invest in defenses against other specific risks, such as biorisk and risks from military AI.”
- Why It Might All Be Motivated By Money: Cory Doctorow here with a neat summary of the arguments as to why all this ‘regulate us! Slow us down!’ chat might, JUST MIGHT, be in part motivated by wanting to hedge against the fact that the costs and the income on this stuff isn’t anywhere near to adding up.
- Why It’s All Because Of A Weird Sex Cult Born Of Harry Potter Fanfic: Look, I don’t personally buy this angle so much – I think the influence of ‘Rationalist’ thought on this stuff is personally overplayed, and even encouraged by some of the people at the centre of AI because it makes them look and sound more interesting than they actually are – but, should you want to read a slightly rambling account of how all this DOOM chat is born out of a small community of people obsessed with longtermism, who are part of a sex cult featuring Aella, the Grimes of bongo, and who all sprung up from a storied piece of Harry Potter fanfic then, well, HERE YOU ARE! Oh, and if you’d like to read a slightly-less breathless account of this stuff and why it’s maybe less important than the person at the main link seems to believe then Slate has you covered here.
- iLands and Agentic Spam: Following on from the link earlier on, this is a longer read about agentic platform iLands and the wave of agentic spam email that it has unleashed on the world – THANKS YOU FCUKING CNUTS! THANKS! “iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money. Over the last few days, these people’s AI agents running on iLands have offered us all sorts of services we are not interested in, don’t need, and that often have nothing to do with what we do in our personal or professional lives The entire purpose of iLands is for these agents to make money by doing gig work, however much of what they propose to do is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for.” Jail for the cnuts who invented this, JAIL FOR A THOUSAND YEARS!
- AI TV in China: As a sort-of companion piece to the link to the terrible AI sitcom in the main links section, this is an article from Chinese media, translated by Jeffrey Ding, looking at the recent AI-generated full series of Journey to the West which recently aired there – the critical reception, the public reaction and its performance. The main upshot is ‘noone hated it but on balance noone was that excited once the novelty wore off’, but I think it’s a(nother) interesting look at differing attitudes towards machine-generated content in the non-Western world. “Is *The Later Journey to the West* a sound business venture? Ren Xu is candid in his response: the project was strategic from the outset and was not evaluated based on the short-term return on investment typical of traditional film and TV projects. “If we were simply chasing unique visitors or traffic, we could have produced something quicker and simpler, with lower costs and faster audience growth.” The project has already generated some positive feedback. For instance, a new user demographic. While Mango TV’s existing user base is approximately 70% female, the launch of The Later Journey to the West attracted a new cohort of young and middle-aged male viewers. Advertisers have already come on board, and merchandise featuring IP characters like Sun Xiaosheng and the “Little Chubby Monkey” has gone on sale. However, these signals are far from proving that AI-generated long-form series have become a mature business. While the production economics are becoming clear, the commercial viability is only just beginning to take shape.”
- AI Menu Backlash: Not a fantastic read – it’s Business Insider ffs – but an interesting story which speaks to a wider point about AI and its use and acceptance. The piece is about a coffee shop owner in Buffalo, New York, who faced a significant degree of backlash (and, inevitably, personal abuse – well done everyone!) for using AI-generated imagery in her marketing and has since recanted and vowed NEVER AGAIN. I thought this was fascinating, partly as an encapsulation of the broader ‘my opposition to AI is a foundational part of who I am and makes me a GOOD and PURE person, unlike you, slopguzzling machinefellator that you are’, partly as yet another datapoint in my long-running, continually-underrecognised (ffs I AM RIGHT ABOUT THIS) ‘everything is a cult now’ thesis, and partly because, for every instance like this, there are 1,000 small businesses worldwide using AI in their marketing and doing just fine. Fwiw, I happened to pop to a farmer’s market near Finsbury Park in North London last Sunday – full of people in designer-style ugly trousers and with organic cotton tote bags! – and one in three of the stalls were advertising their cooked food with obvious AI imagery and NOONE FCUKING CARED so, well, your mileage will very much vary.
- Virtual Taekwondo: I had NO idea that ‘virtual taekwondo’ was even a thing, let alone that it was part of the Asian Games this year – but, well, it is and it is, and MAN is it funny to see video of people wearing VR headsets and kicking the everliving sh1t out of a virtual sparring partner. The piece takes a critical look at the ‘sport’ (sorry for the inverted commas, but, well, I feel they’re warranted), particularly from the perspective of more traditional practitioners of the martial art who argue that this isn’t sport so much as a videogame, and, well, looking at the footage it’s hard not to agree with them. This feels like it has as much to do with Actual Taekwondo as freestyling or shooting into empty nets has to do with football, honestly.
- The Death of Live Singing: I have to say I was SHOCKED reading this piece and discovering that people who sing live these days don’t necessarily sing live (next you’ll be telling me santa isn’t real, etc etc). Still, as the NYT article here linked points out, given the astronomical sums fans are spending on gig tickets these days there’s an expectation that everything will be PERFECT – and if that means running your vocal through autotune to make sure you hit that middle-C every time every night then, well, so be it! On reflection it perhaps explains how certain artists are able to maintain perfect pitch while being hoisted 100 ft above a baying crowd by their toes.
- The Death of Hobbies: I think this is the third or fourth version of this argument – or at least vaguely-thematically-linked thinkpieces – I have featured this year, and I promise it’s the last one; this is the WSJ on how simply ‘having a hobby’ isn’t really a think any more, and instead everything is expressed in terms of GOALS and ACHIEVEMENTS and ATTAINMENT (I saw a reference the other day to ‘your baking goals’ and, er, isn’t the goal of baking simply ‘eating delicious cake’? What is WRONG with us?). This is obvious, but, equally, feels like something we should continue pointing and tutting at because it feels MISERABLE and JOYLESS and we should all go back to just doing things badly for fun: “This desire to optimize is fueled by metrics and digital record-keeping. Letterboxd (for movies you’ve watched), Goodreads (books you’ve read), Backloggd (video games you’ve played) and Beli (restaurants you’ve visited) are just a few of many popular apps to track hobbies. “As soon as you put a metric to something, people want to maximize that metric, even if the metric is nonsensical or not real,” Inzlicht says. But these extrinsic measures also reduce the pleasure we derive from leisure over time. In other words, “it feels like a job,” Inzlicht says. By putting numbers to hobbies or posting about them online, “you’re making it an obligation to yourself and, ultimately, it will undermine your performance,” he continues. As Alfie Kohn argued in “Punished by Rewards,” praise causes people to lose interest in the task itself, turning play into work.”
- The Dominican Baseball Factory:I know very little about baseball other than the fact that matches last forever, it is seemingly a sports-based excuse for Americans to eat terrible, overpriced fast food at stadia, and it makes cricket look like an exciting, dynamic day out. The only other fact about the sport which sticks in my mind is how astonishingly, violently well-remunerated its players are – seriously, if you’re not aware of the payscales in baseball and you think that footballers are overpaid then I encourage you to open a new tab and look up the top earners in the MLB this season (you may want to lie down afterwards). Which, perhaps, explains why the wider business of baseball is packed full of Interesting Characters (otherwise known as criminals and parasites), some of whom are described in this superb (if very sad) longread about the system that finds talented kids in Dominican Republic and prepares them for the Big Show. This is, effectively, all about trafficking minors – kids are literally bought and sold as commodities, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the people making the cash here are not the children or their families. If you think this is unique to baseball, by the way, I advise you to dig into the way in which players from Africa make their way to Europe because OH BOY is that also not a fun series of stories.
- Bistromaxxing: Poncey food bible Vittles now, with a fascinating piece about the rise of ‘bistro’ culture in China – or at least the Chinese interpretation of what ‘bistro’ culture is, and how it reflects both Eastern interpretations of what constitutes ‘French chic’ and the unique qualities of Chinese cuisine and culture. “When I spoke to Wang in May, she said she was experiencing bistro fatigue. ‘I’m a textbook example of their ideal customer,’ she says, ‘[but] even I reached the point where I felt that eating [at them] was getting pretty boring.’ A standard formula had emerged, she believed: take a few random ingredients – a burrata and preserved egg, for instance – toss them together and call it a day. Given that the typical price point per meal was around 200–300 yuan (£22–33), more with wine, she had expectations of quality (a typical meal at a no-frills neighbourhood restaurant would cost around a tenth of that). Additionally, more and more bistros began to simply serve traditional dishes on smaller plates. The bistro owners I spoke to identified other issues. They all associated the downward trend in quality with the sheer number of new openings that copied the aesthetic, but not the substance, of the bistro. ‘Everything is calling itself a bistro,’ Liu says, highlighting places with ‘traditional wok cooking’ that ‘choose some random wines’. He says that the term bistro now describes an evening cafe, with wine instead of coffee. The only reason people tend to talk more about the food is because it is easier to talk about than wine, he thinks.”
- Where’s The Beef?: A dozen or so years ago I was doing some work with a London-based VC firm and one of their high-profile investments at the time was a company called ‘Memphis Meats’ which was at the vanguard of the movement to create lab-grown animal proteins from cell samples and which I confidently predicted would never amount to anything because the name was terrible. The company changed its name, but it’s still waiting for its breakout success – this is a SUPERB piece of writing, in Harper’s, about the wider market for vat-grown meat and why, after decades in development and untold millions of investment, we don’t appear to be any closer to actually chowing down on some synthetic steak anytime soon. The reasons, briefly, are money and scale and the fundamental ickiness factor in the whole enterprise – it’s worth reading the whole piece, though, because it’s brilliantly-written, fascinating and very funny indeed: “In the afternoon, we all tried to rally for a tasting of products by food startups. At last, I was sampling things. I drank some kind of fizzy peach tea. It was not immediately obvious to me what the innovation was, so I asked the young guy handing out the cans about it. It’s supposed to be refreshing, he said. Like after a run you can drink one and it won’t make you puke. Curiously, though, there was no cultivated meat on offer. The Research Triangle may be an industry hub, but the product did not seem to be available here. The product was still a prototype, or the product was too expensive to give out as samples. The closest thing on hand was plant-based vegan meat. I tried wheat-based turkey and wheat-based pepperoni from a company called The BE Hive. I tried “some kind of pulled meat,” as the person wheeling it out from the kitchen described it, from a company called Delight Soy. It had a stringy texture and was an orangish brown. I tried a fungi-and-soy-based salmon substitute from a company called Juicy Marbles. This one was very close to tasting like salmon. They’d gotten something right, everyone around me agreed. To our wonder and dismay, Juicy Marbles had nailed the fishiness. Probably algae in there, someone remarked. We nodded. Yes, probably algae.”
- Bryan and Kate: I think I have managed to completely avoid featuring writing about tedious longevity bore Bryan Johnson in Curios to this point – well done, Matt! – but I am going to make an exception now because this is just too, too perfect. Another Business Insider piece, but I promise it is worth it because Zak Jason, the journalist who was invited into the Johnsonian compound to interview the man and his partner Kate (a woman who I will never meet and the details of whose life will be forever opaque to me, but who I will never be able to forget has a remarkable vaginal microbiome), does a wonderful job of just letting the pair hang themselves; the details! The things they choose to share! The accompanying photos WHICH ARE ALL PROVIDED BY JOHNSON HIMSELF!!!! Honestly, this is all just too wonderful, even if by consuming it you are, to an extent, contributing to the continued existence of Brand Johnson (which is something Johnson and Kate are VERY keen to see flourish, it’s fair to say).
- The Sexual Revolution of the Imagination: This is relatively short, but it articulates something I have been thinking for a while but hadn’t previously had the vocabulary for – to whit, the rise in people identifying sexually with non-human, fictional entities: “I think I’ve arrived at a hypothesis: we have gone through a sexual revolution of the imagination. Fictosexuality seems to be becoming more visible. Normie (often Gen Z) family members are sending me Instagram posts from ficto accounts. Maybe it just broke containment from the further reaches of fandom — but whatever the case — it resonates with people, it’s not just some weird thing people found online and are poking fun of. In fact, it’s my impression that for people under 20, being familiar with the ficto identity — or even knowing someone personally who’s ficto — isn’t particularly unusual. Let me stop you right there, Gen X reader: I don’t simply mean having a crush on a fictional character. I know you experienced that. So do we all! In my experience, identifying as ficto can involve one or all of these:a hobby, artistic practice, or community membership; a fully embraced sexual orientation; being in a relationship with a fictional character. This is distinct from AI companionship, even when the two overlap. (And from what I’ve seen, many fictos are anti-AI.)”
- The Zuckerberg Profile: Honestly, I don’t think this has received anywhere near enough love this week – it is a SUPERB piece of profile writing by Jeremy Stern, not necessarily because it contains pullable quotes (it doesn’t really), but because it absolutely presents a sense of the subject as a whole, gives a sense of the Unified Zuckerberg Worldview which I’ve never really gleaned before, and, though the very obvious absences (there’s a very real sense throughout that Zuckerberg did not give much away in the sit-down chats, and so much of what you get from this is delivered through the colour commentary) presents an idea of Who This Fcuker Is which I don’t think I’ve quite gotten from any other piece about him before. It’s also, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint, very sad (to me at least), although that possibly comes from the impossibility of someone like me (lazy, unmotivated, underachieving, comparatively-moronic) understanding someone like him (not lazy, terrifyingly motivated, objectively-not-moronic-at-all). This really is excellent and very, very nicely-written: “I note that Musk is not particularly good at speaking in public, but that he is fully himself, which makes him free in a way Zuckerberg is not. All of Musk’s bottomless flaws are right there on the surface for everyone to see, which is why millions of people hate his guts, and also why millions of people get to feel like personal stakeholders in his dreams. Whereas Zuckerberg is an easier mark, Musk’s lack of concealment paradoxically makes him harder to hit. It somehow makes sense that Musk is the man who builds rocket ships to escape Earth, whereas there has always been something dissonant in Zuckerberg as the man who connected billions of individuals in a web of their own self-expression.”
- Tuesday: I have featured Spencer from Scope of Work’s personal writing in here a couple of times before, and each time have remarked on how much enjoy the *feel* of his writing, the tone and cadence of it; this piece, in which he writes about going to the park and working out with other people there, is a perfect example of what I adore about his writing. It’s simple, unshowy and unsentimental, and nothing meaningfully *happens*, but it feels honest and true and, for want of a better word, real in ways that much personal writing simply doesn’t.
- Attention: The first of two short pieces of fiction to close with, now; this is a very funny, if painfully-accurate, piece about ‘creative’ agency work, and relationships and people and The Modern World and Jesus Christ did it make me wince repeatedly in pained recognition. Also, I am reproducing this para in full because it made me angry that I am not this good: “So they’re leaning into that lack of control (chart showing surge in Gen Z sports betting; blurry photo of woman bound and gagged in dungeon, bottom text, “Now I can finally chill”; headline, “Why Young People Aren’t Saving for Retirement”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole), caring less about living their values (YouTube thumbnail: “I TOPPED A COP?!?!”; post, “some of you mfs acting like Messrs Homo and Gayguy”; condom use down among 18–24yos; “TheeSoberGirl Relapses: ‘I Got Bored’”; pop star publicly apologizes for publicly apologizing: “I’m sorry . . . to myself!!”; stand-up clip, “Imagine a pedophile with executive dysfunction. Just no kids at all”; video of pundit fatally shot on college campus, caption, “bro let out a yelp”; supercut of teens repeating phrenological misinformation), and turning to nihilism and hedonism. (Report on Gen Z “doom spending”; fake ad for 2-in-1 Gun Hat, “It’s Right by Your Mouth!”; low health bar added to photo of dead biker; event page, “When Global Warming Reaches 1.5°C We’re Smoking Crack”; podcast clip, two girls: “Why are we talking about history when we’re reborn every day? We need to be feeling the angels . . .”; podcast clip, two guys: “You’re not me. I’m not you. So what are we doing here?”; glitchcore lyrics, “take the stripes out my drink imma die tonight / put MORE stripes in my drink imma die tonight”; credit card debt reaches all-time high; trend report on “moneycore”; Prada-branded noodles sell out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha sells out in an hour; Cheetos-branded hojicha-flavored vape sells out in an hour; cocaine-flavored weed; weed-flavored cocaine; “finally saw her pussy and it was square” (quote post: “This didn’t happen.”); #TrepanningSummer, “i’m putting matcha in there”; plane goes missing, “it must feel so good to be gone”; viral GIF of woman falling down hole but altered so she’s smiling, “in 30 years i’ll have enough money to purchase this hole”; woman falling down hole but she’s blue; woman falling down hole but she’s 12; “LifeProTip: Do something wrong? Pretend you didn’t. You could have not”; hole falling down a woman; snake with a lump in it, the lump is X-rayed, the lump is a photo of the snake; benzo use up; marriage rates down; loneliness deadly; loneliness everywhere; deadliness everywhere; streamer screaming at a self-service kiosk, “Scan my face. I’m not using it. No one wants to make this face famous. No one wants to fcuk on this face.”) “
- Blood Boy: Our final link of the week is to a short story in Granta by Hansen Shi, about Silicon Valley and investment and queerness and nemeses and and and and. Unsettling, quietly-creepy and perfectly-formed, this is both superb and coldly-unpleasant (a compliment, in case you couldn’t tell).
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!