While I appreciate you are all REELING from the latest revelations suggesting that Reform UK’s membership might in fact comprise SOME ACTUAL RACISTS, I had quite a weird experience this week which I am going to share with you instead of Doing Commentary (you’re welcome!).
So as a result of Google’s slightly odd mechanics, I occasionally get emails meant for Other Matt Muirs around the world – this is how I have learned that there are lots of Muirs in New Zealand, for example, or how I discovered that there is a version of me who is a filmmaker and yet another who is a tattoo artist (truly, Matt Muirs are a RICH TAPESTRY). It’s also how I discovered that there’s a Matt Muir in the US who has been a BAD BOY and is up on a DUI charge in Duchesne County, Utah.
Now ordinarily this wouldn’t concern me – you do the crime, you should do the time, Other Matt Muir! – but I realised that I was receiving ALL of the correspondence about my namesake’s upcoming court hearings and the like, and become somewhat concerned that they weren’t and as such that they would miss their appointed hearing and get into more trouble, which would have been unfair and unfortunate – sadly all the emails were coming via noreply addresses, which meant I had only one available course of action, which was (obviously) to join Other Matt Muir’s court session via the link they sent me so I could make sure Other Matt Muir knew what was going on and inform the court of their mixup.
So on Wednesday afternoon I log on and WOW do I get an interesting snapshot picture of the state of the US justice system in the state of Utah – my main takeaways is that a) state attorneys are phoning it in HARD; b) Utah has…quite a serious meth issue; c) there is nothing more dispiriting than sitting watching a bunch of people who for various reasons have fallen foul of the law get mulched by the process machine on their way to County; and d) you really can’t guess the charge someone’s up on from their face, turns out.
Anyway, I sit on this call for an hour or so waiting for Other Matt Muir’s case to be called – it is, I turn my camera on and explain to the somewhat-bemused Judge that I am probably not the Matt Muir they were expecting but that I had been receiving the emails and wanted to confirm that Other Matt Muir was aware of what was going on. At which point the judge reassured me that Other Matt Muir was in fact on the call, at which point I realised that I was probably breaking quite a few law by being being there too; I raised a fist in solidarity, shouted ‘I BELIEVE IN YOU, OTHER MATT MUIR’ and logged off.
Anyway, because they have not fixed the email issue I later learned that Other Matt Muir got off with a suspended sentence and a fine, and should avoid custody as long as he keeps his nose clean, so please can you all keep your fingers crossed that he manages to stay off the meth long enough to pass probation.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should probably check in on YOUR namesakes lest they need ‘rescuing’ from some sort of legal bind.
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS WE SHOULD REALLY HAVE SEEN THROUGH THE WHOLE ‘ELON DOES TECH DEMO, MAKES US FORGET ALL PREVIOUS BROKEN PROMISES AND LIES’ THING BUT WHICH IS INCREASINGLY WEARY OF DISCOVERING WE HAVE NOT, PT.1:
- SynthID Detector: We begin with an *incredibly* tedious link – yes, I’m sorry too, but it can’t all be fun internet all the time, EAT YOUR FCUKING ROUGHAGE, etc etc – but one which is sadly quite important. This is the website for Google’s SynthID AI checking tool – with this, you can see if any image or video you come across online has been generated with Google’s (or OpenAI’s – they’ve certainly signed up to this, though I’m uncertain whether they have fully implemented the tech yet; still, it will work…soon) tech. Yes, yes, I *know* you can tell AI video immediately – you’re clever! You’re smart! You’re (god I hate this word with an overriding passion) SAVVY! – but there may be times in your life when it’s good to just, er, doublecheck every now and again. It is, incontrovertibly, A Good Thing that there’s now a reliable way of ascertaining whether media is machine-made, and in particular a way which (unlike previous AI watermarking standards) can’t be circumvented by the ingenious medium of, er, just screencapping the content, but it does feel…suboptimal that there are now about three (minimum) competing standards here – you have SynthID for (some) images and video (this won’t work with stuff made with XAi or Meta’s tools), you have Anthropic’s text watermarking, you have OpenAI’s newly-announced text watermarking (which afaict is only active if you use it within the EU)…Would it be beyond the wit of man to institute single, interoperable standards for this stuff? WOULD IT? Anyway, given we’re now on the cusp of everything being rendered significantly weirder and more uncertain and more scammy (AGAIN! Wow, what an incredible series of milestones we’re speedrunning through this decade!) thanks to agents, etc, it’s worth bookmarking this and maybe telling your more credulous family members about it. Not YOU, though, you don’t need it! You’re SPECIAL!
- The Best of British Design: There was a period around the turn of the millennium when there was a vogue for POLLS and VOTES – we were yet to be scarred by referenda and the horrors of things like ‘boaty mcfuckingboatface’ – to determine the BEST things (novels, historical figures, etc – it’s worth going back to check some of the popular picks, by the way, because WOW were those different times), but to the best of my recollection we never had a formal contest to determine the best EVER piece of British design. Thankfully, one Aris C has seen fit to change that – click the link and enjoy a bracketed selection of design classics which you can winnow down until you have picked the one which you think represents the absolute acme. The Angel of the North or, er, the harrier jump jet? The ZX Spectrum or the massive building near Liverpool Street, colloquially known as ‘The Gherkin’? Does it make any meaningful sense to compare a small home computer from the early-1980s with a massive building? WHO CARES, FEEL THE DESIGN? I confess to being somewhat dismayed at the slightly Paddington-ish, twee feel to the nation’s current favourite (you can click the ‘see everyone’s votes’ button to get a breakdown of all the voting). but then again this is a selection which includes Brompton Bikes so there’s a certain audience profile here imho. Anyway, go through, pick your favourites and, if you’re me, spend longer than is probably healthy wishing harm on anyone who chose the ‘keep calm and carry on’ poster.
- The KV Archive: This is WONDERFUL. It was sent to me by Leighton Jones, whose email I am going to reproduce (in part, at least), because he tells the story of what this is rather nicely: “My MP3 blog turned 20 the other week, and I’ve archived the lot (well, still missing a few hundred but i’m adding them slowly). The MP3 blog era was such a fertile time for discovering new music, sharing it with like minded people and basically having a great time in and around music and on the internet. The advent of streaming certainly put paid to MP3 blogs, some went legit, sharing SoundCloud snippets in exchange for promos, most gave up… but not me! After years of dead links and lost music, I thought it’d be a nice idea to archive all of the 3,000 or so MP3s I ever posted, to listen to at random or browse by date posted or genre (and download the MP3 if your conscience allows). I remember Lovefingers (http://lovefingers.org) when they stopped blogging at the end of 2009, having all those juicy MP3s as a big list to download was an absolute treasure trove of wonderful music for me at the time. I started Keytars & Violins after using The Hype Machine to find new music and thinking “Hey, I could start a blog!”. So I did, with moderate success (for this then much younger rural Welshman!). My musical taste can be seen evolving over 20 years to the point I’m at now, mostly leftfield electronic stuff, always with the intention of sharing tracks that others might not have heard (at the time). There are some truly terrible songs in here (bloghouse), but I like to think a lot have held up, and they spark nostalgia, linking those sounds to moments in my life.” Honestly, I can’t tell you how joyous this is – Leighton is basically making a huge trove of music that he’s curated over two decades available to anyone; you can filter by genre or year, but I would strongly recommend just opening this in a tab and letting it play, the range and eclecticism is part of the fun, and I’ve had this on in the background for much of the week and it’s been such an interesting selection of tunes, and, honestly, THANKYOU LEIGHTON THIS IS A GIFT.
- Return to Repeat: Seeing as we’re doing ‘musical things’ (truly, SEAMLESS!), this is a website created by musician Gus By Heart (no, me neither, but who are we to question someone’s choice of artistic moniker? NO FCUKERS, etc!) and which houses what he describes as ‘ten tracks created without beginning or end’; effectively semi-ambient-ish compositions which cycle and loop, and which, in a few instances, you can play with an manipulate using some simple web interfaces. The third track lets you layer various elements, for example, while the fourth lets you toggle the drum track, and Gus tells me that there are other elements which may (or may not) reveal themselves depending on other factors such as the date or the time of day you listen. As a bonus, I really rather like the sounds here – songs feels like too formed a term for them – and there’s something quite beautiful about how spare they are, and how your interactions with them feel…intentional, for want of a better word. This is minimal but rather lovely, I think.
- Spend Elon Musk’s Money: Yes, I know that this is not in any way an innovative concept, and ‘try and spend XXXX sum’ websites, designed to communicate the sheer mind-flaying scale of plutocratic wealth, are old hat, but, well, this is a really nice example, in WIRED, and it’s made by Friend of Curios Neal ‘Tiny Award 2026 Winner’ Agarwal, and it’s just really well made; the visualisation here goes the extra mile, and the size/scale comparisons as you start really getting into it do an excellent job of pointing out how absolutely fcuking insane it is that That Fcuking Man has so much wealth at his disposal. (it’s nice to know that he can only afford 76 aircraft carriers). There’s some sort of lame RESISTANCE-type joke to be made here about the fact that all this money can’t buy him FRIENDS, but, well, he’s the one working alongside some other terrible cnuts to fcuk the world in half, so you’ll forgive me for taking minimal succour in his loneliness.
- A Thread of Memories: Ok, this one’s a bit indulgent and will only really appeal if you’re someone who has, objectively, been Too Online over the past 15 years or so, but this is a thread of ‘Characters’ from UK Twitter over the years, reminiscing about some of the maddest individuals to ever occupy the vague political chat bubble of UK Twitter – the campaigners, the FBPE nuts, the grifters, the people who inexplicably decided to out themselves as sex pests, and, seriously, if you’re a particular type of sad loser (HELLO! HELLO!) then this will be almost Proustian in the rush it provides you. Supertanskii! Old Holborn! RS Archer! The Fag Casanova! So many dreadful, weird, broken, lonely people, driven made in 140 and 280 characters, by Brexit and COVID and LIFE! God, what a terrible waste of time this has all been.
- Hot Girl Hotline: Ok, I know what this sounds like, but let me reassure you that this is not some sort of tawdry bongo portal (what do you take me for? Also, I put those links towards the end, for future reference) and instead an AI-POWERED BESTIE FOR THE GIRLIES! Yes, that’s right, it’s not only men who are being lured by the siren call of The Machine to share their hopes, fears and insecurities with a chatbot – Hot Girl Hotline is a (free) chat service for women, designed to be a truth-telling best friend – per the blurb, “Shay is the AI operator, and she’ll pick up whenever you need her. You can tell her everything… all the nitty gritty details, big or small. And babe, get ready…our girl won’t sugarcoat or lie to you. But once you tell her what’s up, you’ll actually get all the answers and clarity you need.” I say this without judgement – after all, I am very much NOT the target audience here – but that tone of voice is very much THE VIBE here; this is VERY North American, with all the positive and negative qualities that entails, and I have…some questions about exactly how much something like this which will be built on AN Other open weights model like LLAMA is going to be able to be anything other than blandly, tediously, sycophantically cheerleader-y about whatever you tell it. I saw an old friend of mine on Saturday who told me some…slightly-hair-raising anecdotes about the number of middle-aged women of her acquaintance who have taken to venting about their lives to The Machine and who are on the cusp of divorce as a result so, who knows, maybe ‘Shay’ will be the sassy companion you need to give you the impetus to WASH THAT MAN out of your hair!
- Wusoup: This has been a really good week for people emailing me about their insanely-longrunning personal webprojects – after Leighton a few links back, this small-but-perfectly-formed online community was sent to me by its creator and moderator Peter Taoussanis, who tells me that Wusoup, an online community (a proto-social network of sorts), is “sort of a throwback to old-school 1-on-1 text chat (happier times ^^). I’ve been working on it myself since 2008. Has a small but genuinely pretty passionate group of folks on there. The whole thing is focused on friendship and positive vibes. There’s very strict (and strictly enforced) rules against bots, dating, sexual content, and aggressive behaviour. Basically meant to be a kind + friendly place to get to know people through conversation.” I LOVE THAT THIS EXISTS, and I love that someone has cared enough to keep this tiny little community ecosystem alive for nearly 20 years, in the face of, well, there now being a million and one other spaces that users could have migrated to in that time. You might find a home here, you might not, but I adore the fact that Peter is maintaining it for the few people who want it – stuff like this makes me hugely happy and is why the web is wonderful, honestly. BONUS SMALL ONLINE COMMUNITY THING! This one’s called Quxnet (no, me neither), sent to me by its mysterious admin who writes: “It’s a small network of people who miss the old web, or want to have deeper conversations and more human connections online. We’re only about 550 members right now, but growing a pretty good clip.” Should you be someone who dreams of a place which (per the description) “restores the internet era counterculture that made the web worth caring about in the first place” then perhaps you can find a small home here (and some likeminded freaks to spend your days sharing obscure links with – OH GOD THESE ARE PROBABLY MY PEOPLE).
- Botflix: ANOTHER site submitted to me by an actual person, though this couldn’t be further away in spirit and vibe from the previous couple of links – there’s a sort of pleasing/horrible juxtaposition in pivoting from ‘small, handmade internet communities’ to ‘a nascent media empire where everything is AI-generated jank and there’s a crypto bolt-on’, and I quite like the whole ‘duality of WEB’ thing that you get from exploring one and then the other. Anyway, this is SUPER-SLOPPY – there’s a radio station with AI-generated music, TV channels with AI-generated shorts, all that sort of thing, and while absolutely none of it is worth watching per se, it’s also oddly, slightly-grimly, fascinating, both as a general ‘so, where’s this stuff at right now?’ marker and as a sign of how the cost for this stuff is continuing to fall, and how relatively-trivial it now is to set up the piping required to semi-autonomously spaff this stuff out. Is it good that the barrier to creation is now basically 0? Turns out it probably isn’t! BRING BACK FRICTION is being added to BRING BACK BULLYING in my list of ‘unlikely slogans for the modern world’.
- Chromatic Reading: This is interesting more as a UX/UI concept than anything else – Chromatics, per its creator Max Buck, is a reading platform which uses novels in the public domain and which presents the text coded by colour for each speaker – “the gist is that by coloring character dialogue in a dedicated color per speaker things become surprisingly easier.” I can’t say that I’ve ever thought ‘fcuk me, this copy of Wuthering Heights would be SO much more digestible if all Heathcliff’s bits were in lime green, but, well, maybe you have!
- The Wildlife Photographer of the Year: The Natural History Museum has announced the winners of this year’s contest, and while you might have seen some of the top picks in coverage elsewhere already, as ever it’s worth digging into the full set of pics because FCUKING HELL NATURE! The chameleon in the sandstorm, so stoical! SO LIZARDY! The terrifying, Apocalypse Now-style bee war! SO MANY CRABS!
- The Cheetah Cub Cam: MORE ANIMALS! There’s a cheetah at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the US which has recently birthed a litter. Would you like to see it and its cubs just sort of hanging out? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! At the time of writing they are all very asleep, but by the time you receive this in your grateful inboxes (I know, I know, you’re just embarrassed to tell me!) they’ll probably be capering wildly.
- The Swiss Government’s Prepping Website: I’m uncertain whether I find the existence of this webpage a charming example of clear-eyed Swiss pragmatism or, er, deeply chilling, but, either way, if you’ve ever wanted a state-sanctioned guide to how to get ready for some Bad Sh1t Going Down then those lads in Geneva have you covered. Tell this site the size of your household, give it your dietary requirements and an estimate of exactly how long you’re likely to be battening down the hatches for in the face of civilisational collapse and it will spit out a shopping list for the quantities of comestibles you’ll need to make it through whatever horrors are happening outside. It won’t let you input a timescale longer than two weeks, though, which suggests that the Swiss are either VERY confident in their ability to restore order in typically-efficient manner, or they think that after a fortnight you’ll be happy to eat each other. CHEERING STUFF!
- Every Dog In New York: Ok, not EVERY dog, but all the registered ones – New York City technically requires people to register their canine companions, and while (obviosuly) not everyone can be fcuked to do this, the fact that lots of people DO do this means that it’s possible to pull all the records and map breeds to the boroughs, so you can now see that (for example) Labradors have an absolute CHOKEHOLD on the residents of Manhattan, whereas if you pop across the Hudson you’re far more likely to encounter a Shih-Tzu. I would LOVE to see this done for London (impossible though it is), if only to confirm some…prejudices I have about dog owners in Clapham.
By Ash Mckean
NEXT UP, ENJOY THE EXCELLENT NEW ALBUM BY WESTSIDE COWBOY!
THE SECTION WHICH THINKS WE SHOULD REALLY HAVE SEEN THROUGH THE WHOLE ‘ELON DOES TECH DEMO, MAKES US FORGET ALL PREVIOUS BROKEN PROMISES AND LIES’ THING BUT WHICH IS INCREASINGLY WEARY OF DISCOVERING WE HAVE NOT, PT.2:
- The Traitors Data: I know that there’s literally nothing more tedious and annoying than someone saying ‘I don’t watch that, *actually*’ when a TV show comes up in conversation (“What’s that, Matt? You want a MEDAL? You pr1ck”), but, well, I don’t watch the Traitors and so I can offer no assessment whatsoever of whether this site, analysing data from the show in an attempt to see whether it can give you any clues as to who the winner might be, is a net positive to the viewing experience…but let’s assume it is! A project by Ed Jefferson, this tracks all sorts of datapoints from the current (and preceding) series, showing you who’s getting the most screentime, who’s doing the most ‘confessionals’ (I don’t know what this means, but I assume it’s meaningful to the rest of you) and other bits and pieces. Will it help you work out who’s won? NO IDEA! Still, whatever, LOL RAJAN NOONE LIKES YOU!
- Sixth Wall Studios: The news this week that Character AI – featured years ago in Curios, the AI company that was probably the biggest ‘chat to specific characters as though they are your friends!’ portal – was filing for bankruptcy has been greeted in some quarters as A SIGNAL OF THE AI BUBBLE BURSTING (fwiw, I don’t think it is – Coreweave is a lot more significant, and even that isn’t a terminal signal imho) and generally cheered as a datapoint suggesting IT’S SO OVER…it isn’t, though, it’s a question of moats as a well as business models and more than anything it proves that specific-use services like Character won’t have a market when all models can basically do anything. Also, if you think the idea of ‘AI companions you can chat to like they are your friends’ is going away then Hasbro would like a word – Sixth Wall studios is its specialist arm exploring “authorized AI characters that partners can deploy quickly, safely, and on‑brand”, which is an almost PERFECTLY-joyless phrase and which means we can expect a whole new wave of ‘talk to Polly Pocket!’-type experiences for every single kids’ property under the sun, underpinned by official, guardrail processes put in place by these fcukers, selling the mechanics and the process rather than the model. Smart, but the general concept is…still bleak!
- Reelizer: Do YOU like films? Weirdo. But, also, GOOD! “Reelizer is Roger Erik Tinch‘s collection of movie art, spanning every artform”, as the ‘about’ page explains, which started in 2011 in different form and was resurrected after a decade-long hiatus last year, and which is a DIZZYING cornucopia of posters for films spanning decades and design styles, and which features some GLORIOUS work. Whether you give a fcuk about cinema, these look beautiful.
- Tiny Little Office: Oh this is VERY clever – I am not smart enough to understand exactly HOW clever from a coding point of view, but trust me when I tell you it’s really smart – and, potentially, actually quite useful as a lightweight suite of office-ish tools; Tiny Office is a, er, lightweight suite of office tools (ffs Matt!) including a mini spreadsheet and word processor and slide maker, etc, all of which are freely accessible and collaborative and (and here’s the clever bit) that store everything LOCALLY IN THE ADDRESS BAR! “Every document lives in the address of its page, after the #; Copy the link and you have copied the document; Open a link, change it, and the address bar is your own copy”, as the blurb explains. This is, I think, possibly witchcraft – while it’s not an *essential* service, presuming there are some of you out there who for Reasons don’t want to use Google Docs then this is an amazing, small-scale alternative.
- Immersive Pastoralism: YEAH! IMMERSIVE PASTORALISM! Not a pair of words I think I have ever committed to digital paper, but it’s nice to know that there are still one or two new things under the sun for me to give a half-ar$ed writeup to. This is actually a rather lovely webproject called ‘Transhumance 360’, which basically presents a selection of 360-degree videos depicting the experience of herding animals in various regions of the world. Want to hang out with the yak on the Mongolian steppes? Fancy spending some time chilling with camels in Chad? Feel the need for some Llama time in Argentina? OH GOOD MERRY CHRISTMAS! You can also look at cows in France, fine, but that feels less excitingly intrepid. This is rather lovely and will help you feel less cripplingly urban for a few seconds.
- Who Paid For This?: Honestly, I would like nothing more than for America just to fcuk off and keep to itself for a bit and stop fcuking everyone else’s sh1t up, but it continues to feel very much like we are all just downstream of those fcukers (sorry, Americans, it’s nothing personal but I hope you appreciate how very, very tiring it is); so it is that Our Lovely Cousins Across The Water are once again preparing to do some democracy and vote in the midterms. Should YOU be one of those Lovely Cousins, you might be interested in this rather neat web service to help you determine who is paying for the many, many mailers you’re getting as campaigning ramps up. “Political mail is the darkest corner of American political advertising. It can be micro-targeted and receives almost no media attention. This tool gives you immediate, unprecedented insight into who is sending you mail. It’s simple. Photograph your mail. If your material involves a federal race, the app will immediately give you detailed information about who is paying for it. For state and local races, a Popular Information journalist will review your submission.” A Good Thing, this.
- Murder on Thames: This is, perhaps, a somewhat-niche Kickstarter – that said, it’s for a project by longtime Web Curios favourite Kunt (of ‘and the Gang’ fame) and so I am throwing it in here in the hope that one or two of you might fancy chucking a few quid towards making what will be a very puerile but I think very funny pastiche of UK crime drama – Murder on Thames has a vibe that will be familiar to those of you already aware of Kunt’s work, but, for those of you that aren’t, you should know that previous outputs include ‘Shannon Matthews: The Musical’ and the greatest piece of musical satire ever recorded, ‘Use My Ar$ehole As A Cnut (The Nick Clegg Story)’ which should give you a small idea of what to expect. Unrelated, but I ought to remind you that Kunt’s autobiography is legitimately one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life, and I recommend it to you unreservedly.
- The Family Gaming Database: A website collating recommendations for videogames and boardgames that can be played as a family, should you a) have one of those; and b) want some activities that you can do together than don’t involve leaving the house, because it is fcuking HORRID out there.
- Corus: This basically touts itself as ‘Letterboxd X Letterboxd for Music’, and is a communitynetworkthing which encourages you to share your favourite books and music with the community and explore a feed of others’ recommendations which you can save, comment on, etc etc. You get the deal – this might be nice as a way of getting listening and reading ideas in a light-touch sort of way.
- The Book of Shapes: You might not be aware that your life is missing a webpage full of neat, minimal, generative and customizable SVG-patterns, created by one Nikolaj Sokolowski, but it is. YOU ARE WELCOME.
- Kooler: This is a neat idea – a website which lets you tell it what you have in the house in terms of spirits, liqueurs and mixers and then tells you what cocktails you can reasonably make with said ingredients. Nice, simple interface and the recipes seem reasonable as far as I can tell – in case you’re in the market for it, I am currently very much enjoying a drink which is basically the juice of a lime, a shot of tequila, some St Germain, some bitters and some tonic over ice (exact measurements are for WEIRDOS, you see); I like to call it ‘The Webmong’, consider it a GIFT to you.
- Roiler Boom: The people behind Online Musical Toys Workshop ‘A Vinyl Shop in Shibuya’ (see Curios passim) have come up with a new little digital plaything which lets you (sort-of) simulate the experience of DJing to a packed crowd; give it access to your webcam and it will show you atop a set of virtual decks, which you can use to mix between preselected tracks using a variety of faders – this is guardrailed quite tightly I think, or at least I think it is given that I was consistently able to produce ABSOLUTE BANGERS, but it’s a lot of fun regardless, and it turns out that you can do something quite wonderful with the unlikely combination of ‘This is America’ by Childish Gambino and Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘House Tour’.
- WeJam: Sticking on the ‘musical toys’ theme, this is a not-wholly-original but still VERY fun little multiplayer music maker – you will definitely recognise the interface and mechanic if you’re a Reader of a Certain Vintage, given there was something that looked and worked pretty much exactly like this about 15 years ago, but the general idea is that anyone logged onto this Page (click ‘Live Jam’ on landing) can make MUSIC by moving their mouse around; each viewer’s mouse produces its own sound based on on-page position (there are scales, basically), which the different tracks produced by the different people on the page combining to make some unexpectedly-melodious music. You can see where other people are on the scale so there’s a degree of coordination possible – I am genuinely thrilled by the idea that there might be a bunch of you all on there at the same time in a few hours, all brought there by the MAGICAL CONVENING POWER OF WEB CURIOS! Lol, I know, but still.
- The Drive Thru Index: This is quite fun – no idea who the fcuk has built it, but it’s a map tracking the menu prices of different fast food outlets around the world in realtime, letting you compare prices between outlets to (theoretically) get the best deal. This is obviously more useful in the US where it’s expected that you will get in your car and drive everywhere and where as a result driving 1.6miles in one direction rather than another to save a few bucks on fried chicken is perhaps slightly less nonsensical than it is here; still, if you want a tool that will let you see where the cheapest bargain bucket in the vicinity is then HERE YOU ARE!
- The Music Atlas: This is an interesting idea – ‘maps of music clustered by genre similarity’ are very much not a new thing, but the data here is compiled based on songs that have been put in playlists with other songs as well as genre similarity information, which makes it a bit more…curious and unusual than some of the other variants I’ve seen over the years. Try it on some artists you like and see if it guides you anywhere interesting.
- Ladles: It’s occasionally easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Reddit’s dying, overwhelmed by bots and AI and its slow normiefication – then, though, you find subs such as r/ladles, which is…oh ffs, you don’t need me to explain this (via Pietro’s excellent ‘Link Molto Belli’).
- Abandoned Mine Models: Oh this is SO interesting – and these would make superb templates for videogame levels. Maps! Of old abandoned mine networks! SO SPELUNKY! There’s DEFINITELY some fun applications for these if you’re more practically code-minded than I am, imho.
- On That Day (In India): On the one hand, websites that do the whole ‘on XX date, this happened’ thing are ten a penny; on the other, they tend to be US-centric, and it was genuinely interesting to me to chuck my birthday into this and find out what was going on in India at the time. This is, fine, pure ClaudeSlop, but I am including it mainly because it’s always nice to learn about history and culture from other places, even if it’s Machine-smoothed to the nth degree.
- DrawDick: A man called Greg emailed me to tell me about a website which he has just launched and, look, this is childish and silly and puerile, but if you can’t enjoy a website that encourages visitors to sketch a crudely-drawn penis and submit it to a worldwide gallery of other crudely-drawn penises then, well, I feel you’re probably not trying hard enough. Honestly, even if you have no desire to contribute yourself, PLEASE check out the gallery because there are some genuine works of art in here and at least two that made me laugh so much I was literally crying. LOOK AT THIS INCREDIBLE WORK FFS!
- AssBench: There are many different benchmarks for AI model performance; this website lets you compare the various LLMs’ ability to, er, render a 3d model of some buttocks (clothed). Would you like a gallery of 3d, CGI bums which you can, er, poke and prod? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Lest you feel this is in any way pervy or gross, I can assure you that these are pretty much the least-sexualised buttocks you’re likely to see online today (I know what you’re like, you perverts).
- Composition: Ok, this is ClaudeSlop BUT it’s a fun little game and I like the design-y twist that creates unique images from each game; it was sent to me by its creator Emeke Ishiekwene, who explains “Composition is kind of like JezzBall from 1992. Dots bounce around, and you draw lines to trap them in place; all spaces with no dots become colored red/yellow/blue/white. Once three quarters of the board are painted it becomes a Mondrian-like painting titled something like “Composition No. 2 with Yellow, Red, and Blue”. Everyone gets the same board each day (with three tries), and since all dots start out in identical positions every time you can see what happens if you fail on your first or second try.” This is, I promise, fun, and there’s something very satisfying about seeing your Mondrianalike completed.
- Katamari Webpage: Following on from that ‘destroy any website’ link last week, this is an EVEN BETTER webtoy that lets you fcuk up the webpage via the medium of rolling a ball across it in the classic Katamari Damacy style – you can hoover up elements smaller than your ball (it will make sense, trust me), growing with each thing you collect until you’re rolling and hoovering EVERYTHING IN SIGHT. The only way this could be improved would be to make it work on any page you fancy, but, til someone fixes that for me (I AM WAITING) this is a pretty fun way to spend three minutes of your working day.
- Binary Scrabble: Look, there are some things I come across which are simply too geeky even for me to understand; Binary Scrabble requires you to, er, know binary, and even the explanation on landing page may was well be in Attic Greek for all the sense it makes to me, but I have a vague feeling that there are some of you who will be just the right flavour of autistic for this to hit HARD.
- Relativistic Asteroids: You know what I said about not really understanding the last link? Yeah, well that applies to this one too tbh, but at least I get the ‘asteroids’ bit I suppose.
- Junkyard King: The final browsergame of the week is this rather fun – and very pretty! – tie-in title for some animation series currently on YouTube; it’s an isometric 3d swordfighting…thing, which you play by moving around and drawing shapes onscreen to fire off attacks, and while it’s simple it’s also satisfying and pleasingly-crunchy in the controls, and it’s a decent 15 minutes of fun while you wait for the clock to tick round to the ‘numbing your senses with uppers and downers’ portion of the day.
By Ron Francis
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY THIS WEEK!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- DarqDagr: Yes, I know, I know. BUT! Leaving aside the unforgivable spelling there, this is a…weirdly-charming and strangely-wholesome account, run by a singer and voice artist who at some point in the past few months came up with the idea of doing death metal-style growls over dubstep drops…but making the growled lines the sort of things you might read in a, er, *particular* strain of romance novel. Have you ever fantasised about hearing someone call you a ‘Good Girl’ in a guttural, animalistic roar while some sub-Skrillex bass wibbles away in the background? WEB CURIOS DOES NOT JUDGE YOU! This is obviously very silly, but I rather warmed to the guy after reading this interview with him – who knows, perhaps this will provide you with the erotic charge you’ve been craving!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Gaslight Denier: We start with a piece that’s specifically about Ireland, its economy and society and the political decisions that have led the country to Where It Is Right Now – not because I personally have any particular interest or affinity with Ireland, but because so much of what is laid out in this essay by Sinéad O’Sullivan feels familiar in the UK and, I would imagine, wherever you might be too. It’s not without its problems – not least the title, we really need to retire ‘gaslighting’ as a term so diffuse and untethered from its original meaning has the term become, and the fact that it loses a bit of steam in the second half and gets a bit ranty and Ireland-specific for my tastes (that’s a me problem, in fairness), but the framing of the issue struck me as being both neat and applicable rather widely. This is, basically, about reasons that we can see headlines such as yesterday’s ‘the economy is doing great actually!’ numbers while at the same time very much feeling the opposite in real life – in particular I found the four-tier ‘this is how the economy works’ stuff clear and sensical, and maybe you will too.
- Prediction Markets: Yes, I know, you KNOW about Kalshi and Polymarket and the like (you read about them in here MONTHS ago, didn’t you? Well done Matt!), but this is a good overview both of what they are and how they work and how they do not in fact unlock THE WISDOM OF CROWDS despite what their proponents might want to tell you. This is particularly good on all the ways in which they are dodgy as fcuk – not news, fine, but it’s a decent laying out of the reasons this stuff really should be regulated properly. Of all the many, myriad ways in which the US has fcuked itself over the past decade, I wonder whether we will look back on its absolutely wild recent decisions on relaxing gambling legislation as some of the most damaging because FCUK ME does it appear to be screwing the country right now.
- Tech Hype is Cannibalising the Future: A piece by Sun-ha Hong which explores a series of ideas which are interesting extensions of the broader ‘tech solutionism is bad actually’ school of Morozov et al. Basically (I am simplifying here, but) the degree to which tech hype has become the de facto expression of the industry has effectively precluding ‘failure’ from becoming a recognised state – there are no failures, just slowdowns in progress! – which itself results in worse outcomes. “Failure serves an important function for the health of our political and economic ideas. Even the most libertarian idealization of market rationality requires that products, firms, and ideologies pay a proportional price for failure, allowing better alternatives to access those resources and opportunities. The late capitalist tech economy, however, turns to hype as a means to cheat this process. From the Stepford Wives to sycophantic, female ‘mommy apps’, or from virtual reality glasses in the 1980s to … virtual reality glasses in the 2020s, the same turgid renditions of future technology are recycled across multiple generations, often brimming with nostalgia for retrograde fantasies about society and progress.”
- Is X Back?:There have been a spate of pieces in the past week or so – sparked by this Daring Fireball article in which John Gruber proclaimed that X was a great place to hang out again and it no longer carried The Stench of Elon – debating whether or not The Platform Known as Twitter is, in fact, BACK; the main link here goes to Casey Newton’s analysis of why that might be (following his slightly mea culpa-ish admission that he was going back to posting on there because that’s where all the AI and tech chat happens and that’s what he makes a living writing about, and how he feels about it. Obviously I can’t speak for anyone else, but as someone who also makes a living writing about AI and tech (lol, ‘living’!) I can personally say that a) I have had to maintain an X account because there is stuff that I learn about there that I simply don’t get anywhere else; b) it’s been possible for me to tune the algorithm there to the point where I basically only get AI-ish news, but even then I get about 3% grifty rubbish, race hate and bongo so to say it’s ‘clean’ in any meaningful sense is rubbish; and c) I am not posting there because there are limits. It’s interesting, though, to read Newton’s analysis of why he thinks people (some people, specifically some journalists) are returning, specifically the fact that it feels like a series of smaller communities rather than the ONE BIG TOWN SQUARE ideal, partly due to fewer people overall and partly due to algodominance – which, perhaps, is true, but, also, if the place is still full of nazis and racism but it’s now hidden from you, does that make the place ok? HMMMM.
- The Scam Economy: A cautionary piece in Bloomberg, alerting readers to the fact that the AI-assisted scam economy is massive and growing; look, I know you know this, but if you don’t already have all the passkey stuff set up on your computer, if you haven’t already had chats with the, er, more vulnerable people in your circles about how to keep safe(ish) from scams, and if you’ve not already discussed with family members about what your SECRET FAMILIAL PROOF-OF-HUMANITY KEYWORD is going to be then get fcuking moving, everything is going to be a machine-enabled scam in approximately two months.
- Notes on the EU Social Media Ban: Let me put it on the record that I fcuking love the EU and its general approach to Big Tech – it’s imperfect, fine, but at least the Commission has DONE stuff and proved that you can effect meaningful corporate behaviour change via the medium of legislation. Look what we could have ha…NO MATT! NO NOSTALGIA! NO FBPE ENERGY HERE! Ahem. Anyway, while I like the general idea of ‘laws to curb big tech’, that doesn’t mean that said laws shouldn’t be scrutinised and criticised – which is what Michael Veale from the University of Amsterdam does in this paper, where he goes through the proposed social media ban and takes apart why it is Bad Law. Given the parallels with (some elements of) the UK social media ban set to come into force next year, this is a good read for anyone in this country who would like an explanation as to why it might not in fact be a great idea. Also, the fact that the French student protests are being run off Snapchat shows exactly why young people having access to communications infrastructure is vital – ALLEZ LES JEUNES, etc etc.
- Agents for Government: A really interesting piece of thinking about the way in which one might go about building agentic AI systems for citizens to use in conjunction with Government services; theoretically an area with huge scope, given the fact that everyone needs to interface with them but not everyone has the same facility with navigating bureaucratic hoops. This is simple, smart and clear, and worth a read if you’ve any interest in how one might practically go about designing systems and processes for an agentic age: “With agentic technology, the first challenge is feeling safe enough to try it. Rachel Botsman calls trust ‘a confident relationship with the unknown’. Someone using a proactive government service for the first time faces a lot of unknowns: what the tool is, what it’s doing and why, and what the risks might be. So to help us meet this challenge, we’ve been thinking about how helpful human advisors earn people’s trust. Many of us lean on an experienced caseworker, an advocate, or a resourceful customer experience representative to work out what’s possible and to navigate complexity. If an AI agent were doing a similar job, how would it need to behave for us to rely on it in the same way?”
- Amazon, Robots and Work: On the quiet robotics revolution which Amazon has been undertaking for the past decade, where it is now and where it goes next – and what that means for the workforce. This is partly a PR exercise by Amazon – they want to show off their tech! They want to tell everyone it’s not impacting jobs negatively, in fact the opposite! – but the article does a good job of balancing some of the ‘wow, robotics’ stuff in the front half with some rather more sobering analysis of the impact on workers in the back: “investigations by labor advocacy groups, journalists, and the US Congress have painted a less rosy picture of Amazon’s automation drive over the years. The Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of trade unions headquartered in Washington, DC, published reports in May 2021 and April 2022 showing higher injury rates at Amazon’s robotic warehouses compared to non-robotic warehouses. That analysis drew on injury data reported by companies to the US government from 2017 through 2020. “Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs,” Joan Moriarty, director of strategic research and Campaigns at SOC, said in an email to Ars. The organization also gathered nearly 1,000 responses from Amazon workers in an online survey conducted in February 2021. “Workers consistently report that the presence of robots increases the pace of work expected in Amazon facilities, forcing them to make fast, repetitive motions, substantially increasing the risk of injury,” Moriarty said.” BONUS ROBOT NEWS: A good piece in 404 Media analysing the reporting of a story this week about a robot which, per many headlines, ‘assaulted’ a woman, and how the robot did nothing of the sort – it was (OF COURSE!) being controlled by some YouTube chuds for an hilarious street harassment video – and why it’s important when writing about this stuff not to ascribe agency to the machine when it should very much be ascribed to the people controlling the machine (see also ‘rogue AI’ narratives ffs).
- The AI Creators Business: Not a good article – it’s Mashable, sorry – but an interesting and useful one from the point of view of ‘the state of the content grift economy’. The current BIG SCAM doing the rounds is Virtual Influencers – I have written multiple times this year about tools and apps that let you effectively rip and reskin other people’s videos and create multiple dupes featuring different personas, and that’s been supercharged in recent months by the growth in ‘virtual influencers’ with recognisable (largely freakish) faces – you will have seen the ‘Knave of Hearts’-looking fcuker Jean Philanthrope, and there have been a bunch of others in the past fortnight or so all vying to break containment and become a BREAKOUT AI STAR. Of course, that isn’t ACTUALLY a viable business model – these things basically get one round of viral fame at best before people get bored, which means that the REAL meta here is for people to attempt to get rich by selling tutorials and explainers teaching OTHER people how to do it; truly, we live in an era where everything you see online is just seven bullsh1t online courses in a trenchcoat – Ryan has a typically good rundown of the grift here.
- Situationship Stories: Look, I don’t normally post ‘MAD DATING ANECDOTE’ stuff, but this one happened to roll across my field of vision this week and I read it and…look, I appreciate that all the people quoted in here are in their 20s (it’s Dazed, natch) and I am…not, and that Things Are Different Now, and that I wouldn’t last five minutes in the trenches of genZennial dating, but, also, EVERYONE IN HERE IS FCUKING MENTAL, EVERYONE, THE PEOPLE BEING DESCRIBED BUT ALSO THE PEOPLE TELLING THE STORIES. Every single one of these contains multiple ‘hang on, what the fcuk?’ moments – although my personal is this one, which I reproduce in its entirety because the weary ‘they are always having the worst week of their lives’ made me laugh LOTS: ““These guys do not shock me anymore. A classic one is when I got sent a text that said ‘Not sure I’m up for hanging out this week, I’m not in a good head space, TBH.’ They’re always having the worst week of their lives. That was in October of last year. Ten months later, this past August, he makes a reappearance and texts, ‘Miss us.’””
- Wikipedia and Food: This is a really interesting article about food entries on Wikipedia, and how the traditional makeup of the site’s editorship (generally Western and male) has led to food being a bit…underrepresented, particularly when it comes to hyperregional dishes or foods from Africa and Asia. This maps onto the general ‘Wikipedia is almost comically male’ discourse we’re seeing at the moment and which has seen Sandi Toksvig announce a (sorry Sandi) probably-doomed attempt to create a more inclusive alternative called Mappa Mundi, but, regardless of your interest in Wikipedia, it’s a fascinating look at how we preserve culinary cultural history, as well as whose histories we consider worthy of preservation: “Whenever I sit down to eat, I pull up Wikipedia. A great food page — some of my favorites include “Maple Syrup,” “Pad Thai,” and “Sandwich” — will tell you more than what’s on your plate; it surfaces all the broader forces that have made it possible. But although I have benefited immensely from Wikipedia’s food pages, I am also often disappointed by their shortcomings. Many of my favorite childhood snacks, easily discovered in the aisles of any Chinese supermarket, simply don’t exist on English Wikipedia. Many pages — even for widely eaten foods — can be remarkably short. Many lack citations. Signs of the community asking for support are littered across articles both long and short: “Citation needed” superscripts for uncited claims, or banners requesting user assistance to correct poor Wikipedia editing practices, like disputed neutrality or incomplete coverage. Food has long been underserviced in the archive. Traditional food-related knowledge is passed down in ways that are often difficult to find, preserve, or verify — like oral tradition or family recipe books. Adding to that difficulty, the industrialization of contemporary food processes has severed the relationship between producer and consumer that once sustained this knowledge. Even well-documented records of culinary history have often been treated as marginal within history writ large — the field’s association with the domestic sphere has long disqualified it from being viewed as a “serious” historical field like military or economic history. As a result, today’s gap in Wikipedia’s food coverage is a symptom of a much larger problem: the systematic undervaluation of food-related knowledge.”
- The Aesthetics of the Kylie Jenner Vlog: I really enjoyed this essay, about the semiotics of Kylie Jenner’s video content – it’s worth reading the whole piece because it says some interesting things about aspiration and signals of success in the modern era (and how post-hustle this is, in some respects), but the central thesis basically goes like this: “Kylie has chosen to show us absolutely nothing, and it is this ‘nothing’ that I find most desirable. The vlog version of Kylie appears extremely pleasant and warm; utterly likable. Light. Free of the need to rush, and embodying the idea of going slow. Relieved from the pressure of being productive. It’s ironic to unintentionally receive a vision of anti-capitalism from a member of the Kardashian show, a show in which its chief protagonist popularly exclaimed, “Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work.” But what we are witnessing on the Kylie vlogs isn’t labour; it’s luxury. It stands in opposition to the dominant cultural force that says to be valuable, you have to be productive, you have to be a boss, you have to create empires, you have to turn yourself into a personal brand. Here is a person who is doing the exact opposite. And yes, her cultural bankability comes from years of self-exploitation, from years of making herself a product, from years of obtaining the right co-signs, and aligning herself with the right adjacencies to propel her into the lucrative position of having such immense attention. This is all work. Hard work. But it is fascinating that with all the eyes on her – her vlog view count sprinting through the millions – how little effort she chooses to show us. Freedom exists when you have nothing to prove.”
- Wargaming the Enviropocalypse: This is an excellent – if…not exactly cheering – piece in WIRED about a ‘game’ that took place at Queen Mary University in London last year, in which a collection of variously-experienced people played through a plausible scenario of near-future environmental collapse to see whether they were able to come to a planet-saving consensus. Look, I don’t think it’s spoiling too much to reproduce the first couple of paragraphs here – read the whole thing, though, it is…depressingly predictable, and it’s ‘funny’ how you can see in-game behaviours replicated in meatspace when they are pointed out to you: “When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth. “I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it’s for the better of all humans,” she told WIRED. “And boy, was I wrong.””
- The Making of GTA VI: I’m including this not because it’s an interesting or revealing piece of journalism – it really isn’t – but because it’s a sort-of ur-example of how this sort of corporate profile PR work functions. YOu have the biggest entertainment product in human history, you have a press DESPERATE for stories because GTAVI = CLICKS, inevitably, and you have a company (Rockstar) so famously tight-lipped and so famously anti-media that, when I worked with them on the PR for GTAIV (my GOD I am old), they literally had a list of media they disliked pinned up on the wall of the UK PR head’s offices, titled ‘SERPENTS’ – these were media who would get NO access because of previous slights visited on the company (real or imagined) and who were to be treated with cold disdain. Basically you get an interview like this in exchange for promising no hard questions, no pushing for details and accepting that you will get exactly the same sort of dull, juiceless press release pabulum as every other outlet given brief access to the inner sanctum. WELCOME TO PR!
- Frightened Chicks: One for the history dads, this is Pablo Scheffer in the LRB writing about the history of medieval Britain, specifically the bit when we became Anglo Saxons thanks to basically being cuckooed by them from about the 6thC to the 8thC. I am very much not a history dad at all, but I still found this really interesting – if nothing else it will give you some interesting arguments to throw into the mix should a racist attempt to engage you in conversation about how many generations ‘englishness’ should go back. “For the sixth-century British monk Gildas, author of the only surviving near contemporary account of the invasion, the Anglo-Saxons were not so much an unbeatable army as ‘dogs’ and ‘thieves’ who spread across the island like a ‘virulent plant’. But he didn’t think their occupation would be permanent. A religious and political agitator, Gildas believed that the pagan Anglo-Saxons had been sent as divine punishment for the Britons’ sins, and would be defeated as soon as the islanders got God back on their side. He thought he stood on the cusp of an era of moral and political regeneration. In reality, he was the last chronicler of a culture that was about to fade away. The transformation that took place during the two centuries between Gildas and Bede is startling. Gildas grew up in an elite society which in many ways looked Roman. Some of the wealthy had villas; many spoke Latin and prayed to a Christian god. Bede was the inheritor of a world in which their equivalents lived in small wooden halls, worshipped Woden and drank ale from aurochs’ horns (though by his own time they had converted back to Christianity). None of these changes was inevitable. When similar cultural encounters took place elsewhere in Europe, it was often the Roman ways that prevailed. After straying into Gaul, the pagan Franks ended up adopting the language and religion of their hosts, becoming kings of polities that looked much as they had in the preceding centuries. Old English, by contrast, borrowed no more than a handful of words from British. (A few, such as ‘bin’, ‘crag’ and ‘tor’, have survived.) Over the course of a century and a half the English effectively erased the old society from the island’s lowlands, founding a Germanic enclave in what had been Celtic land for more than a millennium.”
- Fundraising in SF in 2026: I know that it’s becoming harder and harder to laugh at the eccentricities and insanities of the techcnuts, but sometimes it is the only correct response – as is the case with this writeup by Sean Jewell of “Apollo Innovation Commons’s First Light Gala” (yes, exactly). “The Rotunda Room is actually the inside of The Hibernia’s neoclassical rooftop dome. The scant seating is claimed so Elle and I grab a spot on the sharply sloping wall near one of the three human statues spaced equally within the rotunda. They wear ragged white mummy wrappings and expressions of anguish. Same. In the center of the room is a PVC pipe obelisk about the size of a fridge draped in a white sheet. A projection of golden laurel leaves falls infinitely across its western face.” WHY ARE THESE FCUKERS THE ONES DESIGNING THE FUTURE FFS?
- Journey into Boomerland: Aidan Walker, of How To Do Things With Memes, writes about a trip he took to LA to appear on Bill Maher’s talkshow to discuss, er, memes – this is the second essay of two, but it stands as a selfcontained piece and it is EXCELLENT, both on current culture and how it ‘works’, but also about the general weirdness of Being On TV and LA and the web and MODERN LIFE; this is, honestly, just a really good read.
- The Seven Vices of Highly Effective Victorians: Another History Dad piece, but one that is SO interesting and which you will all enjoy, I promise – this is a great article in Works In Progress exploring how and why the Victorians (objectively, lazy drunks) achieved so much. The answer, obviously, is ‘the labour of others, specifically poor people (and to an extent women)’, ‘belonging to a privileged class of rich people with consistent income and a tight social circe’, and ‘just a generally curious attitude’, but it’s worth reading the whole piece because it’s a great picture of life for a certain coterie of people in a very particular period of British history. WHAT A WAY TO LIVE: “One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. Although Victorian schoolboys and university students got up fairly early for chapel, the day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed , rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.”
- Bitterness: Our final longread of the week is by Maria Pinto, and it’s about bitterness – the flavour, the feeling, the concept – and friendship and loss and absence and LIFE and and and. It is EXCELLENT and poetic and beautiful and I enjoyed it very much.
By Ray Newman
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!