This website is the home of Web Curios, a blognewslettertypething which has existed in various forms in various places online since about 2010.
First published on the corporate website of PR agency Hill & Knowlton UK (this amazes me as much as it does you, trust me), Web Curios was then published by Imperica between 2013-20; now it lives here along with the (partial) archive of previous editions.
Thanks to the magic of coding, the archive is now searchable – I plan to add tags to this when I get a moment to go through the 7,000-odd links that said archive contains, but til then you’ll have to make do with freetext. I can’t stress enough how potentially-useful this is – honestly, if you need digital-type ideas, I suggest you go spelunking and rip off some old shit from 4 years ago that you can give a conceptual refresh to and pass off as ‘original’ thinking. Noone will EVER know.
I thought I’d write the next bit in the style of an FAQ – I mean, let’s be clear, no fucker has ever asked me any of these questions, and I’m not so self-important to imagine that anyone ever will, but just on the offchance that you ever wanted to know…
What IS this?
Web Curios is a weekly roundup of stuff that its author – that is, me – has found interesting online over the past 7 days, and thinks worth sharing with its small readership. Web Curios has no real curatorial theme, beyond ‘stuff that its author thinks is interesting’, which may in part explain its steadfast refusal to grow beyond a very niche concern despite its preposterous longevity.
If you had to give a rough overview of what you cover, what would it say?
FINE. Roughly, I’d say something along the lines of ‘digital arts, online culture, webdesign and creativity, philosophy, economics, sex, art, death, drugs, music, animation, literary fiction, comedy, nihilism, advertising, marketing, pornography, rights, AI, identity, PR, and the crippling horror of being made of meat’.
Why do you do this?
That’s a good question. Mostly compulsion, if I’m honest (it’s a bit like a tic at this stage, and I worry if I didn’t have this outlet I would start scrawling urls on park benches or all over the walls of my house, like some sort of awful, never-to-be-discovered (even posthumously) outsider artist).
But, to be serious for a second, it’s because the web is obviously horrible and has ruined us as a species, but it is also amazing because of all the incredible, strange, mad, odd, obsessional, creative, interesting, sad, terrifying, stupid, evil, cruel, selfish, venal, poignant, funny, disturbing and utterly human content that people put on it. I think it’s A Good Thing that there are some places online that help spread the word about some of all of the amazing stuff that exists out there, outside of the walled gardens of many people’s online experience. You don’t get this shit on Insta, is what I’m saying.
Why is it so long?
Look, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet, it’s not my fault.
Seriously though, how the fuck am I meant to read all this?
You don’t have to! Think of Web Curios as an overly-stocked buffet – you don’t have to eat everything, and many would argue that it would be ill-advised to try. Skim it, click whatever sounds interesting, see where it takes you.
Why do you bowdlerise all your swears? You cunt.
Mainly because I think there are quite a few people who get this at work, and I would hate for them to be deprived of *gestures* ALL THIS simply due to an overzealous firewall. Although I think most weeks I forget at least one, rendering the whole exercise otiose.
Why do you use words like ‘otiose’? You cunt.
You should probably just navigate away now, we’re unlikely to get on.
This would be loads better if it was just the links and you did away with the tediously-overwrought prose stylings
1) That’s not a question
2) The prose is the price you pay for getting this for free; deal with it
Some of the links are wrong! Or broken! Or wrong and broken!
Again, not a question. Look, there are various possible reasons – one is that I simply pasted the wrong url, which can happen when you’re doing 100 a pop. In such instances, please let me know and I will correct it on the website version. Sometimes, though, if you’re spelunking in the Curios archive you will occasionally come across dead links, simply because the internet degrades; in which case, may I suggest giving the Internet Archive a go?
Why can’t you even be bothered to clean up the prose you lazy fuck?
Look, the way it works is this – every Friday morning I get up at 6am and I do the morning’s sweep and then I type for 5 hours and then I do all the publishing stuff and then I walk away from a screen for as long as I can before getting withdrawal symptoms. You will forgive me if I don’t go through the whole thing to proof it – I am by that point a little tired (also, would you read this back? Exactly). I apologise for the typographical and grammatical errors, and the occasional linguistic imprecision, and the times I try and write in anything other than English and do something appalling to another tongue, and the general slapdash air of the whole thing, but let’s both pretend it’s ‘part of the charm’ and never talk of it again.
Why isn’t this on Substack[Nazi policy, fwiw] Beehive/AN Other monetisable platform? Why don’t you have a Patreon? Where is your ko-fi? I WANT TO PAY YOU MONEY FOR THIS!
Proof that this is most definitely not an FAQ there, as the likelihood of anyone asking me any of these questions is probably quite small. Still, in case you’re curious, Web Curios is free because, honestly, I don’t think ‘collecting links’ is worth paying for, and I’m not stupid enough to believe anyone’s here because they like my writing. Curios is in many respects an extension of my brain and memory, and I really don’t write it for anyone else other than myself; it would feel cheeky requesting money for something I would do regardless of whether anyone read it. Still, if you really want to pay me, why not hire me to be arrogant, sneering, supercilious and lazy at you? As all my employers to date can attest, this forms part of what I believe is known as my core skillset.