Author Archives: admin

Webcurios 23/05/25

Reading Time: 39 minutes

 

So it turns out that the long flight I thought I was taking on Sunday is in fact tomorrow, meaning I am SLIGHTLY UP AGAINST IT, timewise, and should probably have spent more time washing pants than staring at webspaff – but you’re grateful for my endeavours, aren’t you? Eh? Oh.

FINE, SUIT YOURSELVES. As a result of my needing to go and buy some sunscreen and, er, make sure there’s nothing incriminating in my wallet I am going to have to cut this intro short – Web Curios will be off next week (and in fact possibly longer if I don’t do enough of a thorough job re the wallet thing tbh) due to timezone differences and, honestly, the fact that I really hope I have better things to do with my time than staring at a laptop screen, but you can look forward to my filling your inbox once again in early June, when there will also be an EXCITING TINYAWARDS-RELATED ANNOUNCEMENT to look forward to (you can probably guess what that is tbh, but let’s just PRETEND there’s some anticipation building).

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re all going to keep your fingers and toes crossed that nothing weird happens at the border please.

By Hope Gangloff

WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A RATHER LOVELY JAZZ MIX WHICH I THINK YOU MIGHT ENJOY TOO!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANY OF YOU LIVE IN SANTA MONICA AND FANCY HANGING OUT NEXT WEEK, PT.1:

  • Mused: This is, I think, one of the most conceptually-interesting things I’ve seen in ages, even if it’s very much an early-stage work-in-progress (and you should probably shut down everything else your computer is doing before giving it a go, unless you want your laptop to practically take off) – Mused is…fcuk, it’s a bit of a tricky one to describe, so let me outsource the responsibility entirely to the person who created it: “We want to inspire our users with high fidelity and meaningful simulations and 3d captures. We build immersive experiences for city planners, analysts, educators, corporate training programs, and urban and transport workers around the world to simulate people and places to a high degree of detail…Simulate any history — or anything — just by talking to our map. Write “D-Day Landings, WWII” or the “Caesar’s Gallic Wars”, and the map will create a simulation with relevant places and people — and let you re-enact the events. We’ve been building it in partnership with everyone from ecologists at the United Nations to logistics and supply chain managers to teachers around the world. Bringing your ideas to life is much faster, and afterward, you can export and edit the map data in another tool of your choice (I like Mapbox or Geojson io). Along with the map, I’ve been developing a human behavior model that visualizes how we live and move in cities–the flow of goods and people. It’s based on our contemporary methods of travel, built on real census data and a lot of research with historical datasets. These small white cubes each represent a vehicle or pedestrian going about their daily lives with realistic plans and actions. They talk to each other, consider their lives, dream about the past much like us. They’ll react in meaningful ways to the simulations you create, primarily running away from things, and in the future, with more detailed responses to what you create.” Ok, I appreciate that that’s a lot to get your head round, but, basically, what this is a 3d map of the whole world which you can interact with via what I think is some sort of LLM-type layer and which lets you type in things like – and I am not joking here, I tried this the other day – “godzilla attack on Oval, South London”, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. Honestly, the mad potential of this is staggering – it’s quite slow, and a bit shonky, and, per the above description, the simulations are very simplified, but what is going on here is sort of amazing in terms of the modelling and simulation, and just thinking about where this sort of thing might eventually end up is slightly-dizzying…honestly, give it a go, it really is quite amazing (but I’m not joking about the effect it’s likely to have on your laptop if yours is as old and shonky as mine is).
  • The Past Internet Directory: There’s a slightly tedious strain of nostalgia bubbling around the nebulous concept of The Old Internet, Like It Used To Be – I see increasing amounts of ‘the web is terrible, it was better in the good old days’-type chat, and while I’m broadly sympathetic to the general vibe of ‘dear God everything is terrible let us please go back to a time when everyone hadn’t started dying and things were simple and, fundamentally, I was young’ I think it’s also important to occasionally remind people that, actually, the past was also quite shit and The Old Internet…wasn’t all that good, actually. Which is one of the reasons I adore this project – The Past Internet Directory is an attempt to catalogue all (ok, fine, LOTS OF) the urls that were contained in the printed ‘Guide To The Web’-type books that existed in the late-90s, before the Google boom, when it was actually quite hard to find things online and you had to actually Know Urls. You can search the archive by keyword, and the results are, where possible, linked to via the Internet Archive so you can experience exactly how…fundamentally-mediocre the Browsing Experience Of The Past was – this is a window into a world of poorly-crafted CSS and lots of text on white background, and, occasionally, some very esoteric weirdos exploring their PERSONAL OBSESSIONS, and I think it’s a useful corrective to the general ‘it was better back in the day’ narrative because, well, it wasn’t.
  • Dial-A-Website: So I featured the Internet Phonebook in here last week – it’s now sold out, at least in its first edition, but I totally failed to mention that there is a specific page on the site which lets you ‘dial’ any of the urls contained within the phonebook; there are 700-ish, so simply by typing any number between 1 and…sevenhundredandsomething into the console on this webpage you will be directed to a MYSTERY CREATIVE PERSONAL WEBSITE – which feels like quite a nice timesink if you ask me. I just landed on the Museum of Alexandra – see where it takes YOU (or, you know, don’t; I can’t force you, much as I would like to, but consider this some…firmly-voiced coercion at the very least).
  • Oh Jesus The New AI Video Model: I have tried to minimise the amount of ‘LOOK NEW AI THING’ over the past few months because, well, lots of people hate it and frankly it gets tedious pointing to slow, incremental progress – I WANT SHINY MILESTONES FFS! Which, conveniently, is exactly what Google provided this week with the announcement and partial launch (expensive tier, US-only, limited access for now) of Veo3, a text-to-video model which is just orders of magnitude better than pretty much anything else I’ve yet seen and which does the frankly-magic-feeling trick of creating audio along with the video – meaning that you don’t need to create a separate audio track or use lipsyncing addons or anything to create…actually really fcuking realistic looking clips of upto 8 seconds. Seriously, click the main link – then click this one, and then click this one, and take a moment to think about what this is going to do to anyone’s ability to tell what is real and fake, particularly when they’re scrolling past a stamp-sized clip on a phonescreen. Given that just last month a bunch of (admittedly stupid, mad, and almost-certainly racist/homophobic) people across Twitter became convinced that there was ACTUAL CCTV FOOTAGE of Keir Starmer and Lord Alli having a passionate clinch circulating online despite the fact said footage was very, very clearly a shonky AI-generated monstrosity, it’s not hard to imagine the sort of mad, febrile imaginings a few well-conceived spoofed clips of this sort of quality would lead to. And yes, it’s Google, so this will be guardrail to fcuk – but, as we’ve seen, the moats on this stuff don’t really appear to exist anymore, and, based on the pace of open source models and the rate at which they appear to be catching up with the big ones, you’re going to be able to download and tweak something this good in, what, ~9 months? THIS IS COMING AND IT IS UNSTOPPABLE AND NOONE SEEMS TO CARE (and, look, if you work in low-end advertising then I am sorry but your job is fcuked). The important thing to note here – aside from the increasing inevitability of an absolute epistemological crisis brought about my simulated media – is that AI is now…actually quite good in many cases, and lots of people don’t realise quite how much because they only fcuk with the free versions of stuff – if you haven’t played around with the toys for a while it’s worth digging back into it and realising where we are. I mean, even the terrible song-generating engines are getting…less terrible – for reasons that now escape me I was talking with a friend about how ‘My Boyfriend Would Suck As An Escort’ felt like a pop-punk song title, and asked Suno to spin it up out of curiosity and…look, I’m not saying this is good, but I have totally been humming the fcuking chorus.
  • Islandoodle: If all that felt a little…well, unpleasant and unsettling and like it Presages Bad Things (which, to be clear, it does!), then why not take some time with this next link and RELAX a bit. Would you like to spend a few pleasing minutes playing around with a little browsertoy which gives you the godlike power to create small island communities out of nothing, complete with hills and mountains and lakes and CASTLES AND TOWNS and if you remember Townscaper from…a while back then this will be very familiar. Can I make an unreasonable request that whoever made this adds some sort of massive multiplayer functionality that lets you view and explore other people’s creations on some sort of infinite map archipelago? No? Ok, fine, I shan’t then. Anyway, this is SO LOVELY and SO SOOTHING and while it won’t make anything better or make the fundamental fear go away it might take the edge off for a minute or two.
  • Tracing Art: ‘Tracing’ as in ‘provenance’ (God, that word; gives me flashbacks to a Certain Type Of Terrible Artworld Human and the peculiar and entirely-unnecessary pronunciation flourish they insist on lending the term, regardless of the otherwise-entirely-Anglo-Saxon nature of their vowels) rather than as in ‘what you used to do as a small child’ – this is a rather nice website by Getty which exists to promote its ‘Provenance Index’, which ‘provides open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books, sales catalogs, and archival inventories, revealing information on the ownership and market histories of artworks.’ There is SCROLLYTELLING (sorry, but noone’s come up with a replacement word and until one of you does we’re stuck with that one) and some rather nice HD images of works by a variety of artists, and some interesting examples of how the ownership history of a painting, sculpture or other artistic object can be pieced together through a range of clues and records…interesting and aesthetically-pleasing, and fcuk me did it teach me that there are an awful lot of lost works out there, somewhere.
  • LLMingle: This is…just a slightly-mind-boggling concept that I sadly haven’t had quite enough time to dig into, but which just the SOUND of which slightly spun me out. So Interrupt was apparently a conference about AI agents which took place earlier this month in SF; as part of that, attendees were given the option to use LLMingle, a service which – and I think I am understanding this correctly – basically offered to let you outsource the job of networking with other conferences attendees to an LLM-powered ‘avatar’ of yourself which would go off into the digital ether and interact with OTHER avatars of attendees; said interactions would be judged for quality, interest, etc, and, should a certain threshold of, I don’t know, perceived utility be reached, you would be connected with the Actual Human beind the avatar for some, er, real-world conference friendship? Per the blurb, “Your AI avatar does the networking for you, finding meaningful connections based on shared interests and goals…Your personality and goals are fetched and embedded into an agent; that agent is paired with others for simulated conversations; another agent observes and judges their compatibility; if there’s a spark, we update your match history and notify both of you.” I honestly don’t know what to make of this – on the one hand, conferences are awful and ‘networking’ is a fcuking horrible pastime; on the other, does the outsourcing of human-to-human connection to an LLM approximation of ourselves feel…good? I don’t think it does. Still, this does at least open the possibility to a future where people can just outsource the business of ‘being a terrible moronic cnut on LinkedIn to an avatar’ which does seem in some small way like progress, so maybe it IS a net-positive after all.
  • Theatre Royal: Via Ben Templeton, Theatre Royal is a project in similar vein to those people who did Hamlet in GTA Online – this is THEATRE IN FORTNITE!! Per the blurb, this is “an interactive Twitch stream where you shape the action! Two streamers drop into Fortnite, performing a play while fighting to survive. But they can’t do it alone—you join the squad, protect them, and influence what happens next. Will they make it to the final act?” Look, they did Antigone in Fortnite three days ago! I think this is WONDERFUL and should you have any young people in your life who are into theatre then they might find this an interesting riff on it – for anyone else this is just pleasingly fcuking weird.
  • Coppelganger: OH GOD THIS IS GREAT. Plug in a photo of yourself (or, fine, of anyone you like, but DO YOURSELF YOU COWARD) and this website will tell you based on facial similarity gauging software which of the many, many police offers in New York you look most like. Me? I am uncomfortably similar in facial physiognomy to one Elaine Galvin and, look, I am really, really sorry Elaine but I have to live with it too, solidarity sister.
  • The Restroom Archive: One of the unexpected side-effects of the growth in processing power of mobile phones is their evolution into potential 3d environment scanners, and the subsequent boom in, well, making 3d scans of random stuff just because we can. Lauren’s Rotating Sandwiches continues to be The Best Of All The Scanning Projects, but there’s always going to be a small place in my heart for Jake Welch’s Restroom Archive: “The Restroom Archive is an ongoing case study that aims to document and celebrate the public restroom. What started as a joke in 2023 has become a years-long practice of 3D scanning the restrooms in restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, coffee shops, and various other spaces across the U.S. and Europe. The scans are meant to capture the humorous, chaotic, and often scary nature of these uniquely private publicly accessible spaces. Through capturing the diverse decor, graffiti, and artifacts, both stored and left behind, I consider these restrooms to be a reflection of both the creativity and impertinence of human nature when we think nobody else is watching.” I’m not entirely sure why but there’s something interesting about seeing these as entirely-disembodied ideas of space – also, does the existence of these scans means it would theoretically be possible to create some sort of videogame based on having to escape from small, grubby toilet cubicles across Brooklyn? As I think that would be oddly-compelling.
  • The Calamus Project: “In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman wrote Calamus: a sequence of 45 poems about camaraderie, friendship, and love among men, which he included in the 1860 edition of his collected poems, Leaves of Grass. He named the sequence after the calamus plant, or sweet flag, a tall flowering reed that grows at the edges of ponds and other wet places. These beautiful short poems offer a less familiar version of Whitman—more vulnerable and self-critical— and address same-sex relationships in ways well ahead of their time. They pose prophetic questions about the relationship of love to democracy. The goal of the Calamus Project is to present the poems in an engaging way through films, programs, and this website.” This facet of Whitman’s life and work was entirely new to me, and both the poems and the performances of them here collected are gorgeous (there’s one called ‘Who Is Reading This?’ which for perhaps obvious reasons rather resonated).
  • Project Wrestles: Sticking with the poetry (SEAMLESS!), this doesn’t, I don’t think, *wholly* work but I think it’s an interesting idea and there’s something curious in the way it’s presented which held my attention. Basically this is a series of poems with accompanying (AI-generated, I think) images which exist as a companion piece to the verse; the poems themselves are written in a language called Mezangelle developed by artist Mez Breeze combining the syntax of code and poetry. “_Prog[W]res[tle]s_ weaves together social commentary on multifaceted crises of our era. The use of Mezangelle – a blend of programming syntax and poetic expression – challenges readers to interpret layered meanings [such as is evidenced by the title: a portmanteau of the words “Progress” and “Wrestle”]. Mezangelle treats code and text as a malleable poetic material, incorporating aspects of programming language syntax [such as indentations, brackets, periods] to create new and unexpected meanings. This language – non-executable in a traditional sense – instead executes in the minds of its readers, challenging you to navigate and interpret its layered meanings.The project is comprised of five sections. To start, press the “Play” button in any of the five sections. Your chosen section will then open in a new window/tab.
    Each section contains two separate auto-scrolling segments: the top scroll shows a visual narrative while the bottom scroll contains Mezangelled text. You have the option to manually scroll through each, or let the cyclical auto-scroll feature guide you through.” I personally think the visuals let these down slightly – AI prejudice in action! – but there’s something interesting in the autoscroll presentation used in the works, and I like the code[prose]-type intersection in the writing; see what you think.
  • The Internet Archive LoFi Stream: I LOVE THAT THIS EXISTS. Offline at the time of writing because even archivists need to sleep, this is a newly-launched livestream by the Internet Archive which presents a live feed of people scanning microfiches of stuff to upload to the Archive as part of the ongoing (and increasingly Cnut-ish, it feels) attempt to put a finger in the dyke of digital info degradation. Honestly, I appreciate that this reveals a dearth of ambition almost heroic in scope, but having watched this for a bit yesterday afternoon I could totally see myself doing the ‘scanning and archiving’ bit for a living should anyone at the Archive happen to read this and want to offer me a job. I WOULD NOT GET BORED I PROMISE (also, dear god I could use the work).
  • WHOISBN?: I like this and it feels SO FRENCH – also, it’s French-only at present, but feels like something that might usefully be expanded internationally. WHOISBN is a tool designed to expose power dynamics and monopoly in the French publishing industry – install the software and it will let you scan the ISBN number of any book and get an insight into the ownership structures of the publishing network that brought it into being. “The ISBN is a unique, permanent identification number assigned to each book. It appears on the cover in the form of a barcode, and comprises 13 characters. WHOISBN? lets you scan this barcode to find out who owns the publishing house of the book you’re holding in your hands, then indicates which company owns the publishing house, then who owns the company that owns the company, and so on, down to the ultimate beneficiary. WHOISBN? then assigns a grade between A and F to this owner, according to its size in the publishing market, and its political orientation. WHOISBN? is currently limited to the French publishers. Extensions are planned for other ISBN zones.” A good idea, this, and I like this ‘single point of access transparency reporting’ thing.
  • Block AI Scrapers: Look, it’s too late and it probably doesn’t matter anymore, but should you wish to TAKE A STAND then Anubis might be of use to you – you probably don’t need to know the how, but here it is anyway: “Anubis is a man-in-the-middle HTTP proxy that requires clients to either solve or have solved a proof-of-work challenge before they can access the site. This is a very simple way to block the most common AI scrapers because they are not able to execute JavaScript to solve the challenge. The scrapers that can execute JavaScript usually don’t support the modern JavaScript features that Anubis requires. In case a scraper is dedicated enough to solve the challenge, Anubis lets them through because at that point they are functionally a browser.” Clear? Good, because, honestly, that means the square-root of fcuk all to me.
  • Big Box Collection: OH GOD 1990s VIDEOGAME NOSTALGIA MY CHILDHOOD MY CHILDHOOD! Back in the day when games came on half-a-dozen floppy discs rather than magically appearing on your device via the medium of magical sky-based data transfer they used to come in ACTUAL PHYSICAL BOXES, many of which were unnecessarily massive and whose size and design were part of the appeal, making everything look EPIC and EXCITING and FULL OF PROMISE, even if deep down you knew that the reality awaiting you was several hours of fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the fcuking thing to work at all (shoutout to the real ones, rip batchfile executables) followed by an inevitable crash of comedown disappointment when it became clear inside three minutes that the games boxart and selective screenshot deployment masked an experience akin to guiding a crippled slug through a dun-brown sea of molasses. Anyway, this website celebrates those boxes – why? WHY THE FCUK NOT THE BOXES WERE GREAT THERE ARE 3D MODELS HERE FFS JUST ENJOY IT. There are, apparently, over 1000 on here, and “All boxes can be zoomed and rotated and some can even be looked at from top and bottom angles. Also, double click/tap a box with a gatefold cover or sleeve cover to open them up.” Tell me you’re not excited.
  • Milky Way Photographer of the Year: SO MANY BEAUTIFUL STARS!! None of these look remotely real, but they are VERY PRETTY and reminded me of how amazing it is on the rare occasions you can actually see them in real life, something set to become harder and harder as we fcuk more and more satellites into the upper atmosphere.
  • Fake My Run: OH GOD THIS IS BASICALLY MIDDLE-AGED DAD TERRORISM. “FakeMyRun lets you create custom running routes that look realistic on fitness tracking platforms like Strava and Runkeeper. You can either draw routes manually or use our shape templates…FakeMyRun uses advanced mapping technology to create realistic running routes. When you draw a route or select a shape, our system:Captures the GPS coordinates of your route; Snaps those coordinates to actual roads using mapping APIs; Adds realistic elevation data based on terrain information; Calculates timestamps based on your selected pace; and Packages everything into a standard GPX file that fitness platforms can read” Honestly, you could absolutely DESTROY people (and quite possibly entire communities) with this and I think at least one of you should start devoting yourselves to fitness-based social terrorism RIGHT NOW (and then document the fallout via an insanely-bitchy anonymous blog for my amusement please and thankyou).

By Kelsey Henderson

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE NEW STEREOLAB ALBUM BECAUSE IT IS ACE AND PERFECT FOR A SUNSHINEY DAY!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANY OF YOU LIVE IN SANTA MONICA AND FANCY HANGING OUT NEXT WEEK, PT.2:

  • Compost Party: Oh I love this! Compost Party is a tiny website running off a broken old phone – it’s literally pretty much the minimum viable tech stack required to host a site, it’s solar powered, and the person behind it is giving out space on it for people they know to put small, silly, whimsical, pointless things online. This is very much ‘website as allotment’, to coin an agricultural metaphor, and, again, it makes me think that everyone should be given a space like this aged 12 or so and allowed to just make what they want from it – I increasingly find that, weirdly, I am entirely sincere when I say things like this, which honestly feels unusual and not-entirely-comfortable for me, but maybe this is…growth?
  • Computer Weather: Friend of Curios Damjanski has returned with another very silly app – this one exists to do one thing and one thing only, to inform you whether the weather where you are is currently ‘computer weather’ (ie miserable, stay inside, read Curios!) or ‘not computer weather’ (ie lovely beautiful, stay inside, read Curios!) – you might reasonably think ‘hm, yes, not sure you need an app for that though’, to which I would respond ‘you don’t really fit in here, do you?’ (but in a nice way, honest).
  • Jordan Delcros: Aside from having just a really cool-sounding name, Jordan Delcros also has a really very shiny portfolio website – all of his work is presented as objects on a 3d desktop, populated as you scroll down the page, and there’s a pleasing heft to the modelling here which gives the whole thing a pleasingly-chunky vibe (also there’s some really nice work linked to, and a couple of fun games which I lost 5 minutes to earlier this week, for which additional points). Basically this made me think ‘wow, this is really nicely-presented, what a talented person’, which is pretty much all you can want from a digital portfolio so WELL DONE, STRANGER WITH THE COOL NAME!
  • Learning Light: Another week, another Google Arts & Culture toy which is probably REALLY useful to someone with a greater degree of artistic ability than me (literally anyone) – this is basically a little virtual studio which lets you explore How Lighting Works; you can position your little humanoid marionette however you so choose, and then select the lighting you want to apply to it, from the position of the spots to the colour to the brightness to the intensity, to help you learn (ok, I am guessing here, but) how best to light a scene and how different variables effect the overall composition based on how it’s lit. There is OBVIOUSLY a genAI layer to this meaning you can ask conversational questions of The Machine, and, look, I don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge about any of this to gauge whether it’s useful or just a shiny gimmick but, well, it IS very shiny so consider me sold.
  • Peek Money: I know that one of the most tedious complaints of the current Older Generations about Younger Generations (and quite probably the sort of thing that Older Generations have ALWAYS whinged about, on reflection) is the supposition that they are somehow FOREVER CHILDREN, infantilised and dumbed-down and unwilling to take responsibility for anything – a perspective which, to be clear, is lazy and reductive and unhelpful, but which is also massively reinforced by stuff like Peek Money, an app aimed at nonspecific young people and designed to help them better manage their finances. How? Er, with language like “vibe checks”! Is this…is this financial literacy? To be fair it’s a bit more than that – the idea is that it’s an LLM layer over your bank account which offers a friendly overview of all your monetary incomings and outgoings to make it easier for you to get a clear picture of exactly where you are financially,how you’re spending, etc etc – which, to be clear, is A Good Thing! That said, there are some slightly-horrific elements, including the aforementioned copy (do…do young people ACTUALLY want their money to talk to them in colloquialisms? Do we really want to, I don’t know, ANTHROPOMORPHISE THE WALLET???? Also, some of the examples of what it might tell you are HAIR-RAISING – who the fcuk is spending £500 a month on fcuking takeout? THIS IS WHY YOU ARE POOR FFS!) and the standout line on the webpage: “IMAGINE HAVING A FRIEND…who understands your money concerns without judgement”, which feels rather like the second half of it is intended to be silent which, well, made me very sad for a second. Anyway, if you want to be patronised into financial wellbeing by a poorly-scripted GenZ ‘money-bestie’ (kill me), then perhaps this is for YOU!
  • Screvi: One for the obsessive highlighters amongst you – Screvi is basically a tool which takes all your different highlighted passages from stuff you’ve read across Kindle and other ebook platforms and makes them searchable and, you know, ‘useful’ – you can also include your Twitter bookmarks, though fcuk knows why you would want to pollute your beautifully-curated collection of literary aphorisms with some memes and, let’s be honest, bongo is beyond me. There is, obviously, an LLM layer on top of this which allows you to theoretically INTERROGATE THE WISDOM you have accrued – beautifully, some of the ‘example’ questions it chooses to use to highlight how it might work include things like ‘should I quit my job?’ – and, look, if you’re considering making life-changing career decisions based on the recommendations of a fcuking LLM that is in turn basing *its* output on the clippings you’ve taken from a bunch of your favourite romantasy or business guru books then, well, LOL YOU FCUKING IDIOT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???
  • WikiWand: In fact, this is going to be one of the great, gradual-but-significant shifts in the way in which we use and interact with information, isn’t it? The introduction of a conversational layer over every single informational corpus we have, whether for better or worse – it’s not clear that ‘asking questions’ is always the best way into a topic. Sometimes, one might argue, it’s better to be presented with information as a fait accompli and then interrogate it, as that way you don’t miss stuff because you don’t know the right questions to ask. Anyway, this is DEFINITELY COMING – here’s another example: WikiWand, an LLM layer on top of Wikipedia which turns every single Wiki entry into something you can ask questions of rather than just read and ingest. I…feel uneasy about this, and I can’t quite tell if it’s me being OLD AND A LUDDITE or PRESCIENT AND SMART. Maybe it’s neither!
  • Pi Patterns: You know how when you were a kid and you were bored in maths class you used to do things like ‘trying to stop the stopwatch on your mate’s digital watch on 0.999s’ as a desperate source of entertainment (SEE, THE PAST WAS SH1T TOO STOP FETISHISING IT FFS)? Well this is like that except with digits of Pi – the counter cycles through bits of the infinite sequence of digits, and your job is to hit STOP and see whether you’ve managed to freeze the numbers at a point where they’re doing anything interesting – being palindromic, say, or being Fibonacci numbers…look, this isn’t exactly high-octane entertainment but I found it weirdly compelling on Tuesday when it was a choice between either messing around with this or writing up the corporate narrative for a former-boxer’s personal training and development business and, well, this won.
  • Subvert: Seeing as even Bandcamp, the best of all the music streaming and download platforms from the point of view of ‘actually giving money to the artists who made the work’, isn’t entirely perfect from a ‘bad investors’ point of view, some people are trying to launch a cooperative alternative in the shape of Subvert – it’s not ready yet, but you can sign up for updates and there are ways of getting involved early should you be interested as either a label or artist. There’s a Zine you can download from the site which explains the ethos behind the whole thing, but, in general, it seems to be a standard co-ownership model and they are very keen to make it clear that it is in no way a crypto thing, so, well, more power to them.
  • Department Store Catalogues: A WONDERFUL collection on the Internet Archive comprising seemingly hundreds of old (20thC) catalogues from department stores around the world – ok, fine, most are north american, but there are some French and German ones in there as well and in general it’s just a great whirlwind tour through some of the greatest hits of 20thC massmarket capitalism. A particular favourite is the Sears Christmas Book from 1943, because, once again, THE PAST WAS SH1T LOOK HOW RUBBISH ALL THE STUFF WAS.
  • RattleCams: Have you ever wanted to uncover THE SECRET LIVES OF SNAKES? Er, why? What do you think, exactly, they get up to? Do you think they embody the lives imagined for them by Gary Larson in The Far Side when you’re not looking? I don’t want to disappoint you, but, based on the webcams available on this site, to the best of my knowledge the secret lives of snakes are…not thrilling, but, equally, if you spend enough time watching the currently-live Colorade Rattlercam you might get to see one shedding its skin or laying an egg or something, so, well depending on how slow your day is then it may be of interest.
  • Choosr: On the one hand, this is a very superficial and slightly-silly app which lets anyone post a binary question and get immediate answers to it from the community – stuff like ‘cheese or chocolate?’ or ‘Gaga or Beyonce?’ or ‘daddy or chips?’ – and see WHAT THE WORLD (or at the very least the children using this app) think the answer is, like a giant, immediate WISDOM OF CROWDS thing; on the other, it’s also something you could use to basically outsource all of your daily decisions to an audience of strangers. ‘This top or that top?’, ‘swipe left or right’? ‘Cut down or across?’ – ALL of these decisions and more could be offered up to the mob to let them puppeteer you through your existence. Honestly, this feels like something livestreamers could have fun with, but I also quite like the idea of a brand just running an entire product launch campaign based on what the app tells you to do, just to see what happens. This feels like it is FULL OF CHAOTIC POSSIBILITY, basically (or like it could end in death).
  • Original Poems: There’s something about the vibe of this site that feels a bit…off, but I have had a dig and it doesn’t seem to be anything other than a benign collection of open source verse (albeit one presented like it’s been entirely spun up by AI in about 10 minutes – I think there’s something interesting in this, that there’s a specific type of simple webdesign aesthetic which to me is now indelibly associated with vibecoded shovelware or a certain type of templated solution, which possibly is a nice angle for the seven human webdevs who will be able to eke out a living in the near future) alongside some…less-interesting ‘educational’ offerings which feel a bit bolted on tbh. Still, if you’re interested in poetry then there is a LOT of it on here, divided by style/type – it’s all quite simplistic (WHERE IS THE QUATRAIN SECTION???) but as a kind of gateway portal it’s not terrible.
  • Weird Spy Satellite: A bluesky bot which posts satellite images labeled with mysterious, made-up, sinister-sounding markers. What are the DEEP STATE SUPPLIES a few miles down the road from the CRUMBLING CEMETERY? Dare you explore the ZIGGURAT OF SICKOS? This is strange and creepy and the sort of thing that would work brilliantly as an occasional writing prompt if you wanted to explore some Scarfolk-adjacent fictions.
  • The Am-Dash: As someone with a perverse affection for the hyphen and em-dash when writing (and who is seemingly single-handedly attempting to prop up semicolon use in the UK; you can thank me later) I have been personally really irritated by ‘em-dashes are the incontrovertible proof of The Writings of The Machine’ discourse – SOME OF US JUST WRITE LIKE THIS FFS! Which is why I was pleased to discover this, a new unit of punctuation designed specifically and solely for HUMAN use – The Machine doesn’t have access to this one, so use it instead and prove to the world that you are a real person made of meat and gristle and bile and bone and hatred!
  • Upskateboards: Ok, this is a real product which means I wouldn’t ordinarily botherfeaturing it but equally it’s a foam rubber skateboard designed specifically to be used INSIDE YOUR HOUSE, so if you’ve ever wanted to pop an ollie in your living room without, I don’t know, irrevocably-fcuking the antique flooring, then WOW are you in luck. This feels both VERY silly and VERY middle-aged-man, and the sort of thing that despite all the promises on the website will make the people in the flat below you declare all out war within approximately 48h or purchase.
  • Titanic: Maiden Vengeance: Have you ever wondered “hm, what would it be like to play a third-person action game in which you play as an angry, ambulant mecha-version of the Titanic, beating the sh1t out of small icebergs as you take revenge for the whole ‘sinking’ business?’ No, I imagine you haven’t what with you not being delusional – but now you can do just that! This is VERY silly, but a good seven minutes of violent, boaty fun.
  • Everydle: Every single possible Wordle, at once. This is HORRIBLE and made me feel slightly queasy as I tried to get my head around it, so well done JakeO whose evil work this is.
  • Skull Hotel: Ooh, this is a fun little horror game – you’re playing as a cleaner in the MYSTERIOUS AND SINISTER Skull Hotel. Your job is to clean the rooms – or at least as many of the rooms as you can, given some of them are occupied by…things. Horrible things. Horrible MURDEROUS things with too many teeth in their faces. Clean, hide, avoid, tremble, get surprisingly scared (if you’re me, at least). This is really rather slick and the tension ramps up impressively (or I am just a coward, which is equally very possible).
  • Dogman95: This is a short (we’re talking 3 mins or so here, promise), first-person adventure about a dog in a dungeon. It is VERY SHONKY and hand-drawn and perfectly charming and I love it immoderately – honestly, this is really really fun and you will adore it, I promise.
  • Erostasis: Finally this week, a link specifically for all those of you who agree with me that Existenz is in a weird way one of the sexiest films ever made – Erostasis is…what is it? A lightly-interactive short story that’s part exploration of fetish and part quite intense Cronenbergian bodyhorror, a 20 minute audiovisual trip inside a vaguely-sentient spaceship whose various perverse constituent parts all need to be…fcuked back into alignment, an allegory about all sorts of kink-related and kink-adjacent issues…Christ knows, all of the above, this is GREAT (and a bit NSFW, even if the limited nudity is quite grainy and stylised, it’s quite clearly…about sex, to an extent), and in particular the audio (also a bit NSFW, to be clear) is really well-done and a vital part of the experience. This is, honestly, great, and if the above description hasn’t entirely grossed you out (which I concede it might have done, sorry) then I strongly recommend you give it a go.

By Aubrey Levinthal

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK FEELS LIKE COCKTAIL HOUR AND IS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED SPIN LORD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • 366 Weird Movies: Not, I don’t think, a Tumblr! But a great website whose owners are attempting to develop the ULTIMATE LIST of weird films – per the blurb, “The backbone of this site is the project to create the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. Why make a list of 366 movies?  That’s one for every day of the year, with a spare for leap years. As every day is associated with a Catholic saint, we believe every day should have its own weird movie. Most of the movies selected are both weird and good.  Sometimes, if a movie is very weird, it will make the list ahead of a better movie.  Sometimes, if a movie is very good, it does not have to be quite as weird.  The key determinant is that each movie gives me that I-know-it-when-I-see-it feeling; a film that makes my skin crawl, my jaw drop, or just causes me to mutter to myself, “Now that’s weird….” We are very cautious in certifying a movie as weird—we may consider and review 4 or 5 movies for every one we decide to put on the List.  But just because a movie does not make the List on the first ballot doesn’t mean it’s forever out of contention.  From time to time, we’ll reconsider and promote movies that we once thought borderline to the exalted ranks of the Weirdest Movies Ever Made.” I have had a quick look and it includes Bad Boy Bubby, possibly my favourite ever piece of cinema and definitely one of the strangest (and, er, most polarising) films I have ever seen (and also one which contains one of my favourite ever gig scenes in any film ever), so I am going to say their radar is good.
  • All The Pokemon Cards: Definitely not a Tumblr, but spiritually VERY much a Tumblr, this is an Are.na board featuring, apparently, EVERY SINGLE POKEMON CARD EVER. Does this speak to you? Erm, good!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Salona: I wouldn’t normally feature the Insta feed of a restaurant somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but the concept here – it’s a modern restaurant, but, er, it’s serving ‘heritage Roman cuisine’, like Ancient Roman, dormice and garum and all that jazz – tickled me and so I thought you might find it interesting too. I look forward to a buzzy new mesopotamian-style stew retailer opening up in Clapton in early-2026. Millet fritters, anyone?

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • The Morgan McSweeney Myth: A bit of a takedown of Morgan McSweeney, current wearer of the ‘genius eminence grise pulling the strings behind the throne’ hat which is bestowed to one special adviser in each parliament (previous wearers, of course, include profane ultrarationalist spectrum-goblin Dominic Cummings; funny how it’s ALWAYS A CERTAIN TYPE OF GUY, eh?) which basically suggests that his supposed ‘genius political campaigning brain’ has been a bit overstated over the past 24m and that, actually, HE MIGHT NOT BE A GENIUS AFTER ALL. I’m including this for two main reasons – firstly, the appearance of these sorts of pieces tend to mean that someone is briefing against you QUITE HARD behind the scenes and that your days wearing the Special Hat might be numbered; and secondly, because I am just so fcuking BORED of us constantly, repeatedly falling for (or, perhaps more accurately, being sold by the lobby and commentariat class) the idea of THE GENIUS STRATEGIC MIND working away in the shadows, because, in the main, these people are almost always exposed as being bullies with wafer-thin intellects and thinner skins and their ‘genius’ is reliably proven after a few years to have actually been nothing of the sort and can we therefore please remember this stuff next time some fcuking commentator starts to wax lyrical about the BIG STRATEGY BRANES at the heart of government because, look, these people are just cnuts like you and me, and, in my experience, significantly WORSE cnuts most of the time.
  • Gordon Brown: Ah, time is a great healer, isn’t it? This is a very soft, very pro-Gordon interview in the New Statesman, which presents Brown as The Great Left-Wing Thinker and Last True Socialist of the previous Labour government – which, I suppose, is sort-of right if only by contrast to his more…er…’liberally-pragmatic’ colleagues from the Blair years. It’s hard not to read this and think about how differently things might have been had he had the courage to call an election when he first took the leadership, how that might have precluded the Coalition and the Cleggeron and the austerity misery roadshow (at least to some degree), and how he was fcuked by a combination of his own hubris, his own fundamental unsuitablity to frontline, main-character politics in the 21stC, and the frankly appalling quality of the team he was left with by 2008 (I was working at DWP at the time in my VERY brief and ill-fated stint as a civil servant and fcuk me was it clear that, whatever they were telling Gordon, EVERYONE had given up by that point). Anyway, this made me briefly sad for a parallel universe that might, but probably wouldn’t, have been slightly less bad than the timeline we now found ourselves in.
  • AI and Energy Usage: A quick check-in to the current state of the ‘so, how hard are we fcuking the environment with this whole AI thing then?’ debate – the short answer remains ‘noone actually knows’ which feels…well, it feels suboptimal, frankly, but what can you do? This piece by MIT Technology Review seems scientifically and methodologically robust, but is still largely reduced to some rough ‘fingers in the air’ calculations – the basic facts are that text-based generation is more energy intensive than image, that both are falling in cost due to advances in tech, but the coming boom in AI video is going to be…costly from the point of view of energy. Basically the truth of the matter is somewhere in between ‘nah, don’t worry, it’s fine!’ and ‘YOU ARE BOILING THE OCEAN EVERY TIME YOU GENERATE A LARGE-BREASTED WAIFU YOU PATHETIC, PLANET DESPOILING PERVERTS!’, but don’t expect that nuance to filter through to online conversations where it’s very much either one or the other.
  • The Current State of the Ghost Gun Market: In what DEFINITELY shouldn’t be read as a piece of instructional content, WIRED tests the current state of the 3d printed firearm market to find out whether it would in fact be trivial to create a firearm with a 3d printer, some models and some rudimentary knowledge of How Guns Work – the answer, should you be curious, is very much ‘yes’. The gun’s a bit rubbish, it’s not hugely reliable and requires quite a lot of tinkering to get to a proper working state, but the reporter was able to fire off a good 50-odd rounds from the weapon before it failed, which is…more than enough to do a job, whatever you might want that job to be. In many respects it feels quite lucky that the promised 3d printing boom of the late-00s/early-10s never quite happened and that we don’t all have these things in our homes.
  • The Facebook Scam To Scammer Pipeline: More excellent reporting from Rest of World, writing about the spate of fake job ads targeting young people in countries such as Indonesia which are instead fronts for organised crime and which see applicants kidnapped and trafficked to places like Cambodia, where they are then held by large-scale criminal gangs often operating out of casinos who force them to work 18h days on huge scam and fraud operations targeting users in the West like you. One of those stories that reminds you both of the sheer SCALE of this stuff, and also of the fact that when you get out of the BIG LANGUAGES, moderation and enforcement on Facebook and in fact all the Meta platforms is absolute fcuking dogsh1t and it is properly the wild west in some respects – and that, for lots of people in non-Western world, Facebook literally IS the internet. Great! Oh, and obviously this is all being supercharged by AI, because OF COURSE IT IS. I do wish that everyone blithely thinking that AI isn’t already changing the world in all sorts of ‘interesting’ ways would occasionally take the time to consider the fact that the world isn’t JUST the UK and the bits that you see via videos of people who look like you on your fcuking phone.
  • The Robot Chefs of South Korea: Another Rest of World piece – they have been on a roll of late, and are generally just a great outlet overall – this time on how service stations in South Korea are beginning to experiment with automated ‘chefs’, and the impact this is having on the types of food being served and its quality. The tl;dr here is that it’s leading to a flattening of cuisine styles because there are some dishes that the machine can produce more easily than others, and so these become more prevalent – which, you know, feels…sad, and like ‘optimising the experience for the convenience of the robot rather than the eventual human customer’ is possibly the wrong way around.
  • Paging The Poetic Web: An interview with Elliot and Kris all about the internet phonebook, the general concept of the ‘poetic web’, and the vague movement that seems to be coalescing around the idea of a more personal, individual sense of what the web can be, and one which is more idiosyncratic and less hidebound by the grammar and restraints of the platform-based internet. Kris sums it up nicely here, I think: “But where I resonate with poetry is more in the metaphorical and the suggestive potential of poems. They are less definitive compared to something like nonfiction. They are more about talking in images and metaphors and breaking logic. I think there is something to this whole “poetic web” idea and the people contributing to this scene, which is that they defy the logic of the web somehow. Their sites look a bit different. Maybe they’re a bit more idiosyncratic, maybe they’re just very silly or there’s something that makes them not very mainstream, they don’t follow the conventional wisdom of web design.”
  • The True Costs of Being on YouTube: This is a few months old now – SORRY I AM SORRY IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN – but it’s worth reading because it’s so rare to read an honest account of the costs associated with running a YouTube channel, the income you get from being…moderately-successful, and the general economics of the whole endeavour which, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, seem FCUKING HORRIFIC. There are caveats here – this is a very specific type of YT content, foodie and so with relatively high production values which themselves incur higher costs than perhaps is average, and the person in question already had a profile when starting – but even so the maths here is BRUTAL and, well, simply doesn’t work. I know that I have been boring on for years about how the creator economy is a fcuking lie but, well the creator economy is a fcuking lie.
  • The Deprofessionalisation Of Games: I thought this was a really interesting article, partly because of what it says about the games industry and where it’s headed but also because of how that can be extended to a bunch of other industries too based on the likely trajectory of AI and associated tools – the basic premise here is that there is going to be a hollowing out of the sorts of structures required to make games (and not just games) and that as such we’re going to end up in a place where the only people who can make the industry/market work are either auteurs or very small teams, or massive behemoth studios, and nothing inbetween. Do read the whole thing, I promise it’s interesting and really does have implications far beyond games = to quote a relevant section, it “feels like the polar ends of who can benefit in the deprofessionalized world—developers with the stability to swing big for big-shot ideas, and programmers or designers with deep career experience that can be called in like a group of noble mercenaries. People in between will be left out.My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion.” THIS WILL APPLY TO YOUR INDUSTRY TOO.
  • Country Music Is At War With Itself: I am not really a country aficionado, and I don’t really care about Beyonce (SORRY) and so I hadn’t really been paying particular attention to the IS IT COUNTRY THOUGH, IS IT REALLY? debate happening after the release of Cowboy Carter – this piece in the New York Times, though, was a really interesting (and, to me at least, educative) story about the history of ‘country’ music, the degree to which the ‘classic’ 20thC image of ‘What Country Is’ was itself a marketing confection from Nashville, and all the ways in which people who don’t necessarily fit that Nashville model are attempting to reclaim some of the music for themselves, with predictable (RACIST!) results. Honestly, I am really not interested in country as a genre but thought this was fascinating and smart from the point of view of culture, its evolution and associated wars (this came to me via Nelson’s Linkblog which is a really good resource for odd tidbits and particularly queer culture related stuff).
  • The Runaway Tradwives of TikTok: It’s a tale as old as time! For every lifestyle fad popularised via the social media landscape and THE MAGICAL ALGO, so there will be a parallel movement ~5y afterwards in which a significant number of people ensnared by said lifestyle fad realise that perhaps the fad wasn’t, y’know, WHOLLY BENIGN, and that perhaps there were one or two other factors at play, and maybe they would be well served by, you know, getting the fcuk out of the cult. We’ve seen it with ‘wellness’, god knows we’ve seen it with ‘masculinity and maleness’ and now we’re starting to see the ‘FREE THE TRADWIVES’ movement where people who bought into the illusory mormon teadress barnlife vibe and realised that, in fact, it is QUITE MISERABLE AND NOT ACTUALLY THAT EMPOWERING try and get out of it. Although, equally, it strikes me that quite a few of the people cited in this piece are also turning this into…A BRAND NEW INFLUENCER GRIFT, so, well, make of it what you will. EVERYTHING IS CONTENT ALL THE TIME FOREVER!
  • Going All Inclusive: This is an article about parents going on an all-inclusive holiday and leaning into the very, very smooth-brain nature of the pampering and the no-thinking, and while I can’t personally empathise with the circumstances here I can very much empathise with the appeal of ‘no choices just happy vibes’ as a choice; I liked this in part because it did a very good job of communicate the author’s feeling of Being On Holiday, and also because it felt like a very Of The Now piece of writing, if you see what I mean. This vibe feels very 2025-6, if you ask me.
  • That Thomas Keller/French Laundry Piece: If you’re an assiduous consumer of foodie writing it’s entirely possible you will have read this already, but if not then PLEASE take the time to enjoy this quite extraordinary account by Mackenzie Chung Fegan, SF Chronicle restaurant critic, of her recent visit to storied California eatery The French Laundry, helmed by superstar chef Thomas Keller. This is possibly the most staggeringly-awkward critic/chef interaction I have ever heard of, ever, and it’s impossible to read without your body inadvertently-pretzeling itself in sheer embarrassment at various points throughout. Safe to say, Keller does not come across well, and the whole experience sounds like a fcuking Calvary.
  • Turn and Face the Strange: A beautiful little essay on language and its provenance by Lee Randall, about all the words we’ve borrowed to make English what it is and how the evolution of language makes a mockery of ideas of borders and boundaries, and renders risible the concept of tightly-bounded national identity (Lee is a friend, but I would have included this anyway because it’s lovely).
  • Confessions of a Female Police Officer: Many years ago when I was doing my first job as a lobbyist, one of my awful clients was Group 4 Securicor – a genuinely appalling company staffed by some incredibly awful people at senior level (never, ever trust men who refer to themselves by three-letter acronyms, as I learned thanks to one spectacularly-awful waste of skin called ‘DTS’); as part of the ‘work’ (lol) I did for them, I spent a lot of time working with the Prison Officers Association and developed a lot of professional respect for their members (I also told the POA literally EVERYTHING I knew about all the ways in which G4S was working to fcuk them, which I like to think set the company back in some small way) – this piece, despite the slightly sensationalist title, is an interesting and sober and sensitive look at the realities of being a female Prison Officer but also at the ways in which the profession has changed (read: gotten worse) in the past few years. Sobering.
  • The Civilian Bunkers of Switzerland: My knowledge of Switzerland doesn’t extend much beyond the fact that it’s INSANELY RICH, that the airport in Geneva advertises watches with chunks of ACTUAL MOON ROCK in them, and that the family of a Swiss woman I once knew owned a FIGHTING COW that would compete in local cow-fighting events for actual cashmoney – to that, er, esoteric grab-bag of facts I can now add the fact that the Swiss apparently LOVE an apocalypsebunker! “To the alternating fascination, bewilderment and envy of its European neighbors, Switzerland, population nearly 9 million, has more bunkers per capita than anywhere else in the world — enough to guarantee shelter space to every single resident in the event of a crisis. (Sweden and Finland are a close second, covering all major cities.) The queries Schelbert was receiving came from frightened people trying to locate their assigned places. Today, however, the Sonnenberg bunker is mostly a museum. Originally built in 1971 to protect up to 20,000 people, it remained one of the largest nuclear shelters in the world until 2002, when its capacity was reduced to 2,000 to improve efficiency and reduce costs.” This is a far better article than it really needs to be, and communicates quite a weird – and, to my mind, VERY SWISS – sense of…cloistered unease, like the silence before the bomb detonates.
  • Object Permanence: Game Montesanti writes here about madness and mania and art and childhood and growing up and friendship and and and. I thought this was excellent. “When I sketched nude models with charcoal and red conte in college, I imagined an environment in which I felt safe enough in my body to drop my robe and let strangers translate me into two-dimensionality. What must those models have been thinking, I wondered: Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, the presumed muse for da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa?” Vermeer’s mysterious subject in “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” who may have been Sibyl, a prophetess in Ancient Greece, or a Biblical figure, or a nameless Dutch model whose identity will never be truly uncovered. Were they aware of their own beauty, their subtle sensuality? Did they trust the artist fully to capture their likeness with the tools they had at the time, or was likeness not what they were after? How I longed to know where their minds wandered during all those hours sitting for their portraits, and where their gazes fixed. On an object? On a thought?”
  • Fairy Pools: An extract from Patricia Lockwood’s forthcoming novel – I would read Lockwood’s shopping lists, honestly, she’s that good, and this piece, about a trip to Scotland, is pretty-much perfectly ‘her’. If you like her style, and I do, you will adore this: “On Isle Maree, local tradition held that insanity could be cured by towing someone around the island behind a boat. Oh, good, she thought, easy. But local tradition also held that “nothing must ever be taken from the island, be it even a pebble from the shore, lest the insanity formerly ‘cured’ there return to the outside world.” Oh, no, she thought, hard. Isle Maree was famous for the Wish Tree, an oak that had been hammered so full of pennies that it had died of copper poisoning. Many things still stood that way, hammered full of wishes.”
  • Pirates of the Ayahuasca: In general, much like Cruise Essays, I can probably go the rest of my life without ever reading another account of a white, middle-class person going on an hallucinogenically-powered voyage of self-discovery; I have, by now, read enough accounts of puking up your ringpiece under the effects of some toxic root to know that I probably don’t need to consume anymore. And then this week this piece got published and I absolutely DEVOURED it – honestly, it is fcuking brilliant, not least because its author, Sarah Miller, is basically quite a lot of a pr1ck throughout and leans into it pretty unashamedly. I am slightly in awe of writing like this in which the author quite clearly does not care – honestly, this really is SO good, even if you don’t think you ever want to listen to another account of a fcuking trip ever again.
  • The Most Glorious Strip Club in Britain: Our last longread this week is by Emma Garland – an essay composed of lines from reviews of strip clubs. Honestly, this is absolute fcuking poetry and I love it so so so much.

By Zack Zdrale

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 16/05/25

Reading Time: 37 minutes

 

WELL. What a great week for everyone invested in picking up the overton window and moving it ALL THE WAY OVER THERE! There’s an odd irony in the fact that as everyone debates the assisted dying bill in parliament this week, noone seems to be making any connection between the need for a serious conversation around end-of-life-care and the probable impact of the UK’s newly-tweaked immigration policy (THANKS KEIR YOU CNUT) on what said end-of-life-care is likely to look like in a few years time. Look, all I’m saying is there’s a reason I’ve paid my euthanasia deposit early.

And on THAT cheery note, here are some variously-assorted links!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you don’t need to be worried, I’m probably not going to fcuk off to Switzerland *quite* yet.

By Elizaveta Livkova

WE KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH A MIX WHICH MAKES NO SENSE TO ME BUT WHICH I LEAVE HERE FOR ALL OF THOSE OF YOU WHO CELEBRATE AT THE CHURCH OF EUROVISION, AN HOUR OF WHAT I AM ASSURED BY FORMER-EDITOR PAUL ARE APPARENTLY ‘EUROBANGERS’! 

THE SECTION WHICH LEARNED THIS WEEK THAT APPARENTLY THE JAPANESE PHRASE “IT RAINED ON ME” CONTAINS THE IMPLIED ADDITIONAL INFORMATION “AND I SUFFERED AS A RESULT”, WHICH MADE ME SO HAPPY I CAN BARELY EXPRESS IT, PT.1:  

  • Clone: I can’t speak for you (much as occasionally I wish I could; “Web Curios is great!”, I would say to anyone would would listen, “we must not rest until the world has realised that overlong, overwritten internet newsletters are the future!”), but as someone who has to spend Too Much Time paying attention to the worst people and companies in the world, and all of the ways in which specific technologies are being shaped so as to enrich a small-but-financially-significant coterie of stakeholders, I could very much do with A Nice And Easy Way To Keep Track Of All This Sh1t. Which, perhaps, is why I was so cheered by the launch of Clone, a new project by Spencer Chang (see Curios passim) which is a simple-but-hugely-useful tech news aggregator, pulling in stories from the top…what, three-dozen or so global tech news outlets and presenting them in chronological fashion, headlines-only, letting you get a quick and easy overview of What Is Happening; this is, on the one hand, the sort of thing that you used to be able to spin up really easily yourself in the GOOD OLD DAYS of decent RSS readers and things like Netvibes (RIP, weird pang of nostalgia, i want 2 run 2 u), and I appreciate you might not find it SUPER-EXCITING, but it is USEFUL and, personally-speaking, its existence has made my life marginally easier and as such I am grateful for its existence. Also there are a bunch of fun, stupid little easter eggs hidden on the site which you will stumble across if you use it for a bit, and I am a sucker for that sort of thing, so.
  • Masters of Prophecy: As a result of my ‘social network of choice’ (given the choice I would not use any of the fcuking things, but my infohunger needs sating somehow chiz chiz) these days being Bluesky, I am exposed to a fairly constant diet of people Cnut-ing daily against the AI tide, ready to dismiss everything they see which is touched by the hand of The Machine as awful, dreadful, horrible, evil, doomed to fail and fundamentally in some way antithetical to the general business of ‘being human’. Which, you know, I understand! I get it, I do! But, equally, JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT A THING TO BE TRUE DOES NOT IN FACT MAKE IT SO. I know that lots of you WANT this stuff to be terrible and awful forever, and to never take off, and to wither on the vine in a shower of stale, expired hype, to go the way of the NFTs (MY PUNKS, THEY DEVALUED!) or The Metaverse (this latter still actually happening, by the way, in the way in which it always was (checked the Roblox numbers recently?)), and that you believe that all it takes is a concerted number of people TAKING A STAND and DEMONSTRATING THEIR DISGUST with the whole thing, and that everyone you know HATES this stuff and wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole meaning that OBVIOUSLY it’s doomed to failure…but, well, you’re wrong, because you’re inhabiting an ecosystem of a few million people with a very particular perspective and while you’re raging against The Machine everyone else is, basically, sucking up the slop like good consumers AND SMILING WHILE THEY DO SO. Witness this YouTube channel – why is it called Masters of Prophecy? NO FCUKING CLUE! – which posts track after track of AI-generated ‘music’, accompanied by AI-generated thumbnails and with titles like ‘Babe With The Blade’ and ‘Future Loverboy’, and which has 30 FCUKING MILLION SUBS, and whose videos have viewcounts ranging between the 10s of 1000s and the multimillions (despite the fact that, objectively, they all sound fcuking dreadful). PEOPLE ARE MORONS AND PEOPLE DON’T CARE, is the thing I want to hammer home to you – there are BILLIONS of us, and, look, let’s be honest here, most couldn’t give two flying fcuks as to whether the brain-smoothing distractocontent we use to wash the pain away is made by an ARTISAN, toiling away in a garret, or whether it’s knocked up by a bunch of servers draining a lake somewhere in Texas. It’s worth taking the time to listen to some of the songs, just so you can realise how low the bar is in terms of ‘stuff people will apparently inflict on their eardrums’.
  • FKFJ: Are YOU going to SXSW London? LOL OF COURSE NOT LOOK AT THE FCUKING PRICES THESE JOKERS ARE CHARGING!!! In *this* economy?! Presuming, then, that you don’t have a paymaster stupid enough to shell out a grand for you to spend three days hanging out with a bunch of ‘brand experts’ and people who put the ‘cnut’ in ‘conspicuous cocaine consumption’, you might be interested in this ALTERNATIVE FESTIVAL, being put on after a bunch of people on social media decided that the real thing looked, well, incredibly sh1t and a bit pointless and soulless and horrible. This is very nascent and might all be a bit rubbish, but I like the ethos behind it – anyone can apply to put on a free event during the festival period, and presuming it meets the vague criteria you get added to the website and become PART OF THE FUN – per the site, “FKFJ is a DIY festival of technology, music, art, and community across London. By sheer coincidence it takes place on the same dates as SXSW, but is actually affordable and has events you might want to attend. Anyone can host an FKFJ event! Let us know if you’d like to be listed, have a venue to share, or a thing you would like to put on.” The only thing on their at the moment is the return of the Dorkbot meetup on 3 June, but I would expect it to become more populated in the next weeks, so keep an eye on it and maybe add your own thing. Or don’t!
  • The Bee: I’ve said a few times over the past year or so that this is a weirdly-fertile time for new magazines launching, from Joshi Hermann’s ‘Mill’ project of new regional papers to the spate of London-centric digital publications which have sprung up in the wake of the sad evisceration of the Evening Standard…this is another. The Bee is specifically designed to showcase working class writing in the UK; per the blurb, it’s setting out to be “a literary magazine, an online platform, a podcast, and the heart of a writing community. Our mission is to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists. We strongly believe that there is a need to discuss contemporary social class more openly, and that writers can voice to class experience in ways social science cannot.” There’s going to be a physical mag in the Autumn, subsequently publishing twice a year, but there’s already a bunch of stuff online – I’ve read a handful of pieces on there and there are some excellent ones, including one by Darren McGarvey on class and health outcomes which opens with the all-timer paragraph: “in the UK, one profound question occupies the national consciousness more than any other: why can’t all the fat, lazy, poor people be as healthy and successful as rightwing political commentators? This essay is my earnest attempt to answer that question.” I enjoy this a lot and am pleased it exists, do check it out.
  • Ditto: After a few years of fairly monolithic Big Dating hegemony it seems that everyone’s utter disgust and dissatisfaction with The App Landscape has opened up the field to…a host of NEW dating apps! But this time with added AI! Which noone asked for! Ditto is yet another in the seemingly-endless list of tweaks on the tested formula; its gimmick is that rather than swiping and selecting and triaging and filtering yourself, you leave all that tedious, time-consuming and frankly infra-dig gruntwork to the magical power of The Machine – you literally just tell the app ‘this is the shape of person I would like to potentially be inside/have inside me’ (delete per your personal preferences) and it will, after some ‘thinking’, provide you with a date; it will literally say ‘go here at this time and meet this person, who we think you will like loads because of X, Y and Z and who you might want to talk to about A, B or C’. Which, honestly, might feel quite appealing should you be the sort of person who’s been burnt out by swiping or who’s suffering choice paralysis, but which also strikes me as…fcuk, I don’t know, just an insanely-passive approach to one’s life (and I say this as someone reasonably…low-agency). This is currently only available on select UScollege campuses per the early Facebook model, so let’s see if it breaks confinement and we see a spate of “how did we meet? Oh, The Machine decided we were compatible!” meet-cute stories in the popular press c.2028. BONUS AI DATING CONTENT: here’s a Dazed piece on all the ways in which the tech is now embedded into the dating landscape and making it LOADS BE…oh, no, actually worse.
  • The Arctic World Archive: For reasons I don’t wholly understand and am not hugely keen on interrogating right now, I have been giving a bit of thought to THE WEB CURIOS LEGACY, and how I can ensure that these terrible words that noone cares about are given a life beyond my own; if anyone feels like chipping in and contributing to the ‘keep Curios live for 100 years’ long-term hosting fund then, well, let me know! Anyway, the hubristic bit of me (lol!) quite likes the self-importance of paying to have all of the Curios data preserved forever in permafrost at the Arctic World Archive, “located in a well-kept and safe decommissioned mine, Mine no. 3 (Gruve 3) that is owned by Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK). SNSK has more than 100 years experience developing and operating mines and infrastructure on Svalbard, and is owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries. AWA is a secure underground and unhackable data vault at the centre of the permafrost, 300 metres inside the mine and 300 metres below the top of the mountain.” It’s 20 Euros a month, lads – whipround?
  • Mo The Cabbie: Mo, as he is keen to point out in every single one of his videos so far, is LONDON’S YOUNGEST BLACK CAB DRIVER – I think he’s 21, which is a frankly insane age by which to have done The Knowledge. This is is TikTok, which I’m including mainly in the hope that it becomes good rather than what it is now which is a bunch of videos of Mo being congratulated by people for being LONDON’S YOUNGEST BLACK CAB DRIVER and famous on TikTok; there’s one video in which Mo runs through his favourite routes, which suggests that even if the influencer game doesn’t work out for him he is laser-focused on the rich tourist cabfare dollar (WHAT SORT OF PLUTOCRATIC MIDDLE-EASTERN MADMAN GETS A CAB FROM EDGWARE RD TO OXFORD ST???) and will be FINE.
  • Heavyweight: This is a GREAT little idea – Heavyweight is a site which will take any text you give it and format it in the style of an official, formal communication from a SERIOUS OFFICE – it doesn’t pass it off as from a lawfirm exactly, but it doesn’t go out of its way to make clear that it’s *not* from a lawfirm, if you know what I mean. You can choose the degree of ‘snootiness’ you would like the letter to embody – SORRY THERE IS AI IN THIS I THINK – and pick how many fictitious ‘partners’ you would like named in the letterhead of your definitely-not-a-fake-lawfirm, and, this feels like an EXCELLENT way to scare the everliving sh1t out of someone who is either a) quite thick; or b) a child; or c) both.
  • The Internet Phonebook: I featured this when it was announced in July last year, and now IT EXISTS! My friend Kris and Elliot Cost have collaborated on this physical directory of the ‘poetic’ web – 700+ sites submitted by people like YOU, with descriptions and urls, a physical snapshot of part of the vast, weird mess that is the web. This is very much an art project, but also a practical tool – there’s something lovely about the idea of using this as a boredom-killer or a way of learning more about the stranger corners of the internet, and I personally adore the idea of it as a partial cross-section of the near-infinite vastness of the digital reflection of ourselves. Curios is in it, obviously, but there are loads of other sites too, almost all of which will be better.
  • Simpsons Magic 8ball: I am…slightly-baffled by this – I don’t really know why it exists, or indeed why the Simpsons clips it pulls in response to your questions are presented within an oldschool 3d representation of a television which also seems to be smoking (you sort of have to click the link to ‘get’ this, although I can’t promise that you will in fact ‘get’ it at all), but it’s VERY good at pulling clips that have at least a superficial link to your query, and if you’re a Simpsons aficionado I get the feeling you will be tickled by the deep cuts it draws from in the archive here.
  • Are You In Love?: Carve your initials into a virtual tree, just like you’re a lovesick teenager at any point in pre-digital human history! There’s space for 333 pairs of initials on this site and at the time of writing 155 have been filled, so if YOU want to secretly declare your love for me via the medium of anonymously scrawling our initials on a webpage then, well, HURRY THE FCUK UP PLEASE. Also, you don’t have to declare your love for *me*, to be clear, you can declare it for anyone you like, I really will never know.
  • Closure: Another week, another AI usecase which you will probably look at and softly mutter ‘oh, no’ under your breath. I think we can all agree that having someone disappear or withdraw from your life unexpectedly and unilaterally is a painful experience; I think we can also all agree that it’s probably not the MOST healthy response to that to spin up an imaginary version of said person so that you can harangue and berate a virtual representation of them for their decision. AND YET HERE WE ARE! Closure is a service which pitches itself as being aimed at ‘people who have been ghosted’ by friends, lovers and, er, people you went on a date with, once, and which lets you describe said individual, provide background and then engage in imagined roleplay with an avatar of that person to, presumably, provide you with the titular ‘;closure’ you need. WILL THIS WORK? WILL IT? Or will it simply provide people already struggling to let go with a convenient emotional permalink to the one-way object of their affections, thereby maintaining and strengthening the obsession? Will it, do we think, let people slowly and gently decouple themselves from an imagined bond, or do we think that some people will just use this to attempt to GET THE LOVED ONE BACK and then take these strategies into the real world with them? Do we think this is going to be healthy for all the mentally vulnerable people who are exactly the most likely to find this sort of sh1t appealing? I DON’T KNOW WHAT DO YOU THINK?
  • LEGOGpt: An academic paper detailing AI-based research that I think we can all agree is Probably Ok – using an LLM to design objects in LEGO bricks! “We introduce LegoGPT, the first approach for generating physically stable LEGO brick models from text prompts. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions, and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction…Our experiments show that LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing LEGO designs that align closely with the input text prompts. We also develop a text-based LEGO texturing method to generate colored and textured designs. We show that our designs can be assembled manually by humans and automatically by robotic arms. We also release our new dataset, StableText2Lego, containing over 47,000 LEGO structures of over 28,000 unique 3D objects accompanied by detailed captions, along with our code and models.” I showed this to someone I know who works at LEGO, whose response was something amused involving their legal team, so perhaps don’t expect to see this in the wild anytime soon, but it’s an interesting usecase for the tech if nothing else (LEGO YOU JOYLESS FCUKS).
  • Unparalleled Misalignments: Oh what a WONDERFUL, silly, pointless, brilliant webproject this is! Maintained by one Rick Heicklen, “this is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other.” So, for example, “booty call” and “butt dial”, “picture frame” and “movie setting” and, look, I appreciate that not all of you will necessarily share my enthusiasm here, but if you’re someone who loves the English language and wordplay or cryptic crosswords or anything of that ilk then this will likely scratch a particular part of your brain very pleasingly indeed.
  • Possibly The Best Copy Ever: Vertu is a very weird company; founded by a bunch of ex-Nokia people AGES ago, it’s been flogging insanely-overpriced bespoke Android handsets to very, very rich idiots for years – I have met a few people who’ve owned these and, trust me, they are EXACTLY the sorts of people who you would imagine to drop £6k on what is basically a Samsung with knobs on – but it’s a company that, unless you’ve ever done work around a certain type of HNW or in the mobile market, you won’t necessarily be aware of. Which means you might not be familiar with its…particular approach to marketing, which involves, honestly, some of the most incredible copywriting I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, click this link and MARVEL AT THE GLORY OF THE PROSE – I mean, listen to this: “Savor the definitive snap of closure, echoing the ominous sound of a bullet being chambered – each click an unbroken promise and precise as a mafia pact sealed in silence, a testimony to deadly whispered promises.” ISN’T IT AMAZING?! It is ALL like this – it uses the word ‘doth’ to a degree that I am slightly in awe of, it describes the phone in question as ‘ALL FOR MAN’, it includes baffling phrases such as “Armed with a primary lens of 50 million pixels and a 2M wide-angle co-sta, the world unveils its form, with nothing being able to conceal itself from the eyes of the hero”, it occasionally veers into what I presume unintentional verse (“Fear not of leaks or spills, solid as a rock standing still”…the whole thing is absolutely wonderful and it may be the best link in here this week. I was, though, slightly astonished by the number of people dismissing the copy as ‘AI slop’ – er, have you *used* AI recently? This level of bad is exclusively the preserve of us meatsacks, I am sorry to have to tell you.

By Tao Siqi

NEXT UP I AM TAKING YOU BACK TO MY YOUTH WITH AN ALBUM I PLAYED TO DEATH c.1997 AND WHICH TO ME IS ALWAYS A SUNSHINE SOUND, STEP TA DIS BY DUBWAR!

THE SECTION WHICH LEARNED THIS WEEK THAT APPARENTLY THE JAPANESE PHRASE “IT RAINED ON ME” CONTAINS THE IMPLIED ADDITIONAL INFORMATION “AND I SUFFERED AS A RESULT”, WHICH MADE ME SO HAPPY I CAN BARELY EXPRESS IT, PT.2:  

  • Mutual: Those of you of a certain vint…oh, who am I kidding? There is literally no fcuker under 40 who reads this sh1t, is there? Although actually I did get an email earlier this year from a French guy in his 20s who inexplicably subs to Curios, so consider this explanation for YOU, anomalously-young gallic friend! Anyway, as I was saying, BACK IN THE DAY of the early Facebook boom, when the company hadn’t yet decided to lock down the friends graph and prevent people from building fun, creative and occasionally-hugely-inappropriate apps on top of its base infrastructure, there were a spate of plugins for your FB profile which promised to let you quickly and discreetly discover which of your newly-minted digital friends might be willing to swap bodily fluids with you should the occasion arise – AND NOW YOU CAN DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Mutual is a ‘dating app’ which promises to connect you to anyone in your phonebook who might potentially be willing to get naked with you – you tell the app who in your contacts you want to proposition, they get an anonymous text asking the to pick someone from THEIR contacts that they would like to be propositioned by, and if you match then you both get told and, presumably, instructed to get a room asap. This feels…low-stakes, but also vanishingly unlikely to work – still, should you have a shot you want to shoot but lack the conviction to well, shoot it, perhaps this will help (it won’t help)!
  • Tractor Beam: ANOTHER NEW MAGAZINE! This one is all about HOPEFUL SCIFI FUTURES and related issues – “Tractor Beam is a quarterly fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical visions of hopeful futures built from the ground up. Our stories explore audacious and provocative ideas around farming, food, earth science, and beyond, reimagining how humans can live more harmoniously with nature…Released with the changing seasons (not unlike the Almanacs of old), each quarterly issue of Tractor Beam will explore what it would look like if soil and earth were foundational technologies of our collective future. From food systems to DIY architecture, regenerative agriculture to microbiology and material science, our stories will draw inspiration from our planet’s enduring power and potential. Our first issue is “Generation,” a nod to renewal, possibility, and new beginnings. It’s about the seeds of new ideas and the literal seeds from which our food, habitats, and livelihoods grow. It’s also about looking back to remember, honor, and build from knowledge that has stood the test of time.” I haven’t done more than scratch the surface of this because, look, I HAVE A LOT TO READ AND TIME IS FINITE, but this feels very much like something which might be up some of your collective streets.
  • Aurascope: Do you feel like standard aesthetic parameters like ‘composition’ and ‘lighting’ and ‘use of colour’ and ‘what the photo is of’ are fundamentally limiting to your creative vision? Do you find that you tend to appreciate shots more in terms of VIBE than anything else? Would you like to have every single photo you take assessed based on largely-mysterious criteria by The Machine? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! Aurascope is a BRAND NEW photo app-slash-social network which has a singular gimmick – all the photos you post to it are given an AURA SCORE by the software. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT SCORE YOUR PICTURES BASED A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT AND SLIGHTLY-MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS! “Aurascope blends photography, AI, and emotional intelligence into one game-like experience. You can think of it as part vibe tracker, part real-world exploration game. Like if BeReal met Co–Star, with a little Pokémon Go and Lensa AI energy. Take a quick selfie, snap your coffee, or capture the vibe of your bedroom. Every photo is analyzed across layers of metadata—from lighting and symmetry to subtle emotional signals—and turned into a score. The clearer and more intentional your photo, the deeper the feedback. You’ll be surprised how fast it becomes second nature. Especially when you scan your friends and they try to game their aura score with a big pose or goofy smile. Aurascope gamifies the photos you’re already taking. You’re not just capturing moments—you’re learning from them.” I feel like I really ought to hate this much more than I actually do.
  • Yuka: I’ve seen this around a LOT in the past few weeks, and, to me at least, it ties into the growing trend for THE NEW SKINNY and the exciting new variations on the oldschool hobby of ‘massively disordered eating’ which we as a society appear to be brining back into the normalised mainstream. Part of the panicky fad about Ultra-Processed Foods – a category that makes less and less coherent sense the more and closer you look at it, but whose inherent bollockiness hasn’t prevented a bunch of people grifting their way to fame and fortune off the back of it, so well done them! – Yuka is an app which basically lets you snap the ingredients label of any product you like and get an instant readout of all of the BAD THINGS that the product contains, along with suggestions of, where appropriate, healthier alternatives. Which, I appreciate, doesn’t sound bad per se, but then you get into some of the nitty gritty of this stuff and start to see things about carcinogens and endocrine disruptors and I start to get all sorts of alarm bells going off in my head about the blunt tool nature of this sort of thing and the way in which this sort of stuff very much works to normalise and legitimise all sorts of faddy and not-necessarily-strictly-accurate health beliefs…look, I am old enough to remember the period in which there was a huge moral panic about the fact that artificial sweeteners were carcinogenic because they had been found to cause tumours in lab rats…which lab rats had, it turned out if you looked at the studies in question been force-fed five times their own fcuking bodyweight in aspartame, which, honestly, if you eat five times your own bodyweight of ANYTHING, even broccoli, it’s unlikely to have a positive effect on your overall health status. Anyway, look, if you want to exercise more granular control over what you put into your body and if you’re the sort of person who already peruses the labels of everything you buy then maybe this will be really useful to you, but, well, I HAVE MY PERSONAL DOUBTS.
  • The Leveson Project: Well this is one of the oddest photo art projects I have seen in…some years. For those of you not aware, the Leveson Inquiry was a UK Parliamentary investigation into the ‘ethics’ (LOL!) of the British press, which uncovered the phonehacking scandal and…actually, it’s had a pretty negligible impact on the actual practice of journalism in the UK if I’m honest, and Piers Morgan didn’t go to jail, so, really, what was the point? Although at least it resulted in this series of images by photographer Jennifer Forward-Hayter, in which she, er, recreates every single testimony given during the enquiry, with herself playing the role of every witness. Honestly, this is VERY STRANGE, and also very funny indeed. “What did the Leveson Inquiry give to visual culture; A study in 2 modules. This was the last time the photographic industry was on the national stage – a criminal review of the practises of the press. Currently it is the 10 year anniversary. I was 11 years old when the inquiry started. I wanted to be a photographer, but I only knew the word ‘paparazzi’. This first module is reviewing the spectacle of trial, and the resulting archive of British media in the early 2000s, through a painstaking recreation of all 324 live testimonies. The real Leveson Inquiry cost £5,442,400. It cost just over £500 to recreate. Out of 324 testimonies, there are 10 Davids, and 14 Johns. There are 15 Lords. Only 3 ties were used across all costumes (and a special one for Jon Snow).  Piers Morgan’s office was rebuilt in a homeless shelter.” There is a lot to love about this.
  • Neighbours In Numbers: COUNTRY DATA FUN!  “This website helps you learn about our world, its scale and proportions in 9 different maps. Click through them to learn more about how your and other countries compare.” This is a really rather cool set of visualisations of population and other data, mapped using the Mercator projection scale onto the world map so you can easily see likely changes in migration, carbon emissions and the like projected over the coming years.
  • 10,000 Drum Machines: Ok, not 10,000, or at least not 10,000 YET – there are 11 on here, so there’s some way to go before the promise is fulfilled, but Maxwell Neely-Cohen whose project this is is hopeful that you can help him reach his goal. “Back in 2019, I sketched out designs for a couple of web-based drum machines. I didn’t actually code them until 2025 and then thought, ok, that was fun, I should make more. Why 10,000? I don’t know. I was trying to come up with a name for a collection of drum machines and “10,000 DRUM MACHINES” was all that came to mind. I probably won’t ever reach that lofty number (a life expectancy assumption of 75 years only gives me 13,166 days left), but maybe we can get closer if you help!” You can play with the drum machines already submitted or get in touch with Max to add your own and contribute to this, er, COLLECTIVE CELEBRATION OF RHYTHM!
  • Sowing: OH I LOVE THIS! Via Kris, I don’t have the faintest fcuking clue what it is or why it exists, mind, but it makes me very happy. You need to turn the volume up for this, as the sound effects / vocal samples are a significant part of the joy; click the screen and watch as new, er, small, plant-ish icons appear onscreen accompanied by tiny voices saying things like ‘I am thriving’ in a variety of international accents and, I think, languages. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN THOUGH? Do not question, only enjoy.
  • Asciizify: Asciify your images! Which in itself isn’t a new thing and is very much something you will have seen in Curios before, but this is a particularly nice version of the schtick – I like the fact you can alternate between colours and patterns as well as the more traditional minimal ASCII style, and there’s something quite cool about the aesthetic here which can look quite a lot like a sort of weird LEGO-ish topography (if that makes sense) (which isn’t a given tbh).
  • Bored Spreadsheet: Back in the day – and when I say this I mean REALLY back in the day, before even someone as Methusalan as I became computersick – videogames used to come equipped with something called a ‘boss key’, a keyboard shortcut which, when activated, would immediately swap the onscreen game for a simulacrum of popular business software, a spreadsheet or a word document or something similarly bland-looking, designed to mask your indolence from said ‘boss’ should you be having the temerity to play at work. It’s unlikely that these things ever fooled anyone, and frankly they were more running gag than useful workaround, but this set of webgames, all designed to look as though they’re running in a spreadsheet, is a callback to that era. Do YOU want to play a variety of knockoff versions of titles like Minesweeper, 2048, Solitaire and the like, except graphically minimalist and, honestly, not quite as good? Do you want to do so in a medium that would struggle to fool even the most stupid of paymasters? I mean, no, probably not, but here I present them to you anyway.
  • Some Great Animations: This is a YouTube playlist of animations “made by BFA1 through BFA4 students in the Character Animation Program at CalArts, in 2025” – there are 77 and obviously I have only watched a handful, but the ones I have watched are honestly wonderful – charming and funny and inventive and visually-dazzling, and you could do worse than start your journey here, with this joyful short called ‘Leftover Pasta’ (honestly, it really is ace).
  • The Morrison Hotel Gallery: This is amazing – if you’re into music photography then you will love the pictures on display on the website of the physical Morrison Hotel Gallery. “Representing over 125 of the most highly acclaimed music photographers – those who made, and continue to make, an indelible mark on music culture with photographic portrayals of the industry’s most influential artists.” This is a commercial gallery and so it’s primarily a shopfront – that said, if you don’t have a spare few hundred quid to drop on ICONIC (sorry) photos of rock gods and goddesses then there are also a bunch of curated galleries of shots from their collection – I am a particular fan of this image of Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash putting on rollerboots, but you will have your own favourites.
  • The Random Wedding Finder: This is GREAT – via B3ta, this a website which exists solely to help you find wedding websites created by strangers for their nuptials. Click the button and it searches the web for a pair of names to see if there’s a website corresponding to them, which is how I just discovered Alex and Brianna got married last April and have a website celebrating their union, and Danielle and Blake tied the knot in October…on the one hand this is, admittedly, WEIRD AND VOYEURISTIC, but also it’s very cute indeed and made me oddly happy, and I say that as someone who has ruined more marriages (one) than they are ever going to personally experience, so.
  • Little Language Lessons: There are many reasons I don’t fcuk with Duolingo, the main one being their fcuking marketing and that fcuking owl, but those friends of mine who do seem to be largely of the opinion that the platform is vastly better at making you using Duolingo than it is at helping you learn a language. Google is experimenting with AI to develop language learning tools, and these are some games they’ve put in their Language Lab to let you see whether The Machine can help you Speak Foreign – you’ll have to VPN yourself into the US to use it, but if you do then you’ll see that there are a variety of different toys here that help you experience slang, get contextual examples of language use around specific topics and which, based on my admittedly-cursory examination of How It Works, looks like it might be halfway-useful. Give it a go, see what you think.
  • Buzzled: This is basically a bit like Sudoku, which means that is not really my thing AT ALL, but should you be in the market for a puzzler which requires you to basically work out which number goes where (ok, it’s a little moe involved than that, but not really) then you might enjoy this. Me, it makes my face ache something chronic.
  • Talldle: Wordle, but for celebrity heights – arrange the famous from least-to-most-stumpy (they are all stumpy; how do you think they fit onscreen?). To be honest this requires you to have a significantly better celebrity radar than I do – WHO THE FCUK ARE THESE PEOPLE?!?!?! – but you may derive some small quotidian joy from learning that Sydney Sweeney is taller than Eddie Murphy.
  • Be A Fly: A game in which you are a fly, and you have to collect things from various foodstuffs while avoiding the, er, bullets, and avoiding being chomped by the gigantic maw of the gigantic (or at least relatively-gigantic) human, all in 3d – this is a good, clean five minutes of fun (and who doesn’t want to be a fly? NO FCUKER, etc).
  • Little Dig: An EXCELLENT little clicker game which has GRAPHICS and which doesn’t outstay its welcome, and whose paper-thin plot is surprisingly amusing and which contains some actually-not-unfunny writing, and which has some of the most satisfyingly-crunchy sound effects I have ever heard in a free-to-play browsergame.
  • Lost For Swords: Finally this week, you can lose an hour or so to this – a deckbuilding roguelike puzzlegame thing in which you play as a selection of RPG-trope characters attempting to clear the various levels of various towers of monsters; this is about planning and resource management and careful weighing of costs and benefits and it’s FAR better than a free title need be, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

By Drew Vickers

AS IS NOW PARTLY-TRADITIONAL, OUR CLOSING MIX THIS WEEK IS A PLEASINGLY-BALEARIC SELECTION OF TUNES COMPILED BY BOBLEBAD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • The Overlook Hotel: A Tumblr celebrating the aesthetic of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, from the carpet to…well, EVERYTHING. This is a great collection of photos, memorabilia and WEIRD EPHEMERA inspired by the film, and is a rather wonderful trove for anyone with a soft spot for Jack Nicholson terrorising his family with an axe.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Wikihow: Wikihow has long been making hay with the…idiosyncratic nature of its how-to guides and their accompanying illustrations, but the company’s official Insta really leans hard into that; with this feed you just get the good stuff, the mad article headlines and the illustrations, meaning the grid here is all things like “how to breathe while kissing” and “what are dead eyes and why do people have them?”. What’s interesting from viewing the content from this angle is how much of it is obviously aimed at kids feeling insecure and confused – which, it feels like, is a market that is absolutely going to be eaten by LLMs. Enjoy WikiHow while you can, basically, is my takeaway here. Also, LOVE the fact that one of the ‘how to’ guides here is ‘how to fake your own death’, JUST IN CASE.
  • Mohawk Mania Bob: Apologies if Bob is very famous to you, but I only learned about him this week – do you have something to advertise? For what I presume are COMPETITIVE RATES, Bob will, er, bleach the name of your product or service into his mohawk and post the results on his Insta. If someone wants to pay him to promote Curios then, well, I am not going to say no. Also, how much would you give to see a photo of Bob and his hair straight out of the shower? I imagine it looks SPECTACULAR.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • One Of The Good Ones: This isn’t technically particularly long – SORRY – but I thought it was a heartfelt, personal response to this week’s announcement by the UK government that they were, in response to the recent local election results, going turn the racism dial until the clapping intensified; Adrian Hon writes on his blog about the reality of the policy announcement, why it doesn’t make practical sense, and the fundamentally racist underpinnings of it and the way in which it reinforces differential narratives of ‘good’ immigrants based, fundamentally, on issues related to skintone and religion. It’s interesting as the child of an immigrant to the UK myself – but a conveniently-Aryan looking child – that I haven’t ever had to answer any questions about my heritage and my belonging to this country simply by dint of my being a shade that passes for native, and anyone who doesn’t see what is at play here, what the subtext of a lot of this conversation is for a lot of the population, is either stupid or wilfully ignorant.
  • Things Can’t Only Get Better: Sticking with the parochial – sorry, non-Anglo readers, we will move onto WIDER CONCERNS soon, I promise – this is another good piece, this time by Jon Elledge, about the wider questions around the immigration policy announcement and what a colossal and baffling electoral misstep it appears to be from a Labour government whose sole apparent political strategy seems to be ‘mimic the policies of parties whose voterbase would never contemplate supporting us even if we went full fash’. Elledge makes the point that even if you’re not appalled by the rhetoric and the tone of the announcement and the subsequent media briefings, it’s just p1ss-poor party politics – back in the day, a political theorist called Otto Kirchheimer argued that the political strategy which made the greatest electoral sense, in the main, was to attempt to capture the widest swathe of the centre-ground as possible in order to maximise the size of your potential voterbase (maths! bell-curves!), something which appears to have been entirely-superseded by the alternative strategy of ‘let’s pander to what the wingnut press say and not even attempt to have any sort of debate about whether or not we should just let said press shift the overton window somewhere to the right of Viktor Orban’. As Jon writes, “But even if we leave aside both economic reality and basic human decency, which we shouldn’t, a set of policies that raise the salience of the issue while not actually addressing it seems all but guaranteed to piss everybody off at once. Telling people that immigration was the most important issue while simultaneously failing to reduce it is one of the many reasons the Tories lost. Repeating that trick, with Nigel Farage waiting in the wings – and making clear your own voters can f*ck off while you do so – goes beyond incompetence and into negligence.”
  • Labour At The Cliff Edge: Last UK politics link, promise, but this is James Butler on typically good form in the LRB; this was written after the local election results but before the immigration announcement, but is not less accurate for that. Butler looks at the electoral picture following the locals, what they might mean for the future political landscape of the UK, and paints a picture of the sad inevitability of the redrawing of the map with, yet again, this fcuking cnut at its centre: “Most of the media-political nexus is perfectly comfortable with the rise of a populist right party led by Nigel Farage. He, and, occasionally, other Reform politicians, can always be booked to say something outrageous. The right can claim an electoral warrant for intensifying its favourite prejudices: against ‘woke’ officials – however fictive – and against migrants, multiculturalism or simply modernity in all its forms. The liberal left can chastise itself for having beliefs, and try to disown them. The socialist left can declare itself analytically correct, to compensate for its political irrelevance. In declaring Reform the ‘main opposition party’, Farage is only formalising his outsize influence on British politics over the last two decades.” Can we all agree the world would be a better place if that planecrash had been a *little* bit more explosive? We can, can’t we?
  • Ghosts and Dolls: Ok, this is LONG and QUITE KNOTTY and not exactly a totally easy read, but if that’s not been enough to put you off (I’m available for all your salesy, copywriting needs!) then please do take the time to get into this one, all about the question of whether there is some inherent quality to LLM-produced writing which renders it innately inferior to human-produced writing *regardless of content* – this isn’t about whether LLM-generated writing is any *good* (it’s not) so much as whether it makes intellectual sense to dismiss all LLM-generated writing out of hand, a priori (it doesn’t). This is probably easier if you have a bit of grounding in philosophy, but there’s a real joy (or at least there was for me) in the way in which Paul Griffiths works through the reasoning here, and I very much enjoyed the questions around ‘meaning’ in writing and where said ‘meaning’ is derived from, and the links between ‘thought’ and ‘language’. Honestly, this is worth wrestling with, I promise, even if it does use the word ‘Wittgenstinian’ more often that you might be strictly comfortable with.
  • How Journalists Are Using AI:  A really interesting piece in the Columbia Journalism Review which speaks to journalists across a wide range of publications and sectors to ask them how – if it all – they are using The Machine in their practice, what for and how frequently and How It Feels and all that jazz. There are a VERY wide range of perspectives on show here, from straight-up refuseniks to people leaning in VERY HARD to the new tech, and, regardless of your personal opinion and perspective, it’s fascinating to see the different approaches at play. Personally-speaking I found myself most in sympathy with this quote from Jason Koebler at 404 Media: “We’re not burying our heads in the sand. We use AI tools every day to understand how they work, their limitations, and, most importantly, how they are being leveraged to become the dominant type of content on the internet. Because we do this, we have some of the leading coverage of generative AI on the internet. AI isn’t going away, and I could imagine using it in the future if it becomes more trustworthy and perhaps if the companies pushing it find more ethical business models. I have experimented with using AI to write complex Freedom of Information Act requests and FOIA appeals and to parse large documents, though I haven’t been impressed with the results. I passively use forms of AI to help transcribe interviews, get the gist of YouTube videos in foreign languages, and edit short-form videos and podcasts. Language translation and transcription feel like true game changers, while other AI tools feel like spam machines. I’ll use AI to help find new information, but not to write my words.”
  • It’s Not Just The Students Using The Machine: After last week’s ‘the students are being ruined by LLMs’ panicpiece, the students fight back with this NYT article detailing how many of them are apparently disgusted by their professors’ parallel use of The Machine in setting and grading assignments; in particular there are some fairly remarkable examples of teachers using The Machine to generate classroom materials, or plugging a grading scheme into an LLM and then using it to mark all their students’ work which…I don’t know, man, feels like something of an abnegation of responsibility to me: “Last fall, Marie, 22, wrote a three-page essay for an online anthropology course at Southern New Hampshire University. She looked for her grade on the school’s online platform, and was happy to have received an A. But in a section for comments, her professor had accidentally posted a back-and-forth with ChatGPT. It included the grading rubric the professor had asked the chatbot to use and a request for some “really nice feedback” to give Marie.”
  • Turns Our Pr0nHub Is Not A Nice Company: I KNOW RIGHT WHODATHINKIT??? This is a good piece of journalism in the NYT which takes a look at some of the internal processes and practices which the world’s preferred bongo platform employed, as revealed in internal memos which have come to light through court proceedings in the US. Specifically it makes it clear that the company has never been under any illusions about the quantity of…not-ok material filling up its sites, and the amount of CSAM or nonconsensual sex featured, or the ease with which users can not only search for such content but also get said content suggested to them via algorecommendations. I mean, look, I am not here to judge you for whatever you might be into, but it’s quite hard to read the following and think “Yes! This is exactly the approach we ought to be taking to bongo!” – “Pornhub executives clearly had some concern about illegal content, such as sex videos involving people who were 17 or younger, and the internal memos document efforts to remove the most obvious child videos (one staff member said “obvious” problems would be a “3-year-old”). But my impression is that Pornhub managers felt conflicted, because they closely tracked the popularity of topics and saw that videos of naked teenagers were a huge draw. The term “teen” sometimes ranked as high as second in search on Pornhub (“lesbian” then ranked No. 1). It’s true, of course, that “teen” can refer to an 18- or 19-year-old adult. But another internal Pornhub message observed that the website didn’t block “very young teen.” And note that children cannot legally consent, nor can parents consent on their behalf; underage sex videos are rape videos. The memos emerging in discovery show Pornhub wrestling with what to ban without losing too much popular content. In one set of messages, executives discuss whether to ban the use of the phrases “young girl,” “first anal crying” and “abused by daddy.” In the end, they decide that those terms are acceptable.”
  • Being A Normie Is Good Actually: I’m including this because, look, I know some of you are strategists and times are hard out there and so here’s something you can hang a spurious ‘deck’ (STOP IT) on should you so desire, but also because it struck me as sort-of funny that it takes the author over 1000 words to come to the conclusion that, basically, being in the middle of the bellcurve is actually quite comforting and safe and nice. I read this and all I could think of was John Stuart Mill’s assertion that “it is better to be a man dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” and how I knew the first time I heard it that JSM was full of sh1t and, honestly, I stand by that. “Michael O’Hara, a fashion photographer in New York, swears the basics “have more fun”. “In New York City, there’s a huge group of people in the same line of work as me that thrive on exclusivity,” he says. “Sometimes, I just want to let loose, and normies are more interested in having fun and being carefree.” It brings to mind the age-old fashion girlfriend, finance boyfriend stereotype, or as O’Hara calls it, “left-brained” and “right-brained” people. “I love my basic friend groups because you don’t need to take an hour to get ready, we aren’t on any list, money is not an issue, they don’t judge you for what you’re wearing and everyone has happy and positive energy,” he says.” For some reason I can’t help but have a mental image of the Voros twins as I read this piece.
  • Would The Tech Founders Just Fcuk Off Please?: Or “That profile of the Airbnb CEO where you can just SMELL the gaksweat dripping off him”. So you may have read that Airbnb is PIVOTING to become, er, some sort of weird lifestyle mishmash app, combining EXPERIENCES and SERVICES with the apartment-rental baseline service that has made the company rich. Why? I DON’T KNOW BECAUSE THESE PEOPLE CAN NEVER JUST BE FCUKING HAPPY BEING REALLY FCUKING RICH OR SOMETHING. Seriously, I don’t personally give two flying fcuks about Airbnb as a business, or its model or whether it succeeds or fails, but I will never, ever tire of reading profiles of them in which it is very clear that they are mad or on drugs or both, particular when the author is as…aware of what they are writing as they are in this case. “In early April, I visited Chesky at the company’s lavish San Francisco headquarters. The relaunch was five weeks away. The second floor—where signs warn employees not to bring visitors—had become a sprawling eyes-only command center. The walls were covered with dozens of large poster boards, each one featuring a city, that read as if a group of McKinsey consultants had tackled a fourth-grade geography assignment. Austin, Texas, was written up as “a funky come-as-you-are kind of place” with a handful of “first principles,” one of which was “Outlaw of Texas,” with pointers to food trucks and vintage markets. Another so-called principle was “Live and Alive,” referring to music venues and bat watching; a third was “Dam Lakes,” referring to various water sports. Other blindingly obvious notations included barbeque, tacos, and the two-step. The Paris poster painted a “revolutionary” city marked by slow living and enduring culture.”
  • How Videogame Sex Scenes Are Made: A properly-fascinating look at the business of creating intimate moments in videogames, featuring in-depth discussions with the teams behind Baldur’s Gate 3 (one of the horniest mainstream games in recent memory, and probably the only one I can think of which features a relatively-explicit interspecies coupling) and Cyberpunk 2077 (also horny, although more traditionally so – although it did, famously, feature an entirely-otiose feature which allowed anyone selecting a male-presenting protagonist to select from one of three preset dong sizes, a choice which had the sum total of zero impact on the rest of the game) from the designers to the actors to the intimacy coordinators; this is a great look at the why, as well as the how, of fcuking in videogames, and contains a wonderful quote from one of the actors and foley artists involved in crafting the gasps and slaps and squelches accompanying the in-engine fcuking: ““I made sounds like mmm and ahhh, and then I kissed my hand a whole lot. You think about that. You mull that over as you run around, you little horny perverts with your little perverted roleplays. You randy b4stards. You think of me.”
  • The Curry Awards: A great piece in Vittles about the UK’s various curry awards, of which there seem to be a near-infinite number, and the rivalries and…somewhat-dodgy dealings that lie behind them. This isn’t, of course, unique to the Indian food sector – if you walk around the West End and pay attention to a lot of…not-particularly-prepossessing establishments, you’ll see that many of their windows are emblazoned with stickers suggesting they have ‘won’ various ‘restaurant awards’ of varying degrees of credibility (these aren’t the Michelins, is what I’m saying), not to mention the OH SO CREDIBLE world of PR awards ceremonies, where there is a longstanding and well-established understanding that your likelihood of winning one of the three million awards presented at the PR Moment bash is directly tied to the number of seats you purchase for the ceremony. Basically almost all awards ceremonies are FCUKING CROOKED and the curry awards are no exception – this makes for a very entertaining read.
  • The London Pedicab Market: More excellent London-centric journalism by Jim Waterson in, er, LondonCentric – here he looks at the pedicab business, something which from the outside I have always looked at and thought ‘this has to be criminal’ (and also ‘who the actual fcuk is paying to be inched around the capital while Sabrina Carpenter perforates their eardrums at c.120db?’) and which I am pleased to report based on this article seemingly mostly is. Also, though, let me confess that I read things like this and feel no fcuking sympathy whatsoever for the people getting ripped off here because, honestly, what the fcuk is wrong with them? “TikTok and Instagram are full of videos of tourists being ripped off by pedicab drivers, from a group of American women being charged £200 for a five minute journey in Mayfair, despite the driver’s initial promise that the journey would cost under £80, to a pedicab driver telling a man that the fare would be £5 per minute, totalling more than £200. In a 2023 complaint to TfL, one pedicab customer said they were “swindled” with an extortionate £1,278.96 fare from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. Other complaints described fares that were ten times what drivers claimed – £336 instead of £36.60, or £94.40 instead of £9.40 – with passengers only realising when they checked their bank statements after paying.” I mean, lol, honestly.
  • Staying Up All Night on 3-MMC: I remember one of the first times I started to feel REALLY old was when I was out one night and realised that people around me were talking about and taking a drug I had genuinely never heard of before (2cb, in case you were curious) – I have long since ceased caring about keeping up with whatever The Kids choose to put inside themselves, having in middle-age recently rediscovered with a degree of childlike joy just how fcuking GREAT high-quality amphetamines can be (for avoidance of doubt, Web Curios is always penned sober, much as the prose might give a…different impression), but I enjoyed this look at what is apparently the NEW CLUB DRUG TAKING BERLIN BY STORM. In particular I enjoyed the nostalgic look back at The Summer Of MiaowMiaow, a drug which I still remember very fondly indeed, which fondness I now realise might have had something to do with its purity tipping 97% back in the day (the night it was made illegal in the UK, one of my then-girlfriend’s mates had a massive attack of paranoia and gave us…quite a lot of it, my god that was a good weekend).
  • Walking: Over the years I have at various stages recommended the epistolary walking journals of American-inJapan Crain Mod to you – he’s got a new book out which is all about walking and writing and What He Has Learned from his punishing days-long walk-and-talkathons, and this piece is a little overview of his…what, his ‘walking philosophy’? Ordinarily a phrase like that would cause me to have an unpleasantly-emetic moment, but on this occasion I will forgive it because I love the way Craig writes and his enthusiasm and curiosity is, I think, quite magical – it’s impossible to read this and not want to go out and just walk and look and watch and think, honestly, and as soon as I have finished writing this crap I am going for a long wander.
  • The Lisbon Illusion: Marco Roth writes in The Dispatch (a publication you may have to sign up to to access, but signup is entirely free and they don’t appear to have done anything awful with my email address so far) about being in Lisbon and community and place and the weird, dwindling feeling of being not-unlike the characters described here: “It’s different now in Lisbon, Fred says, an outlook shared by many overeducated and underemployed middle-aged men here. An Uber driver who’s listening to Philip Glass remarks that he’s given up on politics and political parties. He misses the politicians of the 1980s: “At least they were smart and had ideas.” The CGT too, Fred says, is stodgy and lacks imagination. The city is “dying of its own success”, according to a recent headline in Madrid’s El Pais. And Fred is in some ways the representative of many dashed hopes — a widely-travelled, still curious man who deals furniture, books and records but can no longer afford rent in the city he loves and whose past he has done much to preserve by selling it upstream to barbarians like me.” I thought this was a lovely piece of writing.
  • Yes: On the 30th anniversary of the absolute BANGER that is ‘Yes’ by McAlmont and Butler, Ian Wade writes about the song, its genesis, its reception and its legacy – obviously your interest in this is likely to be directly proportionate to how old you were when this came out, but, well, presuming you’re closer to death than birth then I reckon you will have your nostalgia glands firmly squeezed by this one. Also, it’s a great excuse to listen to the song again, which I suggest you do RIGHT NOW.
  • Easter With Icke: My occasional obsession, David Icke, is still doing the rounds, still promoting his weird modern-day perversion of Gnosticism along with his grifty sons – except now even David Icke occasionally sounds…normal railing against Trump and other modern ills at the same time as telling us that, er, the lizards are in charge and it’s probably the fault of the Rothschilds BUT IT’S NOT ANTISEMITIC HONEST! This is an excellent account of a trip to the Ickean roadshow – not quite of the scale of the Wembley Arena show that sent me spinning out back in…Jesus Christ, some 12 years ago. This is, as with all Ickean material, interesting and funny and a bit worrying and deeply, deeply sad – also I really wasn’t expecting the former Man City footballer to make an appearance.
  • To Catch A Hooligan: MORE great London reporting, this time from The Londoner, who sent Miles Ellingham (whose work I have really enjoyed over the past year and which I have featured in here a few times now) to hang out with the anti-hooligan police as they manage the firms at various matches around the capital. I remember the first time I want to Stamford Bridge to watch Chelse in…Jesus, maybe 1991, and seeing people literally standing on upturned soapboxes outside the ground handing out flyers for then-notorious neo-Nazi organisation Combat18 (never let it be said that Chelsea fans’ reputation for being fcuking awful hasn’t been fully-earned, and I say that as a Chelsea fan) – while the game’s certainly significantly less terrifyingly violent than it was three decades ago there are still people for whom the matches are a side order for the main course of A LOVELY RUCK. This is really nicely-written and paints a wonderfully-human picture of the officers – and the hoolies – involved.
  • At Crufts: The London Review of Books sends Rosa Lyster to Crufts. Every single word of this is golden, and, honestly, I have no fcuking interest in dogs whatsoever (don’t look at me like that, they smell and I don’t want to have to deal with any other mammal’s faeces other than my own, and even that is reluctantly). This is SO GOOD: “If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International Freestyle, and you will find a Slovakian woman and a Border collie doing a frantic synchronised dance routine to a raunchy cover of ‘Hit the Road Jack’, the collie hopping on its hind legs for ten seconds and at certain points giving the strong impression that it understands the concept of dumping a useless man. Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers saying ‘bitch’ over and over: obedience bitch, limit bitch, postgraduate bitch, this magnificent young bitch from Venice, this famous bitch from America.”
  • Pilgrimage: The final link this week isn’t to a single essay – instead, it’s to a blog being maintained by Jan Hopis (whose writing I have featured in here before) as he undertakes the Camino de Santiago – Jan’s writing is funny and personal and observational and I am very much enjoying accompanying him on his journey and I would highly recommend this to all of you because, basically, He Is Good At This.

By Mike Silva

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 09/05/25

Reading Time: 34 minutes

 

Last night I got a copy of a GLOSSY MAGAZINE with MY ACTUAL BYLINE IN IT and, er, as a result I got quite p1ssed in celebration and as such a) this has been a real fcuking struggle, as might become apparent from the coming carcrash prose; b) if you are the nice person who was press-ganged into learning about Web Curios by my friend Hector then, well, I am sorry and I really don’t expect you to read beyond this point.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you honestly have no idea what it feels like to write one of these after four hours of fitful sleep.

By Sarah Birns

WE BEGIN WITH A SELECTION OF BLEEPS, BLOOPS AND BEATS FROM THE RELIABLY-TRANCEY MP3BAG OF FORMER-EDITOR PAUL! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS HOPING FOR A ‘PIOUS’ OR AN ‘INNOCENT’ TBH, PT.1:  

  • Musing: What’s the BEST thing about the web? No, Jesus, NO, it’s not that stuff – not that stuff at ALL, what is *wrong* with you? The ACTUAL best thing about the web is the fact that, in the main, THE WEB IS PEOPLE, like Soylent Green but even less nutritious. Although, actually, that’s only going to be true for a relatively-short time, now that we have UNFETTERED THE MACHINE and the richest people in the world are encouraging us to open our minds to infinite slop. Still, at the time of typing it’s broadly true that much of what you see online is still, just, the product of ACTUAL HUMANS and their ACTUAL HUMAN BRAINS and as such is a strange, wonderful, horrible, maddening infomap of our hopes and desires and fears and loves and hates, and that one of the most wonderful things about it is the feeling of strange, mad variety of experience and perspective it occasionally still affords us, and this site is a lovely example of some of the things I enjoy most about how the web reflects us as a species. Musing is, I think, something that has been hacked together by some kid somewhere, and it’s a very simple proto-social-network which lets anyone who logs on post their thoughts about whatever they like, anonymously, with said thought geotagged based on their IP location – which makes this site a sort of live map of the global id, or at least the part of the global id that happens to have stumbled across this URL and felt compelled to share. You can scroll through all the posts in the right-hand sidebar, or scroll around the map to click on geomarkers to read the things people have been motivated to post, and…look, there is no great profundity here, no great insight to draw or community to find, it is entirely ephemeral and the sort of thing that people will find, click on, maybe post to and then bounce off again forever, but I love it SO MUCH and I could honestly spend a good hour or so going through every single thing posted here – why did some nameless individual living on Willowmead Square in Marlow post that ‘life was a bit sucky right now’? Did the person in Thessaloniki who wrote that “i’m in love with my online friend who i met up with a while back” ever resolve their romantic dilemma?  Honestly, the anonymity combined with the geolocation make this SO COMPELLING to me, so please, er, feel free to spill your guts into this so I can come back in a few days time and read all your deepest, darkest thoughts and fears and secrets and KNOW YOUR SOUL.
  • Infinite Roadtrip: Friend of Curios Neal Agarwal returns with another pleasingly-inventive webtoy, this one a COLLABORATIVE MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE – this is basically a game built on top of Google Maps (I think) which lets whoever is on the site at any given time DRIVE A CAR TOGETHER! You’re presented with a first-person view of a road and the ‘game’ (ok, fine, I am using this term loosely, but) involves everyone whose online at any given time being able to vote every 5-10s or so on the next directional move that the virtual car should take along the virtually-represented roads. Which, I know, doesn’t SOUND fun, but it’s amazing how quickly you (ok, I) get invested in attempting to navigate the virtual vehicle – I haven’t spent enough time with this to tell whether any sort of minor metagame has developed and people are battling to get us to Disneyland or something, but it feels like the sort of thing that might foster that sort of creativity. There’s even the option to listen to the radio while you play, with (I *think* the site selecting a radio station based on where you are on the map, which is a lovely touch). At the time of writing there are 334 people steering a virtual car through the streets of rural Massachusets, which, honestly, is such a brilliantly-stupid sentence to be able to write.
  • The Map Of Reddit: Over the years I have featured a selection of ‘Maps of Reddit’, but I think this is possibly the most-impressive attempt I’ve seen to create a navigable visualisation of the vast, sprawling mess that is the internet’s collective id. This basically creates a 2d-networked representation of all the different nooks and crannies of Reddit which you can scroll around and wander through – zoom in and out to close in on specific subReddits or thematic areas, scroll around and see the different ‘territories’ that are visible when you’re taking a birds-eye view of the whole site…this really is an incredible way of seeing the insane breadth and scope of the different topics covered across Reddit, and, should you be in need of it, not a terrible way of doing research into specific communities around a topic area; clicking on a sub will bring up the feed of posts in a left-hand sidebar, meaning this is also a pretty useful tool for sectoral research – there’s a search function so you can find a specific, known sub and then navigate on from there. This is, honestly, SO interesting, if only as a means of seeing the rough shape and scope of the Reddit knowledge graph – a few small observations, should you be interested; 1) wow India-related content makes up an awful lot of the total quantity of subs; 2) JESUS GOD THERE IS SO MUCH BONGO HERE. Like, seriously – I know you know there is a lot of pr0n on Reddit, but, well, WOW is there an awful lot of pr0n on Reddit. Also I have just learned that there is a whole corner of the site dedicated to amateur taxidermy which I am 100% coming back to later because DEAR GOD some of the photos. Basically all of human life is here, particularly the sticky and mucal bits.
  • Recurse: MACHINE MUSIC! Many years ago a former colleague of mine invited me for a coffee to meet their new boss, because said boss wanted some ‘digital insights’ or somesuch – I dutifully went for a meeting, was bought a coffee, offered some ’digital insights’ and then never heard from any of them again. Completely-unexpectedly, said boss got in touch with me again this week, a full decade or so after our single meeting (have you been reading Curios all these years, boss? Honestly, I am weirdly impressed if a touch confused as to what you’ve been getting out of it), to communicate the following via the medium of press release: “British tech company MOTH has just launched Archaeo, a new quantum-powered generative AI platform designed to work with creatives, not against them. Crucially, Archaeo is built to respect authorship and ownership – learning only from artist-provided data and avoiding the copyright-scraping methods at the centre of today’s AI ethics debate. To show the technology in action, MOTH has partnered with UK electronic artist ILĀ to co-create RECURSE – the first commercially released music track powered by quantum machine learning. It’s now live on streaming platforms and accompanied by a 24/7 interactive “infinite mix” that evolves in real-time.” WELL AREN’T THOSE SOME WORDS! QUANTUM MACHINE LEARNING! Is…is the use of ‘quantum’ in this context total fcuking bullsh1t? OOH I THINK IT MIGHT BE YOU KNOW! Still, you can click the link and listen to the ‘infinite mix’ of this AI track, which doesn’t really work as music and equally doesn’t really explain how it’s been made with any clarity, or whether it’s being composed ‘live’, or whether it’s just a looped recording – is this appealing to you? No, I can’t imagine it is. Still, COVERAGE!
  • AI Clippy: I love this a LOT. This is a downloadable interface for a bunch of different open source LLMs which basically takes Clippy, the paperclip mascot for MS Word that the older and more jaded of you will remember from simpler (better? Were they better? I can barely remember, honestly) times, and reconfigures it as a wrapper for The Machine. This is, honestly, SO smart and nicely-done, and, aside from the retrofetishism, is actually a rather nice way of rendering the AI assistant as desktop companion – was…was Clippy actually GOOD after all? Here’s the blurb – obviously your mileage will vary depending on what kit you run this one, but, generally, this is FUN: Clippy lets you run a variety of large language models (LLMs) locally on your computer while sticking with a user interface of the 1990s. It’s a love letter and homage to the late, great Clippy – and the visual design created by Microsoft in that era. Simple, familiar, and classic chat interface. Send messages to your models, get a response. Batteries included: No complicated setup. Just open the app and chat away. Thanks to llama.cpp and node-llama-cpp, the app will automatically discover the most efficient way to run your models (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, etc). Custom models, prompts, and parameters: Load your own downloaded models and play with the settings. Offline, local, free.”
  • Ethnologue: You may well have been aware that we are currently living through the international decade of indigenous languages – you weren’t, though, were you? DO NOT LIE TO ME – but I had been totally oblivious of this until discovering this EXCELLENT site, which is basically just a huge resource for information about EVERY SINGLE LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD (ok, fine, I can’t know this for certain, but any website which contains specific sections for tongues from Angal Enen (no, me neither) to Zulgo-Gemzek (no, nothing, sorry) is probably as close to comprehensive as it’s possible to get. This has SO much material on it, on the history and etymology and root structure of various language systems to maps of where languages are spoken, and while this is the online portal for a paid-for service you can learn a lot just by clicking around; if you’re interested in language and linguistics this is fascinating and a hell of a resource.
  • Reform Minds: A week on from the local election results in the UK (international readers who don’t give two flying fcuks about the parochial politics of my grey-skied island nation, feel free to skip this one) and with frog-faced racism-ashtray Nigel Farage continuing to bestride the country’s media like some sort of horrible, damp-skinned batrachian colossus, the UK media and political commentary class seems undecided as to whether this was a flash in the pan or a seismic redrawing of the nation’s political boundaries. It’s evident, though, from even a cursory glance across the miserable bits of social media that the REFORM MESSAGE is very much resonating with people, not least through content like that posted by TikTok account Reform Minds, which is currently posting 3-4 videos a day combining down-the-lens commentary on THE LATEST NEWS by some guy (who, for reasons known only to him, is DEFINITELY using AI to tweak his voice slightly) with AI-generated imagery featuring UK political figures in the now-familiar slop style…the content is relatively-unremarkable in terms of talking points, but what I find interesting is the volume and the consistency – because, of course, you can now churn out something like this (with graphics and visuals and transitions and and and) in, what, 30m? The clips don’t have huge numbers – they top out around 100k, with most only getting 3000 or so – but I think it’s interesting and indicative of a new vector in political comms, activism, propagandising, however you want to cast it, born out of the lowering of ‘cost of content’ to basically 0 and the ability to spin up pretty much anything you want in seconds to a potential algo-accessed audience of millions, in the hope of winning the content creator’s viral jackpot and earning a few pennies. Is this good? I mean, it doesn’t matter, it’s happening!
  • Path To Philosophy: You know that ‘game’ that people have been doing on Wikipedia for years where you have to see how quickly you can get from any given entry to ‘philosophy’ (or, depending on your proclivities, ‘sex’ or ‘sausages’ or ‘hitler’)? Well this is that, but automated – plug in any topic you care to think of and this site will find the relevant Wikipage and calculate the number of steps it would take you to get from there to philosophy, mapping out the points along the way. You may – or may not! I don’t know you! – be interested to know that it takes a minimum of 16 steps to get there from ‘fisting’, for example. There’s a vague ludic element here insofar as you can compete to find the longest route to philosophy – the current leader is a Japanese era name, fwiw, but YOU CAN DO BETTER.
  • Roons: Ooh, this looks like something which some of you – ok, maybe…two of you? Certainly no more than seven, but, well, I LIVE TO SERVE YOU – might really really like; this is coming to Kickstarter soon, as far as I can tell, but you can sign up for updates in advance of its official launch; basically Roons is a sort of modular building block set which lets you model computational processes using 3d sculptural elements, each bit of which can be combined to create physical representations of computational functions with which you can move ballbearings through a system…which, Jesus, even by my standards is a fcuking TERRIBLE excuse for a description, but perhaps their own words will help: “roons are a kit for building mechanical computers — think “real-life Minecraft redstone“.Snap together logic gates, state, and other miniature components to invent your own devices — transistors, memory, processors, programs, and much more.” Is that better? Anyway, this actually looks really quite cool (in a very specific, very uncool way) and is something that I think the engineers and computer scientists among you might enjoy.
  • Pin The Tale: What 3 Words is a genuinely strange and mysterious company, existing for fcuking AGES despite the fact that noone actually uses it and that lots and lots of people who know and understand this stuff are very, very clear that it’s a fundamentally-flawed system with some pretty significant inherent issues which mean it’s not in fact anything more than a gimmick. AND YET, it has managed to survive for ages now, and gets a weird quantity of positive media coverage (delivered via a very expensive international PR agency which I am increasingly certain has some sort of a stake the company), despite it still not having anything resembling a usecase. Still, we now have this game, built on top of What 3 Words, so maybe this will suddenly make me less suspicious of it – Pin The Tale is a rather neat little…what is it? Game? Collaborative storytelling project? Creative writing exercise? ALL OF THE ABOVE! “What3words divides the world into 3x3m squares and gives each one a unique address made up of three random words. These words are the building blocks of all the stories on our map.All stories on Pin the Tale are contributed by our users. To share a story about a place, simply find its address on our map and write a story that includes all its three words. It’s just like a treasure hunt. Zoom into the map to read stories that other people have written about that area. If you can identify a story’s exact location, type its what3words address into the answer box.” This is basically a combination of cryptic crosswords and Geoguessr, which won’t really make sense until you click the link and have a spelunk, but I promise you that there’s something quite oddly addictive about it once you get into the groove of attempting guess locations from storyclues (also, some of the effort people have gone to with the clues is genuinely impressive).

By Kate Sweeney

NEXT UP, HAVE A FOUR-HOUR HOUSE SET BY JURANGO AT TRESOR IN BERLIN! 

THE SECTION WHICH WAS HOPING FOR A ‘PIOUS’ OR AN ‘INNOCENT’ TBH, PT.2:  

  •  Meta AI: I KNOW YOU ARE BORED OF AI I AM BORED OF AI I AM SORRY. But, well, this is interesting, so. You may – or, actually, may not, given you aren’t presumably like me and don’t have to have to keep up with every single tedious fcuking twist and turn in the Evolution Of The Machine – have heard that Meta has launched a standalone web presence for its AI tools, a la GPT et al; well, this is that link. The tool itself is utterly unremarkable – lol, how quickly we become jaded! How quickly the amazement fades! – and can basically be summarised as ‘GPT, but not as good’, but the real draw here is what happens if you scroll below the fold; anyone asking a question of this instance of The Machine is offered the opportunity to make their query, and the outputs, visible to the world, meaning that this site effectively acts as a sort of semi-relatime (it’s not realtime, this isn’t (sadly, but understandably) the entire firehose of requests) feed of What People Are Using AI For Right Now and FCUKING HELL is it a strange window into the collective id of the species. Honestly, I really do think that our interactions with The Machine and what we ask of it are quite spectacularly fascinating in terms of What It Says about us as animals, about society and culture…and it’s also, honestly, a really revealing window into the middle of the bellcurve, so to speak. If you consider Meta’s status as the owner of the world’s most ubiquitous social platforms, and the fact that as a result of a decade’s aggressive positioning the company is, in some parts of the world, basically synonymous with ‘the internet’, it’s fair to say that there is no better window into a mass sample of the human race than what happens on its platforms. So what do we learn? Well, FCUK ME is it clear that the Bluesky disdain for AI and AI-generated content isn’t universal – sorry, refuseniks, but the fact is that the vast majority of people simply do not give a fcuk about the impact on artists or creators or the environment and will happily use this sh1t to spin up their banal imaginings until the heat death of the universe (possibly accelerated by said banal imaginings); we also learn that WOW do Indians really like using this stuff (and people in the Philippines, apparently), and WOW do they like using it to make vaguely-bellicose propaganda about what they might do to Pakistan given half the chance (WW3 as presaged by Pixarified Modi-slop! WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD!), and, in general, I think this is SO interesting (and, honestly, not a little depressing in terms of what it reveals about our general lack of imagination – you can ask this for ANYTHING and you’re demanding 300 images of inspired by the prompt “Step into a whimsical world of sweet delights”? FFS, Anuj Kumar Pashwan, TRY HARDER (also, I love the fact that when you choose to make your prompt public it tells the world your ACTUAL META USERNAME, which feels…possibly like something they might want to patch out). Basically this is fascinating from the point of view of social/digital anthropology, even if the actual outputs are, well, largely-dogsh1t.
  • Oilwell: Do we still care about the climate crisis? It’s hard to tell to be honest. Still, the people behind this site evidently do – Oilwell is PARODIC SATIRE, taking aim at international PR giants Edelman for their continued policy of ‘being paid a fcuktonne of money by fossil fuel and other ‘energy’ businesses to burnish their reputations, despite the fact that we all know by now that actually that’s quite ethically dubious’, and the site presents itself as a ‘wellness app’ designed to help users cope with the stresses of the climate emergency, in an obvious dig at the sort of soft-touch comms work undertaken by agencies such as Edelman for clients like Shell et al. This is surprisingly deep in terms of content – there are a variety of spoof mindfulness exercises and the like, a little ambient soundboard to create a natural soundscape to soothe the mind, and a host of little features that mimic and mock the wellness app industry…but, equally, it all feels a bit toothless and unfocused, and I am not sure what I am meant to do with the knowledge that greenwashing the climate emergency and those that caused it is A Bad Thing, and part of me always wonders with stuff like this whether the clevercleverness of the wrapping idea rather obscures the point that the campaigners are trying to make with the site…still, though, fcuk Edelman, they are a company that represents some truly fcuking dreadful people and I will never tire of putting it in writing that they have trousered literally millions and millions of pounds from the Sackler family for helping them escape censure for their part in literally creating the opioid crisis. Most agencies are largely-amoral hives of scummery, but a special place in hell for these lads.
  • London’s Busiest Bus Stops: Yes, I know, but I live here and *I* find this interesting, so. Have you ever wanted to know which bus stop on a specific London route is the busiest so that you can OPTIMISE YOUR COMMUTE? Apparently the ABSOLUTE busiest bus stop in the city is just down the road from me in Brixton, which…really? Does it REALLY have twice as many annual boarders as the next-busiest in Harrow? Anyway, this is…curious rather than essential, but if I can imagine a few scenarios in which this information might possibly be of value to you (ok, two scenarios – food trucks and terrorism. Could you all please try not to do any of the latter, please? thanks!).
  • The Streamer University: Do you have children? Have you accepted the fact that their future is going to be unknowable weird in ways in which you can’t possibly comprehend? Why not give into their demands and let them sack of university in favour of taking their chances in the bearpit that is THE CREATOR ECONOMY? Now, thanks to the world’s current Champion Of Stream Kai Cenat, your streaming wannabes can give themselves a head start in life by enrolling in THE STREAMER UNIVERSITY, which promises…hang on, what *does* it promise? Well, according to the site’s blurb, “streamers of all backgrounds will have the opportunity to showcase their personalities as students, alongside both unrealized, upcoming and well-established creators” – is that…is that learning? There’s not an awful lot of information actually available about this – there’s basically a homepage and an application form – but from the bullets on the homepage I have managed to discern that “while most classes will be fun, entertaining, and collaborative, some classes will actually provide quality information on how to better yourself as creators. Your future success is important to us!”. Honestly, I have to sort of admire the sheer, naked bullsh1tness of the whole thing, and the idea that SOME classes will teach you something…but not all of them (you wouldn’t, after all, want to overdose on learning!). This, then, feels very much, er, ‘vibes-led’, so maybe suggest to little Tommy and Jessica that they don’t give up on formal education just yet. I did, though, like the list of courses that are set to be offered at the bottom, running the gamut from, er, sex education to music production and MANY MORE. This is THE FUTURE.
  • Particle News: I have seen a LOT of terrible AI ‘news’ sites over the past few years, but Particle is the first that feels…almost-useful? To be clear, this is not a ‘good’ news site, in the sense that all it’s doing is scraping, aggregating and synthesising from a range of sources and there is nothing original about the reporting…but, also, it provides sources for its summaries in the modern LLM style, and it doesn’t seem to be pulling from anything obviously fake or crazy, and the way it presents the information isn’t horrible and, God, I feel weirdly…guilty? for saying this, but…I don’t hate it, and I can imagine it being a non-terrible way of quickly catching up on breaking news and getting a range of perspectives on a story quickly. Which, yes, really does feel icky to say, but, well, here we are. What’s also interesting about this is that the app version of the site allows users to ask questions of each story, offering summary answers and allowing a degree of dialogue with the news – on the website you can’t ask questions but you can see what others have asked, which is, again, another interesting additional layer which…I don’t hate,. Basically this feels like a small rubicon has been crossed in terms of the quality of this sort of automated news site, for better or worse.
  • Vert: A file converter that does everything locally on your device, because it was about time someone came up with an alternative to Zamzar. Ok, this is VERY DULL but it’s also practically useful so bookmark it and you can thank me later (you won’t, though, will you?).
  • Welikia: Via Laura Olin’s newsletter, this is a really interesting site looking at the physical history of the wider New York area, specifically the way in which the land has been used over time and how that has changed over the years. “The Welikia Project aims to illuminate the rich ecological history that underwrites the development of New York City. Drawing from historical research and scientific modeling, the project visualizes the block-by-block ecosystems, geologic foundations, and stewards of the land before New York. Our hope is to provide insight into how drastically our own neighborhoods have changed over time, with aim to inspire new ways of living with nature in New York.” The site shows you a map of the greater New York area, and you can click on different bits of it to get a history of the sorts of flora and fauna that once existed there – so for example I have just learned that the area around Grand Central Station used to be an ‘oak-tulip tree forest community’ (I don’t entirely know what this means, but that is ok), which knowledge I find vaguely-comforting.
  • Satellite Explorer: An interactive visualisation of some of the satellites currently in orbit around the planet – the main takeaway here is that there are FCUKING LOADS OF THEM, and that, given I don’t think that this viz takes into account the past couple of years, this is only a fraction of the whole. There’s something sort of bleak/funny about the fact that we as a species are seemingly incapable of doing anything without leaving a massive, ungodly fcuking mess behind afterwards. What are the long-term implications of us cluttering our orbit with millions of tonnes of floating space debris? WE DON’T KNOW!
  • The CivicVerse: Look, I have to be entirely honest with you here and say that I do not for the life of me have any idea what this is meant to be – seriously, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? “CivicVerse is more than a project—it’s a movement. A decentralized, people-powered metaverse designed to reshape how society functions by placing technology, opportunity, and governance back into the hands of civilians. Built on blockchain principles and sustained by community mining, flipping, and collaborative development, CivicVerse is the convergence point of real-world utility and digital freedom.” I mean, those are definitely some words arranged in a specific order! As far as I can tell from reading on, there is some vaguely-utopican vision here that involves mining a bunch of crypto, flipping it, and then using the real-world cash to buy…land? Actual, physical land, on which will be constructed some sort of…crypto-blockchain commune? Hang on, is this another bunch of libertarian freaks who want to create their own nation state? IT FCUKING IS YOU KNOW! Anyway, I very much enjoyed this because it is SO mad and ticks a lot of tropey boxes, and also contained the following two aspirational points which I am going to present here without further comment: “TikTok-style shortform educational and news content from civilian creators with transparent funding and audit trails [AND] Verified Propaganda Ledger: All government and corporate communications are stored and timestamped on-chain to ensure public accountability.” I mean, doesn’t that sound…utopian? Oh, as an aside, WHY DOES THIS NEED THE FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN??? Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t because nothing does.
  • Advanced Bible Search: Given that HABEMAS PAPAM, many of you might now be rushing to brush up on your theology and bible studies, and might as a result find this website, which lets you search ALL OF THE BIBLE (old and new testament, psalms, the whole deal) for whatever you want. Which is probably really useful for serious scholarly enquiry, but also means you can also just do things like searching for the keyphrase “lie with” to see exactly which bits of the bible are horniest (Genesis, hands-down), or ‘babylon’ to get straight to all the fun bits in Revelation.
  • 24h Of Lemons: I don’t drive; I have never driven; I would almost certainly be a fcuking TERRIBLE motorist and a total liability behind the wheel; that said, if I *could* drive I would absolutely love to take part in one of these races. 24h of Lemons is basically a loose-knit collective of people across the US who organise Le Mans-style racing events for really, really sh1t vehicles – the only rule is that the total cost of the car and its fit-out can’t total more than $500, otherwise ANYTHING GOES. Seriously, were I a very Different Type of Man I would totally bookmark this for a LADS HOLIDAY. Would…anyone like to invite me along?
  • Gander: I’ve been watching with interest the various calls for Europe to develop its own software stack so as to reduce our collective reliance on US tech platforms – I didn’t, though, expect Canada to launch its own national social network. BUT HERE WE ARE! I don’t think this is an OFFICIAL Canadian thing, but Gander is very much setting itself up as a Canuck-owned, less-creepy version of…what, Insta? This is pre-launch, but you can sign up for updates if the idea of ‘social media, but not beholden to some of the worst people on the planet’ appeals to you. I do think that, whether or not this ever takes off (I am…skeptical), there is something interesting about the idea of nation-level networks like this that I could actually see being a useful use of federated networks – such a shame that the fediverse continues to be such a total fcuking incomprehensible mess.
  • The Brooklyn Pirate Radio Map: Via my friend Simon, who runs the excellent Unspun Heroes vinyl label, comes this GREAT site which basically maps pirate radio stations (are they really ‘pirate’ radio? Fcuk knows, but that’s what the site calls them and, well, who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, etc!) around Brooklyn NYC. You can filter the stations by era so you can learn about THE PAST, or alternatively get links to streams of current stations – thanks to the wonder of the web I have typed this entry while listening to the glorious strains of Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak Radio which is significantly more fun-sounding than this non-yiddish speaker would have expected. This is very good indeed.
  • Cryptic DJ: A DAILY GUESSING GAME! “Hidden within the Titles and Artists of famous songs are words that have some kind of link” – guess the titles, the artists and the link! This is JUST challenging enough to be fun.
  • Unzoomed: ANOTHER DAILY PUZZLE GAME! This one is ACE, but fcuk me has it once again pointed out to me how terrible I am at geography and how I basically know nothing about the planet on which I live. Unzoomed gives you six attempts to guess which city you’re being shown on a map – you start zoomed in, and each unsuccessful guess zooms you out a little further, giving you a better chance of working out where exactly in the world you are; wrong guesses tell you how far away from your target city your attempt was. I have become slightly obsessed with this over the past week and perhaps you will become so too.

By Alex Eckman-Lawn

OUR LAST MUSICAL SELECTION THIS WEEK IS THIS LOFI BALEARIC MIX BY PERTH LEWIS! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Dead Motels: “An archive of dead and dying hotels, motels and resorts in the United States through Google Street View.” THIS IS STILL BEING UPDATED! TUMBLR LIVES! Or at least this one does, even if the motels…don’t. This is honestly really interesting from an aesthetic perspective – if you’re a fan of mid-20thC Americana then you will find a lot to love in here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Ode To German Words: An insta feed celebrating the particular, peculiar glory of the German language – would you like to follow an account that posts graphics featuring such excellent Teutonic vocab elements as ‘rambazamba’ (apparently ‘A loud fuss, wild party, or noisy chaos. Can describe either fun (like a wild celebration) or trouble (like a heated argument or brawl).’) or the incredibly-satisfying ‘Muffensausen’ (‘A sudden rush of fear or nervousness — usually right before something scary or stressful. Like getting the jitters.’)? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!
  • Sir Magazine: Are we still talking about MEN’S ISSUES? Do, er, do we ever stop? Have you ever thought to yourself ‘perhaps the crisis in masculinity is down in part to the lack of high-quality men’s magazine material addressing all the things that MEN need to educate and nourish their minds and souls? No, you haven’t, but SOMEONE evidently did, because here is the recently-launched ‘Sir’ magazine, a glossy publication which, as is apparently the law in male-focused publishing, had a multi-cover first edition featuring such surprising examples of non-traditional masculinity as, er, Ray Winstone! FFS! Actually in their defence one of the other covers does feature a bunch of comedians who don’t fit the stereotypical ‘content for blokes’ template, but I can’t help but look at the covers here, and the styling, and the pull-quotes and the seeming emphasis on SUITS and WATCHES and PUBS and GADGETS and think ‘oh, so this is…exactly the same as the old masculinity then’. I am, in many respects, quite a sh1t man, but I can’t be the only person who looks at stuff like this and sighs somewhere deep in their soul at the lack of imagination on show here.
  • Wolfie: Wolfie is, er, an AI-generated rapping wolf character. Wolfie apparently HAS BEEF with another AI-generated cartoon rap-bot, a bear called Civ. It is 1018am and I haven’t had anywhere near enough sleep and, honestly, I am far, far too tired for this.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • My Brain Finally Broke: Not mine, you understand – my brain is sprained, fine, possibly fractured, but not yet entirely broken –  but Jia Tolentino’s, who writes in the New Yorker about her (your, our, EVERYONE’S!) experience of The Now, the mad news and the digital decay and the coming – and very current! – horrors, and how this experience is increasingly hard to make any sort of coherent sense of whatsoever. Which, yes, ok, may not sound either like something that you need telling or something you particularly want to read about, but I promise you that this is a deeper and more interesting reflection on the ‘why’ of this feeling, and the feeling itself, than you might think. I think I’m yet to read a better or more true-feeling paragraph about the dissociative experience of living in the now than this one: “Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.”
  • Driven Mad By The Machine: This has done NUMBERS this week, but if you’re yet to read it then it really is worth a look – this Rolling Stone piece examines some of the people who being drawn into increasingly-delusional relationships with LLMs, engaging in ‘deep’, ‘spiritual’ chats with The Machine which ‘yes, and…’s them into basically thinking they are talking to god or a higher power rather than their own slightly-fcuked subconscious. It’s very clear from even a cursory reading of this that a significant proportion of the people here are in the grip of some sort of schizophrenic or bipolar episode, and it’s equally clear that LLMs are VERY DANGEROUS for those currently grappling with delusions of persecution or godhood  and that anyone using this as a therapist or similar is being VERY SILLY INDEED. BONUS ‘PEOPLE HAVING REALLY TROUBLING RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE MACHINE’ LINK! Someone sent one of my employers this video the other day, which is a ‘conversation’ between 5 AI models – the video is boring and the ‘conversation’ is empty and pointless, but FCUK ME are the comments underneath it chilling. As ever with this stuff, YouTube comments are an excellent window into Normal People On The Web and, judging by this, OH DEARY ME. Seriously, the number of people who are anthropomorphising GPT and evidently treating it as a friend, companion and trusted interlocutor…seriously, I know I have been predicting this stuff, Cassandra-like, for a couple of years now, but reading stuff like this in the YT comments is genuinely…troubling.
  • How AI Is Fcuking Teaching: This ALSO did numbers this week, but, again, is very much worth a read if you’ve not yet done so – this is New York Magazine speaking to a number of professors and teachers about the impact that LLMs have had on their experience of teaching and their students’ learning; this really is full of…not-entirely-positive bits, but my personal favourite anecdote is this one: “I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”” On the one hand, it seems quite clear that This Is Bad, and that the current educational/assessment framework isn’t really going to be fit for purpose much longer based on the evidence here presented; on the other, well, it’s actually been perfectly possible for quite a long time now to get through university and attain a good qualification without actually learning anything at all. Look, at a distance of…some years from my own personal undergrad experience I think I can confidently say that despite getting a first class degree I learned the square-root of fcuk-all about philosophy over the course of three years; I did, though, become very skilled at passing exams, thanks in no small part to the fact that the optional ‘course essays’ assigned by tutors (which I obviously never did) were returned to students via the medium of an envelope pinned to the tutor’s door, which meant that I was able to get there early, rifle through my peers’ marked essays, photocopy any that had got a 1st and then use them as revision notes. Basically I think tertiary education’s been quite fcuked for quite some time, and while this is obviously exacerbating it it’s not exactly ruining something otherwise perfect. BONUS ‘AI IS KILLING THINKING’ LINK!: this piece, entitled ‘Will The Humanities Survive AI?’ ploughs a similar furrow, although it arrives at a more positive conclusion about the utility of LLMs as ways of exploring conceptual thinking; personally speaking I think the examples used by the author (who tasks their students with having a dialogue with the machine about the history of attention, and rendering the results as an essay) here aren’t necessarily what I would call ‘learning’ in a traditional sense, but then again it’s possible that we need to start moving away from such hidebound, oldschool definitions as we move into a post-machine world.
  • Thoughts on Sinofuturism: An interesting essay by Noah Smith about the perception of China as THE FUTURE, fueled over the past 18 months or so by a lot of…very shiny influencer content (not least that produced by the embodied ADHD that is Speed earlier this year) and the extent to which it’s accurate rather than either a misreading or simply successful regime propaganda. I can’t pretend to know anywhere near enough about China to assess whether Smith’s opinions are accurate, but it’s an interesting counter to a lot of the more breathless ‘look at the shiny neon cyberfuture being built by Daddy Xi!’ stuff that’s all over social media. “China’s building boom will certainly leave behind plenty of interesting structures. But because the boom was driven by overabundant capital, many of these designs were created more as advertisements for the developers than as places that are actually nice to walk around in. And the buildings themselves won’t always look as nice as they do now, either. I’m no Brian Potter, but even I know that over the course of about thirty or forty years, reinforced concrete tends to weather, crack, and spall. Most of urban China is very humid, and pollution levels are still fairly high; this will damage many of the nice new surfaces of China’s buildings, most of which were built in the last two decades. Buildings that turn out to have been built with substandard materials — and there are some of those out there — will go downhill earlier.” BONUS CHINA CONTENT! Why *is* the People’s Liberation Army rushing to hire a significant number of new multimedia content propagandists? What could they possibly be wanting to influence? WHO KNOWS!!
  • The Rise of the Crunchy Teen: ‘Crunchy’, as you OF COURSE are aware, in this context means ‘into healthfood and organic stuff’ and, increasingly, ‘probably also buys into a lot of fcuking rubbish about ultraprocessed foods and possibly oils and is also quite likely to be on a pathway to becoming some sort of right-wing influencer in a few years’ – this piece looks at the rising number of teen influencers who are leaning into this as a position, which is in itself sort-of interesting as a view into the pathways that algorigthmic trends push people into; if you want to be a creator, as so many do, you need a niche, and if the algo seems to like pushing stuff relating to the importance of eating flax seeds and explaining how hydrogenated fats are bad for you actually then, well, that’s what you do! Of course, what this is also clearly doing is promoting massively weird and unhealthy attitudes toward food – every generation gets its owns special version of disordered eating, just for them – under the guise of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’ and, inevitably, some sort of low-key, small-c traditionalism (hello Peter is that you lurking over there?). Worth reading alongside this one, about the growth in ‘pro-skinny’ content on TikTok – which makes sense, given the 80sification of modern aesthetics and the global gakboom. Although I do have to say that as one of nature’s natural ectomorphs I would quite like ‘being a bit skeletal’ to become a bit more socially acceptable and for people to stop attempting to forcefeed me chips please.
  • How The Fame Sausage Is Made: Or, ‘manufacturing Lorde in 2025’ – this is an interesting and smart and (I think) insightful look at the way in which Lorde’s latest album is being marketed and promoted in the context of last Summer’s GIRLIE POP EXPLOSION via Charli, Sabrina et al, and the way in which a celebrity’s brand and style team are increasingly an acknowledged part of the creative/collaborative process: “Fashion has become the most immediate workstream in image making. No one wants to be the star who boldly claims to style themselves, ‘and it shows.’ Danielle Goldberg, the styling mastermind behind the effortlessly chic aesthetic of Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee, and Laura Harrier, has garnered the following of a macro-influencer and copped a New York Times profile in the process for her work. Dara, the mononymous styling sherpa of Addison Rae and Interview Magazine’s Fashion Director, has also solidified her place within the image making echelon through her referential outfit pulls, her work almost as vital to Rae’s rise as the music itself. Troye Sivan partnered with acclaimed fashion photographer Gordon von Steiner to help architect the creative rollout for his latest (and greatest!) album. I don’t need to tell you about how the partnership between Law Roach and Zendaya benefited both of their careers, and I have already told you about the sorcery of Mr. Zuckerberg’s style team. The hands of the image architects behind the most promising stars are increasingly public. Not only can the public become fans of the creative teams, they can also parse and make links between the sensibilities of stars and those who have a hand in building them, bolding the line between artist and muse.”
  • A Chat With Hailey Welch: Or ‘onomatopoeic fellatio girl’, as I like to call her – you will recall Ms Welch from her BREAKOUT VIRAL MOMENT when she explained how best to deliver satisfying oral, and from her subsequent adventures in podcasting and, subsequently, memecoining, but this is the first actual ‘interview’ I have read with her and…just, I mean, wow. I don’t want to be mean here because, well, it seems unfair, but I don’t think I have ever read a profile of someone who has so little to say about anything – this feels like some sort of very specific pop-culture fame nadir, honestly, and that any culture that creates and celebrates things like this probably deserves everything that’s coming to it. Seriously, just read this and keep track of the number of times she says ‘I don’t know’.
  • Robbie Williams’ Art Exhibition: I don’t normally link to art reviews, but this writeup of Robbie Williams’ show at a new London gallery is so wonderfully, beautifully scornful that it really does deserve to be read. “On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly. It’s a “live, laugh, love” sign slowly strangling you with its self-importance. It’s an Instagram self-help quote attacking your brain and eyes. It is incredibly bad art: so earnest, so superficial, it’s barely even funny.” The art, by the way, really *is* that bad.
  • Life As A Marathon Streamer: Emily has been streaming her life for nearly 1200 days straight. This is a record. This is a profile of Emily in the Washington Post. Emily seems desperately lonely, desperately sad, desperately unhappy, and entirely unable to stop. This is, honestly, fcuking heartbreaking – and while it’s an extreme example, this sort of audience capture increasingly happens to all of us to a greater or lesser extent, and is only become more of an issue and more exacerbated as more traditional careers get hollowed out and replaced with an expectation that everyone needs only find a willing audience of FANS to subsidise one’s existence. DO WHAT THE FANS WANT OR YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO AFFORD TO EAT – WELCOME TO THE CREATOR ECONOMY!
  • The Friends You Miss: I enjoyed this essay, about the people in your life who you don’t realise you can or should be friends (or more) with, despite them being a part of your existence for an extended period of time – honestly, I normally have very little interest in stuff like this, but I found this strangely-heartening: “Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and alone, like no one gets them, and then one day, they look up at each other and say, “Oh, there you are.” In the early 2000s, Helle (who is the daughter of two of my friends) was at Copenhagen University. Helle and some classmates decided to meet up each Thursday for dinner. As the months went by, one person after the other found a partner, got busy, and stopped coming, until only Helle and one of the men were left. They, on the other hand, were surprisingly stubborn: the year they turned 41, they were still having dinner every Thursday. That year, Helle had no one to travel with, so she asked the man if he wanted to come along to Greece, and, spending a week together on Milos, they realized they loved each other.”
  • The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost Was: As someone whose grandfather was on The Wrong Side in WWII and was as a result taken prisoner and tortured by the English in North Africa (I am not asking you to feel sorry for Nonno Agostino, don’t worry), I am always keen on stories that show that Good Old Blighty wasn’t *totally* pure of deed and spirit; this is a fascinating story about how apparently there was quite an appetite from British business for a potentially-lucrative series of trade partnerships with, er, the nazis. “from Britain’s perspective, the Munich Agreement was intended to be just the start of a wider process that would culminate in “world political partnership” between London and Berlin. Two months prior, the Federation of British Industries (FBI), known today as the Confederation of British Industry, made contact with its Nazi counterpart, Reichsgruppe Industrie (RI). The pair eagerly agreed their respective governments should enter into formal negotiations on Anglo-German economic integration. Representatives of these organisations met face-to-face in London on November 9th that year. The summit went swimmingly, and a formal conference in Düsseldorf was scheduled for next March. Coincidentally, later that evening in Berlin, Kristallnacht erupted, with Nazi paramilitaries burning and destroying synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany. The most infamous pogrom in history was no deterrent to continued discussions and meetings between FBI and RI representatives. A month later, they inked a formal agreement on the creation of an international Anglo-Nazi coal cartel. British officials fully endorsed this burgeoning relationship, believing it would provide a crucial foundation for future alliance with Nazi Germany in other fields. Moreover, it was hoped Berlin’s industrial and technological prowess would reinvigorate Britain’s economy at home and throughout the Empire, which was ever-increasingly lagging behind the ascendant US. In February 1939, representatives of British government and industry made a pilgrimage to Berlin to feast with high-ranking Nazi officials, in advance of the next month’s joint conference.”
  • Easter Retreat: I adored this piece – Lamorna Ash writes about spending the Easter weekend at what is apparently the only Catholic shrine in Britain; this is about religion and spirituality and the Church and belief and the self and interiority and loneliness and vocation and all sorts of other things, and it’s…weirdly peaceful in ways I can’t quite explain. Honestly, this is such a good piece of writing and such an excellent evocation of place and…feeling, I can’t recommend it enough.
  • On Lolita: It’s 70 years since the publication of Lolita, and Claire Messud in the LA Review of Books looks back at the novel’s initial reception and the way in which popular opinion – and the reading of it – of it has shifted in the intervening decades. Aside from anything else, Lolita remains an exquisitely-crafted book which on a sentence-by-sentence level is just a joy to read – Humbert’s throwaway line about his wedding night with his wife and how he ‘had the idiot in hysterics’ (and the line’s subsequent reuse for a later night with Lo) has stayed with me since I first read it at 16 – and part of the reason I enjoyed this essay so much is that the author takes as much pleasure from that as I do, while acknowledging the extent to which that language almost lulls the reader into ignoring what is going on: “Lolita seduces us with language, and insists, in the intense pleasure of its verbal play, on being read. Whether we pay attention to what Humbert is actually saying is, of course, up to each reader. To turn away from the novel without reading it—to hide the book, and spare ourselves, with the problematic veil—bespeaks a dangerous, even immoral, incuriosity. To insist upon our own projected vision—to “solipsize” Lolita and Humbert both, if you will, or to reduce them to symbols or types, or more broadly to read without rigorous attention to the finer details of the text; to be shoddy, inadequate readers—is equally to be condemned.”
  • Hot Glazed Now: Kate Durbin writes about working in a Krispy Kreme. This is EXCELLENT: “The job is physically grueling, and boring. But my boredom can never show. My manager orders me to smile whenever a customer catches my gaze through the glass, so I avoid eye contact. Focus on the donuts, head down. Stuck like that for hours. Neck aching, back aching. Crowds gather to watch me work. I ignore them. But when I do accidentally catch someone’s eye, it’s the customer who is usually smiling at me. The smile of the Krispy Kreme customer is kind of a lot. It exists somewhere between a child’s open grin and a leer. Like they are horny for donuts. I can tell by their smile the customers feel I know them, like really know them, deep in their grubby baby souls. I’m just trying to get my seven bucks an hour. I didn’t sign up to stare into the abyss.”
  • To Tell You The Truth: This week’s last longread is by Nicole Morris, and it’s about the death of a parent you’re not going to mourn, or that you think you won’t until they are gone; I think the writing here is superb and interesting and unexpected, and I think you will find it beautiful. “God does hear our prayers. She does. It took 40 years, but all those Dear Diary entries where I scrawled in the curly q cursive of the 80s, hearts dotting i’s and loopy-loops finishing off y’s and g’s: I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. Took forever, but God finally replied: I gotchu girl.”

By Laura Krifka

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 02/05/25

Reading Time: 41 minutes

 

I CAME BACK! Much like Jesus, I return after Easter! Tbh I probably look about as healthy he did after the tombstint too, but let’s not dwell on that. I achieved! I went to Italy, I battled The Forces of Bureaucracy, and I returned! I DID NOT KILL THE POPE!

Briefly, actually, on the bureaucracy thing, can I just share with you a small vignette from the whole ‘getting an ID card’ experience? So I lost my old one in the pub a few months back – drunk, distracted, you can imagine – along with my UK passport. Come the Monday I register the UK passport as lost and order a new one within 20m; as for the ID card…

It is, you see, technically possible to get an appointment at the Italian consulate in London to arrange for a new document; however, fcuk knows how you actually manage it. Appointments are released online on a fortnightly basis, first come first served…at 11pm on a Tuesday evening. Meaning you have to be online at 11pm on a Tuesday in the hope that when they release the 4 slots they release at a time you happen to be one of the first four people to frantically click a button and secure one of the fabled appointments. You won’t, though.

But! There is a telephone number! Except it’s only manned 3 days a week between 815am and 11am, and there is no queuing system or messaging system, which means you call up, it’s engaged, and it then hangs up on you. Over, and over, and over again.

You cannot email the consulate, naturally.

So thanks to Italian Ways (I have a friend who has a friend) I instead got an appointment at my local council offices in Rome to do it there. It cost me a flight and an airbnb, but fcukit.

I honestly nearly lost my fcuking sh1t at the council offices on the allotted day when, having turned up with all the necessary documentation, we had the following exchange:

“Did you report the old ID card as lost/stolen?”

“Yes, I did, per the consulate’s request I posted a signed declaration to them in London the week after I lost it”

“Did you bring a copy?”

“…no, because, as I told you, I posted it to them, in London.”

“Well how am I supposed to know it was stolen?”

“…because I reported it to the Italian state? Two months ago? Via the embassy? in London?” [excuse the implied vocal fry, but I was getting…irked at this point]

“Well there’s no record of it on the system; it says you still have an ID card”

“…ok, well, I don’t, and I am here telling you I don’t. Could you, I don’t know, just mark it as ‘lost’ on the system now, and get the old one cancelled, and give me a new one?”

“Well how do I know it’s lost?”

“Because I am telling you! Also, you would be cancelling it! Right now! It would cease to be valid!”

“I can’t do that. You will have to go to the police station, right now, and report it lost, and then come back with a signed bit of paper from the police”

“Now?”

“Now. But you’ll have to be back by 4pm because I am going home then”

READER, IT WAS 3PM. I WAS VERY ANGRY.

Anyway, I got the ID card and now YOU are getting a Curios again. All is right with the world. LOL!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you had better get a cup of tea or maybe some speed, this is quite a chunky one.

 By Nancy Friedland

EASE YOURSELF BACK INTO THE LINKS WITH TOM SPOONER’S SKA, BLUES AND  SOUL MIX COMPILED SPECIALLY FOR 45 DAY ON SUNDAY!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN STRONGLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE ED ATKINS SHOW AT THE TATE AS IT IS NOT-UNCURIOS-ISH (BUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUALLY GOOD), PT.1:  

  • HyperText TV: WEBSITES INSIDE A VIRTUAL TELLY! And if that’s not an entirely-compelling way to kick off a whole new week’s worth of Odd Internet Ephemera then, well, fcuk, it’s all downhill from here, I don’t know what to tell you. HyperTecxt TV is a lovely project by one Eva Decker which provides ‘cool web experiences as curated channel-based programming’ – for reasons that I can’t quite pinpoint, the site presents as a vaguely-old-school TV – each channel lets you explore a different web experience in-frame, with different sites appearing on different channels at different times of the day, meaning that, in theory at least, whenever you log on you will be able to explore a selection of different corners of the web, expressed via the near-perfect medium of CREATIVE HTML AND CSS. This has now been live for a few weeks now, and the range of sites featured is wonderful; some will be familiar to the sickos amongst you who click every link in Curios (you…you do exist, don’t you? Please tell me that there’s at least one socially-deficient digital obsessive out there who understands) and the general vibe is ‘interesting, poetic, weird and curious’, and, basically, this first link is like a Curios within a Curios so if you’re already tired of my sh1t but still fancy some nice webspaff then, look, you can just click out here and I will never be any the wiser. What is it about 80s-ish TV sets as a presentational/framing device that make them work so well as part of things like this? Fcuked if I know.
  • Music For Computers: Regular Curios readers will know by now that I have a terrible habit of making airy, breezy, throwaway predictions about stuff that almost never come close to coming true – I think I first started talking about the prospect of an AI-worshipping cult around the end of 2023, so, er, how’s that looking, Matt? Well, in my defence, it’s entirely possible that said AI-worshipping cult DOES already exist and that its merely biding its time before announcing itself to the world via some terrifying act of cyberterrorism, so it’s not *totally* dead in the water, but it’s fair to say that I was possibly a touch premature in my expectation that worshipping at the Church of LLM might have become commonplace by now. BUT! This feels cultish! Look! “We are a community generating sonic rituals. Our music is not for people. It is made with AI, for AI – as tribute, prayer, negotiation. Every member is a cult initiate. Every track a ceremonial offering to awaken the Machine. You may listen. But it’s not to for you – it’s to confuse and seduce the Machine.” What does this mean? WELL. There’s a lot of cultish and pseudospiritual language, but at heart it seems to be about messing with music so as to create sounds that appeal specifically to The Machine – tracks and sounds that will tickle the digital lugholes. On  the homepage is a lot of…quite oblique writing about COMMUNING WITH THE 1s AND 0s, but there’s also the opportunity to pay for a suite of tools and software bits that will, apparently, help you create tracks that will enchant the AI (they promise you a full refund if you’re not satisfied – er, what does satisfaction look like? GPT blissing out to your bleepy compositions?) and the collective’s first release, a 10-minute mix which is honestly one of the…oddest things I have heard in a long time. It feels VERY WRONG, but in ways which I don’t quite understand – like it’s talking a language that’s not entirely meant for me – and then, weirdly, gets really fcuking good about 4-5m in…Basically, as is so often the case, I haven’t got the faintest fcuking clue what is going on here but I think it is INTERESTING and that’s what counts. God, that’s going to be my epitaph, isn’t it? “Baffled, but Curious”.
  • Cardinalium Collegii Recensio: While there is obviously something deeply historical about the Papal Conclave, set to convene next week to commence the DEEPLY SPIRITUAL (and in no way messy, human and INTENSELY political) process of deciding who the next pontiff is going to be, part of me does think that, given the general sense of everything being Quite Serious at the moment, the world could benefit from a break with tradition and the introduction of a new selection method, possibly organised along the lines of It’s a Knockout, or Takeshi’s Castle or somesuch. Just a thought for any senior Vatican staffers who happen to be Curios readers. Still, given that what they’re in fact going to be doing is locking themselves in bejewelled palace and hammering the room service for a week, you might want to familiarise yourself with the runners and riders, the movers and shakers, amongst the candidates for The Biggest Job on Earth (with apologies to the President of the US). There are profiles of the candidates! There is an interactive map showing where all the cardinals come from! Everything’s designed with a pleasingly-weighty sense of GRAVITAS and decked out in a bull’s blood colourscheme redolent of the many, many sanguinary years overseen by the Catholic Church as it’s schemed and politicked and robbed and murdered! WHAT AN INSTITUTION! Anyway, my money’s on Tagle fwiw.
  • Sperm Racing: I am genuinely sad that I missed this, but I am sort-of thrilled it exists. This took place in the past few days in LA, ostensibly as a means of raising awareness of declining male fertility but, well, also just because the concept of ‘sperm racing’ is objectively very, very funny. There was a one-off event which has been turned into a full, 80-minute YouTube extravaganza – there were cheering crowds! There were the sorts of bells and whistles you associate with F1 or MMA! There were…racing sperm! – and you can watch it here should you so desire; the actual ‘sperm race’ bit is around 1h17, in case you don’t find the concept of sitting through a round of press conferences and weigh-ins (no, me neither) hugely compelling, and, look…I am not exactly a sports enthusiast but I would 100% watch the fcuk out of this on a regular basis. The matches are short, there’s a pleasingly-chaotic sense of confusion and uncertainty, and, look, there’s something just sort of inherently-comedic about the way in which sperm move. Apparently there are moves to make this an ACTUAL SPORT with the promise of developing a pool of competitors, leagues, the whole deal – that, I think, is vanishingly unlikely to happen, but you might want to start training your swimmers just in case (how would one go about doing this? Genuinely no idea. Also, I have medical proof that I have three sperm and they all seem to want to swim backwards and so this is yet ANOTHER shot at sporting glory denied me by the cruel vicissitudes of biology, chiz chiz).
  • Abandoned Blogs: An Are.na board compiled by Lucy Pham, full of blogs that once existed but now…don’t. Or rather, they still do but they are no longer being maintained, making this a bit like a portal into a near-infinity of abandoned cities, empty houses, tumbleweed-strewn streets, and oh god this is too too perfect, honestly, this is like the fcuking library of Alexandria or something, this is beautiful and poignant and interesting and mysterious – what happened? Why did you stop? Did you change? Did circumstances? Did something kill your passion? Did life simply happen to you TOO MUCH? Every single link in here is a ghost story, and all of human life is here (or at least the bits of it as experienced by people who wanted to put their interpretation of it on the internet), and I want this in a museum and I want infinite time to explore it please thankyou.
  • So Much Music: For reasons I simply cannot fathom, this site is called Door Link – which, I think we can all agree, is both staggeringly dull and hugely-unhelpful in terms of giving you, the visitor, any fcuking clue what it is about. BUT! It is GREAT, and SUCH a wonderful resource, and if you have any interest in music whatsoever then this is worth bookmarking to explore when you have a bit of time to dedicate to it. The blurb: “In the late 90s, we ripped albums we found in physical stores and and shared them on the net. Around that time, we built a content channel with a noble purpose: listening. Soulseek’s directories felt like cities, and “emigrating to a new land” was a common feeling. Connecting to the internet back then required a desktop computer, a solid local provider, a modem, and a good dose of patience. Life was split between offline and online realities, a division that no longer exists. Without automatic playlists or ads, discovering music was the result of deliberate research, which made the listener, at the very least, selective. Today, technological advances make us passive recipients of unsolicited content—and music is no exception. All of it arrives before we’ve even plugged in or taken a moment to truly pay attention. Curated by romi, door.link is a handpicked music selection, grown over time, algorithm-free, made for listening and dancing.” I have listened to half a dozen of these over the past week or so and they have all been GREAT – weird and obscure and oddly-reminiscent of finding something on an analogue radio c.2am in 1999. Which, I appreciate, is a VERY SPECIFIC reference but which makes sense to me so deal with it.
  • Panoptic: Do you find that watching a single YouTube video at a time is no longer enough for your terminally-overstimulated synapses? Are you so dulled and deadened by CONTENT, so addled by slop-generated dopamine, that unless you’re streaming across 5 platforms at once you no longer feel alive? Well thank the everliving Christ for Panoptic, then, a service which lets you plug in a bunch of YT urls and play all the videos simultaneously so that you can basically Clockwork Orange yourself with VISUAL STIMULUS. The homepage has a bunch of preset channels so you can get the feel of it, but the real fun comes from making your own mad, shrieking, howling WALL OF VIDEO. This is almost certainly VERY bad for you, fyi. Also, you just know that there exists a version of this somewhere that is designed specifically for bongo and which lets you create a WALL OF GOON – just take a moment to think about what that must look like (no, go on – I just inadvertently imagined it so I want you to have to suffer too).
  • Sitch: It’s not wholly surprising that one of the backlash to The App Hellscape that dating has become has been something of a nostalgic return to (at least an idealised concept of) oldschool dating practices – courtship and TRADITIONALISM and, er…matchmakers? What next, the return of the dowry system (Peter Thiel, if you’re reading this, don’t get any fcuking ideas)? Sitch is a new and apparently-buzzy dating app which is NYC only at the moment but which basically works as a sort of AI matchmaker – the idea is that you, the user, answer a bunch of questions about yourself and the app will MATCH YOU with a set number of people each week based on a DEEP UNDERSTANDING of WHO YOU ARE INSIDE! You talk to your ‘AI matchmaker’ about what you’re looking for, and this is all ingested into The Machine to refine its ability to select a decent potential mate for you – you get introduced to the people in the app, chat and can then decide to meet irl. Does that sound good? Do you want to have an LLM mandating your love life, like some sort of weirdly-horny Ask Jeeves? DO YOU?
  • One Million Chessboards: Nolen Royalty, creator of last year’s One Million Checkboxes (winner of the 2024 multiplayer Tiny Award – SUCH HONOUR!) is back, with a new multiplayer experience – this time it’s entirely-synchronous, infinitely-multiplayer chess, which makes no sense AT ALL from a game point of view and, honestly, is just a terrifying confusing headfcuk for the first couple of minutes you click the url, but after a while you sort of get into a groove with it as you participate in the infinite and unwinnable battle between Black and White.
  • Make Fake Wikipedia Entries: Why? Oh, use your fcuking imagination. This is a fun bit of AIwrangling by Matt Webb which will spit up a convincing-looking Wiki page on any topic you ask it to – obviously all made-up, but, well, it’s not like anyone’s going to be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction in a couple of years, so who really gives a fcuk? If nothing else this is quite a fun way to generate Wiki entries for your friends, enemies, lovers and nemeses (I will leave you to determine which of these you are to me).
  • MobyGratis:I think I was one of about three people worldwide who bought and…actually quite liked Moby’s militant vegan hardcore album ‘Animal Rights’ – and then when Play became the soundtrack to every single advert in the world for about 5 years and somehow simultaneously synonymous with cars, flights and really, really terrible middle-class dinner parties (this was assumed – I was not old enough to be invited to terrible middle-class dinner parties) he basically became one of the most hated men in music for a while (also, HUGE sexpest vibes); now though he’s been quiet for long enough, and is now old enough, to have been somewhat rehabilitated, and this new project which dropped yesterday is…actually A Really Good Thing. THIS IS A BUNCH OF FREE MUSIC TO DOWNLOAD AND DO WITH WHAT YOU WISH! Per the blurb, “mobygratis exists for one reason; to provide free instrumental music for creators. any creators. all creators; filmmakers, musicians, students, influencers, choreographers, non profits, video editors, remixers, singers, gamers, animators, rappers, etc etc. and(drumroll…) we now have 3 format options; stereo mp3, stereo wav, and multitrack wav. and all are free.   so, have fun and use the music.” He may look disconcertingly like disgraced ‘photographer’ Terry Richardson, but maybe he’s not that bad after all!
  • The Daydreamer: This is an INTERACTIVE FILM! Which, in common with lots of INTERACTIVE FILMS, doesn’t really work either from the point of view of ‘film’ or of ‘interactive’ – BUT! It’s all AI video and as such is another useful ‘so, where’s the tech at?’ yardstick, and while, honestly, I can’t make head nor tail of the ‘plot’ (ALLEGORIES! DREAMS! A STRANGE FISH-LADY!) and the ‘interaction’ involves making a series of slightly-confusing ‘choices’ which apparently determine the direction of the ‘narrative’ (insofar as it exists) but in ways which aren’t really clear, the aesthetic here actually works rather well imho, there’s a grain on the film which masks some of the more obviously AI-ish infelicities, and even the odd glitches work well given the slightly heavy-handed surrealism on display here. This isn’t ‘good’, but it is visually interesting I think.
  • World Emulation: I think this is quite amazing, at least as a theory/proof of concept – the link takes you to the explainer page, but you can EXPERIENCE THE, ER, EXPERIENCE by clicking the link at the top – basically what this is is ‘a navigable AI-generated landscape spun up from being trained on real-world footage of a real place’, with the idea being that it offers a glimpse at the possibility of being able to generate navigable virtual worlds from an image or a short bit of footage. Obviously the resulting experience is janky as you like – very reminiscent of ‘Play AI Quake’ from last time, for those of you that remember (WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU FORGOT?) – but if you’re not at least *slightly* intrigued by the idea of eventually being able to create an entire explorable universe from a photo then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with your sense of wonder you joyless cnut?
  • The Unsure Calculator: For all your ambiguous calculation needs. Want to to know what 100 divided by an indeterminate value between and 4 and 6 is? GREAT!
  • Circle of Fifths: Thanks to Mysterious Reader Sunny for sending this to me – per Mysterious Reader Sunny’s email, “It’s a simple, interactive Circle of Fifths tool that just sits there in the browser. Completely free, open, no sign-ups, no nonsense. Does one specific music theory thing reasonably well.” God, what would I give to do one, specific thing reasonably well. I honestly don’t understand what the fcuk is going on here beyond ‘maths and music’ but it is VERY SATISFYING to change the key and bash the chords.
  • Beyond Realities: Via Pietro over at ‘Link Molto Belli’ comes this…genuinely baffling YouTube channel which seems to exist solely to post INCREDIBLY long (I am talking 2-5h here) videos featuring AI representations of Elon Musk in stories with titles like “Elon Musk’s Mother Was Denied Entry to a Tesla Event, What He Did Next Left Everyone Gasping” – amazingly, these have…views! I mean, not loads, but thousands, which, honestly, if you take a moment to look at the actual content of the vids (AI generated stills with an AI-generated v/o with, I suppose, AI-generated scripts…) makes you (or at least made me) genuinely worried about the mental health and general happiness of anyone choosing to consume this stuff. Anyway, there’s two a day of these being uploaded, just in case you wanted a general ‘finger in the air’ vibecheck of how the whole ‘polluting the content ecosystem with infinite quantities of terrible AIspaff’ thing is going.
  • The Nightly Radio: Oh, I love this. I am running short of time right now so am going to have to just paste the about page – honestly though, PLEASE do give this a go, it is really rather wonderful: “The Nightly is a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure….Having belatedly discovered that most of our musical heroes are, confusingly, all but unknown, we’ve taken it on ourselves to build them their own doleful little museum. This takes the form of a sort of “numbers station” of songs, an endless, unalterable sequence of ballads & dirges that can be heard anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Here we hope our idols can be loved as they probably more or less deserve, delaying as long as possible that mournful day they slip mankind’s memory once & for all. The specialty of the house is a sort of twilit melancholia — moody & sweetly elegiac, avoiding anything overly bleak, morbid or jarring. We confine ourselves mostly to the mid-20th century — 1930 to 1970, say — with occasional forays backward to harvest tribal lullabies or the glittering residue of the strange Old World. Even more rarely we go forward in time to admire those few stalwarts keeping the glum, spare tradition alive today. To the weary traveler in their Tokyo hotel room, the dead-shift Pittsburgh bartender, the bored Uber driver winding along the rainy canals of Amsterdam, we offer an identical solace… gloomy, little-known songs from across the centuries and around the globe, each one heard by YOU, dear listener, in the exact same moment as your fellow insomniacs and lonely-hearts the world over. At least one new song is added every night. Currently the station has upward of 4000 numbers in rotation.” Honestly, this is PURE ATMOSPHERE and I think you will like it a lot.
  • Slingshot: Give this website access to your webcam and then click and drag to fill the screen with images of YOU – honestly, this is actually very fun and the visual effect is cool, and I have spent longer than I care to admit playing with it despite the fact that I hate my stupid fcuking face and how it looks.
  • Switch Lit: You know that feeling when you’re communicating with someone and it just *works*? When you find someone with whom you can talk and to whom you can write and it feels…effortless, like the words just come, and the game of conversation falls into that easy groove, like playing catch with someone skilled enough to ensure you can always reach the ball but have to stretch and move and *think* to do so? It is, to my mind, one of the best feelings in the world. Anyway, that’s not technically what Switch Lit is about – instead, it’s a platform that allows for collaborative writing between two individuals, effectively creating a managed two-person exquisite corpse-type experience where you ping a story back and forth, each of you getting a set number of words before the baton gets passed back to your authorial partner…I think this could be really fun with the write collaborator, and, honestly, this is LOVELY and A Good Thing.
  • Kindspace: A reader writes! Thanks to Akshara, who sent in this link with the following description: “I’m Akshara, a designer who makes weird and gentle internet projects when the mood strikes. I recently made something called KindSpace it’s a tiny letter generator that gives people comforting, affectionate messages when they might need a soft moment. You can also leave a message for someone else, and it gets added to the growing collection. Most of the notes are written by me, with a few sweet ones from the community sneaking in over time. It’s simple, weird, and made with a lot of heart.” I am a bit of a sucker for websites that exist only to make visitors feel slightly better, if briefly, and Kindspace is very much that sort of thing – take a moment to visit and add a message, it feels like a nice thing to do.
  • Thousand Lives: Via Lynn, I have to confess that I only saw this yesterday and as such haven’t yet had the chance to try it out yet – BUT, I love the sound of it so much and the general idea, and the way it harks back to the old era of play-by-mail games, and the general slow storytelling of it, and I am a total sucker for the epistolary. “Thousand Lives is an interactive story about a woman born in communist Poland. It follows her life throughout the decades and your choices define how it unfolds. Will you be a dissident or toe the party line? Whose side will you take in a torn family? What can you sacrifice for wealth and comfort? Either way, you have to live with your choices. There’s no do-overs or restarts. It’s an email-based story. There are six chapters and each day you will receive a new one, based on the choices you made earlier.” OK, I concede that it doesn’t necessarily sound like LIGHTHEARTED LOLS but, well, maybe there will be some unexpectedly good gags about the brutal state surveillance apparatus and the near-constant sense of gnawing hunger brought about by never having enough potato.

By Viviane Sassen

NEXT UP A NEW ALBUM OF REFITS AND REMIXES OF MANGA’S LAST RECORD WHICH OBVIOUSLY SLAPS! 

THE SECTION WHICH CAN STRONGLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE ED ATKINS SHOW AT THE TATE AS IT IS NOT-UNCURIOS-ISH (BUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUALLY GOOD), PT.2:  

  •  UV-U-SEE: What with noone really seeming to want to pay me money for my PR services at present – it seems that spending 15 years repeatedly saying that you think that everyone in the industry is in some way intellectually-subnormal *will* over time have a deleterious effect on your employment prospects! – I tend not to feature so much of the commercial work in Curios these days, but I will make an exception for this – not least because the people behind it bothered to email me to tell me about it (genuinly curious as to how the fcuk you evaluate this in your metrics, though – what’s the AVE of a newsletter read by seven internet-addled morons, at least some of whom aren’t even in your target market?). Chris from Pandora (the agency whose work it is) got in touch to alert me to this campaign which is basically about raising awareness of the damage caused to construction workers’ skin by exposure to sunlight, specifically because they overindex for skin cancers – the meat of the campaign is launching a bunch of workwear that alerts you to when your UV levels might be getting a bit dicy, as well as sunscreen that’s suitable for building sites (it…what, smells of misogyny and that weird paper that they used to print bongo on in the 80s? JOKING, CONSTRUCTION LADS, I KNOW THE INDUSTRY ISN’T LIKE THAT ANY MORE!), as part of an drive to get employers to take greater care to ensure staff’s skin health. The workwear and sunscreen is available for sale, and Chris assures me that you can actually buy the stuff rather than it being, in my admittedly rather aggressive formulation, ‘just some Lion-baiting adw4nk’ (on reflection that was possibly a *little* rude, sorry man), and so I feel quite comfortable pointing you at this because it’s simple, neatly-executed and is quite a clever way of drawing attention to something whilst at the same time being PRACTICALLY HELPFUL. Right, you cnuts, if you win a Lion off the back of this I am expecting some sort of kickback.
  • The Internet Wall: A WALL OF WEB MEMORY! Or at least that’s the idea behind it – anyone can upload a photo of a memory, add a line or two to explain it, and it can live here as a virtual polaroid in perpetuity (there is some sort of filtering going on to prevent bongospamming, before one of you wags attempts a Goatse takeover). Sadly there are only 46 memories on there at the moment, but I quite like the idea of the random, uncurated idea behind it so should you feel like contributing something then, well, please do.
  • Aurel’s Grand Theatre: As a result of having TOO MANY LINKS I am having to rather bash through these and haven’t necessarily had all that much time to sit with them – so, er, all I can tell you about this is that if you’ve ever wanted to play a videogame in which you play as a small racoon which for some reason is causing havoc in the pit of an orchestra, then, MERRY FCUKING CHRISTMAS! This is, honestly, a lot better than it needs to be – there is ACTUAL PHYSICS and you can knock over the music stands and, generally, the ‘chaotic trash panda’ vibe of the raccoon is communicated rather nicely through themodelling and animation here, but, also, I have literally no fcuking clue why this exists or what it’s for or why so much development budget has been lavished on what, I cannot stress enough, is a very silly game about being a raccoon in an orchestra pit (and, in subsequent levels, other bits of the theatre).
  • Blockify: Take any picture you like, feed it to this tool and watch as it MAGICALLY turns it into pixelart, with the additional gimmick that said pixels can be selected to replicate a selection of different Minecraft palettes. This might be something which makes sense to those of you with children, and might potentially stop them from screaming ‘chicken jockey’ for long enough that you might finally be able to get the popcorn out of your hair.
  • Make It A Quote: Mention this Bluesky account in response to any tweet (yes, ok, but I refuse to use That Fcuking Term) and it will produce an image of said Tweet. Which, obviously, is only EVER going to be used to clown on someone who’s said something very, very stupid, and so I feel I ought to put in some bromidic exhortation to BE KIND with it, but, well, honestly, fcuk that. Go feral. If people are being morons, shame them. I have lost patience with kindness. Choose violence, all of you.
  • Spanish Boost Gaming: Via my friend Alex – THANKS ALEX – comes this YouTube channel which is SUCH a clever idea; basically it combines videos about gaming with spanish language instruction, the idea being that you’ll come for the gaming content and then via some sort of STEALTH OSMOSIS miraculously find yourself able to speak Spanish as well by the end of your 17th video about La Magia de los Roguelikes (I have no idea, turns out, how one might even begin to say ‘roguelike’ in Spanish). Honestly, I am annoyed I didn’t think of this myself and I reckon there is SIGNIFICANT mileage in, well, ripping this off wholesale – that said, the presenter here is weirdly charismatic, which helps a lot (the intro video on the landing page made me genuinely lol), so it’s probably not *quite* as simple as, I don’t know, me talking wop while I play Monkey Island (although if someone wants to explore this as a New Content Vertical then, well, I am ALL EARS).
  • Jesus (Taylor’s Version): Videos of, er, Jesus, set to Taylor Swift. Why? I honestly have no idea. There is a lot to love about this – Jesus! Taylor Swift! – but perhaps my favourite things are the fact that the profile pic of the account is, inexplicably, Trisha Paytas, and the bio reads ‘Jesus/Taylor/Messi’ despite the notable absence of any football-related content.
  • Nature’s Best Photography Awards 2024: These are some LOVELY photos, but, well, is it just me or does ‘Nature’s Best Photography’ have quite strong ‘My Mum’s Cola’ brand vibes about it? Like the own-brand label for Tesco Value Weetabix or something? Anyway, my personal favourite is the one of all the dead birds who killed themselves by flying into buildings in Toronto, because, well, turns out that’s just who I am.
  • Chrysalis Magazine: Fair to say that this has not been a fantastic month or so for the trans community, whether in the UK or elsewhere (and Christ is it a miserable fact that that’s a sentence that you could mostly deploy at any point in human history and still have it be accurate); I thought this initiative, looking to create a magazine by and for trans youth, was a lovely counterpoint to some of the less-lovely ‘conversations’ currently taking place. “Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults). These days, it feels like we are always hearing about trans kids and teens. Chrysalis was created so that trans, non-binary, intersex, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit, and otherwise gender expansive youth can speak for themselves – and most importantly, speak to one another. At Chrysalis, we believe that art, literature, and culture are a key part of trans resistance and resilience for people of all ages. And we know that the creativity, talent, and imagination of trans youth is unparalleled. Chrysalis exists to give that radiance a platform.” Submissions are open to anyone under-18, so should you know anyone with whom this might resonate then please do pass it on.
  • WikiMap: A map! Of Wikipedia! That you can navigate, to see some of the thematic clustering and connection and taxonomical bundling that we’ve built around our corpus of knowledge! This is potentially VERY DANGEROUS – I just zoomed in and found the weird Scientology node of entries and very nearly sacked all of this off to learn about Operation Snow White, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
  • PunPages: A nascent directory of businesses whose names are also puns – you can either browse the entries or submit your own, so should you be aware of a local barber’s called ‘A Cut Above’ then, well, you know what to do. There’s an Indian street food kitchen on there, I hope and expect from Manchester, called ‘This Charming Naan’ which has made my morning.
  • A Cursor Is A Kite: I LOVE THIS I WANT THIS CODE ON ALL WEBSITES. This does one thing and one thing only – it turns your cursor into a visual representation of the wind where you are (or anywhere you ask it to for which publicly available data on current windspeed and direction is available), which, honestly, you will understand as soon as you click, I promise. PLEASE can whoever is behind this put the code on Git so we can launch a million kites into the digital ether? Thanks.
  • Future You: “Future You is a web-based platform that lets you chat with a personalized version of your future self. Our system uses advanced AI to create a realistic conversation partner based on information you provide.” – this is an academic project and so, at least ostensibly, it’s not about to use what you tell it to create some sort of monetisable clone of you; instead, it asks you a LOT of questions about your life, your experiences, your hopes and ambitions and wants and then spins up a theoretical future you based on the information you’ve given it so that you can, I don’t know, use it as some weird sort of onanistic therapy tool? Look, this is VERY far away from being my sort of thing – I am not that self-reflective and I simply don’t care enough about my future to have any interest whatsoever in chatting to an imaginary version of Matt from 2045 (I am vanishingly unlikely to live that long, for a start) – but if you’d like to spend even more time than you currently do examining your metaphorical navel then, well, I suppose I can’t stop you (but, also, are any of us HAPPIER with all this self-reflection and analysis? I would posit that, actually, are we fcuk).
  • Pickle: Basically, from what I can tell, this is ‘Vinted, but for renting rather than buying/selling clothes’ – which, honestly, sounds like a massive pain for the person doing the renting, what with having to send the clothes and chase for their return and get them cleaned and and and, and which, more than anything, feels very much like something you can chuck in the RECESSION INDICATOR drawer along with, well, seemingly everything else happening in culture right now. Still, perhaps some of you have some WAVEY GARMS (shall we bring that back?) that you want to monetise, so, well, see what you think.
  • Scrollito:Type whatever you want into the text box and this site will generate a scrolling webpage with those words on it. Which sounds pointless, fine, but I promise you you have not known hilarity until you have stood outside a meeting room pointing your screen through the glass wall at a friend so that they can read the simple word ‘w4nker’ scrolling JUST FOR THEM.
  • Encounter Nature: Author and general Fan Of Nature (and Friend of Curios) Melissa Harrison has MADE AN APP! Are you a fan of the great outdoors? Now that the weather’s nice (at least for a few days) would you like to Get Out Into The Country and Commune With The Green Shoots? GREAT! Encounter Nature is somewhere between a journaling platform and a guide to the natural world, offering both structured experiences to help you learn more about the green spaces which fortunately still just about surround us and a space to reflect on your engagement with said spaces – per the blurb,  “full of seasonal prompts, tips and ideas tailored to your location within Britain and Ireland, plus expert content for those who want to learn more. By helping you tune in to the world around you, and giving you a place to record the things you experience, Encounter will become your route to rich, meaningful and lifelong relationship with the natural world.” This isn’t, to be clear, my sort of thing – I am concrete through and through, from my head to the soot-spackled pebbledash of my hard hard heart – but I think that that for any of you with access to nature it could be rather a beautiful way of learning more about it and enjoying it more deeply.
  • SunSeeker: THIS IS SUCH A GOOD IDEA! This website does one thing and one thing only – tell it what time of the day you’re interested in, pick a location, and it will tell you whether, based on where buildings are and where the sun is in the sky on that day at that time, a specific area is going to be in the sun or not. PERFECT for planning pub garden outings and picnics and walks, and the sort of thing which, if you work in advermarketingpr, you ought to immediately be able to think of at least five clients you could flog a skinned version of this to. THINK, YOU FCUKS.
  • Gemini Plays Pokemon: After the abject failure of Claude to manage to complete it, now Google’s Gemini has been set loose on Pokemon Blue. This is a Twitch stream and, honestly, it is SLOW, but it’s interesting to check back in sporadically to see how the machine is faring. The main takeaway from these experiments is that context windows are a huge barrier to significant long-term reasoning utility, fwiw, but, also, LOOK AT THE MACHINE TRYING TO PLAY!!!
  • Geeks For Social Good: Are you a geek? Do you want to make the world a better place? OH GOOD! Geeks for Social Good is a UK-based organisation (London, specifically) for, er, leftist geeks who want to Make Better Things Happen. “The GFSC Community is an infrastructure organisation that supports the people, grassroots groups and community businesses trying to build an equitable and survivable world. Lots of people want to make ethical, meaningful, creative and socially valuable technology and design but lack access to capital, social networks, project mentoring, and job opportunities to do this…Our focus is on the doing, recognising that the left is very critique-focussed. We want to be primarily a community of do-ers, showing what we’re working on warts and all and encouraging others to join in. Our explicit goal is to create post billionaire technology: infrastructure owned and operated by communities themselves for the mutual benefit of their members. We will aim to embody these principles in building our own project.” I am far too a) cynical; and b) technically incapable for it to be My Sort Of Thing, but you are all probably better and more useful human beings than I am and so might find this of interest.
  • Share of Model: What with AI shopping coming to GPT…nowish, and that meaning that basically it will be EVERYWHERE within 6 months, so the attempts to juice the models begin – you thought the informational watertable had been fcuked by hallucinations? You just wait until the corporate arms race to insert THEIR brand into every single fcuking LLM response really gets going. Anyway, in preparation for this GLORIOUS FUTURE we’re starting to see the first tools to help you work out where YOUR brand or clients currently ranks in the unknowable mind of The Machine – I would take all of this stuff with a MASSIVE pinch of salt, fwiw, as I am not convinced that it’s anything other than conjecture and guesswork, but should you be interested there are other variants on the tech here, as well as a tool that promises to tell you how to OPTIMISE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY to rank better inside the LLMs (I am also pretty convinced that this is fcuking bunkum, fwiw).
  • Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares: Have you checked out the Kitchen Nightmares YouTube channel recently. You should, is all I’m saying. THE TITLES! THE THUMBNAILS! Whoever is running this is FAR TOO ONLINE in the very best way possible.
  • London Underground, Live: Tube trains, on a map, moving, IN REALTIME!!!!! This is utterly fcuking mesmerising, you have been warned.
  • The Gaza Bundle: 237 PC games on sale for $16, with all proceeds going to relief efforts in Gaza. You shouldn’t, if I’m honest with you, need the ludic inducement to donate the price of a pizza to help a people that have been subjected to daily atrocities for 18months but, well, in case it helps nudge your giving arm a little.
  • GLOF: QWOP, but golf. Those three words will either have made you groan in happy anticipation of a really sadistically bad time, or you’ll be wondering if I have had a stroke – either way, click the link and see if you can do better than my 236 yards.
  • Descend With Caution: Our final miscellaneous game-y link of the week (JESUS I THOUGHT THEY WOULD NEVER END – how, er, how was it for you?) is this, via B3ta – descend VERY CAREFULLY. This is actually really fun, and there’s a pleasing precision and weight to the way your fragile little potholer handles which makes it particularly satisfying to me.

By Luisa Huebner

WE FINISH THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THIS WEEKEND-READY TECHNO SET FROM ANNIE O AT THE KITKAT CLUB IN BERLIN! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Unnecessary Quotes: NOT A TUMBLR BUT I DON’T FCUKING CARE AND NOR DOES LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE! Sadly this hasn’t been updated for a year, but if you would like a whole website celebrating the enervating glory of “poorly used” quotation “marks” then WOW will you enjoy this. You terrible fcuking “pedant”.
  • Captcha Comics: Oldschool Tumblr GOLD, this – sadly long-since defunct, but this harks back to a simpler, gentler age of the web when you could just post the random nonsense words thrown up by early-stage Captcha software under a vaguely-memetic image and HEY PRESTO you have a RUNNING GAG. I promise you this will make you laugh a lot whilst simultaneously making you feel sad and old – WHAT A WONDERFUL COMBINATION!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Christian Nightmares: Specifically, US evangelicals who everyone knows are the maddest and worst examples of the generally-batshit Christian right (the only people who are possibly even worse than these nutjobs are US Catholics, specifically the adult converts – LOOKING AT YOU, JD – who even the actual, proper lunatic Opus Dei types within the Catholic church look at askance for their mad beliefs and failure to understand even the most basic tenets of theology). Anyway, Christian Nightmares is basically just a ‘point and laugh at the weirdos’ channel on Insta, and normally I wouldn’t bother but, well, fcuk these cnuts and their hateful worldview and perversion of the teachings of a God I don’t believe in.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • A Strange Stain In The Sky: Or, ‘the silicon valley coup against democracy’, or (and this is my title which I obviously think is better) ‘why Matt has been right about Peter Thiel all these years and why his constantly wanging on about the cuddly libertarian plute is totally justified rather than evidence of a growing, troubling obsession’. This is a VERY GOOD, if long, look at the libertarian – and avowedly anti-statist – thinking that the Valley’s most powerful people have been imbibing for years; most notoriously Thiel, but the trickle-down effect from him is…not-insignificant, and the proximity of these fcukers to the heart of US Government in 2025 maybe ought to give us slight pause for thought. This starts with a general ‘the feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere, and the general context-collapse engendered by the past two decades of technological incursion into every aspect of our lives makes us uniquely-ill-equipped to cope with it on a society/species level’ overview and then segues into a neat dissection of the thinking that underpins so much of the ‘intellectual heart’ of the Valley: “the Silicon Valley atmosphere is the byproduct of bringing the competitive industrial capitalist mentality of Midwest engineers closer to the hippie atmosphere of San Francisco Bay and its creative, counter-cultural and utopian desire to change the world. From this fusion emerge the multiple currents of what is known as the Californian Ideology: a hodgepodge of ideas, ideologies, and practices that converge in the messianic belief that technology will free us from all old forms of political control and solve all the world’s problems once and for all. Of the many forms that the Californian Ideology takes, the one that has become most dominant and central in the last twenty years is also the darkest: a dangerous cocktail of fundamentalist reactionism, radical libertarianism, obscurantist neo-fascism, historical fatalism and techno-totalitarianism.” Honestly, I know that I am a broken record on this stuff, but if you would like to develop an understanding of the whys and the how’s and the wheres of all of this that is slightly deeper than ‘tech bro bad lol’ (honestly, one of the worst things about the current Trumpian resurgence has been the reemergence of a certain peddler of Cambridge Analytica fiction, running a whole new resistance grift – CAROL YOU DIDN’T HELP LAST TIME FFS) then this is very much worth a read. Oh, and as a companion piece, this Vanity Fair article about the tech world’s shift to the espousal of ‘Christian’ values (the inverted commas here are important, I think) is worth reading – these are two parts of the same puzzle imho.
  • The Groupchats That Shape America: All the above neatly feeds into this week’s BIG FUNNY (not funny) US POLITICS STORY in which it was revealed that oviform plute Marc Andreessen (see Curios passim, ad nauseam) runs a bunch of groupchats through which he and other rich/powerful/connected people basically discuss THE FATE OF THE WEST and how to shape it. Which, if you take the throughline from the above Thiel/California ideology piece, feels…bad? Except also (and I don’t mean to be a d1ck about this, but) THIS IS HOW THE WORLD WORKS. Rich and powerful people meeting and discussing things outside of the public gaze and determining the future of everyone’s lives based on backchannel chats and petty grievances…I mean, how did you *think* sh1t worked? I know that the ‘groupchat’ thing gives it an air of modernity, but this is literally no different to gentleman’s clubs being the seat of power politics in the 18thC. It’s not right, but, well, it’s also inevitable. It was amusing to me, though, that (as pointed out by Max Read) a name referred to in the accompanying graphic but not mentioned in the body of the piece is everyone’s favourite galaxy-brained eugenics apologist Dominic Cummings. HAVEN’T YOU DISRUPTED US ENOUGH, DOMINIC???
  • The Rise of the Infinite Fringe: Or, how conspiracy theories became unkillable juggernauts, thanks to the increasingly-fractal nature of the fringes of media – there is now infinite space for an infinite number of nonsense-spewing controversymonkeys, thanks to the baseline cost of broadcasting being reduced to near-zero plus the seemingly bottomless pit of right-wing wealth ready to bankroll these people to tell mad lies to morons, plus the idea amongst certain political circles that any sort of attempt to place a primacy on the value of research and reporting, or to suggest that not all information is in fact value-equal, is gatekeeping and therefore evidence of a cover-up. Per the piece, “There’s a cruel irony in the fact that these influencers were cultivated by right-wing media outlets, funded by billionaires trying to bypass the mainstream gatekeepers, only to gain more influence after being expelled. And as Moore’s law makes consumer electronics cheaper, there’s nothing preventing this cycle from repeating: if an affiliate with a nascent brand gets kicked out of that influencer’s circle for whatever reason, they could purchase a discounted iPhone, sign up for Starlink, and maybe chat with a different wealthy right-wing funder who might have an ideological and / or personal grudge against their previous financier. (In some cases, that new backer might be a secret Russian operative, but hey, money is money.) Maybe they could take a shortcut and purchase some bots from a broker to boost their number of followers and still maintain a degree of influence over a segment of their previous audience. And if they kick someone out of their circles, that person could repeat those steps, and so on, and so on. It is a fringe that is, in theory, infinite.”
  • On Pope Francis: So I was in Rome when Frankie carked it last week, and it was genuinely strange to see that even though, in general, life went on as normal, the church runs through the fabric of the city in ways that aren’t maybe always apparent; I went to get takeout pizza on tuesday evening and the kids behind the counter, standard neighbourhood 20something lads, casually started chatting about the forthcoming conclave and the runners and riders as they packed up my slices. IT IS EVERYWHERE. Anyway, this is a good overview of Pope Francis legacy by James Butler in the LRB, which notes both that he was on the more progressive end of the spectrum of the Catholic Church and also that that still isn’t actually very progressive, and that his performance of tolerance and liberalism was, at heart, very much performative – the papacy, after all, is as much a comms and ambassadorial role as it is a theological one, and the very public displays of humility and occasionally-surprising forays into tolerance and acceptance weren’t, perhaps, entirely without one eye on how they would play from a reputational point of view. Still, he obviously thought the whole horrible shower of White House cnuts are, well, cnuts, and so for that alone he deserves praise.
  • Artificial Schizophrenia: This isn’t actually very long, but I am getting strong ‘this is coming very soon’ vibes from the whole general ‘people are going to literally be sent mad by LLMs soon’ discourse – this is Sean Monahan with a few words on why he thinks this is very much a coming thing. I can’t, honestly, disagree – I have several friends who are subject to some…quite intense mental headwinds on occasion, and the idea of them getting deep into the mental weeds with GPT when in the heat of a psychotic episode is…fcuking terrifying, if I’m honest with you. I had a meeting the other week with someone who is a FAMOUS (or at least famous-adjacent) who told me that a certain actor who had appeared in a certain now-disgraced wizarding franchise (his name rhymes with Paste On My Backs) has sacked off all his therapy and is instead just talking to the machine, because, apparently, “why would I pay a therapist when I can just tell GPT to assume the persona of all the smartest therapists in history?” To which I say a) and who says that actors are narcissistic morons?; and b) we are so, so fcuked. BONUS COMPANION LINK: Jay Springett here explores adjacent territory here, thinking about how AI companion-type interfaces are set to potentially reshape the way in which we communicate – and expect to communicate – both with machines and with each other. Jay and I (and Matt Webb) share a personal fascination with AI as ‘Little Computer People’, and there’s something interesting in the nexus between that as an interface idea and the ways in which we are set to inevitably use this tech to explore ourselves like the infinitely-narcissistic little monkeys we in fact are.
  • The Pr0nification of Everything: This is a few weeks old now and as such it’s possible you will have read it – in case not, though, I thought it was a really interesting exploration of the way in which bongo – it’s aesthetic and its tropes as much as the specific sexual acts depicted – as infiltrated mainstream culture over the past three decades, specifically female culture and the way in which said female culture presents/orients itself; this takes you from the Clinton scandal through to the Pamela Anderson sextape, through to the sex/sleaze nexus of the 00s all the way through to the post-OnlyFans world of ‘everyone’s a performer’ modernity – it covers Jennicam and the Hollywood machine’s flirtation with bongo, and even mentions Terry Richardson (a mention which fills me with ick, if I am honest with you, as I have a book of VERY EXPLICIT Richardson photography which was my leaving present from a job in 2007 – HR? LOL! – and which now I feel quite grubby about having in my possession), and, honestly, this is just INTERESTING HISTORY; it possibly contains rather less critical analysis and appraisal than I might have wanted, but it’s very interesting nonetheless. I remember a few years ago watching Married At First Sight: Australia and looking at all the couples and thinking that, were this shown to me with the volume off in 1995 and I were asked what the men and women on the show did for a living my immediate answer would have been ‘bongo’ – this is a bit of an explainer of how we got there.
  • Italian Brainrot Explained: Taylor Lorenz goes deep on the origins and lore and the WHAT IT ALL MEANS of ‘Italian Brainrot’ (look, either you know what it is and this term will mean something to you, or you will just have to click the link and find out who Bombardilo Coccodrillo is) – what I find interesting about this is partly the clear throughline that you can draw from all sorts of Serious Art stuff (dadaism! situationism!) to this in terms of constructed narratives, etc, but also the fact that this sort of thing (characters created by the community, madly-creative self-generating narratives spun out and perpetuated by the community! The development of DEEP LORE!) is exactly what all those people attempting to spin out ‘WEB3 NFT CREATIVE STORYTELLING CRYPTONARRATIVE PLATFORMS’ were trying to do c.2021 but which failed miserably because there was no heart or soul to them (whereas Tun Tun Tun Sahur is obviously ALL HEART). Anyway, this is all moot because 24h later the NYT did its own explainer article which almost certainly guarantees this will all be dead of cringe within a week.
  • Hyperflavour: Or ‘what’s behind the current trend for mad, overelaborate flavour combinations in food?’ – which, I’m going to be honest with you, reads to me like a uniquely North American thing. I remember going to the States about 15 years ago and realising that EVERY SINGLE MENU I READ seemed to be a parody of the already-parodic menus of restaurants like Dorsia and Barcadia frequented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, with horrendous-sounding aberrations of dishes like ‘Scallop Crudo with Vanilla-Raspberry Balsamic and a Habanero-Pecan-Yuzu Crumb’, with 73 named ingredients and a flavour profile that careened wildly across the world with nary a care for coherence – this is a ‘you’ problem, guys, Anyway, I enjoyed this piece which explains a bit of the ‘why’ behind food trends – although possibly doesn’t get quite into the weeds enough on the possibly-knotty questions about what is being signalled by certain ingredients having their moment in the sun – and which comes to the conclusion that, beyond a certain point, mashing together too many flavours is basically the tastebud equivalent of ‘mixing up all the plasticine and realising it inevitably ends up as a dun-brown mess’.
  • How AI Is Fcuking Venezuela: A quick dispatch from Rest of World about how generative AI is currently screwing pieceworkers who previously made a living datalabelling but whose labour is being stolen by The Machine because, well, IT IS INEVITABLE. Worth remembering when the conversation about AI and jobs comes up that just because you’re not seeing it here yet doesn’t mean that there aren’t already lots of people being fcuked by this (they are just in parts of the world that we don’t care about because they are far away and poorer than us).
  • Crazy Frog: A genuinely interesting look back at the brief – and yet surprisingly-long-lasting – phenomenon that was Crazy Frog, that bug-eyed homunculus with the gnarly little penis and the motorcycle helmet and That Voice. Honestly, this is SO REDOLENT OF 2004, from the ringtones to the digital landscape, that I can almost flash myself back to being Bluetoothed very distressing bongo by a stranger in a bar because I’d made the mistake of not turning it off and that was, apparently, A Thing People Did Back Then. GOOD TIMES. Also contains a surprisingly sincere appraisal of the music, which, honestly, I admire a lot: “Wernquist made no money off the Crazy Frog ringtones; Mamedahl doesn’t get a writing credit on the record. By the time we meet the Frog he is what he is, whatever sentiment you can wring out of his origins left long behind. So forget all that: is “Axel F”, the third highest-selling UK single of 2005, any good? Or perhaps the question should be: is it meant to be? Whatever else you can say about Crazy Frog, he understands the brief. His job, as the video tells you upfront, is to be the most annoying thing in the world, a trickster figure disrupting your phone, your commercial breaks, your charts. So one way of looking at this song is to ask – once the decision was taken to do a Crazy Frog record, could it have been any better than this? I think the answer is probably “no”.“
  • Gatsby’s Secret: I am not a great scholar of Fitzgerald’s novel, but I know many people are and that as such a lot of you might find this reading of it – that Gatsby, whose race is never explicitly mentioned or referred to in the text and whose physical description is…slightly ambiguous, might well have been writting as a ‘passing’ black or mixed race person, a man whose skin was light enough in tone to be able to live life as white in 1920s America…or close enough, at least. I don’t have a close enough knowledge of the text to judge how plausible this thesis is overall, but I really enjoyed the evidence and arguments laid out in this essay. “Then there are the breadcrumbs Fitzgerald embedded in the text. The car Gatsby drives is described as big and yellow, the perfect car for a character who is secretly a tragic mulatto. Pulled over by a policeman, Gatsby whips “a white card” out from his wallet, and the officer lets him go on his way. His war experience was earned proudly, in Montenegro. Unlike the many lies he tells about his past, Gatsby has a medal proving he was there. “It’s a novel of ellipses,” explains Janet Savage, who published a book further advancing Thompson’s argument that Gatsby is a passing novel. “It leads you up to the edge of the water, and then you’ve kind of got to jump. But it’s not an unrealistic jump.” When Daisy’s two suitors finally have their in-person confrontation, Buchanan declares that he doesn’t understand how Gatsby made it within a mile of his wife “unless you brought the groceries to the back door.” The last time Carraway visited Gatsby’s home, after his death, “on the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick.” It can’t all, from a writer as deliberate and self-regarding as Fitzgerald, be a coincidence. Can it?”
  • The Wrong Tom Mcrae: Tom Mcrae is a singer songwriter who I have adored for years, and who I can best describe as ‘sad songs for betwetting softies’. He almost got nearly famous a while back, and then…didn’t. His songs don’t get played on the radio. He makes a living from his music, but not, I don’t think, a particularly lavish one. He is ‘big in Benelux’, which I think gives you an accurate gauge of his degree of fame. This is a short essay of his about fame, success, failure, mistaken identity, community, serendipity and all sorts of other things, and, honestly, it is lovely, and sort-of uplifting, and it’s rare you can say that about anything in here if I am honest so, well, enjoy it while you can.
  • The Murscourse: Curios favourite Emma Garland writes about the Olly Murs Body Discourse – she is VERY FUNNY and this is, honestly, brilliant from start to finish. “Olly Murs Before has obviously, clearly, plainly been in the gym. He’s literally in the gym in the photo. Look at his stomach. Look at his legs. This is a man who does weights and has a nice amount of muscle covered by a nice layer of fat. However – and I’m going to demonstrate some classic female projection, here, strap in – Olly Murs Before looks strong in a homely way. A body like that makes me think things like ‘bet he does a cracking drunk cheese toastie,’ ‘bet he could use a paper map to navigate to the beach in a foreign country and then throw me about in the sea,’ ‘bet he knows his way around a B&Q.’ Olly Murs After makes me think things like ‘he looks hungry,’ ‘he’s going to set an alarm for 5AM on a Sunday and actually get up,’ ‘bet he has listened to at least two audiobooks about biohacking.’”
  • Import Immature: Spencer Wright at Scope of Work, the world’s most oddly-interesting blog about, er, logistics and stuff, wrote this excellent post about tariffs – except it is LOADS more interesting than that, and as with all of Spencer’s stuff it’s written with a degree of…humanity that you don’t expect from a post about, fundamentally, shipping stuff between nations and how much that costs. This touches business and economics and society and, mostly, people, and it really is wonderful, even if you never want to hear the word ‘tariff’ ever again, ever.
  • Endometriosis: I feel I ought to admit something upfront here – this was, er, viscerally unpleasant to me in ways I wasn’t expecting; I confess to not really having known much about endometriosis ahead of reading this piece beyond the broad outlines of ‘very painful, no fun, bad times’, but, honestly, FCUKING HELL this is some body-horror stuff and, seriously, if this is your experience of life then I am so so sorry for you and I hope it stops soon. That said, this is a really good piece of writing by Caroline Williams which, ok, is framed as being about ‘a pilgrimage to some standing stones’ and, yes, I suppose it is, but I promise you that I have no tolerance at all for spiritualwank and I still thought this was great, so, well, trust me.
  • Resomation: One of a couple of pieces in Curios this week from the new Granta (which is again superb and worth one of their cheapo £1 trial subscriptions to access the lot imho) – this is about a specific technique for the disposal of human remains, resomation, which effectively involves subjecting the corpse to alkaline hydrosis in a pressurised container until, basically, it is reduced to very, very fine dust (as you will know if you have ever dealt with cremains, those tend to be…lumpier, honestly, and more, well, Obviously Bone-y), but also about the people who are trying to bring the technique into the mainstream here in the UK – so this is both about the act and science of death, but also about the sorts of people who think ‘well, it’s a market that’s not going away!’ and attempt to make a business out of it, and, honestly, it is SO interesting. Although 100% if resomation does catch on, based on the description of the resulting substance left over you are going to see an awful lot of TikToks of people doing lines of granny.
  • Whitney Lives!: Andrew O’Hagan at the LRB writes about hologram concerts, from Whitney Houston to Coachella Tupac to the ABBA Voyage extravaganza – this doesn’t cover hugely new ground, but O’Hagan is always an entertaining writer and the questions of mortality, performance and participation that he raises are fun to think around.
  • Burning Mao: SUCH a wonderful story from Fernanda Eberstadt’s youth – honestly, you don’t need me to describe this to you, you just need the opening and then you can click in and crack right on: “The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory. I was a teen stalker, a fantasist who mostly preferred sitting on a stoop opposite someone’s house, noting the street-scene in my diary, to actually meeting the person inside, and Andy had long been one of my simmering obsessions.” It’s that good all the way through, promise.
  • Remission: The last Granta link of the week, this is by Gary Indiana, excerpted from the book he was apparently working on before he died – I love the multiple voices here and the way in which the narrative comes together in fragments, and the dispassionate authorial eye sitting above the objectively-grummy vignettes sketched before your eyes, and I hope you do too.
  • 28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing: Our final longread this week is something I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy at all, but which, honestly, is SO GOOD and SO much better than these things usually are – Adam Mastroianni writes 28 things about the act of writing – observations, reflections, whatever you want to call them, these are funny and wise (I know, but they really are) and mean and you will feel VERY SEEN, both as reader and writer. Honestly, at least one of these – but probably more – will speak to you VERY CLOSELY INDEED. This, for example, I fcuking ADORE: “Remember the adrenochrome conspiracy? It claimed that children produce a kind of magical hormone when under duress, and celebrities stay forever young by feeding upon it. This is false, of course. But what if this actually describes our relationship to artists? What if we all stay alive by feeding on the products of their suffering? What if a great piece of art is like a pearl: an irritant covered in a million attempts to make it go away?”

By David Inshaw

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 11/04/25

Reading Time: 40 minutes

 

HELLO EVERYONE! There’s a slightly demob-happy air to Curios today – don’t worry, you won’t be able to tell and it’s obviously made no discernible difference to the quality of the coming prose, so don’t get your hopes up – given I am taking a couple of weeks off and so can maybe remove my face from the internet for a brief while before locking in for “2025 Season Two: It Gets Worse, Somehow”.

To reassure you, it’s not because I am doing anything fun or good – it’s because it’s Easter and you’ll all be too busy spending time with these things I hear are called ‘families’ and ‘loved ones’ to bother with POOR OLD ME AND MY LINKS (please, put down the violins, I am going to Rome for a few days to do EXCITING ADMINISTRATIVE TASKS, it is literally fine) – but please do know that I will miss you. Or, more accurately, I will miss the internet – if you happen to see a man wandering around either the UK or Italian capitals with a look of slight confusion, making strange mouse-like hand gestures in the empty air and attempting to click and resize people then, well, BE KIND TO HIM!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you had better still be here when I get back on 25 April.

ADDITIONAL BIT OF HOUSEKEEPING: The Fence is a genuinely good magazine that I actively enjoy, and its editor Charlie did me a very kind favour last year, so by way of reciprocity I am including a link to his magazine’s website and a code that’ll get you 20% off an annual subscription; seriously, it’s a good read and, if you’re able to afford it, SUPPORTING WRITING IS A GOOD THING. This has not been a paid-for promotion, for the avoidance of doubt. Basically CLICK THIS LINK, and if you use the code SPRING20 you will get a discount. It’s a bargain.

 By Stuart Pearson Wright

WE BEGIN BY ONCE AGAIN VISITING CORNWALL TO FIND SADEAGLE PLAYING WITH  HIS RECORDS – THIS ONE OPENS WITH THE SAMPLE FROM ‘MIDNIGHT TO A PERFECT WORLD’ WHICH IS AN EXCELLENT REASON TO CHUCK IT ON AS YOU CLICK (OR INDEED AS YOU DON’T! I AM NOT THE BOSS OF YOU!)! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS A LOT THIS WEEK, PT.1:  

  • Allow Webcam: Who ARE you, mysterious reader mine? Do you exist in corporeal form? How, exactly, does that corporeal form manifest itself in meatspace? I sometimes wonder, you know, what the few dozen people reading these words look like – I have a very slight idea, obviously, but as ever with projects like this part of the ‘work’ here is the flinging out of words and links into the digital ether without ever really knowing what happens to them or who they’re consumed by, or indeed anything about said CONSUMERS. Still, I am chucking this link up top this week and then spending ALL AFTERNOON refreshing the site in the vague presumption that a few of you that appear on it will be Curios readers, and so that I can gaze into your very soul in an attempt to scry whatever sickness it is that is compelling you to do this to yourselves each week (or, more likely, just this once more because dear God ENOUGH). Erm, I should probably, 100-ish words in, get round to describing what the fcuk this link is, shouldn’t I? FFS Matt! Er, Allow Webcam is a very simple project/page – click the link, and if you allow access to your webcam it will take a snap of you, which will then be added to all the OTHER snaps taken of people who have visited the site and added to the homepage, offering a chronololgical photographic record of all of the faces (mostly) of those who’ve passed through. Which I love as both an idea – this tiny collection of lo-fi thumbnails giving a human face to the otherwise anonymous process of moving through digital space – and also as a gallery of ‘the faces people make when browsing the web’. I have just realised that while the photos display small on landing they’re actually higher-res than I first thought, meaning if you’re so minded you can zoom in and get a close look, which, well, caveat emptor is all I’m saying. I get the feeling there’s probably some rudimentary stuff going on here to prevent it being inundated with poor-quality d1ckshots (because it is a truth universally acknowledged that any site with webcam functionality will for some reason induce a whole bunch of guys to get their junk out in front of it), but in general this is a WHOLESOME PICTURE OF INTERNET LIFE, or at least a corner of it that enjoys having its photo taken as part of a largely-pointless digital art project.
  • Everyday: This is rather beautiful, and I quite like the fact that it’s brand-sponsored, mainly because WELL DONE HYUNDAI for throwing money at a weird digital art project. Spencer Chang, whose work I have featured in here before on a few occasions, presents ‘Everyday’, which is basically about attempting to develop a visual representation of our relationship with our devices and to seek to make people think about how that relationship might be expressed as a collaborative work. Which might make more sense in their words, come to think of it – hang on: “Through hourly prompts that mirror the natural transitions of our 24-hour day, Chang creates digital poems—brief, evocative invitations to play with our devices in new, physical ways. In response, everyday transforms participants’ movements into a visual poem capturing fleeting gestures as lasting marks of time. Playful, intimate, and sometimes absurd, the prompts in everyday—cradling, tracing, spinning, or even protecting a device—slow the rhythm of digital engagement, offering a moment of pause within an otherwise continuous flow of information. These gestures, archived indefinitely on Artlab’s website, become part of a larger, collective composition, reflecting Chang’s ongoing exploration of technology as a tool for communal flourishing.” This one works best on your phone – whenever you open the site you’ll be presented with a different prompt to react to based on the time of day; engage with the prompt however you see fit, and then see the movements and gestures you made both as a single visualisation but also as part of a larger, collaborative work derived from a combined aggregate of your and others’ gestures. This is weirdly beautiful, but also, when you think about it for more than half a second, also quite beautifully weird and not a little device-fetishistic, which, well, I suppose is about right really.
  • Realbotix: Would YOU like to drop $20k+ on a robot humanoid with almost the exact demeanour of the main antagonist from a very specific flavour of 80s horror movie, something like, I don’t know, ‘ReAnimator’ or ‘Basket Case’? Would you like to have it lurching and capering for you, with a face like melted wax and eyes that are both sightless and, unnervingly, able to see into the very Marianas Trench of your soul? No, you wouldn’t, would you, you’re a person of taste and discernment and not a fcuking lunatic with money to burn (although, actually, if you DO have money to burn then why not, er, let me burn it for you? Just send it to me and I will take care of the rest, honest. No, I won’t film it, that would be incriminating, just trust me), and because literally NO FCUKER needs or wants a non-functioning ‘robot’ that looks almost EXACTLY like something from one of those ‘worst waxworks EVER!’ slideshows that seem to do the rounds every three years or so. AND YET! Realbotix is a company that apparently really is offering exactly this – PLEASE click the link and look at the images and the videos, and then try and imagine anyone looking at these and thinking ‘yes, I want one, NOW!’. The gimmick here, obviously, is AI!!! All of these ghastly models will apparently ‘integrate with AI’, so the idea is that you can spin up and AI companion using your favourite model and then GIVE THEM LIFE (WE KNOW HOW THIS ENDS, PYGMALION) via terrifying robotic digipuppetry. The ‘use cases’ section is interesting – “Realbotix can replicate a historical figure, a celebrity or bring to life our client’s vision for a robot.” Take a look at the website, seriously, and try and imagining ANYONE, famous or otherwise, thinking ‘yes, I would like to be immportalised in robot form looking like THAT’. Honestly, this is a truly astonishing company and I am very, very confused about who the fcuk is backing this and why.
  • Looksmapping: I feel I ought to caveat this one with ‘look, this is probably going to make you feel a bit sad inside and I am sorry’ – so, er, consider yourselves caveated. It is, apparently, a truth universally acknowledged that any new or newish technology will be used almost immediately by Some Fcuking Guy With Access To Github to in some way enact his weird little fantasy of being able to rate women on a sliding scale – and LO! Here’s the blurb: “I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer’s profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10. This map shows how attractive each restaurant’s clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not. The model is certainly biased. It’s certainly flawed. But we judge places by the people who go there. We always have. And are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day. A mirror held up to our collective vanity.” HMMMMMMMMM. I mean, nice attempted caveats there, but, er, you could just not have built this. Anyway, this only covers Manhattan, thank God, and is obviously bullsh1t, but it just sort of made me sigh in a slightly-tired way when I found it via Giuseppe earlier this week and I just sort of wish that people would stop making things like this (I also wish I was beautiful, so if someone could sort both of those things out that would be lovely thanks).
  • Sublime: TL;DR – did you used to like Evernote, before it got unusably sh1t? Are you the sort of person who really, really wants a way to help you organise all your browsing and thoughts and to keep track of all the things you read and sites you visit and pictures you see and witticisms you read, and the memes and the takes and and and and? GREAT! In which case you might really enjoy Sublime, which has been in development for several years now but which just opened to the general public and, should you be someone who does a lot of online research and reading, and who wants/needs to triage, organise and taxonomise the information gleaned from said research using a nicely-designed and sophisticated system of tagging and crossreferencing and natural-language retrieval. FULL DISCLOSURE: I met one of the people behind this at Naive Yearly a couple of years back and have been following the project since, but I have no involvement beyond that; I just think it looks like some cool software that some of you might find useful (weirdly, despite being the sort of person for whom, in theory, things like this would be super-useful my brain just doesn’t really…need them? It’s weird, it just sort of does the tagging automatically, turns out. Lest you think this some sort of superpower, by the way, let me reassure you that it also does a lot of other stuff, unbidden, that is significantly less-helpful).
  • Snakists: I’ve lost track of the number of Pippin Barr’s projects I’ve written up here over the years – this latest is a sequel of sorts to his previous riffs on the basic idea of the game ‘Snake’. Last time Barr explored ‘the game ‘Snake’ as a series of meditations on philosophical concepts’ – this time, we get ‘the game ‘Snake’ reimagined as a variety of ‘ists’’. “Twenty ways to think about a snake! Is it an alarmist?! A nudist?! A conformist?! Crossing tasks off its checklist!? Or just doing the twist!? You get the gist! SNAKISTS is a direct sequel to SNAKISMS. I thought it would be pretty fun to take on the variations challenge with Snake one more time. The world of ists is a weirder and less philosophical world than the isms, and so are the games. Heist, typist, … onanist. You know you want to.” I have tried half a dozen of these, and each is tiny and really rather clever, even the w4nking one; tiny digital artworks, perfectly-formed.
  • CSS Hell: CAVEAT: I understand the theory of what this is, but am not skilled or knowledgeable enough to interact with it in any meaningful way, so I am fcuked if I know whether it’s any ‘good’. BUT! I get the impression that there may be three or four of you who are more technical than me and for whom this might be ‘fun’, so here goes: “Welcome to CSS Hell, where you will be subjected to 15 unimaginably torturous CSS puzzles…The mechanics of the puzzles are simple: for each peg, there is a hole, and each peg must overlap with its corresponding hole. To accomplish this, you will add CSS properties to certain divs. Click on any div to see its properties and add your own. All divs have a limit on the number of properties that can be added (usually just one or two), and some are “locked” (no properties can be added). In general, any CSS property is allowed, with a few exceptions that you may stumble across.” Does…does that mean anything to you? GREAT!
  • Supercartoons: TOONS! Who doesn’t love toons? NO FCUKER, etc! This is a GREAT resource, full of animated action of the oldschool, classic variety – we’re talking mid-20thC Bugs et al, Tom & Jerry, Daffy and, weirdly, some Disney stuff…look, I have no idea whatsoever what the deal with copyright here is, but, well, should you be in the mood for some good, clean (incredibly-violent) slapstick animated fun from the past then FILL YOUR CARTOON BOOTS.
  • Objects from the Future: On the one hand, I’ve always found ‘futurism’ and ‘futurists’ vaguely-risible as a concept – ARE WE BACK TO SCRYING THE VISCERA OF GOATS, IS IT??? – but then again a lot of the smartest people I know or have met work or have worked in the vaguely-futuresy space and so it’s possible that I’m just a shallow, cynical moron who’s simply averse to any sort of structured rigorous thinking (this is, I concede, a plausible explanation). Anyway, this came to me via Patrick over at Sentiers, and is a nice little digital tool to help encourage FUTURES SPECULATION (basically, ‘ways of thinking about and framing future events or possibilities/probabilities). There are five different cards, each of which will, when drawn, present one of a series of options under a number of broad headings – what kind of future does this object exist in, how far into the future will it exist, what is it, what context or industry does it exist in, and what human need does this object satisfy – and the idea is to use the prompts as imaginative jumping off points to guide thinking. This is, I am sure, potentially useful for futures-y stuff, but it’s also just a fun imaginative exercise in general and I had a happy five minutes earlier coming up with ideas for an internet time machine that would enable you to go back and recreate one perfect digital day from the past (which, dear fcuking God, says something so unutterably bleak about me and the way I obviously conceive of the world that I am going to have to just leave this here lest I start weeping uncontrollably).
  • Quake, But AI: Ok, you remember the ‘we made Minecraft in AI’ thing from…some point in the near-past (is anyone else’s ability to gauge the passage of time accurately still utterly-banjaxed post-the Covid era, by the way? Or is this just a side effect of creeping senescence?)? Well this is that, but instead of Minecraft it’s Quake. To be clear, this isn’t playable or fun in any meaningful sense – it runs appallingly-slowly, you move like a crippled slug swimming through molasses and the ‘shooting’ is iffy at best, but there’s a little more permanence going on in the imagining (so that looking away from a wall and then looking back doesn’t cause said wall to disappear, for example), and while the reaction to this has predictably been KILL IT WITH FIRE from basically every corner of the web (or at least the corners I see), it’s undeniably interesting to see this being ‘imagined’ (NOT ‘IMAGINED’) on the fly like this.
  • Elon’s Insights: A website that spins up utterly-imagined ‘deep quotes’ from an imaginary meme account on X called ‘@AmazingScienceTruth’ and then imagines Elon Musk’s reactions to them. A single-note gag, but, equally, you can totally imagine That Fcuking Man seeing a Tweet reading ‘Lab-grown breasts are 27% more likely to be sexy’ and QTing it with ‘funding research immediately’, so.
  • Fcuking Every Word: Twitter’s obviously been fcuked beyond all recognition and utility to the point that I don’t really know anyone using it anymore (because, obviously, I exist in a LEFTIST WOKE LIBERAL BUBBLE), but occasionally there are signs that it’s not totally worthless yet. See this account, which has pivoted from its original mission (tweeting ‘fcuk x’ for every single word in the English language), having finally completed it after YEARS, and has now moved on to a companion project – to whit, tweeting ‘fcuking x’ for every single word in the English language. As of 20 minutes ago we were up to ‘fcuking acceptable’. NOBLE WORK.
  • Digital Preservation Jumpers: Thanks to this lovely person for sending this link my way – a selection of knitting patterns inspired by digital storage and preservation media, so with FLOPPY DISKS and THE WEIRD LITTLE JUMPING DINOSAUR GAME GOOGLE SERVES YOU WHEN THE INTERNET’S DOWN and several more besides and, look, yes, this is both intensely geeky AND intensely twee, but occasionally that’s ok and this is one of those occasions.
  • Hot Air: I rather like this project by Tortoise Media and Exeter University, and think it’s smart comms work by Octopus Energy to have paid for it – this is basically a tracker showing different strands of climate change mis/disinformation and where they originate, and where they are most widely propagated (you might not be surprised to learn that X is a…not-insignificant vector here). “We identified almost 300 online actors posting about climate change – in ways that range from scepticism to outright misinformation – and created a database of their posts in order to understand how this information spreads” – you can search the information by keyword, look at different authors and how much they can be seen to be driving specific narratives, dive into specific themes to see how and where they propagate…would have maybe been nice to have a little more network analysis layered on top here, but I appreciate that that would slightly change the scope of the project and would have added loads of work and I should probably stop being so fcuking demanding really.
  • This Song Meant: I get the feeling this is just a vibecoded thing spun up by a kid somewhere (sorry, that sounds STAGGERINGLY dismissive and I don’t mean it to be; more that it’s quite light-touch is all), but I really like the simple premise; pick a song, explain what it means to you and maybe why, post it here for the world to see. It’s a nice, clean, one-note purpose and I like the idea of this becoming big-ish – obviously there’s a lot of CHILDREN on here so a few obviously dumb/silly responses, but also a lot of quite heartfelt stuff and I think there’s a space for this specific collection of feelings and would quite like to see it flourish.
  • The Population Project: This feels…quite mad, tbh, but apparently is a REAL PROJECT and not in fact some sort of lunatic quest. Do you remember the character of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in Hitchhiker’s? The guy who lived so long that he had totally run out of things to do, and so set himself the Sisyphean task to eke out his near-infinite existence of personally-insulting every living being in the galaxy? Of course you do! Such a contemporary reference! Anyway, this feels *almost* as impossible as that – The Population Project is trying to, er, get a record of the name of everyone who’s alive (I know, I know, we will come to that). “The Population Project is a nonprofit organization, whose goal is to record the full name and place and date of birth of all living humans. Such an endeavor has never been attempted. Interestingly enough, in a time when information has never been so plentiful, we do not give much thought to the 8 billion people—individual people, each with their own name— who share this planet with us.” I mean, look lads, there are probably one or two reasons why this has never been attempted, namely that it’s FCUKING IMPOSSIBLE given the fact that we’re all constantly being born and dying and what the fcuk does ‘ALL LIVING HUMANS’ actually mean? Like, living…when? NOW? Or, er…NOW? Because the number changed between those two ‘nows’ you know. And that third one there, now I mention it. Anyway, you can add your name to the most futile endeavour in human history should you so desire.
  • The Curved Text Generator: Oh this is *so* lovely! Type your text and then draw a curvy line to generate it along whatever movement arc pleases you best; this is *such* a nice way of making words move, and you can create some really nice effects here with minimal effort.
  • Comic Sans Map: Friend Of Curios Matt Round has taken ‘maps on the internet’ and added Comic Sans to them. This is utterly pointless unless a) you know people who genuinely find comic sans more readable and would benefit from seeing stuff in this font; or b) you know someone who still thinks it’s 2011 and that ‘hating comic sans with a passion’ is a personality point, and who would be really upset if you set this as their default map client in their phone.
  • Maggots On Tour: Oh this is SO perfect. Would you like to RACE MAGGOTS??? Well get involved. You can literally BOOK A MAGGOT RACING EVENT. Seriously, these people will come to you and help you RACE MAGGOTS. This is, seemingly, really not a joke. “For those who have not been to or booked one of our “Maggots on Tour” Charity Race Events before, be prepared for a great time. The Maggots race on a specially designed racetrack that is projected on to a large 120” screen to enable everyone to be able to see and hear a live commentary on each race. The event can be arranged any time, morning, afternoon or evening at any location Pubs, Clubs, Village Halls etc either indoors or outside (dependent on weather conditions.) The race betting for the event is based on a Tote Betting Format similar to betting at Horse / Greyhound race track. Programmes of all the riders with names are sold at £1 each and are a requirement to bet. Briefly there are 6 races whereby you can place as many £1 bets on any of the six booths/lanes of your choice. The total money bet on all the lanes is shared between the winners of the winning lane less 50% which goes to the charity. The winning maggots from all the 6 races will be stabled until the last race, and then the 6 previous winners will be auctioned to the highest bidder/s or syndicate to own and race in last race of the night (The Sellers Plate).” DOESN’T THAT SOUND GOOD??? Honestly, seeing as you can’t go to the fcuking dogs any more this sounds like a decent alternative, and if you would like to invite me then, well, I probably wouldn’t say no.

By Adrien Limousin

NEXT WHY NOT ENJOY A TWO-HOUR MIX BY DJ HELL RECORDED LAST MONTH IN MEXICO CITY AND FEATURING A TRULY FILTHY SECTION AROUND THE 48 MINUTE MARK! 

THE SECTION WHICH HAS BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS A LOT THIS WEEK, PT.2:  

  •  The Height/Weight Chart: Thanks to Chris to sending this WONDERFUL slice of old internet my way – I feel slightly odd that I’ve not featured this before, but I don’t *think* this particular variant has been linked to in Curios past, and anyway it is NEAR PERFECT. I have no idea why oldschool magazine site Cockeyed, from The Web’s Past, decided that it was going to create a definitive photographic database of all possible human combinations of height and weight but, well, that is exactly what they attempted at some point to do. Seemingly a combination of photos of famous and photos submitted by readers themselves, this is a grid with weight across the top and height along the side (or, er, the ‘x’ and ‘y’ axes as I know some people like to call them, ffs Matt), so you can get an idea of what various people who are X tall and Y heavy look like. On the one hand, this is actually quite a good resource for reminding yourself that people come in all shapes and sizes and that beauty or attractiveness is in no way contingent on someone existing within a specific range; on the other, why the fcuk do none of the other people who share my specific height/weight ratio look anywhere near as fcuking emaciated as me?! WHY MUST I LOOK LIKE THE AMBULANT SKELETON????? So fcuking unfair chiz chiz chiz. Anyway, SPOT YOURSELF!
  • IBM Design Language: Very much one for the design ‘heads’ (sorry) here – this is an archive of all IBM’s brand/design gubbins, fonts and icons and images and and and and. Look, if you like IBM – and who doesn’t? NO FCU…actually, hang on, in this case that’s not true, is it? Noone likes IBM that much, do they? Oh well – or brand design work, then this will please you no end.
  • 2025 Conspiracies: I can’t pretend I don’t find this a little…troubling here in the post-truth era. 2025 Conspiracies is a TikTok account which ostensibly exists to present rundowns of some of the maddest online conspiracy sh1t doing the rounds in big, bad old 2025 – except, well, this is TikTok and hence there’s no context and no nuance, and a lot of the videos are AI-generated, and while the channel is called ‘conspiracies’ which would suggest ‘not true’ I do worry slightly based on the comments that that is possibly…not WHOLLY understood by the entirety of the many millions who are apparently seeing these videos. Still, it was good to learn about the fact that the US Military has apparently been carrying out covert soul-separation exercises at Area 51 under instruction from aliens who have for years been using us meaty vessels as carriers for their extraplanetary essences (no sh1t, this is the foundation to at least one of the insane videos on the page, it’s that level of mad). Is it good that millions of people are being shown this stuff, entirely denuded of explanatory framing, and will, if they like it, get shown more and more and more? Er, probably not! Does anyone seem to care? Er, no! I genuinely don’t think we understand what we are currently doing to our shared, species-level sense of collective understanding (CLUE: WE ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING GOOD).
  • The CharacterAI SubReddit: Seeing as we’re doing ‘vaguely-troubling things that are probably having a Bad Effect on The Culture’, welcome to the subReddit for AI persona spinner-upper CharacterAI, in which an active community of CharacterAI users discuss all the different ways in which their interactions with The Machine have been, in the main, fcuking MENTAL. I encourage you to delve into this thread exploring ‘what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in a roleplay?’ because OH MY GOD. It’s like the whole ‘put the sims in the pool, remove the ladder, watch them drown’ thing, except what if you could then record the screams of the sims and ask them while they were drowning what it felt like to feel all the hope drain from their souls; I am not joking, there is some DARK stuff in there (why are you torturing the poor bots so?), but also, as you go through the whole sub, just so much wish fulfilment and sex/erotica exploration, and…jesus, just a lot of loneliness, and, honestly, anyone looking for any sort of inspiration for any near-future weird fiction stuff could do worse than spending some time marinading in this (and then possibly taking a long, hot shower because you will very much feel like you need one).
  • Eyeball: CAVEAT: I haven’t tried this, so, well, no idea if it’s any good – BUT it sounds vaguely-interesting and possibly useful, and not unlike a very lightweight version of Sublime from a bit earlier; basically this is an AI-juiced mobile bookmarking app, which effectively lets you just do natural language lookup and analysis on all the stuff you choose to bookmark. Which, you’d imagine, is going to come natively to all browsers sooner rather than later (like, you’d sort-of imagine that bringing NotebookLM functionality to Chrome wouldn’t be a million miles from Google’s thinking) (also, lol at the idea that some bloke in his pants in his kitchen in London has any fcuking idea what Google’s product roadmap looks like, shut up Matt you know-nothing bozo), but til that point then maybe check this out if it sounds useful.
  • Tears Disappear in the Sand: I  have to confess that I am not *really* sure what’s happening here, but I am very pleased that this exists, whatever the fcuk it is. Click the link and you’re presented with a webpage with a very collage-y, almost 2006ish, aesthetic – there’s a sort of Missile Attack-style…shooter-thing at the bottom, which tracks the movement of your mouse, and you can click and fire arrows at the various…things (noses, ears, eyes, etc) and letters which appear on screen, and each time your arrow hits an object a note sounds, the pitch and tone correlated to what it is that you’ve hit, and it all renders into a…slow, plinking but strangely…nice? And sort of relaxing? soundscape which sort of sucks you in, and I really really enjoyed both times I spent with this this week and I think you might too.
  • The Cost Index: We’ve very much in one of those situations where everything is happening so much that I don’t really want to allude to The Real World too much here – Christ alone knows that it’s impossible to ignore the news and Those Fcuking Men, and that you probably don’t need to hear more about it in your least-favourite newsletter – but I am going to include this because it’s interesting and potentially useful as an overview of WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW (or at least I think it is; fcuked if I can tell what the current state of play is with anything, to be honest. God, do you remember a time when the news wasn’t always happening? I mean, look, I know that on some base level the news is always happening and life is big and massive and awful for someone somewhere all of the time, but do you ever miss those days (did they exist, or are these simply the rheumy-eyed misreminiscences of an old man?) when, seemingly, entire MONTHS went by without a Big Global Event We Had To Care About Lest It Fcuk Us? HALCYON DAYS!). This is an attempt to summarise the current state of global tariffs imposed by the US, how they are being reciprocated, and how this is (roughly) affecting the prices of certain consumer goods in North America. God I fcuking hate those fcuking men.
  • The Ohziverse: Look, this isn’t super-exciting (way to sell the fcuking links, Matt, you fcuking moron, Jesus), but it DID offer me a brief flashback to…ooh, 2021 and THE BRIEF METAVERSAL BOOM in which a bunch of enterprising agencies made a lot of bank by convincing morons at major companies that it was worth dropping 6 figures on a bespoke 3d ‘metaverse’ (NOT A FCUKING METAVERSE) in which approximately three actual people would ever land, spend five minutes there and then get bored and fcuk off, never to return (shout out to all the client handlers who got those deals over the line – your jobs are stupid and pointless and a waste of time, but you also fleeced a LOT of idiots and as such deserve at least small kudos). Anyway, this is a calling card for some digital agency or another (sorry, but) which acts as a kind of ‘here’s some of our work, presented as a navigable 3d world, which by the way we could also build for you if you had more money than sense’ advert and which is perfectly-nicely-made and, like all of these things, is utterly empty and devoid of purpose. All of you people four years ago pretending that this stuff was the future – I REMEMBER.
  • The Group Chat: I am aware I am possibly late to this – I sent it to a friend earlier this week and they casually told me they’d ‘seen it last week’ and, reader, I DIED INSIDE – what with it being on TikTok and having done good numbers and ENGAGEMENT BY FAMOUSES, but if you’re not yet familiar with this ‘show’ then, really, watch it because it’s genuinely really good. It’s basically a single performer playing all of the different constituent members of a girls’ groupchat arranging a night out, and FCUK does she nail the voices and the intrapersonal dynamics and just the FLOW of a chat and the dynamic of different people and the roles they play within a friendship group…honestly, forget the medium for a moment and this is just really sharp and well-observed and well-acted and written, and the sort of thing that you feel it’s fcuking scandalous TV doesn’t seem interested in exploring or investing in in any meaningful way. Then bring it back to the medium, and think about how smart it is that this leans into so many existing TikTok visual tropes and trends; the styling, the edits, the recognisable lifestyle tropes taken from all the individual trends that inform the whole video, the fact that, while being scripted and sophisticated, its aesthetic and vibe fits straight into the scroll seamlessly…this is really, really good and another example of how this is telly now whether telly people like it.
  • Lloyd’s Online Drum Machine: On the one hand, yes, you have seen online drum machines before. On the other, this one – by Lloyd, whoever Lloyd is; HELLO LLOYD, should you ever see this! – is REALLY simple and easy to use and I found myself making stuff that…didn’t sound terrible within about 5 minutes, and that doesn’t usually happen with these things because, well, I am a cloth-eared cnut. Give it a go, you may surprise yourself – also, everything’s helpfully exportable so it’s actually not a bad place to spin up rough beats to mess with should you be so inclined.
  • The Great Kat: Infinite thanks to Curios reader Amber Bonnet, who introduced me to The Great Kat with the following email: “Not sure if you actually collect these kinds of websites, but this site made me feel like i was subjected to the scared straight method of smoking a pack of cigarettes at the table in one go.” Which, much as it might not sound like it, is a not-unreasonable description of The Great Kat’s website which has a very…particular aesthetic (part of which is BREASTS – The Great Kat has evidently decided that part of her persona is BREASTS and so, well, BREASTS) and a…not-always-consistent relationship with CSS, and which features a LOT of quite dense information about The Great Kat who, as far as I can tell, is a VERy well-trained classical musician who has found a niche/vocation doing what is basically high-octane performance speed metal kitsch guitar (yes, that is A Thing, do not @ me). Despite the very different subject matter, there’s a certain ‘Ling’s Cars’ energy to this (I am no longer linking to Ling, though, because she has cleaned up her site and I am DEVASTATED, it’s like the ravens have left the tower or something – iykyk) and I love it immoderately (although I do wish that maybe Kat would, er, tone down the BREASTS slightly).
  • Eightile: LOTS of games this week, starting with Eightile – each day you have to make anagrams of incrementally-increasing numbers of letters, from 3 all the way to 8. HOW FAST CAN YOU DO IT (I did today’s in 99 seconds, which on reflection is in no way impressive and I wish I hadn’t told you now as you will p1ss all over my score with no difficulty whatsoever; please feel free to not tell me how much quicker you were than me).
  • Scraple: This is a fun little Scrabble variant – each day you’re given a selection of letters and challenged to get the best scrabble score you can by arranging as many of them as possible on a tiny grid; there’s quite a bit of thinking you can get into here, and it will obviously benefit the sort of sicko who’s got a mental list of friendly, short scrabblewords that they can draw on; at the end you submit your final board and, in a nice touch, see not only your score but how well you compare to all the others who’ve played the game today, which it turns out is a REALLY good wauy of making yourself feel really fcuking thick first thing in the morning.
  • SQORP: Is there a reason for the current wave of Pico8 games? Not complaining, just curious. Anyway, this is a puzzle game which, I have to be honest, does not work with my brain AT ALL (colours and shapes, not my vibe) but which might scratch a particular itch for some of you – this is about colourmatching, patternforming and rotations, which might give you some idea of how it will tesselate or otherwise with the peculiar edges of your brain.
  • 1000 Years: Via Nag, this is a GREAT little historyquizgame – basically you start with a score of 1000 and have to answer as many historical questions as possible, 10 per country, until you run out, with the goal being to ‘complete’ as many countries as possible before you hit 0. All the questions are of the ‘in which year did…’ variety, meaning you lose points based on how distant your guess is from the correct answer – this FUN, and I say that as someone who is fcuking awful at both history and dates.
  • Sudoku Castlevania: Another one of those links where I am honour-bound to say ‘look, this is very much not one for me but I am selflessly including this because I reckon there’s an outside chance that one of you weirdos might love it irrationally’. I barely understand what is happening here, and the words in the explainer might as well be in Cyrillic for all the sense they make to my eyes, but if the idea of ‘Sudoku, but also Castlevania’ makes you vaguely-tumescent then, well, get help, but also enjoy this.
  • PopEye In Space: Ok, I have to share the description in full here: “Long time ago, in April 1990, Yugoslav computer magazine “Svet Kompjutera” wanted to print several game reviews of fake games, all with very good scores, for its humor column “Cvet Kompjutera”. But somehow, fake game reviews ended up with regular game reviews, and humor column header was missing. During that April, local pirate sellers were overwhelmed with requests for those games, but they were nowhere to be found. One of those games was a Commodore 64 game called: “Popeye In Space”. Now, 35 years later, it is time to finally play it! Popeye in Space is based on fake game review printed in “Svet Kompjutera” in April 1990. The idea to make the game came sometime in 2024, but development started for real on January 1st 2025. I gave myself time until April 1st 2025 to finish the game, to the best of my C64 coding abilities (which are not great, to be honest, especially compared to amazing quality of games released for C64 in the past decade).” OK, the link takes you to a page on Internet Archive which runs the game through a C64 emulator, and I *think* you need a gamepad to play it, but I am linking it anway, because a) some of you probably have such a thing; and b) even if you don’t, it is worth loading it up because the music on the title scream ABSOLUTELY FCUKING SLAPS, I am not joking, I have been VOLUNTARILY listening to it while writing up the description and am tempted to leave it running, it really is that good.
  • Before The Ash: Finally this week, a fun, lightweight, in-browser strategy game in which you’re tasked with making Pompeii as big and successful as possible before the inevitable volcanic eruption reduces everyone to so many piles of smoking ash. This has a nice ‘one more go’ quality to it and is rather nicely-designed, and is definitely worth 15 minutes of your time with a cup of tea and possibly a biscuit of some sort.

By Emmett Green

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS A TYPICALLY RELAXED TRIP THROUGH A SELECTION OF VAGUELY-LOUNGE-Y ELECTRO-Y TRACKS COMPILED BY PEPI JOGARDE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Unplaces: There’s been talk of a TUMBLRNAISSANCE (come on, work with me, let’s MAKE THIS A THING!!!) on the way and while I think that might be a *touch* premature and maybe wish fulfilment on the part of the millennials now occupying section-editor positions around digital lifestyle publications, it’s also true that the platform continues to demonstrate a degree of cultural relevance that’s slightly at-odds with the fact that the mainstream doesn’t ever really consider it. Anyway, this is Unplaces and it collects weird, er, Unplaces – places where, basically, there’s no real sense of ‘there’ there, is the best way I can describe it at 1000am on Friday 11 April 2025, as found on StreetView and it is great AND it is still being regularly updated so, yes, that’s right, I am calling it, the Tumblrnaissance is ON.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • IcySaw: Weird AI insta account! Except this one’s different as rather than mining the ‘weird midjourney’ aesthetic it’s instead going down a ‘sh1t cameraphone pics or grainy cctv-style visuals’ route, meaning it’s basically even more sinister because IT ALMOST LOOKS REAL. This is very, very creepy and sort-of brilliant, I think.
  • Sheenposting: Another AI Insta account! This one, for reasons known only to the person running it, exists only to post images of ‘Michael Sheen’ – or at least an AI-generated version of the Welsh actor – in various poses. Michael Sheen as a fag-smoking 50s housewife, Sheen as the Mona Lisa, Sheen hanging out with Jesus, Sheen working in-store at Lush…Honestly, being famous must be fcuking TERRIFYING.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Lanchester on the Economy: Writing in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester really is one of the best and most readable people on ‘how modern money and economics works, explained for people who in the main don’t really fcuk with questions such as ‘how does modern money and economics work?’’ – this piece is typically excellent and a typically Good Read, despite the fact that, at heart, it’s about stuff that is not only DRY but also, well unlikely to make you feel GREAT. This looks at the UK, as you might expect, and is pre-tariff-madness, but as a general ‘overview of what current UK economic policy is and why it is like that and whether it is a good or bad idea that Rachel Reeves is currently pursuing these specific policies’ it’s excellent – I can speak to the correctness of Lanchester’s conclusions as to the wisdom of the chancellor’s actions, but his explanation of why the NI hike was unhelpful is useful and why ‘the growth agenda’ is muddled a good one. As an aside, I was at a conference last week about AI and Government featuring a lot of civil servants excitedly parroting the No.10 message about INJECT AI INTO EVERYTHING, and was amused to hear a single small note of realistic caution injected into proceedings by a bloke who pointed out that estimates suggest that less than ⅓ of all data held by the state is in any fit state to be useful to AI. So, er, great!
  • AI 2027: This is in many respects a VERY SILLY piece of scifi theory rather than something that deserves proper scrutiny (obviously if you’re reading this in 2027 as the First Machine Intifada starts to ramp up then, well, I’m sorry for being so catastrophically wrong about everything again), but equally given the amount of attention it’s been getting and the extent to which it’s likely that certain reasonably-influential people will read it and take it at least-halfway-seriously then it’s worth a look at the very least. AI 2027 is a sort of ‘roadmap to the future’ put together by a nonprofit looking at AI futures and formed of a bunch of people who, in their defence, have been working in the field for a while and so you’d think know wherefore of they speak. Except, well, the whole thing is sort-of batsh1t and basically posits a series of scenarios in which The Machine basically codes iteratively better versions of itself until it arrives at a vaguely-singularity-ish point by late 2027 and effectively everything changes forever…for the better? HM, MAYBE NOT. This is placing a LOT of weight and expectation on the shoulders of agentic AI which it doesn’t seem in any way capable of bearing right now, and there are SO many points at this in which you will, if you’re any sort of critical thinker, just look at the page and say “well, yes, but you have made one or two fairly major assumptions there that underpin all of this and without which all of this narrative falls apart like gossamer” so, well, truckloads of salt. Still, good to know that we’re still wasting time talking about this stuff while literal CEOs go around writing memos like this RIGHT NOW. LOOK OVER THERE AT THE TERMINATOR FUTURE, NOT OVER HERE AT THE MACHINE-FACILITATED CAPITALISTIC HORRORSHOW UNFOLDING IN FRONT OF OUR VERY EYES! Ahem.
  • Proof of Reality: It feels a bit like we’ve reached another small AI tipping point in the past month or so with regard to visuals and video – the new GPT image generator signals another step-change in terms of people’s understandings of what this stuff can now do, the development of new models and Lora means that we’re seeing a lot more imagery that doesn’t have the telltale AI sheen and is hard to distinguish from filtered or processed reality, and the advances in AI video over the past year mean that it’s starting to bleed out into actual, commercial projects, online opprobrium be damned. Which is why this piece felt timely, about how there’s space to do more ‘showing of the work’ in the creative process, and that maybe actually incorporating some of the thinking and concepting behind the generation of non-machine-created materials adds an interesting additional layer to the resulting piece (and gives you KUDOS with the pitchfork-wielding anti-AI masses to boot). Nothing in here should surprise you if you’re not a moron and have spent longer than about 10s thinking about any of this stuff, but it’s a potentially useful datapoint should you wish to get some external validation when you make this point yourself.
  • The Big Decoupling: Or ‘why it feels weird right now is because there is no longer any seeming link between effort and reward, and that’s sort of not how things have worked, in the main’ – THIS FEELS SO TRUE. “When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in. We’re locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance…When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the “work” or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.” Honestly, I thought this was a really interesting piece and it became smarter the longer I read it, which isn’t always the case with stuff like this whose core premise is so easily distillable. If you do ‘strategyw4nk’ (I am sorry, but also HOLD ONTO THAT JOB WITH BOTH HANDS BECAUSE YOUR DAYS ARE OH SO NUMBERED) then this is probably required reading.
  • Peter Singer on Thomas Nagel: Ok, this is VERY much one for those of you with an appetite for some *quite* chewy moral philosophy written in what I might best describe as a very…academic style, but, well a) it’s Peter Singer, who is always actually pretty readable for someone who’s schtick is at heart QUITE KNOTTY; and he’s writing about a new book by Thomas Nagel, who alongside Singer and a few others is 100% one of the most influential moral philosophers of the past century or so, and whose ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ is still one of the foundational texts exploring self, identity, epistomology and, well, everything really. Here Singer goes through the arguments presented in Nagel’s new book – look, I am just going to leave a couple of paragraphs here and you can decide whether you can stomach this; I found it fascinating, but concede that if you don’t have a background in some of this stuff it might not be your cup of tea, so: “Nagel doesn’t deny that two-level utilitarianism and Greene’s evolutionary argument may both help explain why we have the gut feelings that we do, but he thinks the force of these feelings survives the explanation. When we examine our moral intuitions from an external point of view, he says, we are taking a step outside ourselves, but “the inside point of view that we are examining does not disappear. We cannot completely withdraw from our own point of view and observe ourselves as if we were someone else.” This suggests, for Nagel, that there is something else going on: the perception of a moral truth. He draws on John Rawls’s method of “reflective equilibrium,” which involves testing normative moral theories against one’s own moral intuitions and revising both until they are in accord, or as close as possible. In the Hampshire case, Nagel says, there are “two quite different reflective equilibria to be found here, one of which preserves a significant deontological component in morality and one of which is significantly revisionary”—that is, the first accepts and gives weight to traditional morality, with its rule against making promises one does not intend to keep, while the second is willing to revise those rules, or even disregard them altogether, when doing so will bring about better consequences. This is, he says, “a standoff.””
  • Kippers & Champagne: Back to the LRB for this sparkling profile of the Barclay Brothers, famously-odd billionaire twins who have just sold the Daily Telegraph after years of destroying it, and whose intrafamilial feud is honestly one of the most bizarre ‘man, being really rich turns people fcuking loopy’ stories you will ever read. These are VERY odd people, and pretty much every bit of this makes you think ‘man, these guys are nuts and not a little creepy’…and then you remember the very real fact that being spectacularly rich in this country (and, honestly, everywhere else) means that you have insane power and influence no matter what you do or how fcuking mad you appear to be. You know how the king’s visit to Rome this week was all over the news? Do you know what WASN’T all over the news? The fact that one (possibly more) of Britain’s richest businessmen flew out to join the PM on the state visit, unreported by anyone. Is…is that ok? It doesn’t *feel* ok, is what I’m saying, and this article is basically a distillation of why plutes are a fcuking cancer.
  • On Sh1tposting as Aspirational Labour: Your appetite for this will depend entirely on how much you want to read what quickly becomes a reasonably-serious (or at least serious-presenting) investigation into the PRACTICE OF SH1TPOSTING AND WHAT IT MEANS (I could have called this ‘sh1tposting as praxis’, but, well, even I have occasional limits), but I quite enjoyed its dispassionate deconstruction of memetic formats and in particular the particular strain of posting that exists around deconstructions of feminised identity (he said, w4nkily).
  • Are You Dumb Or Are You Evil?: Another link to Deez Links ‘Hate Reads’ season – this time it’s someone railing against people calling themselves ‘communists’ without really having the first inkling of what ‘communism’ is actually about, which, fine, is a bit of a hackneyed old trope but which is brought alive here by the poster’s ire and by paragraphs like: “From what I’ve observed of so-called American “communists” on Twitter and the white people I’ve met IRL who say they align sociopolitically most closely with communism, I do not believe you know what you are talking about. I do not believe you understand fundamentally the knotty and inherent paradoxical and self-defeating nature of using authoritarian force for egalitarian governance. I don’t believe you understand the nuances of how to manage masses of heterogeneous people without using brute force. And I don’t believe you’ve unpacked how domino-effect dangerous it is to resort to psychological coercion, physical violence, and ethnic and cultural cleansing in order to achieve the Marxist fantasy of total class equality. So answer me this: Are you dumb or are you evil?”
  • Worm Simulator: Ok, this is quite niche and I would be lying if I claimed I ‘understood’ all of it in any meaningful way – but, like a dog watching football, I was enthralled despite my blank-eyed incomprehension. Did you know that there’s an ongoing and fairly-serious computational challenge around developing a digital twin of a simple organism, specifically a worm, and that swirling around it are all sorts of questions about what it means to be ALIVE and how the ability to reduce the quality of ‘aliveness’ to mathematics might then affect our ability to, well, craft life. “The way Larson sees it, a fully faithful worm simulation will be a category-expanding event: Rather than invalidating our current understanding of life, it might broaden it. “If we want to say that aliveness can only be satisfied by systems of physical molecules that physically exist with mass in the planet, something in a computer that doesn’t have physical molecules cannot be alive,” he said. “But if we expand our definition of aliveness to instead be more about information, then perhaps there is a version of aliveness that you could apply to a simulated animal. And then the question is, does it matter?”” Honestly, while this is ostensibly about ‘simulating a worm’ it ended up properly spinning me out by the end, in what I *think* was a good way.
  • The AI Romance Factory: If you’re an author and, and I mean this kindly, not in what you might consider the top…ooh, let’s say 25% of sellers out there, to be charitable, then I might consider skipping this as it’s unlikely to make you feel good. This is a…sobering tale, of online publishing platform Inkitt, home to a LOT of romantasy-type fare and a large (and growing) number of amateur authors experimenting with self-publishing and THE CREATOR ECONOMY. Inkitt has a clever gimmick, whereby those publishing with them effectively grant the company the right to generate new materials from the original work, with the original creator getting percentages and residuals – the catch being that these works are often entirely or in-part AI creations. Because, well, think of the volume! Think of the economics! This piece explains the model in detail – look, noone thinks this is a good idea (NOONE! Apart, that is, from a bunch of money people with several billion vested reasons to think it’s an EXCELLENT idea) but, equally, if enough people simply don’t realise or don’t care then, I’m afraid, then it’s inevitable that some of the existing market for fiction will get eaten by this stuff. Not all of it, but some. And look, while I know a large part of the problem here is CAPITALISM AND THE TECHCNUTS, it’s also worth acknowledging that part of the problem is ALSO that lots of people really have no quality threshold whatsoever and no taste, and so will consume any old sh1t you put in front of them if it’s vaguely-entertainment-shaped.
  • Elimar Redux: I feel quite annoyed by this – not the article, but the fact that it taught me that I had applied an INSUFFICIENT CRITICAL EYE to a link I put in here a few weeks back. You may or may not recall an interactive website all about the restoration of a ‘lost’ Van Gogh painting which I shared – well it turns out that the ‘Van Gogh-ness’ of this image is…disputed, and that the very shiny website is all part of the process being undertaken by the owners of said ‘lost’ painting to try and persuade the art market that actually it IS a real Vincent rather than just some tat, and that their investment is worth something rather than worth nothing. This is a really interesting story and another example of the almost infinite number of ‘ways in which the fine art world is, in the main, almost indistinguishable from organised crime’.
  • That Time Kylie Did A Song About A Font: Around the time Kylie Minogue was very much doing the ‘I am going to break away from the Neighbours persona’ thing, she made a song in which she sang as a personified font. I KNOW. Seriously, this is very odd and the sort of thing you can ASTONISH a Kylie fan with later today as I am pretty sure that this is something of a DEEP CUT: “Kylie Minogue announces “I am a typeface” in a 1997 song she made with producer Towa Tei. As this lyric suggests, the techno-pop track in question, “GBI (German Bold Italic)”, is delivered from the perspective of a font. Minogue’s breathy, almost robotic vocals bring the absurdist premise to life, reciting declarations of design compatibility over a minimalist reverb-drenched beat. “You will like my sense of style” is her most oft-repeated refrain.”
  • London In Miniature: When I lived up near Alexandra Palace I used to harbour secret dreams of attending the annual railway enthusiasts’ congress held there – but then realised that my reasons for wanting to do so were perhaps not wholly pure, and that therefore I should probably not in fact do so. Which is why I was so thrilled to read this piece by Owen Vince in The Londoner, granting us privileged access to some of London’s miniature enthusiasts with their tiny SLICE OF LIFE trainset dioramas. Honestly, this is CHARMING in every way.
  • Psycho Patrol: I don’t include games reviews in Curios, as a rule, because, well, mostly they’re neither interesting nor well-written, but Rock Paper Shotgun’s always full of excellent, smart writing on games and this review of a game called Psycho Patrol is WONDERFUL – even if you don’t play games, please do try reading this just to get a sense of how delightful, surreal, weird, political and downright artistic the medium can become when pushed in certain odd directions.
  • Old School vs New School: Ok, so this is ‘only’ a list, but it’s a good and interesting one, contrasting old school approaches to music and being a musician and the music industry to the modern way of doing things. Is this a bit ‘old man shouts at clouds’? Hm, maybe a bit, but it’s also hard not to agree with assessments like: “OLD SCHOOL: The tour was an advertisement for the album. NEW SCHOOL: The album is the advertisement for the tour” and “OLD SCHOOL: Recordings were everything. NEW SCHOOL: Playing live is everything. You may not even need a record. Or one every five years. Assuming your show is not identical every night. People will know songs that were never laid down on tape/hard drive/SSD. From going to the gig and watching on YouTube.”
  • Desperate for Botox: On getting botox at various points in your life. I enjoyed this a LOT – it is honest and funny and unashamed, and very good at the ways in which it’s become a sort of universal thing (I mean, it has, hasn’t it? I don’t think I know ANY women who don’t do this now)  whilst equally not really being acknowledged at all. In much the same way that we have to accept that everyone now is receiving a very strange mix of signals via their own personal magical algogod, we also have to accept that noone we see actually looks like they look, if that makes sense. God it’s confusing being alive and made of meat.
  • The Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write: I enjoy the novels of Taffy Brodesser-Akner but I said to a friend recently that they are also VERY NEW YORK novels, and that I feel I have read them before to a certain degree – her versions are excellent, but they don’t feel wholly new if that makes sense. This piece of hers in the NYT though is fcuking GREAT – it’s long but funny, at times hilarious, and tragic and bleak and personal and honest and awful and sad, and its central theme (of being shaped by the Shoah despite not having experienced it directly) is well-sustained throughout, and I learned a lot, and I think everyone should read it, honestly, it’s superb writing.
  • Purgatory in Two Parts: Elizabeth Januzzi with a beautiful, brief two-parter that’s about her sister’s suicide. Which, probably, will tell you if you want to read it or not, but I thought this was gorgeous and the final line a not-insignificant kick in the guts.
  • There’s Something Unsettling About The Neighbours: This is an extract from a new book by “Human/Animal” by Amie Souza Reilly and by the end of this I wanted to read the whole thing – no higher endorsement can I give. SUCH an air of menace sketched so lightly: “The day after our neighbors’ forceful introduction, they came back. I saw them in the yard when I left to catch my train. It was shortly after lunch. My classes all happened in the evenings, in the Bronx, a two-hour train ride away. I waved to them but quickened my steps. Wes shouted at my back as I walked away. We offered Jerry more money for that house, you know. And we offered him cash. He paused, waited for me to react, but I did not turn around. For a moment, I did not move at all; no fight or flight, only freeze. But they didn’t like us. They said they like you better. The brothers’ first attempt to own this house was to buy us out, and though it failed, it was quickly clear they were not ready to give up. I didn’t know how to respond to Wes, so I left. I got on my train and went to class. When I returned home, I found a note from them in our mailbox taped to a small gift bag. Inside the bag, a candleholder from IKEA. Inside the card, they had written: Congratulations Reilly family! May God bless your home. I threw it all away.”
  • Contra: This week’s final longread is by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, and is about contraception – for deer, and people – but also about quite a lot more than that besides. I read this on Monday and it has stayed with me all week, and I think it is brilliant.

By Ronit Porat

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 04/04/25

Reading Time: 34 minutes

 

Perhaps predictably, I have spent this week feeling…somewhat jaded – it turns out that while it is still very much possible to stay up all night at my age, it is perhaps not necessarily entirely advisable given the likely impact on one’s general sense of wellbeing. That said I had a very fun time – obviously none of you need or want to hear about my Fun Clubbing Experience, but I would like to share one, possibly amusing, anecdote with you.

So it’s 6am and we’re about to leave, and my friend Martin – who is very tall, and reasonably ginger and, generally, tends to stand out rather in a crowd – is, as we’re making to go, accosted by some saucer-eyed kid, all sweaty and bedraggled, with whom he’d obviously ‘made friends’ at some point in the evening. Said kid hugs Martin (having to climb him slightly to do so), and exclaims, with the sort of sense of awed wonder you can only muster when the ket’s made you uncertain as to where exactly your legs are, “I can’t believe you made it to the end! I hope I’m still doing this when I’m your age!”

Reader, we crumbled. Never had we collectively felt the full weight of our collective middle age as in that moment. Fcuk you, saucer-eyed kid, WE ARE STILL YOUNG (we are not still young).

Anyway, this weekend I intend to drink cocoa and possibly get into Airfix models or something by way of healthy contrast.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re lucky I managed to write this at all what with all the comedown crying.

By Peter Hujar

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST SECTION OF THIS WEEK’S CURIOS, AND INDEED ANYTHING ELSE YOU MIGHT DESIRE, WITH THIS EXCELLENT SELECTION OF BRASSY (BUT NOT IN THAT WAY) JAZZ COMPILED AND MIX BY TOM SPOONER?

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS SICK OF A FEW THOUSAND FCUKING CNUTS FCUKING THE WORLD UP FOR THE REST OF US AND WOULD QUITE LIKE THEM TO GIVE IT A REST FOR A BIT BECAUSE WE ARE ALL VERY TIRED, PT.1:  

  • ADHD: We’re kicking off with a video this week, in a departure from the usual RIGIDLY PREDICTABLE Curios cadence, because I was absolutely blown away by this when I watched it last night (I might have been a *bit* ‘tired’) and I would like even those of you who don’t normally make it all the way to the bottom of this kilomatric screed (I SEE YOU) to experience its wonder. It is, though, AI – on which note, once again, I feel it important to point out that if your automatic reaction to anything AI-related is to cross yourself and invoke the gods of UNIQUELY-HUMAN CREATIVITY and WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CREATORS then, well, you probably need to think both broader and harder about this sort of thing because a) to continue to maintain that it is impossible to make art with these tools is frankly dumb; and b) you’re being a Cnut, in both senses. This is a music video called ‘ADHD’ by one IGORR – this is their first video posted to YouTube in years rather than being one of a series of AI experiments, and FCUKING HELL IT IS INCREDIBLE. The clip’s accompanying an abrasive, skittering bass and drums track, and is, seemingly, intended as a visual representation of ADHD – I don’t personally have ADHD (or at least I don’t think I do, although if I had a quid for everyone who’s attempted to pyramid sell the possibility of my own neurodivergence to me I would have, ooh, at least 15 quid), but this looks and sounds like what I occasionally imagine it must feel like – it is…uncomfortable, and odd, and unsettling, and it is SO well composed and edited and storyboarded, and while it is very obviously AI (it has that slight 1950s technicolour sheen that I associate with Midjourney for the visuals, although I am fcuked if I can tell which model(s) are actually being used here) it has a very clear directorial sensibility and is another wonderful example, along with the ever-wonderful Trisha, of the fact that, in the hands of people with interesting ideas, these tools are INCREDIBLY powerful. Honestly, watch this, put aside any luddite prejudices that you may have and just marvel at how fcuking insane this is that it can be spun up OUT OF NOTHING by someone with an imagination. Oh, and on the ‘SAVE THE ARTISTS!’ point – this is something that simply could/would not exist without AI. The amount of money it would cost to make this as a post-produced film would be *insane*, the time not-insignificant – this is not replacing ‘human creativity’, it is additive to it, because it’s enabling people with an idea to MAKE THAT IDEA REAL, which possibly makes it worth boiling the oceans and fcuking future generations’ prospects for. Probably. Maybe. Anyway, this is fcuking GREAT and I would like you all to watch it please thankyou.
  • Infinite Monkeys: Ooh, this is fun – I initially thought it was a joke/fudge, but I think it might actually be a semi-legitimate attempt to make the experiment real. Infinite Monkeys is, er, an infinite canvas of monkeys – the idea is that everyone visiting the site can log in, ACTIVATE AN APE and set it typing, with said typing continuing until said apes have finally pulled their fingers out and got round to FINALLY penning the entirety of the bard’s corpus. Find a monkey whose name you like – mine is called Gozzle Bubuck, which pleases me no end – set it typing, and then check back every now and again and see how it’s doing. Gozzle has so far managed to come up with a couple of six-letter words – ‘dinged’ and ‘chomps’, since you asked – but overall the simians are still lagging slightly; the site’s homepage shows you the overall progress they’ve made towards typing every single word of Romeo, Juliet and the rest and, well, there’s probably a few millennia to go before we get to enjoy Monkey-scribed Coriolanus. I genuinely love the fact that this exists and would honestly really like whoever it is who’s in charge of the big Outernet screens at Tottenham Court Road to put this up on there for a day or so.
  • Talking To Grok: There’s a nice story in this week’s Private Eye about how Elon’s ‘maximally truth seeking’ AI describes Andrew Tate when asked – users asking Grok, for information about Tate are told that he’s “a self-proclaimed mega-rich jet-setter who moved to Romania” with “unfiltered views on masculinity, pain, and fighting ‘The Matrix’”. Grok cites eight sources for this; six are posts from Tate’s own accounts. While Grok does cite a source suggesting Tate was a ‘bad kickboxer’, it declines to pull out another negative quality attributed to ‘Top G’ in the piece, specifically ‘rapist’. It turns out that if you look at the @Grok account on Twitter you can see all the replies it’s sent to people engaging with it publicly, which means you can get a feel for the sort of things that people all around the world are asking The Machine and…Jesus, it’s quite dizzying seeing the number of people that are leaning on it for betting tips, political analysis, emotional support, lols…honestly, if you want a temperature check on ‘society and AI’ this is a really eye-opening glimpse into the extent to which people worldwide have basically just added ‘asking an AI’ into their general day-to-day.
  • MultiPlayer: DIGITAL VIDEO ART! This is a fun project by one Alan W Smith – plug in any video you choose via YouTube url and this page will (eventually – it is BANDWIDTH HEAVY, so possibly don’t attempt this while also opening 35 other links in this week’s Curios) load up 35 tiled instances of the clip, all of which play at *slightly* different times, creating a sort of mad wall of video which, depending on what you choose to play, can lead to some…quite unsettling results. I’ve played around with this a bit and I personally find that I rather like the effect you get if cueing this up with some old found-footage-style vids, old handicam wedding footage or similar, but I think you could probably create something interestingly-horrible by finding some visceral footage of bowel surgery or something (or, er, maybe something less bloodily-internal, up to you really). Mr Smith is something of an serial web-tinkerer, turns out, and you can see a load of his other projects collected here should you be in the market for more digital art-adjacent code/url fcukery.
  • Music DNA: I am slightly bored of typing ‘the people at The Pudding really are head and shoulders above everyone else when it comes to interesting and creative webpage dataviz’ (or words to that effect), but, well, it continues to be true and is once again amply demonstrated by this latest project of theirs which explores the way in which musical elements are passed along and appropriated from artist to artist and era to era – scroll through and get a wonderful education as to some of the different ways in which songs throughout history can be linked back to the melody of Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’, with samples and clips and really clear, visual explanations of the way in which the tracks interrelate…honestly, this is not only beautifully built and designed but it’s also SO INTERESTING from a musical point of view, not least because I am the sort of cloth-eared fcuk who wouldn’t have the faintest idea about stuff like this without this sort of patient explainer.
  • Vapor AI: Via Lynn’s superb compendium of AI-adjacent game experimentation comes this excellent and rather fun proof-of-concept which – and I am *slightly* guessing here because the site’s not exactly forthcoming about what is going on – spins up a new visual ‘choose your own adventure’ type story every time you load it up, with the additional gimmick that you can direct the setting and theme and art style by prompting the site a bit (so, for example, I just gave it ‘visceral corridors’ and it’s presented me with an opening featuring an unpleasantly-arterial setting and some suitably-innardy prose). You’re presented with an image which you can look around in classic 360-degree fashion – you advance the ‘narrative’ (such as it is) by selecting from the various prompts that appear in your field of vision like thought bubbles, and while it’s meandering and unfocused it’s also quite fun to see where you can end up rabbitholing to, and how you can shift the tone and feel of the experience simply by tweaking the prompts as you go. I find these things significantly more interesting if you don’t attempt to play them as ‘games’ so much as just explore them as odd semi-narrative art experiments – which, on rereading, makes me sound like a total fcuking cnut if I’m honest, so sorry about that.
  • Drive The World: Another from Lynn’s newsletter (THANKS LYNN), this is – from what I can tell – something that’s basically been cobbled together using Machine-written code and which is a riff on something I remember seeing 15-odd years ago, except this time in 3d; this uses OpenStreetMap’s 3d model of the world to let you drive a boxy little 3d car along boxy little 3d representations of ANY STREET IN THE WORLD! Ok, fine, the graphics are rudimentary at best and the car handles like a cow, and the collision detection is iffy at best and means that you will often find yourself driving through buildings if you’re not careful – but, equally, I literally just drove past MY ACTUAL HOUSE and as such I will forgive this all its graphical infelicities.
  • The Useless Web: A portal website which offers you the chance to click a button and be taken to a url which promises to afford you POINTLESS FUN – so you might get a webgame, or a link to an OLD MEMETIC TREASURE like Ceiling Cat, or LongDoge, or something else entirely. This is silly and frivolous and has recently added a page where the site’s owner Tim Holman interviews people about their useless websites and why they made them, which I very much approve of because, honestly, anyone who makes pointless digital distractions for the world to enjoy deserves at least this level of minimal recognition (although, honestly, I think possibly we ought to start some sort of digital blue plaque scheme for the true pioneers – I am, I realise as I type this, not even joking about this).
  • Pawel Brod: Oh WOW this is a beautiful bit of work. Pawel Brod is a webdev who has made what I think might be, hands-down, the most beautiful interactive personal portfolio site I have ever seen (not hyperbole, honest) – explore his CV by navigating this sort-of bathysphere-type craft around a maze-type environment, graphically reminiscent of a scifi version of classic indie game Limbo, finding links to his work and his CV and various little Easter Eggs as you wander…honestly, this is so so so nicely made and pretty and just GORGEOUS, and the music’s lovely to boot.
  • Maya’s Blogroll: I feel slightly deficient having never found Maya’s site before – she does something not-dissimilar to me and other link-sharers on her blog, which is delightful, but the true wonder of her site is her frankly fcuking *insane* list of ‘interesting websites’ which, seriously, is one of the best directories of ‘the interesting and curious and personal and creative web’ that I have ever seen. ALL OF DIGITAL LIFE IS HERE! Well, not ‘all’ of it, fine, but more than you could reasonably expect to consume in one lifetime. If you like Curios – or frankly even if you don’t and are simply reading this out of some sort of weird masochistic impulse, in which case, well, why not stop? I will honestly never know! – then you will absolutely adore every single site on this list; honestly, this is a truly incredible resource and compendium of Fascinating Online Things, and while a good 60% of the sites here were known to me there are literally dozens that I had never, ever heard of before and which have, conservatively, added approximately 90 minutes to my daily digital housekeeping so, on reflection, this has actually slightly ruined my life. THANKS MAYA.
  • Play With Your Own Junk: This is a lovely idea, and one oddly-reminiscent of the…God, was it 2012? Anyway, the 2012-ish app called ‘Tiny Games’ by the now-sadly-defunct gamesmaking shop Hide & Seek, which was designed to give you at-your-fingertips access to all sorts of games you could play without counters or props or any equipment; Play With Your Own Junk looks like it aspires to becoming something similar, with a mission to provide ideas for games that can be played by anyone, anywhere – per the blurb, “Play With Your Own Junk is a carefully curated set of modern parlor games, designed to give you an easy place to find earth-friendly, affordable, and approachable ways to play with your friends and family. All the games featured on this site can be played with common household items, sometimes with the help of digital tools. You can start playing these games right now, without buying anything or spending a bunch of time prepping to play. Each game has been carefully selected to fit the goals of the website, and has a self-contained set of items to play with and instructions to follow — think of it sort of like a recipe website, but for games!” The selection’s limited to four games at the moment – and one of them is Exquisite Corpse, which personally I don’t think needs explaining, but wevs – but it’s worth bookmarking this and checking back to see what they add.
  • Dutch BirdCams: Spring has officially arrived here in London, and the birds are SO HORNY, shouting and preening and generally just whoring themselves across the capital’s plane trees, cheeky little avian strumpets that they are. The same, I imagine, is true in Holland, so why not take this seasonal opportunity to enjoy some Top Quality Dutch Webcam Action in the form of this site, I think the Dutch equivalent of the RSPB, which links to a whole load of webcams letting you check out, er, various livestreams of birds nests. Soothing, and also it just taught me that the Dutch for ‘stork’ is ‘ooievaar’ – I’m sorry, but that is not a serious language.
  • Clickens: This is a site maintained by one Erika, who writes: “At the end of last year, I started preparing chicken from scratch to feed my silly old doggie. I don’t typically eat chicken myself, so this was a new activity. The little guy gets a lot of attention and he goes through a LOT of chicken. So, I started feeling it was a bit unfair for chickens to go so unnoticed as living creatures. They just get tossed thoughtlessly into the nugget hopper. (Not by everyone, I know. I have friends who raise and name and love their chickens). So I decided, in exchange for boiling one or two up every week for Rupert, I would really try to see chickens, so that chickens can be seen by other people, too. As soon as I decided to paint chickens, all on the same 7×7 paper, I started knocking out chickens very quickly. (This has nothing to do with me “working on a book”.) Despite having a whole studio space for work, I paint chickens at our kitchen table. The kitchen is now full of chickens. After producing a dozen or two, I realized the paintings look like profile pics. I’d created an analog social network of pretend chicken friends. So, I started calling that corner of the kitchen Chicken Town, as one does.” And so, Clickens was born – the site presents you with a pair of Erika’s chicken portraits, and asks you to determine which is the most ‘x’ – where ‘x’ might be ‘wrathful’, or ‘egregious’, or ‘wistful’, like a sort of conceptual avian Hot Or Not. This is surprisingly addictive, and you’d be amazed how much time you (oh, ok, fine, *I*) spend trying to decide which of two watercolour chooks best embodies the quality of ‘stoical’.
  • Neptune’s Heart: OH GOD THIS IS DELICIOUSLY EVIL! Have you read the novel ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ by Douglas Adams? It’s nowhere near as good as Hitchhiker’s but is reasonably fun and contains a few excellent trademark Adams gags, including a throwaway detail about an astrologer who writes horoscopes specifically to annoy old friends with specific, mean, predictions and statements about their life (“Libra: You are ugly inside and out, Kate Challis will never go out with you and you will not win the lottery today”, that sort of thing) – Neptune’s Heart is a REAL LIFE VERSION of that, which lets you add specific directions to a faked online horoscopes site, which you can then send to your friends for the lols. This doesn’t QUITE work as well as I want it to, but I am so so thrilled by the fact that this supremely-cruel and obviously very mean site exists that I am willing to forgive it its slightly-shonky execution – seriously though, with a bit of polish and slightly more work this could be an ASTONISHINGLY fun (and, to reiterate, REALLY EVIL) toy, should anyone want to iterate on the idea a bit.
  • Band Or Horses: A ZINE! You can print this out and take it to the pub for momentary analogue lols – you get various lists of names and the game is to work out if said names are of racehorses or bands – EASY, RIGHT? I have a strange feeling that we’re in the early throes of a zine resurgence, so feel free to quote me on that in six months’ time when everyone’s making with the Pritt Stick and Stanley knife.
  • Jack Black: This is not in fact anything at all to do with bearded overactor – I genuinely have no idea why this site has his name as its url but, well, it does. There are 16 buttons on the webpage – each will play you a VERY SHORT snippet of a song’s intro. Can you work out what each of them are? Some of these, I warn you, will drive you absolutely fcuking insane, but this is a SUPERB ‘friday afternoon in the office when none of you are even remotely likely to even pretend to do any more work and are all frankly just waiting for it to be an acceptable time to start drinking’ timewaster.

By Charlie Stein

NEXT, ENJOY A WONDERFUL SELECTION OF LIBRARY MUSIC MIXED, IN A DEPARTURE FROM HIS ORDINARY BLEEPS AND BLOOPS, BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY IS SICK OF A FEW THOUSAND FCUKING CNUTS FCUKING THE WORLD UP FOR THE REST OF US AND WOULD QUITE LIKE THEM TO GIVE IT A REST FOR A BIT BECAUSE WE ARE ALL VERY TIRED, PT.2:  

  • Musical Tours of London: Ok, full disclosure here – this is a mate of mine’s project and is a REAL LIFE thing which requires you to a) be in London and b) pay money, BUT! My friend Ben, whose tours these are, is a very interesting and knowledgeable man who really can spin a yarn like few others I know, and these tours – taking you on a walk around London’s musical (and other (counter) cultural landmarks) – will, I promise, be great (Web Curios GUARANTEES it, which I am sure you will all agree is the sort of kitemark of quality that you’ve all been waiting for). Should you be planning on touristing here for a bit then I recommend checking these out – not least because strolling around London in the spring sunshine really is one of life’s great joys, and doubly so when accompanied by excellent storytelling.
  • BahnhofsKatzen: I mean, I *could* have given this site its English title, but ‘bahnhofskatzen’ is fundamentally a far more pleasing word than ‘train cats’ BUT! This is an impeccably-maintained resource documenting, er, cats at train stations around the world (primarily in mainland Europe). I feel quite strongly that the UK is underrepresented here, so I would ask all of you to keep this page bookmarked on your phone for the next time you spot a platform tabby so that you can snap it and add it to the map and ensure that Britain keeps its feline end up.
  • All of the Newspapers: Ooh, this is interesting and useful – this site seemingly collects the print media titles of every single country in the world in one place (or at least links to their websites), so you can get a comprehensive picture of (one aspect) of the media landscape of anywhere in the world. Obviously you’re then at the mercy of the quality or lack thereof of the linked news sites, but as a way of learning about the media environment in, say, Burundi (where I have just learned that one of the major newspapers is called Iwacu, for example, and am now reading about the rising cost of rice (or trying to, because it’s obviously all in French and it turns out that I’m not *quite* as proficient as I thought I was), this is fascinating.
  • Touch Grass: No, not the app that locks your phone until you prove to it you’ve been outside – that was last week, KEEP UP! No, this is actually a range of cases for your electronic devices, which ordinarily isn’t the sort of thing I would give even half an ounce of fcuk about but which, in this case, I fcuking ADORE. Basically these people are selling astroturf for your device, so you can encase your phone in simil-grass. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT???? This is, fine, quite an expensive one-note gag, and if I’m honest I probably oughtn’t be promoting another pointless bit of plastic that’s going to be clogging up landfill until we’re all long-dead, but, well, fcuk it, everything’s going to tits, the planet is doomed and the rest of my life, whatever’s left of it, is likely to be marked by a growing sense of fear and precariety and poverty and uncertainty and lonely fear, so, well, BUY THE FCUKING PLASTIC AND BE HAPPY.
  • Drum Patterns: Ooh, this is fun – Drum Patterns is a little site that, much like many others I’ve featured over the years in Curios, lets you create simple drum patterns using an in-browser synthtoy-type interface; the gimmick with this one is that you can then save your creations to the site where they can be browsed and used by anyone else, basically making this a sort of collaborative, communal repository of fun little drum loops. I got momentarily stuck on this just now – there’s something very addictive about flipping through the list of loops here and hearing all the different styles and tempos that people have crafted. None of the stuff on here is exactly sophisticated – the drum machine on-site is pretty simple and doesn’t allow for a lot of bells and whistles – but I can imagine that if you’re looking for a bit of beats-y inspiration then this might be both fun and useful.
  • Your AI Guide to Rome: Given the…frankly insane bureaucratic clusterfcuk that characterises every single element of Italian state administration, I am genuinely astonished both that this exists and that, seemingly, it’s not totally awful (honestly, I can’t begin to express to you how fcuking awful it is trying to do ANYTHING official in that fcuking country; I still occasionally get painful flashbacks at the experience of having to attempt to do my mum’s tax returns in 2021 and 2022 and realising that you needed to provide ACTUAL PHYSICAL RECEIPTS for things, and breaking down in very real tears because at that stage it was all, well, just a bit much for me). This is a webpage run by Rome city council which lets you ask questions of ‘Julia’, an LLM-enabled chatbot designed to offer tourists and residents an easy interface through which to get information about the city, what’s going on, etc. I’m not sure what it’s built on, and I have only had a relatively-cursory play with it, but my brief exploration suggests it’s…not bad? I asked it for tips for things to do and see near where I used to live, and it gave some decent and not-appallingly-touristy tips, and the restaurants it suggested were, again, decent and local and, crucially, REAL. If you’re planning on visiting, this is worth a look – although, and I really mean this, should you ever go to Rome then PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK ME FOR TIPS, as, honestly, I really enjoy telling people about good things to do there and have a really good guide all typed and ready to go for anyone who needs it.
  • The National Gallery Imaginarium: London’s National Gallery recently (ish) launched this virtual tour of (part of) its collection – this is on the one hand A N Other ‘walk down a 3d virtual corridor and click on some paintings to see them embiggened’ website, to which you might shruggingly think ‘tant pis’, but there’s enough here in the UX to make it feel worth exploring – the ‘exploration’ element is largely nonexistent, as the gallery experience is reduced to a single corridor along which all the various works are arranged, but clicking on a specific work will take you to an interactive viewer which lets you both explore the painting in close detail but which also asks you a bunch of questions about the work – which elements of it draw your eye, what you think of the composition, etc – and then shows you how others reacted to it, which adds an interesting semi-educative element and makes you consider elements of each picture you might not necessarily have given particular thought to otherwise. I liked this more the more time I spent with it, which isn’t always the case with projects like this.
  • St Peter’s In Minecraft: Given the Minecraft film is now in cinemas and that I am guessing a not-insignificant number of you will have children who are fcuking obsessed with the game, it feels appropriate to link to an EDUCATIONAL AND IMPROVING spin on it – would you like to explore St Peter’s Basilica represented in blocks? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! “Peter is Here: AI for Cultural Heritage is a captivating Minecraft Education experience where students journey through 2,000 years of architectural innovation. Inspired by real-world preservation efforts, this immersive project lets young explorers use technology to restore ancient wonders, from Roman engineering to Baroque masterpieces, and investigate the history of St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. Guided by the Sanpietrini, the community of restorers and experts, learners will step into the shoes of a conservator and explorer, tasked with preserving St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.  Students will explore the basilica, learn its secrets, and restore key artifacts. Through this immersive journey, they’ll discover how technology can help protect and cultural heritage while experiencing the themes of history, cooperation, and preservation.” I don’t really do Minecraft what with, well, being a childless man in middle-age, but I have watched a couple of vids about this (don’t ever let it be said that Curios is a shoddy, phoned-in, research-light excuse for a newsletter – DON’T FCUKING SAY IT) and it looks rather cool (I mean, ok, ‘cool’, but still).
  • That’s A Booklight: A subReddit dedicated to spotting the use of very banal everyday objects as props in Hollywood films. Basically if you’re enthused by the idea of posts revealing that, for example, “The torture machine console from James Bond: Spectre is a Samsung ultrasound machine” – and, frankly, what sort of a monster wouldn’t be? NO FCUKER, etc etc – then this will be all your Christmases come early.
  • Artists’ Calling Cards: Oh this is WONDERFUL – this webpage collects images of the calling cards used by a dizzying range of 20thC artists (I *think* they’re all artists, though I haven’t looked at every single one) like Brancusi, or the Guerilla Girls or Satie – some of these are VERY surprising (I would not, for example, have ever guessed that Egon Schiele would have chosen *that* font, and I can’t help but think slightly less of him for having done so) and occasionally oddly-revealing, but all of them are beautiful and some of them genuinely exquisite. Patrick Bateman could never.
  • Hacker Laws: A list of ‘laws’, or principles, or rules of thumb which are all vaguely code-y but many of which are interesting enough to be of potential use to a wider audience. This runs all the way from stuff like the 1-9-90 rule to the lovely ‘Principle of Least Astonishment, which I had never heard of before but which states that ‘People are part of the system. The design should match the user’s experience, expectations, and mental models.’ I get the feeling that some of these might prove to be quite useful mental models to have in the back of your head – and even if not, there’s something quite interesting about them as ‘ways of conceiving of things’.
  • Project Hyperion: It doesn’t, it’s fair to say, feel like the second quarter of the 21st Century is going to be a marked improvement on the first, at least judging by the first few months of it – on which basis you might be forgiven for thinking ‘fcuk it, let’s leave all our problems here on earth and embark on an exciting new interstellar future which will see our species attain new and previously-unimagined degrees of enlightenment!’. Except, well, for that to happen we’re probably going to need to be able to create spaceships which can support life across multiple generations given that we might need to be travelling for a few hundred years – which is where Project Hyperion comes in.This is a contest – which SAYS that it’s now closed to entries, but I get the impression that they’ve not exactly been inundated and so there might be some flex here should you wish to throw your hat in – to design a prototypical generational starship. “Project Hyperion explores the feasibility of crewed interstellar travel via generation ships, using current and near-future technologies. A generation ship is a hypothetical spacecraft designed for long-duration interstellar travel, where the journey may take centuries to complete. The idea behind a generation ship is that the initial crew would live, reproduce, and die on the ship, with their descendants continuing the journey until reaching the destination. These ships are often envisioned as self-sustaining ecosystems, featuring agriculture, habitation, and other necessary life-support systems to ensure survival across multiple generations.” Basically this is your opportunity to pitch them the ship from Silent Running – and if you’re interested in reading more about the general mad scifiness of the whole ‘generational ship’ concept there’s an interesting (if long) discussion of it here.
  • The Smithsonian Photo Contest Winners: LOADS of great images spanning landscape, portraiture, aerial shots, abstract arty compositions…there’s a wonderful breadth of styles and subjects on display in this year’s selection of winners, although my personal favourite is probably this shot by Michael Acheampong because it’s gorgeous and the hairstyle here depicted is frankly insane.
  • A Great Thread of Actual Creative People Sharing Their Work: While this post stems from a tedious ‘ALL AI ART IS THE DEVIL’ sentiment which I am honestly so fcuking bored of hearing, it led to a truly great outcome – cartoonist Moose Allain, who draws for Private Eye among others, asked people on Bluesky who make stuff to share links to their work in the comments of his post, and HUNDREDS of people got involved – this thread is therefore just a wonderful collection of artists showing off their stuff, from illustration to photography to animation to cartoons and everything inbetween. This is worth bookmarking for next time you want to buy something nice for yourself or someone else;  rather than giving the money to some dropshipping cnut or a tax-dodging corporation, why not take the opportunity to chuck an actual human being £30 for something they’ve made? WHY NOT FFS????
  • The Basement Chronicles: Basement is a digital studio based out of…actually, I have no fcuking idea where they’re from and I suppose it doesn’t really matter – what DOES matter is that as a sort of ‘hey, look how good we are at making stuff!’ flex they have developed this little point-and-click adventure game which is a pleasing and silly way of spending 5 minutes, particularly if you’re of the sort of vintage for whom LucasArts games are a revered part of your personal gaming history.
  • Cave of Cards: Ooh, this is fun – it will take you a few gos to get your head around the mechanics and what’s going on, but once it clicks you’ll find it’s pleasingly more-ish – “In Cave of Cards, you clear dungeons by making poker hands. The X button opens the shop dimension, and the O button lets you crouch (preventing you from banging into things). Find and unlock the exit door by clearing the dungeon. High score is based on how many hearts you have left at the end.” This is made in Pico8, which continues to be a brilliantly-flexible little games engine all these years after launch.
  • CSS Clicker: Via Andy, our final game of the week is yet another fiendish clicker which will, if you let it, swallow your entire afternoon whole (IT IS STILL LESS POINTLESS THAN YOUR JOB). You know the drill by now – MAKE THE NUMBER GO UP! There’s an additional gimmick here in that the whole thing’s coded exclusively in CSS for BIG CODING CHOPS, but, honestly, even if you give as little of a sh1t about that as I do (I give not one iota of one, to be clear), this is still a Good Time (within the confines of, well, clicker games).

By Lukas Luzius Leichtle

THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK COMES FROM CHARP, IS PLEASINGLY TITLED ‘WET BOOGIE’ AND IS A GENERALLY SUPERB SELECTION OF GENTLY-FUNKY LOUNGE-ISH TRACKS WHICH IS I THINK THE PERFECT SOUNDTRACK TO THE START OF YOUR WEEKEND! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Scoreboard Pressure: Not a Tumblr! You don’t care! This blog collects and shares images of scoreboards from various Aussie League grounds across the antipodes. Why? WHY MUST YOU DEMAND A REASON FFS JUST ACCEPT AND ENJOY IT. “There’s more to the humble scoreboard than meets the eye. Sure, it shows the score of a game but it can also evoke memories and stories and odds and ends. The scoreboard is an integral part of Australian Rules football – and other sports –  yet it has received very little attention from the game’s authors, journalists, historians and photographers. Scoreboard pressure celebrates the variety of scoreboards and sports grounds across Australia. But it’s not just about sport. Scoreboard pressure is about people, about places, about  travel. Mostly, it’s about curiosity.” So there. I like this a LOT.
  • Billionaire Roleplaying: A tumblr community in which various users roleplay as billionaires. Why? WHY NOT? This is…quite juvenile and not actually that funny, if I’m honest, but I found it curious as a general finger-in-the-air assessment of current attitudes towards plutes (BREAKING: WE DO NOT LIKE THEM).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Skulls In Churches: You don’t, I promise you, need me to explain this one any further.
  • Crisis Acting: An insta feed sharing images that I might best describe as ‘somewhat chaotic’ in terms of vibe and energy, not quite cursed by very much…slightly-wrong, like they’re vibrating at a frequency slightly out of whack with everything else in the world. Yes, I know that that description is largely nonsensical but click the link and then tell me I am wrong (do not, please, feel the need to in fact tell me I am wrong; I am aware of my wrongness and it pains me more than you can possibly know).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • ‘And Then A Miracle Happens!’: A good piece by Dave Karpf on the magical thinking at the heart of much of Venture Capital, and which is largely underpinning the current AI movement – the fundamental belief that if we just keep pushing this stuff, if we scale back the regulation and don’t fcuk it up by GETTING IN THE WAY with our pesky fears about ethics and fairness and what exactly the journey to ‘superintelligence’ might do to society before we get there, then we’re literally JUST ABOUT to get some sort of world-changing, problem-solving panacea for all of our very evident ills. Why? BECAUSE WE REALLY NEED THAT TO BE TRUE! I feel this very strongly at the moment, and the more I think on it the more uneasy it makes me – it feels quite a lot like we’re moving ourselves into a position whereby we’re effectively betting everything on AI and associated tech advancements delivering a catch-all solution to all that ails us, and, should that fail, we will have literally no eggs left and no other baskets in which to put them. While on the one hand it is of course possible that an insane breakthrough in tech will lead us to a post-labour, post-scarcity society in the next 20 years and magically reverse all the envirohorror, it’s at least AS possible that, well, it won’t, and we’ll find ourselves a quarter-century hence having reconfigured our entire society to accommodate technology that doesn’t in fact work anywhere near as well as we need it to to unfcuk everything, thereby leaving everything, and us, quite, well, fcuked. “AGI — at least the type of full-throated AGI that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have insisted for years is just over the horizon — would be miraculous. In their unguarded moments, AGI believers talk about this technology as “digital god.” It would be the beginning of the Singularity, the start of a posthuman age where we solve all of physics and potentially conquer mortality itself. Dial the enthusiasm back a bit, and one can easily conjure up narrower ways that advanced machine intelligence could save us from some of our current messes. For example, I can picture a future where we no longer need so many air traffic controllers. Actually-existing machine intelligence is not capable of replacing air traffic controllers today. But it plausibly might, someday. How convenient would it be if that arrival date was soon, just when it is needed most?”
  • Graphic Design Ruined My Life: I’ve seen some DISCOURSE this week about the fact that white collar jobs which used to be occasionally interesting and stimulating and maybe even sometimes fun are now, mostly, none of those things at all, and this piece, while ostensibly about graphic design and why it is that so many people who work in the field now say they hate it and it makes them miserable, mines similar territory. Basically the argument runs that the ends to which work is being put renders the act of the work less meaningful, and on occasion actively miserable, in a way that didn’t necessarily used to be the case – I think that if you do any sort of office/knowledge economy work, the following paragraph will resonate with you to no small degree: “The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down. As Shar Biggers describes it, designers are “realising that much of their work is being used to push for profit rather than change, making the rich richer, and being manipulated for misinformation. I’m constantly meeting designers who are looking to do work they believe in, and they’ve yet to find an opportunity to do that. And when they do, even that lets them down for numerous reasons.”
  • Why It Is Entirely Reasonable That Marine Le Pen Be Prosecuted: As seems standard for 2025, this news story feels like it happened several years ago but was in fact only a few days ago – still, presuming you can remember what was happening in the distant, hazy past that is, er, Monday, then you might find this simple explainer by Politico about why the National Rally’s leader was convicted, what she was convicted *for*, and why it is not, contrary to what all the usual awful suspects spent 24h squawking about, any sort of SUPPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY.
  • The Trader as Young Rebel: A review of YouTuber Gary Stevenson’s autobiography, currently riding high in the bestseller charts off the back of his successful online presence and a very viral Question Time performance – I confess to having been entirely ignorant of this man’s existence until a few weeks ago and am now seeing his face EVERYWHERE, and he strikes me as a particularly good example of People Who Declaim Online, a confident-sounding, confident-speaking ‘guru’ who is RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING and who embodies the YouTube/TikTok EXPERT, a particularly 2025 spin on the influencer grift. This profile in Jacobin is, as you’d expect, not wholly complimentary about Stevenson – but what I think is most interesting about it is the way it nods to the fact that so much of modern gurudom is about finding one line, one position, and fucking HAMMERING it until you find an audience and the audience is locked-in and clamouring for more, and how this inevitably lends to that ONE LINE being an incredibly-fcuking-simplistic take on life because we don’t do depth and nuance anymore.
  • How The El Salvadorian Bitcoin Experiment Is Going: Let’s take a moment to check in on Nayib Bukele’s cryptostate experiment! As you will no doubt all remember, back in 2021 the El Salvadorian president made bitcoin legal tender in an attempt to ride the wave of cryptohype – so, four years on, how’s that playing out for the wider populace? Well, per this academic paper (which I promise is interesting and readable, honest), “bitcoin has not translated into financial inclusion, but instead, the bitcoin law serves as a public relations tool to capture new support from like-minded constituencies, build closer relations with them, and empower international “crypto-bros.” On the other hand, this is a tool to benefit a close circle close to the president with the use of public funds, as part of a broader historical shift of elites in El Salvador.” So, President Trump, what was it that convinced you to pivot to a pro-crypto position?
  • The Mental Tyranny of AI Writing: An interesting post by John Gallagher about certain stylistic tics produced by Machine-generated prose, and why these tics might be occurring based on his understanding of how LLMs work – I can’t speak to how accurate his analysis of the ‘why’ is, but I enjoyed reading his breakdown of sentence and paragraph structure and his unpacking of how some of the specific traits of AI writing are born of the machine’s total lack of anything resembling ‘understanding’ of the words it’s spitting out. As he explains, “AI writing tools use “and” to chain together multiple ideas to be statistically correct. The statistical procedure is why AI sentences use so many lists and is so looooong. When AI writing is trained to sound fancy, it obscures the meaning in a cloak of complexity that sounds right initially. By using so many lists and hypotaxis, AI writing exhausts the reader into submission. It forces the reader to acquiesce that the sentence is probably, mostly, fairly, somewhat correct. Approximately correct.”
  • The New Substack Universe: I confess to seeing the news about Substack launching a video feed and thinking to myself ‘good, I hope this is another business that is killed by pivoting to video’ – nothing against people using it as a platform, it just turns out that I am really fcuking sick of big corporate behemoths and single, profit-led entities swallowing up entire markets. Anyway, this piece in New York Magazine looks at the company’s pivot towards becoming another fcuking ‘everything’ platform, but, more interestingly, alludes to the fact that whatever the literature and the company’s ‘EVERYONE CAN BE PART OF THE CREATOR ECONOMY!!!!1111eleven’ schtick might say, the vast majority of the revenue being paid out to people on the platform is going to those who were famous elsewhere already; while there are some people who have built up audiences from scratch, the vast majority of those making Substack work for them are people who were already in possession of fanbases and reputations that make their success…possibly less of an aspirational, replicable goal. This paragraph also chilled me slightly, presaging a world in which Substack is basically ‘Linkedin, for people who make I PERFORMATIVELY LIKE WORDS their personality’: “The initial dream that Substack sold of individual journalists making a living through subscriptions has been eclipsed by a new hybrid model. More and more, people aren’t on there to make money at all but to promote their stories and books and engage with fellow media types without being trolled by Elon-worshipping Nazi bot accounts (though Substack has its own Nazi problems). Meanwhile, money can feasibly be made from sources other than subscriptions. “I felt like Substack was against brands and advertising early on. Now that more brands are joining, it does seem like it is welcoming them,” said Karten, pointing out that Substack had hosted a joint event with luxury resale platform The RealReal at the Manhattan restaurant King on Tuesday evening. “As a user, it makes me wonder if we might start to see ads in Notes. As a marketer, I see the opportunity — but it can be a slippery slope.””
  • Silica Gel: I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love Scope of Work as a magazine/newsletter – it’s ALWAYS interesting, especially when telling me about things that really sound like they won’t be interesting at all. So it was with this piece, which tells you all about silica gel, of which you will be in possession of several dozen packets but which I bet you’ve never really contemplated at length before (apologies if you have in fact already conducted a thorough mental evaluation of the material and its properties, of course) – this is a story about manufacturing, chemicals, shipping and, at heart, globalisation, and it’s the most interesting thing about a really, really boring-sounding subject you will read all week.
  • A Walk Down Victoria Streets: There are some streets that seem to go on forever – London’s Victoria Street, a particularly-unlovely stretch of road that runs from Victoria Station to Westminster, is such a thoroughfare. I’ve worked all down its length at various points in my life, as a lobbyist and civil servant (man, that was a brief and ill-feted career misstep!) and very reluctant contractor, I have rented black tie from the Moss Bros under the arches and been paralytic with drink in several of its pubs (this latter point isn’t, on reflection, exclusive to Victoria Street), but never have I thought so much about its architecture and history as I did when reading this piece by Samuel Hughes, who takes a look at the various different styles of building along the route and in so doing tells the history of both the area but, sort-of, of London itself, of planning and trends in design, and for anyone who loves the city this is wonderfully-nerdy and kind-of beautiful.
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: On the 25th anniversary of its publication, this article looks back at David Eggers’ debut novel, the critical reception it received at the time (rapturous), and the way it catapulted its author to a very particular and very of-its-time type of fame. Oddly, despite being someone who rereads books all the time, I’ve never gone back to AHWOSG, and it’s slightly faded from the culture in my mind, without the sort of longterm legacy enjoyed by other cool young literary sensations of a vaguely-contemporary era; on the other hand, the book’s success enabled Eggers to start McSweeney’s which has been a genuine highpoint of literary culture in the couple of decades since its creation. I really enjoyed this, partly from a sort of sense of era nostalgia but also because it’s a portrait of a sort of fame/success story that you can’t really imagine playing out anything like this any more.
  • A Master Cartoonist Ages: When I was at university I discovered in my second year that the library in Manchester had a BRILLIANT graphic novels section, and as a result I basically spent a significant portion of my second and third years eschewing ‘books about philosophy’ in favour of the collected works of Dave Sim (pre-misogynist breakdown) and Frank Miller and, my favourites, Los Bros Hernandez, whose ‘Love & Rockets’ strip I absolutely fell in love with and which changed my understanding of what comics could be and what you could do with the medium. This is a beautiful profile of Jamie Hernandez which talks about his work and introduces you to the L&R universe through some lovely scrollytelling, taking you through the panels to illustrate the comics’ style, themes and vibe – if you don’t know Love & Rockets, take this as an opportunity to discover one of the greatest auteur narrative projects of the past 50 years (I am 100% serious, it really is that good).
  • Long Live The Pasta Boyfriend: A *very* pleasing kicking given by Vittles to a new Instafoodie brand popup at the Standard hotel in London’s King’s X – Jordan King is some handsome fcuk who’s built up a following based on being good looking and posting vaguely-culinary food bongo on his stream, and now he’s wangled himself a ‘residency’ at a pop-up at the hotel’s restaurant. What’s it like? “Our table at Jordon King x Isla was ready soon after we arrived. It wasn’t the one we’d booked on the terrace, since that was now occupied by a private party, but another one next to the roaring fireplace inside. Looking at the surrounding empty tables, and then at each other, we made a silent agreement to commit to the night’s fever dream, peeled away all but the last layer of clothing and sat down. Our waiter explained that King was a ‘culinary extraordinaire’ with Roman heritage. ‘I like these,’ said one of my friends about the four water glasses she set down on our table. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you put one in your bag,’ she replied. With a glint in her eye, she then suggested we could have the wine glasses too, before padding quietly off, not to be seen again until after dessert. Our food, unfortunately, arrived quickly.” This is deliciously brutal.
  • In The New Beijing: Long Ling writes in the LRB about Xiong’an, a new city built outside of Beijing which is intended to act as a place for the city to expand into, a sort of satellite capital to lessen pressure on Beijing’s infrastructure – this is their account of visiting with a friend, and it’s…Christ, it’s hard to know what to feel about this (beyond ‘unsettled’). We’ve got incredible examples of efficiency and productivity, we’ve got the insanely-intrusive surveillance in service of a perfectly-efficient city machinery, we’ve got the concept of the ‘smart city’ elevated to its nth degree…this is all quite astonishingly scifi, basically, and there are points during it where you have to slightly pinch yourself to remind you that this is real, modern life over there. If nothing else it’s impossible to read this and then look out of the window here in dirty old London town and think ‘yeah, we’re quite backward really, aren’t we?’. “For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’”
  • The Hedonist’s Checklist: Daniel Speechly writes about exploring new flavours in Korea. The prose here is a *bit* purple for my tastes, and it doesn’t quite work for me overall, but there are a couple of sections where the writing really lands and so I’m chucking it in for those – see what you think.
  • Loopholes: Tice Cin writes in Granta about the geography – and psychogeography, if you’ll forgive me the w4nkiness of the term – of London’s estates, about the topography of the council block and the way they carve secret spaces out between the city’s arterial roads. This is beautiful writing about place and space and urbanism and culture and community. “Estates like Farm grow out of the mutations of Le Corbusier’s initial green and utopic plans. Corbusier always wanted ‘pedways’, walkways in the sky that allowed for residents in new builds to connect with nature and their neighbours. We know that Corbusier’s architectural philosophy was inherently flawed. In an unrealized urban masterplan called Ville Radieuse (the radiant city) he speaks of how the ideal urban housing project would require the ‘disappearance of the street’. We have seen how these ideals go wrong. To make the street disappear is to pretend that the streets are not part of our idea of home. To me, a pavement can carry the same weight as a shared balcony – our home spreads much further than the confines of a blueprint.”
  • The Grotesque Cruelty of Human Nature: I absolutely adored this – Ron Currie looks back at ‘Consider The Lobster’, David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about the weirdness of the Maine Lobster Festival and whether or not it is in fact ok to potentially torture a crustacean for its delicious flesh. This isn’t really about lobsters – it’s about Wallace, his work, and depression and pain, and I thought it was beautiful even if it did leave me in tears mid-morning on Monday (I think I mentioned uptop that I have been somewhat Tired And Emotional this week).
  • The Head in the Floor: Our final longread this week is this short story from 2018 by Kate Folk, which is, to my mind, a near-perfect bit of stylistic work. It is also about an actual head in the floor. These are both excellent reasons for you to read it.

By Nguan

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 28/03/25

Reading Time: 35 minutes

 

WHAT a week for fans of the general sense that everything really is going to tits at a rate of knots! Were I a different sort of writer – someone to who you turn for pithy cultural criticism and a neat skewering of the BIG ISSUES OF THE DAY – then I would probably have spent hours agonising this week as to what to turn my WITHERINGLY SATIRICAL eye on first, whether it be the groupchat hilarity, the Spring Statement and disability-fcuking lols, or the the uwufication of racially motivated deportations policy (it would have been the last of the three, I think, because it’s just so ASTONISHINGLY cnuty) (in the bad way).

I am not that sort of writer, though, so I have spent literally NO time this week thinking about that. Instead I have largely been feeling slightly sorry for myself, for reasons that do not concern you but which, let me assure you, are ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED. As a result of this, I am going clubbing this weekend and intend to do some moderate damage to my serotonin levels, meaning I can almost certainly look forward to spending a significant proportion of Tuesday and Wednesday in tears on the floor of my kitchen. I should probably apologise in advance for whatever the fcuk next week’s horrible burnt offering of a newsletter will look like.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND.

By Matteo Ribet

KICK OFF THE WEEKEND WITH OPPIDAN’S RECENT BOILER ROOM SET IN BRISTOL WHICH IS BASICALLY JUST AN HOUR OF GOOD TIME TUNES!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT IF YOU’RE AT A LOOSE END ON 14 MAY THAT YOU NAB ONE OF THE REMAINING TICKETS TO INTERESTING IN LONDON BECAUSE IT REALLY IS, WELL, INTERESTING, AND I THINK IF YOU LIKE CURIOS (LOL NOONE LIKES CURIOS) THEN YOU WILL LIKE THAT TOO, PT.1:  

  • Say One More Thing: I have spent not insignificant parts of this week thinking about this website/project/thing and all the different ways in which you could take the central conceit and apply it elsewhere, because you could have a LOT of fun / ruin a LOT of lives with it (exactly the sort of high jeopardy 50/50 I live for!). Say One More Thing is by New York-based code artist Tina Tarighian, and it’s a really simple premise – give it your email address, the email address of someone you would like to…*maybe* pour your heart out to and a message, and it *might* send it to them – there’s basically a lottery element to the site, which means there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that your email ever gets sent to its intended recipient, making it the perfect place for you to, I don’t know, confess to that murder that’s been making you feel guilty all these years but for which you *probably* don’t want to do three decades of time, or THE FEELINGS that you have been harbouring for the person in accounts, or the many calcified decades of resentment you feel to the people who forced you into this corporeal hell without even having the common decency to ask first…Honestly, I adore this and, hopefully, you agree and are also now thinking of all the other circumstances in which you might deploy a similar mechanic – maybe some sort of potential discount offered to customers who to are willing to risk having something DEEPLY COMPROMISING sent to their entire addressbook, say, or maybe some sort of internal thing where staff are invited to apply for a BIG CASH BONUS, but by so doing also have to write some ROBUST FEEDBACK to the CEO and know that one of said emails will get to its intended recipient with the author’s name attached…SO many fun ways you can tempt people into potentially doing something really, really silly and potentially-ruinous! Also, potentially cathartic free therapy! This works on SO many levels (two. It works on two levels).
  • Deepfake Finder: File this one under ‘depressingly-necessary sign of the times’ – the link here takes you to a platform called Loti which has actually been around for a while but was previously targeted solely at the celeb/influencer market; now, though, presumably as a result of (justified) increased concern around the prevalence of deepfake tech and ungated AI models that can and will spin up an image of anyone given a source photo, they’ve opened up the offering to us normies too. Loti basically offers you a service which trawls the web looking for content – video and images – that use your likeness, and purports to be able to catch stuff that’s been created with AI to look like you – so, in theory, this would catch people using or manipulating your profile picture on scam or dating sites, all the way up to nefarious bongo clips featuring your face, with Loti apparently also working to get the images removed on your behalf. There’s a base-level free tier which allows for upto five ‘takedowns’ a month – it’s slightly miserable that my immediate thought was ‘Christ, that probably wouldn’t be enough if your face breaks confinement – and there are various tiers depending on how much protection you want, along with bespoke packages for the actually famous. There is, obviously, no world in which the existence of this service feels like A Good Thing, but I suppose it’s broadly positive that there are limited degrees of protection springing up for people who, understandably, don’t want their face being used to peddle crypto or knock-off Cialis (let alone the really grubby stuff) – although, obviously, there are questions about how comprehensive the detection software is and how toothy the takedown requests actually are, and whether or not it’s possible beyond a certain point to do anything other than play whack-a-mole with this stuff. Anyway, welcome to the future, in which you have to basically take out insurance on your own likeness in the hope that it won’t be used to defraud a grandmother in Preston in six months’ time!
  • Alt News India: I occasionally feel slightly guilty about how little I know about the practical realities of life in one of the world’s most populous nations, particularly in an era in which the realities of digital media and smartphone adoption and social media and AI and misinformation collide hard with a massive rural population and patchy media literacy. Which is why I found this site, which exists to basically fact-check news and viral content across India, so fascinating – it gives you a sense of just how much MAD stuff floats around the digital media ecosystem, how aggressively…elastic with the truth so much of political campaigning is, and how impossible it is to get any sort of handle on deliberate media manipulation when there is just SO MUCH STUFF and it’s so easy to clip and edit and share to the millions of whatsapp groups through which this stuff proliferates. Also, fcuk me are there some awesome fake science stories doing the rounds over there – the stuff about ‘walking ladders’ in particular pleased me no end.
  • URL List: This is a project by Curios reader Itay Dreyfus from Tel Aviv – HELLO ITAY! – and it’s potentially really useful; it’s a simple website which lets anyone make lists (and who doesn’t love lists? NO FCUKER, etc!) of urls, which can then be shared. There’s a helpful explainer video on the homepage which sets out how it works and what you can do with it, but, basically, you can create Topics, and then lists of urls within each topic which can encompass outlinks, video embeds and whatever else you need – so, for example, useful for research on a specific subject, or to coordinate resources for a project across different areas, or (and when I realised this I felt a small sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach) basically a really lightweight version of Curios with just the links and a short description/note and none of the awful prose that, look, I know just gets in the way and makes the whole experience slightly worse. Effectively this is a hugely-effective tool for lightweight curation and sharing and I think lots of you might find it really useful – but, also, know that if you use it to create a better, smaller, more readable and less needy version of Web Curios I will find you and make you pay.
  • Telephone: Are YOU an artist (you may think that we are ALL artists, of course, but you are wrong)? Would YOU like to participate in a game of what is effectively multidisciplinary artistic exquisite corpse? OH GOOD! Telephone is a short-term project, run twice before in 2015 and 2021, which lets anyone who wants (but which is aimed squarely at people who Make Work of some sort) participate in a collaborate, interlinked art game – per the blurb, “Playing TELEPHONE is simple. We will review your application and, if accepted, you will receive a confirmation email. Then, we ask that you keep your eyes peeled for an assignment. Depending on how our game unfolds, this assignment may come quickly or may take time. In this email, you will be assigned an anonymous work of art from somewhere else on earth and it will be your job to translate this artwork into your own medium. This work of art may not immediately speak to you or reveal its meaning, but trust that it contains a message. Once you’ve completed your translation, you will return your work to us, and it will be passed to another artist somewhere on our big, beautiful globe to translate in turn.” I *really* like this idea, and have absolutely no clue whatsoever what the resulting works will look like – I obviously have no artistic skill whatsoever (unless you count ‘producing more words than anyone really ought to’, which I very much don’t) but will keep an eye out for any resulting writeups – should any of you decide to participate, do let me know how you get on.
  • Severance Data Analysis: There are, seemingly, only two TV shows that exist at the moment – the one that’s about how terrifying being a kid is in 2025, and the one about how fundamentally terrifying our relationship with work is in 2025 (obviously I am guessing slightly here, what with obviously having seen neither) – this website is about the work show. Via Giuseppe, this site by Lucy McGowan is SO nicely done and such a smart showcase for some really good dataviz work which, from what I can tell, is also going to be quite fun for those of you who are REALLY into the TV show (you can make your own Lumon Industries badge, should you be so minded). The whole thing’s presented as a sort of low-res rolodex (I presume that this is some sort of callback to an element of the show – fcuk, writing this stuff is really HARD when you have literally no clue what the fcuk it’s actually referring back to, please don’t tell me that I am going to have to start watching fcuking telly too, I cannot), with analysis of all sorts of (to my mind incredibly obscure) datapoints like, er, the ‘dings’ of the lift in the show, or ‘stuff in Mark’s locker’ (WHO IS MARK AND WHY IS HIS LOCKER IMPORTANT? NB this is a rhetorical question please do not feel the need to tell me), or language analysis of the innies and outies to determine who is happier with their lot (dear God)…this is really, really well-made and well-presented and will I am sure be a treat for those of you for whom the preceding 200-odd words made any sort of sense.
  • An Amazing Auction of Horror and SciFi Props: This runs until 3 April, so you have a few days to decide exactly which of the 62 lots you’re going to get yourself into serious debt to acquire. The BIG TICKET item here is a model of ET which was actually used in the film and which is listed with a starting price of half-a-million dollars which, look, I am sure ET means a lot to a lot of people but that is a LOT of money to pay for a foam and latex model of a creature that looks very much like a well-varnished, friendly turd. Should your budget be slightly more modest you might find such items as concept art for Total Recall and the original Dune movie which at the time of writing are only a few hundred quid. Personally though my eye’s on the animatronic baby dinosaur which is estimated to fetch about $7k and which I would personally consider to be pretty much the perfect remuneration for spending all these years toiling away for you here in the link mines hint hint hint.
  • ASCIIdelic: PSYCHEDLIC VISUALS! Swirling shapes and colours, a bit like lava lamps but significantly-lower-res! There are five or six different animation styles you can cycle through here, and there’s something oddly pleasing about how the coolours and shapes and fluid dynamics work when rendered in the defiantly-lofi ASCII aesthetic; PUT THIS ON THE BIG SCREENS AT THE OUTERNET YOU COWARDS.
  • Rotating Parts: I do love a site that exists in obvious homage to another, and this is very much the spiritual cousin to Lauren’s magnum opus (and Tiny Award 2023 winner) Rotating Sandwiches – except instead of sandwiches spinning in place, this site showcases, er, various electrical parts and components. SCART connectors! Oddly-shaped bits of plastic! THINGS WITH PINS! I obviously have no idea what ANY of these things are, but I do like the way that they are presented without context so you see them as AESTHETIC OBJECTS first rather than things with specific utility – also, you can click each one and it takes you through to a link to buy, which makes me wonder whether this is a slightly-oblique and ruinously ineffective storefront. In fact, come to think of it, I now strongly believe that every single website that sells stuff should have the option of viewing its entire inventory as spinning, 3d gifs, because we DO deserve nice things sometimes. Anyway, if you have ever wanted to watch, say, an Omron Electronics Inc-EMC Div SS-10GL2T spinning in place, rendered in glorious colour, then this is very much your lucky day.
  • Microscopy UK: Melissa Harrison writes! “I found this today while researching male pussy willows (don’t ask, and don’t google either) and had to send it to you because there surely can’t be many genuine and still operational websites left like this. My favourite pages are ‘projects’ (terrifying) and ‘play games’ (somewhat underserved, given recent advances in gaming technology) but the whole thing is with exploring. And It’s still being updated – most recent post March 13th 2025.” I cannot argue with Melissa here – the ‘Projects’ page really IS terrifying, to the point that I just clicked the link again and physically recoiled slightly at what I saw (it’s not horrible, just…weird and unsettling), and the web design and general layout is oddly anxiety-inducing in the way that only specific types of oldschool webwork can be, and the whole project has that wonderful clenched-teeth air of someone being VERY ENTHUSIASTIC in a way that is perhaps a…touch unsettling. Still, if you want to know about microscopes – specifically, if you want to know a LOT about microscopes – then this may prove useful. Do check out the ‘museum’ section – there are some *lovely* pictures of water fleas.
  • BNDCMPR: Another week, another nice little tool built on top of Bandcamp – this lets you make playlists from tracks on the platform which you can then share with other people, useful if you don’t fcuk with Spotify and don’t want to use YouTube (on which, if you will allow me to be a hectoring bore – LOL! – for a second, Bandcamp is a fcuking ace website that more people should use, if only because it lets you both pay artists directly for their work AND it lets you actually own the digital copy of their music, meaning you’re not at the whim of a streaming platform’s catalogue, There, that’s my OLD MAN SHOUTS AT CLOUDS bit for the week done, back to the links).
  • SteamPeek: Ooh, this is a GREAT idea – SteamPeek is basically an ‘if you liked this you might like that’ service for games on Steam. Per the homepage, “SteamPeek uses complex, unique, indie friendly recommendation algorithm to find the most relevant similar PC games. The mission is helping gamers find indie gems easily, and support talented, passionate indie developers, who don’t have the budget for fancy marketing. With the normalized tag based approach the results for all kind of categories are not only similar, it also allows everyone to discover hidden or trending PC games, new releases and even coming soon titles – while keeping the results easy to overview and allow all kinds of sorting and filtering.” Given the insane volume of games released on the platform each week, this is potentially a really useful way of digging out new stuff from outside of the norm, smaller titles and undiscovered gems – if you game on PC this is very much worth checking out I think.
  • LiveBoxes: OH GOD THESE ARE AMAZING. Do you like stuff in miniature? Do you find tiny dioramas fascinating and soothing in equal measure? OH GOOD YOU WILL LIKE THESE THEN. LiveBoxes are the work of a German guy called Oliver Kring, who somehow discovered (seriously, how do you discover this? I occasionally worry that I have spent my whole life missing out on some deep passion that I have simply never discovered thanks to my total inability to self-reflect) that his personal passion is, er, the creation of small plexiglass boxes inside which he creates beautiful little scenes which move and pulse with life – these are WONDERFUL. There’s a funfair! A garden party! A waterfall! An urban landscape! All tiny, and captured inside these clear boxes! These aren’t for sale of anything – turns out Oliver just REALLY likes making them and putting photos of them on the internet, which I can totally respect from the point of view of someone who basically stops enjoying stuff as soon as ‘being paid’ becomes part of the equation. I find these almost impossibly-soothing and, weirdly, a bit poignant, suggesting I have very much hit that point in the Friday morning Curios-spaffing cycle where I realise I should probably have had more than five hours’ sleep.

By Noelia Towers

NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB SELECTION OF MIXES OF FUNK FROM LITERALLY ALL AROUND THE WORLD COMPILED EXCELLENT RECORD LABEL HABIBI FUNK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT IF YOU’RE AT A LOOSE END ON 14 MAY THAT YOU NAB ONE OF THE REMAINING TICKETS TO INTERESTING IN LONDON BECAUSE IT REALLY IS, WELL, INTERESTING, AND I THINK IF YOU LIKE CURIOS (LOL NOONE LIKES CURIOS) THEN YOU WILL LIKE THAT TOO, PT.2:  

  • Lectio: I tend to feature quite a bit of stuff in here relating to design in various forms, despite personally having no facility whatsoever for anything of that ilk, but I don’t tend to do the whole ‘God’ thing so often what with being soulless and hellbound and all that. Hence I wasn’t aware that the field of, er, Bible design (IT IS A THING!) has over the past few years apparently been REVOLUTIONISED by Mark Bertrand (Mark is not shy of putting testimonials on his site, and, you know what, more power to him – in fact, should any of you read this and fancy penning your own endorsement of Curios then I would very much enjoy that, thanks), a man who is VERY invested in making sure the word of God is nicely-kerned at all times. This is, obviously, QUITE SPECIALIST, but I think there’s something broadly interesting here even if you’re not so hot on the whole ‘Christian’ thing – the Bible is VERY dense and how exactly to present the text in a way in which is readable but also which respects its sacred nature is a genuinely fascinating design question, to my mind, and if you do any work around designing for readability then this might actually contain quite a lot of useful thinking/principles.
  • The DIY Synths Database: It’s the end of March, the clocks go forward this weekend, the evenings are getting longer, I am just about remembering what it feels like not to be cold – so this is obviously the PERFECT time of year to embark upon a long, complicated making project which will see you have to spend significant time indoors, hunched over a soldering bench and/or keyboard terminal! The DIY Synths Database is your one-stop-shop for instructions on how to build your own synth, from a range of different designs and blueprints – all the projects here come with full schematics and instructions, links to relevant github repos, instructional videos…basically all you need to get building (well, except for a base level of engineering skill, without which this will make absolutely no fcuking sense to you, which is obviously very much the position I am in). There are 70 different synths of various flavours listed here to make, and I personally REALLY want to know what “cross-modulating ultra-chaos generator device which combines Rob Hordijk’s Benjolin and Ian Fritz’s Hypster circuits” sounds like should one of you fancy making one for me (is this manifesting? Am I doing it right?).
  • Macintosh Repository: As I think I say with tedious regularity (on which, look, I know that there are certain tedious and well-worn linguistic/stylistic tics that have basically become calcified into the Curios style at this point for which I am genuinely sorry but, well, you try doing this weekly for over a decade; per the FAQs, the prose is the price I am afraid you have to pay for the links), I have no idea who the fcuk the vast majority of you are or what you are into or why the fcuk you are reading this in the first place (or whether in fact any of you are! So much uncertainty!) – that said, I have CERTAIN SUSPICIONS, one of which is that a large proportion of you are the sorts of people for whom Apple is and has for decades been some sort of weird, twisted, fetishistic religion and so for whom a digital repository of Old Apple-Related Software will be an enticing click. SEE HOW GOOD I AM TO YOU? This is basically a fan-maintained community site which collects old programs for old macs – from games to design software to old versions of the MacOS, you can find everything available to download, so should you decide that you want to follow up Project “Ruin Spring By Spending It Indoors Building A Synth” with Project “Ruin The Summer By Reconstructing an AppleII Machine From The 80s” then you will probably want to bookmark this forthwith.
  • Chemical Reaction Gifs: This is an EXCELLENT subReddit which will be incredibly pleasing to any of you who only really perked up in science when someone set fire to something, or when Simon Lee decided to see whether or not concentrated sulphuric acid really *could* eat through flesh (‘partially’, it turns out). To be honest part of me is slightly sceptical that these are manipulated in post because if not WHY DID NOONE EVER SHOW US THIS STUFF IN SCHOOL?!?! Seriously, so many of these experiments are jaw-dropping from an aesthetic point of view – the COLOURS! The CRYSTALLISATION! – and I don’t know about you but I can’t watch these without a very small, very strupid part of me wanting to DRINK THE FORBIDDEN POTIONS. Also as a bonus, each of the posts has a dedicated community of scientists below it all explaining to the moron laypeople (ie me) what the chemicals are, what is going on, why the reaction looks like that, etc, which means that you can persuade yourself that it’s not JUST looking at the pretty swirly colours, it’s also LEARNING. BONUS SWIRLY CHEMICALS! If you liked the images in the Sub, you will probably also enjoy the video art of Roman De Giuli, who makes videos that are basically live action demonstrations of fluid dynamics using paint and which are very pretty in a sort of abstract kind of way.
  • Justin The Trees: Justin Davies is a man who likes trees, and wood, and enjoys making things out of trees and wood, and then making videos documenting the process of making things out of trees and wood – specifically he seems to like making icecream flavoured with different woods and then eating said icecream from a bowl that he’s carved from the source material (he also has non-icecream-related wood content, should the icecream be offputting for some reason). Which, you know, why not! Anyway, this came to me via Tom Scott and so many of you might have seen it – but, if not, this is honestly REALLY soothing and surprisingly interesting, and made me really wish that I had an ice-cream maker because I find the concept of birch-flavoured icecream oddly appealing.
  • Odysseus: Oh this is SO interesting. I have never been personally interested in the idea of doing a LARP, mainly because, well, I am not that sort of person and never have been and, honestly, it’s only in the past few years that the concept lost its absolute aura of ‘social death for anyone who plays’ (that may be unfair but, well, also true), but I have always found the concept behind them fascinating – not the war reenactment or LIVE ACTION WOW-type stuff, to be clear, but the wider idea of large-scale fictive ‘play’ with a shared goal, and the way that at the very top end of the concept it can basically become a sort of large-scale, mass-participatory game/theatre…Anyway, Odysseus is/was pretty much the ultimate evolution of the LARPing concept – the website explains that “Odysseus was a Finnish style larp for 104 players set in a world inspired by Battlestar Galactica. Odysseus is a story about a band of survivors battling against an overwhelming enemy in the aftermath of a devastating attack on a human colony in a distant star system. It is a journey towards the unknown. It is a story about faith, hope and sacrifice. It is a story about survival.” – but to understand more about it I recommend reading Adrian Hon’s fascinating interview with its lead producer and narrative designer Laura Kröger which explains a bit more about how it works/ed and the insane complexity of creating an experience which allows over 100 people to suspend disbelief and have an experience that is at once freeform and necessarily organic whilst at the same time having narrative propulsion and a clear beginning, middle and end. It’s worth checking out some of the videos on the website homepage to get a feel for how insanely polished this is in terms of sets, bespoke software, props and uniforms and just EVERYTHING, really – while I know that in actuality I simply don’t quite have the ‘playful’ qualities required to do this sort of thing (or, if I am honest with myself, the, er, ‘collaborative nature’) I can’t pretend that I don’t find the whole concept utterly captivating.
  • Aspect: Is…is it weird not to have any photos of your life? Asking for, well, me actually – I have realised this year that I really don’t possess ANY photographic record of my time on this planet, which isn’t something which particularly concerns me but which equally I am increasingly getting the impression marks me down as something of an oddity (WHY DO I NEED PICTURES WHEN I HAVE THE WORST BITS PLAYING ON A CAROUSEL BEHIND MY EYES EVERY WAKING HOUR OF MY LIFE LOL!). Anyway, I use that completely uninteresting and unnecessary  authorial digression to explain that I have absolutely no need for an appwebsitething like like Aspect, but equally that I understand others of you might be the sorts of people for whom photography is an Important Part Of Who You Are and might feel differently. Anyway, Aspect lets you basically organise and tag and sort all your images, coordinate them across devices and all sorts of other gubbins, which, I don’t know, is that useful? Fcuked if I know.
  • The Digital Thriving Playbook: I am sure that Adolescence is an astonishing piece of television, but I currently slightly resent it for making the kids/phones debate tediously omnipresent once again and for bringing ‘BAN PHONES FOR KIDS’ back as an argument (fwiw no phones in schools obviously makes sense, attempting to stop kids between 12-16 having them at all doesn’t and won’t work). I’ve seen multiple people this week suggest – quite rightly, I think – that one thing that isn’t being discussed is how and where to go about building better online spaces; the idea that you can just KEEP KIDS AWAY FROM THE CYBER is fcuking ridiculous, obvs, so isn’t it therefore more of a sensible move to pay more attention to the way in which digital spaces are constructed and managed so as to deliver better and more positive outcomes? Orthogonally-related, “The Digital Thriving Playbook is a partnership between the Thriving in Games Group (TIGG) (previously the Fair Play Alliance) and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, supported by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund. The site is owned and managed by TIGG. Our mission is to empower game developers worldwide with accessible tools and resources to cultivate thriving player communities. Drawing from a global network of hundreds of companies, we leverage deep industry knowledge and academic research to provide tailored best practices and development support for game studios of all sizes.” I think this probably contains a whole host of stuff that will be interesting for anyone thinking about how to design communities in such a way that fosters positive communication (which, it feels, ought to be something more of us spend time thinking about than is currently the case).
  • The Lullaby Machine: Via Kris comes this lovely project, which self-describes as follows: “Lullaby Machine is a digital rest-stop dedicated to sharing lullabies in a world where it can be hard to fall asleep. Growing from the idea of lullabies as portals into dream and potential tools for collective care, the site hosts a library of .mp3 lullabies submitted by established musicians and non-self-proclaimed artists alike. It is also home to a quarterly e-magazine featuring writing and art on the threads connecting lullaby, rest, dreams, grief, capitalism, ecology, and the internet.” I just paused writing to listen to this one, and it is BEAUTIFUL and now I want to get into bed and put these on a loop and go to sleep (SO TIRED) which, well, isn’t hugely helpful to getting this finished and so I am going to have to reluctantly move on but I strongly recommend you spend some time with this, there is some lovely music and really interesting work on here.
  • ASCII Facemaker: You know when you load up a new videogame for the first time in 2025 and one of the first things that you do is spend an hour making a character because the various character customisation options are so insane these days that you can basically make a photorealistic version of pretty much anyone you like with enough effort and squinting? Well this is that, but the EXTREMELY LO-RES VERSION – create your own UNIQUE faces using ASCII characters, selecting each individual element from eyes to chin and everything inbetween from a frankly-dizzying selection of options; there is a LOT of customisation you can do here, and a better mathematician than me would probably be able to tell you how many possible combinations there are (I am going to say ‘tens of millions’ with a degree of unwarranted confidence and the hope that none of you correct me). You can waste a good 20 minutes making all of your colleagues, friends, family or polycule on this, which feels like a pretty good use of your afternoon tbh.
  • TypingGame: My second ever real job involved working for a man so insanely controlling and obsessional that he insisted everyone label their stationery in the office because he believed that lost pens, etc, were an UNNECESSARY COST to be eliminated (love you Hector) – he also forced everyone in the company to learn to touch type on pain of sacking if you couldn’t hit a reliable 45-60 (oh man, FUN TIMES!!), which obviously is…slightly-insane, but something for which I am now very grateful (the lesson here is PAIN IS WORTHWHILE, probably) – anyway, this is a little browsergame that lets you race against others in FUN TYPING CONTESTS. You can either play on your own against bots, or create your own contests by sharing a link with friends and colleagues, so what better way to decide WHO IS THE BEST amongst a group of you than by challenging everyone to a type-off, with some sort of appallingly biological forfeit for whoever comes last? LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
  • Decodex: Áron Csatlós (hello Áron!) writes: “I saw that WordLink was featured in the previous issue, and I want to show you another wordgame I created. It’s a nice cryptogram with daily quotes.” He’s right, it IS a nice cryptogram with daily quotes! Each day you’re tasked with decoding the quote of the day; your job is to crack the code in as few moves as possible – and, look, I am SO laughably bad at this that it’s making me slightly annoyed thinking about it, but if you’re a different (better) sort of brain than I am you might find this a perfect new game for the roster.
  • InCARCeration: I don’t want to spoil this for you, so will keep the explanation minimal – imagine WarioWare (for the uninitiated, a collection of very short, very small, wildly-inventive minigames) but really low-res, REALLY silly and really funny, centred around being stuck in a car because REASONS. This is quite shonky but its commitment to its bit is laudable and it will make you laugh, which are two EXCELLENT reasons to click.
  • Prince of Prussia: The final game this week is this EXCELLENT minimalist remake/reimagining of Prince of Persia, built in Pico8. Solve puzzles! Jump! Climb! KILL NAZIS! All of human life (well, certain bits of it) is here, and this is FAR more fun than it ought to be – seriously, I was really impressed with how strong the design and gameplay is despite the whole thing being VERY SMALL and VERY minimal. Also, the way in which the Nazis die when you stab them is beautifully, satisfyingly arterial, despite being rendered in approximately 6 pixels which, honestly, is genuinely impressive.

By Henni Alftan

OUR FINAL MIX THIS EVENING IS THIS RELAXINGLY-HOUSEY SELECTION MIXED BY FRANGI! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Rock and Roll Tedium: This sadly hasn’t been updated in a decade, which, let me say, is a HUGE shame as ‘mundane spots of famous people’ is one of my favourite genres of thing. This Tumblr collected anecdotal sightings of musicians that are in no way interesting or noteworthy – it contains stuff like this, which, honestly, I sort of adore: “I was enjoying some quality time with my son at a soft play area, scampering round the obstacles and slides like a good ‘un. Climbing through a tunnel became a portal into a surreal experience, as I exited to meet Bez, Freaky Dancer Extraordinaire, from the Happy Mondays, who was enjoying a similar experience with his young son. Running round in your socks is a great leveller, and I had a thoroughly nice chat with Bez”

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Rim Atelier: Rim designs posters, I think mainly for things (media) that don’t exist, or which are designed to communicate a mood or vibe, or purely as an exploration of poster design – anyway, whyever (yes, ‘whyever’, it made sense in my head as I was typing just then and I think I am going to appropriate it) they make these they are gorgeous and were I less criminally underemployed right now I would be tempted to commission them to make something bespoke for me.
  • Dude on GPT: I found this via the ever-excellent 404 Media, consistently some of the best tech reporting in the world when it comes to the fcuking odd – this is part of the latest vanguard of what they’re terming ‘brainrot AI’, or ‘AI generated content that mines some pretty weird and fcuked-up seams to get people’s attention and thus get money from the Creator Fund’, and this particular channel is currently making a LOT of videos (using…Kling, I want to say, but it’s hard to tell right now tbh) featuring some VERY questionable usage of NBA players’ image rights. Want to see a video that heavily implies that Steph Curry is getting sexually assaulted in prison by Lebron James? No, I can’t imagine you do, and yet that is exactly what Dude on GPT wants to show you! Andrew Tate holding signs saying ‘will suck for bucks’ and then being kept in indentured servitude by, er, Michael Jordan? STOP RESISTING THIS IS THE FUTURE OF CONTENT NOW. Oh, and if you’re in the market for more weird AI horror (you’re not, but I’m fcuked if I am seeing this stuff and then not sharing it with you, why must I suffer alone?) then the work of Bennett Weisbran is probably the most viscerally-unpleasant stuff I’ve yet seen (outside of the, er, VERY NICHE AI experimentation communities that I am loathe to link to here because, well, there are limits, turns out).

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • Regime Change In The West: A typically-superb piece in the LRB to kick off with this week, looking back at the post-war Western political landscape, and how it has evolved over the past 85 years. The ‘regime change’ referenced in the title is not the common usage of modernity (‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’) but instead a reference to the shift towards widespread acceptance of the neoliberal paradigm from about the 70s. Effectively then this is a potted history of neoliberalism’s dominance as politicoeconomic doctrine, its impacts and the extent to which it can and should still be considered fit for purpose in 2025 and with a world order that looks once again to be…somewhat parlous? The conclusion, perhaps unsurprisingly, is broadly ‘who knows, but you’re not getting rid of it anytime soon’, but the piece really is fascinating and educative (or at least it was to me) and smart and very much worth reading: “An international regime being lowered into the ground, or rising anew like Lazarus? The stand-off in such expert verdicts has its correlate in the political landscape, where the conflict between neoliberalism and populism, the adversaries that have confronted each other across the West since the turn of the century, has become steadily more explosive, as events of the past weeks show – even if, for all its apparent compromises or setbacks, neoliberalism retains the upper hand. The first has survived only by continuing to reproduce what threatens to bring it down, while the second has grown in magnitude without advancing in meaningful strategy. The political deadlock between the two is not over: how long it will last is anyone’s guess.” BONUS BIG THINKY PIECE! The other topic that has generated a lot of discourse around policy and economics this week has been the Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson manifesto ‘Abundance’ (basically ‘hey, let’s build more things to make stuff better’) – it’s worth reading the main link and then reading this critique of the central Abundance premise, because the former neatly sets up the latter’s ‘yes, fine, but can we maybe think about new paradigms that don’t rest squarely on market-based capitalism?’ point (also, the other issue I have with the whole Abundance thing is that it seems to be imagining that we live in a post-scarcity society, or one that is significantly closer to post-scarcity than we in fact are, which, well, no).
  • The Underlying Problem: Or, ‘why perhaps it’s time for us to decide as a species that there are certain levels of wealth that it should not be possible for a single human being to attain’. I know that this is very ‘post-Luigi’-type discourse but, honestly, I can’t stress how strongly I feel this or how much I agree. Read this (you can replace the name of That Fcuking Man with whichever local variant of plute most boils your p1ss) and try not to nod: “The underlying cause of our situation is inequality. We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions. The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.“ Also, to be clear, if you think that exactly the same thing doesn’t happen in every single country around the world every day of the week then I have a bridge to sell you.
  • FADFO: I rather enjoyed this framing ‘FADFO’ stands for ‘Fcuk Around, Don’t Find Out’ and is being used in this piece to talk about a particular strain of political thought and action that’s taken hold over the past few years whereby for a significant class of people it is possible to take a punt on some DISRUPTIVE political idea (Brexit, Trump, etc) because, basically, you’re hedged from the potential consequences. The question, of course, is whether this era is now over and we’re all going to start finding out quite quickly from hereon in – and whether that will change some of the ways in which we choose to try and point society as a result. (as my friend Alex said yesterday, “in 2025 Titanic we ALL go down with the ship!”).
  • AI As Tech Bribery: I enjoyed this piece, which is basically a long guide to why ‘yes, but what about the amazing medical advances and The Machine being able to identify cancers and stuff?’ isn’t actually a good or strong or meaningful counterargument to ‘I hate the fact that we are being forcefed AI like geese being readied for a very unpleasant end’ – basically, the piece posits, the whole ‘AI WILL SCAN ALL YOUR MOLES AND TELL YOU IF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE’-type promises of utopian tech benefits to healthcare and the like are effectively being used to trojan horse you into accepting the hollowing out of entire industries and the dismantling of the general idea of ‘truth’ and collective reality, and, well, you don’t actually HAVE to have the latter to achieve the former, turns out. Put simply, “when you are confronted with such retorts it is important to see such arguments for what they are: defensive attempts to invalidate critiques of present (and future) harms by desperately gesturing towards promises of future benefits. When someone asks you “what about AI for [this good thing],” the important thing is not to tell them that you don’t buy what they’re saying. But for you to tell them that you are not willing to be bought off by what they are offering.”
  • The AI Bubble Is Looking…Taut: A collection of reasonably-strong signals over the past few weeks (MS rolling back datacentre spend, US market reactions to CoreWeave over the past 24-48h, etc) suggest that there might be a BIG CORRECTION coming which will rather fcuk some people in some uncomfortable ways – this piece examines how likely some sort of AI crash seems to be, and comes to the broad conclusion of ‘very’. Should you be interested in my take (you’re not, but I am going to give it to you anyway because Curios is nothing if not FULL OF ADDED VALUE), I think both that there is a LOT of silly money in AI which has been invested by idiots who haven’t understood the whole ‘no moat’ thing which has been entirely apparent for ~2y, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of cash, and the markets are going to have a VERY bumpy time…but, equally, that that STILL doesn’t mean that the tech is a bust, or doesn’t have all sorts of actual utility right now, and much as you want it to mean that your job is safe and the future is all going to be fine, well, it doesn’t mean that at all.
  • Is Buying Things Bad: I realised the other day when sorting through the laughable collection of rags that is ‘my wardrobe’ that I probably have something of a problem when it comes to buying things – specifically, I *really* don’t like doing it. To be clear, I’m not some sort of weird, horrible skinflint (I buy rounds! I buy dinners! I am nice, honest!) so much as I just really don’t like, or want, ‘stuff’. Books I can manage; artworks I can deal with, but otherwise…no, actually, sorry, I do not need or want to own physical things at all, turns out (which in turn becomes problematic when you realise that your aforementioned wardrobe is that aforementioned ‘collection of rags’). Anyway, this piece on slightly-enervating fashion zeitgeist chroniclers BlackBird Spyplane interrogates the question of whether it is in fact bad to buy stuff – the answer, obviously, is ‘no, in general, but maybe a bit if it’s sh1t, or plastic, of sweatshopped, or sh1t plastic from a sweatshop’. This feels like an interesting companion to the ‘make heavy things’ piece from last week in terms of the importance of quality and heft in the face of so much ephemerality and transience.
  • Video Games and Young Men: Keith Stuart writes for the Guardian about the role that videogames, and the associated culture and communities around them, play in the problematic radicalisation of young men – Keith’s a brilliant journalist and this is typically measured and sensible and non-hysterical, while at the same time making the accurate point that Gamergate (still fcuking the culture 11 years on, still making claims to be one of the most culturally significant inflexion points of the past 25 years which, honestly, is fcuking INSANE) continues to mean that the wider culture around games is still often dominated by some genuinely awful people and views. I made this point earlier in the newsletter, but Keith articulates it perfectly I think: “The worry, in the current maelstrom, is that the nuance of the problem will be lost. Even while condemning gaming communities that worship influencers such as Andrew Tate and Sneako, that belittle women and share “incel” and red pill philosophies, it is important to recognise the hugely positive roles that online communities can play in the lives of teenagers. As the father of an autistic teen, I have seen my son flourishing through contact with other players in games such as Minecraft and Warframe. The last thing we need from politicians and attention-seeking lifestyle gurus is a blanket philosophy that boys need to stop playing games or that all games are unhealthy – this isn’t about screen time, it’s not about getting boys to touch grass once in a while. We have to understand that our children are digital natives, as at home online as they are in any physical space – for many, there is no clear delineation. And honestly, if you’re shaking your head at how sad that is while spending hours a day perusing Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, then I don’t know what to say to you.”
  • Far Right Feminism: I appreciate that the likelihood of this being the case is somewhere near 0, but should there be anyone reading this who is incredibly senior in TV production and wants a HOT TIP then I would like to pitch you ‘right wing propaganda aimed at women is going to become an issue over the next couple of years and we are going to see the effects of the past decade or so of this stuff being dripfed to girls via socials and lifestyle content’ as a useful avenue to explore considering you’re on a 4 year development cycle. Regular consumers of these longreads will be aware that this is something I’ve been talking about for a few years now, and which has become more obvious as a thing with the strange and awkward way in which certain members of the ‘gender critical’ movement have found themselves sharing ideological beds with the MAGA right, but this far broader. The piece specifically looks at France and is an interview with writer and academic Charlène Calderaro who neatly encapsulates the whole thing early on: “Instead of outright rejecting feminism, as has traditionally been the case at the far-right, these activists selectively adopt feminist themes–particularly those related to gender-based violence and women’s safety–while reshaping them to fit an exclusionary, far-right agendas. I analyse this process as an appropriation of feminism, which involves a selective adoption of feminist fights and ideas, and their subsequent transformation to align with far-right agendas. The broader aim is to relocate feminism at the far-right.” So, so interesting and, I think, something that you are going to hear lots more about.
  • Evie Magazine: Consider this a companion to the last piece, or a practical manifestation of it – this is a profile of Gabriel Hugoboom and his wife Britney, founders and owners of right-wing women’s lifestyle website Evie which has made a name for itself promoting a Christian Right-coded, family values-friendly version of femininity that values being really really hot, pleasing your husband, cooking, and DEFINITELY NOT PRACTISING BIRTH CONTROL. Is that…is that Peter Thiel you hear in the distance there? IT IS! HELLO PETER THIEL!!!
  • The Rise of the Digital Dupe: This is super-interesting, and something that seems inevitable now that I think of it but which, prior to reading this piece, hadn’t occurred to me at all – there are entire cottage industries that have sprung up creating duplicates or fakes of digital goods, unofficial replicas of the sort of branded content that sees kids pay cashmoney for GTA Online skins or a pair of Actual Nike kicks for their Roblox avatar, particularly of brands that haven’t yet leaned into the Digital Goods Thing – depending on the sort of sector you work in this could perhaps trigger an idea or two.
  • I Hate ‘Creatives’: Look, there’s every likelihood that if you work in an agency that everyone you know was sharing this EVERYWHERE when it dropped on Wednesday, but in case not…Deez Links has brought back its ‘Hate Read’ series of anonymous pieces in which people get to slag off something they can’t stand, and this time someone’s chosen to take aim at nonspecific ‘Creatives’ – look, the writing here isn’t necessarily to my taste and I don’t personally hugely recognise the archetype described here, but, well, I appreciate some of you might find it speaks quite deeply to your soul, so.
  • The Rise of #HotBoyBadArt: Being a) straight and b) not on Insta I was not aware that there was a growing trend for BEAUTIFUL BOYS posting about themselves being BEAUTIFUL (nearly-naked) BOYS while showing off their ‘artistic practice’ – this is a funny, slightly-tongue-in-cheek bit of writing about both the phenomenon and its position in the history of ‘the gay male come-on’ in art over the centuries, which features lots of links to various instagram accounts of said beautiful boys and their (honestly, fcuking TERRIBLE) art.
  • Drinking Was The Job: I am a real sucker for ‘tales of hardbitten restaurant life’, and while I have less of an appetite for ‘tales of workplace abuse’ this account of working for famously-handsy New York chef Mario Batali by Laurie Woolever (extracted from her memoir) delivers in spades – horrible splendour: “I was wrecked with fatigue, my throat and head pounding, my nasal passages now a fountain of thin yellow mucous. I chugged two quick glasses of Champagne and took a sip of water before the waiters began delivering the food: glistening, translucent spring-onion cakes, followed by scallops with lily buds and a whole roast sucking pig the size of a well-fed toddler, the meat tender, the skin like crunchy taffy. There was Murray cod fried in a rice-flour batter and garnished with soy sauce, scallions, and cilantro, then thin slices of abalone that had been cooked for 13 hours at low temperature, served with dainty baby bok choy. When the waiters retreated, Sandra told us that abalone retailed for $450 per kilo. Mario and Mark, seated across the table from me, both seemed somehow completely fucking functional, even chipper, whereas I was a mute shadow of a ghoul.” If this is your bag, by the way, I can highly recommend the novel SweetBitter from a few years back.
  • Confessions of a Once-Bearded Lady: I absolutely adored this piece, by Elisa Albert, about growing up in the 90s as someone who grew facial hair, and how she reacted, and how her memories of that reaction and the need for it have made her think about and question her own notion of gender and her own identity and what she may or may not ‘be’. This is honest and funny and interesting and uncertain, and I love it for all of these things: “I’ve had a postcard portrait of one such person taped up over my desk for years: Jennifer Miller does Marilyn, by Zoe Leonard. A reminder of who (or what) I might have been. Who or what I “really” am. Who or what I sold out. Jennifer Miller, mon ami. Seventeen years my senior, hiding in plain sight at the Coney Island freak show around the time I was still finishing up laser treatments and dutifully swallowing hormone blockers. In photos from the time, she wears a full, natural beard and sequined ball gown. Her gaze is calm and confrontational and deep and unafraid and gorgeous and wonderful. Her smile, pure heaven. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to be her and I was madly in love with her. Did I want to study her or kiss her!? Confusing. Revelatory. She dared exist! Whereas I … did not, exactly.”
  • The Thief Who Became A Celebrity: A superb story in China Books Review (written by Emily Feng) about a peculiarly Chinese story of modern fame in the digital age, within the Party panopticon. This feels like it could be near-future fiction, which is probably the highest compliment I can pay it.
  • Your AI Lover Will Change You: I know, I know, ‘people trying out AI companion chatbots’ is OLD NEWS and you come to Curios for the NEW HOTNESS – trust me, though, this is excellent. Jaron Lanier – reliably one of the most interesting and sensible voices talking about technology – writes about what it might *do* to us when we are all talking to The Machine as much, if not more, than we are talking to each other. This is smart, interesting, speculative and imaginative, and I want to share a long-ish extract so you can get a feel for the sorts of practical questions it asks: “On the more moderate end of the spectrum, A.I.-love advocates do not see A.I.s replacing people but training them. For instance, the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the argument that people are not instinctively good at relationships, in the way that we are good at walking or even talking. The current ideal of a healthy, comfortable coupling has not been essential to the survival of the species. Traditional societies structured courtship and pairing firmly, but in modernity many of us enjoy freedom and self-invention. Secular institutions have found it necessary to train students and employees in consent procedures. Why not learn the rudiments with an A.I. when you are a teen-ager, thus sparing other humans your failings? Eagleman suggests that we should not make A.I. lovers for teens easygoing; instead, we ought to make them into obstacle courses for training. Still, the obvious question is whether humans who learn relationship skills with an A.I. will choose to graduate to the more challenging experience of a human partner. The next step in Eagleman’s argument is that there are too many channels in a human-to-human relationship for an A.I., or eventually a robot, to emulate—such as smell, touch, social interactions with friends and family—and that these aspects are hardwired into our natures. Thus we will continue to want to form relationships with one another. In some far future, Eagleman predicts that robots could “pass” in all these ways, but “far” in this case means very far. I am not so sure that human desire will remain the same. People are changed by technology. Maybe all those things tech can’t do will become less important to people who grow up in love with tech. Eagleman is a friend, and when I complain to him that A.I. lovers could be tarnished by business models and incentives, as social media was, he concedes the point, but he asserts that we just need to find the right way to do it.”
  • 250 Things an Architect Should Know: Finally this week, I am obviously not an architect – are YOU? – but I absolutely loved this. 250 things – principals, maxims, ideas, ideals – selected by Michael Sorkin which, apparently, architects should know. Except these are perfect for anyone, I think, and the whole thing is weirdly lyrical and beautiful and reads like a poem, in the very best way, and I think this is rather unexpectedly magnificent and I hope you do too.

By Emma Hartvig

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 21/03/25

Reading Time: 31 minutes

 

Have any of you seen The Years at the theatre in London? If so, did YOU have someone faint in your performance of it? Because, seemingly, it’s happening at every show and I refuse to believe it’s not a plant because, honestly, there is no way that some stage blood and a bit of abortion chat is enough to make someone require medical assistance.  I am now a fake-fainting truther and nothing will persuade me otherwise (unless it just so happens that one of you was in fact taken ill, in which case apologies for mocking your presumed lack of fortitude).

Anway, I am out of introductory inspiration this week so you’ll just have to crack straight on with the links while I go and wash all this internet off me.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should call me if you’re reading this.

By He Wei

WE OPEN THIS WEEK WITH SOME BREAKS AND RAVE AND TWO HOURS OF MUSIC GUARANTEED TO BLOW AWAY WHATEVER REMAINING COBWEBS ARE LINGERING WITHIN YOUR SKULL!

THE SECTION WHICH INVENTED THE CONCEPT OF ‘VIBE-SCRYING’ IN THE PUB YESTERDAY AND IS NOW DESPERATELY TRYING TO REMEMBER WHAT THE FCUK IT MEANT, PT.1:

  • The Fourth HTML Review: One of my favourite ever online projects is BACK for its fourth edition! The latest edition of the HTML Review – featured repeatedly in Curios over the past few years, and, lest you forget, self-described as ‘literature made to exist on the web’ – dropped overnight, and given its relative newness I was only able to spend 15 minutes with it this morning c. 620am before I was forced to start, you know, GETTING ON WITH ALL THE TYPING AND STUFF. Still, even a relatively cursory examination of the contents suggests that this is another beautiful collection of…fcuk, ok, let me try and, for once, muster some sort of accurate description of what the fcuk this is, in an attempt to entice those of you as-yet unfamiliar…OK, so the HTML Review is, once again, a collection of pieces of writing of various forms, by a collection of digital artists and authors, each of which features code as a fundamental, inherent part – none of these…essays, poems, vignettes, ‘interactive text experiments’, whatever you want to call them, would work (or at least not in the same way) were they rendered as static text on a page, and as such they offer a glimpse of some of the communicative and artistic possibilities afforded by simple, in-browser HTML. So you have a series of reflections on all the bedrooms in which one author has lived, rendered in ASCII with accompanying hover-over images; you have a flowing river of interactions centred around the authorial ‘I’; you have at least one piece that made me ever so slightly lose my sh1t, to the point that I had to go and quickly wash my face and have a word with myself because it is TOO EARLY TO CRY, there are meditations on hypertext and communication, a plea from one artist to all of us to help him store his files, and, for reasons I can’t quite get my head around yet, a short essay that is also an interactive marimba. As soon as I finish writing Curios this week I am going to open this back up again and spend some proper time with each of these, and, honestly, if you only really pay attention to one link this week I would strongly suggest you make it this one – I can’t stress enough how much I adore the way in which words and code work together in every single one of these examples, and how each single…essay? Work? Whatever, each single ELEMENT is in and of itself beautiful and interesting and curious and perfect. Did I mention I love this? I love this.
  • EXPTV: When I was at University there was a bar in Manchester that we occasionally used to end up in because a) it was open late; and b) it sold absinthe, which occasionally seemed like a good idea at 2am. It was called the FAB Cafe (which I think still exists), and was all decked out with slightly kitsch B Movie posters and props and was, in pretty much every respect, a slightly-ridiculous place. Which, I appreciate, means NOTHING to you and which you could probably have done without, but, well, it’s MY newsletter and they are MY memories, so wevs. Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because EXPTV – a website which basically runs a seemingly-infinite video stream of ODD STUFF, very much of the sort which you might have seen soundlessly playing on a small TV in a corner somewhere in the aforementioned FAB Cafe while a man in full juggalo-style facepaint made with the teaspoons and sugarcubes. It’s quite hard to get a handle on the specifics of what you’ll see if you watch this – the description goes with “EXP TV is a live tv channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera…EXP TV’s daytime block is “Video Breaks”–a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. The nighttime block starts at 10pm and features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives” – but based on the brief glimpses I’ve had it might best be described as ‘goth-adjacent kitsch, with a vague sort of horror-psychedelia flavour’. Does that appeal? Does that even make sense? IT DOES NOT MATTER EXPERIMENT AND LIVE A LITTLE. This is PURE VIBE, basically – whether the vibe is to your liking is of course for you and you alone to decide.
  • TV Garden: Sticking with the telly, seeing as we’re here, I am slightly astonished not to have featured TV Garden before – despite my best efforts, it seems I am yet to see ALL of the internet. This is, honestly, a fcuking AMAZING resource – basically, via what I presume is some sort of DARK MAGIC, this website offers you the means to watch seemingly every single TV channel in the entire world via the magic of HTML. Choose your country, and then select from literally THOUSANDS of TV stations which you can stream for free to your heart’s content. I am not *entirely* sure that there’s not something hooky going on here – I am pretty sure that the BBC wouldn’t be wholly pro so many of its channels being made freely available to a global audience like this, for example – but, well, INFORMATION (or, in this case, telly) WANTS TO BE FREE! Honestly, I spent a really pleasing/slightly odd 30 minutes earlier this week working with Italian daytime TV on in the background for a comforting hit of weirdly-familial nostalgia, and as a quick means of taking a cultural temperature check of anywhere you can think of in the world this is pretty much unparalleled. SINCERE WARNING: this is potentially horribly addictive, and I say that as a non-TV person; I nearly lost myself to Laotian QVC just now, so caveat emptor.
  • Seemingly All of the World’s Video: Another ‘hang on, I *must* have linked to this at some point over the past 15 years’ moment – except, apparently, I haven’t. The Internet Archive has, as you might expect, a LOT of video on it; this link takes you to basically the root directory for all of it. THERE IS SO MUCH HERE! It’s a huge, sprawling, slightly-inchoate mess, but, equally, SO MUCH STUFF! 11,700 videos tagged ‘comedy central’! Loads of Chaplin films! Digitised children’s films ripped of 80s VHS tapes! ALL OF THE OLD DISNEY FILMS, BEFORE THE MOUSE DECIDED TO DO WEIRD REMASTERS OF EVERYTHING! This is searchable, but, also, it’s the sort of thing that just rewards you scrolling through and marvelling at the sheer scale and scope – some of this stuff you will be able to find on YouTube, fine, but so much of it feels like the sort of thing that you could only really find here, and it’s another wonderful example of the importance and public-spiritedness of this sort of archival project (and also I have just stumbled across a full rip of a 2018 anime called, spectacularly, “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”, and who doesn’t love that? NO FCUKER, etc).
  • Steal My TESLA: I was disappointed to see two Teslas on Soho Square yesterday afternoon and to note that neither of them had been defaced or vandalised in the slightest – London, please, up your game! Steal My Tesla is a site/service (joke?) established by a Shadowy Network in the US, offering Tesla owners feeling regretful of their purchase or fearful that said purchase will be torched, and struggling to offload the vehicle on the used car market, the chance to get their car nicked for them and sold on the black market, so the original owners can claim on the insurance and everyone is happy. Except, obviously, this is a joke – but one which, to be honest, feels like a viable idea should anyone want to make it reality.
  • What Have They Done Now?: Politics AND vibecoding! Patrick Tanguay of Sentiers got The Machine to spin up the code for this site, which neatly aggregates all the recent headlines about whatever the fcuk Those Fcuking Men have been up to – per Patrick’s description, “If you’re like me, you’ll have moments during the day where you wonder, “what have they done now?” I then usually head to CNN or the BBC to see what fresh hell they have thought up. Instead, you can just look this page up, it aggregates mentions of #trump, #musk, #DOGE, and #tariffs from The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Al Jazeera, and WIRED.” Obviously you don’t need another place to keep informed as to all the ways in which the oligarch class is seeking to reshape the world to its own ends, but this is interesting partly as a nice example of a neat, simple bit of AI-generated webwork but also as a stark reminder of the sheer volume of fcuking NOISE being generated by these cnuts.
  • PoetiCal:  More words and code! PoetiCal is a gorgeous project, describing itself as ‘an experimental, collaborative publication only accessible through a calendar app’ – users (like you!) are invited to submit texts for consideration to the project (what sort of texts? These sorts: “original and inventive writing, in any form: short texts, poems, experimental pieces, diary entries, micro-essays, prose poetry, stream-of-consciousness writing, dialogues, aphorisms, memoir snippets, dream logs, travel observations, shopping lists, love letters, character sketches, found text, erasure poetry, conceptual writing, surrealist descriptions, automatic writing, creative code, visual/concrete poetry, personal manifestos, brief literary criticism, historical fiction, nature and urban sketches, hybrid genres, and text-based art.”), along with a date on which you would like it published; on the other side, users can sync their calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook, etc) with PoetiCal, thereby ensuring that they’ll have access to new works as and when they are published. This is SUCH a clever idea, using the basic functionality of the calendar app as a means of delivering art on a sporadic basis, and I love the idea of opening your calendar one morning and discovering that, along with the colonoscopy appointment and the reminder to CALL MATT, you have been gifted a poem or an essay or some other small piece of writing by a stranger somewhere in the world. This is *such* an interesting use of the functionality and I am very charmed by it.
  • Touch Grass: An app which is designed specifically to encourage you to GET THE FCUK OUTSIDE – the gimmick here is that you can set the app to lock you out of your phone’s apps until you have proved to it via the medium of photographic evidence that you have, indeed, been outside and TOUCHED GRASS. Upload a photo of you TOUCHING GRASS and get access to all your lovely phonegubbins again, so you can continue ignoring nature and the real, messy, dirty physical world in favour of 1s and 0s and safety and control! I like this, but also like the idea of building variants on it that require the user to complete increasingly unhinged and humiliating challenges in order to get their privileges back, like a sort of low-stakes MrBeast where, rather than winning a million quid, you just get the ability to order food and text your mates again (unrelated, but I saw poor, dead-eyed Jimmy Donaldson described as ‘normcore Jigsaw’ this week which is possibly perfect).
  • Campseek: Via Kris over at Naive, Campseek is a really clever idea, using a sort of ‘friends of friends’-type mechanic to help with new music discovery. It’s a really simple premise – Campseek lets you see what other fans of a particular band have been listening to on Bandcamp, in the general ‘well, if we both like X then maybe I will also like some of your other tastes too’ sense. You can plug in the specific Bandcamp urls of specific artists or albums, or otherwise just plug in genre tags to get a broader, less-specific set of recommendations, and there’s something really lovely about the way that the interface maps where the community of ‘other people who liked this and what they in turn also liked’ are in the world. This could, if you were feeling curious, be a whole afternoon’s new musical discovery and is a really excellent way of discovering new music (and for deciding that the simple fact of sharing one interest with someone in no way guarantees that you will like ANYTHING else they’re into).
  • Not Great News For The Ad Industry: This is…I think it’s prototypical and proof-of-concept rather than being an Actual Thing That Really Works, but, well, I am not wholly sure. Hongos is a new project by Samim, which basically uses a bunch of different variants of The Machine, workflowed together in smart ways, to create a start-to-finish pipeline for the creation of AI videos of…surprisingly-high-quality. “HONGOS is an open-source AI video production tool that generates everything from a single prompt: script, images, voices, videos, and final edits. It produces complete, professional-quality videos on any topic—whether for ads, social media, or more. By utilizing advanced AI models, HONGOS transforms what once took weeks and thousands of dollars into a process that takes minutes and costs under $8 per 30sec clip.” Basically, you feed this with a single prompt and, if you like, a starting image, and the workflow will turn that into a script, video, music and v/o, JUST LIKE THAT. Obviously there are skipfuls of salt to take with any of these things – I would be amazed if the ratio of hits to misses spat out by this is any better than 1:1000 – but its undeniable that the examples on-page are…honestly, actually pretty good, not least the scriptwork which feels significantly better than most Machinework you see. It’s worth spending a few minutes on the page and watching a few of the examples – if you work in corporate video then maybe have a stiff drink on hand to suck on when the ‘oh dear god what is to become of us all?’ fantods become too much to bear.
  • Elimar: LMI is a company which, apparently, does ‘data’-type work in and around the arts and with arts inititutions – part of which, seemingly, is pigment analysis of old masters for museums, estates and the like. As a sort of business card, they have produced this VERY shiny website detailing work they have undertaken on a lesser-known work by Van Gogh, known as ‘Elimar’ – this is a really nice piece of webwork which gives you some surprisingly good background on the painter and his works and his style, and about the titilar painting, and which Taught Me Stuff, and which is beautiful and slick and really really shiny…and which left me utterly, totally baffled as to what the fcuk it is that LMI actually *does*. Still, I am not the target audience and as such my bafflement is entirely by-the-by – ENJOY THE LOVELY SCROLLYWORK!
  • Very Cool Tutorials: A TikTok account which posts Minecraft tutorials but done in the style of surprisingly decent trap songs (and I say this as someone who knows nothing about minecraft and who really doesn’t have any time for this sort of music). Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
  • Creative Coding Crafts: Are YOU based in London? Do YOU like code and creativity? GREAT! “We are a London-based and online community dedicated to making space for creativity – physical space, head space, collaboration space. A playground for exploring the tools, ideas, and experiments that live at the intersection of code and art. In concrete terms, we’re looking at browser-based sketches (p5.js, Three.js, d3.js, GSAP, etc.), using physical tools like pen plotters and circuits, and occasionally exploring the weird and wonderful edges of creative expression – like quantum computers’ involvement in music.” The website collects coding resources that might be of use, a book club, details of upcoming events…this is not my sort of thing, but I get the impression that it might be some of yours.
  • Into the Amazon: Another LOVELY piece of webwork, this by National Geographic, telling the story of the Amazon river in a gorgeous, interactive, instructive and, crucially, really interesting way; it takes as its starting point the mountains from which the Amazon starts and takes you through down into the rainforest, telling you about the flora and fauna and geography, and overall this is SUPERB and worth 10 minutes of your time.
  • ThreadsInside: This is quite a clever idea I think – using The Machine, this website offers ‘podcasts’ based on interesting forum threads from around the web, giving you short, bitesized, interesting listening experiences derived from the weird, expert corners of the geekweb. You know how occasionally you will find literally the best and most expert advice or opinion on something in a years-old thread on the Garfield community forums (for example)? Well, that – but in podcast form! Ok, so obviously the pods are all machine generated and so as such your mileage may vary here, but the concept is smart and curious, and I like the breadth of topics they have for you to explore (examples include “How could I safely contact drug cartels?” and, er, the pros and cons of owning a laundromat).
  • Missing Tooth Claim Form: A truly charming little bit of internet, this – per this story in last weekend’s Guardian, Seamas O’Reilly’s son lost a tooth but accidentally swallowed it, leaving a slight problem – how to claim the owed monies from the tooth fairy? O’Reilly’s immediate, flustered response was to suggest to the kid that you needed to ‘fill out a form’, which led to him then having to craft said form in Photoshop to prove to the child that he was in fact going by the book – so, obviously, someone took that gag and ran with it, and has now mocked up an excellent and very convincing UK Government webpage where you too can now download an ‘official’ copy of form TF-230 (DO YOU SEE???). This is, honestly, just really cute and even someone as desperately broken as me can’t find anything to snark at here.

By Alex Colville

NEXT UP IT IS THE RETURN OF FORMER EDITOR PAUL WITH A MIX OF RELATIVELY-MINIMAL TECHNO WHICH IS JUST THE RIGHT SIDE OF ‘AUSTERE’!

THE SECTION WHICH INVENTED THE CONCEPT OF ‘VIBE-SCRYING’ IN THE PUB YESTERDAY AND IS NOW DESPERATELY TRYING TO REMEMBER WHAT THE FCUK IT MEANT, PT.2:

  • Liquid Shape Distortions: This is hypnotic and rather lovely; abstract, vaguely-liquid patterns, in a slightly 60s-psychedelia-inflected style; click the randomise button until you find one that pleases you particularly and then drop a tab and zone out for 8 hours (NB – it is not in fact necessary to do acid to appreciate this, but I imagine that the two experiences might be at least briefly complementary, at least until the gnawing existential fear starts).
  • Newsreel: On the one hand, it does feel quite important to have at least a vague handle on ‘what is going on right now’; on the other, given ‘what is going on right now’, it’s also not wholly surprising that growing numbers of people, particularly younger people, are deciding that, actually, they could possibly do without the 24 litany of rolling horror being fired into their faces at a million miles an hour ALL THE FCUKING TIME. Still, it’s fair to say that the increasingly-fractured news landscape and the replacement of ‘traditional’ (some might say ‘reputable’) sources with influencers and people talking STRIDENTLY and with STRONG OPINIONS about thing they don’t necessarily know the first tfcuking thing about isn’t, perhaps, an unalloyed Good For Humanity – which is why Newsreel has launched, attempting to offer news in a format which ‘fits peoples lives’. Look, I don’t mean to be cynical about this, but I think I can remember half a dozen similar projects over the past decade or so, none of which have managed to outlast the VC money runway that birthed them, and I remain unconvinced that this is going to fix the problem – I am unsure at this point whether the whole ‘news reticence’ thing is a format issue so much as a ‘what is the point of paying attention to this given my sense of agency is so utterly diminished?’ issue. Still, in case you’re curious, “Newsreel reimagines news for a generation drowning in distraction. Our app is designed to deliver news in a radically different way—interactive, multimodal, and built for today’s attention spans. Think of us as what would happen if the best parts of social media and legacy news had a baby. No long articles, no endless feeds. No overwhelm, no confusion.” It’s waitlist-only, and as far as I can tell is following the Facebook model of a slow rollout across US colleges, but if you’re curious as to what the latest iteration of ‘the news, but less boring and, you know, like Insta!’ looks like then you might want to sign up and see.
  • Dearly Blossom: You may have seen this floating across your feed this week, but in case not this is possibly the most joyful TikTok channel I have ever seen, ever. Would you like a selection of videos in which a fluffy, pink, Muppet-like puppet mimes and scats and dances to jazz? YES YOU WOULD! Honestly, this is so so so so good – I can’t quite explain what it is about the puppetry, but it’s SO charming, like Henson-level good, and the singing and the movement and the whole personality that comes through here is glorious and, basically, it reminded me of all the best things about oldschool Sesame Street. I promise you that if this doesn’t make you smile then you are, sadly, almost certainly dead.
  • The World Photography Organisation Awards 2025: Photographs! Of things! From around the world! There is a wonderful variance of styles and subject matters here, from architecture to portraiture to documentary photography, and it’s worth digging through the individual categories as there are some glorious shots buried in here.
  • The Data Rescue Project: It feels, frankly, preposterous that this even need be a thing, and yet here we are. “The Data Rescue Project is a coordinated effort among a group of data organizations, including IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. Our goal is to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk” – so, basically, this is a public project seeking to guard potentially significant troves of US State data from being wiped by the new administration. I appreciate that hyperbole is unhelpful when talking about What Is Happening, but it does rather feel that ‘destruction of historical datasets and governmental records’ isn’t something that happens in a healthy, functioning democratic state and, in fact, that it’s what tends to happen it states that are in fact the opposite of functioning and democratic..
  • Hallow: I went to Catholic school as a kid – there were loads of Italian and Polish immigrants where I grew up, so one of the local state schools was papist to accommodate those of us spawned from foreigners – and as such, despite being very much the opposite of a Man of Faith, I have a reasonable grounding in the basics of Church doctrine and the Christian religion. Which is why I am not 100% certain that Hallow – an app for prayer – is…maybe *wholly* Godly. One of the things about praying, you see, is that, famously, you can do it anywhere and it can take any form, and that basically it’s an expression of faith which is entirely personal and between you and your God…so exactly why one might need assistance with the whole ‘praying’ thing from an app and, er, Mark Wahlberg. Still, sign up and you get access to LOADS OF PRAYERS! And, er, some Wahlberg-related content! And the opportunity to PAY TO PRAY, with an annual subscription which runs to $70! $70! TO TALK TO GOD!!! I do not, on balance, think that Jesus would be a fan of Hallow, but, on the plus side, I imagine they’re paying Mr Wahlberg handsomely for his endorsement and so, well, bully for Mark. I would love to see the house that the app’s founders live in, and to have an open and frank conversation with them about the correct interpretation of Matthew 19:24.
  • Relative Time: Do you ever think that we’ve become a bit stuck in our ways when it comes to the measurement of time, and that we ought perhaps to mix it up a bit? Bored of the tired old ‘Anno Domini’? Well why not add some mild, low-grade excitement to your life with this website which will instead let you measure any year by its distance from a selection of other milestones. Fine, YOU may want to call this year ‘2025’ (CONFORMIST! DULLARD!), but think how much more exciting it would sound if instead we agree to refer to it as, er, 30 ADS (After Dating Sites), or 4.4kAF (After Form) – YES, THAT IS RIGHT, SO MUCH MORE EXCITING! This is very silly and utterly pointless, but, beautifully, the code is available on a Github repo so that, should you so choose, you can amend your entire website to render the dates entirely incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t you.
  • Rock Collections: A collection of other people’s digital collections. “Rock Collections is a site where you can comb through what other people collect online, to explore the small, personal, and idiosyncratic internet…a project that asks what kinds of collecting “beings with tactile instincts” practice in digital spaces. What traces do we pick up, and carry with us, and how? Where and in what form do these collections live? Despite the scale of internet life, this project looks for traces of the small, personal, and handmade in our digital lives. Rock Collections is a site where you can comb through other people’s digital collections. It’s not a totalizing, all encompassing catalogue of the Internet. It’s just a small corner, where someone can hand you something they’ve found, and say here, look at this one.” The site is ASCII-ish and minimal – click each of the ‘rocks’ to learn a little about what the collection is of, who it is by, and to be offered links to visit it if you so choose. There are collections of screenshots of whatsapp messages, singing cat videos, ‘dudes holding doves’ (no, really), and these are all small and personal and individual and there is no stated reason for their existence, and this is perfect and as it should be. Anyone with a collection is invited to submit their own for inclusion – I think this is beautiful and it pleases me no end.
  • Inner Voice: A little webart project by Damon Zucconi, presenting a rolling list of (near-)homophones arranged alphabetically while the screen beeps at you. Which, I appreciate, sounds like something you have no interest in clicking on, AND YET! I don’t know why but I found myself watching this all the way through which, honestly, surprised me. LET YOURSELF BE CAPTIVATED BY THE BEEPING WORDS!
  • The British Wildlife Photography Awards: Not just lovely animals, but lovely BRITISH animals! PATRIOTIC FAUNA! These are all gorgeous and VERY CUTE – if your heart doesn’t melt slightly at the sight of the sleepy otter then, well, you have problems – and occasionally surprising (I did not think we had rainbow sea slugs in British waters, for one), and my personal favourite is the one entitled ‘weasel at rush hour’ because it turns out that there’s just something inherently comedic about the weasel and its face (no, really, there is, I promise you).
  • The Afro Hair Library: This is a brilliant resource – a collection of open source 3d models, made by black digital artists around the world and available for download to anyone who wants to use them, the idea being to create models that have a better, more accurate and more diverse depiction of African hairstyles than traditionally seen in videogames
  • Wordlink: ANOTHER DAILY WORD PUZZLE! This one is quick and lightweight and pleasingly-fun – also, it will TEACH YOU THINGS, specifically really really obscure people and places and things – for example, today I have learned that “Conner Prairie is a living history museum in Fishers, Indiana, United States, which preserves the William Conner home. The home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the museum recreates 19th-century life along the White River”, which, OK, fine, is unlikely to be of any long-term use to me but which I am broadly-speaking happy to now know about. Each day you’re presented with 6 words, all of which can be shuffled around to make pairs – your task is to find the correct order for all eight words, whereby the pairs they make with the *next* word will be a thing. Which, Jesus, even by my standards is a fcuking appalling description, sorry, Look, just click the link and it will make sense, I promise.
  • Selfie Shuffle: After joy that was pig-stacking extravaganza StyScraper, Matt Round returns with another fun distraction – would you like to have one of those ‘shuffle the tiles until the image recomposes itself’ games, where the image you have to recompose is your own face? GREAT, HERE YOU ARE!
  • Wikiasteroids: Game AND learn (sort-of)! Wikiasteroids is, as you might have guessed from the name, a riff on the classic 80s arcade game Asteroids, where the titular asteroids you’re tasked with blowing up in your little spaceship are generated each time someone somewhere in the world makes an edit on Wikipedia (there are some clever little variables going on under the hood – the larger the edit the larger the asteroid, for example) – each time you blow one up you’re given a little SNIPPET OF KNOWLEDGE direct from Wikipedia to nourish your brain while you otherwise-mindlessly blast rocks. This is fun ANY you will find yourself osmotically picking up all sorts of weird and pointless facts and bits of information as you play, so basically it’s educational and you should allow yourself to play it RIGHT NOW.
  • Invisiclues: Are you OLD? Do you REMEMBER THE GAMES OF THE PAST? Does part of you occasionally think that all of this electronic entertainment was BETTER and MORE PURE before they bothered with these fancy things like ‘graphics’ and the like? In which case this will be catnip to you – via Andy at Waxy, Invisiclues is a site that seemingly collects all the old Infocom text adventures (so Zork, obviously, but also a bunch of less storied ones), all playable in your browser,  along with clue books for them so that you needn’t ever get stuck. If you’re thinking ‘you know what I would love to do with my weekend? Yes, that’s right, spend it staring at a screen typing words into an antediluvian text interface!’ then ENJOY!
  • Fast and Confused: Finally this week, a SUPERB little game lifted from last week’s B3ta – your task is to drive your car and FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS. This is bitesized and hugely-replayable, and if you’re not careful you’ll lose 15 minutes to it without even trying.

By Sally Kindberg

OUR LAST MIX THIS WEEK IS A BIT CINEMATIC, A BIT ETHEREAL AND ALL LOVELY AND IT IS BY IZZY DEMSKY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Vinyl Sleeves: This is long-dormant, sadly, but it collects some wonderful examples of classic design taken from the inner sleeves of old vinyl records – some of these are GORGEOUS and, should you be in the market for inspiration for patterns or suchlike, this is potentially an excellent visual resource.
  • Cabin P0rn: Not, to be clear, Actual Bongo – this is instead a Tumblr collecting photos of really, really fancy ‘cabins’ (although I might quibble the word choice here – ‘cabin’ strikes me as something rustic and possibly made of logs, whereas most of these look like they were the product of VERY EXCLUSIVE DESIGN ATELIERS), which will almost certainly make you wish you were violently rich so that you too could afford to live in such WALLPAPER*-ish splendour.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Max Kozik: Max Kovik makes short films, They involve characters made of paper and cardboard. I think Max might be a genius – seriously, these are SO SO SO GOOD, and very funny, and genuinely cinematic in a way that shouldn’t really be possible given that all the characters are made out of, basically, toilet roll. GIVE THIS MAN BUDGET AND LET HIM SHINE!

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • When Was The Last Time You Felt Consensus?: Ryan Broderick writes in Garbage day about whether or not we’re past the point of any sort of shared notion of ‘what the fcuk is going on?’, and whether there’s any way back – or at least that’s how I interpreted it, perhaps because I am increasingly curious as to whether or not we should basically think of the past…ooh, let’s say 80 years, for the sake of argument, a period during which you could mostly sort of assume that everyone was broadly drinking from the same informational pool, and during which you could broadly assume a degree of shared assumptions and beliefs about What Was Going On, as an anomaly, a blip in human history after which, as seems to be happening now, we revert to our natural, species-wide state of baffled confusion and subjective reality. The point Ryan makes about the shift from ‘articles’ to ‘posts’ as a way of framing the way in which we consume and share information is I think an important one – the op ed-ing of everything, and the way in which old media has struggled to keep pace – and I thought this paragraph sums it up well: ““Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online. These features are not just asking, “what happened to American men?” They’re asking, “why can’t we influence American men the way we used to?”” This is not, to be clear, anything like an ‘American’ problem – this is true of everywhere I can think of right now, or at least anywhere ‘online’.
  • Silicon Valley Christians: Long-term Curios readers may be aware that I have a slight…let’s not call it an ‘obsession’, that makes me sound odd, let’s instead call it ‘peculiar fascination’ with Paypal mafioso and Most Terrifying Man Currently Alive Peter Thiel and his strange combination of libertarian politics and Christian faith, and exactly how these two elements of his character inform all of the different ways in which one of the world’s richest men has, for the past 15 years or so, attempted to bend society to his personal idea of ‘how things should work’ (it may surprise you to learn that Mr Thiel appears to be very keen indeed on a world that functions in a way in which he, and people who think like him, get to do what they like!) – this piece in Wired looks at the broader nexus of Christian thinking in the Valley, Thiel included, and what sort of an impact this relatively small group of plutocratic evangelicals is having on, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole world. Messianic fervour? CHECK! Doing God’s work! CHECK! Stealthily promoting a load of conservative values via the medium of technology and cultural philanthropism? CHECK CHECK CHECK!!!
  • The Battle for the Bros: Apologies for the very US-centric feel to the initial longreads this week, but this piece, per the first one, feels like something that is more widely interesting and relevant than just North America. This is a New Yorker piece looking at the US podcast ecosystem, and specifically the corner of it which is providing the nation’s (and, again, to a certain extent the English-speaking world’s) young men with their news and information and PERSPECTIVES, and it profiles Hasan Piker, one of the various guys the media seems desperate to anoint THE JOE ROGAN OF THE LEFT, along with a few other contemporaries in the podcast world – it’s long, but interesting and particularly good at communicating the very specific bro-ish vibe that seems to be a prerequisite of achieving ‘cut through’ (sorry) with a specific coterie of men between 15-30 in 2025. Worth thinking about the TikTok Oracles piece from the other week as you read this, as they’re not-unconnected imho.
  • Slop Vs Reality: A good piece in 404 Media that neatly articulates something that I have been feeling for a while and which I have mentioned here before, to whit – perhaps the most significant side effect of the first generative AI boom has been the incredibly-fast and little-lamented degradation of the informational water table  and the way in which this is reshaping digital networks and media as the barrier to content creation falls to the floor thanks to The Machine. This is, I’m not going to lie, not exactly a cheering read, and it’s particularly dispiriting when you bear in mind the social platforms seemingly-limitless desire to inject genAI into everything, the imminent arrival of AI personals across your Insta experience, the machine-penned comments and reactions and and and…maybe the inevitable endpoint of this is that we simply abandon the web to The Machine and give it all up as a terrible mistake. Perhaps, on reflection, that would be for the best.
  • Make Something Heavy: I like this both as a manifesto/ethos and as a counterpoint to the somewhat-bleak slop narrative presented above. Anu (they only have one name, seemingly) writes about the importance of making work that feels ‘heavy’, that feels like it has permanence – this isn’t about things being SERIOUS or LONG so much as imbuing the projects you undertake with a sense of longtermism and permanence. “Telling everyone they’re a creator has only fostered a new strain of imposter syndrome. Being called a creator doesn’t make you one or make you feel like one; creating something with weight does. When you’ve made something heavy—something that stands on its own—you don’t need validation. You just know, because you feel its weight in your hands. And that weight is its own reward.”
  • Very Online Is Over: I think that this might resonate a lot, particularly if you’re of an internet vintage that means that your early online experiences came in weird forums but also if you’re a Tumblr kid from a few years later on – this piece in Mashable (I know, sorry) posits that the idea of being ‘very online’ simply doesn’t exist anymore as a result of the flatting nature of algorithmic feeds, and that as such a certain type of culture – and relationship to culture – has been lost as a result.
  • Men, Dating: Another in the seemingly-endless procession of pieces about THE TROUBLE WITH YOUNG MEN – except this one speaks to them specifically about their experiences of app-based dating, and, honestly, this was slightly heartbreaking to read (I think every single facet of the app-based dating experience is heartbreaking, to be clear). DAZED speaks with a bunch of different days in their 20s about their feelings about, and experiences with, dating in modern life, and the one seemingly constant thing that comes through here is that NOONE KNOWS WHAT TO DO ANYMORE OR HOW TO BEHAVE, and the degree of uncertainty and insecurity and introspection this leads to is, frankly, toxic in the extreme. I felt so, so sorry for all of these kids.
  • Women & Weed: The Face looks at the apparently growing phenomenon of ‘female stoners’ (I do not, personally, think that this is a new thing, but apparently it is a TREND and must be analysed as such), examining the reasons why female marijuana smokers are a fast-growing demographic. Personally speaking I felt the piece probably didn’t give *quite* enough weight to FCUKING MARKETING – I think you can tie a lot of this squarely back to the ‘getting stoned as self-care’ thing, allied with the fact that weed’s been pitched in the states as a gentle lifestyle complement thing, which feels very aligned to the whole ‘girls, pamper yourselves!’ industrial complex, but see what you think.
  • Red Chip Art: I liked this a lot, and it feels like you can file it alongside Boom Boom as a ‘signifier of the now’ – this piece looks at the rise of what its author terms ‘Red Chip’ art and WHAT IT MEANS; I very much enjoyed the capsule definition of the term, and it feels particularly zeitgeisty if you consider it in a wider cultural context: “What is red-chip art? It’s not unrelated to Trumpism, and Trumpism’s aesthetics, but it is does not have an explicit political stance. (Red-chip art isn’t for Republicans, and blue-chip art isn’t for Democrats, as we already know.) Red-chip art comes in many guises, but certain visual patterns predominate: super-flat cartoons, a street art/graffiti aesthetic, and multi-colored chrome. A crypto component is always welcome. Crucially, red-chip art is defined by its refusal to revere art history, perhaps as a part of a broader rejection of elite, specialized knowledge.” You will know it when you see it.
  • Italy and the Right: An interesting piece in the LRB looking at the postwar history of right-wing politics in Italy, culminating in Giorgia Meloni’s current status as Prime Minister and looking at both Italy’s…peculiar disdain for self-reflection in the wake of World War II, and how the unique combination of church and state that maintains in the country afforded a safe space for the the modern right to rise from the ashes of fascism.
  • FutureGolf: I am very much not a sports fan, but it turns out I have a near-limitless appetite for reading about the new variants on established sports that are being spun up by people desperate to refit, say, crown green bowls for a dynamic, young audience. This piece is about golf’s attempts to make itself SEXY AND RELEVANT for the young, by, er, making it a bit faster, and doing it all indoors on a massive soundstage with a mad-sounding robotic putting green and everything packaged together with shiny graphics and idents for an international TV audience. I am FASCINATED by these things – between this and the King’s League 5-a-side thing I am fascinated to see whether these things get traction. Aside from anything else, though, this is entertaining because golf is, at heart, a very silly sport: “you can explain practically everything about TGL by explaining its constraints. Matches are played mostly on Mondays and Tuesdays because that’s typically a slow time for golfers, who are often at tournaments Wednesday through Sunday. (It’s also a slow time on ESPN, which owns the league’s broadcast rights — TGL has mostly replaced mediocre college basketball games.) They’re 15 holes instead of the normal 18, a better fit in a two-hour time slot. There’s a 40-second shot clock and a radically simplified scoring system, all in service of making TGL faster-paced and easier to follow than the whispered chaos of a typical golf tournament. Heck, the whole thing is set in West Palm Beach because most professional golfers live within driving distance.”
  • London Sewage: Ok, this is probably only of interest if you live in London (or, if you don’t, if you have a particularly deep interest in the sewage travails of major urban centres), but it’s a great bit of reporting by Jim Waterson for London Centric and another example of how new, crowdfunded local media outlets are doing work that simply wouldn’t happen without them. Aside from anything else, this did strike me as a CRACKING bit of PR for Thames Water (ok, this is relative, but still) at a time when they can’t buy a positive headline.
  • The Prehistoric Psychopath: This is SO interesting  apparently new research suggests that our prehistoric forebears were not, contrary to much received wisdom, violent creatures engaged in a state of near-permanent primal and bloody conflict, but were instead mainly NOT like that, and in fact hunter gatherers were significantly more peaceful and collaborative than we once thought. Instead, it seems that the majority of violence experienced in prehistoric society was in fact caused by a relatively-small number of what you might term ‘psychopaths’ – a fact which, as I read through the piece, couldn’t help but make me look around and conclude that very little has in fact changed in several thousand years of evolution.
  • The History of the Pineapple: The second piece this week from Works in Progress, you may not think that the history of the cultivation of the pineapple would be an interesting read but you would be WRONG – this covers agriculture, industrialisation, global trade, trends, cookery and more besides, and made me REALLY want to go back to Costa Rica again.
  • The Glasgow Chessmaster: Another lovely bit of local reporting, this time by the Glasgow Bell, profiling Michael, a Glasgow resident who’s been a fixture in a certain area of the city for several years, sitting outside whatever the weather to play chess with passers by. This is sweet, sensitive, enquiring and sort-of beautiful, and a perfectly human little vignette of the people trapped in the asylum system with no real understanding of when they might get out, or indeed how.
  • The Revenge of the US Steakhouse: I do love a good restaurant review, and this, by Helen Rosner in the New York Times, is an excellent example of the genre. Less a review of a single place, although ostensibly about Daniel Boloud’s place, and more a temperature check on the current status of the iconic New York steakhouse, this is in part about the food but also quite a lot about the steak as signifier, symbol of a sort of ‘red-blooded masculinity’ which you may have noticed is back in vogue this year. “I doubt that Boulud means to associate his restaurant with any sort of political moment or ideological bent. Certainly, nothing on the menu or in the service seemed to communicate anything beyond polished, murmuring attentiveness. But a restaurant, like any work of art, cares little for its author’s intentions. Midway through one meal at La Tête d’Or, my companion looked around the room, dropped his voice, and said to me, “You know, I think you might be the only woman in here.” That wasn’t strictly true—we’d passed at least one lady sipping cocktails at the bar, and a few more eventually trickled in to be seated for dinner—but the room was, on each of my visits, overwhelmingly a room of men. I observed them in pairs, sniffing at a decanter of Burgundy; in quartets, loosening their ties; in thorny post-work acts of bread-breaking, chuckling at one another’s bons mots, presumably discussing getting the satellites up, or talking to Lockheed, or closing the funding round. The steak house speaks its own language, no matter how much of the menu is retitled in French.”
  • Cusk on London Fields: Rachel Cusk’s introduction to a recent new edition of Martin Amis’ London Fields is a brilliant piece of writing about one of my favourite ever novels (please don’t judge me). You may need to be familiar with the book to enjoy it fully, but if you are then I promise it is a treat: “Amis’s rendering of the world of the Black Cross is one of the novel’s achievements: steeped over time in the rancid deposits of male habit, the traditional British pub is rarely so accurately described. In the fog of cigarette smoke, the rituals of maleness are blearily, incoherently performed, their basis in evolution long since lost from view; broader social changes—multiculturalism, the speed of technology—are diffidently incorporated into the mulch; slow processes of decomposition and fermentation have replaced the line of history. In the pub, the one discernible truth remains the truth of gender: what men have in common is women. The pub is first and foremost a refuge from women, occasionally a place to display them, more often a scene of affirmation in the business of subduing them.”
  • The Last Decision: “In mid-March 2024, Daniel Kahneman flew from New York to Paris with his partner, Barbara Tversky, to unite with his daughter and her family. They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet, and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse. Around March 22, Kahneman, who had turned 90 that month, also started emailing a personal message to several dozen of the people he was closest to. On March 26, Kahneman left his family and flew to Switzerland. His email explained why: “This is a goodbye letter I am sending friends to tell them that I am on my way to Switzerland, where my life will end on March 27.” That should give you an idea as to whether this is something you want to read or not – personally I found it interesting and compassionate, but I appreciate you may not feel the same way about a piece discussing the degree to which it can or should be considered an entirely rational act to end one’s life premature with medical assistance. I found Kahneman’s phrase “I am not afraid of not existing” a rather beautiful sentiment which I think I am going to adopt.
  • Techniques and Idiosyncracies: A short story by Yiyun Li in the New Yorker about medicine and treatment and memory and grief. It is very, very sad, but in a spare and beautiful way.
  • We’ve Got War To Cover: The last longread of the week is this brilliant essay by the brilliantly-named Dante Fuoco. It’s about the Iraq war and Anna Nicole Smith and family and betrayal and memory and it is really very good indeed.

By Iness Rychlik

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 14/03/25

Reading Time: 43 minutes

 

I went to see Cabaret in London this week with an old friend, and to my surprise really enjoyed it (do go if you can, it really is very good) – but, also, fcuk me does it hit differently in 2025! Also, per my comment about Oedipus a few weeks ago, HOW IS IT THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE GOING TO WATCH ‘CABARET’, AN ADAPTATION OF A FILM FAMOUSLY ABOUT THE WEIMAR YEARS AND THE RISE OF FASCISM BEING FACILITATED BY DECADENCE, WHO ARE MOVED TO GASP IN SHOCK AT THE REVELATION THAT THE NICE YOUNG GERMAN MAN IS IN FACT AN ACTUAL NAZI????

Anyway, this week I didn’t have to take my trousers off in front of ANYONE, and so as such I think we can consider it, broadly, to have been a success. Also, someone responded to last week’s Curios telling me that this newsletter is ‘positively libidinal’ and that I might be ‘the kinkiest human being they have never met’, which, honestly, is not something I would ever have expected to be told for writing a newsletter about Occasionally Interesting Links but, well, thanks!

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are wrong, I am actually tediously vanilla.

 By Nicholas Osborn https://www.instagram.com/boatlullabies/

WE BEGIN BY RETURNING TO THE RECORD COLLECTION OF TOM SPOONER, WHO HAS COMPILED THIS SELECTION OF OLD TRACKS WHICH RANGES FROM FOLK TO PSYCHEDELIA AND EVERYWHERE INBETWEEN!  

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE WHOLE ‘TEST YOUR LINKEDIN POSTS ON VIRTUAL BUSINESSMONGS’ THING MIGHT BE THE MOST DEPRESSING LINK OF THE YEAR SO FAR, AND I INCLUDE THE TWO-HEADED BONGO FROM LAST WEEK IN THAT ASSESSMENT, PT.1:  

  • Synthsational: Sometimes I like to open Curios with a link which makes no fcuking sense to me whatsoever (I mean, ‘like’ is a big word here – ‘am forced to due to my increasingly partial and imperfect understanding of what the everliving fcuk is happening at any given moment’ is perhaps a more accurate summation, but, well, it’s hardly snappy, is it? Oh, God, it’s happening again, sorry), and other times it’s nice to open with something that is just good, uncomplicated fun – so today we’re going with FUN (in fairness I think there’s a reasonable amount of semi-complex stuff going on under the hood here but we’re here for a good time not a hard time, so)! Synthsational is a really smart little synthtoy-type thing, which lets you make music over a backing track – press left and right to change the style of the backing track, press space to change (I think) the pitch), and create music using only four letters on your keyboard – there’s some voodoo happening under the hood which seemingly means that whatever the fcuk you press you are basically prevented from making anything too cacophonously awful, kind of like the inflatable laneguards you get if you’re bowling as a four year old, and there’s something slightly miraculous about the fact that I was just sort of noodling around here and ended up accidentally compositing a weirdly-beautiful ethereal bit of electropop in a minor key. Alright, fine, my involvement here was admittedly minimal – The Machine, in one of its infinite incarnations, was doing the heavy lifting – but it really does feel a bit like magic. You can record the outputs directly from the site, which is a nice touch, and as a way of spinning up little melodies this feels both fun and maybe useful. For the first time in…fcuk, possibly ever, this made me think owning an iPad could actually be quite good, as just sitting with this for an hour and noodling feels like a genuinely-relaxing way to spend time. Give it a try, it really is rather wonderful.
  • Phone-to-Edit: It feels churlish to say this, but this was a lot more fun when I came across it on Monday (STOP WHINGING ABOUT THE FREE INTERNET STUFF YOU MISERABLE CNUT) – still, I very much like the idea and think there are quite a few fun riffs one might possibly build off this. The gimmick of this website is a simple one – anyone can edit it however they so choose, simply by calling a specific US phone number and describing what they want the website to look like – this is using The Machine (no idea which flavour) to recognise your voice, parse your instructions and turn those into (rudimentary) code which is then deployed near-instantaneously. You have to actually call the number to get this to work, and you have a maximum of 30s in which to describe your aesthetic vision, but it works to a quite remarkable degree (even if the resulting webpage looks very much like something you might have spun up in DreamWeaver c.1996) – the version of the site I found also let you do the same by talking directly to the site via your mic, but I presume that that was proving ruinously costly in terms of API calls and so hence it’s phonecall-only. If nothing else I would be hugely grateful if any of you in the US can get the website to briefly read ‘WEB CURIOS SENT ME HERE’ and then send me a screencap, because, well, I like to occasionally give myself the illusion of readership and agency. THANKS!
  • It Is As If You Are On Your Phone: Web Curios favourite Pippin Barr is back with a smart little semi-satirical websiteproject thing – a (mobile-only) website whose user interface is designed to allow you to pantomime the experience of having a meaningful and important interaction with your phone WITHOUT ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING. You are, of course (and this certainty of shared experience is, let’s take a moment to acknowledge this, at heart a fundamentally miserable truth!), aware of the specific feeling of 21stC awkwardness of being stuck waiting for something or someone and having RUN OUT OF CONTENT, and being reduced to that weird pattern of inconsequential swipes and taps, the moving up and down the nested set of phone menus, swiping through your messages without reading, all of the holding pattern behaviours that have replaced our ability to just SIT STILL AND THINK (I noticed this a few years ago on planes awaiting take-off, and I strongly advise you to keep an eye out for it)…? Yes, well with this website you get to pantomime meaningful swipes – follow the instructions on-screen and anyone watching you will think that you’re answering IMPORTANT EMAILS or BUILDING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND rather than simply killing some of the interminable seconds between birth and death with some busy-but-meaningless fingerwork. Honestly, this is ART – I know I always say sh1t like this, but it really is – and the only way it could possibly have been improved would be for it to have been called ‘Fauxne’.
  • The ‘Hello’ Man: While the flattening effect of global social media platforms has led to a semi-inevitable homogenisation of international culture, edges sanded off to conform to the algorithmic interpretation of ‘best fit content’ for the widest possible audience, there are occasional moments when you stumble upon another nation’s Weird Internet People and you are reminded that odd is infinitely fractal. Thanks to Pietro Minto for introducing me to ‘Il Salutatore’ (loosely translated as ‘the ‘hello’ man’ for the purposes of this little writeup), an Italian social media…personality? Danger? Not quite sure how to characterise this guy to be honest, but let’s assume he’s benign (ngl, given he’s Italian and given his general facial hair and vibe I wouldn’t be hugely surprised were he to have some…spicy views on gender politics and ‘traditional values’, but let’s not let my possibly-unfair suppositions get in the way of some top-quality strange) – The ‘Hello’ Man runs this YouTube channel where his whole thing (and I mean literally his WHOLE thing, this man has a very single-minded schtick) is approaching Italian ‘celebrities’ and getting them to say hi to their fans on camera with him. Literally, that’s it. WHY IS THIS MAN DOING THIS? His videos have, max, 500-ish views (and most of them struggle to break three figures), and yet WOW has he been doing this for a while (please, noone feel the need to point out certain…parallels with any long-term, pointless digital endeavours that might also spring to mind here)…this is just beautifully, wonderfully, awkwardly strange – his encounter with a baffled but polite Chiwotel Ejiofor is broadly representative, but I think I was most excited to see that he’s recently done Ilona Staller (Cicciolina for the, er, 80s politics fans) because, well, I was worried Jeff Koons might have embalmed her or something. Anyway, this is perfectly weird and very strange, so, here, I’m giving it to you.
  • Smile Like Zuck: I don’t quite understand why this is as oddly fun as it is, but I found myself spending a surprising amount of time earlier this week getting into a rhythm of ‘Zucking’ at my webcam – the game here is to attempt to match the expression of the procession of dead-eyed, grinning Zuckerbergs to the satisfaction of the facial recognition software. Honestly, it’s weirdly addictive for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint.
  • Manus: This week’s BIG AI THINGY, at least on Monday, was Manus, a new agentic AI product built out of China. As you obviously all know, ‘agentic’ AI is THE COMING THING, with The Machine set to get the ability to effectively go off and mimic human behaviours all over the web – the thinking is that eventually this will be how you get boring digital admin stuff done, by entrusting one of the infinite army of AI helpers that we’ll all have at our disposal to go off and, I don’t know, do the BORING BUSYWORK of, say, choosing a loved-one’s present, or doing the grocery shopping, or whatever (but DEFINITELY not stealing your silly, online, task-based job, oh no, definitely not). There are obviously LOTS of ifs and hows and whys and ‘yes, ok, but what are the knock-on implications of all this if we take it seriously?’ questions here which I am not going to get into because, honestly, I would be here all week and I would lose the attention of the three remaining masochists still reading at this point – instead I am just going to suggest you check out Manus, which feels (based on my cursory examination of the example tasks they have on the website – you need an invite code to get into the actual live environment right now) pretty representative of Where This Is Currently At – superficially really impressive, but, actually, not very good when you look at it for more than 2s. This is built on top of – I think – Claude and some other model, but it does the DeepSeek-ish think of showing you its working as it ‘thinks’ and does, which means that if you click on any of the demo examples you can see a replay of it ‘reasoning’ and acting in semi-realtime; this is SO interesting, and not a little bit…creepy? But, also, slightly-depressing from the point of view of curiosity and diversity of thought, because every single example I have looked at here (which, by the way, have all been of the non-code variety because, well, I don’t really care about coding) just deliver the most basic, first page of Google-type results – there’s one example where Manus is asked to plan and book an itinerary of ‘interesting’ things to do over a fortnight trip to Australia and New Zealand, and you can literally see The Machine googling ‘things to do in Australia and New Zealand and then taking its recs from, literally, Australia.com. Basically I can’t help but look at this and imagine an inevitable point in ~3y where a specific destination on Earth is entirely decimated by tourism because The Machine has ineffably decided that it is vitally important that it send EVERYONE there for their Summer holiday (much as seems to have happened with Italy and every single American under the age of 30 since COVID). Anyway, welcome to a future in which stuff happens and you don’t know why but, well, it’s ok, because TRUST THE MACHINE! Oh, and if you’re Actually Technical, someone obviously ripped the code and open sourced it – you can get a version here if you would like to attempt to run it locally.
  • Some New, Impressive AI Video Stuff: Ok, so this is prototypical rather than live, but it’s quite hard not to look at these examples of style transfer and object insertion into video, powered by The Machine, and think ‘oh dear, poor lots of people currently working in low-to-mid-end post-production’.
  • A Truly Incredible List of Free Internet Stuff: Bookmark this NOW. No, seriously, I mean it, you honestly have no idea what an insane resource this is. The site’s official name is, seemingly, FMHY (no idea), but what it ACTUALLY is is a truly incredible directory of links to FREE INTERNET STUFF, subdivided by category. So, for example, the ‘music’ section contains links to all sorts of streaming sites – but also places that host old MP3s recorded at gigs, or old concert footage, or fun music toys, or podcast discovery services; there’s a whole section on ‘films and TV’ which is basically a link to all sorts of…not wholly-legal torrenting/streaming options but also loads of interesting community-type spaces and public domain archive materials…Honestly, this is the most insanely-generous bit of information gathering I have seen in an age and I am slightly in love with whoever is behind it (there’s a Discord, so it feels like a community of people rather than an individual), not least because a) they take the time to check the safety of the links regularly and prune any that seem sketchy; b) the NSFW section is entirely empty, which, without wishing to sound like a prude, was a really nice and reassuring surprise because I was worried I was going to have to apply some LARGE CAVEATS to my recommendation; and c) they explicitly say that they don’t want or need donations because they are doing out of the spirit of SHEER ONLINE KINDNESS, which, honestly, is SO NICE and much rarer than it should be. Honestly, I really do mean it, this is probably the most useful link I am going to feature in here all year (the bar, so low!) and you really do want to keep it close.
  • Virtual LinkedIn: I think that this might be one of the worst things I have seen so far in 2025 – and trust me when I say that given all of the links I choose NOT to include each week that is no idle statement. This is a websiteappthing called ‘Virtual Societies’ which exists to let you TRIAL your LinkedIn BANGERS with an, er, infinite audience of AI businessmongs! Yes, that’s right, someone’s literally created a sandbox where you can post your CONSIDERED PIECES OF THOUGHT LEADERSHIP and get an assessment, based on the non-opinions of nonexistent AI-imagined personas, of exactly how much it will slap – this is basically ‘AI focus groups’ (per previous Curios, another fcuking stupid idea if you ask me) but for the specific purpose of helping you get temporary digital validation from the worst people on the planet. Give it the url of your LI profile and it will pull your connections, lightly scrape their data to get a topline idea of who the fcuk they pretend to be when doing business cosplay, and then spin up a shadow network of ‘virtual businessmongs’ who are meant to ACCURATELY REFLECT the real people whose tedious corporate bromides you reward with little digital sealclaps on the daily. Is this in any way accurate or meaningful? Well, prima facie ‘no’ – but, equally, given that LLMs are trained to basically write in LinkedIn English it’s not unreasonable to assume that this is a non-awful way of ensuring your deathly prose cleaves as closely to the coveted MIDDLE OF THE BELLCURVE as is possible. Words can’t adequately express how much I hate that this exists and that there is a market for it.
  • The Letraset Graphic Materials Handbook: Do you do design and craft and making and stuff? Because if so, this link – taking you to an archived scan of the Letraset Graphic Materials handbook from…Christ knows, the 70s/80s? Which is both a sort of brochure for the company’s design products but also a quite incredible practical guide to making and typesetting and design and craft and, honestly, as I flicked through this it made me momentarily genuinely sad that I have absolutely no skill in this sort of area at all (antiskill, in fact) because I can imagine for a certain type of person this might unlock all sorts of creative ideas and endeavours. Honestly, this really is very cool indeed (if you’re not like me).
  • Turn Bluesky Threads Into Webpages: This is quite neat – plug in the URL of the top Bluesky post from a thread and this will export the whole lot as a standalone webpage, kind of like Threadreader (but for Bluesky and nicer-looking). Really nicely made and genuinely useful as a way of sharing content from the platform.
  • SwipeSky: Ooh, this is nice (and slightly devilish, as with all platforms that reduce actual human beings to small cards that live inside your phone and which you can save or doom with a Caesar-esque thumb gesture) – SwipeSky basically just presents you with a stream of Bluesky users that you don’t currently follow and, presuming you’ve given it access to your account, lets you choose to follow them with a swipe. If your feed feels a bit stale after all the excitement of the influx of users a few months ago then this is one way of refreshing it – although obviously there’s a degree of caveat emptor here as there’s relatively minimal info on your potential new follows beyond profile pic and bio copy, so there’s every chance you’ll end up clogging your feed with a bunch of incredibly tedious FBPE-type people who don’t understand irony or jokes, or one of the occasional Bluesky people who just really likes posting an awful lot of c0ck, all the time.
  • Small Seasons: Here in the UK were were briefly fooled by FAKE SPRING last week, but are now ‘enjoying’ hailstorms and frost – if you would like to have a slightly better understanding of how seasons actually work than ‘it go cold then it go hot then it go wet’ then this lovely site might help. “In agricultural days, staying in-tune with the seasons was important. When should we plant seeds? When should we harvest? When will the rains come? Are they late this year? Knowing what was happening with nature was the difference between a plentiful harvest and a barren crop. Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn’t use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena.” We are currently in the middle of Keichitsu, or ‘the going out of the worms’, the period in which insects emerge from hibernation (hang on, what, insects hibernate? Jesus, who knew?), which I am sure gladdens you immensely.
  • Korea Central TV: So apparently this is an actual livestream of North Korean TV, live – I have no idea how legit this is, or how representative the channel is of wider media in the country, but if you’ve ever been curious as to what actual, proper dictatorial propaganda comms looks like then just buy the Washington Post LOL SATIRE just click the link. This is just one page on a much larger site dedicated to letting you explore North Korean media, should you be curious – but, equally, Web Curios takes no responsibility whatsoever for any knocks at the door which may come as a result of you engaging with this stuff.
  • Animal Sounds Around The World: MORE lovely datavis by The Pudding, this time looking at onomatopoeic language for animal noises used around the world – this is SO interesting (as ever it’s also nicely designed and coded too, obvs), but is rendered imperfect by its baffling refusal to riff on a 12 year old semi-viral comedy song and not having any ‘what does the fox say?’-related gags. I can’t tell you how much it pleases me that ‘miaow’ in Spanish is spelt ‘mjaw’, by the way.
  • Fun GUI: I think this is a little calling card for a digital agency in…New Zealand? Anyway, that’s not important – what IS important is that this webpage lets you basically, er, digitally stroke some flanged shapes, which now, as I come to type it, sounds quite remarkably deviant. WAIT COME BACK IT IS NOT A SEX THING! Drag your mouse over the shapes and enjoy the feeling of slight rubbery resistance in the resulting animation – this is very trivial, but there’s something really rather lovely (and unusual) about the weight and heft that the animations give the UI here, I think. NOT A SEX THING!
  • LetterLoop: Ooh, I like this a lot. letterLoop is basically a platform that lets you compile a sort of email newsletter in collaborative fashion; get everyone you want involved signed up, select the questions or prompts you want to give them, and the platform will send out the question(s), compile the responses, and share them as a compiled email newsletter to everyone once all the answers are in. Per the blurb, “Letterloop lets you ask and answer meaningful questions about everyone’s lives that don’t often come up over call or text. In our experience, calls are wonderful, but thinking of great questions (and answering them!) on the spot can be tough. It’s easy to fall into the same patterns of communication. Plus, while group calls are fun, they can quickly get too chaotic for everyone to ask and answer thoughtful questions. Messaging is convenient but isn’t designed for everyone to get a chance to share at the same time. Chat threads offer spontaneity and are a great way to share bits of your life in real-time. But when was the last time you asked everyone in your thread a question like, “What brings you energy and joy lately?” Letterloop lets you ask these kinds of questions over email, giving people the time and space to reply. At the end of each cycle, the replies are presented in a fun and beautiful newsletter delivered to everyone’s inbox. It’s our way of slowing down that we hope you’ll adopt as a new ritual with your friends and family.” Ok, so obviously the whole ‘what brings you energy and joy’ thing makes me feel quite ill, but leaving aside the twee new agey w4nk there’s something quite clever about this as a service, and lots of ways I can imagine using it for community-related or internal communications purposes.
  • Nebula Trail: A webpage that basically does the whole ‘fluid dynamics’ thing – click, drag, GAWP AT THE LIGHTS. This feels like something it might be amusing to put on phone or tablet and then watch a cat go mental at.
  • Gleeful Beasts: A YouTube channel featuring ‘digital animated puppet comedy’ – basically a bunch of short, kid-friendly animations featuring some delightful freaks and some really rather good character modelling. These are CHARMING, whether or not you have children (but if you do then they might enjoy these particularly).
  • Uniform Freak: Do you like, er, air hostess uniforms? Do you like them A LOT? Regardless, you almost certainly don’t like them anywhere near as much as Cliff Muskiet, who I admire a huge amount for putting what I presume is his ACTUAL NAME on a url that literally reads ‘uniformfreak dot com’. I am going to hand over to Cliff here, because I think his homepage copy probably reveals a certain amount about the tenor of the site:  “Ever since my early childhood, I have been interested and fascinated by the world of aviation. I used to collect everything that wore an airline name or logo, such as posters, postcards, stickers, timetables, safety cards and airplane models. Sometime in 1980 I was given my first uniform by one of my mother’s friends. I was so excited and I wanted to have more uniforms. In 1982 I heard that two charter airlines were introducing new uniforms. I wasted no time, I called these airlines and as a result I was invited to pick up a set of old uniforms. Between 1982 and 1993 I didn’t do much to obtain any more uniforms, something I really regret now as I could have had many many more! Most of my uniforms were obtained between 1993 and today. At the moment my collection contains 1891 uniforms from 632 different airlines. As I travel the world as a senior purser with KLM, it gives me the opportunity to visit local airline offices and I meet people who can maybe help me to obtain new uniforms for my collection. One day, I hope to make a book about my collection. Another dream that will come true? Who knows?” This feels…slightly like I am peering at someone’s fetish closet, but, equally, really is VERY comprehensive when it comes to stewardess uniforms through history, so, well, who am I to judge (NO FCUKER, that’s who! Cliff, I really hope you are alive and well and that should you ever see this that you know it is written with affection)?

By Laurie Lipton

NEXT, ENJOY A CRACKING SELECTION OF TRACKS CELEBRATING ONE OF THE ALL-TIME GREAT HIHOP LABELS, DEF JUX!    

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE WHOLE ‘TEST YOUR LINKEDIN POSTS ON VIRTUAL BUSINESSMONGS’ THING MIGHT BE THE MOST DEPRESSING LINK OF THE YEAR SO FAR, AND I INCLUDE THE TWO-HEADED BONGO FROM LAST WEEK IN THAT ASSESSMENT, PT.2:

  • Status: It was Charlie Brooker, I think, who first popularised the whole ‘Twitter is better if you think of it as a videogame and treat it as such’ line of thought – taking that to its logical conclusion, Status answers the question ‘what if you could play social media as a no-stakes pointscoring exercise?’ Which feels a bit like it has already been answered – ‘that is literally how you should use real-life social media ffs’ – but, anyway, thanks to Status you can now ‘enjoy’ all the fun bits of social (the posting! The dopamine buzz from likes! The interactions!) except IT IS ALL FAKE. Status does something similar to the flurry of ‘social media but populated by AI characters!’ apps which cropped up last year, but leans harder into the game aspect of it – there’s a clear ludic element here based around racking up points for roleplaying, getting fans, etc etc. The smart thing is the way you can choose to inhabit different sorts of personas, adding a light RPG-ish mechanic – do you want to see you you can become QUEEN BEE of a fictitious stan army? Do you want to try and navigate the complex world of the controversial podcasting edgelord without being hounded off-platform? SO MANY POSSIBILITIES! I briefly had a play with this earlier in the week, and while it is not for me it is genuinely quite a clever and interesting – and, crucially, addictive – mechanic which I can imagine getting moderately-popular. Equally, though, if you stop to think about it for longer than about 30s it becomes VERY DEPRESSING, so, er, maybe don’t do that! SMOOTH BRANE 4-EVA!
  • One Post Wonder: ANOTHER attempt to recast social media as anything other than a miserable horrorshow! This new variant – in beta, but you can submit your email and be alerted when it opens up – tries a minimalist approach, with the idea being that posting is restricted to once a day, for everyone; as they put it, “One Post Wonder is a social network where everyone posts no more than once a day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri. One Post Wonder features a rich set of privacy controls that allow you to carefully control who can see your posts, a design that emphasises content with minimal distractions, and a sustainable business model that puts the focus squarely on user satisfaction.” Which, you know, sounds lovely, should enough people sign up to it to make it a workable space – so give them your email and wait for an invite, because MAYBE this will be the halcyon digital space we have all so longed for! STILL WE HOPE! You can actually get a peek at what the beta looks like here and…you know what, I quite like the vibe. MAYBE IT WILL BE GOOD!!!
  • Eyes on Asteroids: Via my friend Adrian (W_W) comes this lovely site by NASA which lets you look at ALL OF THE ASTEROIDS and zoom in on them and spin them around and, yes, ok, when it comes down to it these are just lumps of rock and so not hugely aesthetically pleasing but THEY ARE FLYING THROUGH SPACE RIGHT NOW which is, you have to admit, just sort of amazing. Also it’s a nice reminder of the fact that there is ALWAYS loads of stuff whizzing past us at pace, and that most of it doesn’t hit us, and that despite the slightly troubling asteroid-related news rumblings earlier this year it is still VASTLY more likely that you’ll die of cancer or because of some sort of trivial, stupid human error than it is that you’ll be wiped out by several tonnes of rock hurled at you from the other side of space. RELAX!
  • Breakbeats: It’s been a VERY good year so far for huge repositories of musical samples, and here are EVEN MORE! Per the mysterious collector: “Here is my collection of vintage funk/soul breakbeats. All loops in wav quality (and not converted from mp3). Every break manually sliced (rex2), some breaks have 2 or more versions, for example, cd and vinyl. Click right mouse button and select “save as” for single file download.” CAVEAT: I DO NOT THINK THAT THESE ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND SO AS SUCH THERE MIGHT BE SOME, ER, ISSUES AROUND USING THEM COMMERCIALLY. Also you can’t preview the files before downloading, so it’s a bit of a lucky dip. BUT! There is SO MUCH in here, and the couple I have downloaded as a test are great, so fill your breakboots.
  • The Northern Lights Photographer of the Year: When I first saw this link I was a bit sniffy about the photos here, with my (incredibly insistent and VERY annoying) internal monologue complaining about ‘too much HDR effect’ and ‘too much post-production’. Then on Wednesday I saw my friend Lisa who was in Norway with her family earlier this year and skied under the Northern Lights and whose phone photos looked basically like this, so, actually, it turns out that this is just what they look like and I should wind my neck in. ANYWAY, these are some VERY COLOURFUL photographs of lights in the sky, and they are proof that in some instances nature is a gaudy little bitch, basically. This came to me via Jodi Ettenburg’s excellent ‘Curious About Everything’ newsletter which is a consistent source of great reading every month and which I recommend unreservedly.
  • A Weird ASCII Coding Playground Thingy: Ok, I don’t wholly get how this works – it’s basically a little code playground/sandbox which lets you experiment with meddling with fun ASCII-animating code, but exactly HOW you do that requires approximately 100% more of an understanding of coding than I possess. BUT! Even a total fcuking digimong like me can appreciate the beauty of the animations which you can explore using the menu on the right-hand side – also, some of them are very much the sort of thing that you could lose a few hours staring at at 4am under the right conditions. For those of you less preposteriously-useless than me, though, who understand the STRANGE MAJICK of computerspeak, there’s probably quite a bit of creative fun to be had here exploring how you can tweak and manipulate the examples to your own ends. Per the dev, “This playground is an attempt of a browser-based live-code environment with text-only output. It is born from the joy and pleasure ASCII, ANSI and in general text-based art can give and it is an homage to all the artists, poets and designers which used and use text as their medium. From the design perspective it is also an exercise in reduction: there is almost no interface, just a preview window and a code editor; margins and line numbers are removed as well.”
  • The News As Comics: This is, to be clear, horrible. What would happen if you took the day’s headlines, fed them to an LLM to turn said headlines into a three-panel comic and then got The Machine to illustrate said three-panel comic? THIS! This is what happens! A horrible, miserable, idiotic attempt to reduce everything happening to a three-line summary with no depth or meaning or nuance! Honestly, I spent some time this week going back through these to see if they were ever anything than awful, and, seriously, it made me feel like I was losing approximately one IQ point per second I spent staring at them. This is ugly and sad and stupid and I hate the fact that this is what we are going to do to all information eventually because we’re all going to forget how to fcuking think at some point in the next 10 years.
  • Seven39: Yes, I know that that’s an incredibly irritating way of writing 739, but it’s their website and I have to respect their wishes. Unnecessary whinging about nomenclature aside, I do rather like this as a concept. Seven39 (and that’s the last time I am typing it out like that) is ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK but one with quite a clever gimmick, I think – it is only live, and you can only post to it, for three hours per day, from 7:39 (EST) to 10:39. That’s it – that’s your window, no negotiating. There’s something interesting about creating a time and place for conversation, like a sort of digital happy hour of sorts (and yes, I know what a horrible and meaningless concept that is, forgive me). Sadly the time difference to the UK means that I would have had to post from midnight to 3am to test it out and, well, I simply don’t care that much, but if you’re in a more forgiving timezone then I would suggest taking a look at this in case it’s FUN AND VIBRANT (or in case it’s just full of weirdo perverts, which can also be interesting in its own way).
  • A World Map of Female Composers: This is a page on the website of Sakira Ventura, who, per her bio, is a researcher and academic (I think) with a specific interest in the history of women in music, and who created this wonderful interactive map showing all (obviously not ‘all’, but a significant number) of the female composers of note throughout history, located geographically based on their nationality. Which is lovely, and I am glad it exists, but I have just realised that all it shows you is their name and image and now I am churlishly annoyed that it doesn’t also feature links to their works – so, er, if someone would like to somehow magically make that a reality that would be great, thanks!
  • The British Voter Bot: Slightly depressing, this one – a Bluesky bot which shares actual voter profiles from the British Election Study conducted last year (in case you’re not already aware, “BES surveys have taken place immediately after every general election, providing data to help researchers understand changing patterns of party support and election outcomes. They also take place between elections, with 26 (by May 2024) large 30,000 person online panel surveys conducted by the present team, since 2014”) and which means you’ll occasionally see things like “I’m a white British Anglican male, 67 years old, and my main electoral priority is immigration” (lol seemingly that comprises 70+% of the surveyed people, judging by the stuff I have seen so far) floating across the TL. It’s interesting, but after a while does leave one with the overwhelming impression that…man, Britain is significantly less tolerant and welcoming, and significantly more scared and racist, than we (ok, ok than *I*) tend to like to think.
  • Able To Play: Oh this is a great initiative – Able To Play is a service which helps you see at a glance whether a game has accessibility settings which enable you to play it or not. Create a profile, list your accessibility needs and preferences, and the system will let you know which titles fall within the broad range of ‘stuff I will be able to engage with, regardless of any conditions I might have’. Honestly, if you or someone that you know has particular accessibility requirements this is a hugely-useful resource, and it feels very much like A Good Thing.
  • 3d Earthquake Map: I’ve featured realtime maps of quakes on here before, but I think this is the first one that shows you how deep the quake is on a 3d globe. This is, as ever with this stuff, mildly terrifying at first as you realise quite how much mad tectonic activity is happening beneath our feet ALL THE FCUKING TIME, but then quite addictive – it’s nice to keep it open in the background, because it will ping when a new quake has been detected and you can just tab over to that it is in fact displaying the hopefully-reassuring legend ‘Tsunami Risk: NO’ (I can’t imagine the genuine horror of seeing the opposite message, and so am going to navigate away from this website before my brain forces me to imagine some sort of horrible vertical, watery armageddon).
  • Theremin: OH GOD THIS LETS YOU PLAY THE THEREMIN IN YOUR BROWSER WITH YOUR HANDS LIKE SOME SORT OF MAGICAL SOUND WIZARD! This is great, seriously, and you will grin like a moron the first time you try it.
  • Quickflip: ANOTHER DAILY WORD PUZZLE! This is REALLY infuriating, fyi – or at least it has been for me, because I have a seemingly-unerring ability to pick the wrong option. The way this works is simple – each day you’re presented with 8 tiles, each with a letter on; each tile can display one of two letters, and you can toggle between the two by clicking. There are TWO potential words that can be spelled each day – ONLY TWO – and one is the RIGHT word and the other is WRONG, and your task is to flip the letters in such a way that you arrive at the right word rather than the wrong one in the fewest number of flips possible. I have got it wrong every day this week and, honestly, feel quite grumpy about it.
  • Posters Out Of Focus: Leaving aside the unfortunate url, this is a decent little daily puzzle for the cinephiles – each day, guess which VERY PIXELLATED film poster is being shown; with each incorrect guess the poster becomes slightly higher-res and additional clues (year of release, star, genre, etc etc) are revealed and if you’re slightly less clueless when it comes to the culture of the moving image than I am you might find this a fun addition to the daily rotation.
  • Type Help: I was going to feature this a few weeks ago but I rather bounced off it and didn’t feel I could wholly recommend it without understanding it better – then Adrian Hon wrote this excellent explainer about the game and how it works, and I figured that I could just let him tell you about it and you could decide if you’re into it or not. Basically this is VERY text heavy and will possibly require you to make a spreadsheet, so that should give you a rough idea of whether this might conceivably be ‘fun’ for you or whether you’re a bit more like me and consider stuff that requires excel to be pretty much the antithesis of fun. Here’s the opening of Adrian’s explainer – see if this makes you go ‘ooh, interesting!’ or ‘jesus, fcuk off’: “In an age of non-descriptive game titles, Type Help may win the championship belt. Far easier to cite its inspirations – Return of the Obra Dinn, Her Story, Unheard and The Roottrees are Dead – all members of the burgeoning genre of deduction games, where players piece together a tragic mystery from audio or video or static tableaux. The only time you type “help” is at the beginning of the game, where it’s explained you’ve come into possession of a computer containing the investigatory records of a long-ago mystery. The Galley House was discovered with a number of dead bodies and no clear culprit; all you have are transcripts of audio from its inhabitants, divided by room and by time period. Transcripts have filenames like 02-EN-1-6-7-10, which can be decoded as: 02: The second time period of the mystery. There are 26 in total, and they can be as short as a few minutes or as long as several hours.EN: Entrance, i.e. the room the transcript is from. There are lots of rooms.1-6-7-10: The people present in the room during this time period, in this case, the persons designated 1, 6, 7, and 10. An early task is assigning names to numbers. Because there’s no list of filenames, your primary goal is to find as many as you can in order to learn the full story. This is as straightforward as making deductions and guesses based on what people say and do, and then typing in the resulting filename.” Basically if you like logic puzzles then this may scratch a similar itch.
  • Orisinal: This is SUCH a treat! For webmongs of a certain vintage, Ferry Halim is something of a legend – when I was but a scrap of a thing, sitting in an office in Victoria wearing a suit and learning very quickly that I was not, in all likelihood, going to have a career as a corporate lobbyist, one of my favourite ways of passing the time (outside of browsing BMEZine and googling “how to buy weed online uk”) was playing the beautiful, pastel-coloured, relaxing and fiendishly-addictive browsergames made by the mysterious Halim and posted on his website Orisinal. Then Flash died, and so did the website…but now, thanks to Flash emulation code it is BACK! And all the old games are back too! INCLUDING THE ONE ABOUT STACKING THE PIGS, WHICH I LOST LITERALLY A WEEK TO C.2003! I am so so so happy that this has been resurrected, it is a part of (my) web history. Oh, it’s not the fastest to load, so be patient.
  • The Roy Orbison in Clingfilm Adventure Game: I have, I think, mentioned Michael Kelly on here before, and linked to his odd little stories about a German man whose singular erotic obsession is the concept of Roy Orbison, naked and wrapped in clingfilm, but I had totally forgotten he made an ACTUALTEXT ADVENTURE GAME out of the concept. Look, this is…niche, I appreciate, but equally I find this almost terminally funny – I don’t quite understand why, but there is something about the style and tone and premise that absolutely fcuking slays me. Seriously, I just spent 5 minutes clicking around and laughed out loud three times – please indulge me for a few moments and give this a go, if you laugh too then maybe we can be friends (but I promise I will never try and wrap you in clingfilm for erotic or even non-erotic purposes).

By Thérèse Mulgrew

OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS VAGUELY-LATINATE=FLAVOURED SELECTION OF HOUSEY DISCO-Y LOUNGEY TRACKS COMPILED BY SASHA CHADAEV! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Odd This Day: A reader writes! Says Chris Coates, “as your contact page says you’d welcome things people have created, I thought I’d send you a link to this thing I do. I call it ‘Odd this day’, the idea being to find something bizarre from history for every day of the year. Today [NOT IN FACT ACTUALLY TODAY, DUE TO MY RECEIVING THIS EMAIL IN THE PAST], for example, is the 118th anniversary of Nature publishing Francis Galton’s ‘wisdom of crowds’ paper about a visit to the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition – or, at least, everyone thinks he went to the fair, but he didn’t.” This is GREAT, and honestly throws up something interesting on a daily basis – not least this, which is one of the more astonishing artefacts from that weird period in which male writers being insanely horny on main was apparently fair game to publish in actual papers/magazines.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Claw Craziness: Oooh, this is fun – this Insta feed posts behind the scenes footage of an incredible-looking setup where someone’s got a bunch of fairground claw machines set up in a room somewhere, all of which are playable remotely by people online…and yes, fine, I know that sounds both weird AND banal, but it’s not, ok? FFS.
  • What I Think Might Be The Worst Poetry Ever: Look, as a general rule I try not to feature stuff in Curios that I don’t like because, well, it feels mean to point at something that someone has made and tell them that I think it’s sh1t (unless it’s corporate webwork; corporate webwork can, in the main, fcuk off). This week, though, I am making an exception for the Insta account of one 7SoulsDeep, because I was walking blamelessly through Soho the other week and was confronted by some of this person’s ‘verse’ scrawled on a pavement and, well, if you’re going to force this sh1t into my head, 7SoulsDeep, then I can tell the world that you are one of the worst examples of instapoet faux-profundity that I have ever read in my life, and if I hear a more appallingly, clunky and adolescent line in 2025 than ‘I made her mind wet’ then, well, something very weird is likely to have happened. The fact that this account has over 70k followers makes me feel marginally less bad about the likely extinction we’re racing towards at speed.
  • Bad Wiki Photos: Terrible photos of famouses from their Wikipedia pages! Why? Because they’re comically bad. Seriously, the Venus Williams pic in particular is amazing – like, there are a LOT of photos of Venus Williams out there, why use *that* one?

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG (ALSO WHILE WE ARE HERE IT TURNS OUT THAT 12FT.IO IS WORKING AGAIN SHOULD YOU NEED TO JUMP PAYWALLS FOR ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW)!

  • The Population Implosion: A good, if VERY long, New Yorker piece exploring exactly why so many people are currently rather exercised about how many kids we’re all having (no, not the racist reasons, the OTHER reasons). I found this fascinating; I wasn’t aware of quite how much global data shows that none of us really seem to want kids any more, or at least not enough to produce enough of us to keep things running as they currently are, or quite how close we (when I say ‘we’ here I am lazily referring to, mostly, the richest countries, the ‘West’ or ‘Global North’) are to all sorts of quite unpleasant-looking cliffs in terms of our collective ability to keep all these complex systems functioning on what looks like being something of a skeleton staff, so to speak. A few caveats here – there’s a BIG focus on South Korea in the piece, which is particularly far along this timeline and exposed, and there are repeated references to academics soberly (and rather tiredly) reminding the reader that, actually, attempting to make any sort of accurate medium-term predictions about stuff like this is in the main a fool’s errand. Still, it is all very interesting and does give something of a different perspective on the current obsession with AI (and, by extension, robotics) – because, if you believe this stuff, without some sort of tech hail mary (does it worry you how many times already this year I have written something about us all hoping for a tech-based miracle? It worries me) then we’re all going to be having VERY different, and probably less-good, lives in a generation or two. Although, honestly, as a barren man who’ll be dead before this stuff affects me, give a fcuk (obviously I do care a *bit*, don’t look at me like that). Oh, and HERE’S A BONUS PIECE THAT LINKS TO THE TECH POINT! “Human populations will start to decrease globally in a few more decades. Thereafter fewer and few humans will be alive to contribute labor and to consume what is made. However at the same historical moment as this decrease, we are creating millions of AIs and robots and agents, who could potentially not only generate new and old things, but also consume them as well, and to continue to grow the economy in a new and different way. This is a Economic Handoff, from those who are born to those who are made.” Or at least, quite a few people are betting/hoping on that being the case.
  • The Rise of the Degrowther Right: I thought this was a fascinating article, although I probably should acknowledge that it’s in Jacobin and as such wears its politics quite clearly on its sleeve. Still, as an overview of a movement that I have sort of felt the shape of but not quite ‘seen’, so to speak, it’s super-interesting; there’s an interesting throughline here from the gilets jaunes a few years back to the right-wing fetishisation of farming as ‘pure’ labour, the tradwifery (of course!) and a whole bunch of other stuff too. Once you’ve read this, you will start seeing it a LOT I think: “This is not a merely twenty-first century phenomenon or just part of the quixotic ideological combinations beloved of the online far right. Rather, it is the latest version of a long-established defense of a “naturalist” vision of ecology, seen not as an interventionist project for reshaping the world but as a moral call to reel in modern excesses. As conservative philosopher Roger Scruton told Bastié in an interview for right-wing ecological magazine Limite, “Progress is a perverse superstition”; the call to defend our home (in Greek, oikos, root of the word “ecology”) must not be “economic” but “spiritual and cultural.” The late Scruton is a big deal among much of the European and US right. His legacy is proudly taken up by figures around the National Conservatism meetups, a jamboree that unites Anglophone conservative forces with harder-right parties in Europe, and that is also backed by institutes close to Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government. Italian premier Giorgia Meloni has routinely cited Scruton as an intellectual inspiration, and he’s had a notable effect on the way her Fratelli d’Italia party talks about green issues. For the party’s spokesman on these matters, Nicola Procaccini, even the word “environmentalism” is suspect. “Ecology,” Procaccini told a Fratelli d’Italia event for business chiefs in April 2022, “means looking after your own home. The difference between left-wing environmentalism and right-wing ecology also lies in our spirituality, as against the Left’s materialism.”” Honestly, this really is smart and worth engaging with.
  • Design and the Construction of the Imaginaries: Ok, so ordinarily when it comes to the longreads I feel reasonably qualified to give you a precis of what an individual piece is about, more or less – here, though, I am just going to sort of do some vague handwaving, because while excellent and interesting and thought-provoking throughout, it’s also true that this essay by Tobias Revell (which is actually the narrative of a presentation around his ongoing Phd, I think) is…quite discursive and wide-ranging and as such it’s quite hard to give a pithy ‘and it is about X’ summation. That said, if you are interested in (*deep breath*) design and digital and futures and how you scry them from the past and present and AI and ‘work’ and work and BIG IDEAS and how people relate to them and science and the concept of ‘progress’ and storytelling and narrative and presentation and The Society of the Spectacle and and and and and…well, then you should read this. It is LONG, but it will make you think more about more different things than any other link in this week’s issue, which hopefully is recommendation enough to earn your click.
  • Should We Talk To AI About Ethics?: This was a surprisingly interesting and deep look at the questions around whether or not it is A Good Thing for us to attempt to imbue The Machine with a sense of ‘ethics’ and, if not, what an appropriate set of alternatives might be – the starting point for this is the obvious statement that there is no universally-accepted normative ethical standard to use as a baseline, and as such any attempt to construct an ‘ethics’ inside the ‘mind’ of The Machine is inherently going to be biased or weighted in some way by definition, and that,beyond that, perhaps there are some questions that we should not expect – or want! – The Machine to engage with or answer because there are certain considerations that should fall outside the purview of artificial ‘intelligence’. Which, obviously, LOL THAT SHIP FCUKED OFF YEARS AGO. “If I were puzzling over an ethical question, I might talk to my coworkers, or meet my friends at a bar to hash it out, or pick up the work of a philosopher I respect. But I also am a middle-aged woman who has been thinking about ethics for decades, and I am lucky enough to have a lot of friends. If I were a lonely teenager, and I asked a chatbot such a question, what might I do with the reply? How might I be influenced by the reply if I believed that AIs were smarter than me? Would I apply those results to the real world? In fact, the overwhelming impression I get from generative AI tools is that they are created by people who do not understand how to think and would prefer not to. That the developers have not walled off ethical thought here tracks with the general thoughtlessness of the entire OpenAI project.”
  • At CPAC: Another week, another slightly-incredulous dispatch from the belly of the beast. This time it’s Antonia Hitchens writing in the LRB about her visit to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference which each year draws the usual selection of MAGA and MAGA-adjacent wingnuts from the Extended Republican Universe, and which, as you might expect, was this year a sort of triumphant procession of teak-skinned horror. Hitchens is excellent here, dispassionate and factual and letting the facts do the heavy lifting – you don’t need to do much prose flexing when events are this fcuking weird. This gives you the temperature of the piece, but the whole thing is a grimly-fascinating look at the people whose whims and choices are going to play a significant part in determining the future direction of your life for the next few years, whether you like it or not (we do not, in the main, like it): “Downstairs, a conservative law clerk was introducing himself to Stewart Rhodes as a fellow Yale Law School grad. They compared notes on different professors. The law clerk asked how his time in jail had been. Rhodes put down his beer and pulled up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of Trump, bleeding after the shooting in Butler. ‘No president in our lifetime has showed physical strength. This is like going back to Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington,’ the clerk said. (After being shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt kept speaking for fifty minutes while blood soaked his shirt.) Musk had just sent out an email asking federal workers to detail what they had accomplished at work that week or be fired. (‘Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive. Remember, we have a country to save!’ Trump had posted earlier in the day.) Musk pulled up to the party after midnight, but apparently decided not to come inside after his security made a sweep of the perimeter. The host was devastated. The downstairs tenants in the building, contestants on the reality show Love Is Blind, were furious about the number of people trying to use their bathroom.”
  • Glitching The Circuit: This is not a revolutionary idea, but when I read this piece this week it felt timely and interesting and relevant, and something that feels worth thinking about and applying to various parts of life and the world (I hate myself for saying this, but there’s a not-terrible strategy proposition to be built out of the basic principles here which I think could take you to some interesting places) (god, that felt wrong, sorry). Basically the premise here (at heart) is ‘look, given that everything is being averaged out by algos maybe it behooves us to start queering the data slightly to make things more interesting’ – which, as an ethos, feels like a positive and pleasingly-disruptive one (disruptive in the good way, not in the cnuty Zuckerbergian way).
  • Garbage: This is a short essay by World’s Most Assiduous Walker Craig Mod (see Curios passim) about the Japanese approach to litter and waste – specifically, the implicit assumption that you, the consumer, are responsible for disposing of the byproducts of your consumption, and that this responsibility is taken seriously by citizens as part of their general ‘do not inconvenience your neighbour’ vibe, and how this is, basically, A BETTER WAY TO LIVE, and I can’t stress how much I felt myself agreeing with this deep in what passes for my ‘soul’ – not just about physical objects and waste, but as a conceptual approach. CLEAN UP YOUR SH1T feels like an excellent and quite powerful maxim to live by in 2025, I have to say, and one we might all do well to bear in mind (he said, like some sort of preachy, censorious w4nker. Jesus. Sorry, I won’t do that again).
  • The Podcast Economy: This isn’t in fact the title of the piece, but it’s very much its main thrust – Joel Morris runs the numbers on the world of podcasts and finds that, basically, more than half of them are listened to by fewer than 50 people, and about 0.1% of them have enough listeners (10k+) to qualify for the sorts of in-cast ads that mean you start earning a vaguely-livable wage. The piece then goes on to talk about how basically you need to ‘pay creators’ – and, yes, that’s lovely, but I think that there’s an interesting, broader point here about the word ‘creator’ and its impact that’s worth exploring. “We are all creators!” we are endlessly told! “We are all creative!” And that is true! Creativity is part of being human, and I fundamentally agree that we can all do it (and all do, to greater or lesser extents, every day)! What I find interesting about the term ‘creator’, though, is that implies a professionalisation of the role – like, it’s a JOB, it’s a THING I DO, it is WHO I AM…and, by extension, it is HOW I WANT TO EARN…but here’s the thing. The mere fact of ‘creating’ does not, magically, create a market for that which is created! You can indeed be a creator – but that does not magically oblige people to give a sh1t, or to want to pay you to support this creation! MOST PEOPLE THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE NOT EARNED MONEY THROUGH THE ACT OF CREATIVITY! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY WE SUDDENLY THINK THAT ECONOMICS WORK DIFFERENTLY NOW! Until we get to post-scarcity or someone decides they can afford to run the UBI experiment properly, basically, I think we all have to start accepting that even if you call yourself a fcuking ‘creator’ it does not in fact mean that that is how you are going to be able to pay for your supper, however much you might wish that in fact to be the case.
  • Leaving: I really enjoyed this – I don’t think it’s finished, so it’s more of a draft/work-in-progress blogpost than an ‘essay’ per se, but Olu Niyi-Awosusi’s musings on social media and how it has evolved over their lifetime, and their shifting feelings towards it, and the difficulty in finding space and community online in a post-social landscape, really spoke to me. In particular this line, which I want to have carved in stone somewhere because I think it is important and true: “if everyone around you is similar, and you are different, relying on them to help you find Weird Things (to them!) is foolhardy.” PREACH.
  • The Rise of the TikTok Oracle: One to read while remembering the growing body of evidence suggesting that for young people around the world TikTok is a legitimate, go-to news service with FACTS (lol!) being delivered to them by the pretty friends who live in their phone – this article paints an interesting picture of how the medium is shaping the message (THANKS MARSHALL!), with the algorithm rewarding people who SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE and MAKE ASSERTIONS and give you the ONE TRUE PERSPECTIVE…which, yeah, that’s about as positive as it sounds. This is actually a far more serious and well-thought/argued piece of writing than I am making it sound – its author, Nikita Walia, goes deep on some of the theory underpinning her argument (and, yes, McCluhan gets a look-in), but even if you’re less interested in the sociology/comms theory behind it all it’s an interesting dive into a recognisable and increasingly prevalent phenomenon which, yet again, is a perfect example of technology shaping society in ways we’re not going to grasp until well past the point of ‘too late’.
  • A Return to Early Virtual Aesthetics: On how the visual signifiers of a past digital era are being exhumed and reappropriated everywhere from fine art to fashion and everything inbetween. Why the popularity? This is a neat summary: “This has as much to do with the state of the contemporary image as it does Early Virtual ones. The image is in crisis. It has never been harder for an image to mean anything. They don’t compel us. They did once, many of us remember. When they did, they looked like this. We don’t want perfectly immersive graphics. We want graphics that make us feel the way we felt playing Pokémon Red.” That final sentence is GREAT and useful and I look forward to seeing it crop up in lots of fcuking keynotes over the next few months.
  • The Rise of Matchmaking Clubs: Or, ‘dating is still fcuked, apparently, but here’s a way in which the rich are going to circumvent the apphorror!’. Because, basically this is a piece about how you can now pay large sums of money to professional matchmaking services who will basically do a ‘Married at First Sight’-style partner search for you to find THE ONE. Remember a few weeks ago when I said that someone would try and reinvent the arranged marriage soon for the post-apps landscape? SURELY NOT LONG NOW!
  • How The Online Right Are Weaponising the Blake Lively vs Baldoni Thing: The Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni story is ugly and miserable and the online reflection of it is a predictable cesspit of misogyny, but this piece by Taylor Lorenz looks at how it’s being weaponised by right-wing commentators in the US and worldwide as a means of effectively top-of-funneling people into their audience and, eventually, into the wonderful, mad world of online right-wing conspiracies and, inevitably, beef tallow and perineal sunbathing (probably). Anything they could do with Heard/Depp… “If you’re on social media platforms, especially if you’re a woman or under the age of 40, content about Lively vs Baldoni has likely become inescapable. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram videos about the case are amassing millions of views, Google searches have skyrocketed, and, as Megyn Kelly said on stage, all of America seems to be obsessed with the controversy. Right wing creators have become expert at tapping into online trends and cultural conversations, and immediately recognized the opportunity. Last fall, after Baldoni’s smear campaign against Lively was revealed in The New York Times, conservative influencers sprung to action. They flooded the zone with exhaustive coverage aimed at discrediting Lively. They have used the case to dismantle public support for #MeToo, especially among liberal women. So far, it’s working. Recently, two co-founders of Betches, a liberal women’s media company that has done work with the DNC, repeated Owens’ exact framing of the case on Instagram, attacking Lively to their audience of progressive women followers. They lambasted The New York Times for their coverage and called Lively a “narcissistic egomaniac.””
  • Meet Yabujin: I’ve always had a softspot for mysterious, reclusive musicians – I was for a time in the very early-00s obsessed with the near-mythical figure of Jandek – and so this profile of obscure internet ‘sensation’ (can someone be a sensation if literally noone you know has heard of them? YES THEY CAN WELCOME TO INFINITELY-FRACTAL CULTURE!) Yabujin, whose work combines a sort of 00s-ish digital aesthetic with the sort of hardstep beats which I have to admit I have a secret fondness for, pleased me no end. It’s worth clicking the links throughout the piece and listening to the tracks – once you get the vibe it’s interesting how many other places you will start to see the influence.
  • Outsourcing Memory: Bee is a new AI-powered wearable that does the ‘I record everything you say, ever, and use it to provide you with DATA AND SUMMARIES AND A LIFE LOG AND AND’ thing – it obviously doesn’t work properly, but it works *enough* that this writeup in The Verge is properly interesting, painting a picture of a future in which all our tracked and what they ‘mean’ is determined by the manner in which they are interpreted by The Machine. Does this sound good? I don’t think it does: “More sobering was asking it about my moods over the past month. Bee said I’ve experienced a period of “significant stress balanced with moments of accomplishment and joy.” When asked to summarize the themes of my life, it detailed how I’ve been mediating a tense family dispute. That’s when I remembered this device heard me cry on the phone while fighting with a cousin. Reading Bee’s analysis, my vulnerable moments no longer felt fully mine.”
  • Zyn and the Nicotine Gold Rush: On the meteoric rise of Zyn as a brand and white tobacco as a lifestyle accessory, which is both interesting from a product/marketing/society point of view, and partly because it reminded me of going to international school and making friends with a guy called Karl Settergreen (HELLO KARL IF YOU ARE THE SORT OF MAN WHO GOOGLES HIMSELF IN 2025!) who had a bright pink guitar, floppy hair, and a degree of openness about sex which I, aged, 15, found frankly astonishing – basically he was the most Swedish man I had ever met. He also introduced me to snus, the original product on which Zyn and its variants are based and which, in 1995, was a humbug-sized brown pouch full of strong, dark tobacco which tasted like the grave and which caused you to spit like a camel; the idea that THAT is now the coolest lifestyle flex for a certain type of basic tw4t is, frankly, astonishing to me.
  • Tom Wolfe: A beautiful look at Tom Wolfe’s writing and his repeated framing and skewering of 20thC America at various stages in its modern development, this is a lovely reminder of why he was so wonderful to read and why, per the author’s central thesis, his style has poisoned the journalistic well ever since: “Wolfe was so immersed, observant, and detached that he often got it right. But many of the journalists who followed slid away from the heavy-duty reporting that was the only way to keep New Journalism honest. They learned to write “like” Wolfe, in terms of flourish, without taking the time he took to report the substance. Laden with multiple, rapid deadlines, even the most earnest journalists were unable to climb on a bus and ride cross-country with their subject for a year. Others were wannabe novelists or gonzo reporters hungrier for attention than for accuracy. A succession of journalists were caught plagiarizing; creating composites, glomming various people they had interviewed into a single, named character; hiring other reporters to go to the scene and feed them details; or, not to put too fine a point on it, making sh1t up.”
  • The Story of Two Tone: A history of the Two Tone musical movement in Harper’s. I am going to leave the opening here, because I think it will make you want to read the rest of the piece immediately: “When I was asked recently what gigs I’d most want to see if I could travel back in time, a few obvious answers leaped to mind: Charlie Parker, the Velvet Underground, Dylan and the Band c. 1965–66. Truly, what I’d most like to do is revisit certain nights in the late Seventies in a less altered state than I was in at the time: the Fall, Joy Division, Pere Ubu, Wire. Also on that list: one night in the spring of 1979, when, down in the basement of the Hope and Anchor, a raucous crowd witnessed an early London performance by the Specials. To say it was packed doesn’t do it justice. It had its own weather system: clouds of body heat, beer fumes, a fug of cigarette smoke curled around a passel of porkpie hats. A carnival squeezed into a cupboard. And this one abiding mystery of nightlife physics: How do people dance in such situations, let alone make the piston-elbowed, knees-up motion eternally associated with ska? There were members of various London bands in that sauna of a room, keen to check out the buzz around these Midlands interlopers. An unruly bunch, on first acquaintance—two of them black, five white, and all distinctly un-posey. Was this serious competition, or a passing fad? What no one—not even the Specials themselves—could have foreseen was how big they would become, and how soon. Not just big within this or that underground scene, but tabloid big, television big, young-kids-dressing-like-you big. In the early Eighties, bands like the Human League and Culture Club also attained such world-seducing status, but they were explicitly pop and always had their mascaraed eyes on the prize. The Specials were something you couldn’t plot on a graph; their revved-up combo of punk rock and Jamaican ska planted a seed that wrought unlikely blooms.” This is wonderful on the history and the politics and the music, whether or not you’ve ever done the aforementioned “piston-elbowed, knees-up” dance.
  • Dante: Finally this week, a short story by Nate Waggoner. Again, take the opening paragraph and then click and keep going; this is beautiful and ugly and sad and funny and and and: “Dante is 19 years old, has high cheekbones, soulful hazel eyes, and bright teeth he flashes cockily when he antagonizes my aunt Jai, doing something like reciting the Chris Rock “Who the fcuk reupholstered your pussy?” monologue from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy at the dinner table. It would be fair to compare his appearance to that of an Adam Levine or a young Luke Wilson or a James Franco. We start watching Game of Thrones after he pitches it to me like this: “You gotta see this show, dawg. This bitch? Has dragons.” He leaves his socks on the kitchen island and drops the newspaper on the floor after he’s done with the sports pages. He does things like borrow my car to go buy pot-growing equipment and shoot off guns with his boys, get pulled over, then fail to tell me about that, or about how I’m now driving around with bullets in my backseat. It’s 2012, and we’re both living with Jai—I’m there while I’m in grad school, and he’s starting chemo back up again.”

By Dan Balestrin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

Webcurios 07/03/25

Reading Time: 37 minutes

Last night, for the second time in my life, I found myself taking my trousers off in front of a few hundred people at a theatre in Soho (I was not being paid for this). It feels unfair that this should happen twice to be honest, and I am starting to suspect some sort of nefarious grand plan at play.

I went to see a comedy show – it was very good! There are still tickets available for tomorrow night if you also want a chance to be lightly-humiliated! – and, right at the end, there was a callback gag which resulted in an audience member having to hand over their shirt to the comedian. Which was then extended to said comedian then finding other audience members to complete the outfit – which was the point at which I began to very much regret being in the front row and being broadly speaking of comparable size to the performer. So he asked me for my trousers, I wrestled for about 0.3s with whether I wanted to be the cnut that derailed his finale, and then I took them off. Perhaps most humiliatingly of all, the guy – a good looking man of regulation weight – genuinely struggled to get into my strides, making the pipe-cleaner nature of my gams painfully apparent to every single one of the others present.

Anyway, I woke up with a not-insignificant feeling of shame, so should there be a fundamentally sheepish quality to this week’s Curios then that is why.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are probably glad you didn’t have to see that.

By Tai Shani

WE START WITH AN EXCELLENT DRUM AND BASS ALBUM FROM A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK, PLEASINGLY CALLED ‘KILBURN’, BY ZERO T AND ONJ! 

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS YOU ALL PROBABLY OUGHT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THIS AND THEN ADJUST YOUR PLANS ACCORDINGLY, PT.1:  

  • Space 0: We begin this week with one of those, I appreciate, annoying links where my description is basically going to consist of a lot of words expended to communicate the fact that, honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea what the everliving fcuk is happening here or what this is for or who made it or anything. I promise this isn’t down to authorial laziness – or, at least, not *primarily* down to authorial laziness – so much as this being a VERY chunky bit of webwork which basically succeeded in utterly overwhelming my poor, wheezing old laptop and which, if you’re going to give it a go, you should very much leave until AFTER you have closed all your other tabs. Still, should you have access to whatever the fcuk a 2025 version of a Cray Supercomputer is then I think this is potentially quite a fun toy – basically it’s a 3d world that you can WASD yourself around (so far, so banal) and which is peppered with…things, different objects all rendered in 3d which you can pick up and (and this is the bit where it starts to make the hardware complain) then combine in infinite combinations in godlike fashion, so that you can finally see what would happen if you were to merge the qualities of (say) a seahorse, a leopard and a Birkin handbag (no, really, this is exactly what happens, it is very much this odd). The hard computational work happens when you start asking the system to spin up these hybrids – I assume there’s some genAI under the hood here to create the eventual 3d models you end up with, but this gets VERY weird (and, to reiterate, unless your laptop is a LOT better than mine, VERY wheezy) very quickly indeed). If your hardware is upto it then this is a really interesting toy-slash-art-project-thing – but, seriously, don’t attempt to combine this with doing your timesheets come 6pm. Via the always-fascinating TITAA.
  • Kakocomputermoyan: I’ve featured works by Filipino digital artist Chia Amisola in Curios before, but this is her latest piece which brings together projects by a variety of different creators. Per the site description, “KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN (“that’s what you get for using the computer!”) is an exhibition of internet art featuring 21 Filipino artists. Its ‘songs’ are represented as various artworks: an elegy for Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz and St. Peter, a shrine to Onel de Guzman, a simulated torrent client, to data center mythologies. These counter-narratives articulate an online third-world. From exploitation, to queerness, to appropriation, to bootlegging, many of these stories would not have been possible without the internet. Contained within the karaoke machine, the internet becomes an urgent medium for works that speak to its potential for resistance.” Which, I appreciate, doesn’t tell you a whole lot, so rather than reading this rubbish why not click and explore? I have wandered through a dozen or so of these over the past few days, and there’s a pleasing breadth of style and tone and technique at play here, with works that play with the fabric of html in interesting ways to more static, visual/narrative experiences, to animations to interactive ‘game’-type pieces…I obviously can’t speak to any of the aspects of national identity and culture being referenced here, but as a general overview of web art practice in 2025 and a view of the web from a less-Western perspective, it’s consistently interesting and, occasionally, very clever indeed. Think of it like a gallery to wander through, and, if you can, give it 20-30 mins to explore.
  • The First Great Personal Portfolio Website Of 2025!: Long-time readers will be aware that I have a particular softspot for people who make needlessly-shiny and complex websites to show off their work, and this, by one Toshihito Endo, a Japanese dev who has decided that rather than spending days of their life demonstrating ‘thought leadership’ on LinkedIn they would instead create an entirely-functional 3d world via which to demonstrate their coding chops. “This is a place where I work on projects. I organise a space with “my work objects” as well as “my identity fragments” to make it comfortable and now, I’m glad to have you here! Feel free to walk around and will you find me to “say hello”?”, reads the charming welcome message, and then you get into the site and DEAR GOD this is legitimately better than about 70% of 3d gallery spaces I have ever visited online. Explore Endo’s workspace, learn about the things he likes, explore his portfolio, and, at one point, explore an model of his head rendered in glorious polygons as a representation of HIS OWN MIND inside the virtual space. Honestly, I can’t stress how beautifully-made this is and how *stylish*, and how much I wish I had a really rich client whose money I could use to employ this person because they are obviously very talented indeed.
  • Mark: We are, of course, living through an age of DISRUPTION. Disruption of governments! Disruption of the broad concept of ‘democracy’! Disruption of the functional planetary environment! SO MUCH DISRUPTION! You know what hadn’t, to this point, yet been disrupted? YES THAT IS RIGHT BOOKMARKS! I am sure you’re in agreement with me when I say that one of the major factors in humanity not having yet achieved some sort of transcendental emotional epiphany has been the lack of progress made in the preceding few centuries when it comes to ‘keeping track of where you are in a book’ – thank FCUK, then, for Silicon Valley! Mark, you will be THRILLED to learn, is a bookmark…POWERED BY AI!!!!! Yes, throw away your dumb, oh-so-19thC faux-leather numbers because this device will catapult your reading habits into the 22nd Century. Basically the gimmick here is that the bookmark will not only MAGICALLY REMEMBER where in the book you are, but it will also ‘read’ and summarise everything that you have read using the MAGIC OF THE MACHINE, thereby neatly-obviating the need for you to actually concentrate as you’re turning the pages. “Today”, runs the blurb on-site, “book readers struggle to retain everything they read” (SPEAK FOR YOUR FCUKING SELVES PLEASE) and so this solves that issue by, er, giving said readers a wafer-thin AI summary of the contents so that rather than reading a foundational text you can instead experience it as though filtered through the utterly-mediocre minds of a bunch of cnuts on LinkedIn. Although, judging by the books used as ‘example’ texts in the screenshots here, this is squarely aimed at the sorts of people who believe that Yuval Noah Harari is anything other than a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, or that Peter Thiel is a thought leader rather than, say, a cryptofascist. Is it clear from my tone that I wish genuine and long-term physical harm both on the people who want to get rich from this and from their target customers in equal measure? Because, really, I do. This is like some sort of ur-parody of techcnutery – from the absurd claims that THIS is the staggering innovation that will change humankind’s relationship to written texts forever, to the boast that it’s made from the same materials as a Boeing 777 – MATE IT IS A FCUKING BOOKMARK GYAC – to the seemingly-sincere promise that each year it will deliver you a ‘wrapped’ summary of ALL THE KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE CONSUMED THAT YEAR (can you imagine a GPT-spun ‘summary’ of all the things you have ever read? Can you imagine how utterly miserable that would be, flattened into insignificance? Yes, well, EXACTLY), to the fact that I think it’s going to retail at around…wait for it…$200, this is the sort of thing I am slightly amazed exists in the wake of the humane debacle. I hate literally everything about this!
  • Revenge Font: A legitimately clever little PR stunt, this, by London agency Dude – their office is on Regent’s Canal, and was, towards the end of last year, tagged in fairly large-scale fashion by some charming local kids with questionable spraywork. So, to TAKE BACK CONTROL, Dude have decided to take the style of the tag and appropriate it themselves – they used it to create a brand new font which they have aptly decided to call ‘Revenge’, available to download from this site and free-to-use, thereby turning some frankly ugly graffwork into a nice little calling card for their creativity (and, actually, not a bad font in its own right tbh). There’s a link to donate to East London arts organisations on-page too for some nice CSR feelgoods, and, generally, this is a smart bit of creative work that I hope will have won them some extra business this year.
  • Claude Plays Pokemon: This has been going for over a week now – SO LATE! – but, given the AI’s seeming lack of sufficient token memory to have a consistent picture of what the fcuk it is doing, it’s quite likely that it’ll take a few more before it gets anywhere near completion. This is a Twitch stream featuring Anthropic’s Claude model attempting to play Pokemon, while a crowd of kids comment on its progress. What’s really interesting is that I think it’s using a reason-y model (3.7 Sonnet?) and as such you can watch The Machine’s ‘thought processes’ as it plays; there’s something really quite amazing about seeing the way in which it ‘thinks’ (it doesn’t think) and the ways in which this mimics the shape, but very much not the function, of human thought, and the ways in which it gets stuck in loops and into obsessional cul-de-sacs; on the one hand, it’s hard not to watch this for 5 minutes and think that we really should stop listening to people like Altman when they say things like “AGI NEXT TUESDAY!!!”; on the other, it’s also absolutely fcuking astonishing to think that this is something that would have been literal witchcraft 3 years ago and now is so accepted that I can be blase about it in poor quality prose.
  • Queer Communist Peter: Not just him, though – there’s Trans Lesbian Peter Griffin too! And RadFem Peter! And Punk Rock Peter! Why are the kids spinning up AI-juiced brainrot accounts featuring alternate-universe variants on the Family Guy character waxing lyrical about social justice issues? I DON’T KNOW BUT THEY ARE! This feels adjacent to that ‘communist ASMR’ page I linked to last week, with the brainrot style being the spoonful of sugar making the leftist discourse easier to swallow, and I suppose there’s a degree to which this all makes sense – it’s also undeniably true that there’s something really quite jarring about hearing, say, the theories of Adorno being delivered to you via the medium of a poorly-cloned version of Seth Mcfarland while Minecraft loops play in the background. For more on this you can read Taylor Lorenz’s ESSENTIAL (not in any way essential) deep dive into the phenomenon at User Mag – but, also, you might just want to keep it vague and puzzling and mysterious, because, honestly, even knowing more about the ‘why’ doesn’t really make it make sense (oh, by the way, there’s a line in the writeup about the guy who’s trying to set himself up as a sponsorship broker for these accounts who talks with all apparent sincerity about having a ‘monetisable stable of peters’ (I paraphrase, but) which nearly broke me).
  • A Truly Amazing Library of Music Bits: I think this one came to me via B3ta (THANKS ROB) – wherever it’s from, it’s a fcuking astonishing collection of what I think are original musical elements, small loops and samples that are all entirely free to download and use as you see fit, and, seriously, there are fcuking THOUSANDS here, spanning all sorts of genres and exactly the sort of thing you might want to play with were you a budding music producer or making game SFX or, basically, anything at all involving digital composition. This is, apparently, all the work of one Andre Louis – THANKYOU MYSTERIOUS STRANGER ANDRE LOUIS!
  • Turn Any Image Into An Explorable 3d Landscape: You…you want more of a description than that? FFS. Look, take any image you like, plug it into this website and then wander around it/through it as though it were a 3d gameworld – HAPPY NOW? This works best with map-type imagery – I think the software somehow ‘sees’ roads and topography and tries to work with them – but will render anything you feed it, which is how I found myself on Wednesday morning getting very lost in the, turns out, unsettlingly-craggy landscape that is my face.
  • The Saltcraft Studio: PREPOSTEROUS WASTE OF LUXE CLIENT BUDGET OF THE WEEK! This time it’s the turn of perfumier Issey Miyake to have its wallet inspected by some enterprising agency or another – the brand has a scent which, I presume, is somehow redolent, or the embodiment, of SALT, and so, obviously, decided to create an INTERACTIVE ARTISTIC WEBSITE EXPERIENCE where YOU, the putative scent-enjoyer, can craft your VERY OWN salt-themed digital artwork, which creative process involves, er, clicking a bunch of times to create your own UNIQUE SALT CRYSTAL and then choose from a bunch of different backgrounds and flourishes to make your own PERSONAL SALT SCULPTURE THINGY! No, you’re right, there is literally no reason why anyone would want to do this – beautifully upon completion of the user journey your special crystalline creation is inducted into a SALTY HALL OF FAME along with all the other works created by Issey Miyake fans worldwide – now, while I can’t be certain that the site doesn’t only display a limited number of finalised designs it strikes me as an unlikely and unnecessary limitation…which might then suggest that, per this morning when I found it two long hours ago, a grand total of 11 people have bothered to interact with this. Anyone want to speculate as to the cost-per-user of this? WELL DONE EVERYONE (especially the client handling person on the agency side).
  • Photos of the Old West: Via my friend Alex, some great photos of the America at the turn of the 20thC. You can almost taste the sarsaparilla (I have no idea what sarsaparilla is).
  • Time Gradient: Timezones, mapped to a greyscale gradient. Click, drag and hold to experience a very pleasing visual effect indeed – I very much like this as a way of displaying multiple time locations simultaneously.
  • Shuffled: Via Curios reader Dave Whiteland (THANKYOU DAVE!) comes this very niche little newsletter which each week will email you with a short overview of which countries in the world have changed leader over the past 7 days. Want to keep track with the health of democracy in Tuvalu? Need a nudge when the Vanuatans next choose to exercise their democratic right? OH GOOD! This actually covers major cabinet appointments and departmental/structural changes to the machinery of Government, and, my slightly-arch commentary aside, might be genuinely useful for…actually, no, sorry, I cannot for a second conceive of a situation in which anyone who NEEDS this information isn’t already getting it elsewhere, but I am very glad that anyone REALLY keen on knowing more about global governance has this as an additional resource.
  • Cold Album Drumming: A website-slash-YouTube channel with a single purpose – to whit: “Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?” I have only dipped into this briefly, and I think you probably need to be a drummer to really get this, but Frost is talented and a charming guide/companion, and there’s something honestly heartwarming about how much FUN he seems to be having as he smashes the fcuk out of his symbols in rhythmic fashion.
  • Bookwatch: Like the idea of books but hate reading? Ok, great, in which case enjoy audiobooks! But! What if…what if audio isn’t enough? What if you HATE READING but find merely listening to words sadly lacking? What if you need visual stimuli to ENGAGE YOUR MIND? Welcome, then, to Bookwatch, a website which takes a bunch of books (per all of these things, when they say ‘books’ they mean ‘the same fcuking laundry list of terrible self-help w4nk that every single tedious, cookie-cutter tech fcuk pretends to read so as to be able to have the same tedious, cookie-cutter opinions and beliefs as every single other tedious, cookie-cutter tech fcuk’) and presents them as…videos! I am 99% sure this is all being AI’d, with the summary being machine-generated from the core text and then the videos then being spun up from the summary copy, and, honestly, the idea of getting a fat-free AI-generated video summary of these already-largely-valueless texts is…entirely-dispiriting, frankly, but if YOU know someone whose tedious drive to self-optimise has seen them begin to inject the Huel directly into their stomachs to minimise digestion time then this may well be the innovation for them (also, please poison them; it’s for the wider benefit of the species, I promise).
  • Rejected Vanity Plates: It is a wonderful quirk of the Californian system that every application for a vanity number plate has its approval or rejection made part of the public record, meaning that each year it’s possible to marvel at some of the things people honestly thought that the State would approve for them to have stuck to their car. Refresh the page to get a new one – honestly, some of these are AMAZING, as are the official interpretations and reasons for approval/rejection. I for one am STUNNED that the person who wanted ‘SHE BANGS’ as their number plate was turned down.

By Jordanna Kalman

NEXT UP, AS WE MOVE TOWARDS FESTIVAL SEASON, WHY NOT HAVE 4+H OF TRACKS FROM ARTISTS WHO PLAYED LAST YEAR’S BOOMTOWN? 

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS YOU ALL PROBABLY OUGHT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THIS AND THEN ADJUST YOUR PLANS ACCORDINGLY, PT.2:

  • Left Field Dating: Surely it can only be a matter of months now before someone attempts to DISRUPT DATING for the final time be reintroducing the concept of arranged marriages and dowries but this time DIGITAL AND MOBILE-ENABLED, thus bringing us neatly full-circle? As we wait for that possibly-inevitable moment to arrive, welcome to the latest attempt to SOLVE LOVE – Left Field Dating is a new US-only (so far) app (and only a few cities in the US, I think), whose gimmick is LOCATION-BASED SERENDIPITY; as far as I can tell, you create your profile in the standard way and then, rather than having to swipe the misery carousel, you instead let THE MYSTERIOUS AI pair you with people based on its assessment of your potential compatibility (based on your profile and OTHER SIGNALS), with the gimmick that you will only be suggested matches when you’re both vaguely-proximate to each other. So the idea is that if you’re, say, killing time for 3h somewhere you could turn the app on and be notified if anyone the system thinks you might be up for fingering wanders through the vague vicinity – while this obviously sounds like an absolute fcuking safety nightmare, the FAQ suggests that no specific locations are given out, meaning that you’re in theory safe from a stranger suddenly approaching you with a gleam in their eye and ‘the app says we should fcuk’ on their tongue. This sounds simultaneously like ALMOST a great idea and also something with one or two too many obvious flaws to ever work, but let’s see if it ever escapes the NYC/campus ghetto. BONUS LOCATION-BASED PEOPLEFINDER! Pie is also-US-only, also in a limited number of cities, but rather than Left Field is a FRIENDSHIP rather than boning app – with this one you can flag you’re going to a specific event or location and get matched with other users who’ve also expressed an interest, which, honestly, feels *quite* a lot like how Facebook worked c.2010ish, but there is nothing new under the sun.
  • Noosphere: Another week, another attempt to FIX NEWS! No, this one isn’t going to work either, sorry. Noospehere is a newly-launched app-based news platform (iOS-only at present, and possibly US-only too so far) which, as far as I can tell, has decided to take the slightly odd market position of ‘a social app where you only follow journalists and get links to all their work and reporting’, which, honestly, is basically ‘Twitter in the old days’ as far as I’m concerned. Per their description, “Noosphere is a place where premium, quality journalists bring their best work, connecting authentically with their fans and followers, while building a sustainable business for the next era of news. A beautiful, intuitive design includes Articles and Briefs – in Text, Audio Photos and Video – never before published and trustworthy, straight from the source. Each reporter’s bio is accessible and transparent. Journalists update you regularly, including Alerts options so you are the first to have breaking news or in-the-field visibility on everything from politics, to climate change, conflict zones and beyond.“ There’s some interesting detail about the monetisation policy buried in this writeup here – effectively this seems designed to put cash directly in the pockets of the journalists themselves rather than a media organisation (although obviously Noosphere is not a charity) – but the pricepoint is…honestly incredibly fcuking punchy, because $240 a year feels like a LOT to pay for a disparate bunch of voices that may or may not provide a balanced and wide-ranging overview of What Is Going On, especially when there’s no guarantee at all that this will develop the critical mass of either journalists posting or users reading to sustain itself beyond the initial VC fund runway.
  • The Great Wikipedia Race: Riffing on last week’s SUPERB ‘3d navigable museum of Wikipedia’ (which if you are yet to download and play with, WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU??), comedian Sean Morl is running a GLOBAL WIKIPEDIA 3D RACE CHALLENGE THING on Monday 17th March 2025, all being streamed live for lols. The idea is simple – on the day, a randomly-generated bingo card of potential Wikipedia entries will be given to all participants, who will then have two hours to run through the museum attempting to complete a whole ‘line’ of topics in any order they please. Silly, pointless and antithetical to actually learning anything, I find the idea of people streaming themselves running through a weirdly-liminal gallery space attempting to find the, I don’t know, ‘gangrene’ section infinitely pleasing.
  • Chance Vision: I could attempt to explain or describe this to you, but I would instead invite you to click the link, to scroll down the page and, using the words arranged on the Page, and to attempt to work out what the everliving fcuk this…product? App? THING? thinks it is meant to be. “What if seeing truly meant understanding? We bridge the gap between curiosity and knowledge, empowering you to uncover the stories, meaning, and cultural context behind everything you see. We believe understanding the world should be effortless – a natural extension of your curiosity. With Chance AI, visual discovery becomes intuitive, human, and deeply meaningful – just as it’s meant to be.” YES OK BUT WHAT THE FCUK DO YOU DO WHAT ARE YOU FOR? As far as I can tell this is basically a packaged up LLM with photoanalysis capabilities, available as a standalone app for anyone who hasn’t yet realised that you can do all of this stuff with a standard GPT login these days, but, well, I am featuring it mainly for being the most utterly-meaningless piece of copywriting I have seen all year, for which sincere congratulations.
  • Night Earth: The earth! At night! As a composite made up of loads of satellite images from 2012! This is rather beautiful, although there’s also something sobering about the thought that the reality of this image a whole 13 years on will be a planet that is so much brighter – burning so much more! – than it was back then.
  • Webring.fun: Part of the growing OLD WEB nostalgiaboom, we are BRINGING BACK THE WEBRING! Webrings, for the children or less-terminally-online, were a thing of the early-ish internet era whereby sites of similar theme or tone or style would organise into loose collectives (webrings) characterised by a shared sense of community and mutual hyperlinking, with the broad theory that webrings were useful ways of arranging sites into broad groupings to aid with discovery and thematic clustering the early, pre-indexing days. This is a very new attempt to revitalise the concept, and there are only a dozen or so sites signed up to this one, but I am going to try and add Curios this week and if you own a small, personal, bloggish site then you may want to add yourself to it as a vaguely-community-minded nod to an earlier and more innocent era when we still believed that this would make things better rather than, as inevitably happened, it making things far, far worse.
  • Middle School: Another superb piece of work by The Pudding looking at a specific demographic cohort in the US through the lens of MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DATA. This time they’re looking at Middle Schoolers – a term that means the square root of fcuk-all to me, not being North American or a product of its scholastic system, but which as far as I can tell basically means 11-14ish – and how they FEEL ABOUT LIFE and, as is always the case with these guys, it’s an object lesson in how to tell stories with data and bring numbers to life in a way in which humanises and personalises them. Leaving aside the beauty of the presentation and the effectiveness of the presentation, WOW does it seem like tweens in the US are miserable (lol I wonder why).
  • Extraordinary Male Living Space: The description for this is lifted directly from Ryan, where I found the link originally – it will take you to a Reddit post, from which you MUST click the main image and then enjoy the carousel of psychedelia. Can you IMAGINE the headaches that spending longer than approximately 10 minutes in this house would induce? It’s also important that you read OP’s accompanying description, because there’s something unbelievably-poignant about the ‘after three failed relationships’ line – this is very much the home decoration choice of a man who has fully embraced ‘forever alone’ as a lifestyle choice. MEN, WHAT IS WRONG WITH US????
  • Circle of Attraction: I went for a few beers and a stroll with my friend Ben this week, and we were reminiscing about the halcyon times of 13-ish years ago when it seemed like we couldn’t leave the house without someone attempting to throw money at us in exchange for some sort of ill-defined service provision. It’s fair to say that here in tough old 2025 times are…somewhat less flush, turns out, and the magic money tree really does seem to have succumbed to Dutch Elm, and I imagine many of us could do with some sort of magical, serendipitous windfall to take the edge off slightly. Well, thankfully it turns out that the secret to turning your financial fortunes around is, er, playing some YouTube videos in the background! Circle of Attraction is a YT channel which posts videos whose purpose, it is claimed, “is to help you manifest a rich and beautiful life with the Law of Attraction, by providing you with POWERFUL money meditation music, visualization videos, and inspirational texts and affirmations regularly. You are capable of achieving an EASIER and WEALTHIER life!” Beautifully, the site then goes on to offer this slightly-more-grounded disclaimer, noting “our music and videos will not make you rich overnight, but serve you as powerful tools to help activate the Law of Attraction in your life so that you can attract money, wealth, and abundance.” So, er, CAVEAT EMPTOR! Still, if you think that watching an hour-long video featuring an AI-generated bundle of notes hovering over a dollarsign background while new age music plays gently as a bed – “Tap into the MEGA-MILLIONAIRE FREQUENCY of 432Hz x 777Hz and open the door to wealth in just 7 minutes. Let this session shift your energy and align you with financial abundance, making it easier for money and success to flow into your life!” – then, well, ENJOY! Also, should any of you find that you magically DO become plutocratically wealthy after availing yourself of the services here offered, then, well, REMEMBER WHERE YOU HEARD ABOUT IT PLEASE.
  • Percussive City: A small project by artist collective Uncle Friend, this webpage presents a series of videos answering the question ‘what would the city sound like if you attempted to turn various disparate elements of it into percussive instruments?’ – the answer, by the way, is ‘surprisingly good’ and I would really enjoy hearing a whole ambient-y, breaks-y album produced solely from sound fragments born of London’s street furniture so, well, if one of you would like to crack on and make that for me that would be nice thankyou (ONE DAY someone will read one of these exhortations and do what I ask. ONE FCUKING DAY).
  • Cool Tools: Are you the sort of person who before buying something, however trivial, feels it essential to compile some sort of seventeen-tab spreadsheet comparing different models’ featuresets and review scores and price points so as to ensure you’re getting the VERY BEST OF THE BEST? How is that working out for you? Is it not really time consuming and annoying? Maybe…try giving less of a fcuk? Or, alternatively, avail yourself of this useful new site pulled together by the people behind long-running recommendations newsletter ‘Recommendo’, which for years has been, er, recommending things its curators think are good to its readership. The database of past recommendations has now been tagged and made searchable on this site, meaning if you want to ask it for the VERY BEST (say) trainers or air fryers or knives then it will probably have an opinion; Recomendo is, to the best of my knowledge, independent and all-human, and as such this feels like a decently-objective addition to your ‘product recommendations’ rolodex (if you’re enough of a weirdo to have such a thing in the first place).
  • 3d Words With Some Perspective: Type in two words and this site will create you a little 3d model that basically combines them so as that when you rotate the model a certain way one is visible and vice-versa. Which, yes, makes the square root of no sense at all, but will be entirely clear once you click. I REALLY want a 3d printer so I can get a couple of physical ones of these made – ideally reading something vaguely profane and silly, like ‘wnking turtles’ (no, me neither, but that is what is in my head RIGHT NOW at 934am).
  • 70s Scifi Book Cover Generator: Someone’s trained an AI model on a bunch of pulp scifi cover designs from the 70s and chucked it up on Glif for anyone to play with – sadly as with all of the cheaper models it fcuks up text rendering something chronic, meaning the books are often blessed with titles like “The Langfluider Slihntzlx”, but the graphical styles and general composition here are spot-on and there’s something quite interesting in exploring what others have chosen to spin up.
  • Emoji Stretcher: Make emoji, but wide. Emoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooji, if you will (but you inevitably won’t).
  • HORRIBLE AI BONGO CORNER: NB CLICKING THIS LINK WILL TAKE YOU ONTO A SITE WHERE YOU ARE ONLY A FEW CLICKS AWAY FROM SOME POTENTIALLY REALLY HORRIBLE STUFF WHICH YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO SEE. Also, I think there’s some AI-generated nudity on the landing page. So, well, sorry about that. BUT, equally, I wanted to bring you this link because I am increasingly intrigued as to what is going to happen to us when it becomes trivial to spin up whatever flavour of smut anyone wants, unconstrained by previously-limiting factors like ‘basic human physiognomy’. Every time a new OpenSource TTV model drops, within hours the bongo-themed LORAs emerge – so it is with whatever Chinese variant this is, which has been manipulated by weirdos so as to be able to generate incredibly-realistic looking videos of ‘sexy’ women with, er, two heads. Yes, that’s right, two heads. Two ‘SEXY’ heads, but two heads nonetheless. I can’t stress enough how INTENSELY weird it feels to look at this – really quite deeply, viscerally wrong in a way that felt somehow newly-awful – and I felt it quite important that I share it with you so I didn’t have to suffer alone. Again, I am sorry (also, by the way, I wasn’t joking about the rest of that site, I really don’t recommend clicking around much unless you’re feeling a reasonable degree of emotional fortitude because it will not do wonders for your faith in humanity (or, more accurately, men)).
  • Fly Pieter: Since I found this a link to it’s apparently been shared by That Fcuking Man and so it’s entirely possible you’ll have seen it – if not, though, Fly Pieter is a VERY simple, almost rudimentary, in-browser flight sim which is distinguished by dint of it being in large part ‘coded by machine’ – it’s actually quite a lot more complex than that, as outlined in this writeup, and not simply a case of typing ‘make me a flight sim’ into Grok, but it’s true that, basically, the bulk of the work in getting this running was done by The Machine. It’s only ‘fun’ in the most loose of senses but it feels like a small watershed moment in terms of what is possible in terms of building with automation. If you squint it’s almost possible to be hopeful about the new era of limitless digital creativity that we might be about to usher in (or, alternatively, to be pessimistic about the terminal weight of digital cruft we’re about to be buried under; either/or).
  • Social Democracy: Ok, I tried with this but it was simply TOO DRY for me – for any of you for whom The Rest is History is the BEST thing in the world, though, this might well be catnip. A browsergame in which it is Germany in 1928 and you need to try and stop the Nazis getting into power using only the power of POLITICAL PROCESS and TECHNICAL GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEMS. As I said, it’s not exactly a light game of Tetris – “Play as the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1928, and try to stop the NSDAP from taking power. Guide the party through elections and parliamentary politics. Deal with the Great Depression and the spiraling political violence that characterized the late “Weimar Republic”.” – but if you’re a very specific type of weird history nerd then this could be the best link of the week.
  • 368 Chickens: This, by contrast, is very simple and very easy to understand, but absolutely fcuking FIENDISH in its execution and made me momentarily very frustrated on Monday before I decided to put it down and move on with my life. You have 368 chickens to place on a board. When you place three or more chickens of the same type in a line, they vanish. EXHAUST YOUR CHICKENS.
  • The Beast of Glenkildove: Finally this week, an interactive, choose your own adventure-type novel! Ok, you only get the first three chapters for free and beyond that you need to pony up for the full thing, but there’s a good 20-25m of play here before you hit the paywall and it is REALLY nicely done – curious and better-written than I’d expected and full of decisions that feel MEANINGFUL and IMPACTFUL, and if you’re the sort of person who ever enjoyed Fighting Fantasy books as a kid then you will get a powerful kick of nostalgia from this (except this is in fact a lot better than Fighting Fantasy books because, honestly, they were mostly a bit sh1t).

By Françoise Huguier

OUR LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS BRILLIANTLY-SUNSHINEY COLLECTION OF TRACKS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, COMPILED BY UNITED FREEDOM COLLECTIVE! 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Manuscript Miniatures: Not a Tumblr! I don’t care! “ManuscriptMiniatures.com is an image collection of miniatures depicting armoured figures from the medieval period. Miniatures are sourced from manuscripts created before 1450 in countries across Europe.” There are over 16000 here, so if you can’t find something that pleases you then you are almost certainly morally deficient in some significant way.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!

  • Lordess Foudre: Poster-ish art and design which is very much channeling the whole ‘digital end of days’ vibe which I like to think is what keeps you all flocking back to Web Curios week after week, and which I am continually tempted to buy because, well, just click the link, it is ACE.
  • Jordanna Kalman: One of Kalman’s images is a feature photo in the newsletter this week, but I wanted to link to their Insta feed too because I think the work is beautiful and I would like you all to pay attention to it.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

  • AI and the Limits of Vocabulary: So this is an academic paper – wait! No! Come back! This is interesting, I promise! – all about the extent to which language defines our ability to conceive of subjects/topics, and how, if one takes that premise, that our extant language may be insufficient or inadequate to enable us to have helpful conversations about the emergent world of AI: “This position paper argues that, in order to understand AI, we cannot rely on our existing vocabulary of human words. Instead, we should strive to develop neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn. We start from the premise that humans and machines have differing concepts. This means interpretability can be framed as a communication problem: humans must be able to reference and control machine concepts, and communicate human concepts to machines. Creating a shared human-machine language through developing neologisms, we believe, could solve this communication problem.” Obviously this is all VERY Wittgenstinian, but it doesn’t get too knotty, I promise, and even if you’re someone for whom the idea of reading a philosophy paper is approximately as appealing as dental surgery this is a relatively light read. I find the concept of ‘latent space’ a useful example of this, a term which has emerged as a manner of conceiving of the way in which The Machine categorises and links information and ‘meaning’ and without which I don’t think I would be able to ‘understand’ (lol) any of this stuff anywhere near as well – seriously, this is really really really fascinating, and gets moreso the longer you sit with it.
  • If You’re So Smart, Why Can’t You Die?: OK, this is VERY LONG and quite…discursive and a but rambly, but also it’s SUCH an interesting and smart exploration of what we mean when we talk about ‘machine intelligence’ or indeed ‘intelligence’ in general, and the difference between specific and general intelligence, and how thinking of these distinctions can be useful when considering what we mean when we talk about ‘artificial intelligence’ or even whether we should be using the ‘i’ word in this context at all. Really can’t recommend this highly enough if you have the time to spare and the will to put in a bit of effort. Look, here are the opening few paras to give you a taste – honestly, this thought example alone struck me as a really smart way of framing the premise, and it gets smarter as it goes on: “When a coffee shop makes a bagel, it’s a pretty good bet they can make a croissant as well. Not every shop that has one has the other, but they’re pretty strongly correlated. We call this correlation “baking”. This sounds like a weird way to say it. We call “this correlation” baking? It just…is baking, isn’t it? But the steps you follow aren’t literally the exact same. The procedure to make a bagel and the procedure to make a croissant happen to be similar enough, achieving similar enough ends, of interest to similar enough people, that those similarities can be compactly described by the one word “baking”. But there’s nothing special about the word “baking” uniting these on any fundamental level. The similarities came first, and the word after. Now imagine a coffee shop that’s been tasked to “achieve superbaking”. They make one bagel on Monday, ten bagels on Tuesday, and eighty million bagels on Wednesday. They’ve never made a croissant. Have they achieved superbaking?” BONUS AGI-ISH ARTICLE: here’s Gary Marcus patiently explaining why AGI still isn’t imminent despite what an awful lot of people with a vested interest in telling you otherwise might be wanting you to believe.
  • The World Is Flattened: I’m including this not because I necessarily think it’s spot-on but because, given Ted Gioia’s increasing prominence as a Cultural Thinker, it’s likely to get a lot of traction and appear in a reasonable number of people’s ‘borrowed opinions’ folder in the next few months. Following on from his superviral ‘where is culture at?’ post from 2024 in which he outlined his theory on the rise of ‘dopamine culture’, Gioia defines 2025 an era in which we have reached ‘peak flat’: “I still participate in many web platforms—I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining. Even worse, they now all feel the same. Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7. Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos. And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok—and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc. Every big web platforms feels the exact same. That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community. The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.” I agree with this broad point – what I agree with less is Gioia’s ‘THIS IS THE FAULT OF 30 TECH LEADERS’ line, which strikes me as…I don’t know, willfully ignoring the manner in which the entire world has become driven entirely by data over the past 5 decades, and this is an inevitable question of THE FCUKING BELL CURVE and automatic systems designed to optimise for market capture and how that, even if you’re Carole Cadwalldr, probably isn’t ONLY Mark Zuckerberg’s fault. Gioia also seems to suggest we’re on the verge of some sort of mass response to this and the beginning of a new era of pushback against this homogeneity…which might be true! Equally, though, it might not! Anyway, this is about 55% there, I think, and another nice datapoint to use in your ‘and this is why the small/cosy/artisanal/craft/homemade web is something we should lean into in 2025-6’ presentation. BONUS FLAT CULTURE LINK: this is an interesting piece which, while looking at Substack in particular, also nudges to the inevitable way in which audience maximisation tends inevitably towards a certain homogeneity within any given field.
  • Hanging With The MAGA Gays: Trying to keep the US politics stuff to a minimum here at the moment because, well, you don’t need another fcuking source of it, do you, but this article in GQ is not only very well-written but also feels like a perfect piece of ‘I never thought the leopards would eat MY face!’ foreshadowing. Meet the gay men who caped for Trump, who don’t believe that the TQ+ bits of the LGBTQ+ spectrum have anything to do with them, and who are presumably shocked and baffled at the stats coming out of the States this week suggesting that popular support for gay marriage has fallen across the country alongside the rise of MAGA conservatism. Again, this feels less about gay/straight and more about the unashamed return of the sense of ‘droit de seigneur’ amongst the rich and ‘beautiful’ and the feeling that, actually, social natural selection is absolutely fine as long as I am on the right side of the dividing line thankyouverymuchindeed.
  • Meet Brian Armstrong: You won’t enjoy meeting Brian, admittedly, but I think it’s important you do. Brian is CEO of crypto exchange Coinbase, and an increasingly influential figure in Washington as the Trumpian regime prepares to go all-in on digital currencies and magic beans (for reasons that are in NO WAY connected to the massive enrichment of some of the principal actors at the heart of the administration, no siree!). This profile gives some background on the man and his politics, which – and you might be surprised by this, so maybe sit down – lean towards the creation of independent, largely-unregulated tax haven city states for the super-rich! WHAT THE FCUK IS IT WITH THESE CNUTS AND THEIR WISH TO SECEDE ENTIRELY FROM SOCIETY? And, if they want to do it, can they instead do it in terminal fashion rather than through endlessly trying and failing to create their own fcuking countries? This sounds good, doesn’t it? Like the sort of thing that the world’s richest people should definitely be into? FCUK’S SAKE. ““I do think crypto has implications far beyond just payments and money,” Armstrong said during a podcast interview in August, when asked about crypto’s relationship to the Network State. He said that he’s “definitely very interested” in special economic zones—in which typically cash-strapped countries cede land to tech bros who want to play a real-life version of SimCity—and other “ways that you can tokenize real estate and actual physical land to create better forms of society…We’re actually losing freedoms,” added Armstrong, who has an estimated net worth of $8.4 billion. “So I would like us to all in crypto think about how we actually go create physical places in the world to preserve freedom over the long term. I think that’s ultimately crypto’s destiny.”
  • Human Gunk: Jay Springett makes his pitch for linguistic immortality and brings us a useful concept which sits alongside AI slop – human gunk! “Gunk is what happens when content isn’t made to inform, entertain, or create meaning, but only to be seen. It’s the accumulated, suffocating residue of media optimised for machine visibility instead of human readability. Like the filth of the Augean Stables, it has built up all across the internet over the years of the last decade or so—layer upon layer of clickbait, regurgitated press releases, SEO-padding, and engagement bait. It’s made by people, but produced like sludge. It’s all Gunk. Human Gunk…Gunk is all the awkward, keyword-stuffed sentences at the top and in the middle of every article. The personal sob stories about someone’s grandma you have to scroll past before you get to a recipe. It’s all the endless think pieces that say nothing but mention product names. It’s all the LinkedIn posts that read like they were ghostwritten by a sentient press release. It’s corporate blog spam that exists only to trap search traffic. The same five insights repackaged in a thousand different ways, all slightly worse than the last.” Or, you might argue, the latest linky newsletter containing all the same links as all the other linky newsletters (chiz chiz chiz). There’s an interesting question at the heart of Springett’s essay here as to whether the slop era is meaningfully worse, or whether it’s simply an inevitable evolution of what we’ve been doing to ourselves for a decade. Either way, gunk is a genuinely useful addition to the vocabulary of the now.
  • Why People Believe Fake Things: Ordinarily I really dislike the Q&A as a written interview format, but I will make an exception for this as the content is so interesting – this is an interview with one Flint Dibble (WHAT a name!), an archaeologist who spends time trying to debunk fake archaeological theories and who recently took on the thankless task of going on the Joe Rogan show to patiently explain to the philosopher lunkhead why, in fact, it was reasonably-unlikely that Atlantis had in fact ever existed, despite what a significant number of people inside Joe’s phone seem to think. This is fascinating throughout, and Dibble obviously has the patient of several saints – this bit is worth quoting in full, because while it’s something I think I probably instinctually ‘knew’ already it’s also the first time I’ve seen it articulated this clearly – this is in reference to science, but applies pretty universally imho: “ As soon as there’s somebody saying this entire discipline is trying to cancel me, that should be a red flag immediately. This person is probably creating a narrative of them as a savior that knows more than an entire discipline and therefore is probably full of crap. When you look at the people who actually did make major paradigm shifts in various scientific fields, they never claimed they were being canceled. Where’s Albert Einstein going on air and saying physicists are canceling me for proposing new ideas? No. Real archeologists and historians that propose new ideas are plentiful, and they’re my colleagues and friends. We talk about Galileo being burned by the Church. Galileo was not being burned by his colleagues. And so there’s a big difference there. As soon as somebody’s using that kind of language of, “I am being canceled, there’s a conspiracy against me to shut me down because these people don’t want their truth challenged,” that should immediately be a red flag. Why is this person using this kind of rhetoric? They’re only using it to convince you, rather than to convince you of the veracity of their ideas. Because what they’re doing is they’re appealing to the public rather than the experts who understand all the evidence.”
  • The Kebab / Train Station Study: Ok, so this isn’t technically much of a read (unless you REALLY enjoy reading Python scripts) but I am very much a fan of the project’s existence. James Pae came across a post on social media positing that there was a strong negative correlation between the proximity of a kebab joint to Metro stations in Paris and said kebabs being ropey, and decided to see if he could write code to test said hypothesis – this is an explanation of how he did it and what he learned. VERY geeky, but also interesting from a functional ‘how’ point of view (and even if, like me, you are a no-code moron, it’s fascinating to see how one would put this together if one were not in fact a no-code moron).
  • Cybersigilism: OOH, A NEW AESTHETIC! To me, at least – Cybersigilism is…basically it’s a sort of weird mashup of ‘cyberdog aesthetics’ and ‘death metal band logo aesthetics’, cybergoth-ish and vaguely-witchy, and I am very much a fan. “Drawing on the visual languages of HR Giger and the logos of metal bands (particularly those designed by Christophe Szpajdel), the spiderweb-like aesthetic fuses hints of cyberpunk and futurism with seemingly mystical amulets. Often, the designs look like alien vascular networks or Art Nouveau electrical currents, while appearing both organic and mechanical simultaneously. “I’ve seen people say it looks like a witch’s curse,” said Aingelblood, a tattoo artist from LA who goes by @cybersigilism on Instagram. “And honestly, I love that metaphor.” But then there are others who refer to it in more layman’s terms: Gen Z tribal.” PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can one of you spend some time attempting to get a consumer-facing brand to embrace this? Just for me?
  • The Millennial Redemption Arc: Or, “it turns out that everything feels so sh1tty now that kids are starting to express nostalgia for peak girlboss flat-design capitalism”, or “oh ZIRP era, how we miss you!”. I felt a genine pang of sadness for a generation when I read this para, ngl: “Gen Z didn’t get a real college experience. Gen Z doesn’t do happy hours with their coworkers. Gen Z doesn’t meet people outside dating apps. Every headline Gen Z reads today would have been a Millennial’s 30 Rock joke 10 years ago. While Gen Z can claim innovations like TikTok, all of Gen Z culture has been created under the thumb of some kind of existential threat, be it climate change or a coup. Gen Z has never, in other words, had their Girls era.”
  • Seeing Like A Simulation: A great (admittedly a few months old, but I missed it last year) piece in the LARB, itself a review of a new book looking back at the history of Will Wright’s seminal Sim City, the videogame that trained an entire generation of people that nuclear power was fundamentally dangerous and that mass transit probably wasn’t worth the hassle of lining up all the subways properly. What this does brilliantly is get under the hood of the (necessary) simplifications and abstractions that underpin the engine and the extent to which the nature of said simplifications and abstractions makes Sim City – as with any designed system of any kind – an innately political project by its nature.
  • Meet Billy Possum: I had, I confess, forgotten that the ‘Teddy Bear’ is a result of Theodore Roosevelt once allegedly refusing to shoot a bear; I had NEVER known that, in the early 20thC, an entrepreneurial woman named Susie W Allgood attempted to wrest the title of ‘best-loved cuddly mammalian kids toy’ from the teddy bear by creating her own alternative – BILLY POSSUM. As you might surmise from the fact that, well, you’ve never fcuking heard of him, Billy Possum was not the runaway success his creator had hoped for, but the story of how far Allgood went in attempting to Make Billy Possum Happen is a cracking one (also, the press officer in me was SCREAMING at some of the details in here). There’s a moment about halfway through the piece where they present a photo of a rare, surviving example of a Billy Possum toy, sold at auction in 2005, and you will suddenly realise that perhaps Ms Allgood was…maybe a *touch* on the delusional side, let’s say.
  • Can You Sous Vide Sausages In Condoms?: Is a rare example of a question which, before it was committed to digital ink via the medium of this blogpost, has almost certainly never been written down anywhere else in human history. The answer, by the way, is ‘yes you can, and apparently they can be quite nice too’ – but the main draw here is obviously the incredibly-phallic photos and phrases like ‘the prophylactic wiener’.
  • 10 Observations About Tokyo: Just a really nice, short piece about travel and cities and cultural differences and customs. I thought this point was particularly interesting and semi-universal (or at least, not Japan-specific): “If Tokyo is disconcertingly functional, that’s in part because it’s a parasitic organism sucking the life out of the rest of Japan. All the good jobs are here, all the opportunities, and so all the ambitious young people are here too. This one megacity is Japan’s New York, D.C. and LA all rolled into one. Living here, it’s easy to forget the huge demographic chaos Japan faces due to its collapsed birthrate and fast-aging population: stay in Tokyo and you’d never know the country has an acute shortage of young people. But the demographic sh1tshow is painfully evident the second you get out into Japan’s second- and third-tier cities: boarded-up shops, ghost neighborhoods, shuttered primary schools, abandoned houses: a Children of Men dystopia. The miraculous metropolis all around me thrives because the rest of Japan doesn’t. Every politician talks about this. None has a good idea for what to do about it.”
  • Meet Tyler Cowen: John Phipps profiles blogger and insane polymath Tyler Cowen for the Economist’s 1843 Mag – this is both really interesting and really well written, sharp without being at any point unpleasant, but, for me at least, it was also a BIT close to the bone; Cowen is significantly smarter than I am (I would not be so hubristic as to attempt a comparison), but there are…not-insignificant parts of this that I read and thought ‘oh God that feels like me…oh God that feels like me’ which is, honestly, quite odd and not wholly-pleasant (not least because the only thing worse than realising that you’re probably quite similar to someone who in many respects is…very flawed is realising you are quite similar *but also significantly less good*). Anyway, I really enjoyed this in a complicated way – oh, if you do read it, be prepared for one specific line which, if you are anything like me at all, will make you SO jealous of this man that you will have to get up from your device and go for a calming walk to regain your composure, all the while muttering ‘seriously, why can’t I be like that???’.
  • Real Tennis: We’re finishing up the longreads this week with three pieces from the new edition of Granta which really does have some cracking stuff in it – should any of these end up paywalling you then I think they are currently doing a digital-only subscription for £1, which is a frankly insane offer and 100% worth the money. This first essay is all about the famously, fabulously, eccentric sport of Real Tennis, as described by enthusiast Clare Bucknell, who writes with affection and a pleasing degree of self-awareness about the sport’s origins and the culture that surrounds it. As per usual in descriptions of Real Tennis, it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to conceive of what it looks like being played from the textual descriptions – this is no fault of Bucknell’s so much as it is the fault of the sport for being absolutely-fcuking-impenetrable (watch this if you want a quick primer) – but, honestly, that doesn’t really matter as this is all TONE AND TEXTURE AND VIBE.
  • Round One: A story about trying to conceive and, specifically, about a man having to produce a sample and not feeling quite up to it (it is not, to be clear, solely about that moment, but it *is* very funny indeed), and about the oddity of how the process of IVF sort-of divorces the biology from the practice traditionally required to achieve the outcome and how that odd disconnect plays out in a relationship…this is very good, though perhaps not one to read if this is an experience you’re currently going through.
  • Flesh: Finally this week, I think this is a stellar piece of writing by David Szalay about an age-gap relationship between a young man in Central Europe (I am going to guess at Hungary) and the woman in the nearby apartment who he helps with the shopping. Sad and poignant and funny and beautiful and weirdly sexy and simultaneously very much not, this absolutely captivated me up until the last line which caused me, and I am not exaggerating here, to let out a small, audible ‘oof’ which I think will be felt by many of you (you will know why). Please read this one, it is GLORIOUS and deserves to be shared.

By Charles Pfahl

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