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
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.
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.
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.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
