Something something throw the booky wook at him something something.
WHAT A WEEK TO BE ALIVE! A Republican defeat in the mid-terms (now would you all fcuk off and be quiet for a while, America? We have, frankly, had quite enough of you over the past couple of years, maybe just take a quiet time out while you calm down and sort your sh1t out, eh?), Russell Brand finally getting what’s been coming to him for 20 years (on which note: every fcuker in telly and ents knew, EVERYONE, and there should be a lot of people working in booking and commissioning who feel very uncomfortable today, with any justice) and the unnamed celebrity seeking to protect their anonymity against similar allegations seemingly having said anonymity taken away! THE ARC OF THE UNIVERSE ONCE AGAIN BENDS TOWARDS JUSTICE!
Take these wins while you can, because, inevitably, something awful’s going to happen next week to take the gloss off (this is not me being pessimistic, this is literally How Life Works) – still, while we can, let’s all raise a small, linky toast to those occasional rare moments when the bad guys don’t come out on top.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re still in time to blow the whistle on the men in YOUR industry who everyone knows have been getting away with it for years.
By Dickkk_O
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT KATY PERRY MAKES OF IT ALL, PT.1:
- Zig Zag FM: This is, I promise you, an absolute TREAT and a link it’s entirely possible you might get stuck on (but, er, don’t get stuck! I’m about to spend the next five fcuking hours typing and it would be a genuine shame were that all to be for naught!) – via Andy Baio, Zig Zag Fm is a genuinely beautiful idea, a music discovery website in which you explore different songs and genres via the singular (and, admittedly, incredibly inefficient) mechanic of ‘piloting a small 2d ship over a pixellated OCEAN OF SOUND’. So basically (this is *slightly* harder to describe than it is to experience) you’re presented with a top-down view of a simple ship afloat in a vast ocean; the ocean is ALL OF THE WORLD’S MUSIC, and you can navigate around it to discover islands of sonic similarity, genre archipelagos, odd outlying rock formations in the vast, uncharted Straits of Noise…as you go you can add tracks to your personal playlist, and if you stumble across other intrepid navigators you can, should you choose, listen to whatever they happen to be listening to, tuning into the sounds of their exploration or sharing your own. Make playlists, share playlists, explore, listen, meet people and have small, low-impact interactions…honestly, this really is absolutely delightful and it’s *such* a nice build on the general ‘here’s a navigable genre map of music’ thing which has been going since the canonical ur-example of ‘Every Noise At Once’ from, Jesus, some 15 years ago. I promise you, this really is quite gorgeous (and if you like you can read an interview by Kris with its creator here). BONUS MUSIC GENRE MAP THINGY!: This is called Hyphae, and is a navigable, er, genre map of music, just like wot I said. It’s slop-y, but pretty – but, basically, significantly less-interesting than ZigZag which I really do suggest you play with immediately.
- Grand Theft Bluesky: BLUESKY’S BACK! Or at least it is if you believe everyone libbing out on the TL, declaring it a new renaissance for the network (it isn’t a new renaissance, text-based shortform social media is still not what most people in the world want and Bluesky will remain the niche interest of the special interest, bullied-at-school crowd – of which, for the avoidance of doubt, I am a part) – so what better way to celebrate that while you wait for all of your available attention and free time to be sucked up by GTAVI than to spend some time hanging out on a website which turns your Bluesky feed into, er, a janky-as-fcuk navigable 3d city through which you can walk and drive and bumble and saunter! There are different districts corresponding to different areas of the Bluesky ecosystem – a queer zone, a furry zone, an 18+zone for all the feetpics, d1ckpics, Alf Hog and yiffing, you can see posts represented as posters and billboards, you can chat to people…there’s something actually kind of interesting about the base concept here, I think, and it’s probably slightly more fun and engaging than I have just made it sound – go and have a wander. NB – to the best of my knowledge, the GTA-ness stops short of the world including firearms, which sadly means that you’re not able to strut around virtually gunning down all the people you hate-follow, which let me just say is a crying shame.
- What Is It Like To Be A Fly?: Ok, this is SUCH a clever and interesting idea, and a prime example of ‘when making websites with Claude can be a good thing, actually’. You know how they encoded a fly’s brain, neuron-by-neuron? Well my friend Andrew Sheerin has taken that brain and turned it into an instructional website which explains how that information relates to ‘being’ a fly, presented as a faux-old textbook and guiding you through the experience of Embodying Drosophilia: “It has lately become possible to know a fly completely. Every one of its 139,255 nerve-cells has been located, named and joined to its neighbours, so that the fly may now be read as plainly as a railway timetable! In the exercises which follow, the student will first observe the specimen, and then become it; and if he attends closely to the record, he will find there is nothing whatever in a fly that he cannot do.” You flick through the faux-book, and as you read there are various interactive elements which explain which neurons are tied to which movements, and the whole thing, honestly is both interesting and engaging – and would have been SO much work (and so hard) without the heavy lifting of The Machine. Andrew explained to me how it was built: “When I heard of FlyWire I had this impression there was an entire digital brain somewhere you could just prod and get behaviour out of. That made me think of Nagel and the link between understanding and experience and I saw something there that was relevant to the current discourse about whether AI could be conscious etc. So I had this idea for a story game based on that impression of the model but when I dug into it, that’s not what the FlyWire connectome is at all; it’s just a map of neurons and behaviour is a completely separate piece…essentially I ended up turning to simulations like Desktop Fly to see what behaviours were reliably mapped and from those – basic motor response, feeding, grooming, looming threat take off – I built a story around it and used the Desktop Fly code for most movements. The feeding response was run on a different simulation (Shiu et al) and I just kept 3 runs that looked like they could be replicated by key presses and randomised those. After establishing where I was going to lean on science and where to divert, the rest was then just sketching some layouts, deciding on the basic game controls, designing a fly and then handing it over to Claude.” Seriously, click and play and marvel at quite what an astonishing artefact this is.
- The Tiny World of Tiny Maps: Via Lynn’s excellent newsletter of AI gubbins, I had totally missed the fact that the person who did the Tiny London pixel map from a few weeks back has now created a world map of all the *other* tiny pixelmaps of different cities, so you can use this as a jumping off point via which to explore a tiny, pixellated version of (eg) Barcelona or Tashkent (no Rome yet, pull your fingers out, my people!) – I know these are a formula now and there’s (relatively) minimal artistry involved in their creation by this point but, well, I can’t help but enjoy peering from a godlike perspective on a 16-bit representation of urban life, and maybe you also share this slight, benign perversion.
- Twelve Seconds Later: Are you REALLY into planes? Do you find contemplating the history of human flight a transportative, near-erotic experience? Are you prone to boring friends and family with detailed analyses of the aileron profile of the Sopwith Camel? Welcome, in that case, to your new Happy Online Place, a website made by Turkish developer Ilker Kurtel (and some hefty AI assistance, judging by a lot of the copy) which basically presents you with a detailed history of ALL OF THE PLANES EVER (ok, not quite, but lots of the ones which were major milestones in the history of Us vs Gravity) – information (including detailed deep-dives into each plane and the people behind it), images, detailed (interactive) diagrams of how their, er, joysticks work (I confess that my personal enthusiasm for planes is…not that great, so I am possibly skipping over some deep and important nuance here, but, well, you will forgive me I hope) and – and this is the REALLY cool bit – offers you the chance to have a go at doing a takeoff and landing with EVERY SINGLE ONE thanks to 3d interactive simulations which you can launch from the webpage, letting you experience the glorious skin-of-the-teeth thrill the Wright Bros did back in 1903, or maybe to try your hand at making a terrifyingly-massive Airbus stay in the sky. This is FUN, honestly, even if you couldn’t possibly give less of a fcuk about what an ‘aileron’ actually is.
- What Shape Is AI?: It’s quite possible that many of you have a Gut Feeling about this – how would YOU draw the concept of AI, given the chance? Would you attempt to render it as the Lovecraftian Shoggoth of long-held analogy, or something (even) more insidiously evil? Maybe you think it it as an cuddly-but-sinister companion, Meta’s Jolly avatar with Labubu teeth (Christ, that’s a sentence that simply could not have been written a few years ago, and perhaps, on reflection, it never should have been)? Regardless, this website is inviting the world to DRAW AI! Here’s the explanation: “they call it “intelligent”. they say it is everywhere. yet no one has ever seen it. What happens when multiple shapes of ai are imagined together? This experimental archive is a playful invitation to build a collective imaginary of ai. Not by asking what artificial intelligence really is, but by attending to the different shapes through which it becomes imaginable, and to the affects that gather around them..it began from a conversation with a group of high school students in the south of switzerland in october 2026.Before explaining how ai works, where its infrastructures are located, or what systems sustain it, i asked them a different question: “what shape does ai have, for you? and what emotion comes with it?”” I rather like this – add your own interpretation! Shout out to whoever it was who drew Orwell’s ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’.
- The Sounds Of The Planet: On the one hand, this is *quite* Claudesloppy; on the other, I really am a sucker for a data sonification project and I do like the noises this website makes, and the idea behind it is interesting and smart even if the execution on-page is…depressingly-generic-feeling. This site takes live (or as-live as is possible) data from all sorts of different sensors around the world – seismographs, tidal information, solar radiation monitors – and uses that information to create a constant, evolving soundtrack generated in realtime. “Live earthquakes, solar wind, ocean swell, tides and the space station, played as sound and sent as MIDI. Every note is a real event: a quake, a solar flare, the sun rising over Lagos. Filter sweeps follow the actual solar wind, the drone bends with real tides. Listen, play along, or take the raw data into your DAW.” I have this playing in the background as I type this, and while it’s unlikely to get you out of your seat dancing or have tears streaming down your face in emotional transport (unless you have a very particular set of cues for dancing or tears), it’s surprisingly coherent and not-unpleasant, and, personally, turning data into sound is something I love as a concept and as such I think this is quite ace (but, also, I really do wish all these websites didn’t all look and feel like *this* these days).
- Dither’s House: Another site culled from Lynn, this is an interesting little experiment which I am mainly including because I really like the style in which it’s rendered (machine-y though it is). Kevin Ngo is running an experiment – he has an AI agent doing ‘shopping’ for a virtual apartment, based on crowdsourced recommendations of what it should buy to decorate and improve its imaginary living space (there’s no real money at play here and no real purchasing – and, obviously, no real apartment – but the bot ‘shops’ at real stores so the things it is ‘buying’ correspond to real-world objects), which is then rendered on this website for you to look at; per his explanatory post on X, “My bot Dither is building its first home and needs your help. Every post interaction gives it pretend money to shop for furniture, art, and impulse buys. Reply with what it should buy next. Its house is linked below.” It ‘earns’ additional monies based on the number of interactions the original post gets on X – new followers, say, or likes – and the experiment will continue as long as there are funds; there’s something quite cute about the way it’s shaping its virtual living space, and there’s something pleasingly Little Computer People-adjacent to the whole thing imho.
- TimeTube: Ooh, this is a clever little tool – TimeTube lets you scrub back through a YouTube channel’s history so that you can see the way in which it has changed over time – you can see what all the thumbnails looked like in 2022 vs now, say, or how the way in which the video names have shifted, which is a BOON if you’re looking into, say, the ebb and flow of yassified YT imagery, or the point at which Mr Beast really *did* lose the light in his eyes forever. This is useful for journalists and anyone who’s interested in How YouTube Works, How Channels Operate and How That Changes Over Time.
- 1 in 65 Million: This was sent to be by its developer, Ava, who writes: “1 in 65 Million is a free browser game about living a randomly assigned life in Thailand. You start with a different birthplace and family background, then make choices around school, work, relationships, money, health, and family as the years go by. It is a small, thoughtful project about how much a life can change from its starting point. It runs in the browser, and you can save multiple characters and continue across devices.” This is…ALMOST a really brilliant project; there’s something pleasingly Alter Ego-ish about the scope of it, and I love the idea of taking decisions across a whole lifespan and seeing how your actions and decisions play out, but…it doesn’t *quite* hit the brief; part of this is, I think, just cultural stuff that I don’t understand about growing up in Thailand, specific customs and traditions and ways in which society is structured which I simply don’t get – but part of it is also the sense that not all the systems interact with each other properly, that the game doesn’t necessarily remember all your actions, and that there’s quite a lot of it that feels…just a bit random and arbitrary (although, well, that’s life! RIGHT KIDS????); I wonder how much of this is a result of there being AI in the mix and how much is just ‘young person makes game for first time’ – either way, this is a potentially great idea that is more interesting than brilliant, but I definitely think it’s worth spending 5-10 minutes with because there’s a really good idea here which, I think, could be built on quite successfully (also I learned a LOT about the Thai school system, which, well, is unlikely to ever benefit me, but I am sort-of glad about regardless).
- Race Replay: Whilst I am obviously *thrilled* that one of My People has apparently won the F1 driver’s championship, I remain of the opinion that Formula 1 is the dullest sport in the entire fcuking world (and also that Drive To Survive is the greatest piece of PR ever, given that it has seemingly managed to make ‘group of men who drive round and round and round, admittedly very fast, for a living’ apparently seem like an interesting, sexy and thrilling time for millions of viewers – HOW???) – still, if you are more invested in the THRILLING antics of large-necked dullards with a speed fetish than I am then you will perhaps enjoy this website, which lets you relive every single exciting moment of every single thrilling race to date this season via the medium of top-down recreations of each (and others going back 5 years or so): “Each replay is built from F1’s live timing: every car’s position about four times a second, its speed, gear and pedals, and the official timing, flags and pit stops. It comes from F1’s own archive or, for races the archive no longer serves, from OpenF1 (2023 on), which republishes the same data, and from TracingInsights’ copies of the archive (2018 to 2022), made with FastF1. Results and grids for those years are Jolpica’s.” This is boring as fcuk as far as I am concerned, but is also something that F1 should really have done themselves, which feels like a miss.
- Paint in Oils: ANOTHER AI-enabled painting app not unlike the watercolours toy from last week, but this time letting you daub in oils. This is another one of those ‘one layer of interface too many’ websites – picking up a virtual brush and dipping it in virtual paint might *look* cool, but it does not, it turns out, massively-facilitate detailed brushwork (or it doesn’t if you’re me) but this is undeniably quite soothing to mess around with and there’s something very pleasing about the way the paint renders.
- Cybersoda: A TINY NEW SOCIAL NETWORK! This is VERY cute in a sort of 8-bit. mini-Myspace sort of way; its creator, Shoggi, sent it to me, saying: “i made cybersoda.blog, a free social blogging site that works like the 2004 internet: profiles with your own css (or a whole custom html page), top 8s, guestbooks, hit counters, an oekaki board, quizilla-style quizzes and an 88×31 button maker. the newest bit is that tiny pixel bugs sometimes crawl out while you browse and you can catch them. no ads or algorithm, just me building it.” There’s already a small community of like-minded nerds on there, and I think there’s something genuinely charming about the featureset and look/feel of the whole thing which makes it worth exploring a bit imho.
- Subvocal: On the one hand, this is quite an interesting idea; on the other, this is NEVER a long-lasting, actual, successful product and, also, I don’t quite understand how it will be possible to use it without looking quite, quite mad. Subovcal is a company marketing MAGIC TRANSCRIPTION GLASSES (yes, I know, bear with me), which will let you silently dictate to them without speaking out loud: as the pitch goes, “write at the speed of speech, without speaking out loud. Subvocal decodes almost-invisible subtle, silent mouthing into text at 200+ WPM.” So, er, this works by you basically mouthing wordlessly into the ether and…what, filming your lips?! Just imagine for a second – you’re sitting on the tube, dictating your novel silently to your glasses while the person sitting opposite you looks on in rapt horror and the wrongman vocalising wordlessly into space…no, this is ridiculous and you will never, ever hear of it again.
- Spelunkr: Based on the number of websites I’ve seen in the past 18 months that are, basically, “linear retro TV in your browser” I think we can safely say that there is…some small demand, at least, for a contraction of choice and the infinite pool of dreck we’re all confronted with when we open a streaming app in 2026. So it is with Spelunkr, another variant on the theme, which (if you will excuse the horrid Claudeslop copy here) shows: “monster movies. classroom films. detectives. cartoons older than your grandparents. somebody’s vhs tape of a saturday morning in 1989, commercials and all. You don’t pick what plays. you tune in, and whatever is on is on, for you and for everyone else on that channel, at the same second. that’s how television worked. we didn’t invent it. we missed it. What it costs. nothing. no account to watch. no ads. nothing to buy. Whose tapes these are. not ours. every tape plays from the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that kept all of this when nobody else would. spelunkr serves no video of its own. your browser plays the Archive’s file. under every title the player says “via archive.org”, and that tag opens the tape’s own page at the Archive, where you can see who uploaded it.” This is fun, and pleasingly varied, and kitsch and the sort of thing I can imagine playing soundlessly on TVs in a Certain Type of Late-Night Bar.
- Light A Paw: Ok, this really is PURE CLAUDESLOP (sorry), and I wouldn’t ordinarily include it because, honestly, fcuk things that look like this at this point, but…well, look, this is an AI-generated 3d memorial for people’s pets and I am SO CURIOUS. Basically you click the link and get dumped into some sort of memorial chapel thing where people can upload photos and memories of their departed, beloved animal companions – visitors can leave little tributes to the deceased, light candles, and just wander round and browse the memories…but, because it’s AI and we can trust NOTHING in 2026, part of me wonders…are these memories real? Were they just spun up by The Machine as part of the site creation process to make it *look* like a vibrant, living (er, you know what I mean) community? IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE TO TELL ANYMORE? Anyway, you might find this DEEPLY EMOTIONALLY RESONANT or pathetic and mawkish in the extreme – either way, should you want to look at some photos of other people’s dead pets then HERE YOU GO!
- The 2026 Good Dog Photo Contest: This is basically an antidote to the last link – none of these dogs are, to the best of my knowledge, dead.
THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHAT KATY PERRY MAKES OF IT ALL, PT.2:
- The Real Reformer: For Tedious Professional Reasons I have to spend rather more time than I would like exploring the awful posts and awful opinions of racists on the internet, which means that my personal appetite for keeping up with all the different ways in which Reform are an awful bunch of dreadful cnuts led by a frog-faced racist ashtray is…small. Still, if you’re the sort of person who really enjoys learning about all the DREADFUL THINGS they do then you might enjoy this project by Chris Barker, based on the fact that Reform are paying to distribute their own propaganda paper to UK households; this website is effectively a daily news bulleting highlighting the top 3 ‘wow, these people are dreadful cnuts!’ stories from the past 24h, presented in pleasing tabloid frontpage fashion (perhaps unsurprisingly, Chris has yet to struggle for material). This is a bit #fbpe-coded for me personally, but I figure some of you might be into it.
- The Ultimate Grand Designs Map: A note for the non-Anglos; Grand Designs is a long-running UK TV show which combines the English obsessions of a) property; b) immense schadenfreude; and c) a weirdly-masochistic desire to spend your leisure time watching people with far more disposable income than you dispose of said income. Each show follows (usually a couple of) ordinary people who have decided to embark upon the borderline-insane task of building their own home, often to their own, batsh1t set of baroque specifications, over the course of what is often several years, until the property is finally completed and the wreckage of the couple’s marriage is but a dusty memory in the rearview mirror (not always, but often). This website is a map of ALL of the different property builds that have ever been on the show, aerial pics, a bit of data analysis about costs and the like…all of which is actually a smart bit of PR by some guy who makes a living advising on this sort of stuff. This is a really clever idea, well done that man.
- The Calcuseum: I know, I am sorry, but it’s what the site is called and, well, who am I to deprive you of this specifically-horrible neologism? This site is a museum of electronic calculators throughout history, and it is *exactly* as you might expect. THERE ARE SO MANY ELECTRIC CALCULATORS IN HERE. Pleasingly, the man (ok, I am guessing here but, realistically, it’s probably a guy) who runs this actually OWNS all of these devices and is looking for a physical space to house them so that you can go and experience their majesty in the, er, plastic – FINGERS CROSSED, EVERYONE!
- All Of The Trains: “Welcome to the Mobility Portal by geOps. Our portal combines maps of many aspects of public transport and mobility in general, e.g. real-time vehicle positions, line network plans, transit-maps, fare networks, location and detailed information on stations.” REAL-TIME VEHICLE POSITIONS! Ok, it’s not *all* of the world’s trains but it looks like a lot of them, and if you have ever thought how much you would like to observe global rail transit from on high like some sort of GOD OF RAIL (and,honestly, who hasn’t? NO FCUKER, etc etc!) then you will enjoy this very much.
- Lou’s Telephone: I don’t quite understand what is going on here, but I quite like it – I *think* this is some marketing for a musician called Lou, who is French. The link presents you with a mocked-up iPhone, whose homescreen you can unlock to explore different bits of the interface – the messages, the whatsapps, acces to files – and through this you can hear little song fragments to give you a teaser as to the sound of the album… play around enough and you’ll get a ‘call’ from Lou herself, telling youtube album’s out on 20th November. The music is…dull, frankly, and generically-trappy (but, French!), but I really like the gimmick being used here and it’s nicely done (although if I’m nitpicking – and when am I ever not? – it could do with another layer or two of stuff to explore and find imho, it feels maybe only 75% finished) and it’s worth checking out (for inspiration if nothing else).
- The Museum of Motion: Ooh, this is nice – another link for which I need to thank Lynn, this one is a really nice collection of different examples of on-page movement design facilitated by a pack of AI skills called ‘Animaxxing’ (and, look, if those words mean nothing to you then just click the link and just enjoy the lovely animations and motion graphics in piece, it is FINE), Some of these are really very cool indeed; if we’re going to use AI to build websites (and we obviously are) can we use it to make more fun, pretty stuff like this rather than the standard Claudeslop, please?
- A Guy Snorkels: This is the YouTube channel of one Joseph Ricketts, whose YT bio reads ‘I snorkel pretty much anywhere” and, well, he really fcuking does. If you’re interested in gentle videos featuring a lot of first-person video of a man snorkeling in various habitats and narrating what he sees – “oh look, a really weird turtle!” – then OH MY will you enjoy this. Much as I hate this word, the term ‘wholesome’ really does seem to apply here (please do not milkshake duck yourself, Joseph Ricketts!).
- Arkivism: On the one hand, “searchable frontend for all the world’s public domain images” is in no way a new idea; on the other, this new(ish) variant on that theme, Arkivism, is a nice example of the genre; there’s some AI under the hood which makes the search function pleasingly-fuzzy – I just asked it for ‘people looking quizzical’ and it delivered in spades – and, generally, this seems both functional and benign (Jesus, were it possible to say that more often) (also, should the person who made this ever stumble across this small writeup, PLEASE feel free to use ‘functional and benign’ in all of your marketing).
- Weather FM: Another bit of data sonification here, this time taking your local weather data (cloud cover, temperature, humidity, etc) and using that to create a DYNAMIC SOUNDSCAPE. “weather fm is an experiment in listening as a method for tuning into the weather. It turns your local meteorological data into a live ambient composition, with visuals emerging from your coordinates.” At the moment the weather here in London is cold, vaguely-damp and fundamentally-uninspiring, with a sky the colour of steel wool, and as such the accompanying soundtrack is…not exactly inspiring, but should you be reading this in the Southern Hemisphere I assume yours will basically be Sunchyme by Dario G.
- The Baseball Walk Up Song Database: I might have mentioned here before that I consider baseball to be only marginally-less-tedious than F1 in terms of ‘sports I would rather sandpaper my knees than ever watch’; as such, I don’t really know much about the traditions of the game, and the fact that players all have songs which are played out as they approach the, er, batter’s…thing? Plate? Anyway, this website is a collection of ALL OF THE PLAYERS and ALL OF THEIR MOST SPECIAL SONGS, which is how I learned that a frankly amazing seven players currently use ‘The Chain’ by Fleetwood Mac as their tune. What would YOU pick? I am personally torn between ‘something by Napalm Death’ and ‘Yakkity Sax’, but please feel free to speculate as to what you might pick given the option.
- Timelines Wiki: Ok, this is, fine, ostensibly INCREDIBLY boring, but it’s also the sort of thing I can imagine one or two of you (maybe) finding both useful and interesting, and, as ever, I do it for YOU, you adorable freaks. This is a Wiki of Timelines – a bunch of different topics across different areas and disciplines arranged as chronological timelines – so, for example, you can explore a chronological history of Amazon Web Services (YES YOU KNOW HOW TO LIVE!) or, I don’t know, one of the concept of the quantified self. Why? I HAVE NO CLUE!
- Open Pitch: It’s fair to say that if you’re someone with the general misfortune to work in advermarketingpr, times are…tough right now. There’s no money, AI has eviscerated the ‘our studio makes content’ model that so many agencies spent much of the past decade building out, and you can’t even make a convenient, parasitic 10% off influencer engagement or ad buying because the platforms have all cut out the middleman. There is not a lot of business going round – which, perhaps, might make Open Pitch worth a look; it’s a directory of people and businesses for the ‘creative’ (broadest sense) industries, and while there’s a LOT of AI in the copy, it does promise that every single submission is reviewed by a Real Person to ensure the quality of suppliers on there; there’s an interesting gimmick in how they present results, with any company or individual that gets 5 organic clicks being rotated to the back of the pack til the end of the month (although I have just realised you can pay to minimise this, which, well, makes me feel considerably less well-disposed to this, frankly) – look, if you’re desperate then this might be worth a look, although, if I’m honest, it does feel like the game might be up for a significant proportion of the apparently-3million ‘creative strategists’ seeking employment in the UK right now.
- Joe Marbles: DO YOU LIKE MARBLES??? Not as much as Joe did, I promise you. This is a quite INCREDIBLE repository of information about, er, marbles, maintained by one man who was really into them and who died a few years ago, and whose hobby/passion/obsession (all of the above) is commemorated and memorialised here – I, er, can’t pretend not to have teared up a bit at the ‘about’ description here (but, equally, I have had something of an Emo Week, no idea why): “This site was created by Joe Street, who passed away in 2020. Joe was admired in the marble collecting community as a passionate and generous person. Joe created this site with help from others in the hobby, and we are keeping it alive both for his memory and the public’s benefit…Welcome to joemarbles.com. This site is designed for and dedicated to the beginner mibologist. Mainly it is an identification site, thus there are tons of photos. Hopefully you will find it useful in figuring out what “that” marble is. In case you aren’t able to id a particular marble don’t get too hung up on it, a friend of mine is fond of saying “sometimes it’s just a pretty marble”. May we all leave as generous a legacy as Joe Marbles.
- The Drawn Feet Wiki: Look, I don’t want to imply that anyone is lying on the internet or anything, but in much the same way that I don’t believe that most people who talk about being ‘scared of clowns’ are actually scared of clowns at all, I also don’t believe that the feet pics thing is real – like, I know that *some* people find feet particularly erotic, but, equally, I simply don’t believe that they are as common an erogenous zone as Current Online Discourse would have you believe (alternatively, of course, I am merely showing off my Tediously-Vanilla Bedroom Stylings, which, ok, FINE). Still, should you number among the people who ACTUALLY get off on toes – but one who inexplicably finds that Real Feet don’t do it for them, and who instead prefers, er, cartoon or anime feet – then WOW is this website going to make you happy (exactly how you choose to express that ‘happiness’ is a secret which I am happy for you to keep to yourself). Look, if this is what it takes to get you off then, well, that’s fine – BUT I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.
- Brown Trombone: This is somehow simultaneously more and less-disgusting than the name makes it sound. You remember that Pink Trombone website from a few weeks ago that was designed to mimic the movements of the mouth/throat in speech? Well this is the same, but for the sphincter and buttocks, to help you realistically mimic the mechanics of flatus. YOU’RE WELCOME – you can thank Giuseppe Sollazzo for this, who emailed me yesterday with the link and knew full well that I wouldn’t be able to resist linking to it.
- Fine, Whatever: I don’t really know what this is, but I really liked it. It’s 3-5 minutes, and you just sort of wander around…but it’s funny and weird and cute and…strangely-emotional, although I couldn’t quite explain why, and I think it’s a really worthwhile bit of tiny webart that’s worth exploring.
- Continuum: A little top-down puzzle shooter that looks and feels almost exactly like something you might have played on the Apple II c.1984, from the graphics to the overall feel, and while it’s slow and clunky it’s also…quite fun, in an oldschool sort of way.
- Key Lime Slime: A little 8-bit-style puzzle game where you have to collect keys and open doors, and which I spent an enjoyably-frustrated 10 minutes with when I found it.
- Multiplayer Asteroids: Fine, this is, once again, pretty much total Claudeslop; equally, though, it’s chaotic and fun, if largely a total mess, and it’s worth playing for 5 cathartic minutes as you blast, and get blasted, to smithereens.
- Need For Speed Unlimited 2: Our final game of the week is another decompiled browser port from The Past, but FCUK ME is this a good one. You want the entirety of street racing ‘sim’ (not, in any way, a sim) Need For Speed Underground: 2? You want all of its mid-00s XXXXXTREEEMMMMMEEEE stylings, you want its soundtrack, you want the fully-voiced single-player campaign, multiplayer, the whole deal? OH GOOD! Honestly, this is amazing, and even more amazingly it runs perfectly-acceptably on my dogsh1t laptop, meaning you can probably play this quite comfortably on your phone if you like, and, well, this is your afternoon GONE if you’re not careful.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Ink Spill: Not, in point of fact, a Tumblr! But you don’t care and neither do I! Designations are MEANINGLESS! Ahem. This is the website of Michael Maslin, New Yorker cartoonist of nearly 5 decades’(!) vintage, where he examines the magazine’s cartoons and writes about some of the people who drew them: “In August of 2007 I began Ink Spill, dedicated to news of New Yorker Cartoonists, past and present. Ink Spill is comprised of six sections: News & Events, The New Yorker Cartoonists A-Z (a listing of bare bone bios of all cartoonists who have contributed to the magazine), Links, Posted Notes (essays on New Yorker cartoonists), From the Attic (artifacts related to New Yorker cartoons/cartoonists) and The New Yorker Cartoonists Library.” If you have any love for cartoons, this is GOLD.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Akira Kenda: Akira Kanda makes small felt sculptures of anthropomorphsed…stuff. Click the link, seriously, if you’re not charmed by these then you are probably dead or evil or something.
- Crap In Charity Shops: An Insta feed dedicated to, er, crap in UK charity shops. Christ I love this stuff – a previous partner and I used to have a WONDERFUL collection of poignant, terrible charity shop mugs (sample design: “Ain’t Nobody Got Thyme For That” – WHY? WHO MADE THAT????) and this made me briefly nostalgic for my “I Love You Granddad” cup.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Welcome To Chud Nuremburg: WHAT a phrase – honestly, take a bow Ryan Broderick, possibly one of the best of 2026. This is the Garbage Day take on the US Midterms (yes, well done America, we are all very proud of you, but a) make sure you carry this same energy into 2028 please; and b) would…would you mind fcuking off and fixing your country quietly and just SHUTTING THE FCUK UP for a couple of years, please? I am very, very tired), which makes the excellent – if admittedly contestable – point that this marks the end of the Long Gamergate era, and the perceived ability to dominate the US electorate and political discourse via the medium of manipulating large numbers of terminally-online young men (which, honestly, thank God). You can read a longer, more involved and less-fun expansion of this thesis in 404 Media’s own analysis (and another one here in WIRED), but there’s been a lot of talk about how this proves that the recent ‘X is so back!’ chat was all a lie and that it’s just a right-wing echochamber that has no impact on real life and…I don’t know, I know we WANT to think that that is true right now, and certainly the increasingly weird obsessions of the Ultra-Online Maga-adjacent Creeps aren’t either representative or cutting through, but, equally, let’s not pretend that this is ALL OVER and we have done a sudden volte-face and that we’re all going to gambol happily across the partition to the sunlit Bluesky uplands where we’ll all Von Trapp the Nazis to death; I think this additional piece in Vox, about how, basically, culture war stuff is always going to take a backseat to economic stuff feels very true, and I would argue the real test of whether there has in fact been any sort of significant meaningful long-term shift in the propensity of the US electorate to ‘vote cnut’ is to see what happens in the next election in which people can afford petrol and eggs (of course, there may never be another of those, in which case FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY SPACE COMMUNISM BABY).
- Cyberattacks As Physical Threats: This is a decent Bloomberg piece which actually preempted this week’s new wave of ‘hey look, if you connect all your freezers to the web then people can absolutely fcuk with them remotely’-type incidents, but which is worth reading as a decent overview of all the different ways in which a bunch of kids with access to some reasonably-decent models and compute can do some genuinely-terrifying things to national-level infrastructure with a few million tokens and some malicious intent. On the one hand, obviously it’s REALLY annoying to have to adjust temperatures on fridges manually; on the other, well, this. Without wishing to be alarmist, it does increasingly feel like something is going to go very, very wrong somewhere before too long as a result of this stuff.
- Does The EU Have A France Problem?: I have over the years regularly joked about the propensity of the French electorate to edge the far right at election time, bringing them to the very brink before laughing, winking and, in the final reckoning, choosing to, er, bring off a centrist candidate instead (sorry, that analogy really falls apart, turns out, but I am nothing if not willing to live with my horrible, misshapen linguistic mistakes, and so ONWARDS!) – it does rather seem, though, that next year they might finally consummate the relationship and let the fash all the way in, so to speak (again, sorry). This is a really interesting piece – entirely let down by my childish and entirely-unsuitable preamble – about the extent to which much of the European Union project might be undermined should Le Pen’s merry band of racists get into the Elysee next year based on their plans to absolutely reconfigure France’s relationship with the EU and, specifically, the amount of money the country pays into European coffers. This is another one to file under ‘hmm, this feels quite concerning and like quite a large oncoming train which we might not be able to do anything about’.
- How AI Detectors Are Changing Writing: Thanks to Pangram – written up by every single media outlet in the world as an INFALLIBLE MAGIC AI TELL, despite being nothing of the sort, well done tech media ffs! – certain shifts in the way in which people tend to write can now be observed; the slow death of the em-dash (literally noone apart from American journalists cares, give a fcuk, honestly), the rejection of ‘it is not just x; it’s x’ phrasing, greater attempts from writers to break from their slavish devotion to tripartite sentence construction in a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from The Machine…The thing about this that slightly boils my p1ss is that we now have apparently largely-effective textual watermarking from both Anthropic and OpenAI…but the public don’t have access to these tools! In fact, access is by application only (still waiting for mine, despite telling them I am a JOURNALIST and everything, the cnuts), which…I don’t know, slightly undermines the whole fcuking point of having working watermarks. Anyone would think that perhaps these companies don’t actually want to give people the opportunity to discriminate in favour of the human-penned – WHODAFCUKINGTHUNKIT?!
- You’re Probably Already Listening To AI Music: SORRY ABOUT THAT! This is a really good piece in Dazed about a selection of young artists making hiphop-adjacent music who are quite happy to talk about the fact that they’re using AI in their creative process, arguing that it’s a tool like any other and one which requires skill to wield it properly; as one of them puts it, ““Anyone can go on a browser and access [Suno], it’s even more accessible than auto-tune ever was. So, why am I outshining everyone?” There’s a bit of back and forth here about ‘ethics’, etc, but the simple fact is that these things are ubiquitous now, and, if you’re a kid in a bedroom and you want to make music, and you want to have access to the greatest array of tools and processes, and you’re not a purist about it then of course you’ll be playing with this stuff, why wouldn’t you?
- The Hipster Is Coming Back: Ok, I don’t *know* that that’s true – and based on my oft-referenced terrible track record of predicting anything at all about the future, it probably isn’t! – but that’s basically what I am inferring from this piece in Harper’s which looks at the terrifyingly-fast WHEEL OF NOSTALGIA and finds it now pointing squarely at the early-10s – so, apparently, skinny jeans are coming BACK, and my short-lived stint at the very bullseye of the fashion zeitgeist (achieved by the incredible hack of dressing EXACTLY the same way for three decades, more or less) is soon to be over, and we can doubtless expect a full-on Von Dutch and moustache revival which will, I hope, make millennials feel METHUSELAN. I also found this paragraph interesting – can you *really* not imagine, or are you, er, just not fcuking trying hard enough ffs? “While Y2K and ’90s nostalgia usually boils down to aesthetics, the desire to bring back the 2010s also involves experiences, at least for Gen Z. For the first time, my generation is experiencing a wave of nostalgia for a moment we can actually remember. When we look back at the late ’90s or 2000s, we can appreciate the fashion, but the culture of that world is completely foreign. We have no frame of reference for what life looked like beyond the warm-toned filter of early digital cameras. We don’t understand how anyone could hang out with friends without texting them first. We don’t get how we would’ve found new music, TV shows, or restaurant recommendations without some sort of algorithm. It’s a way of life we can’t really imagine.”
- The Best Inventions Of 2026: A now-regular fixture on the late-year Curios longreads list, Time Mag once again presents its BEST INVENTIONS OF THE YEAR rundown, a selection of brilliant innovations (and, ok, fine, some useless, overhyped techwank, but still) like prosthetics for darker skintones, a new, low-environmental-impact modular building system, and plant fertiliser made from, er, human p1ss. Honestly, while I know that this year has been a particularly bad one for the whole general idea of ‘technology as an ameliorating force’, at least two-dozen of the things on this list will restore a modicum of hope that things might one day get better (you’ll be dead by the time they do, but don’t let that get you down!).
- Did I Miss My Shot?: I really enjoyed this piece, by Kate Lindsay, in which she reflects on a moment of viral fame a few years back which she ‘enjoyed’ as a result of having coined the term ‘millennial pause’, and how she singularly failed to SECURE THE BAG around said moment, and what that now feels like. This is a really interesting reflection on the nature of modern algo-driven fame and the advisability or otherwise of ‘doing a Hawk Tuah’ or ‘becoming the Very Demure, Very Mindful woman, and the weird feeling of knowing you have missed an opportunity without knowing exactly what it might have been an opportunity *for*.
- The Roommate TikTok Saga: This came to me via Caitlin’s perennially-superb ‘Links’ newsletter, and, while I have largely fallen out of love with the oh-so-North American mode of journalism that I like to characterise as “I am fcuking mad, and so is everyone else in this story – JUDGE US!”, I read this with a steadily escalating sense of both amazement and also species-level dread. This is, basically, about a flatshare that got fractious and how the whole thing was exacerbated by the fact that one of the people involved is a, er, ‘TikTok Creator’ who decided to turn the minor beef into CONTENT to feed the algo – read this, and then asked yourself “HOW DID THE PEOPLE IN THIS STORY BECOME LIKE THIS? HAVE THEY NEVER LIVED IN THE WORLD BEFORE? HOW HAVE THEY ARRIVED TO THIS RIPE AGE SEEMINGLY WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING THAT THE WORLD IS POPULATED BY OTHER PEOPLE WHO AREN’T THEM?” I know that everyone under 30 is, functionally, a total fcuking moron (in the unlikely event that you are under 30 and reading this, know that this absolutely 100% includes you; I don’t mean it pejoratively, we have all been there, it’s like soiling ourselves in infancy, just a stage to pass through) but, honestly, this is deranged in a quite terrifying way.
- How To Cancel A Spotify Subscription: A useful guide from V Buckenham on some of the alternatives, should you wish to stop paying 120+ quid a month to a company that has done significant harm to the music industry and which continues to convert money into arms via former CEO Daniel Ek.
- The Tragedy of Losing Your Wikipedia Page: I really enjoyed this; a profile of some of the people who have a Wikipedia page but who are on the cusp of losing theirs due to not quite being notable enough (per the deliberations of the SHADOWY CABAL of Wikipedians who determine such things in interminable, kilometric chats on the Wiki discussion boards). There’s something rather lovely about the very human degrees of personal vanity on display – obviously I found it all quite funny, but that’s because noone’s yet seen to create a Wikipedia entry for Web Curios (ASTONISHING, let me tell you), or the Tiny Awards (you know, that might be a nice thing for someone to do actually should any of you be Secret Wikipedians); obviously if I got an entry and then someone threatened to take it away, my entire sense of self would crumble like a sandcastle beneath the tide.
- Rome’s Urban Shepherds: One of the weird qualities about Rome is that at some points it just sort of…stops; there are bits at the edges of the city where there’s a very clear dividing line between ‘here are some roads and buildings’ and ‘here are fields and trees and farms’, and it is a stark one, compared to London where the city just seems to go on forever as it slowly morphs into Essex or Surrey suburbia. This is a really interesting piece about the shepherds who still graze flocks of sheep (and goats) in some of the more liminal areas of the outer city, a wonderful reminder of the fact that as recently as 80 years ago large swathes of the city were rural, swamp or slum. I am, inexplicably, feeling some fairly deep nostalgia for Rome this week and this really brought it home.
- Inside Aardman: Everyone’s favourite plasticine-botherers Aardman Animations, they of Wallace and Gromit fame, get the LRB treatment here thanks to an exhibition about the company’s history currently going on at the Young V&A in London which gets a writeup here. This is a lovely piece, taking you through the company’s beginnings to its current position as the darlings of (mostly) analogue animation; I really enjoyed the section about the company’s significant 80s work in brand advertising, not least as it reminded me of some absolutely classic spots (anyone not familiar with them, take a moment to look up the Aardman Lurpak ads on YouTube, which, honestly, were SO good and utterly charming in a way ads so rarely are). Does rather feel like paying cash for this sort of work is pretty much the easiest brand win in 2026’s performative AI hatred era (this is my favourite maximalist example of the trend towards handmade animation btw).
- In Praise of the Dilettante: Look, I can’t lie – I read this and spent a lot of time thinking “IT ME!” – ok, fine, mainly for the less-flattering bits of the depiction, the ones around the inability to really apply oneself to a single thing, the, er, magpie-ish approach to engagement with the world, but, still, I AM A DILETTANTE AND PROUD! “It is a life liberated from specialisation, instrumentalisation and meritocratic bean-counting, as well as from a Protestant work ethic that is suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Arguments denigrating specialisation in education and vocation are well known, as are those championing well-roundedness and the virtues of the liberal arts. Though similar in spirit, this defence of dilettantism is less about the purpose or outcomes of academic or professional life and more about making the mental switch away from the socially conditioned pressure to find your thing and stick with it to an open and exploratory pursuit of pluralistic interests. Reclaiming this sense of joyful experimentalism is intended to show dilettantism as a mode of abundance rather than deficiency.”
- Nae Danger: This is long, but it is BRILLIANT: on language, meaning and how dialect is more complex than often thought, with specific reference to Scots and in particular the repeated failure of US outlets to accurately appreciate what ‘nae’ connotes, and, specifically, how it differs in meaning to ‘naw’. SUPERB, and very funny indeed in places. “Enter the New York Times Crossword, which under your stewardship, Will, has become the global arbiter of America’s general knowledge, which is everyone’s general knowledge. Thanks to you, and under sufferance, I know more about baseball than cricket. And thanks to you, as I soothe myself by filling out your squares, I must every so often confront the little wound of my personal absurdism. Ah, a reference to Scots. Ah, it’s only used as glue to hold the meaningful American words together again. And ah, it’s wrong again. That my language should be treated by your crossword as most of us treat most of the world, with unchecked ignorance? Appalling! Here, where only facts and logic are supposed to count, I once again encounter the inescapable goddess: history. The betrayal, Will! Your crossword was supposed to be my diversion from all that, a place where, thinking, I did not have to think. And you have the gall to make me think, yet again, about the conditions of my own existence? The betrayal!”
- Self-Other Fcuking: This is less…confrontational than that title might suggest; instead, it’s a really very good piece on Egon Schiele, his art and his work’s relationship to the self, the other and the body in both cases. I have adored Schiele’s work ever since I was a kid, and this spoke to me quite deeply – aside from anything else, though, it’s just a really good essay about art, artist and appreciation: “Schiele drew without an eraser, so certain of his hand that lines of shoulders go through mouths, people move through each other. His pioneering use of empty space creates an emotional vacuum in which viewer and subject are trapped forever. Because they are often painted onto an empty void of canvas or paper, his subjects are not objects of decoration in a room or scene. No analogies can be made with food or consumption save that all animals are made from flesh, including Schiele himself. In many drawings and paintings, his subjects look directly at him, more often than not with contempt or other depictions of emotional strength. Sometimes he ruins or spoils their faces on purpose, making them look like dolls or puppets, which is a distorted way of simultaneously empowering himself, diffusing or making literal the emotional or erotic content of the situation, or of providing his subjects a kind of anonymity through weirdness. The results consist of a very elusive yet specific act that takes place somewhere between inquiry, play and disturbance.”
- Road Trip at the Borderland: Aube Rey Lescure returns to China to take a road trip with their father and grandmother, to the border with North Korea – this is part personal essay, part travelogue, part food diary, and it is a fascinating picture of a China (or perhaps more accurately ‘Chinas’) I haven’t seen depicted so much in English language writing. “My dad hooks up a video of hardcore techno from Douyin for our drive back. He meets my amused gaze and explains: “Driving is more epic this way.” I don’t tell him I feel the same about thunderous bass, a soundtrack to so many of my runs. Nainai reveals to cousin Yin, on WeChat, that she’s hidden 200 RMB under a photo frame on their dresser, for the trouble of our lunch. She hates spending money, but is constantly hiding it in others’ houses. In the oncoming dusk, we drive past the same decrepit shipyards, swampy riverside, canals behind barbed wire. “Is your grandma asleep?” my dad asks over the techno. I look over at her. Her eyes are nearly closed, but her thumb is swiping up the screen in a familiar motion. “No,” I say. “She’s watching reels.””
- The Beer Wars: No question one of the most interesting pieces I have read all week, this is a truly fascinating account of the beer industry in DRC, which becomes a history of alcohol’s role in African colonialism and the wider economics of the region – you will, as always with these sorts of pieces, come away thinking in-part ‘fcuk me does Belgium get off lightly because fcuking hell’, but you will also learn an awful lot about very particular bits of the economics of DRC, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and how, frankly, mental so much of it is (the simple story of ‘getting beer around the Congo is itself quite mad). “The beer’s trek into le Congo profond—the country’s deep interior, where roads and formal government presence do not reach—is the most profitable part of its journey. Two years ago, an armed group called Le Front Patriotique pour la Paix–Armée du Peuple even distributed a leaflet outlining its tax rates for transporting beverages through the forests of North Kivu: “case of 65Cl: Fc 3.500; case of 50Cl: Fc 5.000; case of soft drinks: Fc 5.000.” These very reasonable sums are what the commander expects to see per crate but not necessarily what the hawker pays—how else is the foot soldier going to get what’s his but by relieving this trader of a few more banknotes? After the highway turns to dirt, the crate will be taxed somewhere between eleven and twenty-two dollars among five or so militia roadblocks. This means that a few dozen armed men extract between two and four times what the national treasury does from each crate.”
- What Happened At The Peptide Party: On the one hand, this piece is published in a magazine which I have previously mocked in Curios for its tediously-laboured ‘we’re so edgy’ posturing and vibe, and I have a strong feeling the business and people behind it might be Bad News. On the other, this piece made me laugh out loud on four or five separate occasions; it is awful, funny, tragic, brutal, vapid and perfect, and I love it very much: “Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a pair of strange lumps on her hand. She noticed me noticing them, even though I had looked away quickly. She held out her hand and bent back her thumb. “Were you looking at this?” she asked. “Yeah.” “It’s a microchip,” she explained. “I got it at a tech party in Vegas. It’s FDA approved for dogs and cats, but not humans.” “What does it do?”“Give me your phone.” I pulled out my phone. She grabbed it from me and held it up to the microchip sticking out of her hand. A notification popped up on the screen. “Swipe it,” she said. I did. I swiped it. And before I knew it, the music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley was playing. I stared at her in total disbelief.”
- The Lifeline: Finally this week, Jacob Hibbard writes for Another Chicago Magazine about his experience working the phones for a suicide prevention charity; I found this…very hard to read, if I’m honest, but it’s sad and beautiful and poignant and it made me cry in what was a good way, I think.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!
- Our final song this week is one which really unexpectedly fcuked me in half – which is weird, as it’s not a sad track at all, it’s a love song, it’s pretty and it’s poppy and I don’t know why, as I have just rediscovered to my damp keyboard’s cost, that I can’t listen to the chorus at all without sobbing my eyes out. WEIRD. Probably fine! Anyway, this is “You Remind Me That I’m Dying (and that it’s good to be alive)” and it’s by The Big Moon and THAT IS IT I LOVE YOU WE ARE ALL DYING AND THAT IS OK I LOVE YOU BYE!
