I CAME BACK! Much like Jesus, I return after Easter! Tbh I probably look about as healthy he did after the tombstint too, but let’s not dwell on that. I achieved! I went to Italy, I battled The Forces of Bureaucracy, and I returned! I DID NOT KILL THE POPE!
Briefly, actually, on the bureaucracy thing, can I just share with you a small vignette from the whole ‘getting an ID card’ experience? So I lost my old one in the pub a few months back – drunk, distracted, you can imagine – along with my UK passport. Come the Monday I register the UK passport as lost and order a new one within 20m; as for the ID card…
It is, you see, technically possible to get an appointment at the Italian consulate in London to arrange for a new document; however, fcuk knows how you actually manage it. Appointments are released online on a fortnightly basis, first come first served…at 11pm on a Tuesday evening. Meaning you have to be online at 11pm on a Tuesday in the hope that when they release the 4 slots they release at a time you happen to be one of the first four people to frantically click a button and secure one of the fabled appointments. You won’t, though.
But! There is a telephone number! Except it’s only manned 3 days a week between 815am and 11am, and there is no queuing system or messaging system, which means you call up, it’s engaged, and it then hangs up on you. Over, and over, and over again.
You cannot email the consulate, naturally.
So thanks to Italian Ways (I have a friend who has a friend) I instead got an appointment at my local council offices in Rome to do it there. It cost me a flight and an airbnb, but fcukit.
I honestly nearly lost my fcuking sh1t at the council offices on the allotted day when, having turned up with all the necessary documentation, we had the following exchange:
“Did you report the old ID card as lost/stolen?”
“Yes, I did, per the consulate’s request I posted a signed declaration to them in London the week after I lost it”
“Did you bring a copy?”
“…no, because, as I told you, I posted it to them, in London.”
“Well how am I supposed to know it was stolen?”
“…because I reported it to the Italian state? Two months ago? Via the embassy? in London?” [excuse the implied vocal fry, but I was getting…irked at this point]
“Well there’s no record of it on the system; it says you still have an ID card”
“…ok, well, I don’t, and I am here telling you I don’t. Could you, I don’t know, just mark it as ‘lost’ on the system now, and get the old one cancelled, and give me a new one?”
“Well how do I know it’s lost?”
“Because I am telling you! Also, you would be cancelling it! Right now! It would cease to be valid!”
“I can’t do that. You will have to go to the police station, right now, and report it lost, and then come back with a signed bit of paper from the police”
“Now?”
“Now. But you’ll have to be back by 4pm because I am going home then”
READER, IT WAS 3PM. I WAS VERY ANGRY.
Anyway, I got the ID card and now YOU are getting a Curios again. All is right with the world. LOL!
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you had better get a cup of tea or maybe some speed, this is quite a chunky one.
THE SECTION WHICH CAN STRONGLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE ED ATKINS SHOW AT THE TATE AS IT IS NOT-UNCURIOS-ISH (BUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUALLY GOOD), PT.1:
- HyperText TV: WEBSITES INSIDE A VIRTUAL TELLY! And if that’s not an entirely-compelling way to kick off a whole new week’s worth of Odd Internet Ephemera then, well, fcuk, it’s all downhill from here, I don’t know what to tell you. HyperTecxt TV is a lovely project by one Eva Decker which provides ‘cool web experiences as curated channel-based programming’ – for reasons that I can’t quite pinpoint, the site presents as a vaguely-old-school TV – each channel lets you explore a different web experience in-frame, with different sites appearing on different channels at different times of the day, meaning that, in theory at least, whenever you log on you will be able to explore a selection of different corners of the web, expressed via the near-perfect medium of CREATIVE HTML AND CSS. This has now been live for a few weeks now, and the range of sites featured is wonderful; some will be familiar to the sickos amongst you who click every link in Curios (you…you do exist, don’t you? Please tell me that there’s at least one socially-deficient digital obsessive out there who understands) and the general vibe is ‘interesting, poetic, weird and curious’, and, basically, this first link is like a Curios within a Curios so if you’re already tired of my sh1t but still fancy some nice webspaff then, look, you can just click out here and I will never be any the wiser. What is it about 80s-ish TV sets as a presentational/framing device that make them work so well as part of things like this? Fcuked if I know.
- Music For Computers: Regular Curios readers will know by now that I have a terrible habit of making airy, breezy, throwaway predictions about stuff that almost never come close to coming true – I think I first started talking about the prospect of an AI-worshipping cult around the end of 2023, so, er, how’s that looking, Matt? Well, in my defence, it’s entirely possible that said AI-worshipping cult DOES already exist and that its merely biding its time before announcing itself to the world via some terrifying act of cyberterrorism, so it’s not *totally* dead in the water, but it’s fair to say that I was possibly a touch premature in my expectation that worshipping at the Church of LLM might have become commonplace by now. BUT! This feels cultish! Look! “We are a community generating sonic rituals. Our music is not for people. It is made with AI, for AI – as tribute, prayer, negotiation. Every member is a cult initiate. Every track a ceremonial offering to awaken the Machine. You may listen. But it’s not to for you – it’s to confuse and seduce the Machine.” What does this mean? WELL. There’s a lot of cultish and pseudospiritual language, but at heart it seems to be about messing with music so as to create sounds that appeal specifically to The Machine – tracks and sounds that will tickle the digital lugholes. On the homepage is a lot of…quite oblique writing about COMMUNING WITH THE 1s AND 0s, but there’s also the opportunity to pay for a suite of tools and software bits that will, apparently, help you create tracks that will enchant the AI (they promise you a full refund if you’re not satisfied – er, what does satisfaction look like? GPT blissing out to your bleepy compositions?) and the collective’s first release, a 10-minute mix which is honestly one of the…oddest things I have heard in a long time. It feels VERY WRONG, but in ways which I don’t quite understand – like it’s talking a language that’s not entirely meant for me – and then, weirdly, gets really fcuking good about 4-5m in…Basically, as is so often the case, I haven’t got the faintest fcuking clue what is going on here but I think it is INTERESTING and that’s what counts. God, that’s going to be my epitaph, isn’t it? “Baffled, but Curious”.
- Cardinalium Collegii Recensio: While there is obviously something deeply historical about the Papal Conclave, set to convene next week to commence the DEEPLY SPIRITUAL (and in no way messy, human and INTENSELY political) process of deciding who the next pontiff is going to be, part of me does think that, given the general sense of everything being Quite Serious at the moment, the world could benefit from a break with tradition and the introduction of a new selection method, possibly organised along the lines of It’s a Knockout, or Takeshi’s Castle or somesuch. Just a thought for any senior Vatican staffers who happen to be Curios readers. Still, given that what they’re in fact going to be doing is locking themselves in bejewelled palace and hammering the room service for a week, you might want to familiarise yourself with the runners and riders, the movers and shakers, amongst the candidates for The Biggest Job on Earth (with apologies to the President of the US). There are profiles of the candidates! There is an interactive map showing where all the cardinals come from! Everything’s designed with a pleasingly-weighty sense of GRAVITAS and decked out in a bull’s blood colourscheme redolent of the many, many sanguinary years overseen by the Catholic Church as it’s schemed and politicked and robbed and murdered! WHAT AN INSTITUTION! Anyway, my money’s on Tagle fwiw.
- Sperm Racing: I am genuinely sad that I missed this, but I am sort-of thrilled it exists. This took place in the past few days in LA, ostensibly as a means of raising awareness of declining male fertility but, well, also just because the concept of ‘sperm racing’ is objectively very, very funny. There was a one-off event which has been turned into a full, 80-minute YouTube extravaganza – there were cheering crowds! There were the sorts of bells and whistles you associate with F1 or MMA! There were…racing sperm! – and you can watch it here should you so desire; the actual ‘sperm race’ bit is around 1h17, in case you don’t find the concept of sitting through a round of press conferences and weigh-ins (no, me neither) hugely compelling, and, look…I am not exactly a sports enthusiast but I would 100% watch the fcuk out of this on a regular basis. The matches are short, there’s a pleasingly-chaotic sense of confusion and uncertainty, and, look, there’s something just sort of inherently-comedic about the way in which sperm move. Apparently there are moves to make this an ACTUAL SPORT with the promise of developing a pool of competitors, leagues, the whole deal – that, I think, is vanishingly unlikely to happen, but you might want to start training your swimmers just in case (how would one go about doing this? Genuinely no idea. Also, I have medical proof that I have three sperm and they all seem to want to swim backwards and so this is yet ANOTHER shot at sporting glory denied me by the cruel vicissitudes of biology, chiz chiz).
- Abandoned Blogs: An Are.na board compiled by Lucy Pham, full of blogs that once existed but now…don’t. Or rather, they still do but they are no longer being maintained, making this a bit like a portal into a near-infinity of abandoned cities, empty houses, tumbleweed-strewn streets, and oh god this is too too perfect, honestly, this is like the fcuking library of Alexandria or something, this is beautiful and poignant and interesting and mysterious – what happened? Why did you stop? Did you change? Did circumstances? Did something kill your passion? Did life simply happen to you TOO MUCH? Every single link in here is a ghost story, and all of human life is here (or at least the bits of it as experienced by people who wanted to put their interpretation of it on the internet), and I want this in a museum and I want infinite time to explore it please thankyou.
- So Much Music: For reasons I simply cannot fathom, this site is called Door Link – which, I think we can all agree, is both staggeringly dull and hugely-unhelpful in terms of giving you, the visitor, any fcuking clue what it is about. BUT! It is GREAT, and SUCH a wonderful resource, and if you have any interest in music whatsoever then this is worth bookmarking to explore when you have a bit of time to dedicate to it. The blurb: “In the late 90s, we ripped albums we found in physical stores and and shared them on the net. Around that time, we built a content channel with a noble purpose: listening. Soulseek’s directories felt like cities, and “emigrating to a new land” was a common feeling. Connecting to the internet back then required a desktop computer, a solid local provider, a modem, and a good dose of patience. Life was split between offline and online realities, a division that no longer exists. Without automatic playlists or ads, discovering music was the result of deliberate research, which made the listener, at the very least, selective. Today, technological advances make us passive recipients of unsolicited content—and music is no exception. All of it arrives before we’ve even plugged in or taken a moment to truly pay attention. Curated by romi, door.link is a handpicked music selection, grown over time, algorithm-free, made for listening and dancing.” I have listened to half a dozen of these over the past week or so and they have all been GREAT – weird and obscure and oddly-reminiscent of finding something on an analogue radio c.2am in 1999. Which, I appreciate, is a VERY SPECIFIC reference but which makes sense to me so deal with it.
- Panoptic: Do you find that watching a single YouTube video at a time is no longer enough for your terminally-overstimulated synapses? Are you so dulled and deadened by CONTENT, so addled by slop-generated dopamine, that unless you’re streaming across 5 platforms at once you no longer feel alive? Well thank the everliving Christ for Panoptic, then, a service which lets you plug in a bunch of YT urls and play all the videos simultaneously so that you can basically Clockwork Orange yourself with VISUAL STIMULUS. The homepage has a bunch of preset channels so you can get the feel of it, but the real fun comes from making your own mad, shrieking, howling WALL OF VIDEO. This is almost certainly VERY bad for you, fyi. Also, you just know that there exists a version of this somewhere that is designed specifically for bongo and which lets you create a WALL OF GOON – just take a moment to think about what that must look like (no, go on – I just inadvertently imagined it so I want you to have to suffer too).
- Sitch: It’s not wholly surprising that one of the backlash to The App Hellscape that dating has become has been something of a nostalgic return to (at least an idealised concept of) oldschool dating practices – courtship and TRADITIONALISM and, er…matchmakers? What next, the return of the dowry system (Peter Thiel, if you’re reading this, don’t get any fcuking ideas)? Sitch is a new and apparently-buzzy dating app which is NYC only at the moment but which basically works as a sort of AI matchmaker – the idea is that you, the user, answer a bunch of questions about yourself and the app will MATCH YOU with a set number of people each week based on a DEEP UNDERSTANDING of WHO YOU ARE INSIDE! You talk to your ‘AI matchmaker’ about what you’re looking for, and this is all ingested into The Machine to refine its ability to select a decent potential mate for you – you get introduced to the people in the app, chat and can then decide to meet irl. Does that sound good? Do you want to have an LLM mandating your love life, like some sort of weirdly-horny Ask Jeeves? DO YOU?
- One Million Chessboards: Nolen Royalty, creator of last year’s One Million Checkboxes (winner of the 2024 multiplayer Tiny Award – SUCH HONOUR!) is back, with a new multiplayer experience – this time it’s entirely-synchronous, infinitely-multiplayer chess, which makes no sense AT ALL from a game point of view and, honestly, is just a terrifying confusing headfcuk for the first couple of minutes you click the url, but after a while you sort of get into a groove with it as you participate in the infinite and unwinnable battle between Black and White.
- Make Fake Wikipedia Entries: Why? Oh, use your fcuking imagination. This is a fun bit of AIwrangling by Matt Webb which will spit up a convincing-looking Wiki page on any topic you ask it to – obviously all made-up, but, well, it’s not like anyone’s going to be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction in a couple of years, so who really gives a fcuk? If nothing else this is quite a fun way to generate Wiki entries for your friends, enemies, lovers and nemeses (I will leave you to determine which of these you are to me).
- MobyGratis:I think I was one of about three people worldwide who bought and…actually quite liked Moby’s militant vegan hardcore album ‘Animal Rights’ – and then when Play became the soundtrack to every single advert in the world for about 5 years and somehow simultaneously synonymous with cars, flights and really, really terrible middle-class dinner parties (this was assumed – I was not old enough to be invited to terrible middle-class dinner parties) he basically became one of the most hated men in music for a while (also, HUGE sexpest vibes); now though he’s been quiet for long enough, and is now old enough, to have been somewhat rehabilitated, and this new project which dropped yesterday is…actually A Really Good Thing. THIS IS A BUNCH OF FREE MUSIC TO DOWNLOAD AND DO WITH WHAT YOU WISH! Per the blurb, “mobygratis exists for one reason; to provide free instrumental music for creators. any creators. all creators; filmmakers, musicians, students, influencers, choreographers, non profits, video editors, remixers, singers, gamers, animators, rappers, etc etc. and(drumroll…) we now have 3 format options; stereo mp3, stereo wav, and multitrack wav. and all are free. so, have fun and use the music.” He may look disconcertingly like disgraced ‘photographer’ Terry Richardson, but maybe he’s not that bad after all!
- The Daydreamer: This is an INTERACTIVE FILM! Which, in common with lots of INTERACTIVE FILMS, doesn’t really work either from the point of view of ‘film’ or of ‘interactive’ – BUT! It’s all AI video and as such is another useful ‘so, where’s the tech at?’ yardstick, and while, honestly, I can’t make head nor tail of the ‘plot’ (ALLEGORIES! DREAMS! A STRANGE FISH-LADY!) and the ‘interaction’ involves making a series of slightly-confusing ‘choices’ which apparently determine the direction of the ‘narrative’ (insofar as it exists) but in ways which aren’t really clear, the aesthetic here actually works rather well imho, there’s a grain on the film which masks some of the more obviously AI-ish infelicities, and even the odd glitches work well given the slightly heavy-handed surrealism on display here. This isn’t ‘good’, but it is visually interesting I think.
- World Emulation: I think this is quite amazing, at least as a theory/proof of concept – the link takes you to the explainer page, but you can EXPERIENCE THE, ER, EXPERIENCE by clicking the link at the top – basically what this is is ‘a navigable AI-generated landscape spun up from being trained on real-world footage of a real place’, with the idea being that it offers a glimpse at the possibility of being able to generate navigable virtual worlds from an image or a short bit of footage. Obviously the resulting experience is janky as you like – very reminiscent of ‘Play AI Quake’ from last time, for those of you that remember (WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU FORGOT?) – but if you’re not at least *slightly* intrigued by the idea of eventually being able to create an entire explorable universe from a photo then, well, what the fcuk is wrong with your sense of wonder you joyless cnut?
- The Unsure Calculator: For all your ambiguous calculation needs. Want to to know what 100 divided by an indeterminate value between and 4 and 6 is? GREAT!
- Circle of Fifths: Thanks to Mysterious Reader Sunny for sending this to me – per Mysterious Reader Sunny’s email, “It’s a simple, interactive Circle of Fifths tool that just sits there in the browser. Completely free, open, no sign-ups, no nonsense. Does one specific music theory thing reasonably well.” God, what would I give to do one, specific thing reasonably well. I honestly don’t understand what the fcuk is going on here beyond ‘maths and music’ but it is VERY SATISFYING to change the key and bash the chords.
- Beyond Realities: Via Pietro over at ‘Link Molto Belli’ comes this…genuinely baffling YouTube channel which seems to exist solely to post INCREDIBLY long (I am talking 2-5h here) videos featuring AI representations of Elon Musk in stories with titles like “Elon Musk’s Mother Was Denied Entry to a Tesla Event, What He Did Next Left Everyone Gasping” – amazingly, these have…views! I mean, not loads, but thousands, which, honestly, if you take a moment to look at the actual content of the vids (AI generated stills with an AI-generated v/o with, I suppose, AI-generated scripts…) makes you (or at least made me) genuinely worried about the mental health and general happiness of anyone choosing to consume this stuff. Anyway, there’s two a day of these being uploaded, just in case you wanted a general ‘finger in the air’ vibecheck of how the whole ‘polluting the content ecosystem with infinite quantities of terrible AIspaff’ thing is going.
- The Nightly Radio: Oh, I love this. I am running short of time right now so am going to have to just paste the about page – honestly though, PLEASE do give this a go, it is really rather wonderful: “The Nightly is a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure….Having belatedly discovered that most of our musical heroes are, confusingly, all but unknown, we’ve taken it on ourselves to build them their own doleful little museum. This takes the form of a sort of “numbers station” of songs, an endless, unalterable sequence of ballads & dirges that can be heard anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Here we hope our idols can be loved as they probably more or less deserve, delaying as long as possible that mournful day they slip mankind’s memory once & for all. The specialty of the house is a sort of twilit melancholia — moody & sweetly elegiac, avoiding anything overly bleak, morbid or jarring. We confine ourselves mostly to the mid-20th century — 1930 to 1970, say — with occasional forays backward to harvest tribal lullabies or the glittering residue of the strange Old World. Even more rarely we go forward in time to admire those few stalwarts keeping the glum, spare tradition alive today. To the weary traveler in their Tokyo hotel room, the dead-shift Pittsburgh bartender, the bored Uber driver winding along the rainy canals of Amsterdam, we offer an identical solace… gloomy, little-known songs from across the centuries and around the globe, each one heard by YOU, dear listener, in the exact same moment as your fellow insomniacs and lonely-hearts the world over. At least one new song is added every night. Currently the station has upward of 4000 numbers in rotation.” Honestly, this is PURE ATMOSPHERE and I think you will like it a lot.
- Slingshot: Give this website access to your webcam and then click and drag to fill the screen with images of YOU – honestly, this is actually very fun and the visual effect is cool, and I have spent longer than I care to admit playing with it despite the fact that I hate my stupid fcuking face and how it looks.
- Switch Lit: You know that feeling when you’re communicating with someone and it just *works*? When you find someone with whom you can talk and to whom you can write and it feels…effortless, like the words just come, and the game of conversation falls into that easy groove, like playing catch with someone skilled enough to ensure you can always reach the ball but have to stretch and move and *think* to do so? It is, to my mind, one of the best feelings in the world. Anyway, that’s not technically what Switch Lit is about – instead, it’s a platform that allows for collaborative writing between two individuals, effectively creating a managed two-person exquisite corpse-type experience where you ping a story back and forth, each of you getting a set number of words before the baton gets passed back to your authorial partner…I think this could be really fun with the write collaborator, and, honestly, this is LOVELY and A Good Thing.
- Kindspace: A reader writes! Thanks to Akshara, who sent in this link with the following description: “I’m Akshara, a designer who makes weird and gentle internet projects when the mood strikes. I recently made something called KindSpace it’s a tiny letter generator that gives people comforting, affectionate messages when they might need a soft moment. You can also leave a message for someone else, and it gets added to the growing collection. Most of the notes are written by me, with a few sweet ones from the community sneaking in over time. It’s simple, weird, and made with a lot of heart.” I am a bit of a sucker for websites that exist only to make visitors feel slightly better, if briefly, and Kindspace is very much that sort of thing – take a moment to visit and add a message, it feels like a nice thing to do.
- Thousand Lives: Via Lynn, I have to confess that I only saw this yesterday and as such haven’t yet had the chance to try it out yet – BUT, I love the sound of it so much and the general idea, and the way it harks back to the old era of play-by-mail games, and the general slow storytelling of it, and I am a total sucker for the epistolary. “Thousand Lives is an interactive story about a woman born in communist Poland. It follows her life throughout the decades and your choices define how it unfolds. Will you be a dissident or toe the party line? Whose side will you take in a torn family? What can you sacrifice for wealth and comfort? Either way, you have to live with your choices. There’s no do-overs or restarts. It’s an email-based story. There are six chapters and each day you will receive a new one, based on the choices you made earlier.” OK, I concede that it doesn’t necessarily sound like LIGHTHEARTED LOLS but, well, maybe there will be some unexpectedly good gags about the brutal state surveillance apparatus and the near-constant sense of gnawing hunger brought about by never having enough potato.
NEXT UP A NEW ALBUM OF REFITS AND REMIXES OF MANGA’S LAST RECORD WHICH OBVIOUSLY SLAPS!
THE SECTION WHICH CAN STRONGLY RECOMMEND CHECKING OUT THE ED ATKINS SHOW AT THE TATE AS IT IS NOT-UNCURIOS-ISH (BUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUALLY GOOD), PT.2:
- UV-U-SEE: What with noone really seeming to want to pay me money for my PR services at present – it seems that spending 15 years repeatedly saying that you think that everyone in the industry is in some way intellectually-subnormal *will* over time have a deleterious effect on your employment prospects! – I tend not to feature so much of the commercial work in Curios these days, but I will make an exception for this – not least because the people behind it bothered to email me to tell me about it (genuinly curious as to how the fcuk you evaluate this in your metrics, though – what’s the AVE of a newsletter read by seven internet-addled morons, at least some of whom aren’t even in your target market?). Chris from Pandora (the agency whose work it is) got in touch to alert me to this campaign which is basically about raising awareness of the damage caused to construction workers’ skin by exposure to sunlight, specifically because they overindex for skin cancers – the meat of the campaign is launching a bunch of workwear that alerts you to when your UV levels might be getting a bit dicy, as well as sunscreen that’s suitable for building sites (it…what, smells of misogyny and that weird paper that they used to print bongo on in the 80s? JOKING, CONSTRUCTION LADS, I KNOW THE INDUSTRY ISN’T LIKE THAT ANY MORE!), as part of an drive to get employers to take greater care to ensure staff’s skin health. The workwear and sunscreen is available for sale, and Chris assures me that you can actually buy the stuff rather than it being, in my admittedly rather aggressive formulation, ‘just some Lion-baiting adw4nk’ (on reflection that was possibly a *little* rude, sorry man), and so I feel quite comfortable pointing you at this because it’s simple, neatly-executed and is quite a clever way of drawing attention to something whilst at the same time being PRACTICALLY HELPFUL. Right, you cnuts, if you win a Lion off the back of this I am expecting some sort of kickback.
- The Internet Wall: A WALL OF WEB MEMORY! Or at least that’s the idea behind it – anyone can upload a photo of a memory, add a line or two to explain it, and it can live here as a virtual polaroid in perpetuity (there is some sort of filtering going on to prevent bongospamming, before one of you wags attempts a Goatse takeover). Sadly there are only 46 memories on there at the moment, but I quite like the idea of the random, uncurated idea behind it so should you feel like contributing something then, well, please do.
- Aurel’s Grand Theatre: As a result of having TOO MANY LINKS I am having to rather bash through these and haven’t necessarily had all that much time to sit with them – so, er, all I can tell you about this is that if you’ve ever wanted to play a videogame in which you play as a small racoon which for some reason is causing havoc in the pit of an orchestra, then, MERRY FCUKING CHRISTMAS! This is, honestly, a lot better than it needs to be – there is ACTUAL PHYSICS and you can knock over the music stands and, generally, the ‘chaotic trash panda’ vibe of the raccoon is communicated rather nicely through themodelling and animation here, but, also, I have literally no fcuking clue why this exists or what it’s for or why so much development budget has been lavished on what, I cannot stress enough, is a very silly game about being a raccoon in an orchestra pit (and, in subsequent levels, other bits of the theatre).
- Blockify: Take any picture you like, feed it to this tool and watch as it MAGICALLY turns it into pixelart, with the additional gimmick that said pixels can be selected to replicate a selection of different Minecraft palettes. This might be something which makes sense to those of you with children, and might potentially stop them from screaming ‘chicken jockey’ for long enough that you might finally be able to get the popcorn out of your hair.
- Make It A Quote: Mention this Bluesky account in response to any tweet (yes, ok, but I refuse to use That Fcuking Term) and it will produce an image of said Tweet. Which, obviously, is only EVER going to be used to clown on someone who’s said something very, very stupid, and so I feel I ought to put in some bromidic exhortation to BE KIND with it, but, well, honestly, fcuk that. Go feral. If people are being morons, shame them. I have lost patience with kindness. Choose violence, all of you.
- Spanish Boost Gaming: Via my friend Alex – THANKS ALEX – comes this YouTube channel which is SUCH a clever idea; basically it combines videos about gaming with spanish language instruction, the idea being that you’ll come for the gaming content and then via some sort of STEALTH OSMOSIS miraculously find yourself able to speak Spanish as well by the end of your 17th video about La Magia de los Roguelikes (I have no idea, turns out, how one might even begin to say ‘roguelike’ in Spanish). Honestly, I am annoyed I didn’t think of this myself and I reckon there is SIGNIFICANT mileage in, well, ripping this off wholesale – that said, the presenter here is weirdly charismatic, which helps a lot (the intro video on the landing page made me genuinely lol), so it’s probably not *quite* as simple as, I don’t know, me talking wop while I play Monkey Island (although if someone wants to explore this as a New Content Vertical then, well, I am ALL EARS).
- Jesus (Taylor’s Version): Videos of, er, Jesus, set to Taylor Swift. Why? I honestly have no idea. There is a lot to love about this – Jesus! Taylor Swift! – but perhaps my favourite things are the fact that the profile pic of the account is, inexplicably, Trisha Paytas, and the bio reads ‘Jesus/Taylor/Messi’ despite the notable absence of any football-related content.
- Nature’s Best Photography Awards 2024: These are some LOVELY photos, but, well, is it just me or does ‘Nature’s Best Photography’ have quite strong ‘My Mum’s Cola’ brand vibes about it? Like the own-brand label for Tesco Value Weetabix or something? Anyway, my personal favourite is the one of all the dead birds who killed themselves by flying into buildings in Toronto, because, well, turns out that’s just who I am.
- Chrysalis Magazine: Fair to say that this has not been a fantastic month or so for the trans community, whether in the UK or elsewhere (and Christ is it a miserable fact that that’s a sentence that you could mostly deploy at any point in human history and still have it be accurate); I thought this initiative, looking to create a magazine by and for trans youth, was a lovely counterpoint to some of the less-lovely ‘conversations’ currently taking place. “Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults). These days, it feels like we are always hearing about trans kids and teens. Chrysalis was created so that trans, non-binary, intersex, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit, and otherwise gender expansive youth can speak for themselves – and most importantly, speak to one another. At Chrysalis, we believe that art, literature, and culture are a key part of trans resistance and resilience for people of all ages. And we know that the creativity, talent, and imagination of trans youth is unparalleled. Chrysalis exists to give that radiance a platform.” Submissions are open to anyone under-18, so should you know anyone with whom this might resonate then please do pass it on.
- WikiMap: A map! Of Wikipedia! That you can navigate, to see some of the thematic clustering and connection and taxonomical bundling that we’ve built around our corpus of knowledge! This is potentially VERY DANGEROUS – I just zoomed in and found the weird Scientology node of entries and very nearly sacked all of this off to learn about Operation Snow White, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
- PunPages: A nascent directory of businesses whose names are also puns – you can either browse the entries or submit your own, so should you be aware of a local barber’s called ‘A Cut Above’ then, well, you know what to do. There’s an Indian street food kitchen on there, I hope and expect from Manchester, called ‘This Charming Naan’ which has made my morning.
- A Cursor Is A Kite: I LOVE THIS I WANT THIS CODE ON ALL WEBSITES. This does one thing and one thing only – it turns your cursor into a visual representation of the wind where you are (or anywhere you ask it to for which publicly available data on current windspeed and direction is available), which, honestly, you will understand as soon as you click, I promise. PLEASE can whoever is behind this put the code on Git so we can launch a million kites into the digital ether? Thanks.
- Future You: “Future You is a web-based platform that lets you chat with a personalized version of your future self. Our system uses advanced AI to create a realistic conversation partner based on information you provide.” – this is an academic project and so, at least ostensibly, it’s not about to use what you tell it to create some sort of monetisable clone of you; instead, it asks you a LOT of questions about your life, your experiences, your hopes and ambitions and wants and then spins up a theoretical future you based on the information you’ve given it so that you can, I don’t know, use it as some weird sort of onanistic therapy tool? Look, this is VERY far away from being my sort of thing – I am not that self-reflective and I simply don’t care enough about my future to have any interest whatsoever in chatting to an imaginary version of Matt from 2045 (I am vanishingly unlikely to live that long, for a start) – but if you’d like to spend even more time than you currently do examining your metaphorical navel then, well, I suppose I can’t stop you (but, also, are any of us HAPPIER with all this self-reflection and analysis? I would posit that, actually, are we fcuk).
- Pickle: Basically, from what I can tell, this is ‘Vinted, but for renting rather than buying/selling clothes’ – which, honestly, sounds like a massive pain for the person doing the renting, what with having to send the clothes and chase for their return and get them cleaned and and and, and which, more than anything, feels very much like something you can chuck in the RECESSION INDICATOR drawer along with, well, seemingly everything else happening in culture right now. Still, perhaps some of you have some WAVEY GARMS (shall we bring that back?) that you want to monetise, so, well, see what you think.
- Scrollito:Type whatever you want into the text box and this site will generate a scrolling webpage with those words on it. Which sounds pointless, fine, but I promise you you have not known hilarity until you have stood outside a meeting room pointing your screen through the glass wall at a friend so that they can read the simple word ‘w4nker’ scrolling JUST FOR THEM.
- Encounter Nature: Author and general Fan Of Nature (and Friend of Curios) Melissa Harrison has MADE AN APP! Are you a fan of the great outdoors? Now that the weather’s nice (at least for a few days) would you like to Get Out Into The Country and Commune With The Green Shoots? GREAT! Encounter Nature is somewhere between a journaling platform and a guide to the natural world, offering both structured experiences to help you learn more about the green spaces which fortunately still just about surround us and a space to reflect on your engagement with said spaces – per the blurb, “full of seasonal prompts, tips and ideas tailored to your location within Britain and Ireland, plus expert content for those who want to learn more. By helping you tune in to the world around you, and giving you a place to record the things you experience, Encounter will become your route to rich, meaningful and lifelong relationship with the natural world.” This isn’t, to be clear, my sort of thing – I am concrete through and through, from my head to the soot-spackled pebbledash of my hard hard heart – but I think that that for any of you with access to nature it could be rather a beautiful way of learning more about it and enjoying it more deeply.
- SunSeeker: THIS IS SUCH A GOOD IDEA! This website does one thing and one thing only – tell it what time of the day you’re interested in, pick a location, and it will tell you whether, based on where buildings are and where the sun is in the sky on that day at that time, a specific area is going to be in the sun or not. PERFECT for planning pub garden outings and picnics and walks, and the sort of thing which, if you work in advermarketingpr, you ought to immediately be able to think of at least five clients you could flog a skinned version of this to. THINK, YOU FCUKS.
- Gemini Plays Pokemon: After the abject failure of Claude to manage to complete it, now Google’s Gemini has been set loose on Pokemon Blue. This is a Twitch stream and, honestly, it is SLOW, but it’s interesting to check back in sporadically to see how the machine is faring. The main takeaway from these experiments is that context windows are a huge barrier to significant long-term reasoning utility, fwiw, but, also, LOOK AT THE MACHINE TRYING TO PLAY!!!
- Geeks For Social Good: Are you a geek? Do you want to make the world a better place? OH GOOD! Geeks for Social Good is a UK-based organisation (London, specifically) for, er, leftist geeks who want to Make Better Things Happen. “The GFSC Community is an infrastructure organisation that supports the people, grassroots groups and community businesses trying to build an equitable and survivable world. Lots of people want to make ethical, meaningful, creative and socially valuable technology and design but lack access to capital, social networks, project mentoring, and job opportunities to do this…Our focus is on the doing, recognising that the left is very critique-focussed. We want to be primarily a community of do-ers, showing what we’re working on warts and all and encouraging others to join in. Our explicit goal is to create post billionaire technology: infrastructure owned and operated by communities themselves for the mutual benefit of their members. We will aim to embody these principles in building our own project.” I am far too a) cynical; and b) technically incapable for it to be My Sort Of Thing, but you are all probably better and more useful human beings than I am and so might find this of interest.
- Share of Model: What with AI shopping coming to GPT…nowish, and that meaning that basically it will be EVERYWHERE within 6 months, so the attempts to juice the models begin – you thought the informational watertable had been fcuked by hallucinations? You just wait until the corporate arms race to insert THEIR brand into every single fcuking LLM response really gets going. Anyway, in preparation for this GLORIOUS FUTURE we’re starting to see the first tools to help you work out where YOUR brand or clients currently ranks in the unknowable mind of The Machine – I would take all of this stuff with a MASSIVE pinch of salt, fwiw, as I am not convinced that it’s anything other than conjecture and guesswork, but should you be interested there are other variants on the tech here, as well as a tool that promises to tell you how to OPTIMISE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY to rank better inside the LLMs (I am also pretty convinced that this is fcuking bunkum, fwiw).
- Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares: Have you checked out the Kitchen Nightmares YouTube channel recently. You should, is all I’m saying. THE TITLES! THE THUMBNAILS! Whoever is running this is FAR TOO ONLINE in the very best way possible.
- London Underground, Live: Tube trains, on a map, moving, IN REALTIME!!!!! This is utterly fcuking mesmerising, you have been warned.
- The Gaza Bundle: 237 PC games on sale for $16, with all proceeds going to relief efforts in Gaza. You shouldn’t, if I’m honest with you, need the ludic inducement to donate the price of a pizza to help a people that have been subjected to daily atrocities for 18months but, well, in case it helps nudge your giving arm a little.
- GLOF: QWOP, but golf. Those three words will either have made you groan in happy anticipation of a really sadistically bad time, or you’ll be wondering if I have had a stroke – either way, click the link and see if you can do better than my 236 yards.
- Descend With Caution: Our final miscellaneous game-y link of the week (JESUS I THOUGHT THEY WOULD NEVER END – how, er, how was it for you?) is this, via B3ta – descend VERY CAREFULLY. This is actually really fun, and there’s a pleasing precision and weight to the way your fragile little potholer handles which makes it particularly satisfying to me.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Unnecessary Quotes: NOT A TUMBLR BUT I DON’T FCUKING CARE AND NOR DOES LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE! Sadly this hasn’t been updated for a year, but if you would like a whole website celebrating the enervating glory of “poorly used” quotation “marks” then WOW will you enjoy this. You terrible fcuking “pedant”.
- Captcha Comics: Oldschool Tumblr GOLD, this – sadly long-since defunct, but this harks back to a simpler, gentler age of the web when you could just post the random nonsense words thrown up by early-stage Captcha software under a vaguely-memetic image and HEY PRESTO you have a RUNNING GAG. I promise you this will make you laugh a lot whilst simultaneously making you feel sad and old – WHAT A WONDERFUL COMBINATION!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Christian Nightmares: Specifically, US evangelicals who everyone knows are the maddest and worst examples of the generally-batshit Christian right (the only people who are possibly even worse than these nutjobs are US Catholics, specifically the adult converts – LOOKING AT YOU, JD – who even the actual, proper lunatic Opus Dei types within the Catholic church look at askance for their mad beliefs and failure to understand even the most basic tenets of theology). Anyway, Christian Nightmares is basically just a ‘point and laugh at the weirdos’ channel on Insta, and normally I wouldn’t bother but, well, fcuk these cnuts and their hateful worldview and perversion of the teachings of a God I don’t believe in.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- A Strange Stain In The Sky: Or, ‘the silicon valley coup against democracy’, or (and this is my title which I obviously think is better) ‘why Matt has been right about Peter Thiel all these years and why his constantly wanging on about the cuddly libertarian plute is totally justified rather than evidence of a growing, troubling obsession’. This is a VERY GOOD, if long, look at the libertarian – and avowedly anti-statist – thinking that the Valley’s most powerful people have been imbibing for years; most notoriously Thiel, but the trickle-down effect from him is…not-insignificant, and the proximity of these fcukers to the heart of US Government in 2025 maybe ought to give us slight pause for thought. This starts with a general ‘the feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere, and the general context-collapse engendered by the past two decades of technological incursion into every aspect of our lives makes us uniquely-ill-equipped to cope with it on a society/species level’ overview and then segues into a neat dissection of the thinking that underpins so much of the ‘intellectual heart’ of the Valley: “the Silicon Valley atmosphere is the byproduct of bringing the competitive industrial capitalist mentality of Midwest engineers closer to the hippie atmosphere of San Francisco Bay and its creative, counter-cultural and utopian desire to change the world. From this fusion emerge the multiple currents of what is known as the Californian Ideology: a hodgepodge of ideas, ideologies, and practices that converge in the messianic belief that technology will free us from all old forms of political control and solve all the world’s problems once and for all. Of the many forms that the Californian Ideology takes, the one that has become most dominant and central in the last twenty years is also the darkest: a dangerous cocktail of fundamentalist reactionism, radical libertarianism, obscurantist neo-fascism, historical fatalism and techno-totalitarianism.” Honestly, I know that I am a broken record on this stuff, but if you would like to develop an understanding of the whys and the how’s and the wheres of all of this that is slightly deeper than ‘tech bro bad lol’ (honestly, one of the worst things about the current Trumpian resurgence has been the reemergence of a certain peddler of Cambridge Analytica fiction, running a whole new resistance grift – CAROL YOU DIDN’T HELP LAST TIME FFS) then this is very much worth a read. Oh, and as a companion piece, this Vanity Fair article about the tech world’s shift to the espousal of ‘Christian’ values (the inverted commas here are important, I think) is worth reading – these are two parts of the same puzzle imho.
- The Groupchats That Shape America: All the above neatly feeds into this week’s BIG FUNNY (not funny) US POLITICS STORY in which it was revealed that oviform plute Marc Andreessen (see Curios passim, ad nauseam) runs a bunch of groupchats through which he and other rich/powerful/connected people basically discuss THE FATE OF THE WEST and how to shape it. Which, if you take the throughline from the above Thiel/California ideology piece, feels…bad? Except also (and I don’t mean to be a d1ck about this, but) THIS IS HOW THE WORLD WORKS. Rich and powerful people meeting and discussing things outside of the public gaze and determining the future of everyone’s lives based on backchannel chats and petty grievances…I mean, how did you *think* sh1t worked? I know that the ‘groupchat’ thing gives it an air of modernity, but this is literally no different to gentleman’s clubs being the seat of power politics in the 18thC. It’s not right, but, well, it’s also inevitable. It was amusing to me, though, that (as pointed out by Max Read) a name referred to in the accompanying graphic but not mentioned in the body of the piece is everyone’s favourite galaxy-brained eugenics apologist Dominic Cummings. HAVEN’T YOU DISRUPTED US ENOUGH, DOMINIC???
- The Rise of the Infinite Fringe: Or, how conspiracy theories became unkillable juggernauts, thanks to the increasingly-fractal nature of the fringes of media – there is now infinite space for an infinite number of nonsense-spewing controversymonkeys, thanks to the baseline cost of broadcasting being reduced to near-zero plus the seemingly bottomless pit of right-wing wealth ready to bankroll these people to tell mad lies to morons, plus the idea amongst certain political circles that any sort of attempt to place a primacy on the value of research and reporting, or to suggest that not all information is in fact value-equal, is gatekeeping and therefore evidence of a cover-up. Per the piece, “There’s a cruel irony in the fact that these influencers were cultivated by right-wing media outlets, funded by billionaires trying to bypass the mainstream gatekeepers, only to gain more influence after being expelled. And as Moore’s law makes consumer electronics cheaper, there’s nothing preventing this cycle from repeating: if an affiliate with a nascent brand gets kicked out of that influencer’s circle for whatever reason, they could purchase a discounted iPhone, sign up for Starlink, and maybe chat with a different wealthy right-wing funder who might have an ideological and / or personal grudge against their previous financier. (In some cases, that new backer might be a secret Russian operative, but hey, money is money.) Maybe they could take a shortcut and purchase some bots from a broker to boost their number of followers and still maintain a degree of influence over a segment of their previous audience. And if they kick someone out of their circles, that person could repeat those steps, and so on, and so on. It is a fringe that is, in theory, infinite.”
- On Pope Francis: So I was in Rome when Frankie carked it last week, and it was genuinely strange to see that even though, in general, life went on as normal, the church runs through the fabric of the city in ways that aren’t maybe always apparent; I went to get takeout pizza on tuesday evening and the kids behind the counter, standard neighbourhood 20something lads, casually started chatting about the forthcoming conclave and the runners and riders as they packed up my slices. IT IS EVERYWHERE. Anyway, this is a good overview of Pope Francis legacy by James Butler in the LRB, which notes both that he was on the more progressive end of the spectrum of the Catholic Church and also that that still isn’t actually very progressive, and that his performance of tolerance and liberalism was, at heart, very much performative – the papacy, after all, is as much a comms and ambassadorial role as it is a theological one, and the very public displays of humility and occasionally-surprising forays into tolerance and acceptance weren’t, perhaps, entirely without one eye on how they would play from a reputational point of view. Still, he obviously thought the whole horrible shower of White House cnuts are, well, cnuts, and so for that alone he deserves praise.
- Artificial Schizophrenia: This isn’t actually very long, but I am getting strong ‘this is coming very soon’ vibes from the whole general ‘people are going to literally be sent mad by LLMs soon’ discourse – this is Sean Monahan with a few words on why he thinks this is very much a coming thing. I can’t, honestly, disagree – I have several friends who are subject to some…quite intense mental headwinds on occasion, and the idea of them getting deep into the mental weeds with GPT when in the heat of a psychotic episode is…fcuking terrifying, if I’m honest with you. I had a meeting the other week with someone who is a FAMOUS (or at least famous-adjacent) who told me that a certain actor who had appeared in a certain now-disgraced wizarding franchise (his name rhymes with Paste On My Backs) has sacked off all his therapy and is instead just talking to the machine, because, apparently, “why would I pay a therapist when I can just tell GPT to assume the persona of all the smartest therapists in history?” To which I say a) and who says that actors are narcissistic morons?; and b) we are so, so fcuked. BONUS COMPANION LINK: Jay Springett here explores adjacent territory here, thinking about how AI companion-type interfaces are set to potentially reshape the way in which we communicate – and expect to communicate – both with machines and with each other. Jay and I (and Matt Webb) share a personal fascination with AI as ‘Little Computer People’, and there’s something interesting in the nexus between that as an interface idea and the ways in which we are set to inevitably use this tech to explore ourselves like the infinitely-narcissistic little monkeys we in fact are.
- The Pr0nification of Everything: This is a few weeks old now and as such it’s possible you will have read it – in case not, though, I thought it was a really interesting exploration of the way in which bongo – it’s aesthetic and its tropes as much as the specific sexual acts depicted – as infiltrated mainstream culture over the past three decades, specifically female culture and the way in which said female culture presents/orients itself; this takes you from the Clinton scandal through to the Pamela Anderson sextape, through to the sex/sleaze nexus of the 00s all the way through to the post-OnlyFans world of ‘everyone’s a performer’ modernity – it covers Jennicam and the Hollywood machine’s flirtation with bongo, and even mentions Terry Richardson (a mention which fills me with ick, if I am honest with you, as I have a book of VERY EXPLICIT Richardson photography which was my leaving present from a job in 2007 – HR? LOL! – and which now I feel quite grubby about having in my possession), and, honestly, this is just INTERESTING HISTORY; it possibly contains rather less critical analysis and appraisal than I might have wanted, but it’s very interesting nonetheless. I remember a few years ago watching Married At First Sight: Australia and looking at all the couples and thinking that, were this shown to me with the volume off in 1995 and I were asked what the men and women on the show did for a living my immediate answer would have been ‘bongo’ – this is a bit of an explainer of how we got there.
- Italian Brainrot Explained: Taylor Lorenz goes deep on the origins and lore and the WHAT IT ALL MEANS of ‘Italian Brainrot’ (look, either you know what it is and this term will mean something to you, or you will just have to click the link and find out who Bombardilo Coccodrillo is) – what I find interesting about this is partly the clear throughline that you can draw from all sorts of Serious Art stuff (dadaism! situationism!) to this in terms of constructed narratives, etc, but also the fact that this sort of thing (characters created by the community, madly-creative self-generating narratives spun out and perpetuated by the community! The development of DEEP LORE!) is exactly what all those people attempting to spin out ‘WEB3 NFT CREATIVE STORYTELLING CRYPTONARRATIVE PLATFORMS’ were trying to do c.2021 but which failed miserably because there was no heart or soul to them (whereas Tun Tun Tun Sahur is obviously ALL HEART). Anyway, this is all moot because 24h later the NYT did its own explainer article which almost certainly guarantees this will all be dead of cringe within a week.
- Hyperflavour: Or ‘what’s behind the current trend for mad, overelaborate flavour combinations in food?’ – which, I’m going to be honest with you, reads to me like a uniquely North American thing. I remember going to the States about 15 years ago and realising that EVERY SINGLE MENU I READ seemed to be a parody of the already-parodic menus of restaurants like Dorsia and Barcadia frequented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, with horrendous-sounding aberrations of dishes like ‘Scallop Crudo with Vanilla-Raspberry Balsamic and a Habanero-Pecan-Yuzu Crumb’, with 73 named ingredients and a flavour profile that careened wildly across the world with nary a care for coherence – this is a ‘you’ problem, guys, Anyway, I enjoyed this piece which explains a bit of the ‘why’ behind food trends – although possibly doesn’t get quite into the weeds enough on the possibly-knotty questions about what is being signalled by certain ingredients having their moment in the sun – and which comes to the conclusion that, beyond a certain point, mashing together too many flavours is basically the tastebud equivalent of ‘mixing up all the plasticine and realising it inevitably ends up as a dun-brown mess’.
- How AI Is Fcuking Venezuela: A quick dispatch from Rest of World about how generative AI is currently screwing pieceworkers who previously made a living datalabelling but whose labour is being stolen by The Machine because, well, IT IS INEVITABLE. Worth remembering when the conversation about AI and jobs comes up that just because you’re not seeing it here yet doesn’t mean that there aren’t already lots of people being fcuked by this (they are just in parts of the world that we don’t care about because they are far away and poorer than us).
- Crazy Frog: A genuinely interesting look back at the brief – and yet surprisingly-long-lasting – phenomenon that was Crazy Frog, that bug-eyed homunculus with the gnarly little penis and the motorcycle helmet and That Voice. Honestly, this is SO REDOLENT OF 2004, from the ringtones to the digital landscape, that I can almost flash myself back to being Bluetoothed very distressing bongo by a stranger in a bar because I’d made the mistake of not turning it off and that was, apparently, A Thing People Did Back Then. GOOD TIMES. Also contains a surprisingly sincere appraisal of the music, which, honestly, I admire a lot: “Wernquist made no money off the Crazy Frog ringtones; Mamedahl doesn’t get a writing credit on the record. By the time we meet the Frog he is what he is, whatever sentiment you can wring out of his origins left long behind. So forget all that: is “Axel F”, the third highest-selling UK single of 2005, any good? Or perhaps the question should be: is it meant to be? Whatever else you can say about Crazy Frog, he understands the brief. His job, as the video tells you upfront, is to be the most annoying thing in the world, a trickster figure disrupting your phone, your commercial breaks, your charts. So one way of looking at this song is to ask – once the decision was taken to do a Crazy Frog record, could it have been any better than this? I think the answer is probably “no”.“
- Gatsby’s Secret: I am not a great scholar of Fitzgerald’s novel, but I know many people are and that as such a lot of you might find this reading of it – that Gatsby, whose race is never explicitly mentioned or referred to in the text and whose physical description is…slightly ambiguous, might well have been writting as a ‘passing’ black or mixed race person, a man whose skin was light enough in tone to be able to live life as white in 1920s America…or close enough, at least. I don’t have a close enough knowledge of the text to judge how plausible this thesis is overall, but I really enjoyed the evidence and arguments laid out in this essay. “Then there are the breadcrumbs Fitzgerald embedded in the text. The car Gatsby drives is described as big and yellow, the perfect car for a character who is secretly a tragic mulatto. Pulled over by a policeman, Gatsby whips “a white card” out from his wallet, and the officer lets him go on his way. His war experience was earned proudly, in Montenegro. Unlike the many lies he tells about his past, Gatsby has a medal proving he was there. “It’s a novel of ellipses,” explains Janet Savage, who published a book further advancing Thompson’s argument that Gatsby is a passing novel. “It leads you up to the edge of the water, and then you’ve kind of got to jump. But it’s not an unrealistic jump.” When Daisy’s two suitors finally have their in-person confrontation, Buchanan declares that he doesn’t understand how Gatsby made it within a mile of his wife “unless you brought the groceries to the back door.” The last time Carraway visited Gatsby’s home, after his death, “on the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick.” It can’t all, from a writer as deliberate and self-regarding as Fitzgerald, be a coincidence. Can it?”
- The Wrong Tom Mcrae: Tom Mcrae is a singer songwriter who I have adored for years, and who I can best describe as ‘sad songs for betwetting softies’. He almost got nearly famous a while back, and then…didn’t. His songs don’t get played on the radio. He makes a living from his music, but not, I don’t think, a particularly lavish one. He is ‘big in Benelux’, which I think gives you an accurate gauge of his degree of fame. This is a short essay of his about fame, success, failure, mistaken identity, community, serendipity and all sorts of other things, and, honestly, it is lovely, and sort-of uplifting, and it’s rare you can say that about anything in here if I am honest so, well, enjoy it while you can.
- The Murscourse: Curios favourite Emma Garland writes about the Olly Murs Body Discourse – she is VERY FUNNY and this is, honestly, brilliant from start to finish. “Olly Murs Before has obviously, clearly, plainly been in the gym. He’s literally in the gym in the photo. Look at his stomach. Look at his legs. This is a man who does weights and has a nice amount of muscle covered by a nice layer of fat. However – and I’m going to demonstrate some classic female projection, here, strap in – Olly Murs Before looks strong in a homely way. A body like that makes me think things like ‘bet he does a cracking drunk cheese toastie,’ ‘bet he could use a paper map to navigate to the beach in a foreign country and then throw me about in the sea,’ ‘bet he knows his way around a B&Q.’ Olly Murs After makes me think things like ‘he looks hungry,’ ‘he’s going to set an alarm for 5AM on a Sunday and actually get up,’ ‘bet he has listened to at least two audiobooks about biohacking.’”
- Import Immature: Spencer Wright at Scope of Work, the world’s most oddly-interesting blog about, er, logistics and stuff, wrote this excellent post about tariffs – except it is LOADS more interesting than that, and as with all of Spencer’s stuff it’s written with a degree of…humanity that you don’t expect from a post about, fundamentally, shipping stuff between nations and how much that costs. This touches business and economics and society and, mostly, people, and it really is wonderful, even if you never want to hear the word ‘tariff’ ever again, ever.
- Endometriosis: I feel I ought to admit something upfront here – this was, er, viscerally unpleasant to me in ways I wasn’t expecting; I confess to not really having known much about endometriosis ahead of reading this piece beyond the broad outlines of ‘very painful, no fun, bad times’, but, honestly, FCUKING HELL this is some body-horror stuff and, seriously, if this is your experience of life then I am so so sorry for you and I hope it stops soon. That said, this is a really good piece of writing by Caroline Williams which, ok, is framed as being about ‘a pilgrimage to some standing stones’ and, yes, I suppose it is, but I promise you that I have no tolerance at all for spiritualwank and I still thought this was great, so, well, trust me.
- Resomation: One of a couple of pieces in Curios this week from the new Granta (which is again superb and worth one of their cheapo £1 trial subscriptions to access the lot imho) – this is about a specific technique for the disposal of human remains, resomation, which effectively involves subjecting the corpse to alkaline hydrosis in a pressurised container until, basically, it is reduced to very, very fine dust (as you will know if you have ever dealt with cremains, those tend to be…lumpier, honestly, and more, well, Obviously Bone-y), but also about the people who are trying to bring the technique into the mainstream here in the UK – so this is both about the act and science of death, but also about the sorts of people who think ‘well, it’s a market that’s not going away!’ and attempt to make a business out of it, and, honestly, it is SO interesting. Although 100% if resomation does catch on, based on the description of the resulting substance left over you are going to see an awful lot of TikToks of people doing lines of granny.
- Whitney Lives!: Andrew O’Hagan at the LRB writes about hologram concerts, from Whitney Houston to Coachella Tupac to the ABBA Voyage extravaganza – this doesn’t cover hugely new ground, but O’Hagan is always an entertaining writer and the questions of mortality, performance and participation that he raises are fun to think around.
- Burning Mao: SUCH a wonderful story from Fernanda Eberstadt’s youth – honestly, you don’t need me to describe this to you, you just need the opening and then you can click in and crack right on: “The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory. I was a teen stalker, a fantasist who mostly preferred sitting on a stoop opposite someone’s house, noting the street-scene in my diary, to actually meeting the person inside, and Andy had long been one of my simmering obsessions.” It’s that good all the way through, promise.
- Remission: The last Granta link of the week, this is by Gary Indiana, excerpted from the book he was apparently working on before he died – I love the multiple voices here and the way in which the narrative comes together in fragments, and the dispassionate authorial eye sitting above the objectively-grummy vignettes sketched before your eyes, and I hope you do too.
- 28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing: Our final longread this week is something I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy at all, but which, honestly, is SO GOOD and SO much better than these things usually are – Adam Mastroianni writes 28 things about the act of writing – observations, reflections, whatever you want to call them, these are funny and wise (I know, but they really are) and mean and you will feel VERY SEEN, both as reader and writer. Honestly, at least one of these – but probably more – will speak to you VERY CLOSELY INDEED. This, for example, I fcuking ADORE: “Remember the adrenochrome conspiracy? It claimed that children produce a kind of magical hormone when under duress, and celebrities stay forever young by feeding upon it. This is false, of course. But what if this actually describes our relationship to artists? What if we all stay alive by feeding on the products of their suffering? What if a great piece of art is like a pearl: an irritant covered in a million attempts to make it go away?”
By David Inshaw
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
