I was at a pub last night in central London and, walking through town, was struck by the fact that we have entered that time of the year in which People Who Do Not Normally Pub This Hard start clogging up the bar and the pavement with their CHRISTMAS FCUKING JUMPERS (there was a man yesterday I saw wearing one which was literally just an advertisement for Lidl – like, it was a ‘festive’ jumper in the vague Lidl brand identity with the Lidl logo on the front, and GOD I WISH WE COULD GO BACK TO AN ERA WHERE PEOPLE WOULD BE BULLIED FOR THIS) and, basically, realised that we are now well into the part of the year where I spend significant periods of time wistfully imagining a medically-induced coma.
BUT! I know that there are many of you who will read the above and think ‘fcuk’s sake, Matt, you miserable, joyless fcuk, what has Christmas ever done to you? LET PEOPLE HAVE THEIR FUN!’ – and while quite a large part of me would like you to fcuk off with that opinion, I concede that you may have a point and so I promise that there is going to be minimal whinging, kvetching and b1tching about The Season in the year’s remaining Curios. Mostly.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios and you are welcome to Christmas, just don’t bring it anywhere near me.
By Hana Choi
LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC THIS WEEK WITH THE, ER, CHALLENGING-BUT-INTERESTING ALBUM ‘HEXED’ BY AYA!
THE SECTION WHICH DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE ARBITRARY AGE THAT SPOTIFY HAS ASSIGNED YOU AND WOULD LIKE YOU TO STOP TELLING THE WORLD ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST DOING DANIEL ‘I TURN MUSIC INTO BOMBS’ EK A FAVOUR, PT.1:
- Grungeology: I’m going to make a wild assumption about my ‘readership’ here (the inverted commas, by the way, are a nod to the fact that I’m not entirely sure whether an audience of six weirdos can meaningfully be said to constitute a ‘readership’ in any meaningful sense) and take a guess that a…not-insignificant proportion of you are Of An Age whereby grunge has something of a place in your heart, or at least your memory, and there are one or two plaid-clad, long-haired, guitar-forward moody rock bands in your personal pantheon of greats, and that, as a result, you will be DELIGHTED with this site which is basically a sort-of museum-slash-guided tour of the places in Grays Harbor County that were formative to the scene and, specifically, Nirvana. “Grungeology™ is the story of Kurt Cobain and the roots of the grunge movement, uniquely tied to Grays Harbor County. This experience explores Kurt’s early life, the local influences that shaped his music, and the cultural impact. As a part of The Music Project, Grungeology™ celebrates the history, people, and places that defined a musical revolution, offering fans and visitors a deep connection to the origins of grunge.”This is REALLY nicely-made – each of the locations you can look up has an associated audio description and photo gallery and text outlining why it is so important to the story of the genre (“Kurt did skag here once”) and, basically, if you are a FAN then this will be a very pleasing way of delving into the place that made the people that made the music.
- Wishful Tree: You may have noticed that Curios doesn’t exactly go big on the whole Christmas thing – this is, in the main, motivated by my very strong feeling that this time of year goes on MUCH TOO LONG (it already appears to have been ‘Christmas’ for several years, and at this stage in proceedings it does feel like it might never, in fact, stop, a scenario so chilling to me that it actually caused me to momentarily stop typing and shudder involuntarily) and that if you want Assorted Christmas Gubbins then there are plenty of other places that will cater to your whims and so, well, you can fcuk off. BUT! Occasionally, very occasionally, there will emerge PLEASING DIGITAL ARTEFACTS which, while tainted by tinsel, are cute enough to make it in. Wishful Tree is…not really one of those things, but there are a few elements which made me laugh (cry inside) and so I thought I would share it with you. Basically this is a webpage that lets you create a virtual Christmas tree and decorate it with baubles, each bauble representing a message or ‘wish’ which you can attach to said bauble for others to read – you can share this with your friends and family, they add their own baubles/wishes and you collaboratively create a LOVELY DIGITAL TREE garlanded with all of your hopes and dreams for the year. Which, you know, is fine! Twee, but fine! Then you look a bit deeper and you realise that this is monetised, which, well, GOOD LUCK WITH THAT LADS – the free tier lets you add upto 10 baubles/wishes to your tree, but you can up that to 100 for a mere, er, $50! Or to 1000 for $100! CHRIST ALIVE. Oh – and this is the bit that really made the tattered remnants of what passes for my ‘soul’ shrivel – if you can’t think of a wish then you can GET AI TO WRITE ONE FOR YOU!!!!! Truly, the spirit of yule is alive and well!
- Kupid: Ok, to be clear you probably aren’t going to be able to do anything with this link – there’s no homepage to speak of for this site, as far as I can tell, and the only working URL seems to be the one that takes you right into the chat feature, which you need to be a US college student to access (and I am…reasonably-certain that none of you are US college students – and, honestly, if you are, stop reading this! You have lives to live!), but I wanted to share the link because the idea…oh wow, the idea! Kupid is marketing itself as ‘Omegle but for dating’. Per one of the founders, ““KupidTV is basically a safer, college-only Omegle where every conversation can be broadcast live and shaped by the audience…Students hop on to meet strangers from other campuses, and the crowd inside the app decides who stays on, what questions they answer, and what prompts or dares they take on next.” So this is basically a platform where you can, in theory, watch two strangers talk in presumably-vaguely-flirtatious fashion, while the peanut gallery comments and prods and effectively offers the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ to the interaction, turning yet another facet of life into an opportunity to mug for the digital crowd. WELCOME TO THE FUTURE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL CAPERING JESTERS, W4NKING AND GRINNING AND CRYING AND CAPERING TO AN INVISIBLE AUDIENCE AND AN UNKNOWABLE ALGORITHM! Does this feel like it’s going to have positive outcomes? Oh, God, I don’t even know any more. This is still in beta and still US-only, but I thought it worth flagging for vague direction-of-travel reasons – and because it reminded me that I have been vaguely predicting livestreamed, crowd-directed dates since the Google Glass era, and so I feel vaguely validated by the fact that (only a decade and a half later!) I am (possibly) being (vaguely) proven right.
- Newsmap: This is quite brilliant, I think – thanks to Paul Armstrong for pointing me at it. Newsmap is, er, a MAP of NEWS – except it’s not really a map to be honest, it’s more of a grid (THESE THINGS MATTER). Still, it’s a smart and potentially-useful way of displaying the news RIGHT NOW – click the link and you’re presented with a segmented view where various news stories that are trending in the English-language media are presented, colour-coded by topic (business, tech, sports, etc), with (I think – it’s not HUGELY well-explained) the size of the boxes for the stories is determined by the number of links the story is receiving and thus its significance (but, again, this is something of a guess because they don’t actually explain quite how this is being generated). Anyway, this is quite cool and might be a useful bookmark should you want a decent one-stop overview of THE HEADLINES RIGHT NOW.
- Printable Grid Paper: This is not, I appreciate, a hugely-exciting link – BUT! Life is not all excitement! Not every link has to shock or horrify! SOMETIMES DULL IS GOOD TOO! Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted a tool that lets you create an infinite gridded canvas, and where you can change the size of the grid to suit your whims, and you can choose different types and layouts of grid (isomorphic, say, if you’re the sort of person who actually understands what that means, which it turns out I very much am not), and then print them out so you can spend some time with a pencil and ruler crafting architectural blueprints or D&D maps (I don’t, as I always say, know who you are, but I have a…strange feeling that the latter is more likely than the former here) or whatever else you like. Basically bookmark this and ABUSE THE FCUK out of your office printer next time they force you to go in, and VWALLAH! Infinite graph paper. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
- Ongo: What are the main qualities that you look for in a desk lamp? Illumination? Posability? Design? A hefty, well-weighted base? NO YOU RUBES, YOU IDIOTS, YOU CREATURES OF THE PAST, YOU ARE WRONG! What you in fact should be looking for is a lamp which is able to ‘live, laugh and love’ – so thank FCUK, then, for the inventors of Ongo, a ‘smart’ lamp (truly, technology is a neverending gift) with (inevitably) AI, which…oh, look, here, have the blurb: “lights up your desk and your day. It brings your space to life with movement, personality, and emotional intelligence. It remembers what matters, senses how you feel, and supports you through the day with small, thoughtful interactions. Ongo senses the rhythm of your day and responds with quiet understanding, reading the subtle shifts in your environment.” I DO NOT WANT SMALL THOUGHTFUL INTERACTIONS WITH A LAMP I VALUE IT SOLELY FOR ITS ILLUMINATING ABILITIES I DO NOT NEED IT TO BE MY COMPANION! There are many, many questions raised by this, but the main one is ‘WHY DOES THE LAMP HAVE SAD AND ANXIOUS EYES?’ – when I posted the link to this online, someone replied “It’s “I fcuked up!!!” Wall-E” which, honestly, is 100% accurate. It’s VERY Pixar-coded (obviously there’s a lot of Luxo Jr in the design), and there’s a Toy Story writer that’s been involved it its design, and…I don’t know, this just makes me weirdly-uneasy but I can’t quite tell you why. Actually, I can – IT LOOKS LIKE IT’S ABOUT TO CRY, WHY IS MY LAMP SAD???
- Cloudly: Your mileage on this will very much vary depending on which corner of the internet has discovered it most recently when you click the link – this is basically a site that lets anyone post an anonymous passing thought, which will appear briefly on the screen before fading into nothingness, a museum of evanescence, basically. Or at least that’s the theory, but, as is often the case with this, it is very much a weathervane for its audience – when I first found it it was full of vaguely-poignant messages about love and loss, whereas now it’s a constant stream of ‘xD lol’ and Spongebob memes. No idea what the moderation is like on this, so caveats obviously apply – I quite like the idea, though, of it momentarily becoming a place where YOU, anonymous readers, can communicate with each other through brief, vanishing messages. UNITE, WEBMONGS!
- Searching The World: A really nice project, illustrating Google search trends and showing how they differ from country to country – which nations see spikes in searches for ‘yoga’ in the morning, vs which tend to search more for ‘French Toast’? Who searches terms related to ‘sadness’ in the evenings (Ukrainians, apparently, which tells its own unhappy story)? This is rather cute, even if the data doesn’t really tell you anything meaningful whatsoever.
- Intertapes: OH I LOVE THIS! Combining several of my favourite things – found objects and the stories behind them, old mixtapes – this site presents recordings from found cassettes from, at the timeof writing, New York and Berlin and Barcelona and Instanbul, recordings which run the gamut from mixes to, er, slightly-creepy messages recorded by a guy to a woman on telly he was evidently a bit obsessed with…GOD I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. “Intertapes is an updating collection of
found cassette tapes from different locations. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more.” Honestly, this is BRILLIANT – I am slightly obsessed with this mix of not-particularly-good dance music because it sounds like it’s playing from several rooms away, possibly through a very thick layer of sponge, which gives the whole thing a very odd but rather wonderful quality.
- Kindling Paper: This is such a nice idea, by Friend of Curios Jared Shurin – Kindling is a project which produces small mini ‘newspapers’ designed to be burned after reading – per the site blurb, “Kindling is a ten-minute newspaper that’s completely free. It is there to fuel your discussion while you’re hanging out around the fire. Every issue is themed around a really critical topic; something fun and inclusive that encourages everyone to share their own take. Each issue of Kindling also includes a short piece by someone funny and wise who gives their take on the question, to help get things started. We also include key numbers, top lists, quotes and other trivia, to help keep the discussion going.” A really cool concept, this, and something I would very much like to see taken up by people and places who use lots of paper, or events with bonfires and the like. It’s totally free, so if you’re interested in getting a bunch then you can get in touch via the website (and you should!).
- Bluesky Harvest: Plug in your Bluesky account, should you have one, and this site will give you STATS! A wordcloud (perhaps unsurprisingly, mine is dominated by the single word ‘fcuking’)! Some data about your relative propensity to share links! The number of different domains you’ve shared! Your most active days, the number of works you’ve written (for me a meagre 25,000 in 2025, barely two Curios’ worth) and a whole bunch of other stuff besides. Narcissistic in the extreme, but interestingly-so, and it’s all very nicely presented.
- Biketerra: I am slightly-confused as to why this exists but I am hugely impressed that it does – also, it is FAR too resource intensive for my increasingly-clapped-out laptop, meaning I have only really scratched the surface here, but, basically, imagine “Microsoft Flight Simulator but for cycling, all for free in your browser’ and you’re sort-of there. Biketerra lets you basically virtually simulate, in relatively-minimal, polygonal graphical style, the experience of cycling routes in the real world, with accurate depictions of hill gradients and curves and all that sort of jazz, theoretically to let you scope out a potential ride in advance, say, or, I don’t know, maybe to relive a particularly thrilling ascent up that hill near your house. I confess to not REALLY getting what this is for, but I think it might be absolutely AMAZING for at least one of you – WILL YOU BE THAT PERSON?
- Charlie Kirk Terminator: Just to be very clear on this – this video is an EXCEPTIONALLY FASCIST ARTEFACT. It’s also just jaw-droppingly weird, and as we come to the end of 2025, a year which, in common with the recent past, has blown all previous years out of the water in terms of ‘fcuk, this is WEIRD isn’t it?’, it feels a very fitting near-coda to all the madness. Did you know that there’s a whole ecosystem of ‘creators’ who are making very strange AI-generated videos of a Terminator version of Charlie Kirk, promoting all sorts of VERY IFFY stuff (lots of very Nazi symbolism in these vids, children!) in an overblown, scifi way? No, neither did I til I read this piece by Ryan and learned all about it. Look, you really do have to watch the clip at the main link – it is VERY FCUKING WEIRD, and I can do no better than Ryan does in describing it and so am just going to lift his words here:the clip “depicts cyborg Kirk and Alex Jones flying to Agartha, where they’re greeted by a morbidly obese Vice President JD Vance, Hulk Hogan, the mythological figure Yakub from Nation of Islam, John McAfee, and a white version of FBI director Kash Patel. In the video, Vance, dressed as the pope, anoints Kirk as a Sonnenrad spins behind him and a supercut of Nazi occultist brainrot flashes on screen, set to a nightcore remix of t.A.T.u.’s “All The Things She Said.”” Oh, and Alex Jones has a Hitler moustache. This is…normal.
- Astrolight: “What if Spirograph, but the planets?” is a question I am fairly sure noone on earth has ever asked themselves, and yet this is exactly what this appears to be – basically this is a representation of the solar system which lets you ‘connect’ planets to each other; doing this makes them leave trails, thereby letting you make some quite involved graphical designs based on the orbit of the spheres. Which, I am aware, is not a description that has probably helped you understand this in any way, but I promise it will make more sense if you click the link and then click the ‘Open Scene’ button and pick from one of the presets – this is…weirdly beautiful, honestly.
- A Million Random Acts: A digital art project by one Mark Sample (whose work I have featured in here before), “A Million Random Acts is a vast grid of procedurally generated cruelty, resistance, and more, an attempt to capture the chaos and fear of our times.” This is DIZZYING and WEIRD and creepy and sad, and quite overwhelming, and were this on a big screen somewhere, scrolling, I would lose possibly months to staring at it. I promise you there is so much strange, melancholy poetry in this – so many of the individual text fragments are stories in themselves. ”Delaney’s medical records categorically denied her existence. The doctor shrugged.”. SEE WHAT I MEAN?
- The Library Of Time: This gave me a momentary feeling of intense temporal vertigo – ALL OF THE WAYS YOU MIGHT TRACK TIME (nanoseconds, seconds, months, years, revolutionary time, hex time, Beats by Swatch!), all presented simultaneously. This is very cluttered but SO interesting and really rather hypnotic.
- Boing: This is possibly my favourite link of the week. Turn your sound up, play, enjoy. You’re welcome.
THE SECTION WHICH DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE ARBITRARY AGE THAT SPOTIFY HAS ASSIGNED YOU AND WOULD LIKE YOU TO STOP TELLING THE WORLD ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU ARE JUST DOING DANIEL ‘I TURN MUSIC INTO BOMBS’ EK A FAVOUR, PT.2:
- The School For Poetic Computation: I am…uncertain as to what exactly is going on here – as far as I can tell, it’s a series of projects by students at the School for Poetic Computation (“an experimental school in New York and online founded in 2013. SFPC facilitates the study of art, code, hardware, and critical theory through lenses of decolonization and transformative justice. SFPC offers programs grounded in solidarity across social differences and empowerment through a deeper technical and political understanding of tools towards building just communities.”) all based around creating audio art from sampled materials. Your degree of engagement with this is likely to be determined by your immediate reaction to descriptions like this one: “’Tidepool’ is a relational in-between space where tactile percussive textures swirl with lush, wave-worn pads, shaping ambient contours.My goal was to translate the attunement and presence of a shifting relationship into a diverse soundscape, while also channeling impressions of the California coast, where I grew up.” Some of these are weird, some of these are…unsettling, but all the ones I’ve listened to so far are *interesting*, which, well, is what we’re here for. Or at least I am, no fcuking clue what you’re doing here.
- Meta’s Fun AI Video Tools Gallery: Meta’s quietly developed what I am told (thanks Lynn!) is a really useful and quite powerful suite of tools for videomakers to be able to apply fun effects and creative filters to videos using genAI. Clone people! Give everyone bobbleheads! Apply little wobbly graphic outlines to everyone in a video! This feels like…good AI! AI as a creative tool! AI as an adjunct to existing creative processes! If you’re someone who makes videos then I strongly recommend you check these out, I think you could have a lot of fun with them.
- Unlock the 4th Dimension: Look, let me be upfront with you here – I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND stuff like this at all. I think I have mentioned before, but there are certain concepts in maths and physics which when I try and engage with them see my brain become utterly smooth and frictionless like a teflon frying pan; so it is with the concept of the ‘fourth dimension’, which this site tries to represent graphically. I have NO CLUE what is happening here, but I, er, quite like the graphics. I just clicked on this, set it to ‘4d rotate’ and had a blissful moment of complete ignorant appreciation of the pretty lights, so at the very least you might enjoy doing that too.
- Social Agent: This feels like a good idea if you’re in the miserable position of having to commission video content. Social Agent is basically an app that connects ‘people who are good at making video’ with ‘people who need video making’ – so editors, camerapeople, vfx people, etc etc, all theoretically reachable via this single marketplace, so you can spin up a creative team or get a single person to help you with relatively-minimal hassle. I think this is a US-only thing at the moment, but it looks very much as though it’s quite a high-end, professional market that it’s aiming to service – I get the impression that the sort of ‘creators’ they’re looking to get on their books are very much at the professional end of the spectrum which actually seems like rather a smart idea. Worth a look if you’re in this world (also, you can still escape in 2026, there is still time).
- Lines: I happened to be in the market for some last-minute entertainments the other week and thought I would have a look at Time Out to see what was on in London that evening, and learned to my horror that Time Out is now an utterly-unusable piece of sh1t website/magazine/non-thing which simply…doesn’t do the one thing it was always reliably excellent at, to whit ‘telling you what the fcuk is going on in your city’. I was happy, then, to see that Lines has expanded from Australia into London, because it feels like there’s a gap in the market (would that it did more than music, but hey ho). Basically Lines is a listings service through which you can also buy tickets, which seems to do a really good job of showing you stuff that is ACTUALLY HAPPENING – it alerted me just now to the fact that, at the time of writing (0851) I have one more hour to get down to Union in Vauxhall where they are just coming to the end of their regular Thursday midnight-to-10am session (words cannot express the genuine horror I felt on learning that there were people doing ketamine under a railway arch 15 minutes from my house while I was dragging myself to the keyboard to write this thing, it feels WRONG). Anyway, if you’re in London and you want a new ‘what is on and can I go to it?’ app for music, this looks like it’s genuinely useful. BONUS GIGFINDER! This is Whirligig – tell it the day you’re looking for gigs on (today or any of the next five) and it will give you a list of all the gigs on in London (or a city of your choosing – there’s a big list) that day, along with some audio of the artist so you can get a feel for the vibe. This is SUCH a good, lightweight service which also links out to ticketing and is a nice, less-clubby companion to Lines imho.
- The SNL Timeline: Saturday Night Live is not, as a rule, funny, and US culture’s obsession with it is frankly baffling to me – still, if you care more about an increasingly-obsolete pop culture vehicle from North America than I do, you might like this website which offers a timeline of all the different people who’ve presented the show over the course of its MANY years – regardless of my lack of any personal interest in the subject matter, the design here is really nice; as you scroll you can see cast members being swapped in and out, so you can get a sense for the way in which the lineup changed over time, and each of the different combinations of cast members is defined as a specific ‘era’ in the show’s history, with a short textual overview of how it was viewed at the time and its impact on the wider culture. Via Giuseppe, as most of my nice dataviz links tend to be.
- Rondo: Are you the sort of parent who is INVOLVED in their child’s football team? Do you scream from the sidelines like some sort of sociopath? Do you secretly hate the other, better child who consistently shows up your progeny for the malcoordinated flashsack they are? Er, I hope not, that would be weird. If, though, you’re someone who is involved in any way with football coaching or training, you might find this app useful – it’s paid-for, fine, but it might be worth it for some of you. Basically this lets you set up all your coaching plans via the app, track starts, plan sessions, and everything else you might need to turn your group of barely-coordinated cloggers into prime Barcelona.
- How Long Til It Stops Being Dark All The Time?: I am yet to quite get used to the whole ‘gets dark at 4pm’ thing, and am very much counting the days til we get daylight back again – or I was until I saw this website, but now I am counting the seconds instead (just over 9.82million at the time of writing). Put this on a big screen somewhere and WAIT.
- The Untamed Heroine: Pointless luxury brand website corner! Max Mara, purveyor of understated and VERY EXPENSIVE clothing to the discerning middle-aged woman has, for reasons known only to its head of digital (and, honestly, possibly not even to them) decided to promote its A/W25 range via the medium of, er, a small, short, simple and very uninvolving platform game! Take control of…some woman in what is presumably a Max Mara coat and, er, move through three levels of barely-increasing complexity! Collect manuscript fragments which unlock portentous voice-over clips! Listen to the…oddly-sinister soundtrack! WHY IS THIS SO BORDERLINE-CREEPY, MAX MARA! This is SO curious – aside from anything else, the ‘game’ element of this is quite astonishingly phoned-in and while, ok, I get that a full, bouncy platformer vibe doesn’t quite fit the ELEGANT MARA AESTHETIC, this is also just a…very dull experience. I would KILL to know conversion stats on this – what do you reckon the funnel from ‘spends three minutes playing an in-browser platformer’ to ‘drops somewhere in the region of three grand on a camel coat’ is likely to be?
- Date Atlas: You know the weirdly-unkillabe ‘What3Words’,right, that platform where every location on earth is given a three word code and which on the surface sounds like a good idea but which actually falls apart under the slightest scrutiny (not least because of the truly-horrific possibilities for tragedy should you attempt to use the system to report a serious incident and find that the emergency responder misheard ‘Dog Tower Burgher’ as ‘Dog Tower Burger’ and now the ambulance is seven counties away)? OF COURSE YOU DO! Well for reasons I can’t possibly fathom, someone has made something similar but with all the locations being dates instead. Type in your birthdate, and see what location on the earth’s surface is linked to your SPECIAL DAY (mine is in Antarctica, perhaps fittingly). This is, as far as I can see, entirely pointless on every level.
- Motifs: I figure it’s plausible that a few of you might be knitters – if you are then you might find this tool useful, which lets you scope out what a repeating pattern might look based on a gridded layout. Choose the size of your grid and then fill it in with blocks of the colour of your choosing to see what that would look like as a tiled output which I presume is useful if you’re trying to plan a scarf or something. Can, er, can you tell I don’t know the first thing about knitting? I really don’t, you know.
- The NYC Realtime Subway Clock: OK, this is a) a product you have to buy; b) only of any use or interest if you live in New York, but I’m including it because I think some of you do actually live there, and also because I WANT SOMEONE TO MAKE THIS FOR LONDON SO I CAN BUY IT. I featured a homebrew version of something similar a few years back (by Terence Eden, I think), but, honestly, I reckon these would sell like hotcakes. IMAGINE having a clock in your kitchen that tells you when the next buses and tubes at your local stops show up. IMAGINE. PLEASE can someone turn this into a UK business in 2026, I promise to buy one.
- Archives.Design: “A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives. This collection is compiled and curated by Valery Marier. It is a labour of love run in her free time.” THANKYOU VALERY THIS IS A BRILLIANT RESOURCE! Honestly, if you do anything at all related to design then this is the motherlode, honestly.
- Another Big Gay Art Auction: This one’s happening in a week, should you be in the market for some VERY GAY ART. “Our final AFTER DARK catalog of the year sees giants of male erotic art take center stage, with numerous works from institutions and private collections from Rex, The Hun, Matt (Charles Kerbs), Stephen Hale, Michael Kirwan, Etienne and many others. At AFTER DARK we offer each catalogue of artworks with an argument and a confidence that these are more deserving than the infinite supply of common aesthetic motifs that artists use to replicate, repeat and adorn. AFTER DARK illuminates the quietest corners and loudest soirees of gay history, art, and culture in the 20th century and beyond.” Let’s be clear – this is VERY UNAMBIGUOUS and if you click the link you will see a *lot* of (tasteful) erect cock. Some of the work here is genuinely beautiful, some is cheerfully obscene, and some is, honestly, baffling – I don’t think I have *ever* seen a bronze of JUST a penis before, and, having now done so, I am not certain its a part of the anatomy that needs memorialising in this specific medium.
- Happy Fish Water T-Shirts: As a rule I really wouldn’t normally feature a shop that sells tshirts, particularly not one that sells tshirts which I might charitably describe as ‘novelty’. However, on this occasion I am making an exception because the owner of the site emailed me this week with the simple message: “I came across your website and thought you may be interested in featuring my brand” and while my immediate response was ‘yes, but probably not in a way that you would like very much’ I then dug into the tees and…look, these are very much not something I would ever personally wear, and if I’m honest I’m not wholly convinced that I would want to ever meet or hang out with anyone who would, but, also, some of these made me laugh until tears literally poured down my face, and, well, that means I have to share it. I am not certain if it’s possible for anyone to carry off a garment reading “The Worst Day Of Fishing Beats The Best Day Of Withdrawing From Heroin In Jail” or “My Anus Prolapsed” but, maybe YOU are that person!
- Castle Generator: This little toy creates procedurally-generated castles. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Part of this year’s Procedural Generation Game Jam on Itch, which is itself a lovely collection of things to explore.
- Album Guessr: A wordle-ish daily game where you have to guess the day’s album – you get certain information about which elements of your guess are correct (eg year, genre, etc) to try and narrow it down within a set number of attempts. Honestly, I thought this was IMPOSSIBLE but the more musically-inclined amongst you might enjoy this more than I did.
- The Writer Will Do Something: A short piece of interactive fiction – you are a writer on a videogame which is Having Some Problems. I really enjoyed this – you might have to have a *bit* of knowledge of the games industry for this to fully land with you, but for any of you who are involved in games then you will recognise…elements, certainly. Nice sound design too.
- Geo Racers: THIS IS SO GOOD! Someone’s made a lightweight game version of Race Across The World – start in Scotland, get to Gibralter with only £400 and no flights allowed! Other challenges are coming soon, but this is SO much more fun than it ought to be and there are so many nice little touches – the national anthems as you enter a new country, the need to change money(!)…honestly, this really is a lovely piece of work and I hope the dev gets the time to expand it because it has lots of potential imho. Aside from anything else, were I a train or bus company operating across Europe I would 100% think about sponsoring this and offering direct links to purchase tickets through the interface, because after 5 minutes of playing this I really wanted to get on a train somewhere foreign.
- Laserball: ISOLATE THE BALLS WITH LASERS! This will make sense when you play it, I promise.
- Schattenjaeger: This week’s final gamelink is a really nice Castlevania-esque action platformer which you can play at three different levels of zoom – at its most zoomed-out you can see the whole of the play area at once (but it’s near-impossible to play), meaning you can get a sense of how the whole thing fits together…this is generally just FUN and I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.
OUR FINAL MIX THIS WEEK IS THIS SUNSHINEY SET, APPROPRIATELY TITLED ‘BALEARIA’, BY MALKÖ!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Yebbi Gongju: I have no idea who this belongs to or what it is or what it is for or where it is from, but I am a BIG FAN of the aesthetic here, all sweets and glitter and head-vibrating quantities of sugar.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- The American Pigeon Museum: MEMETIC PIGEONS! Honestly, this is just GREAT (unless you really dislike pigeons) – like, how can you not love this? IMPOSSIBLE.
- Fukutaku10: You will, of course, have seen some very impressive examples of art made with LEGO – you have not, I promise you, ever seen anything quite like this. Really, I can’t stress how much this is going to surprise and impress you when you click through (if you are not surprised or impressed, please feel free to email me and explain how you got to be so jaded).
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- The Great Downzoning: This is, full disclosure, VERY LONG and VERY WONKY, and the sort of thing which I get the impression will really appeal to a certain type of middle-aged man who has strong opinions about things like the Green Belt and NIMBYISM/abundance and the like – is that you? OH GOOD! Anyway, I thought this was really interesting – the piece looks back at varying trends in urban design and housebuilding across Europe over the course of the past century or so, specifically the waxing and waning approach to densification in city design. Honestly, if you’re interested in economics and PRACTICAL REALITIES OF MAKING THE WORLD WORK, this really is a good and informative read.
- How The OBR Fcuked Up: Again, this one’s, er, A BIT NICHE, but this week the Office for Budget Responsibility published its own report on how, exactly, its budget analysis was leaked approximately 35 minutes before the actual budget – if you’re interested in either IT or comms, this is worth a read, I promise. It’s obviously not thrilling or well-written, but it’s a good example of clear, honest communications which I thought did a very good job of explaining how it happened; there are some…quite obvious flaws in the process they describe, but there’s also something very, very funny about the image of a dozen or so vaguely-tech-savvy journalists spending the morning clicking ‘refresh’ on a speculative url in the hope that they’re read the naming convention tea leaves correctly.
- Conversation: An article about the current ‘glut’ of self-help books focusing on helping us have ‘better’ conversations (I was not aware that this was a thing, but will trust the author on this), and why it is that ‘we’ seem to feel that we are not having good ones anymore. I am slightly-intrigued by this, partly because I think that the reason we feel like this is because we FCUKING OVERANALYSE EVERYTHING IN 2025, and partly because I think there are certain emergent social conventions around boundaries, personal preferences and potential offense which do possibly have a chilling effect on conversation – not, to be clear, because good conversation stems from someone being able to be really fcuking offensive or unpleasant, but because, to my mind at least, a good conversation is like a game of catch. You throw the chat between you, and a good conversationalist will return it to you in a way that you can reach, but that requires you to move or stretch slightly, or where there’s some spin on the return…because otherwise it’s really fcuking dull – and so, limiting the potential scope of conversation due to increasing desires to comply with people’s boundaries and preferences, necessarily reduces some of the scope for that sort of play. Does that make sense? Hm, I think, on reflection, that that might be a TERRIBLE analogy, but hey ho. “Back on my date, I was distracted by a paranoiac daydream about our tentative, preliminary chat being dissected somewhere by a bunch of scientists in — as my imagination had it — lab coats. Was I “self-disclosing” intimate facts about myself to build up a “rapid rapport,” because I’d just read that people actually want to know more about us than we give them credit for? Or was I doing it because of the strange and fragile dynamic produced on first dates where — because there is no history between you and possibly there will be no future — you can exist more earnestly in the present, speaking more truthfully and unrestrainedly than you might even to your closest companions? Recently a friend suggested that in some ways a one-night stand echoes the dynamic of a confessional: this quasi-sacred space in which you can reveal deeper aspects of yourself, and from which you go away feeling somehow unburdened.”
- GPT at 3: Gary Marcus gives the negative point of view on Where LLMs Are after three years of endless hype – this is worth a read, being very clear-eyed about the limitations of the tech (which Marcus has been consistent on from the beginning, to his credit), and while I am a lot more bullish about it than he is (I think possibly because I know a LOT more people who do the sort of stupid, pointless, bullsh1t jobs that really can now be largely automated by The Machine – I get the feeling Gary doesn’t have many friends working in advermarketingpr, although, based on current rates of progress, I won’t either in a year or so) I also agree that this isn’t, and never was, a pathway to whatever ‘AGI’ might be, and that as such a lot of the hype has been built on false promises and there’s a lot of disappointment to come.
- Using Nano Banana Pro: The new Google image gen model is fcuking astonishing, seriously, yet another ‘fcuk, goodbye to the ability to distinguish real from fake!’ moment to mark on the 2025 calendar (to their credit, Google’s shipped this with SynthIO, an automatic watermarking technology that can be identified by Gemini – so you can give an image to Google’s AI and ask ‘is this AI?’ and, if it was made with Google’s tools, it will tell you. The tech works even when you screencap an image – which hasn’t been the case with other watermarking variants – which is good! But, er, it only works on Google-made images! And you need to know that you can do this! And bother to do so! So, er, I don’t think it’s really going to make a blind bit of difference!). This is a guide to how to prompt it – it’s useful, but neglects to mention how fcuking p1ss-poor the guardrailing is, and how simple it is with this stuff to mock up faked screencaps of newsreaders announcing things complete with realistic astons and logos and the like, or to produce images depicting natural disasters or fires…OH WELL.
- The AI Clout Economy: An interesting piece on fan communities and their relationship with AI, particularly in relation to creating faked imagery of the stars they stan, and how the increasingly parasocial nature of the relationship between the famouses and the proles who keep them on their pedestals make this sort of thing potentially quite seriously damaging to their careers: “Stans using AI or otherwise deceptively edited media to bait other stans into engagement on X also has the knock-on effect of potentially spreading disinformation and harming the reputations of their favorite artists. In late October, a Grande stan account with nearly 40,000 X followers that traffics in crude edits — their last nine posts have all been images of Grande with slain podcaster Charlie Kirk’s face superimposed over hers, which has become a popular AI meme format — posted images of Grande wearing a T-shirt with text that says “Treat your girl right.” “I wonder why these photos are kept unreleased..” they captioned their post. Another Grande stan quoted them and wrote “Oh girl we ALL know why,” referencing Grande’s controversial (alleged) history of dating men who are already in relationships. The post has 6 million views.”
- Kicking Robots: This is long but SO good – honestly, possibly the best piece on robotics I have read all year, by the very smart James Vincent, all about humanoid robots and whether this year’s buzz is justified and the link between robotics and the next iteration of AI and all sorts of things besides – this has great interviews, good anecdotes and smart thinking, and is very readable despite the objectively-geeky subject matter, and generally is hugely recommended if you’d like to understand a bit more about the truth behind the buzz. “My first shove is hesitant. I’ve been told that the prototype in front of me is worth around $250,000, and while breaking it would make for a good story, it would also be the end of my visit to Apptronik. In response to my prod, the bot merely teeters. It’s heavier than I’d expected, around 160 pounds. It feels, well, like a person. “Oh, you can do it harder than that,” says an engineer, and I jab forward again. Nothing. Apollo is still trotting on the spot. Fine, I think, I’ll give it a real push. Drawing back, I grip my makeshift spear and strike the robot hard in the chest. It staggers backward, stamping its feet, flinging its arms toward me in an appealingly human gesture. I’m struck by a flash of involuntary alarm, whether out of sympathy for a fellow being or fear of an expensive accident I can’t say. For a moment, the robot looks like it might fall, then regains its balance and returns to its position in front of me. I look at its blank face with wonder and disquiet. It seems pretty real to me.”
- The Robots of Milton Keynes: Another superb piece, this time by Joanna Kavenna at New York Magazine, all about the odd little delivery robots of Milton Keynes – I saw these in LA earlier this year, trundling about and largely ignoring any passing pedestrians (and being ignored by them in turn, possibly because if you’re walking in LA you are either a tourist or, seemingly, suffering from quite major mental health challenges, or on crack), and they are a strange and surreal proposition; this is VERY funny, both about the robots and Milton Keynes itself (fish in a barrel, fine, but still some good gags), and the vignettes of local residents’ interactions with the tech are beautifully-drawn, and, in general, this is just a joy.
- On Twitter’s Location Verification Thing: A self-indulgent link to a piece by ME, all about the recent introduction of location details to X and how it doesn’t work properly, is being misused by pr1cks and is only making everything more confused. THANKS ELON YOU HORRIBLE APARTHEID TOAD.
- GenZ Broke The Marketing Funnel: This is a bit of a hatelink, sorry – this is some advermarketingpr-facing research all about HOW YOUNG PEOPLE PURCHASE NOWADAYS and it’s full of stats and data and research, the idea presumably being that people will cite these stats and thereby give KUDOS and CLOUT to Vogue for its insight and perspicacity – except it’s presented as a VERY annoying piece of scrollytelling, you can’t isolate the data and there’s no pdf of the report to download to make it readable and useful. It’s HORRIBLY style over substance, basically, and largely-unusable, and for some reason this really irked me – do feel free to skip this, unless you have a professional interest or want to get angry alongside me.
- The YouTube Scriptwriter: An interview with one Justin Kuiper, who’s been writing scripts for YouTube vids for nearly 10 years and is apparently quite good at it – this is VERY inside baseball and you will need to care about marketing for this to offer you anything, BUT if you have ever had to think or worry about viewer dropoff rates and conversion rates and horrible things like that, this will be honestly useful to you.
- Fortunes: This was sent to me by a reader, the mysterious and fabulously-named Blue Granby (HELLO BLUE GRANBY!), and it is a running collection of all the fortunes that Josh Madison has received from fortune cookies since 2008 (it was last updated a couple of months ago). This is…very random, but also a bit like some sort of massive, weird poem, and there’s a slightly hypnotic effect that kicks in as you read them, and I don’t know why but I find it…slightly beautiful. It also feels like something that one might Make Something With, should anyone want to get creative with several hundred fortunes.
- Horses: Horses is a game that was released this week by small studio Santa Ragione; it’s become the subject of some minor controversy, having been delisted from Steam for an apparent violation of the platform’s policies on sexual content. This is a review of the game by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell in RPS and while I am probably never going to play it I was fascinated by the premise and the ideas it explores, and the questions it obviously raises about sexuality and trauma and the links between the two. This is, I promise, a really good piece of critical writing and analysis that stands alone even if you haven’t (or, like me, won’t) played the game. “The “choices” are about investigating your own impotence, in other words. Later on you acquire a gun, videogaming’s favourite “verb”, but no ammunition. The gun is eventually used by somebody else, and not as a gun. There’s also a “save the damsel” subplot, videogaming’s other classic verb, but this is thwarted and respun as a softcore daydream, with the Farmer rubbing his thighs from the other side of a screen as he watches you abscond with the “princess”. The above scenario is a reminder of the projector clattering away behind you, the player of Horses. That projector and the Farmer are one and the same abuser. The machine discharges his pious, voyeuristic need to be estranged from his own sexuality, to experience it as a moving picture. The game’s many rapes, beatings and scenes of self-flagellation are appropriately machinic and abortive, the beginning and end of each animation failing to knit. It’s like watching somebody trying to remember how to jerk off, automatic and listless, even subjectless. The suffering isn’t really inflicted by a character, but unthinkingly enacted by the game’s own technology. However vile the pixel-bruised imagery of welts and amputations, the mayhem is always structural and in a bizarre way, disembodied, even dispassionate. It is merely the action of this world. It just… is.”
- The Best Albums of the Year 2025: The Quietus’ annual list of their favourite records of the year is always a treat, mainly just to see how many of the bands I have heard of (this year it was about 7, which feels average) – let’s just say you won’t find Sam Fender on here – but also because as a gateway into some genuinely interesting sounds you might not have heard elsewhere it’s practically-unparalleled.
- The Small Press Books of the Year: There was a period when the Guardian did an annual roundup of the best titles from independent publishers, but I think that has fallen by the wayside in recent years – in its absence, this selection by LitHub is US-centric and so might mean you can’t find everything listed here easily available outside North America but also contains some really interesting-sounding works which might pique your interest. I want to read ALL of these.
- 52 Things Tom Whitwell Learned This Year: The now-traditional Whitwell list returns for 2025, and it’s excellent as ever. As is standard, there will be at least one of these that you’re compelled to copy and paste to a variety of chats – personally this one has continued to baffle and confuse me since I first read it six days ago, but, well, pick your own! “A gram of silica gel has almost the same surface area as two basketball courts” – SERIOUSLY HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE HOW????
- Underrated Reasons to be Thankful: I really loved this – it is not, I promise, as twee as the title would suggest; instead these are funny, weird, sad, poignant, poetic and occasionally beautiful, and there are four more lists linked at the bottom of the post which I really do recommend unreservedly: “That if I was a fish I would live in unending terror of getting eaten by a bigger fish, but presumably fish don’t feel that way because when evolution adapts a creature to an environment it would be counterproductive to wire them to experience life as torture, although it’s not clear this is true and I have no idea why or how evolution would set a hedonic baseline.”
- I Thought About That A Lot: Another now-traditional recurring link! I Thought About That A Lot is, you will OF COURSE recall, the annual collection of essays, a new one posted each day in December, of personal writing about whatever the authors want to write about. The link here goes to the main page where all the essays from this year and years past are collected – the 2025 crop include (so far) pieces on Aftersun, constipation and dancing while sober (amongst other things), and they are all a pleasure to read, so carve out 15 minutes with a cup of tea and enjoy them (the Aftersun one in particular is beautiful, I think).
- The Real People of America’s Zombieland: This is an INCREDIBLY miserable piece in many respects, but it’s well-written and clear-eyed and it does an excellent job of describing the sheer misery of serious substance addiction in Philadelphia – I don’t think I’ve ever read something that glamourises drug use less than this does, honestly. “In the shadow of the Market-Frankford “El” metro, which runs on a track directly above the street, the daily grind is in full swing. On one side, a man stares into his reflection in a car window and shoots a needle into his neck. He eventually finds a vein, then slumps into an unresponsive stupor. Watching him is Amanda, who has also just been discharged from hospital after her blood pressure “went through the roof” from medetomidine withdrawal. She describes it as “a poison” which makes her “feel like I’m crawling in my skin” when she’s coming down. “Everybody’s minds just start curving too,” she says. Amanda grew up a stone’s throw from Kensington and during the pandemic, with no job or support system, got drawn into the drug scene. The first thing she saw was a young woman injecting into her neck and it going badly wrong. “It looked like a scene out of a zombie movie,” she recalls. “She missed the vein in her neck and her whole eye went really dark and bloodshot. Her eye was never the same as before.””
- Postscript to an Open Marriage: I get the impression that you will have…opinions on this piece and its author – but I think the author is very much fine with that. You might have read pieces by Jean Garnett before – she’s written extensively about opening her marriage, and then it all going wrong, in a sort of madly-confessional style that, honestly, I don’t understand AT ALL. Anyway, this is Garnett writing about the Lily Allen album and saying ‘hey, maybe her husband wasn’t that much of a bad guy after all’, which while I don’t have any strong opinions either way was, I thought, at least a perspective I hadn’t read before (also, on a sentence level she is a reliably-entertaining writer, if astonishingly self-absorbed).
- The First Night: This was recently republished having originally been written five years ago – it’s an account by an Hasidic woman of her wedding night, when her and her husband were both virgins with a minimal understanding of sex, and how it went. It doesn’t feel like a *massive* spoiler to say that the answer here is ‘not AMAZINGLY’, but it’s a really honest piece that feels neither prurient not voyeuristic, and it will make you SO GLAD that, presumably (I hope), you knew a little bit more about what you were doing and what was going on the first time you rubbed mucous membranes with someone else.
- Very Important People: Mike Nagel writes about tagging along to a music festival on a backstage pass, and the oddity of being adjacent to the famous, and, generally, just sort of riffs, whimsically, in a manner vaguely-reminiscent of a (straight, less waspish) David Sedaris – which, ok, may not be a recommendation for you, but I very much enjoyed the voice and tone of this.
- The Giant in the Attic: This is an absolutely STELLAR profile of author and revered comics writer (Watchmen, etc) Alan Moore – honestly, even if you don’t know anything about Moore this is a brilliant read, funny and intelligent and educative and FULL of great lines and anecdotes; Alexander Sorondo, the author, obviously loves and admires Moore and this affection is visible throughout – although, I shared this with a friend who knows Moore in real life, who was keen to point out to me that there is a factual inaccuracy in this piece because, and I quote, “alan only smokes solid – 9 bars…he makes the most enormous sh1tty spliffs, full of massive hot-rocks – he is a man unchanged since the 80s. The first job of the morning is to take out his tea tray of spliff ephemera, put it on his lap and skin up a series of massive joints ‘so i’m set up for the day’”
- Unnameable: This is…OK, this is quite a challenging read – not because of the prose, but because of what it’s describing. Dan Thurot goes to a boardgame convention and describes his experience of a game based on the Holocaust, in which you, the players, are tasked with enacting the final solution. The game sounds EXACTLY as horrible as you would imagine it to be – it’s not presented as something you would do for ‘fun’ so much as an educational tool to communicate the banal, logistics-based horror that sat behind the millions of deaths, something that reduces numbers of corpses to points and genocide to a game between competing generals. Thurot is himself Jewish, and this is honestly a very beautiful piece of writing in many ways, but it’s also very, very hard to read and quite…horrible. I recommend it, but advisedly. “This is how it happens. Four officials hope to prove themselves competent and effective. The more prominent the Jews they find and exterminate, the greater their prestige. So they delve into the hidden parts of the Reich’s occupation. They uncover and transport and shoot and incinerate. They select their partners carefully, always elevating those who won’t threaten them in turn. In the East, they don’t bother with the trains. As soon as an undesirable is found, it is easier to kill them where they stand. In the West, far from the camps, they must first be removed and processed. When one of these officials rises above the rest, the others find ways to obstruct them. Paperwork. Troops on call elsewhere. Polite but stern refusals to collaborate. This is how it happens. The targets of our solution are not human. They are things. Cattle: unthinking, guilty of imagined sin, unclean from wallowing in their own filth. Cards: black and red suits for the lowborn, face cards for those with connections or wealth. Numbers: identities lost in a string of numerals, more indecipherable than gematria. This is how it happens.”
By 28 Grillz
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