So it turns out that the long flight I thought I was taking on Sunday is in fact tomorrow, meaning I am SLIGHTLY UP AGAINST IT, timewise, and should probably have spent more time washing pants than staring at webspaff – but you’re grateful for my endeavours, aren’t you? Eh? Oh.
FINE, SUIT YOURSELVES. As a result of my needing to go and buy some sunscreen and, er, make sure there’s nothing incriminating in my wallet I am going to have to cut this intro short – Web Curios will be off next week (and in fact possibly longer if I don’t do enough of a thorough job re the wallet thing tbh) due to timezone differences and, honestly, the fact that I really hope I have better things to do with my time than staring at a laptop screen, but you can look forward to my filling your inbox once again in early June, when there will also be an EXCITING TINYAWARDS-RELATED ANNOUNCEMENT to look forward to (you can probably guess what that is tbh, but let’s just PRETEND there’s some anticipation building).
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you’re all going to keep your fingers and toes crossed that nothing weird happens at the border please.
WE BEGIN THIS WEEK WITH A RATHER LOVELY JAZZ MIX WHICH I THINK YOU MIGHT ENJOY TOO!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANY OF YOU LIVE IN SANTA MONICA AND FANCY HANGING OUT NEXT WEEK, PT.1:
- Mused: This is, I think, one of the most conceptually-interesting things I’ve seen in ages, even if it’s very much an early-stage work-in-progress (and you should probably shut down everything else your computer is doing before giving it a go, unless you want your laptop to practically take off) – Mused is…fcuk, it’s a bit of a tricky one to describe, so let me outsource the responsibility entirely to the person who created it: “We want to inspire our users with high fidelity and meaningful simulations and 3d captures. We build immersive experiences for city planners, analysts, educators, corporate training programs, and urban and transport workers around the world to simulate people and places to a high degree of detail…Simulate any history — or anything — just by talking to our map. Write “D-Day Landings, WWII” or the “Caesar’s Gallic Wars”, and the map will create a simulation with relevant places and people — and let you re-enact the events. We’ve been building it in partnership with everyone from ecologists at the United Nations to logistics and supply chain managers to teachers around the world. Bringing your ideas to life is much faster, and afterward, you can export and edit the map data in another tool of your choice (I like Mapbox or Geojson io). Along with the map, I’ve been developing a human behavior model that visualizes how we live and move in cities–the flow of goods and people. It’s based on our contemporary methods of travel, built on real census data and a lot of research with historical datasets. These small white cubes each represent a vehicle or pedestrian going about their daily lives with realistic plans and actions. They talk to each other, consider their lives, dream about the past much like us. They’ll react in meaningful ways to the simulations you create, primarily running away from things, and in the future, with more detailed responses to what you create.” Ok, I appreciate that that’s a lot to get your head round, but, basically, what this is a 3d map of the whole world which you can interact with via what I think is some sort of LLM-type layer and which lets you type in things like – and I am not joking here, I tried this the other day – “godzilla attack on Oval, South London”, and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. Honestly, the mad potential of this is staggering – it’s quite slow, and a bit shonky, and, per the above description, the simulations are very simplified, but what is going on here is sort of amazing in terms of the modelling and simulation, and just thinking about where this sort of thing might eventually end up is slightly-dizzying…honestly, give it a go, it really is quite amazing (but I’m not joking about the effect it’s likely to have on your laptop if yours is as old and shonky as mine is).
- The Past Internet Directory: There’s a slightly tedious strain of nostalgia bubbling around the nebulous concept of The Old Internet, Like It Used To Be – I see increasing amounts of ‘the web is terrible, it was better in the good old days’-type chat, and while I’m broadly sympathetic to the general vibe of ‘dear God everything is terrible let us please go back to a time when everyone hadn’t started dying and things were simple and, fundamentally, I was young’ I think it’s also important to occasionally remind people that, actually, the past was also quite shit and The Old Internet…wasn’t all that good, actually. Which is one of the reasons I adore this project – The Past Internet Directory is an attempt to catalogue all (ok, fine, LOTS OF) the urls that were contained in the printed ‘Guide To The Web’-type books that existed in the late-90s, before the Google boom, when it was actually quite hard to find things online and you had to actually Know Urls. You can search the archive by keyword, and the results are, where possible, linked to via the Internet Archive so you can experience exactly how…fundamentally-mediocre the Browsing Experience Of The Past was – this is a window into a world of poorly-crafted CSS and lots of text on white background, and, occasionally, some very esoteric weirdos exploring their PERSONAL OBSESSIONS, and I think it’s a useful corrective to the general ‘it was better back in the day’ narrative because, well, it wasn’t.
- Dial-A-Website: So I featured the Internet Phonebook in here last week – it’s now sold out, at least in its first edition, but I totally failed to mention that there is a specific page on the site which lets you ‘dial’ any of the urls contained within the phonebook; there are 700-ish, so simply by typing any number between 1 and…sevenhundredandsomething into the console on this webpage you will be directed to a MYSTERY CREATIVE PERSONAL WEBSITE – which feels like quite a nice timesink if you ask me. I just landed on the Museum of Alexandra – see where it takes YOU (or, you know, don’t; I can’t force you, much as I would like to, but consider this some…firmly-voiced coercion at the very least).
- Oh Jesus The New AI Video Model: I have tried to minimise the amount of ‘LOOK NEW AI THING’ over the past few months because, well, lots of people hate it and frankly it gets tedious pointing to slow, incremental progress – I WANT SHINY MILESTONES FFS! Which, conveniently, is exactly what Google provided this week with the announcement and partial launch (expensive tier, US-only, limited access for now) of Veo3, a text-to-video model which is just orders of magnitude better than pretty much anything else I’ve yet seen and which does the frankly-magic-feeling trick of creating audio along with the video – meaning that you don’t need to create a separate audio track or use lipsyncing addons or anything to create…actually really fcuking realistic looking clips of upto 8 seconds. Seriously, click the main link – then click this one, and then click this one, and take a moment to think about what this is going to do to anyone’s ability to tell what is real and fake, particularly when they’re scrolling past a stamp-sized clip on a phonescreen. Given that just last month a bunch of (admittedly stupid, mad, and almost-certainly racist/homophobic) people across Twitter became convinced that there was ACTUAL CCTV FOOTAGE of Keir Starmer and Lord Alli having a passionate clinch circulating online despite the fact said footage was very, very clearly a shonky AI-generated monstrosity, it’s not hard to imagine the sort of mad, febrile imaginings a few well-conceived spoofed clips of this sort of quality would lead to. And yes, it’s Google, so this will be guardrail to fcuk – but, as we’ve seen, the moats on this stuff don’t really appear to exist anymore, and, based on the pace of open source models and the rate at which they appear to be catching up with the big ones, you’re going to be able to download and tweak something this good in, what, ~9 months? THIS IS COMING AND IT IS UNSTOPPABLE AND NOONE SEEMS TO CARE (and, look, if you work in low-end advertising then I am sorry but your job is fcuked). The important thing to note here – aside from the increasing inevitability of an absolute epistemological crisis brought about my simulated media – is that AI is now…actually quite good in many cases, and lots of people don’t realise quite how much because they only fcuk with the free versions of stuff – if you haven’t played around with the toys for a while it’s worth digging back into it and realising where we are. I mean, even the terrible song-generating engines are getting…less terrible – for reasons that now escape me I was talking with a friend about how ‘My Boyfriend Would Suck As An Escort’ felt like a pop-punk song title, and asked Suno to spin it up out of curiosity and…look, I’m not saying this is good, but I have totally been humming the fcuking chorus.
- Islandoodle: If all that felt a little…well, unpleasant and unsettling and like it Presages Bad Things (which, to be clear, it does!), then why not take some time with this next link and RELAX a bit. Would you like to spend a few pleasing minutes playing around with a little browsertoy which gives you the godlike power to create small island communities out of nothing, complete with hills and mountains and lakes and CASTLES AND TOWNS and if you remember Townscaper from…a while back then this will be very familiar. Can I make an unreasonable request that whoever made this adds some sort of massive multiplayer functionality that lets you view and explore other people’s creations on some sort of infinite map archipelago? No? Ok, fine, I shan’t then. Anyway, this is SO LOVELY and SO SOOTHING and while it won’t make anything better or make the fundamental fear go away it might take the edge off for a minute or two.
- Tracing Art: ‘Tracing’ as in ‘provenance’ (God, that word; gives me flashbacks to a Certain Type Of Terrible Artworld Human and the peculiar and entirely-unnecessary pronunciation flourish they insist on lending the term, regardless of the otherwise-entirely-Anglo-Saxon nature of their vowels) rather than as in ‘what you used to do as a small child’ – this is a rather nice website by Getty which exists to promote its ‘Provenance Index’, which ‘provides open access to millions of resources from dealer stock books, sales catalogs, and archival inventories, revealing information on the ownership and market histories of artworks.’ There is SCROLLYTELLING (sorry, but noone’s come up with a replacement word and until one of you does we’re stuck with that one) and some rather nice HD images of works by a variety of artists, and some interesting examples of how the ownership history of a painting, sculpture or other artistic object can be pieced together through a range of clues and records…interesting and aesthetically-pleasing, and fcuk me did it teach me that there are an awful lot of lost works out there, somewhere.
- LLMingle: This is…just a slightly-mind-boggling concept that I sadly haven’t had quite enough time to dig into, but which just the SOUND of which slightly spun me out. So Interrupt was apparently a conference about AI agents which took place earlier this month in SF; as part of that, attendees were given the option to use LLMingle, a service which – and I think I am understanding this correctly – basically offered to let you outsource the job of networking with other conferences attendees to an LLM-powered ‘avatar’ of yourself which would go off into the digital ether and interact with OTHER avatars of attendees; said interactions would be judged for quality, interest, etc, and, should a certain threshold of, I don’t know, perceived utility be reached, you would be connected with the Actual Human beind the avatar for some, er, real-world conference friendship? Per the blurb, “Your AI avatar does the networking for you, finding meaningful connections based on shared interests and goals…Your personality and goals are fetched and embedded into an agent; that agent is paired with others for simulated conversations; another agent observes and judges their compatibility; if there’s a spark, we update your match history and notify both of you.” I honestly don’t know what to make of this – on the one hand, conferences are awful and ‘networking’ is a fcuking horrible pastime; on the other, does the outsourcing of human-to-human connection to an LLM approximation of ourselves feel…good? I don’t think it does. Still, this does at least open the possibility to a future where people can just outsource the business of ‘being a terrible moronic cnut on LinkedIn to an avatar’ which does seem in some small way like progress, so maybe it IS a net-positive after all.
- Theatre Royal: Via Ben Templeton, Theatre Royal is a project in similar vein to those people who did Hamlet in GTA Online – this is THEATRE IN FORTNITE!! Per the blurb, this is “an interactive Twitch stream where you shape the action! Two streamers drop into Fortnite, performing a play while fighting to survive. But they can’t do it alone—you join the squad, protect them, and influence what happens next. Will they make it to the final act?” Look, they did Antigone in Fortnite three days ago! I think this is WONDERFUL and should you have any young people in your life who are into theatre then they might find this an interesting riff on it – for anyone else this is just pleasingly fcuking weird.
- Coppelganger: OH GOD THIS IS GREAT. Plug in a photo of yourself (or, fine, of anyone you like, but DO YOURSELF YOU COWARD) and this website will tell you based on facial similarity gauging software which of the many, many police offers in New York you look most like. Me? I am uncomfortably similar in facial physiognomy to one Elaine Galvin and, look, I am really, really sorry Elaine but I have to live with it too, solidarity sister.
- The Restroom Archive: One of the unexpected side-effects of the growth in processing power of mobile phones is their evolution into potential 3d environment scanners, and the subsequent boom in, well, making 3d scans of random stuff just because we can. Lauren’s Rotating Sandwiches continues to be The Best Of All The Scanning Projects, but there’s always going to be a small place in my heart for Jake Welch’s Restroom Archive: “The Restroom Archive is an ongoing case study that aims to document and celebrate the public restroom. What started as a joke in 2023 has become a years-long practice of 3D scanning the restrooms in restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, coffee shops, and various other spaces across the U.S. and Europe. The scans are meant to capture the humorous, chaotic, and often scary nature of these uniquely private publicly accessible spaces. Through capturing the diverse decor, graffiti, and artifacts, both stored and left behind, I consider these restrooms to be a reflection of both the creativity and impertinence of human nature when we think nobody else is watching.” I’m not entirely sure why but there’s something interesting about seeing these as entirely-disembodied ideas of space – also, does the existence of these scans means it would theoretically be possible to create some sort of videogame based on having to escape from small, grubby toilet cubicles across Brooklyn? As I think that would be oddly-compelling.
- The Calamus Project: “In the late 1850s, Walt Whitman wrote Calamus: a sequence of 45 poems about camaraderie, friendship, and love among men, which he included in the 1860 edition of his collected poems, Leaves of Grass. He named the sequence after the calamus plant, or sweet flag, a tall flowering reed that grows at the edges of ponds and other wet places. These beautiful short poems offer a less familiar version of Whitman—more vulnerable and self-critical— and address same-sex relationships in ways well ahead of their time. They pose prophetic questions about the relationship of love to democracy. The goal of the Calamus Project is to present the poems in an engaging way through films, programs, and this website.” This facet of Whitman’s life and work was entirely new to me, and both the poems and the performances of them here collected are gorgeous (there’s one called ‘Who Is Reading This?’ which for perhaps obvious reasons rather resonated).
- Project Wrestles: Sticking with the poetry (SEAMLESS!), this doesn’t, I don’t think, *wholly* work but I think it’s an interesting idea and there’s something curious in the way it’s presented which held my attention. Basically this is a series of poems with accompanying (AI-generated, I think) images which exist as a companion piece to the verse; the poems themselves are written in a language called Mezangelle developed by artist Mez Breeze combining the syntax of code and poetry. “_Prog[W]res[tle]s_ weaves together social commentary on multifaceted crises of our era. The use of Mezangelle – a blend of programming syntax and poetic expression – challenges readers to interpret layered meanings [such as is evidenced by the title: a portmanteau of the words “Progress” and “Wrestle”]. Mezangelle treats code and text as a malleable poetic material, incorporating aspects of programming language syntax [such as indentations, brackets, periods] to create new and unexpected meanings. This language – non-executable in a traditional sense – instead executes in the minds of its readers, challenging you to navigate and interpret its layered meanings.The project is comprised of five sections. To start, press the “Play” button in any of the five sections. Your chosen section will then open in a new window/tab.
Each section contains two separate auto-scrolling segments: the top scroll shows a visual narrative while the bottom scroll contains Mezangelled text. You have the option to manually scroll through each, or let the cyclical auto-scroll feature guide you through.” I personally think the visuals let these down slightly – AI prejudice in action! – but there’s something interesting in the autoscroll presentation used in the works, and I like the code[prose]-type intersection in the writing; see what you think.
- The Internet Archive LoFi Stream: I LOVE THAT THIS EXISTS. Offline at the time of writing because even archivists need to sleep, this is a newly-launched livestream by the Internet Archive which presents a live feed of people scanning microfiches of stuff to upload to the Archive as part of the ongoing (and increasingly Cnut-ish, it feels) attempt to put a finger in the dyke of digital info degradation. Honestly, I appreciate that this reveals a dearth of ambition almost heroic in scope, but having watched this for a bit yesterday afternoon I could totally see myself doing the ‘scanning and archiving’ bit for a living should anyone at the Archive happen to read this and want to offer me a job. I WOULD NOT GET BORED I PROMISE (also, dear god I could use the work).
- WHOISBN?: I like this and it feels SO FRENCH – also, it’s French-only at present, but feels like something that might usefully be expanded internationally. WHOISBN is a tool designed to expose power dynamics and monopoly in the French publishing industry – install the software and it will let you scan the ISBN number of any book and get an insight into the ownership structures of the publishing network that brought it into being. “The ISBN is a unique, permanent identification number assigned to each book. It appears on the cover in the form of a barcode, and comprises 13 characters. WHOISBN? lets you scan this barcode to find out who owns the publishing house of the book you’re holding in your hands, then indicates which company owns the publishing house, then who owns the company that owns the company, and so on, down to the ultimate beneficiary. WHOISBN? then assigns a grade between A and F to this owner, according to its size in the publishing market, and its political orientation. WHOISBN? is currently limited to the French publishers. Extensions are planned for other ISBN zones.” A good idea, this, and I like this ‘single point of access transparency reporting’ thing.
- Block AI Scrapers: Look, it’s too late and it probably doesn’t matter anymore, but should you wish to TAKE A STAND then Anubis might be of use to you – you probably don’t need to know the how, but here it is anyway: “Anubis is a man-in-the-middle HTTP proxy that requires clients to either solve or have solved a proof-of-work challenge before they can access the site. This is a very simple way to block the most common AI scrapers because they are not able to execute JavaScript to solve the challenge. The scrapers that can execute JavaScript usually don’t support the modern JavaScript features that Anubis requires. In case a scraper is dedicated enough to solve the challenge, Anubis lets them through because at that point they are functionally a browser.” Clear? Good, because, honestly, that means the square-root of fcuk all to me.
- Big Box Collection: OH GOD 1990s VIDEOGAME NOSTALGIA MY CHILDHOOD MY CHILDHOOD! Back in the day when games came on half-a-dozen floppy discs rather than magically appearing on your device via the medium of magical sky-based data transfer they used to come in ACTUAL PHYSICAL BOXES, many of which were unnecessarily massive and whose size and design were part of the appeal, making everything look EPIC and EXCITING and FULL OF PROMISE, even if deep down you knew that the reality awaiting you was several hours of fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the fcuking thing to work at all (shoutout to the real ones, rip batchfile executables) followed by an inevitable crash of comedown disappointment when it became clear inside three minutes that the games boxart and selective screenshot deployment masked an experience akin to guiding a crippled slug through a dun-brown sea of molasses. Anyway, this website celebrates those boxes – why? WHY THE FCUK NOT THE BOXES WERE GREAT THERE ARE 3D MODELS HERE FFS JUST ENJOY IT. There are, apparently, over 1000 on here, and “All boxes can be zoomed and rotated and some can even be looked at from top and bottom angles. Also, double click/tap a box with a gatefold cover or sleeve cover to open them up.” Tell me you’re not excited.
- Milky Way Photographer of the Year: SO MANY BEAUTIFUL STARS!! None of these look remotely real, but they are VERY PRETTY and reminded me of how amazing it is on the rare occasions you can actually see them in real life, something set to become harder and harder as we fcuk more and more satellites into the upper atmosphere.
- Fake My Run: OH GOD THIS IS BASICALLY MIDDLE-AGED DAD TERRORISM. “FakeMyRun lets you create custom running routes that look realistic on fitness tracking platforms like Strava and Runkeeper. You can either draw routes manually or use our shape templates…FakeMyRun uses advanced mapping technology to create realistic running routes. When you draw a route or select a shape, our system:Captures the GPS coordinates of your route; Snaps those coordinates to actual roads using mapping APIs; Adds realistic elevation data based on terrain information; Calculates timestamps based on your selected pace; and Packages everything into a standard GPX file that fitness platforms can read” Honestly, you could absolutely DESTROY people (and quite possibly entire communities) with this and I think at least one of you should start devoting yourselves to fitness-based social terrorism RIGHT NOW (and then document the fallout via an insanely-bitchy anonymous blog for my amusement please and thankyou).
NEXT UP, ENJOY THE NEW STEREOLAB ALBUM BECAUSE IT IS ACE AND PERFECT FOR A SUNSHINEY DAY!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF ANY OF YOU LIVE IN SANTA MONICA AND FANCY HANGING OUT NEXT WEEK, PT.2:
- Compost Party: Oh I love this! Compost Party is a tiny website running off a broken old phone – it’s literally pretty much the minimum viable tech stack required to host a site, it’s solar powered, and the person behind it is giving out space on it for people they know to put small, silly, whimsical, pointless things online. This is very much ‘website as allotment’, to coin an agricultural metaphor, and, again, it makes me think that everyone should be given a space like this aged 12 or so and allowed to just make what they want from it – I increasingly find that, weirdly, I am entirely sincere when I say things like this, which honestly feels unusual and not-entirely-comfortable for me, but maybe this is…growth?
- Computer Weather: Friend of Curios Damjanski has returned with another very silly app – this one exists to do one thing and one thing only, to inform you whether the weather where you are is currently ‘computer weather’ (ie miserable, stay inside, read Curios!) or ‘not computer weather’ (ie lovely beautiful, stay inside, read Curios!) – you might reasonably think ‘hm, yes, not sure you need an app for that though’, to which I would respond ‘you don’t really fit in here, do you?’ (but in a nice way, honest).
- Jordan Delcros: Aside from having just a really cool-sounding name, Jordan Delcros also has a really very shiny portfolio website – all of his work is presented as objects on a 3d desktop, populated as you scroll down the page, and there’s a pleasing heft to the modelling here which gives the whole thing a pleasingly-chunky vibe (also there’s some really nice work linked to, and a couple of fun games which I lost 5 minutes to earlier this week, for which additional points). Basically this made me think ‘wow, this is really nicely-presented, what a talented person’, which is pretty much all you can want from a digital portfolio so WELL DONE, STRANGER WITH THE COOL NAME!
- Learning Light: Another week, another Google Arts & Culture toy which is probably REALLY useful to someone with a greater degree of artistic ability than me (literally anyone) – this is basically a little virtual studio which lets you explore How Lighting Works; you can position your little humanoid marionette however you so choose, and then select the lighting you want to apply to it, from the position of the spots to the colour to the brightness to the intensity, to help you learn (ok, I am guessing here, but) how best to light a scene and how different variables effect the overall composition based on how it’s lit. There is OBVIOUSLY a genAI layer to this meaning you can ask conversational questions of The Machine, and, look, I don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge about any of this to gauge whether it’s useful or just a shiny gimmick but, well, it IS very shiny so consider me sold.
- Peek Money: I know that one of the most tedious complaints of the current Older Generations about Younger Generations (and quite probably the sort of thing that Older Generations have ALWAYS whinged about, on reflection) is the supposition that they are somehow FOREVER CHILDREN, infantilised and dumbed-down and unwilling to take responsibility for anything – a perspective which, to be clear, is lazy and reductive and unhelpful, but which is also massively reinforced by stuff like Peek Money, an app aimed at nonspecific young people and designed to help them better manage their finances. How? Er, with language like “vibe checks”! Is this…is this financial literacy? To be fair it’s a bit more than that – the idea is that it’s an LLM layer over your bank account which offers a friendly overview of all your monetary incomings and outgoings to make it easier for you to get a clear picture of exactly where you are financially,how you’re spending, etc etc – which, to be clear, is A Good Thing! That said, there are some slightly-horrific elements, including the aforementioned copy (do…do young people ACTUALLY want their money to talk to them in colloquialisms? Do we really want to, I don’t know, ANTHROPOMORPHISE THE WALLET???? Also, some of the examples of what it might tell you are HAIR-RAISING – who the fcuk is spending £500 a month on fcuking takeout? THIS IS WHY YOU ARE POOR FFS!) and the standout line on the webpage: “IMAGINE HAVING A FRIEND…who understands your money concerns without judgement”, which feels rather like the second half of it is intended to be silent which, well, made me very sad for a second. Anyway, if you want to be patronised into financial wellbeing by a poorly-scripted GenZ ‘money-bestie’ (kill me), then perhaps this is for YOU!
- Screvi: One for the obsessive highlighters amongst you – Screvi is basically a tool which takes all your different highlighted passages from stuff you’ve read across Kindle and other ebook platforms and makes them searchable and, you know, ‘useful’ – you can also include your Twitter bookmarks, though fcuk knows why you would want to pollute your beautifully-curated collection of literary aphorisms with some memes and, let’s be honest, bongo is beyond me. There is, obviously, an LLM layer on top of this which allows you to theoretically INTERROGATE THE WISDOM you have accrued – beautifully, some of the ‘example’ questions it chooses to use to highlight how it might work include things like ‘should I quit my job?’ – and, look, if you’re considering making life-changing career decisions based on the recommendations of a fcuking LLM that is in turn basing *its* output on the clippings you’ve taken from a bunch of your favourite romantasy or business guru books then, well, LOL YOU FCUKING IDIOT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???
- WikiWand: In fact, this is going to be one of the great, gradual-but-significant shifts in the way in which we use and interact with information, isn’t it? The introduction of a conversational layer over every single informational corpus we have, whether for better or worse – it’s not clear that ‘asking questions’ is always the best way into a topic. Sometimes, one might argue, it’s better to be presented with information as a fait accompli and then interrogate it, as that way you don’t miss stuff because you don’t know the right questions to ask. Anyway, this is DEFINITELY COMING – here’s another example: WikiWand, an LLM layer on top of Wikipedia which turns every single Wiki entry into something you can ask questions of rather than just read and ingest. I…feel uneasy about this, and I can’t quite tell if it’s me being OLD AND A LUDDITE or PRESCIENT AND SMART. Maybe it’s neither!
- Pi Patterns: You know how when you were a kid and you were bored in maths class you used to do things like ‘trying to stop the stopwatch on your mate’s digital watch on 0.999s’ as a desperate source of entertainment (SEE, THE PAST WAS SH1T TOO STOP FETISHISING IT FFS)? Well this is like that except with digits of Pi – the counter cycles through bits of the infinite sequence of digits, and your job is to hit STOP and see whether you’ve managed to freeze the numbers at a point where they’re doing anything interesting – being palindromic, say, or being Fibonacci numbers…look, this isn’t exactly high-octane entertainment but I found it weirdly compelling on Tuesday when it was a choice between either messing around with this or writing up the corporate narrative for a former-boxer’s personal training and development business and, well, this won.
- Subvert: Seeing as even Bandcamp, the best of all the music streaming and download platforms from the point of view of ‘actually giving money to the artists who made the work’, isn’t entirely perfect from a ‘bad investors’ point of view, some people are trying to launch a cooperative alternative in the shape of Subvert – it’s not ready yet, but you can sign up for updates and there are ways of getting involved early should you be interested as either a label or artist. There’s a Zine you can download from the site which explains the ethos behind the whole thing, but, in general, it seems to be a standard co-ownership model and they are very keen to make it clear that it is in no way a crypto thing, so, well, more power to them.
- Department Store Catalogues: A WONDERFUL collection on the Internet Archive comprising seemingly hundreds of old (20thC) catalogues from department stores around the world – ok, fine, most are north american, but there are some French and German ones in there as well and in general it’s just a great whirlwind tour through some of the greatest hits of 20thC massmarket capitalism. A particular favourite is the Sears Christmas Book from 1943, because, once again, THE PAST WAS SH1T LOOK HOW RUBBISH ALL THE STUFF WAS.
- RattleCams: Have you ever wanted to uncover THE SECRET LIVES OF SNAKES? Er, why? What do you think, exactly, they get up to? Do you think they embody the lives imagined for them by Gary Larson in The Far Side when you’re not looking? I don’t want to disappoint you, but, based on the webcams available on this site, to the best of my knowledge the secret lives of snakes are…not thrilling, but, equally, if you spend enough time watching the currently-live Colorade Rattlercam you might get to see one shedding its skin or laying an egg or something, so, well depending on how slow your day is then it may be of interest.
- Choosr: On the one hand, this is a very superficial and slightly-silly app which lets anyone post a binary question and get immediate answers to it from the community – stuff like ‘cheese or chocolate?’ or ‘Gaga or Beyonce?’ or ‘daddy or chips?’ – and see WHAT THE WORLD (or at the very least the children using this app) think the answer is, like a giant, immediate WISDOM OF CROWDS thing; on the other, it’s also something you could use to basically outsource all of your daily decisions to an audience of strangers. ‘This top or that top?’, ‘swipe left or right’? ‘Cut down or across?’ – ALL of these decisions and more could be offered up to the mob to let them puppeteer you through your existence. Honestly, this feels like something livestreamers could have fun with, but I also quite like the idea of a brand just running an entire product launch campaign based on what the app tells you to do, just to see what happens. This feels like it is FULL OF CHAOTIC POSSIBILITY, basically (or like it could end in death).
- Original Poems: There’s something about the vibe of this site that feels a bit…off, but I have had a dig and it doesn’t seem to be anything other than a benign collection of open source verse (albeit one presented like it’s been entirely spun up by AI in about 10 minutes – I think there’s something interesting in this, that there’s a specific type of simple webdesign aesthetic which to me is now indelibly associated with vibecoded shovelware or a certain type of templated solution, which possibly is a nice angle for the seven human webdevs who will be able to eke out a living in the near future) alongside some…less-interesting ‘educational’ offerings which feel a bit bolted on tbh. Still, if you’re interested in poetry then there is a LOT of it on here, divided by style/type – it’s all quite simplistic (WHERE IS THE QUATRAIN SECTION???) but as a kind of gateway portal it’s not terrible.
- Weird Spy Satellite: A bluesky bot which posts satellite images labeled with mysterious, made-up, sinister-sounding markers. What are the DEEP STATE SUPPLIES a few miles down the road from the CRUMBLING CEMETERY? Dare you explore the ZIGGURAT OF SICKOS? This is strange and creepy and the sort of thing that would work brilliantly as an occasional writing prompt if you wanted to explore some Scarfolk-adjacent fictions.
- The Am-Dash: As someone with a perverse affection for the hyphen and em-dash when writing (and who is seemingly single-handedly attempting to prop up semicolon use in the UK; you can thank me later) I have been personally really irritated by ‘em-dashes are the incontrovertible proof of The Writings of The Machine’ discourse – SOME OF US JUST WRITE LIKE THIS FFS! Which is why I was pleased to discover this, a new unit of punctuation designed specifically and solely for HUMAN use – The Machine doesn’t have access to this one, so use it instead and prove to the world that you are a real person made of meat and gristle and bile and bone and hatred!
- Upskateboards: Ok, this is a real product which means I wouldn’t ordinarily botherfeaturing it but equally it’s a foam rubber skateboard designed specifically to be used INSIDE YOUR HOUSE, so if you’ve ever wanted to pop an ollie in your living room without, I don’t know, irrevocably-fcuking the antique flooring, then WOW are you in luck. This feels both VERY silly and VERY middle-aged-man, and the sort of thing that despite all the promises on the website will make the people in the flat below you declare all out war within approximately 48h or purchase.
- Titanic: Maiden Vengeance: Have you ever wondered “hm, what would it be like to play a third-person action game in which you play as an angry, ambulant mecha-version of the Titanic, beating the sh1t out of small icebergs as you take revenge for the whole ‘sinking’ business?’ No, I imagine you haven’t what with you not being delusional – but now you can do just that! This is VERY silly, but a good seven minutes of violent, boaty fun.
- Everydle: Every single possible Wordle, at once. This is HORRIBLE and made me feel slightly queasy as I tried to get my head around it, so well done JakeO whose evil work this is.
- Skull Hotel: Ooh, this is a fun little horror game – you’re playing as a cleaner in the MYSTERIOUS AND SINISTER Skull Hotel. Your job is to clean the rooms – or at least as many of the rooms as you can, given some of them are occupied by…things. Horrible things. Horrible MURDEROUS things with too many teeth in their faces. Clean, hide, avoid, tremble, get surprisingly scared (if you’re me, at least). This is really rather slick and the tension ramps up impressively (or I am just a coward, which is equally very possible).
- Dogman95: This is a short (we’re talking 3 mins or so here, promise), first-person adventure about a dog in a dungeon. It is VERY SHONKY and hand-drawn and perfectly charming and I love it immoderately – honestly, this is really really fun and you will adore it, I promise.
- Erostasis: Finally this week, a link specifically for all those of you who agree with me that Existenz is in a weird way one of the sexiest films ever made – Erostasis is…what is it? A lightly-interactive short story that’s part exploration of fetish and part quite intense Cronenbergian bodyhorror, a 20 minute audiovisual trip inside a vaguely-sentient spaceship whose various perverse constituent parts all need to be…fcuked back into alignment, an allegory about all sorts of kink-related and kink-adjacent issues…Christ knows, all of the above, this is GREAT (and a bit NSFW, even if the limited nudity is quite grainy and stylised, it’s quite clearly…about sex, to an extent), and in particular the audio (also a bit NSFW, to be clear) is really well-done and a vital part of the experience. This is, honestly, great, and if the above description hasn’t entirely grossed you out (which I concede it might have done, sorry) then I strongly recommend you give it a go.
THE FINAL MIX THIS WEEK FEELS LIKE COCKTAIL HOUR AND IS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED SPIN LORD!
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- 366 Weird Movies: Not, I don’t think, a Tumblr! But a great website whose owners are attempting to develop the ULTIMATE LIST of weird films – per the blurb, “The backbone of this site is the project to create the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. Why make a list of 366 movies? That’s one for every day of the year, with a spare for leap years. As every day is associated with a Catholic saint, we believe every day should have its own weird movie. Most of the movies selected are both weird and good. Sometimes, if a movie is very weird, it will make the list ahead of a better movie. Sometimes, if a movie is very good, it does not have to be quite as weird. The key determinant is that each movie gives me that I-know-it-when-I-see-it feeling; a film that makes my skin crawl, my jaw drop, or just causes me to mutter to myself, “Now that’s weird….” We are very cautious in certifying a movie as weird—we may consider and review 4 or 5 movies for every one we decide to put on the List. But just because a movie does not make the List on the first ballot doesn’t mean it’s forever out of contention. From time to time, we’ll reconsider and promote movies that we once thought borderline to the exalted ranks of the Weirdest Movies Ever Made.” I have had a quick look and it includes Bad Boy Bubby, possibly my favourite ever piece of cinema and definitely one of the strangest (and, er, most polarising) films I have ever seen (and also one which contains one of my favourite ever gig scenes in any film ever), so I am going to say their radar is good.
- All The Pokemon Cards: Definitely not a Tumblr, but spiritually VERY much a Tumblr, this is an Are.na board featuring, apparently, EVERY SINGLE POKEMON CARD EVER. Does this speak to you? Erm, good!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Salona: I wouldn’t normally feature the Insta feed of a restaurant somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but the concept here – it’s a modern restaurant, but, er, it’s serving ‘heritage Roman cuisine’, like Ancient Roman, dormice and garum and all that jazz – tickled me and so I thought you might find it interesting too. I look forward to a buzzy new mesopotamian-style stew retailer opening up in Clapton in early-2026. Millet fritters, anyone?
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Starvation In Gaza: Alex de Wall in the LRB writes about the ongoing efforts by the Israeli administration to ‘defeat Hamas’ by, er, killing an awful lot of innocent Palestinians in a continuation of what it is increasingly hard to argue isn’t at least, well, *genocide-adjacent behaviour*, whatever Bibi might desperately shout. I mean, fcuk’s sake, read this: “The standard humanitarian ration is 2100 calories per person per day. Depending on how much food there was at the start of the blockade – estimates vary – average food availability in Gaza will at best fall to 1400 calories in the next few weeks, or may have already dropped below that level as early as mid-April. Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets – are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage. Between 28 April and 6 May, staff with the World Food Programme, under the umbrella of the UN-accredited Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), conducted a phone survey of Palestinians in Gaza. They asked what people were eating, how often, and what they were doing to get food. Several aid agencies also compiled data for how thin young children are – ‘wasting’ or ‘global acute malnutrition’. It was the fifth such survey since the outbreak of war nineteen months ago.” What, exactly, is one meant to call this? Oh, and while we’re on the conflict in Gaza, this piece in Rest of World is a really interesting look at the practicalities of living in a warzone, particularly one which for Geopolitical Reasons has not necessarily been afforded the same status as other places and as such lacks some of the digital infrastructure we might take for granted; it’s all about the homebrewed mapping systems that provide residents of Gaza with (moderately) up-to-date information about how to navigate a city under siege, and is the sort of reporting about the practical realities of what it means to be Palistinian which there isn’t enough of.
- The Morgan McSweeney Myth: A bit of a takedown of Morgan McSweeney, current wearer of the ‘genius eminence grise pulling the strings behind the throne’ hat which is bestowed to one special adviser in each parliament (previous wearers, of course, include profane ultrarationalist spectrum-goblin Dominic Cummings; funny how it’s ALWAYS A CERTAIN TYPE OF GUY, eh?) which basically suggests that his supposed ‘genius political campaigning brain’ has been a bit overstated over the past 24m and that, actually, HE MIGHT NOT BE A GENIUS AFTER ALL. I’m including this for two main reasons – firstly, the appearance of these sorts of pieces tend to mean that someone is briefing against you QUITE HARD behind the scenes and that your days wearing the Special Hat might be numbered; and secondly, because I am just so fcuking BORED of us constantly, repeatedly falling for (or, perhaps more accurately, being sold by the lobby and commentariat class) the idea of THE GENIUS STRATEGIC MIND working away in the shadows, because, in the main, these people are almost always exposed as being bullies with wafer-thin intellects and thinner skins and their ‘genius’ is reliably proven after a few years to have actually been nothing of the sort and can we therefore please remember this stuff next time some fcuking commentator starts to wax lyrical about the BIG STRATEGY BRANES at the heart of government because, look, these people are just cnuts like you and me, and, in my experience, significantly WORSE cnuts most of the time.
- Gordon Brown: Ah, time is a great healer, isn’t it? This is a very soft, very pro-Gordon interview in the New Statesman, which presents Brown as The Great Left-Wing Thinker and Last True Socialist of the previous Labour government – which, I suppose, is sort-of right if only by contrast to his more…er…’liberally-pragmatic’ colleagues from the Blair years. It’s hard not to read this and think about how differently things might have been had he had the courage to call an election when he first took the leadership, how that might have precluded the Coalition and the Cleggeron and the austerity misery roadshow (at least to some degree), and how he was fcuked by a combination of his own hubris, his own fundamental unsuitablity to frontline, main-character politics in the 21stC, and the frankly appalling quality of the team he was left with by 2008 (I was working at DWP at the time in my VERY brief and ill-fated stint as a civil servant and fcuk me was it clear that, whatever they were telling Gordon, EVERYONE had given up by that point). Anyway, this made me briefly sad for a parallel universe that might, but probably wouldn’t, have been slightly less bad than the timeline we now found ourselves in.
- AI and Energy Usage: A quick check-in to the current state of the ‘so, how hard are we fcuking the environment with this whole AI thing then?’ debate – the short answer remains ‘noone actually knows’ which feels…well, it feels suboptimal, frankly, but what can you do? This piece by MIT Technology Review seems scientifically and methodologically robust, but is still largely reduced to some rough ‘fingers in the air’ calculations – the basic facts are that text-based generation is more energy intensive than image, that both are falling in cost due to advances in tech, but the coming boom in AI video is going to be…costly from the point of view of energy. Basically the truth of the matter is somewhere in between ‘nah, don’t worry, it’s fine!’ and ‘YOU ARE BOILING THE OCEAN EVERY TIME YOU GENERATE A LARGE-BREASTED WAIFU YOU PATHETIC, PLANET DESPOILING PERVERTS!’, but don’t expect that nuance to filter through to online conversations where it’s very much either one or the other.
- The Current State of the Ghost Gun Market: In what DEFINITELY shouldn’t be read as a piece of instructional content, WIRED tests the current state of the 3d printed firearm market to find out whether it would in fact be trivial to create a firearm with a 3d printer, some models and some rudimentary knowledge of How Guns Work – the answer, should you be curious, is very much ‘yes’. The gun’s a bit rubbish, it’s not hugely reliable and requires quite a lot of tinkering to get to a proper working state, but the reporter was able to fire off a good 50-odd rounds from the weapon before it failed, which is…more than enough to do a job, whatever you might want that job to be. In many respects it feels quite lucky that the promised 3d printing boom of the late-00s/early-10s never quite happened and that we don’t all have these things in our homes.
- The Facebook Scam To Scammer Pipeline: More excellent reporting from Rest of World, writing about the spate of fake job ads targeting young people in countries such as Indonesia which are instead fronts for organised crime and which see applicants kidnapped and trafficked to places like Cambodia, where they are then held by large-scale criminal gangs often operating out of casinos who force them to work 18h days on huge scam and fraud operations targeting users in the West like you. One of those stories that reminds you both of the sheer SCALE of this stuff, and also of the fact that when you get out of the BIG LANGUAGES, moderation and enforcement on Facebook and in fact all the Meta platforms is absolute fcuking dogsh1t and it is properly the wild west in some respects – and that, for lots of people in non-Western world, Facebook literally IS the internet. Great! Oh, and obviously this is all being supercharged by AI, because OF COURSE IT IS. I do wish that everyone blithely thinking that AI isn’t already changing the world in all sorts of ‘interesting’ ways would occasionally take the time to consider the fact that the world isn’t JUST the UK and the bits that you see via videos of people who look like you on your fcuking phone.
- The Robot Chefs of South Korea: Another Rest of World piece – they have been on a roll of late, and are generally just a great outlet overall – this time on how service stations in South Korea are beginning to experiment with automated ‘chefs’, and the impact this is having on the types of food being served and its quality. The tl;dr here is that it’s leading to a flattening of cuisine styles because there are some dishes that the machine can produce more easily than others, and so these become more prevalent – which, you know, feels…sad, and like ‘optimising the experience for the convenience of the robot rather than the eventual human customer’ is possibly the wrong way around.
- Paging The Poetic Web: An interview with Elliot and Kris all about the internet phonebook, the general concept of the ‘poetic web’, and the vague movement that seems to be coalescing around the idea of a more personal, individual sense of what the web can be, and one which is more idiosyncratic and less hidebound by the grammar and restraints of the platform-based internet. Kris sums it up nicely here, I think: “But where I resonate with poetry is more in the metaphorical and the suggestive potential of poems. They are less definitive compared to something like nonfiction. They are more about talking in images and metaphors and breaking logic. I think there is something to this whole “poetic web” idea and the people contributing to this scene, which is that they defy the logic of the web somehow. Their sites look a bit different. Maybe they’re a bit more idiosyncratic, maybe they’re just very silly or there’s something that makes them not very mainstream, they don’t follow the conventional wisdom of web design.”
- The True Costs of Being on YouTube: This is a few months old now – SORRY I AM SORRY IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN – but it’s worth reading because it’s so rare to read an honest account of the costs associated with running a YouTube channel, the income you get from being…moderately-successful, and the general economics of the whole endeavour which, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, seem FCUKING HORRIFIC. There are caveats here – this is a very specific type of YT content, foodie and so with relatively high production values which themselves incur higher costs than perhaps is average, and the person in question already had a profile when starting – but even so the maths here is BRUTAL and, well, simply doesn’t work. I know that I have been boring on for years about how the creator economy is a fcuking lie but, well the creator economy is a fcuking lie.
- The Deprofessionalisation Of Games: I thought this was a really interesting article, partly because of what it says about the games industry and where it’s headed but also because of how that can be extended to a bunch of other industries too based on the likely trajectory of AI and associated tools – the basic premise here is that there is going to be a hollowing out of the sorts of structures required to make games (and not just games) and that as such we’re going to end up in a place where the only people who can make the industry/market work are either auteurs or very small teams, or massive behemoth studios, and nothing inbetween. Do read the whole thing, I promise it’s interesting and really does have implications far beyond games = to quote a relevant section, it “feels like the polar ends of who can benefit in the deprofessionalized world—developers with the stability to swing big for big-shot ideas, and programmers or designers with deep career experience that can be called in like a group of noble mercenaries. People in between will be left out.My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion.” THIS WILL APPLY TO YOUR INDUSTRY TOO.
- Country Music Is At War With Itself: I am not really a country aficionado, and I don’t really care about Beyonce (SORRY) and so I hadn’t really been paying particular attention to the IS IT COUNTRY THOUGH, IS IT REALLY? debate happening after the release of Cowboy Carter – this piece in the New York Times, though, was a really interesting (and, to me at least, educative) story about the history of ‘country’ music, the degree to which the ‘classic’ 20thC image of ‘What Country Is’ was itself a marketing confection from Nashville, and all the ways in which people who don’t necessarily fit that Nashville model are attempting to reclaim some of the music for themselves, with predictable (RACIST!) results. Honestly, I am really not interested in country as a genre but thought this was fascinating and smart from the point of view of culture, its evolution and associated wars (this came to me via Nelson’s Linkblog which is a really good resource for odd tidbits and particularly queer culture related stuff).
- The Runaway Tradwives of TikTok: It’s a tale as old as time! For every lifestyle fad popularised via the social media landscape and THE MAGICAL ALGO, so there will be a parallel movement ~5y afterwards in which a significant number of people ensnared by said lifestyle fad realise that perhaps the fad wasn’t, y’know, WHOLLY BENIGN, and that perhaps there were one or two other factors at play, and maybe they would be well served by, you know, getting the fcuk out of the cult. We’ve seen it with ‘wellness’, god knows we’ve seen it with ‘masculinity and maleness’ and now we’re starting to see the ‘FREE THE TRADWIVES’ movement where people who bought into the illusory mormon teadress barnlife vibe and realised that, in fact, it is QUITE MISERABLE AND NOT ACTUALLY THAT EMPOWERING try and get out of it. Although, equally, it strikes me that quite a few of the people cited in this piece are also turning this into…A BRAND NEW INFLUENCER GRIFT, so, well, make of it what you will. EVERYTHING IS CONTENT ALL THE TIME FOREVER!
- Going All Inclusive: This is an article about parents going on an all-inclusive holiday and leaning into the very, very smooth-brain nature of the pampering and the no-thinking, and while I can’t personally empathise with the circumstances here I can very much empathise with the appeal of ‘no choices just happy vibes’ as a choice; I liked this in part because it did a very good job of communicate the author’s feeling of Being On Holiday, and also because it felt like a very Of The Now piece of writing, if you see what I mean. This vibe feels very 2025-6, if you ask me.
- That Thomas Keller/French Laundry Piece: If you’re an assiduous consumer of foodie writing it’s entirely possible you will have read this already, but if not then PLEASE take the time to enjoy this quite extraordinary account by Mackenzie Chung Fegan, SF Chronicle restaurant critic, of her recent visit to storied California eatery The French Laundry, helmed by superstar chef Thomas Keller. This is possibly the most staggeringly-awkward critic/chef interaction I have ever heard of, ever, and it’s impossible to read without your body inadvertently-pretzeling itself in sheer embarrassment at various points throughout. Safe to say, Keller does not come across well, and the whole experience sounds like a fcuking Calvary.
- Turn and Face the Strange: A beautiful little essay on language and its provenance by Lee Randall, about all the words we’ve borrowed to make English what it is and how the evolution of language makes a mockery of ideas of borders and boundaries, and renders risible the concept of tightly-bounded national identity (Lee is a friend, but I would have included this anyway because it’s lovely).
- Confessions of a Female Police Officer: Many years ago when I was doing my first job as a lobbyist, one of my awful clients was Group 4 Securicor – a genuinely appalling company staffed by some incredibly awful people at senior level (never, ever trust men who refer to themselves by three-letter acronyms, as I learned thanks to one spectacularly-awful waste of skin called ‘DTS’); as part of the ‘work’ (lol) I did for them, I spent a lot of time working with the Prison Officers Association and developed a lot of professional respect for their members (I also told the POA literally EVERYTHING I knew about all the ways in which G4S was working to fcuk them, which I like to think set the company back in some small way) – this piece, despite the slightly sensationalist title, is an interesting and sober and sensitive look at the realities of being a female Prison Officer but also at the ways in which the profession has changed (read: gotten worse) in the past few years. Sobering.
- The Civilian Bunkers of Switzerland: My knowledge of Switzerland doesn’t extend much beyond the fact that it’s INSANELY RICH, that the airport in Geneva advertises watches with chunks of ACTUAL MOON ROCK in them, and that the family of a Swiss woman I once knew owned a FIGHTING COW that would compete in local cow-fighting events for actual cashmoney – to that, er, esoteric grab-bag of facts I can now add the fact that the Swiss apparently LOVE an apocalypsebunker! “To the alternating fascination, bewilderment and envy of its European neighbors, Switzerland, population nearly 9 million, has more bunkers per capita than anywhere else in the world — enough to guarantee shelter space to every single resident in the event of a crisis. (Sweden and Finland are a close second, covering all major cities.) The queries Schelbert was receiving came from frightened people trying to locate their assigned places. Today, however, the Sonnenberg bunker is mostly a museum. Originally built in 1971 to protect up to 20,000 people, it remained one of the largest nuclear shelters in the world until 2002, when its capacity was reduced to 2,000 to improve efficiency and reduce costs.” This is a far better article than it really needs to be, and communicates quite a weird – and, to my mind, VERY SWISS – sense of…cloistered unease, like the silence before the bomb detonates.
- Object Permanence: Game Montesanti writes here about madness and mania and art and childhood and growing up and friendship and and and. I thought this was excellent. “When I sketched nude models with charcoal and red conte in college, I imagined an environment in which I felt safe enough in my body to drop my robe and let strangers translate me into two-dimensionality. What must those models have been thinking, I wondered: Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, the presumed muse for da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa?” Vermeer’s mysterious subject in “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” who may have been Sibyl, a prophetess in Ancient Greece, or a Biblical figure, or a nameless Dutch model whose identity will never be truly uncovered. Were they aware of their own beauty, their subtle sensuality? Did they trust the artist fully to capture their likeness with the tools they had at the time, or was likeness not what they were after? How I longed to know where their minds wandered during all those hours sitting for their portraits, and where their gazes fixed. On an object? On a thought?”
- Fairy Pools: An extract from Patricia Lockwood’s forthcoming novel – I would read Lockwood’s shopping lists, honestly, she’s that good, and this piece, about a trip to Scotland, is pretty-much perfectly ‘her’. If you like her style, and I do, you will adore this: “On Isle Maree, local tradition held that insanity could be cured by towing someone around the island behind a boat. Oh, good, she thought, easy. But local tradition also held that “nothing must ever be taken from the island, be it even a pebble from the shore, lest the insanity formerly ‘cured’ there return to the outside world.” Oh, no, she thought, hard. Isle Maree was famous for the Wish Tree, an oak that had been hammered so full of pennies that it had died of copper poisoning. Many things still stood that way, hammered full of wishes.”
- Pirates of the Ayahuasca: In general, much like Cruise Essays, I can probably go the rest of my life without ever reading another account of a white, middle-class person going on an hallucinogenically-powered voyage of self-discovery; I have, by now, read enough accounts of puking up your ringpiece under the effects of some toxic root to know that I probably don’t need to consume anymore. And then this week this piece got published and I absolutely DEVOURED it – honestly, it is fcuking brilliant, not least because its author, Sarah Miller, is basically quite a lot of a pr1ck throughout and leans into it pretty unashamedly. I am slightly in awe of writing like this in which the author quite clearly does not care – honestly, this really is SO good, even if you don’t think you ever want to listen to another account of a fcuking trip ever again.
- The Most Glorious Strip Club in Britain: Our last longread this week is by Emma Garland – an essay composed of lines from reviews of strip clubs. Honestly, this is absolute fcuking poetry and I love it so so so much.
By Zack Zdrale
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
