Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, regardless of the degree of fundamental dissatisfaction with your current lot in life, at least this week of all weeks you can bask safe in the knowledge that there are a couple of people right now having a worse time than you are – because it’s the schadenfreude that makes life worth living, right kids?
Thanks, then, to the Coldplay Adulterers for their selfless dedication to making everyone else feel grateful it wasn’t *them* on the jumbotron – should we maybe have a whipround to cover the doubtless-punishing divorce settlement that’s about to be visited on at least one of the two handsy music haters?
No, on reflection, probably not.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you, of course, have NEVER done anything that would result in absolutely ruinous consequences had you been spotted doing it on a very large screen at a stadium concert, oh no siree.
THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT THERE’S SOMETHING QUITE SINISTER ABOUT THE INCREASING POPULARITY OF CARTOONS AS SEX OBJECTS, PT.1:
- The Perplexity Browser: Yes, I know, sorry, this isn’t a particularly fun or frivolous way to kick off this week’s Curios, but, well, IT’S NOT ALL FUN AND GAMES (is any of it?). AI company Perplexity has become the latest company to attempt to change the way in which we interact with the web FOREVER via the introduction of a new browser which basically adds a semi-agentic AI layer to the browsing experience, which, per writeups elsewhere, “enables users to ask questions, perform tasks, and conduct research in a single, unified interface. The browser integrates a built-in assistant that can compare products, summarize content, book meetings, and transform complex workflows into simple, conversational experiences.” Ok, so it’s unlikely that YOU will be able to try it right now – it’s waitlisted with priority to paying subscribers to Perplexity – but nonetheless it’s worth knowing about because THIS STUFF IS COMING. Alongside the Perplexity browser, overnight OpenAI dropped in-GPT agentic support; you can read about it here, but the promotional puffery declares that it will “significantly enhance ChatGPT’s usefulness in both everyday and professional contexts. At work, you can automate repetitive tasks, like converting screenshots or dashboards into presentations composed of editable vector elements, rearranging meetings, planning and booking offsites, and updating spreadsheets with new financial data while retaining the same formatting. In your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments.” All this along with the continued rumblings that OpenAI is also going to release a browser sometime soon, with the idea being that this is going to be the way in which we interact with information online – we won’t visit websites anymore, we’ll just let our little agentic slaves wander off into the ether and do things on our behalf. Which ought to give any of you whose incomes are in any way tied to ‘getting actual humans to look at things on the internet’ some slightly-uncomfortable moments – traffic is FCUKED, everyone! Obviously it’s worth remembering that, per most of this stuff, none of this is *quite* cooked yet – the agentic stuff will be slow and buggy and not something you ought to rely on to do anything important, and the browser stuff won’t yet be essential…but, as with all of this stuff, give it a year or so and it quite possibly will be, which doesn’t feel like a long time for a lot of people to work out how to entirely-reconfigure their business models in the face of this new, disintermediated digital reality. Hadn’t we all decided that moving fast and breaking things was not in fact a good way to let companies behave? Eh? Oh.
- Kimi: Sorry, another SEMI-SERIOUS AI THING – promise I will be done with this soon, though, and we can get on with the frivolous (and there’s something REALLY filthy at the end as a reward for all those of you bothering to read the tediously-newsy bits uptop – I KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE). This is Kimi, a new, free-to-use Chinese AI model which basically offers (or purports to, at least) a ‘deep research’-type functionality in the vein of OpenAI’s o3 offering, and which at least on the face of it looks like a pretty serious contender – it’s fast, it’s got all the multimodal gubbins that we have come to expect, it can support upto 50 files of source material at a time…that said, though, when I played with it earlier this week it quickly became apparent that this is a mendacious little fcuk and will spit out completely-invented material with a glee unmatched by any of the actual, paid-for, top-end models; as such I can only recommend it as a fun thing to poke around with rather than a free alternative to the big players. I’m including this at least in some part because it’s a useful reminder that the AI market is currently VERY much a two-tier one, and if you’re not using the paid-for version of these things then, frankly, you’re getting a second-rate experience and none of it works very well. Which, in turn, feels like a small-but-not-insignificant canary in THE COAL MINE OF SOCIETY – I’m genuinely curious to see what sort of interesting, fun inequality wrinkles end up springing up as we move to a world in which your access to Smart Digital Helpmeets is gated by your spending power (as well as your access to, say, accurate information about what the fcuk is actually happening at any given moment – oh God, the fun we’re going to have!).
- The Tourist Map of Literature: Have you heard? READING IS THE NEW HOTNESS! Although actually, per this event I went to the other week out of a sense of morbid curiosity about THE NEW SEXY LITERATI, what the new hotness *actually* is is apparently watching a bunch of relatively-recent Oxbridge graduates and new-wave influencers read fragments of their execrable first novels to an audience of floppy-haired, ruddy-cheeked contemporaries, which basically feels quite a lot like how a certain corner of publishing has always worked. Anyway, my bitter, unpublishable muttering to one side, READING IS COOL YEAH?, and if you agree then you will possibly like this tool, which basically does that ‘map affinity based on people’s tastes’ thing and lets you plug in any author you like and then display other authors whom readers of your selection also enjoyed, with a rough ‘the closer the names, the more readers of X tend to like readers of Y’ functionality. The dataset’s taken from Gnod, which I have mentioned here various times before I think, and it’s comprehensive enough that it recognised all the obscure people I threw at it with nary a pause – feed it your favourites and see if it throws up any interesting new authors for you to fail to read on your summer holidays.
- Cow Stars: I want to be very clear on this link – I WOULD LIKE YOU ALL TO CLICK ON THIS PLEASE. Don’t worry, the entire experience will take you, at most, a minute or so, and it requires a total of 8 clicks from start to finish to see the whole thing – but for reasons I genuinely don’t understand AT ALL I found it weirdly quite deeply emotional. No, honestly, I’m not joking, this SPOKE to me and may speak to you too. And if it doesn’t, you’ve only wasted a minute of your life that you’d otherwise have spent watching some inane cnut filming themselves having an opinion at you so, honestly, you’ve no right to complain. Stop it.
- Life In Weeks: Back in February I featured a project by Gina Trapani which was basically a week-by-week visualisation of her life, annotated to show significant events – now someone’s made a tool that lets you do the same thing without any of the pesky ‘needing to know how to actually make something’ skill requirements. “See your entire life laid out in weeks. Past, present, and future — all in one colorful view. Gain perspective on how you’re spending your most precious resource: time…Color-code the seasons of your life — childhood, college years, jobs, and places you’ve lived. Define and document the meaningful periods that have shaped who you are today…Highlight the moments and memories that matter — achievements, transitions, encounters, or trips. Make each important memory in your life visible on your timeline.” This requires a degree of self-interest and a desire for archival memorialisation that I simply don’t possess, but there’s a chance that one of you reading this will be more interested in recording the details of their doubtless-glorious existence than I am and for whom this will be the chance to FINALLY render the glory of their life and achievements in a nicely-designed digital package – if YOU are that person, you are WELCOME.
- Explore The Onsen: An interesting bit of AI-enabled digital worldbuilding, this, via the consistently-interesting treasure trove of creative AI work that is Lynn’s newsletter; this is, basically, a 3d world which (and, look, you’re going to have to bear with me here because if I’m honest I’ve got no fcuking clue as to the tech here or How It Was Actually Made, but that’s not going to stop me having a vague guess based on my luddite’s best guess because, well, I’m a middle-aged man and we don’t admit ignorance EVER; you’re welcome!) I think has been spun up from photos of a Japanese Onsen (hot springs where people go and bathe and hang out, if I remember correctly from all the wasted hours playing Yakuza games) and which you can wonder round in your browser, guiding your avatar about in a manner that will be instantly familiar to anyone who remembers all the short-lived and UTTERLY POINTLESS branded metaverse experiences of 2021-2 (RIP all those branded metaversal experiences, you are wiv da angles now, but THINK of all the agencies whose bottom lines you propped up over that glorious period!) – what’s interesting about this, I think, is not only that it’s been generated semi-automatically, but also that there’s a degree of object recognition in-world that’s not always present with these things – walls are ‘walls’, you can’t walk through cars, bollards block your progress…obviously these are not, objectively, exciting details, but it’s impressive if, as I think is the case, their in-world ‘physicality’ is being determined by The Machine based on what it ‘thinks’ the things are…am I making any sense? I feel I’ve slightly lost the run of this one. Can you tell I didn’t go to bed til 1am and am feeling a bit wobbly? You can, can’t you? Let’s not talk about it anymore.
- The Fcuking Bible: Is there anything that can’t be rendered INSTANTLY HILARIOUS by the semi-random injection of profanity? Well, yes, obviously, but MOST things are simply funnier when you throw in a fcuk or two, and the bible is no exception; obviously I’m not attempting to make fun of anyone’s religion here – why bother when it’s already all so ridiculous? – so much as draw your attention to the fact that ‘thou shalt not kill’ is, objectively, a less powerful commandment than ‘thou shalt not fcuking kill’. Look, I don’t make the rules, I am simply a COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL (lol!) of two decades experience who knows whereof they speak. Anyway, this is a bot on Bluesky which posts fragments of the bible, unaltered other than for the injection of a strategically-placed ‘fcuking’ – these don’t always quite work, but, well, I can’t help but feel that there is something beautiful about lines like this one from the Gospel of Mark: “But Jesus took him by the hand, and fcuking lifted him up; and he arose.”
- NeuralOS: Oh, one more AI thing (SORRY!) while we’re here – NeuralOS is an odd little project which I don’t really understand the point of, and which as such is perfect for inclusion here – it’s basically a variant on the whole ‘play around inside a version of Minecraft/Doom/Quake that’s being imagined on the fly by The Machine’, except in this instance what’s being imagined is a computer desktop complete with a browser, file manager and the rest… Obviously there’s no ACTUAL desktop, no actual files and no actual browser, as you will discover as soon as you try and navigate to a website and realise that the thing is just sort of attempting to imagine what typing ought to look like rather than actually registering keystrokes, but it’s a strange and eerie feeling to be navigating a familiar user interface that starts to surreally bleed out at the edges like an OS designed by a particularly-spun-out Dali.
- HTML Day 2025: Do you LOVE the web? Ok, fine, I appreciate your relationship with it might be somewhat more complex and ambiguous – love and fear and hate and need and horror and sorrow and strange, reluctant arousal, all in one unnameable sensation of repelled dependence! You…you all feel like that, right? – but for those of you who, broadly, feel more positive than not about the fact that the internet exists, HTML Day is coming! This is the second time this is being run – Laurel Schwultz and Elliot Cost, the organisers, see it as ”an annual celebration of HTML. It’s a day to gather IRL in places around the world to write and learn HTML.” This year’s celebration is on 2 August, and while I appreciate that it’s not *everyone’s* idea of fun to spend a Summer saturday in what I presume is likely to be some…quite dark spaces, tapping away on a keyboard, I am also reasonably certain that at least one or two of the weirdos reading this will think ‘you know what, that is EXACTLY what I want to do with my free time, fcuk you Matt you patronising cnut’, and it is YOU, my funny little code goblins, for whom I include this link. NO YOU’RE WELCOME PLEASE NO GIFTS (send gifts).
- Lettervoxd: This is a GREAT little project tracking the usage of obscure, unusual and rarely-uttered words in films over the years. Writes its creator, “Lettervoxd is a tool that extracts esoteric words from about 25,000 movies from the past century. It lists (nearly) every one-in-a-billion word that can be found in the giant corpus of subtitles I downloaded from Open Subtitles.” The only possible way in which this could be improved would be if you could see associated clips of the words being uttered on celluloid, but I appreciate there are very good ‘do not sue us’ reasons why this isn’t the case – still, if you’ve ever wanted to know exactly how many films in history have seen characters utter the word ‘vituperatively’ onscreen (ONE! IT IS ONE FILM!) then this is probably the greatest resource you will ever learn of and you may as well kill yourself now because there are no more worlds left to conquer.
- The Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature: This is an insane resource – some 10,000 children’s books (North American ones, at least) digitised and hosted on the Baldwin Library’s website; obviously there are too many to ever give you a proper rundown of What It Contains, but if you’re interested in design there’s SO much interesting material here from the covers over the years, and, for the truly curious, there are some odd little gems; I just lost three minutes reading the strange and frankly-sinister tale of ‘Straps The Cat’, for example, which contains the honestly threatening line “He did eat many strange things from time to time. You will see” which made me wonder whether Straps morphs into some sort of child devouring beast by the end (I will never know, though, because I need to keep typing chiz chiz). Anyway, SO MANY OLD KIDS BOOKS SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND.
- The Jay Rayner Restaurant Map: Jay Rayner, for those of you who don’t know, is a UK restaurant critic; at the Observer for…fcuking ages, he recently got poached by the FT but remains one of the best food writers in the land and one who, by dint of his longevity in the role, has reviewed a LOT of restaurants. I’ve featured a Google map of his reviews in here before, but this is a GREAT additional layer to that tool built by a nice person named Jan (I mean, I assume they’re nice; I don’t actually know but let’s all hope I’m right) which lets you apply a light search layer to the corpus of reviews – select your date range, select your town, decide whether you only want the TOP PICKS or if you’re willing to try the second-tier selections and BOOM, you get a really useful list of Rayner-reviewed places to pick from. Worth bookmarking, this, for those times you’re forced to leave the comforting environs you call home and venture into the inhospitable wasteland that is The Rest of the UK.
- Live Soccer TV: Not, I’m sorry to say, a shonky streaming site (you can find your own ones of those), but instead a website listing seemingly EVERY SINGLE FOOTBALL MATCH HAPPENING IN THE WORLD – seriously, I’m not joking, if you want to learn about third-tier fixtures in the Uzbek league then this is the site for you. Should you be the sort of person who likes the idea of going on holiday and then wasting large swathes of it by standing in a crumbling stadium watching low-quality sport alongside a small audience of committed, lonely lunatics, then this will be a GODSEND – my top pick of today’s games is Lafnitz vs Khor Fakkan in the UAE, for anyone interested.
- Woop: Are YOU someone whose profession requires them to have a shiny, full-bleed portfolio site? Do YOU want something that looks marginally less sh1t than a Squarespace template? GREAT! You might, in that case, want to check out Woop, which, at first glance, looks reasonably-priced and quite shiny for anyone with a visual enough body of work to show off.
- NYC Subway Simulator: Have you ever wondered what would happen to the underground transport infrastructure in New York if some lunatic suddenly decided that there should be 3,000 trains on the network simultaneously? Oh man, you will LOVE this website, in that case. “BuildMyTransit.nyc is a web app to design, visualize, and simulate New York City subway systems. Perfect for exploring “what-if” scenarios,” reads the blurb, and while it’s not a very shiny simulation it does let you press a button and add another 10 random trains to the network with a click, thereby letting you see exactly how much you can fcuk up the commute of several million very angry virtual Manhattanites. Turns out you CAN have too much public transport.
- Light Pollution Map: Amazingly I don’t seem to have featured this before in all the years of Curio-ing, perhaps because I am a committed urbanite and as such haven’t experienced actual darkness for approximately 30 years (this is untrue actually – a few years back I was in rural France and looked up at the sky circa midnight whilst very, very stoned and had a proper, terrifying ‘I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HE IS MAGNIFICENT’ moment as I perceived the majesty of the actual milky way with my naked eyes; I then fell over backwards with vertigo, which did rather detract from the revelatory majesty of the moment); still, if you’re someone who’s keen on seeing the stars then you could do worse than use this to plan some trips to gaze at some long-since-dead balls of gas blazing in the inky firmament.
- Pixel Piranhas: A Chrome extension which, if you activate it while looking at a webpage, will send a swarm of small digital piranhas to chomp their way through the page’s pixels, slowly but surely devouring them until no trace remains. Why? I DON’T KNOW MAYBE IT IS ART (it’s not art).
By Liv Sage
NEXT UP WHY NOT ENJOY THIS FUN MIX OF BREAK-ISH PARTY HOUSE BY PALYPALYPALY?
THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY CONVINCED THAT THERE’S SOMETHING QUITE SINISTER ABOUT THE INCREASING POPULARITY OF CARTOONS AS SEX OBJECTS, PT.2:
- Offal 2: I featured Offal in here a year or so ago, in the guise of its weird, Chris Morris-esque podcast audio zine thing, but it is not just an audioart project; it’s also an occasional literary magazine, so occasional that it’s only now that the second edition has been published. This is an Actual Thing You Have To Buy, but the team involved have an excellent nose for good writing and weird vibes, and also the connections to persuade some genuinely-talented writers to get involved; I’m going to give you the full blurb here because it will give you a decent idea of what the general flavour is and whether it will be for you (IT OUGHT TO BE WHAT THE FCUK IS WRONG WITH YOU, etc etc): “Highlights include author Richard Milward’s manifesto for living a ‘liberated lavvy’ (written in Polari, the almost-forgotten gay slang), a dialogue-free play by Tom McCarthy, an essay by Daniel Pinchbeck, plus fragments of fiction from Labeja Kodua Okullu, Kirsty Allison, Henderson Downing and Timothy J Jarvis. Also featuring Offalism (A Manifesto), a guide to cooking the mythical Three-Angel Roast, a poem about Margate called ‘The only way to change things is to shoot men who curate things…’, and a 1953 speech by Allen Dulles, first director of the CIA, warning of Russian psy-op campaigns.” See, doesn’t that sound great? Buying a copy also gets you a bunch of fun additional stuff – audio downloads of the show, and a poster of Aphex Twin lyrics (which for a certain, very specific type of middle-aged Creative Director – I SEE YOU – will basically induce an erection so hard it can cut diamond) and, basically, if you can spare the cash then I recommend this unreservedly because MAKING STUFF IS GOOD and we should all try and support people putting stuff like this out in the world. So there.
- Taiyaki: I can’t pretend that I am not INTENSELY curious about this – specifically about the manufacturing process, and exactly how bad the finished products will look and feel. Taiyaki is a company which uses THE POWER OF AI (sorry) to take any photo you feed it and turn said photo into a 3d model, which they then promise to turn into a pendant-type thing, in either ‘gold’ or ‘silver’ to hang on a chain or charm bracelet or somesuch. I am going to guess that what is happening here is 3d printing and then gold/silver-plating, but the website is…light on specifics; still, I fcuking LOVE the idea of making a genuinely-horrific meme-based charm bracelet for a special someone, or one featuring nothing but a succession of small silvered representations of my head depicting me in various stages of deep psychic distress, and I sort-of want this to be…good? Is that ok? Can one of you take the plunge and try this for me and let me know? What’s that? ‘Fcuk off, Matt’? Oh, fine, please yourselves.
- Self: I am, it’s fair to say, not a man who spends an awful lot of time on self-interrogation and self-improvement, but I appreciate that this is not a universal position and that there are many, many people out there for whom the ceaseless pursuit of personal amelioration is a lodestar in their life (lol, why, WE ALL DIE ANYWAY) – it is for YOU, self-improvers, that I include this link (and for everyone else who likes to laugh at this sort of meaningless bullsh1t). Self is…actually, I’ll leave it to them to introduce themselves: “Self App is a space where you can rediscover and return to your True Self…Learn to tell your own aspirations apart from society’s expectations and understand what you truly want….Self App is not just another motivational app. It’s an interactive ecosystem that helps you build inner freedom and find strength within yourself. From illusions about yourself to a healthy interaction with reality. From internal chaos to clarity and balance. From doubts to actions that align with your true self.” HOW, I hear you scream, HOW CAN I ATTAIN THIS SORT OF ENLIGHTENED STATUS? I’m glad you asked – BY TALKING TO YOUR PHONE! Self promises to track your feelings, your self-worth, your relationships, and quantify all this information to give you TANGIBLE, MEASURABLE SCORES for seemingly every aspect of your emotional existence – beautifully, there’s a screenshot on the homepage that literally reads “your dissatisfaction is currently 2/10”, which is some truly SPECTACULAR w4nk. It’s unclear to me whether there’s an LLM layer to this, but my gut says ‘of course there fcuking is, Matt, it’s that sort of dumb grift.’ Still, maybe I am missing out and in a year’s time you’ll all be laughing at me from your super-optimised eyries of zenlike calm while I continue to sit here in my pants typing word after word to an audience I could count on the fingers of two hands (and still have fingers left over), but, you know what? I doubt it.
- The Realtime Crime Index: Ok, it’s not QUITE realtime – there’s obviously a lag on the data of a few months – but it’s quite the datacollection job to present annual US crime statistics on a rolling basis like this. It covers violent crimes or property crimes, each category broken into constituent offences so you can look at murder numbers, say, or burglaries; it also offers you an at-a-glance, year-by-year tracking comparison so that you can see how the rates are trending; in a rare moment of slightly-cheering news from the otherwise-fcuked US it seems that most crimes are actually down year-on-year – EXCEPT FOR THE ONES BEING COMMITTED BY THE STATE!!!!111111eleventy.
- The World Dog Surfing Championships: Even for a man as jaded, cynical and fundamentally-unhappy as I am, the sight of a grinning dog on a surfboard is a thing of joy; if you’d like the opportunity to look at a lot of photos of canines doing very un-canine things then this is the website for YOU. Some observations: 1) the actual World Championship event takes place on 2 August in California (OF COURSE CALIFORNIA), so if you’re not planning on spending the day in a darkened room for HTML day then maybe you can do this instead?; 2) one of the dogs on the homepage appears to not only be surfing but also WEARING SHADES, which, honestly, is possibly the best thing that I am likely to see today. The only thing that could possibly make this better for me would be were if the website were styled in the acid look of Rude Dog and the Dweebs (real heads know).
- Explore the Bayeaux Tapestry: Another link via Lynn’s ‘Things I Think Are Awesome’, this is an HD megapixel representation of the Bayeaux tapestry which you can zoom around and peruse up-close to your heart’s content; there are some of you, I’m sure, who will be interested in both the craft and the history of this, and the representation it offers of a significant moment in Anglo-French history; for me, though, the main draw of this is the ability to search the thing for the people with the best, most ridiculous facial expressions – there are a LOT of very, very good faces in here, and a lot of examples of what I like to call ‘The hyper-expressive crinkly Charlie Brown mouth of misery’, which is a reference you all OBVIOUSLY understand.
- The Rock Identifier: Do YOU like rocks? Would YOU like access to an app which will tell you, er, what your rocks are? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! If you can’t tell your feldspar from your granite, your igneous from your metamorphic, your…actually, no, fcuk it, sorry, I am completely out of rock-related words to riff on here, this is going to have to do. Is it just me, though, or are rocks having something of a moment? On reflection that might well be the most stupid thing I have EVER written, sorry about that.
- The Big Picture 2025: Photos! BIG PHOTOS! BEAUTIFUL BIG PHOTOS! The annual photo contest showcasing beautiful images of nature from around the world returns for its 2025 incarnation – you don’t need me to tell you that some of these are jaw-dropping by now, but I would like to point out a few spectacular examples. The shot of the octopus eggs in particular is one of the most insanely-alien images I have ever seen in my life, ever, and there’s an image of some…wasps? in the final category that moved me more than I expected to be affected by what is basically a picture of a couple of dead insects on tarmac.
- Design Thinking: This is a comic in newsletter format, and it’s about the business of being a designer, and, look, I have no idea whether the gags land or not but I get the impression that at least a few people reading this are vaguely-designish and as such there might be one person for whom this is basically MY LIFE in crudely-drawn stickman four-panels and, should you be that person, consider this my gift to you.
- Wordsearch Drum Machine: A new submission to the ongoing 10k Drum Machines project which I featured in here a while back; this is a particularly-wonderful, very silly variant on the central theme (to whit: make drum machines), which uses the text from public domain novels to create drum patters from scratch. Pick your text – it defaults to Moby Dick, but you can choose from a few others in the dropdown – set some words to act as element triggers (so, for example, every instance of ‘love’ triggers a snare), set the pace at which you want it to work through the text and then GO! It obviously produces a largely-unlistenable mess and is totally useless from the point of view of actually making anything musically viable, but, well, THAT’S NOT THE POINT. What is the point? Go away, you’re no fun.
- A Brand New C64: Readers of a certain vintage and who grew up in the 1980s may have fond memories of the Commodore64 with its tapedeck and surprisingly-decent selection of games and its oddly-textured plastic fascia; obviously, though, that was 40-odd years ago and, objectively, literally everything about playing games now is better than it used to be in the past. Except, of course, that now you are OLD and close to death and most of the fun things in your life are behind you and, in the main, that which remains is set to involve a slow trudge towards decay and senescence during which everything you have ever cared about will be ruined or die; so why not pretend it’s still the past and that you can still make something of your life, by investing in this newly-announced pristine-looking remake of the original machine? “Commodore has returned from a parallel timeline where tech stayed optimistic, inviting, and human. Where it served us, not enslaved us. We’re here to bring that feeling back – retro • futurism, transparent tech, digital detox, real innovation. This is the first real Commodore computer in over 30 years, and it’s picked up a few new tricks. Not an emulator. Not a PC. Retrogaming heaven in three dimensions: silicon, nostalgia, and light. Powered by a FPGA recreation of the original motherboard, wrapped in glowing game-reactive LEDs (or classic beige of course).” You can download all the ROMs you want, wirelessly, meaning you can play Sid Meier’s Pirates until 3am just like you did when you were 11. Or, you know, you could not exhume the stinking nostalgiacorpse of your past. Either/or really. Anyway, this is pre-release but you can sign up to indicate your interest – the pricepoint’s looking like $300, which, honestly, feels like a LOT, but equally I reckon this will sell out very quickly indeed.
- Aguayos: I love this project. “In 2020, millions of people made their way across Latin America and the Caribbean, driven by the search for safety, stability, and a chance to build a future. The UN 2020 International Migrant Stock captured these weaves of migration, showing how they thread a larger cultural fabric: Latin American and Caribbean identity” – the website visualises these, representing them as ‘Aguayos’, a form of fabric-based storytelling from Andean cultures, creating beautiful, simple patterns from data that tell the stories of people moving between countries and cultures across the continent. Really rather beautiful, this.
- Folio: I know that there are lots of people out there who were very dismayed at the demise of ‘read it later’ tool Pocket, so this is for YOU – basically Folio does the same sort of thing, letting you save interesting stuff you see online in a single place for you to read at a later time of your choosing. This is available on iOS and Android, as a webapp and as a Chrome extension and is worth a look if there’s a significant Pocket-shaped hole in your life.
- Regina Hardon: I like to think I am a reasonably-open-minded man – a friend of mine who’s on Feeld recently shared a screenshot with me of someone she’d come across (not literally) who was into cast play, and I batted nary an eyelid – but the music of Regina Hardon, which I discovered at 626am this morning, really did stun me into a kind of shocked silence. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FILTHY. I mean really, really filthy – I can’t even begin to transcribe any of the lyrics to recent single ‘Instructions’ because, well, it feels…wrong. Just know that Ms Hardon is perfectly comfortable deploying ‘fist’ as a verb and leave it at that. I was initially convinced that this is an AI vocal, but I checked with Shardcore, a Man Who Knows, and he seems to think it’s a human singer – if you’re the sort of person who was bang into the C0ck Destroyers as a vibe (RIP) then I think that this will VERY much be your thing. Honestly, though, I am not joking about this, it honestly made me blush and that NEVER happens (but it also contains a Minecraft reference, which spun me out slightly if I’m honest).
- Crowdle: Can YOU guess how many people are in a picture using just your eyes and intuition? WHY DON’T YOU FIND OUT??? Crowdle is a daily puzzle game which presents you with 5 photos of, er, crowds of different sizes and invites you to estimate how many humans the photos depicts – you get points based on how close you are to the exact number. That’s it, but, well, what more do you want? Fcuk’s sake.
- Daniel Linssen’s Typing Challenge: A typing game! This one’s got a fun wrinkle, though, in that rather than typing words you’re attempting to move around a sort of gameboard, avoiding threats and nimbly jumping around the board from, er, U to F. This is fun and challenging in a slightly-different way to variants on this theme you might have seen before.
- Kickoff League: ‘What if football, but chess?’ is a question that I can’t imagine has troubled you particularly, but should you be curious to know the answer then Kickoff League will help. This is a REALLY fun puzzle game which tasks you with scoring goals in a predetermined number of kicks – you have different types of players whose range of movement mimics that of specific chess pieces, they can move or kick the ball (but moves and passes/shots must alternate), and it has the excellent quality of forcing you to stop and think and plan, and as you play there will come a point where it all just clicks which feels GOOD. You will like this, I think.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Ulan Bator: I have absolutely no idea what the fcuk this has to do with Mongolia, but I very much enjoy the CGA/EGA screenshots and the aesthetic that they embody, so, well, who cares about the name? NO FCUKER, etc.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Animation Fella: This is interesting (well, it is to me – your mileage, as ever, is likely to vary considerably); as recently as a month ago it was posting not-very-good animated skits, seemingly produced using slightly-shonky ‘write the script and we’ll work them up using poorly-animated avatars that look like they’re from 2007’ software. Then Veo3 came out, whoever’s running this discovered it, and the past 6 videos on this account are…genuinely quite funny clips in which a recurring bigfoot character, inexplicably blessed with a scouse accent, does a kind of influencer-style series of reportage videos; the two ‘from Glastonbury’ are genuinely funny and once again demonstrate that if you can write a half-decent script and have a vague idea how to pick shots and edit a short piece of video we’re now at the point when you can make stuff that’s…legitimately quite good? All slop is AI, but not all AI is slop – I think it’s important you start believing this, because it is true.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Palestine Action: We start the longreads this week with a genuinely excellent piece of writing by Huw Lemmey about the decision to brand Palestine Action, a UK campaign group which has since 2020 taken direct action to protest the role of British military and defence contractors in the ongoing suppression of the Palestinian people, a terrorist organisation – as you imagine, Lemmey is not exactly pro this decision, but the argument he makes around why it is wrong and why he feels morally compelled to say so is, I think, beautifully-written and expressed, and very elegantly written indeed, and may also be the first time I’ve mentioned Quakers in 15 years of writing Curios. Honestly, this really is very good indeed. BONUS CONTENT ABOUT PALESTINE: Omer Bartov, a holocaust scholar, writes in the New York Times about why it is a genocide actually.
- The Ensh1ttification of American Power: I can’t help but wince every time i read the word ‘ensh1ttification’ these days – it’s been over- and misused to a point that I am starting to find it genuinely enervating (see also ‘slop’ and ‘techbro’) – but that’s not to say that it’s not an occasionally-useful term; this piece in Wired does a good job of providing an overview of all the ways in which the first months of the current US administration have fundamentally undermined the practical and cultural power of the nation, and how its actions have pushed formerly-close allies of America to begin to consider decoupling themselves from the country and the systems tied to it. This won’t tell you anything you don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but it’s a decent summary of a snapshot slice of geopolitics as of July 2025.
- Why The Grok Stuff Is Quite Dangerous Actually: Gary Marcus here writing about why the past couple of weeks have made him slightly more scared about the potential impact of Bad AI than he was previously – this is worth reading, both as a neat recap of a lot of the Grok stuff and also as a practical guide as to Why This Is Bad. Simply put, an AI whose own creators seem incapable of preventing expressing opinions that are on the continuum from ‘hateful’ to ‘actively bordering on advocating racial violence’ should not be being deployed anywhere, let alone in contracts with the US military, or inside heavy machinery, let alone the ‘millions’ of bipedal robots that Musk envisages being part of the global workforce by 2030 (although that’s obviously never going to happen, being as it is a classic Muskian lie to gull the markets) – and yet, here we are!
- Spending Time With The Sexbot: Oh, and seeing as we’re ‘doing’ xAI, this is The Verge reporting on its interactions with Ani, the ‘sexy waifu AI persona’ (dear God, even typing those words is a deeply-miserable experience) which launched for top-tier Grok subscribers this week, and which is designed to basically offer the user an endless stream of virtual handjobs if said user manages to attain a sufficient ‘romance level’ (no, this really is in the code) in its interactions – it is, predictably, sad and grubby and the sort of thing that countless teenage boys would lose hours in masturbatory fantasy to, and…is that ok? Doesn’t *feel* ok.
- AI Is Like Trains: Oh, ok, it’s nothing like trains – but this essay is, I think, a really smart and helpful way of thinking about AI deployment and use across society, based on the historical example of the way in which railway infrastructure has been embedded across the world, how that compares with infrastructure for cars, and what we can learn from these two examples about how best to think about how and where to deploy a technology with similarly transformative potential. “We’ve been here before. The railways were not universally welcomed. They upended traditional communities. They accelerated migration to low paid, dangerous jobs in cities. Many people tried to keep railways out of their town or village. The London & Birmingham Company was formed to promote the building of what we now call the West Coast Mainline on 17th September 1830, just two days after the opening of the world’s first passenger railway. Almost immediately, a protest meeting of country landowners was held along the route in Towcester, which voted unanimously that the railway would do “great injury” and was unnecessary as “there is already conveyance for travellers between London and Birmingham every day at the rate of ten miles an hour”. Someone at the meeting said that the railway would “spoil our Shires and ruin our Squires”. But they couldn’t stop the railway, because the railway was useful. By 1860, railway mileage had grown 10,000% – both squires and shires were expendable.”
- The Media’s Pivot to AI Will Not Work: I’m increasingly convinced that the reason noone (or the majority of people) don’t seem able or willing to have a sensible conversation about The Machine and What It All Means is, er, not that I’m a tedious, one-note bore who’s long-since alienated all of his ‘friends’ with his tedious Cassandralike carping about the coming jobspocalypse, but instead is like climate change – it’s just too horrible to look at up close, so people don’t really want to engage with it too hard. This piece in 404Media is a rare example of what I think is an honest, factually-accurate and unsugared take on what this technology means for media, and why any attempt by media to ‘embrace’ it is going to end in death. This is both a great piece of writing/arguing, and, in some senses, a hopeful one, at least insofar that it’s core tenet is ‘keep on making good stuff for a defined audience and you will be ok; maybe not rich, but ok’, which, I don’t know, feels about as rosy as it’s possible to get in terms of The Future of Media at present. “So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allows random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news. And yet media executives have decided that the only way to compete with this is to make their workers use AI to make content in a slightly more efficient way than they were already doing journalism. This is not going to work, because “using AI” is not a reporting strategy or a writing strategy, and it’s definitely not a business strategy.”
- I’m Done With Social Media: Caroline Crampton writes about being an author and being told that she HAD to use social media to boost her profile and potential sales, and realising that, in 2025, that advice is mostly fcuking bullsh1t and, in the main, you drive fcuk-all in the way of sales from posting to socials in the modern era. This won’t, in all likelihood, be news to any of you in the beknighted worlds of advermarketingpr, but it’s a useful reminder that the ‘build your business via the power of freely posting on social platforms’ gravy train left the station several years ago and is now a steaming wreck at the bottom of a rather deep ravine. I felt this passage, for example, very strongly: “The more I thought about it, the harder it became not to view the so-called creator economy as a blatant pyramid scheme underwritten by some of the worst corporations in the world. The way to succeed is to get in early, then become an aspirational figure to those who come along later. I’m being deliberately blunt to make my point. If you enjoy watching happy videos of dogs and uploading pictures of your holidays for your friends, I’m delighted for you. If making videos and sharing them online is your hobby, all power to you. As part of a viable creative career, though, where a living wage and sustainable workload is the goal, social media now feels to me like a long con that just hasn’t been exposed yet.”
- Sell Your Face For £40: Or, more accurately, sell an ultra-detailed scan of your face for £40 so it can then be licensed for use in videogames and DEFINITELY NOT bongo. This is a really nice piece of reporting from The Sheffield Tribune, who sent reporter Misty Lamb along to local company Sapiens, which is seeking to build a database of diverse, representative humans whose likenesses can then be used either as-is or as composites in videogames or other digital media. Would you sell your face for £40? Honestly, if someone offered me £20 I would bite their fcuking hand off.
- How Incel Language Infected The Web: I really enjoyed this – an extract from a forthcoming book on the impact of social media on language, specifically looking at the way in which terms from the bowels of subReddits and the Chans have ended up gaining mainstream traction over the years, from incel to the more esoteric mogging and maxxing. “These terms spread partially because the algorithm thrives on negativity and partially because they confirmed our existing cultural outlooks. Phrases like “doomer” and “it’s over” spoke to our disconnected reality, while “brainrot” held a mirror up to our online addictions and “wagecuck” reflected our growing disenchantment with the American dream. And since apocalyptic statements are good for engagement, the phrases eventually became a part of the zeitgeist, emergently reinforcing our pessimistic points of view. Words are memes, and memes are trends, but all are also ideas.” I do believe very strongly that while we’re currently of the opinion that it’s Facebook and Insta and TikTok that have shaped the current version of society we’re living in / suffering through, the truth is that the truly significant platforms have been Something Awful and 4Chan – Lowtax to Trump is a straight line.
- China’s Incel Videogame Sensation: Tangentially-related, this is a NYT report on a game doing numbers in China – called ‘Revenge on Gold Diggers’, the title effectively puts players in the shoes of a man getting his own back on all the ‘cold-hearted’, ‘venal’ women who exist only to drain a guy of his money and VITAL ENERGIES and oh God this is deeply, deeply miserable. “The interactive game, which debuted in June to enormous success, temporarily topped the charts on Steam China, the local version of the global gaming platform. Its tagline, “Who killed love? It’s the gold diggers who killed love,” has electrified Chinese social media. Players, cast as “emotional fraud hunters,” navigate romantic relationships, searching for deception while guarding their wallets — and their hearts. One of the most liked comments on the game’s community board calls it “an elegy for our generation of Chinese men.” Another declares, “Men must never retreat — this is a fight to the death.””
- Hanging With Manu: A rare link to the Guardian here – if you’ve not read this, you really must. Emmanuel Carrère writes about his time on the French Presidential plane, and the wider Macron hang, around the recent G7 summit – honestly, this is such masterful writing it made me quite jealous. The access is impeccable, the style superb, and it’s both very informative and pleasingly-gossipy, giving you a genuine feel for the (sorry, but) general *vibe* of these sorts of things, and the principal players, and what it’s like to exist on the periphery as one of the anointed scribes tasked with preserving the actions of these ‘great’ men and women (and make no mistake, there is no question of Manu’s own conception of his own greatness!). Honestly, this is exceptionally good.
- The Battle Over Iran’s Flag: I confess to having known the square root of fcuk all about the origins of the Iranian flag, or indeed the fact that there are current a few competing versions in existence depending on which particular faction or diasporic group you might belong; this is a really interesting overview of the story behind the banner, and finishes with a call for a whole new flag for a whole new era – I quite like the idea that national emblems need refreshing every few years, which as someone who thinks the Union Jack is VERY UGLY and who can’t help but associate the cross of St George with barely-disguised racism (sorry, but I can’t shake the memories of the Combat 18 lads outside Stamford Bridge when I was a kid) I can’t help but think we should all take this sort of attitude.
- I Printed My Instagram Feed for a Month: Ok, this is quite slight and not that long, and it’s basically just someone talking about what it was like attempting to wean themselves off the gram by printing their feed out and reading it like a newspaper instead, which is obviously both wildly performative and slightly-mental, but, equally, there was something quite interesting about this in terms of the effect it had on the way she read, and her relationships with the friends inside her phone, and I think there might be *something* in here for someone, though I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine what or indeed who.
- Overtourism in Japan: Web Curios favourite Craig Mod writes movingly about what TikTok and Insta fame does to small cafes and other venues in Japan, and how individual shop owners try and inure themselves against the mad vicissitudes of algofame. I found myself nodding throughout – everything Craig says in here can be applied to the wider modern world: “ At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush. Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.”8 This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms.”
- Benidorm’s Patriots: Róisín Lanigan writes from Benidorm on the strange phenomenon of the Orangemen on tour, the Irish, Scottish (and occasional Scouse) who decide to go to the Costa del Sol to celebrate the glory of the Union and sing songs about Fenian blood; this is a fascinating portrait of a very weird subculture which feels odd and outdated when seen in its natural habitat but which becomes genuinely, mind-bendingly surreal when transplanted to 35 degree temperatures in the Iberian sunshine. Contains some EXCELLENT descriptions of men whose hue of face you can just *imagine*, and this paragraph is typical of the understated but…very…pointy depictions contained throughout: “Among the people is Jimmy, who has brought his flute and later says his real name is Mark. Originally from Scotland, he enlisted in the British Army and eventually found himself in Essex. “I’m an army boy,” he says. “I’m a Loyalist.” After two failed marriages, he moved to the Isle of Sheppey. This is his fourth trip to Benidorm this year. “I used to go to Belfast but it was too much hassle,” says Mark, or Jimmy, who has travelled here alone.”
- Rejection: Another LRB piece, this one a review of last year’s book of short stories by Tony Tulathimutte called ‘Rejection’, a book I absolutely loved but which I can’t possibly recommend to anyone because it is so utterly horrible to read (whilst being very well-written indeed). This is an excellent overview which explains its strengths and its weaknesses, and which will give you a good guide as to whether you want to read it or not (and, er, if any of you do, I *may* have access to a PDF proof which I *may* be able to email you if you ask me. But, er, PIRACY IS BAD).
- My Adorable, Wholesome Little Guys: I’m not sure if I’ve ever included the same author’s work twice in a single Curios, but, presuming I haven’t, Huw Lemmey (AGAIN) is the lucky, lucky inaugural winner of this particular distinction – he will never know, but I imagine he would be THRILLED to find out. Here he writes about the TV show ‘Heartstoppers’ and how its emblematic of a certain trend in modern popular culture to find homosexuality acceptable as long as, well, it doesn’t dwell too much on the ‘sex’ aspect of it – as a straight man I can’t really speak to this with any authority, but I found it both interesting and true-feeling; it certainly feels, from a media culture point of view, that something like Queer as Folk would perhaps find it harder to find an audience in 2025 because of the level of discomfort that it feels viewers might experience at its depiction of what it is actually like when men fcuk, and that there’s a strange modern association between ‘goodness’ and ‘purity’ which feels…retrograde in the extreme: “Of course, depictions of queer life need not be miserable, but the idealism on which Heartstopper is built feels curiously narcissistic. Conflict, unethical behaviour, cruelty and unkindness are things we all do and are all subject to. But Heartstopper belongs to a different political-cultural moment, where a crude concept of ‘representation’ is a moral and aesthetic good in its own right (never mind that literature is one field where white gay men have hardly been underrepresented). When it comes to queerness, “representation” often means “an image of myself I’m comfortable seeing”, and anything else is a compounded oppression. It was described in the Gay Times as “the queer graphic novel we wished we had at high school” and has won its plaudits precisely for its idealistic representation of gay teens. But it’s an idealism that has confused representation for endorsement to the point where even heavily signposting inappropriate behaviour is not enough; good queer characters must remain unblemished innocents who don’t do bad things, and bad characters must remain alien.”
- 27 Notes On Growing Older: So after saying at the tail end of last year that ‘XX notes on YY’-style posts were in the main twee and patronising and generally pretty fcuking annoying, it now seems that I am featuring them all the time – I am going to ascribe this to people seeing my criticism and modifying their writing accordingly rather than my being either a massively-inconsistent tw4t or becoming increasingly-sentimental in my approaching dotage. This is Ian Leslie writing about, er, growing older, and, honestly, I really enjoyed this – not cloying, not sentimental, not attempting to TEACH YOU THINGS, this is just a series of nicely-observed and well-written vignettes from middle age. “The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way – that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.”
- In My Zombie Era: I am not always a fan of Sam Kriss’s writing, but I fcuking LOVED this – this is about cultural stagnation in the modern era, the why behind the feeling that it’s all warmed-up leftovers from lavish banquets past, but what really sold this to me is the hyperstylised opening and closing sections which, honestly, I think are really really fcuking great. Your mileage may vary, and I am pretty certain that there are those of you who will hate this with a burning passion, but I am a sucker for these sorts of sustained stylistic exercises and this one really works imho (although I was troubled by the fact that I didn’t have to strain AT ALL to understand it, which possibly speaks to some…deficiencies in my lifestyle and media diet).
- Carousel: We close out this week with two short stories in the new edition of Granta. Carousel is the longer of the two, and it didn’t *quite* click with me until about a third of the way through at which point I realised it might be genius. It’s also quite a hard read in terms of What It Is About (loss, both of mind and everything else), but it’s a very, very good piece of writing indeed by Leopold O’Shea.
- Happy Ending: Finally this week, Hope Newell writes about a woman who, while her girlfriend is away, gets a job in the ‘massage parlour’ at which she works. That’s all you’re getting by way of description for this one – it’s honestly superb, and you will enjoy it more if you go in cold.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
