THEY LET ME IN TO AMERICA! I was, I confess, momentarily a touch scared as I prepared to hand over my documents to the nice (INCREDIBLY MUSCULAR) man behind the immigration desk, but other than asking me one genuinely baffling question (“So, this is your goddaughter?” “Yes” “So did you baptise her?” “Hang on, what?”) it all went off with nary a hitch and I got to spend a week in California with an old friend and her husband and my 16-year-old goddaughter, and was reminded of all of the reasons California is AMAZING (weather, landscape, fruit and vegetables that taste of something) and why it is TERRIFYING (mountain lions, fires, armed response units, a significant proportion of the American population of the state, the fact that everyone is teetotal and goes to bed at 9pm,the insane plastic surgery) and why I could never, ever live there (although the weed really is amazing, down to the way it’s packaged – seriously, if anyone wants to commission a really in-depth article about the repackaging of counterculture for late-stage capitalism then, well, I would be a fcuking terrible but very willing choice).
Anyway, while ordinarily I might be tempted to attempt to write something funny about THOSE FCUKING MEN and their Big Shouty Spat, I am instead going to announce some actual, important news:
THE TINY AWARDS ARE BACK FOR 2025!
That’s right! Kris, Matt and I are, for the third year running, making ourselves SLIGHTLY poorer by running our small awards thing, celebrating the small, personal, non-commercial, silly, frivolous, fun, poetic, beautiful web, and we are now OPEN FOR NOMINATIONS! If there’s a site from the past 12 months that you think deserves to be celebrated or rewarded, if there’s something that has spoken to you in some small way whose creator you feel deserves some recognition, if YOU are that creator and you would like someone to PAY SOME FCUKING ATTENTION to your thing, why not nominate a site? You can read a bit more about the criteria here, but, basically, if it’s the sort of thing that’s in Curios, it’s probably eligible (broadly-speaking).
Nominations are open for a month, so PLEASE submit sites you love or sites you’ve made, and tell your friends and the wider world – noone’s getting rich off this (quite the opposite, in fact), but we would love to spread the word about the fact that people are still making Interesting Internet Things for the love of it, and that those things deserve celebrating.
The Tiny Awards are a genuine labour of love for the three of us – and the lovely, kind judges who’ve agreed to help sift through all the eventual nominations – and, we hope, an expression of the love (NOT WEIRD LOVE, PURE LOVE) we feel for the web. Do feel free to spread the word.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you are beautiful, have I ever told you how beautiful?
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHETHER ANYONE THINKS THAT SPENDING A GRAND ON A TICKET FOR SXSW LONDON WAS WORTH IT BECAUSE LITERALLY NOTHING I HAVE SEEN ANYWHERE SUGGESTS THAT IT HAS BEEN ANYTHING OTHER THAN A PILE OF WNK, PT.1:
- Flynn: We are, thank Christ, still a little way from people attempting to claim personhood for their special AI companion – but, based on what is increasingly clear from the various ‘me and my AI friend!’-type conversations on Reddit and elsewhere, we’re not *that* far. While The Machine, in all its many iterations, is still a very long way from proper autonomy (and let’s take a moment to breathe a small sigh of relief at that fact), we’re going to start to see more and more examples of agentic AI being thrust out into the world to See What Happens – it started last year with the various bots on X with their memecoins and esoteric, vaguely-spiritualist sh1tposting and has evolved in 2025 with the development of Flynn, which, per its creators, is an AI model which has been enrolled in the Digital Arts Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Now obviously you have to take all of the above with a *bit* of salt – ‘enrolled’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting – but, at a very basic level, Flynn combines a bunch of different AI bits – a large language model, a voice synthesizer, and an image generator – and feeds said bits all the course inputs and…sees what comes out (there’s a slightly more comprehensive writeup here should you want one). The main link goes to Flynn’s ‘journal’, where The Machine’s impressions of the course live, along with the output it makes in response to the information it’s ingesting; the results are more curious than they are revelatory, and this is basically just a fun conceptual brainfart rather than anything more impressive, but I have very much enjoyed checking out the occasional musing from the robot on social media and imagining how upset at least one of its coursemates will be when Flynn graduates with a better grade than then come the end of the academic year. If you so choose you can even ‘call’ Flynn via the website, on the offchance that you want to talk to a chatbot about its ‘experiences’ of studying ‘feminist fatigue’ – I tried this earlier and, honestly, it was QUITE STRANGE.
- ConceptMesh: This is an interesting addition to the general ‘AI-assisted knowledge-spelunking digital tool cabinet’ that I know for a FACT each of you is currently maintaining- ConceptMesh basically creates a sort of conceptual mind-map…thing (look, I have been off for a fortnight, bear with me here) for any concept you ask of it – so, for example, I just typed in ‘utilitarianism’ and the website spat out a little map of related concepts arranged in 2d space, including terms derived from it, adjacent or more-refined iterations of the initial prompt (act utiliarianism, rule utilitarianism, etc etc), individuals whose work shaped the school of thought, etc, with each sub-concept something which can be clicked into, learned about and, if you desire, expanded upon…this is the sort of thing that I can imagine being really useful from the point of view of starting to learn about a new topic and expand your perception of the ‘shape’ of an area of learning, and as an adjunct to other search-type tools it feels…useful (if you ignore the fact that this is all basically LLM-enabled and as such there’s a non-zero possibility that it will contain a bunch of stuff that has been made up entirely by the mysterious 1s and 0s inside the black box – but welcome to the future, when we’ve decided to trade the general concept of ‘epistemological certainty’ for speedy magic beans!).
- Google Flow TV: We’re now at the point with AI-generated video that it’s possible to make high enough quality clips that you could reasonably make some…terrifyingly-professional looking telly-style programmes from it, albeit ones that adhere to the strict ‘change the shot every 8 seconds lest everything get incredibly melty and Cthulhu-ish’ limitations of the medium as it stands. While we wait for CREATORS to start properly warping our sense of reality, fact and fiction with the tech, though, why not enjoy this little showcase of ‘what you can do with Veo3’ – Google has created this website which basically acts as a mini TV station demonstrating some of the various types of thing you can make with their shiny new toy. Different ‘channels’ include different strands of video – so there’s an ‘extreme sports’ channel which this morning variously gave me a first-person video of a man riding a horse through a shopping mall and someone skydiving through a landscape of massive sky-glaciers (look, it’s not my prompt, don’t look at me like that), and a ‘skeletons’ channel which is, seemingly, just videos of skeletons just sort of hanging out, and one of people dancing (not people! All 1s and 0s! FCUKING HELL IT IS GETTING HARDER AND HARDER TO REMEMBER THIS FACT), and and and…this is, obviously, designed to show off the tech’s chops, and as such all the clips on show here are pretty shiny – but having played around with it a bit this week, the model really is fcuking incredible and prettymuch everything it spits out is at least 60% plausible and so, well, GOOD LUCK with that whole ‘keeping track of what’s actual footage and what’s totally machine-imagined’ thing!
- Unmute: I’ve been slightly surprised by the lack of seeming mass-market takeup of the ChatGPT voice interaction functionality – while I personally have no need to CHAT TO THE MACHINE, I can’t deny that there’s something fcuking incredible about the uncanny responsiveness of the OpenAI voicemodel these days – but I wonder whether that will change as the open source market catches up in terms of the speed and accuracy of conversational tech; Unmute is a demo of a forthcoming open source text-to-speech/speech-to-text model with very low latency, and you can try it out on the website, and once you’ve gotten past the inevitable first impulse to be very, very rude to the AI (it probably won’t remember!) you will be astonished by quite how smooth and fast this is. Oh, and if you want a small frisson of ‘hang on, THAT doesn’t necessarily seem like a good or safe idea!’ you will doubtless be pleased to know that you can also upload your own short clips of anyone’s voice you like, to create superfast interactive models of whoever you like – OH THE INCREDIBLY CREEPY THINGS THAT PEOPLE (men) ARE GOING TO DO WITH THIS!
- Absurd: I am both amazed and embarrassed that this has been going for 5 years and I have seemingly never seen or featured it before – SORRY I HAVE LET YOU DOWN SORRY – but better late than never I suppose. Absurd is a MSCHF-style projectcollectivething which every month releases a new, fun, silly THING into the world. The latest is a small, digital waving cat (Maneki-neko) graphic which you can embed on your ecommerce website to ‘bring you luck’ – other examples of Stuff What They Have Made include a, er, sexy calculator which rewards you for getting sums right by showing you incrementally more of some ‘erotic’ images for each correct calculation, and a ‘slow delivery service’ which promises to courier anything you like to anywhere in the world, INCREDIBLY SLOWLY. Stupid, yes, but also ART (probably).
- Ozu: This is interesting – Ozu is a new company that basically, as far as I can tell, wants to help filmmakers of all stripes make their work searchable and easier to monetise, effectively with the aim of creating a searchable repository of scenes from films, etc. Which, obviously, is QUITE COMPLICATED from the point of view of rights, etc, and almost certainly doomed to failure of a result of said complication (don’t look at me like that, it’s true) – still, it’s an interesting model and I can 100% see the utility in a single platform that lets you search (in theory) EVERY FILM EVER MADE for scenes featuring, for example, ‘a fleeting expression of deep internal distress’, say, or ‘a barely-suppressed snigger’ or ‘large men crying while wearing shorts’.
- Infinite Threnody: It turns out that I fcuking LOVE the word ‘threnody’, and since this wandered across my radar earlier this week I have been muttering it to myself under my breath on a pretty much hourly basis (and honestly if my brain could stop doing that now that would be great, it is proving distracting and I am not entirely sure how much longer I can keep this up without going a bit funny) – this website is, to quote its maker, “a generative music piece I made in 2018, to memorialize a rapidly-deteriorating 1924 Estey Field Reed Organ. Chords never repeat themselves, and an array of vocal samples provide endless textures for the organ to sing as long as the page is live. The organ itself bears a number of carefully etched markings, DIY fixes, and telltale marks of long-dried wood laminate drippings that indicate the organ was loved long before I recovered it from an imminent scrapping in Stamford, Connecticut.” I promise you that having this open in the background, whatever you might be doing, is a near-spiritual experience – seriously, it’s weirdly-meditative after a while, I’m not joking.
- Paint With Ember: This is some sort of ‘paint with AI’-type toy – you will have seen the idea before, select the type of scene you want The Machine to draw from the menu on the left, then ‘paint’ the area of the canvas you want it to fill in with said type of scene and it will generatively fill the selected area with an imagined interpretation of whatever the prompt requires (‘night sky’, say, or ‘cityscape’, or ‘flames’, or ‘giant penile forest’ (not, in fact, the last one)). This isn’t, per se, that interesting, but one of the options you can select is ‘open mouth with teeth’ and the reason I am including this link is because I ended up creating something genuinely horrifying that looked like some sort of horrific Francis Bacon fever dream and I would like each of you to also be able to experience the very specific toothy fantods that I did.
- AI Warehouse: I AM SORRY FOR ALL THE AI STUFF IN THE INITIAL SECTION THIS WEEK – apologies, I hadn’t realised until I got to typing this all up quite how Machine-heavy we are today, but I promise we’ll move on shortly. This, though, is a lot of fun – a YouTube channel featuring videos showcasing the training and deployment of different little AI ‘bots’ in virtual environments, specifically designed to demonstrate some principles of model training, emergent behaviour and the like. I stumbled across this earlier this week thanks to this video which shows a model learning how to play football and I was TRANSFIXED, see how you get on.
- Obscura: A reader writes! Says Nic Wands (HI NIC WANDS!), “I wanted to share a little thing I made that I thought might be up your alley. I work at a small studio called CTHDRL, and we’re putting on an event in August for a project we’re working on. To get tickets, we built a cool little application. It’s just one question, and you answer it by selecting words from a book of your choice. It’s been really fun to see how the answers take on the tone and personality of the book, and how people approach writing their answers.” The event is taking place in California in August – so manage your expectations for your attendance accordingly – and will, per Nic, feature “speakers, workshops, performances, art installations, hangouts and more fun stuff over the course of that weekend”, and as a way of triaging potential applicants I really like this – there’s something lovely about the way the interface forces you to make what effectively amount to cut-out verses from the various texts at your disposal, and I rather hope that all the submissions are eventually made available to read on the site (so, er, Nic, should you want to pander to my utterly-unreasonable demands then, well, thanks!).
- Odyssey: Fcuk, more AI, sorry sorry sorry – still, this is conceptually quite mindblowing. Basically – ok, VERY basically, to the point that I can’t really be said in any meaningful way to ‘understand’ what I am about to describe to you, for which, well, apologies – this is one of those ‘explore an environment imagined by The Machine’, where said environment is effectively being imagined from just a few frames of video – this is a sort of proof-of-concept for the general idea of ‘you will one day be able to explore an entire virtual world from a single image of a painting’, or the previous attempts to ‘make a version of Quake which is being dreamed on the fly by The Machine’, but, well, moreso; as with previous variants on this stuff it’s more theoretically-impressive than practically-useful at this stage, but it’s undeniably quite mad to be able to ‘navigate’ a full 3d environment based on a few static frames.
- The Britannica Chatbot: You know the Encyclopaedia Britannica, right? That storied repository of knowledge? Well what if we took that and added a conversation layer to it, powered by an LLM, that adds an interesting layer of SPICY UNCERTAINTY to the corpus of information and causes you to have to second-guess anything you find in said repository- does that sound good? No, it doesn’t, and yet the seemingly-ceaseless drive to add AI to everything whether or not anyone wants it (and, let’s be clear, most of the time noone does!) continues very much apace. Will it in any way ‘improve’ anyone’s experience? No! Does it feel like a positive when the interface has to be clearly caveated with “Chatbot answers are created from Britannica articles using AI. This is a beta feature. AI answers may contain errors. Please verify important information using Britannica articles”? NO! BUT THAT DOESN’T MATTER WE MUST ALL LEARN TO LOVE THE MACHINE!
- Eli The Dog: This is HORRIBLE – someone has spun up a news bot on Twitter which, as far as I can tell, is taking breaking news headlines and passing them through some sort of filter (probably an LLM because OF COURSE IT FCUKING IS) that turns them into…the best description I can come up with for the style here is ‘millennial hecking pupper doggo’, if that means anything to you, a very 2014-coded register which, it turns out, REALLY doesn’t work when the source headlines deal with, er, tragic death. I mean, look at the state of this: “Heartbreaking in Sheffield — a young boy, just 16, lost his life in a terrible hit-and-run. An 18-year-old on an e-bike was also seriously hurt, and the driver fled the scene! The community is shaken, and police are on the case. Oh no… I was just about to chase a squirrel when I heard! So sad for the family— Let’s send belly rubs and love their way.” This is…astonishing, really.
- Images AI Couldn’t Recreate: Vaguely-memetic images that are uniquely human and (probably, still) couldn’t be prompted into being. There’s something interesting about the qualities that these share which makes them evidently non-AI, and I wonder how long we’ve got until some enterprising scamp creates a bespoke version of Flux or similar designed specifically to punt out stuff that feels broadly ‘chaotic’ like these do (upsettingly I can half-imagine the workflow to do that, which makes me think that even stuff like this is going to be AI-replicable in under a year; I know I keep on saying this, but our entire sense of real and fake is so utterly, totally fcuked).
- The Map of Github: ALL OF THE REPOSITORIES! ON A MAP! ZOOM AND SCROLL AND EXPLORE! Obviously as a non-coder this means next-to-nothing to me, aside from the whole mapped representation thing, but those of you who know your Java might find something beyond the aesthetic in this. BONUS MAP!: have this mapped representation of ALL THE FONTS IN THE WORLD (probably).
- The AI Bible: The degree to which AI-generated video and images have been embraced by a…particular sort of religious person feels like something worthy of deeper investigation, but while we wait for that deep dive (“Slop: It’s God’s Way”) why not take a moment to enjoy this spectacular YouTube channel which features…Oh, fcuk, look, I can’t even describe this stuff, YOU HAVE TO CLICK IN AND WATCH SOME. Try this – a music video all about the biblical flood and Noah and the Ark, with autotuned vocals and some…theologically-questionable footage of stegosauruses getting onto the boat – or maybe THIS, a, er, ‘trailer for the biblical cinematic universe’ (and can we just take a moment to reflect on that? The ‘bible cinematic universe’?!) featuring some VERY trippy biblically-correct manifestations of the angelic…honestly, this whole channel is a fcuking trip and I cannot stress enough how much you are going to enjoy it. Monetising the word of God via Kling and Hailuo? IT’S WHAT JESUS WOULD HAVE WANTED!
TRAVEL BACK TO THE 70s AND 80s NOW COURTESY OF TOM SPOONER AND HIS WONDERFUL VINYL COLLECTION!
THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHETHER ANYONE THINKS THAT SPENDING A GRAND ON A TICKET FOR SXSW LONDON WAS WORTH IT BECAUSE LITERALLY NOTHING I HAVE SEEN ANYWHERE SUGGESTS THAT IT HAS BEEN ANYTHING OTHER THAN A PILE OF WNK, PT.2:
- Owls In Towels: Thanks to a reader called, er, ‘Kitty Kitten’ (I DO NOT JUDGE YOU KITTY KITTEN) who sent this to me a couple of weeks ago – since which it has appeared EVERYWHERE, but, well, it’s still a lovely website so I am going to include it anyway because, as per, THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE (so why does it always feel like I am losing it, then?). You…you don’t need me to explain what this is, do you? The title is not, I promise you, any sort of trick.
- Ket Horse: Ok, so there’s a degree to which I would have included this TikTok account regardless simply because of the magnificence of its title – who, after all, doesn’t love a ket horse? NO FCUKER, etc! – but thankfully the content is also worth recommending; I don’t understand what is happening here AT ALL, but if you have ever wondered ‘what would it be like if someone made a bunch of videos featuring cut-out images of the Kardashians, animals, a horse in very cool shades, the cast of Harry Potter, firearms and deep-fried meme stuff and posted them on a slightly-chaotic TikTok feed?’ then, well, here is your answer. This is odd, but in a pleasing way.
- Kent Current: I’ve been saying for a year or so now we’re in the middle of a pleasing-if-unexpected local news resurgence in the UK, and Kent Current is the latest in the new crop of small, nascent news providers serving a specific community – per the blurb, “The Kent Current is a new, independent news website for Kent. We believe local journalism is important, but local newsrooms are struggling following years of cuts and a collapse in advertising revenue. We do things differently here. We have no corporate overlords, we don’t run advertising, and we don’t resort to clickbait. We reject the idea that local news can’t cover the big stories facing our community. We believe local journalism should be informative and substantial and challenge those with power. Our model is entirely reader-funded. While our core news briefings are free, we put some additional content behind a paywall. As a result, those who can support our work get a little extra while keeping the main editions free for everyone else.” Subs run at £6 a month, which feels like an entirely-reasonable price to pay to help fund local reporting (or at least it does if you live in Kent – I concede that readers in, say, Vladivostok (I have no readers in Vladivostok) might find it a less-worthwhile use of their monies), and I am generally just really glad to see things like this continue to spring up – more, please.
- The Historical Tech Tree: I appreciate that ‘fcuking hell’ is an…inelegant response to someone’s personal project, but, well FCUKING HELL, this is quite the undertaking. “The historical tech tree is a project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois to visualize the entire history of technologies, inventions, and (some) discoveries, from prehistory to today. Unlike other visualizations of the sort, the tree emphasizes the connections between technologies: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations, and so on. These connections allow viewers to understand how technologies came about, at least to some degree, thus revealing the entire history in more detail than a simple timeline, and with more breadth than most historical narratives. The goal is not to predict future technology, except in the weak sense that knowing history can help form a better model of the world. Rather, the point of the tree is to create an easy way to explore the history of technology, discover unexpected patterns and connections, and generally make the complexity of modern tech feel less daunting.” This is utterly dizzying and not a little daunting, and, frankly, a little bit too big to really work imho (seriously, click the link and drag the window around and get a sense for the SCALE of this thing – there’s a LOT of tech to get through, turns out), but equally it gave me a proper moment of what I can only describe as species-level pride – LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS WE CLEVER APES HAVE COBBLED TOGETHER! – and it feels like something that the right sort of curious individual could lose hours, if not days, to.
- AI Hallucination Cases In Law: A resource for anyone wishing to keep track of all of the different instances of AI being used in courts – specifically those instances in which said AI has just made stuff up, thereby queering the legal process to no small degree: “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings. While seeking to be exhaustive (139 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.” It’s…sobering, frankly, particularly when you consider it’s not likely to be exhaustive. Still, er, LET’S HAVE MORE AI SHALL WE? Christ alive, what are we DOING to ourselves?
- Wandering Stones: A website celebrating large rocks which, thanks to TIME and GEOLOGY and TECTONIC MOVEMENTS and GLACIAL DRIFT and THE WORK OF MAN (writing this has caused me to think of the word ‘moraines’ for what is possibly the first time in 30 years, which is nice) and all sorts of other reasons besides, have changed position over centuries and millennia – YES THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF THING MORE WEBSITES OUGHT TO CELEBRATE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? “This page is about the movement of stones. It’s about glaciers and humans, time and distance, weight and size. It tells stories of specific erratic blocks in north germany and how the human interacted with them. How we tried to move them, to use them and how we gave them a symbolic and cultural meaning mostly based on monarchical national thinking. The research of this website is not finished yet. There is more to the stories of the stones…” I really like this, but I can’t quite explain why.
- Kill The Newsletter: Except don’t, obviously. Newsletters are ACE – well, some of them are, perhaps not this one – but, equally, not everyone likes the slow ‘THUNK, THUNK, THUNK’ of them landing in your inbox and clogging up your communications networks and generally just sitting there making you feel guilty for not reading them…which is why some nice people invented Kill The Newsletter, which is a neat little service designed to turn newsletters into Atom feeds for easy ingestion into the RSS reader of your choice – it won’t necessarily work with all newsletter providers, but it’s worth a go if you’re finding your volume of inbound somewhat overwhelming (I think I am currently subscribed to somewhere in the region of 90-100 newsletters which, on balance, feels like it might be…too many?).
- The Methaphone: Ok, this is both a paid-for physical product AND one which is sold out and which you therefore can’t buy, but, well, I LIKE IT SO FCUK OFF. Also, you can sign up to get updates when it’s back in stock, so it feels like a legitimate link to include. IS THAT OK??? I have literally no idea who I am trying to justify myself to when I write stuff like this, by the way – does it come across as slightly-schizophrenic? ARE YOU JUDGING ME? Ahem. Anyway, the Methaphone is a silly-but-pleasing gag – a phone replacement device, made of smooth, featureless plastic, designed to provide you with the physical comfort of your device without any of the addictive or distracting or life-ruining features that the standard Apple or Samsung model possesses. Why? IT’S A JOKE FFS. “Leave your phone without the cravings or withdrawal. We carry our phones everywhere. It feels strange and unsettling when we can’t feel them. We twitch, worried we’ve lost something. methaphone can help you manage cravings and withdrawal symptoms. It can fill that hole in your back pocket. It can fill that hole in your hand. Opioid addicts have used methadone to help step down from dependency, and now you have this.” Well it made ME laugh you joyless fcuks.
- Aperiodical: Do you like maths? Do you like maths A LOT? No, seriously, HOW MUCH? Aperiodical is “a meeting-place for people who already know they like maths and would like to know more. It was begun by Katie Steckles, Christian Perfect and Peter Rowlett as a shared blogging outlet and grew out of our desire to have a place on the web where we could keep up to date with what’s going on elsewhere, and to share the mathematical things we do.” Look, I am barely-numerate and so literally NONE of the things on this site mean anything to me, but if you’re the sort of person who can read terms like ‘binomial expansion formula’ and think ‘oh, I know what that means’ rather than ‘oh, that’s a Fall album I have never listened to’ then this might be up your street.
- Hourly Simpsons: A BLUESKY ACCOUNT LIKE WHAT THEY USED TO MAKE ON TWITTER BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS! Except there were never any good old days – everything has always been sh1t, the only difference is that in the past you were too young and stupid to realise. Anyway, this is a Bluesky bot – who cares if the site’s dying! – which will post a different random frame from an equally-random episode of The Simpsons on an hourly basis. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?
- Horse: Another vaguely-equine link (no ket this time, though, to the best of my knowledge), this time aimed squarely at the neurodivergent among you – do YOU find that normal web browsers don’t specifically tesselate with the UNIQUELY-CRENELLATED EDGES OF YOUR BRAIN? Do you sometimes wish that your SPECIAL MIND had a matching interface via which to access the internet? You may well enjoy Horse, then, a browser apparently designed specifically for people who are ADHD or ADHD-adjacent, and, apparently, organises information, tabs, etc, in a way in which is more aligned to that sort of mind, making it easier to follow trails of interest and track your progress through the vast information network of the web in a way that works with the unique quirks of the ADHD brain. I have no fcuking clue whatsoever whether this is actually helpful or not what with being tediously-neurotypical (or at least not that sort of weird), but I would be interested to hear reports from any of you who try this out.
- The Mane Quest: Seeing as we’re doing horse-y website (SEAMLESS!), why not enjoy The Mane Quest, a website dedicated to writing about horses in videogames (or videogames about horses). Do you want essays about the best horses in games? Do you want DEEP DIVES into horse mechanics? Do you want disquisitions on mane and tail physics? OH GOOD! “As a long-time equestrian and gamer, I like to analyze horses in video games for their realism, their looks, and their mechanical features. As a video game developer and producer, I can appreciate some of the work that goes into creating life-like digital equines. Nowadays I also offer consulting to developers and publishers of horse games in areas such as marketing, competitor analysis, horse accuracy and animation, translating equine realism into fun and marketable products, community management and more.” Look, I am in no way a, er, ‘horse girlie’ (or horse boy-ie, more accurately), but I can’t help but love a website which features articles including lines like “The hoofpicking minigame is among the better I’ve seen.”
- The David Lynch Auction: Going under the hammer in just under a fortnight’s time, this is a collection of personal items owned by the late director – come for the film memorabilia (props from Mulholland Drive and other classics from the Lynchian oeuvre), stay for the film equipment (YOU CAN BID FOR AN ACTUAL DAVID LYNCH-OWNED CAMCORDER FFS!) and the, er, violently-expensive coffeemaking equipment (10k feels like…a lot for an espresso machine tbqhwy). If anyone fancies buying me a present, I rather like the Lynch-carved incense holder.
- The Short Story Project: Well this is nice – a website dedicated to celebrating short stories, in written and audio form, collecting all sorts of things to read and listen to, freely-accessible in exchange for handing over your email address. You can browse the collection by theme or by estimated reading time, and the collection features works by hundreds of authors from around the world, and as a resource for readers and those who love stories this is all sorts of wonderful.
- Mogul: “What if fantasy football, but for X?” feels like something I have seen a LOT over the years, but not, to the best of my knowledge, for films – Mogul promises to be that very thing, though, selling itself as “the first fantasy league for Hollywood, built by MoviePass” – except, oh, there’s a crypto layer, so actually maybe fcuk it into the sun. Still, apparently the crypto stuff is entirely optional, so if you like the idea of playing some sort of game which lets you earn points by picking stars, directors, writers and the like and betting on their future success for, er, magic beans, then you may well LOVE this. This is yet to launch, but you can sign up for future updates – if you’re properly into films this might be worth keeping an eye on (but, again, you might need to just hold your nose about the crypto thing).
- The Internet Pizza: Oh this is lovely! Although I have no fcuking clue whatsoever why it is called the internet pizza. This site offers you a new selection of INTERESTING LINKS every day, presented, for reasons known only to its creators, in the shape of a pizza. Click different ‘slices’ of the pizza and each will take you to a different url, with the selection seemingly swapping out every 24h, and, look, in the unlikely event that Curios doesn’t provide a sufficient quanitity INTERESTING LINKY EPHEMERA for you each week then a) what the fcuk is wrong with you you fcuking sicko, and why am I unable to meet your needs WHY AM I NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU???; b) this will fill your void.
- Flight Fee Dodger: A game which is sort-of fun but which is also a slightly-wearing reminder of all the ways in which the modern world is just a little bit sh1t – specifically in this instance the ways in which booking a cheap flight (or frankly buying almost anything holiday/travel-related) is basically a miserable calvary of upsell and grift. The game is as follows: “Book a flight from Dublin to Ibiza; Avoid hidden fees and charges; You start with €50 budget; If your budget hits €0, you lose; Successfully book the cheapest flight to win!” Fun, but also ever so slightly miserable – just like life itself!
- Beatrush: Ooh, I like this – upload any mp3 you fancy and get a custom version of Flappy Bird created out of the soundfile, so you can play along to the track with all the different gaps you have to fly through determined by the beats of the track. Put on something that runs at 150+ bpm for a real challenge, you cowards.
- Blasnake: Snake, but BETTER – this features enemies which you can EXPLODE by surrounding them with your serpentine form (don’t worry, it will make sense when you play it), which elevates the basic gameplay really nicely and makes this basically an entirely-new experience (well, insofar as anything based on one of the most famous game mechanics of recent years can be new).
- The Incredible Shrinking Goalie: Our final frivolous gamething of the week is the latest project by Friend of Curios Matt Round – Matt has once again created an absolute BASTRD of a timewaster with exceptional ‘one more try’ vibes. The game is simple: you are a small goalkeeper, and your job is to stop the ball hitting the floor. The small wrinkle is that every time you, the keeper, touch the ball, you get ever so slightly smaller, making the game an increasing challenge the better you do. This is very silly, very fun, takes 10-30s a game and features some genuinely brilliant audio samples which imho elevate this to near-perfect status. I am totally sh1t at it, mind.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Repeated Band Names: Not a Tumblr! But it ought to be! This is a page compiling links to bands whose names feature the same word, repeated – so ‘The The’, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’, ‘Jaguar Jaguar’…you get the idea. Why? HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED NOT TO ASK THE QUESTION AND TO INSTEAD JUST ENJOY THINGS? Fcuk’s sake. Thankyou to Daniel for sending this to me, whoever Daniel is and wherever in the world they might be.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- FBB Growth: Would you like an Insta account which exists solely to post images of very, very muscular women, generated by AI, in what is DEFINITELY some sort of sex/fetish thing that I am quite happy to not entirely understand? No, you probably wouldn’t, but I have had to see this stuff and so I see no reason why I should suffer alone. Some of the proportions going on here are…troubling, ngl. OH MY GOD I HAVE JUST REALISED THAT THESE ANIMATE WHEN YOU CLICK INTO THEM DEAR FCUKING CHRIST ALIVE.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Is This Fascism?: We start this week’s longreads with Nick Trilling in the LRB writing an interesting essay about the extent to which what we’re currently witnessing in the US (and elsewhere) can, or should, be given the F-word designation, contextualised within a review of a book by Richard Seymour called ‘Disaster Nationalism’. Trilling takes us on a tour through the past century or so’s history of right-wing political movements, culminating in the current populist wave of the past decade or so but taking in a wide swathe of actors as part of its scope; I found some of his positions occasionally curious (his characterisation of Nina Power, someone who has literally gone mask-off Nazi, as having taken a ‘reactionary turn’ struck me as oddly-mannered, amongst other things), but I found the whole piece a fascinating piece of analysis and an interesting snapshot both of Where We Are and What That Looks Like Relative To Where We Have Been – and, perhaps most-usefully, a nice counterpoint to all the people on Bluesky shouting ‘THIS IS LITERALLY FASCISM’ about everything. BONUS FASHY ENQUIRY: this is a useful companion piece in The Journal of the History of Ideas looking at the concept of post-fascism, how it might be defined and how accurately it delineates our current era, and I don’t feel I’m spoiling it by posting the closing para, which hopefully shows you why it’s worth reading the whole thing: “Today’s post-fascism is a rhizomatic construct. It commands no organized paramilitaries, builds no welfare state for those of its subjects deemed ethnically desirable, and is more commercial than its forerunners. Present forms of post-fascism unite the most widely varying strains of racism and nationalism with a backwards-looking attitude based on the myth of national resurrection: the nation must lift itself out of the supposedly decadent swamp of diverse, multicultural “wokeness.” It remains unclear whether we are currently witnessing the early stages of a new dictatorship or whether it will take similar steps to those of historical fascism. Neither is impossible.”
- Who Funds Reform?: With the UK’s media classes having seemingly decided that Nige is on track for Number 10 – or at the very least seeming to wish to continue granting him the public profile that makes it more likely! – and the party this week announcing it was going to start accepting crypto donations in what is DEFINITELY NOT a way of attracting funding whilst simultaneously avoiding any accurate scrutiny of where said funding comes from, it seems timely to link to this piece of reporting by Politico which tries to dig into the party’s finances and backers and to determine who’s going to be expecting some return on their investment should the unthinkable happen and the ambulant future carcinoma manage to somehow manage to wangle the top job – you will be…unsurprised to learn that, for a party that spends so much of its time decrying the nefarious influence of THE ELITES on almost every aspect of modern life, its money seems largely to come from people who aren’t exactly everymen. Completely unrelated, by the way, but I was out at a thing last night and some bloke who I had never met before asked me in all apparent seriousness whether I was related to Farage, a question so staggeringly offensive that I had blocked it from my mind until just now. I DO NOT LOOK LIKE NIGEL FARAGE. Er, do I?
- Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI: Does it feel like everything is teetering precariously and might fall apart at any second? It does rather, doesn’t it? This is an interesting framework as to WHY THAT MIGHT BE and HOW IT IS HAPPENING, drawn up by Kyla Scanlon – she bases it on four fundamental steps which will follow on one from the other, specifically trust erosion, knowledge erosion, capacity erosion and algorithmic substitution, and as you read through her explanations of what exactly each stage entails you will (or at least you will if you’re anything like me) start to feel the cold, creeping sense of dreadful recognition as you realise that this is very much a map of the territory we’re currently exploring. We’re currently speedrunning through trust erosion AND knowledge erosion simultaneously, which feels…exciting(?!), and the current drive to inject AI into everything as a cost-saving measure without knowing whether or not it will actually work properly or even well enough feels like it’s accelerating us along the ‘capacity erosion’ path pretty effectively. I for one am THRILLED to see what algorithmic substitution (ie ‘algorithmic systems bypassing democratic institutions entirely’) feels like! This feels very much like a set of things we should be looking to guard against rather than embrace but, well, here we are!
- After The Upper Middle-Class: Sean Monahan with a typically-astute ‘where we are and where we are going’ snapshot, which I am including here mainly because he’s saying something that I have been Cassadra-ing about for 3+ years now, to whit ‘I think all this tech stuff is going to be long-term beneficial to us as a species if you take a 50+ year view of it, but the time up until that point is going to be fcuking BRUTAL in ways that noone has quite realised yet’ – to quote Sean, “Ask an AI optimist and they will tell you that artificial intelligence will herald a new age of abundance, that Optimus, the humanoid Tesla robot will do all the work, and our libertarian oligarchy will, entirely by accident, create the 2015 socialist meme: fully-automated luxury communism—or at a minimum that AI will be so exceptionally efficient, both government and the economy will deliver so much material wealth UBI will be a breeze to administer. Everything will be so cheap! I’m skeptical we get to fully-automated luxury communism before we get to upper middle class implosion. Optimus will not be ready in time to save our oat-milk-swilling, Oura-wing-wearing comrades on the coasts.” What do we do to tread water between a and b? WHY IS NOONE THINKING ABOUT THIS SERIOUSLY???
- The Good Internet: To launch this year’s Tiny Awards, Matt Klein and a bunch of other contributors pulled together this essay (with minimal additional input from Kris and I) all about some of the reasons why we do it, what we think the web can be, and some of the qualities and ideals we would like the Tiny Awards to celebrate and promote. I really like this – I mean, I would, obvs – not least because it feels like a really full, well-thought-out articulation of a bunch of different threads of thinking I have seen over the past few years, encompassing elements of the ‘cozy’, ‘small’, ‘dark’ or ‘garden’ web. In the main, though, it’s a significantly more polite and intellectually-rigorous way of explaining my fundamental thesis about the web in 2025, which can largely be encapsulated as ‘the web isn’t sh1t, you’re just a lazy, bovine fcuk who has become overused to sucking from an algorithmically-determined trough of slop and who, rather than complaining, put some fcuking effort into making your experience of digital life better’. There’s a reason Matt didn’t ask me to write this piece, turns out. This actually links rather well to this other short essay by Dan Sinker which I have seen shared a lot in the past couple of weeks, all about the need to CARE and be intentional online in 2025, which I very much agree with.
- The Prompt Behind The Prompt: A good writeup of Simon Willison’s investigation into the pre-prompt that sits behind the latest version of Anthropic’s Claude – this is particularly interesting if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of How Public-facing LLMs Work, but also as a useful reminder that all of these machines are tailored, tweaked and modeled by SOMEONE – there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ LLM, because both its training data and its weighting, and the pre-prompt instructions given to The Machine that determine its reactions and responses to user inputs, have been defined by a corporation or individual – HI ELON YOU CNUT – with their own agendas, biases, prejudices, etc. “Objectivity’s a lovely idea in theory, just that noone in the history of human thought has ever able to render it in practice” continues to be true even in the era of AI.
- Making Fake News With Veo3: Just to keep hammering home the point about how you really won’t be able to trust any video you see online AT ALL very soon, this is a useful ‘how we did it’ guide to making faked news reports using Google’s new text-to-image model; seriously, read this, not only because it’s a very good practical guide to making longer-form video from AI, with actual workflows and tooltips and everything, but also because it ought to scare the fcuk out of you. You know how the general level of media literacy worldwide seems to have fallen off a cliff in the post-social media era? OH DEAR. Oh, and while we’re doing AI video here’s a little WSJ article in which they showcase their attempts to make TV-quality content using text-to-video models and, er, oh dear, advertmakers! Seriously, if you make low-effort TV spots you don’t have a career in ~3y. Sorry.
- HollyAIwood: Continuing with the AI video theme, this piece explores the uneasy sense in Hollywood that this stuff is getting good enough now to actually start being deployed in earnest – again, it’s hard not to see how the tech doesn’t end up forming part of the production process sooner rather than later when stacked against the…challenging economics of making films in 2025. I thought this paragraph was interesting and illustrative: “This spring, Darren Aronofsky announced a partnership with Google’s DeepMind. James Cameron teamed up with Stability AI, one of the tech companies making inroads in Hollywood. “In the New Year, many people in the studios woke up and said, ‘Okay, in 2025 we need to make a difference,’” said Prem Akkaraju, the CEO of Stability AI. “Because production is down, profitability is down, attendance at theaters is down. It’s harder to make a movie today than it ever has been.” Cameron put it more bluntly on a tech podcast recently: If audiences want more blockbusters, he said, “we’ve got to figure out how to cut the cost of that in half.” Erik Weaver, a producer and technologist who regularly talks with studios on how to use AI, had observed a “radical shift” over the past few months. A few weeks ago, in a meeting with a major studio, an executive told him that “almost every single one of our productions is coming to us and saying, ‘How can I use AI to get back on budget?’” Weaver added, “These filmmakers need $30 million to make their movie and they have about $15 million. They only have so much money, and they’re getting desperate.””
- AI Is A New Storytelling Medium: What’s been interesting about the past couple of years is the way in which image and video generation has improved so significantly while the gains in quality in text-generation have been…less seismic, and as a result it’s easier to feel positive about the future for human-generated words than it is for human-generated images (I use the word ‘positively’ advisedly, obvs – the direction of travel is unidirectional and BAD in all cases, to be clear). Still, while I think we’re a way away from AI-generated scripts being anything other than utter dogsh1t (remind me of this in a year, please), I rather enjoyed this piece which looks at some of the ways in which The Machine can usefully be used to develop ideas and themes and build worlds and generally just form part of the creative toolkit available to writers. This is by scifi author Eliot Peper, who’s been involved in worldbuilding for AI tamagotchi toy-thing Tolans (as seen in Curios 10 months ago!) and who here talks through some of the ways in which he used The Machine to help him flesh out the backstory and mythos behind these imaginary creatures. This is really useful for any of you doing creative work with words, imho, and has the rare distinction of being Actually Practically Helpful rather than just loosely discursive.
- Novels On Substack: Technically ‘is the next great American novel going to be published on Substack?’, but that felt too much like it was begging Betteridge’s Law to make it the main title. This is a look at some of the writers attempting to REINVENT THE NOVEL via the medium of the newsletter, which obviously isn’t any sort of meaningful reinvention at all (authors have been publishing novel-length works episodically (if not in epistolary fashion) for centuries, after all) but which did briefly make me think about the ways in which the newsletter format might be leveraged in interesting ways as part of the writing process and indeed as part of the structural fabric of a work. I found this New Yorker piece quite amusingly-sniffy, but not hugely-illuminating – do any of you know of anyone doing anything formally-interesting with newsletters? The WILD EXPERIMENTAL GENIUS of Curios excepted, of course. BONUS SUBSTACK-RELATED ARTICLE: on why it’s quite important not to let Substack become a generic for the entire newsletter ecosystem, and on the dangers of letting single-platform dominance define an entire niche. I felt this very strongly while I was in the US – someone very kindly asked me if I ‘had a Substack’ and I unfortunately possibly got a *bit* ranty about the fact that other platforms are available and Substack is actually quite sh1t on a number of levels and, basically, this is why I don’t get invited to parties (or certainly not more than once).
- Kids’ Wild Summer: On the ‘growing trend’ amongst middle-to-upper-middle-class parents advocating OLD SCHOOL summer entertainments for kids, all outdoors and screen-free, which I am including mainly because it reminded me of how exactly 20 years ago the PR agency I was working for at the time, which inexplicably had Amazon as a client despite us being literally 15 children on drugs in an office in Camden, made The Dangerous Book for Boys THE must-have book of the Summer for middle-class, bien pensant parents eager to save their darlings from THE EVIL TENDRILS OF THE PLAYSTATION – we did this based on spotting a sales uplift spike and then literally writing a press release that made up a bunch of trend stuff about how it was a rebellion against the tyranny of screens, which goes to show that a) man we have been bleating on about this shit for ages and have done the square root of fcuk all to address the root issues; b) there really is nothing new under the sun and all trends are cyclical;and c) PR is a ridiculous job that largely involves making things up, and I continue to be amazed at how easy it is to get papers to write stuff based on, well, nothing at all.
- The Streamers’ University Experience: The short-lived publicity stunt – what was it publicising? NO IDEA! – that was Kai Cenat’s streamers university may have finished, but it has bequeathed us this article which describes the, er, unique atmosphere cultivated within the august institute over the course of the four-day term, and which contains a line which I have not been able to get out of my head since I read it four days ago – “The whole floor smelled like wild fumes, mysterious funk” – and which now I reread it I think might be some sort of powerful, ancient phrase of power. If someone doesn’t pen a short novella titled “Wild Fumes, Mysterious Funk” I am going to be disappointed at the world, basically. As for the meat of the piece, it makes the whole experience sound not unlike the general Kai Cenat vibe – stressful, exhausting, loud and dumb. Apparently his next big ticket projects are set to be Total Drama Island and a hunger games-type show, and, honestly, we’re about 4-5 years away from this stuff having to involve actual death or dismemberment to up the stakes, aren’t we?
- The Grand Encyclopaedia of Eponymous Laws: This feels like a near-vital guide to existing in 2025 – per the authorial description, “I’ve long been fascinated by eponymous “laws”—those pithy, often sarcastic observations or rules of thumb that capture some universal truth of human experience. Murphy’s Law is probably the most well-known example (Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”). There are many lists of these laws online, but they are all deficient in one way or another (e.g. woefully lacking in comprehensiveness or including various scientific/technical laws which are not really in the same spirit as the more observational variety). What follows is, as far as I can tell, the most complete list of eponymous laws ever compiled by anyone ever (193 total).” This runs from Badger’s Law (“Any website with the word ‘Truth’ in the URL has none in the posted content”) to Zymurgy’s Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics (“Once you open up a can of worms, the only way to get it back in is to use a bigger can”), and is practically-perfect in every way.
- A Week At The Bin Store: The titular ‘bin store’ is a shop in West Philadelphia which sells tat – just tat, nothing but tat, sourced from the returned stock of other retailers and sold via a pricing model which sees cost-per-item fall over the week from a high of $10 to a low of $1. ALL OF MODERN CAPITALIST LIFE IS HERE – or at least the bits of it that are, in the main, made of plastic and shipped from China, and, honestly, this is one of the most incredible snapshots of Where We Are As A Species In 2025 (And Why We Are Fucked). I read something a few years ago about how so much of modern shopping felt like paying money so you could take care of something for a few years before it found its final home in landfill – this is the absolute ur-expression of that idea. It’s quite hard not to feel a sense of plastics-related despair by the time you finish reading this, just to warn you, or the general vibe that we probably deserve everything we’re going to get. Also, this type of thing is 100% coming to somewhere near YOU soon. “A friend is shopping for a mermaid-themed bachelorette party, and we find plenty: That previously mentioned garland of penises is still here (two, actually), as well as a sheet of mermaid stickers and a curly straw that spells “BRIDE.” The problem is that $6 is too expensive for a straw, especially a straw that I know has been here for three weeks, at least. This is one effect of the bin store: There’s plenty of legitimately good stuff, at good prices, but that usually gets snapped up in the first few days. Anything that remains through the whole pricing cycle and back again is revealed to be worth nothing at all. My friend, digging for penis straws, says maybe it’s good to see. We have to confront this stuff. This is the cost of our collective Amazon addiction. There are times when the bin store does feel like an art installation, a message, or a warning. Wander through it for a few days and you will start to feel like you are in a room in a haunted house, one where the corporeal forms of the world economy’s least-wanted products are trapped, unable to move on.”
- I Live In The Future: This piece will probably only make sense to you if you’re American, or have visited the US recently, but I can’t tell you how hard it resonated with me after a week in a very nice part of California: on Irvine, a well-to-do suburb of Los Angeles. “Irvine is completely its own thing: its ‘villages’ only refer to other ‘villages’ in Irvine. Its neighborhoods are compromises between an urban planner and a real estate speculator. Its houses are not well built or well designed, but they are so utterly comfortable. Irvine is completely and utterly anonymous, prosperous, rich, decentered. It is the inhuman future of a frictionless Internet made flesh. It is Artificial Intelligence embodied. It has crunched all domestic architectural styles of 20th century America and remade them in the most profitable, most efficient, least offensive style possible. It is a city designed for the future of the end of history: even if history passes it by, it will continue to shine like a beacon indicating what the United States could be if it could be designed for a happy population of philistine millionaires, serviced by low wage workers. Every wealthy neighborhood in America just wants to be managed by the Irvine Company. Every bohemian neighborhood wants to refute it. Irvine is more than a city: it is anti-humanist, anti-liberal and so low key futuristic you don’t even notice its accelerationist reality.”
- Progress Unraveled: Another wonderful essay by Spencer at Scope of Work, ostensibly about a small engineering/construction problem, but, as ever with his writing, about far more. This starts being about a piece of twine and how it’s made and how it works, and quickly becomes a brilliant and wide-ranging essay about science and learning and human progress and information and how it gets transmitted and I promise you that this will make you think in more interesting ways than almost anything else in here this week.
- The Deadliest Estate in Britain: A really beautifully-written piece in The Londoner about the residents on the Brandon Estate just down the road from me, a place characterised by decades of headlines painting it as a lawless hotbed of crime but where the reality for residents is, as you would expect, slightly more nuanced than that. This is a lovely collection of personal stories and local history by Miles Ellingham (whose work I keep featuring in here, I have noticed) – the theme that keeps emerging here is the love and care of the people who work to create community amongst residents and provide the sort of support and infrastructure that often isn’t readily available to people nearer the bottom of the urban food chain than the top.
- The Dark Web DMT Kingpin: I do love me a big, mad story about someone going full Walter White (but, you know, less evil), and this is a GREAT example of the genre – detailed, VERY funny and with a central character who is a wonderful mix of charismatic, silly and REMARKABLY fortunate. Honestly, this is a GREAT crime caper which you can read without feeling too guilty because, well, it’s only DMT and I don’t think anyone died, probably. Be warned, though, that there are large sections of this piece that make ‘being a very large-scale dealer’ sound, well, quite fun, from a lifestyle point of view at least.
- Strip Mall: Finally this week, another story cut together from anonymous online reviews of various businesses in a strip mall in Massachusetts, by Leigh Alexander. This really shouldn’t work quite as well as it does, but there is a really strong sinister quality to this that I absolutely loved and which I think you might too.
By Sophie Buhai
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
