HI EVERYONE HELLO!
Ok, so this week I am eschewing any sort of pithy commentary on THIS FCUKING WORLD WE LIVE IN in favour of an update about everyone’s (ok, my) favourite annual awards – THE TINY AWARDS!
(any of you who DON’T CARE about lovely, non-commercial websites can obviously skip this bit and get straight to the links, but I might respectfully ask what the fcuk you are doing here in that case because, well, ‘lovely, non-commercial websites’ are very much the Web Curios *vibe*) (other *vibes* include ‘despair’, ‘pain’, ‘fear’ and ‘confusion’, with an occasional frisson of ‘moderate arousal’).
THE TINY AWARDS 2025 SHORTLIST HAS BEEN DECIDED! VOTING IS OPEN!
After going through literally HUNDREDS (not joking) of submitted websites, our esteemed judges have cast their votes and we have whittled the list down to eleven beautiful, silly, frivolous, heartbreaking, funny web projects – you can see the full list at the link above, so take a moment to explore them and see which you like best. Some have been featured in Curios over the past year, some will be new to you, but all of them are in their own way an example of what we want the Awards to celebrate – people just making stuff on the web, because they want to and because they think it’s fun and because they think you might agree.
This is the third year we’ve done this now and I think this year’s shortlist is the best yet – there really is SUCH a lovely range of projects and vibes on display, and if you can’t find at least one site that you slightly fall in love with then, well, I might argue that you’re a bit dead inside.
Anyway, do take the time to click the link, explore the sites, maybe vote, and TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Thanks to all the people who’ve shared and covered this already – and special thanks to whichever maverick at the Financial Times put is in Alphaville this week, not something we were expecting tbh but it was a very pleasant surprise – and if you fancy putting it in your blog or newsletter or reel or slack or Discord or scrawling the url on a local wall, or in the toilets of your local pub, then, well, I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you should click the link and check out the nominations RIGHT THIS SECOND.
WHY NOT KICK THIS WEEK’S LINKS OFF WITH SOME BEATS AND BLEEPS MIXED BY FORMER EDITOR PAUL?
THE SECTION WHICH HAS YET TO READ THIS BUT IS INCLUDING THE LINK AS A BONUS LONGREAD BECAUSE I PROMISE THE OPENER IS A NEAR-UNBEATABLE BIT OF PROSE AND I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THE REST OF THE PIECE DOESN’T GO EQUALLY HARD, PT.1:
- The Universal Turing Machine: Do you like words? Do you like reading? Erm, not sure what to tell you if the answer to either of those questions is ‘no’ – you’re unlikely to enjoy what’s next very much, though. BUT! If the answer is instead ‘yes, Matt, yes I do, I love them immoderately and could quite honestly spend the rest of my days consuming writings and stories while the world burns around me!’ then WOW are you going to like this first link. The Universal Turing Machine is a project by Richard Beard, which is basically a personal memoir / experimental novella-type thing (yes, ‘experimental novella-type thing’ – what do you mean ‘what the fcuk does that mean?’), which basically presents a series of 1000-word sketches or vignettes from each year of his life to date – the wrinkle here is that the interface doesn’t allow you to read them chronologically, instead forcing you to jump through his life in the manner of a knight around a chessboard, meaning you hop from 1996 to 2013 to 2003 like some sort of vaguely-schizophrenic time traveller, finding yourself in Beard’s adolescence one second, middle age the next, in a manner that reminded me quite a lot of storied ‘internet novel’ 253, which I have mentioned in here loads over the years and which you really should check out if you’re not already familiar with it. What I love about this is not just the memoir itself – which, based on the half-dozen or so bits I’ve read so far, is worth a look regardless of the presentational conceit – but also the wider idea behind it; next month, Beard is going to offer anyone who wants to participate the opportunity to submit their own writings in a similar style to the project, expanding it and making it a collaborative work of collective autobiography, which, well, is just fcuking great. I really do adore this – a literary experiment and a collective artwork all in one.
- The HTML Maze: What if there was a maze! And it was on the internet! And it worked a little bit like an old Infocom text adventure in that there weren’t any graphics or anything but you could leave messages on the ‘walls’ of said ‘maze’ to basically make it a sort of infinite collaborative artwork that anyone could navigate through, exploring what previous visitors have seen fit to scrawl on the virtual surfaces! This is a theoretically-fun idea – you can not only leave textual messages, but anyone navigating any of the ‘rooms’ here can also scrawl whatever they like on the walls using a (very) rudimentary paint-style interface, meaning that in theory this is a neverending carousel of other people’s graffiti…in practice, though, what this sadly seems to entail is a LOT of spectacularly-vile antisemitism which I am going to put down to edgelord children based on something of the spelling and grammar choices. A little bit of moderation goes a long way with this sort of thing, turns out. Still, if you want to spend 15 minutes or so graffiting crudely-drawn penises on the walls of a virtual labyrinth for the potential future amusement of a handful of internet weirdos and 11 year olds then this is very much the website for YOU.
- Midjourney TV: Midjourney’s not quite the unassailable frontrunner when it comes to image generation that it was – the Chinese models released over the past few months are increasingly-amazing, for example – but it still makes pretty pictures (with an unmistakable AI sheen) and the recent launch of its ‘static to video’ model has seen loads of people animating their creations to occasionally-interesting effect; now the platform’s launched this site which presents you with a seemingly-neverending stream of short video clips made on the platform so that you can see what everyone else is making; obviously there’s some pre-selection going on here as you’re not being shown any massive, weird fcukups, but as a general temperature check on what’s possible and what the collective Midjourney ID is crafting with the tech it’s reasonably-interesting – as ever with these things there’s something sort-of hypnotic about the neverending procession of clips and the tiny window it gives into people’s imaginations and what they ask for when given access to a machine that can imagine anything they tell it to – actually, on reflection, I would love to have a feed like this which could be filtered by demographic information so I could compare what, say, people in their 50s were making vs people in their 30s, say, or people in the UK vs people in Korea. I would also, obviously, like to see an uncurated version with all of the mess and the horror, but I can equally understand that that might prove…somewhat depressing after a few minutes. Anyway, this is kind of dizzying – DON’T THINK OF THE ENERGY AND WATER COSTS, WHATEVER YOU DO!!!
- The Veodyssey: Have you ever thought to yourself ‘you know what, I’ve always wanted to engage with the Homeric epic about Odysseus’ long, winding, tortuous journey home after the end of the Trojan war, but I’ve always been put off by the fact that none of the canonical adaptations of the text have, to date, involved the story being recounted by a badger dressed up like a Greek warrior’? WELL WELL WELL IT IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! Yes, for those of you who need your historical epics sprinkled with a surprising dash of mustelid flair, this little project from Google will tick all of your boxes – you’re basically presented with a prompt asking you which bit of Odysseus’ journey you want to hear about (or you can select from various options – basically there’s only a finite number of pre-rendered clips to choose from, it’s not making these on the fly for obvious quality control reasons), and are then presented with a short animation in which Odysseus-as-badger (no idea why he’s a badger – er, any classicists out there want to explain this to me) talks to you about, say, Polyphemus, or the sirens, or what it feels like to come home and find a bunch of blokes hanging out in your kitchen and making eyes at your wife, all animated and voiced by Veo3. Basically this is just a little showcase for its text-to-video model, but it’s sort-of cute (if also quite baffing) seeing Odysseus’ story represented by stripey mammals. This is via the latest edition of Lynn’s excellent AI-and-creativity-focused roundup TITAA, which I continue to recommend without hesitation.
- The AI MP: Mark Seward is the member of parliament representing the constituency of Leeds South West and Morley. Mark Seward at some point in the past year was obviously pitched by a tech company based in his constituency that had some FANCY AI TECH that they were willing to offer him for free in exchange for a bit of free publicity. Mark Seward, it’s reasonable to assume, probably wishes he hadn’t bothered now, given the waves of not-entirely-unpredictable derision that greeted the rollout of his AI-ENABLED DIGITAL SELF this week – but, well, suck it up Mark! So you might have seen people pointing and laughing at this this week – but what exactly is the deal with THE WORLD’S FIRST EVER AI MP??? I think the first thing to bear in mind is that all this technically is is an inbox and a FAQ – the only thing it’s intended to do (and the website is very clear about this, though that didn’t stop 90% of the people on Bluesky wilfully misinterpreting the whole thing, as is their wont because AI BAD!!!111eleventy) is basically act as a very simple initial triaging system for inbound constituents’ messages – the ‘AI’ bit is literally just a chatbot designed to direct people to answers to simple questions and to then effectively take down their questions which then get filtered through to the actual constituency office staff via what is, basically, transcription. At heart, there’s nothing here that couldn’t be achieved with webpage and an inbox/answerphone service – EXCEPT THERE’S AI INVOLVED! Does there need to be AI involved? NO! Does the AI make the system work better than it would otherwise? I AM GOING TO BET THAT IT DOESN’T!!! And yet, inevitably, here we are. This is, in many respects, a pretty-perfect analogue for the wider impact of this tech on the world and our experience of it – unnecessary, unwanted, by no means an improvement, but here whether we want it or not.
- Greg The Guy: I am slightly annoyed by this – it’s a good, simple, silly little gag that with about 3% more effort could have been quite a clever site proposition, but which instead just feels a bit shonky, which makes me feel sort-of ok about suggesting that any of you working in advermarketingpr could TOTALLY steal this for a campaign for the right client. Greg The Guy is a website which lets you buy credits for ACTUAL MONEY to then spend on getting Greg, the titular Guy, to do things for you, much like you would an LLM but, well, human. You can either buy text credits to get written responses from Greg, or image credits for pictures – sadly I am not able to tell you what the outputs are like because, well, while I admire the idea and the general principle at play here, I am also not sending money to an actual stranger in exchange for them, I don’t know, drawing me a photo of a duck of questionable quality. If any of you have a desperate desire to try this out, though, do let me know if Greg delivers.
- Google From Anywhere: Ooh, this might be useful to some of you, and it’s certainly potentially interesting – Impersonal (for that is what this service is called) lets you basically see what it’s like to Google stuff from different countries – type in your search, tell it where you want to search from and BOOM!, you can suddenly see what it’s like to search for ‘singles in my area’ from, say, Oman.
- Feel: Thanks to Josh Tucker, who emailed me about this EXCELLENT app which I imagine will appeal to all of you who’ve ever, er, enjoyed having emotions. Do YOU like ‘feeling things’? Would you like to have more granular control over what you feel, when? Do you want to basically be able to treat your emotional state as some sort of internal deliveroo, ordering FEELINGS to be delivered to your soul like so many hungover McDonald’s breakfasts? GREAT! “Revolutionizing emotional well-being through innovative digital experiences,” burbles the copy, meaninglessly, “Feel is a fusion of art, science, and technology coming together to create a unique experience designed to improve your well-being.” How does it do this? I mean, I am fcuked if I know, and they don’t really seem to have much of an idea either – “Created by a team of artists, developers, and experts in psychology and neuroscience, we aim to harness the power of multi-sensory art and cutting-edge science to reshape our relationship with technology and foster a deeper understanding of our emotional world and capabilities.” Anyone? “Navigate your emotions and develop your emotional well-being. Curate your mood throughout your day by accessing and experiencing the feelings you want at the push of a button. Received personalized reflections, mood-shifting audiovisual content, daily rituals, and guided real-world experiences for emotional reinforcement and regulation.” Hm, ok, that’s maybe *slightly* more tangible…OH HANG ON THERE’S A MOOD RING!!!! It’s a SMART mood ring! It lets you SEE YOUR EMOTIONS! This is astonishing, really – someone’s basically reinvented those things that all the girls at school were really into around age 11, but has made it an app and added a layer of SCIENCE-WOO, and, honestly, I am sort of here for it because if you’re going to believe some utterly-moronic bullsh1t then you might as well believe the version that comes with a nice piece of colour-shifting jewellery.
- The Bluesky Dictionary: Tracking the language usage of 38million centre-left scolds on the internet! This is a fun little project built by Avi Bagla which monitors the firehose of posts on Bluesky and tracks them against an English-language dictionary to see how long it takes the platform’s infinite monkeys to work their way through the whole of the linguistic corpus; there are lots of really nice touches here, from the way you can see the latest words to have been used to the fact it pulls in posts to give you a contextual reading of usage, and, generally, this is just PLEASING WHOLESOME WORD FUN. Should you fancy contributing, by the way, at the time of writing we’re still waiting for someone to use ‘eudemonics’ – GO!
- Kilopx: Oh I rather love this – Ben Wilson has built a beautiful wooden pixel display which sits in his office; anyone can use this website to craft a small pixel drawing to possibly appear in real life on said display, based on votes from other visitors to the site. “it’s a physical display sitting in my office in Wisconsin, USA. Each pixel is a cube of wood, painted on two sides, that rotates to be on or off. There are 40 columns and 25 rows, for a total of 1000 pixels – thus the name, kilopixel. The pixels are turned by a CNC-controlled gantry one at a time. Yes, the speed is intentional. The machine really has to work for the pixels! I can’t really explain why this is pleasing to me, but it is, so I’ve done it.” This is SO nicely-done, and would be a genuinely cool bit of public art if done at scale, I think – OOH, now I come to think of it you could do a really nice version of this with a big airport-style matrix display which anyone could theoretically write on, too. Can someone make more large, collaborative, internet-enabled public artworks, please? WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME?
- Celebrateally: Do you have some sort of significant life event coming up? Maybe a celebration or familial gathering which is going to require some sort of personal, heartfelt expression of meaning that demonstrates the deep connection that you feel to the moment and the people in attendance? Can you not really be fcuked to think of anything to say? GREAT! Celebrateally is a service that exists specifically to provide the lazy, the stupid, the illiterate or the emotionally-stunted with KIND AND CARING WORDS to accompany any event you might think of, all powered by The Machine. Got a birthday coming up that you need to make a speech at? Got a Best Man’s speech to attempt? Got, er, a eulogy to deliver? LET THE AI FIND THE WORDS FOR YOU!!! It’s unclear whether this is aimed at individuals or it’s more of an enterprise proposition, for party planners or funeral directors who can’t quite be fcuked with the minutiae anymore – either way, I can only imagine the sort of deep, insightful poetry you’ll get from a word-mincing platform trained on an infinite quantity of Reddit. You can read a bit about some of the people using the platform in this deeply-miserable Washington Post article – and, er, if YOU have some sort of significant moment coming up that you need some words for, can I offer you the opportunity to buy some REAL, ARTISANAL ones from me? Just think, your wedding speech could sound JUST like Curios!
- Infinite Wiki: Ooh, this is fun – basically this is an infinite website, each ‘entry’ being itself infinitely-clickable to create a sort of recursive linguistic maze. Which, I know, will make NO SENSE to you, but I promise that if you just click the link and explore you will get the measure of it. Honestly, this pleasingly-clever, and a nice, playful use of AI to create something playful and weirdly-compelling – the little illustrations at the top of each entry are also a really nice touch, and are occasionally really quite smart to boot.
- Books By People: A nice idea which (and I feel bad saying this, sorry) I don’t think is ever going to take off, Books By People is basically trying to set itself up as a kitemark for ‘AUTHENTIC WORDS BY REAL PEOPLE’ – the idea is that it’s a standard which the publishing industry could adopt to ‘prove’ that ‘no AI was involved in the production of this text’; all well and good, but it’s basically just an honour system as there’s no meaningful way of being able to determine LLM-derived texts in 2025, and, without some sort of platform-agnostic watermarking tech suddenly being introduced by all the major platforms, this isn’t going to change or get better. Still, if you’re an author or publisher who wants the right to have an ‘ARTISANAL PROSE’ sticker on your book then, well, here.
- Hot Page: In the spirit of ‘everyone should make a website about whatever they like best!’, Hot Page is a cool-looking tool to let people who can’t code for sh1t create their own personal webprojects in a way that looks less godawful than currently afforded by template site platforms like Wix, Squarespace and the rest – the gimmick here is that the whole thing is VERY modular and as such loads more flexible, and allows for more interesting and creative design choices than you might ordinarily get from other providers in the space. It’s a paid-for service – hosting costs money, after all – but you can make small, simple sites for free should you want to have a play and see what’s possible with the kit; this is just a really nice tool, I think.
- Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025: Or, specifically, the shortlisted pictures – the winner gets selected in September iirc. Anyway, should you not be able to get to Greenwich to see the physical exhibition, here are some LOVELY PICTURES OF THE DIZZYING MAJESTY OF THE COSMOS for you to gawp at as you contemplate your own ephemeral transience in the face of mind-flaying galactic vastness. I got a very weird sense looking at a few of these that…they looked quite AI, which, honestly, is a really fcuking depressing realisation that I am not going to dwell on because it’s too miserable for words.
THE SECTION WHICH HAS YET TO READ THIS BUT IS INCLUDING THE LINK AS A BONUS LONGREAD BECAUSE I PROMISE THE OPENER IS A NEAR-UNBEATABLE BIT OF PROSE AND I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THE REST OF THE PIECE DOESN’T GO EQUALLY HARD, PT.2:
- The ADHD Experience: It’s been another week in which two separate people have given me the ‘yeah, but you’re…well, you’re obviously neurodivergent in some way, aren’t you?’ line – I have no idea WHAT you are talking about, what is it about my obsessional approach to linkgathering and compulsive weekly wordprolapse that gives you the impression I might have certain…tendencies? Speaking of neurodivergence – SEAMLESS! – this site is apparently designed to give normies a vague sense of the general experience of having ADHD, with its design aiming to communicate some of the sensory overwhelm occasionally felt by people with the condition; can someone with an actual diagnosis (a real one, please, not your vibes-based ‘sometimes I have disordered thoughts, GIVE ME THE MEDICAL SPEED NOW!’ imaginings) try this out and let me know if it’s any cop? Because to my untrained eye it just looks quite a lot like a certain type of webdesign that was in vogue 2-3 years aho.
- Taco Cents: Ok, this is going to be of literally no use to any of you EXCEPT those in North America and who are masochistic enough to actually want to eat Taco Bell – that said, should any of you happen to fit these very specific criteria then a) take better care of yourselves, Taco Bell is literally NOT FOOD and, honestly, I worry for your gut health; and b) GREAT, WELCOME TO A WORLD OF BARGAINS! This is a really smart little website that basically ‘hacks’ the restaurant’s menu for you – tell it where you are and what restaurant you are going to order from, tell it what you’re planning on ordering, and the site will immediately tell you EXACTLY how to order to get your food for the lowest possible price – basically doing all the tedious business of working out whether you can shave $0.19c off the price of a ‘Superquesadillacrunchbastard’ (I don’t, you may be realising, know anything about what Taco Bell’s menu items are called because, to reiterate, it is not food and I have some standards) by ordering all the constituent ingredients separately and then assembling the sad little ‘meal’ yourself while you cry gently at what your life has become.
- Impossible Slit Scan Shader: No, I don’t really understand what that phrase means either, but, well, it’s what the website says it is and who am I to argue. Basically this is a totally-hypnotic screensaver-type thing which presents all these blocks moving in digital space – play with the sliders to affect the movement parameters, drop a microdot (Christ, saying ‘microdot’ in 2025 ages me like saying ‘Quaalude’ in the 90s) and lose 9 hours of your life to the SPECIAL SHAPES AND PATTERNS.
- No Days Off: Do you like running? Do you like quantifying your life? The answer to both those questions might well be ‘yes’, but I am willing to bet that you don’t like either of those things as much as Adrian Friggeri does, a man who has gone on a Proper Run EVERY SINGLE FCUKING DAY WITHOUT A BREAK FOR TEN FCUKING YEARS (ok, he might be lying, but I get the very strong impression that Adrian, whoever he is, is Not A Man Who Lies About Running) and who has collected ALL OF THE DATA about said runs which he’s presenting on this very nicely-designed, simple website where you can see all sorts of information about the mad fcuker’s obsession with putting one foot in front of the other at pace (NB – I don’t know Adrian, so on the offchance that he finds this I just want to point out that I mean ‘mad fcuker’ with all the possible affection in the world and I don’t mean to imply that there’s ACTUALLY anything, you know, mentally odd about going running every day and tracking it to this degree; certainly no more than spending 10+ years writing millions of words about stuff on the internet, anyway). This is a really rather lovely personal project and I get the feeling that there will be a few middle-aged running dads amongst you who will feel a genuine sense of jealousy at this and who might feel compelled to maybe make your own version.
- Rex’s Dino Store: Can any of you who live in New York possibly give me some background as to why there appears to be a pop-up ‘shop’ in one of the city’s Metro stations which is staffed by a large, papier-mache T-Rex called, apparently, ‘Rex’? Anyway, regardless of the why, this is a collection of pictures of Rex is his natural habitat and they make me very, very happy, for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
- Zeos: Do you spend a lot of time thinking of integrated, multi-platform logistics solutions for the fashion industry? WELL STOP IT, IT’S WEIRD. Still, presuming that you’re like me and that those words basically don’t mean ANYTHING to you, you might find this delightful little AR web experience thingy of interest (you won’t, to be clear, but it *is* very cute). Zeos is a company that provides, er, all sorts of logistics equipment to help fashion companies basically manage their processes for manufacture, distribution and the like – the main company website reads ‘MAXIMUM BUSINESS’ which I just found *very* funny for reasons I can’t adequately explain right now – and the main link here is a mobile-only bit of webwork which, for reasons known only to the people who commissioned the project, lets you visualise all sorts of logistical equipment, rendered in vaguely-cutesy cartoonish 3d models complete with little cutesy cartoon people, in actual physical space via THE MAGIC OF AR! It’s still slightly amazing to me that we’ve had AR tech for over a decade now and we still haven’t got the faintest fcujing idea of what to do with it – but, given the lack of a compelling use-case, I suppose ‘make a small factory floor appear in your kitchen’ is as good a usecase as any. This really is very cute, honestly, in the classic ‘a tiny world which you can observe like some sort of godlike colossus’ way, but I would LOVE to know exactly how many people make large-scale purchasing decisions about logistical solutions based on playing around with some AR renders of a conveyorbelt.
- Ambient Sleeping Pill: RELAXING INTERNET RADIO! Also, a VERY longrunning personal project by one Andrew J Klimek, who’s been doing this for 12 years which feels like something that deserves a hearty congratulations or maybe a plaque: “From 2005 to 2008, I had a radio show in college on Rutgers’ radio WRSU. It was during this time that I got more into ambient music. After graduating, I always had it in the back of my mind to research internet radio, so I could keep sharing obscure music with the world. It wasn’t until January 2013 that I finally launched Ambient Sleeping Pill. It was really just a test. I had a large playlist by that name in my personal iTunes library, so I just threw it on a server and kept the name…We simply select music that creates a pleasant and calm environment for sleep or work… ideal music for blocking out other noises and allowing you to clear your mind… less distracting than silence, but not so interesting that you focus on the music instead of falling asleep.” This really is VERY ambient and so your mileage will vary depending on exactly how background you like your background music, but for anyone who finds, I don’t know, Brian Eno a good musical time, this will be pleasing in the extreme.
- Abode: I don’t for a second imagine any of you have the time or inclination to start using ANOTHER fcuking messaging app, but on the unlikely offchance that you’re DESPERATE to spend a few fruitless days persuading your already-fragmented and multiplatform friendship circle to all download a NEW APP and start using that to talk and organise and share and oh god I am tired just typing this stuff… Anyway, Abode is actually a pretty cool-looking platform which will never take off because WHO CAN BE FCUKED IN 2025 – the deal, though, is that it’s a chat-type platform whose ‘gimmick’ is that each of the chats you create within it is customisable to a pretty large degree via a system of widgets and plugins, so, for example, one of your chats might have some games in it for your friends who are into crosswords, say, while another might pull a stream of intensely-upsetting vore hentai from that Discord you all like so much…you get the idea (except, actually, I sort of hope you don’t know what the words in that second example mean). Ok, so you can’t *actually* do the ‘pull in images’ thing, but there are loads of different little tools and toys that you can build into your chats, which honestly seems like a really clever and potentially-useful feature; take a look, it looks…almost fun, maybe? Perhaps The Kids will adopt it, who knows.
- Easy Tomorrow: Would you like to spend a few minutes navigating a 3d METAVERSE created by, er, a Korean company that makes anti-hangover treatments? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! This is quite shiny and, as far as I can tell, UTTERLY pointless, and my main overriding emotion on exploring it is real sadness that they haven’t leaned in to the hangover thing more – this would be INFINITELY better if it was populated with people in various stages of post-boozing distress who you could ‘help’ via the medium of strategically-deployed sachets of ‘Better Tomorrow’ multivitamin slop.
- Ok Stays: This is basically ‘hotel search with an LLM layer on top’ and I am including the link not because I think it’s a particularly good or interesting service but because it neatly demonstrates why Tripadvisor and similar sites are going to find their lunch being eaten by The Machine sooner rather than later – the coming advent of AI search tools, whether the new Google functionality or browsers from OpenAI and the rest, is going to mean that ‘show me the best X in Y’ queries which currently live on intermediary sites are all going to get done through the LLM layer instead, neatly kneecapping traffic. Chalk these things up as another industry set to be ‘disrupted’, for better or worse.
- The London School of Furniture Making: So, into the eighth month of 2025, how are you feeling about your employment prospects? Is the miserable realisation of what’s likely to keep on happening to white collar employment starting to sink in for real? Can you feel the cold, bony fingers of obsolescence tightening on your shoulder and gently stroking your nape? Yeah, me too, it’s…unsettling, ngl. BUT! Web Curios is nothing if not a positive (ha!), forward-thinking (also ha!) publication, dedicated to presenting you not just with problems but with SOLUTIONS, and, as part of that dedication to ameliorating your existence, I present to you the solution to ALL our problems – yes, that’s right, we’re going to learn how to make CHAIRS. Or at least those of us who live in London and can find the time and the money to pay for instruction at the London School of Furniture Making are – the rest of you are just going to have to find some other lifeline to cling to. The School has just moved to new premises in Camden, so there has never been a better time to learn how to bevel a joint (I literally have no idea what this means, but I *think* it has something to do with woodworking). Of course, who the fcuk is going to be able to afford my artisanal, handcrafted pegging stool when everyone’s job’s been eaten by The Machine is its own question, but, well, let’s not worry about that just yet.
- Wanive: It’s been a while since we’ve had a good, old-fashioned ‘urgh, God, Matt, must you bring these miserable, tawdry corners of the web into the otherwise-wholesome Curios experience?’-type link – so say hello to Wanive! Wanive is a service designed to let ‘creators’ on OnlyFans or similar further monetise their genitalia by partnering with the company to make sex toys based on their junk; whether it be a fleshlight-style masturbatory sleeve (and you have no idea of the disgusted expression on my face as I type those words, honestly) or a dildo lovingly modeled on the ACTUAL PENILE SHAFT of, er, some camboy masturbator. This isn’t, per se, a new thing – after all, sex toys modeled on bongo stars have been around for years – but what made me ‘laugh’ (also, slightly, cry) about this was just how…well, how low-rent it is, and how basically it seems to be aimed squarely at the less-glamorous end of the ‘w4nking for pennies’ market (Jesus, ‘the less-glamorous end of the ‘w4nking for pennies’ market’ sounds like a really bleak place, on reflection) – I really want to encourage you to click the ‘products’ page to see the calibre of creator who’s so far signed-up to make latex versions of their mucus membranes available to fans; look, no bodyshaming here, but there’s at least one ‘model’ on that page who looks as though they only have 25% of the regulation number of limbs, to give you an idea. This is really, really quite bleak, but also bleakly funny.
- Whittle: A daily word game! This one’s fun and the mechanic is interesting and it is headscratchy enough to be really satisfying when you crack each day’s puzzle – basically you remove one letter at a time, ensuring that the remaining letters spell actual words, until they are all gone. Sounds simple, is deceptively-tricky at times.
- The Game Maker’s Toolkit Gamejam: SO MANY FUN LITTLE BROWSERGAMES! Seriously, there are SO many here made as part of the ongoing gamejam – the quantity’s honestly overwhelming, so I was grateful for this ongoing thread by Mike Cook collecting some of his favorite picks from the hundreds available. There’s LOADS of fun stuff in here, do check them out.
- Podvodsk:Our final game this week is this EXCELLENT – if really unpleasant to say out loud; seriously, try it, it’s like your mouth is full of sand and ballbearings – little game which is a bit like, er, a sort of reverse-Tetris? Except not, because there’s no time pressure and you can’t rotate the pieces and you’re actually building some sort of mad undersea city rather than trying to make blocks appear. But, well, it’s still a BIT like Tetris, sort of. Anyway, it’s really fun and strangely-soothing, and while it’s not particularly well-explained you will get the hang of it very quickly, I promise. ENJOY.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Upper Texture: Just an aesthetic. But WHAT an aesthetic it is.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Jennifer Latour: Jennifer Latour is an artist who makes work with flowers that looks oddly-geometric and like it’s been imagined by a machine, but, contrary to appearances, it hasn’t. I really like these – they are odd in an interesting and pleasing way.
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- Informational Oversupply: Ok, so technically this essay is titled ‘the catastrophe of knowledge work’, but I prefer my title – this is by Matt Pearce, and it basically makes the point that the coming horrorshow for the ‘knowledge economy’ is a dual result of oversupply and underconsumption; that as the cost of ‘creating’ drops to near-zero and the volume of material created increases exponentially, so does the possibility that it will all get read, or watched, or listened to, drop towards a vanishing point so close to zero as to make no odds, that all the words spat out by the LLMs in pursuit of ANALYSIS and INSIGHT and the holy grail of MOAR CONTENT will just accumulate as cruft to, in all likelihood, be ingested again by more machines seeking fresh training data, and and and…this isn’t anything wholly new, but it made me pause momentarily to think (to be clear, not positive thoughts, but, well, that’s not really a surprise at this point, is it?).
- The End of an Era in Tech: I’m old enough to remember the time 20-ish years ago when tech companies were all ballpits in the meeting room and pool tables and videogame corners; I will never forget the sense of mad excess I felt when interviewing at Twitter in San Francisco in 2012 when I realised that they literally DID have an in-house chef who cooked free food for the staff every day (it was not, of course, free – they were paying with their 17 hour workdays, but, well, I was youngish and naive and my head was turned by the prospect of a pancake station, what can I say?), or the weird time in London in the late-00s when several companies in ‘Silicon Roundabout’ (oh lol!) attempted to mimic the Silicon Valley aesthetic/vibe with this sort of playful office environment but which succeeded only in making it oddly-seedy in a very English way (I recall Mind Candy having a sort of…weird treehouse in their offices? Maybe a slide? Anyway, the whole thing just screamed ‘a really inappropriate-looking venue for post-office-party-fingering)…anyway, all that is GONE now because the tech companies no longer apparently feel the need to pander to their staff because, well, THE JOBS ARE GOING AND YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL TO HAVE ONE AT ALL. Per the piece, “…the shift in tech was compounded by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, which executives say has already made some jobs redundant. In January, Mr. Zuckerberg said he believed A.I. would replace some midlevel engineers this year. Mr. Musk went further, predicting last year that A.I. would eventually eliminate all jobs. “The tide has definitely turned against tech workers,” said Catherine Bracy, the founder and chief executive of TechEquity, a nonprofit that pushes for economic inclusion in the industry. “Companies have even more leverage to use against workers, and A.I. is supercharging that.”” This feels important, not least because it’s a trend likely to hit all workers at some point; your value to the company is not going to grow based on the increasing ability of The Machine to do what you do for a fraction of the cost. Say goodbye to the drinks trolley (do people still do the drinks trolley? I bet they don’t, do they? WHERE HAS THE JOY GONE????).
- Generation Klarna: In developments that should surprise exactly no people reading this, it turns out that Klarna has basically helped get a whole new generation hooked on credit and debt! This is an anecdote-packed piece from The Face about kids in the UK who are living life on tick, BNPLing everything from festival tickets to breakfast because, well, they can, and because aggressively-VC-funded businesses have spent a lot of cash on positioning ‘owing money to a corporation that is charging you a violent amount of interest on said money’ as not, in fact, being the same as ‘being in debt’. On the one hand it’s sort-of been a masterclass in brand positioning, so, er, well done! On the other, it feels like a staggering retrograde step that we’ve basically gone back 20 years in terms of young people’s attitudes to money and indebtedness. Also, can I just point out what an all-time bummer this paragraph is, please: “Obviously, unnecessary spending doesn’t help. Sadie and Ellie both know they shouldn’t be splurging money they don’t have on luxuries. But, as has been the case since time immemorial, a treat is a welcome distraction from their troubling finances. As a friend once put it, “people can’t afford to pay rent so they buy a Labubu just to feel something”.”
- GPT5: So the new OpenAI model dropped yesterday – or it did for some people, I’ve not got access yet so can’t give you the HOT WEB CURIOS PERSPECTIVE, which I imagine you’re DEVASTATED about. Still, Curios favourite Ethan Mollick has been given early access by OpenAI and has spent the week playing around with it – the main link is to his assessment of its capabilities and how it differs from previous iterations of the model, and the tl;dr here is basically ‘it’s an incremental improvement and it’s not going to chance the world anymore and if you believed any of the increasingly-desperate-sounding shareholder-facing rhetoric about AGI being JUST AROUND THE CORNER from Altman over the past few months then, well, more fool you’. That’s not to say, though, that this is a bust – again, as I keep repeating, the top-end models are genuinely really fcuking impressive and useful now, and presuming this is ‘more of that, and more consistent, and just more functional’ then this is going to continue the slow, creeping embedding of the tech into everything you can think of. It doesn’t need to be AGI to really fcuk a lot of things up, remember. BONUS GPT5 LINK! Here’s Simon Willison with a slightly more technical, less-vibesy, assessment of the model and its performance which broadly concurs with Mollick’s.
- Genie3: the other big techy AI thing from this week was Google’s Genie3, which was announced if not made fully public – this is Google’s latest ‘create a navigable 3d world from a single prompt, and make it persistent and explorable’ tool, which you can read about in this Ars Technica piece and which you can also see more of here (the videos are very impressive – fine, of course they are, Google is showing off its best work, but even just the concept here and the degree of object permanence evident in the imagined landscapes is amazing). Basically this allows for a degree of world modelling which potentially makes this tech incredibly useful for training of robots, etc – letting an agent ‘explore’ a virtual environment to gather training data in a safe digital space which can then be applied in a real-world, meatspace scenario, which has all sorts of potential implications for the increasingly-fast-paced development of humanoid robotics (whether or not you find that idea interesting or terrifying is, of course, entirely up to you) – and it feels like this sort of thing is on the cusp of being very, very impressive indeed.
- Addicted To AI Bongo: I was interested in this piece partly because of the subject matter (AI! Bongo! It’s like a venn diagram of the seamier end of the Web Curios interest graph!) and partly because I have a piece in a magazine in a few months’ time which ploughs a similar furrow (er, so to speak) and I was curious to compare notes and, look, while this is obviously a well-written and researched piece by Jason Parham I am going to say that mine is better because I don’t feel that Jason has spent anywhere near long enough staring into the genuinely-horrifying abyss that is Unstable Diffusion and the other places where they make the horrorpictures. Still, I remain genuinely interested in the broad question of ‘what happens when people get really into w4nking to images that bear only a very tangential relation to what you might actually come across (sorry) in real life, and how is that going to impact people’s sexuality long-term?’ and this does gently touch on some of those issues. I mean, look, this is going to end up in some pretty weird places, right? “That’s when he came across an Instagram Reel showing an AI-generated image of a woman with “extremely large breasts the size of her body,” he says. He knew it was fake but also felt strangely seduced by it. “In the back of my mind, I was like, OK, I do find this kind of attractive,” he says. “It was something I had not seen before—and I had to see more.”…The Instagram Reel led him down a rabbit hole of dreamlike pleasure as he searched for AI porn that depicted “women with cartoonish boobs, areolas, and nipples twice the size of the rest of her torso, [and] super wide hips.”” THIS IS FINE.
- Selling Oasis: I’m not really interested in the Oasis reunion – although one person I know who has been to a couple of the gigs now (they get freebies, they’re not some sort of mad obsessional Gallagher fanatic, to be clear) made the interesting (to me, at least) observation that they were the most working-class-centric events they’d been to / seen in years, in general I have found most of the commentary around WHAT IT ALL MEANS to be a bit witless (IT’S NOSTALGIA FFS YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS). Still , I did very much enjoy this post by James Denman looking at the whole operation through the lens of advermarketingpr – the way it’s being packaged and presented and sold to both punters and the media, and how it compares to the way in which last year’s (Dear God, it feels like *decades* ago) ‘Brat Summer’ was sold to us.
- GenZ Is Not Powerless Against Tech: I feel that this is a perspective that doesn’t get enough of an airing, particularly over the past 12 months when we’ve been assailed with wave after wave of IT WAS THE PHONES WHAT FCUKED A GENERATION chat (thanks, Mr Haidt! Thanks!) – there was another Round of Discourse in the UK this week fueled by stories about how screentime is preventing kids from socialising in person and, look, maybe it would be good to maybe develop a small sense of perspective about this and finally understand that SCREENS ARE NOT UNIVERSALLY EVIL and NOT ALL DIGITAL EXPERIENCES ARE BAD EXPERIENCES and that, well, it’s probably a little bit reductive to just point at the mobile device and say that it is to blame for everything. Look, don’t get me wrong, I would be equally sniffy about someone attempting to claim that devices don’t impact behaviour at all, but I liked the general tone of this piece which is, basically, ‘don’t forget that kids have agency too, and that there are a lot of other things going on here’. “I understand why millennials and older adults engage in this sort of doomsaying. Both Big Tech and capitalism are entities that many people love to hate. Calling for controls on social media companies is easier—and more politically palatable these days—than asking people to take responsibility for themselves. And generations immemorial have worried that younger people are being ruined by the media, entertainment, or technology habits of their day. We’ve been through this before with novels, radio, TV, video games, every new form of popular music, early eras of social media, and so on. The idea that every other time was overblown but this time it’s not seems just a bit too neat. I also get why the doomsaying messages on this front seem so omnipresent. Who is going to publish (or read) an article from someone saying, “I have a healthy relationship with technology. I have a robust community of friends and family and colleagues in my life. I don’t feel like my phone is preventing me from self-actualization. It’s all good.” There’s no drama there. No newsworthiness. Nothing to gawk at or stress over. There’s simply no audience for that sort of thing. As in so many areas, we’re getting a skewed picture because that picture sells. And I think I understand why members of Gen Z might feel powerless to define their relationship to technology in a different way too. For one thing, they’ve got the bulk of the adult world and all sorts of fancy institutions telling them they are powerless. For another, they do not know a life before current technologies.”
- Nostalgia for the OG Insta Aesthetic: Look, I can’t pretend to give a fcuk about this, but I’m including it because we’re now at a point where nostalgia is literally on a decade cycle and so you can pretty much plan your culture-baiting brand campaign for 2026 by just picking a grab-back of thematic references from this post and going to the pub.
- Brainrot Summer: I don’t particularly like the headline here, and it’s not a great article, but it clutches at something which I do think is real-feeling; the much-discussed lack of any universally-acknowledged ‘song of the summer’ is testament to the fact that culture is now so utterly fragmented by personalised, algo-led feeds that it’s perhaps not really possible for a cultural artefact to attain truly-universal status here in Q2 of the first century of the third millennium. Look, just read this paragraph and know that you can get DOZENS OF SLIDES of tedious strategyw4nk out of it if you feel so minded. “It’s easy to feel the absence of a universal vibe this summer, but the lack of a ubiquitous pop culture hit may be the result of a longer shift, says Joel Penney, a professor in the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. “There’s been this huge pattern of media fragmentation that’s been going on for a very long time.” Because more people stream music and TV, “the catalog becomes just as important as anything new,” Penney says. Sequels are safer bets for Hollywood to make, and Spotify spins up personalized playlists that feature older songs. Popular content creators with podcasts or large social media followings may seem big, but they also filter us into smaller media bubbles. The privilege of crystallizing and spreading our trends to massive audiences used to rest with late-night hosts, but their influence is waning: Stephen Colbert performed the viral “Apple” dance to go along with the “Brat” song last summer, but this summer his show is facing cancellation.”
- Interviewing the AI Ghost: In case you missed it, my favourite ‘oh, fcuk, no, what are you DOING????’ AI-related story of the week was this one, which saw former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta take to his show to ‘interview’ the AI…er…how do I describe this? The AI ‘representation’? The AI avatar? The CREEPY FCUKING DIGITAL GHOST? Anyway, Acosta ‘interviewed’ one Joaquin Oliver, which feat was notable because Oliver died 7 years ago, one of 17 people murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 by a school shooter. For reasons known only to Oliver’s parents, a company has been given the right to make a digital ‘likeness’ of the man as part of a campaign against gun violence – and so it is that an Actual Journalist had a conversation on television with a chatbot representing a version of a murdered teenager from the past. Honestly, you really do have to click through and watch the clips, because this is so atrocious-conceived on pretty much every level you can think of. The tech is janky, the conversation is stilted and the whole thing affords literally zero gravitas to what is obviously a very miserable issue – WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! This really is quite astonishingly mad.
- The Things I Cook For Work: Rukmini Iyer writes in Vittles about being both someone who cooks for a living and who cooks to feed their children, and how those two different types of cooking intersect, and what her children think of her food; I don’t have kids and as such am not personally intimately-familiar with the doubtless-joyful experience of toddler mealtimes, but this made me laugh a lot AND made me hungry, which is pretty much the greatest recommendation I can give to any writing about food. A sample: “I’ve skipped breakfast, so at 11.30am, when Mia is due her snack, I make my favourite sandwich – the (bougie) Elvis . I spread lightly toasted sourdough with peanut butter and banana coins, and scatter over finely chopped 85% dark chocolate. ‘Here you go, darling,’ I say. ‘A lovely treat for lunch.’ Mia opens the sandwich. I know she loves toast, bananas and peanut butter, and am certain she’ll inhale it. Instead, she demonstrates her pincer grip by delicately picking out a shard of chocolate, and eating just that. ‘You can eat the whole sandwich together, sweetheart!’ She picks up another piece of chocolate, and makes direct eye contact as she eats it.”
- Edinburgh Reviews: A rolling post of reviews from the Edinburgh Festival posted by a selection of writers covering the festival for Exeunt Magazine – this is worth bookmarking and checking back on every few days to see what’s been good, or at the very least interesting; useful whether you’re at, or thinking of visiting, the Festival, or if you’re interested in finding out what might be worth looking out for in London and elsewhere later in the year.
- Following the Scam Rabbithole: Alexander Sammon writes for Slate about what happened when he responded to an obvious scammer looking to rope him into a dodgy-sounding ‘earn loads of money working from home’ scheme – this is both interesting in terms of the mechanics of these schemes and How They Work, and also really quite sad at heart; as you read you get a sense for the fact that noone in this is really having a good time, or making any money (I mean, obviously SOME people are, but they tend to be the ones running the human trafficking operations that provide the labour for these sorts of operations, or who own the Cambodian casinos that house the pig butchering farms), and that it all just feels…crap and tawdry and modern and broken, like much of the rest of life in 2025!
- Gooner Nation: I think,in lieu of attempting to explain the thesis here to you, I am just going to give you a couple of paras that encapsulate the thinking because, well, this just *feels* true: “I think it is easy to see ourselves at a remove from this broader tendency. It is easy to claim that this is just some incel shit, that this is the purview of the Male Loneliness Epidemic and other such manufactured distortions. Yet here we are, all of us perpetually gooned out. We live in a crass, lurid world that feigns purity. We are buried beneath omnidirectional content mills. Every conversation about “hating our phones” just makes them more alluring. AI age verification, a direct result of censorship in the surveillance state under the guise of protecting children, has begun rolling out in the UK and US; this obvious breach of privacy is leveraging a universal reliance on a centralized internet ecosystem. Television shows and podcasts are ever-present background noise and conversation to supplant being out in public. We embrace ahistorical marketing, sift enthusiastically through the conservative dog whistles, become just as entrenched in the proxy debates as those we oppose. We broadcast our opinions for LLMs to scrape and regurgitate back to us. We are obsessed with the stasis and passivity of an increasingly vile world. We are all, in our own way, awash in ambient, exhausting pleasure.”
- The Curse of Disco Elysium: I have mentioned Disco Elysium in here before – the greatest book I have ever played, the greatest videogame I have ever read – but this piece in the FT (which interestingly has made ‘analysis of videogames and their role in culture’ an increasingly-central part of their editorial offering, which is smart imho because, well, THEY ARE CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT ARTEFACTS), looking at the game’s development, the acrimonious fallout, its creators splintering into new, rival studios all working on their own ‘spiritual sequels’ to the game and further explorations of the hyperliterate interactive novel RPG as a genre, is fascinating both for fans and for those unfamiliar with the title. Seriously, if you have the wherewithal to play videogames and are yet to play Disco Elysium, read this and then clear your weekend because it is worth EVERY SINGLE HOUR you will spend it with it, I promise.
- The Decameron: Barbara Newman in the LRB writes about Boccaccio and the Decameron – this is fascinating, both in terms of the historical context it gives you to the text’s author, origins and canonical impact, and in terms of just reminding you what a cracking collection of stories it is; I am obviously biased re the whole ‘wop’ thing, but it beats the Canterbury Tales into a cocked hat if you ask me (yes, fine, I appreciate that literature is not a binary contest but, also, GO ITALY IN YOUR FACE CHAUCER YOU DUSTY BITCH ETC).
- The Great Sword Heist: Talia Levin, a woman who used to own quite a few swords and now owns significantly fewer, writes about the experience of waking up last week to realise that someone had broken into her apartment while she slept and stolen a bunch of really quite large and impressive-looking swords from the wall-mounted display where they ordinarily lived. WHO IS THE SWORD THIEF? HOW DID THEY DO THIS? You will learn the answer to precisely none of these questions by reading this, but you will laugh a lot and that feels like a good reason to commend it to you.
- Wedding Wars: Or, “you thought organising your wedding was hard, try being Indian it sounds like a fcuking nightmare”. This is both instructive and entertaining, particularly the sections about the need to provide approximately seventyfive different culinary options in order to cater for the various cultural/religious preferences of India’s hugely-variegated society. “The modern Indian wedding exists simultaneously on multiple technological planes. The couple wants minimalist elegance — think Sabyasachi lehengas and curated Pinterest boards. The parents want maximum display — think golden thrones and endangered flower species. Instagram has militarized weddings into competitive theater. Pre-wedding shoots in Santorini. Proposals at the Eiffel Tower. Sangeet performances that require three months of choreography. Hashtags that sound like startup names: #SidKiDulhaniya #PriyankiNick #VirushkaForever. Meanwhile, WhatsApp uncles circulate ominous warnings about “western influence” and forward 1970s wedding photos as “inspiration.” They want the bride in 10 kilos of gold and the groom on a horse. The same uncles who use FaceApp to see their “future selves” demand that weddings follow “ancient tradition.””
- Settling Up: Spencer at Scope of Work writes about taking a cab. That’s it – nothing really happens, it’s just the story of taking a taxi from the airport in NYC, of a slightly-shonky driver, of a small, transient interaction in a big city – but I thought this was SUCH a lovely piece of writing and I can’t stress enough how much it pleased me and how much I think it will please you too. It’s about tipping and New York taxis, and people and how odd we are, and, honestly, it’s just charming.
- Jury in a Box: I am a sucker for a good story of jury service and this, by Murray Browne telling the story of his recent experience, is an excellent example of the genre.
- On Laughter: Finally this week, an essay about what it means to laugh, about laughter less as expression of amusement as a physical reaction, a form of release. For Various Reasons I felt this one very strongly indeed – I can’t guarantee it will speak to you in the same way, but, well maybe it will. TRY IT AND SEE.
By Bruno Bourel
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:
